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Robert F. Garratt’s essay examines Browning’s fabricated personae. These personae are classified by Garratt as disparate and distinct productions of what he calls their author’s “system of objectification” which masks human psychological interiority and individuality. Garratt subsequently posits that “The subtle development of Browning’s monologues lies in a kind of double objectification on the part of the poet, where in addition to the primary creation of the character or speaker, there exists a secondary creation, a mask, which the speaker utilizes in dealing with his auditor.” Garratt’s argument implies that Robert Browning is to be read as a strictly objective and social poet. What his reader is left to infer is that Browning’s approach ostensibly precludes the development of an individualized interiority.

Arguably, William Nestrick’s essay refutes, or, in the very least, modifies Garratt’s theory regarding Browning’s methodology. Nestrick focuses, instead, upon Browning’s publicized beliefs regarding both the aesthetic and societal roles of poets and poetry. Nestrick opposes Garratt and seems to suggest the opposite—interpreting Browning’s methodology relies upon a consideration of the subjective, personalized interiority of his characters and not predetermined and standardized “masks” that can be used as tools for classification and interpretation. Thereby, Nestrick identifies Garratt’s “double mask” as but a small appendage of Browning’s humanistic interest in “individual human beings”. This essay will attempt a reconciliation of these divergent opinions, specifically within the context of Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” I will argue that the complexity inherent to Browning’s fabricated personae rebuts the simplistic claim made in Garratt’s critique. Rather than categorically diluting his characters—e.g. the Duke in “My Last Duchess”—into static and fabricated objects, or masks, Browning’s poetic method advocates interpreting its various portrayals of individuality from the inside out. As Nestrick posits, Browning “tries to show the soul”—the individual, the intellect—“beyond the flesh,” or perhaps underneath Garratt’s mask. In so doing, Browning established the groundwork upon which modern literature would subsequently be built. Browning was among the first to look within instead of without.

Robert Garratt sets up his argument with the following proposal—
“Dramatic monologue…which gave Browning distance through the creation of a persona, or mask, has been the subject of continuing study and analysis. I intend here not so much to enter into that discussion, but rather to isolate an aspect of Browning’s dramatic monologue which critics have thus far overlooked: the double mask.”

Garratt goes on to reveal a critical approach based on literary theory developed by William Butler Yeats which “called for the existence of a mask or “anti-self” opposite in nature from the self, to facilitate certain personality types in their dealings with the external world”. Garratt therefore seeks to “isolate” and categorize “types” of personae within the poetic oeuvre of Robert Browning. His critical approach adopts the lexicon of scientific exaction; Garratt’s effort is premised on naming and classifying the various components of Browning’s work. I.e. He is isolating a specific “aspect of Browning’s dramatic monologue,” much to the detriment of the poem itself. Garratt seems intent on arguing that Browning’s personae—including the Duke—are solely concerned with the maintenance of decorum under the scrutiny of a visible or invisible auditor. The root of this phenomenon is left unnoted; the mask simply exists as the character exists for, according to Garratt, they are much the same thing. Garratt thus thinks in absolutes—the character is this way solely because that is the way he/she was designed by Browning. The character accordingly becomes a type that must be categorized by and linked to a specific mask that brings with it an abundance of associations and tools for “understanding” the character. Garratt is uninterested in what caused the character to originally don the mask. He only seeks to show that it is there.

In his essay, “The Maker-See,” William Nestrick upsets and refutes the idea that Browning was exclusively concerned with a socially motivated decorum of character. According to Nestrick, Browning rather “sees into the deeper processes of human nature. He sees us in our secret moments; he writes about the very things we wish to hide, things which, in truth, form as much a part of our personality as any public image”. Browning, in consequence, “reaches into our innermost beings for his subject. The deepest seems to be synonymous with the darkest aspects of human nature”. These assertions both complement and oppose Garratt’s model. Seemingly, Nestrick, too, saw the basis of Browning’s poetry as social reticence. But the distinction is clear: rather than typifying Browning as a poet who categorizes his poems’ inhabitants as objective representations of specific types of personae, Nestrick points to the fact that, as a poet, Browning was more interested in the human root of his poems than the critical abstractions by which they might be dismantled. The approach is psychoanalytic, but not in the Freudian sense. Browning, Nestrick argues, rather wants his reader to discern what lies beneath his creations, so that he might “involve us in the process of grasping truths lying beneath the surface of the poem”. Opposite Garratt’s theory, Nestrick implies that the significance of Browning’s poetics is not to be found on the surface of any masks that conceal his fabricated personae but rather within and underneath. Nestrick’s method is subterranean in design, and though infinitely more vague, it achieves an accuracy which Garratt’s cannot on account of its debilitating precision. Rather than isolate one element in Browning’s poetics, Nestrick colors our broad understanding of Browning’s dramatic monologues with biographical minutiae as well as the author’s own convictions regarding poetry. In so doing, Nestrick recognizes the modernity inherent to the interiority of Browning’s personae and Browning himself.

A reconciliation of the two texts must be possible as both, though in opposition, tend to complement the other. Both critics recognize the centrality of the dissimulation of personae within Browning’s poetics; arguably, both concentrate their arguments on the theme of obscuring the self as a means of social gain. However, where Garratt generalizes his approach in an attempt to construct a system through which all of Browning’s poetry can be addressed, Nestrick denies this possibility—“Since almost every poem [of Browning’s] introduces a new persona, large systems of symbols would violate the integrity of individual expression”. Nestrick suggests that Browning’s dramatic monologues were designed as an experiment in surveying and not sampling humanity. Thus, “man’s consciousness of himself, the introspective quality… explains man’s fundamental dignity,” a dignity which cannot be categorized under a system of absolutes. Nestrick insists on accounting for free-will and psychological realism in a consideration of Browning’s personae. Therefore, they resist being neatly partitioned into a generalized system of classification.

We see in “My Last Duchess” that the Duke indeed dissimulates, and, in his words, does so “by design”. The Duke is obsessed with ideas of decorum, and Garratt is accurate in saying so; the social complex that the Duke must maneuver is emphasized over the internal tensions that may or may not be the root cause of his assumed external persona, or, what Garratt calls a mask. His persona is in direct harmony with its lavish surroundings. The Duke incessantly draws attention to aesthetically sumptuous outliers that display his wealth and influence. This tendency simultaneously draws attention away from the objects’ owner—“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,” the poem opens with the Duke speaking, but immediately, the reader is asked to focus on the Duchess, not the Duke. The Duke’s persona is categorized by Garratt as a “conscious and deliberate double masking…for the Duke to maintain the control he obviously needs”. What Garratt ignores, however, is the mask’s failure. For the Duke’s interiority is drawn outward around line 30 when his bitterness is revealed in the fact that

———————————she ranked
My gift of nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling?

It is imperative, as Nestrick indicates, to see every word the Duke uses as a window that offers a view into his subconscious mind. “The rhythms of everyday conversation humanize the speaking voice…The rhythm dynamically rises and falls with the speaker’s tides of emotional involvement and consciousness”. This rhythm was designed to keep the reader directly in tow. Even the Duke’s use of the personal pronoun in the speculative mode should indicate a break in the poem’s trajectory and tone—“how shall I say?”


Prior to the Duke’s meditation on his “nine-hundred-years-old name,” he attempts to shift the focus away from a consideration of his self and motives. After this break, however, the Duke’s internal self is revealed through his own human frailty. Therefore, we should consider this moment as indicative and elucidatory of the Duke’s mysterious interior which, to this point, has been repressed. The foray into the repressed culminates in the Duke’s mystifying “commands” which led to a censure of “all smiles”. This is as far as the reader is allowed to go. The Duke’s externalized defense mechanism is again raised, and we are left to speculate on the meaning of the preceding lines. Browning was not interested in the masks his characters wore, but rather the inner turmoil that causes each manifestation of these masks.

Conclusively, understanding Browning’s poetic edifice is as difficult as understanding the human nature from which it was derived. “My Last Duchess” assumes the complexity of the interiority or “human nature” it portrays. I have argued that William Nestrick notes this and refuses to classify Browning’s personae underneath “large systems of symbols” or masks. Browning’s conception of his developed personae rather implies “a complementary conception of his audience”. And there, I would argue, is the weakness of Garratt’s argument—Garratt is anachronistically applying a theory of criticism developed by Yeats in order to understand a poet of a different era and of a different type. The psychologically induced wickedness of Browning’s Duke is read only through its outward signifiers. Consequently, Garratt covers the realism and humanity of Browning’s ominous Duke with his objective and static mask.

Both critics have developed unique and functional approaches to deconstructing Browning’s poetry. However, both in tandem indicate the difficulty of their shared task. Perhaps Browning’s personae, as representatives of human nature, are simply meant to be misunderstood.

This certainly has been placed high up on my list of required destinations, London.

50 Berkeley Square, London

http://www.maggs.com/index.asp

Established in 1853, they’ve apparently been in business for some time, and they’ve had an admirable go at it. As their price range starts at or around 200 pounds per book, I can only hope that they won’t keep me from freely exploring the shelves.

I’ve come to the conclusion that any daily, mundane activity can become avant-garde performance art if done within the humming confines of a Midwestern laundromat. Recording your now decided upon avant-garde experiment to 8mm soundless film is strongly advised. Think about it.

“Chopping Roma Tomatoes in Kansan Laundromat” by Villem Ockderfurgen (1973)

“Utilizing Q-Tip To Cleanse Ear Canal of Wax, Bubbles Laundromat, Des Moines IA” by Karl Dejaret (1982)

Milton’s an enigma. I’m currently bludgeoning my head against the poetic edifice of his creation, masochistically. Yes. I am enjoying it. Learning from it. Little else can be said currently. Fifteen pages later and I’ll be through to the other side, emerging with a different mind. We’ve a fascinatingly complex relationship, Milton and I, and I’ll categorize it merely by stating–truthfully–that I’m enjoying the struggle he puts up against analysis.

“THE TEN WORST FILMS OF ALL TIME, AS REVIEWED BY EZRA POUND OVER ITALIAN RADIO”

by Greg Purcell

1. Bambi

Filth.

2. Casablanca

This movie is filth.

3. Cat People

A race may civilize itself BY LANGUAGE, not film. Cat People is filth.

4. Gentleman Jim

To the Animals who made this usurious film: god damn you.

5. The Magnificent Ambersons

This movie is indistinguishable from the filth-rustlings of swine in a sty.

6. The Man Who Came to Dinner

May you choke on it, bacilli.

7. Yankee Doodle Dandy

I sort of liked James Cagney’s filthy Irish energy in this one.

8. The Palm Beach Story

Bless: The Italian Dolcestilnovisti, the “sweet new style” current in the time of the papish Guelphs
and the imperial Ghibellines. One will particularly take heed of its foremost practitioner, Guido Cavalcanti.

Blast: Preston Sturges and the Jewish moneylenders who helped him make this film.

9. Now, Voyager

Two boils for the director’s infected liver.

10. This Gun for Hire

This film reeks of syphilis. Filth.

Printed in “CREATED IN DARKNESS BY TROUBLED AMERICANS: THE BEST OF McSWEENEY’s HUMOR CATEGORY”

Oh, the convulsions of laughter that took hold when first reading this…

The Times writes:

“This fall Herbert will release “One Pig,” which records the birth and life cycle of a pig on a local farm. Before the animal’s slaughter, he is currently toying with having it swallow a microphone that would subsequently record Radiohead’s Thom Yorke singing live in the pig pen; once the pig has gone under the knife, Herbert wants to “make bacon, ask an artist to paint with the blood, ask Heston Blumenthal to make ice cream with the pig fat, record the sound of a toothbrush made with the bristles, ask Bjork to play a flute made from the bones, ask Vivienne Westwood or Hedi Slimane to make a coat or shoes from the skin, ask Will Self to write a story from the perspective of the pig. . . . ” The list, seemingly, is endless.

As is, one presumes, Herbert’s future”

Whether or not you agree with what Herbert professes to be up to musically, it should make for a strikingly interesting album. Ha!

find the rest of the article through this door:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/t-magazine/02talk-herbert.html?pagewanted=1&sq=matthew%20herbert&st=cse&scp=1

In a course I am now taking, I have come to admire the wordsmithing of the Romantics. What I came to admire, in Wordsworth particularly, anticipates the technique of Browning and subsequent moderns. This essay was written for that course and I admit that I enjoyed the process. Wordsworth had at least the tenacity to poeticize “in a selection of language really used by men…” This done while treading on the heels of an era defined by exuberance and mellifluous worthlessness (his opinion). He held a role in the formation of what I enjoy most in literature. I concede due credit here.

“She dwelt among the untrodden ways” is Wordsworth’s stab at explaining the troubling uncertainties of which individualism is composed. The poem achieves this through the use of syntactic and linguistic ambiguities that offer two distinct interpretations of their meaning to the reader. In consequence of this approach, the venerated “maid” and the poem itself become symbols for Wordsworth’s imaginings of selfhood and poetic individualism set inside a hostile world.

With the title, the poem opens in an aggressive mood. Untrodden—alone and in its root tread—is a heavy word, implying an element of violence and obstinacy inconsistent with the poem and its imagery. Both the voice of the poem and his beloved are vulnerable, and consequently the speaker seems distrustful of all that encroaches upon this idealized and unfrequented environment. The scene and its contents are to be protected and cherished, just as they are enshrined within the margins of Wordsworth’s poem. This idea, hinted at by the tone of the poem’s title, sets the stage for Wordsworth’s portrayal of an individuality that exists in a threatened state.

The first stanza displays Wordsworth’s manipulation of syntactic form. In its third line, the speaker describes the subject of the poem as “A maid whom there were none to praise/And very few to love” (l.3). With this line, the reader’s attention is held by the difficulty in its syntax. Seemingly, a preposition has been omitted. For is it to be “by whom there were none to praise…” or rather “for whom there were none to praise…”? The problem centers upon semantic duality: what did Wordsworth intend to mean?! Arguably, both possibilities—that is, the insertion of for or by—construct our understanding of the poem. What is suggested is that individuality, for Wordsworth, exists in a social vacuum—it is a maid both for whom none exist to praise and who is praised by none. The reader’s preference of one over the other is just as irrelevant as the phrase’s ambiguity is important—i.e. the paradox within the phrase’s syntax extrapolates itself into our attempt at interpretation and thus informs our understanding—the obscurity becomes the clarity; the meaningless becomes charged with meaning, and we are left with two distinct possibilities that engage in a dialectic to ultimately expand our understanding of the poem in toto.

Here it is perhaps appropriate to digress with the words of Wordsworth’s one-time friend, Thomas De Quincey. He states, “Wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, as it were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to suggest each other.” Wordsworth’s poetics operates on this principle. Instead of lending further semantic obscurity, this simple omission offers additional routes of interpretation through variety; what was omitted is simultaneously implied by way of its omission. Thus, considering both options in unison, the maid—virginal and innocent—seemingly exists in an extra-rational and extra-social sphere; she is ignored, yet perhaps remains so only as a result of her self-inflicted exclusion. She is a type and degree of individuality that is easily forgotten in consequence of her infrequency and insignificance—stated: “she lived unknown” (l.9) and has since “ceased” to be (l. 10).

Lucy, rather than being a poetic representation of a specific personage, seemingly becomes a symbol for Wordsworth’s notion of the individual. As the figure in the poem “[dwells] among untrodden ways” (l. 1) and remains “half-hidden” (l. 6), it becomes apparent that she has broken from the confines of conformity in all of its guises. However, Wordsworth seems to focus his poem upon the consequences of this solitary existence. Even the speaker seems to address her from a removed perspective; all description is delivered entirely in the past tense—e.g. “she dwelt,” “there were,” “she lived,” “she ceased,” etc. She subsists entirely apart from the speaker’s physical and temporal plane of existence. Moreover, she is never associated with communal scenes or society. Instead she is invariably equated with singularities in nature: a lone star, and a “half-hidden” violet (l.5-8)—both natural objects that are defined by being singular and distinct.

Arguably, Wordsworth has aired anxieties regarding his own individuality. Presumably Wordsworth—through the speaker—indentifies with Lucy. Perhaps this would explain why the speaker feels that “few” but him “could know” of Lucy’s demise; he maintains an almost uncanny awareness of Lucy’s state at all times, as if she is a component of his own being (l. 9). Thus Wordsworth laments the destruction of individualism, but also anticipates the inconsequential death of his fabricated, and heavily poeticized self. A conclusion that is affirmed in his closing line—“the difference to me!” (l.12) Perhaps Wordsworth doubts the validity of his “natural” individualism and fears the consequences of its implementation.

Masked behind the deceptive simplicity of the poem, Wordsworth is seeking reconciliation. The poem attempts to unite the disconnection one must experience in pursuit of an individualized way of being with the inclusive consciousness required of a poet. For the poet must—as Wordsworth specifically believed—speak for himself while simultaneously speaking for his race. But the two pursuits are mutually exclusive, because the true individual remains, by Wordsworth’s definition, a figure for whom there are none to praise and who is praised by none.

i’ve found it.