Limited Analogies: Reading Relations in Wordsworth’s The Borderers

TAYLOR SCHEY Limited Analogies: Reading Relations in Wordsworth’s The Borderers All our reasonings concerning matter of fact are founded on a species of analogy. —David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding The other knows me merely by analogy—and thatjust is not knowing another mind! But I’ve already seen that nothing could be better than, could go beyond, analogy here! —Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason I N THE PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS, WORDSWORTH CONSIDERS “THE pleasure received from metrical language” and ends up offering what is perhaps his most comprehensive but least original statement on aesthetic theory: I mean the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception ofsi­ militude in dissimilitude. This principle is the great spring ofthe activ­ ity of our minds, and their chieffeeder. From this principle the direc­ tion of the sexual appetite, and all the passions connected with it, take their origin: it is the life of our ordinary conversation; and upon the accuracy with which similitude in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude are perceived, depend our taste and our moral feelings.1 “A commonplace of eighteenth-century aesthetics,” as editors Jane Worthington Smyser and W. J. B. Owen note, Wordsworth’s principle of “similitude in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude,” reflects a basic My warm thanks to Deborah Elise White, Mark Stoholski, and Sumita Chakraborty for their help on drafts of this essay, as well as to the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University for its generous support. i. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. Michael Mason, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 2007), 82. SiR, 56 (Summer 2017) 177 178 TAYLOR SCHEY concern with the workings of analogical thought.2 If analogy was under­ stood broadly in the eighteenth century as a “resemblance between things with regard to some circumstances,”3 Wordsworth is interested here in how analogical resemblances are determined in the first place, and in how they determine many facets of life: aesthetic experience, of course, but also mental activity, the passions, morality, judgment, and intercourse in all senses. Approaching this passage with the concerns of queer theory and poststructuralist ethics in mind, recent readers have argued that Words­ worth privileges certain notions of sameness and difference: the first half of his chiastic formulation (“similitude in dissimilitude”) has been criticized as a heteronormative principle that puts forth sexual difference as a necessary condition for attraction, while the latter half (“dissimilitude in similitude”) has been valorized for emphasizing the importance of difference in the context ofethical relations.4 And yet the crux ofWordsworth’s formulation does not so much involve sameness and/or difference as “the accuracy with which similitude in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude are per­ ceived.” At least when it comes to “taste” and “moral feelings,” every­ thing, for Wordsworth, would seem to “depend,” not upon whether one privileges sameness or difference, but upon one’s ability to discern the dif­ ference between a similitude and a dissimilitude. Everything would seem to depend, in other words, upon the possibility of even knowing the differ­ ence between difference and sameness. Of course, by most accounts, the epistemological limits of analogy are supposed to be old news at the beginning of the nineteenth century. “At the beginning of the seventeenth century,” writes Michel Foucault, “thought ceases to move in the element of resemblance. Similitude is no longer the form of knowledge but rather the occasion for error.”5 Students of Romanticism will likely understand the break Foucault identifies in terms of a more gradual shift, whereby a system of analogical correspon­ dences that structured Renaissance ontology breaks down across the En­ lightenment as analogy comes to be seen as a merely rhetorical device, 2. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, Smyser and Owen, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 1:211. 3. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 1 (London: Printed by W. Strahan, 1755). 4. For examples of the former, see Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 87—88, and Christopher C. Nagle, Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era (New York: Palgrave, 2007...