poetry repression scans

8/12/2019 Poetry Repression Scans

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Contents

l Poetry,Revisionism,Repression 1

2. Blake andRevisionism 28

3. Wordsworthand theSceneof Instruction 52

4. Shelleyand His Precursors 83

5. Keats:Romance Revised 112

6. Tennyson: In theShadowofKeats 143

7. Browning:Good Momentsand Ruined

Quests 175

8. Yeats,Gnosticism,and theSacredVoid 205

9. EmersonandWhitman: The American

Sublime 235

10. WallaceStevens:TheTranscendentalStrain 267



242Poetry and Repressio

do not make up the whole of the Freudian unconscious.Mysteriously, there is an original unconscious; indeed

Freud finally thought that the mind originally was totallyunconscious, and that gradually part of the mind becamepreconscious and part conscious, with yet another pan

always remaining unconscious. To this unrepressed un conscious, the augmenting ego added materials throughfresh repressions.

Emerson's version of the unconscious is a purer in-

stance of poetic or hyperbolical repression. Whatever one

may want to say about the structure of the Freudianunconscious (and I do not believe it is structured like alanguage), I think that Emersonian "Spontaneity or Instinct" is structured like a rhetoric, that is, is both a system

of tropes and also a mode of persuasion. Like Freud 's

unconscious, it is originary, and again like Freud's gianttrope, it is augmented by fresh and purposeful forgettings, by evasions that are performed in order to present

something other than the something that is being evaded.But, in Freud, the something evaded is any drive objectiQnable to ego-ideals, whereas in Emerson the something

must take the name of a single drive, the thrust of anteriority, the mystifying strength of the past, which is

profoundly objectionable to Emerson's prime ego-ideal,Self-Reliance. Emerson's pugnacity on this theme is in the

Optative Mood; as he says: "When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded

treasures as old rubbish." As for what became Nietzsche's"guilt of indebtedness," which is so profoundly analyzed

in Towards the Genealogy of Morals Emerson dismisses it

with a Sublime shrug, a shrug directed against Coleridge:"In the hour of vision there is nothing that can be calledgratitude, or properly joy."

With so daemonic an unconscious as his support, Emerson cheerfully places the spirit wholly in the categorythat Kierkegaard called only "the aesthetic." I turn again

Emerson and Whitman The American Sublime 243

to "The Rotation Method" in Either of Either/Or so as toilluminate Emerson's kind of repression:

Forgetting is the shears with which you cut away what you

cannot use, doing it under the supreme direction of memory.

Forgetting and remembering are thus identical arts, and the

artistic achievement of this identity is the Archimedean point

rom which one lifts the whole world. When we say that we

onsign something to oblivion, we suggest simultaneously that it

s to be forgotten and yet also remembered.

Kierkegaard is playing upon his own notion of "repeti

tion," which is his revision of the Hegelian "mediation"

into a Christian conception "of the anxious freedom."

Emerson's Transcendental equivalent is his famous declaration in the Journal for April 1842: "I am Defeated all the

time; yet to Victory I am born." Less than a year later,

Kierkegaard wrote: "The difficulty facing an existing in

dividual is how to give his existence the continuity without which everything simply vanishes The goal of

movement for an existing individual is to arrive at adecision, and to renew it." I think we can remark on thisthat Kierkegaard does not want us to be able to dis

tinguish between the desire for repetition, and repetition

itself, since it is in the blending of the two that the "anx

ious freedom" of "becoming a Christian" truly consists.But Emerson was post-Christian; for him that "Great

Defeat" belonged totally to the past. What Kierkegaardcalled "repetition" Emerson called by an endless varietyof names until he settled on Fate or Necessity, and he

insisted always that we had to distinguish between our

desire for such reality, and the reality itself. In the grand

passage from the essay Fate that I quoted earlier, the

emphasis is sublimely upon what Emerson calls successiverebirths, while meaning successive re-begettings of our

selves, during this, our one life. Perpetually, Emerson in

sists, our new experience forgets the old, so that perhaps



244 Poetry nd Repression

Nietzsche should have remarked of Emerson not that he

did not know how old he was already or how young he

still was going to be but only that Emerson did know that

always he was about to become his own father. This Inow assert is the distinguishing mark of the specificallyAmerican Sublime that it begins anew not with restora

tion or rebirth in the radically displaced Protestant pat

tern of the Wordsworthian Sublime but that it s truly

past even such displacement despite the line from Ed

wards to Emerson that scholarship accurately continues totrace. Not merely rebirth but the even more hyperbolical

trope of self-rebegetting is the starting point of the lastWestern Sublime the great sunset of selfhood in theEvening Land.

But what does this hyperbolical figuration mean or

rather how are we to transform its signification intomeaning? We all of us go home each evening and at

some moment in time with whatever degree of overt

consciousness we go back over all the signs that the day

presented to us. In those signs we seek only what can aid

the continuity of our own discourse the survival of those

ongoing qualities that will give what s vital in us even

more life. This seeking s the Vichian and Emersonian

making of signification into meaning by the single test of

aiding our survival. By such a test the American Sublime

s a trope intending to forget the father in order to present

the son or daughter. In this trope the father s a limita-tion or what Stevens called a reduction to a First Idea an

idea of an origin and the son or daughter intends to be arestituting representation in which a First Idea s re

imagined so as to become the idea of an aim. But what s

a First Idea unless it be what Freud termed a primal

fixation or an initial repression? And what did that initialrepression forget or at least intend to forget? Here

Freud touched his aporia, and so I turn beyond him to

Kabbalah again to seek a more ultimate paradigm for the

Scene of Instruction than even Kierkegaard affords me

Emerson nd Whitman: The American Sublime 245

since here too Kierkegaard touched his aporia, and ac-cepted the Christian limit of the Incarnation. The Orphic

Emerson demands an ultimate paradigm which s beyond

the pleasure-principle yet also beyond these competingreality-principIes.

Lacan in his revision of Freud tells us that the ego s

essentially paranoid that it s a structure founded upon acontradictory or double-bind relationship between a self

and an other or relationship that s at once an opposition

and an identity. I reject this as interpretation of Freud

and reject it also as an observation upon the psyche. But

Lacan as I remarked in another context joins himself tothose greater theorists including Nietzsche and Freud

who talk about people in ways that are more valid even

for poems. I do not think that the psyche s a text but Ifind it illuminating to discuss texts as though they were

psyches and in doing so I consciously follow the Kab-balists. For in poems I take it that the other s always aperson the precursor however imagined or composite

whereas for Lacan the other s principle and not person.

The fourth of the six behinot or aspects of each sefirah,

according to Moses Cordovero s the aspect of a particu

lar s ~ r i r h that allows the sefirah above it to give that

particular sefirah the strength enabling it the later sefirah,

to emanate out further sefirot. Or to state it more simplyyet still by a Kabbalistic trope it s from a son that a f ther

takes the power, that in turn will enable the sonto

become afather. This hyperbolical figuration s a rather complex

theory of repression because the son or later poem in-itially needs to forget the autonomy of its own power inorder to express any continuity of power. But this s very

close also to the peculiar nature of Sublime representa

tion where there s an implication always that what s

being represented s somehow absent and so must be

restituted by an image. But the image which in Sublime

representation tends to be of a fathering force as it were

remains distinct from what it represents at least in the

poetry repression scans

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