| I counter post-structuralist and cultural materialist accounts that have, with admittedly ample cause, tended to associate social norms generally, and aesthetics in particular, with ideological suppression of social realities. I argue that the modern representational crisis finally makes normative aesthetic experience a condition of distinguishing the social as such. I show how the Intimations Ode, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Marino Faliero, Alastor, The Mask of Anarchy, Lamia and The Warden variously frame aesthetic experience as a formal process that secures no determinate political, cultural or aesthetic meanings, but, on the contrary, reflects upon the contingency of modern social structures in order to produce critical practice itself as a form of truth. Drawing on these works' common preoccupation with Hamlet, I present Hamlet's final injunction to Horatio as a seminal appeal for such a practice. Hamlet enjoins Horatio to resist the temptation of a "Roman death"---the stereotypically 'Romantic' fantasy of escaping the inherently ambiguous, or "rotten," modern social context---in order to "draw thy breath in pain to tell my story," even though Hamlet also insists that contingency not be eliminated from his story but "let be." For the audience of the play no less than for Horatio, Hamlet's injunction identifies what I term "literary performance" as the act upon which modern social life hinges, thereby laying the mold for the negatively capable, world-legislating projects of Byron, Shelley and Keats. Like Horatio telling the late Hamlet's story, what Keats celebrates about Psyche, for instance, is precisely that she has always already defied determinate memorialization: "temple thou hast none." An unheard but also unplayed melody, she gives us nothing we might even imagine "fond[ly] believing" in. She is less a determination of the mind than a form of mindedness---the "trellis of a working brain"---testifying to, or normatively "legislating," an autonomous, interminable (and thus "negative") capacity for memorialization, not its object. My purpose in demonstrating Trollope's investment in this project is to suggest that the latter is integral to the modern category of 'the literary' generally, even a literary form as apparently innocuous or even conservative as Trollope's serial novel. |
