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E-book Shelley with Benjamin : A Critical Mosaic
‘A useful godsend are you to me now,’ are the trickster god’s first words to the tortoise in Shelley’s translation,2 and the Homeric shell is clearly a useful godsend for Shelley as well: as Gary Farnell has argued, the pun on ?????/Shelley enables the poet to claim the allegorical account of the origins of lyric poetry ‘as emblem of his own general project . . . he makes it look as if it is indeed Homer who is putting the shell in Shelley’.3For Farnell, this is an example of what Geoffrey Hartman has termed the ‘Romance of Being Named’. Searching for a linguistic equivalent to Lacan’s mirror phase, in which a child ‘sees itself for the first time as a coordinated being and, triumphantly, jubilantly, assumes that image’, Hartman wonders whether it is ‘possible to discern a specular word, logos phase, or imago of the proper name in the development of the individual’.4 In literary writing, such a ‘specular name or identity phrase’ would function like a playful signature disseminated throughout the author’s work: it ‘is reaffirmed in time by a textual mimicry, joyful, parodistic, or derisory . . . The repetition of the specular name gives rise to texts that seem to be anagrammatic or to conceal an unknown-unknowable key, a “pure” signifier.’5A survey of Shelley’s shell imagery suggests that his shells do indeed function as specular names: take, for instance, the shell that appears at the climax of his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound. As he is released, Prometheus instructs The Spirit of the Hour to ‘Go, borne over the cities of mankind’ and ‘breathe into the many-folded shell, | Loosening its mighty music’.
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