Figures of Revision in Wordsworth's Critical Arguments

This essay deals with three key arguments in Wordsworth's poetics: the theorisation of tautology; the definition of the poet; and the relationship between thoughts and feelings. The peculiar discursive manoeuvres of these three arguments may be called figurative revisions. Although the literal notion of revision has its own place, the more comprehensive conceptualisation of revision presented here cannot rely solely on it: understandably, the notion of revision, therefore, has reference not only to that literal activity of making retrospective changes in a text, but even more so to that turning around associated with it. It is in this turning around, this looking again, that revision—or re-vision—constitutes a form of textual self-consciousness that is examined here. No less is revision a form of reflexivity. But this conceptual broadening also requires a reassessment of the relationship between the literal and figurative already radicalised by Derrida's conceptualisation of writing not as a mere scriptive activity but as a spatio-temporal structure. Tracing the "metaphoric transitions" (199) in Freud's theorisation of the psyche in a "Note on the Mystic Pad" Derrida asserts that "the 'objectivist' or 'worldly' consideration of writing teaches us nothing if reference is not made to a psychical space of writing" (212). Thus no more is the figurative a supplement of the literal; in fact, it is the figurative, according to Derrida, which constitutes the conditions of possibility for a conceptualisation of the literal. Moreover, this methodological initiative gives us incentive to treat the seemingly incidental as being essentially central. Consider how Derrida traces out the process by which scriptural metaphors enter into and take over Freud's model of memory. As always, a problem of this nature begs the question: what procedure do we adopt to assess such an elusive issue? We may try to answer such a question by examining the manner in which the problematic begins to be articulated for us in critical discourse. Even the most abbreviated survey suggests how we encounter it disguised, for instance, as Frances Ferguson's notion of "reading" that "proleptic and retrogressive movement in Wordsworth's poetry" (xiv); as Clifford Siskin's "interpretation" (9); as Isobel Armstrong's "repetition" (35); as Cynthia Chase's "disfigurement" (5). (Or even as Howard Bloom's "revisionary ratios" (8) which stipulate that all writing is indeed rewriting.) Nowhere is it more pronounced than in Armstrong's suggestion that in critical moments Wordsworth's poetry appears to "reread" (xiii) itself like a text. To sum it up in Raymond Carney's words, "we need to begin to talk about writing as a process with a significance in and of itself, composition as an activity of consciousness and not merely as a means of producing ultimate meanings" (634). The obvious lack of coordination between these various pronouncements issues its own methodological challenges. But these may need to be taken up elsewhere. For the time being, however, these critical gestures serve to situate the issue for us: Wordsworth's discourse gives evidence of the unintended textualisation of self-division. At the same time, these articulations of the problematic of revision become the pretext for our particular interventions in Wordsworth scholarship. Although the examples given here refer only to the occurrences of figurative revisions in Wordsworth's poetic discourse, the present inquiry takes it even further to demonstrate how such revisions, in fact, occur in another form in Wordsworth's critical discourse. These examples of Wordsworth's critical discourse, we further argue, become self-enacting revisions when they trace out their own procedures. Taken together with Wordsworth's habits of composition (characterised by the incessant revisions of The Prelude, for instance), these discursive manoeuvres cannot be ignored: perhaps, these more figurative forms of revision foreground the possibility …