The familiar postcolonial literary antagonism towards the aesthetic discourses of empire finds a corollary in the critique of Romantic ideology undertaken within Romantic criticism in recent decades: in both cases, the project of critique has had difficulty escaping the object of cr itique. Jerome McGann sought not only to demystify Romanticismās strategies of aesthetic and political evasion, but also to reform Romantic criticism and its compromising investment in these strategies. But according to later critics, McGann ās endeavour was paradoxical and even contradictory: his effort to return poetry to a āhuman formā is as Romantic as it gets,1 a neo-Wordsworthian imperative that surely must itself be demystified.2 Clifford Siskin subsequently offered such a demystification, as he sought, contra McGann and others, to write a literary history of Romanticism rather than a Romantic literary history.3 But Siskin too, in his critique of the ālyric turn ā by which Romantic texts evade their generic grounding and historicity, assumes too readily that the power of lyrical truth procedures can be effectively resisted. Siskin develops a systematic approach that would resist the allure of the lyrical redefinition of the real, with its psychologizing, developmentalist biases, but, as Ed Larrissy has suggested, it may be impossible for language to escape a lyric turn: there is, after all, no metalanguage, no escape from metaphor.4 The point is that even the practice of demystification itselfāof substituting reality for a conventional, generic delusionācan, through a shift of perspective, appear as a version of this same lyrical move.
Romanticism has a kind of insistence. As Marc Redfield claims, an aesthetic discourse of Romanticism appears to recur āin denouncing itselfā.5 There is no guarantee that a heightened critical vigilance is sufficient to leave the aesthetic discourse of Romanticism firmly behind.6 Romantic criticism may unknowingly extend supposedly definitive features of Romanticism as it agitates against Romantic ideology , resurrecting the belief in a universal human poetry (McGann ), or reanimating the faith that a reformed language can capture the truth of things (Siskin ). If this insistence operates in exactly the space that most vigilantly guards against it, then it surely also appears in the wider literary and cultural field. As Marjorie Perloff writes in a provocative reading of a late twentieth-century poetics, even an ostensibly marginalized voice may uncritically inscribe itself through lyric tropes, with the ātacit assumption that the lyric is a univocal and authentic form of self-expressionā.7 But if Romanticism appears here as a power that recaptures the critic (or poet) at every instant she thinks she has escaped its embrace, the opposite phenomenon is also true, where a critical desire to have Romanticism live on shapes readings of its persistence. Romanticism, therefore, sustains the imagination of virtual reality; it informs the orientation of contemporary theory; it undergirds, or is simply is, the counterdiscourse to modernity since the eighteenth century.8
Who can deny that Romanticism lives on, and yet how can this āliving onā accrue any meaningful coherence if such a range of phenomena, reflecting such a diversity of aesthetic and cultural perspectives, are part of this persistence? It is perhaps true, as Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle suggest, that the long-standing interest within Romantic studies of Romanticismās persistence is itself a form of that persistence,9 but perhaps no more true than the idea that Romanticism enjoys a substantial afterlife, its aesthetic ideology continuing to infect our critical orientations, its subversive potential continuing to reopen productive fractures in our senses of history. Here, we undoubtedly confront the metaphorical nature of the Romantic period: to speak of Romanticism is to speak of something supplementary to it, to give a historical name to a critical preoccupation that may have no necessary relationship with Romantic-period cultural products. The problem is surely amplified if we introduce another equally contested period term, as I am doing: the postcolonial.10 As literary-historical periodizations, the terms share the fact that they do not speak to non-controversial historical units (like the eighteenth or twentieth centuries), but are products of an active interpretive agency: the concept of the Romantic period suggests that something happened at the end of the eighteenth century, and the designation āpostcolonial literatureā ascribes a special historical significance to colonial and postcolonial history for an impossibly diverse range of literary production. To approach the afterlives of Romanticism in postcolonial writing is to redouble the difficulty it seems, especially since these terms can signal not only historical and transregional provenance, but also genre, aesthetic mode and sensibility, historical outlook, and the criticās interpretive orientation.
This book can hardly claim to transcend this problem. In opening the question of a relationship between postcolonial and Romantic-period writing, I am implicated in the phenomenon that Cynthia Chase observed in 1993, where there is āa specular or mirroring relation between Romanticism and the present that one cannot be sure of controlling through its conversion into a genetic narrative or historyā.11 I therefore propose no such conversion: it is not that British Romanticismāmy focus hereāprovides the secret origin of postcolonial aesthetics. Nor is it, in the more familiar narrative in this context, that postcolonial writing arrays its forces against a Romantic corpus easily collapsible into the aesthetic ideology of empire. Instead, it is that postcolonial writing furnishes a series of intertextual contact zones which, when threaded together, constitute, in the proper sense of that word, an internally various Romantic afterlife. This is to emphasize the agency of postcolonial writing in mediating, even (re)inventing, what, in a chronological frame, would appear a forebear.12 Postcolonial writing retrieves things from Romanticism (just as critics of Romanticism do): it doesnāt enter into a preconstituted literary-historical field, where Romanticism is given in an ossified form, but reorganizes that field. In this sense, postcolonial writing composes the archive of Romantic writing through which my book builds its reading of the Romantic, as its engagements open a repository of forms, texts, passages, phraseologies, or aesthetic ideas. While I do shuttle between Romantic and postcolonial texts in order to illustrate the sometimes strategic and sometimes falsifying re-inscriptions of particular moments or texts, my main interest is in what these re-inscriptions or readings of the Romantic show about the concerns of my chosen postcolonial texts. This is not to say that my book has nothing to say about Romanticism: it embodies the argument that the history of Romanticism exceeds its historical period; it suggests that postcolonial writing provides as legitimate a lens for reading Romanticism as any other; and it claims that the sometimes warped and estranged Romantic fragments found in postcolonial texts c an stand as shards of a literary-historical constellation that subverts the historicizing and linear biases of conventional literary history. To two such fragments I now turn.
Beyond the Daffodil Syndrome
The story of Romanticismās afterlife in postcolonial writing begins with the invention of imperialist education and the composition of a global syllabus of English Literature (more on this below), but it ultimately exceeds the control of this history. I suggest in particular that the Romantic interest in the sphere of aesthetic life is developed in a variety of complex ways within a neglected seam of postcolonial aesthetic practice, and specifically indexed, at key intertextual moments, to Romanticism, whose key, though nonexclusive, figure here is Wordsworth . Before I further elaborate my terms, let me unfold the migration of this concern by attending to a specific example: Jamaica Kincaidās Lucy. This novella on first appearance seems to offer a conventionally antagonistic posture to the English literary tradition, fitting neatly within the āempire writes backā explanatory paradigm that gained ascendency in postcolonial literary studies in the 1990s. Kincaidās book refracts the history of imperialist education through the perspective of a Caribbean subject burdened by its legacy, but it also glimpses a deeper and more ambivalent persistence of Romantic aesthetic concerns. In a well-known sceneāa seemingly exemplary instance of intercanonical antagonismāLucy is brought to the āfavourite placeā of her American employer and guardian, Mariah. Mariah covers Lucyās eyes with a handkerchief, before revealing the spectacle and entreating Lucy to look:
I looked. It was a big area with lots of thick-trunked, tall trees along winding paths. Along the paths and underneath the trees were many, many yellow flowers the size and shape of play teacups, or fairy skirts. They looked like something to eat and something to wear at the same time; they looked beautiful; they looked simple, as if made to erase a complicated and unnecessary idea. I did not know what these flowers were, and so it was a mystery to me why I wanted to kill them. Just like th...