It will become apparent that the political implications of Wordsworth's working with spots of time in his poem are in fact misread in the context of Ellis's own discussion of memory and autobiography. The upshot of the work which Wordsworth undertakes with these spots, according to Ellis, is that 'Nature' the single most significant and powerful codifying term in the whole lexicon of The Prelude , is, by the final, imagination-consecrating Book of the poem, 'standing in for the mind' p. This is what comes from the combined displacing and screening action of the spots themselves. And as a result, the mind itself is ultimately, in Wordsworth's words, 'lord and master' XI.

If this were not the case, 'the spots of time could not be interpreted optimistically' p. This is Ellis's conclusion, made in the light of the apparent serenity and confidence negotiated by Wordsworth in 'Imagination, How Impaired and Restored', the critical eleventh Book of The Prelude the very site of the explicitly-designated spots themselves. Contrary to this, however, it may be argued that the serenity, confidence and indeed optimism of Wordsworth's spots is misplaced.

Robert Young, drawing on a Lacanian insight, sees that the position arrived at by the close of this particular poem is, really, a positioning.

Breadcrumb

He notes how, in pursuit of the imagination, Wordsworth is 'in fact caught within the function that occurs in its locus'. Ellis tends to share uncritically with his Wordsworth, then, precisely that optimism which goes with idealism in the formation of Romantic ideology. It is a matter of seeing through the haunting recollections and memorializations set forth in Wordsworth's epic exploration of his own subjectivity. This is all to show, for the sake of the poet's autobiographical sense of self as a subject, the reality of that which is being avoided as a positive means of facilitating mental growth.

As we shall see, the 'natural' freedom of the orphan displaces and screens the cultural capture of the man. The deaths of the parents are linked to the play of history itself, and to the experience of failure as a complex ideological achievement. It can be argued, now, that the memory of the death of Wordsworth's mother in fact lies behind the voicing of the first spot of time XI. The poet's re-imagining of the fate of the hanged murderer serves to establish with great vividness in his poem the frank reality of death. Then narrative attention is switched suddenly, undemonstrably to the spectacle of 'visionary dreariness' XI.

The effect seems that of a montage. Images of femininity, valorized as such in terms of the specific culture of Wordsworth's epic, are juxtaposed with the concept of death. Syntagmatically, a number of signifiers are brought into significant relationship with a single signified. This manoeuvre signals and codifies what can be described as the death of femininity in The Prelude. Indeed, if the manifestly archetypal nature of this spot the 'bare' common, the 'naked' pool, the nameless woman is taken into account, then the conclusion becomes clear.

What, above all, is treated in this not fully articulate yet wholly suggestive way in this first spot is the death of the mother-figure herself. Then slightly later in this same Book, in the second spot of time XI. Doubtless this reflects on the part of the poet the increased maturity of his greater years. The suggestion is that these 'desires', now corrected by the Father, have previously been directed hostilely towards the paternal father. Hence the sense of chastisement felt at his passing away. This hostility has manifested itself, it can be assumed, in the shape of the boy's desire for the mother.

We have noted the extent to which the child's relationship with Nature, as remembered by the adult, conforms to the pattern of an Oedipal sexuality. The prospect of a Christmas holiday from school and concomitant return home in Hawkshead, an imminent event at which the thirteen-year-old is 'Feverish' and 'restless' XI. It is in this strict sense, dependent on the social conditioning of such qualities as 'pleasure' and 'connectedness' as feminine, that the poet of The Prelude may be said to display desire for the mother.

This is a type of desire which inevitably generates hostility towards the patriarchal father. Additionally, hostility towards this figure manifests itself in this second spot in the boy's taking for granted the imagined presence of the father during periods of his actual absence. This doing without the father is tantamount to consigning the displaced parent to a kind of death. And so, perhaps, when waiting for the father's scheduled return the boy looks 'in such anxiety of hope' XI.

Having taken the father's presence too much for granted, Wordsworth's reaction is to feel himself chastised in the event of his death. Wordsworth has reacted in such a way as to actively assert, as both a punishment and compensation, the restorative significance of memory in his life. Seen in this light, the close attention to detail subsequently shown at the level of narration in the poem is remarkable. Even by Wordsworth's own standards this second of his 'affecting incidents' XI.

It constitutes a moment of particular intensity. The details of the scene—the 'naked' wall, the 'single' sheep, the 'whistling' hawthorn—are plain in the extreme. Yet they are all the more emphatic for their simplicity. How one would love Ingmar Bergman to adapt this poem for the screen. By this weighting of mood the poet is saying that, in retrospect, he would not have wanted things between himself and his parents particularly his father to have been any other way.

He encapsulates 'Imagination, How Impaired and Restored' in his reporting of a late tendency on his part to overlook the importance of an imaginative response to outward reality. Ostensibly, the reference is to the memory of Wordsworth's alienating experience of life in London and of his suffering disappointment at the collapse of the French Revolution. It has all meant succumbing to a creeping impairment of the imagination. But just ahead of dealing with the death of his parents through the spots of time episodes, Wordsworth is able to call a halt to this social-psychological process of decline:.

I shook the habit off Entirely and for ever, and again In Nature's presence stood, as I stand now, A sensitive, and a creative soul. Wordsworth matches a Miltonic Puritanism of the intellect, it could be said, with a correspondingly Wordsworthian puritanism of the heart: The power of memory he everywhere exemplifies as a poet, arguably to a unique and pre-eminent degree, seems vitally attributable, psychologically, to the event of the death of the thirteen-year-old's father. Richard Onorato, concentrating on the relationship of the poet to the orphan in The Prelude , emphasizes how the poet's 'fatherless freedom' revealingly illuminates his 'need to invent himself' p.

But what might be the political implications of Wordsworth's inventing himself in this way, by means of a discourse founded on absence in the form of a 'fatherless freedom'? The readings of The Prelude which want to interpret the poem 'optimistically', such as those of Ellis and Onorato, tend to take Wordsworthian 'freedom' as implying freedom from direct ideological determination. The danger of holding to this view, it should be said, is that it overlooks the connection between the openness of this 'freedom' and a susceptibility to mediated ideological determination.

Moreover, it overlooks what appears to be the greater powerfulness of this latter determinative mode.

As Althusser has shown, it is when ideology operates from an unconscious basis that it achieves its greatest potency regarding its subjectification of the individual. The individual-as-subject is, in Althusser's words, 'in the "grip" of what Freud registered by its effects as being the unconscious'. We have reached the point at which can be demonstrated directly the greatness of The Prelude as understood in this sense.

This, then, is to turn to the two parts of Wordsworth's poem in which is marked a certain resolution of Oedipal tensions. Symbolically enough, the parts in question are located at the narrative centre and circumference of the work. They feature landscape and scenery the character of which is strikingly sublime.

This is to refer to those passages in the poem in which Wordsworth recalls, first, his crossing of the Alps VI. It is in these particular stretches of the text that the poet of The Prelude goes one better than the Freudian patient who, having 'lost his father at a very early age', 'was always seeking to rediscover him in what was grand and sublime in Nature'.

The episode of crossing the Alps results, startlingly, in an apostrophizing of this imagination. The sudden turning away from the anti-climax of having unknowingly crossed the Alps to the surprise of finding oneself being crossed by imaginative power is the most impressive feature of the passage. Across the caesura separating the end of one verse-paragraph from the start of another at lines , the text shifts into a different register.

In a further instance of crossing, the text itself crosses the lacuna which opens up with the speechlessness of disappointment felt in the moment of Alpine anti-climax. The Prelude , not a unified plenitude of meaning, is made remarkably dissonant by this movement. What is happening is that the distance separating the poem from ideology is embodying itself in the internal distance which is, here, separating the poem from itself. Crossing the Alps in this unknowing way is for Wordsworth a complex achievement. Its significance is not gauged in strictly empirical terms.


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There is a sense of disappointment felt in relation to Nature itself. But Wordsworth's own second nature—now, evidently, a reality in the context of the growth of his mind—is on hand to save this particular poet of Nature from radical disillusionment. Wordsworth writes at line Robert Young has used the phrase 'phallic ghost' p.

Certainly there is a clear acknowledgement here of the sublime as decidedly masculine. On the basis of this, indeed, it has symbolic power over Wordsworth. Wordsworth's being crossed by imaginative 'power' as it comes 'Athwart' him puts him in the grip, so to speak, of the masculine-sublime. It happens that the imagination itself actively means him. I was lost as in a cloud, Halted without a struggle to break through, And now, recovering, to my soul I say 'I recognize thy glory'.

These lines testify to the experience of conversion. The subject has been lost, but now is found.

Acknowledging the powerfulness of the imagination in the aspect its masculine sublimity and sublime masculinity has meant rendering oneself able to recognize the 'glory' of one's own 'soul'. At the same time, it has meant subjectifying oneself before this imaginative power. But what comes from this is, paradoxically, a strong sense of freedom on the part of the subject. Wordsworth goes on to write of the feeling in this moment of having been set free from the clutch of all finite references.

It is a justly famous passage, at once affirmative and profound:. Our destiny, our nature, and our home, Is with infinitude—and only there; With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation, and desire, And something evermore about to be. Here, the sense of crossing, of crossing over into the space of a new phase of one's life is palpable. The lines are reverberate with an underlying sense of an ending. Wordsworth's life has come to a halt so that it can start over again; the narrative break cuts both ways. Progression beyond this effective threshold of the symbolic then comes about by means of entrance into a realm of apparently infinite signification.

It is implied that it is this 'infinitude' which guarantees the subject's new-found sense of freedom. The previously disappointing Alpine landscape now appears transfigured before the Wordsworthian imagination. Its features are seen as internally unified. It is this unity which evokes the infinity of endless significations. Allusions made to the Bible and Milton show the subject taking up a position in sublime discourse. Concluding this account of his 'conversion', Wordsworth tells of how, to his mind, the different sights and sounds of the Alps.

Were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree, Characters of the great apocalypse, The types and symbols of eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end. This passage exemplifies mental growth in and by its disclosure of that point in the formation of subjectivity when the subject, on the point of grasping the form of outward sense, is in fact taken in by it: It reveals Wordsworth's learning to come to terms with the reality of his actually decentred place in the universe.

There is the laying to rest of an Oedipally troubling 'ghost', in the shape of the memory of the father. The transgressiveness of the child manifested in, for example, the boat-stealing desire to strike out against limitations turns into the 'wise passiveness' of the adult. For Wordsworth, the process of the orphan's socialization is now complete. What has been played out is a drama of interpellation.

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This is to invoke Althusser's 'little theoretical theatre' p. We will come shortly to Wordsworth's rediscovery of his mother in the beauty of Nature. But the argument on Wordsworthian subjectivity being put forward here is that the rediscovery by Wordsworth of his parents in Nature itself, his seemingly unalienated standing again in 'Nature's presence', constitutes a fortiori his own crisis-resolving interpellation as an ideological subject.

When remembering the growth of mind, Wordsworth's tendency is to get things the wrong way round, or upside-down. In the guise of Nature, that politically-defined form of society, ideology in its dominant formations has hailed him. He has responded by saying, in effect, 'I recognize thy glory', in turn recognizing that the hailing was 'really' addressed to him, and that it was 'really him' who was hailed in this way. It is very much because of his orphaned state, his 'guilty feelings', and his memory that Wordsworth in The Prelude is 'a chosen son.

That the poet feels himself to be so free just shows the success of the subjectivity which exists in this world. It is Althusser, seeking to articulate Marx with Freud and Lacan, who comments that 'you and I are always already subjects, and as such constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition, which guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and naturally irreplaceable subjects' pp. Our sense of ourselves as 'individuals' in this way 'gives us the "consciousness" of our incessant eternal practice of ideological recognition' p.

These comments may be said to be responsive to the Wordsworthian problematic of 'crossing', of apostrophizing imagination in a moment of crisis as coming 'Athwart' oneself. Althusser's theory of ideology puts on stage for us that eternal circularity in the structure of subjectivity which arises when the structure itself is predicated on ritual recognition.

The wit and point of what is staged in the Althusserian 'theatre' consists in its making explicit that which appears natural—Althusser's word would be 'obvious'—as itself an effect of ideological discourse showing, in relation to the subject, what cannot be stated. Althusser has been criticized—in the context of Romantic studies, by Philip Shaw, for instance—for failing to acknowledge the importance of those ideologies which are resistant to 'the dominant ideology'. Ideology as the dehistoricizing and naturalizing of the historical and non-natural guarantees the individualistic freedom of the subject.

We are dealing with the difficulty of just such a problem as this where Wordsworth himself is concerned. In our consideration of what the autobiography of an orphan might look like we have now reached the point where opposites meet. Across the terrain of subjectivity there is a clear point of contact between Wordsworth's autobiographical poetry and Althusser's scientific theory.

In a way, Wordsworth and Althusser come together on the point that, in Althusser's words, ' individuals are always-already subjects ' p. The peculiar state of affairs described in this remark is the result of the school-family couple in modern society functioning as the dominant ideological state apparatus. Where this is theorized in Althusser, it is dramatized in The Prelude. Typically, the child is born into subjectivity, but as a subject-to-be. It has a name—the father's name—and an identity, but not a mind of its 'own'.

It therefore becomes what it is. A certain ownership of mind is being claimed retrospectively in what we saw of Wordsworth's moment of apostrophe—of turning away —in the crossing of the Alps. Wordsworth turns away from fatherlessness to the father. He becomes what he is as a subject and a 'free' individual. Althusserian science as, by definition, a subject-less discourse offers in its theorization of ideology an inverted mirror-image of the experience of the orphan as himself a subject without a discourse.

In Wordsworth's case, this mirror 'speaks' of what it is to be free, specifying, as a matter of definition in relation to the split between 'subjectivity' and 'subject-to-be', that freedom is being taken in by the father.

Towards Eternal Life

The invertedness of the orphan's crossing-conversion is made explicit. This brings us to the excellent discussion of Wordsworth which has been produced by Marlon Ross. Studying, principally, the Lucy lyric 'Three years she grew in sun and shower' and 'Nutting'—the latter of which was intended in for inclusion in the Prelude —Ross examines, as he terms it, 'woman's place' in Wordsworth's 'ideological landscape'.

The argument turns on that familiar foundational pun in the 'Fair seed-time' passage of The Prelude:. This statement leads to a concise summing up of the complex nature of 'freedom' as it is represented by Wordsworth in his ideological landscape: Society naturalizes itself by Nature more than Nature socializes itself by society. At the same time, it makes a point of seeking actively to disguise the fact that this is not a natural process.

Everything has the appearance of being as it should. This glance at Ross is enough now to direct our attention towards Nature's beautiful-feminine aspects and the bearing which they have on Wordsworthian subjectivity. Wordsworth's account of his ascent of Mount Snowdon is placed at the outer edges of The Prelude , at the beginning of the concluding thirteenth Book of the poem. What gets related is another ritual of ideological recognition. This is suggested by the active presence of the sublime to the narrative. But if the tenor of the episode of crossing the Alps had been one of conversion, now it is changed to one of confirmation.

And the presence here of that which is beautiful in Nature is what makes the difference. This is the moment of rediscovery of the mother in Nature's beauty which Wordsworth shows, but does so without stating it. This showing-without-stating marks the poem's relation to ideology as history's mode of existence in and through the text. Signification itself skews as the resultant poem is pressurized into giving form to a discourse on absence, namely the silence of the dead mother as it presses on the orphan's growth of mind.

As we shall see, that the mother speaks to the subject in this way from the contrasting position of the abject is the point. What we have with the ascent of Mount Snowdon is another of those Wordsworthian experiences 'spots of time' the full significance of which is grasped only retrospectively. Most importantly, the mode of Wordsworth's account of his ascent of Snowdon, which had been generally naturalistic, changes abruptly at line The change is registered at the level of syntax, with the syntax itself becoming slightly twisted: This feature of the writing should, by now, be enough to alert us to something interestingly untoward going on in the language.

We have entered once again into the transfigurative matrix of the masculine-sublime and the feminine-beautiful. The 'sea of mist' swells into an 'ocean' XIII. Nature is displaced by mind in this displacement of the natural sea by a figurative counterpart. The imagination, that 'phallic ghost', is making its sublime presence felt—'lifting up itself'—once more.

In the mist there is 'a fracture in the vapour. The unity of this roaring 'voice' is a manifestation of imaginative power. It is revealed at the end of Wordsworth's paragraph how,. What Wordsworth has recognized, it is explained in the next verse-paragraph, is himself as a subject in relation to the mind the 'sea of mist' and Nature the 'real sea'.

The structure of this relationship is hierarchical; indeed, it reproduces the structure of the bourgeois family. The mind is 'male-paternal', Nature is 'female-maternal', the subject is the 'chosen son'. This is what marks the conclusion to The Prelude as autobiography of an orphan. Wordsworth's retrospect confirms, not least by its use of the passive voice, the subject's interpellative conversion, his becoming what he is in terms of a subjectivity which is ideologically ' always-already ':.

I "Billy" Sunday catrlres the public eye Ind ear by the novelty of his methods. Borne go to hear him lambast the Breach err. Business men and railway Inanagers realize that thousands will tome to town ns to a circus. They bring pressure to hear upon the poor preachfern; for "Billy" wisely insists that he Bvill not come and save the eitlzrns prom Hell If there Is any competition In the business—lnsists that the churches fe. Under the pressure the cannot help themselves and pry to make the best of it. If the Gospel must he sold, it is better done In the open than in the name of the heathen, the collectork getting the most.

Like most preachers he probably hides his true thought on this subject, wiille allowing people to think that he believes in a Hell of eternal tortures.

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The Pastor could not believe that Mr. Sunday or any other intelligent man really believes this Invention of the Dark Ages, which antagonizes the Bible as w'ell ns common sense. More than this, they owe it to God that this foul stain upon the Divine character he denounced. They owe It to themselves ns men to stand for the Truth and to assist in opening the eyes of the poor deluded world.

The Pastor hopes that Mr. Sunday will vet realize that no one can long maintain a moral standard higher than that which he attributes to God. The Injustice and persecution of centuries Is Justly attributable to false doctrines representing God as a demon who unjustly and unlovingly created our race with the Intention that nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand should endure- an eternity of torture. Of this as a Gospel the Pastor has been ashamed for forty-four years. I bring you Good Tidings of great Joy. Undoubtedly no person deliberately plotted this turning of God's Word upside down.

Tt Is the work of the Devil, who gradually foisted It upon the Church as well as the heathen, to turn people away from God and the B B?. Paul both predicted the falling away of the Church and the sueceei of the doctrines of demons. Were It not for Satan's delusions, the whole world might speedily be brought to love the true God. But while we Scrlptiirally hold that Satan had chief responsibility, It is not for us to say that the clerics of the Dark Ages did not connive at the error, trusting that It would make the people subservient to the clergy, through, whom they might hope to escaue future tortures.

But leaving the past and Its responsibilities, we may surely say that grave responsibility rests upon the preachers of today for their perpetuation of this great deception-this fraud upon the people, slander upon the Almighty and opposition to the Truth. Of the degree of this wickedness only God can judge correctly; but It is wicked to keep people in darkness on the subject, it is slanderous blasphemy against the Divine character.

Nearly all ministers privately confess that they do not believe these slanders, while publicly they speak words which give the opposite thought. The time when such horrible assassination of the Divine reputation can prosper is surely short. Messiah's Reign will make an end of all such lies; ns it Is written. Power to Every One Believing Tf belief In the real Gospel Is the Divine power which works in the believer, it follows that whoever has not the Gospel has not tills Divine power; and that in proportion as the Gospel Is perverted Its power is lost.

Ha we see today millions of people professing to believe the Gospel, yet acting like devils under delusions from the Dark Ages which have been fostered by the preachers of Christendom.