Instructor's Project
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"Tintern Abbey"
William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" poem (full title: "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798) is one of the most important works of the poet's early period. Written in a few days in 1798 and published in Lyrical Ballads that year, the poem is one of the first to try out the blank-verse, "conversationally" epic voice that would later be the voice of The Prelude. "Tintern Abbey" has also served as a test bed for a variety of major critical interpretations of Wordsworth and of romanticism in general, ranging, for example, from M. H. Abrams's discussion of the poem as one of the period's experiments with a new form (the "greater romantic lyric") to Marjorie Levinson's New Historicist discussion of the poem as a brilliant lyric elision or displacement in the face of history. (Full text of poem here)
Project Concept (by Alan Liu)
What hidden valences or logics of "Tintern Abbey" might be revealed by adapting the poem to the paradigm of the "first-person shooter computer game"?
In Wordsworth's time, painters and poets of landscape often followed a "picturesque" style in which the action of the eye--trained in the perspective systems, compositional forms, and iconography of the pictorial and gardening arts--triggered a balanced succession of moods culminating in "repose" (see the chapter on the picturesque in my Wordsworth: The Sense of History). "Once again I see," Wordsworth says in "Tintern Abbey," or again, "the picture of the mind revives again," "For I have learned / To look on nature," and so on--all exercises, as it were, of an eye on steroids. This is an eye pumped up through repetitions of the aesthetic and philosophical conventions of the aptly named Enlightenment to extend the purview of all-seeing vision from Enlightenment Reason to romantic Imagination (though already imagination was beginning to punch holes in the fabric of vision itself: "I cannot paint / What then I was," Wordsworth also says in "Tintern Abbey," and much of the action of the climactic section of the poem is scripted as a diffusion of agency away from vision into a more generalized synesthesia: "I have felt / A presence that disturbs me," "the mighty world / Of eye and ear," etc.).
In a first-person-shooter game, by comparison, line-of-sight targeting (an extreme version of perspective recession) is associated with a mood of focused aggression. First-person shooting is vision truly pumped up on steroids, including testosterone. And its military aura might even recall the French Revolutionary war context so profoundly in the background of "Tintern Abbey," which commemorates the five-year anniversary of Wordsworth's previous visit to the ruined monastery during his bleak period of political disaffection after his return from a trip to France. That was the time of the onset of war between England and France and of the poet's ensuing, complicated (even near-treasonous) confusion of sympathies between the French and English. (He was for the "People," but were the democratic people specifically French or English in their government, especially when the styles of both governments seemed to be devolving to earlier forms of authoritarian rule, Pittite or Jacobin [and, later, Napoleonic]? Such was Wordsworth's Hamlet-complex at the time.) (See my "Wordsworth and Subversion" article.)
So, what would transposing "Tintern Abbey" into a first-person shooter game show us about the romantic point of view or POV--that is, about the very celebration of having a POV or subjectivity (the romantic "I") that is ultimately the great "abundant recompence" of Wordsworth's poem? (In essence, "I don't know if the People are English or French, but I know they are me. And, as proof, I only need to get away from all people and retreat to 'nature,' where I can see a memory of myself.")
This project is created in Scratch. Scratch is a downloadable visual programming environment designed by MIT Media Lab to allow children and other novices to learn programming logic by creating interactive animations or games. Implemented in Java, the program runs on the user's computer. It comes with several pre-made "sprites" (e.g., a cat) that can be programmed to move, make sounds, say things, and interact with other sprites or with mouse/keyboard controls by "snapping together" a variety of program logic "blocks" (like snapping together Lego blocks). Users can also draw/import their own sprites and backgrounds.
The project is primitive and crude (my first Scratch project, performed partly to learn the program). But its childishness itself is perhaps a deep testimony to the hold that the romantics (with their equation of childhood and imagination) still have over us even if we can now be critical of them.
Tintern Abbey First Person Shooter
Go to live version of the game on the Scratch site
References
- Abrams, M. H. "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric." In Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970.
- Levinson, Marjorie. "Insight and Oversight: Reading "Tintern Abbey." In her Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
- Liu, Alan. Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. (Especially Chap. 4, "The Politics of the Picturesque: An Evening Walk.)
- Liu, Alan. "Wordsworth and Subversion: Trying Cultural Criticism." Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 55-100.
