English 610 —British Romanticism

Professor
J. Jennifer Jones

Liu’s Vision: Discipline and Picturesque

Alan Liu, in “The Politics of the Picturesque: An Evening Walk,” begins with the following questions, “What is the picturesque? What are the possibilities – and also the impossibilities – of the convention from which Wordsworth takes his start?” From the very beginning, Liu examines the picturesque in terms of the friction created within it between competing terms and ideas. For example, in only the third paragraph of the chapter, Liu writes, “The picturesque bars the desire from its beautiful object even as it carefully maintains the object in sight. As an experience, it is both motivated and immobilized” (63). Here, Liu sets up an impossible opposition, or friction, that occurs within the picturesque. Throughout the chapter, he identifies and examines these frictions, thus unfolding the political nature of the picturesque and its relationship with violence. Also, Liu’s focus on the importance of sight, or looking, can be seen in the quote. Liu understands looking and viewing in the picturesque in Foucaldian terms, as something with regulatory and disciplinary power. Again, this reading reveals the political nature of the picturesque and raises the specter of violence that is contained within it. Throughout the chapter, Liu encourages the reader of Wordsworth to look beneath the surface of the calm lake, into the complex political underpinnings of form so often viewed as pure poetic pleasure.

In the first section of the chapter, entitled “Motive and Motif,” Liu explores the meaning of the term “repose.” Liu calls repose, “the state of general arrest inhibiting picturesque motivation” (64). As seen in the early quote, Liu is deeply interested in the coexistence of motivation and immobilization in the picturesque. Here, Liu is assigning action to repose, by defining it as a state that “inhibits” motivation, thus creating another friction between the definition of repose as “stillness, which seems to connote inaction” (63) and the action that he assigns to it. Liu goes on to write, “Repose is a terrifically impassive ‘passion’ or ‘enthusiastic calm’” (65), and, Liu states, repose is “the prime mover – itself unmoved – of the picturesque” (64). Again, Liu draws us into a matrix of oppositional terms surrounding the term “repose.”

His reflection of repose leads Liu to a key point in his exploration of the political nature of the picturesque – form. Liu writes, “The picturesque was not simply an experience to be studied in motivational terms, but also as a highly specialized experience of form…Awareness of form, indeed, was repose, the sense of arrest in experience” (65). From this point, Liu examines a series of paintings by Claude Lorrain in order to trace “the genesis of picturesque form” (75). Using Claude’s work, Liu illustrates the development of common elements in the late 18 th century picturesque tradition, such as repose and a turn from figures of narrative to those of landscape, in the literary and pictorial arts within which Wordsworth was working. Of special interest to Liu is the recession of narrative figures into the background of paintings. “In effect, such composition rotated the old universe on a pivot in the middle distance such that the narrative foreground swung out of view to leave behind the pivot point itself as the subject” (76). Eventually, Liu writes, “the subject vanished into the middle distance and then into air” (77). For Liu, this change signifies much more than a simple evolution of artistic technique, it is an avenue through which to understand the relationship between the picturesque and institutional power.

When narrative is forgotten, Liu writes, “passion has no outlet more exciting than the seductive curve if a branch or rough upthrust of rock. Passion ends arrested in perfect picturicity” (83). Why, then, is narrative forgotten? Liu asks readers of Wordsworth to delve deeper into the examination of this formal point in order to reveal its political underpinning.

“If form arrests motive within the frame of a literary or pictorial text, there must be a larger, cultural context motivating and supervising the arrest. To seek this supervisory over-motive requires that we probe precisely the cultural forms, as I previously called them, that the picturesque could not forget, however much it repressed the older narrative medium of those forms. Why the arrest of form? The answer, I believe, is not literary or pictorial formalism, but a historically knowable cultural formalism: institution” (85).

Liu understands the term “institution” in the Foucaldian sense. For Foucault, power is diffused through social institutions, which examine, watch over, and subordinate individuals to their demands, mold behavior according to a cultural norm. Those who deviate from that norm are punsihed. Liu ties the repression of the older narrative medium to a specific institution, the Church. Liu writes, “The Church told human history in narrative scenes that were literally part of its institution” (86). Liu then casts the picturesque as a Protestant religious institution, and in doing so, positions the picturesque in a way that will lead him to the heart of his discussion of politics. “But an understanding of the picturesque as a religious institution can only be provisional because the meaning of Reformation in England was also, more basically, nationalism. It was state” (88).

The revelation of the picturesque as form of social control, and his discussion of “the picturesque imagination of social institution” (91), is at the heart of Liu’s argument in the chapter. Liu’s understanding of the picturesque as a form of social control depends upon the concept of seeing, and of framing scenes, as supervision, or as a form of disciplinary power. In a fascinating move, Liu states, “Imagine that the picturesque is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison” (95). Here, Liu ties his own concept of the picturesque with Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. In fact, Liu states that the picturesque, which seems free from discipline, actually deserves its own chapter in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish because it is “secretly obsessed with rules, protocol, and discipline” (95). Here, Liu’s use of the word “secretly” connects his discussion of discipline with his earlier discussion of repose. In Liu’s most compelling example of the supervisory power of seeing in the picturesque, he excerpts a guidebook’s description of the carefully constructed view of Rydal Lower Falls shown to tourists on the estate of Sir Michael Le Fleming. To paraphrase the excerpt, tourists were led into a darkened cottage, and were invited to view the waterfall through a window, thus “increasing its landscape beauty” (89). He also points out that a working peasant, seen through the cottage window frame, is viewed by the guidebook’s author merely as “animation,” serving the picturesque scene, and being presided over through the act of seeing by the tourist and by Fleming, who set the scene. Both observations tie the disciplinary aspects of the picturesque to economic power. Liu’s discussion of the picturesque imagination of the social institution of property leads him to a discussion of its imagination of national politics.

The primary focus of Liu’s discussion of the picturesque imagination of national politics is how the picturesque enters into the British discussion of the French Revolution. Liu traces the role of the picturesque in an evolving debate over the concepts of liberty, revolution, and just government within British national politics from the 1760’s – 1810. Throughout this time period, the picturesque became associated with Foxite liberalism and then with Jacobin politics in France. Liu points to a series of exchanges over the correctness of English landscape gardening and a passage from Knight’s The Landscape, which he reads as “an imagination of the difference between British liberalism and the French ancien regim” (110) in order to frame his argument. In addition, Liu excavates to meaning of Knight’s disavowal of the politics of his landscape poetry, thus tying this more technical, historical discussion of the picturesque back to repose, and its attempt to mask violence. Liu writes,

“The picturesque, in sum, was a political platform whose declaration of British constitutional freedom gravitated increasingly leftward…The lasting effect of such politicization, no matter a writer’s final stance on the French Revolution, was that the picturesque landscape became an almost automatic second language of politics” (113). He goes on to end his discussion of the role of this “second language of politics” by returning to “the congruence between the picturesque as landscape panorama and as social panopticon” (114). Liu has now, as he writes, proven that “picturesque landscape turns out to be a fully economic, social, and political arena” (114).

In the final section of the chapter, Liu moves from the picturesque imagination of social institutions to what the picturesque cannot imagine, or to the impossibilities of the picturesque (117). This brings Liu to his discussion of Wordsworth’s An Evening Walk, and a discussion of what, in the poem, is figured as unimaginable. An Evening Walk, Liu, writes, “wishes to tell incipient stories of desire and violence excessive of picturesque arrest – stories of narrative catastrophe” (119). Such a friction, according to Liu, creates locodescriptive moments within the poem, which he defines as “those antithetical moments marking the bounds of descriptive scenes when a residual feeling for narration daemonizes description even as description contains the chtonic spirit and smooths over the metaphoric ground once more” (120), or, perhaps more beautifully, “as when lightning flashes, a retinal image overlays the scene even as we look away” (121). Such a scene in An Evening Walk is that in which a female beggar freezes to death with her children, a scene encapsulated by a blissful description of swans in a state of courtly and domestic love, and by a picturesque and “supremely reposed” (124) description of the lake involving herons, dabbling ducks, and swallows. As Liu points out, the scene is literally haunted by the beggar, “Placed anywhere else in the poem, this passage would simply be another pastiche of calm. But at its present location, it is also supremely edgy with remembered terror” (125). Here is Liu’s desire and violence, spelled out at the beginning of the chapter, hidden beneath the repose of the picturesque, and revealed in a locodescriptive moment. “The catastrophe of the Beggar,” he writes, “is always threatening to emerge through the surface of repose” (125). In An Evening Walk, however, “Wordsworth wishes to describe a landscape in repose; but in the slips, swerves, and stuttering of his poem, he regresses to landscape haunted by story” (135).

Liu writes of the ending lines of An Evening Walk, “there is more than just repose. Something is happening in the night even if we cannot quite remember what it is. Something raises the hair on the back of our necks” (131). Literally, of course, Liu is referring to the beggar’s story, but figuratively, he reveals in the last paragraphs of the chapter, that he is referring to the French Revolution. Liu sees the time in period in which Wordsworth composed the poem as haunted by a “master plot,” the French Revolution. The politics of this mater plot, Liu writes, “reformed the principles of property exchange, bureaucratic discipline and liberal freedom in a manner beyond the comprehension of picturesque form” (136). In the chapter’s final image, it is the Jacobin Reign of Terror that Liu sees beneath the repose of Wordsworth’s picturesque scene, by envisioning the eye of the picturesque as surmounted by the Jacobin Vigilant Eye (136). To conclude his chapter, therefore, Liu returns, via An Evening Walk to the main points at the center of his argument, fissures and frictions within the picturesque, seeing as a form of social control, and Revolutionary politics.

Megan Bradley
University of Rhode Island
October 4, 2005

Flagg Road 124
TH 11-noon; 2-3pm

Required Texts
John Milton. Paradise Lost (Norton)

Marilyn Butler, ed. Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge)

William Godwin. Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (Penguin)

Stephen Gill, ed. William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford)

William Wordsworth. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 (Norton)

H. J. Jackson, ed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford)

Donald H. Reiman, ed. Shelley's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton)

Jerome McGann, ed. Lord Byron: The Major Works (Oxford)

Edward Hirsch, ed. Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (Random House)

Harold Bloom, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness (Norton)

Course Packet (Rhode Island Book Company)

NOTE: With the exceptions of Caleb Williams and the Course Packet, all materials are available through Reserve at the URI library.

Class Participation (15%)
Seminar Paper (70%)
Class Opening (15%)