Thinking in Difficulties

As the last chapter has shown, the place of Victorian art work could not be confined to the sphere of an aesthetic that was increasingly identified with the so-called ‘fine arts’. The practice of making ‘art’ should rather be seen as a process that was continuously extended into an open field in which the distinction between play and work, creative invention and mechanical execution was still subject to controversy and had to be repeatedly drawn and negotiated afresh. This field of controversy and negotiation is best understood as a gathering of mobile relationships between the personal and the general, the imaginary and the mechanical, the material and the ideal as well as the aesthetic and the economic. As I hope to show in the next couple of chapters, the work of art, or rather the artful work, that is represented by much Victorian literature can therefore be seen as an activity of probing and redefining these unsettled relationships, or, in short, as ‘literary experimentation’.

One way of writing that has been identified as a ‘central genre in a period rich with an extraordinary array of generic experimentation’ is the dramatic monologue, especially the version made prominent by Robert Browning. What makes this a ‘central’ genre of literary experimentalism is that it excessively foregrounds the collective processes of composition and interpretation through which meaningful forms are assembled and brought into shape. In fact, much of Browning's writing is so demonstratively displayed as open and incomplete, as work in the process of taking form, that the only way to read it is to actively participate in it. As a result, the meaning of the ‘characters’ that transmit Browning's monologues, as Herbert Tucker has argued, only arises from the ‘ellipses and blank spaces’ – Wolfgang Iser would say the Leerstellen – between the literal words on the page and the figural sense that readers and writers work out of these words. ‘Character in the Browningesque dramatic monologue emerges as an interference effect between opposed yet mutually informative discourses’, to use Tucker's words, ‘between an historical, narrative, metonymic text and a symbolic, lyrical, metaphoric text that adjoins it and jockeys with it for authority.’