The 'Lucy Poems': A Case Study in Literary Knowledge. - book reviews

Criticism, Spring, 1997 by Elizabeth Fay

By Mark Jones. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Pp. 336. $55.00.

The subtitle of Mark Jones's new book, "A Case Study," is something of misnomer in that it does not merely illuminate a specific problem in literary knowledge, it sheds light on the entire field of literary study. If Wordsworth's lyrics about or over the subject of "Lucy" provide a site of interpretive doubt rather than knowledge, and therefore offer an ideal locus for the study Jones undertakes, these lyrics (as well as their interpretive history) also provide the impetus for a thoughtful re-situation of the interpretive imperative and its consequences. The `Lucy Poems': A Case Study in Literary Knowledge is for this alone a remarkable book; but for Wordsworthians it will also prove a dense and richly rewarding one. It is, in fact, one of those ram books that provokes in the reader the wish to have written it him- or herself.

The question that initiates the problem is: why are we so invested in the

`Lucy Poems'? But certainly a more primary question grounds it: how did the `Lucy' grouping come to be the present one, since it is not Wordsworth's own? These questions together structure the problem: the editorial investment is not entirely separable from the critical investment, both of which respond to but are not the inevitable projection of authorial investment. It is the very mystery that the `Lucy Poems' represent that allows different claims to materialize around them, to turn the insubstantial into a centering and iconic keystone for the field. The `Lucy Poems' are important to literary studies not because they are so very good, but because so much can be read into them, a richness that was certainly intended by their author but which is often broadened to even greater critical, philosophical, and literary weight and substance. Mark Jones sets up his case study to comprehend the historical as well as the present reception of the `Lucy Poems,' their grouping and currently accepted ordering, and their uses for critical interpretation and theory.

Wordsworth's `Lucy Poems' became cemented during the mid-nineteenth century as consisting of the following poems in the following and familiar order: "Strange fits of passion," "She dwelt among th' untrodden ways," "I travelled among unknown men," "Three years she grew in sun and shower," and "A slumber did my spirit seal." These five poems provide, along with Keats's six odes and Coleridge's conversation poems, the touchstones of Romantic period studies, the poems we can teach to our students as embodying the mystery and artistry of the literary imagination. These are our disciplinary fascinations, love affairs that we transfer to students often without the accompanying reasons that justify such passion. And this is a compounded and textured love we hold for these works, composed of what our own teachers have taught us about loving texts as much as of what we ourselves have discovered. The loyalties multiplied in our literary passions can be too cherished for us to want to question or analyze their cost basis, and so it is fortunate that Jones sets about demystifying them and their attraction for us, because we can no longer uphold the kind of Victorian and early Modern purviews that reified and biographically identified the artwork, those projects that first endowed the `Lucy' grouping with such value, we need to understand the history and the context of those earlier projects, and consequently the condition of our literary love. "The important question, finally, is not whether a given grouping is right, but what the readerly activity invited by Wordsworth's text can reveal about the functions of both provocation and response" (12). The puzzle is a considerable one: these are poems that discourse about interpersonal love but that are tacitly about artistic love, evoke textual love from their readers. How vulnerable are we to this triangulated passion, one which is the mediated product of generations of editors, scholars, theorists-in short, an institutional rather than purely poetic feat? And what do the institutional conditions of this love cost us, particularly at the intellectual level?

Jones argues that our relation to the `Lucy' texts, a relation I have been assigning an affective nature although he does not, is a case in point of "the modern literature institution's will to knowledge." The `Lucy Poems,' that is, open themselves up in such a way that they demand interpretive intervention, thus facilitating the process of "legitimat[ing] `English' as a `discipline' capable of producing `knowledge,'" because the indeterminacies of the `Lucy' texts were always suppressed through the interpretive process in order to produce such knowledge. Put another way, our affective relation to the `Lucy Poems' has such power over us because the cost basis is integral to the value of our discipline; we love the thing that has the power to grant our activity institutional, social, and political value; we love to expend its richness to both taste that power and the lovely mystery of its suppressed articulation. On the other hand, the indeterminacies of the `Lucy' texts also give us some pain since they will not reduce to sheer knowledge, and the more freedom we allow ourselves interpretively over these texts, as Jones points out, the less we are able to contain and define our `knowledge.'