Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing by Philip Dickinson

Author:Philip Dickinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Lyric Form

All of this implies the presence of a more interestingly Romantic aesthetic within the text, as it unfolds not a separated, de-historicized vision of space but a poetics of dis-enclosure , in which spatial or temporal sanctuaries persist in a compromised relation to the world that they border. If there is a ‘reality principle’ at work in the novel, this does not imply an abandonment of the aesthetic but rather a realignment of the novelist’s aesthetic expectations. As Anne-Lise François observes, the project of ‘“re-forming” desire to make it compatible with available object choices’ is always ‘an essentially “aesthetic” project, whatever its guise as a tough-minded, disenchanted “return to reality”’.55 In my countervoice I approach Anita Desai’s radicalization of Romantic disappointment and her altogether different deformation of the aesthetic, but in Naipaul the poetic forms of Romanticism find their significance because they permit such aesthetic reformation. Romanticism provides schemas for seeing with the ‘literary eye’ (18), evident at such moments as when the narrator encounters the ‘Wordsworthian figure’ of Jack’s father, ‘exaggeratedly bent, going gravely about his peasant tasks, as if in an immense Lake District solitude’ (16) (he later thinks that he belongs in a poem Wordsworth might have called ‘The Fuel-Gatherer’ (23)), or when he sees Jack’s garden, concreted over after Jack’s death, and thinks that surely ‘some seed, some root, would survive’, some ‘memory of Jack, preserved in some shrub or flower or vine’ (91), a passage that especially recalls ‘Michael’ and the ‘straggling heap of unhewn stones’ that carries the trace of the shepherd’s story. But Romantic lyricism also offers expressive languages for seeing more than once, for responding to aesthetic anomalies or disappointments and tracing the emergence of another way of seeing.

Just as Wordsworth’s speaker in ‘Tintern Abbey ’ notes the hedgerows that he remembers from five years before, that are in fact, he thinks, as he checks himself, ‘hardly hedge-rows, little lines/ Of sportive wood run wild’ (ll. 16–17), so the novelist figure in Enigma habitually looks and looks again, in a way that makes clear the genealogy of landscape perception upon which the text draws. What is especially striking about these repeated acts of looking, though, is the extent to which the second or third moment of perception does not so much modify as radically undermine the initial picture, threatening the narrator’s precarious aesthetic equilibrium. In ‘Tintern Abbey ’, the poet’s muffled recognition of the presence of impoverished workers and vagrants in the landscape has proved a point of critical contention, because their lives are transmuted into an aestheticized trace—only the ‘wreathes of smoke/ Sent up, in silence, from among the trees’ offer the ‘uncertain notice’ of the rural poor that would in fact have been quite visible at the scene.56 But from the narrator’s perspective, threateningly anaesthetic images cannot be transmuted so easily. The cows around his cottage at first seem to him ‘like the cows in the drawing on the label of the condensed milk-tins I knew in Trinidad as

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