Victorians in Theory: From Derrida to Browning

Comparative Literature, Winter 2001 by Bristow, Joseph

VICTORIANS IN THEORY: FROM DERRIDA TO BROWNING. By John Schad. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. x, 180 p.

"I am involved," declares John Schad, "in an experiment of reading, an experiment that is best described as an extended version of the seventeen th-century poetic conceit" (p. 3). The conceit appropriately characterizes the capricious design of Schad's ambitious study. His critical aim, he says, is to put into practice a radical form of "poststructuralist intertextuality" (p. 3). This method involves "not so much making connections as discovering them" (p. 3) between pairings of poets and theorists: Christina Rossetti and Luce Irigaray; Matthew Arnold and Michel Foucault; Robert Browning and Jacques Derrida; Gerard Manley Hopkins and Jacques Lacan; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Helene Cixous. Schad states that these poetic and theoretical combinations remain "in some sense arbitrary," since they are the result of "interpretive ingenuity" (p. 2). His book, after all, "is concerned with accidents of meaning which take place between two bodies of writing that are usually thought of as being separated by language, genre and period" (p. 2). Such accidents, Schad acknowledges, certainly lead him toward the extremity of what one of Robert Browning's most satirized monologists-the boozy Bishop Blougram --styles "the dangerous edge of things."

Schad is fully aware that his hermeneutic procedures, for all their ingenuity, "place some strain on a conventional sense of literary history" (p. 3). This strain, Schad readily admits, suffers greatest torsion when he asserts that Hopkins (in poems like "The Bugler's First Communion") "anticipates the First World War that so concerns The Waste Land that so concerns Lacan in `The Insistence of the Letter'" (pp. 3-4). These otherwise unrelated texts, as he points out, share a direct or indirect interest in types of military conflict. Schad justifies showing how these writings accidentally anticipate one another on the grounds that "such a transhistorical reading is ... internal to both Victorian and poststructuralist writing" (p. 4). According to this logic, the Victorian poets were always already caught up in the same mentalite as their loosely grouped poststructuralist heirs. To support this idea, Schad recalls Foucault's observation, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, that "we" (persons of the late twentieth century) are the "other Victorians."

Schad makes these truly large claims about history, theory, and Victorian poetry in an introduction that terminates abruptly after four breathless pages. And he is probably wise not to have subjected these claims to detailed examination because it would have undoubtedly impeded the interpretive ingenuity that animates much of his ensuing discussion. An altogether more convincing book, however, would surely have emerged had Schad chosen to withdraw at times from the dangerous edge where arbitrary accidents frequently come to grief. No matter how openly unconventional in his approach, Schad requires firmer argumentative ground on which to more rationally than randomly elaborate his authoritative knowledge of Victorian poetry and poststructuralist theory. Unquestionably, Schad possesses a vigilant critical eye that is always quick to identify complex textual features. He is acutely sensitive, for example, to the suggestive ways in which Hopkins's "The Wreck of the Deutschland" represents the body "asunder"-a word that may, he says, be read as "as-under," since the body "functions as a fragmented subtext, or unconscious" in the poem (p. 126). Schad is equally adept at accentuating moments of dazzling wordplay--such as the counter-pointing of "all" and "fall" that creates such a powerful dialectic in Hopkins's "Pied Beauty." Indeed, Schad's responsiveness to these linguistic intricacies, ones that bear traces of meaning that can remain obscure to commonsense reading, yields occasional benefits--but only if and when one can keep up with his often reckless maneuvering.

Without explaining the order in which he has arranged his chapters, Schad opens with a study of femininity in Irigaray's Speculum (on the Platonic cave as "hystera") and Rossetti's "The Lowest Room" (where her speaker occupies the "place assigned" her, which she terms the "lowest place"). Schad tells us that for both poet and theorist "the place that is woman ... is below" (p. 6). With this conceit in place, he promptly launches into a sequence of accidental observations that sometimes prove illuminating. He remarks, for instance, how Rossetti's representation of femininity concurs with Irigaray's assertion that women remain suspended "between the lines," in a space where the patriarchal letter inscribes the sexual law (p. 7). (In Rossetti's poem, he reminds us, the speaker describes her life as "Line graven on line and stroke on stroke" [p. 7].) This is a thought-provoking link, one that raises many ideas about Rossetti's manner of textualizing femininity's "lowest place." As he later comments, Rossetti's women speakers frequently appear to inhabit a realm of quotation, where they are compelled to cite--while desiring to subvert--the fathers' cultural script.