7. Keats’s Nausea

Abstract

Perhaps I eat to persuade myself I am somebody. (1) --John Keats Now no comfort avails any more; longing transcends a world after death, even the gods; existence is negated along with its glittering reflection in the gods, or in any immortal beyond. Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence; ... he is nauseated. (2) --Friedrich Nietzsche KEATS IS KNOWN TO HAVE AS PERPLEXED A RELATION TO THE SENSORY--particularly the savory--as any poet. Elizabeth Bishop remarks in a letter to Robert Lowell that "Except for his unpleasant insistence on the palate, he strikes me as almost everything a poet should have been in his day." (3) The view was shared by many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, including Carlyle, for whom Keats was "a miserable creature, hungering after sweets which he can't get, going about saying, `I am so hungry; I should so like something pleasant!'" (4) Yeats immortalized him as a school-boy with his face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window. (5) And critics since Lionel Trilling have read him as "possibly unique among poets in the extensiveness of his reference to eating and drinking and to its pleasurable or distasteful sensations." (6) Whether we believe, with Helen Vendler, that this preoccupation with gustatory taste represents a healthy relation to a world of vigorously taken pleasure, or, with Marjorie Levinson, that it signals a dysfunctional aesthetic attitude, the physical metaphor of taste informs both his poetry and poetic theory. (7) Keats's chameleon-poet famously "lives in gusto," a term derived from gustus (taste) and characterized by Hazlitt as an effect whereby the eye acquires "a taste or appetite for what it sees." (8) The "poetical character" is defined by its ability to "taste" and "relish" the world it perceives: "its relish of the dark side of things ... its taste for the bright one" (Letters 1: 387). And Keats himself, on December 31, 1818, the eve of his so-called annus mirabilis, declared that he had "not one opinion upon any thing except in matters of taste" (Letters 2: 19). (9) While it would be unwise to assume that Keats really did renounce everything but "matters of taste," we continue to grapple with this particular aspect of his own self-fashioning. As Keats's own experience never let him forget, it is the body that "tastes," or experiences pleasure metaphorically through taste, and in Keats's case, that body was a consumptive body--one that wasted away, consuming itself, as it literally starved to death. In the tragic account of his last days left by Joseph Severn, Keats constantly raved that he would die from hunger as his stomach, rather than nourishing the rest of his body, became instead its devourer: "his Stomach--not a single thing will digest--the torture he suffers all and every night--and the best part of the day--is dreadful in the extreme--the distended stomach keeps him in perpetual hunger or craving." (10) By the end of his life, he had suffered (in Severn's words) "a ghastly wasting-away of his body and extremities" (qtd. in KC 1: 202). The problem for a poet devoted to acts of self-definition through "matters of taste" is that to be hungry, to be physically driven by appetite, cancels all pretensions to taste. As Kant states concisely in his third critique: "Hunger is the best sauce; and people with a healthy appetite relish everything, so long as it is something they can eat. Such delight, consequently, gives no indication of taste having anything to say to the choice. Only when men have got all they want can we tell who among the crowd has taste or not." (11) Whereas the legendary figure of the chameleon feeds upon air (as Keats knew from reading Hamlet), Keats recognized that he himself could not be sustained on the transcendental food of airy infinity. This essay will show how Keats's frustrated effort to exist in the ethereal world of aesthetic taste thrust him (and the idealism implicit in romantic poetics) into the modernist condition of nausea. …