• Français
• English

Introduction

1Although limited in quantity, the letters of John Keats, which contain some of the most-quoted phrases of Romantic-period nonfictional prose, are often seen as limitless in scope. Taken together, they also have an irresistible narrative appeal. Comprising roughly 250 texts written over the course of about four years, his correspondence charts the arc of fast-ripening genius and premature death which continues to inform our conception not only of this particular poet but of the Romantic Poet tout court. In perusing these letters, one gets the exhilarating sensation of being parachuted into the poet’s living, breathing world: “Yesterday I got a black eye – the first time I took a Cr{icket} bat”; “the fire is at its last click – I am sitting with my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet”; “M^rs Dilke is knocking at the wall for Tea is ready – I will tell you what sort of a tea it is and then bid you – Good bye”.¹ At the same time, it feels uncannily as if Keats knew we were there looking over his shoulder; as if, in writing to the moment, he were also dictating the terms by which his future “Life” should be read. Indelible traces of his living hand can be found everywhere. Inevitably, every major biographical account of the poet, from Richard Monckton Milnes’s 1848 Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats, to Nicholas Roe’s 2012 Keats: A New Life, has relied heavily on his correspondence, alongside that of his close circle, to frame his life story and infuse it with vivid detail.² By and large, biographized Keats remains in thrall to epistolary Keats.³

2But what of biofictional Keats? What happens to his letters – or to his epistolary persona – when they are folded into fictional plots, appropriated not to shed light on his life or poetry but for other novelistic purposes altogether? In recent decades, several works pertaining, broadly, to the genre of speculative fiction, have invited readers to imagine what Keats’s future might have been like had he not died of tuberculosis in Rome, at age 25. These range from the homely to the otherworldly. In Dan Simmons’s acclaimed sci-fi novels, Hyperion (1989) and The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Keats is recast as a cloned cybrid named “Johnny”. In The Invention of Dr. Cake (2003), Andrew Motion, a former Poet Laureate and Keats biographer, created a mysterious, middle-aged physician in Essex whose past closely resembles that of the thought-to-be-deceased poet. A more explicitly fleshed out alternate afterlife, or life-after-not-death, can be found in Paul Kerschen’s debut novel, The Warm South (2019), in which the poet, having survived his scare in Rome, joins Percy and Mary Shelley’s expat circle, resumes a career in medicine, and gets swept up in revolutionary politics. Keats as a fictional character has made noteworthy cameos in neo-gothic vampire fiction (Tim Powers’s The Stress of Her Regard [1989]), sentimental short stories (Salley Vickers’s “The Fall of a Sparrow”, in her collection Aphrodite’s Hat [2010]), and, more recently, in a curious sort of fictional biography (James Sulzer’s Writ in Water [2021]) whose narrative is split between the voice of the now-defunct poet, looking back on his misfortunes as he hovers in a limbo-like place over Rome, and that of a philosophically inclined spirit-bird.⁴

3This non-exhaustive list offers some sense of the multitude of Keatses who have come to populate recent fiction.⁵ In a culture awash with biofictional reimaginings of literary figures from the nineteenth century,⁶ the fashion for resurrecting Keats should come as no surprise. My focus here, however, will be on a parallel form of fictional revival: not on biofictional representations per se but, rather, on novels that invoke Keats’s life and letters in meaningful ways without granting him agency as a character. The present article sets out to examine two such works, Ian McEwan’s 1997 bestseller, Enduring Love, and Geoffrey D. Morrison’s lesser-known debut novel, Falling Hour (2023). If, in content as well as form, these works appear to have little in common, their respective interrogation of timeworn Romantic tropes, and, more particularly, their unsettling recourse to Keats’s letters, make them worthy of comparative study. Bringing them into dialogue, or into productive tension, is offered as one way of rethinking an intriguing offshoot of the Keatsian legacy. As highly self-conscious novelistic engagements with epistolary Keats, they give voice to the ambivalence with which contemporary fiction conjures up – and remains haunted by – its Romantic heritage.

Ghostly Correspondences: Enduring Love (1997)

4The work of Ian McEwan is full of haunting, as well as haunted, figures, and Enduring Love is no exception. Keats’s letters play an integral role in the novel, associated as they are with one of the three main characters, Clarissa Mellon. Clarissa, a Keats scholar, is obsessed with unearthing hypothetically lost love letters from Keats to Fanny Brawne: one of the various strands of “love” which “endures” (or which is meant to be “endured”) in the novel. Another is that which is experienced, in different ways, by Clarissa’s partner, Joe Rose, and by his zealous, delusional stalker, Jed Parry, who suffers from de Clérambault’s syndrome, or erotomania (“A homo-erotic obsession, with religious overtones,” as the title of McEwan’s fabricated scientific paper, reprinted as an appendix, puts it).⁷ Joe, a hyper-rational science writer who is also the novel’s narrator, endures Jed’s obsessive love for only so long, while trying to convince Clarissa of the very real danger it poses. Clarissa believes that Joe’s rationalism (itself an obsession) is verging on paranoia, and that he should think more with his heart and empathize with Jed, rather than antagonize him. The trials they are forced to endure – before Joe is proven right, and Jed is locked up in a psychiatric hospital – gradually drive them apart (although the appendix also obliquely informs us of their reconciliation [242], confirming Clarissa’s so-called Romantic notion of “love […] that was meant to go on and on” [219]).

5The novel, on a symbolic plane, thus pits seemingly contradictory worldviews against one another – the rational against the Romantic (as well as the religious) – only to vindicate the former, that which is espoused by Joe, whom the author would later describe as being “almost pathologically rational but also right in his judgements”.⁸ In interviews, McEwan has expounded on his desire to recast “the rational” in heroic terms:

[T]here’s a tradition in Western literature that celebrates the heart, the intuition, trusting your feelings. Perhaps it derives a great deal from our Romantic tradition. The scientific, the rational, is often cast into the minds of villains, and I think Mary Shelley might have a lot to answer for this. But I thought I would like to write a novel that rather celebrated the rational. Not necessarily by making my rational hero too sympathetic, but by celebrating his thought processes. So in Clarissa I wanted someone who was very sympathetic […]. But I wanted Clarissa to be wrong.⁹

6On the surface, then, McEwan’s novel would seem bent on overturning, or at least counterbalancing, a certain Romantic myth or “cast” of mind. It may be argued, in this sense, that the novelist’s use of Keats’s letters – as a metonym not only for “Romantic” love but for the purportedly anti-scientific mind-set associated with the “Romantic tradition” – results in something caricatural, an over-sensitive straw man propped up to receive a healthy, scientific thrashing. Yet the case is not so simple. In fact, as I hope to show, a major source of the work’s complexity and richness lies precisely in the way in which Keats’s epistolary texts come to take on different functions as they get refracted through the medium of the novel.

7Critical studies of Enduring Love have focused on the novel’s somewhat schematic representation of science and literature, or related variations on this “Two Culture” divide, either to show how McEwan explores the advantages and limitations of each, or to suggest ways in which the novel, in highlighting their interdependency and common goals, might offer new pathways into a combinational “Third Culture”. Jonathan Greenberg, for example, in a provocatively titled essay, “Why Can’t Biologists Read Poetry?”, looks at how, on various thematic and diegetic levels, the novel “engages contemporary debates about neo-Darwinism by representing a series of interrelated conflicts between scientific, literary, and religious worldviews”, while positing a potentially “happy marriage” between the disciplines which might “exist somewhere between [their] failures”.¹⁰ Such readings are supported, in part, by McEwan’s own extra-fictional comments, in which he not only expresses his personal interest in modern science while arguing for a broader revaluation of the “rational impulse” in literature,¹¹ but also emphasizes Joe’s role as “the flawed moral centre” of his novel,¹² as a rationalist who (in Joe’s self-evaluation) manages to get “things right in the worst possible way” (215). McEwan has also repeatedly lumped Enduring Love together with his earlier work (including The Child in Time [1987], The Innocent [1990], and Black Dogs [1992]), as novels which were more interested in “finding dramatic or sensual ways in bringing ideas to life rather than [in] characters or settings or plot”, a type of fiction with which he “abruptly fell out of love” in subsequent labors.¹³

8Read, in broad terms, as a novel of ideas, it is understandable that critical discussions, when touching on Keats, should focus on the poet’s ideational function, as one of two key foils to Joe’s scientific rationalism. Early on, after describing Clarissa’s pursuit of Keats’s lost letters, Joe characterizes the poet as a touchstone “in the combative exchanges which were part of our equilibrium, our way of talking about work” (8). Keats is enlisted as a means not of working out but of working around their differences. There are signs, from the start, of widening fissures. While Joe contents himself with knowing “little about Keats or his poetry,” he suspects that “Clarissa’s interest in these hypothetical letters had something to do with our own situation, and with her conviction that love that did not find its expression in a letter was not perfect” (7). (In a revealing study of contrasts, Clarissa is said to have written “some beauties, passionately abstract in their exploration of the ways our love was different from and superior to any that had ever existed”; Joe’s efforts “had tried to match hers, but all that sincerity would permit me were the facts” [7].) From Joe’s narrative perspective, then, “Keats’s letters” (or “Clarissa’s interest in these [...] letters”) reinforce a precariously negotiated disciplinary and epistemological boundary, even as they stand in for – and seek to fill – a basic gap in communication.

9As the novel progresses, Joe pegs “Keats” to an increasingly anti-scientific post, at one point accusing Clarissa of having spent “too much time lately in the company of John Keats. A genius no doubt, but an obscurantist too who had thought science was robbing the world of wonder, when the opposite was the case” (71). Joe’s allusion is to the lines at the end of Lamia, which are often cited as evidence of Romanticism’s contempt for scientific rationalism (or “cold philosophy”): “Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, / Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, / Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— / Unweave a rainbow […]”.¹⁴ It may be only mildly ironic to find Joe making such an allusion, after his having claimed to know “little” about Keats’s poetry; after all, the lines (along with a related anecdote which has Keats accusing Newton of “destroy[ing] all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism”)¹⁵ have been seized on by numerous popular science writers.¹⁶ More to the point, in offering such a restricted reading of Keats, Joe does indeed demonstrate his ignorance, not only of the poet’s life and writing, but more generally of Romantic-period texts’ sustained interest and involvement in science. The Romantic period, after all, has been characterized as a singular “Age of Wonder”,¹⁷ and many of its greatest literary practitioners were fascinated and inspired by, and not merely hostile to, scientific progress. Keats, for one, was a medical student and licensed apothecary before becoming a poet, and his extensive knowledge of medicine manifests itself in countless ways in his verse, just as his reading of Enlightenment philosophy and history undergirds the secular humanism on display in much of his epistolary prose.¹⁸ Suffice it to say, Joe is not to be counted among the growing number of critics to challenge the ostensible schism between Romantic “literature” and “science”.

10Joe’s dismissal of Keats thus belies tensions deeper than those he consciously articulates, just as references to Keats in the second half of the novel draw out broader thematic questions (essential to much of McEwan’s work), such as the role of (unreliable) storytelling in literature as well as in science, and the troubled quest for objectivity. This comes through most clearly in the lesson Joe gleans from an unverifiable but compelling anecdote about a meeting between Keats and Wordsworth, of which Clarissa states, “It isn’t true but it tells the truth” (169). As the critic Peter Childs notes, this episode resonates with a number of related statements in the novel, serving as a reminder of the reader’s own “dilemma [...] with regard to Joe’s narrative because his is the only account available”.¹⁹ Childs gives a summary of other such allusions to Keats in the novel, and points to additional uses that are made of his letters,²⁰ including the way they come to be associated not only with Clarissa but also with Jed, who writes a thousand fervent love letters to Joe – the last of which, rounding off the novel as a second appendix, remains unsent (244-45),²¹ much like those Keatsian letters Clarissa hopes one day to bring to light.

11In fact, the novel, as a whole, threaded with epistolary intertexts, might be said to hinge on the question of correspondence – be it literal or symbolic, affective or scientific – as it probes the tensions between theory and fact, message and meaning, knowledge and faith. In more or less subtle ways, the plot progresses from one letter to the next: two of the novel’s 24 chapters are presented as transcripts of Jed’s letters to Joe (written from the former’s Hampstead home, in another ghostly echo of the Keats-Brawne correspondence), and yet another chapter takes the form of a parting letter from Clarissa (216-19). In the twelfth chapter (exactly mid-way through the novel), Joe rifles through his wife’s desk in search of hypothetical letters (mirroring Clarissa’s sleuthing after Keats’s lost letters) (105); the next morning, he receives a letter from a former professor, spoiling his hopes of being readmitted to academia: “a parallel development” which marks “the death of an innocent dream” (106). Letters unlooked for, letters imagined, letters intercepted, letters unsent: all of these might be said to constitute a series of “parallel development[s]”, strands of an increasingly disjointed correspondence which propel the novel towards its fateful conclusion. Related to this is the question of (mis)reading letters, and, more generally, of searching for signs and signals, be they verbal or non-verbal, to construct a coherent narrative out of the uncontrollable, sometimes incomprehensible flow of events. The three main characters all fall victim to some such hermeneutical trap. Joe spends hours parsing Jed’s letters for veiled threats (142, 150-53), while researching the psychological disorder with which, through a serendipitous convergence of “signals” (124), he has come to diagnose his stalker. At the same time, he wonders if he is not “over-interpreting” Jed’s words (131). Jed, similarly, finds in Joe’s every gesture (such as his lightly brushing the top of a hedge with his hand) a deliberate “pattern” of signs, intended to convey “a simple message” of love (96). When Clarissa confronts Joe about his unaccountable rummaging through her desk, she concludes:

“You even left the drawer open so I’d know when I came in. It’s a statement, a message, from you to me, it’s a signal. The trouble is, I don’t know what it means. […] So spell it out for me now, Joe. What is it you’re trying to tell me?” (132)

12Lurking behind Clarissa’s name, as well, is the ghost of the most famous epistolary fiction in English literature (Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa [1748]), a work whose “writing, to the moment”, synonymous with the advent of 18th-century verisimilitude, also looks ahead to 20th-century novelistic unreliability and doubt. Likewise haunting the novel is a skepticism about language and overly tidy narratives, which, in a McEwanesque way, takes root in both science and literature, with Einsteinian relativity joining up with Derridean deconstruction to send the reader scrambling, amidst shifting fields of perception, for the meaning of a message which is characterized by its capability, “always, of not arriving at destination”.²² If McEwan has expressed impatience with post-structuralist pronouncements like this,²³ his novel attests to a broad engagement with similar postmodern challenges, particularly in its conception of narrative, but also in its intertextual epistolarity.²⁴ Ghosting Clarissa’s question to Joe (“What is it you’re trying to tell me?”), and many of the novel’s epistolary inflections, is a question which endures from the first to the last letter of Enduring Love: How and why do stories matter, and what kinds of “meaning” do they attempt – and always possibly fail – to deliver?

13The final explicit reference to Keats in the novel comes in the last chapter (Chapter 24), when Clarissa and Joe meet up after a week-long separation. As a bookend to her opening quest, outlined in Chapter 1, Clarissa tells Joe about “a new lead in the search for Keats’ last letters”:

She had been in touch with a Japanese scholar who claimed he had read unpublished correspondence twelve years ago in the British Library written by a distant relation of Keats’ friend Severn. There was a reference to a letter addressed to Fanny but never meant to be posted, a ‘cry of undying love not touched by despair’. Clarissa had spent every spare hour trying without success to track down the Severn connection […] and now she was considering flying to Tokyo to read the scholar’s notes. (221)

14Like the tantalizing intimations of lost letters she had found “in correspondence between distant relations of [Charles] Brown’s written in the 1840s” (7), the “reference” she now hopes to “track down” is, at best, a ghostly trace or distant cousin, several times removed from the message she is really after: she hopes to read the notes of a foreign scholar who “claimed” twelve years earlier to have read a letter, written long after Keats’s death, by a “distant relation” of Joseph Severn, about an unsent letter from Keats to Fanny Brawne. This trail of deferred references reads as yet another trial of deflected or postponed meaning, evoking once again the trope of failed message delivery. In circling back around to Keats’s unposted letters, Enduring Love thus signposts its simultaneous suspicion of and commitment to meaning-making – while foiling Joe’s plot to do away with his long-deceased Romantic rival.

15As I have been trying to show, Keats’s letters are woven into McEwan’s novel in complex ways, serving not merely as a foil to the protagonist’s materialist rationalism but also as the sign of something less settled, the trace of an ambivalent legacy. As a “novel of ideas”, Enduring Love can feel didactic at times, but the “lesson” it delivers is not only about the primacy of rationality. It is also, as Matt Ridley suggests, “a warning against hoping that reason will be able to bring closure, redemption or happiness in a world of messy relationships and contingent choices. Joe’s destiny is to be disillusioned by reason’s inability to resolve the horror in which he finds himself”.²⁵

Falling In and Out of Love with Keats: Falling Hour (2023)

16Apart from the parallel grammar of its title, McEwan’s gripping page-turner would seem to have little in common with Falling Hour, a cerebral, implacably plotless novel by the Vancouver-based poet Geoffrey D. Morrison, whose previous work includes a collection of poems (Blood-Brain Barrier [2019]) and an experimental short fiction collection (Archaic Torso of Gumby [2020]). Working against the grain of conventional realist as well as postmodern methods of storytelling, Falling Hour takes it to heart not to let anything “happen” to its 31-year-old protagonist and intradiegetic narrator, Hugh Dalgarno. Hugh – whose name and age we do not learn until two-thirds of the way through the book – balks at anything resembling a neat “story”: “It seemed a risk whenever I told a story about anything. So much of what I thought of as my broken brain was related to story form, metonymy, this standing for that until I could not remember where I began”.²⁶ In lieu of narrative, the reader finds Hugh grappling with his “unbearable” “complaint”:

To put it simply, I had begun to think my brain was broken. My thoughts no longer had the geometric neatness I was sure they used to, the reliable line of yellow dashes down the middle of the road: ‘and then, and then, and then, and then…’ Now thinking was more like trying to keep a fistful of optical fibres together in one hand while the other was tied behind my back, powerless therefore to stop the strands from splitting away from their neighbours in a superfine fray. A hundred dancing glows, like angel-dusted heads of pins: each one possible, each one possibly important, each one with the power to cancel out all the others if I dared let it veer far enough away on its own. (10)

17Over the course of a single summer day, Hugh wanders around a deserted park in a depressing post-industrial town, carrying an empty picture frame and worrying about his “broken-brainitude” (214) (“mind virus” is another term he uses to refer to his malady), which is part and parcel of the broken world he has been born into and conditioned by. In the process of struggling to “stick to my story, to any story, for more than an instant” (102), he allows certain “fibres” or “dashes” of disorderly thought to enter the fray, constantly redirecting the flow of his narrative.

18To the extent that Falling Hour privileges dense, self-referential reflection – cognition and its discontents – over plot or character development, it recalls the auto-fictional experiments of contemporary writers like Teju Cole or Ben Lerner (and, before them, of W. G. Sebald), more than that of the more august, if no less playful, McEwan. As a stream-of-consciousness, mock-epic circadian novel, it summons the ghosts of high Modernism, most obviously, of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.²⁷ However, like Enduring Love, Morrison’s novel also feverishly circles back around to Keats, daring him to haunt the text beyond the limits of reason or understanding. It is to this very different, yet beguilingly resonant, novelistic terrain that I now wish to turn, in particular to some of the novel’s most “haunted” sites – which is, incidentally, the precise term Hugh uses to describe his love-hate relationship with the Romantic poet.

19The ghost of Keats enters the stage early, in the novel’s second chapter, and then sits there, waiting in the wings, as if unsure about the role he has been given. Recalling the famous last lines of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (“‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”), Hugh comments:

I hear the lines and I see the face of Keats, […] and as I look at them I wonder what possessed this man to write something so obviously wrong. As the first human being whose death I read about in unsparing detail, by accident, in a water-damaged magazine a neighbour gave my great-aunt once she did not want to read it anymore, the face of John Keats haunted my childhood to the extent that I could not look long at a picture of him. (17)

20This leads to an aggressively digressive discussion, rife with suggestive offshoots, of the letters Keats wrote during his walking tour of Scotland in the summer of 1818, letters containing sublime descriptions of landscapes but also flippant, disparaging references to the local peasantry, which, we learn, would have included the narrator’s own ancestors. (Hugh was born in Scotland but brought to the west coast of Canada to live with his great aunt and uncle, as his parents, about whom he remembers little, struggled with drug addiction.) Hugh will return to these letters throughout the novel to “loo[k] for some kind of guidance” but also to register the lifelong grudge he holds against this snobbish, not-very-Negatively-Capable Keats²⁸: “I never said I loved the man who haunted me, and in fact I mostly hate the Keats of these letters, who sounds like any other nightmare English tourist to a place that is not England: bitching about the poor quality of the food, moaning about the shabbiness of the lodgings, always trying to get in a dig about the people who ‘clatter’ or ‘gabble away’ in Gaelic in the rooms adjacent to his” (31).

21Like McEwan’s, rational, truth-seeking skeptics, Hugh looks for meaning in signs he is all too aware of only partially being able to understand. As a card-carrying dialectical materialist, he is quick to remind us that Keats’s “condescending letters”, in “their own private way”, are also

incidental reports, white papers, intelligence gatherings on behalf of the pirates of the world; he is looking at Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland with a pirate’s eyes, even if he fantasizes the next year about joining Simón Bolivar’s army of liberation in South America, and even if by some accounts his great poem to autumn is in secret about the pitiless redcoats descending upon the Manchester weavers at Peterloo. So that the man who haunts me is my enemy at the same time that he haunts me, and at the same time that he has written poems that have served the continuation of my life. I see no contradiction. It may all be put to use. (31-32)

22Having fallen in with the ghostly visage of Keats early, the compulsiveness with which Hugh returns to these letters serves as an index of his simultaneous struggle to fall out with him and to properly historicize him, to re-embed him in a nexus of social, economic and cultural relations, and thereby to salvage him from himself. In this respect, the novel sometimes reads like a Frederic Jameson primer. Morrison, through the recursive, self-doubting forays of his despondent protagonist, conveys a strong sense of the cognitive overload, as well as dissonance, which underlies our late-capitalist, hyper-consumerist, hyper-connected present in the Anthropocene. This can be seen in Hugh’s maximalist leaps of thought, as well as in the restless, ramifying syntax in which such leaps come to be articulated: in a single sentence, for instance, we learn that Joseph Severn died “at age eighty-five in 1879, the year Zulu warriors defeat the British at Isandlwana, the first Indian indentured workers arrive in Fiji, Henrik Ibsen premieres A Doll’s House, and Sandford Fleming proposes his system of standardized time” (19). As Hugh thinks, across pages 18 and 19 of the novel, about a series of related dates involving the numbers 18 and 19 (including the year 1819, in which “John begins his decline from the same disease that killed his brother at the age of nineteen in 1818”), he admits that “[a]ll this could mean nothing. Or on the contrary it could mean everything – a seam in the universe, the impress of the tool-and-dye company, the aura of unclipped plastic around the cheaply made figurine” (19).

23For much of the novel, Hugh tracks the “strange and interwoven axis” (19) of history’s traditional as well as less-orthodox time stamps, making “sense” in a way that can be seen as both cause and symptom of the “mind virus” from which he suffers. Keats is never far removed from such forays; in fact, the reader is implicitly reminded that, to the extent that all such bifurcating and re-converging trains of thought (no less than the scattershot events of history) are interrelated, Hugh is never not also thinking about Keats. However, if the poet’s Scotch letters become a particular touchstone for the narrator, triggering in him feelings of shame, anger and contempt, while setting off unruly “chain[s] of associations” (72) that manifest the uncanny ways in which “time folds back onto itself” (162), it is to another letter that Hugh finds himself most compelled to return at the opening and close of the novel: one of the long journal-letters Keats sent to his brother and sister-in-law in America, and which contains, among other things, his account of being hit in the eye with a cricket ball (18). This letter is introduced early on and then deferred to a later chapter,²⁹ proleptically ghosting many of the narrator’s subsequent reflections. It is initially gleaned for a single, suggestive image – that of the “fibres of [Keats’s] brain”, said to be “relaxed in common with the rest of the body”, perhaps in relation to the laudanum he would have taken to relieve the pain of his blackeye (21) – which chimes, however obliquely, with the metaphor Hugh lands on to describe the “fibres” of his own broken brain; and this sends out other web-like tendrils, irrepressible threads of affiliation which weave together the personal and the historical, the literal and the metaphorical, leading the narrator to reflect on how the “whole shape of that bloody century nineteen was governed by fabrics, fibres, textiles, the machines and the land and the people all yoked together and driven to the absurd ends of ever more elaborate clothes” (22):

If your brain is fibres, your systems of production are fibres. If your brain is computation and calculus, your systems of production are computation and calculus. If your brain is bright, fraying, sunken fibres, your systems of production are bright, fraying, sunken fibres. If your brain is broken… Well, you understand. (24)

24Reading such mental spiraling can be dizzying, which would seem to be, to some extent, the point. The grammar of the novel, as a whole, no less than that of its title, reflects the narrator’s radically unsettled state of being in the world: every sentence, like every hour, brings with it a relentless, vertiginous sense of falling, with nowhere safe or sound to alight. The motif of the snail-shell spiral is also, following a concomitant logic, associated with a Keatsian coinage (the image of “snail-shell wisdom”), which is, in turn, associated with a story by Virginia Woolf (“The Mark on the Wall”) (143), and finally with a literal snail crawling up the side of the empty picture frame Hugh has been carrying since the start of the novel – the frame which, finding no one to sell or bequeath it to, he finally places on the coat hook of a public bathroom he has entered as darkness descends upon the park. As Hugh falls back on old habits, this space brings him involuntarily to Keats:

I shut myself into the largest of the cubicles. A fine room for thinking, I thought. […] It was no bigger than a crofter’s cottage in the old days, but it is a truism that those in the smallest houses are the likeliest to make room for an unexpected guest. Even Keats and Brown had been treated hospitably by such people. ‘We lost our way a little yesterday,’ Keats wrote from Mull, ‘and inquiring at a Cottage, a young woman without a word threw on her cloak and walked a mile in a muzzling rain and splashy way to put us right again.’ I wish they had beaten him and taken his money for all he said about them in the language they did not know, but they did not know. It had not escaped me by the way that in Victorian Britain public toilets genuinely had been known as ‘cottages,’ and that I was a crofting tenant of the mind, and so a new chain of fraying words began, words and sounds and images and dreams, so that this place with its thinking room was a cottage for me to work in, and because it was public I could not be rack-rented, and it had not escaped me either that Keats too had once written of his wish to ‘build a sort of mental cottage of feelings, quiet and pleasant,’ and this was another way he haunted me, he had said things I wanted to say two hundred years before I said them […]. (204-205)

25In the final chapter of the novel, at what might be called the “climax” of this toilet-cottage experience but also of the myriad mental spirals he has traced and retraced while rambling around the park like a latter-day Whitman, Hugh remembers “that other letter, the one about the fibres of [Keats’s] brain, the letter whose journey across the world to his brother and sister-in-law I said I would not talk about until later, later, and I see that it is very late now, very late, and that I must, it is my obligation, I will do it if I can do nothing else” (207). The final chain of associations he arrives at, or which now seizes him, transports him back in time to the American wilderness, to the “impossible place of Kentucky” (207) to which George and Georgiana Keats had immigrated, and where they would eventually be swindled by John James Audubon, the now-famous naturalist and author-illustrator of Birds of America who also, it turns out, killed numberless crop-eating blackbirds (particularly the species of blackbird – the red-winged blackbird – which Hugh associates both with Keats’s mythical nightingale and with his own early quest for transcendental knowledge) (208-209). “Why did he kill so many of what he professed to love?” asks the sullen narrator of the contradictory naturalist, as he sits “in the thinking room of my concrete cottage, or rather yours, mine, and everyone’s” (210-211). The conflation of speaker, imagined reader, historical subject, and indiscriminate humanity, in the most unlikely of public haunts, brings this belated Whitman-Baudelaire composite figure to the only act he can muster, as Hugh places the frame, which he now realizes has been “an incredible burden to me all day” (212), upon a hook on the graffiti-covered bathroom door:

I looked now at the frame on the door, framing the portion of the writings on the door that it could frame. It brought me no peace. Why should it? But I liked it there. I liked that the next person who came to think in this place that was everyone’s would be staring right at a grey frame with steplike borders surrounding an array of signets, sigils, signs, and semiots of all imaginable origins in no discernable order, and that the longer they stared at the pictograms and rebuses, the more a kind of order would cohere before them, the more a grammar would knit together the symbols according to the grammar of their own lives, the secret grammar of history and time and word and sound and place and space, ideal and material, mythos and logos tumbling together in darkness, […] the chaos grammar of my brothers and sisters and siblings in broken-brainitude […]. (214)

26As fellow cottagers of the mind, or “siblings in broken-brainitude”, we might be forgiven for having lost the thread, or forgotten about the plot that was never really meant to be framed in any coherent way. In our quest for order and understanding, for meaning that does not simply belie the “chaos grammar” of our overwhelmingly complex lives, Falling Hour, we are again reminded, is but one of many contingent frames of reading. “Romantic Keats” – diffracted through a contemporary novel that does not quite know what to make of him, or how to eschew him – is another, “an incredible burden” born not always willingly but which may shed tentative light on the “signs” and “semiots” of our time. If there is a logic to the way Morrison uses his protagonist’s troubled relationship to Keats to animate his struggle for clarity or peace of mind, however fleeting those may be, it is further proof that our love for this Romantic ghost will endure, generating new frames of reading in the most unexpected places.

Conclusion

27Enduring Love and Falling Hour, though published nearly three decades apart, attest to the continuing intellectual and symbolic appeal, as well as the slipperiness, of one of English literature’s greatest poet-practitioners of the epistolary form. In addition to spawning his own regularly re-written biography, Keats’s letters have engendered diverse works of fiction that seek to reanimate the past while grappling with a legacy that, in part due to the entrenched nature of the Romantic canon, is inseparable from a burdensome anxiety – not so much of influence, in the case of the works under study, as of ambivalence. Unlike recent works of biofiction which bring Keats back into the fold as a character in an alternate history that may or may not play out his deepest hopes and desires, Enduring Love and Falling Hour, in contrastive but not altogether unrelated ways, are offshoots which invoke Keats’s spectral presence through a more oblique portal, allowing his letters to infuse, inflect, or overlay the narratives they simultaneously construct and deconstruct. Both McEwan and Morrison demonstrate an uncertainty as to the post – the station, use, or meaning, but also the belatedness – of this Romantic ghost who is allowed, if not always wittingly, to haunt their works with an arresting vigorousness.³⁰ As Hugh acknowledges, although it “is very late now”, it remains incumbent upon him – and those of us who might identify as “siblings in broken-brainitude” – to return to Keats’s letters, even if we “can do nothing else” (207).