From his first poem at age eleven, "A Cat in Distress," to his last, "The Triumph of Life" (as Stuart Curran suggests), devils persist throughout Shelley's poetry. Stuart Curran's fine essay praises this hypertext edition's pioneering use of its medium, and its exploration of Romantic diabolism. I'd like to respond by suggesting one possible connection between these two strands of his essay-- the diabolical nature of hypertext.
Let's consider the "lovely paradox" with which Curran begins his discussion of "The Devil's Walk": that Shelley's broadside was never technically published. Of course Shelley was hard at work developing alternative methods of mass distribution for this and other writings of this period, his 1812 Irish campaign. Shelley had launched "The Devil's Walk," along with the "Declaration of Rights," by sea and by air, in fire balloons and bottles. These methods of distribution, at once desperate and wonderfully hopeful, are in a sense precursors of hypertext, of the way it sets texts in motion.
In his "Sonnet, To a balloon laden with knowledge" (composed 1812), Shelley's send off of the fire balloon's ephemeral contents ("The Devil's Walk") presages the dynamism and illuminism of the ballad's hypertext edition:
"Unlike the fire thou bearest soon shalt thou
Fade like a meteor in surrounding gloom,
Whilst that unquenchable is doomed to glow
A watch-light by the patriot's lonely tomb;
A ray of courage to the oppressed and poor"
Whether stuffed into the windows of passing carriages, thrown into the streets, or launched into the sky, Shelley's poems of this period clearly reach out for new means of dispersal, new ways to reach increasingly politically diffuse audiences. Hypertext publishing would have suited this poet superbly, as the editors and Stuart Curran have demonstrated.
Shelley's lifelong interest in Illuminism also flourished during this time; yet as with the opposite disposition of his diabolism, as Curran reminds us, we must always keep in mind the contrary nature of this Illuminism, embracing both mysticism and rationalism. Shelley's faith in enlightenment gestures of unveiling, and in the value of transparency, clarity and truth, of course, can never be unperplexed from his even deeper skepticism. Thus the poet who celebrates the fiery knowledge sent in "The Devil's Walk" to illuminate the darkness and ignite "the tyrant's gilded domes" will also counsel against lifting the veil, for the "deep truth is imageless." Similarly, the bottles in which he launches The Devils Walk are at once Vessels of heavenly medicine and hellish songs.
Shelley later wrote in the margins of one of his notebooks that "the dawn rebels not against the night but disperses it," and he echoes this use of dispersion in the final line of "Sonnet on launching some bottles filled with knowledge into the Bristol Channel":
"Until its radiance gleams from pole to pole,
And tyrant-hearts with powerless envy burst
To see their night of ignorance dispersed."
There exists a connection between this fanciful method of circulation, by balloon and bottle, and the political effect desired and envisioned-- the dispersal of tyranny and ignorance. At this moment in 1812 when publishing, particularly Shelley's, was so closely controlled and observed, dispersal, not direct opposition, was a revolutionary method Shelley imagined and enacted, and one which his present hypertext editors have reconceived.
Hypertext has much diabolical potential. The internet began as an effort to centralize computers for disciplinary purposes and has evolved into a decentralized network; similarly, the web, like the devil, is neither inherently liberatory or oppressive, but always dangerous. The devil, as Father of Lies, and Son of Mysteries, is uniquely suited to hypertext and its celebration of the prolific, and of the continual dispersal of truths.
And now at last I come to the second point of Stuart Curran's essay, on Romantic diabolism and its double vision. It is here that the method, hypertext, invites us to question and I think exceed the duality of this double vision, for if there is one thing that hypertext shares with the Devil, it is the perpetual challenging of closure and structure.
The double vision of diabolism that Curran so expertly elaborates, I'd like to argue, is not double but multiple. In titling their page of related texts, such as Coleridge and Southey's, "Romantic Devils," the editors ingeniously hint at an altogether different kind of devil than the ones they actually offer through the related texts. As Shelley, Byron and Coleridge knew, Romantic Devils, in addition to being figures of political satire, were also figures of Romantic desire and seduction.
This diabolical tradition of the Devil in Love flourished during the same time as that of "The Devil's Walk." From Cazotte's Le Diable Amoureux (1772), first translated in English in 1793, to M.G. Lewis's The Monk (1796) and Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya; or, The Moor (1806), and perhaps to Byron's unfinished "Il diavolo inamorato, these Romantic Devils had as much political and satirical charge, albeit indirectly, as their strutting counterparts, and even dared to be desirable.
We catch a glimpse of this Romantic Devil in Love in Shelley's poem, where the Devil reveals his infernal nature to the statesman:
A statesman passd alone to him ,
The Devil dare his whole shape uncover,
To show each feature, every limb,
Secure of an unchanging lover.
This is the Devil as Father of Lies, concealing secret corruption, but this stanza also hints, satirically, at the dubious pleasures of demonic seduction elaborated in Lewis's The Monk and Dacre's Zofloya, two novels which Shelley read and enjoyed. One of the many virtues of this hypertext edition, Stuart Curran points out, is that it can and no doubt will be extended and elaborated upon, to enlarge the circumference of our diabolical knowledge, and our knowledge of Romantic Devils.
--AC, OCTOBER 1997