SOURCE: “Postmodernism, Romanticism, and John Clare” in Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, edited by Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner, Duke University Press, 1998, pp. 157-70.

My remarks in this essay shuttle between two recent works of fiction and the writing of John Clare to suggest how postmodernism—as theory as well as fictional practice—reiterates and thereby foregrounds the sense of extremity and strangeness that haunts Romanticism. Put more contentiously, this essay considers how postmodernism—when it is not a late-blooming species of modernism—revisits Romanticism with something like the ferocious yet dry intensity of John Clare, both sane and mad. What I mean by such claims follows from my understanding of modernism as alienated consciousness, eager to break with its antecedents in order to rid itself of the mess of history and culture.¹ If this account of modernism sounds a little like Walter Benjamin's reading of Klee's “Angel” as an apocalyptic observer who looks backward on the ruins of civilization and calls what he sees history,² it is because Benjamin's theory of history is the critical angel who guards and joins both isms.

As recent theorists have noted, this theory entails a view of allegory that is particularly sympathetic to postmodernism. Consider, for example, how the alienated figure of Benjamin's angel directs Fredric Jameson's analysis of allegory in the present time:

If allegory has once again become somehow congenial for us today, as over against the massive and monumental unifications of an older modernist symbolism or even realism itself, it is because the allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogeneous representation of the symbol. Our traditional conception of allegory—based, for instance, on stereotypes of Bunyan—is that of an elaborate set of figures and personifications to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalence: [yet] … such equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text. (“Third-World Literature” 73)

Elsewhere Jameson reads Los Angeles's Bonaventure Hotel as the monumental sign of postmodernism's devilish compact with late capitalist culture (Postmodernism 55-66). Here he offers allegory's “breaks and discontinuities” as evidence of something quite different and almost certainly better—the “polysemia” found in dreams and, to extend the cultural logic of this declaration, the welter of differences and voices found in postcolonial literature and criticism. This praise owes a good deal to Craig Owens's influential essay on the terrain shared by allegory and postmodernism:

Decentred, allegorical, schizophrenic …—however we choose to diagnose its symptoms, post-modernism is usually treated, by its protagonists and antagonists alike, as a crisis of cultural authority, specifically of the authority vested in Western European culture and its institutions. (“Discourse of Others” 57)

These definitions of allegory under the sign of the postmodern are, however, more univocal than allegory itself, which remains quite capable of mobilizing stereotypical figures whose one-to-one equivalences we might prefer to relegate to an older, now discarded allegorical tradition. I offer two brief but instructive examples—one Romantic, the other postmodern. The eponymous protagonist of Shelley's Mask of Anarchy deliberately advertises the diffused presence of allegory's will-to-power across the political landscape of England in 1819. For if that power is brutally manifest in Shelley's rigidly allegorical names for government leaders such as “Murder” who has a “mask like Castlereagh,” it is as much to be feared on the “liberal side of the question” in the figure of Anarchy itself (Shelley 301-10). The aging dictator in Gabriel García Márquez's Autumn of the Patriarch conveys a similar point, with at least as much figural irony. Even after he grows old and goes mad (or madder), his power is emblematically dispersed among his parts—an elephantine foot, a once-legendary phallic member, and so on. Belonging as it does to the body of postcolonial literature and theory to which Jameson's reading of allegory refers, The Autumn of the Patriarch is a cautionary tale. It shows us that even the allegorical vision of postcolonial literature can be more troublesome than salvific.

With this reservation in mind, we can better assess the explanatory and theoretical power of the allegory that Jameson and Owens admire for its eccentricities, its “breaks and discontinuities” from expectations developed by canons and critics. As I understand the instructive core of this power, it concerns the temporality and historicity of figures made in time and narrative and, as such, subject to the vicissitudes of their making.³ In the theory of modern allegory Benjamin introduces and Paul de Man extends, decay and ruin are the controlling figures of those vicissitudes.⁴ I argue here that what makes the intersection between history or historicity and allegory compelling has more to do with the eccentric and difficult positions allegorical figures take up.

So construed, allegory's modern career is well marked in Romanticism but especially visible and admonitory in Clare's writing, where his stubborn sense of being at the edge of the culture puts the alien, fractured sensibility of allegory into high relief. Precisely because Clare was always marginal and oppositional, his writing and life (that old Romantic song and slippery divide) offer an instructive point of entry into the larger domain of allegory's survival into modernity and postmodernity, where allegory is similarly thrown into relief by its difference from mimetic or realist norms.

Working within and against this realist, experiential disposition, allegory spectacularly performs the enabling paradox of figuration in general. As Gary Stonum puts that paradox, “Even the most valiant attempt at lively figuration, one that might dazzle the rhetorically untutored, can thus be expected to reveal the deathly cogs of a tropological automaton” (“Surviving Figures” 207). For the rhetorically tutored as well, allegory's modern career toward and away from automation warrants notice. Precisely because it acts as a foil to its other self—the cultural authority of figures that move in lockstep to perform fixed meanings—allegory is a capable figure in and for Romanticism and postmodernism.

My analysis begins with two recent novels—David Malouf's Remembering Babylon (1993) and Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980)—in which Clare is a ghostly textual figure, at once marked and tacitly assumed, who hovers like a proleptic and hobbled Romantic angel of the future and the past. At the beginning of Remembering Babylon, Malouf uses verse by Clare and Blake to fix his reader's apocalyptic backward look at the story he tells of Gemmy Fairley, whose early life includes a hand-to-mouth, abused existence as a London street boy, involuntary slavery as a cabin boy on a slave ship, being tossed overboard near the coast of Australia's outback, and living with aborigines for sixteen years until he perches on a fence around a colonial settlement at the edge of the wilderness. To the astonished children of Scottish settlers, he announces with a stutter, “I am a British object.”

The epigraph Malouf selects from Clare's poetry imagines a time when “strange shapes and void afflict the soul,” when “the moon shall be as blood the sun … the stars shall turn to blue and dun,” and “heaven and earth shall pass away.” At that time, Clare's speaker asks, “wilt thou / Remember me.” In Malouf's novel the question belongs to Gemmy, though he never has the words to ask it. After he is beaten by a member of the colony that has sheltered him for over a year and is placed with an eccentric beekeeping lady who can ensure his safety, he eventually takes some exercises written in a school notebook because he believes them to be the written story of his life, then disappears back into the wilderness. One of them and not one of them, Gemmy is a deep source of trouble because he brings the colonists sharply up against their own isolation at the bare scraped edge of a terrifying unknown world peopled by aborigines.

Clare's presence in Hoban's novel is less overtly marked but in the end more pervasive. Riddley Walker is a postnuclear fiction set in southeast England on a ring of terrain whose eccentric hub is, or was, Canterbury. The characters speak a language of their own that looks something like a phonetic transcription of a lower-class south London dialect in which compressed, altered forms of late-twentieth-century English barely survive.⁵ In this fractured, mysterious speech environment, the protagonist Riddley Walker does what his name implies: he tries to riddle out the mysteries and history of the nuclear blast and the present era, and he keeps on walking around the ring of changes and episodes that is, for better or worse, energized by what’s left of Canterbury, called Cambry in the novel.

The “eusa” story Riddley and other characters tell is the story of the thermonuclear power plant that the U.S.A. created or detonated, or both, near Cambry. How to figure out what to do about the power that remains in the superstitious, burned-out, and, again, aboriginal civilization that the novel presents is the problem before all the characters. Riddley confronts it in the last pages of the novel by “roadying” on, with others now following him, having learned what he could from a strange dog and even stranger human characters like his “Ardship.” What Riddley Walker does as he walks is try to map a terrain, its inhabitants, and events as though all were or might be signifiers of a coherent system or world that he knows in the sense of inhabiting it, but can’t quite grasp.

The postmodern dilemmas these novels imagine for the past and for the future usefully foreground several Romantic features of John Clare's writing. The first is rhetorical pathos. In 1841, after nearly six years of incarceration in an asylum at High Beach in Epping Forest, Clare managed to escape. In a brief manuscript now called Journey out of Essex, Clare described his eighty-mile walk from Epping Forest back to Northborough. Although he had initially worked out an escape plan that would have involved hiding in a Gypsy camp where he was well known and would have been safe among companions, the Gypsies left before he could get to them. When he makes his break on his own, he jauntily provides himself with an allegorical companion. “Having only honest courage and myself in my army,” he writes, “I led the way and my troops soon followed” (Clare, Autobiographical Writings 153).

This pilgrim's progress, like that of many a Romantic traveler, requires losing his way until he meets an acquaintance coming out of The Labour in vain Public house. From him, Clare finds “the way.” Supplemented by the names of other inns along the way, including “The Ram” and “The Plough,” Clare's allegorical touch is light and slyly ironic about his own laboring past (154, 156-57). Nonetheless, this is no easy journey without food or money except what little he can beg. At one moment he rests on a flint heap, at another a Gypsy woman warns him to stay off the main road or he will be “noticed” (158). Clare nonetheless keeps to the main road, because, sensibly enough, he fears losing his way again, which he later does. He continues, hoping to find, as he puts it, his “two” wives, Mary Joyce and Patty Turner, unwilling to believe that Mary Joyce had died almost six years earlier. The journal closes with a letter to this Mary, written from Northborough. There, he says, he is “homeless at home” with Patty. He closes, “My dearest Mary, Your affectionate Husband, John Clare” (160-61). It is not accidental that critics of Clare so frequently quote his haunting phrase for how he feels when he finally gets home—“homeless at home.”

Riddley Walker is the repeated verbal figure of the pathos that hovers everywhere in the record of Clare's life and writing, but especially in the 1841 Journey. From the moment early in the novel when his father is crushed to death, Riddley is on his “oansome,” befriended from time to time by characters who seem prophetic or admonitory but never stay long. A “connexion” man like his father, he is invited to offer his own “tells”—half-inscrutable, allegorical interpretations of events and old stories. Like Riddley Walker, Clare manages to keep going against all odds, nearly always semidetached from the subcultures in which he moves. His Journey is an extended figure for his life as a writer who keeps going, whether sane and poor or delusory and incarcerated, in a voice and diction that are local, phonetically spelled, barely punctuated, down-to-earth (as they say), even coarse—like Riddley Walker's.

From Helpston, from Northborough, and from the two asylums where he spent the rest of his span of life, Clare asks “wilt thou Remember me” in ways that bind memory and history to those local details that are the fraught, inadequate particularity of Romanticism. As Malouf's double epigraph helps us recognize, Clare is Romanticism's Gemmy, a figure and speaker so outside and so marginal that he is in, and one whose career was, mostly for the worse, the objective correlative of the English Romantic marketing strategy (and publishing house), which gave posterity the mature work of the cockney John Keats and the early poetry of the “peasant poet” John Clare. Clare might well have growled “I’m a British object” after his publishers rewrote, repackaged his writing so that it would conform to their understanding of what it ought to be.⁶

A second, implicit resemblance between Clare and the fictional worlds of Hoban and Malouf concerns their figural management of the material world. Whether that world is presented as geography, landscape, or particular things, it is persistently emblematic. Malouf trenchantly suggests the strong Romantic pathos that colors this assumption in Remembering Babylon, where Gemmy's capacity to recognize the secrets of the natural world reminds the white settlers of their lack of connection to the world they now inhabit:

When Mr. Frazer and Gemmy go out botanizing, Gemmy deliberately illuminates some parts of that landscape and out of a kind of religious sense of what is proper keeps other parts of it dark. When Gemmy moves through the landscape, something happens; Mr. Frazer moves through it and nothing happens. … This book is not about a purely Australian experience. It is about an experience of landscape or a relationship to the world that is cleared in a place like Australia, or in these people's situations, because all the other kinds of explanations and comforts are taken away from them. This absence makes them ask the question: what is man's place in the world. (Papastergiadis 87).

Malouf goes on to argue that back in a small village in Scotland or England where someone like Frazer was born, he would have been and remained completely at home, sure of his place and its significance.

Clare's botanical knowledge of local names and ecological systems makes him a prescient Romantic forecast of principles now identified with deep ecology—the organicist and philosophical counter-argument to post-modern fragmentation (McKusick, “‘A language … ever green’”). But because of who he was and when he lived, he learned, then had to forgo the rooted sense of place Malouf imagines for men like Clare who did not emigrate. His predicament as a laborer who knew his locality intimately, even as it became an alien place, specifies the tragic but enabling sense of alienation and other speech that complicates his Romantic sense of place. Even here Clare's situation is not as exceptional as we might imagine. Consider, for example, Wordsworth's “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” where the poetic syntax hovers between a forged link between landscape, recollection, and mind and repeated doubts about being able to sustain such links (Poetical Works 2).

Clare, in his plangent efforts to identify what a piece of common land like Helpstone green meant before it was “inclosed,” insists on the cultural need for such places, even as he acknowledges just how absolutely that need cannot be satisfied. Clare, who frequently used the spelling “inclosure,” thereby marks etymologically the literal outcome of British parliamentary acts of enclosure (McKusick, “John Clare and the Tyranny of Grammar” 261). For “inclosure” was, as Clare was no doubt aware, the legal and statutory form throughout this period of English history (OED). This preference for the Anglo-Saxon “in-” over the “en-” form derived from Norman French also makes the linguistic return to ancient English custom and law that Clare cannot make for the land.⁷ When Clare speaks as “Swordy Well,” a natural wetland whose botanic variety he prized before it was made a sand and gravel quarry, the lamination of speech and loss is more openly rhetorical. Speaking for what no longer exists, “Swordy Well” insists on its cultural and ethical value:

The gipseys camp was not affraid
I made his dwelling free
Till vile enclosure came and made
A parish slave of me …
Of all the fields I am the last
That my own face can tell
Yet what with stone pits delving holes
And strife to buy and sell
My name will quickly be the whole
Thats left of swordy well

(John Clare 152)

Like Clare's other jeremiads against enclosure and the landed aristocracy, this one bitterly recognizes the irony of speechifying loss. Names without places and faces will not suffice.

When Hoban uses place names that echo Clare's 1841 Journey and other autobiographical writings, he punningly redistributes the Romantic value of naming places such that their emblematic function becomes more overt. Echoing Clare's remark about an inn named The Ram, Hoban reassigns the name to an island separated from the mainland by a bay named Ram Gut (Ramsgate). The demotic language he invents to specify the geography of southeast England is a wildly allegorical elaboration of Clare's coarse dialect speech: “Do It Over” (for Dover), “Sel Out,” “Moal Arse,” the island “Dunk Your Arse,” and “Bernt Arse.” This trio of place names, particularly the last, echoes one of several local names Clare records for a will-o’-the-wisp, “Jenny Burnt Arse” (Clare, Autobiographical Writings 8). “Pooties,” Clare's name for snail shells, reappears in Hoban's novel as the female puppet figure Pooty (Judy), whose staged altercations with Punch get more violent and more evidently allegorical as the novel proceeds (John Clare 477-79; Riddley 205). Hoban's novel transforms the flint heap that Clare rests on one night into multiple postnuclear, iron-age work sites, a bitterly ironic rendition of Romanticism's desire to go back to the future.

Hoban's Riddley Walker is a larger-than-life version of Clare himself, the inveterate walker who is by his own account fascinated with riddles and riddling. On one occasion Clare comments that he “never unriddeld the mystery” of old superstitions about an ivied tree that was eventually cut down; on another he recalls a farmer who liked to “unriddle the puzzles for prizes” or “rhyme new charad[e]s reddle rebuses on a slate”—like the poet Clare (Autobiographical Writings 35, 40).

The equally strange dialect speech of Riddley Walker dramatizes the demotic, excessive, figural, and, in a word, allegorical tendencies of Clare's writing. Whether in or out of asylums, he kept writing and railing in poems that are, as Riddley would call them, “tells”—tales that carry his history and that of his terrain forward as if to admonish us from another world. For Clare, the gradual disappearance of that world demands not the backward glance of a fleeing Benjaminian angel but an intensive rearguard campaign that takes the form of a verbal history whose local or idiosyncratic grammar, diction, spelling, and punctuation matter as much as the stories they tell.⁸

What these postmodern fictions and we learn from Romanticism is the power and estrangement of foreign or dialect speech. In Malouf's Remembering Babylon, Gemmy can barely recall a few words of his native English after years of living with Australian aborigines. When he steps into the Scottish colonist settlement and stutters, “I am a British object,” he gets a word wrong but tells the truth about the colonists (whose rough Scottish dialect Malouf also reproduces) and himself. Earlier in England and now among colonial settlers, he is at once alien and uncannily familiar. On both grounds, he must be abjected as the unwanted mirror image of who and where they are. Although he speaks several aboriginal dialects, he is virtually inarticulate in English, the language others use to describe him to still others. Gemmy's identity is the linguistic property of others, even sympathetic others, because they construct his identity as they speak for as well as against him. The narrative reversal at the crux of this novel—the moment when several aborigines meet Gemmy on the edge of the English settlement to warn him about the barbarity of the whites (118)—echoes Clare's pervasive sense that he is the “odd man out” whether sane or not: “homeless at home” and homeless among the English poets.

Throwing his voice into Crabbe, Byron, and abandoned wetlands, then taking up points of view more sympathetic to hunted animals than their human hunters, Clare is a more self-consciously ironic ventriloquist than Edward Bostetter's analysis of this Romantic activity would suggest.⁹ Taking up where Clare left off, Riddley becomes one of the puppeteer voices in Goodparley's traveling minstrel show. Riddley Walker's reiterated uncertainty about whether he plays Punch, or Punch or someone else “plays” him, gives way in Malouf's novel to the haunting figure of Gemmy. Puppet or ventriloquist, Clare points up the weird mix of automatism and pathos in that figure, whether we find it in Kleist's Puppentheater or in Benjamin's use of the figure of a chess-playing automaton to explain his theory of history.

Insofar as it is a delusory narrative written by someone who is no longer sane, Clare's 1841 Journey registers a Romantic consciousness not unlike the disjointed worlds and narrative frames of postmodern fiction. From this perspective, the figure of John Clare gone mad might seem little more than a fractured representation of Romanticism—a mirror whose distortions suggest a postmodernist vision otherwise alien in spirit and method to Romantic writing. Or, we might argue, Hoban and Malouf's novels project a refracted image of Clare's madness by turning it inside out. In the charred, survivalist world of postnuclear “civilization,” characters will and do kill to find out the secrets of atomic energy, apparently willing and eager to “do it over.” On the edge of the Australian outback, Scottish colonists imagine Gemmy as a demonic, violent alien, even as his aboriginal companions hover in a clearing at the edge of the wilderness to console and protect him from the strange, spiritless company he must now keep.

The local details of Clare's poetic choices persistently call readers back to linguistic difficulties and resources I take to be fundamental to Romanticism. Consider, for example, his objection to the Linnaean system for generating names for birds and plants, compared with the local names he preserves by recording them in a “natural history” that he began after reading Gilbert White's 1789 Natural History of Selborne. The faults Clare and other early-nineteenth-century critics found with Linnaean classification were its narrow basis (only the reproductive features of plants were discussed) and limited usefulness, since plants with similar reproductive features might have nothing else in common. Clare's natural history was never completed or published, in part because his publishers were eager to maintain his public persona as an uneducated peasant poet, but also because he resisted their efforts to substitute Latin classificatory distinctions for local names.¹⁰

On occasion Clare's botanical ideology looks more playful, more radically figural, than programmatic. In the late sonnet “The Maple Tree,” for example, he uses the hemlock's Latin identification as a member of the family Umbrelliferae to describe how the hemlock's “white umbel flowers” look against the higher branches of the maple.¹¹ This reversion to Linnaean terminology would be hard to miss in a poem that otherwise favors local diction. The opening five lines read:

The Maple with its tassel flowers of green
That turn to red a stag horn shaped seed
Just spreading out its scalloped leaves is seen
Of yellowish hue yet beautifully green
Bark ribb’d like corderoy in seamy screed.

(Later Poems 2:1025)

In Clare's time and place “screed” could refer to a strip of rough material like corduroy, a strip of land, or even a lengthy piece of writing (Chambers 253). Used in the nineteenth century to make clothes for laborers, “screed” insures a local economy of sympathies between laborers and the laboring poet who hasn’t got a strip of land or a lengthy piece of writing—just a sonnet whose figure of “bark ribbed like corderoy” stands up and stands for this poet and this place. So do those “umbel” flowers. Not humble at all, they show how Linnaean terms can be put to descriptive and local English use.

Clare's diction, like his grammar, phonetic spelling, and punctuation, polemicizes the Romantic poetic sensibility that intends to trespass on conventional forms and language.¹² Like the Gypsies he visited often and wrote about, Clare poaches on the linguistic property of others in ways that figure anew Romanticism's borders not as term limits but as the places where raids occur, where excess yields its double effect of transgression and demotic vitality, an instructive because exaggerated version of Shelley's argument in the Defense of Poetry that only vitally metaphorical language can be creative.

As refigured by Malouf's Gemmy and Hoban's Riddley Walker, Clare's writing witnesses elements of postmodernism that have attracted little notice in postmodern theory. Against the claim that postmodernism is an anti-aesthetic whose fragmented and de-centered sensibility is unanswerable to history, let alone critique,¹³ Clare, Riddley Walker, and Gemmy understand surmise and construal as the work at hand. Despite the difficulty and inscrutability of the worlds each inhabits, all persist against well-defined odds in their efforts to piece or hold together the meaning of those worlds, attentive to particulars as though they were emblematic details within an allegorical image or narrative frame. In an irony that is fully sanctioned by the nature of allegory, what keeps this enterprise from being symbolic even in the case of Clare, whose ecological organicism would seem to favor the Romantic symbol, is the problematic nature of the task as well as the materials at hand. It just isn’t possible to sustain or even arrive at the sense or conviction of the whole that Coleridge assigns to the symbol.

If this is allegory by default, it is so because the world is difficult to piece together, conflicted and conflictual by turn, and because human observers are just that—sublunary, eccentric, and limited. They riddle on and muddle through, keeping as much of the spirit and matter of what they learn as they can. The figure whose history and place in history darkens this view is Malouf's Gemmy, not because he has no interest in botanical and lexical bits of a larger system—since he is patently interested in just these things—but because his story and his place in history argue so ferociously against the survival of all this evidence and, above all, Gemmy himself.

By reading Clare in and through the postmodern worlds of Hoban and Malouf, we learn that Romanticism at its extremities is the heart of the matter. More precisely put, we learn that as a poet and writer on natural history Clare figures Romantic excess—the radical, loosened speech at once engaged and put off in Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. For what we discover in Clare's natural history writing against the Linnaean taxonomy but in favor of local names; his stubborn and frustrated campaign against conventional grammar, spelling, and idiom; and his class-driven and class-scarred railing against those socially and economically “above” or “beside” his own class and station (such as it was or could be)—is someone who had to speak in opposition, at extremities, to speak as and for common land and animals, for whom no one else speaks.

Postmodern fiction conveys much in a little of Romanticism's prospective education of a postmodern sensibility that has too frequently been called anti-Romantic. Alan Liu has identified one way to calculate such contacts: Romantic localism, detailism, and particularity¹⁴—terms as descriptive of Clare's aesthetics as they are new historicist and postmodernist watchwords. One apparent sign of this impulse within Romanticism is its claim to use the language, as Wordsworth puts it, “of men speaking to men.”¹⁵ Clare evidently takes this linguistic principle to an extreme that Wordsworth's strictures about adopting a “selection” of ordinary speech try to foreclose. The trajectory that takes us from Clare's radical particularity to a postmodern random array of individual subjectivities and objects is not hard to follow.

Yet because the figures used to map it appeal to the impersonal screen of cyberspace, with webs, links, internet sites, and interfaces, this postmodern vision of Romanticism tends to efface pathos. I grant the informality and friendliness that this format may sponsor. My point is instead that its brilliant intricacy of electronic pathways and nodes prompts a figural and theoretical discourse that is often seduced by cognitive systems that can be mapped, diagrammed, and thereby made into thin if dense lines—not faces.¹⁶

Against this reading of Romantic and post-Romantic culture, we can array John Clare. For his position at the extremity of Romantic speech and figure suggests how pathos, the extremity of feeling that legitimates strong, even exaggerated and excessive figures, invests Romantic speech and Romantic faces with a surprising resilience—not unlike his ability to keep going for eighty miles from Epping Forest to Northborough, without some of his wits and without food. The pathos of the postmodern worlds and journeys of Malouf's Gemmy and Hoban's Riddley Walker is close kin to the highly rhetorical, highly speechified pathos of Romantic figures, including the figure of Clare “roadying on.” Because pathos marks the extremities of figures and narratives invented in its wake, it is crucial to the signifying practices of Romantic and postmodern writing. Without it, both are at their extremities, awash in disoriented, isolated particularity. With it, both are plangent evidence of the desire to figure and refigure those extremities in order to think about where, how, and whether individual subjects figure in their worlds.

Educated by the version of Romanticism Clare's writing objectifies, novelists like Hoban and Malouf give that education back to us as we look through their postmodern subjectivities to Clare and then through his late, alienated Romantic subjectivity to its radical poetic project. If this looking within and through different historical lenses is in one sense to submit to massive distortions as one or several subjectivities bend around and back to meet as tangents on their own extremities, this refraction is also the signifying mark of literary history as stories made by bending matter and figure toward different trajectories.

Notes

1. The term “modernism” here refers to twentieth-century literature and culture up to about 1960. Whether or not the era thereafter is most usefully called contemporary or postmodern is one prong of my argument. By contrast, “modernity” refers to the long arc of Western culture that begins in the seventeenth century and continues into the present. See Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 1-22; Johnson, Birth of the Modern; and Reiss, Discourse of Modernism.

2. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” 257-58.

3. For a Derridean analysis of how figural traces inflect the sense of history available to culture, see Marian Hobson's “History Traces.”

4. See de Man, “Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight 187-228; “Autobiography as De-facement” and “Shelley Disfigured” in Rhetoric of Romanticism 67-82 and 93-124. The view of temporality de Man develops in these and other essays is the basis for the relation I offer between a sense of history that is deeply opposed to the global assurance of Romantic historiography and allegory. My differences with de Man's theory of allegory concern his, and Benjamin's, elevation of disfiguration and decay. I contend that these are neo-Hegelian symptoms, not the instructive core of allegory's survival in modernity.

5. Porter reads the language of Hoban's novel as a deconstructive universe in which puns register the decaying shelf life of language and postnuclear culture.

6. For a summary of Clare's disagreements with his publishers, see Lucas, John Clare 12-24.

7. McKusick argues further (“Grammar” 268-70) that Clare's polemical view of grammar and spelling made him sympathetic to the kind of lexical choices Nathaniel Bailey makes and discusses in his English Dialect Words of the Eighteenth Century as shown in the Universal Etymological Dictionary of Nathaniel Bailey, edited by William E. A. Axon.

8. Clare's views on this point are well known. See John Clare, editors' introduction xix-xxi.

9. See, for example, Clare's parody of Crabbe's “My Mary” (John Clare 59-62), his long asylum poem “Child Harold” in Later Poems, and Swordy Well (John Clare 147-52). McKusick discusses Clare's poetic defense of hunted animals (“‘Language … ever green’” 238-39).

10. White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. Grainger discusses Clare's reading of Gilbert White in her introduction to The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare xli-l.

11. Chambers notes this Latinate designation (253).

12. See Heaney, “John Clare,” and Lucas, “Clare's Politics.”

13. See, for example, essays in Foster, Anti-Aesthetic; Owens, “Allegorical Impulse”; and Jameson, “Third-World Literature” and Postmodernism 55-66.

14. Liu, “Local Transcendence.”

15. Wordsworth added the term “selection” to the Preface after 1800 (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Prose Works 1:123).

16. The current project supervised by Robert Essick, Morris Eaves, and Joseph Viscomi to put all of Blake's graphic images on the Internet will bring some Romantic faces to the computer screen. My point, though, concerns the way the discourse of cyberspace may elide pathos.

Works Cited

Bailey, Nathaniel. “English Dialect Words of the Eighteenth Century.” Universal Etymological Dictionary of Nathaniel Bailey. Ed. William E. A. Axon. London: English Dialect Society, 1883.

Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1978. 253-64.

Bostetter, Edward. The Romantic Ventriloquists. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1963.

Chambers, Douglas. “‘A love for every simple weed.’” Haughton, Phillips, and Summerfield 238-58.

Clare, John. Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Eric Robinson. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.

———. The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare. Ed. Margaret Grainger. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983.

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