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Browning's Modernism: The Infinite Moment as Epiphany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Ashton Nichols
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Extract

Browning's modernism has most often been seen as originating in his use of the dramatic monologue. Blending traditional poetic genres and emphasizing powerfully realized psychological states, the monologues have been described as a source of literary technique in authors as diverse as Conrad, Pound, Eliot, and Joyce. This strain of criticism suggests that Browning's sense of character is his primary strength and that it combines with his dramatic ability to place a fictional consciousness in accurately circumscribed historical time. These arguments leave one essential question unanswered – “to what extent is Browning sympathizing with his characters and to what extent is he passing judgment on them from some objective viewpoint outside the poem?” This question has become an increasingly important focus of critical discussion in recent years. The notion of sympathy is affirmed by defenders of Browning's moral relativism, while the idea of an absolute standard is advanced by those who defend his ability to identify with characters with whom he is actually in disagreement.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 11 , Spring 1983 , pp. 81 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

NOTES

1. For the details of this discussion see particularly Langbaum, Robert, The Poetry of Experience (New York: Random House, 1957)Google Scholar, chapter 2 and the preface to the 1971 edition; Cadbury, William, “Lyric and Anti-Lyric Forms: A Method for Judging Browning,” in Browning's Mind and Art, ed. Tracy, Clarence (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1968)Google Scholar; Martin, Loy D., “The Inside of Time: An Essay on the Dramatic Monologue,” in Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Bloom, Harold and Munich, Adrienne (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), pp. 75–78Google Scholar; and Honan, Park, Browning's Characters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), chapters 4 and 5.Google Scholar

2. Stephen Hero (New York: New Directions, 1963), pp. 211 and 213.Google Scholar

3. The Infinite Moment and Other Essays in Robert Browning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950), p. 7.Google Scholar

4. In the Finer Optic: The Aesthetics of Particularity in Victorian Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975)Google Scholar. Christ's chapter “The Good Moment” contains a thorough discussion of the importance of the particular in Browning's “moments.”

5. All Browning citations are to the Centenary Edition, ed. Kenyon, F. G. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966).Google Scholar

6. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Viking Portable Joyce, ed. Levin, Harry (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 481.Google Scholar

7. See The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress and Decadence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 147.Google Scholar

8. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Kintner, Elvan (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 1, 17.Google Scholar

9. Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: A Broken Friendship Revealed in Their Letters, ed. Curie, Richard (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1937), p. 29.Google Scholar

10. Note VIII in Poetical Works, ed. Hutchinson, Thomas, corr. Matthews, G. M. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 825.Google Scholar

11. See The Sense of an Ending (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 46–50Google Scholar, where Kermode argues that the notion of kairos always suggests the power of certain moments to distinguish themselves from the normal progression of events.

12. King, Roma A. Jr., The Focusing Artifice: The Poetry of Robert Browning (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1968), p. xxiii.Google Scholar

13. DeVane, William Clyde. A Browning Handbook, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton, 1955), pp. 222–23.Google Scholar

14. Joyce, , p. 481.Google Scholar

15. This passage appears in “The School of Giorgione,” in Pater's The Renaissance. This idea of overcoming temporal restrictions is more important to Browning's epiphanies than are Pater's moments “lived only for their own sake,” which point toward the purely aesthetic instants of the decadents.

16. Christ, , p. 108Google Scholar. She is here commenting on Kermode's discussion of the “end-feeling” in The Sense of an Ending (pp. 24–25).Google Scholar

17. See the closing paragraphs of “The Everlasting Yea,” in Sartor Resartus (New York: Odyssey Press, 1937), p. 196.Google Scholar

18. Joyce, , p. 473.Google Scholar

19. Buckley, , p. 148.Google Scholar

20. This paragraph is condensed from von Franz, M.-L., “Time and Synchronicity in Analytic Psychology,” in The Voices of Time, ed. Fraser, J. T. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), pp. 218–31.Google Scholar

21. In her essay “A Sketch of the Past” in Moments of Being, ed. Schulkind, Jean (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanich, 1976), pp. 66–67.Google Scholar

22. Woolf, , p. 72.Google Scholar

23. Woolf, , p. 19.Google Scholar

24. See “Poetry in a Discouraging Time,” Georgia Review, 35, No. 4 (Winter, 1981), 703–16.Google Scholar