Black Gates and Fiery Galleries: Eastern Architecture in "The Fall of Hyperion"

Abstract

ACCORDING TO RECENT DISCUSSIONS, KEATS'S HYPERION FRAGMENTS draw on a historiography of style that opens with the ancient sublimities of Egypt and moves on to the lucent beauties of Greece and Rome. This argument is based largely on descriptions of the Titans which allude to Egyptian sculpture, thus recasting the war with the classical Gods as an international event pitting the west against a prototypical Orient.(1) The identification of the Titans with Egypt is also grounded in Keats's biography; Egyptian sculptures were displayed in the British Museum next to the Elgin Marbles, where the poet viewed and was impressed by both.(2) However, the Titans' spectacular temples and palaces are not exclusively or even primarily Egyptian. Rather, they participate in the Regency's architectural exoticism, which included Egyptian and Greek designs but drew on a broader range of eastern styles among which Indian sources were prominent.(3) Like the Egyptian, the Indian stood for antiquity and sublimity, for the commercial and imperial domination of the East by Europe, and for a generic thrill related to but separable from these other effects.(4) Because of British involvement in the subcontinent, the Indian also foregrounded, more clearly than did domestically neutral Egyptian elements, the exotic style's potent but ambiguous status in the culture at large.(5) Indian designs were pervasive and controversial, and if the discourse surrounding them tended in one way or another to construct India as Other, it remained unclear whether this Other was properly an object of rigorous intellectual inquiry or a source of lucrative cheap thrills.(6) Meditating on how best to please his audience, Keats had concluded that they want is ... sensation, and his descriptions of eastern architecture are significant not because they express a vision of history but because of their sensationalism, which poses itself against the anti-pictorial, anti-commercial orthodoxy of the Regency's critical establishment.(7) The question of description is suggestive for an inquiry into the social elements of literary and taste because it bears on the fundamental between image and word. This difference, which criticism has often emphasized in order to favor the latter over the former, has recently faced a turn in theory. W. J. T. Mitchell, for example, refuses to absorb poetry and painting into a single semiotic but argues that there is no essential difference between them, and Christopher Collins, surveying research in psychology, concludes that mental imaging closely resembles the seeing of the eye, although their physiological and phenomenological differences are also important.(8) That is, we don't have to pretend to confuse poems with paintings in order to acknowledge that visual conceptions can be transmitted through the agency of language and that the pleasures of pictorial are genuinely visual.(9) The exclusively linguistic mind is thus a discriminating mind in an entirely social sense. The elite reader, whose interpretive strategies emphasize what is most difficult to do but also what can be naturalized over time, favors the culturally and semiotically allusive over the vulgarly, simply referential.(10) Complex codes of linguistic signification are more difficult to internalize than the Skills required by most pictorial strategies, which depend upon a combination of immediate, consensual understanding (a noun stands for a common, if potentially complicated, object) and detail-by-detail reconstruction of significant people, places, or things.(11) Conversely, when pleasure is generated by written language, not painting or sculpture, it offers to destabilize critical orders based in linguistic authority. As Collins argues, such orders maintain their own credibility by asseverating the truth of their written messages, but the power of words to produce images is an all-too-vivid reminder of their power to lie. …