In some ways, of course, one can say that about many poems. What makes "Tintern Abbey" fascinating is that the original site of determination within the poem already contains a lack, a lacuna that stands as the prefiguration of falling-into-ruin. This Promethean sign, as it were, has then determined the trajectory of this textual ruin's errance. The aim of my paper today is to outline this textual absence, and to describe the ways in which it has conditioned a particular trajectory of scholarship on the poem.

I will begin, not at the beginning, but in 1986, with Marjorie Levinson's book entitled "Wordsworth's Great Period Poems." This text itself occupies a very interesting position in the history of Romantic criticism. Writing at a time when historicism had just emerged as a major methodology in the study of literature, Levinson sets it against Yale'criticism: Bloom, Abrams and de Man. Levinson's textual agenda is complicated, for it attempts actually to mediate between the two schools rather than simply describe or oppose them. We are unable to consider it fully here, but this mediation will make itself apparent as we turn to one of the chapters--"Insight and Oversight: Reading `Tintern Abbey.'" Rather than summarise the argument of this chapter, which some of you are already familiar with, I will try to bring out the hermeneutic model at work in it, and some of the critical assumptions that provide the grounding logic.

Levinson points out that movements of dissolution recur within the poem, moments of dispersion that always seem to follow the apparition of seemingly stable points of reference: "an object does not materialize in the poem before it is effaced or smudged; a thought does not find its full articulation before it is qualified or deconstructed; a point of view is not established before it dissolves into a series of impressions"(15). Taken together with the very conspicuous absence of any description or substantive reference to the Abbey itself in the poem that bears it in its title, Levinson identifies the key poetic gesture in the poem as one of escape or erasure. Faced with such a lack of textual co-operation, the critical piece retreats to "the writing dimension -the order of authorial and contextual urgencies"(15).

Levinson's reading centers on the first stanza of the poem, which is read in terms of metaphoric transformations, yielding a structure that is then used as "a synecdoche for Wordsworth's overall poetic project"(18). This structure, according to Levinson, is characterised by the systematic replacement of physical components of the prospect as it presented itself to Wordsworth as observer, with the sensations and feelings which they produce. The critical task at hand would be to undo this substitution, this erasure, in order to read. The text therefore becomes for Levinson a palimpsest. One reads a palimpsest, of course, by erasing text after text, and that is what Levinson attempts to do--to strip away layers of concealment, mystification and aestheticisation to reveal the poem's true meaning:

In order to make sense of Wordsworth's advertised exclusion, one would have to infer some problem--in the poet's mind, in the prospect, or in both--that the poem at once solves and conceals (16).

The final goal, then, is what Northrop Frye calls the "occasion" of lyric poetry--an original event that is the cause of poetry, and whose passing away is the aim of poetry.

The texts of a palimpsest are written one atop another, and its reading involves the successive erasure of these textual layers. Each new layer that is written on a palimpsest is blind to the previous one; its inscription depends on the erasure of the existing text, but no semantic leakage occurs from one layer to another. By giving us the metaphor of the palimpsest alongside the rhetorical device of synecdoche, Levinson installs doubly a particular hermeneutic logic--once a poetic gesture is described, its subsequent reiterations bear to the original only a relationship of sameness. Repetition itself yields no difference; each instance can be recuperated without residue to the original event.

This is perhaps what explains the most obvious oversight of this critical text itself. The disruptive effect of repetition on the origin, of the recurrence of the same within a structure of difference is a key trope in Wordsworth's poem--in particular, but not exclusively, as it manifests itself as memory. Turning a blind eye to this trope obscures a certain rhetorical trajectory within the poem, creating the false or reduced dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity, and installing a phantasmagorical dialectic whose sublation constitutes a refusal of historical knowledge.

The best way to elucidate this point would be to turn to the poem itself.

	Five years have past; five summers, with the length
	Of five long winters! and again I hear 
	These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs 
	With a soft inland murmur.

The poem begins with what is already a comment on the ontological position of the original event. Its first words are not the "infinite I AM"of the lyric subject, but rather the setting down of temporal parameters. The occurrence of an original event is held up alongside the time and place of the poetic Jetztzeit. This gesture of setting aside a piece of time, with a past event that flashes up in the present to be apprehended--in short, historical knowledge--is anterior to the lyric subject's act of speaking itself. The first person pronoun "I" is, here and in each of its subsequent occurrences in the first stanza, bound by the temporal adverbial "again." Within this initial matrix, we already have an explicit situation of lyric subjectivity in relation to history. One would almost be tempted to say that historical knowledge precedes and is therefore logically prior to the authorial voice here, except that the historical itself problematises the origin as event and refuses a simple linear vector of dependence along the axis of temporality.

Each instance of the "I" in the first stanza thus carries an extended referential force. Each acts as an indexical to the speaking subject of the present utterance, but this subject is presented specifically as a double, a simulacrum of an original "I." The multiple acts of deixis in this first stanza similarly inscribe not stable points of reference but traces--cliffs, trees, springs that are both objects-at-hand and objects-past-seen. These ghostly objects are not the products of a destabilising gaze that attempts to transfigure them; rather, their fractured ontology is determined by a fissure within the lyric subject itself. The accumulation of deictic references in these lines therefore signifies an accretion of uncanny simulacra, whose dual natures are held in co-existence. The holding-in-suspension of this duality does not reify them; instead, it results in a oscillation between the poles of presence and absence, one that is constantly faced with the threat of collapse into an undifferentiated sameness. The movement of the stanza towards this "one green hue," in which historical difference and geographical structures would "lose themselves, "is what Levinson picks up on and calls "organically sublative evolution" (38).

At the point of imminent collapse, however, the poem makes an interesting turn, one whose abruptness calls into question the adequacy of "evolution"as a description in this case:

	... Once again I see
	These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
	Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
	Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
	Sent up, in silence, from among the trees, 
	With some uncertain notice, as might seem,
	Of vagrant dwellers in the homeless woods, 
	Or of some hermit's cave, where by his fire 
	The hermit sits alone.

The movement from present material trace to original but absent event is here transposed into explicitly literary terms. From the visible wreaths of smoke, we move by specular, or speculative, association to vagrant dwellers. Rhetorical momentum then takes us to the figure of the hermit in his cave. This trajectory can be thus re-described: we move from the visible signifier of "wreaths of smoke,"to conjectured origin embodied as "vagrant dwellers,"to the hermit as mythic archetype. The solipsistic hermit who sits alone in his cave embodies the collapse that surrounds the first stanza as a threat; it is the aftermath of the sublation of sign and origin to yield a transcendent vision.

Where do we go from the hermit, then? How does poetry proceed after this figure of absolute silence and self-containment? Let us take a look:

	These beauteous forms,
	Through a long absence, have not been to me 
	As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: 
	But oft, in lonely rooms, and `mid the din 
	Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
	In hours of weariness, sensations sweet. 

The lyric gaze deflects itself; it turns from the present landscape, with its ghostly history, to the space of time that separates this sighting from the original one. We have, therefore, a break in the flow of logic here, one that mirrors the break inpoetry, signified by the end of one stanza and the start of another.

Levinson calls this second stanza the "antistrophe," a turn that enables the poetic subject to perform "a rejection of present place and occasion" to make room for "reflective revision" that will finally allow the subject to attain self-knowledge. This assumes, however, the possibility of a seamless recuperation of part to whole, and of a reconstitutable continuity in the poetic text. It does not take into account, then, the possible signifying function of what lies between strophes. The white space that separates the first stanza from the second represents the limits of poetry. Within the hermit's cave, once we have attain this sublated position that radically excludes spatial and temporal contiguities, poetry is no longer possible. From this position which obliterates historical and geographical difference and replaces it with the figure of the hermit, the poetic gaze has to turn away. The multiple "I"s of this second stanza now refer to a subjectivity that is dispersed along the axis of temporality, occupying the infinite positions that stretch over the space of time separating original event and enunciatory context. Each "oft" in this second section installs an instance of the lyric subject as it tries to recollect the original event in the five years that pass. Each, in its own lonely room, is a product of the cognitive act of recollection, a subject not prior to but contemporaneous with its cognitive performance. We have, in short, a decisive and abrupt fragmentation of the subject.

Through this plethora of subject positions, all held up in co-existence, runs another contrapuntal imperative -a suspension that threatens yet again to collapse them into non-differentiation. Again, this threat is transposed into an inward-moving momentum:

	Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
	And even the motion of our human blood
	Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
	In body, and become a living soul:
	While with an eye made quiet by the power
	Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
	We see into the life of things.

As the lyric subject contemplates its multiple fragments along the temporal axis, it holds them in a suspension that elevates them towards a transcendental unity. As before, though, we get a break in the poetry immediately following this point. This moment is represented as a negative ideal, an abyss that poetry is lured towards but which ultimately has to be refused.

Oscillation, suspension, movement towards stasis and unity, followed by blankness and dispersion--this progression is therefore more than a local device; it forms the structure of the poem. Levinson does not fail to note this:

These movements which Hartman designates as turns and counterturns might also be conceived as approaches to and withdrawals from the object of address. By this Pindaric allusion, so to speak, Wordsworth suggests the ultimately elusive, ineffable nature ofhis subject, and the necessity of an approach-avoidance relation to it (47).

Wordsworth's subject thus far in the poem, however, is nothing less than his own subjectivity. The true other to the lyric voice are the multiple "I"s that have been installed. The approaches and withdrawals, moments of unity and dispersion, therefore destabilise lyric subjectivity itse lf. Within a poem that presents the lyric subject reading himself, we therefore have a structure that renders problematic both the subject matter of the poem and the subjectivity that subtends it.

We move ahead a little now, to the final stanza of the poem, which contains the intriguing address to the figure of the sister:

	For thou art with me here upon the banks
	Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend
	My dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch
	The language of my former heart, and read
	My former pleasures in the shooting lights
	Of thy wild eyes.

This figure makes is part of the set of circumstances that metonymically surround the lyric speaker. It stands, however, both in a relationship of similarity as well as contiguity to the lyric speaker. The apo strophe thus yields a figure that is present as voice and text, to be heard and read, as well as to hear and read. It is, in short, a full-fledged double of the lyric "I."

In this concluding stanza, then, the split between the present lyric "I" and its various manifestations are situated within a dialogic structure. The addressee is a containing figure, a receptacle in which resides the lyric "I"s fragmented otherness, shards of subjectivity that manifest themselves as the"shooting lights"of the figure's wild eyes. It is at this point, after the trope of address, that the lyric "I" manages for the first time to articulate a presence that does not threaten to sublate into transcendence or fall into fragmentation:

	Oh! yet a little while
	May I behold in thee what I was once,
	My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, 

Deixis in the poem--the act of picking out certain unique entities in a given context by the use of terms like "this,"here,"and "now--has thus far been singularly unsuccessful. Seemingly stable or unique objects have repeatedly been exposed as simulacra, fragments of an unavailable whole. In these lines, however, we witness felicitous deixis--the phrase "this prayer"picks out nothing more or less than itself; its reference is neither before nor behind articulation, but contemporaneous with it.

This is the concluding restitution of the poem--the possibility of knowledge and enunciation is available only in this limited sense, as a particular function of articulation and textuality. The lyric subject contains a breach within itself, a lacuna that condemns its attempts at self-knowledge to inevitable failure, for this breach is reproduced in each poetic utterance. It is only by splitting itself off into an equal other, which acts as a mirroring gaze, that it can find a configuration within which the lyric voice and its utterances can persist. This addressee becomes a rhetorical investment, charged with the recollection and reproduction of the poetic subject at a later point in time. It is thus that the poetic text provides for its own survival beyond inevitable death, its own after-life, as it were.

The question, then, is: how do we read such a text today? The problem with Levinson's reading is that it assumes that the poetry originates in illusion and blindness to its own mode of production. This radical skepticism denies the possibility that the poem can itself comment on its origination, and cannot account for such moments in the poem. In the case of "Tintern Abbey, "this insight manifests itself as the critique of unified subjectivity and the lyric voice. The dissolution and dispersion of spatial and historical categories are effects of this fragmentation within the subject. Reconstruction of context, without attentiveness to this relationship, will therefore always yield an incomplete text that cannot be completed by further elaborations along the same lines.

How do we describe the alternative, then? To provide us the terms, I will turn to a later text by Levinson, called "Back to the Future: Wordsworth's New Historicism."Published in The South Atlantic Quarterly in 1989, it is a condensed version of a longer chapter in a collection entitled Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History. In it, Levinson attempts to describe a historicist reading that is not simply a virtuoso performance of ventriloquism, in which the past becomes a dummy that expresses the truths of our age while our own lips remain unmoving. As a model of a historicismthat is more genuine, Levinson turns to Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator,"and his mode of translation as a prototype for the sort of criticism that would be able to "restore to the dead their own, living language" (650). What I want to consider, as a closing gesture, is how Benjamin's text comments on the texts that we have considered so far, and particularly on the notion of history.

Benjamin speaks of translatability as an essential feature of certain works. Linguistic creations can call for their own translation; a particular lack or lac una in the original can manifest itself in its translatability. The translation belongs to the after-life of the original, and allows it to return at a later point in its history, beyond its own death. Criticism, too, is capable of operating in this particular mode, such that it becomes a part of the continued life of literary works. To do so, the critic has to identify, within the original, the point of lack, the lacuna that manifests itself as a call for critical reading. Benjamin describes this mode thus:

Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one (76).

The final product of this mode, then, is an echo, a reverberation that originates from the original work but only after the activation provided by criticism.

In our particular case, with Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey,"the poem is explicit in naming this necessary lack that will enable its subsequent survival. The Abbey that is so conspicuously missing continues to call for critical reading even today. Too much of this criticism, however, concerns its elf with filling in this lack; the proper place of this lacuna within the poem and its criticism should be as an enabling absence, one that forms the conditions of the possibility of poetry and criticism. Rather than attempt to reconstitute an original whole text, criticism should be conscious of its own place in the history of the text, which, as Paul de Man has argued, is a history of infinite breakages and errance. The poem itself has evacuated the position of origin, by setting into motion the seeminglyoriginal event in a trajectory of infinite regression. The poetic utterance is therefore already adrift, fallen away from this origin.

As our reading of the poem has shown us, movement towards reconciliation with the origin is always synonymous with approaching an abyss, a silence which would obliterate both poetry and criticism. For criticism, this attainment of this moment would be, in Benjamin's terms, the slamming shut of the gates of language to enclose the critic with utter silence. Criticism itselfmust navigate the same treacherous itinerary between the Scylla of irrecuperable fragmentation and the Charybdis of petrified silence. This is what Benjamin means when he says that original and translation must match each other, although they need not belike one another. The original site of production--Wordsworth's original event, or Benjamin's die reine Sprache--is always already lost; criticism must content itself with being the articulation of fragment to fragment, in order to constitute yet more fragments. We produce, therefore, a textual history that is constantly in errance; to speak in Benjamin's terms, we pile wreckage upon wreckage and hurl them at the feet of the angel of history.

Works Cited

Levinson, Marjorie. "Insight and Oversight: Reading `Tintern Abbey.'"Wordsworth's Great Period Poems.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 14-57.

---, "Back to the Future: Wordsworth's New Historicism."South Atlantic Quarterly 88:3. Duke University Press, 1989.

William Wordsworth. "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798."Lyrical Ballads. Ed. R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 1968. 113-118.