Frederick Burwick, University of California, Los Angeles
In his Preface to Prometheus Unbound, Percy Bysshe Shelley declares that his imagery has "been drawn from the operations of the human mind." Similarly in The Revolt of Islam, Shelley attempts to translate the imagery of the brain, inherently incommunicable, into a language of sense (eg. Canto I, stanzas 48-50). The narrative strategy in both works is to re-enact verbally the processes of perception and cognition, with particular attention to their frustrations and failures. While other poets of the period relish the natural world and seek to demonstrate a seemingly spontaneous and unencumbered access through the senses, Shelley exhibits the experiencing mind as it is forced to confront its own limitations and errors. The senses themselves, as thresholds to the external world, can register only small segments of the grand scala of sight and sound. Because its analytic and synthetic modes are inevitably encumbered, not only by the fallibility of its sensory data, but also by the qualia of consciousness and the aporia of causality, the brain is constantly baffled and deceived. Shelley's narratives of revolution in Prometheus Unbound and The Revolt of Islam, not unlike those of William Blake in Jerusalem, trace an interaction and interdependence of internal and external events.With attention to narrative strategy in both Prometheus Unbound and The Revolt of Islam, this paper is divided into three sections. In the first, I explore the peculiarities of the very style of Shelley's narrative--his predilection for participial constructions which render ambiguous the relation between subject and predicate, active and passive, cause and effect. I relate the very syntaxis of Shelley's narrative to his skepticism about cognitive processes. Following David Hume's account of the conditional inference that undermines the certainty of inductive reasoning, and therefore also all deductive propositions that are drawn inductively from sensory evidence, Shelley narrates his introspective episodes with attention to the misperceptions and misjudgments of his characters, as when the narrator at the beginning of The Revolt of Islam attempts to interpret the struggle between the eagle and the serpent, or the woman's embrace of the wounded serpent.
In the second section I examine the various modes of consciousness which Shelley endeavors to represent as part of the mental action of his characters: observation, deliberation, reflection, reverie, dream, hallucination. By emphasizing the similarities in the visual presumption of these vary different modes of experience, I hope to show that for Shelley the complications that arise on the cognitive level are already inherent in the perceptual and reflexive processes. In the third and final section I demonstrate how Shelley, in giving primacy to the synthetic over the analytic, describes an interplay between sensory response and cognition which enables the individual to avoid the fallibility of discreet sensation and the pitfalls of inductive and deductive logic. For Shelley, the trial-and-error process of sensory response leads to a discovery of interconnections, which prompt in turn a conscious search for such of correlations. The plot or story of Shelley's narrative moves from skepticism about sensation and analytic reasoning to an affirmation of the synthesizing process of the imagination. [F.B.]