Dostoyevsky

NOTES ON FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

Our narrator is anything but reliable – he's persistently unpredictable and perverse.  A lot of the passionate quirkiness in the arguments he makes comes from the threat of being absolutely determined, of being devoid of free will and unpredictable, even destructive desire thanks to 2 + 2 = 4, the laws of nature, etc.  For him (and for Dostoevsky himself, I'd say), this emphasis on personality, will, and desire trumps the grandest utopias and logical schemes.  But he can't really set forth any of his claims in terms of the sort of primary causality that makes it possible for blockheaded "normal people" to act.  The Underground Man can never act or speak or write in perfect faith in the justice of his beliefs or words: he's a highly self-conscious mouse, as he admits.  What Nietzsche admired so much about Dostoevsky  seems to be his unsystematic way of proceeding – you can be at once unsystematic and yet precise, incisive, and insightful.  That fits Dostoevsky perfectly when it comes to the exploration of psychological phenomena such as resentment, spite, and so forth.  "The Underground" is both a physical place and a metaphor for the narrator's thinking: whatever mustn't be said, whatever must be repressed, and so forth.

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

Part 1: "Underground"

Part 1, Chapter 1

The first thing we find out about the narrator is that he is spiteful and physically ill.  Moreover, he is very self-conscious, very aware of this spitefulness that belongs to him.  He explains that he was a rather badly behaved civil servant who took pleasure in causing distress to others who needed his help.  But he can't even really enter into his own spitefulness since as he tells us, it was all sort of an act: "I was not at all a spiteful man or even an exasperated man … (96 bottom and 97 middle).  This narrator, it quickly becomes apparent, likes to make bold assertions and then take them back or at least modify them – he is obviously unreliable.  He speaks of "contrary" elements (97 middle) in his nature, and these elements torment him.

The inability to act is the next thing the narrator explains following upon his stated realization that he can't either embrace spitefulness or become good – he is always uncomfortably somewhere in between the hero and the rascal.  And here we are introduced to the notion that intelligence is more a curse than a blessing – a smart man can't do anything or become anything, while fools skate through life always certain of themselves.  To be intelligent is to have no character and therefore strangely unlimited and undelimited, while the man of action is limited.  He used to be a collegiate assessor (8^th of 14 in the C19 Table of Ranks, from the time of Peter the Great, 1722 – with 8^th rank you were accorded hereditary nobility), but a relative left him 6000 rubles, so he retired last year, and now lives in expensive St. Petersburg.  The first chapter ends with a tricky rejection of the discourse of "a decent man" – the decent man takes pleasure in talking about himself, and our narrator says, "I will talk about myself" (98 bottom).

Part 1, Chapter 2

To be overly conscious is a disease (99 top).  The more conscious the narrator became about the beautiful and the sublime, about the good, the less able he was to act, and thus he became bitter.  But finally, after much struggle, this bitterness becomes sweetness and finally pleasure (100 middle).  Is it the same for others?  He wants to know.  As for the pleasure he is talking about, we are told that it came from the fact of being "intensely aware of my own degradation" (100 middle).  You can't change, and you can't do anything, so why not be a scoundrel?  He declares his aim to be explaining the kind of pleasure he is talking about, the perverse pleasure in one's own humiliation and incapacity to do anything about it. (100 bottom)

Part 1, Chapter 3

What do normal people do when they run into natural limits, into a brick wall imposed upon them by nature itself?  Well, normal, probably stupid people, according to our narrator, simply give up.  He says these people are marked by spontaneity or forthrightness in their attitude and conduct (102 middle), and says that the wall, for them, is definitive and meaningful, even "mystic" (102 middle; see also 104 middle).  It is not so for a mouse like our narrator – for that is what he calls himself.  This mouse has what the narrator calls "intense sensibility" (103 top and middle), meaning that he is highly self-conscious, self-aware.  This mouse cannot even work up and execute a plan for revenge the way the so-called "man of nature and truth" or "homme de la nature et de la vérité" can; that is because the mouse knows that revenge is wrong, or at least that it makes no sense to call it justice.  So our mouse cannot act, but unlike the stupid person, he seethes with resentment (103 middle).  This is the origin of spitefulness and resentment, an important quality to our narrator, even though as his reasoning progresses, he demonstrates a conviction that spitefulness, like other supposed reasons, is ultimately hollow because it requires an agent that the spiteful but intelligent man simply does not believe in. 

But here things become even more complicated because our mouse starts to take a certain pleasure in his own predicament, his own feeling of being done an injustice and yet not having the ability to do anything about it.  See page 102-04 on this, and 105 (top-middle) for the narrator's explanation: he doesn't care about the laws of nature or that 2x2 equals 4; the thing is, he dislikes such laws and that is what matters most.  It is better, he thinks, to refuse reconciliation with the laws of nature, mathematics, natural science, and so forth, better to oppose them all so long as you can maintain a certain independence of thought and will.  Simply not to be an absolute dupe seems to be his goal, and to achieve it he sets himself against the cosmos and other men.  There is bitter pleasure in this.  The narrator is not asserting that he is in possession of any grand systematic truth.  Far from it.

Part 1, Chapter 4

The narrator insists further that even consciousness of pain can lead to a kind of voluptuous pleasure – it is precisely the fact that you know there's no one to blame for your toothache that you betray by moaning about it.  Nature can inflict all sorts of injuries and humiliations upon you and your body, even if you despise nature.  There's nothing you can do about it, and perhaps that is what eventually leads to this strange pleasurable sensation or enjoyment.  See page 105 bottom - 106 in particular: the enjoyment becomes downright voluptuous, says the narrator, when, say, the 19^th-century man moaning about his toothache becomes fully aware that the moaning accomplishes nothing but to annoy everyone around him.  He knows he's just acting spitefully and maliciously, and that is what he takes such great pleasure in: it is a kind of knowledge, admirable or otherwise.  The narrator really drills home the point when he asks at the very end of the fourth chapter, "Can a man of acute sensibility respect himself at all?" (107 bottom) To be self-conscious makes it impossible to have self-respect.  Apparently, only healthy, normal idiots respect themselves.  So why be normal?  To be normal is to live comfortably within one's petty performances, one's illusions, always to be surrounded by the paper bag of unalterable reality.

Part 1, Chapter 5

The narrator describes boredom as central to his consciousness – he has always found himself stirring up trouble, getting emotionally involved in things he doesn't really care about, and so forth, simply to escape this boredom for a moment.  The excess of consciousness that structures his being leads, as he says, to "thumb-twiddling," or inertia (108 middle).  The normal, stupid person has little trouble finding a foundation or a secure basis for action in the world, but clever individuals understand that there is probably no such foundation, that there are most likely only "nearest and secondary causes" (109 top), at least as far as we can know.  Justice would be a primary cause, but that is exactly the sort of thing our mouse can never find fully justified, cannot discover – there is only an infinite succession backwards of secondary causes.  You might think spite could stand in for a primary cause, but the problem is that it disintegrates pretty quickly, and you are left with nothing but contempt for yourself for having believed it could serve as a foundation for action.  Strong negative emotions, in other words, soon burn themselves out, and you can't really maintain them as the basis for sustained action.  So we are back to inertia again.  That is hardly surprising: the narrator can't set forth any of his claims in terms of the primary causality that makes it possible for "normal people" to act.  The underground man can never act, speak or write in perfect faith in the justice of his beliefs or words. (109 middle especially)

Part 1, Chapter 6

If only, says the narrator, he could pinpoint the reason for his inactivity as laziness.  But he cannot even do that.  A person can make a fine career out of laziness, and be well respected for it.  You could for example be a connoisseur or art critic who simply affirms what everybody else thinks constitutes "the sublime and beautiful" (110 bottom).  That way, you could become part of a social system revolving around groupthink, aesthetical or otherwise.  If you don't mind going along, it's very easy to get along and prosper.

Part 1, Chapter 7

Plato's notion that enlightenment is the key to the good society because people always act in their own self-interest seems ridiculous to our narrator (111 middle), who insists that history proves otherwise.  What's the value in constructing utopias, in that case?  What if we're all just piano keys being enlisted in the service of some grand concert beyond us?  (117 top-middle) No value.  The greatest advantage of all, the one "greater and more desirable than all other goods" (113 middle), is "free and unfettered choice" (116 middle-bottom).  To follow your own will, even if it takes you off the edge of a cliff – that, I think our narrator is saying, is the key to human existence and it annihilates all utopias, all Crystal Palaces (115 bottom) like the one in the mid-Victorian exhibition, from the time of Plato onwards.

Part 1, Chapter 8

But what if even free will, which the narrator has been so energetically promoting, turns out to be an illusion? (116 bottom)  What if science destroys any possible belief in it?  What if desire itself is nothing but the slave of necessity?  Desire is irrational, and that is its chief virtue – the narrator says that reason is only one dimension of life and that desire is much more pervasive; it is "a manifestation of the whole of life" (118 middle).  Another key statement: humanity is defined as "a creature who walks on two legs and is ungrateful" – but more particularly, perpetually badly behaved (119 middle-bottom).  We really do not act in our own best interests, either collectively or as individuals.  The key to this chapter appears towards its conclusion: even if we could predict and tabulate all the motions of human desire, even if we turned out to be piano keys played upon by the alleged laws of nature (121 top), we would go so far as to abandon sanity itself to escape determination and predictability.  Threatened with being the slave of necessity, or 2+2, so to speak, man will curse, cause disturbances, stir up trouble, defy and make those things the meaning of his existence.  What would be the point of desire if it were not unpredictable, if it were reducible to an algorithm of the laws of nature?  2+2 always make 4, even if your will has nothing to do with it, so why align yourself with the laws of mathematics and nature? (121-122 top)

Part 1, Chapter 9

The narrator contrasts us with ants making their anthills.  The difference is that they keep doing the same thing and their purpose is completely utilitarian.  They're going to make good use of the anthills that they build and will keep doing so until there are no more ants. (123 top)  But for us, achieving the goal of our constructions is the beginning of death, just as 2+2 make 4 is "the beginning of death" (123 middle).  Consciousness is a curse, but at the same time, we would not give it up, and it is "infinitely superior" to "twice two" (124 bottom).

Part 1, Chapter 10

The Crystal Palace (which the narrator had mentioned back in Ch. 7, 115 bottom) is really not as useful as a chicken coop, says the narrator, and at least the chicken coop isn't terrifying in its implications for free will and desire.  It is impossible to stick out one's tongue at such a palace (125 top), which makes the narrator reject it.  Even so, if it represents the power of an ideal over against brute reality, then maybe the Crystal Palace is worth more than the chicken coop after all. (124, 126)  But if it's simply a naïve faith in utopia, that's a problem, too: if it's an ideal of purpose and perpetual progress that we buy wholesale and end up being its dupes, that can't be good, either. (124 middle)  The narrator concludes this chapter by recognizing how dangerous his own brand of thinking is to everyone who is not like him. (126 middle).  On the whole, though, his view is that destruction isn't such a bad thing, not by a long shot -- who wants to be a dupe anyhow?

Part 1, Chapter 11

In this final chapter of the first part, the narrator explains what to some degree he has meant all along by "the underground": he apparently means by this phrase in part thinking itself, but we should add that this thinking is dialogical, meaning that he imagines an audience in response to it.  To this audience he declares that "it is much better to do nothing at all!  Better passive awareness!"  (126 bottom) There is something of the back and forth of conversation going on in this so-called underground.  The underground is everything that healthy, normal people repress as they go about their waking lives and business – they have no need of such philosophizing and agonizing over things like purpose and free will.  It's what mustn't be uttered, perhaps even what shouldn't be thought, lest one suffer the psychological consequences.  The narrator insists that he will never print his words and share them with the public, which privacy-device creates a sense of intimacy as we read (128 top-middle) -- it is as if we are not the reading public but rather individuals who have somehow come by this unpublished manuscript, which itself seems to be the effusion of a man who has been underground for his entire life.

Why not just recall it in his head, if he doesn't mean to publish?  The narrator doesn't give a solid answer to this question, but tells us that perhaps recalling old memories will provide some relief and allow him to get rid of those memories once and for all: "I really may feel easier in my mind" (129 bottom).  This is an ancient concept of writing, in which the act of writing cuts off a stream of thought from consciousness, alienating it forever from its producer.  That is more or less what Plato makes Socrates say in Phaedrus about the invention and act of writing.  And of course the narrator is simply bored, so setting down his tale will give him something to do: maybe in that sense it is an act of mischief, just as he said earlier about how we deal with boredom.  Does the tale that follows reinforce the philosophy that he has set down with such deliberate lack of systematic rigor?  That remains to be seen, but in general, it seems to back up the first part of the text.

Part 2: "Apropos of the Wet Snow"

Part 2,  Chapter 1

At the age of 24, the narrator was outwardly conventional; the unsettling thing that comes out here is how much of the "underground" was already within him, though it may have structured his life at that point more or less in the form of social awkwardness, the inability to meet the gaze of other people, etc.  Even the normal activities in which the young narrator engaged were already manifestations of his resentment and defiance of all things conventional.

The section in which the officer picks him up like a puffball and moves him aside is hilarious (     ).  The big fellow is like a force of nature: there's no point in resisting him because he's a healthy, normal blockhead who probably wouldn't accept a challenge from a resentful man-mouse like our narrator.  He didn't even seem to notice the actual bump that the narrator finally managed to give him after two years or so, in an attempt to turn the affair into something suitably romantic, suitably honorable and literary.  In other words, he's trying to transform his sordid, petty reality into something heroic, to create a situation in which he would be the equal or superior of the blockhead officer.  Along the way, there's the delicious, bitter pleasure of his own self-conscious state of humiliation: all those abortive attempts before the final impetuous one (    ).  If we can say there's a pattern of behavior in this second part, it's something like the following: self-reflection, resentment, boredom with it all, an attempt to get outside one's head, an action at last taken, followed by consequent withdrawal and return to inertia or some other escapist state of mind.

Part 2,  Chapter 2

The narrator withdraws into a fantasy world of romantic reveries about heroism.  He goes to see Setochkin and, more importantly for the rest of the narrative, visits Simonov, his old friend from school days.

Part 2,  Chapter 3

We learn quite a bit about the narrator's early years: he was sent to school by distant relatives, and felt abandoned.  Much of his present character stems from those school years – his contempt for his fellow students and yet his desire to be recognized by them, even to conquer them after a fashion.  He becomes studious because they aren't.  Even as he plans to attend the dinner for the shallow, handsome officer Zverkov, he senses the hollowness of the whole enterprise; that is, putting one over on his old "frenemies" by insisting on attending a dinner to which he hasn't been invited.  I love the fact that the friends already at Simonov's for the initial meeting, Ferfichkin and Trudolyubov, scarcely acknowledge his presence even though he hasn't seen them for years (    ).  All of these so-called friends, of course, and especially the as-yet absent Zverkov, represent stupid acceptance of reality and the limitedness of all that is healthy and normal.

Part 2,  Chapter 4

The narrator shows up early to dinner since he has not been told about the one-hour time change (157 middle).  The better part of the chapter centers on the humiliation of this and indeed of the whole evening.  Zverkov's infinitely stupid, lisping condescension figures heavily (158-60), and so does the bickering of his other friends along with the narrator's own attempt to insult Zverkov, which is initially (163 middle) and then subsequently rebuffed (166 middle-bottom).  In the end, the narrator is again ignored.  He wrangles six rubles to follow his frenemies to the brothel they have gone to, even though his request for reconciliation has been refused by Zverkov.

Part 2,  Chapter 5

The narrator's planned climactic confrontation with reality (167-68, then 171) nets him not the opportunity to slap Zverkov and end up in a duel but rather a chance meeting with Lisa (171 middle), a humble prostitute.  He realizes that he is patterning his plans after great Russian literary works such as Masquerade by Lermontov (170).  Life imitates art, or at least it would if the narrator had any courage.  So instead, he will take out his anger and resentment on Lisa -- Zverkov is unavailable since he and his companions had already left the establishment before the narrator ever showed up.

Part 2,  Chapter 6

After he has sex with Lisa at the beginning of this chapter (172), the narrator begins conversation with Lisa, with an inward realization of just how stupid his own debauchery is (173 middle).  The narrator sets before Lisa the image of a happy family life, and paints for her the horrid prospect of continuing on in this lifestyle (175-76).  The conversation continues and his goal is to save Lisa after the manner of a Russian hero (177 middle).  At first he fails to understand that Lisa's sarcasm is only a cover for genuine feeling -- she is young, after all, and cynicism is seldom more than a fashion with young people.  He knows that his own rhetoric is what she says: something straight out of a book (183 top).  It's cheap talk, and hardly sincere.

Part 2,  Chapter 7

Lisa continues to be subjected to the narrator's harangue, and the pitch reaches its sentimental crescendo (184-87 middle).  The narrator even finds that he responds to his own histrionic speech, saying he had rattled on out of "sporting" enthusiasm (188 top).  This rhetoric is effective with Lisa since it seems to be what she needed to hear in her real-life context.  There is irony in the sense the narrator has so often tried to pattern his life, unsuccessfully enough, after literary texts.  Lisa touchingly shows the narrator the letter she received from a gentleman caller who knows nothing of her sordid present (189 bottom).  While leaving, the narrator realizes "the truth" (190 bottom) about this whole encounter -- as he will say in the next chapter, it has all been nothing but sentimentality, fundamentally insincere.

Part 2,  Chapter 8

The narrator writes to Simonov and pays his debt with borrowed money.  But he is still tormented by thoughts about Lisa, about her pathetic match-light smile, and obsesses over being found out in his cheap apartment (193 middle).  He continues to spin absurd, romantic stories about himself (195 top-middle).  But as it turns out, the narrator can't even be in charge as a master, which we can see from his thoughts about and interactions with Apollon (196-97), his condescending and infuriating servant.  Lisa enters just at the point where the narrator is exhausted from a few pages' worth of arguing with Apollon over unpaid wages (200 bottom).  It is a humiliating moment.

Part 2,  Chapter 9

Infuriated with Lisa, the narrator mocks her in recalling their previous encounter, informing her that it was all just an act.  Why is he so angry at this unoffending young woman?  Probably because she has confronted him with the gap between his self-image and his actual identity.  The Hegelian Master/Servant dialectic may be a good thing to discuss here since for the German Idealist philosopher Georg Hegel, the self is founded upon confrontational moments -- risk, contradiction, dread. The self is established by struggle for recognition and certainty, which entails withholding recognition from others, and Hegel's famous representation of the founding of self-consciousness involves a primal struggle to the death between two individuals, with the outcome being the lordship of one and the enslavement or subjugation of the other, and a consequent need for mediating their now-indirect relations through a relationship to and with objects.  But the Master/Servant dialectic can also be read, as Alexandre Kojève and others have done, as a continuing struggle that happens internally, inside the head of each individual rather than a physical struggle between two individuals: a battle for self-recognition, authenticity, personal autonomy.  I suggest that success in this endeavor would perhaps be constituted by an adequate fit between who one really is and who one thinks one is.  If that's the right way to put it, it's clear that the narrator is not succeeding.  Lisa's is not a blockheaded master-consciousness, and in fact the narrator says that the relative position between himself and this young woman had been reversed: just as she was in the subject-position at the brothel, the weeping nervous wreck of a narrator is now in precisely that position relative to her.  He takes her solicitude for pity, and that is unbearable to him.  She is a sensitive servant-consciousness who seems to be offering him the very recognition he craves but cannot abide.  The situation is intolerable.

Part 2,  Chapter 10

The narrator says that for him, love has always been a matter of dominating others, and it is the product of struggle.  But then, his hatred of real-life makes it impossible to deal with the "subjugated object" (     ).  Lisa takes her leave, having rejected the crumpled five ruble note the narrator tried to give her as a token of his own spite, a symbol of his wish to see her as nothing more than a prostitute in spite of her genuine affection for him.  In the end, writing this entire story down seems to have been punishment rather than relief.  The narrator has throughout cast himself as the anti-hero, the man alienated from so-called real life.  The underground seems to be the place where an unquenchable desire to engage with real life perpetually battles an equally strong desire to escape from it and forget it altogether, to disappear into heroic fictions spun by others or by oneself.

Romanticism

NOTES ON ENGLISH AND EUROPEAN ROMANTICISM

William Blake's "The Tyger" ( Vol. E, 339)

The tyger looks almost tame in most plates, and its appearance varies from one copy to the next. So perhaps Blake doesn't want to pin himself down on its meaning. Geoffrey Keynes says the poem's question is no less than the reconcilement of good with evil. The Tyger is not a natural being, or if it is, it is given a spiritual interpretation. Is it something created altogether by the human imagination? Did God make the Tyger? The poem's answer would be "yes."  The poem is about fallen nature, but this isn't really a nature poem because "forest of the night" is not the description we would give to indicate a natural forest. Blake's forest here is symbolic, and I believe the poem is at base about the terrors of the human imagination. We create something charged with symbolic power, and then shrink back from it in dread. It assumes fetishistic power over us, and renders us helpless. The things of the natural world have often been interpreted in this manner -- that is, as something threatening and alien to human beings. At the same time, a real tiger might be said to possess "fearful symmetry" in terms of its beautiful appearance and elegant movements.  As such, its existence is a challenge to our faith in the simple binary opposition good/evil. But a real tiger simply is and lives; it is neither good nor evil but a creature possessed of copious energy and impossible grace. How does one reconcile its beauty with its violence, its affinity with the lamb it would devour?

William Blake's "London" (340)

The poem "London" evokes a city trapped in a cycle of wretchedness. London here is a real city filled with material oppression and suffering, but at the same time it represents a spiritual state of enslavement brought about by the repression of healthy desires and impulses and the systemic encouragement of unhealthy and selfish ones.  What Blake puts on display is a cannibalistic universe ruled by necessity and ruthless economy: one person's poverty is another's wealth, and one person's sexual desperation is another's livelihood. This is a world made by humans that has become inhuman, inhumane. The poem echoes with sounds of despair -- sighs, cries and curses testify against the mute, sullen, inscrutable architecture of the great City, and in the final stanza, the "youthful harlot's curse" strikes the newborn child and the carriage of the newlywed alike, dooming them to perpetuate the spectacle around them for yet another generation. All is marked, hemmed in ("chartered"), enchained as if by fiendish design.

William Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" (351-54)

 

This meditative poem traces, in brief, the stages of development in the poet's relationship with his natural surroundings, with the aim of recovering a sense of purpose and vocation.  The speaker's affinity with the natural world grounds his very being, so in a sense, the poem is also about the recovery of the poet's capacity for intelligible self-representation.  First and foremost, how does he understand himself?  Nature plays many roles in romantic poetry -- as one of my UC Irvine professors (Al Wlecke) summed up those roles, nature serves as 1) the antithesis of traditional institutions and thought; 2) a substitute religion: 3) a vehicle for self-consciousness; 4) a source of healthy sensations; 5) a provocation to a state of imagination.  Wordsworth makes the environs of Tintern Abbey serve all of those purposes.

Lines 1-22.  This part of the poem is what Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuit founder and author of the meditation guide Spiritual Exercises, might call the "composition of place."  The meditator or "exercitant" thinks about some personally or theologically significant place, with the goal of achieving the calm necessary to focus the mind on some spiritual problem that needs resolution.  That is what "Tintern's" speaker is doing -- he has been here before as a younger and more carefree man, and, as we later hear, the mere recollection of this spot above the crumbling, picturesque abbey has sustained him in difficult, city-bound times.  What sustaining power will it have for him now that he has actually returned?  Will it revive his flagging spirits and diminished sense of imaginative capacity?

The landscape and the cliffs, earthly things, point to the heavenly realm of spirit; these natural images represent the poet's state of mind and his aspirations: the scene is mimetic (imitative, representational) in that it describes the natural scene, but also expressive in that it is charged with emotional and moral significance.  The speaker is rather like the contemplative hermit he mentions in these first lines -- isolated, but intently focused on his spiritual condition or, more broadly, his present psychic health and prospects for the future.

Lines 23-111.  The natural scenes that the speaker recollects have helped him in past times to purge himself of civilization's corrupting, diminishing effects.  It is not only the scenes in nature, the so-called "beauteous forms," that the speaker remembers; these archetypal, eternal forms cause him to recollect past sensations and feelings that made him feel fully alive and creative.  Meditation in nature's presence helps him attain tranquility, and as we may recall from Wordsworth's "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," such tranquility is the precondition for successful poetic composition.  In a state of calm, the poet recalls prior sensations and feelings, this recollection gives rise to new, equally significant feelings in the present, and then the right words begin to course through the poet's mind.  While the romantics are of course attracted to theories of inspiration, the process Wordsworth favors seems more a matter of cultivating in a disciplined way the temperament conducive to the making of poetry -- deep feeling and a healthy excess of imagination are important, but these are fed by affective memory and sustained by habit.

Around line 40, the speaker describes an experience similar to a religious epiphany, a moment of deep spiritual insight in which we are purified and renewed.  He is in a state of "wise passiveness," to borrow a phrase from another of his poems ("Expostulation and Reply").  What does religion provide if not moral intelligibility?  It is clear that much sad experience has come the speaker's way in the five years between the present and his last visit to the environs of Tintern Abbey: "the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world" lies upon him.

Around line 50, the speaker voices his anxiety that his trust in recollections of his relationship with nature may be only "a vain belief."  What if the link between mind and nature is irrevocably broken?  What if such claims about strong affinities between humanity and nature are abstractions, mere products of rhetoric?  It may be that the speaker cannot re-experience the feelings he once had.  If so, he will be cut off from the vital source of his own being.  Still, as his prayer to the river shows, nature is a shepherd, so to speak.  So the speaker will not give in to fear but will instead take comfort in what remains to him.  In the rest of the poem, he will assert the capacity to be sustained by the memory of nature's forms and to respond to his natural surroundings.

The Miltonic diction of line 66 helps provide some contemplative distance for readers.  The precisely delineated moments or stages in the poet's relationship with nature over time now become the recollected past.  The present is linked to this sustainable past, providing hope for the future.

Around line 75, the speaker admits "I cannot paint what then I was."  He has no words to represent how he felt accurately when his love for nature, long after the "glad animal sensations" of childhood, haunted him and had all the intensity of an erotic passion.  This inability to describe a former stage in his relationship with nature is painful to him -- what he cannot describe, he cannot recover in actual experience.

Around line 85, the speaker refers to the "abundant recompence" he has been given for the loss sustained.  As in Jeremy Taylor's book Holy Living and Holy Dying, a Christian must not indulge in despair, and hope comes partly from the reckoning up of one's blessings.  In our poet's case, there is compensation for the loss that comes with maturity.  What is this compensation?  The speaker describes it as a pantheistic "sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns…."  The word "therefore" soon signals that the poem's mimetic language has given way to sublime abstractions that assert the speaker's higher, more philosophical understanding of the continuity between mind and nature.  This moves us towards the end of the "analysis" to which Meyer Abrams refers in writing about the Greater Romantic Lyric, which begins with meditative description, proceeds to the articulation and analysis of a spiritual problem, and concludes with a solution linked to the poet's capacity for healthy emotion and passionate connection to others.

Around line 105, the speaker describes nature as a source of healthy feelings and as the "anchor" of his moral being.  The anchor, of course, is a Christian symbol of hope.

Lines 111-end, Affective Resolution.  Dorothy is nature's equivalent in this final section of the poem.  The poem turns intersubjective at this point, so it's hardly an example of what Keats calls Wordsworth's "egotistical sublime." (The phrase refers to a romantic tendency to plumb the depths of the inner self until nothing else matters -- to use a modern quip, "it's all about me.")  The speaker's retrieval of his connection to nature leads him back to the human world, and he takes pleasure in the hope that his sister will remain after he is gone, still to experience some of the phases of her relationship with nature that the speaker has described.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (379).

What is the source of poetry?  How is poetry composed?  What is the value of expressive acts such as poetry?  One of the two impossible dreams in "Kubla Khan" is to make the inner workings of one's mind available to the waking self and to other people.  To borrow a term from the Twentieth Century, can the Unconscious become available to the conscious mind?  Freud would say we can only make inferences based on certain screening, masking, and distorting devices that keep unpleasant emotional events hidden from us.  We are always "translators" when it comes to understanding the mind, and what we must work with is always fragmentary or somehow distorted. 

In Coleridge's context, the Man from Porlock represents the world noisily breaking in and preventing us from accessing the Imagination (in the form of Kubla Khan the poet-emperor.)  Kubla seems to be a god-figure who simply speaks, and the thing is done; he decrees that a Pleasure-Dome be built, and it is built.  Kubla is close to the source of unconscious creation, which, I believe, is figured by the sacred river Alph.  (The Norton Anthology of English Literature notes suggest that the word comes from the Greek river-god Alpheus, but I can't see why it shouldn't be the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, "Aleph.")  Coleridge treats the Man from Porlock as an external nuisance, but his arrival just in time to shatter the poet's attempt to write down his vision intact points rather to a need that he should show up.  Perhaps, then, the Man is an internal mechanism that maintains the barrier between the dream world and waking consciousness.  To break down that barrier permanently or entirely would almost certainly result in madness.  In the prose preface affixed to his poem, Coleridge indicates a perfect kind of poetic composition: images rise up as things, and the right words ("correspondent expressions") come just as automatically to the dreamer.  There seems to be no need here for what Coleridge describes in his Biographia Literaria as the secondary (or poetic) imagination's coexistence with the "conscious will."  In other words, we are dealing with automatic writing from a source deeper than any that could coexist with ordinary consciousness and will.

But this perfect way of composing cannot be realized -- the hope that it could is the poem's second impossible dream; namely a language that not only names and describes reality but creates it -- so the composition we see consists of written fragments on the printed page.  In this sense, perhaps the Man from Porlock is ultimately the act of writing.  A dream vision, to be communicated as a poem, will have to be written down, and thereby comes a second and irretrievable loss.

Well, what does the written fragment dwell upon?  Mostly it dwells on the river Alph, the chasm, and the fountain.  Kubla is mentioned twice -- first when he decrees the Pleasure-Dome and then when he hears "ancestral voices prophesying war."  The miraculous Dome itself can't be fully represented by Coleridge the poet, it seems.  Well, what would the result be if the poet could build the Dome in writing?  We would, he suggests, have to build barriers around him and treat him as an object of holy dread: he would be co-emperor of Kubla's Empire of Imagination: "weave a circle round him thrice."  But given what we actually, have, it appears that poetry's chief power lies not in delivering such magical realities, but rather in suggesting them.  That is what Mary Robinson's "To the Poet Coleridge" identifies as the chief value of "Kubla Khan."

Charles Baudelaire's selections from The Flowers of Evil (466-80).

"To the Reader"

There's much in this proem of the luxury of self-reproach, homage to the search for novelty, anything, anything at all, to break out of the unbearable stupidity of everyday life and conventional morality.  But the worst "sin" of all, it would appear, is boredom, which in French is ennui (from Old French enuier, modern French ennuyer, to annoy), which involves both boredom and depression, apathy, listlessness.  It's similar to the spiritual sin of acedia (akedía, Greek, spiritual sloth).  So what does this ennui make possible?  I think it's vital to recognize that the state of soul or mind here is as much an opportunity as a curse, at least for Baudelaire and the décadents who followed him.  There's a constant movement towards the voluptuous and the sensuous in Baudelaire, but also a reflux of disgust upon giving in to such states or objects.  I don't think a philosophy like Baudelaire's, which is more or less the basis of the Decadent Movement, can be adopted straight-up, I mean without some irony and a sense of humor: it's morbid, obsessed with the seamy side of things and with strange novelties.  Well, the author's theoretical writings openly reject merely natural things and effects as too limited, too base: as he writes in The Painter of Modern Life, "nature counsels nothing but crime."  The glib way of putting this is of course Oscar Wilde's wonderful judgment on natural sunsets: all we get from mother nature, said Oscar, is second-rate copies of Turner's magnificent painted sunsets.  Nature has no imagination, it seems.

"Correspondances"

The poem "Correspondances" gives us a respectful view of nature's value to us: "nature is a temple" and we wander in its symbolic power and evocations.  It's as if our gaze is met by nature's towards us.  The editors mention Baudelaire's interest in synesthesia, or the blending of the senses as though they all harmonize, all come together to give us a unified experience of some "mystic unity" (the Norton editors mention this aptly on 1383).  This is an odd relationship with nature, isn't it?  It's hardly the one you'd get from, say, Wordsworth, where the natural world is said to be the source of our moral being, of healthy and universal sensations that connect each person to all others, at least potentially.

One could say that to call nature a temple is to transform it into something that signifies in the human realm.  But then, the obverse is also true: it's to suggest that the human realm of language and symbol and image corresponds to nature.  This is how Baudelaire offers a sense of idealism, of the possibility of transcendence.  This poem is vital to the Symbolistes in that language itself takes center stage along with the mind's power.  The point here isn't to imitate an objective, unchanging external reality, it's to assert a mystical correspondence between spiritual or mental states and the realm of external nature.  There's a tendency in modern times to replace any notion of objective reality with an emphasis on the power of language as a realm in its own right, one that shapes and perhaps even constitutes our sense of reality, and later symbolist poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé will take this idea about as far as it can go.

"Her Hair"

For me, the key to this poem is its sensual intensity, which is almost like that of John Donne, he of the "she is all states, all princes I" rhetoric that we can find in "The Sunne Rising" and other poems.  But aside from the gesture towards annihilating time and space, what about the speaker's wish to know "a measure / Of fertile idleness and fragrant leisure"?  As so often, Baudelaire explores the strange delights of indolence, of ennui.

"A Carcass"

This poem follows the ideational structure of a Shakespearean sonnet: "If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved."  That is, the poem's conclusion reasserts the same ideal that the rest of it tore down, with all those images of decay and references to the ugliness and stench of death: putrefaction, morbidity, horror.  Consider, too, Hamlet's mocking muse while beholding the skull of Yorick in 5.1: "Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let / her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must / come; make her laugh at that."  This is the embrace of opposites that the Norton editors mention in connection with Baudelaire's poetics: life and death, beauty and decay, the material and the ideal.  His poetry has something of William Blake's intensity in this regard.

"Invitation to the Voyage" (51^st poem of les Fleurs du Mal)

Is the speaker in fact offering us an idealistic, otherworldly vision?  Maybe, maybe not – the poem revels in eroticism, which isn't the same thing as emphasizing or gesturing towards some grand abstract ideal realm.  Will the lover accept the invitation?  That's not so certain: the poet says her eyes (windows to the soul) are treacherous, not to be trusted, though by no means to be left behind or rejected and despised.  And of course consider the poem "Voyage," where the passage seems to be anything but towards an otherworldly ideal.