Ihsen Hachaichi

The Poetics of the Self in Wordsworth and Ricoeur

Modern philosophy transcended the classical dichotomy of the body, standing for the sensual, and the mind or soul, representing the intelligible and sensible. This encroachment gave food for thought about the different constituents of the self-sufficient entity called the “subject” and its interrelationships. Philosophers of phenomenology and hermeneutics, such as Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and Ricoeur, engaged in this direction. Their thematic amalgamation of time, self, and meaning, especially as it is delineated in Ricoeur’s act of philosophising, is analogous to Wordsworth’s similar amalgamation in the act of narration. Wordsworth is the most emblematic romantic whose poetic discourse is highly conditioned by a context of intense subjectivity. Even where his poems involve another forceful presence, the latter reveals a totally intrinsic power, emerging as a consequence of what might best be described as a “disruptive encounter” with an “other,” be it nature, the “one dear Presence” in nature, or the Imagination. The argument of this paper arises from the sense that there are structural parallels between Wordsworth and Ricoeur’s poetics of the self, the modalities and even the definition they give to the experience of self projection in the narrative. The combination which Ricoeur’s theory of identity distinguishes: “personal identity” and “narrative identity,” echoes in Wordsworth’s poetry through the historiographic style and the imaged, and “imaginary” autobiography. I propose to demonstrate that though Wordsworth acknowledges an ontological discrimination in his consciousness, differences sometimes coalesce because identity, in its “personal” and “narrative” modes, is not based on a principle of closure, but on temporal difference for narrativising the self happens necessarily onto time. Now the time-bound “praxis,” the act of narration, privileges a narrative self whose role is to narrate over a historical self that provides the subject matter. The narrative self is in the authorial/authority position and prevents the personal self from yielding itself in the way of any simple presence. The questions I would like to address are whether the projection of the self in the discursive topos (the way Wordsworth apprehends “self-consciousness”) is a de-centering of subjectivity and its subsequent recovery, or a peaceful “apperception” of the binary structure of the self. If the two different forms of subjectivity manifest themselves as conflicting entities, how does the poet manage to have them resolved in the narrative? The last question is how to locate identity, as the “same,” within temporality, which is essentially characterized by gaps and discontinuities?

Ihsen Hachaichi is a PhD fellow in the English department at the Université de Montréal.  Her field of expertise is, yet not exclusively, British Romantic literature.  Along with a sustained research on the phenomenology of sight and sound in Wordsworth’s poetry, she is developing a constructionist/positivist interest in the modalities of representation and projection in postmodern Gay discourse.