"The small becomes the dreadful and immense"

Browning, "Mr. Sludge, 'The Medium'" (1864)

(It's over 1,500 lines long, so I think this can make up for the fact that yesterday got away from me before I could read a poem, much less read and post. And, hey, I kept my resolution as long as Browning kept his, yo.)

This is one of those ridiculously capacious Victorian poems--not exactly In Memoriam, to be sure, but able to pack in quite a bit of material. Most of which I'm not actually going to talk about here because I need to accomplish something else today other than the Poem of the Day post. Briefly, however: I know that this is supposed to be Browning's great indictment of the spiritualist movement and in particular the medium that had counted Elizabeth Barrett Browning among his disciples. And, yeah, it works at that, with the American connection being a nice twist on it all--the notes in my edition of the poem (Penguin Classics) mention that this is Browning's only dramatic monologue that features an American speaker. Sludge's construction of his credulous, status-obsessed, exploitative patron is also kind of interesting, especially since there are a couple of points in the confession where we seem to veer towards the epistemological concerns of nineteenth-century (British and American) philanthropy--basically, Sludge taunts his patron with the view that, if the patron exposes Sludge as a fraud, then the patron is also exposing himself as someone who has been taken in by a fraud. And so everyone (we get the sense) ends up affirming belief so as not to look stupid. (And they create philanthropic institutions to figure out who's really deserving of charitable aid. The modern equivalent is the ads on the subways that discourage people from giving to panhandlers and recommend charitable contributions as an alternative....)

Definitely something going on with issues of class and epistemology here...something I wasn't expecting, but perhaps there's something in this idea of the "medium" as a stand in for a kind of ascendant middle class who simply gives their customers what they're asking for, regardless of whether they believe it or not....but, see, I'm already not doing a good job here--I felt throughout the poem that I was being kind of twisted around. I know some of this is rhythmic, having to do with the way that Browning is using caesuras and dashes within the blank verse line, but it also has to do with the structure of argumentation, which has the effect, more or less, of shutting down the experimental narrative--for Sludge, you test him and he seems to succeed! There's an interesting discourse here around the idea of what someone can or can't know: what Sludge's observers read as his supernatural powers is really just a symptom of their own dullness in underestimating (misunderestimating?) him: they assume he "can't know" what he knows, when in fact, he can. This seems like a discussion I want to pursue a bit further, especially as Sludge also talks about reading / observing the world in a way that evokes both the figure of the poet in Browning's earlier poem, "How It Strikes a Contemporary" (and, indeed, Sludge twice remarks that his own discourse seems to be falling into poetry) and the opening sections of Foucault's The Order of Things. And I wonder if one of the things that makes the "medium" (at least in this rendering) such a frustrating figure is precisely his resemblance to poets, philosophers, artists--indeed, to anyone else who aims to remake the world in a meaningful way. And I'm not sure that makes a whole lot of sense, but I'm going to leave this for now to allow myself to keep working this one out in my own head. I made many more notes than I'm sharing here, of course.

Possibly not unrelatedly, however, is the sense I've had today of simply needing to be open to things and present to them. It's an okay place to be in for January at least. Must keep working now, though.