Ascent the Negativa

Like Jane (in her first post), I too found Hartman a difficult read. One of the reasons is that he sources the 1850 Prelude instead of the 1805 edition that's in LABL. Plus in its abridgement, LABL omits the Mount Blanc passage that Hartman obliquely refers to as the “unexpected revelation [that] comes almost immediately (ll. 624-40), while the whole is preceded by a parallel instance of disappointment with the natural world followed by a compensatory vision” (219A). I challenge you—not Professor Garrett, of course, and possibly not Dimitrios—to make sense out of this passage without having read those lines in the 1850 edition. Frankly, I had trouble explicating the passage even after downloading the 1850 version on the Internet. But what finally helped me is a March 11, 1965 review in The New York Review of Books of Hartman’s book by Christopher Ricks, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814, in which his article occupies a prominent chapter, prominent because the reviewer spends most of the time discussing its ideas. (You can access the part about Mount Blanc from the Internet, but you have to pay an access fee of $5 to read the full review. If anyone wants to read it, let me know and I will email it to you.)

Returning to Jane’s post, I find her explanation of the mystical via negativa lucid and informative. I was also prompted by her discourse to give a closer reading to Hartman (and Wordsworth) than I ordinarily would have. My understanding is that for both the mystics and Wordsworth, the via negative foregrounds a way toward something. For the mystics it’s toward God, who can never be known directly, and for Wordsworth it’s toward the Imagination, a concept equally difficult to access (“the Power so called through sad incompetence of human speech”).  As Jane says, for the mystic the experience of the secular world must be eliminated—music, television, and technology, and even the abstract idea of experience itself. In Hartman’s analogue, Nature represents for Wordsworth what the secular represents for the mystic. But Jane argues that in Wordsworth “nothing really is being negated or eliminated . . . [e]verything coexists.” I’m not so sure. 

In Part VI, ll 599-608 of The Prelude (as quoted by Hartman), Wordsworth says that the “invisible world”— where “greatness makes[s] abode—is revealed when, with the “strength of usurpation” the senses are extinguished (“the light of sense goes out”). Therefore, the experience of the senses—Nature—holds the same relationship with the Imagination as the secular world does for the Devine. Granted, when Hartman says that “Wordsworth’s journey as a poet can only continue with eyes,” it suggests a symbiosis between the realms of Nature and the Imaginative. But Hartman qualifies this by saying that “the Imagination experienced as a power distinct from Nature opens his eyes by putting them out” (224B). Is not sightlessness the opposite of sight? And do not both the mystic and the poet have to experience these antipodal realms before they can negate them? 

As we know, Wordsworth poetry is rife with negative imagery—hedgerows that are hardly hedgerows, and a visionary dreariness that colors or words cannot describe. In The Prelude he anticipates post-structuralism by showing in the first of the “spots of time” how form collapses into content. Upon revisiting the sight of the Gibbet and the Beacon many years later with his sister and fiancé, he feels the “spirit of pleasure and youth’s golden gleam” . . . “from the power they [these remembrances] left behind.” This has a doubling effect on Wordsworth, conditioned on the reification of the original experience. (“So feeling comes in aid of feeling, and a diversity of strength attends us, if but once we have been strong.”) Now, as the poet in the midst of composition, he recollects this moment, despite his having been especially endowed with this spiritual vision (“it is from thyself it is that thou must give, else never [the poet] canst receive”), he sees only “glimpses now.” Soon, with age, he will “scarcely see at all.” But while he can he will express through his poetry “as far as words can give, a substance and a life to what [he] feels[s].” His purpose is to benefit posterity (“to enshrine the spirit of the past for future restoration”). 

Hartman's Problematics in "A Poet's Progress"

Hartman’s essay arguing the “via naturaliter negativa” of Wordsworth’s poetry seemed to me a difficult read, since I’m only familiar with “the way of negation” in terms of God and spirituality. Therefore, using this paradigm to show how imagination exists as Wordsworth’s true muse, as opposed to nature, which is the commonly accepted theory, Hartman confused me as a reader. I understood his overall argument, that nature guides Wordsworth only so much until the power of imagination supersedes and leads him to a moment of sublime ecstasy communicable solely via poetry. However, I understand via negativa as a spiritual philosophy preaching the negation of all things beyond God himself/herself/itself. So, for Hartman to use this concept as the base of his argument, he introduced some clarity issues for me. Of course, I could be reading this completely incorrectly, but I will point out why I found such difficulty with Hartman’s idea of “via naturaliter negativa” as a means to argue the superiority of imagination over nature in Wordsworth’s poetry.

Spiritually, the “via negativa” is an extreme philosophy, and one’s adherence to it proves frustrating in today’s modern culture. It holds that in order to truly understand and recognize the presence and power of God, one must reject everything that is not God. So there’s no music, no television, no technology. Nothing secular in any fashion should be prioritized before one’s faith in the divine. Even the concept of a temporal, material experience should not exist in one’s mind, as it does not point to an idea of God. As a result, the abstract idea of experience must be eliminated as well. Essentially, the “via negativa” promotes the disposal of all secular thought, culture, and experience in order to understand that life’s true meaning lies in its emptiness. God is the end all, be all.

So, my problem with Hartman’s use of the “via negativa” to describe nature’s demotion from subject of worship to pedagogical guardian in Wordsworth’s poetry is that it conflicts with the essential philosophy of negation. In Hartman’s argument, everything still exists in and around nature, and it is Wordsworth’s imagination that allows him to communicate emotions and thoughts, not the presence of nature itself. He says, “When the external stimulus (that being nature) is too clearly present, the poet falls mute and corroborates Blake’s strongest objection: ‘Natural Objects always did and now do weaken, deaden, and obliterate Imagination in me.’” Hence, Wordsworth is not experiencing emptiness at all. It’s quite the opposite. The poet’s imagination and internal experiences are all provoked by the presence of nature, and therefore nature is not a divine presence. Rather, the Wordsworth’s autonomous mind is the celebrated subject. In my opinion, nothing really is being negated or eliminated in Hartman’s argument. Everything coexists, and consequently, the possibility for emptiness is made null and void. Perhaps Hartman could have used another paradigm of thought to describe the reclassification of nature for Wordsworth only because I find the aspect of via negativa to be a weak metaphor.