Autobiography’s Forms: “The Triumph of Life”

ABSTRACT

Hazlitt characterized Shelley's oeuvre as “a straining after impossibilities”: his ideas remain “conjectures” with no possibility of proof, and his “vague abstractions” find no finished form. While Bloom, Wasserman, Reiman, and others have steadily dismantled this critical generalization, there is something of value in what Hazlitt and Arnold perceived as Shelley's ineffectuality, his tendency to mingle rather than conclude. Shelley was troubled by a misalignment between the autobiographical impulse (the impulse to tell of life) and the forms we must inhabit and create to tell of it, a misalignment exacerbated by writing in the wake of Rousseau and Wordsworth. Indeed, “The Triumph of Life” is a poem about the autobiographical impulse into which Shelley has packed every form that frustrates that impulse. Contrary to de Man, for whom the trajectory of the poem is one “from erased self-knowledge to disfiguration,” this essay seeks to show how the poem assembles as many forms of selfhood as it deconstructs. As “The Triumph of Life” dramatizes, narrates, conjures, extinguishes, dreams, forgets, and remembers lives by the millions, it recasts the autobiographical impulse away from fixed identity and towards a perpetual mingling of forms.

Notes

1 All references to Shelley's poetry and prose, unless otherwise stated, are from Shelley's Poetry and Prose.

2 See “Adonais” (184–86): “Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene / The actors or spectators? Great and mean / Meet mass’d in death, who lends what life must borrow.” Hugh Roberts records the allusion to Eve's account of her first conscious moments (212) while Donald Reiman notes a connection between Rousseau's rebirth and Adam's first moments of recollected consciousness (60n99).

3 Deborah Elise White also acknowledges the allusion to John 8:14—and Christ's “beautifully self-confirming phrase” in the poem's repeated questions (162).

4 See Ralph Pite, Circle of Our Vision (174) and “Dante” (204–05).

5 “By Life I everywhere mean the true Idea of Life, or that most general form under which Life manifests itself to us, which includes all its other forms. This I have stated to be the tendency to individuation, and the degrees or intensities of Life to consist in the progressive realization of this tendency” (49).

6 While John A. Hodgson admits that there can be no final interpretation of an unfinished poem, he nevertheless claims that the vision's answer to the poem's questions about earthly life are “quite explicit, and thoroughly pessimistic” (595). Michael O’Neill takes an optimistic stance on the poem's intended direction (156), while Nora Crook points to the answer these questions receive in “On Life” as evidence that life might ultimately be “neither good nor bad, but miraculous and mysterious” (Shelley, Complete Poetry 235).