ABSTRACT
POETRY AS REVISION: A READING OF ROBERT BROWNING’S THE RING AND THE BOOK
While it is a basic truism that the meaning of a text is largely dependent on its historical context, models of interpretation that all too readily assume the stasis of the past and which fail to relativize the present in their will to hermeneutic truth fall short of accounting for the complexity of our engagement with the past as it is mediated through various modes of literary representation. A critical tool is needed in order to rethink our relationship with the past as it is mediated through literature. The dramatic monologues of Robert Browning offer one way to re- conceptualize history as a category in our attempt to make meaning out of complex, self-conscious artifacts. More than anything, his reproach of the abstract lyrical subject that dominates the Greater Romantic Lyric characterizes the dramatic monologue as a critical tool that forces us to question, and ultimately reject, the notion that history excludes craftsmanship. Rather than reinforce a reductive view of the past, Browning’s experiments with the dramatic monologue encourage us to reflect on the very preconditions of historicism: our “felt historicity,” or being in time. The Ring and the Book manifests Browning’s final attempt to synthesize the dramatic monologue with a long narrative poem that takes history as its subject. Through the dramatic monologue, Browning attempts to exorcise vestiges of Romanticism, which threaten to reduce the autonomy of the reader to a function of the author’s sincerity. By countering inherited beliefs in the integrity of the lyric persona, he offers a radical revision of history.
Patrick Willey May 2016
POETRY AS REVISION: A READING OF ROBERT BROWNING’S THE RING AND THE BOOK
by Patrick Willey
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English in the College of Arts and Humanities California State University, Fresno May 2016 APPROVED For the Department of English:
We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the university and the student's graduate degree program for the awarding of the master's degree.
Patrick Willey Thesis Author
Ruth Jenkins (Chair) English
John Beynon English
Laurel Hendrix English
For the University Graduate Committee:
Dean, Division of Graduate Studies AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION OF MASTER’S THESIS
X I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in its entirety without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of authorship.
Permission to reproduce this thesis in part or in its entirety must be obtained from me.
Signature of thesis author: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have never been asked to write a thesis before, and I certainly could not have asked for a better guide through the process than Professor Ruth Jenkins. This began as a paper I wrote for her seminar on Victorian Poetry. Incredibly, after a year and a half of layover, much of which was spent vacillating over a topic for this thesis, this thesis looks like an unraveling of the thinking that took place in that seminar, as if, unbeknownst to me, it was unfolding during all that time. It’s hard to say when this thesis began. In that seminar there were numerous others there that influenced the direction of this thesis. The revision process could not have been the same without the guidance of my committee, and I want to thank Professor Laurel Hendrix, Professor John Beynon, and everyone else on the committee for their guidance. Things that were taken from all their seminars surely made their way into this thesis. Numerous others from all their seminars certainly influenced the direction of this thesis. Finally, I couldn’t have done it without the library and the helpful staff of the library, which had been my second home during all that time. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page
CHAPTER 1: HISTORY AND THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE ...... 1
Lyric, Dramatic, Elegiac, Apocalyptic ...... 4
CHAPTER 2: LIMITS OF AUTHORITY: LYRIC AND DRAMATIC ROLES IN THE RING AND THE BOOK ...... 16
Romanticism and Empiricism ...... 23
The Lyric and the Dramatic ...... 28
The Limits of Authority ...... 42
CHAPTER 3: HISTORY, ELEGY, AND THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE IN THE RING AND THE BOOK ...... 48
CHAPTER 4: HISTORY AND APOCALYPSE: THE QUESTION OF ENDING IN THE RING AND THE BOOK ...... 69
The Question of Ending ...... 71
Prospectivism and Revisionism ...... 75
The Polar Logic of (the Reading) Process ...... 83
CHAPTER 5: BROWNING AND THE CITY ...... 93
WORKS CITED ...... 100
CHAPTER 1: HISTORY AND THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE
The subject of this thesis is Robert Browning’s re-visionary poetics with particular reference to his long poem, The Ring and the Book. The primary concern of the proceeding chapters will be to show how legible revision, that is, the palimpsest of overlapping interpretation that constitutes the form of The Ring and the Book offers an antidote to a nineteenth century historical imagination which tended to polarize present and past, in the interests of imperial, ideological, and economic expansion. The sense that an actual abyss punctuated the past and gave way to the present led Browning’s contemporaries to conceive their historical moment as an age of transition and refer to the past as an essence that legitimized their vision of the coming millennium. This revision of the past relied on ignoring, or simply omitting, layer upon layer of previous interpretation, a process of omission, which abstracted the subject from a proximate historical situation and excluded the present from the charmed ring of historical time. What distinguishes Browning’s approach to historical revision is that it is historically situated and embedded in a recursive, self-referential ring of interpretations. The Ring and the Book revises itself, preserves all its past moments in the form of separate monologues, and its conclusion returns us to its beginning. The ring of legible revision, which extends and encompasses the entire gamut of The Ring and the Book, resists the desire for apocalyptic renewal that reaches a fever pitch in Books X and XI. This aspect of Browning’s revisionary poetics implies an attitude toward history, heterodox for his time, which views the past and present as co- constructors. The form of the long poem and the technical accomplishment of the dramatic monologue create a fitting stage for a revisionary attitude toward history, 2 2 which distinguishes Browning’s poetic achievement from that of his predecessors, the Romantics. This takes us to the second domain in which Browning can truly be said to be revisionary, and that is in respect to his Romantic forbears, specifically to their conception of the poet as a visionary. The word “vision” in the abstract singular has specific connotations with the future: a “visionary” leads the way forward, toward the future or the frontier, or intends to do so, whether he fails or succeeds. The conflict between the failures of history and the compensating vision that Romantic poets attempted to represent in their version of the long poem forms the terminus for Browning’s revision of their legacy. Rather than turn inward from the failed dream of the collective to the private consolations of the personal vision, Browning attempts to wrest a vision of the present from the past. The past for Browning no longer offers a backdrop for personal woe as it did for Wordsworth; rather it forms the ground for the otherness and contingency of our present, less a source of legitimacy for a compensatory vision of the future than it is an illumination of the disorder of the present. By rejecting the vision offered by the Romantics, Browning’s re-visionary poetics offers a different interpretation of the poet’s social role: the poet no longer redeems the past by being an exemplary individual; he is an empty vacuity who redeems the present by bringing a piece of its past to life. This way of revising the Romantic legacy presents inevitable challenges not only for Browning’s self-justification, but also for his justification and re-articulation of the social function of poetry. Browning’s revisionary poetics contains a third sense: self-revision. The Ring and the Book represents a continuation of Browning’s attempt to write a long poem that could offer an alternative to the Romantic formulas. The resumption of his effort to forge a new form for the long poem follows from a 28-year hiatus in 3 3 which Browning turned from Sordello (1840), an initial effort to trace the outlines in the development of the poet’s soul in a dense contextual web of historical detail, to his experimentations with the dramatic monologue. The Ring and the Book is situated alongside Browning’s historical monologues in an extensive project of self-revision, carried over from his initial efforts to discover a form that coincided with his attempt to supplant the Romantic precedence of the visionary poet. Carol T. Christ offers a strong interpretation of the implications of this instance of self- revision in her book Victorian and Modern Poetics. There she argues that the dramatic monologue allows Browning to free himself from the historical limitations of his own perspective (113). While I agree with Christ in viewing the dramatic monologue as a solution to some of the formal problems the narrator grapples with in Sordello, I argue that the form of The Ring and the Book rejects the kind of historical blindness Christ attributes to it. That poem’s protagonist, Sordello, a thirteeth-century troubadour who Dante featured in his Purgatorio and who Browning appropriates, was the only perspective other than the narrator’s available to the reader. As a form Sordello is not as fragmented or recursive in its development as The Ring and the Book, a poem that includes ten speakers and which has no overarching narrator. The Ring and the Book does not have a protagonist and examines a historical murder-case through a sequence of dramatic monologues. Through the dramatic monologue, its development becomes more recursive, more amenable to the demands of its author’s revisionary outlook. Browning’s introduction of the dramatic monologue allows him to extend his critique of nineteenth-century historicism. The accumulation of the monologues as revisions of one another disrupts the notion that the past is a static object, definable once and for all, while, at a more local level, the device of the dramatic speaker forces the reader to interrogate the desire to transcend the present, and 4 4 makes us increasingly aware of the historical limitations of our perspective. As a revision of the past, of poetic tradition, and of itself, The Ring and the Book embodies a revisionary poetics that continues to be revised. A full account of all this remains to be written.
Lyric, Dramatic, Elegiac, Apocalyptic
No longer do we know very well who loans his voice and his tone to the other in the Apocalypse; no longer do we know very well who addresses what to whom. But by a catastrophic overturning here more necessary than ever, we can as well think this: as soon as we no longer know very well who speaks or who writes, the text becomes apocalyptic. And if the dispatches [envois] always refer to other dispatches without decidable destination, the destination remaining to come, then isn’t this completely angelic structure, that of the Johannine Apocalypse, isn’t it also the structure of every scene of writing in general? (Derrida 87)
According to the elegiac view of language, loss is the foundational moment of all discourse; in Derrida’s account of the apocalyptic, it is a future to be gained which grounds the possibility, the “transcendental condition,” of all signification. Derrida’s definition shifts our attention from the figurative content of the apocalyptic as a depiction of the end of the world, toward of the formal conditions that make the apocalyptic as a scene of unveiling possible. Historically, the dramatic monologue has been the apocalyptic genre par excellence, at least, that is, in the Derridean sense; its built-in references to an internal situation that precedes and inaugurates the scene of inscription leads voices to proliferate until, as Derrida elaborates in the epigraph, we no longer “know very well who addresses what to whom.” The proliferation of addresses and possible addressees, which for Derrida designates the apocalyptic text, is not an essence that we customarily associate with the apocalyptic mode. Yeats’s “Second Coming” offers a paradigmatic example of a conventionally apocalyptic poem. The speaker of 5 5
“The Second Coming” has no particular addressee, his message is addressed to no one and therefore everyone. The universality of the addressee instills the voice with a hypnotic power to captivate us; we find it increasingly difficult to turn away from this voice, or confuse it with another. But precisely where this poem’s speaker succeeds in universalizing his addressee and even momentarily possesses his audience he fails to realize the apocalypticsm Derrida attributes to the apocalyptic. The same movement typifies the classical elegy where the poet mediates between the dead and the living, just as in the apocalyptic he mediates between the present and the past. The dramatic monologue probes the conditions whereby the elegiac and apocalyptic become codified in a generic typology. By reflecting on the strategies speakers enlist in their attempts to circumvent history and identity, Browning’s dramatic monologues reflect on their own capacity to captivate us. One of the premises of my reading of The Ring and the Book is that the dramatic monologue as a subgenre of the lyric is uniquely situated to call into question the kind of transaction that takes place between the speaker and the audience in discursive practices that attempt to accommodate crucial absences, the absence of the dead in the case of the elegy, or of the past in the case of the apocalyptic. The development of the dramatic monologue as a durable form represents one of the key poetic contributions of the Victorians. In principle, the form that the Victorians developed was opposed to New Critical values of unity and coherence—identities in the dramatic monologue are unstable, voices are multiplied, and destinations are re-routed and decentralized. There is a concomitant move away from a romantic commitment toward sincere expression to a consciously performative poetic. In the dramatic monologue, the high- mindedness of the greater Romantic lyric is exposed to the bathos of self-parody 6 6 and the rigid attitude of burlesque is mingled with philosophical rumination. At the same time, there is considerable overlap between the Victorians’ formal experimentations and the high-modernist critique of lyrical subjectivism, a continuity which is usually implicit, but which can be detected in the way Eliot and Pound echo the scientific metaphors and chemical analogies by which the poet-speaker of The Ring and the Book characterizes his poetic method in their efforts to mount a revaluation of poetic technique in the first quarter of the 20th century. The dramatic monologue is part of a sustained, and ever renewed critique, of the authority of the omniscient lyrical subject who, by addressing everyone and no one, evades the problem of history. That is not to say that lyric subjects do not have histories, only that when we read a typical lyric poem, we are not encouraged to be aware of our historicity, or the constitutive effect history has on our perception of the poem. A generic correlative of the dramatic monologue, its next of kin in terms of historical development, is the historical novel, and one of the attractions of the dramatic monologue is the inexhaustible appeal of the past, not only in its ability to define the present but also in its capacity to foreground and set the terms of its otherness. The Ring and the Book magnifies the scale in which the dramatic monologue conducts its inquiries into the impulse to attribute meaning to our present out of our relationship with the past. In the process it connects us to many different presents. According to Christ, the long poem is one of the key forms connecting Victorian and Modernist poetics. The Ring and the Book in particular, offers a crucial link to the Modernist project of reconciling historical particulars with mythic structure; its fragmentation into dramatic monologues respects the integrity of “particular angles of vision” and creates a “pluralism of form” at the same time as it allows an underlying order to emerge that appears objective (115). In Christ’s 7 7 view, this synthesis provides a precedent for the Modernists in their approach to the past. Through a pluralism of form, they present the very chaos they attempt to transcend through a mythic structure. The modernist project of ordering the chaos of the present has its beginnings in the Victorian long poem. My project is a structured attempt to show how the pluralism, hybridity, and heterodoxy of The Ring and the Book disperses authority in such staple manifestations of the lyric as the elegiac and the apocalyptic, actively questioning the notion of subjective sincerity as the touchstone of poetic truth. This attempt gains additional relevance when placed in the context of a post-romanticism at odds with the subjectivism of its origins. The Ring and the Book is part of a long line of attempts to make authority a feature of the poem rather than of the poet. Rather than view this attempt to shift responsibility for the meaning of the poem to a reader as an inherent failure of the contradiction between an objective historicism and a de-historicizing subjectivism, we need to turn our attention to the dramatic monologue and the way this formal device subverts the notion of a stable historical perspective. In order to do so, we need to suspend, for a moment, the habit of adopting a moral high ground in relation to the past, a high ground that allows us to find comfort and security in notions of modernity, progress, and evolution. We must question the abstract historicism of objectifying and sterilizing the past, as if history’s only function were to convey a moral, or feed us comforting illusions about the superiority and timelessness of our modernity, and substitute what Herbert F. Tucker calls “the awareness of our own being in time, our own felt historicity” (“Browning’s Historicism” 30). After all, not everyone comes to these poems with the abstract, objectifying gaze of the Victorianist; they speak volumes about the impulse to make meaning of a time-bound condition that as beings we share. The final obstruction to the centrifugal pull of the dramatic 8 8 monologue, the last bastion of authoritative thinking, is the authoritarianism of the present. It is one of the ironies of literary history that we tend to project our own historicizing habits onto the Victorians, presuming that they could never abdicate the moral high ground of their historical moment. This may be true in cases where the object is polemical, but in aesthetic matters, the Victorians are largely the inheritors of Romantic nostalgia, and, in the case of the dramatic monologue, they combat this nostalgia without necessarily privileging the perspective of their historical moment, or succumbing to idealizing notions of historical progress. Old ways of thinking about poetry inherited from the New Criticism continue to blind us to the intricacies of the dramatic monologue, and this has implications for the way we characterize its formal engagement with history. One of the common assumptions about the Victorian dramatic monologue is that by substituting an invented, historicized “I” for an authorial perspective, which continues to inhabit the margins, the form de-historicizes its own perspective, facilitating the idea that the present moment transcends history. For Christ, one of the defining features of Browning’s monologues is the notion of an epistemological high ground, a kind of historical version of dramatic irony. Browning’s characters lack “historical self- consciousness,” they find themselves in moments they do not understand, moments that impose a blindness on them which keeps them from understanding the movement of history. At the same time “Browning’s structuring of the poem…implies the very understanding his characters lack” (113-14). In other words, the dramatic monologue privileges us with insight into an historical meaning, a telos, that the speakers themselves lack. Adena Rosmarin echoes this view in her comparison of the historical imagination of the Victorians and the Modernists. Rosmarin argues that the dramatic monologue “depends for its effect 9 9 upon the split between the speaker’s meaning and the poem’s meaning”; it “demand[s] we judge their speakers: they always return us to the present, which is to say, to our Victorian selves: they always reaffirm the norms of the time in which they were written” (13). Rosmarin goes on to show how the Modernists divested themselves of this patronizing relationship with the past by developing the mask poem, in which the speaker’s meaning and the poem’s meaning are the same (13). Each of these critical stances, while similar in approach, widely vary in their results, and implicitly replicate the New Criticism’s dismissal of authorial intention as a valid criterion in the meaning of a poem. In particular, Rosmarin’s formulation elides the role of both reader and author; we are supposed to merge our historical perspective with that of the historical moment in which the poem was written without questioning the historical limitations of the author’s perspective or our own. Only by ignoring the intentional structure of the poem can we get away with the kind of reading that ignores the historical limitations of the author’s perspective in our attempt to make meaning of it. In the next chapter, I am very attentive to this underlying intentional structure, and the role of the historical author as it is elaborated in Books I and XII. One of the running arguments of chapter 2 is that, by interpolating himself into the poem, Browning points to the historical limitations of his own outlook and encourages us to question the notion of an ahistorical perspective of the past. The conception of the dramatic monologue put forth by Christ and Rosmarin is also problematic for its reduction of the reader’s role, since the reader of the dramatic monologue is understood to be the passive recipient of a truth about the past, a truth she is privileged to know, in the same way that the reader of a mystery solves the riddle before any of the characters. Like the mystery genre, or detective fiction, the historical monologue creates a demand for a historical irony, 10 10 which forms part of a telos, visible to the reader, yet unknown to the speaker of the monologue. This view of the reader’s role is connected to Robert Langbaum’s notion of the centrality of sympathy and judgment in our experience of reading the dramatic monologue; we sympathize with readers as long as we are capable of passing judgment over them, a judgment which they themselves are not capable of making. But, as Rosmarin points out, the distinction between sympathy and judgment becomes harder to make (12). In order to judge someone, or something, we often feel the need to sympathize with some aspect of it; we would not deliberately seek to sympathize with it, unless it were also capable of being judged. While Rosmarin aligns sympathy with the speaker with the lyric, I understand both sympathy and judgment as part of a process associated with lyric reading. As I argue in chapter 2, the poet-speaker is concerned with synthesizing the lyric reader’s focus on sympathy and judgment, with a dramatic awareness of more complex motives and the historical limitations that condition the reader’s perspective. The device of the dramatic speaker is less of a precondition for our judgment of the speaker, than it is of an interrogation and a confrontation with what makes us want to escape from the limitations and contradictions of our historical moment in the first place. Browning’s poem “Cleon” provides Rosmarin with an example of a dramatic monologue which leads abruptly from sympathy to judgment, ultimately returning us to the Victorian era, where we are graced “with a superior historical perspective and, by implication, with a superior moral perspective as well” (12). “Cleon,” presents us with an epistolary monologue from a first century Greek Renaissance man of sorts, Cleon the poet, painter, musician, and polymath in one, 11 11 addressing his colonizer, and liege-lord “Protus in his Tyranny” (line 4).1 Cleon’s flattery of the Tyrant, his acceptance of Protus’ gift of a group of slaves, and his rejection of Christianity and the apostle Paul, combine to create an unsympathetic figure for us, whose values stem from a democratic, post-secular tradition. If our reading remains on this superficial level, we will ultimately reject “Cleon” as the unfortunate product of an outdated worldview, whether or not we can follow his existential angst and begin to understand him “as he understands himself, from within. . . as in all lyrics” (Rosmarin 12). But what drives the author of “Cleon” to want to impersonate someone from the first century; what drives us to want to read a Greek polymath’s response to a tyrant? Faced with the prospect of a modern audience, Wordsworth courted the consoling outlook of “a pagan suckled in a creed outworn” (Wordsworth 270); Keats sought “an age so sheltered from annoy / That I may never know how change the moons, / Or hear the busy sounds of common sense” (Greenblatt 909). While the Romantics internalized the process of retreat they prescribed to modern man, Browning’s historical monologues question the very desire to understand the past, which leads us to attempt to impersonate Wordsworth’s pagan. "Cleon" is in part, a dramatization of the Romantic attempt to escape from a Judeo-Christian conception of time, and from the bad consciousness that this conception of linear time engenders. Ironically, as badly as the Romantics want to transcend the Christian notion of time, Cleon wants to transcend the classical notion of time as cyclical. As we project our own desire into the past, we find ourselves irrevocably estranged from the mind or consciousness that we wish to inhabit. The innocence of the past, of the pagan who
1 Throughout this thesis, references to individual poems are from Robert Browning: The Poems, ed. John Pettigrew (New York: Penguin, 1982). References to The Ring and the Book are to Robert Browning: The Ring and the Book, ed. Richard D. Altick (New York: Penguin, 1971). 12 12 watches Proteus rising from the sea, is something we project in order to escape from the awful burden of moving on. But Cleon can only show us the inverse of our desire. The poem recognizes this irony, by showing how unsympathetic Cleon is to the historical actualization of the hypothetical doctrine of time he most desires. Rosmarin’s reading of “Cleon” is based on the assumption that character is the expression of an author, rather than an outcome of the formal features of the poem. Rather than foreground character as a “mask” for the author, the form of the dramatic monologue encourages us to view the historicized situation the author creates as a ground for the formation of character. The poem begins with Cleon’s address to “Protus in his Tyranny,” but it does not introduce Cleon as if he were a static object of the narrative. A number of choices arise as a consequence of this insight, and perspectives scatter like rays of light reflected on the glossy surface of a page: we can view this monologue from the perspective of a first century tyrant, of Cleon in his patronage, or of a post-romantic or a post-modern consciousness; each in their own way contributes to a complex rhetorical structure that cannot be reduced to a thesis. In order to feel what its like to be obliged to address a tyrant from the inside we must place ourselves under the sway of a literal tyranny through an act of the imagination. Our ability to understand “Cleon” does not hinge on our capacity to sympathize with him and pass judgment on history; rather it depends on our capacity to surpass the threshold of our historical moment by exercising the faculty of the historical imagination. By focusing solely on aspects of the reading process that activate sympathy and judgment we lose sight of the limitations of our perspective and the necessary negotiation between irreducible angles of vision that constitutes the historical sense, and fall victim to a presentism that reduces all history to an endlessly self- 13 13 fulfilling prophecy. This tendency leads Joseph Bristow to conclude that “Cleon” is a failed prophet who “speaks on behalf of a Protestant belief in God. . . although he remains without the privilege to comprehend the full implications of what he is saying” (112-13). This identification of authorial intention with the views of the dramatic speaker is too narrow, and it leads us to view each of Browning’s monologists as a fictional prefiguration of Robert Browning. At this point critics usually cite Browning’s belief in historical progress, and his idealization of failure; nevertheless, the idea that every “Cleon” is a failed prophet prefiguring the “fail better” of Robert Browning makes identifying the secret meaning that the speaker utters but cannot comprehend the telos of the reading process. For Bristow, Cleon’s tragic failure is that “by virtue of his historical position, [he] is unable to progress to the critical point of knowledge marked by the advent of Christianity” (112). What this view of the poem ignores is that the monologue supports more complex forms of reader-engagement. We cannot fault “Cleon” for using the past to confirm our values or the transcendence of the historical moment they grow out of, especially when we are the ones projecting that desire on the reading process. “Cleon” is about the desire to transcend our own historical limitations, but not in a way that leaves them unaccounted for. While there is a tendency to read The Ring and the Book either as a collection of separate works that can be enjoyed in isolation, or as a novel-in verse, it’s important to view it as a long poem.2 Only as a long poem can we grasp
2 See Hawlin, who argues that it is “not necessary to read it all to get a sense of how it works” and that reading the poem as a novel-in-verse will yield much more to the reader (191, 200). I recognize Hawlin’s effort to make the poem more accessible to readers, but I am obviously opposed to this kind of reading, for the reasons cited below. It certainly does not hurt to use the novel as a context for the poem. In her reading of the poem as a “verse novel,” Dino Felluga does just that; the problem is that she is not as attentive to the rhetorical features of the dramatic monologue as other readers have been. Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism may be more aptly applied to the dramatic monologue than to anything identifiably “novelistic.” For more on the distinction between dialogism and the novel, see Blalock. 14 14 the full implications of its inclusion of dramatic techniques, techniques that pull apart the lyric seams, and expose assertions of atemporal authority to the contending claims of history; it is The Ring and the Book’s engagement with particular discursive practices which rely on a representative ego, an ego that tends to elude the identities that history inflicts on its subjects and that manages to be nowhere and everywhere, to address no one and everyone. The poem is much more about speakers’ attempts to appropriate authority, whether it comes in the form of a timeless lyric subjectivity, a deceased “author” haunting the margins of the text, or history itself. For this reason, my reading of the poem is thematic, rather than chronological. I do not offer a complete exegesis of the poem, but an exploration of the dialogical techniques of the dramatic monologue in relation to three different modes that typically rely on an abstract, monologic entity to authorize its claims: the lyric, the elegiac, and the apocalyptic. In chapter 2, I read Books I and XII in the context of the nineteenth-century distinction between the lyric and the dramatic, and I examine the historical difficulties that beset Browning’s attempt to transcend this categorical opposition as he attempts to re- define his poetic role and model the synthesis of lyric and dramatic reading that the formal innovations of his long poem requires in order to be deciphered. My focus in chapter 3 is on the dramatic monologue’s engagement with the politics of the elegiac mode, as it foregrounds contesting ways in which the dead are appropriated and exploited as speakers seek to convert death into a source of authority. In chapter 4 I turn my attention the eschatological import of Books X and XI and the way the poem’s recursive design disrupts an apocalyptic vision of history by questioning the presentism and prospectivism that underlie nineteenth- century theories of history. Finally, in chapter 5, I return to the theme of the apocalyptic, this time through the image of the city, which I view both as a 15 15 metaphor and as a formal correlative of Browning’s long poem. The project as a whole traces an arc, demonstrating how conventional lyrical modes are subjected to revision and incorporated as an extension of the post-romantic attempt to make authority a function of the process of negotiating between discrete, historically limited angles of vision rather than of an informing mind.
CHAPTER 2: LIMITS OF AUTHORITY: LYRIC AND DRAMATIC ROLES IN THE RING AND THE BOOK
“I incline to think my nature is too undramatic, and I want all poetry to be direct utterance of some congenial feeling—this is too narrow” Julia Wedgwood, letter to Robert Browning, February 21, 1869.
Julia Wedgwood’s discerning eye for the “dramatic improprieties” of The Ring and the Book was characteristic of many of Browning’s readers. Ever since the publication of Men and Women, Browning’s reputation was based largely on his ability to conjure up vivid personalities from the past, men and women viewed as personifications of a place or an age, and present them in the form of “so many utterances of so many imaginary persons not mine” to the scrutinizing eye of the British public. Browning was hampered by the constraints his reputation as a dramatic poet entailed, as his correspondence with Julia Wedgwood on the issue of The Ring and the Book’s “strange mixture” of the “strongly and incompletely dramatic” illustrates (Curle 157). Here Browning is seen to “lead us through [his] picture gallery and [his] stable yard at exactly the same pace, which impartiality is, I suppose, the test of the dramatic, as distinguished from mere lyric, feeling” (Curle 157). But Wedgwood faults Browning for not extending that impartiality fully enough. Browning’s intellectual sympathy overflows the dramatic channel of the monologues and is scattered about indiscriminately in the speeches of the supposedly admirable and in those of those we are supposed to revile. As Wedgwood remarks, “It is your lending so much of yourself to your contemptible characters makes me so hate them” (Curle 159). In her criticism of the “strange mixture” of the “strongly and incompletely dramatic,” Julia Wedgwood seems to be calling Browning’s attention to the moral perils of simultaneously withholding 17 17 judgment of his characters and portraying them all on the same intellectual level as their creator. Perhaps, Wedgwood hates them even more because she finds them seductively refined and well mannered despite their moral culpability. The way the “dramatic” role plays out for Browning is very similar to the way the blot of predetermined guilt plays out for Guido in The Ring and the Book. The role of dramatic poet places Browning in a bind, for, as Wedgwood explains, he is required to be the poet in absentia, he must exercise his moral authority over his creatures while maintaining the illusion of presenting them as they are, in their unique individuality, without any admixture of his own thoughts and preoccupations. Failing to do either of these things, or both, as the author of The Ring and the Book does, the poet runs the risk of seeming too partial, or of making his portrayal of evil too sympathetic. The “dramatic” role pushes the poet into the margins of his own text, and when the dramatic mask is raised to the level of our awareness, the effect of the “incompletely dramatic” is that it seems to be expressing one side of the poet, while leaving the other side in a pristine state. It’s no surprise then that the poet feels exasperated when Wedgwood imputes all the poem’s “ugliness” to its author, and all the poem’s goodness to whatever seems “copied from a model” (Curle 162). Browning repeatedly defends himself and his poem against these charges on the grounds that both the goodness and the ugliness have their basis in the truth of the trial documents upon which the poem is based. The plot of The Ring and the Book takes place after a triple homicide in 17th century Rome. A trial ensues, and Guido, the offending party in the murder, is found guilty and sentenced to death. However, he appeals to the pope and awaits the outcome of the pope’s decision in a jail cell. The last monologue takes place on the eve of his execution. The plot is implied by a series of monologues and the events that shape them are alluded to but never told. That’s because the plot is 18 18 shown; there isn’t a narrator interpreting the action. The monologues that compose the plot are bookended by the poet-speaker’s discovery of the Old Yellow Book, the title he gives to the bound volume of court documents used in Guido’s trial, the event which fills the middle portion of the plot. In the first and last monologues the author, Robert Browning, speaks in propria persona, offering both a synopsis of the Old Yellow Book and a defense of his poem. The monologues are presented from the point of view of nine different characters. After Browning’s poetic persona speaks in Book I, Half-Rome, The Other Half-Rome, and Tertium Quid offer representative views of the murder. These monologues tell the story of Pompilia and her parents from beginning to end and, while the speakers perform much of the meaning in an attempt to persuade their interlocutors, this portion of The Ring and the Book is primarily concerned with interpretation and narration. It’s difficult to find something the speakers of these books agree on. At some point Pompilia is adopted by Pietro and Violante, though in some versions she is Violante’s daughter by birth. Eventually, she marries Guido, either for social advancement, or out of her mother’s sense of shame at having fooled Pietro into believing she is her child. In either case, Pompilia is unhappy with Guido in Arezzo. After finding Guido penniless, her parents move back to Rome. She nearly despairs after a number of failed attempts to win her freedom, but she finds a rescuer in the priest Caponsacchi. On her return to her parent’s home in Rome she has a child. Whether the child is Caponsacchi’s or Guido’s is disputed. In the final monologue, the poet-speaker leaves off, unable to trace Pompilia’s child, long dead. The intervening monologues offer the perspectives of the three main actors in the murder, Guido, Caponsacchi, and Pompilia, in that order. These monologues are more recursive. They are primarily concerned with self-representation; presentations of character 19 19 predominate over interpretations of the murder. The next three monologues present the perspectives of the defense, the prosecution, and the pope. Finally, Guido offers the last of the monologues that compose portions of the plot. By the time we get to Browning’s second monologue, the ultimate book of the poem, the story has been told and retold; its facts and counter-facts built up in incremental fashion; the pile has been fitted into a ring of “rough ore” suitable to stand fast, next to his deceased wife’s “rare gold ring of verse” (XII, 865, 869). While The Ring and the Book was hailed as a great success and critics referred to it as Browning’s opus magnum, declaring it ready to stand alongside Milton’s Paradise Lost as one of the great English epics, reviewers tended to reduce the generic indeterminacy of the poem, and Browning’s poetic role continued to be defined against lyricism and in terms of the opposition between the dramatic and the lyric. While reviewers of the poem observed Browning’s “dramatic improprieties” with less opprobrium than Julia Wedgwood, the same dramatic conventions were applied to their critique of his performance. Frederick Greenwood found the poet’s “open declaration” of his partiality bad art, but he goes on to commend his “dramatic skill,” which is so great that, “even after we are told who really is right and who wrong, we follow every turn of the story with suspense” (314). Though they were divided about how “dramatic” the poem was, reviewers were nearly unanimous about the absence of “lyrical joyousness” in The Ring and the Book (Bagehot 304; Buchanan 294). Though Browning’s capabilities as a lyricist were acknowledged by some, Robert Buchanan contrasted the cool, analytical gaze of Browning with that of his late wife, Elizabeth Barrett, pointing out that in The Ring and the Book “we miss altogether the lyric light which saved ‘Aurora Leigh’ [EBB’s long poem, published in 1857] from mediocrity as a work of art” (296), and Walter Bagehot compares Browning’s “wonderful intellectual 20 20 analysis” with Tennyson’s “acute emotional analysis” in order to qualify the emotional detachment, and lack of “lyrical joyousness,” which he detects in the poem (303-04). Denoting proximity, nearness, intimacy, and emotional intensity, the lyric is neatly divided from the dramatic sense of detachment that characterizes Browning’s monologues; though Browning is portrayed on an equal footing with the likes of Alfred Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, he is, nevertheless, unconvincing in the role of the lyric poet. The designation of Robert Browning as a “dramatic” poet has two important consequences: for one, the term “dramatic” intimates its otherness from the unmixed integrity of the lyric—even though Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett both experimented with the long form, they were still considered “lyric” poets, using the long form only as an elaborate framework for their display of “lyric light.” Cases of fortunate let down, their long poems were critical failures that could not help betraying their integrity as lyricists. The generic murkiness of the term “dramatic” when applied to the form of a poem has additional implications for the “dramatic” poet; a “dramatic” poem is neither purely novelistic nor purely poetic, but adopts an indeterminate position between these poles. The term “dramatic” designates a caste-status in the pantheon of Victorian poets and in the hierarchy of poetic genres; it predicates a failure of lyrical self-affirmation, and threatens to alienate what little remains of a public demand for poetry. Browning’s marginalization from traditional sources of poetic authority, and from the inheritance of the greater romantic lyric, generates a crisis of authority. In her book Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy, Britta Martens situates her reading of The Ring and the Book in the context of the increasing commercialization of literature, the growing popularity of the realist novel, and the marginalization of poetry among the reading public in the 1860s. 21 21
Reading the framing books of the poem as dramatic monologues enables her to view the poet’s claims to absolute and empirical truth in light of his constrained relationship with these audiences. But for Martens, the poet-speaker of Books I and XII is a highly composed rhetorician, a skillful manipulator of his audiences, as quick at concealing his relativism, as he is compelling in his self-construction of a fluid literary persona. Martens’ reading is a part of a larger tendency to view the poet-speaker as someone who evades self-definition, unflustered by his reputation, and the historical categories that condition his reception. Browning’s indeterminate status and the way he struggles to assert himself goes unnoticed in Marten’s reading; by being attentive to this crisis of self-representation, I hope to show how Browning intervenes in the debate over poetic values by attempting to redefine the role of the reader. While he is certainly concerned with the problem of self-representation, he soon realizes that the project of poetic re-definition is compromised by an irresolvable tension between “lyric” and “dramatic” roles; this recognition forces him to construct a new kind of reader who can synthesize lyric and dramatic modes of apprehension. By foregrounding the way our roles and perspectives are always mediated, the poet-speaker dramatizes the social processes through which authority is consolidated; he suggests that authenticating roles are not timeless, universal properties, but historically contingent constructs. One of the ways The Ring and the Book upsets traditional notions of authority is through the formal device of the dramatic monologue. The degree to which the dramatic monologue may be considered a distinct genre has been debated ever since the term was coined in the late nineteenth century; currently, there is a growing consensus that the dramatic monologue is a subgenre of the lyric. The distinction between the lyric and dramatic modes goes as far back as Plato, who in his Republic describes the dramatic, which masks the identity of the 22 22 poet, as an imitative ode, and the lyric, in which the poet speaks in his own person, as simple narration (Plato 85-88). Plato’s characterization of the dramatic mode suggests a duplicity on behalf of the poet, as well as a kind of plurality in terms of perspective; not only does the dramatic poet imitate characters who bear no resemblance to the poet, he also submerges his identity in theirs, staging identity as a kind of performance rather than as something essential and accessible to truth. Not only does the dramatic monologue question the notion of an essential self, it also dramatizes the process whereby speakers struggle to order and consolidate their own identities. As E. Warwick Slinn points out, dramatic monologues highlight “the effort of speaking subjects to maintain an identity within the dissemination of discourse, within the fluid mobility of signifiers” (“Dramatic Monologue,” 84). As inheritors of the Romantic legacy, Victorian poets were tasked with appealing to a public who invested poetry with a divine status and proclaimed its superiority over all other arts, a public for whom poets functioned as divine intermediaries between god and man. Herbert F. Tucker notes, this conception of poetry and the role of the poet was a partial misreading of the legacy of Romanticism (124); nevertheless, Victorians continued to look to poets for moral guidance and tended to value the lyric “I” for its sincerity and spontaneity, qualities diametrically opposed to the historically contingent, ironizing possibilities of the dramatic “I” and its implicit critique of the notion of a coherent self. Paradoxically, as lyric poetry was gaining status as a genre, it was losing relevance among readers: more and more of them turned to cheap, consumable prose fiction. Another way that The Ring and the Book challenges traditional outlets of authority is by blurring the boundary between poetry and forms of popular entertainment. As commentators have noted, The Ring and the Book 23 23 shares many similarities with the novel, both in terms of form and subject matter.1 The poem’s affinity with the novel stems from its intertextuality. It was based on a series of trial documents written in Latin and Italian that the poet picked up in a bookstall in a square in Florence. In a self-referential play reminiscent of Cervantes, the poet-speaker of the framing books encourages us to question the epistemological status of representation and the nature of historical truth he presents us. The narrative unwinds on multiple levels, as each speaker revises an absent source, the discovery of which, rewritten into the story, undermines the truth claims of the poet, at the same time as it mocks his pretensions to authority. All these factors push the boundary of what may and may not be considered poetry—the poem recedes from the self-identity of the lyric and enters the murky indeterminacy of the dramatic. Whatever alluring affinity The Ring and the Book may have with the novel ends here: for the poet-speaker ultimately commits himself to an audience who presumes the superior status of lyric poetry. His initial attempts to appeal to an audience that includes empiricists and Romanticists collapses in his effort to determine the purpose of adapting found material into a poem, forcing him to side with Romanticism and making him the captive of a lyric audience. This decision leads to a crisis whereby the poet-speaker feels excluded from his principal audience and attempts to compensate for the indeterminacy of his poetic role.
Romanticism and Empiricism The poet speaker disrupts our identifications very early on as he parodies the role of the dramatic poet that has been thrust upon him by foregrounding the
1 See Hawlin (191, 200). For an analysis that focuses on the shared formal features with novel, see Blalock. 24 24 performativity of his assertions of the facticity of his source and the poem’s fidelity to it. The poet begins Book I by asking the reader a series of questions about the eponymous “ring” and “book” of the poem’s title before presenting a history of the objects and linking them together in a metaphor, which he hopes will explain the poem’s method. The poet addresses his audience with a combination of deictics, interrogatives, and imperatives: “Do you see this square old yellow book [?]”; “Examine it yourselves!”; “Here it is, this I toss and take again”; “Give it me back!” (I, 33, 38, 84, 89). Our initial impression is that the poet addresses us directly as readers; but if we look closely, we observe that he is also addressing an interlocutor in the poem, someone who sees the physical ring and handles the tangible book before being admonished to give it back. The skill with which the author weaves together an allusion to the title of the poem, reminding us that we are readers outside a determinate time or setting, and a cluster of deictic words, interrogatives, and imperatives that force us into the text, places us at a remove from the determinate interlocutor. Just as the author is divided from his persona, the speaker of Book I, the audience is divided from the interlocutor who cannot see the entire context in which his response to the author is embedded. The different roles correspond roughly to the different habits of mind involved in reading lyrical and dramatic poetry. Valuing intimacy over detachment, the reader of lyrical poetry is limited in her interaction with the text; her agency is restricted by the overbearing proximity of the lyrical “I” in much the same way as the voice of the interlocutor is silenced and her agency remitted by the speaker’s discourse. As paratexts and works of fiction in their own right, Books I and XII attempt to compensate for the poem’s generic indeterminacy and resolve the ambiguity concerning the roles of poet and audience. Though the poet ultimately 25 25 addresses himself to a lyric readership, the potential inclusivity of his audience may help to account for his stylistic idiosyncrasies. The indeterminacy of The Ring and the Book’s form forces the speaker to jolt his readers out of their absorption, bringing them back to the mediacy of the dramatic situation. His poem is interspersed with aural disruptions, which have the effect of drawing an audience’s attention to the constructed nature of the rhetorical situation. These disruptions of metrical conventions and standardized harmonies call our attention to the fundamental materiality of language. They disrupt the consequentiality of narrativized time and remind us of the fictive basis of the speaker’s situation. The cacophonous succession of trochees in many of these phrases shocks the reader into an awareness of the material component of reading, such as when the poet interrupts the summary of the pleadings and counterpleadings of the lawyers with the assonance of, “thus wrangled, brangled, jangled they a month” (I, 241) or, to use another characteristic example, when he apostrophizes a crowd in a market place as the “motley merchandising multitude” (I, 903). Such moments are hallmarks of Browning’s unorthodox style, less the signs of willful negligence on his part, than they are means by which Browning calls our attention to the performativity of the monologue.2 By obviating the necessity of establishing a fixed role for his audience, the poet-speaker makes it possible to diverge from and ultimately reject his initial self- presentation as an impartial dramatic poet. He begins his monologue by addressing his interlocutors in what seems to be a private study, and we learn later on that he is in London (I, 422, 775). While remaining stationary in his study, he spends a
2 For many reviewers Browning’s stylistic flaws were enough to demote him from his public role as a poet to a second rate imitator of Carlyle; see the reviews by John Doherty and Alfred Austin in The Critical Heritage. 26 26 considerable amount of time recounting events and encounters that took place in Florence and Rome. As is typical of most dramatic monologues, the dramatic situation of Book I is the tip of an iceberg, beneath which the speaker careens back and forth between proleptic and retrospective narration. The speaker of Book I adds another layer of temporal depth by refashioning the material of the Old Yellow Book into three different narratives. As the performance of the monologue unfolds in a room in contemporary London, the stories of the poet’s encounter with the Old Yellow Book in Florence, a few years prior to his monologue, and the trial of Count Guido, along with the murder of the Comparini in 17th century Rome, are told on simultaneous levels of narration. This proliferation of settings and temporalities makes it difficult for the reader to adopt a stable position in relation to the speaker. In his attempt to answer the objections raised by a corporate entity referred to as the “British public,” the poet-speaker recognizes that his only recourse is to appeal to the values of sincerity and proximity esteemed by a lyric audience. The poet’s effort to anticipate objections to his poem signals a startling departure represented by the suggestion that he throw his book into the fire, “as who shall say me nay, and what the loss?” (I, 375-76). This move is not only inconsistent with his self-composure up to this point, but also incongruent with the dramatic situation he has established: an intimate scene with a sympathetic interlocutor. The discontinuity indicates the poet’s intimation of another audience, a more critical and impersonal entity referred to as the “British public” (I, 410). The poet’s addresses to the “British public” are distinct from those addressed to an interlocutor within the constructed situation, or to a reader outside the situation and indeterminate in respect to time and place; the corporate entity referred to as the “British public” is contemporaneous with the author. Browning’s appeals to 27 27 his British public steer a fine line between alienating them and attempting to correct their habit of forfeiting their perspective to a figure of authority. By juxtaposing them with the citizens of Rome, whose habitual reliance on empirical standards of truth-worthiness leads them to dismiss his poem, the poet is forced to make concessions that modify earlier claims of objectivity. Confronted with the possibility of losing the Old Yellow Book to the flames, the poet speaks of the life cycle that inheres in truth. “Was this truth of force?” he asks, “Able to take its own part as truth should, / Sufficient, self-sustaining?” (I, 372-74). The book is an extension of the living body; it might provide the last material trace of the “heads and hearts of Rome”—all has been leveled down “as smooth as scythe could shave” in the collective memory (I, 413-21). The poet confirms this in Rome, where he searches for documents he can use to supplement the Old Yellow Book. In this passage we learn that this is not the first time the Old Yellow Book has been rescued from the flames; it has been revealed that the records the poet is looking for met with no such luck: the occupying French armies have burned them (I, 431-33). But the citizens of Rome are not in a mood to celebrate this discovery or thank the poet. They accuse the poet of being partial towards the British and biased against the Church before they have even read a word of what he has written. The Romans’ unquestioning acceptance of the homology between truth and scientific prose, their dismissal of extra-empirical claims, and their prejudice against whatever seems foreign, reflects the poet’s fear of a British public thoroughly enslaved to the values of empiricism more than it reflects the prejudices of Roman citizens. By rejecting the narrow-minded empiricism of the citizens of Rome, the poet is left with no other option than to revert back to the epistemology of Romanticism. His only hope lies in appealing to a lyric audience. 28 28
As he turns to Romanticism for authority, the poet begins to update his image; deemphasizing the poem’s reliance on archival sources, he shifts the stress from the Old Yellow Book to the Old Testament. His comparison of his role as a “resuscitator” of lifeless facts to that of the prophet Elisha is consistent with his notion of embodied truth. His conception of facts as extensions of the body allows him to draw an analogy between his reconstruction of the past and Elisha’s resurrection of the dead. Through this analogy, the speaker invests the act of creative appropriation with the spontaneity valued by the Romantics. He then claims that due to man’s fallen nature he can only create through mimicry, and only God can create ex nihilo (I, 707-72). This collapses the distinction between a poem inspired by the absolute and one based on found material. His appeal to scriptural sources of authority shows how the poet-speaker attempts to compensate for his reputation as a “dramatic” poet, in order to catch up with the expectations he’s established for his audience.
The Lyric and the Dramatic In his effort to redefine the role of poetry, the poet-speaker models the development of a poetic reader, and Book I becomes an allegory of the transition from lyric absorption to dramatic detachment. The poet-speaker begins this bildung by juxtaposing his dramatic persona with his lyric persona. In the ring metaphor, the poet counters a dramatic cliché of the ring craftsman who initiates a process of “mimic creation” with a Romantic cliché of the vates, or poetic visionary, chosen by providence to reveal an oracular “truth” to a worldly audience. These clichés expose the limits of self-representation, while foregrounding the synthesis that will take place between the two concepts of poetry. Initially, the poet embodies an idealized notion of the dramatic poet. The 29 29 malleability of his identity is conveyed by the derivative nature of the ring maker’s “imitative craft” and the iterability of the ring making procedure (I, 3). In the chemical analogy the poet establishes, 3 the ring maker’s art is directly at odds with the hegemony of the lyric. In his description of the ring metaphor, the poet reiterates well-known clichés about the nature of the “dramatic” role. The art of the dramatic poet is relativist—the craftsman stands both outside and inside the ring, which denies him access to a center. The dramatic poet mirrors nature—like the craftsman, his creative function is mimetic and his procedure is predetermined, repetitive. While the ring denies an absolute perspective, the ring-making procedure precludes the personal spontaneity of Romantic lyricism. We find it hard to identify the personality of the craftsman with his personae because he is abstracted from the process of creation, rather than an emanation of that process. This makes the craftsman a recognizable cliché, a perfect stand in for the “dramatic” poet. The craftsman forms a recognizable equivalent of the dramatic poet, but it provides an inadequate description of Browning’s poetic method. Just as the “craftsman” imitates the character of Etruscan rings at Chiusi, the “dramatic” poet imitates characters of life; his art is life-like. His fancy is redundant; the poet compares it to the wax an artificer melts with honey and invites the reader to wipe its trace away, as if it were an excrescence (I, 18-19, 1388). By understating the role of fancy and overstating the importance of facts in the ring metaphor, the poet’s self-presentation at the beginning of Book I adheres to a clichéd notion of the “dramatic” role.
3 Browning’s use of scientific metaphors looks ahead to the legitimizing techniques of the modernists. In the early 20th century, enlightenment beliefs in technological and scientific progress offer the critique of lyric hegemony a more profound outlet of authority. Though the appeals are not as convincing when seen through a Victorian context, Browning provides us with a kind of pre-history of this technique of legitimization in Books 1 and XII. For more on the modernists’ use of scientific metaphors, particularly in the context of modern physics, see Albright. 30 30
In the very next passage, the poet-speaker’s intimations of a providential order and his assertions of the teleological character of his poem’s origins seemingly obviate his aspiration to the ring-maker’s transparently “imitative craft.” These propositions—more characteristic of the Romantic vates than they are of the dramatic poet—are heralded in the section that follows from his elaboration of the ring metaphor: Do you see this square old yellow Book, ...... I found this book, Gave a lira for it, eightpence English just, (Mark the predestination!) when a Hand, Always above my shoulder, pushed me once, One day still fierce ’mid many a day struck calm, Across a Square in Florence, crammed with booths, Buzzing and blaze, noontide and market-time. . . (I, 33, 38-44) Notice the clutter of consonants: the repetition of the plosives b and p, break out into an alliteration of d’s in the line, “One day still fierce mid many a day struck calm,” only to be sundered by the repetition of the nasals n and m in the phrase “noontide and market-time.” The clutter of consonants conveys a derelict scene of disorder and dispersal. With a tightly compact, diverse array of sound-values, these lines complement the thematic tension between the providential order of an invisible hand and the centrifugal chaos of a noontide market at the Piazza di San Lorenzo. In the midst of this jumble of “odds and ends of ravage” (I, 53), the poet- speaker is guided to a bookstall, spots the book amid “five compeers in flank” (I, 75), and makes his selection without hesitation. The poet instructs his interlocutor to “Mark the predestination!” and throws in a plea for gratitude, “Providence be 31 31 praised!” (I, 60). Taken in its entirety, the passage suggests that, despite the random incoherence of historical particulars, the poet-speaker was assisted by providence in his discovery of the book. Beneath the chaos of modern life, history has an agency of its own; it seduces the reader with an invisible hand and strips bare its secrets. This rendering of his poem’s providential origins provides a counterpoint to his account of the origins of the ring. Simulacra of Etruscan circlets unearthed at Chiusi, the rings are interchangeable, and their origin offers an infinite number of iterations. This origin may not differ in kind from the origins of The Ring and the Book, but the narration of the poet-speaker cloaks the affinity between the ring and the poem; the source of the Old Yellow Book is what absorbs his attention. In addition to being a material artifact, the book embodies an oracular truth; its discovery is nothing short of miraculous. As a sign with a secret, it operates on another level of signification, and its discovery singles out the poet. Each origin refers back to a different concept of time: the ring suggests a version of time that returns upon itself, while the book suggests a straight line in ascension from right to left, front to back. The poet-speaker’s self-absorption produces “lyrical” effects that force us to observe a discontinuity from the “dramatic” overtones of the passage in which the speaker touts the ring smith’s “imitative craft.” By interspersing allusions to the ring metaphor, Browning continues to identify with the “dramatic” poet, while also making his underlying rapport with the “lyric” persona of this passage more explicit. His allusions to the ring-metaphor support the notion that he adapts the raw material of life without modifying it. The referent of the poem is “pure crude fact”; “indisputably fact, / Granite”; “The lingot truth” (I, 35, 86, 665-66, 459). “Thus far take the truth,” the poet tells us, “The untempered gold, the fact untampered with, / The mere ring-metal ere the ring be made!” (I, 364-66). These 32 32 extensions of the ring metaphor reinforce his objectivity—he merely pieces together what is already given. He understates the role of “fancy” by comparing it with the alloy that stands in the same relation to the poem as a scaffolding does to the building it supports before being dismantled. The tension between the objectivity and impersonality of the “dramatic” persona and the sincerity and spontaneity that accompany the “lyric” persona strains to the point of damaging the speaker’s credibility. By refusing to resolve these contradictions, the poet- speaker calls our attention to the artifice involved in the construction of these roles and the poet’s desire to evade self-definition. The poet’s ambivalence toward the opposition between the “lyric” and “dramatic” has broader implications for his treatment of history. The poet’s sense of indecision when it comes to self-definition is reproduced and then transcended in his dramatization of the conflict between positivism and Romanticism in his approach to history. By attributing a life cycle to the facts, the speaker invokes a Romantic notion of history as a process that can only be known immanently. On the other hand, his confidence that the facts will yield up “the whole truth” (I, 117) through organization and analysis echoes a positivist notion of history as a static accumulation of empirical facts. The poet is critical of the positivistic tendency to reify the historical process, however much he claims to be able to deduce the “whole truth” from the “facts” of the Old Yellow Book. Indeed, the poet’s problematic use of the word “fact” has tended to obscure the distinction in Book I between the relative merits of a positivist and Romanticist approach to history. The word “fact” conflates an ontological fact with an epistemological fact; the Old Yellow Book, which is a compilation of print and handwriting and a material thing, is a “pure crude fact / Secreted from man’s life when heart’s beat hard, / And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since” (I, 35-37, 86-88; my italics). 33 33
The word “secreted” has the added signification of conveying something that is hidden as well as something that is expelled. Positivists would insist that empirical facts aren’t immediately apparent, that they remain hidden at first and reveal themselves retroactively. Romanticists would view these facts as living realities in themselves, something immediately apparent and always on the verge of a kind of death. The “pure crude fact” of the Old Yellow Book combines both of these meanings: the facts are something “secret,” truths hidden from sight, known only retroactively, and “secreted,” living features of the past transplanted in an alien context. A “fact” is both a product and a process: as an ontological fact, it has a life-cycle and a habitat; as an epistemological fact, it has an ideal existence that can be ordered, arranged, amassed, and made to yield the “whole truth” of its original content. The latter sense is signified by the poet’s affirmation on his way home from the Florentine market that he had “Mastered the contents, [and] knew the whole truth, / Gathered together, bound up in this book” (I, 117-18). But the poet’s idea of historical truth differs ultimately from the notion of truth put forth by positivists because for him truth is closely linked to memory; only facts that produce real affects for the reader, not facts in the abstract, create what we call “truth.” This leads him to side with Romanticism to the detriment of his effort to fashion a reader capable of questioning inherited ideologies. His claims to have raised the dead facts of history to life threaten to restrict the freedom of the reader to formulate her own insights, just as they jar with the reserved gaze of the craftsman who brings a hard, exacting methodological rigor to bear on the resistant subject of his creative labor. Despite his reliance on a variant of Romantic historicism, the poet ultimately endorses a view of history that compliments the centrality of the active reader in his poetics; the freedom he grants the reader decentralizes the authority 34 34 traditionally invested by positivists in a transcendent objectivity and by Romanticists in the notion of an absolute perspective. By interpolating his own perspective onto the past, he destroys the illusion of a transparent objectivity, and rejects the solution of absolute perspective.4 The poet rewrites his discovery of the Old Yellow Book into the story of the Roman murder case in order to emphasize the impossibility of attaining an absolute perspective of the historical process. This induces the irony of the poet’s claim that he “disappeared” from the book to let the facts tell their own story, an irony which is surpassed by our sense that Book I is ultimately about the poet’s experience of projecting himself into the past as he reads the Old Yellow Book (I, 687, 1388-89). The irony of the poet’s claims to objectivity underlies the only possible moral we can draw from The Ring and the Book: our efforts to transcend the historicity of our perspectives are in vain, for, the moment we become interpreters of an event, we rewrite ourselves into its history. The poet’s approach calls attention to the rewriting that goes on whenever the idea of history is invoked; like the ring-maker’s relation vis-à-vis the ring, there can be no absolute perspective, no place outside the ring of the historical process. Though the poet claims to have disappeared from his text, the interpolation of his discovery of the Old Yellow Book in his account of the past belies his suggestion that he remains detached and impartial toward the facts. In Browning’s attempt to synthesize “lyric” and “dramatic” conceptions of poetry he makes use of the metaphor of the drama, in which the actor is
4 Critics are usually split on whether Browning’s presence implies that his version of the facts is authoritative, or whether it implies that no version is completely trustworthy. For representatives of either view, see Peckham and Baker. Peckham argues that Browning’s self-interpolation exposes his own distorting interest in piecing together the facts while Baker argues that Browning’s self-presentation reveals a naive Romanticist insisting on the absolute truth of his version of the facts. While I side with Peckham, Baker’s critique offers an important contribution to my understanding of the intellectual context that fuels Browning’s historicism. 35 35 encouraged to view herself in a play and as part of her own audience. Though the experience of going to a play is not reducible to reading a poem, the poet encourages us to read as if we were acting out the meaning of the poem and watching ourselves act, in the hope that this will distance us from our emotional involvement in the action. The actor provides a focal point for the way the “lyric” is reconciled with the “dramatic” in the poem. As Charlotte Kemper Columbus points out, the carnival atmosphere of The Ring and the Book breaks down the distinctions between the actor and the audience, encouraging readers to become actors, “if only by the act of interpretation” (Columbus 244). While other critics have called attention to the theatrical tropes in the framing books, they are not as attentive to the way Browning interrogates the dual roles of audience and actor.5 Just as the poet highlights the tension between the authority of the “lyric” and the “dramatic” poet, and just as he attempts to view the historical process objectively, without alienating his readers or relinquishing his claims to vatic insight, he also emphasizes the conflict between the roles of the audience and the actor in his account of the poem’s creation. Though it’s possible to view the poet-speaker as someone who, like a “stage-director,” mediates between audience and spectacle, the framing books are just as concerned with conveying the poet’s experience of reading the Old Yellow Book as they are with setting the stage for the reception of The Ring and the Book, and in this way the poet’s persona manages to encompass the roles of audience and actor. While these roles seem predicated on excluding one another, the poet demonstrates his capability to unite them in a marriage of contraries, a synthesis that also characterizes the attitude of his ideal reader.
5 For two contrasting viewpoints on the poet’s role-playing, see Gibson 97-99 and Blalock 48. Blalock refers to the persona of the framing books as a “stage-director” while Gibson argues that Browning fashions himself as a tragic dramatist. 36 36
The manner in which the poet harnesses the mutually exclusive roles of the detached audience and the sympathetic actor can be seen in the range and variety of attitudes he adopts toward Guido, the “main monster” of his tragic play (I, 551). While the poet-speaker’s displays of sympathy and disgust towards Guido align him closely with a lyric elevation of the didactic mode, his translation of Guido into many different contexts gives rise to a carnivalesque proliferation of interpretations and encourages us to adopt a more open-ended attitude toward the reading process. Browning’s presentation of the monologue as a stage and his treatment of identity as a performance encourages us to view his monologists’ statements in the context of underlying tensions between the self and the other, and as ironic commentaries on the very conditions of subjectivity. The endless translation between monologues encourages us to look for the effects of actions rather than their motives and to judge action on an affective basis. The poet’s shifting attitudes toward Guido show us how we can strike a balance between our affective response to the actors in the drama and our desire for a more comprehensive perspective. In the poet-speaker’s revision of his initial stance toward Guido, he presents in allegorical form the growth of a reader’s mind from emotional absorption to critical detachment. At first, the speaker is sympathetically involved in his portrayal of Guido, as an actor who, in attempting to imitate life, gets caught up in his character and ignores the immediacy of his surroundings, making an open display of his emotional investments and his repudiation of Guido’s actions. The poet’s emotional display forms the grounds of a premature judgment of Guido; departing radically from his persona as an impartial observer, the poet-speaker becomes an actor in the “tragic piece” he dishes up for his audience (I, 523). In Browning’s first narration of the murder case we get only a mediated view of the 37 37 emotional core of the story: the persecution and confinement of Pompilia, her deliverance and flight from Arezzo, and her death at the hands of Guido and his henchmen. It’s not until he clarifies the purpose of the poem before the citizens of Rome that he recommences his narrative in an emotive tone fully commensurate with the lyric mode: only then does the poet attempt to redefine himself. He takes us back to the night when the “book was shut and done with” (I, 472). Ready to begin “smithcraft,” now that the facts of the Old Yellow Book have taken to the alloy of his fancy, he steps out onto the balcony of his home in Florence and reenacts the “tragic piece” (I, 470). The overture makes it apparent that he is no longer the impartial observer he was in his first rendition of the tale: The life in me abolished the death of things, Deep calling unto deep: as then and there Acted itself over again once more The tragic piece. (I, 520-23) The poet’s absorption in the “tragic piece” is demonstrated by the shift into the present tense and his affirmation that he sees the events he describes; the past tense of the verb “to see” occurs seven times in the span of about eighty lines (I, 523, 538, 544, 563, 569, 577, 604). Approaching the scene of the crime, he shifts again into the present tense: as Guido, and his pack of sinister-looking “were- wolves” close in for the kill, the poet interjects with an exclamatory aside, warning his reader to “Close eyes!” (I, 611, 627). The poet-speaker’s self-censorship testifies to the strength of his emotional response; his sense of outrage, not his reason, underlines the assumption that Guido is guilty. The proximity of his perspective and its absorption in the scene augments the authority of his insight. But the lack of distance distorts our perception of the actors; the passage presents a hybrid of medieval romance and caricature. While Caponsacchi is compared to St. 38 38
George, Guido is cast in a subordinate role; he is a “main monster,” a “wolf,” kin of a “satyr family” of “obscure goblin creatures,” a descendant of a mother with a “monkey-mien,” an embodiment, in short, of the vast spectrum of the non-human and the abject (I, 549-51, 570-71). The hyperbole of this style reflects the poet- speaker’s need to make a display of his emotions as a sign of his lyric authority. In his commentary on this passage, Frederick Greenwood, the reviewer in the February 1869 issue of The Cornhill Magazine, directs Browning to observe the dramatic poet’s duty to observe no more partiality towards his creatures “than nature herself who first created them” (Litzinger 314). But the emotional absorption of the poet-speaker is a necessary moment in the development of a new kind of reader, part of a process that leads to a synthesis of lyric and dramatic reading. Besides implicitly acknowledging the impossibility of remaining objective, Browning includes this passage for strategic reasons: the emotional display distances himself from the moral estrangement of the dramatic poet. The passage offers perfect support for Browning’s response to Wedgwood’s charges that he had made Guido too sympathetic by “lending so much of [himself] to [his] contemptible characters” (Curle 159). Forced to defend his method against charges of moral relativism Browning asks, “is there anywhere other than an unintermitted protest (which would be worth nothing were it loud) against all the evil and in favour of all the good? Where does my sympathy seem diverse from yours so long as we watch the same drama?” (Curle 176). Browning is aware he has made his sympathies “against all the evil and in favour of all the good” known; rather than declare them outright, he makes a display of them; the performativity of this scene detracts from his sincerity and makes it possible to detect a strain of pragmatism behind Browning’s declaration. Even if we believe Browning is being sincere, 39 39 scenes of direct moral condemnation in The Ring and the Book are few and far between, intermittent and loud, which makes them “worth nothing” in Browning’s scheme of things, other than a demonstration of Wedgwood’s arrested development. Browning’s momentary demonstrations of lyric didacticism allow him to deflect charges of moral relativism, even if they ultimately fail to provide the direct authorial guidance of the omnipresent lyric persona. Indeed, the inconsistency with which the “lyric” is employed in the poem encourages us to view our emotional response to the characters and events depicted with detached scrutiny, as we learn to make the affects subject to an interminable process of self- revision. Browning’s reply to Julia Wedgwood demonstrates that the metaphor of the “drama” was an important one for him. Because the drama takes place in the public eye where one is at a further remove from one’s inner, private self, it imposes the kind of emotional distance between audience and performer necessary for critical reflection. The drama is also collaborative, formed through the interaction among different modes of labor—acting, stage design, costume, lighting, music, dance—which tell different, overlapping versions of the same story, forming a number of different thresholds, thresholds that reflect a broad spectrum of social relations. The poet-speaker reflects the experience of watching the drama through the lens of such a palimpsest, reveling in the ways in which our perspective varies as the threshold from which we behold the action multiplies and interpenetrates. The showman, or stage-impresario, is the persona that comes closest to encompassing the roles of the actor and the audience. After describing the scenes on the “round from Rome to Rome” (the city of Pompila’s birthplace and the scene of her murder) as if he were a living witness of every event along the way (I, 526), the poet provides another summary of the murder story, a 40 40 summary that is more restrained and unobtrusive than either of his previous renditions, before he launches into a sustained overview of the “voices [that] presently shall sound / In due succession” (I, 824-5). He signals his resumption of the “dramatic” voice by presenting his drama as a showman: “Let this old woe step on the stage again!” (I, 824). Sullivan has remarked concerning this passage that “the ‘I’ truly disappears and the ‘you’ (the audience) is called to the fore to hear (rather than see) the actors in the drama” (Sullivan 14). Though there is still very much an “I” at work in this, the fourth summary to date of the Old Yellow Book, the poet comes closer than ever to merging his perspective with his audience by presenting his poem as a play. The poet-speaker’s revisions of the murder story suggest the importance of context in establishing the meaning of an event, since our ability to see things from different thresholds allows us to scrutinize our emotional absorption and suspend judgment. In his re-contextualization of events in the Old Yellow Book, the poet-speaker aligns himself closely with the pope, who transplants the scene of Guido’s execution from the “bridge-foot close by Castle Angelo” to the People’s Square, the “city’s newer gayer end,” under the Pincian gardens, setting the stage for the “spectacle” of the execution which is recounted by three different speakers in Book XII (I, 350-59). The pope’s decision to switch the venue of Guido’s execution gives rise to a number of interpretations. In Book I the poet provides two of these interpretations. Because the “custom” of holding the execution at the bridge-foot by Castle Angelo has “somewhat staled the spectacle,” the pope believes Guido’s execution is significant enough to warrant a relocation to the “gayer end” of Rome (I, 352). The relocation will also teach the aristocracy a lesson, for the poet points out that the “proper head-and-hanging place” was “not so well i’the way of Rome, beside, / The noble Rome, the Rome of Guido’s rank” 41 41
(I, 350, 353-4). The poet-speaker provides additional perspectives in Book XII, where he quotes a letter written by a Venetian describing the execution in Rome. Detailing the carnivalesque excesses of the execution, the Venetian voices his reproval of the pope’s decision, arguing that the relocation comprises a “conciliatory sop / To the mob” (XII, 108-09). He goes further by attributing it to the pope’s “malice” toward the nobility (XII, 147). This is similar to Archangeli’s interpretation, who, in another letter quoted at length, expresses his desire that Rome “stigmatize the spite” which caused the “indecent change o’the People’s Place / To the People’s Playground” (XII, 311-12). The speculation that results from the pope’s decision to transport the execution to a different venue illustrates the importance context has in shaping our opinion of the meaning of an event. The translation between media gives rise to a proliferation of interpretations that make the pope’s motive irrelevant. The relocation makes class a visible factor and it gives rise to a general mood of lawlessness and irreverence. But these are the contingent effects and chance efflorescence of switching venues, rather than expressions of some innate intention. The change of venues foregrounds power relations from another threshold, rousing the ire of the nobility; they impute malicious motives to the pope, but whether or not these motives factor into his decision is never made known, and, furthermore, is beside the point. The episode highlights how the dramatic metaphor allows the poet-speaker to think of context as a space of interaction; like the pope’s relocation of the execution, the poet- speaker’s appropriation of the Old Yellow Book delimits a relationship between reader and text characterized by immersion and critical detachment. 42 42 The Limits of Authority The poet manages to inculcate a more complex understanding of his poetics by exploiting the full range of meaning secreted in the concept of the “dramatic,” but the conditions for self-representation remain what they were at the outset; the poet-speaker finds himself subordinated to the role of the lyric poet, and the process of poetic redefinition, dogged by the historical opposition between the lyric and the dramatic, is brought to a halt because of the very indefinability of the “dramatic.” As Nietzsche puts it, “only what has no history is definable”; the ahistorical character of the lyric makes it particularly amenable to redefinition and reconstruction, but the terms by which the poet undertakes a reappraisal of his public image remain outside the bounds of lyric identities (453). Faced with this dilemma, the poet draws on his autobiographical connections with his dead wife in an attempt to consolidate his authority; as a lyric poet, she is an unproblematic figure of authority that the poet-speaker willingly exploits. Her own verse novel, Aurora Leigh, serves as a precursor to The Ring and the Book, and the poet- speaker’s moniker for her, “Lyric Love,” references her ability to inhabit and redefine the role of the lyric poet (I, 1391; XII, 868). In his addresses to Elizabeth Barrett at the conclusion of each of the framing books, the ring serves as a potent metaphor, not only for the formal distinctions that set his long poem apart from hers, but also as a symbolic assertion of his right to appropriate her poetic authority. The ring becomes a kind of talisman, conducting the person of his late wife back to earth, hypostasizing the authority of a legitimate lyric poet to round out the ring of his poem and shore up whatever deficiencies it may have in respect to the hegemony of lyric. The poet’s entreaty to “Lyric Love” at the conclusion of Book I forms the posy of his ring—an inscription which authorizes the poet- speaker’s performance. In Book XII the poet’s ring of “rough ore” takes its place 43 43 as a guard ring around Lyric Love’s “rare gold ring of verse” (XII, 865, 869). The poet’s homage to the rare gold ring of verse observes standards of decorum, but not the superiority of lyric in itself—since there can be no vantage point, no place of centrality, the placement of the guard ring around the lyric does not align the latter with an absolute perspective. Nevertheless, it alludes to a significant point of distinction between the lyric and dramatic. The poet’s ring is rough because it is a compound of elements. Its ore constitutes a strange mixture of the lyric and dramatic that can’t assert its identity like the purity of the gold ring. The identity of the lyric is placed on a higher level than the difference of the dramatic. The poet-speaker’s stress on the purity of the lyric’s “rare gold ring of verse” ingratiates himself with his “lyric” public, without diminishing the role of critical detachment in his concept of poetry. The poet’s statements about art in the section that precedes his concluding invocation to “Lyric Love” in Book XII forms the clearest attempt to push beyond the opposition between lyric and dramatic verse. In this passage he compensates for the ambivalence of his conclusion, in which he and “Lyric Love” resolve into separate spheres, by making a case for the poem qua poem, rather than as a truthful account of what actually happened. No longer referring to the Old Yellow Book he presents to the interlocutor at the beginning of Book I, but to the poem he wrote, the poet-speaker dissociates his poem from a literal account of what actually took place. Unlike factual accounts of the past which attempt to reveal the “truth” through negation, by pointing out when others lie, and stacking the evidence against them, art remains “the one way possible / Of speaking truth” and performs the “work of truth” through falsehood (XII, 839-40, 853). While art may “twice show truth” because it calls attention to its medium, historical discourse can only undermine previous truths. Art is less concerned with proving the 44 44 soundness of its arguments than it is with producing affects that “breed the thought, / Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word” (XII, 856-57). The poet no longer dismisses the role of his fancy in shaping the facts of his poem, as he was intent on doing in Book I. In Book XII he dismantles the cliché of the dramatic poet and advocates an art of falsehood over an objective rendering of facts. Poetry, whether “lyric” or “dramatic,” constitutes a kind of knowledge of world that does not privilege meaning over the materiality of the “mediate word.” By opposing the literal truth of empiricists and positivists, the poet finds a common ground between his poetics and the imposing inheritance of the greater Romantic lyric; he appeals to an audience more inclined to view the poet as a prophet without compromising his perspectivism. Despite the failed effort of his attempt to redefine his poetic role, the poet still manages to encompass lyric and dramatic habits of mind in his approach to the historical material that supplies the “rough ore” of his rounded ring. His reconceptualization of reading as an exercise in extensive self-revision has ethical implications, since it encourages us to question the universality of particular social roles and scrutinize our own convictions and the social positions that presuppose them. The process of self-revision inhibits the narcotic effect of authority over the reader, and, at the same time, it models the balancing act that must take place between lyric and dramatic readings of the poem. The peril of such an approach is that it embraces a model of perspectivism that runs contrary to nineteenth-century investments in forms of absolute apprehension. The denial of absolute perspective implied by the poem’s method is amplified in the metaphor of the electric egg, in a passage that precedes the invocation to “Lyric Love” in Book I. As John Killham explains, in his comparison of man to a “glass ball” that at a shift of a “hair’s- breadth shoots you dark for bright” (XII, 1367, 1371), the poet-speaker alludes to 45 45 an “electric egg,” a nineteenth-century device “used to show the effect of an electric discharge in a glass vessel partially exhausted of air” (Killham 167). This is not the first time the poet uses a scientific metaphor to describe the reading process; but, unlike the craftsman of the ring-metaphor, the observer of the “glass ball with a spark a-top,” is in a much less stable position in relation to the “Action [which] now shrouds, now shows the informing thought” (XII, 1366-7). The change in perspective that a hairbreadth shift creates, “baffl[ing] so / Your sentence absolute for shine or shade” (1372-3), alludes to the reciprocity between the roles of the poet-speaker and his audience. The criteria for judging “man’s act, changeable because alive” (I, 1365) is modified according to our roles: as long as we rely on the notion of an “author” we forfeit our own perspective. Where we stand in relation to man establishes the criteria we use to judge “man’s act.” By playing with the limitations inherent in these roles the poet encourages us to view our sympathy from a distance and withhold our judgment. The same can be said of our affective response to the action, which supposedly shrouds an informing thought; we are always revising the way we feel about it and can never consummate that process once and for all.6
6 My reading of this passage as an indication of the perspectivism of The Ring and the Book differs from Killham’s argument that the glass ball is an “obscure image for human beings who, by lying, put on a false appearance to the world” (Killham 167), and J. Hillis Miller’s suggestion that the Ring and the Book attempts to “transcend point of view” by “multiplying points of view on the same event…and reach at last God’s own infinite perspective” (Miller 149). Both of these readings assume that the poet- speaker’s observations are reliable and his perspective of the events is absolute and authoritative. If, as Killham argues, the glass ball is a metaphor for the deception of appearances, the poet-speaker must be included among the liars, and all truths, including the reader’s, must be equally inadequate. Similarly, if we accepted Miller’s argument, we would have to deny the possibility that some perspectives are more legitimate than others. Both arguments assume negative definitions of truth and perspective. But for the poet-speaker “truth” is something positive and alive, a process and not a product. He makes the case over and over again that we cannot rely on received authority for the truth.
46 46
It is ultimately, then, a lyrical reading of history and a dramatic reading of his own argument which destabilizes the “author” of The Ring and the Book as a repository of meaning and which establishes the poem’s ideal reader as someone who can negotiate between an affective, lyrical response to the actors, and an ironizing, dramatic attitude to the “informing thought” that lies behind the utterance. By foregrounding the way our roles and our perspectives are mediated, the poet-speaker dramatizes the social process through which authority is constructed. In a diary entry dated May 26, 1868, six months before the publication of his “forthcoming new [p]oem,” William Allingham describes how Browning entertained him by pulling him into his study to show him the book the poem was based on: He takes me into his study, and shows me the original Book, a small brown quarto, printed account of the trial of Count Guido, with some original MS. Letters, stitched in at the end pleading for his respite. B. bought it off a stall in Florence for a few pence. He has told the story over and over again to various friends; offered it to A. Trollope to turn into a novel, but [Trollope] couldn’t manage it; then R.B. thought, ‘why not take it myself?’ (Allingham 180) “Why not take it myself?”—in hindsight, Browning’s epiphany seems predetermined, but Browning’s attempt to unload the “small brown quarto” into the hands of a novelist suggests that the thought of basing a poem on a historical document was far from paradigmatic. For poets to base their poems on History in the abstract was nothing new, but Browning calls deliberate attention to his appropriation of the “original Book,” encouraging us to read it. He does not turn the book into poetry with the hope we will accept it transparently as the truth; in other words, it is not as an historian that he presents us with the book. His practice 47 47 is to show us how the effect of truth is based on our performance of certain roles, roles that cannot be inhabited by just anyone. The effect of this appropriation unsettles us, takes truth and reveals its arbitrary status. Removes the ground of certainty from our interactions with others. It is not the expression of an informing thought, but the possible consequences of laying claim to an authority outside our reach; this is the risk we must be willing to take if we are to follow the poet- speaker’s lead. CHAPTER 3: HISTORY, ELEGY, AND THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE IN THE RING AND THE BOOK
And what has hitherto come of it? Who preserves The memory of this Guido, and his wife Pompilia, more than Ademollo’s name The etcher of those prints, two crazie each, Saved by a stone from snowing broad the Square With scenic backgrounds? Was this truth of force? (I, 367-72)
It is one of the paradoxes of the elegiac that even as it resists closure it succeeds in intervening in the name of the dead, inheriting a voice that compensates for the absence of the deceased, at the same time as it appropriates its power of address to admonish the living for a lapse into forgetfulness. The voice may belong to an aspect of the collective memory, the voice of memory’s conscience addressing a collective audience. This is the case in the dramatic monologue where the “I” of the meditative lyric consciousness is dethroned by the force of historical particularity. In his ability to appropriate the voices of the dead, the dramatic poet participates in the historian’s task of ventriloquizing the past. J. Hillis Miller notes that the “dramatic monologue is par excellence the literary genre of historicism” (108). The telos of the dramatic monologue is to recover the kernel of difference in every age and perspective. It is a resuscitative art. It admonishes the present for its blind superficiality, as much as it acts as a visible ledger for the way a culture wishes to remember itself. It is equally a case of utopian reminiscence and cultural narcissism. Traditionally the elegy is inward looking, but at the center of The Ring and the Book is a concern for a more public mode of address. “Public” has a number of 49 49 different connotations in the poem. It refers alternately to the factious multitude, who along with the poet, review the murder case, as well as the popular audience to whom the poet addresses his justifications of the poem. It signifies a quality inhering both in the documentary evidence and the poem, both made available to a public. It’s a quality that inheres in the form of the dramatic monologue, so many of which are eponymously titled, after the name of a fictionalized “I.” These names contain an incantatory power; they have the ability to start the “dead alive” for those of us always on the verge of forgetting (I, 733). Often the speaker speaks, or is alluded to, while the name is withheld from us. In the passage quoted above the poet addresses the public, at the same time as he reveals the name of the etcher he withheld upon first mentioning the prints (I, 65-71). The tone of the passage is plaintive and admonitory. It is plaintive because near oblivion is the condition upon which Browning bases his poem—his public is unaware of the “fact that…such creatures [as Guido and Pompilia] were” (1, 662), and they seem equally indifferent to the other fact that their trace “trickles in silent orange or wan grey / across our memory, dies and leaves all dark” (XII, 17-18). It is admonitory because this lapse of remembrance, made more acute by the disclosure of the etcher’s name and the reproach that we will have already forgotten it by now, implies that the public is spiritually impoverished and open to reproach. By naming the “etcher of those prints,” the poet acknowledges Ademollo’s obscurity, at the same time as he redeems him from obsolescence. The past imposes the same kind of injunction on the present as the dead do upon those who have survived, and by invoking names we should know but have forgotten, the dramatic structure of The Ring and the Book engages in a dynamic of remembrance and reproach similar to the one found in the elegy, albeit one with a more public mode of address. 50 50
With the exception of a few scholars,1 critics of The Ring and the Book have overlooked the central figuration of death, loss, and the “work of mourning” in Browning’s long poem. By grounding our reading of The Ring and the Book in the theory of elegy, the extent to which it may be classified as an elegiac long poem will become apparent and will contribute to our understanding of elegy as well as our appreciation of the poem. Contemporary scholarship on the elegy has taken Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” as a point of departure. Peter M. Sacks was the first to explore this avenue. Sacks uses the Freudian account of successful mourning to explain the elegiac process. According to Sack’s framework, elegy provides a flexible heuristic for a healthy negotiation between private loss and social obligation, guiding the bereaved past the stages of grief toward substitutions for the lost object and reconciliation with the community. But Sacks’ model tends to overlook the political dimension of the elegiac, which is often more adversarial in its interrogation of cultural norms and objectives. In his reappraisal of the modern elegy, Jahan Ramazani attempts to correct some of Sacks’ oversights by historicizing the elegy, placing greater emphasis on the dialogue between elegy and other modes of commemoration, such as obituaries and funerary practices, but he remains dependent on Freud’s account of normal and melancholic mourning, and fails to transcend Freud’s focus on the personal dimensions of mourning. As R. Clifton Spargo notes, Ramazani and Sacks pay a considerable amount of attention to the “structures of symbolism or idealism that nourish identity and maintain the social order,” while overlooking the political
1 For a discussion of the motif of the reanimated body in the dramatic monologue, with particular reference to Books 1 and XII of The Ring and the Book, see Fox. Her reading of The Ring and the Book builds off of the suggestions of Roberts and O’Gorman who survey Browning’s experimentation with elegy throughout his corpus; see Roberts and O’Gorman. My interrogation of the relationship between history, elegy, and the dramatic monologue in Books VI and IX of The Ring and the Book is indebted to these articles. 51 51 dimension of the elegy’s interrogation of “the symbolic social structures that contain and reduce the meaning of the other who is being lamented” (11). The form of the dramatic monologue and the design of The Ring and the Book with its multiplication of viewpoints, makes it difficult to deal satisfactorily with the loss that haunts its pages—the murder of Pompilia. In this sense, the poem is about both the ethical stakes involved in claiming the right to represent and appropriate the voice of the dead, and the problem involved in negotiating a public sphere in which contesting interpretations of the meaning of the other who is being lamented are necessarily reductive, making the completion of a successful act of mourning impossible. Rather than internalize this process, the form of The Ring and the Book makes this interrogation of mourning a public matter entangled in a complicated discursive atmosphere concerned with establishing guilt and innocence. The multiple perspectives of the long poem opens up a number of possible stances towards the murder: the commemorative stance concerned with accountability toward the other, the utilitarian stance preoccupied with exploiting a relationship with the deceased for ideological purposes, and the forensic stance concerned with using the body of the deceased as a master signifier. Though the stances often intermingle and implicate one another, my reading focuses on Caponsacchi as a representative of the utilitarian stance and Bottini as a representative of the forensic stance.2 In either case, the attempt to speak convincingly for the dead, or to appropriate the body of the dead as a guarantor of
2 There are two basic factions in The Ring and the Book, the pro-Pompilia and the pro-Guido factions. The former are concerned with defending Pompilia’s reputation, while the latter are concerned with justifying Guido’s actions. It makes sense to focus on Caponsacchi and Bottini since these are the last two speakers in the pro-Pompilia camp, though their perspectives are worlds apart. Interestingly enough, the speakers share many of the same characteristics as the speaker of Book 1 and XII. As youthful versions of Browning, they represent “unsuccessful” versions of the relationship between the mourner and the deceased while the relationship between Browning and EBB in the framing books represents a more “successful” version of this relationship. 52 52 truth, subsumes the commemorative impulse of the elegiac under the rubric of forensic truth and retributive justice. As institutions jostle for the power to appropriate the voice of Pompilia, the impulse to account for her loss becomes subsumed by a rationalizing logic, which in its blind pursuit of truth and reparation, turns Pompilia’s death into a means devoid of meaning. As a result of this, we experience the absence not of any one individual, but of death itself. The dead speak in various guises in the poem, but the recognition they are dead remains conspicuously absent. While mourning is usually depicted as a process complete within itself, with a beginning, middle, and end, The Ring and the Book depicts it as a process without termination. Its recursive structure confounds the linearity of the Freudian “work of mourning” as it resists the reader’s desire for elegiac closure. The poem is disturbingly silent in respect to closure, and openly complicit in what Ramazani terms the “economic problem of mourning”—the spirit of opportunism with which the elegist seizes upon the loss that predicates his or her poem for rhetorical or aesthetic purposes (Ramazani 6). The violence done towards the memory of Pompilia serves throughout as a dominant trope for the creative process, refracting the corrosive effect of historical amnesia that motivates Browning’s poetic intervention, at the same time as it makes mourning a central concern of the long poem. The classical reading of Browning’s long poem sees its perspectivism as a weakness rather than a strength, arguing that it detracts from our sense of the poem’s unity. In the criticism of such classical commentators as Henry James, Browning’s effort to present death from the perspective of the polis becomes displaced, and the meaning of Pompilia’s death becomes subjectivized. In James’s view, the poem’s multiple points of view frustrate readers’ attempts to establish a 53 53 consistent attitude toward Pompilia: “amid the variety of forces at play about her the unity of the situation isn’t. . . handed to us at a stroke” (394). He chooses Caponsacchi as a reasonable focal point because he concentrates an emotional complex centered on the figure of Pompilia. James ignores the way that Browning rejects the elegy’s emphasis on a solitary mourner by exposing Pompilia’s death to the contesting interpretations of various speakers in the poem and, by doing so, interrogates of some of the elegy’s unexamined assumptions: What qualifies the “I” of the elegy to appropriate the voice of the dead? Under what conditions and with what ends in mind does the elegist lay claim to the right to resurrect the dead, so to speak? The perspectivism exposes the claims of the solitary elegist to those of the polis revealing the way power is implicated in or attempts to account for death. No portion of the poem maps out the contentious terrain in which speakers contest the meaning of Pompilia’s death better than “Half-Rome” and “The Other Half-Rome”—the titles of these books testify to the way Pompilia’s death forms a public event in the theatrical context of the city, giving rise to public debate over its significance before Pompilia has even had a chance to die from her wounds. The speakers of these books illustrate some of the differences between the forensic and utilitarian stance. In the latter speaker we see traces of the utilitarian stance that will be a major feature of Caponsacchi’s monologue, while in the former speaker’s response to the murder we see strains of the forensic stance that will come to predominate in Bottini’s monologue: Case could not well be simpler,—mapped, as it were, We follow the murder’s maze from source to sea, By the red line, past mistake. . . (II, 182-85) 54 54
“Half-Rome” purges his account of pathos; he is only interested in the fact, the bare geography of the murder. The “source” conflates the motive of the crime with Pompilia’s maimed body, and the absent series of events that led up to the murder is conflated with traces of blood, a “red line” that the body-as-evidence leaves behind. The latter speaker summarizes the murder in the following terms: Truth lies between: there’s anyhow a child Of seventeen years, whether a flower or weed, Ruined: who did it shall account to Christ— Having no pity on the harmless life And gentle face and girlish form he found, And thus flings back. (III, 83-89) The objectivity of Half-Rome’s account of the murder is displaced by the lament of the “Other Half-Rome” who tries to persuade his interlocutors by appealing to the pathos of the situation. Pompilia is “ruined” in a double sense: her sexuality is “ruined” and so is the quality of her presence. From now on, she occupies a liminal space between life and death. The Other Half-Rome seizes upon Pompilia’s “ruined” presence and makes it into the object of our sympathy. The true motive of the murder is not the speaker’s object; whether Pompilia is a “flower or weed” is irrelevant. Nor is the evidence of the body considered an embodiment of truth, as it is in the forensic stance of Half-Rome—instead, the speaker’s appeals to ethos attempt to persuade us of the sincerity of his portrait of Pompilia. Rather than pose a question, death offers a means to an end: it allows the Other Half Rome to condemn the living and demand retribution on behalf of the dead. It is “utilitarian” to the extent that it subsumes the death within a spiritual economy; while the utilitarian elegist sanctifies the dead, he augments the spiritual credit that he inherits. 55 55
Besides juxtaposing divergent stances toward the murder these passages offer competing models of troping: metaphor and metonymy. Returning to the scene of the crime as Half-Rome does becomes a centrifugal tendency, a destabilizing force in the poem, capable of regenerating language. Just as the forensic stance pulls back to reveal the traces and marks left on the site of the maimed body, metonymy analyzes and abstracts. In Half-Rome’s mapping of the murder the color red stands for blood—a metonymy of a metonymy. It’s an abstraction of an abstraction; we hardly realize that the referent is the body of a murdered girl. The Other Half Rome represents the centripetal movement, or stabilizing force of the poem, which augments the metaphorical framework of the poem, finding new metaphors to fill in the sutures. While the metonymic process engenders new ways to conceptualize the murder, it tends to neutralize the referent, a consequence that threatens to desensitize us to the violence perpetrated on the victim. On the other hand, it prevents the metaphorical configurations it presupposes from ossifying; dealing a blow to the idealizations of the utilitarian elegist, it rejects conventional treatments of the deceased. The inclusion of metonymy allows for the possibility of self-critique, since it tends to expose the forensic elegist’s attempts to consolidate the meaning of Pompilia through metaphor. Half-Rome and the Other Half-Rome dramatize the pitfalls of the utilitarian and forensic stances. There are dangers involved in sympathizing with the victim, not because speakers risk projecting their subjective bias on the outcome, but because they risk emptying the victim of her individuality, as the Other Half- Rome does. The appeal to his audience’s sense of pathos forces the Other Half- Rome into a sentimentalizing rhetoric that idealizes Pompilia. This idealization makes it possible to subsume Pompilia’s death within a retributive framework— 56 56 the living are made to feel the debt in the wake of her “ruined” presence. But if the utilitarian stance errors on the side of sentimentality, the forensic stance participates in the same “economic problem of mourning” that the utilitarian stance does, desensitizing us to the violence of death, at the same time as it uses the death to advance an argument. But because its claims refer to the body of the deceased, rather than the character of the deceased, the forensic stance is more explicit about the way it exploits death—its participation in the “economic problem of morning” is self-critical and encourages us to question those who refer to the dead in order to bolster their own ethos. Book VI introduces us to Caponsacchi. Like Bottini he resembles an immature version of Robert Browning: his literary aspirations contend with his social obligations in a way that stunts development in either direction. Bottini finds himself in a less compromised position than Caponsacchi. He is working on a draft of a speech that he will present before the court. Without having to worry much about how he will represent himself before the court, he feels confident he will win his case. Caponsacchi, however, is charged with defending Pompilia’s reputation. The need to establish the credibility of his own ethos places him in the compromised position of having to exploit her death. Pompilia’s death allows him to occupy the moral high ground in relation to his interlocutors and those he perceives as his enemies. The demands of the rhetorical situation impede his capacity to grieve for Pompilia. Caponsacchi’s response to this impasse foregrounds the tension between the ethical need to confront his loss and the practical need to adopt rhetorical postures that subsume the self and turn the experience of loss into self-mockery. In Caponsacchi’s monologue the movement is from self-recrimination to blame and then compensation. Caponsacchi clamors against the destructive force 57 57 of his grief at the news of Pompilia’s death and finds a source of stability in the image of the “hollow rock” (VI, 72), an ambivalent symbol for the church and a personal source of comfort. In time, he ceases to act the part of the indignant lover and, in order to compensate, fulfills a sacerdotal role, as an otherworldly soul who sacrifices his will in order to reveal a redemptive truth to mankind. For this Caponsacchi, Pompilia’s death serves as the vehicle for the redemption of his interlocutors. By this time, the monologue, which had commenced with remorse and self-censure, resolves itself into the empty, stock gestures of the pulpit and the funeral parlor. Caponsacchi recognizes that his need to “show Pompilia who was true” (VI, 172) is bound up in the ethos he presents to his interlocutors. In order to contest Guido’s presentation of Pompilia as his lover he must prove himself a true priest. He cannot adhere to the ethical imperative to present the “death / that’s in my eyes and ears and brain and heart” (VI, 191-92). Instead he must submit to the forensic stance of proving himself “taintless” (VI, 197), Pompilia a “wonderful white soul” (VI, 200), and Guido a “murderer calling the white black” (VI, 201). His rhetoric recalls the Other Half-Rome in his tendency to characterize Guido and Pompilia in terms of opposed types. Like the Other Half-Rome, the destructive energies of the elegiac are turned against Guido in a way that demonizes him as “devilish and damnable” (I, 247) and sanctifies Pompilia as a “snow-white soul” (VI, 195). In order to consolidate his identity as a priest, a role which gives him a much needed advantage over Guido, Caponsacchi must deny his sexual feelings for Pompilia and must exploit her death in a way that is compatible with his vow of celibacy and his claim to have undergone a spiritual transformation at the instigation of Pompilia’s revealed truth. 58 58
Caponsacchi can never come to terms with Pompilia’s death because he must categorically deny his sexuality. His interlocutors would not recognize his legitimacy if he disclosed his love for Pompilia. He needs the authority of the priestly role in order to discredit Guido’s version of the story. He is a “priest and loveless” (VI, 1654); it is “a priest [who] speaks: as for love, — no!” (VI, 1969). His role as priest precludes his role as lover. Consequently, Caponsacchi is ambivalent towards a role that presents a barrier for his capacity to grieve his lover. The situation Caponsacchi is in prevents him from responding to this imperative in a satisfying way. The structure of the monologue calls our attention to the way social formalities hinder us from thinking about the values involved in being accountable for the other. Caponsacchi’s inability to describe Pompilia in terms other than a “snow- white soul” comes back at him with a vengeance in Bottini’s monologue. We may be offended at Bottini’s misogynistic portrayal of Pompilia, but this violent response toward Caponsacchi’s construction of Pompilia is actually more requisite to the ethical demands her death raises than the sentimentalizing pathos of Caponsacchi’s monologue. One may reject Bottini’s misogyny, while recognizing that his monologue fulfills a demand that has been left up for grabs by the complacency of other speakers. Bottini plays off of the reader’s desire for elegiac closure, which is epitomized by troping Pompilia as the “true effigiem of a saint” (IX, 1397), and replaces it with a version of events that actually parodies the compensatory gestures that become fused to the objectless will to grieve. Bottini tropes Pompilia in contrasting ways. On the one hand, she is a metonymization of virtually every female heroine ever recorded in classical antiquity. For Bottini, Pompilia is beautiful and uses her looks and passive feminine instincts to escape from a disastrous marriage, one that threatens her life 59 59 and the honor of her husband. She uses the “right means to the permissible end” (IX, 1416); for the “greatest sin of womanhood” is “that which unwomans it,” and Pompilia’s means are in accord with her “nature,” though “prettily perverse” (IX, 791-93, 804). While she was still alive Pompilia’s sex provided the motive for murder. Now that she is dead it provides Bottini with evidence for his contention that Pompilia was innocent. Bottini encourages us to read the gendered body in the place where the “truth” of the murder secretes itself. The edifice of the forensic quest for knowledge of guilt and innocence is erected around the sign of the gendered body and the forensic stance opens out into the “economic problem of mourning.” After all, Pompilia’s death “enabled [Bottini] to make the present speech” (IX, 1423). The lawyer callously reaps the aesthetic profit that has accrued to him over the loss of Pompilia. In the early stages of his monologue Pompilia is less of a person in her own right than a condensation of a number of classical figures. The way Bottini deploys this metonymic process which pieces Pompilia together from a number of disparate sources mirrors the way a painter patches together a painting of the Holy family from a number of preliminary studies (X, 17-118). Bottini uses the example of the painter in order to point out the shortcomings of metonymy. The painter, Bottini maintains, must turn away from the “fragmentary studied facts” and synthesize them into a whole (IX, 102). This comparison of assembling a case to creating a painting illustrates Bottini’s aestheticization of the murder case. Even though he maintains the superior value of the synthetic view of the case, he quickly reneges from his own advice and reverts from the painting of the Holy family to a portrait of Pompilia, and finally, to the painter’s model which is, ultimately, the gendered body of Pompilia (“I must let the portrait go, / content me with the model” [IX, 170-71]). Bottini is incessantly driven back to his key piece 60 60 of evidence in the case: the body of his model. Like the example of Lucretia, whom Bottini invokes in this scene, the body of Pompilia is paradoxically “ruined” and “virginal”—it becomes a piece of evidence that Bottini can twist and turn in any direction he desires. Regardless of how incongruent his synthesis of the case is from his portrait of Pompilia, he can win his case by tossing those canvases aside and presenting the body of the model. While the metonymies of Pompilia threaten to hypertrophy into yet another stereotypical image of femininity, Bottini deconstructs the utilitarian idealization of Pompilia by presenting Pompilia as a metaphor for the encomium he is composing. Bottini continues to weave a complex fabric of classical allusions as he deploys the following metaphor, which equates Pompilia with a magnetic force: Shall modesty dare bid a stranger brave Danger, disgrace, nay death in her behalf— Think to entice the sternness of the steel Save by the magnet that moves the manly mind? (IX, 482-85) The metaphor of the poem as a magnetic force, which here is being used to trope Pompilia’s seduction of Caponsacchi through her love letters, goes back to Plato, though Montaigne dresses it up more to our purposes in his essay “On Cato the Younger”: It can more easily be seen in the theatre that the sacred inspiration of the Muses, having first seized the poet with anger, grief or hatred and driven him outside himself whither they will, then affects the actor through the poet and then, in succession, the entire audience — needle hanging from needle, each attracting the next one in the chain (Complete Essays, pp. 260, trans. M. A. Screech) 61 61
Bottini, with his intimate knowledge of classical oratory, would have been acquainted with the metaphor. The way he uses it here links Pompilia with the creative act of composition that aligns poet, actor, and audience together like needles in a chain. This metaphorical displacement of Pompilia comes closer to confronting her death than the heap of classical heroines, goddesses, and demigoddesses Pompilia carries in her metonymic train. It does this by collapsing distinctions between the poet, Pompilia, and the audience. The play between metonymy, which calls our attention to the centrifugal energies of the poem, and metaphor, which reconstructs the image of Pompilia, makes her a much more problematic figure of presence in Bottini’s monologue. As a figure of sexual aggression, appropriating the master’s pen and Guido’s sword “in the garb of truth” (IX, 889), Pompilia becomes a destabilizing force in Bottini’s monologue. The eroticization of Pompilia correlates to Bottini’s sadistic plotting of the murder, which, in its eroticization of death, problematizes the conventions of the elegy at the same time as it foregrounds the misogyny of the legal system and the hidden cruelty of transpersonal forces. Bottini transforms a scene in which Caponsacchi carries an unconscious Pompilia to her bed in the inn at Castelnuouvo. Caponsacchi had described this altruistic act in terms fitting his sacerdotal role: I never touched her with my finger-tip Except to carry her to the couch, that eve, Against my heart, beneath my head, bowed low, As we priests carry the paten. . . (VI, 1617-20). The metaphorical association of Pompilia with a paten provides an ironic commentary on Caponsacchi’s compromised position as a priest making an account of his actions before a court of law. Altick and Loucks describe the 62 62 corresponding passage in Bottini’s monologue as the “most audacious sexual scene in Victorian literature” (180). The rape scene, which Loucks and Altick quote at length, depicts a sexually repressed Caponsacchi suddenly losing control over his baser instincts, as he stoops over a sleeping Pompilia. For Altick and Loucks, the rape scene is part of Bottini’s ongoing attempt to discredit Pompilia; they never question the uncanny similarity between Bottini’s testimony and Caponsacchi’s account of what happened at the inn. The parallel accounts lead us to question whether either’s testimony represents a “true” version of Pompilia. In each case the rhetorical situation circumscribes what counts as a permissible representation of Pompilia’s character. In the first instance, Caponsacchi addresses a tribunal of priests. Though he is ambivalent about his role, it is the only thing that guarantees him status. To declare his love for Pompilia would undermine him in his attempts to persuade his interlocutors, and it would lead to his ostracization from society. Bottini’s monologue is addressed to a legal profession that is more openly misogynistic. In his defense of Pompilia, Bottini acts out the role of St. George, a role that Caponsacchi could never legitimately play. By teasing out the possibility that Pompilia and Caponsacchi were lovers, Bottini is titillating his audience. It doesn’t damage his own position; on the contrary, it makes his argument more persuasive without damaging Pompilia’s character. There is no reason why we should treat one version as “truer” than another. Regardless of what we may think of each character, they are both in compromised positions in respect to their audience. In Caponsacchi’s monologue we saw how the objectless will to grieve became fused to the forensic and instrumental aims of the speaker. Caponsacchi’s self-authenticating priestliness was offered as a demonstration of Guido’s guilt and unworthiness, and his troping of Pompilia as a “saint and martyr both” (I, 909) 63 63 constituted a crass exploitation of her death that really evaded ethical accountability by turning her death into a means. Bottini sets himself the task, not of proving Guido’s guilt, or Pompilia’s innocence, but of demonstrating how her actions conform to stereotypical feminine traits. More than any other monologue, his comes closest to classical lyric form because he can ignore the facts and appeal to the poets for authority. Oddly enough, Pompilia becomes less of a stereotype than a complicated semantic site, in which stereotypical traits contend with a power of assertion comparable with the constructive energies that bring poetry to life. Rather than silence Pompilia’s sexuality, Bottini makes it both the subject and the substance of the poem. By rejecting Caponsacchi’s idealized depiction of Pompilia, Bottini comes closer to fulfilling the ethical demands that elegies account for, without succumbing to compensatory fantasies that attempt to profit from the loss. Bottini calls the embedded value structure of the elegy into question by transforming the build up to the murder into an attenuated play between delay and gratification; this build-up becomes an objectifying striptease of Pompilia, the violence of which foregrounds the economic problem of mourning. But Bottini’s objectification of Pompilia is not total: her passivity as object serves to foreground her activity as a destructive force, as in the scene where she appropriates Guido’s sword in her “garb of truth.” Describing her nakedness as a “garb” coaxes out the ambiguity implicit in the relationship between subject and object. In Pompilia’s case, even as the “authors of her being” (IX, 827) fashion her into a passive object of the male gaze, there is also a violence that disrupts that passivity. Like her male authors, Pompilia learns to “play the scribe” (IX, 458) and become her very own author. Even in her passivity there seems to be an immense amount of activity. In respect to gender, Bottini’s portrayal of Pompilia is surprisingly ambiguous, but 64 64
Bottini’s narrative plays into the desires of a patriarchal audience eager for some sort of reprisal for this indeterminacy. Bottini calls attention to this by teasing out the ambiguities of the murder scene. As he builds up toward the scene of the crime, Bottini pictures Pompilia waiting expectantly at her parent’s house, filling the interval with interjections like “O let him not delay” (IX, 1235) and “Husband, return then, I re-counsel thee” (IX, 1299). Bottini’s account of the murder presents Pompilia’s death as an ironic (sexual) consummation of her relationship with Guido. Pompilia’s catastrophic rendezvous with Guido does not entirely do away with the ambiguity: she enters an intermediate stage between life and death, past and present, presence and absence. The ambiguity of her death scene restores a sense of activity to Pompilia, even in her death. This is confirmed by the fact that Pompilia survives the murder long enough to deliver her testimony of Guido’s “immitigable guiltiness” (IX, 1478). Though Bottini continues to refer to Pompilia’s sex as a key piece of evidence in his interpretation of her death, his narrative calls attention to the formal conventions of Caponsacchi’s monologue that objectify her death and render it passive. Caponsacchi managed to avoid broaching the issue of Pompilia’s death by shifting responsibility from himself to the legal system in charge of protecting Pompilia. His canonization of Pompilia is no less an act of appropriation, because the church, like the court, is a significant cultural institution and demands canonization as a means to attract worshippers and consolidate its authority. Bottini, on the other hand, does not need to idealize Pompilia, he only needs to show how her death confirms his argument that Guido endangered her life to the very end and in her flight from Arezzo she acted according to the dictates of her sex. Here the economic problem of mourning focuses less on the character of Pompilia than on the character of her death. Her death becomes erotically charged 65 65 for Bottini because it acts both as a reprisal for her masculine energies and the occasion of Bottini’s self-confirming rhetoric. As such, Bottini becomes oblivious to the actuality of death, and even callous in the way he objectifies it in order to attack his adversary, Arcangeli. Bottini’s subordination of Pompilia’s death in rational economy of means and ends, exemplifies the way representatives of various institutions get so carried away by their language games they loose sight of what it is they refer to, like in the following passage where Bottini confronts his opponent: Listen to me, thou Archangelic swine! Where is the ambiguity to blame, The flaw to find in our Pompilia? Safe She stands, see! Does thy comment follow quick ‘Safe, inasmuch as at the end proposed; But thither she picked way by devious path — Stands dirtied, no dubiety at all! I recognize success, yet, all the same, Importunately will suggestion prick. . . (IX, 947-55) Comments like “safe she stands” and “I recognize success” show that the conversation between the advocates is hardly about a murdered girl, or the values involved in their legal machinations, it is about separating guilt from innocence, and success from failure. The passage shows how far his rhetoric falls short of addressing existential themes in a meaningful way. The lawyers are too self- absorbed, too preoccupied with dismissing each other out of hand and searching through musty books for external authority to reflect on the value of a person’s life or to begin to account for her death. How can someone’s death amount to a success? The notion is as absurd as a language game that legitimizes itself by 66 66 claiming to refer directly to what is real, and an example of how demoded that language becomes which seals itself off from the world. Bottini’s attitude of callous indifference is not only a product of the language games of his institutional role; it is also a condition of his ethos as an aspiring poet. In the same way, Caponsacchi finds himself caught in a middle ground, between his role as priest and lover. But whereas Bottini foregrounds the conditions which make the exploitation of Pompilia’s death possible in his roles as poet and lawyer, Caponsacchi masks his exploitation of Pompilia in religious allegory and cultural myth. While Bottini’s plotting of the murder equates death with sexual climax, Caponsacchi’s fantasies of Pompilia equate erotic frenzy with a desire for death. His desire for Pompilia parallels his masochistic dependence on the church for his sense of a discrete self. When he thinks of reneging on his “plighted troth” to the “mystic love / o’the lamb” (VI, 977-78) he envisions himself before the apple in the “fabled garden” in range of the “seven-fold dragon’s watch” (VI, 1002, 1009). Pompilia is both a forbidden fruit and a damsel of medieval romance. Caponsacchi’s ahistorical allegorization of his relationship with her makes it easier to evade the economic problem of morning. Unlike Bottini, his authority is not derived from particular classical authors like Virgil and Ovid, whose place in Christian dogma is problematic, but from pervasive cultural myths. Bottini’s references are much more problematic because he fashions himself as a pagan author, adhering to a bygone ethical code. His models include the aforementioned authors, in addition to classical orators like Isocrates, to whose “famed panegyric” (IX, 1571), advocating the invasion of Persia, he compares his own speech, not too unfavorably, for he excuses his deficiencies on historical grounds, “being born in modern times / With priests for auditory” (IX, 1576-77). 67 67
Bottini’s classical models tend to historicize his treatment of Pompilia. Pompilia’s death gives him a chance to emulate the classical authors he admires. For all his ambivalence about his role, Caponsacchi cannot break his dependence on the priestly ethos. Bottini’s incompetence offers a more effective critique of his institutional role. His aestheticization of his defense is explicit about the way instrumental reason subsumes death and turns it into a political end. Bottini doesn’t even attempt to excuse himself or anticipate charges of criminal negligence as he opts to defend his client instead of going on the offensive. In his willingness to dispense with such formalities, Bottini satirizes the institution he serves. Rather than allow them to become fused to the utilitarian stance, as they do in Caponsacchi’s monologue, Bottini liberates elegiac energies to work against the prevailing cultural mythologies in a way that ironizes them, and keeps death from perpetuating those mythologies and the institutions that they serve. Bottini makes it possible to view the appropriation of Pompilia’s death from a critical distance. It’s worth noting that in carrying out his forensic aims, Bottini emphasizes the very aspects of Pompilia Caponsacchi found it prudent to ignore, namely, that aspect of sexuality which asserts itself in any formidable attempt to confront death. Bottini’s critique of the forensic approach to the murder depends on overturning the binary of innocence and guilt, “the liker innocence to guilt / the truer to life is what [Pompilia] feigns” (IX, 544-55). For Bottini, the distinction between innocence and guilt is an imaginary one. We may always impute good or bad motives to Pompilia’s actions. By doing so we may transform guilt into a semblance of innocence, or vice-versa. So the point is not to prove Pompilia “perfect in the end, / perfect i’the means, perfect in everything” (IX, 1437-38) but to show how guilt may do the dirty work of innocence, “grime is grace / to whoso gropes amid the dung for gold” (IX, 550-51). For Bottini, not only is perfect 68 68 innocence impossible, it is not a goal worth pursuing, for then, Pompilia would be the purely passive victim others make her out to be. It’s purposeless to quibble about guilt and innocence, especially when Pompilia’s guilt is what makes her innocent. This revaluation of values is highly audacious coming out of the mouth of a public prosecutor, and it corrects reductive readings of Pompilia by the other speakers. Ultimately, Bottini’s monologue frees up forces that counter the compensatory drives of the utilitarian stance and addresses shortcomings in the other monologues. Bottini shows how “guilty” sexuality feeds off of “virginal” death in a way that ironizes attempts to distinguish between them and undermines attempts to subsume death within a sterilizing discourse. It’s possible to argue that Caponsacchi’s monologue does this by foregrounding the way he evades the issue of sexuality rather than indulging in a semantic play that encourages us to view death ironically. In that case, Bottini’s monologue provides both the diagnosis and the antidote for Caponsacchi’s repressive maneuvers in a way that frees up meaning and allows us to reflect on the value of elegiac energies in our attempts to confront death and make an account of the defunct. How can we confront mortality without reifying the will to grieve by settling on a socially conditioned substitute? How can we account for the dead without reducing a life into a vapid abstraction, place filler for an ideology that can take on any meaning? These are questions Bottini’s monologue confronts us with as we attempt to square his approach to Pompilia’s death with other efforts in The Ring and the Book. Any attempt to account for the poem must consider the self-conscious way in which grief is put off and the full encounter with death postponed and the implications this has for an ethics of elegiac reading.
CHAPTER 4: HISTORY AND APOCALYPSE: THE QUESTION OF ENDING IN THE RING AND THE BOOK
Sirs, have I spoken one word all this while Out of the world of words I had to say? (XI, Guido, 2415-16) I seem not to have begun, even, to say the many things I had in mind to say. Robert Browning to Julia Wedgwood, 19 Nov. 1868
Robert Browning was reconsidering the ending of The Ring and the Book as late as 19 November 1868, a few days before the publication of the first installment of the poem. Browning had already posted the first two volumes, printed and bound, to Julia Wedgwood on 5 November. In a May 26 diary entry William Allingham had recalled the poet’s rationale for publishing the poem in separate installments. Browning was preoccupied with the reception of the poem and wanted to combat his reader’s habits of skipping to the end of a lengthy piece of writing. The monthly installments would give people “time to read and digest [the poem], part by part, but not to forget what has gone before” (181). The poet clearly wanted his poem to be experienced as a continuous process in which no part claimed primacy over the whole. He identified in the reading habits of the British Public the same nihilistic tendency with which Guido struggles in the penultimate Book: “sick, not of life’s feast but of step’s to climb / to the house where life prepares her feast, — of means / to the end” (XI, 1901-03). By privileging the end over the process, the British Public had turned reading into active drudgery, a means to an end without end. Despite his best efforts, Browning’s tactics seem to have merely replaced an ending with an end. Wedgwood was representative in this respect, dismissing 70 70 most of the poem except for the monologues of Caponsacchi, Pompilia, and the pope. In her judgment of the poem Wedgwood repeats the division between means and ends through the metaphor of the picture and its frame. Guido and the lawyers make an “ebony frame for that pearly image of Pompilia” (Curle 158) — “a somewhat slight picture has been put into an elaborately carved frame” (170) — making it difficult to infer the end from the means. Wedgwood believes that means should correlate to their ends. But this belief is predicated on a distinction between means and ends that no mere attenuation of the poem into monthly installments on the part of the author could dispel. She keeps grasping for an end in identifications that appeal to her and in doing so turns the reading process into a product-driven pursuit. Wedgwood’s correspondence with Browning is significant because it shows the poet engaging with his historical audience at the moment he was writing his poem. This dialogue surely weighed on him as he approached the poem’s terminus. As his letters indicate, he was revising the poem’s ending up until the end, even as the early volumes were coming out, debating with himself whether or not he should bring back Caponsacchi, giving him space for “a final word to add in his old age” (146). In its interrogation of ending, The Ring and the Book also deploys the thematic concerns of a long line of generic precursors. E. Warwick Slinn contrasts the poem with Paradise Lost, noting that Browning rejects the transcendent perspective of Milton’s God. According to Slinn, the multi- perspectival basis of The Ring and the Book seems to question the teleological imperatives of the Miltonic precedence, in contrast to other Victorian long poems that were more likely to accommodate such a perspective. However, despite Slinn’s contention that “a conclusive telos, towards which all events lead, is neither within nor outside the text” (Discourse 120), it can hardly be denied that 71 71 the importance of ending, of a last-ness whether of words-as-performance or performance-as-words, has a considerable amount of stress placed on the end in these concluding monologues. Without denying their contingency, these final monologues call attention to the performativity of ending by dramatizing the disjunction between the poem’s prospective telos with its termination. Before pursuing the implications of Browning’s methodology toward a reading of history in the poem, we shall pursue the critical context surrounding the following questions: What is the significance of the poem’s conclusion, and how does it encourage us to reevaluate the meaning of the poem?
The Question of Ending In her essay, “The Ring and the Book: the Uses of Prolixity,” Isobel Armstrong pinpoints two different ways of viewing the scheme of Browning’s long poem. On one hand, there is the tendency to view Browning’s poem as a relativist poem, “an amorphous gathering of points of view and of endless moral possibilities” (178). Armstrong repudiates this view because it cannot account for our experience of the poem as a whole or explain why Browning ended it the way he did. The relativist reading of the poem “makes the existing termination of the poem purely arbitrary and ignores Browning’s firm assertion that the poem is completed, formally and morally, by Guido’s last monologue” (178). On the other hand, Armstrong mentions the tendency to view the poem as a “process of growth and discovery” (179). In order to lead the reader from confusion to clarity, the poem “continually doubles back on itself in order to go forward” (179). This “spiral of repetition” enables readers to make discoveries of their own about the moral content of the poem. Rather than passively register the facts of the story, the form of the poem allows readers to expand their “imaginative grasp of the nature 72 72 of the moral questions Browning explores so that we end by knowing in a richer way what we already know” (180). Armstrong argues that the poem is not as open-ended as the relativist reading would have it. She argues that it encourages us to delve beyond a merely “notional” understanding of the case to a real understanding of it. The structure of the poem is designed to facilitate this growth in the reader. In Armstrong’s view, the number and the sequence of the monologues, the notorious prolixity of the poem, builds up enough “analogies and cross-references. . . to arrive at a controlled statement about the nature of a ‘self authorized’ intuitive act of judgment” (184). The poem works toward a kind of closure, resolving its own aporia through a dialectic process which leads to a reconfirmation of what we already know. Armstrong’s reading of the poem has affinities with Robert Langbaum’s reading of the poem. For although Langbaum, notable for renewing critical discussion of The Ring and the Book as it wallowed in a harsh climate beset by the formalist tenets of the New Criticism, famously described the poem as a relativist epic, he shares Armstrong’s preoccupation with closure. According to Langbaum’s definition, the poem is “relativist” in an epistemological sense but not in the sense that the poem lacks a definitive resolution. He and Armstrong see eye to eye on this point. While Armstrong saw the poem as arriving at a “controlled statement about the nature of a ‘self authorized’ intuitive act of judgment,” Langbaum views the poem as progressing towards a definitive statement about the poem’s moral vision. In his view, the pope’s vindication of the good and Guido’s last-ditch recognition of the pure worth of Pompilia represent the poem’s denouement. The manifold deformations of evil are repudiated, and existence is finally redeemed by the embodiment of absolute goodness in the form of Pompilia 73 73 and the recognition of this by even the most evil of characters—Guido (“Relativist Poem” 111). Both Langbaum and Armstrong adhere to some form of what E. Warwick Slinn calls the “tacit humanist belief in the unmediated nature of human subjectivity” a view which overlooks the “inseparability of character and language” and the impossibly of expressing the former through “fictive inventions and rhetorical processes that constitute selves in real life” (“Dramatic Monologue” 83). Readings of the poem that adopt poststructuralist critiques of the incommensurability of the self usually hone in on Guido’s second monologue, the penultimate monologue of The Ring and the Book and the last of the monologues spoken by characters other than Browning.1 In contrast to, Armstrong and Langbaum, who focus on the teleological aspects of this book, these readings use the book to critique the humanist conceptualization of character that permeates earlier readings, not because of its privileged position in the sequence of monologues or the insight it might provide into the trajectory of the poem as a whole. The poststructuralist critique of humanist notions of the self offer new ways of reading the poem, but its adherents have been unable to return to the problems of development and closure that are posed by critics like Armstrong and Langbaum. In short, these readings fail to move beyond the “relativism” that Armstrong criticized for its inability to account for our experience of the poem as a whole, complete within itself, rather than an agglomeration of parts. 2 The poststructuralist critique of humanistic conceptions of character is persuasive and it forms the foundation and terminus for my reading of The Ring
1 See Potkay 143-57 and O’ Connor 139-58.
2 See Potkay 152-53. For all its good points, Slinn’s reading of the poem in The Discourse of Self also neglects the questions Armstrong raises. 74 74 and the Book. With this perspective the “relativistic” explanations of the ending can be avoided. I agree with the basic tenor of Armstrong’s description of the poem as a “spiral of repetition” (179), a “self-qualifying structure, re-examining its presuppositions and values as it proceeds” (184). This view can help us account for the peculiarity of Browning’s procedure in the poem. But I don’t see this procedure as an exclusive and continuous line of argumentation, nor do I see it “arriv[ing] at a controlled statement about the nature of a ‘self-authorized’ intuitive act of judgment” (184). The poem remains conflicted by a desire for a revelatory ending and an impetus towards endless deferral. It is a conflicted desire that becomes highly conscious of itself in the penultimate and the antepenultimate books of the poem, in the monologues of Guido and the pope. Perhaps it is by paying attention to this conflict that we can illuminate the significance of the ending of this monumental long poem. In short, I want to question Armstrong’s conclusion: “Guido’s recognition that he lacks the sense of a ‘nucleus’ of the self completes the spiral of the poem for it suggests that whatever weaknesses the sanction of ‘self-authorized’ action carries within itself it at least posits some feeling of identity, a centre, a stable ego, by which the world can be given shape and meaning” (195). The whole purpose of what follows is to come up with an alternative explanation as to why Browning ends the poem the way he does. By remaining within the time frame of the trial and concluding with Guido’s monologue, Browning resists the urge for historical closure that the pope relies on in order to justify his interpretations. Guido’s revisionism encourages us to be skeptical of the pope’s metahistorical claims by demonstrating how our versions of the past are provisional and contingent upon a fluctuating present. 75 75 Prospectivism and Revisionism One of the most startling things about the penultimate monologues of the Ring and the Book is that one monologist begins by calling a halt to an interminable process of judgment, while the other concludes a lengthy monologue by attempting to begin again from scratch. The pope begins by concluding: “The case is over, judgment at an end, / and all things done now and irrevocable” (X, 207-08). And in the very next book, Guido ends by invalidating his beginning in an effort to begin again: Sirs, have I spoken one word all this while Out of the world of words I had to say? Not one word! All was folly: I laughed and mocked! (XI, 2415-17) One of these characters is at a loss about how proceed, the other about how to conclude. Paradoxically, it is the one most certain of himself and the rightness and irrevocability of his judgments, the pope, who struggles most to conclude. While it is the one racked with the greatest uncertainty about his identity and his fate, Guido, who struggles to evade his beginning and start anew. For the pope, the attempt to nail down an ultimate judgment is easier than it is to seek the same end in history. For given his certainty over Guido’s guilt, why does he hesitate nearly 2,000 lines before finally “chink[ing] the hand-bell” (X, 234) that promises to convey him to his death? After all, he has been appointed to represent God, just as the earth “out of all the multitude / of peopled worlds” was chosen for “stage and scene of [His] transcendent act” (X, 1335-36, 1338). He is an elected official chosen to represent God by nature of the inscrutable logic of history. Nevertheless, he doubts whether action can have any efficacy. The pope’s attempt here is mainly to attribute a larger purpose to his decision to shock Guido into repentance than is warranted by the empirical evidence. He builds his interpretation of the murder 76 76 case from a perusal of the facts, but he needs a metaphysical backdrop in order to give his actions a sense of purpose. The whole enterprise is solipsistic to the extent that he wants to feel like his intervention on behalf of Guido is not belated; that the last act still has efficacy in a larger scheme of redemption, and that in the last act is “summed the first and all” (X, 342). His eschatology merely helps him to confirm the magnitude and importance of his own actions. The pope’s interpretation of history correlates to what M. H. Abrams refers to as “historical prospectivism,” which is epitomized by Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra in his formulation, “the best is yet to be” (“Rabbi Ben Ezra,” line 2). In fact, Abrams seems to be channeling Browning’s character in his definition of the term as “the certainty that. . . the best is inevitably about to be, in this life and this world” (15). This historical optimism has its counterpart in the Hegelian dialectic, which replaces the “figure of history as a great circle route back to the origin” with the spiral that conceptualizes how “all process departs from an undifferentiated unity into sequential self-divisions, to close in an organized unity which has a much higher status than the original unity because it incorporates all the intervening divisions and operations” (13). In response to modernity, the perpetual wandering of the “peregrinatio vitae” gives way to the interminable progress of the dialectic and the idea of an imminent end to history, rather than an earth-shattering apocalypse. Accordingly, history no longer has a telos in the sense of a cataclysmic end leading to a restored unity; its telos is ceaseless self- perfection, ceaseless self-division and the formation of ever-higher unities. Modernity also stirs up anxiety over the continuity between the past and the present. The newfound sense of the past’s “otherness” from the present raises anxiety over the status quo of historical knowledge and cultural continuity. This is a concern that comes to the fore most visibly in the initial stages of the pope’s 77 77 deliberations. The pope’s optimism concerning the future is more typical of the nineteenth-century than his attitude toward the past. This 17th century pope begins his monologue by perusing a history of the popes of Rome like the biblical king Ahasuerus strictly for the purpose of instruction, trusting that what took place in the past (as the pope explains, the case he investigates took place “eight hundred years exact before the year / [he] was made pope” [X, 24-25]) will help him prepare for what will come in the future. Formosus, the subject of the pope’s inquiry, preceded Stephen XII as pope. In an attempt to eradicate the past, Stephen exhumes Formosus’ body, condemns his actions as “uncanonic” and has his body thrown into the Tiber (X, 70). This initiates a chain of inquiries into the reign of Formosus; each succeeding pope in the chain revises the previous pope’s judgement, as the body of Formosus is repeatedly exhumed, in order to accommodate each pontiff’s effort to assert his difference from the past. The pope’s own interpretation of the past is not wholly solipsistic in this passage. He is not merely seeking consolation from the past in the face of the incoherence of the present. At this stage, he is simply trying to figure out how to proceed with his monologue. Indeed, this is the only portion of his monologue in which he has not yet made up his mind. But it’s difficult to see how he could draw “example, [and] rule of life” from the case of Formosus (X, 21). This trial of “a dead man by a live man” (X, 30), this travesty of fertility myths, in which the corpse of a dead pope is cyclically buried and re-exhumed, conveys the sterility of a culture which reproduces the past as the “other” of the present in a perpetual endgame, an endlessly recurring trial of the past in the name of the present. Rather than offer guidance for the future, the case only serves to demonstrate the impossible deadlock of a present that can only advance in opposition to the past. As Sharrock points out, “the historical record [in the pope’s speech] seems to spell out chaos, 78 78 not continuity” (99). The anecdote does far more than indicate the fallibility of the pope’s judgment. His reliance on history to point the way forward overlooks the way the past is reinvented in order to create the present. Historical prospectivism blinds him to the fact that his past is a fiction. The idea that the present occupies a privileged position in relation to the past, offering a truer perspective because more stable, allows the pope to sustain what Roland Barthes calls the “referential illusion,” a term he uses to designate “the process whereby the historian absents him/herself from the discourse to create the impression of realism through direct access to the referent” (Munslow 64). In his narration, the pope omits any trace of himself or how his account of the past is contingent on a shifting present. His judgments seem to derive from the process of history itself, rather than from his own interested ego. The pope’s omniscience seems impervious to the contingency of the present. It maintains a monopoly over the past. Guido’s revisionism offers an implicit critique of the referential illusion. If the pope presents his judgments as irrevocable determinations of the historical process, Guido revises his judgments in order to demonstrate how the past is contingent upon the present. In his first monologue he depicts the murder as a success, — (“I am myself and whole now” [V, 1707]) — an act of divine vengeance predestined by god, — (“I did / God’s bidding and man’s duty” [V, 1702-03]) — a call he was reluctantly forced to answer — (“some song in the ear…of the first conscience” [V, 1571-75]). In his second monologue, he murders Pompilia according to his own designs, and successful execution of his plan is thwarted by the “devil” of contingency: Oh, why, why was it not ordained just so? Why fell not things out so nor otherwise? Ask that particular devil whose task it is 79 79
To trip the all-but-at-perfection, — slur The line o’the painter just where paint leaves off And life begins, — puts ice into the ode O’the poet while he cries ‘Next stanza — fire!’ Inscribes all human effort with one word, Artistry’s haunting curse, the Incomplete! Being incomplete, the act escaped success. (XI, 1551-60) The “devil” of contingency personifies the state of lawlessness, in which the poet and the painter are forced to perform, the less than perfect conditions in which the artist-murderer attempts to actualize his abstract plan. This is the very “devil” of history itself, which the historian attempts to expel in order to sustain the referential illusion. The pope’s view of the past remains “incomplete,” though he envisions his present as its telos. Another history will replace it making the very same claims about its own present: but only by expelling every trace of its own past. Guido’s account of the past is explicitly “incomplete.” Because interpretations of events in the past are contingent on the ceaseless mutations of the present, history must always be revising itself. His efforts to read the past results in a palimpsest with visible signs of erasure leading back to all its past versions. For this reason, The Ring and the Book cannot be read as a history or as a realist novel. It declines to offer a stable version of the past. It must walk hand in hand with the present, discarding demoded points-of view, dispersing the referential illusion that was the bread and butter of nineteenth-century historians. Prophecy no longer relies on the future for confirmation in Guido’s monologue; it designates a momentary illumination, a rare glimpse of a new truth yielded up by the obsolete detritus of the past. The present does not offer a stable perspective of the past as it does in the pope’s monologue. Rather, its mutations 80 80 striate the past and yield up new meaningful connections. Prophecy as prognostication and prophesy as revision: Guido’s monologue pits these two prophetic modes against each other. Scenes he witnessed in the past rearrange themselves into premonitions pointing the way toward his doom. These anecdotes make it clear that present circumstances are dictating the way he re-members the past. Guido recalls his first encounter with the mannaia, a primitive version of the guillotine, a weapon used by the aristocracy to maintain old privileges “doing incidental good, ’twas hoped, / to the lesson lacking populace” (XI, 211-12). But latent in the aristocratic festival of cruelty and death is the realization that in the morning Guido will be killed by the very same machine: There’s no such lovely month in Rome as May – May’s crescent is no half-moon of red plank, And came now tilting o’er the wave i’ the west One greenish-golden sea, right ’twixt those bars Of the engine – I began acquaintance with, Understood, hated, hurried from before, To have it out of sight and cleanse my soul. (XI, 250-56) The imagery expresses a sense of dislocation, the lingering sickness one feels when getting off a rocking boat. The “greenish-golden sea” appears in Rome, and makes itself visible between the red uprights of the mannaia. Natural landmarks, no longer capable of establishing a firm sense of place, have apocalyptic connotations when it comes to time, the weaker light of the moon “tilting” in the part of the horizon where the sun sets. The factual encounter with the mannaia is filled with prophetic resonance. Its inclusion frames Guido’s Apocalypticism, which is more nihilistic and less dialectic than the pope’s prospectivism. Compared to the confident prognostications of the pope, however, they signal an 81 81 awareness that our experience of the past is always mediated by our present circumstances and, consequently, mutable. In the early hours before the sun rises on the day of his execution, Guido successfully predicts the outcome of the next papal election. This provides an instance of the second mode of prophecy. This is the mode that predominates in the pope’s monologue. For the pope the future promises closure. For Guido it remains an abstraction. Prognostication, for Guido, is less the sign of divine authority, than it is mathematical and purely arbitrary. Its culmination is characteristically anti-climactic, coming long after the point at which Guido’s struggle could have been resolved, having absolutely no effect on Guido and probably evident only to those who frequent reference books, study the footnotes of critical editions, or specialize in the papal politics of the 18th century. By relying on the future for self-confirmation, prognostication projects a vision of the past that remains static and incontestable. The attitude toward historical time exemplified by Guido and the pope can be further illustrated by the tropes they use to make sense of the passage of time. For Guido history is a horizontal network of paths merging at various junctures to form cross-roads (XI, 954, 959). For the pope, history is a vertical network of stumbling-blocks and stepping-stones (X, 412). By viewing his past as a flux, Guido recognizes only a series of suspensions, junctures where things could have gone either way, contingencies where none were expected. By viewing the past as a frozen block of time cut off from the present, the pope conceives of history as a means to a higher end – a “vale of soul-making” not unlike the one that Keats describes (Greenblatt 951), imprinting divine intelligences with individual identities – so that the hardships, the “stumbling-blocks” of human history become the “stepping stones” to a higher unity. But the pope’s vision of the past proves 82 82 incapable of making new meaning of the past; it can only reinforce the barriers between a fictional past and a present that uses it to legitimize itself. If, in the words of Browning to his audience, the pope’s monologue offers “the all but end, the ultimate / judgment save yours” (I, 1220-21), why does Guido’s monologue stand poised between the pope’s judgment and the point where the narrative leaves off and leaves us free to judge? Over and against the pope’s prospectivism, in which prophecy is only capable of moving in a unilateral sense, Guido’s revisionism has the ability to point to more than one origin. Just as Guido’s impending execution leads him to revise his reading of the mannaia, the apocalyptic mood of Guido’s mannaia-visions invokes the French guillotine the symbol of what would later become the Terror. His revision of the past, particularly his reading of the mannaia, invokes the alien past of another future. Guido’s revisions remind us of the affinity different versions of the past share at the same time as they indicate the shifting ground upon which those projections into the past are based. In its ability to resonate beyond both the confines of Guido’s past and the historical present of The Ring and the Book, the mannaia also directs our attention to the past of its author. Just as Guido’s monologue suspends the ultimate judgment of the reader, The Ring and the Book takes place in a pensive age, on the cusp of the 18th century between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. History, like the speakers of these two monologues, seems to be grasping for a way to begin or end. Rather than accomplish a new beginning or reach a revelatory ending, the monologists call attention to the force of the referential illusion, the way it separates the past from the present, and the speaker that stands at either end of the narrative, the fictionalized author, Robert Browning in propia persona. Browning’s comments in the paratext of Book 1 are misleading if one thinks of the 83 83
“ultimate judgment” in terms of Guido specifically or any of the other characters on trial. The judgment that the end of The Ring and the Book inches us towards, the judgment whose finality is in sight but whose end we can never quite reach, concerns all the authors of histories, Browning included. The suspensions of the linear progression of the plot, of moral resolutions, and of history itself, bring the narrative closer to the present, by unraveling the illusion of an unmediated past.
The Polar Logic of (the Reading) Process The nineteenth century view of historical time assigns a motive and a direction to history, whether as decline or progress. The shape of history is no longer thought of as being dictated by the laws of chance, or by the secret whims of providence, but by the inscrutable logic of necessity, of final ends working through the bypaths of their own intricacies. Abrams notes that one of the chief characteristics of apocalyptic thinking in the nineteenth century is the “polar logic of process” (12). Blake’s mythologies in which “the tension between contraries” helps to explain the forces of creation, and the Hegelian dialectic in which “the driving force of all process. . . is the compulsion within any element to pose, or else to pass over into its opposite, or contrary, or antithesis” are offered as instances of the “polar logic of process” at work in the apocalyptic imagination around the turn of the century (12). Another aspect of this polar logic carries over to the reading process. The “polar logic of process” as Abrams terms it can help us define a distinctively apocalyptic attitude towards language. This attitude, which is evinced throughout the pope’s monologue, traces the fall of language back to a mythical Babel, and views the defiled medium of history as one which slackens the ties between sign and referent, positing an end of time in which sign and referent are joined in a felicitous new unity, the scene of naming depicted in The 84 84
Apocalypse. Guido’s view of language as a differential play problematizes the notion that his confession presents a true revelation, even as the evidence suggests his responsivity to the pope’s providential intervention is fundamental to the poem’s sense of an ending. From the beginning, the pope’s view of Guido is unapologetically eschatological. Guido’s “habitual creed” is to present a dissembling image of himself to the world (X, 520). The challenge for the pope is how to separate Guido’s true nature from his false representations. Guido is “an ambiguous fish,” he carries his shell like “a coat of proof, / mailed like a man at arms” (X, 485, 480- 81). Outside the shell he is a “slug,” a “puny starveling,” a “naked blotch” (X, 496, 482, 499)–in short, something nameless, shapeless, difficult to pin down, and somewhat sinister. The pope rejects the outer semblance, the shell of the ambiguous fish, and condemns that which evades his ability to classify and to name. The pope rejects Guido’s shell, as the false image he projects to the world. But he cannot judge the ambiguous fish that remains after the shell is gone. He rejects Guido’s shell only to replace it with another referent. The pope replaces the shell with a logical deduction: Guido’s essential character, the naked blotch that haunts the shell, is given solid form in Guido’s “last deliberate act” (X, 521): as last, So, very sum and substance of the soul Of him that planned and leaves one perfect piece, The sin brought under jurisdiction now, Even the marriage of the man: this act I sever from his life as sample, show For Guido’s self. . . (X, 521-27) 85 85
The last act in a temporal sequence determines the score, so to speak, of the interplay of ambiguities the pope locates in Guido’s nature. His reading is bound not just to the notion of a telos, but also to the identity of that telos with a last act: “for in the last is summed the first and all” (X, 342). The process of interpretation is sealed up; its meaning is encompassed by a final product. By privileging the final act in a temporal sequence, the pope is able to eliminate ambiguity. He replicates the strategy of readers Browning was defending against with his method of delayed publication, the strategy of jettisoning to the end of a lengthy work in search of the key to the action. The pope’s teleology is part of the same polar logic of process that informs his theory of language; means, both good and bad, serve a common end. But the pope does not view individuals as composites of these qualities; they fall neatly into two categories. Guido is on the “edge o’ the precipice” (X, 857), which gives way to the “flint and fire beneath” (X, 859). His sin is his “craft.” The pope uses the word “craft” to denote a method of plotting that employs means for undesignated ends, “for ends so other than man’s end” (X, 571), and he also uses it to denote a masking, or dissembling. By maintaining a false representation of himself, Guido takes advantage of the slackness between sign and referent; always stretching language to its extreme he demonstrates his ability to empty words of their meaning. As a synonym for plotting, Guido’s “craft” turns the church into a means for advancement and it uses marriage as a means to make a profit. The pope associates this designation of “craft” with historical decline: mankind has gotten “too familiar with the light” of faith, and people no longer use the institutions for their intended purposes but to serve their own interests (X, 1793). The pope posits a future state in which the distortions of language will be overcome, and individuals in each of his categories will be judged. Time and again 86 86 he envisions a beyond and speaks in the name of a god who echoes his judgments. The pope does not fear god’s judgment. The pope speaks as if he were already dead: he “stand[s] already in God’s face” and at “God’s judgment-bar” (X, 339, 347). It’s easy to lose track of who is speaking, god or the pope. The pope explains that once man is weaned from language, we may know there “simply, instantaneously, as here / after long time and amid many lies, / whatever we dare think we know indeed” (X, 377-79). There we may experience an unmediated version of what we already know, “That I am I, as He is He” (X, 380). Our identities are fluid in the medium of language, the first person singular merges with the third person and we can never figure out who is saying what. The pope divides himself into voices—the voice of the pope, the voice of god, the voice of Guido—unsettling the notion of a sovereign ego that stands accountable. The pope’s “judgment-bar” reinforces the boundaries of the ego in order to intensify the bond between sign and referent. For the pope, a firm sense of the bounded self is necessary in order for history to have a moral meaning. Difference is demoniacal. The dissolution of identity, or the soul, is synonymous with divine retribution. If he fails to repent, Guido will enter that “sad obscure sequestered state / where God unmakes but to remake the soul / He else first made in vain; which must not be” (X, 2129-31). Historical decline imposes upon the pope’s teleology but the pope’s prospectivism casts historical decline as a mirage, a false semblance generated by the polar process that leads inevitably to the formation of a new heaven and a new earth. The pope’s prognostications rely on a polarization of the present and the past, day and night, light and darkness. The dawn has superseded the pagan night; “noon is now / we have got too familiar with the light” (X, 1792-93). The pope predicts that the “enlightenment” will renew the old faith by bringing back the 87 87
“doubt discarded” (X, 1854). The darkness merely adds to the luster of an apocalyptic light, which will seal the deal: time indeed A bolt from heaven should cleave roof and clear place, Transfix and show the world, suspiring flame, The main offender, scar and brand the rest Hurrying, each miscreant to his hole. . . (X, 994-98) The revelation of the “main offender” by a cleaving “bolt from heaven” represents the final unveiling, a summation of the signifying process and the progress of history, the prelude to a new felicitous unity of sign and referent that abolishes difference. The summation of the pope’s monologue leaves room for a reversal, a change of heart in Guido in the same apocalyptic terms. The pope recalls an evening in Naples when “night’s black was burst through by a blaze. . . so may the truth be flashed out by one blow, / and Guido see, one instant, and be saved” (X, 2121, 2126-27). The pope’s apocalyptism can hardly conceal his solipsism. Unlike the pope, Guido recognizes that it is easier to gain mastery over the other at the “judgment- seat” than it is in real life – Pompilia alive offers a greater threat to Guido, than if she were at the “judgment-seat / where [he] could twist her soul as erst her flesh, / and turn her truth into a lie” (XI, 1681-3). Guido recognizes the idea of an absolute ground for judgment is an unstable fiction that can be used to manipulate the truth. As Adam Potkay explains, Guido rejects the idea of absolute perspective that grounds our judgments. Instead of omitting an entire history of overlapping interpretations he “embraces and exploits the fact that our interested and imprecise interpretations of each other are all we can know” (150). Guido sees that the origin of difference in our interpretations of the past can be partially traced back to 88 88 differences of class, race, and gender; in short, factors that determine position in a hierarchy. His interpretation of history conforms to his aristocratic outlook. In his reading of history and his analysis of historical change Guido is embittered, caustic, ironic; history reads like a cosmic satire. Individuals negotiate between their private interests and the interests of the groups they serve. Systems of morality are arbitrary, part of a group’s way of dealing with internal and external threats. Notions of good and bad are the result of whatever group happens to dominate at the time. For Guido, those who believe they are doing good are merely serving the interests of their group, while those who are branded evil are done so according to historically specific communal standards, not timeless laws. The hiatus of judgment in this monologue entices the reader as a metaphor entices one to wander before arriving at the copula. Guido’s approach to making meaning threatens to displace the pope’s polarization of sign and referent. Guido overturns the pope’s distrust of language and embraces the use of metaphor. The enlargement of Guido’s sense of finitude inspires him to imagine his own end, and as his metaphors for the self that imagines its own end become more abstract we become witnesses to the elemental forces behind creation. These are not the abstract forces of good and evil. They are not the captives of a polar process. Lisa O’Connor shows us how Guido rejects the metaphorical system of the Church, which attempts to define him in terms of good and evil, and constructs a self through metaphor. One of the most common metaphors used to demonize Guido is the one which compares him to a wolf. The pope refers to Guido as a wolf who feasts on the lamb-like child of the Comparini (X, 558). But Guido makes it much harder to collapse the wolf-metaphor into a sign-referent dyad. He introduces a sheep into the wolf-metaphor and playing with associations between the wolf and the sheep, challenges our ability to tell them apart. At the beginning of Guido’s 89 89 conceit the pope is a shepherd and Guido is a “sheep [the pope] calls a wolf” (XI, 405). Guido then accuses the pope of being a thief, while identifying himself as a wolf (XI, 434-35). Finally, Guido permits the pope to remove his “sheepskin- garb,” but implores him to leave his teeth free (XI, 444). The wolf and the sheep represent different aspects of Guido. One is playful while the other is submissive. Unlike the pope’s metaphor of the ambiguous fish with the detachable shell, the sheep and the wolf cannot be reduced to parts of a single organism. Unlike the shell in the part-whole relation, the sheep in the predator-prey relation cannot be subsumed in a larger unity. Guido’s variation on the wolf-metaphor upsets the pope’s polarization of sign and referent. O’Connor also notes that “by making himself a wolf and retaining the image of sheep-thief for the pope, [Guido] removes any moral dichotomy between the Church and himself. In terms of the traditional Christian metaphor, both he and the Church must now be seen as morally reprehensible, destructive and anti-social” (143). Like language, morality becomes the product of a differential play of elemental social forces. Guido is not concerned with the end so much as he is concerned with the idea of finitude. While the pope’s monologue was apocalyptic because it sought ways to foreground its “last act” as its telos, the imagery of Guido’s monologue is “apocalyptic” in a different sense: he is drawn to the violent side of nature and becoming. His metaphors register the endless series of changes from a sheep to a wolf, from viscous fire to “stone and ore” (XI, 2066), from “a foothold in the sea” to a wave (XI, 2295). Death is a violence that unleashes itself like the crest of a wave or the eruption of a volcano. Guido is left “with something changeless at the heart of me. . . some nucleus that’s myself” (XI, 2392-93). This is not the “essential self” posited against a false semblance but the fluid substance of reality freed from the snare of all the “accretions” that add up to make an individual 90 90 personality. It is neither the rock the wave beats against or the sea but the sea and the rock together in a ceaseless process of becoming. These elemental forces can never be subordinated in a single process. The metaphors pile up on each other without ever coming to term. The end of Guido’s monologue reinforces our sense of the liminality of his speech. Guido’s “cry of salvation” is a continuation of his construction of a self through metaphor rather than the fulfillment of a telos. While the pope’s reflection on final ends compliments the sense of finality with which he finally dispatches the letter that will either save or sink Guido, Guido’s verbal play reinforces the anticlimax of the last-ditch reversal that marks off his monologue. Guido fumbles around in his mode of address as the guards come to take him away. His train of thought is forced to respond to changes in his immediate surroundings. As we read his final lines we feel as if the end may be suspended again indefinitely. Guido cannot quite settle on an object of address: Don’t open! Hold me from them! I am yours I am the Granduke’s –no, I am the Popes! Abate, —Cardinal, —Christ, —Maria, —God,… Pompilia, will you let them murder me? (XI, 2422-25) On one hand this fumbling makes it seem as if Guido has awakened out of some realm of inexistence, finally forced to face key existential facts. It’s as if he has momentarily jolted into an awareness of his interlocutors. On the other hand, the point his befuddled address leaves off is arbitrary. The names merely help him recognize his surroundings. Guido is merely back to the place where he began his monologue. Startled out of himself he must begin again a long process of redefinition. The structure of language is a metaphor within a metaphor. The accretions pile up until the thread can no longer support itself. It splits. The objects 91 91 of address collapse into another metaphor like the crest of a giant wave. The sense of awakening is very prominent in this scene, and it helps to reinforce the sense of suspended animation in Guido’s monologue. Guido’s end is the anti-climax of awakening. In the view of Langbaum, Guido’s request fulfills the desire for apocalyptic revelation that asserts itself throughout the pope’s monologue.3 Though the revelatory moment is too belated to establish a sense of closure, there is no reason we should cast aside the possibility that Browning was aiming for such an effect. The trouble from the beginning was how he could justify digging around the stubble and debris of a sordid murder-case without affording some kind of compensatory telos for his audience. Even the historical evidence backs up this interpretation. Allingham records Browning advertising the remainder of the poem after making a gift of the second volume: still talk of The Ring and the Book: ‘a builder will tell you sometimes of a house, “there’s twice as much work underground as above,” and so it is with my poem. Guido’s not escaping better, man won’t give him post-horses; the Pope, as Providence; Guido has time for confession, etc.’ (195) Browning wanted to give his readers a reason to reach the end, and a compensation for getting there, but he wanted them to go through the process themselves. But he was still revising the end up to the end. Herein lies the uncanniness of a literary ending. There is rarely a trace of all the endings of a work that were revised or second-guessed or merely left out. The letters to Wedgwood show that
3 See Langbaum’s defense of this position in “Is Guido Saved?”. 92 92 he had at least one other ending in mind. So why does Browning leave off with Guido’s monologue? Guido offers an anticlimactic culmination of the pope’s telos, and any addition beyond that point would have been in excess of this configuration. But are there any other possible reasons for using Guido here? I grant that the ending invites an eschatological reading of the poem, but my argument is that this does not mitigate everything that came before the end, the two thousand lines or so before Guido finally concedes that everything up to that point was a lie. The revelation fails to convince because it is overwhelmed by the context, the context not only of Guido’s revisionary testimony, but also of the perspectivism inherent in the poem’s method of interrogating the past. Furthermore, Guido’s deconstruction of the pope’s polar logic helps us see the extent to which our histories are fictions constructed out of the available facts and contingent on the circumstances of the present. Our perspective of language, whether we view it as an open-system or as a closed-system, informs the way we approach the past. Guido’s reprisal of the polar process of reading democratizes the experience of reading history by providing an alternative to the referential illusion and opening up possibilities for re-visionary thinking. The strategy of translating the eschatological concerns of the Victorian long poem into an investigation of the practice of reading and rewriting history shows how thoroughly Browning was able to turn that convention on its head. He never felt comfortable in the prophetic mode, unless prophecy could be redefined, not as looking toward the prospective end of time, but as redirecting our gaze to the artifacts of a bygone past.
CHAPTER 5: BROWNING AND THE CITY
It’s difficult to think of Robert Browning as an apocalyptic poet, whether we associate the “apocalyptic” with an unveiling or with the end of the world, and in this sense he is distinct from most of his contemporaries.1 Although his genre of choice, the dramatic monologue, manages to replicate the Johannine Apocalypse, if not surpass it, in its proliferation of voices, possible destinations and ironies of translation, Browning is not apocalyptic in any of the above senses. Browning, unlike his contemporaries, views history as a plenum of voices and possible destinations rather than a void. As an apocalyptic poet, he is quite alone in celebrating the city and in converting it to a formal equivalent of his poem. Christina Rossetti’s fin de siècle musings in “Babylon the Great” (1892) can serve here as a representative example of the conventional apocalyptic attitude toward the city. I quote from the last lines of the poem, which is a sonnet. Note the interiority of address, as the speaker models the voice of conscience, or the disembodied voice of the angel commanding Lot not to look back at the city in flames, characteristic of the lyric: Gaze not upon her, lest thou be as she When at the far end of her long desire Her scarlet vest and gold and gem and pearl And she amid her pomp are set on fire. (Roe 181) Apocalyptic poets have never been fond of cities. Rossetti’s speaker adopts the high ground here, invoking the biblical Apocalypse in which Babylon is personified as a harlot and is destroyed along with the earth and the vast majority of its inhabitants. In the tradition that proceeds from the Romantics the country is
1 In describing Browning as an apocalyptic poet I am, of course, alluding to Derrida’s definition of the apocalyptic, as outlined in the first chapter of this thesis. 94 94 the metaphorical equivalent of the high ground. Even the New Jerusalem resembles the insularity of a small country town more than it does the pluralism of the big city. The mistrust of city life; the emphasis on purges and epidemics; the fear of the popular and the populous—these approaches to the city were institutionalized by the Romantics, and they continue to lie at the root of modern day millennialism from the racialism of the early twentieth century to the environmentalism of the twenty-first. Rossetti is part of a long line of nineteenth- century poets who draw heavily on apocalyptic imagery in their depictions of the city. William Blake concludes with a “harlot’s cry” in “London,” while Wordsworth paints the perils of the city in his tableau of the “Parliament of Monsters” in the The Prelude. For the most part, Victorian poets, like their Romantic predecessors, replicate the same single-minded hostility towards the city as John of Patmos, the author of Apocalypse, notable for his depiction of a scarlet Babylon drinking the blood of martyrs from a golden chalice, while seated on a beast with seven heads and ten horns. The perspective of the city Rossetti imposes on us in “Babylon the Great” is just as much a function of the lyric persona she elects for her speaker, than it is of a definable attempt to represent the city; the description, is not of a city at all, but it is implied that the addressee who ignores her command not to look back, and the harlot who is set on fire, share the same fate. The city itself is a metonym for the world that turns its back on the message of the prophet, here the lyric poet; the city is a function of the dominance of the speaker over the addressee. If we turn now to Wordsworth’s Prelude in the earlier part of the century we see a similar mode of address being adopted. The only difference is that this time, the role of the speaker is more overtly didactic. The interiority of address is evident in the use 95 95 of the pronoun “us”, which indicates that the speaker includes himself among those he addresses: For once the Muse’s help will we implore, And she shall lodge us, wafted on her wings, Above the press and danger of the Crowd, Upon some Showman’s platform. . . (Wordsworth 484) The muse is noticeably inaudible, serving only to hoist us along with the poet in a position where we can view “the wide area. . . alive / with heads” occupied by the crowd below us, “with those that stretch the neck, and strain the eyes, / And crack the voice in rivalship” (Wordsworth 485). In contrast to the crowd, our line of sight is unobstructed, and the voice we hear is clear and unencumbered. Here we are privileged, along with the speaker to the earthly equivalent of a transcendent perspective, a moral high ground that compliments the speaker’s ability to pierce the spectacle, to see “the parts / as parts, but with a feeling of the whole” (VII, 712-13). The mode of address Wordsworth chooses does not allow him to pause and consider whether the reader might rather prefer the limited perspective of those in the crowd below us, whether, paradoxically, we might have more freedom as readers if the speaker were to acknowledge the provisory nature of his perspective, perceiving that there is no high ground that does not already presuppose another finite perspective a little higher and little further on down the road from our own. The lyric poet’s inability to adopt a position from below makes the city into yet another figure for his alienation from the crowd and his rejection of limited, historicized angles of vision. Authority is less a function of the poem’s negotiation between finite points of view, than of the sincerity of the author’s vision. 96 96 Browning found many ways to overcome the polarization of nature and art which led the Romantics to retreat from the city and the prospect of a popular audience, and The Ring and the Book comes into its own as a long poem that manages to break out of the apocalyptic denigration of the city and celebrate it by raising it to a formal equivalent for his poem. His appropriation of the city is apocalyptic in the sense that we can never be sure who speaks for whom, whether the city speaks for Browning or Browning for the city. The idea that Browning speaks through a monologist, in a historicized situation, only serves to amplify the bewilderingly apocalyptic connotations of his city, a city that is both literal and metaphorical. His monologists in The Ring and the Book, nine of them in all, constitute a city of dissonant voices, a city dispersed geographically, situated tangentially on the “round from Rome to Rome” (I, 526). Our notion of the identity of Browning is in a sense a result and a compilation of all these voices he creates; he speaks through the city and the city speaks through him, the city that “rounds his ring” (I, 1389). He is at once a cartographer, feeling his way about the monuments and landmarks that populate his city, and an archive, an amanuensis of the first-person testimony of each inhabitant that crowds his teeming brain. Contact with the city was, for Browning like Whitman, a palliative, and an incitement to pass on information. The following passage, taken from the letter of the Venetian visitor in Book XII, highlights Browning’s move from a Romantic investment in first person lyricism to a post-Romantic emphasis on third person observation, while it retains the secondhand attributes of recorded speech that clearly demarcate it from the naratological conventions of historical realism. Notice the stress placed on the “crowd” as a secondhand source of information: Now did a car run over, kill a man, Just opposite a pork-shop numbered Twelve: 97 97 And bitter were the outcries of the mob Against the Pope: for, but that he forbids The Lottery, why, twelve were Tern Quatern! Now did a beggar by Saint Agnes, lame From his youth up, recover use of leg, Through prayer of Guido as he glanced that way: So that the crowd near crammed his hat with coin. (XII, 154-62) The “now” that begins each of these sentences echoes the beginning of Swift’s “Description of the Morning” (1709), a poem which offers an historical analogue to Rome in the last decade of the seventeeth century. The Venetian visitor approximates the irony of Swift’s town eclogue, as an accidental death is translated by the mob into a potential source of revenue, and a beggar’s lameness is exploited for a pittance. The main difference is that while Swift’s poem maintains the reserve of civic mindedness and condescension, the Venetian visitor’s address is a function of the excitement he receives from the crowd; his description gives him a sense of satisfaction as if he were present in the crowd. Its objectivity is not a function of its official detachment, but of its transparent permeability, its ability to mix subject and object and merge with the crowd-as- witness. In this passage, which is representative of Browning’s characteristic approach, the city is not only a series of coordinating physical landmarks—the “pork-shop numbered Twelve” and “Saint Agnes”—but also a proliferation of voices which, while remaining attributes of a third person separate from the speaker, interpenetrate with the speaker’s own. Browning’s city is an odd assemblage, a mixed bag of speakers and interlocutors of varying social status dispersed in physical locations that resemble his historicized situations in their ability to effect the reception and ultimately 98 98 undermine the authority of the scripts they perform. Though most of the poem takes place in Rome, Henry James specifically recalls the flea market where Browning purchases the Old Yellow Book in Book I as he compares the experience of reading the poem to finding his way around the “old Florence,” a city illuminated by its “old-world litter heavy with a “strange weight” that is “at once a caress and a menace” (401). James’s metaphor of Browning as a street peddler highlights the role of performativity in Browning’s cityscape: He takes his willful way with me, but I make it my own, picking over and over as I have said like some lingering talking pedlar’s [sic] client, his great unloosed pack; and thus it is that by the time I am settled with Pompilia at Arezzo I have lived into all the conditions. They press upon me close, those wonderful dreadful particulars of the Italy of the eve of the eighteenth century – Browning himself moving about darting hither and thither in them at his mighty ease. . . I make to my hand, as this infatuated reader, my Italy of the eve of the eighteenth century – a vast painted and gilded rococo shell roofing over a scenic, an amazingly figured and furnished earth, but shutting out almost the whole of our own dearly-bought, rudely- recovered spiritual-sky. (402) James’s analogy offers an illustration of “porosity,” a concept that Walter Benjamin uses to express “the confrontation between a modern sensibility and a premodern environment, to articulate what may be termed the ‘shock of the old’” (Gilloch 34). Porosity describes “a lack of clear boundaries between phenomena, a permeation of one thing by another, a merger of, for example, old and new, public and private, sacred and profane” (Gilloch 25). While the city surpasses any book in its capacity to present this permeation in space, the term offers an interesting 99 99 analogue to the apocalyptic as a proliferation and disorientation of addresses and possible destinations. The key difference between this conception of the apocalyptic and the one we are accustomed to, is that on the one hand, the reader is lifted by the muse above the particulars, while on the other hand the particulars crowd upon us and we are left to pick them over. Authority becomes the common property of a poet who, like a street peddler, forms a moving archive of facts and the reader who can afford to appropriate them. By appropriating the city as a formal ideal, something to be celebrated rather than demonized, Browning permits us to shift our focus from a temporal apocalypse, an end of time, where the burden of history loosens and the quest for eternity begins, to a porosity that spatializes time and history. His poem strives to be a palimpsest and not a line lifted over the void. In this thesis, I have shown how, by immersing his own persona in the poem’s city of impersonators, he denies the privilege of a transcendent perspective, and cedes responsibility for the meaning of the poem to the reader; how he questions the ethics and politics of appropriating the voice and exploiting the death of departed citizens of his makeshift polis; and how he challenges the presentism and prospectivism of nineteenth-century historiography through a recursive and re- visionary layering of monologues. Hopefully this enables us to see the poem as a feature in the landscape of our modernity, a brightly populated city in the vicinity of now.
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