Aesthetics of Shock in Wordsworth
Notes
- 1. The notion of the real as traumatic can be found in Séminaire
VII, in the Chapter Das Ding.
- 2. Usually, I refer to the 1805 version of The Prelude);
but this comes from the 1850 version.
- 3. Baudelaire starts his career by translating Edgar Allan
Poe, and in particular a story called "The Man of the Crowd,"
where this "man" turns out to be, not a man precisely,
but an empty puppet, a dying impersonality.
- 4. The same situations passively suffered procure pleasure
when actively re-enacted. Freud gives children's plays as examples.
- 5. Lacan notes: "Nous devrions concevoir la douleur
comme un champ qui s'ouvre à la limite, quand il n'y a
plus possibilité pour l'être de se mouvoir"
(Séminaire VII, 74).
- 6. According to Freud, the trauma was a passive reception
of too many stimuli the mental apparatus was not in a position
to respond to, could neither appreciate nor structure. Such is
the definition with which he struggles in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle.
- 7. Wordsworth's mother died when he was six years old.
- 8. Few personalities are mentioned in The Prelude, although
Edmund Burke is for instance, and with reverence: "Genius
of Burke!" (Book VII, 1850). My argument on the grotesque
crowd would, of course, benefit from a close reading of Burke's
important book on the aesthetic sublime, his Enquiry into
the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).
As opposed to the beautiful object which pleases, we know that
the sublime encounter consists in the shock the "greatest"
works of art tend to inflict upon their public. The results of
Burke's enquiry seem to contradict my own: Burke praises privations
(Silence, the Void, Nothingness, Death). But not-enough-stimuli-to-register-anything-at-all
and too-many-to-bear may amount to the same traumatic horror
from the perspective of the self. The sublime absence and the
grotesque shock are close parents.
- 9. Lines 255 and 284.
- 10. In the "Leçon du 5 Décembre 1962"
of Séminaire X, L'Angoisse (unpublished), Lacan
explains: "Ce qu'il y a de plus angoissant pour le sujet,
c'est que ce rapport sur lequel il s'institue du manque qui le
fait désir, ce rapport est le plus perturbé quand
il n'y a pas de possibilité du manque."
- 11. This is the meaning, I believe, of the lines 669-71:
................ things that
are, are not,
As the mind answers to them,
or the heart
Is prompt, or slow, to feel.
- 12. Of the mountain's outline, Wordsworth wrote earlier:
"its steady form/ Gives a pure grandeur, and its presence
shapes/ The measure and the prospect of the soul/ To majesty"
(7:722-5).
- We could say with Benjamin that everything around our narrator
has retained its aura, its singularity. It has not yet been multiplied,
dis-placed, reproduced ad infinitum as in the city.