Surface Tension. Julie Carr

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СКАЧАТЬ of these bodies as signaling the nation’s need for criticism’s penetrating work.) It seems that shame rekindles desire—rekindles at the very least the critic’s attachment to results.

      Thus it appears we have answered affirmatively the question posed earlier: whether Arnold’s shame precludes the truly ironic self-distance necessary for disinterestedness. And yet what has not yet been noted is the irony of Arnold’s “Wragg” moment. If reading this passage we say, “he cannot be serious!” this is because he is not. Arnold has been greatly criticized for his attack on names, in our time as well as in his own. In recent years critics such as Josephine Mcdonagh, Marc Redfield, and Susan Walsh take on Arnold’s Wragg. Of Arnold’s contemporaries we can offer as example Fitzjames Stephen from The Saturday Review (December 3, 1864, 684) who wrote sardonically, “Criticism ought to show that Wragg should have been called (say) Fairfax . . . We do not envy the higher criticism if it has to go about ‘murmuring Wragg is in custody,’ till all after-dinner speeches rise to the level of ideal beauty.”^lv

      And in fact, in “The Function of Criticism” Arnold reveals that he is well aware of the reaction the passage will inspire: “Mr. Roebuck [the MP who spoke of England’s “unrivalled happiness”] will have a poor opinion of an adversary who replies to his defiant songs of triumph only by murmuring under his breath, Wragg is in custody,” he admits (274). In parodying his own methodology here, Arnold highlights the irony with which he means to be read. To return to de Man’s definition of irony as the detachment of the subject from his own work, we have in Arnold’s self-parody, a shift in register, a moment, as de Man would have it, of buffoonery (de Man, 177). And indeed, in keeping with de Man’s description of irony’s function, the Wragg passage produces a profound uncertainty in the structure of the essay. We no longer know what is meant by “disinterestedness” because we cannot tell whether Arnold is truly moved to correct the social problems that lead to Wragg’s crime (in which case he is not disinterested at all), or whether he is only offended by the philistinism of those who, in the name of getting practical results, utter inanities (“Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole world!”) instead of employing reason. Does Arnoldian disinterestedness (as Park Honan argues) mean ultimately to save the lives of infants by first changing the intellectual practice of those who construct the ideals of the society? Or is Arnold’s disinterestedness here true to form; is Arnold practicing, to borrow Regenia Gagnier’s term, an “aesthetics of consumption” (Gagnier, 47), disinterestedly passing aesthetic judgment on names, on the newspaper’s abrupt style, on the decrepitude of poor neighborhoods, and finally, on the vulgarity of the MP’s self-satisfied speech?

      Finally, it seems that irony allows Arnold to hang in the balance between the ethical and the aesthetic. The turn to irony allows Arnold, in the manner of poetry, to open up a disrupting because disturbing series of questions about the relationship between beauty (or ugliness) and the good. As Arnold’s metonymy links “the gloom, the smoke, the cold, [with] the strangled illegitimate child,” links the guttural sound of the double “g” with “an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions,” he suggests that aesthetic effect, what we might call surface, is intimately connected to the moral depth of a person or culture. In this way the ironic—the poetic—moment, produced through the metonymic process by which language generates language, becomes itself productive of the ideational. The text-machine, to borrow de Man’s term for the slippery chain of signifiers, births a future of critical thought, as generations of readers confront the ambiguous mode of Arnold’s attack.

      Thus I am arguing that the Wragg moment represents poetry reasserting itself into disinterested criticism, that the moment reverses Arnold’s (gendered) positioning of criticism and poetry in which poetry must carry criticism’s rationally achieved ideas. Here, it seems, poetry penetrates criticism with its irrational, ironic meanings, causing a disturbance in the hierarchy Arnold has set up. If this is true, however, it is not without its complications.

      As I hope is clear, I am not content to suggest that simply by turning to Wragg, Arnold betrays his own stricture against criticism’s involvement in the practical and political, that he betrays “disinterestedness” by becoming interested in the plight of poor unwed mothers, for his irony keeps such a reading at bay. But neither, finally, can we read the Wragg episode as a moment of “criticism” at its most “free” because most disinterested. Shame, to return once more to Sedgwick, marks identity, marks individuation and boundaries. And yet, as Arnold himself will remind us repeatedly in Culture and Anarchy, critical disinterestedness, or what he calls in that work, “culture,” is above all else the ability to recognize the breadth of our intersubjectivity; culture’s purpose is finally to remind us that “men are members of one great whole and the sympathy which is in human nature will not allow one member to be indifferent to the rest” (37). Such a finally radical picture of sociability requires, as Kantian ethics teaches, a detachment of the subject from his own desires, his own “pathology.”

      Interestingly for my reading of Arnold, in Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, we find Kant calling the process of detaching oneself from one’s desire (and thus becoming “not merely legally good, but morally good”) a “rebirth.” ^lvi And yet here in “The Function of Criticism,” as in “Isolation,” the self-perpetuating dyad shame/desire reproduces isolation by acting as a barrier to the “birthing” of the truly disinterested subject.^lvii

      Lurking beneath the explosion of ugly names as the source of the “bad” is the doubling of the difficult figures of feminine sexual desire and murderous maternity. This doubled monstrosity marks the presence of shame/desire and also points to Arnold’s resistance to metaphoric “birth,” to the rupturing of tradition.^lviii In the section to follow I will examine more generally some of the cultural and ideological sources of this resistance to birth in Arnold, and will explore more fully its implications for his poetics and for his attitude toward futurity.

V. Problems with Birth

      Again, for Arnold, the poem, or poetry itself, plays the part of the domestic woman: she carries the race into the future, she acculturates new generations, and she does so by abiding by the laws of wholesomeness, beauty, and pleasure. The critic, then, plays the part of the socially useful male who impregnates the poet with “ideas.” In many respects, this formulation is not surprising—the metaphor of reproductive generation as applied to literary production is certainly conventional. However, what is notable in Arnold’s use of this trope is the degree to which the figure of the poet has been effaced. Poetry becomes an abstracted container for the critic’s projections; the poet seems nowhere to be found. Furthermore, aesthetic unity means for Arnold that poetry cannot be invaded, and yet, to press the metaphor, like the female body when not pregnant, the pregnant body cannot accurately be imagined as fully “sealed.” It might be more precise, as suggested earlier, to read Arnold’s metaphoric poem not as a pregnant woman, but rather as a womb. In this case (again, extending the metaphor here), the sealed womb cannot give birth, for a womb cannot labor without a woman. Thus the problem in Arnold’s ideology of pregnant poetry is a problem, as already discussed, of the “future”—the future of the pregnant poem is simply more pregnancy. “The future of poetry is immense” indeed.

      Regenia Gagnier has argued that Arnold’s aesthetics is an “aesthetics of evaluation,” an aesthetics focused on the consumer/critic rather than on the producer/artist. Some Victorian aesthetes, such as Ruskin or Morris, she writes, “were concerned with productive bodies, whose labour could be creative or alienated, while others [such as Arnold] were concerned with pleasured bodies, whose taste established their identities” (47). Gagnier’s delineation goes a long way toward explaining the erasure of the poet/body in Arnold’s construction, but we can also look to contemporary writings about pregnancy and birth to situate Arnold’s “all-womb” metaphor within its cultural landscape.

      As Mary Poovey and Andrea K. Henderson have demonstrated, nineteenth-century medical texts often described the female body as purely and only a womb. Poovey quotes W. Tyler Smith in the СКАЧАТЬ