http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/TinternRev/Garrett_3.htm
At Home in Landscape:
Mannheim's Chiliastic Mentality in "Tintern Abbey"
Brenda Garrett
November 26, 2001
My last two presentations have argued that Wordsworth is a split and exiled, yet transcendent and visionary poet who creates community by inserting the idealized Romantic poet into the ideological center interpellating those around him into similar subject positions. But, how can Wordsworth, a separated individual, reveal his heightened awareness to the rest of humanity? He answers in his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" when he asserts that poets like himself can communicate their alternate awareness "[u]ndoubtably with our moral sentiments and animal sensations, and with the causes which excite these; with the operations of the elements and the appearances of the visible universe [. . .]" (Norton 173). Poets can express their alternate perception through a shared experience of the landscape.
Landscapes are a reflection of the ideology at the centre. Simon Schama argues
in Landscapes and Memory, "Landscapes are culture before they are nature;
constructs of the imagination projected onto wood, and water and rock" (61).
The real world exists but because we can never unproblematically engage with
reality, we make it over, re-present it as landscape. In this way, landscape
is ideological, is a cultural construct draped over reality. As Wordsworth
writes in Tintern, the perceptions of the eye and ear are
"both what they half-create and what perceive" (107-108). According to Wordsworth,
nature has become the "anchor" (110) of his thoughts, the tether that restrains
his creative imagination. But because landscape is based on the real, it can
also be used to express an alternate ideology.
Wordsworth's approach to landscape is chiliastic, to use Karl Mannheim's term. In Ideology and Utopia, Mannheim argues that although Chiliasm "has always accompanied revolutionary outbursts and given them their spirit" (217), it developed as a movement out of the oppressed strata's refusal of fatalism and their following of the teachings of Thomas Munzer and the Anabaptists in the 16th Century (211 - 212). He writes, "It corresponded to the spiritual fermentation and physical excitement of the peasants, of a stratum living closest to the earth. It was at the same time robustly material and highly spiritual" (emphasis added 213). Chiliasm arises out of something interior, something outside the realm of ideas and reason and cannot be easily described, yet Mannheim does say that: "The only true, perhaps the only direct, identifying characteristic of Chiliastic experience is absolute presentness. […] For the real Chiliast, the present becomes the breach through which what was previously inward, bursts out suddenly, takes hold of the outer world and transforms it" (215). This breaking through into ecstasy can only be brought about through "Kairos" or "'fulfilled time, the moment of time which is invaded by eternity,' and distinguished from progress or 'perfection or completion in time'" (Translator's Note 220). Mannheim argues, "For Chiliasm the spirit is a force which suffuses and expresses itself through us" (220). For Munzer and the Anabaptists, this unifying spirit was God, but for the Wordsworth of "Tintern" this spirit is found in an imaginative connection to Nature. Yet Mannheim argues that even for the Chiliast, "sensual experience is present in all its robustness, and is as inseparable from the spirituality in him as he is from his immediate present" (216). He quotes Munzer as saying, "I seek only that you accept the living world in which I live and breathe, so that it should not come back to me empty" (216). Mannheim explains:
The Chiliast expects a union with the immediate present. Hence he is not preoccupied in his daily life with optimistic hopes for the future or romantic reminiscences. […] He is not actually concerned with the Millennium that is to come: what is important for him is that it happen here and now, and that it arose from mundane existence, as a swing over into another kind of existence. The promise of the future which is to come is not for him a reason for postponement, but merely a point for orientation, something external to the ordinary course of events from which he is on the lookout ready to take the leap. (217)
Wordsworth depicts his chiliastic experience of the world in the 1850 Prelude, when he asserts:
There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
that give
Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how,
The mind is lord and master -- outward sense
The obedient servant of her will. (12.208-223)
And in book 14 Wordsworth literally takes the chiliastic leap. He symbolizes how man can find transcendent unity with the universe through the image of himself leading his group to the peak of Mt. Snowdon. Climbing at night in thick fog, he almost steps off a cliff, but at the last instant, he steps out of the mist, the moon appears, and his location on the brink is revealed. Walking in the darkness of reason, his imagination illumed the night, revealed the invisible world, and spared him his life. What the imagination shows him on the precipice of Snowdon is the world in unity beneath his feet. The poet stands transcendent, looking out towards a distant Atlantic, "usurp[ing]" (14.50) all that he can see and hearing torrenteous rivers "roaring with one voice" over earth and sea and in heaven (14.60). The invisible world revealed behind this natural scene is the world of unity found through the synchronicity of man's usurping mind and the eternal universe. He gives us the image of the poet standing on the precipice, above the world, consuming all within his gaze, rewriting all within his image of self. He writes "Anon I rose / As if on wings" (14.381-382). Taking flight on the soothing breeze of inspiration he has described in book 1, which Abrams points out in a footnote is equated with the inspiration of the Biblical prophets when visited by the Holy Spirit (257), he soars over the world. As prophet, he becomes a part of the "majestic intellect" (14.67) and must "speak / A lasting inspiration" (14.447) to those less fortunate so that they too might find redemption and wholeness. But now the poet has the ability to deliver grace, to unite and redeem mankind in his own subliming image. Not only a prophet filled with, but the actual equivalence to the Holy Spirit, he sets out to transform and unite the void in his universal image.
But, it must be noted that by the time he penned the version of the Prelude published in 1850, Wordsworth had become more conservative and had returned to the Church. "Tintern Abbey" was written in Wordsworth's revolutionary youth. Is this Chiliastic impulse present in "Tintern"?
Just as in the Prelude where he employs the images of the river as unified and unifying, Wordsworth also employs the image of the Wye to chiliastically connect the landscape to the sky in "Tintern." As I mentioned in my first presentation, unity is envisioned in the first stanza where we have the natural cliffs connecting the landscape and the sky on the one hand, and the smoke from the woods uniting the landscape and the sky on the other with the two sides conjoined by the river. But, as Dr. Miall argued last week, we see in this image also that "the River Wye manifests a visible flux as it flows past the sycamore tree, but it also maintains a presence over a far greater time and across a much greater distance" (Course Website). According to Dr. Miall, the river represents "joy" or "the flux of feeling and thought of which Wordsworth speaks in the Preface" (Course Website). Yet, in a footnote, Wu defines joy as "the pantheistic perception of Nature as unified by a universal life-force" (266). Can joy be both? Can it represent flux and at the same time represent the "universal life-force"? As Dr. Miall argues "the problem that the poem sets is how to correlate the contingencies of human life with the sublime level of our life in nature, the "one life" vision" (Course Website).
In the "Preface," Wordsworth argues that the poems in the Lyrical Ballads have a "worthy purpose" or politic that has arisen out of his "habits of meditation" which have formed his feelings. This purpose, he explains later, is the principle of pleasure, or as Wu writes, "the positive sensations (spiritual and physical) deriving from our involvement in the external world" (361). Wordsworth goes on to say that
our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts which are indeed representatives of our past feelings. And, as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other we discover what is really important to men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected with important subjects. (358)
Past feelings lead to thoughts which lead to feelings, etc., etc., and by looking at what is common between these thoughts and feelings, we can discover what is an important subject that will then lead to further thoughts and feelings, but now moved to a universal plain. The individual becomes a part of the community that shares his mental space. This process appears circular, but with the use of the word "influx" defined as the place where one stream joins another, Wordsworth appears to be referring to a more active and influential process whereby this circular process becomes spiral -- revolving around Wordsworth's central politic, the principle of pleasure, and moving through time. Here we have both unity and flux. According to Wordsworth, joy has the chiliastic power to move us from one vision of the world to another, as he writes:
|
[…] with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. (48-50) |
And yet, joy, the"sense
sublime" (96) that leads to elevated thoughts, is caused by something "deeply
interfused" (97) that dwells both in nature and in the active mind of man,
not in the passive soul. Joy, the feeling that arises from a perception of
the principle of pleasure, indicates both unity and flux.
But this combination of flux with unity is not chiliastic. The chiliast is not concerned with time, with further movement once the present is breached and the outer world transformed. Wordsworth appears to be describing both fulfilled time and progress through time. The chiliastic moments he experiences are indicators of an edenic Utopia available to man on Earth through alternate perception. But because this perception is available only to those few individuals who periodically had access to this heightened experience, Wordsworth also writes of change in the fallen world. As a revolutionary, he was preoccupied with chiliastic moments of fulfilled time, but as a liberal humanist, a product and producer of his cultural moment, he writes of progress.
Wordsworth's chiliastic yet progressive metaphysic is an attempt to unite his split subject, unite the landscape, and unite the world beneath the politic of the poet. And, although as I discussed in my second presentation, this universal unity is not only not possible, but is also hegemonic, I do think he has much to demonstrate to contemporary exiled, split and separated poets who are attempting to create disalienating visions of the world. Some of these poets also turn to a chiliastic yet dynamic reflection of self and ideology in landscape. Only, for the most part, they express their centre and its resulting community as one among many.
This expression of self through landscape is discussed by Trinidadian-Canadian poet Claire Harris in her essay "Poets in Limbo." Taking up the question of how to voice an authentic self, Harris asserts that one of the hegemonic traditions that Caribbean women writers can both employ and redeploy is romanticism. In "Poets in Limbo," speaking of herself, Dionne Brand and Nourbese Philip, Black women writers whose formative years were spent in Trinidad studying, as Harris says, the "inimical" British syllabus, learning English folk songs, and memorizing Chaucer through to Arnold (117), she asserts, "We remain, therefore, poets whose sense of the art is essentially rooted in the English tradition. When we turn away, that is what we turn from. What we turn to we have essentially to make ourselves" (118). Located in limbo, these writers must both write to and against a eurocentric literary canon in order to express their difference. Therefore, when Harris asks, "So what does Wordsworth have to do with us?" of course she is referring to their imagination being limited by a eurocentric education; but, she states also that "Apart from his general influence on English poetry, our work illustrates the fact that, lacking a sense of authenticity, we seek wholeness in the landscape" (118). Like Wordsworth, the project of these writers is to voice a sense of an authentic self at home by reflecting that self in the landscape. Like the landscape around them, these poets exist, are real. However, also like landscape, their existence takes place in an ideology and a language that censor and distort them. Following Wordsworth, they dislocate the alienating conventions of their cultural moment by reflecting their alternate selves in an ideological reconstruction of landscape. By bouncing signifiers off reality, off experienced but unarticulated -- or differently articulated -- landscape, they can alter the signified and therefore the signifier in a chain of signification.
I'll leave you with the final lines of No Language is Neutral, a book of poetry by Black, lesbian, Trinidadian-Canadian poet Dionne Brand. Read in conjunction with Wordsworth's 14th book of the Prelude, we can see the obvious parallels between landscape and subject construction. However, rather than taking flight from a precipice, Brand's poetic self takes flight from a beach, from ground level, symbolizing her non-universal yet communal creation of landscape. She writes:
I have become myself. A woman who looks at a woman and says, here, I have found you, in this, I am blackening in my way. You ripped the world raw. It was as if another life exploded in my face, brightening, so easily the brow of a wing touching the surf, so easily I saw my own body, that is, my eyes followed me to myself, touched myself as a place, another life, terra. They say this place does not exist, then, my tongue is mythic. I was here before.
Works Cited
Brand, Dionne. No Language is Neutral. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990.
Harris, Claire. "Poets in Limbo." A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing. Ed. Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli. Edmonton: Longspoon Press, 1986. 115-125.
Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia. Trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. New York: Harcourt.
Schama, Simon. Landscapes and Memory. Toronto: Random House, 1995.