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Overview
This book revisits British Romanticism as a poetics of heightened attention. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as Britain was on the alert for a possible French invasion, attention became a phenomenon of widespread interest, one that aligned and distinguished an unusual range of fields (including medicine, aesthetics, theology, ethics, pedagogy, and politics). Within this wartime context, the Romantic aesthetic tradition appears as a response to a crisis in attention caused by demands on both soldiers and civilians to keep watch. Close formal readings of the poetry of Blake, Coleridge, Cowper, Keats, (Charlotte) Smith, and Wordsworth, in conversation with research into Enlightenment philosophy and political and military discourses, suggest the variety of forces competing for—or commanding—attention in the period. This new framework for interpreting Romanticism and its legacy illuminates what turns out to be an ongoing tradition of war literature that, rather than give testimony to or represent warfare, uses rhythm and verse to experiment with how and what we attend to during times of war.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804798761 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/23/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Watchwords
Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention
By Lily Gurton-Wachter
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9695-8
CHAPTER 1
READING, A DOUBLE ATTENTION
I've discovered that I'm always attentive to, and always thinking about, two things at the same time. I suppose everyone is a bit like that. Certain impressions are so vague that only later, because we remember them, do we even realize we had them. I believe these impressions form a part — perhaps the internal part — of the dual attention we all possess. In my case the two realities that hold my attention are equally vivid.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
One might think that it would be possible to pay a double attention, at one moment doing full justice to the verbal intricacy of a poem and at the next inquiring into the agendas in whose service that intricacy has been put. But here one must recall the difficulty of serving two masters; each will be jealous of the other and demand fidelity to its imperatives.
— Stanley Fish, Professional Correctness
THE FIRST OF SIX "Puzzles for Volunteers!!" (1803) (Figure 6) breaks down the word attention into its component sounds: the letter a, a drawing of a tent, a drawing of an eye, and then the final letters o and n, or on. Substituting the eye for the letter i, the sounds of the word come apart to regroup into something like the imperative to keep an eye on something. The puzzle's clue, "a necessary preliminary," plays on the nascent militarization of attention at the turn of the century in Britain and on its centrality to the act of reading: attention is a prerequisite for the volunteers' military service and for cracking the puzzle itself. And yet while the puzzle demands the continued attention of all war volunteers, it also reminds us of the inattention built into the experience of reading, highlighting the sounds and letters that readers pass over every time they read a word — the eye lurking inconspicuously behind attention, or the bard of bombardment (as the second puzzle reveals). These are the overlooked sounds and shapes that poetry, I want to suggest, keeps an eye on.
Blake pushes an attention to these "Minute Particulars" to its limit, while insisting on a readerly attention that is emphatically distinct from the paranoid watchfulness of political surveillance. Indeed, the puzzle's use of images both to divide the reader's attention and to point to the inattention built into reading itself echoes Blake's larger poetic project, well known for its juxtaposition of word and image that complicates the work of illustration. Blake's interest in the overlap of political and aesthetic modes of observation might be less familiar. In this chapter, I turn to the physiology of reading, the description of which in the eighteenth century repeatedly guards against attention's division. In contrast to this anxiety, I find in Romanticism a poetic tradition that courts a double attention strengthened rather than diminished by its division. Blake, I suggest, both describes and demands a model of reading poetry in which meaning is produced when the reader's attention divides and interrupts itself. This gesture is at once critical of the paranoid claims on attention made by surveillance, spying, and the political demands to keep watch at the turn of the nineteenth century in England and yet is also suspicious of the ideological assumptions at work in everyday reading practices. I invoke Blake to gesture more broadly to the double attention of Romantic poetics: for Blake cultivates in his reader a heightened though unsuspicious attention, vigorous in its passivity and rigorously divided, an unprepared attention that is always ready to be surprised. Where Blake has often been read as a paranoid, self-scrutinizing critic of the mind-forg'd manacles of ideology, I'd like to suggest that the reading practices his texts make possible add to that scrutiny an attitude of openness and passivity that we can think of as an attention divorced from suspicion. Where an unsuspicious reading practice might register today as a refusal of historical and political criticism, I follow Blake to argue that on the contrary, to widen the scope of attention, to demand a double or multiple attention, is to open it onto alternative ways of imagining both history and politics.
Though the first puzzle is most explicitly about attention, the others play with many of this chapter's concerns. The second puzzle, spelling out bombardment, suggestively juxtaposes military attacks and poetic bards. The third, breaking down the word lookout, speaks to the vertiginous and intersecting amping up of watchfulness that accompanies war: eyes looking in every direction, looking out, are themselves, as the caption instructs with irony, "a thing to be attended to." The title "Puzzles for Volunteers!!" also speaks to a broader irony about the militarization of attention in the period. As the volunteer movement emerged in the 1790s, so did the question of just how voluntary it was. In his Political Dictionary (1795), Charles Pigott defined "sailor" as "a seaman who is taken voluntarily by force from his native home, to fight for a country which he is indebted to for nothing, except it be misery and wretchedness." Thus alongside Crichton's sense that by the end of the eighteenth century the idea that attention was voluntary was considered "quite unphilosophical" (257), we also find the insistence that voluntary military service was "by force." Wartime ideas of force and volunteerism complicate an already tricky interplay between attention and habit. An example from William James from the end of the nineteenth century makes light of what happens when habits of attention are militarized:
There is a story, which is credible enough, though it may not be true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out "Attention!" whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and its affects had been embodied in the man's nervous structure.
Despite its humor, James's anecdote takes seriously the way attention always threatens to become habit, a threat that becomes particularly paradoxical when attention is militarized.
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF READING
Implicit in the puzzles' use of the rebus form is the suggestion that war volunteers are readers, who need to attend to all that casual readers do not. Yet a number of eighteenth-century philosophers of attention found a central preoccupation in the curious way that readers must, to some extent, overlook or forget individual letters and marks. For though reading often stands metonymically as a figure of attention as absorption, it also requires inattention and forgetting. Close observation of the close observation of reading raises the question of what happens to those objects that one perceives but doesn't remember, like the tent in attention or the bard in bombardment. Condillac, for one, believes we are conscious of every perception that we have, but that certain perceptions are so faint — from our inattention to them — that we forget them immediately. Locke uses the clock, the landscape, and the operations of one's own mind as his key examples of those objects which come in our way but which we barely notice: "he will have but a confused idea of all the parts they are made up of, till he applies himself with attention, to consider them each in particular." For Condillac and a number of eighteenth-century thinkers, reading is an even better example: "If we reflect on what we have been doing the moment we stop reading," he writes, we don't notice "that we have also perceived each letter as well as the darkness every time we close our eyelids. But we will not be deceived by this appearance if we consider that, without consciousness of the perceptions of the letters, we would not have had the perception of the words and thus the ideas." Thus reading requires at once a complete attention and a consciousness of the minute particulars of a text without any retention of them. In 1792, Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart investigated the same problem, explaining that when we read, "we must perceive successively every different letter, and must afterwards combine these letters into syllables and words, before we comprehend the meaning of a sentence. This process, however, passes through the mind, without leaving any trace in the memory." Though attention is typically linked to memory so that one remembers only what one attends to, the experience of reading suggests that one can pay attention to something without it "leaving any trace in the memory." Stewart unearths a model of minimal attention that lies below the threshold of consciousness and volition, a way of noticing things that are immediately forgotten, or as Anne-Lise François has written, a way to "register a hardly noticed passing." Stewart's interest, he explains, is not in "those different degrees of attention which imprint things more or less deeply on the mind," but rather in "the act or effort without which we have no recollection or memory whatever." Nearly thirty years later, Thomas De Quincey would bring memory back into the picture, extolling "this pertinacious life of memory for things that simply touch the ear without touching the consciousness." Whereas Stewart separates attention from memory, De Quincey queries the gap between attention and consciousness. For De Quincey and Stewart both find that our attention or lack thereof to language has a particularly strange effect. De Quincey writes: "Said but once, said but softly, not marked at all, words revive before me in darkness and solitude; and they arrange themselves gradually into sentences, but through an effort sometimes of a distressing kind, to which I am in a manner forced to become a party."
Erasmus Darwin uses the experience of reading in his Zoonomia (1796) to illustrate what he calls "irritative ideas," those peripheral perceptions that exist but are not actively attended to: "thus when we read the words 'PRINTING-PRESS' we do not attend to the shape, size, or existence of the letters which compose these words, though each of them excites a correspondent irritative motion of our organ of vision, but they introduce by association our idea of the most useful of modern inventions; the capacious reservoir of human knowledge, whose branching streams diffuse sciences, arts, morality, through all nations and ages." Darwin's choice of "printing-press" is a bit dizzying, but it also gives a hint as to why these thinkers would turn to reading when there are examples everywhere of the inattention built into attention; for the entanglement of marking and not marking is particularly striking in the experience of reading printed text, where what has been perceived persists even after we forget having noticed it. Unlike the sounds of speech, which disappear after they have been spoken, the marks and letters of writing remain present even after they have been overlooked, as if to mock our inattention. Darwin is quick to point out that such inattention is not just a matter of the printing press, but a function of language itself, since it is on this "kind of connection" that all "language, letters, hieroglyphics, and every kind of symbol, depend" (53). We typically do not attend, Darwin explains, to the "the symbols themselves" (53).
Yet readers can and do attend with consciousness and volition to individual letters and marks, as the "Puzzles for Volunteers!!" playfully remind us. This possibility is most clear in the anxious attempts to guard against it. George Campbell, for example, who believed that rhetoric was "the pleasantest way of arriving at the science of the human mind," describes rhetorical perspicuity in his Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) by warning that a reader can attend to the sign rather than that to which it points. Echoing Condillac's model of a theatrical absorption that increases the more spectators there are in the theater, Campbell explains that the less the medium of language "intervenes," the more the reader's attention will be properly and fully absorbed in a text. In order for a reader to attend fully to a text, she must not get stuck on the particularities of language:
Now, in corporeal things, if the medium through which we look at any object be perfectly transparent, our whole attention is fixed on the object; we are scarce sensible that there is a medium which intervenes, and can hardly be said to perceive it. But, if there be any flaw in the medium, if we see through it but dimly, if the object be imperfectly represented, or if we know it to be misrepresented, our attention is immediately taken off the object onto the medium ... A discourse, then, excels in perspicuity, when the subject engrosses the attention of the hearer, and the diction is so little minded by him, that he can scarcely be said to be conscious, that it is through this medium that he sees into the speaker's thoughts. On the contrary, the least obscurity, ambiguity, or confusion in the style, instantly removes the attention from the sentiment to the expression, and the hearer endeavours, by the aid of reflection, to correct the imperfections of the speaker's language.
From a rhetorical perspective, the curious division between an attention absorbed in an idea and an unconscious overlooking of language describes the ideal conditions of clarity — and yet the precariousness of this combination rightly suggests how easily it may be disturbed. The intervention of the medium and the resulting division of attention is linked, for Campbell, to error, whereas a successful reading experience would remain fixed — a single, stable, selective attention — on what is represented. Implicit in this model is the way that aesthetic experience involves a fight over attention, between sign and signified, and thus faces the danger that an already divided attention will divide exponentially, and fall unsteadily on the medium rather than its message. Thus Kant warns about the danger of charms, those "foreigners" that "actually do damage to the judgment of taste if they attract attention to themselves as grounds for the judging of beauty," and Rousseau cautions teachers: "never substitute the sign for the thing itself save when it is impossible to show the thing; for the sign absorbs the attention of the child and makes him forget the thing represented." Thomas Reid is therefore unique in encouraging a childlike philosophical attention to the sign when he writes: "When one is learning a language, he attends to the sounds; but when he is master of it, he attends only to the sense of what he would express. If this is the case, we must become as little children again, if we will be philosophers: we must overcome this habit of inattention which has been gathering strength ever since we began to think."
VERSE'S DOUBLE ATTENTION
Up! Up! my friend, and quit your books
Or surely you'll grow double.
— William Wordsworth, "The Tables Turned"
For Campbell, rhetorical obscurity divides the reader's attention between the object of representation and its medium. Attention to the latter, we will see in Chapter 2, turns words into "empty sounds" that seem close to the empty rhetoric of propaganda. Though Campbell's focus is on rhetoric, he does concede that poetry can benefit from the confusion that divides the attention:
Yet there is a sort and a degree of obscurity which ought not to be considered as falling under this censure ... a species of darkness, if I may call it so, resulting from an excess of vivacity and conciseness, which to a certain degree, in some sorts of composition, is at least pardonable. In the ode, for instance, the enthusiastic fervour of the poet naturally carries him to overlook those minutenesses in language, on which perspicuity very much depends. It is to abruptness of transition, boldness of figure, laconism of expression, the congenial issue of that frame of mind in which the piece is composed, that we owe entirely the "Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn." (II: 268)
Campbell can forgive the poetic species for dividing the reader's attention between sense and sound, between what is said and the "minutenesses of language" that say it. Yet in pardoning poetry, he is still participating in a tradition that denigrates poetry. According to this model, verse's excesses and enthusiasm, which replace perspicuity with abruptness, boldness, and laconism, create an obscurity that diverts the proper, full absorption of attention, and redirects it onto the sign.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Watchwords by Lily Gurton-Wachter. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Attention's Disciplines1. Reading, a Double Attention
2. The Poetics of Alarm and the Passion of Listening
3. Bent Earthwards: Wordsworth's Poetics of the Interval
4. "That Something Living is Abroad": Missing the Point in Beachy Head
5. Attention's Aches in Keats's Hyperion Poems
Afterword: Afterword: Just Looking