Abstract
In the context of this study, The Ring and the Book is the triumph of dialectical thinking. It is at once the culmination and the demise of romantic epistemology or subjective idealism, providing both the claim and the critique of the transcendental self, of the Cartesian cogito. A brilliantly conceived poetic experiment, it acts as a focus for all the thematic and structural issues that have dogged literature and theory during the last 150 years. Here the story of a pitiless, penniless nobleman and his naive, novice bride is told three times in book I and repeated variously and discrepantly through ten separate monologues. Through this series of responses and representations, the poem asserts and subverts the structural oppositions of formalism and reference, fancy and fact, trope and referent, legal fictions and social reality, discourse and event, intrasubjective perception and intersubjective relationship, idealism and materialism, scepticism and belief, dissemination and intention. In its overt questions about the role of language — ‘For how else know we save by worth of word?’ (1.837) — all issues are textualised and all representations placed within a discourse without a nontextual origin — without, that is, meaning by nontextual referent.1 As another text, the Old Yellow Book both historicises and textualises the poem’s sources. Attention is thus shifted from event as the source of meaning to discourse as the production of meaning: ‘There’s the irregular deed: you want no more/Than right interpretation of the same’ (V.113–14). In short, the poem is an immense literary undertaking, the implications of which have barely been realised, perhaps precisely because it is so immense.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Quotations from The Ring and the Book are from the final version in The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, vols viii, ix, x (London: Smith, Elder, 1889), and references are to book and line number within the poem itself; this version numbers the half-lines, similar to the issue of the first edition edited by Richard Altick (Penguin).
Richard D. Altick and James F. Loucks, II, for instance, in Browning’s Roman Murder Story: A Reading of “The Ring and the Book” (University of Chicago Press, 1968), claim as a premise of the poem that ‘while man’s truth… is relative, God’s truth is absolute’ (p. 21), and through demonstrating Browning’s discovery of ‘a transcendental truth’ in the case records, the poem enacts ‘a parable of the ways of God to men’ (p. 26); Gordon W. Thompson, in ‘A Spirit Birth Conceived of Flesh: Browning’s Concept of Art in The Ring and the Book, Tennessee Studies in Literature, vol. 14 (1969), 75–86, states that ‘Browning conceives of Art and Love and Truth as… quite apart from the mere words of men’ (75); in ‘Multiple Narratives & Relative Truths: A Study of The Ring and the Book, The Woman in White, and The Moonstone’, Browning Institute Studies, vol. 10 (1982), 143–61, Sue Lonoff suggests that ‘Browning’s truth’ deals with the ways in which mankind may ‘attain spiritual insight and approach The Word beyond mere words’ (149); and in the most recent example of metaphysical reading, Paul Zietlow, in ‘The Ascending Concerns of The Ring and the Book: Reality, Moral Vision, and Salvation’, SP, vol. 84 (1987), 194–218, argues that ‘Pompilia’s tragedy offers luminous moments of reverberate truth whose impact cannot be formulated in words; it blossoms miraculously into reality in those infinite regions of the soul that lie beyond the boundaries of articulation’ (209–10). For non-transcendental readings, exceptions to the separation of language and truth, see Isobel Armstrong, ‘The Ring and the Book: the Uses of Prolixity’, in The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969); Claudette Kemper Columbus, ‘The Ring and the Book: A Masque for the Making of Meaning’, PQ, vol. 53 (1974), 237–55; Susan Blalock, ‘Browning’s The Ring and the Book: “A Novel Country”’, Browning Institute Studies, vol. 11 (1983), 39–50; and Adam Potkay, ‘The Problem of Identity and the Grounds for Judgment in The Ring and the Book’, Victorian Poetry, vol. 25 (1987), 143–57. In ‘The Dynamic Imagery of The Ring and the Book’, Studies in Browning and His Circle, vol. 4 (1976), 7–29, Stephen C. Walker, despite his stress on Browning’s restless and ambiguous imagery, nevertheless concludes that the dynamic symbolism of the poem ‘transcends “mere imagery”’, although what is incarnated is not so much God’s truth as ‘the restless irony of Browning’s poetic insight’ (29).
These contexts also extend to the reader, including you and me. In her use of the masque form as a model for the poem, Columbus demonstrates the reader’s necessary involvement in the poem’s production (see particularly her account of the carnival context, 244–5); Samuel L. Chell, in The Dynamic Self: Browning’s Poetry of Duration (University of Victoria [B.C., Canada]: English Literary Studies, 1984), argues that it is the reader ‘who ultimately holds the key to meaning’ (p. 98); and Zietlow’s claim that the poem represents the transcendent truth of Christian salvation depends on a repetition in the reader’s mind of the Pope’s ‘witness’ to spiritual power (see 195, 216). Zietlow does add that ‘for the nineteenth- or twentieth-century reader to experience fully what Browning intends would in itself be a miracle’ (218).
In Altick and Loucks, chap. 1, and in Mary Rose Sullivan, Browning’s Voices in ‘The Ring and the Book’: A Study of Method and Meaning (University of Toronto Press, 1969), chap. 7.
This powerful aesthetic has been subject to continual critical analysis in recent decades, notably by Paul de Man; see Christopher Norris, ‘Paul de Man and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology’, AUMLA, vol. 69 (May 1988), 3–47; rpt. in Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology (London: Methuen, 1988), chap. 2.
See, for instance, Stopford A. Brooke, The Poetry of Robert Browning (London: Isbister, 1902), G. K. Chesterton, Robert Browning (1903; London: Macmillan, 1957), and Arthur Symons, An Introduction to the Study of Browning (London: Dent, 1906); for further discussion of this point, see Herbert F. Tucker, ‘Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric’, in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, eds. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 226–43.
Most readings which emphasise metaphysical truth in the poem appear not to consider the comic and parodic qualities of this version. Hence Barton R. Friedman, in ‘To Tell the Sun from the Druid Fire: Imagery of Good and Evil in The Ring and the Book’, SEL, vol. 6 (1966), observes a ‘struggle between good and evil, God and the devil’ (706), and Kay Austen, in ‘Browning Climbs the Beanstalk: the Alienated Poet in The Ring and the Book’, Studies in Browning and His Circle, vol. 5 (1977), claims that ‘In showing the truth of God through the archetypal conflict between devil and saint, Browning attains the heaven for which he is striving in Book I — artistic and personal salvation’ (37). In the poem, Tertium Quid and Pompilia acknowledge Guido’s human condition, as a man whose mother, at least, loves him (IV.1593–6, VII.1715), and Guido himself mocks expectations about his horny-headed status (XI.554–7).
Henry James, ‘The Novel in “The Ring and the Book”’, Notes on Novelists (London: Dent, 1914), pp. 306–26; for the use of Bakhtin against James in relation to The Ring and the Book, see Blalock.
See, e.g., Altick and Loucks: Tertium Quid, Pompilia and the Pope, ‘together… embody Browning’s opinions on the central moral themes of the poem’ (p. 40). It is an amazing fact of criticism on the poem that despite the recognition of irony, duplicity and ambiguity in every other monologue, Pompilia’s speech has been almost universally exempted from such linguistic corruptions. The exceptions have been Columbus, and William Walker, ‘Pompilia and Pompilia’, VP, vol. 22 (1984), 47–63. See also Potkay: ‘no one interpretation… can claim absolute validity or transparent truth’ (148).
The triadic structures suggested by Altick and Loucks, and later elaborated by Litzinger, work quite satisfactorily for books II–X (three groups of three monologuists related to popular thought, the protagonists’ action and institutional responses), but they struggle to accommodate the remaining fourth of the poem, the other three books which fail to form a coherent unit of their own. See Altick and Loucks, pp. 39–40, 76–81, and Boyd Litzinger, ‘The Structural Logic of The Ring and the Book’, in Nineteenth-Century Perspectives: Essays in Honor of Lionel Stevenson, ed. Clyde de L. Ryals (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1974), pp. 105–14.
See Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience (1957; New York, Norton, 1963), chap. 3, who also finds that the relativism is marred by books I and XII, which make ‘our judgment… forced from the beginning’ (p. 135); and L. J. Swingle, ‘Truth and The Ring and the Book: A Negative View’, VP, vol. 6 (1968), 259–69, who argues that the poem is not about ‘the search for and discovery of truth, but the loss of it’ (267). Lee Erickson repeats Swingle’s emphasis on an ontological theme, in Robert Browning: His Poetry and His Audiences (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), chap. 7.
John M. Menaghan, ‘Embodied Truth: The Ring and the Book Reconsidered’, UTQ, vol. 52 (1983), 263–76, argues that Browning represents a truth which is ‘embodied, yet elusive’ (275); in his view, Browning’s intention is ‘to bring us through an experience of the inaccessibility of, and at the same time fuel our hunger for, the truth’ (266); this reading closely approximates aspects of Romantic irony, notably Schlegel’s sense of antagonism between ‘the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication’ (see Chapter 2).
The standard refinements of the ring image as an analogy for poetic creativity are Paul A. Cundiff, ‘The Clarity of Browning’s Ring-Metaphor’, PMLA, vol. 63 (1948), 1276–82; George R. Wasserman, ‘The Meaning of Browning’s Ring-Figure’, MLN, vol. 76 (1961), 420–26; and Mary Sullivan’s extension of both these arguments (pp. 19–20).
As Walter M. Kendrick suggests, in ‘The Vanishing Word’, an unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Yale University, 1975), to make the ring ‘the sign of more signs is to extend the figure to include figuration, to make the Ring a figure of a figure’ (p. 228). I am indebted to this thesis for several suggestions about the ring metaphor: that it signifies the whole series of rings (p. 231), and that ‘each ring is the sign of what precedes and follows it’ (p. 233). Kendrick also argues that ‘As an active sign, the Ring reconciles time and space, change and continuity. It is always different, yet always the same’ (p. 233).
Harvey Feinberg, ‘The Four-Cornered Circle: Truth and Illusion in Browning’s The Ring and the Book’, Studies in Browning and His Circle, vol. 13 (1985), 76, 93.
See J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God (1963; New York: Schocken, 1965): ‘The philosophical and aesthetic moral of the poem is: “By multiplying points of view on the same event, you may transcend point of view, and reach at last God’s own infinite perspective”’ (p. 149).
I take the concept of serial texts from Douglas Standring, ‘The Ring and the Book: Texts, and the Texture of Experience’, unpublished M.A. thesis (Massey University, New Zealand, 1984).
See, e.g., Jacques Derrida, ‘Living On: Border Lines’, trans. James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism, eds. Harold Bloom, et al. (New York: Seabury Press, 1979): ‘no meaning can be determined out of context, but no context permits saturation’ (p. 81); for further discussion, see E. W. Slinn, ‘Deconstruction and Meaning: The Textuality Game’, Philosophy and Literature, vol. 12 (1988), 80–7. It is not my purpose here to represent the views of Robert Browning in his letters, but there is a remarkable passage in one letter to Elizabeth Barrett (11 January 1846) which could readily act as a gloss on differance: ‘How I never say what I sit down to say! How saying the little makes me want to say the more! How the least of little things, once taken up as a thing to be imparted to you, seems to need explanations and commentaries’, in The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845–1846, ed. Elvan Kintner, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1969), p. 381. See also the Wedgwood correspondence, which relates directly to The Ring and the Book, where Julia Wedgwood uses the metaphor of a postscript to suggest a related point about supplementally (‘It is as if all utterance were the postscript to some letter that contained all that one really cared to say’) and deferral (‘I doubt if even my postscript is intelligible, or would be to another. I have a wonderful sense that you can drop some grain into these muddy thoughts, that will make them clear’), in Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: A Broken Friendship as Revealed by Their Letters, ed. Richard Curle (New York: Stokes, 1937), p. 160.
Jacques Derrida, in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), locates the first break in the ‘entrenched Western tradition’ of the Logos, the authority of speech and grammar, with Nietzsche and with the ‘graphic poetics’ of the Fenellosa-Pound combination; in order to achieve this break it was necessary to disrupt the ‘transcendental authority and dominant category of… being’ (p. 92). The Ring and the Book does not display a graphic poetics, but its disruption of verbal continuity and conceptual wholeness and its critique of transcendent truth would suggest that it can be linked to this break with logocentric tradition. It is also possible in the context of this study to suggest that Victorian poetry generally, insofar as it enacts a critique of the category of being established by the Cartesian cogito, anticipates such a break. See also Christine Froula, ‘Browning’s Sordello and the Parables of Modernist Poetics’, ELH, vol. 52 (1985), 965–92, who makes a case for Sordello as ‘a kind of “missing link” between Romantic humanism and modernist poetics’ (966).
See Simon Petch, ‘Browning’s Roman Lawyers’, in Browning Centenary Essays: Special Edition of AUMLA, eds. Simon Petch and Warwick Slinn, AUMLA, vol. 71 (May 1989), pp. 109–38. Petch’s article is the first major study to stress the role of the lawyers in relation to the poem’s concern with language: ‘the law becomes the focus for the poem’s central, social interest in language and discourse, institutions and authority’ (p. 115). Cf. Zietlow who focuses only on religious language in the poem.
W. David Shaw emphasises the Pope’s pragmatism in The Dialectical Temper (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), pp. 298–9.
Cf. Myron Tuman, in ‘Browning’s Historical Intention in The Ring and the Book’, Studies in Browning and His Circle, vol. 3 (1975), 76–95, who, by placing the poem within the historicist tradition, reads ‘Art’ as a reference to history: ‘Browning is saying that “Art” has a meaning that transcends the interest of any one group of readers’ (94).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1991 E. Warwick Slinn
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Slinn, E.W. (1991). Language and Truth in The Ring and the Book. In: The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10452-9_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10452-9_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-10454-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-10452-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)