Endo

Johns Hopkins University Press
Seeing Romantically in "Lamia"

Author(s): Paul Endo
Source: ELH, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 111-128
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
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SEEING ROMANTICALLY IN LAMIA

BY PAUL ENDO
As he matured beyond his formative, Huntian idiom, Keats's discomfort with the romance began to surface in regular complaints about its
"mawkish" and "smokeable" qualities.1 For Keats, the romanceescapist, sentimental, unworldly-embodied a feminine and apprentice
aesthetic that he seemed to regard as a necessary rite of passage.2 Even
in the itinerary outlined in the early "Sleep and Poetry," Keats recognized that he "must pass them [romances] for a nobler life, / Where I
may find the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts."3 But Keats
continued to write romances late into his career, and commentators
have tracked the development of more sophisticated and realistic
romances less susceptible to charges of sentimentalism. Jack Stillinger
has detected in the late romances a revisionary anti-romance sensibility
that, in its attention to "The weariness, the fever, and the fret," moved
Keats beyond the popular romances of his contemporaries.4 Isabella
and The Eve of St. Agnes are Stillinger's main exhibits, but Lamia
features a sensitivity to the workings of romance that, rather than
reductively opposing disenchantment to enchantment, foregrounds the
mechanisms of romance-seeing, anticipating, and plotting-as they
contribute to the very shaping of reality.
I. SEEING REALITY
"All romance, literary and human," writes Harold Bloom, "is founded
upon enchantment."5 For Bloom, disenchantment-the
apocalyptic
emancipation of the creative imagination-requires both an engagement with revolutionary causes (social, literary, and political) and a
purgatorial struggle against the dangers of selfhood. More important
here than Bloom's faith in visionary self-transcendence is his recognition
that disenchantment
must include intrasubjective as well as
intersubjective stages. Almost all of the commentary on Lamia condemns enchantment, of course, but without appreciating that it is much
more than a glorified daydreaming. Not surprisingly, romance is opposed to reality and imagination to reason. As John Barnard writes: "The
poem is therefore about mutually exclusive categories of perception,
ELH 66 (1999) 111-128 1999 by The Johns Hopkins University
Press
111
and Lamia's doomed attempt to cross their boundaries."6 Stillinger

writes that Lamia "serves well to introduce the basic Keatsian conflict
between mundane reality and some extra-worldly ideal state."' The very
posing of this opposition seems to encourage the neat valorization of
one pole over the other. Terence Allan Hoagwood's promise of a
dialectical reading of Lamia ends up offering a vulgar Marxist account of
the material as determinant: "The relevant opposition is not between
beautiful imagination (Lycius's love) and cold reason (Apollonius); the
relevant conflict obtains rather between material conditions and the
delusions of idealism which mask them, thereby to entrap the deceived."8 Rather than rejecting the imagination/reason dichotomy, it is
simply relocated to another level (material/ideal) that still performs
much the same work. The critics' findings seem almost predetermined
by their approach: the leading romance/reality binary limits the available readings, compelling one to side with either Lamia as imagination
or Apollonius as reason. Even those ironical readings (like Stillinger's)
sensitive to the appeal of both categories nonetheless continue to see
these categories as distinct alternatives.9 Donald H. Reiman details in
Lamia the powerful human imperative to create gods, myths, and ideals,
but in the end refrains from including Apollonius's rationalism-which
he aligns with the "reality-principle"-amongst "man's mind-created
gods."10
Writing on the status of the supernatural affections in Lyrical
Ballads, Coleridge accords them only a nominal or derivative reality:
"And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from
whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under
supernatural agency.""1But if enough people believe, if a critical mass is
reached, the supernatural "thickens" into the real. If the supernatural
spaces of romance (charmed circles, spirits of place, sacred bowers) are
indeed inspired, it is by an agreement-which may involve little more
than making disagreement uncomfortable-to ascribe causal efficacy to
certain thoughts and acts. Magical incantations and spells are here no
different from the more respectable modes of performative language
(oaths, promises, vows); they work only before a receptive audience, an
audience that has already authorized their reality. Pierre Bourdieu
writes that "degrees are just as much a part of magic as are amulets";
both represent certain meanings that do not inhere in the objects
themselves but in the social and institutional power that endows them.12
Enchantment cannot be opposed to a rational, disenchanted norm. For
Patricia Parker, romance "simultaneously quests for and postpones a
particular end, objective, or object"; it is the world of delay, postpone112
Seeing Romantically in Lamia
ment, suspension, error. Parker sets romance against a communal or

uniform vision that would put an end to the straying of belief. But this
end (her examples include Apocalypse, "the terminus of a fixed object,"
and "abyss or catastrophe") is not the negation of romance; it is romance
in another guise.13 The discourses of religion, ontology, and rationality
are, no less than magic, grammars for shaping disorder into recognizable, ordered phenomena. They neither impose order nor unveil it, but
set up rules determining what will count as an "end." The authority of
reason over romance may thus involve nothing more than the weight
that makes its organizing protocols so much more difficult to ignore.
Lamia exemplifies the way predispositions inform both romance and
reality. The utopian ethos of romance highlights and exaggerates the
processes by which belief is shaped and reality comes to be recognized
as reality, as the shared prejudices, conventions, recognitions, and
misrecognitions-what Bourdieu has called the "habitus"-that decide
what can and cannot be accepted. As Fredric Jameson writes: "romance
is precisely that form in which the worldness of world reveals or
manifests itself, in which, in other words, world in the technical sense of
the transcendental horizon of our experience becomes visible in an
inner-worldly sense."l4 This kind of collective horizon, if "unreal," can
nonetheless generate effects real enough to distribute social bodies and,
what amounts to the same thing, determine inclusions and exclusions.
In the romance, belief serves not so much a cognitive as a communal
function: belief determines who will or will not be granted membership.
Romance can "work,"then, only for those who already believe. Incredulity forbids access to the "secret bowers" (2.149) of romance. Lamia's
narrator speaks, for instance, of "a doubtful tale from faery land, / Hard
for the non-elect to understand" (2.5-6), and of the romance of Lamia
and Lycius being "Shut from the busy world of more incredulous"
(1.397). The language of boundaries is recurrent in Lamia.5 Northrop
Frye writes: "Keats is a poet of the temenos, the marked-off holy place,
the magic circle of The Eve of St. Agnes with the lovers inside and
hostility and bitter cold outside."16 But in Lamia these marked-off
places possess a remarkable mobility. The threshold between inside and
outside is subject to dynamic, shifting pressures: romance spans the
periods of relative equilibrium. The magic spaces of romance are not
rooted in genius loci or geographical locations. Indeed, they are not
rooted at all; they are closer to legal or social contracts because their
grounding is lateral. For Wordsworth in The Prelude, "spots of time" are
like personal memories injected into a landscape that safeguards them."7
The link is between genius and locus, mind and geography, but in Lamia
Paul Endo
113
magic spaces remain unanchored and float about as they are negotiated
and re-negotiated. The magic of these spaces-their sense of timeless
repose, of freedom from disorder-is the effect of a harmonization of
beliefs that is by no means unique to the romance; even those spaces we
think most real-subjectivity, nationality, community-are composed
(in all senses) by the same magic, stabilized by the same overlapping
beliefs.
The move from the countryside to Corinth, from private to public,
does not in itself precipitate the lovers' fall. Because space in the
romance is not defined topographically, but according to zones of
agreement, Lamia is able to transport her magic with her into Corinth.
Rather than imposing their reality on Lamia, the guests commit to her
world:
The herd approach'd;each guest, with busy brain,
Arrivingat the portal, gaz'd amain,
And enter'd marveling:for they knew the street,
Remember'dit from childhood all complete
Without a gap, yet ne'er before had seen
That royalporch, that high-builtfair demesne (2.150-55)
The guests, "with busy brain," cross the threshold into the charmed
palace and enter a space that is both architectural and imaginative. To
"enter[] marveling" is here a redundancy: to marvel is to enter, to leave
behind routine, "the busy world of more incredulous." The paraphernalia of consecration and anointment-"cold full sponge[s]" and "fragrant
oils" (2.192, 194)-initiate the guests into another way of seeing the
world. The power of such communal beliefs is indeed magical: it
effectively constitutes what can and cannot be seen. Rejecting such
conventions, Apollonius becomes by definition one of the non-elect:
"'Tisno common rule,
Lycius,"said he, "foruninvitedguest
To force himself upon you, and infest
With an unbidden presence the bright throng
Of younger friends;yet must I do this wrong,
And you forgive me."
(2.164-69)
Securing magical territories involves gauging and measuring attitudes
and negotiating compatible roles. Seducing Lycius, Lamia tests the
temperature of his desires and carefully probes his vulnerabilities:
Thus gentle Lamiajudg'd, and judg'd aright,
That Lyciuscould not love in half a fright,
114
So threw the goddess off, and won his heart

More pleasantly by playing woman's part (1.334-37)
Their romance consists of the coordination of roles maximizing each

partner's "fit" as the ideal of the other. These adjustments and readjustments create a space of common, overlapping values that constitutes in effect a world of its very own. To be sure, Lycius and Lamia's
relationship can only re-create under sanitized laboratory conditions the
much messier processes of accommodation involved in the formation of
larger collectives. But even here their relationship can betray the darker
side of desire: Lamia, "the cruel lady," is "without any show / Of sorrow
for her tender favourite's woe" (1.290-91); Lycius later takes "delight /
Luxurious in her sorrows, soft and new" (2.73-74), while Lamia "burnt,
she lov'd the tyranny" (2.81). The stability of their romance and, in fact,
of all romantic or magical spaces derives not from some pre-established
harmony, but from shifting, oscillating positions that blur together-like
rapid pulses of light-into a relative continuity and equilibrium. Romance provides a pattern for the formation of identities based, not on
some mysterious internal concord, but on the agreement to see things in
a way that others do not, on the comparative stability of shared beliefs
not held by those outside. When Apollonius discovers Lamia's secret, he
destroys both Lamia and Lycius. They prop up each other's desires and
exist only collectively, so it is not surprising that the death of one leads
to the death of the other.18
II. SEEING AND PLOTTING
"Charm is from carmen, song," Frye has noted, "and the primary
associations of charm are with music, sound and rhythm."19The ear is a
prominent opening for Lamia's magic-her singing enchants Lycius on
a number of occasions, and music is the sole "Supportress" of her
palace-but it is the eye that she exploits most skillfully. Lamia narrows
Lycius's visual field and controls his access to information; keeping him
in her "purple-lined palace of sweet sin" (2.31) at the same time limits
his contact with other citizens of Corinth. By carefully defining his
world, she attempts to create alliances and lines of opposition-Lycius
and herself against Apollonius-that are intended to shape his very
identity.
In Lamia, romance relies on what Foucault has called "disciplinary
power," which "is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it
imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility."20This disciplinary power is modelled on the secret: it knows or sees
Paul Endo
115
things that others do not. From the opening scenes, with Hermes
stealing quietly away "to escape the sight / Of his great summoner"
(1.10-11), secrecy organizes almost all the relationships in the poem.
Hermes knows something Jove ("his great summoner") does not, Lamia
knows something Hermes does not, Apollonius knows something Lycius
does not ... The secret regulates knowledge, power, and identity: to see
secretly is to differentiate oneself from the seen, to make him or her the
object of one's knowledge. To see another while remaining unseen, as if
through a one-way mirror, subjects this other to a "compulsory visibility"
that threatens to exhaust its otherness and reduce it to a series of
predictable stimulus-response reactions. In Lamia, power consists of
silently controlling what another sees without this other ever knowing
that he or she is being watched and controlled.
Bargaining over the nymph, Lamia asks Hermes to "let me have once
more / A woman's shape, and charming as before" (1.117-18). Such
charm does not belong to the realm of magic; nor is "charm"simply an
affective word for the mysterious workings of the beautiful. Instead,
"beauty" and "magic" are different names for the same controlling of
vision, the same planting of predispositions that encourages us to see as
magical or aesthetic what we have in fact been positioned to see. For
Frye, charm mobilizes "repetitive formulas [that] break down and
confuse the conscious will, hypnotize and compel to certain courses of
action."21Rather than breaking down the will, such formulas or patterns
work by reconstituting it, by encouraging certain mental attitudes that
make it more receptive to some phenomena and not others. Repetitions,
duplications, and regularities seem to disclose a deep structure-a
depth whose only proof is these repetitions-that is taken to betray
some underlying substratum or reality. To predict patterns, to anticipate
events, to conjure up accidents for which one is responsible to begin
with-in other words, to narrate or plot-is to generate structures that
are both magical and real. If it is true that romance involves the
narcissistic projection of desire, then reality seems to require a similar
kind of projection: "reality"is another name for those coincidences or
regularities that, screened through a common template, cannot help but
emerge and be seen.
Christopher Ricks's reference to Keats's "purified and liberated
scopophilia" misses the way seeing works in Lamia as an extension of
instrumental reason.22 To see while unseen, voyeuristically, is to claim
authority-to be the maker rather than the bearer of meaning. According to Apollonius, to not see is to prove a "fool" (2.291). It is to expose
oneself to the seeing of others. Indeed, seeing-not surprisingly given
116
the overdetermined masculinity of the gaze-even lends one a sexual

virility.Lycius speaks of Lamia "withering"at the "potency"of Apollonius's
eyes; later, "the sophist's eye" assumes almost phallic properties: "Like a
sharp spear, [it] went through her utterly, / Keen, cruel, perceant,
stinging" (2.299-301).
"Translated into dream terms," Frye writes, "the quest-romance is
the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfilment that will deliver
it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality."23Lamia
exposes the futility of this search: to contain reality and deliver oneself
from its anxieties-which is nothing but sublation in the Hegelian
sense-presupposes a superhuman omniscience, the creation of a plot
comprehensive enough to explain, and thereby disarm, all anxiety.
Instead, delivering oneself from anxiety requires expelling this anxiety.
The non-elect must be kept outside, the elect kept inside. The spaces of
romance require careful policing. In The Eve of St. Agnes, Madeline
"dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled" (234). Reality is
cultivated by a disciplining of attention that excludes antagonistic
elements. Critical to Lamia, therefore, is her capacity
To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain;
Define their pettish limits, and estrange
Their points of contact, and swift counterchange;
Intrigue with the specious chaos, and dispart
Its most ambiguous atoms with sure art (1.192-96)
Lamia's ability to "dispart"and "estrange" belongs to the same sensibility as Apollonius's "cold philosophy" (2.230). Despite the prodigality of
her imagination, she is possessed "of sciential brain" (1.191; my emphasis). She is as committed as Apollonius is to the taxonomic logic
associated with reason and science. If Apollonius's eyes are "sharp"and
"quick" (1.364, 374), Lamia is "ever watchful, penetrant" (1.34). Perplexity is threatening to Lamia; it belongs to the "ambiguous atoms" of
reality, "the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts." She instead entices
Lycius on "To unperplex'd delight and pleasure known" (1.327; my
emphasis), rendering him as uniform and predictable as possible. She
draws and enforces distinctions, expels ambiguities, allowing no opening
from which he can "argu[e] a want / Of something more" (2.35-36).
Voyeurism enables one to slot the seen in a narrative that can so limit
available actions that he or she is effectively drained of all life. As the
object of Lamia's interest, Lycius's very substance-all the differences
that create the effect of "depth"-is in danger of being thinned out. At
times he has no more character than the coordinates on a graph.
Paul Endo
117
Preparing to meet Lycius for the first time, Lamia knows precisely when
and where he will appear:
Lamiabeheld him coming, near, more nearClose to her passing,in indifference drear,
His silent sandalsswept the mossy green;
So neighbour'dto him, and yet so unseen
She stood...
(1.237-41)
Lycius is so visible here and his behavior so predictable that he is all but
imprisoned by Lamia's knowledge. Both Lamia and Lycius aim to
subsume or trap the other: Lycius seeks "to entangle, trammel up and
snare / Your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there" (2.52-53), while
elsewhere finding himself "tangled in her mesh" (1.295), or "in her
comprized" (1.347). But it is perhaps more accurate to speak of a kind of
training (in all senses) of the object that allows one to anticipate its
course because it has been charted in advance.
Laura Mulvey distinguishes voyeurism from "fetishistic scopophilia";
the former occurs "in a linear time with a beginning and an end," while
the latter "can exist outside linear time." Mulvey aligns voyeurism with
plotting and notes its associations with sadism: "Sadism demands a story,
depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another
person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat."24 Seeing and
plotting do often lapse into sadism in Lamia; moreover, recall the lover
in "Ode on Melancholy," feeding deep upon his mistress's peerless
eyes.25 If seeing and plotting seem inseparable-there is no "innocent
eye," no seeing independent of background assumptions-this is far
from demonstrating that they are always sadistic: there is a wealth of
ways in which we "process" or identify with others.26 We can only
emerge as subjects by plotting, by interacting with others. But plots
need not be instrumental; they can include a range of relationships
beyond merely incorporating or controlling others. Plotting and "making something happen" can, for instance, liberate possibilities, initiate
novel and enabling connections, and link together communities.27
Recent Keats commentary has turned to the intersection of the
aesthetic and the political; the inquiry into the nature of non-instrumental plots might be another way of broaching the issue of Keats's political
consciousness. And Keats does in fact allude to an alternative to the
"sciential"attitudes of fantasy and reason: Lamia'scapacity to "unperplex
bliss from its neighbour pain" cannot help but recall negative capability,
the very model of "perplexity" and the mingling of bliss and pain.28 If
the romancer must "dispart,"then perplexity introduces an equivocation
118
that scrambles the predictability essential to romance. Negative capability offers merely temporary or negative relief, however. For if it
prescribes a loosening of subjectivity in order to make available a wider
range of identifications, generalizing negative capability into a political
ideal still fails to provide any internal ethical guidance. The plotting or
sequencing of identifications would lack an organizing principle. Indeed, it should be recalled that Keats's admiration for Shakespeare's
negative capability cites his finding "as much delight in conceiving an
Iago as an Imogen."29 Keats's distinction, in the next sentence, between
the "camelion Poet" and the "virtuous philosop[h]er" may be a way of
justifying the former's "right"to prescribe identifications without specifying ideals for identification.30 If plotting threatens to be too exclusive,
then negative capability threatens to be too open.
III. FORESEEING AND COUNTER-PLOTTING
By accepting Lycius's request for a public feast, Lamia yields her

authority and consents to being seen. She minimizes the risk of
exposure by orchestrating her appearance. Wine is generously provided
to dull the guests' senses and render her more credible:
the gorgeous dyes,
The space, the splendour of the draperies,
The roof of awful richness, nectarous cheer,
Beautiful slaves, and Lamia's self, appear,
Now, when the wine has done its rosy deed,
And every soul from human trammels freed,
No more so strange
(2.205-11)
Lamia "smudges" the border between dream and reality to ease the
transition from one order to the other, smoothing over any jarring
ontological breaks. The wine slides her into the guests' collective
fantasy. Making herself as invisible as possible, concealing any evidence
of orchestration-for "but a moment's thought is passion's passing bell"
(2.39)-she recruits or enthralls new members without their knowledge, a process that belongs less to magic than to clever staging.
"Drunkenness does not make visions appear," Garrett Stewart explains,
"it makes already present wonders appear less wonderful."31 Charm
does not conjure up visions ex nihilo; it instead modulates the reality of
what is seen. As Porphyro's exotic banquet in The Eve of St. Agnes
suggests, creating the proper "romantic mood" is more than a clich6 of
popular culture; basic to romance is the way its spontaneity (the magical
harmony or "chemistry" between lovers) must be encouraged in adPaul Endo
119
vance-planned, in fact, in a manner that often recalls the means-end

logic of the most cynical publicist.32 Lamia's marriage feast-the most
communal of events-is a charmed space held together only through
elaborate and lavish plotting.
When Lamia consents to being seen, occupying the place she is
expected to occupy, she seems to become (as the parallelism suggests)
just another figure in the catalogue of props, the woman-as-spectacle:
"the splendour of the draperies, / The roof of awful richness, nectarous
cheer, / Beautiful slaves, and Lamia's self, appear." She is not confined
by this appearance, however, and is able to manipulate it as an alienated,
third-person counter ("Lamia's self').33 To be seen does not condemn
one to being the passive recipient of meaning. Lamia is seen by the
guests-seen, moreover, through a kind of collective plotting that is all
the more real because of the multiplication of effect. But by foreseeing
that she will be so seen, she is able to dissimulate herself and resist the
plots of others. Lamia is acting "tactically" rather than "strategically":
that is, she is not exterior to the other but operates from within its
space.34 She circulates and recycles its mediations, initiating counterplots and regaining authority.35Lamia is seen without being emptied by
this seeing. She accedes to her role while holding a little in reserve-in
other words, a secret-that allows her to look back in turn. Secrecy
conveys a kind of invisibility: it is to save a part of oneself and thereby
defy surveillance.
Foucault has emphasized the hold that the micro-physics of power is
able to maintain over the body. But compulsory visibility is never
thorough enough to render the body a surface without depth. Successful
plots require subjects so transparent and predictable that, like Greimas's
actants, they are emptied of substance and reduced to functions. But
the subject cannot be seen through. There are desires that will remain
hidden and unknown. Just as important as seeing, therefore, is seeing
qua interpreting, the visionary decoding of the seen. This is why Lamia,
"ever watchful," is so vigilant about reading Lycius's reactions. Romance
is a visionary mode because it seeks to transcend the immediate, to go
beyond the available information. To see with the eye, superficially, is to
leave too many secrets unexposed. Early in the poem, Lamia is
introduced in a long, voyeuristic description that concludes by implicating Hermes and the reader in an almost predatory act:
She was a gordianshape of dazzlinghue,
Vermilion-spotted,golden, green, and blue;
Stripedlike a zebra, freckledlike a pard,
120
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimsonbarr'd;

And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,
Dissolv'd, or brightershone, or interwreathed
Their lustres with the gloomiertapestriesSo rainbow-sided,touched with miseries
And thus; while Hermes on his pinions lay,
Like a stoop'd falcon eye he takes his prey. (1.47-54, 66-67)
The colors and lights glancing off of Lamia paradoxically hide rather
than illuminate her. She is like a prism that is present only in its
aspects.36 There is something that escapes Hermes, something unaccounted for that, not surprisingly, turns back on him:
"FairHermes, crown'dwith feathers,flutteringlight,
I had a splendid dream of thee last night:
I saw thee sitting, on a throne of gold,
Among the Gods, upon Olympusold
(1.68-71)
As Lamia addresses Hermes (by implication catching the reader as
well), it is clear that she has been seeing him all along. Her "splendid
dream" had even given her access to his desires ("Too gentle Hermes,
hast thou found the maid?" [1.80]). Bargaining for the nymph, Lamia's
negotiating position is superior to his insofar as it contains his. She
knows his desire while her own remains a secret until the transaction has
been all but finalized.
This is why Lamia must not only monitor everything within her own
magic space, but remain free from surveillance in turn. As an "uninvited
guest," a member of the non-elect, Apollonius is able to see through
Lamia's charm and expose her secret. But he is an agent of disenchantment not without his own rationalistic magic: Apollonius casts "Some
hungry spell that [Lamia's] loveliness absorbs" (2.259; my emphasis).
Critics have noted how Keats crosses the properties of romance and
reason, undermining their polarity.37 Indeed, reason may be more
deluded than romance insofar as it does not recognize, as Lamia does,
that there exists an unassimilable other from which it must remain
hidden. Lycius and Apollonius are equally enthralled by a desire from
which they dare not stray. When Apollonius conjures Lamia out of
existence simply through the force of his "demon eyes" and the
accusation "A Serpent!," his weapons are rational versions of the evil eye
and the magic spell. Some form of debate would have been more
consistent with the allegorical victory of philosophy, but in Lamia reason
is just as magical as romance in its need to discipline attention.
Paul Endo
121
Apollonius triumphs because he is a more effective romancer than

Lamia, able to plot her into his tale of reason's sovereignty. His own
authority may survive only so long as he is not contained in turn and his
magic is not dispelled.
IV. SEEING THE SUBJECT
Secrecy is a way of warding off comprehension, deflecting the

designs of others. Just as the nymph's invisibility ensures liberty (1.109),
to elude another's observation is to escape being plotted. Unable to
avoid being seen by Apollonius, Lamia is reduced to a mere surface, a
passive object sapped of all difference. To see through others is to
deprive them of life; it enables one to predict, anticipate, and define
their every action, to embed them in a narrative logic. In turn, this
authority exudes a secrecy, a mystique-a charm-that effectively
renders one invisible, that guards against the plots of others. It may not
even be necessary to possess a secret so long as others believe one does.
If the secret is the only way of resisting another's plot-that is, of
preserving one's individuality-then subjectivity would be the sum of all
one's secrets, that unique, individuating store of private knowledge.
Passing Apollonius in the street, Lycius shrinks closer (1.366). It is as
if identity becomes more impenetrable with the concentration of its
boundaries. D. A. Miller proposes that "the self is most itself at the
moment when its defining inwardness is most secret," when the
boundaries between self and not-self are most sharply demarcated.38
But if it is "most itself' at such moments, it is also most selfless and
invisible to the world. There is a vanishing point where the self fades
from sight just as it is most secure and private: the dead Lycius, "wound"
in his "marriage robe" (2.311), serves as a hollow reminder that to be
most visible is to be at the same time utterly emptied out.
Marjorie Levinson writes that Lamia "lives only in circulation, by the
effects she engenders and by the social agreement to recognize her
reality and rationalize her contradictions," but this is true of Lycius as
well.39 Indeed, in the romance, where the borders between elect and
non-elect are differential rather than geographical, all characters exist
"only in circulation," within an economy of perceptual exchange. To be
is to look and be looked at. If secrecy and invisibility are a source of
power, it is only if one is not condemned to this invisibility. The narrator
chides Lycius for introducing Lamia into the public world of Corinth
(2.147-49), but the imperative of subjectivity requires that it be visible,
that its secret not be too exclusive. There is such a thing, as Lycius
122
recognizes, as a secret so secretive that it loses its value as a "prize"

(2.57). Like the perfect murder, the perfect secret-or, what amounts to
the same thing, the perfect subject-would disappear from view. This is
why Lycius must advertise his marriage: the more who partake of his
secret, the more prestige accrues ("Let my foes choke, and my friends
shout afar" [2.62]). Yet one also risks introducing those who, like
Apollonius, refuse complicity. Security would of course be more manageable the fewer the heterogeneous elements one admitted, but one's
subjectivity would then be less visible and public-paradoxically, less
secure.
Although Lamia's plotting may suggest a calculating, wholly rational
agency, no subject is so secure that every plot can simply incorporate
more and more of the outside without at the same time exposing itself to
its own losses. No subject is wholly transparent to itself; perhaps even
more difficult that seeing through another is seeing through oneself.
There are secrets within the self, repeating intrasubjectively the same
asymmetries than arrange social subjects. When pressured by Lycius for
a wedding feast, for example, Lamia masochistically consents:
She burnt, she lov'd the tyranny,
And, all subdued, consented to the hour
When to the bridalhe should lead his paramour. (2.81-83)
Lamia seems to harbor some secret that refuses the imperatives of selfinterest. Such secrets are the very foundation of romance: they are the
heterogeneous, subterranean forces that implicate the subject in its own
self-deception. The desire to be charmed must already be present;
magic is the conjuring of a pre-existing inclination. Lycius's predisposition to thoughtlessness and trance-he is so susceptible to self-absorption that he almost passes Lamia by (1.241 and following)-makes him
vulnerable to her magic from the outset. Even before meeting Lamia,
he is already in her thrall. He has been praying to Jove, who "heard his
vows, and better'd his desire" (1.229). Like Madeline, he is captured by
his desire. The guests are similarly victimized by their own fantasies,
and neglect to investigate the very improbability of having their desires
so magically satisfied:
they all mov'd to the feast
In white robes, and themselves in order placed
Aroundthe silken couches, wondering
Whence all this mightycost and blaze of wealth could spring.
(2.195-98)
Paul Endo
123
Amidst all her sumptuous props, Lamia manages to conceal the lack that
is her own reality. Her success depends on her ability, as woman-asspectacle, to sustain the disavowal of lack at the root of the male guests'
desire. They agree to her desire if she supports theirs. This is the
complicity without which the seams in all plots and magic spaces
unravel. Earlier, Lamia's inexhaustible beauty inspires in Lycius not
critical pause, a suspicion of the "too good to be true," but an anxious
and even redoubled attention to a reality that he knows depends upon
this attention:
And soon his eyes had drunkher beauty up,
Leavingno drop in the bewilderingcup,
And still the cup was full,-while he, afraid
Lest she should vanish ere his lip had paid
Due adoration,thus began to adore
(1.251-55)
Lycius senses her magic, but declines to investigate: "They [the lovers]
pass'd the city gates, he knew not how, / So noiseless, and he never
thought to know" (1.348-49). Lycius at the same time knows but does
not know. Just as too secure a subject would be invisible and unplottable,
too closed a secret would fail to speak or reverberate in the subject at all.
We do not always see clearly; we keep secrets from ourselves, but
secrets that are porous, that are open enough to allow unacknowledged
links, ghostly connections that are magically fleshed out into stable
subjectivities. Lamia's secret is what Miller would call an "open secret":
"the double bind of a secrecy that must always be rigorously maintained
in the face of a secret that everybody already knows, since this is the
very condition that entitles me to my subjectivity in the first place."40
Magic and romance are other names for this open secret, this fantastic
belief that is not really a belief, that is never submitted (or never allowed
to be submitted) to the testing conventionally believed to verify belief.
If romance has an outside, then, it consists of the pressure exerted
against it by those, like Apollonius, who threaten (either from within or
without) to betray its secrets and expose its sutures. If this seems to
resurrect reason as the antidote to romance, it should be noted that it is
the difference between the two that carries the force of the real:
romance would have the same reality-effect if introduced into a world
governed by reason. Apollonius does not provide definitive access to
reality: he is still a representative of a certain way of seeing the world.
What he does introduce into Lamia's charmed world is that difference
or excess that all identities must struggle to silence, must appear to
subsume. Indeed, this excess might serve as an index to reality: what is
124
called reality, in other words, would consist of the most flexible of

grammars, admitting as much difference as possible. It then becomes
possible to challenge the opposition between romance and reality
without leveling everything down to the equally real or equally illusory.
As more risk is introduced, there is a movement away from romance
toward reality. Reality would comprise the loosest and most inclusive of
plots, and subjectivity would be the most exclusive, most secretive
dallying with romance.
The early Keats did not recognize the potential of the romance for
articulating sophisticated relationships between reality and dream. "The
Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream-he awoke and found
it truth," he wrote in an 1817 letter to Benjamin Bailey.41In Lamia, this
visionary faith is severely qualified; although it still applies to the gods"Real are the dreams of Gods" (1.127)-the human imagination can
awaken to truth only through the most restricted and careful seeing.
When the narrator speaks of Lycius's "love trance" (2.241), he is being
redundant. Love-indeed,
any claim to integrity, order, and wholeness-is
always entranced and, like Lycius, "blinded." If Lamia
demystifies the sentimental romance, it similarly demystifies naive
realism. Lamia demonstrates that we cannot help but see romantically:
it is only through such selective seeing that it is possible to discriminate
identities at all. Romance, then, is nothing but this inevitable and
enabling enthrallment to appearance, to the magical steering of attention away from gaps.
Foucault maintains that disciplinary seeing "must not be sought in
the primary existence of a central point," but Keats embodies this point
in Lamia.42 What is lost by the attribution of "disparting" to a single,
central figure is, of course, the "other" of social formation, all the
variable and indeterminate forces that remain opaque to consciousness
even while shaping it. If we must see romantically, if we cannot help but
select and plot, we can at the same time never fully succeed. As Keats
writes in "Ode to a Nightingale," "the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she
is fam'd to do" (73-74). We are never quite visionary and clairvoyant
enough to see and plot every "want / of something more." Even in
Lamia the most rigorous policing cannot secure stable magic spaces.
Not just because the plotter is, as a subject, already a product of
romance, already plotted or interpellated by the social, but because (and
this may amount to the same thing) we must always be implicated in
Paul Endo
125
what we see and desire. The very desire that activates romance is also, in
its radical difference, what guarantees its failure. It is not the inferiority
of magic to reason that dooms Lamia, but the fact that no one can ever
be totally outside, can ever attain a position Archimedean enough to
include and see through all-not even the rationalist Apollonius, whose
triumph is after all contained in an imaginative work.
University of British Columbia
NOTES
SRichard Woodhouse to John Taylor, 19 September 1819, and Keats to Woodhouse,
22 September 1819, in The Letters of John Keats: 1814-1821, ed. Hyder Edward
Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), 2:162, 174.
2 According to Woodhouse, "He says he does not want ladies to read his poetry: that
he writes for men" (Woodhouse to Taylor, 19 September 1819, Letters, 2:163). For
Keats's sensitivity to gender, see Margaret Homans, "Keats Reading Women, Women
Reading Keats," Studies in Romanticism 29 (1990): 341-70; and Anne K. Mellor,
Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 171-86. For Keats's attempt to
negotiate the Virgilian progression of genres, see Stuart Peterfreund, "Keats and the
Fate of the Genres: The Troublesome Middle Term," Genre 16 (1983): 249-77.
3 "Sleep and Poetry," in John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1978), 123-25. All quotations of Keats's poetry are from this
edition, and are cited parenthetically by part and/or line number.
4 Jack Stillinger, "Keats and Romance: The 'Reality' of Isabella" and "The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Skepticism in The Eve of St. Agnes," in The Hoodwinking of Madeline
and Other Essays on Keats's Poems (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1971), 31-45, 6793. "Ode to a Nightingale," 23 ("weariness, fever, and fret").
5 Harold Bloom, "The Internalization of Quest-Romance," in Romanticism and
Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), 12.
6 John Barnard, John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 123.
7 Stillinger, "'The Heart and Nature of Man' in Hyperion, Lamia, and The Fall of
Hyperion," in The Hoodwinking of Madeline, 58.
8 Terence Allan Hoagwood, "Keats and Social Context: Lamia," Studies in English
Literature 1500-1900 29 (1989): 691.
9 Stillinger writes: "If the major concern in these poems [of 1819] is the conflict
between actuality and the ideal, the result is not rejection of the actual, but rather a
facing-up to it that amounts, in the total view, to affirmation" ("The Hoodwinking of
Madeline," 93).
10Donald H. Reiman, "Keats and the Humanistic Paradox: Mythological History in
Lamia," Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 11 (1971): 668, 669.
11Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My
Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), 2:6.
12 Pierre Bourdieu, "Rites of Institution," in Language and Symbolic Power, trans.
Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), 119.
13 Patricia A. Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), 4-5.
126
14 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), 112. We can exorcise the transcendentalism of this
formulation by insisting that the magic spaces of romance, the "worldness of its world,"
are constantly emerging, disappearing, expanding, and re-aligning.
15 For thresholds in Keats, see Martin Aske, "Magical Spaces in 'The Eve of St.
Agnes,'" Essays in Criticism 31 (1981): 196-209.
16Northrop Frye, A Study of English Romanticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1968), 160.
17William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), in The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed.
Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton,
1979), book 12, line 208.
18 Garrett Stewart maintains that there is no evidence for Lamia's death: "After a
transitory stay in the human world, Lamia suffers a return to the merely potential"
("Lamia and the Language of Metamorphosis," Studies in Romanticism 15 [1976]: 31).
19 Northrop Frye, "Charms and Riddles," in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature,
Myth, and Society (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976), 123.
20 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1975), trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 187.
21Frye, "Charms," 126.
22Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 89.
23 Northrop Fyre, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1957), 193.
24 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Visual and Other
Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), 21-22.
25 Such passages are responsible for the notorious discomfort often aroused by Keats.
John Bayley has attributed Keats's "badness" to an "acceptance of the first eager
brainwave, and a subsequent unawareness that it might be modified or corrected"
("Keats and Reality," Proceedings of the British Academy 1962: 100). Ricks similarly
comments on Keats's "wish to pass directly through-not to bypass (however principled
and perceptive the bypassing)-the
hotly disconcerting, the potentially ludicrous,
distasteful, or blush-inducing" (68). More is involved than a refusal (deliberate or
otherwise) to edit his work. Barnard argues suggestively, but too briefly, that Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy "acted as a catalyst for the formulation of Keats's less conscious
attitudes to sexuality, his unease and anxieties" (115). The disconcerting nature of much
of Keats's poetry seems rooted in a complex subject-position to which issues of class,
vocation, and sexual identity all contribute.
26 Kaja Silverman, for instance, distinguishes between incorporative and excorporative
identification in The Threshold of the Visible World ([New York: Routledge, 1996], 2
and the following). There has been considerable recent attention to the role of
identification in the construction of the self. See especially: Diana Fuss, Identification
Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995); Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins
(New York: Routledge, 1992); and Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993).
27 For an account of non-instrumental plotting, or what she calls the "productive
look," see Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, 180-93. E. Ann Kaplan posits
a "mutual gazing" based on the "mutual, pleasurable bonding" enjoyed between the
child and its mother ("Is the Gaze Male?" in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality,
ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson [New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1983], 324).
Paul Endo
127
28On negative capability, see Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1963), 242-63. The pertinent passages are excerpted in Bate, "Negative
Capability," in Romanticism and Consiousness, 326-43.
29 Keats to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, in Letters, 1:387.
30 Keats's writings on negative capability are not detailed enough to yield much
political direction. Since we cannot help but identify, finer discriminations between
identifications are necessary. Frye distinguished between "identity-with" and "identityas": the one a "hostile," the other a "sympathetic relationship to its surroundings" (A
Study of English Romanticism, 142). But this distinction is too indebted to romantic
ideology and its utopian faith in the organic and the One as emancipatory. Sympathy
may, after all, involve the assimilation of the other to oneself, while hostility at least
recognizes the other as other.
31 Stewart, 31.
32 Stillinger has attributed a similar "strategem" to Porphyro ("The Hoodwinking of
Madeline," 73).
33 For the redemptive power of mimicry, see Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not
One (1977), trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,
1985), 76.
34The distinction is from Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans.
Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 36.
35This is why Foucault's claim in Discipline and Punish that power as spectacle was
displaced by power as surveillance is clearly insufficient; they instead co-exist in a
dialectical model of continual correction and adjustment.
36 Stuart M. Sperry remarks on the poem's optical imagery in Keats the Poet
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), 304-7.
37Daniel P. Watkins writes: "Thus, as Apollonius gains authority within Lamia's
palace, he becomes indistinguishable from her, no less a serpent than she is, with
'juggling eyes' (2.277), 'lashless eyelids' (2.288), and 'demon eyes' (2.289)-he
is, in
short, 'possess'd' (2.288)" (Keats's Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination [Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1989], 147). It should be noted, however, that all
these tu quoque accusations are leveled (in more than one sense) at Apollonius by
Lycius. See also Stewart, "Lamia and the Language of Metamorphosis," 32-33.
38 D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988),
200.
39 Marjorie Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of A Style (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1988), 223.
40 Miller, 195.
41 Keats to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817, in Letters, 1:185.
42 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Volume 1: An Introduction (1976), trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 93.
128

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Johns Hopkins University Press

Seeing Romantically in "Lamia"

SEEING ROMANTICALLY IN LAMIA

ELH 66 (1999) 111-128 1999 by The Johns Hopkins University

and Lamia's doomed attempt to cross their boundaries."6 Stillinger

Seeing Romantically in Lamia

ment, suspension, error. Parker sets romance against a communal or

Seeing Romantically in Lamia

So threw the goddess off, and won his heart

Their romance consists of the coordination of roles maximizing each

Seeing Romantically in Lamia

the overdetermined masculinity of the gaze-even lends one a sexual

Seeing Romantically in Lamia

By accepting Lycius's request for a public feast, Lamia yields her

vance-planned, in fact, in a manner that often recalls the means-end

Seeing Romantically in Lamia

Eyed like a peacock, and all crimsonbarr'd;

Apollonius triumphs because he is a more effective romancer than

Secrecy is a way of warding off comprehension, deflecting the

Seeing Romantically in Lamia

recognizes, as a secret so secretive that it loses its value as a "prize"

Seeing Romantically in Lamia

called reality, in other words, would consist of the most flexible of

Seeing Romantically in Lamia

14 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

Seeing Romantically in Lamia

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