LA EDUCACIÓN EN EL PERÚ

“Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude” (1816) was actually written before “Mont Blanc” but dramatises the inner tension that the poet felt between his visionary yearnings and the external world. The title itself is riddled with ambiguity: the original Greek term means evil genius.¹³ It would appear therefore that the visionary poet, who rejects society and nature in favour of his own visions is pursued by an evil spirit, which stems from the spirit of solitude. I believe this points to Shelley’s sense of uncertainty with regards to the moral dimension of his visions, and his ambiguous epistemic standpoint with regards to the natural world. The title could also be ironic, in that many of Wordsworth’s former works often dealt with solitude, and that having recently read The Excursion (1814) both Percy and Mary were disappointed with Wordsworth’s later work, which they classed as traitorous to his earlier radicalism.¹⁴ Moreover, the opening quote of the poem is lifted from The Excursion, although it has been argued that this is also an ironic reference to Wordsworth’s perceived apostasy by Shelley, and that the framing device is a pastiche of the original Wordsworthian position. Earl Wasserman claims:

The framing structure of the two narratives is the same: in place of Wordsworth’s Wanderer, a disciple of nature who tells Margaret’s story and laments her early death, there is Shelley’s Narrator, who tells of the Visionary and might well subscribe to Wordsworth’s claim that the external world and the individual mind are exquisitely

“fitted” to each other. […] To Shelley, Wordsworth has not set his sights high enough and has defined man’s spirit too mundanely, too humanly: the truly good who are soonest taken out of life are not those with unwavering and devoted hope for, and faith in, an absent human love, but those who aspire to a vision that is absent because it can have no existence on earth.¹⁵

This reading of the framing device is key to the dialectical situation Shelley finds himself in. In effect, Shelley is trying to go beyond the Wordsworthian sense of metaphysical equipoise to new visionary heights. Therefore, in “Alastor,” he displaces the Wordsworthian motif into a visionary character, who attempts to go further and attempts to delve beyond the secrets of nature and in so doing to move centrifugally beyond the natural world as representation of the infinite. Wasserman further claims of the design of the poem:

…the Visionary seeks an Absolute which will match his mind’s perfect conceptions and ideals and, to use the language of “Oh! there are spirits,” [a poem supposedly dedicated to Coleridge] alone can answer his demands. Unlike the Narrator, who can boast that the creations of his nature are his “kindred” (15), the Visionary, moulded by his own visions, by nature’s best impulses, and by the true, good, and beautiful that philosophers have taught, early left his “alienated home” (76), an exile without kindred but filled with an insatiable need for some essence with which he can identify himself.¹⁶

The alienated home, upon a Hegelian reading, is also a symbol for the “station along the way” at which Wordsworth finds himself in his organicist conception.

Shelley is attempting to manoeuvre to a position beyond this, and in so doing has become dialectically alienated from his literal home and his home in the world. For Shelley there is no sense of Gefühl, and no sense of discovering a home embodied for example in the Vale of Grasmere. Importantly, he has not lost his spiritual and literal home as has Coleridge, but has chosen to exile himself. His is a movement

through the veil of the natural world. His “insatiable need for some essence with which he can identify himself” is the late-romantic urge towards some telos, which is not pantheistically experienced through the medium of the natural world.

Shelley’s poetry as such becomes in a sense disembodied, as he simply will not be able to experience the higher visions within the realm of the corporeal. This theme of an even higher, or as I have labelled it, centrifugal quest, Bloom correctly claims is in the lineage of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Bloom however fails to couch his argument in Hegelian terms, which pinpoints the precise nature of the movement between the three poets.

Such a theme [an infinite Sehnsucht in the form of a quest leading to the poet’s untimely death] would not have been acceptable to Wordsworth or Coleridge, and yet it is the legitimate offspring of their own art and imaginative theory. Indeed, Alastor is prompted by The Excursion, and echoes both the Intimations Ode and Kubla Khan.¹⁷

Shelley is trying to attain a transcendence of Wordsworthian organicism, which for his metaphysics falls short of The One, or Absolute, and in so doing he attempts to supersede the position of his two exemplars.¹⁸

For Shelley then, there is a divide here between on the one hand the narrator’s Wordsworthian reconciliation with nature, and on the other the visionary’s attempt to move dialectically beyond this position. This is a dichotomy examined in other poems by Shelley, such as the “Song of Pan” and “Song of Apollo” (1820).¹⁹ Shelley then explores a form of the Hegelian unhappy consciousness, where the ideal form has returned dialectically into itself, after seeking some form of recognition in the experience of the natural world. In centrifugally moving away from an embodied representation of itself, (embodied in the natural landscape) it seeks a new adequation beyond nature. In Hegel’s words it can no longer “toil itself”

into the form of a concrete figuration. Rather than attempting to toil itself into the

empirical world, the idea is attempting to transcend the world as represented by nature in the work of art. For Hegel philosophy takes over; for Shelley, aesthetics is the vehicle for this adequation of the Absolute/One.

The poem commences with a sense of a yearning in the opening invocation to the

“Great Parent” (45) by the main narrator, who, in love with nature, has “cherished these my kindred…” (15). However, there is an eschatological bent in the gothic imagery that the narrator invokes, as he continues:

And my heart ever gazes on the depth Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won from thee,

Hoping to still these obstinate questionings (22-26)

Shelley’s narrator, whilst loving the natural world for what existentially is, has still questionings that lead beyond the mortal world. Whilst he is projected by Shelley as the archetypal Wordsworthian poet of nature, he also provides us with the narrative of Shelley’s alter ego: the visionary, who has taken the next dialectical step in attempting to realise his ideal vision. Once the framing device is in place with the narrative of the visionary wanderer, we find that he visits “The awful ruins of the days of old” (108)²⁰ in order to seek timeless truths. Later, the narrator claims that

“…he saw/ The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.” (127-8) in the temple of Denderah in upper Egypt. This encounter suggests that ultimate truths are discerned by and exhibited in man’s representation of the universe in his aesthetic products.

Shelley is self-consciously attempting to go beyond nature as representation of the infinite, and finding, in the same way as Hegel, higher truths represented in aesthetics rather than in the contemplation of raw nature. These are truths which are embodied, and in a Hegelian sense, at the primitive and symbolic stage of representation; they are still however higher approximations of the concrete

universal than contemplation of nature. In the next lines of the poem the narrator moves beyond this concretised representation to his attempt at a higher, more spiritual Gestalt. This process is metaphorically figured with the appearance of the Arab maiden, who attempts, but fails, to wake the visionary from his reverie and enfold him in sensuous, corporeal love. Finally however, she returns to her “cold home/ Wildered, and wan, and panting, she returned.” (138-9). At this point the visionary has witnessed (what are for him) the highest, and still imperfect representations of The One, and has rejected (perhaps unknowingly) the advances of the beautiful Arab maiden. This marks the section of the poem after which the visionary can find no embodiment for his vision, and the true hamartia of his quest begins to take hold.

The poet next dreams of the “veiled maid” (151), an idealised vision, which as in

“Kubla Khan,” is available to the dreamer’s reverie, but once awakened the vision has gone. This is an autoerotic vision, and the poet is in fact projecting his own ideal-other in the guise of the dream-figure. In some of the most erotic lines in Shelley we are informed:

…He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet Her panting bosom:… she drew back a while, Then, yielding to the irresistible joy,

With frantic gesture and short breathless cry Folded his frame in her dissolving arms.

Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep, Like a dark flood suspended in its course,

Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain. (182-191)

Shelley uses a series of erotically-charged verbs and participles to invoke the erotic frenzy of the visionary, “shuddering” “gasping” and “panting,” and describes the scene in equally erotic adjectival phrases, “the irresistible joy” and “short breathless cry.” However, Shelley depicts an awareness of the overall illusory effect of the

imagery by using simple pentameter in uniform with the rest of the poem and therefore restraining the passionate content within a regular rhythm. On line 190, sleep “Like a dark flood suspended in its course,” once again clears the mind—sleep signifies the reality principle, which makes his brain “vacant” once again. This is the sad truth for the visionary: his brain will in effect remain “vacant” with regards to these illusory visions he pursues. The only true reality seems to be his empirical experience. Unfortunately, this does not suffice, and the narrator comments on the visionary’s newfound situation a few lines further on:

…His wan eyes Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly

As ocean’s moon looks on the moon in heaven.

The spirit of sweet human love has sent A vision to the sleep of him who spurned Her choicest gifts. He eagerly pursues

Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade;

He overleaps the bounds… (200-207)

The word “vacantly” is repeated and in this context he gazes vacantly because his mind (brain) has become vacant, and as such his empirical experience no longer works in an interchange with his mind. This is because the ideal vision of the maiden has forced him dialectically into the next shape of consciousness—which for Hegel would be disclosure of reason as Ousia. For the poetic aesthete however, the mind searches for continued interchange between the mind and the empirical world—in a sense his mental sinews continue to work in the way they are accustomed. Here, as with Coleridge, we have a punctum of Shelley’s Romanticism;

the realisation of a space beyond the sensuous, however a noetic praxis for which the poet is unable to legislate, due to his continued reliance on aesthetics as the final cipher of The One.

The only recourse for the poet, at this impasse, is to countenance the conceptualisation of death. Therefore, he faces a choice between eschatology and a

life–affirming realisation of the concrete universal. Shelley utilises his latent Platonism, and pursues a dualistic solution to his aporia. This leads to a rhetorical question and ensuing aporetic exclamations:

…Alas, alas!

Were limbs, and breath, and being intertwined Thus treacherously? Lost, lost, for ever lost In the wide pathless desert of dim sleep,

That beautiful shape! Does the dark gate of death Conduct to thy mysterious paradise,

O sleep? Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds, And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake, Lead only to a black and watery depth,

While death’s blue vault, with loathliest vapours hung, (207-216)

Shelley feels the pull of death and the questioning in his, as in Hamlet’s, mind. He ponders whether or not after death we re-enter a lost paradise, a Shelleyan paradise stripped of all Christian lore, but holding hope for a return to the ideal visions visited upon him in mortal sleep. He cannot embrace death in life and therefore death remains an abstract entity for the poet—and this factor functions as an adjunct to his overall poetic enterprise. Thus, Shelley remains in the state of the unhappy consciousness, and this unhappy consciousness will act antithetically within the framework of the poem: the poet will be haunted by the visions for which he once sought in vain. This is due to the failure on the part of the visionary to take the next dialectical step of absorbing death into the overall Hegelian Idea. Maurice Merleau- Ponty sums up the Hegelian movement of recognition of death in the conceptualisation of the concrete universal thus:

Death is the negation of all particular given beings, and consciousness of death is a synonym for consciousness of the universal, but it is only an empty or abstract universal as long as we remain at this point. We cannot in fact conceive nothingness except against a background of being (or, as Sartre says, against the world).

Therefore, any notion of death which claims to hold our attention is deceiving us, since it is in fact surreptitiously using our consciousness of being. To plumb our awareness of death, we must

transmute it into life, “interiorize” it, as Hegel said. The abstract universal which starts out opposed to life must be made concrete.²¹

Shelley misses out on the crucial philosophical point here—that the “abstract universal which starts out opposed to life must be made concrete.” Wordsworth in effect absorbs the abstract concepts of nature and death into his organic conception and therefore formulates a partial conception of the concrete universal through his aesthetics. Shelley goes beyond the abstract conceptualisation of nature to a vision rooted in the realm of the ideal. However, this movement does not entail the absorption of Nature into the overall Idea—it remains an abstract universal to Shelley. His only option to move to the next dialectical stage is to embrace death as part of the concrete universal—but instead death also remains for Shelley at the stage of abstract universal, and therefore he remains dialectically ‘lodged’ and unable to move to a new space or Gestalt. Henceforward, Shelley becomes for the rest of “Alastor” pursued by his own visions, or his own ironical demon. In fact, from a critical perspective, this is possibly the reason why the poem itself becomes at times repetitive and at times gratuitous, in the next 500 lines or so. For the remainder of the poem Shelley describes the visionary’s unhappy wanderings in nature, which eventually lead him to his own death.

The source of the imagination is interrogated using the symbol of a river—and again, as in Wordsworth and Coleridge, there is no definitive answer for the poet.²² Indeed, the search turns out to be one for death itself, which though not intellectually embraced and subsumed within the Hegelian Idea, can at least be literally embraced:

The meeting boughs and implicated leaves Wove twilight o’er the Poet’s path, as led By love, or dream, or god, or mightier Death, He sought in Nature’s dearest haunt, some bank, Her cradle, and his sepulchre… (426-430)

After originally attempting to transcend nature, Shelley is now led by nature, but at the same time alienated by nature. What is nature’s “cradle” is antithetically the poet’s “sepulchre.” Wordsworth, in accepting nature as his mother, and the cradle of his psychology and imagination, reconciles himself to its otherwise abstract presence. In so doing, Wordsworth manages to transcend the romantic deworlded subjectivity he finds himself in at points in The Prelude. However, for Shelley, nature’s cradle becomes a grave for the alienated consciousness that has failed to absorb the ideal of the concrete universal. This image also implies that Shelley wishes to return to the source of life itself, but that this source can only be apprehended—if at all—in death. The narcissistic archetype that is explored in the poem is also reversed later when the poet catches a glimpse of himself in the pool, within the cavern:

Hither the Poet came. His eyes beheld Their own wan light through the reflected lines Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth Of that still fountain; as the human heart, Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave,

Sees its own treacherous likeness there… (469-474)

The poet sees an aged and wretched version of his formerly beautiful visage, a visage that has now become distorted by its own solitary search for an ideal reflection of itself in the natural world. For Shelley, there is no form of recognition between the poet and the external world, and additionally no recognition beyond the immanent world of reality. The figure of the human heart glimpsing itself in

“dreams over the gloomy grave” reinforces this point. But more than this, even in death, or in visions of death in dreams, the poet has little hope of any kind of recognitive knowledge; death’s likeness to the human is “treacherous.” The poet is therefore alienated both in the world of empirical experience and eschatologically, as he finds no speculative recompense even in the possibility of a life after death.

Later, the poet actually discovers the source of all thought and conceptualisation is indeed rooted within his own unhappy and divided consciousness. This, however, means that the poet gains no sense of recognition in anything exterior, and in going further into the subterranean cave he has entered he is in fact going further back into his own mind. He has discovered a solipsism for which therefore all speculations upon the natural world and death are introspective self-reflections, meaning that the poet has in fact embarked upon an inward path rather than on an outward spiritual search:

“O stream!

Whose source is inaccessibly profound, Whither do thy mysterious waters tend?

Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness, Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulphs, Thy searchless fountain and invisible course Have each their type in me:… (502-508)

Shelley uses the symbol of the stream to represent his own mental excursion rather than any physical excursion into exterior space. The main reason for this is that Shelley has countenanced the physical world, and has been unable to formulate a

Shelley uses the symbol of the stream to represent his own mental excursion rather than any physical excursion into exterior space. The main reason for this is that Shelley has countenanced the physical world, and has been unable to formulate a