is describing a subject that knows itself, knows its own “bounds,” via the (un)pleasure of constantly agitated (because unfulfillable) desire, what might this poem suggest about sociability? What might it suggest about poetry? Remember that in the second stanza, the nightingale’s song recalls the islands to each other; the nightingale’s song awakens the “longing like despair,” which in turn allows the islands to imagine their “marges” might “meet again.” While God has ruled the cooling sea to divide selves, a “divine” song draws them together. It appears, then, that poetry is given the ambivalent privilege of recalling subjects to desire. At the same time, we cannot avoid reading the “rules” of severance as, in one sense, prosody’s rules; Arnold’s strict iambic tetrameter, his unwavering rhyming and end-stopped lines, must be read in contrast to the liquefied notes that kindle desire. What we have then is a theory of poetry as itself enacting the paradox of distance and desire. If notes, like words, because of their liquidity, because of their ability to slide across the horizontal (metonymic) plane, suggest the boundlessness of desire, poetry’s rules, to which the “notes” are bound, suggest the limit, and thus the necessary failure, of that desire’s fulfillment.
Unlike in “Isolation,” where sociability is predicated upon the refusal of desire, here, poetry (ruled song) participates in, perhaps invents, a sociability that does not demand desire’s renunciation, but is instead built upon desire. That this sociability seems only “imagined” doesn’t have to mean it is doomed. For unlike the dreaming “happy men” of “Isolation,” these islands/lovers are fully awake. Arnold’s language of sensation renders them embodied, renders them as bodies in a manner the abstracted happy men can never be. The meeting of marges, occurring at the level of imagination and sensation, becomes the poem’s own “structure of feeling,” its gesture toward a future as yet unknown. Perhaps Arnold meant the island’s imagined reunion as a model for the eventual union of himself and his lover, Marie-Claude. But more generally it seems that in the poem’s celebration of desire in and through distance, we can find a homologous celebration of poetry’s paradoxical embrace of free play and limit, and that together these celebrations lead to the poem’s guarded expression of hope, its future-conditional: “Oh, might our marges meet again!”
To return now to the image of Luna gazing on Endymion in “Isolation”—here too we find a pairing of distance and desire, though with much less charge to the language. Here, too, space is rendered erotic, because without space, there can be no gaze; and yet, throughout “Isolation,” one finds a resistance to this arousing potential of separation. The self-shaming of “Isolation” enacts a refusal of Luna’s perpetually spinning and regenerating desire, a refusal too of the intensely erotic language of “To Marguerite—Continued.” In the context of Arnold’s other work, as we will see, it seems that shame is finally offered, instead of poetry, as the regulating “rule” which enables and demands a movement toward the social at the same time that it allows for a deep, desiring, though socially acceptable, interiority to persist. And yet, the alternative suggested by “To Marguerite—Continued,”—the alternative vision that, instead of shaming desire, recognizes its persistent paradoxical unpleasure as both motivating and marking the limit of intersubjectivity—this alternative will reopen in moments of Arnold’s prose and will speak for poetry as generative of this paradox, even as Arnold seeks for a more secure answer to the problems of desire, even as he seeks to limit poetry’s capacity to animate just this irony.
IV. The Poetics of Shame: Wragg
Arnold’s famous Preface of 1853 stages the central tension within the dilemma of desire that I am describing. This tension can be described most simply as an uncertainty about whether the subject (and thus the poet) is an isolated, “deep,” erotically charged unit, whether the subject is (or should be) a socially engaged citizen, or finally whether these two possibilities can be joined. In the Preface, Arnold seeks to resolve these questions by presenting a theory of socially responsible poetry. His claim, worth revisiting despite its familiarity, is first presented negatively: poetry that expresses unreleased longing is reprehensible because it offers no pleasure to the reader:
What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment 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
