The Narrator’s Self-Definition in Relation to the Audience and the Creation of the Active Reader

The implications of the opening line, ‘Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told’, which resonates throughout the poem, have not been fully exhausted yet. The hne is a

description of Sordello in a nutshell: it declares the focus of the text to be the mediation

of a story through the narrator’s consciousness (‘Sordello’s story told’); this is presented in a dramatic situation of utterance, allowing us to ‘hear’ the speaker; and it stresses that the technique of the poem is ‘Maker-see’ poetics, which work through the reader’s participation in creating the utterance through an act of will ( ‘Who will, may’)

Chapter V

- as Armstrong remarks, the poem’s ‘word for the imagination’ {Language 141). The

line indicates therefore that, in addition to Browning’s self-observation, the main purpose of the poem is to create this active reader who revises his passive habits of reception. In reading the poem, the reader is meant to undergo an educative process which parallels that of Sordello and the narrator. The final line of the poem, ‘Who would has heard Sordello’s story told’, completes the story of his development. The past tense ‘would’ emphasises that only a reader who was willing to engage with the text will have undergone this experience.

In this section, I will concentrate on how the enunciation, especially at the beginning of the poem, endeavours to challenge the reader into active participation and a critical observation of the narrator. Yet the re-education of the reader happens throughout the text and, to a lesser extent, also in the enounced. For instance, an

abundance of imperatives and parenthetical asides (cf. Gibson History 101), even at the

early stages when the narrator still pretends to play the role of a guide to a passive audience, compels us into activity, although the imperatives are strictly speaking not addressed to the reader but to the narrator’s fictional audience within the text. The imperatives of motion and perception in the descriptive passages in Verona (I, 309-45) give the reader the impression that he is physically present and able to influence events through his action:

G lide w e by clapping doors [...] (I, 313) Your finger - thus - you push A spring, and the wall opens, w ould you rush Upon the banqueters, select your prey [...] (I, 319-21) [...](lo o k you) [...] (I, 340)

The same technique is used for Goito castle (I, 374-442) and Taurello’s palace (IV ,111-71). Other imperatives incite the reader to imaginative activity, for instance when the audience is asked to create Sordello’s physiognomy and soul: ‘[...] his face / - Look, now he turns away! Yourselves shall trace [...]’ (I, 461-2).

The authorial intention to get the reader involved is clearly stated in Browning’s paratextual discussion of his original style and subsequent revisions in a letter of 4 February 1856 to his American publisher James T. Fields:

A s for ‘Sordello’ - I shall m ake it as easy as its nature admits, I believe - changing nothing and sim ply writing in the unwritten every-other-lin e which I stupidly left as an amusement for the reader to do - who, after all, is no writer, nor needs be. (Jack ‘Browning on Sordello' 196) Textual analyses of the poem’s elliptical syntax and stylistic complexities like

Armstrong’s ‘Browning and the “Grotesque Style’” or Tucker’s Browning’s

Beginnings have demonstrated how the reader is obliged to fill these ambiguous gaps. His re-enactment of the poet’s constitution of meaning makes the reader aware of his own process of perception, thus inviting him to engage in a self-observation which parallels the poet’s self-observation of his creativity." The deliberate creation of gaps

of course anticipates modernist techniques, especially T. S. Eliot’s excisions in The

Waste Land under Ezra Pound’s influence. Froula even calls Sordello the “‘missing link” between Romantic humanism and modernist poetics’ (966). And in his exposition of his method in the letter. Browning comes close to the concepts of reception theory.

But Latané, who analyses Sordello using Wolfgang Iser’s paradigms, reminds us that

intentional obscurity was not that unusual for the 1830s. He sketches out two clashing conceptions o f the long poem of the period: on the one hand, undemanding entertainment, and on the other, what he calls elitist ‘aesthetics of difficulty’ for a select few CSordello and Aesthetics’ 15-26). Browning already formulates these demanding

poetics in his call for the reader’s ‘co-operating fancy’ in the preface to Paracelsus.

In the letter to Fields, it sounds as though by 1856 Browning had abandoned these ‘aesthetics of difficulty’. If he seriously thought that his original ellipses had been ‘stupid’, this would imply a radical revision of his poetics. The poem’s dedication, which was first added in the 1863 edition, does not go so far as to condemn the entire original scheme. It merely bears witness to Browning’s disillusioned acknowledgement that he had asked too much even of the most motivated readers:

I wrote it [Sordello] twenty-five years ago for only a few , counting even in these on somewhat more care about its subject than they really had. M y own faults o f expression were many; but with care for a man or book such would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness o f either? I blame nobody, least o f all m yself, who did my best then and since; for

" The reader’s participation in the act o f creation may ultimately also encourage him to a critical observation o f his aesthetic criteria. A device which m akes the reader, and even more so the reader who is a critic, engages in such a self-observation at several places throughout the poem is the hetero­ observation o f the changeable hanger-on o f troubadours, Naddo. The reader’s indirect self-observation through Naddo corresponds to B row ning’s self-observation through the character o f Sordello.

Chapter V

I lately gave time and pains to turn my work into what the many m ight, - instead of what the few must, - like: but after all, I im agined another thing at first, and therefore leave as I find it.

In contrast, Browning’s letter in defence o i Men and Women to Ruskin, written on 10

December 1855, three months before that to Fields, suggests that even his new

compositions still follow the original poetics of Sordello:

I cannot begin writing poetry till my imaginary reader has conceded licences to m e which you demur at altogether. I know that I don’t make out my conception by my language; all poetry being a putting the infinite within the finite. You would have m e paint it all plain out, which can ’t be; but by various artifices I try to make shift with touches and bits o f outlines which

su cceed if they bear the conception from m e to you. You ought, I think, to keep pace with the thought tripping from ledge to ledge o f my ‘glaciers,’ as you call them; not stand poking your alpenstock into the holes, and demonstrating that no foot could have stood there; - suppose it sprang over there? In p ro se you may criticise so - because that is the absolute representation o f portions o f truth, what chronicling is to history - but in asking for more ultim ates you must accept less m ediates, nor expect that a Druid stone-circle will be traced for you with as few breaks to the eye as the North Crescent and South Crescent that go together so cleverly in many a suburb. Why, you look at my little song [ ‘Popularity’] as if it were Hobbs’ or N obbs’ lease o f his house, or testament o f his devisings, wherein, I grant you, not a ‘then and there,’ ‘to him and his heirs,’ ‘to have and to h old,’ and so on, would be superfluous [...] (Collingwood 200)

The difference between these statements by the mature author is not surprising in view of the fact that the last one reacts to a critic who stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the author’s right to poetic license and his call for an imaginative reader, whereas the other two are intended for a publisher who wants to sell a marketable, accessible book and for readers who must understand the demands placed on them by the text but must not be put off by insurmountable obscurity. Other remarks, such as that to Moncure D. Conway, betray a similar conflict between Browning’s willingness to make concessions

to the audience and his desire to remain true to his original project: 'Sordello is

corrected throughout’, not altered at all, but really elucidated, I hope, by a host of little

attentions to the reader [...]’ (17 September 1863, De Vane and Knickerbocker 157). Most of the revisions as they finally appear in the 1863 edition - the eighty-five new lines, the changes in punctuation and the addition of quotation marks - do clarify the text. Only the addition of running titles at the top of each page, which are yet another level of self-observation, does not turn out to be a great help in following the storyline, considering that they are on a textual level above that of the narrator and should thus express the author’s superior overview of the plot. The voice of the

running-titles is not as clearly a distinctive persona as the learned gloss writer in

Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, but it does not really give the reader the 151

unambiguous authorial guidance he would expect, either. The running-titles must have either originated in the earnest desire to elucidate the text, after which Browning got carried away by his continuing commitment to his original demanding poetics; or they were from the start planned as an ironic device, as another voice which merely pretends to have authorial authority and lures us into the erroneous belief that the poem is an accessible narrative for passive readers.

It is tempting to embrace the latter explanation, since this would reduplicate the

strategy at the beginning of Sordello, which soon disappoints the reader’s expectation

that the poem is an undemanding romance. The poem opens with the narrator’s discussion of his choice of genre for his utterance. As far as the author is concerned, the narrative form mediated through the narrator’s voice is of course necessary in order to let the reader perceive the effect which his observation of the plot and characters have on his consciousness. On the level of the enounced, the narrator proclaims he would have preferred a dramatic presentation without authorial intervention, thus displaying his agreement with the preference for drama over epic in Book V:

Never, I should warn you first, O f my own choice had this, if not the worst Yet not the best expedient, served to tell A story I could body forth so well

By making speak, m yself kept out o f view. The very man as he was wont to do. And leaving you to say the rest for him;

[ . . . ]

I should delight in watching first to last

His [Sordello’s] progress as you watch it, not a whit More in the secret than yourselves who sit

Fresh-chapleted to listen [...] (I, 11-17 and 22-5)

He argues that the novelty of his subject requires the narrative genre and a guiding authorial voice which explicates the characters and events for the audience:

[ ...] but it seem s Your setters-forth o f unexampled themes. Makers o f quite new men, producing them Had best chalk broadly on each vesture’s hem The wearer’s quality, or take his stand M otley on back and pointing-pole in hand Beside them; so for once I face ye, friends. Sum moned together from the world’s four ends. Dropped down from Heaven or cast up from Hell, To hear the story I propose to tell. (I, 25-34)

Chapter V

When it finally gets under way, the narrative seems to satisfy fully the audience’s expectations. The colourful tableau of the crowd in Verona promises a

typical historical romance à la Walter Scott with its war action and love plot, the genre

also adopted by Mrs Busk’s Sordello. Nevertheless, it becomes increasingly clear

throughout Book I that the generic conventions are not fulfilled. The narrator indulges the public’s taste for authorial guidance so much that it becomes frustrated. His too ostentatious and lengthy interventions slow down a genre which depends on rapid movement. Donald Hair remarks that whereas narrators of historical romance would usually comment on the historical setting and external action. Browning’s narrator only

uses the thirteenth-century setting in Sordello as a backdrop and prefers to reflect on

internal development {Genre 28). Browning’s authorial intention not to write historical

romance is expressed in the 1863 dedication:

The historical decoration was purposely o f no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the developm ent o f a soul: little else is worth study. I, at least, always thought so - you, with many known and unknown to m e, think so - others may one day think so [...]

It seems to me that the significant difference between Browning’s treatment of the

historical setting and the characters’ psyche in Sordello in comparison to the

conventional romance does not lie in their quantity but in their quality. Browning’s disingenuously vague ‘no more importance than a background requires’ suggests that, as mentioned in the previous section, the historical setting does play a role, and that its function is not limited to the delight in external action in the romance. As far as character portrayal is concerned. Hair cites some examples of contemporary reviews

recommending a more detailed description of the passions in romances {Genre 28). On

the surface, Sordello seems to respond to such requests by giving ample space to the

workings of the hero’s psyche, but in their complexity they clearly go beyond what one would expect in a romance.

In their note to the poem’s first line, Woolford and Karlin cite the opening of a

representative verse romance. Sir Eglamour o f Artois, which uses the phrase ‘I wol

tell’, to prove that Browning’s first line, which also contains the word ‘told’, defines

Sordello as a romance {Poems 1: 395). However, there is a crucial difference between

Sordello and such a text due to Browning’s addition of the critical observation of the

genre o f the romance. This dimension is also present in Chaucer’s in propria persona

rendition of the T ale of Sir Thopas’, which Woolford and Karlin quote as their second example of an ‘I wol tell[e]’ opening. The speaker Chaucer first responds to the host’s demand for a story with a typical verse romance, but after the host’s interrupting complaint switches to the moral T a le of Melibee’ in prose. The precedent of Chaucer’s

change of genre in his in propria persona narrative suggests that the conventional

romance opening in Browning’s text is also no guarantee that the following text will obey the generic rules, especially because the narrator clearly states at the outset that he acts against his own values in choosing the genre which is later on in the poem labelled as the lowest in the generic hierarchy.

The deviation from conventional romance does not come as a surprise to an active reader, who can already pick up in the precise wording of the opening, its syntax and imagery, a host of hints at the level of the enunciation as to the true nature o f the poem. A close look at lines 2-4 reveals a difference from the romance pattern:

His story? W ho believes me shall behold The man, pursue his fortunes to the end Like me [...]

The three elements which the enjambement places in the prominent position at the beginning of a line state the main object of the text: it is not ‘His story’, i.e. external plot as in the romance, but ‘The man’, i.e. character; and there is a hint at the importance of the narrator as observer ( ‘me’), on whom the phrase ends.

The analogies which the narrator uses for himself in the opening are a further indication that the promise of an accessible narrative in the enounced must not be taken at face value. The first and most extended one is the simile in lines 4-10 about an

episode in Don Quixote, in which the knight mistakes the clouds of dust raised by two

flocks of sheep for those raised by the armies of Pentapolin and his adversary advancing

to battle {Don Quixote Part I, Chapter 18). The point of comparison with Sordello

which immediately comes to mind is Cervantes’ intervening narrator, who ironically comments on his hero, a device which makes the novel one of Schlegel’s models of

Romantic Irony avant la lettre (‘Athenaum’ frag. 154). But instead, the parallel is

drawn between the narrator of Sordello and Cervantes’ hero. In the enounced, the

simile illustrates the narrator’s awareness that his perception of his historical subject is obstructed. It is difficult to grasp the medieval ‘Sordello, compassed murkily about /

Chapter V

With ravage of six long sad hundred years’ (I, 8-9) through the ‘din / And dust’ (I, 5-6) of temporal distance. This and the anxious reference to the hook-worms in chronicles as agents of time’s destructiveness (I, 189-92) are early instances of Browning’s evolving fascination with the inaccessibility of historical truth, which becomes so

central in R&B. Mark Hawthorne sees the allusion here as an appeal to the reader to

participate in the constitution of meaning because ‘Sordello, like Pentapolin, is a combination of a few facts and much fantasy’ (1036) and Browning’s historical inaccuracies incite the reader to make an ‘imaginative leap’ (1037).

There is a lot more implied in the enunciation, though. The passage alluded to is literally about observation, i.e. Don Quixote’s mistaken perception of the flocks of sheep. It thus once more confirms that observation, and more precisely that undertaken

by the narrator, with whom the Don is compared, is a main issue in Sordello.

Hawthorne rightly insists that in associating the narrator of Sordello with the hero, and