Dismantling the Divine: D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett

By Paul Gleason

Both Kant and the nineteenth-century idealistic philosophers whom he influenced proposed the artist as a replacement for Christ as revealer of truth. "Dismantling the Divine" explores the ways in which Lawrence, Joyce, and Beckett dismantle this model in some of their best novels by questioning the artist’s ability to respond to “subjective relativism”—a term I use to denote the modern phenomenon of existential uncertainty that results from the loss of religious conviction. The book views Lawrence, Joyce, and Beckett through the lens of such philosophers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno. It also stresses intellectual history as a determining factor in modernist artistic production.

Lawrence, Joyce, and Beckett demonstrate their engagement with nineteenth-century aesthetic philosophy in their novels. In "Sons and Lovers," Lawrence engages in a Nietzschean critique of idealism in which Paul Morel strives to develop a redemptive aesthetic philosophy that accounts for the incarnation of the human body in art. Lawrence then considers the social implications of artistic incarnation in "Aaron’s Rod" and ultimately returns to idealism in his portrayal of Ramón’s authoritarian aestheticization of himself as the god Quetzalcoatl in "The Plumed Serpent."

In "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Joyce rejects Flaubert’s theory of artistic detachment, tracing Stephen Dedalus’ failed attempt to create an objective art. In the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of "Ulysses" and the “Shem the Penman” chapter of "Finnegans Wake," he proposes Nietzschean and Heideggerian models of artistic creation that locate the social and philosophical relevance of literary art in the writer’s poetic use of language and participation in reality.

Influenced by Schopenhauer, Beckett criticizes the idealistic notion of the artist in "Watt," contemplates the possibility of authoritarianism and total subjectivity of literary creation in "Molloy" and "Malone Dies," and achieves a negative approach to universal truth in "The Unnamable" that recalls the theories of Heidegger and Adorno.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Gleason
• Release date: Mar 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311970657

Paul Gleason

Paul Gleason is a music critic, literary critic, biographer, novelist, and poet from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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Dismantling the Divine:

D.H. Lawrence,

James Joyce,

Samuel Beckett

Paul Gleason

Copyright © 2015 Paul Gleason

All rights reserved.

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Contents

Introduction

Part One: The Artist-Hero Novels of Lawrence: Universality and Aesthetic Incarnation in Sons and Lovers, Aaron's Rod, and The Plumed Serpent

Introduction to Part One: Nietzsche as Philosophical Background

Chapter One: Sons and Lovers, the Artist-Hero, and Aesthetic Incarnation

Chapter Two: Aaron's Rod and the Artist-Hero's Withdrawal into Silence

Chapter Three: The Plumed Serpent: The Failure of Aesthetic Incarnation and the Artist-Hero's Retreat to Idealistic Metaphysics

Part Two: The Artist-Hero Novels of Joyce: Artistic Impersonality, Linguistic Participation, and Universality in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the Scylla and Charybdis Episode of Ulysses, and the Shem the Penman Chapter of Finnegans Wake

Introduction to Part Two: Flaubert as Philosophical Background

Chapter Four: Augustine's Confessions, A Portrait, and Stephen Dedalus' Linguistic Conversion to Subjectivity

Chapter Five: Dante, Joyce, and the Use of Memory in the Process of Literary Creation

Chapter Six: The Scylla and Charybdis Episode of Ulysses: Stephen Dedalus as an Artist-Critic and Phenomenological Participant

Chapter Seven: Shem the Penman: Between Vico and Heidegger

Part Three: Writing the One: The Artist-Hero, Aesthetics, and Society in Samuel Beckett's Watt, MolloyMalone Dies, and The Unnamable

Introduction to Part Three: Schopenhauer as Philosophical Background

Chapter Eight: Watt as Beckett's Dismantlement of the Metaphysical Artist-Hero

Chapter Nine: Molloy: The Artist-Hero as Master and Servant

Chapter Ten: The Artist-Hero's Imprisonment in Language: Dante, Schopenhauer, and Literary Creation in Malone Dies

Chapter Eleven: The Artist-Hero as Heideggerian they-Self: The Unnamable and Negative Universality

Works Cited

Introduction

Aesthetic experience must pass over into philosophy or else it will not be genuine.—Theodor W. Adorno

I want to introduce this study of the artist-hero in the novels of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett by placing it in a tradition of aesthetic philosophy that began in ancient Greece. Monroe C. Beardsley discusses this tradition in Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present, arguing that the ancient Greeks were the first people that distinguished their response to art as such from their religious and political attitudes and, in so doing, became aware of art as presenting special problems (23). Among the ancient Greeks, Plato, of course, intensely contemplates these special problems, especially those concerning the role of art and the artist in society. In the Republic, Socrates defines art as imitation, declaring that it is far removed from the truth, for it touches only a small part of each thing and a part that is itself only an image (1202). According to Socrates, a painting of a bed imitates a material bed created by a craftsman, which, in turn, is a particular imitation of the universal bed existing in the World of Forms (1201). Thrice-removed from the Platonic realm of ideality, art for Socrates is easily produced without knowledge of the truth (1203). Socrates, accordingly, denounces poets as liars and attacks them because they corrupt decent people by inspiring excessive emotional responses (1210). He goes on to say that hymns to the gods and eulogies to good people are the only poetry we can admit into our city (1211). Even though Socrates himself is highly guilty of poetic strategies, he does not technically banish poets from his ideal state; rather, he contends that the philosopher-kings should act as their censors and determine whether their writings effectively extol such rational virtues as bravery and patriotism.

Many recent critics position themselves in the Platonic tradition by contemplating the social relevance of aesthetic philosophy. While not always emulating Plato's hostility toward artists, his simplistic understanding of art as imitation, or his endorsement of didactic poetry, these critics consider aesthetics to be a socially relevant field of philosophical inquiry. In so doing, their work preserves the legacy of such philosophically diverse and temporally disparate commentators as Augustine, Dante, Burke, Vico, Schiller, Shelley, Arnold, Nietzsche, Zola, T.S. Eliot, Camus, Frye, and Adorno, to name just a few. In his Marxist study The Ideology of the Aesthetic, for instance, Terry Eagleton locates the origin of the aesthetic in the human body. The aesthetic, he writes, is… the first stirrings of a primitive materialism—of the body's long inarticulate rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical (13). Reason attempts to control the senses, just as the universal structure of an artifact attempts to order the particular structural elements of which it is constructed. Eagleton uses the analogy between the body and the artifact to understand the development of aesthetic philosophy in eighteenth-century Germany—the departure point of his own study of the aesthetic. The social structure of Germany changed in the eighteenth century from feudalist absolutism to bourgeois capitalism (14-15). In the new era of bourgeois capitalism and Kantian philosophy, the aesthetic functions as a double-edged concept (28):

On the one hand, it figures as a genuinely emancipatory force—as a community of subjects now linked by sensuous impulse and fellow-feeling rather than by heteronomous law, each safeguarded in its unique particularity while bound at the same time into social harmony… On the other hand, the aesthetic signifies what Max Horkheimer has called a kind of 'internalised repression', inserting social power more deeply into the very bodies of those it subjugates, and so operating as a supremely effective mode of political hegemony. (28)

First, according to Eagleton, the aesthetic illuminates the way in which the bourgeois individual functions in society as a self-governing subject. Second, his Marxist thesis is that art and aesthetic philosophy are socially relevant because they propound ideology. He uses this thesis in The Ideology of the Aesthetic to trace the history of aesthetic philosophy from Shaftesbury to Habermas. In the book's final pages, he claims:

For the final purpose of our universality, of our equal rights to participate in the public definition of meanings and values, is that the unique particularities of individuals may be respected and fulfilled. Particularity returns again to a 'higher' level; difference must pass through identity if it is to come into its own, a position abandoned by much contemporary theory… The universal… is not some realm of abstract duty set sternly against the particular; it is just every individual's equal right to have his or her difference respected, and to participate in the common process whereby that can be achieved. (414-15)

Eagleton asserts that in exclusively focusing on the differences between particular individuals, contemporary literary theory disregards the real political implication of the aesthetic—that in a truly egalitarian society, the individual realizes his or her right to have his or her differences respected and valued, and, in so doing, attains a higher level of universal awareness.

More recently, Henry Sussman has also considered the social significance of the aesthetic. In The Aesthetic Contract: Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity, he describes his theory of the aesthetic contract:

The aesthetic contract is my term both for the conditions defining and constraining the artist and for the memorable experiments… in the modern histories of literature and art. The aesthetic contract defines the artist's transcendence and degradation as well as the terms of the experiments, such as the Elizabethan sonnet, décadence, Imagiste poetry, cubism, and structuralism, in which, partly for their own recognition and protection, groups of artists and intellectuals agree to work, for a time. (38)

The aesthetic contract determines the aesthetic forms that artists use to construct their artifacts. These forms, Sussman goes on to argue, reflect particular historical conditions, as well as the artistic expectations and philosophical needs of the community:

Collectivities of writers and thinkers abandon certain projects, or the public evinces indifference toward them, not because of inherent flaws in these large experiments, but as a result of circumstantial changes, including changes in technological and socioeconomic paradigms, and wars. As the result of such developments, an existing aesthetic contract may no longer satisfy a community's interest in knowledge and experience to the same degree as an alternative enterprise… (167)

Changes in the aesthetic contract result from changes in history. For example, Sussman asserts that the aesthetic contract of time-specific modernism (c. 1890-1945) develops because of such factors as "a jouissance in the recycling, updating, and disfiguration of historical source materials and a mood of nostalgia in the face of dramatic and inevitable social and technological change (169). According to Sussman, the aesthetic contract demystifies art, allowing us to understand it as a sociological enterprise; focuses on a varied body of works that derives from the historico-sociopolitical world of production (168); and avoids the pronounced disregard for historical specificity that became associated with language-based critical models (168). The aesthetic contract defines the relevance of aesthetic philosophy in terms of its ability to illuminate the concerns of specific historical communities. The artist who participates in an aesthetic contract is not a Promethean prophet revealing truth" to the community in an artifact; rather, his or her production of an artifact is determined by historical and sociological conditions.

In the following study of the artist-hero in the modernist novels of Lawrence, Joyce, and Beckett, I follow Eagleton, Sussman, and other theorists—such as Nietzsche, Wilde, and Adorno—by exploring the social relevance of the aesthetic. I demystify the myth of the artist as a self-contained and divinely appointed revealer of universal truth. I argue that Lawrence, Joyce, and Beckett consider the ways in which artistic production responds to the social problem of subjective relativism—a term I use to denote the modern phenomenon of existential uncertainty that results from the loss of religious conviction. Unlike Eagleton and Sussman, however, I also stress intellectual history as a determining factor in the modernist depiction of artistic production. The nineteenth-century novelists and philosophers read by the three modernists under consideration—particularly Shelley, Carlyle, Schopenhauer, Flaubert, and Nietzsche—formulate an aesthetic solution to the problem of subjective relativism, which Kant first posits in the eighteenth century. These nineteenth-century thinkers variously believe that the artist can create an artifact that expresses universal social meaning. The aesthetic contract of Lawrence, Joyce, and Beckett, I contend, derives from their response to this belief. In the remaining part of this introduction, I define subjective relativism as a social problem for the modernists, and indicate the ways in which the nineteenth-century philosophers whom Lawrence, Joyce, and Beckett read offer solutions in their aesthetic theories.

The Artist-Hero and the Metaphysical Artifact

The artist-hero tradition develops in modernity as a response to the decline of the medieval Catholic Church's philosophical and religious hegemony. As I shall argue, the phenomenon of modernity is characterized by the belief that a metaphysical deity no longer provides a standard of objective, teleological truth. The Protestant Reformation and the rise of Cartesian rationalism—which emphasize the primacy of the human subject in the discovery of objective truth—inaugurate the modern age. Heidegger recalls Kant's Critique of Judgement in his characterization of the modern age as an era in which the very way man freely takes a position toward things, the way he finds and feels them to be, in short, his 'taste,' becomes the court of judicature over beings (Nietzsche 83). The artist, accordingt to Heidegger, takes on new importance in an era in which the human subject performs this aestheticized judiciary role.

The artist-hero trope originates in classical and medieval Christian metaphysics, particularly in the writings of Augustine. In the Confessions, Christ, as the human incarnation of God's Word, and the Bible, as the textual manifestation of God's Word, assist humanity in understanding divine teleology. Christ and the Bible form the aesthetic object on which the Christian community is founded. In the Confessions, Augustine directly addresses God as follows: my Lord, the Son of man who is mediator between you the One and us the many, who live in a multiplicity of distractions by many things (244). For Augustine, Christ serves as the mediator between the eternal realm of God and the temporal realm of humanity. When God enters the world as Christ, taking on the form of the human body, he grants the temporal-bound humanity a vision of eternity. Christ thus reconciles the human and the divine. As the Word of God, the Bible preserves Christ's message of eternity and redemption. Augustine describes the Word as follows: No element of your word yields place or succeeds to something else, since it is truly immortal and eternal. And so by the Word coeternal with yourself, you say all that you say in simultaneity and eternity (226). As the second person in the Trinity, the Word originates in God, who endures forever in an eternal present; thus, it is coeternal with God. The Incarnation manifests God's eternal Word in time: Thus in the gospel the Word speaks through flesh, and this sounded externally in human ears, so that it should be believed and sought inwardly, found in the eternal truth where the Master who alone is good (Matt. 19: 16) teaches all his disciples (226). Physically embodied and pronounced by Christ, the Word provides the means by which the individual learns about God's eternal truth. The Gospels preserve this eternal truth as the Word, which the individual encounters through reading and understands through introspection and faith.

In Augustinian theology, then, Christ reconciles the binary opposition between God's transcendent realm of eternal truth and the human realm of temporality, in which the distractions of contingency plague the individual. Through Christ, the Bible represents God's eternal truth in an artifact, and Augustine's language allows us to understand the social importance of the Bible in terms of the aesthetic. For Augustine, Christ mediates between God as the One and humanity as the many (226)—that is, Christ mediates between the universal and the particular. Through the mediation of Christ, the Bible functions as an artifact that aesthetically expresses humanity's position within God's universal order.

Appropriating some of the central tenets of Augustinian thought, Dante's famous Letter to Can Grande Della Scala marks a turning point in the history of aesthetics and forecastes Shelley's and Carlyle's deification of the artist in the Romantic period. In the letter, Dante uses Augustinian poetics to articulate the aesthetic theory of the Divine Comedy. He states that the poem contains the four levels of historical, allegorical, moral, and anagogic meaning, which Augustine in On Christian Doctrine finds in the Bible. By discussing the anagogic significance of the Comedy, Dante, however, differs from Augustine and the church fathers he influenced, who hold that only the divinely inspired biblical authors can write a text with anagogic significance. That is, only the biblical authors can intimate the beatific paradise of God's eternal order and the existential reward of the revealed logos. Elucidating the anagogic function of the Comedy, Dante claims in the letter that the Paradiso presents the liberty of eternal glory (121). The Paradiso, like the Bible, provides humanity with a communal vision of anagogic significance. Noting the importance of Dante's claim for the history of aesthetics, Umberto Eco writes: For Dante… poets continue the work of the scriptures, and his own poem is a new instance of prophetical writing; it is endowed with spiritual senses just as the scriptures are. The poet… is divinely inspired (Aquinas 162). As Eco suggests, Dante's aesthetic of the divinely inspired poet initiates a new, mystical approach to poetic texts, a new way of reading which, through various avatars, was to survive to our own time (Aquinas 162).

In the final canto of the Comedy, Dante demonstrates the way in which the secular poet can grant the reader insight into God's objective metaphysical truth. He describes the vision of Eternal Light (377) that concludes his pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise:

In its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one single volume, that which is dispersed in leaves throughout the universe: substances and accidents and their relations, as though fused together in such a way that what I tell is but a simple light. The universal form of this knot I believe that I saw, because, in telling this, I feel my joy increase. (377)

Dante experiences a moment of stasis in which he views the universe as an aesthetic object created and maintained by God's love. In Dante's vision, the universe's particular substances and accidents form a perfect, universal, and harmonious whole. As a perfectly constructed artifact, God orders all creation into a social structure based on the aesthetic. Indeed, Dante himself and all the other particular substances and accidents from the past, present, and future of human history harmonize in the eternal social order of God's artifact. God exemplifies this eternal social order in Paradise, the realm that he creates and rules through his divine love. Dante's vision of the eternal aesthetic and social order of Paradise is a fitting vision with which to conclude a poem that allegorizes humanity's existential quest to discover a universal teleology in God. The vision of teleological significance culminates humanity's journey to God, just as it concludes the Comedy. The poem, the journey, and the universe, then, all function as artifacts that render a teleological vision reflected in the divine social order.

The Protestant Reformation and Cartesian philosophy disrupted Dante's aesthetic vision of divine social teleology. Sussman and other critics argue that modernity began as a result of the Reformation and Luther's emphasis on the individual's private and subjective experience of God:

Luther established a space for an epistemological-cultural world in which the subject… would henceforth increase in individuation and freedom from exhaustive definition by encompassing social systems. The revised package of modern subject conditions that begins to emerge with Luther includes increased isolation, possibilities for personal liberty, and needs for internal self-regulation. (68)

Habermas, in his analysis of Hegel and modernity, includes the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in his discussion of the Reformation and the historical development of subjectivity: The key historical events in establishing the principle of subjectivity are the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution (17). Habermas notes that for Hegel, modern subjectivity connotes individualism, the right to criticism, the autonomy of action, and idealistic philosophy (17). The modern individual of Hegelian philosophy is liberated from the external authority of the historically preexisting law (Habermas 17). As a result of this liberation, according to Habermas, religious life, state, and society as well as science, morality, and art are transformed into just so many embodiments of the principle of subjectivity (18).

Habermas and Heidegger locate the origin of modern subjectivity in Descartes' famous dictum "cogito ergo sum" (Habermas 18; Heidegger, Nietzsche 83). In Discourse on Method, Descartes famously chronicles modern subjective experience. Having resolved to seek no other knowledge than that which [he] might find within [himself], or perhaps in the great book of nature (6), he isolates himself in a warm room where he has plenty of leisure to examine [his] ideas (7). Descartes' method of withdrawal exemplifies the modern individual's retreat into the subjective realm, in which he or she experiences Eagleton's double-edged concept of emancipation and need for self-regulation. Descartes' period of doubt grants him the freedom to prepare a provisional code of morality (15), which he creates independent of any religious, philosophical, or political system. Although he quickly asserts that his code conforms to the laws of his country and the religion in which, by God's grace, [he] had been brought up since childhood (15), he grounds his philosophical system on the insights he subjectively achieves. Indeed, the famous truth "cogito ergo sum," the mind/body and subject/object dualities, and the whole system of Cartesian rationalism result from Descartes' profound investigation of his inner life.

Writing three centuries after the publication of Discourse on Method, T.S. Eliot notes the philosophical impact of Cartesian rationalism:

[Descartes] clearly stated that what we know is not the world of objects, but our own ideas of these objects. The revolution was immense. Instead of ideas as meanings, as references to an outside world, you have suddenly a new world coming into existence, inside your own mind and therefore by the usual implication inside your own head. Mankind suddenly retires inside its several skulls… (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 80)

As Eliot posits, Descartes' project leads to the dissociation of ideas from objects external to individual consciousness and, by extension, to subjective relativism—that is, individuals experience existential uncertainity because they are neither certain of God nor truth in an objective sense. They are isolated from each other in their subjective possession of particular ideas.

Kant also recognizes the potential for subjective relativism in Descartes and responds to it in his theory of judgment, in which the artist and contemplator of art become paradigmatic of judgment as a whole. The medieval notion of the communal significance of secular poetry informs Kant's aesthetic philosophy. Like Dante, Kant understands the social role of the aesthetic object in terms of its ability to provide humanity with a sense of personal liberty and communal awareness. For Kant, as Eagleton has pointed out, it is impossible for the subject to know other subjects in themselves: it is simply a mistake to think that the subject is the kind of thing that could ever possibly be known (75). In addressing this condition of the impossibility of knowledge, Kant considers the problem of subjective relativism. He indicates in the Critique of Judgment that all sensual drives and cognitive judgments reflect the subject's personal interests and beliefs. He compares Three Specifically Different Kinds of Satisfaction: "That which gratifies a man is called pleasant; that which merely pleases him is beautiful; that which is esteemed or approved by him, i.e. that to which he accords an objective worth, is good (44). The judgment of the pleasant (that of the senses) and the judgment of the good (that of reason) differ from the judgment of the beautiful, because they reflect the subject's personal interest. We may say, Kant concludes, that of all these three kinds of satisfaction, that of taste in the beautiful is alone a disinterested and free satisfaction; for no interest, either of sense or of reason, here forces our assent" (44). In the act of aesthetic contemplation, then, the subject exercises his or her freedom; but, in concluding that an object is beautiful, he or she assumes that other subjects have reached the same conclusion:

For the fact of which everyone is conscious, that the satisfaction is for him quite disinterested, implies in his judgment a ground of satisfaction for all men. For since it does not rest on any inclination of the subject (nor upon any other premeditated interest), but since the person who judges is quite free as regards the satisfaction which he attaches to the object, he cannot find the ground of this satisfaction in any private conditions connected with his own subject, and hence it must be regarded as grounded on what he can presuppose in every other person. Consequently he must believe that he has reason for attributing a similar satisfaction to everyone. (45-46)

In the act of aesthetic contemplation, the subject's disinterestedness ensures his or her freedom. It actualizes this freedom, creating a community of like-minded subjects. As Eagleton suggests, in Kant's aesthetic philosophy, 'Culture' thus promotes an inward, unconstrained unity between citizens on the basis of their most intimate subjectivity (97). Secular aesthetic objects foster this inward, unconstrained unity in the same way that the Bible fosters community and universality in Augustinian theology. But it is important to remember that, unlike Augustine, Kant privileges the subject's response to the work of art. Indeed, whereas Augustine subordinates the subject to God and sees him or her as a part of the divine artifact of universal human history, Kant grants him or her agency and asserts that in the moment of disinterested aesthetic contemplation he or she joins the rest of humanity in the production of a vision of universality.

Sussman has discussed the role of the artist in Kant's aesthetic philosophy. He argues that in Kant the artist replaces Christ as the mediator between an eternal realm of transcendent order and a human realm of temporality and contingency:

The artist, as he emerges from the discourse of Immanuel Kant, is an exceptional person invested with extraordinary powers to see into the intellectual operating system built into the universe and to mediate, as in a theological sphere Christ once did, between the transcendental and human registers. (134)

The artist creates artifacts that provide humanity with universal significance because he or she mediates between the eternal and the temporal, the static and the mutable. In terms of my consideration of binary oppositions, the artist—and, through him or her, the aesthetic object—breaks down such boundaries that separate time and eternity and stasis and change, making universality possible. Kant's universe thus consists of particular subjects discovering universality and community in the act of aesthetic contemplation.

Kant influences the conception of the artist-hero developed by some of the most important poets and philosophers of English Romanticism. In Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, for example, Prometheus is a rebellious artist-figure who opposes the tyranny of Jupiter's authoritarian regime. His revolt is simultaneously social and metaphysical because he aspires to free all humanity from Jupiter's social tyranny, just as he signifies the poet's rebellion against the ordained metaphysical order of received religion. It is also aesthetic because, in rebelling, Prometheus assumes universal importance as the representative of all social, metaphysical, and artistic rebellion. Accordingly, a vocabulary of binary oppositions can be used to describe the social, metaphysical, and aesthetic themes of Shelley's play. Shelley considers the following binary oppositions, among others: individual and state, individual and god, master and slave, artist and society, and particular and universal.

Throughout Prometheus Unbound, Shelley equates Prometheus with Christ, the figure who breaks down these binary oppositions in Christianity and makes human suffering meaningful. In the first act, Prometheus appears crucified on a rocky crag, suffering for his love of humanity (983). As a result of his suffering, humanity realizes the advent of an Edenic society when he defeats Jupiter at the beginning of the play's third act (1005). Shelley's use of Christian imagery to describe Prometheus' victory demonstrates his notion that the artist-hero replaces Christ as the prophet of social, metaphysical, and aesthetic meaning. The new Eden—Christianity posits Heaven as a second Eden to which the faithful travel after a life of suffering—that Prometheus creates is an egalitarian community that can be understood aesthetically. In supplanting Jupiter as the presiding spirit of universality, Prometheus becomes the structural force that through divine love organizes humanity into a communal artifact, the human particulars of which exist in perfect egalitarian harmony. The binary oppositions of individual and state, individual and god, and master and slave cannot be used to describe Prometheus' new community. The dualities of artist and society and particular and universal remain, however, suggesting that humanity realizes itself as a perfect communal artifact through the intervention of the artist-hero.

Among the other English Romantics influenced by Kant is Carlyle, who, without upholding the Shelleyan emphasis on divine love, uses Kantian aesthetic philosophy to discuss the artist-hero's metaphysical and social position. In The Hero as Poet, Carlyle indicates that in the nineteenth century—which he thinks of as a secular century in which scientific advances have made religious belief problematic (67)—the poet assumes prophetic importance as an individual who has penetrated into the sacred mystery of the Universe (69). Carlyle's rhetoric indicates his belief that the poet replaces Christ as the prophet of metaphysical meaning. Carlyle describes the poet as a man sent hither to make [the divine mystery] more impressively known to us (69), and, following Shelley's characterization of Prometheus in Prometheus Unbound, uses imagery gleaned from Christ's passion to discuss the heroic poet's life. Commenting on Dante's life, he writes: A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante; and he, struggling like a man led towards death and crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it (75). In fulfilling his divine destiny, according to Carlyle, Dante becomes a pure star, fixed there in the firmament, at which the great and high of all ages kindle themselves (85). Carlyle's astronomical imagery indicates Dante's metaphysical position as the mediator between the eternal and the temporal. Dante's poetry, the aesthetic object that preserves his heroic life, is an eternal point of fixity that unifies humanity, providing it with universal meaning.

In The Hero as Poet, Carlyle also considers the social role of the heroic poet. He applauds Shakespeare for supplying the English people with a national identity in the aesthetic. For Carlyle, this aesthetic national identity is more significant than the country's political national identity. At the conclusion of the essay, Carlyle asks his countrymen the following grave question: Will you give up your Indian Empire or your Shakespeare, you English; never have had any Indian Empire, or never have had any Shakespeare? (96). Reflecting Shelley's famous assertion in the Defence of Poetry that Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world (1087), he decides that Shakespeare is of greater communal significance than the Indian Empire: Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakespeare does not go, he lasts forever with us; we cannot give up our Shakespeare! (96). According to Carlyle, Shakespeare is eternal and universal, whereas the Indian Empire is temporal and particular. Carlyle goes on to ask: "This King Shakespeare, does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs; indestructible…?" (97). Through his aesthetic creations, Shakespeare for Carlyle becomes the immortal ruler of the English people, the universal force that binds them as a community.

Carlyle's discussion of Dante and Shakespeare in The Hero as Poet privileges the poet over the poetic artifact that he or she creates. Indeed, it is Dante as a poet-genius, and not the Comedy as an artifact, who achieves universality and immortality as a pure star, fixed there in the firmament (85). Carlyle's essay exemplifies what M.H. Abrams has defined as expressive criticism—the Romantic tendency to analyze poetry in terms of… the poet so that the artist himself becomes the major element generating both the artistic product and the criteria by which it is to be judged (22). Read as another example of Romantic expressive criticism, Shelley's Defence of Poetry shows the way in which a poem functions both as a flawed artifact and as an indication of the poet's transcendent power. Shelley famously characterizes the poet's mind in creation… as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness (1084). He goes on to lament that when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet (1084). He posits that in the moment of inspiration, the poet comes into contact with the invisible influence of the eternal regions and the divine (1084). The poet's memory, however, is inherently flawed because it cannot retain this inspirational moment in all its power. The poetic artifact, by extension, is also flawed because it cannot fully and accurately