“Why Linger at the Yawning Tomb So Long?”: The Ethics of Negative Capability in Keats’s Isabella and Hyperion

There’s absolutely no reason why we should make ourselves the guarantors of the bourgeois dream. A little more rigor and firmness are required in our confrontation with the human condition.

Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

“Do I wake or sleep?” asks the speaker in John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale. The question famously exemplifies Keats’s aesthetically productive “negative capability,” a psychic state of lingering “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (I. 193). It has been suggested that Keats’s negative capability resonates with Wordsworthian “wise passiveness,” as negative capability implies a capacious, liberal, “truly protean intellect — wisely passive, watchful, receptive, but also powerfully equal to all things” (Roe 236).¹ Although negative capability undoubtedly fosters receptivity to a variety of ideas, for Keats it is also intrinsically associated with intense existential uncertainty, a dimension that is absent from Wordsworthian wise passiveness. “I have been half in love with easeful death” (l. 52), admits the speaker in the same poem, and this line reminds us that negative capability is often attained by an encounter with the ultimate mystery, death, an experience that challenges and even overwhelms the subject’s sense of identity. Situated within a complex matrix of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, Keats’s concept of negative capability suggests that an encounter with the tragic vicissitudes of existence, rather than being mere disaster, ushers the individual into a state of “posthumous existence”² that forcibly empties the mind of personal, social, and historical certainty. This uncertain mind is then capable of restructuring or even reinventing socially and politically ossified meanings and values.

Keats’s encounters with existential uncertainty were as painfully literal as they were consolingly allegorized in his poetic work. Keats’s poetry, according to Andrew Bennett, “cannot be read — has not been read — apart from a certain figuration of poetic biography, a life which hinges on prescient dissolution, on the corporeal disappearance, sickness or fading of the poet” (157). Bennett further associates Keats’s desire for an early death with his adoration of Chatterton, that “Dear child of sorrow — son of misery” (“To Chatterton”), who achieved fame through death. Keats’s prescience of death is inextricably tied to his creative work, yet this essay suggests that an exposure to the incomprehensible aspects of death overwhelms and unsettles the mind’s preconceived structuring ideas. This not only to say that Keats’s goal is more responsible and profound than the mere craving for posthumous fame — more significantly, we can place Keats’s tragic engagement with the contingencies of existence within a larger context of the ethics of being-towards-death, which opposes rational, calculating, utilitarian forms of ethics.

Encountering the negativity of death and yet remaining alive generates the intense psychological uncertainty that Lacan in his seminar on ethics calls “the domain and the level of the experience of absolute disarray” (304). Lacan’s term “absolute disarray,” like the “negative” in negative capability, implies a being-towards-death, a psychical state that willingly engages a liminal space between the economy of the symbolic and the alterity of the Real. Neither happiness nor pleasure should be the goal of psychoanalysis, Lacan maintains; analysts have a moral responsibility to refuse their clients’ demands for bourgeois happiness and to reveal how the underlying structure of human desire “must remain in a fundamental relationship to death” (303). In a Lacanian reading of “To Autumn,” Mark Bracher perceptively suggests that Keats’s is a “positioning of death as an enactment or efflorescence of being” (650).³ If Keats’s poetry repeatedly transposes the negativity of death with the capability of being, then Keats’s negative capability can indeed be better understood within the context of Lacan’s tragic being-towards-death. Beyond confounding being and death, moreover, Lacan and Keats share an insight into the potential within traumatic loss for fundamental ethical reorientation: although for Lacan the zone between life and death only serves as a model of authentic relation to desire, whereas Keats’s poetry moves beyond the...