It is not surprising then, that one of "the costs of the historical metamorphosis of memory has been a wholesale preoccupation with the individual psychology of remembering," creating a new "economy of the identity of the self, the mechanics of memory, and the relevance of the past" (15). Moreover, it demonstrates that the formerly recreative act of memory Nora postulates has mostly survived as an object: a product, itself, of history. Such critical trends also attest to our difficulty, now, in comprehending such a relationship. Contemporary critics' persistent and well-intentioned efforts to reclaim or reallocate memory-to wrest the displaced "truth" from historical or literary narrative-suggests that Nora's theory of a once-organic relationship between memory and history is correct. The Excursion was written during a process of cultural change demonstrating the beginnings of this opposition, the forces of memory and history struggle within the text like conjoined twins. Nora writes that memory and history, "far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition" (8). It is this failure-a failure of memory, in a sense-that leaves the poem caught between memory and history, and ultimately questions the power of memory to sustain and nourish the modern imagination. But Hickey's reading is important to my discussion for another reason: she focuses her attention on the failure of tropes in The Excursion. These rhetorical figures also structure memory and this suggests that memory is less a corollary to history than a system of meaning unto itself, albeit one that draws its material from history. Impure Conceits, Alison Hickey's recent book-length study of The Excursion, provides an in-depth examination of such rhetorical figures, and how they structure meaning in the poem. As we know, these patterns always operate in terms of a particular discourse comprising a grammar of conceptualized images and figures, all narratives are purely rhetorical at some level. All narrative genres, whether documentary or fictional, create "typical patterns in which we experience and interpret events" (Fentress and Wickham, 73). While considerations of Wordsworth and memory are nothing new, such readings have usually sought to interpret or critique Wordsworth's own relationship to memory, with regard to language, landscape, or an apriori concept of historical "truth." But these investigations do not, usually, read Wordsworth as memory-that is, as a mode of knowledge, that responds to, draws from, and narrates historical events, but has no necessary allegiance to history. "The history of …memory is the history of its transmission." Instead of undertaking a further interrogation of the poem's "anxieties" in this essay, I want to suggest another way of reading them-a reading that also suggests a schema for re-reading critical and editorial interventions that seek to determine any poem's meaning. Galperin and David Simpson have implied, The Excursion engages with these issues by "displacing" them as symptoms or "anxieties." The poem seems to indicate Wordsworth's revision, or at least his questioning, of assumptions about self, imagination, and memory on which The Prelude operated. As the arguments of critics like William H. Like The Prelude (1850), the poem addresses the status of the self, the passage of time, and memory-issues that have revived critical interest in the poem over the last two decades. Despite-or perhaps, because of-its own mixed reception history, The Excursion (1814) remains an interesting comment on the process of historical and cultural change.
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