Alterity begins with the most important theme of Levinas’s work: the relationship between two people. In his ethical philosophy, his Talmudic commentaries, and his political discussions that often hinge on the aftermath of the Holocaust, the well-being of the other person is of utmost concern. In fact, so strong is this idea, that to Levinas, “the only absolute value is the human possibility of giving the other priority over oneself.”39 Levinas develops a philosophy with the politically and socially disenfranchised in mind: the slave, the orphan, the prisoner, the foreigner, the stranger. His philosophy gives us new insights into Romantic writers’ use of the imagination to bring the self face-to-face with the alterity of the radical other of that period: the slave self. It approximates Shelleyan “going out of our own natures” and Keatsian “disinterestedness.” In fact, Levinas uses the term “dis-inter-estedness” to define the being-for-the-other in all human beings.40
The essence of being-for-the-other is self-sacrifice, a fundamental condition of human consciousness. Levinas, in fact, defines consciousness as “a preoccupation with the other, even to the point of sacrifice, even to the possibility of dying for him or her; a responsibility for the other. Otherwise than being! It is this shattering of indifference—even if indifference is statistically dominant—this possibility of one-for-the-other.”41 In ways that both recall and go beyond late-eighteenth-century philosophers like Adam Smith, Levinas sees that responsibility, being-for-the-other, must ultimately test itself against suffering: “For me the suffering of compassion, suffering because the other suffers” is one part of the relationship between self and other that is “much more complex and complete at the same time.”42
But how do we understand this ethical relationship in the writings of British poets? The main problem scholars have in applying Levinas’s philosophy to literature is in coming to terms with Levinas’s rejection of representation. As David P. Haney points out, Levinas is “suspicious of art” because of its seeming autonomy from the ethical other. Despite this, Levinas does champion critical discussions that relate “the inhuman work of the artist into the human world.”43 Still, if Levinas rejects representation, insisting that the face is not a representation and that art has no access to transcendence, how can we face the faceless other, the other of representation? The answer lies in Levinas’s notion of “trace.” In his essay “The Trace of the Other,” he defines “trace” as “the beyond from which a face comes…. A face is in the trace of the utterly bygone, utterly past Absent … which cannot be discovered in the self by any introspection.”44 Since trace is a substitute for the other, it becomes the way that the absent other appears. Trace thus allows representation to have an ethics. The one bears a responsibility for the represented other, and, in fact, some scholars even believe that trace itself is what constitutes the ethical relationship between self and other.45
Along with the idea of trace, another important concept for Levinas, something also directly applicable to art, is his belief that the face of the other is discursive. “Face and discourse are tied,” Levinas says. “The face speaks” he continues, and thus “renders possible and begins all discourse.”46 This idea has attracted some of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, most notably Jacques Derrida, who delivered a eulogy at Levinas’s funeral in 1995, which was published with a speech he gave at a seminar held in Levinas’s honor one year later.47 Here, Derrida reinterprets and extends some of Levinas’s ideas, particularly the notion of “hospitality,” of meeting the face of the other in discourse. In support, Derrida quotes Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence:
To approach the Other in discourse is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Discourse, is … an ethical relation.48
In fact, Levinas ends his most important philosophical work, Otherwise Than Being, with a summary of the connections he has made between discourse, alterity, proximity, and responsibility: these are the very principles at work in the writings of British Romantics in the face of the other because it is here that the other overwhelms the egoism of the self and causes the self to lose its sovereignty.49
To sum up, I am suggesting that Romantic alterity, the philosophical underpinning of the distanced imagination, helped writers form some of the most powerful poetic works of the period. This aspect of the Romantic imagination developed in conjunction with the entire culture’s growing awareness of the alterity of Africans and slaves, who were the most discursively visible example of British otherness. Further, I believe that a strand of what has been canonized as Romantic writing explores issues of alterity that are directly linked to slavery.50 Writers from Wordsworth to Keats, from Blake to Mary Shelley, incorporate the powerful images and ideas of African and slave otherness into their creative works. The literary is the mode through which these writers accomplish proximity, in Levinas’s sense of the face-to-face, a discursive responsibility for the other. By using and reshaping information available to them through various discourses, Romantic writers bring Africans and Britons into a relationship of alterity, one that would have been impossible in the original discursive forms—abolitionist poetry, parliamentary papers, or travel literature—that are either overly sentimental or politically rigid. These forms only reinforce the unequal power relationships between self and other (a typical example would be the abolitionist medallion, crafted by Josiah Wedgwood, which pictures an African in chains kneeling at the feet of a paternalist white man). On the other hand, creative works that are modeled on the distanced imagination acknowledge the unequal power relationship between Africans and Britons, but at the same time they manage to build an imaginative space for mutual alterity and mutual empathy, in Levinas’s sense of the face-to-face.
There are three methodological ways, I suggest, for twenty-first-century readers to account for the ethics of the faceless other of Romantic representation. The first, and most important, happens between the artist/poet and his or her creative subject (for example, Wordsworth’s ethical relationship with the black woman in “The Banished Negroes”; Blake’s with the little black boy). In this case, it is the job of the critic to understand the face as representing an other whose trace faces the poet him-or herself. The second way to understand Romantic literature using Levinas’s philosophy is simply to read the ethical relationship between the one and the other within the stories told by poets and writers (for example, between the ancient mariner and the wedding guest, or between the monster and Frankenstein), and then to evaluate how these ethical moments reshape what is being said in other discourses (parliamentary debates, travelogues, abolitionist propaganda). The third way is to accept the possibility of an ethical relationship between the reader and the trace of the other in representation. To take the example with which this book begins, Tommy’s slave complaint offers a trace, a proxy of the face, which faces the reader, and it is this very trace that points to an ethics between the one and the other. Similarly, Mary Prince, whose story concludes this study, establishes, through representation, an ethical relationship between self and other.
In the chapters that follow, I show how the images drawn from the culture of slavery, abolition, and African exploration reappear in Romantic literature, with a difference. With the exception of The History of Mary Prince, all the works I examine—Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Blake’s engravings and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Keats’s Lamia, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Witch of Atlas,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and poems from Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads—have a critical history of being about the imagination, and, while this is true, they are also about Africans and slaves. I investigate the fever behind