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ОглавлениеI. Introduction
Matthew Arnold makes a sustained case throughout his criticism for poetry’s active role in the history and development of the nation. Of the Victorian critics, Arnold is perhaps the most convinced of poetry’s social usefulness, calling on poetry, as the replacement of religion and philosophy, to carry the values of the democratic nation into the future. And yet, Arnold’s rejection of unresolved feeling and “fine writing” as the foci for poetry, his de-emphasizing of the linguistic surface of the poem and its ability to generate or represent affect, and his corresponding conception of the poem as a sealed container, ultimately limit his vision of poetry’s capacity to participate in social or political change. When he writes in “The Study of Poetry” (1880), “The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay,” he is assigning to poetry the role of vehicle for “the best that has been known and thought in the world,” which, as we know, is criticism’s (or later, culture’s) object (Works, 9:161). Affect in poetry is in the service of “idea,” and ideas are for Arnold the key to social progress. And yet crucially, in Arnold’s poetics, the poem itself does not generate the “stream of fresh and free thought” so necessary for a healthy society. For while poetry may be “criticism of life,” it can only be so when the culture is suffused with ideas—when criticism has already done its work.xxix
The poet therefore serves the very specific and secondary function of carrying ideas within the “effective and attractive” forms of poetry, while the critic serves the primary function of inseminating the culture, and thus the poet, with ideas. Poetry, such as that of the Romantics, without great critical effort “behind it” is, for Arnold, “premature”—that is, like a failed or compromised birth. Thus while the critic plays an active role in shaping history, the poet passively receives, absorbs, and carries within his or her body that which has its true source elsewhere. Arnold’s formulation, rather than granting poetry a powerful role in the shaping of the world from which it emerges and into which it moves, finally empties poetry, and thus poets, of the capacity to effect transformation (“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Works, 3: 261-2).
In Arnold’s formulation, the Romantic figure of the poet as creative agent is erased—replaced by “poetry” as an abstraction that only acts insofar as it interacts with critical production. Arnold praises poetry for its “pregnancy,” imagining the pregnant poem as a sphere sealed tight with “inviolate and inviolable” laws. Pregnancy is a useful metaphor not because it evokes the activity of (re)production, the catastrophe of birth, but rather because it evokes the security of containment. Arnold’s metaphor is thus best envisioned as a disembodied and perpetually pregnant womb, rather than a woman’s pregnant body. And further, this erasure of the woman’s body in Arnold’s metaphor is homologous to the erasure of the figure of the poet in the imagined marriage of poetry and criticism. This obscured and de-legitimated poet, while suggesting the degree to which Arnold disparages the subjective poetry of feeling, means that poems, as representatives of critical thought, must always take a secondary role in the generation of the future. As the pure bride of criticism, poems can only repeat, never create.
There are echoes here with Keats, for Keats, as we saw in “The Fall of Hyperion,” similarly wants poetry to aim toward social responsibility or healing. Negative capability, Keats’s theory of poetic agency, imagines a poet emptied of coherent identity who attempts to fill this emptiness with an acute sympathetic responsiveness. Yet, Arnold’s absented poet differs from Keats’s “chameleon” poet in one crucial way. Negative capability arises out of the poet’s heightened sensitivity, his ability to suspend selfhood in meeting the other; while the self is emptied of center, this emptiness is an effect of the quality of openness. Thus the concept of negativity allows for productivity, allows for the “uncertainties and doubts” that define any movement toward the new. In contrast, the sealed sphere of the poem/idea dyad we find in Arnold’s poetics is given the very specific function of reproducing the rationally apprehended products of criticism’s efforts. Poems themselves cannot ultimately produce the new—the “stranger” that each (actual and metaphoric) birth must produce.xxx Thus the poem, despite Arnold’s claim for its immense futurity, in fact has no future at all.
Arnold’s Aristotelian poetics reveals his distinctive discomfort with the multiple, fragmentary, unresolved, and contingent. He disparages poetry that foregrounds language’s materiality over content because such poetry is not unified: it leaks outward, its focus is dispersed, it seems to lack purpose.xxxi Similarly, Arnold worries throughout his career as a social critic and political theorist about the fragmenting of belief systems, the breaking or loss of cohesive ideals.xxxii This anxiety about fragmentation is tied directly to Arnold’s understanding of “modernity.” As he writes in “On the Modern Element in Literature” (1857), “the present age exhibits to the individual man who contemplates it the spectacle of a vast multitude of facts awaiting and inviting his comprehension” (Works, 1:20). Later in his career he will sound much less confident of this invitation, as when in 1880 he writes, “There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve” (“The Study of Poetry,” Works, 3:161).
As Isobel Armstrong reminds us, Arnold’s anxiety about modernity is not unique to him: “Victorian modernism, as it emerges in its poetics, describes itself as belonging to a condition of crisis which has emerged from economic and cultural change” (Victorian Poetry, 3). Yet, perhaps what is unique to Arnold is the degree to which his concerns about modernity are reflected simultaneously in his politics and his poetics. As we know from the 1861 essay, “Democracy,” as well as from Culture and Anarchy, a strong state is called upon for the administration and dissemination of aesthetic and cultural values, values that are borne forth by critical thought. And a poetry capable of bearing these ideals is crucial to the maintenance of a strongly unified national character. Later in this chapter we will see how despite Arnold’s attempt to harness poetry into serving as modernity’s antidote, poetic language erupts in his work, participating in, rather than healing, the fracturing force of the modern.
To some, concerned about the marginalization and perceived uselessness of poetry, Arnold’s assertion of the political centrality of poetry might sound like good news. Yet according to Arnold, for poetry to perform the function he has set out for it, it must adhere to stringent (classical) “rules.” At a time when other poets were experimenting broadly with prosody, form, emotional range, and subject-matter, Arnold was arguing for adherence to Aristotelian poetics, the disciplining of feeling and poetic material, and against linguistic play. 1848, a year of political fragmentation and revolution across Europe, also marks the formation of the PRB. And though the group was certainly not at that early date influential, their self-proclaimed alliance does indicate the degree to which artists and writers at mid-century were interested in exploring and experimenting with affect, subjectivity, and poetic form. 1850 marks the publication of Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Wordsworth’s The Prelude, works that are perhaps less about aesthetic unity than about the display and analysis of subjectivity. Robert Browning’s Men and Women is published just three years later, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh appears in 1857. Both works self-consciously push against conventions of content and form. The 1850’s are also the years of the “Spasmodic School,” the group of poets (including P.J. Bailey, Sydney Dobell, and Alexander Smith) whose work, in Armstrong’s words, “surges with Keatsian excess and Shakespearean fecundity,” exploring political and social issues directly (Victorian Poetry, 169).xxxiii This enormous wealth of poetic exploration indicates that Arnold’s classicism, his insistence on the “grand style,” on poetry’s “wholesome regulatory laws,” as well as on “great actions from a heroic time” as the truly fit subject-matter for poetry is, at this moment in British literary history, self-consciously reactionary, positioning itself against Romanticism and contemporary Victorian experimentation at once. As the negative reviews of his volumes from 1849 and 1852 make clear, “Arnold’s literary and aesthetic values—his ‘taste’—opposed those of many middle-class readers of poetry and fiction” (Harrison, Arnold, 57).xxxiv
Consistent with Arnold’s demand that poetry incarnate rather than generate ideas is a poetics that attempts to limit language to its referential function. Arnold’s resistance to “fine writing” is rooted in a desire for language to represent, rather than disrupt, the rational and ideational. And yet, while in the pivotal poem Empedocles on Etna, discussed at the end of this chapter, we find Arnold presenting, through the figure of Callicles, an oppositional aesthetics that celebrates sensation, and thus explores language’s ability to represent but also generate affect. Arnold’s rejection of the poem from the reissued Poems of 1853 provided the motivation for his famous Preface. In that essay, as in his later essays on poetics, Arnold’s aesthetic strictures against the exploration of linguistic materiality finally result in a disavowal of language’s ability to interrupt, rather than repeat, ideology. Ultimately Arnold’s poetics resists what defenders of poetry’s negatively critical force (from Shelley and Arthur Hallam to Althusser and Adorno, to Robert Kaufman, Joan Retallack, and Isobel Armstrong, to name a few such defenders relevant here) see as poetic language’s capacity to (in Adorno’s words), “let those things be heard which ideology conceals . . . [to] proclaim a dream of a world in which things would be different” (“Lyric Poetry,” 157).
One might protest here that Arnold’s concept of the “grand style” or “grand manner” betrays an interest in language’s “literariness,” in de Man’s sense, that Arnold’s insistence on the importance of style reveals that for him “content” was not all, that he was not purely interested in language’s discursive functionality. In “On Translating Homer: Last Words” (1861), where Arnold praises Homer for “nobleness, the grand manner,” we find him articulating a theory of poetic language that argues for the importance of style, and thus, we might think, of language’s material properties. And yet, Arnold insists that poetic vocabulary is a product of convention, and as such, an ideally invisible aspect of the poem. Again, this invisibility finally limits the possibility for the poem’s surface to complicate, rather than simply reflect or repeat, the poem’s ideational function.
Arguing for the “plainness of words and style,” in Homer’s poetry, Arnold writes:
Everyone at Athens who dabbled in epic poetry, not only understood Homer’s language,—he possessed it. He possessed it as everyone who dabbles in poetry with us, possesses what may be called the poetical vocabulary, as distinguished from the vocabulary of common speech and of modern prose: I mean, such expressions as perchance for perhaps, spake for spoke, aye for ever, don for put on, charmed for charm’d, and thousands of others. (Works, 1:180)
For Arnold, poetic language is provisional, a product of time and place. However, language’s relativity is not a product of individual invention, but instead of convention. For poetry to “carry” the race it must be recognizably pleasing as poetry; like the domestic woman, it must be unthreateningly “beautiful.” Style becomes useful as a bearer of ideas only in how well it disappears into the invisibility of conventional taste.
And yet it should be said that the notion that poetry must bear the burden of criticism’s ideas is not unfamiliar to twenty-first century readers of experimental poetry. Robert Kaufman discusses just this issue in his essay “Sociopolitical (i.e. Romantic) Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics,” in which he examines the close relationship between late twentieth-century critical theory and experimental poetry. In Kaufman’s analysis of “difficulty” in its romantic, modernist and postmodernist poetic incarnations, the lyric presses language in order to make language “think” beyond its objective purposeful function. The “special intensity” of lyric “arises from lyric’s constitutive need musically to stretch ‘objective’ conceptual thought’s very medium, language—to stretch it quasi-conceptually all the way towards affect and song, but without relinquishing any of the ‘rigor’ of conceptual intellection” (“Sociopolitical,” n. pag.).
This celebration of lyric’s intellectual rigor forces us to ask if our contemporary “experimentation,” often called upon as a critical infiltration, more or less overt, into political and social hegemonies, does not rather closely follow Arnold’s model of poetry as the transmitter of criticism’s ideas. And yet this question hinges on how we understand poetry’s engagement with language. Kaufman is arguing that contemporary theory and contemporary poetry share a “negativity,” which is perhaps inherently critical of dominant patterns.xxxv As opposed to arguing that poetry should carry theory’s ideas as if it were incapable of generating ideas of its own, Kaufman (following Adorno) suggests that lyric itself takes a critical stance, that lyric difficulty per se presents, “a potentially emancipatory capacity for constructing new conceptual-objective knowledge.” In other words, poetry’s language-experiments are thought-experiments, capable of restructuring how we, its readers, think. Conversely, Arnold’s poetics places poetry in a secondary or belated position, even as his poems themselves, and poetic moments within his prose, quite stunningly suggest alternatives to the very positioning he sets up.xxxvi
Following Arnold’s own hierarchy, I have begun this chapter with Arnold’s criticism, his poetics, rather than with his poetry itself. I will continue by examining the aesthetic politics that arise out of the essay “Democracy” and the more developed Culture and Anarchy before turning to the poems.
II. The Future Contained: “Democracy” and Culture and Anarchy
The resistance to the new, the unknowable, which Arnold’s perpetually pregnant poetry suggests, manifests itself also in Arnold’s politics. This should not be surprising, for again, Arnold makes no pretense of distinguishing between the aesthetic and the political. As Ian Gregor puts it, “education, religion, politics, literature are not a series of interrelated ‘subjects,’ but fade into one another as they are woven into the fabric of contemporary society” (Culture and Anarchy, xxii). For Arnold, the problems of democracy are, at least in part, aesthetic problems. Describing in “Democracy” (1861) the inevitable rise of working-class political power, Arnold writes regretfully,
I do not . . . say that a popular order, accepting [the] demarcation of classes as an eternal providential arrangement, not questioning the natural right of a superior order to lead it, content within its own sphere, admiring the grandeur and high-mindedness of its ruling class, and catching on its own spirit some reflex of what it thus admires, may not be a happier body, as to the eye of the imagination it is certainly a more beautiful body, than a popular order, pushing, excited, and presumptuous; a popular order jealous of recognizing fixed superiorities, petulantly claiming to be as good as its betters, and tastelessly attiring itself with the fashions and designations which have become unalterably associated with a wealthy and refined class, and which, tricking out those who have neither wealth nor refinement, are ridiculous. But a popular order of that old-fashioned stamp exists now only for the imagination. (Works, 2:10)
Arnold’s distaste is not reserved for the working classes alone. The British middle class offends not only because it seems to have no “ideals,” not only because of its materialism and stubborn attachment to “stock notions and habits,” but also because it has no style and no taste, or worse, bad style, bad taste. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold presents his aesthetic repugnance of the middle class, the philistines:
Culture says: ‘Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?’ (41)
This aestheticization of class, conflating the happiness of the social body with its beauty of body or voice, associating (uncultured) thoughts with (presumably ugly) furniture, points to the degree to which Arnold’s “culture,” which will be invoked to rescue the democratic nation from the self-interested strivings of its members, is always meant in part as aesthetic refinement. Arnold’s belief in the inevitable rise of democracy is matched by his worry that in modernity aristocratic characterological and aesthetic values will be lost. Despite the critique Arnold levels against the aristocracy, the “barbarian” class that he deems anachronistic, he values and wants to see perpetuated the aesthetic qualities of that class.
This is not to say that Arnold did not authentically support the rights of the working classes. Clearly his work as an inspector of schools, his commitment to state-sponsored education, and his acute awareness of the failures, and in fact obsolescence, of an aristocratic government indicate that his politics were, at a practical level, certainly progressive; his life’s work included enormous efforts toward balancing the distribution of power and education.xxxvii However, in Arnold’s vision of the democratic future as expressed in Culture and Anarchy, a known and established set of cultural values will simply be spread (via “the State” as aristocracy’s replacement) amongst a greater number of people. Missing from this political and cultural philosophy, then, is the idea that a newly born and valuable culture might arise out of a new political and social balance of power—for Arnold did not trust the process of “welcoming the darker odds, the dross” of democracy (Whitman, Leaves, 428). In simple terms, Arnold is a gradualist—“Rather to patience prompted,” as he puts it in his early poem, “To a Republican Friend, 1848.” As Antony Harrison details in his thorough (and thoroughly readable) study, The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold, Arnold’s desire for change is uncomfortably wed to an anxiety about the violent possibilities lurking in sudden cultural upheaval.xxxviii
“Democracy” and Culture and Anarchy, written a few years before and just after the 1867 reform bill, respectively, contribute and respond to the controversies and upheavals of the years leading up to this change. (“Democracy” was originally written as the introduction to Arnold’s report on the popular education of France. Arnold republished it as an independent essay in 1879, indicating the essay’s continued importance to him.) In both works, Arnold is calling on “the State” to respond to “the new and more democratic force which is now superseding our old middle-class liberalism” by disseminating the values of “culture,” values that have their origin, as Arnold consistently reveals, in the aristocratic class—in the intellectual and aesthetic experience leisure affords (Culture and Anarchy, 51). xxxix
One must keep in mind, as others have noted, that “culture” does not entirely mean for Arnold the knowledge of a particular collection of literary texts or aesthetic objects. Rather, as he defines it in Culture and Anarchy, culture is an attitude, an intellectual and moral curiosity through which an individual or group is able to “turn a free and fresh stream of thought” upon stock notions and habits (7). As Marc Redfield writes, “To acculturate does not mean to educate in the sense of imparting knowledge or skills; rather, it means to produce a subject capable of transcending class identity by identifying instead with what Arnold famously called ‘our best self,’ which is to say ‘the idea of the whole community, the State” (75-6). Thus culture and critical disinterestedness become more or less interchangeable terms, their definitions sliding into each other as Arnold moves between literary and social criticism.xl Furthermore, this ideology of consensus is best imparted by a communally shared aesthetic experience. Again, Redfield: “Culture . . . produces the consensual grounds for representative democracy” (76).
Arnold’s abiding concern, developed most succinctly in “Democracy,” is that the middle and working classes, deprived of the examples of “nobility” and “grand style” afforded by the aristocracy, will come to power without humanistic ideals, or, to follow Arnold’s logic, without the desire to emulate the performance of such ideals. (It is worth noting here that Arnold’s political position in this essay is in no way absolute, or even clear. As Harrison puts it, Arnold’s political views in the essay “leave the reader mystified rather than persuaded” (16). However, we can trace some consistencies in Arnold’s anxieties, if not in his solutions.) In the fourteenth section of Popular Education in France, Arnold writes that the most pressing danger of educating and thus empowering the lower classes is that they will, in knowing little, presume too much. With little education and no nobility to emulate, they will become, like the Americans, self-satisfied. America, having grown up “without ideals,” with “no aristocracy,” and therefore with nothing to admire, overrates with “vulgar self-satisfaction” its inferior and fragmented culture. Thus, Arnold worries that the diminishment of the aristocracy will cause England to become “Americanized,” will cause it to fall into “anarchy”—the culture of the uncultured—in which citizens are not motivated to “transcend their class identity,” but instead act only from self-interest. (Works, 2:161). Clearly, the problem of Americanization is not simply a problem of embarrassing and ignorant vulgarity; it is also a problem of stunted intellectual and moral growth.
This problematic proximity between the value of disinterestedness and aristocratic culture is further complicated when, in “Democracy,” Arnold attempts to locate the source of these values in socio-material conditions themselves:
It is the chief virtue of a healthy and uncorrupted aristocracy, that it is, in general, in [the] grand style. That elevation of character, that noble way of thinking and behaving, which is an eminent gift of nature to some individuals, is also often generated in whole classes of men (at least when these come of strong and good race) by the possession of power, by the importance and responsibility of high station, by habitual dealing with great things, by being placed above the necessity of constantly struggling for little things . . . A governing class imbued with it may not be capable of intelligently leading the masses of people to the highest pitch of welfare for them; but it sets them an invaluable example of qualities without which no really high welfare can exist. (6)
Despite this assertion that power, responsibility, and economic well-being (not to mention, race) lead to an elevation of character, Arnold argues that the middle and working classes, new to their (limited) political freedoms, cannot achieve the disinterested curiosity that leads to “intellectual and moral growth,” unless provided an example of these values, or unless somehow trained to them. The inevitable weakening of the aristocratic class therefore presents a vacuum, which needs, in Arnold’s estimation, to be filled by “the State”:
On what action may we rely to replace, for some time at any rate, that action of the aristocracy upon the people of this country, which we have seen exercise an influence in many respects elevating and beneficial, but which is rapidly, and from inevitable causes, ceasing? In other words, and to use a short and significant modern expression which every one understands, what influence may help us to prevent the English people from becoming, with the growth of democracy, Americanized? I confess I am disposed to answer: On the action of the State. (16)
Even if one were to concede that the state can or should serve the role of guiding people toward a more disinterested approach to democracy (one of the abiding arguments in favor of state-mandated public education in our time), Arnold’s argument is logically flawed in at least two ways. Firstly, the idea that possession of economic and political power guarantees or even encourages disinterested behavior is pure fantasy, as history had abundantly demonstrated to Arnold and as it has to us. Secondly, even if it could be argued that economic and political freedom, by affording leisure time and granting responsibility, do in fact lend themselves to disinterestedness, then it is certainly problematic to argue that this quality must be carefully and stringently administered to those newly in possession of such freedoms. Either the qualities Arnold values arise out of socio-economic position, or they are ideologically constructed, and therefore learned or imposed. To claim both simultaneously problematically suggests that elevation of character is at once the property of a specific social group with specific traditions, and therefore inimitable, and a function of material conditions, and therefore automatically assumed once these conditions are met. xli
For running directly against Arnold’s claim that the disinterested critical attitude of the man of culture is a “practice of the self,” xlii is his even more prevalent and urgent argument that without a strong state to replace the strong aristocracy, the people will fall into the anarchy of pure self-interest, of “doing as one likes.” In Culture and Anarchy we find him stating that “culture” is a “balance and regulation of mind which is not often attained without fruitful effort” (34). However, just a few pages later we find him arguing against this self-fashioning, and in favor instead of ideological interpellation: “Culture indefatigably tries, not to make what each raw person may like, the rule by which he fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that” (39). This contradiction marks the degree to which Arnoldian disinterestedness, despite its project of pursuing “a current of true and fresh ideas,” resists its own most radical implications.xliii The embrace of the “new” implied in the progressive searching of the disinterested mind, is met by a resistance to the new, which, as Culture and Anarchy makes abundantly clear, stems largely from a strong mistrust of emergent working class power. To quote Harrison once again, “In Arnolds’ vision of an inevitable new political world in England, the lower classes clearly will play no role in the governance, and certainly not the leadership, of the nation” (17).
The recourse to disinterestedness as finally only the domain of the elite, and therefore a practice of self for some and an ideological imposition for others, arises also out of a profound mistrust of “modernity”—where modernity stands for the urban industrial “spectacle”—and thus reflects Arnold’s anxiety about the unknowable future that democracy always holds out as its hope. Furthermore, this resistance bears a strong relationship to Arnold’s erasure of the figure of the poet and the body of the metaphoric mother discussed above. Both poet and mother, in Arnold’s configuration, come to represent disruptive and productive desire, even as Arnold paradoxically attempts to employ these metaphorically conflated figures toward the perpetuation of tradition.
III. “Thy Remote and Sphered Course”: Desire and Isolation in Arnold’s Marguerite Poems
While Arnold’s Marguerite poems are often admired as some of his most powerfully affective work, they foreground the very problem of desire that leads Arnold finally to reject poetic language as a generative force, and to view poetry as instead the servant of criticism’s ideas. These poems, written during Arnold’s 1849 visit to Switzerland, offer an early assertion of his guiding ethos—that social usefulness must be predicated upon the rejection of unresolved desire. The poems explore the pathology of desire itself and seek to find a remedy to desire’s isolating impact through a movement into the social, a remedy that, for Arnold, demands the renunciation of erotic longing.xliv In these poems desire is problematic because rather than drawing one towards others, desire stands between the subject and the social world. As desire traps the subject in an impenetrable sphere of his own erotic/emotional life, his emergence from this sphere depends upon an absolute rejection of unsatisfied longing.
Arnold most clearly expresses a poetics that rejects desire and embraces disinterested social engagement in the Preface of 1853, though it also arises in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864) and even later in “The Study of Poetry” (1880). Further on I will examine more fully how Arnold’s refusal of desire leads him to also refuse poetic language’s ruptural power. For now, I want to show how the Marguerite poems both forge and complicate this program of disinterested social engagement. Again, the binding nature of desire is, for Arnold, ethically problematic because of the way it isolates the subject in non-productive self-scrutiny. In the therefore ethical act of renouncing desire, figured most clearly in the poem “Isolation. To Marguerite,” Arnold’s speaker announces the shame his desire has produced, and at the same time, names this shame as his remaining affective property once renunciation is achieved.
As shame accompanies the speaker in his movement into productive social engagement, it also writes his continued faith in his own deep subjectivity, for his claim to individual or psychological depth has been based upon the very desire he wishes to forego. Thus the burden/pleasure of shame is that it supplies the speaker with a continued hold on his previous understanding of what constitutes his selfhood, and as such it marks, as we will see, the limit of Arnoldian critical disinterestedness of which these poems are among the earliest of many articulations. Shame creates a rupture in both critical disinterestedness and poetic pregnancy and thus becomes the cataclysmic affect in Arnold’s work that proves the insecurity, and thus the violability, of both Arnold’s poetics of containment and his gradualist politics.
In “Isolation. To Marguerite” we locate the particular bind in which Arnold places his poetic speaker. Here desire and isolation are clearly paired as mutually constructing energies that together negatively impact the speaker’s sociability. Shame and renunciation are paired as the disciplining antidote to this bind of desire/isolation, and motivate his turn to useful social engagement. However, this familiar pattern of Victorian male psychological development (which, as Mary Poovey has shown, has many examples in domestic fiction of the period) is made problematic in this poem by shame’s necessary relation to desire, as well as by the estrangement inherent in the social engagement Arnold imagines as “isolation’s” antidote.xlv
In her essay “Shame and Performativity,” Eve Sedgwick argues that shame is linked to a feeling of isolation or interrupted connection with an “other,” and because of this, is inextricably tied to the formation of selfhood. According to Sedgwick, recent psychologists and theorists of shame locate its inception in the earliest experiences of broken contact, in the moments in an infant’s life when its caregiver fails to return its gaze—when what Sedgwick calls the “circuit of mirroring” is broken.xlvi Sedgwick quotes psychologist Michael Franz Basch as claiming that, “the shame-humiliation response, when it appears, represents the failure or absence of the smile of contact, a reaction to the loss of feedback from others, indicating social isolation and signaling the need for relief from that condition” (4). Sedgwick is interested in how shame, in marking isolation, therefore motivates a need to “reconstitute the interpersonal bridge.” And this link to the desire for reconnection leads Sedgwick to tie shame to performativity and, in a series of moves I won’t reiterate here, to queerness (5, 22).
For my purposes, Sedgwick’s work is of interest primarily in how it names shame as the affect most generative of individuation. Drawing on the work of psychologists (most notably Silvan Tomkins), to support a positive claim for shame, Sedgwick writes:
Shame and identity remain in very dynamic relation to one another, at once deconstituting and foundational . . . What most readily distinguishes shame from guilt is that shame attaches to and sharpens the sense of what one is, while guilt attaches to what one does. One therefore is something in experiencing shame . . . In the developmental process, shame is now widely considered the affect that most defines the space wherein a sense of self will develop. (4)
In Arnold’s work we find shame participating in the formation of identity in just this way. Only, it seems, “with” shame can the subject effectively enter the social world, only through experiencing the “thrill of shame” can the subject recognize his need for engagement at the same time that he recognizes his distinction from others. For Arnold, as for Sedgwick, shame seems to be fundamentally constructive of subjectivity.
And yet, as the poems demonstrate, the conventional link between rich interiority and unsatisfied desire is crucial to Arnold’s construction of subjectivity as well (as it is in general to the Victorian period).xlvii Arnold writes renunciation into the narrative of desire, and attempts to invent a satisfying escape from the anguished bind of unresolved longing which is associated here and elsewhere with emasculating inaction. And yet, an interest in maintaining a deeply unknowable affective space—what John Stuart Mill in the 1830’s and Walter Pater in the 1870’s describe and value as “the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion” xlviii and, “the inward world of thought and feeling”xlix respectively—presents a paradoxical requirement to preserve a rich interiority for the renouncing lover. Even as destructive male desire is surrendered, shame becomes the vehicle through which the poetic speaker maintains the authoritative voice of his previous lyric subjectivity. In this way, shame works to construct a deep masculine subjectivity that is, nonetheless, socially active and productive.
However, as Sedgwick argues, if shame impels the subject to “reconstitute the interpersonal bridge,” it also remains as a reminder of the subject’s isolation; it also reconstitutes the bridge to the subject’s abjection. As the remnant of the desire that was not (that never can be) met, shame keeps that desire alive, which is why it is such a thrill. “Isolation. To Marguerite” foregrounds two problems then: firstly that of the internally binding, and thus anti-social nature of erotic desire, and secondly, that the solution to desire, the antidote “shame,” employed to motivate renunciation, is actually also desire’s representative, marking desire’s continued agitating presence, and thus indicating the limits of “disinterestedness.”
The first and most obvious way in which desire is marked as anti-social can be found in the opening moments of “Isolation,” for here the speaker longs to escape the “world” in order, it seems, to immerse himself in love. And yet, his imagined escape from the world is not, as first it might seem, actually a movement into the world of the beloved, rather it is a movement into the self as occupied by the beloved: “I bade my heart more constant be. / I bade it keep the world away, / And grow a home for only thee” (2-4).
Erotic longing is first and foremost, then, a dialogue with the self. It is secondly a desire to subsume the other into the self. And thus, the second and less obvious way in which eroticism is anti-social begins to emerge: not only is the desiring subject isolated from the “world,” but he is also, as it turns out, more specifically isolated from the beloved as a subject outside of himself.
In the second stanza Arnold describes this isolation in more intensely painful terms, for the “growing home” in the speaker’s heart becomes binding: “The heart can bind itself alone” (9). While the most immediate meaning of this line is simply that Marguerite does not return the speaker’s faithful love (he is bound to her, but she is not bound to him), the reading I am offering shifts the line’s focus onto the nature of erotic longing itself. The “home” grown out of erotic desire traps the lover in an isolating and paralyzing self-scrutiny. This same problem is suggested again two lines later: “Self-swayed our feelings ebb and swell,” the speaker complains. Ebbing and swelling is, of course, like the movement of the ocean, which will reappear in “To Marguerite—Continued.” It moves, but it doesn’t progress. The state of unfulfilled desire is agitating to the self, but does not allow the self to develop. Like the masturbatory erotic that the line hints at, such desire is moving and paralyzing at once.
In the third stanza, we find Arnold’s speaker emphasizing the extent of his growing isolation, for where previously he has been reporting on his dialogue with himself, here he simply addresses himself:
Farewell!—and thou, thou lonely heart,
Which never yet without remorse
Even for a moment didst depart
From thy remote and sphered course
To haunt the place where passions reign
Back to thy solitude again!
(13-18)
This image of the desiring heart’s spherical course, like the image above of binding, figures the lover’s heart as trapped within a container with no exit. This image of a bound sphere appears throughout Arnold’s prose (and is applied to “poetry” and, interestingly enough, to the philistine’s mind and the un-cultured nation). And while here the bound or binding aspect of sphericity is clearly laid out, in his later prose, this binding aspect of the sphere, while still apparent, is obscured. Now, however, Arnold uses the image of spherical movement—like the echo in “To Marguerite—Continued,” and like the ebbing and swelling of the tides of emotion in line eleven of this poem—to represent a static agitation, an activity that gets him nowhere. Recalling here Sedgwick’s description of the early experiences of shame, it’s as if the speaker’s gaze, in failing to be met by its object, must return to its source—must, in failing to connect, turn inward.
And, just at this moment of inward turning, Arnold’s speaker announces his shame:
Back with the conscious thrill of shame
Which Luna felt, that summer night,
Flash through her pure immortal frame,
When she forsook the starry height
To hang over Endymion’s sleep
Upon the pine-grown Latmian steep.
(19-24)
Before discussing how this shame accompanies Arnold’s speaker in his move outward toward the social, which is at the same time a renunciation of desire, I’d like to focus on the image of Luna. In the only truly erotic language of the poem, the speaker identifies with feminine desire, with the “flash” of a shameful desire moving through a female body. Of course, he has prefigured this identification in the preceding lines when he describes the movement of his heart in language metaphorically linked to the circling of the moon around the earth. But here he pushes the metaphor toward a specific, and gendered, mythic figure.
James Eli Adams, writing on Tennyson and Charles Kingsley, claims that figures of female transgression are, for these writers, objects of identification. Adams argues that when images of desiring women appear in these male authors’ works, they represent an imagined escape from masculine self-discipline, and, he argues, this imagined escape is in fact a necessary component of such discipline (Adams, 141). The identification between Arnold’s speaker and Luna works in much this way, for here desire is also associated with femininity out of bounds. In this moment of identification, Arnold’s speaker can represent the transgressive nature of his desire at the same time that he locates it outside of himself. He thus begins the dissociation of his masculine self from his desiring self, and this dissociation will allow him finally to renounce desire and enter the social.
Notably, shame is directly associated with the gaze. In an almost perfect poetic representation of the scene of shaming provided by Sedgwick, Luna experiences the “thrill of shame” when her gazing on Endymion meets his closed, sleeping eyes. Her desiring gaze becomes voyeuristic; and yet her shame is not simply an affective response to the transgressive nature of her desire. Shame, as Sedgwick reminds us, is not only (or perhaps not at all) attached to prohibited behavior. Rather, it is a “reaction to the loss of feedback from others, indicating social isolation and signaling the need for relief from that condition” (36, quoting Basch). The “wandering” that accompanies the “thrill of shame” leads, in the chronology of the poem, to the speaker’s movement into social interaction; as Sedgwick argues, shame “aims toward sociability” (37).
For now, in the following stanza, the speaker allows for the possibility that he may not be “quite alone”—engagement is possible, it seems, as long as it is not predicated upon desire:
Or, if not quite alone, yet they
Which touch thee are unmating things—
Oceans and clouds and night and day;
Lorn autumns and triumphant springs;
And life, and others’ joy and pain,
And love, if love, of happier men.
(31-36)
Here is a construction of effective sociality that is based instead on abstract compassion, much like the disinterestedness Arnold claims for the critic in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” If eroticism assumes isolation, then it seems social involvement must be grounded in “unmating” sympathy. The failure of the speaker’s erotic pursuit and his consequent move into distanced compassion allows him (like Arnold’s critic) to lay claim to a superior knowledge, a superiority that seems to render him more fully human than the abstracted, dreaming “happier men.” Others may be happy, but he is aware, and now it is the happy men who must be shamed for their opacity, as reason asserts its superiority over dream.
Yet, as I’ve said, underlying this poem’s conclusion is a doubling of this disinterested viewer with the “shamed” but “thrilled” desiring voyeur of stanza four. This speaker is “not quite alone” not only because he is distantly “touched” by “unmating things,” but also because he is “with” the “conscious thrill of shame” he has extracted from his desire. He carries this shame with him into his resolved movement into (homo)sociability, and it is this (if anything) that enlivens the otherwise dulled list of abstractions he claims engagement with. Shame, however, disturbs the claim these final stanzas make for the speaker’s resolved, disinterested sympathy.
To reiterate, it seems that isolation/desire has been replaced by renunciation/shame in order to carry the erotically charged subject into a paradoxically more human position defined by critical disinterestedness. This offers a version of Sedgwick’s position, which posits shame as at once a response to isolation and the motivation for its relief. However, the kind of sociability Arnold’s speaker finally enjoys clearly is not the fulfillment of the desire for the other; it is also not a bonding with the universal family of men. Arnold’s Empedocles will claim that by “being true / To our own only true, deep-buried selves,” we are “one with the whole world.” But here Arnold’s speaker achieves sociability only as continued isolation, signaled by the disdainful separation between the I who “loves” (if love) the happier men, and the happier men themselves. What we have to ask, as we look further into Arnoldian disinterestedness, is whether a shamed and shaming disinterestedness can be called disinterested at all. We have to ask if shame, employed here as a bridge not only into the social, but also back into the subject’s deep and desiring interiority, disrupts sympathetic distance as well as the “free play” of the critic’s mind. I will come back to this later in the chapter. For now I’d like to examine Arnold’s other well-known Marguerite poem in order to note the alternative to shamed disinterestedness that this second poem offers.
“To Marguerite—Continued,” like “Isolation. To Marguerite,” presents a narrative of unsatisfied desire. And, while this poem does not stage the movement from potentially transgressive desire into the social, it does posit the erotic as inherently isolating, and thus raises the problem of desire I have been discussing. In “To Marguerite—Continued,” the speaker’s distance from the object of his desire is itself, paradoxically, an eroticized substance. Rather than eroticizing the beloved’s body, the poet eroticizes the space that divides the lovers—a space figured here as water. While the poem might seem to describe a perpetual state of erotic frustration, its opening word immediately challenges this reading, for the “Yes!” that begins the poem might easily be inspired by the highly erotic language of the first stanza. The “echoing straits” are “between us thrown;” the lovers dot the “watery wild;” and as metaphoric islands they feel the “enclasping flow” of the sea. In contrast to the “remote and sphered course” of the speaker’s heart in “Isolation,” this language suggests a definite pleasure found in separation.l
If we read the poem’s opening line, “Yes! in the sea of life enisled,” as a syntactical unit, we find a clear expression of exaltation within isolation. The “Yes!” stands alone as its own sentence with the exclamation point providing a strong visual boundary between the word and what comes after. Furthermore, the trochaic meter of the line’s first foot, read against the following iambs, serves to deepen the isolation of this “Yes!”. This moment of exaltation is metrically and grammatically “enisled,” one might say, in the rolling iambic sentences that follow.
And this opening stanza’s final lines are telling as well: “The islands feel the enclasping flow, / And then their endless bounds they know.” To return again to Sedgwick’s definition of shame, the moment of disconnection allows for individuation. Separated from one another, these “islands” become aware of their own “bounds,” a word that suggests both individuation and skin. In Sedgwick’s words, “in interrupting identification, shame . . . makes identity” (36). And yet the sensing of the sea’s “enclasping flow”—this sensing of the boundaries of the self—is not, in this poem, shameful, though it is definitively erotic. Here, isolation, rather than resulting in cooled, frustrated, or shamed desire, heightens feeling.
The second stanza continues to highlight the pleasures of solitude and longing as Arnold transforms the islands into erotically charged and melancholic bodies:
But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
(7-10)
Arnold then describes the nightingale’s notes, like the echoing straits in the first stanza, as “pouring” “from shore to shore.” In liquefying the nightingale’s song, Arnold again transforms space into fluid, transforms an entity that cannot be touched into one that can, and thus maintains his emphasis on the erotic sensations that arise out of distance. At the same time, these notes, like the straits above, seem to echo. Not only does Arnold rhyme “shore” and “pour,” but he also creates visual rhymes with all the “o’s” and “ou’s” in lines 11-12: “And lovely notes, from shore to shore, / Across the sounds and channels pour.” Echoing becomes in this poem a kind of spherical containment similar too, but more seductive than, the desiring heart’s spherical course in “Isolation.”
In the end-rhymes of the final stanza, “desire” is paired with “fire,” and “cooled” (desire) is paired with “ruled.” Arnold logically aligns desire with the unbound, the un-ruled, while the lessening of desire is aligned with boundaries, with God’s rules:
Who ordered, that their longing’s fire,
Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire?
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.
(19-24)
However, as the poem as a whole makes clear, the simple binary where fiery unbound desire is contained or repressed by divine rules, is not, in the end, wholly accurate, because these very rules—the “order” that divides bodies and hearts—make desire palpable. In the final couplet, the verb “to be” is paired with “sea,” so that existence itself, the “Yes!” of life, is ultimately tied to the “wild” and “estranging,” and therefore arousing and isolating, sea. The melancholic bounded self is the desiring self, and yet desire is represented as boundless. Thus, “To Marguerite—Continued” suggests that the self-binding experience of desire might, in perpetually regenerating itself, ironically represent a kind of freedom.
Examining the poem’s final phrase, “The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea,” we find the strangely affective pleasure of estrangement continuing to shimmer. The “unplumbed” sea might yet be explored—the verb “to plumb” means not only to ascertain depth but also to fall vertically, and thus conjures an image of falling through water. Eventually the sea itself, that which divides the lovers, becomes the body of the desired other—becomes the object to be entered. The frustration of desire represented by the bound heart in “Isolation” is here a more welcomed sense of desire’s boundlessness. The desired object, always out of reach, opens a space, a gap into which the subject can, rapturously, fall.
I am suggesting that in this poem Arnold allows for a quite different definition of subjectivity than he allows for in “Isolation.” In that poem, the social world demands that desire be pressed aside or transformed into the more outwardly directing shame; the subject must carry his or her desire in the form of shame in order to engage productively with others. Here, in “To Marguerite,” unsatisfied desire is presented not as a mistake the speaker must fix in himself, but rather as an inevitable, and even welcomed, aspect of subjectivity.
But if Arnold is describing a subject that knows itself, knows its own “bounds,” via the (un)pleasure of constantly agitated (because unfulfillable) desire, what might this poem suggest about sociability? What might it suggest about poetry? Remember that in the second stanza, the nightingale’s song recalls the islands to each other; the nightingale’s song awakens the “longing like despair,” which in turn allows the islands to imagine their “marges” might “meet again.” While God has ruled the cooling sea to divide selves, a “divine” song draws them together. It appears, then, that poetry is given the ambivalent privilege of recalling subjects to desire. At the same time, we cannot avoid reading the “rules” of severance as, in one sense, prosody’s rules; Arnold’s strict iambic tetrameter, his unwavering rhyming and end-stopped lines, must be read in contrast to the liquefied notes that kindle desire. What we have then is a theory of poetry as itself enacting the paradox of distance and desire. If notes, like words, because of their liquidity, because of their ability to slide across the horizontal (metonymic) plane, suggest the boundlessness of desire, poetry’s rules, to which the “notes” are bound, suggest the limit, and thus the necessary failure, of that desire’s fulfillment.
Unlike in “Isolation,” where sociability is predicated upon the refusal of desire, here, poetry (ruled song) participates in, perhaps invents, a sociability that does not demand desire’s renunciation, but is instead built upon desire. That this sociability seems only “imagined” doesn’t have to mean it is doomed. For unlike the dreaming “happy men” of “Isolation,” these islands/lovers are fully awake. Arnold’s language of sensation renders them embodied, renders them as bodies in a manner the abstracted happy men can never be. The meeting of marges, occurring at the level of imagination and sensation, becomes the poem’s own “structure of feeling,” its gesture toward a future as yet unknown. Perhaps Arnold meant the island’s imagined reunion as a model for the eventual union of himself and his lover, Marie-Claude. But more generally it seems that in the poem’s celebration of desire in and through distance, we can find a homologous celebration of poetry’s paradoxical embrace of free play and limit, and that together these celebrations lead to the poem’s guarded expression of hope, its future-conditional: “Oh, might our marges meet again!”
To return now to the image of Luna gazing on Endymion in “Isolation”—here too we find a pairing of distance and desire, though with much less charge to the language. Here, too, space is rendered erotic, because without space, there can be no gaze; and yet, throughout “Isolation,” one finds a resistance to this arousing potential of separation. The self-shaming of “Isolation” enacts a refusal of Luna’s perpetually spinning and regenerating desire, a refusal too of the intensely erotic language of “To Marguerite—Continued.” In the context of Arnold’s other work, as we will see, it seems that shame is finally offered, instead of poetry, as the regulating “rule” which enables and demands a movement toward the social at the same time that it allows for a deep, desiring, though socially acceptable, interiority to persist. And yet, the alternative suggested by “To Marguerite—Continued,”—the alternative vision that, instead of shaming desire, recognizes its persistent paradoxical unpleasure as both motivating and marking the limit of intersubjectivity—this alternative will reopen in moments of Arnold’s prose and will speak for poetry as generative of this paradox, even as Arnold seeks for a more secure answer to the problems of desire, even as he seeks to limit poetry’s capacity to animate just this irony.
IV. The Poetics of Shame: Wragg
Arnold’s famous Preface of 1853 stages the central tension within the dilemma of desire that I am describing. This tension can be described most simply as an uncertainty about whether the subject (and thus the poet) is an isolated, “deep,” erotically charged unit, whether the subject is (or should be) a socially engaged citizen, or finally whether these two possibilities can be joined. In the Preface, Arnold seeks to resolve these questions by presenting a theory of socially responsible poetry. His claim, worth revisiting despite its familiarity, is first presented negatively: poetry that expresses unreleased longing is reprehensible because it offers no pleasure to the reader:
What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; In which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. (Works, 1:2-3)
Arnold advises the poet to, “esteem himself fortunate if he can succeed in banishing from his mind all feelings of contradiction, and irritation, and impatience; in order to delight himself with the contemplation of some noble action of a heroic time, and to enable others, through his representation, to delight in it also” (14). Even as a poem like “The Buried Life” represents the longing for contact with a deep self, Arnold argues against indulgence in the affective self when the emotions thus contacted are disparate or unresolved. By rejecting (contradictory) “feeling” in favor of an outwardly focused contemplation of the heroic or noble, Arnold seems to argue himself out of the space where the Marguerite poems were born (which is why a critic like Harrison can refer to the Preface as Arnold’s “metaphoric suicide as a poet” [Arnold, 34].) In as much as these poems represent erotic longing (as opposed to the “act” of renunciation), they fail to satisfy Arnold’s prescription for a didactic poetics of the heroic.
Furthermore, in arguing that poetry must teach delight in the noble, Arnold must logically reject what Paul de Man will call “irony.” Following Kierkegaard, de Man terms irony “absolute infinite negativity,” since, “irony in itself opens up doubts as soon as its possibility enters our heads, and there is no inherent reason for discontinuing the process of doubt at any point short of infinity.” (Aesthetic Ideology, 166). For de Man, irony is (ironically) the status quo of poetry, it is the means by which the poem can always and does always interrupt its own narrative line. It is, somewhat playfully, “the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes” (179), the ongoing undoing of the supposed logic of figurative language. If the trope is the poem’s way of meaning, then the “permanent parabasis” of this way creates an absolute instability at the base of the structure of sense.
De Man’s argument draws a necessary connection between irony (in poetry or philosophy) and “[the] radical distance (the radical negation of [the subject]) in relation to his own work” (178). In the ironic gesture, the author interrupts his own voice—that is, he marks irony by shifting rhetorical registers, and this shift in turn marks his detachment from himself, his (recalling Keats) negativity. I want here to turn to the question of whether Arnoldian disinterestedness fails to achieve the “radical distance” of self de Man is describing, specifically because of shame’s presence in the renunciation of desire. I want to ask if what we might call a failure of negativity shows itself therefore in the rejection of irony we find in Arnold’s Preface. For in order for poetry to perform the task of “banishing” (and thus shaming) all “contradiction, irritation, and impatience,” it must refuse its own instability, which, if we agree with de Man, would mean that it was not a poem at all. (Of course de Man doesn’t stop at poetry; true to his moment, he sees all language as sharing in this radical instability: “language is a mere semiotic entity, open to the radical arbitrariness of any sign system and as such capable of circulation, but which as such is profoundly unreliable” [181].)li
By way of addressing this question, we will look in a moment to a famously enrapturing moment of shame and shaming in Arnold’s prose, the appearance of “Wragg,” an infanticidal mother, in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” But first I would like to note more thoroughly the images of spheres, and especially of pregnancy, appearing throughout Arnold’s essays. In the Preface, we find him praising the Greek poets as follows: “Their expression is so excellent because it is so admirably kept in the right degree of prominence, because it is so well subordinated; because it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it conveys” (Works, 1:5). And Greek tragedy is likewise praised because, “the tone of the parts is . . . perpetually kept down in order not to impair the grandiose effect of the whole” (6). In contrast to this admiration for pregnancy, grandiosity, and wholeness, Arnold complains about contemporary poems that display “occasional bursts of fine writing,” or “a shower of isolated thoughts and images” (7). While wholeness is of value, fragment or partiality is disparaged.
Throughout the Preface Arnold continues to praise powerful poetic expression for being “pregnant” and poetry for having “boundaries and wholesome regulative laws” (15). However, in “The Study of Poetry,” where he again describes poetry as a spherical container, we can begin to sense the anxiety lurking under this construction: “In poetry, which is thought and art in one, it is the glory, the eternal honour, that charlatanism shall find no entrance; that this noble sphere be kept inviolate and inviolable” (Works, 9:132). Here poetry is again figured as a pregnant body—a pregnant body praised not for what it produces, but for what it keeps out. Poetry is metaphorized as a female body because of that body’s capacity to represent the future, and yet, just as the reproductive capacity of the feminine threatens the ideology that posits her as pure, as “inviolable,” it seems Arnold’s metaphorical poem demands strident protection lest it find within itself the very disruptive elements it is employed to resist.
The intensity with which Arnold wants to guard the “noble sphere” of poetry is parallel to the anxiety with which he wants to protect the critic in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” from involvement in the practical. Here Arnold claims “disinterestedness” as the one “rule” for the critic, writing that criticism must show this disinterestedness “by keeping aloof from what is called ‘the practical view of things’; by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches” (Works, 3:270). Just before this passage, Arnold discusses the French Revolution as the example qua example of a period in which “a whole nation [is] penetrated with an enthusiasm for pure reason,” in which the abiding question is not (as in the English Revolution) “is it legal?” but rather, “is it rational?” (264). Because of this, Arnold calls the French Revolution “the greatest, the most animating event in history.” And yet, he continues, the ultimate fatality of this great event arises from the “mania for giving an immediate political and practical application to all these fine ideas of reason” (265). Arnold also faults England with precisely this practicality, this obsessive adherence to results. Again, critical free play has, for Arnold, both aesthetic and ethical value; aesthetic because only with reason’s presence in the culture can great art be made; ethical because for Arnold, criticism’s aim is to discover “the best that is known and thought in the world,” in the “pursuit of our total perfection,” by which he means, of course, moral, intellectual, and spiritual perfection (Culture and Anarchy, 5).
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:
‘Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole world!’—how much that is harsh and ill-favoured there is in this best! Wragg! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of ‘the best in the whole world,’ has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original short-coming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names,—Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In lonia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than ‘the best race in the world’; by the Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing! And ‘our unrivalled happiness’;—what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills. The smoke, the cold, the strangled, illegitimate child! (273)
As Sedgwick writes, “shame points and projects,” and we sense in this unmeasured, raging, and seemingly irrational shaming, Arnold’s voyeuristic fascination with the scene of degraded motherhood to which he points (38).lii Furthermore, as Arnold’s shaming of Wragg is also a shaming of England, as such it becomes, like the image of Luna, a self-shaming.
And yet unlike in “Isolation,” where shame inspires the movement away from desire and toward rational social usefulness, Arnold’s abuse of England for its “hideous names” points to the ways in which language, and its ability to produce affective responses, can overwhelm “idea” or “reason” (the critic’s domain). As any reader must agree (and many have), there is no reason behind Arnold’s disgust, and yet the very fact that an ugly list of homophonic names can produce an emotional response that disturbs the logic of Arnold’s argument suggests that the critic’s (and poetry’s) inviolate and inviolable sphere can be ruptured—by language itself.
Following this line of argument, we might read this moment as Arnold slipping into an engagement with the aesthetic, into a judgment of “pure taste” in the Kantian sense. “Ugliness” is presented as an attribute of the thing itself—the name—and not of the thing’s effect. This is purposiveness without purpose, for of course, Wragg’s crime has nothing to do with her name. Her name is bad in and of itself, and Arnold’s fall into homophonic association could thus be called a fall into form. The Wragg moment, despite its seeming interest in practical results (we must not rest in self-satisfaction as long as poor unwed mothers are this desperate) can be, and has been, read as the purest expression of critical disinterestedness within the essay.liii
At the same time, however, the choice of Wragg is not arbitrary. Just as Wragg’s baby (and homelessness) overwhelms her, Wragg’s story, as an example of monstrous maternity, overwhelms the disinterested critic. Again, while pregnancy is everywhere in Arnold’s work a figure for wholeness (and thus for power), birth, as a metaphor for the new, the unknown, the disruptive, is meticulously avoided. In the Arnoldian ideal, poetry might be “pregnant,” but as the bearer and not the producer of ideas; the poem, as the unforeseen and thus disruptive element itself, can never be born. Likewise, the monstrosity of Wragg is a result not only of her having killed, but also of her having birthed. The illegitimacy of the child reminds the reader of the “premature” poetry of the Romantics; this poetry “without critical effort behind it,” which Arnold calls a “poor, barren, and short-lived affair,” rhymes with the short-lived fatherless infant of Wragg (261-2). Thus Wragg’s crime is at least in part her refusal of (or inability to assume) traditional femininity.liv As Arnold writes sardonically, “Wragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivalled happiness” (274). Criticism’s commitment to “pure reason” would, in Arnold’s argument, dispel this confusion and thus rediscover Wragg’s lost sex.
Just as in the poem “Isolation,” where shame, as desire’s remnant, maintains the subject’s isolation even as he moves into social engagement, in “The Function of Criticism,” the shaming of Wragg finally suggests the limit, rather than the expression, of Arnoldian disinterestedness. Even as Arnold’s absorption into the aesthetic materiality of names suggests the free play of his mind, the shame that motivates this “aesthetic judgment” seems to call the critic away from this free play, back toward desire. (Though exactly what the object of desire is here is hard to say: it seems to be at once the social welfare of women like Wragg, and the purging of such women with such disturbing names “appearing like a natural growth amongst us,” from the social body, at once the expulsion of such pregnant bodies, with such disturbing desires of their own, and the exposure of these bodies as signaling the nation’s need for criticism’s penetrating work.) It seems that shame rekindles desire—rekindles at the very least the critic’s attachment to results.
Thus it appears we have answered affirmatively the question posed earlier: whether Arnold’s shame precludes the truly ironic self-distance necessary for disinterestedness. And yet what has not yet been noted is the irony of Arnold’s “Wragg” moment. If reading this passage we say, “he cannot be serious!” this is because he is not. Arnold has been greatly criticized for his attack on names, in our time as well as in his own. In recent years critics such as Josephine Mcdonagh, Marc Redfield, and Susan Walsh take on Arnold’s Wragg. Of Arnold’s contemporaries we can offer as example Fitzjames Stephen from The Saturday Review (December 3, 1864, 684) who wrote sardonically, “Criticism ought to show that Wragg should have been called (say) Fairfax . . . We do not envy the higher criticism if it has to go about ‘murmuring Wragg is in custody,’ till all after-dinner speeches rise to the level of ideal beauty.”lv
And in fact, in “The Function of Criticism” Arnold reveals that he is well aware of the reaction the passage will inspire: “Mr. Roebuck [the MP who spoke of England’s “unrivalled happiness”] will have a poor opinion of an adversary who replies to his defiant songs of triumph only by murmuring under his breath, Wragg is in custody,” he admits (274). In parodying his own methodology here, Arnold highlights the irony with which he means to be read. To return to de Man’s definition of irony as the detachment of the subject from his own work, we have in Arnold’s self-parody, a shift in register, a moment, as de Man would have it, of buffoonery (de Man, 177). And indeed, in keeping with de Man’s description of irony’s function, the Wragg passage produces a profound uncertainty in the structure of the essay. We no longer know what is meant by “disinterestedness” because we cannot tell whether Arnold is truly moved to correct the social problems that lead to Wragg’s crime (in which case he is not disinterested at all), or whether he is only offended by the philistinism of those who, in the name of getting practical results, utter inanities (“Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole world!”) instead of employing reason. Does Arnoldian disinterestedness (as Park Honan argues) mean ultimately to save the lives of infants by first changing the intellectual practice of those who construct the ideals of the society? Or is Arnold’s disinterestedness here true to form; is Arnold practicing, to borrow Regenia Gagnier’s term, an “aesthetics of consumption” (Gagnier, 47), disinterestedly passing aesthetic judgment on names, on the newspaper’s abrupt style, on the decrepitude of poor neighborhoods, and finally, on the vulgarity of the MP’s self-satisfied speech?
Finally, it seems that irony allows Arnold to hang in the balance between the ethical and the aesthetic. The turn to irony allows Arnold, in the manner of poetry, to open up a disrupting because disturbing series of questions about the relationship between beauty (or ugliness) and the good. As Arnold’s metonymy links “the gloom, the smoke, the cold, [with] the strangled illegitimate child,” links the guttural sound of the double “g” with “an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions,” he suggests that aesthetic effect, what we might call surface, is intimately connected to the moral depth of a person or culture. In this way the ironic—the poetic—moment, produced through the metonymic process by which language generates language, becomes itself productive of the ideational. The text-machine, to borrow de Man’s term for the slippery chain of signifiers, births a future of critical thought, as generations of readers confront the ambiguous mode of Arnold’s attack.
Thus I am arguing that the Wragg moment represents poetry reasserting itself into disinterested criticism, that the moment reverses Arnold’s (gendered) positioning of criticism and poetry in which poetry must carry criticism’s rationally achieved ideas. Here, it seems, poetry penetrates criticism with its irrational, ironic meanings, causing a disturbance in the hierarchy Arnold has set up. If this is true, however, it is not without its complications.
As I hope is clear, I am not content to suggest that simply by turning to Wragg, Arnold betrays his own stricture against criticism’s involvement in the practical and political, that he betrays “disinterestedness” by becoming interested in the plight of poor unwed mothers, for his irony keeps such a reading at bay. But neither, finally, can we read the Wragg episode as a moment of “criticism” at its most “free” because most disinterested. Shame, to return once more to Sedgwick, marks identity, marks individuation and boundaries. And yet, as Arnold himself will remind us repeatedly in Culture and Anarchy, critical disinterestedness, or what he calls in that work, “culture,” is above all else the ability to recognize the breadth of our intersubjectivity; culture’s purpose is finally to remind us that “men are members of one great whole and the sympathy which is in human nature will not allow one member to be indifferent to the rest” (37). Such a finally radical picture of sociability requires, as Kantian ethics teaches, a detachment of the subject from his own desires, his own “pathology.”
Interestingly for my reading of Arnold, in Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, we find Kant calling the process of detaching oneself from one’s desire (and thus becoming “not merely legally good, but morally good”) a “rebirth.” lvi And yet here in “The Function of Criticism,” as in “Isolation,” the self-perpetuating dyad shame/desire reproduces isolation by acting as a barrier to the “birthing” of the truly disinterested subject.lvii
Lurking beneath the explosion of ugly names as the source of the “bad” is the doubling of the difficult figures of feminine sexual desire and murderous maternity. This doubled monstrosity marks the presence of shame/desire and also points to Arnold’s resistance to metaphoric “birth,” to the rupturing of tradition.lviii In the section to follow I will examine more generally some of the cultural and ideological sources of this resistance to birth in Arnold, and will explore more fully its implications for his poetics and for his attitude toward futurity.
V. Problems with Birth
Again, for Arnold, the poem, or poetry itself, plays the part of the domestic woman: she carries the race into the future, she acculturates new generations, and she does so by abiding by the laws of wholesomeness, beauty, and pleasure. The critic, then, plays the part of the socially useful male who impregnates the poet with “ideas.” In many respects, this formulation is not surprising—the metaphor of reproductive generation as applied to literary production is certainly conventional. However, what is notable in Arnold’s use of this trope is the degree to which the figure of the poet has been effaced. Poetry becomes an abstracted container for the critic’s projections; the poet seems nowhere to be found. Furthermore, aesthetic unity means for Arnold that poetry cannot be invaded, and yet, to press the metaphor, like the female body when not pregnant, the pregnant body cannot accurately be imagined as fully “sealed.” It might be more precise, as suggested earlier, to read Arnold’s metaphoric poem not as a pregnant woman, but rather as a womb. In this case (again, extending the metaphor here), the sealed womb cannot give birth, for a womb cannot labor without a woman. Thus the problem in Arnold’s ideology of pregnant poetry is a problem, as already discussed, of the “future”—the future of the pregnant poem is simply more pregnancy. “The future of poetry is immense” indeed.
Regenia Gagnier has argued that Arnold’s aesthetics is an “aesthetics of evaluation,” an aesthetics focused on the consumer/critic rather than on the producer/artist. Some Victorian aesthetes, such as Ruskin or Morris, she writes, “were concerned with productive bodies, whose labour could be creative or alienated, while others [such as Arnold] were concerned with pleasured bodies, whose taste established their identities” (47). Gagnier’s delineation goes a long way toward explaining the erasure of the poet/body in Arnold’s construction, but we can also look to contemporary writings about pregnancy and birth to situate Arnold’s “all-womb” metaphor within its cultural landscape.
As Mary Poovey and Andrea K. Henderson have demonstrated, nineteenth-century medical texts often described the female body as purely and only a womb. Poovey quotes W. Tyler Smith in the medical journal Lancet as writing (in 1847), “The uterus is to the Race what the heart is to the Individual: it is the organ of circulation to the species . . . man passes continually from the womb of his mother onward to the womb of time” (35). This construction, as Poovey points out, imagines a giant womb in which men are perpetually floating; birth is quickly sublimated into the ongoing pregnancy of “time.” In her analysis of medical textbook plates from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Henderson notes that even as the image of the womb shifts from “mechanical” to “animalistic,” the woman’s body is never portrayed. Rather, the womb and surrounding pelvis (either as bones or flesh) is depicted as an isolated entity, the woman’s torso and legs appear “lopped off,” sometimes with rather gruesome detail (Henderson, 12-20). This erasure of the woman’s body, these critics argue, aligns with or reflects the ideology that defines the feminine as essentially, purely, maternal.
And yet, the scene of childbirth presents a paradox. At issue is the familiar construction of the feminine as at once man’s moral guide and his temptress (Poovey, 32). And in Victorian era descriptions of birthing, both sides of this paradox are at play. Poovey quotes Smith (who was to become one of the founders of the Obstetrical Society) as arguing that the pain of labor serves the useful function of canceling out, or, neutralizing “the sexual emotions, which would otherwise probably, be present, but which would tend very much to alter our estimation of the modesty and retiredness proper to the sex” (32). Others quoted by Poovey conjectured that because childbirth was, at base, a sexually stimulating act (a surprise to mothers), it presented the doctor/viewer with a problematic display of feminine desire, just at the moment when maternity, as the moral ground of the culture, was being most directly expressed (31-2).
Just as this problematically desirous birthing woman is erased in the medical texts and plates referenced above, Arnold’s pregnant poetry removes the poet from the scene. In order for poetry to carry forward the ideological goals Arnold has set for it, it is necessary that the poet, and poetic language itself, move out of the way. Henderson argues that Romantic-era texts describing the scene of childbirth effaced the laboring woman by naming “nature” as the active agent that draws the baby from the woman’s passive form (12-20). Arnold’s critical essays on specific Romantic poets participate in a similar rhetoric. Despite his anti-Romanticism, Arnold seems to have adopted the Aeolian harp model of poetic agency. The individual poet is praised not for his particular skill or even for the “genius” Arnold will claim for him, but rather for the way in which “nature” moves through him, such as in the essay on Wordsworth: “It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him. He has no style” (Works, 9:52). Interestingly, when writing on Keats (who in fact is praised for the beauty of his poetry), Arnold spends the majority of the essay defending Keats’s “character,” drawing evidence of his “nobility” not from poems, but from his letters, thus replacing Keats the poet with Keats the tragic, yet noble, man (Works, 9:205-216). And, as we’ve seen, in Arnold’s essays where “poetry” in general is discussed, the abstraction is once again offered as a passive recipient of abstract forces.lix
To return now to “The Function of Criticism,” we can begin to see how the figure of Wragg, as an emblem for female sexual desire and agency, plays a particularly disturbing role in Arnoldian poetics. Because Arnold relied so heavily on the maternal image in his descriptions of poetry, his choice of the fallen woman as a figure of shame suggests an apprehension about the ideological disruption that female desire suggests, which is also an apprehension about how poetic language can disrupt the ideological function assigned to poetry. Language embodies desire by gesturing toward what it cannot attain, because of the instability at the base of the structure, because language is always an approximation. If poetry, like the domestic woman, is to carry forth the hegemonic ideals of a particular class into the future, then language, with its propensity to disrupt rather than make meaning, resists the very function assigned to it. Just as the domestic/maternal woman’s desire disturbs the ideology that posits her as morally pure, language (and especially poetic language) as desire makes its servitude to ideology unsteady, if not dangerous.
However, Wragg is not only the bearer of an illegitimate child and as such a figure for female sexual desire; she is also that child’s murderer. As an infanticidal mother she represents an even deeper threat to Arnoldian “culture.” In her study of the figure of the infanticidal mother in the nineteenth century, Josephine Mcdonagh makes the convincing argument that Wragg becomes for Arnold a figure of threatening modernity:
By mid century, under the force of the domestic ideology, the figure of the good mother, in its dominant uses, tends to stand for tradition, against the incursions of industrial society. The infanticidal woman is associated with the disorder and change brought about by industrialization. As the good mother stands for tradition, the infanticidal woman is the harbinger of the modern. (228)
By focusing his and England’s shame on the figure of Wragg, Arnold is once more betraying a resistance to the potential ruptures in England’s future. Arnold’s choice of Wragg points to the dangerous threat, the “anarchy” that lies at the base of his conception of “culture.” This threat, to put it simply, is modernity itself. Mcdonagh writes:
In the rhetorical construction of High Culture, or Arnoldian civilization, Wragg represents the barbaric work of industry—or anarchy—that will be fended off by the formation of the realm of Culture. And if anarchy is represented by the bad mother, Culture, in its civilizing mission, appropriates the function of the good mother. Like the good mother, Culture provides a site in which a class can reproduce its values, and it does so precisely by regulating the modes of literary consumption, in the same way that the good mother performs her acculturating function through the metaphor of feeding. (229)
Finally, I contend that Wragg points both to Arnold’s conservative resistance to democracy’s most radical possibilities, and to his (ashamed) fascination with the unknowable future, with the “modern.” I will turn now to Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna, written a full decade before “The Function of Criticism,” but anticipating many of the issues within the essay. This poem marks the crossroads of Arnold’s work, and he rejects it from his canon for many of the same reasons, as we will see, that he is repelled by and fascinated with the figure of Wragg.
VI. Empedocles on Etna: The Unbirthing of the Poem
Empedocles on Etna begins with a competition between the poet and the physician over who will better heal modernity. Empedocles, a figure for modernity itself, suffers from self-consciousness, what Carlyle calls the “disease” of inquiry. He cannot escape the dialogue of his mind with itself, and this isolation spells his despair. And yet, while Carlyle imagines “the region of meditation” in its “quiet mysterious depths” as an unmapped creatively productive territory, Arnold’s Empedocles mistrusts his own interiority, finding it not at all a source of vital generation, but rather a binding and static sphere. The mind’s un-freedom arises, for Empedocles, out of its modern incapacity to forge cohesive meanings from empirical data.
When Empedocles complains that man’s “wind-borne, mirroring soul, / A thousand glimpses wins, / And never sees a whole” (1:2, 83-5), we will be reminded of Arnold’s “On the Modern Element,” his 1869 inaugural address at Oxford, in which he most fully presents his picture of modernity as “the spectacle of a vast multitude of facts” (Works, 1: 20). Arnold argues that “intellectual deliverance” is only complete when, “we have acquired that harmonious acquiescence of mind which we feel in contemplating a grand spectacle that is intelligible to us; when we have lost that impatient irritation of mind which we feel in the presence of an immense, moving, confused spectacle which, while it perpetually excites our curiosity, perpetually baffles our comprehension” (20). Unable to process the fragmented and overwhelming spectacle of modernity, Empedocles fails to realize this “deliverance”; he finds his soul suspended—reflective, but incapable of unifying vision. While this vertiginous experience of modernity is taken by other authors such as Baudelaire, Walter Pater, and Dante Rossetti, as a point of departure, an opening into the new, for Arnold’s Empedocles it marks a failure, a stay in development.
In the drama of the poem, the physician, Pausanias, and the poet and harp-player, Callicles, attempt to lure Empedocles out of his self-scrutinizing exile. Pausanias is quickly discredited as a philistine, a useless healer more involved in his own career problems than in Empedocles’s fate. The poem then takes up the central question of Keats’s “The Fall of Hyperion,” the question of whether the poet will “vex” or “pour out a balm” upon the world.lx If Callicles can heal Empedocles, then the wager falls on the side of poetry as a socially healing force. If instead Callicles fails to usurp the role of physician, then poetry is shown to be weak or even useless in contending with the pressures of modernity. I will address the poem’s answer to this question below. First I’d like to examine more carefully the problem of modernity as Arnold here presents it.
The metaphor of birth or of birth’s failure appears in various guises throughout this poem. Empedocles has recently performed the “miracle” of calling Pantheia “back to life.” And yet, as Callicles reveals, this rebirthing is in truth a mere sham; Pantheia’s trances are well known. Later, Empedocles’s powers are described by Pausanias as swelling with the “swelling evil of this time” (1:1, 112). Thus Empedocles, this figure for diseased modernity, becomes simultaneously a figure for diseased, because perpetually pregnant, maternity. Unable to rebirth the dead, unable to birth his own powers, Empedocles represents pregnancy as stasis or retention. As he puts it, “we feel, day and night, / The burden of ourselves” (1:2, 127-8). Moreover, Empedocles’s final suicide, the leap into the gaping mouth of the volcano, can be read as a reversal of birth—the symbolic failure of modernity to birth itself into the future.
But what really ails Empedocles? What is the cause of this un-releasable burden of the self? For it is not simply the fracturing of dogma, the overwhelming array of “facts,” or the self-conscious deliberation Arnold elsewhere attributes to modernity that plagues Empedocles. It is not simply “the doubts . . .the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust” which Arnold, in his Preface names as both our and Empedocles’s problem. Empedocles suffers most acutely from the condition of seeing himself as wholly determined, as a product of outside forces, a construction. We are, Empedocles laments, “born into life!,” which is to say, born into limits and conditions we do not set and cannot see:
Born into life!—man grows
Forth from his parents’ stem,
And blends their bloods, as those
Of theirs are blent in them;
So each new man strikes root into a far fore-time.
(1:2, 187-91)
Just as our parentage binds us to a genetic map, historical process keeps us rooted to the past, unable to make ourselves new. “Born into life!—we bring / A bias with us here,” Empedocles continues, indicating that even at the subjective level of taste, preference, or personality, we are determined by forces prior to our birth, beyond our control. Empedocles might be complaining about the pressures of ideology here, or he might be presenting an imprisoned and absolute historicity. But he is also describing an even more fundamental way in which subjects are not free. This is the Kantian pathological—the enormous web of causes both internal and external which determine and motivate our every thought and action: “To tunes we did not call our being must keep chime” (1:2, 196).
This sense of entrapment within the internally and externally generated bind of determination is played out formally in Empedocles’s central sermon as well. Empedocles’s rigidly structured five-line stanzas are woven together by their rhyming fifth lines. The ABABC pattern structurally demonstrates Empedocles’s lament: the tune that seems to come from elsewhere is both within the stanza and outside of it at once. Arnold thus emphasizes (as in the Marguerite poems) that the problem of determination is not simply that we are oppressed by external forces (such as politics, history, economics), but also, and most insistently, that we are bound by the very perpetuity of desire. Our own motives and interests imprison us in a static, because unfree, causality. As Empedocles tells Pausanias: “Our wants have all been felt, our errors made before” (211); even at the level of desire, we are preceded.lxi
And Empedocles restates this sense of “absolute determination” later in the poem, introducing once again, the metaphor of birth:
To the elements it came from
Everything will return—
Our bodies to earth
Our blood to water,
Heat to fire,
Breath to air,
They were well born, they will be well entomb’d—
(2:1, 331-37)
This cyclical course, occurring here at the elemental level of body and earth, figures the newly born as always already entombed. Birth is conjured here not to suggest the eruption of the new, the strange, the unpredicted, but instead to draw attention to the static repetition of the status quo.
And yet, Arnold completes this stanza with the fragment “But mind? . . .” “Mind,” separating the subject from “nature,” proposes an exception to this cyclical pattern of return. But for “mind,” Arnold has Empedocles say, we would gladly fall back into our “mother earth’s miraculous womb”—our return would be, because familiar, a pleasurable reblending with the elements. The ellipses following the word “mind” suggest, however briefly, that Empedocles is allowing for the possibility that unlike all other aspects of the self, the mind might not be trapped within endless and endlessly determined repetition. “Mind” is momentarily figured as carrying us beyond repetition and return, and as such, the possible site of our freedom.
I am reminded here of the final passages of The Prelude (published just two years before) where Wordsworth proclaims the mind “a thousand times more beautiful than the earth / On which it dwells.” And yet, unlike Wordsworth who wants to celebrate the boundlessness of the imagination, and announce reason’s capacity to subordinate sublime nature to itself,lxii Arnold’s Empedocles finds himself finally unable to praise either the mind’s superiority or its freedom. For Empedocles, the mind’s thoughts, bearing no relation to the earth’s body, have no “parent element” to return to. This parentless status means, of course, that mind, or “thought,” must be the child of the self, which is to say, of itself. Because of the impossibility of dividing the subject from its thoughts, “mind” is figured as simultaneously the (unborn) progeny and the (mastering) mother of the self. I’ll need here to quote a lengthier passage. This is Empedocles’s final speech just before his suicidal leap:
But mind, but thought—
If these have been the master part of us—
Where will they find their parent element?
What will receive them, who will call them home?
But we shall still be in them, and they in us,
And we shall be strangers of the world,
And they will be our lords, as they are now;
And keep us prisoners of our consciousness,
And never let us clasp and feel the All
But through their forms, and modes, and stifling veils.
And we shall be unsatisfied as now;
And we shall feel the agony of thirst,
The ineffable longing for the life of life
Baffled for ever; and still thought and mind
Will hurry us with them on their homeless march,
Over the unallied unopening earth,
Over the unrecognizing sea;
(2:1, 345-361)
This strange reversal, in which what seems to be “in” us becomes instead around us, holding us within it as a prisoner, should once again be read in the context of Arnold’s conception of modernity. The modern subject becomes the unborn infant of his own thoughts precisely because of the “immense, moving, confused spectacle” before him. He cannot master thoughts, cannot achieve intellectual “deliverance,” specifically because curiosity is excited and comprehension refused. The infantile or perhaps embryonic subject, swaddled, thirsty, baffled (one thinks here of Blake) in a perpetual embrace, longs to be born; “The ineffable longing for the life of life” is the paradoxical homelessness of the fetus who, because it is always housed in a mastering other, is never at home in itself. The subject becomes entombed in the womb of thought because thought, reflecting modernity, has become too vast, multitudinous, and unwieldy to master.
I’d like to take the metaphor of pregnancy a step further in order to suggest that Arnold fails to imagine a birthing of the modern subject from its own mind precisely because he fails to imagine this mind as an “other” body. In order for the subject to be born from the maternal body of thought, which is to say, language, this body must be construed as other than the self. To recognize language’s otherness, to recognize language as both strange and estranging, is to perform the “radical distance” of self de Man discusses in his essay on irony, for to read language as simultaneously self-constituting and other is to accept an ironic distance at the center of subjectivity. The indivisible union between the subject and its thoughts which leads to Empedocles’s final unbirthing is derived out of a philosophy of language and an aesthetics that explicitly rejects language’s otherness, its capacity to make meaning, as it were, on its own, that specifically rejects, as Arnold puts it in the Preface, “the brilliant things which ar[ise] under [the poet’s] pen as he [goes] along” (Works, 1:7). But it is important to say that Arnold’s poem offers its own counter aesthetics through the voice of Callicles, the voice of the poet.
Callicles, the harp-playing boy, unlike the well-meaning Pausanias, is acutely, perhaps obsessively, attuned to the senses. Not only does he represent pure music, his speech is everywhere distracted or absorbed by the sensual. (As Harrison informs us, his name is Greek for “beauty” [Arnold, 48]). He notes the feeling of the air, the scents of herbs, the sounds of the mules’ bells. He is responsive to heat, to the cool of the shade, to the visual effects of light and shadow. And his response takes the formless form of sentences that seem never to end. In the ongoing movement of the senses there is always something new, and thus a refusal to conclude—to complete or organize a narrative line—dominates Callicles’s style. This is the opening to Callicles’s first song:
The track winds down to the clear stream,
To cross the sparkling shadows; there
The cattle love to gather, on their way
To the high mountain-pastures, and to stay,
Till the rough cow-herds drive them past,
Knee-deep in the cool ford; for ‘tis the last
Of all the woody, high, well-water’d dells
On Etna; and the beam
Of noon is broken there by chestnut-boughs
Down its steep verdant sides; the air
Is freshen’d by the leaping stream, which throws
Eternal showers of spray on the moss’d roots
Of trees, and veins of turf, and long dark shoots
Of ivy-plants, and fragrant hanging bells
Of hyacinths, and on late anemonies,
That muffle its wet banks; but glade,
And stream, and sward, and chestnut-trees,
End here; Etna Beyond, in the broad glare
Of the hot noon, without shade,
Slope behind slope, up to the peak, lies bare;
The peak, round which the white clouds play.
(1:2, 36-56)
This exhaustive twenty-one-line sentence, held together by a seemingly endless parataxis, is itself a winding track arriving into dispersal. Callicles’s final image, the playing of the clouds, moves and dissolves into space, as if to suggest the evaporation of the “clear stream” we thought was our destination. But the language in this passage is not only descriptive of visual and sensual detail, it is also constructed by and through the aural and visual experience of its words. Orthographic groupings such as “Etna,” “eternal,” and “verdant,” homophonic relationships, such as the near-rhymes of “cow herds” and “cool fords,” or “ivy plant” and “hyacinth,” as well as the plethora of internal rhyme and alliteration, seem to guide the speech more rapidly forward than does its narrative. To read this almost Swinburnian passage aloud is to get lost in aural sensation. Just as the “beam of noon” is broken into a display of light and shadow, the narrative line is disrupted here by the play of sound. Callicles is Arthur Hallam’s “poet of sensation,” and his unbound speech stands in counterpoint to Empedocles’s sermon of entrapment that follows it.
Jerome McGann characterizes Callicles’s lyrics as “a surface of untroubled beauty, an apparition of comfort,” and claims that Callicles “exhibits the limitations of a purely aesthetic approach to poetry in circumstances which are shadowed by social and psychic emergencies.” lxiii While I am in agreement with McGann that in the drama of the poem Callicles’s lyric is revealed to be inadequate to the task of saving (or birthing) modernity, I am suggesting that in the figure of Callicles Arnold offers the reader an example of a modern subject who revels in, rather than seeks to master, the overwhelming spectacle of fragmented experience. In the figure of Callicles, Arnold (perhaps unwittingly) offers an alternative to his vision of the modern subject as a helpless fetus trapped within the maternal “mind.” In chapter two we will investigate the implications of this version of modernity for both poetics and politics as it arises in the poetry of Dante Rossetti. Here it suffices to say that while Arnold figures this pastoral wanderer as something of a relic, an idealized romantic figure whose free access to feeling and sensation are unattainable for the very modern Empedocles, other Victorian writers, from Arthur Hallam to Walter Pater and Rossetti, will name the experience of fleeting and fractured sensation as a definitive, and perhaps welcomed, aspect of modernity.
Furthermore, it must be noted that Callicles is not only a figure for aesthetic pleasure or sensory attunement. He is also a figure for the anarchy of desire. When asked by Pausanias to explain his presence on Etna he answers:
The night was hot, and the feast past its prime; so we slipped out,
Some of us, to the portico to breathe—
Peisianax, thou know’st, drinks late; and then,
As I was lifting my soil’d garland off,
I saw the mules and litter in the court.
(1:1, 37-41)
This narrative of sensation and desire does nothing to answer Pausanias’ question. This is Arnold’s “doing-as-one-likes,” the very root of self-interested anarchy. (Interestingly, Harrison refers to Callicles as “wholly disinterested” because of how he “assimilates the beauty of the external world and generates it anew in the self-sufficient mythical structures of his verse”. Like Keats’s “camelion [sic] poet,” Harrison argues, Callicles is constantly “filling some other Body” (48). But this version of disinterestedness, the version where sensation directs one in an ongoing exploration of the physical world is probably not what Arnold had in mind, though it might be where the concept of “disinterestedness” finally arrives.) Later, when Callicles is pressed to explain his willingness to help Empedocles, he admits, “I know not how, he draws me to him, / And I could watch him with his sad face, / His flowing locks and gold-encircled brow / And kingly gait, for ever” (1:1, 58-63). Like Baudelaire’s modern painter, Callicles aestheticizes that which enraptures him, and thereby objectifies his own desire. The very aimlessness of this desire, its tendency to wander from object to object, points to the “psychic mobility,” the “unanchored identity,” of the modern subject (Bersani, 2). And while Arnold’s poem seeks to discredit just this suspended mobile subjectivity, its persistent presence in this central poem, and the poem’s final persistence in Arnold’s self-structured canon, speaks for, rather than against, the anarchic alternative Arnold seeks to control.
