Narrative Means to Lyric Ends in Wordsworth's Prelude

The temporal complexities of William Wordsworth's autobiographical poem The Prelude have long attracted critical attention. M. H. Abrams, in his foundational study Natural Supernaturalism, notes, "The construction of The Prelude is radically achronological, starting not at the beginning, but at the end—during Wordsworth's walk to 'the Vale that I had chosen'" (74), and further observes that "in the course of The Prelude Wordsworth repeatedly drops the clue that his work has been designed to round back to its point of departure" (79). That is, the episode which comes last in a chronological reconstruction of story events—the walk to the chosen vale—is narrated twice, at the beginning and again at the end of the discourse. In the course of this walk Wordsworth finds inspiration in the breeze, which "assures him of his poetic mission and, though it is fitful, eventually leads to his undertaking The Prelude itself" (Abrams 75). As a result, "The Prelude . . . is an involuted poem which is about its own genesis—a prelude to itself" (Abrams 79). Much of the poem consists of Wordsworth's interactions with nature that "assure[d] him of his poetic mission." The goal of the poem is to demonstrate his fitness to produce great poetry, and The Prelude itself becomes evidence of that fitness. Wordsworth alerts readers to this teleological drive of the poem in its opening book, when he asks, "Was it for this / That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved / To blend his murmurs with my Nurse's song?" (1.269–71) As Geoffrey Hartman explicates the rhetoric of this passage, "'Was it for this' potentially simplifies into 'it was for this' and even 'it was'. The question wants to be a statement about an 'it' (nature) that 'was' (acted in the past) 'for this' (a poetry it calls to birth)" ("Was it for this" 14).

In this essay, I revisit such discussions of The Prelude's temporality and teleology from the perspective of narrative theory, in the belief that Wordsworth's poem and narratology can shed light on each other. The Prelude qualifies generalizations about the retrospective nature of narrative, throws into high relief some of the characteristics of confessional literature, and troubles some of Gérard Genette's categories for prolepsis. Narrative theory illuminates the unusual causal relations among The Prelude's story events, and the importance of the river metaphor used to describe those causal relations. The Prelude's rhetoric and narrative structure also exert a powerful influence over the temporality of the reading process, create an ambiguous temporal relationship between the narrator and the poem's endpoint, and produce a specific hybrid of lyric and narrative. In this poem, Wordsworth uses narrative structures to promote lyric effects. All of these implications depend on one central argument: Wordsworth encourages his audience to read prospectively, constantly looking forward to a conclusion the reader knows from the very start—Wordsworth's status as a great poet, fostered by Nature.¹ And yet Geoffrey Hartman is right to assert that "[r]anged against this affirmation are not only doubts about the tendency of the past but also about the poetry it fosters" ("Was it for this" 14). Richard Onorato has shown that Wordsworth compensates for such doubts by creating an idealized, fictitious version of himself, a fiction which the reader can see through: "To the reader, it is always plain that Nature's choice of Wordsworth is Wordsworth's imaginative choice of Nature" (268). Wordsworth's doubts about his past and about his poetry have received so much commentary that Tilottama Rajan has declared, "A study of The Prelude could not now take literally its figures of genesis and memory, which claim to ground Wordsworth's interpretation of his life by attributing causality and factuality to something he himself was always revising" (365). This article certainly does not assume that Wordsworth's interpretation of his life is literally true, but it does explore the consequences of Wordsworth's explicit rhetoric for readers who suspend their disbelief and allow themselves to be guided by his rhetoric.

Narrative, Lyric, and Their...