SOURCE: Bernstein, Carol L. “Subjectivity as Critique and the Critique of Subjectivity in Keats's Hyperion.” In After the Future: Postmodern Times and Places, edited by Gary Shapiro, pp. 41-52. Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990.

One of the problems of postmodernist literary criticism has been that of aligning it with other cultural objects of modernity and of postmodernity itself. Like Twemlow in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, who faces the bottomless abyss of deciding whether he is Veneering's oldest or his newest friend, criticism faces the abyssal decision of where to situate its primary—or its ultimate—affiliations. It would seem to be a contradiction in terms for poststructuralist criticism to defend only the new, although a defense of the old would put its very qualities at risk.

We have seen the results of complicity between criticism and its object before: a poem may be read as a failed epic or as evidence of a struggle for authorial identity, depending on one's critical approach. Add to this the labyrinthine relations of the modern and the postmodern, and the decision regarding affiliation, no matter how critical, does seem to be an impossible one to make. One way out, however, appears in Andreas Huyssen's suggestion that poststructuralism's critical stance, its “retrospective reading” of modernity, locates poststructuralism liminally in the territories of both the modern and the postmodern.¹

In a similar vein, Lyotard argues that a work of art “can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state,”² for modernism comes into being in the conceptualizations that succeed it. Yet the question of “what follows” abhors linearity; a more fitting image might be Coleridge's new moon, which holds the old moon in its arms.³ Let us look at that part of the modernist scenario that foregrounds subjectivity or self-reflexivity: whether it be figured as the progress of reason or the inquiry into the human heart, the theme of a coming to consciousness (which unfolds from or is folded into the unconscious) grounds or reappears in an array of modernist projects or texts.

Poststructuralist theory, as we know, tends to undermine the primacy of subjectivity. Yet ironically, the postmodern questioning of the subject, especially insofar as it is understood to be unitary and conscious, assumes a certain self-consciousness in the act of questioning itself. In effect, self or self-consciousness is separated from its cultural origin, but only in order to return to it by way of a critical gaze, by way of speculation or specularity. It seems as if postmodernism is engaged in a salvage operation at the same time that it is prepared to jettison the very premises of modernism; the “death” of the subject gets played out by way of repression and displacement, for subjectivity reappears in order to constitute a mode of critique. Thus a postmodern stance would want to have it both ways, placing thoughtful man “under erasure” at the same time that its critique incorporates fragments of subjectivity: those fragments are now both part of the mind's machinery and the relics upon which that machinery focuses. Bricoleurs, it seems, would have a field day.

One way of construing this structure appears in Foucault's conception of the double, which “presents itself to reflection as the blurred projection of what man is in his truth, but that also plays the role of a preliminary ground upon which man must collect himself and recall himself in order to attain his truth.”⁴ For Foucault, what man thinks about himself, what he knows about himself, and what he conceives of as his origin are played out against the background of the Other, of what is alien to or historically independent of mankind. It would be a contradiction in terms to speak of the alien or the Other except in relation to man: the separation depends upon a specular or perspectival relation, here repressed as a function or culture. Just as thought is definable only in relation to the unthought—a move that suspends all certainties about being—so speech is dependent upon prior conceptions of language:

[When man] attempts to define his essence as a speaking subject, prior to any effectively constituted language, all he ever finds is the previously unfolded possibility of language, and not the stumbling sound, the first word upon the basis of which all languages and even language itself became possible. It is always against a background of the already begun that man is able to reflect on what may serve for him as origin.

[The Order of Things, p. 330]

The double in its various manifestations then represents both man and his truth, “projected” or “thrown forward,” in which man is nevertheless inseparable from his alien origins; “blurred” yet distinct from his grounds, almost from himself. (“Grounding,” we may observe, is the metaphor that allows the progress of reason or the inquiry into the human heart to appear as a figure. Yet inasmuch as suspicion of the ground is a salient feature of poststructuralist criticism, to call the ground into question would also make indeterminate the status of the figure.) Preliminary ground and projection, origin and end, then form a structure comprised of two dependent parts. Reflection upon oneself, or self-reflection, is inevitably implicated with the not-self. “Man” is himself diacritical, prone to the self-division of the double but also to an imaginary reconstitution in the mirror of theoretical reflection. Such a scenario is replicated in the cultural narrative of modernism, in which the status of man and his subjectivity is so central.

In this dyadic relation, the modern generates the postmodern, but the modern is nevertheless inconceivable without the prior knowledge and critical understanding of the postmodern. The latter thus appears as a critical double moment in the continuing narrative of modernism. Both Huyssen and Foucault, then, project figurative structures for cultural history, which are at once linear and folded, continuous and ruptured. Although they are somewhat abstract, these figures are necessarily diacritical, products of the very structures they cast on to their subjects. The rhetoric of doubling and projection, of otherness and specularity, of finiteness and indeterminacy, of progression and rupture, and of an innocent afterlife or a more sinister belatedness, inhabits contemporary theorizing about modernity and postmodernity. But while the debate tends to favor an either/or form, a both/and form seems more promising. If the link is repressed, if it is represented only in the bar between the terms, that bar may signal that the death of the subject generates an afterlife, a return of the repressed.

I

Ironically, another analogous situation appears in Keats's Hyperion, in which the fall of the Titans and the succession of the Olympian gods is limned. While the poem transposes a Miltonic transposition of biblical myth, it also represents the birth of the modern poet in the figure of Apollo. But the violent emergence of the poet figure in the fragmentary third book challenges one myth of the second book, in which world history appears to be represented, in Oceanus's speech, as a succession of gradual and progressive events. While one might be justifiably wary of granting pride of place to Oceanus, many readers have been prone to do just that, and to associate his grand narrative of progress with the Enlightenment. This has been identified as one of Keats's projects: Oceanus then prophesies the modernity that is to be incarnated in Apollo. Yet Apollo's “modernity” comes as no easy birth: rather it is represented as an agonized dying into life, which breaks off abruptly. The effective collapse of the Enlightenment perspective with the gesture toward the unrepresentable, toward a sublime cancellation or supersession of history, might then be identified with postmodernity. Oceanus's reading of divine succession as a continuing process in which the more beautiful must be the more powerful, appears in a more violent register in Apollo, who incorporates almost literally the “Knowledge enormous” of the past, but whose brain is filled with “Creations and destroyings” that belie the conception of gentle progress. I do not mean to shift the historical frames of modernity and postmodernity, but rather to suggest that the poem “reads” those cultural moments by offering an allegory of their relation. Both are revolutionary, but each moment marks a turn upon the other's revolutionary premise.

In construing the agonistic meeting ground, Hyperion represents a symbiotic or reversible structure in which each perspective casts light upon the other. Thrown into the abyss of temporality and mortality, the Titans attempt nevertheless to control the future by narrative projection. To the bellicose Saturn, Oceanus proffers a narrative of progress that will convert the “pain of truth” into a “balm.”⁵ In counterpoint, the emergence of Apollo, whose brain is filled with texts of past events, or with “knowledge enormous” of the events themselves, signifies an attempt to control the past. Both instances, of projection on the one hand and of introjection on the other, involve repetition, but repetition in translation, as it were. There is an implicit conversion of feeling tone. Although both are gestures of narrative reaching out, the Titans look back upon a catastrophic recent past while the Olympian moves forward by facing the past, propelled, like Klee's angel in Benjamin's account, into the future by his retrospective stance.⁶

Hyperion's “reading” of modernity and postmodernity, then, casts them into the form of a doublet in which each plays the role of ground for the other. Three of the major problematic areas of the doublet are represented in the poem: the death of the subject and its textual reconstitution; the grand march of history with its recasting into a form of narrative representation; the critique of representation as a power play in which “A power more strong in beauty, born of us / And fated to excel us, as we pass in glory that old darkness” (II, 213-15) turns and re-turns. Oceanus identifies repetition grounded in excess, where “glory” surpasses darkness and beauty then “excels” glory, although is account masks conflict in the transfer of power: “doth the dull soil / Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed”? (II, 217-18). The poem figures the uncanny in local ways, but it also figures uncannily the advent of modernism-postmodernism as both structure and problematic.

To view the poem in this light, in a figurative reading of its own figural role, would be to appropriate and revise Huyssen's remark that poststructuralism is a discourse of and about modernism. Now Romanticism plays an analogous role for the poet of Enlightenment, who sees himself as the modern poet compelled to create a new and appropriate discourse for poetic mythology. Huyssen goes on to say that French poststructuralist theory “provides us … with an archeology of modernity, a theory of modernism at the stage of its exhaustion” (After the Great Divide, p. 209). One might say the same of Keats, insofar as the gesture of Romantic modernism places the Enlightenment idea of progress in the ambiguous light of Apollo's agonies, of a succession without distinct beginning or end, archē or telos. (The Egyptian imagery, incidentally, not only runs counter to the Enlightenment Hellenism in a political sense,⁷ but it evokes that very archeological setting which, with its indecipherable hieroglyphics and indeterminate Memnonic sounds, mystifies reading and memory—or Mnemosyne.)

Apollo, moreover, is not just passively filled with “knowledge enormous”: his agony reads that history of the past by evoking the strife-filled elision that marks Oceanus's account as well as that of Keats, whose account of a benign Coelus represses the strife of Giants and Titans. Not only do Keats's Apollo and Hyperion anticipate Nietzsche's reading of an Apollinian in tension with its dark underside,⁸ but they offer a reading of the ambiguities of historical mythologizing.

II

My point here is not to dislocate our sense of cultural periods—although Keats's poem raises radical questions about the length of the period needed to identify them—but to suggest that reading on the cultural scale can be a two-way process. One mediating conception is that of translation, in which the centered self or narrative or text is decentered, and in which the translation bears—to borrow Benjamin's image—a tangential relation to the original. There is in fact a double transformation: “For just as the tenor and the significance of the great works of literature undergo a complete transformation over the centuries, the mother tongue of the translator is transformed as well.”⁹

Translation, as Benjamin suggests, is situated in some pivotal space where it gathers up the “afterlife” of the old original language as well as the “suffering” of the new. The oxymoronic construction, linking the afterlife of the old with the suffering of the new, allows Hyperion to prefigure the modernity-postmodernity doublet. (We may note here too that “afterlife” is only a step away from the Nachtraglichkeit or belatedness that infects the very term “poststructuralism.”) The selfhood of language, or the language of the self, cannot be unitary. The more promising side of this double play is the implication that text and subject are enfolded in one another, and that the domain of subjectivity is not less but more extensive than a determinate modernism might have allowed

Hyperion thus stages a scene of translation, of the Miltonic into the modern; of Titans into Olympians; of the “mother tongue” into the language of Keats—the Other tongue; of a mourning malady (the Titans' “mourning words,” the “aspen malady” of Saturn's “palsied tongue”) into a morning melody (the “melodious throat” of Apollo, the sun god).¹⁰ But within this narrative of divine displacement and linguistic change there is also resistance, for translation, Benjamin remarks, focuses upon a “life” that can be known only by indirection, by some form of figuration. Yet Benjamin is enigmatic: Does the life reside in the textual relationships themselves? It would seem so, for the birth of Apollo in book 3 is prefigured by the myth of progress and the virtually inarticulate cries of Clymene in book 2. The subject, the product of a combined articulation and disarticulation, is already written, and Apollo's awareness of those “Creations and destroyings” is his vocal repetition of that earlier writing. Inasmuch as undoing is part of the process—and a violent one at that—translation cannot be a linear move. Apollo's cry—“Knowledge enormous makes a god of me” (III, 113)—proclaims his subjectivity at the same time that it makes it other than himself, some ground, which we may call Foucaultean, upon which his self or “truth” may be articulated. One may also suspect that sublimation is at work here, with its conspiratorial ally, repression. If Apollo is the modern poet, he is born into modernity at the same time that he is borne past it by dying into life. Earlier, Saturn, the fallen Titan, laments his self-division: “I am gone / Away from my own bosom; I have left / My strong identity, my real self. …” (I, 112-14).

The space of Hyperion is liminal: while the Olympian Apollo has no identity other than earlier texts (which is not quite the same as having no identity at all), the Titans are separated from their strong identities. Saturn has left his “somewhere between the throne and where I sit / Here on this spot of earth” (I, 115-16). Although Saturn speaks as if identity or selfhood were locatable in a distinct place, “throne” and “spot” are metaphors for plenitude and deprivation. By this logic, however, Saturn's loss of identity ought to restore him to the place he has lost, if Apollo is indeed part of the new race who have no identities at all.

The birth of Apollo does recuperate the loss of the Titans, but not by substitution. It is not merely a case of the beautiful being replaced by the more beautiful, nor even one in which the loss of identity is heralded and then confirmed. Rather, transition is a rough business, inhabited by creations and destroyings that may be retrieved later as knowledge, but that preclude direct communication. One logic would link creation with the beautiful, and destroyings with the more beautiful: surely this hints at a suppression of the sublime, or a sublime repression. If we project these divine disturbances onto the modernity-poststructuralism doublet with which we started, then the one cannot be the simple continuation of the other in some figurative afterlife. (Afterlife itself has a double meaning: it is not just survival, but life after a violent rupture.) The knowledge that confers divinity is restorative, but it comes obliquely.

It would seem, then, as if the role of poststructuralism vis-à-vis modernity is recuperative only upon the understanding that repetition can never be the same. Even “rewriting” seems to be too tame a category. Thus Huyssen writes that the “postmoderns … counter the modernist litany of the death of the subject by working toward new theories and practices of speaking, writing, and acting subjects. The question of how codes, texts, images, and other cultural artifacts constitute subjectivity is increasingly being raised as an always already historical question” (After the Great Divide, p. 213). His brain filled with texts, Apollo seems to represent the recuperated postmodern subject. Yet those very textual fragments mark the death of the poem, the fragmenting of the text, which ends at that point with Apollo's agonized cry.

We seem to have gone from the work to a text that is relentlessly indeterminate, neither singular nor plural. What is most determinate is that Apollo undergoes a vertiginous expansion of consciousness: this is what deifies him. Elevation is coupled with an excess that casts a curious backward glance upon Oceanus's idealizing speech in book 2. Surely Apollo is not acting out the measured progress that Oceanus prophesies. No more is his sublime—but not sublimated—elevation identical with Saturn's descent into pathos or subjectivity: the one dies into life as the other falls into mortality. The cultural model, like that of any doubling, conjoins sameness with difference.

III

Let us return to postmodernist criticism's Twemlovian dilemma concerning its relation to earlier literature. In its simplest forms, it offers new ways of reading old texts: those old texts appear as more or less neutral moments in the poststructuralist project. In those instances, the texts are neither transformed nor recuperated: rather, they attest to the power of new interpretive strategies. That puts them into a passive situation where their period contexts are more or less irrelevant. Archeology, which on the contrary might privilege those period contexts, is equally irrelevant, for it entails no transformative procedures but rather tips the balance the other way. One of the premises of poststructuralist theory, however, is that such an imbalance must be ruled out in the name of intertextuality: the literary text assumes a posture of equality in the face of theory. Huyssen's conception presents an additional dilemma, moreover, for it is difficult to locate the point at which poststructuralism separates itself from modernity in the saga of the subject. Nevertheless, Keats's poem offers a viable critical frame at these points:

First, the myth of the war in heaven, of the overthrow of the old regime of gods by the new regime, claims to be a totalizing myth not only because it accounts for progress or enlightenment, but precisely because it claims to align biblical with classical myths. Whatever the local version, all myths are in fact versions of the one true myth. But the “grand narrative” of myth is not always identical with that of history. The relation between myth and history is likely to be one of difference, especially since myth's “progress” is frequently figured as diminution. The fallen Thea speaks to Saturn “In solemn tenour and deep organ tone / Some mourning words,” which, translated into “our feeble tongue” are “frail” compared with “that large utterance of the early Gods!” (I, 48-49, 50-51). Hers is the language of belatedness, a form of diminishment, in which frailty appears as woman who is ironically separated from the mother tongue.

Second, Apollo's dying into life in the third book of Hyperion presents a point of rupture that is also a moment of sublimity. Apollo, who overwhelms his predecessors, is engulfed by the very textual traces of the Titans that should empower him. This is what overturns the myth of progress, and what argues that history itself proceeds by radical breaks. Not reason, not the “more beautiful,” but the sublime marks the succession of history. But the sublime itself involves a communion with the unthinkable, the unconditioned, the unrepresentable: thus the project of the future is always to seek out what is impossible or what was always unthought before. Here we may return to an analogue in Foucault's doubles. If the narrative rhetoric of book 2 represents the thought, it is shadowed and eventually eclipsed by the unthought of book 3.

Third, the fall of Hyperion signifies a fall into temporality, thus providing the conditions for the grand narrative in which myth itself is subject to historical movement. The third book, however, interrupts that temporality and reverses the movement. In effect, it thematizes the birth of the postmodern, which appears in that oxymoronic phrase as “Creations and destroyings.” The postmodern is then subject to the same evasions and ruptures as any construction of mythic narrative. However covertly, myth here is ideologically weighted, as if, subject to history, it undergoes diminution.

Fourth, by way of a conclusion we may return to the beginning of Hyperion where Saturn, newly fallen, mourns his absence from himself. The remarkable closure of the sound patterns figures a verbal narcissism, which is repeated in the image of “fallen divinity” shading and deadening the stream by which he sits. This is indeed an oxymoronic still life or nature morte. His footsteps marked in the “margin-sand,” his right hand “nerveless” on the sodden ground, this mourning Saturn is the very figure of disjecta membra—an image made all the more powerful if we remember that this is not just a fragmentary reminiscence of Milton rewritten in Keats, but one of Wordsworth as well, for surely Saturn sitting stonelike near his lair recalls the familiar image of the leech-gatherer as both stone and seabeast.¹¹ If this pairing questions authorial resolution and independence, it also makes of the self a poetic archive of sorts.

Further, Saturn's listening to the Earth, his ancient mother, evokes uncannily the passage in The Prelude, which Keats could not have seen, where the young Wordsworth listens to the ghostly language of the ancient earth.¹² Poetic nurture, made “ghostly” or external, grounds the subject outside himself.¹³ Here is a fantasy of dismemberment, of some prearticulate time in which language reveals its own independence of the speaker. Here too the fall into humanity, onto “margin-sand,” moves dangerously close to what Foucault characterizes as “the erasure of man, like a face drawn in sand on the edge of the sea” (The Order of Things, p. 387). Keats's poem situates fallen divinity in some marginal area where mortality lies adjacent to what Foucault calls “sandy stretches of non-thought” (ibid., 323).

Yet such a reading, even though it reveals the indissoluble links between the modern and the postmodern subjects, the latter indeed appearing like some return of the repressed, might seem to be too neatly allegorical. All those figures, from the various doubles to the Titanic figure on the sandy ground, tell us as much about the way in which we are prone to construe cultural relations as about those relations themselves. We should remember, however, not only the importance of the fragment in both Keats's poems and poststructuralist texts, but also the importance of the Egyptian images in Hyperion, images that bespeak a romantic poetics of the lost and the incomprehensible or indecipherable.¹⁴ These images, like Saturn lying nerveless or “sans sense,”¹⁵ evoke the problematic of translation, which unseats such a straightforward reading and suggests that an understanding of the contemporary moment requires a third term to invoke the figurative, the mediated, or the deferred. Theorists of translation remind us of its violent, nonlinear nature, whether in the myth of the tower of Babel or the image of amphora.¹⁶

While translation seems to double the available text, the very process is divisive. The images of voice and tongue dispersed throughout Hyperion, moreover, are concerned not only with the material but with adequation, with the subject's mode of subjectivity, with utterance as a sublime act: with translation. The very materiality of voice, the tongue of fallenness, of postdivinity, is, belatedly, unable to evoke the newly sublime. The inadequation that inheres in the sublime moment is at its most ironic here. Nevertheless, if the sublime encounter often acts as a check to self-reflection, it may foster an inner awareness of feeling. Not only is sorrow, bafflement, or terror aroused in Saturn, Apollo, or Hyperion, but an awareness of oneself experiencing those powerful emotions. While they may halt narrative, they do so in the name of a consciousness of self far more powerful than what is available to self-reflection. In this respect, the sublime interfaces with the fragment or aphorism: both bespeak intensity as well as loss.

In this scheme, Keats's modern poet, like his newly emergent Apollo, cannot simply follow the course of the sun, for he is too much in the place of the son. Even in his fallen state, golden-haired Hyperion appears as a “shape majestic, a vast shade / In midst of his own brightness” (II, 372-73). If Hyperion appears like some Nietzschean sunspot, Apollo reverses the image, appearing masklike as some “luminous” [spot] to cure eyes damaged by gruesome night.”¹⁷ Even as a curative figure, however, Apollo cannot be independent. His immortality emerges as the afterlife of old texts, as the creation of divine and poetic catastrophe. For it is a revolutionary sublime that halts the progress of the allegorical, deferring—if deference is possible at such a time—to a detour into translation. Yet if Apollo is subject to old texts or Titanic narratives, never was the consciousness of subjectivity more intense. We might remember that, if we assume that postmodernism and modernism are in collusion to ensure the death of the subject: for subjectivity may be at its most intense at its most catastrophic moment.

Notes

1. See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986). Huyssen's “Mapping the Postmodern” foregrounds some of the complexities that must be encountered in identifying the domain of modernism or postmodernism. Thus the very use of the quasi-historical “postmodernism” seems problematic when history and narrative themselves are called into question. In this essay, I try to limit the term “poststructuralism” to critical discourse, and to treat modernism and postmodernism as abstract cultural moments.

2. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 79.

3. See S. T. Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode,” stanza 1.

4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 327.

5. John Keats, Hyperion, A Fragment. The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (New York: Norton, 1970), 2:202, 243. All quotations are from this edition.

6. See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Shocken Books, 1979), pp. 257-58.

7. For an account of the political import of Keats's Egyptian images, see Alan J. Bewell, “The Political Implications of Keats's Classicist Aesthetics,” Studies in Romanticism, 25 (Summer 1986): 220-29.

8. See Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 167-70. Rajan, however, locates the recognition in Keats's later poem, The Fall of Hyperion.

9. “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, p. 73.

10. Hyperion, I, 49-51, 92-94; III, 81.

11. See William Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence,” stanza 9.

12. See The Prelude, II, 302-11.

13. See Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats's Hyperion,” in The Fate of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 57-73.

14. See, e.g., Hyperion, I, 31-33, 275-80; II, 372-77.

15. See Cynthia Chase's commentary on Derrida's use of sans in “Paragon, Parergon: Baudelaire Translates Rousseau,” in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 74.

16. See Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Difference in Translation, pp. 165-207, and Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator.”

17. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Random House, 1967), sec. 9, p. 67.