Chapter 3 - Performing Conversation: Swinburne and Robert Browning

Summary

Chapter 3, like Chapter 2, discusses poetry where conversation is both a represented and an experiential event – but as a represented event, one marked by swerves, interruptions, and misprisions such as those Blanchot believed essential to honor the otherness of others. Performing conversation in print, Swinburne and Browning drew on the long dramatic speeches, the formal stichomythic exchanges, and the dialogues between communal chorus and heroic characters that both admired in classical Greek tragedy. The chapter argues that the verse dramas and dramatic monologues of the later poets attempted a reparative political work under conditions of conversational asymmetry. For both Swinburne and Browning, as later for Levinas and Blanchot, the often missed exchanges of dramatic speech, especially in its tense relations with lyric or choral song, offered a site where readers not only study but also experience the difficulty of meaningful exchanges with the autonomous, enigmatic, but also authoritative otherness of the human and non-human world.