Legal “Repristination” in The Ring and the Book

Extract

For browning, the central issue in The Ring and the Book is perception of the finite limits of the human capacity for recognizing truth. For the critical reader, the central issue is perhaps better expressed as Browning's awareness of his own capacity for re-creating or “repristinating” the past. Critics have labelled Browning's work as either relativistic or ironic, often using these terms as the poles of a continuum upon which the accuracy of Browning's perceptions might be measured. For example, Robert Langbaum sees relativism as the basis of the poem's associational coherence: “The organized facts are ‘one fact the more.’ The principle of organization is inseparable from the facts because without it the facts would not be knowable. To know anything we must imagine it” (15). W. David Shaw understands irony and relativism to be mutually exclusive (239). He argues that Browning structures his poem by the dialectical irony which arises out of the movement of Guido's guilt and the corresponding movement of Pompilia's innocence. I suggest that relativism and irony come together once one recognizes the close relationship between historicity and fantasy and the rather serious implications this relationship has for the kind of truth Browning suggests his poem specifies. That is, the act of artistic creativity allows the poet to express with freedom intuitive insights into the world of unlimited possibility, or infinity, and indeed, it is for an ever closer approach to the infinite that he or she strives artistically.