Archiving ‘Future Years’: Wordsworthian Dis-ease of Memory from Pantheism to Pandemic

Abstract

While the experiment with memory in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798) has been a much-discussed topic since its publication, what constitutes a discussion seldom approached is the debilitating untenability of the archival project in the text that keeps undercutting itself even as the ensuing tug-of-war—between remembering and forgetting, and also between remembering and recollecting—invariably plunges into a narrative breakdown alongside a fervently collapsing selfhood. A reading of the text allows this article to foreground such restlessness as an obsessive preoccupation with the anxiety of anamnesis, on the one hand, and the compulsion to resist its failure, on the other. While several critics have discussed the narrative of ‘return’ in Wordsworth and the text in question, my interest in this article is to demonstrate that memory is not only emblematic of a return but also of preservation of the future that leaves the transition from the past to the future utterly frustrating in the present. This frustration—a repeated and interminable frustration—in the text is what blinds Wordsworth’s speaker to such an extent that he fails to recognise or remember the unavoidably pathological nature of anamnesis. Diseased as he is, his obsession with archiving entails a pathological projection of an interiority upon an exterior world that is already always a failure in itself. This is because the need to retrieve—and even contrive—memory is, thus, presented as a compulsive impetus that is organised, disorganised and reorganised within a meticulously constructed archive that, as I argue, keeps tumbling over itself. This article, therefore, traces the dynamics of such a discursive attempt at archiving memory—and its subject—while it remains perpetually under erasure. Further, I emphasise that Wordsworth’s pantheism and our pandemic are so similarly structured that studying the failure of one undeniably lends us an insight into the other.