Victorians in theory: from Derrida to Browning By John Schad
p.146 notes...
[Where Hopkins was, there Lacan will be]
‘The whole of history’, writes Marx in 1844,
‘is a preparation, a development, for “man” to become the object of sensuous
consciousness’ [And you wonder why he is liked?] (Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts, in Karl Marx: Early Writings…The conceit of the conscious body, I
am suggesting, is latent in the writings of the early Marx. As Terry Eagleton has recently argued,
Marxism is very much part of the modern attempt ‘to…think everything through
again…from the standpoint of the body’ (The Ideology of the Aesthetic [Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990]---a claim that again finds support from the …MS…when Marx
asserts that ‘the suppression of private property is…the complete emancipation
of all human senses’ (351)… Freud, Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago, 1940), 15.86;
Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 33/34; Hopkins, ‘The Lantern out of Doors’.
Hopkins
writes, in a letter to Robert Bridges, “I have little reason to be Red: it was the red Commune that murdered five of
our fathers lately’…
As
Jesus says: “You will know them by their fruits.” The lanterns outside the doors are false.
And
here is further evidence of the twists in the captivity of the ‘dimensions of
alienation’:
God’s
Sleep
The task [of interpreting the unconscious]
is made no easier by the fact that we are at the mercy of a thread woven with
allusions, quotations, puns, and equivocations.
(Lacan)
It
seems true…that you can trace your dreams to something or other in your waking
life…But the connection may be capricious, almost punning: I remember in one
case to have detected a real pun but what it was I forget. (Hopkins)3
…Hopkins
himself writes of the ‘mind[‘s]…cliffs of fall’, of the ‘heart in hiding’, and
of an ‘underthought, conveyed chiefly in…metaphors…[and] only half realized by
the poet.’4
…Given
the poet’s ‘aspirations to anonymity’,5 we might take from ‘Andromeda’ the
formula ‘no one dreams’ as an epigram for Hopkins. p.116
p.117 That, in effect, is what several critics
have done. Daniel Harris remarks that
the terrible sonnets ‘verge…towards nightmare’; Robert Martin talks of the
‘chaos of [the]…unconscious within…an exigent verse form’; and Hillis Miller
observes that, ‘as in the opium dreams of De Quincey, Hopkins’ time of
desolation is elastic’.6 In his work on
The Wreck of the Deutschland Walter Ong also lays, or breaks, the ground for
our discussion. …puts much stress on the
telegraphic communications that made possible The Times’s day-by-day
on-the-spot reports of the disaster…The Wreck, declares Ong, is a
‘telegraphically conditioned poem’.7
…One
critic who certainly prompts us to read The Wreck as a dream-text is David
Shaw, who points out moments in which it is ‘as if [the poet]…were suffering
from…aphasia’10---at times a similarity-disorder (‘where, where was a, where
was a place?’), at other times a continguity-disorder (‘the Master/Ipse, the
only one, Christ, King, Head’).
According to Lacan, these disorders constitute---as metaphor and
metonymy, respectively---characteristic features of the unconscious.11 In The Wreck, the unconscious most obviously
surfaces through the biblical story of Christ asleep in the midst of a terrible
storm:
If the unconscious, namely Christ’s, is in some
sense crucial to the sea-storm, might it not also have to do with the poem’s
aphasic storm of metaphor and metonymy?....an encounter with ‘the dark side of
the bay of thy blessing’ (st. 12)? Does
the poem confront not only ‘the storm of his strides’ (st.33) but the storm of
his dreams?
To represent God, albeit in Christ, as
unconscious is to make a radical departure from traditional…For the Victorians,
however, it was possible, in the wake of Romanticism’s privileging of the
irrational, to imagine a quite different God.
[Thus the socialistic -atheistic desire to reduce God to a mere
projection of a man’s unconscious, which Joseph Campbell has carried to the
extreme.]
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