American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron 9781623567590, 9781623564155, 9781628926897, 9781623563752

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American Impersonal

American Impersonal Essays with Sharon Cameron Edited by Branka Arsić

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing plc First published 2014 © Branka Arsić and Contributors, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-1-6235-6375-2 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solitions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

CONTENTS

Preface  vii Introduction  1

1

Being Singularly Impersonal: Jonathan Edwards and the Aesthetics of Consent—James D. Lilley  27

2

Melville’s Creatures, or Seeing Otherwise—Colin Dayan  45

3

On Ecstasy: Sharon Cameron’s Reading of Emerson—Paul Grimstad  57

4

The Recognition of Emerson’s Impersonal: Reading Alternatives in Sharon Cameron— Johannes Voelz  73

5

On the Matter of Thinking: Margaret Fuller’s Beautiful Work—Vesna Kuiken  99

6 Thoreau’s Journal: Reading Nature—George Kateb  131 7

What Music Shall We Have? Thoreau on the Aesthetics and Politics of Listening—Branka Arsić  167

vi CONTENTS

8

Hawthorne’s Fictional Commitments: The Early Tales—Kerry Larson  197

9

Hawthorne’s Rage: On Form and the Dharma— Theo Davis  225

10 Formal, New, and Relational Aesthetics: Dickinson’s Multitexts—Shira Wolosky  255 11 Beyond Sense: Portraits and Objects in Henry James’s Late Writings—Michael Moon  281 12 Believing in “Maud-Evelyn”: Henry James and the Obligation to Ghosts—Shari Goldberg  307 13 The Ends of Imagination: Stevens’s Impersonal— Mark Noble  323

Contributors  347 Index  351

PREFACE Branka Arsić

In 2008 the MLA awarded Sharon Cameron the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies. The citation from the Award committee reads as follows: “Cameron always manages to make … canonical authors radically new, so that we read them with a shock of recognition, as if for the first time … Very few scholars can claim to have brought about fundamental changes in method. Sharon Cameron has done it … And she has done more … having spent much of her career giving us brilliant close readings … Cameron is also capable of going far afield, urging us to redefine our discipline in the image of this larger horizon … A thinker and writer like Sharon Cameron comes only once in a long time.”1 That estimate alone would suffice to explain the reasons that motivate this book. From 1979, when she published Lyric Time, to her most recent work on animal suffering,2 standing at the confluence of literature, philosophy and poetics, Cameron’s work has exerted tremendous influence on generations of Americanists, redefining our understanding of major canonical authors, indeed redefining what it means to think in the field of American literature (despite the fact that, in her own words, Cameron regards her presence in the field as “perilous … because my interests never seemed to accord with those of others”).3 Given that, the essays that follow do not represent a celebration of Cameron’s work in any straightforward sense. The book is neither a typical “Festschrift” (the essays that follow are not entirely dedicated to analysis of Cameron’s work), nor a volume simply written in her honor (for neither are the essays unrelated to Cameron’s work). Each essay is dedicated to a major American author whose work Cameron has analyzed, but each formulates its

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own questions and arguments by unfolding, building on, reacting to or even critiquing Cameron’s views. They are therefore less about Cameron’s work than in conversation with it. Hence the subtitle of the book: Essays with Sharon Cameron. The with of the subtitle stands for a practice of reading that is much in accord with the approach Walter Benjamin identified in the late German Romantics, an approach that he also adopted. Unlike modern (or modernist) criticism, which functions “as a negative court of judgment” that aims to determine the value of the work, the criticism proposed by Benjamin doesn’t judge.4 Instead it “potentializes” or “intensifies” the work it interprets. This criticism is, as Benjamin phrases it, “immanent” to the extent that it follows the tendencies of the work it is interpreting in order to unfold it: “in complete antithesis to the present-day conception of its nature, criticism in its central intention is not judgment but… consummation … of the work … Criticism of the work is … its reflection.”5 This is not to say that the criterion allowing us to differentiate between superior and inferior works is lost for, on this understanding, only superior works—works with condensed potential capable of being exposed by critical reading— can be potentialized through reflection: “For the value of the work depends solely on whether it makes its immanent critique possible or not. If this is possible—if there is present in the work a reflection that can unfold itself,” then such a work can indeed be considered superior. The fact that all of the essays gathered in this collection, despite their diversity, so immanently reflect and unfold Cameron’s work, while at the same time pursuing their own questions and arguments, testifies all the more to the radical significance of her writing. Because the scholars whose essays are collected in this book were invited to write their essays from the point at which their own thinking intersects with Cameron’s, their contributions were not expected to have a particular thematic unity. Yet, most of the essays—even those that focus on Cameron’s earlier work— reference in one way or another her rethinking of personhood in certain American authors, a rethinking that culminated in her most recent book, Impersonality (Chicago University Press, 2007). It is that emphasis that gives this book its title: American Impersonal. My introduction reconstructs the trajectory of Cameron’s work precisely from the point of view of her approach to personhood,

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detecting how Cameron’s radical rethinking was already emerging in her earlier work on corporeality, selfhood and time. James D. Lilley’s “Being Singularly Impersonal: Jonathan Edwards and the Aesthetics of Consent” examines Cameron’s reading of impersonality in Edwards in order to ask what kind of communal belonging can be predicated on what is impersonal. After reminding us that Cameron had been articulating an ethics of the impersonal that is now shown to be so central to the political philosophy of thinkers such as Agamben or Esposito, Lilley proceeds to ask what kind of existence impersonality is. On his reading, it is not a simple erasure of personhood—not a simple negation within a paradigm that only allows for endless oscillation between person and non-person—but instead a manner of existence that he understands to be “singular.” The singular is less than a personal identity, as it were, while nevertheless existing in a relational mode. Hence, Lilley’s question regarding whether a community of singularities could be. In analyzing Cameron and Edwards to formulate possible responses to that question, Lilley also relies on how Walter Benjamin appeared to answer it, thus bringing Cameron’s reading of Edwards into the center of preoccupations that we usually recognize to be characteristic of modernity. Colin Dayan’s “Melville’s Creatures, or Seeing Otherwise” is also concerned with the question of personhood and its erosion. It is a meditation on how the crossing of boundaries between human and non-human occurs in Melville. Melville, she suggests, disturbed Enlightenment assumptions concerning the boundaries of consciousness when he turned animals not just into sensitive beings, but also into beings imbued with affect and hence with a form of thinking. In so doing he forced his readers to consider the “limits and dangers of the value-laden term ‘humanity’.” Starting from that unsettling of the category of the human she goes on to detect categorial disturbances that Melville generates on various epistemological and ontological grounds, and reminds us that it was Sharon Cameron who demonstrated with great patience in her essay on Billy Budd (Impersonality) how pervasive such categorial disturbance is, limited not just to the distinction between human and non-human, but also to ethical and political divides, such as those separating good from evil or right from wrong. Cameron demonstrated, as Dayan puts it, that in Melville “distinctions are reworked again and again, until distinctions such as homicidal

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predator and benign victim are ‘deprived of the capacity ever to mean again in a social way’.” The central thrust of Dayan’s essay is thus twofold. On the one hand, she is interested in the different ontology generated by Melville’s erosion of categorial limits, specifically the category of personhood and/or human. On the other, she raises the question of how we are to understand ethics or politics that are immanent to this different ontology, suggesting that embedded in Melville’s project is also what she terms his “epic of the piecemeal,” or a “broken aesthetic” that “bears in its fragments the traces of everyday racism, careless slaughter and commonplace servitude.” Both Paul Grimstad and Johannes Voelz are interested in the nature of impersonality that Cameron detects in Emerson. Grimstad’s “On Ecstasy: Sharon Cameron’s Reading of Emerson,” argues that impersonality occurs in manifold ways in Emerson, taking sometimes existential, other times epistemological form, functioning as self-abandonment but also as acknowledgment. Bringing Cameron into conversation with Cavell and Heidegger, Grimstad is especially interested in detecting what kind of relationship connects impersonality not with intuition, but rather with ecstasy, and so investigates how reception and intuition might function as proper modes of knowing. Voelz’s essay, “The Recognition of Emerson’s Impersonal: Reading Alternatives in Sharon Cameron,” directs Cameron’s reading of Emerson toward the ethical and communal. He is especially interested in how impersonality enables the social world it appears to eradicate. Voelz argues that the impersonality Emerson imagines is not contrary to the capacity of acting—necessary for any political or ethical action—because it is not contrary to the category of identity. Voelz reminds us that Emerson understands identity not in our contemporary sense of individual self-definition, but instead in a sense closer to his philosophical and cultural context. Emersonian identity thus has a platonic aspect, in that it is meant as something that connects the individual with everything else; identity is what “makes us identical with everyone and everything else,” denoting almost the opposite of what we mean today. The “connection” with others enabled through identification is conditioned by what Voelz identifies as “recognition,” but the recognition that triggers identifications is however, a crucial political category— different from simple approbation—through which democratic

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political communities can be formed in the first place. Voelz’s essay is thus about how impersonality enables such a democracy. Vesna Kuiken’s essay “On the Matter of Thinking: Margaret Fuller’s Beautiful Work” investigates the operation of impersonality in Margaret Fuller. Cameron herself has never written on Fuller, but relying on the former’s discussion of pain in Beautiful Work and her essay on Simone Weil from Impersonality, Kuiken investigates how Fuller’s life-long exposure to pain triggered a series of practices comparable to those Cameron detects in Weil. Through those practices Fuller would reach a condition of disinvestment from her experiences; as a consequence, there would be pain or a headache—phenomena whose existence would be perceptually determinable—but it wouldn’t be Fuller’s. Not able to cure her pain, Fuller, on Kuiken’s account, was able to withdraw her personhood from it. Such an operation of generating impersonality was, on Kuiken’s understanding, enabled by the specific status Fuller assigned to thoughts, rendering them material forces that literally affect the brain. The question of impersonality also guides Kateb’s, and my own essay on Thoreau. Kateb’s “Thoreau’s Journal: Reading Nature” asks what kind of relation Thoreau desires to have with the natural and, accordingly, what status he ascribes to the natural; whether the natural is, as Cameron suggested, a radical otherness or something one can mediate into a type of closeness. To address that question Kateb makes a shift from Cameron’s emphasis on Thoreau’s effort to write nature—to inscribe his thought or his perceptions in it, or to be marked by its radical alterity—toward Thoreau’s practices of observing nature, which he understands to be a way of reading it. Kateb proposes that Thoreau’s interest in perceiving nature was in fact a function of his interest in perceiving beauty. Yet, beauty is not for Kateb something aestheticized or fitting pre-existing forms (in that context he also offers a discussion of Thoreau’s critique of visual artists who painted nature as beautiful). Rather, beauty is what is generated by a perception whose goal is not pleasure and enjoyment but “ecstasy, which is dissolution of the self in worship.” My contribution, “What Music Shall We Have? Thoreau on Aesthetics and Politics of Listening,” is also concerned with Thoreau’s perceptual practices as well as with what kind of mind and subjectivity they generate. It suggests that even if Cameron’s

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Writing Nature (University of Chicago Press, 1989) didn’t use the term “impersonality” it came close to detecting the same in Thoreau. Cameron argued in her analysis of Thoreau’s perceptual practices that the thinker sought to exit habitual modes of perceiving that generate forms, in order to access the perceptual as it is, as opposed to what it appears to be when mediated by the mind. Such an effort by Thoreau “emptied” the mind of its thoughts or, more explicit still, sought to free thoughts from the mind and make them into palpable objects, that is, to transform them into what they are not. Cameron also claimed that these practices were predominantly focused on vision and detectable in Thoreau’s Journal (Princeton University Press, 1981), at least implicitly signaling a weakening of the investment in sound that was so characteristic of Walden (Princeton University Press, 1971) (by extension, the major difference between Walden and the Journal lies in the importance they attach to hearing and seeing respectively). I argue that listening remained a major preoccupation for Thoreau throughout his life, and that it is clearly detectable in the Journal. Analyzing Thoreau’s practices of listening as well as his philosophy of sound I suggest that Thoreau’s thinking on sound lead him to astonishing practices of de-figuration and de-ideation of the perceived, which were designed to generate an impersonal mind. Kerry Larson’s “Hawthorne’s Fictional Commitments: The Early Tales” interrogates the status of the fictional in Hawthorne. Larson’s questions are aesthetic, in that they inquire about the way Hawthorne tells his stories, or how he organizes them. But they are also ontological in that they ask about the reality of the fictional by pointing to the tension Hawthorne generates between characters in his stories and readers of his stories, between imagined and real persons, which often blurs a common-sense ontological divide between a figure and the figured. Larson argues that that divide is made only more complex and unstable by Hawthorne’s estimate that “imagination” is a prison of the mind. He reads the ontological instability of Hawthorne’s tales as leading to the matter of meaning: when and how does something come to mean anything if the divide that generates meanings—between real and fictional, for instance—doesn’t hold. Larson’s analysis relies on Cameron’s proposal from The Corporeal Self (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) that in Hawthorne “meaning is

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caught up in a larger complex of issues connected to the relations and boundaries between and among disparate bodies.” This is to say that the question of meaning is related in Hawthorne not only to the text—that it comes out of the text—but also to bodies and minds existing outside the text. As a result personhood, form and reality are found at the core of Larson’s arguments also, even if his reading is not explicitly invested in conceptions of personality. Davis’s “Hawthorne’s Rage: On Form and the Dharma” also discusses form in Hawthorne and how it is often violated, through the prism of Cameron’s Corporeal Self. On Davis’s understanding, Cameron was concerned with bodies and corporeality in that book as a way of raising the larger question—not exclusively related to the body at all—of what identity is in general, and what is required to say that something is this rather than that. Davis reminds us, however, that the identity of bodies and persons— which Hawthorne both generates and violates—is not restricted to the content of his stories alone. Hawthorne does not only “depict violations and abuses of real bodies in the name of images and allegories,” but “also perpetuates a parallel violence upon the images and allegories themselves.” Hence the concern of Davis’s essay lies in this parallelism of the ontological and aesthetic, whereby the operations at work in Hawthorne’s violations of the form of personhood or a body can be understood through what he does to forms of images. To violate a form of representation, however, doesn’t mean exposing the mind to it in some utterly unbounded, open way. That is what Cameron established when, in reading Dickinson’s poetry, she claimed that Dickinson’s problematizing of boundedness doesn’t mean that all limitations are eluded, and that we are facing a completely “open form,” but rather that the poet sought to reach or generate a different type of wholeness. Davis’s essay develops its argument on this fragile border between openness and boundedness; it is there that she looks to understand form but also, by extension, to understand personhood. For just as the unboundedness of form opens paths toward a different experience of “fullness,” so Cameron’s concept of “impersonality”—which Davis also detects in Hawthorne’s stories—does not mean the complete erosion or “destructibility” of personhood. Rather, it is about the “work it takes to keep that image of self going.” That aspect of impersonality—the mobile image of the self, the self’s real experience of irreality, etc.—leads Davis finally

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to approach both Hawthorne and Cameron through the prism of Buddhism, in which the definition of self and material things are rendered inseparable, disabling any easy separation of form and experience, subjectivity and materiality. This connectedness of form and formed, detected in eastern philosophies, ultimately opens up for Davis the possibility of rethinking both ontological and aesthetic questions raised by Hawthorne and Cameron. Shira Wolosky’s “Formal, New, and Relational Aesthetics: Dickinson’s Multitexts,” shares with Larson and Kateb concerns about perception while also examining aesthetic meaning and form in a way similar to Davis. Wolosky offers a brief history of critical approaches to the literary, specifically poetic or lyric, form and how it generates meaning, starting with the Formalists and New Historicists and moving via Marxists and critics of ideology, as well as deconstructionists, to very recent New Aestheticists. What she is interested in specifically is New Aestheticism’s investment not only in the literary as a process of “defamiliarization” but also, more importantly, as what assumes its status as literary only by being “singular.” Because singularity is not reducible to political or cultural norms but is embedded in them while escaping them, it becomes both something unidentifiable and something relational. It is a singularity that is unique yet multiple that, on Wolosky’s reading, Cameron detects in Dickinson’s poetry, not just in her understanding, in Lyric Time (University of Chicago Press, 1979) for instance, of temporality almost brought to stasis, but also in how she detects lyric’s embodiment in the fascicles in Choosing Not Choosing (University of Chicago Press, 1993). Thus, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, Wolosky uncovers singularity—precisely a category that Lilley identified as central for Cameron’s thinking of impersonality—at the very core of Cameron’s preoccupations with the aesthetics of the lyric. Michael Moon’s “Beyond Sense: Portraits and Objects in Henry James’s Late Writings” is invested in aesthetic objects such as painted portraits in Henry James’s late writings, and more specifically in the variety of relations they generate. Some of them Moon finds “decidedly weird,” for example an imaginary portrait that James invents in A Sense of the Past (Collins, 1917) that has the “capacity to come alive and serve as a kind of double of the protagonist,” but also some of the actual portraits evoked in The Ambassadors (Library of America, 2011) and other late

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fictions. However, in Moon’s reading this kind of object is not only aesthetic but also ontological. For, even if, most straightforwardly, the portrait is an object bound to humanizing, Moon finds that it is also given a capacity to overwhelm the observer or reality. Thus the objects that Moon examines don’t withdraw from relations with the world—as proposed by object-oriented ontologists whose philosophy Moon also engages—but instead impose themselves in a way that restructures the real. In that way, James’s portraits examine what an object or thing is, or what the status of a person’s face that they depict is; by extension, they also raise “questions about whether a person (or an object) is single, paired, or in some uncertain condition between these two states.” At that juncture Cameron’s thinking becomes particularly important for Moon’s argument, both her reading of James’s non-psychology and arguments from Impersonality, for she urges us to think of objects and inanimate forms of life, such as rock or stones, as “nonpersonified” impersonal, hence not as something that withdraws outside the world into silence, but rather something that, by means of silence, rearranges the world. Like Moon, Shari Goldberg’s “Believing in Maud-Evelyn: Henry James and the Obligation to Ghosts” is also invested in how impersonality operates in Henry James. Goldberg works from Cameron’s groundbreaking insights in Thinking in Henry James (University of Chicago Press, 1989), in particular her reading of The Wings of the Dove (W. W. Norton & Co., 2002). Cameron argues that the novel depicts thought as externalized and made material: neither the property of an individual mind nor an intangible abstraction, thought becomes instead an object, like a picture, that exists in the shared world. Goldberg pursues the radical consequences that proceed from such materialization of thought by reading one of James’s ghost stories, “Maud-Evelyn” (Atlantic Monthly, 1900). “Maud-Evelyn” treats the thought that a dead girl has not, in fact, died as if it had a physical form. Other characters turn over the thought, take it up, view it from multiple perspectives, and find it not in the least convincing but aesthetically pleasing. In appreciating and housing the idea that they do not want to adopt, these characters suggest that belief may be held without being had. In other words, once dissociated from the personal, beliefs stand to be preserved without being intellectually followed. Goldberg argues that the conclusion of the tale takes this logic even a step further,

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by suggesting that one may be obliged to preserve another’s beliefs, even, and especially, when they are judged unbelievable. This perspective shifts the critical tendency to align James’s ghost stories with his brother’s pragmatism; it also revises the very framework we have for relating to what we cannot, and do not want to, imagine to be true. Mark Noble’s “The Ends of Imagination: Stevens’s Impersonal” is concerned with how impersonality operates in the late poetry of Wallace Stevens. He is interested in impersonality as the form of “human experience” that compels one to search for answers that fall outside the boundary of the “human particular.” While he recognizes that, on Cameron’s understanding, being outside one’s personhood often promises liberation from the constraints that pre-empt our thinking, and force it into habits that block access to experience, he is more interested in how achieving impersonality—something that Cameron understands as a “disintegrative” ethos—also entails a certain violence. What is at issue is violence against one’s own coherence or boundedness. Noble’s patient close readings of a series of Stevens’s poems in which he detects such a “disintegrative ethos” leads to a cluster of ethical issues, for example whether impersonality leads to or forecloses experience of happiness, and whether happiness can be hinged on something that is not bounded within horizons that signal finitude. But Noble’s discussion of impersonality also raises questions more intrinsically related to the logic of the lyric, for he also wants to know how the violence of a person’s self-disintegration affects the lyric’s boundedness within a single poem. My focus in this preface on impersonality registers merely one way in which the essays in this collection interconnect. But the topic of impersonality by no means exhausts the points of encounter among them. There are others; for instance, all of the essays are concerned with aesthetics, with aesthetic perception, literary form and meaning. Additionally, they all raise ethical questions, specifically those relating to community and how the communal can be if it is predicated on impersonality. Yet, even given what they possess in common, each contribution in this collection should be read less as part of a thematically unified conversation than as a nod in the direction of future fruitful discussion of Cameron’s very fecund body of work.

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Notes 1

http://als-mla.org/HMCameron.htm, October 9, 2013.

2

Sharon Cameron, “Animal sentience: Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar,” Representations 114 (Spring 2011).

3

http://als-mla.org/HMCameron.htm, October 9, 2013.

4

Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–26, trans. David Lachterman, Howard Eiland, Ian Balfour, ed. Marchus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 152.

5

Ibid., p. 159.

Introduction Branka Arsić

Sharon Cameron’s Impersonality (2007)1 was a persuasive call to refashion our understanding of the central issues of American literary history. Cameron offered a version of the “American self” that radically differed from what we thought we knew it to be. The radicalism of her claim lay in her argument that the categories of the individual and personhood, of action and domination, did not in fact fashion thinking of the major figures of American literary history, such as Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville or T. S. Eliot; on the contrary, she argued, those thinkers were guided by an effort to subvert individuality, substituting it with a self so powerless that it can’t gather itself into unity. Risking a paradox, I should add that the novelty of Impersonality was an accumulated effect, in that it built on questions Cameron raised in her earlier work, such as personal identity, or how the experience of pain affects selfhood, or the possibility of embodied knowledge and the way in which such embodiment weakens the metaphorical language on which literature is believed to be predicated, coercing it into literality. In that way Impersonality also sheds light on Cameron’s previous work, showing it to be less a series of discrete scholarly studies of particular authors than a coherent philosophical project aimed at a profound revision of the American Literary tradition. To outline the thematic and conceptual unity of Cameron’s work I will return in what follows to the categories articulated in her earlier work, which relate conceptually to the question of the self by dramatizing the experience of the impersonal—most notably corporeality, literality and embodied thinking. I will argue that those very categories are remobilized in Impersonality in a way that calls on us to respond to its arguments.

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**** The Corporeal Self, Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (1981)2 is a strange book in that it negates its title, suggesting the specificity of American thinking—from Edwards to Henry James at least—to lie precisely in its weakening of the allegorical and intensifying of the embodied and the material. As that book radically proposed, by pushing the allegorical into the literal certain “non-coincidentally American” texts amount to genuine experiments in thinking aimed at a revision of traditional categorical divides, most specifically those between body and concept, the thing and its representation. For instance, many strange things happen to bodies in Melville; they are not gathered into any unity, they are not delineated, formed or separated; thanks to their incompleteness (CS, 16) two bodies become one (as in the case of Ahab and Pip (CS, 19)), what is animated traverses what is inanimate (as in the case of Ahab and his “doubloon”), or the individual body forgets that it is severed from others and becomes communal. It is possible, as Cameron suggests, to read these obsessive connections between “literalization and embodiment” (CS, 19) as allegories—as images of some deeper ethical political or philosophical ideas—or as an aesthetic formation of their own strange beauty. But to do so would be to “normalize” the “crazed” mixtures of bodies proposed by Melville; it would be to try to find a “metaphorical consolation” (CS, 17), a consolation because in ideating the body metaphor idealizes and aesthetisizes its pain, its particular, embodied suffering or joy, whereas Melville wants precisely to force us to bear with him the horror of the literal, palpable, and material. However, Cameron’s refusal to read canonical American texts as “allegories;” her refusal to accept “metaphorical consolation” is not simply a preference for a certain strategy of reading, but instead a gesture with radical consequences. First, it signals that the very nature of those texts must be understood differently. For to suggest that texts such as Moby Dick, Emerson’s Essays, Thoreau’s Journal or Walden,3 Hawthorne’s and Poe’s stories, are not made of metaphors or fictions, is to suggest that they belong not to the imaginary but to the conceptual and ontological; it is to suggest that they are to be treated as “having an independent philosophical status” (it also signals that the very distinction between literature

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and philosophy, conceived by Continental philosophers to apply to intellectual developments on the Continent, might not be relevant to the American intellectual tradition at all). Second, Cameron’s refusal to read what is embodied as the image of the spiritual leads to her major claim in The Corporeal Self, namely that American authors are involved in a search for a materialist epistemology. In other words, they seek embodied rather than spiritual—purely mental—knowledge, displacing “ideas from explanatory status and confer[ing] on them the status of immediacy or palpability” (CS, 19). In so “posing questions of identity in emphatically physical terms,” American authors offer explanations of identity that radically depart from the Continental philosophical tradition. As Cameron puts it “most philosophical explanations of identity— how the self understands its relation first to itself and second to the outside world—from the Renaissance on depend on the idea of dualism, on the notion of a separation or a split between two primary terms. The terms may be predicated as body and soul, one self and a separate other, the identity of persons as opposed to nonhuman beings, or the identity of one person at a given moment in time and space as distinct from the identity of the same person at a different temporal-spatial moment” (CS, 1). Following Descartes especially, the world was transformed into the representation of the subject—something mental, mediated, and perspectival—and the subject was rendered irrevocably irreducible to what in the world is not its own mind. Most notably, that was of course its body, since the body too assumed the status of a mental representation for the subject, something that the subject can think but can’t inhabit in an immediate way (hence, Emerson’s accurate diagnosis that the sphere of “Not-I” includes not just nature or art but my own body too). Quite differently, on Cameron’s reading, personal identity as conceived by American authors, is predicated on non-dualistic ontologies; as she puts it, in their preoccupation with the question of identity, “American works … make use of, while transcending, the philosophic dualism available to them” (CS, 3; emphasis added). In the continental tradition, resistance to dualistic ontology had typically assumed the form of mysticism. The European mystical tradition is, of course, highly complex; but regardless of differences among its many versions, from Plotinus to Theresa d’Avila at least, continental mystics tried to cancel the dualistic gap between mind and body by practices of elevation or divination

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through which the mind is not embodied but, instead, the body is overcome in the purely spiritual unity the mind generates with God. It is thus impossible to imagine European mysticism without God. Something completely opposite is enacted by American authors, who search for a non-dualistic ontology not by spiritualizing the body but by trying to embody the mind; instead of disembodied divination they sought what is concrete and material. However, as The Corporeal Self proposes, the embodied knowledge in question should not be confused with a crude materialism (it is not a depreciation of thought in favor of a naively presumed objectivity of things). Rather, the embodied knowledge proposed by Americans, should, according to Cameron, be thought of as a type of “corporeality.” By connecting the mind to matter corporeality creates a third entity out of their unity. Thus, American thinkers “posit a third term or entity which, neither body nor soul, neither one self nor another, knits the respective entities together. The third entity, moreover, while not being material—while transcending the corporeality to include the spirit that is ‘outside’ or ‘within it’—is nonetheless bodily” (CS, 1). On Cameron’s understanding, corporeality—a new, third, ontological realm that confounds the difference between “the identity of the self and the identity that lies outside the self” (CS, 2)—thus emerges not as inert matter but rather as materiality or, perhaps more precisely, the concreteness of things that includes the spiritual, which moves it. The mobile materiality or animated concreteness that is corporeality, enables American writers to generate flexible and often strange identities. Corporeality is thus mobile in the disturbing sense of being able to disjoin identities by diminutions, enlargements or recombinations of bodies, organs or bodily parts, opening the space of the monstrous and strange. The consequences of this understanding of the corporeal are radical, since in disturbing the boundaries of personal identities—which is why it must be seen as an early formulation of “impersonality”— corporeality also dismantles the divide between human and animal or vegetative, organic and inorganic, natural and prosthetic (thus, in the age of post-humanism, Cameron’s work alerts us to the fact that American canonical thinkers always questioned both anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism). *****

Introduction

5

As The Corporeal Self argues, this cognitive experimentation with dismantling divides between one person and another, or other bodies, is characteristic of many American works. For instance, it was the major investment of Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Affections and the latter’s not always successful wish to discriminate between signs “generated in the body from what … comes from outside of it” (CS, 10). The uncertainty or even incapacity of the mind to determine whether affects are generated by the mind within the body, or by something that “comes from outside of it,” leads Edwards to the disturbing realization that “existing in the mind, phenomena may also be in the world, may call into question our pedestrian distinction between the respective placements considered as alternative when it is too assuredly clear” (CS, 10). Affect, as what is simultaneously in the body and in the mind, inside and outside, comes to destabilize persons in Edwards, leading him to suggest frames of mind as something volatile or perhaps merely provisional. Impersonality will confirm Cameron’s early arguments about Jonathan Edwards by complicating them significantly. For while The Corporeal Self, as I have just suggested, argued that Religious Affections should be regarded not only as Edwards’s major and “most moving” work but also as the privileged site of corporeality and its erasure of the interiority of persons (CS, 10), Impersonality will ask that a special status be conferred on Edwards’s last work, The Nature of True Virtue. The importance of this work lies less in the fact that it dissolves person into the infinite impersonal—for that occurs in all of Edwards’s theology—than in the type of the impersonality it proposes. As Cameron reminds us in “What Counts as Love,” a chapter from Impersonality dedicated to Edwards, already in the early treatise on “The Mind” Edwards had formulated the version of impersonality that he elaborated in Religious Affections. Thus, in “The Mind” he identified excellent or virtuous love as something belonging to God only, for it is God’s “love to everything,” love that “naturally dissolves itself into the idea of a general love and delight, everywhere diffused.”4 While man’s personal consciousness can’t possibly become identical to God’s, man can nevertheless increase his excellency and virtue by striving to become like God, that is, by striving to communicate back to “being in general” the infusion of infinite love he has received from being. This is to say that in Edwards, on Cameron’s understanding, an

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individual being becomes ethical only by progressively eroding the boundaries of its “individuality,” of its personal mind; for to try to reach excellency by trying to become like God amounts to nothing less than having a mind attempt to move from “personal” to “general,” in order “everywhere to diffuse” itself. In other words, it amounts to nothing less than an injunction to become impersonal. In contrast to Edwards’s earlier works, where depersonalization was generated by the “pleasure in apprehension” of the impersonal God, or by an intuition activating sensual conversion, in True Virtue self-erosion will be approachable not intuitively but only “deductively” (I, 25). For Cameron, Edwards’s last work counter-intuitively suggests—counter-intuitively because it is not something one would readily relate to evangelical thinking—that he had come to realize that intuition, and affectivity more broadly, must be abandoned in the sphere of the ethical, precisely because they don’t allow for the complete self-erosion adequate to the excellency he seeks. For “intuition”—a way of knowing through feeling that philosophy typically divorces from self-reflection and self-presence—is identified in Edwards as the “inward sense;” differently put, it might be non-reflexive but it is nevertheless conceived of as the way for consciousness to feel itself feeling and thus, through affect, to affirm its own existence. If, however, excellency requires the self to negate rather than to affirm its existence, then its “inner sense” must be cancelled too, a requirement leading to the disturbing consequence whereby the person is incapable of knowing affectively—of feeling itself—although it still continues to exist. As Cameron formulates: “the inward sense is missing on principle from Edwards’s last work. Although in True Virtue ‘the heart’ is invoked as the object of consideration … in instance after instance love to Being in general is just what persons cannot know affectively … Therefore although what is being considered in True Virtue is ‘love’ as a ‘disposition,’ what repeatedly replaces the taste or sense of that disposition is a didactic set of propositions and calculations” (I, 33). By this Cameron is not suggesting that even in his last treatises Edwards still remains faithful to the idea that the ethical is transmitted through religious sensing and affections, even though he now formulates it through geometrically ordered arguments. On the contrary, she argues that the sweetness of selfsensing—always considered necessary for evangelical conversion, for the “vivication” and joy brought by God to the justified

Introduction

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Christian—is now disqualified precisely on the basis of its being sensual: “With respect to the claims made in True Virtue such a sense could never be deep enough, and would in fact always be deficient precisely because, notwithstanding any depth, it would be only a sense. In Edwards’s last treatise, for virtue to count as true, it must have reference to things as they are, not things as they are sensed” (I, 40). Excellency no longer resides in impersonal affect; virtue is not the affect of the heart, but instead an effect of infinite quantifications, which, transcending the finite capacities of persons to calculate, destabilize them and so lead towards the impersonal. Regardless of the ontological complications that follow from the idea that absolute excellency comes through a complicated process of quantification—for instance, it is not clear how its infinite love can have calculable degrees, and yet be infinite or impersonal—the claim that Edwards formulated ethical love as a set of calculations, and determined the ethical disposition as quantification has, it seems to me, at least three crucial consequences, which Cameron’s reading of Edwards urges us to consider. First, in terms of how Edwards’s oeuvre is judged, the claim that True Virtue fundamentally differs from his other works in that it devalues the experiential and sensual in favor of what can be quantified, contradicts the interpretation that Edwards’s theology is essentially “experimental.” That thesis was famously epitomized by Perry Miller’s diagnosis that until his very last work Edwards always “exalted experience over reason” so that even in “his latest thinking he condemned as nonsensical all views that regard reason as a rule superior to experience.”5 Second, if our understanding of the Great Awakening is to be guided by this new understanding of the ethical as mathematical, then, in political terms, an altogether different picture of it emerges. The Great Awakening would no longer be imagined via its pragmatics of “reviving” persons on the basis of “sensational psychology” or the “rhetoric of sensation,” understood as vehicles of revival. Reviving would no longer be understood through the process of a sudden and inexplicable infusion of joy, but as a series of deductions and enumerations that, being compounded in an infinite chain, deductively or rationally—as opposed to surprisingly and sweetly—explode the finite mind. Differently put, if the politics of Great Awakening was presumed until now to be predicated on sentiment and feelings, it will henceforth have to account for an

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altogether different possibility: that it was generated and guided by neatly ordered ratiocinations. Third, if ratiocination can explode the personal mind into the impersonal—if self-abandonment is possible through the mathematical rather than through sensuous ecstasy—then this possibility must affect our interpretation of what counts as reasonable subjectivity, understood since Descartes to be the effect of analytical reason. Cameron’s discussion of Edwards disturbs our confidence in rational agency by showing that analytical reasoning and quantification lead to the erasure of reason and to the devastation of the very personal identity they are supposed to establish. ******* Cameron’s version of the history of American ideas repeatedly suggests that from Edwards on American authors persevered in experimenting with the cancellation of personhood. For instance, such experimentation is the driving force behind Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: “In Wieland, voices heard from inside (as in hallucination) are undifferentiated from voices heard from outside (as in ventriloquism)” (CS, 8). That is, Wieland’s troubles can’t be explained away in either psychological or scientific terms, for whether there is an “objective” or “realistic” explanation of where the voice comes from is not the real question raised by the novel. Instead, as Cameron argues, the real question is in the non-delusional self’s incapacity to determine what is inside and what is outside; in other words, in Wieland, the self has an accurate understanding that it has been pervaded by an external and material phenomenon, such as a voice, as a result of which it experiences chronic “trouble knowing the boundaries between itself and the world” (CS, 8). Similarly, in Hawthorne, selves disintegrate in order to ask the question “how is a part of the self integral to the whole self, which it also represents?” (CS, 5). In Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym a character is “composed of a first person and a second person who is ultimately supplanted by a third person (Augustus is Pym’s second person supplanted by the dwarfed third person of Dirk Peters)” (CS, 3). In Whitman’s “Song of Myself,”6 “the body of the self and the body of the earth are professed frenetically to be one” (CS, 3), thus again confusing personal and impersonal. That the pressure put on the personal to dissipate into what is impersonal is

Introduction

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the guiding force of how American Transcendentalism thinks about subjectivity is an argument to which Cameron had dedicated years of scrupulous reading, resulting in a book on Thoreau and two crucially important essays on Emerson. Both essays on Emerson collected in Impersonality— “Representing Grief: Emerson’s ‘Experience’,” and “The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson’s Impersonal”—engage with the question of how in his philosophy persons are unmade. But even though the operation of forces that transcend the personal in Emerson has been noted by many commentators, the impersonal that Cameron proposes differs in fundamental ways. Cameron explicates the specificity of her concept in the following way: “I understand Emerson’s ‘impersonality’ to be related to, but not identical with, Poirier’s ‘genius,’ Bloom’s ‘energy,’ Packer’s ‘powers,’ as his corrective to the deformation of personal identity. These terms rely on a neoplatonic, upward, sublimatory movement away from material particularity, whereas Emerson’s impersonal moves in the opposite direction. For in impersonality Emerson is elaborating a paradox that truth to the self involves the discovery of its radical commonness” (I, 224). In contrast to the many interpreters who saw Emerson as an idealist even if not a neoplatonist, Cameron states what at first glance appears to be a paradox, but which, as she demonstrates, orients Emerson’s thinking: impersonality gestures towards materiality; it is the movement of the sensual crystallizing itself in or through bodily experiences. In fact, certain operations of impersonality are so far removed from idealized “spirituality” that they become almost primitive. Thus, for instance, Cameron detects personal identities in Emerson to be dismantled through bodies, and independently of any will or intention: “One way of understanding the impersonal then is as something that appears through bodies (as visible in the eyes) as a critique of the personal … that which shows up its limits” (I, 89). Similarly, our persons are easily destabilized—in fact, to the point of being removed—by affective tonalities known as moods: “A second way of understanding the impersonal is in terms of moods and mental states. The very moods that we might suppose to define our individual persons, when scrutinized in Emerson’s representations, rather contradict the idea of the personal …” (I, 89). The third instance of the impersonal, the most spiritual since it leads to the experience of divinity and contrives our ethics, is aporetic. It is

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predicated on sentiments, hence by definition has to be sensual, and yet in negating the limits of the person it also disregards the body: “In yet a third example the impersonal is associated not with the body and not with the affective life of the mind but rather with a law (alternatively called ‘the moral sentiment’) to which the ‘self’ adheres, disregarding as it were the conditions of body and mind” (I, 90). This doesn’t mean that there are no mental states, but rather that persons don’t play a role in constructing them. Mental states would therefore exist but would not be immanently related to the self: “Emerson’s representation of the transience of moods further erodes the commonplace idea that mental states are personal and that we govern what occurs ‘within’” (I, 88). The self doesn’t shape its mind; instead, contingently contrived mental states determine the self. The self is therefore occasional, its states are accidental and as a result, personalities are mediate: “If every insight … is, as Emerson implies, partial, fleeting, and mediate, then we are merely inhabited by these truly extrinsic (hence impersonal) mental states that we host without controlling … Emerson goes more than a step further, suggesting, it would seem, that there is no mental experience with which we are to be identified” (I, 88, emphasis original). The consequences of these arguments are radical. First, they reorient the way we think about will in Emerson, the power of which is rarely disputed by Emerson scholars. For even if it is true that many a reader of Emerson discusses the role played by receptivity, ecstasy, or genius in his thinking, it is no less true that commentators always make an effort to reconcile the force of depersonalization with the power of the will, and decline to fundamentally revise the inherited idea of Emerson’s individual as willful and self-sufficient. Thus, in spite of the fact of its being often problematized, the interpretation of self-reliance as referring to a powerful individual who follows his intentions has never been completely dismissed. The understanding that Emerson calls for relentless personalization and individuation still persists as a commonplace. It is that commonplace that Cameron’s reading renders untenable. For, as she persuasively argues, referencing virtually all of Emerson’s essays, not only can there be no reconciliation of the personal will with receptivity, intention and abandonment, but, more disturbingly, what we become is not in our power to decide. That is because all mental states that we commonly regard as our own are not in fact ours.

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Change is never the result of our intentions: “It is not a matter of willing to be better than we are or different than we are. It is a matter of not-willing, of seeing what we are when the will stops executing its claims” (I, 86). Second, rendering will inoperative in all crucial acts of the individual, would have to affect how we understand Emerson’s ethics. Even though Cameron doesn’t state as much, one should register in this argument a different idea of self-bettering from that proposed by Stanley Cavell’s thematic of Emerson’s moral perfectionism as predicated on “tuition,” that is, on self-improvement derived from reason and intention. In contrast to Cavell who argues that moral perfectionism occurs when one moves from one self to another, each self being final, Cameron finds bettering to be a function of the impersonal: “How one gains access to the impersonal is a question that precedes all others in Emerson’s essays” (I, 82). Access to the impersonal is gained by letting one’s personality go: “In seeing one’s true alliance is not with will or desire, not with anything piecemeal, but rather with the totality, the personal becomes impersonal” (I, 86). This alliance is paradoxical since it relates persons to what acts against their interests: “The personal … is cast aside, not afforded weight, in favor of ‘the moral sentiment.’ … And this impersonal force … also becomes the object of our affirmation, against the evidence of the personal and, even more to the point, against the interests of the person” (I, 90–1). The object of the most profound affirmation of persons would be their own “ravishment,” which, as Cameron defines it, is not just a destabilization of persons and not even their fundamental transformation, but rather their annihilation: “ravishment—that process through which the person is annihilated by the impersonal …” (I, 94). Third, if impersonality is presented as “destroying individualism” (I, 89), then the widespread and often restated understanding of Emerson’s philosophy as emblematic of American individualism and capitalism would have to be left aside. What would have to be accounted for is rather this counterintuitive desiring that makes persons long for their erasure, and the strange idea of mental states evacuated from the self. ******* Emerson was not the only transcendentalist preoccupied with the question of impersonality, for, as Cameron argues, that question

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oriented Thoreau’s thinking also. In fact, until Impersonality, Cameron’s perhaps most systematic engagement with the question of erosion of personhood in American thought was her book on Thoreau (Writing Nature).7 Some critics understood the main stake of that book to be an argument favoring the Journals over Walden, as if Cameron was proposing that any rigorous interpretation of Thoreau should not rely on Walden. Contrary to such interpretations, however, I would argue that the main investment of Writing Nature was less the unanswerable question “What is more authentically Thoreauvian, The Journals or Walden?,” than a radically revisionist analysis of personal identity. In contrast to the whole tradition of interpreting American Romanticism in general and Thoreau in particular as insisting on “expansion” and the enlargement of consciousness—a tradition that includes Perry Miller’s claim that Thoreau’s final goal is not observation of the external world but complete absorption into and enlargement of his self-consciousness, Sherman Paul’s diagnoses that Walden and the Journal were an “inward journey” meant to center Thoreau’s self, or, Walter Benn Michael’s more recent assessment that Thoreau’s quest is for nothing less than the Cartesian Cogito— Cameron finds Thoreau’s practices of perceiving and thinking to be exercises in depersonalization. On Cameron’s understanding, Thoreau doesn’t think in order to reassert the appropriative power of his mind but conversely in order to cancel the power of the mind over the object of thought. Thinking in Thoreau attempts to lead thought into what it thinks about, so that by becoming what it sees the thinking subject loses his subjectivity. As Cameron puts it: “Thoreau wants to be the externality on which he reflects, to be away from the self, to be out of the mind … The self is the depth to which he doesn’t want to sink” (WN, 40). The extraordinary value Thoreau confers on de-personalization—on the human self’s becoming a natural object—has, as its consequence, the dethroning of man’s central position. Or, as Cameron even more radically suggests, if being away from the self, which Thoreau desires, is by the same token to become a natural objectivity and materiality, then such self-abandonment is not only the abandonment of anthropocentrism, creating a world in which man “no longer regards himself as central” (WN, 66); rather, it amounts to “abandon[ing] the human” (WN, 48) altogether. When the differences between human and artificial, organic and inorganic

Introduction

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are thus erased, all that remains is an objectivity in which nature cannot be seen “contrastively … against the background of human concerns;” instead, nature is then imagined as a continuum with multiple aspects “registering” one another as qualities of the same substance.8 *** Whether Emily Dickinson’s poetry should be seen within the larger philosophical context outlined by the Transcendentalists is, of course, open to debate. However, what seems unquestionable, on Cameron’s account, is that Dickinson shared the Transcendentalist investment in the experience of impersonality. In 1979 Cameron published Lyric Time, Dickinson and the Limits of Genre, and in 1992 Choosing Not Choosing, Dickinson’s Fascicles. Both of those books exerted a tremendous influence on Dickinson scholarship and they still count among the most important readings of Dickinson’s poetry to date.9 The short space of an introduction doesn’t allow me even to begin to address the questions that those books formulate, especially the complex theory of the lyric and its relation to what is material (for example, how Dickinson’s poetry relates to the materiality of the fascicles). Instead, I would like to focus on how the idea of erosion of personhood—something that the generic nature of the lyric doesn’t allow—was formulated in those books also, testifying to the extraordinary systematicity of Cameron’s preoccupations and at the same time redefining what counts as the lyric. My interest derives in particular from the status of space in Lyric Time. While recognizing that the feature of the lyric is “compression and temporal indeterminacy” (LT, 247). Cameron’s analysis of Dickinson’s abridgements of temporality point to cases where halted time is not just compressed, or slowed down as it were, but, more radically, rendered indistinguishable from space. I specifically have in mind the large group of Dickinson’s poems on pain that Cameron analyzes in a variety of contexts, showing how Dickinson’s temporality is so altered that it becomes “embodied,” transformed into something that can be located in space rather than being experienced as a succession of thoughts or sensations. For instance, analyzing “Pain—expands the Time,” Cameron suggest that in that poem “pain is atemporal and hence dislocating.” By “dislocation” she means that the speaker suffering

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this unpassing pain alters her relation to her own experience in such a way that what is processual—train of sensation, thoughts, emotions, words—comes to be regarded as inessential to the frozen intensity of pain that nails the speaker to the site in space. The same point is made more explicitly in Cameron’s discussion of the “Element of Blank.” In that poem, she suggests, the speaker’s pain completely annihilates her temporality, causing a spatialization of time that renders the sequence of sensations “narrated” by the poem fallacious: “The ‘Element of Blank’ annihilated temporality and it does so partially for the purpose of returning to a present uncompromised by temporal passage or, at any rate, not cognizant of it. Thus the pure space (space as absence as well as space as domain) to which consciousness is reduced mirrors the space that has replaced the lost object, mirrors loss itself” (LT, 186). This reduction of time to “pure space” intervenes in an important way in Cameron’s discussion of context and sequence. For while the last chapter of Lyric Time involves a “manifest concern with direct questions about temporality” and goes on to show how temporal sequence is the concern of all lyric, it also proposes that Dickinson’s poetry gestures towards an experience of impersonality, which, since impersonality is precisely what escapes continuous temporality, destabilizes that inherited understanding of the lyric. Differently put, if the annihilated temporality of the person’s mind, such as is enacted in Dickinson’s poems on pain as I have just discussed, is what divorces the mind from its change, hence from the sequence of its experiences, then Dickinson’s poems will have to be understood to raise the problem of sequentiality within themselves, among their verses. For if Dickinson’s lyrics manifest the “evasion of single identity” (LT, 208), an identity necessary for relating moments into a continuous sequence, and generating the lyric (the “moment is to the lyric what sequence is to the story”), then her poems are effectively spoken by voices belonging to multiple identities that are not immanently related; as a consequence the poem would come to be seen as an accidental sequence of moments belonging to different minds. Hence Cameron’s revisionary claim that the “lyric is a departure not only from temporality but also from the finite constriction of identity” (LT, 208). The claim is revisionary because it suggests that the lyric, far from being, as it is commonly understood, the unfolding of a moment into a duration, or the account of one single moment experienced and narrated by

Introduction

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a single mind, is, at least in Dickinson, often generated as a spatial arrangement of different moments lived by different minds (as if a poem could be an aggregate of different voices, which is the idea around which Cameron will later organize her reading of impersonality in T. S. Eliot). The lyric poem does not necessarily belong to a single mind and, by definition, does not voice a single moment. On Cameron’s account it becomes a spatial arrangement of word-units. Accordingly, in the last pages of Lyric Time, Cameron will come to describe a lyric poem not as the progression or development of a thought but as an “assemblage” or cluster of thoughts, a “group of perceptions” as she puts it, which can be rearranged, and whose sequence is always in question. That a lyric poem can be seen as a series of interchangeable as opposed to consecutive lines, as if those lines were stratified layers rather than temporal causes, turns it into a geological—as opposed to a historical or temporal—phenomenon. That is how Cameron describes it when she claims that in a Dickinson poem “lyric verbs … collapse their progressions so that movement is not consecutive but is rather heaped or layered” (LT, 240–1). To suggest that a lyric poem “stacks up movement,” turning it into “temporal forays cut off from linear progression and treated as if they were vertically additive” (ibid.) is to destabilize our assumptions about the boundedness of the lyric, a boundedness that Cameron will recognize in Choosing Not Choosing as so “fundamental to our suppositions about lyrics as in effect to become definitional of the genre” (CNC, 5). The question of boundedness is, it seems to me, what establishes a close connection between Lyric Time and Choosing Not Choosing. While Lyric Time raises that question in reference to the logic of a “single” lyric, Choosing Not Choosing raises it in the context of a sequence of poems in a single fascicle, which Cameron also understands as a question of connection and integrity, hence of “preparation of entity” (CNC, 15). Thus, when she asserts that the “category of the fascicle is required to produce identity,” but then proceeds to diagnose the difficulty Dickinson had in enforcing its limit and identity; and when she argues that there is sufficient connection among the poems in a fascicle to “give the fascicle as a whole the appearance of a structure,” but then points to the difficulty we experience in recognizing a fascicle as a “progression” of immanently related discreet units (CNC, 19); and finally when she

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maintains that the “apparent structure” of a fascicle—its presumed unity—enables and so “affects our understanding of the subjects of the poems,” but then proceeds to suggest how a single poem’s variance destabilizes the coherence of its subjects that is presumed to be conferred on it by the fascicle; in all those cases she is not contriving aporias but instead coming close to understanding the fascicles as construing order otherwise, even enacting “multiple orders” (CNC, 17). The order in question would be spatial rather than temporal. For if, as Cameron argues, when “Johnson arranges [Dickinson’s] poems chronologically, that arrangement of poems gives the reader the impression of no arrangement at all” (CNC, 15), it is because “multiply ordered” fascicles are not chronological or narratological but instead establish a “stratified” sequence; they come close to being, just like a single Dickinson poem, “temporal forays cut off from linear progression and treated instead as if they were vertically additive” (LT, 241). Like a single lyric, the fascicles become layered geological phenomena, by which I mean that a fascicle can, like a single poem, be an aggregate of different voices uttered simultaneously, raising the question of whether the mind speaking them is one or multiple, which is also to raise the question of identity and impersonality. As Cameron explicitly puts it: “it seems that given such violations of boundaries it might … appear that Dickinson intended to redetermine our very understanding of how the identity of a poetic structure is to be construed” (CNC, 18). *** In Thinking in Henry James10 Cameron had further developed the idea of the corporeal self, bringing it closer to what will become concept of impersonality. Like Edwards, Melville, or Hawthorne, James too desires to cancel the idea of a fixed identity (something that, on Cameron’s account, will radically complicate if not completely disable the understanding of James as a realist, since non-personalized thinking can’t be confined within the boundaries of a character and so must be located outside of “realistic considerations of it” (THJ, 2)). For Cameron, what James was interested in was a consciousness conceived of not as an individualized mind (the mind as inhabiting a single perspective or point of view) but instead as non-individualized

Introduction

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thinking, as a totality of “all points of view, even those in opposition” (THJ, 5). Such a consciousness, then, is neither temporal (it is not a continuous succession of coherent perspectives each of which cancels the previous one in a narrative flow of time), nor psychological (it is not driven by a set of desires or motives with which the individual struggles and is in the process personalized into a character). Rather, the consciousness that Cameron detects in James operates according to a “different law,” where contradictions, conflicts and differences do not cancel each other out but “became occasions for consciousness to proliferate” (THJ, 5). Rather than overcoming differences into unity, this consciousness, in other words, disseminates endlessly, “showing how much diverse territory it can be made to cover” (THJ, 2). The endless dissemination of consciousness also suggests the absence of a self that is capable of gathering into a unity the perceptions, impressions or sensations that constitute it. As Cameron reminds us, The American Scene—the text through which she introduces her discussion of consciousness in James’s later novels and prefaces—is organized around “reiterated designations of the self as cast out—the ‘restless analyst,’ the ‘homeless wanderer,’ the ‘restored absentee.’” In other words, self there becomes unconfined, a strange “vantage from which everything can be seen and anything can be said” (THJ, 3). Released from the confines imposed by an individualized psyche consciousness is “able to have life, to be as if embodied, divorced from the strictures of situation and character” (THJ, 2), to have an infinite field of forces—perceptions, impressions, thoughts, memories—encountering and mediating one another, each of these encounters generating a little point of view, a tiny temporary perspective. Consciousness conceived in this way does not operate through inflection; it doesn’t interiorize, appropriate or apprehend but is instead an infinite surface, a plane of singular, as opposed to individual, points of view (the individual point of view is a limited set of singular views coerced by the mind into coherence and mediated into unity). The variable points of view, or “points of distinctions” (THJ, 4), as Cameron also calls them, are everywhere: in “scattered wild apples,” in the “figure in the carpet,” in “resounding voids” (THJ, 4). This is to say, as Cameron puts it, that when James talks about points of view, he “is not talking for the people, and he is not talking about them” (THJ, 4).

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People are already too molar, too mediated and psychologized; they are sets of singular points of view. Accordingly, “people are dismissed so that, socially unencumbered, consciousness is free to converse with itself” (THJ, 4). This is an idea that Gilles Deleuze, working on a similar account of consciousness in James and at the same time as Cameron, formulated in the following way: “The point of view is not what varies with the subject … it is, to the contrary, the condition in which an eventual subject apprehends a variation (metamorphosis), or: something = x (anamorphosis). For Leibniz, for Nietzsche, for William and Henry James, and for Whitehead as well, perspectivism amounts to a relativism, but not the relativism we take for granted. It is not a variation of truth according to the subject, but the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject …”11 As Deleuze explains very much along the lines of Cameron’s argument, as a result of consciousness’ indefinite dissemination these point of views are everywhere; they connect what is animate to what is inanimate, humans to objects or objects to vegetal life, rendering the world a single volatile process. Every phenomenon has a point of view, things as well as living beings, so that in thinking about the world one has to take into account their infinite proliferation. The logic of Henry James’s “perspectival” variations can thus best be explained through the circuit of conditions that Deleuze sums up in the following way: “what I am telling to you, what you are also thinking about, do you agree to tell him about it, provided that we know what to expect of it, about her, and that we also agree about who he is and who she is?”12 Points of view thus reside not only in a “me,” “you,” “her” or “him,” but also in “what” and “it;” they might be expected from it regarding her, providing we know what to expect from it, for “it” too emanates its own view affecting us. Because everything is point of view—because views of carpets and bowls have to be taken into account just as those of specters or children—it is only the totality of those points of view that provides us with answers to what is really going on in James’s novels. But since totality is by definition unthinkable, the answers we are afforded are always only partial. Hence the feeling of elusiveness of James’s novels, the chronic feeling that we have missed so much of them. ***

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As I have been suggesting, building on her previous work on depersonalization in American thought Cameron’s most recent book, Impersonality (2007) offered explicit formulations regarding just what depersonalization might be. It stated almost programmatically that impersonality and personality can neither stand in a binary relation (I, ix) nor be understood by means of a mutual overcoming, which means that impersonality does not somehow preserve the traces of a person. Rather, and radically, impersonality falls outside “of the boundary of the human particular;” it “disrupts elementary categories we suppose to be fundamental to specifying human distinctiveness;” it suspends, eclipses and even “destroys the idea of the person as such” (I, ix) and so is marked by the “nonhuman and even the inanimate” (I, x). Significantly, this radical understanding of the impersonal is here understood to mark some American modernist poets too, as if the question of depersonalization were—despite all the differences in literary technique, historical context, philosophical or social background—what connected certain American authors within a specific tradition. Already in her first published essay—“‘The Sense Against Calamity’: Ideas of a Self in Three Poems by Wallace Stevens”13— Cameron was interested in how Stevens often denies the self’s access to itself, so that through such denial, through the self’s incapacity to inhabit its own experience, the self gets “diminished” (S, 584). Even though Cameron didn’t then offer a more general understanding of self-diminishment, she nevertheless pointed to the fact that in “The Snow Man,” for instance, “The very phrase ‘snow man’ collapses the internal and external worlds the speaker tries to keep separate and converts the inhuman into the human terms he assumes he can exorcise” (S, 585). That Stevens disturbs the boundaries differentiating the interiority of the self from what is external to it leads Cameron even more radically to suggest how “diminishment” of the self ends in its complete abolishment: “He knows that the only way to keep the necessary dichotomy between the world and the self is to abolish the self” (ibid.) If in this early essay Cameron didn’t offer a more general understanding of depersonalization either in Stevens or in American modernism, such an understanding was certainly formulated in the reading of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets that is the climax of Impersonality. There she connects various lines of argumentation regarding the impersonal

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proposed elsewhere in the book and puts them into dialogue with modernism as well as with contemporary continental philosophy. “Impersonality” is a word made famous by Eliot. He used it as a name for experiences that stamp themselves on the artist without his willful or even conscious participation. Those involuntary impressions then shape the artist’s sensibility and direct his artistic investments, acting as impersonal forces within his personal intentions. However, while discussing impersonality in Eliot, it is not that received sense that Cameron intends. Leaving Eliot’s sense of impersonality aside, she analyzes the manner in which the poet contrives the voices of Four Quartets. The rift that structures them is aporetic. On the one hand voices speaking in the poem manifest certain characteristics of a self (they can be continuous or reiterative, for example), while on the other they defy selfhood by not being individualized. Cameron will propose to resolve the aporia by establishing a distinction that enables the voices in the poem to be regarded as singular yet not individual; whereas their singularity makes them ubiquitous, their lack of individuality makes them impersonal. The major investment of Cameron’s discussion will therefore be to account for this paradoxical definition of impersonality as singularity or specificity without individuality. The “extinction of personality” operates in Eliot through such a device: the voices speaking in the poem are made capable of repeating their responses to a singular experience, but neither this repetition, nor that experience, gives them personality. As Cameron puts it: “The voices in Four Quartets … have a reiterative response to a single experience … which is neither individual nor typical. Nothing uniform could constitute a type any more than it could constitute an individual” (I, 152). By being reiterated an experience is stabilized or even fixed into an immutable form; but while reiterating this form the person performing the reiteration can suffer changes that distance it from those experiences. The simultaneity of fixed experiences and transmutating persons results in Cameron’s central insight that experiences, in their singularity, are separable from persons: “While mobility is what anyone can have in relation to experience, experience in Eliot’s poem is represented as possessing a fixity not susceptible to change,” so that for instance “a person could be said to change but the agony to abide” (I, 153). As if echoing Emerson’s idea that mental states enter and exit the self, leaving it void, in Eliot persons get connected to

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and then disconnected from singular experiences, in such a way that disconnection, far from diminishing the experience, allows it to continue its life independently of persons. As a result of this strange phenomenology—as a result of establishing an external relation between a person and its experiences—the continuity of those experiences generated by the labor of reiteration in the poem becomes fictional. As Cameron argues, this phenomenology is strange only to the Western mind. The idea of multiple voices simultaneously speaking experiences that live on independently of those who initially experienced them is similar, Cameron suggests, to what “didactic suttas … in Buddhist psychology call ‘aggregates,’ constellations in which dependent relations are not equivalent to or constitutive of a self” (I, 152). Aggregates are networks of relations among the same elements (there are material aggregates, aggregates of feeling, of perception, of volition, etc.). Far from being a stable and abiding essence, personal identity in Buddhist psychology would thus be a temporary outcome of the ways in which those aggregates affect one another: “though these aggregates become the referent for the amalgamation called self, they are more like ‘types of events that are constantly rising and passing away’” (I, 167). While certain aggregates change, forming a new person, other compound aggregates (experiences) may abide, which explains how it is possible for an experience to be “specific, without being individual” (I, 155). Cameron’s recourse to Buddhist psychology as a way of explaining singularity without individuality doesn’t exhaust the complexity of her argument, for the erosion of personhood in Four Quartets isn’t always explained through Buddhist aggregates. For instance, in analyzing the “compound ghost” (“Little Gidding” II) and the ways it enacts impersonality, Cameron relies on the Western philosophical tradition to complicate Buddhist logic. Cameron finds the phenomenon of the “compound ghost” in Four Quartets decisive for “all representations of a person” in the poem “because [the ghost] vividly consolidates and makes manifest the eroded distinctions between the living and the dead” thus becoming the “model for a person’s unmaking” (I, 154, emphasis original). Following a series of dazzling close readings of ghostly operations in the poem (I, 154–163) Cameron proposes at least four ways of interpreting this spectral unmaking of persons and the related question of identification in Eliot. It would be possible, she

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suggests, to compare the ghostly voice to the way Maurice Blanchot uses the neutral “as issuing from a narrative voice, of a ‘he’ that can’t be made into an ‘I’” (I, 163). It would also be viable to read Eliot’s “thwarted identification” as a sort of “perspectivism”—an interpretation proposed by Jeffrey Perl—which “evolved in relation to Eliot’s study of East Asian Buddhism, in which ‘a multiplicity of valid views’ are ‘merely provisional’” (I, 163). A third interpretation would refer to the Buddhist aggregates. Interestingly, however, and despite the fact that her own analysis proposes aggregates as an answer to the question of personalization in Eliot, at this crucial point in her argument Cameron claims that how the “compound ghost” enacts the unmaking of persons cannot be explained through aggregates: “Yet the experience of the ghost, specifically when he speaks, is not primarily of an aggregate” (I, 163). If such a “minimization” of the question of aggregates occurs it is because Cameron wants to open up hermeneutic space for a fourth interpretation. In question would be, she suggests, Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of immanence, formulated in his essay “Immanence: A Life.” The use of the word immanence to refer to the erosion of the person’s interiority should not mislead us for, in fact, it does not name anything internal to the mind. Immanence is not immanent to anything or anybody; it is not what is constitutive of somebody’s life but is that very life. Immanence is not predicated to anybody— not being internal, still less conscious—but refers to a life that defies the distinction between exteriority and self-conscious interiority. Conceived of as a life, immanence is the pure impersonal. Deleuze defines it in the following way: “We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.”14 Deleuze’s example of this life that cannot be attributed, to which Cameron refers, finding it similar to the operation of the ghost in Eliot, is the moment when in Our Mutual Friend Charles Dickens’s character Riderhood revives “after an incident of near drowning,” and hovers “between life and death” (I, 164). Cameron cites Deleuze: “Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and

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external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens” (I, 164).15 It is important to note here that far from being utterly indefinite, impersonality is for Deleuze made of nuances— minor habits, perceptions, sensations—whose subtlety escapes the perception of persons. Deleuze terms those imperceptible nuances “singularity” (“impersonal, yet singular”), unlike persons who are global or molar contrivances generated by self-reflection and will. Such singularities enter into relations that constitute “haecceity” (from Medieval Latin haecceitas, literally: thisness), rather than aggregates, for while aggregates allow for individuation, however temporary and provisional, haecceity doesn’t. Haecceity thus works in the opposite direction to aggregates: “It is a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization; a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, for it was only the subject that incarnated it in the midst of things that made it good or bad. The life of such individuality fades away in favor of the singular life immanent to a man who no longer has a name, though he can be mistaken for no other. A singular essence, a life …”16 Thus, when Cameron compares Eliot’s voices to Deleuze’s singularities, it seems to me that she is moving in the direction of haecceity, that is, toward an understanding of singularization immanent to depersonalization as ever more nuanced differentiation. In privileging fragile distinctions instead of molar persons she gives voice to minorities that escape attention and that are, therefore, powerless, unprotected or perhaps abandoned. For that reason Impersonality can be read as a manual for thinking with subtleties and a guide for living according to nuance. In referring to Deleuze’s argument I don’t meant to imply that his thinking should provide the “key” to understanding the American authors Cameron is interested in. Conversely, it is the American tradition that shaped Deleuze’s theory of the impersonal. Even if the essay on “A Life” draws its examples from Dickens, Deleuze’s philosophy of unattributable life comes from Melville’s Bartleby, from Henry James’s In the Cage, from Whitman’s poetry, from William James’s Pragmatism, from Benjamin Blood’s The Anaesthetic Revelation and from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up. My emphasis on Deleuze’s “singularities” is motivated by the idea that his definition of the impersonal can serve as a connection among the variety of the American impersonalities Cameron discusses. For when Melville in Billy Budd17 or Bartleby constructs freely floating

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attributes that cannot be predicated to anything particular because they can be predicated to everything; when Edwards invents gradations of loving that, in a moment of an impersonal bliss, break under the pressure of infinite beatitude; when Emerson, in “Intellect” declares that the mind thinks “long prior the age of reflection,” suggesting thinking that is not self-conscious, hence, not personal;18 or when Eliot talks about temporality as still and yet dancing, released from inner as well as from outer compulsion and yet existing, all of those authors, despite differences in the way they construct it, are referring to impersonality as “a life,” which affirms the experience of an event or a singularity. And because “a life” is neither the Buddhist aggregate nor the simple indifference of the Western mind, it is safe to claim that the American thinkers who were haunted by its operations contrived, in the “form” of impersonality, what may be identified as a specificity—not to be confused with “exceptionalism”—of American thinking. As I have already discussed, in The Corporeal Self Cameron argued that the specificity of American literature resides in its concern “not simply with definitions of the self but also … with problems of human identity predicated in terms of the body” (CS, 6). According to her, the way American writers dismantle or devastate bodies and selves is often called “childish” and relegated “to an imaginary second class” only because our philosophy and our “value judgment … does not have the terms to understand” it (CS, 7). Cameron’s later work offers us this lacking term in the mode of impersonality while formulating the philosophical and ethical means to understand it. In so doing her work enables us to name what has remained unidentified and to approach the questions American writers have been persistently asking about identity and materiality in a wholly different way. For that reason her work will necessarily command our interest and guide our discussions in the years to come.

Notes 1

Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007 hereafter abbreviated as “I”).

2

Sharon Cameron, The Corporeal Self, Allegories of the Body in

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Melville and Hawthorne, New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 (hereafter abbreviated as “CS”). 3

Elizabeth Witherell, William L. Howarth, Robert Sattelmeyer and Thomas Blanding, Journal, The Writings of Hendry David Thoreau, vols. 1–8, eds, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1971.

4

Jonathan Edwards, “The Mind,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Scientific and Philosophical Writings, vol. 6, ed. Wallace E. Anderson, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980, p. 365.

5

Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005, p. 45.

6

In Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poetry and Prose, New York: Library of America, 1996.

7

Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature, Henry Thoreau’s Journal, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 40 (hereafter abbreviated as “WN”).

8

Cameron’s claim that identities in Thoreau dissolve, however, has a broader impact. It has rarely been noticed that Cameron’s argument concerning impersonality is not just limited to contradicting the critical tradition, which sees American Transcendentalism as a version of English Romanticism. For she in fact elevates Transcendentalism into a unique event in the history of ideas. In fact, on the basis of Cameron’s account of Thoreau, it could be argued that English Romanticism takes the direct opposite route to the American since, in contrast to Thoreau, for whom nature triggers a perceiving that depersonalizes, for the English Romantics perception of nature is an occasion to personify. As Cameron argues, in Wordsworth, for instance, to whom Thoreau is often mistakenly compared, nature “exemplifies … human sentiments” (WN, 165), whereas for Thoreau it is alien and “inhuman” (WN, 48). Similarly, she points out that even if Keats imagines oneness with nature as “equivalent to … death” he also shies away from such a thought in order to reassert to right of the personal (WN, 165). Coleridge’s Notebooks too, “illustrate a progression opposite to that of [Thoreau’s] Journal. The early notebooks read like accretions of uncommented-upon natural detail; as they progress, however, Coleridge aestheticizes them, making them into a symbology or composition” (WN, 166).

9

Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time, Dickinson and the Limits of Genre, Baltimore, NJ: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979 (hereafter abbreviated as “LT”); Sharon Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing,

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Dickinson’s Fascicles, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992 (hereafter abbreviated as “CNC”). 10 Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989 (hereafter abbreviated as “THJ”). 11 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. 20. Deleuze’s book was originally published as Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque in 1988 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris. 12 Ibid., p. 22, emphasis original. 13 Sharon Cameron, “‘The sense against calamity’: Ideas of a self in Three Poems by Wallace Stevens,” ELH, Volume 43, no. 4, Winter 1976, pp. 584–603 (hereafter abbreviated as “S”). 14 Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life,” in Pure Immanence, Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman, New York, NY: Zone Books, 2001, p. 27. Cameron discusses Deleuze’s essay via Agamben’s interpretation of it in Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” Potentialities, Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 220–39. 15 Cf. Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life,” p. 28. 16 Ibid., p. 29. 17 Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Billy Budd, Sailor, eds, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962. 18 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Intellect,” in Essays and Poems, ed. Joel Porte, New York: The Library of America, 1983, p. 418.

1 Being Singularly Impersonal: Jonathan Edwards and the Aesthetics of Consent James D. Lilley

Sharon Cameron’s Impersonality works its powerful effect in the tension, the vibrational relay, between two seemingly incompatible observations about the impersonal. On the one hand, impersonality involves the complete eradication of the human. Such is the stark and necessarily apocalyptic perspective channeled by Jonathan Edwards when he contemplates what “sleeping rocks dream of.”1 But, at the same time, Cameron refuses to equate the impersonal with a flat universe of indistinguishable generalities. Her bold critical gesture is to follow the authors she studies in attempting to think the impersonal alongside the particular and singular. How is it possible to imagine the persistence of the singular in the impersonal? At stake both for Cameron and Edwards is a new form of relation between the “I” and the “other-than-I.” Such a focus of investigation, as we will soon see, traverses terrain traditionally associated with ethics, theology, aesthetics, ontology, and politics. Never simply the non-personal, here impersonality names a different kind of relationship between the singularity of

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the person and the plural constellation of its context. Existing beyond the logical confines of binary opposition, this mode of impersonal relation, Cameron avers, “is not the negation of the person, but rather a penetration through or a falling outside of the boundary of the human particular. Impersonality disrupts elementary categories we suppose to be fundamental to specifying human distinctiveness. Or rather, we don’t know what the im of impersonality means.”2 Although such definitive knowledge of the impersonal will necessarily continue to elude us, in what follows I continue to think the disruptive manner of its relation along with Cameron. In particular, I turn to her chapter on Edwards in order to explore the ways in which this New England divine can help us to think impersonality as an aesthetic practice. In order to outline what such an impersonal aesthetics might entail, I conclude by reading Edwards’s notions of “excellency and beauty,” along with Walter Benjamin’s ideas of technology and allegory. Like Edwards, Benjamin challenges the underlying materialism and instrumentality of modern forms of identity, knowledge, and belonging by developing an alternative aesthetic practice—an aesthetics rooted in immanent and impersonal “relations of consent” rather than the “destructive extravagance” of symbolic substance.3

Impersonal politics; Impossible ethics One way to approach the significance of the “im” in impersonality is to briefly connect Cameron’s work with recent influential texts in the field of biopolitics. Because of the myriad ways in which “personhood” has been infected by modern forms of power, Cameron is joining a number of prominent political theorists when she attempts to think the promise of “a subjectivity that isn’t a subjectivity, a person who is impersonal” (I, 12). Notions of “biopower” and “biopolitics” attempt to register the ways in which the sovereignty of the modern state now fully incorporates the privacy of bare life and manages its care through regimes of jointly political and biological concern. To read Impersonality alongside texts such as Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Stanford University Press, 1998), Michel Foucault’s Society



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Must Be Defended (Picador, 2003), and Paulo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude (Semiotext(e), 2004) is to foreground the ways in which all of these texts adumbrate alternative forms of relationship between the singularity of a life and the political, ethical, and aesthetic communities into which these singularities are gathered under modernity. For example, in Third Person Italian political theorist Roberto Esposito attempts to “rebuild the connection between rights and human beings that was severed by the ancient blade of the person.”4 Rather than guaranteeing political rights and securing basic freedoms, Esposito shows how the concept of the person has radically separated us from any meaningful sense of community. As such, the problem for political theory becomes how to imagine new modes of being-in-common that jettison the deadening baggage of personhood while maintaining a space for the singular. Sharing Cameron’s attraction to the strange impersonal terrain “beyond” the “boundary of the human particular,” Esposito is equally drawn to the peculiar logic of its space: The impersonal is not simply the opposite of the person—its direct negation—but something that, being of the person or in the person, stops the immune mechanism that introduces the ‘I’ into the simultaneously inclusive and exclusive circle of the ‘we.’5 At the same time that it dulls the “blade” of the “I,” impersonality also offers a new “mechanism ... of the ‘we.’” Indeed, both Cameron and Esposito will turn to the work of Simone Weil, another thinker who “sharply denounced the sovereign relationship between rights and personhood,” in order to adumbrate an alternative, impersonal space for politics and for justice:6 “Just as rights belong to the person, justice [for Weil] pertains to the impersonal, the anonymous—that which, not having a name, stands before or after the personal subject, without ever being identical with it and its supposed metaphysical, ethical, and juridical attributes.”7 For Cameron and Weil, as for Edwards and Esposito, the dream life of “sleeping rocks” teems with such visions of community and justice. But it is precisely the status of this vision in Jonathan Edwards’s work that, for Cameron, sets his approach to impersonality apart from the other writers that she will focus on. Indeed, we find out in a footnote that the “suggestive” phrase

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“what sleeping rocks dream of” might have provided the title for this book, but for the fact that Edwards’s insistence on the impossibility of imagining impersonality—the impossibility of imagining the “nothing” that is “you and me” signified by those words—does not apply to the state of affairs represented by Empson, Emerson, Weil, Eliot, and Melville, who countenance ways of imagining the impersonality Edwards both elicits and blocks. (I, 214, n. 10) What accounts for the “impossibility” of Edwards’s impersonal perspective? Cameron approaches this question by way of Edwards’s late dissertation on The Nature of True Virtue8, a posthumously published text that departs from the “phenomenology of questioning” of his earlier works (I, 43). While the dazzling “virtuoso quality” of this earlier mode of questioning involves Edwards capacity to “ventriloquize a mistaken position”— employing “logical deductions” that highlight the errors of this “deluded state”—in True Virtue Edwards attempts to articulate the perfections and values of an ethics of impersonality (I, 43, 44, 43). The problem, however, is that the economy of true virtue refuses to circulate ethical “values” in any traditional moral sense. “The error of private affection,” Cameron argues, is that it supposes an essential difference among persons. This is to imply that some persons are more worthy in their individuality to be valued than others. In distinction, “true virtue most essentially consists in benevolence to Being in general. ... It is that consent, propensity, and union of heart ... that is immediately exercised in a general good will” (W8: 540). Although a particular incarnation of being will inevitably have specific characteristics, these are irrelevant as a first motive for love. Truly virtuous love would remain indifferent to any secondary attributes of being, into which category good or bad characteristics inevitably fall. What compels virtuous love is not a certain manifestation of being, and specifically, Edwards is at pains to indicate, not even being which is beautiful or benevolent. (I, 27) No singular “manifestation” or “essential” ethical substance, true virtue’s value is identified as a disposition toward “Being in general.” As Sang Hyun Lee has so forcefully demonstrated, we



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should take Edwards’s use of “Being” seriously and in its full, philosophical sense. What Cameron confronts here in Edwards’s ethics, then, is one aspect of his systematic critique of substancebased ontology. “The essence of a being,” observes Lee, “is not a separate substance but the disposition to act and to be related in a certain manner . ... Entities actually are, [for Edwards], only as they are related and engaged in action.”9 So too the “entity” of true virtue. As a disposition rather than a substance, accounting for its value will prove a peculiarly taxing enterprise. In Edwards’s impersonal economy of ethical value and ontological disposition—“benevolence to Being in general”—it is the intensity rather than the quality of virtue that “compels” our “love.” Even in his early essay on “The Mind,” for example, Edwards is already beginning to distinguish between a spiritual realm of intensive “delight” and a more mundane world restricted by its purely qualitative modes of measurement: Our common way of conceiving of what is spiritual is very gross and shadowy and corporeal, with dimensions and figure, etc.; though it be supposed to be very clear, so that we can see through it. If we would get a right notion of what is spiritual, we must think of thought or inclination or delight. How large is that thing in the mind which they call thought? Is love square or round? Is the surface of hatred rough or smooth? Is joy an inch, or a foot in diameter? These are spiritual things. And why should we then form such a ridiculous idea of spirits, as to think them so long, so thick, or so wide; or to think there is a necessity of their being square or round or some other certain figure?10 But how are we to quantify the “inclination” and “delight” of thought? “[W]hile love should properly be indifferent to the characteristics of being,” notes Cameron, “it should not properly be indifferent to the amount of being perceived in the object. Crudely put, in Edwards’s theory, the more being there is, the more love there should be” (I, 28). It is this oddly austere calculation of ethical-ontological intensity—what Cameron aptly calls Edwards’s “mathematics of affection” (I, 28)—that makes impersonality impossible to imagine. For what kind of person would be capable of taking such an impersonal account of virtue and “Being?” “He would know how to calculate,” continues Cameron,

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but not according to his own frame of reference. Rather, he would see, on the basis of calculations which constitute an escape from the personal and the psychological, what has most being (hence most beauty), therefore what deserves most love. Thus True Virtue implicitly posits two frames of reference, one intuitively recognizable, the other which can be known only analytically or numerically. To ask what enables Edwards to describe true virtue … is in effect to ask what enables any theological philosophy … to know what can only be alien to it. (I, 38) But rather than focusing on the incommensurable and “alien” opposition between these “two frames of reference,” I want to suggest another approach to the impersonal that does not insist on its radical separation from acts of the imagination. Following a lead that Cameron herself gestures toward, I revisit the problem of imagining “what sleeping rocks dream of” by situating Edwards’s work in the context of aesthetic theory. At stake in Edwards’s aesthetics of impersonality, I will argue, is the possibility of a new mode of “imagining” that preserves the impossible austerity of the impersonal at the same time that it makes a home for and a community of the singular. It is this peculiar mode of aesthetic imagination that Walter Benjamin will name “allegory,” and I will conclude by returning to Benjamin’s Trauerspielbuch (Verso, 1998) in order to reframe Edwards’s theological and philosophical projects in the impersonal light of allegorical aesthetics.

The aesthetics of impersonality Implicit in Cameron’s account of “true virtue” is the remarkable correlation between ethics, ontology, and aesthetics in Edwards’s work. For as she points out in the quote above, what has most virtue also “has most being [and] hence most beauty.” Indeed, as Edwards avers, “when it is inquired, what is the nature of true virtue? This is the same as to inquire, what that is which renders any habit, disposition, or exercise of the heart truly beautiful.”11 The term that Edwards will use to signify the intensity of this jointly ethical, ontological, and aesthetic disposition is “Excellence.”12 In



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“The Mind,” Edwards defines “excellence in and among spirits” as “being’s consent to being.”13 And so in the same way that ethical value—“true virtue”—is to be measured in terms of intensive “inclination” rather than qualitative moral substance, so too the “excellence” of beauty is to be appreciated in terms of relational “consent” rather than essentialized merit. As Roland Delattre puts it, the beautiful is for Edwards “perceived truly, not according to our capacity to stand back as before a painting but according to the inclination of our being.”14 Such excellence cannot exist in isolation: it constellates the singularity of beauty in terms of its relationship with and consent to a broader, pluralized aesthetic context. “That which is beautiful,” notes Edwards, “only with respect to itself and a few other things and not as a part of that which contains all things—the universe—is a false beauty and a confined beauty. That which is beautiful with respect to the university of things has a generally extended excellence and a true beauty; and the more extended or limited its system is, the more confined or extended its beauty.”15 This active consent to the “extended excellence” of God’s networked “university”—its relationship with and inclination toward nodes within the wider aesthetic community—helps Edwards to distinguish between a more “primary” sense of beauty and its other, “secondary” aspects. “[S]econdary beauty,” notes Delattre, “lies in anyone’s or anything’s being consistent with itself; primary beauty lies in being consistent with other beings ... and is therefore not self-contained.”16 In his notion of primary beauty, then, Edwards re-orients aesthetic sensibility away from its more traditional understanding as a passive response to particular qualities of an art object. In place of this more subjective and essentialized reception of the beautiful, Edwards thinks the aesthetic in terms of an objective yet immanent beautifying activity: “Beauty is objective,” continues Delattre, “in that it is constituted by objective relations of consent and dissent among beings, relations into which the subject (or beholder) may enter and participate but the beauty of which is defined by conformity to God (consent to being-in-general) rather than by degree of subjective pleasure.”17 If for Esposito the impersonal promises a new “mechanism ... of the ‘we,’” at stake in these “relations of consent and dissent” is a mode of community that similarly eludes the blade of “subjective pleasure” while registering the singular force of immanent aesthetic “consent.” In the example

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that follows, notice how Edwards refuses to attribute intrinsic merit to the “strokes” of an artist’s pen, choosing instead to foreground the “respect” between these penstrokes. After all, it is their “relations of consent,” rather than the “strokes themselves,” that register the singular manner of exertion at play in the work of art: The notes of a tune or the strokes of an acute penman, for instance, are placed in such exact order, having such mutual respect one to another, that they carry with them into the mind of him that sees or hears the conception of an understanding and will exerting itself in these appearances. And were it not that we, by reflection and reasoning, are led to an extrinsic intelligence and will that was the cause, it would seem to be in the notes and strokes themselves. They would appear like a society of so many perceiving beings, sweetly agreeing together. I can conceive of no other reason why equality and proportion should be pleasing to him that perceives, but only that it has an appearance of consent.18 The impersonal excellence and “mutual respect” exhibited between these “relations of consent” thus unite visions of the aesthetic and the ethical in Edwards’s work. Furthermore, such an “understanding” always also directs us toward a particular ordering of community, a “society of ... perceiving beings” drawn together by their jointly aesthetic and ethical activity rather than by their passive reception of essentialized merit or their possession of any personalized quality. What I am suggesting, then, is that Edwards’s impersonal aesthetics of relation fully resonate with the logic of the “im” as articulated by Esposito and Cameron, a logic that falls “outside of the boundary of the human particular” without simply negating the singularity of personal experience. In such attempts at aesthetic effort—where the mutual respect between singular strokes is inclined toward an impersonal being-in-general—“relations of consent” between the personal and the social are redrawn beyond the “inclusive and exclusive circle” of the biopolitical “we.” “One aspect of the mind’s imaginative activity in its sensation of beauty,” notes Sang Hyun Lee, “is that of holding together or asserting a plurality of ideas”:19 Edwards thus proposes a new form of relation between the singular and the plural, a new aesthetics of consent



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capable of “holding together” a community of penstrokes without suturing them with the blade of the person. It is here that I would like to return to Cameron’s claim that the impersonal in Edwards is impossible to imagine. While Edwards would agree that no person could be said to occupy the perspective of the impersonal or fully account for its mathematics of affection, his theory of aesthetic relation leaves open the possibility of a different mode of the imagination. As Lee points out, this “imaginative activity” does not proceed strictly from the perspective of impersonality: while disposed to the generality of impersonal being, the excellence of beauty is illuminated by the vectored exertion of personal effort and through the mutuality of the singular relations it constellates. But what kind of aesthetic practice is capable of registering these vectors of imaginative effort without reducing their force to a symptom of the personal or an abstract quality of the universal? To address this question, it will be necessary to revisit the eighteenth-century idea of allegory that was about to be ceded to the empire of the symbol.

Benjamin, allegory, and the technology of genre In terms of the history of aesthetics, Edwards was writing during an age that witnessed the symbolic eclipse of the allegorical. While allegory (literally “other speaking,” from its Greek etymological roots) establishes immanent relationships of meaning between singular objects merely as an effect of the relative, gravitational tension—the “mutual respect”—between each other, the logic of the symbol relies on the singular object’s direct and unmediated participation in a transcendent, common meaning: from the perspective of the symbol, each singularity possesses its own (albeit mysterious) link to the common. For Angus Fletcher, then, allegory is associated with a nominalist approach to signification: in an allegorical community of signs, he argues, there will be no ideas in a strict sense, no meanings segregated to a ‘higher’ place on the interpretive side of the wall. The so-called [allegorical] ideas of virtue and vice, good and evil, happiness

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and misery, fame and fortune will no longer be read as referring to universal notions. They will be mere functions of a shared human speech and language, mere conventions, mere names and their grammar. The allegory without ideas could make no appeal to universals and hence could never legitimately establish belief in imagined higher values.20 During the transition to modernity, however, the universalizing logic of the symbol swallows up this “allegory without ideas” and transforms allegory into the shallowest of symbols.21 In tandem with this aesthetic revolution—what Gadamer calls the “subjectivization of aesthetics”22 and Walter Benjamin describes in terms of the “destructive extravagance” of Romanticism23—the way that the strokes of the singular are imagined to relate to the beauty of the common is transformed. Rather than imagine the force of inessential, impersonal allegorical relationships between singularities, aesthetic value begins to be treated as an essential, if ultimately elusive, personal quality—a transcendent thing that inheres symbolically within the singular. Benjamin confronts this transition in a number of different ways. In addition to his book-length Habilitation thesis on allegory in the German mourning play, he also engages the “destructive extravagance” of modernity’s pernicious symbolism through an analysis of its favored modes of technology. At stake in these works is the proper form of the relationship between the personal and the universal. In the same way that Edwards connects these two realms by virtue of the mind’s impersonal imaginative activity rather than through some universalized quality or symbolic value that is possessed by the personal, so too Benjamin will articulate a similarly “ecstatic” and impersonal experience that relates the human to the non-human, a relationship that, at the close of “One-Way Street,” he calls “technology.” Rather than aligning the technical exclusively with the side of the personal and the human—a peculiarly modern habit according to Benjamin—he instead imagines a quite different technology of being-in and belonging-in the world: Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the modern man so much as the former’s absorption in a cosmic experience scarcely known to later periods. Its waning is marked by the flowering



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of astronomy at the beginning of the modern age. The exclusive emphasis on an optical connection to the universe, to which astronomy very quickly led, contained a portent of what was to come. The ancients’ intercourse with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic trance [Rausch]. For it is in this experience alone that we gain certain knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is remotest from us, and never of one without the other. This means, however, that man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights. It is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it, as was made terribly clear by the last war, which was an attempt at new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers. Human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country, high-frequency currents coursed through the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths thundered with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were dug in Mother Earth. This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scalethat is, in the spirit of technology. But because the lust for profit of the ruling class sought satisfaction through it, technology betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath. The mastery of nature (so the imperialists teach) is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education, above all, the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery (if we are to use this term) of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is the mastery of not nature but of the relation between nature and man… . The paroxysm of genuine cosmic experience is not tied to that tiny fragment of nature that we are accustomed to call “Nature.”24 Instead of opposing the human to the nonhuman, the personal to the nonpersonal, or the technological to the natural, Benjamin here uses a series of stellar metaphors to distinguish between two different forms, two different aesthetics of relation. To be sure, in the modern world, technical mastery involves an elevation of

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the human over “Mother Earth,” an optics of experiencing the cosmos that privileges the Enlightened individual observer—a hubristic suitor whose desire quickly turns tawdry and violent. For the ancients, however, “genuine cosmic experience” is always communal—which is to say that from the perspective of the “ecstatic trance,” distinctions between human and nonhuman dissolve under the exercise of a different, impersonal mode of technical mastery. At stake in Benjamin’s idea of allegory is precisely the same kind of ecstatic communion that he aligns with the ancients’ experience of the cosmos in “One-Way Street.” In his study of the German mourning play, the Trauerspiel, Benjamin searches for a new form of relation—a new technology of genre—that can do justice to his rich notion of allegory. He begins by showing how modern approaches to textuality and genre—like modernity’s wooing of Mother Earth—practice instrumental technologies that foreclose any ecstatic relationship to the work of art. This is why Benjamin rejects both inductive and deductive approaches to genre, approaches that—whether they move from the one to the many or from the many to the one—always treat the experience of genre, of aesthetic belonging, as if it could be generalized as a universal technical concept. Such conceptual logic represents, for Benjamin, a hubristic attempt to commingle with “cosmic powers” that is caught within the same kind of binary optics, the same deluded notion of technical mastery, as modern man’s wooing of the natural world. Just as technology in “One-Way Street” does not involve the mastery of nature but rather of the contextual relations of consent between nature and man, so too Benjamin’s idea of genre has nothing to do with any conceptual mastery of the text—a project that he likens to a form of aesthetic imperialism. Making use of another system of stellar metaphors, he distinguishes between the realm of concepts and the “world of ideas,” a world that exercises the same kind of relational and contextual mastery that we have already seen at work in the ancients’ view of technology. As an idea rather than a concept, genre thus belongs to a fundamentally different world from that which it apprehends. ... Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. ... Ideas are timeless constellations, and by virtue of the



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elements being seen as points in such constellations, phenomena are subdivided and at the same time redeemed. ... The idea is best explained as the representation of the context within which the unique and extreme stands alongside its counterpart.25 Like the idea of technology and its mastery of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, Benjamin’s idea of genre practices a similarly contextual aesthetics, providing the relational matrix within which the singular text and its common genre can shine forth. This stellar generic blend is no phenomenal essence that inheres in textual objects as a property, a content, or a common thing; on the contrary, without the relativizing and spatializing gravity of the generic idea, the phenomenal world knows no extremes and possesses no singular measure, no measure of singularity.26 The idea of genre is thus to be appreciated only “in a comprehensive explanation of ... its form, the metaphysical substance of which should not simply be found within, but should appear in action, like the blood coursing through the body.” As this sanguine metaphor suggests, the genre theorist and the philosopher alike must actualize the life of the idea, must materialize this life through critical activity, rather than calmly seeking out its essence via cold, conceptual autopsy. For Benjamin then, modernity’s blindness to the metaphysical realm of ideas leads to the atopia of a totally instrumental existence—and facilitates the proliferation of technological forms designed to target and capture rather than to contextualize and redeem. His ideas of technology and genre thus address what might be called the aesthetics of belonging, the modality of the blend in and through which the singular relates to the multiple or the human to “Mother Earth.”27 His distinction between ideas and concepts enables us to assess the genericity of genre and the technicity of technology—the ways in which we imagine our dwelling in the commonplaces of language, literature, and on the land. What is so significant about the Trauerspiel for Benjamin is precisely the modality of its dwelling within genre, a modality he names “allegory.” Whereas the structure of the symbol—like the modern subject’s optical commingling with the cosmos—lays claim to some deep conceptual connection between the singular sign and its place in a wider nexus of meaning or experience, allegory performs an always-fragmented, non-instrumental gesture that

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materializes generic space and time—a purely active, inessential, impersonal action that says nothing about the phenomenal world or its dreams but that simply speaks, that brings the world to the world. If the singular symbol functions as a conduit to a higher plane of multiple meaning, allegory simply passes in asignifying motility and exertion. To confront these differences in modality between the technologies of symbolism and allegory is to re-encounter the profoundest of Platonic distinctions. As Deleuze succinctly puts it in The Logic of Sense, Plato invites us to distinguish between two dimensions: (1) that of limited and measured things, of fixed qualities, permanent or temporary which always presuppose pauses and rests, the fixing of presents, and the assignation of subjects (for example, a particular subject having a particular largeness or a particular smallness at a particular moment); and (2) a pure becoming without measure, a veritable becoming-mad, which never rests. It moves in both directions at once. It always eludes the present, causing future and past, more and less, too much and not enough to coincide in the simultaneity of a rebellious matter.28 The task of philosophy, like the idea of genre and the achievement of the Trauerspiel, is to enact this insane rebellion. Benjamin asks us to reimagine our dwelling in language and on the land, to reconsider the genericity of genre and the aesthetics of technology, and to spatialize an impersonal allegorical cosmos of irreducibly multiple ideas.

Coda: Edwards and the beauty of knowledge “Truth,” according to Edwards, “is the perception of the relations there are between ideas;” and so it is the sense of beauty—with its capacity to register “relations of consent” and mutual respect—that is to be employed in his quest for this truth.29 To further adumbrate the technology of Edwards’s aesthetics of knowledge, we must not approach the perception of beauty as if it were performed by another, sixth sense that has simply been added to the mind’s



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epistemological apparatus. Unlike the other five senses, Edwards’s sense of beauty does not supply the mind with another, discrete category of aesthetic data to process. As Lee notes, “aesthetic sense is not a separate faculty but rather the active tendency of the entire self that determines the direction of all the functions of the human person”: it is the “cognitive event ... through which a mind and all other entities come to be mutually related.”30 Aesthetic imagination, like Benjamin’s idea of genre, supplies the mind with the contextualizing force necessary to constellate the singularity of the data it receives from the other senses; or as Lee puts it, such “imagination grasps the unitary relational quality among a plurality of ideas. But these creative acts of the imagination do not make or produce relationships; imagination only makes mentally actual what is already virtually there.”31 Like Benjamin, Cameron is drawn to the idea of an impersonal aesthetics—a new technology of genre that “disrupts [the] elementary categories” of experience. While the “aesthetic [for Terry Eagleton] ‘represents on the one hand a liberatory concern with concrete particularity, and on the other hand a specious form of universalism,’” for Cameron and for Edwards “this ingraining of the impersonal—in its lived perception—would not make it specious” (I, 13). An aesthetics of impersonality thus relates and inclines itself to the world beyond the single person, but not in order to collect the singular into some “specious” communal container that sterilizes its unique vitality. While it may be impossible to imagine the content of such an aesthetic imagination—what sleeping rocks dream of—Edwards, Benjamin, and Cameron help us to think the “lived perception” of its form. “Knowledge is not the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas,” writes Edwards, “but rather the perception of the union or disunion of ideas, or the perceiving whether two or more ideas belong to one another.”32 “Perhaps,” he continues, “we may perceive that they are united and know that they belong one to another, though we do not know the manner how they are tied together.”33 At stake in Edwards’s theory of “Knowledge,” then, is the possibility of another kind of knowing—of a truth tied to “relations of consent” rather than definitions of content. To “know that [ideas] belong to one another” is to say nothing about their individual merit. Borrowing again from Benjamin’s work, we might say that, for Edwards, to know is to explain “the representation of the context within which

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the unique and extreme stands alongside its counterpart,” or to master the ecstatic impersonal community between terms rather than to deduce the qualities of their personal worth.

Notes 1

Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Scientific and Philosophical Writings, vol. 6, ed. Wallace E. Anderson, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 206.

2

Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. ix (hereafter abbreviated as “I”).

3

See quotes from Delattre and Benjamin below.

4

Roberto Esposito, Third Person: Politics of Life and the Philosophy of the Impersonal, trans. Zakiya Hanafi, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012, p. 103.

5

Ibid., p. 102.

6

Ibid., p. 100.

7

Ibid., pp. 101–2.

8

Pubished posthumously in 1765 and collected in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 9 Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.

9

Jonathan Edwards, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

10 Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 6, p. 338. 11 Works of Jonathan Edwards, Ethical Writings, vol. 8, ed. Paul Ramsey, p. 539. 12 For a more detailed discussion of the place of “excellence” in Edwards’s thought, see Chapter 4 of Roland Delattre’s Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968. 13 Jonathan Edwards, “The Mind,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Scientific and Philosophical Writings, vol. 6, ed. Wallace E. Anderson, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980, p. 362. 14 Delattre Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards, p. 23. 15 “The Mind,” p. 344.



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16 Delattre, p. 24. 17 Ibid., p. 22. 18 “The Mind,” p. 382. 19 Sang Hyun Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 151. 20 Angus Fletcher, “Allegory without ideas,” boundary 2, 33(1) (2006), p. 88. 21 In The Statesman’s Manual, Coleridge famously contrasts the power of the symbol with the “empty echoes” of allegory (33). See The Statesman’s Manual, vol. 1, Lay Sermons, 2 vols, ed. Derwent Coleridge, 3rd edition, London: Edward Moxon, 1852. 22 See Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, New York: Continuum, 2004, pp. 42–81. 23 Benjamin Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, New York: Verso, 1998, p. 160. 24 Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, eds Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 486–7. 25 The Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp. 34–5. 26 As Samuel Weber puts it, “what is articulated in the Idea is a relation of singularities among themselves, in which they are not subsumed under a general concept ... but rather assembled in terms of their singularizing differences, of their irreducibility to one another” (472). In “Genealogy of modernity: history, myth and allegory in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play.” Modern Language Notes 106(3) (1991), 465–500. 27 For further discussion of the relationship between literature and modern forms of belonging, see my Common Things: Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Atlantic Modernity, New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. 28 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and ed. Constantin V. Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 1–2. Like Cameron, Deleuze also attempts to think the relationship between literature and the impersonal. In “Literature and life,” for example, he claims that “literature exists only when it discovers beneath apparent persons the power of an impersonal– which is not a generality but a singularity at the highest point.” Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, in Critical Inquiry 23(2) (1997), p. 227. 29 “The Mind,” p. 340.

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30 Lee, pp. 150, 154. 31 Ibid., p. 167. 32 “The Mind,” p. 385. 33 Ibid., p. 385.

2 Melville’s Creatures, or Seeing Otherwise Colin Dayan

Oxen that rattle the yoke or halt in the shade, what is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life. WHITMAN, LEAVES OF GRASS

On the accursed lands of “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles,” where tortoises drag under a weight of sun, Melville tells two stories about dogs: Dog-King and Chola Widow. Captain Delano, the well meaning if patronizing captain of Benito Cereno, meditates on benign “naked nature” and compares the rebel slave Babo to a Newfoundland dog, the emblem of good-natured affection. In the posthumously published Billy Budd, Sailor, Melville spends pages describing Billy’s good humor and virtue as something quite beautiful, even if uncivilized and brute. Besides comparing him to a “goldfish popped in a cage,” “a blood horse,” “an illiterate nightingale,” Melville observes that he had as much “self-consciousness” as “we may reasonably impute to a dog of Saint Bernard’s breed.” What’s with the dogs? And all the sharks and whales captured so fully as background to Ahab’s obsession, the white whale of Moby-Dick? Melville lingers for pages on the pod of whales, hovering together in conjugal peace, coming up to the boats as if

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“domestic dogs,” reveling in “dalliance and delight” before being slaughtered by Ahab’s crew. Melville was obsessed with creatures, with the uneasy boundaries between human and nonhuman. Giving affect and sensitivity to the nonhuman, he forced his readers to consider the limits and dangers of that value-laden term “humanity,” as well as Enlightenment assumptions about the boundaries of consciousness. And so he recognizes the lure of whatever is “not ordinarily human,” as he presents Bartleby the scrivener, who stands in reverie as both body and spirit, at once ghost and ruined column, plaster bust and incubus. To put it more baldly, Melville’s dogs, whales, tortoises, and meat, as well as ghosts, scarecrows and wrecks (nonhumans, former humans), bear witness to the excesses of a grasping civilization. In “The Encantadas” Melville introduces us to the native tortoises of the Galapagos Islands. These tortoises live without being able to forget. This is their curse, consumed by a “penal hopelessness,” condemned to “hopeless toil,” as if under the spell of “a penal, or malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolical enchanter.” The sailors’ treatment of these tortoises summons the living ghosts of slaves, chained to the decks of ships or convicts bound in transport to America. When the narrator and his shipmates eat the tortoises, they give rise to cycles of predation: the sailors die and change into tortoises only to be hunted and killed by another generation of sailors. Even when back in “scenes of social merriment,” across the floor of candle-lit rooms, the narrator sees “heavily crawling on the floor, the ghost of a gigantic tortoise, with ‘Memento ****’ burning in live letters upon its back.” Their shells represent all of human history. Even as they recall the mythical tortoises that support the Hindu “total sphere,” they are transfigured into “Roman Coliseums in magnificent decay.” But their “crowning curse” is “their drudging impulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world.” Melville’s broadest interest is epistemological—tackling the ambiguity of categories, particularly those of identity (personal, community, national). The multiple referents that categories engage and the overlapping subjectivities they engender become the unexpected habitat for his fictions. At the end of Benito Cereno Delano prods Don Benito to snap out of his gloom: “But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have



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turned over new leaves.” Benito answers: “Because they have no memory, because they are not human.” Could Nietzsche have been thinking about this capacity for blessed forgetfulness when he wrote “On the uses and disadvantages of history for life”? Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness—what they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal … Nietzsche’s cows come to us like a vision, as Nietzsche later wrote of “a lost paradise.” Not to worry about the future or remember the past, to live “unhistorically” is for Nietzsche the benefit of animal life. A human being reasonable, would like such “happiness” but cannot have it, because he “refuses to behave like an animal.” Nietzsche’s animal fable echoes the transvaluation of cognition in the gospels of Matthew (6.28) and Luke (12.24–7). Here is Matthew: “And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” In recalling the gospel invocation of another kind of knowing, a fundamental poise and discretion, Nietzsche suggests a miracle of life beyond the indignities of human kind, the trauma of memory that Don Benito found unendurable. What does it mean, Melville asks, in times of dissembling, rapacity, and violence to be like an animal? Melville’s Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile began as a rewrite of an obscure biography. Though the story begins as if a picaresque historical adventure of a revolutionary soldier’s encounters with figures such as Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, Ethan Allen, and even King George III, it soon unravels. Hunted as a runaway rebel, “like a beast,” and ultimately turned into nothing more than an “isolated nondescript,” Israel can no longer be recognized as patriot or person. Near the end of the story, Israel, disabled and impoverished, wanders lost in the London streets when he hears “a confused pastoral sort of sound.” Cows bound to Smithfield for

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slaughter tramp and bellow before him. He dreams himself home to the Berkshires, and as if bewitched, he sees through the fog “the white face—white as an orange blossom—of a black-bodied steer.” In his similes, in his metaphors, Melville sought to show the thing-likeness of what might seem human. So we get the descent into the shades near the end of Israel Potter, more certainly the source for Eliot’s London horde in The Waste Land than Baudelaire’s “fourmillante cité”: “That hereditary crowd— gulf-stream of humanity—which, for continuous centuries, has never ceased pouring, like an endless shoal of herring, over London Bridge.” A page later, Melville attempts to give a cast of mourning to “black vistas of streets,” flattened like “tomb-stones,” worn down by “sorrowful tramping” of smokedarkened laborers. By the end of the description, we cannot be sure whether we’re looking at the flagging of London streets or the “vitreous rocks in the cursed Galapagos, over which the convict tortoises crawl.” *** Melville forced proximity on categories usually kept separate: humans and animals, persons and things, slaves and masters, and, ultimately, life and death. But his writings also bear witness to the remnants of histories he could not ignore. His fictions are always historical. And he paid for it not just with public disfavor, but utter oblivion for a generation. This neglect was only terminated with the publication in 1921 of Raymond Weaver’s Herman Melville, which presaged the critical revival that has continued unabated from the 1940s until the present. What attracted Charles Olson to Melville, when he wrote his Maximus poems in homage to Whale’s Jaw in Dogtown, that forsaken place in Gloucester, Massachusetts? Olson also wrote Call Me Ishmael, his meditation on Moby Dick, democracy, and Melville’s library. Why did Jean-Pierre Melville name himself after Herman and go on to make films in homage to men fiercely loyal to each other and driven to their death by the pursuit of something like honor? C. L. R. James, imprisoned at Ellis Island on the Hudson River in sight of lower Manhattan at the height of the Communist “scare,” turned to Moby-Dick, Pierre, and a few of the Piazza Tales, as he tried to make sense of how an America



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devoted to democratic ideals could, in the name of security and order, become guilty of the worst despotism. Melville’s gutsy refusal of popular assumptions and the political injustices that accompany them has made his writing appear the necessary accompaniment to the smug, market-driven life of mid-nineteenth-century America. As Olson, Jean-Pierre Melville, and C. L. R. James knew, each in his different way, humane claims and moral expediency permitted the horrors of slavery and persecution. It is to Melville’s alternative history, his ability to exhume what was truly harrowing—and ultimately ambiguous—about the myth of the Americas that these artists return. With each work, Melville knew he had to invent a prose that could contain and replicate his rage. But it was the way he crafted a language of attachment, making affection strain at the bounds of his anger, that has made him so attractive. But there is the other Melville, the philosopher and theologian, the metaphysician who forged a difficult writing, a way of thinking about thought. Numerous are the academic literary critics who have written brilliantly if sometimes obscurely about this pursuit: the need to write fiction as if it were the surest road to some ultimate knowledge. That passion to know returns us to Melville’s own fascination with things that are not human, which refute selfconsciousness and erase individuality. Up against the inanimate or the apparently unthinking thing, whether wall, rock, whale, tortoise, or other fragments, ruins, or debris, Melville busies himself with a supernatural that is always very real. Melville gives us many kinds of ghosts: the white whale given up to God in the wreck of Ahab’s soul, Pierre’s memory of Old Greylock, the mute head of Babo looking long and hard at Benito Cereno, the souls of “all wicked sea-officers, more especially commodores and captains”—at death and, sometimes, before death— caught in the bodies of captive Galapagos tortoises. These ghosts are not unintelligible phantoms, fit only for dreams and fancy. Instead, they are locked into a nature relived as memories of servitude and possession. Insisting on the phantasmal in the most ordinary of things, Melville reckons with a new kind of haunting. For Sharon Cameron, taking Billy Budd as the last chapter of Impersonality: Seven Essays, the “effacements” of distinction between “the human and nonhuman” generate what she calls “the unpersonified impersonal,” after “Melville’s name in Moby-Dick for

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the three-personed God.” Billy and Claggart both lose the individual tags of evil and good, pure and impure against the light that diffuses their corporeal traits and blunts the moral resonances that accompany them. In an unusual and compelling book that includes essays on Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, and Simone Weil, the essay on Melville stands out for its clarity and power. The refusal to let the ambiguities of Melville’s prose pass unexplored gives us insight into just how much he cared about the transfiguration of character and motive, or, in Cameron’s words, “this erosion of what might seem the boundaries of an entity.” There is a new politics here, not easily identified by such theoretically fashionable academic tags as postcolonial, multicultural, or postmodern. Eschewing such broad and marketable terms, Cameron confronts Melville’s prose dead on. Receptive to something excessive in what first appear to be mere descriptive passages, she takes us outside of rules, systems, and rational expectations. This interpretive challenge is a tricky business. It has nothing to do with doctrinal purity or maximum comfort with minimum inconvenience. Imagine for a moment that Melville aims to pit his writing against the grain of the conventional, against the comfort of respectability, and places his characters beyond the social or the human, so that the idea of character becomes irrelevant. How might he accomplish this feat of language and thought? The answer lies in the violence of category crossings that Cameron takes great pains to demonstrate. Not only does she inhabit Melville’s blurring of the boundaries between human and inhuman, but she takes such disintegration to another level, as she expands it to include Melville’s equation of the violence in a “goodness beyond virtue” and in “an evil beyond vice.” Innocence and depravity blend into each other, just as the special hate of Claggart for Billy becomes the most pliant intimacy. As she demonstrates, Claggart is no “‘vulgar’ villain,” and Billy is no mere type of Christ. “Billy can no more be understood in terms of a binarism of typology (like and unlike Christ) than he can be understood in terms of a binarism of character (good in opposition to Claggart’s evil).” What, Cameron asks, does such a dissolution of typology mean? Distinctions are reworked again and again, until distinctions such as homicidal predator and benign victim are, as she puts it, “deprived of the capacity ever to mean again in a social way.”



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In her lengthy analyses of usually ignored passages of Billy Budd, Cameron prompts her readers to reconsider what we mean by “haunt” or “bafflement.” The ghostly is in nature, not beyond it, part of the “luminous night” and its “waning,” “the manifestation of a phenomenon and its effacement” or “brilliance and its extinction.” Does this drama of equivocation matter to our reading of Melville? Cameron’s analysis is not just a matter of language games, or deconstructive indulgence. We are brought into an engagement with Melville’s fictions that might be compared to our reading of R. P. Blackmur’s rarely taught, not to say forgotten, essays. It is as if Cameron dreamed through Blackmur’s “The Craft of Herman Melville,” and over 70 years later decided to give our inattentive, pseudo-political and vaguely liberal times an articulation of the tools of craft that is inseparable from the most unexpected discipline of thought. Only through such concentrated reading can we begin to comprehend Melville’s obsession with personal identity, a push beyond the limits of personality. Such thought exists as a suspension between what we assume to be contradictory truths. “For there remains a tension throughout Billy Budd,” Cameron explains, “about whether there is in fact a difference between the amoral, secular, historical, experienced world and the sacred, providential one.” In a new-fangled nation of commodity and expediency, religious language rang counterfeit. Melville, writing during the conversions and revivals of the 1840s and 1850s, understood how spiritual convictions and social claims could mask continued oppression. *** Never calling for sympathy or sentiment, Melville writes so that his readers must ask, with Cora Diamond in The Realistic Spirit: “What could we feel if we could feel what we experience sufficiently?” This experience demands a radical change in perspective: not only in how we see the world but in how we read a story. Words no longer mean what we assume. It is as if every image, every metaphor, the lineaments and rhythm of the prose, the repetition and the glut of similes constitute a universe. The operative cosmology of Melville’s late fiction is also a somewhat risky aesthetic program. It challenges readers to abide the tension between matter and not-matter that fuses, and not always

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harmoniously, the spiritual and the material, the claims of earth and heaven. Struggling to reclaim the subject of natural history for the making of literature, Melville recasts rituals of the sacred, traditions of philosophy, and, most of all, the historiography that measured heads, crafted taxonomies of color and proved inferiority. What I have come to see as Melville’s “epic of the piecemeal” or “broken aesthetic” bears in its fragments the traces of everyday racism, careless slaughter and commonplace servitude. In his hands the elements of nature are de-natured, stepped up into something that cannot be described as supernatural in the way we usually mean the term. He struggles instead to grapple with a nature that is natural to the nth degree. Indeed, even on the level of the sentence, our experience is purely corporeal, a pile-up of matter so extreme that it becomes utterly mystical. How do the facts of daily life, no matter how banal—cruelty, oppression, greed, boredom, disdain— determine how language is used, how art must be made for a writer as supremely conscious of unfathomable suffering as Melville, and as uncompromising? In reconfiguring our understanding of the human and non-human animal, of things as basic as bones or blood or as rarified as breath or vision, Melville transfigures that genre called gothic. He walks through the haunted landscape, and he exhumes what is truly harrowing and equivocal about democracy in antebellum America. The alternative history that he tells in works such as Moby-Dick, or the Whale; Pierre, or the Ambiguities; Israel Potter; and the Piazza Tales is made up of the detritus, wreck and flotsam cast out by civilization. What has been disposed of in centuries of conquest, colonization and enslavement? A hodge-podge of gods, spirits, animals, corpses, and all kinds of inhabitants haunts these fictions. He submits this jumbled refuse to radical ethnographic critique, which meant that he used his writing to transform how we think, how we position ourselves in the world. For Melville, the supernatural was never transcendent, but forged out of the fragments of life: the kick of a heifer, a soup spill, or muscular spasm. Although Melville is often cast as a skeptic or unbeliever, he followed St. Paul in his consecration of matter as the surest road to spirit. This hard faith relies on the stuff of spiritual life, which is nothing other than what is radically material. In a society where the claims of sentiment and the ruses of piety alleviated the terror of religious scrutiny, he put his prose to the task of creating on the



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page the ground for rigorous thinking. Reading Melville depends on a devotion to the possibilities of revelation, even if the revelation turns out to be steeped in a terrain of rot, waste, and stink. He looked for faith, as he put it through Ishmael in Moby-Dick, “among the jackals.” He yoked the discarded and the cherished, the universal and the particular, objective and subjective. This coupling is made plain in the sinews of his writing. When it most strains, comes apart, seems least intelligible, it engages the heart, it penetrates and fractures any utopian dream of perfection or instrumental moralism. To give the spirit the color and shape of matter, the most sodden if dark embodiment was his goal. So Melville set out to test the limits of decency, common sense, and “good” writing. In the process, he appealed to a form of ethics that has little to do with right and wrong, good or evil, but everything to do with sensation—and with the instinct or affections that stimulate it. This discrimination leads to his obsession with creatures, with the uneasy boundaries between human and non-human. Everywhere we turn in the late fiction, the flesh, the innards, and bodies of animals matter. He asks both of his readers and himself more than just intellect. He dares us to set the imagination and sensibility and intelligence to work, no matter the pain, discomfort or repugnance. Joining the hard-nosed care of craft with the demands of ethical attention, Melville made readers aware of brutality and extermination, but he also pressed hard against the sentiment and beneficence that masked it. He sacrificed the norms of style and expectations of polish or clarity to the task at hand. That task was nothing less than to bring before his readers the meat—mutilated, bleeding, dead, rotting—that was as much a part of his surroundings as the glories of progress, the cultivation of piety. Language, the forms of speech, the heights of artifice went hand in hand with the meanest terror. High-minded humanitarian sentiments, like the loveliest literature, were tainted. And lurking in the acceptable scripts of civility was the brittle legitimacy of a country that guaranteed racial exclusivity, creaturely extermination, and worse. Humanity remains a position marked by relativity and uncertainty in Melville’s writings, since nonhumans (whether animals, plants, celestial bodies, or even furniture) also possess an anthropomorphic essence or power. This does not mean that humans, for example, are not animals, but rather that everything we grant to that privileged status of human must be suspect if it is not shared.

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Combating hierarchy everywhere he found it, Melville presses hard on what divides in order to rank. He presses and dissolves distinctions so that all kinds of things, incorporeal or physical, are put into relation, as are other dichotomies such as the living and the dead. If, let’s say, a man possesses mens rea then a whale like Moby-Dick can also be styled a person, possessing malice aforethought. But it works the other way around too. Men in various roles share qualities with the objects they possess or destroy. But their bodies and souls also have bones and blood and skin that take their representational cues (and the limits and extent of their existence) from their material connections with animals. The translation between ontologically disparate points of view (or transit between multiple identities) sets the terms for Melville’s writing. What is most striking about the method in Melville’s hyperboles and hesitations, his imprecision and fragmentations, is his emphatic denial of a supernaturalism emptied of what harrows: the wounds, the wear and tear of daily life. His argument, and his tenuous but exacting perturbation of civility and privilege, depends on a radical way of looking at the natural. He offers another rendition of creaturely experience that upsets the reliable, reasonable, moral order of things. *** You do not have to look hard in Melville to find the skeletons in the closet. The land of his fiction is filled with remains, the scattered relics that adhere to the dark underbelly of civilization. Not saints’ relics, no, but the bones of slaves, the skeleton of a whale, the white-washed bones of a black sailor, evidence of what those in power—and most of his readers—would like to forget. These buried fragments are always present for Melville. He practices an archaeology that dredges up the materials, human, animal, and inanimate, that undergird the tide of good feelings and bad faith. “Read if you can,” he dares in Moby-Dick. His pages are traversed through and through with evidence of this toil to excavate the dead and the disregarded. In one sense, he writes for this reason alone: to make his sentences the habitat for the unearthing, to make his language a fit receptacle for the remnants. Words strain at the armature of his sentences. They seem to relish the fight to survive the rot but most often succumb to it.



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The burden of revelation leads Melville to make prose that bridges the gap between body and mind, the dead and the living, earth, sea and sky. But the world he composes is neither anarchic nor chaotic. That is the wonder. Bones loom large in the late fiction. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael relates how the bones of one of the earliest species of whales were found in Alabama. “But by far the most wonderful of all cetacean relics was the almost complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for one of the fallen angels.” In this supple relating of interlaced codes, types, and territories, we read a history of what has transpired not only in the South (the Alabama that is also the birthplace of Pip) but also in the heavens. Natural history is entangled with the fall from Paradise. The law in the person of Judge Creagh lives on through the presence of slaves, just as the perils of extinction collapse into a fantastic surmise. Since when did angels have bones? In Melville’s space of non-differentiation, the disorientation of hierarchy—mixing bodies, minds, flesh, things, and spirits— extends from the metonymic juxtaposition of their parts by placing at center stage a single fundamental opposition: between inside and outside. But these terms no longer mean what we think. It is a world turned inside out, a body enveloped by what it should hide. “What and where is the skin of the whale?” That schema (like the law of identity and non-contradiction) is changed utterly. It is as if the outside skin, or the clothing that covers you and makes you who you are, becomes as uncertain and as light as breath. In one of the more fantastic and delicate representations of whale power, Melville writes: “a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its quick, fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies of the oarsmen.” A blanched shadow—a paradox in itself—can physically take the breath away, as if a strike or hit of the fist. The phantasmal or phantasmagoric everywhere in Melville becomes incarnate, as real, as definitive and as weighty as a force of nature. A shadow once cast on the waters is white. And later, Ahab’s “soul” becomes a “centipede, that moves on a hundred legs.” There are human cadavers, animal corpses, and all manner of dead things that thrive on these pages along with the living. There are men, “the complete spiritual man” and “the manufactured”; there are phantoms, “real” and “subordinate,” just as there

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is the riddle of Ahab’s leg, “phantom” and “real,” “the flesh and blood one” and one that is merely “a stick of a whale’s jawbone.” The task Melville takes on is formidable. He lays out a terrain that amounts to nothing less than an alternative reality that has everything to do with how the unlikely or the extraordinary is always part and parcel of the commonplace or quotidian. Even his ghosts are not quite right: they are too palpable, too real, and at times too much like garbage to be cordoned off as “spiritual” somewhere in the beyond. Melville envisions another kind of history that taxes our habits of awareness, reflection, and discrimination. As readers we are asked not only to engage with the nonhuman realm, but also to experience the daily messiness and unpredictability of interspecies encounters in all the intensity of their intimacy. Let us imagine what prose would look like if it were to become a perspectival phenomenon, a means of seeing otherwise or crosswise. We find in Melville’s prose an extraordinary compression, even when he most seems to digress. Although it does not define action, it sharpens our appetite for seeing and knowing, while it suggests something unseen behind what is seen and heard. Mood replaces certainty. We are left with an all but unintelligible feeling. Or is it another kind of intelligibility? By excluding clarity and concentrating instead on that aspect of the reader’s mind and heart that can perceive but not comprehend, Melville prompts another kind of experience that can be felt but not understood. Or to put it another way, he intimates a region or moment of indiscernibility. We are, to put it mildly, in the regime of metamorphosis: where things, whether animate or inanimate, corporeal or incorporeal, do not eclipse each other. Prose becomes a medium for ritual practice, a discipline of proximity and of order, where the most common things become extraordinary, and the smallest details world-changing. Language turns itself over, just as the philosophy offered up as meaningful or true becomes empty of meaning when it most seems to mean.

3 On Ecstasy: Sharon Cameron’s Reading of Emerson Paul Grimstad

We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature … EMERSON, “THE OVER-SOUL”

It is as if, in [Emerson’s] sentences, his life failed to be experienced as his own. SHARON CAMERON

Dissociation as condition and as acknowledgement One of the many striking things in Sharon Cameron’s indispensable writing on Emerson—I have in mind here her essays “Representing Grief’ and “The Way of Life By Abandonment”—is her claim that in the essay “Experience,” “feeling survives the complaints of its being cancelled.”1 This Cameron describes as a prose “vertigo” in which a “legislative or repressive task [is] assigned to obliquity” (I,

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54–5, 77). An example of this vertigo and obliquity is the line: “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.”2 Despite such cancellations and obliquities the relation of feeling to words in “Experience” is “absolutely adequate.” (I, 54) Adequate because the essay “mourns the loss of affect more than the loss of his son” (an event the essay treats icily). If what is said is “voiced only if the voice is denied” (I, 54), then the conditions under which anything can be said in “Experience” arises from the dissociation between feeling and saying. Dissociation becomes the condition for expressiveness. As Cameron puts it, while the lost son “exists at a remove,” his death nevertheless makes possible “what the essay purports to be able to talk about” (I, 77). Such dissociative logic involves an “extrication from emotion” (I, 84), and so is the “voice of no private person [but] is public and engaged in performance” (I, 93). To treat dissociation as the condition in relation to which anything can be said at all is to treat the legislative task assigned to obliquity in “Experience” as one with the conversion of private affects into public words. Cameron also describes dissociation as a form of “acknowledgment” (I, 54–5). Indeed, obliquity and acknowledgment are different sides of the same process; both involve the way expression can occur only on the condition that feeling turns into words. To “grieve that grief can teach [you] nothing” is to submit the word “grief” to a test or study; to sound out its purport through experiments in use. What if what were grievous was the inadequacy of the word for conveying what I wish to say? What if that were the meaning of “grief”? And then what if the testing of the word’s limits, the surveying of the circumstances of its application, were just what gave “grief” its expressive power? This would be another way of understanding the adequacy Cameron identifies in the move from affect to style; the way that move both entails a loss—the cancellation of feeling—and the requirement that one submit to public intelligibility. If the adequacy Cameron points to—captured also in the word “acknowledgment”—is the way feeling survives the complaints of its being cancelled, then that survival occurs in the way Emerson’s prose registers feeling as dissociated. Take another example from “Experience”: The first paragraph’s dazed voice asks “where do we find ourselves?” and answers “on a stair.” We are then told that “sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree” (EL,



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471). Acknowledgment works in the way the requirement that one submit to the sharable (ourselves; our lifetime; our eyes), amounts at the same time to a loss. What has been lost “lingers all our lifetime about our eyes”; occulted feeling “hovers all day in boughs of the fir tree.” In the broad daylight of our speech hover the tracks of cancelled affects; of feeling turned into words. And because this cancellation, while partial, is nevertheless also “absolutely adequate,” Emerson’s prose can be heard as an ongoing acknowledgment of an initial dissociation. When Cameron says “there could be no more harrowing testimony to the terror of idealism than…a self forced prospectively to imagine the loss it retrospectively refuses to feel,” (I, 59), that “imagine” sounds as if voiced from within the push-pull (prospective/retrospective) between personal pain and general intelligibility. If, in the essay, “death marks the limits of what is experienced” (I, 67) shouldn’t this limit be imagined as analogous to the way the personal must merge with the general? What does one say when a child has been lost? What does anyone say when anyone is lost?3 In drawing attention to words like “condition” and “acknowledgment” I allude to another reader of Emerson who, like Cameron, is attuned to the uncanny accuracy of Emerson’s prose. In his book In Quest of the Ordinary, Stanley Cavell takes the word “condition” in its literal meaning: “saying together” [con-diction] (IQ, 38). The etymology makes explicit the process I have described, following Cameron, as the way the turning of affects into words involves both a (partial) cancellation and a certain kind of adequacy: “conditions” are what allow us to share what we say, to find mutual attunement in our saying. Cavell describes in relation to the line from “Self-Reliance,” “Primary wisdom [is] intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions” saying that “the occurrence to us of intuition places a demand upon us, namely for tuition; call this wording, the willingness to subject oneself to words, to make oneself intelligible.”4 In another essay he calls this a “readiness to subject your desire to words … to become intelligible, with no assurance that you will taken up” (TE, 93). All of this is brought directly into dialogue with Cameron’s reading of “Experience” when Cavell asks, “What happens to [Emerson’s five year old son] Waldo?” and answers “nothing happens and everything happens to him.” Far from forgotten, the lost son rather “generates the ensuing topics of the

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essay [as] a testament to his consuming loss, a work of mourning for him, giving to … experience as such the character or structure of grief” (TE, 116). Waldo’s place in the essay is to generate the criteria by which unworded affection becomes public; to establish the conditions in relation to which one makes oneself intelligible. But Cavell finds Cameron performing her own dissociation, noting that while she makes a “decisive break with the idea of Emerson’s prose as a mist or a fog,” she nevertheless “dissociates philosophy’s pertinence from Emerson’s enterprise,” specifically in rejecting the word “synthesis” as appropriate for describing Emerson’s aims as a thinker and a writer (TE, 116–17). In an essay on experience, “synthesis,” Cavell notes, would name a kind of necessity; one linked to what he calls (following Kant) “putting experience together into a unity in knowing a world of objects” (TE, 117). While Cavell wishes to find in “Experience” a version of the problem of skepticism, in lines such as “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition,” as a statement about the relation of feeling to words, “our condition” sounds also as if it were referring to dissociation in Cameron’s sense.5 And since Cameron sees the death of the child as having a “generative connection to all else that follows” (I, 71)—“generative” because bound up with what she elsewhere calls the “goal of generality” running all through the Essays—Cameron and Cavell converge on similar aspects of Emerson’s prose. If acknowledgment, as Cavell put it in an earlier essay, is “a special concept of knowledge, or region of the concept of knowledge, one which is not a function of certainty” [Must We Mean What We Say?, 258]6, then in Emerson’s partial cancellations there is, not a “knowledge” of grief, but an exhibiting of the conditions in relation to which grief becomes sharable (with all the attendant vertigo, evasion, obliquity, cancellation). Another way to put this is to say that acknowledgment names a condition in which one relates to one’s own pain in the same way others do. Concern with the relation of pain to saying is one of the organizing ideas in Cameron’s fascinating novelistic essay Beautiful Work, where she writes: “To be competent to speak of pain is to speak of pain that isn’t yours. This requires experiencing pain that isn’t yours. Pain experienced as if it were your own”; and, “pain is



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tied up in explanations, veiled by stories about the pain [but] the motive is to extricate the uncompounded thing” and, “I began to hunger for storylessness, before experience had become wrapped up in accounts … but outside of a story pain didn’t look like my own.”7 The question here is what it means to speak of pain; about what is lost when we cast pain into words and what it would mean to imagine pain as somehow extricated from explanation. Now, we might say that Emerson is not so much offering a first person account of grief in “Experience,” but acknowledging, in the essay’s rigorous disavowal of feeling, how the depths of the person are dissociated; and that dissociation might be understood as analogous to the way a person’s relation to their own pain is the same as their relation to the pain of others. In what remains I want to trace out in some detail my sense that for Cameron dissociation arises from the way feeling must turn into words and that this is the condition in relation to which anything becomes sayable in the Essays. But I want to take this further and claim that the making public—the acknowledgment of—that dissociation (in prose that is both accurate and oblique) is to talk also about the relation of intuitions to concepts that is, for a certain tradition of philosophy, constitutive of personhood itself. To say that persons are constituted by dissociation—that persons are one with the problem of reconciling intuitions (sensory affection) and concepts (words)—is to bring Cameron’s reading of “Experience” back into alignment with the philosophy she sees Emerson as resisting. And something revelatory occurs when we bring an explicit concern with the concept/intuition distinction into this discussion. If dissociation names a move from feelings to words it also gives rise to a mode of the impersonal I want to call (following Cameron) ravishment and ecstasy. The turning of our ungrievable (because unsayable) feelings into a public style is ecstatic in that it opens and exposes the depths of the person to the conceptual community. When Cameron says that “the ‘I’ of the essays invoke[s] the impersonal … the celebration of which process is said to produce excess, ecstasy and, alternatively, ravishment” (I, 95) I read this as saying that the ecstasy achieved in the radical commonness of a public style makes sharable a constitutive impersonality; an impersonality understood as a hidden art in the deeps of the person. Attention to the impersonal conditions of personhood itself, and its ecstatic opening onto the shared and

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conceptual, leads me both to celebrate and to challenge fundamental aspects of Cameron’s reading of Emerson.

Alien energy (spontaneous reception) In “The Over-Soul” Emerson writes: “We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature” (E&L, 387). What exactly is it to which we open on one side? And for that matter, what is the other side the line takes for granted? A possible answer to the latter question is the side to which we are open most of the time; the side toward which we direct our saying, which is in turn open to endorsement or rejection, occasions for agreement or disagreement (attunement, acknowledgment, etc.). But again: if we are open on one side to public criteria of intelligibility, to what are we open on the “other” side? Emerson calls it the “deeps of spiritual nature”? “But what are these deeps?” We get a clue to an answer when Emerson writes, elsewhere in “The Over-Soul”: “As with events, so it is with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season it streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come” (E&L, 385). The flowing river of thought, arising from “some alien energy,” is succession itself. But where does it come from? And can it be expressed on the side toward which we submit to the generality of the conceptual community? The possibility of finding adequate expression for the stream of succession in the deeps of person is, for Emerson, nothing less than the possibility of ecstasy. For this would be to make sharable and intelligible the very conditions of personhood; to sound in the commons of public speech the impersonal “deeps” of the person. It would be an enactment of George Kateb’s definition of “Self-Reliance” as “thinking one’s thoughts and thinking them through.”8 Before going into detail about how this “thinking through” might be a way of naming the requirement that we submit intuition to the tuition of words, I want first to consider the lines from “The Over-Soul” as bound up with the idea of the person as dissociated



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into conceptual and affective sides. Beginning from the question “in what does the essence of the personality of the person consist?”9 Martin Heidegger, in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics takes up the problem of thinking the depths of the person through attention to the role of the “schematism” in Kant’s First Critique. Heidegger is concerned with what he calls Kant’s failure to take up the “subjective side of the deduction” in favor of his focusing entirely on the objective side; that is, of deducing the conditions of possibility for empirical objects to become intelligible as part of experience [Erfahrung]. As Heidegger puts it, Kant “shrank back from [the] unknown root” that precedes (ontologically) the division of the person into a receptive intuitions and spontaneous judgments (KPM, 112). What Kant had both put his finger on and evaded, according to Heidegger, was the question of how persons become equipped with a capacity for synthesizing intuitions and concepts (“synthesis,” it should be remembered, was the word in relation to which Cavell found Cameron distancing Emerson from philosophy). Peter Gordon describes this as the way Heidegger, “placed great stress on Kant’s claims … that the production of a schematism is a ‘hidden art in the depths of the human soul’ and that the pure imagination responsible for this production lies beneath intuition and understanding as their common root.”10 As part of his account of the receptive capacity of the intuitions of time and space and the spontaneous capacity of the understanding to bring that sensory manifold into conceptual synthesis (cognition), Kant says of “synthesis in general” that it is the “mere effect of the imagination, of a blind though indispensable function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all” [CPR, A78/B104].11 For Heidegger, what Kant originally meant by schematism was an “original unity of intuition and understanding”; a “pure imagination [which] exhibits both spontaneity and receptivity at once” and so as a “temporality [which] lies deeper than logic” (CD, 146). Heidegger’s sensitivity to the way Kant downplayed the role of transcendental imagination as what lay behind the distinction between reception and spontaneity, draws our attention to the deeps of the person as a “pure and unconditioned spontaneity of the imagination” (CD, 147). To use Heidegger’s phrase, the person is at bottom a “spontaneous receptivity” (KPM, 116).12 In her important recent study of Emerson On Leaving, Branka Arsić takes up Heidegger’s notion of spontaneous reception,

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specifically in relation to Cameron’s account of impersonality. As Arsić puts it, “intuition can be used synonymously with the term reception. It takes-in-its-stride what is out there, and since that type of knowing happens all the time and to everybody, Heidegger can say that ‘knowledge is primarily intuition.”13 Arsić links these insights to Emerson’s essay “Intellect,” where Emerson says, “the mind is first only receptive” and “we shall perceive the superiority of the spontaneous or intuitive principle over the arithmetical or the logical.” Of these lines Arsić notes that “as receptive knowing, intuiting is in Emerson also a way of being attuned to the outside [and so] intuition has a complex temporality, since in his version of it the mind does not immediately intuit what is has taken in stride.”14 As Arsić describes it, there is an impersonal, almost camera-like, registration, whereby perceptions “fall down and inscribe themselves in the open cave of the intellect.” Thus perceptions, according to Arsić “affect one another in the intellect without the mind knowing anything about it [and in such a way that] the moment of our becoming aware of the perception long active within the mind is what might be called intuition.”15 Emersonian intuition thus consists in “encountering for the first time something that has already been encountered impersonally. It is the encountering of an impersonal remembrance.”16 At a later point Arsić states that the “I” in Emerson is “not intuition’s agent, but its patient … it doesn’t create the thought but is given the thought in order to be able to think it” (OL, 154). To modify Heidegger’s wording, not only knowing but “thinking” itself is, for Arsić, nothing other than reception. Arsić’s reading of Emerson on intuition and my own in this essay involve different ideas of “reception.” Let me try to make vivid this difference in relation to an account of impersonality I take to be true both to Cameron’s use of the word (extrication from emotion) and Arsić’s (the identity of reception and thinking). Insofar as Arsić’s account of reception is indebted to Heidegger, it involves thinking about that “hidden art in the depths of the soul” that Kant associated with the schematism of transcendental imagination. Since Kant’s hidden art refers to the meshing of intuitions and concepts in succession, it necessarily precedes personhood. We might say that transcendental imagination is the (impersonal) condition for personhood. I too want to find in reception something before the separation of the person into a side that



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feels (intuition) and a side that says (conceptualizes).17 But unlike Arsić, for whom reception names the way intellect is pierced by stray beams or projectiles, what is “received,” on my account, is that “alien energy” Emerson identifies as that to which we are open on one side. What I call “ecstasy” is not only an openness to impersonal deeps not yet sundered into receptive and spontaneous sides (what you are “open” to is not a jolt from the outside but a hidden art in the depths of the soul); but also submission to criteria in relation to which anything becomes sayable. Ecstasy in this sense is the “thinking through of Self-Reliance” understood as the sharing of an impersonal power—transcendental imagination—with the conceptual community. The difference between my idea of reception and Arsić’s, then, is the difference between the deeps of the person as ecstatically impersonal and a contingent registration upon the blank slate of the intellect. My argument might be summarized like this: nothing in the brute registration of causal occurrences could account for the fact, not only that my thoughts succeed one another, but of the whole set of operations we could call “synthesis.” Emerson’s impersonal involves both the capacity for synthesis arising from the alien deeps of the person, and the tuition by which that synthesis becomes linguistically sharable. Indeed, when Cameron writes that the voice of the Essays is “the voice of no private person [but is] public and is engaged in performance,” and that what is being performed “is something like ravishment (ecstasy) as a consequence of self-abandonment” (I, 93), I hear her as describing an achieved impersonality at the level of what can be said. Cameron too finds in Emerson’s idea of the “Over-Soul” a “rigorous analysis of how the impersonal is incarnated” (I, 85). It is the Over-Soul that turns intellect into genius; will into virtue; affection into love (E&L, 392). Not reducible to any of these modes, the Over-Soul is what “inhabits, vivifies, traverses” them (I, 85). If what is being identified in the Over-Soul’s conversions is a changing power, then in remaining resolutely within this power’s fluxional sweep, Emerson recasts it as the impersonality of a public style. To mark one’s speech or writing as issuing from that place is to find ecstasy in the wording of that to which we are open on one side; the alien energy at the bottom of the person. And if “Over-Soul” is the name Emerson gives to a power of conversion—not only from intellect to genius; will to virtue;

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affection to love, but also from intuition to concept; from private depths to verbal publicity—then ecstasy names the conversion accomplished (however obliquely). To find ecstasy in the turning of the depths of the person into the publically worded is another way of unpacking Cameron’s claim that a prose arising from the dissociation of cancelled feeling is also absolutely adequate. Its adequacy arises from the way the impersonal conditions of personhood (schematism; transcendental imagination; alien energy) are given expression and made sharable.

Ecstasy and barbarism Taking up Emerson’s claim in “The Over-Soul” that “we are open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature” Cameron treats the spatial imagery of “sides” as “testifying to the necessarily divided nature of our allegiance to the egotistical and the impersonal. On one side there is access, on the other there is not” (I, 86). Part of what I have been saying here is that there is access on both sides: to the deeps of the person (hidden art; schematism; transcendental imagination), and to saying as public (the “goal of generality”). If these are the two sides to which we are open, then the “divided nature of our allegiance” would seem not to be an openness to the deeps of spiritual nature on the one hand and an inaccessible impersonality on the other, but the demand that those deeps be cast into a public style. To achieve this goal of generality—of matching the impersonal source of personhood with the impersonal register of words—is what Emerson means by ravishment and ecstasy. A claim that follows from Cameron’s view that the line from the “The Over-Soul” about being “open on one side” refers to a division between the private depths of the person and the generality of the social is that he ends up a “tyranny of egotistic self-enclosure” (I, 83). While Cameron acknowledges that the Over-Soul’s converting power “leads to the social in its highest form,” the concern to avoid at all costs the “threat to self-reliance [in] conformity” nevertheless runs the risk of becoming “petty selfcherishing” (I, 224, n. 10). Finding in lines like “All loss, all pain is particular” a “failed acknowledgement of material difference in the social world” Cameron finds a “barbarous idealism [which]



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infects all the writing” (I, 101). There seems here to be an equation of “barbarism” with a Panglossian indifference to the plight of others; and one linked to a tendency Cameron hears in Emerson seeking what he calls, in an 1840 journal entry, the “infinitude of the private man.”18 But to treat our being “open on one side” as implying that we are at the same time open on another side—the public use of words—is to evade the danger of vanishing into self-cherishing or egoistic self-enclosure. While part of what I am claiming here is that the union of alien energy with public style is what Emerson calls “ecstasy,” it is also one of the forms “religion” may take in his writing. Religion for Emerson is not this or that doctrinal commitment or dogma (he left his pulpit in the Second church of Boston for precisely its threadbare and insipid idea of what religion might be or amount to), but in the literal sense of “relinking.” Here that relinking occurs between a hidden art of synthesis and an everyday use of words. Again I agree with Cameron when she notes approvingly Kateb’s association of Emersonian impersonality with the “ravenously religious.” But while Kateb “correctly associates Emerson’s impersonality with the religions … and approves of Emerson’s idea of the interconnectedness of things,” he nevertheless “tries to divorce the idea of the impersonal from the religious because its piety embarrasses him, and because the driving thrust for unity at the heart of the religious, betrays Emerson’s commitment to antagonism” (I, 225, n.10). As Cameron puts it, the “very impersonality so crucial to Kateb’s explanation of self-reliance is also … inseparable from the religiousness from which Kateb would sever it” (I, 225, n. 10). But are the only options here a designed interconnectedness and a dissociated antagonism? Are the impersonal and the religious to be thought of as relatable only as total synonymy or total antinomy? In fact, as I have been pursuing it, the sides to which we are open—a schematizing power in the depths of the soul and the making general of that power in the spontaneous casting out into the impersonal register of words—offers one version of what Emerson might mean by the “religious”: the ecstatic alignment of two types of impersonality. If I want here to agree with Cameron that Emersonian impersonality takes the form of the ravishment of public intelligibility, I also agree with her when she identifies this movement as ending up in what she calls the “discovery of

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radical commonness” (I, 224, n.,10). When thought of as attuned to the alien energy in the deeps of the person, this striving for radical commonness leads to something other than a barbarous indifference to others. An instance of ecstasy understood as radical commonness can be found in a well-known passage from Emerson’s 1836 book Nature: Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhileration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth…in the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,— all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing. I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me…the name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental. (E&L, 10) The scene celebrates the perfect exhileration—the ecstasy—of impersonality. Affects cancel and collide (gladness spills over into fear), as immersion in nature becomes a return to the hidden arts of succession and transition. The snake shaking out of its skin is just the most conspicuous emblem of nature’s endless self-abandonment (elsewhere in Nature Emerson will offer a philosophy of language in which “every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance” [E&L, 20]). This is not only because it is precisely “egotism” that “vanishes” in this scene in the commons, but because all this—remembering of course the necessary dissociations involved in wording our intuitions—has become sayable. If “nothing can befall” this transparent spheroid receptacle, this conduit for alien energy, this is not a “barbarous idealism” but the “social at its highest”; the egoless ecstasy of spontaneous reception turned into words; the “bare commons” of the general, of the intelligible. The two sides to which we are open— the deeps of the person and commons of public intelligibility—echo



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one another. The way to escape “petty self-cherishing” then is to convert a liberated openness to transcendental imagination (from which spring the powers of synthesis and succession) into the wording of those conditions; the conversion of a “hidden art in the depths of the human soul” into what Cameron calls the “public generality of a style.” One of Emerson’s most uncompromising statements—“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius” (E&L, 259)—would seem a good candidate for the barbarism Cameron hears lurking the Essays; a capsizing into “petty self-cherishing” that would remain indifferent to the suffering of others. But consider something Cavell says about the line: that it “names the promise that the private and the social will be achieved together” (TE, 92). That achievement I have been describing as the merger of one side to which we are open (transcendental imagination) and another side to which we are open (the tuition by which that first kind of openness becomes worded and so sharable). Rather than hearing in such lines a danger of “self-enclosure,” self-reliance, to turn again to Kateb’s construal, is the obligation to start with the “universe in one’s liberated mind” and then to “think one’s thoughts and think them through.”19 Thinking one’s thoughts and thinking them through is the intellectual method of the Essays. What Kateb calls the “universe in one’s liberated mind” is a mind attuned to—indeed one which affirms and celebrates—the impersonal depths from which its synthesizing power springs; and “thinking one’s thoughts and thinking them through” is the methodical casting of that liberation into public speech (what Cavell would call the tuition by which our intuitions are made intelligible). Kateb’s “through” is important. Through from what to what? From alien energy to public style; from the deeps of the person to the conceptual community. To think one’s thoughts and think them through is to acknowledge one’s personhood by making one’s intuitions generally receivable. That Cameron finds this going on in a prose logic of “partial cancellation” is the dynamic of acknowledgment I am here trying both to develop and to contest. In what I hope is a close attunement to Cameron’s own prose I have asked: What does it mean to think of impersonality as the making sharable of that “alien energy” Emerson tells us we are opening to one side in “The Over-Soul”? And in doing so I imagine all of

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us—Emerson, Cameron, Kant, Heidegger, Kateb, Arsić, Cavell—as together in the commons; in the thick of words and shared routes of expression. * Why does Emerson “clap[s] his hands in infantine joy” in an essay about his dead son? If loss is the condition in relation to which anything can be said in “Experience,” it also provokes a dive into an enlarged infantilism. If cancelled feeling is not so much a matter of the lived event (no matter how terrible or traumatic) but of hidden arts in the depths of the person, then even under these conditions—grieving that our everyday use of the word “grief” is both unable to touch the feeling that gives rise to it and yet is absolutely adequate for expressing that condition—Emerson makes sharable the impersonal conditions of personhood. Infantile clapping, mad self-applause, a strange and skittish celebration: not symptoms of walled up self-cherishing, but an affirmation of the impersonal conditions which Emerson ecstatically converts into the generality of the commons. What kind of person is it which “expounds impersonality”? How does “stylistic singularity” become a kind of “anonymity”? “From what vantage could one relinquish the personal perspective one inevitably has a delimited self?” How is it that in Emerson’s sentences “his life fails to be experienced as his own”? (I, 81, 107) Cameron asks, and I have been answering: because that to which we are open on one side must be thought through. Thinking through means submitting personal depths to the test of words. Hence Emerson’s astonishing style: both accurate and oblique; limpid and recalcitrant; absolutely idiosyncratic and completely common … “We lie open on one side to the deeps of our spiritual nature” … “When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season it streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come” … “Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing. I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.” How are we to hear such sentences except as ecstatic?



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Notes 1

Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007, p. 54. I will here move freely between “Representing Grief: Emerson’s ‘Experience’ and “The Way of Life By Abandonment: Emerson’s Impersonal,” not because the two essays are saying the same thing, but because I believe the claims of the two essays are consistent with one another. Page numbering throughout refers to the volume Impersonality, which contains both essays.

2

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, New York: Library of America, 1983, p. 473 (hereafter abbreviated as “EL”).

3

In his “dialectical lyric” Fear and Trembling (eds Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006 [1843]) Soren Kierkegaard (or “Johannes de Silentio”) says something similar when he describes Abraham’s predicament as a problem of disclosure, writing that “The relief in speaking is that it translates me into the universal” (100). I am grateful to Ken Winkler for bringing this line to my attention.

4

Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 4–5.

5

For an illuminating discussion of the relation of this line and skepticism around figures of “grasping” and “clutching”; of hands as concepts [Begriffen] see Cavell, “Aversive thinking” in Transcendental Etudes, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

6

Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969 (hereafter abbreviated as “MWM”].

7

Sharon Cameron, Beautiful Work: A Meditation on Pain, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000, pp. 1–3.

8

George Kateb, Emerson and Self-Reliance, New York: Roman and Littlefield, 2002, pp. 30–1 [my emphasis].

9

Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997 [1929], p. 110 (hereafter abbreviated as “KPM”).

10 Peter Gordon, Continental Divide. Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012, p. 145 (hereafter abbreviated as “CD”). 11 The relevant line from the First Critique is the following: “this

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schematism of our understanding with regard to appearances and their mere form is a hidden art in the depth of the soul [ist eine verborgene Kunst in den tiefen der menschlichen Seele] whose true operations we can divine from nature” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, eds Paul Guyer and Allan Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1787], p. 181 (hereafter abbreviated as “CPR”). 12 Cavell is, in his essay “Finding as Founding,” also attentive to the role of the schematism in Emerson’s essay, and he too links it to Heidegger. But the focus here is on the later Heidegger of “What is Thinking?” and not to Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. 13 Branka Arsić, On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 153–4. 14 Ibid., p. 154. 15 Ibid., p. 155. 16 Ibid. 17 In his essay on “Imagination” Emerson says the “imagination is as old as the human mind”; that the power of the image [is derived from a] power in nature”; that imagination is a word given to the way the “vision of an inspired soul readings [its] arguments and affirmations in all of Nature” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry. New York: Norton, 2001, pp. 301–4.). 18 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “April 7, 1842,” Selected Journals 1820–1842, New York: Library of America, 2010, p. 735. 19 Emerson and Self-Reliance, 31.

4 The Recognition of Emerson’s Impersonal: Reading Alternatives in Sharon Cameron Johannes Voelz

“How one gains access to the impersonal … is a question that precedes all others in Emerson’s essays,” Sharon Cameron remarks in one of her two landmark contributions to Emersonian writing, “The Way of Life By Abandonment: Emerson’s Impersonal,” first published in 1998.1 Building on prior inquiries into Emerson’s impersonal—she makes explicit her debt to Barbara Packer, Richard Poirier, Harold Bloom, George Kateb, and Stanley Cavell—Cameron considerably extends our understanding of the different registers of Emerson’s impersonal, its existence in and through mind, body, and what Emerson calls “law.” Moreover, she develops a forceful critique of what she regards as a deficiency in Emerson’s account and understanding of the impersonal. Cameron argues that Emerson’s idea and representation of the impersonal suffers from his refusal to confront the ways in which the impersonal depends on the person. I will come to these points in detail in the course of my essay by way of returning to what Cameron identifies as Emerson’s most pressing question: how to find access to the impersonal. In what follows I will heed the call

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of that question by considering some reading alternatives opened up by Cameron—possibilities of meaning which she implicitly entertains in the course of her interpretation, but which she keeps from entering her explicit argument. I will focus on two of these unexplored possibilities: The impersonal, I shall argue, does not merely lead “to the social in its highest form,” as Cameron phrases it (WoL, 85), but is itself accessed in and through sociality. This idea forms the basis of what can legitimately be called Emerson’s theory of recognition, though, importantly, recognition here looks differently from the way it does in established theories of recognition, for it radically prioritizes change and transformation over identity and self-sameness. Further, I read Cameron’s essay as hinting at the suggestion that Emerson does not merely theorize a communicative approach to the impersonal, but, by using “style … as a validation of propositions in lieu of logic or as a supplement to logic,” devises literary means of enacting it (WoL, 91). But if Emerson’s theory of recognition is also a performance of recognition, the criteria for evaluating his writing fundamentally change. What Cameron critiques as a deficiency in the representation of the impersonal appears as a condition for its successful achievement from the perspective of the performative. But the person (and the particular, and the differential) does not therefore disappear in Emerson: It rather becomes an obstinate presence to the self as the result of the failure of acknowledgment or recognition derived from the other. Communicative self-transformation having failed, the transformative becomes transferred to the relation of the self to the person—a relation characterized by a destructive transformation of self-sameness that can be called masochistic, and that constitutes the experience of a painful self. If Emerson cannot recognize the person, he makes it a sufferable presence to the self by describing it as the result of failed recognition.

I Early on in her essay, Sharon Cameron provides a first approximation of Emerson’s impersonal by tying it to the idea of self-reliance: “what self-reliance turns out to mean for Emerson is a strong recognitional understanding of the inadequacy of any



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person: other persons or this person” (WoL, 83). The fact that the individual person is inadequate for Emerson may be an uncontroversial point—the bounded self as closed off from the transversion of the soul stands at the center of his cultural and philosophical critique—but what requires further thought is Cameron’s formulation that such inadequacy is the object of “a strong recognitional understanding.” I will consider what a “recognitional understanding” might entail by turning to two of the paragraphs Cameron selects from Emerson’s essays. In order to demonstrate that “in Emerson’s account the impersonal enables the social world it appears to eradicate” (WoL, 85), Cameron cites the following passage from “The Over-Soul:” All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie,—an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is the façade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love. And the blindness of the intellect begins, when it would be something of itself. (WoL, 85)2 In Cameron’s reading, Emerson’s point is that we can become open to the Over-Soul—and gain access to the impersonal—only if we accept the soul as “master of the will” and take up a position of passivity vis-à-vis the active, animating force of the soul: “the Over-Soul animates and makes being palpable. It is precisely this palpability which compels tribute: ‘Would [a man] let it appear through his action, [it] would make our knees bend.’ In fact, it could be argued that it is the Over-Soul’s visibility in action,

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function, property, and person that permits us to mistake action, function, property, person for the manifestational power which animates them” (WoL, 86). At the core of our mistake, according to Cameron, lies a confusion of cause and effect, of the active and the passive. What seems to be the animating force is really something that is itself animated. But because the animated is palpable, it “compels tribute” from us. Following Cameron’s Emerson, this tribute is falsely attributed, for it should be paid to the animating force, but that force only becomes known to us in its palpable effects of animatedness. Perhaps, however, the confusion about the passive and the active, the animated and animating, is not properly described as a mistake at all. I rather take Emerson to suggest that the distinction between those two binary terms needs to be suspended in order to understand and get access to the impersonal. The suspension of the difference between the active and the passive underlies the role sociality plays in opening up the self to the impersonal. While Cameron suggests that the impersonal “leads to the social in its highest form,” (WoL, 85, emphasis in original), I take the final implication of her suggestion to be that for Emerson this process also works in the other direction: that if the impersonal is the social in its highest form, it is the social itself that leads there. If Cameron reconstructs the social telos of the impersonal, I interpret the Emersonian telos as growing out if its own foundation. Activity and passivity thus blur to the point of being indistinguishable. Experientially speaking, we need an interactional partner in the widest sense (that “partner” or, perhaps, “other” could consist of action, function, property, and person) to become open to that force of the impersonal to which we cannot but pay tribute. In saying that “[Man] we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is … would make our knees bend,” Emerson insists that our knee-fall of respect requires a vis-àvis, even if our respect is paid to something that non-identically exceeds this vis-à-vis. If Emerson regards the other as the carrier of the soul’s palpability, he nonetheless refrains from restricting the self’s position to that of passivity. Our reception of the soul’s palpability contains an active ingredient. This becomes clearer in a passage from the “Divinity School Address,” which Cameron selects in order to discuss Emerson’s subtitution of formal argument by style:



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These [divine] laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in each other’s faces, in each other’s actions, in our own remorse. ... This sentiment [the perception of lawfulness] is the essence of all religion. (WoL, 91/EL, 76; brackets added by Cameron) I would like to postpone the discussion of the role of style in Emerson’s writing for the moment, and point to the significance of Emerson’s “yet” in this passage. Divine laws cannot be theorized, yet, to us, they are an “hourly” presence, and this is due to our capacity of reading. If what we read is “each other’s faces” and “each other’s actions” (I will address “our own remorse” later), then such reading is essentially mutual. We provide the opportunity and the material for each other to read the divine laws.3 The impersonal reality of the divine law here no longer is a knee-jerking force that overpowers us, but rather an activity that becomes activated through the face-to-face (and action-to-face) impact of the other on the self. This active element is highlighted by Emerson’s insistence that we read the divine laws—an idea that has to be understood in light of his romantic theory of reading, which is informed by a creative model of reading and writing, and thus part of a tradition centered on Novalis, Schleiermacher, and the Schlegels, for whom reading is always a kind of writing.4 Reading the divine law in the other’s face is thus a state caught between the passive and the active, between being exposed to the other’s face, and actively, even creatively, reading that face. This may be the proper moment to take up what Cameron casually calls the “recognitional understanding” of the inadequacy of the person, for what we see take shape at this moment—and what I will spell out in the remainder of this section—is Emerson’s theory of recognition. To put it as briefly as possible, in reading the divine laws in the other, we recognize the impersonal. Such a moment of recognition encompasses not only the active, cognitive meaning of “recognition,” but also a passive state of being recognized. Emersonian recognition, like reading, suspends the separation of the active and the passive. An obvious objection to the suggestion that Emerson indeed offers a theory of recognition arises from the proximity of the concept of recognition to that of identity. For if intersubjective

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theories of recognition are based on the idea that selves are constitutively social and that selves reach a sense of themselves—which is to say: identity—through their interaction with the other, then it would seem to follow that Emerson, as a theorist of recognition, must also be a thinker concerned with identity. If by identity we mean the self’s definition of itself, where the act of defining consists of fixing and limiting the self, this clearly is not the case. But the originality of Emerson lies precisely in thinking about recognition and identity in terms that differ starkly from what we have become accustomed to in recent discussions about recognition. Identity is used by Emerson not in the sense of individual selfdefinition5; rather, Emersonian identity has a strong platonic ring and describes that which connects the individual with everything else—that which makes us identical with everyone and everything else. Thus, his understanding of identity seems to denote almost the opposite of what we mean today by identity. But of course, even this contrast is a tricky one, considering that Emerson, unwilling to tie himself to the language of the bounded self, would claim that what exceeds our individuality is precisely what the fullest individual self-definition should encompass. In the fourth lecture of his series called “Natural Method of Mental Philosophy,” given in 1858, he writes, “All difference is quantitative: quality one. However we may conceive of the wonderful little bricks of which the world is builded, we must suppose similarity, and fitting, in their make.”6 Identity, for Emerson, is just this: the sameness in quality despite all difference in quantity. The term recognition is closely related to this transindividual field of identity. To it Emerson turns in the same lecture, directly following the above quotation: Wonderful pranks this identity plays with us. It is because of this, that nothing comes quite strange to us: As we knew our friends, before we were introduced to them, and, at first sight distinguished them as ours; so to know, is to re-know, or to recognize. We hail each discovery of science as the most natural thing in the world. (LL, 2:89) Recognition, or re-knowing, touches on memory, on that which we have not exactly forgotten, but which has become unavailable to us, and which now is being re-presented. It requires our receptivity, which is enabled by the other, and which results, ideally, in



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discoveries coming to us. It is telling that Emerson uses the example of friends in this passage: in the interpersonal dimension, filled with affect and affection, we gain access to that which is ours but which also transcends both ours and our friends’. This kind of recognition is a rather standard moment in Emerson’s thought. We find a more famous formulation of it in “Self-Reliance”: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty” (CW, 2:27, emphasis added). Or, similarly, from a 1831 journal entry: “In the wisdom or fancy (which is oft wisdom) of Bacon & Shakspear we do not admire an arbitrary, alien creation, but we have surprize at finding ourselves, at recognizing our own truth in that wild unacquainted field.”7 The reference to Bacon and Shakespeare underlines yet again that Emerson models the act of recognition on the act of reading. I have already noted that for Emerson this act is essentially creative. But in order to grasp to what extent it constitutes a recognitional understanding of the impersonal, a closer look at Emerson’s phenomenology of reading is necessary. One of Emerson’s names for the kind of reading which enables the surprising experience of finding ourselves in the other—of recognizing our own truth—is inspiration. Inspiration signals the religious roots of recognitional reading. As Lawrence Buell writes, Emerson “envisag[ed] the creative process (in Romantic terms) as originating in the experience of divine inspiration.”8 In the state of inspiration, a new type of vision is achieved, in which the relatedness of all things becomes apparent. In his early years, for instance in the “transparent eye-ball” scene in Nature, moments of ecstasy make visible everything at once: “I am nothing. I see all” (CW, 1:10). Even in his mature writings, which are often described as less ecstatic and instead focused on the stubborn realities of the everyday, the inspirational power of extraordinary vision remains his chief concern, even if the ecstatic experience of total vision becomes replaced by serial evanescence. In “Poetry and Imagination,” Emerson writes: “Every man may be, and at some time a man is, lifted to a platform whence he looks beyond sense to moral and spiritual truth, and in that mood deals sovereignly with matter, and strings worlds like beads upon his thought” (CW, 8:40). Relations appear as a string of beads, serially one after another, and, as in the early instances of inspired vision, these relations bind together what heretofore was

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known only separately: “All is symbolized. Facts are not foreign, as they seem, but related” (CW, 8:40). Encapsulated in these statements we find a theory of aesthetic effect, which focuses on the activation of the reader’s imagination. As Emerson phrased it once in a conversation, “the most interesting writing is that which does not quite satisfy the reader. Try and leave a little thinking for him. … A little guessing does him no harm, so I would assist him with no connections.”9 It is not merely the case that the reader provides such connections. Rather, the reader’s activation produces an imaginary effect of limitless connectivity, and ultimately pure potentiality. It is as if the textual suggestion of specific links, which are opaque to logical reconstruction, produces the impression that if one only enters the right state of mind, everything will turn out to be linked. I would like to suggest that the inspirational effect of sensing limitless connectivity constitutes a particular type of self-recognition. But what is self-recognition? In The Course of Recognition, Paul Ricoeur differentiates between three different usages of recognition in ordinary language, each of which he elucidates by reconstructing the philosophical debates that surround these meanings. He distinguishes between recognition as identification (understood as an epistemological process of forming knowledge), self-recognition (by which he means primarily the attribution of agency and responsibility to oneself, but which also includes the lifelong project of fashioning a narrative identity), and finally mutual recognition (epitomized by the passive state of being recognized, which he discusses following Hegel and Axel Honneth). Ricoeur’s aim is to demonstrate a movement from one meaning to another so that what seems to demarcate different sets of meaning in everyday language can be bridged through philosophical reflection: “This, in broad strokes, is how the dynamic I could begin to call a ‘course’ of recognition becomes apparent—I mean the passage from recognition-identification, where the thinking subject claims to master meaning, to mutual recognition, where the subject places him- or herself under the tutelage of a relationship of reciprocity, in passing through self-recognition in the variety of capacities that modulate one’s ability to act, one’s ‘agency’.”10 Emerson’s theory, however, challenges Ricoeur’s account because self-recognition and mutual recognition appear as intricately interwoven, rather than as separate but bridgeable. Even mutual recognition—the state of



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being recognized—ultimately gains meaning for the self only if this mutuality is actively recognized in a process of self-recognition. Such recognition is dependent not on the other’s affirmation of the self, but rather on the other (whether person, thing, or text) making legible something that the self is not yet. Elsewhere, Ricoeur himself usefully describes the experiential effect of reading that underlies the Emersonian hybrid of self-recognition and mutual recognition: It is not a question of imposing upon the text our finite capacity for understanding, but of exposing ourselves to the text and receiving from it an enlarged self, which would be the proposed existence corresponding in the most suitable way to the world proposed. … In other words, if fiction is a fundamental dimension of the reference of the text, it is no less a fundamental dimension of the subjectivity of the reader. As reader, I find myself only by losing myself. Reading introduces me into the imaginative variations of the ego.11 Finding oneself by losing oneself in the aesthetic encounter: this to me sounds like an accurate formula for the Emersonian idea of self-recognition. But if the “recognitional understanding” of the impersonal amounts to a self-recognition in which the encounter of the self with an other leads to an imaginary enlargement, there is yet another dimension of Emerson’s theory of recognition we have to consider. To this Emerson most often refers by the term “approbation.” A good example to show the contrast with recognition is found in “Circles”: We thirst for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of nature is love; yet, if I have a friend, I am tormented by my imperfections. The love of me accuses the other party. If he were high enough to slight me, then could I love him, and rise by my affection to new heights. A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better. (CW, 2:182) While recognition seems to be a function of our own cognition, albeit activated by the presence of the other, approbation is more like a gift: something given to us by another. (It is not accidental that in Emerson’s essay “Gifts” we find a parallel sentence: “We

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do not quite forgive a giver,” CW, 3:94.) Because we do not have an equal share in the act of being approved, Emerson is much less comfortable with approbation than with recognition. Approbation tends to limit us and to bring to a halt our growth, unless the friend is our superior and approves of us by slighting us. Recognition, for Emerson, stresses the active component of the self in transgressing the existing self. Approbation, on the other hand, stresses the judgment of the self by society.12 Emerson, in effect, sets up a dual economy recognition, but doing so, he does not simply sever self-recognition from social recognition. But how does he relate the two? His early texts often suggest that self-recognition—entrance into the impersonal—might compensate for the lack of social recognition. In this sense, selfrecognition is dependent on social misrecognition (which suggests, as I have already pointed out, that Emersonian self-recognition contains a dimension of the state of being recognized, for how else could it compensate for the state of not being recognized?). Later on, Emerson increasingly revises the compensatory understanding of self-recognition and interweaves it with social recognition in a more complex manner. The other turns out to be both enabling and threatening, or more precisely, enabling in posing a threat.13 In “Montaigne, or The Skeptic” (which is the center piece of Representative Men, from 1850) Emerson defines the skeptic as the mediator between the philosopher, who aspires to become one with the spirit, and the man of action, for whom the domain of the spirit is irrelevant. The skeptic searches for the divine, just like the philosopher, but unlike the latter, he is aware that he can never be quite sure that he has found the spirit. Thus, he comes to a conclusion completely contrary to that of the philosopher. While the philosopher strives to expand the self—as captured in the sentence from the “Divinity School Address,” “He learns that his being is without bound” (CW, 1:77)—the skeptic decides to limit the sphere of the self. As Emerson puts it, “This … is the ground of the skeptic, this of consideration, of selfcontaining, not at all of unbelief” (CW, 4:90). Self-containment opens up a “position taken up for better defence, as for more safety, and one that can be maintained” (CW, 4:91). The very act of recognition threatens the extension of the self beyond all limits. But if Emerson now prescribes defense, self-containment, and the affirmation of distance between persons, he does so on that grounds that what is



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thereby defended is not the possession of some fixed identity, but pure mobility itself. The threats of the other save us from a threat even more severe: that of losing sight of the other, drifting off on the sea of our fancy, which constitutes the arrest of the self while it deceptively seems to mark the self’s growth. In its early and later formulations alike, Emersonian self-recognition thus describes a mode of being-in-thinking which depends on the economy of social recognition without being reducible to it. This has potentially unsettling ramifications for recent debates on social theories of recognition, and the political strategies they have helped devise: taking seriously the idea that the thrill of selfrecognition partakes of, and yet is irreducible to, social mechanisms of recognition poses a challenge to theorists of recognition, such as Axel Honneth and Charles Taylor, whose normative goal we might describe, in all brevity, as the creation of a society that accords just recognition to its individual members.14 The moral philosophy approach to recognition assumes that mutual recognition will lead to the formation of a positive and coherent self-identity. On this view, the recognition of the other will ensure that one recognizes and respects oneself. What Emerson suggests, however, is that there is a further dimension to recognition that we might think of as centrifugal. Here the self doesn’t use the recognition of the other to tie oneself to an affirmative self-image, which corresponds to a feeling of justice. Rather the enlarged self experienced in the moment of inspiration unhinges the self and grants recognition by making the self answerable to endless series of metonymic connectivities. These contrary logics of social and self-recognition coexist. What’s more, their realms are not separate. Scenes of eloquence, for instance, cater to both types of recognition at once. Eloquent speakers have the capacity to withhold or grant their listeners a type recognition that will afford or deny a positive relation to the self. But eloquence also has the function of setting off the contrary logic of Emersonian self-recognition, which unravels the bounded self. A politics of recognition is hard-pressed to accommodate the dimension of self-recognition because self-recognition depends on overcoming the self’s boundedness aspired to by the politics of recognition. Moreover the experience of self-recognition cannot be intersubjectively recognized because it cannot be represented in its fullness: all one can do is create the conditions conducive for engaging in self-recognition.

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In order to address this dilemma, social theory and moral philosophy need to account for the interplay of both these logics of recognition, and the divergent desires to which these two logics answer. Freeing individuals from demeaning self-images or invisibility is a political project that remains incomplete if it isn’t brought into touch with the—primarily aesthetic—dimension of self-recognition that is incommensurable with social approbation. As we learn from Emerson, the desire for recognition in democratic societies is in part the desire for what cannot be recognized intersubjectively, and for what will never be realized politically.

II If Emerson’s theory of self-recognition hinges on an aesthetic effect produced by the text, Emerson must base his theory on a particular aesthetics or style. As Sharon Cameron demonstrates, for Emerson the question of style is more than a theoretical problem: it links his theory of the impersonal to his own practice of writing. For Cameron, Emerson’s reliance on style is ultimately responsible for the shortcomings of his theory of the impersonal. In this section, I will try to give voice to a muted argument I see encapsulated in Cameron’s critique, an argument in which the relation of theory and style is conceptualized differently than in her overt line of reasoning. Although her conclusions differ from my own, Cameron’s acute analysis of Emerson’s style has much in common with the reception aesthetics of unlimited connectivity I have tried to reconstruct from his writings in the previous section. She, too, places emphasis on the way the Emersonian text becomes organized around metonymic relations. Pointing to the wide variety of terms with which Emerson associates the impersonal throughout his essays— she singles out “Whim,” the “involuntary,” “genius,” “intuition,” and “the soul” (WoL, 92)—Cameron concludes that, unlike a systematic thinker, Emerson makes no attempt to confer consistency on his designations, or even to establish connections among terms that occupy the same structural position in different essays. … whether these are different terms for the



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same phenomenon remains, I believe, intentionally unaddressed. The consequence for a reader is to encounter phenomena which clearly overlap without being clearly identical. And this nonidenticality seems a purposeful block to the summarizing definition which could characterize the impersonal, but which cannot do so here because the experiences in which it is shown to be situated eschew logical “comparative” relations. … Thus again we note the asymmetry of terms by which manifestations of the impersonal defy systemization: they are connected in this discourse, but not logically so. Their originality lies in their deliberately unexplained relations often perceptible as mere contiguity. (WoL, 92) Cameron suggests two different approaches to interpreting Emerson’s poetics of a-logical contiguity. In one train of thought, Emerson performs the impersonal: “The voice of no private person, Emerson’s voice in his essays is public and is engaged in a performance. What is being performed is something like ‘ravishment’ as a consequence of self-abandonment” (WoL, 93). In Cameron’s competing interpretation, which plays the dominant role in her argument, Emerson offers a representation of the impersonal: “What replaces philosophical logic is something like the representation of ravishment, a phenomenon all the more difficult to recognize because it occurs in relation to experiences that seem … categorically different from each other” (WoL, 92). In this reading, style is not so much an instrument with the help of which a particular experience can be made accessible to the reader. Rather, style is propositional: a mode of representation which pursues the goal of getting to the truth of the object of knowledge. “[T]he point of the essays’ climactic figures is the representation of an encounter whose truth is somehow tied to its stylistic or rhetorical singularity” (WoL, 98–9). Cameron launches her critique of Emerson’s impersonal on the grounds that his representation of it is faulty: “The deficiency in Emerson’s representation of the impersonal lies peculiarly in the missing sense of the person” (WoL, 102). According to Cameron, Emerson speaks in an inimitable and unrepeatable style, but rather than marking a particular individual, the voice that emerges from this style is itself impersonal: “Emerson [is] writing in no man’s voice” (WoL, 98). But if Emerson wants to describe the experience

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of gaining access to the impersonal, his impersonal voice turns into a liability: how, Cameron wonders, can the transition from person to impersonal be depicted truthfully if the Emersonian speaker is always already impersonal? “[T]o speak without the registration of any affect that would contest the construct of impersonality … leaves undisclosed the experience of impersonality (ravishment), to which the essays, from first to last, seductively promise access” (WoL, 107). In this last sentence (which constitutes the closing words of her essay), Cameron effectively attempts to straddle the gulf between her two approaches to reading Emerson’s impersonal: If Emerson fails in “disclosing” the experience of impersonality, he fails at representing it—at telling his readers what the experience of ravishment is like. But if Emerson’s essays “promise access” to that experience, what they claim to be doing is precisely not to represent but rather to enact it. In the first version, we gain an understanding of a particular experience; in the second version, we become enabled to have the experience ourselves. Though this line of thinking is not made explicit by her overall argument, Cameron’s formulation seems to put in touch representation and performance, which suggests that representation is itself a “performative act” and that Emerson’s essays indeed promise to perform the experience of the impersonal by representing it.15 I want to follow Cameron in this direction and rethink the relation of the person to the impersonal from this angle. The aesthetic effect of imaginary self-recognition, which, on my reading, is tantamount to the experience of accessing the impersonal, can be facilitated by texts in principally two different ways. The first applies most directly to narrative fiction and is captured in Ricoeur’s idea of self-enlargement through fiction quoted in the previous section. Recall that according to Ricoeur, the reader finds herself by losing herself through her engagement with the “proposed”—that is, fictional—world of the story. A more precise version of this argument has been developed by Winfried Fluck, who proposes that the reader actualizes the fictional world by creating analogies to aspects of the story taken from her own life. In this case, the imaginary recognition afforded by the reading experience results from the reader’s articulation of aspects of the self which have so far not been acknowledged. The enlarged sense of self here arises from what Gadamer calls “the joy of recognition,” which



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“is rather the joy of knowing more than is already familiar.”16 When the fictional narrative in question is itself thematically concerned with a quest for social recognition, the reader may moreover imaginarily partake of the characters’ quest (without necessarily identifying with the character), and thus experience the drama of the fluctuations of recognition and misrecognition.17 I take Cameron’s critique of Emerson to be located at precisely this point. If we take to heart her argument that Emerson’s failure of representing the impersonal bars the reader experiential access to the impersonal, that argument presupposes an ideal case which Emerson falls short of. Ideally, Emerson should have offered a kind of narrative of the path from person to impersonality which the reader actualizes in the imaginary by finding analogies from her own life, thereby facilitating her own imaginary experience of the impersonal. Indeed, Cameron singles out “the heroic” as the narrative in which Emerson’s impersonal is embedded. After briefly sketching the heroic from Homer to its American reinvention by the likes of Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, and Thoreau, she concludes that “the heroic implies a person’s contact with the real” (WoL, 102). In the heroic narrative we encounter a character of limited power—a mere person—who takes on a vastly superior force (divine or “real”) and gets a glimpse of the awe-inspiring source of that force: the impersonal. If we assume that our readerly access to the impersonal results from our imaginary actualization of a person’s (more precisely: a fictional character’s) contact with the impersonal, then Cameron’s point seems irrefutable: Disregarding the person, Emerson’s heroic lacks the hero. But without it, we cannot experience the impersonal. There is, however, an alternative way of conceptualizing the performative work of the Emersonian text. Here the path from person to the impersonal differs from the model just described in so far as the movement from one to the other is not a matter of representation at all. At the heart of the matter lies a different use of Emerson’s style of a-logical contiguity. Emerson relied on this use for his own praxis as a writer and popular lecturer. In my Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge I have argued that Emerson’s career as a popular lecturer forms the cultural-historical backdrop of his stylization of philosophy, and his concomitant elevation of style to philosophical substance.18 Emerson’s style furnished him with

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an effective means of enabling his audience members and readers to have an experience of inspiration, and this experience largely followed the tenets developed in his own theory of recognition. Whereas the narrative fiction model of readerly recognition is centered on the idea that recognition emerges from the reader’s imaginary recreation of the written text by way of her own analogies, the Emersonian text enables an experience of readerly recognition which becomes available to the reader in light of the text’s contiguous assertions whose logical links are suspended. As we have learned from Cameron’s analysis, Emerson produces assertions and descriptions whose logical connectedness or whose difference from each other is difficult to reconstruct logically. Nonetheless, these assertions are uttered as if the rules of logic remained fully in place. The Emersonian speaking voice is never confounded by its own discourse, even when it proudly admits to its own self-contradictions. This enables the reader to imaginarily experience an excess of the relatedness of things (in a way that is not outright illogical, but that resists summary), of the capacities of her own mind, and of her participation in the sheer connectivity of the impersonal. For this experience to take place, the absence of the person in the text is not a shortcoming but rather an asset. The presence of the person would shift the listener’s and reader’s activity to that of the narrative fiction model. The person’s absence, on other the hand, allows for the listener’s or reader’s undisturbed being-inthinking. Whereas in narrative fiction the movement from person to impersonal becomes the listener’s by actualizing the movement of a fictional character, the Emersonian text allows the reader and listener to experience that movement without any fictional model. This marks the key difference between reading Emerson’s essays and works of fiction: The absence of the person in the text helps overcome the person of the reader. In other words, the fact that Emerson does not recognize the particular person in his text allows the particular person of the reader to recognize herself in the impersonal. Emerson bypasses the performative act of representation by foregrounding instead the sheer performativity of his stylized philosophical discourse. In Sharon Cameron’s reading, the absence of the particular person produces a further lacuna in Emerson’s account of the impersonal: “Although the essays perform the task of ravishment—that



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process through which the person is annihilated by the impersonal—no sacrifice is customarily really exacted, because rarely is it the case that a discrete or particularized self initially occupies the subject position” (WoL, 94). Emerson, according to Cameron, glosses over the fact that the movement from person to impersonal constitutes not only a gain but also a sacrifice, and thus omits from its representation the conflicted response the impersonal in fact elicits: “Ambivalence about the impersonal is the one contradiction Emerson successfully resists” (WoL, 107). But if we comprehend the impersonal as a state that awaits the self in the experience of Emersonian self-recognition, ravishment is not precisely a process through which the self is annihilated. Annihilation is rather what meets the boundaries of the self. As a consequence, the self becomes opened up to the endless possibilities that mark the unlimited connectivity of the impersonal. Moreover, the abandonment of the self is a mere momentary event, producing ever new—provisional—enclosures of the self (or “circles,” as Emerson calls it in his famous essay of the same name). Hence the striving for selfrecognition—for the sense of the widening of the self—is insatiable, and the experience of the impersonal requires constant renewal. In short, while the experience of the impersonal transforms the self, it would be an overstatement to say that it destroys the self, for this would presuppose a self whose existential principle is based on bounded fixedness, and whose transformation must be conceptualized as a serial proliferation of separate selves.19 As Cameron remarks, Emerson displays no ambivalence about the impersonal. What appears as highly ambivalent, however, is the striving for the impersonal. For when that striving—which I read as Emerson’s version of the desire for recognition—meets with failure (or: with misrecognition), it can turn into aggressiveness directed against the self. Similar to his concept of recognition, Emerson’s idea of misrecognition differs from the current usage of that term.20 Generally, today’s recognition theorists distinguish between two kinds of misrecognition. On the one hand, we feel misrecognized when we receive negative feedback. Here we are confronted with a negative image of our self, which we are in danger of integrating into our attitude toward our self. The second form of misrecognition can be called nonrecognition, and it is typically described as invisibility. Here we do not even feel acknowledged, which seemingly constitutes an even more fundamental case of

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misrecognition. Considering Emerson’s transformation-centered idea of recognition, we have to come up with yet another definition of misrecognition: according to his logic, we feel misrecognized whenever we feel that a social relationship by which we have grown has collapsed. Emersonian misrecognition, then, does not exist primarily in an internalized, demeaning image or in the feeling of being an invisible nobody, but in stagnation. Although this argument presents an Emerson who is virtually absent from the critical literature, one of his reactions to misrecognition leads to an embrace of stagnation as his own unalterable failure. When this happens, Emerson redirects the striving for transformative recognition to the stagnating self. In these cases, failure is asked to transform the self without turning failure into success. This becomes apparent from two journal passages written in the winter of 1839–40, during a time in which Emerson works on his first book of essays as well as on his lecture series “The Present Age,” presented between December 4, 1839, and February 12, 1840, at the Masonic Temple in Boston. Emerson’s mind at this point in his life is occupied by the vagaries of sociality, whether it concerns the theory and practice of friendship or the relationship to his audiences. The full range of these apprehensions bears on the two journal passages. Here is the first entry, entitled both “Eloquence” and “Lyceum.” Here is all the true orator will ask, for here is a convertible audience, & here are no stiff conventions that prescribe a method, a style, a limited quotation of books & an exact respect to certain books, persons or opinions. No, here everything is admissible, philosophy, ethics, divinity, criticism, poetry, humor, fun, mimicry, anecdotes, jokes, ventriloquism, all the breadth & versatility of the most liberal conversation; highest, lowest, personal, local topics, all are permitted, & all may be combined in one speech;—it is a panharmonicon,— every note on the longest gamut, from the explosion of cannon, to the tinkle of a guitar. Let us try if Folly, Custom, Convention & Phlegm cannot hear our sharp artillery. Here is a pulpit that makes other pulpits tame & ineffectual with their cold, mechanical preparation for a delivery the most decorous,— fine things, pretty things, wise things, but no arrows, no axes, no nectar, no growling, no transpiercing, no loving, no enchantment. Here he may lay



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himself out utterly, large, enormous, prodigal, on the subject of the hour. Here he may dare to hope for ecstasy & eloquence. (JMN, 7:265) Emerson is celebrating here the widest possible scope for eloquence, and his breathless enumeration of the plentitude of the permissible, vis-à-vis “Folly, Custom, Convention & Phlegm,” conjures the ecstasy of eloquence that is his subject. The enormous stature of the topic of oratory is founded on Emerson’s conviction that in the lecture halls individuals can enter a communicative relationship of the highest sort, in which both parties mutually profit from each other. Eloquence, in Emerson’s vision, has the potential to achieve what friendship rarely ever does: it can enrich both sides through entry to a transgressive relationship, in which all the boundaries of conformist societies are left behind. This passage is eye-opening insofar as it sketches the bodily and performative aspects of the exalted, spiritual, and ideal relationship, to which belong in Emerson’s mind both friendship and public oratory:21 there are “no stiff conventions … everything is admissible.” And not only that: all registers of human expression are combined in one speech. In this way, words become “sharp artillery”: fully materialized, they possess the power to destroy the confines of convention. Emerson is clearly not discussing the institution of the lyceum abstractly here. Rather, he is laying out how he would like to see himself: as an eloquent orator who transgresses the confines of decorous presentation. In other words, he is naming his goals for the upcoming lecture series at the Masonic Temple. On February 19, 1840, one week after having finished the lecture course, he takes stock of the series, in economic and spiritual terms. It is only now that we fully understand the degree to which he was addressing himself when he spoke of the “pulpit that makes other pulpits tame & ineffectual with their cold, mechanical preparation for a delivery the most decorous.” These lectures give me little pleasure. I have not done what I hoped when I said, I will try it once more. I have not once transcended the coldest self-possession. I said I will agitate others, being agitated myself. I dared to hope for extasy [sic] & eloquence. A new theatre, a new art, I said, is mine. Let us see if philosophy, if ethics, if chiromancy, if the discovery of the

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divine in the house & the barn, in all works & all plays, cannot make the cheek blush, the lip quiver, & the tear start. I will not waste myself. On the strength of Things I will be borne, and try if Folly, Custom, Convention, & Phlegm cannot be made to hear our sharp artillery. Alas! alas! I have not the recollection of one strong moment. A cold mechanical preparation for a delivery as decorous,— fine things, pretty things, wise things,—but no arrows, no axes, no nectar, no growling, no transpiercing, no loving, no enchantment. (JMN, 7:338–9) Emerson’s writing technique commonly embraced quotation and copying: he quoted widely from his reading notes, only sometimes naming the source, and often mixing quotation and paraphrase. In his essays and lectures he frequently recycled passages written in letters and in his journals (that was of course the major function of the journal in the first place). And he developed a whole theory about the mutual dependence of genius and quotation.22 But what is peculiar about the above passage is that it presents a form of self-quotation that justifiably can be called masochistic. Emerson has fallen short of his ideal performance, and in his own estimation he has reached no one: “I have not transcended the coldest self-possession.” The entire passage takes ad absurdum the compensatory strategy of turning to self-recognition upon the experience of misrecognition. By quoting himself, he demonstrates that he can create the ecstasy of eloquence once again by writing in his journal, alone, finding friendship in his own text (self-quotation also becomes a self-doubling). Emerson’s lesson is not that we can turn failure into success. Rather, we can only succeed in failure. His failure is not only negative (centered on what he has not achieved) but positive: it binds him to that which he hates—the cold, mechanical, and decorous. I briefly want to mention how radically Emerson’s masochistic self-quotation differs from the shame which Stanley Cavell theorizes as an element of what he calls Emersonian perfectionism. In Cavell’s model, shame is a moment that marks the movement from one self to the next, with the next self becoming accessible through an act of transformative recognition of and by the other.23 By contrast, Emersonian masochism is an attempt to succeed at self-transformation despite the breakdown of the relationship of recognition. But whereas before Emerson habitually declared such breakdowns



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valuable for achieving the higher self without the social other, in this case the only option for achieving self-transformation lies in potential self-destruction. Slightly modified, what I am describing, then, corresponds to Sigmund Freud’s late concept of masochism, developed in his 1924 essay “The Economic Problem in Masochism.” There Freud describes masochism as deriving from the death drive. The death drive is eager to disintegrate the organism, “and bring each elemental primary organism into a state of inorganic stability.” But insofar as primal masochism is erotogenic, the death drive is libidinally bound up with the organism. Thus, “[masochism’s] dangerousness lies in its origin in the death-drive, which correlates to that part of the latter that escaped deflection onto the outer world. But since, on the other hand, it has the value of an erotic component, even a person’s self-destruction cannot occur without a libidinal gratification.”24 Similarly to Freud’s model, Emerson’s self-quotation constitutes a force aimed at self-transformation through aggressive acts against the self. It is as if the attempt to access the impersonal contains an enormous risk: if the attempt fails, it will be repeated over and over, but with its direction fatally inverted, so that self-destruction, to use Freud’s terms, becomes a source of libidinal gratification. Emersonian masochism betrays the menacing potential contained in the idea that the impersonal can be reached through a self-recognition that originates in sociality.

Notes 1

Sharon Cameron, “The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson’s Impersonal,” Impersonality: Seven Essays, Chicago, IL: University Press of Chicago, 2007, pp. 79–107, p. 82 (hereafter abbreviated as “WoL”). In what follows I will not consider Cameron’s earlier article, “Representing Grief: Emerson’s ‘Experience’,” likewise included in Impersonality (pp. 53–78), although it has been equally influential in Emerson studies. I think of her Beautiful Work: A Meditation on Pain (Durham, NH: Duke University Press, 2000) as a more crucial intertext for “The Way of Life By Abandonment,” although I do not have the space to undertake a comparative reading in this essay. In Beautiful Work, Sharon Cameron considers pain’s impersonal dimension and the requirements that have to be met for

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its adequate representation: “To be competent to speak of pain is to speak of pain that isn’t yours. This requires experiencing pain that is yours. Pain experienced as if it were your own” (p. 1). 2

Throughout her essay, Cameron quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte, New York: Library of America, 1983, pp. 386–7 (hereafter abbreviated as “EL”). This edition slightly differs from The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson et al., 10 vols. to date, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971, the edition from which I prefer to quote (hereafter abbreviated as “CW,” followed by volume number and page number).

3

Mutuality should in this context be distinguished from reciprocity. The act of mutually reading the impersonal in each other’s faces is not per se reciprocal because reading itself is not reciprocal. The act of reading, say, a book, does not require the book to reciprocally read the reader.

4

This is the Emerson who famously contends, in “The American Scholar,” that “there is then creative reading as well as creative writing” (CW, I:58)—a milder version, we might say, of Novalis’s dictum that “the true reader must be the extended author. He is the higher instance, who receives his subject-matter after it has already been prepared by a lower instance” (Novalis, Werke, ed. Gerhard Schulz, München: C. H. Beck, 2001, p. 352, my translation). On the links between Emerson’s romantic poetics and the turn to hermeneutics, see Robert D. Richardson, “Schleiermacher and the Transcendentalists,” Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, eds Charles Capper and Conrad E. Wright, Boston, MA: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999, distributed by Northeastern University Press, pp. 121–47, as well as Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009. See also Jan Stievermann, “’We want men … who can open their eyes wider than to a nationality’: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Vision of an American World Literature,” in Emerson for the Twenty-First Century: Global Perspectives on an American Icon, ed. Barry Tharaud, Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2010, pp. 165–215.

5

For the following argument, I adopt some formulations used in Chapter 4 of my Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge, Hanover: University Press of New England, 2010.

6

The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843–1871, eds



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Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, 2 vols., Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001, vol. 2, p. 89 (hereafter abbreviated as “LL,” followed by volume number and page number). In the chapter entitled “Literature” from English Traits, Emerson associates this thought explicitly with Schelling: “the identity-philosophy of Schelling, couched in the statement that ‘all difference is quantitative’” (CW, 5:136). Schelling here serves as one of many examples of a class of thinkers throughout time who organized their thought around unity rather than diversity. As the editors of the Collected Works point out, Emerson’s source is not Schelling himself, however, but John Bernard Stallo, General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature, Boston, MA: Crosby and Nichols, 1848; (see CW, 5:323). 7

The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds William H. Gilman, et al., 16 vols., Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–82, vol. 3, p. 240 (hereafter abbreviated as “JMN,” followed by volume number and page number).

8

Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 47.

9

Charles J. Woodbury, Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson, New York: Baker and Taylor, 1890, p. 22.

10 Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 248. 11 Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, New York: Continuum, 2008, 72–85, pp. 84–5. 12 I have traced the Scottish Enlightenment roots of Emerson’s usage of “recognition” and “approbation” in “Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Dual Economy of Recognition” (Amerikastudien/American Studies 57.4, forthcoming 2013). I argue there that the development of Emerson’s theory of recognition is to some extent representative of the transition from Enlightenment to Idealist-Romantic thought systems. From such a perspective, Emerson’s idea of self-reliance becomes symptomatic of his break with the Scottish Enlightenment notion of approbation. In the context of the present article, however, Emerson’s use of approbation has already been assigned a role in the drama between self-recognition and social recognition. The split between these two scenes of recognition marks Emerson’s break with the Scottish tradition. 13 I elaborate on this point in my article “’The most indebted man’:

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The reconfiguration of conformity and non-conformity in Emerson’s Representative Men,” Conformism, Non-Conformism and Anti-Conformism in American Culture, eds Antonis Balasopoulos, Gesa Mackenthun, and Theodora Tsimpouki, Heidelberg: Winter, 2008, pp. 101–17. 14 For Honneth, see, for instance, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. For Taylor, see “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, eds Charles Taylor and Amy Gutman, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 25–73. 15 My formulation is meant to evoke Wolfgang Iser’s essay “Representation: A Performative Act,” in Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, Baltimore, NJ: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, pp. 236–48. 16 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, New York: Continuum, 2003, p. 114. 17 For Fluck’s argument, see in particular “Reading for recognition,” New Literary History 44(1) (Winter 2013), pp. 45–67, and in “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer,” The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn, eds Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar, and Johannes Voelz, Hanover: University Press of New England, 2013, 237–64. See also Rita Felski, who, in The Uses of Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), reflects on the interconnectedness of the cognitive and social dimensions of recognition, and their importance to reading fiction: “Literary texts offer us new ways of seeing, moments of heightened self-apprehension, alternate ways of what Proust calls reading the self. Knowing again can be a means of knowing afresh, and recognition is far from synonymous with repetition, complacency, and the dead weight of the familiar. Such moments of heightened insight are not just personal revelations in a private communion between reader and text; they are also embedded in circuits of acknowledgment and affiliation between selves and others that draw on and cut across the demographics of social life” (48). 18 See particularly Chapter 2. I develop my reading by drawing on the accounts several of Emerson’s listeners (journalists, fellow speakers, and lay people) have provided of their experience. Most commonly, Emerson’s listeners describe how his performance expanded their own sense of logic and self. 19 Branka Arsić, by contrast, has compellingly argued that Emerson turned “flow into a universal ontological and existential principle, from Nature, where a river becomes an emblem of the ‘flux of all



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things’ … to ‘Quotation and Originality,’ where ‘all things are in flux,’ citing each other incessantly” (Arsić, On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 5). 20 For a fuller account of Emersonian misrecognition, see Chapter 4 of Transcendental Resistance. 21 In the essay “Friendship,” we find a moment that is equally exalting of the transgressive side of the relationship. Here, too, friendship resists the limits dictated by convention and leads to a climactic state described by Emerson with an almost Whitmanian metaphor of nakedness: “A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even these undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off” (CW, 2:119). Emerson presents both friendship and oratory as social arenas of sincerity, occasions for the experience of uplift, defined against the genteel values of autonomy, and, as we will see, particularly against self-possession. 22 See especially the “Shakspeare” chapter of Representative Men (CW, 4:107–25), and the essay “Quotation and Originality,” included in Letters and Social Aims (CW, 8:93–107). 23 Cavell writes, “Shame manifests the cost as well as the opportunity in each of us as the representative of each. It is why shame, in Emerson’s discourse—his contradiction of joy—is the natural or inevitable enemy of the attainable self, the treasure of perfectionism for democracy. … Emerson’s turn is to make my partiality itself the sign and incentive of siding with the next or further self, which means siding against my attained perfection (or conformity), sidings which require the recognition of an other—the acknowledgment of a relationship—in which this sign is manifest” (Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 30–1). 24 Sigmund Freud, “Das ökonomische Problem des Masochismus,” (originally published 1924), Gesammelte Werke, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1999, vol. 13, 369–84, p. 383 (my translation).

5 On the Matter of Thinking: Margaret Fuller’s Beautiful Work Vesna Kuiken

Pain is inevitable, but suffering is not. SHARON CAMERON, BEAUTIFUL WORK

Two concerns traverse the letters and journals of Margaret Fuller— pain and thinking. They are related by physical proximity, as pain, in her case, is most often located in the head. She writes about agonizing, debilitating headaches, and often understands them as having been aggravated by the operation of thinking that is, in turn, immobilized by pain. Yet, because she held thinking in high esteem, she was determined to find a way out of this vicious circle and escape the pain in order to continue to think. As I will be suggesting, Fuller alleviated her headaches through a peculiar pain-management practice that, by generating ecstasy, enabled her to displace herself from the pain. Instead of weakening the pain—which she was unable to do because drugs were not sophisticated enough—her own method consisted of preserving the pain and weakening the self. This practice eventually led her to dismiss the idea of the self as a unifying seat of perception, thoughts, and affects, and concoct a strange conception of personality that goes on experiencing the pain impersonally, without claiming it as its own.

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In what follows, I describe how Fuller developed this method by way of sustained attentiveness to pain, and how it eventually led her to the notion of an impersonal “Ecstatica”1—the idea of a self dislodged from personal identity. The argument proposed here is historical in that it takes into account the chronological trajectory of Fuller’s systematic attempts to alleviate her headaches.2 Crucial for my reading are Sharon Cameron’s two meditations on pain: the novel Beautiful Work and “The Practice of Attention,” an essay on Simone Weil.3 Although Cameron has not written on Margaret Fuller, her attempts to distinguish pain from suffering through meditation and impersonality have been central to my own understanding of Fuller’s life-long wrestling with the pitfalls and potentials of pain. In Beautiful Work Cameron’s narrator Anna embarks on a series of meditation retreats during which she is initiated into the technique of depersonalization by way of abstracting her self from her own desires, expectations and hopes. The purpose of these exercises is to reach a momentary state devoid of personal perspective that enables one to register the distinction between what Cameron calls “seeing” the world as it is, and “remembering” it through an individual point of view. The procedure consists of “look[ing] at objects closely and practic[ing] seeing them clearly … where you try to recognize the difference between seeing and remembering” (BW, iii). In disposing of personal viewpoint, one uncovers perspectivelessness, or what Cameron terms “a moment of innocence … before the burden of stories, and the belief in their causes and consequences” (BW, 2). The result of that process is a state akin to ecstasy in which consciousness is eclipsed, and one is exposed to affects but without any capacity to appropriate them. Although Cameron calls this state “seeing clearly” and “lucidly” (BW, iii, 2), the seeing is clear only insofar as it is unmarred by a personal vanguard.4 The clarity, in fact, is disorienting, even “shocking” (BW, ii), because the standpoint from which the world makes sense is removed. Anna learns to attain this kind of lucidity by way of understanding pain. Pain, according to her, is impersonal because it is prior to concepts, distinctions, or definitions: “Pain is original and pure. It is the first thing” (BW, 1). It becomes “my own” once the mind ascribes to it an experiential narrative of causality, quality, and duration. “Outside of a story,” Anna remembers, “pain didn’t



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look like my own. It was the narrative of pain that I recognized as mine. I did not recognize pain” (BW, 2, 3). Once pain is enfolded in a personalized narrative, it becomes suffering: “Pain doesn’t come from action or inaction. Pain isn’t anything you know, or I know. No one can free himself from pain. But suffering is a house you can unbuild. You have to keep the house whole enough so it doesn’t fall in and crush you. With great care you must dismantle it piece by piece” (BW, 120). Suffering is pain trapped in a narrative and embedded in the consciousness that unifies the self into a temporally coherent conglomerate of sensing, processing and interpretation. To distinguish pain from suffering, therefore, is to gradually dismantle the construction of personality through meditation that eventually eclipses consciousness and transforms the self. Cameron calls this process “work” because it resembles disassembling a house: How to see pain uncompounded? It would be like tearing down a house. I would have to start with the foundation in order to determine whether the house was dangerous to work on. … I would most certainly have to discover the sequence of the house’s construction in order to unbuild it. How to brace the walls while taking down the house? How to keep the standing walls from caving in on me? How not to be destroyed by this work? (BW, 3–4) The care with which the house is first studied and then dismantled suggests that the work of de-creation is not merely destructive; instead, it is building in reverse—taking the self apart, step by step. Furthermore, this kind of work consists of laboring on the self as form: not on the content of consciousness, but on the formal structure that enables it. Because it is attentive to form—transformative—this kind of work may be understood to be aesthetic, that is to say “beautiful.”5 Thus, the distinction between pain and suffering corresponds, for Cameron, to the initial distinction between seeing and remembering, where the former can be viewed as a depersonalized or immediate relation to the world, and the latter as the experience of the world mediated by personalized narrative. In other words, the practice of impersonality marks both the procedure of seeing neutrally and the procedure of understanding pain.6

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This is where Cameron’s association of pain with impersonality becomes relevant for my reading of Margaret Fuller. As I will argue, Fuller developed a similar practice of erasing personal identity through ecstasy in order to achieve an impersonal perspective that would remove her subjective participation in her headaches, leaving the mind to succumb to the neutrally objective pain. Although her ecstasies were not, like Anna’s, fostered by the technique of meditation, Fuller nevertheless arrived at similar inferences that helped her unfold ecstatic trances into a theory of what I will call material thinking and, consequently, a pain-management practice. The corollary to thus juxtaposing Cameron’s notion of impersonality with Fuller’s is significant beyond intertextual parallels and lines of influence, because it weighs heavily on our historical and critical positioning of Fuller within American Transcendentalism. Fuller, like Weil and Anna, understands herself to be a mystic: “I grow more and more what they will call a mystic,” she writes.7 But scholarship frequently identifies her mysticism with a type of individualism or idealism, failing to give it the serious consideration it merits.8 I take Fuller’s mysticism to be essential to understanding her work, as a procedure of turning away from any notion of personality. Fuller’s routine of attaining weariness and exhaustion, disciplined by a set of repetitive bodily practices, aims at cultivating the ecstatic erasure of consciousness by separating the will from its object, and energy from desire. No self is to be left standing during one of these ecstatic exercises. Additionally, in its potential to transcend and abolish personal experience, such radical practice of impersonality raises obvious political questions about rational agency, responsibility and the possibilities for collective action, and complicates the feminist perspectives through which Fuller’s work has been traditionally viewed. Fuller’s politics would, thus, have to be re-examined along the lines of her self-professed mysticism and engagement with pain.9 *** Throughout her life Fuller suffered from violent attacks of “nervous headaches.” Constant references to these painful states fill her journals and letters: “For nine long days and nights, without intermission, all was agony,—fever and dreadful pain in my head” (MMF, 1:154); and again: “A week of more suffering than I have



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had for a long time—from Sunday to Sunday—headache night and day! And not only there has been no respite, but it has been fixed in one spot—between the eyebrows!—what does that promise?— till it grew real torture” (MMF, 2:135). Fuller’s aches and weak health are among her contemporaries’ most frequent memories of her. Emerson, for example, notes in his reminiscences: “She was all her lifetime the victim of disease and pain. She was in jubilant spirits in the morning, and ended the day with nervous headache, whose spasms, my wife told me, produced total prostration” (MMF, 1:227). The severity of pain often led to immobility: both Fuller and her friends remember her body and mind being held captive by pain, while she was struck dumb during the assault. Emerson renders it in terms of victimization and bodily collapse; Fuller too identifies the seizures with “torture,” and calls pain her “black jailer” and a “tomb” (MMF, 2:135), underscoring the condition’s near cataleptic dimension: “This last day before preparing for the March steamer has brought me one of my bad headaches, of which I have not before had one for some time, and I feel paralyzed, not myself.”10 Her paralysis was sometimes total (“I lay bound hand and foot” [MMF, 1:40]), and sometimes severely debilitating, preventing her from performing even the least demanding daily activities: “I avoided the table as much as possible, took long walks and lay in bed, or on the floor in my room. I complained of my head, and it was not wrong to do so, for a sense of dullness and suffocation, if not pain, was there constantly” (MMF, 1:41). Fuller’s “nervous headaches” were a popular name for tic douloureux, a chronic pain condition known today as trigeminal neuralgia.11 The condition involves an irritation or inflammation of the trigeminal nerve, which results in spasmodic attacks of harrowing pain in the head, face, jaw and neck, and which can last hours and even days. According to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, the sensation associated with this disorder has been described as “the most excruciating pain known to humanity.”12 In the nineteenth century, trigeminal neuralgia was treated with rudimentary, often ineffective remedies. Fuller experimented with a number of them—from wet towels and cold patches, to various ointments, acids, bleeding, opium and mesmeric treatments. Most of them gave at best temporary relief. One of Fuller’s accounts tells just how helpless this condition made her even when she had recourse to strong medications:

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I have been very ill; last night the pain in my neck became so violent, that I could not lie still and passed a night suffering and sleepless. There were in the house no remedies and none to apply them. I went crying into town this morning, my nerves all ajar and the pain worse than ever; it was a sort of tic douloureux.—I brought out a very strong remedy and since applying it, have been asleep. Now, waking almost free from pain, earth seems almost as good as heaven. Still, it hurts me to lean on my head and write. I must look rather out of the window on the soft shadowy landscape, which still me. (LLMF, 74–5) A vivid portrayal of the condition’s paralyzing symptoms, this account chronicles Fuller’s state of mind during and after one of her seizures. With or without medications, she can’t think: when medicated, she is asleep; when in pain, she is unable to concentrate; and the aftereffect of a strong remedy is such that, when awake, she is neither entirely free from pain, nor focused enough to think. In the state in which she is “almost free from pain,” the difference between “earth” and “heaven” becomes inoperative, and so does her ability to make the distinctions necessary for the procedures of reasoning. Distinctions seem too sharp for her slow mind, and all she can do is diffuse attention into the monochrome “soft shadowy landscape” that is devoid of clarity and differentiating features. Monotonous sameness may calm her neuralgic attack but it is no mind-set conducive to writing.13 And, as I will be suggesting, although Fuller made repeated attempts to alleviate her headaches, these would have been insufficient had they not been channeled through her unusual idea that pain was inherently linked to thinking. “My head is very sensitive, and as they described the Spina Christi,” she wrote in a letter from 1840. “I shuddered all over and could have fainted only at the thought of its pressure on his head. … It seems to me I might be educated through suffering to the same purity.”14 The comparison with Christ’s crown of thorns conjures up the image of the physical effects that thoughts have on the head. Not only does the headache feel like spikes piercing the head, but the mere thought of the thorns’ pressure may cause pain and fainting. Fuller’s inclination to ascribe physicality and corporeal qualities to thoughts reinforces the bond between thinking and headaches. That bond proved instrumental for her uncommon notion of the



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materiality of thinking, the final consequence of which was Fuller’s theory of impersonality. The claim that she can attain impersonality through exposure to suffering (“I might be educated through suffering to the same purity”) is significant because it emphasizes the radically transformative potentials of pain. As she explains in another letter, the absence of personality attained through physical pain is a form of death: On [the subject of death] I always feel that I can speak with some certainty, having been on the verge of bodily dissolution. I felt at that time disengaged from the body, hovering and calm. And in moments of profound thought or feeling, or when, after violent pain in the head, my exhausted body loses power to hem me in, I have felt changes more important than then. I believe that the mere death of the body has no great importance except when it is in no sense accidental, that is, when the mind, by operations native to it, has gradually cast aside its covering, and is ready for a new one. But this is very seldom the case. Persons die generally, not as a natural thing, but from extraneous causes; then it must be a change only one degree more important than going to sleep.15 Death is important only insofar as it is the death of a mind profoundly transformed, in which case the reference is not to death in the usual sense, as termination of life. For Fuller, another kind of death—the termination of personality—is at work in the rare “moments of profound thought” or “after violent pain,” during which the mind dispenses with its “covering” of consciousness. (“Covering” is Fuller’s term for the consciousness that cloaks the mind into self-presence.) Consciousness may be forfeited only rarely, but its renunciation seems to be the only death that matters to Fuller: indeed, it is welcomed and desired as much as it is feared. Other deaths are “general,” induced by the accidental and external causes that do not constitute the “native” property of the self. Paradoxically, then, the essential property of a person amounts to person’s capacity to be disappropriated of their personal identity. That kind of death is the state the mystics call ecstasy, a state in which the self, like the house Anna describes in Cameron’s novel, is disassembled.

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In the sections that follow, I unfold Fuller’s assertion about the mind’s ability to abandon consciousness. I will argue that this mental capacity, which results in the surrendering of self-presence, was particularly important to Fuller because it allowed for the possibility of assuaging the pain by minimizing the self’s capacity to feel it. Similar to the ecstatic procedures cultivated by Anna and Simone Weil, Fuller’s avoidance of pain consisted of surrendering the personal perspective from which pain causes hurt as the narrative of “my own suffering.” But Fuller’s theory of impersonality, which can be reconstructed from the journals and memoirs of her childhood and which she began to explore by addressing the problem of pain, didn’t come about as an application of a generally acknowledged set of Buddhist or monastic practices. Instead, it emerged from her understanding of the mind as corporeal, and from her idea that headaches are the physical effect of thoughts on the mind. *** In the “Autobiographical Romance,” Fuller traces the origin of her headaches to strenuous childhood discipline, through which her father strove to “bring forward the intellect as early as possible” (MMF, 1:15). The rigorous daily regime he imposed kept her “feelings on the stretch,” “nerves unnaturally stimulated,” and the mind constantly agitated and “over-excited.” The routine finally led to a premature development of the brain, that made me a “youthful prodigy” by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism which at the time prevented the harmonious development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while later, they induced continual headache, weakness and nervous affections of all kinds. As these again re-acted on the brain, giving undue force to every thought and every feeling, there was finally produced a state of being both too active and too intense, which wasted my constitution and will bring me— even although I have learned to understand and regulate my now morbid temperament—to a premature grave. (MMF, 1:15) A peculiar materiality underlies her account. Although she knew that headaches were triggered by an irritation of a nerve (this is why



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they were called “nervous”), Fuller understood them to be inseparable from the activity of thinking. She associates an aching head with oversized thoughts, thoughts too big or too many to fit her small head. It is as if the brain swelled under the pressure of physically heavy thoughts,16 or as if it ached when thoughts impressed themselves on it—as when, in her reading Romeo and Juliet at a very early age, the story and its characters “thronged and burnt my brain” (MMF, 1:27); or when, after reading Plato for days on end, her head begins to hurt: “Theatetus I read with attention and great profit. In the midst of Philebus I was compelled to stop. My mind seems to be revenging itself for the force it was kept under so long by all sorts of freaks” (LMF, 2:106). The “freakish” thoughts that swarm and linger in her head ache by touching the mind which, in turn, hurts itself and produces headaches. That she viewed thoughts as tactile and material is corroborated in a letter to Jane Tuckerman: “I took up the study of German, and my progress was like the rebound of a string pressed almost to bursting. My mind being then in the highest state of action, heightened, by intellectual appreciation, every pang” (LMF, 1:347). Even if the first part of this account is a metaphor, the figural gives way to the literal in the second part where thoughts (“intellectual appreciation”) are identified with a stabbing sensation (“pangs”). Thoughts literally bruise her head by making the mind too tense.17 A year later, in her journal, Fuller ventured to establish a direct causal relation between her mental development and pain: “It would be curious to trace the singular traits of mind I exhibited up to my twenty first year to this ugly and very painful flush in the forehead,” a redness on the skin that began appearing as “a determination of the blood to the head” caused by excitement from intellectual stimulation.18 The thoughts that produce the headaches are, thus, also associated with blood that rushes to her head when the mind is “over-excited” (MMF, 1:17).19 The same sensorial quality ascribed to waking thoughts is attached to dreams—they, too, can cause headaches. In one of her journal entries Fuller recounts how she “went to bed with pain in the right side of my head. Could not sleep for a long time but when I did, dreamt that [a giant butterfly] settled on the left side of my forehead; I tried in vain to drive him away; he plunged its feet, bristling with feelers, deeper and deeper into my forehead till my pain rose to agony. I awoke with my hand on the left side of

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my forehead to which the pain had changed.”20 As implied in the case with Spina Christi,21 vivid images can cause pain, or cause it to move from one part of the body to another, by being impressed on the mind. But, importantly, this happens when consciousness is absent. The butterfly dream, Fuller continues, seemed “very illustrative of the influence of the body on the mind when will and understanding are not on the alert to check it.”22 Two points are worth singling out: that the dream depicts the situation in which consciousness is absent; and that the mind and the body, rather than being rendered separate, are seen as identical in situations when consciousness, or self-awareness (“will and understanding”), is absent. In being thus perceived as exerting physical pressure on the mind—dreams, thoughts, images, and ideas are understood to be a form of corporeality. But for thoughts to be impressed on the mind, the mind too must be understood to be corporeal. This is the point Fuller makes in a remarkable description of the effects of thinking on the “earthly” mind: I have long days and weeks of heartache; … this ache is like a bodily wound, whose pain haunts even when it is not attended to, and disturbs the dreams of the patient who has fallen asleep from exhaustion. There is a German in Boston, who has a wound in his breast, received in battle long ago. It never troubles him, except when he sings, and then, if he gives his voice with much expression, it opens, and cannot, for a long time, be stanched again. So with me: when I rise into one of those rapturous moods of thought, such as I had a day or two since, my wound opens again, and all I can do is to be patient, and let it take its own time to skin over. I see it will never do more. Some time ago I thought the barb was fairly out; but no, the fragments rankle there still, and will, while there is any earth attached to my spirit. Is it not because, in my pride, I held the mantle close, and let the weapon, which some friendly physician might have extracted, splinter in the wound? (MMF, 1:197) Not only is thinking directly associated with headaches—the more intense the thought, the longer its migrainous effects—but the thought that causes it is seen as an object (“the barb,” “the weapon”) injuring the head.23 The account is more of a report than a description, as there is nothing figural about it. There



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is a comparison but no metaphor. Fuller compares her hurting head to the wounded breast of the German; the parallels are drawn between his singing and her thinking; and between the permanence of their wounds (both only “skin over” and will get opened once again). But the accounts are literal because both wounds are corporeal. The unyielding materiality of thought and mind thus undermines the ideal, spiritual quality of the self, while fundamentally questioning the notion of consciousness, or self-presence, as the all-encompassing, unifying structure that keeps the self together and makes sense of its disparate sensorial experiences and perceptions. I call these thoughts material because they are equated with sensation, whereas the mind, by extension, is a sensing organ: “I had headache two or three days. … The outlines of all objects, the rocks, the distant sails, even the rippling of the ocean were so sharp that they seemed to press themselves into the brain” (LMF, 2:77). By rethinking the place of the mind in the hierarchy of the self, Fuller is deposing consciousness as the foundation of personal identity. If thoughts are corporeal and if the self is not ideal, she seems to be asking—who thinks? And if thinking is but a result of organic sensation, shouldn’t the self be understood as a collection of sense perceptions unified, as Sharon Cameron suggested in Beautiful Work, by nothing natural or essential, but by a narrative construct called “experience”? In other words, what remains in the aftermath of the mental eclipse is only the body. The question, then, is not only who thinks but to whom the body belongs. For, if consciousness is a construction rather than the essential appropriative seat of the self, the body then belongs to no one in particular. In Beautiful Work Anna gradually learns this through meditation: “My body is there, but it is not there. It is there, but it is not mine. It is there, but hollowed out” (BW, 63–4)—a body emptied of its proprietor. Anna learns what Fuller intuitively knew all her life about attaining impersonality: she masters the technique of meditation that dismantles her selfpresence and turns the mind into a “sense door” (BW, 12) on a par with vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch: “I see the entity that is ‘myself’ break up and crumble. Then I see the piece of myself I call ‘thinking.’ ‘Thinking’ is independent of any consciousness, which is individual and intentional. ‘Thinking,’ ‘touching,’ ‘swallowing,’ ‘tasting,’ ‘seeing,’ ‘hearing’ are separate as drops of rain are

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separate” (BW, 100). Reduced to a sixth sense, the mind has no capacity to impose itself on the other five: “Once I see my body disappear like this, it’s impossible to say ‘I am that!’” (BW, 51). Hence, when Anna defines the sensation of pain as “original and pure,” “the first thing,” having no cause (BW, 1), she doesn’t mean to single it out as some pre-identitarian moment in time that precedes and conditions the construction of the person.24 The originary purity, the firstness of sensation is, on the contrary, the outcome of the unbuilding of the self—the abdication of selfpresence, following which the sensations (of pain, heat, light, sweetness, joy, etc.) can no longer be attributed to one particular proprietor. Wearied by many hours of meditation, and sometimes by walking, running or chanting, Anna’s sense of self-presence gets annihilated: “I felt affectless. There was no place for affect to be located. In the place where a self was, I saw the contraption of the apperceptive mechanism shaking itself to pieces” (BW, 103–4). Like Anna’s, Fuller’s ecstasies were induced by physical exhaustion. Although Anna’s investment in ecstasy is to learn what pain is and Fuller’s is to find relief from pain, their beautiful work of eclipsing personality gestures toward the same outcome. *** I turn now to certain behavioral procedures in order to exemplify the ways in which Fuller cultivated these attempts to displace herself from pain by forgoing consciousness. These procedures can be loosely divided into three general groups—spinning, strenuous physical exercises, and walking (including sleepwalking)— the common denominator of which is the relinquishment of self-presence through self-exhaustion. Although Fuller habitually practiced all these activities as a child, it was not until her late twenties that she began to understand their full potential as a pain-management technique.

Spinning From as early as childhood Fuller had intuited that physical weariness was conducive to a state of mind she would later recognize as ecstatic. Her self-exhaustion procedures were



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distinctive: they resulted in prostration that led to the absence of consciousness during which the mind would continue to operate. A striking example is Mariana, Fuller’s fictional counterpart in the Summer on the Lakes, a girl characterized by a “love of wild dances and sudden song, freaks of passion and of wit.”25 Her love of intellectual and physical jitters is explained by a strange habit of excitable spinning that results in a loss of consciousness: She had by nature the same habit and power of excitement that is described in the spinning dervishes of the East. Like them, she would spin until all around her were giddy, while her own brain, instead of being disturbed, was excited to great action. Pausing, she would declaim verses of others, or her own, or act many parts, with strange catchwords and burdens, that seemed to act with mystical power on her own fancy, sometimes stimulating her to convulse the hearers with laughter, sometimes to melt them to tears. When her power began to languish, she would spin again till fired to re-commence her singular drama, into which she wove figures from the scenes of her earlier childhood, her companions, and the dignitaries she sometimes saw, with fantasies unknown to life, unknown to heaven or earth.26 Spinning releases the grip of consciousness and abolishes the mental focus. At the peak of ecstatic disorientation, Margaret/Mariana lapses into a kind of unconsciousness that doesn’t generate comatose blackouts or paralysis but instead fills her with the creativity of a powerlessness that doesn’t engage in interpretation—that doesn’t, in other words, favor one perspective over another. No longer solely her own self, she assumes the perspective without perspective that allows her to be everyone and no one simultaneously.27 In a journal entry from 1840, in which Fuller tried to record one of her ecstatic moments, mental discontinuity is reflected in the discontinuous nature of her utterance: Thoughts of Makaria and her stellar correspondences But I cannot think of other souls now. Mine is too fresh and living Understood wreaths of stars and the wandering of the Elysian grove. My head wrapped in my shawl I would listen to the music of earth then raise it and look straight into the secrets of the

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heaven. I fail the moon. Thoughts on lunacy. How could Swedenborg think children were in the moon. She makes me understand the attraction Sand finds in un front impassible I need to go wild when she rose and shriek No bliss for me. But now Nature suffices me, and often I rest in her centre as in the bosom of God! Shapes move across the valley. Abandon thyself to second sight28 DISTANT SHOUTS of laughter. Reflexions on kindred. Michel Angelo’s Sybils. Where is my tripod? Clearest moon. Heaven without a fleck or mark.29 The language is fragmentary and nonsensically multivocal, so much so that it seems to have originated from various unrelated sources or from a single source speaking in tongues. Punctuation is almost entirely omitted; capital letters imply the beginning of a new sentence but a period is often missing at the end, suggesting that the discourse is not a series, but a host of incongruous thoughts in the form of overlapping or dispersed utterances that belong either to more than one mind, or to a mind that is not one with itself—an ecstatic mind lacking the unifying point of reference that allows coherent interpretation. Just as thinking continues without the necessity of being ascribed to one particular mind, so the pain can go on without being felt by one particular subject.

Physical exercises The references to strenuous physical exercises, such as jumping, running, hitting, or climbing persist in Fuller’s journals and letters with a frequency of a pattern: “The peculiarity of my education had separated me entirely from the girls around,” she writes in the “Autobiographical Romance,” “except that when they were playing at active games, I would sometimes go out and join them. I liked violent bodily exercise, which always relieved my nerves” (MMF, 1:41). These exercises quickly exhausted her, bringing relief to the agitated nerves that produce her headaches and other pains. They sometimes even lead to a total blackout, such as when Mariana, in the Summer on the Lakes, overwhelmed by a strong feeling of anxiety, “suddenly threw herself down, dashing her



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head with all her force against the iron hearth, on which a fire was burning, and was taken up senseless.”30 At other times, the pain or anxiety are relieved by the activities that cause her to collapse into sleep: “Alone she went to her room, locked the door, and threw herself on the floor in strong convulsions. For some hours terrible anxiety was felt, but at last nature, exhausted, relieved herself by a deep slumber.”31 Most often, however, the goal of exhaustion was to wear the body down in such a way that consciousness, rather than founder, could be uplifted without blocking the operation of thinking: “I had headache two of the three days we were [in Nahant] … I went out about six o’clock, and had a two hours’ scramble before breakfast. I do not like to sit still in this air, which exasperates all my nervous feelings; but when I can exhaust myself in climbing, I feel delightfully,—the eye is so sharpened, and the mind so full of thought (LMF, 2:76–7). Fuller doesn’t say whether her headache was removed, but the mind, after the body has been jaded by climbing, thinks clearly.

Walking Of all the procedures aimed at abolishing self-presence, walking— getting exhausted slowly and gradually—was the one that most helped Fuller develop a theory of material thoughts, while allowing her to understand the link between bodily exhaustion and the removal of consciousness as a pain-management method. In one of her journal entries she records what seems like an ordinary day: A terrible feeling in my head, but kept about my usual avocations. Read Ugo Foscolo’s Sepolcri, and Pindemonti’s answer, but could not relish either, so distressing was the weight on the top of the brain; sewed awhile, and then went out to get warm, but could not, though I walked to the very end of Hazel-grove, and the sun was hot upon me. Sat down, and, though seemingly able to think with only the lower part of my head, meditated literary plans (MMF, 1:154). The pain is not removed; it is only after a walk, which properly fatigues the body, that thoughts can be literally pushed to the other, “healthier,” side of the head. Hence, even if pain can’t be removed,

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thinking, material as it is for Fuller (“Thoughts move and push forth from my heart like young birds from the nest.”),32 can go on. At the age of twenty one Fuller experienced a strong ecstatic trance. The event made an impression so profound that it altered her relation not only to pain, but to the problem of personality as well. The episode, which she recounts in detail in a journal entry from 1840, can also be read as a reconstruction of the procedures she had been employing unknowingly all along and was to utilize regularly from then on in her struggles with pain. The entry describes how nine years earlier, in 1831, on Thanksgiving Day, she left the church feeling “wearied out with mental conflicts,” “strange anguish,” and “dread of uncertainty.” Seeking fresh air and respite from discomfort, she began to walk fast in the field: This was my custom at that time, when I could no longer bear the weight of my feelings, and fix my attention on any pursuit; for I do believe that I never voluntarily gave way to these thoughts one moment. The force I exerted I think, even now, greater than I ever knew in any other character. But when I could bear myself no longer, I walked many hours, till the anguish was wearied out, and I returned in a state of prayer. To-day all seemed to have reached its height. ... I went on and on, till I came to where the trees were thick about a little pool, dark and silent. I sat down there. I did not think; all was dark, and cold, and still. Suddenly the sun shone out with that transparent sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when it has been unkind all a cold autumn day. And, even then, passed into my thought a beam from its true sun, from its native sphere, which has never since departed from me. I remembered how, a little child, I had stopped myself one day on the stairs, and asked, how came I here? How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it? I remembered all the times and ways in which the same thought had returned. I saw how long it must be before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space, and human nature; but I saw, also, that it must do it,—that it must make all this false true,—and sow new and immortal plants in the garden of God, before it could return again. I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that was only because I thought self real that I suffered.



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… This truth came to me and I received it unhesitatingly (MMF, 1:140–1). Four temporal frames merge in this account: childhood, the period preceding the moment of ecstasy in November of 1831, the moment of ecstasy, and the time of writing in 1840. The earlier periods, marked by a similar set of events and actions, create a behavioral pattern. When upset and anxious, pressed by “the mental conflicts” that wouldn’t allow her to concentrate on anything, Fuller walked for hours in order to exhaust herself physically and reach tranquility. This was obviously the habit she had formed inadvertently long before Thanksgiving in 1831. That particular occurrence is significant insofar as it was impressive enough that she could positively identify it, in hindsight, as a moment of ecstatic experience. In 1831 she remembered how different moments in the past had brought on the same ecstatic dissociation from the self. The journal entry from 1840 reveals Fuller’s awareness that her actions in these situations resembled something of a methodical succession of steps: pain and anguish—walking—exhaustion— tranquility. She associated the ecstasy of 1831 with a number of earlier instances in which her own thought literally took her by surprise, as if it hadn’t originated from her own interiority or hadn’t been continuous with other thoughts. Every time, she seems to imply, a thought, like a sensation, would come from outside into her head, a head evacuated of a reference point (“I did not think” because “there was no self,” and then “a beam … passed into my thought”). It would disorient her perspective (“How came I here? How is it that I became this Margaret Fuller?”) and deprave her of the anchor in her self-presence (the self “was all folly”). At that moment the point of view is erased, since Fuller realizes in retrospect that “there was no self, that selfishness was all folly and the result of circumstance.” What she remembers retroactively is a caesura, a break and discontinuity in her personality. In Beautiful Work Anna is similarly perturbed and asks her teacher Isaac: “If there were gaps in consciousness, where was I during them?” (BW, 94). As if in reply, Fuller continues in the journal: “I was dwelling in the ineffable, the unutterable” (MMF, 1:141). Since perceptions cannot be gathered at a single interpretative point (“the limitations of space and time” have been erased), the glossolalic dimension of her mystical experience only emphasizes the evacuation of

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consciousness. She is unable to find words not because the experience is inexpressibly sublime, as some critics who tend to view Fuller as a Romantic would suggest, but because the thought does not belong to her, and hence, like in the ecstatic utterance recorded in the journal, there is nothing meaningful to express. The aim of Fuller’s walks parallels the goal of walking in Cameron’s Beautiful Work, although there, conversely, the mind is afflicted by the walker’s intense focus on the walk, which becomes a form of meditative attention (the mind gets “trapped in awareness without being able to exercise [its] will,” [BW, 12]). Withdrawn from the grip of consciousness, the body becomes estranged: “I walked … carrying my body as if it were an injured stranger. I guided myself with my hand along the wall. … As I walked, I had the sense that my body was held upright by a force that wasn’t my own. … My body had grown utterly strange” (BW, 86, 93). The strangeness of the body is owed to a temporary gap in consciousness induced by attention that blocks “will and understanding:” My head disappeared into the space around it. There was no single consciousness to unify what happened. There was hearingconsciousness, seeing-consciousness, feeling-consciousness, thinking-consciousness. These states of consciousness were distinct from each other like shiny beads on a string, polished beads set so close to each other I could barely see the beads were separate pieces. But not like that at all. Nothing, no filament, held the beads together (BW, 98). Whether by weariness or attention, walking or meditation, whether what withdraws is the body or the mind, the result is the same: thought (“thinking-consciousness”) is only one among many sense perceptions, and it belongs to no one.33 Fuller insists on this form of thought alienated from the self in a letter to Jane Tuckerman, from October 21, 1838, in which she recounts the same ecstatic episode from 1831. Having remembered how “seven years bygone” the “bitter months [of] a terrible weight had been pressing on me,” and how “at this time I never had any consolation, except in long, solitary walks and my meditations,” she continues: “One day lives always in my memory; one chestiest, heavenliest day of communion with the soul of things. It was



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Thanksgiving-day. I was free to be alone; in the meditative woods, by the choked-up fountain, I passed its hours, each of which contained ages of thought and emotion. I saw, then, how idle were my griefs; that I had acquired the thought of each object which had been taken from me” (LMF, 1:347). That objects are said to have been taken from her implies the conventional separation between me and not-me, a separation that etches out and defines our personhood in relation to the world. But at the moment of ecstasy, when consciousness is dimmed, Fuller assumes the position of every object around her while the contours of her self are erased and the distinction between thought and body, between herself and the objective world, disappears. This is the essence of the mystical experience of ecstasy. The account of it is prefaced in the letter to Tuckerman by a remarkable statement about pain: “I have lived to know that the secret of all things is pain, and that nature travaileth most painfully with her noblest products. I was not without hours of deep spiritual insight, and consciousness of the inheritance of vast powers. I touched the secret of the universe, and by that touch was invested with talismanic power which has never left me, though it sometimes lies dormant for a long time” (LMF, 1:347, emphasis added). That pain should be the “secret,” the underlying principle of all things, is unorthodox and parallels Cameron’s definition of pain as coming “before thought and independent of circumstance” (BW, 1). Pain, in other words, is the phenomenon of impersonality conceptually prior to consciousness, to the sense of self, and to personal suffering. Hence, Fuller’s crucial association of ecstasy with pain is only a reformulated insistence on the circumstantial nature of the self and the originary inevitability of pain. This is why, finally, in Cameron’s words, “pain is inevitable, but suffering is not” (BW, 19). But Fuller, I want to insist, takes things a step further: she becomes all pain—pain in the absence of its experience. For if pain is the world (“the secret of all things”), Fuller’s dissolution into that world presupposes that she turn into pain itself. Though such a move of hyperbolizing pain may seem to contradict her initial impulse to alleviate her suffering from headaches, it in fact aligns with her peculiar philosophy of impersonality. In becoming pain itself, in ceasing to maintain the separation between sensations and a sensing subject, the distinction between pain and the absence of it ceases to exist as well.34

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The power of the ecstatic event from 1831 suggests the experience of conversion. Fuller identifies it in precisely those terms in her 1840 journal: “My earthly pain at not being recognized never went deep after this hour. I had passed the extreme of passionate sorrow. … When I consider that this will be nine years ago next November, I am astonished that I have not gone on faster since; that I am not yet sufficiently purified to be taken back to God” (MMF, 1:141).35 The sense of a new beginning echoes through these confessions, suggesting the birth of a new self through a new insight into the nature of our relation to the world (“Still, I did but touch then on the only haven of Insight” [MMF, 1:142]). The new insight would enact Fuller’s pain-killing procedure by teaching her that ecstasy is the way to disengage pain from the self: “Since that day, I have never more been completely engaged in self. … but [I] am learning to be patient. I shall be all human yet; and then the hour will come to leave humanity, and live always in the pure ray. … Since then I have suffered, as I must suffer again, till all the complex be made simple, but I have never been in discord with the grand harmony” (MMF, 1:142, emphasis added). The temporal caesura (“since that day”) suggests a lesson learned: total immersion in the self by way of self-consciousness is no longer necessary. Fuller realizes that a different relation to the world is possible.36 She will continue to experience pain, but it will no longer be hers since no discord, no distinction would enable her to feel it, as she explicitly says in a letter to William H. Channing in November 1840: “I feel just now such a separation from pain and illness—such a consciousness of true life, while suffering most,—that pain has no effect but to steal some of my time. And I believe it compensates me by purifying me. I do not regret it in the least” (LMF, 2:184). The compensation, much like her “learning to be patient,” may seem to be organized narratively, as waiting for something. But the waiting is, in fact, for the moment of purification or disappearance into “the pure ray,” the point at which her human benchmark of consciousness and self-identity will have been abandoned. The waiting is for nothing in particular, then, since the purity of sensing that she is learning to be patient for is precisely what our lives are like ordinarily, when bodies are dislodged from “will and understanding.” Fuller’s patience is similar to Simone Weil’s, as Cameron reads it: not a desire for death, nor a desire at all. In Weil’s waiting “there is no differentiated sense of time, because the future is understood to be



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just like the past. … There is only pointless waiting—which is to say, waiting that is not waiting at all, but rather waiting that has become being. For once waiting is not intelligible in terms of any goal, there is only the automaticity of an elemental state, enough to satisfy any craving for lifelessness. But there is not here even a craving for lifelessness” (SW, 142). Such waiting is endurance, an attempt “to suspend a person’s state of mind, with its frustrations, expectations, and above all hopes—that is, with its distinctions” (SW, 141). For Fuller, too, ecstasy is devoid of particularities, preferences and desires, all of which she must come back to once the trance has subsided: “I have returned to the world of dust and fuss and conflicting claims and bills and duties. Yet through me flows the same sweet harmony and last night in such full strains that it seemed as if that must be the last of my human life” (LMF, 2:163). The world of fuss and dust is the world of properties, narrative, and meaning, attainable only through a particular point of view. In the moment of ecstasy, on the contrary, temporality is abolished—and with it pain—as Fuller asserts in “Aglauron and Laurie”: “It is indeed the dearest fact of our consciousness, that, in every moment of joy, pain is annihilated. There is no past, and the future is only the sunlight streaming into the far valley.”37 *** “Of the mighty changes in my spiritual life I do not wish to speak, yet surely you cannot be ignorant of them,” Fuller wrote to Caroline Sturgis on September 26, 1840: All has been revealed, all foreshown yet I know it not. Experiment has given place to certainty, pride to obedience, thought to love, and truth is lost in beauty. … When we meet you may probably perceive all in me. When we meet you will find me at home. Into that home cold winds may blow, keen lightnings dart their bolts, but I cannot be driven from it more. (LMF, 2:158–9)38 The “mighty changes,” a reference to the experience of ecstasy from 1831, or rather, to Fuller’s unexpected realization, in 1840, of its profundity, are also understood as having finally placed her “at home.” The home she speaks of, however, is neither a typical house, nor a homey feeling of sheltered inviolability. Resembling

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Thoreau’s cabin at Walden, Fuller’s house is open on all sides—the winds howl through it as the storm dashes the locks. It would seem as though, instead of protecting, it exposes the tenant to the lashes of the outside world. Yet, it does neither, as it provides no interiority, nor even a distinction between the inside and the outside. (“So much joy from abiding nowhere!” exclaims Anna while watching her teacher lose herself in the walk, “She is homeless. … Homelessness is her teacher. She is shelterless. She takes refuge in awareness. She is nowhere” [BW, 14].) The ontological insight into the ecstatic nature of being dismantles rather than unlocks this house of the self, making Fuller at home in homelessness: “From the brain of the purple mountain”39 flows forth cheer to my somewhat weary mind. I feel refreshed amid these bolder shapes of nature. Mere gentle and winning landscapes are not enough. How I wish my birth had been cast among the sources of the streams, where the voice of hidden torrents is heard by night, and the eagle soars, and the thunder resounds in prolonged peals, and wide blue shadows fall like brooding wings across the valleys! Amid such scenes, I expand and feel at home. … This majesty, this calm splendor, could not but exhilarate the mind, and make it nobly free and plastic (LMF, 3:232). To feel at home, paradoxically, is to expand, because this expansion is into the mind’s plasticity and dissolution rather than appropriatively into more space. Fuller’s pull to become one with the world is a far cry from the Burkean sublime, through which her mysticism is sometimes explained, and which presupposes an observing subject detached from the landscape before it. Here, “mere landscape is not enough,” as “the brain” of the mountain intrudes into Fuller’s own, while home is identified with a becomingstream. The exhilarated mind is decomposed into the elemental state of a mountain, stream, and valley. Politically, then, the homelessness Fuller advances here cannot be squared with identityoriented ideologies that propagate exclusivist enclosures, however progressive their policies. Her conception rejects centeredness in particularity or distinction, seeking instead to abandon the essentially human point of view circumscribed by consciousness. In so doing, it strives to let go of the safety of a guarded perspective, the standpoint from which the world makes sense as separate from



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the self. In disrupting the ideology of sovereign individuality by erasing the distinction between self and the world, and in equating both herself and the world with ecstatic pain, Fuller perhaps runs the risk of carving out yet another metaphysics—one whose sovereign principle is pain. But she also understands this position of impersonality to be politically relevant because it is ultimately linked with freedom. Evicted from its shelter, the ecstatic self gets propelled into spontaneity (“In these moments everything is free,” says Cameron’s Anna [BW, 2]). In a letter to Channing, Fuller distances herself from what she understands as the unified, goal-oriented politics of projects and proclamations: We have different ways of steering the ship. Yours is to seek conclusions, which as you often hasten to, you must afterward modify, mine to give myself up to experiences which often steep me in ideal passion, so that the desired goal is forgotten in the rich present. Yet I think I am learning how to use the present, and were my calendar published, it might lead to association too. An association, if not of efforts, yet of destinies. In such an one I live with several, feeling that each one by acting out his own casts light upon a mutual destiny, illustrates the thought of a master mind. It is a constellation, not a phalanx to which I belong (LMF, 3:154). Neither a form of associationism, which Alexis de Tocqueville diagnosed as the hallmark and specificity of American democracy, nor the Fourierist utopianism of George Ripley’s Brook Farm experiment, Fuller’s political inclination, in keeping with her ontology, veers toward a constellation of “destinies”—a conglomerate of disparate, discontinuous elements that form impermanent associations not under the prior presupposition of a mutual interest or predetermined goals, but circumstantially. In thus coming together, these elements must coexist, however temporarily, until a new constellation is formed, and subsequently dismantled. Translated from the plane of self onto the plane of the political, Fuller’s conception of unpredictable constellations—both a risk and a promise—prefigures Sheldon Wolin’s call for advancing but also rethinking the concept of democracy as ultimately ecstatic: “as something other than a form of government: as a mode of being that is conditioned by bitter experience, doomed to success

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only temporarily, but as a recurrent possibility.”40 Both Fuller and Cameron’s Anna advance a conception of ecstasy as a mode of being, and it is in this sense that their ontology can be understood to be ecstatic and ultimately democratic.

Acknowledgment I thank Branka Arsić for her comments, suggestions, and patient reading of the previous drafts of this essay.

Notes 1

“Ecstatica” is Fuller’s term for a woman in ecstatic and/or mesmeric trance, a state Fuller sees as the enlargement of “intellectual resources,” which is to say—as a mode of thinking that is different from rational reasoning. Margaret Fuller, “The great lawsuit: man versus men. woman versus women,” The Dial, 4:1 (July), 1843, 37. In the Appendix to his edition of the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Fuller’s brother Arthur identifies her with an “exaltada”: “Margaret Fuller Ossoli lived above the world, while she lived in it. She was one of those exaltadas who are described in her Woman in the Nineteenth Century” (Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, vol. 1, eds Ralph Waldo Emerson, William H. Channing, and James F. Clarke, Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers, 1884, 365 (hereafter abbreviated as “MMF” followed by the volume and page number).

2

My reading draws primarily on Fuller’s “private” writings—letters, journals, unpublished memoirs (“Autobiographical Romance” and the notes for it), the style and themes of which differ, sometimes vastly, from her “public” texts. The former are not as branded by contemporary rhetorical conventions, and are more interested in the status of the self, the problem of pain, the materiality of thinking, and its relation to suffering. However, the fact that Fuller allowed her journal to be read by her friends renders this distinction between private and public irrelevant. Joel Myerson, for example, points to a pencil mark Fuller made in her journal from August 17, 1842: “Will Mr. E[merson] mark the parts he intends to use. After Mr. E has used this, I would like it again” (“Margaret Fuller’s 1842 Journal: At Concord with the Emersons,” edited with an Introduction by Joel Myerson, Harvard Library Bulletin 21, 1979, 322). Lengthy



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segments of her journals and letters were published in two volumes shortly after her death, as the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852), and then republished by her brother Arthur Fuller (1884), in which Fuller’s correspondence and journals are placed alongside the segments from her published works and the reminiscences of her contemporaries often without any sign of separation or distinction, bestowing on all these texts an equally “public” status. The Memoirs have long been treated by critics as inseparable from Fuller’s published works 3

Sharon Cameron, Beautiful Work: A Meditation on Pain, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000 (hereafter abbreviated as “BW”); and “The Practice of Attention: Simone Weil’s Performance of Impersonality” in Impersonality: Seven Essays, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 108–43 (hereafter abbreviated as “SW”).

4

Like Margaret Fuller, Simone Weil suffered from headaches and depression that brought her to the brink of suicide (SW, 229, n. 4). Like Anna and Fuller, Weil, in Cameron’s reading, attempts to design the procedure of the “undoing of vantage” in order to rid herself of headaches: “To see outside a point of view is to inhabit a stance outside oneself and, notwithstanding the inhospitability of such a space, to reside there” (SW, 117).

5

For this clarification I am indebted to Branka Arsić, who associates beautiful life in Emerson with the Stoic doctrine of “beautiful work”—a work that “intervenes in a life one leads in such a way as to form it” (Branka Arsić, On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, 20; see also 332, n.1, and 297–8). Alternatively, the work could be understood to be beautiful because it is “disinterested” in the Kantian sense. For Margaret Fuller, too, life is an aesthetic endeavor: “What concerns me now,” she writes in the Woman in the Nineteenth Century, “is that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life in its kind.” Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition and Duties, of Woman, ed. Arthur B. Fuller, Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers, 1893, 177.

6

This is the kind of seeing Emerson has in mind when he describes the transparent eyeball in Nature: “I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, New York: Library of America, 1983, 10).

7

Margaret Fuller, Journal 1840, in: Jeffrey Steele, ed., The Essential Margaret Fuller, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995, 12. Emerson, for example, remembers Fuller’s attraction to

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Balzac’s “disagreeable” trilogy Le Livre Mystique (MMF, 1:229), which deals with themes typically associated with mysticism, while explicitly engaging Boheme’s and Swedenborg’s ideas about the soul, the body, and ecstasy. What drew Fuller to this work is precisely the object of Emerson’s derision—the strange relationship between the mind and the body it advances. In the “Introduction” to Etudes Philosophiques (1835), which had been authorized by Balzac, and which Fuller most likely read, Felix Davin defined Louis Lambert, one of the novels in the trilogy, as the story about a thought that literally destroys one’s self: “Louis Lambert is the most deeply penetrating and admirable demonstration of the fundamental axiom of the Etudes Philosophiques. It is Thought killing the Thinker” (“The Comedie Humaine: Translator’s Note. M. Felix David’s Introduction to the Etudes de Maurs,” The Works of Honoré de Balzac, vol. 20, trans. Katherine Prescott Wormeley, New York: Atheneum Club, 1899, 329). In this novel, as in Margaret Fuller’s theory of thinking, the mind is identified with the body, and the cataleptic state the protagonist strives to achieve is understood as ecstasy taken to its extreme: “Deep meditation and rapt ecstasy are perhaps the undeveloped germs of catalepsy” (Honoré de Balazac, Louis Lambert, trans. Clara Bell and James Waring, Project Gutenberg (June 20, 2013): http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1943/1943-h/1943-h.htm). 8

Even her friends didn’t take her mysticism seriously. Emerson, for example, writes with a mixture of irony and admiration about Fuller’s experimentation with mysticism as her “occasional enthusiasm” (MMF, 1:309).

9

Although Fuller’s journals and letters abound in the references to pain, and although pain seems to have been a driving force behind some of her most original ideas, critics have not paid much attention to it. Two notable exceptions are Cynthia J. Davis’s “Margaret fuller, body and soul” (American Literature, 71:1, 1999), and Deborah Manson’s “‘The trance of the ecstatica’: Margaret Fuller, Animal Magnetism and the Transcendent Female Body” (Literature and Medicine, 25:2, 2006). However, contrary to my argument, both of these essays take Fuller’s experimentation with pain as conducive to, or as a defining aspect of, her thinking about gender.

10 Margaret Fuller, Love Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1845–1846, New York, D. Appleton, 1903, 176 (hereafter abbreviated as “LLMF”). 11 Some nineteenth-century physicians distinguished between nervous headaches and tic douloureux, using the former to denote frequent headaches, and the latter “all intensely painful affections of one or more nerves of any part of the body” (A.B. Grainville, Counter-Irritation:



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Its Principles and Practice, Philadelphia, PA: A. Waldie, 1838, 47). Regardless of this distinction and the fact that Fuller and her contemporaries refer to her painful states as nervous headaches, the symptoms she describes are severe and resemble to the last detail what medicine today recognizes as trigeminal neuralgia (or tic douloureux). 12 Cf. www.aans.org (accessed June 3, 2013); and Jeffrey P. Okeson, Bell’s Orofacial Pains: The Clinical Management of Orofacial Pain, Hanover Park, IL: Quintessence Publishing, 2005, 114. Due to its intensity the condition used to be known as the “suicide disease.” An 1856 medical study describes it as a “frightfully morbid sensation”: “[I]n the agonies of ‘tic’ the temple and forehead throb, the eye sparkles and flashes like a fiery meteor, while the tears trickle in gushes down the burning cheek; the deglutition becomes difficult, the tongue fixed and coated, and the jaws clenched, while the saliva copiously flows from the mouth; the piercing, throbbing, buzzing and lancinating pains shoot through the ear, whilst even a whispered sound tends but to add fuel to the fire; the neck becomes stiff, rigid, and immovable, while the slightest motion produces the most excruciating agony” (William Morgan, Tic Douloureux: Its Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment, Oxford: William Davy and Sons, 1856, 17, 14). Fuller gives similar accounts: “My head is oppressed and a dry feverish heat irritates my skin and blood so that each touch and sound is scorpions and trumpets to me” (The Letters of Margaret Fuller, Vol. 2, edited by Robert Hudspeth, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983, 83–4); or “I am tired now so that there is constant irritation in my head which I can only soothe by keeping it wet with cold water, and pain, such as formerly, in the spine and side, through not so acute. I have also a great languor on my spirits, so that the grasshopper is a burden” (LMF, 3:55). 13 In a letter to her husband, Fuller wrote in August 1848: “I have passed a very bad night, my head is this morning much disturbed. I have bled a good deal at the nose, and it is hard for me to write” (Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1890, 251). Fuller was acutely aware of her incapacity to perform any work that involved physical strength, which she explicates in a letter to her brother Richard: “My health will never be good for any thing to sustain me in any work of value. I must content myself with doing very little and by and by comes Death to reorganize perhaps for a fuller freer life” (LMF, V:40). Or, again, in one of her journal entries: “In daily life I could never hope to be an unfailing fountain of energy and bounteous love. My health is frail; my earthly life is shrunk to a scanty rill; I am little better than an aspiration” (MMF, 2:53).

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14 Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, p. 100. 15 Ibid., p. 100 (emphasis added). 16 Cynthia J. Davis reads this passage in gendered terms. Fuller, according to Davis, registers a discrepancy between her “female form” and the “strenuous mental activities she identifies with the male mind”: “In Fuller’s tortuous reasoning, her ‘womanliness’ induces the migraine headaches that advance her intellectual growth by providing insight into life’s meaning, even as her gendered identity seems to thwart such discoveries” (Davis, “Margaret Fuller, Body and Soul,” 42). Although Fuller did experiment with gender all her life, and often identified herself with both or neither, nothing in these childhood recollections indicates that she as a woman was incapable of being an intellectual. Cf. also the lengthy explanatory note by Arthur Fuller about an uneven development of Margaret’s mental and corporeal faculties, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and Kindred Papers, 353–4. 17 Headaches were sometimes intellectually stimulating. Emerson, for example, remembers how Fuller “read and wrote in bed, and believed that she could understand anything better when she was ill. Pain acted like a girdle, to give tension to her powers. A lady, who was with her one day during a terrible attack of nervous headache, which made Margaret totally helpless, assured me that Margaret was yet in the finest vein of humor, and kept those who were assisting her in a strange, painful excitement, between laughing and crying, by perpetual brilliant sallies” (MMF, 1:229). But the paradox is inconsequential. Whether stimulating or paralyzing, pain was always a “girdle” which in Fuller’s hands became a tool that helped her to devise a theory of corporeal thoughts and impersonality. 18 Journal, March 1838, in The Essential Margaret Fuller, 5. Remembering Fuller’s childhood health, Emerson too speaks of the pain and “a force of blood” in relation to her intellectual powers (MMF, 1:228). 19 I would argue that Fuller’s interest in mesmerism and its manipulation of the “secret universal fluid,” which was believed to have healing potential, has roots in this conception of thoughts as effecting material change in the body. Deborah Manson draws close parallels between Fuller’s ecstasies and her mesmeric trances but, contrary to what I argue, for Manson “Fuller’s pain enables her transcendence and opens a channel of spiritual insight” (Manson, “The Trance of the Ecstatica,” 315 and passim). 20 The Essential Margaret Fuller, 6. She continues this account with a description of another dream that followed immediately and that



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displays the same property of causing bodily pain: she dreams of lying on the “cold, damp, brick floor” on her back and wakes up to see that “the pain had gone into the spine” (7). 21 Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 100. See the section referenced by n. 14 above. 22 The Essential Margaret Fuller, 7 (emphasis added). Fuller often uses “mind,” “head,” and “brain” interchangeably, which affirms her conception of the mind as material. 23 For Fuller, thought is an arrow, just like it is for Anna in Beautiful Work who says: “Thought itself was an arrow in the mind” (BW, 96). The “barb” is the sharpest point that reaches deepest and is most difficult to expel (“Some time ago I thought the barb was fairly out”). 24 For Cameron, pain is “storyless” because it is devoid of any narrative quality: “I began to hunger for storylessness. Before experience had wrapped itself up in accounts” (BW, 2). 25 Ibid., p. 118 (also in MMF, 1:42). 26 Ibid., p. 119 (also in MMF, 1:43). 27 For Simone Weil, for example, this is the position of a genius: “Genius … is defined by the inclination to do what seems both impossible and undesirable, and talent the resourcefulness that sees this inclination through. In such a condition good could only be unrepresentable because one would be in its midst without knowing where one was. Only genius could tolerate such a position without seeking to orient itself. Only genius, indifferent to outcome, could regard this vertiginous state as a foundation” (SW, 118). 28 Cf. Emerson: “When she turned her head on one side, she alleged she had second sight, like St. Francis” (MMF, 1:229). 29 The Essential Margaret Fuller, 8. The discourse would be close to how Michel de Certeau defines glossolalia: a speech that “push[es] up through the cracks of ordinary conversation: bodily noises, quotations of delinquent sounds, and fragments of others’ voices punctuate the order of sentences with breaks and surprises. Addresses from whom and to whom? … As it approaches its addressee, speech becomes fragile. Different voices disrupt the organizing system of meaning. Weeds between the paving stones. … This fragmentary ‘possession’ troubles, breaks, or suspends the autonomy of the speaker” (Michel de Certeau, “Vocal utopias: Glossolalias,” trans. Daniel Rosenberg, Representations 56 (1996): 29–30). 30 The Essential Margaret Fuller, 123 (also in MMF, 1:49). 31 Ibid., p. 121 (also in MMF, 1:47).

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32 The Essential Margaret Fuller, 12. 33 In Simone Weil, the operation of erasing the viewpoint is similarly enacted by the state of “being dead,” in which affects cease to matter. According to Cameron, “in Weil’s topography one can arrive variously at being dead, which is not a physical state but which nonetheless relies on the depletion of the body’s energy. Therefore ‘physical labor is a daily death’ in that it transforms ‘a being who loves and hate, hopes and fears, wants and doesn’t want, into a little pile of inert matter’” (SW, 117). 34 In “Literary Ethics” Emerson develops a similar idea about ecstasy as the point of tearing down the walls that separate one from the world: “When I see the daybreak … I feel perhaps the pain of an alien world; a world not yet subdued by the thought; or, I am cheered by the moist, warm, glittering, budding, melodious hour, that takes down the narrow walls of my soul, and extends its life and pulsation to the very horizon. That is morning, to cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body, and to become as large as nature” (Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 102). The upshot is different, however: while for Emerson it is the body that dissolves, for Fuller the body is all there is. 35 Here too there is an aspect of “elementality,” as if Fuller’s purification presupposes the erasure of consciousness and its disintegration into compound elements—senses and matter—that then are returned to God, which in Fuller’s case is never clearly a transcendent, much less a Christian, divinity. 36 In a letter to Elizabeth Hoar from March 20, 1842 she similarly writes: “I do not suffer keen pains and spasms as I used to do. … Then I constantly looked forward to death; now I feel there has been a crisis in my constitution. It is a subject of great interest to me as connected with my mental life, for I feel this change dates from the era of illumination in my mental life” (LMF, 3:55, emphasis added). The constitutional “crisis” and “the era of illumination” refer to the moment of ecstasy on Thanksgiving in 1831, although the realization didn’t come until much later. As if to reinforce the initiatory nature of this experience, in the journal from 1840 Fuller compresses the description of this momentous experience in the exclamation “Selah!,” a liturgical mark in the book of Psalms designating the break or a pause between the poems or stanzas (MMF, 1:142). The experience of ecstasy inaugurates a transformative break in personal identity. 37 “Aglauron and Laurie: A Drive Through the Country Near Boston,” in: Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and Kindred Papers, 185.



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38 In a letter to a friend from 1837 Fuller writes: “I have learned too, at last, to rejoice in all past pain. In future I may sorrow, but can I ever despair?” (LMF, 1:278). 39 The line is from Tennyson’s poem “The Poet’s Mind.” 40 Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” in Sheyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996, 43 (emphasis added).

6 Thoreau’s Journal: Reading Nature George Kateb

Sharon Cameron’s Writing Nature makes us see that Thoreau is no easy lover of nature.1 He becomes in her pages what he actually was but hasn’t often enough been taken for: a philosopher of nature. The book is one of her great achievements. After absorbing it, we realize more profoundly that Thoreau is engaged in an extraordinarily difficult effort to establish a model relationship to natural phenomena. The model relationship is radical—radical in the personal demands that Thoreau makes on himself and his readers. I might add that he seems satisfied that most of the time he has met these demands himself. It is also characteristic of him that he admits his failures. Perhaps the main element of Cameron’s examination is her insistence that Thoreau is determined to get us to think of nature as “other” or “alien,” but not as therefore inferior. (For Cameron on Thoreau’s will to perceive nature as alien, see WN: inter alia 48, 150, and 154.) If we think that nature is inferior we will strenuously or casually try to master it: we will find it fit only for exploitation, or use it to satisfy more benign but nevertheless obtuse or self-centered interests. We understand nature all the better in order to become heedless of it. To be sure, Cameron’s Thoreau does not expect many people, if any, to follow him to the limit, which is defined by the attempt so to merge with nature as

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to be, in ways that are not possible to articulate except metaphorically, one with nature. A person substitutes nature for the human core of oneself; one becomes nature while losing oneself. Cameron’s meaning is, I think, that Thoreau writes nature by being its voice, but not through a pretended ventriloquism and not by mixing his subjective responses with it, but by beholding it as if it did not need human observation and utterance to be complete. Thoreau is not nature’s impersonator but its impassioned advocate to his fellow human beings. Nature does not speak; its beauty is its speech; he must speak on its behalf when he notices human exploitation and indifference. He is trying to call attention to it. I would say that among his chief rhetorical strategies are exhortation and seduction. If nature does not need human beings, they need it to be there and to look at, and they must suppress, without of course completely eliminating, their other uses of nature, so that nature is seen and understood for what it is; beheld as sufficient in itself, and there, whether beside us or far away. Although my main interest is in the way Thoreau reads nature, Cameron’s striking phrase writing nature puts me in mind of the idea of speaking nature, even if she did not intend the resonance. God in Genesis created nature by saying “let there be” this or that. No one was there to hear him, but later writers who were inspired had the intuition that he spoke the world into existence; there was no other way that nothing could pass into something and become substance. It could do so only by means of language, the only cause of magical or miraculous transformation. The authors of Genesis then immaterialized the visible world back into words by writing down God’s spoken acts of creation. By the power of God’s initiating words, substance and flesh directly came to be; his words created not symbols of things but the things themselves. The authors of Genesis did not speak nature; rather through intuiting the necessity for God’s verbal actions, they wrote nature. We could therefore say that in writing nature, Thoreau is re-writing nature. His journal is not an exposition of the first chapter of Genesis, but a rewriting of Genesis 2.19 in the mode of Adam before the fall when God brought the creatures to him “to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof;” but Thoreau is Adam with a pen (Gen. 2.19). Adam began to distinguish the specific identities of creatures by naming them with different names and thus saving them from indistinctness; Thoreau rescues

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things from obliviousness by articulate painstaking attention. The private Journal is more religious than Walden or A Week or any other published work that Thoreau produced. Things are there to be perceived; they are not symbols to be deciphered. Although made by what is greater than they are, they are not symbols of the maker, only his expressions and indications. “Let there be” this or that is a phrase constantly present in Thoreau’s text, though not needing to be written, because it is manifest that Thoreau’s verdict is always God’s: this or that, as it is in nature, is good. Thoreau is suggesting that he might be the only person in his society who is able to have the model radical relationship of intimacy with nature. His singularity makes him both furious and proud. He records dissatisfaction with everyone’s responses. But does he himself define that relationship as Cameron defines it? How should one name the emotion that drives Thoreau in this direction? Is it awe or reverence towards nature? Is it the Greek shock of wonder at the world? If not an easy love, is it a bit like Thoreau’s characterization of friendship as an almost impossible love? Cameron does not propose a neat formula. But at least these possible responses are in the neighborhood where Cameron locates Thoreau’s passion. My purpose in this paper is to show that Thoreau’s approach to nature in his Journal does teach the otherness of nature, but not its alienness. The ordinary understanding of the word alien is that it means something unrelated to us; altogether foreign, perhaps not always like an unwelcome stranger, but basically incomprehensible. In contrast, the word other connotes something importantly different from us, but it can nevertheless be related to us in some way; a connection to it is possible. In any case, for Thoreau, nature, though other, deserves to be looked on and treated with such respect as to discourage our attitudes of mastery towards it and the consequent effort to exploit it for human purposes without regard for its integrity and its importance and value apart from human purposes. But I find that Thoreau’s Journal does not cooperate with the will to see nature as alien in the meaning that I have just defined and that Cameron more or less works with.2 I would say that there is a noteworthy conceptual difference between being other and being alien, even though the two terms are etymologically close. It may turn out that Cameron’s characterization of nature as alien may be closer to the philosophical truth, despite the

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common descent of all living things. But if our purpose is to try to know Thoreau’s characterization of it, the concept of the alien will have to be questioned. I do not think that Thoreau goes in Emerson’s direction in Nature; he does not insist that the self is prior in the sense that everything but my mind or consciousness is the “not-me” and is therefore regarded, despite all “correspondences” between mind and nature, as alien. That is to say, after his effort to trace correspondences, Emerson remains disappointed that we are so alienated from nature, just by being human. Just by being human, we are of necessity unlike nature. We must make an attempt beyond identifying correspondences so that we might overcome our disappointment, our mortified feeling that we are so little at one with and at home in nature. Nature reveals a strong temptation, which, however, Emerson does not succumb to—namely, to embrace Idealism and its epistemological subjection of nature: to look upon it as dependent on the human mind for its only possible reception, if not for its brute existence. Idealism would make nature as the not-me into a human mental phenomenon, a human projection; for me, it is my projection. Thoreau is doing battle with Idealism from the start, no matter how many times he calls himself a “transcendentalist” in the Journal. Nature is real without us. That is part of its otherness. But is it alien? It seems to me that in Cameron’s account, the word alien connotes that nature has a sort of being that is as complex as human being is complex. Nature has “depth” (WN, 38), but in Cameron’s account its depth does not at all resemble human depth. Hence an understanding of the complexity of nature, if we could attain it, would be discontinuous with our study of human complexity, which often verges on the incomprehensible. We are not in nature’s image. And nature is not in ours. We must not pretend to communicate with it; it will never communicate with us. I agree with Cameron’s account that nature’s otherness prevents human communication with it of the sort that human beings have with one another: mind to mind. I believe that Thoreau also thinks so, but he also holds that nature comes from the maker’s mind, even though its creatures and plants have no minds of their own. He does not attribute depth to nature. However, can nature lack depth, as human beings understand depth, and still be alien? I think that as a conceptual matter, depth is not possible without mind, without

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inwardness. The striking fact is that Thoreau nevertheless does want some kind of communion, though not communication, with it. His worship of god the maker of nature takes the form of communion with nature. God is other, but the Calvinist god who is alien is not Thoreau’s god, though there are moments (on Mt Ktaadn and at Cape Cod) when Thoreau apprehends sublimity in nature, God’s handiwork, and calls it “inhuman,” that is, savage and altogether unlike humanity and uncongenial to it. I think this is the closest that Thoreau comes to regarding nature, God’s handiwork, as alien, but nature when inhuman is still wondrous, though it is not ineffable and can be encompassed by a familiar human category. The sublime shows that there is more cause for wonder in the world than beauty. God is capable of sublime effects. In fact, as Thoreau says about the Maine woods, “we have not seen nature unless we have once seen her thus vast and grim and drear— whether in the wilderness or in the midst of cities—for to be Vast is how near to being waste.” Let us notice that cities, which are the most human or the least natural phenomena, are assimilated to a vast wasteland in nature. And then coming down Mt. Ktaadn, he thinks of “ancient Demonic Nature,” which is primitive-powerful gigantic aweful and beautiful, Untamed forever Nature” (PJ, 2. after September 10, 1846, 277–8). (He says “beautiful” but here means what we would be more likely to call sublime—a distinction he himself knew from Edmund Burke.) Although he is ready to see sublimity, he knows only a little about polar regions, jungles, and deserts. He saw the ocean but never crossed it; he made his way through the wilderness in French Canada, but did not like it. This is not to say that Thoreau’s experience was compromised by its confinement. He knew the largeness of space, having traveled as far west as Minnesota; he knew the brutality of time, having had to become aware of the doom of his truncated life. But his disease aside, he is as far as it is possible to be from Melville’s Ishmael, who muses that “all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within.”3 Nature is not alien in Thoreau’s reckoning of it primarily because, as he says numerous times in the Journal, nature (Nature with a capital N) has a Maker (with a capital M) that intends man to read nature and has given man the faculties that such reading requires. Thoreau helps us to read nature by sharpening our perception of it; he is thereby helping the maker by making his

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worship more real. Thoreau is not a Christian; but he is a theist of some sort, and more insistently so than Emerson. Belief in the maker is of major importance to his work as a whole, but it is insistent in the Journal. Despite his admiration of the magnanimity of passages in the gospels, he was in many respects anti-Christian, even anti-Protestant. He was more Greek than anything else, but far more immersed in nature and its manifest beauty than the Greeks are usually thought to be. That nature has a maker, a designer, is Thoreau’s indispensable preconception, even though his implication is that it is not an innate preconception but a discovery that comes early and is thereafter continuously confirmed by observation—by repeated perception. But perception confirms not only that nature has a maker, but that nature is beautiful. It is beautiful because it has a maker. Its beauty is proof that it has a maker; if it has a maker, it must be beautiful. Each idea serves the other by confirming it, and stills any doubt about it. However, can that which has beauty be alien? Can communion with nature’s beauty be possible if nature is alien? The maker is other, but Thoreau appears to think that the maker, though other, is not alien. To be in communion with nature’s beauty is to be in communion with god. I do not say that Thoreau believes that nature has depths. He does not even imply that the reason not to attribute depth to nature is that without inwardness of the human kind there is no depth; that is my view, not his. We could say that for Thoreau nature has something quite as remarkable as depth—it has beauty. Something can have beauty without having depth. It can have beautiful surfaces; it can radiate beauty. But it can also appear to be designed by a maker to be beautiful. That thought is by itself a source of beauty. In fact, Thoreau leads us to believe that unless there is a maker that is a designer, there cannot be beauty. Beauty is not accidental but essential. Would beauty not count if it were accidental? Would the series of beautiful impressions amount to a trivial aestheticism if they had no intentional cause? Does Thoreau therefore think that we cannot attribute beauty to anything unless we first realize that it is designed? (Not that everything designed by a human maker is, just by that, beautiful.) Must we first admire intelligence, the intelligence that design requires, before we can perceive beauty properly? Is the designer’s intelligence, his incomparable and immeasurable skill, the real object of admiration? Of course, we know that the skill exists

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because of the beautiful effects of his making. Perhaps the maker’s skill would not matter to us if the world were not beautiful. Indeed we have no proper awareness of nature’s maker except by the beauty of the world. In any case, when we commune with nature’s beauty we are also communing with the highest intelligence. The perception of beauty is double: it is simultaneously the perception of divinity and the perception of beauty. In an allegory derived from either Genesis or Plato or both, Thoreau says that whenever we “awake to life,” all “actions and objects and events lose their distinct importance in this hour—in the brightness of the vision— As when sometimes the pure light that attends the setting sun, falls on the trees & houses, the light itself is the phenomenon—and no single object is so distinct to our admiration as the light itself” (PJ, 2, 43, 1842–4). All I can say is that temperament enters here. If Thoreau means that nature’s beauty is inseparable from worship of its maker, others can think that the beauty is all the more staggering for having no maker and no maker’s intention behind it. Perception of natural beauty can be just as intense, perhaps more intense, when it is single, so to speak, rather than double. Reading nature is not deciphering it—beauty is manifest and has sufficient reason for being—but rather paying close attention to its one intended message; namely, that its maker wants to us to live in such a way as to be worthy of nature’s beauty. We must learn that it is possible to live so that one feels that there is “perfect correspondence of Nature to man, so that he is at home in her” (TJ, 10, 127, October 25, 1857). (The word correspondence here means suitability, nature’s aesthetic and epistemological suitability to man.) Thoreau says at one point that he is “surprised for the thousandth time at the beauty of the landscape.” Notice that he speaks of surprise. But if one is surprised a thousand times by the same event, the reason can’t be in Thoreau’s case that he’s always forgetting that the landscape is beautiful and has to remind himself or somehow be reminded to look at it. The reason rather is that the landscape’s beauty is such that one must keep telling oneself that it is real, not a dream or fantasy. One must keep a record of one’s impressions as proof of the reality of one’s experience. Thoreau provides an alternative account almost two years later. He says that “To conceive of it [a natural object] with a total apprehension I must for the thousandth time approach it as something totally strange … you must approach the object totally unprejudiced [by

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knowledge or science]. You must be aware that no thing is what you have taken it to be ... You have got to be in a state from common. Your greatest success will be simply to perceive that such things are” (TJ, 12, 371, October 4, 1859). Thoreau goes on to say that if, for example, you are to be affected by ferns so that “they amount to anything, signify anything, to you, that they be another scripture and revelation to you, helping to redeem your life, this end is not so surely accomplished ... if you should ever perceive the meaning you would disregard all the rest” (TJ, 12, 372, October 4, 1859). In the last few years of his life, Thoreau greatly raises the stakes—aesthetic and therefore religious—of perceiving or failing to perceive the beauty of nature. The efficacy of beauty lies in its strangeness (not alienness), but only that kind of strangeness that can manifest itself repeatedly but freshly every time. Its strangeness keeps it fresh; familiarity with it should never make it stale. As we shall see, the moral entanglements of the perception of beauty also intensify from 1854, because of the deepening crisis over slavery. In ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions Books, (1954), 1960, p. 29), Ezra Pound says that literature is news that stays news. Thoreau’s suggestion is that natural beauty is revelation that stays revelation. But unless we keep some record of our impressions and re-read them now and then, the revelation could grow faint or leave us. Thoreau for one must write what he perceives; he must write nature, as Cameron says. ***** As he sits in leisure to look at the “incredibly fair view,” of the landscape, he says reproachfully that “ordinarily we are mere objects [in the landscape], and not witnesses of it” (TJ, 10, 72–3, October 7, 1857). He provides a long description of the many felicities of the valley he can see, and pronounces that such is “the dwelling-place of man.” But go to a caucus in the village or to a church “and see if there is anything said to suggest that the inhabitants of those houses know what kind of world they live in.” Thoreau’s implication is that the only time you know what kind of world you live in is when you live mindful of natural beauty. The rest is turmoil, agitation, and confusion; it is alienation for the wrong reasons, for subjective not philosophical reasons. Then he hears a funeral bell toll. It is an appropriate sound for those who are living but not alive. Its larger

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use, however, is that it “suggests that a man must die to his present life before he can appreciate his opportunities and the beauty of the abode that is appointed him” (TJ, 10, 73–4, October 7, 1857). The opportunities provided by natural beauty make it possible to live without desperation; to live without the desperation to prevail in the economic race; otherwise we become like mere objects, moved but not self-moving. Those who are living are dead to nature’s beauty and therefore live like inanimate things, and must die to their way of life if they are to awaken to the vocation of giving witness to “appointed” beauty, and hence living as if they knew they were already in their proper home. We must remember that for Thoreau to be at home is not necessarily to be comfortable; but it is to lose the feeling of being an alien. If nature is alien to us, we are aliens in the world and as such we must be alienated from it. But nature is not alien. He says, “To insure health, a man’s relation to Nature must come very near to a personal one; he must be conscious of a friendliness in her; when human friends fail or die, she must stand in the gap to him. I cannot conceive of any life which deserves the name, unless there is a certain tender relation to nature” (TJ, 10, 252, January 23, 1858). It is perhaps closer to the mark to say, then, that humanity is what is alien to Thoreau, alien but not other. He can endure few people, except his siblings whom he loves. Whom else does he love? He sets great store on friendship: “In friendship we worship moral beauty without the formality of religion” (PJ, 2, 6, 1842–4). But every friend eventually disappoints him; there are so many passages in the Journal through the years on the frustrations and failure of his friendships. He never feels at home in society, only in nature. He cannot feel at home in society because he is appalled by its avarice and conformity, both of which contribute to slavery. Slavery alienates him conclusively. The abolition of slavery is the one cause that turned him into an active citizen. Only resistance to evil could make him political. I will later see if there is a philosophical link between his love of natural beauty and his hatred of human evil. ***** Let us approach Thoreau’s model relationship to nature guided by Cameron’s brilliant strong-minded attempt to defamiliarize him so that we see him as the difficult writer he is, as difficult as his

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genius requires and entitles him to be. Cameron’s book does not fall because one thinks that the word “alien” might not be quite right. Her book is also about the otherness of nature. If it did nothing else, Writing Nature instructs us in Thoreau’s vision of nature as other. I propose that one way to begin the approach to Thoreau’s tie to nature is to consider a particular assertion that Thoreau makes in the Journal (and nowhere else). He says “The perception of beauty is a moral test” (PJ, 5, 120, June 20, 1852). The perception of beauty is a test of one’s moral capacity. Indeed, beauty is a test of the whole person. Thoreau does not liken it to sensual temptation that moves irresistibly to find a pleasure. Such a contention is striking enough. But that beauty poses a moral test is also an unusual belief. One must be moral in some sense to be able to perceive beauty as it should be perceived. The moral test is a hard test that most people do not pass often enough. Notice that Thoreau has in mind the beauty of nature. Although he praises civilization as by far aesthetically and humanly superior to the social primitiveness of the sort French Canada displays (Yankee in Canada, passim), he never praises the beauty of a vibrant city and its unintentional or deliberately staged spectacles, or its architecture and streets. If he admires the ability of human beings to add beauty to utility in its crafts, the only human art other than some writing that arouses his articulate rapture is music. In contrast, almost everything he sees in nature he finds beautiful. “May I gird myself to be a hunter of the beautiful that naught escape me—I am eager to report the glory of the universe ... To have got through with regarding human values so as not to be distracted from regarding divine values” (PJ, 4, 390, March 14, 1852). He knows the risk: “The gods can never afford to leave a man in the world who is privy to any of their secrets—they cannot have a spy here. They will at once send him packing. How can you walk on ground when you see through it?” (PJ, 4, 389, March 15 [sc. March 14], 1852). But Thoreau announces that he will rise to endure, cost what it may. He says: “To transcend my daily routine- & that of my townsmen to have my immortality now-that it be in the quality of my daily life. To pay the greatest price- the greatest tax of any man in Concord- & enjoy the most!!” (PJ, 4, 390, March 15, 1852). In sum, Thoreau’s judgment is actually that the perception only of natural beauty is a moral test. I think that we approach Thoreau’s relationship to nature if we ponder

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this sentence and follow where it leads. But one thing it does not seem to mean is that the proper relationship to nature is to treat it morally, as if we had moral duties to nature. Rather, the proper relationship and treatment belong in a different sphere from moral conduct; perhaps a higher one—religious worship. The moral test is to understand that there is something at least as important as moral conduct. To a fully moral person, nature is as important in one way as human beings are in another. Brutality to nature is not like brutality towards human beings, but it is just as condemnable. What I have just said is only preliminary and tentative. Let us take up the passage in which this striking sentence about the perception of beauty appears. He says: “Nature has looked uncommonly bare & dry to me for a day or two. With our senses applied to the surrounding world we are reading our own physical & corresponding revolutions. Nature was so shallow all at once I did not know what had attracted me all my life. I was therefore encouraged when going through a field this evening, I was unexpectedly struck with the beauty of an apple tree. The perception of beauty is a moral test. When in bathing I rush hastily into the river the clam-shells cut my feet.” In the middle of June, when he or we would expect buoyancy, nature has recently looked bare and dry. Something in Thoreau, some shift in mood, had recently dominated his perception of nature to such an extent that he experienced a rupture with his almost continuous impression of nature as beautiful. In reading nature we are sometimes at the mercy of a contrary mood, which has the effect of a distorting lens. As Thoreau says now and then, mood is what we must overcome if we are to perceive nature honestly and for what it is; the impression that nature is beautiful must be indelible, ineffaceable by all moods. We don’t need Emerson’s transparent eyeball, beyond all mere egotism, offering no resistance to the light, but we do need a certain kind of what I would call sanity. Actually, Thoreau says that he felt lonely once at Walden and that he then recovered from this “slight insanity” of being alone, but “seemed to foresee my recovery” when he understood that in nature were his “kindred” and that “the nearest of blood to me & humanest was not a person nor a villager” (PJ, 2, 236, April 18, 1846). Nature is more human than humanity—that is, more humane, closer to what the maker originally purposed than human beings turned out to be.

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Sanity is recurrently imperiled by one mood or another. In the case of this incident, the mood must have been strong indeed to make Thoreau see nature as shallow; he for a moment forgets “what had attracted me all my life.” The mood lifts as inexplicably as it had descended. He is “unexpectedly” struck with the beauty of an apple tree; but surely he had been struck with the beauty of an apple tree many times before. Does the beauty before him cause the mood to lift? No, I don’t think so. The mood had to lift or at least have been on the verge of lifting, before the ability to perceive beauty could be restored. Past memory of beauty must have crowded out the mood so that immediate and physically unobstructed beauty right in front of him, right before his eyes, could be perceived. There must have been a struggle within Thoreau, but as quick as a flash, he snapped out of it. When he did, he realized that even for him the wished-for constant perception of beauty might lapse and be possible again only after an inner battle. His battle with himself is of course much less fierce than it would be for most of us; he has spent his adult life in love with nature’s beauty. Yet the sentence that crowns the passage does not say that a bad mood is the test that must be overcome for beauty to be perceived. The test is a moral test. Perhaps by moral, Thoreau means ethical. The perception of beauty is a test of character. Character is the constant effort not to sink, the constant will to selfovercoming. I think that this thought comes closer to Thoreau’s major meaning. What must the person overcome? First of all, the tendency to be and remain obtuse, insensitive to beauty, rather than cultivating one’s receptivity and fighting off the superstition that the sense of beauty is a minor matter or a mere refinement that one can forgo when supposedly more important practical concerns push themselves forward. Of course, Thoreau’s whole work, not just the Journal, is devoted to the encouragement of receptivity and the cultivation of the sense of beauty. Whatever other virtues might be required to perceive natural beauty as it should be perceived, there is no substitute for being able to conceive of beauty as being there for its own sake. The penalty for rushing to use nature, for giving license to deficiency of character, is to cut your feet on the clam-shells. Even so innocent an act as bathing in the river is still using nature. But the rush to use nature is not the only kind of defect. Thoreau is

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a master of self-dissatisfaction. That is the source of his untiring effort of self-overcoming. There is a remarkable and sustained passage of self-examination—one of the greatest in American literature—in Volume 3 of the Journal where in a rapidly metamorphosing reflection on the causes of much self-dissatisfaction and occasional self-acceptance he shows his awareness that unimpeded virtue in a steadfast commitment to his vocation is not possible (PJ, 3, 94–8, after July 29, 1850). Incontinence sometimes overpowers constancy. Still, the word moral as distinct from ethical will not go away. Early in Volume I of the Journal, he says that “Sin destroys the Perception of the Beautiful.” The date is November 13, 1837, roughly three weeks after he started keeping a journal, at the age of 20. He doesn’t say what sin, but the Journal contains passages of self-reproach about his impurity, as if the sin is self-indulgence, the self-indulgence of masturbation. He fills out this jittery passage by saying: “This shall be the test of innocence- If I can hear a taunt, and look out on this friendly moon, pacing the heavens in queen-like majesty, with the accustomed yearning” (PJ, 1, 11). Yet what the taunt is we are not told, but its sting must be overcome, if Thoreau’s relationship to natural beauty is to be right. It would seem, then, that the moral test is a sexual test. One must master one’s sex drive in order to perceive beauty as it should be perceived. One must be chaste. (The Journal indicates that the strong tendency of Thoreau’s attraction is almost always directed towards the male.) A few weeks after the sight of the apple tree elicits from him the sentence that the perception of beauty is a moral test, he tells us of a man (presumably William Ellery Channing) who always speaks about the “sexual relation” jestingly, “though it is a subject to be approached only with reverence and affection.” He adds, “What can be the character of that man’s love?” His conclusion is that “The glory of the world is seen only by a chaste mind. To whomsoever this fact [sexuality] is not an aweful [sic] but beautiful mystery there are no flowers in nature” (PJ, 5, 183, July 5, 1852). However, I think that the fullness of Thoreau’s maxim, that the perception of beauty is a moral test, is not reducible to the idea that unless one is chaste, one will not perceive beauty as it should be perceived. Other passages suggest that there is more to morality than sexual morality, and that alongside morality there is ethics in the sense of the formation of a virtuous character, whose

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qualities include moral traits but also other strengths as well that may assist morality but also figure in the effort to perceive natural beauty. One virtuous trait that stands out in importance for the perception of beauty is impersonality, a trait that has a special importance whenever we think about Cameron’s work, almost all of it, not just the book on Thoreau. Her recent book Impersonality places that concept at the center.4 One is or tries to be more impersonal when one strains to perceive phenomena as if one’s existence does not matter to the objects of one’s perception. At times, Thoreau does show commitment to such a perceptual ideal. In an important passage, Thoreau extends the wish for such self-suppression to the whole human race and in regard not only to earthly nature but beyond. He wants us to observe natural phenomena with as little regard to man as possible. The aspiration is that we should “behold a universe in which man is but a grain of sand” (PJ, 4, 419, April 2, 1852). The poet says “the proper study of mankind is man—I say study to forget all that. ... That is the egotism of the race.” “Man is but the place where I stand & the prospect (thence) hence is infinite” (PJ, 4, 418, 420, April 2, 1852). There is a studied pathos here and it suggests that Thoreau is sometimes able to forget another salient and slightly later thought, namely, that god made the world beautiful so that its beauty could impress man and be perceived by him (August 6, 1852; see below, p. 146). Not to mention the obvious fact that no other creature can think about nature or worship God through it or contemplate an infinite prospect. Yet if Thoreau’s beholding is not mute but constantly articulated, and if this articulation is driven by a metaphysically infused passion, his practice of impersonality, which is undeniably crucial to his work, cannot rest simply on the thought that man “is but the place where I stand.” There is no alternative to human perception. Without it, what or who else can perceive and write—surely not a grain of sand or the most intelligent non-human animal. Yes, Thoreau is vastly better at the work than almost anyone else. But he is an influential teacher of many others because he can make their perception of nature sharper and more patient. He teaches the need for impersonality as self-suppression, but not the desirability of human disappearance, which would be unperceivable on earth after the fact.

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We must immediately add that another virtuous trait of special importance, besides impersonality, is a kind of austerity, which would mean to be like the ancient Greeks (about whom he always says laudatory things), “simple & temperate” in using the word beautiful. He adds that “It is hard to be lovers of beauty without being sentimental” (PJ, 2, 234, April 17, 1846). Yet although Thoreau is neither simple nor temperate in communion with nature, and although he sometimes lapses into the anthropocentric fallacy in describing animals as if to elevate them to a human level of intelligence, his passages of praise for the beauty he sees are not sentimental; they are often magnificent, especially when his attention is directed not so much to the intelligence of animals as to their appearance, their grace of movement, and their fitness, their perfect suitability or adaptation to their existence (need it be said, thanks to the maker’s intention, not to natural selection). There are stunning passages on birds, especially hawks; birdsong, especially the sound of the thrush; flowers; trees; clouds; water of rivers and lakes, and of the beauty of reflections in water that are as beautiful or more beautiful than the objects reflected; snow; the sky, including sunrise and sunset; hills and mountains; the moon and the second world to daylight that moonlight creates; natural fragrances and sounds; and closely observed animals that are, some of them, perhaps more interesting than they are beautiful, but made beautiful just by being singled out as worthy of close observation. Later on, I will take up the idea that perceiving beauty as it deserves to be perceived could in turn contribute to one’s moral improvement and the improvement of one’s character by enhancing the epistemological ability to perceive wrongdoing, especially the worst, and also by confirming and enlarging the worth of such virtues of character as impersonality and austerity. ***** It may seem curious that Thoreau chides John Ruskin for seeing nature through a painter’s eyes (TJ, 10, 69, October 6, 1857). Earlier he had chided another Englishman, an eighteenth-century cleric and travel writer, William Gilpin, for doing the same (PJ, 5, 283–4, August 5, 1852). Thoreau does not here cite Gilpin on painters but is bothered by his tendency to describe a scene as if it matters only because it is painterly. Thoreau complains that

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Gilpin never ascends to the top of a mountain to get the most important view, and accuses him of writing as if “because it [the scene] was not easy to paint- or picturesque-it was not worth beholding or deserving of serious attention” (PJ, 5, 284, August 5, 1852). Yet Thoreau often does what he rebukes Turner and Gilpin for doing: he sees nature as human painters see it; he likens landscapes to paintings. The difference, if there is a difference, is that Ruskin and Gilpin omit the religious element; they separate nature from its maker; they do not say that the only true painter is god.5 Ruskin’s perception is bounded by the work of Turner or some other painter. Thoreau is actually more extreme aesthetically than Ruskin or Gilpin because he is far more overtly religious in his espousal of the Maker. In a passage on a rainbow, he says that “Plainly thus the maker of the Universe sets the seal to his covenant with men- many articles are thus clinched [.] Designed to impress man [.] All men beholding it begin to understand the significance of the Greek epithet applied to the world—Kosmos or beauty. It [the world] was designed to impress man” (PJ, 5, 284–5, August 6, 1852). Jehovah is not Thoreau’s god. How could he be, when Thoreau says that god designed the world in its beauty to impress man as a lover of beauty rather than to demonstrate his power in order to humble unruly man? Thoreau is speaking of his god, not Jehovah. Thoreau’s words transform a scene into the recollection of a painted canvas, the better to convey its beauty and to entice the reader to look again at nature and see something resembling human art and therefore worth the reader’s attention. Most readers, after all, do not worship god through the medium of natural beauty. Thoreau’s hope must be that his descriptions avoid sentimentality because of their exactness, their reluctance to mix in not only sentimentality but sentiments (as Cameron emphasizes). I think that the hope I impute to him is vindicated. He leaves it to the reader to join him in admiration of what he admires and has tried to impart faithfully. Only poetic perception and description are adequate to nature, god’s painting; there is too much prose written about it, and Ruskin adds to the weight of all that sentimental or otherwise improperly inspired prose (TJ, 19, 69, October 6, 1857). The poetical is the enemy of sentimentality, but also the enemy of the prosaic, even of the objectively scientific. Thoreau would have us think that poetry and poetical (even mythological) writings are

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the only truthful responses to nature and its beauty: they have the right rigor and the right love. When Cameron calls the Journal Thoreau’s greatest book, it is not easy to disagree, even though some of the catalogues and inventories of nature can appear “tedious” on a second reading; a few even on a first. The Journal is not a pure book nor is it purely gold. Still, in that book, he observes nature for nature’s sake— without human motive, so to speak—more single-mindedly than elsewhere. Cameron’s insistence on the uniqueness of the Journal in Thoreau’s work opens up the full richness of his mind. But I would say that what makes the Journal great are not only disinterested observations of nature, but also his reflections on the nature of observation, including numerous thoughts on what to look at, how to look, and why. Thoreau’s religious commitment to nature in the Journal shows sides of Thoreau’s intellect and sensibility that do more than complement his published writings and their purposes. At the same time, the Journal places Thoreau at the furthest remove from Emerson, because unlike Emerson, he does not spend his genius on the complexity of the human psyche and hence on the corresponding complexity of human activities and achievements. One does not think of Emerson very often when one is reading the Journal after Volume 1. The site of Thoreau’s most profound originality is the Journal. Cameron’s book helps us to take in the significance of this fact. More than a year after the sight of the apple tree, Thoreau says “If I would preserve my relation to nature I must make my life more moral- more pure & innocent. The problem is as precise & simple as a mathematical one. I must not live loosely but more and more continently” (PJ, 7, 173, November 23, 1853). I think that by living more and more continently, Thoreau does not mean only that he should masturbate less frequently. He must live even more simply, even less distractedly, more passionately engaged with nature, and less concerned with every human relationship but friendship, which is an almost hopeless cause anyway. I believe that Thoreau means that an altogether morally good character is needed to perceive the beauty of nature with the continuous intensity that he holds up as the ideal relationship to nature. A morally good character does not sacrifice the perception of beauty to the aim of utility, which is another term for self-interest, especially exaggerated self-interest that sees nothing that it does not measure by profit or

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power. Thoreau’s work is full of anxious criticism of the American tendency to worship wealth, especially; that is, to desire wealth not merely to satisfy need, but instead to feel an abstract but obsessive need to be wealthy apart from the satisfaction of everyday need. Of course, the exploitation of nature is driven in part by the wish to live decently rather than ostentatiously; but the exploitation has other purposes, which become more important once material need is satisfied. The purpose is to show that a person has won in the game of life. But utility or usefulness is generally given as the goal, which practical-mindedness strives to achieve. Against utility, Thoreau, when in his twenties, simply says, “Beauty is a finer utility whose end we do not see” (PJ, 2, 50, 1842–4). The utility of beauty itself is obviously beyond calculation. The end we do not see is the proper worship of god. Proper worship, the perception of beauty, is not a kind of utilization of nature. It aspires to look but not touch, and to praise. To be sure, as Thoreau recurrently indicates, he feels pleasure from the perception of beauty, just as he feels pleasure from the perception of truth (TJ, 10, 56, September 24, 1854). Is the perception of beauty no test of Thoreau’s character at all? Does it come too easily to him? Granted that it is impossible to imagine Thoreau’s daily life in nature if it were the source of constant frustration and other pains and if it were not, instead, the source of intense, sometimes overwhelming pleasure. The pleasure of looking and the pleasure of writing down what he has seen and elaborating on its features and place in nature are unmistakable; these are by far the greatest pleasures in his life. But I think it would be a mistake to say that Thoreau is driven by the motive of pleasure-seeking, even if we add that he pursued higher pleasures than sensual ones. There is no reason to deny that finding pleasure in some activity may be the instigating cause of one’s attachment to that activity. It is also true that some kind of satisfaction accompanies doing one’s work when activity turns into vocation. But if one loses oneself in doing one’s work, one stops thinking about the pleasure that it may or may not supply, and rather dedicates oneself to the work as if to do otherwise is inconceivable; one wouldn’t exist without it. It becomes interwoven with one’s identity; to lose one’s identity by abandoning one’s vocation is not losing a source of pleasure or even happiness because keeping one’s sense of who one is is a completely different consideration from that of pursuing pleasure or happiness.

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Or, if we prefer, Thoreau wants ecstasy, which is dissolution of the self in worship. Of a scarlet maple, he says that it is “too fair to be believed” (TJ, 7, 58, September 26, 1854), a brief clause in a sentence; it can stand for many expressions of his overriding will to worship that which gives evidences of a limitless divine power to make beauty; but it cannot stand for the merely human will to pursue pleasure for the sake of pleasure. By the way, the idea that something is too fair [that is, too beautiful] to be believed anticipates a memorable section—the section called “The Purple Grasses”—of the later essay “Autumnal Tints,” in which he says that the purple grass, a flowering weed, is cut down and discarded as a “thin and poor grass” and is handled as if it were beneath the notice of the farmer. Or it is cut down “because it is so beautiful he does not know that it exists.”6 Thoreau himself had ignored and “never yet distinctly recognized” the purple grass until “many Augusts” had passed.7 Something exceptionally beautiful, when its sheer existence is too beautiful to be noticed or so beautiful that it cannot be believed to exist (as with the scarlet maple) defies the unprepared observer. But just as Thoreau’s surprise at the maple turns into further cause of worship of its maker, so Thoreau hopes that if the farmer ever “favorably attends” to the purple grass, “he may be overcome by their beauty,” as Thoreau had to learn to be.8 ***** What is beauty, the perception of which is the only communion with the divine maker? Thoreau’s work does not propose a systematic aesthetics. A simple notion of beauty that I derive from his steady practice is that beauty is what you love to look at. The beauty of nature is what Thoreau loves to look at; it is his occupation. In distinction, we could say that the sublime in nature is probably not discontinuous with beauty, yet it is overwhelming, resists articulation, and can threaten the beholder, unlike everyday beauty. In Rilke’s formulation, which I transfer from the beautiful to the sublime, it is the “beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear” (First Duino Elegy, Leishman/Spender translation). One is barely able to endure even the beginning of sublimity’s terror. Thoreau lets the sublime come when it must; he doesn’t expect it, or miss it when it is not there; but he constantly seeks out and examines beauty, the beauty of nature. His writing instructs us to

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allow beauty to compel our attention for the sake of beauty, apart from any human use or purpose. Beauty makes anything beautiful an end in itself. To admire beauty for its own sake is to be prepared to leave a thing unmolested by the wish to possess it or sacrifice it. Of course, Thoreau sometimes extends the word beauty to apply to other facts than those found in nature—human facts, whether they are physically discrete and visible, or appeal to taste or imagination. In any case, the definition of beauty as what you love to look at in the right spirit (for the sake of its beauty) must suffice for our purposes, without pretending that it suffices for a thorough understanding of Thoreau’s works. We should notice that perhaps unexpectedly there is a pronounced tendency in Thoreau’s Journal to regard natural phenomena as beautiful when they resemble human art or craft, or some quality of a human being. It is hard to resist the thought that the beauty of the scarlet maple (just referred to) is so great—“too fair to be believed”—that it gives the impression that it couldn’t be natural, that it has to be artificial like a painted tree. Although it is natural, it looks as if it were made to be beautiful by a human painter. Cattle standing up to their bellies in water “made you think of Rembrandt” (PJ, 2, 16, 1842–4). There are countless passages in many volumes of the Journal where Thoreau is glad to see that the beauty of something in nature reminds him of the beauty of a human work of art or craft (or something else human), whether the resemblance is owed to the prior human imitation of nature or to nature’s accidental echo of independent human creation or being. Where nature does not instruct and inspire human creation of beauty, it seconds or doubles and thus magnifies such creation. But in turn when human art and craft are most beautiful they educate us in the perception of natural beauty. Thus, nature’s beauty and art’s beauty reinforce and multiply each other; they make each other appear more beautiful. Here are a few examples (all taken arbitrarily from one volume of the Journal) where Thoreau looks at nature and praises its beauty because the natural thing resembles human art or being: the sun shines in amid trees as in a warm apartment (TJ, 7, 180, February 12, 1855); young twigs are florid like the complexion of young children (TJ, 7. 226, March 2, 1855); a “crevice” in the sky makes the sky look like a cracked blue saucer (TJ, 7, 227, March 2, 1855); crystals of ice would be a “rare pattern for a carpet

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because it contains a variety of figures agreeable to the eye without regularity” (TJ, 7, 242, March 11, 1855). Thoreau is summarizing his outlook when he says that nature is “a greater and more perfect art” (PJ, 2, 38, 1842–1844), and he frequently articulates this outlook; and when he leaves it unspoken you had expected it to be spoken. Natural beauty is thus often what is like human art or when it lends itself to reproduction in human art. To repeat: not all human art is modeled on nature. When it is, however, Thoreau admires it for its imitation because it shows that human beings, like nature, are capable of being ornamental without regard to utility, and ornamental by, say, fashioning a stone arrowhead into likeness of a bird. To make ornaments is a gratuitous gesture that forsakes considerations of utility; it also marks a departure from primitiveness (PJ, 7, 180, November 29, 1853). Although useful objects, like arrowheads, can be beautiful, overriding concern for usefulness is frequently antithetical to creating or perceiving beauty. (It is also antithetical to doing the morally right thing.) It is as if the world is dominated by use and therefore transforms all the practices and institutions of life into instruments of the will, the aims of which are wealth and power as a matter of course. The perception of beauty is always precarious; that is why perceiving beauty and looking for it and trying to bring more of it into being always constitute a test of character but are nevertheless always in existence. Usefulness usually holds sway; yet it can be overcome by the self-overcoming of an artist or craftsman, or more generally, by devotion to good work, which is worthwhile work done well and done for the sake of the work. Is Thoreau abandoning his worship of god through the perception of natural beauty when he appears to be holding up human art and craft as not merely a fit comparison to natural beauty, but a model for it in many cases? He certainly does not worship humanity because it makes beautiful art and craftwork. As I have said, his celebration of fine art is almost exclusively confined to music. But does a profound humanism re-enter his thinking when he contemplates nature and its likeness to humanly made productions? Is there return of a repressed passion, a passionate but not necessarily religious aestheticism? Maybe not. The easy answer is that for Thoreau nature is god’s art, but god’s art is sometimes like human art, not only because humanity imitates nature but also because man’s mind is continuous with god’s mind, though of course far

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inferior to it. This easy answer might be a correct reading of Thoreau. Otherwise, I don’t know what to say, except that as Plato needs the actual sun to convey the splendor of the abstract idea of the good, so Thoreau benefits from the resemblances of human creativity to natural wonders. As a non-theist I would prefer an extravagant aestheticism to an unwarranted religiousness. ***** It is worthwhile to read Thoreau’s brief criticisms of certain writers on natural beauty. His constant theme is that they write about it in such a way as to sever it from either god or from moral significance. The separation of natural beauty from god in both Ruskin and Gilpin, as we have seen, disturbs him. The separation of nature’s beauty from any moral significance also disturbs him. His additional comments on Gilpin and his views of Hugh Miller, a nineteenth-century Scottish geologist, explicitly raise the question, is god the maker of beauty also the god of morality? Job’s god created all the beauty, but he was, shall we say, half-hearted about morality. But Thoreau’s god is not Job’s. Thoreau’s god is not proud only or mostly of the spectacular elements in nature he created, as Job’s god is, and does not see them as more than compensating for his injustice to human beings, as Job’s god does. Thoreau is committed to the belief that the maker of beauty in nature must also be the god of morality, and thus the guarantor of “a delicate moral sense” in man (PJ, 4, 107, September 28, 1851). In worshiping god as the maker of natural beauty, Thoreau’s suggestion is that we are at the same time and necessarily worshiping a moral god. In a few passages Thoreau is intent on defending the moral reputation of nature’s maker. The brute fact that in nature hunters and prey abound, that animals eat other animals, does not disturb Thoreau’s equanimity; he does not worry that some birds, his favorite kind of creature, eat fish, a species he also studies with fascination, or that splendid hawks consume little animals, towards which he also directs his admiring gaze. Nature is always innocent, whether predatory or not, and no matter how wild it is. At times, he thinks the wilder it is, the more it is nature. It therefore goes without saying that Thoreau doesn’t take his sense of right and wrong from nature; the behavior of animals, often predatory, is not a sanction for human conquest and exploitation.

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There is no indication that the metaphysical naturalism present in the pseudo-philosophical reasoning of some later Social Darwinists or vulgar Nietzscheans would ever have appealed to him, a ferocious abolitionist, studious in his avoidance of injustice. I don’t know whether the two writers that Thoreau criticizes for separating nature from god did so just because they were appalled by the predation of nature, even the natural life of an England no longer inhabited by savage beasts. In any case, Hugh Miller and William Gilpin (whom we have already referred to) don’t deny god but they are content to admire natural beauty without connecting it, as a matter of philosophical necessity, to god’s moral quality and his sponsorship of human morality. Thoreau picks out a passage from Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone for special criticism (Hugh Miller, The Old Red Sandstone: or New Walks in an Old Field, 1841). Miller refers to the “artist” as the sculptor of cherry-stone and the designer of ancient fish and praises their beauty; thus far Miller and Thoreau agree. Then Miller says that beauty in both cases was either only microscopically visible or hidden away from human sight in the depths of the sea. It is “as if the perception and love of the beautiful [by the maker] had been sublimed into a kind of moral sense. Art comes to be pursued for its own sake ... And thus, through the influence of a power somewhat akin to conscience, but whose province is not the just and the good, but the fair, the refined, the exquisite, have works prosecuted in solitude, and never intended for the world, been found fraught with loveliness.” In these sentences, Miller is talking about the maker, even if his point clearly asks to be applied also to human makers. Miller’s view is that when beauty is created for its own sake and not for the wish to display it to others, the act of creation resembles a moral act done out of conscience, not out of a wish for a reward of some kind. Thoreau thinks Miller shows hesitation and betrays “a latent infidelity” because “he describes that as an exception which is in fact the rule. The supposed want of harmony between ‘the perception and love of the beautiful’ and a delicate moral sense betrays what kind of beauty the writer has been conversant with” (PJ, 4, 106–7, September 28, 1851). I think that like Miller, Thoreau is running together the true attributes of the divinity and the desirable attributes of humanity. Thoreau is harsh; he seems unduly to enlarge his difference from Miller. After all, Miller doesn’t speak of a want of harmony

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between the perception of beauty and a delicate moral sense. He says that the perception of beauty in the mind of the maker has been “sublimed” into a kind of moral sense. I think that Miller means sublimated, as a vapor is sublimated when it cools and changes into a hard substance; perhaps also when something is moved into a higher state. If Miller means a higher state, a moral sense is superior to a sense of beauty and comes after it. If I understand Thoreau’s objection, it is that when god wills morality and consequently made humanity to be morally good, god’s will to make natural beauty endured no sublimation. None was necessary. There is not only a harmony in god between beauty and morality, they stem from the same source in his being. The reason must be that they are of the same nature or inseparably allied. God could not will one without the other: he does not will beauty and then see that he must catch up with himself in order to will morality, despite the succession of days of creation in Genesis, when humanity and the possibility of morality come last. Beauty is to nature what goodness is to humanity. More radically, God would not have created the beauty of nature if he did not think that human beings were capable of moral conduct, no matter how many times they fell. Why waste beauty on the incorrigibly wicked? Perhaps he would not have created beauty if he did not create at least one species capable of appreciating it. What is more, beauty is not a vapor, as Miller may imply, but as substantial as morality. On January 8, 1854, Thoreau wrote a four and a half page commentary on William Gilpin’s “Essay on Picturesque Beauty,” that is almost entirely aesthetic in its critique of Gilpin’s rather too precious sensibility. My concern is rather with the fact that Thoreau takes issue with a remark in another of Gilpin’s works, “Essay on Picturesque Travel,” in order to assert that god’s will to create beauty is indissolubly joined to god’s will to have humanity be moral. Acting from moral conscience must be part of the worship of god, no less and no more than the perception of natural beauty. The imitation of god by a person would consist in perceiving beauty and acting morally, as if the two operations are necessary to each other, just as God’s making of beauty and making of morality were. We must now shift our attention from the alliance in the maker’s mind between beauty and morality to the affinity in human beings between perceiving natural beauty and acting from moral

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conscience. This is a pressing concern for Thoreau. Gilpin says that “we have scarce hope, that every admirer of picturesque beauty, is an admirer also of the beauty of virtue.” Thoreau answers: “and he is a clergyman ... This is to give us the play of Hamlet with Hamlets part left-out” (PJ, 7, 232, January 8, 1854). Thoreau’s point of course is that one can’t want to perceive natural beauty in the right spirit without wanting to admire virtue, by which he means, I think, a disposition to act morally for the sake of doing the right thing, rather than from calculations of prudence or expedience. Wanting to admire virtue may help us to become morally better. The perception of natural beauty in the right spirit may have an at least indirect effect in promoting moral virtue, just as it grows out of it to some extent. The perception of natural beauty is a moral test, not only an aesthetic one. But there is a complication. Thoreau doesn’t appear to hold that a person of good character is, just by that, simply disposed to perceive natural beauty in the right spirit; having a good character is necessary for this process, though not sufficient. Conversely, an aesthetically cultivated person can fail to be morally praiseworthy, especially if such cultivation is divorced from perceiving the beauty of nature as god’s work. If god wills beauty and morality concurrently because they share a common essence, human psychology is different. Unfortunately, one direction of the human will can and does exist independently of the other. Thoreau makes an admission. He says, “If I am too cold for human friendship-I trust I shall not soon be too cold for natural influences. It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man & nature. Those qualities which bring you near to the one estrange you from the other” (PJ, 4, 435, April 11, 1852). Clearly, Thoreau tries to overcome estrangement from individuals, although never the estrangement from society or groups in it, all the while loving nature. Is love of natural beauty therefore a compensation for failure to love human beings? I doubt that Thoreau would want to see it that way. Perception of natural beauty can’t be conceived as a mere compensation for anything because it is an end in itself; it is perceptual justice. On the other hand, deficient perception of natural beauty would need compensation. Yet it would be similarly odd to think that love of human beings could serve as mere compensation for deficient perception of natural beauty. Love of human beings is also an end in itself;

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it is affective justice. Is Thoreau’s extravagant love of nature condemned by his deficient love of human beings? Is another person’s extravagant love of human beings condemned by deficient perception of natural beauty? No is the answer to both questions. Without extravagance, that is, without exaggeration, there is no love or justice. We are doomed to be one-sided and to benefit from one-sidedness. With god it’s different. Yet the correct perception of natural beauty must have something to do with acting morally; that is, with avoiding wrongdoing, whether actively or by abstention. Thoreau’s god stands for the unity of the aesthetic and the moral. Just as the perception of natural beauty is a test of one’s morality and virtuous character, so it may be that the perception of beauty has some unexpected connection to the perception of evil. The perception of evil poses a test that is in some ways comparable. Evil is the worst wrongdoing; it is qualitatively different from ordinary wrongdoing. Just as beauty may go unnoticed and un-admired, so evil may go unnoticed and uncondemned. When combined and spread wide, these two failures help to constitute a terrible society. Expedience, practicality, and utility underlie human bankruptcy in all its intertwined forms: religious, moral, and aesthetic. ***** Is the perception of evil, then, a moral test? Thoreau never says that it is, but he says enough to indicate that he would not find this statement uncongenial. I will try to show that at the least Thoreau teaches us that are some epistemological elements shared by the difficult tasks of perceiving natural beauty and perceiving human evil. An enlightened perception of one could possibly contribute to the perception of the other. In Thoreau’s case, which can be taken in major respects as exemplary, the perception of natural beauty goes hand in hand with the perception of evil. His personal coldness did nothing to block his perception of evil; to the contrary, it may have facilitated his perception of evil, while his continuous perception of natural beauty might have taught him lessons about perceiving evil, even as sensitivity to evil may have increased his sensitivity to beauty. The greatness of John Brown is that he stood up “so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature.”9 Evil is therefore not simple injustice or injury; it is the destruction of the human

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person. The perception of evil, blatant and unmistakable extreme wrong, poses a harder moral test than the perception of ordinary and lesser wrong. Political and social evil is harder to perceive, even if it is easier to see because it is not hidden in the house like individual evil. Slavery was Thoreau’s only political cause because he identified it as the only system of evil in his society, which was filled with many ordinary and lesser wrongs that were routinely perceived. He would have gladly remained un-political, but evil made that impossible for his conscience. From its necessary qualities, genuine perception, whether of beauty, truth, or evil is always a test. There is a difference between perception and just seeing or looking. That distinction goes back very far in time, but the most vivid drawing of that distinction is in the gospels, which Thoreau of course knew closely. In Matthew 13.14 and Luke 8.10, Jesus says in the King James Bible that, ordinarily, people see without perceiving, just as they hear and do not understand. The cause of not perceiving is a kind of act that is very close to a deliberate turning away from what would unsettle them and therefore save them or heal them. The people’s “heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed” (Mt. 14.14). “Their eyes they have closed” is the key; they have closed themselves to the teaching of truth. The wording suggests deliberate turning away, which Thoreau believes accounts for indifference to or acquiescence in or acceptance of the evil of slavery. To be sure, in Mark 4.12, Jesus says that the purpose of speaking in parables is precisely to hide his meaning so that it may not be understood and that consequently people not be healed. But that is a complication we should mention but not attend to here. What matters is that just as people turn away from the attentive perception of natural beauty, so they turn away from the perception of evil. The test is not easy, and people prefer, or act as if they preferred, to fail rather than pass the test. Convinced of the inevitability of our common failure, Thoreau nevertheless will continue to teach, hoping to strengthen or convert a few. What is genuine perception? Late in this essay, I will propose the sketch of a synthesis. My purpose is to indicate some affinity between the perception of beauty and the perception of evil. Thoreau provides no general account of his procedure of perceiving. A brief sustained treatment of the characteristics of perception in Thoreau’s work is found in the “Scarlet Oaks” section of

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“Autumnal Tints” (393–4). In that discussion, however, he is quite selective in mentioning the elements that the Journal and his work as a whole displays. Cameron’s book indicates a number of the elements and judiciously selects a few to emphasize, especially the suppression of egotistic, social, or human-species interests, when the object of Thoreau’s perception is nature, not evil. So here are the elements as I have isolated them, and they stand in groupings that are each made up of contrasting precepts that Thoreau enjoins on himself and his readers. Thoreau uses sometimes one precept and sometimes another in the relevant grouping. All are modes of the perception of natural beauty, and although only a few pertain to the perception of evil, these few are crucial. In the Journal, there is no one steady occurrence of one rather than another when Thoreau perceives natural beauty, even though some might be more important than others. I have four groupings. First (Ia), let the unpreconceived natural phenomenon take you over; let yourself perceive it as if for the first time; you will often be surprised by the particular quality of the beauty before you, even if you have already seen it many times. In contrast, (Ib) at the start or soon thereafter, realize that you must be prepared to perceive what you see; you must ready yourself to observe, or the phenomenon won’t register at all or register in the right way. The most general and valuable preparation is metaphysical, not solely empirical. The metaphysical preparation consists in the acceptance of the view that nature has a maker, a designer, who willed that human beings perceive the beauty of his making. You are prepared when you expect beauty to appear continuously in nature. Second (IIa), when you look at nature, glance; don’t stare, but look from the side of your eye. In contrast, (IIb), when looking, study the natural phenomenon intently so that it and its beauty sink in. The phenomenon has many facets; they don’t all disclose themselves in one or a few observations. Look at the same natural phenomenon many times so as to see it from many perspectives and in many different conditions: light and dark, wet and dry, from the top down or from below to the top, or coming from one direction rather than another. Thoreau sometimes practices a kind of perspectivism, as if to say that the phenomenon is the sum of numerous observations, some of them in apparent tension with others, but no one of which is dispensable, and hence no one of which is complete.

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Third (IIIa), don’t overlook the obvious. The natural phenomenon so to speak stares at you because you haven’t chosen to look at it. The obvious phenomenon is often the most beautiful but ignored just because it is the most obvious or familiar. The very last entry in the Journal says of the effect of a storm on the gravel of a railroad causeway: “All this is perfectly distinct to an observant eye, and yet could easily pass unnoticed by most. Thus each wind is selfregistering” (TJ, 14, 346. November 3, 1861). In contrast, nature sometimes hides its beauty, and you must uncover it in unusual places (IIIb). Fourth (IVa), be open to the hitherto unimagined, indeed the unimaginable particular phenomenon. You can’t take the measure of the maker of nature’s indefinite complexity and variety. In contrast (IVb), unless to begin with you are prepared to see a particular phenomenon in its details, unless you have an idea of it or have managed to imagine it, you will never find it. (This kind of preparation for perceiving particulars is distinct from the general metaphysical preparation.) The richness of Thoreau’s work, but especially the Journal, is that he combines all these modes of perception, contrasting though they are. He needs them all to do perceptual justice to natural beauty. What modes does he need to perceive evil? And what therefore does he think his readers (and his contemporary auditors) require to perceive evil; and in perceiving it, not merely seeing it or knowing about it casually and superficially; and then acting on one’s perception to combat the evil? Perceiving natural beauty disinclines us to ravage nature. Thoreau’s premise seems to be that perceiving evil as evil may disincline us to do it or cooperate with it or acquiesce in it. We must go out of the Journal to a few finished essays to get Thoreau’s best statements of the burden that the perception of evil imposes on human beings. The perception of evil is an epistemological and moral burden, like the perception of beauty, but the latter, for all its complexities and its demands, is tantamount to redemptive exhilaration. These modes are the most important for the perception of evil: Ia, let the phenomenon take you over; Ib, let the metaphysical (religious or theological) preparation, which you already have, work effectively to sharpen your perception of evil; IIIa, don’t overlook the obvious: the evil of slavery is right there before you, whether directly or traceable through your political participation and

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economic endeavors; and IVa, be open to the hitherto unimagined, or indeed to the unimaginable. Why is the perception of evil a burden? As Thoreau sees the matter, not only weaknesses of character get in the way, but so do some ostensible virtues. He must exhort his readers, often with barely controlled anger; he can’t seduce them. But Thoreau sees “that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the Maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves.” Human beings are “not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force.”10 Thoreau therefore has moral expectations of his fellows and must treat them accordingly. The expectations are not heroic, but they do require some exertion. The nature of the appeal is a reminder that people already possess a metaphysical (religious or theological) outlook; they are prepared to perceive evil, or should be, if one is to take their profession at face value. As Protestants, they are far better prepared to perceive evil than beauty. That is why Thoreau can remind people of what they already claim to know about right and wrong, whereas he has to persuade them to reorient their worship of the maker so that they understand that the perception of natural beauty is the way to worship him. Thoreau will appeal to the maker of people, as the god who stands for morality, against the people who choose to ignore evil; he will appeal to themselves against them when they choose not to follow their conscience.11 Each person is split: religious but not religious, conscientious but not conscientious. (This is to be double in a bad sense.) He also wants to administer a shock whenever he takes up the issue of slavery and acceptance of it; the shock should reinforce the reminder and the consequent appeal. The act of refusal to pay the head tax eventually forces the agent of the state, a neighbor and a good man, to arrest Thoreau, and thus forces on the agent12 the obligation to consider whether “he shall treat me as a maniac and disturber of the peace.” The agent of the state must be shocked into feeling an obligation to consider what he is doing. The perception of evil must then begin in a commonly available philosophical preparation (Ib); but because the effects of the preparation are liable to fade or lapse, they must be vivified, usually by another person, often an outsider in some sense or other (Ia). Thoreau’s characteristic way of administering shock is to speak or write directly and without compromise.

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In the perception of evil, moral shock takes the place that sudden and overwhelming impressions occupy in the perception of beauty. Thoreau acknowledges that he has not spent his adult life preoccupied by the issue of slavery because he is not “continuously inspired” to think and write about it. “A man may have other affairs to attend to.”13 He has been unlike John Brown, who was always inspired by an unappeasable sense of the evil of slavery and who would not let himself be distracted by any other matter whatsoever, cost what it may. Yet Thoreau is prepared to say, though not clearly about himself, “How many a man who was lately contemplating suicide has now something to live for.”14 John Brown’s deed shocked Thoreau in both senses: he was amazed by the greatness of the deed and he was driven to drop his other affairs and speak in passionate defense of it on three occasions. In a noteworthy passage in “A Plea for John Brown,” he says that persons have the right to be shocked by the death of slaveholders only if they are “continually shocked by slavery.”15 To perceive evil rightly is to be continually shocked by it. Those who are shocked by the death of slaveholders and their agents but not by slavery itself are not entitled to their shock unless they want to stamp themselves as defenders of slavery and to regard any serious attack on it as insane or an actual evil to be resisted. What especially shocked Thoreau in the sense of surprising and appalling him deeply was the ability of people to go about their business “as if nothing had happened” when the fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, was caught and sent back to his master in 1854.16 People acted as if they had done nothing wrong in going along or turning away. A certain moral blankness had overcome them. The majority of them had overlooked the obvious: slavery is evil and must never be supported (IIIa). The ethic of Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (innocent or all-too-human inattention) would have been lost on Thoreau. Overlooking the obvious is a deep tendency in human beings: evil shares with natural beauty the capacity to elicit indifference. People see but do not perceive. Thoreau wants to help some people discover—that is, imagine—that their lovely houses and the gratifying round of their activities are actually “located in hell” and then ask themselves, shouldn’t the value of their belongings in that place be lost?17 In a remarkably Melville-like passage in “Life without Principle” (1854), Thoreau

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redescribes rapacious human behavior in the Australian gold rush as living in hell, but those who are there don’t know it. That is, they don’t know how much of life they have sacrificed to procure the means of life; they have “turned themselves into demons,” ravaged nature, and died (many of them) of disease and exposure.18 The California gold-rush also does not escape his censure. The two worst obstacles to the perception of evil are first, the tendency to overlook the obvious because one has been made morally blind by one’s commitment to the position one holds in the structure of political authority (IIIa); and second, the conscientious obedience of people who know that slavery is evil but will not act against it; their mental preparation helps to make them conscientiously obedient (an unfortunate version of mode Ib). Neither of these mental operations displays the banality of the evildoer. On the first of these obstacles, Thoreau is certain that those who hold or seek office stand “so completely within the institution, [they] never distinctly and nakedly behold it ... Webster never goes behind government.”19 One might say that they are corrupted by their responsibility, not only by their ambition. They forget what they know, even if they remain capable, if pressed, of acknowledging the truth of the evil situation, if only to themselves silently. They resist imagining, however, that anything evil is sustained by their Constitution, except temporarily. Perhaps they finally become incapable of imagining anything inhumanly evil (IVa). They don’t feel that they are hiding from the truth because they feel they already have it: what they have must be the truth. On the second of these two obstacles, Thoreau formulates a few magnificent sentences that deserve to stand forever. He says, “The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of government, yield to it their allegiance and support, are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform.”20 These conscientiously obedient citizens are potentially those most able to perceive evil, but devotion or loyalty to an inferior good holds them back from acting on their perception of evil. Their inferior good is to keep the daily life of free citizens undamaged by morally absolute claims

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against it; but such solicitude for the well-being of others has a morally unacceptable cost, a cost that does not register, or registers only faintly on the conscientiously obedient. The personal cost to the conscientiously obedient that should register is that the continuance of the evil of slavery compromises the perception of natural beauty in the right spirit and hence enfeebles the proper worship of the maker. The perception of evil must be at least as intense as the perception of beauty. For the time that the majority’s perception of evil is inadequate, and evil endures, the moral person’s will to the perception of beauty should and will suffer. Un-remedied evil undermines beauty; the intense perception of un-remedied evil undermines the intense perception of beauty. Thoreau asks what “signifies the beauty of nature when men are base?” and blurts out that “My thoughts are murder to the state.”21 Most important, when the maker is properly conceived and worshiped, the perception of natural beauty and the perception of human evil should be understood as necessarily joined together. If need be, each kind of perception can significantly sensitize the person to develop the other kind. I think that Thoreau’s teaching is not only are there formal similarities that bind the two kinds of perception, there is also the same heterodox religious root. Their obtuse separation ultimately weakens both. Of course, a non-believing person can perceive natural beauty without thinking it is the handiwork of the maker and can perceive evil without thinking that there is a god who is offended by its commission. Such a person just believes that a properly developed faculty of attention is sufficient for both kinds of perception. But Thoreau seems to think he has to invoke the maker; even if he wanted, he couldn’t make non-theistic arguments in his time and place and still be listened to. He was certainly not an atheist; he was only trying to invoke the maker without succumbing to orthodoxy or even one or another familiar heterodoxy. Indeed he is inventing a new religion by means of the perception of natural beauty; and as a necessary part of right worship, the perception of human evil. The new religion is a phenomenology for awakening minds. “I shall not so soon despair of the world for it [i.e., because of the white water-lily], notwithstanding.” But lack of despair is not enough to live on. The hope is that with the end of slavery, which can come about only when there is a genuine perception in the majority of the evil of slavery, more people will at last pass the

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moral test and test of character in its entirety that the perception of natural beauty requires. Thoreau says, “So behave that the odor of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere, that when we behold or scent a flower, we may not be reminded how inconsistent your deeds are with it; ... and if fair actions had not been performed, the lily would not smell sweet.”22

Notes 1

Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985 (hereafter abbreviated as “WN”).

2

In further text two editions of Thoreau’s Journal are quoted. A) Henry David Thoreau, Journal, vols. 1–8, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981–2009, vols. 1–3, ed., John C. Broderick. Vols. 4–6, ed., Robert Sattelmeyer. vol. 7, ed. N. C. Simmons. vol. 8, ed., S. H. Petrulionis (further quotations from this edition—which so far covers October 22, 1837–September 3, 1854—are abbreviated “PJ”). B) Henry David Thoreau, Journal, Vols. 7–14, eds Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1906 (further quotations from these—which cover September 1854– November 3, 1861 are abbreviated “TJ” and cited parenthetically in the text). Of considerable interest are the Historical Introductions to all of the Princeton volumes by the various particular editors.

3

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Norton Critical Edition, eds Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford, New York: Norton & Company, 2002, p. 165.

4

Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

5

For Thoreau on Ruskin and Gilpin see H. Daniel Peck, Thoreau’s Morning Work, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 64–5.

6

Henry David Thoreau, “Autumnal Tints,” in Collected Essays and Poems, ed. E. H. Witherell, New York: Library of America, 2001, p. 370.

7

Ibid., p. 372.

8

Ibid.

9

Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea for John Brown,” in Collected Essays and Poems, ed. E. H. Witherell, New York: Library of America, 2001, p. 407. See also Jack Turner, “Thoreau and John

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Brown” in A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, ed. Jack Turner, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2009. 10 Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” in Collected Essays and Poems, p. 220 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 212. 13 Thoreau, “A Plea for John Brown,” p. 413. 14 Ibid., p. 414. 15 Ibid., p. 413. 16 Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” in Collected Essays and Poems, p. 345. 17 Ibid. 18 Thoreau, “Life without Principle,” in Collected Essays and Poems, p. 355. 19 Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” p. 222. 20 Ibid., p. 210. 21 Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” p. 346. 22 All quotations in this paragraph are from Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” pp. 346–7.

7 What Music Shall We Have? Thoreau on the Aesthetics and Politics of Listening Branka Arsić

It would be stating the obvious to say that the question of perception preoccupies Thoreau. There is no major critical engagement with Thoreau’s thinking that doesn’t analyze his effort to generate techniques of perceiving designated to alter the way humans experience the world. Thoreau’s proposed reform of senses sought to enact what Jane Bennett understands as “enmeshing oneself with Nature,” or what Lawrence Buell identifies as defying the “myth of human apartness” from the environment.1 For these influential readers, Thoreau’s perceptual techniques would “enmesh” the self with nature by generating a vision of nature as something so enchanting that it would suspend the perceiver’s mind—the source of his considering himself apart—bringing about a wondrous feeling of unity with the perceived. Thus for Bennett, Thoreau’s perceptual practices were meant to transform “nature” into something “beautiful, sublime, and Wild;” whereas for Buell, they were similarly a “studious exercise in romantic literary sublimity.”2 But while it seems unquestionable that Thoreau wanted a new sensing to defy the self’s separation from its surroundings, it is less certain that such defiance was to be achieved through the

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sublimation of nature. Sharon Cameron’s reading of Thoreau also suggested that he cancelled the very distinction between external and internal when he recognized his self to be a part of a leaf or a vegetable mold,3 or when he externalized his body into a natural object not related to a spiritualized, detached psyche. But in contrast to readings that understand Thoreau’s effort to vitiate the isolation of selfhood by generating sublime percepts Cameron suggested that the self’s apartness from what is external to it was meant to be enacted through desublimation and disenchantment. The main effort of the mind as Thoreau imagines it, on Cameron’s account, is not to fill itself, as it were, with what is outside it, but instead to empty itself into what is external to it, to “liberat[e] thought from the mind” so radically that no thought remains in it capable of “feeling” or thinking the outsideness as beautiful or wondrous. Cameron predicated this radical proposition, suggesting the mind’s emancipation from thoughts, on the interpretation of the following passage from January 17, 1852: “In proportion as I have celestial thoughts, is the necessity for me to be out and behold the western sky… That is the symbol of the unclouded mind … What is your thought like? That is the hue—that the purity & transparency and distance from earthly taint of my inmost mind” (J: 4, 263).4 Cameron’s understanding of this passage—which, after a patient reading of a series of other Journal entries, predominantly from 1850 and 1851, she finds emblematic of Thoreau’s philosophy more generally—suggested that far from maintaining the distance between “earthly taint” and “inmost mind” Thoreau in fact wants to cancel it; he wants “mind” and “taint” [to] bleed into each other, as if the mental had suddenly become material. Hence Thoreau seeks ‘distance from earthly taint of [his] inmost mind,’ seeks thought which, detached from the mind, is pure and transparent. The hue of ‘the unclouded mind’ is like ‘the western sky before sunset’ … because the western sky looks like thought free of the mind; it looks like nothing at all” (WN: 39). Thoreau’s thinking seeks thus to empty the mind so that it becomes unimaginably hollow, so that it stops being, is reduced to “nothing at all.” If, in Thoreau, thought bleeds into what is corporeal and material it is in order to there transform itself into what it is not, something palpable and objective that can’t be called mental or spiritual for it in fact renders the mind that hosted it unnecessary. What is achieved with this cancellation of mental phenomena is the “muting of differences” that allow man to regard himself as a

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central phenomenon in the world. Instead of a self seeing the world there appears a world affecting itself, seeing itself through itself: “these changes (man playing a minimal part in his own representations; those representations themselves incomplete and subject to transformation) generate the attempt to see nature contrastively not against the background of human concerns, but rather against aspects of itself” (WN: 66). Instead of the reflexivity of subjectivity, what is achieved is something like the self-reflexivity of objectivity; on Cameron’s account, far from insisting on the spiritual or mental, Thoreau cancels it to obtain access to pure materiality. However, that cancellation never occurs as an event; that is, it never occurs suddenly, enchanting the perceiver into wonder and surprise. Instead, it is achieved, if ever, slowly, as a result of efforts to reform sensing in a way that would allow the mind to exit its “perceptual givens” (WN: 50)—forms and figures the eye has learned to observe in a certain way, for instance—and in that way to cancel what is “inmost” to it. Writing Nature argues that Thoreau’s efforts at sense-reform were focused predominantly on seeing as opposed to listening. It is in Walden that Thoreau is “concerned with the discovery of sound,” Cameron suggested, whereas the Journal “explores the complexities of vision” (WN: 14). In what follows I will be guided by Cameron’s understanding of the mind in Thoreau—such as I’ve just outlined—and will proceed on the presumption that his effort was indeed directed towards the self’s de-creation and self-emptying. Cameron’s arguments thus remain the constant backdrop to my discussion, even if I don’t explicitly quote them. But my discussion also aims to potentialize her arguments, expanding them into consideration of listening. I will show how, in my view, from early essays such as “The Service” to Walden, from the early to late Journal, Thoreau was as preoccupied with revising practices of listening as he was with seeing, trying to undo the ear’s perceptual habits and through this undoing to enact a process whereby the mind self-empties into material or concrete outsideness. I will be especially concerned with Thoreau’s effort to listen to literal sounds—sounds not bound into harmony or connected into continuity, sounds that we typically experience as cacophony or downright noise—and the circumnavigation of aural figuration that such listening requires. In reconstructing Thoreau’s practices of listening and pointing towards the different mind they create I will also pay attention to his critique of music,

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and expose the politics that follows from such a radical critique of aesthetics. I will conclude by discussing a little known interview by John Cage, as well as telegraphs he sent to Thoreau’s biographer Walter Harding, all related to Thoreau’s understanding of sound, examining his practices of listening and relating them to the process of emptying the mind that echoes that described by Cameron. *** What consequences follow, one may ask, from a famous passage in A Week, which explicitly claimed that it is access to what surrounds us literally, as opposed to what surrounds us sublimely, that is needed for us to inhabit the world: We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become. We are comparatively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste or feeling. … The eyes were not made for such groveling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible … Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely? When the common man looks into the sky, which he has not so much profaned, he thinks it less gross than the earth, and with reverence speaks of ‘the Heavens,’ but the seer will in the same sense speak of ‘the Earths,’ and his Father who is in them. … What is it, then, to educate but to develop these divine germs called the senses?5 Thoreau’s senses are here called upon to change the direction of perception: not to look upward, towards the skies—toward what is ideal or divine—but downward, into the slimy swamps and mud of the earth. If there is anything divine or heavenly, Thoreau suggests, it resides only in earthly matter, or more precisely, it is matter itself. But that matter is not dumb and inert; to the contrary, if perceived with reformed senses it will show itself as a site of miniscule exchanges and processes, processes that our imagination transposes to the spiritual “Heavens” only because our current senses are incapable of registering them. By discovering in material life what is currently conferred on the spiritual Thoreau’s new perception would, by the same token, radically transform the

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idealist hierarchy between matter and mind. In contrast to the idealist claim that nature is merely a “symbol” of the spirit—as in Emerson’s famous formulation, that “particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts,” and “nature is the symbol of the spirit”—Thoreau’s reformed senses reveal it to actually be the heaven it is presumed only to emblematize; for Thoreau’s new senses, then, the “Father is in the Earths,” God is corporeal. *** Not just in A Week but also in Walden and throughout the Journal, Thoreau offers a critique of “our present senses”—their practices of figuration and sublimation—while simultaneously suggesting how are they to be remade to hear “new sounds” and see what is “now invisible.” For Thoreau, such remaking requires that the senses be trained to register sensorial experiences beyond any figuration, or as he puts it, “ideation.” In a short Journal entry, Thoreau calls “ideation” the operation of abstracting figures out of mobile and unformed perceptual diversity: “It [the eye] is the oldest servant in the soul’s household-it images what it imagines-it ideates what it idealizes. Through it idolatry crept in—which is a kind of religion” (J, 1, 182). Ideation is thus the eye’s habit of sacrificing the specificity of what is perceived now by incorporating it into an idea of it that the mind forms on the basis of previous perceptions; the singularity of the present is thus lost in the ideality of an image. And since the objects of those images are non-existent Thoreau can say that our sensorial habits generate a cultic perceptual field; our senses enable “idolatry” to creep into our minds for we never see material objects but only imagined pictures. Thoreau will explain this process of ideation more elaborately in a long Journal entry written on December 15, 1840. There he will argue that by severing the image from the materiality of a singular visible object the eyes resist the fluid materiality of nature: In the woods one bough relieves another, and we look into them, not with strained, but relaxed, eyes. …–But as soon as man comes into nature, by running counter to her, and cutting her off where she was continuous, he makes her angular and formal... I saw today where some pines had been felled at various angles

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with the rest of the wood, and on that side nature offended me, as a diagram. … I saw squares and triangles only (J: 1, 203–4). By confronting the visible from a view-point external to it, the eye objectivizes it into a “picture,” a kind of a photograph that freezes the motion of the visible into a form: it “cuts [it] off where [it] was continuous,” making it “angular and formal.” These ideated forms that Thoreau calls “diagrams” represent the visible as it is not, for the visible as the processual continuum of the unformed, precisely escapes the eye. That what is seen is not the visible but rather a formalized fictionalization; what is commonly called the visible world is already an effect of mimesis: it is a type of fable. In contrast, in an entry from September 13, 1852 Thoreau describes the eye freed from the habit of ideation as desiring to perceive translation of one color into another at a speed that transcends forms. Such perception, the entry specifies, is achieved by cancelling the ideation of intentional looking: I wish to see the earth translated—the green passing in to blue… I must walk more with free senses—It is as bad to study stars & clouds as flowers & stones—I must let my senses wander as my thoughts—my eyes see without looking. …—I have the habit of attention to such excess that my senses get no rest-but suffer from a constant strain. Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object let it come to you. … What I need is not to look at all—but a true sauntering of the eye (J: 5, 343–4). In contrast to intentional observation that edits a-figural sensuous data into forms, and in fact renders the empirical inaccessible (“the more you look the less you will observe”), “free” looking, as Cameron suggested, renders the “idea of a view” inoperative by “thoroughly confusing that which is seen, and the perspective from which it is seen” (WN: 38). Looking freed from a subjectivized perspective sees things with eyes emptied of the capacity to stabilize the mobile empirical into an image of it already formed by the mind; this is to say that such looking frees the eye from the demand to recognize the seen as something known and classifiable, asking it instead, as Cameron puts it, to “precede the impositions of meaning” (WN: 50). Because it suspends or forgets what it had previously seen, the eye freed from “the constant strain” of

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recognizing encounters the object as something completely novel. A passage written in October 1859 reinforces the idea that in encountering phenomena in their unprecedented novelty a free eye will not be able to say what they are (for it will have forgotten all previously seen forms that would have assisted it in classification), but will be able to see that they are, and that will be its biggest success: “If you would make acquaintance with the ferns, you must forget your botany. … you must approach the object totally unprejudiced. You must be aware that no thing is what you have taken it to be. … Your greatest success will be simply to perceive that such things are …”6 Emancipated from the figural, the unprejudiced eye finally becomes capable of perceiving the forces and elements in the very moment of their formation; it finally comes to see “the earth translated-the green passing in to blue.” And to perceive passings and translations is to perceive the truth, since, as an entry from December 15, 1840 specifies, nature is precisely a motion of forces that defy any figural or geometrical spatiality: “Every where she [nature] preaches not abstract but practical truth. … The moss grows over her triangles (J: 1, 204). The free eye sees this “practical truth,” the fact that life, empirically, escapes forms, that out of each form—or “abstract truth” as Thoreau calls it—there grows moss in all directions, rendering form formless. The free eye, then, sees the incessant process of formation that undoes shapes, the very practice of life revealing the empirical in the plethora of its mobile differences. *** As many Journal entries insist, Thoreau conceived the whole of nature not only as the incessant translation of colors that frustrated figuration but also as matter permeated by sonorous motions. In Thoreau’s ontology vibrant sound, as the force of rendering corporeality, was thus elevated to something having the status of a being. All nature is for him acoustic and rhythmic: “The frosty air … comes clear and round like a bell... And besides all nature is tight-drawn and sonorous like seasoned wood” (J: 1, 439–40, italics mine); or: “All the elements strive to naturalize the sound” (J: 1, 347); or again: “All sounds, and more than all silence, do fife and drum for us. The least creaking doth whet all our senses” (J: 1, 96). Sounds contrive a pervasive ambience in which all entities

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bathe; the whole universe resonates with an “acoustics of space” (J: 1, 61) as if all matter were traversed by sonorous vibrations and so animated. Moreover, a Journal entry from July 7, 1845 explicitly identifies sonorous vibrations with the motion of life: “Sound was made not so much for convenience, that we might hear when called, as to regale the sense-and fill one of the avenues of life” (J: 2, 158). That sound can “fill” us, additionally explains why hearing rather than seeing becomes for Thoreau something of an exemplary perceptual experience (“The five senses are but so many modified ears” [J: 1, 27]). For it suggests that more than the eye, the ear allows an object to inscribe itself upon the perceiver. In the case of listening, then, external materiality—actual sonorous vibration—literally or physically enters the perceiver’s interiority. In listening—more obviously than in seeing—the perceiver hosts in himself a sound external to him, which is why listening can inherently subdue the perceiver to the point of turning him into the perceived, annulling the difference between external and internal. Yet, despite this extraordinary capacity of listening to allow a reality external to the mind to inhabit that mind, Thoreau discovers that tuning the mind to a sonorous reality still requires hollowing out its habitual sensorial patterns. He discovers that the aural field no less than the visual is susceptible to figuration that ideates what is empirical. To experience non-figural sonority—to hear what, as early as 1840, Thoreau called a “stately march to an unheard music”7—requires undoing the habit of recognizing sounds that the ears have contrived. Ears are normally “cultivated” so as to register certain sounds as melodious or arranged, and to disqualify silence as the absence of sound, or to dismiss all discordant sonorous phenomena as meaningless noise. Thus, whereas the ear is not intentional in the sense that the eye is—it doesn’t have the power to focus or close itself at will—it has nevertheless been conditioned to identify certain combinations of sounds as harmonious. Harmony is to listening what geometry is to seeing; just as geometry negates differences among bodies by reducing them to their presumed, but in fact only imagined proportionate shapes, so harmony cancels dissonance by generating concord understood as the perfect essence hiding behind all discord. That is what Thoreau’s notebook for “The Service” suggests in quoting a passage from Coleridge’s Specimens of the Table-Talk, where harmony functions precisely as acoustic geometry: “Take a metallic plate and strew sand on it;

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sound a harmonic chord over the sand, and the grains will whirl about in circles, and other geometrical figures, all, as it were, depending on some point relatively at rest. Sound a discord, and every grain will whisk about without any order at all, in no figures, and with no points of rest.”8 Coleridge’s overlapping of aural and visual—for in this passage harmonic sound generates geometrical images—discards discord as a multiplication of meanings that fragments reality instead of totalizing it as a unity (“every grain” whisks its own “message”). For Coleridge this reality made of many contradictory messages amounts to a falsity, since he equates truth with a coherence and unity of meaning gathered into one form, which is itself generated according to a preexisting ideal of perfection. Interestingly, however, certain influential readers have understood Thoreau not to be negating but instead seeking the very idealization of the empirical into harmonious he himself called cultic. For instance, Sherman Paul’s highly influential The Shores of America presumed that Thoreau’s writings reflected his life-long search for such a harmonious or geometrical perfection of truth. Paul argued that Thoreau’s 1840 essay, “The Service,” promoted the ideal of a virtuous and brave man as the “spiral man coincident with the universe” and, since the universe is presumed to be harmonious, as the “’sole patron of music.’”9 This man, according to Paul, deciphers everything on the basis of a preexisting musical ideal of universal concurrence, which “became the sign of his [Thoreau’s] own spiritual health, the sign of that harmony within the self that Plato had used music to achieve.”10 In interpreting harmony according to the Platonic sense of the “celestial” and ideal—despite the fact that of all Greek thinkers Thoreau was least interested in Plato—Paul suggested that Thoreau understood the aural in general, and music in particular, idealistically and religiously, as the flux of the divine within the soul: “Music for Thoreau was ‘God’s voice,’ the echo of the soul.”11 Thoreau’s presumed musical man thus embarks on an “inward exploration,” searching after the perfect divine form on which to model the soul. Rather than understand Thoreau’s injunction to perceive the imperceptible (to hear “unheard music”) as an invitation to the empirical transformation of perception, Paul reads it as Thoreau’s desire to withdraw from the material into what is archetypal and perfectly formed.12 However “The Service” actually proposes a different criterion for

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detecting “perfect” sound, quite unlike Plato’s stilled harmonies. Its second section, “What Music Shall we have?”—which F. O. Matthiessen used, in the American Renaissance, as the title of a chapter dedicated to Thoreau’s aesthetics in general and his theory of music in particular—suggests that in contrast to one who cultivates a preference for arrangement and melodious order; or in contrast to the aesthetic ear of one who develops a taste for (romantic) music (Thoreau’s specific example is Beethoven), the man with “new” ears will try to hear the “slow” rhythm of the “ages,” which is neither regular nor harmonious. Indeed, one is required somehow to become deaf to harmony in order for “nicer” listening to emerge: Let not the faithful sorrow that he has no ear for the more fickle and subtle harmonies of creation, if he be awake to the slower measure of virtue and truth. If his pulse does not beat in unison with the musician’s quips and turns, it accords with the pulse beat of the ages. A man’s life should be a stately march to an unheard music, and when to his fellows it seems irregular and inharmonious, he will be stepping to a livelier measure, which only his nicer ear can detect. There will be no halt ever, but at most a marching on his post, or such a pause as is richer than any sound—when the deepened melody is no longer heard, but implicitly consented to with the whole life and being.13 Unlike musical harmonies, the “pulse beat of the ages”—the time of humans and beings in the world that one could perhaps call history—is irregular and discordant. It cannot be arranged according to a unifying understanding of form and truth (“does not beat in unison with the musician’s quips and turns”) but embodies precisely what Coleridge dismissed as discord. To register this arhythmia—which an ear conditioned by harmony can’t perceive (“unheard music”)—a “nicer” ear is required; an ear that is—like the unprejudiced eye—emptied of its habits to become an indifferent receiver capable of hosting whatever aural phenomenon traverses it. In the same year when “The Service” was published, Thoreau will also formulate that requirement as a theoretical proposition regarding new perception in general: “to discover a gleam in the trenches, and hear a music in the rattling of the tool we work with- is to have an eye and an ear” (J: 1, 213). By

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equating “hav[ing] an ear” with “hear[ing] a music” Thoreau doesn’t imply that the new ear he has in mind will be the same as the old only more “capable” than it, discerning harmony behind the dissonant rattling of a hammer; rather he suggests that the new ear will listen to and follow the disorder of the rattling dissonance by keeping it divorced from aesthetic production. To “have an ear” is thus to hear as novel and unrecognizable—hence to “discover”— any sound that an ear prejudiced by its aesthetic cultivation would render repetitive and familiar; it proposes a listening that is attuned to cacophony and discord. And while an entry from August 31, 1851, will only briefly confirm that Thoreau meant by “music” any discordant sound (“Every sound is music now” (J: 4, 23)), an entry from June 1852 will finally and explicitly state that the musical is not only what is harmonious but also what transcends the harmonious to include the atonal and discordant: A child loves to strike on a tin pan or other ringing vessel with a stick, because its ears being fresh sound attentive & percipient it detects the finest music in the sound at which all Nature assists. … So clear and unprejudiced ears hear the sweetest & most soul stirring melody in thinking cow bells & the like (dogs baying the moon) not to be referred to association-but intrinsic in the sound itself. Those cheap & simple sounds which men despise because their ears are dull & debauched. Ah that I were so much a child that I could unfailingly draw music from a quart pot Its little ears tingle with the melody. To it there is music in sound alone (J: 5, 82–3). Thoreau’s “unprejudiced” ears do not hear sounds as material representations of ideal essences or spiritualized souls (for instance, the dog baying at the moon is not heard as an acoustic metaphor representing human solitude in nature), nor, moreover, do they associate at all (“not to be referred to association”). Instead, they are traversed by what Thoreau says is “intrinsic” to sound itself, the very material vibrations that the prejudicial ear, aestheticized by the habit of judging what is harmonious, dismisses as dull. They hear sound stripped down to sound: “But the music is not in the tune-it is in the sound” (J: 5, 146). On this understanding, then, any acoustic event is music if heard clearly or intrinsically, that is, not by adjusting the sonorous to subjective preferences but

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by releasing the subjective altogether. By fusing the senses with the sensed, and by refusing all idealizing figuration, clear ears finally access the materiality of the aural sensible, as if recovering it.14 *** Thoreau’s understanding of noise as music—the idea that noise can be equated with musical tones for the simple reason that both are sounds–results however in his repeated dismissal of formal music and aestheticized harmonies, specifically opera, which was of course the primary artistic form of the European nineteenth century. For instance, in 1851 Thoreau recorded the following critique of the Viennese music school: “One will lose no music by not attending the oratorios and operas. The really inspiring melodies are cheap and universal … I am convinced that for instrumental music all Vienna cannot serve me more than the Italian boy who seeks my door with his organ.”15 Opera, then, is the expression of senses or sensibility cultivated according to the aesthetic ideals of an educated middle class, distanced from dissonant sonority. Thoreau contrasts the price of such music, afforded by the Viennese bourgeoisie, with the cheap song of an aesthetically uneducated boy. And because that music is less invested in the unpredictable movements of sound than in the ideality of taste, Thoreau will suggest that there is nothing musical in it at all (by ignoring it “one will lose no music”). Following that claim of the unmusical nature of instrumental music, oratorios and operas, an 1859 Journal entry identifies the art of opera as affecting only those who suffer from a sickness of listening: “In proportion as a man has a poor ear for music, or loses his ear for it, he is obliged to go far for it, or fetch it from far, or pay a great price for such as he can hear. Operas and the like only affect him. It is like the difference between a young and healthy appetite and the appetite of an epicure, an appetite for a sweet crust and for a mock-turtle.”16 To claim that those who listen to opera are like those who crave mock-turtle is to maintain that they indulge in counterfeits, substituting fictions for the real. Mock-turtle was an English soup created in the mid-eighteenth century as a cheaper imitation of green turtle soup, using brain and organ meats such as calf’s head or foot to replicate the texture and flavor of turtle meat. In order to hear anything, the opera listener must fetch sound

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“from afar;” he must substitute the figuration of sound for the raw turtle meat of disharmony. Opera is thus a dish made of fake ingredients (cultivated taste mixed with pre-determined harmonies; melody that reconciles the tension between speech and meter; aestheticized figuration instead of non-figural sound); one listens to it not with cleared ears that settle the listener into the reality of an acoustic disorder, but with poor ears removed from the sonorous into the idealism of aesthetic judgment. Despite the fact that Thoreau explicitly identified sound rather than melody as music, scholars have rarely acknowledged his philosophy of sound as a radical redefinition of the musical, perhaps because they are a loss about what to do with its far-reaching consequences. Such consequences include: (1) the materialism that issues from refusing to treat music as expressive of ideal essences, whether such a music represents a sacred transcendence, or the aestheticized passions of the soul; a materialism, therefore, that returns sounds to the things from which music, in translating them into spiritualized “tones,” has removed them; (2) the demotion of the privilege given to human generation of acoustic forms, a demotion that implies a suspension of aesthetic judgment; (3) the cancellation of aesthetic ideals of beauty, and abolition of the musical sublime understood precisely as the experience of being overwhelmed by such beauty; and (4) the rejection of cultivated or “expensive” listening in favor of ears “cleared” for non-habitual, which is by definition experimental listening. Modernist readers have reacted as if Thoreau didn’t measure up to the elegance of their understanding of art, not as if he wanted to refuse its stylizing. They have supposed Thoreau’s discussion of sound to be radically separated from his discussion of music, since, in contrast to him, they presume that music can’t derive from sound but must always reside in melody. In that way they aestheticized his philosophy of sound—understood as love for the acoustic beauty of nature—but dismissed his mediations on music as a misunderstanding of art. For example, presuming that music can result only from a subjectivity that intentionally translates its affects into aesthetically formed sound, F. O. Matthiessen separates Thoreau’s theory of sound from any philosophy of music, arguing that Thoreau “is never really talking about the art of music, of which he knew next to nothing, but about this close co-ordination [of body and rhythm].”17 Thoreau’s identification

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of the musical with objective sonorous phenomena is interpreted by Matthiessen as an effect of his primitivism; it can be understood only metaphorically, as expressing the desire to attune the body to its natural environment; it doesn’t do anything to redefine the nature of music, remaining silent about real “art.” Similarly, Perry Miller sees Thoreau as an aesthetic bumpkin, disavowing the possibility that Thoreau’s philosophy of sound could in any way affect musical artistry. In fact, as Caroline Moseley remarks, “Perry Miller goes so far as to speak of Thoreau’s ‘musical illiteracy;’ he judges–perhaps harshly–that Thoreau’s musical taste was ‘pathetic.’ Miller assumes that Thoreau’s musical preferences were determined by ignorance of anything more cultivated.”18 In an implicit polemic with Matthiessen and Miller regarding Thoreau’s primitivism, Kenneth W. Rhoads persuasively argued that Thoreau was profoundly interested in issues posed by “man-made song and instrumental music …”19 Yet Rhoads too is at a loss to explain how Thoreau’s interest in the art of organized music can possibly result in “antipathy” for it, because, for him also, interest in music must result in the appreciation of musical beauty as nineteenthcentury aesthetics understood it–that is, as an adequation of the sensual and the idea. He therefore decides to read Thoreau’s lack of such appreciation as a paradox intrinsic to his thinking: “At this point arises one of those ostensible paradoxes which the student of Thoreau encounters frequently; for, despite his euphoric exaltation of music as man’s supreme achievement, he not only knew very little about the art or its technical aspect but expressed an active antipathy for organized or formal music and was rarely known to attend concerts, operas, or other presentations of music or related arts.”20 But what Rhoads identifies as a paradox is resolved if we understand Thoreau’s devaluing of organized music (from sacred oratoria to sentimental sonatas and sublime operas) in favor of arhythmical noise as a redefinition of what constitutes music, and a radical critique of Western aesthetics. *** Perhaps ever since Plato’s Republic, and certainly since the Renaissance and Ars Nova, Western music has been defined as musica ficta. That, at least, is the thesis advanced by Theodor Adorno and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, two of the most important

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philosophers of European Romantic music in the twentieth century. The term musica ficta signifies music as an art of figuration that excludes natural sounds from its domain. As Lacoue-Labarthe explains, the dismissal of the natural as musical essentially signifies that one subjects music to the ‘aesthetic’ principle of mimesis, presentation or representation. The Latin fingere, to which musica ficta refers, is the equivalent of the Greek plassein/plattein: to fashion, to model, to sculpt—thus, to figure. But a nuance also already exists in Greek: to fake and simulate, or to forge by imitation. Either on the basis of ancient testimony about the art of song or on that of the principles of metaphysical linguistics inherited from Aristotle and the Stoics, music … translated or expressed, that is to say imitated, the affects or passions, even ideas, whose verbal signifier was already understood as sensual presentation or expression. It was an expressionism.21 Music, therefore, is concerned with sculpting passions, that is, affects suffered by the subject. In translating affects into sound music not only expresses them but also, it is presumed, embodies them, since a tone is not simply a representation of a subjective interiority but also its sonorous presence in the external world. According to this tradition, then, music enacts the transubstantiation of a mute, internal, human suffering into an objective presence: it lets the suffering utter itself. To hear this affective interiority on the outside, then, the listener must open himself for the passions of another, accepting to be undone by them, so that through this subjugation— what Lacoue-Labarthe calls the “dramatization of passions,” and Nietzsche more colorfully identifies as the “hysterical pleasure of submission”—the listener’s passions themselves will be refashioned and he himself redone or subjectivized anew, his affects remade in accordance with the aesthetic ideal he participates in. Adorno offers the same insight, arguing that this speculative movement of music—the idea that, in expressing the interiority of the subject, music also undoes it to figure a new subjectivity—culminated in Romanticism, from Beethoven to Wagner. Beethoven’s sonatas for instance, were structured as the tonal representation of the Hegelian movement of the idea. In fact, tonality for Beethoven is what spirit is for Hegel; it is, Adorno

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claims, a force of “subsumption,” a force that mediates everything (“subsumption: everything comes under tonality”).22 Once mediated by the aestheticized pathos of otherness, or, for it is the same thing, subjected to it, the subject’s soul comes to be re-sculpted. However, on Adorno’s account, the truly ideological aspect of this music lies not only in the fact that after every transformation of the self the self gets further away from what it was empirically, more “remote from reality.” More perversely, that ideology strengthens the way that music offers this highly idealized affectivity as the objective representation of human passions. According to Adorno, that ideological operation of early romantic music was only intensified by the later Romantics, who strove to annul the empirical by generating a new and highly stylized subjectivity as the only possible empirical reality: “The ideological essence of music… lies merely in the fact that it is a voice lifted up… Its language is magical in itself, and the transition to its isolated sphere has a priori a quality of transfiguration. The suspension of empirical reality and the forming of a second reality sui generis seem to say in advance: all is well.”23 By performing the ideation that Thoreau too saw as intrinsic to it, music distances what is empirical, and renders the natural irrelevant, substituting for it, as “second nature” immanent to the human soul, hence as the real essence of its humanity, what is in fact an ideologically aestheticized affectivity. Closer to Adorno’s words, the magic of romantic music would thus be its transubstantiation of the empirical into an idealized or “second reality,” which, despite its derivative status, assumes as if by a miraculous transubstantiation the existence of something original (it is sui generis). And since for the stylized soul that absorbs such music only this second reality exists (albeit for the short time that listening lasts); since, in other words, in listening there are no boundaries imposed by the empirical—by ragged disharmonious sounds that frustrate the mind and tether it to the materiality of the sonorous—the listening subject is uplifted by the feeling of an unobstructed expansion of the passionate soul with which he coincides; he is uplifted by the feeling of his own grandness, through which he exceeds himself. Yet, that excess of his soul does not effect the annulment of the subject, far from it. As Lacoue-Labarthe interprets it, the subjectivity exalted by music remains highly subjectivized, “is a subject in excess…” The exaltation is still contained within an individualized form, but

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because this form has now been expanded, it results in a subjectivity felt to be, as it were, more than it is. Unlike the condition of emptiness that Thoreau desires, oriented toward the minimization of the self, this subject enlarges its form; from an ordinary self it is transformed into a super-self, which is why, in Lacoue-Labarthe’s phrase, the humanity of man enacted by romantic music is altered so that it now “consists in his superhumanness.”24 As the art of sculpting what Nietzsche called the “gigantic” beautiful soul, music, and specifically opera becomes in that century of European decadence that was the nineteenth century one of the privileged political forces for the aestheticization of human affectivity.25 Hence, to limit ourselves to examples of the musical aestheticization of passions in the age of Thoreau: that would be the case for the masses stimulated by a Wagner opera, in which, to refer to Nietzsche again, “the convulsive nature of [Wagner’s] affects, his overexcited sensibility, his taste that required ever stronger spices, his instability which he dressed up as principles” elevate the European masses, from Germany to Paris and St. Petersburg, into an “idealized beautiful sentiment,” into a collective sublime with over-tones of the super-human;26 or it would be the case for Baudelaire, who describes how listening to Wagner’s Tannhauser in Paris generated an idealistic drift of the soul far “from the natural world,” a drift that despite enacting the soul’s expansion allowed it to remain gathered into the full apprehension of itself: “Soon I became aware of a heightened brightness, of a light growing in intensity … Then I achieved a full apprehension of a soul floating in light, of an ecstasy compounded of joy and insight, hovering above and far removed from the natural world;”27 or for Mallarmé who in “Richard Wagner: Reverie of a French Poet,” understands music as “poetry close to the idea” and precisely claims Wagner to be an artist whose work embodies this unity—“music has joined verse to form, since Wagner”—a unity in which the “sacred experience” of religious affect will allow a recovered Catholicism to find its truth.28 Finally, to move things back sixty years in order to bring them closer to those whose work Thoreau had registered, it would also be the case for Coleridge, for whom the aestheticization of human affectivity into idealized soul that is enacted by opera—albeit not Wagner’s—will similarly come to embody an operation essential to the human. Musical harmony, Coleridge asserts, is what exalts the

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mind so that it drifts away from objective reality towards its true, idealized essence: “A Harmony so divine that a crash of discordant sound by accident did not at all affect the aloofened mind.”29 This exaltation is precisely the force for producing what is specifically human in the natural animal that is man: “Man the only animal who can sing; music is his Invention, if not God’s gift by Inspiration … To man alone it is given to make not only the air articulated, and the articulated Breath … symbols of the articulations & actualities of his Heart & Spirit, but to render his gestures, his postures, & all his outward Habiliments symbolical.”30 In gathering the disordered and disharmonious reality of empirical man—his gestures and postures—into metrical rhythm (breath) and harmonious sound (song), music in fact generates the subject’s articulated spirituality, which in negating the material, reaches towards the pure spirit of god, elevating humans from their ordinary “outward habiliments” towards the superhuman sacredness of the divine. Moreover, for Coleridge, it is this super-human sacred that contains the essential or, as he calls it, “primary feelings” of idealized humanity, which can be achieved only through the melodious uplifting of the soul: “Ode to Music—the thought I lost was that perhaps Music bringing me back to primary Feelings did really make [?moral] regeneration.”31 In the process of feeling its expanded self through listening—which, to reiterate, Coleridge terms the “articulation of the spirit”—the subject thus comes to participate in “primal” human passions, the feelings of a universal spiritualized humanity. That is why Coleridge describes the subject involved in this elevated listening as an individuality expanded into community. By participating in this primal passion, those listening to an opera, he suggests, feel they are participating in the communal memory of universally shared identity that once existed in God and that will be achieved again through the moral regeneration enacted by music: “Thursday Night at the Opera. … In reflecting on the cause of the ‘meeting soul’ in music, the seeming recognizance, &c &c, the whole explication of memory as in the nature of accord struck upon me/accord produces a phantom of memory, because memory is always an accord.”32 No memory, then, without harmonious community—the consonance of a soul meeting with others through listening—and, hence, no human community without the melodious unity of elevated humans. That idea, however, guides not only the European but also the American manufacturer of souls, who will venture to decide

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who is human precisely by judging who is capable of participating in this community of musically aestheticized affects. Thus, Lydia Maria Child not only reminds the readers of her “An Appeal for the Indians” that missionaries judged Indians to be humans because they managed to convert them by affecting them musically, but she will in the same breath propound the same view: “Another proof that their [Indian] natures are emotional is that they are extremely fond of music, which missionaries have found peculiarly useful in arresting their attention and touching their feelings.”33 And, finally, it is just such aesthetes that Frederic Douglass addresses when he relates, in his Narrative, that while he was still a slave—“within the circle” as he puts it—he never thought there was anything unusual about the slave’s “wild notes,” but now that he has become familiar with the musical ideas of those who are “without,” he understands that they might hear slave songs as irrational. They might hear them as “wild songs” that paradoxically confuse joy and sadness, and that, by extension, defy the Western ideal of reasonable, clear and distinct ideas. He explains to them that slaves are human—that their apparently irrational songs “humanize” by “deepening my hatred of slavery, and quicken[ing] my sympathies for my brethren in bonds”—despite the fact that they do not come across as melodious but instead as something much closer to what Thoreau understands as music, music composed without considering the tune, music that embodies a thought “that came up, came out–if not in the word, in the sound;” music, in other words, that is thought materialized into sound rather than enchanted into an aestheticized idea.34 It is my contention that Thoreau was quite aware of the political implications of his re-definition of the musical, of the fact that the nineteenth century translated his question “what music shall we have?” into “who is human?” Already in “The Service” he describes Western music as the political figuration of feeling, explicitly connecting it to the history of European military programs: When Bravery first grew afraid and went to war, it took music along with it. The soul delighted still to hear the echo of her own voice. Especially the soldier insists on agreement and harmony always. To secure these he falls out. … It was the dim sentiment of a noble friendship for the purest soul the world has seen, that

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gave to Europe a crusading era. War is but the compelling of peace. If the soldier marches to the sack of a town, he must be preceded by drum and trumpet, which shall identify his cause with the accordant universe. All things thus echo back his own spirit, and thus the hostile territory is preoccupied for him.35 Music is here understood as an acoustic emblem of the “accordant universe,” which the occupying army enforces by means of a military operation that penetrates discordant territories or peoples (music identifies the occupying army’s “cause with the accordant universe”). The accordant world is thus the effect of an arrangement that subjugates differences into harmony. In Thoreau’s interpretation, the soldier’s insistence on harmony is a function of his practice of subjugation. The soldier’s ears exalt not only in hearing the sound of his soul’s passions in music (“the soul delighted still to hear the echo of her own voice”) but, more importantly, in sending those passions in the form of music into a territory to be invaded (“if the soldier marches to…a town, he must be preceded by drum and trumpet”). And a territory is successfully occupied when the occupied are tamed by the rhythm and tune of the occupier, when the occupied start singing the conqueror’s song, as it were, thus accepting the very “soul” of the invader (“all things echo back his own spirit, and thus the hostile territory is preoccupied”). In other words, the occupied are those whose subjectivity is transformed into the passion of the occupier. In contrast to the bravery of a crusader or conqueror—which “grows afraid” and goes to war out of fear for the disharmonious, taking “music along with it”—“true bravery” for Thoreau consists in refraining from those “resolute actions” through which one imposes a harmonious community of the soul; the “truly brave,” rather than daring to go to war, to die or kill for unity, instead “dare to live” the dissonant particularities of ordinary daily life: “Bravery deals not so much in resolute action, as in healthy and assured rest. Its palmy state is a staying at home, and compelling alliance in all directions. The brave man never heareth the din of war; he is trustful and unsuspecting. … One moment of serene and confident life is more glorious than a whole campaign of daring. We should be ready for all issues; not daring to die, but daring to live” (J: 91). The true bravery that Thoreau has in mind, then, would consist in an effort to weaken the constitution of subjectivity

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predicated on self-expansion, for the true hero never extends himself. Rather than being defined by self-expansion (whose political effect always implies colonization as harmonization), Thoreau’s bravery resides in a restraint that leads to an excess of self-diminution, to what Cameron diagnoses as “the absence of self” (WN: 77). Instead of enhancement through impassioned sublimation, Thoreau’s perceptual exercises, as Cameron suggests, aim at “disassociating” phenomena from “human significance;” they want to liberate perception from “the emblems, the names, the descriptions, the identifications, the analogies” (WN: 75). They are, as Ross Posnock puts it, gestures of a “brush desublimation,” that consists in seeing anew “what is in front of [one’s] eyes– tangled and ragged impressions.”36 The clear ear is de-sublimated by perceiving incoherent, ragged dissonance that cannot effect the political aestheticization of the subject’s sensibility, that does not produce individuals fashioned by passions that overwhelm them, or masses exalted by the superhuman sublime.37 *** John Cage was perhaps the first interpreter of Thoreau who didn’t separate the latter’s thinking on sound and listening from his thinking on music. For Cage did not interpret Thoreau’s understanding of sound as musicological illiteracy but in fact as a sustained and a radical critique of the Romantic aesthetic tradition and the model of subjectivity it conditions. He clearly understood—and in what follows I refer to Cage only as an interpreter of Thoreau, leaving aside his own theory of sound and music, for that would require a separate analysis—that Thoreau’s experiments in listening to sound instead of melody, and the redefinition of the musical that that entails, actually amounts to a quest for a non-aestheticized subjectivity. In the preface to his 1975 Lecture on the Weather, Cage refers to Thoreau’s anti-aesthetics as issuing from a self-evacuation that involves emptying the senses of all memory of harmony and all habits of enjoying the melodious: “Other great men have vision. Thoreau had none. Each day his eyes and ears were open and empty to see and hear the world he lived in. Music, he said, is continuous; only listening is intermittent.”38 In an unpublished 1982 interview with David Katzvig, Cage expanded this insight: “I think that the thing that is relevant to

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our experience now in the work of Thoreau, is the way in which he paid attention to what he saw and what he heard, because he didn’t have any ideas in his head when he was looking at something or listening to something, he let the thing he was looking at or listening to, go into his empty head. Most people have ideas, what they call visions, he had nothing. He’s a very rare person. He had no ideas.”39 Answering Katzvig’s question concerning what he meant in 1975 by saying that for Thoreau “music is continuous; only listening is intermittent,” Cage elaborated as follows: C: There is never a moment when sound is not available to the ears. However, when our minds are full of fears our concern is taken away from hearing. We stop listening even though there is something to listen to at the time. In other words he [Thoreau] thought of all sounds of the environment as music and he frequently says in his Journals that hearing one thing or another is as good as hearing a piece of composed music. K: How do you think he was able for such an extended period of time to keep himself from building up something—maybe call it a reading of experience with which he had to deal with because he kept seeing things new. How did he manage to keep from building a residue of experience? C: That’s the quality in him which I was trying to describe at the outset, his emptiness. He didn’t have anything upon which to base a residue. … And when you pay attention, listening and looking the way Thoreau did, there is no repetition, there is no residue, because the experience that you are then having, is entirely new by virtue of the time and space which have not before been occupied.40 Thoreau, Cage argues, clearly understood that an aesthetically fashioned listening—composed of “residues” of thoughts, feelings, aesthetic preferences and taste—blocks the mind’s access to truth understood as unformed sonorous objectivity. If one is to access the sonorous (or sensorial in general) and to settle in it, the whole history of the ego along with all of its habits must be undone. And only the empty mind—one emancipated from the habit of building sites for residues of the experiential—can truly hear, precisely

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because its emptiness deprives it of direction or the capacity to recognize, judge, evaluate, and thus exclude. Thoreau, Cage suggests, mobilized intention in order to enact its own cancellation, diffusing it into unintended objectivity. Thoreau’s mind, as Sharon Cameron will have also demonstrated, aimed at being dismantled to the point of abandoning all residue of its past forms; in Cage’s phrasing it “has nothing:” it is bereft of all visions and ideas, projects and programs; it becomes what it hears. In other words the sound that enters the mind from the outside to constitute the only phenomenon in it, ushers the mind into the pure materiality of acoustic vibrations. In an unpublished letter to Walter Harding of October 2, 1981, Cage describes a performance of Empty Words, which, according to him, was highly influenced by Thoreau’s redefinition of the musical: As you see above, I’ve moved, but/still love Thoreau. On the night of Sept. 25 through the morning of the 26th I read my Empty Words, derived from Thoreau’s Journal. There are 4 parts, and each part takes 2½ hours. There were three ½ hr. intermissions … I began reading in the Christ Cathedral Church in downtown Hartford, Connecticut at 9:42P.M. At 6:12AM. The curtains were opened to let the first light in. At 6:42 (dawn) the windows were opened so that the sounds of the outside came into the room.41 Here the boundaries of a closed room—emblematic of the self— gradually weaken; the curtains—the subjective gaze—are removed so that the light enters the darkness of the thinking mind behind them, and the windows are opened to enable the sound of the exterior to inhabit the ears. And while at first it might appear that Cage doesn’t escape the colonizing character of the musical that Thoreau critiqued in “The Service”—for, it might be argued, he exposes his listeners to a composed hence, aestheticized assemblage of sounds—the opposite is the case. For what enters the open mind in Cage’s experiment with Thoreau’s listening, is not the composer’s interiority given aesthetic form as a harmonious arrangement called music, since in fact nothing is ordered or arranged at all. Instead, the mind of the listener is occupied by “the sounds of the outside,” whatever they happen to be (whatever comes through the

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open window). The mind/the room becomes the motion of light and sounds that pass through it, from one window to another, as if it were an empty space vibrating with the acoustics of exterior materiality. The mind, just as Thoreau imagined it, becomes settled—as if resting—in objectivity. There is nothing sacred left in it, nothing like the beautiful coincidence of sensual and ideal that Adorno, despite all of his critique of the ideology of Romantic music, will still praise in European musical modernism (Specifically he calls Schoenberg’s work “chipper of a superme, unnameable truth”42). And it is precisely with Cage in mind that Adorno will dismiss as a naiveté verging on the impossible a composer’s attempt to cancel subjective intention in order to reach natural sonority: “While claims are made on behalf of a natural music that is damaged by the composer’s intellectual intervention, the truth is that this so-called natural music itself contains an element of rationalization: musical nature is always a second nature.”43 Thus, in contrast to a European modernism that still hinged on the revelation of the unnameable—albeit through serial twelve tone music—Thoreau can be situated at the beginning of a different, American modernity, one that worked against Adorno’s insistence that the aestheticized “second nature” of the self cannot be undone regardless of the fact that it is ideologically fashioned. This Thoreauvian modernity, in Cage’s words, is “no longer concerned with tonality or atonality, Schoenberg or Stravinsky …, nor with consonance and dissonance” but rather with “noise,” allowing “noises and tones to be just noises and tones,” not “exponents subservient to … imagination.”44 In it, “one finds a concern for a kind of objectivity, almost anonymity—sound come into its own. The ‘music’ is a resultant existing simply in the sounds we hear, given no impulse by expressions of self or personality. It is indifferent in motive, originating in no psychology nor in dramatic intentions, nor in literary or pictorial purposes.”45 In its humble commitment to the ragged materiality that ordinary humans inhabit this different modernity cancels the aesthetic strategies of musica ficta and, in so doing, resists complicity in its political programs.

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Notes 1

Jane Bennett, Thoreau’s Nature, Ethics, Politics, and the Wild, Boston, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002 [1994], p. 26. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination, Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 144–5.

2 Bennett, Thoreau’s Nature, p. 27; Buell, The Environmental Imagination, p. 12. 3

Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature, Henry Thoreau’s Journal, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 31 (subsequently abbreviated in text as WN).

4

Henry David Thoreau, “Journal,” vol. 4, ed. Leonard N. Neufeldt and Nancy Craig Simmons, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 263 (subsequently abbreviated as “J”).

5

Henry David Thoreau, “A Week on The Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, ed. Carl F. Hovde, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, p. 389.

6

Henry David Thoreau, October 4, 1859, Journal, vol. XII, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1906, pp. 371–2.

7

Henry David Thoreau, “The Service,” p. 14.

8

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Specimens of the Table-Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols. in 1, New York: Harper, 1835, II, p. 23. Thoreau’s quote is in J, 1, 97.

9

Sherman Paul, The Shores of America, Thoreau’s Inward Exploration, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972 [1958], p. 87.

10 Ibid., pp. 87–8. 11 Ibid., p. 87. 12 Such a reading is reinforced by Alan D. Hodder’s more recent theological interpretation, which argues that Thoreau always searched for the perfection of musical harmonies because they symbolize the divine harmony of the universe and at the same time embody the ontological accord of all beings that Thoreau saw in nature. Alan D. Hodder, Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Commenting on a passage from A Week, where Thoreau talks about Pythagoras listening to “symphonies of the world” in order to “understand the consonance of the spheres,” Hodder argues that Thoreau insisted on discerning

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the “music of spheres” everywhere in nature: “But in Thoreau’s experience, sphere music need not remain the province of a few rarefied souls from antiquity; it depended on nothing more rare than properly clarified sense. Furthermore, sphere music was audible in the silence he sensed all about him in nature” (p. 87). In confirming this insight I would only add that when he talks about Pythagoras’s “music of spheres,” just as in “The Service,” Thoreau has in mind the totality of objectively released sounds, not an aesthetically arranged consonance. Thus, in the passage from A Week, Thoreau quotes Jamblichus to reassert his views from “The Service,” namely that only by not listening to arranged melodious sounds, but rather by reforming his ears so that they could be “extended” beyond the thresholds of the audible and in violation of our sense of harmony, did Pythagoras acquire his understanding of the universe: “According to Jamblichus, ‘Pythagoras did not procure for himself a thing of this kind through instruments or the voice, but employing a certain ineffable divinity, and which it is difficult to apprehend, he extended his ears and fixed his intellect in the sublime symphonies of the world, he alone hearing and understanding, as it appears, the universal harmony and consonance of the spheres, and the stars that are moved through them’” (A Week, 176). Pythagoras alone seemed capable of hearing the simultaneity of unarranged sounds, of listening to their discord, through which he understood the connection of everything, a connection termed “universal harmony.” 13 Henry David Thoreau, “The Service,” p. 14. 14 The chapter of Walden entitled “Sounds” will list a whole series of such discordant vibrations as musical, annulling not only the difference between melodious and inharmonious but also between natural and technological. The song of a nightingale is no better than a sound released by a machine, because any sound that is heard “finely” requires a “refreshing” emptying of the ears: “The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like a scream of a hawk” (Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971, p. 115); “I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me (Walden: 119).” Even the sound of starving “rats in the wall” is musical on condition that one empty the ear enough to avoid attaching any preconceived idea to it (ibid., 127). Music is thus transformed into an unintended aural objectivity whose literality is not representative of anything. 15 Kenneth W. Rhoads, “Thoreau: the ear and the music,” American Literature, Vol. 46, No. 3 (November), 1974, pp. 313–28 (p. 315).

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16 Thoreau, 28 September, 1859, Journal, vol. XII, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1906, p. 357. 17 F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, London: Oxford University Press, [1941], p. 91. 18 Caroline Moseley, “Henry D. Thoreau and his favorite popular song,” The Journal of Popular Culture, XII (4), March, 2005, pp. 624–9. 19 Rhoads, “Thoreau: the ear and the music,” p. 314. We now know that Rhoads was right. As early as the 1830s Sophia Thoreau acquired handbooks of piano playing Graupner’s Art of playing on the Piano Forte, as well as music sheets such as Third Calisthenic Rondo, by Wilhelm Hugho, and Fleuve du Tage, arranged with Variations for the Piano Forte by G. Kiallmark, all of which suggests that something of what Miller called “cultivated art” was actually known to the Thoreau family (Thoreau family collection, 1828–58, Series IV. Sophia Thoreau Sheet Music and Related Material, 1833–41, Folders 5, 11). 20 Kenneth W. Rhoads, “Thoreau: The Ear and the Music,” p. 315. 21 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner), trans. Felicia McCarren, Stanford, NJ: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. xvii. 22 Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven, The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedermann, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Stanford, NJ: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 16: “Tonality, in Beethoven thus takes the subject out of itself, directing it towards the melodious passions, which undo the listener and fashion a new pathos or sensitivity: tonality does not remain abstract but is mediated: it is becoming.” 23 Ibid., pp. 6–7. 24 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, p. 29. Importantly, the operation of romantic music—the fabrication of the subject’s affective reality—is emblematic of the modern aesthetic in general. For, as Lacoue-Labarthe—guided by Adorno—suggests in his reading of Wagner, Liszt and Nietzsche, the aesthetic is less a theory of the beautiful (object) then the “épistèmè of the sensual and affective behavior of man and, in a more determined fashion, the ‘consideration of the affective state of man in his relation to the beautiful.’ ... But that means … that the exclusive taking account of the affective state of man, apropos of art, necessarily presupposes, even though obscurely at first, the scission between object and subject: the aesthetic will always envisage art from the point of

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view of creation or reception (taste), never from that of the work itself. Its propos, ultimately, will be not art (or the beautiful) but the relation of man—considered for the occasion as sensibility, that is to say according to the metaphysical division itself—to art (or the beautiful)”. (Ibid., pp. 93–4). 25 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufman, New York: Vintage, 1967, p. 167. 26 Ibid., p. 166. 27 Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner and ‘Tannhauser’ in Paris,” in Selected Writing on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet, London: Penguin Books, 1992, p. 331, quoted in Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, p. 24. 28 See Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, pp. 44–5. 29 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks, A Selection, ed. Seamus Perry, London: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 121. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., p. 35. 32 Ibid., p. 68. 33 Lydia Maria Child, “An Appeal for the Indians,” in A Lydia Maria Child Reader, ed. Carolyn L. Karcher, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, p. 93. 34 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, ed. David W. Blight, Boston. MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003, pp. 49–50. 35 Henry David Thoreau, “The Service,” p. 13. 36 Ross Posnock, “‘Don’t think, but look!’: W. G. Sebald, Wittgenstein, and cosmopolitan poverty,” Representations vol. 112, no. 1, Fall, 2010. In discussing why by 1854 Thoreau was “dubbed “the Yankee Diogenes,” Posnock proposes that Thoreau’s philosophy be understood precisely as one of desublimation and impoverishment (p. 122). 37 As the conclusion of Walden famously suggests, where a man is not “desperate” to follow the rhythm that sculpts subjectivity by elevating it into fusion with the masses; where one is differently timed, and follows the sound of a “different drummer,” even if the rhythm of such a sound changes often, is “unmeasured,” or gets interrupted, then the harmony supposedly heard by a collective “originary” identity cannot be recognized: “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is

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because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away” (Walden: 326). 38 Lecture on the Weather, a multi-media performance commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in observance of the bicentennial of the United States of America. The New York Public Library catalog summarizes it in the following way: “The performance starts with the reading of the preface. … After that the work starts, the 12 men reading and singing text fragments by Henry David Thoreau, and/or play instruments. In part 1 this is accompanied by sounds (on tape) of wind and in part 2 by sounds of rain. In the third part the lights in the performance-space are dimmed and the performers are accompanied by the film and the sounds of thunder” (New York Public Library online catalog, http:// www.johncage.info/workscage/lectureweather.html). See: John Cage, “Preface to ‘Lecture on the Weather,’” Empty Words, Writings ’73–’78, Middletown, OH: Wesleyan University Press, 1981, p. 3. 39 David Katzvig Interview with John Cage, Unpublished and unpaginated transcript, 1982, William Harding Collection, Thoreau Institute at Walden Pond, p. 1. 40 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 41 John Cage to Walter Harding, Harding Collection. 42 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Prehistory of Serial Music,” in Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 54–5. 43 Ibid. 44 John Cage, “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” in Silence, Lectures and Writings by John Cage, Middletown, OH: Wesleyan University Press, 1961, p. 69. 45 Christian Wolff, “New and Electronic Music,” quoted in Cage, “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” p. 68.

8 Hawthorne’s Fictional Commitments: The Early Tales Kerry Larson

We, who are born into the world’s artificial system, can never adequately know how little in our present state and circumstances is natural, and how much is merely the interpolation of the perverted mind and heart of man. Art has become a second and stronger Nature; she is a step-mother, whose crafty tenderness has taught us to despise the bountiful and wholesome ministrations of our true parent. It is only through the medium of the imagination that we can loosen those iron fetters, which we call truth and reality, and make ourselves even partially sensible what prisoners we are. (NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, “THE NEW ADAM AND EVE”)

One peculiarity of Hawthorne’s writing is the apparent lightness of its commitment to the fictional world it projects. As readers of his novels and tales, we are never far from sensing that the products of his fancy are at best makeshift constructs that ask for nothing

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more than provisional acceptance. It’s not just that we know that stories about young women who breathe poison or ministers who spend most of their adult life with a veil over their face are not to be taken at face value. Apart from what goes on within the story, the use of multiple narrative frames, intrusive narrators, overwrought symbolism, reductive moralizing, and inconclusive or openly problematic endings (among other things) keeps calling attention to the boundaries of the world imagined for us—and, more particularly, to the porousness of those boundaries. In the case of the short stories in particular, the generative idea, sometimes turning on little more than a pun or paradox, is so flimsy as to preclude the possibility of narrative development. Even Hawthorne’s most well-wrought tales cannot resist toying with the illusions they have otherwise so carefully crafted, as when, in the climactic final paragraph of “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” a withered branch from the oak sapling that has been marking the site of Malvin’s death for the past 18 years falls at the very moment a horrified wife comes upon her dazed husband standing over their dead young son. Into a scene of stunning power is injected a bit of symbolism whose improbable timing acts to place a frame, as it were, around our involvement in the story—our absorption in the narrative and its characters. This breaking of the plane of illusion is habitual in Hawthorne and cannot be adequately explained as an isolated quirk or as a reflection of his love of irony or rhetorical elusiveness. It seems to say something important about how he views fiction and its relation, if any, to the real or whatever we care to call the world that lies beyond the writer’s inventions. It’s worth thinking about the notorious thinness of this writing in relation to the suspicion voiced in the epigram to this essay, where art is thought to have somehow usurped nature. In such a case, fiction does not construct a semblance of “truth and reality” so much as it confronts one in the form of the “world’s artificial system.”1 What becomes of literature when “Art has become a second and stronger Nature?” The standard assumption that the literary exists to shape experience so as to render it more luminous and intelligible is the wrong approach for Hawthorne since this process has already occurred. Structures of make-believe, ready-made and free-floating, are the givens of everyday life, something that the short story does not craft so much as unlock or activate. If, as Sharon Cameron once pointed out, “Hawthorne cannot tell a tale as traditional tales

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had been told,”2 that is because things like the traditional tale have become so much a fixture of common perception that a fundamentally different stance toward aesthetic form and its relation to meaning and reality is required. Because there is a history of opinion that minimizes or dismisses this different stance, in what follows I start by re-examining the influential responses of Poe and James to explain how they misread some basic features of Hawthorne’s enterprise. The latter’s preternatural sensitivity to the way in which “artificial system[s]” precede storytelling explains why he cannot be assimilated to the tradition that Poe and James represent as well as why he should be committed, if only abstractly, to a world beyond the reach of such a system. Since this second point engages directly with the readings offered by Cameron in her chapter on Hawthorne’s tales from The Corporeal Self, I consider her argument in relation to mine in the second half of the essay.

I What I have called a certain lightness of commitment on Hawthorne’s part toward the fictional world he projects has not gone entirely unnoticed. The suspicion stands behind Poe’s criticism of Hawthorne in his otherwise admiring reviews of Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse. The criticism centers on the use of allegory in these collections, about which Poe, famously, has nothing favorable to say. Essentially his objection is that “allegory must always interfere with that unity of effect which, to the artist, is worth all the allegory in the world.”3 “Unity of effect” is a talismanic phrase for Poe since everything he has to say about the short story is shaped by his interest in the fusion of form and effect. This is why he praises the “skillful literary artist” who begins by deciding upon “a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out”4 and then goes on to arrange the various formal components of the tale (length, tone, etc.) accordingly. Anything that goes against this ideal adaptation of the form to a desired effect is taken to be extraneous and thus a distraction. In Poe’s view, allegorical figures, like pop-ups in a children’s book, are one such distraction, which may be tolerated only if the artist makes a special effort to fold them back into his narrative until they are

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“judiciously submerged.” But Hawthorne doesn’t always make this special effort, with the result that we are compelled to question his “earnestness,” by which Poe appears to mean his seriousness of purpose.5 “During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control,” Poe observes at one point in his review of Twice-Told Tales.6 Because the use of allegory calls that control into question, it cannot but indicate to Poe a lapse or carelessness on the part of the writer in failing to recognize that every decision respecting the form of the fiction must be subordinated to the realization of a specific effect. No doubt Poe’s critical notices did more good than harm in bringing recognition to works that had until then garnered very little national attention. Still, the reservations expressed by these reviews were not without their own share of influence. Citing Poe’s critique with approval in his book on Hawthorne, Henry James, for example, accuses the narrator of The Scarlet Letter of “crossing the line that separates ... moral tragedy [from] physical comedy” when the latter slips in the remark that Dimmesdale reportedly beholds in the sky “the appearance of an immense letter—the letter A” during his midnight vigil on the scaffold with Hester and Pearl in Chapter XII (“The Minister’s Vigil”).7 In the same way that allegorical excess creates what Poe calls “interference,” for James a disconcerting “abuse of the fanciful element,” along with “a certain superficial symbolism,” threatens to “spoil” our immersion in the drama at hand (“in this masterly episode the effect is almost spoiled by the introduction of one of these superficial conceits,” he says of the scaffold scene).8 Since he follows Poe in conceiving the meaning of the text to be one of its effects, James believes that Hawthorne’s fiction succeeds best when “the idea appears to have made itself at home” in the “analogies and correspondences” that give it expression. Otherwise, we are left with “something ... slightly incongruous, as if the kernel had not assimilated its envelope.”9 When that happens we are likely to encounter “the lighter exercises of the imagination” or “the lighter order of the story-teller’s devices,” as when the narrator of The Scarlet Letter keeps going on about the “scorching properties” of the letter to the point where his asides “graze triviality.”10 In short, when the kernel leaves its envelope, a sense of the insubstantial and arbitrary may be felt, resulting in what James describes as “something light and cold and thin” in Hawthorne’s representations. Here again the

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overriding implication is that Hawthorne is not always sufficiently vigilant about protecting the “needful illusion” from distracting influences.11 Obviously both Poe and James had the highest regard for Hawthorne’s genius, which is no doubt why both blame his seemingly cavalier attitude toward his fiction on external factors. For Poe, the culprit is the baleful influence of transcendentalism and its enthusiasm for “metaphor-run-mad”; for James, it’s the alleged “thinness” of New England’s cultural environment. Although there’s nothing like offering a diagnosis of a problem to make its existence seem that much more real, it’s nevertheless striking that neither of Hawthorne’s fellow writers consider the possibility that his texts might have their own reasons for being constructed in the way they are. In part their failure to do so is understandable, for the real difficulty is not so much that they misread Hawthorne as that their misreading carries just enough plausibility to make it seem worth taking seriously. For example, when Poe praises a tale like “The Hollow of the Three Hills” because “every word tells and there is not a word which does not tell,”12 he is not foisting his own agenda onto the text, which actually does seem to aim at the “unity of effect” deemed by Poe indispensable to “the tale proper.” If anything, the text, a little masterpiece of dramatic compression, more than fulfills expectations on this score. A “lady, graceful in form and fair of feature, though pale and troubled” (7) arranges for a meeting with a witch as dusk approaches. Kneeling down, she permits her head to be enveloped by the cloak of the seated witch (“an ancient and meanly dressed woman” [7]), whereupon visions from the lady’s past are revealed. The first discloses “two old people, the man calmly despondent, the woman querulous and tearful” each bent down by “shame and affliction” (9) as they think of their dishonored daughter. The second depicts a man in a madhouse who speaks of “a wife who had broken her holiest vows, of a home and heart made desolate” (10). The last concerns the funeral procession for what we’re led to believe is the lady’s dead child. Altogether “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” the first of Hawthorne’s tales to be published, consists nothing more than five descriptive paragraphs interspersed by snatches of dialogue. Yet even at this early date the author is able to wring from the simplest conventions images of startling intensity. The desolate setting of the forest scene, the unsettling use of sound to modulate

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the transition between visions, the fleeting glimpse of the suffering parents, husband, and child drawn against the anguish of the lady’s shame and fear—these and other elements are knit together so well and so effortlessly that it’s easy see why Poe should single out this text for special mention in his initial review of Twice-Told Tales. That said, “The Hollow of the Three Hills” also makes it easy to see why it is a mistake to apply the conventions we’ve been discussing to Hawthorne’s fiction. This much may be anticipated from the presence of the witch, whose role as the medium for the tale’s harrowing visions coexists with a tendency to mock them when she is not jeering at the lady’s feelings of “intolerable humiliation.” In place of plot (minimal) and character development (non-existent), Hawthorne creates just enough sense of a tension in perspective to foster the illusion that our access to the drama is somehow being blocked or withheld. He creates just enough sense of “interference,” as Poe would have it, to incite our interest. Thus to complain, as one interpreter does, that the story “offers scarcely any place to cut in”13 given the lack of a surrounding context is simultaneously to make and miss the point: it is exactly the mirage of an inner space that we can’t penetrate but that nevertheless beckons that identifies the response Hawthorne most wants to elicit. And to the extent that our interest is drawn to the story behind the story, our absorption exists despite the narrative, not because of it. The fusion of form and effect is here replaced by the sense that the effect has broken free from the form, so that our own response is caught out, so to speak, as a subject of interest in its own right. Perhaps this explains the odd impression that the author of “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” so far from coming forward to engage us with an entertaining story of his own devising, is in fact bemused by this very expectation, an impression that becomes unmistakable as we reach the conclusion of this remarkable text. With the lady yielding one last time to the “evil spell” announced by the tolling of a bell, in cadences no less arresting, we may assume, to a young Emily Dickinson than they were for Poe, the tale comes to a moving but perversely abrupt end: Then came a measured tread, passing slowly, slowly on, as of mourners with a coffin, their garments trailing on the ground, so that the ear could measure the length of their melancholy array. Before them went the priest, reading the burial-service, while the leaves of his book were rustling in the breeze. And though no

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voice but his was heard to speak aloud, still there were revilings and anathemas, whispered but distinct, from women and from men, breathed against the daughter who had wrung the aged hearts of her parents,—the wife who had betrayed the trusting fondness of her husband,—the mother who had sinned against natural affection, and left her child to die. The sweeping sound of the funeral train faded away like a thin vapour, and the wind, that just before had seemed to shake the coffin-pall, moaned sadly round the verge of the Hollow between three Hills. But when the old woman stirred the kneeling lady, she lifted not her head. “Here has been a sweet hour’s sport!” said the withered crone, chuckling to herself (11). To be drawn into only to be pulled away from the lady’s story for one last time does two things. It brings our curiosity to a climactic pitch—we want to know, for example, what exactly happened to the child, if the lady herself has died, whether her visions are real or the delusions of a guilt-ridden soul and so on. But no sooner do such questions come to mind than we are made to realize the pointlessness of pursuing them, for the force of the “withered crone[’s]” oddly facetious comment is of course simply to say that “after all, it’s only a story.” And while giving the witch the last word in this abrupt manner may at first glance seem gratuitous and perhaps even cruel, the self-evident truth that this is indeed only a story does invite a different construction. We may imagine the young author laying down his pen and looking up from the page, marveling not so much at his own ingenuity or even at the pleasures of invention but rather at the readiness of our own credulity—a receptivity that requires nothing more than the merest touch to be awakened and that therefore may be as easily dismissed as summoned. To put the point in these terms is to see that the perceived slightness of Hawthorne’s fiction, real enough in its own right, is nevertheless tied to a supreme confidence in the power of the imagination to take possession of the listener. There’s no need to resort to laborious rules of composition, with their guidelines about channeling the reader’s response down a pre-determined path or cautions against crossing the line between comedy and tragedy. Since our involvement in the drama is predicated on our distance from it, the merest interposition is all that is required.14

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The slightness of the Hawthorne story is akin to the slightness of a “simple piece of crape” (373) that hides the face of the pastor in “The Minister’s Black Veil,” another early story with a minimal plot that conceals an untold tale of secret sin and sorrow (or not) and that ends on a deliberate note of irresolution. As the curiosity, bewilderment, and dread that seize the villagers on first seeing their veiled parson one Sunday morning gather in force and momentum, the eerie effects of the veil soon come together in a “pathos” that is sent rippling through the congregation as Reverend Hooper delivers his sermon: The subject had reference to secret sin, and those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them. A subtle power was breathed into his words. Each member of the congregation, the most innocent girl, and the man of hardened breast, felt as if the preacher had crept up upon them, behind his awful veil, and discovered their hoarded iniquity of deed or thought. Many spread their clasped hands on their bosoms. There was nothing terrible in what Mr. Hooper said, at least, no violence; and yet, with every tremor of his melancholy voice, the hearers quaked. An unsought pathos came hand in hand with awe. So sensible were the audience of some unwonted attribute in their minister, that they longed for a breath of wind to take away the veil ... (373) Covering one’s face with a veil and telling everyone else to regard it as a reminder of their failure to be completely honest with themselves or one another would seem just the kind of “superficial conceit” that “grazes triviality” that we’ve seen James complain about in his discussion of The Scarlet Letter. But of course where James is distracted Hooper’s listeners are mesmerized. They are made so not because their minister excels at pulpit oratory (we are told that he is “a good preacher, but not an energetic one” [373]) or because the theme of “secret sin” is especially compelling (it’s safe to assume that it’s been heard before). It’s plainly the veil that sets the mark of difference on everything, for the moment Hooper puts the veil over his face he goes from talking about “sad mysteries” to becoming one, a turn of events that the rest of the story explores in recounting the efforts of the village “to penetrate the mystery of the veil ... and the

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horrors which it shadowed forth” (379–80). Once again, though, the fruitlessness of these inquiries just leaves us circling around this “mysterious emblem”; the technique of intimating hidden depths through veiled surfaces doesn’t lead anywhere—it’s just a technique. What we’re left with is not the meaning of the veil, which remains no less inscrutable at the end of the tale than it was at the beginning, but rather the intensity of its effect, one that seems out of all proportion to anything that might, dramatically speaking, justify it.15 Most of the critical commentary on “The Minister’s Black Veil” assumes, it is true, that the story is about the minister and not the veil. A great deal is said about his hypocrisy, sexual escapism, self-defeating moral perfectionism, sanctimony, false universalism, betrayal of the community, and so on.16 Again, as with Poe’s assumption that “The Hollow of the Three Hills” exemplifies the “unity of effect” he looks for in a story, the assumption that Parson Hooper possesses a character with beliefs and desires we might analyze and for which he might be held accountable is not, on the face of it, patently wrong; we learn, for example, that he has a fiancé, is saddened to discover that children flee when he approaches, and himself experiences “an antipathy” and “horror” of the veil that is “so great that he never willingly passed before a mirror” (380). And yet supplying the minister with a personality and moralizing over his behavior falsifies his role in the story. Like somebody handling a weapon whose workings he doesn’t understand, Hooper, in donning the veil, activates an “awful power” that is no more controlled by him than it is welcomed by his parishioners. Its “unsought pathos,” rather than making the minister’s motives obscure, makes them irrelevant. And in this he is no different from others overawed by the “terrors” of the veil, whether it be Elizabeth, whose attempts to reason with her fiancé are sidetracked by an involuntary “trembling” when “her eyes [became] fixed insensibly on the black veil” (379) or “the chief magistrate, the council and the representatives” of “Governor Belcher’s administration,” whose exposure to the veil as Hooper delivers the Election Day sermon makes “so deep an impression” that “their legislative measures” betray a “gloom and piety” of an earlier era, or “the imitative little imp” who covers his face with “an old black handkerchief” and “well nigh lose[s] his wits by his waggery” (377). A condition of helpless fascination, in overtaking one character after another, overtakes the story as well. It is “the

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effect of this vagary” (327) and its failure to be contained (much less explained) by narrative form that seems to lie at the heart of Hawthorne’s interest. “Hawthorne’s characters often exist in their relations to one another,” Richard Poirier once observed, “much as Hawthorne exists in relation to his reader.”17 His point is to remark upon the prevalence of literary convention in Hawthorne’s fiction, particularly the way in which the stylized speech of the characters echoes that of their narrators. But the idea may be taken further, if only because the response of the characters in a story like “The Minister’s Black Veil” is so clearly focused on an emblem and not the peculiarities of the person who wears it. The close alliance between an intense, immediate emotional response and literary convention is perhaps more transparent in “The Hollow of the Three Hills” since it is genre and not an emblem that plays the leading role, specifically the genre of the gothic romance, whose presence is made unmistakable in the tone, imagery, and characterizations of the story’s opening paragraph. In the case of either the emblem or genre, though, we really do see a fusion of form and effect insofar as the veil gives concrete expression to an abstract idea, just as the gothic romance structures and channels our response by aligning it with a particular literary tradition. But what we’ve also seen is how this very fusion touches off a counter-movement, releasing an energy that can’t be contained. In “The Devil in the Manuscript,” to take a further example, the author Oberon, having “endeavored to embody the character of the fiend” in his writings—“the manuscripts in which I gave that dark idea a sort of material existence” (331), as he explains to his friend—burns his papers after repeated rejection from publishers. In giving “material existence” to a “dark idea,” the manuscripts resemble the veil; upon escaping up the chimney, the sparks from the papers that contain “The Fiend” and “My Brain” cause a conflagration in the surrounding neighborhood, “startling thousands into fear and wonder from their beds” (337). Whether it is a material form like a manuscript, a literary genre like the gothic romance, or an emblem like the veil, the embodiment of feeling or meaning serves as a catalyst for its dispersion. The emotion or affect is already embedded in the form or artifact. Hawthorne is merely setting it free. That’s all the fiction needs to do.

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Of course, it’s possible to explain such contagious effects by reference to the themes of guilt, sin or obsession evident in the stories that I’ve been discussing. So it’s worth turning to another relatively early tale which has nothing to do with “secret sin” but which does join an abstract meaning to a concrete form in a way that transfixes a group of listeners. In “The Ambitious Guest,” a “fanciful stranger” (302), traveling through the Notch of the White Hills en route to Vermont, stops for the night at an inn perched on the mountain-side. Although convinced that posterity will somehow remember him, he has no clue what he is destined to achieve (if anything) to win lasting recognition and in this sense his ambition has no real content. “The secret of the young man’s character,” we are told, “was a high and abstracted ambition” (301). Nevertheless, he gives shape to his fantasy by picturing for the innkeeper and his family a “monument” on which he will one day stand, an image that is no sooner put forward than there is released “a continual flow of natural emotion, gushing forth amid abstracted reverie, which enabled the family to understand this young man’s sentiments, though so foreign from their own” (302). Although his earnestness renders him somewhat “ludicrous,” the guest’s talk of graves and monuments, pillars and pedestals sets “head[s] running” (302) and “mind[s] a wandering” (305) as various members of the family are moved to muse over similar fantasies of commemoration. They may not “spread their clasped hands over their bosoms” in helpless fright, like Hooper’s parishioners, but the same state of involuntary absorption is evoked at such length that it becomes the center of dramatic interest in the tale. As in the other stories, suspense seems less a property of narrative action—as usual, there is hardly any to be observed— than the prolonged condition of startled intimacy experienced among strangers. With a capriciousness that recalls the ending of “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” the reveries of the guest and family are abruptly interrupted by a landslide, which sweeps both to their ruin as they leave the cottage and seek refuge in an adjoining shelter. The ill-fated family becomes a local legend (“Who has not heard their name” [306]), while the body of the guest is never found and therefore utterly unremembered. Because Hawthorne’s tales so frequently oscillate between immersing us in the feelings of its characters (so that their absorption begins to induce a similar state in ourselves) and pulling us away

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from them altogether (so that they seem mere props in a story), a sense of the arbitrariness of the fiction is hard to avoid. More than any of his contemporaries, Hawthorne would have relished, I think, Wittgenstein’s comment that when someone imagines King’s College on fire, it doesn’t make much sense for us to challenge his claim that it was King’s College that he was imagining and not some other building.18 It’s not just that we are free to imagine what we please but that, as a general rule, what we do imagine is free from doubt. Even to speak of acceptance seems misleading. The fiction is just there, like the parson who decides, for no apparent reason, to wear a cloth over his face or the husband in “Wakefield” who decides, for no apparent reason, to leave his wife and spend the next 20 years spying on her from across the street. To be sure, this sense of the arbitrary, precisely because it is arbitrary, may shift from the whimsical to the more disquieting without warning. If we return for a moment to “The Ambitious Guest,” for example, we can see that there doesn’t seem to be any room for asking whether the ambitious guest and the family really deserve the dreadful fate that awaits them when the avalanche carries them off. No doubt we may infer a crude, fairy-tale version of justice: a character who dreams of lasting notoriety is not just wiped away, but, we are told, wiped away without a trace. More subtly, we might read the story as a cautionary fable about preserving the domestic space against the encroachment of worldly desire and ambition: had the family stayed inside it would not have perished. And yet no amount of interpretive ingenuity can reconcile the obvious lack of proportion between what these characters do and the punishment they receive. We are to take their fate as it is given, fair or not. Indeed, it’s not just the concept of fairness that is made tenuous by the story’s unconditional logic. In the final sentences, the narrator explains that not only was there no trace of the guest’s body in the wake of the avalanche but that even “his death and his existence were equally a doubt!” (307). If calling the guest’s death into question seems odd (did he escape? how could that be important?), calling his existence into question seems to cross over into the absurd (if the guest never existed, whose company have we been keeping? why would there even be a story?). It as though the narrator, in savoring the multiple ironies of the ending, could not restrain himself from going over the edge. For like the witch chuckling over her half hour’s sport, the question about the guest’s

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existence comes from some place outside the fictional world of the story. The invitation to doubt is thereby made meaningless: what exactly would we be doubting in challenging the fictional truth that the ambitious guest once existed? The pointlessness of the question—the impossibility of even taking it seriously—appears to be yet another way of implying that we are not to assent to Hawthorne’s fiction so much as acquiesce to it. This last point is significant because so much of the critical response to Hawthorne assumes that his purpose is to create doubt, not render it moot. Arguably, though, focus on ambiguity and problems of meaning do more to deflect than reflect the true strangeness of these tales. Thus it is important to see that Hawthorne wants us to see that there is no good reason why Reuben Bourne, in “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” should be seized by “a sort of guilty feeling” (95) the moment he leaves his companion’s side. It is important for us to see that there is no good reason why Young Goodman Brown, on returning from his forest excursion, should remain unsure whether or not his wife is a witch even as that uncertainty curdles into cynicism and despair. Nor is there any good reason why, in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Giovanni’s faith in Beatrice is “incapable of sustaining itself at the height to which the early enthusiasm of passion had exalted it” (1001). Fearing the worst, either about themselves (the first example) or others (the next two), these characters imagine the worst and therefore make it true. As is so often the case with self-fulfilling prophecies, we see that things could have played out differently, that the story didn’t need to take the turn that it does. Hawthorne heightens this impression by placing his three young protagonists at a crossroad and watches them go down one path while pointing up the presence of others. He lingers over the impossible choice facing Reuben Bourne, emphasizing the evenness of the contest in deciding between staying with or leaving his friend and mentor. He is careful to tell us that Goodman Brown, upon returning to the village after his errand in the wilderness, simply can’t be sure if the world he thought he knew is in fact evil, implying that his projection of guilt onto others comes along to fill the void of his incomprehension. He assures us that “had Giovanni known how to estimate” Beatrice’s virtue, then “all this ugly mystery” of her poisoned self would somehow float away like “an earthly illusion” (1001). A vague sense of the provisional accompanies the doom

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that the credulity of these characters creates. The challenge is not that the worlds imagined in these narratives unsettle or defy our categories for interpretation. The challenge is to appreciate how chance and necessity are laid side by side. The element of randomness shows the slightness of the fiction, its lack of any compelling foundation; the element of fatality shows the power of the fiction, its grip on the believer. In each of the three stories, as indeed elsewhere, Hawthorne is intrigued by the ease with which the first state may lead to the second. Poe, in his insistence on the control of form over effect and effect over form, idealizes the short story as so exquisitely attuned to the anticipated response of the reader that the two become indistinguishable—to shape the text and to shape the reader are one and the same operation. This is of course why any “interference” or “distraction” that calls attention to that operation is an anathema for Poe.19 Hawthorne, with varying degrees of explicitness, makes room for such distractions since he is less interested in shaping credulity than in calling it out and making this a key part of the drama. His fiction is not only at odds with Poe’s formalism, but seems to place itself at a distance from the conventional assumption that the purpose of art is to process, work upon or engage experience in order to transform it into a new imaginative reality.20 At the same time, the tendency of this fiction to include hints of an extra-textual reality hovering just outside the frame of the story (as when the narrator questions the very existence of the ambitious guest) makes it seem unlikely that Hawthorne is bent upon unsettling or undermining reality itself. In “The New Adam and Eve,” he says that the best we can hope for from “the medium of the imagination” is to make us aware of “what prisoners we are” (749). What does this imply about the value and purpose of fiction? If there is an external reality beyond the reach of “the world’s artificial system” (749), what significance does it hold for Hawthorne’s own commitment to the fictional worlds he projects?

II An important source for my sense that the challenge of reading Hawthorne is only secondarily a matter of coming to grips with problems of interpretation as these are normally understood is

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Sharon Cameron’s The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (1981). One way of describing the impetus for the study is to say that it asks us rethink the place of meaning in these authors and, by extension, its connection to matters of form. Bypassing the interpretive puzzles and exegetical difficulties for which texts like Moby-Dick and Hawthorne’s short stories are notorious, it focuses on the ways in which meaning is caught up in a larger complex of issues connected to the relations and boundaries between and among disparate bodies. What a given conception signifies is of less immediate concern than “how conception is to ‘take itself’: of whether it is to take itself as embodied in the world (as literal) or as disembodied in the mind (as metaphor)” (CS, 101). In Melville and Hawthorne, that is to say, the question of what the text means is secondary to the question of where meaning is imagined to be—its position relative to the self, other bodies, and the world at large. Thus, in the same way that “Ishmael unbuttoning the whale cub probes the animal’s essence with his knife” (CS, 73), so Melville’s novel more generally turns on a belief that meaning is encased in bodies which, pried free, could be incorporated into one’s own body. This is of course what drives Ahab’s quest and what leaves a trail of mutilations and dismemberments in its wake. Cameron argues that this attempt to take possession of meaning—to grasp and embody it once and for all—is ultimately doomed to failure, for it seems that while the animal’s essence is not equivalent to the whale cub’s body, it is also inseparable from it and so to extract one from the other is to kill off both. (Or, as Ishmael puts it in “The Mast Head,” “the soul is glued inside its fleshly tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out of it without running great risk of perishing.”21) Here, as throughout the book, the problem of identity and embodiment is the problem of the relation between the two. The first needs but also exceeds or is in some sense non-identical to the second. Out of this asymmetry proliferates the bewildering array of divisions and displacements which it is the primary purpose of The Corporeal Self to sort through and analyze. Recalling a metaphor used earlier by James and applying it to the argument of The Corporeal Self, we could say that Melville’s characters, in tearing through the envelope of form, strive to take possession of the essence or kernel of meaning in order to internalize it, make it part of them. Hawthorne’s characters,

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oppositely, try to reduce themselves to that essence, sometimes by winnowing the body down to a representative part, sometimes by identification with a material object, and sometimes by casting the impure or undesirable out of the body and projecting it onto others. Here again, the discussion is organized around “the way in which the alien and the integral constitute identity” (CS, 133)— the way in which the kernel depends upon but is not reducible to the envelope. It is this double-bind—the condition of being “neither wholly united with nor wholly pried apart” from (CS, 133)—that Hawthorne’s characters are bent upon circumventing through the use of allegory. They never succeed. If the appeal of allegory is essentially to abstract the self from the body, thereby cutting through their vexing interdependency, the characters of Hawthorne’s tales nevertheless come to grief in their varied efforts to externalize what should remain within and internalize what should remain external (CS, 134). Ethan Brand, Roderick Elliston, Young Goodman Brown, the Ambitious Guest, Wakefield, Oberon and a number of others are, in Cameron’s readings, betrayed again and again by allegory’s false promise of healing or reconciling those primal “contradictions and transformations” that, insofar as they “characterize life itself,” are intractable (CS, 123). For the purposes of the present discussion, the most critical passage in the chapter on Hawthorne appears in its opening section, where a key difference between Melville and Hawthorne is emphasized: ... for Melville, the outside world is acknowledged in order to be incorporated. It does not exist except in relation to the self, except in the process of being made integral to the self. For Hawthorne, on the other hand, the world is irremediably other. It cannot be incorporated. It cannot be dismissed. Hawthorne harbors no illusion that the world could be sufficiently domesticated ever to be known. The world must be acknowledged at a distance and not in a possession. It cannot be reduced to the size of the human body ... the world never has anything but the status of an outside (CS, 81). A little while ago I suggested that the familiar view of art as taking up the particulars of experience and transmuting them into a new imaginative reality is foreign to Hawthorne. The idea expressed in

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the passage above about the imperviousness of the outside world to possession seems related to this point. Before I explore how, I want to delve further into the significance of this insight for the interpretations developed in The Corporeal Self. At first glance, taking note of Hawthorne’s insistence on the sheer otherness of the external world may seem a bit puzzling. Isn’t separation from “the world” already symptomatic of the delusion afflicting so many of his characters? Why should Hawthorne enforce a prohibition that his characters, in their self-isolating obsessions, appear to respect all too well? Thus the Man of Adamant in the story of that name withdraws, in his misanthropy, into a cave where his heart and then his whole body turns into stone. For Cameron, the rigidity of the man in stone “represents exemption from the world outside his body—represents exemption from the human community from which he flees, and represents as well, and as fundamentally, exemption from all that is beyond corporeal limits” (CS, 80). So it would seem that Richard Digby (the Man of Adamant), no less than Hawthorne, understands that “the world is irremediably other.” The same might be inferred from the discussion of Ethan Brand and his quest for the Unpardonable Sin, where we are presented with a character who travels the globe in search of an abstraction that can only be found within. Any wish to come into contact with a genuine “outside” independent of the self and its illusions seems out of the question. But then a central point of The Corporeal Self is precisely to show how such illusions serve to reify something like sin in a way that shrinks everything outside the self into one essence, so that a character like Brand, in the reduction of his own body to a single organ, the heart, dramatized at the end of the story, may be made “magically commensurate” (81) with this essence. As Cameron explains in the preface to the book, “Hawthorne’s characters ... seek to distill themselves into a representative essence with the hope that this essence—made sufficiently small, made even invisible—could come into correspondence with the body of the outside world” (CS, 5). In their various delusions, then, Hawthorne’s characters only appear to turn away from the external world. The self-enclosed objectification of the self is simply the means by which they attempt to force a relation to what lies outside the self. Thus the insistence that for Hawthorne “the world outside the self ... is emphatically outside the self” (CS, 5) is important in drawing

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a line between the folly of his characters and what is taken to be the ethical commitment of his own fiction. A “moralist” (CS, 101) who “turns the conventions of allegory against themselves” (CS, 80), Hawthorne “forbids externalizations” (CS, 86), “legislat[es] against partializations” (CS, 107), “rebukes [the] desire ... to separate the self from the self, stand outside [one’s] own li[fe]” (CS, 127). Although there may be a sense in which the author of Moby-Dick is caught up in the confusions of his characters, this is decidedly not the case, we are told, in Hawthorne’s tales (CS 81). The punishments administered in story after story attest to as much. But they also raise the question: what would “acknowledge[ing] the world at a distance and not in a possession” look like? What divides Hawthorne’s fantasies from those of his characters? In the case of “Ethan Brand,” the beginning of an answer may be glimpsed in the landscape, whose presence, according to Cameron, is taken to figure “the body of the world” as “something too amorphous and large to be codified as an emblem” (CS, 97). Thus, to cite one of several examples singled out in her reading, the “hoary mist” spreading over the valley and surrounding mountains that is described near the end of the tale suggests, in its expansiveness, a “totality [that] is felt rather than known, seen rather than understood, omnipresent rather than embodied, a mist rather than an emblem” (CS, 99). Natural images like the mist “rebuke Ethan Brand” by “offer[ing] an alternative to the distinctions he would make” (CS, 99). Further images like “the village in the palm of providence or of the earth mingled with the sky,” notable because these are pictures “in which shapes cannot be discerned,” likewise stand as “alternatives to the visible shape of the emblematic heart” (CS, 107). They do not reify or falsely dichotomize “the problematic relation between inside and outside” (99). In exemplifying what it means to acknowledge the world “at a distance,” the mist, like the other images mentioned, “softens distinctions” (CS, 99) according to Cameron. It does so, presumably, because the mist places the literal and the figurative in a proximate relationship: the link between what it is and what it signifies does not draw attention to itself in the way that the emblem does, with its more arbitrary or static pairings. The mist resembles a symbol in the Coleridgean sense that it “partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible.”22 It is in this vein that Cameron claims that the short stories “forbid the very severance

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of life from its palpable embodiment” (CS, 117) that so many of their characters seem to insist upon—forbid, that is to say, the separation of self from body and meaning from form. And yet it is important to note that pitting allegorical excess against symbolic decorum is not really the path that The Corporeal Self follows.23 The interpretation of “Ethan Brand,” appearing early in the chapter, does make use of the opposition, but thereafter mention of “alternatives” or authorial “corrective[s],” symbolic or otherwise, becomes much less prominent as a framework for structuring the individual readings. Instead we come across references to “the prefiguring Idea” (CS, 107, 147), “communal body of the world” (CS, 119), “’the disembodied image’ diffused among us all” (CS, 128), or “the universal human heart” (CS, 129), terminology curiously reminiscent of transcendentalism in its use of abstraction and symbols of the most generalized sort. That a certain vagueness runs through these descriptions makes sense, if only because the world beyond the self is a world that, as noted already, cannot be “had in a possession.” Of course, too much softening of distinction could, conceivably, threaten to undermine acknowledgement of “the problematic relation between inside and outside” (and it is important that both the relation and the problem of the relation be acknowledged) just as much as too much specificity. So we are back to the question of how Hawthorne’s fiction draws the connection to “the human totality” (CS, 130) without betraying it. Because the sheer otherness of the external world is, moreover, the flipside of the desperate effort on the part of the various characters to reduce and take hold of it, we sense a certain pressure in Cameron’s readings to locate a point of reference outside this dynamic. Thus we learn in the midst of a discussion of “Wakefield” that crowds are “redemptive” insofar as they “mediate the rigidity of the individual life that would in judgment or pride memorialize its solitude” (CS, 129). And yet the examples cited—the villagers at the end “The Ambitious Guest” or “the hordes of the dead” of “Alice Doane’s Appeal”—are too fleeting to bear the significance claimed for them24; even on the basis of Cameron’s own reading of these tales, the most that can be said about the assertion that crowds “rescue the self by incorporating it” is that it states a theoretical possibility, as opposed to something the story actually dramatizes. Indeed, in the case of the brilliant account of Wakefield’s self-estrangement, the point about the crowd can only

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be made negatively since “Wakefield cannot get lost in the crowd” (CS, 129). There is an assumption that Hawthorne wants us “to keep the ground we walk on” (CS, 131) lest we go spinning off into the void like Wakefield, but it is nevertheless striking that this must remain an assumption. For the most part, the reader of The Corporeal Self comes away with a much livelier sense of what Hawthorne forbids to the imagination than what he permits. The question of whether the tales bring us back to ground is the question of whether Hawthorne considers it the purpose of fiction to leave fantasy behind and put us back in touch with “the human totality.” The question comes to a head in the concluding section of the book, where Hawthorne’s early masterpiece, “Roger Malvin’s Burial” is discussed. Brushing aside the usual false leads that Hawthorne places in our path (i.e., Reuben is haunted by guilt because he did not keep his promise to return and bury Malvin; he is guilty because he misleads his fiancée, and so forth), Cameron’s analysis centers upon the moment of Reuben’s departure, when he turns away from Malvin and begins his “solitary pilgrimage” (95): “He walked more hastily at first, than was consistent with his strength,” the narrator tells us, “for a sort of guilty feeling, which sometimes torments men in their most justifiable acts, caused him to seek concealment from Malvin’s eyes” (95). The significance of his averted gaze is deepened by the fact that Reuben, “impelled by a wild and painful curiosity,” creeps back to the scene to glimpse the older man and overhear “a fervent prayer, some of the words of which stole through the stillness of the woods and entered Reuben’s heart, torturing it with an unutterable pang” (95). It is “the evasion of his eyes when Roger Malvin tries to meet them” that, for Cameron, constitutes Reuben’s “crime” (CS, 143), his “denial of relations” (CS, 138). What Hawthorne would have Bourne do is to look Roger Malvin in the eye—to look at him as he is leaving him; to accede to the sacrifice and to his part in the sacrifice; to accede to the way in which one life, not equivalent to another, sometimes has to sacrifice that other in order to save itself. Bourne cannot do it. Most of us cannot do it. Instead we look away. (CS, 142–3) Hanging in the balance here is the sense that the protagonist has been placed “in a context understood as chosen and coerced”

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(CS, 142, emphasis in original). The commentary captures, without flinching, the difficulty of honoring that balance by suggesting that there is indeed something that the young man could or should have done even as it concedes that this is just what “most of us cannot do.” But while it makes complete sense for Cameron to approach the story in terms of its “denial of relations,” the question remains whether Hawthorne does as well. What Cameron’s Hawthorne would have Bourne do is set aside his guilt (for this, as the narrative tells us, is what causes him not to look back) and accept the truth of the situation by looking Malvin in the eye. What Cameron’s Hawthorne would have Bourne do is to become someone other than what he is. His failure to transcend his limitations is described in terms of a “refus[al]” or “denial,” as if he had a choice in the matter. This is not to make excuses for Bourne but to question the reality of his moral agency. One could suggest, for example, that in this tale guilt is to Bourne what the veil is to the minister, a “medium of imagination” filtering perception which, once locked in, cannot be shaken off. Hawthorne’s interest is in showing the razor-thin difference between behaving in a guilty manner (as when Bourne first slinks off into the forest) and being overtaken by the real thing, not unlike those who, behaving as if they had come down with something, actually start to become sick. Asking the character to own up to “his part in the sacrifice” is like asking him to discard the veil—or like getting up in the middle of the minister’s sermon and walking out. In other words, the consequence of Cameron’s attempt to anchor the story in a moral reality to which it can be held accountable—namely, the ethical imperative to acknowledge the other—is not to indict Bourne but the basic premise of the story itself. Hawthorne doesn’t want Bourne to look Malvin in the eye; he wants to imagine what it would be like not to. Of course, it could be objected that since Bourne comes to ruin the fiction and the moral meaning do converge. But do they? In the final paragraph Bourne’s delusion triumphs, capped off by the eerie channeling of his consciousness by the narrator (“His sin was expiated; his curse was gone from him” [107]) as he stands over the son he’s just murdered. In a signature movement, we are brought close to the character to a degree we haven’t experienced until this point in the story at the same moment that we recoil in horror from the peacefulness his psychotic deed has brought him.

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Hawthorne doesn’t thereby rebuke his character so much as jar us into awareness of our own fascinated absorption in catastrophe, an absorption that parallels Bourne’s own compulsion to return and gaze, unobserved, on Malvin’s helpless form while picturing to himself, with unnerving vividness, an image of “Death” stealing gradually toward his friend “like the slow approach of a corpse ... showing its ghastly and motionless features from behind a nearer, and yet a nearer tree” (95). For Hawthorne, imagining is an irredeemably unethical activity, which is why the external world must remain “at a distance.” I think this is why Cameron’s response seems more like a repudiation of “Roger Malvin’s Burial” than an interpretation of it—to make moral purpose an integral part of the story is to leave it behind. Indeed if we ask ourselves what lies at the heart of the conception of a story like “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” we find what can only be called a sadistic impulse—the cruelty of placing a young man in an impossible position and watching his life unravel as a result. Versions of the same scenario are spun off in many other, equally well-known tales, where essentially innocuous figures (Goodman Brown, for example, or Robin in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”) find themselves in over their head, hopelessly overmatched. Without turning Hawthorne into one of his characters, it is fair to say that a bemused distance in the face of other people’s suffering is a recurrent note in his short fiction, and in this regard “The Hollow of the Three Hills” may indeed be seen, as Hawthorne’s first published tale, to lead the way. The overtone of moral irresponsibility recalls the bond between imagining and helplessness noted earlier in our discussion of that tale. There the point was to see how this bond generates a split, aesthetically speaking, between meaning and form, something also reflected in Hooper’s veil or the guest’s ambition. Here we can see that the same bond between imagining and helplessness generates a split, morally speaking, between fiction and sympathy. The consequence is that there is no ground to which the story restores us, no redemptive work of mediation it performs. It seems that the most that Hawthorne can hope for his writing to do is to alert us to this fact; “the medium of the imagination,” “The New Adam and Eve” tells us may “loosen those iron fetters” (749) it has forged, but it cannot escape them. This is why Cameron’s insight into Hawthorne’s insistence on the separateness of “the world outside the self” is so indispensable. So

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far as the imagination is concerned, the given world must be left alone.

III “They are so light, so slight, so tenderly trivial,” James observes of some of the selections in Twice-Told Tales, “that simply to mention them is to place them in a false position.”25 James cannot be altogether faulted for his condescending manner since he picked it up from Hawthorne himself, whose prefaces to the short story collections and novels are scattered with apologetic or dismissive references to his “castles in the air” and “phantasmagorical antics.”26 In the “Custom-House” introduction to The Scarlet Letter, for example, he speaks of his fruitless efforts at “creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance” (I, 37). In the preface to The House of the Seven Gables he similarly implores the reader not to engage in “an inflexible and exceedingly dangerous species of criticism, by bringing [the author’s] fancy-pictures almost into positive contact with the realities of the moment” (II, 3). But however stark the division between an ornamental, inconsequential, and trivial “Faery-Land” of art and a rude and crude reality may be, this familiar opposition is also fundamentally misleading, as even these brief quotations suggest. To speak of soap-bubbles broken by contact with actual circumstance is, after all, to place them in the same order of existence, just as worry about “too close a comparison with actual events of real lives” (III, 1) would have no point without the assumption that the imagined and the actual did indeed occupy the same ontological space. Thus, when Hawthorne tells us that Twice-Told Tales must be read in “the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which [they] were written” since in the sunshine his pages would be rendered “blank” (1152), the force of the suggestion is to make the real and the representation commensurate even as he insists on their incompatibility. If the sun can blot out the words on the page, does this mean that the words on the page can return the favor and blot out the sun? Inasmuch as this is not an idle question for

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Hawthorne, we can see the irony behind the role assigned to him by literary history. That role has been to epitomize the dilemma of the writer whose creations struggle to take root in a bleak or hostile environment. James was of course instrumental in the production of this narrative, which was subsequently amended and refined by critics like Richard Poirier, for whom the American writer at large strives to imagine a literary space outside of society, though this is an effort that succumbs in the end to the realities of that writer’s cultural and social environment (an outcome repeated in the more historical or ideological accounts by subsequent critics, for whom the literary turns out, once again, to be made untenable by the realities of society). I’ve been arguing, on the other hand, that Hawthorne’s tales do not aspire to a world elsewhere since this is already part of the cultural reality he confronts; he doesn’t need to invent the lady of “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” for example, since she seems, from the first paragraph, to have walked out of a gothic romance a la Anne Radcliffe. And just as there is no question of fiction attempting to transcend the “world’s artificial system” that it already is a part of, so there is no point in trying to redeem it. The actual or given world is real enough, but can only remain so if the imagination keeps its distance. That is what the fiction, in its willful artificiality and spooky glimpses of an extra-textual reality, is charged with—to keep its distance. So far as Hawthorne’s commitment to fiction is concerned, that is as far as he is willing to trust himself to go.

Notes 1

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982), p. 746. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the essay. Except for brief mention of “The New Adam and Eve” (1843), “Rappacini’s Daughter” (1844), and “Ethan Brand” (1850), the stories considered here were written in the 1830s. With the exception of “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1832), they were collected in the first edition of Twice-Told Tales, published in 1838.

2

Sharon Cameron, The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (Baltimore, NJ: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 11 (hereafter abbreviated as “CS”). In

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addition to Cameron’s study, the views expressed in this essay are indebted to Taylor Stoehr, Words and Deeds: Essays on the Realistic Imagination (New York: AMS Press, 1986), pp. 23–41; Kenneth Dauber, Rediscovering Hawthorne (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); and Theo Davis, Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 74–108. 3

Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, ed. J. Donald Crowley (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), p. 146. Poe wrote three notices of Hawthorne’s shorter fiction. The first two concern Twice-Told Tales and were published in Graham’s Magazine in 1842. The third is a review of Mosses from an Old Manse and appeared in Godey’s Lady Book in 1847. A useful account of each response may be found in G. R. Thompson, “Literary Politics and the ‘legitimate sphere’: Poe, Hawthorne, and the ‘tale proper’,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 49 (1994), 167–95.

4

Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, p. 90.

5

Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, p. 89.

6

Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, p. 89.

7

Henry James, Hawthorne, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956, p. 94. James’s review of Poe’s criticisms occurs in Chapter 3, pp. 50–2.

8

Hawthorne, p. 93.

9

Hawthorne, p. 51. What James notes in passing here seems to have made a much more profound impression on the New Critics, since in their view the dissociation of the kernel from the envelope is what prevents Hawthorne from achieving that “unitary act of perception” true art requires. See, for example, F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), pp. 248–50 and Charles Feidelson, Jr., Symbolism and American Literature, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 6–16. The quote cited occurs in Feidelson, p. 32, as he develops a contrast between Melville’s preference for symbolism and Hawthorne’s for allegory.

10 Hawthorne, pp. 49, 92. 11 Hawthorne, pp. 31, 50. 12 Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, p. 92 (Poe’s italics have been removed). 13 Michael Colacurcio, The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

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Press, 1984, p. 42. For similar expressions of perplexity, see Dauber, Rediscovering Hawthorne, who finds that the tale “rigidly closes us off from participation” (49) and Frederick Crews, Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 44. 14 The idea that Hawthorne’s fiction works by deferring or withholding the disclosure of something, thereby enhancing its mystery or value, is prominent in the scholarship. For example, Gordon Hutner (Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne’s Novels [Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988]) and Richard Millington (Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne’s Fiction [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992]) understand its significance to be primarily moral in nature. Edgar Dryden (Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Poetics of Enchantment [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977]) offers a deconstructive account. 15 For suggestive comments on what ensues when the “icon no longer refers to the particular body that generated it” but instead “refers to bodies all alike,” see Cameron, The Corporeal Self, p. 135. I have also profited from Theo Davis’s reading of the story in Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature, pp. 74–7. 16 Crews, The Sins of the Fathers, pp. 106–11, stresses Hooper’s sexual escapism. Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of the American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 136 calls attention to Hooper’s universalism while Millington, Practicing Romance finds him guilty of “an intolerance of complexity” (p. 30). Terence Martin, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Twayne, 1983) considers him “separated from the life-giving heart of the community” (76), a judgment echoed by Emily Miller Budick, Fiction and Historical Consciousness: The American Romance Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), who asserts that Hooper “denie[s] ... the bases for the human intercourse ... on which social and historical community depend” (110). 17 Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 110. In a fine insight, Kenneth Dauber notes that Hawthorne “desired, ultimately, not to mediate between story and reader, but that the story mediate between reader and him” (Rediscovering Hawthorne, p. 53), an insight that Theo Davis has developed at greater length in her chapter on Hawthorne in Formalism, Experience, and

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the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 74–108. Both accounts center primarily on the novels. 18 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), p. 39. 19 Approaching Hawthorne by way of Poe and James’s preoccupations with form may seem rather dated. Hasn’t Hawthorne criticism moved on to other interests? No doubt it has, but not necessarily in ways that make the concerns of Poe and James any less relevant. Arguably, two of the most influential studies written on the shorter fiction in the second half of the twentieth century are Frederick Crews’s psychoanalytically-oriented study, The Sins of the Fathers (1966), and Michael Colacurcio’s historically-oriented study, The Province of Piety (1984). Whatever their differences in outlook, both studies share a commitment to the view that every aspect of the text is calculated to produce a specific effect. Thus if for the first the oaken cudgel wielded by Robin in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” represents one among many phallic symbols inserted by Hawthorne to convey the sexual insecurity of his young hero (The Sins of the Father, p. 76), for the second the fact that Robin pays the ferryman five shillings and receives three pence in return is taken to be Hawthorne’s way of hinting at the depreciation in provincial currency caused by the British tax on rum in the 1730s, a tax that in turn is supposed to tip us off to one possible explanation for the riot we are later to witness (The Province of Piety, p. 142). Insofar as these examples are not atypical (and I don’t think they are), Poe’s expectation that “every word tells and there is not a word that does not tell” obviously remains in force. Indeed, when we turn to more recent criticism, the same expectation can sometimes verge on the oppressive. In an essay on Hawthorne as a cultural theorist, for example, Joel Pfister finds that “Georgiana’s whitewashed, ‘removed’ red hand” (in the tale, “The Birth-mark”) “is a miniature version of red hands that Natives painted on their face” as depicted in popular portraits by George Caitlin; he also points out that “The Minister’s Black Veil,” dramatizing “widespread feelings of guilt” among New England’s Puritans, was published “just when, in Hawthorne’s own time, abolitionists were indicting New England for its complicity with slavery.” From such observations Pfister concludes that “both tales exhibit charged white anxieties about acknowledging color— red, black—as a public issue.” Here the commitment to Poe’s unity of effect is so absolute that it has been taken beyond the bounds of the literary text to include antebellum American culture as a whole, so that use of a certain sign may be counted upon to call up an immediate effect without the need of further evidence or historical

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grounding. See Joel Pfister, “Hawthorne as a Cultural Theorist,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Richard H. Millington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 55. 20 In this regard, I am echoing the Charles Feidelson’s judgment that Hawthorne was not a symbolist at heart, while eliminating what Feidelson takes to be the pejorative connotations of this supposed failure. See Symbolism and American Literature, pp. 7–9. 21 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, eds Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 137. 22 The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Harper & Bros., 1871), vol. 1, p. 438. 23 For readings that do turn on this opposition, see Bell, The Development of American Romance, 130–55 and Evan Carton, The Rhetoric of the American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 151–264. Bell essentially accepts the charge against allegory that extends from Poe through James to the New Critics, the signal difference in his approach being that allegory emerges for him as a defect of the characters which the author sets out to expose. Carton sees Hawthorne more genuinely torn between symbolism and allegory, the signal difference being that allegory denotes the impasse of reference rather than a retrograde or conservative literary impulse, as it is for Bell and the New Critics. Cameron’s position is also drawn to an anti-allegorical Hawthorne, but is much more wary, as I shall try to show, in committing itself to alternatives. 24 Indeed, Cameron cites “the villagers rummaging through the body-house of ‘The Ambitious Guest’,” but I can find no mention of them. She also refers to “the people outside of Oberon’s house” in “The Devil in the Manuscript,” but the actual description is, again, fleeting, and consists of nothing more than allusions to “footsteps” and stray “voices” (336) crying out in alarm. 25 Hawthorne, p. 31. 26 The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Charvrat et.al, 24 vols. (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1962–96), p. III, 3. Subsequent references to this text cited by volume and page number.

9 Hawthorne’s Rage: On Form and the Dharma Theo Davis

I Hawthorne has a marked tendency to create forms and then to destroy or disparage them. One example is the account of genteel gardening in “The Old Manse,” the introduction to that somewhat haphazard collection of his stories and short sketches, Mosses from an Old Manse.1 Hawthorne writes that in “gazing” at his “crooknecked winter squashes,” he “felt that … something worth living for had been done. A new substance was borne into the world. They were real and tangible existences, which the mind could seize hold of and rejoice in.” After regaling us with the glories of “ cabbage,” he concedes: “the hugest pleasure is reserved, until these vegetable children of ours are smoking on the table, and we, like Saturn, make a meal of them” (M, 15). There is something awful about Hawthorne’s openness about his “huge[] pleasure” in consuming his “children”—just one of the many terrors of human possibility available in Hawthorne. Inside this particular terror there is a fury at the nature of form, and the taking-form which life entails, which this essay seeks to understand. To stay with Mosses from an Old Manse, “A Select Party” tells how “A Man of Fancy” “invited a select number of distinguished persons” to a “mansion” in the air (M, 57)—and concludes with

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“[t]he wind” taking the “breath away” from one of the guests, “whirl[ing] his three-cornered hat into infinite space” (M, 73) and dispersing the guest into parts. “The rising tempest” also blows out the “lights in the twinkling of an eye,” leaving the guests in a howling darkness with no way to return home. With diffident cruelty, Hawthorne comments: How, in the darkness that ensued, the guests contrived to get back to earth, or whether the greater part of them contrived to get back at all, or are still wandering among clouds, mists, and puffs of tempestuous wind, bruised by the beams and rafters of the overthrown castle in the air, and deluded by all sorts of unrealities, are points that concern themselves, much more than the writer or the public (M, 73). In “The Hall of Fantasy,” the narrator supposes that if “the world” were “burnt to-morrow morning, I am at a loss to know what purpose will have been accomplished. Or how the universe will be wiser or better for our existence and destruction” (M, 182). The thing to see is that a world has been stood before the reader for us to consider it being “burnt to-morrow morning.” While Freud’s famous account of a child’s game of fort-da explained how the child managed his anxiety about his mother’s comings and goings, Hawthorne’s game of creating and destroying manages turmoil and confusion about how things begin and end. “Young Goodman Brown” summons up a vision of a meeting of devil-worshippers in the forest only to then take it away. The event is taken away from Brown, since he is not sure if it happened to him or not, and taken away from the reader, as Hawthorne notoriously narrates, “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting? Be it so, if you will” (M, 89). Such narration takes back, or better abuses, the story it has told by asserting that perhaps it wasn’t real after all, but then perhaps it was. I say abuses because the story is taken away or denied, and yet also not allowed to disappear—it’s made to stay and suffer its obliteration as a condition of being. It is at “the famous city of Destruction” (M, 186) that “The Celestial Railroad” begins, and this destructive tendency in Hawthorne is one Sharon Cameron focused on in her readings of Hawthorne’s tales in The Corporeal Self. She observed that “[i]n

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tale after tale, Hawthorne disembodies a man,” and linked this violence to the desire to make meaning out of life, and to make life understandable or knowable.2 One pretense of the assumed split between allegorical levels of significance is that the surface of the allegory, in effect, has no bodily consequences, because, however literal its icon or picture, both the icon and the action that it represents are referred to another (usually doctrinal) level of discourse. Yet notwithstanding this deflection from the physical or corporeal realm ... it is a characteristic of allegorical representations ... that their surfaces or icons tell tales of murder or dismemberment, of contagion and violation, of spells cast on the human body, of gross corporeal misappropriation, tell tales of bodily harm. (CS, 78–9) Cameron writes: “in all cases, allegory hews meaning out of the body. Because the bodies are mortal, they do not survive the abuse” (CS, 84). In this respect, allegory licenses the perpetration of violence upon beings by intimating that they are not entirely real, and hence cannot suffer. The violence in Hawthorne can be seen then as a model of the violence done to life, and to reality, by the very representation which gives each both form and meaning. Yet Hawthorne’s tales insist upon the “consequences” of the way that allegory cuts meaning out of bodies, at least making the cutting known: “People fall apart, their centers will not hold, for they can never be matched to the ‘prefiguring Idea’ that either lies inside their bodies or is displaced from their bodies” (CS, 109). Although one could locate The Corporeal Self in a poststructural context centered on revealing the difference between the life of the body and the life that is known through representation, and reckoning with the violence of that difference, there is that in The Corporeal Self which eludes being contextualized in this way. This includes the drive to make general claims about the human condition, and the pursuit of a problem about identity framed as a question: what does it mean to be one thing, and not another? The book does not presume that identity—human or otherwise—is something we can know or feel with clarity prior to or apart from the concepts by which it is made available to ourselves, or to others. In addition, the body matters to the book less for its inherent value or as a site of identity (indeed, it is profoundly problematic as the

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site of identity, because it makes identity inherently differential) and more because it is the gateway to understanding identity as such. If the texts examined struggle “to define identity, as we all first do, in bodily terms” (CS, 7), the book aims to define identity, to explore in what sense any thing—not just a body or person—exists in itself, and hence in relation to what it is not. The kind of problem that possesses the book is the way that distinctions between one thing and another are both evident, inarguable (this body is not your body) and yet, repeatedly, transgressed or denied. For instance, Cameron writes: “In ‘Alice Doane’s Appeal,’ then, ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ which Hawthorne again forces into alignment, are connected to a larger set of oppositions—public and private, familial and historical, innocent and guilty. Hawthorne similarly forbids the separation of these terms, insisting they are related” (CS, 127). Or, the failure of boundaries to hold is said to drive “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” in which the terror turns on the fear that “to be near [a dying man] is to be him” (CS, 140), and on a failure “to know the difference between one’s self and another for fear one will be contaminated by the object of one’s connection” (CS, 140). Understanding what any thing is is also to consider in what sense any thing is both distinguishable from and relatable to another. The Corporeal Self eschews any hope that better, or abandoned, representation would remedy a difference within experience that is felt to be unbearable as well as unavoidable, and a difference inherent in identity that is taken as both an intolerable confusion and an inescapable fact of what it is to be one thing (always to be also related). Thus, The Corporeal Self considers a series of wishes to deny the identitic integrity of the human being, either by finding that one could exist in another or be “broken up into representative pieces” (CS, 156) and, again, somehow made not-other than the world and others. Abandoning the “hope” of fusion into the world that these stories explore, the book ends by arguing that “the self is thrown back on the trial of human relations” (CS, 157), relations between beings whose distinction from one another—which is yet not an inviolate identity—is accepted, endured, and survived. Perhaps the central understanding of The Corporeal Self is of an inarguable limit in human experience. This limit is that the mind is in the body, and is in this way cut off from all other beings and the world, even if it is through this mind and body we have any

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relation to that world. It is the force in that limit that structures the analysis of the furious ways in which Hawthorne would overcome it, and finds himself wrecked again and again on its inarguability. That identity is both inaccurate to our lived experience, and yet also impossible to live without, produces anguish at the nature of relation that is possible in the human world. Relationality is, in this book, made possible only by accepting that one has an identity which is separate from others, and only by accepting that this very identity feels separate, in some irredeemable way, from one’s experience of life itself. And yet, as indicated above, there is also a sense in which even the unavoidable isolation of the individual being is seen as itself a limitation, in that it continually is felt that identity as such splits apart (into body, soul, and shadowy third part), and is pressed up against the unstructured, unseparated phenomena of immediate experience. I will return later in this essay to this question of the limit, and the problem of identity, in Cameron’s writing. For the moment, I want to go back to the topic of Hawthorne’s violence, which does figure as a matter of the violence of identic form being imposed on lived, embodied experience. The Corporeal Self’s focus on identity shows that the problem of representation per se is not primary to its argument, and I would like to extend that to explore how the destruction in Hawthorne is directed not only at bodies but at forms, including representations and images. The problem of what something is informs not only the body or self, but also story and image in Hawthorne. For if Hawthorne depicts violations and abuses of real bodies in the name of images and allegories, he also perpetuates a parallel violence upon the images and allegories themselves. Consider how Pearl, in The Scarlet Letter, swipes at her imagined Puritans: The spell of life went forth from her ever creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand objects, as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. The unlikeliest materials, a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower, were the puppets of Pearl’s witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage of her inner world ... It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw her intellect, with no continuity, indeed,

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but darting up and dancing, always in a state of preternatural activity,—soon sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of life,—and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy… The singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child regarded all these offspring of her own heart and mind. She never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon’s teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies, against whom she rushed to battle.3 Pearl’s overt “hostile feelings” to the “offspring of her own heart and mind” is an iteration of the hostility we’ve seen already in Hawthorne’s relation to his own offspring, be they his characters or his vegetables. In this passage, Hawthorne attributes this hostility to Pearl’s awareness that she is hated, but I would emphasize a different cause for this hostility: the changeability of forms. Hawthorne notes “the vast variety of forms” Pearl imagines, and how they, and she with them, are “darting up and dancing,” in a frenzy of “activity” that includes starts into life and fits of death: “soon sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of life” (CN, 199). It is a little hard to tell whose life is raging up and dying down: Pearl’s or the forms she projects her mind into. But what is clear is that this engagement in the life of forms has a chaotic beginning and ending that causes hostility and rage. There is a way of thinking, about Hawthorne and about literature, in which images and concepts are seen to be made at the price of material, time-bound life. I am suggesting that behind this problem is a deeper problem, which is about the nature of a reality that includes both concepts and images on the one hand and bodies and lives on the other. Together, they make up a reality which Hawthorne at the very least intuits, if he cannot entirely state as a principle, is limited because it does not last (Hawthorne’s habitual insistence that things do last, over generations, can even be heard as a willed resistance to the knowledge that things change and end). In rage at this state of affairs, Hawthorne takes vengeance on the stories, characters, and images he creates and shares. This rage is affective kin to the rage that Cameron has analyzed in Hawthorne, a rage at the ineluctable boundary between the self and the world and at the problematic nature of that boundary. The shared effect of rage also indicates a shared object—limitation is what is being raged at—but the way that limitation is understood is distinct. In

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The Corporeal Self, limitation is felt as absolute (if also difficult to locate): the limitations of the individual body, and the limitation of images or ideas about it which have a frozen, solid quality that cannot be brooked. The sense is that ideas of identity have a limit—a basic line or form—that is always inadequate to the experience of identity; it is also that the experience of identity is itself limited, by its unknowability from the outside and by its intractable confinement to one body and one consciousness. In contrast, the limitation this essay looks at is the limitation of ending: not limit as what cannot be escaped, but limit as what cannot be held onto. This is limit as ending, partiality, and changeability. One could see this limit as the way that any identity—any form or being—comes to an end, comes apart, and fails to have an essence. While this reading diverges from The Corporeal Self’s sense of Hawthorne and of identity, it engages a sense of the nonessentiality of all phenomena that Cameron has more recently explored in, and as, Impersonality. As that more recent book investigated impersonality, a concept Cameron linked to Buddhist teaching, in this text I consider Hawthorne as intuiting, in his own way, a quality of both limitation and changeability in form, and an identification of form’s unsatisfactoriness with other ways that human experience proves unsatisfactory, which I will liken to how form is understood in the context of the Dharma (the teachings of the Buddha, and the truth of how things are).4 Hawthorne’s hostility to form helps one to see how dissatisfaction and frustration with form’s limits, including the limits of literature and the limits of conceptual thinking, can lead one into a rage at form which is, I argue, fueled not by the inherent brutality or failure of form but simply by its difference from what we had thought it to be.

II The House of the Seven Gables is, in Kerry Larson’s apt phrase, “a book where the line between narrating and humiliating is not always easy to draw”; one reason for this desire to cast aspersions on the characters and events he narrates—also evident in Mosses—is simply because they are destructible.5 In “Drowne’s

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Wooden Image,” a tale about a beautiful sculpture which seems to come to life and walk through town, one character gasps over the sculpture, “If she be other than a bubble of the elements” (M, 318). As if to emphasize that she isn’t, Hawthorne has the sculpture’s fan (which is part of the sculpture/woman) be broken. The potential destruction of the “image”/woman is made more vivid when, at the tale’s end, Hawthorne breaks the illusion the story has turned on—of a sculpture come to life—by asserting that there may have been an actual woman, a “fair stranger” who not only “must have been the original of Drowne’s Wooden Image” (M, 320) but must also have been the one seen walking about town. Destruction is all the more evident in “The Artist of the Beautiful,” in which Owen Warland creates a mechanical butterfly that can fly and seem to live, only to have a child “ma[ke] a snatch at the marvellous insect, and compress[] it in his hand,” leaving behind only “a small heap of glittering fragments” (M, 475). In “The Celestial Railroad”’s time in Vanity Fair, the narrator announces that “nothing was more common than for a person … suddenly to vanish like a soapbubble, and be never more seen of his fellows” (M, 202). These stories are all written from a version of the City of Destruction, where persons and things and forms resembling persons are crushed into “glittering fragments.” In “The Old Manse,” Hawthorne writes about his own work in a similarly abusive tenor, telling us his stories are only “idle weeds and withering blossoms” (M, 34), or else “old, faded things” (M, 34). His tendency to create and destroy here takes a form of gentle humiliation, as he “offer[s] the bouquet, such as it is” (M, 34), insisting on the worthlessness of his own work and the dubious worth of “any whom” such wilted discards “may please” (M, 34). D. W. Winnicott has written that “aggression ... creates the quality of externality,” because it is through aggression that one discovers that an object is not subject to one’s omnipotence.6 “The subject’s perception of the object as an external phenomenon, not as a projective entity, in fact recognition of it as an entity in its own right” can be found out through a phase when the “object survives destruction by [the] subject.”7 Going through this process, “because of the survival of the object, the subject may now have started to live a life in the world of objects, and so the subject stands to gain immeasurably.”8 Hawthorne’s aggression to his own creations entails some of this play, as if he would test his works to find out if

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they are able to exist in spite of him. But unlike Winnicott’s subject, Hawthorne is finding that objects do not survive—they fade like flowers, break like trinkets, or collapse in waves of doubt. One way to frame this, which Hawthorne himself urged, is that he had failed to reach a mature contact with a reality outside himself. Hawthorne writes, in “A Select Party,” about a “crowd of shadow people, with whom the Man of Fantasy had been acquainted in his visionary youth.” These “were beings of crude imagination, such as glide before a young man’s eye, and pretend to be actual inhabitants of the earth … Alas! it is not good for the full grown man to look too closely at these old acquaintances, but rather to reverence them at a distance.” This is because seen too closely, “they were neither human, nor tolerable likenesses of humanity, but fantastic masquers” (M, 63). If there is an implication here that by now the author has reached an ability to relate to real persons, we have to take him at his not very convincing word. Hawthorne frequently presents his stories as if his mission were to disabuse us of our desire to live in a world that follows only our wishes and ideals and lacks its own counterforce of objective resistance: this is Aminadab’s role in “The Birth-Mark,” for example, when he mutters of Georgiana, “If she were my wife, I’d never part with that birth-mark” (M, 43). But who reads Hawthorne for the comfort of a loving, true heart, of an unpretending acceptance of the body and sexuality, or even a healthy subjectivity? Much of the disingenuousness in Hawthorne lies in his didactic statements that coming into unidealized contact with the life of the human heart and body would be a salve for the unease of Aylmer and his ilk. Not only is Amanidab a grotesque caricature— he is described as an “under-worker” with “low stature,” “bulky frame,” “shaggy hair,” and “smoky aspect” (M, 43)—but his peripheral and symbolic position denies that there really is any access to or possibility of living in the world of human life without the delusions of an Aylmer.9 What Winnicott would present as the achievement of the mature subject—an understanding that there is an external reality that survives, and hence is separate from, our psychic rages—is what Hawthorne keeps trying and failing to learn. Reality turns out to be an absurd caricature like Aminadab; in “Young Goodman Brown,” even finding out that everyone in your town is filled with sin comes to pieces.

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In another piece, “Feathertop,” we can see that the issue is more complex than one of Hawthorne’s failure to accept and live in relation to an external reality. This story is about a scare-crow whom a witch, Mother Rigby, fashions from a bunch of rags piled on a skeleton made of a “broomstick,” “a broken rung of a chair,” and “a hoe-handle” along with a “miscellaneous stick” and, for viscera, “a meal-bag stuffed with straw” (M, 224). Throughout the story, Feathertop’s humanness is posed and then qualified, but it is clear that unlike Pygmalion’s beloved statue, he is never truly brought to life. Feathertop is able to not only pass for human, but in emotional and psychic intensity to be experienced as human, without becoming real; his “character” is inherently “illusive” (M, 240), a point emphasized by the way that the pipe from which he breathes his apparent life is covered with “painted figures” that are “in motion” (M, 241), and rise and fall in and out of vividness. Feathertop’s humanity is in his identification with an image. Hawthorne foregrounds that Feathertop is seen—first by Mother Rigby, then by the narrator and the reader, with observations such as, “It was sorrowful to behold how the fine gentleman began to fade back into a scarecrow” (M, 235) and “It was wonderful to see how exceedingly like a human being it behaved” (M, 234). To the extent that Feathertop’s being human is identified with his being identified with an image, Hawthorne works somewhat on an understanding of humanity Barbara Johnson has located through Lacan. In her words, “the subject comes into being in the gap of inferiority between a flawed viewer and the anticipated wholeness of an armor of fiction, an armor of inanimateness. What happens in the mirror stage is the conflating of libidinal investments with beautiful forms: the fantasmatic and the aesthetic are henceforth the ‘reality’ of the self.”10 And yet if Johnson identifies personhood with the misrecognition of oneself in and as an image in a mirror, Feathertop’s story culminates in his quite different realization, looking in a mirror, that he is not the image he had taken himself for: Feathertop … looked towards the mirror, and there beheld, not the glittering mockery of his outside show, but a picture of the sordid patchwork of his real composition, stript of all witchcraft.

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The wretched simulacrum! We almost pity him. He threw up his arms, with an expression of despair, that went farther than any of his previous manifestations, towards vindicating his claims to be reckoned human. For perchance the only time, since this so often empty and deceptive life of mortals began its course, an Illusion had seen and fully recognized itself. (M, 244) Unlike the Lacanian subject, when Feathertop sees his reflection he loses the illusory image of himself. He perceives mere sticks and straw, and he understands that his personhood is an “[i]llusion.” Unlike the enabling misrecognition of subjectivity, the recognition that he is not the image he mistook himself for makes living unbearable: “I’ve seen myself, mother!—I’ve seen myself for the wretched, ragged, empty thing I am! I’ll exist no longer!” (M, 245). But the “ragged, empty thing” that Feathertop sees himself to be is more than a heap of junk. First, his realization produces an anguish that is Feathertop’s strongest “claim[] to be reckoned human.” Losing the image of himself as a human subject produces a “despair” that is a mark of being human, as if the experience of oneself as unreal—as a misrecognition—were the core of humanity. It is possible to see this betrayal of the image and yet to experience this as a loss which leads neither to death, nor to being a heap of sticks, but to a sense of self that is powerfully real—“I’ve seen myself!”—and intolerably disappointing: “I’ll exist no longer!” Excruciatingly, Feathertop still believes in himself as an “I” even as his loss of faith in that “I” drives him to want to kill off the self-same “I” over whose nonexistence he is in agony. In the very moment of seeing he is a thing and not a person, Feathertop cries the plaint of subjectivity: I see myself. Just as the “I” outlives its own seeing-through itself, when Feathertop sees through his image of himself, he doesn’t cease to be an image. He sees “a picture of the sordid patchwork of his real composition”—which is still a picture; and Hawthorne, right after Feathertop’s unveiling, identifies him as “The wretched simulacrum!” Even revealed as only an image, Feathertop’s suffering marks him as a person not only to himself, but also to the reader, invited to sympathize with his wretchedness, founded precisely in his identification with an image of an “empty thing.” This is an acute case in which we see that for all that Hawthorne feints toward, even forces himself toward, an argument that human life

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must be more than images of itself, the imbrication of image and life is found to be beyond remedy. Insofar as Feathertop’s mirror-recognition entails an unraveling of the fantastic imagination of selfhood, we can understand it in light of Cameron’s recent work on the category of the impersonal. For in realizing that he is nothing—that the “I” isn’t real—you could see in Feathertop a crude perception that there is no essential self or I to be found, in any person. As Cameron writes of how mindfulness meditation picks apart the illusion of selfhood: In the absence of distraction, one is able to discern the changing nature of bodily sensation and the contingent (nonautonomous) nature of bodily sensation (to see that nothing can arise alone without the support of other things on which its existence depends)—that is, the nonsubstantive nature of bodily sensation. And similarly, of feelings, mind states, and objects of mind ... Thus when the Buddha says about the four foundations of mindfulness, ‘This is the direct path for the purification of beings,’ he is advocating an immediate experience which demolishes the perception ‘I am’ or ‘This is mine.’11 But what of the wild increase of self that Feathertop experiences just as he perceives that there is no real self to himself at all? Seeing he is just a bunch of sticks and rags that has been perceived as a person, by himself and by others, leads Feathertop not to release or peace but to a wish to kill himself, and an intensified sense of what he is: “I’ve seen myself! ... I’ll exist no longer!” Just how is one, in Steven Batchelor’s words, “to tolerate the terrifying and fascinating emptiness that quivers beneath the threshold of common sense”?12 It is possible, in Buddhist practice, for one to see something of the impersonal and ever-changing nature of reality—but to see it only vaguely, half-intellectually rather than directly, and without the development of other factors, including continuity of mindfulness but also equaniminity, loving kindness, and compassion. When this happens in practice, impersonality or emptiness comes through in distorted, incomplete ways that can be terrifying and confusing. The mind can move very quickly between belief in an “I” and the perception of its nonexistence, and this can lead to some over-excited and terrified states of mind not all that unlike Feathertop’s shrieking. Until the Dharma is known, as

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Deborah Ratner Helzer recently explained, as deeply as we know gravity,13 our peering into it and partial washings by it can be so disappointing that one can wish to ruin what is seen, to turn and, like Pearl, Feathertop, and Hawthorne, destroy what has been found not to really be at all. Seen more clearly, impersonality isn’t a glimpse of the destructibility of the self, or its evanescence, but of how much frustrating work it takes to keep that image of self going. Precisely because it is a misrecognition, an error, it is an ongoing irritation to keep it alive in our minds. Indeed, throughout the story what is most striking is not the enabling misrecognition of subjectivity but the grating and compulsory labor it takes to keep this image of life afoot. Where Lacan’s infant startles in delight to see himself, Feathertop begins his life under the “threat[]” of Mother Rigby’s harsh injunction to smoke his pipe: “‘Puff away, wretch!’ cried she wrathfully. ‘Puff, puff, puff, thou thing of straw and emptiness!—thou rag or two! … thou nothing’!” (M, 230). It is a compulsive and painful effort: “In fear and trembling did this poor scarecrow puff” himself into the illusion of a human being (M, 230), and any relaxation of the work leads him to “fade back into a scarecrow” (M, 235).

III The components of body and mind are not stable or permanent. They have no inherent reality. The Buddha advised us not to see them as real. Why would you want to see something that has no inherent reality as real? Appearing and disappearing, in a constant state of change—where is the reality in that? The only reality is this insubstantiality itself. The Buddha wanted us to see this truth, the truth that things are impermanent, unsatisfactory in nature, and without self-essence. Not seeing this and grasping at things, the only result is suffering. Seeing and letting go leads to freedom.14 While I’ve been writing in the last section about the person’s discovery of his or her unreality, the words of Ajahn Chah, a renowned Thai teacher, explain that such unreality applies to other perceived entities as well. In the passage, Ajahn Chah moves

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between an account of human experience and an account of things in general in a way one might find a bit perplexing. Ajahn Chah first speaks of “The components of body and mind,” as if what we are thinking about is primarily a human subject’s experience, but in a few sentences he is speaking about “[t]he only reality” there is. He says that “things are impermanent, unsatisfactory in nature, and without self-essence”—things, again, not just persons. The imbrication of an account of the self as empty and of other things as also empty is also evident in the following account of experience by the monk and writer Ajahn Sucitto: Something only has presence (that is, gets established as a conscious experience) because there is the sense of contact. Contact depends on something being contacted, like food contacting our tongue. From that contact with form15 (rupa), all sorts of feelings, and perceptions (or impressions) arise. There forms a heart-definition of what a thing “is”: … as feelings and impressions designate something, they—together with contact, volition, and attention—make up what’s called name, or nama. Nama, therefore, is a composite of feeling, perception, contact, volition and attention … Our entire world is made up of nameand-form ... In a way, we build our own world—and our world builds us.16 Particularly perplexing, here, is the difficulty we have in locating something like a distinct definition of selfhood, on the one hand, and material things, on the other; they build each other. There’s also a particular difficulty finding a definition of form apart from the perceiving experience or apart from the material world. The reason it is difficult is because the Buddhist understanding of reality is, precisely, not split between subject, materiality, and abstract concepts or forms; all three of these things arise as a perceived experience out of combinations of a whole multitude of factors (not just nama-rupa). It is confusing to try to separate questions about form from questions of impersonality in Buddhist writing because the sense of a form arises in a manner similar to how a sense of a self emerges.17 And self and form can’t really be separated out either; as Sue Hamilton, a scholar of early Buddhism, writes:

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nothing, of whatever nature, exists or occurs independently of conditioning factors. All such things, therefore, are conditioned things ... it is important to grasp the generic relevance of this: that it applies both subjectively and objectively. Not only is the state of any individual human being … at any given moment dependent on conditioning factors, but so are chairs, trees, stars, the air we breathe, toenails, musical notes, ideas and thoughts … and so on. Impersonality, or lack of identity, thus applies to everything, including persons but also trees and concepts: “If all things are dependent, then it follows that nothing has independent self-hood.”18 This is another way to understand the intensity of non-self: there is no real difference between the phenomena that constitute the experience of “I” or those that constitute the experience “you” or “that.” Any perceived identity—person, genre, object, belief—is a mistaken perception of identity in the sense of independent existing entity apart from other things.19 In this regard, impersonality is less about persons—or what pass for persons—than about the insufficiency of conceptual identification, an insufficiency in the very act of identifying one thing or entity as having distinct form and existence. This is, as in The Corporeal Self, often learned through the body but it is not limited to the body. In the words of Joseph Goldstein, an American Dharma teacher, If someone holds up his or hand and asks what we see, most likely we would say, ‘A hand.’ Actually, though, we don’t see a hand at all. What the eye sees is color and form and light and shadow, and then the mind jumps in and quickly puts a conception on that constellation of perception. We call it ‘hand,’ and we think that this is what we are really seeing ... Sit for an hour and pain arises and the knee hurts. But ‘knee’ is a concept. There is no sensation called ‘knee’ or ‘back’ or ‘muscle.’ That’s not what we feel. We feel tightness, pressure, hardness, softness, tingling. These sensations are what we experience. ‘Knee,’ ‘back,’ and ‘muscle’ are all concepts.20 Concepts—and we need concepts to have words, thoughts, and texts—are fundamentally not accurate to experience; nama and

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rupa, that is, do not quite match up (basically, because they are different things). This aspect of Buddhism—its lack of commitment to the explanatory power of concepts—can look, especially to minds trained in poststructuralism, like it urges us to abandon conceptual thinking for its ongoing falsification of some real experience, prior to form, we might want to access. But thinking this way assumes that concepts ought to be something other than what they are—which is in itself a deluded approach, to begin with an idea of what concepts ought to be and rail against the fact that they are something else. And these passages also intimate something else about concepts: concepts, themselves, are not that stable. What happened to the concept ‘knee’ as we watched the burning or tingling? What happened to the concept of self as we felt lightness, hardness, pain, the movement of air? This is why I find fascinating Hawthorne’s sense, in “The Birth-Mark,” that the form of the hand—as both a phenomenon that touches the eye, and as a concept in the mind—can’t really be stabilized. Apart from, prior to, its meaning and the different ways it affects different persons, the very formal outline of the birthmark is changeable: In the usual state of her complexion,—a healthy, though delicate bloom,—the mark wore a tint of deeper crimson, which imperfectly defined its shape amid the surrounding rosiness. When she blushed, it gradually became more indistinct, and finally vanished amid the triumphant rush of blood … But, if any shifting emotion caused her to turn pale, there was the mark again, a crimson stain upon the snow, in what Aylmer sometimes deemed an almost fearful distinctness. Its shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand. (M, 37–8) Whether the birthmark is or is not distinct from the cheek in which it is “deeply interwoven” cannot be fully decided. In some conditions, it has “an almost fearful distinctness,” and in others it seems to lack any boundary whatsoever. This apparent token of embodiedness is at the outset identifiable precisely not in its fleshliness but in the fluctuations of its form between “distinctness” and disappearance. If we think back to the passage in which Hawthorne described Pearl’s hostility at the forms into which she projected her mind, and the lack of clarity as to whether the issue

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was her life in them or their life as forms, what we see is that lurking in the vicinity of Hawthorne’s accounts of the need to access a human reality other than the world of images and meanings is an intimation of a beginning and ending in all form, whether it be the form of a living body or the form of an idea, an image, or a character. The point is tucked away in “The Birth-Mark” between the account of Aylmer’s horror at it, and Georgiana’s death. As the potion works on her, The Crimson Hand, which at first had been strongly visible upon the marble paleness of Georgiana’s cheek now grew more faintly outlined … the birth-mark, with every breath that came and went, lost somewhat of its former distinctness. Its presence had been awful; its departure was more awful still. (M, 54) To be made in form is to have an end, as Feathertop resolves to exist no longer; the distinction of the birthmark comes in and out of prominence; and, too, the appearance of form to a mind, a perceiver, is a critical observation to Hawthorne. One of The Corporeal Self’s core arguments was that what have been taken as hermeneutic problems in Hawthorne are, more accurately, ontological ones. In accordance with this view, I would say that Hawthorne’s preoccupation with how images and ideas appear to different persons is grounded in a vexing problem: how real is any form you see or think, if it pops like a bubble, breaks like a fan, or vanishes like “the stain of a rainbow fading out of the sky” (M, 54)? *** The non-conceptual emphasis of Buddhism, which I touched on shortly above, is clearly part of what drew Eve Sedgwick to it. She asks us to consider: “Where is the gap between knowing something—even knowing it to be true—and realizing it, taking it as real?” She continues, “The order of truth, after all, is propositional. The order of reality, on the other hand, while it might include people uttering or thinking propositions, isn’t itself propositional.”21 What is most powerful to me in Sedgwick’s writing is her courage to articulate her own doubt about the power of the very intellectual forms to which she had not only dedicated

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so much of her life, but for which she had received so much praise. It is no small thing for someone whose ideas and writing have been guiding for so many to write about the possibility that those same ideas are not sufficient, that the stuttering, exclusive perseveration of epistemological propositions in contemporary critical theory reads as a stubborn hysterical defense. Whether it comes in the form of anti-essentialist hypervigilance or, say, of the moralizing Marxist insistence that someone else is evading a true recognition of materiality, all this epistemological fixation, with all its paralyzing scruples or noisy, accusatory projections, can also seem like a hallucinatorily elaborated, long-term refusal to enter into realization as a complex practice.22 Seeing concepts about Hawthorne, about stories, about form come and go in the mind can lead to a rage, a frustration, like that in Hawthorne. There may be some of that rage in Sedgwick’s turn on queer theory—a not fully understood fury at what the things we put our faith in turn out not to be able to do. This is partially out of frustration at the disappointment of conditioned things, but it is also, I think, out of a disappointment at what form (which includes concepts) can do, out of a disappointment with form’s failure to provide true clarity. A political position, a theoretical understanding, somehow ceases to satisfy one; a character, a story similarly ceases to satisfy one; these things one writes come to the end of their ability to interest us or to feed us. But it would actually be a mistake to take this to mean that forms, or concepts, need to be destroyed or abandoned. In fact, we can’t really stop conceptual thinking—as Helzer points out, perception by means of both sensory and mental activity is a “universal element of consciousness,” so that as long as we are living persons, we’ll be having thoughts about what our senses perceive.23 And in the words of Thanissaro Bhikku: “It’s not just an issue of being able to go beyond concepts or not. It’s more an issue of finding the right concepts to help you act in such a way that you can put an end to suffering.”24 Perhaps an end to suffering seems far from the sphere of Hawthorne’s work. But Hawthorne depicts and manifests the rageful sorrow that we get in return for asking for happiness where it cannot be found. And it is even in this rageful sorrow that you

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could say Hawthorne provides a window onto the inability of the heart to accept a view of reality that in some sense it knows is, as Cameron wrote, “unbearable.” In calling it unbearable, in showing it to be unbearable, a strained and nascent belief in some other way can sometimes break forth. In Emerson’s words: “What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim?”25

IV In “The Old Manse,” Hawthorne tells this charming anecdote of the Revolutionary War, in which a New England boy encounters two British soldiers in the wake of a battle: Two soldiers lay on the ground; one was a corpse; but, as the young New-Englander drew nigh [them], the other Briton raised himself painfully upon his hands and knees, and gave a ghastly stare into his face. The boy—it must have been a nervous impulse, without purpose, without thought, and betokening a sensitive and impressible nature, rather than a hardened one— the boy uplifted his axe, and dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow upon the head. (M, 10) What happens: a boy sees two men, one dead and another, near death, who gives him a “ghastly stare.” That stare is ghastly because it is the stare of consciousness from a body, fully aware that the body is dying, in the very process of dying and becoming like the “corpse” at its side. At first we were told both were soldiers—“Two soldiers lay on the ground”—stressing the identity of these two beings, which is then confused when we find one is a corpse, one not yet. That being is in the state that shows without question: living consciousness is inside a body that is dying, will die, can be dead like this corpse. There can be horror in finding that what it means to be human is to be in a form that is not stable, to be in a form that we can’t stay in or keep going. And what he would do, like this boy, is “uplift[] his axe” to crush forms for their oncoming betrayal.

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Western literary culture is built around the idea that form is what saves us from mortality, and that form is opposed to the transience of human life. Susan Stewart writes that in its essence “poetry is a force against effacement,” and continues: Poetic making is an anthropomorphic project; the poet undertakes the task of recognition in time—the unending tragic Orphic task of drawing the figure of the other—the figure of the beloved who reciprocally can recognize one’s own figure—out of the darkness … The poet’s tragedy lies in the fading of the referent in time, in the impermanence of whatever is grasped.26 We retain the image, the representation, of the person even in his or her absence, which is implicitly that person’s death. As Anne Carson wrote of the ancient Greek poet Simonides and his epitaphwriting: “Had Simonides not named their names, [his clients and subjects] the Skopads would have vanished into the past. As a poet he is under contract to say something that will continue the Skopad memory for as long as his words can charm our attention.”27 Barbara Johnson focuses on a different immortality, that of the poet himself who (now in print) speaks in contradiction of his own death: “What an epitaph accomplishes, then, is what all literature has to accomplish: to make poetry that convinces the reader that the poet speaks, that the poem gives access to his living voice—even though the individual author may have been buried for more than two hundred years.”28 This takes us back to the tendency to identify our life with its depiction in form. Cameron writes about the young man in “The Ambitious Guest” who is consumed by “his yearning not be forgotten” and anticipates when he can say, “I shall have built my monument!” (CS, 112). But this monument—this record of his being—would necessarily be “displaced from life. It is not made from life’s accomplishments but rather stands outside of them, freezing them into static form” (CS, 112). This yearning to be in representation which for Stewart especially marks our being real as persons—having reality to others—is, then, also about a yearning not to exist, or to exist only in and as an image and thus escape being alive. Cameron wrote of this as something powerfully visible in Hawthorne, especially in the case of the grandmother in “The Ambitious Guest.” She wants, when “in the coffin,” someone to

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“hold a looking-glass over [her] face” so she “may see whether all’s right.”29 Cameron comments, “Unless we keep the ground we walk on we will be converted from life into static image. This is what Hawthorne’s characters dream they want—the grandmother in ‘The Ambitious Guest’ able to see her appearance in the world, to see the smile on the coffined face” (CS, 131). In my understanding, the desire for “the smile on the coffined face,” is the habitual yearning of the person to identify him or herself with an image, with a form. In “Monsieur du Miroir,” a sketch that plays upon the idea that the speaker’s reflection is a mysterious other person, Hawthorne again considers the reflection of a face in the coffin: And when the coffin lid shall have closed over me, and that face and form, which, more truly than the lover swears it to his beloved, are the sole light of his existence, when they shall be laid in that dark chamber, whither his swift and secret footsteps cannot bring him,—then what is to become of poor M. du Miroir! Will he have the fortitude, with my other friends, to take a last look at my pale countenance? Will he walk foremost among in the funeral train? … Will he linger where I have loved, to remind the neglectful world of one who staked much to win a name, but will not then care whether he lost or won? ... He will pass to the dark realm of Nothingness, but will not find me there. (TS, 402–3) The focus, here, is on the anticipated failure of the image of the self to stand as a memorial to the departed—not only can it no longer reflect him, it will not “remind the neglectful world” of Hawthorne’s “name” and reputation. It is the opposite of Simonides’s poems of memorial tribute; the image can do nothing but die. In The House of the Seven Gables, there is another confrontation between the dead and his image: the chapter on Judge Pyncheon’s corpse. It’s often considered that the oddity in this chapter is the way that the narrative voice addresses the dead Judge, goading him to wake up and get to work: “Pray, pray, Judge Pyncheon, look at your watch, now!” (CN, 586). But the chapter is also a picture of Judge Pyncheon, as is underscored by the lurking presence of the portrait of the ancestral Pyncheon patriarch. At one point a parade of ghosts passes including “the ancestor himself,” in ghost form:

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“He looks up at the portrait; a thing of no substance, gazing at its own painted image!” (CN, 591). Similarly, the chapter is a staged confrontation between the dead Judge and an image of him. The image of him—the chapter—pretends that the Judge lives, is just sleeping and dallying, although it is quite obvious that he is dead. The chapter pretends that it can keep him alive—its taunts that the Judge must move even echo those that Mother Rigby directs at her scarecrow, “Puff, wretch!” In this chapter, there is a rage on the part of the image (the chapter) toward the once-living person; this can be explained as a displaced inversion of the fury throughout Hawthorne, in which images do not do what they were thought to do: they don’t sustain the presence of the person upon his death. They don’t even sustain their presence to the living as images; think of Pearl’s “fit of passion, gesticulating violently,” that Hester can take the “A” off, at what Hester calls “any, the slightest, change in the accustomed aspect of things” (CN, 299). Pearl is in a frenzy to see that the form of the “A,” which she had identified with her mother, can be discarded or changed.30 Not only do forms not truly continue the being of those they represent and memorialize, they don’t really continue in their own being, to us. What I mean is that however final or finite a text might look, we never experience it that way. Andrew Ford has discussed how Simonides critiqued poetic inscriptions, which threatened the primarily oral quality of his work. In Ford’s words, Simonides pointed out “a short piece of inscribed poetry may be enduring, but it could be inconveniently out of the way—gravestones were usually situated along roads outside of town, and victory dedications, though a signal honor, were left in temple precincts at the place of competition.”31 Not only that, but our experience of that inscription would change if we tried to really stick with it. As the nun Ayya Khema wrote, All contacts pass quickly, because that is their nature. The same goes for sight, our eyes are constantly blinking. We can’t even keep sight constant for the length of time we’re looking at anything. We may be looking at a beautiful painting for a little while and really like it. Someone says: ‘You can stay here and look at the painting for the next five hours, we’re not closing the museum.’ Nobody could do that. We can’t look at the same thing a long time, without feeling bored, losing all awareness, or

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even falling sleep. Sense contacts are not only limited because of their inability to give satisfaction. They are actually waves that come and go.32 Think of Hawthorne’s frustration with his works: they are like bubbles that pop, flowers that fade. He keeps telling us, and himself, the problem is that he is a trivial writer, something of a failure, that he needs to get back to the real world. These are the kind of things you might tell yourself when you’ve felt a belief creep into your heart that everything that is known to you—ideas, concepts, stories, family, self—is flickering in and out of being. Ayya Khema tells us the eyelids flicker open and closed even as we try to just look at something. Hawthorne is fixated, filled with awe and anger, to see how that mimic hand comes in and out of being, how his characters elude his grasp, how stories come to an end. What Hawthorne is up to, I am contending, in all of his crushing and destruction of forms human and nonhuman is an acting out of the destructibility that characterizes all form, so that he might somehow control or manage the terror of that discovery. This is in part simply to take him at his word: this man has discovered “in the perfected vigor of our life, … that Time has now given us all his flowers, and that the next work of his never idle fingers must be—to steal them, one by one, away!” (M, 26). The purported original scarlet letter is found in the Custom House, where “time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it to little other than a rag” (CN, 145).

V Poe observed that Hawthorne’s chosen genre—“the short prose narrative, requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal”—enabled him to produce an effect of “totality.”33 But Hawthorne’s short fiction is nevertheless attuned, in a way Poe does not consider, to the fragmented, by which I simply mean limited, bounded, ending quality of form. While during the tale’s reading period (if anyone reads with such extreme concentration) “There are no external or extrinsic influences,” the very shortness of the reading period—the sense that the story is so soon finished—makes

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the non-totality, the limitation, of its existence as a formed thing all the more difficult to ignore.34 It is also true that Hawthorne does not really keep his works that separate from one another. Bubbling persons appear in both “The Celestial Railroad” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” destroyed art appears in both “Drowne” and “Artist of the Beautiful,” and the bouquet offered in “The Old Manse” resembles the flower offered at the opening of The Scarlet Letter. Hester tells us that Pearl is her Pearl “of great price” (CN, 194), but “the Pearl of Great Price” (M, 327) also appears in “The Intelligence Office.” In “Feathertop,” the witch lets out “a glimpse of her diabolic nature, (like a snake’s head peeping with a hiss out of her bosom)” (M, 230); the serpent inside Roderick Elliston also emits “an audible hiss” (M, 269) in “Egotism; or, the Bosom Serpent”; in “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” Reuben Bourne’s “one secret thought” works “like a serpent, gnawing into his heart” (M, 350), much as Elliston’s serpent causes him to cry, “It gnaws me!” (M, 269). Such interpenetration of tales and novels occurs not only at the level of phrase or image, but also in terms of plot and theme. If “The Birth-Mark” is partly about a man reckoning with the human imperfection of his wife, so too is “Mrs. Bullfrog,” in which the narrator just married to a young woman discovers that she is “a witch” and “a she-tiger” (M, 134). Moreover, the way Mrs. Bullfrog alternates in his mind between “sweet woman” (M, 134) and “gorgon” (M, 135) evokes the way that Feather-top flickers between a human being and a man of straw, between humanity and the form of humanity. In Choosing Not Choosing, Cameron observes that Dickinson’s poetry pursues a question about wholeness, or in Poe’s word totality. She argues that choice is in its nature a concession—“It is to consent to ‘this’ in lieu of ‘that.’” In making this concession—in choosing one thing and hence not everything—choice “produces wholeness.” This is because “the integrity of an entity depends on its single identity, which, once established, resists reversal, complication and change.”35 However, “Dickinson’s poetry dramatizes the impossibility of wholeness understood as boundedness”: no poem, story, or understanding is truly whole if its wholeness is dependent upon its having a boundary or limit to it.36 Dickinson’s work offers an alternative sense of wholeness: in not-choosing, “nothing is excluded.”37 What’s particularly interesting is that Cameron observes that Dickinson does not truly suggest any poem could be

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all-inclusive—unlike in Whitman, in Dickinson “it is asserted that choice is required,” even if “transgressed.”38 The possibility of a totality not reached through choice or boundedness, if asserted and explored in the poetry, is not something that the poetry (or any poetry) can itself be said to attain. What is happening in Dickinson, as Cameron reads her, is “the opening up of spaces allowed to remain open.” The purpose of this is, importantly, not to produce an open form—some kind of writing not bound by genre, that can be read as we wish, or in some other way eludes limitation. Rather, the finitude of form becomes a tool “to penetrate divisions” or limitations by bringing together and connecting what would seem to be separate. And yet, “the point of such a connection is … neither completion nor equation.” It is something different than either closed identity or open infinity: “radical connection,” in which “the dead and living are not divided, as the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ are not divided.”39 Hawthorne’s work highlights the limits of forms, and even emphasizes them by crushing and destroying forms as if to both control and to emphasize that forms are not totalities. Furthermore, elements appear across the stories in ways that make us wonder about the integrity of any one piece, such as that snake gnawing at the heart and hissing across the Mosses. And yet, comparing Hawthorne’s treatment of form to the way Cameron speaks about Dickinson’s treatment of it brings out how utterly different the two authors are. Hawthorne’s work has the quality not of using form to open up space or to investigate totality, but rather of wreaking a frustrated vengeance upon the forms that remain the primary thing that it has to offer. It is as if he saw a limit to form, on the one hand, but did not see more than form, did not see a space around or within it. Nor did he conceive that experimentation with form, such as Dickinson’s variants, could remedy or address its essential non-totality. The limit is not that form is abstract and reality is not. It is that ordinary, experiential reality is made up of concepts and sensations and none of them are lasting, all of them have limits. In the context of Western literature and metaphysics, the problem and the allure of form is that it offers something truer than, more durable than, apart from the world of life in time and in the body. In the context of the Dharma, form does not offer either this allure or this problem; it is one more instance, to be looked into, of the impermanence and unsatisfactoriness of experience. It

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is one more thing to be let go of, since, as we look into it more and more, it is found not to be there, at all, to begin with. My point is that form can cause us despair not just for its excisions and limitations—what it would leave out—but for the fact that form is, in itself, lacking in totality. It has an end. Even worse, form is not apart from but part of and parcel of how we make our experience, even of the time-bound, materially embodied form. Hence the Crimson Hand is at once a form, and a part of Georgiana’s flesh; its changeability isn’t eradicated by stressing one or the other aspect of it. Concerns about reality in relation to ideas about it—about the difference between experience and form—are compelling in that they depend on a separation, a difference, that is never fully attainable nor entirely feasible. This is partly Cameron’s interest in human identity in The Corporeal Self—it is body and soul, yet those two are, confoundingly: distinct; not severable from one another; not unifiable. But the confounding nature of such problems—things are separate, but not distinguishable, and yet not the same—is, at least in the case of the issue of form in relation to embodied experience, that its endless fascination protects us from seeing that each shares the limit of impermanence. And, this endless effort to fit together or separate that never settles keeps us from contemplating, even finally from knowing, what Cameron calls in Choosing Not Choosing a totality not considered in terms of boundaries. Or, in Thanissaro Bhikku’s presentation, it prevents us from even approaching the thought of a release from the limitations of all known experience, from all that can be known through the body or through the mind.40 I suggest that considering Hawthorne’s rage can prompt us to consider cognate furies in ourselves; the subtle grating frustration, for me at least, that texts never quite do what I want them to do, or the lingering disappointment, in Sedgwick, that even queer theory didn’t quite satisfy. That’s what one can learn from Hawthorne’s fury: the fruitlessness and even the staleness that come when we persist in raging against form, concepts, images and words for not being what we’d thought they were, and not being able to do what we’d hoped they do. Perhaps seeing that can help us let go of the hopes we have, from either form or no-form. At the very least, if we could stop wanting form to do what it cannot—stave against chaos, dark, death; take us to a truth that will never leave

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or a presence we can always have; or even be the thing whose destruction will finally let us feel real—form might not come in for such furious abuse.

Notes 1

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses From an Old Manse (1846), The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. X, eds. Charvat, Pearce, Simpson et al., Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974 (hereafter abbreviated as “M”).

2

Sharon Cameron, The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne, New York: Columbia University Press, 1981, 105 (hereafter abbreviated as “CS”).

3

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850), in Collected Novels, New York: Library of America, 1983, p. 199. Hereafter, both The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables (1851) will be cited to this edition (hereafter abbreviated as “CN”).

4

I specifically use the term Dharma rather than Buddhism, because I am not arguing for any cultural or intellectual historical connection between Hawthorne and Buddhism. I also follow Thanissaro Bhikku, a monk and scholar who points out that Buddhism, especially in academic work, refers to a set of social practices and beliefs that are culturally located, whereas the Dharma refers to the teaching of the Buddha and to the truth of reality. “When academics are talking about Buddhism and the Buddha is talking about Dhamma, they are talking about two very different things. Buddhism, for the majority of scholars, is a phenomenon of social history; Dhamma, for the Buddha, is release and the path to release.” Thanissaro Bikkhu, “The essence of the Dhamma,” Insight Journal, http://www.bcbsdharma.org/insight-journal/, July 22, 2013, n.p. accessed August 12, 2013.

5

Kerry Larson, Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 118.

6

D. W. Winnicott, “The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications,” in Playing and Reality, pref. by F. Robert Rodman, London & New York: Routledge, 1971, 2005, p. 125.

7

Ibid., p. 120.

8

Ibid., p. 121.

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As Cameron observes in regard to the story “Ethan Brand,” Hawthorne offers ostensible lessons about the impropriety of “the sacrifice of life to the idea that would dissect it” (CS, 90), but the story is more convincingly about the wish not to preserve or inhabit life but to excise it—because “the heart is unbearable” (CS, 91).

10 Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 59. 11 Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 5–6. 12 Stephen Batchelor, Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime, New York: Riverhead Books, 2000, p. 1. 13 Deborah Ratner Helzer, “The Process of Insight,” talk given at Insight Meditation Society, August 7, 2013, http://dharmaseed.org/ teacher/49/talk/20300/ accessed August 15, 2013. 14 Ajahn Chah, Being Dharma: The Essence of the Buddha’s Teachings, trans. Paul Breiter, Boston: Shambala, 2001, pp. 39–40. 15 This use of the word form is not equivalent to its use in Western philosophy or criticism. It means a physically sensed material presence, such as hardness, outline, texture, or heat. Nama, or name, is closer to what we mean by form, as it’s the part of the mind that takes a visual impression of wavy outlines and pink and yellow colors, maybe with a certain sweet scent along the way (each of which is rupa), and decides: “flower.” There’s also thinking about what is known, however, and a good amount of what we call form would fit in this category. 16 Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth: Commentary on the Buddha’s First Teaching, Boston: Shambhala, 2010, p. 69. 17 Thanissaro Bhikku, in the article referenced above, offers a different understanding of this: “I don’t think the Buddha was concerned about whether things do or don’t have an essential essence. The categories of their existing or not existing are categories that he puts aside. For him, the issue is, if you look at things as processes, it’s easier to let go of them.” 18 Sue Hamilton, Early Buddhism: A New Approach; The I of the Beholder, Richmond: Curzon, 2000, p. 20. 19 The important exception, to again turn to Thanissaro Bhikku, is the “release” into the unconditioned towards which the Buddha directed us. This, he urges us to consider, is essential in that it is unchanging and unconditioned.

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20 Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield, Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation, Boston, MA: Shambala, 1987, p. 20. 21 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust, ed. Jonathan Goldberg, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 208. 22 Sedgwick, pp. 212–13. 23 Helzer, “Insight.” 24 “Getting Out of the Romantic Gate,” a conversation with Ajahn Thanissaro, in Insight Journal, http://www.bcbsdharma.org/insightjournal/, May 5, 2012, n.p. accessed August 12, 2013. 25 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul” (1841), in Essays and Lectures, sel. with notes by Joel Porte, New York: Library of America, 1983, p. 385. 26 Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 2. 27 Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 41. 28 Johnson, p. 14. 29 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches, notes and chronology by Roy Harvey Pearce, New York: Library of America, 1982, p. 305 (hereafter abbreviated to “TS”). 30 In The Corporeal Self, Cameron argues that this is a moment when Pearl “does not recognize her mother” without the letter, a sign of how “without the clarity that brands us with meaning” one “cannot recognize” the seen (CS, 84–5). My point is distinct: Pearl precisely recognizes her mother, but she is enraged to find her mother without the accustomed marker; her outburst is confusion and anger that her mother has been able to change, to shed her formal appearance. 31 Andrew Ford, The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 100. 32 Ayya Khema, (To Be Seen) Here and Now: Ten Dharma Talks, Sri Lanka: 1994–2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/ khema/herenow.html, 10 (accessed September 24, 2013). 33 Edgar Allan Poe, “Nathaniel Hawthorne” (1842), in The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. G. R. Thompson, New York: W. W. Norton, 2004, p. 646. 34 Ibid., p. 647.

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35 Sharon Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 151. 36 Ibid., p. 154. 37 Ibid., p. 153. 38 Ibid., p. 24. 39 Ibid., p. 188. 40 In “The Essence of the Dhamma,” Thanissaro Bhikku is directly addressing academics: “When linguists and historians don’t recognize the limitations of their methods and claim that the Dhamma has no essence, they are actually doing harm— discouraging themselves and others from testing the Dhamma in practice to see if the Buddha’s claims about its essence are true.”

10 Formal, New, and Relational Aesthetics: Dickinson’s Multitexts Shira Wolosky

Aesthetic schisms Aesthetic theory has tended toward schism since its modern philosophical inception. Kant’s notion of “purposiveness without purpose” entered into aesthetic discourses as associating the artwork with autonomy.1 The ahistoricity of this vision then led to its critique. Historicist initiatives countered aesthetic autarky by insisting on the economic, institutional, political and social formation of art. What has in turn followed is the reassertion of the aesthetic as an autonomous realm, resisting reduction to historical and/as ideological structures. This action/reaction tracks in waves: Marxist theorists served as background to Russian and Prague formalism, emerging in America as the New Criticism; formalism and structuralism in turn gave rise and way to New Historicism and Cultural Studies, which has again led to concern about the loss of the text as “aesthetic” object. As Marjorie Perloff warned, “the governing paradigm for so-called literary study is now taken from anthropology and history;” “Poetry is studied as a symptom of anxieties, inequities or cultural displacements of one sort or another.”2 Against what it regards as “treating of a text as a

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means to a predetermined end” that reduces literature to categories external to it, New Aestheticism has accordingly set out to reaffirm an independent ontology and axiology of literature.3 But in reasserting the aesthetic status of literature, New Aestheticism does not fully break with the ahistoricism of the old aesthetic formalism that Cultural Studies set out to rebuke. To be sure, both sides of the divide have claimed to take both sides into account. But these tend to be at most partial gestures. Aesthetic theory in many ways remains where Adorno placed it: an unanswered call to see works of art in “relation to social matters,” not so as to “misuse them for the demonstration of social theses ... [but to] expose something of their essential quality”.4 Roman Jakobson’s schema that helped define twentieth-century formalism provides a powerful tool for charting the variety of theoretical attempts to meet this challenge, and their failure to do so. Jakobson’s well-known table posits the different poles of communication and defines the aesthetic in terms of, or rather, against them.5 The historical “context,” the author “addresser” and reader “addressee,” the “phatic” contact and dictionary “code” all enter into communication, but are all set aside in and as art. The poetic as such focuses on what Jakobson called the “message,” which is the “text-itself” in its constitutive compositional elements. That is art: what refers to itself and not to world, to code, to means, to speaker, and to what Jakobson named the “addressee” but I would call the responder, in ways that already depart from Jakobsonian aesthetics. Jakobson’s exclusionary definition of the aesthetic usefully places other modes of twentieth-century aesthetic theory. The orientation and direction of various critical trends can be seen as a matter of focus on each of its poles.6 Reader Response theory reintroduced the “addressee,” although mostly as abstract cognitive phenomenology. Psychoanalytic theory reintroduced the “addresser,” although mostly as Freudian and post-Freudian structures. Cultural Studies reintroduced the “context,” although mostly as institutional political-economic forces. Deconstruction refocused on what Jakobson called the “palpability of signs,” more in philosophical/ theoretical than purely aesthetic terms, but apparently extended to absorb all reality, as announced by Derrida’s provocative “there is nothing outside the text”—although in Derrida himself signs ultimately extend beyond the text into contexts as well.7



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At issue is the meaning of “aesthetics” itself. In each of these cases there remains an assumption that the “aesthetic” proper means what Jakobson said it did.8 When Jerome McGann remarks that in contemporary Cultural Studies “the critical investigation of this aesthetic element was largely set aside ... in order to examine social formations and ethical problems as they were reflected in aesthetic representations,” “aesthetic” here continues to mean compositional elements, as against “social formation and ethical problems,” which ultimately define and absorb the compositional “aesthetic” as the intended artwork.9 This self-referring sense of the aesthetic persists in New Aestheticist discourses as well. To Hal Foster, Cultural Studies represents an “Anti-Aesthetic” in that it sees literature as “a practice, as cross disciplinary in nature, sensitive to cultural forms engaged in politics—forms that deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm.”10 Here “aesthetic” again means “privileged realm.” As he goes on to say, echoing the traditional reference to Kant, “experience that exists apart, without ‘purpose,’” in a self-reflexive autonomy. But aesthetics is not, I will argue, defined by its division from, or resistance to, reference, or its apartness from address, expression, reception, response, contact, or code. Neither does the approach to the literary work encode either the exclusion of or reduction to any one of these. Rather: the aesthetic is exactly the interrelationship between these different poles that together necessarily take part in the aesthetic event, thus precisely making it into art. Art is just such interrelationship between the multiplicity of further dimensions that engage all the Jakobsonian poles. This multiplicity of dimensions, in open relation to each other, is what constitutes the “aesthetic” rather than the specific self-direction into the art object it is taken to be in almost all aesthetic discourses. Aesthetic interrelationality is what must be theorized: art as the site of address and response, configuration and also conflict and disjunction, among all its constitutive dimensions, pointing outward as much as inward, with its compositional energies the very arena in and through which multiple trajectories come into contact and veer apart. Literature is not the exclusion of the Jakobsonian poles in the name of self-referentiality or linguistic self-consciousness, but rather, and precisely, the mutual engagement of many different domains in an inclusionary but open multidimensionality. Literature is an act of address, from authors to responders ongoingly readdressing

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each other in ways that shapes each the other, each in historical and ideological situatedness: indeed in the multiple situations of composition and receptions. This is not a dialectic tending to any sort of consolidation but an open dialectonic that is generative but not synthesizing. Literature likewise directly engages, enacts, and alters “codes,” transmuting the very meaning of words as they mutually impinge on each other within the textual frame and then outward again into the general experience of language. As we see unmistakably today, the ‘phatic’ contact is also intrinsic and far from merely instrumental. Digital conduct is radically constitutional to literary experience, underscoring how older forms of contact—coterie circulation, letters, salons, oral performance, display—penetrated and shaped the experience of the work, but always as experienced within the composition as well as situating it. Contact, far from being what compositional form excludes—or, in the “materialist” sense of manuscript artifact, production and circulation, what the text becomes in a new iconicism—penetrates the text’s formal constellations of trajectories as one among them. The Jakobsonian schema, when seen to pose functions against each other with a domination of one to the subordination or exclusion of the others, produces partial accounts that ultimately betray the aesthetic. As against the reification of aesthetic definition and discussion within the confines of theories that each in turn privilege one constitutive element to the exclusion of the others; aesthetic theory should posit the artwork—here specifically literature and most particularly poetry—as relational across both intra- and extra-textual trajectories.11 Literature, poetry, precisely is the arena and event in which the multiple poles of discourse come into a mutual and multiple encounter, although not necessarily agreement or harmony, with each other: author and responder, contact and code, social experience through its multiple levels.12 Relationality also measures the status of an artwork. The more dimensions enter in, the greater the artwork. Indeed, I would propose this multiple relationality as the mark of literary greatness, open to analysis, discussion and evaluation. Multiple dimensions in relational address and response through specific configurations that are both compositional and situational are what define and gauge the aesthetic. It is exactly this multiplicity of dimensional relationality that the “aesthetic” organizes, not, as in common usage, as the compositional structure as form as such, but as the energies



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that juxtapositions of elements put into play. The art-event, in this case as poetry, addresses and is responded to; is both historically situated and compositionally configured; points outward and is self-reflective; is formal and open, with each dimension and level inter-relational in changing and indeed unpredictable, unclosed ways.

Relational aesthetics Such a relational aesthetics has antecedents. Both Cultural Students and New Aestheticists agree that the theory, or ideology of the aesthetic as Eagleton calls it, refers back to Kant. Eagleton describes the Kantian aesthetic as one that “expels all sensuousness from the aesthetic representation.” Evading materiality and history, it abstracts from “determinate thought,” so that we “seem to be in the presence of the pure eidetic forms of language itself, purged of any very determinate semantic substance.” This aestheticism intensified in “symbolist poetry,” and in the formalist schools where the aesthetic promises the possibility of our “standing apart from our own vantage-point [to] grasp the relation of our capacities to reality, in a moment of wondering self-estrangement [that comes to] found an entire poetics.”13 Kantian anti-mimetic formalism remains as well a steady influence in analytic philosophy in the guise of counterfactuals, literary cognitivism, and Searlean speech-act theory as “feigned illocutionary acts” removed from direct locutionary gestures.14 The “Introduction” to a collection called Poetry and Cultural Studies reviews extensively the Kantian tradition, which it goes on to critique, as one in which the subject stands in “disinterested contemplation before an object of beauty in a moment of nonexploitative, nonappropriative appreciation.”15 Derek Attridge likewise sums up aesthetic tradition as originating in Kant but exemplified in the New Criticism as seeing the “beautiful” to exist in a “sphere separate from the practical or utilitarian and governed by purely, or largely, formal considerations.”16 In some sense, both Cultural Studies and New Aestheticism set out to modify Kantian abstraction. Each, however, eventually reproduces the isolation of the aesthetic that they attempt to overcome. Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of “resonance,” for example, exactly

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insists on “situate[ing] the work in relation to other representational practices operative in the culture” on the “negotiations, exchanges, swerves and exclusions by which certain representational practices come to be set apart from other representational practices that they partially resemble.” Nor does Greenblatt intend to deny the “wonder” of the unique art object. Yet this is thought of as “isolated” and “displaced,” its enchantment a “circle ‘drawn around itself from which everything but the object is excluded.” The formal object remains opposed against the “network of ... social practices” which situate them. At the same time, the “permeability of boundaries” of “resonance” threatens to dissolve the artwork into other practices: into the “production” and “consumption,” “making,” “appropriation” and “display,” “institutional and economic forces by which the artwork is shaped.”17 As Jerome McGann puts it, formal, stylistic analysis is one among other “specialized studies” that “must find their raison d’être in the social historical ground,” which is made up of the “political, economic, and ideological.”18 Here, rather than relationality, one dimension, the historicist-ideological, absorbs the other poetic elements into a kind of second-order ideological referentiality. The artwork is analyzed as “ideological product,” in McGann’s terms, to expose “the concealed and often nonconscious ideological purposes and assumptions of certain institutional and systematic forms.”19 Relationality instead would point outside the artwork but also see its forces as constituting compositional configurations, with the aesthetic itself the multiple and changing connections among the trajectories that penetrate and indeed create the literary work as art. New Aestheticism, too, attempts to bridge the divide between reference and form in ways that point to relationality. Relationality is in fact already suggested in its own formalist antecedents. Prague formalist Jan Mukarovsky defines the “aesthetic function” as standing in opposition against “practical” or “communicative” functions. What makes art is its “isolation,” separating the “object ... from other associations, so as to “concentrate attention on the linguistic sign itself.”20 Reference, information, communication recedes into the background. The aesthetic proper is in “dialectical negation” of every practical function, “free[ing] the literary from reference and from dependence on author and reader to internal organization.”21



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But Mukarovsky also speaks of art as “not [being] extracted from context of surrounding phenomena.” The aesthetic remains in “complex relations of other components” as an “interrelation between spheres.” Texts display the “polyfunctionality of human activity.” In poetry “several functions are not only potentially but actually present.22 In ways that link to Bakhtin’s dialogical project, itself born from formalist as well as Marxist antecedents, Mukarovsky’s “Two Essays on Dialogue” underscores the “relation between participants and the real material situation surrounding them.”23 There are as well pragmatist elements in Mukarovsky. The aesthetic function is not the “property of an object” and does not in that sense inhere in its formal structure. Rather, “any object or activity can become a bearer of aesthetic function.” The aesthetic is not intrinsic to a work in a self-standing way but instead emerges from an attitude brought to the object, which can take place in and in relation to a variety of social contexts.24 These relational suggestions in Mukarovsky, however, tend to be reabsorbed back into closed formal structures, as interrelationship within its component terms that devolve into “dynamic unity.”25 “The material of poetry is intertwined with the interrelationships of the components,” but as these remain within the text: “each linguistic component is linked directly or indirectly by means of these multiple interrelationships, linked in some way to every other component.” As Mukarovsky explained when describing foregrounding, every communication has a “dominant” function from which “all other components ... as well as their interrelationships, are evaluated from the standpoint of the dominant. The dominant is that component of the work which sets in motion, and gives direction to, the relationships of all other components.”26 For Mukarovsky, the dominant in art is the formal function: it is “to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself.”27 Ultimately the governing figure is wholeness and unity: The mutual relationships of the components of the work of poetry… constitute its structure, a dynamic structure including both convergence and divergence and one that constitutes an undissociable artistic wholeness, since each of its components has its value precisely in terms of its relation to the totality.”28

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In similar wise, New Aestheticist writers concede that “aesthetics is imbricated with the political and cultural,” and that there is no question of a “return to art as universal and apolitical.” “Art is certainly tied up with the political, the historical, the ideological.” Their wish is only that art be “not determined by them or reducible to them,” which they see the “new revisionists” as doing.29 In their view, Cultural interpretation makes art either escapist or complicitous with social domination. As one critic puts it, historicist interpretation treats art either as “delusion or repression.” The New Aestheticist intention is to restore the artwork’s integrity, which would not evade, but positively explore “how great culture opens up worlds of the imagination which provide new resources for meaning in all kinds of different social and historical contexts” without reducing the artwork to social or/as ideological sources.30 But, despite these gestures towards historicity, New Aestheticism, too, reproduces the divide it sets out to overcome. In reviewing the traditional aesthetic connection between the “literary” and the formal, Derek Attridge cautions against traditional claims to “universality, self-presence, and historical transcendence.” Yet he goes on to reiterate the primacy of the “distinct linguistic domain” defining the work as an “integrity, a quiddity, a singular and strong identity” which “stem from the shaping of language and not from some set of ideas or emotions which the work encodes.”31 The problem remains how to reorient towards formalist attention without falling back into the abstraction and dissociation that historicist critique accuses it of. Attridge’s theory in many ways points to a relational aesthetic that would respond to this challenge. He speaks of both “movements of enclosure and movements of opening;” of the “redeployment of the resources of the culture, understood as sets of relations rather than concrete objects.” The poetic text is not a static object but “a mobilization of meanings,” with the work a “staging of these relations” including attention to “the operation of reference, metaphor, intention and ethics.” Attridge does not wish radically to demarcate text from context, and rightly insists that context enters as a formal event, even as he emphasizes that literature consists in a specific “selection and arrangement of words” as the work’s “formal uniqueness.”32 And yet Attridge also stipulates that such interrelations are “not a sufficient condition” for art. Retreating back to the text as non-instrumental in the traditional formalist



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way, he insists that the poem “does not include any extractable sense, information, image, or referent that the work lays before the reader.” Art as such is not defined by its multiple relationships. Instead, Attridge defines aesthetic power as what “introduces new perspectives and relationships which can be understood as implementation of new codes and norms.”33 In New Aestheticist discourses, “singularity” emerges as the key term designating what in the artwork resists historicist reduction, reaffirming the artwork’s self-integrity. This term recurrs as the distinctive aesthetic value through a series of books and essays. It is the “singularity” of the work, writes Timothy Clark in The Poetics of Singularity, “that is at odds with the aim of explaining a text as a document determined by historical place or politics of identity;” and that refuses to be “conceptualized or mastered” through reduction to a “dogmatism of cultural political determinism.”34 The editors of the collection The New Aestheticism describe the concerns of “materialist and political criticism” as that from which the “singularity of the work’s artness escapes.”35 In another collection, The Question of Literature, singularity is recurrently elicited as “truths given nowhere else except in a specific literary text.”36 Derek Attridge, both in his essay “Singular Events” in The Question of Literature and his subsequent book The Singularity of Literature sees singularity as what withstands the view of literature as “instrumentalist,” reducing it to purposes other than its own aesthetic ones.37 Yet there is a “danger,” as one New Aestheticist critic puts it, “that the singular as literature becomes purely negative: unfixed, transcending context.” Setting out to “read a text as itself and solely on its own terms;” “to affirm it in itself only in its own singular terms,” where the “text projects itself to particularity by “achieving its own form out of itself, expressing its own nature:” such formulae threaten to re-enclose the work as in old Aestheticisms.38 Singularity recalls not only an aesthetics of autonomy but very pointedly formalist notions of estrangement or defamiliarization. There is in fact an intrinsic relation between defamiliarization and formalism. Terry Eagleton notes that “what the various formalist literary elements ... had in common was their “estranging” or “defamiliarizing” effect, which distinguished literary language and experience from the ordinary and intensified attention on language itself.” As Eagleton confirms in his

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recent The Event of Literature, the Formalists see “all literary devices [as working] by a form of estrangement.”39 As a distancing device, the effect of defamiliarization is to isolate the artwork from ordinary discourses and structures. “The goal of formalism was to create an autonomous discipline with its own methods vs. mixed methods across disciplines: defamiliarization increases [this] focus especially on language.”40 The foundational role of defamiliarization in formalism is clear in Mukarovsky’s discussions of foregrounding. The “systematic distortion and systematic violation of standard language [is what] makes possible the poetic utilization of language,” Mukarovsky declares; “without this possibility there would be no poetry.” It is deviation that “pushes communication to the background, and places in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself.41 New Aestheticism remains an aesthetics founded in defamiliarization. Andrew Bowie identifies “aesthetic status” with the text’s revealing “the already known world in a new light, thereby rendering the familiar unfamiliar,” specifically through “deviation from linguistic norms.”42 Timothy Clark’s definition of literature’s art as “singularity” and of singularity as what is not reducible to political or cultural norms makes defamiliarization the criterion of both aesthetic status and value: “the more singular the work the more it resists the frameworks that would appropriate it.” Kantian autonomy is realized when the work “achiev[es] its own form out of itself expressing its own nature” in self-reflexive counter-referentiality.43 In Derek Attridge, singularity takes its place with inventiveness, alterity or otherness, and/as newness as the essential terms defining aesthetics. Besides being rather circular, these are tied to each other above all as modes of defamiliarization. The “irreducibility” of literature is its “new existence that can’t be apprehended” by ordinary frameworks. Attridge speaks of aesthetic “deviation from the norm,” whose effect is to challenge habits and resist “the pre-existing and familiar.”44 Literature itself is defined as a “non-discursive, non-rational” potential in language, an enactment in language of the distancing from the given, the incursion of an “otherness” as “newness,” that is, “at a given moment is outside the horizon provided by the culture.” The summation of aesthetic experience thus inheres in “a suspension of literary instrumentality” that “estranges itself,” to allow the emergence of a “wholly new



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existent that cannot be apprehended by the old modes of understanding.45 But it is not “newness” as such that defines art; not defamiliarization, with its echo back on self-reflexive specificity of word formation that, as the New Critics insisted, must resist paraphrase. For one thing, the insistence on newness as the defining characteristic excludes lots of art. Whole periods and aesthetic kinds involve not only reworking, but also reconfirming traditional structures, modes, techniques, embracing what is both aesthetically and socially common. Icons, Roman statuary, Troubador verse forms, sonnet structure, topoi, rhyme schemes do not turn on newness, although they are not merely reproductive. Their aesthetic value emerges not against but through the reach of their interconnections. Art is never completely and not necessarily resistant and anti-institutional, not only because it necessarily invokes, as one of its dimensions, past art, but also because the approach to tradition is very varied and has many different aesthetic roles.46 For another, there are any number of cultural practices that require “unique configuration” of compositional elements, but which are not art or literature. Rituals, emblems, slogans, advertisements come to mind, as do certain kinds of philosophical terms and expressions. These also can defamiliarize, separating practices from surrounding contexts to center attention on their own make up, even while remaining integrally tied to and ultimately focused on another constitutive pole. Self-reflection is one aspect, one dimension of art, as is certainly the materiality of language in its sound, rhetorical, and visual patterns. But what self-reflection reflects on are the many dimensions that compose it. Rather than singularity, multiplicity, or rather, multiple relationality, is what defines the literary artwork and constitutes its greatness. Rather than uniqueness, of which there are many kinds, the aesthetic entails an intercrossing of relation among the multiple trajectories for which it is a material site. Nor is unity a necessary, or even possible, determinant. Unity is pivotal in a very long tradition of aesthetic assumptions, and extends from formalism into New Aestheticism. The New Critics, of course, spoke of the essence of the poem as its unification by and through “paradox.” Andrew Bowie, arguing from the history of Romantic aesthetics, sees the artwork emerging as “one location of our sense of the unity” in a world where epistemological and theological

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unities have been lost.” Tracing Romantic theory back to the desire to rejoin the increasing separation between science and humanities, and within the humanities, philosophy and literature, Bowie offers art as a possibility of the “unity of understanding and imagination.” The Romantic aesthetic attempts to create a “unity” within “the divisions and fragmentation of our world of the understanding,” as a necessary ground even for grasping “contradiction and difference.” Jay Bernstein likewise traces the rise of aesthetics as a response to the “fragmentation of spheres” in modernity, as a desire to “heal” its increasing breach from reason.47 Adorno himself, whose work New Aestheticism reclaims from Cultural Studies—where the emphasis is on art’s complicity in the culture industry—still speaks of the artwork as discovering “a unity containing contradictions,” invoking “harmony” and the drive to “embody the whole” as deeply embedded in the lyric subject—even if in negative dialectic against a society increasingly both atomized and rationalized.48 As Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory, “The manner in which art communicates with the outside world is in fact also a lack of communication, because art seeks, blissfully or unhappily, to seclude itself from the world.”49 Attridge, aligning himself with Adorno’s “resistance” to art’s instrumentality, also speaks of the “creative use of language” as what “fuses what might otherwise seem different processes or opposing accounts.”50 As Terry Eagleton sums up, there is a “compulsion to coherence,” a “prejudice” of unity that has “survived with astonishing tenacity from the age of Aristotle to the early twentieth-century,” and indeed beyond it, although he himself retains this impulse toward literature as “a utopian unity of word and world.” While Cultural Studies rejects notions of unity, it does so in ways that absorb the artwork into social-political forces as the dominant focus of art—”text and ideology,” “text and history” as “alternative facets of a single symbolic process.”51 Coherence models, with their preferences for wholeness, run deep in the histories of aesthetic theory as well as theology (as Joyce’s Stephen for example reviews).52 But unity is not intrinsic to the aesthetic, nor is uniqueness except as this is multiplied through the manifold events of literary encounter. No artwork ever finally or completely achieves unity, nor is unity a defining hallmark for art, but only for some aesthetic theories. Produced and experienced



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in multiple situations by multiple participants who respond as well to each other, the very multiplicity of dimensions that the artwork brings into contact ultimately attests to the diversity, temporality, materiality of human experience, which may drive to unity, but need not, and will never achieve it. In some periods or artists, such as our own, what is privileged in a work is disjunction and fragmentation rather than convergence or harmony. Aesthetic relationality does not necessarily desire, or ever entirely achieve the unitive force that traditional aesthetics idealizes. Multiple trajectories across its field both form and situate the literary work. What makes a work literary is its multiple relationality, where relation is neither negation nor unity, but what at once links and separates distinct elements, impulses, techniques, dimensions. The status as art does not consolidate and does not eliminate any dimensions that enter into it, but rather includes them in its compositional relationships—its composition as relationships. This is perhaps most evident in poetry, where the very materials, language, necessarily (and counter to formalist claims, including those that subsist in Bakhtin), remain words shared by other discourses and their circulation. These discourses are imported into the text, where they remain linked to their other usages outside the text. Many sorts of reference, as well as the constitution and historicities of author and responder, both constitute the text and make it point outward to the world’s that situate it. The inclusion of what Jakobson called the “phatic” enters as well, in Cultural Studies attention to textual production, consumption, circulation and technologies, what McGann calls social-material textuality which is a “polyvocal ... thick description.” Yet McGann’s sense of materiality remains focused on the phatic—the “aesthesis of text” as transmission, as social-economic functions. Materiality itself becomes strangely iconic as the manuscript’s “visible” language.53 This is to reassert a controlling aesthetic dominant, where material means both phatic and the economic. But it is all the dimensions of textuality that makes up the aesthetic, each of which shapes the others in their multiple and changing interactions, pointing outward and inward in an intensity of relation, intersection, counterpoint, and disjunction.

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Dickinson’s multiextuality In Emily Dickinson the effect of approaching the text as relational among multiple domains can be dramatic. Dickinson’s poetry has long been the very emblem of enclosure. Her life of reclusion, her extreme textual compression, her refusal to publish, all accord with the paradigm of closed, self-referring iconic language. Feminist interpretation significantly broadened this. The entry of gender into poetics alters the field of aesthetics. Feminist critique recognizes gender itself as a constitutive dimension in any textual event. This already multiplies textual dimensionality, with gender affecting history and ideology, speaker and responder, contact and code as well, as studies of women’s language attests. No text lacks gender, no context remains unaffected by it. Gender constitutes an ineradicable dimension and alters all other domains. It immediately informs all spheres of social life and the widest range of approaches: psychological, political, historical, religious, linguistic. Recognizing gender as an indelible element in any textuality thus works to open the text to an aesthetic of relationality across functions and spheres. Once gender enters in, it is impossible to sustain a merely enclosed textuality. Rigid division between public and private has largely governed the understanding of gender, in both cultural and literary terms.54 This has been acutely felt in Dickinson studies, where, even granted the extremity of Dickinson’s reclusionary case, her work was narrowly regarded as interior, remote and abstract, that is, as essentially private. Even in feminist readings of Dickinson, a sense of privacy has continued to be felt. Feminist approaches to Dickinson first opened her work to questions and connections of literary history, comparing her to other mainly female writers, with questions of literary tradition, the entry into and exclusion from it, as central. However, these discussions continued largely to be framed within the private sphere of domesticity. The step from literary history to a wider historicism and Cultural Studies has broken through this domestic encirclement. Attention has turned to Dickinson’s relationship to events contemporary to her such as the Civil War, which had been overlooked even by gender studies; as well as other social, cultural and political trends, including class, race, and gender itself, the touchstones of Cultural Studies.55 Yet



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these different trends continue to be pursued in parallel rather than fully intersecting courses. Only through a fuller aesthetic relationality can these various strands be brought into configuration within the multiple strata that constitutes Dickinson’s textuality, as the very measure of their greatness.56 This includes shifting relations of responders and responses to the text, as readers reside within their own history and social culture, always in shifting relation to the historical situation of the text’s production, circulation and materiality. Dickinson’s texts put extraordinary pressure on each aesthetic function. Manuscript study has shown how explosive the mere “contact” functions in writing and transmission can be and are in Dickinson’s case. The lack (refusal) of publication, the circulation of poems in letters, dramatize questions of audience: to whom was her “Letter to the World” addressed? What are the gendered and sexual trajectories of her address? How are her texts shaped by and shape her own multiple identities, each with its own dimension and sphere— gendered domesticity, relations between public and private worlds in times of war, industrial transformations, poetic tradition and representation. Sharon Cameron’s study of Dickinson Choosing Not Choosing importantly engaged manuscript study as a material experience of Dickinson’s work. Her interpretation there of Dickinson’s not-publishing as suspended decision in a sense extended the theoretical positions of Lyric Time, which, in taking Dickinson’s as paradigm lyrics, pursued and combined both phenomenological and formal analysis.57 In this, Cameron marked out some of the core issues and levels of Dickinson’s textuality, presented as exemplary of formal tendencies intrinsic to and defining of lyric itself: Dickinson’s lyrics are especially caught up in the oblique dialectic of time and immortality [but] all lyrics oppose speech to the action from which it exempts itself, oppose voice as it rises momentarily from the enthusiasm of termporal advance to the flow of time that ultimately rushes over and drowns it. (LT, 23) The outstanding, defining feature of lyric to its generic core is here its resistance to time, its “recoil from temporality.” Cameron sets

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out to trace the techniques through which “lyric poems attempt ... a stasis” (LT, 25). That is, in Cameron, lyric time is frozen time. Her argument, in many ways close to that of Joseph Frank’s in his seminal essay on “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” charts Dickinson’s arts of interruption as an attempt to overcome the linearity intrinsic to language.58 Frank’s argument is intellectual historical. He refers the resistance to linear temporality to a modern alienation from the natural forms that mimetic art sets out to reproduce. Dickinson has of course been closely associated with modernity, especially in her formal radicalism exactly in the rupture of syntactic and other temporal sequences that Cameron reads as lyric exemplarity. Cameron does not refer this formal iconicism, whose interruption of sequence inevitably serves to refer language back to itself—”words come unhinged from all context” (LT, 24)—to intellectual or cultural, political, and social context. Her interest is in a phenomenology of form: how interruption is grasped in the experience of the text and its defining association with lyric itself as emblematically a static moment in time: “consistent with the speaker’s desire to shelter themselves from the anxieties of temporal sequence” (LT, 24). Cameron’s is a phenomenology of text and its formal realizations. However, from the viewpoint of an inclusionary and inter-relational aesthetic, her account is partial. It engages only the compositional dimension of textuality, with some glance at reception to the extent that phenomenology investigates cognitive processes. How this works, and other textual dimensions for which it does not account but which also constitute both formal and experiential textual experience can be suggested in considering Cameron’s treatment of Dickinson poem “That After Horror”:59 That after Horror—that ‘twas us— That passed the mouldering Pier— Just as the Granite Crumb let go— Our Savior, by a Hair— A second more, had dropped too deep For Fisherman to plumb— The very profile of the Thought Puts Recollection numb—



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The possibility—to pass Without a Moment’s Bell— Into Conjecture’s presence— Is like a Face of Steel— That suddenly looks into ours With a metallic grin— The Cordiality of Death— Who drills his Welcome in— Cameron introduces this poem as one where the “speaker documents the experience of near death,” rendering it as “surrealistic, punctuated by the gaps in thought that attest to the terror of fragmentary comprehension” (LT, 106). The imagery of “mouldering Pier” and “Granite Crumb” marks “the end of the earthly terrain,” caught in “the instant of near-annihilation” as an “experiential instant” that can be neither represented nor comprehended by being placed in a “more substantial examination.” An impelling ambiguity in Cameron’s analysis of the instant is its double status as on the one hand, pure displaced fragment; but on the other as image of immortal eternity, as in the Augustinian phenomenology of time she cites that seeks to “stand firm and for a little while seize the splendor of that ever stable eternity” (LT, 25). Cameron sees Dickinson as in fact precisely caught between these two: fusing both “the transcendence of mortal vision and the impossibility of that transcendence” (LT, 24). In either case, what Cameron’s analysis underscores in this poem and elsewhere is the way it “freezes in its own conception.” The second stanza’s imagery of “Face of Steel” Cameron sees as connecting “death and sexuality.” The poem leaves the speaker at the end “tottering on the edge of the line dividing life from death, but the strength of the completed sequence no longer admits of any resolve to turn back” (LT, 108). But this poem, while surely registering what can be called an existential anxiety at once attesting the possibility of surviving “Horror” and also doubting it, opens a number of senses of “Horror” that is not only interior and not only phenomenological. One is suggested by the lexical choices the field of this poem collects together. “Savior,” and in light of it, “Fisherman,” evoke a Christian salvation that eludes the speaker even as she appeals to it. The “mouldering Pier” may then be linked to Dickinsons’s

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“Faith is a Pierless Bridge” (Fr, 978) that, in a near oxymoron, both invokes and suspends the possibility of conduct from skepticism to affirmation; an ambivalence deepened by the text’s revision of an Isaac Watts hymn that confidently declares: “Faith is the brightest evidence/of things beyond our sight.”60 The “Fisherman” here fails to save from the plunge off the collapsing bridge. Religion, or rather religious agon, is then a dimension this text brings in, locating the problem of locating “Horror.” The death that cordially “drills” may recall the nails of the Cross. The “Horror” then would also be that of religious loss, such as Nietzsche described in the madman’s cry of the death of God. A different dimension of “Horror” emerges in the second stanza’s simile comparing “Conjecture’s presence”. Like a Face of Steel— That suddenly looks into ours With a metallic grin— Helen Vendler, in her discussion of this text sees the “Face of Steel” as the image of a death’s head, displaced, in the face of some “dreadful possibility,” from any natural “corruptible skull” to “an immortal Platonic Form of skull,” thus realizing Dickinson’s characteristic pattern of “beginning with a narrative of ‘real life’ and then abstracting from it”.61 But these images are not merely abstract. “Face of Steel,” “metallic grin,” suggest cannon. The “drill” of death can also be a military image. The “Horror” Dickinson imagines facing can then be placed in terms of the Civil War raging around her. Another poem with clear reference to war clearly brings into association the moment-shattering “horror” of confronting death with looking in “a Cannon’s face” (Fr, 619). Estimated as written in 1862, “That after Horror” was sent in a letter to Higginson while he was serving as commander of the first black regiment—a war context of circulation (‘contact’) that surely bears on reading the text and situates Dickinson the writer to a particular responder.62 The “Us” identified with and as the “After Horror” may in its pluralization register a shattered inner life that cannot be re-collected. But it may cross from private to public, making “Horror” a shared and not only an interior experience, reaching also across the divide of gender that sequesters women from military as other public experiences,



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a crossover confirmed by the military imagery of “Face of Steel” and “metallic grin” to render shock, experienced on a multitude of levels. The “Cordiality of Death” recalls other deadly courtship poems such as “Because I could not stop for Death” and “Death is a Supple Suitor” (which Cameron also discusses) combining public military death with Dickinson’s gendered senses of sexual, metaphysical, and social threat. The point here is not to claim direct reference to war or any other historical event; nor to claim religious concern and conflict as the poem’s subject. But it is also to counter the exclusion of concrete reference, as if public and private were either/or, especially in gendered senses.63 This is something they never are. The self is always constituted of both. The text instead should be approached as a site in which public and private, textual materiality and historical engagements come into contact and collision. Dickinson’s textual construction creates an aesthetic event of intercrossing domains in intense and shifting ways. These may be parallel; or they may be disjunctive. As to lyric in generic terms: Dickinson’s textuality verges into rupture; yet this is not a necessary condition of lyric as such: lyric modes can confirm sequence, harmonious correlations, affirmative engagements, and can quite variously represent temporality. Nor does rupture lessen or defeat the text’s historicity, neither formally, where the text is instead rendered even more insistently unstable; nor in its address to and within cultural contexts. Dickinson’s senses of fragmented time are themselves intensely historical, situated in the ruptures of civic contest verging into devastating war, religious doubts and claims, destabilization of gender roles, industrial incursion, all of which intensely define her period and cultural experience. Such contextual references need and should not displace formal, phenomenological, material manuscript and other critical approaches. Indeed, contexts penetrate composition through lexical events, images, the constitution of speaker and responder, the material transmission of the artwork. This multiple inter-reference comprises the aesthetic experience. The result is a textual inexhaustibility of which Dickinson is truly exemplary. It is exactly the multiple interactions among dimensions, each situated in and changing with time, that constitutes the aesthetics of the text in ever new and inexhaustible encounters. The text itself ever retains an otherness, a mystery as it addresses, aligns, parries,

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penetrates multiple domains, such that it is never mastered and never fully enclosed.

Notes 1

Bruce Robbins, “Pretend what you like: literature under construction,” The Question of Literature, ed. Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell, Manchester: University Press of Manchester, 2002, 190–206, pp. 196, 201; Maria Damon and Ira Livingston, “Introduction,” Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader, eds Maria Damon and Ira Livingston, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009, 1–17, pp. 6–7, who describe Kant’s Enlightenment aesthetics as one where “the subject stands in disinterested contemplation before an object of beauty in a moment of nonexploitative, nonappropriative appreciation.”

2

Marjorie Perloff, “Presidential Address 2006, It Must Change,” PMLA 122, No. 3 (May 2007), 652–62, p. 654; “The Poetry-Sound Initiative: A Convention Overview,” MLA Newsletter 38(3) (Fall 2006), 333–4. Jerome McGann The Point is to Change it: Poetry Criticsm in the Continuing Present, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007, p. xvii.

3

Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 7.

4

Theodor Adorno, “Lyric poetry and society,” Telos 20 (1974), 56–71.

5

Roman Jakobson “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1960, 350–77.

6

M. H. Abrams of course outlined such a sequence of critical orientations in ways parallel to Jakobson’s, defining modern art as formalist in Jakobson’s sense of focus on the object (The Mirror and the Lamp, New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).

7

Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, for example, describes Derrida’s as a “libertarian pessimism” in a “dream of an entirely free-floating signifier, an infinite textual productivity, an existence blessedly free from the shackles of truth, meaning, and sociality,” p. 387. Derrida himself, in his well-known controversy with Searle, insists that “the import of context can never by dissociated from the analysis of a text” Limited Inc., Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 79; “Context is always, and has always been at work within and not only around it,” p. 59.



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For further discussion see Shira Wolosky, Feminist Theory Across Disciplines, New York: Routledge, 2013, pp. 172–5. 8

Isobel Armstrong (The Radical Aesthetic, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000), notes that “traditional definitions of the aesthetic haven’t altered whether radical or conservative,” p. 5.

9

Jerome McGann, The Point is to Change It: Poetry Criticism in the Continuing Present, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2007, p. xvii.

10 Hal Foster, “Introduction,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, Port Townsend, Washington, DC: Bay Press, 1983, ix–xvii, p. xvi. 11 The focus of this article is on literature and poetry in particular, although a relational aesthetic has implications for other forms of art as well. 12 Terry Eagleton’s most recent theoretical work (The Event of Literature, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), argues against unities of multiple criteria in literature still seen more or less as properties—what he calls “constitutive features” p. 74; the need of whose presence is then argued, pp. 4, 28; but he then also falls back into unitive language, evoking the “unity of theory and practice,” p. 64 and of art as “clinging to the specific without thereby relinquishing the whole,” p. 66. 13 Terry Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 196, 86–9; Jo J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, “Introduction,” New Aestheticism, give a history of the term, pp. 12–13. The New Aestheticism, Jo J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, eds, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Bruce Robbins points out that there are two Kants: “the one who sponsored romantic imagination and with it today’s social constructivism; the other who proposed the categorical imperative, which is as yet unrescued from abstraction by the aesthetic,” p. 201. 14 On analytic philosophy’s opposition between the fictive and the real see: David Lewis, “Truth in fiction,” American Philosophical Quarterly 15(1) (1978), 37–46; Shaun Nichols, The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006; John Searle, “The logical status of fictional discourse,” New Literary History 6(2) (1975), 319–32. 15 Maria Damon and Ira Livingston (“Introduction,” pp. 6–7. Gary Banham, “Kant and the Ends of Civilization,” in The New Aestheticism, eds. Jo J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. 193–207) argues against

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reading Kant’s aesthetics as anti-historicist, p. 193. He ultimately remains, however, within the boundaries of literary history. 16 Attridge, Singularity, pp. 11–12. 17 Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Literary Theory Today, eds. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990, 74–90, pp. 75, 79. Cf., for example, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980, grants that “poetry” is usually seen as “rhymical language formally marked off from the ordinary, practical functions of discourse,” in ways he sets out to challenge, p. 119. 18 Jan Mukarovsky, “Standard Language and Poetic Language,” Linguistics and Literary Style, Donald Freeman, ed., New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1970, pp. 40–56; Cf. Jerome McGann (The Romantic Ideology, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), who sees “ purely stylistic formal study” as one among other “specialized studies [that] must find their raison d’etre in the social historical ground” which is “made up of the political, economic, and ideological,” p. 3. 19 Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 83. 20 Jan Mukarovsky, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1970, pp. 5, 9, 20–1. 21 Jan Mukarovsky, The Word and Verbal Art, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977, pp. 4–5; 9, 21, 68. 22 Jan Mukarovsky, Word, pp. 18, 37, 54; Jan Mukarovsky, Structure, Sign and Function, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978, p. 37. 23 Mukarovsky, Word, p. 86. 24 Mukarovsky, Word, pp. 1, 3–4. 25 Mukarovsky, Word, pp. 53, 87. 26 Jan Mukarovsky, “Standard Language,” p. 45. 27 Mukarovsky, “Standard Language,” p. 44. 28 Mukarovsky, “Standard Language,” pp. 45, 47. 29 Jo J. Joughin and Simon Malpas “Introduction,” in The New Aestheticism, eds Jo J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, 1–19, p. 3. 30 Andrew Bowie, “What comes after Art,” in The New Aestheticism, eds. Jo J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, 68–82, pp. 69–70.



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31 Attridge, Singularity, pp. 11, 13. 32 Attridge, Singularity, pp. 68, 73, 109–14. 33 Attridge, Singularity, pp. 109, 73, 119, 29. 34 Timothy Clark, The Poetics of Singularity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005, p. 11. 35 Joughin and Malpas eds., “Introduction,” p. 4. 36 Thomas Docherty, “The Question Concerning Literature,” The Question of Literature, ed. Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, 126–41, p. 138. 37 Attridge, Singularity, p. 148. 38 As Clark warns: The Poetics of Singularity pp. 8–9, 16. 39 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 3–4; The Event of Literature, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013, p. 33. Eagleton notes that literariness for the Formalists is “relational, differential, context-dependent,” but these notions are reabsorbed back into the “dominant” compositional interest, which privileges, as he also notes, one literary kind, the poetic: but in fact privileges the compositional as the poetic itself (p. 3). Eagleton argues that Reader Response also turns on defamiliarization, pp. 91–2, 94–5. 40 Anna Jefferson, pp. 125–41 “Literariness, Dominance and Violence in Formalist Aesthetics,” in Literary Theory Today, Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan, eds, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, 125–40, p. 128. 41 Mukarovsky, “Standard Language,” pp. 42–4. 42 Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory, New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 5. 43 Clark, The Poetics of Singularity, p. 48. 44 Attridge, “Singular Event,” The Question of Literature, ed. Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. 50–1; Singularity, pp. 2, 29, 55, 63, 53. Cf. Clark, p. 50. The point here is not to reduce form to social context as in Culturalism; but not to see aesthetic form as disjunctive defamiliarizing. 45 Attridge, Singularity, pp. 19–20, 29. In invoking otherness and alterity, Attridge is drawing on Levinasian ethics. However, I do not think his usage is ultimately congruent with Levinas’s, but closer to Thomas Kuhn’s notions of “paradigm” in ways that I cannot pursue here.

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46 Attridge notes that this stress on “literary inventiveness of form [as] singularity is to privilege certain genres and modes and certain periods,” and concedes there can be “inventiveness” in works that are “largely conventional.” But he then restates that the works that have been “most powerful” and most praised are those prized for inventiveness, for its “introduction of alterity,” Singularity, p. 120. Tzachi Zamir, in a review of Attridge, notes the circularity of Attridge’s terms, its privileging of defamiliarization, and the constriction of the canon his aesthetics thus implies, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65(4) (Fall 2007), 419–21. See also Eagleton, Event, where he points out that there is much literature in which language is not “especially deviant, ambiguous, figurative, deautomatising, self-referential or self-focusing,” p. 35. 47 Bowie, Romanticism, p. 295, citing Manfred Frank, pp. 14, 299; Cf. Clark on literature’s resistance to institutionalized lines of demarcation, p. 92 (J. M. Berstein, The Fate of Art, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, Fate of Art, Polity Press, 1992, p. 5; Cf. Jay Bernstein, “Against voluptuous bodies,” New Left Review, 225, 1997, 89–104, p. 102; also Anthony Cascardi, that to Adorno, modernity “suffers the effects of the differentiation of the spheres and invites us to reflect upon it,” Consequences of Enlightment, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 20. 48 Adorno, “Lyric Poetry,” pp. 57, 63. Adorno’s aesthetics connects social forces to lyric through negation: what Andrew Bowie calls a “negative aesthetic theology,” in “What Comes After Art,” p. 75. As Adorno puts it, the “social condition impresses itself on the poetic form in a negative way” “Lyric Poetry,” p. 58. For an attempt to elaborate such a negative aesthetic in cultural terms see, Barrett Watten “On the advantages of negativity” Avant-Garde Poetry, New Music, and the Cultural Turn, Poetry after Cultural Studies, eds. Heidi Bean and Mike Chasar, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011, pp. 199–232, where he hopes, beyond Adorno’s “formalist, high cultural, nonidentical, autonomous” aesthetic “to show how aesthetic uses of negativity demand an expanded account of the work of art as a locus of engaged, critical and transformative agency,” p. 202. Cf. Mukarovsky, Structure, who acknowledges that there are “periods tending toward maximally attainable harmony and stability,” but still affirms that “the history of art has much more the nature of a perpetual revolt against the norm,” p. 54. 49 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, New York: Routledge, 1972, pp. 6–7. 50 Attridge, Singularity, pp. 7, 24.



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51 Eagleton, Event, pp. 57, 172, 170. See note 12 above. 52 For an aesthetics of theology, see John Hicks, Evil and the God of Love, New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 53 Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 75–6. 54 This is my core argument in Feminist Theory Across Disciplines: Feminist Community and American Women’s Poetry, New York: Routledge, 2013. 55 For Dickinson’s relation to the Civil War, see Shira Wolosky, Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War, Yale University Press, 1984. Faith Barret reviews historical study of Dickinson in “Public selves and private spheres: studies of Emily Dickinson and the Civil War, 1984–2007,” Emily Dickinson Journal, 16(1), 2007, 92–104. 56 For a fuller discussion of an aesthetics of gender see Wolosky, “Relational aesthetics and feminist poetics,” New Literary History 41(3), 2011, 571–92. 57 Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre, Baltimore, MY: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979 (hereafter abbreviated as “LT”); and Choosing Not Choosing, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Jerome McGann places the question of Dickinson’s non-publishing in terms of her manuscript practices, as resistance not only to the “marketplace of publication” but the restrictive modes of print typography, Emily Dickinson Journal 2:2, Fall 1993, 40–57, pp. 42–3. 58 Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963. 59 Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Univesity Press, 1998, poem No. 243. All further references to Dickinson poes will be ot this edition, cited as Fr followed by poem number. 60 Shira Wolosky, “Rhetoric or not: hymnal tropes in Emily Dickinson and Isaac Watts,” The New England Quarterly, LXI(2), (June, 1988), 214–32. 61 Helen Vendler, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 84–5. It is interesting that Domnhall Mitchell, responding to Jerome McGann’s emphasis on the significance of scriptural forms with Dickinson a paradigm case of manuscript materiality, suggests on the one hand that the hyphenation in “Presence” in manuscript can be read as signaling the “delayed encounter with death—dreadful anticipation—desire

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to postpone.” Yet he also points out the limitation of this scriptural evidence, since the same can be said for any hyphenation, Monarch of Perception, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000, p. 205. Pure manuscript editing materiality has its own dehistoricizing impulse, yielding generalized readings of scriptural iconicity. 62 Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas Johnson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976, vol. II; Letter 282, p. 425. Cf. Wolosky, Emily Dickinson, pp. 41–2. 63 Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism and the Politics of the Body, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993; even as she puts Dickinson into feminist and abolitionist contexts argues that in Dickinson these and other public issues are “fashioned into a poetic, ahistorical, ontological dilemma,” p. 106.

11 Beyond Sense: Portraits and Objects in Henry James’s Late Writings Michael Moon

There has been considerable debate in recent decades over the significance of things—“things” in the sense of material objects— in Henry James’s fiction. In this essay I propose to take up the question again with regard to a particular kind of object, the painted portrait, that circulates through some of James’s later fiction with striking energy and frequency. I am especially interested in exploring some of the relations between the magical or “miraculous” portrait at the narrative core of The Sense of the Past, an unfinished novel on which James was actively working at the time of his death, and several actual historical portraits alluded to with varying degrees of obliquity in two other late novels of James’s, The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove. When I was first studying James’s work in the early 1980s, Jean-Christophe Agnew’s critique of the alleged complicity of James’s writing with the burgeoning commodity culture of his time had considerable impact on the way in which relations between persons and objects in James’s fiction were understood. Twenty years later, Bill Brown’s “thing-theory” project, focused in substantive part on James’s fiction, conduced readers to consider other ways in which the objectification of both things and persons in certain

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kinds of modernist literary texts might exceed the compromised forms of relation traced by earlier critics of “consumer culture.”1 My interest in trying to think some more about “things”— works of art, objets de virtu, bibelots, “spoils,” and the fictional persons who collect, exchange, quarrel over, discard, and lose them—in James’s writing has been restimulated recently by the reading I have done (often fairly resistantly) in, and some of the discussions in which I have participated about, a set of developments in philosophy and theory known generally as “object oriented ontology”—especially the work of Graham Harman, the founder of the movement and the most prolific of its proponents. Harman and his colleagues in “O.O.O.” vigorously reject what is known in the related philosophical movement of speculative realism as “correlationism,” the fundamental Kantian notion that objects conform to (or correlate with) the human mind in a way that precludes the mind’s having any more direct or less mentally mediated access to them. Harman and others in the movement also reject what they see as the privileging in philosophy and theory of the human over (other kinds of) objects; some advocate a radical democracy of objects in which, again, the human is denied ascendancy.2 Reading the work of Harman and other object-oriented philosophers (almost all of them male) with their (to me) somewhat austere-sounding and occasionally even somewhat autistic-sounding insistence on the inaccessibility of objects to humans sometimes made me wonder at first if object-oriented ontology might be a version of queer theory’s anti-social thesis for straight guys. As general philosophical postures or attitudes, the two positions resemble each other in some ways, especially in their repudiation of the rather conventional set of assumptions that ground ordinary or common-sense notions of human-object relations (critiqued in object-oriented ontology) or similar received assumptions about the high degree of compatibility and mutual “fit” between sexuality and community or sociality (critiqued in the antisocial thesis). On closer acquaintance with the work of Harman and his colleagues, I have come to think that there may be affinities well worth considering between some work in object oriented philosophy and the work of some literary artists who have not yet been brought into the intellectual purview of the object-oriented movement, such as Henry James, and also between object oriented philosophy and



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some of the more generative departures that have occurred in the criticism and theory of James’s work, such as that of Leo Bersani or Sharon Cameron. For Harman, several aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy of the object are crucial to reconceiving our relations (and/or non-relations) to objects: Harman especially emphasizes Heidegger’s idea of the general inaccessibility, the “withdrawnness” of objects from other objects, including from human perception and understanding.3 Ian Bogost, another proponent of “O.O.O.,” has critiqued the overinvestment of many academics in making ever more finely reticulated accounts of the complexities of human persons’ relations with one another.4 James’s late writing might, from one perspective that was long pervasive in its twentieth-century critical reception, appear to be potentially a primary object of this form of critique, given this writing’s alleged fixation on making discriminations among increasingly subtle perceptions and discreet interactions, all supposedly in the context of an elaborately refined psychology of intimate human relations—the kind of understanding of James inaugurated by Joseph Conrad in a 1905 essay in which Conrad calls him “the historian of fine consciences.”5 However, at the same time that some critics were introducing new ways of thinking about the things in James’s fiction, others, notably including Bersani and Cameron, were developing a strong critique of the critical view still dominant in the 1970s that James was essentially a psychological novelist, a limner of individual consciousness.6 Bersani began dislodging what had been (and for some readers remains) a central tenet of James criticism, that an ethic of depth psychology is a sufficient and even an indispensable lens through which to read James’s fiction, insisting to the contrary on the productivity for James’s work of the deception and betrayal of the community and of socially based notions of truth as a recurrent, indeed generative, condition of his work. Cameron argued in her 1989 monograph Thinking in Henry James that the novelist, far from depicting “consciousness” as being discretely lodged within individuals, represents it as functioning outside or between persons, in some transpersonal space. Cameron also argued that consciousness itself was depicted in his work as being capable of having effects beyond the intentions or understandings of the individual subjects from whom it supposedly arose.7 No one would mistake Bersani’s or Cameron’s readings of James for essays

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in object-oriented ontology, but the strong anti-psychological, antiindividualist, and anti-personalist impulses in these critics’ work may be of interest and considerable potential use to presentday students of modernity interested in returning to the question of the significance of material objects not only in James’s fiction but, perhaps more broadly, in a range of kinds of fictions—literary, theoretical, and otherwise. In this essay I propose to focus on the relations, some of them decidedly weird, between a particular kind of object, the painted portrait, in both its fictional and historical modalities, in James’s late writing: an imaginary portrait that James invents and evokes at length in A Sense of the Past that has the capacity to come alive and serve as a kind of double of the protagonist, as well as some of the actual portraits—several early modern ones, by Holbein, Bronzino, and Titian, respectively—that bear explicit or implicit relations to several others of his late fictions. The painted portrait—numerous daubs of oil on prepared canvas stretched across boards and often displayed in an elaborately ornamental frame—would seem to carry the practice of “humanizing” or “personalizing” material objects to one of its extremes, applying effigies of human persons to canvas surfaces to be hung up and displayed on a wall, supposedly for the purpose of capturing and maintaining a visual likeness of the subject for posterity. But it is also possible to regard the portraits that figure in James’s writing against the grain of this way of understanding how portraits “work,” a way informed by both the anti-psychologizing, anti-personalizing tendencies of such James criticism as Bersani’s and Cameron’s and the, in some ways perhaps, complementary tendency of object-oriented philosophy to oppose the privileging of human persons over other kinds of objects—as, for example, in the case of the portrait in The Sense of the Past, where its becoming-human may not only unsettle the reader’s sense of what a portrait is but also of what being human involves. There are a number of characteristics of the portraits that figure in James’s late writings that seem to me to make them particularly interesting objects for such an analysis. One is their tendency to display on and around the persons of their respective sitters congeries of other kinds of objects—staging, as it were, the existence of the sitter as an object among a given set of other (kinds of) objects. Another is the quite notable capacity of several



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of these portraits to act in various ways, to produce effects on at least some of their human viewers far in excess of what such an object is ordinarily considered capable of doing, of overwhelming the viewer psychically and/or emotionally, and even (as in, for example, The Sense of the Past) physically transporting the viewer as well as the sitter in the portrait into other places and times, so as (once again) to call into question ordinary conceptions of the human-object distinction. Several late works of James have titles that directly allude to allegorical or symbolic objects: The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, as well as the other novel left unfinished at the time of his death, The Ivory Tower. These titles tend to draw the novels themselves into the orbit of the object named in the title. Among James’s late works, The Ambassadors, along with The Sense of the Past, might seem to be exceptions to this practice; however, as I shall discuss further a little later in this chapter, the term “sense” itself in the latter title may be taken as pointing to the role of the sensory perception of objects as a crucial element in the novel’s paradoxical depiction of the presence of the past and the present in each other, while the title of The Ambassadors can also be shown to cite an object, and an object with potential allegorical or symbolic significance. This is Holbein’s 1533 painting of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve called The Ambassadors (National Gallery, London), which had just been identified by Mary F. S. Hervey in 1900 as a double portrait of these two French visitors to the court of Henry VIII. Hervey’s book appeared and was widely discussed in print during the time (1901–2) that James was planning and composing his Ambassadors. Besides the identity of the two splendidly dressed men it depicts, the painting poses another, different kind of interpretive, identificatory crux to the viewer: Holbein famously painted an anamorphic representation of a human skull in the lower foreground, one that appears heavily and weirdly distorted when viewed head-on (so to speak), but as a more “realistic” and mimetic image when viewed from the far sides of the picture. Theorists—aesthetic, psychoanalytic, and others—have taken considerable interest in trying to interpret the relation between the relatively non-mimetic skull or death’s-head in the painting and its relation to the remarkably mimetic renderings not only of the two men but also of the other elaborately (but non-anamorphically) painted objects in

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the portrait. It is of course a commonplace in historicist readings of many Renaissance portraits to point out that one particular “prop” in the painting—a certain book or kind of book or scientific instrument—identifies the subject of the portrait as an adept in or patron of Humanist learning. Holbein’s Ambassadors may well represent a kind of limit case for a single portrait depicting a range of such objects: in the space between the two human figures, there is an extensive display of scientific instruments variously identified by art and science historians as a shepherd’s dial (or timestick), a horary quadrant, a copy of a new arithmetical treatise, various pieces of astronomical equipment such as a torquatum and a celestial globe—but also an eleven-stringed lute and a Lutheran hymnal. Historicists both old and new have been interested in such questions as what one or the other of these objects may be suggesting about the state of the Reformation in England (the year that the the painting was created—1533—having been a prolonged period of high tension between Henry VIII, Cranmer, and Rome and the political implications of the king’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn). Rather than attempting to adjudicate between competing accounts of what the individual objects in the painting signify, such as what the various cartographic devices (one of which is centered on Rome, another on “ambassador” Dinteville’s rural seat in France), or the various calendrical devices (one of which is said to be set to the date of Good Friday 1533) suggest about the painting’s ostensible “theme,” I am more interested in trying to register the incongruity and lack of coherence in the array of objects that appear in the painting, in relation to each other (e.g., the lute’s relation to the astronomical and/or timemeasuring instruments or to the printed hymnbook) and in relation to the two human figures in the painting, including not only the anamorphically rendered skull but also the crucifix that appears on the far upper left hand margin of the painting (often cropped out of the image in reproductions). None of the numerous objects necessarily provides a “key” to understanding the painting’s ostensible “iconography.” To a present day humanist intent on arguing that the most interesting thing about the painting is the way that in it, the proliferation of innovative and newly designed and improved scientific instruments in the painting represent its sixteenth-century human subjects’ newly possible ability to order, understand, and



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penetrate the ostensible secrets of the material universe, I would counter-argue that the interest of James and some of his contemporaries in the painting and its meanings may have proceeded rather from the both splendid and overwhelming effects it is likely to have on a modern viewer.8 What are all those gizmos doing in this painting, one may still ask, even after most of the devices have been more or less precisely located in the history of science. And what have they to do with the two men, severely and somewhat austerely handsome of face and figure, in contrast with the luxurious mode of their (to modern eyes) rich and elaborate dress? And with the lute, the books, the crucifix? What is the nature of the relation of the two men to each other? What if it, rather than being simply a “secret” (or “open secret”) or encoded kind of relation, is at least in some ways as occluded or enigmatic as the relation between them and any one (or all) of the (other) objects in the painting? What is the status of the kind of learned puzzle that the picture has been commonly taken to be throughout the twentieth century in relation to such a literary text as the late novel of James’s which may be named “after” it? If we as viewer/readers of the painting and its scholarly literature profess dissatisfaction with such “solutions” to the painting’s elaborate enigmas as the settling on an ostensibly significant date or some kind of iconographic statement about the state of the Reformation that year in England, we may be more willing to accept the proliferation and elaboration of various kinds of enigmatic relations and non-relations among persons, among objects, and between persons and objects, as an aesthetic program in itself, and one in which James was himself increasingly interested and involved from around 1900 to the end of his career. Potential or virtual relations (of resemblance, of identification, of situation or condition) and non-relations between various of James’s protagonists and the figures in several Renaissance portraits is a recurring concern in much of his late fiction. There is a relatively simple example of this practice in the opening pages of The Sense of the Past, when, as Ralph Pendrel unsuccessfully courts Aurora Coyne, the narrator recounts Ralph’s having constructed an elaborate fantasy of her as “an Italian princess of the cinque-cento” in a Titian or Veronese portrait— while the narrator also notes Ralph’s own “rueful” sense that his knowledge of such paintings must be “uninstructed,” since, not having yet visited Europe, he has mostly to this point studied

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only unsatisfactory reproductions of them in print (7). Given his alleged ignorance of Venetian portraiture, he nonetheless manifests a rather detailed sense of how to paint Aurora imaginarily in a “period” manner if we take the ensuing narration as free indirect discourse giving us as readers some access to these imaginings of his: “large calm beauty, low square dresses, crude and multiplied jewels, the habit of watching strife from a height and yet of looking at danger with a practised bravery” (8). James’s narrator seems to treat the by then established practice of idealizing American dollar princesses as “Titian-haired beauties” in a somewhat satirical vein (“large calm ... low square ... crude and multiplied jewels”), but Ralph seems not to be in on this mild joke, at least at this initial point in the novel; he shows in his manner toward her nothing of the ironic tone that the narrator has already struck when he speaks of her rich “roots” as having been “watered by Wall Street,” from where several older male relatives “conspired to direct the golden stream” (7–8). The question of the relation of Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove to a Bronzino portrait of a lady is one that that novel stages at considerable length and with notable intensity. Milly Theale is such another (in James’s narrator’s word) “awfully” rich New Yorker of the turn of the century as Aurora Coyne is, but her connection to the Bronzino portrait that she confronts produces grave and far reaching rather than merely topical and satirical ironies: Milly, who has at the time recently learned that she may be fatally ill, sees the superficial resemblances between herself and the portrait (“a mass of hair, rolled back and high,” “recorded jewels,” “handsome in sadness”), but appears to be most deeply struck by what she perceives as the portrait’s power to display what she says she sees as a state of irremediable deadness—so that Milly appears to be most forcibly impressed by the portrait as an image of human mortality, including her own imminent death.9 Without featuring an anamorphic skull as (among whatever other things it may signify) memento mori, as the Holbein portrait does, the Bronzino painting seems to function for Milly, if not also for James’s reader, as an emotionally charged image of the inevitability of death, and of death as something that has fixed the subject of the portrait, once a living person and “a very great personage,” in some inalterable and inaccessible past—”dead” in a particularly tendentious sense:



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for Milly Theale (according to the narration of her response to the painting), the Bronzino lady is simply and redundantly “dead, dead, dead” (157). At the other end of a spectrum from that on which the effects of looking at a portrait and noting a resemblance in it to oneself are depicted as being mortifying or deadening in a nearly literal sense lie the highly enlivening and empowering effects that are attributed to the quasimagical or “miraculous” portrait that figures in The Sense of the Past. This is the portrait that Ralph Pendrel sees after he leaves New York and Aurora Coyne and moves into the London home (“of around 1710”) bequeathed to him by a relative who has read Pendrel’s book entitled An Essay in Aid of the Reading of History.10 Pendrel, drawn to old times and the places that represent them, takes possession of the house and its contents, and soon becomes intrigued by the portrait that hangs in the innermost room. It depicts an elegant-looking young man of circa 1820, one whom Pendrel imagines may be both a man of fashion, even something of a dandy (“of the age of the bucks,” [Sense of the Past: 75]), and a glamorous veteran of the Napoleonic wars. The plot of The Sense of the Past unfolds from a series of uncanny events that transpire around this portrait, which strikes Pendrel as being weird even before it starts producing its “miraculous” effects for him. To begin with, the subject of the portrait turns his face and back away from the viewer. Rather than decreasing the intensity of his interest in the portrait, the way it generally withholds its subject’s appearance tends rather to magnetize Pendrel’s gaze. “Ralph ended in fact by asking himself what other mere male back would so have produced the effect of sharpening curiosity,” the narrator reports, and goes on to enumerate the details of the picture that Pendrel can see: this gentleman’s close compact dark curls, ... long straight neck, which emerged from a high stock and rolled collar, ... the fall of his shoulder and the cut of his dark-green sleeve, ... the way his handsome left hand, folding easily over a pair of grey gloves, rested its knuckles on his hip and conveyed the impression of a beaver [hat], of the earliest years of the century, held out of view in the right [hand] ... (Sense of the Past: 77) These “few indications,” “scant showings” of the young man’s

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appearance, the narrator says, “provoked to irritation” Pendrel’s desire to see more. Pendrel begins interacting with several portraits of men in the house by walking back and forth before them and seeing how far their eyes seem to follow him. After playing this game for awhile, he starts playing another version of it that is specifically adapted to the pose of the subject in his favorite portrait: Pendrel imagines that when it is not being observed, the subject faces forward in a conventional portrait-pose, turning away from the viewer only as the viewer enters the room and begins to look at the portrait, and he starts trying to “catch” the subject of the portrait in the act of turning away from his gaze. Feeling that he has begun to come close to winning this game, Pendrel mounts a vigil through much of one stormy night in and around the room where the portrait hangs. Re-entering the room at one point, he catches sight of something that suggests that his wish has been fulfilled even beyond his hopes, something that the narrator speaks of as being “beyond sense”: the figure in the portrait has not only turned around to face the viewer, but has stepped down out of the picture into the same space and time that Pendrel is occupying. The events and appearances that, since taking possession of the old house, Pendrel has been experiencing as a series of “prodigies,” phenomena that defy natural order (or go “contrary to nature,” [Sense of the Past: 102]), culminate in a “miracle”: The young man above the mantel, the young man brown-haired, pale, erect, with the high-collared dark blue coat, the young man revealed, responsible, conscious, quite shining out of the darkness, presented him the face he had prayed to reward his vigil; but the face—miracle of miracles, yes—confounded him as his own (Sense of the Past: 87–8). What ensues between Pendrel and the “other man” once the double has emerged from the portrait the reader comes to know only eventually and partially. This is not only a consequence of James’s having left the novel unfinished at the time of his death: even from the extensive fragment of the novel that we have, it appears clear enough that whatever colloquy might have taken place between Pendrel and his double, James had decided to keep it offstage. Pendrel confides what has happened to the U.S.



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ambassador to Britain. What he tells the ambassador about his exchanges with the 1820 man and their likely implications, along with James’s own projections about them in the extensive written plans for the book that survive, give us some idea of the relation between person and portrait figure in this novel, but only in a highly fragmentary way. The reader learns from what Pendrel tells the ambassador that he and his double have agreed to “exchange” (but not to “merge”) identities, and that the exchange will enable Pendrel to move back to live in 1820s London for a time of some indeterminate length (possibly quite a while, perhaps even for good) and the man from the portrait to move forward to live in 1910 New York. According to James’s notes, the two men, the “1910 one” and the “1820 one,” would remain in intermittent communication with each other; apparently, their being able possibly to return to the times and places whence they came was to be something they would have to negotiate with each other. James limns plot-possibilities in his notes in which Pendrel eventually wants to escape the 1820s, but is at least initially unable to persuade his double to give up his life “in the future” so that Pendrel can return there. James wrote the pages about the portrait in The Sense of the Past and Ralph Pendrel’s quasi-magical interactions with it just a couple of years or so before writing about Millie Theale’s experience as she stands before the Bronzino. In considering the two scenes side by side, one may notice that—in contrast with what appear to be the deadening effects of Millie’s study of the Bronzino—Ralph’s experience of the portrait in his London house opens up a ready path to the past for himself at the same time that it opens up a similarly ready path to the future for the young man in the portrait. What the two characters’ experiences of the respective portraits they study has in common is that both experiences, different as they are in their effects, are intense to the point of being overwhelming. “Overwhelming” is the narrator of The Ambassadors’ term for yet another significant Renaissance portrait in James’s late work, this one Titian’s Man with a Glove (also known as Man with a Torn Glove) in the Louvre: Lambert Strether is standing before it, “one of the splendid Titians—the overwhelming portrait of the young man with the strangely-shaped glove and the blue-grey eyes” with Little Bilham when he first encounters Chad Newsome, the young man Strether has been dispatched to Paris to bring home

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to Massachusetts from the dissolute life, and specifically from the “illicit” relationship, in which his family fear he may have become involved.11 Before Strether is able to meet with Newsome, the reader has seen him speculating about the kinds of “roots” that the younger man has established in Paris and the kinds of “initiations” which he has undergone, and Strether’s coming to know Newsome (in the company of Newsome’s friend Little Bilham) under the sign of this particular Titian portrait constitutes an initiation of sorts for Strether himself into a greater openness to an expanded range of experience—an openness that is largely a product of his friendship with the two younger men in this scene. The narrator’s term for the immediate effect of the encounter on Strether is that it made him feel that “he had a sense” (after feeling quite the outsider since his arrival in Paris) “of having at last taken hold” of the new (new old, that is) world he has entered and the novel forms of life and social and aesthetic experience it promises to afford him. I want to pause briefly over the term “sense” here, and the way it links “sense” with the connotation of sensory impression (the sight of either object; the touch or “tak[ing] hold” of Newsome’s hand, perhaps, as they meet in the gallery, as Strether has just been contemplating the subject of the Titian portrait with his one bared hand and one gloved hand) and “sense” with the connotation of an affectively charged impression (as in the phrase “a sense of the past”)—albeit one affectively charged in what may be an indefinite or as yet unspecified way. It is in relation to this particular double significance of the multiply complex term “sense” that one might begin to explore a more extensive set of connections that bind The Ambassadors with The Sense of the Past particularly closely among James’s late fictions. So there are two movements happening more or less simultaneously in the moment encapsulated in the sentence from The Ambassadors presently under consideration: Strether stands side by side with Little Bilham before the Titian portrait and is “overwhelm[ed]” by it in the same moment that he turns and sees Chad Newsome advancing toward him through the gallery and having “a sense of having at last taken hold.” Critics have repeatedly interpreted the allusion to the Titian portrait of the young man as a kind of proleptic signaling to Strether and to the reader that the young man he is about to meet has made himself over from a naive young American into a cosmopolitan product



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of the older high culture of which he has availed himself in his extended stay abroad. That seems to my mind to scant the potential effect—on Strether, on the reader—of the overwhelmingness of the portrait in favor of overreading the orientating steadiness that Strether is said to begin to feel as soon as he catches sight of and recognizes Newsome. Part of what may be said to be “overwhelming” about the Titian portrait is the capacity that is attributed to it to overpower a viewer at least momentarily and the strangeness of its having such (otherwise unspecified) powers. The portrait depicts a young nobleman gazing intently to his left, out of the space of the picture. Below his brightly illuminated face (most of the rest of the picture space is dark), a brilliant small white ruff and a narrow line of dazzling white shirt front tends to lead the eye downward first to the bared right hand of the subject, pointing in the direction of the subject’s gaze, and, in the right foreground of the picture, the subject’s left hand, covered by what is sometimes called the “torn” glove (James’s narrator’s word for the glove is “strangely-shaped”) and also holding the other glove in its grasp. The same portrait of Titian’s appears to have served the young Henry James himself, as well as his brother William, as a kind of palimpsest or model for some of their earliest experiments in selfrepresentation: when Henry was about twenty, and William about twenty-one (i.e. circa 1863–4), both young men had themselves photographed as versions of The Man with the Glove. William gazes out of the pictorial space with both hands bared and his left holding a glove, while Henry reproduces the one glove off, one glove on asymmetry of the Titian portrait, stretching the “empty” glove between his hands. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass summarize briefly but suggestively the iconographic tradition of reading the figure of the torn glove in the Titian portrait as a Petrarchan figure for the lacerated heart of an unhappy lover.12 Jones and Stallybrass further pursue a Derridean line of reasoning about the potentially complicated effects that can arise when any pair (of gloves, shoes, or whatever) begins to come unpaired, at which point it may begin to take on uncanny qualities, exhibiting a kind of ghostliness that an object such as the “empty” glove may take on for a viewer, putatively “emptied” or “drained” as it is of the liveness or “fulness” associated with the hand-in-glove.

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Such questions about whether a person (or an object) is single, paired, or in some uncertain condition between these two states are very much at issue and under stress in The Ambassadors: is Chad Newsome a member of an illicit pairing, or is his relationship with the woman Marie de Vionnet “a virtuous attachment,” as Little Bilham somewhat misleadingly assures Strether that it is early on in the novel? Little Bilham is a “bachelor,” and unattached or unpaired as far as Strether can see. Is Strether a single man or does he (or should) he constitute a pair with one of the other characters? Similarly, The Sense of the Past pairs and unpairs Ralph Pendrel with the male ancestor depicted in the portrait with whom he changes places, but also with Aurora Coyne in 1910 New York and with the Midmore sisters, Molly and Nan, in 1820 London, each of whom in turn, and with increasingly high degrees of tension between himself and each of the three women, becomes a potential mate for him. One of the features of the Titian portrait that may contribute to Strether’s finding the image somehow “overwhelming” is the sitter’s gaze, which he appears to direct outside the visual field of the painting, at the same time that he also appears to be gesturing with his bared right hand, again, either at something “outside” the painting or at his other, gloved hand. It may seem a small matter that the sitter does not appear to return the gaze of either the painter or the viewer, but, especially given the gestural microdrama that may be taking place at the level of the sitter’s hands, his directing his gaze elsewhere than at the viewer or at his hands may have the effect of uncannily disconcerting—even overwhelming—a viewer who proves susceptible to the dynamics of the action of the portrait, as Strether appears to be. In The Sense of the Past, the sitter’s turning of his whole person, including most of the surface of his face, away from the viewer—the single feature of the image that most intensely engages Pendrel’s interest and eventually leads to all that ensues from the sitter’s eventual turning around and descending from the ontological space of the portrait—may be said to be an extreme example of the kinds of effects that James can imagine of the looking away combined with gesturing that Strether appears to find so disconcerting—and so stimulating—in the Titian portrait. There may be a paradox at work here that is worth thinking about a little further. Consider the rhetorical commonplace that is



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often evoked by a speaker as he or she begins to attempt to clarify a distinction or an opposition: “on the one hand ... on the other hand ...” As long as the rhetorical hands keep distinct from each other, neatly paired at the same time that they seem readily distinguishable from each other, the rhetorical move may function fairly straightforwardly. But if the kinds of ambiguities and uncertainties begin to emerge that Derrida has identified as proceeding from pairs that begin to come unpaired, or singular objects that begin to pair or “mate,” they may eventuate in the kinds of “overwhelming” effects that the portraits in The Ambassadors and The Sense of the Past seem to produce, at least on some beholders. One potentially uncanny possibility that is opened up by the divergence of such twains that Derrida considers is that of fetishization: it is not a pair of gloves or shoes or feet that tends to get fetishized, but the single entity. One of the ways in which Titian’s torn-glove portrait may participate in a dynamic of fetishization—and in this it resembles many other portraits of the period (portraits of women as well as of men)—lies in its presentation of one bared hand alongside one gloved hand. (Jones and Stallybrass point out and illustrate several instances of this contrast, but do not pursue it for theoretical purposes.) In other words, this and many other Renaissance portraits re-present the fundamental rhetorical trope, “on the one hand ... on the other hand,” as a marked contrast between a bared body-part and a covered body-part—or, as one might say, between a nude or naked body (-part) and a clothed one. Physical nakedness and/or vulnerability, both eroticized and uneroticized, fetishized, and unfetishized, also constitutes a possible set of referents, metonymic or metaphoric, for bared hand and gloved one. Although it may be highly unusual for the subject of a portrait to turn most of his person away from the viewer, as the subject of the portrait in The Sense of the Past does, there is another major artistic genre from the long nineteenth century—the drawing and painting of the male nude—in which the focus on the subject’s back—on the rendering of the muscle groups of the shoulders, back, and buttocks—is a commonplace. Perhaps some of the fascination that the picture holds for Ralph Pendrel has to do with the way that the elaborately clothed subject’s adopting a pose commonly associated with the drawn or painted male nude disturbs or “overwhelms” his ordinary sense of the

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relations between artistic genres—portrait, study of the nude—and the kind of depiction of the body supposedly appropriate to each, whether clothed or nude. The extremity of vulnerability that Ralph Pendrel comes to experience as he trades places with the sitter in the portrait and attempts to take up a different life in 1820 London is figured powerfully, if only implicitly, in a portrait that depicts a richly costumed man in a position that a viewer may likely associate with a nude or naked figure. James’s narrator introduces the detailed description of the portrait in The Sense of the Past with what sounds like an air of satisfaction, even perhaps of satiety: It was enough to say for this gentleman’s close compact dark curls, for his long straight neck, which emerged from a high stock and rolled collar, for the fall of his shoulder and the cut of his dark-green sleeve, from the way his handsome left hand, folding easily over a pair of grey gloves, rested its knuckles on his hip and conveyed the impression of a beaver [hat], of the earliest years of the century, held out of view in the right—it was enough to say for these few indications that they provoked to irritation the desire for others (Sense of the Past: 77). The litany of the beauties of the painting, which parallel the attractions of the person, clothing, and demeanor of the portrait’s subject, as I have noted, are said to “provoke[ ]” to irritation the desire for other [“indications”] on Ralph Pendrel’s part. The narrative seems to imagine that the intensity of Pendrel’s wanting to “see more” of the young man in the portrait has something to do with the “miracle” that ensues, the subject’s stepping down out of the painting and exchanging historical places with his admirer. Of the two features that James’s narrator in The Ambassadors quickly sketches in as perhaps the most notable “indications” of Titian’s portrait of the Man with the Glove—”the strangely-shaped glove and the blue-grey eyes,” the gloves get duly noted here among the appurtenances of the figure in the portrait in The Sense of the Past, but the eyes and the face of the subject get passed over in silence; it is withheld from the reader until the closing words of the chapter, eleven pages later, that the face of the man who has stepped down out of the portrait closely (perhaps exactly) resembles Pendrel’s own (Sense of the Past: 88).



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Some of the terms that circulate in the description of the portrait in The Sense of the Past suggest that, at least for Pendrel, the young man in it is likely a denizen of a more rakish, less domesticated milieu than Pendrel’s has been (the narrator says that even without seeing the young man’s face, Pendrel sees in the details of his costume and posture “some whim of old-time elegance, some conceit of the age of the bucks,” [Sense of the Past: 75]). Pendrel imagines the young man in the portrait as the product of a world of military dandies and dandified aesthetes that culminated in, and came to its supposed end, around the time of the fall of Napoleon. Strether catches a glimpse of this imagined alternative male world not only in Titian’s portrait of the young nobleman of the early sixteenth century but in the recently emerged bohemian world of young artists into which Little Bilham has begun introducing him around the time Strether meets Chad Newsome. It has long been recognized that the Little Bilham episodes in The Ambassadors rewrite some of the episodes in the life of the bohemian artist called Little Billee in James’s close friend George du Maurier’s enormously popular 1895 novel Trilby (James as much as announces the connection by making the name of his character almost identical to that of du Maurier’s character, and making them both “little” bohemian bachelor artists). In du Maurier’s novel, Little Billee is passively in love with the young milk-girl and artist’s model Trilby; he experiences an emotional crisis after entering a studio where she is posing nude for a group of his fellow artists. Trilby experiences a crisis of her own when she realizes that Little Billee feels embarrassed and ashamed for her that she poses nude. What Little Billee seems to retain of his supposedly thwarted love for Trilby (of which he and she are represented in the novel as eventually dying) is a fixation on drawing her feet, and the outsize men’s slippers that she used to wear around the studio. In a passage that may remind us of Jones and Stallybrass’s discussion of the alleged liveliness of the hand-in-glove as opposed to the uncanniness and apparent deadness or ghostliness of the “empty” glove with/from which it is paired and/or unpaired, Little Billee produces drawings that he considers particularly beautiful of the shape of Trilby’s feet filling her old slippers (a “haunting” image of their intense but unfulfilled love and desire for each other). This (for Little Billee) highly reparative reclothing of a potentially bared body-part of Trilby’s participates in the same uncanny and

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paradoxical economy as the one bare hand paired/unpaired with one gloved hand do in Titian’s portrait, or the elaborately dressed figure and the nude male figure associated with the pose that the figure assumes do in the portrait in The Sense of the Past. Only a year or so before turning back to take up once again the early chapters of The Sense of the Past, James had written in the second volume of his autobiographical writings (Notes of a Son and Brother, published in 1914) about an experience of his as a very young man (in his teens) entering into an artist’s studio in Newport and discovering his brother William (along with some of their fellow art-students) drawing their cousin Gus Barker as he posed nude for them. The scene as presented makes a telling contrast with du Maurier’s way of telling the story of Little Billee (it may also be a response of a sort to the episode from Trilby). James presents the scene not as one that produces a crisis for himself (as Little Billee’s seeing Trilby pose nude does for him) but actually resolves one, or at least figures the resolution of a crisis— in this instance, a vocational one. Seeing his brother William producing a “brave” and creditable drawing of Gus Barker nude, whose “perfect gymnastic figure,” James writes, “meant living truth” to the young Henry James, James tells the reader that he put his would be artist’s drawing pencil resolutely back into his pocket, and (supposedly) decided on the spot that his sole aesthetic instrument in future would be the writer’s pen.13 James recounts a further anecdote in The Middle Years (Scribner’s, 1917), the third of his autobiographical volumes and yet another text on which he was still working at the time of his death, about feeling both “shaken” and “satisfied” as he stood before another Titian (Bacchus and Ariadne) in another museum (the National Gallery, London). Some years older but still a young man, at the time that he had recently taken up permanent residence in London, James in this scene comes to realize that the man standing beside him studying the same painting is the poet Swinburne. Without exchanging a word or even a glance with him, James depicts his young self as “thrilled” to find himself “admiring Titian in the same breath with Mr. Swinburne—... in the same breath in which he [i.e. Swinburne] admired Titian and in which I also admired him ... I was shaken, but I was satisfied ... (The Middle Years: 569–70). That James’s writing after the turn of the century registers in many ways the possibility of a man being “shaken” and even



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shattered into desire by the sight of another man, of his body or some part of his body, is a set of perceptions that has been thoroughly and, for many of us, satisfyingly explored in the James criticism of the past generation. Less familiar are the satisfactions—for James (according to his own accounts), for some of his characters, potentially for his readers—that may accompany the “shakings” and shatterings to which we as readers have become so well-attuned in recent decades; these satisfactions at least in part proceed from a recognition, an awareness, and even an acceptance of the inaccessibility and unknowability of many objects under many circumstances, including many human objects but also including non-human ones—even ones in or as such uncanny spaces as gloves and pockets—or paintings and portraits. A potentially uncanny feature of Bronzino’s portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi (Uffizi Gallery, Florence, ca. 1545), a likely analogue for the Bronzino portrait of a lady to which Milly Theale reacts so intensely, raises—at least for present purposes—one final question about the significance of objects in the portraits we have been considering. It raises this question only if one is able to observe certain visual aspects of the portrait which it can be hard to see, even in the best reproductions. A close examination of the painting reveals that the larger of the two necklaces that the subject is wearing is engraved with the motto, “L’amour dure sans fin,” “Love lasts endlessly.” This is a feature of the painting that may make the viewer/reader wonder what the narrator of The Wings of the Dove may mean by the phrase “recorded jewels.” Might “recorded” in the phrase mean not only that the jewels are represented in paint by the artist but also (or perhaps instead) that they are inscribed or engraved with words? What is the reader to make of the possibility that the motto or “legend” inscribed in the necklace about the subject’s neck in the portrait is in one sense resolutely “not there” (not mentioned, not “recorded” in turn in the narration), at the same time that the incised sentence as painted may paradoxically manifest itself at some level (may haunt the text), given some readers’ awareness of the motto inscribed in the portrait of Panciatichi? What is it about the portrait that is stimulating Milly Theale’s strong emotional response to it? Might it not be in part the motto that at most remains implicit in James’s narrator’s rendering of it in the novel, in ironic and paradoxical resonance with the notion that Milly seems to be taking from the

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momentarily overwhelming image before her, that it is perhaps not “love” but death—and specifically her own imminent death—that is going to last forever? The lexical proximity of “La mort dure sans fin”—“Death lasts forever”—to “L’amour dure sans fin” may serve only to underscore a powerful impression that Millie Theale has already taken from the painting. Millie turns from the painting and expostulates, “I shall never be better than this” (The Wings of a Dove: 157); whatever she may mean by that, the formulation anticipates in the energy of its negation the closing words of the novel, which are uttered by Kate Croy, “We shall never be again as we were” (The Wings of a Dove: 509). Poised in tense relation to both idealizing notions of love (“love lasts forever”) and totalizing notions of death (“death lasts forever”) are this novel’s two female protagonists’ pronouncements about their respective fates: “never better,” “never again.” So the potential paradox of whether it is love or death or some compound of both that “lasts forever” is not resolved in the novel, either by Milly’s eventual death or the apparent impasse in relation to each other at which her friends, betrayers, and wouldbe heirs, Kate Croy and Merton Densher, arrive in the aftermath of Millie’s death. The question of Milly’s relation to the portrait in the novel and the objects that inhere in it remains a kind of enigma that may also be thought of as a paradox. Barbara Johnson, in an essay on Kant and Winnicott that appears in her book Persons and Things, argues for the crucial importance of preserving the paradox at the heart of Winnicott’s thinking about the small child’s relation to the transitional object: “My contribution,” she quotes Winnicott writing of his theory, “is to ask for a paradox to be accepted and tolerated and respected, and for it not to be resolved.”14 The paradox in question in Winnicott’s theory is that between the object—in this case, the so-called transitional object, the frayed blanket or bear that the small child has powerfully cathected—and between the ostensible fate of the object: for Winnicott, the child has to have the experience of venting its destructive impulses on the object but also of recognizing that the object can survive the child’s destructive impulses and attacks on it. But the paradox also structures the maintaining of the tension between whether the child “created” the transitional object or whether the object in some important sense precedes the child’s cathexis of it. Winnicott’s restatement of the paradox at this point takes the form of his



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writing, “The baby creates the object, but the object was there waiting to be created, and to become a cathected object.”15 Here again we come up against another version of the kind of question with which this essay started: are we to accept a Kantian account of the relation between our minds and our objects (one emphasizing that our relation to objects must be hedged about on all sides by the peculiar capacities and limitations of our human minds to apprehend and/or perceive them), or are we to take a less “correlationist” account of both minds and objects? We may want to extend Winnicott’s insistence on maintaining some paradoxical relationship between child and object to all attempts to determine whether mind or object “comes first,” perceptually, epistemologically, ontologically. Such a commitment seems potentially quite productive to me in thinking not only about how the discourse of portraiture in James’s late work participates in these economies of persons and objects, but also in thinking more broadly about the psychic life of objects. I imagine object-oriented ontology having significant and substantial contributions to make to a general rethinking of object-relations, extending that theoretical project beyond the psychoanalytic context from which it emerged and in which it has so far largely developed. As Johnson notes in the epilogue to her Persons and Things, certain places in psychoanalytic theory but also in deconstruction have already made considerable inroads into discovering powerful and useful ways of raising questions about the relations and non-relations (and relative statuses) of the human and objects, as in some phases of the work of Jacques Lacan (in, for example, “The Mirror Stage” Ecrits, 1966) in which the very basis of selfhood is revealed to lie resolutely and determinately in the non-human, or in some phases of the work of Paul De Man (in, for example, “Shelley Disfigured” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 1984) in which De Man draws on the non-human, the “thing,” to de-idealize the human. Johnson mentions a third key text in this connection, James’s own story “The Last of the Valerii” (1885), in which an Italian nobleman forms an attachment to an ancient statue unearthed on his estate, an attachment so intense for him that, to the distress of his wife and others, it becomes his primary relationship. What does it mean to forsake a living human partner for an object made of stone that has lain in the earth for a couple of millenia? Hillis

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Miller in his book Versions of Pygmalion (1990), argues that James’s story is a fable about a form of infidelity to the present, and a kind of putatively illicit or quasi-adulterous union with the past, and it may not surprise us that since writing at length about this story some years ago, Miller has since written extensively about The Sense of the Past in somewhat similar terms. But rather than regarding either James text as essentially an allegory or fable about attachments to past versus present, as Miller does, I want to conclude this essay by focusing on the fact that it is a stone effigy (an object somewhat, although not exactly like, an oil portrait) that constitutes the object with which James’s Italian nobleman forms his primary attachment. Like other James characters (Milly Theale, Lambert Strether) who are depicted as being at least momentarily and perhaps for longer overwhelmed by a similar kind of effigy, and like at least one other James character (Ralph Pendrel) whose life is radically transformed by being transported from one time and place to another by an apparently magical portrait, the Count Valerio—perhaps exemplarily for James’s works—evinces a notable, even remarkable, openness to his impressions of objects (or at least to his impressions of this one particular object, the sculpture), and, one might also say, potentially to domination and de-personalization by an object or objects—which may, by these Jamesian texts’ own lights, be a good or at least neutral thing, one that allows for a re-understanding of human relations to objects not built on the supposition that objects are shaped by human perceptions of them or that they are less worthy of human attachment than are other humans. Alongside such examples of critical and theoretical work as those that Johnson mentions (Lacan’s, De Man’s), work that has inaugurated and engaged in the difficult but necessary rethinking of object-and-person relations and non-relations, I would mention again in closing the work of Sharon Cameron, her own work on James on the operations of thinking, of mind and consciousness. In such a connection one might think as well of her more recent work on impersonality and its effects. Here the potential affinities, contradictions, and paradoxical relations one can imagine between her work and some current work in and around object oriented philosophy, speculative realism, and process philosophy seem particularly potent. Consider, for example, the importance for her thinking and writing about impersonality of Jonathan Edwards’s



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remarkable passage on what he urges the reader to consider may be the dreams that sleeping rocks have (at the end of the notes he entitled “Of Being”), or in her exploration of the meaning and effects of Melville’s “personified impersonal” (which is a way of Melville’s of denoting or characterizing the Christian Trinity) from God to a quite other realm that Cameron reads as (again following Melville) the unpersonified impersonal of stones and the pyramids.16 So far, the literary-based enterprise that has appeared to engage object-oriented ontologists most intensively has been the product of their common interest in and attraction to the writing of H. P. Lovecraft.17 But when Graham Harman calls for what he imagines to be a “new” philosophical project, a “speculative psychology,” that would investigate the “cosmic layers of the psyche,” “ferreting out the specific psychic reality of,” among other objects, “stone,”18 one may wonder if he and some of his fellow object-oriented philosophers might not find considerable material for productive engagement in some of the writings of Edwards and Melville and—despite his largely mistaken reception in some quarters as a model exhibit for certain modern(ist) strands of humanism—Henry James, as Sharon Cameron has helped us radically rethink the significances of these writers’ respective bodies of work.

Notes 1 For representative examples of the respective approaches of these two critics, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, “The Consuming Vision of Henry James,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, eds Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, New York: Pantheon, 1983, pp. 46–100, and Bill Brown, “‘A Thing about Things, The Art of Decoration in the Work of Henry James,” Henry James Review 23(3), (2002), 222–32. 2 See, for example, Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object, Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2011, and Graham Harman, “ObjectOriented Philosophy,” in his Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, pp. 222–32. 3 On the concept of “withdrawnness” in Heidegger’s philosophy, see Graham Harman, Tool-Being and the Metaphysics of Objects, Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2002, pp. 1, 2, 4–5, 9, 15–16, etc.

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4 See the opening four or five pages of the chapter entitled “Wonder” in Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology: Or What It Feels Like to be a Thing, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2012. 5 Joseph Conrad, “Henry James: An Appreciation,” reprinted in Conrad’s Notes on Life and Letters, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1921, p. 17. 6 Leo Bersani, “The Jamesian Lie,” in his A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature, Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1976. 7 For her argument about the (re)location of consciousness in James’s fiction as outside the mind and as between persons, see Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1989, esp. pp. 32–3, 56–60, and 77–82; for her argument about the alleged powers of consciousness, especially its powers to reverse death, see the book’s fourth chapter (on The Wings of the Dove), pp. 122–68. 8 Elly Dekker and Kristen Lippincott discuss other scholars’ attempts to identify the objects in Holbein’s painting in their article, “The scientific instruments in Holbein’s Ambassadors: a re-examination,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 62 (1999), 93–125. 9

References to The Sense of the Past are to Scribner’s (New York) 1917 edition; page references to the book after the present one are included parenthetically in the text. The phrase “of around 1710” occurs on p. 66.

10 Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, ed. Peter Brooks, New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 1984, p. 157. 11 Henry James, The Ambassadors, ed. Christopher de Butler, New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 1985, p. 87. 12 Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, “Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe,” Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn, 2001), p. 129. 13 Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother, New York: Scribner’s, 1914, p. 96. 14 Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2008, p. 96. 15 Barbara Johnson quotes this passage from Winnicott’s Playing and Reality on p. 97 of her Persons and Things. The passage originally appeared in E. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971, p. 89). 16 Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2007. Cameron cites and discusses the



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“sleeping rocks” passage from Edwards on pp. 21–2, 26–7, and 51–2 of the book; she discusses Melville’s treatment of persons (particularly in his Billy Budd) as being in some ways indistinguishable from stones throughout the last chapter of her book, entitled “‘Lines of Stones’: The Unpersonified Impersonal in Melville’s Billy Budd,” pp. 180–204, especially on pp. 182–3 and 197–9. 17 Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2011. 18 Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, Melbourne, Australia: re.press, 2009, p. 213.

12 Believing in “Maud-Evelyn”: Henry James and the Obligation to Ghosts Shari Goldberg

What is our obligation to a belief in ghosts? The answer may seem to depend on whether or not we ourselves believe in ghosts: if not, no obligation accrues. In Henry James’s tale “Maud-Evelyn,” however, no such exemption is available. “Maud-Evelyn” revolves around Marmaduke, who has joined a couple in believing that their dead daughter, Maud-Evelyn, continues to live. They act as if Maud-Evelyn did not die, as if she has gone on and will go on experiencing life, even though she has long ago been buried. This premise is not in the least convincing to Marmaduke’s closest confidante Lavinia, nor to their mutual friend and mentor Lady Emma. Yet James refuses to make Marmaduke’s belief irrelevant to Lavinia and Lady Emma: instead, what they will do with his belief, a belief they are disinclined to share, is the central problem of the text. The text investigates what his belief warrants from them, why it would do so, and how they ought accordingly to respond. “Maud-Evelyn” proposes that Lavinia and Lady Emma are addressed by Marmaduke’s intimate fantasy, that his belief in ghosts constitutes something obliging for their more skeptical characters. The relationship between a character who sees ghosts and another less spiritualist observer occupies several of James’s tales. In the most famous of these, The Turn of the Screw,1 the observers

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are aware of the belief, but do not necessarily participate in it. Similiarly, in “The Friends of the Friends,”2 the narrator judges her friends’ ability to see ghosts as an idiosyncratic trait. In these two texts, visions of ghosts may be read as restricted to individual characters. But in other tales, the observers take part in other characters’ sightings. In “The Jolly Corner,”3 for instance, Alice Staverton encounters in her dream the double that Spencer Brydon confronts on the stairs; in “Sir Edward Orme,”4 the narrator sees the ghost that haunts Mrs. Marden; and in “The Third Person,”5 Miss Amy completes the ghostly transaction that Miss Susan initiates. These relationships suggest that an apparently private ghost may insinuate itself into the world of a sympathetic observer, so that believing in ghosts is a business unrestricted to the haunted. “Maud-Evelyn” is an important complement to both types of tales, for like the first it sets a definite limit on believing in ghosts, while like the second it considers ghosts to be a shareable concern. In thereby suggesting that non-belief does not serve to exempt relationship, “Maud-Evelyn” pushes a particular and unusual envelope. It asks us to think about why one would, and how one might, take responsibility for a belief one does not have.6 The stakes of this strange premise may be clarified by considering Marmaduke as one who bears witness to a very unlikely event. In attesting to Maud-Evelyn’s existence, Marmaduke would potentially draw authority from two oppositional sources. On the one hand, he would offer an account based on his personal experience. On the other hand, he would promise broad applicability, such that his account could be construed as representative. Derrida summarizes this duality: “The singular must be universalizable; this is the testimonial condition.”7 If the singular fails to be universalizable, the supposed act of witness becomes an eccentricity, an idiom, or a falsehood; what qualifies it as testimonial is that it submits itself as generally true, as useful for apprehending a shared world. If we understand Marmaduke to testify to Maud-Evelyn’s after-life, then, he not only describes his private feelings; he submits them as accurate assessment. Yet for many addressees, Marmaduke would not succeed in his submission. Judging his attestation as singular but not universalizable, they would downgrade it to fantasy. The problem with dismissing Marmaduke’s claim is that it reveals a skepticism about testimony in general, and testimony to the rare or paradigm-shifting in particular. William James writes in



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Pragmatism, “by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.”8 Thus, by ignoring Marmaduke’s testimony or abusing him, we are released from believing in ghosts; but we thereby cultivate a habit of rejecting any testimony that offers a radical way of seeing the world. This means that the more likely a testimony is to produce new knowledge, the more likely it is to be immediately rejected. The consequences of this formula were brought to the fore in the twentieth century not by testimonies to the supernatural but by testimonies to the horrific—to the concentration camps, to the gulag, to genocides that produced suffering that is often referred to as unimaginable. When such suffering is conceived as outside the boundaries of shared experience, when testimonies to it are understood as singular but not universalizable, the survivor stands to be ignored and abused like Marmaduke. One way to respond to this threat to testimonies of extreme stress and suffering is to deemphasize their historical importance—their importance as information—and cultivate their status as literary interpretations. Psychoanalyst Dori Laub takes this route in his account of a woman who testified to an uprising at Auschwitz: “‘All of a sudden,’ she said, ‘we saw four chimneys going up in flames, exploding. The flames shot into the sky, people were running. It was unbelievable.’”9 The problem is that the four exploding chimneys were unbelievable: no historical record corroborated them. Laub interprets the testimony as bearing witness to the magnitude of the smaller uprising that did take place: “The woman was testifying ... not to the number of chimneys blown up, but to something else, more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence.”10 In explaining the apparent inaccuracy, Laub ends up dismissing the particular experience narrated in favor of an allegedly “more radical, more crucial” abstraction. In my reading of “Maud-Evelyn,” James offers an alternative response to the challenge of testimony that resists corroboration. Instead of psychologizing the witness, the text provides a way to keep unbelievable testimony in tact—without thereby requiring that others accept it as a description of their reality. My argument depends on Sharon Cameron’s groundbreaking observations in Thinking in Henry James, especially the idea that James externalizes thought, specifically the thought of death, so that it becomes

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something “pictured, even made material.”11 In “Maud-Evelyn,” Marmaduke’s belief in the dead daughter’s survival is passed between the characters as if it bore a material dimension, and the criteria of true/false is thereby rendered irrelevant. It becomes possible to judge the belief in aesthetic terms—as beautiful—and to preserve the objects it touches as the relics of a foreign, but not rejected, worldview.

Turning it over Cameron’s reading of The Wings of the Dove explicitly addresses neither ghosts nor testimony. Yet its analysis of how the novel renders the thought of death describes a model of exchange that shatters the basic premises of a psychological model of witnessing. Cameron argues that Milly Theale’s thoughts of death are not confined to the interior of her mind, where she might consider the impending end as it relates to her present experience. Instead, in scenes where such thinking would take place, Milly encounters or projects her death as if it were located in the world outside her mind and body. In one of Cameron’s key examples, when Milly first goes to see her doctor, Sir Luke Strett, the thought that she is to die ensues neither from her own mental activity (she never says to herself, “So I am to die”) nor from the doctor’s diagnosis (he in fact recommends that she live). She perceives her sentence from his treatment of her, which she construes as pity, and she accepts its inevitability by imagining how she would ultimately be memorialized in his office: “she should be as one of the circle of eminent contemporaries, photographed, graved, signatured, and in particular framed and glazed.”12 As Cameron writes, here Milly “think[s] of [her] death as if it could be an actual picture for others to look at.”13 She specifies elsewhere, the thought “exists in the public domain, where it can be viewed.”14 The thought of Milly’s death is thus externalized. It seems unrecognizable as thinking, as Cameron explains, because it proposes, “if you just think enough, and you exteriorize what you think, you eradicate the difference between subjective and objective reality.”15 Since another being can retrieve your exteriorized thought, since it exists in the world as “objectified [...] as pictured, even made material,”16 no matter how idiosyncratic the content, it no longer makes sense to exclusively



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call it “yours.” It makes just as much sense to consider it part of a broader reality. The consequences of the novel’s logic for how we understand the act of bearing witness are extreme. The process of rendering a verbal statement of one’s thought is obviated, for the thought need not be publicly articulated to be available to the public. All thoughts potentially gain the status of attestations intended to reach a broad audience.17 More pertinently, a thought that is externalized and made material need not be assessed as truthful in order to become part of a shared reality. Even if it reflects a subjective position, it bears an objective place in the world. In Derrida’s terms, its singularity thus becomes largely irrelevant, and it claims universality in its location, its availability, rather than in its representativeness. Accordingly, the would-be addressee of testimony can interact with the witness’s thought in new ways. Instead of determining whether the thought conforms to his or her own beliefs and experiences, the addressee can relate to it as a material object. I might adopt your thought, then, not as one adopts a credo but as one adopts a kitten. Your thought could come to occupy my space, without changing the intellectual commitments of my mind. We would not need to think identically, in other words, in order to hold the same thoughts, as we might each hold the kitten. Finally, because the thought’s truth-value is inconsequential, the thought can be outlandish and unbelievable, even in its shared state. In Milly’s case, converting her thought of death into a public picture reverses its ostensible import, for instead of conceiving her end, it marks her mode of continuation. Yet this untenable denial of death’s finality in no way disqualifies Milly’s thought as an accessible, adoptable thing. “Maud-Evelyn” lacks the heft of The Wings of the Dove, but it shares aspects of the novel that suggest it as a related production (in particular, an investment in the “might-have-beens” and a male character who prefers a dead woman to a living one18). “Maud-Evelyn” warrants critical attention, as I have suggested, because it expressly addresses the possibilities for bearing witness to the denial of death that are intimated in Wings.19 In what follows, I develop my argument by first closely reading passages of the text that depict Marmaduke’s belief as a material object. Marmaduke’s belief in Maud-Evelyn serves as the adoptable thought; I focus on how Lavinia and Lady Emma respond to his belief and judge it without either accepting or rejecting it. I then turn to the text’s

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final paragraphs, in which, following Marmaduke’s death, Lavinia is bequeathed the house he believed he shared with Maud-Evelyn. In analyzing how Lavinia handles her inheritance, I gauge James’s contribution to the questions of witnessing and ethical obligation raised above. Since the tale is relatively unknown, I begin with a few introductory details. At the start of “Maud-Evelyn,” there is no indication of the supernatural. A brief frame story establishes Lady Emma as the narrator. Lavinia has just refused Marmaduke’s proposal of marriage, though Lady Emma retains hope that her young friends will eventually become engaged. On a trip to Switzerland, Marmaduke becomes companions of the Dedricks, a middle-aged couple who, Lavinia learns, obsessively imagine their dead daughter’s continued life. After several months, Marmaduke begins to participate in their fantasy, and the tale thereupon acquires its energy. In a central scene, Lavinia informs Lady Emma of Marmaduke’s newly professed belief, explaining that he has “memories of his own. I mean things [Maud-Evelyn] said to him and that they did together—places they went to. His mind is full of them.”20 Lavinia reasons, “They’ve persuaded each other—the parents—of so many things that they’ve at last also persuaded him. It has been contagious” (ME, 194). The idea of contagion is key, as it suggests how the belief in Maud-Evelyn takes on a materialized quality. Lavinia seems to think that the parents’ belief was so strong that Marmaduke agreed to follow it. Yet the word contagious suggests Marmaduke’s passivity, suggests that he involuntary contracted the belief, as if it were a germ that entered his system. James describes such contact in the preface to The Spoils of Poynton, likening the “germ” from which he grows a story to the germ that is used in inoculation. The novelist reacts to the story germ by wincing, “as at the prick of some sharp point: its virtue is all in its needle-like quality, the power to penetrate as finely as possible. This fineness it is that communicates the virus of suggestion.”21 If we imagine Marmaduke as similarly sensitive, he does not decide to join the Dedricks, nor does he accept their position. He is physically obliged, in the manner of succumbing to a virus, rather than intellectually convinced. When Lavinia and Lady Emma discuss the advent of Marmaduke’s belief, they are not similarly infected, yet their conversation



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expands the sense that the belief possesses a substantive form. Still in the scene quoted above, Lady Emma meets Lavinia’s information by “turn[ing] it over” (ME, 194); she later charges in response to Lavinia’s sympathetic account, “Then are you taking it up?” (ME, 194). The verbs turning and taking ostensibly refer to mental processes, yet they describe actions taken in relation to something external. Although there is no clear antecedent in the first instance (a point to which I will return), what Lady Emma turns over seems to be Lavinia’s new knowledge about Marmaduke. In the second instance, Lady Emma specifies that she refers to taking up “the preposterous theory” of Maud-Evelyn’s continued existence (ME, 194). In both cases, for the “it” to be turned or taken up, the knowledge or the theory must exist in a location as accessible to the speaker as to the addressee. This premise is developed when Lady Emma asks what Lavinia “made out from [Marmaduke],” as she implies a process of externalizing his position, of rendering outside (of himself) the belief that thereby becomes available to the two of them. Thus, Lady Emma and Lavinia are able to look, to recall the terminology of The Wings of the Dove, at Marmaduke’s belief in Maud-Evelyn. Indeed, before they are aware of his attachment, their intimations of it are described as a picture they will see: “I had had great initiations,” Lady Emma recalls, “and poor Lavinia had had them as well—hers in fact throughout went further than mine—and we had shared them together, and I had settled down to a tolerably exact sense of what I was to see. It was what Lavinia added to it that really made the picture” (ME, 191). An actual portrait of Maud-Evelyn as a child is mentioned, but the picture to be seen here refers to Marmaduke’s advancing belief in her continued existence. Once they have discerned it, Lady Emma and Lavinia treat the belief as a picture, seeing it from different angles, gauging how it was made, taking it up and putting it down. The belief becomes something they can manipulate, not only an object of thought but a physical object that might look better or worse depending on the view. In developing the belief as externalized and possessed of physical contours, the text effectively dissociates it from Marmaduke. Lavinia seems to have taken it with her when she saw him in order to bring it before Lady Emma. In this sense, Marmaduke’s profession of belief no longer belongs to his person; it no longer requires his presence for its presence. Language used elsewhere

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in the text draws out the nature of such transfer. The belief had “dropped” from him, as if through a process of exfoliation: “I couldn’t help its dropping from me before we parted that I had never supposed him to be that sort of fool” (ME, 189). Lavinia had, in turn, taken it up: when Lady Emma leaves a thought unfinished—hanging—Marmaduke “took [her] up promptly” (ME, 185). Finally, the belief had become Lavinia’s own possession, “what [she] had had from him,” and hers to determine the shape of: “She considered as if there might be many sides to it” (ME, 187). Although there is no syntactical way around it, it seems incorrect to continue to refer to the belief as Marmaduke’s, since that implies it is something he alone possesses. Dissociating the belief from Marmaduke allows it to exist in a depersonalized state, unattached to individual mental activity. Rather than determine whether the belief is a convincing interpretation of their shared world—rather than determining whether they will or won’t also believe it—Lavinia and Lady Emma assess its separate ontological status. Lavinia responds to Lady Emma’s charge that believing in Maud-Evelyn is a “preposterous theory” (quoted above) by asserting, “It is a theory [...] but it isn’t necessarily preposterous. Any theory has to suppose something [...] and it depends at any rate on what it’s a theory of. It’s wonderful to see this one work” (ME, 194). Lavinia thus designates the belief as something that does work, and Lady Emma refines her vision: “It’s the oddest thing I ever heard of, but it is, in its way, a reality” (ME, 194). Her point is sharp: the belief is not a way of understanding a shared reality, but, possessing its own form and course, a reality itself. In other words, Marmaduke has not contributed a subjective perspective on death, but an objectively verifiable entity like death. He has added a thing to see, not a way of seeing. Lavinia’s return affirms this characterization of the belief and goes even further, for she refers to it as first likable and then beautiful: “Well, whatever we call it, I like it. It isn’t so common, as the world goes, for anyone—let alone for two or three—to feel and to care for the dead as much as that. It’s self-deception, no doubt, but it comes from something that—well […] is beautiful when one does hear of it. They make her out older, so as to imagine they had her longer; and they make out that certain things really happened to her, so that she shall have had more life” (ME, 195). In liking the belief, Lavinia judges it as a response to death without



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implying that she wants to respond likewise. We are told that this conversation takes place “immediately after her mother’s death” (ME, 193), so the personal application is a logical possibility. But Lavinia seems to be after something else: not learning to cope with death but appraising the aesthetic value of a new model for doing so. That she finds this one beautiful suggests that she admires its form, as one would an art object. Or, more accurately, as one would one a fictional story, which need not convert the reader to believing in its world to succeed aesthetically. This is not to say that Lavinia dismisses Marmaduke’s belief as a fiction (in the sense of irrelevant fantasy), but that its beauty consists in its capacity to represent experience in a formally pleasing manner.22 Lady Emma later agrees with Lavinia that Marmaduke’s belief is beautiful—indeed, “really beautiful” (ME, 198). If we hear the judgment as echoing her earlier assessment—“it is, in its way, a reality”—“really” might resonate in a strong sense, so that the belief is beautiful in a real way. The tale ultimately turns in this direction, concretizing Marmaduke’s belief so that it becomes more like a kitten one must confront than a fictional world one might admire but avoid. To anticipate this shift, I want to note how often “it” is used in the text to designate, without explicitly referring to, Marmaduke’s belief. Here are the instances I have mentioned thus far: “I turned it over” “Then are you taking it up?” “It was what Lavinia added to it that really made the picture” “She considered as if there might be many sides to it” “it is, in its way, a reality” “whatever we call it, I like it” Here are a few others: “They’re all three in good faith building it up” (ME, 194) “They make it and they make it” (ME, 194) “I might push it away, but I couldn’t really get rid of it” (ME, 196). The insistence of the “it” emphasizes that Marmaduke’s belief is dissociated from him, a separately existing thing. It also suggests

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indeterminacy, since in several cases, including the first and last lines in my list, no antecedent is clearly evident. “I might push it away, but I couldn’t really get rid of it” actually begins a chapter, which implies its object is pervasive or obvious but leaves its contours unspecified. Combined with the manipular verbs that appear in these lines, the “it” adumbrates something tangible that has yet to be fully revealed. In the closing lines of the tale, the pronoun’s potential solidity is confirmed, as the “it” gives way and a collection of actual objects takes the stage.

Taking it up I have thus far traced how Marmaduke’s belief bears out the premise Cameron discerns in The Wings of the Dove, of thought released from personalized mental states and made externally, materially present in the world. As “Maud-Evelyn” closes, the more radical consequence of Cameron’s analysis comes to the fore, for in addition to contracting, touching, or aesthetically appraising Marmaduke’s belief, it appears possible to hold it without internalizing it. When Lavinia inherits the things that Marmaduke and the Dedricks supposed were Maud-Evelyn’s own, the belief they memorialize becomes a physical part of her life even as she refrains from admitting it to her own interiority. Several events precipitate this possibility of holding without believing. Marmaduke announces his engagement and marriage to Maud-Evelyn. Following this ultimate consummation, the Dedricks are somehow able to admit Maud-Evelyn’s death; they soon pass away and Marmaduke, too, outfitted in mourning clothes for his wife, wanes. Upon his death, he wills to Lavinia the house and treasures that were devoted to Maud-Evelyn during her after-life. Lavinia feels reluctant to take possession, or even to view the items of her inheritance, which, after all, have come from a man she once thought she would marry who instead imagined that he married a dead girl. I quote the tale’s closing dialogue, in which Lady Emma helps Lavinia resolve her squeamishness: [Lavinia] looked at me with a troubled—almost a pleading— sense, which I understood; and presently she said: ‘Will you go with me?’



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‘Some day, with pleasure—but not the first time. You must go alone then. The ‘relics’ that you’ll find there,’ I added—for I had read her look—‘you must think of now not as hers——’ ‘But as his?’ ‘Isn’t that what his death—with his so close relation to them—has made them for you?’ Her face lighted—I saw it was a view she could thank me for putting into words. ‘I see—I see. They are his. I’ll go.’ She went, and three days ago she came to me. They’re really marvels, it appears, treasures extraordinary, and she has them all. Next week I go with her—I shall see them at last. Tell you about them, you say? [Here she addresses the initiator of the narrative in the frame story.] My dear man, everything (ME, 205). Lavinia’s discomfort stems from her understanding of the objects as Maud-Evelyn’s; that is, as belonging to a delusion. The objects do not have for her the significance with which Marmaduke bequeathed them, so it is as if she has been given the “relics” of a god in which she never believed, though she is sensitive to their former status and thus hesitant to convert them to their material value. Lady Emma intervenes by shifting the presumed original owner of the relic, from Maud-Evelyn to Marmaduke. Why should the transfer make such a profound difference to Lavinia? If the relics are not hers but his, she inherits something closer to the relic of a saint than the relic of a god. She receives the physical remnant of his belief, rather than the shrine—“temple” is the word she uses (ME, 204)—supposedly desired by its object (“her taste was extraordinary,” Marmaduke previously says, referring to Maud-Evelyn [ME, 199]). As such, the items she inherits are not really—are not substantially—different from the belief itself, for they may also be seen as having dropped from him to be taken up and aesthetically appreciated by her. I want to underscore this subtle chiasmus: after having treated the belief as an object, she is given objects to treat as beliefs. It is not the case that the two become interchangeable, for the objects are hers unequivocally—the solicitors “tell her there will be no complications” (ME, 205)—whereas the belief she was able to hold at arm’s length, to judge dispassionately. But this is to say that Lavinia ends up inheriting a belief she had never wanted to adopt.

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The nature of Lavinia’s possession is thus thrown into question. Lavinia now bears responsibility for the material form of the belief, though there is no evidence that she will start to subscribe to it as truth.23 In this sense, she “has” the belief without believing it. Such a formulation is impossible in common parlance, for to have a belief means to believe it. But herein lies the profundity of James’s arrangement as seen through Cameron’s lens: once belief becomes dissociated from the personal, its possession is not continuous with the mental behaviors of its possessor. Lavinia need not see the world as Marmaduke does in order to take care of his way of seeing; she can have an investment in it that does not impinge upon her own investments, even if they are oppositional. She can maintain Maud-Evelyn’s legacy without having to think that she ever existed, and without compromising either the legacy or the integrity of her own intellectual commitments. To return to the framework of testimony I invoked at the start of this essay, Lavinia avoids the problem William James posed as perpetual: the problem of “handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions” by preemtive rejection. Following the elder James brother’s logic, Marmaduke’s profession of belief could only be met by Lavinia by sharing it, by ignoring it, or by condemning him as a madman. Laub’s model offers another option, for like the psychoanalyst listening to the Auschwitz survivor’s testimony, Lavinia could avoid taking at face-value the content of Marmaduke’s profession. She could instead read the belief as symptomatic of another, unarticulated impulse on Marmaduke’s part. Yet Lavinia would thereby lose the opportunity to perpetuate it as a thought available for circulation, for others, like Lady Emma and her “dear man,” to see. One of the shortcomings of tabling the informational value of testimony thus becomes clear. It leads to an underemphasis on the weird constructions through which other beings experience the world, for these are seen as dissolvable into a more or less universalized idea of history. Another way to read the survivor’s testimony would consist in preserving the content as Lavinia preserves the relics: as the strange way that another person has seen the world, one which cannot necessarily be believed but need not for that reason be dissolved. “Maud-Evelyn” thus shifts, subtly but significantly, the ethical ground on which testimony is supposed to operate. Recalling



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Derrida’s formulation of testimony’s structure, that it be both singular and universalizable, recent atrocities have been construed as primarily problematic for the universalizable requirement. That is, testimonies have been read as no longer able to support to a consistent and accurate historical narrative. In turn, their idiosyncrasies have been interpreted as offering new, impressionistic perspectives on the history that did happen, rather than as revising such events entirely. The basis of this logic presumes that the reader of testimony’s first obligation is to a collectively shared history. But James’s “Maud-Evelyn” reverses this premise exactly. It presumes that the reader is not mainly concerned with the testimony’s correspondence or non-correspondence with historical events. Instead, the reader comes to care for the testimony in all of its potential wrongness and inaccuracy—in its singularity and its idiosyncrasy. In “Maud-Evelyn,” testimony obliges because it records a way of seeing and thinking and being more than it obliges because it clarifies the truth. Testimony becomes a means to preserve the variously wonderful worlds in which different individuals live. Preservation is requisite, “Maud-Evelyn” suggests, even when those worlds are irrational and unbelievable, and especially when they are irrational and unbelievable. Despite critical efforts to twin “Maud-Evelyn” and Pragmatism, the tale thus yields a starkly different conclusion from the treatise.24 While William James allows a pluralism of beliefs, one considers another’s only in terms of its potential value should it be engaged. Hence, I would ask how your belief might “help [me] get into satisfactory relation with other parts of [my] experience.”25 In “Maud-Evelyn,” Lavinia has already decided that believing in the dead girl does not help her. She might like the belief and find it beautiful, but it does not improve her cognitive relation to what she knows to be true about life and death. Nonetheless, she inherits the belief’s ultimate physical form. She keeps it, she harbors it, so that it might continue to be taken up. Her offering suggests an obligation to hold on to the useless thoughts of others.

Notes 1

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, ed. Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren, New York: Norton, 1999.

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2

Henry James, “The Friends of the Friends,” in Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17, New York: Scribner, 1909, pp. 325–8.

3

Henry James, “The Jolly Corner,” in Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17, New York: Scribner, 1909, p. 483.

4

Henry James, “Sir Edmund Orme,” in Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17, New York: Scribner, 1909, p. 308.

5

Henry James, “The Third Person,” in Complete Stories 1898–1910, New York: Library of America, 1996, p. 286.

6

I am subverting here the tendency to approach James’s ghost stories as posing questions about what is real, as, for instance, in Martha Banta’s classic study Henry James and the Occult: The Great Extension, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1972. Instead, I want to investigate how his text suggests that belief (whether in the real or the unreal) is ethically obliging. See Pericles Lewis, “’The reality of the unseen’: shared fictions and religious experience in the ghost stories of Henry James,” Arizona Quarterly 61 (2005), 33–66, which is also interested in the social ramifications of the admittedly irrational.

7

Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 41.

8

William James, Pragmatism, in Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975, p. 35.

9

Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 59.

10 Ibid., p. 60. 11 Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 168. 12 Ibid., p. 146. 13 Ibid., p. 138. 14 Ibid., p. 150. 15 Ibid., pp. 150, 159. 16 Ibid., p. 168. 17 See Cameron’s reading of The Golden Bowl, which more thoroughly explores the possibility of “magical access to other minds” (Cameron, Thinking in Henry James, p. 85). 18 The phrase “might-have-beens” appears in Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, eds Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 113.



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“Maud-Evelyn” was published in the Atlantic and the collection The Soft Side in 1900. 19 In pursuing the materialization of belief that Cameron’s insights make visible, my approach diverges significantly from other critical treatments of “Maud-Evelyn.” These tend to see the tale in three primary ways. It has been interpreted as a study of delusion or fantasy by Neal B. Houston, Richard Gage, and Adrienne Tintner. (Houston, “Henry James’s ‘Maud-Evelyn’: Classic Folie a Deux,” Research Studies 41 [1973], 28–41; Gage, “Henry James’s ‘Maud-Evelyn’: menage a trois fantastique,” in The Shape of the Fantastic [New York: Greenwood Press, 1990], 67–73; Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James, Studies in Modern Literature 89 [1989]). Gennaro Santangelo and Lyall Powers read it as a demonstration of Henry James’s pragmatist thought, a position I directly oppose in my conclusion (Santangelo, “Henry James’s ‘Maud-Evelyn’ and the web of consciousness,” Amerikastudien 20 [1975], 45–54; Powers, “James’s ‘Maud-Evelyn,’” in Leon Edel and Literary Art, Studies in Modern Literature 84 [1988], 117–24). More recently, Donatella Izzo, Kathryn Wichelns, and Kevin Ohi have attended to the implications of James’s absent love-object in terms of gender, identity, and queerness, respectively (Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James [Lincoln, NK: University of Nebraska Press, 2001]; Wichelns, “The Perversities of Marriage in Henry James’s ‘Maud-Evelyn,’ The Henry James Review 32 [2011] 75–86; Ohi, “Second Thoughts: ‘Queer “Maud-Evelyn,”’” in Henry James and the Supernatural [New York: Palgrave, 2011], pp. 137–48). Two outliers are Nicholangelo Becce’s reading of the tale in terms of contemporary spiritualist movements (“The Preposterous Theory: Modern Spiritualism in Henry James’s ‘Maud-Evelyn,’” in Revisionary Interventions into Henry James [Naples, Universita degli studi di Napoli ‘l’Orientale,’ 2008], pp. 201–30) and Mario D’Avanzo’s connection of “Maud-Evelyn” to Robert Browning’s poem “Evelyn Hope” (“James’s ‘Maud-Evelyn’: source, allusion, and meaning,” Iowa English Yearbook 13 [1968], pp. 24–33). 20 Henry James, “Maud-Evelyn,” in Complete Stories 1898–1910, New York: Library of America, 1996, pp. 193–4 (hereafter abbreviated to “ME”). 21 Henry James, Preface to The Spoils of Poynton, in Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, New York: Library of America, 1984, p. 1138. 22 James makes a similar distinction with regard to the depiction of Jews in Daniel Deronda. In a review essay staged as a dialogue,

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James has one character propose, “George Eliot takes [the Jews] as a person outside of Judaism—aesthetically. I don’t believe that is the way they take themselves” (Henry James, Rev. of Daniel Deronda, in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers [New York: Library of America, 1984], p. 981). The point is that Eliot’s “aesthetic” Jews are not designed to offer insight into Judaism as consciousness-producing religion. Thus she need not have believed in Judaism in order to see its form, and the reader need not believe in the accuracy of Eliot’s Judaism (“I don’t believe that is the way they take themselves”) in order to appreciate the plot that turns on Judaism. As in Lavinia’s judgment in “Maud-Evelyn,” one can admire the aesthetics of the represented belief without wanting to enter it and without thereby disregarding it. 23 Houston, Santangelo, and Tintner assert that Lavinia comes to believe in Maud-Evelyn as Marmaduke does, but I insist that the text does not support such a reading. Lavinia specifies that Maud-Evelyn’s after-life experience was “invented” (ME, 195), and when she supports Marmaduke’s choice to live in the past, as well as his claim that he was married, it is to smooth the tension between Marmaduke’s earnestness and Lady Emma’s cynicism. Lady Emma notes that Lavinia speaks “gently and as if to help us both”; later she intervenes “quietly, stupendously,” in light of the circumstances—not as one who is also swindled (ME, 201). 24 Powers’s position is more precisely articulated than Santangelo’s. Powers notes (and here I would agree) that when it comes to Marmaduke’s fantasy, “concepts are as real as percepts—since they are something we have to take account of” (Powers, “James’s ‘Maud-Evelyn,’” p. 122). But when he goes on to propose that Marmaduke’s belief “has had the further practical result of benefitting Lavinia by securing her future” (ibid., 122), his argument becomes muddied, for while the reader might be in a position to acknowledge such benefit, the characters are not. For Marmaduke, the practical results of his belief long precede his death and Lavinia’s subsequent inheritance, and for Lavinia, the fact of inheritance may render the belief more concretely real, but it does not thereby become accepted as her truth. 25 William James, Pragmatism, p. 34.

13 The Ends of Imagination: Stevens’s Impersonal Mark Noble

In those hyperborean regions, to which enthusiastic Truth, and Earnestness, and Independence, will invariably lead a mind fitted by nature for profound and fearless thought, all objects are seen in a dubious, uncertain, and refracting light. Viewed through that rarefied atmosphere the most immemorially admitted maxims of men begin to slide and fluctuate, and finally become wholly inverted, the very heavens themselves being not innocent of producing this confounding effect, since it is mostly in the heavens themselves that these wonderful mirages are exhibited. MELVILLE, PIERRE

When the speaker at the end of “The Auroras of Autumn,” the title poem of Wallace Stevens’s 1950 volume, reduces the poem’s several tensions to a formulaic understanding—“An unhappy people in a happy world”—he attests to a disjunctive relationship that readers have often struggled to explain.1 It is not immediately clear whether the formula describes an “unhappy people” who neglect to appreciate features of a “happy world,” a particular

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tribe of malcontents (say, secular poets and readers of their poetry) for whom modernity has spoiled the world, or some dialectical situation poetry attempts to transcend. In the range of critical responses to the poem, some of which I discuss below, each of these has been essayed. The difficult thing about the poem’s formulation, however, is that the disjunction is not simply between instances in which we are unhappy and instances in which we are happy; it is rather a disjunction between a condition of our being at all and some facet of the material world that gives our condition its possibility. In “Auroras,” as in much of Stevens’s late writing, such disaffection becomes the trope that designates estrangement not just from external reality, but from the selves we hope to secure via some “shelter of the mind,” a structure which in turn reveals itself as a mere “thing of ether that exists/Almost as predicate” (CP, 413, 418). Unhappiness looks less like a consequence of experience, in other words, and more like a definition of experience—less a product of one’s relation to a happier world than the logic of that relation. One of the peculiar challenges for readers of “The Auroras of Autumn” and “The Rock” (1954) involves deciding just how seriously to take this emphasis on an unhappy state. In a poem such as “Large Red Man Reading,” for instance, it is unclear whether we are instructed to feel sympathy or empathy for those ghosts returned to earth—“those thin, those spended hearts”—who would have “wept to step barefoot into reality” (CP, 423). In “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” allegorical figures for the mind’s relation to death comprise the “sad splendor” of the speaker’s elegiac reflections, but without disclosing the significance of the loss recorded by that poem’s “monsters of elegy” (CP, 435).2 In “The Rock,” we confront a despair that evacuates 70 years of meaning (our shelter of the mind now “rigid in rigid emptiness”), and then we are told the “cure” for such a condition somehow encompasses, among other things, the “starting point of the human and the end” (CP, 525, 528). In each of these examples, unhappiness figures prominently in the characterization of a human perspective; in each, however, the promise of a “cure of the ground and of ourselves” entails obliquities that seem oddly out of human scale (CP, 527). Such poems navigate the terrain occupied by “An unhappy people in a happy world,” but they also arrive at consolatory figurations that seem not to belong to an affective register—meditations on



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unhappiness that would likely be unrecognizable from the point of view of any particular unhappy person. In one sense, then, Stevens would seem to be trivializing unhappiness, or affect generally, by refusing to employ “unhappy” in any conventional sense. The sorts of experiences one might situate within a personal narrative or associate with a subject-position give way in such poems to theories of experience as such, in which narratives and subjects are curiously ephemeral even if the relations they designate are said to be eternal. The plight of an unhappy person residing in a happy world thus indicates less a question of one’s misfortune than a condition of one’s specificity—of having a fortune in the first place. In another sense, however, it often seems as though this curious obliquity, which makes the subjectivity that occasions unhappiness seem irrelevant, has itself become the state of affairs about which these late poems are so often disconsolate. Rather than an affective condition that corresponds to a human perspective, this sort of “sad splendor” would correspond to the absence or instability of any such perspective. If this is the case, then unhappiness is anything but trivial. The formula in “The Auroras of Autumn” thus might be said to characterize not just an association between feelings and entities (infelicities and peoples, felicities and worlds), but a more fundamentally unhappy dissociation of the events of experience from the selves typically said to experience them. These poems do not simply mourn our loss of a happy world, in other words, so much as they mourn their own loss of the subject used to measure and describe experiences like unhappiness in recognizably human terms. To the extent that Stevens’s late poetry seems to consider this loss necessary, it raises questions about how we should understand the significance of its cryptic melancholia. This essay describes the requirement that we ask such questions by posing them alongside the discovery of impersonality central to a poem like “Auroras” and alongside Sharon Cameron’s recent discussions of impersonality as a practice of disintegration. Of course, responses to Stevens’s post-war writing do not typically dwell quite so long on its characterization of unhappiness. Critics often describe the difficulty and the occasional despondency of the late poems in terms that link those features to the production of a “consoling fiction,” however minimal, that extends Stevens’s earlier insistence upon the capacity of the poetic imagination to mitigate the alterity of the external world.3 In such readings, even

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these poems’ darkest moods are said to correspond to the arrival of some “cleansing and revitalizing power” that rehabilitates experience; or they are called “the price paid for literary survival,” which in turn sponsors the “act of recovering the ordinary world.”4 The plight of an unhappy people typically leads, in other words, to the (re)discovery of what “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” famously calls the “first idea,” in the light of which poets uncover opportunities for ordering (and surviving) the “complicate, amassing harmony” that gives rise to experience (CP, 383, 403). In one of the earliest book-length studies of Stevens’s career, Joseph Riddel suggests that any “sense of human presence” in the late poetry, however diminished, becomes “the reward of discovering how far the mind can go, and thus its limits.”5 Despite numerous adjustments and variations, this assumption that Stevens’s epistemological exercises finally uphold his early valuation of a “sense of human presence” has remained a prominent feature of the scholarship. But just what such a presence looks like in the poetry of the late forties and early fifties is often unclear. While the late poems undoubtedly do recall the theorization of that “first idea” in “Notes,” and while they clearly do populate the world with human elements, one nevertheless senses that the sorts of human presence that might enjoy the discovery of “how far the mind can go” are curiously absented from them. The promise of a “consoling fiction” does not exclude, in other words, the sense that Stevens also records the loss of the human subject that could measure the efficacy of any consolation. In “Things of August,” for instance, we are called to produce a “new text of the world” that springs from “a bravura of the mind,” but we are also warned that minds presuming to order reality are just as often ordered by it (CP, 494). The poem thus answers it own vocational summons (“a text that we shall be needing”) even as it displaces the imaginative power it solicits (“The world imagines for the beholder”): The world? The inhuman as human? That which thinks not, Feels not, resembling thought, resembling feeling? It habituates him to the invisible, By its faculty of the exceptional, The faculty of ellipses and deviations, In which he exists but never as himself. (CP, 492–3)



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A conventional reading of this passage would point to the conspicuous repetition of “resembling.”6 By calling attention to the fact that the disjunction between the human and the natural must be understood in terms of a semblance—that is, a metaphorics—the passage indicates the poet’s habituation “to the invisible” is already a consequence of processes of cognition. This amounts to a famously Stevensian twist: an unthinking, unfeeling world transforms us only insofar as the mind also conceives such transformation via deviant and elliptical faculties for making resemblances. But I am also proposing a shift in emphasis within such a reading—one that asks why the poem hints at the endurance of the imagination by locating it within a person that “exists but never as himself.” A passage like this one implies that the mind that endures no longer belong to a person. This disjunction between the conditions under which one exists and the possibility of being oneself correspond, I would argue, to the “unhappy people” formula in “Auroras”; in each case, closing the gap between the mind and the world means dislocating the mind from the person. The world imagines the human and imagines for the human (“its faculty of the exceptional,” not ours) in poems that replace persons capable of experiencing themselves with oblique figures. In “Things of August,” the assemblage of such figures is called “The total of human shadows bright as glass” (CP, 494). I am suggesting these poems register, often in disturbing ways, the dislocation of the human subject who experiences unhappiness as a person does—the sort who exists “as himself.” That they can be said to do this in order to preserve the creative possibilities Stevens has long attributed to “imagination” does not, I think, obviate the role played by a tendency to record features of a loss they also struggle to specify. The anguished ghosts of “Large Red Man Reading,” for instance, suffer not simply because death removes them to a “wilderness of stars” that diminishes experience; they suffer because the “poem of life” they return to hear—“the literal characters, the vatic lines”—also signifies their dispossession (CP, 424). For such ghosts as readers of these poems invariably are, eavesdropping on a reading of the “outlines of being and its expressings” means acknowledging one’s spectral status: the poem “spoke the feeling for them” both because feeling “was what they had lacked” and because such feeling no longer derives from a human source (CP, 424). Even a poem that promises compensation for our diminishment by filling “spended hearts”

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with the size and shape of “things as they are,” in other words, records both the unhappiness of a diminished state and a more fundamental unhappiness about the displacement of the human figure for whom the compensation matters. This becomes a perilously difficult distinction to trace in Stevens’s writing, however, not least because his poems often conceal their own ambivalence about the costs of such consoling fictions. And that ambivalence in turn makes it difficult to locate analogues to this necessary unhappiness belonging to whatever human presence can be said to inhabit a happy world. My characterization of this problem in Stevens resembles the logic Cameron finds in the opening pages of Emerson’s 1844 essay “Experience,” for instance, in which the most poignant loss is not the death of Emerson’s son, Waldo, but the loss of the grief that commemorates his death. Cameron argues that Emerson denies the validity of suffering as an experience of reality in order to preserve it, ironically, within the essay’s covert elegy. Claiming to mourn the loss of one’s grief more than the loss of the beloved object thus becomes a strategy used to “sustain at a remove what cannot be sustained in immediacy,” so that grief can be at once marginalized and memorialized in a way that prevents it from troubling (or being troubled by) the essay’s premises.7 I am not suggesting, however, that Stevens neglects to represent the experience of being a person in order to quarantine either persons or poems from some kind of discursive contamination. Rather, he seems to experiment with possibilities for understanding the necessary marginalization of that experience. These poems vary between moments in which subjectivity is dispossessed of claims to stability or centrality and moments in which it is exposed to an erasure that suspends its particularity entirely. Such moments can be exhilarating (“total of human shadows bright as glass”) or they can be devastating (“It is an illusion that we were ever alive” [CP, 525]). Better even than the account of Emerson’s insulation of experience, Cameron’s recent discussions of the experiments with impersonality found in Simone Weil’s and T. S. Eliot’s writing instruct about these alternatives. In those essays, Weil’s and Eliot’s radical discoveries of impersonal vantages—or points of view that can be articulated without needing to belong to anyone in particular—cannot be understood without acknowledging the radical violence done to the particularities that would register the value of such discoveries.



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Weil and Eliot are said to invite readers into this aporia by calling it desirable (Weil) or inevitable (Eliot). Cameron’s work thus helps specify what might be at stake if we decide to take the diminishment of the person in Stevens’s poems seriously. In order to develop such an assertion, I devote the first part of what follows to an extended reading of “The Auroras of Autumn,” which privileges the indeterminacy characteristic of the sorts of moments in Stevens’s late poetry described above. In the second part, I review features of Cameron’s recent work on impersonality that help frame a discussion about the significance of Stevens’s disintegrations of human particulars. My sense is that such a discussion invites reconsidering, for instance, the famous Stevensian proposition that the end of the imagination, which in “The Plain Sense of Things” marks a loss that “had/Itself to be imagined,” can be specified as an idea belonging to a person (CP, 503).

I In “The Auroras of Autumn,” Stevens arrives at his “unhappy people” maxim only after reenacting a Romantic encounter between the limited powers of human perspective and an impersonal entity that seems to both embody and dissolve those powers. The aurora borealis provides the central figure for the poem’s vision of a naturalized animus that exemplifies the ceaseless change and radical alterity characteristic of the external world as it appears to an awestruck viewer. Stevens imbues the “frigid brilliances” and “great enkindlings” of the northern lights with features that suggest the “happy world” in which we reside oscillates between indifference to human experience and violence toward its manifestations (CP, 413). Appearing in several configurations across the poem’s ten cantos, the aurora thus demonstrates an amorphous and ateleological principle of constant motion and transformation, revealing its logic “the way/A season changes color to no end,/ Except the lavishing of itself in change” (CP, 416). But if the figure of “Boreal night” stands for the meteoric otherness of a material world that necessarily eludes the grasp human understanding, then it seems odd that Stevens also frames such a figure in terms that have often led readers to see it as an emblem of the imagination.

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The “brilliances” of the aurora thus appear to span another confounding disjunction by standing for both the mind and all that dazzles but is not the mind. In a particularly arresting example of this phenomenon, the speaker attempts a definition of the aurora that endows it, at least provisionally, with something resembling a human form: Is there an imagination that sits enthroned As grim as it is benevolent, the just And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops To imagine winter? (CP, 417) The question proposes that the activity of change—a world that unfolds “the way/A season changes color”—could be understood in the way an imagination can be understood to envision different states. Imagining winter from the midst of summer requires a consciousness not limited by the immediacy of a present condition and capable of tolerating incommensurable properties—grim/ benevolent, just/unjust, summer/winter—by conceptualizing the distance between them. This would be different, for instance, from Stevens’s famous “mind of winter,” phrased decades earlier in “The Snow Man” as that inhuman point of view that cannot conceive “any misery in the sound of the wind” precisely because the only difference it does behold (“Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”) refuses mediacy entirely (CP, 9). In a second rhetorical question, the imagination occupies a privileged position: When the leaves are dead, Does it take its place in the north and enfold itself Goat-leaper, crystalled and luminous, sitting In highest night? (CP, 417) While the mind of winter in the earlier poem cannot be distinguished from the “same bare place” it observes (CP, 9), the boreal figure in “Auroras” presumes to sit atop that world. A third iteration of the question further distinguishes the enthroned imagination by endowing it with features of a destroyer-god: And do these heavens adorn And proclaim it, the white creator of black, jetted



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By extinguishings, even of planets as may be, Even of earth, even of sight, in snow, Except as needed by way of majesty, In the sky, as crown and diamond cabala? (CP, 417) This is a moment in which a speaker stops in the middle of a poem to imagine that the collisions of charged particles lighting the night sky (and signaling the ineluctability of change elsewhere in the poem) are in fact the adornments of an apocalyptic instance of the poetic imagination. Can the world’s ephemerality be understood as the product of an ordering principle of the imagination? And what if, the speaker seems to ask, the minds we like to believe order the world are in fact hostile to us? The poem’s answers to these questions are equivocal. Stevens couches his assertions in rhetorical questions because he intends they be understood as necessarily provisional. In the third example above, for instance, the lights are understood as a mysterious sign of the presence of a mind that extinguishes planets (its “crown and diamond cabala”), which echoes a moment from the poem’s opening canto that describes the aurora as a serpent whose “Eyes open and fix on us in every sky” (CP, 411). The lights depict an omniscient serpent, or the lights signify the sloughed off skin of that serpent—“Another image at the end of the cave/Another bodiless for the body’s slough” (CP, 411). The speaker proposes that if these are events of signification then perhaps the aurora serves as a celestial roadmap: These light may finally attain a pole In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there, In another nest, the master of the maze Of body and air and forms and images, Relentlessly in possession of happiness. (CP, 411) Whether as “diamond cabala” or as serpent’s skin, the northern lights are understood in these passages as signs in need of reading, or phenomena that point the way to what “The Rock” calls “the main of things” (CP, 528). In the case of the serpentine imagery, however, the apocalyptic “master of the maze” silhouetted in the night sky does not simply extinguish the earth but, even worse, disabuses human spectators of their faith in the happiness he

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seemed to possess: “This is his poison: that we should disbelieve/ Even that” (CP, 411). These renditions of boreal night as legible instances of an impersonality that knows our secrets are recognized as imaginative fantasies that dissolve even our belief in their possibility. They have a power, in other words, but never the power we hope they have. The peculiar thing about Stevens’s alternatives for envisioning the boreal figure thus involves this sense that they are human projections that erase human perspective. The poem installs a vision of the imagination in the sky and then proposes such an imagination represents an alien force capable of effacing the human context that gives rise to it. This effacement appears explicitly in the poem’s early cantos, which include a series of elegiac reprisals of human fictions. Or, it would perhaps be better to call these mockelegies, since they neglect to produce consolatory effects or enact redemptive transformations. Each begins with the elegiac lamentation “Farewell to an idea ...”; and each entertains an instance of what the poem will later call “innocence” before exposing that idea to this annihilative logic of boreal representation. In canto ii, the stability of the visual markers that allow us to establish things like identity and commensurability seem to be at stake. The scene begins by positing the significance of visual properties belonging to its desolated cabin on a beach. The whiteness of the cabin anchors it to the material world: “Here, being visible is being white,/Is being of the solid of white.” As with the epiphenomenon in the night sky, whiteness functions as a referent: the “flowers against the wall/Are white,” for instance, and they provide “a kind of mark/Reminding, trying to remind, of a white/That was different, something else” (CP, 412). This white refers to some other white, not present or now past, whose particular features have been lost, but whose link to the present can be discerned via the commensurability of whiteness now and whiteness then—the fact of its “being of the solid.” Whatever the importance of the idea preserved (or re-minded) by the white cabin, however, the night sky supersedes it in the canto’s conclusion: The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach. The long lines of it grow longer, emptier, A darkness gathers though it does not fall And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.



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The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand. He observes how the north is always enlarging the change (CP, 412) The aurora disrupts the referential stability of whiteness in a polychromatic twilight that signals the transience of all reference, rather than a former instance of “solid” being. And it seems to threaten a similar erasure of the human figure walking on the beach, who observes but cannot order “its polar green,/The color of ice and fire and solitude” (CP, 413). In canto iii, the lost idea includes the hope that personal memory, and whatever binds us to the familiar, could provide a sanctuary from such violence. The human fiction penetrated here equates “The mother’s face” with “the purpose of the poem”—a purpose that “fills the room” with warmth, filial attachment, and “none of the prescience of oncoming dreams” (CP, 413). This “mother’s face” becomes the trope for the poem’s first and fullest characterization of what it later calls “a time of innocence” (CP, 418)—the sensation of being at home in the world as in a native state—in which persons “are at ease in a shelter of the mind / And the house is of the mind and they and time,/Together, all together” (CP, 413). But just as the “being of the solid of white” succumbs to the aurora, the northern wind dissolves the maternal eidolon that “gives transparence” to the minds sheltered in her house. Like a fading memory, the “house will crumble and the books will burn” because “she too is dissolved, she is destroyed” (CP, 413). That dissolution thus entails a displacement of experience from the sheltered embodiments of a maternal scene: Boreal night Will look like frost as it approaches them And to the mother as she falls asleep And as they say good-night, good-night. Upstairs The windows will be lighted, not the rooms. (CP, 413) In one of the poem’s cleverest iterations of impersonality, these windows in the mother’s “shelter of the mind” are lit from without (as by the aurora) rather than from within (as by the mind). The light of the mind is said to illuminate a body as if from the outside—a reflection of something external to the body that voids

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the “idea” of an inner light or vital spark. In the final lines of the canto, Stevens reminds us of the violence implicit in this transformation by characterizing it as a militaristic rounding-up: “A wind will spread its windy grandeurs round/And knock like a rifle-butt against the door” (CP, 414). To some extent, canto iv appears to break this pattern. Its opening lines hint at the possibility that what is lost in the previous examples is not lost irrevocably: Farewell to an idea ... The cancellings, The negations are never final. The father sits In space, wherever he sits, of bleak regard As one that is strong in the bushes of his eyes. He says no to no and yes to yes. He says yes To no; and in saying yes he says farewell. He measures the velocities of change. (CP, 414) It is difficult to discern whether the farewell to this idea is the same kind of farewell as those issued in cantos ii and iii. This father figure, sitting in space and busy with his no-saying and yes-saying, appears to be capable of something important. Readers have offered an unsurprising variety of interpretative options for understanding this figure: it has been glossed as the fatherly third of the tripartite Christian god;8 a contemptible descendant of the “mythy Joves” of Western paternalism;9 a composite “failed Prospero” representing both Canon Aspirin (the archetypal Romantic poet of “Notes”) and Stevens’s own father;10 a “supreme fiction of the artist” that has been Stevens’s “most cherished defense against chaos”;11 an “invocation to the power of the mind” that produces our cosmologies;12 and “an enthroned Olympian deity” of specious and limited powers.13 Each of these readings probably does capture features of this unusual passage, in which the father of canto iv “leaps from heaven to heaven” and “assumes the great speeds of space and flutters them/From cloud to cloudless” (CP, 414). But what strikes me about Stevens’s articulation of a paternal fiction is not just its allusive quality. The father figure stands apart from the earlier “ideas” because the poem seems not quite able to bid him farewell—or at least not immediately. The supplicant appeal to this figure (“Master O master seated by the fire”) outlasts the fourth canto, which begins



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by announcing his dissolution, because he often seems to emulate the aurora—that is, because he discerns “the velocities of change” with a “deep ear” capable of detecting “supernatural preludes of its own” (CP, 414). Of course, “master” here recalls the serpentine “master of the maze” imagined to sit at the center of the world in possession of happiness. The human fiction that endures the longest, in other words, is the one that most closely resembles the impersonal power that elsewhere dissolves the particularity of human experience. Stevens’s poem thus entertains a fantasy in which a human idea, the very sort we are told we will disbelieve, unfolds in terms that suggest the creative powers of the artist reflect and rival the powers of the aurora. If the archetypal mother “invites humanity to her house,” the father in canto v opens a theater: he “fetches tellers of tales/And musicians”; he “fetches pageants out of the air/Scenes of the theatre”; he “fetches his unherded herds,/Of barbarous tongue, slavered and panting halves/Of breath” (CP, 415). The creative patriarch stages a play, in other words, comprised of parts that recall that the bawdy secularism of Stevens’s early poetry (think of “Sunday Morning” or “The Emperor of Ice Cream”).14 Apparently, the ability to hear the velocities of change here means putting on a show so explicitly and barbarously human that “the musicians strike the instinctive poem” (CP, 415). But, of course, this too begins to unravel, or degrade. No sooner does the speaker declare that “We stand in the tumult of a festival” than the show itself comes undone: What festival? This loud, disordered mooch? These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests? These musicians dubbing at a tragedy, A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this: That there are not lines to speak? There is no play. Or, the persons act one merely by being there. (CP, 415) This discovery that the mind’s “Blessed rage for order” (CP, 130) amounts to a “disordered mooch” collapses any distinction between having purposive lines to speak and merely “being there.” The scene remains an important one for the poem’s experiment with impersonality, however, because the fantasy first indulged and then penetrated in these line replaces the dilapidate houses of the earlier cantos with a theatrics imagined to sustain a human

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role—fixed, iterable, as in a play—that somehow correlates to the productions of the night sky. This latest failure leads to a both a crucial turn in the poem and its most dazzling passage, in which the human elements threatened above are at once represented and made unrecognizable by the transformations of the night sky: It is a theatre floating through the clouds, Itself a cloud, although of misted rock And mountains running like water, wave on wave, Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed To cloud transformed again, idly, the way A season changes color to no end, Except the lavishing of itself in change, As light changes yellow into gold and gold To its opal elements and fire’s delight, Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space. The cloud drifts idly through half-thought-of forms. (CP, 416) These lines are simultaneously breathtaking and bewildering in large part because envisioning the northern lights as a theater of clouds both reproduces and suspends the human theatrics of the previous canto. Refiguring the aurora as a cloud-theater must be a consequence of the preceding human drama—a mental projection of sorts (“resembling thought, resembling feeling”) emblematic of the imaginative “faculty of the exceptional” that Stevens’s has so often been said to champion. But these boreal theatrics also conspicuously elude or exceed any theatrics of human interest or human scale. The passage endows the aurora with something weirdly like a subjectivity (“it likes magnificence/And the solemn pleasures”), but it also reminds us that this capacity for transformation (“idly, the way a season changes to no end”) cannot be ours. The moment the imagination can be observed at work in the sky thus coincides with the moment of its disarticulation from the perspective of any person on the ground. And as the poem elsewhere demonstrates, this displacement entails a violent exposure to an external reality just as likely to undertake performative embodiments of human truths as to erase their possibility. As if to emphasize the degree to which this impersonal logic of



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the imagination embodied in the aurora operates at a remove from the interests of any person, Stevens’s momentarily condenses the poem’s perspective to that of a single individual: This is nothing until in a single man contained, Nothing until this named thing nameless is And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house On flames. The scholar of one candle sees An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame Of everything he is. And he feels afraid. (CP, 416–17) The procession of “half-thought-of forms” amounts to nothing, according to these lines, unless understood as lived; but that understanding is also a conflagration.15 While the poem has represented experience as the inhabitation of “ideas” (house, mother, father), it here depicts an instance of that experience—“a single man”—in order to characterize the insecurity and the intensity of the circumstances that comprises its particularity. The “scholar of one candle” fears the apocalyptic display of the boreal night not simply because it advertises his annihilation, which it does, but because the contents of its revelation include an amplification and an overpowering of his single candle. What terrifies most about our “unhappy” relation to a world of shifting forms, in other words, is this sense that the imagination said to endure the coming and going of human fictions may no longer be our imagination.

II In Cameron’s writing, impersonality designates, among other things, an approach to the question of what compels human experience that requires its answers fall “outside the boundary of the human particular.”16 Experiments with the possibilities derived from this “falling outside” often seem to come with two edges: they promise to liberate understandings of experience from the constraints of personality, and they tend to undermine the foundations of understanding in ways that threaten to moot the enterprise. Cameron’s discussions of texts that explore and advocate impersonality seem

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to me most instructive, in other words, for their demonstrations of the ways that privileging impersonality also means privileging what she calls “an ethos which is disintegrative” (I, ix). In the essay on Weil, for instance, the analysis of practices designed to achieve an authenticity that escapes the particularity of an “I” insists upon acknowledging the unusual violence that comes with those practices—even if the term used to describe them is as seemingly benign as “attention.” The essay asks whether that violence can be tolerated—if it converts liberation to bondage, sacrifice to mere death—and how it can be understood by a reader (rather than a practitioner) of Weil’s radical attempt at “decreating” a self.17 In this case, and in the essay on Four Quartets, Cameron’s approach to such questions models the requirements for approaching the indeterminacy and disintegrative ethos of Stevens’s late poetry. Within the unusual range of didactic assertions that characterize Weil’s ethic of self-annihilation, Cameron notices the peculiar ways in which “attention” comes to entail “affliction.” The value of a purely attentive state (one that precludes all forms of self-interest required to sustain a person in any conventional sense, including food) is “its capacity to free us from limitation” (W, 228); it promises “an escape from the predictability of what is possible in the human world” through an abandonment of comfort and “an idea of what might be experienced if one had the courage to perceive the body without consolatory illusions” (W, 246). Or, this idea is what Cameron imagines Weil’s reader discovers. The essays and journals themselves cannot be understood, however, without their visceral experimentation with an “efficacious violence which separates the sacred from the personality that degrades it” (W, 244). This event of separation requires a “stripping away of solaces, a sacrifice in which [Weil] claimed nothing was lost,” but such requirements also risks reducing the sacrificial self to a state no longer recognizable to any measurer of its value (W, 247). Cameron’s account of the cost of Weil’s performative disintegration thus posits it as a tragic irony: It was the mechanical nature of the personal that Weil, in her philosophy and her political thinking, tried to contest. Yet the defiances she crafted—the sentences she wrote her way into— hurried her toward a death as catastrophically wasteful (indeed



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as imaginable) as the conventions that seemed moribund to her. (W, 248) It is unclear whether this loss becomes an inevitable loss—that is, whether examining Weil’s propositions means that such loss might be avoided or that it must be factored into the calculus of any access to what Cameron calls “a margin, a condition, a reduction, a glimpse of what might open up through an abandonment of imagination” (W, 251). In the eighth and ninth cantos of “The Auroras of Autumn,” Stevens addresses a version of this question by suggesting that an unacknowledged immediacy links his visions of “a time of innocence/As pure principle” to a catastrophic understanding of human necessity (CP, 418). The poem’s idea of innocence, which echoes the maternal “shelter” passages cited above, emerges from a series of contingent propositions that often do resemble solaces: innocence is no less real if only notional (“Existing in the idea of it, alone,/In the sense against calamity”);18 it often feels like a natural commensurability between persons (“we fed on being brothers, fed/ And fattened as on a decorous honey-comb”) and between persons and environments (“We were as Danes in Denmark all day long”); it often resembles a conscious simulation of unconsciousness (“we …/Lie down like children in this holiness/As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep”); and it provides a “sense of the activity of fate” (CP, 418–19). Such a perspective even promises to revise the boreal figure by dispelling its destroyer-god mythos: So, then, lights are not a spell of light, A saying out of a cloud, but innocence. An innocence of the earth and no false sign Or symbol of malice. (CP, 418) But then after this extended blazon to this state in which “being there together is enough” (CP, 524), canto ix takes a devastating turn. As if without warning, innocence becomes catastrophe: Shall we be found hanging in the trees next spring? Of what disaster is this the imminence: Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt? The stars putting on their glittering belts. (CP, 419)

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The curious thing about this twist is not just that Stevens strips away the consolatory fiction so as to once more glimpse the devastating logic of the aurora, but that the passage also effaces the difference between a state in which we pretend to sleep amidst a maternal holiness and a state in which our bodies, like those of Dante’s suicides, hang from trees. The aural resonance between “innocence” and “imminence” suggests the simultaneous inevitability and untenability of this non-difference. The “mechanical nature” of the transitions that distinguish our lives from our deaths has yet again been relocated to a region that neglects to recognize human agency. Of course, what motivates Weil’s pursuit of “attention” differs from what motivates Stevens’s penetration of “innocence.” For Weil, the hope is that we might be liberated (from the predictabilities and constraints of personality); for Stevens, the hope is that we might be saved (from the alterity of the world that remains once we have disposed of our gods). But each envisions a scenario in which allegiance to what Cameron calls “the other side of unimaginable” enables a glimpse of whatever might be durable enough to withstand the loss of person (W, 251). Weil’s practice recommends this allegiance, insisting that whatever costs come with it must be trivial, in order to arrive at the peculiar “genius” of impersonality— “the brilliance of seeing outside of one’s perspective and outside of perspective generally” (W, 226). Such brilliance must be a state of consciousness but it must not be personal, according to Cameron, because “[o]nly genius, indifferent to outcome, could regard this vertiginous state as a foundation” (W, 226). In Stevens’s case, the challenge involves finding a method for representing such a figure in terms that record its paradoxical relationship to the subjectivity that perceives it. In the wake of his “unhappy people” proposition, for instance, Stevens’s once more fashions the aurora in such terms; it becomes “The vital, the never-failing genius,” capable of thinking “the full of fortune and the full of fate” on behalf of an unhappy people (CP, 420). As in Weil’s decreative program, this figure seems at once the product of a human agency and something that falls outside the human. And, as in the case of Cameron’s analysis of Weil, such a figure witnesses the coincidence of what exceeds the personal with what imperils it. In the essay on Eliot, Cameron observes a disarticulation of identity from experience that raises the stakes still further. The ability to represent voices that bear no relation to speaking subjects,



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or experiences that are “particularized without being particularized as someone’s,” entails an even more profoundly disorienting model of what “falling outside” the human might mean—an insight that Cameron calls “Four Quartets’ most radical discovery” (I, 149). In Eliot’s configurations, the differences between what we tend to think of as fundamental states—say, being and not being, life and death—are effaced by an effort to rethink elements of experience not as entities but as fugitive traces that refuse to leave impressions on the poem’s surface that one might specify as impressions of a person. These are often linked to one another, as if remembered or anticipated, but they also resist attempts to locate the source of an utterance or fix its meaning. In the instance of Eliot’s famous “compound ghost,” Cameron identifies a logic in which the simultaneity of being alive and no longer being alive—“now living, now dying”—suggests not a tension or paradox so much as a “range of an experience that perception sequentially inhabits” (I, 176). This means that the non-exclusivity of obverse states should be understood “not ultimately but rather immediately”—as Eliot puts it, “Not the intense moment/Isolated, with no before and after,/But a lifetime burning in every moment” (I, 152). Under such conditions, no human figure, or idea of order, could claim stability or autonomy, “since they no sooner arise than they pass away” (I, 169). Unlike what motivates Weil’s writing, then, Eliot’s insight liberates phenomena from personality “not because they are bound by orthodoxy, but because they are bound by nothing” (I, 176). In Cameron’s account, Four Quartets proposes this on an astonishing scale: by calling all phenomena expressions of a principle of change, Eliot’s poem “reiterates a failed attempt to establish essence anywhere” (I, 178). The effect of Eliot’s representations of voices that speak as no one, or ghosts that relinquish the identities they represent, resembles the effect of Stevens’s darker figurations of the aurora borealis: It leaps through us, though all our heavens leaps, Extinguishing our planets, one by one, Leaving, of where we were and looked, of where We knew each other and of each other thought, A shivering residue, chilled and foregone. (CP, 417)

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The residuum that outlasts exposure to the night sky is not even the residue of a person (a ghost), but the residue of a place (or idea) in which “a time of innocence” had been imagined. We are understood here as conduits of an impersonal logic (“it leaps through us”) that joins our ideas about ourselves to the charred residue of those ideas. Cameron describes this relation to impersonality in Eliot’s poem, in which persons are similarly understood “in terms of a passage,” as the experience of “knowing you are incorporated in something that couldn’t be intelligible to you, but that could be perceived” (I, 165, 174). The terror that recurs in Stevens’s poem anticipates the consequences of this gap between what can be understood and what can be perceived. Despite repeated attempts to rehabilitate earlier consolations, the speaker at the end of “Auroras” acknowledges the permanent imminence of his catastrophe: “It may come tomorrow in the simplest word,” he admits, “Almost as part of innocence, almost,/ Almost as the tenderest and the truest part” (CP, 420). Cameron’s essays thus develop methods for approaching Stevens’s “unhappy” experiment with impersonality. Weil’s example requires attention to a “vertiginous state” that only genius could regard as a foundation; Eliot’s example strips identity in demonstrations of “a vertigo that undoes the possibility of foundation” (I, 176). In each of these cases, understanding the terms in which impersonality occurs means acknowledging a devastating connection between one’s imagination of what “falls outside” and the end the imagination itself. A poem like “Auroras” thus might be said to stage encounters like the ones Cameron observers—an encounter between identity and its erasure in Eliot, an encounter between the subject’s liberation and its finitude in Weil. But I do not mean to suggest these are alternatives between which Stevens’s poem somehow enables one to choose, nor do I think it implies that such a choice could be made. Rather, Stevens’s theatrics with the northern lights reintroduce a question also raised by Cameron’s analyses of such alternatives—a question, that is, about whether the loss recorded by such a poem is a loss that should be said to matter. Even in passages that reduce human fictions to ash, in other words, “Auroras” retains an interest in representing that reduction as a loss. This makes it curiously difficult, as I suggest above, to discern the importance of the specification of “An unhappy people



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in a happy world.” There may seem to be an important difference, for instance, between Eliot’s conflation of antipodal states (“now living, now dying”) and Stevens’s maintenance of a distinction between “An unhappy people” and their “happy world.” One implies a radical conjunction, the other insists upon a disjunction. In a reading that privileges Stevens’s disjunctive sense, the distinction between our affect and the world’s affect might make all the difference—that is, if it preserves the possibility that the alien and annihilative power of the aurora still “beckons forth our creative impulses to make substitutive fictive worlds.”19 On the other hand, however, Stevens’s poem might be suggesting that exposure to the aurora in fact demonstrates Eliot’s coincidence of living and dying (now sheltered, now hanged), and that “unhappiness” here signals the dislocation of the human from the scene of its imaginative powers (the person viewed “in terms of a passage”). In the former reading, the “unhappy people” formula resembles a means for holding off the vertigo that Weil courts and Eliot amplifies. In the latter reading, it admits the necessity of that vertigo (and its violence) for any understanding of what “falls outside” the limited scope of the personal. In one case, that is, the loss of the subject that indexes “unhappiness” would be understood as devastating and partial; in the other case, it would be understood as trivial and total. The fact that Stevens’s late poems seem to equivocate when approaching these options, or to oscillate between them rather than arrive at a consolation for either, suggests once again these distinct understandings of the costs of the poem’s representations—unhappiness as the price of insight versus unhappiness as the death of insight. I find that the improbability of choosing between these options within a work like “The Auroras of Autumn” is not so much an impediment to understanding Stevens’s late poems as it is their topic.

Notes 1

Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems, New York: Vintage, 1982, p. 420 (hereafter abbreviated as “CP”).

2

For a discussion of “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” that acknowledges that poem’s equivocal status as “anti-elegy,” see

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Toshiaki Komura, “Modern elegy and the fiction and creation of loss: Wallace Stevens’s ‘the owl in the sarcophagus,’” ELH 77(1) (2010), 45–70. 3

“Consoling fiction” is a phrase used by James Longenbach to characterize the iconic leaves of “The Rock,” the figure used to make “meanings of the rock,/Of such mixed motion and such imagery/That its barrenness becomes a thousand things” (CP, 527); see James Longenbach, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, 295–8, 303.

4

Respectively, Janet McCann, Wallace Stevens Revisited: The Celestial Possible, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995, p. 107; Charles Berger, Forms of Farewell: The Late Poetry of Wallace Stevens, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, p. 153; Longenbach, Wallace Stevens, 303.

5

Joseph Riddel, The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens, Baton Rouge, LO: Louisiana State University Press, 1965, 230.

6

See, for instance, Alan Perlis, Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, London: Associated University Presses, 1976, 99–104.

7

Sharon Cameron, “Representing grief: Emerson’s ‘experience,’” Representations 15 (Summer 1986), 15–41.

8

Donald Davie, “The Auroras of Autumn,” in The Achievement of Wallace Stevens, eds Ashley Brown and Robert Haller, New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1962, p. 167.

9

Helen Vendler, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens Longer Poems, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969, pp. 258–9.

10 Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976, pp. 266–7. 11 B. J. Leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987, p. 182. As the following discussion indicates, I find Leggett’s account of this figure, which relies upon his account of Stevens’s discovery of Henri Focillon’s The Life of Forms in Art during the early 40s, most valuable for its willingness to decipher the poem’s difficulties without simply reducing them to established tropes from Stevens’s earlier work. 12 McCann, Wallace Stevens Revisited, p. 109. 13 George S. Lensing, Wallace Stevens and the Seasons, Baton Rouge, LO: Louisiana State University Press, 2001, p. 97. 14 Critics such as Vendler and Leggett have suggested, I think rightly,



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that this carnivalesque imagery also recalls “Credences of Summer,” composed a year earlier, which concludes with Stevens vision of “personae of summer” participating in a “huge decorum, the manner of the time,” in which “characters speak because they want/ To speak” and thus feel “Complete in a completed scene, speaking/ Their parts in a youthful happiness” (CP, 377–8). 15 Leggett is particularly helpful here: “An intellectual understanding of the phenomenon as ‘flux’ or ‘metamorphosis’ is nothing compared to the ‘nameless’ experience of it. But to render it nameless by experiencing it directly is also to destroy it as a ‘named thing’ by recognizing the traditional names or ideas for it are now inadequate,” Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, p. 184. 16 Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. ix. Further references to this volume will be cited parenthetically in the text as Impersonality hereafter abbreviated to “I,”. 17 Sharon Cameron, “The practice of attention: Simone Weil’s performance of impersonality,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Winter 2003), 216–52 (hereafter abbreviated to “W”). 18 Interestingly, this line furnishes the title Cameron’s first published article, in which she examines a progression of defamiliarizing effects in three other Stevens poems: “The Snow Man,” “The World as Meditation,” and “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”; see “‘The sense against calamity’: ideas of a self in three poems by Wallace Stevens,” ELH 43(4) (Winter 1976), 584–603. 19 Frank Lentricchia, “Versions of Existentialism” in Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens, eds Steven Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese, Boston, MA: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988, p. 101.

CONTRIBUTORS

Branka Arsić is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Harvard University Press, 2010), and a book on Melville entitled Passive Constitutions or 7½ Times Bartleby (Stanford University Press, 2007). She has co-edited (with Cary Wolfe) a collection of essays on Emerson, entitled The Other Emerson: New Approaches, Divergent Paths (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). She is currently completing a book entitled Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau. Theo Davis is Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University, and the author of Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the 19th Century (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Colin Dayan, Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities, Professor of English, Vanderbilt, and scholar in literary, legal, and religious studies of the Americas is author of A Rainbow for the Christian West; Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction; Haiti, History, and the Gods; The Story of Cruel and Unusual; and, most recently, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, selected as a top-25 “outstanding academic book of 2011.” Shari Goldberg is Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is the author of Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Fordham, 2013) and has published articles on Emerson and Melville in Paragraph and Arizona Quarterly. Paul Grimstad is Assistant Professor of English at Yale. He is

348 Contributors

the author of Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses (Oxford University Press, 2013). George Kateb is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Emeritus, Princeton University. He taught political theory first at Amherst College and then at Princeton University. He has published, among other books: The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture; Emerson and Self-Reliance; Patriotism and Other Mistakes; and Human Dignity. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Vesna Kuiken is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, where she is completing her dissertation, entitled “Revolutionary Ecstasy,” on the reformulation of personhood and community in nineteenthcentury American literature. Kerry Larson is professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Whitman’s Drama of Consensus (University of Chicago Press, 1988) and Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2008) and has edited the Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His many articles on nineteenth-century American literature have appeared in ELH, Raritan, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and other publications. James D. Lilley is assistant professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he teaches courses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature. He is the author of Common Things: Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Atlantic Modernity (Fordham, 2013), and editor of Cormac McCarthy: New Directions (University of New Mexico Press, 2002). His essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in journals such as ELH, New Literary History, and The Southern Quarterly. Michael Moon has taught at Duke, Johns Hopkins, and Emory. He is the author of Darger’s Resources (Duke University Press, 2012); A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American

Contributors

349

Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Duke University Press, 1998), and Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Harvard University Press, 1991). He was for two decades co-editor with Jonathan Goldberg, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michele Barale of Duke University Press’s Series Q, presenting new work in queer theory. Mark Noble is assistant professor of English at Georgia State University. He specializes in American literature and philosophy from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His research and teaching interests also include the history of religion in America, the philosophy of science, critical theory, and American pragmatism. He is currently at work on a book project, The American Atom: Materiality and Poetic Vocation from Whitman to Stevens, which examines poetic attempts to rethink personhood using the terms of both contemporary science and classical materialism. Johannes Voelz teaches American studies at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany. A Humboldt-Foundation fellow at Stanford University (2012–14), he currently is completing a monograph provisionally titled “Fictions of Security: American Literary Threat Management from the Early Republic to the War on Terror.” He is the author of Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge (University Press of New England, 2010) and has co-edited several essay collections, the most recent of which is The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn (with Laura Bieger and Ramón Saldívar; University Press of New England, 2013). Shira Wolosky was Associate Professor at Yale before moving to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her books include Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (Yale University Press, 1984); Language Mysticism (Stanford University Press, 2004); The Art of Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2004)); “Nineteenth Century American Poetry,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature IV, Major Voices in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (Toby Press, 2003); Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); The Riddles of Harry Potter (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), as well as other writings on poetics, literary theory, and religion. Her awards

350 Contributors

include Guggenheim, ACLS, Fulbright and other Fellowships, a Fellowship at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, and Drue Heinz Visiting Professorship at Oxford.

INDEX

Adorno, Theodor 180, 182, 190, 266 aesthetic schism 255 Agnew, Jean-Christophe 281 Allegory 28, 32, 35–40 Ars Nova 180 Arsić, Branka 63–5, 70, 96n. 19, 122, 123n. 5 Attridge, Derek 259, 262–4, 266 Bacon, Francis 79 Balzac, Honoré de 124n. 7 Baudelaire, Charles 183 Beethoven, Ludwig van 181 Benjamin, Walter viii, 28, 32, 35, 36, 38–40 Bennett, Jane 167 Bersani, Leo 283 Biopolitics 28, 34 Blanchot, Maurice 22 Blood, Benjamin 23 Bloom, Harold 73 Bowie, Andrew 264–5 Brown, Bill 281 Brown, Charles Brockden 8 Brown, John 156, 161 Buddhism (includes references to the Dharma) 231, 236, 238–9, 240, 241, 242, 250, 251n. 4 Buell, Lawrence 79, 167 Burke, Edmund 120, 135

Cage, John 187–90 Cameron, Sharon American literary tradition 1 Beautiful Work xi, 60, 93n. 1, 99–101, 109, 110, 115–17, 120, 121, 123n. 3, 127n. 23 Buddhist aggregates 21–2, 24 Cameron and abandonment 65, 68 Choosing Not Choosing xiv, 13, 15, 248, 250, 279n. 57 consciousness 100, 101, 109, 115, 116 grief 58–61, 70 imagination 62–6 Impersonality viii, xi, xv, 1, 5, 9, 12, 19, 27–8, 49, 93n. 1, 144, 231 Lyric Time vii, xiv, 13–14, 15, 269, 279n. 57 mind 100, 109, 110, 116, 119, 127n23 otherness of nature in Thoreau 131, 133–4, 138–9 pain 99, 100, 101, 102, 110, 117, 123n. 3, 127n. 24 phenomenology of text 270, 283–4, 302–3 reception 62, 63–5, 68, 70 self 100, 101, 105, 109, 110, 117

352 Index

sentiments in Thoreau 146 suffering 99, 100, 101, 117, 123n. 4 The Corporeal Self xiii, 2–5, 24, 199, 211, 213, 215–16, 219–20, 226–31, 239, 241, 250, 251n. 2, 253n. 30 Thinking in Henry James xv, 16, 310, 320n. 6 Thoreau’s Journal 147–8 vision in Thoreau 168–9 walking 110, 116, 120 Writing Nature xii, 16, 131–2, 140, 168, 309 Carson, Anne 244 Cavell, Stanley 11, 69–70, 73, 92, 97n. 23 Certeau, Michel de 127n. 29 Chah, Ajahn 237, 238 Channing, William 118, 119, 121, 122n. 1 Child, Lydia Maria 185 Clarke, James Freeman 122n. 1 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 25n. 8, 43n. 21, 174–6, 183–4, 214 community 29, 32–5 Conrad, Joseph 283, 304n. 5 Dauber, Kenneth 222n. 17 Davis, Cynthia J. 124n. 9, 126n. 16 Davis, Theo 221n. 2, 222n. 15, 222n. 17 Death 310–12, 314–16, 319 Deleuze, Gilles 18, 22–3, 40, 43n. 28 Derrida, Jacques 256, 308, 311, 319, 320n. 2 Descartes, René 3 Dickinson, Emily 13–16, 87, 248–9

and textual materiality 267–8, 270 Douglass, Frederic 185 Eagleton, Terry 259, 263, 266 Edwards, Jonathan 1, 5–8, 24, 27–30, 35–40, 50 Elegy 324, 328, 343n. 2 Eliot, T. S 1, 15, 19–24, 50, 328–9, 340–2, 343 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 1, 9–11, 20, 50, 122nn. 1, 2, 123nn. 5, 6, 124nn. 7, 8, 126nn. 17, 18, 127n. 28, 128n. 34 “Circles” 81 “Divinity School Address” 76, 82 “Experience” 61, 70, 71n. 1, 328 “Gifts” 81 “Imagination” 72n. 17 “Montaigne or the Skeptic” 82 Nature 68, 79 Representative Men 82 “The Over-Soul” 57, 62, 66, 70 “The Present Age” 90 Epson, William 50 Esposito, Roberto 29, 33, 34–6, 40–2 Feidelson, Charles 221n. 9, 224n. 20 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 23 Form 225, 227, 229–30, 234, 238–42, 244–51, 253n. 30 Formalism 255–6, 259, 263–4 Frank, Joseph 270 Freud, Sigmund 93 Friendship 90–2, 97n. 21 Fuller, Arthur 122n. 1, 123nn. 2, 3, 5, 126n. 16

Index

Fuller, Margaret xi, 99–123 “Aglauron and Laurie” 119, 128n. 37 “Autobiographical Romance” 106, 112, 122n. 2 brain 106, 107, 109, 111, 113, 120, 127n. 22 consciousness 102, 105, 106, 108–11, 113, 116–20, 128n. 36 corporeality 104, 106, 108, 109, 126nn. 16, 17 ecstasy, ecstatic 99, 100, 102, 105, 106, 110–12, 114, 115–22, 122n. 1, 124nn. 7, 9, 126n. 19, 128nn. 34, 36 headaches 99, 100, 102–9, 112, 113, 117, 124–5n. 11, 126nn. 16, 17 identity 100, 102, 105, 109, 110, 118, 120, 126n. 16, 128n. 36 impersonality 99, 100, 102, 105, 106, 109, 117, 121, 126n. 17 Letters 102–4, 107, 109, 118–21, 122n. 2, 124nn. 9, 10, 125nn. 12, 13, 128n. 36 material thoughts, materiality of thinking 102, 105–7, 109, 113, 114, 122n. 2, 127n. 22 Memoirs 102, 103, 106–8, 112, 113, 115, 118, 124n. 8, 125n. 13, 126nn. 17, 18, 127nn. 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 128n. 36 mind 102–13, 116, 120, 121, 124n. 7, 126n. 16, 127n. 22, 129n. 39

353

mysticism 102, 105, 111, 116, 117, 120, 124n. 7, 8 pain 99, 100, 102–8, 110, 112–15, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122n. 2, 124nn. 9, 11, 125n. 12, 126nn. 17, 18, 19, 127n. 20, 128n. 34, 129n. 38 self 99, 100, 102, 105, 106, 109, 111, 114–18, 120, 121, 122n. 2, 124n. 7 self-presence 105, 106, 109, 110, 113, 115 suffering 102, 104–6, 115, 117, 118, 122n. 2, 128n. 36 Summer on the Lakes 111, 112, 127nn. 30, 31 “The Great Lawsuit” 122n. 1 thinking 99, 102, 104, 105, 107–9, 112–14, 116, 122nn. 1, 2, 124n. 7 walking 103, 110, 113, 114–16 Gadamer, Hans Georg 36, 86 Ghosts 307–10 Gilpin, William 153, 154 Gordon, Peter 63 Grainville, A. B. 124n. 11 Greenblatt, Stephen 260 Harding, Walter 170, 189 Harman, Graham 282, 303 Hawthorne, Nathaniel “A Man of Fancy” 225 “A Select Party” 225, 233 “Monsieur du Miroir” 245 Mossses from Old Manse 225, 231, 249 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” 209, 220 “Roger Malvin’s Burial” 198, 209, 216, 218, 220

354 Index

“The Ambitious Guest” 207–8, 212, 215, 224n. 24, 244–5 “The Birth-Mark,” 233, 240–1, 248 “The Celestial Railroad” 248 “The Devil in the Manuscript” 206, 224n. 24 “The Hollow of the Three Hills” 201–3, 205–7, 218, 220 “The Minister’s Black Veil” 204–5, 206, 223n. 19 “The New Adam and Eve” 197, 210, 218 The Scarlet Letter 200, 204, 219, 229, 248 “Wakefield” 208, 212, 215–16 Hegel, G. W. F. 80, 181 Heidegger, Martin 63–4 70 Helzer, Deborah Ratner 237 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth 124n. 13, 125n. 14 Hoar, Elizabeth 128n. 36 Hodder, Alan D. 191n. 11 Holbein the Younger, Hans 285–7 Homer 87 Honneth, Axel 80, 83, 96n. 14 imagination 79–80 inspiration 79–80, 88 Jakobson, Roman 256–7 Jamblichus 192n. 12 James, C. L. R. 48, 49 James, Henry 16–19, 23, 199–201, 204, 211, 281–305 The Ambassadors 291–4 The Jolly Corner 308 The Sense of the Past 287–91, 295–6 The Third Person 308 The Turn of the Screw 307

The Wings of the Dove 288–9, 299–300, 310–13, 316 James, William 23, 309, 318–19, 320n. 3, 322n. 20 Johnson, Barbara 234, 244, 252n. 10, 300–2 Kant, Immanuel 60, 63, 64, 70, 255, 259 Kateb, George 62, 67, 69, 70, 73 Keats, John 25n. 8 Lacan, Jacques 234–5, 237 Lacou-Labarthe, Philippe 180–1 Lee, Sang Hyun 30, 21, 34, 35, 41 Liszt, Franc 193n. 23 Mallarmé, Stéphane 183 Manson, Deborah 124n. 9, 126n. 19 masochism 92–3 Matthiessen, F. O. 176, 179, 221n. 9 du Maurier, George 297–8 McGan, Jerome 257, 260, 267 Melville, Herman 1, 16, 23, 24, 87, 135, 161, 211–12, 221n. 9, 323 and animals 47–8, 52–5 and dogs 45–6 and non-human 46, 50, 53 Benito Cereno 45–7, 49 Billy Budd, The Sailor 45, 49–51 Israel Potter 47, 52 Moby-Dick 45, 48, 53, 211, 214 Pierre, Or the Ambiguities 48, 52 Michaels, Walter Benn 12 Miller, hugh 153, 154 Miller, Perry 7, 12, 180 Morgan, William 125n. 12 Moseley, Caroline 180

Index

Mukarovski, Jan 260–4 Myerson, Joel 122n. 2 mysticism 3 New Aestheticism 256, 259, 260–6 New Criticism 255, 259, 265 Nietzsche, Friedrich 47, 180, 183, 272 Novalis 79, 94n. 4 object oriented ontology 282–3, 303 Okeson Jeffrey P. 125n. 12 Olson, Charles 48 Packer, Barbara 73 Paul, Sherman 12, 175 Pearl, Jeffrey 22 Perloff, Marjorie 255 Plato 40, 107, 137, 175, 180 Plotinus 3 Poe, Edgar Allan 8, 199–202, 205, 210, 223n. 19 Poirier, Richard 73, 206, 220, 222n. 17 portraits 284 Posnock, Ross 187 Pound, Ezra 138 Pythagoras 192n. 11 relations 206, 211, 214, 216–17 Rhoads, Kenneth W. 180 Ricoeur, Paul 80–1, 86 Rilke, Reiner Maria 149 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 95n. 6 Schoenberg, Arnold 190 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 241, 242, 250 Shakespeare, William 79 Steele, Jeffrey 123n. 7

355

Stevens, Wallace 19 “Large Red Man Reading” 324, 327 “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” 326, 334 “The Auroras of Autumn” 329–30, 339, 342–3 “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” 324, 344n. 2 “The Rock” 324, 331 “The Snow Man” 330 “Things of August” 326–7 Sturgis, Caroline 119 style 74, 76–7, 84–7, 90 Sucitto, Ajahn 238 Taylor, Charles 83, 96n. 14 Tennyson, Alfred 129n. 39 testimony 309–11, 318–19 Thanissaro, Bhikku 243, 250, 252n. 17, 253n. 19, 254n. 40 Thoreau, Henry David 12–13, 25n. 8, 87, 120 “A Plea for Captain John Brown” 161, 165n. 9 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers 170, 191–2 “Autumnal Tints” 149, 157 “Civil Disobedience” 165 critique of opera 178 natural beauty 132, 135–40, 143, 147, 150–9, 163–4 religion 171 “Slavery in Massachusetts” 165n. 16 “The Service” 175–6, 185, 189 Walden 2, 12 Thoreau, Sophia 192n. 18 unhappiness 324, 328, 343

356 Index

Wagner, Richard 181, 183 Weaver, Raymond 48 Weil, Simone 50, 100, 102, 106, 118, 123nn. 3, 4, 127n. 27, 128n. 33, 328–9, 338–42 Whitman, Walt 8, 23, 45, 87, 97n. 21

Winfried, Fluck 86, 96n. 17 Winnicott, D. W. 232–3, 252n. 6, 300–1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 208, 223n. 18 Wolff, Christian 190 Wolin, Sheldon 121, 129n. 40 Wordsworth, William 25n. 8