Imageless Truths: Shelley's Poetic Fictions. - book reviews

Criticism, Wntr, 1996 by Mark Kipperman

Jones's historicism gives us, then, a refreshing look at Shelley's rhetorical dilemmas, portraying him struggling with anger and alienation in the context of the social forms and gestures through which he wanted to be understood but which he hoped his love ethic might transform. Shelley was, it seems, as troubled a satirist as he was an idealist. What will be the effect on the social world of his satire? In his complex treatment of the figure of the Devil in Regency satire, Jones points out that the "scourge" of satire may vent anger only to sow hopelessness and violence, since satire's "moralistic scourge is at odds with Shelley's program of reform" (54). The Regency was a time of fierce competition within the elites of England in the period of post-Napoleonic expansion. Shelley knew himself to be, like his Devil in Peter Bell the Third, a gentleman in exile from the Hellish city of London. The "quotidian" (43) in that social world conceals the evil of class distinction and the oppressions of a growing imperial capital. How can Shelley play at this game of satire, how deploy its gestures and linguistic conventions and avoid its taint? One can sup with a long spoon but not write with one.

That Shelley retained many of his class's attitudes towards violence and revenge even while he struggled to repudiate them is elegantly demonstrated in Jones's chapter on dueling and Shelley's quarrel with Southey--one of the best treatments of this issue in Regency literary circles that I have seen. Jones explores what surely was Shelley's deepest moral qualm about a literature of personal attack, that it employs a rhetoric of revenge and deterrence by fear rather than a rhetoric of moral suasion. To convert such personal anger into a social movement is the political motive of Shelley's most accomplished satire, The Mask of Anarchy. In his important treatment of this poem, Jones takes the poem as a typically Romantic mode of satire, combining as it does the violent imagery of the era and its corrupt politics with the hope that a representation of truth--like the age's iconic spirit of Liberty--can exhort the nation to transform itself.

Jones's book is learned and informative on a range of social acts, from theatricals to pantomime and political cartoon, that situate Shelley's rhetoric within the hurry-burly world of the early nineteenth century, where revolution or tyranny seemed to turn on the next broadside or libel prosecution. If Weisman's Shelley yearns to embrace and yet transform the "quotidian," becoming trapped in rhetorical contradictions and despair, Jones shows us the social sense of that rhetoric and the conventional import of particular gestures of critique and transformation. He fills out the rather rarefied, almost idealist, sense of the quotidian in Weisman's study. Everyone must decide for him or herself whether these are two sides of the same Shelley, two levels of abstraction, or two very different Shelleys. My own sense is that these are two opposing critical approaches to this poet's sense of the role of art in resolving the contradictions--either of figuration or of public voice-that condition its own appearance. They will not appeal to the same readers. But they are good examples of the directions taken by modern Shelley criticism.