12. The Broken Mirror: The Identity of the Text in Shelley's Triumph of Life

Abstract

In Prometheus Unbound Shelley goes as far as he can in separating the pragmatic from the metaphysical, the positive activity of reading or more properly acting out, from what he sees as the deconstructive ac­ tivity of writing. But there is something evasive about this solution. De­ nying that reading can return us to a point of origin, the play neverthe­ less affirms that it can enact a work identical with itself. For in making his text into a play, Shelley allegorizes reading as performance rather than interpretation, a discourse that legitimizes itself by doing what it says rather than by conveying an anterior and provable truth . At the end of her encounter with Demogorgon, Asia gives up the attempt to inter­ pret anything and simply acts as if certain suppositions were true. We are not bound by these suppositions, since the fourth act is a masque that knows itself to be sustained only by Demogorgon's rough magic . 1 Yet if we stand back from the play, we begin to sense that Prometheus Unbound only represents a solution. For the notion of reading as performance ignores the fact that there is no such thing as an act of pure will unmedi­ ated by language. Or to put it differently , it avoids recognizing that performance also occurs in a linguistic world . Indeed, in one of the manuscript versions of the Defence Shelley sees perception or poetry, expression or art, and "invention" or "the application of art" to knowl­ edge and use, as gradations of the same power, thus implying that they