Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

ring becomes a metaphor for the book that he is about to write, that he has already begun to write—it is necessary to use a metal alloy. The ring cannot be made of pure gold, one must mix the gold with other, baser, metals. And for him to make this book,
The Ring and the Book
, he has had to add to the gold—this humility is also typical of Browning—baser metals, the metals of his own imagination. As for the pure metal, he has found it. He found it, but he has had to extract it from a book that he found at a stand in Florence, and that book is the story of a criminal trial that took place one century earlier in Rome.
    That book was translated into English, published by Everyman’s Library, and you would know it under the title
The Old Yellow Book
. 16 This book contains the entire story of a criminal trial, which is sordid, and a rather horrible story. It is about a count who married a peasant woman believing she was wealthy. Then he repudiates her and locks her up in a convent. She manages to escape from the convent to go live at the home of her parents. Then the count appears, because he suspects her of being an adulteress, of having had a love affair with a priest. The count is accompanied by several murderers; they enter the house and kill her. Then he is arrested, and the book records the declarations of the murderer and some letters. Browning read and reread the book, and learned all the details of this sordid story. Finally, the count is sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. And then Browning decided to discover the truth and wrote
The Ring and the Book
.
    And in
The Ring and the Book
, the story is repeated I think ten times, the same story. And what is curious, what is original, is that the story—as opposed to what happens in
Rashomon
—as far as the facts, is the same. The reader of the book learns them perfectly. The difference is in the point of view of each character. 17 It is possible that Browning was inspired by the epistolary novels that were in fashion in the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. I think that
Die Wahlverwandtschaften
, byGoethe, belongs to this genre. 18 And he was also inspired by the novels of WilkieCollins. Collins, in order to lighten up the long narrative of his detective plots, would pass the story around from character to character. And this worked for satirical purposes. For example, we have a chapter narrated by one of the characters. That character tells how he had just conversed with So-and-so, who had impressed him greatly with the wit and depth of his conversation. And then we go to the next chapter, narrated by his interlocutor, and in that chapter we see that he has just spoken with the narrator of the previous chapter, and that the other bored him to death with his imbecilities. That is, there is a game of contrast and satire.
    Now, Browning takes this method of having several people tell the story, but he does not do it in succession. That is, one character does not pass on the story to another. Each character tells the whole story, the same story, from beginning to end. And Browning dedicates the first part toElizabeth Barrett, who had died. And at the end he says, “
Oh, lírico amor, mitad ángel, mitad pájaro, toda una maravilla y un incontenible deseo
.” And he says how sometimes he has looked at the sky and he seems to have seen a place where the blue of the sky is more blue, more passionate, and he thought that she might be there. I remember those first lines. “Ah, lyric Love, half angel, half bird, and all a wonder, and a wild desire.” And then we have the first canto of the poem, titled “Half-Rome.” And there we have the facts, the facts told by a random individual who saw Pompilia—Pompilia is the murdered woman—and was impressed by her beauty and is certain of the guilt of the murderer, of the injustice of her murder. Then we have another chapter that is called “Half-Rome” also. There, the same story is told by a gentleman, a gentleman of a certain age, who is telling it to his nephew. And he tells him that the count, by killing his wife, has acted justly. He is on the count’s side, the side of the murderer. Then we have “Tertium Quid,” and this character tells the story with what he believes is impartiality: that the woman is partially right, and the killer also is partially right. He tells the story halfheartedly.
    We then have the defense of the priest. Then we have the defense of the