Margaret Russett. Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authorship, 1760-1845.

Murphy, Peter

Margaret Russett. Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authorship, 1760-1845. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. 258. $101.00.

The writer of ambitious literary and cultural criticism faces, these days, a curiously difficult though profoundly familiar task. The would-be critic must, to start, demonstrate a keen awareness of other writing similar to his or her own project, especially recent writing, The more encyclopedic this knowledge is shown to be, the better; the curious and familiar part being that while thus re-voicing others the critic must also demonstrate a crucial difference, a small but forcefully stated newness which proves, most basically, the urgency of adding the current article or book to the world of the already written. The Voice of the Profession must be put on, ventrilo-quized, but with a difference: and the difference is the Professorial Self, the essential individuality of the critic, an individuality which is paradoxically underwritten by a reproduction or imitation of previous critics. This Imposture, as Margaret Russett would call it, is the process through which the Professoriate (and, by the by, "literature") is constituted, the process through which (any)one can enter the Critical Aristocracy.

As with any similar process--becoming an "author," say, in and after the Romantic Period--it can be sharply cruel in its punishment of the insufficiently adept. If the past is not ventriloquized with adequate completeness, or if the Already Written is not reproduced in some collectively recognizable way, the densely interrelated matrix of "criticism" will not flex and open up a spot for the new writing, nor will the Profession admit the new Professor. And yet, of course, the aspiring critic will also be left out if this reproduction of the Already Written becomes simple reproduction: what Russett calls "forgery." The new writing must (at the same moment it embraces sameness) produce some note which resists incorporation into the matrix it is designed to enter. On the other side of tenure, the reiteration of one's critical voice in aspiring new voices--the footnote, trackable through various library databases--reiterates and affirms one's Professorial legitimacy, the authority of the imitated voice: what Russett calls "canonicity"; what Harold Bloom called, in a different key, "influence."

I rehearse these familiar truths about the self-policing processes through which our "discipline" maintains itself for two reasons. First, it demonstrates with intimate clarity the truth of Margaret Russett's argument: that our understanding of "literature" and authorship is fundamentally Romantic: "a drama ... that reifies call and response into mutually reinforcing canonical categories" (89). Most of the terms I use above are Russett's; and the claim about "reiteration" is filtered through her wonderful explanation of Coleridge's claim, in the Biographia, that Wordsworth could not be imitated except by those "not born to be imitators" (45). Second, it helps dramatize the virtuosic and densely interesting way in which Russett herself threads the critical needle.

To deal with the first first, Russett's book is a welcome and sharply interesting extension of recent critical work on the creation of modern notions of "self" in the 18th century. A plain way of complementing Russett's work on these issues is to call it eminently responsible. She has a calm command of the critical corpus, and understands very clearly the need to fill in the Romantic gap in this work. We often glide too easily from McKeon's and Pocock's formulations (to name just two) all the way to the current world, with its fascination for credit, freedom, virtue and elite democracies. This is not quite right, and Russett's faltering of all these cultural constructs through the slightly unfashionable strangeness of Romantic culture goes a long way towards correction. For instance, she begins her study by connecting the fictional truth-telling of the novel to her basic building blocks of imposture and forgery. This is quite right, and happens, delightfully, at the very moment when, in the process of reading the beginning of her book, one starts to notice that Russett's description of the way the true self is found through alienation sounds a lot like Fielding's insistence that he needs to make things up in order to show the world as it really is.

In pursuit of her corrective and convincing argument, Russett demonstrates a simple, even personal, love of the strange and irreducibly interesting stories Romantic culture produces so continually: the "Kubla Khan" effect, one might say. She takes up, in turn, Chatterton's copies without originals; Coleridge's unsettling claim that he did not copy from himself when writing "Christabel"; the story of the Maid of Buttermere; the Princess Cariboo hoax, famous now, and then; the heart-rending and yet oddly resistant and even irritating story of John Clare's obsession with Byron; and the sad, inspiring case of James Hogg, the author everyone thought they knew. Unlike some similarly-minded critics, though, she refuses to pretend that Romantic strangeness is reducible to the plain forces of cultural action. She saves out the strangeness, the "stupidity," a wonderful term she uses for the persistent if counterintuitive literariness of Chatterton's poems. In fact--and, after she explains it, one could substitute an "of course"--this residue is the very subject of her book, the difference of the forged self, the "author function" generated by ventriloquizing with a difference, a process laid bare by the various stories of forgery she tells. This argument is the argument Harold Bloom might have made, Russett reminds us, if he had been able to think more genuinely historically, and if he thought more about women and less about Freud. Russett's quiet but strong engagement with Bloom is no small thing, and typical of the steady rethinking she does of the theoretical positions she inherits. The genuine interest and importance of Bloom's argument is recovered, in the Chatterton chapter, by linking its deficits to the more humanly compelling urgencies of Chatterton's fathering of himself.

Indeed, Russett diversifies her McKeon-like, meat-and-potatoes erudition through a running engagement with various threads of fancy theorizing, especially European theorizing, French, psychoanalytic and otherwise. This is sharply interesting and very intelligently done. It is also self-consciously done, and Russett's self-consciousness about the two paths in her theoretical ground (call them: homely British talk and fancy French artistry) makes for one of the most interesting features of her book. She often places the two pathways next to one another, and signals the change. First (as on page 85, for instance), Lacan, seamlessly and relevantly quoted; and then, "more prosaically," Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth. Depending on the reader, one might pass over with relief or bemusement, but, in both cases, the transition produces a delightful clarity, as the two modes reinforce one another with their different conceptual vocabularies. There is an especially interesting, even sly, example of this interweaving in the last chapter, on the native tormented genius James Hogg, the unabashed "hero" (191) of the story. One could find no more compelling theoretician of Scott-ish cultural self-fashioning than James Hogg, and Russett's starkly clear description of the way Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner lays the temporizing erasures of Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel open to view is quite brilliant. Speaking, in this chapter, of John Scott, the editor of the London Magazine whom John Lockhart killed, in a way, and theorizing the power of the pseudonymous tactics of Blackwood's, Russett says: "the authority of the name is enhanced by its position as an object of desire; it 'holds the place of a certain lack,' and is therefore 'perceived as a place of supreme plenitude.'" Who is that, being quoted? John Scott? Well--Slavoj Zizek, it turns out, checking the endnote; but for a moment English lays claim to it. Zizek is not openly introduced as a source of theoretical language for another couple of pages. I would say there is an implied argument here, made more interesting by being quietly withheld. Coleridge is the true theoretical ground for the book, and Russett's deft maneuvering makes this entirely convincing. She suggests, all along, that Coleridge did it first. The Fancy French is explained by reference to Coleridge, rather than the other way around, a method reminiscent, of course, of Jerry Christensen, whom Russett acknowledges in her preface.

Practically speaking, there is some textural unevenness in the book; the middle chapters, on the Maid of Buttermere, Princess Cariboo and John Clare, have a less densely articulated argument and feel somewhat lighter than the beginning and end, They are not discordant (their arguments are tightly bound to the project), and certainly not less interesting; this stylistic unevenness is typical, in the end, of our books these days, with their dialectical relationship to "articles." The chapter on Clare, in fact, has a plangent and sharp analytic interest, and feels like the first work on Clare that deals capably with the painful insanity of his self-inscription, surrendering neither its interest nor its craziness. The story of the Maid of Buttermere is obviously too good and too relevant to pass up; Russett mostly does her best to keep up with the phenomenon, deftly transcribing, in a way, a chapter Coleridge and De Quincey already wrote. In a good example of the forceful argument-by-quotation Russett often employs, the uncanny already-written nature of this material comes to a head in a simply astonishing anecdote about Coleridge, at the end of the chapter: Coleridge performing sadness as he tells a little girl about the Maid of Buttermere, complete with tears and an audience of admiring women.

The chapters on Chatterton and "Christabel" are beautifully managed and smart. It is harder to explain the perverse interest of the Preface to "Christabel" than it is to explain the interest of the Preface to "Kubla Khan" or the gloss to the "Rime," all features which appear when Coleridge rewrites himself in the teens, in response to Wordsworth's oppressive reinscription of himself at the same time. Russett does explain it, through an understanding of the legal and psychological nature of literary property. Some of the plainest explanatory work of the book is done in this chapter: Coleridge, the Author defined by the properties he owns, is created backwards, Bloom-style, by Walter Scott's reiteration of "Christabel."

Perhaps the sense of unevenness is created only by a contrast with the denser accomplishments of the opening and closing chapters. Her introduction is not perfunctory, and her first chapter, "Toward a Romantic Theory of Imposture," is a remarkable work in itself." its command of fact and theory is simply most impressive, and its accuracy about how culture works is delightful and revelatory. The last chapter, already described above, is a dense, exciting, encyclopedic and hermetically brilliant analytic story. There is pleasure in it: a pleasure in placing the frantic insights of James Hogg (always talking and never being listened to) against the overwhelming force of Walter Scott, which means placing Hogg against the World. Hogg's heroism is his resistance to the crushing, imaginary and yet perfectly irresistible forces which dictate the formation of the Romantic Author and its Freudian rewards of Women and Money. What Professor does not want to resist these forces, forces we feel in every step through the Academy? What Professor does not give in to them, does not recognize and exploit them as best we can? Hogg's mixture of despair and triumph is ours too, and Russett's rueful celebration of Hogg is moving, and interesting, and true.

Peter Murphy

Williams College