E. WARWICK SLINNpoem is bound to disappoint us. "Here were the end," says the poet i n Book
XII, invoking the irresolution of the subjunctive, "had anything an end"
(RBRB XII. i). Rather than providing a terminal explanation for his poem,
Browning instead suggests a structural supplementarity: each speaker
enacts a pattern of retrospective narration which claims a truthful account
but each monologue is also succeeded by another that extends the context
and alters the meaning of the previous one. Through the monologue form,
Browning draws attention to the ironic limits of each speaker, to the
contingent circumstances of any claim to total or transcendent truth. Yet,
by means of serial juxtaposition and recurring images, and through the
contestation of institutional languages (of church, law, and literature), he
also displays the structuring processes of social practices. The result is a
subtle critique of the complex interrelationships among private and public
discourses. Meaning, perception, and understanding are all rendered
fundamentally textual in this story of citations, citations within citations,
eyewitness accounts, hearsay, and letters, with one textual version suc-
ceeding another.
The Ring and the Book provides a climax for the formalist claim that
underpins this whole discussion: that poetry, through its intensive linguistic
formalizing, foregrounds the inseparability of experience and discourse.
The Ring and the Book overtly asks the question that implicitly lurks in
other Victorian poetic experiments: In a culture where signs and texts
continually proliferate, "how else know we save by worth of word?" (I.
837). If there is no other means of knowing, then all knowledge is
mediated. We are, therefore, thrust back onto the epistemological dilemma
of a relationship between self and world that is always already constituted
through representation, through the discursive descriptions and expression
that characterize all our versions of experience. An awareness of this
formalist dilemma, and the way it characterizes acts of human perception
as well as acts of poetic creation, is the legacy of Victorian revisionary
formalism. Through adapting and restructuring previous conventions,
poems such as Amours de Voyage, Aurora Leigh, Maud, and The Ring and
the Book explore possibilities for combining poetic expression with cultural
critique. They contest, extend, and transform perceptual conditions and
ideological assumptions. In this sense, they manifest cultural experiments,
textual testing grounds where various discourses - epistemological, litur-
gical, poetic, political, psychological - meet, mingle, and question one
another.
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