Surface Tension - Julie Carr

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focusing his and England’s shame on the figure of Wragg, Arnold is once more betraying a resistance to the potential ruptures in England’s future. Arnold’s choice of Wragg points to the dangerous threat, the “anarchy” that lies at the base of his conception of “culture.” This threat, to put it simply, is modernity itself. Mcdonagh writes:

      In the rhetorical construction of High Culture, or Arnoldian civilization, Wragg represents the barbaric work of industry—or anarchy—that will be fended off by the formation of the realm of Culture. And if anarchy is represented by the bad mother, Culture, in its civilizing mission, appropriates the function of the good mother. Like the good mother, Culture provides a site in which a class can reproduce its values, and it does so precisely by regulating the modes of literary consumption, in the same way that the good mother performs her acculturating function through the metaphor of feeding. (229)

      Finally, I contend that Wragg points both to Arnold’s conservative resistance to democracy’s most radical possibilities, and to his (ashamed) fascination with the unknowable future, with the “modern.” I will turn now to Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna, written a full decade before “The Function of Criticism,” but anticipating many of the issues within the essay. This poem marks the crossroads of Arnold’s work, and he rejects it from his canon for many of the same reasons, as we will see, that he is repelled by and fascinated with the figure of Wragg.

      Empedocles on Etna begins with a competition between the poet and the physician over who will better heal modernity. Empedocles, a figure for modernity itself, suffers from self-consciousness, what Carlyle calls the “disease” of inquiry. He cannot escape the dialogue of his mind with itself, and this isolation spells his despair. And yet, while Carlyle imagines “the region of meditation” in its “quiet mysterious depths” as an unmapped creatively productive territory, Arnold’s Empedocles mistrusts his own interiority, finding it not at all a source of vital generation, but rather a binding and static sphere. The mind’s un-freedom arises, for Empedocles, out of its modern incapacity to forge cohesive meanings from empirical data.

      When Empedocles complains that man’s “wind-borne, mirroring soul, / A thousand glimpses wins, / And never sees a whole” (1:2, 83-5), we will be reminded of Arnold’s “On the Modern Element,” his 1869 inaugural address at Oxford, in which he most fully presents his picture of modernity as “the spectacle of a vast multitude of facts” (Works, 1: 20). Arnold argues that “intellectual deliverance” is only complete when, “we have acquired that harmonious acquiescence of mind which we feel in contemplating a grand spectacle that is intelligible to us; when we have lost that impatient irritation of mind which we feel in the presence of an immense, moving, confused spectacle which, while it perpetually excites our curiosity, perpetually baffles our comprehension” (20). Unable to process the fragmented and overwhelming spectacle of modernity, Empedocles fails to realize this “deliverance”; he finds his soul suspended—reflective, but incapable of unifying vision. While this vertiginous experience of modernity is taken by other authors such as Baudelaire, Walter Pater, and Dante Rossetti, as a point of departure, an opening into the new, for Arnold’s Empedocles it marks a failure, a stay in development.

      In the drama of the poem, the physician, Pausanias, and the poet and harp-player, Callicles, attempt to lure Empedocles out of his self-scrutinizing exile. Pausanias is quickly discredited as a philistine, a useless healer more involved in his own career problems than in Empedocles’s fate. The poem then takes up the central question of Keats’s “The Fall of Hyperion,” the question of whether the poet will “vex” or “pour out a balm” upon the world.lx If Callicles can heal Empedocles, then the wager falls on the side of poetry as a socially healing force. If instead Callicles fails to usurp the role of physician, then poetry is shown to be weak or even useless in contending with the pressures of modernity. I will address the poem’s answer to this question below. First I’d like to examine more carefully the problem of modernity as Arnold here presents it.

      The metaphor of birth or of birth’s failure appears in various guises throughout this poem. Empedocles has recently performed the “miracle” of calling Pantheia “back to life.” And yet, as Callicles reveals, this rebirthing is in truth a mere sham; Pantheia’s trances are well known. Later, Empedocles’s powers are described by Pausanias as swelling with the “swelling evil of this time” (1:1, 112). Thus Empedocles, this figure for diseased modernity, becomes simultaneously a figure for diseased, because perpetually pregnant, maternity. Unable to rebirth the dead, unable to birth his own powers, Empedocles represents pregnancy as stasis or retention. As he puts it, “we feel, day and night, / The burden of ourselves” (1:2, 127-8). Moreover, Empedocles’s final suicide, the leap into the gaping mouth of the volcano, can be read as a reversal of birth—the symbolic failure of modernity to birth itself into the future.

      But what really ails Empedocles? What is the cause of this un-releasable burden of the self? For it is not simply the fracturing of dogma, the overwhelming array of “facts,” or the self-conscious deliberation Arnold elsewhere attributes to modernity that plagues Empedocles. It is not simply “the doubts . . .the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust” which Arnold, in his Preface names as both our and Empedocles’s problem. Empedocles suffers most acutely from the condition of seeing himself as wholly determined, as a product of outside forces, a construction. We are, Empedocles laments, “born into life!,” which is to say, born into limits and conditions we do not set and cannot see:

      Born into life!—man grows

      Forth from his parents’ stem,

      And blends their bloods, as those

      Of theirs are blent in them;

      So each new man strikes root into a far fore-time.

      (1:2, 187-91)

      Just as our parentage binds us to a genetic map, historical process keeps us rooted to the past, unable to make ourselves new. “Born into life!—we bring / A bias with us here,” Empedocles continues, indicating that even at the subjective level of taste, preference, or personality, we are determined by forces prior to our birth, beyond our control. Empedocles might be complaining about the pressures of ideology here, or he might be presenting an imprisoned and absolute historicity. But he is also describing an even more fundamental way in which subjects are not free. This is the Kantian pathological—the enormous web of causes both internal and external which determine and motivate our every thought and action: “To tunes we did not call our being must keep chime” (1:2, 196).

      This sense of entrapment within the internally and externally generated bind of determination is played out formally in Empedocles’s central sermon as well. Empedocles’s rigidly structured five-line stanzas are woven together by their rhyming fifth lines. The ABABC pattern structurally demonstrates Empedocles’s lament: the tune that seems to come from elsewhere is both within the stanza and outside of it at once. Arnold thus emphasizes (as in the Marguerite poems) that the problem of determination is not simply that we are oppressed by external forces (such as politics, history, economics), but also, and most insistently, that we are bound by the very perpetuity of desire. Our own motives and interests imprison us in a static, because unfree, causality. As Empedocles tells Pausanias: “Our wants have all been felt, our errors made before” (211); even at the level of desire, we are preceded.lxi

      And Empedocles restates this sense of “absolute determination” later in the poem, introducing once again, the metaphor of birth:

      To the elements it came from

      Everything will return—

      Our bodies to earth

      Our blood to water,

      Heat to fire,

      Breath to air,

      They were well born, they will be well entomb’d—

      (2:1, 331-37)

      This cyclical course, occurring here at the elemental level of body and earth, figures the newly born as always already entombed. Birth

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