Surface Tension. Julie Carr

can be derived? They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; In which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. (Works, 1:2-3)

      Arnold advises the poet to, “esteem himself fortunate if he can succeed in banishing from his mind all feelings of contradiction, and irritation, and impatience; in order to delight himself with the contemplation of some noble action of a heroic time, and to enable others, through his representation, to delight in it also” (14). Even as a poem like “The Buried Life” represents the longing for contact with a deep self, Arnold argues against indulgence in the affective self when the emotions thus contacted are disparate or unresolved. By rejecting (contradictory) “feeling” in favor of an outwardly focused contemplation of the heroic or noble, Arnold seems to argue himself out of the space where the Marguerite poems were born (which is why a critic like Harrison can refer to the Preface as Arnold’s “metaphoric suicide as a poet” [Arnold, 34].) In as much as these poems represent erotic longing (as opposed to the “act” of renunciation), they fail to satisfy Arnold’s prescription for a didactic poetics of the heroic.

      Furthermore, in arguing that poetry must teach delight in the noble, Arnold must logically reject what Paul de Man will call “irony.” Following Kierkegaard, de Man terms irony “absolute infinite negativity,” since, “irony in itself opens up doubts as soon as its possibility enters our heads, and there is no inherent reason for discontinuing the process of doubt at any point short of infinity.” (Aesthetic Ideology, 166). For de Man, irony is (ironically) the status quo of poetry, it is the means by which the poem can always and does always interrupt its own narrative line. It is, somewhat playfully, “the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes” (179), the ongoing undoing of the supposed logic of figurative language. If the trope is the poem’s way of meaning, then the “permanent parabasis” of this way creates an absolute instability at the base of the structure of sense.

      De Man’s argument draws a necessary connection between irony (in poetry or philosophy) and “[the] radical distance (the radical negation of [the subject]) in relation to his own work” (178). In the ironic gesture, the author interrupts his own voice—that is, he marks irony by shifting rhetorical registers, and this shift in turn marks his detachment from himself, his (recalling Keats) negativity. I want here to turn to the question of whether Arnoldian disinterestedness fails to achieve the “radical distance” of self de Man is describing, specifically because of shame’s presence in the renunciation of desire. I want to ask if what we might call a failure of negativity shows itself therefore in the rejection of irony we find in Arnold’s Preface. For in order for poetry to perform the task of “banishing” (and thus shaming) all “contradiction, irritation, and impatience,” it must refuse its own instability, which, if we agree with de Man, would mean that it was not a poem at all. (Of course de Man doesn’t stop at poetry; true to his moment, he sees all language as sharing in this radical instability: “language is a mere semiotic entity, open to the radical arbitrariness of any sign system and as such capable of circulation, but which as such is profoundly unreliable” [181].)^li

      By way of addressing this question, we will look in a moment to a famously enrapturing moment of shame and shaming in Arnold’s prose, the appearance of “Wragg,” an infanticidal mother, in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” But first I would like to note more thoroughly the images of spheres, and especially of pregnancy, appearing throughout Arnold’s essays. In the Preface, we find him praising the Greek poets as follows: “Their expression is so excellent because it is so admirably kept in the right degree of prominence, because it is so well subordinated; because it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it conveys” (Works, 1:5). And Greek tragedy is likewise praised because, “the tone of the parts is . . . perpetually kept down in order not to impair the grandiose effect of the whole” (6). In contrast to this admiration for pregnancy, grandiosity, and wholeness, Arnold complains about contemporary poems that display “occasional bursts of fine writing,” or “a shower of isolated thoughts and images” (7). While wholeness is of value, fragment or partiality is disparaged.

      Throughout the Preface Arnold continues to praise powerful poetic expression for being “pregnant” and poetry for having “boundaries and wholesome regulative laws” (15). However, in “The Study of Poetry,” where he again describes poetry as a spherical container, we can begin to sense the anxiety lurking under this construction: “In poetry, which is thought and art in one, it is the glory, the eternal honour, that charlatanism shall find no entrance; that this noble sphere be kept inviolate and inviolable” (Works, 9:132). Here poetry is again figured as a pregnant body—a pregnant body praised not for what it produces, but for what it keeps out. Poetry is metaphorized as a female body because of that body’s capacity to represent the future, and yet, just as the reproductive capacity of the feminine threatens the ideology that posits her as pure, as “inviolable,” it seems Arnold’s metaphorical poem demands strident protection lest it find within itself the very disruptive elements it is employed to resist.

      The intensity with which Arnold wants to guard the “noble sphere” of poetry is parallel to the anxiety with which he wants to protect the critic in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” from involvement in the practical. Here Arnold claims “disinterestedness” as the one “rule” for the critic, writing that criticism must show this disinterestedness “by keeping aloof from what is called ‘the practical view of things’; by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches” (Works, 3:270). Just before this passage, Arnold discusses the French Revolution as the example qua example of a period in which “a whole nation [is] penetrated with an enthusiasm for pure reason,” in which the abiding question is not (as in the English Revolution) “is it legal?” but rather, “is it rational?” (264). Because of this, Arnold calls the French Revolution “the greatest, the most animating event in history.” And yet, he continues, the ultimate fatality of this great event arises from the “mania for giving an immediate political and practical application to all these fine ideas of reason” (265). Arnold also faults England with precisely this practicality, this obsessive adherence to results. Again, critical free play has, for Arnold, both aesthetic and ethical value; aesthetic because only with reason’s presence in the culture can great art be made; ethical because for Arnold, criticism’s aim is to discover “the best that is known and thought in the world,” in the “pursuit of our total perfection,” by which he means, of course, moral, intellectual, and spiritual perfection (Culture and Anarchy, 5).

      And yet, despite disinterestedness’ usefulness to the aesthetic and ethical health of the social body, the aloof critic “touches” upon subjects in much the same distanced way that Arnold’s speaker in “Isolation” is “touched” by “unmating things.” In “The Function of Criticism,” as in “Isolation,” we find that the socially engaged male figure is isolated nevertheless. While now he is not isolated in erotic longing, his disinterestedness seems to construct for him a course as remote as the heart’s lonely sphere in “Isolation. To Marguerite.” (Indeed, in Culture and Anarchy Arnold refers to the truly disinterested citizen as an “alien.”) And this isolated sphere, like that of poetry, is burdened by the threat of rupture.

      For the sphere of disinterestedness appears to be broken in the essay by a moment of shaming that is at the same time an image of pregnancy violated. In an attempt to convince his audience of the need for progress, Arnold draws on a news story about “Wragg” (whose very name suggests fragment and tearing as opposed to containment and wholeness). When a “thrill of shame” flashes through the body of “The Function of Criticism in the Present Time,” it is in the figure of this impoverished unwed mother accused of strangling her illegitimate child. Arnold’s language here is intended to shame his audience out of unthinking self-satisfaction. Yet at the same moment, we find a released outpouring of his affective subjectivity that is anything but aloof:

      ‘Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole world!’—how much that is harsh and ill-­favoured there is in this best! Wragg! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of ‘the best in the whole world,’ has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original short-coming