Intertexts

Intertexts, Vol. 5, No. 1,2001 Psyche’s Progress; Soul- and Self-making from Keats to Wilde Joel Black U n i v e r s i t y o f G e o r g i a For all the attention that questions of subjectivity, agency, and the self have received in recent years, theorists have shown aprofound unwilling¬ ness to address the topic of the soul. The modern preoccupation with the self in Western, and now increasingly in Eastern, societies has largely re¬ placed discussions about the soul that have dominated human history— and especially literature and the arts—from their beginnings, well before the issues of identity, individuality, and personality captured critical atten¬ tion. As aresult, much of the current theoretical writing on the self seems somewhat lopsided, and will no doubt continue to seem so until an inquiry into the shadow-discourse of the soul—now relegated for the most part to fictional and poetic writing—is initiated, and the relation between the concepts of soul and self are critically investigated beyond the point of viewing the former merely as an un(de)constructed precursor of the latter. As apreliminary move in this direction, Iturn to two writers who ex¬ emplify the transition between the pre-romantic discourse of the soul and the post-romantic discourse of the self. Whereas John Keats attempted in his poetry to work out the program of Soul-making elaborated in his let¬ ters, Oscar Wilde invoked Keats even as he embarked on one of the most conscious and comprehensive exercises of self-making ever undertaken. Yet as part of the curious dialectic of Self and Soul, we find Keats inadver¬ tently constructing in Ode to Psyche and his other odes what Wilde and other readers took to be aparadigm of the imaginative, poetic self, while Wilde, in his most uncharacteristic and personal work De Profundis, enun¬ ciated one of the most moving modern meditations on the soul. It’s altogether fitting that Keats should have chosen the goddess Psy¬ cheasthesubjectofthefirstofhisgreatodesof1819.'Asthe“latestborn and loveliest vision far /Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy,” Psyche is alate¬ comer who appeared in the second century when widespread belief in the ancient myths was already in decline, and when the new religion of Chris¬ tianity had begun banishing the pagan deities (Vendler 50). As Keats him¬ self (following Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary) explained in the jour¬ nal-letter in which he introduced the ode to his brother and sister-in-law, “Psyche was not embodied as agoddess before the time of Apulieus [sic] the Platonist who lived after the A[u]gustan age, and consequently the Goddess was never worshipped or sacrificed to with any of the ancient 7 8 I N T E R T E X T S fervour—and perhaps never thought of in the old religion—I am more or¬ thodox tha[n] to let ahe[a]then Goddess be so neglected” (2: 106). In portraying Psyche as a“late-bloomer,” Keats exercises acertain amount of poetic license. Elements of the Psyche story appear to have “been in Western consciousness from at least the fourth century B.C.” (Hagstrum 71); Apuleius may have borrowed the tale from the Athenian storyteller Aristophontes, and early documentation of Psyche’s “story” ap¬ pears in classical art. More significantly, while the most coherent and com¬ plete version of the myth of Psyche is relatively recent,^ the concept of psy¬ che is quite ancient. Homer conceived psuche or the soul as an immanent “other” or “second self’ that is “without feeling, deserted by mind and the organs of the mind,” and that remains hidden during the individual’s life, only manifesting itself at the individual’s death when it separates itself from the body to lead aseparate existence, “an invisible ‘image’ which only gains its freedom in death” (Rohde 5-7). The Homeric view of the soul as “a ghostly double of the body” evolved into the Platonic conception of the body “as aghostly reflection of the soul” (Vernant 190)—“a dctimbn in us, adivine being, asupernatural force whose place and function in the uni¬ verse goes beyond our single person” (Vernant...