A First Step towards Functional Differentiation

The analysis of Sordello has shown that, despite a lingering nostalgia for the Romantic

concept of poetry as comprehensive self-expression. Browning at this early point displays the essential prerequisites for a poetry of functional differentiation. As far as the reader is concerned, the principle of a poetry of second order observation is fiilly developed, and an effort is made to teach the reader to take a more critical stance towards the text and the authorial voice. With reference to Browning’s new self­

conceptualisation as a poet, Sordello is still very much a transitional work. The author

already acts as an objective poet in presenting his fictional selves for observation in dramatic situations. In adopting the idea characteristic of Romantic Irony of the impossibility of encompassing the infinite self in the finite text, the poem represents a first step towards the total separation of the author’s self from the literary work, which Luhmann defines as a token of the autonomy of art from other systems in a modem, functionally differentiated society. The poem still draws on traditional methods for the poet’s self-conceptualisation, i.e. the omniscient, unified authorial voice and the autobiographical narrative, but both turn out to have lost their epistemological value and are subverted. They are subsequently replaced by Browning’s dramatic endeavours and his concentration on the dramatic monologue, which he first uses in 1836 in

‘Madhouse Cells’ and with which Sordello also experiments. The impossibility of

comprehensive observation and the suspicion that the limitation of perspective also applies to the poet-narrator is already tentatively suggested (see Chapter V. 1.2 and the Don Quixote and St. John passages). Yet the emphasis of the poem is rather on the possibilities which a differentiation of levels of observation holds for the exploration of the various stages of Browning’s self and his development.

It was, however, neither Browning’s incomplete transition to an exclusion of his self nor his doubting of absolute perspective which proved problematic for the poem’s reception, but the highly demanding strategy of second order self-observation. Readers

simply did not understand that the main purpose of the text was the synchronous observation of the stages of Browning’s artistic development. Despite his asseverations that he never expected a public success, Browning could not come to terms with the public’s and the reviewers’ sheer unwillingness to engage with such a difficult poem. His discontent must have been so strong that, even after a gap of twenty-eight years, he

felt the need to rewrite Sordello in his next narrative poem in propria persona. R&B,

written 1864-68 and published 1868-69, not only returns to Sordello's central motifs,

such as the determination of parentage (both of Pompilia and Gaetano), the voice of the public and the role of the papacy; it is also an occasion for Browning to argue his poetics, his relation to genre, the literary tradition and the readership all over again. Most importantly. Browning discovers multiperspectivism as a more accessible framework for second order observation.

V.2. The R ing and the Book

In Book I, 839-58 of R&B, the speakers in their efforts to grasp the truth of the Roman

murder story are compared to a person who is unsuccessfully trying to pick up a stone from the bottom of a pool. He fails because the surface o f the water breaks the light and creates the optical illusion that the stone lies in a different place. This metaphor prepares the reader for the discovery that the divergent versions of the story in the following books are always determined by the observer’s point of view. The poem thereby makes the issue of the existence of objective truth and absolute perspective its central concern. Interpretations of Browning’s use of the device of multiperspectivism in R&B either assume that the absolute point of view can be deduced from the entirety

of all monologues (Miller Disappearance 149), that certain speakers - especially the

Pope as God’s representative on earth and Fra Celestino - enjoy a privileged

perspective (Langbaum Poetry o f Experience Chapter 3; Whitla 129-37; Raymond

‘Pope’) or that the monologues are arranged in a pattern which assigns different levels of credibility to the speakers (McElderry; Altick and Loucks 39-40, 76-81; Litzinger;

Woolford Revisionary Chapter 7; Rigg 20). An opposed view considers the

discrepancies between the monologists as an indication that absolute truth is either not

existent or at least unobtainable (Crowell Convex Glass 182-224). R&B thus either

Chapter V

becomes an aesthetic document of ‘how something that once existed slides towards nothingness’ (Swingle 259)^^ or is seen to enaet the deconstructionist indeterminacy of

meaning (Slinn Discourse Chapter 5; Findlay).

However, the framing device of two monologues in Browning’s own voice, in which he takes the stance of the omniscient author and narrator, retells the story four times and makes a clear moral judgement in favour of Pompilia, seems to undermine all of these interpretations. Several critics have seen this unwillingness to ‘preserve

narrative mystery’ (Roberts Browning Revisited 94) as a flaw in the poem’s design.^^ If

we suppose that absolute truth is indeed ‘Evolvible from the whole’ (X, 231) of all monologues, the version of the story in Book I deprives the reader of the pleasure of finding the truth for himself through collating Books II-XI; and if we assume that the poem illustrates the impossibility of complete observation, the poet-speaker’s omniscience contradicts the underlying thesis of the rest o f the poem. On the surface, the poet’s claim to a privileged insight seems to be sufficiently justified: he is the only

speaker to have read all documents in his source, the Old Yellow Book {OYB)\ he is

separated from the events by an objectifying historical distance; and he occupies a

higher narrative level than the other - in Genette’s terminology {Figures III 238) -

intradiegetic speakers, whose utterances he partially transcribes, partially recreates and partially imagines on the basis of the court documents. His monologues are, moreover, like a prologue and an epilogue situated on the threshold between fiction and non- fictional extratextual discourse, so that they can easily appear as the serious expression of Browning’s authorial intention.^^ Yet at the same time the enunciation suggests that the poet’s monologues have a fictional status. Through their inclusion in the twelve- book structure, they are integrated into the fictional realm - unlike ‘One Word M ore’,

For L. J. Sw ingle the poem ’s interest is therefore not epistem ological but an ontological ‘contest between being and non-being’ (259). Cf. the same em phasis in Erickson (Chapter 7).

Ian Jack’s condem ning conclusion is representative: ‘In The Ring an d the B ook [...] the author does “stand by”, so anxious is he that his m essage should not go by default. The “modernity” o f the poem has been exaggerated, alike by Chesterton and by Langbaum, and it is difficult not to see it as other than a dead end in the history o f English poetry’ {M ajor P oetry 299). See also Cook {C om m entary 3), Fairchild, who calls Brow ning ‘one o f the least impersonal o f E nglish poets’ ( ‘Simple-Hearted C asuist’ 240), and Langbaum him self, who thinks Browning is ‘abandoning the dramatic m onologue entirely - by speaking in his own voice in the first and last Books in order to establish the right

judgem ents’ {P oetry o f E xperience 158).

An indication that contemporaries naturally considered Books I and XII to be non-fictional is T ennyson’s remark about B row ning’s reading o f Book I which he attended: ‘Brow ning read his Preface to us last night [ . . . ] ’ (Tennyson Tennyson M em oir 59).

which, as the fifty-first poem in Men and Women, is unambiguously placed outside the sphere of Browning’s fictional ‘fifty men and women’. The use of verse and the creation of a dramatic situation of utterance, in which the speaker repeatedly uses

imperatives and seems to hand the OYB to his interlocutor(s), would also be unusual

for a preface and postface.

In view of this ambiguous status of the poet-speaker’s monologues and following the lead of the four analyses which doubt the absolute reliability o f the speaker’s view of the story (Blalock; Sullivan) and his poetics (Menaghan and Dupras),

I want to argue that, as in Sordello, this character is designed as a fictional version of

Browning’s self. His views may in many points coincide with those held by the implied author, but his observations of the Roman murder story and his creativity with their biases and limitations are also exposed so that the reader can observe them. The reader has to decide which of the speaker’s statements can be attributed to the author and in which places the author takes a more detached (ironic) view of his speaker. In order to discover this, I will seek to determine the varying degrees of distance and proximity between the enounced and the enunciation of Books I and XII on these central aspects of the speaker’s self-portrayal.

The analysis is divided into four sections, progressing towards increasing abstraction and higher levels of observation. In a first step, I will contrast the poet’s self-portrayal as a realist author, who presents his work as an objective, quasi- historiographic endeavour, with his first order observation of the story as it appears in his narration of the events, which reveals his personal, literary and moral patterns of thought. This will permit us to evaluate whether the poet’s version of the story is authoritative or not. Afterwards, I will consider his account of the genesis of Books II- XI, i.e. his second order self-observation of his creative process. I will then examine his general reflections on poetics. I will finally seek to determine if and how the author distances himself from the statements about the epistemological function of art in the enounced and inquire whether he thereby rejects the assumption that absolute observation is possible.

Chapter V

V.2.1. The Poet as First Order Observer of the Story