Shelley's Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority. - book reviews

Criticism, Wntr, 1996 by Mark Kipperman

by Steven Jones. Normal: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv 215. $30.00.

Shelley's early critics thought of him as a poet both in and in some way out of "the world." Modern critics do so as well, but they understand this dualism differently, and in their vocabulary Shelley's poetry meditates on the possible autonomy of its own language, while claiming also language's grounding in the social and material realities it both mirrors and enriches.

Though Shelley scholars today are a diverse lot, since the early 80's two general approaches have come to dominate. In one view, for the Romantic Iyric to claim to speak of a "world created by language" is to conceal rhetorically language's inability to create much beyond endless iterations of its own conventions. If language is to articulate its own autonomy, clearly a number of paradoxes ensue, not least of which is the lack of real autonomy of the actual speaker from the given world or the conventions of form. In that case, language can only claim but never realize autonomy: how could autonomy from the given world even be thought outside the language needed to express it? Thus one group of Shelley scholars sees Shelley's career as a continuing struggle over his poetry's need to point beyond itself, to express its world while also suggesting something greater, truer, not given in ordinary experience. As Karen Weisman puts it in Imageless Truths: Shelley's Poetic Fictions, Shelley comes to perceive "expressibility itself to be so large an issue that he claims it as the chief occupation of his life" (83). If this itself seems like a large critical claim, it is one consonant with the interests of recent scholars like Tilottama Rajan and Jerrold Hogle. Shelley's career is seen as a series of dislocations, some radical in their revision of traditional theologies, literary genres, or theories of language; some truly disorienting, obsessive, haunting. As Rajan has recently written of Alastor, "the complications of (self)-representation produce a fear that what underlies language may be an abyss of meaning.... it oscillates between positing a transcendental signified accessible through lyric or allegory and seeing language as subtended only by a vacancy" ("The Web of Human Things: Narrative and Identity in Alastor," in The New Shelley: Later Twentieth Century Views, ed. G. Kim Blank [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991], 107).

At the same time, language is clearly a social act. Weisman herself summarizes the emphasis of a second group of Shelley scholars when she remarks that "language as we normatively experience it . . . exists only insofar as it is actualized . . . and that actualization is only possible because communities publicly subscribe to certain shared assumptions about sounds and signs" (83). While this view of language is not her own emphasis, she does understand this as a central practical concern of Shelley's. For those critics who begin with these more pragmatic concerns, the origin (such critics are more willing to speak of origins) of Shelley's obsession with language was his need to bring utopian vision or a hint of some ultimate good into the public sphere. There, without recourse to didactic reasoning, poetry might engage the heart and energize the will to act. Karen Weisman and Steven Jones represent these two diverse approaches to Shelley's career, and both of their books are filled with original, sometimes even startling insights.

Karen Weisman's ambitious study explores these complex issues of language and fictionality through which their multiple permutations across Shelley's career, from Queen Mab to The Triumph of Life. For Weisman, Shelley is pulled in the opposing directions of fiction making and fiction unmaking, of questioning the very process of figuration through which poetry claims to point to a truth greater than, more intense than, more beautiful than, given experience. Some of this project will seem familiar to scholars aware of the work of Paul de Man, David Simpson, Rajan, and Hogle. But the distinctive strength of Weisman's book is in her shrewdly dialectical sense of Shelley's commitment to that given, "quotidian" experience which grounds all metaphoric elaboration. For Hogle, for example, Shelley's shifting imagery and self-referential metaphor is an element in a metaphysical project to undermine all fixed conceptual loci, the better to destabilize radically even such categories as "subject" and "object" in a continuing metamorphic process of representation, concealment, and displacement. Weisman, however, while presenting a view of Shelley's imagery similar to Hogle's, attempts to be more sensitive to what she calls "the pressures of dailiness," Shelley's real urge to celebrate that fixed and determinate "thingness" through which we all move. "He could experience considerable anxiety over his troping of the world without oversimplifying the philosophical cruxes pertaining to the ontology of reality" (2). Though I think this is inelegantly written, it is a clear first premise leading to the other pole of her dialectic: that it was in fact Shelley's desire to transcend the empirical world and figure forth that transcendence which itself so often produces his sudden guilt for and embracing of the everyday with its fixed and clear objects beautiful in themselves. Shelley, then, struggled "at once with both the actual and its problematizations" (2).