Victorians in Theory: From Derrida to Browning

Comparative Literature, Winter 2001 by Bristow, Joseph

Elsewhere, however, Schad's comparative method points toward intriguing insights, if still refusing to explore what they might imply. In the chapter on Browning and Derrida, Schad mentions the racialized metaphors of blackness that appear in both the poet's anti-spiritualist satire "Mr. Sludge, `The Medium'" and the theorist's post-Cold War Specters of Marx. We learn that Sludge (Browning's far from subtle moniker for the United States medium-cum-con-man Daniel Dunglas Home) is at one point "accused of being a `hybrid,' literally the child of a slave and a freeman" (p. 100). Schad immediately remarks that "to mediate between the living and the dead is, it seems, to mediate between master and slave" (p. 100). But rather than investigate the fascinating link between mediumship and "medial[ing] between master and slave,"Schad speeds ahead to make fresh connections with cultural context: "`Mr. Sludge' is not only written by the son of a former master of a West Indian plantation but published within eighteen months of Abraham Lincoln's emancipation of slaves" (p. 100). Perhaps these pieces of biographical and historical information are supposed to elucidate the momentousness of slavery to Robert Browning. Yet Schad's characteristically brisk run of sentences chooses not to comment on Browning Sr.'s horror at plantation life at St. Kitts and Browning Jr.'s response to the abolitionist struggle. Instead Schad observes that "the poem makes its ghosts work as a metaphor for slaves" (p. 100). He has, it seems, only passing interest in the historical forces that energize those metaphorical specters with such satirical glee.

It should be abundantly clear that Schad's book strikes me as misconceived. Yet, on occasion, one cannot help but admire his eager intelligence and compendious grasp of the field. Moreover, his scholarship certainly deserves better treatment from his pubfisher, which has allowed more than a few typographical howlers to creep into the text. The first name of Wilfred Owen, for instance, appears--ironically enough in a book celebrating verbal play--as "Wildred" (p. 131). This kind of negligence encouraged me to think about why I had felt (perhaps appositely) "wildered" by a study that ends not with a conclusion but with an unexplained verse from the Acts of the Apostles: "These have turned the world upside down have come hither also" (p. 170). This "wildered" reading-effect, however, is one of the book's unhappier accidents since it suggests that Schad's enthusiasm for topsy-turvy meanings can prove dangerously infectious. All the more reason, then, to contest Schad's marked resistance to analyzing the intellectual consequences of his experimental conceit.

JOSEPH BRISTOW

University of California, Los Angeles