Surface Tension

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Julie Carr. Surface Tension

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SURFACE TENSION

RUPTURAL TIME AND THE POETICS OF DESIRE

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And yet, despite disinterestedness’ usefulness to the aesthetic and ethical health of the social body, the aloof critic “touches” upon subjects in much the same distanced way that Arnold’s speaker in “Isolation” is “touched” by “unmating things.” In “The Function of Criticism,” as in “Isolation,” we find that the socially engaged male figure is isolated nevertheless. While now he is not isolated in erotic longing, his disinterestedness seems to construct for him a course as remote as the heart’s lonely sphere in “Isolation. To Marguerite.” (Indeed, in Culture and Anarchy Arnold refers to the truly disinterested citizen as an “alien.”) And this isolated sphere, like that of poetry, is burdened by the threat of rupture.

For the sphere of disinterestedness appears to be broken in the essay by a moment of shaming that is at the same time an image of pregnancy violated. In an attempt to convince his audience of the need for progress, Arnold draws on a news story about “Wragg” (whose very name suggests fragment and tearing as opposed to containment and wholeness). When a “thrill of shame” flashes through the body of “The Function of Criticism in the Present Time,” it is in the figure of this impoverished unwed mother accused of strangling her illegitimate child. Arnold’s language here is intended to shame his audience out of unthinking self-satisfaction. Yet at the same moment, we find a released outpouring of his affective subjectivity that is anything but aloof:

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