Having just read quickly through the first part of Book the tenth for the first time, I’m going to make this week’s response short. If I had to sum up the theme or subject of the first part of the book, I’d say something like this: Wordsworth, who believes that freedom is necessary to moral action, struggles to retain hope in the possibility of human liberation after the politicized struggle for the cause has devolved into mass violence in France, a turning against the principles of liberty in England and war between the two nations.

If Wordsworth attempts to work out his place in nature in the early books, he seeks to locate himself inside of a history shaped by human action in this book. One of the things that I find fascinating about the chapter is the way in which we see Wordsworth’s body and mind getting entangled with the temperament of his historical moment–a time when “a reservoir of guilt / And ignorance, filled up from age to age…burst and spread in deluge through the land” (436-39). Although Wordsworth expresses the hope that a “faith, / an elevation and a sanctity” (426-27) may survive the afflictions of “evil times,” this “faith” is under serious threat. Wordsworth does not look upon the violence in France as an outsider or observer: he understands the most private aspects of his “soul” (380) to be implicated in the shameful perpetuation of violence happening around him, first in France and then in England.  The “enormities” of the Great Terror leave him haunted by “ghastly visions” (374) that recur “through months, through years” in his dreams and waking thoughts.

Recalling Britain’s preparation for war with France in the summer of 1793, Wordsworth describes a “shock” felt among the “ingenious youth” of England that “might be termed” a “revolution.” In no uncertain terms, Wordsworth likens this psychic “revolution” happening in England to the revolution that had precipitated so much violence in France. Wordsworth captures this shock in a set of territorial figures: the news of war throws him into a “another region” alien to the teleological, or spiritual “path” he had been traveling up to this point. Another set o figures follow: that of Wordsworth as a “green leaf” “cut off” from his “beloved country” and “tossed about in whirlwinds” (258).

It is as if Wordsworth has been violently thrust from an order of being familiar to him into one that is unfathomable. Where he was once able to experience “enjoyment” in his felt connection to the natural world, he now experiences “a conflict of sensations without a name.” I’d suggest that the sensations “without a name” chart a severing of affect from cognition. The harmonious links between mind and world confirmed by feelings of “enjoyment” are no where to be found in an affective situation where Wordsworth cannot put words to feelings. Of course, Wordsworth is writing about all this, which suggests that the disorientation can be recalled without completely impeding the discursive process. Though the memory of this “revolution” can be written, it is nonetheless upsetting, and the proliferation of figures that follows Wordsworth’s identification of the “shock” suggests that the poet’s mind at the scene of writing is turning, unable to pin this experience down in ordinary language.

I’m interested in the way in which the “shock” in England puts Wordsworth out of synch with what is happening in the empirical world around him. The sense of spatial displacement evoked in the metaphor of the whirlwind is matched by a correlated sense of temporal displacement, which gets expressed on the level of narrative. As I end this response, I want to look at a moment where we see Wordsworth thinking and feeling out of time with what is going on around him. The example I’ve chosen happens while Wordsworth is still in France, but I think that it illuminates a temporal problem that Wordsworth experiences even as he is back in England.

At the beginning of book ten, Wordsworth recalls seeing a public square in France “Heaped up with dead and dying” corpses. The immediate experience is one that Wordsworth cannot make meaning of.The sight of slaughtered corpses is not awful or fearsome in this moment of witnessing, but meaningless—there exists a gulf between the autobiographical writer, the observer in the memory and the significance of what the observer is looking at. He retrospectively figures his incomprehension in this moment as a hermeneutic failure, or as a failure to make present a voice known to be immanent in the words of a book. The alignment of Wordsworth’s present and past selves comes into view if we can posit a parallel between Wordsworth as a reader of his past and the figure of the reader baffled by a book that has been reduced to the sheer physicality of ‘mute leaves.’

It is not until later in the evening when Wordsworth is “felt and touched” by what he terms “the fear gone by.” The temporality at work here is very strange. Wordsworth belatedly experiences a fear that he suggests would have been fit to atrocities already witnessed through a virtual, or imaginary, anticipation of a sequence of violent returns. The feeling of anticipatory “dread” has to do with the witnessed scene but only indirectly: Wordsworth explicitly describes the dread as an effect of “tragic fictions / And mournful calendars of true history, / Remembrances and dim admonishments” (67-69). Wordsworth’s failure to read and thereby process the manifestations of mass violence when they are directly before him is followed up by a moment where reading takes its effects, precipitating a “voice that cried / To the whole city, ‘Sleep no more!'” (76-77). I suspect that this whole episode might be understood as an allegory for Wordsworth’s autobiographical project, which aspires to situate the self in relation to ‘nature’ or history but which frequently ends up locating the self where nature and history are not. In other words, the autobiographical subject finds himself in places that he didn’t expect to find himself and the very activity of writing produces affects (here fear) that are related to those experienced in response to sense data but epistemologically distinct.