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

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Mikyung Park
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Anthony Harding points out that the Romantics are characterized as
obsessed with the publication of life-narratives. Above all, the term “autobiog-
raphy” did originate in the Romantic period (1797); Robert Southey used the
term in the Quarterly in 1809 and gave currency to the term “autobiographer.”
See his “Biography and Autobiography,” Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed.
Nicholas Roe (New York: Oxford UP, 2005), 447-48. In his earlier essay,
“Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Tracey Emin, and Romantic Autobiography,”
Wordsworth Circle
34.2 (Spring 2003), Harding reminds us of the particular
context surrounding Romantic autobiography: “As early as the 1790’s, writers
had reacted against self-display and self-exploration, and, by 1800, writing
about oneself had become tainted through an association with revolutionary
politics” as demonstrated in “the life-writing practices of Mary Wollstonecraft
and Mary Shelley” (60). 

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cial to refer to Anthony Harding, who counters the simplification of
Romantic “genuine self-exploration” to “a vulgar narcissism” (59).
Refuting the alleged solipsism of Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem,
Harding forcefully claims that “it was the expression of a visionary mate-
rialism or sentiment of being, which was for a time seen as strengthening
the poet’s fellow-feeling with other human beings, and not a self-explor-
ing impulse as such, that got The Prelude started” (59-60). Wordsworth
embarked on the writing of The Prelude towards the end of the 1790s,
when he was still going through crises, personal and historical alike.
“The earliest versions, addressed to Coleridge rather than to the public,
and to be published only if and when The Recluse should be finished,”
according to Harding, “are an extended exercise in recreating moments
when his sense of self was actually obliterated” (61). It is significant to
note that the culture of the romantic autobiography did not aim at
strengthening the idea of subjectivity but at intensifying the experience
of anxiety heightened by the striking contrast between the erasure of raw
materials and the act of inscription. Aware of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
impact on the British writers’ practice of life-writing, Harding empha-
sizes not merely the elusiveness but also the fictiveness of Rousseau’s
“pursuit of the ‘states of soul’” behind the cross-cultural phenomenon of
the autobiographical impulse (60). “Instead of writing and reading auto-
biography for the pleasure of revisiting a past (suffering or scandalous)
self, from the safe haven of the present,” Harding continues to argue,
“the autobiographical project is driven by the exigencies of the present,
the sense of the self’s incompletion, of emptiness (‘du vide’)” (Ibid.).
Besides, not restricted into the solitary frame of the autobiographer, the
“autobiographer’s strategy of rebuilding or re-imagining a self from the
broken shards of memory awakens a corresponding hope in the reader”
(Ibid.). It is remarkable that Harding calls attention to a dynamic of sym-
pathy implicitly formed between a writer and a reader beyond the imme-
diate space and time of writing. Most importantly, Harding pushes his
argument to the extent of suggesting that Wordsworth’s poem of “the
growth of the poet’s mind” entails less self-glorification than self-obliter-
ation. The critic places emphasis on ineradicable anxiety that haunts
Wordsworth’s autobiographical individuality. “The anti-autobiographical
moment of The Prelude, the disjunctive and disruptive” is none other
than “a prophetic resistance to the approved narrative of personal success
and progress that is imposed on subjects of the modern state” (62). The
fact that the poem was posthumously published creates more doubts than
Wordsworth’s Re-Formation of Individuality: “Spots of Time,” the Fragment and the Autobiography 1379

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self-assurance about the poet’s self-consciousness.
Harding’s claim for heterogeneity intrinsic to Wordsworth’s autobio-
graphical project supports the idea that the analogy of the fragment to
individuality and the analogy of the work of art to a porcupine are opera-
tive in fragmentary wholeness. Yet the analogy in question is inoperative
as well because fragmentary wholeness is not self-sufficient insofar as it
remains alienated from external influence for too long. The notion of an
autonomous individual as a fragment is made possible and at the same
time impossible as long as each is automatically based on the negation of
an outside and other fragments; an autonomous individual does not equal
and cannot represent the other individuals, either. An individual’s experi-
ence presents autonomy as universally singular. The rewriting of daunt-
ing childhood experiences was a necessity for an independent person,
and the two “spots of time” are dominant memories from Wordsworth’s
early childhood that nonetheless shed light on their vivid differences
from the other recollections. The Prelude is complete and extant in itself
and at the same time incomplete in its completion, not because of the
unachieved work of The Recluse but because of the unwritten versions of
each spot of time. Wordsworth’s initial plan to write a greater poem than
John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) ends up with an unending work in
progress. Wordsworth’s idea of individuality is performed and re-formed
in the scene of writing his autobiographical poem, which to a large extent
verges on the scene of reconstructing a fragmentary whole out of frag-
mented memories.
Seoul National University
Key Words: William Wordworth, individuality, fragment, The Prelude,
autibiography, Friedrich Schlegel
Works Cited
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Gaschè, Rodolphe. “Ideality in Fragmentation.” Foreword to F. Schlegel’s
Philosophical Fragments
. Trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: U of
1380
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Minnesota P, 1991. vii-xxxii.
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Wordsworth’s Re-Formation of Individuality: “Spots of Time,” the Fragment and the Autobiography 1381
Received
October 30, 2010.
Accepted
December 7, 2010.

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