I got the text through JSTOR, made available through the ISU Library. If anyone wants to see the whole article and does not have access to a library (for either the JSTOR or a paper copy of NLH), post me off list and I will send it to you as an attached Word or PDF file (your choice).
The opening paragraph:
IT IS no new discovery that the period we used to associate with an organicist aesthetics, which accomplished the fusion of the signifier and the signified, in fact produced a Large number of texts, intentional in structure, that make that fusion problematical. This paper will be concerned specifically with a phenomenon I shall call the disappearance of narrative, dramatic, or conceptual actualization, a phenomenon which results in the absence from Romantic texts of embodied or achieved meaning as opposed to discarnate meaning. The problem is most obvious in the many Romantic texts that are fragments, where the written "text" does not coincide with what we may call the "work,"' the essential meaning which Romantic hermeneutics discovers through a reading which is psychological and divinatory rather than grammatical and structural. In Coleridge's Christabel, for instance, the work consists not only of Christabel's captivation and ontological deconstruction by Geraldine, the psychological double who reveals to her the other side of herself. It includes a happy ending, in which this disturbing difference of the self from itself is annulled, as Christabel and the father who rejects her are reconciled and Geraldine is either vanquished or saved. But this projected ending is never incorporated into the text, which concludes with Christabel being rejected by her father, and intimates the ending only negatively, as a desire for a happy ending that would correct the present unjust state of affairs. Similarly in Keats's Hyperion, Apollo's deification is intimated at the end before the text breaks off in asterisks, but remains abstract. He undergoes no psychological maturing and development until he somewhat unconvincingly ingests the lessons of several millennia of history in five lines, as though to make us aware that his deification is not something that happens in divine history, but is a linguistic constitution, subject to doubt and dismantling. To bring the poem to its conclusion we must leave the text, which de-realizes its conclusion, for the work. ****
Skipping a few paragraphs:
Nor is the disappearance of actualization exclusively a feature of fictional texts. We find it also in expository prose, where continuous logical argument normally serves the function of plot and narrative syntax. Coleridge's Biographic Literaria, for instance, is made up of disjunctive and unsynthesized parts. Its centerpiece is a redemptive theory of imagination as a reconciliation of opposites which reduplicates the primal act of creation. But the link between Coleridge's aesthetics and the ten scholia from Schelling which precede it and provide its metaphysical grounding is not made in the text. Moreover, while Coleridge promises a hundred-page treatise on the imaginalion, the very extensiveness of which would give the theory philosophical credibility, what he provides is two elliptical paragraphs which must be fleshed out by the sympathetic reader. Characteristic of all these texts is an erosion of the concrete actualization, the illusion of reportorial, psychological, or even conceptual realism that comes from creating transitions and modulations between parts. The text becomes like the script for a film or the score for a piece of music rather than the film or music itself. It becomes a signifier which points to a meaning not embodied in the text. It would be all too easy to conclude that much Romantic literature is technically incompetent, especially since at first sight it seems to lack the technical self-consciousness that might lead us to defend it as experimental. But in fact what we are dealing with is a series of far-reaching shifts in concepts of the location and nature of meaning, the relationship of reader to text, and finally the status of discourse itself.
Corresponding to this pervasive shift in literature itself is a shift in Romantic aesthetics from a concern with the text as a finished product that contains its own meaning to a concern with the creative process and its mirror image, the reading process, as loci of meaning. The emphasis of earlier criticism on genre, as a means by which the text encodes, codifies, and institutionalizes what it says, disappears. The decline of generic criticism is matched on the intratextual level by a diminished emphasis on the structural grammar of the work as emphasized by the Aristotelian tradition. Though a first generation Romantic like Coleridge continues to give some emphasis to matters of construction, such as the relationship of part to whole, it is interesting that he designates as secondary imagination the capacity for formal shaping that is specifically the possession of the poet, and describes as primary imagination the originating creative perception that precedes and gives value to aesthetic structuring.4 We see in Coleridge the beginnings of a shift from a formalist aesthetics of craft to a phenomenological aesthetics of genius, though Coleridge's view of the creative process stops short of rejecting structural actualization as unimportant. In this it resembles Schleiermacher's view of the reading process, in which psychological interpretation is primary, though grammatical interpretation is also necessary. But from here it is only a short step to a second generation Romantic like Shelley, who introduces a dualism between inspiration and composition, thought and language, which shifts the locus of meaning altogether away from the written text. What this means is that though the work behind the text is assumed to be a unity, the written text is no longer required to be an autonomous formal unit. The text as signifier may become the trace, the re-presentation, of a signified that precedes it in the creative process. Or it may become an intent of consciousness, the catalyst for a signified to be produced in the reading process. More commonly it becomes both, in a hermeneutics which sees the reading process as a corrective which recovers the separation of signifier from signified that occurs as the creative spirit submits itself to the process of composition. *****
Note: I am not including the careful historical analysis with which Rajan grounds her arguments in the theories propounded by writers in Germany and England during the Romantic period. I'll bless the list with some of that material if and only if anyone claims that Rajan is imposing her own views on Coleridge & Shelley. Two more paragraphs:
Schleiermacher does not allow for any disjunction between work and text, the psychological and grammatical readings, because he sees the two levels as complementary. What he offers is a Romantic version of Dante's fourfold method of exegesis in which, as Auerbach points out, figural meaning is meant to deepen and not erode realism.8 Yet Schleiermacher stands on the fringes of a radical shift from a concept of Literature as mimesis to literature as representation which defers the presence of meaning. From here it is but a short step to a hermeneutics which sees meaning as absent from the written text and present in the writer's intention which becomes a separable mental entity from the process of working out thoughts in language.
This crucial step is taken in Shelley's Defence of Poetry. Anglo-American criticism has tended to place the Defence within a classical and English philosophical and critical tradition. But it is better understood as an analogue to developments in Continental hermeneutics, which attempts a defence of logocentrism in the wake of its own deconstruction of structuralist concepts of Linguistic and literary systems. Early in his argument Shelley proclaims confidently a view of language as a free-standing system similar to that conceived by Saussure, in which words bear a direct relationship to thoughts, or in which the acoustic image evokes the concept signified by it. Acoustic images or "sounds" (to use Shelley's word) "have relations both between each other and towards that which they represent,"9 and it is the former, the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations among signifiers, that guarantee the coherence of the signified and its uptake by the reader. But simultaneously Shelley questions this belief that the relationship between conception and expression is unproblematical (278). In the famous description of the mind as a fading coal, he speaks of the fracturing of the sign that occurs in the transition from inspiration to composition (294). Given this disjunction between signifier and signified endemic to writing, a self-present meaning can no longer be located in the written text, but must be sought in what for convenience's sake we shall call the work: the conception or thought that exists before it is formulated in a Language which makes it different from itself. If I seem to use a poststructuralist vocabulary, the choice is deliberate, for Shelley's prose everywhere betrays the pressure of seeing the text as decentered and semiotically fractured, even as it resists this pressure through a phenomenological hermeneutics which enables him to defer the centering of meaning from the text to the consciousness of the author, and to shift the structural actualization of this meaning from the text to the reader. Shelley's view of the communicative process thus goes far beyond Schleiermacher's: it short-circuits grammatical reading of the text by seeking an immediate psychological fusion with the author on a subliminal or transverbal level. Correspondingly it also eliminates the need for structural actualization in the text: "a word, or a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the enchanted chord and reanimate in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past" (294). And again: "A single sentence may be considered as a whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated portions" (281). Moreover, Shelley can go far beyond the concept of reading as a completion and actualization of the text to a concept of reading as reversal which we will discuss later. His own readings of Dante and Milton are hermeneutic but not exegetical. Instead of explicating what is in the text, he locates the meaning of the work in the author's intention, which is radically at odds with the published text, and thus inaccessible except to a purely psychological reading.
It is apparent that this defence of the gap between depiction and subject matter through the supplement of reading is highly problematical. The rise of hermeneutics is the beginning of a massive but still unacknowledged change in Romantic concepts of literary discourse. For one cannot shift the Location of meaning from the text to the reading process without also changing the very status of literary meaning as a fixed essence that does not vary between individual readers and generations of readers. Recently David Simpson has pointed to a pervasive tendency in Romantic aesthetics toward the "disestablishment of the text as an authority and the stressing of its function as a heuristic stimulus."1° That hermeneutics inaugurates the disestablishment of authoritative meaning was not, however, recognized by its theorists and literary practitioners. Indeed they turned to hermeneutics because of its apparent logocentrism: its origins in biblical interpretation, which also committed it to preserve the authority of various secular scriptures. Yet the contradictions in the hermeneutic concepts of author and reader will eventually lead to the dismantling of its fervent logocentrism. While denying the authority of the text and its classic or historically invariable status, Romantic hermeneuticists inconsistently make the author the locus of a fixed meaning and conceive of him as a grounding center. Equally problematical is the role assigned to the reader. For hermeneutics grants the reader as producer of the text a large degree of autonomy from the letter of the text, while at the same time requiring that he be faithful to the spirit of the work. Thus it confers a certain liberty on him only to take it away. But to shift the centering and actualization of meaning from text to reader is to destabilize this meaning. For the actual reader may decide to use his autonomy in a manner different from that intended by the author, if indeed we can define the author as a fixed point of meaning. *****
Incidentally, for those who scoff at theory at such: Where does the Meaning of a text reside? What is a "Meaning"?
Carrol