:Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation

Next article FreeBook ReviewPoetic Form and Romantic Provocation. Carmen Faye Mathes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. Pp. xii+245.Eric LindstromEric LindstromUniversity of Vermont Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreWhen Benedict de (Baruch) Spinoza was expelled from the synagogue, he is reported to have said: “All the better; they do not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my own accord if I did not dread scandal.”1 His thought and works were the subject of philosophical and religious controversy across Europe for much of the next two centuries, their very policing made foundational to Western intellectual modernity in many of its standard tellings. (According to Jonathan Israel, underground communities of dissident Spinozist thought provide the key to a “Radical Enlightenment” countermodernity.)2 In her long-awaited book Thinking through Poetry: Field Notes on the Romantic Lyric (2018),3 Marjorie Levinson powerfully leveraged not only the controversy embedded in the history of Spinoza’s thought, but her own past notoriety as a brilliantly polemical new historicist literary scholar in British Romantic studies, into the excitement of a bold recognition of not cultural but poetic materialism: a monist, materialist philosophical poetics. In this shift from history to poetics, Spinoza supplied the terms for a postdialectical materialism. Where Levinson was long known as the argumentative demolisher of the evasively grand harmonies of William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Thinking through Poetry exchanged that fierce repute for something irenic, elaborating upon the mostly intuitive and affective Spinozism found in Romantic poetry, on the grounds of Wordsworth’s nondualistic lyricism of motion and spirit.Characteristically argument driven, Levinson’s study also—and I would surmise deliberately—cultivated a self-stylizing dimension that measured its aim and impact as the performance of an apparent conversion along the road of a major scholarly career. And yet, as in Spinoza’s thought, the idea of a consciously willful shift is ultimately presented as an illusion. The act of a high-profile academic critic repositioning herself over a lifetime through altering trends, Thinking through Poetry instead announces a generative (and belatedly generous) adjustment to lower-frequency rhythms of being there all along: an anthropological and ontological tribute to the inescapable truth of Spinoza’s conatus. Conatus, as Mathes states in her own new study, is a fundamental “striving to persist in being” (17). In Levinson’s characteristically more fulsome elaboration:Conatus is defined as a ceaseless and instinctive striving through which individuals endeavor to persist in their individuality. What gives conatus its radical cast is that unlike an instinct for self-preservation operating within individuals to preserve their defining essence or content, so to speak (and unlike a physical instinct in the service of a mental entity), Spinoza’s conatus equates individuals with their endeavors to preserve a kinetic poise within a dynamic ensemble of relations, an ensemble that also composes them as individuals. “The human body, to be preserved, requires a great many other bodies, by which it is, as it were, continually regenerated.”4Rocks, and stones, and trees, and thoughts, and books, and scholars: a great variety of materialist bodies of one substance. Yet insofar as Levinson’s Thinking has marked a kind of transformation in recent Romantic studies, it is in large part due to the impersonal specific gravity of its particular author, matched to that quality of affect most inherent in Spinoza’s materialist and “skeptical” philosophy. No matter how much it disrupts, it is astoundingly placid. Informed by and itself already regenerative of the recent bodies of thought of her key intellectual influences—from the Spinoza of Levinson to the scholars of sympathy, affect, gender, colonialism, and race in Romanticism, not to say the scholarship at large on British Romantic poetry—Carmen Faye Mathes’s Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation amply demonstrates the same quality of “kinetic poise within a dynamic ensemble of relations.” However, Mathes’s Spinoza adds a necessary element, in further evoking conatus as “the force by which we can resist the affections” (18). The grace note of Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation is this often-impersonal resistance, which in Spinozist terms is no heroic effort, but found in improvised forms of letdown, tripping, “unasked-for responsibility” (29), and “striving to endure” (37). When compared to the conspicuously hardworking ethos of Levinson’s collection of writings (just compare their handling of discursive notes), in all but the core argument Mathes draws this trait of poise from quite different constitutive elements.In its tone, Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation does not project forth a new mode of Romanticism, but carefully tracks “anticipatory affects” in the negative space of “affective impingement” (20–21). Embracing dissonance, the book itself reads nondisruptively (22–26). Like Spinoza wanted, there is dissonance without scandal. Its one undeniably provocative feature (meant to provoke and suggest the schematic of form?) is the gaudy cover art. In her study Mathes avoids reflexively stylizing a thematic of provocation. Far from depending on disciplinary agitation for its effect, Mathes’s book gains its force from limpid academic writing, and from the consistent display of its expert, savvy positioning within the present field of British Romantic studies. In Mathes’s hands, this field takes new bearings not just from a wider canon, but in the effort to think with, or endure, our current time of perpetual crisis. For a book mostly focused on canonical authors (with William Wordsworth “a significant touchstone in all five chapters” [23]), Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation is conscientiously diverse in its matters of concern. Some aspects of this judicious study appear to reach back in their scholarly approach to the works of Adela Pinch (Strange Fits of Passion [1996]) and Susan Wolfson (Formal Charges [1997]), studies written in the more secure academic milieu of the 1990s. Yet Mathes’s work is open at many points to present recognitions of forms of repair and harm. Mathes was recently announced a cowinner of the 2023 NASSR (North American Society for the Study of Romanticism) Anti-Racist Pedagogy Contest.5 Commitment to a more inclusive version of Romantic studies informs this book both in terms of its treatment of historical networks and contexts of literary authorship, and by acts of strategic presentism that seek to critique and renew Romantic solidarity by means of twenty-first century social justice imperatives.Despite richly textured development of readings in the event, Mathes’s initial remarks on the handling of form, content, and genre are so terse as to make me wonder whether she is being crystalline or flippant, so as to set up and then overturn conventional readerly expectations of form and genre (10–12). The real “forms,” not found but as Mathes engages with them, are delivered via redoubling and renegotiation of the expected formal genres and conventions. Among these reciprocal maneuvers are Charlotte Smith’s double volta Elegiac Sonnets, Mary Robinson’s disappointing and “noncathartic” revisions of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads in her Lyrical Tales (73), Coleridge’s “tactics for avoiding disappointed reading of Wordsworth” (92), Keats’s dynamic sense of passivity and his “nondominant” sensation of writing on posthumousness in the dark (130), and Percy Shelley’s political logic of “probable safety and assured violence” (163)—the last brought to bear through a brilliant reading of bondage, prison, and home in the alienated massed bodies in Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy.Though Mathes does not follow this track, ordinary language philosophy, too, and more explicitly, provides a model for addressing the sociolinguistic base of an asymmetry in what is meant by form. Provocations—if they can be organized into a single kind of thing at all—belong to a class of linguistic actions that J. L. Austin called “perlocutionary” speech acts.6 Like other instances of perlocution (and not of the more institutional, ritual, and formalized illocutionary acts for which Austin’s idea of performative language is famous), a provocation cannot just be declared, patly and descriptively. “I seduce you”; “I insult you”; “I provoke you”: all fall bathetically flat as verbal acts so rendered, because the effect of this kind of unscripted performative does not derive from invoking a formula. Rather, it is conveyed and received—and potentially disrupted—only in the event. As perlocutions, provocations must be attested through their experience. In Mathes’s book, similarly, provocations “disrupt and invite, disturb and compel” (back cover print). Not only the politics of provocation, but their aesthetic form is radically open in a constitutive sense. All perlocutions, by their nature, to some extent resist and reshape the affective substance that vibrates fast or slow in form. By invoking the thought of Spinoza throughout as a philosophical guide for best understanding the “anticipatory affects” that are disrupted by Romantic poetry (4), Mathes redistributes the force of this insight. It is not only linguistic and social as in Austin’s ordinary language philosophy; it is “pre-personal” and “prior to apperception, and may thereby vex our belief that our feelings are our own” (6).Mathes draws equably rather than with partisan loyalty from scholarship in the broad trend of “new formalist” literary criticism and from theoretical studies of affect. For the latter, she takes parallel lines drawn from both Spinoza’s Ethics and from contemporary affect theorists such as Sianne Ngai and Brian Massumi. On the basis of the notes, the intellectual labors of reading and research behind the book are carried light, but without exception the sources are all judicious. The introduction shares a key conceptual maneuver, in the reorientation of conceptual background history away from eighteenth-century British empirical underpinnings and its ubiquitous keyword of sympathy, and toward the impersonal affect-based philosophy of Spinoza. As such, Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation enters the now quite-long list of contributions to scholarship on Romanticism that seek to negate and dissolve the autonomy of a bounded, self-willing subject. This ubiquitous, almost compulsory project may invite an ironic recognition at the disciplinary level: in its professional context, the departure isn’t disruptive; its successful anticipation means that just as Mathes compellingly demonstrates how a Spinozist understanding of affect can pivot readings toward exciting new bearings on Romantic thought, persons, and texts, the contribution risks successful admission to an unobjectionable status. Barbara Johnson’s remark never stops hitting: nothing fails like success. Were Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation to deal in some way with this recursive configuration of negative affect, it would have proved a messier yet even more admirable feat.Still, a virtue of Mathes’s book is that its negative caretaking elaborations of readerly affect themselves allow, without building a defense against, such movements of restive irony. Mathes’s Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation shows how to realize important work within the new distribution of Romantic studies where scholarship can be at once a refresh to canonical inheritance, strategically juxtapositional, and inclusive.Notes1. Steven Nadler, “Why Spinoza Was Excommunicated,” Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities 34, no. 5 (September/October 2013), https://www.neh.gov/article/why-spinoza-was-excommunicated.2. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford University Press, 2001).3. In a review of Levinson’s book (Romantic Circles, October 1, 2020, https://romantic-circles.org/reviews-blog/marjorie-levinson-thinking-through-poetry-field-notes-romantic-lyric-reviewed-carmen), Mathes discusses its formative role in her own scholarship.4. Marjorie Levinson, Thinking through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric (Oxford University Press, 2018), 113–14. The inset quotation is from Spinoza’s Ethics.5. “NASSR/ECF Anti-Racist Pedagogy Contest 2023,” NASSR Newsletter 32, no. 1 (Spring 2023):13, https://www.nassr.ca/newsletter. The syllabus for Matthes’s award-winning course, “Romanticism, Labour and Longing,” may be found at https://ecf.humanities.mcmaster.ca/romanticism-labour-and-longing/.6. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), lecture 9. Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/727338 HistoryPublished online September 20, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.