Plasma Pool

The very fact that Paul de Man would edit a selection of Keats’s work is matter for critical reflection.¹ The linkage between postmodern materialism and Romantic aesthetics is perverse, to say the least, but it is hardly surprising: in each we find a gravitation toward the object as such that rejects, at least on the face of it, any economy other than the aesthetic. In both there is a sense that any object can be an aesthetic one, though the Romantic poet fashions his while the materialist (only) discovers his.

Both embrace extravagance: the Romantic, of his belief that any object can be made into the subject for aesthetic reflection; the materialist, of his conviction that this is so even for the unintentional art-object. In so doing, too, both display a passion for detritus, for the display of virtuosity that can make of anything an aesthetic object, even beyond that which we are accustomed to believe “fit matter” for the artistic endeavor. In this way, their mutual view of art is only as radically democratizing as it is hopelessly and permanently elitist/aristocratic: anything may constitute art, but it requires a trained, inventive, luxuriant eye to discover those possibilities in garbage, or in error, or in the materiality of the book.

The commitment to the lyric subject that is the hallmark of Romantic poetry converges with the materialist’s penchant for scrutinizing flotsam on the plane of philosophy, in the irreconcileable breach between Self and Other, between that which is for-itself and that which is in-itself. For the Romantic poet’s pathos is also his triumph, the display of irreducible Selfness in a medium that ostensibly aspires to mutual selfhood (the “reader-as-poet” phenomenon described by critics like Vendler).² The encryption of the Self in text may, in fact, take the surest route to inscription of the text as object, the seat of inscrutable eddies and fluxes that present for the reader as mystifying an object as the comma-out-of-place or the book’s table of contents (when he is told, in the latter case, to interpret that document as a literary text).

This reading of Romanticism is itself intentionally perverse, but to couple an art encrusted with the self’s indulgence and final inscrutability with a gentle (and naive) formalism makes of Romantic lyric an idealized and genteel farce, one that ascribes to the poet no motive and to the reader no firm ground on which to stand. For the poet always wants something, and he wants something more than the mere inscription of himself in lyric monument, more even than the putative interpersonal connection that one feels (however fleetingly) when reading him. Romantic lyric, understood as from the pure lyric subject, the unsullied aesthetic appreciation and consideration of one’s surroundings, is the most luxurious, inflated, and self-absorbed of artistic endeavors. In presenting himself as the lyric-subject-for-all, the grand total of the “I” in the text, the Romantic poet presents a monstrosity of ego. His work is as useless—even as an aesthetic experience—as it is onanistic.

However, that is only the inevitable conclusion if we treat the Romantic poet as he has typically been treated. It is better far to acknowledge, as some have done, the poet’s selfishness, his investment in his surroundings, and his untrainable tendency toward literary aristocratism. To recognize the poem as object, rather than as the pure transmission from the speaking subject, is to find a place for its encrustations and to understand the nature of ego in the poetic work. What the poet wants changes, but it is certain that it is not merely to connect with you, gentle reader. Taken as object, the lyric freezes in time; no longer is it the perpetual and ageless (hence uninteresting because vague, general; “timelessness” is a dangerous game) virus that lives through you. It is only when we begin to take the poem as object that we can see it clearly. Only then does the accumulated detritus of time or the element of the random that is always already present in the poetic endeavor become meaningful artistically (rather than, say, historically or biographically).

There is much in the materialist’s (such as de Man’s) reading that is suspicious or outright ridiculous, but the attitude bears more affinities with Romantic lyric—and hence criticism—than the old-guard critical conservatives who typically congregate in the midst of the topic would like to acknowledge. Our criticism is (and shall remain, until we recognize this) still too close to Romanticism, too much its by-product and the inheritor of its dramas, lies, and performances. These, taken rightly, are merely what they are—art. But when a lie is celebrated and promulgated by a criticism too blind to know the difference, it remains only a lie, rather than art. To tell lies in art is one thing: the vast majority, if not all, of art is, in fact, comprised of beautiful lies: but it is in the knowing-of-the-difference between that which is told and that which simply is that the aesthetic experience of art occurs. Without that, our criticism will remain dull, and naive, and self-betraying.

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1. John Keats: Selected Poetry, ed. Paul de Man (New York: Signet, 1966).
2. “When a poem compels one to read it with passion, the reader feels he is momentarily its author, and that is how he knows the poem is beautiful;” Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983), 3.