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4 How to Do Things with Wordsworth
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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chapter four William Wordsworth and his poems crop up repeatedly in various discussions that span the breadth of Cavell’s career, from the early essays in Must We Mean What We Say?, through discussions of romanticism in The Claim of Reason and other texts of the 1980s, and on into the later work. Cavell’s discussions of Wordsworth are often brief yet complex; he claims he is “reading texts of Wordsworth . . . as though they are responding to the same problems philosophers have, even responding in something like the same way (a way that cannot be dissociated from thinking)” (IQO, p. 7).1 These discussions establish Wordsworth—on Cavell’s reading—as a poet investigating the challenge of “ordinary language,” a claim that puts his poetry in a similar orbit to that of the philosophy of J. L. Austin. Though this claim might at first seem counterintuitive—what, after all, could Austin, the most insistently ordinary of ordinary language philosophers, have in common with Wordsworth, a romantic poet?—I shall nevertheless be adding another claim to it, namely, that Wordsworth also shares a (loosely) Austinian awareness of the performative power of language itself, that is, an understanding of how we do things with words. Following Angela Esterhammer, I shall refer to this dimension of Wordsworth ’s poetry as the Romantic performative, and, building on her insights, I hope to demonstrate that this term can help us understand broader issues in Cavell’s understanding of romanticism itself. i Wordsworth’s well-known ode “Intimations of Immortality from RecollectionsofEarlyChildhood ”isapoemtowhichCavellturnsatseveralmomentsin his writings. The first of these, and the earliest encounter with Wordsworth’s How to Do Things with Wordsworth 100 s ta n l e y c av e l l a n d t h e c l a i m o f l i t e r at u r e poetry in Cavell’s writings, is to be found in an essay entitled “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy” (see MWM, pp. 73–96). For the most part, the essay conducts itself as an alert sparring partner against various orthodoxies in thethendominantNewCriticism,particularlyCleanthBrooks’sconcept“The Heresy of Paraphrase.” Brooks’s argument, which decries the idea that a poem can be taken as a kind of statement, with a content that could in principle be summarized, is deflated by Cavell in what could easily be read as a moment of satire: Someoneislikelytoburstoutwith:Butofcourseaparaphrasesayswhatthepoem says, and an approximate paraphrase is merely a bad paraphrase; with greater effort or sensibility you could have got it exactly right. To which one response would be: “Oh, I can tell you exactly what the Ode means,” and then read the Ode aloud. (MWM, pp. 75–76) This response may sound facetious, but taken seriously, it contains several characteristically Cavellian insights: most obviously, that the “Intimations” Ode, like any other piece of language, must mean what it says; equally, that a moment ofromanticismisintersectedby amoment ofskepticism.Moreimportantly , though, if Wordsworth’s poem is not reducible to a mere statement, then there is something about the poem that is not simply constative, which might imply that, in J. L. Austin’s terms, it entails some sort of performative dimension . This much is suggested in the upshot of the recital alluded to at the end of Cavell’s quote: someone who recites Wordsworth’s “Intimations” Ode in this context is not telling us what it means so much as exposing us to its illocutionaryforce .Whetherthereisalsoaperlocutionaryaspecttothisrecitalisdifficult to ascertain for many reasons (e.g., it is not clear what securing uptake in this context could mean). Indeed, to follow Austin’s crude test for perlocution, one cannot say “I poem you” in the way one can utter other performatives like “I promise you,” “I bet you,” or “I order you.” Nevertheless, the poem itself is inscribed with various gestures toward the performative power of language, in ways that, I shall argue, expand our concept of performativity itself. Cavell takes Brooks to task for suggesting, in spite of his views on paraphrase , that the “Intimations” Ode is a statement “about” the poet having “lost something.” Nevertheless, the poem is best known for giving voice to the experience of loss: “It is not now as it hath been of yore” (line 6); “there hath past away a glory from the earth” (line 18); “The things which I have seen I now can see no more” (line 9). But it is how the Ode frames this experience of loss that is most interesting here...