Psyche’s “Whisp’ring Fan” and Keats’s Genealogy of the Secular

JOHN SAVARESE Psyche’s “Whisp’ring Fan” and Keats’s Genealogy ofthe Secular I N A PREFATORY LETTER TO GEORGE AND GEORGIANA, KEATS CLAIMS TO have written the Ode to Psyche because he is “more orthodox tha[n] to let a he[a]then Goddess be so neglected.”1 In its most apparent sense, this pose of Hellenic orthodoxy sounds typical of the “Cockney classicism” that has increasingly come to define one aspect ofKeats’s literary practice. Situating Keats in the “Cockney school” has helped to illuminate the worldly and oppositional character of poetry that previously seemed aestheticizing or escapist. In particular, Nicholas Roe and Jeffrey Cox have reemphasized the oppositional use to which Greek antiquity was often put.2 By aligning himself with history’s victims—specifically that “old religion” made obso­ lete during the Augustan age, but arguably also its modern counterparts— Keats positions himself against the geopolitical power he often refers to simply as “Christianity.”3 But criticizing Christianity may not be as radical or as simple a posture as is sometimes assumed. A number of scholars, most recently Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, have argued that Christianity and secularism have more in common than Cockney classicism would suggest. Challenging “subtraction stories” of secularization, in which the emergence of “secular” values like liberal pluralism and autonomous state institutions is characterized as a reThanks to Colin Jager for conversation and advice at various stages of composition. I also received valuable feedback at Peter Kitson’s 2008 NASSR session on “Romanticism’s Di­ verse Religions.” i. Letters ofJohn Keats, 1814—1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:106. 2. Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and Their Circle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Nicholas Roe,John Keats and the Cul­ ture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 3. Letters, 106. See especially James Chandler’s discussion ofKeats’s “late riposte” to Milton ’s Nativity Ode, and its celebration of the advent of Christian history, in England in 1819 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 414. SiR, 50 (Fall 2011) 389 390 JOHN SAVARESE moval of religion, Taylor has argued that such values can be understood as developments of a specifically Christian logic.4 On this argument, Keats’s secularist program, which often seems to give him his subversive edge, may in fact be substantially continuous with what it claims to be critiquing. Moreover, recent critiques ofsecular politics, from scholars like Talal Asad, Gil Anidjar and others, pursue the more dramatic possibility that the “in­ vention” of the distinction between secular and religious has served the interests of a state power bent on the management and coercion of its sub­ jects. That distinction has been conditioned, they argue, by the govern­ mental interests of colonial expansion, as well as the Orientalist scholarship that underwrote that expansion. Anidjar offers perhaps the most stringent version of this critique when he proposes that the secular is not just reli­ gion’s continuation by other means, but that both “the religious and the secular are terms that . . . have persisted historically, institutionally in mask­ ing . . . the one pertinent religion,”—that is, Christianity.5 To the extent that Keats’s paganism remains caught up in a critique of religion, it is open to the challenge that secularism “is a name Christianity gave itself when it invented religion, when it named its other or others as religions.”6 Keats may call Hunt’s Examiner a “Battering Ram against Christianity,” but both Hunt’s Religion of the Heart and Keats’s Ode to Psyche would, on Anidjar’s argument, be examples of Christianity carrying on in the form of “secular­ ized religion.”7 If this is right, and the interests of the secular are still those defined by Western Christendom, it raises a substantial problem for the Ode to Psyche. Even if we follow Mark Canuel in tracing an evolution in Keats’s thinking from an early, wholesale critique of religion as “vulgar superstition” into a 4. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 22. O11 the ways in which “religion,” notably Christianity, can be seen as continuous with disen...