Reviews

Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language. By John T. Hamilton.

New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. xviii + 252 pp.

This superb book is a worthy successor to John T. Hamilton’s first book, Solic-
iting Darkness. Unlike the temporally expansive earlier book, which traced
the history of poetic obscurity from its origins in Pindar down to the Roman-
tic period, the new one concentrates on a series of texts — from Diderot’s Le
neveu de Rameau through several of Hoffmann’s works — that cover a half
century of writing about the relation of music and madness. Yet Hamilton’s
ability to place a wide range of texts in their appropriate historical tradition
is just as evident here, for he constantly has recourse to ancient texts — such
as Plato’s various statements on music — to make his points.
More than a quarter of the new book is devoted to Diderot’s great dia-
logue, which introduced the conflation of music and madness into mod-
ern thought in the person of the title character. The two chapters on the
dialogue are remarkable not only for the precision with which Hamilton
analyzes the text’s language and irony but also for the context in which he
situates it. These contexts include Rousseau’s ideas on music; such Platonic
dialogues as The Sophist, Cratylus, and Phaedrus; Horatian satire; and, most
notably, the myth of Apollo and Marsyas from antiquity through Dante and
Titian and thence into Diderot’s reshaping of it in the relationship between
his characters Moi and Lui.
Hamilton devotes a whole chapter to Hegel’s use of Le neveu de Rameau
in Phänomenologie des Geistes, a conduit of the dialogue’s ideas for later writ-
ers. Hegel quotes Diderot at three points to portray the state of mind that he
calls Zerrissenheit, by means of which the spirit achieves Bildung, in contrast
to that unselfconscious, harmonious state that Hegel attributed to antiquity.
As Hamilton stresses, it is not accidental that during the early nineteenth
century Diderot’s dialogue exercised a more powerful influence in Germany
than in France, for in 1805, long before its publication in 1821 in French, it
appeared in Goethe’s translation, by means of which it not only helped Hegel
formulate a key concept but also reached such later texts linking music and
madness as Kleist’s Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik  and Hoffmann’s
Ritter Gluck, Rat Crespel, and Kater Murr, all of which receive extended analysis
in the book’s final two chapters.
Hamilton’s history of the two linked concepts relies not simply on

Modern Language Quarterly 71:2 (June 2010)

© 2010 by University of Washington
214 MLQ June 2010

the power of Diderot’s dialogue but also on writings on the sublime from
Longinus to the beginning of the nineteenth century. However these writ-
ings differ — and Hamilton distinguishes between them with considerable
finesse — they reduce the subject to a relatively passive, nonrational state, and
it is thus that the experience of the sublime can open the door to madness.
Among the significant analysts of the sublime, only Kant ignored the power
of music. Burke, though writing little about music, at least had acknowl-
edged the power of sound. The sublimity of music and, consequently, its
ability to bend, even to undo, the mind was, as Hamilton shows, particu-
larly powerful in certain passages of Herder and in Wackenroder’s novella
Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders. In the latter book, and
later in Hoffmann’s tales, it becomes difficult to separate the experiences
of the protagonists from those of their authors. Indeed, in a brief epilogue
Hamilton cites the case of Nietzsche, in which ideas about music and mad-
ness converge both in the philosopher’s writings and in his life history.
Herder’s analyses of the experience of music have a particular relevance,
I might add, to certain scientific studies of music’s effect today. When Herder
speaks of the “involuntary reaction” of our nerve fibers (84) or of the “intoxi-
cating” effects of music (115), he anticipates the discoveries, all in recent
years, of neuroscientists. Through the use of scanning techniques, above
all functional magnetic resonance imaging, scientists have established that
music affects the same brain networks as food and drugs.1
Hamilton’s study, as the title indicates, focuses not simply on music and
madness but on their relation to language or on “the unworking of lan-
guage.” Indeed, his descriptions of changes in the way that we conceive of
language is one of the strongest elements of this book. It is scarcely acciden-
tal, as Hamilton demonstrates, that the obsession with music and madness at
the turn of the nineteenth century developed as the traditional, representa-
tional view of language became open to question. “Writers who turn to the
topic of music and madness,” he concludes, “do so in order to unwork the
limitations endemic to the language of representation” (195).
Citing the philosopher Charles Taylor, Hamilton speaks of the shift
from a “designative” (or representational) view to a “disclosive” view of lan-
guage (159 – 60). Once readers and listeners began to seek out “sublime”
experiences, the rational faculty that had remained almost unquestioned
in Western thought gave way to a validation of nonrational forms of expe-

1  See, e.g., Vinod Menon and Daniel J. Levitin, “The Rewards of Music Listen-

ing: Response and Physiological Connectivity of the Mesolimbic System,” NeuroImage

28 (2005): 175 – 84. I describe a number of other studies about the effects of music
on the brain in “Arts in the Brain; or, What Might Neuroscience Tell Us?” in Toward
a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2010), 13 – 35.
Halmi Review 215

rience that could not easily be expressed in a logical and verbal way. The
nonverbal nature of music provided an ideal escape from the limitations of
language. Yet the break with rationality, as the texts Hamilton analyzes show,
also opened the door to the experience of madness.
Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language can serve as a model in
literary study today. It is both a rigorous history of an idea, or of several
closely connected ideas, and a searching analysis of some major literary and
philosophical texts. It is, in short, a living testimony that philological learn-
ing and literary sensibility can be happily compatible.
Herbert Lindenberger

Herbert Lindenberger is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities Emeritus at

Stanford University. His books encompass topics such as Wordsworth, historical
drama, critical theory, and opera. He is finishing a book on the social and intel-
lectual contexts of opera.

doi 10.1215/00267929-2010-006

The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism. By Adam Potkay.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xiii + 304 pp.

Receiving a literary prize from the Austrian government, the novelist

Thomas Bernhard, by way of thanks, remarked that human life is mostly
miserable and ends in death. The story of joy, we learn from Adam Potkay’s
wide-ranging and stimulating study, is much the same — not the experi-
ence of joy itself but the conditions in which that experience is articulated:
“Were it not for death, and its prefiguration in absence and loss, we might
still have joy, but we wouldn’t have the same need for stories about joy”
(235 – 36). While M. H. Abrams once suggested that Romantic affirmations
of life may have lost their relevance to “an age of profounder decay and der-
eliction than Shelley and Wordsworth knew,”1 Potkay speculates that joy is
less accessible to a society — contemporary American society, specifically—
that has “less imaginative engagement with death” (236) than societies of
earlier eras or other places. Why so little joy in the land premised on the
pursuit of happiness?

1  M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971), 452.

216 MLQ June 2010

Potkay’s answer derives from his conception of joy as an evanescent sus­

pension of ordinary experience: “a sudden illumination, a climactic moment . . .
a gift, an experience of fullness” (20). In contrast to happiness, which
Potkay, with reference to the Stoics, defines as an ethical ideal of rational
contentment (20 – 21), joy is a disruptive experience of irrational, even inef-
fable, fulfillment. If it proves elusive in bourgeois American life, the reason,
according to the diagnosis offered in the book’s conclusion, is that its name
has been misappropriated by advertising executives for the sake of a perva-
sive commodification of pleasure. Inspired by Randall Jarrell’s depiction,
in his poem “Next Day,” of a woman proceeding down a supermarket aisle
of incongruously named washing products, Potkay observes drily, “ ‘Joy,’ a
Procter and Gamble product that allows me to clean my dishes cheaply and
efficiently, is the instrumental cause of a mild pleasure in my life; it does not,
however, occasion joy” (223). We may see beauty decreed in the marketplace,
as Ezra Pound lamented, but we won’t find joy in the kitchen sink.
So the story of joy — or, rather, The Story of Joy — has its villains, of whom
the “ad men” are the secular successors to the original killjoys, early Prot-
estant theologians. In one of the most interesting chapters Potkay argues
compellingly that once joy was interpreted, in early Protestantism, as an
assurance of God’s presence — and hence as a supplement to, if not an out-
right substitute for, the sacraments — its proclamation became an obliga-
tion. Yet being by definition a divine gift, spiritual joy could not be humanly
willed, and Luther himself lamented its absence in his life. As Potkay nicely
formulates the paradox, “Spiritual joy, so intensely desirable in Protestant
theology, announces its elusiveness through the very insistence with which
it is invoked” (78). By making this individual feeling an index of its distinc-
tion from Catholic sacramentalism, Protestantism condemned itself to a
permanent anxiety about joylessness, an anxiety that Potkay traces through
Spenser, Donne, and Bunyan to Defoe.
Need joy be an individual feeling, however? Though Potkay understands
joy as involving “an expansion and at least partial loss of self,” his definition
of it as “primarily a mental state” implies that it is an individual experience
(2 – 3): a momentary or partial loss of individuality, after all, presupposes
individuality as the normative condition. Moreover, the differentiation of
joy from happiness hinges on exactly this issue: “As an ethical evaluation,
[happiness] can pertain to the condition of an individual . . . or  of commu-
nity or political nation” (2; my italics). Three of the kinds of joy that Potkay
distinguishes, religious (discussed in chap. 1, which ranges from the Bible to
Aquinas, and in chap. 3, on Protestant theology), erotic (discussed in chap.
2, on the troubadours), and ethical (discussed in chap. 4, on Shaftesbury),
clearly are individual; but the “tragic joy” of Nietzsche and Yeats (discussed
in chap. 8) seems to me a more ambiguous case, insofar as it consists in an
“embrace of fatality” (203), a longing for the complete dissolution of the
Halmi Review 217

self. If, in tragic joy, “what is fulfilled . . . is a cycle of history coming to an

end,” as Potkay writes (referring to Yeats’s poem “The Gyres”), then what the
individual feels, as a participant in the historical cycle, is not fulfillment but
an anticipation of or longing for annihilation. And longing is precisely not
fulfillment. That is why the assimilation of German Romantic Sehnsucht to
joy, near the end of Potkay’s analysis of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (185),
is also unpersuasive.
To restate this objection in more general terms: if this learned, lively,
and attractively written book suffers from one methodological flaw, it is a
tendency to cast its net a little too widely, guided by historical uses of the
word joy (and its equivalents in languages other than English). Thus it does
not wholly avoid the problem of family resemblances, whereby A may have
something in common with B, and B in turn with C, but A and C need not
have anything in common beyond the word by which they are designated.
But fortunately this problem is restricted to chapters 7 and 8, which pro-
ceed rather breathlessly from Schiller to Auschwitz by way of Blake, Shelley,
Joseph Smith, Wagner, Nietzsche, and Yeats, with a one-paragraph excursus
on Hoyt Axton’s hit song “Joy to the World.”
At the book’s center Potkay mounts a challenge to “a facile historical
meta-narrative that links modernity with progressive secularization” (x). His
alternative is a narrative of secularization by means of productive tension
between the religious and the secular — in short, a dialectic. Accordingly,
he interprets Shaftesbury’s notion of virtuous conduct not as a revival of
pagan Stoicism but as a salvaging of Christian caritas from Christianity itself
(98 – 99), and he insists on Coleridge’s retention of “something of joy’s Chris-
tian context” in the interiorized joy imagined in “Dejection: An Ode” (150).
Whether or not one accepts such claims of conceptual affinities will depend,
in part, on one’s definition of secularization — and it is a shame that Potkay
does not elaborate on his own understanding of the term. But he is surely
right to identify a Shaftesburian heritage in Wordsworth’s view of “ joy as the
crucial element in the formation of the habitual actions that constitute moral
virtue” (125) and to characterize Wordsworth’s poetry as a celebration of
“an erotically charged natural terrain and a sexually muted human nature”
(122). Potkay’s acuity and subtlety as a close reader are manifested through-
out the book, but nowhere more than in his chapter on Wordsworth.
Surprisingly, Wordsworth reappears at the end of The Story of Joy, where
“Tintern Abbey” is linked with Sam Mendes’s film American Beauty  in affirm-
ing “the joy of elevated thoughts,” affirmations made not in ignorance of,
still less in denial of, the world’s evils but in the very face of them. If, finally,
Potkay’s study is itself less joyful than elegiac, it teaches us to value the expe-
rience of joy as an act of defiance against both the dreariness of life and the
terror of death.
Nicholas Halmi
218 MLQ June 2010

Nicholas Halmi, University Lecturer in English Literature of the Romantic Period

at the University of Oxford, is author of The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol
(2007) and editor of the forthcoming Norton Critical Edition of William Words-
worth’s poetry and prose.

doi 10.1215/00267929-2010-007

The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol. By Nicholas Halmi. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2007. viii + 206 pp.

The pleasures of reading Nicholas Halmi’s Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol

are many: conciseness, the well-turned phrase, scholarly reach and breadth,
originality, and above all the excitement of feeling oneself riding a sea
change in critical and intellectual history. These pleasures are multiplied by
the importance of Halmi’s topic. Although he devotes much more attention
to German idealism and Naturphilosophie than to its British proponents—
Coleridge predominantly, of course — anyone interested in the history of the
Romantic symbol, and the bearing of that history on the concept itself, will
find a great deal of compelling and challenging material between the covers
of this surprisingly slim volume.
Halmi’s central thesis is that the intractable contradictions and anoma-
lies that have emerged over some two centuries of commentary on this sub-
ject do not represent something fundamental about the Romantic symbol,
something profound and ineffable yet essential and thus in need of careful
(and apparently unending) explication. Rather, they tell us something fun-
damental about Western intellectual history and the moment in its develop-
ment that we call “Romantic.” “At once infinitely meaningful and incapable
of being reduced to any particular meaning” (2), sequestered from allegory
only by repeated acts of critical coercion and bad faith, and often “indistin-
guishable from conventional tropes” like synecdoche (3), the Romantic sym-
bol as a theoretical concept poses for Halmi only one important question:
“whether its irrationality did not serve some purpose for which reason was
inadequate. In other words, what intellectual and social purposes might the
concept of the symbol have served for the Romantics?” (5). Halmi’s book is
an attempt to historicize the concept of the Romantic symbol and thereby
reveal its intellectual necessity as a product of the demands and pressures—
scientific, philosophical, and religious — of a particular culture at a particu-
lar place and time.
For Halmi, the “symbol” achieved its indeterminate, indeterminable
conceptual status in reaction to the Enlightenments flattening out of the
Rzepka Review 219

traditional notion of allegory — a fundamentally religious notion — into an

artificial sign: “arbitrary, motivated, discursive, and contextually dependent”
(13). In opposition to the medieval “culture of the sign,” ultimately grounded
by faith in the divine Logos, the Enlightenment bequeathed to the Roman-
tics only a “philosophy of the sign, meaning the reductive analysis of culture
in semiotic terms — and precisely in the absence of the ideological coher-
ence that had characterized medieval culture” (14). The Romantics sought
to redeem representation by defining its conditions not institutionally or
epistemologically (as the Enlightenment sought to do) but “ontologically”
(14), transcending the dualism of semiotics altogether by appealing to an
aesthetic monism in which any and every “thing” could be interpreted as a
symbol of something whose reality it shared and thus immediated. “Natural-
izing the symbol” made all of nature “symbolic,” and being and meaning
(theoretically) identical.
In chapter 2, “Burdens of Enlightenment,” Halmi traces in the philoso-
phers and scientists of the Enlightenment a longing to reconcile the age’s per-
spectival “anthropocentrism with the idea of ‘nature’s truth’ as perspectivally
neutral” (32). The sublime was a perfect example (especially in the Kantian
formulation) of the finite part (subjectively perceived) that stood for (gave an
impression or representation of) the infinite whole that was otherwise inac-
cessible to the individual imagination. The emergence of landscape and its
aesthetics as theme and topic in the eighteenth century embodied analogous
contradictions. Landscape appreciation, especially in the picturesque mode,
offered a “subjectivist aesthetics” that “compensated” for the scientific posit-
ing of the necessary separation of observed nature from observing subject
in the pursuit of knowledge (32). The Romantics eventually became dissatis-
fied with this “aesthetic compensation” (37) and sought instead an unme-
diated version of the “perceived infinite” in the experience of the sublime
(44). Kant’s apparently superfluous vindication of reason’s “supersensuous
vocation” in the “sensuous confirmation” of the sublime (48), in turn, belied
a fundamental uneasiness with his own enlightened, dualistic assumptions
and faith in the inherent supremacy of reason over sense.
In his last three chapters Halmi examines how theorists of the Roman-
tic symbol, along with their critics and commentators, attempted to allay,
elide, elude, or reconcile these contradictions by resorting to the intellectual
resources of philosophy, theology, and mythology. Since chapter 4, “Uses of
Theology,” focuses almost exclusively on Coleridge, I shall reserve my com-
ments on this chapter until the end.
In chapter 3, “Uses of Philosophy,” Halmi notes how four crucial changes
in the West’s understanding of its relationship to nature potentiated the phil-
osophical justifications of the Romantic symbol that are his central theme:
the “vindication of visibility” (65) in the new sciences of natural history, with
a consequent “non-subjectivist recuperation of sensible intuition” (64) as
220 MLQ June 2010

an alternative form of knowledge to the abstract, impersonal language of

mathematics; the transformation of the medieval microcosmic-macrocosmic
analogy governing humanity’s understanding of its relation to the universe
from a participatory to an oppositional model demanding sublimation; the
acceptance of a version of Spinozan metaphysical monism shorn of its athe-
istic implications; and the substitution of vitalism for mechanism as a theory
of matter and its causal processes. Ultimately, Naturphilosophie  sought to
revise and reconcile the semiotic contradictions inherent in these changes
ontologically: self and world are a single entity (as Spinoza argued), part
and whole, but this entity evolves teleologically (for it is alive) and continu-
ally increases in knowledge of itself as a collective expression of subjective,
sensible intuitions.
In chapter 5, “Uses of Mythology,” Halmi shows how these crises in the
natural sciences and in human self-understanding prompted the Romantic
theorists of the symbol, especially in Germany, to call for a new mythology
to provide the social integument of the age, on the model of the ancient
mythologies. But of course, the contradictions of such an appropriation
loomed large: how could one consciously adapt an exploded mythology to
the foundational symbolic demands of consciousness inhabiting another
place and time? Lacking an inherited mythology, how did one evolve or
create a new mythology to serve as an instrument of “social identification
and unification” (136)? Herder suggested using the old myths as “models
of allegorizing” when in fact a new mythology was already deployed and
dominant, an Enlightenment mythology “that was to be free of myths” (152).
This new mythology, perfectly transparent and “uninterpretable” in itself
(153), “disallow[ed] the freedom to form alternative stories” (150) except in
the realm of the aesthetic: thus the new mythological epics of Hölderlin,
Shelley, Keats, and other Romantic poets, which fell far short of what phi-
losophers like Herder were calling for. A mythology, as opposed to the indi-
vidual symbolic meaning conveyed by, say, Prometheus Unbound or Hyperion,
requires a “communal intuition,” “a body of shared assumptions and percep-
tions that, precisely by being shared, need not be articulated or explicitly
acknowledged in order to perform their social function” (159).
In chapter 4, “Uses of Theology,” Halmi seeks mainly to disentangle the
Romantic symbol from attempts to Christianize it, whether by Coleridge or
by subsequent commentators like Thomas McFarland and Robert Barth, as
well as to secularize it in the spirit of M. H. Abrams’s epical Natural Super-
naturalism.1 For Halmi, Coleridge’s sustained but ultimately self-defeating
efforts to reconcile Christian theology and the doctrine of consubstantiality
with the concept of the Romantic symbol were both “wishful” and ambigu-

1  M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Lit-

erature (New York: Norton, 1971).

Rzepka Review 221

ous, thereby allowing him “to avoid making the choice . . . between simply
rejecting the Incarnation as incomprehensible . . . or more prudently alle-
gorizing it as the philosophically necessary unity of the transcendent and
the immanent” (126), a move that would compromise its Christian essence.
This contradiction is abundantly apparent when Coleridge, writing on the
consubstantiality of the Eucharist, attempts to endorse a part-whole repre-
sentative structure without embracing the trope of synecdoche, which would
impute “divinity to the sacramental elements themselves” and turn “the sac-
rament into an idol” (130).
Following the elegant turns in Halmi’s examination of endeavors to
Christianize Coleridge’s speculations on the symbol and the Trinity, which
turn out to be more indebted to pagan Neoplatonism than to patristic doc-
trine, I was prepared for an equally revelatory analysis of similar appropria-
tions from the opposite direction, secularization. Yet for someone who posits
the origins of the Romantic symbol in the Enlightenment’s transformation
of the religious culture of the sign into a secular philosophy, Halmi seems
oddly oblivious to the affinities between his own position and Abrams’s read-
ing of these developments in Natural Supernaturalism. Like Colin Jager in The
Book of God, another entry in the resurgence of interest in, and reassessment
of, Romantic religion, Halmi sees in Abrams an idol to pull down rather than
an ally to embrace.2 The “reoccupation” of “the systematic positions of the
divine persons” of the Trinity by the “constituent elements” of Coleridge’s
version of the symbol, Halmi insists, “should not be confused . . . with the
secularization of Christian teachings” (121), in Abrams’s terms.
That Abrams has little or nothing to say about the Romantic symbol
(it is missing entirely from his expansive index) makes Halmi’s attack look
superfluous at best. It is motivated, apparently, by a desire to promote what
Halmi, like Jager, takes to be Hans Blumenberg’s superior description of
what Abrams calls “secularization,” namely, “reoccupation.” “Whereas reoc-
cupation preserves a conceptual system in form while changing it in content,
secularization does just the opposite,” writes Halmi (121). Here is Abrams’s
description of the process he has in mind: “Despite their displacement from
a supernatural to a natural frame of reference, . . . the ancient problems,
terminology, and ways of thinking about human nature and history sur-
vived . . . as the presupposition and forms of . . . thinking about . . . the his-
tory and destiny of the individual and of mankind” (Abrams, 13; emphasis
mine). If, as Halmi points out, Blumenberg himself “strangely declined” to
criticize Abrams when invited to do so (122), one might expect a similar
degree of reticence from Halmi, who, to his credit, gives us Blumenberg’s
gracious response: “I don’t want to speak against M. H. Abrams’s seculariza-

2  Colin Jager, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Phila-

delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

222 MLQ June 2010

tion schema. Methodologically, the essential thing would be to show the

conditions under which one can speak of secularization. In what relation
do the secularized concepts stand to their point of departure?” (122). In
Natural Supernaturalism they stand, arguably, in a relation very close to the
one described by Blumenberg.
Aside from this detour into matters only tangentially related to the con-
cept of the Romantic symbol, Halmi provides much more bang for the buck
on that subject than anyone else, to my knowledge, for the last half century
or so, and he is particularly illuminating on Coleridge. His voluminous foot-
notes hardly ever fail to satisfy, and they often delight. A work that wears its
considerable weight of knowledge lightly, with style and grace, The Genealogy
of the Romantic Symbol  is the kind of book whose growing, and glowing, repu-
tation will soon, I expect, make reviews like this one unnecessary.
Charles Rzepka

Charles Rzepka is professor of English at Boston University. He is author of The

Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats (1986) and
Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (1995), as
well as of Detective Fiction (2005), a cultural history of the genre.

doi 10.1215/00267929-2010-008

Milton and the Victorians. By Erik Gray. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 2009. ix + 183 pp.

Milton and the Victorians is a wonderfully uncontentious book. Who would

doubt that John Milton, the eminent national poet, figured as such in nine-
teenth-century Britain and beyond? One may, of course, question the exis-
tence of a consolidated body called “the Victorians,” as Erik Gray is aware
(13). One may, moreover, be diffident about the shape of a “Victorian Mil-
ton” as it arises in the title of chapter 1. Are we invited to inspect the Vic-
torians’ relation to a nineteenth-century phantom rather than to Milton
(1608 – 74), thus bypassing the question of influence? But then, influence
may be defined by the logic of cause and effect, which recognizes the latter
as the true reason for the former. It is the river that establishes the source.
Why not focus on a Victorian Milton, the more so as the concept of “the Vic-
torians” may acquire a profile from a shared attitude to Milton?
For Gray, that profile is delineated by Harold Bloom, Joseph Wittreich,
Hofmann Review 223

and others, who assign the anxiety of Milton’s influence to the Romantics
and relegate the Victorians to a separate category with regard to Milton’s
reception. The Victorians, with anxieties of their own, are circumscribed by
their acceptance of Milton rather than by self-consciously asserting them-
selves against his influence. By developing this line of argument, Gray’s book
takes part in a discussion documented recently in this journal.1
Gray conscientiously avoids pleading his case by suppressing or mini-
mizing Miltonic traces in Victorian literature. Carefully noting his own and
other people’s findings, he even labels as borrowings words and phrases
that Victorian authors may share with Milton only by coincidence. If Eve in
Paradise Lost and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch both use their hands in
a significant way, they may do so without George Eliot’s drawing on Milton.
“One could easily compile a hefty tome of Miltonic echoes, allusions, and
appreciations by the Victorian poets. . . . Yet something has altered since
the early years of the century” (9). Gray explores this “something” in various
directions and in a set of diverse authors, paying due attention to Milton’s
relationship to daughters, his matrimonial ones as well as those ascribed to
him, notably by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Elizabeth Barrett Brown-
ing and Christina Rossetti head the file of Victorian poets who accept “Mil-
ton as Classic” — even, in Rossetti’s case, “Milton as Bible” — as the title of
chapter 2 has it. “Milton,” Gray suggests, “was a Victorian Classic: if his influ-
ence becomes less obvious in the later nineteenth century, that is due not
to his disappearance but to his pervasiveness” (9). Barrett Browning’s “Lost
Bower” and Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” are shown to be permeated by Mil-
tonic reverberations, notably in Rossetti’s use of similes, yet the two poems
or their authors are strangely — or typically — reluctant to own up to their
dependency.
Chapter 3, “Milton, Arnold, and the Might of Weakness,” works a dif-
ferent mine of presumed Miltonic influence, the lode of topical persistence.
Gray traces the notion of the “might of weakness,” pervasively yet by no
means exclusively Christian, along a line from Milton to Anthony Trollope
and Matthew Arnold, though, admittedly, the claim to intellectual property
is diverted to a fictional character in The Warden and Barchester Towers. The
Mr. Harding principle, “that the best way to win is to lose, or seem to lose”
(63), hardly qualifies as a specifically Miltonic bequest. More to the point is
Gray’s demonstration of Arnold’s maneuvering Milton, the candidate for
representing Hebraism, to the side of Hellenist culture.
The case of Tennyson in chapter 4, “Milton and Tennyson: Diffusive
Power,” reverts to the field of poetic ancestry, the adoption of forebears,
and the construction of influence, Idylls of the King conjuring up, by way of
creative imitation, the epic that Milton never wrote (160). Gray tousles Ten-

1  See Andrew Elfenbein, ed., “Influence,” special issue, MLQ 69, no. 4 (2008).
224 MLQ June 2010

nyson’s texts for Miltonic echoes and inserts, plunging into that “hefty tome”
more deeply than he may have needed, to demonstrate that Milton’s influ-
ence has become the nutrient fluid in which Tennyson’s poems thrive, satu-
rated with recycled poetic material. The result does credit to neither party.
Diffused power, not “diffusive power,” is the issue. Imitation and borrowing
are Gray’s preferred terms. They do not quite express what he is driving at:
Tennyson’s insouciant absorption of what is floating about.
Chapter 5, “Middlemarch and Milton’s Troubled Transmissions,” breaks
out of the confines of the book’s program. Eliot, as she is presented by
Gray, does not relate to Milton as a poet who exerts an influence, be it only
through his ubiquitous presence. She uses him as she uses characters from
his poems for modeling her fictional characters. In Middlemarch  Casaubon
is, from Dorothea’s initial remark on, endowed with Milton’s traits as he
is endowed with the name, and perhaps features, of another seventeenth-
century personality. Milton’s marital problems loom over the various rela-
tionships in the novel, as do other dispositions ascribed to him, notably the
issues of authorship, secretaryship, and dependency on amanuenses. Eliot
steps out of the line of authors confronting Milton the poet. Without recog-
nizing it, Gray breaks up the sorority of “Milton’s daughters” once more, this
time its Victorian section.
In his concluding chapter, “The Heirs of Milton,” Gray changes tack.
Abandoning the genesis of “the Victorian Milton,” he ventilates a possibility
pertinent to his own undertaking: Is Milton serviceable to literary scholar-
ship? Does he provide templates for the construction of a history of liter-
ary influence? In fact, Gray has hung on to this idea from the beginning:
“Throughout this book I have repeatedly offered models for Milton’s influ-
ence that derive from his own writings, suggesting that the nature of Milton’s
influence on the Victorians can best be understood by examining represen-
tations of similarly oblique, diffuse, or hidden influence in Milton’s poetry
and prose” (152 – 53). Gray sees himself in the company of critics, presided
over by Bloom, who “seem to agree that the influence of Milton can most
fruitfully be understood through models drawn from Milton’s own work.”
He is aware that “at worst, such arguments run the risk of seeming to mystify
literary history — as if to suggest that Milton had somehow composed a pro-
phetic allegory of his own reception” (153). Yet Gray readily accepts this risk,
confidently supplementing Milton’s texts with Milton’s biography. He looks
for patterns of influence in Milton’s life as well as in his poems in order to
“describe a process of influence in terms that are derived from the source
of that influence” (154). He finds consistently delineated in Milton’s life and
work the duality of a personal, authoritative agency and a circumstantial,
depersonalizing one, which, to Gray, circumscribes the contending issues
of present-day discourse — formalism versus historicism, influence versus
intertextuality — and provides an overarching closure to these oppositions.
Hofmann Review 225

In a final exposition of Milton as the purveyor of models for the literary

scholar, Gray chooses “a notable feature of Milton’s own life and poetry: his
hair” (161), surprising the reader who may not have counted that among the
features of his poetry. Indeed, Milton the poet recedes behind Milton the
bearer of an impressive fringe of locks. His hair assuming the status of a sym-
bol, the historical Milton recedes likewise. The symbolic figure ranges along-
side the protagonists of Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, Lycidas. Distinctions
between poetic and historical existence, between “fact and fable” (161), are
blurred, as are gender lines between the “Lady of Christ’s” and “the fairest of
her daughters Eve.” In this garden of symbolic meanings a troping metamor-
phosis turns Eve into Adam’s hair and Adam into Eve’s (166 – 67). Gray might
have profited from Immanuel Kant’s and Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the
parergon; he in fact joins in this discussion when musing over the ambiguity
of hair as part of but alien to, certainly alienable from, the body (162 – 67).
Hair represents a duality of Milton, the “singular force: unmistakable, self-
sufficient, autonomous,” and Milton who is “enmeshed in history, subject
to influence, interpretation, and intertextual diffusion” (167). Locks from
Milton’s head, whether reaching posterity by the macabre ways described in
Philip Neve’s Narrative of the Disinterment of Milton’s Coffin (1790) or as heir-
looms, are imaging, more palpably than poetic language could, the poet’s
reaching out to his would-be peers, especially when entangling a lock of Bar-
rett Browning’s in a reliquary at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome. Armed
with such evidence, Gray concludes that “the Victorians are most truly the
heirs of Milton” (170), and the reader is left wondering whether the printer
observed the intended spelling of the word that reads heirs in the text.
Klaus Hofmann

Klaus Hofmann is professor emeritus of English literature at Johann Wolfgang

Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. Recent publications include articles on John
Keats, Theodor W. Adorno, Alfred Döblin, and literary aesthetics.

doi 10.1215/00267929-2010-009
226 MLQ June 2010

The Dark Side of Literacy: Literature and Learning Not to Read.

By Benjamin Bennett. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
ix + 347 pp.

The Dark Side of Literacy is an exemplary study of reading undertaken by an

exemplary reader. As the subtitle suggests, however, this book is exemplary,
not as a model proffered for those eager to learn how to read but as a con-
crete exception that can never ground the abstracting theorization necessary
to formulate such models. Resistant to any paradigms that might explain to
us or systematize for us what we are in fact doing when we read, Benjamin
Bennett’s readings show, again and again, that reading can begin only after
we have learned not to read. The paradox is only apparent, as the exposition
amply demonstrates, and is handled with the utmost mastery, sophistication,
and persuasiveness.
For those familiar with Bennett’s work, this judgment should be per-
fectly foreseeable. Over the decades Bennett, Kenan professor of German at
the University of Virginia, has published magnificently insightful and com-
pelling works of literary criticism, generally devoted to German literature
but always training a steady eye on the broader European traditions from
classical antiquity to the modern day. Since his first book, Modern Drama and
German Classicism (1979), which patiently and adroitly addressed pressing
issues of interpretation in theatrical works from Gotthold Ephraim Less-
ing to Bertolt Brecht, Bennett’s scholarly productions have provided dexter-
ous and frequently innovative analyses of central texts. With Beyond Theory
(1993), which outlines and explores a “poetics of irony,” there is a turn to
ever more challenging themes, succinctly reflected by Bennett’s subsequent
titles: Goethe as Woman: The Undoing of Literature (2001) and All Theater Is
Revolutionary Theater (2005). Bennett’s present offering, likewise formulated
in consummate prose as communicative as it is demanding, requiring the
reader’s close attention and inviting an engaged response, continues this
trend with a sharpened polemical edge by calling to account the very modes
that inform approaches to literature.
Following a brief and provocative introduction, The Dark Side of Literacy
opens with two chapters that critically examine some of the major twentieth-
century contributions to so-called theories of reading. In turning to a sam-
pling from a vast array of writers and scholars — from Ezra Pound and Henry
James to Georges Poulet, Wolfgang Iser, and Stanley Fish, among others—
Bennett gradually brings to the fore the various figures of the reader and
conventional notions of reading that continue to be posited as paradigmatic.
What motivates this investigation throughout is dissatisfaction with theoriz-
ing that attempts to summarize definitively a practice that is radically indi-
vidual and therefore irreducible to these kinds of conceptualization. Actual
reading emerges for Bennett as an experience that, precisely as immediate
Hamilton Review 227

experience, remains wholly unidentifiable or rather, when identified, is irre-

vocably corrupted by the very theory that assigns this knowable identity. Pro-
ceeding with admirable care, Bennett takes representative and authoritative
statements to task, posing ever fresher questions, and persistently exposing
any contradictions or conceptual slippages that arise.
The principal figure adumbrated in these chapters is what Bennett
refers to consistently as “the reader for thrills,” further specified as the
reader of novels. Distinct from “readers for art,” like the literary scholar
who attends to the technical devices that constitute a text, the theoretical
construct henceforth referred to as “The Reader” is the one who, as James
puts it, longs for some kind of “miraculous enlargement” or is desirous of
“another life.”1 Bennett thus describes The Reader as “the inferred vessel of
a supposed experience of reading, an experience which does not exist except as
a theoretical response to the question of reading” (29). Purely experientially, there
is no Reader, only readers.
According to Bennett, this figure is closely tied to and more or less coin-
cident with the historical emergence of the idea of literature in the eigh-
teenth century. In the next phase of his study he therefore turns to this
history to ask a pressing question: If The Reader cannot be found in the
domain of experience, how did this figure come to be formulated? Rather
than begin with the advent of the novel and The Reader proper, the inves-
tigation moves farther back, to Dante’s Commedia, which creates the condi-
tions that will shape the later tradition. Through a pertinacious consider-
ation of key passages, addressing incidentally many of the interpretive issues
that continue to guide current Dante scholarship, Bennett concentrates on
the tension between problems of immediate experience, ultimate truth, and
the individual reader’s contingency. This long chapter, whose complexities
and details altogether enhance rather than stifle the argument’s thrust, is
the centerpiece of the book, broaching the issues that directly lead into the
subsequent chapters, first on Boccaccio and Cervantes and then on the fig-
ure of Doctor Faustus as he is portrayed in Christopher Marlowe’s play and
in Thomas Mann’s novel.
The final section turns exclusively to German literature, first to late-
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century novellas — Gerhart Hauptmann’s
Bahnwärter Thiel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Reitergeschichte, and Mann’s Tod
in Venedig — and then to exemplary (and exceptional) texts by Heinrich von
Kleist and Franz Kafka. In Bennett’s analyses, the German novella comes
across as a “renegade narrative form” that sets up a “trap of reading” (262).
This dark side of literature manifests itself particularly in Kleist’s short fic-
tion. Regarding Die Marquise von O . . . , Bennett remarks with typical con-

1  Henry James, “Alphonse Daudet,” in Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan,

1888).
228 MLQ June 2010

ciseness: “To read this story is to unlearn how to read, or to learn how to
read without reading” (269). Yet, as Bennett astutely observes in his “Con-
cluding Note,” this “unlearning,” which implies getting rid of The Reader,
cannot take place without serious consequences: “If I am to dispense with
The Reader, I must also be willing and able to do without a belief in the text’s
identity as an aesthetic object, an object whose existence is fully realized
in the experience of a recipient” (309). To unlearn, then, is never to cease
from learning; or rather, it is to learn in order to unlearn and unlearn in
order to learn. In the end, therefore, Bennett offers a highly literate plea,
antidogmatic to the core and truly exemplary insofar as it simultaneously
refuses and accepts the power of exempla. That is, he promotes an idea of
literature that I, for one, find altogether crucial, an idea whose force consists
in keeping literature in question.
John T. Hamilton

John T. Hamilton is professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. His

publications include Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradi-
tion (2003) and Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language (2008).

doi 10.1215/00267929-2010-010