nutting

Copyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.
ELH 63.3 (1996) 657-680

Wordsworth's "Nutting" and the Violent End of Reading
Robert Burns Neveldine

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? As a rule this cruel aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at the service of some other purpose, whose goal might also have been reached by milder measures.
--Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
The name is the end of discourse.
--Michel Foucault, "The Quadrilateral of Language"
What kind of disquieting play on words is it that can make the analyst a promoter of anality?
--Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
"A Recapitulation of the Three Syntheses"
Symbolically ... this hotly contested (male) hole remains, for the heterosexual man, a site of extreme privilege, his pink badge of virtù, so to speak.
--Jan Zita Grover, "AIDS: Keywords"
Prelude
By 1790, Wordsworth is exploring revolutionary France with his friend Robert Jones. That same year, the Bastille having been stormed and his manuscripts' fate uncertain, the Marquis de Sade walks away from Charenton asylum, poor but free, to set his affairs in order.
About Sade's compulsive rewritings of traditional themes, Foucault remarks that it was "not in view of a dialectical reward, but toward a radical exhaustion." 1 And belatedly, Bloom has remarked [End Page 657] that "The romance-of-trespass, of violating a sacred or daemonic ground, is a central form in modern literature, from Coleridge and Wordsworth to the present." 2
This essay is not overtly concerned with the relationship between Sade and Wordsworth--contemporaneous and yet ostensibly worlds apart. But the time has been long in coming when Sade and Wordsworth would meet openly on that ground.
Introduction
Wordsworth criticism has been focusing again on "Nutting," the blank-verse allegory he completed in 1799, first published in the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), and never assimilated into The Prelude, for which he originally intended it. 3 The speaker of the poem, a young man "with a huge wallet o'er [his] shoulders slung, / A nutting crook in hand" (6-7), leaves home one day in search of hazelnuts. He sounds optimistic enough, and, when he discovers a worthy tree, becomes positively playful, but ends up decimating the hazel in a scene of "merciless ravage" (45), and never returns home with his harvest. It is the speaker's startling violence that has most often attracted criticism. For example, Rachel Crawford, in "The Structure of the Sororal in Wordsworth's 'Nutting,'" reads in this allegory Freudian acts of primary narcissism and castrating vehemence against the phallic mother, complementing similar assertions in Jonathan Arac's "Wordsworth's 'Nutting': Suspension and Decision" with her own concerns for the mechanisms of sisterhood. Crawford seems correct in identifying the sororal as a neglected yet crucial issue here. 4 Charles Altieri, also responding to Arac, takes yet another approach. He suggests, even more powerfully than Arac, that in Wordsworth's short poem occurs the founding moment of modernity. According to Altieri, the "hero" of the narrative (that is, the poet), frustrated over the inadequacy of the pastoral mode in representing fully the power of the poetic "spirit," seeks violence against nature, positioned as object vis-à-vis this newfound source of subjectivity. "Nutting" is thus a "great achievement" in establishing the origins of the modern spirit of poetry in the drastic convolutions of the Romantic self. 5 All these critics share with their predecessors an assumption about the gender of the hazel's "mutilated bower" (50), as well as emphases on routine psychoanalytical modes, problems of poetic form, and even neo-Hegelian dialectics over issues regarding sexual difference per se, which the poem would seem so meretriciously to advertise. 6 [End Page 658]
As far back as the sixties, when "Nutting"--receiving sudden avid attention--was often implied to be a masturbatory fantasy, these emphases were common, along with the implication that a bower must be female if a male character, in a male heterosexual's poem, assails it. 7 Perhaps it is the rare critic with heterosexual imperatives and prerogatives, feminist or not, who would dare suggest otherwise. Arac, for instance, in confusing the poem's supposed phallic mother ("dubious fetishism") and feminine "lack" ("culturally valued sublimation"), seems incapable of conceiving (so to speak) an alternative to conventional readings, when in "Nutting" he finds "something with no natural existence, an act which could not occur": 8 not only because nature is female and therefore always already castrated, but because the poem's representational mode is allegorical, that is, not real.
This is a failure of the imagination, and perhaps lack of experience, that, we should not be surprised to learn, Wordsworth does not share. Indeed, enough evidence exists in "Nutting" to support the claim that the self-effacing anti-hero of the poem expends himself, in fact, upon a male bower. This would challenge not only certain fairly predictable Freudian/Lacanian, structuralist, and deconstructive readings of Wordsworth's troubling different-sex politics, but--even more fundamentally--the troubled relationship of reader to poem. Yet, though "Nutting" has been nothing if not seductive as a subject for criticism, its confusing strategies work rather to discourage than encourage further readings. If "the allegorical work tends to prescribe the direction of its own commentary," "Nutting," then, tells us to go south. 9 At first arousing interest, the poem ultimately makes it impossible for different readers of different orientations to respond in ways that would satisfy critical criteria of accountability and universality, to say nothing of the aesthetics of autonomy and sensibility. In Kantian terms, it is hardly a "pure" object of beauty, and thus judgments about it cannot but be less than perfect. More than a founding, heuristic text, "Nutting" represents "that blind confrontation of antithetical meanings which characterizes the allegory of unreadability"--but not deconstructive indeterminability so much as implosion, foreclosure, expenditure, undoing. 10 In Hegelian terms (but contra Hegel, via Deleuze's Nietzsche ), "Nutting" dramatizes the all-consuming exertions of the master ("total critique") over the recuperative labor of the slave ("self-consciousness"). In Benthamite terms, to subvert the utilitarian, the poem's narrator makes a "fabulous waste" outside the "moral hygiene" of the behavioral/experiential [End Page 659] catalog. 11 In short, he forces an "end," subsuming the teleology of ends under a peculiarly brutal telos of end.
Silence to an End
It appears odd when a critic, writing about sexual issues in Wordsworth's poetry, passes over "Nutting." Wayne Koestenbaum is a current example, providing an opportunity to fill in some of the background against which the poem so disturbingly echoes.
"Nutting" is indeed one very erotically charged poem omitted from Koestenbaum's recent analysis of the erotics of Wordsworth and Coleridge's literary collaboration, Double Talk. Koestenbaum focuses on Lyrical Ballads, specifically, those poems on which the two poets actually collaborated (such as "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "We Are Seven") and on those in which closet dramas of homoerotic tension are being played out ("Simon Lee," "The Nightingale"), along with several poems written before the poets' first encounter. "Nutting" would seem to be more than just a curious omission here. Its openly sexual content, coming across nevertheless as displacement of troubling impulses onto nature through poetry--though veiled by Wordsworth's particular type of decorum--is by now hard to miss.
Koestenbaum's is an inexplicable, seductive omission, and for several reasons. To begin with, it could be argued, and it has been argued, that once Wordsworth and Coleridge met in September 1795 at Bristol, having already entertained a mutual attraction for some time, they lost a sort of double innocence which would never be recovered (even if this had been desirable); and that, indeed, their most individual work kept in circulation a dialog revealing the more neurotic, spiteful, devious, and of course darkly erotic aspects of collaboration, of which Lyrical Ballads forms but one record. Thus, for example, the cons-piracy of that revolutionary poetic project later degenerates into Wordsworth's individual piracy in the Preface to his own Poems(1815) of Coleridge's ideas about the imagination as he expressed them in his lectures on Milton and Shakespeare--followed by Coleridge's unusually swift but carefully damaging response inBiographia Literaria. 12 There, Coleridge holds up the rules of these two most eminent of English poets (along with Bowles) not simply to measure his opponent, but to beat him with them--in his own words, " per argumentum baculinum," by the argument from the stick. 13 Now, the Biographia is itself a bold piracy, plundering the avant-garde [End Page 660] German philosophy of the time to augment its author's weaponry. Both the 1815 Preface and the Biographia were meant to affirm ascendancy in discourses each writer had long before deferred to the other: in Wordsworth's case philosophy, in Coleridge's poetry (or poetic theory); obviously, however, their roles had long been switched and were only reinforced by these documents.
Moreover, in the case of "Nutting," it remains an open question whether Wordsworth attempts to allegorize the plundering of another's poetical bower--namely Coleridge's (as in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison")--or whether the poem is designed to confess and thereby exorcise rancor and assuage opponents, though in the light of other more powerful Wordsworth-Coleridge exchanges it could only fail in doing so. Yet with its "merciless ravage" (45), the loud crash of its violation (which the speaker tries to muffle by claiming sympathy for the fetishized hazel and admonishing readers "with gentle hand [to] / Touch" [55-56]), "Nutting" calls attention to the destruction and expenditure of sex, especially male sex, on which Koestenbaum tends to concentrate as a paradigm for wasteful, redundant, possessive poetical fashioning. Male anality may be privileged, but Koestenbaum's shaky reliance on the heterosexual model of (re-)production disjoints his "pliant" critical model--even though this model applies to: the poets' own conceptions; the imitative procreation by males without females (an ancient myth revived by the Romantics); and their traffic in women (Annette Vallon, Dorothy, Mary, the two Saras, all the Ladies and Maidens and Friends of the poems). 14 Koestenbaum both vitiates praiseworthy intentions to increase, as it were, the validity of gay male literary criticism, and ignores reception. He writes, "The Lyrical Ballads is not centrally concerned with an erotics of writing," which is to state the obvious; but he chooses to occlude biography, and also the pleasures and pains of listening (Wordsworth and Coleridge would read their drafts to each other and to small familiar audiences). 15 That is, what these two men expected their work to do to the receiver was crucial. Collaboration does not simply involve an erotics of writing: it is just as powerfully one of reading, between collaborators, between groups of collaborators, between them and their audiences (which were mostly female, in contrast to the homosexual economy amongst the poets). 16If Wordsworth's Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads can be trusted, the ways in which his and Coleridge's offspring was received concerned them deeply. "Several of my Friends are anxious for the success of these Poems," Wordsworth [End Page 661] confesses near the beginning, and continues to emphasize the instruction and delight of "the Reader" capitalized (however conventionally). 17 The negative criticism with which the volume was soon greeted became a source of friction for the collaborators (even an occasion for delight, to Coleridge [Biographia, chapter 4]), one that would continue to generate the heat of composition, reading, and reply as each accused the other of sabotaging the original project. As the revised Lyrical Ballads increasingly became Wordsworth's volume alone (according to the byline, at least), his proprietorship expanded in proportion to his own Wordsworthian myth of self-creation.
Finally, perhaps, Koestenbaum avoids reading "Nutting" precisely because it isn't readerly, allegorizing as it does male literary volition as violation, directly concerning an erotics, rather, of thewriterly text.
"Nutting" in Con-Text
Barthes writes, "I love the text because for me it is that rare locus of language from which any 'scene' (in the household, conjugal sense of the term), any logomachy is absent." 18 "Nutting" dramatizes departure from the heimlich: not only does the speaker leave home (apparently never to return) and engage the Other, the poem stands apart from the central Wordsworthian oeuvre, disturbing and disrupting the well-maintained mechanism of recompense, of recuperation after loss, that makes reading Wordsworth so often an exercise in resolution. 19 Logomachy, a war of words, is absent here because it is marginalized. Disincluded from The Prelude, "Nutting" is that unassimilable, unproductive part that Bataille describes, perhaps because the speaker of the poem is supposed to remain distinct from Wordsworth's more sympathetic persona(s) in the larger poem. 20 "Nutting" falls handily under the Coleridgean rubric of "Poems of the Imagination," along with such narratives as "The Thorn" and "Tintern Abbey" with which it is contemporary, but it does not occupy a particularly noticeable position relative to those more famous poems. 21
By comparison, the allegorizing of "The Thorn" seems more that of the ventriloquist who must directly address readers in the second person, both to fool and to wink at, buttonholing them like Coleridge's compulsive storyteller except that in the Wordsworth poem the speaker constructs his attachment out of hearsay and not participatory experience (or so it would seem). The narrator/Wordsworth exploits [End Page 662] the ballad form while claiming lack of penetration into Martha Ray's case ("More I know not, I wish I did, / And it should all be told to you" [144-45]). Nevertheless, he positions her obsessively next to the phallic tree, perhaps, as Koestenbaum suggests, to replace the child she has lost with the thorn's linguistic impregnation. 22 In "Tintern Abbey," the speaker, who is typically identified with Wordsworth, effects an even more insidious, extraordinary, positively sublime, subordination (in the Kantian sense) of the female subject, Dorothy. She is fixed by the poet throughout the narrative yet addressed only toward the end, once he has finished writing "nature and the language of the sense" (108) into his private moral agenda. This "dear, dear Friend," object of condescension (and hyperrationalization), must notwithstanding accept the responsibility of retaining the poet's present feelings for later tranquil recollection (easy access, in other words), as an inviolate vessel, "a mansion for all lovely forms" (140), ones which the speaker alone has articulated and stored within the apostrophized "Friend" for future exploitation (her true identity, including sexual, like the speaker's but far less generalized, must remain hidden). Dorothy's own journals, of course, served a similarly useful purpose. (It may be that, the more Wordsworth used them, the more she wrote to be used.) The faceless female is made to resemble Wordsworth's image for the poem in his Prefaces: the poem's comparable ideality, along with its ability to be reified, makes it the only other such possible cache of emotion. The poem is "the rock of defense of human nature" (Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads ), a site of loss and, more crucially, of recovery of the unfamiliar compelled into familiarity, and just as rigorously protected from the corruption of the "getting and spending" world. Once matured within a falsely Edenic environment, the "Friend" will anyhow draw upon these feelings for her own protection and peace of mind. Presumably, she has no original feelings to claim, despite, and not as a result of, her Romanticized youth. 23 Memory becoming memorialization, in Wordsworth, becomes language's act of violence upon whatever silence, whatever oblivion, that might have spared these and other female subjects, especially Lucy, from the poet's peculiar forms of Romantic importunities.
Wordsworth's much earlier "Lines, Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree," completed the year he met Coleridge and the first blank verse to appear in Wordsworth's own arrangement of his poems, contrasts with "Nutting" by preserving instead of ruining its isolated vessel, "this deep vale" (46), in order to house the spirit of its "favoured [End Page 663] Being" (16). He, like the hero of "Nutting," goes forth into nature and never comes back, but because the poem is meant to record a useful admonishment, it confidently anticipates the itinerant reader's return. Thus these "Lines" offer another example of unproductive solitude (or self-absorption), though not as radically expensive as, say, the subject's in Shelley's Alastor, that critiques Wordsworth. In the yew-tree "Lines," as in "Nutting," the reading figure is apostrophized (as "Traveller" and "Stranger") and admonished to pass by the charged spot in a particular manner. Of all these narratives, "Nutting" is the most difficult to read, not least because of its overt violence, arresting the reader, almost loud enough to drown out its troubling implications--a destruction so powerful as to incapacitate deconstruction, or a reconfiguration of oppositions. The action in the poem exceeds a rationalized, cathartic sexual economy as described by Freud: "As is well known, temptations are merely increased by constant frustration, whereas an occasional satisfaction of them causes them to diminish, at least for the time being." 24 But "Nutting" hardly achieves the "nonhegemonic (and ultimately homoerotic) economy of desire" of Bataille. 25 Like the "Lines" localized to the yew-tree and to Tintern Abbey, "Nutting" provides an early example of Wordsworth's mature mode of time-spot blank verse, impossible without the earlier example of Coleridge's conversation poems. Yet the Wordsworth poem seems more willful, staged, artificial, openly deliberate--quite unlike the perfectly "natural" or "effortless" poem of the Wordsworthian stereotype. In a word, "Nutting" is thoroughly allegorical, but in a manner almost polymorphously perverse, which alone describes a range of positive and negative responses.
An Allegory of Reading's End
Indeed, the poem demands an allegorical reading, even though direct correspondences to objects and processes outside the poem remain tenuous, if not evaporative. Put another way, as Crawford remarks, while "the story of 'Nutting' can be simply paraphrased," the ambiguous symbology of the poem impedes both the flow of the poem's narrative and the flow of the narrative of reading--as well as any complete identification with the speaker. 26 The poem attempts to interpellate and interpolate readers as violators, but succeeds instead in forcing those readers into metacritical positions that call attention to their subject-formations in terms of sexuality. Voyeurs, seduced into violating, end up reading themselves into and out of the task of "Nutting." [End Page 664]
Certainly the poem offers readers plenty of imagery to arouse prurient interest, raising questions about Wordsworth's own sexual, and textual, intentions. The ambiguities of its images, however, prevent us from uncovering any secrets, altering a Coleridgean sublime of indefiniteness into a more Burkean sublime of terror and pity which is meant to mask the speaker's own subjectivity. 27 His empathetic pain, occurring upon objectification from his mutilating act, transmutes into the muted pleasure of his realizing his own survival, even if the terms of existence have altered permanently. It is as if the violence performed in the poem is so great as to obliterate all traces of the victim's identity, leaving only ruin and the boy's now merely, or absolutely, imperative ("move," "Touch") consciousness. "Merciless ravage" thus becomes more than partaking, more than taking: it is taking-away. It is a decimation, one that reaffirms and violates the violator equally. It is a sexual exchange: both parties are affected, though the male would prefer to retain his innocence--in both the legal and sexual senses. But the loss is difficult to identify. Nutting can not be merely a performance, sexually or poetically. In the conflict enacted by the boy, either he or the bower must succeed; instead, the "self" he might have sought is permanently lost along with his very presence, and the bower is decimated beyond recognition (in the Lacanian as well as the journalistic sense). There shall be no evidence remaining to alert anyone but the solitary reader to the boy's breaking of social taboos.
Beforehand, the phallic images, of course, predominate. The hazel--"Tall and erect, with tempting clusters hung" (20)--most closely resembles the thorn in the poem of that name: "It stands erect, and like a stone / With lichens is it overgrown" (10-11). It also resembles "The woods of autumn, and their hidden bowers / With milk-white clusters hung" in The Two-Part Prelude of 1799 (235-36). 28 The overtly masculine shape of the images in "Nutting," which are virtually impossible to mistake for female, renders incomprehensible--except to those sensitive to his (hetero-)sexism--Harold Bloom's claim that "The rough analogy is with the human female body," as well as Margaret Homans's reading of this bower as a woman's. 29 Maybe they make the bower female for similar though opposite reasons: Bloom, to ensure that any male protagonist of Wordsworth's will figure nature as the other gender, however exploitative the reinscription of hetero-sexism; Homans, to ensure that the female gender is the one being violated, all the more to indict Wordsworth's motivations as oppressive, however admirably revisionist [End Page 665] Homans's feminism might be. 30 At any rate, phallic imagery abounds in Wordsworth: trees, crags, mountains, eminences, even gibbets (the hanged are said to become erect, even ejaculate) 31 --all of which are usually isolated, privileged symbols of the powerful masculine gender principle as it imposes itself upon the landscape. 32 The dead man in Esthwaite's Lake (The Prelude, 1805, 5.450-81)--who "bolt upright / Rose"--represents a clearly Burkean and Freudian moment of terror and guilt repressed by language or the "romance" (477) of the boy's reading that can, so he claims, relieve him of libidinous, patricidal impulses. 33 This is the very definition of a fetish--poetry taking the place of the violence it describes as absent in its own present. 34 The terrific enjambment here on "Rose" recalls the speaker's powerful movement in "Nutting": there, he says, "Then up I rose" (43, where the word prominently ends the line), before he brings down the hazel. In both instances, rising sexual action leads to a fall into a consciousness of death which words can scarcely screen.
What, then, is the nature of the deflowering in "Nutting"? Is it a rape of the male-as-nature (or nature-as-male), with a deeply sadistic component (again, obsessively, "merciless ravage" [45])? The speaker, after all, carries "a huge wallet o'er [his] shoulders slung, / A nutting-crook in hand" (6-7)--a huge endowment, from behind--and proceeds to ravish a phallic symbol plus the nearest virgin opening he can find, that "green and mossy bower, / Deformed and sullied" (46-47) contrasting with "one of those green stones / That, fleeced with moss, under the shady trees, / Lay around [him]" (35-37), which may conceal some feminine principle to tempt the boy away from his desired objective: an inexperienced male orifice. Frances Ferguson suggests that the boy's hesitation to ravage the bower is meant to allow nature time to seduce him after a gratification "too easily won." 35 In other words, he discovers more than he had hoped for: "A virgin scene!" [21]--three "loaded" words at the beginning of the line, and with an exclamation mark prominently positioned. Such an object itself incites to ravish (according to the terms of the poem). The "mutilated bower" would typically imply a female organ, but is it not perhaps a rather male opening, that "green and mossy bower" instead of "one of those green stones / ... fleeced with moss"? Or do those stones themselves represent a circle of male parts, an audience for the boy's conquest? 36 The allegory does not lend itself to an absolute correspondence of images, yet the drama [End Page 666] and its actors cannot, almost helplessly, but suggest this kind of sublimated fantasy.
Nevertheless, the exact nature of the symbolism remains mysterious. Does the "Figure quaint" leave his "frugal Dame" to pursue what are to him probably illicit desires? or to satisfy anydesire because this woman--mother, sister, wife? (Ann Tyson?)--is inadequate, in which case the "Maiden" would substitute and complete the sexual, allegorical triangle? 37 While the eroticism is undeniable, the prefix (homo-, hetero-, bi-, even a-) to the act of sexuality shifts, leaving only speculation and a reminder of the ultimate emptiness of the oppressive sexual signifier. 38 "Nutting," to paraphrase Crawford, is more "ingenious" than simply to veil a disturbing act. The poem itself pauses many times; indeed, the first line begins in medias res after a long dash covering six absent syllables; it includes nine dashes and liberal caesuras; but then there are as many sudden, startling, intrusive enjambments, such as "Through beds of matted fern, and tangled thickets, / Forcing my way" (15-16; emphasis added). "Nutting" textualizes sex, sexualizes language, teases the reader just as the boy teases the hazel remaining erect while he dallies on the fleecy stones, finally rearing up and completing his "service," but savagely. 39 Repetitions echo libidinous yearnings, as in line 38: "I heard the murmur and the murmuring sound." The meter, highly syncopated in Wordsworth's experimental fashion, follows the inciting and discouraging rhythms of seduction: "The heart luxuriates with indifferent things, / Wasting its kindliness on stocks and stones, / And on the vacant air" (41-43). Alliterations and assonances, plus the magnificent sounds of English onomatopoeia (especially the climactic "crash" [44, line-end] of the patient hazel), make the language virtually palpable. But what really happened, despite all the noise, remains unknown, which seduces, too. It is as if the reader were not there, to hear the falling of a hazel in the woods. "All the categories of language and consciousness, all the structures of subjectivity and objectivity, of intuition and comprehension, have collapsed, and yet an indefinable violence, a sense of pain or ecstasy, remains. 'Something' subsists, even when there is no revelation, no truth, nothing to be found." 40
"Nutting" involves recollection versus recalled immediacy ("unless I now / Confound my present feelings with the past" [48-49]), the most abused Wordsworthian trope. Foucault's fugitive vision of male-to-male sexuality applies here: it inspires the recollection of an [End Page 667] act which was performed too quickly for recognition, either of self or of other. An elegiacal, melancholy gazing after the departed object lingers, while all the literary mechanisms of concealment and revelation (that is, diagesis) play through the mind over and over again, offering the promise of the object's continual return. 41
Reading/Nutting
So "Nutting" solicits allegory and an allegorical reader (each reader who has ever taken a literarily prurient interest, anyway), not simply because, as Foucault cuttingly remarks, "underneath everything said, we suspect that another thing is being said." 42 The poem, if read literally, might not merit all the criticism it has recently been offered. Further, certain elements of the poem--manipulations of styles and especially figures--call attention to its allegorical nature. But just as the bower must be portrayed as virgin in order all the more violently to be ravaged, the poem remains indirect, inviting the transgressive act of scanning through its verses, the to-and-fro of earth-breaking ( versus ) and dissemination (semelfaction). Furthermore, the force of repeated readings fatigues as well as exhilarates us. The search for the most applicable allegorical reading leads down, like the very act of scanning the verses, to disaffection, even disgust, the depression resulting from the most fantastic "masturbation," though Wordsworth be the subject and we (critics) the witnesses. What Allan Stoekl reads in Bataille can perhaps be read in "Nutting": "the terminal subversion of the pseudostable references that had made allegory and its hierarchies seem possible." 43 Wordsworth dramatizes and confirms such a headless allegory by having his subject force down the hazel's top and disperse both the subject's and the hazel's self-possession(s), "wasting ... kindliness" (42) in both senses, amongst all the senses. Similarly, the poem effects a linguistic and sexual perturbation in readers by not allowing them to remain mere observers, much as it seems to ignore them. Seduction, indeed. And abandonment.
Because the poem begs a reading that would substitute external for internal figures--whether that of the mind/nature dichotomy, guilt over literary indolence, justifiable destruction of the phallic mother's threat, or demonstration of poetical authority--it also begs the reader to adopt the subject-position of ravisher, importunate, as to "meaning." 44 Hence, Galperin's contention that the reader finds it difficult to identify with the speaker is apparent to the point of impracticability, even though his interpretation of the reader's being [End Page 668] marginalized is thoroughly practical, in terms of apostrophization (that is, the reader cannot be the Maiden). 45 "Nutting" interpellates the reader as a violator, interpolating him or her into the poem, which itself had for some time existed as an undiscovered bower whose "discovery" has pleased Wordsworthians and anti-Wordsworthians alike. Galperin, an example of the former, reads "Nutting" as yet one more early demonstration of the undermining of genius's authority that would only develop, rather than fail, during Wordsworth's decline. "Nutting" has thus become an allegory of reading, a poem about writing and getting re(a)d, ruining its symbols just as surely as the boy brings down the hazel tree "deformed and sullied" (47), an accurate description of the act of reading the act of nutting. It bloodies the bloodier.
In the meantime, the speaker of the poem remains disguised as a romantic "Figure" and then perhaps as a "spirit in the woods": the I is concealed while the reader's eye is brought out into the open, forced to look, like Burgess's intrusive criminal, at the very acts he has performed over and over again, for the sake of some perverse discipline. Readers/subjects cannot remain disguised; every reading dis-covers them, shocks them into the recognition of their own complicity. Revealed in this way, readers are obliged to adopt a metapoetic stance in order to call attention to their own subject-positions vis-à-vis the poem, and to maintain defensive positions as well. Admittance to the violating act therefore must identify readers with the speaker critically (in both senses), forcing them to read, react, and respond from subjectivities that can no longer remain subconscious. Yet these responses remain defensive because they rely on sexualities which readers declare and live, not necessarily the multiple possibilities to which they themselves might be subject. The consciousness of the poem thinks it knows its readers but knows only as much as any embodied come-on. "Nutting" backs them into a corner, rendering their defenses untenable by delimiting the terms of their reading. Here is where Ferguson's interpretation comes across as the most believable: the imagination in this poem figures negatively--as absence--and, because nature "[deludes the speaker] into writing himself into his own text," the reader has to do the same. Imagination sleeps while apprehension importunes. 46 It is therefore possible, contra Galperin, that it is the reader who gets figured as the "Maiden" (Magnuson, conventionally, reads her as Dorothy [182]), who should not tread too harshly on this fragile concatenation of speaker, poem, and narrative. 47 "Nutting" can indeed inspire a variety [End Page 669] of speculations--a strong poem to the extent that it manipulates responses (wholly disturbs), a weak one to the extent that the message remains linguistic and overconfident (remains wholly and "merely" literary). At any rate, its effectiveness must be measured on the outside, in a manner of a speaking, by how successfully it can embody itself apart not only from Wordsworth's "gothic church" of a life's work (never completed), to which it would seem only tangential, but apart from the very page on which he allowed the poem to appear and represent him.
"Nutting" as Con-Catenation
This "lyrical ballad" (or anti-ballad, as Mary Jacobus might say) intersects with other genres that disturb it. "Nutting" is narrative but not stanzaical or rhymed; it moves in the manner of "Tintern Abbey," with its "fluctuating, overflowing blank verse ... its restless enjambments and its disdain for borders." 48 The speaker's "sense of pain" (52) suggests elegy, while the quaintness of the boy's appearance--indeed, the quaintness of his very self-consciousness, the very Spenserian diction in which his narrative is couched (that of the knight errant: "a Figure quaint / Tricked out in proud disguise of cast-off weeds / Which for that service had been husbanded ... Motley accoutrement" [8-10,12])--is deliberate archaism, as had been Spenser's (along with the image of the feminized bower). Ferguson observes "an artful character stepping from the pages of romance narrative." 49 But the poem hardly resolves--so unlike Wordsworth, or so critics have tended to think; like Spenser's extended epic-allegory, it never quite finishes. And this is due partly to a complex of forms which is not perfectly synthesized. 50
"Nutting," leading readers into the silence of the "far-distant wood" (8), stays disquiet, admonitory, as if the hazel continues to vibrate along with the language, discouraging further action. 51Is the poem responding, in a sexual/textual sense, to Coleridge's own bowers? 52 Does the poet want to ravage the rival's bower of poetry, of whom, as the boy, he claims to be "fearless" (24)? Does rival here refer to what the "banquet" (25) of the hazel, then, is not? And does the recognition of pain bespeak guilt over having deprived this adversary of some innocence, naturalness, perfection? We must acknowledge the pain in intercourse for the inexperienced, but here it is the penetrator who accepts the pain, or considers, quite openly, only his own, perhaps because it can only ever be referred to one's own, and is never completely displeasing. Adela Pinch, wishing to [End Page 670] deemphasize the notion that "engagement with literary suffering is like a form of personal violence," claims that "meter and the invocation of sexual difference provide partial solutions" to the "pain of reading." 53 (Wordsworth hopes, in his prose prefaces, that meter will help restrain passion.) Yet it is Elaine Scarry who, linking pain to the turning in upon oneself and the precluding of imagination, has perhaps the most to say to the convolution of the "Nutting" reading experience: "The less the object accommodates and expresses the inner requirements of the hunger, desire, or fear, the less there is an object for the state and only the state itself, the more it will approach the condition of pain." 54 In other words, readers respond with their own sexual and damaged subjectivities, making it obvious that the poem has violated them through an act of consciousness-making. The seduction of "Nutting," as well as nutting, succeeds only in turning actors--whether inside or outside the text--back painfully upon themselves, rendering the poem far less interesting to look at than, as Coleridge might advise, to reimagine: a process of becoming self-aware yet necessarily "disinterested" sexually. "Nutting" rehearses, over and over again, this type of Kantian (virginal) sublime.
Finally, does the importunity of poetry gloat or feel, itself, guilty? To Galperin, the poem, purportedly a confession, by pushing aside the reader-as-confessor and then the reader-as-auditor, becomes dramatic monolog, pleased with its own speaker's perfect reception. 55 This monolog, yet another form, contains possibilities for pride as well as shame--adolescent but also ideologically repressive sexual affects. And if the sexual politics of the poem are as convoluted as they seem, the male reader indeed must be positioned differently from the female ("Maiden"); however, the male reader becomes somewhat of a problem if he is actually feminized (that is, figured allegorically as female for the purposes of concealing a male-to-male sexual act). Because readership was largely female in Wordsworth's day, the society of male writers (and Coleridge and Wordsworth can certainly be read as their own homoerotic society) thus trafficked homosexually (à la Irigaray) in these women, whether inside or outside their poems (Koestenbaum also makes a point of this). 56 Remember that the boy remains apart from his "Dame," acting out a conflict between recollection and expenditure without her. The boy must waste to collect, an ambiguity conveyed by the poem's very title. He must wreck to become rich, pull down to gather, destroy to enjoy. Though he seeks the utility of accumulation, [End Page 671] he produces instead a futility of expenditure: an increasingly startling problem in the early years of the Industrial Revolution and corporate capitalism. This problem would help the English Romantics reconstruct crucial myths: Cain (the fratricide, who kills to gain autonomy and is exiled); Prometheus (the rebel, who must re-call the curse that was meant to bring down the despotic head); Pygmalion (the artist, chipping away the cold, excess stone to achieve the living ideal); Ahasuerus (the wanderer, condemned to homelessness, bearing his own forms of destruction). The boy of "Nutting" is, perhaps, the capitalist who, despairing in his inability to decode all the partial flows of wealth ( pace Deleuze and Guattari), withdraws from life after the crash of his resources. He invests far too much.
Language is violence upon nature, but does nature have to be figured as innocent? Perhaps the speaker must do so in order to make the act that much more appealing, and appalling. A female principle may be "both pivotal and underplayed" in Wordsworth, and is perhaps ultimately "picturesque," but this does not mean that any human principle has been emptied out of that bower which the speaker of "Nutting" is, at the same time, careful to keep allegorized, and anxious to possess. 57 The poem's self-awareness, disguising itself (like the speaker) thereby as a kind of innocence (a deceptive maneuver, of course), seduces. That the hazel, it seems, has never before been touched does not render it "virgin" unless the boy loads the rift beforehand with as much dis-possessable meaning as possible.
Nutting Readers
The boy seems, for his own purposes, rather successful in doing so, yet he is bound not to persuade the silent companions he has brought along on his expedition--his imagined readers. One reason for his failure in establishing a community of violators is that his own subject is decisively split: into the I of the narration, that of past events, and of the intermediary existing, though hardly thriving, in the interstices of allegory and metaphor, the reader's solicitors. And if the speaker can be said to carry within himself and deliver to the hazel the Oedipal triangle (frugal mother, absent father, castrating and castrated self), his companions may not be sure who is leading them into criminal complicity (and against whom--the father to be seduced and preemptively castrated?). The speaker cannot force his way into the reader as a unified self, and this somewhat vitiates his potential. Furthermore, "where" does he end up? does he return to[End Page 672] his "Dame"? (One psychoanalytical reading, figuring her as Mother, would likely disallow him from returning, except linguistically: to rehearse and rehearse his expectable act on the mossy couch of anamnesis.) He has become "rich beyond the wealth of kings" (51) but is also deprived painfully of--what, precisely? his real life, which he can only recall from the shadowy position of a spirit? But if he never really had such a life, his is the most dastardly of crimes: Ferguson's reading of an unstable message in the poem is therefore understatement. 58The message is wholly literary, and wholly disturbing, one that can leave the reader as much dismayed and displaced as the nutting, nutted boy.
Though readers realize the multiplication of the speaking subject, and resist "Nutting" with their own histories, they nevertheless may exploit the potentialities that its "merciless ravage" has afforded, drawing from the experience of revolutionized sensibilities the power to eventuate subversive, liberating, and motivating actions that are "voluptuous" (24), like the speaker's while he observes the "unvisited" hazel "with wise restraint" (23). 59 ("Voluptuous," appropriately, marks another erotic enjambment.) Here is the allegory of one possible reading: The poet, expecting to be read, pens the confession; and so readers, bringing the poem into consciousness, mobilizing the mechanisms of seduction and violation, seduce the poet into leaving behind tracings of the pen(is) to be followed--not so much back to their originator as to his narrator, upon whom he has apparently displaced his motivations. Readers, then, hearing from the woods the speaker's admonishments to the Maiden, themselves become that shadowy, feminized, allegorical figure vanishing into the poem by participating with the "spirit" that has been left there, and may experience, upon reentering "Nutting," a "sudden happiness beyond all hope" (29). This will not be some unpersuasive instance of the imitational fallacy, but an imitation of the literal silence of reading prior to consciousness of the poem's success-in-failure. 60
But to conclude might be to render "Nutting" metaphorically, myself, and cease for a moment the flow of narrative which it has initiated and reiterated, to silence this brief supplement ("Wordsworth's 'Nutting' and the Violent End of Reading") to the brief supplement ("Nutting") to the Wordsworthian project ( The Recluse ). I offer a tripartite reply to the subjection fostered by the threesome, the "grotesque triangle," that is the seductive voice of Wordsworth's poem. 61 "Nutting" is a misericord: a suspension of [End Page 673] obligations (the boy's), a side-chapel to the greater edifice of poetry (Wordsworth's), and a phallic, chivalrous weapon for delivering the coup-de-grace to its fatally wounded subject--reading.
University of Washington, Seattle
Notes
Raimonda Modiano has provided invaluable assistance in the writing of this essay.
1. Michel Foucault, "Language to Infinity," Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), 62.
2. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), 35.
3. "Nutting" first appeared in this edition located between the "conversation" poem called "The Fountain" and the Lucy poem beginning "Three years she grew." They form a trio of poems that dramatize various kinds of rising (life) and falling (death) actions. Wordsworth ultimately collected "Nutting," according to his final arrangement of the oeuvre, as one of the "Poems of the Imagination." The version I here discuss can be found in William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), 147. Henceforth I will cite line numbers of poems from this collection parenthetically in the text.
4. Rachel Crawford, "The Structure of the Sororal in Wordsworth's 'Nutting'," Studies in Romanticism 31 (1992): 197-211; Jonathan Arac, "Wordsworth's 'Nutting': Suspension and Decision," Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), 34-49. Crawford opposes the sororal to fraternal modes, which are at any rate not negligible. In fact, at least one other narrative with which "Nutting" resonates is the story of Cain and Abel. Wayne Koestenbaum mentions Cain several times, even according him the honor of being "in Harold Bloom's terms ... history's first strong poet" ("The Marinere Hath His Will[iam]: Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads," Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration [New York: Routledge, 1989], 10). The distinction, if it is one, that Koestenbaum confers upon Cain might better be conferred upon the younger Abel, by Bloom's cyclical and psychoanalytical logic. In any case, the theme of the murderous brother preoccupied the Romantics. Wordsworth and Coleridge were to collaborate on "The Wanderings of Cain," but could not finish the poem (Koestenbaum accurately associates the story with the poets' own fraternal rivalry). Byron developed the Cainite myth into a closet drama. Because it is a primal act of transgression in Western culture, Cain's crime becomes for Wordsworth and others a paradigm for: the individual imagination's violence against a world not wholly of its own creation; a certain sacrificial economy among men (recall the Christ/Abel of Coleridge's poem, which he could not, or would not, finish in time for the second edition of Lyrical Ballads ), an exchange involving the penetrative-receptive action of anality and peripeteic role reversal in the sexual drama; defamiliarization (Cain, like Wordsworth's heroes, must become a fugitive, disrupting and then fleeing from the familial order); as well as the act of violence implicit in the reader's search for delight and instruction, or meaning, in the text.
5. Charles Altieri, "Wordsworth and the Options for Contemporary American Poetry," The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1990), 190.
6. At least one precedent exists for a male bower in English poetry, one with which Wordsworth and Coleridge might indeed have been familiar: Richard Barnfield's notorious The Affectionate Shepheard Sicke for Love, whose speaker beckons Ganymede towards "my pleasant Bower / Fild full of Grapes, of Mulberries, and Cherries" (Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991], 100). Coleridge, for his part, knew "Nutting," since Dorothy Wordsworth included a draft of the poem with a letter to Coleridge late in 1798, along with early versions of the skating and boat-stealing episodes from what came to be called The Prelude. See Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years, 1770-1799 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), 259, 331, quoting Dorothy, who describes "Nutting" as "the conclusion of a poem of which the beginning is not written." It is difficult if not impossible to avoid thinking of the poem, then, as an end in itself. Wordsworth, for his part, described it as "intended as part of a poem on my own life, but struck out as not being wanted there"--an intriguing note that almost seems to confer the power of desire upon that life-poem. The Prelude itself had rejected the disturbances of "Nutting." See William Wordsworth, The Oxford Authors William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 694, n. 153.
7. Virtually every book-length study of the poem, dating from before the sixties to the present, includes some take or other on "Nutting." This might not strike us as unusual for literary criticism, especially of Wordsworth, except when we survey the diverse ways that "Nutting" positions critics hermeneutically--how, as Foucault might say, the poem incites critical discourse. To read "Nutting" is thus inevitably to navigate a wilderness of commentary, as much as to construe the poem's tropes. At first, critics approach the poem gingerly--as if obeying its ultimate imperatives--and discuss it only in terms of Wordsworth's struggle with his relationship to nature, based on his own gloss (he associates the poem with recollections of his own nutting expeditions in the vale of Esthwaite). See William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. Michael Mason (London: Longman, 1992), 377. When critics begin to talk about the poem's sexual implications, they emphasize rapine, but consider the state of the speaker over the bower's, almost to excuse the boy's act as autoerotic. Hence, David Ferry, in his The Limits of Mortality: An Essay on Wordsworth's Major Poems (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1959), 24, attributes "practiced libertinism" to this sexual prodigy. And David Perkins remarks that "the child has ravaged the hazel bower, but to call it a 'ravishment' expresses mainly the weightiness of the child's feeling, his thrilled fascination and sense of guilt" ( Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964], 185). Perkins suggests, as well, an autoerotic response in the reader. Bloom, in The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971), claims that Wordsworth "transcends the directly sexual element" by displacing it onto the maiden, implying that the poem is a sort of preparation for actual sex (30-31). Arac, for his part, boldly confronts the issue of self-abuse: "by the turn to female sexualization composing the scene, the poem displaced youthful autoerotic fantasies, the symbolic masturbation Freud recognized in what Americans would call 'jerking off' branches" (45). He quickly shifts his discussion, however, to the castration of the phallic mother. Earlier, Arac notes the critical attention the poem has received as a result of its sexual content, "still acknowledged, though with some embarrassment" (44)--an affect of masturbation, not of rape. Michael G. Cooke, in Acts of Inclusion: Studies Bearing on an Elementary Theory of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), remains one of the few critics finally to touch on, however carefully, what he calls the "sub-hermaphroditic" posture of the bower (141). Cooke is quoted in Bruce Bigley, "Multiple Voices in 'Nutting': The Urbane Wordsworth," Philological Quarterly 70 (1991), 451, n. 14.
8. Arac, 45.
9. Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism," parts 1 & 2, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 53. Owens refers to an idea originally found in Northrop Frye.
10. Owens, 79. Throughout, my discussion is indebted to Owens' theorization, which, although it draws on Coleridge, is not concerned with the aesthetics of Romanticism. My own essay is an allegory of reading in itself, written by a postmodernist; so it cannot help, in allegorical fashion, but to read Romanticism through the palimpsest of postmodernism.
11. See John Rajchman, Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 61.
12. See Raimonda Modiano, "Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Ethics of Gift Exchange and Literary Ownership," Coleridge's Theory of Imagination Today, ed. Christine Gallant (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 243.
13. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. George Watson (London: Dent, 1971), 93.
14. See Koestenbaum, 37, 41, 71.
15. See Koestenbaum, 71.
16. See Luce Irigaray, "Commodities Among Themselves," This Sex Which is Not One , trans. Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 193.
17. Hutchinson and De Selincourt, 734.
18. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975), 15-16.
19. For a discussion of the trope of leavetaking, see James W. Pipkin, "Wordsworth's 'Nutting' and Rites of Initiation," Interpretations 10 (1978): 11-19.
20. Bataille, 142. Bataille's position is perhaps no less heterosexist than Wordsworth's, Coleridge's, or even Koestenbaum's (despite his posing the crucial question, "Must homoeroticism justify itself by mustering analogies to childbirth and reproduction?" [25]). Yet Bataille is probably the most radical in locating sexuality generally in a ground where growth and perpetuation maintain no more and no less a trajectory toward some telos than non-reproductive sex. See especially "The Solar Anus," Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985), 5-9. The hetero in the "heterogeneous" Bataille valorizes must remain a cause for some wonder, however.
21. See Paul Magnuson, Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988), 180. Magnuson emphasizes rightly that "Nutting" is also contemporary with the Lucy poems, the Matthew poems, and some of the early material for The Prelude, such as the skating and boat-stealing episodes, in which the speakers feel guilt and sorrow as a result of (sometimes quite deliberate) alienation. We might well speculate that, since Coleridge privileges the organic symbol over the mechanical allegory ( pace de Man), he derided "Nutting" and encouraged Wordsworth to shun(t) it from what we now know as The Prelude, into which it couldn't properly be synthesized. Was this, then, Coleridge's own act of (self-)preservation? that is, did he denigrate the allegory precisely because it all too fully embodied (translucently, in de Manian terms) Wordsworth's poetic triumph?
22. Koestenbaum, 86.
23. Her own experiences are deemphasized almost to the point of denial. Similarly, in "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways," the "difference" that Lucy makes to the speaker is not just that the poem would not be without the occasion of her death, but that this female subject must remain "unknown" to all but the speaker, who shares as little as possible with readers; Wordsworth's typically isolated images--here, the violet and the star--disembody Lucy while keeping her singular and unattainable, apart from sublunary life. In "Three Years She Grew," Nature presumes to absorb Lucy, perhaps generously, for its own child, the différance between them constituting Nature's forms and Lucy's existence alike. But the speaker's melancholy tone in the last lines--"The memory of what has been, / And never more will be," the familiar Wordsworthian complaint--reveals the guilt of his identification with that Nature which has foreshortened Lucy's life by overenergizing her, giving her the impossible duty of becoming Nature's perfect mirror (itself an already outmoded doubling of poetry's image in the prose prefaces). Finally, in "A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal," Lucy has passed decisively into the natural world, into its deep immortality, its permanence, turning with its diurnal and seasonal rounds, in order to assuage the speaker. This may seem like "abundant recompense" ("Tintern Abbey," 88), the favor Lucy pays the speaker back; but it remains to be asked whether the cost to Lucy has been too great, especially since the speaker considers only the cost to himself.
24. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), 73.
25. Steven Shaviro, Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory (Tallahassee: Florida State Univ. Press, 1990), 95. I should note that, while Shaviro does not elaborate on the nonhegemonic/homoerotic conjunction specifically, he nowhere associates Bataille with such poets as Wordsworth (he prefers Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens). Shaviro mentions Bataille's heterosexism and "virility" (37, 96), but doesn't investigate them to the point of revising Bataille's economy of desire from nonhegemonic to counterhegemonic, which I feel it must remain so long as 1) Bataille's economy banks on basically heterosexual investments, and 2) it gets used as an alternative to a sexual hegemony that it may contest but cannot supplant. We gay critics--including Bruce Boone, to whom Shaviro refers--might well learn from Bataille, perhaps disturbed at the thought, however, that once again we shall be forced to take with shame our own (queer) opinion from another (straight man), as I (and Shaviro) do by referencing Emerson, and as I do by plundering Shaviro. In his "Masculinity, Spectacle, and the Body of Querelle,"The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press), upon viewing Fassbinder's film, Shaviro admits, "it would be futile for me to try to write about it without registering the force of [its] seduction" (159)--exactly how I feel towards "Nutting," but from a reversed subject position). "Nutting," in any case, may be homoerotic, but is hardly nonhegemonic, as should by now be all too clear.
26. Crawford, 201.
27. See Albert O. Wlecke, Wordsworth and the Sublime (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), 73-94.
28. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 7, n. 7. The frequency with which Wordsworth uses "hung" might be overlooked if he had not devoted so much space to a discussion of forms of the verb "to hang" in the Preface to Poems (1815). Interestingly, Wordsworth uses the description "milk-white" at least one more time, in reference to the ill-fated pair of swans in "Home at Grasmere" (323), which Modiano recognizes in MS. D as a pair of males. One of them, representing Coleridge, must be sacrificed so that Wordsworth can choose the more proper domestic companion--Dorothy ("Blood Sacrifice, Gift Economy and the Edenic World: Wordsworth's 'Home at Grasmere'" [forthcoming in Studies in Romanticism ]).
29. Bloom, 129. Margaret Homans, "Eliot, Wordsworth, and the Scenes of the Sisters' Instruction," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 240.
30. Crawford's insightful reading also assumes the bower to be female, or at least feminized.
31. This bit of folk wisdom has formed an exchange, to choose one instance, in Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1954), 12:
ESTRAGON: What about hanging ourselves?
VLADIMIR: Hmm. It'd give us an erection.
ESTRAGON: ( highly excited ). An erection!
VLADIMIR: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That's why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you know that?
ESTRAGON: Let's hang ourselves immediately!
Beckett recognizes with Wordsworth the potential destruction caused by a form of sexuality that is estranged; out of bounds; associated with crime, punishment, and death, and shared amongst males.
32. The most brazen example is, without doubt, "There is an Eminence," third of "Poems on the Naming of Places." "This Peak" [5], "this lonely Summit" [17], retains the poet's "Name" as if to keep it apart from the woman whom the speaker loves--an embarrassing inscription, so to speak, of the narcissistic stereotype of homosexuality: double talk, indeed.
33. "Either we flee the event in terror; or else we are lulled with assurances that it is something to which we are already 'appropriated,' that is already our own" (Shaviro, Passion and Excess, 33).
34. As De Man remarks, "allegory exists entirely within an ideal time that is never here and now but always a past or an endless future." De Man's deconstructive (indeterminate) language itself embodies allegory's ironies ("The Rhetoric of Temporality," Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle [Tallahassee: Florida State Univ. Press, 1986], 220).
35. Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven: Yale Univ Press, 1977), 73.
36. Speaking of landscape with a male appearance, Koestenbaum identifies such in at least two other texts: Lang and Haggard's The World's Desire, where some rocks are covered with brush like a man's hairy limbs, and Browning's allegory, "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,'" where cockle, spurge, thistle, bents, dock--just to name a few phallic plants--populate the desolate scene (158). In "Nutting" the speaker feels confident enough "to smile / At thorns, and brakes, and brambles" (12-13).
37. For Ann Tyson, see Gill's edition of Wordsworth, 694, n. 153.
38. As well as a reminder of our own post-sexological biases, in which we strive, often against our better judgment, to sexualize as well as to anthropomorphize plants and animals.
39. Arac terms this highly charged anticipation a mere pause in the action (41).
40. Shaviro, Passion and Excess, 88.
41. Michel Foucault, "Sexual Choice, Sexual Act," Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966-84), ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext[e], 1989), 223.
42. Michel Foucault, "The Discourse of History," Foucault Live, 21.
43. Allan Stoekl, Introduction to Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, xiv.
44. For mind/nature dichotomy see Ferguson, 73. For guilt, see Magnuson, 180. For phallic mother's threat, see Arac, 45. For poetic authority see William H. Galperin, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: The Interpretation of a Career (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 140.
45. Galperin, 95.
46. Ferguson, 75.
47. Magnuson, 182. As Jean H. Hagstrum points out, "In the alternative version of Nutting, the poet addresses his sister as Lucy" (The Romantic Body: Love and Sexuality in Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake [Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1985], 98).
48. Koestenbaum, 82.
49. Ferguson, 73. See also Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), 73.
50. Arac identifies them as ode, epic, and tragedy (39), but I think the complex might be denser still, in effect to overload the structure so that it collapses inward. "Nutting" thus remains a sort of Romantic ruin (which Owens associates with allegory as formally synthetic [206]). The poem has a picturesque quality that Wordsworth--unlike Coleridge--would have utterly rejected had he not been so scrupulous to collect as much verse as possible for his oeuvre --itself a lengthy supplement to the grand philosophical poem never completed. See Raimonda Modiano,Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (London: Macmillan, 1985), 9. Instead, "Nutting" occurs in the Works as a fragment amongst fragments: not a discard but a record of its own discarding.
51. "It should be remembered that allegories are frequently exhortative, addressed to the reader in an attempt to manipulate him [ sic ] or to modify his behavior" (Owens, 225).
52. I wonder whether Coleridge's response to Otway was conditioned by Otway's personal reputation, such that Coleridge's using this minor poet's "Lutes, laurels [or "lobsters" in the 1817 edition], seas of milk and ships of amber" as an example of the concatenating fancy (rather than the organic imagination) looks like the sublimation of a common complaint against sodomites: that their affections are artificial and their loves unproductive (chapter 4 of Biographia Literaria ). Indeed, in chapter 14 of the Biographia, where Coleridge discusses the co-genesis of Lyrical Ballads, he glancingly refers to the "disgust and aversion" accompanying the reading of homoerotic poetry (172). This homophobic shibboleth was common in the poets' day (even the otherwise liberal Percy Shelley repeated it), particularly as a result of their increasing social, philosophical, and moral conservatism, itself resulting, partially, from disaffection towards the French Revolution. See Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), 284. Crompton provides a detailed and admittedly sober account of the Regency period's spectacular punishment of sodomites. Their gibbeting cannot but recall Wordsworth's first example of a spot of time in the 1805 Prelude: the emptied site of a hanging (278-301). The cruel spectacle of this punishment might be all the more reason for Wordsworth to sublimate his feelings towards his rival through an eventually marginalized poem, which thus becomes a sort of trace of the unspeakable. But how, though by talent, might Coleridge have incited such a discourse? Although his was still the Age of Sensibility when members of the same sex were likely to express mutual affection openly, it was also one of sexual differentiation when male sexuality, as such, separated from the female qualitatively, became rationalized (in-visibilized), so that same-sex attraction was just as openly disciplined because it threatened to collapse the distances of the homosocial power hierarchy. See Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (New York: Viking, 1990), 99n.; and Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), 196-97. Holmes, despite clearing Coleridge of suspicions, discusses his subject quite suggestively, especially in terms of his submissiveness to authority (101-2, 285), his acquisitiveness in intellectual property (193, 232), his initial avoidance of parenthood (223)--characteristics arrayed around the symbol of Coleridge's habitually agape mouth, an erotogenic zone of internalization (130, 219). Hazlitt was one of the first to notice: "His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent" ("My First Acquaintance with Poets," Selected Writings, ed. Ronald Blythe [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985], 46-47). Contemporary portraitists drew and painted Coleridge this way--without exception in Holmes's illustrations. Coleridge's volubility, what Deleuze and Guattari might call a deterritorialization of the mouth's incorporation function, constitutes an expulsiveness of improvised discourse supplementing the elaborately composed but rarely completed plans of the notebooks. What Coleridge cannot create (to become a legendary poet) he assimilates and disgorges (to become a legendary talker). In reading Judith Butler, I note that Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok identify the empty mouth, "which becomes the condition of speech and signification," as the literalized site of mourning over loss--in Coleridge's case, that of his poetic potency? ( Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York: Routledge, 1990], 68).
53. Adela Pinch, "Female Chatter: Meter, Masochism, and the Lyrical Ballads," ELH 55 (1988), 837.
54. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 169. It is almost as if Wlecke anticipates Scarry's argument when he terms the Coleridgean sublime a sort of "sacred horror" in which individual autonomy, and thus the very sense of self, gets rendered null (73-94).
55. Galperin, 96.
56. Irigaray, 193.
57. For the picturesque see Sarah McKim Webster, "Circumscription and the Female in the Early Romantics," Philological Quarterly 61 (1982), 57, 58.
58. Ferguson, 70.
59. On reading and resisting the subject, see Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: Minnesota Univ. Press, 1988), 37.
60. Ivor Winters defines "the fallacy of imitative form" as follows: "the procedure by which the poet surrenders the form of his statement to the formlessness of his subject-matter" ( The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises [London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1962], 54). On the contrary, "Nutting" plans and executes its seduction with the care of a Richardsonian landowner.
61. "Grotesque triangle" from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), 171.