Blank Splendour: Mere Existence in British Romanticism considers moments in British Romantic poems and paintings when the world is blanked out, when subject and object, person and world, and at times even emotion, dissolve into a condition of mere existence.
This book began when I encountered a little-known sonnet in the poetry of John Clare, a major rural working-class British poet of the early nineteenth century. In that poem, Clare ponders the situation of a tree whose existence is unrecorded by a wind that passes by and moves on, consigning it to the state of “blank oblivion.” In considering a condition that exceeds human subjectivity – and that hollows out even the life of a tree – this poem ventures beyond virtually every framework we might bring to bear as we interpret it. As a result, it haunted me, demanding a response that for many years I did not have.
Eventually, I realized that a range of several further poems and paintings in that era explore closely related themes. At least initially, these works consider the disappearance of the world on the death of one’s mother, the nullity of life in the condition of mortality, the stasis and darkness that certain classical gods must endure after they are defeated, and the dissolution of the visual field under the assault of the sun’s excessive brightness. But each of them pursues that initial insight further, evoking a state that transpires beyond the context of any specific absence or loss. Moreover, each relies on the word “blank” or its visual equivalent, and in doing so, attempts to capture a situation not entirely beyond life – the state of death – but rather what arises when everything has been blanked out, yet still goes on. They are interested in something very strange indeed: a condition of abiding in a domain without attributes of any kind that nevertheless does not, and cannot, cease – of enduring perpetually in a state of mere existence.
The fact that so many artists were fascinated by this blank state in that period is remarkable in itself. But what could explain why these works of art are interested in such a condition? Their concern is so surprising, so subtle, that one cannot grasp it without creating a new interpretive approach to match it. After considering them for many years – and being inspired by the thoughts of colleagues who were responding to my initial thoughts – I eventually found my way to the argument of this book, constructing a new interpretive framework in the process.
On one level, these moments show how several Romantic poets and the great painter J. M. W. Turner articulate an aspect of our shared modernity, the sense of our vulnerability in the face of nature’s indifference. This sense of things was emerging, just in this period, with most clarity in the initial phases of modern geology. But this sense, in turn, points us not to a preoccupation with material processes (as in the “new materialisms” of such influence in humanistic study today) but to the movement of time that undoes all material things, all subjects and all objects alike. Their concerns, then, are not material, but more elusive; their insights are ultimately philosophical, except that they take us beyond what philosophy proper can provide us. They attempt to capture what it means for all entities to abide in the face of what will obliterate being itself – in a state they ultimately conceive as one of nonbeing, of oblivion.
Once I understood this level of concern in these works, I realized that this book addressed many of the themes I was exploring in another book I was writing at the same time on the import of potential human extinction for us today. Like that book, this one is discussing the possible erasure of human significance. In daring to take up such themes, these works anticipate aspects of our own moment, when for nearly the first time in human history we must begin to contemplate the possibility that our own actions may, in the next several decades or century, lead to our disappearance. Our possible nonbeing is now a palpable element in our ordinary modes of existence. These works on a blank condition, then, are contemporary with us, speaking to us about an elusive state that we now endure.
One might think that those who contemplate mere existence would do so in a mood of shock, horror, or dismay. So, it came as a big surprise that at times, these artists did so in a rather different vein, with something like bliss. A striking instance of this response may be found in Turner’s late painting, Norham Castle, Sunrise:
J.M.W. Turner, Norham Castle, Sunrise (c. 1845). Photo copyright Tate Gallery, Creative Commons, CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported).
Here one might see a world that, in the midst of disappearing, takes on a certain strange beauty, the bliss of the void, a blank splendour.
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