The Work of the Negative: Symbolic, Gothic, and Romantic in Shelley and Hegel

Abstract

I IN A DEFENCE OF POETRY (1821), AMIDST SEVERAL CONVENTIONALLY ROMANTIC figurations of it, (1) Shelley also describes poetry as a secret alchemy that turns to potable gold poisonous waters that flow from death through life (533). The phrase marks persistence in Shelley's work of what Jerrold Hogle calls a sensibility, and points back to his second Gothic novel St. Irvyne (1811), (2) whose plot has as its absent cause alchemist Ginotti. In that novel Ginotti sees a ... borne on sweet strain of music. Like famous Brocken-spectre that so fascinated Romantics, (3) this phantasm suddenly changes into a gigantic and deformed shape (St. Irvyne, 237), anticipating Shelley's last poem, The Triumph of Life (1822). For Hogle, discussing earlier work, Shelley struggles against this 'Gothic' psyche with its oscillation between light and darkness, seeking to transform death into life, and managing to put an 'intelligent' Soul in place of vacancy through a kind of deism. (4) In this paper I will suggest a more profoundly generative relationship between Romantic and Gothic, while thinking Gothic more broadly in terms of what Shelley's contemporary Hegel calls Symbolic. For Hegel uses term in a sense almost opposite to way it is understood by Goethe and Coleridge, so as to signify an art that is premature and malformed rather than one that embodies general in particular. (5) Unusually for a period in which aesthetic was associated with beautiful, Hegel also makes a place for this art that fails to adequate[ly] embody the Idea, which can only be signified through symbols that set reader task of deciphering them without actually attaining to decipherment. (6) As a form that is adolescent and manic, Hegelian Symbolic aptly describes one side of disconnection of modes in St. Irvyne. The novel has two plots whose disjunction, lest we fail to notice it, is also marked by omission of two chapters. In main plot ostensible hero is Wolftein, though its prime mover is Ginotti, obscure symbolic figure who sanctions Wolftein's poisoning of bandit Cavigni in order to obtain lovely Megalena de Metastasio. The names are themselves significant, in this novel that egregiously confuses foreign nationalities: Ginotti suggests an Italian cunning, whereas Wolfstein's name is rough and Germanic. In main plot Ginotti functions as Mephistophelean shadow and Dark Interpreter of increasingly dissolute Wolfstein, until plot disposes of both of them in its Faustian conclusion. But novel is also sporadically intersected by a Radcliffean subplot, focused on more elegantly named Eloise, who turns out to be Wolfstein's sister, even though she is French while he is Bohemian. Eloise is seduced by casuistical Nempere, rescued by another libertine, and finally ends up marrying Fitzeustace, a Peacockian parody of typical Shelleyan Poet. This Romantic subplot fantastically escapes Gothic sensibility of main plot by which it is enveloped. For Nempere turns out to be Ginotti, which means that Nempere, though killed off in subplot, is still alive in main plot, thus casting doubt on whether his metamorphic alias Ginotti is indeed dead. But do we want to dispose of Ginotti and work of negative figured by Gothic? And do reductive conventions of Gothic, in turn, foreclose upon a certain Symbolic excess in novel? Or does novel's titular echo of Godwin's St. Leon (1799), where alchemy is also a figure for schemes of sociopolitical improvement, make Ginotti a shorthand figure for some future and as yet undigested transformation of the poisonous waters that flow from death through life (DP, 533)? Indeed before its unsatisfying conclusion, Ginotti had opened up Symbolic potential of Gothic by promising Wolfstein elixir of life. …