BROWNING AND THE FICTIONS OF IDENTITY BROWNING AND THE FICTIONS OF IDENTITY E. Warwick Slinn © E. Warwick Slinn 1982 So ftc over reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1982 978-0-333-30056-5 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1g82 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-05684-2 ISBN 978-1-349-05682-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-05682-8 For my parents Eric and Vera Slinn v Contents Priface lX The Repudiation of Experience 2 'God a tame confederate': Irony in Pippa Passes 20 3 The Drama of Self-Conception 37 4 The Function of Illusion 76 5 Histrionic Action in The Ring and the Book I I o 6 Experience as Pageant: Subjectivism in Fifine at the Fair I 34 7 The Self as Subject I 5 I Nutes I64 Index I70 Vll Preface This book arises out of the simple aim of explaining what Browning meant by 'action in character', although the explanation itself is at times not so simple. Browning seems to me to be a psychological dramatist who used monologues to explore man as the product of a self-reflexive use oflanguage. Consequently my concern is with the nature of the histrionic in his poetry, with the way characters are engaged in verbal acts which dramatise themselves, and with the way Browning considers the multiplicity and complexity of human personality, re-examining its nature and suggesting the richness of its possibilities. The dramatic monologue is a form which almost invariably raises questions about personality and reflexive consciousness, so that dramatic tension becomes focused on conflicts about self-conception. In this, Browning is clearly a nineteenth century subjectivist, although at the same time he challenges a Romantic epistemology which assumed a continuity between experience and reality. 'To reach reality we must first repudiate experience', wrote Levi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques (New York, 1961), and Browning questions the truth of experience by exposing the ironies of conceptualising and the fallibility of his speakers. He emphasises therefore not the speaker's subject, but the speaker as subject. While the raw data of material existence remains, its meaning may be transformed or redefined through linguistic artifice. For Browning this process is the ironic drama which lies at the heart of all human consciousness; and it means that in his poetry the elusive suggestiveness of metaphoric and aesthetic language coincides with the ambiguous reality of a subject-determined view of experience. Life for Browning's characters is frequently a tightrope walk between a multitudinousness which threatens to fragment and diffuse experience on the one hand, and the self-determined fiction of a controlled solipsism on the other. As they confront the impositions of a world which would absorb them into its own shaping processes, speakers are engaged in defence of their very IX Priface X existence as individuals, and they often retaliate through acts of verbal aggression which attempt instead to subsume the world into their web of understanding. Out of this flux emerge the fictions which form a basis for personal identity. In examining Browning's portrayal of this drama, I have endeavoured to avoid the inflexibility of clinical terms taken from modern personality theory. While this may at times seem to lead to some imprecision of analysis, his poetry is not a system, and I think the variety of his characterisation and form requires an openness of approach which avoids the restrictions of distinguishing between conflict models, fulfilment models or consistency models. I have used terms, then, mainly in their ordinary dictionary sense: personality as 'being a person', 'having the distinctiveness of an individual human being'; and identity as 'oneness', 'the quality of being the same', 'the condition of being a specified person', or simply 'individuality'. It should also be noted that I use the words 'illusion' and 'fiction' descriptively, not pejoratively. All quotations from Browning's poetry, except where otherwise indicated, are taken from Browning: Poetical Works I833-I864, ed. Ian Jack (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). Two of my chapters have been previously published: Chapter 6 appeared in Journal of English Literary History, 42 (1975), 651--68 (I have made minor revisions to this article), and Chapter 2 appeared under the title '"God a Tame Confederate": the Reader's Dual Vision in Pippa Passes', in Universiry of Toronto Quarter()', 45 (1976), 158-73. I am grateful to the Johns Hopkins University Press and to the University of Toronto Press for permission to reprint these essays here. My first serious attempt to work on Browning was supervised by Professor William E. Fredeman at the University of British Columbia and if it were not for his disciplined training and friendly encouragement I might never have proceeded this far. It will be apparent from other acknowledgements in the course of my discussion that the main influences on my reading of Browning have been the writings of Robert Langbaum, Morse Peckham and Isobel Armstrong, and in a real sense this study could not have been written without their work. For their publications, and for those by Roma King and David Shaw, I am indeed grateful. I am indebted also to the Victorian Studies Centre at Leicester University for providing me with facilities that greatly assisted my writing, and to Massey University for granting me sabbatical leave and therefore Preface Xl the time to write. Finally I should mention Suzann Olsson, since her refusal to indulge my tantrums or to sustain my petty triumphs combined with her scepticism to provoke a ruefully acknowledged impetus towards continued explanation. E.W.S. Massey Universiry New Zealand May 1!}80 The Repudiation of 1 Experience Browning's poetry is characteristically mimetic, not in the older pre-Romantic sense of imitating an order believed to be inherent in the natural world, some independently created reality, but in the more modern sense of imitating ways of thinking and speaking about the world. With the growing nineteenth-century anxiety about publicly shared beliefs, poets were increasingly required to examine the assumptions underlying their creativity, in particular the relationship between poetic language and its referential world. Shelley, for instance, argues that poetry could free men from the tyrannical deception of a contingent and habitual reality: poetry, he says, 'creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration' .1 Shelley still refers to 'the' universe, a transcendent realm which sense impressions veil or distort and which it is the poet's task to reveal, but by suggesting that poetic language may order the world, he detaches words from a strict representation of things and raises the possibility of a new series of created realities, a different order of mimetic art characterised by metaphoric relationships rather than direct imitation. Clearly such a possibility questions the objective nature of reality, and in this context poetry becomes increasingly dramatic, shifting the emphasis from what is perceived to the processes of perception, from the structure of an external world to the structuring powers of individual minds.2 The natural conclusion to this trend is solipsism, and later in the century Pater's description of the mind imprisoned within its own impressions of the world follows naturally from Coleridge's pro position that 'we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does nature live', from Shelley, and from Tennyson's decision to dream his dream and 'hold it true' .3 However, the dangers of such a self-circumscribed view were recognised from the start: in Shelley's 'Alas tor', for instance, where the hero-poet dies through pursuing