Walter Pater’s Dream Rhythms

This chapter considers how Walter Pater, singing master of the aesthetes, constantly pushes language beyond the purely grammatical and expositional, in order to think through an idea which may not be simply recoverable as a ‘statement’. Many critics have pointed to Pater’s stylistic tricks of delay and postponement—terms which by their very nature suggest ‘something’ to be delayed or postponed. What is interesting, however, is the way that postponement might be in the very nature of Pater’s thinking, connected to his philosophical sense of life as a non-heuristic, passenger experience. In particular, the chapter looks at his oddly fussy punctuation, especially his dashes, both as a means to notate the rhythms of his writing, but also as a way to signal pauses which radically derail the logic of thought.