Keats’s Ways: The Dark Passages of Mediation and Why He Gives Up Hyperion

Abstract

YOHEI IGARASHI Keats’s Ways: The Dark Passages ofMediation and Why He Gives Up Hyperion We could posit a desire for communication which is so strong, so idealistic and hence so frustrated, that it becomes inevitably a dream-state. —Geoffrey Hartman, “I. A. Richards and the Dream of Communication”1 I N A JOURNAL LETTER OF DECEMBER I 818—JANUARY 1819 TO GEORGE AND Georgiana in Kentucky, writing on the cusp of what will come to be hailed as his annus mirabilis, Keats offers his initial thoughts on the recent death ofTom and then meanders into a truly arresting thought experiment: [S]ometimes I fancy an immense separation, and sometimes, as at pres­ ent, a direct communication of spirit with you. . . . Now the reason why I do not feel at the present moment so far from you is that I rememb{er} your Ways and Manners and actions; I known you man­ ner ofthinking, you manner of feeling [sic]: I know what shape your joy or your sorrow w{ou}ld take, I know the manner ofyou walking, standing, sauntering, sitting down, laugh]ing,} punning, and evey [sic] action so truly that you seem near to me. You will rem{em}ber me in the same manner—and the more when I tell you that I shall read a passage of Shakspeare every Sunday at ten o Clock—you read one {a}t the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room.2 Keats’s dispatch had begun by assuring his brother and sister-in-law that, in the wake of Tom’s death, he has “scarce a doubt of immortality of some nature of [or] other” (LJK 2:4). Nor has he any doubt that souls in the af1 . Hartman, in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 35. 2. To'George and Georgiana Keats, December 16, 1818, in The Letters ofJohn Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:5. Keats’s letters are hereafter cited in the text as LJK followed by volume and page number. SIR, S3 (Summer 2014) 171 172 YOHEI IGARASHI terlife engage in unmediated communication with each other, and enjoy, like Milton’s angels, intuitive rather than discursive knowledge: “That will be one of the grandeurs of immortality—there will be no space and conse­ quently the only commerce between spirits will be by their intelligence of each other—when they will completely understand each other” (IJK 2:5). But in the intriguing thought experiment that follows, Keats transposes the ease of immortal interaction to the real world; he imagines a situation whereby he and his correspondents might achieve a similar kind of instan­ taneous, reciprocal “intelligence of each other.” Because each party pos­ sesses an abundant capacity for sympathetic imagination (“I known . . . you manner offeeling” [sic]), ifthey were to engage in a coordinated reading of Shakespeare, they would establish an intimate transatlantic connection and overcome the “immense separation” between London and Kentucky. Re­ membering the name of the ship George and Georgiana took to America six months earlier, the Telegraph—which alludes to the late eighteenthcentury semaphoric communications technology—while looking ahead to Mark Twain’s 1891 satirical treatment of its electric successor, one might name this scene “mental telegraphy.” One might even be tempted to call Keats’s scenario Shakespearean Skype. After all, his proposal of synchronized reading raises the same question about time difference that the railway made newly urgent in the early nineteenth century, and which lives on in the scheduling of today’s planned mediated interactions: “ten o Clock” in whose time zone?3 But even as Keats indulges in this fantasy of instantaneous communica­ tion, he intimates its counterfactual nature and the obstacles to true con­ tact. Note his final simile: he declines to liken his scenario to sighted indi­ viduals each sequestered in far-flung places and hence invisible to one another. That would be the more appropriate simile for the situation he narrates. That would also be a fitting, reflexive image for the very act of postal correspondence in which he is participating; as...