|
Article Excerpt
The most compelling question in Tennyson's Maud (1855) is not, as some have suggested, "What is it, that has been done?" (1) but rather, "Who knows if he be dead?" (II.119). Both of these inquiries, in their immediate contexts, relate to the speaker's uncertainty surrounding the fate of Maud's brother after their duel, but each also represents a more general method of reading the poem. Most readers have approached Maud with the first question in mind, either to attempt to reconstruct the events that take place in this notoriously fragmented narrative or to foreground their absence. (2) The latter question, however, draws our attention toward what E. Warwick Slinn calls the "brilliance of Tennyson's dialectical and figurative ambiguity which shifts dramatic action away from external event towards signifying process." (3) Asking "Who knows if he be dead?" provides an occasion to look beyond the "O that 'twere possible" lyric (privileged as the historical, compositional, and thematic germ of Maud (4)) and to thereby reconsider the function of the less-analyzed "madhouse canto" that follows it. Here, the speaker surrenders at last to the insanity that has haunted him throughout the poem and raves under the delusion that he has died and has been buried in a makeshift tomb. Given the poem's preoccupation with death and madness, it is easy to dismiss the speaker's conflation of the asylum with a "shallow grave" as an incidental trope deployed to demonstrate the extent of his insanity. Most of Tennyson's readers have done something of the sort, if they have noticed this section at all. However, even if we accept that the "burial" experienced by the Maud speaker is the disturbed reality of a deranged mind, it nonetheless reflects and cites the concerns of a cultural and scientific discourse that is missed when we focus too much on Tennyson's sheerly psychological skill in rendering madness. Premature burial, while today associated almost exclusively with Gothic horror, was to the nineteenth century a possible (if not entirely likely) consequence of medical error. Understood within the context of uncertainty surrounding death, Maud's so-called mad scene discloses a fear of what might be broadly termed insignificance: not only the lack of societal importance the speaker complains of across the poem, but also a textual condition in which one's very survival depends on other people's reading practices which are themselves always open to dispute.
The rhetorical question "Who knows if he be dead?" is key to Tennyson's construction of Maud in and as discourse. A rhetorical question, as Paul de Man explains, "engenders two meanings that are mutually exclusive: the literal meaning asks for the concept (difference) whose existence is denied by the figurative meaning." (5) Although we usually privilege the figural meaning over the literal (that is, we understand that the speaker is not literally searching for a person who could report on the status of Maud's brother but is commenting on the impossibility of establishing that status), de Man invites us to consider the possibility that the literal meaning might also be equally urgent. The conjunction of meanings that are mutually exclusive and mutually dependent creates what de Man calls a referential aberration, an undecidable suspension of reference between literal and figural. The two meanings thus no longer "exist side by side" but "engage each other in direct confrontation, for the one reading is precisely the error denounced by the other and has to be undone by it. Nor can we in any way make a valid decision as to which of the readings can be given priority over the other; none can exist in the other's absence" (de Man, p. 12). The mode of the rhetorical question and the referential aberration it opens in the text help us recover the literal connotations of the Maud speaker's figural burial. Slinn applies de Man's frame of referential aberration specifically to explore in Victorian poetry what he describes as "the potential for cultural critique engendered ... by that suspension of normative referential logic that is frequently an effect of poetic utterance" (Cultural Critique, p. 10). Although my argument will not directly address critique as such, it is implicit in many of the questions of signification raised in Maud, especially since Tennyson situates these issues within the social world, unsettled and sometimes marginal as it occasionally appears in the poem.
1. "They cannot even bury a man"
As the well-known story goes, Tennyson composed Maud's "mad scene" in about twenty minutes at the beginning of 1855, making it one of the last sections of the poem to be written (Shatto, pp. 208-209). Placed just after "O that 'twere possible" and right before the poem's perpetually controversial conclusion, it marks a rare forward movement in a text that Aubrey de Vere famously described as being "written, as it were, backwards." (6) From a narrative perspective the canto breaks very little new ground. The speaker revisits the circumstances that occasioned his present crisis, but the emphasis is no longer on events ("What is it, that has been done?") but rather on betrayal: "Who told him we were there?" (II.290). Though he repeats key images and phrases from earlier in the poem, the speaker remains powerless to make meaning out of his plight. He no longer possesses even the modicum of self-awareness that earlier had enabled him to wonder whether he was "raging alone as [his] father raged in his mood" (I.53); now, he simply rages as this mood takes him. To the extent that Maud as a whole relies, as Aidan Day argues, on the "representation of the condition of near madness" to generate its "peculiar force," (7) the fully-realized insanity portrayed in the final section of Part II constitutes the lessening of that force and, consequently, of our reasons to be interested in it. Part III, for example, has generated a passionate debate about Tennyson's politics and his speaker's language; the madhouse canto seems to offer no comparable ambiguity. (8)
However, at a time when widespread uncertainty about the signs of death made the Victorian reading public "deeply ambivalent about the ambitions of medical science," (9) the speaker's belief that he has died yet still retains consciousness and physical sensibility is legible not simply as evidence of madness but also as a speculative fiction concerning the unknowability of death. Tennyson's poetry of the 1840s already registers some of the nineteenth century's uncertainty about the boundaries between life and death, with the most significant example from this period being the narrator of The Princess (1847), who suffers from an inherited susceptibility to catalepsy. At the moments when he is "silent in the muffled cage of life" (7.32), the paralyzed Prince embodies the more haunting figure of "Death in life, the days that are no more" (4.40) who passes through the final line of "Tears, Idle Tears." When he becomes inexplicably paralyzed during the battle, the Prince appears "stark, / Dishelmed and mute, and motionlessly pale" (6.84-85), and only Princess Ida is able to discern that he still lives, though without evidence of vital signs. Thanks to Ida's attentiveness, the Prince is never in imminent danger of live burial. He nevertheless recognizes the connection between that fate and thwarted communication, using that distressing possibility to heighten the suspense of his first attempt to speak to Ida as his coma dissipates:
I could no more, but lay like one in trance, That hears his burial talked of by his friends, And cannot speak, nor move, nor make one sign, But lies and dreads his doom. (7.136-139)
True, he speaks figuratively--but just barely, given that he has been lying in a trance that with a different set of bystanders could have ended with that "doom" he imagines.
"Death-in-Life" is also the title of an anonymous article by George Henry Lewes in the July 1847 issue of Fraser's magazine. (10) Staged as a discussion among a group of educated men at a dinner party, this fictional tale surveys contemporary medical and anecdotal information about bodily states that confound professional medical attempts to diagnose death. The...
|
