Robert Young discusses two dominant interpretations of The Prelude: the first which ignores history altogether, and the second which recognizes the role of history in the poem, only to erase it in order to affirm the function of art as the bearer of a transhistorical truth. Young is suspicious of the way in which critics of The Prelude have neglected the play of history in the poem, especially since the poem is a history about history. He feels that this critical ambivalence reflects the poem's problematic treatment of history as well as fluctuations in Wordsworth's own view of history's role in his personal formation.

Young employs the terms erasure and superscription in the first place to describe the way in which criticism has eliminated history from Wordsworth's text, and replaced it with transhistorical inscription. This Arnoldian perspective, while recognizing the historical aspects of the poem, valorizes its apparent movement from mass protest to individual quietism, and thus eliminates the political in favour of the personal, which results in the erasure of history. Yet this criticism fails to account for the complex manner in which the competing ideologies of, say, Jacobinism and conservatism, express antithetical forms of history throughout the poem. In the first instance, nature might be seen as the innocent state of man free from the oppression of society and its institutions, while in the second instance, nature is the timeless spirit that produces permanent and universal values.

Furthermore, erasure and superscription are evident in Wordsworth's involvement with and reaction to contemporary events, as well as in his continuous revising of The Prelude. The structure of the poem and the history it explores, both personal and public, are best described in terms of the palimpsest, which has the unique capacity both to retain and to erase texts. In the model proposed by Thomas De Quincey, the palimpsest is a literal agent of history containing texts from different historical periods in a single parchment. According to De Quincey, the Greek tragedy of some palimpsest only seems to have been displaced by the Christian legend which in turn, only seems to be displaced by a medieval romance. But these texts resist erasure, and thus history becomes a series of superscriptions. De Quincey goes on to claim that the brain itself is a kind of palimpsest, from which experiences cannot be erased and upon which new incidents and accidents are inscribed, layer upon layer. Thus the palimpsest provides a psychological and historical model for the processes of erasure and superscription offered by The Prelude. Indeed, the poem's "spots of time" recall this model in that they are "memories as disturbing as they are renovative, which almost seem to be the wounds that they come to heal." Temporality itself is destroyed and history is invoked in order to be superscribed, in the manner of the palimpsest.

Finally, Young addresses the "external accidents" of history which prompt Wordsworth to inscribe and re-inscribe his own "internal" history. Thus, the episodes of the Drowned Man and the Gibbet-mast are impressed "With images to which in following years/Far other feelings were attached, with forms/That yet exist with independent life/And, like their archetypes, know no decay" (1799, I.284-7). Again, the palimpsest serves as model. According to Young, each accident is superscribed upon the first, and enlarges its significance. Indeed, "it is only the superscription that makes the first first, and recalls it for reading." History can only be known through its accidents, especially through those which illuminate earlier unexamined experience; it can only be known "through the writing that it has left for later reading." Perhaps Young's exegesis offers an explanation for The Prelude's preoccupation with epitaphs, with the monumental inscription that marks and remarks, that recalls to the mind of the monument's reader earlier experiences and writes upon them. Mourning and monument recall a past upon which the present emotion is superscribed, only to be recollected later, and thus, memory upon memory is written in the palimpsest of history and heart. The superscription transforms but fails to erase earlier experience, until it is no longer history, but an imagined conflation of many historical moments, a spot of time.

Document created February 26, 1997