Limited Analogies: Reading Relations in Wordsworth’s The Borderers

Abstract

All our reasonings concerning matter of fact are founded on a species of analogy. --David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding The other knows me merely by analogy--and that just is not knowing another mind! But I've already seen that nothing could be better than, could go beyond, analogy here! --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason IN PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS, WORDSWORTH CONSIDERS THE pleasure received from metrical language and ends up offering what is perhaps his most comprehensive but least original statement on aesthetic theory: I mean pleasure which mind derives from perception of in dissimilitude. This principle is great spring of activity of our minds, and their chief feeder. From this principle direction of sexual appetite, and all passions connected with it, take their origin: it is life of our ordinary conversation; and upon accuracy with which in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in are perceived, depend our and our feelings. (1) A commonplace of eighteenth-century aesthetics, as editors Jane Worthington Smyser and W. J. B. Owen note, Wordsworth's principle of similitude in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude, reflects a basic concern with workings of analogical thought. (2) If analogy was understood broadly in eighteenth century as a resemblance between things with regard to some circumstances, (3) Wordsworth is interested here in how analogical resemblances are determined in first place, and in how they determine many facets of life: aesthetic experience, of course, but also mental activity, passions, morality, judgment, and intercourse in all senses. Approaching this passage with concerns of queer theory and poststructuralist ethics in mind, recent readers have argued that Wordsworth privileges certain notions of sameness and difference: first half of his chiastic formulation (similitude in dissimilitude) has been criticized as a heteronormative principle that puts forth sexual difference as a necessary condition for attraction, while latter half (dissimilitude in similitude) has been valorized for emphasizing importance of difference in context of ethical relations. (4) And yet crux of Wordsworth's formulation does not so much involve sameness and/or difference as the accuracy with which in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in are perceived. least when it comes to taste and moral feelings, everything, for Wordsworth, would seem to not upon whether one privileges sameness or difference, but upon one's ability to discern difference between a and a dissimilitude. Everything would seem to depend, in other words, upon possibility of even knowing difference between difference and sameness. Of course, by most accounts, epistemological limits of analogy are supposed to be old news at beginning of nineteenth century. At beginning of seventeenth writes Michel Foucault, thought ceases to move in element of resemblance. Similitude is no longer form of knowledge but rather occasion for error. (5) Students of Romanticism will likely understand break Foucault identifies in terms of a more gradual shift, whereby a system of analogical correspondences that structured Renaissance ontology breaks down across Enlightenment as analogy comes to be seen as a merely rhetorical device, rather than an organizing principle that unifies physical, moral, and spiritual realms. According to both Earl Wasserman and M. H. Abrams, for example, the last significant vestige of myth of an analogically ordered is found in eighteenth century, albeit in a greatly weakened form, after literal belief in a universe of divine types and correspondences, which had originally supported this structural trope, faded. …