Wordsworth’s Re-Formation of Individuality: "Spots of Time," the Fragment and the Autobiography

Lyrical Ballads
. The “spots of time” under discussion can also be consid-
ered as a dominant mode of memories that constitute not only The
Prelude
but the poet’s endeavor to re-form his individuality through a
life-long process of writing. Considering that empirical aspects of frag-
mented perception are intrinsic to the formation of our cognition, numer-
ous other memories that are integral to and scattered in The Prelude can
be comparable to different “spots of time.” It is crucial to be reminded of
the fact that in his lifetime Wordsworth did not publish The Prelude,
whose title was given by his widow only after his death in 1850. More
importantly, Wordsworth planned to write The Prelude primarily as an
“ante-chapel” of the “gothic church” of The Recluse, which remains an
unborn philosophical poem “on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life”
(1949, 2).
4
In the Preface to The Excursion (1814), Wordsworth was
thinking of a kind of organic relation among his entire poetical works
that could include The Excursion, The Prelude, The Recluse and his
minor poems. Similar to The Prelude, which was initially conceived only
as a part and yet happens to be an independent poem due to the poet’s
death, the “spots of time,” childhood memories, and individuals can be
complete fragments in their incompletion. Although all of them to some
extent presuppose the myth of an unseen whole, such a premise does not
dictate their meaning.
While revisiting the first “spot of time,” Wordsworth reflects upon the
“mystery of man” (12. 272), whose greatness lies in early childhood and
yet whose sublimity is beyond the persona’s comprehension. The magni-
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structure. It is the structure of textuality in general. A text is signed only much
later by the other. And this testamentary structure doesn’t befall a text as if by
accident, but constructs it” in his work The Ear of the Other: Otobiography,
Transference, Translation
, ed. Christie V. McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 51.
4
Wordsworth regards “the conclusion of the first book of The Recluse”
(which turns out to be Home at Grasmere) “as a kind of Prospectus of the
design and scope of the whole Poem” (1949, 2). Kenneth R. Johnston provides
a comprehensive investigation into the chronological history of Wordsworth’s
composition in his book Wordsworth and The Recluse (New Haven: Yale UP,
1984).

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tude of the human mind is accounted for in this passage:
The days gone by
Return upon me almost from the dawn
Of life: the hiding-places of man’s power
Open; I would approach them, but they close.
I see by glimpses now; when age comes on,
May scarcely see at all; and I would give,
While yet we may, as far as words can give,
Substance and life to what I feel, enshrining,
Such is my hope, the spirit of the Past
For future restoration. (12.277-86)
Due partially to its self-defeating quality, the act of remembering accu-
mulates failures to revivify the nostalgic memories, that is, fragments of
the past experiences/phenomena. In the above lines, however, remember-
ing hinges not only upon the impossible task of restoring the past in the
present but upon the potential to re-create the past into future hope. The
persona sees childhood memories, or “the hiding-places of man’s power”
only “by glimpses,” which are hard to grasp but tantalizingly spread
before the mind’s eye through the mediation of words. Regarding the
predicament inherent in the representation of memories, it is quite apt to
refer to Paul de Man’s claim that poetic language is “essentially paradox-
ical” in that it is already “condemned in advance to failure” (7). De Man
continues to note, “Poetic language seems to originate in the desire to
draw closer and closer to the ontological status of the object, and its
growth and development are determined by this inclination” (7). Unable
to maintain ontological priority, memories frustrate attempts at proximity
and invoke “the nostalgia for the object” (Ibid.) On the other hand, de
Man maintains that “it becomes difficult to distinguish between object
and image, between imagination and perception, between an expressive
or constitutive, between a mimetic or literal language” (Ibid.). In writing
a literary form of life, Wordsworth’s memories seem to dispute the incip-
ient shapes and to elicit metamorphoses. Put otherwise, the boundary
between life and writing is constantly constituted and reconstituted in the
practice of remembering and revisiting the past moments of import.
Both as the foundation and source of irretrievable anxiety, the two
specified spots of time urge us to question how they come to play a deci-
sive role in nourishing and invisibly repairing the persona’s mind
“depressed / By false opinion and contentious thought, / Or aught of
Wordsworth’s Re-Formation of Individuality: “Spots of Time,” the Fragment and the Autobiography 1369

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heavier or more deadly weight, / In trivial occupations, and the round /
Of ordinary intercourse” (12.210-14). Indeed, they are so traumatic and
distressing that they are rather haunting memory-traces than “[a] renovat-
ing virtue” (12.210), “by which pleasure is enhanced, / That penetrates,
enables us to mount, / When high, more high, and lifts us up when fall-
en” (12.216-18). Both “spots of time” demonstrate the young persona’s
alienation from his companion(s) in spite of the apparent presence of
company. The first spot of time sums up a five-year-old boy’s experience
of getting lost and encountering a gibbet-mast and a girl with a pitcher on
her head. The incident is the direct result of the boy’s transgressive desire
to be a sovereign person; he gets lost because he handles a horse with his
own inexperienced hands. The second spot of time marks a critical point
at which the persona turns into an orphan. Registering a peak in the
young mind’s anxiety in mapping his life, the second spot of time is cen-
tral to Wordsworth’s project of writing his own life since it covers the
death of his father. Here we find a voluntary estrangement undertaken in
order to practice self-governance. Moreover, the persona thinks that he
should have distanced himself from his father, or from his former self
even though he is well aware of the continuity, particularly because of
the very nature of these memories. That is, memories, the construction of
which is possible, are never to be re-enacted in the present; memories
disclose constantly shifting versions of the past experience only within a
transitory present. In order to render the growth of the poet’s mind,
Wordsworth takes the past as moments to link his life to the future. Yet
the past days seem to be wavering between temporary emergences and
lasting disappearance on the surfaces of the text.
In the first “spot of time,” the memory is itself uncanny in that such a
young child perceives his experience in great detail. A closer look at the
passage, however, reveals that it is the persona’s retrospective desire to
rewrite the reminiscence once again that culminates in the moment when
the depiction itself transcends the limits of human language. The young
boy, by averting his eyes from the gibbet-mast and fixing them on a girl
with a pitcher on her head, overcomes a horrifying encounter with the
gibbet-mast, the reminder and grave-marker of an ancient wife-murderer.
To the persona, nonetheless, that which does matter is not the fearful
event itself but the “remembrances” and the “power they had left behind”
(12.268-69). The peculiarity of the experience lies in its consequential
effects upon the speaker’s feelings, not “in the [external] action and situ-
ation” (“Preface” to Lyrical Ballads 73).