““Never can there be anything more between us,” Lady Grace said passionately to Lord John, as she rebuffed his marriage proposal. “Never, no, never!” Aghast and defeated, he sank after a moment into a chair and remained quite pitiably staring before him, appealing to the great blank splendour.”
Aficionadi of Henry James will recognize this passage from a dramatic scene in his 1911 novel The Outcry. The concept of ‘blank splendour’ as mere existence is explored in a fascinating new book by David Collings (professor of English at Bowdoin College in Maine).
He examines blank splendour through the poetry of the great Romantics Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and the lesser-known John Clare; and also finally the paintings of Turner. I will begin here with his study of Turner’s painting Regulus, as it has echoes in the prose of Henry James (who Collings does not mention in the book).
Regulus (photo with this article) was first exhibited in Rome in 1828 but reworked by Turner and shown in London in 1837. Without knowing ancient Roman subject matter, most visitors to the Tate Gallery give this painting a quick pass. Back when people had the benefit of a real education, everyone knew the story of the Roman general Marcus Regulus. Initially victorious in the First Punic War with Carthage, he was defeated and seized in 255 BCE. While his torture at their hands may be an invented tale, it is said he was forced to stare at the Sun. Analogous to Lord John, he stared into a blank splendour. In the painting, Turner gives the “violently blazing light of the sun” a central place in the canvas. “If one seeks an image of what Hazlitt describes as the void that defines Turner’s practice, one could scarcely do better than consider his sun.” Before getting into the essential aspect of what blank splendour is, this quote about the Regulus painting gives an example of what Collings wants us to understand.
“The painting aligns an assault on the embodied process of perception with one on the temporal coordinates of subjectivity, taking the subject to the verge not only of blindness but also of delirium, to the edge of a dismemberment at once physical and psychoanalytic. To eclipse the visible is to undo the coordinates of subjectivity itself. Regulus deciphers the import of the blank sun with singular rigour,” Collings writes.
Throughout the book, Collings relies heavily on the work of the late French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, even though he does not reference his 1995 book Alterity and Transcendence. While reading Blank Splendour, I kept thinking of the concept of ‘blank alterity’, and how it might be used to better comprehend what Collings is explaining in his highly sophisticated academic prose (the quote I just gave being an exemplar). I will merely plant that intellectual seed for any reader intrepid enough to make the journey while reading Collings.
In the Introduction, Collings spells out what his study is animated by. In the range of works considered by him
“The fact that these works share a range of strategies is best revealed by the fact that each relies on the word blank as it depicts the contours of mere existence. The usage is the most pivotal indication of what is at stake. All the literary instances in these works deploy the word blank as an adjectival form rather than a substantive noun such as blankness. It never appears in any proper form, and fixed scene, but rather, as Levinas suggests, invades all possible regions of existence. The status of a blank condition, then, remains elusive.”
Trying to bag this elusive quarry for close study in his forensic poetic and artistic laboratory is what this book is all about. From the ‘blank misgivings’ of Wordsworth to the ‘blank splendour’ of Keats, this book is quite an experience: sometimes disorienting, always provocative.
I note that the famous poem Upon Nothing (first correctly printed in 1711) by the Earl of Rochester is not mentioned in the book. Is there a Venn diagram in which ‘nothing’ intersects with ‘mere existence’? While it might have been a digression, I wish Collings had addressed this existential question. However, this is but a minor quibble. Perhaps the most pressing concern any reader of this book has to confront is found on page 18. “Novalis makes a contribution pivotal to this book. He not only theorizes a version of mere existence but also argues that it cannot be approached directly through philosophical thought. Novalis suggests that one must rely not on conceptual argument but rather on the resources of literature.” And this is exactly what Collings does, by studying the Romantic poets.
Each chapter has extraordinary insights. In the Wordsworth chapter, in his Intimations Ode (“which he regarded as the most definitive poem of his career”), Wordsworth writes of a child. “He may be in distress because the worlds have left him in a blank domain,” Collings discerns. “The poem accentuates how primary affect is indeed a blank state, a supremely evacuated condition in which the mind persists without a world. The child has nowhere to turn, neither towards a being too vast for him nor the worlds that perpetually vanish. He is caught between infinity and finitude, eternity and time.”
A similar theme emerges in his study of two poems by Coleridge, Limbo (1811) and Human Life: on the denial of immortality (1811-15). In these poems, Collings sees a close relation between faith and the secular, “an intimacy between an orientation to the divine and a confrontation with the ‘blank accident’ of life. The intensity of Coleridge’s search for redemption lends these poems an extraordinary urgency.” By “interrogating the import of a finitude,” Collings explains, “one ultimately sketches the contours of the mere there is, the scene of a blank existence.”
A lengthy essay could be written about the insights here. I will just note in closing the identification of ‘gaps’ is a recurring one throughout. Even so, it is not indexed. I submit that this is an important subtext to consider when reading this important book, which I highly recommend.
(The Index is not comprehensive. For example, a mention of the poet Mallarmé on page 10 does not have an entry).
Blank Splendour: Mere Existence in British Romanticism is by University of Toronto Press. It lists for $60 Canadian dollars.