Imageless Truths: Shelley's Poetic Fictions by Karen A. Weisman (review)

196 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 political structures that inflict it.' But Bruhm is attentive to the many contradictions and problems with each stance, never reducing a text to any settled position. This book deserves praise for the subtlety of its analyses, the rigour of its political insights (not least regarding the politics of class), the convincing way in which it links problems in law and medicine to the obsessions of literary texts, and the importance of its readings of several Gothic texts which often have not been served well by other critics. But one frequently notices the absence of attention to gender, not only in the reading of Radcliffe's work (where Bruhm himself notes its absence) but also - to take only two examples - of Godwin's Fleetwood, in which the protagonist constructs and tortures an artificial version of his wife, and of Shelley'S Cenci, whose Beatrice is the most devastating example in the book of a I character destroyed and unwritten by pain.' These texts variously display the specifically gendered body, whether to link sadism and a particular form of masculine anxiety (Godwin) or to confront the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of articulating the female body's experience of rape (Shelley). Similarly, Bruhm does well to place the Gothic within the history of representations of subjectivity and individuality in Britain, but he fails to make serious use of current psychoanalytic theories about the subject as it is constituted through relations to other subjects. Such failures make the book remarkably accessible to readers resistant to theory; they also suggest what contemporary criticism might yet achieve if this book, which does not call upon such important resources, nevertheless opens the way to an enlivening new understanding of the Gothic. (DAVID COLLINGS) Karen A. Weisman. lmageless Truths: Shelley's Poetic Fictions University of Pennsylvania Press. xiii, 227. $34.95 cloth As a poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) had a big problem: he came to an unsettling conclusion that thought could not be adequately expressed in language. But his problem went further than this, simply because he wanted his poetry to get out there and participate in and reflect the world. He even wanted to change a lot of things. Such are the aspirations of an unacknowledged legislator of the world. There is a long critical history that variously takes up this strain of doubt in Shelley's writings, all the way from C.E. Pulos's The Deep Truth: A Study ofShelley's Scepticism (1954) and Earl R. Wasserman's Shelley: A Critical Reading (1971), and on to Lloyd Abbey's Destroyer and Preserver: Shelley's Poetic Skepticism (1979). Postmodern critical readings of Shelley in the 1980s further highlighted this aspect of Shelley: deconstructive strategies which pursue the problems of language, meaning, and referentiality are right up HUMANITIES 197 Shelley's sceptical alley, and not just because his poetry can be worked easily from a deconstructive approach, but because the poetry itself takes a kind of deconstructive attitude towards its various subjects. Karen A. Weisman's Imageless Truths: Shelley's Poetic Fictions returns with new and very clear eyes to this sceptical side of Shelley's writing as it relates to his language and fiction-making. This study energetically traces how, over his shortened career (Shelley's boating death was just a month before he was to turn thirty), he came to recognize and poetically grapple with both the physical and the metaphysical sides of 'things,' how his poetry necessarily draws on the quotidian world in order to find metaphorical expression, yet at the same time it desires to transcend that world. Throughout the book, Weisman's buzzword for this dual, contradictory drive in Shelley is 'anxiety,' and this anxiety, this fictionalizing, is viewed as motivating aspects of his work, rather than forestalling it. By exploring some of Shelley's major poetry, Imageless Truths deliberately and chronologically traces Shelley's poetic development in terms of how the poet self-consciously worked through these problems of articulating the ineffable, beginning with Queen Mab (1813). In this early and in many ways immature poem, Shelley was beginning to see 'that the language of imagination participates in a reciprocal relationship with the life...