The poem’s most dramatic way of presenting the process of Browning’s development is the autobiographical conversion scene in the Venice digression in Book III. This is of course a highly conventional device, but Browning’s variation on the theme implies a critical observation of the established pattern of autobiographical narrative. Paul Jay in
his study Being in the Text. Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes
A parallel case o f a speaker who creates his imaginary, silent listener is Prince H ohenstiel- Schwangau. The end o f this poem, which reveals the utterance to be a soliloquy without a listener, shows that the prince’s im pressive creation o f an audience through his willpow er is nevertheless an illusion.
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traces an evolution leading from Wordsworth, with his need to overcome the feeling of self-division and his nostalgic desire to return to his origins and to recover an idealised homogeneous past self, towards writers like Paul Valéry and Roland Barthes, who
accept and enjoy the diversity of the divided subject. On Jay’s scale, Sordello would
occupy a middle ground between these two extremes. The narrator constructs a
coherent biography of Sordello, Browning’s youngest alter ego in the text, and tries to
make sense of it. But Sordello’s abortive Bildungsroman shows that the aim of
harmonious self-fulfilment is out of reach: he experiences an epiphany in his vision of his mission for the people, but cannot act on it; he seems to enact the desire for original unity through his two cyclical returns to Goito, but these returns are tokens o f his failure and the fragmentation of his self, most clearly when his corpse is buried in the caryatid fount.
For Sordello, Browning’s Romantic self, fragmentation is fatal, but for the narrator it is so no longer. He does not even attempt to construct his own comprehensive biography. Instead, the reader has to piece his character together from self-referential remarks in his interventions. And whereas we see Sordello also in the role of lover and would-be politician, the narrator isolates only the episode which is immediately relevant for the composition of the text which records it, limiting self representation strictly to his artistic self: a fragment of the self presented in a fragment
o f his autobiographical plot. Nevertheless, as in Sartor Resartus, which represents the
same state of development in literary self-presentation and advocates the same reorientation from egotism to humanitarian altruism, the conversion episode stands out through its situation exactly in the middle of the text and its vivid detail. This economic solution dispenses with the cumbersome grand narrative of the self, since the crucial turning point of the conversion encompasses the whole biography through looking backwards and forwards.
The moral-aesthetic content of the conversion experience in Sordello is not
essentially different from that in The Prelude. Both poems pivot on the discovery of the
poet’s love of mankind, but the radical difference lies in the influence this realisation has on their poetry. Wordsworth largely continues to write introspective poetry,
whereas after Sordello Browning turns from self-observation to the observation of
mankind through drama and the dramatic monologue. Of course, Sordello itself still
draws on the self-observing autobiographical plot. Yet in writing the key episode of his own Kiinstlerroman, Browning overcomes the poetry of self-mirroring because the formal presentation of the conversion scene is already informed by his new objective poetics.'^
Several devices in the enunciation which distance or postpone self-revelation indicate that the author already enacts his new poetics. Firstly, the retelling of the Venice scene after the narrative movement ending in III, 545 is approached in a very evasive manner which avoids direct self-reference: the narrator draws the first explicit comparison between Sordello and himself, but surprisingly, the analogy is not with Sordello’s poetic but his political crisis. Sordello is at this point tempted to become a political tyrant who disregards the people, whereas the narrator reflects on his temptation to disregard his audience (III, 577ff.). Before the narrator refers to himself, the brief digression about Brennus’ siege o f Rome (III, 571-6) acts as a delay. Although only a simile for the sunrise in the enounced, in the enunciation the literal fall of Brennus’ soldier from the parapet of the Capitol foreshadows Browning’s and Sordello’s fall from the height o f their idealist-subjectivist dreams. Direct self observation is further delayed by the inserted passage on the archimage as a former self (III, 577-91). Nine lines of direct self-reference follow, but in the pre-1868 versions Sordello then replaces the narrator as the speaker.
Secondly, the reflection in Venice, which leads up to the resolution to write objective poetry, is cast in the objective mould of a dramatic scene. It is a monologue spoken by the former self of the narrator to a silent interlocutor, ‘suffering humanity’. The narrator’s former self, too, is already a prolific producer of dramatic monologues in that he invents the utterances of three exemplary poets reciting their poetry and the audience’s response to them (III, 843-89). The speech-punctuation in the 1863-65 editions puts these three examples in single quotation marks and opens double
Surprisingly, to establish a distance from his own self, Browning does not exploit the differentiation o f two levels of consciousness inherent to any autobiography, i.e. the distinction o f the retrospectively narrating self and the past narrated self. They are, on the contrary, hardly distinguishable. In addition to the blurring o f the narrator and Sordello due to the om ission o f closin g quotation marks after line 599 o f the 1840 version (see section V .l .1), there is a fluid transition between the speech o f the former self in V en ice (alias Sordello) and the narrating self. The narrated se lf addresses ‘suffering humanity’ for the last time in line 755, and the addresses to the fictional audience within the text from line 853 onwards must be spoken from the point o f view o f the narrating self, but it is not clear at which point the change o f voice occurs.
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quotation marks at line 843, which are mistakenly never closed. This suggests that all three speeches are embedded in the direct speech of one of the ‘best poets’ who devises dramatic examples of himself and the other two types. Thus three monologue creators
are at work - the author, the narrator in Venice and the ‘best poet’ - , generating a mise
en abîme of dramatic utterances. The past self of the narrator moreover invents a hypothetical dramatic scene in which ‘suffering humanity’ approaches him and he plays the condescending alms-giver (III, 730-45). His obvious delight in this role-playing confirms his reorientation towards objectivity.
There is a third reminder that the entire poem is the narrator’s dramatic utterance in front of an audience, i.e. objective poetry: the voice attacking the narrator as ‘Presumptuous!’ (Ill, 807) after he has compared himself to Moses. As I have already argued in Chapter II.3, the analogy with Moses suits Browning to authorise his self-image as a self-sacrificing, unappreciated precursor poet. As in ‘One Word M ore’, however, the reference to the stereotype of the poet as prophet here calls up a number o f other notions which are central to the Romantic self-conceptualisation, above all the idea that the poet has a defined ‘office’ (III, 809-10). The critical member of the audience who interrupts the narrator denounces such Romantic pretensions, and the narrator vehemently rejects this aspect of the analogy. In Chapters IV.3 and IV.4, we have already seen Browning responding to established metaphors and methods of self conceptualisation and revising them in order to signal his difference from the
Romantics. He does this throughout the digression. As in Pacchiarotto with its hints of
an underlying similarity to the self-conceptualisation of the Romantic poets it criticises, there are some, though fewer, indication in this scene, in which Browning officially discards Romanticism, that the narrator has not left Romanticism fully behind.
The Venice digression can be read as a rewriting of several precursor texts which convey a certain idea of the poet and his vocation and from which Browning distances himself. If we can trust lines 942-5 and Browning’s letter to Fanny Haworth
([May 1840,] Corr. 4: 269), the scene recounts a genuine autobiographical episode
during the real poet’s visit to the city in June 1838 before the composition o f the second half of Book III. But the setting in Venice also has a literary predecessor. ‘I sung this on an empty palace-step / At Venice’ (III, 656) echoes the opening line of
Canto IV o f Byron’s Childe Harold, ‘I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs’, which
introduces the interruption of the narrative by the narrator’s self-conscious reflections. At the outset Browning’s narrator is just as self-centred as Byron’s, but in the course of the episode he overcomes the Byronic pose through his conversion to humanitarianism. However, this superiority to Byron only applies if he is conceptualised exclusively as
the poet of Childe Harold, which is the case in Browning’s many other references to
him as the stereotypically egotistical Romantic. But the whole Byron is actually a model for the narrator’s conversion. Far from lacking unselfish humanitarianism, he was the only British Romantic poet to take the step from poetry to political activism, the ideal which neither Sordello nor Browning can attain. He became involved in the Greek
struggle for liberty while writing Don Juan, a poem whose self-conscious, self-
satirising narrator is a perceptible, though unacknowledged, influence on Sordello.
The confrontation with ‘suffering humanity’, which leads to the conversion, also rewrites W ordsworth’s encounters with representatives of the poor, such as his
meetings with the rural people described in Book XII of The Prelude, the discharged
soldier (Book IV) or the urban beggars in London (Book V II).W o rd sw o rth , who in
the ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads makes a point of defending his for the 1790s
indecorous realism, often presents realistically depicted men to endow them with a symbolic meaning. In contrast. Browning demonstrates in his description of the Italian peasant girls that he can master Wordsworthian realism, which by the 1830s has become inoffensive, but then goes on to outdo Wordsworth with the more radical realism of his decrepit, ‘care-bit’, ‘sad disheveled ghost’ (III, 721 and 676). This is confirmed by his move from a metaphorical reference to clothes standing for happiness (III, 685-94) to the literal meaning of the tattered clothes which are not sufficient to cover the bodies o f the poor.
At the same time. Browning transgresses blatantly against realism, since his startling description is that of an allegorical ‘suffering humanity’. In his affectionately ironic address, the narrator promotes her to the even more artificial role of the muse,
thus opening up the issue of the revaluation of (epic) inspiration. Sordello" s structural
similarities to the epic and its modifications of that genre have been discussed by Ryals
{Becoming 108) and at greater length by Grube, who calls it a ‘Christian Epic’. The
A ll references are to the 1805 version. The P relude was only published in 1850, but sam ples o f this type o f Wordsworthian scene were already available to Browning in the 1830s.
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central position of the digression recalls in particular the Miltonic technique of authorial interventions and apostrophes to the muse at the beginning of Books I, III, VII and IX o f Paradise Lost. In substituting the traditional epic goddess with the most repulsive aspect of humanity, Browning dismisses aesthetic concerns in favour of ethical motivations in his definition of the purpose of art. He also replaces the traditional superior - inferior relationship between the inspiring muse and the inspired poet by equality. He insists he is ‘your friend (not slave)’ (III, 720), thus abandoning his earlier concept of her as an adorable queen (III, 661). His look back at his former self by conceptualising it as an archimage who conjures up a ‘transcendental platan’ of splendid hermetic poetry to court a ‘novice-queen’ (III, 581) shows that in his
subjective phase he also claimed royalty for his élite audience.
The narrator’s declaration that he has abandoned the self-conceptualisation of the fantastically omnipotent archimage is called into question when he pictures himself as a conjurer of ‘peri or ghoul’ at the very end of the text (VI, 871), but that passage is lightened by irony. More disturbing is the less clearly humorous section immediately after the archimage reference, in which the narrator pictures himself as a God gliding away from the universe of his fiction to contemporary Venice (III, 594-9). This analogy with the divine creator and ultimate model for the subjective poet seems strangely out of place as a transition to the passage in which he reports his conversion to objective poetry. Thus, even before the narrator expounds his theory, we are made aware that he at least may not be able to practise what he preaches.
The narrator’s personal inability to embody the objective ideal of ‘Maker-see’ poetics is not expressed in the enounced. But the Venice digression contains many protestations that perfection is generally neither attainable nor desirable. This point is made through the engine metaphor (III, 814-35). At first sight, it seems to be a repudiation of Romanticism in that it substitutes the Romantic organic metaphor of the poem as a supernatural ‘transcendental platan’ with its diametrical opposite, the mechanical engine. However, the metaphor of growth for the engine’s construction (III, 819) once more links it to Romantic organicism. The metaphor states that perfection lies outside the scope of the living poet, but that the imperfect poem is a valuable object of observation. Its interest lies in the fact that it reflects the artist’s process of learning and striving for continual improvement. We are reminded of
Browning’s declaration in the dedication that his ‘stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul’. The promotion of process over closure here justifies the narrator’s and the author’s inability to attain perfection. The repetition o f this point throughout the digression gives the reader ample occasion to absorb it. But it also betrays Browning’s uneasiness about his paradoxical claim of only approximating his ideal and yet not being a failure.
Sordello’s speech immediately after the archimage passage exphcitly states that a good work of art need not be wholly objective and may contain references to its author. The speech contrasts the minor poet Eglamor, whose whole self is comprised within his work - making the ‘song and singer One’ (III, 604) - with true poets, whose infinite creative self cannot be contained within a poem - a group from which the narrator’s bracketed intervention ironically excludes Sordello, who can posit but not realise that ideal:
[...] from true works (to wit Sordello’s dream-performances that will B e never more than dream) escapes there still Som e proof the singer’s proper life ’s beneath The life his song exhibits, this a sheath To that; a passion and a know ledge far Transcending these, m ajestic as they are. Smoulder; his lay was but an episode In the bard’s life. (Ill, 606-14)
Presenting a single ‘episode / In the bard’s life’ is literally what Browning does through
the Venice digression in Sordello. The passage reflects Schlegel’s concept that the
finite text can only give a glimpse of the boundless plenitude of the author’s life beneath it. It also announces Browning’s transition to a poetry of functional differentiation. He no longer perceives the artist and his work as identical, although he does not yet deny that the artist is not part of his work at all.
The digression also undertakes to re-educate the reader in acquiring a taste for impersonal and dramatic objective poetry. The passage about the sailor who recounts his voyages (III, 633-55) emphasises that the reader must not expect the poet to tell his life story in his work. The sailor is the positive counterpart to the archimage and the inversion of another central Romantic poet-character, the ancient mariner.'* Unlike
'* W oolford and Karlin point out that, despite the clear inversion o f the ‘A ncient Mariner’, the sailor’s inland journey might be derived from C oleridge’s B iographia L iteraria (Poem s 1: 569).
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Coleridge’s character, whose Romantic egotism compels him to tell his story over and over again and who is on a constant quest for listeners, Browning’s sailor is not at all concerned about disappointing his audience when he breaks off his narrative at the first hint of a breeze. The inspiration and potential for a continuation of his life journey which are symbolised by the wind are of much greater importance to him than sharing his observations of the world with his audience. The artist’s indifference about communicating his art and self-observation approaches the ideal of the silent poet
alluded to in ‘One Word M ore’ or at the end of The Two Poets o f Croisic (1233ff.), a
stance which has the advantage of protecting the poet from an uncomprehending reception.
If a full revelation of the poet’s self through his work is denied to the audience, what remains for them is to concentrate on the second order observation of the process of the imperfect, yet aspiring poem. A succession of verbs o f vision in the engine metaphor, which apply to poet and reader alike, stresses this: ‘we watch construct [...] Remark [...] wonder [...] Make out’ (814-22). The same duality of the poet’s observation of his artistic self and the encouragement of the reader to a second order observation of the text appears in the survey of poetic genres (III, 836-89). It is both the poet’s evaluating observation of the genres at his disposal and a dramatic method of educating the reader through his observation of the direct speech by an imaginary naïve audience in response to three different poets. The reader needs to follow the learning process of the imaginary audience and go beyond mere first order observation of a