Turning the Autotelic on its Head, One Poem at a Time

[X-posted from the Valve ]

Continuing with the general theme of my scholarly shortcomings, I'm proud to annouce that I'm terrible at close-reading cold.  Worse than that, even.  Some people spin stupendous yarns on the spot. 

I spin my wheels. 

Unsuccessfully.

Too much stupid gunk in the gears ... by which I mean, too much stupid-gunk in the gears, preventing my wheels from even spinning.

My remedy?  Mandatory close-readings.  Cold.  No preparation.  No background research.  I'm practicing a radical New Criticism here, the kind which only ever existed in the minds of its opponents.  I hope to be a good Horacian and entertain while edifying, but fear that until I get better at this, the entertainment will be in the mocking and the edification nil. 

The first victim will be Robert Browning's "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister."  Of all the poems ever written since the dawn of time, I chose to open with this one because I've always had an affinity for Browning ... and because, since it's a dramatic monologue, the sad skills I've acquired reading novels may apply. 

Below the fold you'll find the temporarily autotelic little bugger as well as my New Critical gloss on it:

Gr-r-r—there go, my heart's abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God's blood, would not mine kill you!
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?  (5)
Oh, that rose has prior claims—
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up with its flames!

At the meal we sit together;
Salve tibi! I must hear (10)
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Sort of season, time of year:
Not a plenteous cork crop: scarcely
Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt;
What's the Latin name for "parsley"?  (15)
What's the Greek name for "swine's snout"?

Whew! We'll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we're furnished,
And a goblet for ourself,  (20)
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere 'tis fit to touch our chaps—
Marked with L. for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps!)

Saint, forsooth! While Brown Dolores (25)
Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
—Can't I see his dead eye glow, (30)
Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair's?
(That is, if he'd let it show!)

When he finishes refection,
Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection, (35)
As do I, in Jesu's praise.
I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange pulp—
In three sips the Arian frustrate;
While he drains his at one gulp!  (40)

Oh, those melons! if he's able
We're to have a feast; so nice!
One goes to the Abbot's table,
All of us get each a slice.
How go on your flowers? None double? (45)
Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange!—And I, too, at such trouble,
Keep them close-nipped on the sly!

There's a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails (50)
Twenty-nine district damnations,
One sure, if another fails;
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying (55)
Off to hell, a Manichee?

Or, my scrofulous French novel
On grey paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial's gripe; (60)
If I double down its pages
At the woeful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
Ope a sieve and slip it in't?

Or, there's Satan!—one might venture (65)
Pledge one's soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he'd miss till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We're so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine ... (70)
'St, there's Vespers! Plena gratia
Ave, Virgo!  Gr-r-r—you swine!

I'm resisting the urge to invoke Tony the Tiger, and will instead point to the fact that the poem opens and closes with a voiced growl.  The overly emotional speaker—I'm inferring strength of emotion from frequency of exclamation points in the first two quatrains—begins by describing the actions of Brother Lawrence as he passes him watering his "damned flower-pots" (2).  First, it's significant that the poem is of the occasional variety, written to commerate a particular rising of the speaker's ire.  Brother Lawrence waters his pots, the speaker becomes enflamed, and the poem commences.  Not your typical occasional poem, but Browning certainly creates the impression that it's been occasioned by a particular watering of pots, instead of a general one.

Of course, this watering is typical of prior ones, if we believe the speaker.  To my deaf ears, lines 5-8 are spoken with a high-pitched, sing-songy voice typical of witches and Jewish grandmothers:

Whaaaaaaat?  your myrtle bush wants trimming? 
Ooooooooh, that rose has prior claims—
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?

Can you hear the passive-aggression oozing from those lines?  I can.  The next, however, is intended to be aggresively exclamatory.  (Hence, the exclamation point.)  But given that the speaker is currently situated somewhere Brother Lawrene could instantly intrude, it must be muttered under the speaker's breath:

Hell dry you up with its flames!

Only it can't be—one can't yell in a whisper—and that tension accounts for its effectiveness, if you consider it effective.  Sure, you can damn someone in the immediate vicinity to hellacious dessication, but if you do, your curse won't be muttered so much as silently screamed.  That's what us New Critics call  "paradox."  It's also that odd-but-familiar theatrical non-scream favored by actors in asides.  More hoarse than harsh ... think Gollum's dueling soliloquies in The Two Towers.  (Add an "s" to "Hell" and double possessivize "its" for full effect.) 

As the next stanza begins "At the meal we sit together," you might be inclined to think we've moved forward in time.  However, later lines suggest otherwise.  I'm thinking, in particular, of the parenthetical aside "He-he! There his lily snaps" (24).  The dinner is a scene in the speaker's mind, imagined while he's still in the garden and able to snap Brother Lawrene's lilies.  (I'd comment on the apparent attempt to emasculate B.L. by associating him with the daintier garden fare, but I'm an imaginary New Critic tonight, so all this gender nonsense is beside the point.  There's no such thing as a homosexual—no, not even in a monastic cloister—and vaginas haven't even been invented yet.)  The closing stanza reinforces this idea, with its "Blasted lay that rose-acacia" (69) being in the present-tense. 

What we have, then, is a prolonged grumbling by an over-worked, under-appreciated monk currently breaking his back as he tends Brother Lawrence's rose garden.  The ornamental quality of the flowers the speaker cultivates, coupled with his complaints about the distribution of melon (41-44), suggests quite a commonplace motivation for mentally ensnaring his superior in a heresy:

He's disgruntled.  He does all the work but Brother Lawrence gets all the melon.  Not all the melon, mind you; merely an entire melon to the speaker's slice.  Which is itself important, since Brother Lawrence has a melon all to himself, whereas his subordinates must split one between them.  (I'd comment on matters relating to the alienation and the unequal distribution of labor, but I'm an imaginary New Critic tonight, so the world exists in an edenic state of pre-capitalist equity.  There's no such thing as the unequal distribution of wealth.  Poverty hasn't even been invented yet.)

You'll note that all of this occurs in the speaker's mind.  He doesn't actually try to trap Brother Lawrence in one heresy or another; instead, he takes his revenge by keeping Brother Lawrence's flowers "close-nipped on the sly" (48).  He's not unlike the movie theater employee who, to spite his manager in ways which will be unnoticed and thus beyond retribution, lets his friends in free-of-charge to see Independence Day opening night.  He'll feel gratified, certainly, that he's cost his manager some meager profit-margin; but his manager will never feel the effect of the gate he lost.  He'll merely wonder why it is Independence Day didn't do quite so well at his theater as others and sigh.  (Which sigh will bring horrors upon the popcorn solution's buttering agent, but that was a long, long time ago.  Ancient history.  No need to talk about it now.)

In short, then, "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" is a terrible poem.  Its paradoxes are of the intellectual variety; it contains clearly identifiable attitudes with which readers can sympathize; and there's not a whit of ambiguity about it, unless you count the exact heresy the speaker desires Brother Lawrence to roast for. 

Of course, it may be that I'm a terrible New Critic ...

Comments

[Alex Leibowitz]

I took a cursory glance at it and -- was that a reference to the Georgics, the part in Italics? And this is interesting -- it's proper sounding English (to an American ear) and it's colloquial. That's Browning for you -- I guess.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

That is Browning for you, I think. He seems particularly concerned with the ... what was it called? Aristotelian decorum? Wordsworth's thing about writing in the "real language of real men"? But yes, there's always a strong association of voice with character, largely because he's writing monologues. The reader's job is to tease from them the narrator's attitude, and the less philosophical part of that is his diction and voice.

[CR]

Don't know, Scott. I think you've gotten enough of this poem wrong to make a hash of it (see the comments at the Valve.)

and there's not a whit of ambiguity about it,

Well, unless you count the Big Browningian Ambiguity / Irony, which is the way that the formless streaming under-the-breath / interior monologue fits into such a tight stanzaic form. I rather think that the magic of Browning is to show the way our ownmost, our not for publication, is inhabited by / compatible with rhetoric and form. We're not as authentically ourselves as we might have thought. (Or - in the case of "My Last Duchess," those we meet in the world aren't just making it up as they go along, speaking naturally...) "Even had you skill / in speech - (which I had not)"...

(This move, of course, is important in terms of literary history as well. But we'll leave that to the side for now...)

In short, this is naive close reading, which ignores the poem as a formed object - takes the "speaker" and demotically psychoanalyzes him. Which isn't a very good sort of New Criticism at all...

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Well, unless you count the Big Browningian Ambiguity / Irony, which is the way that the formless streaming under-the-breath / interior monologue fits into such a tight stanzaic form. I rather think that the magic of Browning is to show the way our ownmost, our not for publication, is inhabited by / compatible with rhetoric and form.

I'm composing another post in another window, but I just wanted to say:

Nice.

More later, when I can switch tracks.

[CR]

Merci, if you're being serious.

It's something I take quite seriously, the close reading.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I'm being deadly serious, it's just that I have my head in The Canterbury Tales at the moment and want to finish those thoughts before returning to these.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

So, for the past few weeks I've been trying to discover the reason why I've become obsessed with reading Browning. I admit that it began not as an academic interest, but as a visceral response to reading him ... and that I loved that I could still feel that response, as I thought I'd inadvertantly analyzed it out of my system. But I think you've nailed the appeal: there's something in the give-and-take of poetic strictures and the (William) Jamesian flux they contain that I can't help but be enticed by. I'm not sure I follow you to the interpellative extremes you allude to above—but then again, I don't know if you hie to the strong form of the argument you suggest. I wouldn't, but the general tendency, the drift strikes me as absolutely right ...

... I need to think about this more, but I want to thank you for summing in two sentences what I've been beating against for weeks.

[Rich Puchalsky]

CR: "I rather think that the magic of Browning is to show the way our ownmost, our not for publication, is inhabited by / compatible with rhetoric and form. We're not as authentically ourselves as we might have thought."

I don't see what's so magical about this. Our ownmost is only inhabited by rhetoric and form when within a Browning poem, which is an artifact like any other. Writers can show nearly anything they want to show within the world of their writings. It's the same reason why (to illustrate by jumping down to the ridiculous) so many undergraduates are so impressed that Ayn Rand's principles "really work".

I find Browning annoying in part because he really does seem to trying to say something like CR's statement. It's a colonizing move.

And Scott beware: one reason that you may be "obsessed with reading Browning" is because he does appear to provide an answer to your deafness-fueled insecurity about your reading of "voice". It's a bad answer, in my opinion.

[CR]

Really, Rich? No rhetoric and form, eh? Like you just reinvent the entire English operating system ever time you tap tap tap your predictability into the 'putah? Some sort of Adamic awakening into this sort of profundity? Wow. That's amazing. How nice for you.

Or are you again, in your predictability, performing another self-deconstructive dance step? If so, brava! It's frickin fantastically done! I almost thought you was human this time!

[CR]

"It's a colonizing move."

This is interesting too. You think Browning was, like, trying to steal airtime from the analytical philosophy departments? Or psychology? Who was Browning trying to "colonize" exactly?

And, while we're at it, where did you learn to use this metaphor? Came up with it on your ownmost, didja? Or borrowed it? Not trope, not rhetoric, no no no no no.

[Rich Puchalsky]

CR, why are you being such an ass?

Or rather, why are you being this particular kind of ass at this particular time? Because I agreed with you, and my method of agreement pointed out that your understanding of literature is as programatic, resentful, and uncreative as your understanding of politics?

[Rambling Thomas]

"My remedy? Mandatory close-readings. Cold. No preparation. No background research. I'm practicing a radical New Criticism here, the kind which only ever existed in the minds of its opponents."

FYI, a paper consisting of nothing but this sort of close-reading is still mandatory on both parts of the Cambridge undergraduate English tripos. I.A. Richards and all. This may be well known to you, but academics over here are frequently astonished when I tell them. Personally, I'm a big fan of this policy.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Actually, I think that there may be larger lessons to be learned here from CR. He equates "our ownmost, our not for publication" with what I type into a computer, for publication. This only *appears* to be clueless buffoonery. It may be better represented as a sort of professional deformation -- CR as representative comprador. Who could possibly object to a writer showing how the inner monologue "is inhabited by" his rhetoric and form? Why, not hopeful tenure-track CR.

[CR]

Rich,

Your two trademark moves - reading every intellectual position that you disagree with as a symptom of an underlying psychopathology and reading every intellectual position to disagree with as a sign of sold-out professional indoctrination - render your comments unworthy of response. If you'd like to talk about rhetoric and form and the ownmost, shoot. If you'd like to talk about my professional affiliation and aspirations, I'm afraid I'm not really game. It's not interesting, more than vaguely tautological, and is a line of conversation that pushes me toward responding to your ad hominems in kind (preview: everything you say drips with an anxiety about your lack of a creditial, your outsider status that on one level you cultivate, on another you are terribly embarrassed about...)

But why go there? What's the point? I've never lorded it over you in that way - why do you react to me as if I do? It's like you want me to hit you with this sort of arrogance.

Here, I'll even give you an opportunity to get the train back on the tracks: would Daniel Dennett, do you think, disagree with the theory of the self that Browning's work recommends to us?

[Rich Puchalsky]

CR, before risibly criticizing the use of ad hominems, you might want to re-read your own comments to me in this thread. But if you'd rather hold to proud individuality in your inability to distinguish the ownmost from the blog comment, that's fine. In neither case am I at all interested in anything that you have to say about rhetoric, form, or the theory of the self.

[CR]

See, Rich, the difference is I argue with your arguments. You argue with the fact that I am assistant professor. Which might make sense, I suppose, if I defended my ideas on the basis of my job. But I don't, and wouldn't, and so you shouldn't. It's bad form, cuts off useful conversation before it has the chance to start.

[Rich Puchalsky]

CR, rewriting history is a bit difficult within a less-than-20-comment comment thread, isn't it? I wrote that I mostly agreed with your view of what Browning was trying to do, and stated my annoyance at Browning for what I described as his colonizing move. I even used Ayn Rand as an illustration -- hardly a critique of academia.

Your response is still there to read. I've made precisely one reference to your professional status -- one late in the thread, when I started to wonder what could explain such poor interpretive reading from someone whose job is interpretive reading. As I've written, feel free to insist that it is your individual problem, not your field's. I'm really not committed to either case.

As for your "I argue with your arguments", why bother? Once again, your comments are still there, just above in this thread.

[CR]

I wrote that I mostly agreed with your view of what Browning was trying to do, and stated my annoyance at Browning for what I described as his colonizing move.

Which just so happens to be the "colonizing move" of lit studies in general, right? Don't play stupid. You know what you were doing in the first comment.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Come on, CR. Of course I dislike this move wherever it appears. But Browning can hardly be a stand-in for contemporary literary studies. The guilty flee when no one pursues.

But I also disagree that this move is characteristic of literary studies as a whole. Not everyone is convinced that their particular rhetoric and form is congruent with human interiority. You're doing the same thing that Jonathan Goodwin always objects to when people pretend that some particular grouping within literary studies is all of literary studies.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Rambling Thomas:

FYI, a paper consisting of nothing but this sort of close-reading is still mandatory on both parts of the Cambridge undergraduate English tripos. I.A. Richards and all. This may be well known to you, but academics over here are frequently astonished when I tell them. Personally, I'm a big fan of this policy.

As am I ... but as you can tell, I'm in the minority. Although, maybe it's just an Irvine thing. I wager not, given the "quality" of much of what I see out there, but I can't be certain this isn't the product of my own limited experience.

Rich:

I find Browning annoying in part because he really does seem to trying to say something like CR's statement. It's a colonizing move.

It may be, but it's more interesting, to my mind, than L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry. To be frank, I find it "colonizing" in the same way the "Penelope" chapter of Ulysses is, i.e. fascinatingly so. Browning appeals to what remains of the Joycean/modernist scholar who arrived in Irvine all those years ago.

And Scott beware: one reason that you may be "obsessed with reading Browning" is because he does appear to provide an answer to your deafness-fueled insecurity about your reading of "voice". It's a bad answer, in my opinion.

I've started reading around, and I'm taking it that you're in the Tennyson camp, then? Or just generally opposed to such simulcra of thought? Granted, I'm not reading this naively, but I'm interested in the construction of voice, and sometimes even a terrible example is intellectually productive. (I'm thinking here of something like terrible dialect poetry.)

Who could possibly object to a writer showing how the inner monologue "is inhabited by" his rhetoric and form?

I'm not sure about that professional connection, Rich. I mean, I can remove this from the profession entirely, introduce T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" into the conversation instead and land in much the same place CR did. It seems to me a quasi-modernist concern with the relation of the formal characteristics of a literary text to the modes of consciousness related therein ... and as I say, I think the question an interesting one.

CR: But thinking back on your comment, I see that it's not necessarily a reading of that particular poem, so much as a general statement about Browning and modernism. Still, I find it a productive one, and thinking about Browning as a proto-modernist in this respect has certainly heightened my interest in him. (This interest, contra Rich, is entirely unprofessional. I've put the funny books away from the time being and am reading Browning for fun now.)