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Wordsworth in The Preludedoes not propose the literal overturn of the political or economic foundations of modernity, advocating counterrevolution against revolution. Rather, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak remarks, Wordsworth's position is that "social relations of production cannot touch the inner resources of man. The corollary: Revolutionary politics, seeking to change those social relations, are superfluous; poetry, disclosing man's inner resources, is the only way" (352). Wordsworth distinguishes his literary output from other contemporary books, those which vaunt "the utter hollowness of what we name / The wealth of nations" (12.79-80) and which delineate only "the outside marks by which / Society has parted man from man, / Neglectful of the universal heart" (12.217-19). Wordsworth's poem will transcend the conditions of the commodity just as the "universal heart" transcends the conditions of class. Wordsworth is aware that the qualitative values he counterposes to capitalism's mercantilist rationality must take a new form, a form ostensibly to be embodied in The Preludeitself as a narrative of the growth of an exemplary redemptive consciousness. The growth of this consciousness is grounded not in the quantitative, capitalist values of the city but in the qualitative, precapitalist values of the country, values which James K. Chandler discovers in what he calls Wordsworth's "second nature." Wordsworth's "second nature" is, according to Chandler, the world of human culture, but a conservative, Burkean notion of culture in which "use, custom, and habit constituted a second nature to rival the first" (xviii). Wordsworth attempts to fashion an authorial identity that recuperates these imperiled traditional social values from the "levelling" effects of capitalism that he experiences during Book 7's London sojourn.
Wordsworth's London is primarily the site of the circulation, rather than production, of commodities. Mary Jacobus likens Wordsworth's initial vision of London to "a gigantic shopping centre" that is "a symbol of the eighteenth-century consumer revolution" (232-33). Gone are the elevated, hilltop perspectives which afford privileged insight into "the life of things"--such prospects are unavailable in Wordsworth's city. The poet finds himself confined to a world of surface appearances, most notably the appearance of commercial traffic, where "men and moving things" are conjoined in an "endless stream" (9.158). This generalized and self-propelling motion is a figure for trade itself. Wordsworth's closer look at the crowds and shops that line the streets intensifies this impression:
Here, there, and everywhere, a weary throng, The comers and the goers face to face-- Face after face--the string of dazzling wares, Shop after shop . . . (9. 171-74)The repetitions in this passage suggest a uniformity which paradoxically underwrites the city's dazzling profusion. Especially remarkable is the pairing of "face after face" and "shop after shop," rhetorically suggesting that the faces and wares share an occult equivalence--the condition of being commodities. The advertising signs to which Wordsworth turns his attention, with their "allegoric shapes, female and male, / Or physiognomies of real men" (9.179-80), suggest a disturbing transformation of the human into the non-human, a field of representation based on commodity fetishism.
Questions of representation are central to Book 7. The spectacles of the streets give way to the "spectacles / Within doors" (9.245-46), such as the public displays of dioramas and panoramas. The panoramas, says Wordsworth, offer "mimic sights that ape / The absolute presence of reality" (9.248-49). As Ross King notes, the literalism of these works produces a "confusion of art and life" (70), a confusion which King equates with the "collapse into equivalence" that characterizes Wordsworth's London experience as a whole (57). In terms of my argument, the dangerous equivalence of art and life reflects the more fundamental principle of equivalence operative in capitalism itself--the principle of exchange value and its ultimate expression in the form of money. Wordsworth's reaction to the imitative style of art-as-commodity reveals his ostensible commitment to an aesthetics that resists commercialism's "levelling" effects. Speaking of the panoramas, Wordsworth makes the following distinctions:
I do not here allude to subtlest craft By means refined attaining purest ends, But imitations fondly made in plain Confession of man's weakness and his loves. (9.248-55)
"Subtlest craft" and "refined" suggest that, figuratively, alchemical means must be employed for the "purest end" of transforming, rather than merely reproducing, the base metal of human needs. Wordsworth contrasts his alchemical art with the "mechanic" skill (265) or "microscopic vision" (272) of the commercial artist with his "greedy pencil" (258). The contrast between the imaginatively-transforming and the mechanically-reproducing operations conceals an irony, however, because in this instance it is the mechanical, imitative skills which turn base metals into gold (i.e., profit) through the production of entertainment commodities. Although these panoramas are not machine- or mass-produced, Wordsworth's "mechanic" rhetoric makes it possible to read here an early response to the effects of mechanical reproduction upon art and the artist, a response that prefigures the analysis undertaken in our century by Walter Benjamin. "Once a writer had entered the marketplace," says Benjamin in his work on the Paris of Charles Baudelaire, "he looked around as in a diorama" (35). Such spectacles reflect an aesthetic that strives "by means of technical artifice" for "a perfect imitation of nature"; in this respect foreshadowing the quintessential forms of mass commercial culture, photography and cinema (160). In his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin notes that mechanically-reproduced art loses the "aura" of authenticity that surrounds traditionally-made and non-reproducible works of art, a change which signals the transformation of art's social function from ritual to politics (221-24). For Benjamin, the loss of the "aura" finds its compensation in a correspondent phenomenon: the participation of the popular masses themselves, whose demand for an imitative or realist aesthetic signals "the adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality" (223). Thus the phase of art's capitalist commodification adumbrates a succeeding phase of art's popular or proletarian expropriation, both of which Wordsworth rejects. From Wordsworth's position, mechanically-imitative representation cannot recuperate intelligibility from the threat imposed by mass commodification (including the commodification of the masses themselves), i.e., it cannot articulate a value distinct from the homogenizing money-value imposed by commodity exchange. The conditions of London threaten the availability of any position of meaningful difference that will allow Wordsworth himself to escape implication in the marketplace.
A key episode involving the urban masses in Book 7--the "Blind Beggar" episode--encapsulates this important dimension of Wordsworth's reaction to capitalist modernity. Specifically, the experience of the sheer numerical quantity of human traffic on the London streets imperils any possibility of an imaginative grasp of the whole. "How often in the overflowing streets," says Wordsworth,
Have I gone forwards with the crowd, and said Unto myself, "The face of every one That passes by me is a mystery." Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed By thoughts of what, and whither, when and how . . . And all the ballast of familiar life--< The present, and the past, hope, fear, all stays, All laws of acting, thinking, speaking man-- Went from me, neither knowing me, nor known. (9.595-607)
This intense experience of social alienation provokes a full-scale ontological and epistemological crisis. The crowd unmoors Wordsworth's identity by removing the "laws" of the knowledge of self, other, and world. The linkage of social existence with the levels of being and knowing is central here: Wordsworth suggests that self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are irreducibly social--"speaking man" in a community of comprehending auditors. The spectacle of the Blind Beggar--a stable, "unmoving" (621) entity amidst the surrounding flux--recuperates this sense of social identity. Wordsworth takes the sign advertising the Beggar's blindness as "a type / Or emblem of the utmost that we know / Both of ourselves and of the universe" (618-20). Paradoxically this profession of ignorance also represents a saving moment of intelligibility that recuperates Wordsworth's self-consciousness through an act of reading--a point made in different ways by Geraldine Friedman (140) and Neil Hertz (59). In terms of my argument, the assertion of this difference rescues Wordsworth from the danger of being subsumed in an overwhelming condition of equivalence, a condition which might implicate Wordsworth's own authorial identity in the system of commodity exchange and make him culpable for that system's reproduction. Whether as passersby on the avenues or as plebeian throngs at Bartholomew Fair, the urban crowd creates a reaction in Wordsworth whose main characteristic is the erasure of differences. Crowd and city become swallowed in
the same perpetual flow Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity by differences That have no law, no meaning, and no end-- (9.702-05)
Such experiences make it difficult to maintain a holistic vision, to see "the parts / As parts, but with a feeling of the whole" (9.712-13). The spectacle of such fragmentation, such undifferentiated difference, threatens to produce a correspondent fragmentation of the viewing subject. Neil Hertz relates this reaction to Kant's notion of the "mathematical sublime," a sublime "arising out of sheer cognitive exhaustion," in which "the mind [is] blocked not by the threat of an overwhelming force, but by the fear of losing count or of being reduced to nothing but counting--this and this and this--with no hope of bringing a long series or a vast scattering under some sort of conceptual unity" (40). In terms of Wordsworth's experience, the urban mass is perceived as sheer number or quantity, a"long series or scattering" that resists "conceptual unity" and thus provokes a fragmentation of identity--Wordsworth's "neither knowing me, nor known." Innumerable but meaningless or "lawless" differences comprise the mass, thus rendering it "one identity" to Wordsworth. As Hertz remarks, "it is not that differences disappear, but that the possibility of interpreting them as significant differences vanishes" (59). Hertz's Kantian "mathematical sublime" isolates the crucial feature in Wordsworth's account: the idea of sheer number subsuming significant difference, a feature which can be rewritten as quantity subsuming quality, or as exchange value subsuming use value. The absence of "law" that threatens Wordsworth is simultaneously the lawless "anarchy" of market competition and the totality of the law of value or equivalence in a system of generalized commodity production. The "mystery" of the faces in the crowd turns out to be the mystery of how differences in this system come to share the condition of overall equivalence--what Karl Marx in Capitalcalls "the mystical character of the commodity" (164).
Capitalism depends upon a transformation of qualitative "use values" into quantitative "exchange values," the ultimate expression of which is the "form of value" itself, money. Commercial exchange demands a form of equivalence between otherwise qualitatively dissimilar objects; the unit of equivalence is the amount of human labor, measured in time, required to produce the object. But the character of exchange value effaces this social substance of commodities, producing a condition Marx calls "the fetishism of the commodity." Marx's ironic deployment of the rhetoric of religious mystery in his celebrated description of commodity fetishism points up the mystification by which human labor is effaced. As a use-value, an object such as a table is merely the sum total of its sensuous qualities; "there is nothing mysterious about it," says Marx (163). But as soon as the table becomes a commodity, he continues, "it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness":
It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will . . . The mystical character of the commodity does not therefore arise from its use- value . . . [The commodity form] is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. (163-65)
In Marx's humorously macabre scenario, the commodity becomes a automaton, exercising a grotesque parody of free will in apparently self-motivated activity. Taken collectively, the circulation of commodities appears as a monstrous condition of "relations between things," where humans themselves appear as objects. In the process of commodity exchange, money comes to epitomize the mystery of fetishized or reified social relations: "Just as in money every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished, so too for its part, as a radical leveller, it extinguishes all distinctions" (229). Marx's irony is precise: capitalists deplore all "radical levelling," yet historically nothing is so levelling as capitalism itself, which, to reintroduce Wordsworth's phrases, produces a "perpetual flow" of objects, "melted and reduced / To one identity by differences / That have no law, no meaning, and no end" (9.702-05). The sublimity of Wordsworth's London experience is an aesthetic response to determinate social conditions created by urban capitalism at the beginning of the 19th century: a sublime of commodity fetishism. But, as a negative sublime, it has a simultaneous appearance as a monstrous, threatening entity, in which the sublime reappears in a different register, the grotesque.
In Ronald Paulson's formulation, the "aesthetic challenge" posed by historically new experiences is "how to represent the unprecedented" (26). Paulson notes that, in portraying the French Revolution, Edmund Burke (and indeed Wordsworth himself) drew from the more familiar aesthetic categories of the sublime and the grotesque (7). The grotesque, according to Paulson, reflects an "aesthetic of eliding difference"; this feature makes the grotesque "a perfect revolutionary paradigm in that . . . it showed either the human emerging triumphantly from nature or the human subsiding or regressing into nature--or ambiguously doing both" (7). Sequences involving the grotesque, adds Paulson, tend "to be cyclic and repetitive, toward undifferentiation" (7). The question of popular sovereignty was the primary representational problem posed by the French Revolution: how can the will of the many, or politicalrepresentation, be re-presentedaesthetically? According to Paulson, those, like Wordsworth, who politically mistrusted popular sovereignty had recourse to the representational category of the grotesque. In Books 9-10 of The Prelude, which recount Wordsworth's stay in revolutionary France and his anguished return to England during the Jacobin "Terror," Wordsworth uses grotesque imagery to depict the behavior of the Parisian masses.
A more or less explicit rhetorical linkage of the political revolution in France and the economic revolution in London occurs in the grotesque vision that culminates the Bartholomew Fair episode, in which Wordsworth beholds
All out-o'-th'-way, far-fetched, perverted things, All freaks of Nature, all Promethean thoughts Of man--his dulness, madness, and their feats, All jumbled up together to make up This parliament of monsters. Tents and booths Meanwhile--as if the whole were one vast mill-- Are vomiting, receiving, on all sides,< Men, women, three-years' children, babes in arms. (9.688-95)
Both the political revolution in France and the economic revolution in London are implicated in the phrase "Promethean thoughts," thoughts which in this case produce a perversion of the natural order--a Frankenstein's monster of mismatched parts, monstrously jumbled together. "All" of this jumbled mass is then said to comprise a "parliament of monsters," an unrepresentable parody of the very form of popular representation. Wordsworth then links this political expression of popular will, in its perverted form, to the economic form of capitalist production in the form of some infernally totalizing factory: "one vast mill." This factory simultaneously consumes and produces members of the crowd, just as capitalist social relations consume human workers by objectifying their labor power in commodities.
The spectacle of this crowd threatens to put Wordsworth's "creative powers . . . asleep" (7.655), much as they had been in the earlier Blind Beggar episode. To escape this, says Wordsworth,
For once the Muse's help will we implore, And she shall lodge us--wafted on her wings Above the press and danger of the crowd-- Upon some showman's platform. (7.656-59)This passage--with its invocation of the classical muse--has several troubling implications. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White note, in order to achieve his escape from the threatening crowd, Wordsworth "turns to the machinery of the classical canon which he had deliberately set his face against in the Lyrical Ballads" (123). The authors continue: "It is as if the fair's threat to authorship and identity alike could only be contained by returning to the poetics, and also the politics of the old classical dispensation--a return to the categorial distinctions which The Preludeas a whole tries to dissolve" (123). Yet the precapitalist social hierarchies behind the "classical dispensation" cannot be returned to in any authentic way; rather, the classical becomes resituated and problemmatized in the modern context: Wordsworth's self-consciously risks the implication that he and the "showman" can be in some sense equated. Wordsworth assumes the position of a purveyor of marketplace commodities, a petty capitalist. And this showman's muse, unlike the heroic muse of previous social formations, is a capitalist muse, debased and debasing, a "levelling" muse. According to Jon Klancher, the development of urban capitalism in the early 19th century brought with it the transformation of the traditional crowd into a legitimate commercial reading audience in its own right, a new "'mass' audience who would discover its own image in what it read" (155). Wordsworth's equivocal "showman" on the platform suggests an uneasy gesture towards this phenomenon of the mass audience, the mass journal, and, especially, the mass author--the wholesale commercialization of literature. A gesture of refusal, it is also an admission. Alan Liu has argued that Wordsworth's "strong denials of history are also the deepest realizations of history" (32), and the same might be said of Wordsworth's denials of capitalism, a central feature of the history that Wordsworth strongly denies.
According to Mary Jacobus, Wordsworth maintains the integrity and continuity of his autobiographical self through the suppression of gender difference, a rejection of the female body that produces the generically-male humanity of Romantic humanism. In terms of my own argument, I add that this rejection is a condition of bourgeois humanism per se. Bourgeois humanism constructs its ideology of a generic humanity--a humanity that effaces the class differences that underwrite bourgeois rule--by reinscribing that rupture in terms of gender and race. Thus Wordsworth's image of the race split "in twain"--between human essence and human form--signifies simultaneously the rejection of the feminine body and the condition of reification (or commodity fetishism) generally. Splitting the race in twain is the paradoxical price of healing the human heart within us all, of achieving a vision, "among the multitudes / Of that great city," of "the unity of man" (8.824-27). The trans-class resolution of social contradictions invariably displaces the suppressed class divisions into other social regions: reinstating the sovereign, patriarchal subject of bourgeois ideology, romantic anticapitalism is always a contradictory, compromised, failed anticapitalism. Wordsworth struggles to wrest a meaningful, distinct subjectivity from the commodified urban crowd and its threatening erasure of differences, but the same gesture that marks his own difference from the crowd inaugurates the sovereign subject of bourgeois ideology. The complementary pole of this very ideology is generic humanism, Wordsworth's "unity of man," and it is this ideology that serves to reproduce the conditions of generalized commodity production. Wordsworth retreats from London, but he can never escape from the monstrous crowd, because this crowd is always simply the other face of Wordsworth's humanism, just as the commercial author is always the other face of Wordsworth himself as the autobiographical subject of The Prelude.
Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: NLB, 1973.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 217-51.
Chandler, James K. Wordsworth's Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.
Friedman, Geraldine. "History in the Background of Wordsworth's 'Blind Beggar'." ELH56 (1989): 125-48.
Hertz, Neil. The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New York: Columbia, 1985.
Jacobus, Mary. Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays onThe Prelude. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.
King, Ross. "Wordsworth, Panoramas, and the Prospect of London." Studies in Romanticism 32 (Spring 1993): 57-73.
Klancher, Jon P. "From 'Crowd' to 'Audience': The Making of an English Mass Readership in the Nineteenth Century." ELH50 (1983): 155-73.
Liu, Alan. Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976.
Paulson, Ronald. Representations of Revolution, (1789-1820). New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Sex and History in The Prelude (1805): Books Nine to Thirteen." Texas Studies in Literature and Language23 (1981): 324-60.
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.
Wordsworth, William. The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979