Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading 9780804788212

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   

LISTENING ON ALL SIDES Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading

Richard Deming

   , 

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund, Yale University. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deming, Richard, ‒ Listening on all sides : toward an Emersonian ethics of reading / Richard Deming. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.  ---- (alk. paper) . American literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. . Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ‒—Influence. . Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ‒—Philosophy. . Literature—Philosophy. . Pragmatism in literature. I. Title. .  .'—dc  Typeset by Classic Typography in /. Adobe Garamond.

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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1. On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Reading for Life 2. Reading, Agency, and the Question of “Fate” 3. Foundling Texts: Originality and Authorship in Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses”  4. Response and Responsibility: Stevens, Williams, and the Ethics of Modernism  Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

Despite its solitude, no writing project is ever undertaken completely alone. First, I would like to acknowledge those who read, in part or as a whole, earlier versions of this manuscript: Kenneth Dauber, Susan Howe, Peter Hare, Robert Daly, Joseph Conte, Henry Sussman, and Charles Altieri. All provided more professional, intellectual, and personal guidance than I could have ever hoped for. An additional note of thanks to that most Emersonian of authors, the late Robert Creeley, who always will offer a consistently locating example of why poetry does matter and what is at stake when we talk about writing and community. There is a long list of friends and colleagues who offered encouragement and intellectual challenge along the way. A partial list includes Joel Bettridge, Cathy Eisenhower, Logan Esdale, Graham Foust, Peter Gizzi, Joy Leighton, Jean-Jacques Poucel, Roberto Tejada, and Elizabeth Willis. My heartfelt thanks to them all and to Nathaniel Tarn, who provided support at an important juncture. In July 2003, I participated in the NEH Summer Institute “Emerson at 200: Literature, Law, Philosophy.” The intensity of the conversations I had and heard during that time was crucial in bringing my thinking about Emerson to the next level. I thank all of the participants, especially Russell Goodman and his co-director Steven Affeldt, for organizing and facilitating that program. The regular, sustaining intellectual company of the Whitney Humanities Center Working Group in Contemporary Poetics at Yale University has consistently reinvigorated my thinking. I also want to thank the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University, whose assistance has helped make the publication of this book possible. At Stanford University Press, my thanks to Carolyn Brown, EmilyJane Cohen, and Cynthia Lindlof, who helped me enormously. I would

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like to thank both Charles Bernstein and the reader who remained anonymous for their observations and suggestions. Also, thanks to Norris Pope, my editor, who was patient and encouraging from the very start. Any researcher is only as good as the librarians who help him or her. Michael Basinski, curator of the University of Buffalo’s Poetry/Rare Books Collection, helped me with my various archival questions about Williams. Craig Gable, librarian at large, served as invaluable and indefatigable aidede-camp. I really owe him a great deal. The staff of the Beinecke Library was terrifically helpful and insightful. Also, Nancy Kuhl, associate curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke, worked tirelessly to help uncover facts, citations, and manuscripts, finding materials that no one else had even heard of. Nancy had the double duty of also being my beleaguered spouse without whom Listening on All Sides would not have been possible. Every word reflects her suggestions, insights, support, patience, and, above all else, love. The last chapter is dedicated to her. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publishers for permission to reprint certain material. “Re-statement of Romance” and “The American Sublime,” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., and by Faber and Faber Ltd. “The Ivy Crown” and “To Be Recited to Flossie on Her Birthday” by William Carlos Williams, from Collected Poems 1932–1962, vol. 2, copyright 1953 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and by Carcanet Press. “Exultation is the going” by Emily Dickinson. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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Introduction

In “The Philosopher in American Life,” Stanley Cavell describes “a certain pathos in [his] sense of struggle for the writing of philosophy.”1 Since it is a similar sense of this pathos that Listening on All Sides invokes and confronts, this situation requires perhaps fuller clarification. Cavell delineates the drama he cites this way: Both the idea of grasping the intention of a text and the idea of sharing or hearing what has called it, are interpretations of reading, of following a text. But the idea of being intended can close out what the idea of being called and of obedience, of listening, brings into investigation: namely, how it is that one writes better than one knows (as well as worse) and that one may be understood better by someone other than oneself (as well as understood worse).2

This formidable passage, I wager, bears out the struggle to get that pathos into language. Reading this passage enacts, then, the commensurate struggle of interpretation the reader participates in if he or she commits to reckoning its meaningfulness. For Cavell such a struggle is not “merely personal,” and he insists that “the struggles it joins are nothing if not common— those between philosophy and poetry, . . . between writer or reader and language, between language and itself, between the American edifice of fantasy and the European edifice of philosophy, between the hope and the despair of writing and reading redemptively.”3 The difficulties present in this sense (and in the previous Cavell passage) play out that struggle between

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Introduction

hope and despair. The struggle is intrinsic to any act of reading; and in squaring Cavell’s prose, one stakes a claim for what one senses the sentences mean even before arriving at that meaning. Gerald Bruns describes an underlying thematic of Cavell’s writing that has broad implications: “Cavell’s idea is that language is not something under our control, yet it is our responsibility, and this responsibility consists in not tuning out what is logically excessive in language, for example the sound and look of words and the way they echo and mirror one another.”4 The literary elements of Cavell’s philosophical writing indicate and express the way such writing acknowledges its attentiveness to its life in and as language. In other words, what Cavell’s writing might mean indeed means something to the reader who gives it his or her attention. The pathos Cavell invokes is, as I say, central to Listening on All Sides. Among the discussions of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. W. F. Hegel, Wallace Stevens, and others in the following chapters are a number of ratifying figures, often below the surface: Cavell (more or less explicitly) and Richard Poirier (rather implicitly) perhaps chief among them. There are some agendas to be sure, especially seen in the moments when I lobby for the importance of ordinary language philosophy and pragmatism and when I insist on facilitating a dialogue not only between Anglo-American and Continental philosophy but also between poetry and philosophy. In all, however, I claim no thoroughgoing fealty. Methodologies are ladders of sorts, things to be used and not to be used by. Although that might sound polemical, I see it more as a caution raised again and again by Emerson, a caution he wants readers to take to heart. For Emerson, reading needs to be an active proposition in order for it to count as “reading,” in that only through activity does one come back to oneself. “The state of society,” he writes, “is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”5 Reading and writing are means of discovering one’s own constitution, that which makes a self, however provisionally and contingently, a self. In Emerson’s nightmare vision, the body is dismembered into its component parts. In such conditions, persons are monsters because they are not fully human. The wish to be fully human may be another kind of dream. But at the very least it seems that coming back to one’s language as if for the first time is Emerson’s idea of re-membering a body politic, and re-forming (in all senses) a politic’s body.

Introduction

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The emphasis of my discussion tends to be poetics, a kind of liminal writing between philosophy or criticism and literature itself. Poetry in particular expresses indirectly the values and understanding a poet has, so looking at how poets and philosophers read these particular language acts reveals much about the ways that language is used. Heidegger suggests there are two possibilities when it comes to engaging with thinkers: either one goes to “their encounter” or one goes “counter to them.” He writes, “If we want to go to the encounter of a thinker’s thought, we must magnify still further what is great in him. Then will we enter into what is unthought in his thought. If we wish only to go counter to a thinker’s thought, this wish must have minimized beforehand what is great in him. We then shift his thought into the commonplaces of our know-it-all presumption.”6 Listening on All Sides pursues the unthought (but which is nonetheless present) in poetics and poetry and in doing so takes the literary not as special kinds of language acts but as exemplary occasions of language use. Thus, I do not look at literary influence but see poets, in their roles as exemplars, as close listeners to the words others—particularly other writers—use and how they use them. In that sense, any of us are poets, and words, thus, remain common to us all. Chapter 1 sets the groundwork for discussing the role of ethics in reading and begins by contending knowledge is not a static body of information but is instead a measure of informed, participatory action. In “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” Walter Benjamin insists, “[A]ll genuine works [of art] have their siblings in the realm of philosophy,”7 and this book takes that claim as a given. Poetry, in its various modalities, provides one way the conditions for interaction, or contact, can be established and maintained, can be made rhetorical and edifying, and can be open to interrogation. The interaction that exists through and as poetry and the reading of poetry ideally makes it possible to effect changes in both self and milieu. Emerson becomes the representative figure of Listening on All Sides because he continually interrogates the metaphors that represent and conceptualize an objective “reality,” while remaining skeptical about the metaphormaking process.8 The process of negotiating literary texts dismantles certainty in order to keep open the possibility of an ethics of difference. Chapter 1 posits a pragmatist poetics that emphasizes the negotiations occurring between reading and writing and contends social and cultural values can be formed out of these efforts. In pursuing this proposition, I revisit Derrida’s discussion of J. L. Austin in Limited Inc and Jean-Luc Nancy’s

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Introduction

reworking of Heidegger in Being Singular Plural: I compare and contrast these texts with Wittgenstein’s theories of language from Philosophical Investigations to establish that the conventions of language frame and delimit human imagination and subjective identity. Poetry, as the idealized expression of subjective identity, becomes a way of focusing the mind and working with structures by which acts of the imagination might lead to a constantly intensified perception, upon which community is built. The poem calls into being interpretive occasions by which both the beliefs and the whole language of the community are tested. Because these social arrangements produce and reproduce agency and subjectivity, they need to be tried out, questioned, subjected to a constructive skepticism that uses doubt and self-consciousness to discover what is necessary, what is useful, in order to create the possibilities for ethics, ethics that are ever dependent on the possibility of choosing. In Chapter 2 I turn these questions of literature’s philosophicality toward the particularities of Emerson’s poetics. Looking at key essays (including “Circles,” “Fate,” and “Experience”), I draw out their intrinsic and generative tensions to show how they enact a constitutive skepticism. Emerson, as Nietzsche would also do, defines false boundaries by crossing them. Indeed, both writers locate their struggles in the very form that their writing takes. Lawrence Buell describes Emerson’s use of the fragment as a strategic compositional move attempting to clear the ground for thinking to occur: “Of his broader aspiration, aphorism, and the aphoristic series, were telltale linguistic and syntactical marks. Emerson’s partiality for aphorism was also a sign of his discontent with a narrowly belletristic understanding of what writing should be all about. Literature didn’t mean just artistic play, though in some sense it was that, but also potentially scripture, philosophy, social prophecy.”9 I would substitute for the idea of “play” the possibility of “experiment.” And Buell’s description of literature as “scripture, philosophy, social prophecy” stacks the deck in favor of the vatic Emerson that Harold Bloom has offered over the years. I argue against this model of Emerson in Chapter 3. Yet, as Buell implies, since no other philosopher or poet recognized the kinds of problems Emerson himself was drawn to, the Concord sage finds the conventions of both philosophic and poetic discourse available to him to be confining. Emerson is frustrated by the way that discourse—and its systematizing of reference and signification—predetermines thought and action by shaping and delimit-

Introduction

5

ing one’s relationship to the world. No single discourse can make possible the kind of agency from which or by which Emerson can address subjectivity. The agency that is available in conventional poetic and philosophical discourses lacks immediacy because of an intrinsic “impersonality.” Emerson pits the two kinds of discourse against each other, as he does with various binary oppositions, through his use of aphorisms and other literary devices in order to create a generative negation of claims. I use Emerson’s essays to demonstrate how this negation prompts a continual recontextualizing of terms that shifts and revises the position of the subject; such active negotiations are the means by which one invests in one’s own participation in language and the community it forms. In some sense, this is the way that language and community come to be more than obligations but can be made to matter (as matter) to a person. The complexity and textual resistance so characteristic of Emerson’s texts provide pedagogical moments that call for a deepening of the reader’s understanding of ethics and critique constructions of authority. For Emerson, intellectual duty has a moral dimension that gives the reader an occasion for thinking about the materials and media of thinking and subjectivity within an aesthetic as well as a sociopolitical milieu. Such reflexivity, or so goes Emerson’s fast hope, makes possible an enactment of an imaginative, generative principle. Then the reader is forced to revisit and revise expectations of understanding. This understanding of Emerson sets up the terms and conditions for modernism. The difficult, modernist text gives the reader opportunities to plunge into a sea of doubt—doubt of language, doubt of the writer, self-doubt—and to broaden an understanding of the ways that language and culture do and do not work, but might given the right conditions. The act of reading and interpreting fashions a community of those who see participation in meaning—its circulations and implications—as neither settled nor transparent. The modernism I describe is not, strictly speaking, a literary period or even a codifying series of textual strategies, so the reader coming to this book seeking generic taxonomies, academic exegeses, and literary histories is apt to be frustrated. Instead, the term as I situate it describes something a bit broader: it is a stance, a worldview, that brings together skepticism and a commitment to finding a way of going on, of continuing with a kind of attentiveness, a responsiveness, that might call one again and again to the world as it is. Cavell might call this “living one’s skepticism”;10 I believe this to be the condition of living the

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Introduction

modernism wherein and whereby we find ourselves. This is to make modernism not only a literary proposition but a philosophical one as well. Investigating the implications of calling Emerson a philosopher, I argue in Chapter 3 that he is better thought of as a theorist, which creates an indeterminate position for his writing. The reader engages the production of textual meaning by negotiating this indeterminacy and establishing its parameters. I show how Emerson arrives at a constitutive skepticism that compels him to critique the vocabulary he inherits from history, art, and politics. Emerson’s poetics indicates his commitment to reporting the experience of being a self, in all its contradictions and complexities, and for him literary texts make language the site and the citation of that struggle. The text for Emerson is the scene where the agon between recognition of an individual’s chosen values and the values one inherits ideologically is enacted, not only for the writer but for the reader as well. Having established the ways that Emerson’s work both calls for and enacts textual and authorial self-consciousness, I bring these theories to bear on Emerson’s contemporaries, Melville and Hawthorne. I look at the rhetorical devices in Melville’s essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” and argue that his self-conscious reading practices raise issues about how the authority of an author is established and legitimated. Moreover, I illustrate how Melville constructs Hawthorne in a way that authorizes American literature through a dialectical self-consciousness. By means of this theoretical performance, Melville re-creates himself (by way of a pseudonym) as a fictive author of the essay and so blurs the boundaries of subject and object through a critical discourse that seeks to invent and establish itself by engaging the dialectics of another writer’s text. “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” by deconstructing the authority of the author (by turns, Melville, Hawthorne, and the fictive critic), attempts to democratize the interpretive process and open it to include culture, ideology, and history. My reading of Melville’s text draws on a close discussion of Kojève’s work regarding Hegel, especially in regard to the latter’s description of the master/slave dialectic. Kojève’s focus on the mechanisms of prestige and what he takes to be a necessary—even definitively human—desire for recognition and acknowledgment by one’s equals is central not only to his reading of Hegel but to his sense of why a subject needs continually to engage and confront the Other. This model of identity as a calculus of desire and resistance to the Other is necessary in order to situate the ethical dynamic in Melville’s

Introduction

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poetics within a broader philosophical tradition. The Other (in Melville’s case, Hawthorne) is the figure from which and even against which we draw the language to name ourselves within a world. Chapter 4 focuses on the interrelated efforts of Stevens and Williams, whose poetries are, each in its own way, enactments of alternative democratic processes. In discussing the problems of poetic composition these two poets faced, I argue that metaphor and form become matters of ethics as well as aesthetics. Reading these two poets alongside one another, I show they both see America as a culture in constant need of understanding the terms and conditions of language because it is a nation caught simultaneously between the conflicting worldviews of transcendentalism and pragmatism. In a discussion of major works by both poets (including Paterson and “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”), I indicate that the democratic investments of Williams and Stevens are to be found in the pedagogical models posed by the semantic, cultural, and ethical difficulties within their work as well as in each poet’s engagement with cultural institutions and mores. Their poetics necessitates that readers deepen their mastery of the tools and conditions of language and meaningfulness in order to engage the poems. My discussion of Stevens focuses on his aphorisms and his late poems to show how they seek to resituate the social and epistemological functions of art and poetry in the absence of theology. Without the superstructure of a belief in God, a new means of investing in one’s world is made necessary. Poetry becomes a replacement for God, as in its negotiations a poem’s text is both the creation of a worldview and the way one writes (or reads) oneself into that world by means of poetry’s acts of creative, constitutive imagination. In these efforts of Stevens’s, there are meaningful links to be drawn between his idea of language as being in a fallen state and that offered by Walter Benjamin. Both writers, I argue, suggest that literature has a moral dimension whereby one must work to grasp the concepts and metaphors that exist in such literary texts, deepening a mastery of language, culture, and figuration. Moving to Williams, who similarly sought to refresh the possibilities of a democratic, participatory “ordinary language,” I show how the poet attempts to establish poetry and poetics as alternatives to the logic of a market economy that assesses work as a means to an end, rather than as an end in and of itself. Williams and Stevens therefore situate poetry within an Emersonian mode whose complexities emphasize the need for literary

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and social imagination to seek out and determine new systems of valuation, aesthetics, and semantics. In the opening of Paterson Williams acknowledges with a fraught combination of hope and resignation, “For the beginning / is assuredly the end—since we know nothing pure / and simple beyond / our own complexities.”11 Williams emphasizes a need for clearing the ground of what came before, not out of some nihilistic impulse but as a means of restarting possibilities of invested, flexible beliefs. I locate Williams in terms of Dewey’s pragmatism in order to discuss how Williams’s poetics tries out language in its commitment to both present (in the sense of making present) and represent experience. For Williams, poetry is an activity that moves toward commitment and cohesion by constantly pressing the limits of principles of order, form, and composition. For writers in the Emersonian mode—a conscious and tactical selfconsciousness—poetry constitutes acts of language upon language. In the self-conscious poetics of writers like Dickinson and Williams, Whitman and Stevens, Cavell and Emerson, Stein and Nietzsche, Heidegger and Hegel, writing remains in a perpetual conversation with itself as well as with its reader. This conversation becomes both the ground for and call to an ethics of reading. The wager then is that what changes when one listens for such conversation is not reading or modernism or ethics. Rather, it becomes evident that what first must change is one’s stance toward such things. Changing one’s stance starts with finding that where one stands is both a beginning and an end intertwined with our own disconsolate, our own redemptive complexities, a place we cannot hope to get beyond and that yet lies everywhere still to be discovered.

1 On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Reading for Life

How do we find ourselves? As straightforward as it is, I hope that this is no simple question, at last. In it lies the assumption that we can find ourselves, and that we have “selves” to find. To suggest there is a subjectivity to which “self ” refers is not necessarily to hold that, as such, an “I” must be a continuity. It may in fact be thought of as a contiguity of irresolvable moods, modes, and contrary forces. If that is so, even provisionally, how do we make such contiguity accessible to each other, and to ourselves? Or is it simply impossible? These are the problems, I wager, that bring us to encounters with ethics. Said another way, ethics is the negotiating among selves. Already, there are risks aplenty of falling into a morass of metaphysics, but in the end, the payoffs may be worth it. If there is a chance of finally evading metaphysics, it is in the hope of finding the way epistemology and ethics are inextricably bound together, each, like conjoined twins, giving birth to the possibilities and the limitations of the other. The connections are dangerous to both; yet separate them and they cannot survive. Ralph Waldo Emerson once, and famously, declared that each age needs its own writers, for “the experience of each new age requires a new confession.”1 Here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, how could we deny such a statement to be, somehow, fundamentally true? Too often Americanist literary critics and scholars read each period of history—at

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Reading for Life

least as they are so commonly delineated: antebellum, postbellum, the age of realism, of modernism, of postmodernism—as somehow being a reaction to the previously held “master narrative.” Emerson, however, in his call for “confession” wanted both to evoke and to legitimate that Shakespeare who might yet be born on the banks of the Ohio River. This possible genius is of a piece with Emerson’s constant claims to a futurity, the “new yet unapproachable America,” and “the true romance which the world exists to realize.”2 Each age’s poet is always yet to arrive, but the reason is that “the poet” is no longer the bard who retells dramatic cultural narratives. Instead, the poet that Emerson calls for is a lyric poet whose focus is on the activity of his or her poetry. For any age, the poet must always be out ahead of history to avoid belatedness. “Art is the path of the creator to his work,” he avers in “The Poet.”3 Art is not the end of the poet’s efforts; rather, it is a means. It is difficult to say what for Emerson the end is thought to be, but in some sense it is that poesis brings the poet into accord with a primal and constituent force. We could say then that this process brings the poet, and the reader via interpretive acts, into a kind of accord with self and thus world making. If, as Alexandre Kojève proposes, “the Concrete Real . . . is both Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing a real,”4 then the shape and sound of language use determine position and relationship between the subject and myriad objects. The poet works with language, clearly, but if language and discourse make perception possible, then his or her work indicates ways that the world becomes an inhabited and subjective space. The question then might be, what has reading literature of the past to do with the confession of an earlier “age”? How might we profitably read literature of the past? The answer seems somewhat obvious. If we hold as valid the Barthesian truism that all reading is (re)writing, then every age needs new readers. Emerson writes in his journals, “There is creative reading as well as creative writing,”5 and we might ask, what indeed may be created in the act of reading? Although recent questions of identity and cultural politics force us to reconceive what makes it into the cultural and historical consciousness in the first place, it would seem that no less important is the motivation to revisit old texts that may in fact speak to us anew. For as developments of critical acumen and philosophical systems continue their work upon us, reshaping the means by which experience itself is experienced, then those canonical texts are not the same as earlier readings. Knowledge is not static; rather, it reconfigures itself upon each

Reading for Life

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new development of the grounds of perception, each new structure assimilated or at least encountered by understanding. This is not merely to justify my own use of philosophical arguments offered by such thinkers as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and Richard Rorty, some of whom come after the actual literary texts. Instead, it is to say that no text stays put. If we approach the literature of the past with new tools, the works themselves offer us new insights. Literature and its constituent poetics, contrary to philosophy’s belatedness, trace the ways that consciousness manifests its own motions and possibilities of thought by enacting them via speech acts that are simultaneous with themselves. Literature is aware of itself as language, and since it is not specifically descriptive or prescriptive, its existence lies in its articulation and rearticulation. Philosophy, by and large, demonstrates a repression of its own literariness, as Derrida brilliantly showed over the course of his lifetime. Much philosophy is conceived of as a mediation of systems of thought, but of course this is why it seems always to be behind itself, as Hegel described it, and remains beholden to an argument that seems to exist always and already—given the right listener, that is, one who can legitimate or at least identify with its structures of rhetoric. Philosophy as a discipline is too often hyperaware of discourse at the cost of realizing that it is itself discourse: the implications of this insightful blindness are not minor, either. There is the recurring advice that the way to avoid sinking into either metaphysical discourse on the one hand or sophistry on the other is to avoid ontology as fully as possible. The reservation expressed in this warning is that at a particular level, Being as such cannot be directly confronted; it is always arrived at, and thus missed altogether, via language. In other words, Being is always the act of language as language. At the heart of this debate is the question of the “I” and what constitutes its agency. If we are “everywhere in language,” then the question Emerson poses at the beginning of “Experience”—“Where do we find ourselves?”—is best addressed by making a kind of linguistic turn, for to answer that question necessitates a look at what and how such a question ultimately means. The work that might ensue would fall in line with the types of therapeutic philosophy that both Wittgenstein and Friedrich Nietzsche attempt to put in place. Paradoxically this attention to language usage as a means of activating and developing subjectivity has ethical implications, as the icons of ordinary

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Reading for Life

language philosophy—namely, J. L. Austin and Wittgenstein—are apt to insist. Ordinary language criticism, to speak broadly and perhaps idealistically, wants to break the tyrannical hold of metaphysical categories that in the act of philosophizing separate words from their everyday use. Cavell, one of the most important and valuable thinkers about these problems, explains: [T]he philosopher who proceeds from ordinary language is concerned less to avenge sensational crimes against the intellect than to redress its civil wrongs; to steady any imbalance, the tiniest usurpation, in the mind. This inevitably requires reintroducing ideas which have become tyrannical (e.g., existence, obligation, certainty, identity, reality, truth . . .) into the specific contexts in which they function naturally. This is not a question of cutting big ideas down to size, but of giving them the exact space in which they can move without corrupting.6

Cavell’s use of “corrupting” suggests the threat of alienation arising from some forms of doctrinal philosophy. If we are everywhere in language, metaphysics and the attempts to argue from specialized and rarefied lexicons of ontology create a radical disharmony between individuals and the language that they employ on a daily basis. If the very condition of the “self ” is a text of language (that is, Wittgenstein’s idea of language comprising “a form of life”), then metaphysics or philosophy that seeks out either a modus of transcendental understanding or an “incorrigible” foundation of meaning limits agency. By leading words back to the ordinary, individuals have access to the stuff of their own individuation. We return to the paradox that the product of socialization is individuation. Jean-Luc Nancy offers an amplification of what I’m getting at, even if his direction is distinctly Heideggerian. In Being Singular Plural, the French philosopher writes: The “meaning of Being” is not some property that will come to qualify, fill in, or finalize the brute givenness of “Being” pure and simple. Instead, it is the fact that there is no “brute givenness” of Being, that there is no desperately poor there is presented when one says that “there is a nail catching. . . .” But the givenness of Being, the givenness inherent to the very fact that we understand something when we say “to be” (whatever it may be and however confused it might be), along with the (same) givenness that is given with this fact—cosubstantial with the givenness of being and the understanding of Being, that we understand each one (however confusedly) when we say it, is a gift that can be summarized as follows: Being itself is given to us as meaning. Being does not have meaning. Being itself, the phenomenon of Being, is meaning that is, in turn, its own circulation—and we are this circulation.7

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Clearly, there is no move or series of moves that brings us to the bare and unassailable fact of Being. Being is neither substantive nor objective nor empirical: it is motion of a sort, circulation. To think otherwise is to court essentialism and foundationalism. There is no way to “endure our thoughts all night,” as Wallace Stevens would have us do, “until / the bright obvious stands motionless in cold.”8 Only through interaction and the community building that arises from communication is the question of meaning or being even possible. Being is not ineffable; it resides in the effable, even if there is no way to step outside Being. This is not to make gestures toward transcendentalism, although that is becoming perhaps more and more unavoidable. Instead, Being is the sum total of activity. “The world,” Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “is all that is the case.”9 How the world gets read, how we conceive shifting patterns of activity and action into discernible structures, is what is at stake. Nancy locates Being as existing simultaneously with language, and the difference between Heidegger and Nancy is subtle but crucial. Heidegger is, beneath it all, Romantic, and he can be read as merely replacing an ineffable mysticism with a quasi-divine conception of language. For Nancy, however, language is not some Geist out there, operating above and beyond human ken. Rather, language is only language, that is, only has meaning, because it is used. Being is the use of language. In other words, language is not simply a tertium quid that occurs between the world and us, but the world and those of us in it circulate as language. Users of language, which means all of us, both circulate language and circulate as language. It is easy to see how these questions can be chimeras that lead us down false alleyways. Nancy, however, uses metaphysics of a sort to potentially give us a way around the trap of metaphysics. Or, seen another way, the terms that metaphysics provides us can be redefined or amended to get beyond those terms in order to bring questions of ethics and agency to bear. How else to avoid the “brute givenness” of things and get to the matter of how one might proceed? And in this, two strange bedfellows, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson, point the way. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein tells us, “Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. —Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us.”10 This is to say, the world is all already there in the language within which we operate, and philosophy

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offers us nothing that is not already there. New perspectives, and that is what the best philosophical arguments obtain, create nothing new. Is this a conservative reading of philosophy? Certainly. Is it skeptical? That, too. And fundamentally, Wittgenstein is in no way visionary. He does not offer us a complex system or cosmology the way that, say, Kant or Hegel does, but the reason is that Wittgenstein sees language as relational rather than representational. Hegel and Kant were in the business of creating systems in order to represent the world as they found it. In fact, an argument could be made that Kant (in the critiques) and Hegel (in the Phenomenology of Spirit) wrote philosophical novels, with Reason and Spirit being the respective protagonists.11 Both provide narratives, after a fashion, of development in which the heroes come to know their place in a troubled yet representable world. Wittgenstein’s books are far more fragmented because he sees language, or at least grammar, as a text itself, one that has no plot or development. In the Philosophical Investigations we do not have language mirroring the world, and thus Wittgenstein does not employ symbols and tropes in the same way. Of course, he does use metaphor, but his figures are used in an economy of exchange. He is not trying to build a world. Where Kant and Hegel bring us further into philosophy, Wittgenstein wishes to show us the way out. In this sense, it is the attitude toward language that tells the story of intention. “It is in language,” he writes, “that an expectation and its fulfillment make contact.”12 Of course, that fulfillment may not be, usually is not, satisfying. At the very least, the question of expectation, and in another mode desire, is what brings us to how one means. But meaning is use by Wittgenstein’s definition, and use requires a dialogue among various others. This emphasis on interrelation creates a dimension of sociality in Wittgenstein’s work, and this sociality brings up close the issue of ethics. Knowing language, by way of looking (and listening) closely (to words and use), can create sensitivity to the intimacies it affords, and such intimacies include, or at least ought to, a sense of how we interact with each other and the world. One need invest his or her attention in the effects of language acts, attending to what words perform on others and on oneself. Intimacy goes in two directions: it is disclosure to another but it is also willingness, a receptivity to address others on one’s own terms and according to one’s needs and desires, respecting them without simply effacing or coopting them—seeing them, in Kantian terms, as ends and not means. In-

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timacy is a set of choices revealed in the language that we choose, not only in order to listen to the effects of language but also to gauge how these effects might contribute to the Other and bring about interrelation. Particularly as the drive of both Wittgenstein’s earlier work, his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and the later Philosophical Investigations is toward the social rather than the personal, we can see the philosopher allows us to conceive of language itself as a poem—if not a poetics—of creation. It should be evident that I do not mean this in any necessarily mythological way but in terms of the psychological, the cultural, and the social, and the way that these modalities are in fact composed, structured along possibilities of representation, and policed by conceptual taste. Language both creates and is created by context, and for Wittgenstein, context means use. “Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it,” writes the philosopher. “It leaves everything as it is.”13 What is required of criticism is to investigate how that “is” is being used. But it is in the frame of poetry that language is tried out, experimented with as well as experimented on. Wittgenstein writes, anticipating the field of cultural studies, “What belongs to a language game is a whole culture.”14 What is necessary to Wittgenstein is the need to listen to the everyday, where it is we find ourselves. Being “everywhere in language” means it is necessary that we learn to locate ourselves in and via the language of the ordinary. It is in their ordinariness, their use value, that words arise from and form a community. This community is the very conditions of the circulation that Nancy describes. “Meaning,” and thus “Being,” occurs only in a dialogue of sympathies and resistances with others. This in itself, as I will describe in Chapter 3, is a version of the complexities of self-consciousness that Hegel describes, but it is a reading of self-consciousness that arises after Wittgenstein. The consciousness of “self ” is a consciousness of a necessary and procreative tension of “self and Other.” But this idea of Being needs first to be thought of in terms of what Wittgenstein describes as “forms of life.” The Wittgensteinian concept of a form of life (Lebensform) does not mean biological life but instead refers to historical groups of individuals who are bound together into a community by a shared set of complex, language-involving practices. The community is formed not by agreement but by a pattern of activity and mores. The Lebensform Wittgenstein describes is the frame of reference we learn to work within when initiated

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into the language of our community. Learning that language is thus learning the outlook, assumptions, and practices with which that language is inseparably bound and by which its expressions come to their meaning. By leading words back to their ordinariness, Wittgenstein restores them to their initiating community. Because a community thereby regains its ability to mean, this ordinariness, this immediateness, enables a democratized community, one that participates directly in the creation and circulation of meaning. Individuals of the collective (a loose band of elective affinities) are able to reinvest their commitment to the mores (even and perhaps especially in the form of negotiation and critique) that language shapes and makes possible via communication because they can recognize how words are the medium of their understanding and enable perception of their milieu. Their own use of language contributes to and determines their field of activity. In this light, communication is not transference of doctrine but an engagement characterizable as use, as an activity. “Words are deeds,” writes Wittgenstein in his notebook.15 We might think of this along with his earlier proposition: “Whatever we can describe at all could be other than it is. There is no a priori order of things.”16 We see that language is the activity by which is revealed both our world and the revelation that it is only one world out of which countless are possible. Of course, we need to ask just how this learning and locating may take place. The word that I am reaching after in characterizing Wittgenstein’s thought, particularly in trying to direct this toward its applicability to poetics, is responsiveness. The responsiveness arises out of what we could envision as a crisis of misunderstanding: “Philosophy is the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”17 Here we see Wittgenstein caught somewhere between a faith in language and a skepticism about philosophy. This intersection (enacted in Philosophical Investigations by the conflicting interlocutors, which render a polylogical and heterogeneous—rather than unified—text) causes both the belief and doubt to intertwine and at times come to be indistinguishable, even indivisible. At the heart of the paradoxical nature of Wittgenstein’s arguments is the possibility that words in their “ordinariness” may be at their most estranged, even alienated from us. No wonder we are bewitched. Like the luckless teens in the Blair Witch Project, the thing that we use to get us out of our predicament (in their case either the ill-fated map or the river forever in the

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background) seems somehow to lead back into chaos. “When you are philosophizing,” Wittgenstein writes in his notebook, “you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.”18 In other words, such a descent is what is necessary to make the strange ordinary, and the ordinary strange. This last comment is not something that Wittgenstein himself might have felt to be anything other than a further confusion of language. Regardless, what is necessary is responsiveness to the way that words are used, especially since use determines meaning. The kind of problematics that occurs in the reading process, a process brought in some degree to crisis if not resistance and frustration beginning with Emerson’s theorizing, is foregrounded, sometimes explicitly and directly, sometimes not, in the work of many authors who appear in Emerson’s aftermath. The economy of resistance and identification is central to Emersonian modernism. Ralph Waldo Emerson begins his essay “Experience” with the question, “Where do we find ourselves?” This question, I am arguing, is not only central for Emerson but propels a kind of thinking that reveals itself in various and sometimes conflicting ways in the literature of the United States. This thinking is modernist in that it is obsessed with the question of how experience can be represented to itself. In other words, can consciousness be conscious of consciousness? This is no mere theoretical question, is not just an issue of (and from) metaphysics. Instead, this question of “Where do we find ourselves?” fuels an ethical search that is epistemological in nature if not in its discourse. For as we shall see, we find ourselves always among a community—separate from a community and yet always operating within the jurisdictions of community. For example, let us look at Emerson’s response to his question about where we find ourselves: “In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none.”19 In these first two sentences Emerson has made some interesting moves, moves that go a long way toward suggesting the ethical situation he is trying to interrogate. He asks, “Where do we find ourselves?” Clearly, the question here is one of agency. The subject “we” is what is actively described and ultimately self-defined. It is not another force locating this “we,” nor is the “we” seeking something more abstract, such as values, spirituality, or character. The moment is wholly self-reflexive. Can one ever “find” oneself ? Aren’t we always where we are? One determines location when one says, “Where am I?” but that isn’t what Emerson asks, nor is that what he answers. And usually location is decided on in terms of

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relation: “x miles from Yellowstone National Park,” or “at such and such longitude and latitude,” or “on the shelf in the medicine cabinet.” We are, he tells us, “[i]n a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none.”20 In this sense it has to be “we” rather than “I” because the “I,” in its singularity, is distinct from a “we.” In other words, here the “we” is a series of “I’s” that become porous, indistinct, that blur together. An “I” that is not its own extremes fractures among its own multiplicities. “All things swim and glimmer,” Emerson tells us later in that opening paragraph.21 If the “I” were as individuated as Emerson sometimes suggests it is, then it would never not know where it was. How are we to reconcile this with the version that has lingered for years of Emerson as rugged individualist? It would be false to say that the sometimes facile, self-reliant “bootstrap” side did not exist. Since those claims are always competing with other aspects of his Weltanschauung, to characterize Emerson’s work solely or even primarily that way is to read it out of its context. The bigger mistake is to overlook the other side of Emerson, that which presents and even enacts a fragmented self and a reality that is in excess of its representations. In fact, as I will argue in the next chapter, Emerson enacts the tenuous condition of the individuated subjectivity as his texts perpetually attempt to authorize and invent the fictive self as well as the fiction of a self. Let me come to this question of an excessive reality from another direction. In Call Me Ishmael, the poet Charles Olson writes, I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy. It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning. That made the first American story (Parkman’s): exploration.22

There is an uncanny similarity, or at least sympathy, between this passage and the opening of “Experience.” In both, subjectivity occurs within an inestimable space, space as the extension of the transparent eyeball Emerson describes in Nature. That is to say, for Olson and Emerson the central fact is that we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the sublime. The central fact of space is, as it was for Kant, that which is surely a priori. At the heart of this space is a “manifoldness” of forms and possibilities that are not a priori but are articulated during the process of articulation.

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It is worthwhile to linger with this digression a bit further. The title of Olson’s book of course refers to the first sentence of Melville’s MobyDick, but Olson’s title also can be read as self-referential. In other words, Olson himself is also Ishmael: a narrator who begins by naming himself and who is and is not (is it Olson or Olson as Ishmael that we respond to?—the double allusion superimposes itself over Olson, the flesh-andblood man) the author of the text that is being held. “[T]his is no book, / Who touches this touches a man,” says Whitman of his own Leaves of Grass.23 In this way, many American writers have taken it upon themselves to write themselves into existence, not as people but as cultural discourse, writing themselves out of exile into a kind of home. “Homeliness,” Thoreau writes in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, “is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there.”24 Of course, this suggests a kind of domesticity that I would argue is not apt, or is at least beside the point. Olson’s focus is on America as space and on the act of exploration, and the act of reading, which is a kind of geography, is both the means of exploration and the mapping of the world-in-itself. The text is what keeps the discourse, the speech act, perpetually a place to return to and then leave from once more. Obviously, I am suggesting a kind of American exceptionalism. As much as anything else, Emerson’s “American Scholar” is, as has been so often said, a literary declaration of independence. It is also the manifestation of (and response to) the philosophical groundlessness that so many American writers felt and feel. As such, Emerson inaugurates an exodus from overdetermined European modalities into an American experience. American writers are exiled from the literary and philosophical traditions of Europe because the space that Olson mentions seems to swallow up those old models of thinking, as that space he describes resists inscription. Whether or not European authors face these issues is not really relevant. What is relevant is how the issues of authority and legitimacy are broached. Emerson believed Americans needed the apparatus by which to authorize experience itself that was distinct from British traditions. In a minor anecdote from Emerson’s life we see a useful metaphor. In 1831, during his trip to Europe shortly after the death of his first wife, Ellen, Emerson traveled to Highgate to meet with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Emerson had been reading the old master, who embodied the most exhilarating, electrically inventive thinking on poetry and philosophy

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that post-Kantian England had to offer, yet the visit consisted mainly of Coleridge’s rants against Unitarianism. Emerson left, not discouraged, but certainly feeling as if there had been no give and take, feeling that Coleridge, the embodiment of contemporary British thinking, had no way to dialogue with Emerson’s immediate experiences.25 In short, Coleridge could not be one of Emerson’s readers. I cannot help thinking that this confirmed for Emerson that Europe could no longer provide the means necessary for legitimating American thought; thus, he saw the need to create his own readership, his own community. Writers (American or otherwise) in the Emersonian mood, then, are all Ishmael, cast out and wandering in a desert of space that is in constant need of exploration. Exploration is one way of seeing reading as procedural, as an act of interpretation that locates the author within that space, but the space is defined by the parameters the author has determined in the act of exploration. In other words, that act of textual negotiation creates the text as much as it creates the writer and the reader. This foregrounds the primary characteristic of text as a “web or tissue” (to allude to the etymology of text) of relations. From these negotiations with and of the primary materials of culture and selfhood, ways of reading “self ” and “Other” are made available. The American epistemology is conceived as a kind of, as Cavell might say, “finding as founding.”26 Whereas Cavell sees this in terms of a moral perfectionism, I see it as an ongoing skepticism of vocabularies that might otherwise displace this continuing act as finding. Both Whitman and Emerson refer to the United States as a kind of poem. As I mentioned earlier, Emerson insists, “Art is the path of the creator to his work.” In this way social existence comes into being as an articulated act. But as all of these “creations” are without a rigorous grounding—in terms of being authenticated and legitimated by previous philosophical systems—the poet is forced to keep writing. The terms of the argument keep shifting as the terms of the conversation keep changing, for if “finding is founding” then, as Emerson tells us, “defining” is “confining.” This problematic of perfection being both a goal to be pursued and a prison to be avoided is picked up most provocatively by the poet Wallace Stevens. “Let be be finale of seem,” writes Stevens in “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.”27 Frankly, “be” can never “be the finale of seem” because (to shift to another of Stevens’s poems) the “gay waltzes” do end, and “[S]ome harmonious skep-

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tic soon in a skeptical music // Will unite these figures of men and their shapes / Will glisten again with motion, the music / Will be motion and full of shadows.”28 There may be another way to approach this dilemma Emerson underlines. In “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” Whitman writes, “O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me, / O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you.”29 In countless passages, Whitman moves from the oratorical and impossibly universal to the incredibly particular and tender, testifying to his poetry’s emotional range. Whitman has constructed a bardic persona to be sure—one that was so successful, in the sense of being persuasive, that it even seemed to drown out his own modulating voice when it was taken up by his critics. Yet Whitman’s incessant use of “I” is really, if read closely, dislocating in that it diffuses the singularity of a self into “[t]he impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,”30 so the reader never knows quite how to respond because Whitman’s “I” keeps morphing and transposing itself. Here the singer/author creates the conditions for listening that give rise to a listener, but the conditions are perpetuated only if the listener keeps listening. Both singer and listener exist within the action of song, just as reader and author exist as long as the text does. Even the line I have just cited leads me toward the question I am wrestling with now. How does Whitman, say, construct the reader? Whitman’s poems seem to operate with an extreme awareness of both other and elsewhere that becomes even more personal in his writing of Drumtaps, which begins as pro-war but very quickly changes its tone and stance. John Carlos Rowe sees Whitman’s struggle in that particular book to be with “the ethics of poetically representing war and the violence it does both to the sacred body and human community.”31 The tension, argues Rowe, is ultimately between “the realities of war and Whitman’s ideals as a poet,” and thus in the end Whitman’s poetic diction overwhelms the soldiers and their real, historical presence and effaces them. Rowe seems not to acknowledge the vivifying effects of poetry that represent pain subjectively, allowing both the poet and the reader a place in attempting to recognize or acknowledge suffering, to bear witness to it and participate in the process of representing it. In some sense that shuttling between positions both public and seemingly private (but not hidden) is Whitman’s subject all

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along—not only in “A Sight in Camp,” where the boy of the last section is transfigured into Christ, and “The Wound-Dresser,” in which we are transformed into those pressing the poet to bear “witness,” but in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” as well, which is written toward the futurity of “those generations and generations hence.” Whitman writes the text of his community into existence by writing from such an amorphous, inclusive, uncentered center. Whitman’s reader is a generation (in the sense of having been generated), formed not only in the reading and negotiation of his poems but also “in dreams’ projections.”32 This formulation of generations being generated by Whitman’s present moment (and its awareness that it is also the past) indicates an ethical modality in which these poems participate. Again, Whitman is writing to a particular “us” that is formed by responding to his work. How does he accomplish this? What might the face of that reader look like? The question we might deal with comes from the seventh section of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”: “Who was to know what should come home to me?”33 The habits of language are in fact a habitable space in that the circulation and circumlocution of language bespeak a sense of belonging because one participates in these agreements as well as challenges them. Thus, home, where one dwells, comes to be the circumstances of subjectivity. For the writers I am discussing, there come moments when questions of locution invoke both skepticism and a kind of intimacy. The skepticism is a resistance to the possible ways in which eloquence can be a seduction, and thus a trap. And I am careful to call it an “action” rather than a “process,” as the latter implies that there is a telic product in sight. With “action” comes implied consequence or even result, but not a necessary resolution. This situation is at the shifting center of Emerson’s work and that of many of his contemporaries and progenitors. It is not a line (and thus anxiety) of influence I am sketching, nor even a genealogy, but a nexus of sympathetic writers, invested in the dynamic tensions of language’s materiality and metaphysics. The tensions come into play via the process of reading. Much like the motivating question, “Where do we find ourselves?” central to his essay “Experience,” Emerson’s overarching concern, “How shall I live?” (expressed explicitly in the essay “Fate” and implicitly throughout his writing), undermines any answer that is made available. In both cases, Emerson’s resolution of the central question is simply another question. “Fate” is precipitated by the various (and nearly simultaneous)

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discussions that Emerson cites as offering theories for the “Spirit of the Times.” Instead of summarizing these other arguments, he offers his own theory—a theory that is systematic (depending on the strength of one’s glance) yet resists dogmatism. In that sense, we see that discussion elicits response, and such “call and answer” is itself a form of responsibility in that it is a measure of social capital being invested in the community of “the Age.” Thus, “the conduct of life,” as both the title of the book where “Fate” appears and a phrase that Emerson incorporates into the essay itself, may be not read as “deportment” but as the very engagement of life that needs to be carried on.34 In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein writes, “Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.”35 In that sense we see what, among other things, motivates Wordsworth, as he claims in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, to “imitate, and . . . adopt the very language of men.”36 Wordsworth’s commitment is to “make use” of the language of the everyday, rather than a poetic diction, as that is where and how relations among people are formed. The emphasis of “a man speaking to men” foregrounds language as a network of relations rather than as a vehicle for communication. To want to be part of the text of the everyday is to invest in the tribulations of circulating within a community of language users and to offer a means of perspective by aestheticizing that speech. However, it is more accurate to contend that lyric poetry simply changes perspectives and thereby illuminates the aesthetics of the ordinary use of language. Shelley, in “A Defence of Poetry,” says it another way. For him poetry is a kind of ethics: “It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”37 Finally, Shelley believes, this allows a man to “put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.”38 Thus, paradoxically the familiar is estranged and then somehow becomes more intimate because of that estrangement. That makes sense when we think in terms of intimacy and “Otherness.” If the Other is able to maintain its own distinction, there can be a condition of intimacy, which is a kind of surrender, a deference. This necessitates two equal parties. However, if “Otherness” is erased, communication breaks down and there is no “intimacy.” Distance is the condition of intimacy.

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Ethics, then, does not mean a prescriptive morality, for example, “Thou shalt not kill,” or “Don’t spit on the floor.” Generally speaking, spitting on the floor is wrong, or at least unpleasant for most anyone involved. What needs to precede specific rules are the conditions for how and why people might invest in particular rules, laws, and so forth. Instead, ethics is a generalized view of negotiating the world and discovering how one lives in it. One hopes that the reason for investing is for more than one’s own good and the good of others because that response feels located already within an ethical position. Attention to how one uses language is a way of locating one’s investment in socializing interaction. “The poet thinks with his poem, in that lies his thought,” writes William Carlos Williams.39 And as William Blake writes, “As a man is, so he sees.”40 Also, then, we could say, “As a poet writes, so he thinks.” This would go toward saying that mind is indeed shapely, and that the poem is a bodying forth of thought. It is thought, not about thought. Or when it is “about thought,” it is “disciplined” by anxiety over wanting to think the “right thought.” There are, however, the Wordsworthian “spots of time” that maintain a kind of immediacy, that have a kind of “renovating virtue.” These are the moments when poets are open to the act of writing a kind of revelation, yet this revelation need not be prophetic. It is in fact a means of making available how one sees the world. “Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles,” writes Shelley.41 Thus, the revelation is not divine, but personal. “What are all those / fuzzylooking things out there? / Trees? Well, I’m tired / of them and rolled her head away,” writes Williams in his poem about the death of his English grandmother.42 Once she recollects the name of what she sees, Williams’s grandmother is familiar, indeed too familiar, with them. Once she locates them by making the world momentarily more distinct, and thus real, by naming them she situates herself within a specific space. After that, after the language renders “placeness,” she is able to leave. Perhaps we could say that it is not revelation but rather relation that becomes possible, a kind of intimacy that can arise in this tension of location and dislocation. I think of Dickinson’s poem that reads: Exultation is the going Of an inland soul to sea, Past the houses—past the headlands Into deep Eternity—

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Bred as we, among the mountains, Can the sailor understand The divine intoxication Of the first league out from land?43

The exultation, which is a kind of ek-stasis, a “going,” is the activity of moving out of a cloistered conceptual milieu (“an inland soul”) and moving into the mise en abîme of the sublime (“the sea”). The poem’s first stanza moves into metaphysical abstraction and an invocation of the ineffable and then seems to dissolve into the white space between the stanzas. But rather than stay in this “blank” void, the speaker becomes immediately self-conscious (“Bred as we,” the speaker says) and then becomes aware of the “other,” in this case the sailor. So here, being overwhelmed does not show that language is limited by what it can or cannot represent. Instead, Dickinson acknowledges a shifting from one vocabulary to another, to new ways of saying that are more receptive to, or at least are made more readily available to, a world of worlds. This poem ends with an interrogative, eliciting further conversation and evoking an ever-expanding community of the question, forestalling any false conclusions and keeping language’s activity open. At the very least, the question she ends with considers the limitations of understanding within language games. Can a sailor understand in the same way that those bred among the mountains understand? Is there ever a way to bridge the gap between these two vocabularies? Rorty suggests that philosophical change occurs “not when a new way is found to deal with an old problem but when a new set of problems emerges and the old ones begin to fade away.”44 Dickinson’s poem acknowledges the difficulty of communication between groups as well as the fact that what is ordinary to the one group can only be experienced via metaphor and in terms of difference by another group. The fundamental problem of never knowing, of never being certain, of complete communication, is neither a new set of problems nor an old set: it is reality that constantly reasserts itself in different ways. Interrogatives are one manner of delineating the gaps between groups of language users. Language is the space that these American poets negotiate and find a way to live within, each finding his or her way to a question. Such negotiation with language may be true, on some scale, of any writer. These writers in the Emersonian mood (or mode), however, make that engagement their central concern. This movement is not toward representations of states of

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knowing but circulates restlessly, like some hungry ghost, unable to find a form of thought that either consoles or states experience conclusively. It is no arbitrary choice—I hope that it is in fact more than whim at last—that my focus is on poetry and poetics. Charles Altieri writes: “[The lyric poem] itself comes very close to serving as our finest philosophical instrument for dealing with agency because its abiding question is what is involved in making those [social] investments.”45 In other words, I am reading these works as the works of poets—not in terms of their genre but in the way Rorty uses the term (thinking of poesis, a “making”)—as examples of thinkers trying to find and even make new vocabularies, new tools (“We make our meek adjustments,” Hart Crane writes in “Chaplinesque”), in order to find new ways to address and respond to (and thus be responsible for) the world.46 This is the poet that Emerson envisions as a language worker. Nothing more than this? Nothing less. I am trying to chart out ways in which the discourses of ethics and epistemology (and this has everything to do with language) are connected. It is important, however, to make these issues something more than academic. Acts of criticism, just like literary acts, may not make anything happen, but attempts at reading, interpreting, and making sense of language (and therefore how we reveal the world to ourselves and others) ought to let us see how things could be otherwise, if approached from different and differing perspectives. What I mean by this might best be represented by the following excerpt from a letter Wittgenstein sent to Norman Malcolm in an attempt to mend their estranged friendship. [W]hat is the use of studying philosophy if all it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any . . . journalist in the use of dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends. You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about “certainty,” “probability,” “perception,” etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people’s lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s most important.47

There are few passages that are as moving to me as this. In this passage, we see that for Wittgenstein epistemology always implies an ethics, and that is why philosophy is a way back to a dialogue of self and community. In other words, “doing philosophy” is a way of discovering the grammar of

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subjectivity within a wider epistemological frame. For Wittgenstein, Emerson, and Nietzsche, philosophy is an activity whose aim is to make apparent the operative ethics that are latent within, often obscured by, systems of metaphysics. The thrust here echoes Emerson’s essays as well as Wallace Stevens’s belief that the function of the poet is “to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others.” By doing this, the poet’s role is “to help people to live their lives.”48 This intercourse or economy of the imagination is predicated on engagement and can make available the conditions of what that engagement might include. This engagement and its stakes form the very arena of ethics. “Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a lurking-place, every word is also a mask,” Nietzsche writes.49 Thus, negotiating with epistemological positions is an ethical act that renders opaque the mask of ideology. By ideology I mean the underlying (and largely unconscious) principles that suggest a group’s structure of cohesion: the means by which the constituent members know how to respond to or negotiate given situations and by which each individual locates himself or herself via sympathies and resistances. It was Nietzsche’s project to make the mechanisms of naturalized ideology apparent, to show that values and beliefs, though certainly not unmotivated, are arbitrary and contingent. In that do we find both possibilities of change and the nastiness Wittgenstein speaks of in his letter to Malcolm. As it stands, there is a genealogy of skepticism that moves from (negotiates, critiques, distrusts) Kantian and Hegelian systematics, through Nietzsche, and to Derrida, de Man, and others. What I am suggesting, however, is that there is another possible arc that moves from Emerson to Nietzsche to Wittgenstein, but this movement is more of a circulation than a progression: each of these thinkers changes and reinscribes our understandings of the others. Thus, reading these three in conjunction with one another offers an alternative to the deconstruction paradigm, an alternative that does not reify its own oppositional stance. Instead, this alternative genealogy makes available what I describe as “constructive” or “constitutive” skepticism. In “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” Emerson writes: “The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds both

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wrong by being in extremes. He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance.”50 The skeptic must keep shifting in order to avoid stultification—if not, one could find that one’s high-wire, balancing act occurs in a ditch. Ultimately, Emerson’s skeptic does not find a position of balance but is himself or herself the means of balance. Exploring answers to these questions may be a way out of the quagmire of deconstruction’s intrinsic metaphysics toward an ethical arena. At the risk of invoking one of poststructuralism’s adopted forefathers, it seems Nietzsche’s opening to Beyond Good and Evil is entirely useful here. He begins that book with his famous critique of the “Will to Truth,” a condition that he believed had become naturalized to the point of transparency. But his further reflection is particularly useful: “The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us—or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem? Which of us is the Oedipus here? Which the Sphinx? It would seem to be a rendezvous of questions and notes of interrogation.”51 Nietzsche questions what motivates the Will to Truth as well as what establishes the values that ground such a question. The Will to Truth desires a definitive, even authoritative positioning of both Oedipus and the Sphinx. The terms of the question, even its grammatical hierarchy, cannot be definitively established. As is to be expected of him, Nietzsche critiques the obligatory set of antitheses that this suggests. Simply adhering to a metaphysical system of antitheses delimits possibilities and simply reifies rationalist and transcendentalist systems of discourse. These are the systems that maintain that something is either “A” or “not A” but cannot be both. In any event, such systems of discursivity depend on binaries in order to operate, and these binaries support various appeals to empirical verification or logical syllogisms. The general poststructural/deconstructive reading of Nietzsche’s project argues that he calls for (and from) a condition of play that turns these rigid binaries into generative displacements. In its efforts to dismantle the shackles of rationalism, this is certainly no mean feat. But what the conventional deconstructionist move tends to overlook is the phrase “rendezvous of questions.” We could read this in terms of a calling us back, repeatedly, to a sense of conversation as context, and context as conversation. Each question becomes an activation of a new context, a new frame interpreting meaning. The consistent move toward rearticulation is predicated on a wish to be understood. Even if there can never be

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complete understanding, the wish to be understood and the efforts to make that possible imply a responsibility to a larger discourse community (variously defined by shifting contextual parameters). Who is Oedipus and who is the Sphinx, in the most Jamesian of situations, depends on a given context, and that is why the question needs to be posed and reposed (lest it slip into repose) continually. The posing of questions and the need for interpretive paradigms allow one to make an investment of intellectual and social capital by which one commits oneself to the community. By such light, interpretation is participation in the cultural gestures by which a group comes to know itself and be known by others. “The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing,” writes Wittgenstein.52 What grounds the conversation, then, is its groundlessness: how we are called upon again and again to restate the terms of our going on. What the mask of philosophy hides is an ideology, yes, but it is an ideology hidden in the deep grammar that gives us the world as we know it. In fact, it is this grammar that makes ideology possible. The ethics that this calls for requires of us not to investigate how language works— “For how does a man learn to recognize his own state of knowing something?” asks Wittgenstein53—but to see how language is used. As he says repeatedly, philosophy does not invent new ways of seeing; rather, it reveals to us what has always already been part of the language within which we exist. “Philosophy,” he tells us, “is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”54 If language can be a bewitchment, then only by careful attention to the ways it is used, and to what kind of action is constituted by language, will one be able to stave off this confusion. This suggests a certain skeptical stance toward the view that one can ever, via introspection or circumspection, draw near an incontestable clarity since language and a community of relations are inseparable. Such skepticism posits that there can never be a fully apprehended universalized context. As there can be no bedrock meaning or foundation, the terms must be approached from every side and at every point by a multiplicity of voices and perspectives. This skepticism is what motivates a perpetual (or infinite) conversation. In charting out how socialization and individuation are inextricably linked, in more than just an attendant relationship of reactivity, one must look closely at the grammatical formation of the “I” and what it entails. Language is a relational medium, is the tissue that connects the mores and

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means of proceeding in a given situation. Intrinsic to this view is the belief that language does not give a logical picture of the world. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein insists, “Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all,—but that they are related to one another in many different ways.”55 This complex of relationships constitutes language. In mastering these relationships (in the sense of being competent), the palette of one’s subjectivity broadens, becomes more comprehensive, subtler. Skepticism is still a constituent part of this concept of language, but its locus resides in interpretations rather than in the mechanism of meaning itself. Meaning is discerned by its use in and as language. Such a conception of language is necessarily antifoundationalist, as meaning is wholly contingent. This antifoundationalism might be used to democratically reframe the conditions of the self and to navigate the self as it circulates in the relational matrix of language and culture. In J. L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia we see the more generalized positions of an antifoundationalism that does not sacrifice agency outright and in fact seems to be based in a communitarianism that makes ethics possible. Austin focuses here on the work of three of his contemporaries (A. J. Ayer, H. H. Price, and G. J. Warnock) who were drawing on ideas posited by eighteenth-century Irish empiricist George Berkeley (in particular the claim that only individual particular perceptions are possible, so abstract ideas were an impossibility) in order to argue toward a “two languages” conception of epistemology. Their argument distributes utterances into two categories. The first category comprises sentences that foreground observation based on data provided by the senses. These sentences are about perception and incorporate empirical evidence that moves toward “material objects.” The second language is based on composites of observations. Austin summarizes the general grounding of their views against a Kantian background. “The general doctrine,” he writes, “generally stated, goes like this: we never see or otherwise perceive (or ‘sense’), or anyhow we never directly perceive or sense, material objects (or material things), but only sense-data (or our own ideas, impressions, sensa, sense-perceptions, percepts, &c.).”56 Moving from this premise, Ayer and the others argue that the language of material objects stands in need of verification, and this material-object language is the best hope for bringing “things-in-themselves” into the realm of language

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and its inevitable distortions. Austin’s contemporaries, in fact, provide a formula that employs a dizzying catalogue of verifications that may not be spoken but are implied. Ayer and the others hope to prove that “materialobject” sentences can be reduced to sense-data, if necessary, in order to be verified. Austin maintains that the two-language concept put forth by his contemporaries is marshaled to create (or support) a foundation for language as it seeks out utterances that he describes as “incorrigible.” This incorrigibility would be the basis of a foundational system by which the truth or falsehood of a sentence could be evaluated, regardless of the context. One need not be Nietzsche to see the Will to Truth motivating such efforts. Austin calls the belief that one can never know an object (the “thing-in-itself ”) but only sense-data the “argument from illusion” because it suggests that one perceives only indirectly. But Austin notices that “indirectly” implies a “kink in distance” that may be apropos only to the sense of sight. How can there be illusory smells, for instance? Separating languages into “materiality” and “immateriality” sets up a false dichotomy (the “real” and the “false,” and so forth) that smacks of idealism. If we can never discern a “real,” if it can never be accessible to us, then what would it matter? Instead, Austin places his emphasis on the words we use and points us in the direction of ordinary language. “It is perhaps even clearer that the way things look is, in general, just as much a fact about the world, just as open to public confirmation or challenge, as the way things are.”57 If there is no discernible distinction to be made between appearances and the Ding an sich (between a “real x” and “not a real x”), then there can be no way of telling the difference. If such is the case, we must respond to the appearances that are available to us via the normative processes of language. What this means is that there are no transcendent criteria to be laid down in order to always tell the real from the not real. All situations depend on the elements and the problems of particular cases. It is easy to see how this could fragment into relativistic sets of interpretations. However, what makes these interpretations possible is the shared system of language. Even if we disagree in our views, we agree in the language used to express the various readings. In short, one is able to respond because the scaffolding of language is inclusive rather than exclusive. No one has more of a claim than anyone else to truth; no one has greater or lesser access to what is real.

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Austin contends that the force of an utterance needs to be considered in and via the frame of its own context. This last word is essential to Austin in that he is trying to critique and undermine the notion that there is something intrinsic to an utterance that constitutes its force. Derrida’s first challenge is to this idea of context—what might it entail? Derrida, in Limited Inc, mounts a salient argument against Austin’s focus on speech acts and performative versus constative utterances, in the course of which he asks, “Is there a rigorous and scientific concept of context? Or does the notion of context not conceal, behind a certain confusion, philosophical presuppositions of a very determinate nature?”58 On the one hand, this is a problem that arises from Derrida’s own inquiry (in the form of a symptomology predicated on a particular if not specific set of assumptions) rather than being an intrinsic weakness of Austin’s arguments. One could not, and perhaps, pace Nietzsche, should not, rigorously define all boundaries of context, as even the notion of context is determined by the context within which it occurs. However, Derrida’s primary concern is that Austin’s ideas of the felicity or infelicity of a performative (that is, whether or not the various conditions for the successful execution of a performative sentence, in the form of an oath, pledge, and so on, are met) are dependent on the intention of the speaker—for example, is the speaker serious?—and presuppose the presence of a speaker by which to measure the immeasurable. The dangers of Austin’s assumptions are all too clear. In response one feels the hackneyed impulse to put each word in postmodern sardonic scare quotes: “How” can “anyone” ever “really” “know” if the “speaker” was “serious”? The ironizing of the component words is (ironically) tongue in cheek, but it does suggest the dead end to which certain strains of poststructuralism lead one—driven, as it were—into scare-quoted silence. Such ironizing neglects the fact that the sentence is intelligible in various capacities and registers even if it cannot ever fully be exhausted of semantic repositioning. In some ways, though, intent does not matter; if the various social conditions are met, these are the circumstances that authenticate the utterance, not interior states of intentionality. In “Signature Event Context,” Derrida insists that writing is traditionally defined as a means of communicating and that one writes to communicate to someone who is absent. Representation supplants presence in this way, and thus absence is seen as the modification (or privation) of

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presence. Since every sign presupposes an absence, the absence within the field of writing will have to be “of an original type.”59 Moreover, writing, to be writing (that is, to count), must be able to “outlive” both the addressee and the addresser, who after all are trapped within their historical moment. Writing must be iterable—repeatable, itinerant, citable—and each repetition changes the context and the effect. This contextuality is not the problem but the very point, I argue later, of appealing to an ordinary language argument. Derrida criticizes Austin for privileging speech over writing because it is dependent on the speaker’s context, not the utterance’s context. As such, Derrida argues, not inappropriately, Austin’s view of speech acts is predicated on binaries that, even though not of the value/fact form that Austin is trying to undermine, are of the felicitous/infelicitous type. In their way, speech acts (or at least speech act theory) are dependent on the foundation of Western metaphysics. Rather than undermine the false dichotomies of value and fact, Austin unconsciously rephrases the binaries that are in place. Thus, Austin’s efforts deconstruct themselves. Deconstruction’s aim, Derrida tells us in an enactment of his methodology in Limited Inc, is to expose those binaries and reverse them, both in their own ideological situation and elsewhere. Doing so offers an intervention in the standard teleological movement of philosophy and ideology. If we can see the value in Derrida’s formulation (or revelation) of difference, it seems clear that binaries and metaphysics still carry the day. Derridean notions of linguistic play make available a certain profitable skepticism, but a skepticism that short-circuits any means of proceeding. The charges that deconstruction has no political efficacy are legion. Perhaps the most insidious by-product of deconstruction is that self-reflexivity displaces self-reflection. The move to decenter the subject becomes habitual, and there is no place from which one can speak that is not suspect. Jonathan Culler, long one of deconstruction’s most articulate spokesmen, suggests, “If the possibilities of thought and action are determined by a series of systems which the subject does not control or even understand, then the subject is ‘decentred’ in the sense that it is not a source or centre to which one refers to explain events. It is something formed by these forces.”60 The terms get slippery here, especially when concepts such as “agency,” “subjectivity,” and “intentionality” blur together and quite often are used interchangeably. The forces at work include but are not limited to the discourses of culture,

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historiography, and material production. But in all that, “where do we find our selves”? Culler, Derrida, and others are right to destabilize the grounds of subjectivity, to make its conditions less transparent. In seeking out the various forces that conjoin to form a subject, to characterize both its form and function within a philosophical grammar, Wittgenstein, however, makes available in his unflagging investigations a situation in which meaning is derived wholly from use. For this reason, the subject arises out of negotiations with its larger community. The subject is an individuated manifestation of “forms of life” characterized by language use. “The common behaviour of mankind,” he writes, “is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.”61 The unknown comes to be re-cognized in the radical of difference between the language of the community in which the subject circulates and that which is alien. The function of the unknown is either accommodated (even if it resists interpretation, it functions as a cipher that discourse approaches but cannot appropriate) or is simply not apprehended. Obviously, to say that subjectivity is constituted in and by language (and in terms of a relation to language) is to be antiessentialist and antifoundational. However, it remains true that whether or not the subject is constructed by language (and various schools of thought would indeed argue against such a view), the possible conditions of subjectivity do not make a discernible difference in the subject’s grammatical and syntactical positioning as that which performs activity. If that is the case, it is not so much the subject that gets decentered but our sense of its trajectory (in the form of our own philosophical investigations) that is changed: how we make sense of its negotiations of objects, ideas, and events. What I mean to say, then, is that intentionality is read not as an inner (and hidden) state but as the locus for interpretive acts by others evaluating or “reading” a subject’s actions. Charles Altieri justifies finding an alternative to those conventions of poststructuralist thought that might otherwise inhibit agency when he offers this: [Perhaps] we can use the problems Western philosophy has in discussing this subjectivity as an index of what an alternative approach may be able to do: rather than depend on a sharp dichotomy between what we can represent as knowledge and forces we posit beyond those representations but cannot describe, we can turn to an expressivist tradition concerned not with knowing selves but with realizing

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them through the work of articulation. . . . It suffices to grasp subjectivity as a relation to the world formed and facilitated by our learning to use the full grammar of first person structures afforded by our languages.62

Embedded in these comments is a sympathy with Austin’s argument that to try to make sharp distinctions between the way the world looks and the way it is, is to chase after chimeras and obfuscation. Instead, Altieri (as well as Austin and Wittgenstein, I contend) turns toward language as a means of discerning the presence that Wittgenstein intends when he says with the opening sentence of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The world is all that is the case.”63 Replacing a metaphysical concern with the ineffable with a subtler apprehension of the grammar of socialization is a complex interplay of cultural forces and hermeneutic responses (and responsibility). The shift of emphasis reveals that the topoi of these forces are of what the self consists. The world is a sum of the apperception available as language. This is not to say that there is no materiality, but consciousness moves in the medium of language, and to suggest (as Ayer and Warnock do) that there is another kind of language that might break us out of our system could only be called a bewitchment. “We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge—and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves—how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?” Nietzsche writes in the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals.64 To seek ourselves means attending to the words we use in order to make the experience of language (which is not a theory about epistemology but an enactment of epistemology) a site of discovering our subjectivity. Looking at the language we use every day to communicate, indeed to locate ourselves amid desires, among sundry drives and appetites (“bringing words back from their metaphysical use,” Wittgenstein would say), is an attempt to describe what it means to be a subject, is in fact to posit that we exist within a concatenation of rhizomatic subjectivities. This situation of subjectivities is not an impossibly vast network of simultaneous solipsisms, but it is an agreement of language. Mired in metaphysics, words sound as if a long way off. It is in their ordinariness (a vexing term but useful because of its vagueness), their use value, that words arise from and form community. It almost need not be said that deconstruction’s insights are indeed its blindnesses. By locating the focus of its skepticism in the writer’s intentions and not in the exchange of interpretation, deconstruction renders

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hermeneutic subjectivity inert. What it fails to consider is that we are interpreting language acts, every day and in every way. What is necessary is an alternative critical inquiry that posits the self as the subject’s interpolation of the actions of language. Granted, I risk privileging literature in suggesting what criticism’s project might be. The act of writing is a subject’s putting into practice the various normative strategies that he or she has been initiated into by attaining a certain competence when it comes to language. But in writing, the subject makes visible the negotiations and articulations of culture: the subject is written into existence in its action as language. Writing is an interpretation of linguistic and epistemological potentialities. Further, it is the annunciation of an individual’s interpretation of the mechanism of language. I believe that I can say “x” because that is how I understand language to work. This is not an argument for a private language because that annunciation, that interpretation, falls within a horizon of expectations made possible by social mores. Again, I cite Wittgenstein (and his interlocutor): “‘So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?’ —It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.”65 A readable self is thus not represented as language but is presented in language. Then a further act of interpretation, this one performed by the “reader,” occurs. The reader must read with, as well as against, the grain of the text because if generally the situation is a shared language (and as Wittgenstein says, “[T]o imagine a language is to imagine a form of life”), its nuances and particular actions are instances of meaning that operate within various indices simultaneously. Ultimately, I am uncomfortable with the notion of levels, as that implies a hierarchical structure of meaning, and how would such a hierarchy be determined? How are the relative values of denotation and connotation gauged against each other? How is the value of allusion over reference established? It is more useful to think of the situation as rhizomatic (to borrow the term from Deleuze and Guattari, who use it for different if not unrelated ends in A Thousand Plateaus), and thus meaning and levels of interpretation exist in dimensions or, to allude again to Emerson, circles that become accessible in various gradations and capacities depending on both the context of the reading and the abilities (even capabilities) of the reader. Literary acts consciously foreground interpretive situations. If we are rarely conscious of the fact that we are engaging in in-

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terpretation when we, for example, ask, “When’s the next train?” or complain, “These pretzels are too salty,” then in a literary text we are constantly aware of reading as interpretation. Participation in a language game signals mastery, but it is a particular understanding of the conventions and “rules” of the game. The literary text, on the other hand, poses itself as “a rendezvous of questions and notes of interrogations.” We can once more turn to Nietzsche, whose own efforts, much like Emerson’s, are directed toward overcoming his own authority as authorizing context of his books. Such a conflict as the text evidences and enacts (the contrary motions of a self-apotheosis that attempts to overcome itself ) goes a long way toward showing the heterogeneity rather than the homogeneity of the ego. Ego is equated with willing, grammatically presupposing a singular subject (the “I”). Nietzsche, however, argues against perceiving the “I” as simply an analytical proposition. The first-person singular pronoun is instead a synthetic proposition. A more radical reading would be to suggest that the “I,” in its capacity as an extended metaphor, is an allegory—a figure that tropes a subject’s compendium of experiences without resolving them. Nietzsche thus moves out of doxa via paradox to disrupt the naturalized grammatical position of the subject, to revise the “I” as metaphor. If each word is a mask, then the “I” is both the most insidious and the most transparent of masks. In light of Nietzsche’s efforts, it is clear that the “I” is the mask of the mask of philosophy, for the “I” as veil does not efface us—it effaces the world. In tracing the movements that texts make, we see that the self is a topology of resistances. Cultural forms become objective expressions of the way in which the self gives itself shape as palpable actuality. Formally, ethically, and epistemologically, literary texts, in varying degrees and gradations, make cultural mores and naturalized ideology visible via the matrix of interactions and confrontations of their rhetoric. In Act and Quality, Altieri suggests, “If poets are not legislators of the race, they may still be considered its educators. . . . Our passage into a fully adult understanding depends in large part on our effort to meet the demands on our grammar imposed by the complex perspicuous samples which poets and philosophers create.”66 The semantic, cultural, and ethical difficulties that a text raises allow a reader to “mature”; that is, one must work to grasp the concepts and metaphors that exist as literary texts, thereby deepening one’s mastery of language, culture, and figuration. Perhaps all along Nietzsche’s

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aim, and the aim of Emersonian modernism, is just that: to create a condition in which the reader must overcome his or her self in order to engage the texts. In that they are wholly performatives and not descriptions, literary texts form embouchures for the self ’s articulation and call upon acts of criticism and interpretation to deepen resources for apprehending the way language enacts epistemology, history, and culture. “Exultation is the going / Of an inland soul to sea,” writes Emily Dickinson. The movement across ways of proceeding opens the identity to a furtherance of its own potentiality. Perhaps this suggests a naïve belief (certainly many Marxists would level that charge) that language makes possible a spectrum of perceptions and experiences that allow one to read the world in its various modes and fits of appearances, sometimes in compensatory ways and sometimes in contradictory ways. The self then is not a stable unit, nor is it even a field or locus. It is a happening, an action that reveals itself in gestures and articulations. In an exchange between the interlocutors in his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asserts, “‘When one means something, it is oneself meaning’; so one is oneself in motion. One is rushing ahead and so cannot also observe oneself rushing ahead.”67 The text and its attendant hermeneutic possibilities externalize and concretize those very motions. By seeing and dramatizing interactions within the text and among author, text, and reader, we can see that choices are being made all of the time. In light of this, the possibility of making other choices, ones that might have never been realized, opens up to individuals. In this way agency is reinvested, and the dialectic of the individual and the collective becomes a generative situation. Action, admittedly, is a term difficult to pin down. At once, though, it is possible to see action as response, a motion of the self in the public sphere. Action or response must necessarily appear in the context of the public, else it could not be verified. Yet the question remains: what counts as response? If it is publicly verified, it is individually defined, in the sense of Emerson’s suggestion (in his essay “Fate”) of the “private solution.” This tension between the public and the private is one of the most provocative that Emerson lays out. He writes: “A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one and the other foot on the back of the other.”68 The tension that arises is that of a being who is constructed of the public materials of language and rhetoric but who believes itself to be private and individu-

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ated. This tension is what we could call self. If “[m]an is not order of Nature . . . but a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the Universe,”69 it is our grammar that creates a position for the subject, “I.” Being everywhere in language means we are everywhere in the communal, relational properties of language. If “[h]istory is the action and reaction of . . . Nature and Thought,” then “[e]verything is pusher or pushed,” insists Emerson.70 Out of the collision between idealism and materialism, from the grappling and negotiation of the world’s recalcitrant materiality with an itinerant grammar, consciousness arises. Agency is not necessarily complicity, but it does involve a process of identification. A broadened awareness of the mechanisms of subjectivity (including those that sometimes go against the grain of sociological matrices but still act as coherent parts of dialogical processes) allows one to master language games and to attain the acuity to discern differences in contexts that might not otherwise be observable. Because one has a deft and more broadly realized means of reading the world, those ideological and cultural templates once thought to be totalizing and inflexible become fluid, and the subject might be more apt to move between and choose among conceptual apparatuses. The hope and claim upon which liberal education is founded are that general knowledge leads to self-knowledge, which is the necessary condition for ethical agency. This self-knowledge may not be a complete political freedom, as situations of tyranny and oppression would not completely vanish, but the individual (re)gains the ability to respond; such responsibility, in fact, is agency itself. The ratio of difference and affinity being the calculus of its self-consciousness, the subject gains access to the materials of its own existence—a consummation devoutly to be wished. Perhaps this all again risks teleology, but finally I think not. There is an appeal to coherence, to seeing how a community might recognize modes of coherence that do not homogenize difference but find their negotiations as productive and generative. The question of agency persists amid the conversation and agonism of a liberalism brought forth on principles of ethical responses to political and social conditions. We are faced again and again with Emerson’s question “How shall I live?” Each action that such a question brings about reaffirms ethical participation in the “form of life” in which and by which we discover ourselves and confirm subjectivity. And if we also ask, as Vladimir in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot does, “And in all that what truth will there be?” we are free to remember that context is a text perpetually in need of revision and revisitation.

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I use Emerson as my representative figure for a kind of modernism that begins well before the various aesthetic and psychological crises occurring after the First World War. Emerson uses his prose to loosen the grip of the habitual on the conventions of thought. That is why, as Stanley Cavell, Richard Poirier, and others have shown, Emerson needs to be reckoned in terms of philosophy, and yet at the same time as a philosopher he doesn’t “behave.” Emerson aims, for himself as much as for his reader, at an awareness of the way our minds are dominated by conventions and concepts that we can hardly escape, given the rules and mores to which language is subject. To suggest that Emerson wants to escape these conventions would be to put things too heroically. Instead, Emerson makes possible negotiations of concepts via language. “[T]he experience of poetic creativeness . . . is not found in staying at home, nor yet in travelling, but in transitions from one to the other, which must therefore be adroitly managed to present as much transitional surface as possible,” Emerson writes.71 Moving amid deep structures of thought is not to completely escape but to negotiate, and negotiation demands social, and thus ethical, investiture. Emerson’s modernism is forged in the kiln of the belief in a “stupendous antagonism.” This commitment and interrogation of resistance as well as acceptance are and are not Hegelian, are and are not Kantian. For Emerson brings as part of the essential project of a new yet unapproachable American literature an emphasis on self-consciousness, and this self-consciousness constitutes the ground of otherness and intimacy. Although I have placed them alongside philosophers, those literary figures I discuss in the following chapters are not philosophers as such because they use their art to confront foundational systems of thought not at the conceptual level but at the experiential level. To respond to philosophy with philosophy is to participate in a discourse determined—some would say overdetermined—by its own systemicity, by its own equation of proposition and redress. Still, philosophy and poetry are often fellow travelers. By using philosophical lenses to read certain writers who participate in a phenomenological performativity inaugurated by Emerson, we see the ways they, via language, begin to write themselves and their audience into existence. The network of sympathies and resistances, choices and disavowals that this gives rise to, while always in effect, offers an occasion to consider encounters of subjectivities, and to wonder what might constitute an ethics of reading.

2 Reading, Agency, and the Question of “Fate”

To write about the ethics of reading is no small thing, and it is difficult even to say where such ethics might be positioned. On the one hand, ethics ought to be an intrinsic condition for textuality. Since all rhetoric is au fond an attempt at persuasion, readers might do well to become attentive to the ways that language and its social contract (and as a social contract)—the necessary condition for meaningfulness—create particular possibilities for meaning and meaningfulness. J. Hillis Miller offers a useful, if broad, description of this question of ethics and reading as being “that aspect of the act of reading in which there is a response to the text that is both necessitated, in the sense that it is a response to an irresistible demand, and free, in the sense that [one] must take responsibility for [one’s own] response and for the further effects, ‘interpersonal,’ institutional, social, political, or historical, of [the] act of reading.”1 Miller’s thinking need not send us back to Barthes’s “Death of the Author.” Whereas classical rhetoric focuses on the most useful strategies for persuasion, eschewing questions of meaning making, thereby assuring the rhetor of his or her ascendant or at least dominant position, Miller shifts the attention to the audience. This repositioning suggests that a text’s meaning is a complicity, which implicates reader and author, neither having sole or even definitive authority. It is hard to miss the irony of Miller’s insistence that the reader “must take responsibility.” Why must the reader do this? Why, for his or her “own

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good,” of course. But who determines that and on what authority? These questions are not meant to be either relativistic or facetious; rather, I want to point out how Miller’s authority creates itself and persuades the reader, or attempts to, of such authority’s legitimacy. That Miller does this while trying to “empower” the reader is problematic: as is so often the case with any theoretical frame, a theorist replicates the conditions and situations that he or she is trying to dismantle. In this case, the forcefulness of Miller’s terms may be his attempt to be polemical or provocative in the hopes of stirring the reader into inspired agreement or informed disagreement. Thoreau often makes claims throughout, say, “Civil Disobedience” designed to provoke some kind, perhaps any kind of impassioned response, for or against him. In Thoreau’s texts the exaggerations, sometimes so extreme as to verge on self-parody, draw attention to the process of his rhetoric. Miller’s text never exposes its mechanisms so self-consciously as that. Nevertheless, the struggle of the mechanisms of his own text in negotiating his claim suggests questions of force operating within the field of textuality. A text provides the occasion for negotiation of sense, of meaning, with meaning being a complex dynamic of consent, assent, and resistance. These elements and modes knitted together form the overarching matrix of identification that underwrites the representation of agency and authority. In other words, it is inadequate to see a text merely as the object of the reading process. A text is not simply acted upon. A text, in these terms, is the medium by which writing acts (acts that are themselves the media of cultural and epistemological identifications and resistances) require further, even supplemental actions. Miller’s reference to an “irresistible demand” (made ironic by Miller’s use of imperatives) echoes Emerson’s description of an “irresistible dictation” in his essay “Fate.” The connection between Miller and Emerson lies in the process of interpretation, which is regarded by some as an attempt to “get things right.” On the one hand, readers must be “true” or at least faithful to the text. There is ample room to question how we could quantify or verify this fidelity, and surely relativists and certain reader response theorists might take issue with this claim. At the very least, we rarely read, “It was a dark and stormy night,” and think it to mean, for instance, “Fruit pies are too tangy.” In fact, the dispute of boundaries of reading practices testifies to at least one foundational agreement of what constitutes reading: the text’s the thing by which we’ll test our cultural understanding.

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Traditionally, symbolists or allegorists, even those who linger as New Critical “werewolves” in deconstructive disguises, would point to words as being freights for meanings, seeking to illuminate the primarily figurative qualities of language. Words in texts are important, or so the arguments go, inasmuch as they always point to other concepts, a preference for tropes over topoi, cite over site, representation over presentation. By moving quickly and reductively through some opposing methodologies, this crude assessment of a handful of other critical practices is useful only in that it highlights how some critical methodologies are too focused on burning away the text in order to get out its truth content. What if we were to suggest that a text’s immediate truth content (that is, what it is about) is neither its most interesting nor its most important element? Such a proposition would be invested in how a text attempts to enact the conditions of truth, the way it creates its own authority. Since ultimately the reader needs to legitimate that text’s authority and legitimacy, the text needs to convince the reader to do so. This is not simply to point out the features of rhetoric and persuasion and suggest that they are always in effect. Rather, it is to suggest that questions of resistance and identity between the reader and the author form and are formed by the performances of the text. This complex relationship maps out a series of agreements, but agreements not in principles or ideas so much as agreements in the ways someone within a given community or culture can and cannot say things in terms of making sense. These agreements are never wholly settled, and their implications can be vast. The interaction, for instance, is predicated on commensurate ideas of subjectivity, the “I’s” and the “you’s” being relatively commensurate in their grammatical function. That said, not making sense can sometimes be at least as meaningful as being “clear” because the shape and sound of the negotiations of meaning and of what constitutes meaningfulness give a horizon of the beliefs and values by which ideas get measured. Getting things “right” is not all that is at stake, nor (at least with literary texts) is it ever possible. We dip words into the flow of our own understanding and the constitutive forces, experience, training, temperament, which form that understanding and measure it both against another’s and in terms of a larger community. In other words, it must make sense to us, even if that means, as so often happens with the most obdurate modernists such as Gertrude Stein or James Joyce, that if we do not understand a particular text, we can locate it against or within ideas of genre, literary convention, even historical paradigms. Or at the very least, to say “I

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don’t understand that” locates the sentence as being outside the boundary of our understanding. There is nothing that remains unnamable, despite the claims of petit poststructuralists, because its name becomes “that which is unnamable,” although such a label will most likely be unsatisfying. This inadequacy, this insufficiency, comes to inform the term that stands in its place, in the way that the term sublime so often operates. Facing, so to speak, a difficult, even intractable sentence or passage forces the reader to work harder at the process of meaning making, to determine whether the gap is in one’s own mastery of the terms or if it lies in the language game itself. This meaning making is not wholly within the reader but arises in the encounter between reader and text. But the field of this encounter is the thousand manifold aspects of culture that circulate as and within language. It need not be said that everyone goes through this process a thousand ways, a thousand times a day. These instances of reading seem as natural as taking a breath, but the difficult text foregrounds that there is a process, that the way one uses language is evidence of an investment in ways of using language. The reader then must revise expectations of what it means to understand a text. Because of its resistances, the difficult sentence gives the reader opportunities to sound the depths of doubt. Yet recognizing the extent of this condition broadens an understanding of ways that language and thus understanding do and do not work, but may. Reading and the opened condition of interpretation make possible a community of those who see meaning as a conversation that can be closed but never finished. With Emerson, the complexity and textual resistance so characteristic of his texts both provide pedagogical moments that deepen the reader’s understanding of ethics and undermine his own authorial position. “What is the hardest task in the world? To think,” Emerson tells us,2 and for him thinking or “the role of intellectual duty” is inextricably bound with a “moral duty.” That duty, at least for Emerson, is to give the reader an occasion for thinking about the materials and media of thinking and subjectivity—to think about thinking. Such reflexivity, or so runs Emerson’s hope, enacts imaginative, generative principles. To think implies, then, not simply using language but being attentive both to the ways it gets used and to the ways it does not get used. An ethics of reading regards reading as both a social and socializing activity. Writing is the way and the means by which one enters that particular ethical field by participating in and manipulating social dynamics in a

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public context. In this crisscross of reading and writing, we are aware that a certain communication occurs. The past speaks to the present but only through the present. This communication sets the conditions for community of sorts. “When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me—when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more,” Emerson writes in “History.”3 Ironically, Emerson makes such an ahistorical claim within an essay entitled “History.” The thrust of the argument, however, is that reading creates a contiguity or sympathy that allows for investment in ways of thinking, but this sympathy arises out of a sense of familiarity with one’s own reading practices and what he would call moods or temperaments. Mood measures time, as it is mutable and depends so often on environmental factors, as well as a degree of identification, with identification being a privation of resistance. “What is it we heartily wish of each other? Is it to be pleased and flattered?” Emerson asks in “New England Reformers.”4 Within Emerson’s poetics, the writer or the poet, in the largest sense of the word, creates new possibilities out of the limitations of the old, and community is not simply a collection of like-minded sympathies. Instead, what we need most from others is not necessarily affinities but resistances as well, for what we need from others is “to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts and phantoms.”5 A need for self-authorization thoroughly drives Emerson’s particular Romantic valence, but paradoxically his essays are generative in the hopes of continuing their work of self-authorizing within the reader. Emerson’s distrust of so many narratives of authority and hierarchy are what characterize his particular form of modernism. His distrust, his skepticism is certainly not pervasive; instead, his goal is an increase in attentiveness and responsiveness. In endeavoring to become a “representative man,” or what Nietzsche calls “an exemplar,” one improves not only oneself but also all that of which humanity is capable. This idea may be naïve but it is also ambitious. One becomes a “representative man” not by displaying “exemplary” characteristics in terms of any type of propriety but by being exceptional. For Emerson, development of selfhood is arrived at primarily by a direct and indirect agonism. To be “representative” means also to be the catalyst by which others might be moved, negatively or positively, to their own accomplishments. In fact, Emerson oftentimes prefers the negative example— “I like the sayers of No better than the sayers of Yes,” he writes in his journals6—in that a person is forced to respond in an original and distinct way.

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The result of such agonism is individuation, and a version of society predicated on this would be a collective of simultaneous singularities. Although many could point to the dangers of the fetishized Will’s appetites, Emerson profoundly believed in the corrective abilities of Reason and the idea that one’s pursuit of his or her own moral perfection would benefit the entire community. If one acts out of obligation or social coercion, he or she is, as Rousseau might insist, everywhere in chains. However, Emerson believes pursuing Enlightenment goals of reason leads to social investment, in that increased social agency allows for the possibility of investment in social mores, which are freely chosen and not enforced. The underlying concern is that eloquence, although valuable, could ultimately be, as Santayana observes, the greatest threat that a democracy faces. A citizen competent and literate in the ways that language can operate is able to appreciate eloquence and genius without being gulled by it: a person in such a situation ideally lends consent provisionally because he or she recognizes legitimacy without the relationship presuming authority. Clearly there is a connection between aesthetics and agency, and because of this connection people are both products and agents of the process of their own social and ethical conditions. Accepting (or acknowledging) such a situation means one would have a say in the construction of one’s Lebensform rather than simply being thrust into its limitations and demarcations. Emerson hesitates to freely accept the limitations forming the horizon of that agency, as he often feels the crisis of being able to decide seemingly in all directions (a kind of Sartrean existential angst), but becomes apprehensive that this range of possible decisions has been narrowed culturally, or that he has been led in a particular direction because of ideology. The fear of impotence contributes to his hesitations. What characterizes Emersonian modernism, then, is an extreme attention to those moments when an understanding of subjectivity confronts a self-consciousness that simultaneously respects this subjectivity and violates it. The encounter with what is real becomes, ideally, far more variegated, a plenitude of possibilities constituting what William James would later call a Moral Multiverse. For Emerson, the work that must be done, ethically and conceptually, is the composition of one’s own subjectivity. Like Nietzsche’s Übermensch, Emerson’s “representative man” becomes so, is so, by being ever in excess of himself. This excess is the means by which one circumvents personal and, which is often the same, socio-

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cultural limitations. Thus, the geometry needed to span the orbits of cultural construction and its commensurate epistemology can be reframed. “Thoughts,” writes Emerson in “Inspiration,” “let us into realities.”7 Talking about Emerson comes with a certain weight of critical baggage. For many, and evidently even for the more sympathetic of his twentieth-century readers, Emerson could be both frustratingly naïve and indecisive. T. S. Eliot called Emerson’s essays “an encumbrance.”8 These frustrations stem largely from the ease with which Emerson’s aphoristic tendencies could be appropriated to further the “bootstrap” propaganda of the dubious “American Dream” myth. To read Emerson in such a way is to read him out of context and to abridge—if not to willfully overlook—his very real complexities. Nowhere are these complexities more evident, more contested, than in his negotiations, his struggles with primary antinomies. One of the most foundational of these antinomies within liberal philosophy is the opposition of the private and the public, which sets the order for subjectivity and its relationship to objects. At the practical level, we see rising out of this tension the problem of why a private individual should feel any obligation to anyone or anything beyond his or her own needs and desires. Emerson wrestles with these inherent dilemmas of a liberal democracy in which there can be a “we the people” bound together beyond simply homologous desire and suggests these issues are not to be resolved within existing vocabularies. If Emerson’s reputation might have suffered because of his aphoristic tendencies, it is because the performances of these apothegms are often overlooked for their messages. The content overwhelms the form. Nietzsche, one of Emerson’s most famous and canniest readers, would have been most compelled by Emerson’s aphoristic style. Indeed, Nietzsche draws a great deal from Emerson’s style as well as that of the German Romantics Friedrich and August Schlegel. In his seminal work, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze discusses the impact of the particular formal elements of aphorisms in terms of Nietzsche’s larger aims. “Understood formally,” he writes, “an aphorism is present as a fragment; it is the form of pluralist thought; in its content it claims to articulate and formulate a sense. The sense of a being, an action, a thing—these are the objects of the aphorism. . . . Only the aphorism is capable of articulating sense, the aphorism is interpretation and the art of interpreting.”9 If this is an apt argument about Nietzsche’s style, it is even truer, a fortiori, of Emerson. The aphorism’s fragmentariness

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necessitates the participatory action of the reader, as the reader must decipher and negotiate, and often even reinvent, context. In that the fragment can stand alone, it suggests or perhaps cites a totality. “Nothing so marks a man as imaginative expressions,” writes Emerson in the late, neglected essay “Poetry and Imagination.”10 But in this passage it is unclear what he means by “marks.” In one sense, it means that an author’s style is how we know him or her. “A figurative statement arrests attention,” he continues, “and is remembered and repeated.”11 The “imaginative expressions” mark the reader, as if the reader—in that moment and in its encounter—is being inked into existence. At the very least the question of Emerson’s style is not suggestive of the way it might construct an idea of an authoritative voice but provides a compositional valence to Emerson’s insistence both on metonymy and on the way that latent in all fragments is a suggestion of how things finally cohere. This cohesion is determined only via a proper perspective, but that perspective is unattainable because it is always incomplete. “The key to every man is his thought,” writes Emerson in “Circles.”12 Those thoughts, of course, must be delivered by words, words that ultimately stand as images, imperfect, distorted representations of things-as-they-are. Instead, the aphorisms stand metonymically for the author’s individuated self but only as measured against a larger context, and always with an auditor in mind. Emerson privileges literature because that is where the primacy of language can be transfigured into plasticity. “Is not poetry,” he asks, “the little chamber in the brain where is generated the explosive force which, by gentle shocks, sets in action the intellectual world?”13 Nietzsche, in the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals, echoes Emerson’s observation: “An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been ‘deciphered’ when it has simply been read; rather, one has then to begin its exegesis.”14 Aphorisms as well as poetry demand active, attentive engagement of the text by the reader. This action is the confrontation of two sets of values. In writing about the German Romantics, whose theories of the fragment at least indirectly shape Emerson’s discourse, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue, “Fragmentation is not . . . a dissemination, but is rather the dispersal that leads to fertilization and future harvests. The genre of the fragment is the genre of generation.”15 Emerson’s work is generative in that he hopes for it to continue its work in the reader—to provide something for the reader to work on. By bearing witness, by addressing and recogniz-

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ing its values, the reader completes the self-consciousness of the Emersonian text. This activity is a creative, even procreative action. Emerson, strictly speaking, does not write fragments, at least not of the order the Jena Circle employed.16 And yet, the writing demands a reader to experience this fragmentedness, paradoxically. Emerson’s poetics moves not toward completeness but outward in ever-increasing circles so that distinctions that are not real distinctions are revealed as illusory. Although these illusions may still be useful ones, the distinctions, the separations, are what we begin with, and finally all that we are left with. Emerson situates this problematic in the act of reading, among the encounter and subsequent negotiations of author, reader, and text, all predicated by the tension that language most necessarily produces, produces because it is the very stuff of perception. Above all, he is a nominalist. Nowhere is this problematic more deftly confronted than in one of the last important essays, an essay that still seems underappreciated. Prepared in the autumn of 1851 initially as a lecture, Emerson’s “Fate” was first published in 1860 as the opening essay in the collection The Conduct of Life, widely considered to be his last book of major significance. The essay falls within what Stephen Whicher describes (in his seminal biography, Fate and Freedom, as well as the important selection of Emerson’s writing that he edited) as Emerson’s “mature” years. Essentially, Whicher constructs a bifurcated Emerson. For Whicher, the attitudes and ideas he finds in the later period (after 1848) evince a falling off of vigor and originality. “We no longer find in his later books,” Whicher writes, “either the confusion or the dramatic uncertainty that accompanied the serious adjustments of his earlier thought.”17 Whicher, whose reading remains foundational, sees this “lack of vigor” and acquiescence as evidence of middleaged malaise creeping into the work. Unfortunately, Whicher’s reading of Emerson, although quite often remarkably acute, contributes, however unconsciously, to the repression of Emerson in American philosophy that Stanley Cavell has brought to our attention over the last several years. By valorizing the earlier work, Whicher brackets off the later efforts in which Emerson does indeed face the tragic, contrary to the yet prevailing criticisms that the Emersonian vision could not perceive evil. There is, however, an alternative and more sympathetic reading of Emerson’s development. What Whicher calls a lack of “dramatic uncertainty” may be Emerson’s attaining a philosophical “negative capability,”

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which allows the essayist to become sensitive to the inherent paradoxes arising within a system of thought that offers the possibility of both “Fate” and “Will.” As I later argue, Emerson’s vision is not merely resigned to accepting an immutable, inexorable fate. He acknowledges instead two irreconcilable forces that, in loose terms of the Hegelian dialectic, oppose each other while at the same time constructing and even perpetuating one another. Within such tension are framed the present and, in its unfoldings, history. The awareness of this tension is a self-consciousness that throws the subject into a productive crisis. In “Fate,” Emerson marshals his tropes in order to undermine the otherwise “unassailable authority” of the author and to elicit a necessarily hermeneutic response from the reader. By doing so, Emerson enacts an intervention in the standard teleological movement of philosophy and ideology. Inelegantly put, the drive in traditional philosophy is toward resolution. The world is seen as a set of resolvable problems that might be taken care of through rigor and the right set of moves. The resolutions then offer a picture of things apodictically clear, that is, unshakably grounded and incontestably objective and claiming an authority that is complete and impervious to all dissent and disagreement. Emerson’s intervention positions both ideology and the practice of reading in an ethical matrix. In “Fate,” Emerson informs the reader that in response to a proliferation of discussion on “the theory of the Age,” the “question of the times” resolves itself, for him, into a “practical question of the conduct of life.” The theories “resolve” for Emerson into the question, “How shall I live?”18 Such a question is clearly framed by choice or agency. If such a question can occur, then the world is not simply deterministic, although—and the issue remains in flux for Emerson—it may be complexly deterministic. As is readily apparent, what he offers is not quite a resolution so much as a reframing of the various epistemological and ontological problematics arising in a post-Calvinist era of increased industrialization, not to mention the political and moral strife coalescing as the United States slid inexorably toward civil war. As David Robinson points out, “Emerson understood the unpopularity of discussion of such limits in a culture of expansive optimism: To speak of Fate in America amounted to a form of political dissent.”19 Not only does the idea of a deterministic Fate run counter to the idea of limitless resources and possibility inherent in the idea of expansion

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(although conversely it could be said to propel and justify, on some level, the principle of Manifest Destiny) but it can also be read as suggesting that secession and war were inevitable. To say it generally, “the question of the times” was motivated by a keenly and often violently felt dialectic. In regard to the cultural and ideological principles by which people attempted to locate themselves, the spectrum of responses to this dialectic ranged from compromise to violence. Emerson’s locating question, “How shall I live?” anticipates William James’s posing of the fundamental pragmatist question at the turn of the century: “What practical difference does this theory or that make?” In “What Pragmatism Means,” James writes, “[T]he true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.”20 The “true” is that which is most beneficial, and in that light, at least for James and his followers, terms become positioned by way of what is “good.” The result is the recurrent need for discussion and reassessment of how best to proceed for the good of the community. Thus, pragmatism seeks to avert metaphysical impasses by changing the vocabulary and the foci of conversation in the hopes of facilitating action. Although many would argue its “practicality” suggests a protopragmatism,21 Emerson’s question is less directive and more reflective. As is so often the case in his essays, a question acts as both a vocative and a locative. By way of the question, here and elsewhere (the opening sentence of “Experience” being perhaps the strongest and most obvious example), Emerson calls out to the reader, and in this calling out positions himself in dialogue with the reader via a self-consciousness that identifies (and makes discernible) his subjectivity. The resulting contrast delineates the reader, thereby activating his or her self-consciousness. Rather than perform moralistic authority as so many other figures do through variedly unassailable pronouncements, Emerson represents via his peregrinations and equivocations an ethical process, thus reversing the traditional rhetorical formula. Instead of trying to convince his audience, he might be trying to convince himself, yet the reader is necessary in order to bear witness and to provide legitimacy.22 To put this more clearly, Emerson’s addresses to the reader create, even grammatically, a subject and object in their respective positions.

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Cavell claims Emerson’s prose produces this sense of activation in a way similar to what I describe, observing that the thought that human freedom, as the opposition to fate, is not merely called for by philosophical writing but is instanced or enacted by that writing: the Emersonian sentence is philosophical in showing within itself its aversion to (turning away in turning towards) the standing conformation of its words, as though human thinking is not so much to be expressed by it as resurrected with it.23

In Cavell’s reading, with Emersonian poetics, ethics operates at the level of the sentence itself. In “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” Emerson argues, “The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility.”24 In the gaps and idiosyncrasies of his articulations, Emerson believes the act of reading as well as the act of writing to be transfigurative practices in and of themselves. In “History,” an earlier essay, he insists, “The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.”25 Elsewhere in the same piece he explains that the result of this active reading is that “[a]ll history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no History; only Biography.”26 In other words, this hermeneutic action is a means by which social capital is invested into communities of interpretation, and thus (various) discourse communities arise. The reading subject, moreover, cannot help inserting himself or herself into history, aware of the weight of the social institutions that suggest various interpretive practices. “Meaning” becomes a graph of cultural and institutional influences. As we shall see, this situation is at the shifting center of “Fate.” We could, on the one hand, see this as Emerson describing history as the development of Geist, à la Hegel. On the other hand, it might suggest that history is a genealogy of perceptions and the process of attempting to make sense of them. Attempts to read history constitute active reconstructions both of past ideas and prior conceptualizations via their lingering representations. Thus, history is most properly considered an interaction, one present reading another and always by its own dominant terms. Hawthorne, Emerson’s contemporary, is most aware of the discrepancies of historical narrative and the blurred lines between documentation and fiction. For all that, he remains a narrativist and rarely focuses on the way ideology shapes either the audience or the conventions shaping narrative structure itself.

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In the spirit of the question motivating his essay “Experience” (“Where do we find ourselves?”), Emerson’s “How shall I live?” undermines any answer that is made available, for Emerson’s resolution of the one question is simply another question. “Fate” is precipitated by the various (and nearly simultaneous) discussions that Emerson cites as offering theories for the “Spirit of the Times.” Instead of summarizing these other arguments, he offers his own theory—a theory that approaches the systematic yet resists dogmatism. In that sense, his discussion elicits response, and such “call and answer” is a form of responsibility in that it is a measure of social capital being invested in the community of “the Age.” Instead of solving the “question of the times,” the question “How shall I live?” seems to propose an endless sequence of re-solving (solving in order to solve again) as the relationship of his life to “the times” continues changing. The difference perhaps between ideological dogma and a call to action is not solutions but resolutions. Tellingly, Emerson never holds that he himself is “resolved.” To say so would be antithetical to his profound belief in the constant motion of things: “Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole,” he writes at the beginning of “Art.”27 Inasmuch as writing is an action toward producing a new whole, the work that must be done needs to be done through and as language. But this whole is one that can never be fully realized, as each action changes the parameters of what is possible and what is necessary. Ambiguity is never an end in itself for Emerson; he wants above all to overcome his own habits, tendencies, and beliefs, which are always already informing his ideas about his moment and milieu. As all around him the world was changing politically, philosophically, socially, and scientifically, Emerson believed it folly to offer a comprehensive explanation of the world. In that theories and systems from the philosophic to the economic are still more or less fetishized (even critique becomes systematic), we can see why Emerson’s dilemma remains relevant and instructive. “We are incompetent to solve the times,” he reminds the reader.28 Immediately we might notice the leap from the first-person singular to the first-person plural, implying a tension between the public and the personal, a tension Emerson returns to evoke more fully near the end of the essay. “Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return and reconcile their opposition,” he tells us as

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explanation of our inability to provide a singular solution.29 This statement, taken metaphorically, seems akin to what Wittgenstein describes in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “[T]he limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”30 But Emerson repeats his sentence in a modified version two paragraphs later as if his words are indeed circling round again, demonstrating that rhetoric is finally limited to circumscription. Thus, he is unable to reconcile the dialectics that he attempts to describe. If we are to take the statement of geometry’s limitations literally, an added dimension comes to the fore. Inasmuch as geometry is a product of Euclid’s foundations of scientific postulates (including the postulate that only one line may be drawn through a given point parallel to a given line), Emerson’s critique of a certain rationalism—perhaps even in spite of himself—here provides a very specific example of the inadequacy of a totalizing systematic of explanation. In the early 1830s there was a growing movement that questioned Euclid’s postulates. To begin with, German mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss had proposed Euclidean geometry offered, at best, an idealized picture of the physical world because it did not take into account the curvature of space. Although Gauss, fearing political repercussions, kept his ideas relatively quiet, his discoveries led to fundamental advances in geodesy, a branch of applied science that measures, among other things, Earth’s dimensions. Although this allowance for the curvature of space is conventional nearly two hundred years later, at the time Gauss’s “new geometry” posed a threat to Euclidean geometry. Working independently both of Gauss and each other were the mathematicians Janos Bolyai and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky. Both had developed ideas questioning Euclid’s postulates and moved toward delineating the limitations of traditional geometry. However, not until the appearance in the 1850s of G. F. B. Riemann, Gauss’s protégé, did nonEuclidean geometry begin to be more than a critique or possibility. Although most of these discoveries were limited somewhat to the discourse of specialists, it is quite probable that Emerson, with his great interest in astronomy, would have heard of the radical ideas about geometry occurring in Europe through his acquaintance with Benjamin Apted Gould (who had studied at Göttingen while Gauss was also there) and Benjamin Peirce (Charles S. Peirce’s father), both of whom were associated with Harvard College and the Cambridge observatory.31

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This digression into the history of mathematics is necessary in order to provide background for certain events corresponding to the “theory of the Age.” Through the early to mid-nineteenth century, geometry had been seen as the prototype of clear thinking and reason and, as such, was a standard and fundamental part of each student’s education. Until Gauss, it had seemed impossible even to imagine geometries other than Euclidean. Emerson and his contemporaries stood at the cusp of a profound paradigm shift, a shift that would foreground the way rhetoric, science, and logic all serve as contingent means of ordering the world. Later in “Fate” Emerson writes: No one can read the history of astronomy without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empedocles, Aristarchus, Pythagoras, Oenipodes, had anticipated them; each had the same tense geometrical brain, apt for the same vigorous computation and logic [an idea that Emerson borrows directly from Kant]; a mind parallel to the movement of the world.32

Seen most generally, all of these thinkers were Euclidean or supported a Euclidean perception of the world. Because intellectual history had naturalized geometric conventions and perceptions, Emerson is being literal when he describes “a mind parallel to the movement of the world.” Because their perceptions were encoded into Western culture at large (and shaped by the same ideologies and methodologies), the world’s movement was “made” parallel to the mind, per inherited and disseminated perceptual and cultural templates. Although Emerson links these mathematicians as examples of “representative men,” his implication of a chiastic structure (the early anticipate the late; the late anticipate the early) indicates that even these individuals who moved beyond conformity of thought are operating within a still limited system. “Every spirit makes its house,” he cautions the reader, “but afterwards the house confines the spirit.”33 Thus, within the context of the mid-nineteenth century Emerson’s use of the word geometry is both metaphorical and literal (“our geometry” referring to “Euclidean geometry”), marking the limitation of traditional paradigms in the face of a changing understanding of the physical world, both specifically and generally. Loading the word geometry with both a literal and figurative meaning (to choose one reading seemingly brackets off the possibility of another) makes available a revolution of perception.

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Because of the possibility of such revolutions (often intellectually violent overthrows of previous conceptual regimes), Emerson begins to blur the boundaries among “the huge orbits” of ideas, even if these distinctions can never be fully reconciled. And yet at the same time Emerson is aware that revolution can be counterproductive—better to have a heterogeneous circumstance that allows participatory consent comprising elements that are at odds. Revolution too often merely replaces one stringent inflexibility with another, and Emerson, wary of the merely reactionary, seeks “fluxion.” But then “Fate” is fraught with paradox. “We can only obey our own polarity,” Emerson continues, layering paradox upon paradox (perhaps recalling the impossibility of mediating Jonathan Edwards’s “infinite upon infinite”).34 How is one able to obey forces pulling in two contrary directions, as his use of the term polarity implies? As if commenting on that problem, Emerson offers an even more difficult sentence: “’Tis fine for us to speculate and elect our course, if we must accept an irresistible dictation.” If we “must,” that is, if we are compelled to “accept an irresistible dictation,” then we are not electing our own course. And the use of “irresistible” certainly reinforces the compulsion of the “must,” negating the possibility of “speculation.” Speculation in such a context could be interpreted as a form of resistance (inasmuch as it is a casting around for other possibilities). Can one “accept” that which is forced upon him or her? The sentence itself is a polarity of choice and Fate, a polarity that somehow finds its torque in the extremely loaded term elect. On the one hand, the word still carries all of the theological resonances of Puritanism and Calvinism, for which “the elect” were those selected by God for salvation via, to use Emerson’s terms, a surely “irresistible dictation.” However, during the proliferation of industry and the development of ideals of liberalism, the democratic voice of the nation became “an irresistible dictation” that elected course of action, the polarity that results here most obviously illustrated by the secession of the southern states. And of course, the individual within the democratic system also elects by way of voting. It is also possible to imagine on some level Emerson has in mind a specific election, perhaps the Compromise of 1850 or the Fugitive Slave Law, both of which were implemented to avert the impending threat of the Union’s dissolution. Daniel Webster, who for Emerson had long been a model of exemplary principle and character, had given his support to these compromising measures, much to Emerson’s dismay. After that point, Emerson savages his

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“corrupted” hero in “Fate”: “But strong natures [such as Webster] . . . are inevitable patriots, until their life ebbs and their defects and gout, palsy and money, warp them.”35 Is it Will or Fate that leads Webster thus? It is possible that Emerson’s implicit answer is that there is, in Webster’s case, the lack of ethical responsibility, which is a weakness, I dare say, of constitution. Emerson may also have in mind the election of Henry Ware as Hollis professor of divinity at Harvard College in 1805. The election of a Unitarian to the post created a schism within the established Congregational churches and eventually resulted in the formation of the American Unitarian Association in 1825. This significant turn away from Calvinism’s precepts via Ware’s election (an event that impacted Emerson directly both as a graduate of Harvard and as Ware’s successor as Unitarian minister at the Second Church of Boston) signaled that even in religion, that is, in terms of belief systems, there is a choice of paradigms, a situation that he would more fully investigate in “The Divinity School Address.”36 In the space of the one word elect, Emerson brings together three distinctly irreconcilable and irresolvable orbits—the theological, the political, and the individual, revealing that “orbits” of action, in that they are operant elements of the present tense, are not solvable but may be soluble. Returning to “Fate,” we see that the first sentence of the following paragraph is wholly self-referential. “In our first steps to gain our wishes, we come upon immovable limitations,” the essay tells us.37 With our first steps through this essay we have come upon a series of “immovable limitations” in the form of the text’s rhetorical, philosophical, and semantic circlings. What propels us (and by now we see that we cannot risk calling it a progression) is embodied in the dialectic of Fate and Will. Although we cannot say how, “necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, and . . . personal polarity with the spirit of the times.” If these dichotomies are to be responded to, it must be by a “private solution.” Such a solution one can arrive at only by way of experiment, that is to say, by experience. “A man’s power,” we are told, “is hooped in by a necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc.”38 One learns one’s limitations only by running against them. Freedom and Fate are valences, linked and vibrating along the same “iron string.” Fate is thus recognized or known only through the dialogue of action and resistance, and can be read as a catalogue of that which is available and that which is not. This essay, then, like so many of his others, does not attempt

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to define a clear, unequivocal discourse. They are above all provisional thought experiments exploring the terms and implications of a vocabulary that makes his culture, our culture, possible. “Power,” “Wealth,” “Character,” “Experience”: all these essays are Emersonian investigations into the agreements of language that America’s Lebensform comprises. In that it provokes individuals, Fate is a “Beautiful Necessity.” Additionally, as Emerson writes (and almost immediately repeats), “Fate is unpenetrated causes.”39 “But,” he continues, “every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us, is convertible by intellect into wholesome force.”40 Here, although Emerson surely means “wholesome” in the sense of conducive to well-being, it is possible to read it as a pun. Given that the drive in the essay is toward the idea of a “Blessed Unity which holds nature and souls in perfect solution,”41 then “wholesome” could be read as a “whole sum,” a complete figure. On the face of it, this sentence is in line with Emerson’s youthful, optimistic incarnation, which finds its voice in “Nature” and other early lectures. Such an image of Emerson as the “Brahmin sage” who appears incapable of acknowledging the tragic still lingers in high school classes around the country. In the late essays a darker sensibility replaces Emerson’s optimism. If at first glance he appears naïvely positive about the ability of the intellect to convert “every jet of chaos,” such a view is tempered when we read his references to the “water drown[ing] ship and sailor, like a grain of dust” as well as other earlier uses of shipwreck imagery.42 In 1850, the year before he first drafted “Fate,” Emerson learned that Margaret Fuller, his fellow transcendentalist and a woman with whom he was more than half in love, drowned in a shipwreck off Fire Island near New Jersey during her voyage home from participating in the unsuccessful revolution in Italy. Emerson never fully recovered from her loss. Fuller’s death was not the only crisis on Emerson’s mind. “Fate” mentions the cholera epidemic that the Concord lecturer witnessed firsthand during his travels west during the end of the 1840s. He looked into the dark-ringed eyes of cholera victims often enough that such a reference would not be so blithely put to use in the making of his essay. Even here Emerson is “making use” of real and specific tragedies and, by utilizing them as figurative tropes, is thus revising them by indirectly revisiting them as language. In doing so, Emerson tempers the tragedy of events by regaining agency. By making these and other instances (such as the death

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of his son Waldo) useful, he does not minimize their emotional impact but rather shows that although one may not be able to change what happens, language allows one to change perspective. Language is the means of responding to and recontextualizing events that otherwise make all too evident the limitations of human capabilities. However, to see all tragic events as “useful” is to risk courting illusion and self-denial, dangers of which Emerson is keenly aware. We can, even on a broader scope, begin to read the later essays as being revisions of the earlier work, the essays thus locked into a writerly chiasmus. There is evidence in “Fate,” for instance, that Emerson is specifically critiquing the “Pollyanna attitudes” he too easily fell into earlier in his career. When he writes, “Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity,”43 he may have in mind his own earlier essays, essays such as “Nature” and “The Oversoul.” The later Emerson parodies the less experienced attitudes of the earlier period because “whitewashing” the varying registers of events is ethically irresponsible and “[n]o picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts.”44 The older Emerson not only admits such circumstances but makes them part of his vision of ethics. These “odious facts” can be, he tells us, what make life “an ecstasy” in that they rouse a person from stasis to kinesis. With Emerson the tragic is not justified; rather, it is met with stoic realism, if not pragmatism, that redirects circumstances into new possibilities. He claims, “Fate involves the melioration,” and yet before launching into a Hegelian formula for the progression of history resulting from the struggle and eventual synthesis of conflicting sources,45 he does qualify his argument: “If Fate is ore and quarry, if evil is good in the making, if limitation is power that shall be, if calamities, oppositions, and weights are wings and means,—we are reconciled.”46 By putting this in the conditional via his use of “if,” Emerson subverts any such reconciliation. If the proposition is not reconciled, neither is it possible for “us” to be reconciled. Besides, to meet all of these conditions is to take away the “odious facts” of life (that is, by simply but completely redefining them), which would be to dispel the tensions Emerson plots out, tensions that are a “beautiful necessity.” At the very least, if we don’t see all these conditions as being mutually

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dependent, then the rhetoric allows for opportunities of assent. This would not resolve or reconcile the tension, but it does set the grounds for dialogue, one predicated on contingencies of if. These tensions are present even at the rhetorical level of the essay. The principal unit in “Fate” is the chiasmus, a rhetorical structure in which elements are repeated in reverse, as in “If Fate follows and limits power, power attends and antagonizes Fate.”47 Even though this particular chiasmus is central to Emerson, it is the very figure of chiasmus itself that shapes Emerson’s thinking, a variation of the dialecticism that he would inherit, albeit indirectly. Because of this, any forward motion is subverted, as the second half of a chiasmus is predetermined by the first half. It is a device that “beholds its own return.” As the essay’s epigrammatic poem states, “For the prevision is allied / Unto the thing so signified; / Or say, the foresight that awaits / Is the same Genius that creates.”48 The chiasmus is its own prevision, but a prevision (as it both reflects and distorts) that keeps its two parts locked in a perpetual dichotomy. In its crisscross structure, this perpetual dichotomy is indeed a kind of grammatical balance and remains unresolved in that it shuttles back and forth between its two halves, each perpetually responding to the other. Perhaps language is the only means of balancing the forces of Fate and freedom, or perhaps language itself keeps this dichotomy in place, and at odds with itself. At the very least, the chiasmus is a rhetorical figure that foregrounds syntax, which is a means of bringing order to chaos, or so go classical conceptions of rhetoric’s capabilities. On the other hand, language is the medium of social bonds and even consciousness. Because he is “in language,” Emerson will never be able to get outside this tension. The “steps towards our wishes” mentioned in the beginning of his essay suggests the function of desire in the economy of agency. Desire, however, occurs within the parameters of language. Even if to express a desire or a wish one uses language and its relatively normative properties, the desire is still expressed. Acting on desires and wishes tends to effect change on language because in its darkest moments it outstrips language. This threat may be why, deep down, Emerson distrusts overt radicalism despite his innate tendencies toward provocation in various forms, aesthetic, political, and otherwise. Even at the level of syntax, the ideas of Fate and Will are constructions (and thus revisable) by which Nature, the world-as-such, is apprehended—the means by which it gets named. With Emerson’s po-

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etics not only the concepts of Fate and Will but our very sense of theory, philosophy, and morality are themselves structured by the social practices and institutions that inform and form our lives and thought, as well as by the contingencies and agonisms of history shaping those structuring practices and institutions. The Fate one must negotiate is not some metaphysical force but rather the dictates of social and even linguistic conventions. That Emerson turns to lyric poetry and the essay form is no surprise; these nonnarrative structures allow for the possibility of alternative forms of knowledge, knowledge that would not necessarily be verified by appeals to causality, rationality, or linearity. In and of themselves these processes of legitimation are not suspect. They do, however, limit the kinds of answers one can hope for, as too often they allow only a constrained range of interrogation. If a multiplicity of questions and ways of questioning cannot exist, change, real change, can never occur. Yet the essay is rife with repetitions of words, structures, and phrases. On one level these repetitions attest as patterns to the observation that “relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always.”49 Repetition serves to provide emphasis while simultaneously signaling the limitations of what language can express. “If a man has a seesaw in his voice, it will run into his sentences, into his poem, into the structure of his fable, into his speculation, into his charity.”50 Emerson’s statement here accords with his stated belief in “The American Scholar” that “[l]ong must [the scholar, or Man Thinking] stammer in his speech” as he develops his abilities of perception and articulation.51 The very see-sawing of his rhetoric in “Fate” indicates that no matter the claims he might make, Emerson himself has not reached equipoise, so the efforts he suggests being made toward reconciling the forces of the universe must be first trained on the very essay that makes such exhortations. In Emerson’s formula, the Will then arises to oppose, resist, or even circumvent Fate. For Lawrence Buell, the essay’s reluctance to cast its lot with either side of the opposition is a weakness, and he argues that, in the end, [f ]or better and for worse, the essay has never been able to make up its mind as to whether to conceive of fate monistically or dualistically: as freedom’s antagonist or as Emerson’s old friend “compensation” in disguise. . . . To the extent that Emerson entertains this possibility, the essay’s ethical energy is dissipated, its “bravery” compromised, by the facile either/orism that takes comfort in the prospect that we can neither shun the fated nor incur the not-fated.52

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In many ways this corresponds to Whicher’s disappointment in Emerson’s lack of “either the confusion or the dramatic uncertainty that accompanied the serious adjustments of his earlier thought.”53 Buell and Whicher, among others, are frustrated with Emerson’s reluctance to argue definitively either for Fate or for Will. As Buell sees it, this hesitation results in the undermining of the essay’s overarching ethical framework. These criticisms represent Emerson’s ambivalence as “indecision” that evinces a final and regrettable immaturity of spirit and a lamentable lack of rigorous reasoning. This reading plays into a recurring critique that Emerson never could commit to actual causes. Instead of a lack of commitment, Emerson’s ambivalence enacts his fraught desire to avoid being trapped by discourse. A cause’s discourse often overwhelms the separate agencies of the individuals who come together to support that cause. Emerson was wary especially when this occurs, as it must, at the level of nationalism. As Emerson says at the outset, “We are incompetent to solve the times.” This incompetence may be read as an inability to fully master all of the possible readings and interpretations of the present tense. This is not a confession of weakness but an acceptance that there are limitations, that the world and its paradoxes cannot be resolved. If Emerson’s thinking isn’t unequivocating or definitive, it may be that he does not wish to engage the necessary conventions of systematic or academic philosophy. Philosophy demands answers to the problems that philosophers encounter. The unavoidable situation remains that proposed solutions or paradigms exist in philosophical discourse within dialectical frames of thinking. The solutions could perhaps resolve particular problems, but not the problem of philosophy as a discourse. Such a solution would need to be indistinguishable from the philosophical system of which it is part. Emerson’s efforts are directed toward combining philosophy and poetry in an attempt to escape the problems of systematic thinking. Cornel West characterizes Emerson’s work as an evasion of modern philosophy in that Emerson refused both “its quest for certainty and its hope for professional, i.e., scientific, respectability” as well as its search for foundations.54 Instead, West thinks that it is better to see Emerson as engaged in cultural critique, which is extremely useful, especially in that it makes room for the ways in which Emerson explicitly considered the power dynamics and ideology that comprised, and comprise, the United States. And yet, because he has his own agenda charting out a history of pragma-

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tism, West does not go quite far enough with his reading of Emerson and rarely addresses questions of textuality. Naturally all critics pursue their own agendas, and West’s includes an insightful critique of Emersonian liberalism. West believes that Emerson’s claims never escape the indiscreet trap of the bourgeoisie and West’s argument indicates how Emerson’s rhetorical strategies bring out the capitalist fault in American discourse, especially in its inability to commit to anything outside of one’s own self-interest. In short, Emerson’s activism allegedly falls short of real action. But West also seems to be working through Emerson to get beyond him. In that sense, West dutifully critiques his predecessors in order to situate his own argument. Indeed, he acknowledges that his book American Evasion of Philosophy, which starts its genealogy with Emerson, began as “an exercise in critical self-inventory, as a historical, social, and existential situating of [West’s] own work as an intellectual, activist, and human being.”55 He creates a critical bibliography of his own intellectual inheritance. Ironically, West’s self-consciousness and self-doubt are his most Emersonian characteristics. Although he is involved in cultural criticism, Emerson undertakes more than that, and West fails to think through Emerson’s value as a language worker.56 If West’s Emerson is not literary enough, Harold Bloom’s may be too literary. Bloom’s interest, from John Milton to John Ashbery, is virtuosity. When Emerson is set as the virtuoso against which all other American writers must contend in working out their anxieties of influence, the standard by which American literature is established, it becomes unclear how Emerson would be useful to anyone who is not a poet or literary critic. Bloom does not so much misread Emerson as appropriate him as a figure of genius. Positioned this way, Emerson would not have any real use beyond the literary. Although it becomes easier to see Nietzsche’s debt to Emerson this way, this vatic Emerson suppresses the possibility of approaching him seriously as a language worker. Bloom’s Emerson maintains the mechanisms of institutional authority. Bloom insists, “Nietzsche particularly understood that Emerson had come to prophesy not a de-centering, as Nietzsche had, and as Derrida and de Man are brilliantly accomplishing, but a peculiarly American re-centering, and with it an American mode of interpretation, one that we have begun—but only begun—to develop . . . a mode that is intra-textual, but that stubbornly remains logocentric, and that still follows Emerson in valorizing eloquence, the inspired

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voice, over the scene of writing.”57 Claims that he was visionary and prophetic come at the cost of repressing Emerson’s textuality, pulling Emerson from the ebb and flow of culture, making him rarefied and otherworldly. Emerson’s emphasis on language, however, makes him more directly invested in culture and the fashioning of its ideals and its ideas than Bloom allows for. Bloom’s reading of Emerson in A Map of Misreading belies certain ideological implications. In a seductive move, Bloom puts this reading of Emerson as “recentering” in Nietzsche’s mouth. The rhetorical performance is fascinating: Bloom makes Nietzsche into the authority that validates his view of Emerson performing this recentering, contra Nietzsche. According to Bloom, Nietzsche approves of this. This ventriloquism—we notice Nietzsche is not actually quoted—serves to make Emerson a prophet, which ensures that the place for critics as hermeneutic mediators who must translate the prophecies for the masses is untrammeled. If West feels Emerson is trapped despite his best intentions and efforts by bourgeois ideology, Bloom risks separating Emerson from social bonds and encasing him in amber. “Emerson,” Bloom concludes, “who said he unsettled all questions, first put literature into question for us, and now survives to question our questioners.”58 Although I agree with that statement, Bloom’s context of “the visionary” might fashion this questioning the questioners into a way of staving off dissent and protecting the sacerdotal function of the academy. Few have done as much as Bloom to indicate Emerson’s importance. The question is whether or not this particular version of the visionary Emerson makes him a rarefied figure. Emerson neither decenters nor recenters—he creates new circles, so it is important to put distance between Bloom’s priest and Emerson’s poet. In either case imagination is the key principle. Emerson’s idea of the imagination coming from Kant and filtered through Coleridge is not visionary in the way Bloom characterizes it. Kant believed imagination to be the faculty that joins intuition with concept. The imagination takes this synthesis and schematizes, by which understanding can then make judgments. “Thus the principle of the necessary unity of pure (productive) synthesis of imagination . . . is the ground of the possibility of all knowledge, especially of experience,” asserts Kant.59 In that we can, through acts of imagination, refashion how we synthesize phenomena and our ideas about them, we can see the fundamental role of the imagination in experience. Deleuze, in his small book on Kant, argues that the “[i]magination itself is

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thus really part of moral common sense” in that the consciousness of morality includes not only beliefs but the acts of imagination through which the world seems fit for given conceptual frames.60 The imagination becomes part of a discussion about ethics because it is an essential condition for a person to identify with others, to recognize commonality. Imagination, the ability to think beyond one’s own milieu, is necessary for “otherness” to be possible. The resultant possibility for difference also gives birth to the individual. Even if Emerson was himself far less systematic than this, we can see how these ideas are the backdrop for his sense of the moral and ethical aspects of what he terms “the poet.” Imagination does not invent out of whole cloth but is a means by which materials can be reconfigured so that the terms of the world can be resignified, an idea he takes up more directly in the late essay “Quotation and Originality.” Coleridge makes a distinction between primary and secondary powers of imagination, similar in kind to one another but separated, he tells us, in degree and in mode. The primary imagination is creative, whereas the secondary dissolves in order to re-create. His discussion of the imagination in organic terms is similar to Emerson’s use of tropes and templates from science to describe the capabilities of the imagination. Coleridge, apparently channeling Descartes, drives toward an organic unity when he says that the primary imagination is the “living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”61 Although Emerson often writes of a transcendental whole as well, he is far more invested in exploring how the malleability of concepts means that the very way we experience things might be changed. These changes come from reordering already existing data. So language and its cognitive principles maintain cohesion even as language continues to shift and be reconfigured and recontextualized. Truthfully, Emerson often is caught between the two divisions of the imagination that Coleridge offers because they are finally the same process. Most important for Emerson, though, imagination does not create a new language so much as it provides the possibility of seeing existing language in a new way. Emerson pursues a medium that perpetually revises itself and, thus, creates possibilities of interpretive response, which is why we might describe him as radical without being a revolutionary. Rather than undermine ethical action, the inconclusiveness of “Fate” creates a space necessitating action in the form of

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participation. David Robinson offers another way we might explain this when he writes: To see fate from above or outside the self is to cease to see it as an antagonistic power, and to realize that “Fate has its lord; limitation its limits” in the capacity of the individual to become self-disengaged. Fate could thus be understood as a part of a pattern of natural forces that also includes human power. Limit can exist, Emerson realized, only in the context of expansiveness, and he saw this fundamental polarity as a resource for a workable philosophy of conduct.62

Although Fate (or limitation) can never be overcome, at least within the parameters of any language game wherein its use is appropriate, it necessitates a form of action to resist it. Opposed to Coleridge’s “I AM” is an Emersonian “WE MIGHT BE.” Just as the concept of Otherness is necessary for subjectivity, Fate is necessary for the idea of the Will. Language is the field of this simultaneous division and unity. To think of Emerson’s destabilizations in “Fate” by importing the notion of negative capability is worth the risk of conflating poetry and philosophy. This blurring of boundaries, which Emerson himself makes possible (present even in his conjoining the epigrammatic poem with his essay, so that each obliquely comments on the other),63 is a particularly problematic gesture within American literature, according to Joseph Riddel, who argues, “The scandal of ‘American’ thought is that it has always appeared as ‘poetic’—primordial but anti-intellectual, idealistic and pragmatic by turns, above all, nonsystematic.”64 Riddel here must mean “poetic” in the pejorative sense: ornate, lacking rigor, precious, and without function, finally. But it is possible that readings such as this fail to be, well, literary enough. If Emerson equates form with content, then he would be compelled to make his writing (qua writing) antisystematic (or even nonsystematic) since that is the trajectory of his ethos. Here we arrive at the grounding of Emerson’s constructive skepticism. In a key passage from “Montaigne, or the Skeptic” (cited in Chapter 1), Emerson describes the skeptic as a kind of median figure between the dogmatisms of materialism and abstraction, “a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two,” a figure who “labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance.”65 The skeptic, Emerson tells us in his effort to redeem the term, is that person who attempts to find the balance between extremes of dogmatism, but obviously this balance is not a static position.

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The skeptic must keep shifting, laboring, working, in order to prevent the reification of his or her stance. For Emerson, the skeptic becomes his or her activity, thereby keeping skepticism’s own dogma at bay. “Every thought’s a prison,” Emerson tells us in both “The Poet” and “Intellect.” If Emerson is “nonsystematic” in “Fate,” it is in order to avoid being programmatic. In the long run, attempting to counterbalance the binaries of Fate and Will is doubtlessly foredoomed to failure, but the attempt counts for something. To embark willingly and consciously on a project predetermined to fail is to acknowledge the benefits of committing oneself to the fallible and transitory endeavors of humanity inveighing against the constraints set before it. The benefits are indirect but worthwhile—one tests the mettle of social coherence and delineates the grain of our cultural inheritances in the form of language. As if anticipating Buell’s criticism, and my own application of negative capability, Emerson also reasons in “Montaigne,” “If there are conflicting evidences, why not state them? If there is not ground for a candid thinker to make up his mind, yea or nay,—why not suspend the judgment? I weary of these dogmatizers. I tire of these hacks of routine, who deny the dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. I stand here to try the case. I am here to consider . . . how it is. I will try to keep the balance true.”67 For him to resolve these issues for the reader and to reconcile the tension in “Fate,” Emerson would be forced to reinvest his authority, a position he is trying to escape. Being locked in the position of authoritarian would run contrary to his ideals of a progressive (and personal) moral perfectionism, would in fact keep him from being able to move from circle to circle, and thus it would entail his succumbing to the fact—and the fate—of his own position as author. In the middle of the essay, Emerson avers, “We hear eagerly every thought and word quoted from an intellectual man. But, in his presence, our own mind is roused to activity, and we forget very fast what he says, much more interested in the new play of our own thought, than in any thought of his.”68 Clearly, this indicates what the author, or at least an Emersonian author, is good for: creating an intellectual opening within the constraints and limitations that are part and parcel of language and culture. As he further persists, “’Tis the majesty into which we have suddenly mounted, the impersonality, the scorn of egotisms, the sphere of laws, that engage us. Once we were stepping a little this way and a little that way; now, we are as men in a balloon, and do not think so much of the point we

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have left, or the point we would make, as of the liberty and glory of the way.”69 What is most vital is not the author or even the effect of the text within the reader (as in an emotional response) but the moment after, when the reader (re)acts. And what is interpretation if not the reader’s reacting (acting again) of the author’s initiating activity, albeit in a transfigured and transfiguring way? Thus, reader and author are bound together in their own hermeneutic chiasmus. Acts of language are always occurring within the space of mutuality; Emersonian texts consciously, actively tease out the possibilities of that mutuality. In essence, Emerson’s vagaries are part and parcel of his need for competent readers—the difficulties of his texts, the irreconcilable calls on the reader to negotiate these problems, to be more sensitive and careful than he or she might otherwise be. The dilemma of the text is that it replicates, however obliquely, the master/slave dialectic between the author and his or her reader, with all the constituent forces of self-consciousness and the desire for recognition (and then legitimation) in play. Emerson’s desire to “self-overcome,” as it must happen in language, must happen as language. Paradoxically, to register in his own consciousness, this overcoming must be recognized or acknowledged (which is neither necessarily validation nor verification) by others for it to have happened, for it to be public and actualized. Emersonian texts undertake to educate the reader but neither merely for any altruistic end, nor really for the sake of being liberal and egalitarian. The authority of the author must remain intact while the reader also gains power because only in that way can the reader’s recognition be the recognition of an equal by an equal, and thus it is worth more. Put another way, for Emerson even to attempt to extricate himself from cultural power structures and illusion, he needs minimally to have his readers free of such things themselves, or else his audience could not possibly be in a position to recognize his achievement. Otherwise, the author and the naïve reader would be playing different language games, no matter how similar they might seem. But to enlighten the reader, which Emerson does experientially more than didactically, and to conceive a text that needs the reader’s authority are to weaken the author’s power. If we have learned nothing else from Michel Foucault—that is, nothing that we had not already learned from Nietzsche—it is that power and force are endemic to relationships of all kinds, from the political to the per-

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sonal. Force in fact determines the grain of relationships, both with one another and with one’s place in the world. The question is how one might shift and negotiate the drift of force so that all thoughts and actions are not predetermined, before the fact. I am aware, self-consciously perhaps, that beginning this way suggests I see the resistance to lines of force as heroic and thus as a Romantic, even idealistic, struggle against oppression. It is that, of course, but not merely that. For all Marxism’s vaunted focus on materialism, I have never been convinced that it is not similarly Romantic. Seen from a sufficient perspective, the struggle for freedom creates heroes and is similar to the Romantics’ desire to awaken the sleeping masses. Emerson’s self-consciousness always incorporates others, yet the recognition that another can give is what motivates him. Bloom’s version of Emerson as “priest of the invisible,” although complex and compelling, is ultimately too abstract and obscures Emerson’s constant attention to interaction and interrelation with the world as he found it. Emerson tells us at the beginning of the essay, “We are incompetent to solve the times”; neither can we (even as he himself cannot) reconcile the “huge orbits of the prevailing ideas.” At the same time he urges the reader to experience his or her own process, so he works toward a prose that avoids imprisoning the author in the role of necessary dogmatist or consigning the reader to the predestination of an author’s singular conclusion. Barbara L. Packer argues, “Emerson’s tendency from the first is to efface himself, to leave the reader no clues as to how his text is to be privately performed. If his reticence leaves room for the freedom of the reader, it also invites his distortions and mistakes.”70 This is not to say that there may not be room for fallibility, for fallibility makes possible a moral perfectionism and implies that reading is necessarily an action of interpretation. We can think of such an action as itself being the negotiations of an individual’s hermeneutic apparatus (which is constantly being shaped and reshaped with each new interpretive experience) when it meets the resistance of another’s words. Richard Poirier explains, “[T]he Emersonian individual exists not in its assertions; it exists in a continuous struggle with the language by which it tries to get expressed.”71 In this view, words themselves are as materials in that their resistances are registers of limitation, and the reader Emerson makes possible (rather than “constructs”) is compelled to participate in that struggle, a struggle between dogma’s Fate and

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interpretation’s (free) Will. By negotiating the text’s meaning—actually participating in its potentialities—the reader is able to transgress the inexorability of programmatic meaning and sense. Thus, freedom is an action to be fashioned through our making sense of the materials of thought, culture, perception—in short, the materials of our world. Emerson’s text may or may not be of a more open form than those of his contemporaries, but one crucial difference is that his texts are pedagogical about their own theories. The freedom that the Emersonian text attempts to describe as well as enact is an interplay among types of discourse, seeking as it does to combat increasing trends toward specialization (a trend far more pervasive these days) and to forestall the homogenized discourse resulting from what would become cultural imperialism and, eventually, globalization. The freedom is not a freedom from language but the possibility of moving within language games. “The self for Emerson,” Poirier emphasizes, “appears only in its own doings, in its workings, in its actions with words—in movements which turn back against any self, or on any assemblage of words as it may have been constituted even a moment ago.”72 We can read in this “turn[ing] back against any self ” a form of “disloyalty” to the past and fealty to a constant renewal. Or perhaps it would be better to call it “disobedience” (as we can only obey “our own polarity”). But I am intrigued with the idea that disobedience, or—in other words—“acting out,” is an enactment of other possibilities and can thus be constructive. Disobedience, in terms of dissent or cultural dissonance, broadens the range of available possibilities. In light of Buell’s criticism of Emerson’s indecisiveness, is not the reader thrown back into the workings of the argument? Since there is no resolution in Emerson’s essay, we will never find one if we keep looking to him for it. Emerson’s negotiations give us an occasion for our own grapplings, and grapplings with a text seem clearer than grapplings with complex metaphysics. To circle back around to Riddel’s concern, is this “disobedience” to doctrine, even to conventions of genre, too “poetic”? A corollary question we might ask is, is this philosophy? Michael Lopez characterizes the most challenging of Emerson’s philosophy as being “a taut, complex web of infinitely crisscrossing threads” and ultimately determines that “unraveling it in a systematic way, strand by strand, category by category, can be all but impossible.”73 “Fate,” we could say, is not a text about philosophy but is a

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text that enacts philosophy, even in its civil disobedience to standard conventions of philosophical, or even poetic, rhetoric. It is as impossible to separate out the poetic principles of form as a method of proceeding from the philosophical discursiveness as it is to separate “Fate” from “Will.” One might recall Wittgenstein’s belief that philosophy is an activity, and not a doctrine.74 For Emerson, that philosophy qua activity is the means of escaping doctrine, but it is an action in which both the reader and writer must engage. “Thought,” Emerson tells us, “dissolves the material universe, by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.”75 Emerson, thus, brings out the aesthetics or at the least the artifice of ethics so that one might live responsibly and attentively in the world. The ethical implications of this destabilizing of conceptual framework, especially on the eve of the Civil War, are clear: if the ideas of race and “genetic” superiority that keep the mechanism of slavery in place are not Nature’s “irresistible dictation” but a product of ideological dogma, those ideas can be taken apart. Therefore, if there is a lingering criticism among contemporary scholars that Emerson does not confront the issue of slavery in this essay, it may be because some fail to see that his project is both more subtle and more complex than it is given credit for being. His real project all along is to make possible a critique, at the level of epistemology and rhetoric, of the foundations of culture itself. This critique can be our Emersonian inheritance and can also be used to create new possibilities, new visions of today, but out of already existing materials and ideas. This certainly smacks of the utopian, except that such possibilities require, as Emerson himself tells us, work and action, and are never realizable. The final paradox is that only humankind’s perceptual apparatus accounts for the extant dichotomies and, as such, is also the only hope of overcoming that polarity. Yet the resolution of the tension may be the disappearance of consciousness, and that is neither possible nor desirable. Perhaps that which Emerson calls “the Beautiful Necessity” must find as effigy the hoary figure of the self. In the end, “Fate” gives no resolution—and thus no solace—but only asks of us a further response. This is not to say simply (and perhaps tritely) that language is a prison-house from which we can never hope to escape. There is what I take to be a significant shift in tone near the end of Emerson’s essay when it becomes clear that the polarities of Fate and Will remain in place. If these cannot be resolved, Fate remains dominant. If the

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structure and grammar of knowledge and belief are set, then the Will must negotiate limitations, not the other way around. Obviously this could bring us to a very cynical place, since no matter what anyone does, the limitations are imperturbable. Emerson, possibly at his most pragmatic, instead suggests we “build altars to the Beautiful Necessity.”76 To maintain social cohesion, we must play the hand that we are dealt, so to speak. Emerson is not blithe about this, either. He chooses to deal with the illusion and the limitation of the polarities, to work with them rather than simply doubt their existence. Whether or not the polarity is wholly illusory, it still shapes understanding and impacts language use, still has real consequences, in other words. That is to say, even though the polarity might be an effect or even symptom of discourse, it still has a functional influence, so it is not necessarily “merely” illusory. How one responds to an illusion is no illusion. To deny this polarity or otherwise dissolve it altogether—difficult even to imagine how that might be done—would be countersocial. As Emerson says, “If we thought men were free in the sense, that, in a single exception one fantastical will could prevail over the law of things, it were all one as if a child’s hand could pull down the sun. If in the least particular one could derange the order of nature,—who would accept the gift of life?”77 Better to become as aware as possible in order to master, that is, become more competent at, the possibilities of language, more savvy about the subtle contracts and agreements one enters into consciously and unconsciously when using language, and the concomitant social dynamics. Emerson is therefore better thought of as a reviser than a revolutionary. Resisting collusion is not the same as attacking cohesion. When tempted to dismiss Emerson as utopian, we would do well to remember that his vision is not idyllic, demanding as it does a condition of continual dissensus and resistance. This dissent, paradoxically, perpetuates social investment, just as resistance is a necessary component for dynamic motion. How else can we explain Emerson’s characteristic move to elide, even undermine an author’s (especially his own) value? “I think I have done well,” he writes, for instance, “if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though it were only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.”78 Authorship sets up possibilities for quotation, so that one way that we might think of interrelatedness is textual. If “language is everywhere we find ourselves,” as Cavell puts it,79 then that text is the very condition,

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again the very medium, of Being. If that is so, the next consideration is how one might write toward an existence that is aware of that textuality. Emerson’s skepticism then is motivated by the belief that “Truth” amounts to whatever is useful, but is mindful that such a thing might be only a limited use. The limitations of language are put into place by our language use leaving us, as Wittgenstein describes it, “bewitched.” These limitations might be made useful, as they point not to boundaries but to actions possible within those boundaries. These possible actions form nothing more nor less than community, than commonality, one developed not from identity or ability but from capability. Even at the level of composition Emerson shows ways in which coherence does not mean that all claims and propositions must form a singular consensus. Cavell argues Emerson writes the way he does because by showing himself “undermining or undoing a dictation,” he makes it apparent enough that “his writing is meant to enact its subject, that it is a struggle against itself, hence of language with itself, for its freedom. Thus is writing thinking, or abandonment.”80 Yet to reduce these questions of Fate and Will, and the question of what Emerson is doing when he writes, to the problematic of language would be a mistake. He might start from such questions, but he does not end there because language does not end there. Writing is thinking; it is circulating with meaning, testing its properties and assessing its contingent values, ever ensconced within the possibilities of an “us.” Modernism is never innocent. It does not and cannot resolve or dissolve the totalities that it finds so troubling. Emersonian modernism, characterized by its investment in “freedom to” rather than “freedom from,” is signaled by an exploration into how certain texts construct one another and even each one’s own reader, overtly, in order to create and maintain a text’s own legitimacy, to create the conditions for a given text’s own prestige, the measure by which it can be recognized by the Others. Instead, it uses these totalities to create a counterforce wherein dissent and multiplicity can exist. To overwhelm the totalities would bring an end to them as well as to the text’s hard-won agency. So if it is not innocent, Emersonian modernism is not heroic or liberatory either, despite its vocabulary. The totalities of culture and of social institutions are never so absolute, and individuals never wholly wrest their individualities free from those structures. To be is to be in conflict, to ever negotiate with traditions and mores, with culture, with government, or, primarily, with oneself. Since doing cannot

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be separated from being, Emerson plunges toward the heart of conflict to sound its value. Truths are redefined, totalities displaced—all but the totality of language, despite any constituent vocabulary. But if Nancy is right that there is no difference between the ethical and the ontological,81 Emerson’s questioning how he shall live his life interrogates not only what he should do but what he should be. What he then seeks, for himself and for his reader, is not some ethereal, amorphous existence without any constraints but a freedom shaped by responsibility. For if freedom to pursue happiness is the fetish of a liberal democracy’s pathological drive, responsibility is the mechanism creating a counterforce that makes that drive possible, locating it as part of an identification with a larger community. Thus, desire and identity stay in flux, attempting again and again to overwhelm each other, continually reordering the world so as to put this conflict of the democratic subject’s internal antagonism at rest, but never with any real hope of success. Emerson’s wish was to see that America is a set of elective affinities arising out of the simultaneity of struggle, and that the internal antagonism of the liberal subject is our common text, a text he wished to publish to the world.

3 Foundling Texts originality and authorship in melville’s “hawthorne and his mosses”

Suppose that Nietzsche, one of Emerson’s great readers, is right that truth is, indeed, both a “mobile army of metaphors” and “a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically intensified”;1 then the questions of texts and textuality become more than relevant. Nietzsche’s claim demands of us an attention to how these metaphors might be interpreted, how truth is read. Of course, as suppositions go, that is a sizable one, and it gets us into a fair number of predicaments, about which I am sure he would have taken real pleasure. But maybe it gets us out of many more predicaments than it gets us into. Paradoxically, the very fact that at least some of us can agree with Nietzsche—at least up to a point—serves to support his claim. Implicit here is a critique of any kind of absolute knowledge. Because such a possibility is not only imaginable but is for many a reality, one could argue Nietzsche’s claim is apodictic. Since Nietzsche can make the claim and mean it in good faith (the conditions for the statement are otherwise felicitous, as Austin would call it), then the possible implications are ones that a person must take seriously. If the means of taking Nietzsche seriously did not exist, then his statement would not be something that we could entertain as a possibility. We would not hear it, as Cavell might say. Taking Nietzsche seriously on this point means we can think of the world as a community of perceptions and beliefs engaged in the encounter with material objects. Thus, interpretations are dependent on context, and

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Originality and Authorship

truth cannot refer to a singular, essential quality or condition; it must be multiple and heterogeneous, and it would take the whole of humanity in agreement to establish one condition of unified, unifying, transcendent truth. Short of such consensus, which would be as distasteful as it is impossible, truth must always be seen as provisional. Better to see truth as habits of belief. Belief and interpretation are inseparable, then, as one interprets according to belief systems. This situation brings texts to the center stage of our attention. Accordingly, the problems of what constitutes authorship and what function the author serves continually hold the attention of critical discourse. Michel Foucault has famously employed Samuel Beckett’s question, “What matters who is speaking?” in order to give context to the more knotty concern of what an author is, rather than what an author does. One wonders, though, whether what an author is can ever be separated from what an author does. These questions permeate the boundaries of discourse. If my formulation of the kind of modernism Emerson enacts holds, then there is a claim to be made that he anticipated the “linguistic” or even “textual turn” long before, say, Roland Barthes or Derrida or so many other iconic discourse makers. Even though Emerson would have never used the term textuality, his thinking comes around and around to questions and conditions of textuality. We can take his thinking and look at how it might open up certain texts, even familiar ones, in new ways. “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Melville’s essay on Hawthorne, can become a useful case for seeing how Emersonian modernism and its poetics become manifest in one author’s attention to one of his peers. Melville serves as example because he employs many Emersonian arguments about how a community arises in the relational matrix of literary writing. Moreover, we can see the ways that Emerson’s antifoundational tendencies and his interest in ethics anticipated developments in philosophy and in contemporary literary theory. It may be safe to say, in fact, that these developments had to occur in order for us to be able to read Emerson’s most sophisticated theoretical implications. Emerson anticipates many ideas that hold current critical imagination, but he also offers perspectives that may ultimately offer a way around some of the impasses of poststructuralism. At the very least, he shows how in the dialogue that texts have with one another, time is not linear, nor hierarchical: the ideas circulate endlessly, moving forward and

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back through history, renewing our understandings and offering new approaches to what we read, or have already read. If, to begin with, we look at one of the most important passages from Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” we come to how poststructuralism’s dilemmas provide reading strategies that will help us situate Emersonian poetics as modernist. Barthes writes: The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. . . . [T]he writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner “thing” he thinks to “translate” is itself only a readyformed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely.2

One would not want to minimize the different valences available to Barthes, who is French, and Emerson, who is American, with more than one hundred years between them. Be that as it may, what Emerson and Barthes hold in common is a belief that the author is not, finally, an originary force. In “Quotation and Originality,” one of his most provocative essays, Emerson writes, “Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant,— and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing,—that, in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality.”3 This is where the two come closest together in their thinking, especially when Emerson says of literature, “The originals are not original.”4 For both men, the writer is a web or compendium of endlessly recycled cultural materials. Of course, Emerson believes this is true of everyone, not just writers. For Americans, at least in the mid-nineteenth century, such a claim posed a problem all its own because it suggests that it might be impossible for the United States to become its own community, to create and lay claim to an identity separate and distinct from that of the British Empire. The United States needed to see itself as something more than a fugitive colony forever citing and replicating the authority of its former sovereign. The American Revolution and the Constitution established a de jure separation, but a distinctively American sense of autonomous identity was slow to come. By extension, this tension between agency and authority raises issues of political and ethical efficacy. Embroiled in the debate over

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slavery and states’ rights, the United States as a nation and at the level of its constituency felt keenly democracy’s central paradox: remaining part of the community without having to give up personal desires and principles. Put another way, how does one hold on to one’s beliefs, say, that slavery is absolutely immoral, yet live as a citizen of a nation tolerant of such an institution, as the United States was for much of Emerson’s life? As authors cannot be free of influence and tradition, how can an individual citizen hope to be free within a community governed by a morality and by principles he or she does not hold or support? The rift is a result of the overlapping of liberal and democratic ideologies. Agency, as ever, remains an irresolvable problem of inquiry, philosophical or otherwise. This is not to say that culture, national identity, and textuality are all interchangeable concepts, but we can see that a certain confluence exists. Emerson begins “Quotation and Originality” by drawing analogies between parasites from the insect world with “the extreme content they take in suction, which constitutes the main business of their life” and the same functions he sees at work in “a library or news-room.”5 It is possible to miss the pun that “content” suggests, but the slipperiness of the wordplay opens up room for possible readings. In this case, the word content acts in different ways, depending upon which syllable is stressed. There is the sense in which to be “content” means to be happy while taking in the “content” of whatever the parasites (or patrons of the news-rooms) are attached to, whether that be the blood of other insects, or in the case of the “library,” the books’ contents. At the very least, with the analogy, it is the mutual dependence that parasites and hosts share that Emerson foregrounds. But puns also act symbiotically, each variant needing the other to work as a linguistic device. The trope is in one sense negative (especially in a culture that fetishizes individuality). At the same time it suggests the existence of an ideological ecosystem where species exist not as separate organisms but in a state of interrelation. Uncharacteristically for Emerson, the passage suggests a kind of eroticism. As he describes, this “suction” is “performed with like ardor, with equal impatience of interruption, indicating the sweetness of the act.” The book, he continues, “is still the highest delight.” A pun works here on a larger level suggesting that discourse is a kind of intercourse—if not coitus, at least, an oral intercourse—so for Emerson to use sexual metaphors and language is entirely apt. The passage may not seem sexual at first, but it does

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when we think about the connotations of the words and figures he uses.6 It becomes especially clear with the next sentence, which asks, “Of a large and powerful class we might ask with confidence, What is the event they most desire? what gift? What but the book that shall come?”7 Since the sexual tension is indeed uncharacteristically high here, we can only guess that the eroticism is unintended. Still it is here even as it is present in the wordplay, beginning with “content” and continuing on to the double meaning of “come.” It is not going too far to see the pun as sexual since it not only follows the word desire but is the suggested attainment of that desire. The eroticism of this passage is important to note because it factors into Emerson’s argument. The “suction” that he refers to can be read as one being’s total absorption while in the contemplation of another. One is absorbed by what one contemplates, losing an individuated consciousness to the object of one’s attention. Through desire, the subject can be returned to a sense of himself or herself because it points out the lack or inadequacy of the object of attention. Emerson describes the ways that the thoughts and books of other people can absorb us when we are too absorbed in them. Desire throws us back into our own situation. The desire may be for food, but it may also be for recognition and attention, aspects that are certainly part of sexuality. The desire that Emerson refers to may also be an ongoing desire for the book that says everything. In that no book does this, people continue desiring, continue searching, with each moment or incident of dissatisfaction creating a better image of what it is that is desired. The opening section of Emerson’s essay suggests the mechanisms of this wish to articulate while at the same time uses tropes of sexual, albeit masculinist, desire. Perhaps what shuttles back and forth between the eroticism and language is the desire to articulate experience in order to know and share experience itself by moving it from sensation to conception. One’s ability to experience is commensurate with the ability to make known via language that we do experience the world, but how we make sense of experience, how it becomes a part of knowledge is by way of its existence as language. The eroticism of Emerson’s tropes, perhaps unconsciously, in a transcendent and anti-Cartesian move, links the body with the mind. In using sexually charged tropes and language, Emerson creates the possibility for erotic desire in the reader. How we respond or do not respond to what is more or less a seduction becomes an index for ourselves of our own intersections of identification and resistance, and how we respond to contingent

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circumstances, and what happens to the text and to the reader when those different situations are shown to be closer together than we might otherwise imagine. “We expect a great man to be a good reader; or in proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power,” he continues.8 Active reading, like the sexual act, is mutually participatory; when the subject disappears into the text and the text disappears into the reader, the discernment where one begins and the other leaves off becomes blurry. The intercourse is a series of simultaneous and even spontaneous exchanges, when wants and desires of different subjects confront each other and are in open negotiation. Pleasure and sensuality have their own haptic grammar, in which consent and a refusal to comply become entangled. Barthes would unconsciously echo Emerson a century later: “a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.”9 To which one could add Emerson’s claim: “The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader.”10 In a democracy, the individual is in a constant oblique space where subjectivity vies with social and cultural forces, but that space occurs only in the process of negotiating these elements. In short, then, the subject is the reader of culture and as such is always being written by social forces while at the same time resisting or negotiating them. “Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair,—all these we never made; we found them readymade; we but quote them,” Emerson argues, adding, “But there remains the indefeasible persistency of the individual to be himself.”11 In that resistance, he or she becomes an author. The tension for Emerson is that one knows one is a tissue or site of quotation, and yet strains to forget that—to make use of discourse as a place for beginning conversation, that is, to start out from the vocabulary and conceptual mechanism that is part and parcel of one’s historicity. Clearly, these issues of textuality do not apply only to literature, critical works, or philosophy; they shape an understanding of the world. Thinking this way returns us to the false problem of whether or not to take Emerson as a legitimate philosopher. Emerson suggests that inquiry is what expands or at least recontextualizes the possibilities of consciousness, but these possibilities are often closed off because of reification of thought. “The highest statement of new philosophy complacently caps itself with some prophetic maxim from the

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oldest learning. There is something mortifying in this perpetual circle. This extreme economy argues a very small capital of invention.”12 This is not to argue tritely that there is nothing new under the sun. Rather, it is to argue that language use—as whatever particular language game—perpetuates itself, so ideas are reconfigured without being invented anew. The reason for this ought to be evident: given conceptual systems (or nonsystems) comprise the materials and ideas of prior thinking. An example one might point to is the jargon that takes over any kind of discourse and that supplants generative thinking with habits of thought dictated by the conventional or familiar uses of a particular set of words. Aware that discourse is the primary medium of culture, Emerson arrives at a constitutive skepticism that keeps him from merely accepting the vocabulary he inherits from history, art, and politics. Emerson insists on the possibility of an expansive conversation that might make words and ideas both more flexible and more available to difference and heterogeneity. In this, aesthetics and epistemology are for him not real divisions. “How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as, of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act?” he asks in “Intellect.”13 All these approaches link together in the knowing subject. Compartmentalizing different disciplines and conceptual frames limits the associations that one can make, moving from one discourse to another. Associative thinking seems to be a key to spontaneity, at least as Emerson thinks of it. One can even take note of the titles of his various essays and lectures, which so often suggest that his rhetorical aims are to be primarily definitional. Rarely do they have a clear thesis or argument, nor, except perhaps in “The Poet,” does he offer a substantive clarification of the term announced by the title. Instead, the titles offer points of departure, allowing him to move by way of association, analogy, and above all imagination, continually outward in his hopes of finding new approaches to experiencing not only words but the world. Because for Emerson the worst offense is limitation, he does not proceed according to the conventions of particular professionalized jargons. Jargon and reified language are certainly not limited to the literature of philosophy, or a philosophy of literature. Such situations of conceptual stasis are the general conditions of any society, even those that are supposedly liberal. Paradoxically, even in liberal democracies, which should be inherently

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given to equality and justice, a lack of parity arises, forcing a progressivism to be created in order to counteract a prevailing status quo. For Emerson and his contemporaries, the rampant governmental corruption and moral turpitude that were becoming very real forces in nineteenth-century politics were clear and present examples of what happens when social forces are not in a perpetual condition of renewal. Systems, institutions, and even thinking need to be constantly innovating, lest they become stagnant and corrupt and thereby open to manipulation. Regardless of the particular discipline or situation, jargon takes over mechanisms of thought, rendering them inert. Instead, Emerson leaves open the possibilities of crossing party lines and wandering from one language game into another in the hopes of evading established patterns of thought (which are both seductive and disciplinary) and attaining spontaneity. “The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity,” he writes.14 It is his particular interest in spontaneity that places his thinking in a line with that of other writers, from Melville and Dickinson to Beckett and Kafka. There are no doubt endless strains of modernisms. One distinction that can be made for the Emersonian mode is the belief that spontaneity may yet be possible. The version of modernism where we might place Beckett, for instance, seems to be in perpetual mourning for that spontaneity. What is fascinating about Emerson, and what prevents sophisticated readers from dismissing him as naïve, is his paradoxical attempt to will himself into this spontaneity. He believes that “genius” is an intuitive grasp of how to make language new and not yet domesticated. This pregnant tension, as do so many of his contradictions, creates a fissure of thought and response for his reader to participate in meaning making. Of course, willed spontaneity is a contradiction in terms. Yet, since the text will not dictate the way, the reader must make the decision, a decision that he or she cannot make until faced with a situation that offers no predetermined response. Against the claims many critics of Emerson have made, he is a philosopher if we look to a surprising resource, Alexandre Kojève, in order to clarify some of these terms. The Russian-born Kojève is arguably one of the most important interpreters of Hegel in the twentieth century. Although Emerson was no strict Hegelian, there are, as I have alluded to, some clear affinities between the two figures. Kojève argues that it is the

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philosopher figure who must stand at the edge of each dialectical movement, for it is the philosopher who wishes to become a fully self-conscious, knowing subject. “Indeed,” Kojève offers us, “it is the Philosopher, and only he, who wants to know at all costs where he is, to become aware of what he is, and who does not go any further before he has become aware of it.”15 If Emerson’s constant questioning of where we are, of how he should live his life, are central to his particular brand of modernism, a modernism that makes use of self-consciousness in the hope of arriving at a possible self-knowledge that distrusts the grounds of its own knowledge, then Emerson is not only more modern than he generally is given credit for being but he is also a philosopher. At least if we use Kojève’s comments as a guide, he is a post-Hegelian one at that. Again and again, Emerson’s questions are largely involved with social relations and ethics, for it isn’t enough that “genius” exists on its own. “To genius must always go two gifts, the thought and the publication.”16 Yet this still does not stray too far from Kojève, who continues in his description of the Philosopher, saying, “The others, although self-conscious, close themselves up within the range of things of which they have already become conscious and remain impervious to new facts in themselves and outside of themselves.”17 The philosopher, or what Emerson calls “the Poet,” makes possible new ways of thinking by enacting spontaneity, or “wildness of mind.” For Emerson, this is the only way to respond to exhausted, untenable ideas of authority, and poetry becomes the shape and activity of inquiry. So, if Emerson does not use the conventional methods of philosophy, should he not be considered a philosopher? Emerson’s definition of “Man Thinking” critiques entrenched thinking, especially that which is circumscribed by habit. These habits and familiarities are what allow one to recognize a kind of discourse and thinking when one encounters it. At the same time, those elements that are recognizable can impede philosophy’s efforts. Theodor Adorno, in his own study of Hegel, writes of the particular impetus of speculative philosophy: Philosophy is concerned with something that has no place within a pregiven order of ideas and objects such as the naiveté of rationalism envisions, something that cannot simply use that order as its system of coordinates and be mapped onto it. . . . To the extent to which philosophy makes an ongoing effort to break out of the reification of consciousness and its objects, it cannot comply with the rules of

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the game of reified consciousness without negating itself, even though in other respects it is not permitted simply to disregard those rules if it does not want to degenerate into empty words.18

Although admittedly he (and his devotees) would recoil at any point of comparison between the two, Adorno, despite himself, sounds in this passage as if he has read Emerson. Philosophy is in a double bind: if it attempts to break free of reified thinking (an idea that is inherently Romantic), it must engage reified thought to do so, thus becoming complicit. But to avoid conventions altogether (inasmuch as that might even be possible) is to court meaninglessness, because to use language other than in its familiar ways is to change context and contingency. This complicity of “doing philosophy” according to traditional conventions takes the teeth out of any critique that accuses philosophy as itself being ideological. To take Emerson seriously, we might ask what he does. Asking whether or not Emerson is a philosopher is to submit his actions to judgment of criteria. What do we mean when we say someone is a philosopher? That act of judgment might result in a definition, but one that reflects back on the person who asks the question in the first place because it will bear witness to a constellation of beliefs about what a word signifies lexically as well as semantically. Raising the question in the first place implies that meanings and concepts face a great deal of slippage in terms. We may just as well ask, what are the situations that cause there to be doubt? And furthermore, what role might that doubt play? One answer might be that such doubt allows one to be in dialogue with culture, or history, or any ideological situation that circumscribes us. How would one enter into such a dialogue if the terms were always in place, always self-identical? Perhaps that is one advantage that literature has over philosophy: it can risk emptiness, indirection, as it does not adhere to conventions of rationalism. Its ambivalence toward systematic thought is an openness, a wildness that makes new thinking possible. Something about experiment leads to abandonment, for it implies innovation or newness. Experimentation, at the very least, by taking known elements and putting them in new situations, looks to discover the not yet known. The truth we consent to, that we support, is prompted not only by rhetoric or logic but by aesthetics as well. The act of giving consent, and whether that is done actively or through a tacit approval, is itself expressive of a horizon of conceptual beliefs that are part of the grammar of community. And consent can exist

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also by recognizing the terms and their uses. Such acts of judgment guide the Poet, to use Emerson’s term, or the Wise Man, to use Kojève’s, to perform in response to the forces that coalesce in writing’s oblique space. This is not to limit such a situation only to literature, but literature is a kind of activity that exists wholly as work for itself. At its best, literature can be seen as a manifestation, an embodiment, of alternative democratic processes because its value lies in its processes rather than in any commodity status. What do we gain by calling Emerson a philosopher? Actually, we might lose more than we get. “Well,” we can hear someone insert, “it depends on what you mean by the word philosopher.” Cavell’s arguments notwithstanding, calling Emerson a philosopher is to risk possibly having to accept that he is not a particularly good one. Philosophy might gain something if he were to be seen as doing philosophy, as it would expand its realm, make its processes more inclusive and flexible. It might, in other words, be a way of redeeming philosophy—and certainly there is a growing list of those who argue that it could use some redemption or even salvation—from Wittgenstein to Heidegger to Rorty and beyond. One of Cavell’s most compelling gestures is to locate Emerson provisionally in a Continental rather than an Anglo-American analytic tradition. There are two ways to inherit philosophy, Cavell tells us, “either as a set of problems to be solved (as Anglo-American analysts do) or else as a set of texts to be read (as Europe does—except of course where it has accepted, or reaccepted, analysis).”19 Cavell shows how Emerson (and Thoreau as well) fall away from either version, although their obsession is with reading. It never becomes quite clear what Emerson would become if he were considered seriously as a philosopher, except a certain kind of authority. That brand of authority might be too constraining given Emerson’s fast intent, however, to question external authority—even his own. It is no better to think of his essays as being poetry because that also means that we do not take his thinking, or at least the points upon which he insists, seriously. Why would we think of them as poetry? Because of the works’ metaphoricity? The attention to sound and rhythm? Their aesthetic sensibility? Of course, this characterization is to marginalize the effects of poetry, is to suggest it is merely ornamental. I realize that the versions of poetry or philosophy that I am suggesting here are very limited, parochial even, and are generalizations that have various and sundry exceptions. And yet Coleridge is never mistaken for Kant, and Heidegger, even late

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Heidegger, is never mistaken for Rilke. Poetry is far more than just an exercise in beauty, an occasion for aesthetic appreciation, and philosophy is not just a certain method of ratiocination. There are, however, geometries of genre at work that circumscribe the kind of attention we give to a book and shape the way that we hear it. Emerson finds in his own work a perspective that helps his readers learn to read actively. He writes in his journals, “When the mind is braced by the weighty expectations of a prepared work, the page of whatever book we read, becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant & the sense of our author is as broad as the world. There is creative reading as well as creative writing.”20 What better way to think of Emerson than as a creative reader? We might, then, profit more by thinking of him doing “poetics” rather than philosophy. If we can divorce the term from the realm of linguistics, “poetics” suggests that Emerson is invested in an active engagement and deployment of style that might, along the way, subvert the generic conventions of philosophy or poetry. “And what is Originality?” he asks rhetorically, answering, “It is being, being one’s self, and reporting accurately what we see and are.”21 Language is what we use to express what we are, composing the cultural and conceptual templates that we are heir to, and from among which we choose. Emerson’s poetics is a commitment to reporting the experience of being a self, in all its contradictions and complexities, and the best way to report that experience is to make language the site and the cite of that struggle. The text for Emerson is the scene where that struggle between recognition of one’s values and the values that we inherit is enacted, not only for the writer but for the reader as well. Thinking of Emerson’s work in terms of poetics as being not merely a collection of aesthetic rules or precepts governing poetry but as a process that bears on composition of works having language at once as their substance and as their instrument, emphasizes the work’s awareness of its own rhetoricity. Emersonian poetics flows between philosophy and literature, between analysis and originality, and keeps the work in flux while it critiques and makes use of its own methods of belief and expressivity. The implications of talking about the artifice of belief systems, or ideology, to put it another way, are by their nature radical. For instance, such a position suggests that “truth” is a concept supported by the whole range of a particular discourse, rather than vice versa. We might even talk

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in terms of the aesthetics of truth. In other words, truth happens within the discourse (not outside it), but because discourse is the use of language within a particular community, its use, in all its complexities, is seen as necessarily valid by those who use it. Actually, it would be better to say that the members of the discourse community never consider its validity; it is valid simply because they use it. Again we come to the kind of modernism that Emerson engenders, for Emerson is keenly aware of the problems and possibilities that arise when one becomes conscious of truth as an effect of one’s language use. Emerson’s particular modernism arises from the Romantics’ belief that language is always insufficient as a means of representing Nature, or Hegelian World Spirit, inadequate for representing genius, or existence. However, Emerson’s modernism begins when he realizes that even if one kind of language is inadequate, what that calls for is either finding a new vocabulary or, more immediately, creating alternative possibilities for an existing cultural vocabulary by using it in new ways. Quotation is thus not the same as imitation, for in quoting, a subject maintains its own identity even if it makes use of prior material in order to establish legitimacy and authenticity. Imitation subsumes self as it tries to replicate or even become the Other. “To insist on one’s self,” as Emerson puts it, is to make use of discourse, to be conscious that self is a function of discourse while still insisting on creating new uses for old tools. Experimentation, at least as Emerson posits the term, is to use discourse and not be used by it. There are at least two reasons why this actually is a question one might pose to literature, and that literature itself might pose. First, in saying that such truth is a fiction is to suggest it is authored even as it authorizes. And second, thinking of truth, whatever that may be, as being constructed rather than as something “natural” means that it can be thought of in terms of aesthetics. Literature, in that it has no discernible goal, no clear intent that it is trying to communicate, enacts the various resistances and identifications that we might say constitute subjectivity, both for the reader and for the writer. The literary text performs a kind of subjectivity, adding yet another circle to the hermeneutics at work. The reader encounters not only the writer’s struggles with language and the attendant doxa of genre; he or she must also encounter the writer’s performance of subjectivity in the form of literary expression. What is “expressed” is not some private essence per se—though it may pose as such—but the values, mores, and

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traditions that have inscribed themselves in the writer’s oblique space, a struggle that the reader participates in as well. So, if we are to ask these questions about ethics, a discussion of the cultural functions of authorship is relevant because it suggests the relationship and the power dynamics that surround this reading/writing chiasmus. Such a relationship is dramatized, I will now argue, by Herman Melville’s reading of Nathanial Hawthorne. In “What Is an Author?” Foucault argues that the author’s name “serves as a means of classification,” and that the author, as a function of discourse, serves “to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society.”22 To put it simply, the function of an author is to provide a locus by which a text may be contextualized. Also, it allows for someone to be accountable for the work, an aspect that Foucault himself does not strictly address. The author as a function within discourse operates in (and as) language, which is necessarily relational. The author as name authenticates a work in terms that are both relational and, in some sense, contractual. Paul de Man takes up this very issue in his discussion of autobiography: “The name on the title page is not the proper name of a subject capable of self-knowledge and understanding, but the signature that gives the contract legal, though by no means epistemological, authority.”23 A text in this way becomes quotable because it is attributable, it has a discernible source that can be authenticated or at least supported by a text’s reader. Or so it might seem. But the “origin” of any text is in dispute if an author cannot claim propriety over the language that is being used. To begin with, language is communal. One crucial difference for Emerson, as opposed to either Barthes or Foucault, is that if a text is a tissue of centers, then we are necessarily delivered into an ethics of reading, because these dialogues of culture(s) are themselves in dialogue. For Foucault, of course, the author is already written, but Emerson’s emphasis on experimentation and abandonment, often an implicit suggestion to read and write against the grain, reconsiders the possibilities of choice in order to provide ways of resisting functions by resituating the contexts. Although de Man, Foucault, Barthes, and others have explored these issues in exemplary ways, we can cast our eyes back and see that Herman Melville anticipated these arguments in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” his 1850 essay on Hawthorne’s collection Mosses from an Old Manse. In many ways, the problems of authorship are brought into play by Melville himself. Only rarely have critics paused over the fact that when the essay first

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appeared, it was an unsigned review. Although the anonymous review was, as a practice, hardly rare in the mid-nineteenth century (we no doubt remember the glowing reviews that the first printing of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass received from its own author, writing anonymously), in the case of “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” the author’s use of a pseudonym needs to be explored for the very reason that it raises issues in terms of what the essay in fact accomplishes as a theoretical performance. The fact of Melville’s authorial proprietorship has traditionally relegated the piece to Melville scholarship rather than Hawthorne scholarship. In the essay, the “author” writes, “[H]owever great may be the praise I have bestowed upon [Hawthorne], I feel, that in so doing, I have more served and honored myself, than him.”24 Many have argued that the essay serves as an index to Melville’s own obsessions, but however useful such a reading is in terms of literary history, it does not begin to approach the text’s poetics. To press the question of what Melville’s text does gives an opportunity to see the ways that writing blurs the boundaries of subject and object through the operations and interactions of a critical discourse that seeks to invent and establish itself via the dialectical mechanisms of another writer’s struggle with and as a text. In Hawthorne circles, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” is considered an interesting side note that provides the groundwork for investigating the relationship that arose during the most important periods of their respective writing careers. There is little real discussion, however, of the essay’s performance as a theoretical text and the questions it raises about representation and authorship, so what is lost is the effect Melville’s essay has on a possible theoretical understanding of Hawthorne. “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” meant to shed light on Hawthorne, instead creates a veil, however intertextual it may be, between Hawthorne and his audience. But this veil reveals one way to think about reading as a dialectic with ethical, not to mention epistemological, valences. Much critical work overlooks how Melville absorbs Hawthorne’s fictive voice, so that often it is Hawthorne’s very rhetoric that works to obscure Hawthorne’s work. The emphasis on Melville as author keeps critics from seeing how “Hawthorne and His Mosses” interacts with Mosses from an Old Manse, even breaching textual boundaries. What matters who’s speaking? we ask, and the question distracts us from our search for who is speaking. Or perhaps we might ask, how are they speaking? What sort of community allows—no, engenders—this speaking? It seems these questions

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might unveil the ways that the addressee, in his or her resistance to interpretation, tropes the addresser, and vice versa. The latter’s sublation of the former fashions a textual interweaving of subjectivities. The byline of Melville’s essay reads, “By a Virginian Spending July in Vermont”—more than a pseudonym (and how could it be even considered that when no actual name is given?); Melville creates a fictive critic and a nameless heteronym. In that Melville is from the Northeast and writing the essay in Massachusetts, Melville creates not just a persona but a fictive character, one who begins reading Timothy Dwight’s Travels in New England and New York, and who has a cousin, Cherry. And when we see that the fictive critic prefers Hawthorne’s tales to Dwight’s chronicles, we see him laying the foundations for a case that fiction, aware as it is of its artifice, self-consciously participates in a system of representations. Dwight’s work, which presents itself as nonfictional and objective, is unaware that it is an exponent of (in this case Federalist) ideology. In Travels, Dwight, Yale College’s eighth president, casts New Englanders as a distinct ethnic group. The “Virginian” behind the essay on Hawthorne would naturally be anxious to replace this version of the development of American cultural potential with a point of view that is more inclusive. Although partly intended to correct the criticisms made by European travel writers, Travels indicates that Dwight sees little hope for the possibility of native genius in the United States and believes only strong centralized authority—especially in the area of education—will enforce quality and standards. This perspective runs contrary to what the fictive critic was claiming in his essay on Hawthorne about the possibility and potential that exist for real innovation and genius.25 “Would that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or mother,” the author in the text writes, “that so it might be, we could glorify them, without including their ostensible authors.”26 Melville composes an essay that orphans itself as it issues forth from no definite author; there is no body behind the name. In fact, the only name that is offered is itself an example of antonomasia, a rhetorical device wherein the appellative takes the place of a proper name. As it stands, the antonomasia serves to establish the author as a substitution, a veil that leaves the quality and authority of voice as inscrutable as it is unverifiable. Moreover, as the “critic” subverts the conventions of critical discourse by being fictive, Melville undermines the “unquestionable” authority of an author.

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The antonomasia also works to offer not an individuated author but rather a type, a classification such as Foucault would later describe. Leon Howard, in his important biography of Melville, tells us that Melville and the editors of The Literary World, Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews, had decided that the review should not appear with his name because “[t]hey evidently decided that the marks of its origin were too strong upon it.”27 To read the essay’s byline in this way is to foreground the national literary identity the essay calls for. Melville also made additional changes, tempering that decidedly chauvinistic rhetoric and perhaps, some have speculated, adopting the persona in order to stress Hawthorne’s national appeal. Although perhaps partially true, the effect of this byline is quite a different matter. To begin with, the text itself betrays that the regionalized identity of the reviewer is decidedly false. As the textual critic P. Marc Bousquet points out, “Melville provided [unmistakable] clues to his identity by inserting nautical talk patently incompatible with the plantation persona” and cites such examples as the sentence, “You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the Truth in,” as well as “by all the gods of Peedee.”28 We are given only where the reviewer is from and where (or so the essay claims) he currently is. The critic employs terms and phrases that do not serve to locate him in the group he represents himself as being part of. Since there is no person standing to authenticate the claims that he makes, verification, if not presentation, can occur only at the level of language. Here a telling gap opens up between the critic’s claims and their legitimacy. Thus, the reviewer is himself a false identity trying to make a case for a national identity, an identity that would have to be invented. At the very least what occurs is that the reader must choose whether or not to recognize the critic’s authority. The reader must consent to it for it to be at all tenable. Identity is not wholly based on self-claims. Rather, the language—the very vocabulary—one uses to make these claims provides grounds for a persuasive, legitimating force. The tension of such irony threatens to deconstruct what seems to be the prima facie argument of the essay: the United States must develop its own literature. Since the essay is unsigned, the text need not make a good faith case. “Nationalism of the literary and political variety provided the most pervasive of the essay’s original topoi . . . but that does not necessarily imply that nationalism participated in the essay’s telos,” suggests Bousquet.29 We must be skeptical of a call for a definitive or even exemplary national

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identity when Melville’s invented critic illustrates that identity is mutable and contingent and finally cannot convey an unquestionable authority. It suggests that any transnational or unionist identity would be a fiction born of efficacy. But is this not the case with personal identity in its public guise(s)? Do not especially immediate context, environment, and power dynamics, at least as demonstrated in social intercourse, always shape identity—not for oneself only but in relation to others as well? The question then is whether or not there is a stable unified ego that is always latent. Or are the various masks veiling nothing? Although the national literature claim has traditionally been what critics have perceived as the focus of “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” it seems many may have been looking in the wrong place, that in fact such chauvinistic claims are but a veil over what the text’s other issues are, and the other issues may be that we can never get past distractions and substitutions. Between Melville’s apparent topic of discourse (his intent) and the dynamics of the text, a shadow falls. In attempting to praise Hawthorne, the fictive critic ends up burying him. In other words, the text performs a complex dialectic in which a fictional critic writes a version of Hawthorne and his work into existence. This interpretive act, however, attempts to translate Hawthorne into discourse, but by so doing displaces and even negates the original referent. Behind every mask is another mask. The byline not only serves as a periphrastic indirection, a veil, but also provides that veil a means by which to speak. This speaking veil is itself an example of prosopopoeia. A rhetorical figure that de Man throughout his career argued was “the master trope of poetic discourse,”30 prosopopoeia is a trope wherein an absent or imaginary person, or a nonsentient thing, is represented as speaking. In this way, the “critic” who writes “Hawthorne and His Mosses” is not mimetically representational (again, does not stand as a real person) but is instead a figure that foregrounds that irruption between the reader and the text and the author. In the guise of his fictive critic, Melville dons his own veil—or perhaps mask is the better metaphor—to shed light on the impossibility of shedding light on Hawthorne. Just as J. Hillis Miller writes that the reading of Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” may culminate in “the double proposition that the story is the unveiling of the possibility of the impossibility of unveiling,”31 “Hawthorne and His Mosses” may offer that same conclusion—a conclusion that offers no resolution but only further deferrals. Hawthorne states in “The Old Manse”:

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“So far as I am a man of really individual attributes I veil my face; nor am I, nor have I ever been, one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit for their beloved public.”32 Although the actual works of Hawthorne do stand prior to “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Melville is moved to write the piece, so the text has constructed him along the lines of the aspects with which Melville identifies. For this reason, we can say that the Melville persona that exists within the writing of the text exists prior to Hawthorne’s text, but Melville’s critical act translates Mosses into his own version. Hawthorne’s subjectivity is transformed into the textual object that is then translated back into another’s subjectivity. Ironically, Melville’s “individual attributes” help to veil Hawthorne even as Melville attempts to unveil Hawthorne’s work to the world. I realize this flirts with a deconstructive reading; however, the distinction I would make is that the act of reading creates the conditions of self-consciousness that become manifest in the act of writing. If self-knowledge is revealed via action, then thinking and writing are coterminous with Being. In Hawthorne and History, Miller contends: For Hawthorne, so it seems, subjectivity is, or can be, “outside of everything,” perhaps even outside of itself, or beside itself. If it is outside of everything, this means that it cannot touch anything closely enough to make that “anything” when it is named even a metonymic expression of itself, much less a metaphorical or symbolic expression giving access to the secret self by way of a similarity. One devastating form of this is the inability of a work of literature to function as a communication to others of the self of its author. Hawthorne is by no means sure that he even ought to try to communicate his secret selfhood. One’s inner self may be that one thing of which one should not even try to speak.33

Hawthorne’s work as a whole does seem to support such a reading, and to speak generally, Hawthorne’s very project may be this, the self ’s ineffability. The “ineffable” may not necessarily be the kind of mise en abîme that certain schools of thought would describe it as. There exist certain sympathies between deconstruction and Anglo-American philosophy, or what I have referred to as Emersonian modernism. Here it is the impossibility of getting at a Platonic ideal of the self that the two modes share in common. “What we cannot speak about,” Wittgenstein tells us in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “we must pass over in silence.”34 The implications of this inability to describe subjectivity in anything but general terms are

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quite different. We remain silent because it is the “I” that speaks. Grammatically, it must be in the nominative position, but that subjectivity is revealed in its activity, enacted via its articulations; the self always bespeaks its selfhood. In “The Old Manse,” the Manse is not merely Hawthorne’s residence but can be read as a metaphorical figure for his self. Throughout the passage relating the boat ride taken by Hawthorne and William Ellery Channing, images of obfuscation recur—“the over arching shade formed a natural bower,” “a heap of ashes and half-consumed brands,” and so on35—images that foreshadow Hawthorne’s statement that he veils his face. But most telling is his description of the Old Manse itself: [B]est seen from the river, overshadowed with its willow and all environed about with the foliage of its orchard and avenue,—how gently did its gray, homely aspect rebuke the speculative extravagances of the day! It had grown sacred in connection with the artificial life against which we inveighed . . . and, with these thoughts, it seemed to me that all the artifice and conventionalism of life was but an impalpable thinness upon its surface, and that the depth below was none the worse for it.36

Hawthorne allegorizes “a cloud, in the shape of an immensely gigantic figure of a hound, crouched above the house, as if keeping guard over it,” and while “[g]azing at this symbol,” Hawthorne “prayed that the upper influences might long protect the institutions that had grown out of the heart of mankind.”37 Here and elsewhere Hawthorne uses the figure of the Manse to stand for himself—an act that reveals while at the same time pointing away from himself, for as he says, the Manse is best seen from the river, that is, at some remove. The Old Manse is the figured and figural site of the interior struggle for self-consciousness, which Hawthorne’s persona creates as a type for itself, and which Melville’s persona appropriates for its own process of embodiment and exteriorization. In a very real way, the Old Manse is the scene of a unique confluence of authorial voices. Emerson lived there for a time during the period when he began writing Nature, working in the same study that Hawthorne would use years later. Heightening the metaphoric suggestiveness of the actual study is the fact that Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia, both used a diamond ring to etch phrases onto the study windowpane that still remains at the Old Manse. Hawthorne himself wrote “Nath’

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Hawthorne This is his study 1843.” The words seem to be superimposed over what one sees when looking out the window, specifically the Concord River. One possible reading of this is that the words refer to the world outside, so nature is Hawthorne’s study. In any event, the concept (as ordering tendency) comes before or between the viewer and the sense perception. The scene is not unlike the painting Les Promenades d’Euclide by surrealist René Magritte, which self-consciously depicts a window overlooking a town. In front of the window is an easel on which sits a painting that coincides exactly with that part of the town that it covers. In both cases, the conceptual order masks what it supposedly attempts to reveal, as does any allegory. The very nature of allegory is to import a figure by which to foreground perception as an interpretive act. In the passage that describes the Old Manse, the house’s transformation by the imagination parallels the way that it is veiled by nature. In short, its materiality is transformed by and into figuration. This is the very motivating trope of much of Hawthorne’s work: Georgiana is obscured by her birthmark, which comes to stand for imperfection; Hooper’s veil renders the cleric a cipher; and in numerous cases Hawthorne reoccupies history by fictionalizing actual events (“Endicott and the Red Cross” and The Blithedale Romance) and historicizing legends (“Wakefield” and The Scarlet Letter). These tropes then take the place of their referents. “Which, after all, was the most real,” asks Hawthorne, “the picture, or the original?—the objects palpable to our grosser senses, or their apotheosis in the stream beneath? Surely the disembodied images stand in closer relation to the soul.”38 With this brief but telling passage Hawthorne posits a typical Kantian epistemological predicament that suggests perception supersedes materiality. But even here, the veil descends as we notice the tropes embedded in Hawthorne’s language: “palpable,” “apotheosis,” “disembodied,” and “soul” spiritualize the material world. The language here is in fact generally gothic, the conventions of which foreground an impasse of interpretation, in that nothing ever is what it seems to be. Hawthorne must again fall back on tropes in order to discuss which is more “real.” The lesson seems to be that regardless of what stands “in closer relation to the soul,” we can discuss such things only via metaphor, thereby negating the possibility of an experiential language that is either direct or incontrovertible, necessitating that symbolic exchange must remain open. Imagination, in this way,

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is an act upon the real, translating and transforming materiality. Such translation allows a person to be absorbed by an object even while absorbing it into his or her consciousness. “Black as such . . . is more the absence of signification than a clearly identifiable sign,” J. Hillis Miller argues,39 and it is this opacity that Melville lights on in his own essay. “For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black,”writes Melville of the “blackness in Hawthorne . . . that so fixes and fascinates [him].”40 Melville’s language itself becomes opaque: hyperbole aside, what blackness can be “ten times black”? This itself is a metaphor that is closed off from precision, and the hyperbole only heightens the awareness of language’s limitations. Only by turning the language back in upon itself—the hyperbole creates a paradox—can Melville’s fictive critic bring to bear the fact that language comprises a set of conventions, a doxa, informed by and (re)forming an ideology. In effect, Hawthorne’s “blackness” is that which cannot be read by the dominant ideological codes. After all, Hawthorne is, the fictive critic tells us, “a man who means no meanings” and the “blackness” is an interpretive resistance.41 Melville’s fictive critic says the blackness “fixes him.” “Fixes” has several connotations—“to repair or mend,” “to transfix,” and “to make permanent.” In the context here, any of these connotations can be applied to very different ends. The first impulse is to read “fix” as “transfix,” especially because of the correlation with “fascinates,” which also appears in the sentence. But inasmuch as the critic is fictive, coming into existence only as an essay on Hawthorne, it is Hawthorne’s blackness that gives the critic being and a kind of literary permanence; in other words, in some sense Hawthorne has also authored Melville’s critic. The critic exists only in language, has no corporeality that is “palpable to our grosser senses,” and the essay borrows and revises Hawthorne’s images of obfuscation. Since the critic whom Melville has created draws on tropes and stylistics culled from Hawthorne’s oeuvre, the critic is completed or “mended” by Hawthorne’s tropes. The very beginning of “Mosses” reads like an homage to Hawthorne: “A papered chamber in a fine old farm-house—a mile from any other dwelling, and dipped to the eaves in foliage” sounds very similar to the begin-

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ning of “The Old Manse”:42 “Between two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone . . . we beheld the gray front of the old parsonage terminating the vista of an avenue of black-ash trees.”43 The author in the review essay says that the papered chamber “surely is the place to write of Hawthorne.” The curious thing about the opening of the essay is the deictic use of this as “this surely is the place.” What is meant by “place”? Ordinarily we may assume that the critic is referring to a real location, but since the critic is a fictive construct, the this refers to a diegetic space, a space that is composed of Hawthornian discourse. This sense of space is compounded by the pun that is employed here: a “papered chamber” is both a wallpapered room and the metaphorical space of a text. The fictive critic slyly announces his own status as prosopopoeia. Looking further at this pun, we might remember that another word for a pun is paronomasia, which is constructed of para, meaning “beyond,” and onomazein, meaning “to name.” With the first sentence of “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” the text questions our conventional conceptions of what an author is and what authorial boundaries entail, going beyond the name, as if to say one must employ such discourse to write about the author who employs it. In this way, the text seemingly anticipates Barthes’s argument that all reading is rewriting but with a Wittgensteinian wrinkle, as one author takes on the language and therefore the Lebensform of another. The fictive critic draws on Hawthorne’s own images to forge a discourse on Mosses from an Old Manse. Beyond that the fictive critic equates his own trope making with Hawthorne’s in the parallel description of the orchard in the following passage: The orchard of the Old Manse seems the visible type of the fine mind that has described it. Those twisted, and contorted old trees, “that stretch out their crooked branches, and take such hold of the imagination, that we remember them as humorists, and odd-fellows.” And then, as surrounded by these grotesque forms, and hushed in the noon-day repose of this Hawthorne’s spell, how aptly might the still fall of his ruddy thoughts into your soul be symbolized by “the thump of a great apple, in the stillest afternoon, falling without a breath of wind, from the mere necessity of perfect ripeness”! For no less ripe than ruddy are the apples of the thoughts and fancies in this sweet Man of Mosses.44

Thus, “the fine mind” that describes the orchard refers both to Hawthorne and his critic, so both are figured by the very metaphorical images they

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create. In this way, the figure makers conflate both with the figures and with one another. This mutual identification having once been established between Hawthorne and Melville’s fictive critic—and by extension Melville himself—Hawthorne as author is refashioned into a figure himself. This identification is ratified thereafter: whether in “a parity of ideas . . . between a man like Hawthorne and a man like [the critic]” or the “one shock of recognition [that] runs the whole circle round,”45 Hawthorne is rendered as the very veil that obscures his own voice. In this way authors are interchangeable as “the names of all fine authors are fictitious ones . . . simply standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding Spirit of all Beauty, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius.”46 If all authors’ names signify this “Spirit of all Beauty,” then they can be substituted for each other via metalepsis. Metalepsis is a minor trope that occurs when one metaphor is built upon or displaces another, quite often via allusion. “Spirit of all Beauty” is certainly a kind of metaphoric substitution, even if there is not an allusive quality; however, how could we not hear echoes of Hegel in the phrase? Since one of the most foundational elements that particularizes a text is an assessment of proprietorship to a particular author, this metalepsis breaks down specific authorial boundaries, and texts become permeable by other texts. In a very different but not unrelated reading to the one that I am proposing, Ellen Weinauer argues, “Melville’s representation of authorship in ‘Mosses’ suggests that the drive to escape affiliation is the logical extension of the drive to forge it: the notion of shared genius is as threatening as it is enabling, for it demands a renunciation of boundaries, of the very proprietary impulse upon which the Lockean liberal subject is based.”47 This condition is what gives the fictive critic permission to revise “tranquil spirit” in a passage from “The Old Manse” to “magic spirit” in “Hawthorne and His Mosses.”48 Furthermore, such a renunciation of boundaries amounts to a conscious intertextuality that characterizes Hawthorne’s paraphrasing of Emerson’s “Nature” in the passage “Assyrian dawn and Paphian sunset and moonrise from the summit of our eastern hill,”49 which is then cited in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” as well. The “shock of recognition” that “runs the whole circle round” is an intertextual concatenation that erodes the distance between texts and their authors, enacting Barthes’s description of the text as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.”50

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The telos of “Hawthorne and His Mosses” does not culminate in this metaleptical envisioning of authorship. Instead, the trope of prosopopoeia is invoked as the author while a centralized, material agent is dispersed. What is left is the mask that speaks for that absence. Hawthorne is made as fictive as the critic Melville has created, and with that Hawthorne is himself allegorized, bringing to pass what the critic contends: “[T]hat on a personal interview no great author has ever come up to the idea of his reader.”51 In some sense, then, the person who writes a story is not the same as the author of a text, for the latter becomes an allegory, bodied forth via the intimacy of the creative and interpretive acts; in other words, the reader is invested in and complicit with what Foucault calls the author function. As even the capitalization of “Spirit of Beauty” suggests an allegory, Hawthorne becomes the prosopopoeia of an allegory. Through this act the fictive critic completes the transformation of Hawthorne into trope and places him within the hermeneutic circle of author, reader, and text in a movement that most supports Hawthorne’s project: the interrogation of historical narrative. The question of what the essay accomplishes in terms of this figural transumption of the author now arises. To what end has “Hawthorne and His Mosses” done this? In effect, the essay converts Hawthorne into a literary signifier—an “author” with all the concomitant authority that entails—by remembering him into the future. Melville’s critic attempts to write Hawthorne into a literary continuum, and he does this by drawing on the authority of Shakespeare in order to justify such a historical positioning. Again, in the light of the essay’s argument for a national literary identity, this is paradoxical. In using Shakespeare as a comparison, the fictive critic indicates that the Bard speaks as a particularized allegory of genius, “[t]hrough the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago.”52 On the whole, Shakespeare is misread, the critic tells us, and it may be because the operant prosopopoeia is misconstrued as mimesis. It is no accident that Shakespeare is used as an example, for his body of work is the first source for well over seventeen hundred words. Shakespeare is as much an author of culture in the Western world as he is a playwright. “Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one,” writes Hawthorne, “and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries.”53 But, Hawthorne argues, “It

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is the age itself that writes newspapers and almanacs”; therefore, those texts that have lasting influence are those that are most clearly evincing their dialogue with the culture and ideology from which they emanate.54 The theories of reading implicit in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in its breaking down of authorial boundaries and questioning of the sovereignty of author as explanation, allow for one text to revise another, for texts to ebb and flow over and into one another, “the shock of recognition” running though the texts themselves by means of an associative intertextuality. This textual transgression allows for the reader’s investment in Barthes’s description of writing as “that neutral, composite, oblique space where . . . all identity is lost,”55 a place where “genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand.”56 It is neutral in that all points of the discourse community recognize each other. But is this space neutral? Can it not be informed by hierarchies as well? In other words, is this “oblique space” free from ideology? This finally may be the idea motivating “Hawthorne and His Mosses”: culture is a rhizomatic intermingling of texts, texts that create a context by which to perceive “Otherness” and by which sense-data are conceptualized. But these texts, these contexts, while seemingly revealing meaning, too often serve to veil ideology. If history is naturalized, the ability to “problematize Historical narratives” is lost, and individuals succumb to an alienation precisely because history is severed irrevocably from the present. When that happens, history becomes a neutralized space, and all access to a consciousness of ideology is closed off. Emerson maintains in “History” the stance that individuals need to be invested in the narrative of the present tense in order to locate themselves. “We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience, and verifying them there. All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no History; only Biography.”57 His sense of things is that history is a text like any other and must be included in interpretive processes in order to be a formative element in self-consciousness. No one is a better exemplar of Emerson’s belief that history is to be read “actively not passively” than Hawthorne, who repeatedly uses his fiction to reoccupy history, perhaps most famously in The Scarlet Letter, where he uses the framing “Custom-House” sketch to write his veiled or fictive self into a self-conscious narrative that fictionalizes and historicizes itself simultaneously. Similar efforts are apparent in Hawthorne’s collection Mosses from an Old Manse, particularly in a story like “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” which

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interrogates the morals traditionally culled from the countless ballads and artistic, romanticizing representations of the 1725 “battle” known as Lovell’s Fight, an incident that was initiated when a band of Massachusetts soldiers led by Captain John Lovell came upon a group of ten sleeping Indians and slaughtered them. Hawthorne, because he is aware of history as an ideological text, is free to question its authority. Fiction allows for Hawthorne to accomplish this because, as de Man would later write in The Resistance to Theory, “What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism. It follows that, more than any other mode of inquiry . . . the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence.”58 In much the same way as Melville’s fictive critic saying the best place to write about Hawthorne is “the papered chamber,” the best way for Hawthorne to make history conscious of itself as a fiction, as an allegory itself, is to use the tropes and rhetorical devices of fiction. As fiction, as allegory, history must be interpreted and reinterpreted, for it does not give up meaning. In fact, history as such is much more than mere chronology—it is the narrative that a country tells itself to bind the citizens together, to convince them that their presence is part of the nation’s becoming. Hayden White describes in The Form of Content how historical narrative, at least in the United States, functions to produce cultural meaning in ways clearly similar to literary texts. He writes, “The historical narrative does not, as narrative, dispel false beliefs about the past, human life, the nature of the community, and so on; what it does is test the capacity of a culture’s fictions to endow real events with the kinds of meaning that literature displays to consciousness through its fashioning of patterns of ‘imaginary’ events.”59 Historical narrative takes real events and dips them by the ankle into a symbolic system, giving them formative cultural importance. Rather than being submitted to questions of their being “true” or “false,” historical narratives are legitimately thought of as allegoresis. Thus, White points out how “rather than regard every historical narrative as mythic or ideological in nature, we should regard it as allegorical, that is, as saying one thing and meaning another.”60 We are free to see the narrative as both allegorical and ideological. Regardless, what it makes clear is the ways that literature might help one to reoccupy history.

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“Hawthorne and His Mosses” brings this allegorical reading of history to the fore when the fictive critic declares that “as I now write, I am Posterity speaking by proxy.”61 The immediate effect of this proposition is that the text declares its own authority to grant Mosses from an Old Manse its culturally authorizing influence. This performative declaration renders the fictive critic as both being history and speaking for history. The effect of this performative declaration suggests that whoever speaks for history is also speaking as history. In this case it is the “I am”—the proposition of a simultaneous sense of being and self-consciousness that authorizes such an action. Since the critic is a fictive construct (im)posing as a “real person,” history—metaleptically revised into allegory—is foregrounded as a linguistic rather than “natural” event. And as Paul de Man tells us, “Allegory names the rhetorical process by which the literary text moves from a phenomenal, world-oriented to a grammatical, language-oriented direction.”62 But what motivates this “translation”? The textual performances implicit in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” make it evident that history is an isotope of ideology. This makes of history a linguistic event, and it is in this way related to Wittgenstein’s discussion of Lebensform. “[T]o imagine a language,” the philosopher writes, “means to imagine a form of life.”63 The underlying consensus of linguistic and nonlinguistic behaviors, assumptions, traditions, and practices that human beings share is presupposed in language and, therefore, woven into human activities and experiences. Because of this, culture, ideology, and language, although not interchangeable, are inseparably bound together. In fact, the possibility of the former two exists within language, and accordingly language is essentially public. The endless possibilities of life arise out of the possibilities latent within the intricacies of language use. When the relationship is reversed, and language and ideology are made transparent or veiled, individuals are denied access to history. Usually Wittgenstein’s arguments are used to inveigh against a logically private language, but in the context of discussing “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” we see his ideas give a broader dimension to the context of authorial boundaries. “The shock of recognition” that the text describes comes from an intuitive sense that language is public and relational, as Emerson makes so clear in “Quotation and Originality,” rather than simply an expression of inner states of being. The deferred sense of subjectivity that Hillis Miller describes operating in Hawthorne’s work seems to lead to this idea. The condition of authorship

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can be seen as the tension between the essentially public function of language and a subject that believes language is private and expressive. In looking at these various tensions, it becomes evident that a subtle dialectic is occurring in the text. Toward the end of the essay the fictive critic claims that “in all men, hiddenly reside certain wondrous, occult properties—as in some plants and minerals—which by some happy but very rare accident (as bronze was discovered by the melting of the iron and brass in the burning of Corinth) may chance to be called forth here on earth.”64 This passage is a seeming evaluation of all humankind in its implication that each individual has a reserve—and thus a potential value— awaiting the special circumstances by which it may be realized. Therefore, when the fictive critic claims “that Shakespeares are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio,”65 he is not merely being a chauvinist. Instead the claim is motivated, if obliquely, from a Hegelian sense of the struggle for recognition or acknowledgment. The fictive critic has deconstructed the author function in order to dissolve a blinding self-consciousness into an awareness of Otherness via the “shock of recognition.” The essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” is a twofold quotation. On the one hand Melville as the fictive critic literally uses passages and paraphrases from Mosses from an Old Manse in order to represent Hawthorne and his text. On the other hand, this process of quotation is the means by which the fictive critic intensifies desire for Hawthorne in order to assimilate his authority and thereby sublate him. Just as Hawthorne literally replaced Emerson in the Old Manse, the critic/Melville imaginatively occupies the same study after Hawthorne has left. The fictive critic is dependent on the dialectic operation that allows him, and thus Melville, to overcome Hawthorne. A similar movement occurs in the form of Moby-Dick, the text that Melville dedicates to his older friend, Hawthorne. Because he only comes into being with the text’s opening performative declaration, “Call me Ishmael,” Ishmael, the narrator, exists only as the text of MobyDick, as a performance. Although this can be said of any novel told from the first-person point of view, it is true a fortiori here, for the novel is an extension of what “Ishmael” signifies. The text that follows is an explanation of what “Ishmael” means or signifies. Because he is an “orphan,” at least as far as the novel concludes, there is no knowing what other name he has gone by, and we learn nothing about his life save the symptomatic behavior caused by depression, following funerals and the like, that leads him to

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go to sea. Ishmael’s naming of himself, however, is the ultimate self-actualizing move, but still he needs to write himself into existence so that the reader might recognize him. With Moby-Dick, Melville attempts to write the foundling text he describes in the essay on Hawthorne. Moreover, the entire text is an analepsis, its opening occurring just after the narrative’s ending, and the end of the Pequod. And although the events in the novel have already occurred, they do not “count” until recognized by an audience. The text itself is the coffin that contains the bodies of the crew, who are dead before the novel even begins. That coffin, like the one he clings to in the final chapter, is what keeps Ishmael alive, for the account he relates ends chronologically just before the beginning of the book. And in the final irony, Ahab and the others have to die for Ishmael to be born, yet he is born to tell of their death. This discussion places much of Melville’s work into the framework of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. For Hegel, self-consciousness is dependent on the interaction of at least two conscious beings. Both beings are conscious of being selves (selves in the act of being), but when they first encounter one another, they cannot vouch for the consciousness of the other; in other words, each does not recognize the other as a subjective agent. Initially, there is no way to see the other as having otherness. For Hegel, desire for recognition (for validation or affirmation that a person is indeed an “I”) is the necessary condition for self-consciousness. To desire recognition is to want the Other to value one’s worth as the Other’s own as well. Since both subjects are engaged in this “desire to be desired,” the meeting becomes agonistic; and to be resolved, one of the subjects must be ascendant. Kojève glosses this process: “[M]an, to be really, truly ‘man,’ and to know that he is such, must, therefore, impose the idea that he has of himself on beings other than himself: he must be recognized by the others (in the ideal, extreme case, by all others). Or again, he must transform the (natural and human) world in which he is not recognized into a world in which this recognition takes place.”66 The fight to death for recognition need not be literal; it can be at the level of public reception, which explains why Melville sets up the conditions for others to desire Hawthorne, for this is the desire that defines him. He then intensifies this desire in order to overcome it. To become the Melville who was to write Moby-Dick, Pierre, and the other books that were to be significant departures from the literary adven-

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ture tales of his early career, Melville has to make possible the conditions of an originless author, one who wills himself into existence and then backward into history. Once this has occurred, the fictive critic clears the way for the “metaphysical” Melville to come into being. He is legitimated in his relations to Hawthorne and through his distinctions. By suggesting that Mosses is Hawthorne’s masterwork and the culmination of his talent and powers, the fictive critic pushes Hawthorne into posterity. He praises Hawthorne and buries him. Melville’s self-consciousness is born out of the recognition paid not only to his distinctive being but also to the network of relations that allows there to be a family resemblance between Hawthorne, himself, and even Emerson. To imagine such an intersection is to imagine a way of life that can be cognizant of such connections. “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” by renegotiating the author’s authority, is an attempt to democratize the interpretive process and to open the interpretive process to include culture, ideology, and history. But here democracy refers to an ideology rather than simply politics. The democratic political process is important as a means of making decisions or aggregating interests, but as ideology it provides a foundational means for the expression of the dialectic of consensus and dissent so that all individuals may seek recognition for their own views. What can now factor into the psychological and ethical conditions is the potential for a person to desire to be seen as equal as others, rather than needing to dominate. This desire, an impulse that Hegel makes no real allowance for, is what motivates one toward maintaining a sense of sympathy and empathy with others. The American development of the Hegelian dialectic comes to the fore at this point. Rather than create a hierarchical, teleological series of aesthetic and epistemological victories, these agonisms perpetuate themselves in an ongoing dispute in which the conversation is one of individuals seeking to be “right” (when “to converse” is to assert “the converse”), seeking to be the ascendant Master, but at the same time recognizing the need for community and the need to be defined by that community. If only to keep in place the mores and traditions that they try to resist, the texts are part of a larger cultural context in which members of a community seek to realize that in order to recognize one another at all, there must be some values that are held in common. These values, or at least the conversation and debate that surround them, are not foundational because they could be otherwise and, over time, will undoubtedly be so. They are

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instead a commonality. But the members of the community seek to hold the community together lest their most powerful instinct, that of selfpreservation, should undo the mechanisms by which they invest in the mores and ethics of coexisting with fellow others. This Emersonian version of Hegel’s dialectic demands recognition, both of itself and of other people, for its own sense of values. This is not mere altruism. The possibilities of resistance and identification are not contradictory but complementary imperatives by which the warp and woof of one’s own consciousness can be discerned. To know ourselves, to be able to decide about values, principles, and beliefs, we need others to test the composition and potential of our, of anyone’s, actions. This version of subjectivity that Emerson offers, which we see being performed in Melville’s textual negotiations of authorship, envisions a self that struggles to have its own value system commensurate with the estimation of others around it. In positing the author function as fluid, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” attempts to give access to the very materials that compose a form of life as Wittgenstein defines it. There is a radicalizing skepticism at work in the text, and as the text. But this skepticism clears the ground so that new texts and new relationships can come into being. By throwing into doubt riverbed propositions, we are given more possibilities of life, and thus greater depths of sympathy among people and texts become possible as well. As Hawthorne and even “Hawthorne and His Mosses” question history, culture, and the ideology latent in fiction, we see that “self ” occurring in the tension between the public and private may in fact be a veil itself. In all its complexities, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” shows us that if we cannot get beyond the veil, we may at least be able to know it is there, and it is this final “shock of recognition” that closes the distance between life and culture, and between the past and the unfolding now.

4 Response and Responsibility stevens, williams, and the ethics of modernism

Whatever else it may be, reading is a process of setting positions— including the reader’s position—in terms of language, culture, history, and definitions of subjectivity, all of which are factors that create a horizon of movement for the faculty of understanding. The difficulty (perhaps to a large extent it is even an impossibility) lies in keeping the positions from becoming reified. As Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir reminds us, “habit is a great deadener,”1 and unless continually challenged and revised, understanding reifies, effectively stopping knowledge. The factors that contribute to this are legion, of course. From the illusions of the status quo, to the pitfalls of jargon, to the commodification of language, there is no shortage of ways that active negotiation with the world and with the materials of consciousness can come to rest too soon. Poetry, however, is one negotiation that stays a negotiation. Consequently, the questions posed as poetics are a means of finding one’s own ground, a means of seeing beliefs, values, the very contents of knowledge that are the propositions by which one discerns the shape of the world as one understands it, all of which is subjected to the ebb and flow of material and ethical contentions and sympathies. This is the frame within which I situate Emerson and a particular engagement in a modernist poetics, a poetics that is always already in excess of any frame, if for no other reason than that the poetics is built upon the same materials, the same approaches, as the frame that I bring to it. This

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pursuit of flexibility as a kind of progressivist intent is evident in many authors of the twentieth century, but certainly not all. Two poets, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, both exemplify different but interconnected strains of this Emersonian modernism, particularly in the ways that they write their poems and in their recurring commitment to establishing the terms of their poetics. How we think about the world dictates how we respond to it and how we find ourselves responsible to it. These questions of how one responds and what enables response are at the center of the work of these two poets. Stevens, to begin with, offers ways of reenvisioning, even reinventing how we think about the world. Such a dynamic is the mechanism that generates certain aspects of Stevens’s poetics. In “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” we find the following stanzas: The poem refreshes life so that we share, For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies Belief in an immaculate beginning And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, To an immaculate end. We move between these points: From that ever-early candor to its late plural And the candor of them is the strong exhilaration Of what we feel from what we think, of thought Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came, An elixir, an excitation, a pure power. The poem, through candor, brings back a power again That gives a candid kind to everything. We say: At night an Arabian in my room, With his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how, Inscribes a primitive astronomy Across the unscrawled fores the future casts And throws his stars around the floor. By day The wood-dove used to chant his hoobla-hoo And still the grossest iridescence of ocean Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls. Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.2

We are quick to see the claim that “the poem” refreshes “the first idea” echoes C. S. Peirce’s description of “firstness,” one of three modes of the expe-

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rience of reality. According to Peirce, “firstness” is not quite a fully realized idea; it is possible or potential thought, the not yet actualized. What might get overlooked is the insistence in Stevens’s poem that a “we” shares this “first idea.” It is crucial not to lose sight of that insistence, as it keeps its sense of the community as part of the discussion. Indeed, the shared experience (in the form of the pronominal “we”) of the poem continues at least through this excerpt.3 This shared experience certainly frames this excerpt of Stevens’s massive poem—from the “we share” of the first line through the “strange relation” found in the last. In fact, this communal or interrelational experience of the poem, its “elixir” or “excitation,” encounters difference with the Arabian and his “hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how” and the wood-dove’s “hoobla-hoo” and the ocean’s “hoo.” Denis Donoghue reads the nonsense syllables in the passage as examples of Stevens’s interest in resemblance. Donoghue writes: The relation between hoo and hoobla-how and hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how is . . . a relation of resemblance, which Stevens in “Three Academic Pieces” was careful to distinguish from identity. “Both in nature and in metaphor,” he said, “identity is the vanishing-point of resemblance”; and further, that the prodigy of nature “is not identity but resemblance and its universe of reproduction is not an assembly line but an incessant creation.” So, in the poem, there is resemblance between the Arabian, the wood-dove, and the ocean as forms of power no longer available to the nocturnal speaker. Intelligence may not respect the resemblance, or it may think its casualness a scandal: it is gibberish, but which gibberish? But that only shows why “the poem reveals itself only to the ignorant man”; it is the ignorant man who appreciates, without being too intelligent about it, that “life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.”4

Donoghue is right, I think, in suggesting that primary concern is with resemblance, but his claim becomes unclear near the end, other than his suggesting that Stevens is being anti-intellectual. Instead we might see the resemblance in the function of the sets of nonsense syllables. In each of the three cases the reference is to language—the Arabian, whose language as well as his whole cosmology is radically different from the speaker’s, the language of the wood-dove, and the suggestion of language by the ocean— and all function in the same way.5 Each case is recognized as language, but they each resist the speaker’s understanding (and since he is the mediator, the examples resist the reader as well) because they are each unfamiliar. The speaker recognizes these moments as moments of language use. Even if he

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cannot understand the vocabulary, the language functions in the same way, at least as best as he can tell. The resemblance is in the shared arbitrariness of language, which seen in a certain way is comic but not nonsensical, at least within the milieu of each example. This “strange relation” is what binds a community of difference together, a complex text of identification and resistance. How poems can be occasions for thinking through these issues is what requires further thinking. Simon Critchley, employing one of the poet’s own phrases, describes a Stevensian “metaphysics in the dark,” when he writes, “For Stevens, as for Kant, reality is really real for a real audience of real people, but it is wholly shot through with conceptual content whose ultimate source is the imagination.”6 In this way, there can be no appeal to the myth of a given for a set of the possibilities of relations; rather, the conditions that make those relations possible must be both found and forged, simultaneously.7 With Stevens, this question of relation is a central one for making sense of the act of making sense. Albert Gelpi sets the stakes of modernist poetics quite high for both Williams and Stevens: “Stevens and Williams considered the chief challenge to the Modernist poet—one of life-or-death urgency—to be the redefinition of the function of the imagination, liberating it from shaky epistemological premises and so reclaiming its power in the face of psychological and social circumstances more desperate than the Romantics or the Victorians, for all their prescience, had foreseen.”8 It is banal to say that for modernists poetry replaces “God,” but for Stevens and Williams poetry, instead of an apotheosis, is a means of trying out the conditions of relatedness—Stevens by way of an attention to tropes and Williams by way of an investment in ordinary language and such social materials as one finds at hand—which gives them a way of committing to larger possibilities of cohesion. Stevens provides a means of thinking about—as he thinks through—structures of belief and their larger function, not just in terms of one’s own subjectivity but in terms of larger cultural formations. When I turn to find the traces of Emersonian modernism that I am describing, I am not charting out a line of influences nor looking at Bloomian contests between “Strong Poets” and their predecessors. If we think of Emerson as a Strong Poet, one who seeks to create vocabulary anew and displace those who came before him, then the predecessor he most actively attempts to overcome is himself. Emerson makes available a kind of think-

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ing, a kind of discourse, that is forever in pursuit of destabilizing itself not simply because of being caught in unavoidable binaries but because a restlessness in and of forms of thinking allows for increased possibilities, allows for a progressive mechanism, and model, of change, transition—certainly an indeterminacy of another color. In fact the term unresolved would be infinitely more appropriate, as it points to meaningfulness and values that hold within a range of contingencies. If those contingencies change—and they must and do—then the terms change. Insofar as literary texts are expressivist, they express a poetics of feeling and thinking, an unstated theory of experiencing and communication. These implicit structures of feeling are determined or gauged directly, and more often indirectly, by close attention to response and the way the text sets the conditions for engagement—all factors of discourse, genre, tradition, address, and even intelligibility. Reading in this way, the way that Emerson saw it, is the site (and cite) of encounter and conflict. Although this privileges literature, literary texts are built wholly of language and both dictate and are dictated by the ways that language gets used to say things. All writing does this, but literary texts are disinterred from an immediate or definable social, and thus communicative, instrumentality. “Art is the path of the creator to his work,” Emerson tells us in his essay “The Poet.”9 At first, we might assume he means “God,” but then we notice the c in “creator” is not capitalized. Emerson’s switch, a kind of sleight of hand, conceives of the artist as the creator, but one among many. In this situation the artist is both divinized and made common, and the artwork is not the object of a “creator’s” efforts; it is a process, a working out of a method by which the artist comes to his or her “real work.” The work is, finally, an ongoing, never-depleted process of creation and invention of circumstance built out of the conceptual and historical models at hand. That one is born into an ideology does not change the condition of Being, of consciousness, of life lived within those ideas. Emerson created a poetics and fused it with his ideals of the democratic possible community, a community that could be written toward. Hegel himself, in The Philosophy of History, gives a sense of the coming community. “America,” he contends, “is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself. . . . It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe.”10 He goes on to say, “It is for America to abandon the ground on

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which hitherto the History of the World has developed itself. What has taken place in the New World up to the present time is only an echo of the Old World—the expression of a foreign Life; and as a Land of the Future, it has no interest for us here, for, as regards History, our concern must be with that which has been and that which is.”11 One direction to take this, and it is an important one, would be to see “America” as meaning a perpetual Heideggerian “coming to be.” That, at least along the lines that I have been arguing, is a provocative and hopefully generative way to understand America as being a word signifying much more than nationhood. Yet, along with that use of the word comes the sense in which America means a way of investing in social values that are not grounded on anything more, nor anything less, than the good—or even projected good—that they do.12 Now “good” is vague, and “good for whom?” certainly is a question that creates more problems than it solves. And yet as Rorty tells us, the good of the community and the good of the individual are linked, not necessarily but pragmatically. “[P]oetic, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or political progress results from the accidental coincidence of a private obsession with a public need.”13 The intent here is useful even if the terms are problematic. “Obsession” comes from a psychoanalytic standpoint and “need” from perhaps the sociopolitical sphere.14 Although in part I agree with Rorty, his emphasis on private obsession reduces agency, and thus a concern about ethics is not a strong enough part of his formulation. The individual will not change, he seems to suggest, will not invest in the community unless compelled to by forces out of his or her control. Were Rorty’s assessment persuasive, more or less, then the processes of continually weighing the possibilities of value and choice as well as sounding out the vocabulary of beliefs motivating a community would become necessary recourse against one’s self, or against various obsessive selves. One would hope progress is more than pathology at last. Rorty is most persuasive, however, with the implication that social and cultural willed change entails friction between individual uses of a public, shared term. In other words, with other words, the community could be otherwise, could be different than it is. Individuals need not be invested in the progress or success of the society or culture in which they find themselves. One way to begin tracking the orbit of American idealism, at least as it is described in the Constitution, is to see it as the balanc-

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ing of the community’s needs with personal desires. That ideology itself has no real, no absolute grounding—though it generally is constructed in such a way that it facilitates the illusions of immutability to those circulating within it—means its constituents must find ways to be invested in the community in order for it to cohere. For Emerson these reasons were not simply evident; they had to be discovered, and the process of being a cultural worker, of attending to the problems of language, was a way of engaging and confronting the cultural templates he was born negotiating. If America, as Hegel suggests, comes with the burden—and freedom—of creating the terms of its own present, then along with that comes the need to listen closely to the constituents of democracy and the element, the medium, of its methods and articulations. Language is that medium. In her essay “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” Gertrude Stein tells us, “I always as I admit seem to be talking but talking can be a way of listening that is if one has the profound need of hearing and seeing what every one is telling.”15 Stein in her idiosyncratic way indicates that “talking” is listening in the sense that talking to others involves an attention, conscious or otherwise, to rules of the language games people are involved in in the way they speak with and listen to one another. To speak is to listen to a deep grammar in order to be listened to, rather than heard. Hearing something implies a kind of passivity. Listening is an action that includes seeking a context for, making a meaning of, what one is listening to. In a liberal democracy, ideally, increased attention to one another creates a better understanding of one’s own self. Emerson, too, sees writing as a way of objectifying the movements of one’s own belief system, and at the very least it allows for one to think about words, about the ways and moments that we use them and what we accomplish in the ways that we use language. Along with that is the possibility that we might find new uses for old words, ways that open up more and more varied beliefs and values. The recontextualizing of the familiar in order to bring about change in perspective as well as possibility is what becomes the central concern of Stevens’s poetry and poetics. Stuck demurely among scores of other apothegms in Wallace Stevens’s “Adagia,” we find the following claim: “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”16 It is difficult to know what to make of this statement, floating as it does free

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of explicit context, fragmented. At first glance, the proposition presents itself as if predicated on truth claims. In other words, since it presents itself as constative, there is reason to look at how the sentence performs. As part of “Adagia,” a series of short statements on poetry and poetics that first appeared in 1940 as “Materia Poetica” in the journal View, and was later collected as part of Opus Posthumous, the sentence works aphoristically.17Aphorisms operate by a principle of assertion and are effectively modular. Because they are not dependent on discursivity or narrative, they can be reconfigured within any arrangement and lose none of their rhetorical effect. In the chapter “On Reading and Writing” from his philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes, “He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.”18 Nietzsche foregrounds an authorial self-consciousness that the act of writing aphorisms can activate and make into an action of ongoingness. The epigram lends itself to being “true” by being catchy, so to speak. By being “learned by heart,” it continues to shape the reader’s perception of reality and continually reasserts its influence. Its “truth” becomes a touchstone against which other claims may be judged. Nietzsche’s statement, itself an aphorism, helps explain the ways that aphorisms work as generic convention. Principally these statements are not arrived at via deductive reasoning or syllogism. The aphorism’s force of persuasion lies not in its argument but in its style—in its conception of itself as a self-legitimating authority. It cannot, strictly speaking, be externally or empirically verified, nor can it be disputed on such grounds. Thus, if the reader wants to believe it, the claim is true. Experience, in such cases, becomes the arbiter for what is true. Because the aphorism exists largely in free-floating space, the reader, as I suggested in Chapter 2, must supply the context and the consent to make the statement viable and valid; with the aphorism, the reader is complicit in the creation of meaning. Now I would amplify that argument by saying that what underwrites meaning is belief.19 In Stevens’s proposition lies an implicit inevitability: “[a]fter one has abandoned a belief in god” foretells, with no sense of conditionality or doubt, a circumstance that will follow abandonment. Moreover, the use of the imperfect suggests grammatically an inexorable movement that leads from abandoning a belief in god to the second half of the sentence where we are told poetry takes over the function of religion. Since the statement is not embedded in a specific context, the ambiguities of the syntax be-

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come a knotty issue. The proposition is not arrived at—it is self-identical with its form. For this reason, we are forced to think through its articulation. For instance, we might wonder what the possessive pronoun “its” refers to. The pronoun may refer reflexively to itself in the sense of meaning “poetry is that essence which takes its [own] place.” Said another way, poetry obtains its own authority. Or if the “its” refers to “god” (and it is important to see that Stevens uses lowercase here, indicating that he has abandoned a belief in a particular Judeo-Christian god thoroughly), then something else is implied. Since the pronoun is degendered, it is clear that Stevens, in direct countertension to the Christian doctrine of a personal god, recasts god as impersonal and abstract. Using “god” as he does, the term becomes a shorthand signification for “anything that could be called ‘god.’” Strictly speaking, then, this god need not be theological. Stevens is troping, of course, but the effect of this figural sleight of hand has real philosophical implications. To begin with, it opens up the question of what one means when one uses “god.” The word becomes a term and no longer acts as either the name of the Christian god or as an antonomasia—god is rendered impersonal. This is important because when we come to consider the idea of redemption, the possibility of seeing it as a contract between god and his believers becomes more difficult. The contract is not ratified because the word god neither acts as a name by which the contract can be ratified nor signifies a personalized representation of a divinity. There is no “contract” between believers and a transcendent authority. The possibility for redemption comes not as a promise from some univocal transcendent authority to those who support it with their belief. Instead, redemption is created by the believers. It is no longer a reward by which the Master rewards the Slaves, to frame this along Kojève’s reading of Hegel. Those who believe create an illusory Master so that they can work toward redemption, which is, after all, recognition of worth, of “deservedness.” If Stevens’s proposition holds, recognition, redemption, comes not from elsewhere but from the believers themselves and therefore becomes an act of choice, possibly in the responsibility of choosing what and how to believe. In the way that Stevens is using it, god, as a term, suggests a centralized concept that defines all actions surrounding it and provides grounds for a belief system, a kind of cathexis. This reading becomes stronger when we notice in another part of “Adagia” a different claim: “God is a symbol for something that can as well take other forms, as, for example, the form

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of high poetry.”20 “God” is not just a free-floating signifier here: it is charged with a dynamism of beliefs and desires and becomes the focus for those psychic, emotional, and conceptual energies. The idea of redemption posits a contract between those who believe and their beliefs. Stevens is no Freudian, but we can see how there becomes a confusion between subject and object in the transference of certain libidinal energies to god as an icon, or a landing site for these affective forces. “It is the belief and not the god that counts,” he tells us.21 Stevens in this statement sets out the groundwork for the major activities of his poetry. He insists on the reclamation of those energies by the subject. His initial translation of “God” into “god” repositions the authorizing force of the signification back in the individual. This “retroping” allows a person to assess received ideas rather than simply acquiesce to them. Thinking of “god” in this way is not dissimilar to Wittgenstein’s discussion of the “I.” He writes: Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? You say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.22

Charles Altieri reveals the similarity in thinking between later Wittgenstein and Stevens, noting, “This nonobjective ‘I’—at once too deep for words and too private to be manifest, except in the universal function of each willing subject pursuing its differences—could serve as the typical speaker of Stevens’s later poems.”23 Altieri’s claim brings the poet and the philosopher together, and his sense of the recurring speaker of Stevens’s poems places the poet in a complex genealogy. Wittgenstein also contends in the same passage already cited, “The thinking subject is surely mere illusion. But the willing subject exists.” To take Altieri’s claim even further, the cathexis that “god” serves as, the ultimate predicate on which the “I” comes to base itself, chiasmically provides a way for the “I” to coalesce, as a means of distinction. Because the “I” invests itself via the cathexis, the “I” has a point of resistance around which its own forces can coalesce. The “I” cannot say what it is; it can only articulate itself as it is. But the shape of the concepts in which it invests itself, by which it produces its own identity, is the way that its movements and gradations can be determined. That being

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the case, the need for something formally to take the place of a belief in god as “life’s redemption” becomes more evident. There is a clear sense that the frame for reading Stevens this way comes from Jamesian pragmatism, but there is no shortage of critics who locate elements of pragmatism in Emerson. Many of these same elements are also what make Emerson a modernist. In any event, in describing how Emersonian pragmatism maintains a kind of flexibility in its terms, Richard Poirier argues that a perpetual process of retroping key terms is a “salutary activity.” He insists, “[T]hough troping involves only words, it might also, as an activity, make us less easily intimidated by them, by terminologies inherited from the historical past or currently employed in the directives of public policy.”24 Poirier is speaking specifically of certain important terms such as power, work, and action that recur repeatedly in Emerson’s essays and lectures. The essential element that makes it possible for these terms to resist being statically defined is their vagueness. James discusses the tendency toward logos, an “illuminating or power-bringing word or name” that would be the key to an enigmatic universe.25 The problem with finding any absolute logos, whether it be God or Reason, is that each word suggests a solution, one that individuals have no hand in acquiring. In arguing that the “pragmatic method” destabilizes false absolutes, James writes, “You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.”26 Words are parts of larger tropic processes with each term carrying and giving the shape of the thinking that composed its use. So often Emerson observes this by looking at specific phenomena and moving inferentially to large tropes, as when he explains, “Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole and in every part.”27 The way one views a concrete particular and the context one uses in order to discuss it is where the productive tension between exteriority and interiority arises. To frame the discussion itself suggests a broader conceptual order. Therefore, by looking at the words we use and thinking about the moments and situations when they appear, we gain a perspective on our own epistemology. To which I add that such attention may also free us from an inflexible repressive morality and make it possible to consider an ethics receptive to change and negotiation that responds rather than prescribes. But first it is necessary to see the ways that key terms, as tropes, can be made to remain open.

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Turning back to his proposition, one now sees the ways Stevens indicates how the signifier god can be translated into another form. What remains consistent is an abstract, conceptual system that even while it has a focus remains in flux and, like Emerson’s geometry, unresolvable. This focus is not logos so much as a trope that acts as a principle around which a kind of thinking can be organized. In this way, certain conceptual dynamic indices can be swapped in, so to speak, when prior ones become inadequate to their task. Perhaps when the ideological mechanisms become too apparent, they can no longer serve as the means by which beliefs can hold together or be legitimated. At the same time, there is a sense that particular abstractions (those that can act as cathexes) perform the same function within the grammar of belief, and that is why they can be substituted. This substitution is not what we would call evolution but a perpetual condition of transition kept in motion by the need to find, even invent if necessary, the metaphors by which to frame a life and animate an active body of knowledge. And yet in thinking about Stevens’s proposition, the problem, the paradox, that remains lies in his use of “life’s redemption.” Strangely, the first half of the proposition seems analytical and detached. The last phrase, “as life’s redemption,” does retain its valence, however, as religious terminology. If a belief in god, any god, is abandoned, how can there be redemption—or even a need for it? Is Stevens offering a way out of the nihilism and angst that Nietzschean existentialism can give rise to? Perhaps the death of God is the birth of agency. This agency can carry some difficulties with it. For example, with one of his paradoxes (and he has more of them than anyone should have a right to), Blaise Pascal argues that humankind’s greatness lies in the fact that it knows itself to be miserable. And yet it is miserable because it knows that it knows it is miserable. Let us put aside for a moment that “miserable” is Pascal’s judgment call; suppose instead that what his paradox points out is a consciousness of our own self-consciousness. There are clear reasons why this “meta-self-consciousness” might create an anxiety and in that way provide one possible reading of the fall of Adam and Eve. Becoming aware that they were naked was not really Adam and Eve’s problem—their real problem was being aware that it mattered to them, that it bothered them. That anxiety is the shame that created the schism between

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themselves and God, and between one another. One might wonder if Stevens ever resolves this anxiety, or are all his declarations merely an attempt to convince himself of the efficacy of a “Supreme Fiction”? “Authors are actors, books are theatres,” he tells us in the “Adagia.”28 The certainty of his declaratives is something akin to wishful thinking. “The sense creates the pose,” he writes in “Add This to Rhetoric.”29 The poet writes his own self-representation into existence via the text. From his poems to his “Adagia,” the declarative is Stevens’s poetic mode of choice, and the declarations perform an act of persuasion by which Stevens creates a belief system that he must work toward embodying. One risk of the line of thinking Emerson and Stevens represent is seeing that one’s own self is the world’s circumference, that nothing exists outside of one’s perceptions. At once, naturally, the threat of a collective solipsism looms. Relativism, also a possibility, is less of a real threat. In the end, one’s own beliefs are totalizing. If someone believes that what he or she feels to be true is so only for himself or herself, believes that everyone has his or her own private value system, those value systems apply to others without everyone else’s consent or awareness. In other words, in that I believe the world corresponds to the ways in which I experience it, if I believe something, then I believe that it is true for everyone, even if everyone does not know it. In moral relativism, one may not actively impose values on others, but individuals are aware of the Other. Because this is the case, one would soon have to find ways to negotiate values and beliefs in ethical confrontations and dialogues, as values soon come into conflict. Relativism quickly seeks out democratic processes to find a balance between a community’s most contentious values and beliefs. Solipsism, on the other hand, always threatens to shut down ethics because it does not recognize the Other as a subject, and the horizon of vision is not the boundary of the “I” but the edge of the possible world. Doubt and skepticism are what temper such solipsism if they are turned upon one’s own beliefs and perceptions. Self-consciousness is what makes the self ’s mechanisms opaque to its own subjectivity. At the same time, if we are aware, or can be made aware, of the ways that subjectivity fills and forms all conscious (and unconscious) experience, then we become clear on the ways that aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology are, as Emerson suggests, closer together than one might think. But why might it be useful for

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them to be closer together? That is a question that perhaps will take some building toward. The more immediate question is, what does Stevens mean by “redemption”? In order to come to that question, there is the responsibility first to address what so many critics have seen as the primary concern of Stevens’s poems—the sublime. What I contend, though, is that if it is a concern of Stevens’s, it is only as a symptom or perhaps precipitating condition for the real force of his poetry. For Stevens the sublime is the moment of radical and definitive separation between the order of discourse and the order of the sacred. Because he has abandoned “god” as early as Harmonium (notwithstanding the rumors of a deathbed conversion to Catholicism), one can readily believe that Stevens’s poems are consistently about the sublime. Certainly, on the one hand, that is a reasonable claim, despite the way it simplifies much of the poetry’s complexities. Another way to put this is to say that Stevens’s poems, like many of Dickinson’s, are eschatological, positioned at the vanishing edge of conventional belief systems. Stevens’s emphasis on the power of imagination need not be read as a kind of melancholia or nostalgia for bygone values because he maintains a belief in values, values that are necessarily social in effect if not in nature, however they are determined. The particularities of how those values are formed are constantly being questioned, however. Abandoning belief in “god” certainly implies a conscious choice, and something else, poetry, is the element that takes the place and function of the old belief. Stevens never loses sight of what he takes to be Reality, which is a constant force for the poet, exerting a necessary pressure both on the poems he writes and on his poetics. His poems revise and revisit, however, the ways that perceptions about reality are shaped again and again. “A dream” he evokes in “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” “in which / I can believe, in face of the object” is “[a] dream no longer a dream” but rather “a thing.”30 Idealism is no longer a shadowy reality beyond our ken, reflected in the world as phenomena. Idealism is a text of possibilities, ways of seeing that move from “dream” to being “a thing” via the actions that attend belief and investment in shapes of thought. Stevens wants to maintain belief even as he “decreates” prior thinking authorized only by habit, convention, or tradition. Decreation is a term that Stevens, in his essay “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” borrows from Simone Weil. “She says that decreation is making pass from the created to the uncreated,” he explains,

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“but that destruction is making pass from the created to nothingness.”31 Stevens goes on to say, “Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers.”32 Whether for good or ill, every change is a violent, by degrees, disruption of the status quo, of the banal, and yet belief itself, or rather the condition for belief, the “Will to Believe,” is continuous. Belief, as an idea of order, means a kind of continuance, and poetry, for Stevens anyway, becomes both a method and a reason for continuing. Belief, then, becomes the end and not the means of thinking, of being. Discussion of the sublime seems to come up de rigueur in discussions of Stevens, but with the Wordsworthian ideal of all good poetry being a “spontaneous overflow of great feeling” serving as a guide, the sublime becomes the means of locating feeling in Stevens’s work. Of the many criticisms lodged against Stevens over the years, we see two most evidenced in light of Wordsworth’s criteria: Stevens is anything but spontaneous, and the “feeling” of his lyric, to some, often seems cold and detached. Still, if the sublime is his constant theme, the poems could tend to look like responses to a crisis in language, of language. As I indicated previously, the sublime for Stevens is that break between the order of the sacred and the order of discourse. For him this is not necessarily a crisis. He responds to the entropy endemic to belief systems that are subject both to reevaluation and revaluation. Of course, we can also consider how Jean-François Lyotard’s description of the postmodern sublime as a moment wherein language gives way to itself and representation is seen to be ever in excess of itself can also shape reception of Stevens’s poetry. Lyotard is no Romantic, naturally, but in this light we can see traces of his thinking deriving from the Romantic “ineffable.” For him, the sublime is a perpetual state of negation that is a continuously and radically open, unresolvable space. And yet such readings take one only so far with Stevens, and possibly leave a great deal of his usefulness, or the work his poetry engages in, out in the cold. If this perpetual negation is Stevens’s sole motive for meter making, why would he continue to write, decade after decade (despite his periodic “breaks”)? Moreover, why would a reader be compelled, as so many are, to return to him again and again? Stevens’s particular version of the sublime calls out to be addressed, negotiated, but not necessarily described. Negation is not the whole story, then. Stevens’s poetry negates and affirms new possibilities.

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The displacements it brings forth are attempts to clear the ground for possibilities. Turning the poems in on themselves, although certainly seductive, leaves the rest of their force obscured. Poetry, like Stevens’s version of what “god” signifies, resists the intelligence almost successfully in that it is abstract enough that it can be revised. But resistance is a matter of neither denial nor negation; it is a countertension that allows force to be defined both against and alongside that which it resists. This resistance is the way that subjectivity in Stevens’s poems claims the conditions of its own making. It seems banal, though, to say that Stevens is perpetually caught in the struggle with language, with a foredoomed crisis of language’s failure to express experience. Words are “The obscure moon lighting an obscure world / Of things that would never be quite expressed.”33 The continuance I described stutters and falters. We see this most clearly in the moments when Stevens’s poetic diction breaks down into nonsense syllables, as it does from the “Ti-lil-o!” of “The Ordinary Women” to the “Yillow, yillow, yillow” of “Metamorphosis,” and beyond. The version of Stevens as the connoisseur of linguistic crisis is certainly the Romantic incarnation of Stevens, to be sure, but it arises in poststructuralist readings such as Joseph Riddel pioneered in his essay “Metaphoric Staging: Stevens’s Beginning Again of the ‘End of the Book’” and elsewhere. In his reading of the work, Riddel contends, “Stevens’s poems . . . rework an old myth of origins, not by way of getting it ‘straight’ at the Sorbonne, but in a manner to reveal that the origin, so fundamental to poetry’s need to ground itself in unity or presence, is at bottom poetic and abyssal.”34 Although Riddel is extremely insightful in finding the ways that Derridean “scenes of writing” are applicable to Stevens’s work, at this point in time the second half of Riddel’s claim seems almost quaint, simply because that conclusion starts to feel unavoidable, even predetermined, given the frame of reference. Ultimately, the reading becomes tendentious. My real concern is that it feels too much as if a lack of resolution is a kind of resolution, and such a reading is at best only half true of Stevens. Riddel has not been the only one to read Stevens this way. J. Hillis Miller writes in Poets of Reality, “After Stevens’s experience of the dissolution of the gods it seemed that he was left, like post-Cartesian man in general, in a world riven in two, split irreparably into subject and object, imagination and reality,” and goes on to say, “Any attempt to escape [this dualism] by affirming the priority of one or the other power leads to falsehood.”35

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The inability to escape this dualism, in the terms that Miller and Riddel offer, is symptomatic of what can be called language’s failure to reconcile signified and signifier. To be fair, both Miller and Riddel are incisively subtle in the readings they bring together. Also, even if these readings are still extremely enlightening, it is important to point out that decades have passed since these essays appeared, and they are more or less products of their intellectual moments. The reason to return to them is that these readings take language seriously in terms of what it makes possible as modes of being in the world. Cultural studies readings, however powerful and important, fail to address the philosophical ramifications of texts. This is not necessarily a value judgment. Rather, it is a value assessment in that it is simply a matter of pointing out that different methodologies listen for different things. Poststructural readings did undertake (and continue to do so) to see poems as structured thought. At the same time, it is important to point out that Miller’s and Riddel’s thinking tends toward a broader circularity. What gets lost is the reinstatement of the possibility of values, the continuance of the Will to Believe that is the complementary arc to Stevens’s sense that “‘Everything / Falls back to coldness.’”36 Stevens works to show how object and subject, rather than being “riven in two,” are produced by the intertwined conditions of reality and the imagination— knowledge and materiality. The processes of belief, which are a direct engagement of conceptual force, become the means of shoring up subjectivity against the dissipation it always and everywhere faces. Deconstructive readings of Stevens’s poetry are useful to a point, but as I suggested in the first chapter, there is a certain self-fulfilling prophecy to deconstruction as a whole that even though in many ways very nuanced also becomes reductive. Yet at the same time it is necessary to revisit these arguments, for at the very least deconstructive readings of Stevens attend, in ways that strict cultural studies cannot, to kinds of actions that poems undertake in and as processes of thought touching on phenomenological possibilities. For instance, Riddel claims, “If [“Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”] has an argument, it occurs as a movement of negations, a dismantling and reworking of the venerable triad of metaphysico/poetics, the dialectics of subject/object that is mediated and regulated by the illusion of resemblance.”37 As we would expect, Riddel plots out the way the poem turns its rhetoric in on itself, and points out how the dialectical tension he describes never can achieve synthesis. In the case of Stevens, the question

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that follows such a reading is, brought to the moment of the sublime, with its balance of intellectual pleasure (because our conceptual systems are overwhelmed and seen as insufficient) and ethical pain (that all concepts are illusory), what do we do now? In other words, having reached that point of a kind of transport, what do we do about “reality”? Perhaps the most poignant question to ask might be, do deconstructive readings actually touch the binaries they make evident? In Of Grammatology, Derrida argues, “The ‘rationality’ . . . which governs a writing thus enlarged and radicalized [via technological advances in the retrieval and dissemination of print], no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the desedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos. Particularly the signification of truth.”38 Despite the insights that have been gained through the antifoundational, antiessentialist arguments that certain philosophers and critics have put forth since Derrida’s first articulations of this network of thinking, the ways that it cannot usefully get beyond itself are concerns that need to be reckoned with. Is there any hope of escaping deconstruction’s dead ends? If not, then deconstruction serves only to perpetuate the poles and positions that it plays off against one another. The real problem that deconstruction, at least in the broad version that has taken hold in the American academic system, fails to grapple with is ethics. Some, such as Rorty, would charge that this is a kind of escapism. At the very least, it bespeaks a very real blindness, perhaps even an insurmountable disability of a particular kind of thinking that does not seek to get beyond itself, does not seek to throw away its own ladder even after its usefulness is gone. Stevens’s poetics works past deconstruction because its concerns are with a self-consciousness that seeks more than the anxiety of continuous critique. Although Stevens famously wrote, “A possible poet must be a poet capable of resisting or evading the pressure of the reality of this last degree [that being the violence of World War II], with the knowledge that the degree of today may become a deadlier degree tomorrow,”39 this does not mean that the poet wants to flee reality like some mere aesthete. What I take here to be evasion (or is it aversion?) is not an attitude of escape from the very real violence of the modern world, as some critics of Stevens would read it. Instead, Stevens is arguing against a very parochial view of literary realism that insists on a kind of authenticity and sincerity that responds to a moral imperative to reflect the world “as it is,” in all its horror

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and barbarism. But for Stevens there is no simply saying “how things are,” no matter how noble one’s aspirations are to represent social conditions truthfully and objectively. How one gives oneself to an understanding of the world, how a Weltanschauung is made to hang together in such a way that it makes perspective possible, is as much a part of the force of Stevens’s poetry as the work’s tendencies to deconstruct its own intentions. The decreation is part and parcel of the creation that accompanies it. In a letter to Henry Church, Stevens writes that he has “no idea of the form that a supreme fiction would take. The Notes start out with the idea that it would not take any form: that it would be abstract. Of course, in the long run, poetry would be the supreme fiction; the essence of poetry is change and the essence of change is that it gives pleasure.”40 For Stevens these two motions, of negation and affirmation, are finally the same one, the motion of change, transition. To focus on negation is to miss what is affirmed. If the essence of poetry is change, and poetry is the essence that can take the place of a belief in god, then change as a process might be best thought of in terms of the sacred. The sacred is not simply theological. Instead, it is a particular conceptual order that shapes, or gives circumference to, a series of ethical positionings. It is the shifting ground by which one can begin to think about what he or she believes in. Seen this way, belief is fundamentally a matter of choice, whether we are conscious of that or actively participating in determining how and what we might believe. The sacred operates within the aesthetic order. For this reason, Stevens seems, like Nietzsche before him, and Emerson before Nietzsche, to divinize “the Poet.” The Poet is one who circulates wholly within the now sacred order of the aesthetic. No one can ever do this completely, but it is in the act of writing poetry that the Poet engages in a sort of participation mystique looking to locate himself or herself within the sacred. In this way, writing, as well as reading, can be seen as a kind of ritual. But this is a ritual without rites and so must be invented again and again. If we consider, no matter how problematic, John Stuart Mill’s claim that lyric poetry is “utterance overheard,” a soliloquy by which poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, then this element of ritual becomes more evident. The poem is not intended for an audience other than itself—but in the fact that it is “uttered” or written or articulated even to an audience of itself, the performative aspect locates poetry self-consciously in terms of theater and rite. We now have an explanation for why critics of Stevens so often feel compelled to discuss him in relation to the sublime. Setting the poetry

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against the sublime restores a kind of mythic valence to poetry, but the mythic is not simply a narrative. It is a metatrope for ways of ordering “reality.” For Stevens, “life’s redemption” comes about because poetry, especially lyric poetry, re-creates conceptual systems within the aesthetic order. Belief, god, ethics become elements of a narrative that are revealed, not depicted, in the actions of the poem. Also among the “Adagia” Stevens writes: “The relation of art to life is of the first importance especially in a skeptical age since, in the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate, for the support that they give.”41 The redemption is then the mind’s reconciliation of the world with language. The anxiety of self-consciousness is replaced, ideally, with awareness, with knowledge as a kind of active intelligence in which an individual is neither isolate nor inviolate but is a part of the world. Although there is no shortage of indicators that sublimity was part of his sense of being a poet, we see in his poem “The American Sublime” that Stevens might have been exasperated with the limitations of the concept. How does one stand To behold the sublime, To confront the mockers, The mickey mockers And plated pairs? When General Jackson Posed for his statue He knew how one feels. Shall a man go barefoot Blinking and blank? But how does one feel? One grows used to the weather, The landscape and that; And the sublime comes down To the spirit itself, The spirit and space, The empty spirit In vacant space. What wine does one drink? What bread does one eat?42

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Initially the question, “How does one stand / To behold the sublime,” might be read as asking how can one withstand the feeling of the sublime, but soon we see that Stevens is being ironic if not satirical as the poem’s continuing lines “confront the mockers / The mickey mockers.” In other words, in what position, the poem asks, is it best to stand to be in tune, like an antenna, with the sublime? The tone is as funny, as self-mocking as Stevens can on occasion be, but even in that self-mocking and satirizing of the Romantic lyric tradition there is a keen self-consciousness. This selfconsciousness becomes more evident as the poem continues: “When General Jackson / Posed for his statue / He knew how one feels.” Jackson knows how one feels experiencing the sublime, we can assume, because he lived through a war. But the question seems to be how might we, or in this case Jackson, represent that experience? Or is Jackson himself, as an icon, a means of representing the experience of war? Will “blinking and blank” convey it? Evidently not, because this question only prompts the question again: “how does one feel?” One of the reasons Stevens’s poetry lends itself to close reading is that it is open to being read in multiple ways, especially depending on which way the reader sutures the lines and concepts. Ambiguity can be seen in all writing, since the meaning is never fully settled. Yet Stevens takes advantage of the necessary abstractness of all words. Here all referents leave out, or more aptly put, leave off context. For instance, “wine” is a concrete particular, but it is abstract in that the locating context (“wine in a bottle on a table in the kitchen of a house in Hartford in Connecticut in the United States,” and so on) is absent. Stevens’s abstractions are not insubstantial or ideal but are in fact material abstracted from a totality. Stevens’s formal maneuvers work to bracket off materials as well as indicate where points of difference become sites of negotiation. For instance, when Stevens asks, “But how does one feel?” the question comes immediately after a stanza break. In this poem, there are four stanzas of five lines each. There is no set pattern of syllables, although the lines tend to hover around five or six. In light of the poem’s theme, one wonders if this formal regularity is not unlike the posing of General Jackson, an artifice that imposes representation by the sheer act of composition. How does one make a form that allows for the sublime without domesticating it? This concern is echoed by the ending of the immediately preceding poem, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” in which the poet invokes “The maker’s rage

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to order words of the sea.”43 One issue Stevens struggles with throughout his oeuvre is the possibility that writing about experience imposes an order that delimits or reifies immediacy. Emerson warns that “every thought’s a prison.” Art simply extends that possibility of imprisoning an openness of possibility. In this case, the question “But how does one feel?” may not refer simply to how one feels sublimity, but rather asks more generally, what allows or causes one to feel? What are the mechanisms of feeling? Somehow, that subsumes the question of the sublime and its particular aesthetic questions into a larger framework concerning affect. Stevens is certainly not the only one of the modernists to be concerned with affect. The subject is, in fact, very clearly one that Eliot continually engages. This is not the place to offer a discussion of Eliot’s ideas about lyric affectivity, but it is certainly at the heart of his impersonalism. Stevens so often is removed from explicit discussion of emotions that his attention to affect tends to be overlooked. With this poem, however, the question of what constitutes emotion is a clear subtext. Poetry, whether or not we equivocate about the constructs of lyric subjectivity, is tied into questions of affect. At the very least I would venture to say that affect, emotional valence, is one measure of response and investment. The reader’s investment is not simply calibrated in terms of ideological identification. If ideology and indeed culture are largely unconscious, then emotional response is one way to chart shades and gradations of meaningfulness that happen at the intuitive, the prerational level. Although I debate the ways Stevens becomes linked with the sublime, I do argue that the sublime also without a doubt measures emotional boundaries—and in fact is the condition in which the emotion that one feels in response to the material does not immediately announce itself. One might even suggest that the emotion one feels with the sublime—pleasure in response to pain—is not unidentified but is, rather, repressed. When we look again at the poem, we can read the ways that the speaker looks to Jackson and the artifice of representation in order to get clear on the affective conditions of the sublime. Kant makes a distinction between the dynamically and the mathematically sublime. The latter is the feeling that occurs when one is confronted with the power of nature that defies or transcends the imagination. Yet Stevens tells us, “One grows used to the weather, / The landscape and that.” Perhaps the tone is a bit too coy,

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but the poem tells us, “the sublime comes down, / To the spirit itself, // The spirit and space, / The empty spirit / In vacant space.” Again, the meaning is twofold—the sublime, the feeling of the ineffable comes inward from outside, and rather than transcend, generally thought of metaphorically in an upward or at least outward movement, the sublime “comes down” to the spirit. The passage also suggests that the sublime is dependent on the spirit, which is its foundation, as if to say, “it all reduces to this.” If the coy, even flip, tone informs this stanza as well, we might think of this as a critique of metaphysics, something Stevens was prone to, at least early in his career. The stanza break after “spirit itself ” gives the reader a moment to ponder “spirit.” In the context of this poem that becomes dizzyingly vague—what does Stevens mean by “spirit,” and moreover what does he mean by “the American Sublime”? How is the (and is there only one?) American Sublime a different experience somehow from a European one? In the blank space of the stanza break, the reader must wrestle against the vagueness of Stevens’s terms, terms that he qualifies in the next stanza. The next stanza repeats the term spirit, this time connecting it with the use of “and.” At first, the syntax does not seem odd because the stanza break puts enough space between the third and fourth stanzas. But how does something “come down” to space? To “come down” is to assume that space exists a priori. There is an irony in “coming down to space” because “down” implies moving in a given direction through space. As if aware of this paradox, Stevens repeats the terms but qualifies them; the spirit becomes “empty spirit” and space becomes (almost tautologically) “vacant space.” Now the terms “spirit” and “space” are divided again onto separate lines, reflecting perhaps a schism that is bred by abstraction. The concepts are separated via the inherent rationalism that keeps “spirit” or subjectivity distinct from space. Such distinction is completely different from those found in “The Snow Man,” where one is to have a “mind of winter,” to be able to somehow transcend subject/object divisions.44 But the spirit here is “empty,” which sounds a far cry from “the nothing that is” that we find at the end of the earlier poem, “The Snow Man.” If “vacant space” is tautological, then empty spirit deconstructs itself, for spirit seems intrinsically to be the presence of some consciousness, whether it be the Hegelian world spirit or individual subjectivity. Either way, these terms are emptied of meaning because there is nothing to which they can be related; they are blanks—blank words, a null

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set of vacant concepts. The poem’s redemption, what brings us from the edge of these emptinesses, is the acute self-consciousness that paradoxically reasserts itself. “The American Sublime” ends, “What wine does one drink? / What bread does one eat?” The speaker is drawn back into the world, away from the emptiness by an awareness of bodily desires, food and drink. Some readers might be content with reading the ending this way: the body’s natural drives restore the speaker’s self, but I would suggest that these lines play on the irony that inflects much of the poem. Stevens, apparently, asks at the end of the poem, in vacant space what is the proper decorum? It is an anxiety that comes in here at the end. Stevens is joking of course: those are patently foolish questions, we would assume, to ask when one is overwhelmed with “the grandeur of nature and being.” And it certainly does not seem close to the ethical imperative of Emerson’s “How shall I live?” nor does it have the same sense of intimate empathy expressed in Dickinson’s wondering about whether or not the sailor can understand the “divine intoxication / Of the first league out from land.” At the hinge of Dickinson’s poem #76, mentioned in the first chapter, the sublime (or “Deep Eternity”) sends her speaker out into the realm of the Other in a compassionate selfconsciousness. Stevens is conscious enough of the self-consciousness to mock it. In that way, the speaker of the poem becomes one of the very mockers that he is so worried about at the beginning of the poem. Yet the questions about feeling seem earnest and not ironic. In fact, as far as can be discerned the third stanza is sincere; at least there is no clear marker that it should not be taken as such. So, the speaker in Stevens’s poem is anxious, yet realizes that anxiety is absurd. This sounds a great deal like Pascal’s paradox about humankind’s misery. There is a tremendous difference between Stevens and Pascal. That difference, or at least one difference, might be Emerson. Emersonian modernism, as I have been arguing, is marked by an extreme attention to the moments when an understanding of subjectivity is confronted with a selfconsciousness that simultaneously respects this subjectivity and violates it. Such a moment occurs in (and possibly as) “The American Sublime” and indicates Stevens’s dialogue with a literary ethos, an ethos inflected with a particular strain of American individualism. Fraught as it is with public policy that can be oppressive and even repressive while also sometimes attempting a gesture of egalitarianism, this individualism is always necessar-

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ily imperiled. By extension we can say that if one gets used to the weather, as Stevens indicates, then one can get used to subjectivity. A necessary part of the mechanism of liberal subjectivity, inherited as much from Kant as it is from Locke, is this doubt of its possibilities. At the same time subjectivity, agency, needs to be open to question as well, so that desires and appetites created by capitalism do not blind subjects to the real attention that community needs in order to be maintained and by which individual autonomy can be protected. If Emerson is the early practitioner of this constitutive skepticism, certainly Stevens becomes one of the most adept theoreticians of its poetics. In his texts, there is little distance between life and poetry for Stevens. The forces marshaled in the attention to one are made manifest in the other. As Jonathan Levin argues, “Stevens writes from the leading edge of unfolding transitions, the edge where novelty emerges and reconstructs habitual patterns of perception and understanding.”45 The difference between Riddel and Levin centers around divergent, even contrary, readings of “decreation.” Levin’s reading emphasizes an emergence of new understanding, a new kind of knowledge that follows the decreation of the static conceptual models. Strictly speaking, this is no dialectic; the new does not displace the old so much as it reenvisions and refashions prior knowledge. Truth, in its unfolding, is not, in this light, indeterminate so much as perpetually unfinished. The concrete Real is revealed and in its revelation changes our understanding and, thus, our experience of the world as we know it. Accordingly, neither the self nor culture, which take their cues from experience and the Real, can rest, and the “I” becomes a means of shoring up difference so that subjectivity can continue even as it redefines itself and is recontextualized. Grammatically, the positions remain clear even as the content changes. In the case of “The American Sublime,” when a polite table manner arises at the height of abstraction, we see two different models; two different language games come into conflict. On the one hand Stevens is mocking bourgeois conventions. It almost stereotypes a New England repressivity to ask about the particulars of what kind of wine to bring in the face of something that throws all concepts into disorder. At the same time, these problems of the aesthetic sublime do have a tendency to be circular. The key then is in the speaker’s reaction. Instead of being struck dumb with awe, he makes a joke. The context’s the thing wherein to catch

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the significance of a thing. This humor undercuts the metaphysics, the idealism, in talking about the sublime and shows an unexpected discrepancy between what ought to be and what is. In a letter to his friend Henry Church, Stevens discusses a conversation he had with a student about “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.” He writes, I said that I thought that we had reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognized that it was a fiction. The student said that that was an impossibility, that there was no such thing as believing in something that one knew was not true. It is obvious, however, that we are doing that all the time. There are things with respect to which we willingly suspend disbelief; if there is instinctive in us a will to believe, or if there is a will to believe, whether or not it is instinctive, it seems to me that we can suspend disbelief with reference to a fiction as easily as we can suspend it with reference to anything else. There are fictions that are extensions of reality.46

Clearly, Stevens’s Jamesian roots are showing. The inflections of this passage are decidedly that of pragmatism. The most fascinating claim he makes is that there are fictions that are extensions of reality. This suggests that these “fictions” constitute the ways that we create narrative out of concrete particulars. The fictions are the synthesis through the imagination of sense-data and concepts. In her discussion of Stevens’s pragmatist poetics Patricia Rae reveals, “Stevens’s ideal trope is the one that will communicate to its readers a sense, not just of play, but of discovery.”47 His ideal is also a trope that communicates sense itself.48 The synthesis Stevens describes holds or maintains itself because it usefully supports what one might want to be able to do. In fact, pragmatism is also a possible reading of what constitutes “the American Sublime.” In that pragmatism is arguably America’s greatest contribution to philosophy, Stevens could be suggesting that in the face of questions of ultimate abstractions, questions about practicality and the ordinary are activated. In other words, how do we live our lives? If we can do nothing about feelings of the sublime, if we cannot ever completely express them or know if we are experiencing the sublime “authentically,” the only real recourse is to wonder about the mores of interaction. And what, no matter how cloying or elitist, are manners but a means of knowing what to do in given social situations? At the very least, asking about proper decorum or social conventions is to be reminded that one is always in relation to others (the cod-

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ified behavior making them present although otherwise physically absent in the poem), and manners signify a particular understanding of the Other based on behavior codified by class. There is an obvious criticism of pragmatism that also needs to be considered. Pragmatism, some argue, has a tendency to dismiss philosophical questions, perhaps much too quickly and easily. Not all philosophical problems, many critics argue, are of the same weight as wondering which way a squirrel is running around a tree. There is not really an orthodoxy of pragmatism. Its main usefulness is as a broad range of methods and principles that cohere along a base agreement of antiessentialism and antifoundationalism issuing, at least in part, from the tenet that truth is never absolute. Clearly, there is some overlap between pragmatism and deconstruction, yet pragmatism resists its own tendencies toward conclusion or some predetermined end or agreement. It is a kind of thinking that searches for methods, ways of believing, when the certainty and stability of past metanarratives have gone ashen. I would not necessarily make the claim that Stevens is a pragmatist per se (or perhaps would do so only sotto voce), but certainly there is a sympathy between the poet and, for instance, William James, that we can see in their different bodies of work. At the very least, with both James and Stevens, ideas are kinds of performances that strut and fret their hour upon a revolving conceptual stage. Poetry in its foregrounding of tropes and language as a process and in its insistence on meaning as interpretive negotiation of possible values is the scene of trying out ethics, beliefs, contingencies of community. Authors are actors staging performances of ethics in the theater of the poem. That is why Stevens can say all poetry is experimental. The Will becomes its own dramatic figure. In fact, we could say that not only is the speaker of the poem the mask of the Will but the “I” itself is an allegory for its desires and its drive toward truth, certainty, power, and so forth. The “I,” the grammatical force behind consciousness, is the allegorical mask for “wanting.” This could be, by turns, a reading of the “I” as heroic and at the same time, profane. That is to say that the “I” does not point to a singular, unified state. It is the mark of a contiguity or a gathering of forces and impulses. This understanding of the “I” is an extension of the conditions of belief. Redemption, coming from the believers rather than from some absent divinity, conceives of the “I” as a logos, but an origin of no origin that manifests itself as the subject. The “I” is a logos as Heidegger reconsiders

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the term, in that it is a gathering of forces. But as he notes, “Gathering is never a mere driving-together and heaping-up. It maintains in a common bond the conflicting and that which tends apart.”49 Moreover, gathering as logos “does not let what it holds in its power dissolve into an empty freedom from opposition, but by uniting the opposites maintains the full sharpness of their tension.”50 The first-person singular is a force of conflict and tension that is never resolved, which explains why Stevens’s impulse to change is evident in the way metaphors displace metaphors as the various worldviews struggle for dominance, and why truths individually and at the level of the community continually need to be rewritten. The sacred and the profane coexist and refashion one another, redefine one another, as the scenes shift and as different values assert themselves. Reading Stevens’s poetry as an exploration of this simultaneity of the sacred and the profane, the heroic and the pedestrian, may situate the poet closer to Walter Benjamin than might otherwise be apparent. Peter Szondi, in writing about Walter Benjamin, notes, “The tension between name and reality, which is the origin of poetry, is only experienced painfully, as the distance separating man from things.”51 Szondi is responding to the following passage that he quotes from Benjamin: In the evening, heart heavy as lead, full of anxiety, on the deck. For a long time I follow the play of the gulls. . . . The sun has long since gone down, and in the East it is very dark. The ship travels southwards. Some brightness is left in the West. What now happened to the birds—or to myself?—that occurred by virtue of the spot that I, so domineeringly, so lonely, selected for myself in my melancholy in the middle of the quarterdeck. All of a sudden there were two flights of gulls, one to the East, one to the West, left and right, so entirely different that the name gull fell away from them.52

The passage is long, and I quote it so fully not only because Szondi does but for the reason that it sounds so much like both Stevens and Emerson. This break between the name and the experience of the reality is for Benjamin nearly overwhelmingly melancholic, as it would be for Stevens. In fact, Stevens’s poem “Re-statement of Romance” sounds as if written alongside the already cited passage from Benjamin:53 The night knows nothing of the chants of night. It is what it is as I am what I am: And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

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And you. Only we two may interchange Each in the other what each has to give. Only we two are one, not you and night, Nor night and I, but you and I, alone, So much alone, so deeply by ourselves, So far beyond the casual solitudes, That night is only the background of our selves, Supremely true each to its separate self, In the pale light that each upon the other throws.54

About the Benjamin passage Szondi notices that in the gulls’ momentary namelessness the birds are “now only themselves, but as such they are perhaps closer to man than if he possessed them by virtue of knowing their name.”55 But humankind’s heritage, so to speak, comes from the process of naming handed down from Adam, and if poetry’s origin is in the tension between name and reality, then we see that such pain includes the pleasures of change that Stevens describes. The pleasure is not a blissful, ecstatic one. It is pleasure that comes from various potential relations that occur via naming, via an attempt to name things for one another. The gulls might be closer to humankind, but in Stevens’s poem the “you” and the “I” are further apart when there is no way to communicate, no way to even attempt to express experience to one another. “Life’s redemption” might, for Stevens, come down to poetry being a way of expressing the intensities of life, not in language but as language. The world will be what it is, whether the truth of it, its immediacy, is gone at “the the” or not. And yet, poetry is how one speaks the world to oneself and to others. In “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” Stevens claims that the poet’s role is “to help people live their lives” in their capacity to make imaginative thought, in their ability to make associative leaps accessible to others.56 In fact poetry, more than any single poem, is predicated on the belief that an all too human reality can be kept flexible, supple, and usefully fallible. That there are so few people in Stevens’s poems may be beside the point. What remains his point is that people are all around the poems, and not in the sense of being merely a sympathetic or even receptive audience. The poems reach out to auditors. The way language coheres as a poem—as the values and beliefs that shape composition—signals the shape of the poet’s subject: the community with which he or she is aligned.

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The fact that there are readers at all and that those readers, in their own capacities, listen and then perhaps respond, is the fragmented hopefulness, ragged in its intentions and borne by its faith in the relation of “you” to “I” and the “pale light that each upon the other throws.” Poetry, then, is a process shorn of religiosity or theology that creates the order of the sacred from discourse, that establishes a mythic valence out of the everyday. Stevens shares with Williams this investment in the ordinary, the world that is at hand as a means of locating oneself and its network of relations, emotionally and socially as well as epistemologically. The means by which one comes to dwell in the world, to borrow from Heidegger’s thinking, and within a community is the use of language to locate experience between subject and object and between self and other using the materials that exist all around. The poet and the reader come to negotiate the terms and vocabulary of relation in the act of reading the world within the poem, and by seeking out a text of relations. The sense of dwelling or of belonging, necessary for a community to identify itself both as a collective and as individuals making up a communis, arises from a participation in the community’s process of creating and using knowledge. Poetry is one site of the disclosure, not of being, but of the Will in the face of countervailing forces. A specter has always haunted America. From the start, America’s potential, what it could be but is not yet, the “new yet unapproachable America” that Emerson refers to, colors and critiques its every stage. There can be, on the one hand, no surprise that pragmatism developed in America, a country, or even, some might argue, a condition, of eternally coming to be. Because of this perpetual state of not quite arriving, origins and beginnings, which are not the same things, are a central concern for American culture. American literature is a manner of coming to dwell in the language and idiom of a place, and a finding out what that might entail. Such a circumstance shapes and grounds the pluralistic poetics of William Carlos Williams. There has long been a reluctance by many critics and scholars to engage Williams’s thinking directly and seriously in ways that reveal how his poetics can, by extension, be brought to bear on culture or epistemology. Partly the reason that he gets overlooked in this way, despite real commitments to his own vision of progressivist strategies, is that Williams is a nonsystematic thinker. Since he is not rigorous in the traditional sense of philosophical discourse, he is seen as “merely” a poet, which suggests he

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can teach us only about poetry, or at worst, he is merely ornamental. But it is by being nonsystematic that he provides ways in which the traditionally separate modes of inquiry composing, say, aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology might be brought closer together—the categories becoming permeable and porous. Williams offers us a great deal, not least of which is his attention to the primary fact of language as a social medium. “It is not a language that is desired—but language; for in that and its phases and functions a great— [sic] lies for correcting gross faults of perspective in the whole structure of the modern intelligence.”57 The gap that the second dash in this passage from an essay by Williams signifies is an unnamable aporia, a blank space that gives rise to possibility for change. Strangely, this blank comes just when Williams is trying to articulate the possibilities of correcting the social and even philosophical problems with an attention to language. The blank serves to indicate that language, at least as it currently is employed, is somehow unable to get out of these problems, these blindnesses. Language is something one lives, and Williams, in essence, suggests a therapy not unlike that which Wittgenstein proposes. The turn, we could say, is not toward compartmentalization or specialization that removes experience from its fraught contingencies and contexts. The move instead is toward ethics and an investment of social capital into a variegated community, an ever-shifting nexus of values, beliefs, and subject positions that the poet presents and represents by his blurring of ordinary speech and poetic diction, personal letters and overheard conversation, artifice and accident into the great work Paterson. Another thing worth considering in order to determine the crux of the poet’s thinking and to put it into a broader context is that the emphasis and drive of Williams’s efforts so often coincide with those of the poet’s slightly elder contemporary, John Dewey. Dewey is of course a major figure in American thought, and to compare the two men indicates the real value of Williams’s poetics. John Beck, in Writing the Radical Center, brings together the work of these two and reads them as representative figures—not in the sense of being exemplary but as thinkers whose attempts at negotiating culture become a means of reading the cultural mechanisms of early to mid-twentieth-century American cultural politics.58 As Beck tells us, he reads these two “not to unveil a pattern of textual and theoretical correspondences . . . nor to claim Dewey as a major direct influence on Williams’s work.”59 Beck also, wisely, does not read

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Williams as a frustrated philosopher or Dewey as an abortive poet. The link between the two men, as Beck articulates it, is their shared “refusal to hold on to the past and concern for the future.” This results in a struggle “to attain a middle ground, a sense of balance and control over forces that seem uncontrollable and hopelessly unstable.”60 That is to say, Williams and Dewey are radical but not revolutionary, and certainly not anarchists. The problem for both men is not how to get rid of cultural or political power; neither of them needed Foucault to tell them power dynamics can never be dispensed with. Instead, the question they continually struggle with is how might we reconceptualize such political and intersubjective hierarchies in order to reconceive the world, to make it anew. The answer, at least according to Williams, lies in the imagination, which is, as Beck explains it, “the interaction of subject and object in space and time, not a transcendent subjectivity that exists for and of itself.”61 Beginning with their work in the early 1920s, both men struggle to find vocabularies that not only demarcate community but also empower the individuals that make up that community. In Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey argues that “when self-hood is perceived to be an active process it is also seen that social modifications are the only means of the creation of changed personalities. Institutions are viewed in their educative effect:—with reference to the types of individuals they foster.”62 More explicitly than Williams perhaps, Dewey is concerned with social possibilities, and he worries that social institutions replicate their own conditions rather than strive to push the boundaries of social formation and to question the weal of certain cultural arrangements and conventions. This inquiry into the way institutional structures create standards of socialization, Dewey believes, would begin to dissolve the long-established separation between ethics and politics. Although Williams was at least acquainted with Dewey’s work, often enough he claimed no conscious sympathy with the philosopher’s general ideas. “John Dewey and others,” Williams complains in The Embodiment of Knowledge, “appear to look for a solution to the problem of education in psychology and sociology—in philosophy then. They might do worse than to seek it in poetry.”63 Surprisingly, in back of this is an antiessentialist tendency, not an anti-intellectual one. It is perhaps more accurate to say that “the solution” is not in a particular overdetermined discourse. Williams

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maintains the “poet thinks with the poem,” and he believes that if form or materiality has primacy, then poetry, an art where language is first and foremost form, needs to be at the center of education. Poetry occasions imaginative acts about language with language, so it is through the act of composition that the poet thinks, neither ahead of nor prior to articulation. Despite Williams’s voiced criticisms of him, Dewey would most likely agree with Williams’s concern about looking for solutions in philosophy. At the very least, both of them shared a Jamesian tough-mindedness and a desire above all else to have their respective disciplines be “useful.” For Williams, and for Dewey as well, tradition is not so much a prison as it is a community of discourses and beliefs, and Williams sees Dewey in his position as public intellectual as an easy target. In principle, the two agree, however, that cultural and social structures are inherently flawed. Or perhaps to characterize them as flawed is to flirt with a kind of idealism that is inaccurate. Perhaps better to say that these structures, as they are, are unjust. Language is the conversation culture is having with itself, but it is the dream of a participatory democracy (itself more dream than reality) that it must be a generative, interactive polylogue, and this is where Dewey and Williams come together most productively and forcefully. There is no a priori, inexorable authority to which truth systems or a particular poem is submitted, Williams and Dewey contend, but that of social conscience. Since that is the case, the elements and circumstances that help form and inform that conscience cannot stand untried or else lie fallow. At the same time, that conscience is always caught between society as a collective and as a network of contesting individual desires. In his book-length poem Paterson, Williams writes, “how to begin to find a shape—to begin to begin again, / turning the inside out: to find one phrase that will / lie married beside another for delight.”64 Although he is clearly talking about the process of writing the poem itself, for Williams this process was more than that. In fact, this excerpt, coming near the beginning of the third book of Paterson, is actually quite philosophically dense. We notice, of course, the desire to “find a shape” as the means of both beginning again and “turning the inside out.” Desire motivates attempts to change the given, and thereby to bring the world into conjunction with the subjective. These attempts to transform the given, or at least change one’s (and/or others’) understanding are the external force of values.

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There is also the sexual pun of the two phrases that will “lie married beside another for delight.”65 In that the line is a metaphor as well as a pun, the two meanings are wedded in this context. The pun is not merely for the sake of a wink; it suggests that the joining of the phrases is a conjugation, a yoking together that also synthesizes two different theses, and the pleasure or “delight” comes from the efforts of bringing the two phrases together. The small passage from Paterson cited previously also links two conditions of subjectivity—pleasure and work. Evidently for Williams, the work creates pleasure or “delight,” again situating poetry in the realm of affect and selfconsciousness. The work, then, creates pleasure and counters alienation or the poet’s own self-objectification. The attempt to change language, even to find what it will and will not do, is an attempt to change one’s relation to language and to others. Through this practice readers are reconnected to their sense of value, and their capacity to invest and shape values larger than themselves—the pleasure then comes from the possibility that the values realized as communicable text or proposition might be recognized. Yet the phrases Williams searches for are not randomly or arbitrarily thrown together. Because they are married, the synthesis is seen as valid or legitimate and the words make sense, or at least a new example of sense. In any event, the validated synthesis creates a valid perception, and the validation comes from the feeling of delight. This delight Williams mentions might also be considered as an exercise in Kantian “taste,” which the philosopher describes in The Metaphysics of Morals as being “that pleasure which is not necessarily connected with desire for an object, and so is not at bottom a pleasure in the existence of the object of a representation but is attached only to the representation by itself.”66 The capacity of having pleasure or displeasure in terms of representation is called “feeling” because, or so argues Kant, it involves what is merely subjective. Pleasure or displeasure, because not intrinsic to an object or representation, only indicates relation between the subject and the object. Taste is an “inactive delight” rather than a predicative or predatory one, a responsive gesture. At the same time, the moments of delight indicate one’s nexus of beliefs or values, in an unmediated fashion. The response, the exercise of taste, brings that nexus into view for both the author and the reader. In the space of the negotiation, the distance of that difference, is a whole culture and value system.

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In the essay “Caviar and Bread Again: A Warning to the New Writer,” Williams contends, “On the poet devolves the most vital function of society: to recreate it—the collective world—in time of stress, in a new mode, fresh in every part, and so set the world working or dancing or murdering each other again, as it may be.”67 Although there is a shared interest in the materiality of language, what Williams argues for is a far cry from the Russian Formalists’ belief that poetry’s function is to estrange language. The Russian Formalists wanted ultimately to foment dissent in hope of maintaining revolutionary consciousness. Williams, not unlike his friend and rival Wallace Stevens, sought to revive language, wanting to make language, in a sense, more immediate by recovering the ordinary in language, disclosing subjectivity rather than capitalizing on alienation. In one of his essays, Williams states: “The mutability of the truth, Ibsen said it. Jefferson said it. We should have a revolution of some sort in America every ten years. The truth has to be redressed, re-examined, re-affirmed in a new mode.”68 Although he uses the word revolution here, Williams also cites Jefferson and so maintains the continuity of a liberal democratic dialogue. Thus, the newness that experiments with language make possible is not a major and sudden paradigm shift; it is a resettling of the issues, a revitalizing of the process of decision that gives rise to a new way of perceiving one’s position in culture, and in the world. Since this new perception revises an understanding of the world, Williams’s use of “lie married” in the passage from Paterson is procreative, because a new understanding means effectually a new reality. And we also cannot miss the other pun of a poet saying “lie,” which suggests, of course, intercourse (both sexual and textual discourse) and telling falsehoods. But these are “lies” in the nonmoral sense, as are Stevens’s fictions. Once the phrases are “married,” the lies, now legitimated, become truths. So, the poem is the action by which the poet reinvents subjectivity, providing not an origin but a beginning out of the action of composing. Thus, the poet takes an idea and makes it into reality. The question here revolves around choice. Williams begins “to begin again” via the attempt to turn “the inside out” by representing or making real his Eidos or the shape of his desire. This unfulfilled and unfulfilling representation, since desire itself must by definition be, is signaled by attempts to marry one phrase with another. With all the other resonances mentioned, “married” also suggests a legal condition and legislated choice.

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Marriage is perhaps one of the most dominant tropes of Williams’s poetics, and in fact he links marriage to the poem itself. “To marriage: no ideas but in things. Metaphor is a marriage—right and free,” he writes in some notes prepared for the third book of Paterson.69 The combination of two objects creates a third one out of the relation between the now conjoined or juxtaposed phrases, objects, or ideas, as well as a new relationship for the metaphor maker, the poet. The marriage is a result of this motivated choice of arrangement. Divorce, at least in Paterson, is Williams’s trope for division of thinking and experience into subdivided jargons and is “the sign of knowledge in our time.”70 Given the importance of marriage as a trope for Williams, it is worth thinking through its implications. Tangentially I would bring to mind Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities. Although the connection might seem strange at first, as I indicated earlier, there are more connections between Benjamin’s modernism and American modernism than most critics have explored. The relevant connection here lies in the phenomenological weight of marriage, something that interests not only Williams and Benjamin but Kant and Goethe as well. In his essay, Benjamin worries the problematics of marriage since Goethe’s novel relates both the failures of marriage and its functionality. In thinking about the central marriage (between Charlotte and Eduard) in Elective Affinities, Benjamin represents marriage as a constantly rearticulated choice of fidelity. “For if the moral world shows itself anywhere illuminated by the spirit of language, it is in the decision. No moral decision can enter into life without verbal form and, strictly speaking, without thus becoming an object of communication.”71 The relevance to Williams’s thinking is that the focus here is not so much the actual choice itself, which of course is always historical, but the act of deciding that signals an ethical moment. In the movements and forms of its composition the poem discloses the poet’s deciding as well as providing an occasion for the reader’s own deciding about meaning, which becomes the hermeneutic process. Consequently the poet’s “marriage” of two phrases constitutes (1) a new meaning; (2) a negotiation of form; (3) a contract with the reader; and (4) the reader’s contract with meaning and its cultural and epistemological materials. Goethe uses the term affinity (Verwandschaft) to describe this relatedness, signifying the closest of human connections, but since the affinities are elective (Wahlverwandschaften),

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the connection, although deep, is not natural but constructed, even if it springs from intuitive processes. The affinities are part of a shared set of references that shape ranges of human actions within a certain spectrum— evaluating them and codifying them as moral, immoral, or amoral. The resulting behaviors determine and even legislate a set of family resemblances. All of these connections must begin to begin again each time these interrelations get assessed. Each decision, even if it is a decision about the same situation, is paradoxically a renewal of relations, beginning to begin again. Everything could always be otherwise. Ironically, or not so ironically, Williams himself was no model of marital fidelity—his affairs were numerous and notorious. Thus, the need “to begin again” for both him and his wife, Flossie, was a conscious decision that they made again and again, literally. On the other hand, the decision was based on reason—security, efficacy, and so forth rather than the passion of romantic dalliances that, because based on impulse, act directly counter to reason. Fidelity, then, is not limited to romantic or sexual constancy. Rather, the focus is on the union, a union that creates an identity out of two individuals, what Benjamin calls a “continuance in love” (das Bestehen der Liebe).72 As Williams writes in Book III of “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”: What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise? Because of this I have invoked the flower in that frail as it is after winter’s harshness it comes again to delect us.73

He continues to say that he does not come to confess because he has confessed already. Instead, he writes, “In the name of love / I come proudly / as to an equal / to be forgiven.”74 This offers a clear picture of Wittgenstein’s Lebensform as an agreement of reference rather than opinion, with love being

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a shared identification, a thoroughgoing sympathy but one that entails willingly submitting to the Other, to be equal and yet prostrating so as to seek forgiveness, a forgiveness that is a kind of recognition. Ideally, in a marriage both partners maintain their individuality while consciously forgoing it in a public way, that is, in the eyes of the law. Marriage, like metaphor, is a way of legislating elective affinities. But the condition of that affinity is ever in flux and is paradoxically never quite resolved. Love distinguishes a merely obligatory duty to a legal union from one’s commitment to a partner and to the relationship with its variously delineated structures of power. In an imagined dialogue with his brother Paul, Williams writes the following exchange, with himself presumably being the first voice. Let me ask you, Have vows ever made a marriage? There is no marriage without them. But marriages may languish even when the vows are not broken, may they not? Yes, I suppose so. Did it ever occur to you that a marriage might be invigorated by deliberately breaking the vows? That is impossible. Nothing is impossible to the imagination.75

In reality this “deliberately breaking the vows” in order to jump-start a marriage is a problematic point of view. Admittedly this is informed by the swaggering machismo Williams sometimes self-consciously affected. Too often this swagger takes the place of careful thinking or considered attempts to persuade. This affectation may be Williams’s way of overcompensating for insecurities about his abilities to make a sustained argument (as opposed to someone like T. S. Eliot, who did make such arguments frequently in his critical work). Perhaps. Or perhaps we might read it as the provocation it is meant to be. In other words, Williams risks an amorality to make a point about priorities of principles. The interlocutor then responds, “I’m not talking about imagination but—the basis of faith in art.” A few sentences later Williams insists that he is talking about the same thing. “How can a man make any progress in his life without philosophy? And yet, one must.” He adds, “[E]ven a peasant may sing and in Spain they, anonymously, indite coplas to the expansive mind in all sorts of colors. So that, not having philosophy, nor even a shadow of it, some sort of order still emerges.”76 The brother-as-interlocutor suggests that Williams is offering a model of imag-

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ination as amoral and having no principles. “No principles,” Williams retorts, “save the rediscovery in people of the elements of order.”77 We see that a faith in skepticism is the kelson of William’s poetics, as it was with Emerson. What they share is an insistence on action that opens doubt in the heart of doxa. Even if some of the things that the passage implies about marriage are a bit problematic, it still may have its usefulness, especially if we put it in the context of another claim that Williams makes in the short essay “The Advance Guard Magazine” included in the first issue of Contact, where he writes, “The measure of the intelligent citizen is the discretion with which he breaks the law.”78 So Williams’s recklessness or even sloppiness is part of the performance of the invented dialogue between him and his brother. This is not to make excuses for him or defend him but to see the claims within a larger project of disrupting expectations, which is the effect of his exaggerating. The other effect, however, suggests that the uttered vows are not what make a marriage, and breaking the vows reconstitutes the act of actively deciding whether or not to stay in a marriage, rather than doing so out of merely contractual obligation, or worse in Williams’s view, simply out of habit. Williams comes as an equal in “Asphodel,” but since he needs forgiveness, he acknowledges Flossie’s moral dominance. Yet once she forgives him—a pledge once again to begin to begin again—she willingly gives up her dominance. This pas de deux wholly within the ethical milieu signals a confrontation of self and Other, and a subject’s objectifying his or her own identity in the Other as a result of the union.79 The feminist arguments that one can imagine rising up in response to Williams and/or Kant are both legion and quite valid. A central issue, certainly, is whether or not there can ever be parity in marriage. In this case, Williams begs forgiveness, but is there any real possibility Flossie might not give it? If not, if it is a fait accompli, she is not a free moral agent, and the whole ritual is simply rhetorical. I counter that this was, and remains more or less, a real problem of gender ideology, one that is still entirely relevant, as anyone who has seen Todd Haynes’s film Far from Heaven can attest. At the same time in many cases one partner can withhold forgiveness from the Other, yet remain married. Also, that one partner cannot freely choose indicates the problems of marriage in a formal way and might get us to rethink the formal conditions of marriage.

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Williams is sensitive to the problems of agency in marriage. In “The Ivy Crown” he writes, The whole process is a lie, unless, crowned by excess, it break forcefully, one way or another, from its confinement— or find a deeper well. Antony and Cleopatra were right; they have shown the way. I love you or I do not live at all.80

For Williams, structures are also actions, or ought to be. Once they ossify, forms and structures become prisons, hence this poem’s emphasis on action and excess. Excess of what? Excess of intention, to begin with. In the case of marriage, where there is no agency, on either side, there is no life. Problematically, and self-servingly, he claims that breaking that confinement “one way or another” is preferable to that confinement. In this case, one might read his desire for freedom as likely to overwhelm his commitment to the integrity of the union, which is the very condition Williams continually feels the need to critique. Commitment that is consciously and freely chosen and invested in is the necessary condition that makes the recurring breaks possible. As he insists in “Asphodel,” the power of love is forgiveness, and in that we see, in light of his body of work, the destruction of the past he calls for is not nihilistic but is a means of increasing the intensity of an investment in the possibilities of order. Such a dynamic of social commitment can never become rote if it is also always being tested, and for Williams it is an instrument to use, not a blind fealty to be used by moral systems others have established. His emphasis on “the rediscovery in people of the elements of order” indicates this must happen at the level of the individual in his or her pursuit of an order of his or her own creation. Since that order is always partial, it needs continually to be “rediscovered.” For Williams, then, love and modernism are equivalencies, both shaped by a kind of continuance that is the grounds for a necessary discontinuity.

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Without the underlying commitment and belief in community, the individual is lost because there is no coherence by which an individual measures his or her subjectivity. Against a doctrinal philosophy, Williams’s poetics suggests that each step, in a nearly Cavellian fashion, is both the testing and the discovering of the possibilities for continuing on. As Williams’s poems indicate, this is not so easily done. “The business of love is / cruelty which, / by our wills, / we transform / to live together,” Williams’s “The Ivy Crown” states. These lines are preceded by the assertion “Romance has no part in it,” which I take to be the poem’s reiteration of its own modernity.81 Despite the plethora of natural images found among the poem’s lines—roses, jonquils, ivy, and violets— Williams seeks to recontextualize tropes borrowed from his Romantic forerunners. Indeed, as we have already seen, for Williams modernity and love are analogues. The claim that “the business of love is cruelty” underlines a reading of love as not simply a state of feeling but a specific kind of economy; indeed, for some “the business of love” is paradoxical in that it is the yoking together of words from two different discourses. This model, one that is fraught with complex negotiations that must acknowledge violence, recognizes the intentionality of love and disavows love as a state of rapture. Indeed, it is the risk that requires the lover and the beloved to recognize and address the dangers and threats to their subjectivity and individuality. With this threat also comes the awareness that one is apt to threaten the Other’s claims to individuality as well. “Just as the nature of briars / is to tear flesh, / I have proceeded / through them.”82 In coming together, one’s Will becomes a cruelty to another, so that Will to Power must be transformed. The negotiation and continual overcoming of these Wills ensures that the agents involved have an investment in that one is aware of earning the respect and desire of an equal. Children pick flowers. Let them. Though having them in hand they have no further use for them but leave them crumpled at the curb’s edge.83

When the Will to Power is not tested by the beloved, the Will overwhelms the object of its desire and then discards it. The poem suggests that the

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unchecked Will is a kind of immaturity. In the poem, Williams states, “At our age the imagination / across the sorry facts / lifts us / to make roses / stand before thorns.”84 Since the relationship is as much a “business of cruelty” as anything else it might be, the work it takes makes marriage an occasion for discovering responsibility by way of the considered consent each marital partner offers in the face of the thorns of cruelty, present and future. I to love and you to be loved, we have, no matter how, by our wills survived to keep the jeweled prize always at our finger tips. We will it so and so it is past all accident.85

Because they “will it so,” the Will to Power is contravened and the relationship is a created thing for which the respective participant-creators can acknowledge (and be acknowledged by) their responsibility for its continuance. We notice, too, the formal negotiations of Williams’s poem in that he spreads his lines across the page, not in the signature triadic stanzas that mark so much of his other late work. In “The Ivy Crown,” the lines cover the page in a way that might recall ivy covering a wall, spreading across as it grows. They resist cultural determinations of conventional poetic form in evident, immediately visible ways. We could also say that their sprawl courts and resists entropy. What, we might ask, holds the lines of this poem together? What is the principle of its cohesion? The writer uses the poem to objectivize the shape of the world he or she desires; the process of representing this world creates pleasure or, better said, an immediacy of his or her own subjectivity, and this is reflected in Benjamin’s comment that the moral decision needs to achieve verbal form in order to be a “communicable object,” or text. Thus, to represent here does not necessarily mean the artist or poet says, “This is a picture of how I’d like the world to look.” Rather, the representation makes into a com-

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municable object the artist’s values and the geometry of belief and social investments. The worldview that gets expressed in this process calls out to a particular community, one that can identify even provisionally with that constellation. I do not want to cross over into Bloom’s idea of the visionary poet; instead of overselling the idealization, I would rather see the focus on the tension between subjective desire and the given. Not the represented or ideal reality but the privileging of the decision process indicates how Williams’s modernism is inflected with Emersonian self-consciousness. For Williams, the modernist poet attempts to shake himself or herself free from various ideological and, what is more, cultural constraints to assert his or her individuality so as to create a better community. Rather than put this in revolutionary terms, Williams more likely implies the constraints are real by-products of previously held fictions. In his essay “The Work of Gertrude Stein,” Williams describes “an alertness not to let go of a possibility of movement in our fearful bedazzlement with some concrete and fixed present. The goal is to keep a beleaguered line of understanding which has movement from breaking down and becoming a hole into which we sink decoratively to rest.”86 Indeed, in the essay Williams argues that the task of the poet is to keep the language fresh but also to maintain a continuity of community, even if it redetermines the geography of that community. This passage echoes Wittgenstein’s desire to deliver us from the bewitchment of language. Either way, the desire is to create a new commitment in the midst of reinventing one’s present context. I point to this particular passage from his essay on Stein to balance other readings that overemphasize Williams’s declaration near the end of In the American Grain: “However hopeless it may seem, we have no other choice: we must go back to the beginning; it must all be done over; everything that is must be destroyed.”87 Obviously, we can see how a statement like this would make Williams seem suited for deconstruction if not nihilism. At the same time, the passage comes near the end of In the American Grain but is not even in the last chapter, so to suggest that this is the thesis is inaccurate. In other words, one ought not to take the claim out of context. So often Williams seems to be, again, sympathetic with the idea of “decreation” rather than sheer destruction. In another essay he writes, “But I insist, yes, that the purpose of art IS to be useful. Why does a poet write as he does? It may be defiance but it is defiance because he sees something worth having. He must shake himself free, he himself as one man,

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from the destroying horror of an oppressive existence, but if he write it can only be in the hope that he may gather to himself others with whom he would like to see the world better populated.”88 Although Williams is more or less avant-garde (or is so north-northwest; when the wind is southerly, he is simply “modernist”), he is also much more than merely oppositional. The negations he engages in, especially as in the passage from In the American Grain, are marshaled to reconstruct the given and to suggest a desire for other possibilities, possibilities that allow people to pursue desires and to increase their capacities and abilities, to better themselves, not merely in material terms, but in social, ethical, and even emotional terms, while maintaining social cohesion and promoting a responsibility toward that cohesion. The difference between Stevens and Williams, at least in terms of metaphor and the making of poems, lies in their sense of what metaphor does. Both see “decreation” (although Williams never actually uses the term) as a necessary action, but for Stevens metaphors rearrange ideas, providing new ways of apprehending the given. For Williams, poetry and metaphors allow for different and differing connections to be made among objects. Either way, as Williams describes the ideal, the Poet transforms the objectified world via his or her own subjectivity, his or her own ability to imagine or discern family resemblances among unlike things. The trick is to strike a balance in shaking off social oppression without simply severing the possibility of social responsibility, to see the self within a world beyond the self. The dangers of individualism, however, are part of the grain of American ideology and are reflected even in otherwise beneficial policies. Beck, in Writing the Radical Center, sees the Depression as a pivotal moment that motivated policies such as the New Deal, which provided many social benefits but was in reality designed to protect not citizens but capitalism itself, and to advance the pursuit of materialist wealth. At a time when Dewey sought to bring about the conditions for an individualism that allowed a subject circulating within a social medium to make the most of his or her capabilities, that allowed both the collective and the agent to exist in mutual interdependence, actual social and economic policies were being devised—marketed, in other words—to increase the desire for wealth and gain, at the expense of all else, in the economic subject. It is clear why Dewey describes liberalism in “organistic terms”—he had to find

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metaphors to stop the shift from “production to consumption capitalism” and the new values that are attendant. In the new economy, individual desire is valorized above social responsibility—especially where the latter might impinge on a person’s getting what he or she wants. With this as background we can turn to Williams and see how this shift in vocabularies politicizes Williams’s tropes of divorce and marriage, one being a profound egocentrism—cutting oneself off from the needs of the community—and the other a negotiated commitment to the larger body politic and a “continuance in love.” The problems intrinsic to the act of making poems can be, by extension, brought to bear on culture and politics. Whether in the act of writing a poem or arguing a truth-value, to search for a place to begin is to make origin uncertain, and if origin is uncertain, the very conceptual foundations of community are open to change. In the unpublished notes to a talk that he gave at Harvard University in 1941, Williams emphasizes poetry’s importance: Perhaps never in the history of the world was it more important to have well constructed verse than today—when the structure of our democratic structure is so threatened—from within and without. To steady us as we pass through the fire (the necessary fire) what can there be but the poem? It represents often our only grip on reality. How important is it then to retain the power of invention, to see to it that in our structures . . . a constantly intensified perception on the basis of which we are to build and not mere nostalgia remain alive in our minds.89

Evident in this passage from Williams is his belief that poetry is the means of a kind of redemption (that which steadies “us as we pass through the fire”) that takes the place not only of religion as it was with Stevens but also the ideological state that is “threatened—from within and without.” The paradox is that what “represents often our only grip on reality” is linked with “the power of invention.” Despite their differences, Williams and Stevens have some distinct sympathies with one another. Some might charge Williams with the very nostalgia he cautions against, but as with Stevens this would not be accurate. Poetry becomes a way of focusing the mind and working with structures to create new structures—so as to see to it that forms or acts of the imagination lead to “a constantly intensified perception,” which is what the community is built upon. In other words,

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the “action” is at the same time a “structure.” The poem calls into being interpretive occasions by which not only beliefs but the whole language of the community is tested, which is why we might think of Williams’s poems as being pedagogical. What is constructed is more important than what gets destroyed because Williams seeks a purging of what is habitual and reactionary so that construction wins out over destruction. Evident in Williams’s belief in poetry’s efficacy is a correlation with Dewey’s pragmatic sussing out of the educative effects of institutions and social mores. “We are led to ask,” the philosopher tells us, “what the specific stimulating, fostering and nurturing power of each specific social arrangement may be.”90 Because these social arrangements produce and reproduce agency and subjectivity, they need to be tried out, questioned, subjected to a constructive skepticism that uses doubt and self-consciousness in order to discover what is necessary, what is useful, to create the possibilities for ethics that are ever dependent on the possibility of choosing. Poirier, in discussing Emerson and Stein and an Emersonian pragmatist poetics, suggests, “[W]hile writers are necessarily obliged by the language they use to express the historical moment in which they find themselves, they can also use that language to free themselves from any absolute obligation.”91 In these terms, the inherited obligation is dismantled to allow the possibilities of taking responsibility for and being able to respond to one’s language. Thus, Emersonian modernism is not only a freedom from imposed duty but a freedom to choose one’s commitments. Although there may be no necessary causal relationship between pragmatism and social liberalism, the two are in practice inextricably connected. Dewey explains that liberalism, if nothing else, is “committed to an end that is at once enduring and flexible: the liberation of individuals so that realization of their capacities may be the law of their life. It is committed to the use of freed intelligence as the method of directing change.”92 It is that flexibility, ever open to discussion and nuance, that links the two. Pragmatism in whatever guise or modality it takes tends toward the freeing of thought from reified templates of thinking. Truth, such as it is, instead of being absolute acts as a “Supreme Fiction,” but at times a useful one if we can but keep in sight the ebb and flow of contingencies. In such a narrative of knowledge the principle settings, telos, and figures are constantly but never conclusively being established.

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As I mention in the first chapter, Charles Olson writes in his seminal critical study of Herman Melville, Call Me Ishmael, “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.”93 The physical space writes itself upon conceptual space. It makes a great deal of sense, and not just the Yankee kind, that pragmatism is the central contribution of the United States to philosophy. As the country developed, as it evolved, brought together by a dizzying spectrum of social, political, philosophical, and economic factors that one hardly can imagine occurring elsewhere, a clear paradox became evident. If America is a great experiment, it is also a text of multiple elements, beliefs, modalities, and grammars drawn from multiple centers into a dialogical relation. As such a text, as a context for actions and beliefs, it is perpetually in flux, always being written. Although no society is ever really static, for the United States this flux is its very raison d’être. Thus, America has always had to contend with the double motion of democracy, which places its political strength in the hands of its constituents while too often eliding if not homogenizing difference. Knowledge is not a static body of information but is instead a measure of informed, participatory action. Art is one way that the conditions for interaction, or contact, can be set up and maintained. As Emerson tells us, “Art is the path of the creator to his work.” The interaction that exists through and as poetry and the reading of poetry ideally makes it possible to effect changes in both self and milieu. If “SPACE” is the “central fact,” is the “vacant space” that everything comes down to, as Stevens says in “The American Sublime,” then there can be no true origin, and all beginnings, as well as perspectives, are contingent. Because, philosophically speaking, there is no sure thing, conversation at the level of the individual on upward is a way of increasing perspective, making it multiple and refractory. These perspectives are not interchangeable, but they are all interconnected. Thus, thinking and writing are deliberative social acts, and if democracy is to be redeemed and made participatory, it may well be through engaging in a critique of its failings that we can revisit its potential. As many critics have claimed, especially since its recent “revival,” pragmatism does not necessarily lead to liberalism (in other words, pragmatism and democracy are not interchangeable), and attempts to balance tradition and innovation usually come around to the traditional elements

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being dominant. And indeed, Dewey and Williams too often are guilty of simply reconfiguring dominant forces, albeit in perhaps slightly different terms, because they merely make new uses for existing vocabularies instead of creating entirely new social systems. Both writers are finally too optimistic, too general in their terms to make it clear how their versions of democracy would work if they obtained to the trope of conversation. Such a critique echoes Richard Rorty, who, in Achieving Our Country, also raises concerns about well-intentioned pragmatists who, while not overtly describing a democratic utopia, are too often vague and unclear as to the actual mechanics of their vision.94 In that perhaps poetry and pragmatism are most fully compatible—neither makes anything happen. What they both do, however, is to make it possible to see how things might be thought about in other ways, and that a foolish consistency in relation to received ideas and values, for the sake of tradition alone, rather than for the advantages or benefits they may or may not give rise to, is something we can avoid in order to achieve a fuller, more equitable ethical community. So, if poetry does not make anything happen, perhaps it does not need to. Rather, it may be more useful to see poetry as pedagogical. The semantic, cultural, and ethical difficulties that a poetic text, or at least a modernist one such as Williams offers—from Spring and All to Paterson— allow a reader to “mature”; that is, one must work to grasp the concepts and metaphors that exist as such literary texts, thereby deepening one’s mastery of language, culture, and figuration. In many ways, this is the process of maturation that signals the separation between the adults of “The Ivy Crown” who confront and negotiate the thorns as opposed to the children who pick flowers and then discard them. Poetry qua poetry qua composition is an alternative to a market economy that assesses work as a means to an end, rather than as an end in and of itself. Williams indicates ways poetry in the Emersonian mode, simply by its operation and existence, enacts a “messiness” that gives evidence and occasion for the possibility of engaging other systems of valuation, aesthetics, and semantics. Williams in “To Be Recited to Flossie on Her Birthday” says of the reader engaging his text who seeks out “that tortured constancy” that such tortured constancy “affirms where he persists” and, like the flower that blooms and struggles “to assert itself / simply under / the conflicting lights,” such conflict in situ is also affirmation.95 The tension and struggle are how that subjec-

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tivity comes to be. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that although poetry does not create new systems, it does often throw into question the idea that language is itself systematic and that thinking is less orderly, less domesticated, than Kant would have it. One failure that critics of liberalism point to is its concessionist tendencies and the insurmountability of power inequities, not to mention the ways that democracy is just as susceptible if not more susceptible to co-optation, oppression, commodification, and alienation, since it continually moves in and as ideology and cannot dismantle itself from the inside. Arguably, we could see this radicalizing of existing ideology (aesthetic and otherwise) as being ineffectual and, what is worse, capitulatory. These failures Williams runs into are failures Emerson himself could never reconcile. The key move is to become aware of just how one invests in the dominant ideology, and risking “failure” can help achieve this perspective. Liberal democracy is in fact motivated by failures, not to mention incompletion and dissatisfaction, and the attempts to negotiate these, to overcome them. The beauty, and let us call it that, of Williams’s poetics is that it makes use of failure, which manifests itself in the “excess” he mentions in “The Ivy Crown,” sounding similar to Emerson’s belief that a necessary wildness is crucial for a poem. Failure can be judged not on its own terms only but in relation to the traditions and conventions that it critiques. To say a poem “fails” is already to be inside the ideology, to be invested in the mechanisms of value dictated by capitalism. To be awake to the fact that one is feeding various institutions and structures is to make these mechanisms visible, detectable. We need not all be poets, but if we learn to see the ways that the artifice of culture is indeed a made thing, we might just find ways that social action can give substance to the specters haunting us all along. Outside of will and intention, the poet makes his or her way through that world as if it were possibility and not explanation. In his massive, messy poem “A,” the poet Louis Zukofsky writes, “Come we to full points here; and are etceteras nothing?”96 The etceteras are the place to begin. Perhaps it is easy enough to say that changing the terms of the discussion opens up possibility. In part, it may be discussion itself, both in the form of philosophy and in the form of criticism, that needs more discussion in order to broach renewed possibilities of thought as its own activity.

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Response and Responsibility

The moments of defining that have happened thus far in my discussion are, paradoxically, arranged in fond hopes of bringing to light a certain pathos of reading. In part, then, an Emersonian modernism does not change our ideas of modernism but asks us to change our stance toward language, asks us to be self-conscious of the self by way of the act of reading. This stance includes recovering responsibility for one’s own values. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson writes, “Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions and do not see that virtue and vice emit a breath every moment.”97 Emerson in that regard asks a great deal of his readers, for this is as true of reading as of any other activity. Accepting an Emersonian modernism, that is, living one’s modernity, entails an attention to identification and resistance. Williams’s “Asphodel” reminds us it is “difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”98 What is to be found there? According to Emerson, ourselves. Reading as a poet, in Emerson’s sense of the word, or reading as a modernist as I would put it, is the path back to one’s own language, a recognizing (that is, a thinking again) of one’s own “rejected thoughts” that in our encounters by way of another’s text and textual negotiations “come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”99 Yet, it is both the alienation and the majesty that must be continually overcome. Perhaps all along, I have painted Williams and Stevens, as well as the others, too heroically, reenacting a Romanticism that is suspect and exhausted. The specters that haunt America might be unavoidable in the ghostly weight of failings, missed communications, the Brigadoon of community that appears only as a disappearance. If that is true, then the trope of revision and revisability has also been a mistake the whole time. Wittgenstein writes, “Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.”100 Since space is America’s central fact, we haunt our own language, our own lives, as idiom and idea expand and grow, redefining our context. “One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted— / One need not be a House— / The Brain has corridors—surpassing / Material Place—” Emily Dickinson assures us.101 Thus, it is not revision that we can speak of, since our vision, and our ver-

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sion, is still incomplete. What is left is a continual starting out in speech, sounding the dimensions of language and the shape and hew of possible thought. We speak, we write, we argue to sound out the dimensions of linguistic and conceptual space, such stuff as lives are made on. If a vocabulary is in flux, then conversation must go on in order to get things straight. The result is that the discussion can go on, in all its articulate stammerings and hesitations of inclination and affections, perpetually circling around and out, to begin again.

Notes

abbreviations CPWCW CPWS EFS ESS HM “HHM” LG PI RWE SEWCW TLP WCW WS

The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens Essays: First Series Essays: Second Series Herman Melville “Hawthorne and His Mosses” Leaves of Grass Philosophical Investigations Ralph Waldo Emerson Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus William Carlos Williams Wallace Stevens

introduction 1. S. Cavell, “The Philosopher in American Life,” in In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 25. 2. Ibid., 24–25. 3. Ibid., 25. 4. G. L. Bruns, “The Last Romantic,” in Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999), 207. 5. R. W. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 54 (Emerson hereafter identified as RWE). 6. M. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Gray (New York: Harper, 1968), 77. 7. W. Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Selected Writings, ed. Bullock and Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 1:333. 8. The major figures that dominate this discussion are men, though Dickinson is repeatedly mentioned, as is Gertrude Stein. As I make clear, all the issues of

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Notes to Introduction and Chapter 1

Emersonian poetics are certainly applicable to these two authors, as they are, I might add, to H. D. and Marianne Moore. The focus on Melville and Hawthorne in Chapter 3 and Williams and Stevens in Chapter 4 is to recontextualize authors who are historically seen as being in direct dialogue with one another. In that this book does not attempt to assign literary value but in a sense presumes it, the door is left open to other configurations of writers. Indeed, the very nature of the argument suggests that different readers would necessarily come up with their own constellations of texts by which to measure the ethics of reading. 9. L. Buell, Emerson (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003), 157. 10. Timothy Gould, one of Cavell’s finest commentators, frames the knotty question of skepticism “not as a false theory but as a belated interpretation of the situation of human beings as knowers in the world. Skepticism disguises a deeper anxiety about our place in the world” (Hearing Things [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998], 208). Gould characterizes Cavell’s depiction of “the truth of skepticism” this way: The skeptic (the skeptic in us) has got hold of something crucial in the human situation, but that something is not accurately represented as a kind of fact. It is more like a kind of relationship or relatedness, something about the way in which the world is present to us, and we to the world. But the skeptic interprets this aspect of the situation—that the presentness of the world to us does not reside in our knowledge of the world—as the discovery of a disastrous fact. The idea is not so much that skepticism has true things to say about our situation, but that the skeptic is in a situation. He voices that situation as best he can—given the way he got into it. But he interprets it as a kind of catastrophic progress. His interpretation of his chastened sense of human knowledge presents us not with truths that we should learn to deal with but with developments we can learn to read. (Hearing Things, 99) As I hear that last sentence, a great deal of sympathy exists between Cavell and Williams. I show in Chapter 4 how Williams offers “a chastened sense of human knowledge” as interpretive occasions for learning how to read our own investments and understandings of culture, community, and subjectivity. 11. W. C. Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1963), 3 (Williams hereafter identified as WCW). chapter 1 1. RWE, “The Poet,” in Essays: Second Series (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1983), 7 (hereafter cited as ESS). 2. Ibid., 41, 49. 3. RWE, “The Poet,” 22.

Notes to Chapter 1

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4. A. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Bloom, trans. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1969), 178. 5. RWE, Emerson in His Journals, ed. Porte (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press), 152. 6. S. Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), 18. 7. J. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Richardson and O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2000), 2. 8. W. Stevens, “Man Carrying Thing,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1990), 351 (hereafter cited as CPWS; Stevens hereafter identified as WS). 9. L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Pears and McGuinness (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1993), 5 (hereafter cited as TLP). 10. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, 3d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1958), 50e (hereafter cited as PI). 11. Such an argument, at least for Hegel, can be traced back to Josiah Royce. In recent years the most comprehensive tracing out of the literary dimensions of Hegel’s work is found in Allen Speight’s Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001). Henry Sussman, however, was the first to draw to my attention the argument of reading Hegel’s Phenomenology as a bildungsroman. His book The Hegelian Aftermath (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982) mentions this model of Hegel’s work. 12. Wittgenstein, PI, 131e. 13. Ibid., 49e. 14. L. Wittgenstein, “Lectures on Aesthetics,” in Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Barrett, comp. Smythies, Rhees, and Taylor (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press), 8. 15. L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. Wright, trans. Winch (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 46e. 16. Wittgenstein, TLP, 58. 17. Wittgenstein, PI, 47e. 18. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 65e. 19. RWE, “Experience,” 27. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. C. Olson, Call Me Ishmael (New York: Reynal, 1947), 11. 23. W. Whitman, “So Long!” in Leaves of Grass, ed. Bradley and Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1973), 505 (hereafter cited as LG). 24. H. D. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Orleans, Mass.: Parnassus, 1987), 129.

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Notes to Chapter 1

25. For the narrative of Emerson’s meeting with Coleridge, see both Gay Wilson Allen’s Waldo Emerson (New York: Viking, 1981), 211–12, and Robert Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 143–45. Although both biographers find the moment poignant, neither quite makes the attempt to locate the meeting in terms of Emerson’s creation of his own authorial identity. 26. See S. Cavell, “Finding as Founding: Taking Steps in Emerson’s ‘Experience,’” in This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque, N.M.: Living Batch, 1989). 27. WS, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” in CPWS, 64. 28. WS, “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz,” in CPWS, 122. 29. Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” in LG, 252. 30. Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in LG, 160. 31. J. C. Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 148. 32. Whitman, “The Wound-Dresser,” in LG, 310. 33. Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 163. 34. RWE, “Fate,” in The Conduct of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003), 1. 35. Wittgenstein, TLP, 71. 36. W. Wordsworth, “Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads,” in English Romantic Writers, ed. Perkins (San Diego: Harcourt, 1967), 323. 37. P. B. Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in English Romantic Writers, 1076. 38. Ibid. 39. WCW, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951), 390–91. 40. W. Blake, “[To the Revd. Dr. Trusler],” in English Romantic Writers, 163. 41. Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” 1078. 42. WCW, “The Last Words of My English Grandmother,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, ed. Litz and MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 1:465 (hereafter cited as CPWCW ). 43. E. Dickinson, [#76], in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 39–40. 44. R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), 264. 45. C. Altieri, Postmodernisms Now (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1998), 123. 46. H. Crane, “Chaplinesque,” in Complete Poems and Selected Letters, ed. Hammer (New York: Library of America, 2006), 9. 47. N. Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), 39. 48. WS, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” in The Necessary Angel (New York: Vintage, 1951), 29.

Notes to Chapters 1 and 2

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49. F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Zimmern (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1997), 143. 50. RWE, “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” in Representative Men (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), 88. 51. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1. 52. L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. Anscombe and Wright, trans. Paul and Anscombe (New York: Harper, 1972), 24e. 53. Ibid., 77e. 54. Wittgenstein, PI, 47e. 55. Ibid., 31e. 56. J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), 2. 57. Ibid., 43. 58. J. Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Weber (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1988), 3. 59. Ibid., 7. 60. J. Culler, Literary Theory (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 111. 61. Wittgenstein, PI, 82e. 62. C. Altieri, Subjective Agency (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 6. 63. Wittgenstein, TLP, 5. 64. F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals [and] Ecce Homo, trans. Kaufmann and Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), 15. 65. Wittgenstein, PI, 88e. 66. C. Altieri, Act and Quality (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 68. 67. Wittgenstein, PI, 132e. 68. RWE, “Fate,” 25. 69. Ibid., 12. 70. Ibid., 23. 71. RWE, “Plato, or the Philosopher,” in Representative Men, 32. chapter 2 1. J. H. Miller, The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), 43. 2. RWE, “Intellect,” in Essays: First Series (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1979), 196 (hereafter cited as EFS). 3. RWE, “History,” in EFS, 15. 4. RWE, “New England Reformers,” in ESS, 161. 5. Ibid. 6. RWE, Emerson in His Journals, 106. 7. RWE, “Inspiration,” in Letters and Social Aims, ed. E. W. Emerson, Concord ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1903), 272. 8. T. S. Eliot, rev. of A History of American Literature, ed. Trent et al., Athenaeum 4643 (Apr. 25, 1919): 237.

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Notes to Chapter 2

9. G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Tomlinson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), 31. 10. RWE, “Poetry and Imagination,” in Letters and Social Aims, 12. 11. Ibid. 12. RWE, “Circles,” in EFS, 180. 13. RWE, “Poetry and Imagination,” 64. 14. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 23. 15. P. Lacoue-Labarthe and J. Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Barnard and Lester (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1988), 49. 16. By citing Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s important text on German Romanticism, and by drawing on the Schlegels to examine Emerson’s compositional form, I am in danger of undermining a view of Emerson as a modernist rather than a Romantic author. The truth is that he is both Romantic and modernist, but his modernity has too often been overlooked. 17. S. E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 156. 18. RWE, “Fate,” 1. 19. D. Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 136. 20. W. James, Pragmatism (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1991), 36. 21. There is no shortage of those who hold this view, but Cornel West, Richard Poirier, and Jonathan Levin are three names that come immediately to mind as consistently the most persuasive proponents of the view of Emerson as standing at the beginning of American pragmatism. 22. Most evident examples of this model of moral thinker would include Kant and Hegel among the Germans or Jefferson, Franklin, and Webster among the Americans. 23. S. Cavell, “Emerson’s Constitutional Amending,” in Philosophical Passages (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), 31. 24. RWE, “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” 91. 25. RWE, “History,” 5. 26. Ibid., 6. 27. RWE, “Art,” in EFS, 209. 28. RWE, “Fate,” 1. 29. Ibid. 30. Wittgenstein, TLP, 56. 31. Although there is no direct evidence that Emerson was familiar with Riemann, Lobachevsky, or Bolyai, he was familiar with Gauss’s work. He writes in his notebooks, “Gauss, I believe it is, who writes books that nobody but himself can understand, & himself only in his best hours. And [Peirce] & Gould & others in Cambridge are piqued with the like ambition” (The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Bosco and Johnson [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1982], 16:341). 32. RWE, “Fate,” 10.

Notes to Chapter 2

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33. Ibid., 5. 34. Edwards’s statement occurs in the course of his personal narrative at a point where language itself is overcome when faced with sublime, negative ecstasy: “My wickedness, as I am in myself, has long appear’d to me perfectly ineffable, and swallowing up all thought and imagination; like an infinite deluge, or infinite mountains over my head. I know not how to express better, what my sins appear to me to be, than by heaping infinite upon infinite, and multiplying infinite by infinite. I go about very often, for this many years, with these expressions in my mind, and in my mouth, ‘Infinite upon infinite . . . Infinite upon infinite’” (“Personal Narrative,” in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, ed. Lauter, 3d ed. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998], 1:590). We readily see that “infinite upon infinite” deconstructs itself (i.e., how could “infinite” be “stacked,” “added to,” or “increased”?). In Edwards’s case it points to the radical failure of language to mediate the ineffable. Emerson’s position is not so extreme here, but the sense of language’s limitations, which is the limitation of life as we know it, is Emerson’s central paradox here. In Emerson’s case, these limitations are “a beautiful necessity.” For both, it is a question of interpretation. For Edwards, the paradox ultimately resists interpretation, whereas for Emerson paradox provokes interpretation. 35. RWE, “Fate,” 7. 36. Emerson may not have Ware’s election specifically in mind here, but it would be a particular election that metonymically suggests that an election (or choice) within one paradigm can bring about a new paradigm. This is not unlike Emerson’s use of Oken’s pioneering cellular theory that all organic materials are made up of “vesicles.” The nascent vesicle is determined only by the circumstances in which it exists. Changing the circumstances yields new possibilities. Emerson writes, “Lodged in the parent animal, [the vesicle] suffers changes which end in unsheathing miraculous capability in the unaltered vesicle” (“Fate,” 8). In a homologous manner, the election of Ware weakened the old institution of Congregationalism and gave rise to American Unitarianism. 37. Ibid., 2. 38. Ibid., 11. 39. Ibid., 17. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 26. 42. Ibid., 17. 43. Ibid., 4. 44. Ibid., 11. 45. Ibid., 19. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 12. I chose this particular sentence to serve as example because it not only comments on Emerson’s essay but also operates as a moment of self-reflexive metadiscourse on the chiasmus as trope. 48. Ibid., 1. 49. Ibid., 17. 50. Ibid., 24. 51. RWE, “The American Scholar,” 63.

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Notes to Chapter 2

52. Buell, “Emerson’s Fate,” in Emersonian Circles, ed. Mott and Burkholder (Rochester, N.Y.: Univ. of Rochester Press, 1997), 24. 53. Whicher, Freedom and Fate, 154. 54. C. West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 36. 55. Ibid., 7. 56. I intend this term in a way very different from how Nietzsche might see it. Nietzsche refers disparagingly to both Kant and Hegel as “philosophical laborers” (philosophischen Arbeiter) because they each take existing ideas of value and truth and compress them into identifiable systems, thereby codifying the knowledge. My hesitation with Cavell’s work on Emerson is that he attempts to show how Emerson is (just) a “philosophical laborer.” No doubt Cavell would read my hesitation as in some part being complicit with the repression of Emerson. However, I would not want Emerson subsumed by professionalized philosophy, which is one possible result of Cavell’s efforts (despite his intentions to the contrary). For Nietzsche, a philosopher proper creates value and so must be a poet, a collector, a traveler, a moralist, and a free spirit. In any event West does not consider Emersonian poetics. I use the term language worker to indicate all of these elements that Nietzsche prizes except one: Nietzsche believes that the true philosopher is a legislator, a role at which Emerson would certainly balk. 57. H. Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), 176. 58. Ibid., 176. 59. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, unabridged ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), 143. 60. G. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Tomlinson and Habberjam, 6th ed. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999), 43. 61. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. Engell and Bate (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), 304. 62. Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life, 137. 63. In an essay on Emerson’s poetry, Saundra Morris takes time to discuss the problematic, and problematizing, relationship of the epigrams that introduce so many of his essays to the prose that follows. She suggests that “we might also imagine the epigraphs and essays as together figuring the positions of poetry and prose in Emerson’s life. Emerson positions the two together, establishing between the genres a dialogue in which formal divisions become happily indistinct. This invitation to pause at the thresholds of his essays provides our best hint about how to read the prose that follows—poetically” (“‘Metre-Making’ Arguments,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Porte and Morris [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999], 240). At the very least we could see that the epigrams and essays are, as she also says, anticonventional. The two genres so juxtaposed throw each other into relief while simultaneously eroding their epistemological distinctions.

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64. J. N. Riddel, Purloined Letters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1995), 42. 65. RWE, “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” 88. 66. Cavell would describe this as part of Emerson’s “moral perfectionism.” He defines it thusly: “Perfectionism . . . is not a competing theory of the moral life, but something like a dimension or tradition of the moral life that spans the course of Western thought and concerns what used to be called the state of one’s soul, a dimension that places tremendous burdens on personal relationships and on the possibility or necessity of the transforming of oneself and one’s society” (introduction to Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990], 2). For Emerson, this is a process, or action, that is never completed, in that completion would mean stasis, conformity, and dogma, all of which are to be avoided at any cost. “The waters of the great deep have ingress and egress to the soul. But if I speak, I define, I confine, and am less,” he writes in “Intellect” (202). 67. RWE, “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” 89. 68. RWE, “Fate,” 14. 69. Ibid., 14–15. 70. B. L. Packer, Emerson’s Fall (New York: Continuum, 1982), 20. 71. R. Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), 67. 72. Ibid. 73. M. Lopez, “The Conduct of Life,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 250. 74. Wittgenstein, TLP, 25. 75. RWE, “Fate,” 15. 76. Ibid., 26. 77. Ibid. 78. RWE, “Nominalist and Realist,” in ESS, 141. 79. Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 118. 80. Cavell, “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant,” in In Quest of the Ordinary, 40. 81. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 99. chapter 3 1. F. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in the Non-moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 46. 2. R. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 146. 3. RWE, “Quotation and Originality,” in Letters and Social Aims, 178. 4. Ibid., 180. 5. Ibid., 177. 6. Further context for the erotic Emerson comes from his training as a minister. It had long been a Puritan tradition that ministers in their sermons ought to seduce the congregation. The culmination of this may occur with Jonathan

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Notes to Chapter 3

Edwards (although George Whitefield, by all reports, was the pop sensation of the Great Awakening). For a useful and seminal discussion of Edwards’s thinking on language as a means of linking the intellect and the emotions via rhetoric, see Perry Miller’s “Rhetoric of Sensation” in his venerable Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956). Nevertheless, Edwards’s sermons, although powerful and evocative, are not especially sexy, and Emerson’s seduction is undertaken by his eloquence as well as his tropes, at least in this case. Nancy Ruttenberg, in Democratic Personality (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998), argues that an aesthetic of innocence informs the Emersonian “poetic” voice and is part of its domesticizing influence (340–43). This might explain why Emerson’s sensualized tropes are apt to be overlooked. 7. RWE, “Quotation and Originality,” 177. 8. Ibid., 178. 9. Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 148. 10. RWE, “Quotation and Originality,” 194. 11. Ibid., 200. 12. Ibid., 179. 13. RWE, “Intellect,” 193. 14. Ibid., 194. 15. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 85. 16. RWE, “Intellect,” 198. 17. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 85. 18. T. W. Adorno, Hegel, trans. Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 101. 19. Cavell, “The Philosopher in American Life,” 15. Cavell’s claims about Emerson also need to grapple with one particular dilemma Heidegger articulates about philosophy. In his lectures on Hegel, Heidegger writes: But why is philosophy called the science? We are inclined—because of custom—to answer this question by saying that philosophy provides the existing or possible sciences with their foundations, i.e., with a determination and possibility of their fields (e.g., nature and history), as well as with the justification of their procedures. By providing all sciences with their foundation, philosophy must certainly be science. For philosophy cannot be less than what originates from it—the sciences. If we add to the field of that for which it is the task of philosophy to give a foundation, not only knowing in the manner of the theoretical knowledge of the sciences but also other forms of knowing—practical knowledge, both technical and moral—then it will be clear that the foundation of all of these sciences must be called “science.” (Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Emad and Maly [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1994], 10) Heidegger does not wholly support this, and in fact he offers very different ideas about philosophic discourse, but he recognizes that this model works to define the

Notes to Chapter 3

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genre of philosophy and to predetermine the course of its discourse. He also suggests that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard might not be philosophers according to this model, but they should not then be set against philosophy. Instead, their texts are occasions for which not only a new vocabulary but new concepts are needed as well. Such is the case with Emerson. This passage from Heidegger at the very least offers a clear sense of the difficulties anyone faces in trying to argue that Emerson is a philosopher. 20. RWE, Emerson in His Journals, 152. 21. RWE, “Quotation and Originality,” 201. 22. M. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Bouchard, trans. Bouchard and Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), 123, 124. 23. P. de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), 71. 24. H. Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1987), 249 (hereafter cited as “HHM”; Melville hereafter identified as HM). 25. The additional irony is that although he lived for a while in Massachusetts, Melville was not a New Englander himself. He was a New Yorker, which, then and now, is a very big distinction. 26. HM, “HHM,” 239. 27. L. Howard, Herman Melville (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1951), 160. In the editorial appendix to the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville’s work, the editors raise questions about where and how to deduce intent in terms of the textual intrusions of Duyckinck and Matthew and believe Howard’s representation of what happened to be inferential rather than verifiable (Piazza Tales, 655). 28. P. M. Bousquet, “Mathews’s Mosses? Fair Papers and Foul,” New England Quarterly 67, no. 4 (1994): 640. 29. Ibid., 642. 30. P. de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), 48. 31. J. H. Miller, Hawthorne and History (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), 51. 32. N. Hawthorne, “The Old Manse,” in Mosses from an Old Manse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882), 44. 33. Miller, Hawthorne and History, 57. 34. Wittgenstein, TLP, 74. 35. Hawthorne, “The Old Manse,” 34, 35. 36. Ibid., 36. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 32. 39. Miller, Hawthorne and History, 67.

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Notes to Chapters 3 and 4

40. HM, “HHM,” 243, 244. 41. Ibid., 242. 42. Ibid., 239. 43. Hawthorne, “The Old Manse,” 11. 44. HM, “HHM,” 241. 45. Ibid., 252, 249. 46. Ibid., 239. 47. E. Weinauer, “Plagiarism and the Proprietary Self,” American Literature 69, no. 4 (1997): 710. 48. HM, “HHM,” 241. 49. Hawthorne, “The Old Manse,” 13. 50. Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 146. 51. HM, “HHM,” 240. 52. Ibid., 244. 53. Hawthorne, “The Old Manse,” 31. 54. Ibid., 30 55. Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 142. 56. HM, “HHM,” 249. 57. RWE, “History,” 6. 58. de Man, The Resistance to Theory, 11. 59. H. White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 45. 60. Ibid. 61. HM, “HHM,” 253. 62. de Man, The Resistance to Theory, 68. 63. Wittgenstein, PI, 8e. 64. HM, “HHM,” 253. 65. Ibid., 245. 66. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 11. chapter 4 1. S. Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber, 1956), 91. 2. WS, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” in CPWS, 382–83. 3. The use of the “we” raises the question of reference. The most immediate answer is the speaker of the poem, presumably Stevens, and the dedicatee, Henry Church. Yet the abstraction of the poem and the range of its philosophical scope (how could it otherwise be “supreme”) make that “we” more inclusive. Certainly it refers to the poet and the reader. In fact, since the poem is dedicated “to” rather than “for” Church, the reader, an eavesdropper who is drawn into the “we” simply because of his or her attention is swept along by the poem.

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4. D. Donoghue, “Stevens’s Gibberish,” in Reading America (New York: Knopf, 1987), 167–68. 5. It makes sense to contrast the “hoo” of the ocean in Stevens’s poem with the ocean’s whispered “Death, death, death, death, death” in Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (LG, 253). Whitman uses nature as a means of ventriloquizing himself, and this act is the way by which he authorizes himself and his vocation as poet or singer. Stevens resists translating the ocean’s “hoo” in order to preserve that Peircean “firstness.” 6. S. Critchley, Things Merely Are (London: Routledge, 2005), 37. 7. Critchley’s book in several ways enacts many of the principles I am suggesting in this discussion in his attempts to think through the philosophical implications of Stevens specifically and modern poetry generally. He avers, “Poetry describes life as it is, but in all the intricate evasions of as. It gives us the world as it is—common, near, low, recognizable—but imagined, illumined, turned about. It is a world both seen and unseen until seen with poet’s eyes” (Things Merely Are, 12). In this idealization one hears also echoes of Cavell, Emerson, and Heidegger, and more obviously this speaks most clearly to those who happen to already feel this way about poetry. 8. A. Gelpi, “Stevens and Williams,” in Wallace Stevens, ed. Gelpi (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 5. 9. RWE, “The Poet,” 22. 10. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 86. 11. Ibid., 87. 12. There is no reason to think that this skews wholly toward the economic or material good. In fact, I am suggesting that “good” operates differently in different situations—morally, legally, and philosophically. “America” suggests a flux of discourses that need to be continually rebalanced. 13. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 37. 14. To be fair, Rorty makes this claim amid a discussion of Freud, so the psychoanalytic references are appropriate. The irony is that he often is not quite attentive enough to their implications. Even in talking about Freud, one should not forget Kant’s questions about ethics and obligation altogether. Rorty argues what separates “fantasy” from speculation or imagination is how useful the delusion or obsession might be to others. If it is useful, one calls it genius; if not, then the person is “perverse” or “eccentric.” Context is everything, and that is Rorty’s point. To tie obsession and debates about perversity and society’s normative processes with the mechanisms of social engagement seems to be a confusion of vocabularies. 15. G. Stein, “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Van Vechten (New York: Vintage, 1962), 241.

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Notes to Chapter 4

16. WS, “Adagia,” in Opus Posthumous, ed. Morse (New York: Knopf, 1957), 158. 17. The aphorism appeared originally as “Poetry is a means of redemption.” We can presume that whereas both versions appear in Opus Posthumous, the later version is a revision of the former. The change is significant. As it originally appeared, the claim is far more general. Who or what is redeemed? Although the revision is less ambiguous, the original can too easily be read as suggesting that poetry redeems language, which would put Stevens closer to Eliot than he would like. 18. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Hollingdale (Baltimore: Penguin, 1961), 67. 19. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein makes the following claim: “I believe what people transmit to me in a certain manner. In this way I believe geographical, chemical, historical facts, etc. That is how I learn the sciences. Of course learning is based on believing” (24e–25e). In a discussion of this passage Joachim Schulte explains, “[B]y ‘believing’ here Wittgenstein does not mean a lower form of knowledge but (above all) a certain attitude on the part of the learners to unhesitatingly treat as valid what they are being taught, and to assimilate it” (Wittgenstein, trans. Brenner and Holley [Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1992], 167). This is something of what I mean by “belief ”—a motivated, willing, and often willed form of knowing. 20. WS, “Adagia,” 167. 21. Ibid., 162. 22. Wittgenstein, TLP, 57. 23. C. Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1995), 350. 24. Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism, 129. 25. James, Pragmatism, 26. 26. Ibid. 27. RWE, “The Poet,” 8. 28. WS, “Adagia,” 157. 29. WS, “Add This to Rhetoric,” in CPWS, 199. 30. WS, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” in CPWS, 174. 31. WS, “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” in The Necessary Angel, 174–75. 32. Ibid., 175. 33. WS, “The Motive for Metaphor,” in CPWS, 288. 34. J. N. Riddel, “Metaphoric Staging,” in Wallace Stevens, ed. Doggett and Buttel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), 338. Riddel’s book The Clairvoyant Eye was first published in 1965 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press), some years before poststructuralism in its various modes began to cohere. Although that book is not so enamored with the “abyssal” reading of Stevens, there is some evidence of what is to come. Riddel, however, would become one of the first critics—but by no means the only—to find productive ways of opening

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American literature to developments occurring in European philosophy and literary theory. 35. J. H. Miller, Poets of Reality (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 274. 36. WS, “The Reader,” in CPWS, 147. 37. Riddel, “Metaphoric Staging,” 321. 38. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), 10. 39. WS, “Noble Rider,” 27. 40. WS to Henry Church, Dec. 8, 1942, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. H. Stevens (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1996), 430. 41. WS, “Adagia,” 159. 42. WS, “The American Sublime,” in CPWS, 130–31. 43. WS, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” in CPWS, 130. 44. WS, “The Snow Man,” in CPWS, 9. 45. J. Levin, The Poetics of Transition (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1999), 187. 46. WS to Henry Church, 430. 47. P. Rae, The Practical Muse (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1997), 194. 48. John T. Lysaker’s You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2002) is a particularly useful study of the ways that poetry’s address sets up a condition of attentiveness that shapes the possibilities of perceptiveness. Lysaker’s overarching framework is Heideggerian, which makes his reading of Stevens’s poem “Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination” one to which I am especially sympathetic (22–26). Lysaker’s work is thus a generative counterpoint to Rae’s pragmatist reading of the poet. 49. M. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Manheim (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1961), 113. 50. Ibid. 51. P. Szondi, “Walter Benjamin’s ‘City Portraits,’” in On Textual Understanding and Other Essays, trans. Mendelsohn (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), 140. 52. As quoted in ibid., 140. 53. The closest analogue to this passage from Benjamin occurs at the end of Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning”: And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings. (CPWS, 70)

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Notes to Chapter 4

54. WS, “Re-statement of Romance,” in CPWS, 146. 55. Szondi, “Walter Benjamin’s ‘City Portraits,’” 140. 56. WS, “Noble Rider,” 30. 57. WCW, “(A Sketch for) The Beginnings of an American Education,” in The Embodiment of Knowledge, ed. Loewinsohn (New York: New Directions, 1974), 146–47. 58. Beck makes a persuasive case for this connection, and my own claims build on this association that Beck sets up. Paul Mariani also acknowledges the moments of contact between the thinking of Dewey and that of Williams in his biography of the poet, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). See especially pp. 544–45, where Mariani describes the affinities Williams shares with Dewey’s liberal philosophy, even if the poet distanced himself from Dewey’s politics. 59. J. Beck, Writing the Radical Center (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2001), 2. 60. Ibid., 3. 61. Ibid., 21. 62. J. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, enl. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1948), 196. 63. WCW, “Beginnings of an American Education,” 7. 64. WCW, Paterson, 140. 65. This is an important passage for Riddel, who discusses it at length in The Inverted Bell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1974), 51. For Riddel, Williams is radical in his investigation of American poetry’s essentially originless position. Whereas I make claims that American writers are all Ishmael, Riddel takes that argument further. The key difference is that Riddel sees Ishmael as the orphan survivor, still floating among the wreckage of the Pequod. For me, Ishmael exists as the retelling of what happened. In other words, Ishmael comes into existence as a relation of experience to others. Riddel sees American literature as perpetually orphaned; I see it as perpetually seeking a new shape and form in the hopes of transforming itself and its community. 66. I. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 12. 67. WCW, “Caviar and Bread Again: A Warning to the New Writer,” in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1954), 103 (hereafter cited as SEWCW ). 68. WCW, “Against the Weather: A Study of the Artist,” in SEWCW, 217. 69. WCW, “Notes for Paterson,” William Carlos Williams Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Univ., New Haven, Conn. 70. WCW, Paterson, 18. 71. Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” 336.

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72. Ibid., 301. To be precise, “a continuance in love” is Stanley Corngold’s translation of Benjamin’s phrase. I find Corngold’s version very useful, although I do not wholly agree with the translation. Das Bestehen suggests persistence or even endurance. Thus, Benjamin suggests that Love endures or withstands conflict and gives it a sort of agency. Corngold also switches the genitive “of love” to “in love.” I think he does that to resolve the ambiguity of whether or not Benjamin means “love withstands” or “one withstands love.” In actuality, I think the ambiguity suggests that love must withstand itself. 73. WCW, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” in CPWCW, 2:325. 74. Ibid., 2:326. 75. WCW, “The Basis of Faith in Art,” in SEWCW, 188. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 189. 78. WCW, “The Advance Guard Magazine,” Contact 1, no. 1 (1932): 90. 79. It goes without saying that marriage is messier than this might sound, but it serves as an attempt to think through the formal problems and possibilities of marriage, which is, I think, why Williams is attracted to it as a trope. It certainly is less rationalistic than Kant’s definition of marriage as being “the union of two persons of different sexes for lifelong possession of each other’s sexual attributes” (The Metaphysics of Morals, 62). Small wonder he died a bachelor. Kant wants to solve the “problem” of lust, which would be a giving in to animalistic urges, thereby preempting ethical concerns. Lust as Kant theorizes it entails one person making use of another, and he maintains as part of the categorical imperative that people are their own ends and not means to something else, not the least of which is for another’s gratification. Benjamin insists that Kant’s mistake is that “he supposed that from his definition of the nature of marriage, he could deduce its moral possibility, indeed its moral necessity, and in this way confirm its juridical reality” (“Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” 299). The digression here hopefully illuminates a concern, or rather critique, that Williams, Benjamin, Dewey, and even Stevens all share: Enlightenment vocabulary is not interested in the concrete but only in formalism, abstraction, and a priori structures of knowledge. Hence Williams’s credo, “no ideas but in things,” is a call to descend out of abstraction into the particular. Again, this is not to say Williams is anti-intellectual; rather, he and Stevens want to restore the immediacy of language so that individuals do not feel alienated, do not feel estranged from language. 80. WCW, “The Ivy Crown,” in CPWCW, 2:287–88. 81. Ibid., 2:288. 82. Ibid., 2:289. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., 2:289–90.

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86. WCW, “The Work of Gertrude Stein,” in SEWCW, 117–18. 87. WCW, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 1956), 215. 88. WCW, “Basis of Faith in Art,” 179–80. 89. WCW, “Harvard Talk,” William Carlos Williams Collection, The Poetry Collection, Univ. Libraries, State Univ. of New York at Buffalo. 90. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 196–97. 91. Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism, 75. 92. J. Dewey, “Liberalism and Social Action,” in Pragmatism and American Culture, ed. Kennedy (Boston: Heath, 1950), 94. 93. Olson, Call Me Ishmael, 11. 94. See especially the first chapter of Rorty’s book (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998) for a discussion of the problems of the New Left’s spectatorial distance. 95. WCW, “To Be Recited to Flossie on Her Birthday,” in CPWCW, 2:410. 96. Zukofsky, “A” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), 83. 97. RWE, “Self-Reliance,” in EFS, 34. 98. WCW, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” 2:318. 99. RWE, “Self-Reliance,” 27. 100. Wittgenstein, PI, 8e. 101. Dickinson, [#669], in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, 333.

Index

Action: expression as, 34, 38–39, 47–49, 143; interpretation, 47–49, 52, 65–66, 69–70; knowledge as, 3, 13, 22, 81, 93, 106, 145, 153, 155; and language, 4–5, 29, 36, 42, 53, 73, 123, 141; philosophy, 51, 71; politics, 53, 63, 169n66; structure, 33, 57, 146, 151–152. See also Agency Adorno, Theodor W., 83–84 Agency: Emerson and, 17, 46, 50, 58, 60; language, 11; literary texts and, 4, 5, 26, 42, 73; marriage and, 146, 177n72; philosophy, 12, 13, 30, 34, 38, 112, 131; politics, 77–78; responsibility, 39, 118, 152. See also Action Allegory, 37, 43, 95, 99. See also under names of specific authors Altieri, Charles, 26, 34, 37, 116–17 Antiessentialism, 34, 124, 133, 138 Antifoundationalism, 30, 34, 76, 124, 133. See also Foundationalism Austin, J. L., 3, 12, 30–33, 35, 75 Authority, 37, 41–42, 43, 46, 77–78, 90, 114–15. See also under names of specific authors Ayer, A. J., 30–31, 35 Barthes, Roland, 41, 76, 77, 80, 88, 97, 98, 100 Beck, John, 137–38, 150, 176n58 Beckett, Samuel, 39, 76, 82, 107 Being, 11, 12–13, 15, 73, 93, 111 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 7, 134–35, 142–43, 148, 175n53, 177n72; on marriage, 142–44

Bloom, Harold, 4, 63–64, 69, 149 Bolyai, Janos, 54, 166n31 Bousquet, P. Marc, 91 Bruns, Gerald, 2 Buell, Lawrence, 4, 61–62, 67, 70 Cavell, Stanley, 72, 73, 75, 85, 168n56, 170n19, 173n7; moral perfectionism, 20, 169n66; ordinary language, 12; skepticism, 5, 162n10; writing, 1–2, 8, 52, 73 Church, Henry, 125, 132, 172n3 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 19–20, 64, 85; Emerson, meeting, 19–20, 164n25; on imagination, 65–66 Communication: impossibilities of, 23, 25, 93, 135, 156; and meaning, 23, 25, 93, 135, 156; writing, 32, 35, 45, 111 Community, 13, 23, 39, 51, 53, 75, 137, 154, 156; authors fashioning, 20, 22, 45, 89, 176n65; language and language use, 5, 15–16, 23, 35, 43, 73, 87, 135, 136, 138, 139, 162n10; literary texts and, 25, 44, 52, 76, 133, 151–52; politics, 74, 77–78, 84, 111, 119, 131; subjectivity formed in response to, 17, 26, 29, 34, 46, 110, 112–13, 147, 149 Context, 48, 88, 92, 100, 117, 131–32, 173n14; Austin and Derrida on, 32–33; language and, 15, 28–29, 84, 113–14, 137; reconstructing 149, 156 Critchley, Simon, 110, 173n7 Culler, Jonathan, 33–34 Culture, European. See Europe

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Index

Deconstruction, 27, 28, 33, 35–36, 43, 93, 123–24, 133, 149 Deleuze, Gilles, 36, 47, 64–65 de Man, Paul, 27, 63, 88, 92, 101, 102 Democracy, 46, 56, 105, 111, 113; challenges of/to, 47, 74, 78, 80, 81–82, 151, 155; dialogue and, 19, 141, 153–54 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 11, 27, 32–34, 63, 76, 124 Desire, 6, 14, 35, 112–13, 140. See also under names of specific authors Dewey, John, 8, 137–39, 150–51, 152, 154, 176n58, 177n79 Dickinson, Emily, 8, 24–25, 38, 82, 120, 130, 156, 161n8 Donoghue, Denis, 109 Duyckinck, Evert, 91, 171n27 Dwight, Timothy, 90

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, works of: “American Scholar,” 19, 61; “Art,” 53; “Character,” 58; “Circles,” 48; “The Divinity School Address,” 57; Emerson in His Journals, 10, 45, 86; “Experience,” 17–18, 22, 51, 53, 58; “Fate,” 22–23, 38–39, 42, 44, 49–74, 167n36; “History,” 45, 52, 100; “Intellect,” 44, 67, 81–83, 169n66; The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, 166n31; “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” 27–28, 52, 66–67; Nature, 94; “Nature,” 59, 98; “New England Reformers,” 45; “Nominalist and Realist,” 72; “The Oversoul,” 59; “Plato, or the Philosopher,” 40; “The Poet,” 9–10, 67, 81, 111, 117, 153; “Poetry and Imagination,” 48; “Power,” 58; “Quotation and Originality,” 65, 77–81, 86–87, 102; “SelfEdwards, Jonathan, 56, 167n34, 169–70n6 Reliance,” 156; “Wealth,” 58 Eliot, T. S., 47, 128, 144, 174n17 Emerson, Waldo, 58–59 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2, 3, 4–6, 8, 9–10, Emersonian modernism. See Emerson, 13, 17–18, 19–21, 22–23, 26, 27–28, 36, Ralph Waldo, modernism of 37, 38–40, 42, 44–74, 75–88, 100, 103, Epistemology, 30, 71, 81, 88, 95, 110, 117, 105–6, 107–8, 110–11, 113, 117, 118, 119, 136–37; American, 20, 47, 50, 105; 125, 128, 130, 134, 136, 145, 152, 153, ethics and, 9, 17, 20, 26, 119; literary 155–56, 164n25, 166n16, 166n21, 166n31, texts and, 37–38, 42, 89, 142, 168n63 167n34, 167n36, 167n47, 168n56, 168n63, Ethics, 9, 24, 30, 39, 112, 154, 173n14; 169n66, 6, 170n19, 173n7; aphorism, 4, challenges to, 13, 28, 124; conditions 5, 47–48; authority, 5, 19, 45, 48, 50, 51, of, 46, 65, 138, 152, 177n79; language 63, 64, 67, 68, 83, 85; Coleridge, meetuse and, 29, textuality and 23, 26–27, ing, 19–20; desire, 47, 60, 68, 74, 78, 37, 88, 126, 133. See also Reading, ethics 79–80; eroticism, 78–80, 169–70n6; of; and under names of specific authors ethics, 5, 11–12, 17, 27, 39, 40, 44, 46, Europe, 1, 19–20, 54, 85, 90, 111–12, 129, 50, 51–52, 57, 59, 61–62, 65–66, 71, 74, 174n34 76, 81, 83, 106, 107, 117, 119, 130; fate, Everyday, the. See Ordinary, the 50–51, 56–62, 65–66, 67, 69–70, 71–72, 73; freedom, 39, 46, 52, 57, 60, 61, 68, Fate. See Emerson, Ralph Waldo, fate 69–70, 72, 73–74, 78, 152; history, 6, Foucault, Michel, 68–69, 76, 88, 91, 99, 10, 38, 50, 52, 55, 59, 61, 76–77, 81, 84, 138 100; imagination, 5, 27, 44, 48,64–66, Foundationalism, 13, 31, 40, 42. See also 81; modernism of, 17, 37–38, 40, 45, 46, Antifoundationalism 73, 76–77, 82–83, 87, 93, 107–8, 110, Freedom, 39, 41, 52, 113, 152; and fate, 57, 117, 130, 152, 156, 166n16; representative 60, 69–70. See also under names of speman, 45–47, 55; United States, 9–10, 18, cific authors 19, 40, 58, 62–63, 66, 74, 78, 85, 166n21 Freud, Sigmund, 173n14

Index Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 54, 166n31 Gelpi, Albert, 110 Geometry, Euclidean vs. non-Euclidean, 54–55 God, belief in. See under Stevens, Wallace Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 142–43 Gould, Benjamin Apted, 54, 166n31 Gould, Timothy, 162n10 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 6, 7, 52, 76, 88–105, 106, 162n8; allegory, 94–95, 99, 101–102; authority, 101, 103; desire, 103; freedom, 100–101; history, 95, 100–101; Old Manse, 94–95, 97, 103 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, works of: “The Birth-Mark,” 95; The Blithedale Romance, 95; “Endicott and the Red Cross,” 95; “The Minister’s Black Veil,” 92, 95; Mosses from an Old Manse, 88, 89, 93, 97, 100–101, 102, 103, 105; “The Old Manse,” 92–93, 94, 96–97, 98, 99–100; “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” 100–101; The Scarlet Letter, 95, 100; “Wakefield,” 95 Hegel, G. W. F., 11,14, 22, 87, 98, 113, 163n11, 168n56; desire, 104, 105, dialectic, 52, 105–06; history, 52; master/ slave 6, 104, 115; self-consciousness, 8, 15; United States, 111–12 Heidegger, Martin, 3, 4, 8, 13, 85–86, 133–34, 136, 170n19, 173n7 History, 9–10, 107, 111–12. See also United States; and under names of specific authors Howard, Leon, 91, 171n27 Ideology, 33, 50, 64, 78, 90, 102, 105, 111; conditions of, 27, 113, 128, 150; confronting, 37, 62, 86, 118, 145, 155; literary texts and, 100, 101; structures of 29, 52, 96 Imagination, 4, 36, 64–65, 95–96, 102, 173n14. See also under names of specific authors Interpretation: language and text, 1, 30, 35–37, 42, 75–76, 92, 105, 133; as gen-

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erative condition or occasion, 4, 26, 47, 63, 65, 162n10, 167n34; fashioning community, 5,6, 28–29, 31, 44, 52; forming subjectivity, 20, 68, 69–70, 100; problems of, 92, 95 James, William, 11, 46, 51, 117, 133 Jefferson, Thomas, 141, 166n22 Kant, Immanuel, 18, 55, 128, 131, 168n56; ethics, 140, 142, 166n22, 173n14, 177n79; imagination, 64–65; sublime 128 Kojève, Alexandre, 6, 10, 82–83, 85, 104, 115 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 48, 166n16 Lebensform, 15–16, 46, 58, 97, 102, 143–44. See also Wittgenstein, Ludwig Levin, Jonathan, 131, 166n21 Liberalism, 39, 56, 74, 113, 141; challenges of/to, 47, 63, 78, 81–82, 155; pragmatism and, 150–51, 152, 153 Lives, how to live our, 24, 27, 39, 50, 53, 74, 83, 130, 132 Lobachevsky, Nikolai Ivanovich, 54, 166n31 Locke, John, 131 Lopez, Michael, 70 Lysaker, John T., 175n48 Malcolm, Norman, 26, 27 Mariani, Paul, 176n58 Mathews, Cornelius, 91, 171n27 Meaning: as use, 14, 15, 16, 17, 30, 34, 36; Being and, 12–13; making of, 41, 44, 82, 84, 113, 114; processes of, 5, 28, 38, 42, 42–44, 127; textuality and, 6, 52, 70, 73, 100, 101, 133, 142 Melville, Herman, 6–7, 19, 76, 82, 88– 106, 153, 162n8, 171n25; allegory, 99; authority, 6, 90–92, 99, 102, 103, 105; desire, 103, 104, 105; ethics, 6–7, 88, 89, 105; fictive critic, 6, 89–93, 96–99, 101, 102, 103, 105; “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 76, 88–106; history, 6,

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Index

101–2, 105, 106; Moby-Dick, 19, 103–4; Pierre, 104 Metaphysics, 17, 22, 116, 123; evading, 9, 11, 28, 35, 51, 70; limitations of 12, 13, 23, 33; Stevens and, 110, 127, 132 Mill, John Stuart, 125 Miller, J. Hillis, 41–42, 92, 93, 96, 102–3, 122–23 Miller, Perry, 170n6 Modernism, 5–6, 73, 82, 110, 128, 142, 146–47, 149, 156; living our, 173n7. See also under names of specific authors Morris, Saundra, 168n63 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 3–4, 12, 13, 15, 48, 74, 166n16 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 11, 35, 37–38, 75–76, 125, 171n19; aphorisms, 47–48, 114; Emerson and, 4, 27, 45, 46, 68; as “language-worker,” 168n56; Will to Truth, 28, 31 Olson, Charles, 18–19, 153; United States and space, 18–19, 153 The Ordinary: Cavell and, 12; language and, 7, 12, 23, 31, 35, 110, 137; problems of 25; the world as, 15, 16, 136, 140, 141; Wittgenstein and, 17 Ordinary language philosophy (or criticism), 2, 11–12, 31, 33 Other, 9, 15, 20, 23, 25, 40 Ourselves, finding, 6, 9, 11, 15, 17, 22, 35, 39, 53, 72, 108, 156. See also Self Packer, Barbara L., 69 Pascal, Blaise, 118, 130 Peirce, Benjamin, 54, 166n31 Peirce, Charles S., 54, 108–9 Perception: community of, 75–76, 119, 141, 151–52; geometry and, 55–56, imagination and, 4, 65; as interpretive act, 95–96, 100, 114, 131; knowledge and, 10–11, 52, 70, 81, 140; language as basis and condition for, 10, 16, 30–31, 35, 38, 49, 61, 120 Philosophy: as activity, 26–27, 29, 155, 168n56; Emerson and, 40, 49, 50, 66,

70–71, 76, 80, 85–86; lateness of, 11; literariness of 11, 81; as mask, 29, 37; poetry and, 138; as system or discipline, 40, 61,62, 83–84, 170n19; Williams’s concerns about, 138–39, 144, 147 Philosophy, European. See Europe Philosophy, ordinary language. See Ordinary language philosophy Poet, 24, 26, 37, 45, 85, 139, 141, 142; as exemplar, 3, 155, 156; role of, 27, 65, 83, 110, 124, 125, 126, 135, 136, 148–150. See also Writers Poetics: defined, 3; Emerson’s, 45, 49, 52, 76, 77, 86, 111, 152, 161–62n8; modernist, 107 118; and responsiveness, 11, 16; Stevens and, 108, 113, 120, 123, 137, 132; Williams and, 7, 8, 136, 137, 145, 147, 155 Poetry: belief and, 121, 138–39, 151–52; as knowledge, 61, 83, 128, 154–55, 175n48; as language act, 3–4, 8, 15, 23, 48, 85–86, 107, 133, 141, 153; replacing God, 7, 110, 113–16, 120, 135; as representation, 21, 121, 125–26, 134, 136, 140, 173n7 Poirier, Richard, 2, 40, 69–70, 117, 152, 166n21 Postmodernism, 10 Poststructuralism, 28, 32, 34, 44, 76–77, 122–23, 174n34 Pragmatism, 8, 62–63, 112, 136, 166n21; poetics and, 3, 132–33, 152–54; William James and, 51, 117 Price, H. H., 30 Rae, Patricia, 132, 175n48 Reading, ethics of, 3–4, 8, 40, 41, 44–45, 88, 162n8 Richardson, Robert D., Jr., 164n25 Riddel, Joseph N., 66, 70, 122–24, 131, 174n34, 176n65 Riemmann, G. F. B., 54, 166n31 Robinson, David, 50, 66 Rorty, Richard, 11, 25, 26, 85, 112–13, 124, 154, 173n14, 178n94 Rowe, John Carlos, 21

Index Royce, Josiah, 163n11 Ruttenberg, Nancy, 170n6 Schlegel, Friedrich and August, 47, 166n16 Schulte, Joachim, 174n19 Self, 2, 6, 9, 136, 150; as action, 38, 39, 70, 131; changing, 3, 30, 45, 113, 153; forming, 10, 18, 36, 86; overcoming, 38, 71, 87, 112; as relation, 15, 20, 21, 26, 48, 93–94, 106, 119, 145; as site, 35, 37; textuality, 12, 156. See also Ourselves, finding; Subjectivity Self-consciousness, 37, 36, 50, 83, 100, 118, 119, 124, 126–27; authorial, 6, 51, 68, 69, 102, 103, 104; Hegel and, 104–105; literature, 40, 130; reading and, 6, 25, 48–49, 93–94, 152, 156 Sense. See Meaning Shakespeare, William, 99 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 23 Skepticism, 20, 22, 29–30, 106, 119, 145, 162n10; constructive or constitutive, 4, 5, 6, 27–28, 131, 152; deconstruction and, 33, 35; Emerson and, 45, 66–67, 73, 81; Wittgenstein and, 16 Solipsism, 35, 119 Space, 24, 25, 68, 121, 129–130, 140, 157; America and/as, 18–19, 153; subjective, 10, 18, 22, 80; textuality and/as, 20, 85, 88, 100 Speight, Allen, 163n11 Stein, Gertrude, 8, 43, 113, 149, 152, 161n8 Stevens, Wallace, 2, 7, 8, 13, 20–21, 27, 108–36, 141, 150, 151, 153, 156, 162n8, 172n3, 173n5, 174n17, 175n48, 175n53, 177n79; 119; allegory, 133; aphorism, 7, 113–14, 174n17; desire, 116, 130, 131, 133; ethics, 7, 119, 123–24, 126, 130; freedom, 117, 134; God, belief in, 7, 113, 114–20, 122, 125–26; imagination, 7–8, 110, 120, 122–23, 128, 132, 135; modernism of, 108, 110, 128, 130, 173n7; sublime, 120, 121, 123–24, 125–32 Stevens, Wallace, works of: “Adagia,” 113–20, 126; “Add This to Rhetoric,” “The American Sublime,” 126–32, 153;

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“The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” 20; Harmonium, 120; “The Idea of Order at Key West,” 127–28; Letters of Wallace Stevens, 125; “Man Carrying Thing,” 13; “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” 120; “Metamorphosis,” 122; “The Motive for Metaphor,” 122; “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” 27, 124–25, 135; “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” 108–10, 132; Opus Posthumous, 114, 174n17; “The Ordinary Women,” 122; “The Reader,” 123; “Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination,” 175n48 “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” 120–21; “Re-statement of Romance,” 134–35; “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz,” 20–21; “The Snow Man,” 129; “Sunday Morning,” 175n53 Subjectivity, 22, 39, 43, 80, 93–94, 110, 119, 129; Emerson and, 5, 18, 51, 106, 130, Hawthorne and, 93–94, 102; language use and, 11–12, 33–36; literature or poetry and, 87, 128, 140, 148; in relation to others or otherness, 47, 66, 138, 147; Stevens and, 122, 131; tested or tried, 4, 30, 46, 162n10; Williams and, 139–140, 141, 150. See also Self Sublime, 18, 25, 44. See also under names of specific authors Sussman, Henry, 163n11 Szondi, Peter, 134–35 Texts, literary, 3, 6, 7, 11, 37–38, 43, 87, 101, 102, 111, 154 Thoreau, Henry David, 19, 42, 85 Transcendentalism, 7, 12, 13, 28, 65 United States: culture, 1, 7, 47, 50–51, 58, 62–63, 74, 77–78, 90, 137, 101, 111–12, 129, 136, 141, 142, 150, 153, 156; history, 50–51, 77–78, 111–12, 150; literature, 6, 17, 19, 20, 25, 40, 63, 66, 91–92, 101, 136, 174n34, 176n65; philosophy, 2, 49, 50–51, 63, 66, 85, 93, 105, 124, 132, 137, 153, 166nn21–22. See also under names of specific authors

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Index

Ware, Henry, 57, 167n36 Warnock, G. J., 30, 35 Webster, Daniel, 56–57, 166n22 Weil, Simone, 120–21 Weinauer, Ellen, 98 West, Cornel, 62–63, 64, 166n21, 168n56 Whicher, Stephen E., 49, 62 White, Hayden, 101 Whitman, Walt, 8, 19, 20, 21–22, 89, 173n5; “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 21, 22; ethics, 21–22; Leaves of Grass, 89; “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” 21; “A Sight in Camp,” 22; “So Long!” 19; “The Wound-Dresser,” 22 Williams, Florence “Flossie,” 143, 145 Williams, Paul, 144–45 Williams, William Carlos, 7–8, 24, 108, 110, 136–52, 154–56, 162n8, 162n10, 176n58, 176n65, 177n79; authority, 139; desire, 137, 139, 141, 146, 147, 148–49, 150–51; ethics, 7, 137, 142, 145, 150, 152, 154; freedom, 145–46, 149–50; imagination, 110, 138, 139, 144–45, 148, 151–52; marriage and marriage as trope, 139–46, 148, 151, 177n79; 24; modernism of, 108, 110, 146–47, 149, 150 154

Williams, William Carlos, works of: “The Advance Guard Magazine,” 145; “Against the Weather,” 141; “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” 143–45, 146, 156; “Basis of Faith in Art,” 149–50; “Caviar and Bread Again,” 141; “Harvard Talk,” 151; In the American Grain, 149–50; “The Ivy Crown,” 146–49, 154, 155; “The Last Words of My English Grandmother,” 24; Paterson, 137, 139–42; “(A Sketch for) The Beginnings of an American Education,” 137, 138–39; Spring and All, 154; “To Be Recited to Flossie on Her Birthday,” 154–55; “The Work of Gertrude Stein,” 149 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2, 4, 11–12, 13–17, 26–27, 34, 35, 36, 38, 54, 71, 73, 85, 93, 102, 106; 116–17, 137, 143, 149, 156, 174n19; ethics and, 14, 23, 29–30; Norman Malcolm, letter to, 26 Wordsworth, William, 23, 121 Writer, American, 19; Emersonian mode, 8, 20, 22, 40, 152; negotiations of textuality, 25, 71, 87–88, 148. See also Poet