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

Criticism, Wntr, 1996 by Mark Kipperman

In a sense this is a more pragmatic focus (on Shelley's real problems with visionary articulation) than we find in earlier linguistic-rhetorical critics, though in Weisman it is elaborately theorized. She offers a purpose for all the making and unmaking of fictions, namely, to disclose a more lucid relation between Shelley's imaginative forming and the world he would embrace. If this seems a paradoxical or self-nullifying career choice, that is because it is. Weisman's predecessors, as she is well aware, see Shelley's poetic language hanging over a void of its own creation; but in Weisman's account it is his Poetic career, his progressive development of this problem, that seems to flirt with self-consuming annihilation--as the poet himself confesses in Weisman's reading of Epipsychidion ("Shelley goes with [Emily] to annihilation because he too has been consumed in his fiction of union" [131-32]).

This reading follows a dialectic similar to that she had initiated with her analysis of Alastor, where Shelley's Poet figure "consumes himself into annihilation by over-indulging his desire to transcend the spiritual aridity which, he believes, is the defining feature of the mutable world" (21). I found myself wondering, in later chapters, why after the triumphant mythologizing of Prometheus Unbound, Shelley himself would fall not so much into pessimism (for which there could always be a psychological explanation) but rather into the same epistemological culs-de-sac as in the poetry of four or five years before? From Weisman's critical perspective, the answer is the instability of the resolutions of Prometheus Unbound, which may always unravel.

Her analysis of this poem is, I think, the book's central achievement, and while I find her conclusions not entirely satisfying they do represent an ingenious development of her argument and a shrewd sense of her place in the contemporary debate. She focuses on speech and speaking as the central obsessions of the play. Yet much of that speech is--unspoken, reported, or only imagined by the "audience"/reader. While critics like Rajan and Susan Hawk Brisman have focused on this problem, Weisman's approach is more dialectical: she sees the paradoxes of represented speech here as a parallel problem to the dual nature of Prometheus himself, as spokesperson for humanity (Everyman) and as mythic construct. The poem acknowledges that the great truths may be ineffable, yet we must nevertheless construct, self-consciously, those fictions that may hint at "the wonder of our being," the obscure Promethean possibilities of the human. Thus the self-consciousness of our fiction making cautions us against (mis)taking our myths for immutable truths. The paradox is, of course, that our myths do tease us out of thought, that fixed interpretation is inevitable to us. So Shelley skill feels he must warn us, even amid the celebrations of the play's final vision, that "we are all, finally, unsure of the efficacy of our stories and of our response to stories" (111). This uncertainty is yet a virtue, is socially liberating because in this poem's "qualified celebratory mode" there is "room for song and hope in the very midst of our frailty" (112). The unmaking of fictions may, after all, be the beginning of a new reverence for the truths we cannot capture and a new chance for a revitalized world.