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Friday, August 04, 2006
Turning the Autotelic on its Head, One Poem at a Time
[X-posted from Acephalous]
Continuing with the general theme of my scholarly shortcomings, I’m proud to annouce that I’m terrible at close-reading cold. Worse than that, even. Some people spin stupendous yarns on the spot.
I spin my wheels.
Unsuccessfully.
Too much stupid gunk in the gears ... by which I mean, too much stupid-gunk in the gears, preventing my wheels from even spinning.
My remedy? Mandatory close-readings. Cold. No preparation. No background research. I’m practicing a radical New Criticism here, the kind which only ever existed in the minds of its opponents. I hope to be a good Horacian and entertain while edifying, but fear that until I get better at this, the entertainment will be in the mocking and the edification nil.
The first victim will be Robert Browning’s "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister." Of all the poems ever written since the dawn of time, I chose to open with this one because I’ve always had an affinity for Browning ... and because, since it’s a dramatic monologue, the sad skills I’ve acquired reading novels may apply.
Below the fold you’ll find the temporarily autotelic little bugger as well as my New Critical gloss on it:
[Actually, you won’t. I can’t square the format so read the poem here instead, then come back to comment.]
I’m resisting the urge to invoke Tony the Tiger, and will instead point to the fact that the poem opens and closes with a voiced growl. The overly emotional speaker—I’m inferring strength of emotion from frequency of exclamation points in the first two quatrains—begins by describing the actions of Brother Lawrence as he passes him watering his "damned flower-pots" (2). First, it’s significant that the poem is of the occasional variety, written to commerate a particular rising of the speaker’s ire. Brother Lawrence waters his pots, the speaker becomes enflamed, and the poem commences. Not your typical occasional poem, but Browning certainly creates the impression that it’s been occasioned by a particular watering of pots, instead of a general one.
Of course, this watering is typical of prior ones, if we believe the speaker. To my deaf ears, lines 5-8 are spoken with a high-pitched, sing-songy voice typical of witches and Jewish grandmothers:
Whaaaaaaat? your myrtle bush wants trimming?
Ooooooooh, that rose has prior claims—
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Can you hear the passive-aggression oozing from those lines? I can. The next, however, is intended to be aggresively exclamatory. (Hence, the exclamation point.) But given that the speaker is currently situated somewhere Brother Lawrene could instantly intrude, it must be muttered under the speaker’s breath:
Hell dry you up with its flames!
Only it can’t be—one can’t yell in a whisper—and that tension accounts for its effectiveness, if you consider it effective. Sure, you can damn someone in the immediate vicinity to hellacious dessication, but if you do, your curse won’t be muttered so much as silently screamed. That’s what us New Critics call "paradox." It’s also that odd-but-familiar theatrical non-scream favored by actors in asides. More hoarse than harsh ... think Gollum’s dueling soliloquies in The Two Towers. (Add an "s" to "Hell" and double possessivize "its" for full effect.)
As the next stanza begins "At the meal we sit together," you might be inclined to think we’ve moved forward in time. However, later lines suggest otherwise. I’m thinking, in particular, of the parenthetical aside "He-he! There his lily snaps" (24). The dinner is a scene in the speaker’s mind, imagined while he’s still in the garden and able to snap Brother Lawrene’s lilies. (I’d comment on the apparent attempt to emasculate B.L. by associating him with the daintier garden fare, but I’m an imaginary New Critic tonight, so all this gender nonsense is beside the point. There’s no such thing as a homosexual—no, not even in a monastic cloister—and vaginas haven’t even been invented yet.) The closing stanza reinforces this idea, with its "Blasted lay that rose-acacia" (69) being in the present-tense.
What we have, then, is a prolonged grumbling by an over-worked, under-appreciated monk currently breaking his back as he tends Brother Lawrence’s rose garden. The ornamental quality of the flowers the speaker cultivates, coupled with his complaints about the distribution of melon (41-44), suggests quite a commonplace motivation for mentally ensnaring his superior in a heresy:
He’s disgruntled. He does all the work but Brother Lawrence gets all the melon. Not all the melon, mind you; merely an entire melon to the speaker’s slice. Which is itself important, since Brother Lawrence has a melon all to himself, whereas his subordinates must split one between them. (I’d comment on matters relating to the alienation and the unequal distribution of labor, but I’m an imaginary New Critic tonight, so the world exists in an edenic state of pre-capitalist equity. There’s no such thing as the unequal distribution of wealth. Poverty hasn’t even been invented yet.)
You’ll note that all of this occurs in the speaker’s mind. He doesn’t actually try to trap Brother Lawrence in one heresy or another; instead, he takes his revenge by keeping Brother Lawrence’s flowers "close-nipped on the sly" (48). He’s not unlike the movie theater employee who, to spite his manager in ways which will be unnoticed and thus beyond retribution, lets his friends in free-of-charge to see Independence Day opening night. He’ll feel gratified, certainly, that he’s cost his manager some meager profit-margin; but his manager will never feel the effect of the gate he lost. He’ll merely wonder why it is Independence Day didn’t do quite so well at his theater as others and sigh. (Which sigh will bring horrors upon the popcorn solution’s buttering agent, but that was a long, long time ago. Ancient history. No need to talk about it now.)
In short, then, "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" is a terrible poem. Its paradoxes are of the intellectual variety; it contains clearly identifiable attitudes with which readers can sympathize; and there’s not a whit of ambiguity about it, unless you count the exact heresy the speaker desires Brother Lawrence to roast for.
Of course, it may be that I’m a terrible New Critic ...
Comments
I would like to comment on this post but I can’t figure out what you’re up to - is this a genuine attempt at reading the poem or are you trying to ridicule new criticism?
Genuine attempt at a non-historicist reading. My NC cracks refer back to the first full paragraph and my declaration that I’m the sort of NC who only ever existed in the minds of their opponents. So yes, comment away. I’m more enamoured with Browning the more I read, partly because teasing out the speaker’s attitude is so central.
I find Browning to be possibly the most annoying of the “good” poets—from his themes, to his style, to even his technical aspects. This poem, for instance: its scansion is neither interestingly irregular enough nor regular, and if someone isn’t going to off-rhyme I really wish that they’d avoid annoying rhymes like “scarcely” and “parsley”.
And look at how, in this poem, nothing is interesting. OK, one monk hates another for his joie de vivre. (It’s not that Brother Lawrence gets a whole melon, btw, Scott—the abbott does. Brother Lawrence apparently shares out the rest.) Yes, Brother Lawrence likes flowers, has no intellectual gifts apparently, chatters about the weather, likes having his own good dishes, peeks at women, doesn’t do the minor rituals that the narrator does to flatter himself, so the narrator ineffectually and hypocritically plots to damn him. Brother Lawrence is a bore, and so is the narrator.
Let’s see, what’s the most interesting ahistorical reading that comes to mind? Perhaps this could be a satirical poem written by an anarchist about the contemporary U.S. online right and left. The narrator is a radical right blogger, simmering with ressentiment, full of religiousity and tough talk, hating B. L. because he seems to be having fun. Brother Lawrence is a moderate liberal blogger, cat-blogging and asking about derivations of words, saying that perhaps we should each get a slice of melon if we’re able. But both mouth the same phrases and sit down at the same table.
Isn’t Brother Lawrence the abbot? I actually considered that he wasn’t—"At meal we sit together” doesn’t quite work with “One goes to the Abbot’s table,” but then again, that “together” is ambiguous enough to allow for both meanings. Also, since I was reading sans apparatus, I decided not to go see whether an ordinary monk would also refer to his superiors as “brother,” or whether they’d opt for a title. My memory of The Rule of St. Benedict being fleetingly undergraduate, and the question of whether that rule would even apply to a Spanish monestary’s something to consider. (This is an exercise in cold-reading, not an exuse to do cursory research and seem like I know more about monastic life than I actually do.)
Now, I disagree that the narrator’s a bore ... or, I’ll say he’s a bore only inasmuch as his complaints are typical. Who isn’t disgruntled, these days? And I think there’s a mocking whininess to his list of complaints:
At the meal we sit together;
Salve tibi! I must hear (10)
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Sort of season, time of year:
The sarcastic “wise talk” followed by the loping “kind of weather, sort of season, time of year” diminishes both the narrator and B.L., since it’s said so childishly. I don’t think we supposed to find the narrator charming, after all, which means the whole poem indicts the petty and/or unintellectual nature of monastic communities. I also think the off-rhyme is meant to emphasize B.L.’s stupidity. The sudden appearance of an off-rhyme (the only other in the poem is Delores/stories) seems to break the poem, and whose fault is it? B.L.’s. Because he’s stupid, which this hammers home. (But no, I can’t account for the second one, nor am I altogether sure what those lines mean.)
Finally, I said non-historicist, not ahistorical, but I like your ahistorical allegorizing anyway.
Final note: I suppose what I’m saying is that when I say “radical,” I mean “radical.” An actual New Critic would’ve known and/or consulted the Rule of a Spanish monestary (the spelling of which I did check, but could only conclude that there isn’t a commonly accepted one) before beginning their analysis. That’s the common critique of NC, after all: they didn’t realize how learned they already were, and were seeing in texts things which required the cultural capital they brought to them.
No, Brother Lawrence isn’t the abbot; the narrator isn’t complaining that BL gets the whole melon, but that BL is being wonderfully generous (plenty of fruit to go around).
That makes sense, given the rest of his complaints. Funny how that one attribution error multiplies. Anyhow, practice makes perfect not-so-damnably-poor.
I hope I’m not stating the absolutely obvious here, but I think what’s interesting here is the same thing that is of interest in “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” - the discrepancy between a species of Christianity and life. Let’s remember, these are monks! There are no attempts by the King’s bastard son to poison his brother for control of a kingdom (mighty fates hang poised in the balance, etc) - or anything like that. Within the strictures set by the religious system, even a melon can become the object of huge strife. And just as in “The Bishop Orders”, the strange melange is what intrigues. On the one hand, the narrator’s whole mindset, responses, etc., would lead us to pronounce that this is not a ‘true Christian’. On the other, look how seriously he himself takes the system - up to believing that opening at the text of Galateans will ensure damnation for his hated opponent (but wait- how does he know of this text? Has he not damned himself already? How can he ignore that...?).
You’re stating the obvious, I think, but also pointing to a context I should’ve addressed. I hadn’t even considered the Galateans paradox, for one.
It’s funny, but I first encountered this poem in some “Introduction to Poetry"-type book. So its use as a random example fails through no fault of yours.
At some point Browning’s conversational quasi-realism was admired, but it looks pretty flat today. They say he had a great rivalry with Tennyson, playing the Brahms role vs. Wagner.
In my distant childhood I was taught by elderly teachers whose own teachers had been elderly and not up-to-date, so there are quite of few things that are closer to me than they should be. The composer Rimsky-Korsakoff is another.