Unbinding Forgiveness: Prometheus Unbound

ABSTRACT

This essay traces the aspirations and limits of forgiveness in Prometheus Unbound and asks whether unbinding can ever amount to forgiving. The implications of unbinding are complicated by the manifold forms of bonds and bondage at stake in Shelley’s drama and in the world in which he lived, from financial instruments to manacles. Their significance and reach call into question what it might mean to read and to historicize Shelley adequately today. The problem is further complicated by Shelley’s understanding of language itself as a kind of bond, exemplified in the drama by the form of the curse, which poses a challenge to straightforward accounts of poetry’s liberating power. To understand unbinding as forgiveness transforms both forgiveness and unbinding; rather than heroic liberation, we are confronted with a mournful but resolute kind of critical engagement that calls into question both the fixity of the past and Romanticism’s supposed investment in futurity.

I cannot forgive. (Shelley, Letters 1: 70)

What! will you not forgive? (1: 142)

Do not talk of forgiveness again to me[.] (1: 459)

1. Bonds

In Prometheus Unbound, the ultimate form of unbinding is forgiveness.¹ Yet the word can hardly be uttered, appearing only as an infinitive in the drama’s final lines. One reason for this blockage is that the dramatic logic of binding and unbinding reaches far beyond Shelley’s nominal source material, encompassing everything from personal antagonisms to world historical networks of ownership, so that in order to unbind anything at all, literally or figuratively, he is prompted to imagine a world in which everything is forgiven. What is more, the idea of unbinding (as opposed to a more transactional or juridical account of injustice) complicates forgiveness by ruling out the possibility of merely balancing past wrongdoing. Binding leaves a mark, just as various forms of domination and incarceration cause lasting and traumatic damage. “Binding and unbinding as a regular practice modifies the body,” Vahni Capildeo notes (71). Her essay on binding introduces another important connection by linking the art of knotting in seafaring cultures to the binding of language by verse forms; in both cases we observe “minute fibres latching together or fractioning as the material’s own properties respond to the deliberately made shape” (72). In Capildeo’s sense, poetry is binding twice over: the binding of language to deliberate forms, and the subtle but irresistible power of words to bind their users. At the center of Shelley’s Prometheus we find the double bind of the curse, at its peripheries a series of historical bonds whose significance and reach call into question what it might mean to historicize Shelley adequately today.

A longstanding question for readers has been “the relation of will and necessity in Prometheus Unbound,” or more bluntly, whether to “grant Prometheus primary responsibility for Jupiter’s overthrow” (Rieder 776). Depending on how one answers, the task of forgiveness might fall principally to Prometheus himself, to Asia, Panthea, and others present, or to the spirit world at large. In the common reading of the drama as a re-staging of the French Revolution, forgiveness would stand for the possibility of Revolution without Terror, which is to say, the possibility of transitional justice.² The problem of unbinding complicates forgiveness in Prometheus considerably, but also provides grounds for reimagining the role forgiveness might play, here and at large. For this reason, my focus will be less on the evaluation of actions and more on the work’s philosophical and ethical reach. Towards the end of the drama, Shelley’s Earth sings of

   The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness!

   The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,

   The vaporous exultation, not to be confined! (4.319–21)³

What are the stakes of joy such as this? And what liberation is implied? Taking unbinding in the broadest terms, I am interested in literal shackles as well as the metaphorical bonds of punishment, coercion, obligation, and debt: in sum, the drama’s negatively charged forms of attachment. In this way, my overriding question is not so much who forgives and why, but how the play reaches toward the possibility of forgiveness, and whether such forgiveness can be understood as actual, or only as gorgeously suspended, perpetual Orphic song.

Since my contention is that forgiveness is thinkable in Prometheus only through the logic of unbinding, like Shelley I will have to defer direct talk of forgiveness for now and begin with the matter of binding. Richard Holmes locates the originary scene for Shelley’s binding motif in a childhood episode he calls “the ‘asylum’ incident at Field Place,” in which Sir Timothy supposedly attempted to commit his wild and feverous son (32). The language of bonds and binding echoes not only through Prometheus but The Revolt of Islam and Queen Mab. Understood as restriction that is at once personal and political, bonds are for Shelley aligned with tyranny (and male authority figures) and opposed to the liberating force of love (but pointedly not marriage).⁴ Bonds also recur in Shelley’s life in a very different but ultimately related way: he spent considerable energy throughout his adult life trying to sell debt-bearing financial instruments. With the help of solicitors, post-obit bonds were secured against the expectation of Shelley’s inheritance. As well as meeting a practical need, these were tools to bind Sir Timothy and oblige him, against his wishes, to bankroll his son’s projects. They also had crucial non-monetary effects on his life; Shelley’s schemes would in turn bind Shelley to Godwin, and thus to the philosopher’s daughter.⁵

My linking of binding to financial debt might appear opportunistic, but Shelley was clearly thinking about both simultaneously. “My Prometheus is finished,” announces a letter of August 1819 to Leigh Hunt, suffused with the language of debt and inadequate returns. As well as complaining about Godwin’s ingratitude and unending requests for money, Shelley regrets that he has nothing to repay Hunt’s own kindnesses, which he likens to “lending to a beggar” (Letters 2: 107–09). In October of the same year, around the time Shelley turned to writing a fourth act, he began urging John and Maria Gisborne to sell their government bonds “at this crisis of approaching Revolution” (Letters 2: 132), explicitly linking political change with the cancelation of the current debt regime. As Paul Stephens has demonstrated, debt plays a crucial role in Shelley’s political and ethical thinking in this period, and crystallizes in his analysis of the national debt in A Philosophical View of Reform, also drafted around this time (124, 134). And although Shelley cannot have known, his Prometheus was itself fated to bear financialized debt that would indirectly benefit the institution which expelled him at eighteen.⁶

The combination of literal shackles, legal constraints, and transnational capital implicit in the term bond coalesces in the master signifier of unfreedom in the period: transatlantic slavery. Bonds denote manacles (as in Wordsworth’s sonnet to Toussaint L’Ouverture), as well as the forms of legal and financial agreement that facilitated the plantation economy. One especially flexible credit instrument, the conditional bond, allowed owners of enslaved people to bind themselves and their commercial partners in English common law, without requiring litigants to explicitly disclose the nature of their property, which is to say, persons trafficked from the African coasts to American plantations (L. Wilson 69–76). Equally importantly, Miles Ogborn has underscored various ways in which “speech (as binding oaths, prescriptions, divinations, incantations, and proclamations) actively combined what others thought of as law, medicine, politics, and religion, to create something apart from plantation slavery and, at times, something that challenged it” (33). Linguistic bonds shadow their literal equivalents, but also provide for subversion and organized resistance. Far more than a metaphorical overlap, talk of bonds is doubly entangled, connoting both the equipment of the slave trade and the forms of linguistic abstraction that could be employed in service or resistance to it.

The biographical parallels make a psychologizing reading of Shelley’s unbinding obvious to the point of being predictable. The broader logics of binding operative in the early nineteenth century implore us to read in terms of the power exercised by men over women and children, the rich over the poor, tyrants over citizens, and slavers over unfree people. Yet reading Prometheus as the mythological re-staging of personal conflict or contemporary social antagonism would also bind the work to its circumstances in ways that are antithetical to Shelley’s ambitions. After all, unbinding also provided Shelley with a figure for poetry’s abstract freedom. “[P]oetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions,” declares “A Defence of Poetry,” aligning poetry with necessity and against the “peculiar errors” of any given epoch by figuring historical contingency as a binding curse (Shelley's Poetry and Prose 544; 516). Poetry frees us from the curse which binds: this encapsulates the promise of Prometheus Unbound, even as it insists on poetry’s independence from any possible encapsulation. In the context of the “Defence,” unbinding implies an argument for poetry’s negative capability and transhistorical reach; read in dialogue with Prometheus, it suggests that customs and beliefs, like curses, act as pernicious bonds.⁷

Shelley’s unbinding is richly resonant with a whole array of bonds and attachments, yet the idea of unbinding is central to his insistence that poetry escapes “a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events” (“Defence” 515). The friction in reading Shelley’s work points us towards a dialectical tension in unbinding itself that emerges bluntly or obliquely whenever the term is invoked. On the one hand, unbinding means dissolving a determinate bond or restriction; on the other, any attempt to characterize what that dissolution would look like would effectively rebind in advance the very thing it ought to liberate. Without a moment of unconditioned freedom, unbinding swiftly rebounds into a new form of constraint. But without some degree of determination, unbinding can only operate as a purely abstract freedom, as the violent negation of any actually existing conditions. This abstract freedom appears most clearly in the logic of Revolutionary terror, which “can elaborate itself only as the repetitive production of nothing—the empty negativity of unworked death” (Comay 76).⁸ Unbinding is therefore caught between a compulsive tendency to sabotage itself and a restless negativity which offers up for sacrifice the very things it attempts to save. Unbinding exemplifies through its own contradictions the broader malfunction of enlightenment European philosophy’s attempts to articulate political freedom, which fix on the most concrete world historical example of unfreedom—chattel slavery—and yet abstract from it, until literal shackles come to stand, perversely, for white property rights.⁹

Prometheus brings these tensions into clear view. The work draws on, and yet unbinds itself from, both Aeschylus’s original and the circumstances of its own day, in an effort to tell an unconstrained story about revolutionary freedom. By eschewing existing historical and literary narratives, Shelley allows poetry to create new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; yet each degree of abstraction (each degree of poetic freedom, if you like) inches the work away from the actual conditions and events that it might otherwise challenge directly. “The fact that the work does not have its eye simply on the Revolution, but on ‘every revolution that resorts to force instead of forgiving wrongs darker than death,’” Michael O’Neill once noted, “is a source of both strength and weakness” (257). The stakes are far broader than post-Napoleonic European politics. As Jared Hickman has demonstrated, the situation of the Prometheus myth in relation to both Africa and the Caucasus linked it to notional blackness and whiteness for European readers, and after the globalizing events of 1492, “the full possibilities and implications of Prometheus’s act of political-theological rebellion only become legible through a high-stakes racial coding in global modernity” (16). The relation of myth to world history is not merely a question of context: Hickman develops two ur-readings of Prometheus, one as a holdout against Jupiter, and therefore as an exception to absolute power, which he associates with slave rebellions and calls “black Prometheus”; the other, a rebel in search of upward mobility, who asserts his own divinization and embraces absolute authority in order to assume it for himself: “white Prometheus” (76). Hickman’s argument is wide-ranging and significant, although sometimes constrained by this bipartite scheme. Its most significant conclusion is that the problem of situating Prometheus in geographic and literary terms is not simply analogous to the racially charged and yet blinkered nature of European political philosophy: it is the same problem.¹⁰

Shelley’s unbinding presents a critical difficulty, I have suggested, because we need a broad contextualizing account in order to appreciate its significance and reach, while at the same time the significance of unbinding lies in its claim to do away with exactly the kinds of causation and constraint we think of as context. But this is not a purely theoretical problem; it is also a way to understand the stakes of Shelley’s own composition. Insofar as Prometheus appeals to an ideal revolution rather than an extant one, it engages in just the kind of thinking Burke was warning about in 1790, “stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction” (58). But diverging from those taut philosophical accounts of natural rights, Shelley directs his unbinding words towards a Hellenic tradition which is equally mediated, “subject to the necessities and pressures of translation and interpretation” (Webb 151). This combination of abstraction and mythologization permits the work a degree of referential range that will necessarily disappoint readers wishing to map it to the historical events of, say, Paris around 1789, or Saint Domingue around 1791. But it opens a space for a different kind of historical thinking: allusive, speculative, and unwilling to subordinate itself to what Shelley would call the particular facts of the age. Myth poses both as an alternative to narrative history and as a check on the limitless abstraction of pure reason. In the place of both, we find what O’Neill calls Shelley’s trust that “a symbolic structure” can “act as a corrective to the failures of history” (262). This gives Shelley’s mythopoetic work a promissory quality, yet insofar as a promise also binds its utterer, we cannot hope even for this.

Here the significance of forgiveness becomes more legible. Judging by his letters, Shelley does not seem to have found forgiveness especially easy. The word rarely appears in his poetry (and appears most frequently in The Cenci, where revenge easily wins). Yet Shelley’s offering of forgiveness in act 4 of Prometheus signals that unbinding must be something other than abstract freedom. The drama’s late wish undercuts any reading which would see its mythological unbinding from historical events as mere dereliction of duty. If freedom were nothing more than severance from constraint, or release from obligation (as it sometimes appears in Shelley’s invocations of free love), there would be no ongoing relation to others, and ultimately no question of forgiveness. Put another way, forgiveness saves unbinding from its most destructive impulses. Even the naming of forgiveness serves as proof that Shelley wants more than a fantasy of release. Unlike a promise or an exchange, forgiveness cannot be demanded, offered in advance, or brokered by a third party. Nor does forgiveness negate, undo, or forget past actions.¹¹ Rather, it asserts that past actions do not bind us forever. Forgiveness insists on the gravity and facticity of a misdeed while releasing those involved from a future determined by it.

2. Curses

Just as forgiveness comes into view, there is a snag. The bonds of Prometheus are formed, like the work itself, from language, and from the moment Shelley “transforms the mythological Promethean deed into an originary act of words, the annunciation of the curse,” words outrun those who utter them (Jacobs 20). This makes the characters’ responsibility for past actions considerably more complicated. More than by deeds, Prometheus and Jove are bound to one another by two unspeakable sequences of words: the secret Prometheus will not disclose, and the curse he cannot remember. In “the abyss between an obliterated originary moment that it takes three hundred lines to recall and a revolution deferred for yet two acts” (Jacobs 23), Prometheus is alienated from the most significant of his words:

             I speak in grief

   Not exultation, for I hate no more,

   As then, ere misery made me wise. The Curse

   Once breathed on thee I would recall. (1.56–59)

Having neither the will to keep his word, nor the capacity to recall his words, Prometheus is caught in what Andrew Warren has characterized as language’s entanglements, “its ability to ensnare without anyone’s direct ‘intention’” (2). The curse snares Prometheus in a hatred he no longer feels; words prove more permanent than the passions that provoked them.

Shelley’s belief in the cunning of words helps to explain his special attraction for deconstructive readers, even though (or perhaps because) Shelley often resisted them. In 1980, Jonathan Arac spoke of Shelley as very nearly one of their own, and of Shelley deconstructing Aeschylus (and by extension, the implicit hierarchies of West over East and male over female) (245–46). Arac also noted the case of Deconstruction and Criticism, originally intended as a collection of essays on “The Triumph of Life,” and in its eventual form still bound up with Shelley, most urgently in Paul de Man’s breathtaking “Shelley Disfigured” (248). Shelley was, among what was then a far less contested “big six” of British romanticism, the obvious choice for theoretically minded critics: politically engaged, philosophically sophisticated, by turns passionate and skeptical. Arac took unbinding as deconstruction avant la lettre, yet Shelley had a knack of staying somehow both behind and ahead of even the most rigorous readers (a bind acknowledged in de Man’s macabre figure of the overdue and yet incomplete burial). This resistance to both historical sequence and critical method might be usefully understood as aspects of what Lee Edelman has called “romanticism’s dialectical pursuit of contemporaneity” (“Pathology” 37). But where Edelman sees “a temporal fantasy of reproduction” (39), I am more inclined to emphasize Romanticism’s sensitivity to things gone silently out of mind and things violently destroyed, which suggests that the future is best understood (if it can be at all) as a multiplicity of incomplete and missing possibilities.¹² Shelley stands as a striking example of this ambivalent yearning for futures past, and nowhere does Shelley articulate the problem better than in (and as) the Promethean curse.

There is a chthonic obstinacy to the curse. Its purpose is to bind speaker and addressee, maker and victim. It is analogous to the promise, save that a curse promises something you do not want to receive; it is “always the anticipation of an event of retributive punishment” (Ferris 138). But promises can also become curses. Perhaps no romantic writer is more suspicious of the promise than Godwin, who describes it as “a fallacious mode of binding a man to a specific mode of action” (87). Since it binds its user in the face of changing circumstances, for Godwin the promise is not rational; you might even say that promises are counterrevolutionary in essence: they grant the past illegitimate power over the future. The Promethean curse has similar features: it endures when minds and times change; it persists as ineliminable normative residue. This is why Prometheus’s best hope is not to negate the force of his past words but to summon that force again:

         if then my words had power,

   Though I am changed so that aught evil wish

   Is dead within; although no memory be

   Of what is hate — let them not lose it now! (1.69–72)

The formulation is not far from Yeats’s “Man and the Echo.” Prometheus’s hypothetical wish, housing within itself another declaration of his rehabilitation, hangs the efficacy of his words on their own past power, as if attempting to have it both ways, leaving the world either untouched or else tautologically repaired. But curses do not take kindly to logic games, and by the time that Prometheus hears the curse again, he recognizes that his present voice is not the most important. The Phantasm of Jupiter speaks the words, and he observes: “It doth repent me” (1.303) (potentially meaning both that the words make him repent and that the phantasm performs penitence for him). The words are all his own and utterly changed.

In J. L. Austin’s classic How to Do Things with Words, “accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond” (10). Yet the binding power envisaged by Austin is extremely constrained: the parties must agree; the context must be correct; the right people must be speaking. Read against the grain, the book is about all the ways in which language fails to make claims on people. Where binding does occur, it is unhurried and uncompelled. Its hallmarks are the active voice and the present tense (156). Austin’s examples of binding are often jovial, frequently bureaucratic, but always the deed of a comfortable individual with few real obligations to others. In Shelley’s drama, Prometheus must learn that these conditions do not obtain. He of many wounds discovers that “His words outlived him, like swift poison / Withering up truth, peace, and pity” (1.548–49). In Austin, infelicitous words flicker out like a dead lightbulb; for Prometheus, they linger like fears.

In his treatment of Prometheus in relation to libel law, Andrew Franta suggests that Shelley faces the same problem of linguistic binding as Prometheus. He faces it in revisiting Aeschylus and, more unhappily, in seeing his own uncaring letters to Harriet Westbrook piled up against him in the 1817 Chancery case over the custody of their children (157). In Prometheus, “Shelley follows the law of libel in maintaining that the power of words lies not in the intentions that produced them but in their effects,” Franta argues.

If libel seeks to police a work’s potentially dangerous effects by making those who are responsible for its publication accountable for its ‘malicious tendency,’ the recall of the Promethean curse insists that while Prometheus can change his mind, he cannot undo what he has done. (159)

The lesson that Shelley has Prometheus learn is that words are legislative in force, but best understood as completed actions. This suggests why Prometheus’s insistence that he no longer bears hate has little effect on his original words, which remain stubbornly active and efficient. Prometheus’s curse operates more like mortal writing than speech (hence why it is like libel and not slander). Whereas “speech fades,” you might think, “writing lasts and can always return to commemorate or damn me” (Bennington 44). In this sense, all writing is a promise (and potentially a curse). The thought is a Shelleyan one, central to his “Defence of Poetry” but also discernable in his painstaking adjustments between volition and compulsion, fear and reverence, in the manuscript alterations to the Earth’s words: “Listen, and though ye weep, rejoicing know / That our strong curse cannot be unfulfilled” and then “Rejoice to hear what yet ye dare not speak” before arriving at “Rejoice to hear what yet ye cannot speak” (Poems of Shelley 2: 492n; 1.253, emphasis added).

A pessimistic reading of Prometheus might suggest that words prove most powerful where they most tightly constrain. The implications for forgiveness are scarcely more positive: the relevant parties cannot simply agree to reconcile because their words are uncontrollable and self-propagating. Yet words also operate in a strikingly different way: not as imbrication but inspiration. In act 2, Panthea describes a dream sequence (in fact two, but one declared unrememberable). In the dream, Prometheus is present almost as a ghost, but is palpable as faint music, less words than a language of pure sound, “Like footsteps of far melody” (2.1.89). Panthea too is, by her own report, “made the wind” (2.1.50). As before, all her words are drowned (1.758). Asia responds to the vanishing quality of Panthea’s speech:

          Thou speakest, but thy words

   Are as the air. I feel them not … Oh, lift

   Thine eyes, that I may read his written soul! (2.1.109–10)

Words that slip away on the breeze—words that are a correspondent breeze—might seem to be the antithesis of everlasting poetry but can sometimes be its apotheosis.¹³ These lines permit a variety of stress patterns: “Are as the air” may be metrically preferable; “Are as the air” more syntactically pleasing. Shelley’s editing of both punctuation marks in this line suggests that he felt the line flex on the page and in the mouth, and that he dwelt on precisely how long and consequential the pauses ought to be, as if the difference in significance between word, pause, and breath was almost nothing. Asia suggests that Panthea’s words are little more than sounds on the air. Yet they prove compelling:

         As you speak, your words

   Fill, pause by pause, my own forgotten sleep

   With shapes … (2.1.141–43)

The sounds of Panthea’s speech seem to restore forgotten memories, as if the words are themselves a restorative song. Asia’s own lines are segmented by short clauses and heavy punctuation, so that, like the best and worst of romance, everything is said in the gaps. But Asia and Panthea are not dreamy observers; at least by act 3, their words prove consequential. References to sub-audible words persist from here to the closing moments:

   Ione

   There is a sense of words upon mine ear —

   Panthea

   An universal sound like words … O list! (5.517–18, emphases added)

These sounds do not add up to determinate pictures of the world, or normative claims about it. They are thick with memory and anticipation, but never attempt to make categorical demands of the present. They hint, on the contrary, that the sounds of speech outlive the grammar of intentions. Here, forgiveness might at last become thinkable.

3. Forgiveness

Having promised, and then delayed, talk of forgiveness twice now, I want to offer some justification. In Prometheus, as I said at the outset, the word forgiveness is late to appear, and the drama turns on a liberation that will be late at any date. But delay proves necessary for forgiveness in a substantive sense. Prometheus’s initial claims in the drama to feel no hatred prove almost irrelevant. This is hardly surprising: to forgive is not merely to put what happened out of mind, to forget, or to grow weary of hating. What matters most is finding the antidote to a poisonous curse, a curse that draws its poetry only from the past. Delays, pauses, and breaks in the line are not so much dead ends as chances to contest their future meaning. For Hent De Vries and Nils F. Schott, forgiveness is a way of coming to knowledge, of accepting grief as a kind of knowledge (12). Forgiveness’s knowledge arrives late, but it makes lateness into a virtue, into a kind of ethical patience. Forgiveness is the mournful (and hence ambivalent) thought that the past cannot be rewritten or repaired, and yet the future can be something other than the unfolding of its curses. This non-prescriptive “something other” links forgiveness both to the unconditioned moment in unbinding, and to the undersong of barely hearable words in Prometheus, the sound of language “reopening beyond comprehension” (Nancy 32).

After testing your patience twice, I’m going to risk one final dialectical turn. From what I have said so far it might seem that forgiveness depends on whether the imaginative logic of dreams and music in Prometheus can outrun the bonds of curse and promise. This would amount to an appeal to what William Michael Rossetti called Shelley’s “supersensible meander.” “We dream and bask in it,” Rossetti says; “we do not attempt to analyse its purport” (24–25). He is thinking in particular of “My soul is an enchanted boat” (Asia at 2.5.72), a lyrical passage which was set to music in multiple arrangements. Long before the New Historicist turn, Irving Babbitt was complaining of Romanticism’s dreamy escape from the world, and the enchanted boat passage was a favorite example (282). For a reader like Babbitt, such self-enchantment is morally irresponsible; it grasps at freedom by renouncing society. But this familiar critique is too generous to Shelley in this case because the apparent freedom of reverie is short-lived. Unbinding soon becomes a way of reasserting control, and freedom takes on the exact structure of unfreedom. With the fall of the “cruel king,” Prometheus makes himself a monarch: “Yet I am king over myself, and rule / The torturing and conflicting throngs within” (1.50; 1.492–93). His aspirations to self-mastery sound analogous to Jupiter’s own tyranny (Hogle 105). This may be understood as a moment of naïve error and dramatic irony, but the problem is never truly resolved. Insofar as freedom means counter-hegemonic control, it lapses back into monarchic and colonial forms, and the final lines even risk “appropriating ‘Empire’ as a name for freedom’s self-maintaining power” (Keach 140). Freedom becomes another name for sovereignty.

The solution for Shelley ought to be love. Not the intergenerational sort that might humble a patriarch and soften a defiant child, but the horizontal, romantic love that Shelley seemed to associate with escape from parental authority. For a certain kind of civic-minded conservative (like Babbitt or Sir Bysshe), romantic love represents an escape from the polis and moral responsibility, and a slide into abyssal self-consciousness. But love demands as much as it gives: it teaches even committed egotists that their needs are intertwined with those of others. I have written elsewhere about Shelley’s handling of love, and its potential to undercut and dissolve, as well as to inflate, its subjects (Freer, “Genealogy”). A wide variety of work over the past twenty-five years, by Jean-Luc Nancy, Eve Sedgwick, David Halperin, bell hooks, and others, demonstrates that love remains a crucial site for philosophically engaged writing to find purchase on the ethical and political contours of communal life. Love is easy to find in Prometheus, both as singular experience and metaphysical principle. Jacobs suggests that love might stand for mutability itself (50). Yet as readers have noted, even love rebinds the subject it purports to free. It “reimposes a metaphorical rule” (Ulmer 91) as it takes control of the drama. It takes hold of individuals and shapes their shared history. On the most pessimistic reading, “the Absolute-as-Jove” is merely replaced by “the Absolute-as-Love” (Hickman 157). The will of men is “as a tempest-wingèd ship, whose helm / Love rules, through waves which dare not overwhelm, / Forcing Life’s wildest shores to own its sovereign sway” (4.410–11). Unconditioned freedom was never the real problem; the sovereignty of love furiously rebinds everything it purports to free.

At last, we can begin: forgiveness raises the possibility that unbinding could be something other than escapist fantasy or irresistible rebinding. By definition, forgiveness can neither escape personal or world history (since then there would be nothing to forgive) nor compel its subjects in advance. Shelley rarely wrote of forgiveness by that name, yet much of his writing yearns for it under other names: debts, bonds, freedom, love. I am going to turn to the climactic closing moments of Prometheus, but I want to bring in two supplementary treatments of forgiveness alongside. Here is the first:

To have forgiven our debtors is to have renounced the whole of the past in a lump. It is to accept that the future should still be virgin and intact, strictly united to the past by bonds of which we are ignorant, but quite free from the bonds our imagination thought to impose upon it. (Weil 223)

Simone Weil’s forgiveness preserves what Shelley might call necessity while renouncing claims on the future. Its self-abnegation is almost unbearable: the wronged party, the one from whom so much is taken, must give up whatever is left. Forgiveness heaps damage on damage; it demands from the weak even their wish for recompense. Weil writes for saints, and here forgiveness looks perilously close to death. Embracing the sheer negativity of unbinding, Weil’s account harbors a wish for the future beyond political futurity.¹⁴ Hers is a political theology of almost unbearable coldness.

Contrast this account, rather more proximate to the poet, nestled within what James Bieri calls “the most tragic letter Shelley ever read” (23):

My dear Bysshe let me conjure you by the remembrance of our days of happiness to grant my last wish—do not take your innocent child from Eliza who has been more than I have, who has watched over her with such unceasing care.—Do not refuse my last request I never could refuse you & if you had never left me I might have lived but as it is I freely forgive you & may you enjoy that happiness which you have deprived me of. There is your beautiful boy. oh! be careful of him & his love may prove one day a rich reward. (Bieri 23)

Harriet Westbrook’s letter couches its message in the claims of the past (“remembrance of our days”) and an appeal to the unfolding years of “your beautiful boy” that Edelman might term reproductive futurism. In between, there is a moment of paratactic free fall. As it is I freely forgive you. The freedom in “freely forgive” is nothing like the freedom of self-mastery or sovereignty. Nor is it the beautiful soul’s renunciation of society, or the awful coldness of the saint. It is inseparable from mourning and loss, and yet Westbrook invokes freedom in the present tense, without claim or condition. Both Weil’s renunciation and Westbrook’s “last request” imply severance and loss; the purity and finality of their forgiveness cost them everything.

The final lines of Prometheus declare that to forgive is to be free. But in this case the thought is far more transient. The closing salvo of the drama conscripts even as it releases; moments after they are named, forgiveness, suffering, defiance, and love are enrolled in the army of Empire and Victory:

  To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;

  To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;

   To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;

  To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates

  From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;

   Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent:

  This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be

  Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;

  This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory! (4.570–78)

This passage is eerily resonant with the lurching motions of “The Triumph of Life,” in spite of its apparent neatness. If you take every line to be indelibly marked by the next, there is no escape: everything can be mobilized. At the same time, it is also grammatically and metrically reasonable to read a stronger break after “contemplates,” so that the first five lines I have quoted operate as a list in the infinitive, modified but not wholly determined by those that follow.¹⁵ The demands on forgiveness are infinite, and yet the move from hope to forgiveness opens enough space that hope can be named for a second and third time, in a line of beautiful redundancy, not wrecked but incontrovertibly afloat. Forgiveness glimmers, if only for a moment.

It is tempting to stop here, with Shelley’s forgiveness in its momentary splendor. But that would be to forget everything riding on the bonds of Prometheus, every wrong and wreck of history, every shackle and constraint that the drama summons and suggests, and which Demogorgon’s appeal to Empire and Victory does nothing to allay. Why is forgiveness so fleeting in a drama that desires it so desperately? The answer is overdetermined: the matter of Shelley’s own forgiveness (of others and them of himself) may have been too weighty to confront head on; the task of acknowledging every bond, manacle, and scaffold the work invokes may have been too great. Above all, the ethical reach of Prometheus means that any effort the drama might have made to authorize its own forgiveness would have risked becoming facile. Like words at their most consequential in the drama, forgiveness comes through as faint music, mingled with other sounds, and bordered by silence.

If Shelley’s unbinding can be understood as a kind of forgiveness, it should come as no surprise that this forgiveness emerges more as ephemeral wish than concrete and directed action. In contrast with Weil’s or Westbrook’s articulations, it appears impure and incomplete. There is no conclusive moment, and in fact the final lines force readers to choose between forgiveness and conclusion, since the verse reaches stability and oneness by subordinating its prior list form to a singular “this,” bundling diffuse words and thoughts into a notional goodness that is explicitly opposed to repentance. Forgiveness persists only as a conceptual remainder, neither wholly absorbed into the mythmaking nor comprehensible without it. Yet there are times when forgiveness might usefully be understood otherwise than as a stable conclusion or unwavering target.¹⁶

Prometheus points to a vision of forgiveness beyond the ambit of individual agents or actions (and hence unrelated to exculpating particular individuals). This vision also grants increased significance to arguments made in the drama’s preface defending Greek poetry, analogous to those in the “Defence” and the “Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks.”¹⁷ “Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age” (preface to Prometheus Unbound 474–75). Poets cannot escape history; their best hope is that the work sings out from amongst the wreckage; that “a majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume” (“Defence” 516). Apprehending poetry in the way that Shelley envisions it here would require a mournful but resolute kind of critical reading, tracing the graceful motions that exist alongside, but remain inseparable from, barbarity. Taking this moment as key to Shelley’s historical aesthetics means cutting against the grain of the broader argument, but it also makes it possible to read the “Defence” as something other than a sweeping assertion of legislative triumph. The argument about the Greeks has its difficulties, even in the deflationary way I read it. How can poetry be understood as perfection while being shot through with the faults and flaws of its age? The play of “perfect” and “imperfect” in the “Defence” suggests that perfection is more a regulative ideal than a descriptive claim. If forgiveness were to be taken in a similar way, it would not offer a hypothetical standard for redemption, but require critical engagement without end.

Thinking with the Greeks means thinking about ruin for Shelley, as compositions from “Ozymandias” to Hellas make only too clear. The connection Prometheus suggests between forgiveness and ruin is more than incidental: without a determinate endpoint, forgiveness is fated to break down and remake itself over time; it must create from its own wreck the thing it contemplates. “Only those who are belated can observe a ruined form,” Susan Stewart writes in the opening to her wide-ranging study of ruins (11). To imagine forgiveness along these lines is to imagine an exception to this rule. By the same token, unbinding implies a form of forgiveness without futurity. By refusing to determine its own desired outcomes, unbinding opposes any fantasy of a determinate future, be it “virgin and intact” or definitively repaired. Suspended between ruin and possibility, Shelley’s Prometheus figures its predicament through bonds of language it cannot ultimately escape. It finds forgiveness—where it can—in moments of unbinding that are inseparable on the page from an idle pause or a sharp intake of breath. It can anticipate, but not determine, the nature of its release.

Notes

1 I am not the first to make this claim. In a brilliant though brief discussion, Barbara Johnson argues that Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci are in effect two attempts at the same political and aesthetic challenge: to dramatize the defeat of a patriarchal tyrant and to demonstrate “the idea that forgiveness is better than revenge.” The differences between them are many and important: subject matter, genre, and the relation of victimhood to sexual difference. But at the most fundamental level, “Prometheus forgives while Beatrice kills” (101). For compelling recent accounts, see Jager; Lindstrom.

2 See Jager.

3 Shelley’s poetry is quoted from The Poems of Shelley, and cited by act and line or volume and page, as applicable.

4 On the latter point, consider this draft lyric, likely addressed to Sophia Stacey:

I fear thy [singing] sweet voice child of Beauty

It is too sweet for me

[Thy voice dissolves the chain of ] Duty

[binds more tight]

[But yet seem]

[Heavy & tight for]

Whilst thou remainest free (3: 237)

5 See Holmes (232–33 and passim).

6 When Oxford University issued £750,000,000 of bonds in 2017, the prospectus prepared by JP Morgan listed, among other collateral, the University’s vast “heritage assets,” including library holdings, such as Bodleian MSS. Shelley e.1, e.2, and e.3, containing Prometheus Unbound. The work itself is ensnared in what Shelley might have termed “fairy-money, bonds, and bills” (Poems of Shelley 3: 679).

7 See Freer, “Shelley’s Vestimentary Poetics” (298–99).

8 See also Redfield (162–63).

9 See Buck-Morss (23–40).

10 Thus for Hickman, the way in which Shelley’s “conspicuously Caucasian Prometheus” is made to submit to an abstract Absolute (rather than maintaining the oppositional dynamic of slave rebellion) aligns the drama with “a strategy of Euro-Atlantic idealism … whereby Prometheus as a figure of the liberated human becomes a figure of the civilized white European” (223).

11 This point is argued in Jankélévitch (13–56).

12 On the latter point see Galperin; Rohrbach.

13 One obvious case would be Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” I am thinking also of a line of argument that stretches from Abrams to R. Wilson (116–41).

14 See Edelman, No Future (1–32).

15 This distinction hangs on the punctuation of “contemplates,” which undergoes some revision (Poems of Shelley 2: 648).

16 See Jager’s account of transitional justice, which invokes “infinite forgiveness, orders of magnitude beyond completion” (28). Or for a more concrete example, consider the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: as Charlton notes, “the Commission’s most widely lauded adage—‘no future without forgiveness’—has proven itself more of a shackle than a spur to liberation, binding the country to a pristine and, as such, intolerable self-image” (3).

17 On the “Discourse,” see Freer, “Genealogy” (19–23). The argument that follows draws on Freer, “Shelley’s Vestimentary Poetics” (297–301).