Shelley among Others: The Play of the Intertext and the Idea of Language by Stuart Peterfreund (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.3,2004 755 pression (in the material field) or the despair of that minority of writers (most notably Byron) who were disenchanted by the 'crowning carnage'. Brief review necessitates simplistic summary. It is unfair to the flexibilityof Shaw's nuanced and highly theorized account. The text readily leaps to overarching generalities to redefine Romanticism, drawing (often uncritically) upon authorities such as Lacan (not an obvious figure to quote on Waterloo) or Christensen. Some of the leaps are demanding. Thus Coleridge's Zapolya is claimed to reveal, as 'the meaning of Waterloo', 'the renunciation of endless erotic play in the resumption of symbolic castration' (p. 137) and Wordsworth's guilty confession of pleasure in the narration of battle is argued to show how, 'in the symbolic order [. . .] the poet's participation in a culture of sacrifice [. . .] finds a perverse form of reassurance, to invoke Rene Girard's analysis, in rehearsing the spectacle of its own dissolution' (pp. 140-41). This kind of writing functions at a high level of abstraction which, forthe 'pedestrian muse' of this reviewer, sometimes recalls Byron's comment on Coleridge (in the Dedication of Don Juan): 'I wish he would explain his explanation.' What exactly is meant, for instance, by the words 'real' and 'other' (with or without capitalization) in a statement such as 'With Coleridge there remains [. . .] the pathos of having failed to reach the place ofthe Real in the Other' (p. 130)? In contradistinctionone might claim that had Coleridge got to the 'real' he would have outsoared not only Plato but St Paul! Cardiff University Malcolm Kelsall Shelley among Others: The Play of theIntertext and theIdea ofLanguage. By Stuart Peterfreund. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2002. xiii + 4o6pp. ?38.50. ISBN 0-8018-6751-7. Stuart Peterfreund's aim is ambitious and laudable in a critical climate which is still redolent of fragmentariness and almost compulsory patchiness: 'to produce a com? prehensive study of Shelley's poetry, including most ofthe major poems and many of the so-called minor poems as well' (p. ix). This endeavour situates Peterfreund's book among those studies which attempt to draw together the idealistic and the politically grounded dimensions of Shelley's work, to make 'Shelley whole' so to speak, but it also acknowledges the heteroglossic nature of Shelley's thought and work. Broadly, Peterfreund attempts to discuss 'the intertextual and linguistic conceptions and prac? tices that Shelley himself deployed in seeking and claiming forhimself a place in the Western literary tradition' (p. ix). Peterfreund emphasizes the importance of philo? sophy, psychoanalytic criticism, and theories of language forhis own analysis and for Shelley' s understanding of the role of poetry in society. More specifically, Peterfreund examines what he understands 'Shelley's idea of language and its play to be, and how [he understands] this idea to inform the formal and thematic elements, as well as the social focus, of his poetry in general and of several of his major poems in particular' (p. 2). For Peterfreund, Shelley's play of language, throughout his ceuvre, centres primarily on the continuous tension between metaphor and metonymy: 'It is the drama of moving beyond historical contingency if not beyond temporality outright, the drama of fostering the reign of metaphor and forestalling the reign of metonymy, of fostering heteroglossia and forestalling the advent of a common language, that is the basis for the [sie] both the artistic and the social engagement of Shelley's poetry' (p. 24). So far so good. This focus on the tension between metaphor and metonymy, however useful as a starting point, is unfortunately reduced to a rather rigid instrument of evaluation, and, as a result, the texts under scrutiny suffer from readings which do not reflect the ongoing exploratory and probing struggle for elucidation so often at the heart 756 Reviews of Shelley's poetry. In some ways I read Shelley as a poet of obstinate questionings, who has, in Michael O'Neill's words, 'a dislike of reaching conclusions' (Romanti? cism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 131). Peterfreund 's interpretations, however, are geared towards conclusions which are coloured by the predominance of either metaphor or metonymy: 'Metaphor...