Remembering the Revolution: Wordsworth, Benjamin, and Mnemonic Critique

Abstract

ABSTRACTThat The Prelude records Wordsworth’s turn into himself and away from politics has become a commonplace in Romantic studies. However, the work of Walter Benjamin—a radical who finds revolutionary possibilities in tradition, memory, and nostalgia—suggests another reading of Wordsworthian subjectivity in The Prelude. Benjamin sees nostalgia for the past as a way of critiquing the present. Wordsworthian memory, I claim, functions in similar fashion as it registers an immanent critique of the French Revolution—that is, a critique rooted not in anti-revolutionary sentiment but based on the Revolution’s own founding, but forgotten, principles. Engaging in what Benjamin calls “blasting apart” the continuum of history, Wordsworth disrupts the chronologically linear progression of the poem in order to bring the past—his own and the Revolution’s—to bear on the present. My reading highlights moments where The Prelude depicts the new ritual events and holidays of the French Republic. Such commemorative actions aimed to remind the Revolutionaries of their founding ideals, but from Wordsworth’s perspective, these commemorations ultimately failed. Wordsworth implicitly critiques this mnemonic failure by juxtaposing it with his own ability to remember his past calling to become a poet.