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 is conjured here not to suggest the eruption of the new, the strange, the unpredicted, but instead to draw attention to the static repetition of the status quo.
And yet, Arnold completes this stanza with the fragment “But mind? . . .” “Mind,” separating the subject from “nature,” proposes an exception to this cyclical pattern of return. But for “mind,” Arnold has Empedocles say, we would gladly fall back into our “mother earth’s miraculous womb”—our return would be, because familiar, a pleasurable reblending with the elements. The ellipses following the word “mind” suggest, however briefly, that Empedocles is allowing for the possibility that unlike all other aspects of the self, the mind might not be trapped within endless and endlessly determined repetition. “Mind” is momentarily figured as carrying us beyond repetition and return, and as such, the possible site of our freedom.
I am reminded here of the final passages of The Prelude (published just two years before) where Wordsworth proclaims the mind “a thousand times more beautiful than the earth / On which it dwells.” And yet, unlike Wordsworth who wants to celebrate the boundlessness of the imagination, and announce reason’s capacity to subordinate sublime nature to itself,lxii Arnold’s Empedocles finds himself finally unable to praise either the mind’s superiority or its freedom. For Empedocles, the mind’s thoughts, bearing no relation to the earth’s body, have no “parent element” to return to. This parentless status means, of course, that mind, or “thought,” must be the child of the self, which is to say, of itself. Because of the impossibility of dividing the subject from its thoughts, “mind” is figured as simultaneously the (unborn) progeny and the (mastering) mother of the self. I’ll need here to quote a lengthier passage. This is Empedocles’s final speech just before his suicidal leap:
But mind, but thought—
If these have been the master part of us—
Where will they find their parent element?
What will receive them, who will call them home?
But we shall still be in them, and they in us,
And we shall be strangers of the world,
And they will be our lords, as they are now;
And keep us prisoners of our consciousness,
And never let us clasp and feel the All
But through their forms, and modes, and stifling veils.
And we shall be unsatisfied as now;
And we shall feel the agony of thirst,
The ineffable longing for the life of life
Baffled
