'Yet in its depth what treasures': Shelley's Transforming Intellect and the Paradoxical Example of Coleridge

One readily thinks of Shelley as inhabiting a Lucretian world of flux. His mind—by nature volatile and mercurial—seems instinctively drawn to a poetics of transformation, relishing the interplay of shifting perspectives, while working to negate as well as reformulate what the mind has itself distorted. Characteristically, he engages a process of correction, one that unmasks and naturalizes fixed conceptions or ideologies (the 'fixities' and 'definites' of objectivization) so that they can be reconstituted within the flow of mutability, to which, in Shelley's view, all systems and all life are ultimately bound. Where entrenched views are involved, transformation invariably begins in transgression, because systems of thought acquire the character of indisputable authority, which to resist is considered 'evil' and to obey 'good'. In reversing these moral categories Shelley transgresses 'normality', intimating that 'evil' (the self/other dichotomy that legitimizes oppression) can indeed be transformed into 'good' (requiring delegitimation, the absence, withdrawal, or negation of that dichotomy). It is a tenet of poststructural theory that, while not definitely leading to the kind of creative transformation Shelley is seeking, the infraction of boundaries is a consequence of the arbitrary constraints and symbolic displacements of human culture (built on the repression of nature), opening up infinite possibilities for change. Disputing the bourgeois homogenization of culture, French intellectuals have, for example, discovered in writing itself primary evidence for the necessity of transgression. An inevitable slippage of meaning undermines the very attempt at 'signifying' or 'defining' reality, that is, marking out the exact limits and boundaries of everything. This points to the unstable character of prescriptive authoritative meaning (the dictionary definition, or the definition of those in power) which, acting as a social interdict, prompts transgression, the infringing of the code and the liberation of energies or drives inhibited by the code. The vital source of such instinctual drives is figured by the Power in Shelley's 'Mont Blanc' that causes devastation within the ravine of Arve, and which is said to 'repeal / Large codes of fraud and woe' (80-81). Presaging Bataille's view that rational order (utility) is undermined by unproductive expenditure ('waste') of energy in nature, Shelley draws satisfaction from the fact that ideologies (codes) are negated or 'transgressed' by natural forces, which are themselves indifferent to human culture and which are untamable and inexorable. The breadth of reference in 'large codes' implicates the entire spectrum of legislation regulating thought and conduct, encompassing 'the law of the father', and symbolized in Prometheus Unbound by the figure of Jupiter. The point is that the codes legitimate 'fraud and woe' by disguising themselves as rational and humanly beneficial. They are a trap for the fainthearted who, intimidated by the threat to homogeneity (orderly and time-honoured rule), resist the 'otherness of the sacred' which, according to Bataille, encompasses our 'divine', though actually repressed, and even despised, animal nature. Remaining imprisoned in a frozen self/other dichotomy, the reactionary holds fast to a fortress of imagined certainties with which to ward off the transgressing and transforming other. Shelley was, of course, not alone in his advocacy of transgression. He was drawing on the radical discourse of his time and of the Enlightenment sceptics before him. The term 'fraud' is a loaded signifier in radical discourse, applied subversively to imperious British policy, and recalling Paine's satirical attack on the aristocracy, whose assumption of power by original conquest and plunder had, through crown succession, robbed the people of their rights. Republicanism, or at a further extreme, Jacobinism, were and perhaps still are 'transgressive fields', threatening Britain's class structure and way of life. Given this context, it is not without irony that among the …