Surface Tension. Julie Carr

drama of the poem Callicles’s lyric is revealed to be inadequate to the task of saving (or birthing) modernity, I am suggesting that in the figure of Callicles Arnold offers the reader an example of a modern subject who revels in, rather than seeks to master, the overwhelming spectacle of fragmented experience. In the figure of Callicles, Arnold (perhaps unwittingly) offers an alternative to his vision of the modern subject as a helpless fetus trapped within the maternal “mind.” In chapter two we will investigate the implications of this version of modernity for both poetics and politics as it arises in the poetry of Dante Rossetti. Here it suffices to say that while Arnold figures this pastoral wanderer as something of a relic, an idealized romantic figure whose free access to feeling and sensation are unattainable for the very modern Empedocles, other Victorian writers, from Arthur Hallam to Walter Pater and Rossetti, will name the experience of fleeting and fractured sensation as a definitive, and perhaps welcomed, aspect of modernity.

      Furthermore, it must be noted that Callicles is not only a figure for aesthetic pleasure or sensory attunement. He is also a figure for the anarchy of desire. When asked by Pausanias to explain his presence on Etna he answers:

      The night was hot, and the feast past its prime; so we slipped out,

      Some of us, to the portico to breathe—

      Peisianax, thou know’st, drinks late; and then,

      As I was lifting my soil’d garland off,

      I saw the mules and litter in the court.

      (1:1, 37-41)

      This narrative of sensation and desire does nothing to answer Pausanias’ question. This is Arnold’s “doing-as-one-likes,” the very root of self-interested anarchy. (Interestingly, Harrison refers to Callicles as “wholly disinterested” because of how he “assimilates the beauty of the external world and generates it anew in the self-sufficient mythical structures of his verse”. Like Keats’s “camelion [sic] poet,” Harrison argues, Callicles is constantly “filling some other Body” (48). But this version of disinterestedness, the version where sensation directs one in an ongoing exploration of the physical world is probably not what Arnold had in mind, though it might be where the concept of “disinterestedness” finally arrives.) Later, when Callicles is pressed to explain his willingness to help Empedocles, he admits, “I know not how, he draws me to him, / And I could watch him with his sad face, / His flowing locks and gold-encircled brow / And kingly gait, for ever” (1:1, 58-63). Like Baudelaire’s modern painter, Callicles aestheticizes that which enraptures him, and thereby objectifies his own desire. The very aimlessness of this desire, its tendency to wander from object to object, points to the “psychic mobility,” the “unanchored identity,” of the modern subject (Bersani, 2). And while Arnold’s poem seeks to discredit just this suspended mobile subjectivity, its persistent presence in this central poem, and the poem’s final persistence in Arnold’s self-structured canon, speaks for, rather than against, the anarchic alternative Arnold seeks to control.