ARNOLD’S POETICS OF DISTANCE, IN-BETWEENNESS,

Philip Drew, in “Matthew Arnold and the Passage of Time” has suggested that anyone willing to get acquainted with Arnold's poetry would eventually have “to meet the blunt question, ‘You say that Arnold writes superbly in some poems, and that in others he offers us an argument of great subtlety and importance, but does he ever do both at once?’” (201). Whether Arnold writes with technical finesse or not at every turn is not a concern of this study, but the second part of Drew’s question is of importance, because, it points to the argumentative side of Arnold’s poetry, where, in Drew’s view, Arnold’s

poetry presents the reader with a sophisticated vital argument of the origins of mankind’s connective nature. Drew locates the case as being hidden within the relationship between Arnold’s portrayal of nature, where nature is “what man is not, imply[ing] the incompleteness of man” observable in Arnold’s memorable imageries like the sea, the countryside, or melancholy use of landscape, as “[n]ature is unified, especially the sea, but man is isolated, at which Arnold grieves” (205). Perhaps, a more suitable question, at least for the purposes of this study, would be to ask whether this argument on alienation is resolved or not, and if not, how to connect such detachment with the kind of a failed sense of human ritualization and in-betweenness as a non-functional and broken mechanism of self-awareness, which gets stripped of its integrating and reorienting nature.

The key point, if not the argument, would be to consider whether or not participation is involved within what Drew calls Arnold’s use of “the equivalence between time and place”, where “helpless despair” shows itself through “the inevitable ebbing away of Time, [where] the countryside becomes a vast clock [...] swallowing [...] human hopes [as] poetic inspiration [...] drie[s] up” (208). In Drew’s view, the argument Arnold poses is to question if even the remotest possibility exists in overcoming the modern detachment of humanity from its primary connection with the cosmos, personal memory, and time, which seems very unlikely to happen, because Arnold’s poetry

“contrast[s] [...] the firm physical imagery” with that of the “modern man”, where modern man is infected and “marked by vague, widely-applicable classes of experience”, since “all that the world has now to offer us is a ‘store of sad experience’”

(209). In this regard, Drew’s observation becomes highly suggestive of the conflict or dichotomy between Grimes’ proposed modes of the experiential-personal clashing with the mythic-narrative modes of ritualization, in which, Collini’s observation underlining the secondariness of Arnold’s poetry also finds its place. As “the second-order reflections” of Arnold's poetry are never about participating with the actual experience itself, Collini has argued that they are rather concealed questions and expressions regarding reflection, addressed towards, and compiled through secondary means (27).

Therefore, a circular, “desperate, eternally self-defeating desire to escape from this unending round of intellection, from being the prisoner of [one’s own] consciousness”

gets transformed into one of Arnold’s most memorable expressions of the modern experience, becoming “the dialogue of the mind with itself” (Collini 27).

A similar view has been expressed by Anthony H. Harrison, where the elegiac nature of Arnold’s poetry reveals a non-participatory consciousness of “lost love or lost faith”, divided forever from their natural counterparts, where “love is drained of its eroticism, and faith of its asceticism” (Victorian Poets 29). Both love and faith, when thought in terms of human activity, are actions that require participation, whether as the worship of a loved one, joining in bodily ways or otherwise, or the worship and practice of withdrawal, which seeks to become one with the ultimate spiritual reality by way of renouncement. However, as Arnold’s commentators suggest above, it would be hard to argue for a participatory mode in Arnold’s poetry, because the mode Arnold employs is not one of continuity but rather an uncomfortable sense of in-betweenness and discontinuity, where the thought-action dichotomy between thinking about the world, and participating within it by becoming part of a greater reality, such as love, faith, time, or a peaceful and harmonious cosmic existence is not overcome. Instead of participating in “cosmic time” through continuity, as Eliade’s previously discussed conception of profane time suggests, Arnold’s poetic characters are caught in-between distant, pleasing, yet no longer approachable times and the now desolate, worldly places haunted only by past and incomplete memories, culminating in the reflective, secondary, and melancholic-nostalgic quality of Arnold’s poetry.

A counter view, arguing for the reconciliatory nature of Arnold’s poetry, has been suggested by Dwight Culler, where Culler notes that “[t]he central feature of Arnold’s world is a river which the poet unabashedly calls the River of Life or of Time” (3).

According to Culler, Arnold’s poetry demonstrates a similar flow of the experience of humanity, by “denot[ing] historic time, [and] [m]ore frequently, [...] the life of the individual” symbolized by “three distinct regions” as Arnold’s poetry makes use of landscape imageries of the threshold, like “the Forest Glade, the Burning or Darkling Plain, and the Wide-Glimmering Sea”, which are “separated from one another by some kind of ‘gorge’” (4). These symbolic regions, for Culler, represent “childhood, maturity, and old age or death, [where] the first is a period of joyous innocence when one lives in harmony with nature, the second a period of suffering when one is alone in a hostile

world, and the third a period of peace in which suffering subsides into calm and then grows up into [...] the joy of active service in the world” (Culler 4, Collini 27).

In Culler’s view, Arnold’s strategy is deliberate, and has its roots in the “thesis-antithesis-syntheses” model of history popular in Arnold’s day, understood as the continuous clash of “organic periods [of] faith and imagination” with those of the sceptical, “mechanical or critical periods”, restarting the “threefold pattern” all over with the “incorporated epoch”, which Arnold was so fond of in his criticism (4-5).

Therefore, Culler contends that “[t]he third phase of Arnold’s myth is the phase of reconciliation, first, with the self and then with the world. The river joins its various streams and then it merges with the sea, ending in undramatic fashion as “a moment of inward illumination” (16). Although Culler notes that Arnold’s use of the threshold metaphors involve a “still point”, as “the moment of stasis, far above and yet plumbing far below the world’s surface”, this in-between period is functional and transitional in making it known to the human psyche that there is “a subterranean river”, a “silent and strong [...] buried life” of the universe, where the greater reality of being can be felt (15). Culler’s observation is quite reminiscent of Otto’s ganz andere (the wholly other), and highly evocative of Turner’s previously featured model of the liminal phase of ritualization, utilizing the threshold as an activator of awareness and integration.

However, this study would tend to argue more towards interpretations of a rather incomplete, or non-indulgent mode of awareness, and not of participation (uniting/becoming one with), being dominant in Arnold’s poetry of in-betweenness, because, as Cave’s formerly noted anecdote concerning Rudolf Otto would remind us, that being awake to certain realities is not the same thing as being able, or being allowed to participate or overcome them.

If “the dominant note of Arnold's best poetry” is indeed “reflection” and not the actual experience itself, as Collini argues (27), then another paradoxical question emerges as to the nature of such reflection: Can reflecting on a reality, whether the ganz andere or not, be considered on the same level as an experience of it? And where does poetry stand in this endeavour? The majority of the previously cited professional experiences of Arnold’s poetry would testify to its “paradoxical” and “vulnerable” nature focusing on

“failure” rather than union (Rosenberg 149), where “a nostalgia” arising from

“dislocation [...] give[s] voice to a poetry of memory [...] haunted by the pathos of [...]

order lost” (Madden 50), or an “intensifi[ed] melancholy divid[ing] the mind [...]

emphatically against itself” resulting in a twice removed “melancholy of melancholy”

(Riede, Allegories 2). Could these interpretative experiences, then, be considered as the reality of, or the realities behind Arnold’s poetics?

Perhaps, it would be more suited to direct attention to the meta qualities and the self-reflexivity of Arnold’s poetics concealed under the theme of “vocation”, or the “poetry-religion continuum”, as Ruth ApRoberts has noted (2, 7), because such a meta approach would be more demonstrative in underlining the practical side of Arnold’s poetry, which, as Grob also argues, is the presentation of “a secondary realm of human existence in which consciousness can imagine its wishes fulfilled, but [...] does so in such a way that its transparent unreality, its status as mere wish-fulfilling dream, is clearly evident” (135). However, all such critique would still lead back to the original question of the modes Grimes, Bell, Turner, and Rappaport observed, which is also posed above by Drew as the constant battle between “vague, widely-applicable classes of experience” (209), where narrative and experiential modes converse, converge, convert, and then separate, only to reunite again, as they have been locked in an eternal contamination of mythology, religion, and worldly action, represented through the palimpsests of human language and ritualization.

In this regard, even Culler admits to “the airs and floating echoes of our true or buried self” emanating from Arnold’s poetry, where “Arnold's poems mark the moments at which such echoes come” as consciousness stands aside from “[a] surface self and communes with his own soul, [where] the one is religious, the other naturalistic” (15-16). As Culler further notes, “one is to be gained by effort, the other without any effort at all”; since the natural mode is “a cyclical movement [,] a stage in the world-process”, it does not require accomplishment, but the religious mode, consisting of the urge towards discovery of the self and the world, demands awareness and participation regarding the ultimate purpose of existence (15-16). Nonetheless, as Collini also notes, it is hard to reconcile such a feeling of unity with what happens in Arnold’s poetry;

since nothing much happens, and only references of fragility to broken symbols as vessels for an emotion or feeling of perpetual in-betweenness float about, where there

are only distant echoes represented through “a set of symbols on to which man’s travails and hopes are transposed”, which are “never immediately at one with man, nor [...]

infused with a deeper life of [their] own”, turning Arnold’s poetry into “that of emotion recollected indoors” (30). Thus, the reader is only illuminated in a secondary way, by

“the light” which is “a little too clinical”, where “the yearned-for transforming emotion [...] can only be reflected upon and not experienced” (Collini 28).

In that vein, the dichotomy between thought and action becomes primarily a problem caused by the in-betweenness of reflection against actual and temporal human experience. Armstrong refers to its origins in Arnold as arising from an inner contradiction in Arnold’s poetry as to the matter of expressive language, which prioritize “inner experience” over “language and metaphor”, but since both arise out of

“psychological states, [an] ‘allegory of the state of one’s own mind’ simply returns one to the inner subjectivity of the self, because the outer shell of language is merely the equivalent of subjectivity” (176-177). Therefore, experience gets mixed up with metaphor and reference, and reference with experience within the dichotomy of the

“inner and outer” modes of experience and expression in Arnold’s poetry (Armstrong 177). In such a context, Armstrong contends that Arnold “is continually aware of the results of its over-reflective, alienated conditions [as] the poet of cultural displacement”, because Arnold is able to realize “the psychological stress it engenders”, where crisis turns into “isolation”, making him “hyperconscious of the intruding footsteps” within his own poetry, as the use of “culturally dislocating forces” are represented through

“heavy [...] territorial reference, [such as] the boundary or limit of field, sea, land, European mountain, [...] desert [or] the subaqueous world” (202-203).

Making use of readings offered by Culler, Drew, Grob, Collini, Armstrong and others who either point towards the problem of reflectivity or the meta-concerns involved in the process regarding Arnold’s poetry, it should become evident that amongst the main issues underlying Arnold’s poetry is the in-betweenness of human experience located amongst thought-action dichotomies concerning the experiential and the narrative modes of being and participating with the world. This “liminoid” situation, as Turner coins it (Dramas 16-17), causes unease and discomfort for Arnold’s poetic characters, yet also reveals a deeper inner mechanism for the modern reader to gaze upon his own

incompleteness by employing a mode of division and secondary reflection. Turner regards the “liminoid” as separate from the “liminal” in the sense that the liminal is the integral part of the traditional structure of ritual which seeks completion, whereas the liminoid can only be experienced in “post-industrial” revolutionary and voluntary modern modes of adaptation, in which there is a continuous tendency to escape from closure, where, “to be either [the] agents or [the] audience [of ritual] is an optional activity” for the modern participant / observer (Dramas 15-16). As a result, the

“liminoid [...] symbolic activity” (15) becomes a crucial mechanism, of both association and dissociation, a continuous familiarization and defamiliarization, where “yesterday’s liminal becomes today’s stabilized, today’s peripheral becomes tomorrow’s centered”

(16).

Catherine Bell has also been suggesting a parallel structure, but only by highlighting the internal paradox of human ritualization, where ritualization may not always be

“approached as a means to create and renew community, transform human identity, and remake our most existential sense of being in the cosmos” (Perspectives 264). Since the ritual structure is open to abuse, rites, especially in their modern or capitalist contexts may not always “work as a type of social alchemy to transform good intentions into new instincts or weave the threads of raw and broken experiences into a textured fabric of connectedness to other people and things” (264). Regarding the pervasive nature of ritualization, Bell’s remark interprets the phenomenon as capable of going both ways, especially when the dynamics of ritualization, due to their correlative involvement with each other as the narrative versus the experiential, prevent “scientific detachment”, where familiarity is continually broken and re-established as “ritual theorists, experts, and participants are pulled into a complex circle of interdependence”, because theory changes how people ritualize, and new ways of how people ritualize, or newly discovered ways of how people have been ritualizing, changes the focus or mode of the theories involved (265).

On the other hand, ritualization may also act as a stimulant of recognition pointing towards the central role of the in-between within the process, which can then be used to make sense of both the literary dimension and its accompanying physical functions, as in the narrative-mythic modes of experience in the world being set against physical

participation within the moment through the experiential-personal, unravelling a greater structure, whether this is the inner-workings of social life, the selfhood of the individual, or that very mysterious, yet verifiable ganz andere. Hence, it is no surprise that Rappaport also describes ritualization as the process resembling a “remarkable spectacle”, where “the unfalsifiable supported by the undeniable yields the unquestionable, which transforms the dubious, the arbitrary, and the conventional into the correct, the necessary, and the natural. This structure is the foundation upon which the human way of life stands, and it is realized in ritual” (405). Similarly, Turner also recognizes the fundamental logic of ritualization, as being formed within a

“consciousness, which should lead anthropologists into extended study of complex literate cultures where the most articulate conscious voices of values are the ‘liminoid’

poets, philosophers, dramatists, novelists, painters, and the like” (Dramas 17).

Signifying the importance of “liminoid analogues” residing in the subtle ways of how the poetic, dramatic, or plastic arts work, Turner gives priority to “modern arts and sciences”, as opposed to more “serious genres of symbolic action” such as “ritual, myth, tragedy, and comedy” that are “deeply implicated in the cyclical repetitive views of social process” (Dramas 16). In Turner’s view, because of the lack of “obligation” and

“constraint from external norms” in liminoid rituals, “a pleasurable quality [...] enables”

agents of ritualization “to be absorbed more readily into a consciousness of individuality, where “pleasure, thus becomes a serious matter”, as forming and enabling a questioning and meaning-making mechanism of its own (16). Again, this process of the individual being turned into the pleasurable ritualized agent goes both ways, as the threshold between the mythic-narrative and the temporal-experiential is incessantly crossed and re-crossed within what Turner has baptized as the liminoid, moving backwards and forwards within the interplay of changing social ideologies and its counter attitudes. In such a context, a self-awareness and an appetite towards cultural discovery are motivated. As Storey observes, “film noir” or “Shakespeare” or any other cultural heritage easily becomes an intellectual commodity which is apt to transgress

“the border” between a cultural-narrative, and temporal-personal experience, as in the example of “film noir start[ing] as despised popular cinema and within thirty years [,]

becom[ing] art cinema” (9). Because of the preferred nostalgic value attached to it by those, in Fiske’s words, who are engaged in “a fruitless exercise [of] nostalgia”,

seeking, yet failing to find “the authentic”, the process is essential for human culture, thus continually keeps producing culture crowds that continually search for the

“authentic” by constantly looking into the past, and “bemoaning the loss of the authentic” in the present (Fiske 27, Storey 9).

However, akin to Turner’s above argument of the “liminoid consciousness” as the exercise of seeking and transforming the nostalgic, especially by employing modes common to ritualization, the study of in-betweenness can be seen to reveal the cultural dynamics behind the quest for this illusory sense of the authentic, where this quest becomes relocated within the fragmented consciousness of a modern and disoriented consciousness, also exemplified within Arnold’s broken poetics of in-betweenness. As it stands, the views provided on the relationship between human ritualization and in-betweenness so far singles out ritualization as a mechanism that contains and re-negotiates both modes of the experiential-personal, and the mythic-narrative modes which allow for a critical vantage point for the analysis of human culture. If the dynamics of in-betweenness and ritual creation can be seen to reflect upon each other as the ritualization process itself, they both emerge as ways of talking about the past and the present, involving contesting strategies of participation towards something overwhelming, whether in myth, or history. Arnold’s poetic voices, in this regard, also make use of the in-between to question the relationship of the human mind with that ever-fleeting sense of the authentic.

If Marjorie Garber is right in affirming that the essential human condition as poetic creation depends on the reciprocal transgression of boundaries between the narratives of the past, and the experiences of the present, since “[t]he act of writing is a sleight of hand through which the dead hand of the past reaches over to our side of the border”, then, “the uncanny connection between Shakespeare’s propensity to write ghosts and his continuing capacity to write us” (xxvi), can also be observed in the way Matthew Arnold’s poetry engages the structure of human emotions as well as the secondariness of human intellect, continually operating within the pregnant and creative in-between common to human ritualization and poetic creation. Perhaps, Arnold’s poetry can be considered, not as a ‘sleight of hand’, but rather as a sleight of the mind, which continues to speak inwardly with us the moderns, and also making and facilitating us as

the moderns, sustaining our sense of modern detachment through its many ghostly characters like the strayed reveller, the scholar-gipsy, Empedocles, the forsaken merman, or the mysterious Marguerite of long lost Switzerland. This is to suggest, that the boundary is crossed both ways; as Arnold himself travels in the Cumnor Hills of his Oxford youth within “The Scholar-Gipsy”, his readers also travel, each in their unique, yet similar hillsides of human perception and recollection, being in pursuit of their own scholar-gipsies, or their own mermen of the deep sea caverns. After all, what is poetry, but “the recognition” of the self through the other, an intention where “the poet intends toward another, even if the other is the poet apprehending the work in a later time and other space”, and since that very “intention proceeds in time, the objectification of the other is also subject to transformation” (Stewart, 1-2, 12). It is for this reason that Stewart defines the poetic process as “the repetition of an ontological moment and the ongoing process or work of enunciation by which that moment is recursively known and carried forward” (15). In that regard, poetic voice becomes the definitive ingredient, both in poetic creation and ritualization, making both the communion with the past and the communication with the present possible amongst contending modes of human experience from within the boundaries of the in-between.

1.3. POETIC VOICE AS THE INVOCATION OF THE IN-BETWEEN