The Crisis of Meeting: Mediation and Synthesis in Browning’s Sordello

Abstract

THE C R IS IS OF M EE T IN G : M ED IA T IO N AN D S Y N T H E SIS IN B R O W N IN G 'S SORDELLO ROBERT A. LECKER York University T „ the reader Browning's Sordello poses problems because of its breadth and depth. Superimposed over a broad, albeit abstract horizontal presentation is a vertical perspective which attempts to achieve simultaneity by obliterating the sense of spatial and temporal sequence. Just as we have fixed our attention on a certain portion of the past, the narrator1 confuses us by his imposition of the present. No sooner do we assimilate a particular setting than that setting becomes universal, taking on qualities of all space and time. If, from a height, we watch Sordello perform at Ferrara, we see below this final public encounter Sordello's first contest at Palma's court. Over (or under) the walls of the San Pietro Palace are the walls of Mantua, and over (or under) these are the walls surrounding the castle at Goito. The problems of explication are immediately apparent: Sordello is not only multi-dimensional, it is virtually non-dimen­ sional. Corresponding to Sordello's need to annihilate the distinction between thought and perception is his desire to "grasp the whole at once" (i, 854),2 to be both everyman and himself, simultaneously existing everywhere and some­ where. Ultimately the poem is anarchic - like Sordello, it will attain its ideal identity to the extent that it destroys all that defines it. When every bound is broken, Sordello and the poem Sordello might live in some transcendental equilibrium where all space and all time intersect to create divine meaning. But Sordello never achieves the final synthesis (perhaps attainable only in death's eternity), he dies on the brink of it, and so dies the poem. It is this inevitable failure which permits us to speak of Sordello; although we are far from understanding the poem's limits, we can still relate to its contours as part of our finite understanding. In the opening lines, the speaker hints at the nature of the mould within which the story will be cast. Locating himself in the present, he addresses an audience "summoned together from the world's four ends, / Dropped down from heaven or cast up from hell" (1, 32-33). The speaker attempts not only to bring together the points of the compass, but to blend the dead below with the living above. Endeavouring to "rehearse the future" (1, 846), he becomes the meeting point between history and the hereafter. Situating himself in the midst of universal time and place, the narrator prepares to unfold the story of another English Studies in C an ad a, iii, 3, Fall 1977 308 poet similarly caught between several times and places. Confronting the dispar­ ity between his own world, the world of the poem to be related, and the world of the audience surrounding him, the speaker's "Quixotic attempt"3 to bring together three complete worlds into a single vision anticipates Sordello's des­ perate need to find a balance between his private life, his public life, and his art. Sordello's shape must be described as more than panoramic, and although the narrative development may tempt us to view the poem as a circular structure, that perspective is not always satisfying, for it cannot account for simultaneity and it inadequately explains the layering effect of what I have called Sordello's verticality. Like Sordello and the speaker, Browning wanted to be all-inclusive, to "circumscribe / And concentrate" (i, 723), omnipotently creating a cosmos that would hold the masses with the heroes, the poets with the warriors, the wasteland with the garden, and the mountains with the sky. More than this, he wanted a "core with its crust" (1, 703), the within with the without, the point with the periphery, the moment with eternity. Unable to represent the "mystic frames" (11, 671) of the universe, Browning did the next best thing - he took as his subject the limits of a universe he could know. The shape of Sordello reflects this aim. What I termed the vertical...