Employing a passage in which Wordsworth reveals his shifted attitudes toward William Godwin's philosophy (X.814-29), Hopkins sets out to establish the fact of, and a means by which to distinguish, the various "voices" coexistent in The Prelude with which Wordsworth speaks. Hopkins is particularly interested in the poet's use of "free indirect discourse" (281), a voice we associate with Wordsworth's relatively unmediated address to the reader and that serves to "critique his own earlier ideological positions" (280) vis-a-vis the French Revolution especially. Hopkins' goal is, in part, to clarify the ideological position(s) from which Wordsworth critiques earlier statements and assertions, recognizing Wordsworth as someone who developed suspicion of the power of words to convince unthinking, uncritical readers/listeners of the validity of a given viewpoint, especially when words are not brought "rigorously to the test of thoughts; and these again to a comparison with [concrete] things" (Prose II.77).

In Bakhtinian terms, the self-critique Wordsworth exercises functions by means of a "double-voiced discourse," one that "employs 'intonational quotation marks' to frame itself within the larger narrative" of a given passage (281). By means of this double-voiced discourse, Richard Gravil suggests, Wordsworth aims to "tell the truth twice: the truth of enchantment and the truth of disenchantment " with Godwin and his hyper-rationalistic discourse. Godwin's language of extreme rationalism seems to provide a sort of pathological ability to disconnect oneself from the lived/material context of human mutual relations, thus enabling a reliance upon pure rationalism to judge the world and one's actions in it, free from "conventional social restraints and obligations" (281). Wordsworth's use of words or passages that draw attention to their own ideological assertions -- to the extent that they become self-ironizing -- represents a practice of "conditional discourse" [another Bakhtinian term], in which discourse is "conditional in the sense that it is self-consciously mediated by the ironic intentions of the author and by the reader who reads them through the frame of those intentions" (282). The goal of conditional discourse here is to heighten the reader's skepticism with respect to the power of words.

Citing various passages from Wordsworth's Prose as well as The Prelude, Hopkins addresses Wordsworth's distrust of words that, specifically, constitute an "ideologically and externally grounded discourse . . . , a discourse detached from human feelings and human thought" (283). Though Hopkins does not use such terms, such a discourse is destructive of a reader/listener's connection with his or her material context because the discourse itself is not grounded in material relations but, rather, is abstracted by and in the language of ideals. It is the euphemistic nature of the language of ideals, such as Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite -- words that "[substitute themselves] for thought" (286) -- that enabled the slaughter of so many in the September Massacres (Sept. 2-4 1792). Wordsworth, in his use of conditional discourse, aims to entice his readers to think about language, "where thinking involves a critical, even profoundly skeptical engagement with the words on the page" (286) as a means of achieving "genuine liberty" (286): self-mastery and freedom from the controlling tyranny of words.

Hopkins goes on to examine passages in Book Ten, seeking to distinguish between Wordsworth's voice of direct discourse and the "'voice' of his earlier self . . . and all it represents in ideological terms" (288). The result is that the "voice of the poem's present narrator . . . passes a kind of judgment on the naivete" (289) of the younger poet. "The poem's central rhetorical interest and source of pleasure," claims Hopkins, "is the relationship between the voices within the poem itself, particularly as the narrator impersonates and sometimes even parodies his earlier self" (289). Looking at lines 287-93, and 328-36, she effectively argues such voices can be distinguished by means of scrupulous rhetorical analysis, attending specifically to such devices as asyndeton and polysyndeton, synathroesmus and anaphora, among others.

It is such devices that make possible the "intonational quotation marks" necessary to the functioning of The Prelude as a "double-voiced discourse," consequently setting up the poem's politically informed effects: i.e., drawing the reader's attention to the perfidies and slipperiness of language -- paradoxically through language itself -- while reducing, ideally, the capacity for self-delusion.

The word "skimpy" appears nowhere in this article.

Document created March 28, 1997