Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem 9780226822037

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Maladies of the Will

Maladies of the Will The American Novel and the Modernity Problem jennifer l. fleissner

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 31  30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22  1  2  3  4  5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­82201-­3 (cloth) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­82202-­0 (paper) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­82203-­7 (e-­book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226822037.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Indiana University toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fleissner, Jennifer (Jennifer L.), author. Title: Maladies of the will : the American novel and the modernity problem / Jennifer L. Fleissner. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022014515 | isbn 9780226822013 (cloth) | isbn 9780226822020 (paperback) | isbn 9780226822037 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: American literature—19th century—History and criticism. | Will in literature. Classification: lcc ps217.w45 f54 2022 | ddc 810.9/353—dc23/eng/20220616 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014515 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my B. and my Z.

Contents

Preface The Book’s Organization Chapter Descriptions Introduction: The Novel and the Will Literary-­Critical (from Lionel Trilling to Zadie Smith) Historical (from Augustine to Romanticism) Theoretical (from Locke and Sentimentalism to Pragmatism and Affect—­and an Alternative to Both) 1  Before and After the Novel: Abyssal Modernity and the Interior Life of the Will The Strange Problem of Too Much Interiority The “Awfully Expanded World”: Seventeenth-­Century Selfhood and Its Precursors The Eighteenth Century Tames the Self The Return of the Wilderness Within, from the Gothic to Kant Law and Freedom in The Scarlet Letter

ix xii xv 1 2 20 36 46 46 51 67 76 84

2  Vitalizing the Bildungsroman The Bildungsroman as a Body’s Story The Birth of Medical Vitalism: The Body as Wayward Will Vitalist Legacies, I: Sensibility, Romanticism, and the Birth of Psychology The Morgesons as Vitalist Bildungsroman The Reflex and the Return to Mechanism Vitalist Legacies, II: The Alternative Neovitalisms of Goldstein and Canguilhem

95 98 105

3  General Willfulness: Moby-­Dick and Romantic Sovereignty Modernity’s Two Wills Ahab, or Anatomizing the Romantic Will (Hegel, Fichte, Lukács)

146 150 158

110 118 130 139

Ishmael and Intensity (Spinoza, Schopenhauer) The General Will (Rousseau, Arendt) Coda: Pip’s Dissent 4  The James Brothers at Century’s End: Mysticism, Abstraction, and the Forms of Social Life William and the Will Four Visions of Sociality: Intermingling, Fusion, Intersubjectivity, Form William and the Sick Soul The Social Phantasmagoria of The Ambassadors 5  “Begin All Over Again”: Naturalism, Habit, and the Embodiment of the Will Evolutionary Economics and the Moral Danger of Doing Nothing The Brute’s Two Faces: Frank Norris’s Vandover Subjects of Interest and Habit in Contemporary Theory: Sedgwick, Berlant, Foucault Nietzsche’s Return to Vitalism Coda: Humanization Run Wild 6  Narrative and Its Discontents: Racial Justice, Existential Action, and the Problem of the Past The “Racial Politics of Temporality,” Then and Now (Hopkins and Dunbar) The Realist Insistence: Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition A Certain Distance: The Uncanny Everyday (Spillers and Freud) Du Bois and the Moment of Hesitation Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

170 187 200 204 208 216 239 248 262 266 275 289 299 312 318 321 332 352 363 371 375 413 443

Preface

That the will is a problem is, today, a surprisingly widespread view. The right suggests democracy may have been a mistake. The left moves to curb notions of untrammeled freedom on behalf of justice. Meanwhile, an increasingly neurology-­based account of human behavior deems the entire notion of will a form of wishful thinking. In literary criticism, these tendencies have played out in an increasing attention to that which exceeds the individual—­to collectivities, on the one hand, and the nonhuman world, on the other. Yet such approaches can never simply define the study of the novel, the present book argues, because of the form’s distinct interest in confronting, rather than ignoring or overcoming, the complex and indeed often problematic features of the will as such. The will as problem is an idea with a long history; indeed, it is an idea as old as that of the will itself. Moreover, many writers, again from a wide range of positions, have seen that problem as defining of the modern world. Individual freedoms go too far, encroaching on those of others; alternatively, society’s very complexities produce a state of apathy or lack of interest. A temptation thus repeatedly presents itself: why not just move past this “will” idea altogether? The other two human qualities perhaps more commonly associated with modernity, reason and sentiment, can each seem to promise a fairer future, one opening out beyond the desires of particular persons, or even those of distinct smaller groups, to what is shared among them. And yet the question remains of how to think about that particularity, which has learned, within the same modern framework, to assert its rights to be heard. The real effect of the will, then, is to open up a persistent conflict. This conflict, moreover, is embedded within the very conception of will itself. The philosophical trajectory of the will begins in Saint Augustine, who finds his

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own will to be divided between his own inclinations, which he finds at times inexplicable, and his yearning to give himself to God. Modern philosophy finds other ways of expressing this split, such as Wille as maxim versus Willkür as the power of spontaneous action in Kant, or the stages of right in Hegel, with God replaced by more secular manifestations of a higher principle, such as the state or the social world. At the same time, as modernity advances, the foundationless will that so distressed Augustine gets taken more and more seriously as a crucial contributor to freedom’s advent. The question begins to be raised, most pointedly by Nietzsche, of whether that will ought itself to be the primary object of interest, not as a generalizable good, but more as an amoral force of life. The present study argues for these issues’ centrality to the novel during its nineteenth-­century heyday. Of course, we have long imagined the novel as centered on the notion of the autonomous individual able to chart a path toward self-­determination, and therefore a crucial contributor to the imagination of Western modernity, whether this is understood in positive or ideological terms. As suggested, in today’s intellectual landscape, multiple phenomena have collaborated to render that notion suspect, in a double sense: such a figure no longer appears desirable, on the one hand, or plausible, on the other. Yet the novel remains vital, Maladies of the Will argues, precisely because, from its earliest instantiations, its engagement with the idea of the individual will has not taken the simply idealizing form we assume. Rather, as the literary critic Lionel Trilling put it, still startlingly, back in 1973: “A chief subject of the literature of the nineteenth century was the physiology and hygiene of the will . . . what were its pathologies of excess or deficiency, what were its right and wrong goals” (Moral 502). Far from simply celebrating the will as modernity’s triumph, the novel has conceived it as a subject for (indeed sometimes physiological) investigation, a site of enduring maladies of extremity or insufficiency—­from obsession to indecision, wild impulse to melancholic inertia. To the extent this is so, then, the novel has been less a mere booster for modern autonomy than a form of ongoing interrogation, both invested and critical, of modernity’s core premises from within. The central question here concerns the fit or misfit between the individual will and some greater Will understood to provide that will’s ideal telos. At times, one such larger Will can appear to offer a refuge from another: God or nature become alternatives to a constraining society or state (though the reverse may just as often be true). The will’s maladies, its excesses and insufficiencies, may result from a tension with a higher aim, as originally in Augustine, but the novel can also conceive them as the result of believing oneself

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to be coincident with that higher Will. Alternatively, the trouble may lie in the very demand to decide at all. In all of these forms, the novel’s interests overlapped with those of the many other arenas in which such issues were central—­theology, moral and political philosophy, medicine, criminology, and the nascent social sciences—­and thereby contributed to a broader discussion that remains more consequential today than we often realize. The present book is organized as an investigation of these maladies of “excess or deficiency” across the history of the novel during its nineteenth-­ century apogee. While I have been saying “the novel,” however, this book departs from most contributions to the “theory of the novel” (from Lukács to Watt to more recent instances like Margaret Doody and Thomas Pavel) in its focus on the often more philosophically minded American novel—­both canonical instances like Hawthorne and James, and important, often still insufficiently recognized voices like those of Elizabeth Stoddard and the Black novelists Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. It is, of course, no surprise to say that the question of the individual, in both a positive and negative sense, has possessed particular salience in American cultural history. Moreover, the novelistic tradition in the nineteenth-­century US has long been argued to stand in an oblique relation to the very category of the novel; its authors have been associated just as much with the older mode of the romance. In fact, this book argues, this duality simply renders their works akin to the novels of nineteenth-­century France, Russia, and Germany (as Ralph Ellison suggests in his reference to the “philosophical” writings of “Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and Melville” [760]); it is the British tradition, so often taken to represent “the novel” in English departments, that is perhaps the outlier in its more wholehearted resolve to embrace—­with, of course, notable exceptions, including Britain’s own pre-­Victorian novels—­the realist mode. The other traditions’ hesitancy to do so may be understood as part and parcel of a more equivocal relation to modernity itself, whether due to skepticism toward its aims or to a sense of those aims’ insufficient fulfillment. At its broadest, then, this book aims to offer not only a new interpretation of the novel, but a way of reconceptualizing our understanding of the modern individual. It maintains, further, that these subjects remain critical to the world we inhabit, for our relation to them remains as complex as these writers show them to have long been. The problem with modernity continues to be cast as too much freedom (as in critiques of libertarian propensities) or not enough. We regret the lack of will to act on urgent matters, or alternately deplore the demand for constant engagement and insufficient room for the slower pace of reflection. Fiction expresses a similar ambivalence in its typical focus on figures whose fascination is inseparable from their problematic and

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often enigmatic natures—­whether the maniacal focus of Melville’s Ahab or the impenetrable recalcitrance of his Bartleby. Or, as the novelist Zadie Smith has put it in a recent essay, “The conflicted, the liars, the self-­deceiving, the willfully blind, the abject, the unresolved, the imperfect, the evil, the unwell, the lost and divided. Those were once fiction’s people” (“Fascinated”). This is scarcely the “rational autonomous subject” against which so many of our current posthuman endeavors pitch their interventions, powerful though these may otherwise be. Indeed, Maladies argues, the appeal of the more-­than-­ human aggregate that simply acts, rather than reflects, may not be separable from its ability to circumvent the enduring dilemmas of human agency to which the notion of maladies of will refers. Instead, individuals are at times simply imagined as subsumed into a greater enveloping “Will”—­if not, now, that of God or the state, then “Life,” or “History”—­in a way that the novels and thinkers who have explored these issues in greater depth always warned of as a move possessing its own dangers. From this vantage, the will’s maladies are unavoidable because of their tie to what remains most serious about human life: the need to render judgments of value. The novel, this book contends, has been a crucial contributor to our recognition of this enduring task. The Book’s Organization The six chapters of Maladies of the Will tell a historical story about the relation of the will as a problem to the development of the novel as a form across the “long nineteenth century.” As stated, the book focuses on American novels, though these are discussed with reference to defining works of European, and sometimes British, fiction by such writers as Goethe, Balzac, Zola, and Eliot. At the same time, the chapters actively engage the multiple intellectual traditions that contribute to the fictional exploration of will, from theology (Augustine, Edwards) to philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Sartre, Arendt) to psychology (William James and his precursors) to social theory and medical vitalism. This engagement occurs within the framework of modernity theory in a more general sense (as in the work of Hans Blumenberg, Sylvia Wynter, and Robert Pippin); hence, at its broadest level, Maladies aims to make a meaningful contribution to our ongoing grappling with this category and its significance for both history and thought. To offer a general overview: The book’s chapter-­length introduction has two aims, to make the case for the significance of the novel and the will to contemporary discussions about personhood in both the humanities and the sciences and to lay the groundwork for the book’s historical account of its

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subject. With respect to the former, I show how a range of arguments about “the death of the novel” have turned for a century on claims of its supersession by a more biologically materialist psychology, which I counter by demonstrating the still vexed status within that psychology of the category of will. The will functions in the novel, I argue, as the site of a struggle over value that, as I further demonstrate, risks being abrogated by leading intellectual frameworks in the humanities and psychology alike. The introduction then historicizes the will concept by discussing Augustine’s role as, in the view of some critics, “the first subject” for his intensive, retrospectively narrated self-­ exploration in the Confessions. This investigation, as I emphasize, centers on the puzzle of the wayward will, whether as disobedient, “willful” excess (his famous theft of a neighbor’s pears) or lackadaisical insufficiency (the reluctance to embrace God). The early novel in English has often been understood as influenced by the Augustinian-­inflected mode of the Protestant spiritual autobiography; in a brief look at Robinson Crusoe, I demonstrate how the Lockean, protocapitalist individual usually thought to emerge from such fictions is in fact portrayed as in ongoing struggle with a more Augustinian conception, in which Crusoe’s deepest motives remain a bedeviling question for him. The book’s first half, then, traces out the legacy of these Augustinian ideas in a surprising series of instances, all key to mid-­nineteenth-­century American fiction in its turn away from the increasingly realist British example: protolibertine and gothic writings, eighteenth-­century vitalism and its successors, and Romanticism. In each of these cases, the more Faustian, “willful” dimension of Augustine’s paradox, which appears the most threatening in this still essentially religious context, takes center stage. Libertine and gothic writings are shown to grow perversely out of spiritual autobiography’s intense plumbing of the dark corners of the human soul, helping to explain Hawthorne’s decision to situate his modern novel of adultery in the seventeenth century. Vitalism, as first developed within German Pietism, argues against modern science’s mechanistic account of life by theorizing a life force that acts as an embodied version of the unaccountable Augustinian will; these ideas would influence novelistic bildungsromans like Elizabeth Stoddard’s as well as, later, the philosophical work of Schopenhauer (and, through him, Nietzsche). And Romanticism builds directly on these vitalist arguments to conceive creative power and the quest for freedom as inseparable from Sturm und Drang, darkness and torment—­conceptions that would be crucial to Melville in his formulation of Moby-­Dick as a work of romance. The second half of the book turns to the later nineteenth century, a period during which the ideal of will as self-­restraint began to seem outmoded

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compared to that of will as effective power. In this context, the will plagued by maladies appeared in the form less of willfulness than of inaction. Writers began to argue that civilization’s emphasis on reasoned deliberation was stymieing the ability to act decisively, while the Victorian ideal of self-­sacrifice threatened the “springs of enterprise.” The era’s realist fiction, I suggest, complicated these ideas by portraying social outliers as sites of a critical take on the era’s fast-­changing mores. Thus, Henry James’s late novels of manners typically situated an uncertain individual observer on the social world’s margins as a kind of artist or philosopher manqué. Frank Norris’s naturalism took its cue from Zola in reimagining the supposed social “degenerate” not as a violent brute but as an individual without the will to participate in an economic world given over to rapacious appetites. Finally, Charles Chesnutt joined other writers, during the first sustained efflorescence of African American fiction around 1900, in placing the nation’s relentless drive toward historical progress alongside a hesitancy born of the unhealed wounds of a continuing legacy of oppression. The book thus traces a trajectory from maladies of excessive will, in its first three chapters (in the context of a more “Victorian” encouragement of will as self-­inhibition) to ones of the will’s deficiency, in its second three (in the context of a late nineteenth-­century revaluation of will as robust force). The first half considers the experimenter’s amoral curiosity, the youth’s outsized avidity for worldly pleasures and success, and the Romantic will of the Byronic individual and its collective counterpart. The second examines the indecisiveness of the thinker, the lassitude of the daydreamer, and the inertia of the melancholic. Each is mapped onto a different mode crucial to the novelistic tradition: the gothic, the bildungsroman, the “modern epic” or romantic adventure, the realist novel of manners, naturalism, and the historical or documentary novel. And each is considered, as well, in relation to a different representation of the “Big Will” with which the individual is enjoined to merge: God, life, the state, society, the economy, and history. The exploration of these questions means that each chapter considers its literary examples in the company of key writings from the multidisciplinary tradition of exploring the subject of will, from theology and moral philosophy in chapter 1, to vitalism and the philosophy of biology in chapter 2; political theory in chapter 3; social theory in chapter 4; economic theory in chapter 5; and theories of history in chapter 6. In every instance, it is important to stress, the book maintains a nuanced stance toward the maladies it describes, because its position is that it is often far too easy simply to celebrate or decry the will, and particularly the individual will. As the introduction argues in more detail, contemporary critical

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attempts to think past these issues can end up simply replicating them in a less complex form. Moves “beyond” the person, that is, can enable more idealized forms of agency by evading the difficulties constitutive of the will as such. This book’s very different aim—­both a historical and a theoretical one—­is to recover a long tradition, for which the novel is central, of understanding that will as the central problem of modernity, in a genuine sense. As such, it appears not as something to overcome but as that which we have no choice but to continue to think through. Chapter Descriptions Chapter 1, “Before and After the Novel: Abyssal Modernity and the Interior Life of the Will,” argues that we have been wrong about the modern individual. The familiar Enlightenment versions thereof, predicated on reason or feeling, in fact represent attempts to tame and manage earlier, Augustinian conceptions of the person based on will. Influential on the wilder interiorities of seventeenth-­century spiritual autobiography and the early novels these inspired, such conceptions would then resurface, following the realist consolidation of self and world, in gothic fiction. Yet how to explain this transformation of the pious into the demonically profane? I argue that the modern subject’s freedom must be seen as emerging within the context of a powerfully alien totality that is at once that of the radical Protestant “God of Will” and of modern science’s infinite, inhuman cosmos. In writings from Pascal’s Pensées to John Bunyan’s protonovelistic spiritual autobiography, we see how this sense of being left to oneself can prompt both existential anxieties and a newly expansive curiosity, engendering an intense probing not only of cosmic mysteries but of the inner self and its potentialities. In their relentless focus on human failings, however, these Augustinian writings would improbably begin to inform more libertine detailings of the fascinatingly rich panoply of evils that men do. The chapter then traces the afterlife of this strange conjuncture: on the one hand, in the eighteenth-­century Lockean and sentimental accounts of the self (more familiar to novel studies) that attempted to conceive of an individual more naturally inclined toward social order, and, on the other, in a range of opposed writings, from gothic novels to Kant’s moral philosophy to, finally, Hawthorne’s strangely premodern/hypermodern The Scarlet Letter, that refuse such solaces in order to plumb both the pathologies of will and the serious quests for freedom and knowledge emerging from the sense of a radical rift between human beings and a given, generalizable law. Chapter 2, “Vitalizing the Bildungsroman,” discusses the novelistic bildungsroman’s eighteenth-­century emergence, in Goethe’s writings, out of

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the biologized discourse of the Bildungstrieb (or developmental drive). Here, I argue, we see the origins of the sense of will not as an inner relation to the good but, as in the later writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as a pure life force. Clearly, this counternarrative alters our usual sense of the bildungsroman as a story simply of the individual’s indoctrination into social norms, and we can see the effects of this dual construal of it in a Romantically inflected bildungsroman like Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. The Bildungstrieb concept is bound up with the development of vitalism, a theory that, beginning in the early eighteenth century, reacted against Cartesian mechanism to insist on the specificity of life. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that its Pietist progenitors made their case by describing the vital force as an embodied version of Augustinian will—­irreducible to mechanism because subject to irrational tendencies that could prove harmful for self-­preservation. This chapter focuses on Elizabeth Stoddard’s 1862 novel The Morgesons as a vitalist and feminist bildungsroman, written against the renewed mechanistic thought of the mid-­nineteenth century (and the fiction it inspired). Suggesting that the book’s Augustinian, medically rooted vitalism finds an echo in the mid-­twentieth-­century writings of Kurt Goldstein and Georg Canguilhem on the organism, the chapter contrasts these to a range of contemporary new-­materialist “neovitalisms” that often resemble the less conflictual eighteenth-­century sensibility theory and Naturphilosophie. Chapter 3, “General Willfulness: Moby-­Dick and Romantic Sovereignty,” focuses on Herman Melville’s “modern epic” Moby-­Dick, seeing it as a staging ground for historically enduring ambivalences about the Romantic subject, which I discuss as especially pertinent to Americanist criticism as to its literature. While readers often oppose the book’s mad Captain Ahab as exemplar of the maladies of individualism to the crew of the ship Pequod, this chapter maintains that they need to be understood as a collective version of the same dilemma of Romantic will posed by their leader. Hegel, I demonstrate, sets the stage for a long tradition of skeptical treatments of the Romantic will as absolute self-­sovereignty in his account of Fichte, which strikingly resembles his treatment elsewhere of insanity as a form of subjectivity defined by “monomania” (the same diagnosis Melville gives Ahab). The individual is meant to overcome this stance by recognizing that true freedom entails self-­subjection to that which lies beyond the person—­finally, the state. Yet, as Rousseau’s writings show, the theory of the political reopens these same ques­ tions about the general will’s relation to right. And Hegel’s own writings on the aesthetic transition away from heroism toward the “prosaic” present offers a more equivocal account of the rise of a bureaucratic modernity. The

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chapter explores Melville’s charged ambivalence about these questions of heroism, sovereignty, and art by examining, in turn, Ahab himself; the book’s narrator, Ishmael; and the crew in their differing rationales for turning away from the everyday world to enter the more romantic space of the hunt for the white whale. Chapter 4, “The James Brothers at Century’s End: Mysticism, Abstraction, and the Forms of Social Life,” finds us in a late Victorian period in which the moral ideal of self-­restraint and impulse controlled by reason had begun to seem effete, a way of avoiding active participation in life itself. Current critical trends, I argue, have followed William James’s personal trajectory in positing pragmatism and sociality as antidotes to the potential pathologies of philosophical abstraction, a tendency attributed by William and others to the writing of his brother, Henry. When the social as Big Will is simply embraced, however (in a move that, I show, links contemporary criticism to turn-­of-­the-­ century social science), its own irrationalities and violences tend to fade in the vision of an idealized communion. By contrast, the novelist of manners as embodied by Henry, I argue, maintains the view of the social as something into which the individual observer is drawn and yet toward which he also maintains a self-­protective distance. The social, as a result, becomes here not thought’s other but its primary object. The result, as seen in the protagonists of Henry’s turn-­of-­the-­century fiction, is a finally aesthetic attempt to map the social, one that grows manic in its hope to manage the abysses intuited. This project is portrayed (not only in Henry’s fiction of this era, and the writings of Balzac that inspired it, but in William’s contemporaneous work on religion and abnormal psychology) to be, at its best, beautiful and admirable in ways inseparable from its artifice. I suggest, in conclusion, that this may be true of many of the utopian models of relationality in current criticism as well. Chapter 5, “ ‘Begin All Over Again’: Naturalism, Habit, and the Embodiment of the Will,” is situated amid the more dramatic turn away from Victorian conceptions of the strong will as self-­restraint that led to moralized invocations of the will as bodily power in turn-­of-­the-­century Europe and the US. The result was a new exhortation to strengthen oneself through exercise and diet, and a denigration of earlier religious views as forms of weak-­willed sentimentality. I show how these ideas worked together with a Darwinism-­ inspired conception of economic growth as a form of common good driven, rather than threatened, by internal conflict. The chapter’s question is how to conceive these developments in relation to the era’s “naturalist” fiction, which in the hands of writers like Zola and his American disciple Frank Norris has often been thought similarly to conceive characters as bodies struggling in a

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Darwinian world. In fact, I argue, Norris’s Vandover and the Brute, like Zola himself, critiques this ruthless construal of common life through the depiction of “lazy” individuals who opt out of a rat race depicted as producing not supermen but automatons. Similarly, Nietzsche’s writings, which can appear to overlap with the conception of will as bodily power here described, are shown to move past such ideas by raising value itself as a question. I finally consider whether contemporary critical tendencies to affirm the reduction of will to embodied habit can risk making such questions harder to ask. Chapter 6, “Narrative and Its Discontents: Racial Justice, Existential Action, and the Problem of the Past,” considers the fear of history as stagnation rather than progressive motion that began to emerge in the movement toward modernism. As scholars of British literature have discussed, these concerns produced a revival of romance at century’s end, a return to stories in which heroic figures could be understood as fulfilling their own and their people’s destinies at one and the same time. It has been insufficiently appreciated, I argue, how much Black novelists, writing in the aftermath of the failures of Reconstruction and amid the growth of Jim Crow law, contributed to the development of a related phenomenon in the US. A sense of impasse in the wake of an incomplete freedom, that is, led to a sense, in the work of novelists like Pauline Hopkins and Paul Laurence Dunbar, that history writing might require more mythic or tragic forms. I contrast their works to an important documentary novel of the period, Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, which meditates at once on realism’s importance and the lure of romance alternatives before turning to modalities that I argue predict the fictional modes of the coming century. Specifically, Chesnutt evokes the moment of existential world-shattering as a way of imagining action in the face of trauma; I thus read his work together with the later philosophical explorations of Sartre and Fanon, on the one hand, and the oeuvre of Freud, on the other. In conclusion, I turn to W. E. B. Du Bois’s meditation “On the Meaning of Progress” in The Souls of Black Folk to explore why a move away from assumed ideas about progress, without yet succumbing to despair—­a combination I describe through the notion of hesitation—­might have been a crucial gesture for Black writers at the end of the Victorian era.

introduction

The Novel and the Will In a world situation where the organic was the all-­dominating category of existence, to make the individuality of a living being, with all its limitations, the starting point . . . to represent [an individual life] as the vehicle of values rather than their substratum . . . would have been an act of the most ridiculous arrogance. g e o r g l u k á c s , Theory of the Novel It is at the outset of the self-­emancipating modern subject’s self-­reflection . . . that we find the divergence of insight and action paradigmatically laid down. The more the subject turns into a being-­for-­itself, the greater the distance it places between itself and the unbroken accord with a given order, the less will its action and its consciousness be one. t h e o d o r a d o r n o , Negative Dialectics I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. s a i n t p a u l , Romans 7:15

What does the novel have to do with the will? In one way or another, we have long understood this to be its subject, as novels, perhaps more than any other literary form, foreground the question of the individual amid a social setting. While it may appear that recent criticism has moved away from both of these—­replacing individuals with collectivities and the social world with bodies merging in physical space—­the present book contends that these moves have not resolved the issues at hand but merely relocated them, and in ways that can make their defining complexities harder to address. Such approaches arguably amount to the latest salvos in what we will see is a century-­ old history of attempting to cast the novel as an outmoded form, one purportedly tied to lost Victorian idealizations of human will. In fact, I argue, it is the novel’s core engagement with the will’s inherent perversity—­which this book will give both a history and a philosophical framework—­that renders it indispensable in a contemporary era when we confront, in multiple realms, individuals’ paradoxical and divided relations to their own interests. This introduction offers an alternate genealogy for the emergence of the “modern subject.” So doing, it aims to provide a way into current debates about individualism and the hope of moving beyond it that can acknowledge this topic’s genuine and enduring knottiness. It is structured in three parts. The first considers what the philosopher Robert Pippin has termed the “modernity problem” in its two main forms, both often figured by the concept of

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will—­the problem of autonomy and the question of persons’ scientific explicability. The novel’s powerful and ongoing responses to both of these, I argue, have too often been occluded, in literary studies, by an account that treats the form as an outgrowth of a just-­so story of modernization rather than as a serious participant in that story’s ongoing theorization. Here I turn to such thinkers as Hans Blumenberg, Hans Jonas, and Sylvia Wynter, writing in the wake of World War II and the move to decolonization, for whom the central question posed by modernity lay in its liberation of human will from any determining fealty to a greater Will (initially, that of God or, by extension, that of nature). Freedom thus became at once an aim, a risk, and a possibility, one that critics writing on literary subjects around the same time—­from Lionel Trilling to Ralph Ellison to James Baldwin—­saw the nineteenth-­century novel as particularly devoted to exploring. While for the modernity theorists, Renaissance humanism was usually understood as the decisive moment of break, some with a more phenomenological background, such as Jonas and Hannah Arendt, would trace the emergence of these existential questions back to the original thematization of human will by the North African theologian Augustine in his fourth-­century Confessions, a work that has often been understood as an important urtext for the novel as a form. In my second section, drawing on these writers, I offer a counterhistory of the modern subject based not on reason or feeling but on will, showing how doing so renders the category of the person a persistent difficulty. I then consider, briefly, what it might look like to rewrite the story of the novel’s modern ascendance through this different view. In the final section, accordingly, I ask what it would mean to introduce these ideas into a contemporary intellectual landscape that, both within the academy and beyond it, can sometimes appear bent on conceiving a humanistic thought devoid of the distinct complexities raised by human beings. In an era racked by social fragmentation and inequality, we are understandably drawn to envision, in our seemingly ever more common utopian moments, forms of relation that circumvent, rather than confront, what W. E. B. Du Bois once termed the “incalculability” of human will (“Sociology” 41). The novel, this book suggests, can offer crucial reminders of what stands in the way—­both for good and for ill—­of that project. Literary-­Critical (from Lionel Trilling to Zadie Smith) t h e p r o b l e m , i : au t o n o m y ’ s d e s i r a b i l i t y It might appear easy enough to answer the question: What does it mean to think of the novel in relation to the will? In English departments, discussions

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of the novel’s modern advent as a culturally central literary mode have focused, unsurprisingly, on the form’s efflorescence in eighteenth-­century Britain, and, at least since Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel in 1957, have understood that emergence as inseparable from that of the modern individual, an entity conceived as striving to fulfill its own self-­interest in an increasingly secular world. (Robinson Crusoe, which we will briefly consider later in this introduction, provides the emblematic example.) This conception considerably outstrips the specific context of the novel, moreover; when Talal Asad seeks to define the way cultural theory treats the concept of an “agent,” for example, the terms used are much the same.1 And yet the novel’s defining “subject” has also been defined in essentially opposite terms, as the person who has learned to subsume his or her own interests on behalf of a larger totality, a higher Will. Here, to have a strong “will” is not to go forthrightly after one’s pleasure, but, rather, to exercise “will power” over precisely those desires. Social contract theories are in this regard exemplary, but the work of Michel Foucault has probably had the greatest influence on this conception of “subjectivation” as, essentially, self-­subjection.2 And what makes these two construals of the novelistic subject odd to consider side by side isn’t simply that they negate one another. It’s that each has called forth strong critiques of that subject (as overly self-­defined, on the one hand, or overly constrained, on the other)—­critiques that can then have the effect of returning us to the opposing version. These issues persistently reemerge beyond literary studies, as questions endemic to modernity as such—­variants on what Robert Pippin terms the “modernity problem.”3 Has the insistence on freedom gone too far? The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, focusing specifically on will, writes of this as the distinct pathology of America: “What is immortal in the United States . . . is precisely the will,” he states, as we see it enshrined in “the voluntaristic clichés of American culture: the sky’s the limit, never say never. . . . With its impious denial of limit . . . this infinite will represents the kind of hubris that would have made the ancient Greeks shiver and glance fearfully at the sky” (After 187–­88). Yet the flip side of this sort of claim insists, as Pippin notes, that modernity has failed us by not going far enough, that its flaw lay in “just the sense of limitations or finitude it presupposed” (Modernism 6). For such critics, the emblematic vision of will to be discarded is that enjoined by Kant, will as the imposition of the moral law over oneself, as in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s account of Odysseus as already on the way to becoming a bourgeois subject, tying himself to the mast so as to resist the lure of the Sirens: “the self who always restrains himself and forgets his life,” in whom “the wish must not be father to the thought” (55–­57). Here, in other words, the

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problem is not willfulness but its purported antidote, will power, will as the strength to resist. The feminist critic Sara Ahmed, in her book Willful Subjects, thus enjoins her readers to ever greater acts of willfulness, identifying the category as such with protest against constraining norms. No matter which position is taken here, then, one claim is constant: both the novel and its defining subject appear—­if not subjected to “apocalyptic renovation”—­as exhausted forms, unable to do more than index the Enlightenment epoch from which they sprang.4 Suppose, however, that these characterizations’ uncertainty regarding the nature of the problem—­too much willfulness, or too much control?—­in fact bespoke the opposite? Suppose they attested to the novel’s expression of an ambivalence around these questions that, as our conflicted responses demonstrate, we continue to share? From such a vantage, the novel becomes not simply a symptom of its era, but itself a resource for helping us think through Pippin’s “modernity problem” as a living question. And its interest in will becomes the preeminent sign of this very capacity, for, as the concept’s philosophical history makes plain, the significance of “will” has long split between our capacity for self-­restraint (as in Kant and Hegel) and a morally neutral galvanizing energy, at times indeed attached to a project of self-­assertion (in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Romantic tradition more broadly). An important project of the present book is to portray these traditions as more deeply intertwined than they might seem.5 How might a focus on will, then, expand how we think of the novelistic rather than affirming our sense of its limitations? Probably more than any other critic, Lionel Trilling recurred to a language of will in his work on the novel, with results that are instructive to consider here. A brief glance at essays from “Art and Fortune” (1948) to “Art, Will, and Necessity” (1973) suggest a familiar enough exaltation of the category; Trilling fears for the novel’s future due to its association with “the great former will of humanism,” a will described as presently “dying of its own excess” in a postwar era with no use for the nineteenth-­century virtues of “character,” or “will-­power” (Liberal 255; Moral 515). (In the second essay, this lament responds to the movement away from the human individual already evident in structuralist criticism and postmodern art alike.) And yet, on a closer examination, the subject is one that repeatedly leads Trilling into an irreducibly dialectical mode. This dialectic appears most strongly in his characterization of the nineteenth-­century novel as recording the clash between the aristocracy and the emergent bourgeoisie. On the one hand, it did so literally, which accounted for Trilling’s famous (or infamous) assertions that Americans, with both their disbelief in class’s structuring force and lack of a royalist past, were at a disadvantage when it came to the writing of novels.6 On the other

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hand, more pertinently to the longer-­lived conflict between views of modern freedom sketched above, Trilling’s portrayal of the confrontation between class sensibilities appeared, in a more Nietzschean vein, as one between two broadly construed sets of warring values: one based on power and pleasure, the other on self-­denial on behalf of a greater good.7 Both of these, it turned out, could be oriented through the category of the will. Thus, for Henry James (the one American writer Trilling saw as able to write well about class), “art spoke . . . of the imperious will, with the music of an army with banners”; it was “not a friend of the democratic virtues,” and if this made James a “snob,” then, Trilling rejoined, “he is of the company of Rabelais, Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, Balzac, and Lawrence, men who saw the lordliness and establishment of the aristocrat . . . as the proper condition for the spirit of man” (Moral 170).8 Yet Trilling’s point was not at all simply to uphold this allegiance to the “imperious will”—­a stance that in “Art, Will, and Necessity” appeared in its less glamorous form as that of the “willful” toddler, or egotist, lacking in the mature “will-­power” necessary to coexist in the world with other persons and physical necessity alike (Moral 515). His point, rather, was that out of a foundational “ambivalence” around this divide—­one that, again, clearly inflects the opposed views on modern freedom with which we began—­the novel’s dialogic project grew (Liberal 250). This could explain the importance of Don Quixote at its outset. In Quixote, “the world of ordinary practicality” appears to be mocking that of knightly “romance”—­until “Cervantes changed horses in midstream and found that he was riding Rosinante” (Moral 107–­8). And suddenly, what had appeared as madness began to seem, instead, a fealty to a denied ideal. In the example of Quixote, we begin further to see how Trilling’s point about competing modalities of will might be connected to his sense elsewhere of the novelistic will as prone to maladies, “pathologies of excess and deficiency” (Moral 502). He thus describes the novel as having been invested in “the celebration and investigation of the will” (Liberal 254). The novel, that is, did not merely uphold an ideal of the will that critics would later be able to probe and, as we saw, most typically reject. The novel itself conceived the will as its primary object of investigation—­exploration, theorization, questioning—­for the very reason that it took that object so seriously (including, at times, as an object for celebration). In this way, it undid the boundary so often thought to inhere, these days, between appreciation and genuine critique. The novel’s critique of the will, then, was a critique of the pathological “excesses” inherent in its aristocratic version and the “deficiencies” in the bourgeois—­but, in either case, that critique depended on taking the potentials

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of each seriously. And thus—­though Trilling would not have framed it this way—­the novel became a meditation on modernity itself, which could be understood as a repudiation of the “willful,” aristocratic will, but also as a potential democratization of it. (This was evidenced by Lawrence’s place among Trilling’s “lordly” figures, and might be further attested to by any number of pop-­cultural examples, beginning with the defining attitudes of both rock and hip-­hop.) As such, it could be seen, again, not simply as a historical artifact for others to critique, but as itself a serious participant in the theorization of the “modernity problem.” Ralph Ellison, in his rejoinder to Trilling’s “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” made a version of these very arguments in order to refute the claim that the novel was losing its moorings in the face of the moral shocks of the twentieth century. And for Ellison as an American novelist, this became a way, further, to reject Trilling’s insistence on the characteristic thinness of the American novel since its inception. If, Ellison argued, we recognized that Trilling’s value struggles were really the great questions posed by modernity itself—­“where shall we draw the line upon our own freedom in a world in which culture and tradition and even history have been shaken up?” (728)—­ then it became clear that American fiction had posed these with particular clarity from the start, for, in his words, “in no other country [was] change so swift and continuous and intentional” (705). For this reason—­and centrally, Ellison underscored, because of the radical gap between its ideals and its realities made plain by chattel slavery—­American novels already in the nineteenth century meditated on the potentially “tragic” aspects of progress itself that the twentieth century often conceived itself to have discovered (728). Writing in the wake of World War II, these thinkers offer crucial resources to the present study, precisely for their sense of freedom as enduring dilemma rather than either self-­satisfied modern accomplishment or hoary humanist shibboleth of which we are glad to be—­well, free. (More on that problem anon.) Indeed, for this very reason, they were perhaps most suspicious of claims to have gotten beyond the problem of will altogether. We are likely most familiar with the “Cold War” versions of such claims, as in Trilling’s critique of totalitarianism for “cherish[ing] the idea of revolution as the final, all-­embracing act of will which would forever end the exertions of our individual wills,” exertions that were by definition so exhausting, frustrating, and endless (Moral 511). The dream was that the malady-­ridden will might go away, that a larger, more dependable Will, both more right-­minded and more efficacious, would take its place. It might be easy to imagine that to critique such a view was to produce a ringing endorsement of American freedom as its dependable opposite. This was, however, not simply the case,

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as Trilling made clear he saw the very liberalism he held dear as prone to a related problem—­that of conflating one’s own will with the greater good, and thereby aggrandizing oneself in the name of virtue.9 In both cases, then, dangers arose when the dilemma of the two wills—­ moral and imperious, collective and individual—­was “solved” by claiming them simply to be one and the same. Trilling was onto something here, as it can fairly be stated that some version of this ideological project has buttressed the greatest crimes of Western modernity, from slavery to colonialism to Hitler’s Germany. Like most white critics of his era, Trilling had little to say about the first two of these, although Sacvan Bercovitch would not long after him critique American Manifest Destiny, its genocidal sweep across the continent, in similar terms as the invocation of a solemn “duty” to self-­expansion, and thus a conveniently self-­serving “fusion of political-­spiritual opposites” (xvii, xxxvi). As Sylvia Wynter, Lewis Gordon, and other scholars of racialization would later argue much more broadly and resoundingly, the modern West’s potentially revolutionary rejection of “Absolute Being” (or overarching Will) in the form of the all-­powerful God of late medievalism seemed irresistibly to bring in its train the temptation for human beings—­in particular, Westerners eager to justify their own imperial depredations on moral grounds—­to conceive of inhabiting that position themselves.10 Arguments like these have so powerfully shifted the intellectual landscape that it can be tempting simply to conceive them as superseding that of their midcentury predecessors—­the inhabitants of what Mark Greif has termed “the age of the crisis of man.”11 Such narratives, however, risk obscuring the strong ties and continuities between the two with respect to the issues of concern to us here. A mutual interest in affirming human autonomy and thus rejecting the temptation to reinstall—­or, worse, reinhabit—­various forms of what we might term “Big Will” can be discerned in all of the above writers. One might characterize their work broadly as critiquing modern premises on behalf of a continued commitment thereto. Wynter is in fact a rare and important example of a thinker whose work grows directly out of these earlier debates to extend into our own present, which may account for her continued investment in the category of the “human”—­in an era often invested in dispensing with it—­as a means of getting away from the problematically racist and sexist connotations of Western “Man.”12 She can be understood as the meeting point of two powerful traditions for thinking the question of modernity as freedom: the writings of Caribbean intellectuals from C. L. R. James to Orlando Patterson to, in our own epoch, Anthony Bogues, on the one hand, and, on the other, those of German Jewish ones like Hans Blumenberg and Hans Jonas who wrote on these subjects in the aftermath of Nazism.

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All of these writers, and others adjacent to them—­including Hannah Arendt, Jean-­Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, and Kurt Goldstein, whose work would be so formative to the philosopher of biology Georg Canguilhem, himself in turn a touchstone for the early Foucault—­have important roles to play in the project that follows. The challenges they pose are enduring ones, for, as we begin to see above, the problematic “Big Wills” they contest range from those appropriately anathematized today to others still visible in political and academic discourse. Most pertinently for contemporary literary studies, perhaps—­as we will later discuss in more detail—­a number of these writers extend this critique to the presently widespread desire, in the face of climate change, to move beyond “the human” to speak on behalf of a larger, more impersonal realm. As Jonas, himself an early “ecocritic” of a sort and a student of Heidegger’s, put it, the latter’s “shifting the initiative to Being [may be] in fact the most enormous hybris in the whole history of thought. For it is nothing less than the thinker’s claiming that through him speaks the essence of things themselves . . . that in principle the basic human condition, that of being at a distance to things which we must bridge . . . can be remitted, avoided, overcome” (Phenomenon 257). Arendt, in her great book on will, wrote similarly about the Stoics: “It is only when will power . . . can will what is and thus never be ‘at odds with outward things,’ that it can be said to be omnipotent” (Life 81). Such critiques are thus skeptical that the problem of the imperious will has been solved, rather than perhaps magnified, by a move “beyond” it. “Surely what we need,” Trilling wrote, in response to Sartre’s call for a novel “written as if without an author” (a call that, for him, tended simply to “reinforc[e] the faceless hostility of the world” and “teach us that we ourselves are not creative agents”) “is the opposite of this, the opportunity to identify ourselves with a mind that willingly admits it is a mind and does not pretend that it is History or Events or the World but only a mind thinking and planning—­possibly planning our escape” (Liberal 258).13 Or, as Wynter would more succinctly put it, “The buck stops with us”—­that is, with the species she dubs Homo narrans, the being that creates narratives for itself (“Toward” 331; “Ceremony Found” 194).14 These recognitions should not at all be taken to deny the crucial importance of confronting the devastations, both for human beings and the nonhuman world, of looming climate catastrophe. They remind us only that doing so will still require the same number of complex choices as any human activity, choices for which an ultimate blueprint remains unavailable. Moreover, for the philosopher of biology Jonas—­as for Wynter, who has drawn on both cognitive science and systems theory—­an emphasis on will did not deny the

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role of embodiment but, in fact, possessed a strong “organismic” dimension (which will receive more attention in chapters 2 and 5). The point was simply to take the will seriously as both necessity and potential threat, rather than imagining such dilemmas might be avoided through merger with some greater Will. In the present book, then, I draw on this panoply of ideas to plan our escape from an epoch that can seem in danger of forgetting the gap between will and Will and denying the multiplicity of wills that, as both Trilling and Arendt argue, by definition constitutes the novel just as it defines modern political life.15 Similarly, for Zadie Smith, to whom we will return, ambivalence is the novel’s very keynote—­the rationale for its characteristic focus on “the conflicted,” “the self-­deceiving,” and “the willfully blind,” as she puts it in her own recent “Defense of Fiction.” For we are, she suggests in another essay, “both the prisoners and perpetrators of the will” (Feel 135). Fiction here is motivated by conflict, both between individuals and within them, because of genuinely competing conceptions of how best to live, as the differing accounts of the modern project above began to suggest. The novel—­“a riot of subjectivity,” in Smith’s phrase—­is also a riot of wills (“Book”). To stress will’s relation to individuality, then, can be the opposite of a rejection of the “many,” in Alex Woloch’s term. It is also a way to insist on the ineradicability of meaningful human difference—­for the novel, the very stuff of both joy and sorrow alike. Yet Smith was once again, in 2019, doing what Trilling had been: defending the novel against the threat of its demise. For her, the question was whether the novel’s distinct capacity for extending sympathy to multiple positionalities—­and especially those of a morally vexed nature—­could survive a resurgence of the moral imperiousness Trilling saw as liberalism’s constant companion. In this sense, her concerns resembled not only his but those of James Baldwin when he argued that the protest novel, “an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene”—­he was writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but also of Native Son—­risked distracting us from the “disquieting complexity of ourselves.” It did so, he wrote, in two registers—­by conceiving the individual as “merely a member of a Society or a Group” or, should they seem enigmatic, as a “conundrum to be explained by Science” (Notes 19, 15, emphasis mine).16 Here, too, we find echoes in Smith’s more recent worries, as she ends her “Defense of Fiction” by querying the political platitudes of social media and the algorithms feeding on these, as two intertwined means of simplifying the problem of self-­reflection in our present age. In the path from Baldwin to Smith, then, the second set of recurring arguments for the novel’s (and subject’s) obsolescence, which we will now consider, begins to emerge.

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t h e p r o b l e m , i i : au t o n o m y ’ s p o s s i b i l i t y Indeed, if a surprisingly long history stands behind the claim that fiction’s interest in the will renders it irrelevant to a more enlightened age, the same can be said of a related argument: that science might render the novel’s view of the person superfluous. Typical of our own era, a 2009 New York Times article states that while “for centuries,” “artists and writers have led the exploration of identity, consciousness, and memory,” neuroscientists are now “racing ahead,” “poised to alter the understanding of human nature in ways artists and writers have not” (Carey A1). Such claims, however, did not require the techniques of contemporary neurology in order to be made. In the modernist era, the influential Spanish critic José Ortega y Gasset could already be heard asserting that Darwinism and other scientific determinisms had made the novel’s focus on human striving irrelevant by the time of late nineteenth-­ century naturalism. And when Ortega returned to these ideas around the same time as Trilling in 1951, he reiterated them even more strongly, asserting that twentieth-­century advances in the “science of psychology” had made the novelist’s art appear “naive.” Now that we knew “psychological phenomena, like the phenomena of experimental physics, obey factual laws,” Ortega explained, we could hardly expect to turn to novels for an informed view of human motivation (Notes 313–­14). Novelists’ only hope lay in somehow finding a way to make such discoveries their own. Such claims speak to the second way Robert Pippin asserts that modernity can appear as a “philosophical problem”: if the first entails the meaning and legitimacy of human autonomy, the second regards its viability in a universe governed by natural law.17 For Marco Roth, writing in our own century, the advent of what he terms the “neuronovel” (books in which characters’ eccentricities can be ascribed to brain disorders) bespeaks “the novel’s diminishing purview” in an era of “medical-­materialist” forms of explanation. Mark McGurl thus wittily dubs the novel a “zombie” mode, a dead genre walking despite having “outlived its life as a cultural form.” In his account, the recent fascination with books featuring literal zombies (like those introduced into the narrative of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, to popular effect) confirm our inhabitation of a neurologically informed world of “suspended agency”—­no longer one of “individuals making rational decisions,” let alone the “enchanting inwardness” of an Elizabeth Bennet. In sum, no less than for Trilling decades earlier, the will, no less than the novel, looks from this perspective to be merely a relic of nineteenth-­century ideals. In fact, the category of will did abruptly vanish from psychological discourse around 1900, a dramatic turnaround given its centrality to debates

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within the nascent field over the previous several decades.18 It is no doubt easy enough to look back and concur with W. L. Burn that “one of the cardinal differences between the mid-­Victorians and ourselves” may be found in “the much greater faith they had in the power of the human will” as a spiritual force outstripping its material substrate (quoted in Reed, Victorian Will 14)—­a faith that seems inextricable from its political and moral optimism concerning modern progress, a certainty about its capacity to uplift human beings across the globe to a higher state of enlightenment and happiness. As we began to see earlier, however, in Trilling’s depiction of the novel’s fascination with the will’s “physiology,” its “pathological excesses and deficiencies,” such statements may rely overmuch on a particular, triumphalist construal of what “will” actually meant at that earlier time. Far from simply entailing the victory of a human mind and spirit now laid low by the revelation of its neuronal foundations, it turns out, even in the view of its greatest champions, to have been a matter already definingly vexed. Consider that William James, in his famous chapter on “Will” in The Principles of Psychology (1890), dispenses with rational deliberation in a mere handful of pages, so as to devote about half the remaining hundred or so to the will’s mysteries and its tendencies to go awry—­to what he, too, conceives as either the “Explosive” or “Obstructed” (excessive or deficient) will. (Over a century before the “neuronovel,” James in his Varieties of Religious Experience was already concerned about the narrowed perspective of what he, too, termed a “medical materialism” ready to “finis[h] up St. Paul” by proclaiming his vision on the road to Damascus “a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex” [21].) Seen through James’s both medical and philosophical lens, the will represented neither a way for the mind to deny the claims of the body nor an idealized site from which the modern subject strode forth, confident in having decided independently on a rational aim. Rather, as suggested earlier, the will was a problem—­a sign that the individual was also a problem, if not perhaps the enduring problem of the modern age, as much as the sign of its triumph. Indeed, as James’s invocations of Paul’s experience, in Romans 7, of “seeing the better and doing the worse” would attest, the will as object of unprecedentedly intensive scrutiny across the nineteenth century stood much more for the mystery of human motivation—­for the fact that the merger between individual will and any sort of higher authority, including its own moral aims, could never simply be guaranteed.19 More strikingly still, this perverse will often failed to heed the body’s pleadings as well. James thus wrote of some of the same bizarre impulses Edgar Allan Poe had ascribed several decades earlier to “The Imp of the Perverse”—­such as our temptation, when peering into an abyss, to contemplate throwing ourselves down—­as well as of addiction,

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which even present-­day neuropsychology has characterized via the divide, highly pertinent for the present book, between “wanting” something and “liking” it.20 As Michael Clune has noted in a discussion of this literature, however, “exactly what . . . is referred to by wanting has been unclear” (78). It is notable, indeed, that in a contemporary era when much academic psychology dismisses “will” and “self ” alike as “bit[s] of prescientific metaphysical clutter” now destined for “the bin” (Ross 8), one of the few places in such scholarship that talk of the will does endure is in discussions of addiction (explosive will) and depression (obstructed will), where will very much takes up its place as an enduring problem (and one often harder to separate from a broader social context).21 Hence, even as volumes like Decomposing the Will have been busily announcing the category’s extinction, one interesting anthology appeared not long ago with the title Disorders of Volition. As its editors note, the subject of will is one psychology has not merely ignored but actively “avoided”—­why? On the one hand, they suggest practical constraints: while the study of cognition considers action in response to environmental conditions, volitional approaches view it as an outcome of “the agent’s needs, motives, desires, or goals,” things much less amenable to experimental stimulation (2–­3).22 (One notices here the intrusion of what can only be termed a narrative dimension to the problem at hand.) Yet on the other hand, they, too, also point toward an ambivalence about the category of will itself, one that in their account possesses a much lengthier lineage, as they note two very different visualizations of the faculty from a Renaissance iconography: in one, Free Will is a crowned sovereign surveying his land before stepping forth decisively; in another, The Will appears as a winged female figure of much more unkempt, mysterious mien. Facing these complexities, the editors go so far as to conclude that “it may perhaps be wiser to speak of varieties rather than disorders of volition,” in a formulation that itself strikingly echoes William James (9).23 From our present perspective, to find will continuing to be taken seriously, in an age largely determined to discard it, by a neuroscientific volume interested in its “disorders” appears in no way accidental. As we will see later in this introduction, this understanding of will dates back to its first elaboration in early Christianity (for the Greeks did not possess a distinct notion of will), and, specifically, to Augustine’s writings on Paul’s ideas—­where it in no way took the form of the idealized rational deliberation we now presume. Will, rather, was a faculty divided from the first, called into being to name the experience Augustine had first read about in Paul: “what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” (Meditating on why he might have been driven to steal not particularly tasty pears from a neighbor’s tree, Augustine, too,

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wondered about a gap between “wanting” and “liking.”) As I argue in more detail in the next section, as well as in my first chapter, the more familiar individualism, whether as rational decision making or “enchanting inwardness,” appears historically later, in the Lockean and sentimental models of personhood popularized in eighteenth-­century Britain, precisely as an attempt to manage this problem of individual and whole and, we might say, render modernity a workable project. Moreover, as we will see in the final section, it’s my contention that contemporary materialist accounts of personhood—­including many in literary studies, with their emphases on habit, networks, or affect—­can share more in common with these Lockean and sentimental formations than with the malady-­ridden will they sought to supersede. As recent criticism on the novel has emphasized, both Locke’s and the sentimentalists’ theories of selfhood conceived of interiority not as an originating force but as built up out of externalities, whether empirical experience or affectability. Each of these could provide a way out of the will’s dilemmas, whether by restricting its purview to the pragmatic realm or, in sentimentalism’s case, conceiving a kind of power made possible through will’s apparent abandonment, by giving oneself over to the flux of feeling. Especially as the latter move opened onto certain supraindividual strains in Romanticism, however, it could have the effect that the postwar critics described above warned about, of not so much defusing individual sovereignty as inflating it by rendering it coincident with a larger whole. To make this claim is to suggest, as I will discuss in more detail later, that our present emphasis on the “impersonal” can similarly become a means not only of saving but of hyperbolizing claims made for an idealized freedom. The subject, that is, may be left behind less because of its purported tie to sovereignty than because of its apparently built-­in tendency to fall short of that end—­a tendency in fact expressed, we will see, by the very notion of having a will. Put simply, being a subject, unlike an object, is a rather embarrassing affair, for reasons inseparable from its occasional moments of glory.24 Yet this rather commonsense view of what is meant by “human”—­human, only human—­seems perpetually lost as we assail the category for its presumed grandiosity. From Don Quixote forward, novels have known better. Hence, this study argues, they bear continued significance for any serious engagement with the meanings of personhood in the age we still inhabit. To begin to get at this different way of looking at the novel and the will, then, it’s helpful here to turn to one last “future of the novel” essay: Zadie Smith’s oft-­cited “Two Paths for the Novel.” At first, Smith’s version of the “old versus new” novel appears similarly to turn on the status of the individual

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in an age of neuroscience. It pits what she terms “lyrical Realism,” with its “founding, consoling myth” that “the self is a bottomless pool”—­here, that of Joseph O’Neill, portrayed as channeling Austen and Eliot—­against the blank wall of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2007), told in flatly affectless tones by a young man suffering from memory loss and a sense of fragmentation after a mysterious accident. McCarthy does not seek after “the secret, authentic heart of things,” but instead focuses, relentlessly, on the recalcitrant contingency of mere matter: random bits of everyday goop and detritus that get in the way of our choices and plans. As such, Smith suggests, he may be thought of as heir to the postmodern lineage that structuralist criticism imagines superseding realism and selfhood in the work about which Trilling’s “Art, Will, and Necessity” complains.25 Crucially, however, Smith’s essay ends up refusing this opposition. “Friction, fear, and outright hatred spring up often between these two traditions,” she writes, “—­yet they have revealing points of connection. At their crossroads we find extraordinary writers claimed by both sides: Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Nabokov.” Smith ends up placing Remainder more in this last tradition, for, as she notes, its nameless narrator’s “obsessive” quest to recreate, from the ground up, the scene of one half-­recalled memory is a story with ancestors, from “Marlow’s trip downriver” to “Ahab and his whale.” What is this space, in which realist selfhood and its rejection do not face off but, rather, intertwine? Earlier in the essay, Smith asks whether lyrical realism, with its belief in “the essential fullness and continuity of the self,” is really getting selfhood right to begin with. “Is this really what having a self feels like?” she muses. “Do selves always seek their own good? Are they never perverse?” The obsessives mentioned as occupying this third space seem ideal candidates for such queries, as their most unshakable attachments, whether grand or absurd, seem not to offer fulfillment but to call fulfillment’s possibility into question. What if we were to understand this as the space of the will?26 Before 1900, when the will was the consuming question in discussions of personhood, it was typically seen as the third term in a tripartite structure that also encompassed feeling and reason, or heart and mind. Particularly as Smith positions them, the “lyrical” mode of realism seems to map onto the first of these and its rejection onto the second; thus, as she states, earlier postmodernisms were critiqued as amounting to “intellectual” exercises that “lacked heart.” Between the two, however, stand these strange texts that are above all, we might say, about that perennially vexing problem of wanting. And more than anything else, this seems to be what Trilling, across his various essays, means by will:

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the will of [the nineteenth-­century novel’s] characters, who want so much from life—­money, rank, achievement, fame, each other—­and . . . the will of the reader who wants these things, too, and seeks to learn what are his chances of getting them and at what cost; and not least . . . the will of the novelist himself, so all too imperious . . . in encompassing and directing his world, controlling his characters, assigning them their fates. (Moral 512)

Such a will appeals, Trilling suggests, precisely because it owns up to its own consuming avidity for the world’s offerings, rather than covering that over by asserting itself and world to be one. Yet the novel can also provide us, characteristically, with converse images of “the will unbroken but in stasis,” as its characters discover the world to be less than what they hoped, and thereby discover a new form of integrity in the refusal to want anything at all (Liberal 257). In such a formulation, the novel seesaws back and forth between William James’s “Explosive” and “Obstructed” will, the will aiming at its goal so feverishly it goes a bit wild, and the one that abjures all goals altogether. This is not so different from the story told in Franco Moretti’s classic study of the bildungsroman, The Way of the World, with its historical movement from Stendhal and Pushkin—­their heroes “strained and at times unhinged by their keen tenacity in pursuing the new and treacherous paths of individual formation”—­to Flaubert and the “retreat from life” (76, 141). Fredric Jameson similarly charts a path for the nineteenth century from Faustian “rage” to Flaubertian “ennui” as modes of “historical pathology” that “illustrate the psychic adaptation of man to an increasingly humanized world” (“The Vanishing Mediator” 7). And yet how is it that the features that for Smith marked a curious subterranean “third category” between the novel of character and its rejection, one populated by strange obsessives like Ahab or recessives like the heroes of Beckett and Kafka, comes in these influential accounts to characterize the nineteenth-­century novel as such? the american novel and the persistence of romance An interesting possibility presents itself: the problem may lie, at least in part, in Smith’s British focus. The familiar novel the postmodernists reject, she tells us, is that of Jane Austen and George Eliot. In English departments, too, “the novel” lies here; claims for the “rational autonomy” or “enchanting inwardness” of the novel’s purportedly emblematic modern self are made with these writers’ characters—­or their forebears, Robinson Crusoe or Pamela—­first

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in mind. In comparative work like that of Moretti and Jameson, however, the British serve as the exception—­the case where, amid modern values, “happiness” is privileged decisively over “freedom.”27 More to the point, we might consider the remarkable (and now too often neglected) work done by Leo Bersani in A Future for Astyanax (1976), in which his survey of the most characteristic nineteenth-­century heroes and heroines barely gestures toward England (save for the always exceptional Wuthering Heights, and a nod toward Eliot’s Dorothea and Austen’s Fanny Price), but makes capacious room for the tradition nearly always absent from British “rise of the novel” studies and their Continental counterparts alike: the American novel. Ahab, Hester Prynne, Huck Finn, the heroines of Henry James—­pairing these with their counterparts in Balzac and Dostoevsky, Stendhal and Flaubert, Bersani makes the still striking claim that such protagonists, whether with their “energetic excess of being” or their equally unnerving “stillness” (excess or absence of will), stand as “the flaws in [each] text, its menacing moments of illegibility” (70, 69, 81).28 They represent, for author and reader alike, a site of “ambivalence” that goes back to Don Quixote’s “complicity with [its] hero’s madness,” Bersani writes—­a break in the realist frame that the remainder of the novel works to secure (68). The present study adds to these canonical examples important lesser-­ known instances like Elizabeth Stoddard and the African American novelist Charles W. Chesnutt. Within the American tradition, however, Melville does seem an especially key exemplar of the mode here described. Captain Ahab “has ceased to be . . . a human being,” one well-­known critical account decides, but amounts to only a “will”—­what another terms an “inhuman will” (Arvin 177; Friedman 209). What has happened when the will, of all things, becomes the sign of the inhuman? This seems the same question asked by the narrator of “Bartleby,” who is driven to consult Jonathan Edwards’s treatise on the will, along with Joseph Priestley on necessity, to make sense of his barely mobile, yet oddly resistant employee. We see in Melville’s “great characters,” Gilles Deleuze has written, either a “will to nothingness” or a “nothingness of the will.” What does it mean for “character” to be defined not as the appealing knowability of Smith’s realism but by a relation to nothingness—­by an “unknowable absence” or, as James Baldwin puts it, “this void—­ourselves” (Notes 20)? If Bersani is right, character itself—­individuality—­may be, not the novel’s coziest feature, but the source of its deepest strangeness, a strangeness from which the more familiar “lyrical realism” and postmodernism both pull away, one by reassuring us about interiority, the other by reassuring us it doesn’t exist.29 Smith’s “third category,” these books about obsessive wanting, thus stand

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out simply for hyperbolizing a tendency endemic to the novel to the extent it focuses on the individual subject.30 Like Trilling, Ortega y Gasset in Meditations on Quixote has named this quixotic core to the novel “will,” defining it as the place where realism and imagination meet. From Quixote to Madame Bovary, the protagonist’s will is “obsessed with one single goal: adventure. . . . In this will for adventure, in this effort and courage, we come across a strange dual nature, whose elements belong to opposite worlds: the will is real but what is willed is not,” rendering the will a “paradoxical object which begins in reality and ends in the ideal” (Quixote 282, 286–­88).31 Hence, Ortega concludes, “although the realistic novel was born in opposition to the so-­called novel of fantasy,” or romance, “it carries adventure enclosed within its body” (282). Such accounts, so often forgotten when we decide the novel is synonymous with realism, attest to the centrality of the American novel for the understanding of the genre, as Bersani’s account witnesses. Typically read for reasons of mere linguistic commonality together with its British counterpart, the American novel in fact has arguably far more overlap with Continental fiction, for, as has long been noted, it never quite makes the transition to realism from romance. (As Stanley Cavell puts it, “What might it betoken about a culture’s literature that its founding works are works of the fantastic?” [Quest 183].) It also joins Balzac, Dostoevsky, and others in remaining in greater contact with the philosophical tradition, a tradition for which, as we will see across the different chapters of this book, this more wayward will forms a persistent crux. Yet if novel theorists tend to ignore American examples, Americanists have, traditionally, had little interest in theorizing the novel.32 In part, the “romance thesis” of American literature, a product of Trilling’s mid-­twentieth century, has long been misunderstood, conceived as part and parcel of a Cold War attachment to the notion of “American exceptionalism.” Yet Richard Chase’s innovative The American Novel and Its Tradition, which made the most sustained case for that tradition as one of romance, did not aim to celebrate his subject, which he described as clearly lacking the “complexity of character and event” of British Victorian fiction (5). Instead, he merely hoped to defend American authors against their detractors, notably D. H. Lawrence, who saw Melville, Hawthorne, and others as hampered by an inner “duplicity”: “a tight mental allegiance to a morality which all their passion goes to destroy” (quoted in Chase 9, emphasis mine).33 Rejoined Chase, In short, like all the observers of American literature we are citing in these pages, Lawrence was trying to find out what was wrong with it. . . . He thinks that the American novel is sick, and he wants to cure it. Perhaps there is

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something wrong with it, perhaps it is sick—­but a too exclusive preoccupation with the wrongness of the American novel has in some ways disqualified him from seeing what, right or wrong, it is. (9)

American novels, it seems, were accused of suffering from maladies of the will. Indeed, the striking thing is how much a formulation like Lawrence’s renders them paradigmatic cases of the dialectics of value that, for a critic like Trilling, would define the novel as such—­and that, further, defined the philosophical engagement with will as both moral autonomy and vitalizing force. For Chase, American novels did contain a kind of “poetry of disorder,” rendering them less able to “absorb all extremes . . . into a normative view of life,” as he suggests British realism, governed by its “great practical sanity,” aimed to do (2). For that very reason, however—­and especially because American novels tended in fact to be odd “hybrids” of realism and romance—­they were able to raise questions about the potential limits of that “normative view” (14).34 Such questions, as we have seen, concerned the relation of the individual to a greater whole.35 The issues raised by philosophy of the will have long been articulated in the name of this question. Beginning as God, that larger “Will” shifts form as modernity unfolds, yet its later incarnations—­whether a generalized “life,” or the state, the social, the economy, history—­often bear greater traces of their theological past than it may at first appear. The novel’s ambivalence toward such conceptions might be said to derive from the individual’s capacity to serve as a site of critique in two senses: as a point from which to question the totality and as a genuine source of danger thereto. As Jesse Molesworth points out, far from simply emblematizing modern rationality, the novel’s “valorization of the individual,” like that of Romanticism itself, might in fact be said to push back—­both powerfully and also, as we have seen in recent years, riskily—­against modern science’s preference for systematization and the “general case” (10). As noted above, then, the more familiar Lockean and sentimental understandings of the person, defined by “rational autonomy” or “enchanting inwardness,” in fact appear as arguments for how the individual and the social order can form a naturally self-­supporting whole. Reason or feeling, as the two more commonly adduced achievements of the modern subject, each may be called upon to support such a claim, given their more universalizing tendencies; to focus on will, however, is to restore the crucial recognition that such a whole can only ever tenuously and with considerable difficulty be achieved and/or affirmed. All this is to say that literary scholars might, like the philosophically inclined novels discussed in the present study, consider writing about modernity less as

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a historical accomplishment, a done deal to be excoriated or upheld, and more as announced by the title of Pippin’s Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. (By “modernism,” Pippin means less the artistic movement than what literary critics more typically deem modernity.) Providing the link between American “romance” and the mostly modernist cases (Beckett, Kafka, and so on) instanced by Zadie Smith, Pippin speaks of the modernity problem in relation to what he terms the “Romanticism-­to-­modernism cycle.” This framing makes plain the historical linkage between literary interventions and philosophical ones (preeminently, those of Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche) around these questions. Further, the Romantic moment queried the Enlightenment’s one-­size-­fits-­all approach to addressing human dilemmas—­thus returning us to the value conflicts with which we began—­by recourse not merely to individual specificity but to forms of knowing irreducible to scientific mechanism, on the one hand, and, by reference to other cultures and other times, irreducible to the modern West’s self-­understanding as pinnacle of human existence, on the other. Its enduring legacy can be heard in the way such critiques have later come to inform arguments made both through and against the language of progress alike. And yet in fact, as the next part of this introduction will argue, these questions possess a still lengthier history. As we can glean from a temporally expanded version of the “rise of the novel” story, the individual emerges, as the ancient world recedes, in the form of a problem—­a problem named by the new category of the will. For those who took that problem seriously—­ from Augustine himself through to the later writers inspired by his ideas who would influence the early novel in English—­it provided the impetus for a new kind of life narrative. For others—­the Lockeans and sentimentalists who would gradually frame our more familiar understandings of “novel” and “individual” during the 1700s—­it was, rather, the problem to be overcome in order to render modern society workable. In the movement toward the nineteenth century, however, Augustinian ideas once more began to appear, thanks to the influence of Romanticism, which, challenging modern conceptions of rationality and feeling alike on their own ground, would return, via will, to the notion of modernity as a question, one now posed from within. The result, I will contend, was the nineteenth-­century novel as irreducible hybrid of realism and romance. The novel thus vivifies in human narratives the dual threads of moral dilemma and living existence in the philosophy of will, revealing these to be more dialectically intertwined than they otherwise often appear. Precisely this dualist, dialectical dimension, however, is most in danger of being occluded in much contemporary theory. As suggested in my concluding section, the problem is that such interventions may not get rid of the problems of will so much as reinhabit them in a less complex way.

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Historical (from Augustine to Romanticism) au g u s t i n e ’ s d i l e m m a (and the advent of the will) The more familiar way the novel has been enlisted as a crucial contributor to the “creation of the modern individual” takes its most exemplary form in Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel (1957). Arguably inaugurating the entire field of novel studies, Watt also generates the commonplace of associating it with eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Britain. There, under the influence of Lockean ideas and, later, sentimentalism, a subject was purportedly birthed who used empiricist techniques to learn about and act in the world, while trusting her innate moral sense to guide her toward the good. Although later treatments would conceive this production of a “liberal” self as more of an ideological one, the underpinning of a capitalist and colonialist order, its contours remained in place. Was this, however, all that could be said about even the rise of the British novel? A different notion of the willing individual, we will see, may be derived even from urtexts of Watt’s like Robinson Crusoe. Moreover, while the significance of the nineteenth century for novel studies remains undisputed, there has otherwise long been a tension between such accounts and those with a more Continental focus. The latter could be said to begin with Georg Lukács’s pioneering Theory of the Novel in 1916, and already we see the difference: the modern subject, far from comfortably sallying forth in a world that seems made for his inventions, appears as fundamentally alienated, cast adrift in “a world abandoned by God.” The will’s task, that of world making, remains, but it is necessarily far more fraught, requiring a more groundless, hence willful, act of self-­assertion, closer to that described by Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Acknowledging this split, the most interesting theories have tended to be those that posit a foundational conflict at the heart of the novel as a form. In Franco Moretti, as we saw, this appears as the difference between English and Continental novels, the former pledging allegiance to the “happiness” principle, the latter to “freedom.” The will thus provides the solution in the former, the problem in the latter (or, marriage—­to a spouse of one’s choosing—­in the one case, adultery in the other). And yet the British novel, too, may be seen as haunted by less realist strains, as in Nancy Armstrong’s account of the persistence of the gothic in How Novels Think. Inevitably, these challenges to realism’s dominance have also ushered in a more radical destabilization of the “rise of the novel (as rise of modernity)” story, one that acknowledges the longer history of the form going back as far

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as Greece and the Roman Empire. In Margaret Doody’s The True Story of the Novel, the remarkable result of this counternarrative is a novel linked first and foremost not to realism but to the romance that typically forms its degraded other (elsewhere in Europe, the word for “novel” remains roman or romanzo). For Doody, to reaffirm the novel’s romantic roots via a detour into its more capacious history more broadly implies a rejection of the larger progress narrative toward an enlightened modernity that undergirds the argument for realism in books like Watt’s: one in which, in her words, “The Novel replaces the Romance as Reason replaces Superstition, and as the Model-­T Ford replaces the horse and carriage” (3). Even in Lukács’s less triumphalist version, she argues, the “world abandoned by God” assumes the novel’s basis in secularization. (We will later see why I am less sure this is the case.) “It rumples such tidiness to say that the age of early Christianity was also an Age of the Novel,” Doody writes, “—­but so it was” (3); for it appears that “alterations parallel and similar to those we now attribute to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may have been occurring before or during the age of Rome” (8). The present book, then, suggests that one of the most salient of these alterations concerns the gradual emergence of the category of the will. Doody’s account, it should be noted, rejects the link between novel and modernity by relocating that figure so often associated with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the autonomous individual, in the early Christian era. That is to say, Doody’s rejection of Watt doesn’t entail denying that novels are centrally invested in individuals; what she denies is only that it took the modern era to “invent” them. Instead, drawing on Orlando Patterson’s Freedom, she argues for the emergence during the earliest centuries CE of personal freedom understood as “individual rights over oneself,” as a counter to the Greek political ideals of “civic freedom” (participation in the polis) or “sovereignal freedom” (power over others)—­noting that the first of these appears in association with those barred from the latter two, that is, with women and the enslaved. (As Patterson points out, the former made up the majority of the latter.)36 “The novels,” Doody notes, “tend to put women at or near the center of experience”; those “written in Greek and coming from Asia Minor or North Africa are particularly likely to do so” (41). While without any reference to fiction, this account of freedom’s shifting meanings during this period has been proffered elsewhere—­albeit with a more ambivalent cast. In Hannah Arendt’s “What Is Freedom?,” it appears as a means of explaining the rise of the idea of the will. As Arendt notes, and others have concurred, Plato and Aristotle did not possess a concept equivalent to what would later be understood as “will,” and, in her account, this is because they understood freedom simply to denote the freeman’s capacity for

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action in the public realm, a freedom dependent on being “liberated . . . from the necessities of life” (148). Only with the emergence of what Patterson calls “personal freedom” does the notion of will arise, as a means of designating an “inward domain,” one “into which men may escape from external coercion and feel free” (145–­46). It is thus unsurprising to find such ideas promulgated by figures such as Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher born a slave.37 “Put me in bonds?” he writes. “You will fetter my leg” only, but never my will (quoted in Kahn 252). As Charles Kahn writes, the new Stoic notion of a moment of inner consent, a yes-­saying or no-­saying accompanying our actions—­the idea of performing an act willingly or unwillingly—­may clearly be glimpsed here in Epictetus, and Seneca, writing in Latin, would give this idea, a precursor to later notions of “moral character and personal ‘commitment,’ ” the term voluntas (Kahn 252).38 Both Stoicism and the early Christian thought with which it so significantly overlapped were thus central to the shift Arendt and Doody both identify—­which for Doody, again, is crucial to grasping the development of the novel in terms very far from the standard emphasis on secular realism. “The novels all reflect a religious sensibility,” she states, for only from such a vantage does it appear that “[the] deepest individual experience of the voyage of life and its significance to the soul has to take place away from the civic realm” (41, 61). Thomas Pavel, who echoes Doody in seeing in Greek novels’ conception of an “inner, inviolate space” a precursor to the more fleshed-­ out inner life of Samuel Richardson’s eighteenth-­century epistolary heroines, underscores the specific role of a God or gods that appear more remote, and thus able to serve as an object of longing (Lives 35). Already in Greek tragedy, he notes, “the gods’ position gets loftier, their intervention less frequent, and their individuality less palpable”; as an “almighty force that guides human destiny from far above,” they are “ready to merge into a single deity” (27). To turn away from the world and toward such an inhuman being was an act that could generate both “anxiety and wisdom” (24). (It is also, of course, as Pavel recognizes, the kind of antimaterialist ideal with a lengthier history elsewhere in the world’s religions, as preeminently in Buddhism.) As in Doody, however, who sees here the potential for resistance to the world’s injustice, Pavel’s emphasis lies chiefly on the wisdom, not the anxiety; by reposing in Providence, the nascent novel’s lovers are able to spurn a world that holds nothing for them and instead find faith in themselves. We can see more of the ways that anxiety and wisdom may intertwine, however, if we look to the later slave narratives that develop Patterson’s sense of the interrelation between enslaved experience and ideas of “inner freedom.” Most famously, perhaps, Frederick Douglass follows up his most

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intense description of enslavement as obliteration of selfhood—­“I was broken in body, soul, and spirit . . . my intellect languished . . . the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died . . . behold a man transformed into a brute!”—­ with the beautiful moment where, “with no audience but the Almighty,” he “pour[s] out” his deepest existential questions and yearnings for freedom to the ships passing on the Chesapeake Bay (74–­75). There is a crucial tension here—­does enslavement endanger or intensify the inner will, or both? As when learning to read first awakens young Douglass to the full horror of his condition, the freedom to roam in one’s mind may offer succor, but also a torment when the most basic of bodily liberties remains denied. Inner freedom is thus affirmed here as essential and insufficient at one and the same time. Arendt, then, emphasizes a still deeper cause for concern lying at the core of the very conception of an interior will itself. Indeed, the remarkable feature of Arendt’s account—­and what makes it crucial for my argument here—­lies in its association of the emergence of will with the revelation of a problem lying at the heart of human freedom. “Historically,” she writes, “men first discovered the will when they experienced its impotence and not its power,” when they joined Paul in recognizing the experience of failing to follow one’s sense of the good, either by wrong action or inaction (“What” 161). As we see most acutely in the writings of Augustine—­himself so indebted to Paul’s thought, and often portrayed as “the inventor of our modern notion of will” (Dihle 144)—­“Christian will-­power was discovered as an organ of self-­liberation and immediately found wanting” (“What Is Freedom” 162). Specifically, what it finds is a gap between what Arendt calls the “I-­will” and the “I-­can”: the will to do (or forbear from doing) something and the sense of true ability to carry that aim out (“What” 159). Augustine gives multiple familiar examples of this gap—­when we can’t help but look at things that repulse us; his famous theft of the pears; the difficulty in rising from bed—­but articulates it most memorably as his experience of struggling to turn to God: “No more was required than an act of will. . . . To will it was to do it. Yet I did not do it. My body responded to the slightest wish of my mind by moving its limbs . . . more readily than my mind obeyed itself by assenting to its own great desire” (171). In Augustine, then, the will as site of inner freedom is not, as Doody and Pavel describe, simply the reassuring site of a higher truth that can transcend earthly limitations. It is, rather, the scene of an irreducible conflict, of a yearning toward God constantly interrupted by other desires startling in their intensity.39 The Confessions famously devotes many pages to the latter, and while some of these concern the aim at bodily pleasure, the most intriguing dwell on yearnings of a more mysterious nature. The pears, again, were “neither attractive to look at nor to taste” and, once stolen, were simply thrown

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to the pigs (47). Instead, Augustine suggests, we might see the theft as a way of “relish[ing] and enjoy[ing]” the sin, the will, itself (49). There is an odd circularity here. And, strikingly, it is one that might be said to render the most paradigmatically sinful act a perverse mirror of God’s inexplicable grace, as neither can be explained by reference to worldly advantage.40 In sum, Augustine suggests, there may be more than one sort of mystery in the universe.41 By turning to Augustine, then, we can follow Arendt in seeing the will’s appearance less as the sign of freedom’s emergence, and more of its emergence as a philosophical problem—­a problem, crucially, unknown to the ancient philosophers. (Moreover, as we will see, Arendt’s own stance toward this development in fact shifted away from critique toward interest and even affirmation later in her career.) To say so, however, is to mark a dramatic shift in the story of the “rise of the individual”—­and, hence, the novel—­as it is more commonly narrated. Indeed, while it remains rare to acknowledge the novel’s roots in this period, Augustine’s Confessions have not infrequently served as a kind of watershed in the development of the “selfhood” thought to come to full fruition in Western modernity; such accounts even go so far as to parallel him to Descartes, for their mutual exploration of what Charles Taylor calls the “first-­person standpoint” (30, 141).42 With respect to the novel, John Freccero, who calls Augustine “the first subject,” terms the Confessions “the paradigm for all representations of the self in a retrospective literary structure” (17). To consider Augustine’s narrative has thus long appeared a means of thinking through what “individuality” would eventually come to mean; Doody’s account simply broadens this point by allowing us to note that the Confessions belongs to an age of the early novel, an age that she, too, sees as marked by a new interest in the individual self.43 If Arendt is correct, however—­if that very exploration on Augustine’s part is inseparable from a problem at the heart of that self, a problem the term “will” comes to designate—­how does this change the story we tell about the individual, the novel, and, finally, modernity itself? Ordinarily, it is key to recognize, to make these connections has made little difference in the just-­so story Doody critiques; unlike in her own narrative, the theological focus of Puritan and Augustinian autobiography alike has not impeded the ability of these writings to serve as the root of Watt’s realist novel. There are several reasons for this. Most simply, to the extent these writings emphasized a more personal relation to God, and concomitant exploration of one’s inner thoughts, they were seen in a book like Watt’s simply as part and parcel of the turn toward individual experience characterizing the Enlightenment more generally: empiricism in philosophy, capitalism in economics, democracy in politics, and so forth.44 Beyond literary studies, as my first chapter discusses, it has been even more commonplace to bring

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Augustine into a narrative in which late medieval theology, with its hyperbolization of the early Christian divide between our fallen world and that of an infinite God, paradoxically lays the groundwork for modern science’s instrumentalization of the natural world. If a God defined only by an inscrutable will rules over the heavens, human beings, equally defined by will, can exert theirs over the earth. In such accounts, the usual divide between the early modern period and its religious antecedents here falls away, rendering a figure like Descartes simply an apotheosis of preexisting tendencies in medieval nominalist philosophy.45 (Descartes, after all, in a famous letter describes the human will, in its liberty, as modeled on that of God.)46 In one left version of these arguments, Augustine’s focus on will thus comes to represent the root not only of Cartesianism but of a later capitalism’s assumption of the “primacy of the will over the order of nature” (Alliez 135). The key thing to see about all of these arguments is that their sense of what “modernity” looks like, whether baleful or affirming, is not altered, but indeed augmented, by tracing it back to a period often conceived as “premodern,” whether late medieval or late ancient. An opportunity seems missed to allow this lengthier narrative to provide a different account. What happens here, after all, to the sense of will’s strangeness, its self-­division and self-­ sabotage, so crucial to its Augustinian formulation?47 As suggested above, most striking about the Augustinian will is its lack of relation to the rational self-­concern believed (again, whether approvingly or disparagingly) to characterize the modern individual. This crucial fact, then, could just as readily open the door to a treatment of Augustine as the “first subject” that does not assume modern selfhood must take a Cartesian, self-­affirming form. Charles Taylor’s account in Sources of the Self is notable in this regard, for while he sees Augustine as originating the “first-­person standpoint” that would become codified in Descartes, he also sees this move as having, in the two thinkers, completely opposed results. Whereas in Descartes the turn inward enables him “to achieve a quite self-­sufficient certainty,” for Augustine, doing so generates not the self-­assurance of the cogito but further bedeviling (if also fascinating) questions (156). It is in the role of will, indeed, that this difference most strongly appears—­as the site of power and self-­control in Descartes, of self-­division in Augustine. Hence, in Descartes, and even more fully in Locke, Taylor argues that the first-­person stance paradoxically enables what in fact comes to supersede it: a “third-­person perspective” made possible by self-­objectification, or “the ability to take an instrumental stance to one’s given properties, desires, inclinations . . . so that they can be worked on,” producing a “human agent who is able to remake himself by methodical and disciplined action” (176, 159). For Locke, in particular, such arguments

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crucially required a view of the Pauline or Augustinian experience of akrasia, or seeing the better and doing the worse, as not the deepest of human mysteries, but, rather, simply the readily addressed result of insufficient education (as, indeed, it had originally been understood, prior to the advent of the will concept, by Plato). What Taylor’s account helps us to see, then—­and the present book’s first chapter will explore in greater detail—­is that the familiar lineaments of the “modern individual,” so often derived from Descartes or Locke, in fact represent a reaction against the stranger conception of a newly individuated self found in writings like Augustine’s.48 Yet what, then, of the novel? When the rise of the novel and that of the modern subject are narrated together, this generally entails a thoroughly Lockean account, one in which the emergence of individualism, whether for better or worse, is part and parcel of the broader development of capitalism and democracy. For such treatments, Robinson Crusoe often appears as an urtext, as Defoe’s novel portrays an individual generating a self and a society from, as it were, the ground up. And yet Crusoe, it turns out, demonstrates the push and pull between these familiar conceptions of modern selfhood and the more Augustinian one we have been considering—­unsurprisingly, given its clear relation to the spiritual autobiography on which Augustine had such a strong influence. the t wo robinson crusoes (and the management of the w ill) Why does Robinson Crusoe go to sea? At one time, it was in fact quite common for scholars to view Defoe’s novel, as its own era’s readers had, in theological terms.49 Its hero’s shipwreck was divine punishment for his “original sin”—­his words—­of disobeying his father and leaving home (14). And yet it seems fair to say that (with one notable exception, to be discussed below) the field of “rise of the novel studies” as we know it has been built on the edifice of a gradually increasing distancing from this aspect of the text. Should Crusoe be taken as a cautionary tale, to be read alongside The Family Instructor (1715) and Defoe’s other religious conduct manuals? No, we are told: not if Defoe’s saga is to stand at the wellspring of the modern novel. For that novel to get rolling, the youthful hero must leave home, must imagine a life different from that which tradition has plotted for him, must encounter adventure as the birthright, not the cost, of being young and self-­motivated. “Crusoe’s ‘original sin,’ ” Ian Watt writes, “is really the dynamic tendency of capitalism itself,” as manifested in the “individualist” aim

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at “improving on the lot one was born to,” not resigning oneself to a predestined fate (65).50 What, then, of all the talk of God? Ought we to consider it merely “vestigial,” as Watt—­following Karl Marx—­blithely asserts (76)?51 A simple solution has been to draw on Max Weber’s famous argument: Robinson’s father simply fails to register that his son’s “aspiring thoughts” are actually expressions, not rejections, of the Protestant ethic. This line of thinking can readily be extended to incorporate our sense of Crusoe as a paradigmatic colonialist novel: “master yourself and you master your destiny; master your destiny and you master others; master these and you master the economic contingencies of life,” Brett McInelly writes, in terms paralleling Taylor’s sense of the Lockean, self-­making individual (6). From one perspective, this point of view certainly seems reasonable enough. If, for Augustine, to turn away from his sins and toward God meant eschewing a life of worldly reward—­specifically, the law career urged by his father—­for Crusoe, the lesson is, conversely, that his father, who also “design’d me for the Law,” was right (4). Having run away from the patriarch, he thus rediscovers on his desert isle the very virtues that authority had been urging on him—­a life of “Industry,” “Moderation,” and so forth, virtues we can then see as colonialism’s ideological exports (4–­5). Does this mean, however, that the act of running away and that of settling down make a kind of whole, rendering their apparent opposition merely the residue of a discarded theology? I would suggest, rather, the opposite: that our tendency to treat them as such results from reading backward onto Crusoe a version of Taylor’s Lockean mode that is not yet fully that of Defoe’s story itself. In the actual novel, after all, Crusoe is quite clear that his tendency to run off, which recurs following his initial departure, does not tend to serve his own “Interest” (31), but, rather, represents a kind of mysterious predilection for self-­ sabotage described in terms very close to those of Augustine (unsurprisingly, given the latter’s importance for the spiritual autobiographies that influenced Defoe).52 We might, indeed, say that the most salient difference between the youthful Crusoe and the one who builds himself a home—­and, eventually, a mini-­civilization—­on his island is that the latter begins to act on what are portrayed as rational grounds, while the former is propelled wholly by will, or by the term Augustine establishes as its analogue, “inclination” (4). It is crucial to the depiction of young Robinson’s “wandring inclination” that he is repeatedly asked what “Reasons” he has for it, “on what Account” he goes (4, 13), and he can give no response. Indeed, this same interchange plays itself out in his own head, as one between his reason and what appears as a kind of inner compulsion:

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tho’ I had several loud calls from my Reason and my more composed Judgment to go home, yet I had no Power to do this. I know not what to call this . . . it was impossible for me to escape. . . . [It] push’d me forward against the calm Reasonings and Perswasions of my most retired Thoughts. (12)

Given such mental dialogues, the remarkable thing is then how immediately and completely Crusoe’s arrival on his island transforms him from a being propelled by a fundamentally irrational, if not antirational, “inclination” to a man of reason. Essentially from the moment our hero finds himself in a situation of sheer survival, he becomes a creature of untiring labor, on the one hand, and calculation, on the other. As he himself puts it, right before his first venture into industry (building himself a raft so as to gather provisions from the wrecked ship), “this Extremity rouz’d my Application” (37). Or, later: “Time and Necessity made me a compleat natural Mechanick” (53). One is almost tempted to wring a variation on Flannery O’Connor: You can get a rational subject, if you can threaten him with a situation of pure survival every minute of his life. And, notably, this turn toward rational agency in fact comports with Taylor’s sense that Lockean individualism actually requires a certain backing off from introspection. As Leo Damrosch notes, Crusoe’s diary, which he begins to keep during his time on the island, functions not “to anatomize the self, but rather to keep track of it. . . . It is evidence of the separation between the behaving and the scrutinizing self ” (195). In one strand of post-­theological novel criticism, however, the notion that Crusoe may not simply add up to a Lockean whole does remain alive and well. Despite their lack of interest in anything like sin and deliverance, that is, more Foucauldian treatments like those of John Bender and Nancy Armstrong take quite seriously the notion that Crusoe undergoes a radical transformation in character once he is marooned. In their accounts, the island setting indeed proves necessary to rid our hero of precisely the sorts of troubling characteristics he himself notes—­an excess of will and desire, “erran[cy],” and, above all, an inability to account for himself (Armstrong 34; Bender 54–­55). Yet instead of the story of the production of a godly subject, this simply becomes that of the production of a properly modern individual, a category in which the former, more Augustinian Robinson can thereby play no part. What if, however, we were to retain the sense of opposing Robinsons, but lose the developmental-­historical plot where one must supersede the other? Defoe, in fact, goes out of his way to keep insisting that Crusoe’s transformation is never complete, so that Crusoe insists on the continuing reverberations of his “original sin” considerably after his supposed conversion, where he appears just as he was at the outset, “fill’d with Projects and Designs”

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for further travel and adventure, unable to “satisfy my self ” in his present “Station” (140–­41). As would be the case later in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the bildungsroman plot appears persistently dogged here by its amoral obverse, the picaresque (the centrality of which is more obvious, of course, in Defoe’s other novels, such as Moll Flanders and Roxana). Hence, the need to write The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Part 2, so that our hero can light out, as Huck Finn would put it, once again.53 When the story of the “rise of the novel”—­along with “the rise of the individual”—­is told, as both usually are, using British examples, these persistently picaresque elements are understood as residual, features of a still-­ adolescent eighteenth-­century fiction that will become less central by the novel’s Victorian heyday.54 The individual that emerges in their stead, like Robinson on his island, is said to be defined by rational calculation and self-­ regulation, and is able to achieve hegemonic status in modernity as a result. This is not, however, the story told from a more comparativist perspective. There, as in Franco Moretti’s account of Pushkin and Stendhal, whom he pairs with Goethe’s Faust, the nineteenth-­century novel is itself characterized by a violent rift between the inner individual and “the way of the world”; that interiority, moreover, itself appears as “a principle of contradiction,” of “duplicity and disharmony” (85–­86). Such a figure’s “restless ambiguity,” Moretti writes, “makes him the natural representative” of a post-­Revolutionary age in which “existence truly becomes what [Lukács’s] Theory of the Novel calls problematic,” in which “each value is opposed by one of equal importance,” and “liberty and equality . . . enter into violent and painful conflict” (76, 83). This more dialectical view of modern subjectivity recalls the rift with which this introduction began, between those thinkers concerned to expand its horizons and others aiming to modulate its excesses. What if Crusoe, with its back and forth between opposing conceptions of what “liberty” means, had more in common with this story? What if, that is, it were less an instance of a triumph of “modern individualism” over some discarded alternative and more a case of attempting to dramatize as a developmental narrative what is actually an enduring dialectic? We can see this, ironically enough, only if we take the book’s religious dimension more seriously. Here it is worth remembering what, precisely, Lukács meant by defining the modern novel as “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” (88). This is not, at its outset, a secularization story. God has not vanished in the early novels his Theory discusses; he has, rather, withdrawn, with the result that “he cannot be comprehended and fitted into some kind of order from the perspective of earthly life, and therefore he cannot reveal himself as God” (102). This is the “God of will,” his motives inscrutable to us, of Calvinism and

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other seventeenth-­century radical Protestantisms, from Pietism in Germany to Jansenism in France, all often influenced directly by Augustinian ideas (as chapter 1 will further discuss)—­just as Crusoe is in his invocations of original sin. Lukács, like the Marxist critic Lucien Goldmann in The Hidden God (1955), would portray the mindset of the individual in such a situation as a proto-­existential one, as God’s unknowability prompted a crisis of legitimating value.55 In Lukács’s words, the “contingent world” begets the “problematic individual,” as the motivating significance of each, in a more radical version of Augustine’s dilemma, appears equally shrouded in mystery.56 Crusoe, then, might more convincingly be read as modeling several possible responses to this situation, only one of which entails becoming the “rational modern subject” whether for good or ill. Another would be that of the picaresque, in which the deafening silence of the cosmos leaves human beings simply forced to make their way in the world, focused on the basic facts of self-­ preservation and pleasure. This might at times be a desperate project, amid a chaos of self-­interested individuals, but it could also be one shot through with the exhilaration of a radically open-­ended trajectory, as so many road novels attest. Crusoe clearly possesses such features, and yet, as we saw, his ongoing adventures remain punctuated, particularly in the book’s first half, by precisely the sort of troubled reflection on his own motives that Augustine inaugurates. In its recognition of a genuine conflict between aims, the book becomes more a meditation on value than an abandonment of all values. The Lockean ideal we read backward onto Crusoe, then, represents more an attempt to deny there is a conflict here and to insist that liberty and morality simply make an uncomplicated whole. As my first chapter lays out in greater detail, however, not simply in the pages of these early novels but elsewhere—­in the philosophies that inspired them, but also “on the ground”—­ this more familiarly “modern” perspective required a quite self-­conscious residualization of the Augustinian alternative, in order to conceive of a workable modern polis for which the individual would not pose too great a threat. From having provided a means to engage with complexities at the core of the human person per se, the wayward will became a way to talk about criminality and psychic pathology, indeed contributing to the eventual emergence of psychology as a discipline, out of theology and “moral science,” in the nineteenth century. It also, crucially, became over time a way to talk about hierarchical difference more broadly—­such that other classes (whether aristocratic or proletarian), women and children, and, above all, racialized subjects were cast as helpless repositories of the irrational “inclinations” white bourgeois men were defined by their capacity to master, a narrative thus legitimating colonial rule.

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As Sylvia Wynter makes this argument, drawing on Hans Blumenberg’s concept of “reoccupation,” “rationality/irrationality,” mapped onto hierarchies of difference, “reoccupied” what had been the place of “Redeemed Spirit/Fallen Flesh” in the Augustinian conception of original sin (“Unsettling” 287).57 A more universalizing thread in the Augustinian version itself is thereby lost. The key, for our purposes here, is that the later (twentieth-­century) writers, such as Aimé Cesaire and Frantz Fanon, to whom Wynter turns to contest this narrative—­and to reopen a truncated “Man” to the potentialities of the broader “human”—­were themselves influenced not only, manifestly, by the decolonizing struggles of their own epoch, but by the intellectual and artistic legacies of Romantic countercurrents that, as we will now see, had pushed against this triumphalist version of Enlightenment from its very beginnings.58 In the spirit of Wynter’s work, however, I would emphasize the versions of these that did not seek simply to undermine the modern (by conceiving a return to an organically or divinely meaning-­filled cosmos) but, rather, to expose the ineluctable complexities entailed in autonomy itself. the will returns as problem: romanticism After all, if the nineteenth century simply saw the triumph of a will properly aligned with rationality in its triumph over unreason, why would the nineteenth-­century novel in America and on the Continent—­and, of course, even in some English examples, such as Wuthering Heights—­so persistently suggest otherwise? In such instances, the wayward will continues to be taken seriously; it may, indeed, at times be glorified. Here, I would argue, it becomes crucial to bring Romanticism back into the frame, not simply as a literary movement but as a set of ideas with philosophical, social, and political implications—­and as, in essence, an arguably ongoing critique of modernity from within.59 As Arendt discusses in her genealogy of the will, the Romantic era sees will for the first time since Augustine and the late medieval nominalists made a major philosophical category, precisely because of its fascination with the contingent rather than the necessary, and with creative power as spontaneity—­ ideas themselves eventually inseparable from the period’s broader revolutionary spirit. Arendt, interestingly, who was so skeptical about the emergence of the will as category in her earlier “What Is Freedom?,” makes a strong case for its importance in Willing, the third volume in her Life of the Mind, and the last book she completed before her death, where she writes directly against the behaviorist rejection of interiority characteristic of the early to mid-­twentieth century.60 The key here—­and what makes Arendt’s

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account powerful for thinking about the novel as well—­lies in the will’s Romantic association with imagination, with the conception of not “ ‘objects’ . . . but projects,” by which thought “projects itself ” into a future it hopes, but cannot guarantee, to make manifest (14). Like the novel, then, the will is associated with “restlessness [as] the ground of Being,” as “the price paid for Life,” and, hence, above all with youth (44–­45). As I discuss in my second chapter, the Romantic affirmation of will may be seen as having intellectual roots in what has retroactively been seen as the “vitalist” reaction against Cartesian mechanism: the insistence, within eighteenth-­century medical writings, on the specificity of life and of individual development. Within this framework, “will” becomes associated less with a desire for the good, as in theology or the moral philosophy that would supersede it, than with a life force, a vitalizing energy, one I show in chapter 2 is directly linked to the development of the novelistic bildungsroman. Only with this genealogy in mind, I would insist, can we understand the form taken by will in the later German philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as its later transmutations in some of the writings of Bergson (who would be an important influence on Arendt’s ideas, above) and, crucially, Freud. The concerns of Freud, however—­as well as Schopenhauer’s idea of a voracious, perennially unsatisfied will—­can help to remind us that the vitalist emphasis on will as struggling and grasping life force did not always appear as the more positive sense of creative potentiality we see in Arendt. It is more apt to say that it entailed a franker engagement with all the possible intensities of human existence, and particularly those that could seem most maddeningly mysterious to their own bearers. German Sturm und Drang drama, the Byronic strain in Romantic poetry, and, in the case of the novel, the emergence of the gothic all spoke to this fascination with will as at once power, enigma, and torment. In this sense, then, Romanticism—­and I use the term broadly here, to encompass all of these phenomena, following the lead of critics such as Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre—­could be said to look paradoxically forward and backward at once, as its blasphemer’s embrace of a liberating “Satanic” or “Promethean” energy was accompanied by the very Augustinian sense of a strange and troubling core to human motivation we saw at work back in Crusoe. (This was in no way accidental, since, as the first half of this book discusses, vitalist arguments, Byronism, and even the gothic could all be shown to have roots in Augustinian thinking.) Most broadly, its effect was once again to lay bare the value conflict at the core of modern autonomy that the realist novel’s more Lockean strain had, with its moralization of liberty, aimed to resolve. As Saree Makdisi and others have noted, moreover,

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such Enlightenment ideals were further called into question by the strong influence of non-­Western forms and themes on Romantic writing. The result could certainly at times entail its own sort of idealization, with triumphalist narratives of modernity replaced by ones of a more postlapsarian sort, where an originary freedom or holism was conceived as lost and then redeemed in an imagined future (a phenomenon at times entailing what Renato Rosaldo would term “imperialist nostalgia”). Unless Western rationalism were to be rejected fully, however, the result of this wider lens was more a destabilization of value, and thereby, arguably, a return to the notion of modernity as a foundational problem. The sense here of two strains in the Romantic critique—­one that seeks an alternate, nonrationalist form of universal value, perhaps most often in the natural world, and one that sees such an option as having been permanently foreclosed—­was thematized some years ago, and still usefully, by Morse Peckham as a distinction between “positive” and “negative” Romanticism. The first of these, as he noted, has some overlaps with another eighteenth-­ century challenge to Enlightenment rationality that became more incorporated into the mainstream of the novel in English, likely because it entailed the same unmitigated optimism as what it replaced: sentimentalism. In its insistence on the significance of feeling, sentimentalism clearly shares some overlaps with a broader Romantic turn. It has also, at times, enabled a strong critique of the instrumentalizing logic of capitalism, which extends in a book like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the condemnation of chattel slavery. Finally, however, I would assert that although sentimental claims often look like strong repudiations of Lockean ones, they in many ways represent their flip side more than an alternative that can genuinely speak to the predicaments of modernity. What I mean is simply this: Lockean practical reason and sentimentalism represent two different attempts to deny those predicaments—­the absence of given meaning, the problem of the liberated individual will, and the fault lines between individual will and a higher Will that result—­by asserting, each in its own way, a form of “having it all.” Lockeanism does this by mostly evading the issue of a greater Will altogether, and sticking simply to the particular instance (hence, its overlaps with pragmatism); or it remains confident that everyone can get along simply by staying out of each other’s way and pursuing their own interests. Sentimentalism is predicated on ideas like Rousseau’s that all the Augustinian dilemmas are simply the result of corruption by civilization, a formula Stowe’s evangelicalism frames in theological terms. It thus reinstates a higher Will of either God or nature that is explicitly opposed to those of the state or society—­one with which the liberated individual will

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simply be happy pleasurably to merge. Finally, the entire category of will, deprived of its defining tension, recedes in both Locke and sentimentalism alike, as chapter 1 discusses in more detail.61 As noted earlier, it gives way to the more easily universalizable categories of reason, on the one hand, and, on the other, feeling. Sentimentalism has a strong presence in nineteenth-­century American writing, but, with respect to the era’s best-­known novels in particular, it cannot help but appear in hindsight as a means of managing rather than fully grappling with not only the broader dilemmas of modernity mentioned above, but, in particular, the problem posed by Black slavery and its aftermath. These aims, indeed, conjoin. Thus, Huck Finn’s raft, unlike any site within a society portrayed again and again as given over to the will to power, is the place where “everybody [can] be satisfied, and feel right and kind toward the others” (177–­78), a dream of the perfect merger of freedom and morality that is also a dream—­as Leslie Fiedler long ago pointed out in his work on Twain, Cooper, and others—­of the perfect, innocently eroticized merger of races. In Stowe, the “romantic racialist” conception of Tom as emissary of a future great civilization in Africa based on love enables the transportation of the novel’s surviving Black characters to Liberia to look like a twinned historical and divine fulfillment rather than a means of dodging the issues at hand.62 The idealizations of liberty-­as-­love that these books put forward have long appeared as their most memorable features, despite the fact that, in each case, other, more conflictual elements clearly push against them.63 Indeed, we might note that at least one of Fiedler’s examples, the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby-­Dick, has outlived its earlier liberal context to become an emblem of a contemporary left utopianism not devoid of its own sentimental features (as chapter 3 discusses in more detail). Yet Melville’s novel, I would argue, is finally an instance less of the sentimental-­adjacent “positive Romanticism” that the books cited above share with Emerson and others and more one of the “negative” sort that, as Peckham describes in his distinction between the two, “refus[es] to accept any consolation for the irresolvable tension of human existence” (Behavior 31). Here the alienated subject—­whether in the form of Ahab, or even Ishmael himself—­cannot simply be identified with as an alternate site of value, but represents, rather, value coming into question. This is, I would argue, why it is so crucial to hold on to Richard Chase’s conception of the American “romance-­novel”: these books do not turn to romance as an antidote to realism, but are meaningfully torn between the two as alternate frameworks for making sense out of the world. We see this in Moby-­Dick, but also in other books throughout this study, from

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James’s The Ambassadors through Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, and, in all cases, this fundamental conflict inflects their discussion in the study that follows. Here, then, we are back to where we began: the novel must be understood as caught perennially between realism and romance, as in the discussions cited earlier of Don Quixote—­where, as we saw, the will stood for this foot in both realms. I suggested earlier that Trilling’s arguments about the significance of will to the novel were also ways of expressing its ambivalence in this sense; it is unsurprising, then, that he, like Chase, finally turns to Henry James’s discussion of realism and romance to theorize it.64 There, in the preface to his early novel The American, James famously defines the two modes as well-­nigh Kantian antitheses—­the real as “the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later,” and romance as those that “reach us only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and our desire”—­and yet insists that the greatest novelists (here Scott, Balzac, Zola) are those who have never quite fully “deflected” to one or the other of what he finally defines less as epistemological poles than as axiological ones, as systems of “value” (Art 279). It is striking to note how much this account resembles that of the Lukács of The Historical Novel, for whom it is Scott’s “objectivity” as a novelist (his Weberian Wertfreiheit, we might say) that enables him to portray “the true poetry of the past,” because he can both affirm realism’s present while acknowledging “the endless field of ruin, wrecked existences, wrecked or wasted heroic, human endeavour, broken social formulations, etc., which were the necessary pre-­conditions of the end result” (54, 58).65 Lukács’s account has the particularly salutary effect of reminding us how often—­certainly in Moby-­ Dick, as we will see in chapter 3—­the contest between realism and romance as systems of value enables the novel to think historically about modernization as both progress and irreparable, often violent loss.66 Do such dualist accounts have any purchase, however, at the present time, an era in critical (or “postcritical”) thought often defined as explicitly “monist” in character?67 Its guiding precepts, as we will see, entail a rejection of the distinction between the natural and normative that generates the two trajectories of the will—­along with a denial of the distinction between realism and romance, either by jettisoning the latter altogether (in favor of a resolute “realism”) or, as I have argued elsewhere, by collapsing the difference between the two terms, rendering the real as romance, and thereby allowing the individual to merge seamlessly with a greater totality once more.68 As I suggested earlier, these two strategies have respective affinities with the two modes of thought that superseded the Augustinian account of the individual during the eighteenth century—­with, that is, the Lockean emphasis on a will

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straightforwardly fulfilling itself as practical reason, or with the sentimental injunction to surrender will altogether in favor of a feelingful merger with a larger whole.69 These solutions to the problem of the individual simply appear in a more (apparently) nonmoral register, as habit or affect. Their effect, however, is the same—­to solve the modernity problem by insisting that the dualities are all false ones. Most notably, as we saw Trilling, Jonas, and Arendt argue with respect to earlier instantiations of these arguments, they avoid the split between individual and greater will by envisioning that the individual’s dissolution simply paves the way to a radicalized freedom. And yet, as we’ll now see, these may not avoid the problems of will so much as evade them—­ particularly in the second case, where the purportedly discarded will has a tendency to return. Unsurprisingly, then, attempts to apply these ideas to the novel tend to find the dualisms we have just described once again taking up their place as defining features of the form. Theoretical (from Locke and Sentimentalism to Pragmatism and Affect—­and an Alternative to Both) the nove l’s dualism in a “monist” er a If the concept of “will” began to fade from the scholarly lexicon in 1900, we might say it remains alive and well in our contemporary popular culture in a form that paradoxically points toward the rationale for its obsolescence within more serious thought. In the pop-­psychology book Willpower (2012), that is, the conflicts central to the will’s history simply become no conflict at all: rather, the book follows the logic of the now-­notorious “marshmallow test” to make clear that the virtues of self-­control lie in its ability to ensure the procurement of more goodies down the line.70 In such formulations, no tension exists between self-­fulfillment and any brake on such that might acknowledge the competing needs of others; the modern individual is encouraged, like the business raising its profits by declaring moral sentiments, to “have it all.” With its Fitbits and other techne of the “quantified self,” this neoliberal modality thus appears as the latest incarnation of the Lockean will we saw earlier. Yet what, then, of its sentimental counterpart, in which morality and power make a whole via the individual will’s purely pleasurable merger with a greater totality? This mode, evident in various strands of what might be termed the “relational” criticism of the present day (which receives more attention in chapter 4), has, I would argue, become a kind of default within contemporary literary and cultural studies—­indeed, one often understood as a reaction against the neoliberal version, which is always presumed to be

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what any invocation of “individual” or “will” necessarily amounts to. This opposition not only makes it impossible to consider alternate, nonidealized construals of either individuality or group life. It further occludes what the Lockean and relational approaches in fact have in common with one another (which is why, as chapter 1 shows in more detail, it is no accident both emerge in the eighteenth century as solutions to the Augustinian dilemmas of will). Neither can meaningfully engage with genuine differences of value, nor the conflicts these engender—­in the pragmatic case, because all encounters are understood as transactional, and in the relational one, due to its construal of all blurring of boundaries between entities as a necessarily positive good.71 We might, however, consider that the latter perspective, often presented as an insurgent one, is in fact every bit as pervasive in the wider culture as the much-­maligned notion of individuality. As Dierdra Reber points out, the constant insistence that the disembodied individual is culturally valorized itself no longer makes sense in a crowdsourcing-­obsessed era that often loudly proclaims the merits of an idealized collective agent—­as in the title of a book she cites, We Are Smarter than Me.72 And as Reber further notes, this post-­ individual entity is frequently characterized in highly somatized terms, as a kind of “superorganism.” Here we arrive at one of the most striking features of the neoliberal and relational—­or Lockean and sentimental—­formations: their joint interest in conceiving a more reliable agency through recourse to embodiment. Hence, just as the first “modernity problem,” of the noncoincidence of individual and greater will, is solved by such theories, so is the second, which saw critics worried about the fate of human willing in an era of neuroscientific accounts of human behavior. Consider, for example, two self-­help books drawing on recent psychological research, each of which reorients the problem of freedom as a matter of rewiring the brain. (Let me be as clear as possible here: the point is not to discount the individual stories told in these volumes, which are often eye-­ opening, but to engage critically with the broader assumptions that frame them.) Norman Doidge’s 2007 volume The Brain That Changes Itself updates the Lockean construal of the “human agent . . . able to remake himself by methodical and disciplined action” with tales of neuroplasticity: individuals—­or brains—­bettering themselves through the deliberate cultivation, via habit change, of new neuronal pathways.73 More recently, Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind takes the sentimental (or “positive-­Romantic”) route, recommending not the dogged inculcation of new routines but the escape from the imprisoning ego into a Romantic worldedness and sensitivity made possible by hallucinogens.

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While some humanists have expressed interest in the legitimately intriguing field of neuroplasticity, one also sees a fair amount of suspicion of some of its more sweeping claims—­again, often by linking these to neoliberal ideals of self-­making.74 Much more widespread within humanities departments has been the sentimental alternative, as evidenced within many (though certainly not all) instantiations of new materialism, affect theory, and theories of potentiality and of the Event. Such theories typically understand themselves as means of moving beyond the individual will to contact with a wider and prerational realm understood to outstrip it. Just as we saw Trilling argue with respect to the theory and art of the 1960s, with its similar hope to “dispense with ego-­values,” however, the removal of human agency from the scene can have the paradoxical effect of aggrandizing the will in the name of denying its role. This is made possible by the human agent’s merger with a larger totality, whose far greater and less malady-­ridden powers of action it gratefully assumes. I am not the first to note the curious way in which affect theory—­which displaces feeling away from the individual subject toward that subject’s merger with a greater collectivity and the ambient environment—­conceives of a turn to biology as motivating a liberatory politics. Drawing on the incisive critique made by Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard, Ruth Leys notes that affect theorists tend to construe the body in “dynamic, energistic, nondeterministic terms that emphasize its unpredictable and potentially emancipatory qualities” (“Turn” 441). In Brian Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect,” “will and consciousness” are described as “subtractive”—­“limitative, derived functions which reduce a complexity too rich to be functionally expressed” (90). We begin to see here just how the realm of affect—­or, in the new materialism of Jane Bennett, that of the posthuman “assemblage”—­becomes the site of a “richer” potentiality, to use another key term for these writings, than that of the mere willing subject. On the one hand, as we see in Bennett, the assemblage is able to harness an efficacy unthinkable to any of its mere constituents: in her words, “bodies enhance their power in or as a heterogeneous assemblage” (23, emphasis mine).75 On the other, as is evident in Massumi’s title “The Autonomy of Affect,” the “impersonal” realm turns out to be the true bearer of the “autonomy” that, in a writer like Kant (as I discuss in chapter 1), proved to be so elusive a human achievement. We might, then, go a step farther and suggest that, given the dilemmas of will we have just been discussing, it may be in part because of that achievement’s elusiveness that these alternatives prove so enticing. Unlike most writing in these areas, Bennett admirably takes a moment to note that, in fact, in the writers most associated with the concept of will—­that is, Kant and

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Augustine—­“human agency appears as a vexed concept,” as will turns out to be divided against itself (28–­29). This very vexedness, however, is what the truncated notion of agency as mere motiveless action, which Bennett borrows from Bruno Latour’s actor-­network ­theory, circumvents (9).76 As Sianne Ngai has argued, network aesthetics, or what I am here calling relational ones, have two significant lacunae: their difficulty conceiving of “negative relations,” on the one hand, and, on the other, what we might term their allergy to narrative as such, in preference for a “ceaseless process” taking place in an extended present tense (“Network Aesthetics” 384, 369).77 As we will shortly see, the latter of these, the preference for synchrony and “activity without development,” may relate to why some of the most serious attempts to extend the posthuman turn to the theory of the novel in fact end up reintroducing the dualisms earlier discussed (391). The issue of negative relations, however—­that, as Ngai puts it, “networks can help us schematize extremely dense and complicated social connections, but not the most basic rupture or gap”—­would seem to have much to do with these theories’ desire to evade the disjunctures defining of willing both without and within (384). Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind demonstrates precisely this problem, as well as its enthusiastic uptake in cultural discourse beyond the precincts of academic theory.78 Its sweeping brief for psilocybin, in itself a legitimately fascinating area of psychiatric research, derives from work in neuroscience showing how the drugs decrease brain activity in an area called “the default mode network,” said to be most active during times of pure thinking without interaction with the world. When this decrease occurs, subjects report an experience of “ego dissolution,” a return to a more childlike state, in which “the usual boundaries . . . between self and world, subject and object, all melt away” (304–­5). Yet are matters really so simple, even amid the brain discourse here? Pollan notes that some neuroscientists call the default mode network “the me network,” for its association with the bounded adult ego (304). And yet, as he notes, it is also associated with the imagination (daydreaming) as well as, notably, with “higher-­order ‘metacognitive’ processes such as self-­ reflection, mental time travel . . . moral reasoning, and ‘theory of mind’—­the ability to attribute mental states to others, as when we try to imagine ‘what it is like’ to be someone else” (302). None of this is followed up on—­perhaps because it comports so poorly with the sense here of a choice between a solipsistic “me network” and a state of mental freedom predicated on a boundless relationality. In this brief moment, however, we glimpse what such an opposition leaves out: the recognition of a self that differs from that of others, which is also, of course, an acknowledgment of those others in their specificity. For

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this reason, perhaps the most consistently powerful critiques lodged against the tendencies here described have been those made from the position of philosophical normativity, for which individual autonomy derives its dignity from its recognition of the distinct claims made by other persons—­and for which, notably, the process of adjudicating those claims in relation to one another can never entail recourse to nature, but only to agreed-­upon norms. Put otherwise, one may construe the process of maturation as one in which the individual ego gradually withdraws (lamentably) from its holistic relation to its environing world, as in the affect theory discussed above, or one may understand that same process as one in which the individual comes to acknowledge (laudably) that its desires and those of others differ, in ways that may require negotiation. Robert Pippin’s work on the “modernity problem,” the source of this introduction’s overall framing, is exemplary of this way of making the argument, which represents a serious attempt at co-­articulating will and Will. Drawing on Hegel’s writings, it works against both the Lockean mode (where all is “merely instrumental”) and the relational one of Latour and others (where “practices just go on” and we merely “catalo[g] the interrelations” among various “dispositions,” “responses,” etc.) in favor of emphasizing the human reflective capacity to “detach” from certain “ongoing commitments and desires” and “reattach” to others based on “some deliberation about whether [one] ought to do so” (Idealism 425, 378, 15). Only through such a model, Pippin suggests, can we conceive of someone choosing to limit their personal freedom on behalf of what is recognized to be a higher end. (Indeed, the very modernity of such a scenario inheres in that end’s being taken up voluntarily rather than simply imposed.) The turn to Hegel to make such arguments is not surprising, given his importance to the turn in nineteenth-­century philosophy toward narrative articulations of the path toward greater understanding. The interesting effect of this turn—­itself related to the same developmental focus that generates the novelistic bildungsroman—­is that the wayward will of Lukács’s “problematic individual” itself becomes incorporated into the philosophical system dedicated to its overcoming. Hence, in an inverse of Hegel’s system—­in which a mature existence in the world entails closing the gap between that will and the responsibilities it resists—­Schopenhauer’s philosophy posits that the will’s torments can be left behind only by rejecting worldliness altogether. What both end up reaffirming, as a result, is that the individual remains a problem, one that can only ever be socially or mystically transcended. Yet the novel—­as Trilling, Smith, and the other critics cited earlier saw—­has seen greater joyousness as well as a dilemma in this problem. The novel,

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this project argues, thus envisions a more enduring dialectic between will and its others, in part because it is in many ways split between the Hegelian and Schopenhauerian conceptions themselves. It produces, that is, the never-­simply-­closeable gap between the ordinary everyday of collective life and shared institutions, on the one hand, and the unimpeachable seriousness of “that which we never can directly know, that which reaches us only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and our desire,” in Henry James’s words—­the subject matter of important formulations of the modernity problem closer to James’s own era, from William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents to Weber’s “Scholarship as a Vocation.” Finally, the novel’s resistance to our contemporary hopes of transcending human will can explain why two major attempts to introduce the recent “impersonal” or “affective” turn to novel theory end up reintroducing the more dualist framework the present project details. This is the case even though, at the outset, their accounts would appear to share many of the characteristics of that turn as described here. Thus, in both Fredric Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism and Jacques Rancière’s The Lost Thread, the time of affect (in Jameson) or of the nonhuman (in Rancière) appears as an extended present tense, one that acts against linear, narrative time, defined as that of “the great phases of human life and the essential relationships between human beings” (“Wandering” 2). Moreover, while this progressive temporality had once entailed, at least back with Ian Watt, a new open-­endedness—­the modern protagonist’s ability to make of himself what he would—­Jameson and Rancière appear very much of our moment in treating it, rather, as a kind of inexorability, what Rancière calls “the tyranny of the plot” (3), to be contrasted with the now more familiar association of its impersonal counterpart, rather, with a kind of liberation. Yet what is striking, then, is that this perspective is finally rejected, in favor of an argument for a more irreducible dialectics structuring the novel as a form.79 Rancière arguably makes this claim with greatest force, through his account of Virginia Woolf. Woolf may appear, he writes, in the lyrical dailiness of Clarissa Dalloway, to render the “incessant shower of innumerable atoms” the newly burnished site of human salvation—­yet this, Rancière argues, is why it is crucial to introduce Septimus Smith (or, differently, the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse, where beloved characters marry and die in bracketed instants amid the slow indifference of the house’s physical decay). What Septimus brutally demonstrates is the impossibility of merely dwelling amid the impersonal as such and retaining one’s sanity. “For a moment,” Rancière writes (here on The Waves), “one can enjoy the peace of the

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‘sunless territory of non-­identity.’ But one cannot live on this territory”—­as Woolf herself knew too well. “One has to gather sensations in the form of a self and link words in the form of stories” (“Wandering” 13).80 And this means, for Rancière, that the dialectic cannot resolve itself: “life is doomed to be split between the kingdom of identity and the kingdom of non-­identity,” between two distinct revelations of the form of time (“Wandering” 13).81 In Jameson, by contrast, the emergence of affect—­the realm of nonidentity, the pure present of sensory life—­might appear to be more fully valorized, as in his startlingly enthusiastic recuperation of the naturalism of Émile Zola. In fact, however, Jameson’s construal of this realm turns out to comport little with those of the other affect theorists and other new materialists discussed above, for the striking reason that it is finally understood in terms he identifies as “existential” ones (Antinomies 43). Affect, that is, is here conceived as “the vehicle of my being-­in-­the-­world” as described by “Nietzsche and after him phenomenological philosophy” (43), and therefore it seems unsurprising to see this aspect given a fuller accounting in Jameson’s writing elsewhere on modernist style, which finally develops the idea of the impersonal dimension such that it becomes, notably, a rejection of both “subjectivity” and “physiology” alike (Antinomies 69). As Jameson explains, in a discussion of Proust, he does not wish to endorse “the stereotype of Proust’s irrationalism, his substitution of sheer feeling and intuition for rational deliberation and choice” (Modernist 186). The point, rather, is that involuntary memory as Proust thematizes it—­not as a helpless surrender to what emerges unbidden from the flux of affect, but, rather, as its grasping, so as to form a Benjaminian monad fusing present and past—­refuses this opposition: What is energizing in Proust is indeed not some mystical inward spiral into the fascination of one’s own past . . . [but] the liberation of Goethean forces of praxis and sheer activity, which, hobbled by a will-­power busy struggling against its own inclinations, is able by shaking off that inner tension to find (“for the first time”) a full identification with its own project. (Modernist 186)

Once again, then, we might say, “two paths for the novel” appear, albeit of a different kind. For rather than telling the story we saw at the outset of this introduction, in which Ortega, Trilling, and others bemoaned the novel’s supersession by a more scientistic perspective, both Jameson and Rancière conceive of a dialectic between these views as internal to novelistic realism itself. If Rancière’s account thus affirms will in the novel as the marker of an irreducible dualism between the human and the impersonal, in Jameson, will as Sartrean “intentionality” appears at the flickering, utopian moment of their crossroads.

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the question of freedom as t h e q u e s t i o n o f va l u e At this juncture, then, we might ask, What to make of this reemergence of the existential—­which formed, in multiple ways, Trilling’s and Arendt’s context in their returns to the will as well? One might see existentialism as representing the last moment in which something akin to the will as I am defining it here had critical force. We think of structuralism and poststructuralism surmounting it in the 1960s, just as Robert Scholes describes in the essay Trilling’s “Art, Will, and Necessity” critiques, which is actually remarkably congruent with the present moment in its sense of impersonality as love. And yet, has this opposition been overblown, as Jameson’s own fealty to both Lacan and Sartre suggests? Poststructuralism emerged just as much out of a dialogue with existential phenomenology, out of the same tradition that led Paul Ricoeur in the 1960s to write a three-­volume study of the will. Or consider the neovitalism of Georges Canguilhem, discussed in more detail in chapter 2. Foucault famously insisted that Canguilhem had to be read alongside Lacan, not Sartre, that his was a philosophy not of “meaning, subject, and the experienced thing,” but, rather, of “error, concept, and the living being” (24). The old association between the “subject” and fullness is operative here, rendering it impossible to see the clear existential dimensions of Canguilhem’s philosophy of life. To construe life, indeed, in terms of “error”—­and, in Canguilhem just as in the original medical vitalists, both “error” and care—­ might well be said to conceive it in terms of a malady-­ridden will.82 Strikingly, one of the same doctors who in recent decades strongly pushed for a model of mental illness as a “broken brain” now argues that today’s neurological psychiatry might benefit most from a return to phenomenology.83 Another psychiatrist working on bipolar disorder concurs, advocating for an “existential psychotherapy” that would begin by “engag[ing] with the patient as a person (his ‘being-­in-­the-­world’)” rather than rendering a diagnosis based on the symptom categories of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (Ghaemi 122). Explicitly invoking figures like Karl Jaspers, such writings go so far as to suggest that certain depressive states may represent forms of excessive “realism” about existential dilemmas rather than the false perceptions more typically ascribed to the mentally ill.84 Perhaps relatedly, then, it is possible to discern an unthematized existentialism marking a resurgence of thought on the human in the era of the posthuman, in its engagement with climate crisis—­underscoring our absurd minuteness amid the terrifying vastness of the predicament we have produced for ourselves.85 Yet this diminishment of our status does not obviate

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but generates the need to act that our situation demands—­along with the fact that, inescapably, a significant part of what we wish to salvage is human existence. Finally and most extensively, as discussed in more detail in chapter 6—­ focusing on the first widespread emergence of the African American novel at the end of the nineteenth century, a development with great significance for the century to follow—­Black and Africana philosophy and criticism, always distinctly writing from a situation of affirming humanity in the face of precarity, has for a considerable stretch of time been unabashedly engaged with existential themes. At times, these are marked explicitly, as in Lewis Gordon’s arguments for a Black existential tradition, or Paul Gilroy’s engagements with Sartre, Arendt, and Fanon.86 More often, they resonate in the continued assertion of the human in terms that complicate rather than merely reiterate those of the idealized, and historically so often exclusionary, “rational modern subject”—­as preeminently in Sylvia Wynter’s extended “Ceremony Found” project, but also in the work of literary critics such as Lloyd Pratt, Jesse McCarthy, and Christopher Freeburg. Such endeavors clearly resonate with the broader wave of antiracist thought that has begun to transform the landscape of scholarly work and far beyond. In their engagement with the human, however, they also occupy a distinctive place within that discourse. As we saw at the outset of this introduction, a project like Wynter’s explicitly understands itself, like the lengthier tradition we have been considering, as a critique of modern premises from within.87 That means she retains the sense, so particularly crucial to the existentialist project, of the absence of any predetermined framework giving the modern person her moorings. A similar standpoint has led scholars from Gordon to Hortense Spillers to question what has been termed the “Afro-­ pessimist” perspective; as Gordon writes, “An ironic dimension of pessimism is that it is the other side of optimism” in that both abrogate the question of value to an inexorable unfolding (3). Gordon and Spillers thus both decry the shift in emphasis from Black subjects to “black bodies,” noting the way this gesture obscures both the value-­judging individual and, in Spillers in particular, that individual’s necessarily divided selfhood.88 In neither does such discourse impede attention to structural inequality and what modern progress has failed, abysmally, to accomplish. It is simply offered in a spirit aware that such critiques will not keep us from having to confront the challenges of a world without foundations. That the recognition of value conflict provides the necessary underpinning for a moment of meaningful choice—­and action—­represents the signal argument of Max Weber’s famous essay on scholarship as a vocation. The

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teacher stands aloof from value, he writes, not due to his Olympian vantage, but as a means both of making value itself appear as subject and as an acknowledgment that “the various value spheres of the world stand in irreconcilable conflict with each other’ ” (25). As Jameson eloquently expresses it in his early essay on Weber, the pluralism suggested by Weber’s (and Nietzsche’s) suspension of all values is as far from that tolerant coexistence ritually invoked by modern liberal apologists as was Wertfreiheit itself from the dominant fetish of positivistic objectivity. Pluralism for Weber meant pantheism, not peaceful coexistence but a Homeric battlefield, in which “different gods struggle with one another, now and for all times to come.” (“Vanishing” 11)

This fact, then, as figured by the two domains of will (moral and vitalistic), is also what makes space for willing as action, which Weber himself expresses in the language of each domain, respectively: “it is necessary to make a decisive choice,” and each can do so if he “finds and obeys the demon who holds the fibers of his very life” (From 152, 156). (Like Trilling, Weber was not averse to talk of demons;89 the “experience of the irrationality of the world,” which produced religion’s dualisms, was for him also that of political life, entailing as it did necessary “contracts with diabolical powers” [From 123].) For Arendt, indeed, it was the fact that only means could be deliberated, and not ends—­for all human beings were assumed agreed on the latter: health and happiness—­that made the Greek discussion of choice not, in her final analysis, worthy of her own sense of freedom (Life 62). That possibility, strange as it seemed, arose only in the recognition of its precarity, in the Pauline dilemma that invented will as a problem in the same act as inventing the will.

1

Before and After the Novel: Abyssal Modernity and the Interior Life of the Will It is now perhaps clear why adultery should be the main . . . topic for the bourgeois novel. For . . . the action of adultery portends the possible breakdown of all the mediations on which society itself depends, and demonstrates the latent impossibility of participating in the interrelated patterns that comprise its structure. t o n y t a n n e r , Adultery in the Novel (17) Augustinus: You may not realise how wearisome the way is. Franciscus: Now my fears are growing. Why do you say it is so wearisome? Augustinus: Because the one word “desire” implies so many things. p e t r a r c h , My Secret Book (14–­1 5) O! no one knows the terrors of those days but myself. j o h n b u n y a n , Grace Abounding (315)

The Strange Problem of Too Much Interiority Within earlier nineteenth-­century American literature, The Scarlet Letter holds a distinctive place: it is, at first blush, the only book that resembles a European novel. Early reviewers certainly believed as much, routinely classing Hawthorne’s work among that of the “French romancers” (Scarlet 270). George Sand, in particular, came more than once to mind (239, 241). Responses divided, however, on whether the New England writer wished to join such company (“Is the French era actually begun in our literature?” one reader moaned) or, by trespassing on its terrain, to rebuke its “libertinism . . . of the brain” (259, 241). Such questions seemed unavoidable, given Hawthorne’s decision to center his 1850 novel on what Tony Tanner once termed “the central subject” of nineteenth-­century European fiction: a woman’s transgression of her marriage vow (15). Adultery, for Tanner and others, raises in a particularly condensed way the question many have seen structuring the novel as a modern genre: what relation obtains between the protagonist’s founding freedom and the demands of social, no less than literary, form?1 Given that this question is nearly always asked within the context of Euro­ pean writing, however, far fewer have posed another: Why, if Nathaniel Haw­ thorne in 1850 wished to render a contribution to the novel at its most unre-

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pentingly “modern,” did he decide to set his story not in his own tumultuous present—­a time of uprisings abroad and a growing antislavery ferment at home—­ but, rather, in the context of, of all things, seventeenth-­century Puritanism? Such a question might seem destined to call forth in response, if not the hoariest construal of the Pilgrims’ voyage as the earliest stirrings of American liberty, then at least the more palatable countervision of Hester Prynne as a woman before her time, her quest for self-­definition merely sharpened by coming up against a premodern theocracy. Since both of these options are equally sure what that burgeoning freedom entails, however, they cannot provide our answer here. Rather, I will be arguing, it is the specific version of individualism born out of the revived Augustinianism so influential upon Puritanism and other radical sects that ends up taking nineteenth-­century liberalism far beyond its own comfortable limits. The “individual” that emerged in that earlier context, in other words, was a far more extreme, and hence enduringly problematic, entity than the version commonly thought to populate the novel in its nineteenth-­century heyday, a time by which entire social orders, in the US in particular, conceived their purpose as that of supporting citizens’ path to self-­fulfillment—­even if we now recognize just how very many remained left out of that project. The novel as a form, with its affirmation of everyday life, its democratic makeup, its open-­ended structure, and, above all, its careful attention to the workings of individual minds, has long been conceived as the literary analogue to such investments. “As Ian Watt has shown,” writes Thomas Pavel in his recent, sweeping study of the novel’s history, modern developments from the rise of commercial society to the spread of political liberty all helped to render each individual’s “inner life so precious, so interesting,” that, as in Richardson’s story of a servant girl, Pamela, “everything she sees, hears, or experiences deserves to be written down and considered carefully” (122, 128). Indeed, that the novel grants new significance to subjective interiority is a truism so entrenched that at present, in a critical era far more skeptical about the individual as such, all that seems left to do is to treat it with more detachment as a historical fabrication (the eighteenth-­century “invention of inwardness” as elaborated by Deidre Lynch) or put forward reminders of its incomplete reach (as in Jonathan Kramnick’s work on the novel and philosophies of action). To insist on interiority’s constructed nature, however, need not necessarily trouble the most familiar assumptions about it as a feature of novelistic discourse: its centrality to readerly enjoyment, and, often, to our understanding of what it means for something to be a novel at all (as opposed to, say, metafiction, or the often-­dismissed genre fiction).

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What if, however, a work were to pressure the boundaries of the novel not by refusing the by now much-­maligned category of interiority, but by hyperbolizing it?2 What Sianne Ngai calls the “tone” of this particular feature of fiction changes if we refuse to understand its emergence simply in the mode of a triumphant assertion of those qualities typically deemed central to the modern individual (reason, sentiment, self-­determination) (Ugly Feelings 41). Consider Hawthorne. “There is a certain ghastliness” about The Scarlet Letter, one reader complained, a feature traceable to not only its somberness but its “exclusively subjective character” (Scarlet 271). This emerged as a surprisingly common thread within early critiques: to find the book’s greatest “fault” lying in “the almost morbid intensity with which the characters are realized” (Scarlet 240). Our writer had become “too painfully anatomical” in his characterizations, many agreed, wielding his writerly “scalpel” to generate “tables of spiritual statistics” of “the natural history of the human mind” (Scarlet 240, 244, 264). How was it that the very strategy we think of as most reliably humanizing fictional characters here had the opposing result? Answering this requires us to recognize how our sense of characters as “moral and accountable beings” might have been threatened in Hawthorne, as such readers caviled, not by the revelation of their social or material construction, but, rather, by a different and apparently more unsettling conception of interiority itself (Scarlet 250). This less familiar interiority, as much a threat as a support to the integrated self, can begin to explain, this chapter argues, Hawthorne’s relocation of the modern novel in the seventeenth century. As we will see, the late 1600s offered distinct resources for that project in its radical Protestant writings in England and France alike. In these works, modernity’s promises of self-­ determination appeared in forms so baroquely convoluted that later generations—­in particular, those that would later solidify what we now take to be modern personhood, along with the modern novel—­would begin to relegate them to the realm of pathology. The possibility rejected was that these texts laid bare perverse possibilities at the core of modern freedom itself. Such suggestions, however, remained to haunt the margins of the realist novel, in the form of the gothic writing that is often understood to have influenced Hawthorne’s techniques. Indeed, the gothic itself, we shall see, requires the seventeenth-­century background we are here tracing in order for its innovations to be fully understood. This chapter thus urges us to consider the Puritan era neither as scholars of British literature typically depict it—­as that which its successors must leave behind in order to become fully “modern”—­nor, certainly, in the now critiqued older Americanist sense as the purported cradle of our cherished

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independence, but, as, rather, the site of a peculiarly intensified exploration of modernity’s meanings for the individual subject that those later eras, both understandably and problematically, must in fact manage and disavow. The Puritan fascination, derived from Augustine, with the category of human will serves as a fulcrum for such investigations, as for Hawthorne’s as well—­another feature noticed by early readers, who saw as his primary subject the “conflict of law and will,” a contest so “awful” it could threaten any writer’s “balance of mind” (Scarlet 265). In order to understand how it does so, however, we must move beyond familiar conceptions of will as simply the privileged attribute of the rational agent. Will, instead, becomes the site of the human confrontation with an unprecedented level of determinism, a radically alien cosmic order (or, better, lack thereof) that forms the oft-­neglected counterpart of modernity conceived as simply liberating for the human subject. In this context, that Hawthorne would choose to explore the significance of adultery within a context of Calvinist theologies of predestination begins to appear less strange than it might seem. Crucially, however, he does so during the nineteenth century. And as Tanner explains so well, what makes adultery the dangerously irresistible subject it seems to have been in that era has everything to do with the fact that the structure and law it violates is itself entirely a human creation, a contract (17). (The Puritans, in fact, were among the first to treat it as such.)3 For the desirous individual to flout that system thus pits one version of modern self-­ determination against another, thereby calling into question the premise that individualism can found rather than threaten social order—­and, for Tanner, novelistic order as well. Hence, in his account, adultery acts as “the gap, or silence, in the bourgeois novel that finally leads to its dissolution and displacement” by, in effect, modernism—­or what Tanner terms “postsocial fictional forms involving extreme states of physicality and/or linguicity (or Proustian solipsism)” (14, emphasis mine). This notion of the “postsocial” is crucial here; what both Tanner and, later, Franco Moretti are immensely helpful in recognizing is that when the nineteenth-­century bourgeois novel falls apart, what falls apart is very specifically a nexus in which individual and social are able to work in tandem to form a whole. This is why, crucially, in the aftermath of this collapse, we see not only the experiments in language, embodiment, or deindividualized collectivity that critics usually see as marking the subject’s exhaustion, but, alongside these, radicalizations of subjectivity itself (“Proustian solipsism”). What looks new, in the twentieth century, is the isolation of these sides. Thus, from Moretti’s perspective, when Georg Lukács in 1916 defines the novel form through the idea of “transcendental homelessness,” he reveals himself to be a

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product of his own modernist era. Only there, Moretti asserts, has the social as “ideal medium” for a narrative of “growth” (as in, say, Austen) given way to tales of “rootless heroes” adrift amid an “impersonal” world, one “thoroughly indifferent” to their development as individuals (231–­33). It’s an understandable argument: that one would portray the novel, as Lukács did, as “the epic of a world abandoned by God” only after Nietzsche’s famous pronouncements on the deity’s demise. Yet in fact, the present book insists, both Lukács and modernism might be said to return here to the modern novel’s seventeenth-­century beginnings, to a time prior to the consolidation the twentieth century will rend apart—­to what Leo Damrosch calls “the rootless adventurers of the picaresque, and the rootless pilgrims of the Puritan tradition,” “individuals who moved through society without ever being of it” (17). Moreover, the nineteenth-­century American novel, in part due to its frequent Puritan roots, had never simply left that alienated realm.4 The world “abandoned by God” is not, at first, a secular one; it is, more literally, that of the Deus absconditus, the withdrawing God of the Reformation defined by his unfathomable will, and thus, in his originary late-­medieval conception, the rationale for the very imaginability of a rift between ourselves and a larger, mysterious totality.5 The result, this chapter argues, is an infinitization of cosmos and individual alike—­one we tend to conceive only in the mode of human self-­ aggrandizement, but which in fact, as we began to see in the responses to Hawthorne, could, if turned inward, just as easily destabilize conceptions of what “human” meant at all. In sum, we deal here not with interiority as that charming substantiality that makes a Pamela “precious” but with the more unnerving development Nietzsche saw as key to a much earlier break between ancient and modern: “the internalization of man,” or the development of his “soul” as a strange involution of the “instinct for freedom,” “burning a will” into himself, an act inseparable from that of “turn[ing] himself into an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness” (Morals 523, 521). Thus, as we will see when we return later to The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne’s wildest transgressions, like Kant’s conception of free willing, are conceived as taking place not in the forest alongside her lover but in the realm of pure thought. As in Augustine’s Confessions and the Puritan life-­writings his work inspired, the “immeasurable sanctuary” within—­not only thought, but memory, that which makes narrative possible at all—­becomes the repository both of the ideal and of the most intractable forms of resistance to it (216). Most hauntingly, both in Hawthorne and in the gothic tradition that inspired him, we find something closer to what Nietzsche expresses, and which the figure of the will often served to indicate: the way that, on the one hand,

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the very quest for the ideal could bring transgressive passions forward, and, on the other, that transgression itself might become a strange pathway toward reencountering the ideal.6 As all this suggests, then, the story this chapter has to tell is a historically capacious one. We begin with the Puritans, but only so as to establish through them a lengthier Augustinian thread generating a double-­sided modernity, in which what Hans Blumenberg termed “human self-­assertion” can be thought only in relation to the revelation of a radically alien cosmos, both unprecedentedly open and unfathomable in its vastness.7 Ralph Ellison’s description, in his discussion of the novel, of modernity’s “awfully expanded world” speaks to both sides of this situation, its promise and its terrors (703). This genealogy will take us from the nominalists of the fourteenth century, and Petrarch’s dialogue with Augustine at the dawn of the Renaissance, through to the seven­ teenth-­century writings that would establish the significance of interiority and lay the groundwork for the early novel—­albeit by construing the inner self not as a safe harbor but as a threatening, if at times also fascinating, abyss. Hence, we will then see how the eighteenth century, drawing on writers like Locke and Shaftesbury, strove to manage that interiority in order to conceive it as the grounding for modern political and social life. And finally, then, we will be in a position to consider its reemergence in those later eighteenth-­century works through which we can, at last, understand Hawthorne’s novel: not only gothic fiction, but Kant’s moral philosophy, with its enduringly curious emphasis on interiority rather than action as the site of the will. The “Awfully Expanded World”: Seventeenth-­Century Selfhood and Its Precursors the double birth of determinism and will Consider, to begin with, a different account of the modern “discovery of consciousness,” that provided in two literary histories by Marshall Brown: What would be left of a person, these novels ask, if all human society were stripped away, all the expected regularity of cause and effect? They ask, in other words, what are people in themselves, when deprived of all the external supports that condition ordinary experience? What resources, if any, does the mind retain in its isolation? What is the nature of pure consciousness? (Gothic Text 12, emphasis mine)

“Absolute, pure consciousness,” he later concludes, “is the persona of madness” (Gothic Text 80).

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Strange claims, no doubt, to make about the eighteenth-­century novel, which has more familiarly been said to install a reassuringly interiorized subject and a modern social order simultaneously. On the one hand, the discrepancy may be explained by the fact that Brown’s subject here is the gothic novel, already a counter-­Enlightenment formation reacting against the narrowing of fiction to the world of everyday facts by writers like Fielding and Richardson. (He thus relates these ideas about consciousness to Kant’s “temptations toward transcendental speculation,” despite the philosopher’s own cordoning off of the noumenal realm [12].) Yet on the other, one might then still ask: whence this strange interiority at the limit? If it rejects the secularizing, world-­embracing tendencies of a burgeoning eighteenth-­century realism, might we not consider its roots in the earlier modes that realism is thought to reject? This chapter argues that the more radicalized interiority Brown discovers via the gothic can in fact be traced back to the seventeenth-­century Puritan milieu in which Hawthorne chooses to set his Scarlet Letter, and that to say so is to alter our understanding of what “modern subjectivity” looks like and means. We tend to assume that subjectivity’s basis in a confident choice of values for oneself—­an idea that may be either applauded or condemned as the basis of a self-­serving ethic, if not outright systems of domination. (In the case of some of modernity’s most expansive theorists, such as Sylvia Wynter, both positive and negative potentialities are affirmed.) Yet whether modernity’s groundlessness is seen to offer a hopeful opportunity or a predatory one, what often drops from the picture is the alienation at its core, that experience of “transcendental homelessness” that for Lukács defined the novel as a form (Theory 61). It’s this sense of cosmic abandonment, in both its liberating and its terrifying dimensions, that I want to argue Hawthorne rediscovered, surprisingly enough, by looking backward from his own more self-­assured era to the seventeenth century—­a time when the silence of an all-­powerful God could seem scarcely less unnerving than that of an empty universe. Here the gothic sensibility is born avant la lettre, with all of its terrors and its transgressive energies—­not simply as a reaction against Enlightenment, but as its occluded foundation. Of course, were one simply to emphasize the emergence of interiority, it would be familiar enough to suggest that the radical Protestant emphasis on self-­scrutiny before God, and the intensive autobiographical writing that resulted, influenced the individualizing turn more often attributed to the eighteenth-­century novel. Indeed, some have chosen to emphasize Puritan thematics at work, not only in the comparatively early works of Defoe, as discussed in the introduction, but in Richardson as well.8 Over time, however,

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even these arguments have been made with less and less frequency, such that studies of eighteenth-­century fiction and modern selfhood are now quite commonly written as if the Puritans had never existed.9 The result is that the “worldly” modality of eighteenth-­century writing, its commitment to both social and commercial interchange, which is assumed to be where “modernity” lies, is severed from the spiritual, which is assumed to be where it doesn’t.10 As we will see, such a dichotomy cannot speak to the overlaps between these realms; more specifically, opposing them renders it impossible to talk about the emergence of the gothic novel, of vitalism (subject of chapter 2), and of Romanticism (subject of chapter 3) during that same secularizing century. At one time, it was much more common to speak of a worldliness among the Puritans themselves—­the problem being only that the contours of that worldliness still derived wholly from what continued to be conceived as its more full-­fledged form in the century that followed. In many respects, of course, Puritanism did lay the groundwork for that century, and perhaps above all for the new respect given to the individual. As Michael Walzer puts it, while the “willful, omnipotent” Calvinist God could easily seem “without precedent in the history of tyranny,” that deity “also freed men from all sorts of alternative jurisdictions and authorities,” encouraging rebellion against these by ordinary working people in the name of freedom of conscience, and deploying modern political strategies from “free assembly” to “mass petition” in order to do so (152, 125).11 In Walzer’s account, the modern notion of social reform, even of revolution—­“destroying the established order and reconstructing society”—­ could be traced to the English Calvinists, in whom it appeared as inseparable from their spiritually motivated aim to reform themselves (what Foucault has called “the will to alterity” [“Political Spirituality” 128]).12 Indeed, in perhaps most productive and complex tension with the authoritarian, individual-­crushing dimension of Puritanism was the prompting that its emphasis on conscience, together with the abolition of oral confession, gave ordinary churchgoers to pay serious attention to their inner lives. In the words of Charles Lloyd Cohen, while “Puritans may have thought of themselves as sinkholes of corruption,” they were “sinkholes deserving extended discussion; it is hardly coincidental that a great number of locutions involving ‘self-­’ entered English during the first half of the seventeenth century” (20).13 During the century’s latter half, spiritual autobiographies began to flourish in both England and America. As a result, the mass public’s involvement in literary production both as readers and as writers grew to hitherto inconceivable levels, prompting Hobbes’s sneering comment: “After the Bible was translated into English, every man, nay every boy and wench, that could read English thought they spoke with God Almighty and understood what he

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said” (quoted in Damrosch 137). A work like John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, which went through six printings during its author’s lifetime, was “used up like a commodity . . . literally read to pieces” (Webber 23). Yet Bunyan was a tinker with only scant education, who had himself been drawn to Calvinism after reading Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety and Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven, books his wife brought with her when they married. Both Grace Abounding and the later Pilgrim’s Progress—­the first book the young Nathaniel Hawthorne read—­emerged out of periods when their author was imprisoned for itinerant preaching of his faith.14 Such works encouraged self-­examination as a means of contact with God; as many have noted, however, the practical result was a text characterized by an unprecedented level of attention both to individual specificity and to the details of the everyday.15 The argument that has been made for writings like Bunyan’s as protonovels has typically turned on not only such features but their narrative effects. These are twofold: since any ordinary experience could prove of great spiritual moment, the most mundane and even shameful passages making up the unregenerate life appear newly worthy of elaboration; and the self ’s seemingly endless vagaries emerge as a subject of legitimate “fascination” (Watt 75). As William Spengemann articulates the coordination of these elements, despite the apparent structure of the conversion narrative, Bunyan’s depiction of “an almost purely naturalistic world” enables the portrayal of a proto-­empiricist “mind arriving at its own conclusions through its own experiences” (45, 50)—­ thus, a confirmation of the sense that Puritanism, for many, offered a “new and exciting pattern for a significant and adventurous life” (Watkins 14). For many readers, Pilgrim’s Progress takes a further step toward transforming spiritual guide into novel by radicalizing these elements—­“self-­awareness,” on the one hand, and “experience,” on the other, gradually becoming the new epic of individual confronting world that we see in Lukács’s Theory of the Novel (Iser 28). This has looked, as in Watt, like a process of gradually increasing human freedom, and affirmation of human reality, at the expense of a preordained and otherworldly theological narrative. Yet do the thickening of the external world and the finer delineation of the human protagonist necessarily go hand in hand here? Or might we see, rather, in the move toward novelistic realism, a truncation of the latter innovation—­of a dangerously unmanageable interiority—­on the former’s behalf? Indeed, as Leo Damrosch writes in a telling aside, one is “almost” tempted to suggest that Bunyan is “pulled toward novelistic detail” precisely in order to evade the “dizzying abysses” opened up by the plumbing of the “inner life” (176). After all, while Bunyan’s fictional pilgrims do endure doubt and

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despair, they are hardly as “destabilized” as Grace Abounding revealed Bunyan himself repeatedly to have been, as we will later see in more detail (Pooley 81). The unavoidable suggestion here is that the novel as it matures does not increasingly privilege interiority but, rather, tames or resocializes it. What it abandons, Damrosch suggests, is “private idiosyncrasy,” of the kind expressed by the life of dreams (153). Put otherwise, we need to understand the way the portrayal of the private subject in Bunyan and others has appeared, to many observers, disturbing, in ways unaccounted for if such textual features appear merely as harbingers of modern subjectivity as we know it. As we began to see in the introduction in the case of Crusoe’s Lockean turn, eighteenth-­century writers, following Locke himself, will find it necessary to substitute a much less troubled conception of the individual for that which darkens these earlier writings. The end point of this process will lie in Bunyan’s reconception, by the end of the nineteenth century, as a pathological case.16 For the diarists themselves, it is worth recalling, “self ” represented the problem to be overcome, not the solution. Indeed, the difficulty with simply acceding to readings like those above—­these works as offering visions of a newly exciting life—­lies not only in their historical certainty about what was to come, but their bracketing of the fact that for quite a few readers, the new sense of interiority evident in spiritual autobiography is notable chiefly for its ability to generate a tone of unremitting anxiety. Hence, John Stachniewski’s The Persecutory Imagination argues strongly against the view of Puritan life-­writing as protonovelistic precisely by contrasting the former’s extensive dwelling on what one text calls “Trouble in Mind” to the relative circumscription of introspection by the time of Crusoe.17 Puritanism, for Stachniewski, needs to be recognized as “seeking the dissolution of independent selfhood” (70, emphasis mine); his inspiration lies in post–­World War II writings like Erich Fromm’s The Fear of Freedom, which includes Lutheranism and Calvinism among its examples of “authoritarian ideologies in modern history” (3). What has been extraordinarily difficult to conceive, then, is that the “modernity” of a text like Bunyan’s might actually go together with its “vibrating undertone of terror,” as one commentator describes the tone of Luther’s writing (Gillespie 157). If we recall where we began, however, with Marshall Brown on the sublime interiorities of the gothic, on the one hand, and Kant, on the other, it seems worth exploring the possibility that writings like Bun­ yan’s open the door to destabilizing potentialities within modern selfhood that continue as a subterranean thread alongside the more self-­assured voices of eighteenth-­century narrative. In an important sense, Stachniewski and the “autobiography as protonovel” readings he opposes are both right: written

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at moments of extreme instability both political and epistemological, works like Bunyan’s, no less than Luther’s, gain their intensity through their confrontation with unprecedented extremes of determinism and voluntarism—­ the impetus toward self-­making—­at one and the same time.18 The key lies in grasping how it is that these two conflicting ontological modes come forward simultaneously, such that “modernity” would much better be defined via the persistent tension between them. Put otherwise, Robert Pippin’s formulation of what he calls “modernism as a philosophical problem”—­how a person could at once “be the kind of object studied . . . by modern biology and physics,” be so “determined and dependent,” “yet also a subject, and free” (Modernism as a Philosophical Problem xvi)—­should be understood to begin as a theological dilemma considerably prior to its reformulation by Kant and his nineteenth-­century successors. How, then, did a radical determinism and an equally radical new voluntarism appear not such that one replaced the other, as in familiar accounts of medievalism’s wane and modernity’s rise, but, rather, in tandem? Here the concept of the will can play a crucial role, for it appears that intensified versions of both God’s will and that of human beings came forward as one. To an extent, this was already the case in Augustine, whose thought—­with its powerfully anxiety-­inducing sense of divine predestination and its strikingly “modern” attention to the mysteries of the self—­would exercise such a wide influence over the development of radical Protestantism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, anchoring the ideas not only of Luther himself but of Calvin; through the latter’s teachings, the English Puritans; and, later, the Jansenists in mid-­seventeenth-­century France. Yet the already arguably prominent tension in the Confessions between Augustine’s stern doctrine and his narrative emphasis on individual experience was magnified in these later incarnations of his ideas, thanks to intervening late medieval writers who focused their investigations on the category of the will. Despite the centering of the Confessions on the struggle within the individual will, Augustine had, crucially, not defined God’s power through that attribute; God was always seen as exemplary of reason, as would be true during the high medieval period for Aquinas. With the controversial later writings of William of Ockham and others, however, that began to change: now God’s very power lay in the fact that he acted according to nothing other than his divine will, the workings of which mere human beings were powerless to grasp. In such a situation, then, faith became split apart from rational judgment, to occupy a sphere of its own. This doctrine, developed in the Reformation as that of the Deus absconditus or “hidden God,” subjecting human lives to what could appear only as

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an absolute, terrifying contingency, could have intense psychological consequences for those who embraced it—­nowise excepting Luther and Calvin themselves, who each struggled with doubt and despair as they confronted what Calvin called an “abyss of sightless darkness” (Gerrish 280). Here one indeed encounters the extreme abjection of the individual Stachniewski and others have found in later works like Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. And yet it is crucial to recognize that, more broadly, Ockham’s innovations, gathered under the general rubric of “nominalism,” can also appear as portents of the modern worldview (as it would appear later in, for example, the political writings of Hobbes). In their rejection of universal concepts through which humans could gain access to the underlying order of reality, the nominalists insisted on the radical particularity of things (and of human individuals), a notion that paved the way for the empirical techniques of modern science. For Ockham, in one commentator’s words, “nothing exists except that which is individual” (Gilson 51). A “growing empiricism” and a “growing fideism,” or insistence on faith as revelation, thus in fact emerged hand in hand—­and, hence, the possibility for abjection in the face of God’s impassive majesty was matched by a new potential for human “self-­assertion,” in Blumenberg’s term, to gain knowledge about the natural world (Leff 291). For this reason, although it remains common enough to find more familiar narratives of progress such as Anthony Levi’s—­for whom Ockham embodies a “medieval” sense of absolute divine sovereignty that must yield in the Renaissance and Reformation to a “modern” affirmation of individual human autonomy—­a strikingly long-­lived countertradition of scholars has insisted that the roots of modernity be traced to Ockham’s nominalism itself. Notably, however, these have nearly all been highly critical accounts, for which a dangerously unfettered modern individualism may be traced to the original theological replacement of reason with will. Thus, for Michael Allen Gillespie, writing in The Theological Origins of Modernity, “in emphasizing the centrality of divine will, [the nominalists] also gave a new prominence to and justification of the human will. Humans were made in the image of God, and like God were principally willful rather than rational beings” (27–­28). The Promethean view of human freedom that resulted, for Gillespie as for other thinkers writing in a related vein, licenses modern scientific overreachings and, finally, a relativistic nihilism.19 This counterintuitive argument—­that a ramping up of God’s will could lead to a new faith in human will—­has also been made by stressing the nominalists’ dissolution of the Thomist synthesis that bound earthly and celestial spheres into a single, rationally organized, meaningful whole.20 The point is that the deity now appears so far removed from anything human reason can

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understand that he eventually becomes superfluous. The “hidden God” becomes an absent God, leaving a Descartes, who appears here as the ultimate modern individual, confronting a nature that appears as merely a complex machinery, fully open to human manipulation, by virtue of being drained of any deeper orderliness or significance.21 While the conservative version of this argument focuses on these dangers of the secular human will unbound, it shares more territory than one might expect with the Weberian variant more familiar within literary studies (and particularly work on the rise of the novel), which focuses in on the importance of these ideas to post-­ Reformation theology. In The Protestant Ethic, too, the chief historical result of the “unbridgeable gulf ” Calvinism sets between God and man is the soulless modern subject: the capitalist consumed by “worldly activity” (105, 112). Robert K. Merton then influentially extended Weber’s ideas to argue that the same Puritan embrace of “utilitarianism and empiricism” could explain the sect’s level of participation, via Puritan Royal Society members such as Bacon and Boyle, in bringing modern science into being (119). the double response of anxiety a n d s p e c u l at i o n Thus are a set of claims meant, by the nominalists, to shore up God’s utterly transcendent, self-­determining authority said to become, improbably enough, in their Protestant successors the foundation for a wholly secularized modernity marked by human domination over a bare, mechanistic nature. There is at once something very important about these claims and, I will be contending, a set of serious limits to them as well, with significant consequences for their typically jaundiced (though highly influential) view of the modern as such. Where these arguments fall short, I would assert, is in failing to stay true to their own precepts. Their power lies in the double-­sided portrait of the modern that they bring forward—­marked on one side by a new revelation of our determination by forces exceeding our control or understanding, on the other by unprecedented claims for human self-­determination. This is in fact as relevant a depiction of our situation after the discoveries of modern science as prior to these; indeed, it is arguably as relevant as ever in our present era of neuroscientific personhood. And yet rather than explore it as a genuine existential dilemma, such accounts tend to abandon their own sense of modernity as paradox by asserting, in effect, that the deterministic side merely falls away as the self-­asserting one triumphs. While the modernity of Puritanism forms my own interest here as well, it will be immediately evident that simply assimilating the Calvinist to the role

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of the confidently self-­aggrandizing modern knower and maker enables no way of addressing the terrors wrought by the Deus absconditus on progenitors of modern self-­writing from Petrarch through Pascal and Bunyan.22 Indeed, the new fascination with interiority evident in these writings can find little foothold here; that entire project is often presumed simply an invention of late eighteenth-­century Romanticism. As described by Merton, for example, the instrumentally driven Puritans supposedly eschewed “contemplation” or any sort of “curiosity” for its own sake—­an assertion that comports poorly with the seventeenth-­century explosion of works of self-­examination of which Bunyan’s provides such a striking example (121, 118). What is often missing from these accounts is sufficient attention to Augustine, whose writings would be rediscovered during the nominalist period, and who would influence the early modern efflorescence of life-­writing far more than Ockham and others. In Augustine, as we began to see, the especially stern sense of divine omnipotence familiar from Calvinism—­insisting on the utter depravity of human beings and the notion of “double predestination,” in which God decreed in advance not only to save some but, explicitly, that others would be damned—­appears alongside a more “personal and individual” understanding of faith than that found even in Aquinas (McGrath 99; Wilcox 232–­36).23 The result, then, was a paradoxical combination that did not divide Reformation thinkers from the Renaissance ones usually conceived as their worldly antitheses, but that, rather, inspired them both in turn.24 Put simply, we have tended to downplay the ways in which the very vastness of the new terrain of self and cosmos alike could generate, in these kinds of early modern writings, both unprecedented levels of intrigued speculation about one’s world and prospects and a terror at the abysses revealed.25 With respect to the scientific work so important to the later Renaissance, for example, one might affirm how “God of will” ideas in play there as well generated not simply confidence in human capabilities to map the cosmos but a sense of its disturbing strangeness. Indeed, without such a recognition, one can scarcely understand why, despite Descartes’s key role in the argument for modern science as human self-­aggrandizement, Cartesian thinkers actually balked at ideas such as the occult workings of gravity, or the notion of pure void, that implied a more radically inhuman totality. As the more Cartesian Leibniz put it in his famous debate with the Newtonian Samuel Clarke, “La volonté sans raison seroit le hazard des Epicuriens” (Will without reason would be the chance of the Epicureans); to accept a universe ruled by an utterly unharnessed God differed little from a turn to blind atomism (quoted in Blumenberg 150).26 What one really saw on display in these exchanges was a conflict between two distinct conceptions of modern science: the Cartesians’

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more mechanistic one and the Newtonians’ more contingent one, yet it was the latter, not the former, that found its roots in the nominalist conceptions of absolute divine sovereignty. The possibility of meditation on God’s infinite, brooding power and the intellectual adventure of modern science at one and the same time is perhaps most palpable in Pascal, who will so hauntingly follow up his mathematical speculations about the scale of human existence with the confession, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread” (66). And yet for some, particularly when exploring the infinite universe within as well as without, the cultivation of dread was itself the point. We might consider a particularly “frightening,” indeed nearly proto-­gothic treatise by Daniel Dyke, a fellow at Cambridge in the early 1600s, that achieved wide circulation from Pascal’s Jansenist France, to Pietist Germany, to Puritan En­ g­land (Stoeffler 74). Entitled The Mystery of Self-­Deceiving, Dyke’s book drew extensively on the writings of Calvin and Luther as well as Augustine’s Confessions to exhort, via diary-­keeping, a literal voyage to the depths of the soul, to “descend downe into this deep dungeon, and to launch out into this vast Ocean,” wherein lay all that men and women kept hidden even from themselves. Once descended to these murky realms, Dyke recommended no less than a self-­vivisection, using the “anatomizing knife of the word” to tear open the “veines of deceitfulnesse”—­a project as essential as its outcome appeared doubtful, given that such “veines” were simultaneously described as “infinite,” abundant with “blind corners,” and “secret turnings and windings” (Dyke 24, 6, in Schlaeger 109). Much like Pascal’s project of confronting the astronomical infinite, Dyke’s corollary venture into the wilds of the self—­like Bunyan’s and John Donne’s—­could thus easily produce anxieties, in the face of not simply the multitude of sins revealed but their maddeningly elusive nature. If one side of these texts tends toward a terrifyingly proliferative attempt at confronting either self or cosmos, however, another takes a more detached, “anthropological” approach. Improbably enough, the very features emphasized by the project of “anatomization”—­the analytic detail as well as the universal propensity toward “self-­deception”—­begin to make religious extremism shade into its opposite: a more secular and even cynically fascinated probing of the multifarious perversities of human beings. As Devon Hodges writes of the genre of the anatomy during this period, its “painful procedure for revealing truths seems to kill them” (6). A number of scholars have explored this tension via the apparent influence of Dyke’s work, in particular, on the “anatomie de tous les replis du coeur” in the 1665 Maximes of the Duke de La Rochefoucauld, published within five years of both Pascal’s Pensées

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and Bunyan’s Grace Abounding—­as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost (Clark, La Rochefoucauld 119).27 Here assertions on the unquenchable role of self-­love (amour-propre) in human affairs—­that, as he states at the outset, “What we take for virtues are often merely a collection of different acts and personal interests” (37)—­are tossed off with what can seem far greater breeziness, if not downright relish on the investigator’s part.28 Thus, strangely enough, does Puritanism beget a modernity quite opposed to that with which it is more commonly associated—­in effect, a perverse one. For Henry Clark, one might say that Dyke and the Jansenists had gone “so far in demonstrating the pervasiveness” of amour-propre “that they helped to establish its naturalness as well,” “an effect emphatically contrary to their intention” (93). The door was thus left open for a hyperbolization of these arguments—­a particularly “sweeping ‘unmasking of will’ ” on La Rochefoucauld’s part—­to secularize them entirely, by “clearing away all in [their] path, including the Christian virtues,” while “leaving a pregnant silence on the prospects for repentance and regeneration” (Clark 15). Affirming the capacity for the “hidden God” to melt away into the modern cosmos of mechanism, La Rochefoucauld’s writings thus appear to Clark and others closer in tone to those of naturalistic contemporaries like Hobbes (and even, later, given Nietzsche’s fondness for the Maxims, Paul Ricoeur’s “school of suspicion”) than to the Augustinian writings from which they derived (15).29 No wonder, then, the Maxims’ eventual influence on no less than Bernard Mandeville’s early eighteenth-­century libertine apologia The Fable of the Bees—­the genesis of which Adam Smith, in a later critique of Mandeville’s excesses, would place squarely in certain “popular ascetic doctrines” whose very rigors made the attempt at virtue appear too implausible an exercise to continue.30 For already in the earlier writings, as Clark points out, moralizing accounts of various vices coexist with the tendency simply to observe and enumerate these from a position of worldly detachment (23, 121). b u n ya n ’ s c u r i o s i t y a n d t h e b e g i n n i n g s of the novel Clearly, then, the emergent genre of the novel participates in both of these strands—­and readers would continue to find their juxtaposition unsettling, as witnessed by responses to Hawthorne’s anatomizations of the soul in The Scarlet Letter. Did the author’s minute mapping of the sinner’s tormented interiority indicate a moral aim or a fascinated indulgence in vice for its own sake?31 Of course, the complexity in Hawthorne in particular was that this very question was itself often his theme, as figures from Scarlet’s Roger

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Chillingworth to the protagonists of tales like “The Birth-­Mark” were shown to justify their immoral probings into the souls of others by conceiving themselves as valiantly rooting out sin. More than adultery per se, it is this idea that transgression might result not from rejecting the moral law, but, rather, from that law’s very goadings that makes Hawthorne’s novel exemplary of the breakdown in the bourgeois worldview that, for Tony Tanner, will usher in the twentieth century and the fragmentation of the novel as such. My point here, then, is that The Scarlet Letter discovers that fragmentation at the novel’s outset, not its dissolution/reinvention—­in, that is, its own seventeenth-­century setting. The idea of law begetting sin—­that, just as in nominalism, an apparent curtailing of individualism can generate an often disturbingly intensified individuality—­is already quite central to a spiritual autobiography like Bunyan’s 1666 Grace Abounding. We see this from the very beginning of Bunyan’s saga, in which, in the middle of playing a game of tipcat, the young man suddenly hears a voice within, asking: “Wilt thou leave thy sins, and go to heaven? Or have thy sins, and go to hell?” (281). The very first effect of this is to make Bunyan return to his game, yet with a newfound intensity that the revelation itself seems, against its own aim, to bring forward: I returned desperately to my sport again. . . . I found within me a great desire to take my fill of sin. . . . I made as much haste as I could to fill my belly with its delicates, lest I should die before I had my desire, for that I feared greatly. . . . Therefore I went on in sin with great greediness of mind. (282–­83, emphasis mine)

And clearly, too, while the youthful Bunyan had engaged in play, he never experiences anything at the level of his later brushes with sin—­“often I have been ready to clap my hand under my chin, to hold my mouth from [speaking blasphemy]” (302)—­prior to hearing the word of God. While Paul would write, memorably, in Romans 7 of the possibility that the law itself could produce the urges it forbade, giving adulterous “coveting” as his example, in Grace Abounding, we might say that it is the injunction to self-­examination itself  that produces these sorts of unforeseen effects.32 Interiority, that is, becomes for Bunyan the very source of anxious torment, because interiority—­one’s thoughts, more than one’s actual misdeeds—­also appears in a new way as the primary staging ground for the will, and, hence, potentially the very site of sin itself. This is because the questions asked—­“Wilt thou leave thy sins, and go to heaven? Or have thy sins, and go to hell?”—­need to be recognized as addressing not simply the state of Bunyan’s soul but also its future, which is to say, its narrative. And the story that follows then represents an extended, and, again, chiefly internal reaction to these questions. While

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one reaction indeed lies in Bunyan’s worry that he is, precisely because of his hope of getting better, becoming “worse and worse” (296), the most prominent, and novelistic, entails a quest for knowledge: he seeks the signs that will grant him certainty about where he is headed, and he worries less about his sinful behavior than about what he might do. In itself, that Bunyan’s writings move in the direction of the novelistic is not an unusual claim. Such claims, however, typically entail conceiving a human-­centric viewpoint emerging from the discarded shell of a theological precursor. Thus, Wolfgang Iser argues for the way the “theological withholding of certitude stimulate[d] human self-­assertion,” in Blumenberg's term, and, specifically, the “self-­examination” mandated by Puritanism enabled the attainment of “an increasing degree of certitude” and focus regarding one’s prospects (28, 24, 23). Why are these sorts of ideas—­familiar, as I’ve suggested, from Weber as well—­so hard to apply to Grace Abounding, in which this same internal quest seems, just as in Daniel Dyke, only to multiply abysses? Put otherwise, we might ask, why and how might we see the Puritan autobiography as, if anything, a gothic novel-­in-­the-­making—­an early emblem of how the interiorizing turn might tend toward the verges of madness? One way to begin to address this conundrum actually derives from Blumenberg himself, from his central discussion of the modern reformation of curiosity or what Ludwig Feuerbach will in the nineteenth century call the Wissenstrieb (knowledge-­drive). While Blumenberg can appear simply to af­fi rm the progression from Augustine’s view—­where the human quest for knowledge risks courting illicit access to the workings of God—­to the modern scientific appreciation for such a quest in Descartes, matters in fact turn out to be more vexed. Indeed, this is the case precisely due to the complexity of the idea of a knowledge-­drive, something based more in the will than in the cool calculations of rational thought. As Blumenberg describes, the ancients bequeath to the moderns two distinct lines of thought concerning the quest for knowledge as such, knowledge that exceeds the practical demands of the everyday. The exemplary instances here, Blumenberg writes, are “seafaring and astronomy” (266). (One thinks here of Crusoe, and also of Pascal.) For Plato, quests of this kind are simply deemed distractions from what matters in life. Aristotle, by contrast, speaks approvingly of “the appetite for knowledge,” since by remaining in the realm of pure theory, untethered to immediate needs, we attain the greatest heights of which reason is capable (255). In neither instance, however, is knowledge-seeking of this sort explicitly condemned. This idea, Blumenberg suggests, requires the turn evident in both Stoicism and early Christianity, in which the highest truths appear as

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hidden. To “want to know more than is sufficient” thus begins to take the form, as for Seneca, of “intemperance” (261) and for Augustine, eventually, of sin. At this point, the stage seems set for modern investigators—­Bacon and Descartes—­to reject such insistences so as to claim the entirety of the cosmos as the purview of scientific inquiry. Characteristically, however, Blumenberg’s discussion of all this opens out onto lacunae on which he himself does not directly comment—­ones that end up destabilizing this apparent opposition between the premodern and modern.33 Consider that Augustine in fact warns against knowledge-seeking for two very distinct reasons, only one of which concerns the possibility for scientific achievements to lead us so far down the path of “autonomous cognitive security” that we forget the deity whose “transcendent conditionality” undergirds it all (310). From another perspective, both the Stoics and Augustine lament such explorations’ tendency to generate only frustration—­the “affects of fear and hope” that “cheat [life] of its happiness” and even spur “disorders of the mind”—­due to their necessary “infinitude” (e.g., 262, 318, 303). Here, the problem lies less in the attainment of an illegitimate “certainty” than in an abyssal, affectively charged confrontation with its opposite (303). Crucially, however, in Blumenberg’s account, such heightened affect is itself unthinkable without the very proscription against knowledge-seeking that had no correlate in the earlier Greeks. As he puts it, “As a result of the discrimination against it, what was natural and went without saying was explicitly ‘entered into’ and accentuated”; “letting the truth come to one” gives way to “the energetic desire for knowledge,” a “blasphemous industriousness” (234, 244, emphasis mine). In this formulation, the Christian limitation on human knowledge directly fires it with the manic excess that will eventually leave the limitation behind. Yet when Blumenberg writes of the achievement of Descartes in this latter regard, he specifically states that curiosity here loses its earlier “pathos,” as it “takes on the professional quality of the scholar” (397). With the new belief in certitude made possible by method, that is, the affective charge of the knowledge-­drive no longer seems to obtain. Modern scientific method, then, emerges as a way to manage curiosity’s excess, removing the attached affective tension in the process. And yet the excess, Blumenberg underscores, continues to reassert itself—­not only in the narratives of Faust (a key urtext for The Scarlet Letter) but in the nineteenth century in the theorizations of figures like those with whom Blumenberg concludes his story: Feuerbach and Freud. Curiosity in Blumenberg’s account, no less than in Genesis, thus becomes an exemplary case of the Pauline notion of proscription leading to transgression rather than forestalling it. What Grace Abounding demonstrates, then,

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is the potential for Protestant self-­examination, or the quest for knowledge of self, to take precisely the highly charged form of the seeking after knowledge outside practical limitations. Hence, the same affective intensity evident from the first return to the tipcat game remains insistently present, giving Bunyan’s text a heightened, desirous tone entirely different from that of the Confessions (unsurprisingly, given the much greater remoteness of Calvinism’s God). The same language we see applied to his plunge into sin, above, recurs in the remarkable avidity with which Bunyan seeks after God’s grace: he “hunger[s]” for it, imagines chewing the Word like a ruminant, experiences it as a “savour” (291, 294, 321). Bunyan’s very hope for salvation is thus expressed with the earthly gusto that, from the first, characterized his turns to sin. The overall effect, then, is of a powerful anxiety—­in the double sense of both a nervousness and a desirous impatience—­in the face of an unknown and newly wide-­open future. Certainly, there is the possibility here of a pathological excess. (The narrative reaches a climax of sorts when, for an entire year, Bunyan feels assaulted by an evil rather than a righteous inner voice, one urging him to repeat the sin of Judas and “sell Christ.”) Bunyan’s obsessive fears, like the obsessive rootings out of sin in a book like Dyke’s, suggest the two primary ways in which law can itself beget its opposite, as Paul Ricoeur discusses in the first of his three-­volume study of the will: self-­abnegation, on the one hand, and, on the other, the “self-­righteousness” of those who would, instead, plumb the faults of others. Both, crucially, are inseparable from the new, novelistic taste for detail and “nuance” with respect to the subject at hand: “For the confession of sin . . . there is substituted a detailed and indefinite examination of the purity of intentions” (Symbolism 143, 145). In The Scarlet Letter, then, it is easy to see how the dangers of both self-­and other-­condemnation of this kind play a role in Hawthorne’s characterizations of the Puritan milieu. As with Bunyan’s, however, Hawthorne’s account of that milieu also opens onto larger questions of how to think these risks of willing as inherent to the modern subject’s pursuit of freedom. This is how they appear in the work of another mid-­twentieth-­century philosopher heavily influenced by phenomenology, Hans Jonas, who focuses these issues through a reading of Paul’s experience in Romans 7. For Jonas, once will is conceived as interiorized, it begins to raise questions of the status of imagination. “For the sake of the good,” he writes, “to miss nothing, the distrust must be inventive in evil” (“Abyss of the Will” 349). It must be like Bunyan, imagining all one might be or do, and thus risk becoming consumed by exactly the thoughts one most fervently wishes to eradicate. This process, however, can be grasped only if we recognize that it is at one and the same time emblematic of “freedom’s

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relation to its own possibilities,” indeed “a kind of giddiness of freedom” as it contemplates all of its possible futures, “the lure of its own possibilities”—­a “lusting of the self for itself,” as Augustine had warned the will was especially prone to do (“Abyss of the Will” 350–­51). Finally, then, we have arrived at the consciousness of the novelistic protagonist—­of, say, Henry James’s Isabel Archer “affronting her destiny.” As Iser suggests at the end of his essay on Bunyan, the reading of fiction began in the eighteenth century, for many readers, to open up this space of imaginative freedom—­particularly for young women, in ways that many found alarming to the extent they involved dwelling in a realm explicitly not that of the social everyday. As time went on, however, this more threatening potentiality was cordoned off—­at least in the mainstream of British fiction—­ under the notion of “romance,” which Michael Davitt Bell reminds us was a notion at one time associated with madness, “originating in the heated brain” (10). It was the task of the mainstream of later seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­ century writers, then, less to open up the territory of the mind than to manage its excesses, leaving these to become the property of those who could defend their productions as emanating from the mysterious realm of dreams. Announcing their fealty to romance, then, nineteenth-­century American writers like Hawthorne and like James, whom he directly inspired, signaled their dissatisfaction with the compromises that, we will presently see, these eighteenth-­century developments entailed. They can thus be profitably read alongside the gothic fictions that began, during that same earlier century, to express similar doubts. It’s in no way accidental, then, that in such writings the (often female) protagonist’s explorations of her own trajectory can open out onto darker surmises about the chasms underlying it all. In Charles Brockden Brown, the early American gothicist who was a particular influence on Hawthorne, such storylines offered a way to directly critique the Lockean and sentimental harmonizations of self and world that undergirded Enlightenment-­era confidences about modernity as progress. Hence, we will now see how the eighteenth century turned to these in order to ward off the darker potentialities of an increasingly pathologized Puritanism, before we then consider, in Brown and Hawthorne alike, their gothic revivification. And we will end, finally, with a reading of The Scarlet Letter that shows how, even more than Bunyan, it puts the novelistic plot—­the daydreamer’s curiosity about her now more secular future—­together, in the adulteress Hester and her daughter, with the philosophical confrontation with freedom as curiosity about the cosmos, God, or nature—­indeed, about the underlying reality of existence itself.

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The Eighteenth Century Tames the Self l o c k e a n d t h e s e n t i m e n ta l i s t s To recognize this vexed early history of interiority is, then, to recognize that the writings and movements most commonly associated with the emergence of the “modern self,” such as Locke’s philosophy or the eighteenth-­century culture of sentiment, ought to be understood as taming that self—­rendering it less in conflict both internally and in relation to the external world. As we will see, this was a project dependent on the replacement of will as core human capacity with reason or feeling. As Leo Damrosch puts it, “If the seventeenth century was an age of the anarchic will . . . the eighteenth century strove mightily to tame the will and restore the damaged social fabric” (17). It is crucial to recognize how much these writers’ positive arguments were bound up with critiques of Puritanism—­critiques that eventually understood what the Puritans (and La Rochefoucauld and others) had seen as perils associated with personhood as such to be, rather, physiologically determined forms of madness. Indeed, at least one commentator goes so far as to argue that the modern conception of abnormal psychology and its treatment grows out of these critiques.34 Unsurprisingly, then, when Puritan conceptions of interiority did resurface later in the century, it would be, as we will see, amid the wilder terrain of gothic fiction, with its worrying of the boundaries between madness and sanity. Critiques treating religious nonconformity or “enthusiasm” as a form of physiological disorder already began to surface in the early 1600s.35 In these accounts, the treatment of Puritanical “zeal” as a form of bodily “excitation” allowed critics to paint a portrait of hypocritical believers whose true investments lay in worldly self-­advancement, if not, indeed, earthier satisfactions. While this vision of religious ecstasy motivated by lust would reappear, famously, in Swift’s Discourse on the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, overall, such critiques began to shift over time into portrayals of Puritan interiority, in particular, as a form of mental disease—­specifically, melancholia.36 Not only might fire-­and-­brimstone sermons and obsessive self-­scrutinization produce what we would now term anxiety; more pointedly, the hearing of inner voices, as in Bunyan’s case (not to mention Saint Paul’s) bespoke the infection of the brain by vapors, themselves caused by the excess of bile that formed melancholia’s signature symptom. Hence, we might say, such critiques turned Puritan introspection against itself. Rejecting the fallen world, enthusiasts were deemed shut up in themselves to a pathological degree, losing contact with reality itself. One saw here,

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Lawrence Klein writes, “the nightmare of Protestantism”: “a kind of hypertrophic egoism in which the interior life of the self stood uncorrected and undisciplined by social institutions or intercourse” (161–­62). Increasingly in the years following the Restoration, these kinds of arguments became commonplace, part of an overall move on the part of nondissenters to distance English thought and religion from the years of civil conflict and to argue on behalf of the principles that would be instantiated in the Revolution of 1688. These ideals arguably found their most powerful philosophical exponent in Locke, in both his political writings on liberalism and private property and in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding.37 Writing in the latter on “enthusiasm,” which became the catchall term for religious excesses, Locke affirmed the view of the “melancholy” Puritan as cut off from all validating externalities and substituting as grounds for belief the mere “fancies of a man’s own brain” (616). Unfolding without any reference to externals, the mind of the enthusiast could not really be said to contain thought or ideas at all; if anything, its contents seemed closer to waking dreams. Indeed, in a lengthy and much-­discussed section at the start of the Essay’s second book, “On Ideas,” Locke takes quite a bit of time to refute Descartes on the subject that the soul is always thinking, even while the man sleeps and therefore possesses no access to sense-­data of any kind. This was, of course, part of Locke’s broader refutation of the notion of innate ideas, in favor of a thoroughgoingly empiricist epistemology. Given Locke’s hostility to radical interiority, one might well ask, as Jonathan Kramnick does, why his theories have seemed to so many to provide the foundations for a new sense of the “enclosed individual” said to be crucial to the rise of the novel over the decades following the Essay’s 1790 publication (86). Kramnick derives this argument from a number of scholars, but perhaps principally the philosopher Charles Taylor and the literary critics Ian Watt and Nancy Armstrong. We will return to Taylor presently, but with respect to the literary critics, Kramnick’s assertion would seem unimpeachable: Locke does appear over and over at the supposed founding of modern “self-­enclosed” personhood, indeed with remarkable consistency whether that achievement is celebrated or lamented. At the time of Watt, Lockean empiricism appeared hand in hand with the rise of democracy; “critical, anti-­traditional, and innovating,” it allowed any ordinary person to arrive at truth firsthand via sense perception (12). Armstrong, by contrast, draws more on Locke’s Two Treatises of Government to arrive at a conception of the modern self defined primarily by “self-­enclosure” in the sense of both private property and what Locke termed “Property in one’s own Person” (12). In this analysis, more familiar in

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the present day, Locke appears primarily as laying the groundwork for bourgeois, liberal individualism. Certainly Locke’s political and moral commitments did play a role in the Essay’s account of the mind; indeed, they are evident even in his critique of enthusiasm, which chastises the radical believer for avoiding what Locke calls the hard “labor” of reasoning and for instead “tyranniz[ing] over his own mind” (615–­16). Yet as Kramnick argues, and as the above discussion of “On Enthusiasm” is meant to suggest, “enclosure” seems the wrong term given Locke’s strong emphasis on “factors that lie outside the head” in his account of human decision-making (86, 160). I want to suggest that an argument closer to Kramnick’s that sees Locke concerned to balance “internalist” and “externalist” accounts, and which can further root that desire in part in his strong critique of Puritan interiority, can actually provide a firmer basis for grasping Locke’s importance to the construction of modern selfhood than those that, disregarding that critique, see Locke instead as, himself, where interiority begins. Locke, together with his good friend Shaftesbury and those writers influenced by his ideas, should in fact be understood as engaged in a project of managing the Pandora’s box of selfhood opened by seventeenth-­ century introspection—­one aimed at achieving a more proper balance between self and world, and, by so doing, in envisioning a workable modernity. Shaftesbury, too, wrote against enthusiasm, although his critiques were considerably milder than Locke’s. Unlike the latter, he was willing to opine that in certain cases enthusiasm might lead to “greatness” of a heroic, poetic, or philosophical kind (quoted in Sena 305). For him, the less salutary variety associated with religious melancholy resulted merely from our unfortunate tendency to turn to God in times of ill health or other woe; the notion of a deity filled with vengeful wrath arose, in such cases, simply via projection of the unstable state of the believer’s mind. Thus, Shaftesbury’s chief counsel lay less in the proper use of reason, like Locke’s, and more in the attainment of “good humour,” presented as not only “the best security against enthusiasm” but “the best foundation of piety and true religion” (22). As in Locke’s case, these ideas could be seen to open out onto Shaftesbury’s broader program, which substituted for the Lockean tabula rasa a view of the human being as innately equipped to seek the good, again less through reason than, more strongly, through an built-­in “moral sense.” As expanded upon by the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson, this notion formed the bedrock of what many have described as the broader eighteenth-­century “culture of sentiment,” for which human progress transpired through the dissemination of virtuous feeling. Especially given the obvious relation of these

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ideas to strains within the burgeoning novel—­above all, perhaps, the writings of Richardson—­the sentimental stance has, no less than the Lockean one, been taken as crucial to the advent of modern subjectivity, expounding the idea of a true “heart” in the guidance of which one may trust.38 And certainly, the epistolary, minute-­by-­minute unfolding of novels such as Pamela seems to allow us access to a character’s innermost responses, the closest we can get to hearing that heart’s every throb. And yet just as with Locke, more recent scholars, including Armstrong as well as Dror Wahrman and Adela Pinch, have argued against the association of sensibility or the moral sense with the inner self, noting that, after all, these ideas portray, above all, a person constantly being affected by her environment. Even the epistolary form, in contrast to the diary, represents a mode of interiority that is immediately communicative, an eminently social art. Once more, my only objection to these useful correctives is that, first, they have little or nothing to say about the significance of Puritanism’s radicalized interiority to these eighteenth-­century alternatives, and, second, as a result, they risk simply turning the standard accounts of Lockeanism and sentimentalism on their heads, rendering them fully “exteriorized” versions of selfhood that are then reacted against by either Romanticism or Victorianism, which here do “invent the modern self,” as Wahrman puts it, Puritanism having been left out of the picture entirely. The problem, as stated above, is that we are left with no way of considering the particular achievement of Lockeanism and sentimentalism alike, of, in their respective fashions, harmonizing the self-­world gap they critiqued as at work in Puritan interiority—­ and, again, by doing so, paving the way for a less problematized version of selfhood in a naturalistic age. Sheer externalism, a mode closer to that of the French sensationalists, would not have enabled the moral arguments crucial to these British philosophers. One wanted, as Addison put it, to be neither too inward-­looking nor too driven by externalities, like the craven courtier; the key lay in the possibility that “autonomy and sociability” might be harmoniously balanced (Klein, “Sociability” 154–­55). With respect to Lockeanism and sentimentalism themselves, my argument here does not differ dramatically from the influential claims made by Albert O. Hirschman, who documents the transition whereby the same selfish core of the human soul exposed by Puritan and Jansenist writers in the 1600s became, by the eighteenth century, conceived as able to be harnessed for the civic good of all. In Hirschman’s account, the key transformation involves the shift from a language of “passions” to one of “interests.” Conceived as a passion, the self-­love of the seventeenth-­century writers was a dangerous, irrational force, the fruit of original sin; as “interest,” it became the foundation

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of purely rational calculations of how best to achieve happiness. Already with Locke and, later, Hume, Hirschman shows, each individual’s desire for self-­ advancement begins to appear as not only rational, but socially desirable, the foundation of a market-­based economy. Reacting against the affirmation of bare calculation here, then, the sentimentalist writers, as well as Hume, began to rehabilitate passion itself, distinguishing calm, benevolent passions of love for one’s fellow man from violent, excessive ones, thus reinstating a place for feeling in a moral universe dominated by legitimated ambition.39 As this reaction on the sentimentalists’ part suggests, however, the question of whether these new, secular ideas could support a legible moral framework remained an open question. The dilemma here can be grasped, in fact, through the fate of the concept of will, which the eighteenth-­century writers specifically aimed to reconstrue through the lens of either practical reason (the ideal of willing effectively) or sentimental feeling (the ideal of surrendering the will). As Charles Taylor writes, these eighteenth-­century developments might be opposed either for their “rather rosy, optimistic view of the world”—­a charge to which he suggests more neutrally naturalistic arguments, like those of the radical Enlightenment, responded—­or for a feature shared more in common with the naturalists, “a too simple view of the human will, intent simply on happiness” (or in the naturalists’ case, “desire”). As Taylor elaborates, “Good and evil became a matter of training, knowledge, enlightenment; they were no longer the fruit of radically different qualities of the human will . . . in conflict in the human breast” (Sources 355). The latter perspective is, as Taylor underscores, the Augustinian one, which as we saw resurfaced in seventeenth-­century Puritanism and Jansenism. As Norman Fiering has extensively documented, Puritan writings frequently cited not simply Romans 7 but the similar lament of Ovid’s Medea (“I see and approve the better course; I follow the worse”) to dramatize the tendency of the human will to fly in the face of reason (“Will” 528). Locke, one might say, thus admirably enabled the moral valorization of human freedom precisely by limiting it—­and the notion of will—­to a more instrumentalist framework. In the Essay’s much-­discussed chapter “On Power,” which Locke continually revised up until his death, he wrote very directly of his desire to avoid dangers arising from the tendency to speak of the will and understanding as “two faculties of the mind,” which generated the nonsensical question, in his view, of the freedom of the will as such (222). Describing will as if it were a kind of entity rather than simply a power, Locke argued, not only produced the fallacious notion of the will, rather than the man, as the possessor of freedom (an idea that for him had chiefly a political meaning). Moreover, like the earlier-­discredited idea of dreams as forms of thought,

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which if entertained would lead us to conceive of the idea of “two persons in one man” (118), the hypostatization of faculties tended to generate an equally absurd, in Locke’s view, sense of the individual as populated by “distinct beings” within, each possessing its own agenda (223). (As we will see in chap­ ter 5, Nietzsche would later take this very idea to a radical extreme.) No less than his remarks on enthusiasm, it is clearly possible to read Locke’s dismissal of the reification of the will as directed at Puritan interiority. For the Puritans, that is, the will was “the inner essence of the whole man,” the site across which the “personal drama of salvation” was enacted (Fiering, “Will and Intellect” 529; Miller 249). Locke, by carefully distinguishing “man” from “will” as above, was able to address many of his concerns about Puritanism simultaneously. The will, in his account, was simply a sort of tool, the use of which enabled a thought to enter the realm that mattered to him, that of practical action. It was thus never “free,” in the sense that its activity and direction was always determined by what one wanted to do. The question of how that—­the aim—­was arrived at, however, famously opened out onto the complexities generated by Locke’s hope of conceiving body and mind of acting in tandem to produce a moral result. Thus, Locke in his revisions vacillated on this issue. On the one hand, he asserted that the aim resulted from “uneasiness,” a more physicalizing term he sometimes used similarly to “desire.” On the other, however, he insisted that the mind could not only deliberate on the best course of action to relieve the uneasiness, but, more strongly still, could choose to forebear in the moment on behalf of a more remote goal—­which, once in sight, would therefore raise uneasiness and set the process of willed action in motion.40 As Richard Glauser argues, Locke’s stance in many ways hearkens back to the intellectualist arguments, originating in Plato but also commonplace in medieval thought prior to the nominalist revolution, against which the Augustinian ones were pitched—­arguments for which evil or irrationality always resulted simply from insufficient education. Notably, the closest Locke would come to conceiving it as more than that was to speak of such things as resulting from a personal “relish” for the wrong sorts of moral fare—­a flaw then imagined as readily correctable in the same way one might train oneself to eat more salubrious foods (246, 255). What I would stress, then, is the way Locke’s system placed the physical, the rational, and the moral on a felicitous continuum: “uneasiness” and our “natural desires” generally, in putting our wills into action, had typically laudable effects, for without their prompting we would never rise from our slothlike state and go forth to produce a general state of improvement (234).

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Despite their different and even at times opposed emphases on rationality and feeling, then, the Lockean and sentimental strands of eighteenth-­century thought also shared important common ground.41 Broadly put, both systems aimed to harmonize spheres that earlier Puritan thought, building on Augustine, had portrayed as in tension if not outright conflict: the internal and the external, social and self, the this-­worldly and the otherworldly, and determinism and voluntarism (or body and mind). If, then, modernity as a problem could be traced back to the nominalists’ separation of these realms, modernity in its more familiar guise as a confident doctrine of progress has its roots in their eighteenth-­century realignment. And the overlaps between Lockean and sentimental ideas in this regard can begin to explain why, in what would become Nathaniel Hawthorne’s nineteenth-­century United States, the two were able to form a particularly durable, and culturally influential, combination. f r o m t h e g r e a t a wa k e n i n g t o victorian america Yet how could this occur, given that the 1730s and 1740s saw the American colonies gripped by the Protestant fervor, indeed often condemned by its opponents as “enthusiasm,” of the Great Awakening (Bushman 186)? Moreover, as the centrality of figures such as Jonathan Edwards demonstrates, the Awakening did entail a reaffirmation of Calvinist conceptions of human fallenness—­the inherent perversity of the will, subject of Edwards’s most famous study—­and a rejection of worldly goods in the face of a ruling clergy believed to be moving in the direction of what were considered “Arminian” notions of self-­determination. Despite this, however, these same Americans would only a few decades later rise up to defend just those Lockean ideals as the basis of their political sovereignty. Strikingly enough, historians of American religion appear more or less in agreement that the Awakening was finally instrumental in bringing into being that same “modern” American mindset—­an argument that, once more, turns crucially on Puritanism’s complex relation to what we understand modernity to entail. As we have already seen, some scholars depict it as more “medieval” than modern, emphasizing its repressive, authoritarian dimensions. Such an argument has been easy enough to make in the American colonial context, often with reference to two events of particular interest to Hawthorne: the Salem witch trials and the Antinomian Controversy, which led to the banishment of the dissenter Anne Hutchinson, to whom Hester Prynne is directly

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compared. And yet even in the colonies, Puritanism’s clear relation to the antiauthoritarianism and individualism seen as hallmarks of the modern also manifested itself, with important lines drawn between church and state and a mandated universal education that led to far higher literacy rates than in Britain.42 Emphasizing the Awakening’s liberatory dimensions, historians often write the early eighteenth-­century US, implicitly or not, as a version of mid-­ seventeenth-­century England—­Bunyan’s time—­thus underscoring Puritanism’s ability to bolster democracy rather than theocracy. Once more, after all, New England clergy in the early 1700s began to warn that any individual “persuaded he has an inwd Call” ought not to believe himself thereby “Sufficiently Authorized” to preach to others (Bushman 206). As in seventeenth-­ century England, pleas for religious toleration—­the Awakening, notably, involved many splinter sects or “Separates” as well as divisions within mainline Puritanism—­led toward a more modern state form and increasing demands for independence. And on a more personal level, historians such as Patricia Bonomi have argued, the affirmation during this period of a “personal, internal” relation with God would open out onto a broader belief in “individualism” rather than a reliance on “consensual values”—­paving the way for the revolution to come (Bushman 195; Bonomi 158). These arguments, in sum, perform the valuable service of refusing the alignment of “modern” with “secular.” At the same time, I would argue, they continue to rely on Lockean and sentimentalist commonplaces regarding what “individualism” means, recognizing only that in the nascent US, these eighteenth-­century developments arose within Puritanism itself. What remains to be accounted for, however, is the way that these same versions of modern personhood would become able, once consolidated within the nineteenth-­century American evangelicalism of Hawthorne’s day, to pit them­ selves against what would once more appear as an insufficiently modern Puritanism, by employing the same pathologizing terms we have seen at work in the British writings above. And once more, crucial to this pathologizing account is a sense of the dangers involved in excesses of interiority. In sum, then, the purported eighteenth-­century “emergence of the individual,” in the American case no less than overseas, could only go so far. Hence, as American theologians, beginning with the Calvinists themselves, began to move in the direction of Lockean and sentimental ideas, they split these more reassuring notions of individual rational and moral capability off more and more from the sorts of conceptions of the individual’s solitude before God that stressed the worrying gulf between the two. At the outset of the Awakening, the older generation of Calvinists could already be

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heard making Lockean arguments for faith as a rational experience in the face of revivalists’ emotion-­laden preaching; as the century progressed, then, more liberal Congregationalists in Boston began drawing more directly on Locke, Newton, and natural theology to insist on such liberal heresies as universal salvation, natural revelation, and freedom of the will (Noll 139–­40). At the same time, however, the revivalists themselves shared ground with the burgeoning Scottish Enlightenment.43 Moreover, while in the early days of the Awakening, practical reason and sentiment had appeared strongly at odds, by the end of 1700s they had fused. Intellectually, Hutcheson’s successor Thomas Reid’s theories of the moral sense as a rational power helped to bridge the gap; on the ground, both Lockean theories of self-­reform and sentimental assurances regarding widespread benevolence could bolster optimism about the American project. As J. C. D. Clark has argued, faith in human rational and moral capacities produced a sense of human corruption, ignorance, or enslavement as the result only of “outside forces (that is . . . other people)”—­such as tyrants from afar (38).44 Unsurprisingly, then, arguments concerning the beneficent social effects of self-­interest had their place in eighteenth-­century American writings also—­ preeminently, those of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard.45 By the early nineteenth century, even a more modernized Calvinism’s intellectual influence was giving way to that of the Unitarians, who promulgated a highly influential critique of Calvinist ideas (Howe 6). That critique represented a still more thoroughgoing merger of Lockean ideas with sentimental ones, often based on the theories of writers like Reid. Daniel Walker Howe and Philip Greven have written about how these precepts undergirded what we think of as “Victorian” culture in America: a flexible system of middle-­ class morality, predicated on “self-­government,” that was adaptable to both religious and secular ends. Within this system, the concept of will took on positive connotations far more familiar to American ears today. As Greven argues, tracts like Horace Bushnell’s popular Christian Nurture wrote directly against Calvinist ideas of the need to “break the will” of the child, substituting a Lockean sense of the unformed being as a blank slate awaiting parental molding. Filial rebelliousness, these writers insisted, derived simply from overly tyrannical parenting. What we might well consider a laudable move away from a sense of the will as corrupting force thus went hand in hand with a rejection of any sense of its complexities at all. Instead, the will in its new guise was indeed a trainable tool for engaging the world, just as Locke had written; to view it as the earlier Puritans had, as the site of an inner struggle between mysterious inclinations, was to risk falling prey to what these nineteenth-­century writers concurred with Puritanism’s earlier

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critics was a debilitating state of introspection. “Perpetual self-­inspection,” wrote the Unitarian physician and novelist Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., “leads to spiritual hypochondriasis” (Pages 397). As did Holmes, writers turned to psychologically pathologizing accounts of the young Jonathan Edwards to make this point—­rather ironically, given Edwards’s actual status as a more transitional figure. In fact, precisely due to his own youthful tendencies to what nineteenth-­century medical men would deem “morbid introspection,” Edwards had at twenty-­one made a resolution “never to suffer my thoughts and meditations at all to ruminate” (Parker 199). The will for Edwards never entailed the tormenting state of self-­contradiction evident in Augustine; instead, as a site of ineradicable perversity, it simply needed to be surrendered, as the heart was filled with grace.46 Holmes was on firmer ground, perhaps, in his critique of Edwards’s own sermons, such as the infamous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Vividly depicting for their listeners an “underground laboratory of ‘revenging justice’ with a complete apparatus of torture,” such performances, he wrote, could instill only fear and “despair,” if not outright “insanity” in their listeners (of whom Bunyan provided one example, Pages 387–­88). William Ellery Channing, too, feared Calvinism could “shak[e] the throne of reason” to the point of madness (Herbert 89). In essence, nineteenth-­century writers pathologized Puritanism by rendering it gothic—­and, thus, archaic, as with the subject matter of the gothic novel. It would fade over time, Holmes confidently pronounced, like any other relic of “old-­world barbarism” or “Asiatic legend” (Pages 401). The Return of the Wilderness Within, from the Gothic to Kant Any attempt to understand the fiction Nathaniel Hawthorne produced during this same period must grapple with such arguments, for not only did Hawthorne return incessantly to the Puritan past; he did so, moreover, in a mode that has seemed to many continuous with the gothic writers he had long admired: Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, and American counterparts like Charles Brockden Brown (Mellow 41). Did Hawthorne’s linkage of these reflect his era’s sense of Puritanism as a grim “medieval” chamber of mental horrors from which the modern US was now, thankfully, extricating itself? Certainly it seems possible to view The Scarlet Letter’s Arthur Dimmesdale as a pathological case of self-­punishment, matched in his flagellatory fervor only by the moralized sadism of his self-­appointed judge, jury, and torturer, Roger Chillingworth. And yet the difficulty here, to begin with, lies that the intensified interiorities laid bare by such remorseless practices seem inseparable

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from, as we saw at the outset, Hawthorne’s own most characteristic novelistic techniques. Emerging during precisely the years of Lockeanism and sentimentalism’s eighteenth-­century consolidation, the gothic novel can in fact be seen as deliberately refuting the historical trajectory toward Enlightenment by attempting to modernize the discredited mode of romance. As we see already in Walpole’s founding Castle of Otranto, the gothic was predicated not only on taking the supernatural seriously but on the proposition that the past continued to live on into the present; these came together in the only barely de-­theologized insistence that the sins of the fathers would be visited, narratively, on their progeny. The gothic protagonist was often literally “entrapped by the past,” in the sense of being locked into an old castle, tomb, or other site of decay. As Marshall Brown is only the latest defender to suggest, however, for all the theatrical flourishes, the gothic’s deepest subject might be said to be consciousness itself. “Typically, after all,” he reminds us, “the early gothic novels devote far more space to the thoughts and feelings of the victim . . . than to the mechanisms of punishment and torment” (Gothic Text 12). As we saw earlier, for Brown, the gothic decides that, once “deprived of all the external supports that condition ordinary experience,” “absolute, pure consciousness is the persona of madness” (Gothic Text 12, 80). Thus, the horror of the claustrophobic space in tales of locked rooms, hidden recesses, and live burials is that of the mind turned back on itself. One might suggest, however, that such an argument is already implicit in critiques of enthusiasm like Locke’s, for whom the mind at work without reference to externalities inhabits a kind of waking dream, if not, indeed, a madness. It is, indeed, a curious feature of Brown’s fascinating analysis that he does not note how much the gothic interiority he describes resembles that of the Puritan mind. This is especially the case given his emphasis on two early sources of the elaborated interiority the gothic will develop as lying in La Princesse de Clèves, a novel emerging directly out of French Jansenism, and the poetry of the melancholic Calvinist William Cowper.47 Brown powerfully uses his observations regarding the gothic as “theater of mind” to challenge the Victorian-­centric view in novel studies that, as Dorrit Cohn puts it, “the avoidance of psycho-­narration . . . dominates the third-­person novel well into the nineteenth century” (quoted in Gothic Text 34). Why not point out that such psycho-­narration arose, both in earlier fiction and in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century gothic, out of the same Protestant self-­scrutiny so often placed at the origins of the modern novel? The problem is perhaps that the same tendency turns out here both to predate the realist novel and to postdate it (in moves toward modernism), but it is precisely this sense of Puritan

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interiority as a modern “road not taken” that interests me here. As a repository thereof, the gothic novel can be reconceived: in bringing back what the Enlightenment deems archaic, it in fact brings back what might be argued to be a more radically modern construal of the inner self.48 All this can help explain why the critiques of Puritan sermons and the interiority they generated by nineteenth-­century writers like Holmes could sound so much like descriptions of sensational fiction. As we saw, in their accounts, Calvinist sermons would lead to the same agitated interior state as reading gothic novels and entering the similar mental condition of their tormented protagonists. Gothic novels themselves, however, possessed a famously equivocal stance toward the excesses they described. They could, like Holmes and Channing, draw a clear line opposing the fancies of a fevered brain to cool, rational thought. Yet given how extensively they lingered upon the former, they were often critiqued—­indeed by Unitarians and others—­for having the potential to generate similar thought patterns in their readers, as Puritan sermons did. It could easily be argued they were more invested in exploring the irrational than condemning it. Such explorations became most critically interesting when they went so far as to call into question the “modern” (Lockean and sentimental) assumptions behind the thinking of the genre’s critics—­which, as we have been tracing, undergirded their criticisms of Puritanism as well. One particularly notable example from the earliest days of American fiction is Wieland, by Hawthorne favorite Charles Brockden Brown. The tale of an orphaned brother and sister growing up in near seclusion in rural Pennsylvania, Brown’s text has often been understood as dramatizing the experience of the modern individual “left to the guidance of [his] own understanding,” and, specifically, to the external world’s “impressions” thereupon (Brown 20). His critique of prevailing empiricist and sentimental models might not be immediately evident, however, since the novel’s gothic events can appear simply to stem from the opposite: the perils of religious “enthusiasm.” These begin with the strange fate of the siblings’ “mournful and contemplative” father, a convert to radical Protestantism whose strict arrangement of his existence according to “religious duty” renders him “alternately agitated by fear and by ecstasy,” until one day he seems literally to go up in flames, a victim of spontaneous combustion (8–­9). In his son Theodore, then—­equally an “enthusiast,” his sister tells us, of “an ardent and melancholy character”—­this obsessive temperament combines with the modern individual’s quest for evidentiary certainty with horrific results, as the young Wieland ends up murdering those he most loves in order to satisfy the supposed demands of a divine voice (13).

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Despite its moments of sanguinary excess, however, the book is largely true to Marshall Brown’s assertion that most of the suspense involves the workings of the mind—­specifically, that of Clara Wieland, Theodore’s sister and our narrator, who tries over the course of the book to make sense of what is happening around her. Though Clara indicts herself in the book’s final sentences—­in one of the more cursory “morals” in gothic fiction—­for having failed along with her brother to remain true to the precepts of reason and duty, given their autodidactic upbringing, her failings in fact stand as an unmistakable rebuke to Lockean-­sentimental confidences concerning the educable modern mind. The meddling outsider Carwin, the actual source of some (though not all) of the mysterious voices, is able to disturb Clara’s peace as well as her brother’s not because she shares any of the latter’s Pietist beliefs, but precisely because she relies on a combination of empiricism and sentiment to guide her. The critique of empiricism is most obvious, since Carwin’s successful deceptions as a ventriloquist make plain how little the characters can trust the evidence of their senses. Beyond that, however, we may note that Carwin first breaches the novel’s small circle by inducing an equally untrustworthy sentimental response in Clara: his voice “imparted to me an emotion altogether involuntary and uncontrollable,” she writes. “When he uttered the words, ‘for charity’s sweet sake,’ I dropped the cloth that I held in my hand, my heart overflowed with sympathy and my eyes with unbidden tears” (48).49 Brown’s critique of American Enlightenment has struck readers powerfully enough that many critics, noting he sent a copy of his novel to Thomas Jefferson, have read it as essentially offering up to the founders—­or at least those, like Jefferson, with greatest faith in the people’s innate powers of discernment—­the same imperative uttered by Carwin throughout the book: “hold!”50 Yet as Chris Looby has argued, even within the novel itself, anxieties about the democratic present do not appear to lead to any confidence that older authorities would provide better guidance. Put otherwise, Wieland, like many other gothics, does not place much faith in any clear alternative to the dangers on display; at most, it simply seems to encourage the reader not to believe, as the burgeoning Lockean-­sentimental nexus appeared to do, that they ever might simply die out as vestiges of a less enlightened time. Within the context of our own argument, then, one might say such texts insist that the contents of the Puritan interior—­Dyke’s “mysteries of self-­deceiving”—­ remain ineradicable aspects of the human mind. More broadly, they insist on the continued significance and complexity of interiority as such, in an era in which the self ’s reliable formation by externality was, as we have seen, more commonly emphasized.51

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If Locke and Shaftesbury preside over modernity in the form of the more confident individual-­social nexus, then, Kant provides the philosophical analogue to the perspective I am describing here. Moreover, he shows how it brings back the question of the will. Indeed, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant elaborates most sustainedly a view that has never failed to surprise its readers: that the will to do good, which for Kant represents the only true instance of human freedom, should be understood first and foremost as an attribute of interiority, to the extent that it need never result in any action at all. Thanks to our usual understandings of interiority as the either enchanting or sturdy core of the liberal subject, this fact has generally been adduced in order to link Kant to the Germanically inclined transcendentalists (and therefore to an interiorized will as guarantor of subjective authenticity)—­or, conversely, to the much-­maligned liberal aim of freely chosen self-­subjection.52 The latter is typically critiqued, as by Ian Hunter, for being at once overly self-­abnegating and overly self-­aggrandizing at the same time—­a point of view based on the assumption that Kant’s moral perspective encourages a project of ceaseless self-­perfecting and mortification of the flesh (something closer to what we see in The Scarlet Letter’s Dimmesdale, perhaps). In fact, however, both of these represent inadequate characterizations, for they simply collapse Kant into the Lockean or sentimental frameworks that I wish to show him resisting. What nineteenth-­century secular morality of the kind we see in the Unitarians, where “will” is given a simply positive connotation, most wishes to avoid is the Pauline recognition of the power of moral law to generate sin (an idea clearly central to Wieland as well). This cheerier moralism entails that the law deny it is law, or radical otherness, in order to be taken up willingly. Correlatively, evil becomes in Locke merely a matter of error, as for the rationalist tradition. Critiques of Kant typically assume his position to be the same as that of these moralists here, and therefore merely wield versions of “law generating sin” against him. To generate a perspective on Kant that does not fall prey to this problem requires, paradoxically enough, emphasizing precisely those aspects of his thought his champions often most prefer to downplay: that is, the way his ideas build a secular edifice directly upon an earlier Christian structure. To recognize the radicality of this move, however, we need to recognize that that structure is specifically Augustinian (or Pauline). Kant’s often overlooked Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is the key text here—­one that, as Henry Allison notes, many readers find mystifying and even disturbing, for, as he puts it, it inevitably generates the response: “How can we be both autonomous agents capable of acting from respect for the law” and, in Kant’s infamous terms, “radically

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evil” (146)?53 (Religion also begins by explicitly opposing the belief, which Kant attributes to “Seneca and Rousseau,” or a pre-­Lockean or sentimental perspective, that human beings are progressing over time to a higher moral plane [Religion 45–­46].) The key to understanding this lies in what Kant means by radical evil, which turns out to mean less the human capacity for horrible deeds than, more broadly, our inherent “perversity” (Religion 60), which turns out to be another way of saying the complexity of our relation to freedom. Hence, according to Joan Copjec, the dyad expressed by Allison’s question captures precisely what we must grasp about Kant’s view of will. Where earlier thinkers conceived evil as the result of “human finitude”—­“the limitations of human will by earthly passions or by human freedom through original sin”—­Kant “attach[es] it to human freedom (or: to our ‘immortal aspirations’)” (138–­39). On the one hand, this comment draws on a crucial insight. Kant makes directly clear in Religion that what he means by radical evil has nothing to do with the “predisposition to animality in the human being,” or even the more complex form of self-­love evidenced by the “inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others,” the classic subject of moralistes like La Rochefoucauld (Religion 51). As Kant makes clear, each of these—­embodied desires and worldliness—­in fact derive from what he is glad to call an “original predisposition to good”; while they can be “used inappropriately” to the extent that they become the basis of vices (such as gluttony, envy, and so on), in themselves they ought not to be conceived as the site of evil (Religion 51–­52). On the other hand, Copjec is mistaken to conceive that Kant has therefore wholly departed from earlier construals—­in particular, Augustine’s, which lies behind any invocation of original sin. In fact, what is remarkable about Kant’s arguments in Religion is how closely they adhere to an Augustinian frame—­ indeed, to the extent that his first example of what evil actually looks like is drawn directly from Paul’s lament—­“What I would, that I do not!”—­in Romans 7 (Religion 53). Evil, as Kant depicts it, is inseparable from freedom (rather than being the sign of its absence, the triumph of a mere bodily mechanism) in the sense that it can be said to emerge only to the extent that the human being has an built-­in “propensity” both to grasp the moral law and to diverge from it at the same time. The experience described by Paul (which Kant states thus “might indeed hold true of human beings universally,” Religion 61) thus appears as the first and least offensive of a series of three instances expressing this duality; in the second, “actions conforming to duty” are performed so as to gratify desires alien to it (the case of Hawthorne’s Chillingworth or, we shall see, of many of the apparently virtuous Puritans he describes); while in the third, we see true corrupt behavior, which for Kant is nevertheless always performed in recognition of the moral law (Religion 53–­54).

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As Allison explains, the “natural dialectic” all of these instances express itself derives from the twofold character of human will, as Kant defines it (151). (Allison also further suggests the amenability of this understanding of will to narrative of an existential kind [151].) Building on this Augustinian insight, Kant concretizes it in the form of two different concepts of will—­ Wille and Willkür—­that both play a crucial role in human willing, insofar as neither alone is sufficient for genuine freedom. While these two aspects of will might seem to map onto true, free willing (of the moral law) and mere choice among empirical objects or in response to bodily impulses, the power of Kant’s conception lies in the full entanglement of the two aspects. Allison expresses this helpfully as the combination of autonomy and spontaneity required for free action; Wille, that within us which gives us the moral law, possesses autonomy (it generates the law rationally from within, rather than following divine precept), but only Willkür can act freely, either on what the Wille has recognized or on baser impulses. Wille, in effect, must motivate Willkür (a process, again, that may itself be strictly internal). And what makes this difficult—­perhaps impossible—­is the absolute divergence of their aims: Willkür seeks happiness (is essentially the Lockean will), whereas Wille requires suspending that aim in favor of something more disinterested. Locke, in a mode much closer to many contemporary philosophers of will, explains this distinction in empirical terms as the choice of near-­or long-­term gratifications, keeping the structure of reward intact. Kant’s point, by contrast, isn’t that doing good cannot produce satisfactions, only that these will unavoidably always be mixed with some negative feelings (of restriction or insignificance); again, the refusal here is of the possibility that one could ever, on this earth, simply align one’s will with the freely given law (Critique 69). And this is Kant’s rebuke to the sentimentalists also, including Edwards to the extent he specifically mentions the impossibility of truly following the moral law either through enthusiastic assent or due to “terror” of the consequences of failing to do so (Critique 70–­74). For Kant, to insist on the moral law’s nonrelation to feeling is to affirm its status as the sign of our irreducibility to “the mechanism of the whole of nature” (Critique 74). The inherently mixed experience of the moral law, which is to say of freedom, in Kant means that one’s proper affective relation to it is to be “anxious” (Critique 72). Yet despite this fact, Patrick Frierson comments, neither “despair” about oneself nor harsh judgment of others should result, precisely because the experience described is universal, and because, for Kant, complete depravity (absolute denial of the moral law) is impossible in anyone possessed of a working reason (Frierson 51–­52, 54). With respect to Hawthorne, then, the reactions of both Dimmesdale (despair) and Chillingworth (judgment) are

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explicitly warned against. This leaves, then, as a means of thinking through Hester Prynne’s (and, we will see, her daughter’s) relation to the question of freedom, a set of issues more similar to those we raised around Bunyan’s self-­ narrative: anxiety (in both the positive and negative sense: fear and hope) as the relation to the revelation of the openness of one’s future possibilities. We might consider here Kant’s “Speculative Beginning of Human History,” in which, in a discussion of Genesis 3:7 as the moment of movement beyond instinct, he describes the newfound “ability to choose [our] own way of life” as producing at once “delight” and “anxiety” concerning how best to “proceed,” given the “infinitude” of possibilities stretching before us as if “at the edge of an abyss” (51). We are back here to Ellison’s “awfully expanded world.” Anxiety, as Kierkegaard would later emphasize in his more “psychological” and narrative elaboration of these themes, ought not to be understood as a simply negative experience. Thus, he notes, children are drawn toward the mixed experience that is anxiety, seeking out “the adventurous, the monstrous, and the enigmatic” before shying away (42). Oddly, in Blumenberg’s discussion of curiosity, he does not touch upon the section of Augustine’s Confessions that frames curiosity in just this sort of light, conceiving it as a kind of perversity in that it is drawn to certain things not only hard to grasp as instances of pleasure, but potentially productive of its opposite. Mangled bodies, predators devouring their prey, “freaks and prodigies” attract us despite our concomitant dismay, Augustine suggests, perhaps because they seem to capture some essential fact about nature precisely by embodying its excesses (242–­43). These phenomena, too, not simply contemplations of the cosmos, suggest the combined allure and threat posed by moving beyond the boun­ daries of the ordinary everyday. Indeed, they clearly overlap with the subject matter of the gothic novel as Marshall Brown describes it, its imaging of “dark powers at play in the womb of the world,” “recesses hidden at the very center of human experience” that “test the limits of human reason” (Gothic 9, 69, 12). Brown, too, it should be noted, conceives Kant’s writings as the philosophical analogue to such texts, albeit less for the reasons adduced above than for their positing of a “metaphysical sublime” toward which we are irresistibly drawn, for “human understanding is impelled toward its limits” (Gothic 12, 70). For this account, Kant’s noumenal realm of “starry heavens” and “moral law” can appear as it­ self the object of our anxiety-­laden desire. In fact, Kant does directly suggest as much in a fascinating passage in his Anthropology in which “the inclination to freedom” is described as a passion, indeed “the most violent” of all (168). The caricature of  Kant as the philosopher of a stern rationality that becomes the stand-­in for an “angry God” has meant that when readers acknowledge

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these affective complexities—­the will in its Puritan sense as, in Norman Fiering’s words, a “desire for ideals”—­they have tended to do so in the name of undermining Kant’s project (“Will” 525, emphasis mine). Thus, when the Kantian individual is not conceived as a version of the blandly Lockean self subject to technics, we see, as in Adorno, this idea of law as passion, showing that “rage is the mark of each and every idealism” (Negative 232, 23). In Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, this critique famously takes the form of reading Kant as a version of Sade. The intensity of the moral law, its absolute distinction from all worldly pleasures, here births its own perverse rewards in the sadomasochistic policing of self and others typically associated with Puritanism. And yet Kant himself, as we saw, already predicts this possibility. For our purposes here, then, the pairing of Kant with Sade by another thinker, Lacan, proves of greater help. In his readings, it is Sade, or the libertine, who simply transforms desire into a new form of law, or reason, whereas Kant, precisely by insisting that to follow the moral law can never mean simply to follow the path of pleasure, opens up the possibility for doing so to take the form of desire in the specific way Lacan theorizes it—­as, precisely, one’s approach to the noumenal or, in Lacanese, “the Thing,” which, like the objects of curiosity described by Augustine above, both attracts and repels.54 As Slavoj Žižek explains, the key is to avoid both the notion of it as merely repellent (which would make the attraction sadomasochistic) or as merely attractive, “naturalizing” one’s approach to the Real along the lines of antinomianism.55 Consider, then, that what interested Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, his tale of adultery’s aftermath, lay amid precisely these potentialities. In the pairing of the minister Dimmesdale and the anatomist Chillingworth, Hawthorne depicts these pathologies inherent to interiority and the encounter with will as such: the same ones we have seen throughout this chapter, whether in the movement from the terrors of Daniel Dyke’s Mystery of Self-­Deceiving to the cynical unmaskings of the libertine, or in Bunyan’s alternating despair and wild turns to sin, or Ricoeur’s and Jonas’s accounts of the dangers of self-­scrutiny. In the mind of Hester Prynne, however, and differently in her daughter Pearl, we see something closer to the “passion for freedom” as such, in all of the complex senses toward which Kant’s discussion points. Law and Freedom in The Scarlet Letter At one level, Hawthorne’s novel clearly develops a critique of the Puritan community by portraying its law and those who affirm it as “pathological” in both the medical and the Kantian sense. In other words, to the extent that scriptural commandment (here inseparable from the community’s law)

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appears not as a stern imposition from without but as the willingly adopted framework within which the community operates, the members’ iterations of that framework are, from the first, depicted as not just “invested” but distinctly erotically charged. (Was Hawthorne’s aim, like Swift’s, to depict “the essential sensualism of enthusiasm”? one reviewer wondered, citing Horace Bushnell’s critical account of the New England Puritans, “cut off from the more refined pleasures of society,” as declining into “baser passions” as “the spring of their enjoyments” [Scarlet Letter 258].) In this sense, the jeers and shouts of the town’s well-­fed matrons upon Hester Prynne’s reemergence in public wearing her stigmatic A, in the book’s opening chapter, form the inevitable supplement to the magistrates’ “rigid” self-­repression (47); in their cries that the “naughty baggage” be stripped and/or branded (39, 41), they replicate the sin itself in sadistic form. Of course, a gentle young wife and mother softly reproves them, but Hawthorne has no trouble conceiving the erotic dimension of such delicate creatures’ devoutness either. The shy virgins in the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale’s congregation lust after him with “a passion so imbued with religious sentiment that they imagined it to be all religion” (95, emphasis mine), an admission that seems to license the later moment—­arguably the text’s single most daring—­when the minister suffers the “grotesque horror” of a vision in which said virgins emerge hastily from their homes without quite enough time to have covered their snowy bosoms with their kerchiefs (100). The vigilante justice meted out against Dimmesdale by Hester’s returned husband, Roger Chillingworth, of course forms the apotheosis of this mode in which the moral law becomes its Sadean inverse, an absolute instrumentalization of the other as a form of legitimized “enjoyment” (111). As with the Renaissance literary “anatomist,” Chillingworth’s drive to “know” his subject generates an “excess [that] subverts the ‘objectivity’ of anatomy and emphasizes its aggressive spirit” (Hodges 6). It is evident that this serves as the text’s exemplum of the deepest depravity of which man is capable—­that which comes closest to the “diabolical” (man transformed into a demon), which certainly does not describe its two lovers. Dimmesdale does, however, form his tormentor’s mirror inverse—­they are in that sense the perfect couple—­in representing the other mode of pathological, overly “scrupulous” investment in the law itself, the position of masochism. Hence, just as Chillingworth does to him, Dimmesdale bores down relentlessly into his own interior, a process literalized by the physicalization of the scarlet letter on his chest (129). The book, indeed, tellingly wavers on whether to ascribe the literally “mor­bid”—­toxic—­character of the minister’s intensified self-­scrutiny to Chil­ lingworth’s Satanic influence, which keeps his victim’s “conscience” in a perpetually “irritated” state (124), or to the ordinary effects of the process of

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self-­examination, which itself demands one “watc[h], with morbid zeal and minuteness  .  .  . each breath of emotion, and  .  .  . every thought” (129). His parishioners, after all, welcome the physician’s arrival precisely because they have already noticed the ill health deemed resultant upon their clergyman’s “too earnest devotion to study, his scrupulous fulfillment of parochial duty,” his “fasts and vigils” (80). Simply to state that what appears as an unhealthy adherence to law really devolves from an unconfessed sin fails to grapple with the ways in which to strive toward a “higher state” here does entail physical and perhaps even mental frailty (137). Put otherwise, Dimmesdale—­not unlike a sentimental heroine—­must die because he is too good, and too weak, for earthly life at one and the same time. Like such a heroine, he is also, in his introspection, a bit of a narcissist—­imagining the entire “universe” to be “gazing” at his “naked breast”—­and, like those critics of Puritanism before him, Hawthorne does seem concerned that this “egotism” might be but the logical result of an excess of virtuous “self-­contempla[tion]” (98, 102). Very like Bunyan, Dimmesdale seems determined to conceive of his sin as the very worst imaginable; and it is hard not to hear amusement behind Hawthorne’s suggestion that the more hyperbolically he describes himself before his congregants as “an abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity,” the more they “reverence” him, for are not such self-­descriptions merely the generic stuff of the penitent’s spiritual autobiography (95)? Where Dimmesdale’s scrupulosity most overlaps with that of Bunyan, however, is in its particular “pathological” motivation. Whereas in Chillingworth this insistence on rooting out sin is charged with a pleasurable rage, in the minister, as in Bunyan, it is electrified by fear. Like Bunyan, he is haunted by a fear that is at once of the very idea of sin, of its relation to his own sin, and finally by the punishment that sin demands—­which Dimmesdale fears in the form not only of God’s wrath but of that of his parishioners: the “dread of public exposure” is “the anguish of his life,” clearly more so than his other excuse, that should he confess his crime he would lose his ability to positively affect the souls of others (101). Despite all this, however, most of the time, Dimmesdale lacks the maniacal quality we see in Bunyan’s response to fear, the way it motivates a religious passion. We might say that in Bunyan, fear thus expresses both sides of the divided will with equal intensity, whereas in Dimmesdale, quite crucially, fear has the effect of dimming the will itself. Hawthorne combines the Augustinian understanding of will here with one more contemporary to his own era, such that Dimmesdale’s inability to inhabit fully either the good will or the perverse will keeps him in an odd twilight state. The word that expresses this is “tremulous,” which is first applied to the minister’s mouth (48, 83). To

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confess—­which would be to express the divided will most fully, to admit to the truth of sin—­is, on the one hand, what Dimmesdale can’t do and, on the other, what he is therefore always on the verge of doing. His entire physical existence—­walking about with his hand over his heart—­both testifies to his crime and fails to do so. No wonder Hawthorne describes his most “ready faculty” as that of “escaping from any topic that agitated” him (89); the only thing actively at work in Dimmesdale is the will to subdue the will, that is, to repression, and even that is doing a very poor job of it. As the text unfolds, the minister’s tremulousness begins to appear as a near paralysis: “There was a listlessness in his gait; as if he saw no reason for taking one step further, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have been glad . . . to fling himself down . . . and lie there passive, forevermore” (122). The horror Dimmesdale represents is not that of the will gone astray, but of an evacuation of the will, a near inability to move or to see why anyone would bother doing so. He is frank about this, imploring Hester, “Think for me! . . .  Resolve for me!” (125) to the point where she must yell at him, “Preach! Write! Act! Do anything, save to lie down and die!” (126). Dimmesdale is literally void of “moral force”; he does not struggle so much as, “to speak more accurately, [he] had ceased to struggle,” and this absence of will is what the text more than anything else deems “lunacy” (104, 109). It also means that, again like Bunyan, the minister is particularly susceptible to blasphemous thoughts he is terrified he might actually utter. Here the desire the law seems irrepressibly to generate indeed appears to the self as a sort of horrifying automatism with a mind of its own, a kind of Tourette’s-­like tic urging him to argue against the soul’s immortality to a venerable widow or to teach schoolchildren to curse. Elaborated on most fully after Dimmesdale recommits himself to Hester in the forest, these impulses are deemed the sign of a deeper assent to sin, but Hawthorne is once again equivocal, for we see the same tendency earlier in Dimmesdale at the moment that most foreshadows his later confession. It is thus more appropriate to see them as the sign of the law’s illicit entanglement with the generation of sin, which, again, both Chillingworth and Dimmesdale differently embody. Were their pairing to represent Hawthorne’s only word on this subject, then, The Scarlet Letter would seem quite in keeping with its nineteenth-­ century intellectual milieu: to lose the sin (or pathology, here shown to be inextricable from an excess of interiority), soften the law and, hence, enter the modern age. And yet we began, of course, with the interesting dilemma posed by the actual wearer of the letter, Hester herself: she is, if Tony Tanner is correct, the modern individual par excellence in nineteenth-­century American literature, embodying the “freedom principle,” in Moretti’s term,

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that will finally shatter the novel from within. And this turns out to have everything to do with her capacity to represent the complexities just discussed in relation to Kant—­the way in which freedom emerges not against law but out of one’s relation thereto. Hence, in Hester, the assent to the law’s demand for introspection and withdrawal has a very different result: it does not, as in the minister’s case, exhaust her will but radicalizes it. The fascinating thing about Hester, one might say, is that she is in many ways an anti-­Bovary. The scandalous break with convention, that is, has already been committed, and The Scarlet Letter is therefore less a story of will in relation to ambition and action (though it raises those issues through Pearl) than one of, as in Kant, will and thought: the theory of modern freedom, as it were, toward which Hawthorne displays a particularly nineteenth-­century American kind of ambivalence. The crucial chapter, with respect to understanding Hester’s interiority, is “Another View of Hester.” Here we learn, back to back, two things—­and the problem is that the two seem irreconcilable. We find out what has been going on, these seven years, in Hester’s mind. And we find out what she has been doing. The mind, as discussed in more detail below, has been wandering in a space described as beyond law, enacting in its freedom of thought “deadlier crime[s] than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter” (107). Yet at the same time, for the people of the town, Hester’s status as sinner has been rapidly diminishing, not increasing, thanks to her tireless work on behalf of the poor and otherwise afflicted—­to the extent that for many the letter is pronounced to mean “Able” (106). How are we to understand the relation between these two facts? Hawthorne sums up the chapter by having his narrator claim bluntly, “The scarlet letter had not done its office” (109). How not? We might simply say that Hester has not repented her sin, her passion for Dimmesdale, yet this is not, as suggested, the chapter’s focus. Rather, the sign of the scarlet letter’s failing seems to lie in Hester’s mental speculations. Specifically, it would seem that we need to see both Hester speculating and Hester ministering in order to acknowledge the gap between the two: Hester’s good works do not bespeak a good will, or the truth of her will; rather, they dissemble on her behalf. And yet this doesn’t actually seem quite right either. To begin with, as the notion of “A” standing for “Able” suggests, Hester’s “self-­ordained” role as “Sister of Mercy” clearly derives directly from her strength of will: she is “unfailing to every real demand, and inexhaustible by the largest” (105–­6). So there does in fact seem to be a public Hester who is genuine, overflowing, in her selflessness, her attention to the public good. Yet there is also a private Hester who is then apparently the one to focus on if we are to understand that

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the scarlet letter has not done its office. Nonetheless, some new relation between these two must be forged. This seems particularly the case given a remarkable feature we have not yet noted: while in describing the inner Hester, Hawthorne writes that the “links that united her to the rest of human kind . . . had all been broken,” in describing the Sister of Mercy, he writes that she “was quick to acknowledge her sisterhood with the race of man” (105, 106). These two seemingly antithetical descriptions are separated by a single paragraph. How can Hester at once be separated off from and completely linked to “human kind”; and what is the relation between this fact and Hawthorne’s repeated insistence that she has broken with law (therefore remaining, while by herself, in some crucial sense a criminal, which seems the real meaning of the letter’s failure)? The Kantian definition of freedom as the choice of the moral law seems the key to these conundrums. When we read of Hester that she does not “measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself ” (105), that “the world’s law was no law for her mind” (107), we usually assume this means she occupies a lawless, asocial sphere: individualism rather than communal responsibility. Yet this would not account for Hester’s role as selfless “Sister of Mercy.” We should remember that Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, not to speak of the eagerly sadistic matrons, reveal strenuous adherence to the magistrates’ law to be little different from the sin it punishes. Hester’s introspection, then, much like Augustine’s (or Clarissa’s), instead has the effect of distancing her from the law of her “world” by showing her a law that can be imposed only from within: an idea of universality inseparable from individual freedom. Readers of Hawthorne’s paragraphs on Hester’s inner speculations have tended to zero in on their feminist content. Yet while important, this aspect of her thought needs to be situated in relation to its broader Enlightenment purview. The claim that “the world’s law was no law for her mind” is followed by a direct reference to a broader seventeenth-­century context, and very specifically a philosophical one: It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged—­not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was their most real abode—­the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter. (107, emphases mine)

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The suggestion seems clear enough: Hester is to be understood as an Enlightenment thinker in the broad sense, rejecting old “systems of thought” (presumably religious ones) specifically in favor of the new understandings of the cosmos and of human freedom therein that replaced them.56 If this is so, then the relation between her speculations (and what they suggest, that the scarlet letter has not “done its office” in the sense of reconciling her to her town’s religious law) and her role as Sister of Mercy is no longer mysterious. Precisely as an Enlightenment thinker, Hester has of her own volition arrived at an acceptance of a wider moral law that is human rather than divine; in her services to the community, she acts on this law; but, crucially, those acts thereby derive, just as Kant would prescribe, not from sentiment, but from reason. As Sacvan Bercovitch rightly notes, Hawthorne’s portrayal of this stance is equivocal—­in a way that seems gendered, and yet is perhaps no less true of his depiction of men given “excessively” (in his view) over to reason. Moreover, we are perhaps little different in our frequent critical desire for Hester to represent the second coming of Anne Hutchinson, perhaps in transcendentalist form. That would entail a Hester who is more truly antinomian, against all laws, and therefore one who would listen only to the truth of her heart. But this is not the Hester Hawthorne depicts. Hester goes about her business as Sister of Mercy with a distinct detachment (this is the “marble coldness” others see in her, 107). And this also helps clarify how she differs from figures like Chillingworth or, say, Aylmer in Hawthorne’s story “The Birth-­Mark,” for whom reason becomes merely an alibi for a monstrously excessive passion (as in the reading of Kant as Sade)—­a kind of sublimation of it. Hester’s speculations, rather—­her “enthusiasm[s] of thought” (108), a formulation rather like Hawthorne’s reviewer’s notion of “libertinisms of the brain”—­are passionate because they represent a passion inherent to reason itself, once it is understood as a crucial mode of freedom of thought. This might also help explain some of her relation to wearing the scarlet letter. We are shown in no uncertain terms that it is her position as the wearer of the letter that allows her the “latitude” she takes up. Removing her from the “world” in which she actually lives (and serving as a kind of armor against that world’s slings and arrows), and thus showing her the entrée to another, it is both a blessing and a curse. One of Hawthorne’s more brilliant apparent ambiguities appears at the moment when Hester, who has just been described as having been “set free” by her outlaw status and the speculative thought it engenders (128), then feels the return of a lost “freedom” when she takes off the symbol of that status, the letter, and lets down her hair in her reunion with Dimmesdale in the woods (130). How is it a blessed relief to be free of freedom? This is the real (Kantian) question being asked here. Again,

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our readings of this scene are perhaps hampered by seeing it simply as about Hester in love versus Hester punished or restrained. The scene is really about a plan—­Hester’s idea that she and Dimmesdale escape on a boat to the Old World whence they came, which she refers to more than once as a kind of “undo[ing]” of time itself: “The past is gone! . . . I undo it all, and make it as if it had never been!” (130). As she exhorts Dimmesdale, they will “Begin all anew!” simply by “choos[ing]” “the broad pathway of the sea” or the forest over remaining where they are (127). Though Bercovitch sees Hester’s remaining in the town at story’s end as evidence for the force of American ideology, clearly the dream these statements represent—­of an absolute new beginning, a magic vanishing act whereby the past disappears, that is all the result of free choice—­speak much more to that ideology’s deepest foundations: to “freedom from” rather than “freedom to,” in effect. And as we have seen, here what Hester most imagines being “free from” is “freedom to” itself, to the extent the latter is engendered rather than thwarted by the reality of finitude. So: why? Why would one want to be free from freedom? Here the other side of Hawthorne’s clearly equivocal portrayal of Hester’s speculative roamings—­the portrayal of their limitlessness in gothic terms, as producing a Kierkegaardian anxiety—­can be of help, to the extent they represent a more complex critique of Enlightenment. While Hester’s thoughts excite and energize her, and give her a mission, they also frighten her, representing as they do a realm without any moral signposts, an abyss or void (“deep chasm” or “precipice”), a “dark labyrinth of mind” with a “home and comfort nowhere” (109). Most interesting, perhaps, in light of our genealogy of the will from Augustine forward, is what could easily appear Hawthorne’s most critical takes on Hester’s interior state, his concern (when he suggests she contemplates killing both Pearl and herself) that her heart has “lost its regular and healthy throb,” and his claim (in the scene with Dimmesdale) that her mental wanderings have both “made her strong” and “taught her much amiss” (128). Both the depths of Hester’s despair (her suicidal wish) and her wild dream of erasing the past, which might seem affectively opposed (and both dramatically “willful”), share in common a turn away from the project of freedom toward an obliteration of its demands—­but in Hester, as Hawthorne portrays her, we see that these turns, which indeed show the will acting against its own highest goals, its forward motion, derive, as Kant might have conceived, precisely from the intensity of her encounter with freedom. When Hester returns to her New England home to take up her position as wearer of the letter once more, then, she shows she has fully given up on the notion of beginning all anew, for that would have been untrue to

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Dimmesdale’s memory. Here we see that her admission of the finite dimension of her own existence makes possible her freer explorations in the sphere of art, on the one hand, and thought, on the other—­as well as, not unimportantly, her continued work as “Sister of Mercy” to the women of the community, hearing their innermost thoughts and offering equally secret guidance.57 Thus Hester, improbably, passes from being the heroine of a novel of adultery to a kind of counselor for future generations. And yet The Scarlet Letter, of course, also contains a representative of one of those generations, in the product of the illicit liaison itself: Hester’s daughter, Pearl. As Hester’s story cannot, Pearl’s moves in the direction of the novelistic bildungsroman, the subject of our next chapter, and so it is fitting that her story is where we here conclude. The first thing to notice about Pearl are the diametrically opposed reactions she has generated in readers since the time of The Scarlet Letter’s publication. In essence, she is deemed either the book’s most recognizably human character or its least human (which view Hester herself at times shares, 63). I would argue that this very uncertainty results from Pearl’s specifically childlike relation to will as such. For the Puritan, the child fearfully embodied human duality at its most intense; in treating the child, instead, as harmless tabula rasa, nineteenth-­century moralism insisted the will was not born but made. Pearl, then, serves as a reminder of a lost uncanniness endemic to personhood itself—­recalling Hans Jonas’s account of freedom’s “giddiness . . . in the presence of its own possibilities” (350). Yet her form of “relishing” her own will is closer to young Augustine stealing the pears—­or to his and Kierke­ gaard’s sense of youth as drawn toward the “monstrous” and “enigmatic”—­than to Bunyan obsessing over whether he might sin. Characterized by an unflaggingly wild “curiosity,” Pearl is, in essence, an experimenter, though of a reckless rather than methodical kind (73, 155). In her slight form, “intelligen[ce]” and “perversity” go hand in hand (63); this combination seems to be what “play” means for her, as when she throws flowers at the symbol on her mother’s breast. (She might have approached it with awe or fear, or flung a stone in frustration, but no: she hurls blossoms.) Hester, too, has such “sportive impulse[s]” that “c[o]me over her, in the midst of her deepest suffering” (67), and Pearl indeed seems to take Hester’s own modalities of freedom to another level—­one made possible precisely by the fact of being a child. In the contemporaneous female bildungsromans about which Hawthorne famously groused, mid-­nineteenth-­century best sellers such as The Lamplighter or The Wide, Wide World—­though he was kinder to the more unusual one we will examine in our next chapter—­youthful heroines are tasked with learning to tame their impulsive emotional outbursts, whether of rage or grief.

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Thus, will once more appears here as the achievement of self-­government. Pearl, too, is said to require a transformation in order to become what the text at times calls “human,” but finally, more specifically, “a woman” inhabiting “the world” (119, 162). This is a process almost the opposite of that in the other novels, a sentimental rather than Lockean one, in that it entails Pearl losing the “hard” quality she shares with her mother and, by surrendering to feeling, developing proper “sympathies” (162). And yet, as always, Hawthorne remains as equivocal regarding his text’s moral dimension as the gothics on which he was raised. Thus, just as in Hester’s case, Pearl’s tendency to stand out rather than merge into her “world”—­her status as a “law unto herself ” (89)—­is associated at times with an absence of “order,” with “caprice” (will as arbitrariness), but at others with a different order that is simply “peculiar” to Pearl alone (63, 69). And, again as with her mother, there are Kantian resonances to the way Pearl merges these possibilities, such that their intensities of freedom seem inseparable from the rigor of their shared demand for truth, and a distance from particular sympathies appears to enable the taking up of a more universal position. In Pearl’s case, this is most evident in her relations with her unacknowledged father, and never more so than in the forest scene, in which she can be read as indignantly rejecting the adults’ plan, one that, if carried out, would enable the minister to evade ever having to confess his role in public. Why does Pearl’s embodiment of freedom as a kind of excess seem more uncanny than Hester’s does—­uncanny even to Hester herself? We might say that, unlike Hester, Pearl is not disturbed by it—­seeing its difference from the finite, human sphere—­but lives in it fully and wholly precisely because she does not yet inhabit any other world. In this way, then, Hawthorne reconceives the Puritan conception of the child as pure will as a mode of pure freedom that is, to the observer, unnerving for the same reason that it is dazzling, “iridescent” in Jonas’s phrase—­literally dancing across the spectrum of possibilities, as Pearl skips among her ancestors’ graves. If Pearl represents anything fully, it is energy, intensity, or abundance as such—­curiosity, desire, creativity, and multiplicity, as a willful inhabitation of as many possibilities as she can conceive. If all of these may be summed up as “that perversity, which all children have more or less of, and of which Pearl had a ten-­fold portion” (89)—­that is, as will incarnate—­then we begin to see that Pearl merely hyperbolizes qualities Hawthorne ascribes to the child very much as his New En­ gland ancestors might have: the child not as untamed adult but as the embodiment of the capacity for freedom before the choice of it, freedom in extremis. We can see this, as others have noted, in the way his depiction of Pearl echoes his reactions, recorded in his notebooks, to his own daughter Una, who also

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seemed to her father “supernatural” in her boldness, her unabashed “curiosity” about her dying grandmother, her “comprehension of everything” in the sense both of understanding but also of inhabiting (because trying out) all alternatives, all extremes, from hardness to tenderness, coarseness to delicacy, irrationality to wisdom (Scarlet 218–­19). In the adult world, we might say, speculation or art offer ways of reinhabiting this space beyond connectedness or finitude: hence, the way Pearl’s extravagance of will gets mirrored in the Renaissance lavishness of Hester’s needlework, which adorns her daughter throughout the book, and which at the end of the novel we find her producing as “baby-­garmen[ts]” for Pearl’s own child (165). In Moretti’s account of the bildungsroman, it is the novel’s association with youth—­a period of life by definition “circumscribed”—­that enables it to give form to modernity itself. For the same things may be said of youth and modernity alike: “Only by curbing its intrinsically boundless dynamism . . . can [it] be represented. Only thus . . . can it be ‘made human’ ” (6). We thus conceive the bildungsroman as the plot proper to the Lockean and sentimental domestication—­here, literally—­of modernity. As the next chapter reveals, however, this is far from where the idea of Bildung began. It turns out to have been—­and remained, in the hands of one very remarkable American woman writer—­no less than a means of telling an Augustinian story about the developing body itself.

2

Vitalizing the Bildungsroman

In Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons (1862), the bildungsroman is a story of the body. The purpose of this chapter is to argue that, as such, it is also a story of the will. To be clear, however: I do not mean a story of will as a triumph over the body—­a familiar enough understanding, easily assimilated to common construals of both the term’s Christian and its liberal connotations. And just as easily assimilated to common construals of the bildungsroman, above all in English, where the plot of self-­formation is typically conceived as entailing the proper restraint of one’s appetites.1 Put otherwise, while the novel on the model of the spiritual autobiography associates such restraint with holding worldly temptations at bay, the more fully secularized nineteenth-­century version aligns it with one’s entry into society—­and, hence, with a more clearly developmental trajectory from willful childhood to the patience and self-­ command of the mature, marriageable adult. With Stoddard’s heroine Cassy, something different has happened. To mature entails becoming aware of one’s body. As a young teenager, she not only begins to “burst out” of her clothes, the result of a new ravenousness, regarded by even her rigidly Calvinist grandfather with less censure than amusement: “The creature will eat us out of house and home,” he states, “looking at me, for him good humoredly” (46–­47).2 More unsettlingly, she finds the first stirrings of sexual feeling in the presence of her married cousin Charles, such that she accepts his invitation to come spend a “finishing” year with his family in a larger town (despite her fear, after a spartan first dinner at their home, “that I should not have enough to eat” [69]). As with Cassy’s earlier growth spurt, this new turn toward womanhood is depicted somatically, as an awareness of

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“the ebb and flow of blood through my heart” (77), a more fickle appetite, and a feeling of “nervous[ness]” she initially blames on caffeine (99). It also, notably, takes the form of sickness. While earlier in the book Cassy’s robust health contrasts with her sister Veronica’s “delicacy of constitution” (26), from the moment Charles first reveals a hint of passion for his cousin, she finds herself “too ill to rise the next morning” (84). And thus begins the first of several exchanges throughout the book in which Cassy receives medical advice, solicited and not—­here, from a doctor who, announcing that “like many women” she will henceforth suffer many such bodily disturbances, she should avoid both coffee and nighttime balls (84). Later in the book, two strangers, seeing Cassy drink alcohol on a train, inform her that her “circulation is too rapid” and “electricity would be first-­rate for me” (204). Although The Morgesons has still received relatively scant critical attention for what may well be the finest nineteenth-­century novel by an American woman, those readings that do exist have most often, unsurprisingly, been feminist ones, for which such moments suggest a familiar narrative. Cassy is encountering “the medical profession’s paternalistic efforts to restrict women,” and specifically their sexuality; her “traveling companions are offended by her unconventionality and seek to put her in her place by suggesting that she is suffering from nervous disorders” (The Morgesons and Other Writings 255, 257). With such understandable accounts comes the corollary that for Stoddard herself, the body is not one’s enemy but a friend; it is not simply salubrious, but a form of self-­expression and freedom, for Cassy to affirm her desires, whether for food, drink, or men. If the bildungsroman typically entails a gradual education in self-­restraint, such treatments thus suggest Stoddard has written something closer to a riposte of one. And certainly, the reader cannot help but be struck by the book’s upending of the expectations encouraged by seduction and marriage plot alike: cousin Charles, not Cassy, is punished by death for their illicit passion, leaving Cassy free to move on and eventually marry a younger man, Desmond, who seems if anything a double of his predecessor, an equally Byronic type to whom she responds with just as immediate and “mad” a desire (200). These deviations from Victorian convention are not at all to be taken lightly, and certainly form a crucial part, together with the detailed attention to embodiment, of why The Morgesons can appear so remarkably modern—­in addition to its fierce, vividly fragmentary style. Rather than arguing for Stoddard’s as simply a progressive, liberatory revision of a constraining tradition, however, this chapter argues that she in fact harkens back to the roots of the bildungsroman itself. One can take this quite literally: Stoddard was an avid reader of German Romanticism both literary

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and philosophical, from Goethe to Schiller (both of whom The Morgesons references) to the popularizations of Kant and Hegel by the French philosopher Victor Cousin.3 Yet while that ur-­bildungsroman (and a favorite of Stoddard’s), Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–­96), has played little role in discussions of nineteenth-­century American (or even, for the most part, British) “novels of formation,” it might at first appear to do little to change our sense of those novels as being primarily devoted to a process of proper socialization.4 Indeed, in Franco Moretti’s classic account in The Way of the World, Wilhelm Meister pairs with Jane Austen as the high-­water mark of the bildungsroman at its most perfected, in which marriage as the symbol of the “happy belonging to a harmonious totality” is gladly accepted in exchange for one’s “freedom” and a finally wearying “individuality” (65, 59). As Reinhard Koselleck has pointed out, however, the guiding assumption here—­that, we might say, Bildung essentially means “making bourgeois”—­ draws on a limited understanding of the term’s longer history. Up until the late eighteenth century, Bildung appears much more as a theological term—­ precisely not a social one, which is why Koselleck prefers Shaftesbury’s coinage “self-­formation” to the frequent translation of Bildung as “education,” which suggests a worldlier schooling (Koselleck 173). Thus returning Bildung to its radical Pietist origins, I would argue, Koselleck ends up offering us a way into considering its even more occluded physiological dimension. For at the time Goethe and his fellow Germans were inventing the bildungsroman,5 Bildung was in fact being conceptualized as a term for the physical “self-­formation” of all organic life. This was especially true in the work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, professor of medicine at Göttingen, and still best known for his influential classification of human beings into five races, which he saw as resulting solely from environmental influences.6 During his own era, however, Blumenbach enjoyed particular influence, not only on other naturalists but on readers from Goethe to Kant to Coleridge, for his theory of what he called the Bildungstrieb. As the name suggests, this concept strikingly weds the Pietist conception of Bildung as spiritual self-­formation to the biological notion of Trieb, which can connote both the first push upward (the shoot) of a young plant, as well as the more general idea, familiar to us today from its usage by Freud, of a motivating force or drive.7 Through this coinage, Blumenbach aimed to conceptualize the process by which the living organism initially develops and, moreover, continues to renew itself (along with, eventually, further generations) throughout its life. The present chapter, then, begins by demonstrating how important these ideas were to a writer like Goethe during the same years he was laying the

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groundwork for what would become the bildungsroman. Its overall aim, however, lies in providing both a pre-­and post-­history of such concepts that can make clear their broader relation to the evolving fortunes of both the novel and the will. Emerging out of German Pietism, the medical vitalism that eventuates in notions like the Bildungstrieb represented an explicit attempt to push back on Cartesian construals of the body as mere mechanism, by theorizing the workings of a developmental, embodied will capable of working both for and against self-­preservative aims. As the novel gathered steam across the eighteenth century, however, such conceptions became split between more Romantic versions rooted in their Pietist precursors and sentimental ones more certain of the body’s inherent wisdom. While the novel has more commonly been read in relation to the latter, I argue here for The Morgesons as a vitalist bildungsroman in the older sense. The debates I discuss here remain, moreover, surprisingly current ones. Although, as we will see, vitalism would once more be overshadowed by a mechanistic physiology and psychology during the nineteenth century, by century’s end neovitalisms had once again begun to emerge in the writings of figures like Henri Bergson. Contemporary criticism, and even some writing within the sciences, have in recent years encouraged a return to these. In response, I make the case here for the extension of the longer and more medically focused vitalist tradition in the work of Kurt Goldstein and Georg Canguilhem, twentieth-­century philosophers of biology who retain the questions about will that I contend are so central to that fuller intellectual history—­a history, this chapter argues, that proves surprisingly congruent with that of the novel as a form. The Bildungsroman as a Body’s Story Given its focus on such bodily activities as eating and sexual reproduction, Blumenbach’s “formative drive” might, admittedly, seem at first blush to have little in common with either a religious notion of Bildung or a more secular one predicated on bourgeois self-­command. And the essay “Über den Bildungstrieb” (1789), where he introduces the concept, is anything but indirect about the earthy nature of its material. “What is the nature,” Blumenbach rhapsodically begins his text, “of that change which takes place within a female, when after having experienced the most delightful of all sensual pleasures, and being duly impregnated, form, and existence are about to be given to her offspring?” (15). The work’s primary target was the then-­popular notion of preformation, which held that God had created in a single act all living forms that had been or would ever be—­forms that thus inhered, fully formed

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albeit involuted like an adult moth curled in a cocoon, within either egg or sperm (writers went back and forth as to which). Building on the work of Harvey, Buffon, and most directly the pioneering embryologist Caspar Friedrich Wolff, who in 1759 first posited his idea of the vis essentialis (essential force), a precursor of the Bildungstrieb, Blumenbach argued strongly for the opposing view, termed epigenesis, in which life itself contained the power to develop fully out of what was initially mere formless matter. Epigenesis thus transforms biological development from a temporally static given into a story. Blumenbach then extended this story: in his account, the Bildungstrieb named the power by which the organism not only arrives at full-­ fledged being but—­with particular fervor during its youth—­maintains and even augments that being over time by taking in nutrients, warding off disease, and finally making more of its kind. (He was especially fascinated by the case of the hydra or polyp, a kind of freshwater anemone with the ability to regrow, in shorter form, tentacles that had been severed, seeing this restorative capacity as a kind of “partial repetition” of the initial impulse that led to the gestation of the animal as a whole.)8 In this more lifelong form, then, the Bildungstrieb’s tale begins at least to map onto—­if clearly to depict from a rather different vantage—­that of the bildungsroman. Thus, just as the novel as a form is said to grant a new open-­endedness, a historically contingent dimension, to human narratives once thought determined in advance by Providence, we see here how the new story of biological life that Blumenbach joined other eighteenth-­ century naturalists in generating also placed within an ongoingly unfolding trajectory entities once conceived as inhabiting a timeless, pregiven realm. Yet if in one sense the Bildungstrieb and bildungsroman clearly inhabit parallel tracks, conceptually as well as historically, the fact remains that Blumenbach’s biologized take on youthful Bildung nonetheless would seem to emphasize aspects of that process that not only differ from, but indeed radically oppose those of either spiritual Bildung or the traditionally understood bildungsroman, with its narrative of managing desire. If anything, the version of life we see here seems more proto-­evolutionary than proto-­Victorian. Yet perhaps it has been too easy, when considering the history of the novel, to place on the sidelines (say, with the gothic or other more “minor” offshoots) details such as Goethe’s quite central involvement in the scientific debate of his day. In fact, while we never find Goethe employing the term Bildungsroman to describe his own work, he was enough of an admirer of Blumenbach to write a paean to his ideas, titled simply “Bildungstrieb,” during the same year, 1796, that he wrote Wilhelm Meister. Might the foundational bildungsroman be reconceived, then, as a story of the Bildungstrieb?9 Moretti’s argument in The Way of the World tellingly

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allows for such a possibility only once, when he is describing an aspect of Goethe’s novel that he clearly finds distasteful and out of keeping with its overall tone. Certain characters, he notes—­in a pattern also evident in Goethe’s more clearly scientifically inflected Elective Affinities (1809)—­are killed off or driven mad in a way that suggests a proto-­Darwinian unfitness for existence. Specifically, their tendency to a kind of excess of personality is expressed literally as a form of “illness”: “The limbs that are severed from the organism, in Wilhelm Meister, can never be rejoined” (47).10 That such conceptions derive directly from Goethe’s interests in biology can readily be argued.11 Yet there is a significant danger in the tendency, which Moretti’s argument clearly evinces, to assume that the introduction of a biological dimension to the narration of human life necessarily entails a deterministic sorting out of fit from unfit, of the sort usually associated (whether fairly or not, as we will see in chapter 5) with later post-­Darwinian naturalism. Writings that spend actual time with Goethe’s scientific writing and the milieu of which it formed a part, such as Carl Niekerk’s and Astrida Tantillo’s, arrive at a more nuanced portrayal, in which Goethe’s engagement with writings like Blumenach’s encourages him to move beyond deterministic formulations (for Niekerk, indeed, even elsewhere within Wilhelm Meister).12 In his essay on Blumenbach, after all, Goethe specifically emphasizes his sense of the Bildungstrieb as characterized by both “unity” and “freedom” (36), and aligns it with other concepts in his writing that he also sees as creating a bridge between the formative capacities of matter and more anthropomorphized ideas such as Steigerung (“striving”), a term Tantillo notes applies equally readily in Goethe to both plant development and Faust’s unquenchable yearning for meaning.13 Hence, as Tantillo finds, Bildungstrieb, Steigerung, freedom, and will (Willkür) have overlapping and even synonymous resonances in Goethe’s writing: in all cases, what interests him is the way in which, as he puts it in “Bildungstrieb,” “life” entails a heroic struggle toward “form” (36). In this sense, then, the Bildungstrieb’s story very much resembles that of the novelistic protagonist Lukács would describe, the “seeke[r]” whose personal trajectory allegorizes the novel’s “form-­determining intention” (Theory 60). Here, however, we begin to see how, in Goethe in particular, the idea of the Bildungstrieb, far from entailing the reduction of human life to biologized determinism, becomes seemingly against all odds yoked to a project of transcendence. Although in one sense, again just as in the novel as a form, we see in Goethe’s nature writings a refusal of teleology, an insistence on the provisionality of ends, we do also find, in notions like Steigerung, the idea of the living thing approaching an ideal “perfection” of form: in Tantillo’s words,

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“Steigerung enables the plant to transcend the matter that first gave it the impetus to grow” (78, 68). Notions like these allow Goethe to align the Bildungstrieb with the formative spirit of the artist in search of beauty.14 Overall, then, it would seem that while the Bildungstrieb might at first appear to remove the story of Bildung from a spiritual or moral sphere to a bodily one emptied of such judgments of value, the literary figures captivated by Blumenbach’s concept seem instead to have taken it as a means of respiritualizing the physical realm. And yet is this really a surprise? If recent work on Romanticism has sought to remind us of these writers’ engagement with the sciences, that engagement is usually understood as part of a broader eighteenth-­century project of vitalism, a refiguration of the natural world precisely through concepts like Blumenbach’s that attributed to the minutest organisms a striving force or will. For later biologists, such theories amounted to anything but a physicalizing of what had once been seen as spiritual; instead, notions like the Bildungstrieb or its predecessors, Wolff ’s vis essentialis or the animism of Georg Stahl, reacted against the mechanization of life’s processes by Enlightenment science by positing an independently acting “sentient principle,” as the Edinburgh physician Robert Whytt described it, that some of them, including both Whytt and Stahl, were more than happy to call the “soul.” In this sense, then, the Bildungstrieb does not circumscribe the will’s domain but extends it; it is less an upsurging of materialist modernity than, as its appeal to the Romantics would suggest, a critique of modern science from within. Such characterizations are not wholly mistaken; as I will be asserting, there is indeed something very important here about this radicalization of will, this new rooting of a formerly spiritual principle within the earthiest processes of nature itself. For one thing, some of the stranger turns taken by the will as a philosophical concept in the nineteenth century, particularly in Schopenhauer, seem highly illuminated by this history. It is, moreover, fully appropriate to consider Blumenbach’s concept within the larger context of eighteenth-­century vitalism, and this does mean that he wrote not only against religious ideas like preformation but, equally, against what he conceived to be overly mechanistic accounts of living beings, presenting such accounts as not so much mistaken as, crucially, incomplete. After all, even Descartes had acknowledged that embryonic development posed a challenge his system could not yet answer.15 What I wish most to emphasize, however, about the vitalist aspects of the Bildungstrieb idea is their capacity to open out onto a less familiar and more powerful account of vitalism itself, one that can overcome the usual sense of it as a spiritualizing discourse rendered moot by modern biology. Here it is

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helpful to consider the historian Peter Reill’s argument that we might distinguish a formation he terms “Enlightenment vitalism” from the later Romantic movement known as Naturphilosophie, for which, in his words, “spirit [is] the true essence of reality” (202). As Reill shows, for most scholars these forms of thought appear as virtually synonymous, with the result that vitalist thought is easily treated as a regrettably recurring hiccup of antimodern nostalgia, an outmoded way station along the way to the consolidation of cell theory in the 1850s and, eventually, the discovery of DNA a century later. As the term “Enlightenment vitalism” would suggest, Reill aims to contest this account, reconceiving vitalists from Stahl to Blumenbach as participants in furthering the project of Enlightenment science rather than as stubborn relics of an older religious worldview. Stahl, for example, drew directly on Harvey’s pioneering work on blood circulation, while Whytt was one of the first to posit the workings of the nervous system. Their concern was simply that the mechanistic theories of Descartes, Boyle, and others provided no means of distinguishing living entities from nonliving ones; hence, they in many ways laid the groundwork for the very notion of biology as a distinct scientific project. Stahl, the earliest to raise such issues, theorized this distinction through the concept of organism, arguing that while mechanism could explain very well how a body’s individual parts functioned, it had far less to say about how they worked together as a whole. For Stahl—­as later for Kant—­to ask after the whole necessarily reintroduced the issue of purposiveness, which the mechanists had banished by positing a nature subject only to the movements of “blind chance.”16 Wholeness or integrity, after all, was itself one way to understand the difference between the living creature and that same creature once death had begun to subject its form to a process of breakdown, de-­differentiation, and decay. The ongoing encroachment of that process, and the attempt to forestall it, along with the direct countermovement of ongoing growth, thus generated the innate direction, the narrative drama of the living thing’s existence—­a drama unknown to inorganic substance.17 Clearly, these kinds of ideas impressed Blumenbach, who played a significant role in reviving Stahl’s thought toward the end of the eighteenth century.18 In Reill’s argument, concepts like Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb need to be recognized as sharing more in common with those of Stahl and other “Enlightenment vitalists” than with the Naturphilosophie of Romantic-­era contemporaries like Friedrich Schelling and others, for two reasons in particular: one, their emphasis on the specificity of the individual organism, as opposed to a subsuming larger unity, and, two, their location of that organism, as an entity for study, within a historical, developmental trajectory. In the words of Carl Kielmeyer, who taught alongside Blumenbach at Göttingen, the scientist

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always needed to work diachronically, to ask not just “How is it” but “How was it, and how will it become?” (quoted in Reill 192). Such questions are, of course, crucial ones for the bildungsroman as well. And yet to think about the ways they might function there, we need now to take Reill’s arguments about vitalism itself to a different place than he does himself. While Reill writes to defend vitalism against its many detractors, in the intervening period, as has often been noted, vitalism has itself gained new life.19 One can see this in many quarters—­in the renewed interest, often via Gilles Deleuze, in the work of Bergson; in some iterations of affect theory; and, perhaps most directly, in “new materialist” scholarship like that of Jane Bennett, who in her influential book Vibrant Matter draws directly on Blumenbach’s writings on the Bildungstrieb.20 Much might be said about this diverse body of work, but, for our purposes here, we can make the sweeping claim that much—­though not all—­of it actually reverses the arguments made in Peter Reill’s book. That is, while it does aim to make the case for vitalism, it does so precisely by reading it once more through a lens like the one he associates with Naturphilosophie.21 To see this, it is important to recognize the surprising continuities Reill identifies between Naturphilosophie, for which all of nature embodies “spirit,” and what might otherwise seem an utterly opposed strand in eighteenth-­century thinking, the radical materialism of skeptics like Diderot. While one could scarcely reduce these to one another, Reill’s argument enables us to see how each, in their distinct ways, works against the concerns he stresses in his “Enlightenment vitalists.” In both cases, that is—­and in many contemporary “neovitalisms” as well—­the emphasis on the individual organism gives way to a focus on the larger category of “nature” (or, in Diderot’s case, “matter”), and the emphasis on developmental time, that organism’s inexorably linear movement of growth and temporarily warded-­off decay, becomes subsumed into a generalized sense of ongoing “process.” With respect to the contemporary work, the rationale for all of this can be readily understood. The new vitalism forms part of the larger move away from human uniqueness in our field. From that vantage, to emphasize the bounded individual is to side with what is construed to be the Enlightenment understanding of Man as the autonomous “subject of reason,” who disavows his own embodiment in order to deny his commonality with nonhuman life. And to emphasize developmental time is to see from the point of view of human history, rather than the life of the planet as a whole, in which our seemingly urgent dramas form but a tiny blip within cosmic time. These new perspectives offer crucial correctives to decades of criticism insensible to the nonhuman world. And yet the context we are exploring also

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lays bare some of their limitations. After all, the individual, developmental viewpoint of Enlightenment vitalism scarcely accords with the notion of a disembodied, rational subject; as we see in a notion like Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb, it is fully material and, indeed, not necessarily limited to human life at all (although, as we will see, it can also usefully recharacterize the specificity of more complex organisms in a register that is as much about the potential for pathology as transcendence). By rejecting it in favor of later eighteenth-­century writers’ emphasis on a larger “Nature” or “process,” then, these new materialisms are not so much reintroducing materiality as such, as they are presenting it from a particular vantage—­arguably, as I suggested in this book’s introduction, a more utopian one, to the extent it circumvents the complexities of the individual will in its relation to a greater whole. In order to develop this contrast, however, we must bring forward two elements of Reill’s “Enlightenment vitalism” that he himself tends to downplay. I refer to this body of thought’s roots in medical writing (rather than the natural history, growing out of Buffon, that forms his primary focus), and to that medicine’s own roots in Christian Pietism, which, given his “Enlightenment” emphasis, Reill understandably minimizes.22 Medicine as a context is in fact crucial not only to vitalism’s efflorescence in Edinburgh and Montpellier in the late 1700s but to the earliest arguments on its behalf, in the writings of Georg Stahl, who studied medicine at Jena in the 1670s before becoming court physician and, in the 1690s, professor of medicine at Halle. What we need to recognize, then, is how that medical context, surprisingly enough, intertwines with the Pietist one that was crucial to Stahl also. Now, Stahl, we should note, is just about the last person one would imagine turning to in order to make a case for vitalism in the present day—­his version of a vital principle, the anima, seeming the hardest to distinguish from an immaterial soul. I want to argue, however, that only by seeing these ideas’ connection to their radical Protestant context can we, surprisingly enough, understand their embodied dimension—­and particularly a dimension we need their medical context to appreciate, their importance for thinking about not only developmental processes but pathological ones. Put simply, it is with Stahl that the version of “will” Lionel Trilling conceives as crucial to nineteenth-­century fiction—­the “physiological” will, subject to “pathologies of excess and deficiency” (Moral 502)—­comes forth as a feature of modern vitalist thinking. As such, vitalist ideas can be shown to support not simply the notions of fit and unfit forms of life that we saw at work in Wilhelm Meister, but, as a counter to such views, the much more complexly interrelated portrayal of health, unhealth, and the relation of both to (female) adolescence evident in a book like Elizabeth Stoddard’s mid-­nineteenth-­century

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bildungsroman, which has seen the intervening elaboration of some of these ideas within the nascent field of psychiatry. The Birth of Medical Vitalism: The Body as Wayward Will While within the history of science—­and indeed already during his lifetime—­ Georg Stahl has been a controversial figure, his medical vitalism contains enduring insights. Ideas such as the notion of the circulation as guided by the motions of the soul—­as opposed to Harvey’s conception of the heart as a mere mechanical pump—­grew for Stahl out of a desire to understand how personal feelings, including Pietists’ emotional response to God, could quicken the pulse and bring a flush to the face.23 Such reactions meant, for Stahl, that in contrast to Cartesian dualism, mind and body formed an indissoluble whole. Depicting a body itself capable of purposiveness, even of thought, Stahl, like Hippocrates, conceived of fevers as expressing our “nature’s inherent capacity to heal,” against mechanical views of such phenomena as “heat, friction, or fermentation” (Geyer-­Kordesch 75).24 Imagined as such, bodies were highly individual entities; no two would respond to stimuli, whether internal or external, quite alike. The skilled physician, then, rather than confronting a mere thing on a table, to be bled, cut into, or fed drugs, would learn to recognize the physical form as the “subjective expression” of a person’s entire being, ren­ dering reported symptoms as relevant as visible signs. The vitalist introduction of the concept of organism (in early terminology, organization) comes into play here, as the body is seen not simply as an assortment of disparate parts or forces but as a totality, and a distinct one at that.25 For Stahl, “form or configuration” had to be grasped as “of the very essence” of what it meant for something to be alive (King 128); put otherwise, the parts could only be understood in relation to the greater whole that they subserved. With this insistence not simply on how the body’s components worked (which Stahl was fully willing to grant mechanism could best explain), but on why, on what its workings were for (which he thought required a different kind of account), purposiveness reentered the discussion.26 What put the body in motion—­and for Stahl, “movement without direction was inconceivable”—­was the anima, or “life soul,” a precursor to the Bildungstrieb, which worked not according to the mechanists’ logic of “blind chance” but, rather, against it to bring forth and then sustain the integrity of the individual life form (Rather 45, 42). How should we think about the Stahlian anima? Its English translation as “soul” and function as a kind of prime mover of the body’s matter have had the effect, in most accounts—­again, both in the eighteenth century and today—­of making Stahl appear a theological leftover battling modern scientific

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materialism. Indeed, as Johanna Geyer-­Kordesch has most thoroughly explored, Stahl’s work did grow very directly out of his involvement in late seventeenth-­century Pietism. Historians of vitalist thinking thus tend either to emphasize a gradual secularization or materialization of these ideas by later thinkers, Blumenbach among them—­or, if Stahl himself is to be given more credit, to make the case for his importance by downplaying the theological features of his own thought. The problem with such approaches, however, is that we are left with no tools for understanding Stahl’s intervention as a crucial moment in the historical reformulation of the concept of will: a reformulation that does not simply leave its Protestant features (the Pauline or Augustinian struggle) behind, but, rather, reconceives these features in vitalist terms.27 Here it helps to be clearer about the specificity of the word anima. Stahl here in fact employs a term that had at one time designated “life, the vital principle,” in contrast to the animus or rational soul; earlier writers thus conceived of the anima as material and “passed on from one generation to another,” as the immaterial, God-­given animus was not (Rather 47; French, Robert Whytt 125). Seen from this perspective, Stahl’s use of the single term anima to express “soul” tout court can be recognized as something much closer to the full materialization of a principle that had previously been hierarchically split between an embodied and a disembodied dimension (French, Robert Whytt 138). Hence, while from our present vantage Stahl’s can easily look like an early mode of vitalism that was not materialist enough, it is crucial to recognize that what most disturbed Cartesians like Leibniz, who famously sparred with Stahl, was not the power Stahl gave the soul over the body but, rather, his excessive materialization of the soul.28 While Stahl crucially does not say the soul is the body, he also emphasizes consistently the inability to think either one without the other. In François Duchesneau’s words, the Stahlian soul’s very existence must be understood as being both “in and for the body” (220, emphasis mine). In sum, if seen anew in comparison to its more fully immaterial predecessor, the anima might in fact be recognized to be newly dependent upon its physical dwelling place. Here we can usefully remember that Stahl’s vitalist ideas grew out of his work in chemistry, and specifically, as Charles Wolfe shows, out of his interest in the theories of fermentation developed by Thomas Willis, the seventeenth-­ century English professor of medicine and natural philosophy. (Willis is also notable for having coined both the terms “psycheology,” or knowledge of the soul, and “neurology” [Weiner, “Part I” 268].) Fermentation, Wolfe shows, was crucial to Stahl’s conception of the specificity of organic matter, which we might thus describe as follows: to grasp life, we must grasp the power of the

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not-­merely-­mechanical anima; but to understand that—­to see what moves the anima to action—­we need to recognize its situatedness within a body defined, as organic, as “in a process of fermentation, which in fact meant it was vulnerable to putrefaction—­indeed, always in a process of putrefaction in some sense” (Wolfe, “Why” 203). One may put this another way, in terms more harmonious with our interest in the novel: for Stahl, as for those who took up his ideas later in the century, the living being was defined, as we began to see earlier, by two crucial features: first, the “organization” of matter into the form of the individual organism and, second, by that organism’s being “peculiarly and essentially subject to change” over time (King 122, 121). In other words, individuation and narration, the key features of the novelistic subject, are also here the key features of the living entity. How does this follow from fermentation and putrefaction? Because we know a body is alive when it has not yet begun to decay, to dissolve into indifferentiation (or a generalized “Life”); its urgent task, throughout its life, is to “maintai[n] its integrity”—­to “engender its own organization” (Rather 44; Duchesneau 219)—­by warding off the full effects of a process that is nonetheless internal to it from the first, and that, as such, inspires its very acts of self-­ preservation.29 (The inorganic, by contrast, is notably “ ‘indifferent’ to the arrangement or pattern in which it may be” [King 121].) Hence, we could say: Life, on the one hand, opposes the processes of decay—­with, in effect, an opposing narrative movement—­and is thus defined as their antithesis. But these same movements toward death are, on the other hand, also defining of the living organism. Many consider the nineteenth-­century physician Xavier Bichat to be the source of the concept of life as “the ensemble of functions that resist death”; here we see, however, that this essentially agonistic conception of existence is already present at the origin point of vitalist thought. Its effect, as suggested, is to define “life” via the twinned principles of individuation and narrative. Might we then say, then, that what we see here, before Blumenbach and Goethe, is already the intimate intertwining of bildungsroman with Bildungstrieb? The close connection of the two can be more fully registered, I would argue, if we consider the possibility that the Stahlian anima represents the soul functioning as a kind of will.30 Recall, after all, that the primary action of the anima is conceived not as thought but as movement or force (and remember, for Stahl “movement” immediately presupposed “direction” [Rather 45]). Again, however, this understanding of it runs contrary to the usual construal of Stahl’s thought. Just as the anima is too often deemed a merely immaterial principle, so, too, Stahl’s interest in the body’s self-­healing capacities typically leads to characterizations of the anima as a rational power.31 That Stahl did, and did importantly, want to see the body as possessing at least the capacity

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for a wisdom of its own is indisputable. Yet simply to portray the anima as a beneficent force ensuring the heart’s steady pumping, the blood’s circulation, and so on again makes it harder to understand the violent reaction Stahl’s writings inspired in Leibniz or his Halle colleague Hoffmann, which was inseparable, once again, from the sense that Stahl had removed the motive power of such events from its properly divine source and placed it in the hands of an all too human agency.32 What is complicated to understand, perhaps, is precisely the dimension that Stahl’s Pietism, and specifically the Pietist understanding of human will, can most help us to grasp: that human freedom and human perversity are being insisted upon here at one and the same time. Essentially, the role of the physician in Stahl has become to help the patient to help himself. But this is precisely because of his capacity to harm himself, as a result of his anima’s commanding role over his bodily functions. Put otherwise, when Stahl objects to the notion of man as machine, his privileged examples tend to stress not our wondrous capacity for spontaneity or self-­control—­as would, for example, the English physician George Cheyne, who famously invoked a “Colonel Townsend” who had purportedly succeeded in stopping and restarting his own heart.33 Stahl, in marked contrast, wondered how mechanism could ever explain our “instability,” our “fitfulness”—­giving examples like that of a miser’s inordinate lust for gold (Geyer-­Kordesch, “Passions” 160; Rather 45). Indeed, to defend his concept of the anima to Leibniz, Stahl recurs first and foremost to the way our passions, even if guided by “pure fiction,” can wreak havoc on our physical systems. Under the influence of rage, our hearts race; terror slows our blood; grief diminishes appetite; in such cases, the anima can scarcely be said to cooperate with “the primordial disposition of the Creation itself,” but, rather, reveals its ability “not only to divert movements . . . but to pervert them completely into the contrary, namely into the most severe disturbance or actually the subversion of acts required for the preservation of the body” (Stahl, quoted in Rather and Frerichs 62–­63). How can this be explained? Here it is clear that Stahl’s conception of the anima draws on Pietist, and finally Augustinian, ideas about the human will. In his words, It has seemed to me useful and necessary to direct attention to the fact that man’s nature has a special propensity toward error and excesses, brought about by his impatience, hastiness, irresolution . . . as well as his tendency to oscillate between willful impulse and despondency. . . . All of these emotions culminate in imprudent actions not regulated by rational consciousness. (Stahl, quoted in Geyer-­Kordesch, “Passions” 159)

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Stahl thus takes existing ideas about the excesses and insufficiencies of the will and uses these to account not simply for the condition of the soul but for that of the body as well. (We might note, too, the effect this seems to have on the individual’s narrative motion: he is, chronically, either overhasty or irresolute.) As a result, Stahl thus paves the way not only for all manner of approaches to illnesses considered to have a “psychosomatic” dimension, but, more broadly, as we shall see later in more detail, for the advent of modern psychology itself. (The very term “psychosomatic” was in fact coined by an early German psychologist, Pietist, and follower of Stahl in the early nineteenth century, in relation to the subject of insomnia; and when Stahl’s tortuous Latin prose was finally translated into German in the 1830s, it was by the young psychologist who first developed the notion of drives, or Triebe, in a proto-­Freudian direction.)34 As Stahl is careful to stress, the anima need not act at a conscious level, and, unlike the rational soul described by mechanists, it was capable of being ambivalently influenced by multiple, even opposed ideas at the same time.35 In Stahl, the notion of “temperament” became a favored way to describe one’s behavioral and internal, bodily tendencies (including the potential for specific diseases) at one and the same time, for temperament expressed the conjuncture of an individual’s passions with his or her physical form (Reill 126). The use of “temperament” as shorthand for the interconnection of body and mind would become one of the strongest currents in medical vitalism throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In particular, the increasing interest over the course of the 1700s in human development led to mappings of different temperaments onto the successive stages of an individual life, a project evident not only in the work of Blumenbach, but also in that of the Scottish physician William Cullen and that of the French medical vitalists at Montpellier, who, particularly in midcentury, played an especially important role in disseminating Stahlian ideas in the decades following Stahl’s death in 1734. To understand the significance of these ideas’ reemergence in a novel like Elizabeth Stoddard’s, however, we need also to see how some of these same later eighteenth-­century vitalists not only extended Stahl’s ideas but also reacted against them. For our purposes here, these reactions are important for two reasons. First, they have been much more influential in existing attempts to think the early novel in relation to medical vitalism, which has had the result of rendering a female bildungsroman like Stoddard’s eccentric while the more familiar seduction and domestic plots appear central. Second, these post-­Stahlian medical vitalisms, like the Naturphilosophs discussed by Peter

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Reill, can be shown to share a good deal more in common with many of the “neovitalisms” prevalent today. Vitalist Legacies, I: Sensibility, Romanticism, and the Birth of Psychology s e n s i b i l i t y ( a n d i t s m o d e r at i o n ) Recall the Cartesians’ concern that, in rendering body and soul an inseparable whole, Stahl had made it impossible for the soul to retain its lofty dignity of purpose. The later vitalists, then, took a different approach to this same problem. For them, body and soul were to be drawn into a linkage closer still—­yet one that, far from threatening the soul’s standing, affirmed it, by granting a new kind of intelligence to the body itself. Conceived explicitly as a rejection of the problematically arbitrary freedom of Stahl’s anima, Robert Whytt’s vitalist conception, the “sentient principle,” was conceived as much more bound by necessity to work on the body’s behalf.36 Whytt, in his work toward theorizing the idea of a nervous system, thus imagined a more multiplex soul distributed across the different organs and tissues of the body and thereby bound to act in a manner consistent with its particular local site. “Sympathy” became the term through which Stahlian ideas about the effects of the body’s different sites on one another, and of the external world on each of those sites, was now conceived. In essence, then, the sense of the vital force as potentially wayward will was replaced by one construing it in more positive terms as feeling.37 While Whytt’s ideas were far less influential in his own day than those of his student, William Cullen, they have often seemed to later observers to crystallize the broader eighteenth-­century fascination with sensibility.38 As we see in Diderot’s Encyclopedia, “sensibility” as a concept linked natural and moral philosophy, as our responsiveness to the world at once bespoke the body’s vitality and our capacity for sympathetic connection to other beings, forming a “sensory basis of civic life” (Gaukroger 417).39 (The new idea of a “moral sense” goes along with this: being sensible means we are made to respond to others.) Human nature as a whole thus took, in Whytt as in eighteenth-­century sentimentalism more generally, a far less constitutively vexed form than it had in Stahl. Indeed, a far greater optimism about not only our natures, but about nature in general, suffused such writings, rendering them not wholly dissimilar from the Naturphilosophie that for Reill subsumed the conceptions of the earlier Continental vitalists. The idea of sympathy was important to the

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Naturphilosophs also, as in the work of Lorenz Oken, for whom each organ in the body needed to be understood as in “sympathy” with the rest in a way that rendered them versions of each other, in the same way that each individual entity could be seen as “a microcosm of an all-­encompassing unity” (Reill 213).40 Similarly, for Whytt, sensibility could be seen as “a primordial force pervading all vital matter” (Vila 46). Naturphilosophie went yet further, however, extending these ideas to nonliving things as well, the relations among which were similarly seen in terms of joyful cooperation (as in Oken’s image of the planets moving “playfully around the sun” [Reill 219]). This wasn’t to say that the advent of sensibility theory simply promised harmony within and without, for new medical dilemmas did arise out of the idea that it might be possible to be too affected by one’s sympathetic link to the surrounding world. If human beings overall were less defined by the potential for waywardness of the will, some were thus now deemed especially vulnerable to what, after Whytt, came to be termed “nervous” conditions (Whytt’s student Cullen would coin the term “neuroses”). Nervous disease meant excessive or insufficient sensibility, though the former seems to have received much more attention, in part because with it a new perversity did seem to creep in: the problem of the individual overly attuned to others in a way that threatened her own health. It could result from inborn excessive sensitivity, especially in “the seats of hypochondria or hysteria” (digestive or reproductive organs), which showed especial sympathetic resonances with the body as a whole, or, perhaps most commonly, from an onslaught of stimuli to a person with a dormant susceptibility in these areas—­a susceptibility that might itself be engendered by high living, or even by “excessive suffering” itself, as in the case of the sentimental heroine (French, “Sauvages” 39). Such theories regained their optimistic premise by underscoring that the kinds of symptoms that for Stahl had bespoken matters of human will and passion were, if more traceable to environmental influences, deemed much more submittable to curative regimes.41 As in George Cheyne’s influential The English Malady, such measures took on a moral cast; Cheyne thus blamed sedentariness and epicurean luxury, advocating for more spartan fare. Whytt, for his part, cautioned against intemperance and recommended bathing in the sea.42 Overall, then, we see here the beginnings of the new paths the will was to take in the nineteenth century: either a sentimental one for which the key was to replace an overly striving will with a surrender to feeling or a liberal one for which the will, now never itself seen as subject to pathology, could through virtuous habits moderate the challenges posed by a sensitive body. When vitalist ideas have been linked to the early novel in England as well as in France, then, these arguments based in sensibility have stood at

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center stage. It is not at all hard to see why—­and not simply because Cheyne was Samuel Richardson’s physician. Important early genres like the seduction novel, with its heroines buffeted by storms of sensibility, and, indeed, the bildungsroman in its usual construal as a brief for bourgeois happiness both clearly map onto the ideas presented here. In early American fiction, both of these also appear—­indeed, they appear specifically as women’s stories, as seduction novels like the 1791 Charlotte Temple give way to the equally popular domestic fiction, often written in explicit critique of these, of the mid-­nineteenth century.43 Charlotte Temple may have extolled the virtues of emotional receptivity, but no reader could fail to notice the way that very responsiveness helped hasten its good-­hearted heroine’s seduction and eventual demise. Thus, a mode in which the body’s sensitivities doom the heroine who may simply be “too good for this world”—­a sentimental model that would still find echoes in Little Eva of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—­would give way to one where, as in midcentury best sellers like Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World or Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, the will is able to exercise restraint over the body’s excesses, and the properly socialized heroine thus to reap a marital reward. Tellingly, this plot runs into difficulties not only in books like Stoddard’s, as we will see—­which retain the earlier sense of will as an intense vitalist energy capable of promoting either physical flourishing or its opposite—­but in a rare Black female bildungsroman from the same epoch, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859), the first novel to be published by a Black author in the US.44 Wilson’s book, too, possesses a greater ambivalence toward the ideal of self-­restraint, though here this results not only from the idea of growth occurring through spiritedness, as also in Stoddard, but from the material associations of “restraint” with the quasi-­slave-­like condition of indentured servitude experienced by the book’s young mixed-­race heroine, Frado. Frado is introduced in the book’s second chapter as “sparkling with an exuberance of spirit almost beyond restraint,” to the extent that her impoverished white mother determines “severe restraint would be healthful” and sees the position of servant as a way for Frado to achieve it (17, 20). In the household where she works, however, that restraint takes the horrific literal form of shutting Frado up in a tiny space and placing a wedge in her mouth to keep her from speaking. (The reader today may hear here echoes of Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative, published shortly after, in which Jacobs’s only hope of escape from enslavement entails shutting herself for years in such a constricting space, from which she is unable to communicate with her own children.) For the modern reader, it is hard not to feel that Frado’s real moment of healthful maturation occurs when she throws off prior restraints by

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standing up to her abusive, racist mistress, shouting and physically threatening her while “feel[ing] the stirring of free and independent thoughts” (105). Wilson’s book itself, however, displays a more ambivalent approach to the question of what “restraint” might mean for Frado. It is in no way unimportant that her tyrannical mistress, Mrs. Bellmont, is a woman entirely lacking in restraint herself, but, rather, a creature given over to the pure willfulness that works from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its depiction of Marie St. Clare emphasize as the result of the slave-­owning woman’s unchallenged authority. We should bear this in mind as we read of Frado, no less than the heroines of Warner or Cummins, learning that to find religion might offer a means of “self-­reliance” through a practice of self-­“restrain[t],” as we hear it described in the book by her guiding light (and crush), the Bellmonts’ born-­again son, James (69). When Mrs. Bellmont hears that Frado has “related her experience” at a church meeting, she is seized by terror that the girl will have revealed the extent of her mistreatment, and yet we discover that Frado’s real triumph is that she now possesses a fund of inner “experience” utterly unrelated to Mrs. Bellmont at all, regarding her hopes of conversion (103). The book is thus complex around the subject of whether Frado’s force of will would best be described as her unquenchable “exuberance of spirit” or her capacity to hold something in abeyance, a capacity that in fact bears some relation to the measured terseness of Wilson’s own prose (17). That is to say, passion is here clearly enlivening, and in ways directly related to the quest for freedom from being restrained from without, even as maturation requires, at the least, a sense of knowing when best to unleash it. And yet Frado’s triumphs finally meet a very material limit, as, permanently weakened by her years of ill treatment, she sets forth into a world with very little care, and often outright hostility, for a Black woman trying to survive on her own. r o m a n t i c i s m ( v i ta l i s t i d e a s r e t u r n ) Wilson’s distance from the conventional female bildungsromans of midcentury is unquestionably inflected by her negotiation of the period’s racialized and gendered expectations of white feminine “refinement” in contrast to Black women’s purportedly “uncontrolled” “instincts,” as described by critics such as Hazel Carby (26–­27). And yet in the epigraphs appended to a number of the chapters in her book, we can also glimpse one source of literary inspiration for resisting these: Romantic poetry. Citing writers like Byron and Shelley, Wilson taps into the strong associations between Romanticism and the struggle for Black freedom discussed by Ethan Kytle and Jared Hickman.45

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This linkage was enabled, in part, by Romanticism’s retention of the more radical conceptions of the will as complex power central to the earlier vitalism of writers like Stahl, which reappears in the late eighteenth-­century era of sensibility in formulations like Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb. As we can see in the overlap between Blumenbach’s theory and Goethe’s conception of the bildungsroman, these more Stahlian ideas can be brought to bear on the history of the novel as well. Romanticism is, of course, a polyvalent phenomenon: the Naturphilosophs who imagined a joyfully communing cosmos were thus as much part of it as figures like Blumenbach who remained indebted to Stahl’s earlier ideas about more conflictual inner energies. Despite their differences, however, Blumenbach shared with a Naturphilosoph like Friedrich Schelling a commitment to a core Romantic notion particularly relevant to thinking about both the novel and abolitionism, one central to the theorization of Romantic literature by German writers like Schlegel in the 1790s: the idea of life as an ongoing striving.46 (Later in the century, as discussed in chapter 6, we would see how this same idea would reach W. E. B. Du Bois from his encounters with German writing as well.) This led, on the one hand, to a developmental emphasis, one very distinct from the diffuse, moment-­by-­moment undulations of sensibility. And, on the other, it produced a focus less on the passive organism’s mere receptivity to stimuli, and more on an internal “excitability,” a term popularized by the Scottish physician John Brown—­whose medical system had a surprisingly widespread influence on German Romantic thought—­that suggested an abiding inner drive, much closer to will, needing only to be roused by its encounters with an outer world.47 Hence, although a Naturphilosoph like Schelling did conceive of all of nature, animate and inanimate, as an interconnected, quasi-­organic intelligence—­indeed as itself a sort of “organism”—­in terms very evocative of posthumanist criticism today, he also insisted on the importance of excitability for understanding the specificity of the living being.48 John Brown himself, in conceptualizing excitability, had been influenced strongly by the thought of William Cullen, who replaced his mentor Whytt’s sentient principle with the notion of an internal “excitement” that was said to be “the source of all bodily vigor,” hence “the source of life itself ” (Vickers 153). As with Stahl’s anima, this notion of excitement enabled Cullen to understand potentially debilitating passions as simply more intensified modalities of the will that enabled the body’s persistence. Especially as developed further by Brown, however, Cullen’s ideas moved more in the direction we saw in Stahl, in which what is both remarkable and in some sense perverse about life, and specifically about this life force, this “excitement,” lies in its

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fevered attempt to keep its inevitable end at bay.49 Health and disease thus become “different manifestations of a single principle”: the state of our life force (Vickers 157). It is crucial, then, to the broader late nineteenth-­century context of Blumenbach and Goethe that medicine and philosophy intertwined powerfully with one another. Indeed, this newly holistic view of the “physical and the moral” emerged not simply in Romanticism but in the “philosophical medicine” that grew out of the vitalist, indeed explicitly Stahlian work being done at Montpellier in France (Vila, Enlightenment 45, 43). What is essential to stress, however, is that there were two quite distinct overarching orientations toward what it meant to think “the physical and the moral” as a whole. The more clearly moralizing of these, founded in ideas about sensibility, was fundamentally predicated on an optimistic sense of the human being as body and as mind, and often entailed “detailed programs of moral, physical, and social hygiene” based on the ideas of Rousseau. As Anne Vila notes, such ideas could be found in sentimental and antisentimental literature (such as that of Sade or Diderot) alike (Enlightenment 6). By contrast, as I have been attempting to demonstrate, the tradition Stahl inaugurates, which the Montpellier physicians also followed, bases a conjuncture of “physical and moral” more around something akin to will. Brown’s “excitability,” in which external stimuli in effect rouse an always present inner drive to action—­and which, strikingly, thus produced a tendency to look favorably on stimulating agents such as alcohol as therapeutic50—­represents an important attempt to draw these more Stahlian ideas back into conversation with those emphasizing receptiveness and sensibility. Another, which also found expression both at Montpellier, involved an emphasis on the conjoined medical and moral dimensions of the passions.51 As Thomas Dixon has argued, the Scottish Enlightenment milieu so formative to sensibility theory was also crucial for a shift away from the older, often religiously inflected terminology of the passions to the more physicalist discourse of emotions with which we remain familiar today. In contrast to their terminological predecessors, emotions were conceived as “passive, non-­ cognitive and ‘altogether unmodified by the will’ ” (Dixon 131). They were also much less narrative in form—­brief eruptions rather than lasting states of mind.52 Once again, however, a focus both on Romantic thought and on vitalisms more indebted to Stahl’s ideas can serve to complicate this linear historical trajectory. On the literary side, merely a glance at Sturm und Drang drama can confirm the importance of the passions to a core strain of Romantic expression—­ and here, too, medical conceptions played a role. Schiller’s Essay on the

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Connection of the Animal and Spiritual Natures of Man thus explains, in a section titled “Spiritual Pain Undermines the Well-­Being of the Machine,” that Plato termed passions “the fevers of the soul.”53 Such ideas would receive perhaps their defining elaboration in the writings of Alexander Crichton, the translator of Blumenbach’s “Über den Bildungstrieb” into English, and whose work, like Brown’s, notably bridged the Scottish/German divide.54 Where Hume cheerfully subordinated reason to feeling with his famous assertion that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” Crichton’s medical standpoint, inflected by Stahlian ideas via Blumenbach, conceives the passions as potentially salubrious and dangerous in equal measure.55 Both sides, moreover, result from passion’s necessary relation to the will—­to a kind of embodied insistence in the face of opposition, another idea obviously crucial to the linkages between Romantic and abolitionist thought. Passions, Crichton explains, can be distinguished from simple bodily desires in that they arise only when the latter are “opposed, or not gratified,” causing “new desires and aversions to emerge” together with “feelings . . . totally distinct from those which gave birth to the primary desire or aversion” (2:112). Hence, for example, Crichton asserts that “sorrow scarcely has a claim to be classified with the passions,” as “in many cases of sorrow and anguish, the will is not excited into action by any distinct object”—­unlike in “anger and rage, jealousy and envy,” all of which “excit[e] volition into powerful action” (2:177). A passion like anger demonstrates the double nature of passion more generally: it is both “one of the most powerful means with which nature has endowed us for resisting injury,” as we see compellingly in Harriet Wilson, and a form of excess capable of affecting the body in a deleterious way (2:279). As Crichton explains, aversive passions generally tend to slow the circulation and produce a feeling of cold, whereas strong desirous passions such as love or hope have the reverse effect (2:133). Love, indeed, Crichton writes, is, “of all the passions which subjugate human reason,” “the most irresistible in its attacks, the most insidious in its progress, and the most powerful in its effects,” having even “made a sacrifice of friendship and brotherly love” (2:299). Most importantly, perhaps, as Louis Charland notes, passions were con­ ceived differently from the more momentary emotions in their ability to “grow and endure for months or even years,” to merge into “projects or goals” that might “extend over a lifetime” (Charland 254, 249). We can see in Crichton’s work on the passions how important a developmental and often conflictual conception of the individual remained to these Romantically inflected theories, despite their emergence in a period associated more with the discourse of sensibility. Goethe’s writings—­not only Wilhelm Meister but the later Elective Affinities, with its exploration of extramarital passions through

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the language of chemistry—­begin to demonstrate the significance of these themes of internal development and conflict to the emergence of the novel. And yet as stated, despite American instances of this mode such as Wilson’s and, as we will see, Stoddard’s, the novel has much more often been associated with sensibility theory—­with the fate of overly sentimental protagonists or with the notion of increased maturity as self-­constraint. As we see in the shift from Stahl to Whytt, the idea of an embodied will that might itself create challenges for the individual was, largely, replaced by the notion of the will—­if not, indeed the body or feeling itself, as in Whytt—­as the site of an innate rationality. the birth of psycholo g y and the will as appetite An important realm in which the will’s complexities continued to receive attention, however, would be in the burgeoning discourse of psychology, or the science of the soul (psyche). This was in no way accidental. Both in Germany and in France, doctors beginning to address themselves to the medical treatment of mental disorder drew directly on the post-­Stahlian writings we have just been surveying. Thus, in France, the legendary Philippe Pinel spent a third of the introduction to his 1800 Traité medico-­philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale ou la manie giving a précis of Crichton’s ideas about the passions (Weiner, “Part II” 294). His student J. E. D. Esquirol would delve even more deeply into Crichton’s ideas, producing a thesis titled On the Passions, as Causes, Symptoms, and Curative Means of Mental Alienation. The result was that, through Crichton, German vitalist ideas would have an important effect on psychiatry’s French emergence. In Germany itself, the situation was more complex: while some key figures in the era’s psychology retained a holistically developmental and vitalist emphasis, others were beginning to move in the direction that psychiatry would take as the nineteenth century progressed, one toward locating the soul and, finally, the secular will within the brain alone. One of the last remnants of vitalist thought within these nascent psychological discourses was that which inquired after the relation between mental disorder and the state of the digestive system. As Elizabeth Williams has pointed out, appetite becomes in vitalism a distinctive locus in which the greater complexity of the human organism can actually result in one’s own Bildungstrieb working against one’s physical health. While animals, that is, seek out nourishment based solely on the dictates of their senses, the fact that in humans the soul plays a role in defining appetite (as opposed to mere hunger) makes pathological appetites possible.

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The fascinating result of this is that in the early psychology of writers like Crichton and Pinel, both influenced by vitalist precursors, appetite becomes in many ways the new location of the duplex nature once ascribed to the soul. Like the soul, it, too, has to be understood as a good, and yet, in ways inseparable from its link to the individuality of the bodily constitution (one’s taste, as it were), it is constantly subject to error, definable (as in the Encyclopédie [1751–­65]) as a “penchant of the soul for an object it represents to itself as a good though only too often it is [in fact] a great evil” (Williams, “Sciences” 399). This pathological appetite might entail gourmandizing indulgence, but it could just as easily (particularly in the case of women) mean the opposite: picky eating or food refusal, associated as the nineteenth century went on with female adolescence in particular.56 It is in this later context, then, that Elizabeth Stoddard produces what I want to argue is her bildungsroman as Bildungstrieb: her remarkable and still underread debut novel The Morgesons (1862). The Morgesons as Vitalist Bildungsroman stoddard’s embodied interiorities Stoddard, as we will see, writes directly against the seduction and domestic plots that emerged out of sensibility theory, recurring to more Romantic conceptions, and to Stahlian ones in particular. There were good reasons for this. Stoddard adored Goethe—­she called Wilhelm Meister the rare book that “reveals oneself to oneself,” showing the true “power of genius” (Letters 20)—­and, in the same year she married the aspiring poet Richard Stoddard, expressed to a female friend her impatient search for a copy of Kant in translation. Yet while scholars have long traced the affinities between Melville, Hawthorne, or Emerson and a broader transatlantic Romanticism, for a woman writer those imagined linkages have typically extended no farther than the Brontë sisters. Stoddard deeply admired such precursors. Her intellectual milieu, however, exceeds the literary and is long overdue to be understood as such. Like Melville and Hawthorne (both of whom were members of her circle), Stoddard understood herself as a Romantic writer. When her novels began to be reissued in the late 1880s, and she was deemed an American precursor to the “extreme realism” of Tolstoy and Turgenev (Matlack 550), Stoddard insisted that she was “not realistic” but “romantic”: “the very bareness and simplicity of my work is a trap for its romance” (quoted in Amstutz 140). In an essay on the Crystal Palace in 1854, she seemed to be directly channeling Hawthorne’s “Custom-­House” preface to The Scarlet Letter, envisioning a twilit world given over to romance by “imagin[ing] myself there at night”

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and seeing all the opulent goods coming to life (quoted in Amstutz 96). Yet Stoddard’s version of romance also differs in important ways from that of Hawthorne. In the crepuscular scene in “The Custom-­House,” moonlight spiritualizes the everyday, while firelight enlivens it with warmth and “human tenderness” (Scarlet 29). Stoddard’s animated Crystal Palace, by contrast, is tinged with the “grotesque”; its more Hoffmann-­like array of babbling and shrieking paintings and objects seems both dream and, in her own words, “lunatic asylum” (quoted in Amstutz 96–­97). The difference can begin to be understood if we note what for Stoddard strikes the crucial chord of the realm of fantasy: it is a space in which “the will was able to realize all it desired” (96). For Hawthorne’s spirit land imbued with feeling, Stoddard substitutes a nighttime world animated by an imperious, clamoring, possibly mad will. The relation between realism and romance changes as a result. For Hawthorne, by showing us a spiritual world, romance bypasses the surfaces of things to penetrate to “the truth of the human heart” (Seven 1). Stoddard employs this same language of interiority, but very differently; indeed, we begin to see why what she understood as romance may have looked to many, particularly in midcentury, as an unacceptably frank realism. Consider the letter she wrote to James Russell Lowell, then editor at the Atlantic Monthly, in defense of a story he had rejected with a letter she paraphrased as “object[ing] strongly to the realistic tone of our present literature” (Letters 54):57 Do I disturb your artistic sense by my lack of refinement? I must own that I am coarse by nature. At times I have an overwhelming perception of the back side of truth. I see the rough lathes behind the fine mortar—­the body within its purple and fine linen—­the mood of the man and the woman in the dark on the light of his or her mind when alone. (52)

For Stoddard, to plumb beneath the surface is to glimpse the hidden, solitary self, but it is also to imagine the flesh under the clothes, the roughness of something still in the process of forming itself. This same duality reappears in nineteenth-­century reactions to her work. If, for one reviewer, Stoddard’s novels look “beneath the familiar . . . features” to the “ominous and uncomprehended soul,” another is put in mind of “a fragment of one of Michel Angelo’s frescoes—­a mass of powerful, struggling anatomy,” not yet subjected to the controlling touch of “form.”58 Hence, if Stoddard’s “romance,” like that of Hawthorne, entails the revelation of interiority, it seems this interiority must be understood as at once that of the soul and of the body alike—­very much as Stahl and other medical vitalists imagined. In The Morgesons, then, the heroine Cassy is portrayed as quite similar in her perceptions of the underbelly of things to Stoddard herself (123). When

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she is sent to live with her strict Calvinist grandfather to awaken her religious sentiments, she watches her aunt bake the bread for the church service, only to mash up the leftovers unceremoniously into a pudding, such that the ritual’s “sacred ideality” was at once “destroyed for me.” This event leads Cassy to ponder her temperament at greater length: “Was it a pity,” she wonders, “that my life was not conducted on Nature’s plan, who shows us the beautiful, while she conceals from us the interior? We do not see the roots of her roses, and she hides from us her skeletons” (45).59 Cassy, too, is someone who cannot help looking beyond the surface of things, and to do so, it seems, means to learn a vitalist lesson: one of life’s intimacy with death, and concommitantly, of the writhing roots whose ceaseless movement toward sustenance keeps that inevitability at bay. In the book’s first half, however, we see Cassy attending far more to the drive to live. Her blithe confidence in her “flourishing,” which seems to be shared by most others who know her, typifies her throughout the novel, and the word associated most with it, over and over, is “power” (e.g., 60, 160, 27). Calling herself a young “animal,” “robust in health,” Cassy writes that “I never looked upon the dead; perhaps that sight would have marred the slumbrous security which possessed me—­the instinctive faith in the durability of my own powers of life” (27). The passage recalls one in Stoddard’s journalistic writing from the late 1850s, in which, on a damp day that weighs down both her “limb[s]” and her “heart,” she witnesses a young woman with a baby walking amid a warehouse filled with coffins and quotes George Sand: “Love asserts its happiness over the bones of the dead as well as on beds of roses.” (One pictures Hawthorne’s Pearl, skipping among the graves.) “Is it right,” she continues, “that the main feeling of life should be a defiance of death, or should we feel that the meaning of life is to die? You see what the weather does for me in the way of metaphysics” (Morgesons and Other 329). We saw, however, that, as in Pearl’s case, the bildungsroman typically seeks to channel that amoral life force toward a more social end. Stoddard thematizes this familiar plotline from the first, as we can see if we return to the moment where Cassy, at the time a young teenager, speaks of her “instinctive faith in the durability of my own powers of life” (27). The next paragraph then begins: “But a change was approaching.” Cassy’s Aunt Merce, her mother’s sister—­who in the first words of the book pronounces, “That child . . . is possessed” while watching Cassy climb a bureau’s knobs to reach some favorite books (6)—­sets the story in motion by “call[ing] mother’s attention to my non-­improvement” and recommending a year away at her grandfather’s house in Barmouth (thought to be Plymouth), with attendance at a ladies’ school there (27). Thus begins the first of three trips away from home that

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Cassy ventures over the course of the book—­the first two, at least, with the express purpose of “improving” her. As many critics have commented, given Cassy’s markedly unpleasant treatment among the mean girls at the Barmouth school, her distaste for her grandfather’s household, and the fact that on her next trip, she falls in love with her married cousin, the book would seem dramatically to reject the plot of improvement envisioned for its heroine. At the same time, however, Cassy herself narrates a different developmental story that runs parallel to the socially expected one, referring to a different sort of unformedness at moments like the one about never looking upon the dead or a later claim that she as yet “looked neither to the past nor to the future” (77). The very act of being able to look back and tell her own story in the first person suggests she later gains this ability—­an important fact to which we will return. For now, however, we should recognize that the same “animality” in Cassy that for Merce and even for Cassy herself bespeaks a need for “finish” is also posited quite clearly by the novel as itself encouraged by the process of maturation. As I noted at the outset of this chapter, adolescence in The Morgesons is a remarkably physical affair, an experience of newly voracious appetites for food and, soon, a “hunger” for a man’s kiss (123). Cassy’s avidity in both of these realms distinguishes her strongly from her sister Veronica, who is described as “never hungry,” constantly being prodded to eat by the family’s servants, and experimenting with “liv[ing] entirely on toast” (51). Where Cassy drinks coffee and wine, Verry confines herself to milk. Her lack of interest in food seems linked to a kind of arrested growth, and yet more that of someone who has prematurely reached a kind of childlike old age than that of an actual child. More than anything, it evidences the strong tie the book creates between development and appetite—­and, hence, between development and will. “I am inclined to think sin a physical matter,” Stoddard wrote in one of her articles, noting the influence of such diverse items as pancakes, champagne, and gin on her temper. “So it would seem vice and virtue are stomachic” (Morgesons and Other 316). She scorns her fellow women writers, above all, for their denial of such facts. “Why will writers,” she grumbles, “especially female writers, make their heroines so indifferent to good eating, so careless about taking cold, and so impervious to all the creature comforts? . . .  Is goodness, then, incompatible with the enjoyment of the senses? .  .  .  If I were [such a writer’s] physician, I should recommend a tremendous course of champagne” (Letters 33).60 Such remarks, then, along with Cassy’s lusty appetites, have led most readers, understandably, to associate the realm of the body in Stoddard’s writing with a kind of feminist liberation. The “petrifying” repression of her Calvinist

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grandfather’s household, with its propensity for “trampling” women, is never more evident than at table, where the profundity of the silence only ensures Cassy’s ability to hear every “gulping swallow,” every dyspeptic rumble from the bellies of the two “cadaverous” women who work in the tailor shop owned by “Grand’ther” (28, 30–­31). Living in such a place, however, Cassy ends up less succumbing to its rigors than gaining a new compassion for her withdrawn mother and Aunt Merce, whose unfulfilled hungers are figured by her compulsive chewing of flag root.61 Meanwhile, Cassy’s own vital forces, if anything, expand during this period, as she assumes a “plump” and “womanly shape”: “What an appetite I had, too!” (47). The advocacy of “creature comforts” might well appear to be clear. And yet in fact, The Morgesons turns out to have a fairly complex relation to the idea of appetite, much like the vitalists themselves. As stated, Cassy’s journey to maturity takes her to three households outside her own: after her Calvinist grandfather’s, that of her cousin Charles in the more affluent town of Rosville, and finally to bustling Belem, home of the Somers brothers, one of whom will later marry her and the other, her sister Veronica. If in the Calvinist setting Cassy’s natural appetites prevail over an atmosphere of restriction, things grow more complicated at her cousin’s more bourgeois home (as we will see), and by the time we arrive at Belem, we are amid a family of louche aristocrats, “reclining on sofas” and holding “elaborate” dinner parties, whose indulgence of every desire has led to the predictable results of gout and, more notably, alcoholism, said to be a family legacy with which the two brothers themselves struggle (169). This plot thread leads to a stark final page of the book, in which the brother who has married Cassy’s sister dies in delirium tremens, leaving behind a baby who seems already to be developmentally compromised. By this point in the novel, then, it might appear that the stage has been set less for a triumph of embodied desire over restriction than for a familiar enough brief for moderation, as embodied by the mid-­nineteenth-­century American middle class: if Calvinist repression clearly leads to pathological symptoms, no less does the aristocrats’ decadent excess. In fact, however, I want to argue that Stoddard ends up being most critical of the bourgeois attitude toward appetite, and that, in so doing, she leverages the tradition of Stahlian vitalism I earlier mapped out against an Americanized variant of the arguments of its heirs and critics. That variant appeared, interestingly enough, in the writings of the Jacksonian reformer Sylvester Graham (of graham cracker fame). Graham’s ideas grew directly out of his reading of the later generations of French vitalists, such as Broussais, who firmly resegregated the two realms Stahl had so scandalously treated as a whole, thus rendering soul, mind, and will fully distinct from the more

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wayward bodily realm of the passions, which they saw as ruled over by the digestive tract.62 In Graham’s more Rousseauian view, however, this realm of appetite had merely been corrupted by the excesses of civilization; the cure, then, entailed adopting a gentle, moderate diet based on bread products and milk—­precisely that to which Cassy’s sister Veronica turns in an attempt to alter her “tiger”-­like temperament. Veronica thus explicitly attempts to remake herself, primarily through diet, into a version of Goethe’s Beautiful Soul, and it is this idealized version of her as an ethereal vision of purity that captivates her hard-­drinking suitor Ben Somers, who imagines Veronica herself will be his cure (after his own attempt at a Grahamite regimen lasts two days). Cassy foretells this project’s failure, stating, “It will be the literal you will hunger for, dear Ben” (226). In many ways, moreover, Cassy’s diagnosis seems equally applicable to her cousin Charles, for whom she develops her own illicit passion. In Charles’s case, his fastidiously well-­ordered bourgeois existence—­symbolized most by the impossibly delicate portions of food he and his wife serve—­seems to have the effect of merely magnifying the barely controlled wildness beneath. Cassy’s erotic effect on him is thus depicted as the sudden emergence of a “maniac,” “[breaking] loose” from behind the bars of a cell (114). In The Morgesons, then, it is, strikingly enough, these more familiar attempts at Bildung as a kind of “becoming bourgeois” that are revealed, rather, as forms of arrested development. Put otherwise, these are the characters who get killed off or in some way seem to “fail to thrive.”63 Yet where does this leave Cassy? As we saw, the book itself, as opposed to those within it who disapprove of her, initially seems to identify her appetites, in a more Bildungstrieb-­ like way, as a sign of the capacity for flourishing. Yet no sooner has Cassy asserted that “I feel well to my fingers’ ends; they tingle with strength; I am elated with health” than she becomes “conscious of a streak of pain, which cut me like a knife, and vanished,” leaving her stunned (67). Is this merely the hubris of youth rebuked, or are we, in a sense more akin to Stahl’s anima, to imagine a continuum linking Cassy’s feelings of vitality to the potential for such streaks of pain? This message seems to be what the book’s second section, where she lives and falls in love with Charles, is meant to convey. As another kind of “appetite,” and one specifically linked to adolescent maturation, Cassy’s awakening sexual desire, too, seems initially to be presented as a kind of life-­affirming somatic force; it is literally aligned with the movement of her blood. And yet, as any former teenager will remember, things are also a bit more vexed. To begin with, her obsession with Charles seems also to produce, at least temporarily, a diminished or more fickle appetite for actual food. And when Charles

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first reveals some feelings for Cassy, she falls ill, in a pattern that continues—­ culminating in a striking moment where, upon his confession of love for her, her mouth literally fills with blood (84). “Do you think,” Cassy worries to her friend Helen, “that I shall ever have consumption?”; and indeed, in another book, this frank admission of illicit love could lead easily to a narrative of sentimental decline. This is not, however, Cassy’s narrative, for the workings of the blood are here too overdetermined by a complicated, vitalist-­inflected language of will. Hence, the “mysterious vitality” (111) linking her with Charles is variously described with a language of blood—­“The same blood rages in both of you,” Helen says (110)—­and one of will, which intertwine. “An intangible, silent, magnetic feeling existed between us,” Cassy writes, “changing and developing according to its own mysterious law” (74). This feeling may be figured as Charles’s will flooding Cassy’s body: his gaze, “which I could not defy or resist . . . filled my veins with a torrent of fire” (86). Or it may be Cassy’s own will, figured as a fluid, embodied force, as when a passing mention of Charles’s name “broke into the foundations of my stagnant will, and set the tide flowing once more” (113). The complexity here lies not simply in the materialization of will as a physical force acting within the body, but in the way that this renders it susceptible to the wills of others, which can exert a seemingly magnetic pull. All of this, of course, resonates with the discourse of mesmerism, an immensely popular fad in Stoddard’s mid-­nineteenth-­century US.64 Particularly in its literary manifestations, as in Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables and Blithedale Romance, a sexual undercurrent was rarely absent from portrayals of charismatic men possessing a hypnotic hold—­often, a sinister one—­over susceptible, ethereal young women. Stoddard, however, may have been particularly influenced by the conception in Balzac, another of her favorite writers, of will as “a material substance that operated according to the same laws as Mesmer’s magnetic fluid” (Tatar 155). In her portrayal, sexual attraction is less a matter of the sustained domination of one will over another than of an electric linkage between two wills that can generate uncontrollable reactions in either one. The portrayal of passion here, while not moralizing, thus nonetheless does not stint on emphasizing its potentially dangerous intensity. Charles and Cassy’s edgy erotic play snowballs toward their final scene together, in which their ride behind a volatile horse leads to a crash fatal to its driver. (His love for seemingly “ungovernable” horses, which he determines to master, is almost parodically yoked to his passion for Cassy, with her great “mane” of wild hair [71, 100]—­as well as to Charles’s own death drive.) Yet the risks

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involved in such liaisons are evident from the beginning, from her physical collapse at his first hint of jealous rage, to say nothing of the later, strangely consumption-­like symptoms. It’s these developments that lead the local doctor, as I mentioned at the start of this chapter, to inform Cassy that she is merely becoming a woman, which for him means the need for a strict regimen of avoiding excessive stimulation, from coffee to balls: “Like many women, you will continue to do something to keep in continual pain. If Nature does not endow your constitution with suffering, you will make up the loss by some fatal trifling, which will bring it. I dare say, now, that after this, you will never be quite well.” “I will take care of my health.” . . . “You won’t—­you can’t. Did you ever notice your temperament?” “No, never; what is it?” . . . “Is it possible? How backward you are! You are quite interesting.” (84)

From this moment, indeed, Cassy becomes a “case” for Dr. White, who drops in regularly to see how she is faring (87). “I am studying my temperament,” she tells him (87). The vitalist idea of temperament—­what Stoddard, in her letters, called our “organization,” our “capacities,” “passions, traits, appetites, etc.”—­in fact recurs throughout in The Morgesons, perhaps most amusingly in a joke of Veronica’s: “Where’s the Buffon? I want to classify Cass” (57).65 This might seem surprising, given its association here with Dr. White’s patronizing strictures for Cassy. Yet Stoddard took seriously the idea that body and mind could impinge on one another in sometimes problematic ways. As we will see, she evades the good doctor’s determinist account of these by imagining what it might mean for Cassy to explore and experiment with her own temperament. Put otherwise, the task is not to deny the role of an always potentially pathological embodied selfhood in The Morgesons’ version of the “life”-­narrative, but, drawing on what we have learned about vitalism, to transform what we believe that version of self to mean. the plot of recovery Stoddard herself appears to have been intimately familiar with Cassy’s psychosomatic experiences here. Having completed the first half of The Morgesons, up to the moment of Cassy’s recovery, she wrote to a friend, “If it proves a failure I shall have a fit of sickness.” Throughout her life, indeed, Stoddard spoke alternately of her feeling—­at sixty-­eight!—­of “my own inward power of life” (elsewhere “vitality,” elsewhere “will”), which for her was always inseparable from her capacity for “passion”; at the same time, she spoke just as

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passionately of her bodily ills, her graying soul (!), a sense of “some hidden disease that preys upon my strength” and that renders her “intellectual life” at ceaseless war with “my other life.”66 Thus, we might say, what really seems to interest Stoddard is the notion that Cassy is, essentially, somatizing. The very forcefulness of her passion expresses itself in her bodily woes, but this allows the woes to be not the opposite of her vital strength but, ironically, one very real sign of it. This crucial paradox is most sustainedly explored through Stoddard’s treatment of the subject that most links her to both Goethe and Blumenbach, to both Wilhelm Meister and the hydra, with its regenerating tentacles: that of the capacity for recovery. (As we will see in chapter 5, this would be a key theme for Nietzsche, himself an heir to many vitalist ideas, later in the century.) What makes The Morgesons a vitalist bildungsroman, that is, is that its developmental story is a story of recovery: a story, that is, not of “onward and upward” but one of stumbles, fits, and (re)starts, depicted in a highly physicalized form. It is in this sense that we can distinguish it most directly from the seduction plot, which tells a story of gradual wasting, and the more typical plot of Bildung that in the US takes the form of the domestic novel, which here appears as the failed plot of alcoholic Ben and Grahamite Veronica: the story of self-­reform. The denouement to the Charles section of the book indeed represents Cassy taking her leave from both of these familiar options. In another novel, she might have successfully learned to curb her appetites like her properly bourgeois cousin Alice or perished along with Charles as a punishment for her illicit desires. Neither occurs. In the riding accident that takes Charles’s life, Cassy sustains no more than some cuts upon her face and what the doctor pronounces “a simple fracture.” Alice, meanwhile, awakens to the limitations of her own existence, announcing her intention to manage her husband’s mills. In both cases, it is as if a process of growth that had been prematurely halted has started up once more: in Alice’s words, “When perhaps I should feel that I have done with life, I am eager to begin it” (125). This capacity for recovery—­a capacity, that is, both to suffer and to flourish—­is, in fact, emphasized throughout the book. At her Calvinist grandfather’s home, where her mother and aunt’s forces were irrevocably dimmed, Cassy’s, too, is nearly frozen: “I did not get thoroughly warm all day.” The result is “so bad an ague that I was confined at home a week.” Yet Cassy’s vitality prevails: “I grew fast in spite of all my discomforts” (46–­47). Back home in Surrey, her first suitor succumbs to death from measles a month after their date; the Morgesons all catch it too, but none are felled by it (56). In Rosville, Dr. White’s stern admonitions concerning the dangers of balls are not proven

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wrong so much as they prove mundane: after one such night out, Cassy awakens with a fever, but is already recovered by that evening (106). And yet compared with these childhood instances, Cassy’s process of recovery from the riding accident clearly does present a more complex case, for her own somatic response, upon hearing of her beloved’s fate, far outstrips her visible wounds: My mind went astray.  .  .  . While it was gone, my friends were summoned to witness a contest, where the odds were in favor of death. But I recovered. Whether it was youth, a good constitution, or the skill of Dr. White, no one could decide. (123)

One cannot mistake Stoddard’s emphasis here: willfully choosing to ride with Charles behind the wild horse, Cassy brings physical danger on herself, and, fighting against recovery, almost succeeds, it seems, in stilling her own heart. Yet she does not. She lives, to drag herself back home, where the conflict with the preservative self continues: “My zeal oozed away. . . . What a dreary prospect! The past was vital, the present dead.” Beneath this lassitude, however, she feels something, “aimless movements” that work in her against completely “stagnating.” These motions are personified in a second self, which demands why, given she feels neither “remorse” nor “repentance,” she yet “suffer[s],” a question to which Cassy cannot supply an answer (131). “I have found [in Charles] a counterpart,” she states, “but, specter, you were born of the union” (132). Cassy’s experience, then, gives birth to, or perhaps merely renders manifest, a self-­division, one capable of being expressed in the familiar language of Saint Paul—­as the difference between what Cassy, too, calls “my thoughts” and “my actions”—­yet not reducible to it (132). It is the knowledge of the self as mystery—­but perhaps most of all, its inability to explain why it would bring suffering on itself. Passion is life-giving and also a source of torment. And so, crucially, is its absence; hence, Cassy’s sense of her “zeal” retreating, a state of willed indulgence in woe and physical lassitude from which she is jolted back to life only by realizing how much her own state is “agitat[ing]” her mother. Embracing her, and feeling “the irregular beating of her heart, a pain smote me. What if she should not live long? Was I not a wicked fool to lacerate myself with an intangible trouble . . . ?” (134) and thereby neglect her mother’s “vital” love (128)? Here the Stahlian inclination to work against one’s own flourishing is shown to have the disturbing potential to threaten concerned others as well. As this moment foreshadows, the novel will reach a climax of sorts when Cassy returns from her final trip away from home, where she meets her future

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husband, to find her mother dead in her chair. Veronica, “appalled by the physical horror of death,” is all but useless in the situation; Cassy must assume command (206). If at her cousin’s home Cassy’s life threatened to take the form of the seduction novel, here the domestic one, the “prosaic domain,” seems to rear its head (216). “Oh, Cassandra, can you give up yourself ?” worries her mother’s sister, Merce. “I must, I suppose,” she responds (215). This scene, however, is fascinatingly positioned, in one of Stoddard’s most exquisite moments of juxtaposition. It follows on a second, very differently climactic moment, in which Cassy, who throughout the book feels a kinship with the sea, feels directly addressed by the water’s spirit while wandering by the shore outside their home, and “sprang up the highest rock on the point,” giving herself over to the waves’ “boundless joy”: “ ‘Have then at life!’ my senses cried. ‘We will possess its longing silence, rifle its waiting beauty. . . . Its roar, its beauty, its madness—­we will have—­all’ ” (215). This scene, “antipodal” (to use a Stoddardian word) as it is to the domestic one that follows, nonetheless makes its presence felt therein: responding in the affirmative to Merce’s question about self-­surrender, Cassy is distracted once more by the sea. “Confound the spray,” she mutters, “it is flying against the windows” (215). If Cassy must belatedly ascend to a certain domestic competence, then, the reader is in no way given the sense that this will entail merely leaving her passions behind. This fact is made even more evident by Cassy’s new romantic obsession, with the brooding Desmond Somers. Her friend Ben, his brother, is horrified by the feeling growing between Cassy and Desmond, whom he dismisses as “a violent, tyrannical, sensual man” whose “perceptions are his pulses” (226). In responding to him, he feels, Cassy is in no way sacrificing her outsized desires for a wifely role, but merely once again giving herself over to appetite rather than reason. “Have you so much passion that you cannot discern the future you offer yourself?” he rails at her (200). For him, moreover, that passion represents a repetition of her earlier irresponsibility concerning Charles, whom he had called a “savage, living by his instincts” (102). Ben’s own plan of total self-­reform aims at the rejection of this sort of repetitive structure, substituting a progressive vision toward an achieved state of moral perfection. Yet as we saw, however, the result is depicted as a far more relentless submission to repetition, as Ben continually fails to meet the lofty goals he sets for himself, continuing to fall victim to his urge to drink. With both him and Charles, then, dies a certain bourgeois ideal, in which one’s passions may be transformed into a passion for duty itself, a passion for passion’s eradication. (If anything, it is Verry who seems most successful in conquering her own will, and at the price that she seems more childlike than ever as an

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adult.) As Ben states himself, in disgust at his situation, “Damn it! the world has got a twist in it, and we all go round with it, devilishly awry” (226). It is important to keep these words of Ben’s in mind, for they are echoed by the words of his brother that conclude Stoddard’s abruptly ending story: “ ‘God is the ruler,’ he said at last. ‘Otherwise let this mad world crush us now’ ” (253). Stoddard’s readers have struggled to grasp this ending, with its near-­Calvinistic fatalism, with the power and modernity of Cassy’s story of development. And if Ben has failed in his attempt to escape a hereditary appetite, what are we to think of Desmond, who similarly undertakes a project of self-­reform in Spain (“ ‘I have eaten an immense quantity of oil and garlic,’ he said with a sigh” [250]), returning thin and prematurely gray-­haired to claim Cassy’s hand (250)? The difference, perhaps, lies in the difference between reform, which denies the body, and recovery, a bodily process. What first brings Cassy and Desmond together is his observation of her scars. From that moment, he understands the history of passion she does not verbally share—­and the reason, we discover, is that her story is also his own. Around his neck hangs the ring of a woman with whom he shared a “shameful” love—­hastening to add, however, that theirs ought not be deemed a “tragic” tale. “She is no outcast,” he tells Cassy. “She is here tonight; if there was ruin, it was mutual” (199). Cassy and Desmond, then, are not like Ben or Veronica—­creatures ever struggling with their own passions, determined to tell a story in which maturity means an absolute and fully pleasurable self-­mastery. For them, maturity can be read in one’s scars. Put otherwise, their story, written on the body, is one of what they have, thus far, survived. This, then, seems closer to how we might think about both the fragility and possibility embodied by their union at the end of Stoddard’s novel. Like them, and like Blumenbach, seeing the hydra’s fragile new tentacles, Stoddard seems to have imagined development as an ongoing process, one ever intertwined with the possibility of curtailment. In fact, Stoddard would confront this double possibility all too directly. A month after The Morgesons was contracted for publication, her beloved son Willy died at the age of six and a half, devastating her. Six months later, the novel appeared in print. At the time, Stoddard was in bed, wrote her husband to their mutual friend Stedman: “Willy’s death has nearly killed her” (82). “Nervous prostration the doctor calls it,” Stoddard herself wrote. “I call it Life, it is too much for me” (82). She is certain she “can never write as I have written,” for “Willy’s death has produced a revolution in my mind—­the blood has all gone out of me—­and something whiter has come in its place” (84). In reality, Stoddard went on to publish two more novels, Two Men in 1865 and Temple House in 1867. Temple House she even called, late in life, her best

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work (asserting The Morgesons, against contemporary preferences, to be her weakest).67 In 1865, looking upon one-­year-­old Lorimer Stoddard, she realizes she has forgotten to mark the birthday of the boy who would have been his brother. “What an infirm thing the soul is,” she wrote her husband, away in the city. “I know that somewhere in my being that child’s being is intense—­ that I love him, mourn for him, shall never get over the loss of him, and yet I forget the day of his birth” (119). And yet, is this a sign of the soul’s infirmity, or of its embodied vitality? Which is worse—­to be laid waste by such an event, like the heroine of a sentimental novel, or to find oneself, albeit never quite completely, recovering? Ben is wrong about Cassy, perhaps because of the body/soul dualism to which he clings. She is not simply a creature of passion, of appetites. The Cassy who will look back and write her own story is nascent in the story she tells, for, as she feels her feelings, she is at once always asking about them. She is a “case” for herself as much as she is for others. “Charles,” she asks her cousin, “is love a matter of temperament?” “Are you mad?” the Byronic hero cries. “It is life—­it is heaven—­it is hell” (118). Cassy knows such feelings; the difference is that she alone seems able to know them both viscerally and analytically, again quite like the woman who created her. Cassy, then, is not just a vitalist heroine; she is herself a vitalist, fascinated by life’s processes as the mystery and the scientific fact that they are. In this her romance and her realism are at one with Stoddard’s. “I love him,” she tells Ben of Desmond, “as a mature woman may love,—­once, Ben, only once; the fire-­tipped arrows rarely pierce soul and sense, blood and brain” (226; see also 184). We can hear the echoes here of Stoddard’s own letter on the eve of her marriage: “I have experimented with myself since I knew him, before this finale, I looked into physical emotion, graded it by feeling it, and by imagining it. I studied the voluptuous. I can obtain no more.” “I believe,” she concludes (perhaps unwittingly echoing Coleridge), “love is a matter of will very much.” Her words give all the embodied meanings to “will” that we have seen here. “I am happy in love,” she writes, and “it is neither a dream nor a hope.” It is, rather, life: “it is an existence” (Letters 8). The Reflex and the Return to Mechanism Stoddard was, however—­like the subject of our next chapter, Melville—­ swimming against the tide of her time. Even as these writers kept vitalist conceptions of will alive through a living relation to Romantic thought, mechanistic accounts of embodiment had begun to return. No longer conceived as inseparable from will itself, and thus from the complexities of human exis-

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tence, matters of excessive or wayward passion now bespoke physiological imbalances that marked such individuals—­including, often, those racially marked—­as aberrant from an increasingly clear norm of moderation. Not unrelatedly, then, The Morgesons’ Cassy was easily overshadowed by the chatter generated by another anomalous heroine whose adventures appeared at nearly the same time, in a novel controversial precisely for its explicit endorsement of these new medical paradigms. Elsie Venner, the first of several “medicated novels” penned by the physician and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, caused an immediate stir; according to Van Wyck Brooks, “Every breakfast-­table in the country resounded” with talk of the volume (496). Even more than Stoddard’s Cassy, Holmes’s titular Elsie will not be tamed; a “dangerous, self-­willed girl,” she plays with her cousin “at boys’ rude games, as if both were boys” and, at twelve, is found one night “sleeping in the open air under a tree, like a wild creature” (195, 121, 117). Yet in stark contrast to Stoddard, Elsie’s surfeit of “dangerous life” bespeaks not adolescent blossoming but its opposite, the signs of a congenital weakness that will nip her in the bud at eighteen (197). Elsie’s most obvious adolescent antecedent, indeed, would seem to be the doomed Mignon of Wilhelm Meister, a similar case of arrested development, who, prior to her untimely demise, can be found dressed as a boy, scampering and climbing about the house, yet verbally revealing little; just as Holmes states of his near-­mute heroine, “Her only language must be in action” (256). The clearest parallel, however, emerges at a memorable moment in Elsie Venner when the local doctor, hearing the rattle of castanets, peers in at Elsie’s window, and finds her awhirl (and half-­dressed) in a “wild Moorish fandango” (118). Goethe’s readers will recall that Mignon, too, famously takes up castanets and executes a fandango for the awestruck Wilhelm, who is “amazed to see how completely her character”—­“Severe, sharp, dry, and violent”—­“was manifested in the dance” (65). The same can be said in the case of Elsie, whose every whirling movement bespeaks her “passionate fierceness” (118). Yet beyond their expression of intensity, the two fandangos share a further characteristic, one that becomes especially salient in Holmes: their mechanical dimension. Mignon, we are told, “pursued her course relentlessly like clockwork” (64), while Elsie’s paroxysms suggest “the dancing mania of Eastern devotees”: “a convulsion of the body and the mind, rather than a series of voluntary modulated motions” (266). While in Goethe we may already note the idea of an inexorable fatality to Mignon’s trajectory, in Holmes this notion of a predetermined course suggests more than merely a temperamental weakness; it has become bound up with the mid-­nineteenth-­century language of reflex, or, as the novel’s sage

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Professor puts it, “automatic action in the moral world; the reflex movement which seems”—­but only seems—­“to be self-­determination” (174). In Elsie, that is, her very force of will—­her being a “dangerous, self-­willed girl,” who comports herself solely “to please her own fancy”—­in fact signifies will’s absence, that in her case “apparently voluntary determinations” have been removed from “the control of the will” (195, 84, 169). It is this defining duality, more than anything else, that her wild yet involuntary “dancing mania” best conveys. As a medical man, Holmes was in fact quite explicit about his intentions in writing Elsie Venner as a novelistic representation of what a later essay, “Mechanism in Thought and Morals,” terms “reflex action of the brain,” which, he states, “has been of late years emerging into general recognition in treatises of psychology and physiology” (Pages 277). Specifically, as another essay, “Crime and Automatism” (1875), explains, We hear [nowadays] comparatively little of that “original sin,” which made man ex officio a culprit and a rebel. . . . But we have whole volumes on hereditary instincts of all kinds. . . . All of these newer modes of thought are to a large extent outgrowths of what we may call physiological psychology.  .  .  . Now the observation of certain exceptional natures tends to show that a very large part of their apparent self-­determinations or voluntary actions, such as we consider that we should hold ourselves responsible for, are in reality nothing more than reflex movements, automatic consequences of practically irresistible causes existing in the inherited organization and in preceding conditions. (Pages 327, 330)

Via reference to the criminological work of “M. Prosper Despine, Doctor of Medicine,” the essay goes on to explain the way such ideas may absolve apparently hardened criminals from responsibility, for, in “persons destitute of the moral instinct,” there can be no “struggle between desire and the sense of duty”; indeed, “Nothing more clearly resembles the sleep of the just than the sleep of the assassin,” as we confront in each an instance of wholly undivided will (Pages 333–­34). In a new preface for Elsie Venner published after these essays in 1883, Holmes explains that “The real aim of the story was to test the doctrine of ‘original sin,’ and human responsibility for the disordered volition coming under that technical denomination” (Elsie xii). Hence, in a pre-­genetic explanation for hereditary tendencies, Elsie is said to have been the unwitting victim of a snakebite received by her pregnant mother. Her sinuous dancing, “diamond eyes” capable of fixing an onlooker in a hypnotic trance, tendency to bite when aroused (another echo of Mignon), and strange coldness all speak

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to the resultant reptilian temperament, which literalizes what M. Despine describes as the uncanny “sang froid” of the congenital criminal (Pages 332). We thus see in Holmes’s novel a near-­textbook instance of the transformation of vitalist interior complexity into a matter for medical if not judicial intervention. Interestingly, the novel can occasionally seem almost nostalgic for an earlier, more Romantic means of understanding Elsie’s eccentricities; invoking similar figures in Coleridge and Keats, its narrator will at times portray her as more of a misunderstood outcast, one whose singular nature may extend to “marks of genius—­poetic or dramatic” (165). In the end, however, Holmes’s heroine is able to be valorized only as the tragic possessor of a “double being,” embodying “two warring principles”—­one reptilian, one a “true womanly nature,” the latter of which is simply unable to flourish when entwined with its opposite (328, 321, 319). Especially as manifested similarly in her half-­Spanish, “mixed blood” cousin Dick, moreover—­a figure in whom the “passionate impulse[s]” common to “the dark-­hued races of Southern Europe” are portrayed as linked to hereditary criminality—­Elsie’s wilder side thus possesses clear racial overtones, which are only amplified by her association throughout the book with her Black nurse Old Sophy (139, 252). Unsurprisingly, then, in marked contrast to Stoddard’s Cassy gazing at herself in the mirror, Elsie—­with her vagaries suggesting congenital pathology rather than the complexities of will as such—­is portrayed as incapable of self-­reflection on her doubled state. The book instead surrounds her with mostly male authorities who analyze the case she presents from varying medical and theological perspectives.68 It is here that Holmes is able to bring in his theories of “reflex action of the brain,” as Elsie’s teacher Bernard discusses the matter with his mentor, the Professor: “Do you think,” he muses, “that there may be predispositions, inherited or ingrafted . . . which shall take out certain apparently voluntary determinations from the control of the will, and leave them as free from moral responsibility as the instincts of the lower animals?” (169). “Until somebody shall study this as Marshall Hall has studied reflex nervous action in the bodily system,” the Professor replies, “I would not give much for men’s judgment of each other’s characters” (174). What was reflex action? It was, in many ways, the theory that, ascendant in nineteenth-­century physiology and psychology, sounded the death knell to vitalism’s earlier dominance. And yet, as the philosopher of medicine Georges Canguilhem emphasized in his La formation du concept de réflexe au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, the paradox was that the “purely mechanistic concept of the reflex,” as codified by the aforementioned Marshall Hall, was itself initially theorized within vitalist medicine (Clarke and Jacyna 128). Not, however, the Stahlian variant that has been our chief concern here, but the later

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eighteenth-­century sort that reacted against it, the theories of sensibility and Naturphilosophie. As Canguilhem points out, the reflex concept is often believed to have originated within Descartes’s mechanistic conception of bodily life. Yet while Descartes used the idea of reflection to describe the way a sensation could generate a near-­instantaneous muscular response, he still believed the latter to originate in the heart (site of the “animal spirits”). It would be left to other writers—­Thomas Willis, but preeminently the sensibilist vitalist Robert Whytt—­to conceptualize the true “reflex concept”: that “some kind of stimulus stemming from the periphery of the organism is transmitted to the center and then reflected back to the periphery,” such that reflex motion “does not proceed directly from a center . . . of any kind,” whether heart or brain (Canguilhem, “Concept” 183). Indeed, as Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna point out in their excellent history of the reflex concept, the notion of reflection had roots in the ancient idea of sympathy between nonproximate areas of the body, an idea we saw to be crucial to both sensibility theory and the related Naturphilosophie.69 In Whytt’s writings, the construal of a “sentient principle” distributed throughout the body helped him to concretize this idea via the notion of a nervous system. That same principle, however, undergirded Whytt’s vitalist sense of the reflex as not merely an automatism but a crucial power of the individual soul to “defen[d] the body from harmful stimuli” (Clarke and Jacyna 103). He simply did not believe such a power had to be executed consciously; it could thus proceed from the spinal cord as readily as from the brain. (This helped to clear up the nagging problem of why headless frogs—­and fetuses born without brains—­ could still exhibit reflex action.) Once the role of the spinal cord was identified, however, anatomical researchers began to break down its components in a way that posed a threat to vitalist holism. The German physiologists Franz Gall and Joseph Spurzheim, famed for their morcellization of the brain in the theory of phrenology, began to recognize that each segment of the cord possessed a distinct function, an idea later codified in the Bell-­Magendie law that mapped the cord’s posterior roots onto sensation and the anterior onto motion. As Clarke and Jacyna note, from a vitalist perspective this separation of roles was unnerving, suggesting the presence of “two individual souls”; as one 1842 critic complained, “obviously it is the same soul that feels and moves” (113). A temporary solution to this problem, then, involved the shift that Edward Reed describes occurring “from soul to mind”—­that is, a renewed Cartesianism resegregated the individuating, rational, and volitional phenomena vitalism had ascribed to a distributed “soul” within the cerebrum and

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distinguished these completely from the merely mechanical work of digestion, circulation, and so forth. One thinker, William Pulteney Alison (who held Whytt’s former chair at Edinburgh) went so far as to recast Whytt’s sentient principle along these lines, insisting (implausibly) that by “soul” Whytt had meant not unconscious sensation—­from the Cartesian perspective, a “contradiction in terms”—­but only the conscious actions of the mind (Hall, quoted in Clarke and Jacyna 128). The reflex became de-­mechanized by thus becoming wholly conscious, an untenable solution soon overcome by the definitive mid-­nineteenth-­century work of Marshall Hall, the British researcher mentioned in Elsie Venner, who introduced the use of the term “reflex” (and “reflex arc”) into English physiological discourse.70 Hall, in fact, was no less a Cartesian than Alison; he, too, wanted to keep the brain and will sacrosanct, but for him this meant denying they had any role in reflex function, which he influentially theorized as a purely mechanistic, “aimless” affair bearing no relation to “adaptive or intentional movement” (Canguilhem, “Concept” 199). Once this step had been definitively made, however, the temptation arose to reconcile Cartesianism’s split being yet again—­this time, however, not from the vitalist side, by rendering “soul and body . . . coextensive,” but, rather, “by denying also to man the privilege of a soul instead of extending it to all his lower brethren,” producing “an extreme materialistic monism” (quoted in Clarke and Jacyna 131). The reflex, that is, was newly conceived by the era’s “physiological psychology,” such as the work of William Carpenter, as extending to the operations of the cerebrum itself. A follower of Hall, Carpenter initially hewed to his mentor’s split between reflex functions and those involving mind and will. In later editions of his Principles of Human Physiology published shortly before Elsie Venner in the 1850s, however, he revised this view, adding a lengthy section on physiological psychology that eventually expanded into its own volume by 1874. Carpenter had been convinced by the work of a contemporary, Thomas Laycock, who dismissed Hall’s Cartesian divide despite the fact that, as he himself acknowledged, “many will consider it dangerous to concede, that apparently pure mental acts are only the result of vital machinery excited into action by physical agencies” (quoted in Clarke and Jacyna 143). In Carpenter’s case, a chief interest lay in finding a medical explanation for the phenomenon of mesmerism, which he accomplished via his theory of “ideo-­motor action,” a kind of reflex action produced not by sensations but by the action of ideas on the mind. As Kurt Danziger explains, “The necessary condition for this effect would be the ineffectiveness of the will,” due to distraction, somnolence, or other means of achieving the hypnotic state (130).

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Carpenter would extend this concept, however, to cover a number of more everyday and even exalted instances as well, all of which Holmes (citing Carpenter) would enumerate in “Mechanism in Thought and Morals”: dreams, the association of ideas, the sudden remembrance of a forgotten fact after one has ceased trying to recall it, and, finally, no less than “the artistic productions of genius,” all gathered under the rubric of “unconscious cerebration” (Danziger 130; Holmes, Pages 278). Yet, crucially for Holmes, such theories could also provide explanations for more all-­encompassing pathological manifestations such as “hysteria, impulsive insanity, and bizarre religious behavior” as well (Danziger, “Mid-­Nineteenth” 127). In such instances, the “ineffectiveness of the will” might extend beyond a temporarily induced condition to a defining one, as when Holmes’s ophidian origin story for his heroine provides for what one critic terms “the prearranged restriction of Elsie’s will” (Boewe 309). When scholars discuss the influence of reflex theory on mid-­nineteenth-­ century literature such as Holmes’s novel, it has most commonly been understood as a physiological dethroning of an idealist conception of mind and soul, and hence as a kind of companion development to the Darwinism that would have such an impact in the century’s latter half. While such a perspective may easily enough be taken, as a historical story it obscures another that is of arguably greater importance for the history of both physiology and psychology: the toppling of vitalism, as an alternative theorization of a fully embodied mind.71 Telling the story in these terms can further enable insight into the conflict at the turn of the century between reflex theory’s inheritors and a resurgent vitalism that would eventually have an influence on Canguilhem’s work. One important account that does render vitalism’s eclipse central, however, albeit without thematizing it as such, is Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic. Although Foucault barely uses the word “vitalist” in his text, the epistemic shift he narrates from eighteenth-­to nineteenth-­century medicine could easily be characterized as, preeminently, a move away from vitalist tenets, as espoused by the Montpellier physicians—­Sauvages, Bordeu, Barthez—­whom Foucault portrays as embodying the residual mode of thought. In fact, Foucault invokes Stahl as well, for Stahl’s view of a phenomenon like fever, as a sign not of disease but of the body’s resistance thereto, is equally emblematic of the perspective being overcome. Overall, a focus on “the internal structure of the organized being” (note the vitalist phraseology here) is said to be giving way, in the work of physician-­researchers like Xavier Bichat and Claude Bernard, to one based around “the medical bipolarity of the normal and the pathological”—­a formulation that displays Foucault’s indebtedness to the work of Canguilhem (35). One learns of disease not from the symptoms the patient herself

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reports—­Foucault calls Sauvages’s approach a “symptomatology”—­but from the visual evidence only a trained professional can decode: the landscape of “organs, sites, causes” mapped out by pathological anatomy, or what is termed here “medical positivism” (138, 122). This emphasis on the need for an “external, deciphering” expert gaze can clearly be recognized in Holmes’s novel, with its array of professionals seeking to grasp the pathological phenomenon that is Elsie Venner (Foucault 136). And so is the new language Foucault describes of statistical norm and aberration, of the “average” and the “obliquities” therefrom that, as Elsie’s high school teacher explains, are given over (in a notably Foucauldian formulation) to “penitentiaries and insane asylums” if they prove beyond the gentler corrections of the educational institution (Holmes, Pages 66). In fact, as John O’Donnell writes in his Origins of Behaviorism, psychology’s greatest success in the US as the nineteenth century progressed occurred in the field of education. “Child study, eugenics, intelligence testing, psychometrics—­in short, the whole range of activities subsumed under the banner of ‘human engineering’ that occupied the majority of psychologists” by the early 1900s grew out of the earlier use of theories like phrenology as providing “an etiological explanation for aberrant human behavior; a predictive technology for assessing character, temperament, and intellect; and a biological blueprint for social reform” (77–­78). Psychology was, in short, moving toward the behaviorism that would become its dominant mode in the US by the early twentieth century—­a mode for which the reflex formed the core “focus . . . of investigation” (O’Donnell 205). For the movement’s founder, J. B. Watson, all human action was “ultimately analyzable into the simple reflexes, or tropism” (205). “Psychology is a branch of natural science,” he proclaimed in “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” (1913). “Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior.” Not simply the “educator,” but “the physician, the jurist, and the business man” would find they could “utilize our data in a practical way” (quoted in O’Donnell 66). For other historians of psychology, the move toward behaviorism during this epoch can be summed up as the story of, in Eckhart Scheerer’s words, “How the Will Disappeared from American Psychology” (51).72 For Scheerer, this process begins with the “general trend toward assimilating psychology into reflex physiology,” which produced a tendency to conceive of volitional action via the “arbitrar[y]” logic of stimulus-­response, in which cognition played no role (49, 52). As chapter 4 will discuss in greater detail, to the extent will survived at all in late nineteenth-­century discussion, it was typically as a capacity for inhibiting, rather than originating, human action.73 As the

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century waned, however, researchers like Harvard’s Hugo Münsterberg—­ and, in a more complicated case, William James—­would cordon off the will from psychological inquiry altogether. “All aspects of human experience that relate[d] to active striving and the realization of values were to be dealt with by the humanities,” Scheerer explains (49). All of this, then, comports with the kind of linear narrative about an epistemic shift—­here, from vitalism to mechanism—­that we have come to associate with Foucault-­inspired work in the humanities. Yet while there can be value in this narrative, it is also not the whole story. After all, not only was this same period also that of Freud and the harder-­to-­categorize James, who will each receive more attention in later chapters of this book.74 In Germany in particular, it was, moreover, one of an explicitly humanistic psychology that pushed back against positivism by acceding to Münsterberg’s association of will with “the concept of value”—­specifically, with the “conflict of values” described by Max Weber—­and awarding it pride of place accordingly (Scheerer 52). (In the US, Alain Locke, who had been Münsterberg’s student, would contribute to an important philosophical theorization of value along related lines.)75 As its eventual codification as “Gestalt” psychology suggested, this work gave the same importance to holism in the face of a mechanistic reductionism as did the earlier vitalism. As such, it formed a kind of companion development to the more explicit neovitalisms being conceptualized during the same period by, in Germany, Hans Driesch (whose “entelechy” represented an explicit developmental update of Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb), and by Henri Bergson, William James’s erstwhile correspondent, in France. As Sanford Schwartz and others have documented, the renewed vitalism/ mechanism conflict that resulted would go on to have a strong influence on the modernist literature of the early twentieth century. Such instances thus offer proof of the dangers of too strong an allegiance to the notion of a totalizing epistemic shift. Canguilhem, who provided such important inspiration for Foucault, was himself far more interested in the notion of, as he puts it in Réflexe (citing Bachelard), “une histoire récurrente, une histoire qu’on éclaire par la finalité du présent” (167). The returns to figures like Bergson and Blumenbach by contemporary new-­materialist theorists attest to vitalism’s “vitality,” in one writer’s words, even in our own epoch.76 As I’ve suggested, however, these neovitalisms frequently take their cue from the anti-­Stahlian formulations in sensibility theory and Naturphilosophie. What would it look like, then, to follow both Canguilhem’s own example and that of his mentor, the neurologist Kurt Goldstein, and ask how a more medically oriented vitalism—­which, this chapter has argued, is at once a more novelistic, because

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necessarily narrative, one—­might intervene into the mechanizations of the present day? Vitalist Legacies, II: The Alternative Neovitalisms of Goldstein and Canguilhem For most observers, after all, the twenty-­first century would appear even more marked, in the realms we have been discussing, by the absolute triumph of mechanistic reductionism—­from the genomic focus of developmental biology to the transformation of psychology into, effectively, a subset of neuroscience. It might well seem impossible, within such frameworks, to imagine an account of human Bildung, as in the literature we have been discussing, in which biological and existential maturation might be conceived as intertwined. And yet at the same time, there has been pushback from scientists stressing a new organicism, some even using the word “vitalism.” Pointing out the long history of antireductionist thinking in developmental biology, Scott Gilbert and Sahotra Sarkar have argued it is due for a revival in the twenty-­first century, noting that even gene expression is now understood as a more holistic process involving interactions between levels. Others point to the renewal of nineteenth-­century ideas about “emergent” properties within systems and complexity theory. And in a cheeky essay titled “Biologists Behaving Badly,” Susan Oyama questions the knee-­jerk dismissal of vitalism by suggesting mildly that the conception of the genome as master organizer of life shares some of the same notions of a single all-­powerful internal agency for which vitalism was so often faulted. Those working in the humanities, in areas with explicit ties to vitalist thought such as affect theory and new materialism, will be likely less surprised by these developments. Influenced by Gilles Deleuze’s work on Bergson, Brian Massumi thus turned to the latter’s ideas, along with those of Spinoza, to develop his theory of affect as a preconscious “impingement” upon the body, a “pure and productive . . . receptivity” to the world (92–­93). Here we see some overlaps with Oyama’s emphasis on environments as crucial contributors to the process of development. And in her much-­discussed Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett’s new-­materialist conceptualizations flow through the work of Bergson, Driesch, and Blumenbach on the Bildungstrieb, though she emphasizes in all three cases her desire to extend the “vitality” they see as specific to organic life to “matter” as such (75). Here, complexity theory’s attribution of “life”-­like properties to phenomena like storms is affirmed.

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While this scholarship has reoriented our attention toward vitalism, then, it does so in two familiar registers crucial, as I argued earlier, to the historical turn away from the Stahlian variety and, it can be argued, eventually toward the resurgence of mechanism in the form of the reflex concept.77 That is, we see in affect theory’s emphasis on “receptivity” overlaps with sensibility theory, and in new materialism’s broadened construal of “vitality” a link to Naturphilosophie’s similar extension of vitalist ideas to the entire cosmos. As such, however, both necessarily move away from the version of vitalism found in Stahl, with its specifically medical origin and its interest in the living being’s struggle against death (as evidenced in phenomena like fevers), as well as both the individual’s distinct “temperament” and its potential to work against its own well-­being as evidence of a nonmechanistic, vitalized Augustinian will. An alternative theoretical framework more in keeping with Stahl’s, I want to conclude here by suggesting, may be found in the mid-­twentieth-­century writings of Georges Canguilhem. Canguilhem in fact spoke with approval of Stahl’s work, in addition to drawing extensively on that of a now too rarely recalled German émigré neurologist and later psychiatrist, Kurt Goldstein, whose own writings bore the influence of his intellectual development amid the rise of Gestalt psychology. Both, I would argue, put forth a model of vitalist inquiry that remains resonant for thinking about both the novel and, more broadly, about the question of human freedom conceived in embodied terms. Canguilhem, as has often been noted, had no problems with being taken for a vitalist, despite being very clear that he did not believe in immaterial forces of any sort.78 Rather, for him, “life” had to be understood not in ontological terms, but in axiological ones—­that is, as a value. It was for this reason, he suggests, that vitalism developed in the eighteenth century in relation to medical practice. In his words, “no living being would ever have developed medical technique if the life within him—­as within every living thing—­were indifferent to the conditions it met with” (Normal 130).79 For Canguilhem, indeed, the organism itself could be understood as “first among physicians” in its built-­in means of struggling against the “menace to its existence” its dynamic environment presented, a tendency acknowledged in vitalism’s Hippocratic emphasis on “the organism’s reaction and defense” more than in the “morbid cause,” and, hence, its therapeutic restraint (Knowledge 62). Medicine is thus for Canguilhem an extension of the organism’s own propensity to fight for its ability to persist and expand, a propensity expressive of the fact that “life is polarity, and thereby even an unconscious position of value”—­in sum, that “life is a normative activity” (Normal 126). Given these ideas’ similarity to Stahl’s original conceptions, it is perhaps less surprising to discover that when Canguilhem makes the distinction be-

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tween eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century medicine from which Foucault would borrow in Birth of the Clinic, he states that the former, “under the influence of the animists and vitalists, remained a dualist medicine. . . . It is with a great deal of satisfaction that we take up the following passage in a history of medicine: ‘Paracelsus was a visionary, Van Helmont, a mystic, Stahl, a Pietist . . . [who], despite his intellectual rigor, availed himself . . . of the belief in original sin and the fall of man’ ” (Normal 103–­4). For Canguilhem, the point of affirming such writers is not, of course, “to identify disease with either sin or the devil,” but to acknowledge the “negativ[ity]” inherent in disease as experienced by the living being, as an existential threat rather than simply, say, a shift up or down in the production of blood cells or glucose (Normal 104). The book that emerged from these ideas, The Normal and the Pathological (1943), inflected the distinction between the vitalists and their successors as one between different understandings of the concept of “norm.” For Claude Bernard and other physiologists of the nineteenth century, influenced by the burgeoning science of statistics, disease could be defined, as above, by the move away from a “normal” average—­as, thus, entailing a measurable excess or deficiency relative to that norm. Such a perspective went together with the reflex theory in its isolation of a local phenomenon from the totality of the body and concomitant construal of therapeutic technique as an intervention into that distinct site. Canguilhem, by contrast, insisted that what constituted the “norm” was always an individual matter and, further, that health could be defined as the capacity of the organism for creating its own norm—­both for “tolerating infractions of the habitual norm” and for “instituting new norms in new situations” (Normal 197).80 These ideas derived directly from the work of Kurt Goldstein, and specifically his remarkable book The Organism, published in Germany in 1934 and in English in 1939 after his flight to the US.81 Trained in neurology and psychiatry, Goldstein began to develop the core ideas of his study during his work at a clinic he had founded in Frankfurt for soldiers suffering brain injuries after World War I. Here he came to believe that “in each clinical case, whatever particular neurological deficit might be treated . . . there was always a general reaction or change in the individual as well” (Ferrario and Corsi 214). In other words, as his emphasis on “the organism” implied, Goldstein’s interest—­as Stahl’s had been at the moment of vitalism’s founding—­was in understanding the living entity, and health and disease in particular, in holistic and individuated terms. This commitment formed the basis of his objection to the reflex theory, with its view of the organism as “a bundle of isolable mechanisms” (69) (an objection Canguilhem would also affirm in his history of the reflex).82 That theory, Goldstein asserted, had led to “the supposition

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that circumscribed injuries would result in disorders specific to the mechanism involved,” when in fact, his observations had led him to the global view that “all performance fields” were necessarily affected—­that the organism’s entire being was always in some way at stake, its need to carve out a livable “environment” within an always potentially hostile “world” (36, 43, 85). This view, then, generated a Stahlian perspective on symptom formation, in which, rather than seeing symptoms as “direct expressions of the damage” produced by an external source, it was imperative to recognize that “symptoms are answers, given by the modified organism, to definite demands” (35, emphasis mine).83 The living being, understood in the terms Canguilhem would later adopt as a producer of norms, necessarily strives, “despite the persistence of the defect,” to “return to an ordered condition,” and what Goldstein found was that this could mean an antidevelopmental withdrawal into a more narrowed state of being as a means of coping with the distress at the loss of capacity (43). Such a deadlock could only be addressed, by the physician, in tandem with an understanding of the vital values that undergirded it in the first place. Goldstein’s, and later Canguilhem’s, focus on the organism thus produced the same two emphases we traced, at the outset, in Stahl’s on life as “organization”: an emphasis, first, on the individuated entity, its capacity for survival inseparable from the permeable but indispensable boundary distinguishing it from its surround, and, second, on what Goldstein terms the living being’s “historical,” or temporally produced, character (387). These characteristics, individuality and historicity, were, we will recall, the same ones that allowed for a continuity between the developmental Bildungstrieb and the novelistic bildungsroman. As I suggested, moreover, they are also the features that distinguish theories like these from the other, likely more familiar vitalist modes cited above that also link the eighteenth century to the present day: the environment/receptivity-­based sensibility theory and its affective counterpart in contemporary theory, and the vitalization of everything, beyond “life,” that links today’s new materialism to its precursors in the era of Naturphilosophie. Through the lens of Canguilhem’s insistence on healthy life’s inability to be “indifferent” to the possibility of its dissolution, for example, we can see why he, like Goldstein (and like Hans Jonas, a philosopher of biology who taught with Goldstein at the New School), would not wish to treat inanimate “agents,” even other complex systems, in quite the same way. As Christine Skarda and Walter Freeman put it, while a “self-­organized” phenomenon like a storm may act like a living entity in that it “takes in and gives out energy,” and may “move towards land,” “it does not do so under the constraint to survive as a unity” (quoted in Wolfe, “Do Organisms” 219). This insistence

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on individuation underlies Goldstein’s critique of the environmental orientation within reflex theory as well. Simply to understand the organism’s behavior as an unconscious response to stimuli, Goldstein argues, keeps us from acknowledging that even the simplest reflexes, such as the knee-­jerk, vary according to the “total condition” or “mood” of the being in question, including whether “attention” is paid to the phenomenon, and of what kind (74, 70–­7 1).84 “In human beings,” he notes, “even in the face of pain and injury, no avoidance reflex will appear if the subject needs to obtain information regarding the nature of the stimulus,” suggesting once more the key role of judgments of value (72). A simply stimulus-­based account, for Goldstein, can never explain how “any movement, any dynamics, enter into the situation to give direction to behavior[.] And direction,” Goldstein sums up, in a highly Stahlian formulation, represents the truly “outstanding characteristic in the performances of an organism” (84). With this language of direction, then—­and perhaps also attention, which William James saw as the will’s preeminent achievement85—­we move toward the possibility that what interests these theorists about organisms, as they write amid the darkening clouds of World War II, is the question of will. Goldstein’s discussion of the brain-­damaged patients who have moved toward a narrowed state of being thus culminates in the issue of what medical intervention looks like in such a situation, and what occurs, he states, is that “the whole problem complex of the concept of freedom enters into medical practice” (341). The patient must confront the question of whether she prefers self-­limitation as a means of avoiding greater suffering. In such a situation, in turn, the physician must recognize that “any effective interference . . . must affect the patient’s essential nature,” in the form of “the freedom of another person” (341). This idea of a “nature,” something “essential,” that reveals itself in such a crisis is central to Goldstein’s conception of the individual, and in his formulations, it clearly overlaps with the older vitalist conception of “temperament” as embodied will. Hence, he defines the “normal” entity, in the sense Canguilhem would later adopt, as one that “actualizes its essential peculiarities” (325). He will state that the only external phenomena that come to act as “stimuli” are those that do not disturb “the actualization of the performances that constitute [an organism’s] nature” (105). Or he will speak of an organism’s “performance potentialities (essential nature),” a formulation clearly linking this “nature” with what a being has the capacity to do (334). And yet for Goldstein, in ordinary persons just as in his brain-­damaged patients, one can in fact find two broad tendencies, one expansive, the other more contractile. One, that is, seeks “new experiences,” “the conquest of the world,”

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while the other tends toward “order, norms, continuity, and homogeneity”—­ precisely what we see in exaggerated, pathological form in the patients (238). It is clear that Goldstein, along with Canguilhem, privileges the former of these; it is a modality synonymous in his theory with “actualization,” the term that would later become more famous in its adoption, in fact directly from Goldstein, by Abraham Maslow. In this sense, the powerfully self-­driven will that in Stahl’s originary vitalism still retained traces of its theological tie to sin, in its capacity to cause difficulty as well as health for the body, has become, by the time of these later vitalists (in the wake, perhaps, of Nietzsche, whom we will discuss anon)86 more fully embraceable as a kind of excitingly creative force. Inhibition, that high Victorian achievement, would appear the greater problem. And yet perhaps the earlier religious dimension, concerned about the will’s excesses more than its deficiencies, has not wholly vanished from Goldstein’s conceptions. In the conclusion to The Organism, he writes more directly of the relation between the individual and a larger totality—­between what some writings on vitalism have termed the difference between “life” and “Life,” the latter of which might be said to function in some neovitalisms, as in Naturphilosophie, as a new “Big Will.” Writes Goldstein, Every creature is, so to speak, simultaneously perfect and imperfect. Regarded in isolation each creature is, within itself, perfect, well organized, and alive. With regard to the entirety, however, it is imperfect to various degrees. . . . The individualization, which always means an emancipation from the superordinated whole, be it species, group, and so forth, involves a necessary contrast between the individual and his fellow men and so brings about that imperfection that manifests itself in the catastrophic form of all coming to terms of the organism with the world. In that fact is given the transitoriness of all beings bearing a specific individuality. This may well be the only genuine, real imperfection by the very nature of life, the imperfection that is inherent in life itself. It shows itself in the incompleteness of the individual’s participation in that reality to which it belongs according to its nature. (375, 392, emphasis mine)

The striking thing about this formulation isn’t just its recurrence to an older lexicon linking imperfection and transitoriness. It also lies in the way Goldstein’s vitalism, too, becomes a kind of bildungsroman for the Bildungstrieb, telling the story of the individual organism’s ongoingly vexed—­because genuinely ambivalent—­relation to a larger whole. We must always think of the individual life in relation to time, Goldstein tells us—­the organism is a “historical being”—­and yet it is at the same time possible to conceive it in “eternal time,” in the sense that the events that define its existence gain

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“intelligibil[ity]” only “from the subsequent biography—­from death” (387). This is a novelistic view—­that we need the entire story in order to make sense of what precedes, and that a life can take on another life, beyond life, in the work of giving it value. So does the novel itself take on the two characteristics through which, as Jean Gayon writes, Canguilhem conceives life: “openness and irreversibility,” the power of recovery—­or rereading—­amid the recognition of the impossibility of any return to “biological innocence,” or a time unmarked by the engagement, both so fraught and so avid, between self and world (314).

3

General Willfulness: Moby-­Dick and Romantic Sovereignty

Is Moby-­Dick a novel? Considering what an outsized role Herman Melville’s 1851 magnum opus has played in the discourse of the “Great American Novel,” the question has been a surprisingly hard one to answer—­and not simply because of Yale University’s infamous cataloging of the whaling ship Pequod’s adventures under “Cetology” prior to the 1920s Melville revival.1 For Eyal Peretz, such errors themselves demonstrate the way Moby-­Dick looks to the future, by “open[ing] the question of literature as that which is beyond or in excess of literature” (20). Melville himself, like his companion Hawthorne, called his work a “romance”; for Franco Moretti, its voluminousness and uncategorizability suggest, as with Faust or Ulysses, a reinvention of the epic mode that the novel is usually thought to leave behind. Novels, after all, are said to center on that eminently modern entity, the individual. Moby-­Dick, instead, closer to Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights, gives us a flickering, pseudonymous writer-­voice through whom we receive access to a charismatic individual—­yet through whom we also experience phenomena so capacious in their reach that we might easily give them the appellation of “world.” This duality is crucial, and yet the charismatic figure—­Ishmael’s obsessed captain, Ahab—­possesses an ability to govern plot trajectory that seems if anything far in excess of that granted to any more ordinary hero or heroine. Hence, Moby-­Dick seems both to destabilize and yet to radicalize novelistic individualism, and this combination has led a remarkably diverse number of readers, across time and space, to read it as a text that theorizes or, more strongly, critiques that individualism rather than merely instantiating it, as it might if it were more like a “novel.” In Hawthorne, as we saw, the term “romance” suggested a hyperbolization of subjective interiority that also turned out to be problematic for the project of

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installing a workable individualism; hence, its association with the “residual” Calvinism of spiritual autobiography. Melville’s usage of the term seems more in keeping with the oft-­suggested sense that the most characteristically “American” long narratives of the nineteenth century eschewed the social spaces of novelistic realism altogether, in favor of tales of adventurous souls braving the wilderness, such as Last of the Mohicans and Huckleberry Finn. Compared with Melville’s, however, these texts possess more recognizable protagonists and thus are arguably able to make the case for a certain antisocial individualism (with some clear overlaps with liberalism as “negative liberty”) rather than placing it under critique—­in part, perhaps, because these rather innocent heroes wish to be left alone together with their bosom companions, and thus don’t raise as radically the specter of a total refusal of relation. Put otherwise, many readers identify passionately with the intuitive values of Cooper’s Leatherstocking or Twain’s Huck. In contrast, very few have seen fit to align themselves with Ahab. Ahab, then, appears more like a limit case for individualism, and specifically the American myth thereof. Yet what is his relation, as such, to the sea-­ vast book that in some way contains him? As we will see, with several notable exceptions, the two have been treated as in some odd sense opposing principles—­Ahab as a sort of a demon within that the book must manage and finally exorcise. What if we were to understand that demon as the will? One might do so under the sign of “willfulness,” that problematic defiance that, as Sara Ahmed has argued, often appears in the form of the part causing trouble for the whole (“Willful” 243). Ahmed is discussing the training of recalcitrant Victorian children (and girls in particular, as we saw in the case of Stoddard’s Cassy); willfulness in Ahab, however, would seem to open onto a deeper problem. In the words of Newton Arvin in his 1950 critical biography of Melville, Ahab “has ceased to be a personality, if that word is to be understood as signifying a human being”; he stands, rather, as “only a proud and defiant will” (177). The point is echoed by another reader, who describes Ahab’s “human emotions” as buried under the weight of his “inhuman will” (Friedman 209). What has happened when the will, of all things, becomes the sign of the inhuman? Such a question can offer the gateway to what we will be exploring here. And that question can begin to be yoked to our opening one concerning Moby-­Dick’s generic status, if we recur to one of the more interesting attempts at its classification, that made long ago by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism. For Frye, Melville’s book stands as a hybrid of two narrative modes, “romance” and, like Frye’s own classificatory project, “anatomy.” It is by yoking these two, I would argue, that Melville is able to achieve a critical perspective toward his Romanticist predecessors’ paeans toward will, even

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as his own work’s wild ambitions reveal how much he has greedily imbibed their example. What is an “anatomy,” for Frye? Traced to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, the form emerges out of an older mode, the Menippean satire, which ranges the world as a series of ironically presented philosophical attitudes; at the same time, however, the writer himself appears to indulge in the very intellectual excesses being cataloged, offering up “a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern” and “piling up an enormous mass of erudition about his theme” (310–­11). In Burton, the particular theme of “melancholy”—­ one of considerable importance for Melville also, if we consider the depressive “hypos” that drive Ishmael to sea—­provides the theoretical key to mapping the social whole. In Melville, an exhaustive examination of whaling life sheds light on not only human relations—­political, economic, social—­but the manifold wonders of the natural world, and, indeed, even the far reaches of transcendental speculation. The idea of reading Moby-­Dick as anatomy has had considerable appeal—­ not least because, as Samuel Otter emphasizes in Melville’s Anatomies, Melville’s particular mode of encyclopedism can appear such a fleshly, hence literally “anatomical” one, with distinct chapters accorded the different body parts and effluvia of the whale.2 Yet Frye’s insistence on the anatomy as a highly intellectualized mode is worth preserving—­not only for its obvious relevance to Ishmael’s characteristically philosophical flights, which transmogrify spermaceti into Platonian Ideas and back again, but, as I suggested above, for the curious effects produced when such a mode is wedded taxonomically to romance. After all, if the anatomy, in its relentless satire, seems to emblematize Thomas Pavel’s “anti-­idealist” strain in the novel, the romance idealizes, stepping outside the social’s confines to a more mythic realm, in which prenovelistic dreams of heroism and adventure can reassert themselves, and heightened emotions, “passion and fury,” again find a place (Frye 304). The romance thus inflates, while the anatomy deflates. How, then, might they coexist side by side? To begin with, it seems helpful to recall two features of each mode that start to muddy such a characterization: romance’s “tragic” and at times even “nihilistic” dimensions, on the one hand, and the anatomist’s enthusiastic participation in what he elsewhere mocks as pedantry, on the other (Frye 304, 308). Let us consider Moby-­Dick, I propose, not only as a straightforward “romance” (heroic adventure) and “anatomy” (intellectual mapping), but as, more complexly, “romancing anatomy”—­rendering thought, intellectualism, as its own sort of adventure, one as exhilarating and yet potentially self-­destructive as whaling itself—­while, at the same time, “anatomiz-

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ing romance”: subjecting romantic idealizations to a categorizing scrutiny. Necessarily, then, none of these projects can ever achieve full stability, as they constantly double back, like the sharks feeding off the Pequod’s leviathan leavings, to devour their own tails. Following Burton, I would offer up as exemplary of the “anatomization of romance” Moby-­Dick’s subjection of its own bearer of the archaic hero’s charisma, Ahab, to the psychiatric diagnosis of monomania—­defined in the period, as we will see, as a disease of excessive will. As Melville was growing up, the sense of such extremes’ significance to the period’s revolutionary spirit and to the related emergence of Romanticism rendered them at once heroized, feared, and, in either case, insistently thematized, as perhaps never before. And unquestionably, throughout his career—­including in crucial shorter works such as Benito Cereno and his final novella, Billy Budd—­ Melville remained fascinated by this notion of the drive toward freedom as marked by an ineluctable excess. His unceasing ambivalence on the subject can be discerned not only in those texts but in the portrayal of Ahab as both a “grand, ungodly, godlike man,” granted the book’s most Shakespearean linguistic flights, and a mad criminal, a case for psychiatric treatment (78). That ambivalence, this chapter suggests, is hardly Melville’s alone; it forms part of a lengthy and honorable intellectual lineage that stretches all the way up to the present day. Moby-­Dick’s critics, that is, while typically deploring Ahab’s ambitions, not only at times find these hard to disassociate from the novel as a whole; moreover, they often place in those ambitions’ stead a hyperbolic vision of political collectivity that, as we will see, may have more in common with them than it might seem. Both, that is, can be understood as manifestations of a specifically Romantic mode of will, or “willfulness,” that we, no less than Melville, find enduringly compelling and troubling by turns. The temptation simply to separate Ahab off as the problem, however, makes it harder to come to grips with the Romantic will’s true complexity. That complexity may be better glimpsed, I here show, if, bearing Melville’s fascination with German philosophy in mind, we trace the way the Romantic will—­in the form of Fichte’s philosophy, on the one hand, and an older mode of heroism, on the other—­is, from the first, both incorporated and abjected within an emblematic account of modern subjectivity such as Heg­ el’s (and, differently, in Schopenhauer’s account of the world as will). Having explored this history, we will then be in a better position to grasp its nuances in the portrayal not only of Ahab, but of all that is so often thought, in Moby-­Dick, to oppose his influence: Ishmael, the natural world, and the crew of the Pequod.

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Modernity’s Two Wills If any one figure in American literature stands for modernity in crisis—­and, hence, for the dilemma of the will—­it is, surely, Captain Ahab. Indeed, what is remarkable is how durably he has been understood to express the undoing, from within, of the notion of individual self-­determination—­of the modern, and above all the American, ideal. To say so may surprise many who have been taught that, when Melville was raised from watery obscurity to the forefront of American letters in the century after Moby-­Dick’s composition, his Cold War–­era defenders cast Ahab as the totalitarian tyrant menacing democratic freedom in the form of our narrator, Ishmael. While such ideas were and remain entertained, the mid-­twentieth-­century critics who first made the case for an “American exceptionalist” literary tradition, based around the idea of romance, in fact had no qualms about placing at its core a figure in whom the most cherished freedoms seemed to blur into their tyrannical opposite. “He is the American cultural image,” wrote Richard Chase in 1949, “the captain of industry and of his soul; the exploiter of nature who severs his own attachment to nature and exploits himself out of existence” (Herman Melville 43). “He is modern man, and particularly American man,” agreed Newton Arvin a year later, “in his role as ‘free’ and ‘independent’ Individual, as self-­sustaining and self-­assertive Ego,” gone wild—­embodying “the ruinous individualism of the age” (176, 181). Such accounts differ little from those of later historicizing scholars more directly intent on reading that individualism as “ideology” and Ahab with his dream of “absolute freedom” as thus bespeaking the ultimate American “ideological principle” (Pease, “Cultural” 390).3 Whether in the 1950s or the 1980s, what Melville’s book critiques is said to be, finally, “will” itself—­the “grasping individual will,” the “will [that] has cut itself off from the heart”; as F. O. Matthiessen puts it, the book directly questions the Emersonian virtue of self-­reliance. If, for the Emerson of “Fate,” “the one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will,” in Melville that “formidable will” leads only to destruction, as surely as Manifest Destiny left a trail of blood and agony in its wake.4 Melville, writing of the disastrous “impulse to envelop and control the universe” (Chase, American Novel 109), thus appears to characterize his country, decades before its rise to imperial power, no differently than a leading British Marxist would at the dawn of the twenty-­first century: What is immortal in the United States, what refuses to lie down and die, is precisely the will.  .  .  . It is a terrifyingly uncompromising drive, one which knows no faltering or bridling, irony or self-­doubt. It is so greedy for the world

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that it is at risk of pounding it to pieces in its sublime fury, cramming it into its insatiable maw. The will is apparently in love with all it sees, but is secretly in love with itself. . . . With its impious denial of limit, its bull-­headed buoyancy and crazed idealism, this infinite will represents the kind of hubris that would have made the ancient Greeks shiver and glance fearfully at the sky. (Eagleton, After Theory 187–­88)

True, “buoyant” is not exactly the word for Ahab (in more ways than one), and that problem is worth returning to. For now, however, let me note that, as the threat Moby-­Dick represents has been conceived as that of individualism in the form of will, so has the antidote it presents taken the form of “human solidarity” (Arvin 181). At times this possibility appears in the person of Starbuck, the first mate who poses the most direct challenge to Ahab’s rule, and who seems at one moment late in the book, to which we will return, to recall him to “natural lovings” (Moby-­Dick 406).5 At others, it can be found in the sensuous companionship Ishmael finds with the kindhearted “cannibal” Queequeg, arguably the book’s most unqualifiedly virtuous figure.6 Most often, though, it seems Ahab’s world-­defying hubris can find its counter only in an equally outsized gesture of commonality; as Chase puts it, if we are to defeat our “liberal” tendencies toward “freedom apart,” we must “learn to love Leviathan, who is the mythical body of the world” (Herman Melville 301). For readers then and now, Moby-­Dick can be said to imagine such an embrace in the brief, blissful chapter “A Squeeze of the Hand,” where communion with the whale-­as-­world and with one’s fellow men become one shared, near-­ orgiastic enterprise: Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! .  .  .  I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-­laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—­Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-­humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. (322–­23)

Cesare Casarino’s treatment of this effusion is emblematic: in a stroke (or squeeze), the scene sweeps away the remnants of a mythical “will” or “individuality,” in favor of a joyous, politically revolutionary merger of all bodies into one (147). For Donald Pease, as for Casarino, such a vision might

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be said to instantiate Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s conception of the “multitude” in its powerful capacity to exceed both global capital and state power, for here we witness “activity  .  .  . released from the grip of law,” “a non-­capitalist commonality between men, a form of relation founded in a sharing without proper measure” and in an experience of “affective intensity” (Pease, “Biopolitical” 20; see also Casarino 145). More recently, the universalized, multitudinous “sharing” imagined here has been envisioned along lines closer to Chase’s (and, more recently, Geoffrey Sanborn’s) conception of the Leviathan as the “body of the world,” such that to squeeze among the fluidities of the whale dissolves boundaries not only between the men but between human beings and the totality of nature.7 All of which means, of course, that Ahab must stand for the capitalist’s appropriation thereof (“the powers of circulation,” as Casarino puts it, 159)—­which, along with his tie to the imperialist projects of Manifest Destiny, would certainly seem in keeping with the sense of Moby-­Dick as an exposé of the dark side of the modern individualist ideal. Yet is Moby-­Dick, then, essentially a sentimental novel? Captain Ahab is like the willful child Gerty from Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, published around the same time—­both should stop throwing those tantrums and learn to be loving toward others? Next to such single-­minded best sellers, of course, Moby-­Dick stands as a rather sprawling book. “A Squeeze of the Hand,” and even Ishmael’s relationship with Queequeg, constitutes a mere drop in its textual ocean—­or, at most, one of many currents therein. (Following shortly upon “Squeeze,” the chapter “The Try-­Works” presents the crew in a gothic light that threatens to undo all of the former’s utopian sentiments.)8 Chapter upon chapter devoted to the minutiae of whale lore may work against Ahab’s self-­aggrandizement, but they don’t do much for instilling the sentiments of revolutionary love either. Indeed, though for some such digressions suggest a persistent destabilization of all human aims, in the name of an affirmation of “life” as such, quite a few readers have detected in the novel’s very expansiveness an Ahab-­like “greed for the world,” in Eagleton’s parlance, on the part of either our narrator Ishmael or, indeed, Melville himself. Moby-­Dick the novel, that is, becomes the true willful individual. Such extensions of the diagnosis tend to involve portraying the problematic will in question as a hyperbolic will to knowledge—­easily linked, once more, to the excesses of Western modernity, now via the connection to science.9 Hence, one might query such readings merely by wondering about the way the critic now takes up the position able to encompass and delineate such excesses that was once occupied by Ishmael, or Melville, delineating Ahab. Finally, however, the interest in doing so—­in making clear our own invest-

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ments in the same intellectual overreachings we find problematic—­would lie in taking that willfulness more seriously, as it is quite evident Moby-­Dick the novel does, indeed even in its Ahabian form. The crew, in fact, seem especially taken with their commander’s wild goal, a fact that cannot help but cause discomfort for the many readers who would like to see them as his sturdy antithesis.10 They, too, speak in awe of the singularity of Moby-­Dick, mysterious monster of the deep, and see the quest to conquer him as one worthy of true heroes. If anything, indeed, it is the properly bourgeois first mate Starbuck who is most disturbed by Ahab’s bizarre divergence from their stated economic aim. (More than anyone else, Starbuck surely represents liberal selfhood in Melville’s novel. Driven to rage by Ahab’s blasphemy, he remains capable of “mastering his emotion” [362]—­as befitting a man who understands courage in pragmatic terms, as a “useful” item, not a “sentiment,” and one thus “not to be foolishly wasted,” just as one would not waste “beef ” or “bread” [102].)11 Yet how then can it be Ahab who stands for American individualism, for the self-­affirming capitalist ideal? “Individualism,” it turns out, represents the generally unexamined term here—­and with it, we shall again see, “will.” As it turns out, the free individual upheld by modern societies can be understood in at least two very distinct, and crucially often opposed, forms—­perhaps best distinguished by the turn-­of-­the-­century sociologist Georg Simmel in his essay “Freedom and the Individual,” where he describes them as, respectively, quantitative (or “numerical”) and “qualitative” individualism (224). The former, Simmel explains, universalizes; it predicates freedom on what all share in common, or the “natural equality of individuals,” who thereby form communities based not on patriarchal notions of kingship but on the principle of fraternity (219, 222). As we see in seventeenth-­century social contract theories, however, such arguments for the sovereignty of each individual over his own person come hand in hand with a moment of subjection: the “voluntary act of renunciation” of absolute freedom that forms the modern state (222). The alternative, then, develops in the eighteenth century: what Simmel terms the “individualism of uniqueness,” rather than of shared humanity, promulgated by Romanticism in its challenge to Enlightenment rationality (224). Here we see emerge a new upholding of feeling over reason, of psychic flux over stability, and the call to each person “to realize his own, his very own prototype” (224). Historically, the latter of these reacts against the first, in the Romantic literature and philosophy, from Byron’s poetry to German idealism, that was so important to Melville.12 It can be understood as a claim that modernity has failed to fulfill its own promise of freedom—­that, in Philip Fisher’s terms, “the autonomy of the self has been purchased at the expense of the autonomy

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of the will” (180). Yet in literary history—­with the notable exception, once more, of American literature—­the Victorian period, apogee of the novel form and of the modern formulation of liberalism, is often understood itself to react against Romanticism. John Reed, too, has formulated this reaction through the category of the will, arguing that “the movement from Romantic to Victorian” entails a rejection of the former’s “imperial will,” associated with artistic genius, to the ideal of the “disciplin[ed]” will, of “self-­renunciation” as embodied by a figure like Florence Nightingale (9, 18, 9). Indeed, one of the difficulties with the tendency to collapse Simmel’s two individualisms, or wills, in the characterization of Ahab lies in the fact that Romantic will, or willfulness, has often been the target of both liberal and conservative critique. Thus, not only do conservative polemics such as Irving Babbitt’s The New Laokoon (1916) portray Rousseau, Byron, and others as the progenitors of a modern condition Babbitt calls “eleutheromania,” or the mania for freedom (from the Greek eleutheros, “free”): “the instinct to throw off not simply outer or artificial limitations, but all limitations whatsoever” (196). Further, even in classical liberal accounts such as Isaiah Berlin’s The Roots of Romanticism (1965), which depicts the movement as crucial to our own acceptance of the value of multiple forms of life, Byronism, identified with what Berlin terms the core Romantic notion of the “indomitable will,” appears as less a set of ideas than a “syndrome” that, “if driven to its logical conclusion, does end in a kind of lunacy” (132–­33, 145). The inability of Romantic will as a kind of pathologized excess to be folded into more hegemonic understandings of modern selfhood can explain why, if anything, progressively minded literary critics have often championed a version of it themselves, as we already began to see in the case of Ahmed’s “willfulness.” Thus, as common as the critique of liberalism for its emphasis on the individual have been interpretations of that same individualism as, in fact, not individual enough. Following Foucault’s critique of subjectivation, critiques of this kind became quite common, and became imported into novel theory on both sides of the Atlantic. If the novel had long been understood as a key player in the dissemination of modern individualism, this achievement became understood anew as an ideological one—­one founded on internal “discipline,” in Foucault’s sense—­in the writings of scholars such as Richard Brodhead and Nancy Armstrong. Such an individual’s supposed freedom was said simply to mask a deeper subjection—­meaning the ideal itself could remain alive and well. Hence, at the same time that these studies evinced skepticism about the supposed freedom of the bourgeois “self-­governing” individual, Simmel’s first type, they often did so, as Winfried Fluck has pointed out, precisely in the name of the “self-­expressive” or Romantic individual, his second.

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Brought to bear on Moby-­Dick, such a perspective might at least enable us to begin to take the crew’s, and perhaps Melville’s own, investment in Ahab and his mode seriously. But the reason that has been so enduringly challenging a task is inextricable from the coup of Melville’s book: as depicted in mad, domineering Ahab, the Romantic will cannot simply be readily identified with—­as it can in so many other literary figures, in a politicized age as much as in earlier paeans to, for example, the gothic outsider. Hence, the tendency, then and now, to turn away from will altogether, in either its self-­asserting or its self-­disciplining forms, toward an idealized, selfless collectivity. And yet, crucially, that turn itself needs to be understood no less in relation to the legacy of Romanticism. That is, I want to suggest here that Americanist criticism, no less than American literature, often participates in a distinctly Romantic tendency—­one that should be neither condemned nor celebrated before it is, at the very least, adequately described. In such a task, I am aided by a number of scholars who, drawing on ideas like Simmel’s, have theorized Romanticism as a mode transcending a specific historical era to offer ongoing inspiration for critical work—­scholars like Stanley Cavell and Josef Früchtl, both of whom see American writing as particularly bound up with such an ethos,13 or the Marxist critics Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre. In broadest terms, we might characterize the collective alternative promulgated in readings of Melville’s “A Squeeze of the Hand” as being itself Romantic in two senses. On the one hand, its imagination in opposition to the state, law, and even society as such, and its concomitant association with limitlessness rather than “self-­government,” suggests a collectivized counterpart to the radical individualism of Byronism, an insistence that modernity fulfill its unmet aims of truer freedom and self-­will. On the other hand, however, its therapeutic dimension as cure for freedom’s “pathologies” suggests another side of Romanticism, one that has been viewed as nostalgic for a prior moment of unity, a prelapsarian moment prior to the advent of modernity’s chronic “malaise” (Abrams 145).14 Indeed, for Northrop Frye, even the less apparently collectivist Romantic “cult of the hero” can be understood in these latter terms, if we recognize how Romanticism at such moments reaches back toward the prenovelistic mode of romance, in which the hero’s aims merge seamlessly with that of the community as a whole (306). Perhaps the most interesting question that then emerges is whether Ahab himself can be understood in these latter terms, as the collective’s representative rather than merely its antagonist. If it has been understandably easiest to conceive him as a tyrannical sovereign, the very fact that he targets the mighty “Leviathan” might suggest, at least to a reader of Hobbes, the possibility that his quest pits the Pequod against the modern state itself.15 Certainly,

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the question of state power and individuals’ authority to challenge it would have been much on the minds of Americans in the years Melville was writing, only a decade prior to Civil War—­and, as in the case of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, at the same moment that the Fugitive Slave Law forced the nation as a whole to collude directly in the enforcement of slavery. If for Alan Heimert, Melville’s fiery-­eyed captain resembled John C. Calhoun, John Stauffer suggests the opposite: a resemblance to John Brown, whose radical abolitionist views led to his being referred to in the popular press as, like Ahab, a “monomaniac” (an epithet about which more below).16 As Toni Morrison would famously suggest, Ishmael’s chapter on “the whiteness of the whale” might be read as implying that the terrifying creature the book wishes to destroy is, in some respect, whiteness itself. What if, then, Ahab’s outsized will bespoke not sovereignal domination but Romanticism as rebellion? As mentioned in the last chapter, Jared Hickman points out the striking emergence in Melville’s era of what he terms “Byronic abolitionism,” noting the adoption of the poet’s rhetoric by Frederick Douglass and others, along with the insistence of titanic Byronic heroes like Manfred on their refusal ever to be enslaved. Such formulations thus refuse the distinction between the intense, grasping will and the communal sharing that is usually construed as its antithesis. As Hickman freely acknowledges, however, the capacity to conceive these together, in the figure of the single-­minded hero consumed with his people’s freedom (such as Stowe’s Byronic rebel Dred or Frederick Douglass’s Heroic Slave) often requires a self-­consciously mythic frame. Without such—­and perhaps even with it—­it is less clear how both an “absolutism of the subject” and an “ethic of reciprocity” can simply coexist without introducing further potential tensions, as this chapter’s final section will explore (Hickman 18, 21). Löwy and Sayre’s argument for Romanticism’s Marxist dimensions—­in its objection to modern rationality’s “quantification” of all aspects of existence (35)17—­is thus more typical in its strong rejection of its willful dimension, which they see as merely a symptom of a present alienation. The “true kernel of value among Romantics,” they state firmly, “is oneness with humanity and the natural universe” (27). In the nineteenth century itself, and in some of these more recent accounts as well, the two positions here (radical individualism and unity with the world) were perhaps most often rendered harmonious by being construed as stages within an unfolding historical trajectory—­one we will explore in greater detail in the next section. M. H. Abrams’s account of this narrative in his classic study of literary Romanticism renders it, as did many in the period such as Carlyle, in explicitly therapeutic terms. Thus, “man, who was once well, is now ill,” victim of the “modern malaise,” thanks to the disruption,

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within and without, of an originary unity: “He is divided within himself, he is divided from other men, and he is divided within his environment.” The only hope lay in a future “reintegration” (145). The utopian appeal of such a perspective is manifest, as it conceives virtually all human conflict, individual and social alike, as a temporary condition. In the future, we will all squeeze hands. And yet can Melville’s Romanticism really be assimilated to such a perspective? In Robert Milder’s compelling account, “while reproducing the pattern of Romantic myth, Melville’s quests thematically abort it”; his heroes “resemble, and openly draw upon, the legendary antiheroes (Ishmael, Cain, the Wandering Jew), sometimes figured as interim or crisis phases within the Romantic myth of fortunate return. In Melville, this ‘interim’ phase is permanent,” and the texts’ journey more a “spiral inward into greater complexity and ambiguity, not upward into higher unity and toward ‘home’ ” (32). Such a perspective, then, necessarily changes the meaning of modernity as “malaise,” in ways more in keeping with Melville’s famous reference to the “sane madness of vital truth” operative in Hawthorne and, in Moby-­Dick, with his claim that “all mortal greatness is but disease”—­this in a premonition of the “half wilful over-­ruling morbidness” driving Ahab (73–­74). Put otherwise, the fact that modernity’s affirmation of will may produce a pathological willfulness does not negate the former but begins to indicate the nature of the complexities we, as moderns, have no choice but to face. Within the work of contemporary scholars writing on Romanticism as an enduring critical formation, this is a position closer to that of Josef Früchtl, on the one hand, and Stanley Cavell, on the other. For these writers, Romanticism is defined by the very agon between individualism and collective reintegration, as neither represents a simply discardable element.18 This can help to explain why texts like Melville’s—­and, in Cavell’s view, important pretexts for Moby-­Dick like Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”—­must incorporate the willfulness they might otherwise appear invested in critiquing. Without that “moment,” we might suggest in Hegelian terms, they would not be the writings that they are. That incorporation, indeed, itself speaks to Melville’s kinship with the German philosophical tradition. Post-­Kantian philosophy is distinctive for, among other things, its developmental structure, which it shares with the novel. Their mutual reliance on such a schema arguably renders wildly disparate thinkers, such as Hegel and Schopenhauer, both in a sense “Romantic.” And yet unlike their immediate predecessors, such as Fichte and Schelling, both also wrote in many ways against Romanticism—­indeed, specifically against the Romantic will as we have been describing it here.19

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What makes their projects akin to those of a novelist like Melville, as well as the other nineteenth-­century American writers who interest a philosopher like Cavell, is that they, too, nonetheless conceive that will as in some sense foundational to subjectivity tout court. It is thus in need of both acknowledgment and exploration even if, in Hegel’s and Schopenhauer’s cases, the broader endeavor at hand seeks to overcome such willfulness on behalf of a merger of will with humanity, for the first, or world, for the second. As the next section will explore in more detail, then, the Romantic will appears as a core dilemma internal to the modern philosophical conception of subjectivity as such. In Hegel’s critique of Fichte, in particular, it appears in terms highly relevant to Moby-­Dick, as a form of monomania—­a term that, as we will see, Georg Lukács also took up to describe novelistic subjectivity in his Hegelian account of the novel form. In contrast to the liberal conception of self-­ownership, the Romantic will so described turned on extremes of subjectivism that, strangely yet crucially, could not be divorced from the sense of an alien otherness at the core of the individual will. In this sense, like the vitalist will described in the previous chapter, the will that Hegel wished to leave behind in order to secure the modern polis would reappear in the wake of his contributions, in the trajectory leading from Schopenhauer through to psychoanalysis. Finally, once we have a more adequate vocabulary for understanding the Ahabian position in Melville’s novel, we will be in a position to turn to those elements of the book that have so often been conceived as its antithesis, despite their evident investments in the hunt: Ishmael, on the one hand, and the crew, on the other. With Ishmael, we will, further, be able to ask after the novel’s portrayal of the natural world, and of the philosophical stance that engages with it. And with the crew, we will at last be in a position to return to the questions that the Americanist criticism discussed in this initial section raises regarding the relation of Romantic will to political community. Ahab, or Anatomizing the Romantic Will (Hegel, Fichte, Lukács) the philosophical critique Art thou nothing other than a Vulture . . . that fliest through the Universe seeking after somewhat to eat? Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe. c a r l y l e , Sartor Resartus (146)

As Hannah Arendt points out in her genealogy of will, after centuries of philosophical disparagement of the will in favor of reason, “suddenly, right after Kant, it became fashionable to equate Willing and Being.” Poets and

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philosophers alike proclaimed that, in Schiller’s words, “there is no other power in man but his Will” (quoted in Arendt, Willing 20). And yet, as Carlyle’s reference to Goethe suggests, already within the Romantic period itself, this tendency had begun to inspire the kinds of critiques that would later become commonplace in writers from Isaiah Berlin to the various critics of Captain Ahab. Goethe, who in his 1813 writings on Shakespeare suggested “duty” versus “will” might be added onto the set of oppositions between “ancient” and “modern,” went on to dub the will a dangerous “flatterer.” Because it is “advantageous to the individual,” he wrote, it becomes “god of the modern world,” and thus, ironically, functions as a new sort of necessity, “tak[ing] possession of men” (Literary 180–­81). Coleridge, similarly, while himself stress­ ing the spontaneous force of will so as to critique more materialist views of human action (Biographia 129), elsewhere warned of the capacity of will to magnify into a “remorseless despotism,” a kind of self-­subjugation borne of “the fearful resolve to find in itself alone the one absolute motive of action, under which all other motives from within and from without must be either subordinated or crushed” (Statesman’s 458). Such qualities had an ambivalent cast; they might be found in the “commanding genius,” but equally so in the Napoleonic despot (Statesman’s 459). For Coleridge, both the salutary new emphasis on will as the foundation of self and the potential for a disturbingly excessive subjectivism that this view entailed could be traced to the idealist philosophy of J. G. Fichte. The Biographia Literaria thus hails Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (1794–­95) for “commencing with an act, instead of a thing or substance.” In its emphasis on “acts of arbitrary reflection,” however, this theory is then said to “degenerat[e] into a crude egoismus, a boastful and hyperstoic hostility to nature” or to all that stands outside the ego (Biographia 160–­61). In this critique, and particularly in his portrayal of F. W. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as a corrective to the subjectivism of Fichte’s, Coleridge comes surprisingly close to Hegel, despite having little familiarity with Hegel’s writings. From his first publication, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy (1801), forward, Hegel often returned to the writings of his idealist predecessors—­in particular, Kant and Fichte—­in order to sketch out both their usefulness and their limitations for his own speculative enterprise. With regard to the issues that concern us here, the most significant aspect of Hegel’s critique lies in the distinction he draws between the two different terms for will that, in chapter 1, we saw were already important in Kant: Wille and Willkür. As Michael Inwood points out, the latter of these terms originally meant the will as “decision” or “choice,” and in Kant it still possesses this meaning; by the late eighteenth century, however, it had also begun

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to be used in a more derogatory sense, as something akin to what we have been calling willfulness: “caprice, acting as one pleases with no regard for others . . . arbitrariness.” This usage reflects Willkür’s connection to the Latin arbitrium, or the freedom to select between alternatives, which is also the source of the English word “arbitrary.” To understand why freedom of choice would become linked to mere caprice, however, it is helpful to turn to Hegel’s writings on the subject, which are the first to make a decisive philosophical distinction between Wille and a negatively judged Willkür, in large part by associating the latter with the understanding of freedom found in Kant, Fichte, and Romantic literature.20 The central reflection on will as such, as distinctive to modern philosophy, arguably finds its apogee in the work of Fichte, who stated that the “practical power” constituted the “innermost root of the I.” As Robert Pippin comments, this is a radical claim, in that even thought itself is recast in Fichte’s system as an energetic activity, as “something I do” (“Fichte’s” 155). In place of a Kantian categorical imperative, we find what Marina Bykova terms “a categorical demand for action, an ‘ought’ or internal urge for an engagement with the world” (139). In this sense, the “I” moves necessarily outward, and we will return to this important point. Fichte’s system remains resolutely constituted around the “I,” however, and this feature has received the most attention, in that the “I” is said, equally radically, to emerge out of an act of self-­positing—­suggesting an individual creating itself from the ground up, with no indebtedness to anything beyond itself. For Hegel, then, the problems with this subjectivism immediately appear if we turn to the Romantic writers he groups together as “followers of Fichte”: Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Novalis, and so on. In their writings, Fichte’s conceptions degrade into “the subjectivity of arbitrary will and ignorance,” if not, indeed, “madness” (Lectures on the History 511, 510). The theorization of Romantic will not simply as solipsism, hubris, or excess but as pathology, then, already appears in Hegel’s early nineteenth-­century writings; indeed, as we will see, his account of insanity in The Philosophy of Mind renders the mentality of the unbalanced individual as such in essentially Fichtean terms.21 As Pippin himself also underscores, however, Hegel remains at the same time deeply invested in the category of subjectivity, arguing for “the right of the subject’s particularity to find satisfaction, or . . . the right of subjective freedom,” as “the pivotal and focal point in the difference between antiquity and the modern age” (Right 151). This emphasis, I want here to argue, creates unavoidable complexities within Hegel’s account of the relation between the Romantic will and his own version of what true freedom entails. As Pippin notes, after all, the Romantic will is not in fact purged from Hegel’s account

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but, true to his dialectical procedure, “sublated”; it represents an early, crucially superseded, but just as crucially unavoidable “moment” within the passage toward a fully achieved Wille not reducible to mere Willkür. And as such, it turns out to possess nuances that can, finally, aid us in our aim of constructing an equally nuanced account of the operation of Romantic will in the pages of Moby-­Dick. Does will as Willkür, then, refer for Hegel, as for so many others, to a will that is simply too subjective, too rooted in the individual self? To an extent, this is surely the case: Hegel does argue strongly against the notion that freedom means merely “do[ing] as one pleases,” “stand[ing] out from the rest” (Right 48–­49])—­as he argues with regard to the Romantic artist.22 And yet, it turns out, the problem can just as readily be said to lie in excessive dependency on externalities. Willkür, will defined as arbitration or decision, refers only to a choice between options that are externally given. Or, in Hegel’s words, “It is inherent in arbitrariness [Willkür] that the content is not determined as mine by the nature of my will, but by contingency; thus I am also dependent on this content. . . . The common man thinks that he is free when he is allowed to act arbitrarily, but this very arbitrariness implies that he is not free” (49). He chooses, that is, only among possibilities that in themselves have nothing to do with the content of his own freedom. Complicating matters even further, then, is that Hegel in Philosophy of Right also considers and rejects what might seem the opposite of this overly particularized willing: “universal” willing, which strives for an absolute abstraction, a “flight from every content as a limitation” (38). This modality of willing, fascinatingly, appears as a kind of potentially dangerous hyperbolization of a tendency that could otherwise be said to define the human as such: the power, via thought, to transcend all immediate ends and determinations, which is said to differentiate us from other animals (38). “The human being alone is able to abandon all things, even his own life,” Hegel writes. This absolute sacrifice of self may appear as “the Hindu fanaticism of pure contemplation,” or as the “active fanaticism” motivating the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, which was predicated on a “universal equality” in which “all differences  .  .  . were supposed to be cancelled out” (39). The key here, however, is that this self-­denial, this merger of the individual into a greater totality (itself associated, via Rousseau, with Romanticism), and the self-­inflation of the Romantic artist represent, for Hegel, two sides of the same problem, one his own philosophical contribution is designed to overcome. Hence, Hegel’s conception of the truly free will entails “canceling the contradiction between subjectivity and objectivity” so that these can be seen to work together as a whole (57). In Hegel’s view, Kant’s belief that accession to

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what is right entails self-­limitation is merely the mistaken product of construing will or freedom as Willkür. The key to the latter, instead—­and here love and friendship form the crucial examples—­lies in the possibility of “willingly limit[ing] ourselves with reference to an other,” a process that does not curtail our selfhood but, on the contrary, should be understood as bringing it into meaningful being (42). For Hegel, in other words, the restoration of true Wille rather than Willkür has the dual effect not only of restoring genuine freedom but of creating a meaningful union between self and otherness, one that will eventuate as the foundation of modern citizenship. He critiques Fichte’s subjectivism on both of these counts, via the notion, repeated in various places in the Hegelian oeuvre, of “bad infinity.” Rather than ever finding a home in which both selfhood and otherness may be expressed as mutually constitutive forces acting on each other, the Fichtean ego proceeds through a series of finite encounters in which it first finds itself limited by the non-­ego, then the reverse, and so on. This endless striving, ironically, could itself be said to express the sense of the ego as continuous activity so crucial to the Fichtean system (Lectures on the History 498). For Hegel, however, it leads to only to a “bad infinity,” in the sense of being no more than a succession of finite moments without end (Lectures on the History 499). In Hegel’s Aesthetics, then, he further suggests that the aesthetic counterpart of the Fichtean stance, as expressed in an artist like Schlegel, is irony (66). Here, however, we arrive at the striking role played by these ideas in conceptions of the novel. Most pertinently, in his Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács not only defines the novel’s stance as an ironic one; he uses Hegel’s term “bad infinity” to define the novel as such, due to its “lack of limits” as a form (81)—­a fact itself inseparable from the novel’s being “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” (88). The problem facing the novel, then, is how to generate a meaningful totality in a world where this is no longer pregiven, a dilemma that joins the protagonist’s quest to that of the narrative itself. Like the Romantics Hegel critiques, Lukács’s novel protagonists “become real personalities” by “energetically placing themselves in opposition to a world that is becoming closed to them,” scorning that “alien” world while at the same time struggling mightily to impose their own subjective stamp upon it (68, 75). It is the opposition presumed here between self and world—­as opposed to the organic totality of epic, which constitutes them inseparably through the figure of the community—­that generates the famed “interiority” of the novelistic subject (104). At least in this early phase of his thought, there is no doubt that Lukács is more sympathetic to this position than is Hegel. He can, indeed, sound down­

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right Melvillean: “because of the remoteness, the absence of an effective God,” he writes, “the indolent self-­complacency of this quietly decaying life would be the only power in the world if men did not sometimes fall prey to the power of the demon and overreach themselves in ways that have no reason and cannot be explained by reason” (90). Finally, however, just as in the Hegelian critique of Romanticism, this demonic assertiveness of the self-­positing ego becomes a form more of entrapment than of liberation, as what seems a self-­inflation is revealed to be at once a kind of “narrowing” (98). One might well think here of Melville’s Ahab, whose obsession develops as it “deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge” (157). And yet Lukács’s account of this “demonic” subjectivity is even more relevant here than it might seem, for he ends up describing novelistic interiority as such as “the demonic obsession by an existing idea,” using the very term Melville uses to diagnose Ahab—­that is, “monomania.”23 The hero, Lukács writes, is “maniacally imprisoned in himself,” such that “a maximum of inwardly attained meaning becomes a maximum of senselessness, and the sublime turns to madness, to monomania” (100). the psycholo g ical diag nosis Why monomania? Prevalent enough in the nineteenth century that it became a favored character descriptor for Balzac, Melville, Emily Brontë, and others, the term had no psychological credence left by the time of the early modernist era when Lukács himself wrote. He may thus be drawing here on Hegel as well, for when Hegel in his Philosophy of Mind defines insanity as such as a version of Fichte’s Romantic subjectivity, he does so precisely by associating it with the notion of the “fixed idea” (213). The problem with the idée fixe, in Hegel’s account, is that it represents a confusion between the realms of the merely abstract and possible and that of the “concrete and actual.” Hence, Hegel states, a man may believe himself a king, even when such an idea “has no other ground and content whatever than the indeterminate general possibility that since a man, in general, can be a king, I myself . . . am a king” (128). In making such a statement, however, Hegel—­and by extension Lukács, in taking up his ideas—­is more connected to the actual psychiatric discourse of Melville’s era than it might seem. The diagnosis of monomania in fact emerged therein as a medical counterpart to philosophy and literature’s burgeoning suspicion of the pathological potentialities inherent in the modern individual’s much-­vaunted will. This was made possible, in the first place, by the role that monomania played in a larger shift toward widening the purview

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of mental disorder by conceiving the possibility of manie sans délire, or mania without delirium—­mania compatible, in other words, with reason, as in Freud’s later conception of the nonpsychotic neuroses. And also as with Freud, then, modern forms of life were deemed especially conducive to such symptoms’ widespread flowering. In the view of the influential German physician Johann Christian Heinroth (1773–­1843), if a more primitive antiquity had been prone to the disturbances of “rage and frenzy,” the “increased material wealth” of a civilized society produced its own dangers through the spread of new ambitions to a greater swath of the populace (39). The problem, as he explained, lay in the potential for a kind of hypertrophy of the will: “precisely because [the will] is free,” he put it, in a notably Hegelian formulation, “it needs some limitation, so that it does not lose itself in the infinite,” and thereby “destroy itself. . . . This limitation is given to the will by reason” (228). Monomania, a concept originally developed in France by the celebrated alienist Jean-­Étienne Esquirol, was a distinct form of manie sans délire in early psychiatry that eventually came to encompass precisely these very dilemmas of the excessive modern will. As Jan Goldstein has documented in her account of the term’s meteoric rise, Esquirol originally intended the term to refer more narrowly to a mania on one subject, or what was otherwise often referred to as an idée fixe. As such, the notion quickly spread to cover any sort of insistent return to a cherished theme—­including, in instances such as Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, an artistic one. In the later work of Esquirol’s student Étienne Georget, however, “monomania” came to refer to a mania in one part of the brain—­an isolated “lesion of the will,” leading to actions to which the patient’s unaffected reason might respond with horror. The notion’s polyvalence in these regards could explain the quite varying ways in which it was commonly understood as a kind of side effect of modern subjectivity as such. On the one hand, in Goldstein’s words, monomania as idée fixe seemed a hyperbolic parody of the “single-­mindedness and goal-­directedness”—­the “obsessive narrowing” and intense concentration on particular fixed goals—­that distinguished the habits of an emergent, “striving” bourgeoisie, with its new possibilities for “self-­making,” from their predecessors (Console 161–­62). On the other, Esquirol, like Heinroth (and in line with Hegel as well), saw the Revolution and the “appearance of ‘new kings’ ” as encouraging monomaniacs whose hypertrophied wills led them to believe themselves royalty, a rise of “immoderate and pathological ambition” or monomanie ambitieuse (quoted in Goldstein, Console 159–­60). With such emphases on ambition or striving, one begins to see how readily the cluster of ideas surrounding monomania could become fodder for the novelist, whether as a way to express an artist’s devotion to his uncompleted

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masterpiece in Balzac or a lover’s undying passion in Brontë. Indeed, even in psychiatric accounts, the distinction between the condition and that of the mere “maniac” can end up turning on monomania’s conduciveness to narrative elaboration. Hence, the maniac, one physician explains, acts on pure impulse (as in a homicidal rage); by contrast, “the excitement of the monomaniac does not pass so immediately towards the exterior”—­this being the sign that we are dealing here not with a mere reduction to a sheerly instinctive state but with true “morbid volition.” The real distinction between the two amounts to a narrative one: “the more . . . that some sort of plan presides over the morbid will, the further is the condition removed from mania and drawn toward monomania” (Griesinger 305, emphasis mine). The same medical text, moreover, also implies at times that the monomaniac’s fixed idea is really his “persistent over-­estimation of self ” (Griesinger 303). Here the monomaniac as obsessive more obviously shades into the “monomania of ambition,” the sense Esquirol describes in which the sufferer may imagine himself not merely a king or lord—­or, interestingly, a poet—­but, more radically, a “god” (Griesinger 303; Esquirol 322). His freedom of action is thus conceived to be absolute, “nothing  .  .  . oppos[ing] the free exercise of all his functions” (Esquirol 320). Indeed, the monomaniac may even turn out to be in a very real sense right in this regard: given that the “power of volition” is “actually exalted” in such states, they are “accompanied by great freedom of thought and an abundant flow of ideas” (Griesinger 304). Or, as Melville writes of Ahab, his “special lunacy  .  .  . turned all its concentrated cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab . . . did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear on any reasonable object” (157). In deeming his captain a monomaniac, Melville thus invokes a conception of modern subjectivity in which genuine and even impressive force of will and a kind of pathological possession were not at odds but, somehow, strangely intertwined.24 Yet what, exactly, is Ahab’s fixed idea? It certainly seems possible to understand it in the terms above as selfhood itself, as when Ahab gazes upon the engraved doubloon that the characters read, in turn, as a kind of Rorschach expressing their deepest convictions, and proclaims, “The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab,” and so on (332). And yet, of course, we might choose instead to see it as Moby-­Dick, the name Ahab mutters even in his sleep. Given these opposing options, perhaps the most compelling possibility is that which emerges out of Hegel’s elaboration of the fixed idea as congruent with Fichte’s Romanticism, as mentioned earlier. For the insane individual, Hegel writes, “the moment of difference” itself (“duality

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of being” between subjective and objective) “become[s] fixed,” a “fixed limitation” (Mind 129). In this sense, as for Fichte, that which is external to the self functions as “[what] Fichte calls the infinite check upon the ego, with which it ever has to deal, and beyond which it cannot get,” producing, once more, the dreaded “bad infinity”: a ceaseless cycle of limitation and overcoming that itself can never be overcome (Lectures on the History 495). As this formulation begins to suggest, however, Hegel’s depiction of the monomaniac in Philosophy of Mind turns out to resemble his characterization of the Romantic philosopher in a very specific sense: what at first appears as a critique of an excessive subjectivism (the self-­positing ego of Fichte) opens out onto a sense that the real problem entails the agonistic relation conceived between self and otherness. To the extent it places this contradiction at center stage, the Fichtean self might just as easily be understood to be overly marked by the presence of what exceeds the “I” as to be dominated by subjectivism.25 This very fact, however, has the effect not simply of undermining the will but of goading it into existence, as the fascinating double valence of Fichte’s “check upon the ego,” or Anstoß—­which means not only “obstacle” or “hindrance” but, at the same time, “impetus” or “stimulus”—­implies (Breazeale 88). As Daniel Breazeale puts it, the Anstoß is “a ‘determination’ of the I” (specifically, the “practically striving I,” or the I as will), in that it is “something that provokes or impels the I to further actions of self-­determination, that is self-­limitation” (91, emphasis mine). Usually, of course, we would think of “self-­determination” as an opening of horizons rather than as a limitation of these. Yet to determine is by definition to set bounds; to recognize it as such is to see the will as Willkür as an inherently self-­limiting force, in the sense that it is the power to decide on a given course. Moby-­Dick, then, plays on these thematics very directly in its conflation of Captain Ahab’s course, the ship’s course, and the course of narrative, all of which can seem peculiarly expressive of freedom and fatality at one and the same time. Melville twice describes Ahab’s monomaniac will as “determinate”; specifically, he states that as Ahab gazes forward from the prow of the “ever-­pitching” ship, “There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance” (109). If “determinate” implies fixity and “unsurrenderable” implies freedom, we have begun to see how “willfulness” is the right word to express the Fichtean collision of both of these extremes. Similarly, consider the harpooneers in the book’s penultimate chapter, stubbornly retaining their “once lofty perches” as the ship goes down, “fixed” there, whether “by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate” (426, emphasis mine).

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For generations of readers eager to conceive the novel as simply giving the lie to Ahab’s brand of Romantic self-­assertion, moments like these have seemed to demonstrate the lack of agency at those insistences’ core. Put otherwise, just when Ahab might most appear a towering testament to will, his own discourse suggests otherwise: “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run,” he bellows (143). The dilemma for such accounts, however—­which reach a kind of zenith in a striking new collection titled Ahab Unbound—­is that, no more than in the case of his Byronic predecessors, Ahab’s self-­understanding as a kind of machine does not appear to undermine his power over crew and narrative alike, but, if anything, augments it. This is, however, entirely true to the Fichtean conception we’ve been describing. Most famously, perhaps, in the chapter “The Chart” we see a gap open up, in the sleepwalking Ahab, between the Ahab who is horrified at his obsessions and the obsessions themselves, which seem here to assume a life of their own. Crucially, however, they are also defined here as his “purpose,” a “purpose” to which, when awake, all his “thoughts and fancies” are irresistibly tied (170). Two chapters earlier, Melville makes the complexity here more clear: Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this: namely, all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate. (157–­58)

In this passage, which speaks further to the division within Ahab, the monomaniacal side is even more clearly aligned with the will itself: with “motive” and “object,” with “power,” with “will determinate.” Ahab’s dividedness here is, thus, far from being a sign that his is not the commanding will we assume, rather a sign of that will’s excessive domination over his reason.26 Moreover, if Fichte is correct, the fact that Ahab’s monologues “almost always arrive at questions about the limits of individual autonomy”—­that, in Mark Noble’s words, “the wall through which the prisoner punches turns out to be integral, not merely oppositional, to the punch thrown”—­in fact bespeaks his outsizedly Romantic self-­positing in and through the revelation of self-­limitation. As we’ve seen here, willfulness in Hegel appears as less simply an excess of subjectivism than as a fixation on the opposition between self and nonself, thereby arguably instantiating the latter more deeply within. A formulation of this kind seems especially apt for Ahab; we might recall, after all, that his artificial leg—­the sign both of confrontation with his cetacean enemy and of his indefatigable “purpose,” as the others are condemned to hearing it pace ceaselessly over the deck—­is itself constructed of whalebone.

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It would thus be quite mistaken to conceive of will or freedom as Ahab represents it as any sort of Emersonian “self-­reliance.” Rather, subjectivity’s very excessiveness here bespeaks the mark of an originary trauma, hence a defining limitation—­one that Ahab’s particular wound only instantiates.27 Yes, one can imagine either a return to a moment of idealized oneness prior to that break, or, as Hegel does, a more “realistic” and therefore humanly satisfying mode of being in the world. For many of Moby-­Dick’s readers, the crew and Ishmael have exemplified these two anti-­Ahabian options, such that the text is understood to perform what Stanley Cavell would call a “cure” for the position of the “skeptic”: the Romantic subject split off from the world and others, and hence afflicted with a doubt regarding the nature of reality itself (32). Cavell’s account of these matters is of particular relevance to Moby-­Dick, and not simply because his linkage of skepticism to the “Kantian settlement” bracketing off a truer, deeper reality from our sensory apprehension speaks powerfully to Ahab’s desire, as Noble notes, to “strike through the mask!” (Moby-­Dick 139). (As he explains to Starbuck, “All visible objects . . . are but as pasteboard masks. . . . How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me” [139].) Beyond that, Cavell’s notable sympathy with the skeptical position, despite its clear dangers, can offer a model for how to think about what more therapeutic readings frequently ignore: that is, what seemed powerful about Ahab’s quest not only to Ishmael, and not only to the crew, but, indeed, to Melville himself, who persistently gives his captain the “bold and nervous lofty language” he had learned from Shakespeare, which renders him “a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies” (73). “I am . . . suspicious of the charge of perverseness,” Cavell writes, regarding Coleridge’s Ahabian Mariner, for such a claim appears “in too great a hurry to declare [such a figure] incomprehensible,” thus evading the very “ordinariness” of the “human . . . wish to escape the human” (58–­59). Absent a return to a meaning-­ infused cosmos, that is (which Cavell states bluntly his own “Enlightenment conscience” refuses), Ahab’s questions may have to be taken, at least briefly, seriously (53). Yet can Ahab be affirmed without disastrous consequences? Here we are very close to Ishmael: “There is a wisdom that is woe,” he concludes, “but there is a woe that is madness.” And his image for the one who might achieve the former without succumbing to the latter is of skirting an enormous fissure without sinking therein: “there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again” (328).28 As Paul Hurh has suggested in one of the most powerful recent accounts of

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Melville’s project, this image encapsulates Ishmael’s, and Melville’s, most characteristic mode of thought, which is incessantly, dynamically dialectical—­the demonic side of Hegel himself, as it were.29 The movement from an idea to its negation and back again produces the text’s most exhilarating and most terrifying intellectual flights. Indeed, although, again, Ishmael is often aligned with the crew as taking a more pragmatic, everyday view of things, one that recently has been conceived as the foundation for participatory democracy, this perspective must bracket off not only his own linkages to Ahabism—­ which, we will see, are specifically affective ones, as in the crew’s case also, requiring us to alter our usual understanding of affect simply as a self-­dissolving alternative to the dilemmas of excessive will—­but his persistent association, which is probably the strongest feature of his character, with the pleasures of thought for their own sake. (Indeed, Leo Bersani has suggested Ishmael is so much a form of thinking that it may be wrong to think of him as a character at all.) The book, then, may be most interesting when it aligns these two, the thinking and the affect, through an understanding of will that has much in common with the counterintuitive one we have been developing. Where Hegel envisions a dialectical process that is also a progressive one, leading toward a properly free will, Moby-­Dick’s wild oscillations between positions lead only—­literally—­to a vortex. One might hear in its pages more of the philosopher who would attract Melville later in his life, Schopenhauer, who conceptualized will not as the privileged achievement of higher beings but as the endlessly striving condition of the world as such. (Given this eternal flux, he reserved particular scorn for an unnamed fellow German who “imagines that the inner nature of the world can be historically comprehended” [1:273].) Instead, for Schopenhauer, the essence of reality lay in ongoing conflict. Such conflict spoke at once to the basic fact of difference (he cites Empedocles, noting that “if strife did not rule in things, then all would be a unity”), as well as to “that variance with itself that is essential to the will” (147). And the remarkable example given of the latter once more suggests the Fichtean otherness within, as Schopenhauer conceives of higher modalities of will like ourselves as containing—­literally, having swallowed up—­lower forms that then continue to express themselves as competing inner causalities (the need to eat, to sleep, and so on), against which we must ceaselessly struggle, a struggle essential to making us the particular entities that we each are. Schopenhauer’s more violent construal of will as strife and suffering—­ “the will-­to-­live  .  .  . feasts on itself,” he writes, recalling Moby-­Dick’s self-­ cannibalizing sharks—­leads him to call, finally, for its evacuation. What the will must learn to do, paradoxically enough, is to “freely abolis[h] itself ” (285); his text thus moves toward Hinduism and Buddhism as practices aimed

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at leaving the rapacious world behind. And yet as Nietzsche noticed, The World as Will thus possesses a strange duality between the powerful intensity of its accounts of living existence and its prescriptions for transcendence. The tensions here are perhaps strongest, indeed, around the characterization of thought itself, which is said to reach its apex via the latter, even as the suffering and joy characteristic of the will in extremis are themselves linked to “great mental activity”—­as it appears Schopenhauer himself intimately knew (317). Noting this relation of thought to suffering, and associating both with Ahab, Moby-­Dick’s readers have tended to conceive the captain as a version of Cavell’s skeptic, tormented about the rift separating self from others; hence, they offer up a cure the opposite of Schopenhauer’s, not transcendence of the world but a deeper involvement therein, a turn to the body and its pleasures rather than the harassing doubts of the mind. As the next section will show, however, Melville, like Schopenhauer, denies this split, portraying in Ishmael the affective intensities of a kind of voracious thought that, at its outer limits, takes its leave from both reason and bodily desires alike, seeking its own goals beyond the calculus of pleasure and pain. Thought here thus becomes will; it is defined, above all, by the same quality that has drawn so many readers to Melville’s language, that of intensity. As such, its Ahabian contest with the world and its Ishmaelian “greed for the world,” to use Terry Eagleton’s Schopenhauer-­like description of the Romantic will, cannot simply be separated. Ishmael and Intensity (Spinoza, Schopenhauer) skepticism and therapeutics As I’ve suggested, most readings of Moby-­Dick are essentially curative ones. The language of therapeutics begins, however, as Ishmael’s own. His “hypos” resemble depression—­the “damp, drizzly November in [the] soul” that makes funeral processions appear alluring—­but it is also, unmistakably, a version of what Cavell calls the “human . . . wish to escape the human.” When Ishmael pictures himself turning into the person who “deliberately step[s] into the street, and methodically knock[s] people’s hats off,” he creates an image of self-­separation by physical disruption of the social contract (18). The sea is meant to be the cure for this desire—­the drug, in effect, that will prevent Ishmael, he explains, from simply committing suicide. What kind of cure, though? It is the one the skeptic imagines: tearing himself loose from his fellow mortals will bring him in closer contact with

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“the ungraspable phantom of life” (20). The sea appears as totality, a “Potter’s Field” of all the continents, beneath which all the centuries of planetary dead lie slumbering (367). Thus Ishmael goes, reaching out not to the living but to the lost, to what Cavell calls “death-­in-­life,” and so the book leads us to wonder, as we ponder the “death-­longing eyes” of such men hoping to “bury [themselves]” in the deep, is such a voyage a cure for suicide or a more expedient means of achieving it (369)? By the time of Starbuck’s last, desperate attempt to sway Ahab from his quest, the book, like most of its critics, appears to have decided on the latter response. Inspired by the beauty of a springlike day, nature at its kindest, the obsessed captain seems about to have a conversion experience. What has he been doing? he suddenly wonders—­and he urges Starbuck to “stand close” (406). “By the green land; by the bright hearth-­stone!” he cries. “I see my wife and child in thine eye.” As the scales fall, forty years of sea life stand revealed as bitter self-­exile, a “desolation of solitude” amid the “pitiless sea” (406). By contrast, the two men’s locked gazes promise a communion of sympathy, as Starbuck, too, is moved to yearn for his family ashore. We must ask, then: Why does this scene go awry? Why is it followed by “The Chase—­First Day”? It appears on a first reading that Ahab merely recalls his mission; he begins mutteringly to recur to it, and Starbuck, appalled at the death of his final hope, slinks off in despair (407). Yet “hark ye yet again,” as Ahab might say (140). In fact, what happens is this: Ahab recalls his wife and child; Starbuck, jubilantly echoing that he is a husband and father also, bids them turn course and return home; Ahab seems moved by this, losing himself still further in a reverie of his wife telling his son tales of his father’s return; Starbuck evokes an identical scene in his own household—­and something shifts. The exchanged gaze is broken; Ahab averts his eyes, and begins a new soliloquy, one we might see as addressed to the will itself. “What is it,” he demands, “what cozening, hidden lord and master commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time. . . . Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, or God, or who, that lifts this arm?” (406). It is during this speech that Starbuck vanishes, and the result is that when Ahab shifts verbal course once more, back to something more like fellow feeling—­“But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild-­looking sky. . . . Aye, toil how we may, we all sleep at last on the field . . . Starbuck!” (407)—and the mate’s name is once again called, no one remains to reply. Might not we consider Starbuck’s failings in this scene, rather than simply blame the reemergence of Ahab’s irresistible monomania? Ahab’s first “turn,” after all, might be said to represent a withdrawal from an intimacy on the mate’s part that no skeptic could accept; when Ahab says he pictures his wife

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telling stories about him, what Starbuck says is not, “My wife does the same thing,” but, rather, “ ’ Tis my Mary, my Mary herself!” And then, “Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket!” (406). We should remember with what deep skepticism Melville writes of the sentimental hope of full access to another’s interiority in stories like “Bartleby.” The error Starbuck makes here is to insist he and Ahab are literally the same person; it is this gesture, it seems, that necessarily recalls Ahab to his irrefutable difference. And yet he does not even insist on that difference; he simply wants to know where it comes from; whether, to the extent he finds it as repulsive as attractive, that feeling should be seen as coming from “Ahab” at all; and whether, if it is not, one should lay the blame at God’s doorstep or that of other, more alien forces. Starbuck might have responded to such questions, but for the fact that his frantic demand for merger—­between selves, between merged selves and a motherly nature—­leaves no room for them. Here, then, it seems necessary to revisit Ishmael’s opposing gesture at the outset: the drive not to return to land, but to head out to sea. Certainly, earlier in the book—­prior to meeting Ahab—­we see a more conventionally “Romantic” view of this move, as expressing the self-­reliance of a bold few who would rather risk destruction in the “howling infinite” than “craven[ly] crawl to land” for safety (97). The mysterious sailor Bulkington embodies this “intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea”; “Bear thee grimly, demigod!” Ishmael salutes him, as if an idol worthy of his youthful worship (97). And yet by midway through, we can see him already doubting this split between landlubbers’ workaday existence and that of the brave seafarer. As Henry James in his famous American preface rejects the distinction between “heroic” romance and “prosaic” realism on the grounds that the “panting pursuit of danger” is no more than “the pursuit of life itself ” (280), so does Ishmael concede as the wisdom of the “philosopher” that the person “seated before your evening fire with a poker” is as enmeshed, as all mortals must be, in “the silent, subtle, ever-­present perils of life” as surely as the man who may be torn from the whaleboat at any moment (229). In this account, life at sea represents merely an intensified version of the everyday; this, it seems, is Melville’s “realism”—­one for which Romanticism may be misguided less in its conclusions than in its conventional notions of where these inhere. Or, rather, as Ishmael puts it a few pages earlier, we should view the sea neither as a place of escape from the land, nor (as Starbuck might have it) vice versa, but as encircling the land, just as “in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life” (225).

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We could call this an anti-­Freudian image, especially when contrasted with the more familiar version offered up by Starbuck as he meditates on the gold doubloon Ahab has nailed to the mast to encourage his men. On that coin, where each denizen of the Pequod reads in turn a version of his state of mind, the mate discerns a chilling “vale of Death” that is “gird[ed] round” by God’s grace—­just as “over all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope” (333). Thus is doubt rendered internal to the human heart, while that which is larger than us speaks feelingly against it; this mapping directly reverses Ishmael’s image, where the human stakes its tiny claim in a vast and unknowable universe. It is telling, moreover, that in this scene, too, Starbuck “steals away” just as a premonition of the latter view of things begins to raise its head; led by his own conception of God as a sun-­like beacon to a shuddering acknowledgment of the sun’s daily disappearance from the sky, he decides to leave off his meditations on the coin, “lest Truth shake me falsely” (333). Just as in the later scene with Ahab, then, Starbuck’s worldview is shown to require an at times strenuous act of repression. One cannot help but hear in back of his soliloquy Ishmael’s own invocation of the sun a few pages earlier, which similarly begins by exalting “the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp,” before abruptly turning to state that the sun cannot hide from us the vast emptinesses of desert and sea (328). Here—­as in “The Whiteness of the Whale”—­it is not what is hidden but what is revealed that affrights. Yet this is wisdom, Ishmael tells us, that the “wilful world” eschews—­preferring to “dodg[e] hospitals and jails, and wal[k] fast crossing graveyards,” and dismiss a Pascal or Cowper as “sick men” (328). All at once, then, we are privy to a new kind of willfulness—­the willfulness of therapeutics itself, the willfulness of Starbuck, the willfulness of repression. The problem, however, is that Ishmael is quite adept at this brand of willfulness himself. We see this from very early on: given various hints there might be something to concern him about Ahab or the Pequod, he systematically “beat[s]” his misgivings “down” (92)—­even, indeed, to the extent of thematizing this very propensity: “when a man suspects any wrong,” he explains, “it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly tries to cover up his suspicions, even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing” (90). The art cultivated might be termed a kind of studied inattention: filled with conflicting feelings upon first being told about his captain, Ishmael simply finds his thoughts to be “at length carried in other directions,” and his concerns reach an end (79).

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The side of Ishmael we see here will be a familiar one to any reader of Melville’s 1850s writings. Indeed, although Ishmael is by far the more sympathetic creation, one can hear here echoes of “Bartleby” ’s lawyer-narrator pleased he has found a way to manage rather than confront the disturbances caused by an equally challenging individual; one might think even of the maddeningly cheerful Captain Delano of the Bachelor’s Delight in Benito Cereno, who like Ishmael manages to end up a survivor of an otherwise decimating encounter. While the latter’s moral failings are of another magnitude, a certain cheerful pragmatism, a refusal to think too deeply about intractable dilemmas, nonetheless links this side of Ishmael’s character to such figures—­one that can manifest, as in those two tales, as a self-­serving materialism, but also, as in Ishmael, as the more festive “materialism” of simply celebrating life as such. The latter position seems encapsulated by the ship called Bachelor that shows up in Moby-­Dick itself: one manned by another candidate for Melville’s Paradise of Bachelors, a captain waving a glass and bottle who “good-­humoredly” states his simple refusal to “believe in” the white whale and whose crew’s merriment is itself portrayed as a celebration of freedom. Ahab “grit[s]” his teeth in reply (375); to be a survivor, of course—­the opposite of Ahab—­one must eat, tend to one’s “common, daily appetites,” as Ishmael puts it when explaining why even the Pequod’s crew could not think of their captain’s obsession day in and day out and still keep “healthily suspended for the final dash” (178). The central idea here in fact appears as early as the brief chapter on Bulkington, in which his “grim” countenance seems inextricable from the fact that, shunning the land completely just as Ahab has done, he has also turned his back on all that is “kindest to our mortalities”: food, friends, comfort, warm blankets of the sort Ishmael snugglingly shares with Queequeg (97). And yet with such a portrayal, we seem to arrive at the opposite perspective from the self-­separating one where we (and Ishmael) began—­that is, to the one governing the later “Squeeze of the Hand.” There, simply to “forg[e]t all about” the quest for Moby-­Dick entails a recognition that “man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his concept of attainable felicity: not placing it anywhere in the intellect, or the fancy,” but, once again, in the simpler pleasures Starbuck attempts to enjoin Ahab, later, to recall: those of “the heart,” of table and bed, hearth and home (323). As we saw at the outset of this chapter, for a strikingly diverse majority of readers this has appeared as the true moral of Moby-­Dick. Ahab on one side, aligned with pure “will”; the men on the other, embodiments of feeling. We note, indeed, the association here of Ahab with the disembodied pursuits of mind and imagination, whereas the crew’s communion is wordless and

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sensuous, thus, aptly to be linked to what warms us, to our “mortalities” in the form of the most basic, animal pleasures and needs. There is, however, a philosophical precedent for precisely the perspective on view here. It is that of David Hume, as prone to “hypos” as Ishmael, thanks to his own skeptical conclusions regarding the capacity of our reason to lead us anywhere near the truth of things. “The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain,” he despairs in his Treatise of Human Nature, “that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning” and fall into a “philosophical melancholy and delirium.” The only cure, crucially, lies in an escape from the realm of thought altogether, into one more evidently congenial: “I dine, I play a game of back-­gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when . . . I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold . . . that I cannot find it in my heart to enter into them any farther’ ” (175). Does Moby-­Dick, then, affirm such a perspective, by showing it to lie behind the effusion of fellow feeling, and rejection of airy speculations, Ishmael counsels in “Squeeze of the Hand”? The problem, as we have begun to see, lies in thinking through that chapter’s relation to the text as a whole. Far more than either Ishmael or the crew, it is in fact Stubb, the second mate, who most reliably embodies the relation to life on display here. As Ahab aptly notes, he is Starbuck’s reverse: where the former’s self-­control bespeaks both piety and calculation, Stubb approaches life with a “happy-­go-­lucky” spirit and “good humor” for all—­forever singing, thinking eagerly of his next meal, and indeed “presid[ing] over his whale-­boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited guests” (104). And yet in Stubb, too, we see the repressions this good cheer can entail: “Think not, is my eleventh commandment, and sleep while you can, is my twelfth,” he counsels himself, as Ahab begins to get under his skin (112). Stubb and Starbuck thus fall divergently short of being equal to Ahab’s challenge; the crew and Ishmael, who do take it on, have trouble remaining “on the shore” at all as a result. The problem is that when Ahab, or Bulkington, reject “all that’s kind to our mortalities,” it is, the book suggests, because they embody what Ishmael calls a “mortally intolerable truth”: that “all deep, earnest thinking,” all questing for “the highest truth,” may demand precisely this self-­separation, as “the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea” (97, emphasis mine). To attribute to Melville a final rejection of philosophy, after all, simply because he depicts it as dangerous and even at times absurd, seems finally as wrongheaded, given the wildly speculative mode of his oeuvre, as attributing the same to Hume, who concludes the passages just cited by explaining his return to philosophizing despite himself.

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Put otherwise, it has seemed singularly difficult to conceive Moby-­Dick as a text that takes body and mind equally seriously (and is interested in what is both comic and tragic about such an attempt), even though it is hard to imagine a book among the many candidates in American Romantic literature that does so with greater insistence and gusto.30 g reed for the world In order to think “thinking” in Moby-­Dick as itself an energizing force—­if sometimes darkly so—­we might return to Hume himself. As Hume explains, he in fact returns to the realm of thought once more, for two reasons. First, once “tir’d with amusement and company,” and thus driven toward “a solitary walk” or reverie at home, the old “curiosity” and “ambition”—­two notions to which we will return—­once again present themselves, inevitably, to confront the deepest principles of things (176). The suggestion, moreover, is that this is a widely shared propensity: since, Hume informs us, “ ’tis almost impossible for the mind of man to rest, like those of beasts, in that narrow circle of objects, which are the subject of daily conversation and action”—­that is, the “visible world”—­philosophy offers a safer outlet for our extra-­empirical speculations than religion, which has been found to be far more likely to impinge upon actual action, often with unfortunate results. Here, then, we begin to enter upon the territory broached by Ishmael in “The Whiteness of the Whale,” the chapter where he attempts to explain to the reader his own investment in “the fiery hunt.” For no less than Ahab roaring his hope to “strike through the mask” to the “unknown . . . thing” behind events, Ishmael conceives the white whale’s threat in metaphysical terms; its blank surface suggests “the heartless voids and immensities” of the cosmos, posing the inevitable question of whether anything lies beneath or beyond (140, 165). (This literal reading might be yoked to Morrison’s ideas about racial whiteness if we consider it as a way of removing any moralizing overlay from the projects of colonialism and slavery: modern civilization as Big Will proves as nihilistically empty of meaning as the universe as unveiled by modern science.) In this sense, Moby-­Dick expands Ahab’s personal confrontation with contingency into the modern emergence of self-­defining subject and scientific universe at one and the same time—­very much as we saw in chapter 1 of the present book. As Hans Blumenberg narrates this process in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, the “disappearance of order” at a cosmic level generates unease, but at the same time poses a challenge: “The reality that at the end of the Middle Ages comes to be seen as ‘fact’ (factum: something done

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or made, i.e., a contingent state of affairs) provokes the will to oppose it and concentrates the will’s attention on it. . . . There lives, consciously facing an alienated reality, a will to extort from this reality a new ‘humanity’ ” (138–­39). Where in Ahab’s case, however, doing so seems to entail insisting on his irrefutable presence (“In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here”), Ishmael’s most reliable tendency is to vanish. He has, indeed, far more commonly been understood as Ahab’s antithesis—­an understanding having everything to do with his flexibility and wit, which enable him to ceaselessly inhabit multiple points of view in apparently stark contrast to Ahab’s “iron way.” And yet, Donald Pease asks, Is a will capable of moving from one intellectual model to another—­to seize each, to invest each with the subjunctive power of his personality, then, in a display of restlessness no eloquence can attest, to turn away from each model as if it existed only for this ever-­unsatisfied movement of attention—­is such a will any less totalitarian, however indeterminate its local assertions, than a will to convert all the world into a single struggle? (“Cultural” 413)

Here the very multifacetedness of Ishmael’s narrative becomes the sign not of a diffusion of self but of its consolidation; in Winfried Fluck’s words, such a narrator “strengthens [his] authority [in using] a potentially infinite number of objects [to establish] himself as the person who is ‘world-­hungry’ and creative enough to connect them in new and meaningful ways” (“Cultures” 209).31 Ishmael, that is, responds to the “disappearance of order” less with defiance than with his own ordering aims, which in their exuberant excesses cannot help but mirror their creator’s. To borrow Hume’s two notions for philosophy’s Wissenstrieb, we might say that if Ahab embodies willfulness as “ambition,” Ishmael, for the readers above, suggests willfulness as curiosity—­his “world-­hungriness” merely a more ecumenical take on Eagleton’s characterization of the outsized American will, “greedy for the world.” If such accounts can fail to acknowledge criticism’s own participation in the tendencies described here, the more recent “postcritical” ones, in which Ishmael acts simply as a conduit through which we experience the natural world in all its un-­or anti-­Ahabian proliferation, can risk leaving the willful streak powering that exuberance too far behind. We might think of the matter this way: where the options can seem either “Ishmael explores the world in order to master it, to subject it to rational classification” (as in the chapters on cetology) or—­quite conversely—­“Ishmael is not a self at all, but rather dissolves into worldedness,” a third possibility might understand our narrator more as doing what art does. He finds, that is,

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that his genuine delight in the manifoldness of things leads him irresistibly to acts of elaborating—­hence, neither offering a transparent window onto what is encountered nor obliterating it. Like Melville’s, his philosophizing is always also an aesthetic act. Surely, after all, this is what can make page upon page of detailed whale lore enjoyable for the reader; it is always both more than that, and yet never so much so that what Bonnie Honig calls the “fleshiness” of the matter at hand is left behind. Ishmael simply can’t stop diving back in for more pearls—­ but the book is perhaps most interesting in suggesting a connection, rather than only a divergence, between this mode and that which binds Ishmael to Ahab, the mode embodied by the chapter on “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Curiosity as an intensified will to knowledge, after all, could be said able to take on two distinct forms: one that restlessly seeks out more and more new experiences, and another that bears down more deeply than others would into one phenomenon, as we see Ishmael, and indeed the book itself, do into the whale—­as if it were itself infinite, endlessly unfolding new wonders with each new angle of vision. This second mode, however, which can make of a single object of thought a world, edges closer to the state of the monomaniac. It also suggests the Schopenhauerian turn of Melville’s mind, if we consider that philosopher’s advice, that “true wisdom is not to be acquired by measuring the boundless world,” but, rather, “by thoroughly investigating any individual thing . . . to know and understand perfectly its true and peculiar nature” (for, he notes, any one thing, by embodying will, is “the whole world itself,” in “microcosm” [1:129, 162]). Indeed, although Ishmael’s commentary, like Melville’s own reading, ranges freely across the history of philosophy—­ the sperm whale resembling “a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years” (267)—­the broad portrayal of the natural world in Moby-­ Dick seems perhaps closest to Schopenhauer’s, in the sense it gives of a pervasive willfulness animating all things.32 Thus, just as Schopenhauer parallels human striving with “the powerful, irresistible impulse with which masses of water rush downwards, the persistence and determination with which the magnet always turns back to the North Pole . . . the vehemence with which the poles of the electric current strive for reunion, and which, like the vehemence of human desires, is increased by obstacles” (118, emphasis mine), so, as we saw, does Melville yoke Ahab’s monomania to “the unabated Hudson” flowing “narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge” (157). Of course, for Schopenhauer himself, as mentioned, this intensity of willing was inseparable from the fact that it brought only suffering, for the will’s desires were insatiable ones—­able to be quenched, for him, only by a transcendence

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of will that left the world and all its cares behind. We see something akin to this achievement in Moby-­Dick perhaps only in the remarkable character of Pip, whom we will consider in more detail later; transcending his individual selfhood, thanks to a solitary encounter with the open ocean, brings Pip to a state of either nirvana or madness, as he becomes “indifferent as his God” (321). At least at this point in his career, it is important to underscore, this could not be the answer for Melville himself, or for Ishmael, who is defined, narratively and otherwise, by remaining in the human world—­just as his creator, as we saw Robert Milder argue, never quite moves to embrace the third, redemptive stage of Romantic literature. As an alternative to linking Melville to Schopenhauer, Michael Jonik, in his Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, suggests we might derive a different, but equally “nonanthropocentric” Melville from the author’s engagements with Spinoza, whose own conception of will as conatus, or the “striving” of each thing “to persist in its own being,” similarly extends to all of nature (Jonik 13; Spinoza 74–­75). For Jonik, who draws as a number of others have re­ cently on Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, Spinoza offers a means of linking human beings to the rest of nature while retaining each entity’s specificity, producing a “plural ontology of relations” rather than an all-­subsuming Goethean “all,” a notion about which Melville was famously (and humorously) skeptical (15).33 Jonik’s insistence on Melville’s continued attention to a kind of singularity amid plurality is a welcome one. And so is the chance to think Melville in relation to Spinoza, for the meaning of thought for Ishmael, as the ultimate fulfillment of conatus by knowing the world, seems very close to Spinoza’s conceptions. Indeed, where Schopenhauer’s degraded view of will finally leads him to turn away from both will and world to seek truth in their abandonment for a higher plane, Spinoza embraces worldedness for its relation to truth, indeed precisely in the form of the multiplicity Jonik, and like-­minded others, so admire. As I emphasized above, however, this joy in multiplicity is only one way to describe Moby-­Dick’s epistemological project. It is also, in its radical attentiveness to the whale, a monomaniacally focused one—­closer to Schopenhauer’s advice to find the universe within a single thing, a project Spinoza, notably, would seem to join many of Melville’s readers in finding finally pathological. Indeed, precisely to the extent that Spinoza praised multiplicity, he was wary of partiality—­of that which “occup[ies] the mind in the consideration of one object so much that it cannot think of others” (139). For this reason, Spinoza, too, conceived of the state of the enthralled lover or the ambitious or greedy man as a “species of madness,” a kind of monomania (140).

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the emotions and the will More broadly, for Spinoza, the danger of partiality could be understood as the result of our susceptibility to affect, a key concept in his ethical lexicon. For Spinoza, affects can be good—­in his remarkable monistic sense of being both healthy for what he conceives to be the living being’s supreme goal of self-­ preservation and also as tied to the virtue of freedom—­only if they arise from within, and specifically from reason, or from what he calls the mind’s having “adequate ideas.” Most affects, however—­those “by which we are daily torn”—­ are the result of being “affected” by external things and bodies, and these are described as problematic—­due both to being “excessive” by nature and for their tie to partiality, to favoring “one part of the body . . . without regard to the health of the whole” (139). These tendencies again render them problematic both physiologically and also ethically, for, by “draw[ing]” men “in different directions,” they prove corrosive toward harmony among them, as well as to the ability to render an impartial, hence properly just judgment (136, 83). It is striking to note how little such ideas resemble the many invocations of affect within Melville criticism as elsewhere in contemporary literary studies, which tend to see the very porousness that worried Spinoza as an ethical virtue, enhancing our relations with everything and everyone around us. (Indeed, more striking still is that Spinoza often appears as the font of such insights.)34 Jonik acknowledges that Spinoza sees some kinds of affects as troublesome, but, for him, these are only the “sad” ones (95).35 Melville, by contrast, seems more deeply attuned, in his portrayals of Bulkington, Ahab, and Ishmael, to the ways in which positive passions such as avid excitement, as Spinoza in fact recognizes, might be just as problematic. Indeed, it could be argued that they are conceived as yet more problematic still, since, contra Spinoza, but like the psychologists writing on monomania, Melville seems interested in the way not only wild transports of joy but even more negative instances like rage and fear could be potentially energizing, not simply debilitating—­means of access to a “being more intense,” as Milder (citing Byron 112) would have it, and thereby harder rationally to let go of than Spinoza asserts. We can see this not only in “The Whiteness of the Whale”: as Milder puts it, the chapter implies that any of us might have been “one of that crew” were we, like Ishmael, to “cease to regard the naturalistic universe intellectually and begin to register it on our pulses,” that is, emotionally (81). More broadly, powerful feeling, which is most often thought to be what Ahab lacks and “Squeeze of the Hand” gives back to us, turns out, throughout Melville’s book, to be ranged, rather, on the side of Ahab. Despite the critical tendency to align the captain with “inhuman will” as opposed to “human emotion” (Friedman

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209), Ahab characterizes himself as one who “never thinks” but “only feels, feels, feels,” for thinking is “a coolness and a calmness” inaccessible to a throbbing heart (419). Further, when he muses on the need to attend to his crew’s “common, daily appetites,” Ahab notes that such “base considerations” are flung by the wayside only at moments of “strong emotion”: that is, when the men, as he himself always does, have “their one final and romantic object” in view (178).36 We see here, then, in capsule form, the true complexity of the portrayal of feeling in Moby-­Dick. How has emotion, rather than reason or a self-­mastering will like Starbuck’s, become the means of holding at bay one’s “common, daily appetites”—­which is to say, one’s embodied needs? Our difficulty addressing such a question surely has much to do with the older moral framework wherein mind and will are seen as, ideally, subduing body (a category including feelings). Yet I would argue it is hampered just as much by the assumptions of contemporary affect theory, which keep these categories intact while reversing their valences. Indeed, the very distinction often promulgated, as in Brian Massumi’s work, between “affect” and “emotion” turns on the former’s construal as a pure, often valorized bodily effusion, while the latter represents affect’s “capture and closure” by the temporally later, “limitative” effects of “will and consciousness” (Massumi 90). Such a characterization directly conflicts, however, with that offered by historians of emotion as a concept, who make clear that the concept of “emotion” in fact emerges (in the Scottish thought discussed in the previous chapter) as itself a physicalist alternative to the older discourse of passions. The turn from passion to emotion, that is, is what produces the modern sense of feeling as “passive, non-­cognitive and ‘altogether unmodified by the will,’ ” as well as, crucially, less narrative in form (Dixon 131). Might a reappreciation of passion, then, enable a way into Melville’s conception of feeling as what can lift us beyond our “common, daily appetites,” rather than—­either laudably or problematically—­returning us thereto? In his book The Vehement Passions, Philip Fisher suggests as much, offering up the Greek partitioning of the soul as exemplary in this regard. Where eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century psychologies would typically divide the human being into body, mind, and will, the Greek conception substitutes for “will” its notion of spirit, or thymos. As Fisher notes, thymos is then linked not to the body’s desires or appetites; it is a category that thus combines features of the later conception of will (particularly the will in itself, divorced from reason) with intensities of feeling, and, above all, the passion of rage at a perceived sense of injustice. For these reasons, Albrecht Dihle goes so far as to suggest that the concept of will, which the ancients famously did not possess, could potentially have emerged out of Aristotle’s theorization of anger as an outbreak of spirit,

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given that this seems to occur independently of reason or desire (indeed, often surprising its possessor as much as anyone, 57). Fisher, too, characterizes Aristotelian thymos as a way to talk about “the autonomy of the will” prior to its modern conception as a mere tool of reason (170). In anger, one might say, the ordinary individual, like Hegel’s Fichtean monomaniac, momentarily behaves as if a king or a god, incensed that his or her will has been denied. For Aristotle, however, while one could scarcely possess too much reason, and while enslavement to other feelings, as to appetites, is shameful, thymos occupies a sui generis place, in that it has a tendency toward excess we can understand, because it results from an overvaluation of honor or natural pride. The examples given, notably, include Niobe quarreling with the gods, or the son with his father; if the first suggests an Ahab-­like (and thus perhaps futile) rebellion against necessity, the second may itself be assimilated to the necessitated emergence of the new generation. Unable to be assimilated to reason or to embodied desire, thymos thus stands outside both the re-­physiologizing aims of affect theory and the claims of reason these are intended to deny. For this very reason, Fisher argues—­as has Peter Sloterdijk in a book on the same subject—­this dimension of human affective experience, in its crucial tie to the Romantic will, has by the nineteenth century, with the shift to the materialist discourse of emotion, become a subject only for literature. (Paul Ricoeur makes a similar point in his trilogy on the will.)37 From the perspective of bourgeois modernity, Fisher writes, a state such as Ahab’s can appear only as madness, as possession by a fixed idea: the “all-­absorbing, monarchical object” that is one’s passion itself (73). A novel like Melville’s, both diagnosing Ahab’s monomania and granting him a tragic hero’s stature, thus demonstrates its equivocal relation to this shift. And yet in fact, even the era’s burgeoning materialist psychology often reached a kind of aporia around the question of how to judge the attachment to a single passion or idée fixe. Alexander Bain’s The Emotions and the Will (1859) is typical of the period in the balancing act it attempts between a more moralizing perspective and a physicalist, proto-­Darwinian one. Hence, for Bain, while will is defined in baldly material and utilitarian terms as “the operation of pleasures and pains for stimulating activity for ends” (2:313), he remains enough of a Victorian to conceive of the mature will as operating in the mode of self-­restraint; the body, he suggests, has simply learned that self-­ control (including of one’s emotions) will lead to greater pleasure in the end. The question, then, is how to think about those cases in which “the attention [is] fixed exclusively upon one thing.” Is the thing in control (by generating a pleasurable response), or the attention? The problem is that such attention characterizes both great “men of mind”—­inventors, for example—­whose

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capacity for focus on the task at hand is said to constitute “volition pure, perennial, and unmodified”; but then a similarly intense bearing down on one subject seems to render others the helpless pawns of “fixed ideas.” The real problem, it finally turns out, is that fixed ideas upset Bain’s utilitarian calculus; they belong to a class of states “wherein we cannot discover any connexion between pleasure enjoyed, or pain averted, and the energy manifested in pursuit.” As Poe would before him, and William James after him, Bain offers as a signal instance of this something rather akin to the pursuit of Moby-­Dick, or the willful gaze into the void: “the temptation that seizes many people, when on the brink of a precipice, to throw themselves down.” These are, Bain informs us, cases where an object—­or, we might add, a project—­has, “by some means or other, gained possession of us . . . quite apart from [the action of] the will.” Now, this is in many ways very similar to how Ahab describes the white whale’s pull on his thoughts: “What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet!” (340). One could similarly categorize the effect Ishmael describes in “Whiteness of the Whale,” in which a thought that “appalls” is at the same time “overpower[ing]” in its “intensity,” driving away all others (159). Ahab and Ishmael are important here, moreover, because Bain goes on to note that, in fact, two very ordinary emotions present a similar problem to fixed ideas, in that they, too, disable the pleasure-­ pain calculus and, thereby, in his view, the will: the emotions of anger and fear. In these cases, too, he writes, we find people dwelling with a sentiment despite the fact that it causes as much pain as enjoyment. (One might add that other states of affective “partiality,” such as unrequited love or envy, could easily fit into such a characterization as well.) For Bain, then, this has to mean that the object of the feeling, rather than the will, is in control here. Melville, however, tells this story a bit differently. Like Hans Blumenberg, Melville depicts anger and fear as two understandable responses to modernity’s inhuman cosmos. In his depiction, they represent the human will meeting its limit—­of understanding, of agency—­and responding, as in Fichte or the accounts of the monomaniac, not with mere paralysis or submission but with a heightened intensity. This may be easier to see in the case of Ahab’s rage (Bain himself admits that anger can ramp up one’s “energies” and even capacities) but, in fact, we should remember that Ishmael, too, describes those who insist on staring at the void as doing so “willfully,” refusing the rose-­colored glasses that most prefer. Essentially, what seems to occur here is that the most primitive of instinctual, “self-­conserving” responses—­anger and fear as motivators to fight or flight—­are strangely hyperbolized to the point that they become, perversely, ends in themselves. In

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the modern context, then, this notion of affects as ends in themselves can be more powerfully addressed in relation to the specificity of the aesthetic.

an aesthetic of intensity The intense Pequod sailed on. m o b y -­d i c k (403)

As Charles Altieri suggests, we might understand the very engagement with works of art through the notion of affective states that are sought and enjoyed for their own sake, rather than to further any instrumental aim. Moreover, he singles out one such state of particular relevance for our discussion of Moby-­Dick: “intensity.” Whereas Massumi’s affect theory renders the concept of intensity synonymous with affect as such—­drawing on the discussion of intension in Henri Bergson—­for Altieri it represents a very specific affective state, to be contrasted with another, “involvedness.” The latter is described as having its “genesis in just the opposite mode . . . from the one fostering intensity”—­that is, instead of our sense of the “triumphs and limitations of the individual will,” it derives from “our connections with other people and the natural world” (Rapture 186). Thus, we return once more to our Romantic divide, to Ahab’s Fichteanism versus the feelingful connectedness of “Squeeze of the Hand.” And yet we also recognize how inappropriate “intensity” would be as a modifier for the latter, which if anything suggests a nearly opposed term: diffusion. In contrast to this diffusiveness, we would probably most often understand intensity as a heightening, a maximization. As Altieri, drawing on Adorno, helps us to remember, however, it is also at once a localization, in which tremendous force is achieved through a kind of zeroing in on a single point. In Altieri’s words, “The greater the pressure of the whole on the particular, the richer the intensity” (187). Intensity here is thus literally the opposite of diffuseness in the sense of being about a laser-­like focus or concentration (in both senses of the word). Hence, it must be thought in relation to at­tention, and the root is in fact the same—­intensity, attention, and indeed intent all sharing an origin in a fundamental tension. As Jonathan Arac has noted, Melville has Ishmael adopt Coleridge’s coinage “intensifying” to describe the effect of whiteness in “The Whiteness of the Whale.” (Ahab’s illness also “intensifie[s]” his “vital strength,” and the Pequod itself is described as “intense” in its [or the book’s] relentless course [157, 403].) Coleridge had been specifically attempting to delineate the work of the will, in his argument against Hartley’s mechanistic account of consciousness, thus:

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“the will . . . by confining and intensifying the attention, may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to any object” (Biographia 129). This construal of intensification as a kind of self-­confinement, and specifically a narrowing that generates depth, is in fact present in Bergson’s account of intension also—­and, we might add, in Melville’s account of Ahab’s monomania, which gathers in strength the more that it “deepeningly contracted.”38 Art, by submitting life’s breadth to the constraints of form, therefore achieves precisely this liberating intensity: “the dream of an intenser experience,” as Henry James described romance; “a being more intense. . . . The life we imag[ine],” as did Byron (as so beautifully discussed in Robert Milder’s unparalleled work on Melville’s novel) (James, Art 280; Milder 112). The question finally presents itself, then: need a focus on this narrowing dimension in fact necessitate leaving the engagement with a broader worldedness behind? Just as Schopenhauer did not appear to think so, nor does Melville. Indeed, it is striking to note, in this context, that one of the most inspired recent attempts to reorient Melville’s oeuvre around the natural world so vibrantly present in Moby-­Dick does so not by denying the “egotism” and defiance of death we see both in Ahab and in Melville’s “intensely exclamatory” artistic style, but by generalizing these—­in a way we will shortly see can help us understand the crew’s participation in Ahab’s quest as well (Sanborn 13, 18). Focusing, refreshingly, on Melville’s overlooked comic tale “Cock-­a-­ Doodle-­Doo!” (1853), Geoffrey Sanborn places the lustily crowing rooster at its core on a continuum with not only the story’s human narrator but with particular trees in Melville’s writings embodying “an inspiringly majestic unyieldingness” (18). All, Sanborn writes—­drawing, tellingly, on Elizabeth Grosz’s work on Nietzsche—­represent “exceptional cases” in which a life form, whether human or nonhuman, aims at “a maximization of its being,” seeking “to expand and intensify itself ” beyond the bounds dictated by sensible self-­preservation (19). In the rooster’s case, in particular, this, again, takes the form of a song. Sanborn’s focus on the nonhuman powerfully allows Moby-­Dick himself to come forward as a figure every inch as illustrious as Ahab; indeed, from the whale’s first mention it is evident he is thought of as a “great individual celebrity”: a being both “willful” and intelligent (qualities linked in him no less than in Ahab to a capacity for vengefulness and rage, 171, 175). He is never more Ahab-­like than in his embodiment of precisely the qualities of self-­expansion that Sanborn describes, which in the whale’s case takes the form of “boom[ing] his entire bulk into the pure element of air,” an “act of defiance,” of “immeasurable bravadoes,” by which “the White Whale tossed himself salmon-­like to Heaven” (415). Addressing himself directly to God no

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less than Ahab does, Moby-­Dick takes on similarly divine attributes, being thought by some well-­nigh “ubiquitous,” even “immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time)” (154–­55). As Sanborn helps us to see, Melville clearly enjoyed feeling a kinship with such solitary souls and singers, in all their living forms. And yet as we have seen in this section, that kinship, a kinship of intensity, by definition differs from that derived from Hume’s everyday companionship. Tellingly, Sanborn shies away from this fact, moving at the end of his argument to attempt to collapse Ahab’s mode with that of Stubb. He cites lines marked in Melville’s copy of As You Like It that advise the avoidance of disputation and boasting, in favor of “giv[ing] heaven thanks,” and the shunning of “ambition,” in favor of simply “liv[ing] i’ th’ sun” and enjoying one’s repasts (19). These modest aims are then linked to, just as in Hume, giving up on the quest for speculative “meaning” and, rather, seeking the humbler pleasures of “company” (20). And yet can Melville, or even the assembled creatures Sanborn describes, really be described as opposed to ambition, boasting, and disputation; why have we once again arrived at the implausible notion of a Melville turning his back on metaphysical speculation? Sanborn’s ending unwittingly exposes the instability of the balancing act he aims to produce—­one in which to be like the crowing cock is to be “simultaneously individuating oneself,” and in the Romantic mode of self-­“expan[sion] and intensi[fication],” yet—­and, by so doing, “slipping into a vast stream of [other] individuations,” into a generalized Life (17). By the end, these aims have split again, and to join with others once more appears to require, as for the more usual boosters for “Squeeze of the Hand,” that one turn one’s back on forms of self-­magnification (not to mention ignore the persistently solitary state of the narrator of the story in question).39 Altieri, writing on intensity, suggests quite differently that the idea of art as a site in which affects become ends in themselves, “conative” “satisfactions” that may not mesh with “beliefs,” comports only uneasily with the moral and political aims of much contemporary criticism (5). An account like Sanborn’s of the various Nietzschean creatures in Melville avoids this problem by, in a distinctly non-­Nietzschean fashion, severing their “libidinal energy” from any potential violence such that it can become, improbably, simply the purely affirmable grounds of fellow feeling (17). Thus is it happily possible to be Ahab and Stubb at once, without any of the conflicts we see Ishmael experience in his novel-­defining oscillations between the two.40 As Northrop Frye writes in his Anatomy of Criticism, one of the hallmarks of romance lies in its “idealiz[ation]” of “libido.” It is in this sense that Melville’s critics remain more familiarly romantic than Moby-­Dick itself, which never ceases to anatomize such propensities so as to put forward its own view

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of romance, in which the darkness and celebratoriness need always to be thought as one. It is here, then, that we can arrive finally at the crew’s interests in hunting the white whale.

The General Will (Rousseau, Arendt) To give political power a popular basis may not necessarily make it less spirited. z u c k e r t , Understanding the Political Spirit (15) I do not order ye; ye will it. c a p t a i n a h a b i n m o b y -­d i c k (142)

Written while awaiting deportation from the US in 1953, the Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, republished in 2001 by Donald Pease, remains a landmark in Moby-­Dick criticism, thanks to a remarkable proposition that would later underwrite many treatments of Melville’s text as a paean to democracy. Melville, argues James, intended the crew—­the largely “anonymous” common sailors and harpooneers—­to be the “real heroes” of the book (29, 18). What distinguishes them is precisely that they are “ordinary people” who accomplish astonishing things, such as butchering a Leviathan, simply by virtue of their ability to act in concert (19). For this reason, James salutes as “the noblest piece of writing” in Melville’s book the moment when, “all personal individuality freely subordinated to the excitement of achieving a common goal,” the combined Pequod makes its second assault upon the white whale (65): They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of contrasting things—­oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—­yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltlessness, all varieties were welded into oneness. (415)

The stirring sentence then concludes: “all were directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to” (64). For James, however, that the goal derives from Ahab’s mad vendetta is of secondary concern. What matters is the crew’s own admirable “determination” to achieve it, and their recognition of the collective, always concretely rooted action this requires, which should be seen as the opposite of Ahab’s—­and indeed, for James, Ishmael’s—­“isolation” and enslavement to philosophical “abstractions” (64, 62). The notion that the will’s dilemmas, its excesses and insufficiencies, might be solved by rendering that will collective stands as a powerful modern idea.

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We can arguably see it at work even in individualist theories of free will such as Kant’s, in which true reason entails acting in a way one could generalize as appropriate to everyone. It is with Rousseau’s The Social Contract, however, that this notion of thinking from the perspective of what he famously called the “general will” appears as not only an individual achievement but a collective one, and one that could play an active role in establishing the basis of political freedom. Such an idea has thus appeared to some a revolutionary one—­as it did to the French insurgents directly inspired by Rousseau’s ideas—­ and to others, a recipe for the “totalitarian democracy” of fascism: “the mystic identification of a leader with his people, which has no need of confirmation by so mundane an apparatus as the ballot box,” in Bertrand Russell’s words.41 In essays like William E. Cain’s pointedly titled “The Triumph of the Will,” then, the latter kinds of ideas were applied to Moby-­Dick, and, in Cain’s case, directly against James’s more “optimistic” analysis (260). For Cain, James failed to reckon with the book’s exposure of “the pleasure and brutally clear self-­ definition that comes from consent and fidelity to mad authority,” an interest of a piece, for him, with Melville’s generally “pessimis[tic],” “conservati[ve]” sense of “human nature” (265, 267). For such an argument, far from standing as a form of realization of their noblest natures, the crew’s participation in Ahab’s hunt constitutes a form of “suicidal self-­abandonment,” a hollowing out of their humanity from within (267). If for James, then, the crew’s collectivized will made clear their difference from Ahab—­a difference he posited as that between madness and sanity (25, 48)—­for Cain, from a more liberal perspective, that very “oneness” bespoke the replacement of individual minds and selves by a single charismatic dictator’s intentions. The very same passages in Melville’s book could inspire either faith in the common man or just the opposite. Yet might it be possible for both of these perspectives in some sense to be right? Might the expansion of Ahab’s personal animus into a quest powerfully shared by the entire Pequod (save, very differently, for the liberal Starbuck and for Pip, to whom we will return) be understood as producing a story of both greater heroism and greater tragedy? We must take this possibility seriously, but to do so means to take seriously a collective version of neither rational self-­determination nor its mere evacuation, but, rather, of precisely the Romantic willfulness this chapter has thus far been tracing. Put otherwise, the Pequod collectively grasps for something both heroic and, as such, without a place in modernity, even as a version of it undergirds modern aspirations toward a freedom without limits known in advance. In fact, as I will demonstrate, something of just this sort typically emerges out of many discussions of Rousseau’s idea of a politically generalized will.

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To understand these possibilities, we must acknowledge the curious way Melville’s text does not simply oppose democracy and royalty, but, at key moments, conflates them. This is, of course, not always the case, though even these terms’ opposition often proves more complex. When first introducing the mates, for example—­to move later to the harpooneers—­our narrator breaks off to declare that this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes. . . . Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality! (103)

One of the many remarkable features of this invocation lies in the compact equivalence with which it concludes, in which God’s omnipotent will does not supersede but, rather, models the “will of the people” in a democratic nation. Historically speaking, this striking parallelism is accurate; as Patrick Riley has documented, the phrase “general will,” which is usually associated with Rousseau’s theorization of popular sovereignty, originated in neo-­Augustinian discussions among the French Jansenists of the unopposable will of God. As we will presently see, an acknowledgment of this history can enable a window onto complexities in the treatment of this issue by Melville and Rousseau alike. And yet, arguably, these are already present in what follows—­the passage from which C. L. R. James’s book takes its stirring title: If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who did not refuse to the swart convict Bunyan, the pale poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-­ horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! (103–­4, emphasis mine)

Thus does the populist political victory of Jackson rub elbows with a democratic triumph closer to Melville’s heart: the birth of the novel at the hands of lowly Bunyan and Cervantes. Yet what goes too often overlooked here is the way that, just as with Ahab, the portrait painted conceives “high qualities” that are inseparable from “dark” ones, “exalted” ascendancies that cannot

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be thought absent “tragic graces.” Far from distinguishing them from Ahab, then, such passages encourage us to consider the crew’s “general will” along precisely the lines of the complexly Romantic will we have thus far been unfolding. In fact, we might argue, the encrustation of the impoverished protonovelist with gold and gems has a similar effect: what happens when democratic modernity, which is usually thought opposed to the aristocratic discourse of romance, is itself granted kingly attributes? Even in James’s account, we might note, the three harpooneers, the Pacific Islander Queequeg, the Gay-­Head Indian Tashtego, and the African Daggoo, are described at different moments as either merely part of the “anonymous crew” or as remarkable individuals, “men of magnificent physique, dazzling skill and striking personality” (33, 18). They are, in fact, clearly possessed of thymos, or spiritedness, as the Greeks described it, no less than is Ahab himself. And in the complex understanding of thymos as standing at the core of the political itself lie all the issues that arise with respect to whether Ahab merely dominates his men or, rather, encourages them to assert themselves to an unheard-­of degree. As evident in the crew and Ahab alike defying Starbuck, thymos disregards prudent interest to make a powerful demand for a higher value. The difficulty, with respect to modern sensibilities, is that that value may be understood as simple justice for, or acknowledgment of, oneself and one’s own, or it may appear as a desire to be recognized as superior, a quest for glory, as it were, which is thus never far from appearing as a mere aim at domination for its own sake. What can make these hard to disentangle is precisely the affective excess attached to thymos that we saw in the previous section—­its typical association with “in-­dignation,” or rage on behalf of one’s own wounded dignity. What is notable about Ahab, as we will see, is his ability to encourage others to feel his indignation, his wound, as their own. And as Susan Purviance then puts it, while “by invigorating citizens, thumos bolsters civil life,” by “detonating or igniting passions for self-­respect and good reputation, thumos can lead to actions that destroy” it (4). Melville himself allegorizes this issue in one of the book’s most memorably strange passages—­a paragraph that begins claiming to plumb Ahab’s depths and ends by asserting that what it has described is, in fact, no less than what lies buried within the heart of all of his book’s readers, who are addressed in the second person. More than any other moment in the text, then, the book here suggests a way in which, often without realizing it, we are all, in some way, Ahabs. In literal terms, it describes the Hotel de Cluny, a medieval building in Paris whose fascination lies in its construction atop two-­thousand-­ year-­old Roman ruins. Therein, Melville conjures, “far beneath the fantastic

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towers of man’s upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state. . . . Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old State-­secret come” (157). Thus are we antimonarchical moderns enjoined to acknowledge our tie to the absolutist license we disavow.42 As in the well-­known account in Hegel’s Aesthetics, the romantic hero—­whether ancient Greek battler of monsters and men alike or his later counterpart, the medieval knight—­acts purely according to “the individuality of inclination, impulses, and will,” which forms “a law [unto] itself,” one lying outside morality, society, and institutional structure. The classic example given, of clear relevance to Moby-­Dick, is the difference between revenge, which rests solely on “the subjectivity of those who take charge of the affair,” and the elaborately differentiated, impersonal procedures of modern justice (185, 184). Romanticism, Hegel explains, thus exemplifies modernity’s understandable ambivalence with respect to these developments, just as does Melville’s interest in situating his tales within the stateless space of the sea. As others have noted, such a setting cannot but raise questions of authority’s grounding. Here, again, Rousseau’s general will concept is of particular interest; for although Rousseau, like Locke, wrote against Hobbes’s defense of monarchical authority, he did so less by weakening the concept of sovereignty, as the American founders did, than by relocating it in the will of the people as “collective being” (57). By thus legitimating sovereign power, he could arguably be said to have strengthened it. Thus, it was possible for Rousseau to insist, in his most controversial formulations, that the general will was itself always right, even if those making it up were able to be misled, and that “whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the entire body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free” (59, 53). Critics of Rousseau have typically seized upon such formulations. For Isaiah Berlin, Rousseau erred the moment he stepped away from “the harmless notion of a [social] contract . . . voluntarily entered into” and toward “the notion of the general will as almost the personified willing of a large superpersonal entity,” which as a totality knows my wants better than I do myself (47–­50). Specifically, Rousseau’s critics have often focused on the way the general will, once elevated to collective attribute, risks magnifying dangers seen as always inherent in the notion of will. What they fear, in essence, is a general willfulness. As a result, their critiques can strikingly resemble Hegel’s of the Fichtean Romantic will. (As Berlin notes, Heine imagined a German counterpart to the French Revolution in the following terms: “Armed Fichteans will come, whose fanatical wills neither fear nor self-­interest can touch” [77].)

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Benjamin Constant, one of the earliest to argue against Rousseau in his Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments, thus fears what he terms the “despotism of the general will . . . this popular power without limits” (Farr and Williams xvi). In Constant, the concern was simply that the general will would become a blind for particularly ruthless assertions of individual power, by agents whose authority would be shored up as never before since “they could claim to rule not in their own name but in the name of the general will” (Garsten 387). As he put it, When no limit to political authority is acknowledged, the people’s leaders, in a popular government, are not defenders of freedom, but aspiring tyrants, aiming not to break, but rather to assume the boundless power which presses on the citizens. . . . It would be easy to show . . . that the grossest sophisms of the most ardent apostles of the Terror, in the most revolting circumstances, were only perfectly consistent consequences of Rousseau’s principles. (Quoted in Garsten 387)

For many such critiques, the key was to recognize that the “general will” was, essentially, as Patrick Riley’s work demonstrates, a religious concept grafted onto the scaffolding of a modern political entity.43 Hannah Arendt, however, alone among the general will’s critics actually casts doubt upon the political desirability of Rousseau’s idea by turning to the work of Herman Melville—­specifically, to his last, only posthumously published work of fiction, Billy Budd. In a number of respects, Arendt’s concerns echo those of Rousseau’s other liberal critics: “Politically speaking,” she writes, the danger here lies in the absence of “limitations,” the dismissal of “the drawn-­ out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise, which are the processes of law and politics” (On Revolution 80, 77). More than the others, however, Arendt links these propensities directly to the use of the notion of “will” to identify what binds the citizenry, as opposed to “consent,” which suggests “deliberate choice and considered opinion.” Will suggests, in her view, unanimity—­at a collective level, “a divided will would be inconceivable”—­and, for Arendt, crucially, this is because it is predicated on feeling (66). Feeling works to generate a unified will here, in two senses: “the people” (as opposed to the citizenry) are understood as a sentimental category, a repository of suffering (“le peuple toujours malheureux”), and “a general human solidarization” can be effected by the recognition of this pain: “selflessness” as “the capacity to lose oneself in the sufferings of others” (66–­67, 71). Rather than conceiving that reason is what will lead one to a more universal view, that is, reason is here rejected, Arendt argues, in favor of “the boundlessness of sheer emotion” that, for Robespierre, makes the nation akin to a mighty ocean (70, 85).

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Broadly speaking, Arendt’s and others’ concerns here have been met by two opposed lines of argument in defense of the general will idea. The first of these re-­assimilates will to reason, as Peter Hallward does by invoking Rousseau, Fichte, Kant, and Hegel together as foundational thinkers of a notion of general willing as a “deliberate and inclusive process of self-­determination” (90, 92). Similarly, Andreas Kalyvas, invoking Arendt directly, protests that hers is typical of critiques of the idea of sovereignty that presume only its originary meaning as “supreme command.” In fact, he writes, most modern theorists of sovereignty, including the architects of the French and American revolutions alike, understood the term to mean a “constituting power,” a notion to which the older concept’s associated willful connotations—­of the “voluntaristic,” “normless,” and “limitless,” of “violence, arbitrariness, and raw facticity”—­are, he argues, inappropriately exported (225). Unlike the pure, unopposable decision of the sovereign, he writes, constituent power always by definition aims toward the creation of a legal framework or, literally, Constitution; it is thus mistaken to conceive it, as Arendt does, as the opposite of “the processes of law and politics” rather than their necessary precursor. Kalyvas, indeed, goes further, arguing that even the initial moment of constituting, to the extent it involves people acting together to arrive at a common goal, must already entail the internalization of a “process” built on “symmetry, autonomy, equality, mutuality, disagreement, discussion, and inclusiveness,” one that the Constitution will then enshrine (236). These accounts thus deny Arendt’s worries concerning a will divorced from reason and tied, instead, to a universalized affect. From an opposing vantage, then, political-­theoretical readings of Moby-­Dick that posit “A Squeeze of the Hand” as an emblematic image of democracy affirm the affective fusion Arendt found problematic, but only, arguably, by severing it from will and sovereignty altogether.44 In either case, then, sovereignty conceived as willfulness remains the problem to be avoided, or elided. This is hardly surprising, if one recognizes its association within political theory with the writings of Carl Schmitt. Bill Scheuerman in fact suggests that Arendt’s entire argument about the French Revolution was intended as a counter to Schmitt’s. Schmitt is, of course, best known for his “decisionist” conception of sovereignty as willfulness—­as pure ungrounded action—­and for his organization of the political through the “friend/enemy” distinction, as well as, not at all incidentally, for his ties to the Nazi regime. Despite Schmitt’s disturbing allegiances, however, his ideas reemerged in the 2000s to inflect the work of contemporary left political theory. Perhaps most emphasized among these discussions, as by Chantal Mouffe, is his insistence on the ineluctable role of conflict in the political realm, a point to

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which we will return. A less direct point of contact, however, may be made by recognizing Schmitt’s interest not only in will rather than reason as the foundation of sovereign action, but in the not simply rational form taken by the people’s civic identification. Instead, as Jan-­Werner Müller has written, Schmitt understood such identification as mediated through affective and even aesthetic forms. Hence, he admired Michael Oakeshott’s distinctive take on Hobbes’s Leviathan as a properly “myth[ic]” account of the state as a kind of “collective dream”; for Schmitt, too, the identification of citizenry with state required some sort of “social imagineering” that might well take the form of a powerful “myth or symbol” (Müller 330, 334, 321). Similarly, a strand in contemporary democratic theory suspicious of the rational ideals of purely deliberative democracy has argued for the role of “forms and markers of collective identity” (such as “stories”) that solicit “attachment” to the body politic (Keenan 10).45 While such arguments do not necessarily invoke Schmitt, they do move in his direction by finding fault with Arendt, albeit less her characterization of the French Revolution than her affirming depiction of its American counterpart as evading the affective excesses of the former through a hard-­nosed pragmatism.46 As Bonnie Honig and others argue, Arendt in this sense denies the paradox Rousseau is in fact credited with having been the first to recognize: that “the People” do not exist self-­evidently but must in some way constitute themselves as “the People” in order to will as such.47 Indeed, in Rousseau’s work, too, “visceral, emotional” appeals had their place in producing this sense of civic solidarity; these could take the form of public festivals and rituals, or even, in The Social Contract, of a kind of “civil religion,” based on “sentiments of sociability,” that might wean citizens away from the more destabilizing theological sort (150).48 With respect to the general will as constituting power, the larger paradox here has been influentially formulated by Jacques Derrida via the Declaration of Independence. That is, by saying “We the people,” the people self-­ constitute as the people able to utter such a phrase; as Alan Keenan puts it, “the effect [has to] become the cause” (11). It is, indeed, arguably in this sense that the people as general will most resemble the similarly self-­positing individual will of Fichte, which also seems to bring itself into being ex nihilo and has been critiqued as an impossibility as a result. Just as in Fichte’s philosophy of subjectivity, then, the invocations of rituals of affective or aesthetically inspired civic bonding suggest the need for some kind of supplement—­an idea most directly realized in The Social Contract by the reference to an originary, superhuman lawgiver who ensures the rectitude of the general will.49 As Schmitt thus notes with some glee, the theological reemerges here in

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secularized form: “the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver” (Political Theology 36). And, indeed, given that the lawgiver by definition precedes, exists beyond the law as such, with its invocation reemerge Schmittian notions of a sovereign will unbeholden to law, and here in the form of constituting power—­in effect, we are made aware of the mysterious workings of Melville’s captive king. Most disturbingly, one might finally conceive of the supplement in question more along the lines of Fichte’s Anstoß, the “not-­us” that clarifies who “we” are; thus, Rousseau’s explicitly nationalistic formulations of the general will turn, as both Arendt and Steven Johnston note, on an “articulation of enmity” (Johnston 17). Johnston’s overall project entails emphasizing an undertow of “tragedy” beneath Rousseau’s Enlightenment formulations, and spe­ cifically the way in which his conception of the political seems to depend, as he himself at times acknowledges, on qualities that may “exceed human capacity” (11). Here, however, we begin to move back toward Moby-­Dick, which Robert Milder suggests might be read as a “democratic tragedy.” What could this phrase mean? In the readings with which we began, the tragedy seemed to lie in the way democracy’s populist promise might license a charismatic leader’s willfulness, as in the many liberal critiques of Rousseau. The problem with such readings, however, and perhaps one reason we see pushback against them by C. L. R. James and others, lies in the short shrift they give to the crew’s own will—­and, indeed, I would argue against James’s account, to the particular power, which extends beyond tyranny, that Melville invests in Ahab.50 Put otherwise, we might say, the tragedy here lies not in the crew’s submission or in what they fail to recognize about their situation but, just as with Ahab himself, in the losses entailed by what they legitimately choose.51 While in James’s account (and, more recently, that of the political theorist Jason Frank), the crew are to be understood simply as working men going about their task, such an account cannot get at their own participation in the state of intensity we saw in the previous section. We see that state begin to unfold in the “Quarter-­Deck” chapter, in which the hunt for Moby-­Dick is first presented to the men. The chapter presents an extraordinary condensation of the issues at hand here, as Captain Ahab first reveals his instinct for aestheticized, affectively charged ritual as a means of awakening the men to his purpose. The Ecuadorean doubloon is nailed on high, a prize for whoever raises the white whale; lances are crossed and an oath sworn; all drink—­from their harpoons, yet—­to the death of Moby-­Dick. Such elaborate displays have often been read as means of self-­glorification on Ahab’s part to command obeisance (and, arguably, this is the prime effect they have on the mates,

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particularly Starbuck, functioning chiefly to intimidate). If we follow the theorists above, however, we can read them as modes of aesthetically bodying forth the “state” as such: the people themselves as sovereign—­as when, tellingly, Ahab demands the mates serve their subordinates, the harpooneers. Indeed, given what Melville stresses in Benito Cereno, that in a ship’s captain dwells “a dictatorship beyond which, while at sea, there was no earthly appeal” (44), it seems wrongheaded to suggest that Ahab in this scene takes absolute control; as captain, he already possessed such power, and, hence, what he really does is disseminate it. The language used throughout is of electricity; as Ahab himself is by the lightning storm in “The Candles,” the crew are literally galvanized, “em-­powered” by their captain’s entreaties. More strongly still, they are “animated,” brought to a new life, as a collective that can speak as one: “What do ye do when you see a whale, men?” “Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices. “Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them. . . . “And what tune is it ye pull to, men?” “A dead whale or a stove boat!” (137)

The merger of the men into a new unison, however, is completed only by the mention of the enemy: Moby-­Dick. This brings in the harpooneers, who now begin to attend with “even more intense interest” than the others, as each is struck by a recollection of the white whale in his specificity—­recollections that build in affective force from Tashtego’s initially cool, “deliberat[e]” query—­“Does he fan-­tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?”—­to Quee­ queg’s near-­frenzied, “disjointe[d]” contribution a few moments later (138). By the end of the scene, the crew as a body are fully “frantic”—­a term now more suggestive of fear, but possessing a longer history of suggesting a generalized excitement, wildness, or rage akin to that of insanity (142). Notably, Melville uses this same word two chapters earlier to describe the harpooneers’ comportment at table as an “almost frantic democracy,” marked by absolute “license”; prodigious, indeed royal appetites (“They dined like lords”); and unrepressed avidity (130). Thus are the Pequod’s denizens welded into oneness through the same qualities of the will when both opposed and, as such, unleashed—­avidity and intensity—­that we saw in the previous section. Starbuck’s plea that they remember the “Nantucket market,” indeed, might be taken as one to recall both

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the everyday and the necessarily diffused focus upon which it depends: put simply, a whale boat should not waste its time chasing down, in all the vast oceans of the world, a single whale. To sign on to that task, however, is to leave the realm of modern calculation behind and enter a more archaic, warrior-­like existence charged by Ahab’s exhortation: “What say ye, men . . . I think ye do look brave” (139). Here, we might say, the harpooneers come into their own, for each might be said to represent a kind of heroic idealization of the elements of bravery characteristic of the mate with whom he is matched: moral heroism, in Quee­ queg’s case; carelessness, in Tashtego’s; or pugnacity, in Daggoo’s. In the case of Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, these virtues are present but subject to vacillation or insufficiency. The harpooneers escape these dilemmas, it would seem, thanks to their relative absence of interiority, “the mystery that makes human beings unpredictable,” in Christopher Freeburg’s words (Interior 123)—­a feature James finds laudable, others might see as racially patronizing, but which unquestionably contributes to their status as romantic characters in a more premodern than Byronic sense. (It also distinguishes them significantly from Pip, the only crew member, and the only nonwhite character, to offer up his own soliloquy, as we shall soon see.)52 The intensities we see in this scene, then, reappear at the moment James calls the book’s noblest; what fuses the crew into “one man, not thirty” are, make no mistake, the “frenzies of the chase.” By the “suspense,” the “stirring perils,” and “the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging” toward the whale—­“by all these things,” Melville writes, “their hearts were bowled along” (414–­15). The “project” overtakes them; or, better, it is seized as theirs. As we saw, however, in between these moments the crew’s unity appears more fitful. Indeed, despite the efforts of some readers to conceive it as best exemplified not by such moments but by the common togetherness of shared work, even that labor is not always depicted as an ideally merged purposiveness, as we see when Ishmael weaves mats with a distracted Queequeg. Of particular interest is the “Midnight, Forecastle” scene that follows shortly on “The Quarter-­Deck,” written out as dramatic dialogue among the sailors and harpooneers; it alternates moments in which the men speak as one (as when, in response to an English sailor’s exclamation—­“Blood! but that old man’s a grand old cove! We are the lads to hunt him up his whale!”—­ all instantly cheer their assent [149]) with others in which they separate out and squabble, notably through racial enmities in both directions. Yet neither does resistance to whiteness form a more reliable source of connection; as Daggoo spars with a Spanish sailor who insults him, Tashtego, characteristically indifferent, dismisses the lot with a whiff of his pipe. And once more,

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Pip, that crucial figure to whom we will at last return, is the only one to stand apart, fully and completely, from one and all. Melville is, in fact, as evidently fascinated by individuality as he is by collectivity; what makes him most Rousseauian is finally his attempt to imagine a way, via the idea of will, to be true to both. It is often forgotten that Rousseau conceived of the general will not only as a collective achievement but, prior to that, as an individual one, as what an individual arrives at when he voluntarily considers things from the perspective of the whole (52). Indeed, for Hegel, Rousseau, just like Fichte, could be critiqued as effectively too individual and not individual enough at the same time—­the one error led to the other.53 Isaiah Berlin captures some of the double-­sidedness here in his argument that Rousseau solved the dilemma of individual and communal authority by making them identical: “by giving himself to all, [man] gives himself to no one” (Rousseau 50). It is thus not quite apt to say that Rousseau’s general will falls prey to what Tocqueville theorized as the tyranny of the majority, for Rousseau carefully distinguished “the will of all,” which was “nothing but a sum of particular wills,” from the general will that could distinguish the “common interest” among these. Nonetheless, and crucially for our line of thinking here, he did believe it was possible to arrive at the general will by combining all the particular wills in question; it was simply necessary to perform yet a further mathematical procedure and, “from these same wills . . . tak[e] away the pluses and minuses which cancel each other out” (60). What would be left—­after, in effect, these excesses and insufficiencies of will were removed—­would be the general will. For Rousseau, then, as Hegel correctly worried, extreme particularity and an ideal generality could go hand in hand: the general will should be able to result from “the large number of small differences.” What Rousseau objected to, instead, was the presence of any mediating entities: “factions” or “small associations” that could bias against difference and generality alike (62). As Arendt correctly notes, this insistence contrasts with the American founders’ assumption of the ineradicability of factions and even praise for them (On Revolution 84). Society was thus what Rousseau wanted to do away with, and perhaps, indeed, politics as such as well; Sheldon Wolin terms his system “democracy without politics” (McLendon 408). Unsurprisingly, then, he concludes that it is unlikely to be literalized anywhere but in the smallest nations, giving the island of Corsica as an example (Rousseau 76–­78). In Moby-­Dick, too, we might say there is no space between an utterly radical individualism and the “oneness” of the collective (415). As Ishmael tells us, “Islanders seem to make the best whalemen,” and “They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too . . . not acknowledging the common

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continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own” (107). Here the island as continent gives way to the individual as continent (a term that also referred to self-­will). And yet, he continues, now we see them, “federated along one keel. . . . An Anacharsis Cloots deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab . . . to lay the world’s grievances before that bar from which not many of them ever come back” (107).54 In this sense, however, the Pequod’s crew does not exactly lose their individual excesses in order to become a general will, as Rousseau has it; rather, the general will is so constituted that the excesses of each can find a place therein. Here we can return, however, to Arendt’s objections to the general will within her reading of Melville’s later Billy Budd. For Arendt, too, wants the individual to remain radically individual; the difference is that, for her, this means making sure that political life does not mirror it. This, indeed, is where Arendt’s decisive difference from liberalism becomes most clear; her “individualism” would best, in the context of our present discussion, be deemed “Romantic”—­it is defined as “a constant struggle that goes on in . . . darkness” (as theorized, she explains, by Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and so on)—­and it is for this very reason that, in her view, politics must not be. “Robespierre carried the conflicts of the soul, Rousseau’s ame déchirée, into politics, where they became murderous because they were insoluble,” she writes (On Revolution 87). If Moby-­Dick is read as a political allegory, the same critique could be made of Captain Ahab. Politics, in his hands, becomes a space to determine questions of “life and nature” rather than “the rights of freedom and citizenship,” issues dependent on exactly the mediating forms here thrown overboard (On Revolution 99). Arendt, then, reads Billy Budd as a parable of this conflict. In that novella, she argues, the title character’s perfect virtue proves inseparable from a muteness and elementary violence that mark his conflict with the equally inexplicable evil of his nemesis, Claggart, as beyond the political as such—­meaning that their ship’s captain’s attempt to address it via legal forms can end only in tragedy. As in Arendt’s French Revolution, tragedy results from the importation of the modalities of romance (hero and villain, virtue and vice) into a realist, worldly space. And thus Billy, too—­always caught, for readers, between his status as allegorical and political figure—­seems again emblematic of Melville’s unresolved ambivalence toward the Romantic subject. That ambivalence, finally, seems to be what most characterizes the stance of Ishmael himself, enabling his position as both character and narrator (and, perhaps, for Melville, his ability to survive the vortex). Arguably even more above the textual fray, however, is a figure we must finally now give his due

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before bringing this chapter to a close, one with whom both Ahab and our narrator are curiously paired: the youthful sailor Pip, who also, in his own quite distinct sense, dies and is reborn before our eyes. Coda: Pip’s Dissent At the moment in Moby-­Dick when Ishmael most merges into the crew, one of its members, the youngest of all, stands apart and, like Starbuck and Stubb, evinces unease rather than excitement at the prospect of the hunt. As we have already seen, however, the two mates are able, just as is Ishmael, to manage their own darker thoughts through acts of repression. This leaves Pip, who alone stands apart as the men spar and celebrate on the forecastle. “There they go,” he murmurs, “all cursing, and here I don’t.” His brief speech ends with a plea to heaven: “preserve [me] from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!” (151). Starbuck and Stubb, Ishmael tells us, have found ways—­piety in Starbuck’s case, a devil-­may-­care good humor in Stubb’s—­of conquering the fear and awe that ought properly to attend our relation to the sea and its demons (224). Pip and Ishmael differ; they register those demonic forces, and recognize their reappearance, at times, in the ship’s own men (Pip in this scene calls them “white squalls,” doubles of the sudden gusts from which they scatter [151]). As Ishmael’s speculations lead him to the “heartless void,” Pip’s nervous tendency to jump out of the whaleboat brings him face to face with what Milder calls the “naturalistic universe”—­far more than, say, the proclaimed hero Bulkington, who still stands with his hand on the till of a man-­ made craft. His fate prompts Ishmael’s most Pascalian moment outside “The Whiteness of the Whale”: “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?” Not Pip, certainly. Portrayed as having reached the thing-­in-­itself at which Ahab only grasps (“God’s foot on the treadle of the loom”), Pip becomes something beyond the ordinarily human, all-­knowing or simply mad, and the clearest sign seems to be his affectless merriment, together with his third-­person references to himself; he is, in fact, “indifferent as his God” (321). By the end, it is indeed as if he presides over all: his hand grasped by Ahab’s as an “Emperor’s” (392); seated in the captain’s cabin, hosting imagined admirals as the ship goes down (400). Pip alone thus achieves the godlike state, the “liberty of indifference,” toward which men in their pursuit of freedom reach. (One might also note the doubloon scene; where each of the others sees a version of his own mind in the coin, Pip omnisciently sees all, looking: “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look” [335].) The lowest of the low brought highest, his

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impassive reason sounds to the mere human beings aboard like madness, though Ahab begins to recognize it might, rather, be “philosoph[y]” (396). In all these things, Pip can seem akin to a more fully realized version of Ishmael, who also famously sees from every perspective, and the passivity evident in both raises once more all the old questions about the impotence of reason in the absence of the dangerous but necessary supplement of will. As Paul Hurh notes, Ishmael at one point earlier in the book associates this dilemma with the sperm whale itself. Whereas—­again in line with Schopenhauer—­Ishmael states that human beings struggle in vain “to examine any two things,” “attentively and completely,” at the same time, the sperm whale possesses an advantage in this regard, due to its two widely separated organs of vision. “Is his brain so much more comprehensive,” our narrator muses, “that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects,” one on either side? And yet this marvelous possibility, which would render the whale our intellectual superior, seems also to Ishmael to impart a potentially fatal liability: It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales, when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them. (263)

In Ishmael’s view, then, capaciousness of perspective comes with a price, and that price is will—­“volition”—­itself. The chapter on “The Mast-­Head,” as Hurh shows, makes a similar point: the breadth of vision attained by Ishmael in the crow’s nest leads to a state not unlike Pip’s, as the lookout “loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature,” and feels at one with all things. And once again, the dangers accompanying this ideal, dreamy state manifest themselves as we find that it, too, “precludes action or volition” (Hurh 192); only when the dreamer’s balance falters and his “identity” comes rushing back “in horror” can he act to save himself from joining the depths to which his mind has plunged (136). In the next chapter, we will see, the fears these passages express attain new urgency as the nineteenth century ages: a fear that not reason’s overthrow, but reasoning itself might stand in the way of human progress, precisely due to its tendency to threaten the possibility of conviction and action. These are the internal fault lines of liberal proceduralism that will eventually beget attempts by Schmitt and others to reinstate a politics of the will. Within

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contemporary democratic theory, however, Chantal Mouffe stands out for adapting Schmitt’s interventions to different ends—­ends I would want finally to suggest we might see Ishmael, in his dialectical intensity, as embodying. For Mouffe, the tension between liberalism and democracy that for Schmitt marks the modern state’s untenability (and that for many contemporary left theorists often seems to entail jettisoning the former term altogether, as if it alone stood in the way of a democratic utopia) needs to be affirmed as its source of strength. Mouffe names this source “pluralism,” and it indeed entails the coexistence of disparate perspectives we see in Melville’s narrator. Yet where many usages of this term can themselves fall under the rubric of a mild-­mannered liberal “tolerance,” Mouffe reorients this concept such that what must be “tolerated” is, precisely, agonism: the recognition that at any given moment, one perspective must have the upper hand and, indeed, the very real power that, in a political setting, such a position entails. Her model of pluralism thus derives from the clash of ultimate values described by Weber and Nietzsche, as well as from an affirmation, against the viewpoint of “Squeeze of the Hand,” of the necessarily complex, never simply harmonious affects—­rivalry, envy—­structuring any version of human social life (the other core topic of the chapter to come).55 Mouffe’s arguments appear aimed at centrist politics whether in the form of “third way” liberalism or the theoretical arguments of John Rawls or Jürgen Habermas. As she argues, in their conception of consensus, these tend to imagine the surmounting of the political as such. Yet I think it is crucial to recognize the extent to which her claims also place pressure on radical democratic theories often conceived as these theorists’ antitheses, for these can be equally predicated, as we saw in the case of Rousseau, on idealizations of a shared aim. Mouffe acknowledges as much in a note in which she argues against other democratic theorists’ implication that “the political could under certain conditions be made absolutely congruent with the ethical, optimism which I do not share,” for it entails, as she puts it elsewhere, that “passions are erased from the realm of politics,” thereby “eliminat[ing] . . . the element of ‘undecidability’ ” from human relations (107, 30–­31).56 The present chapter has conceptualized that element as the will, or in the Greek phrase thymos. To acknowledge that politics will always entail struggles over power due to the persistence of incommensurable values is to recognize that, as Sloterdijk puts it, politics will necessarily be “thymotically charged” (20). Thymos has been defined, indeed, as the value-­assigning faculty,57 the fate of which was thus very much on the minds of Weber and Nietzsche as they delineated the competing claims of charisma versus bureaucracy, on the one hand, and, on the other, the premodern and modern

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conceptions of the good, as we see them at work in Arendt’s reading of Billy Budd. Mouffe’s account is perhaps closest to Weber’s, however—­as well as to his student Lukács’s on the historical novel as a form of “objectivity”—­in its recognition that it is modernity itself that makes possible the space in which we can understand these values as in competition, a point already evident if we recognize how dependent Romanticism is upon the modern epoch it both opposes and simultaneously aims to extend. It is, then, this recognition of the truth of the romantic and realist viewpoints alike that Ishmael embodies. To the extent we acknowledge this, we must learn to read Moby-­Dick as neither a nightmare vision of what must not be nor a vision of some utopian alternative thereto. Rather, if we read it as a book about, among many other things, the relation of democracy to will, we might see it as a radically intensified exploration of a necessary, and perhaps necessarily insoluble, conflict.58

4

The James Brothers at Century’s End: Mysticism, Abstraction, and the Forms of Social Life If the advent of modernity saw the collapse of any possible view of a natural order and hierarchy of the cosmos, the late modern world could be said to represent the collapse of any credible claim to a natural or fixed social order, and the advent of the intelligibility and meaning problems that follow from such a collapse. r o b e r t p i p p i n , Henry James and Modern Moral Life (172) “But why can you be [tormented]?” . . . “Because I’m made so—­I think of everything.” “Ah one must never do that. . . . One must think of as few things as possible.” h e n r y j a m e s , The Ambassadors (310)

If Moby-­Dick tells the story of how the modern absence of given values could engender willfulness, the individual’s arrogant raising of himself to the level of God, the second half of the nineteenth century began to fear will’s excesses less than the danger of its evacuation. Disturbingly, it appeared, the same civilized achievement that held willfulness at bay—­the self-­restraining higher will Kant had enjoined, with its ability to see beyond the personal point of view to the good of all—­seemed in danger of restraining the good as well. What if, commentators asked, modern civilization had begun to pose a threat to action itself? Such fears, which this chapter—­and the two that follow—­will further explore, generated two diametrically opposed responses during the century’s final decades: new celebrations of will as force or effectiveness (as opposed to self-­control) and, more surprisingly perhaps, defiant radicalizations of the will in abeyance, of sheer consciousness as such, associated with the emergence of aestheticism. Strikingly, these two tendencies have each been represented by one member of a pair of accomplished brothers, the philosopher William and the novelist Henry James. Both grew to manhood in pre–­Civil War New York during the high Victorian era of morality as constraint, and both wrote their most enduring works as that era began to give way to a nascent modernism, an era of “modernity” in the term’s more narrowed sense of urbanization, industrialization, and the rise of mass media and disciplinary specialization—­ a process in which each, in his own way, centrally participated.

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For many years, however, that participation was thought to take, as just suggested, strongly opposed form: William the champion of pragmatism, of engagement with the world on its own multifarious terms, with his manifold disciplinary allegiances (as professor of anatomy, then psychology, and finally philosophy at Harvard); and Henry the aloof cultural mandarin, known for narrating the same sort of renunciations he himself appeared to embody, with his lifelong solitude, his self-­removal first from the US and then from London, and his self-­devotion to a purified artistic ideal. The mid-­twentieth-­century canonization of Henry James as “masterly” novelist and progenitor of modernism (following on the admiration of Eliot and Pound) makes it easy to forget how much, from the very start, but also increasingly across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and then, once more, in the 1960s), his writings were very frequently pathologized, indeed in terms borrowed from his era’s own developing worries about weakness of will.1 This is perhaps most evident in the infamous 1925 critique by the American critic Van Wyck Brooks, in which James’s narrative mode fatally reflects its originator’s “nervousness,” “hesitancy,” and “constant self-­communion”—­in sum, a “fear of committing himself ” in any definitive way (Edel, Essays 80). Around the same time, Edmund Wilson spoke similarly of the unfortunate effects on James’s prose of the novelist’s “inhibitions against entering into life” (Edel, Essays 66). Rather than the “realities of life,” V. L. Parrington would echo, James’s work reflected nothing but the reverberations of being “shut up in his own skull-­pan” (250–­51). This latter assessment, too, bespoke the late nineteenth-­century shift whereby thought, rather than representing our highest achievement, the triumph of reason over embodied impulse and will, became itself the site of apparent excesses, ones that got in the way of healthy willing and, indeed, “life” itself. Wilson’s James thus foundered amid “abstraction”; for Brooks, he appeared less storyteller than “geometer” (Edel, Essays 65, 80). Yet precisely such critiques had in fact dogged James from the reviews of his very earliest novels—­that a cold, analytical tendency stood in the way of “human feeling”; that “passion” and “sympathies” had been “refined away by the intellect”; that the books displayed “the severity of [a] scientific apprehension” of life, a “vivisect[ing]” eye (Edel Life, 2:180, 225–­26; Hayes 21–­22). Like other Victorians, then, James can be said to have embodied tendencies within the “modern” mind—­toward reflection, abstraction, even scientism, along with moralized restraint and an emphasis on individual conscience—­ that writers during the later 1800s, including Henry’s brother, came to repudiate as residual to a nascent twentieth-­century “modernity” characterized by the liberation of will and action from the confines of morality and mind. The present book, of course, has sought to argue that both of these sides were

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present from the first and, as equally susceptible to excess, neither could hope to offer a definitive solution to what the other presented. Rather, they need to be thought together as twinned responses to the dilemmas of individualism represented by the notion of the will. What does this mean, then, for our understanding of the brothers James? Henry James has most effectively been defended, particularly in recent years, by one of two quite distinct strategies. One refuses the above characterization of him tout court, insisting on James as powerfully and, indeed, sensuously engaged with the phenomena of modern life, which he depicts as stimulating and exciting. While the renewal of interest in James’s sexuality has provided the most obvious impetus for such treatments, this chapter will focus on others, in which Henry appears as participating in a project very akin to William’s pragmatism, such that the two would better be compared than contrasted; in such accounts, the novelist benefits from a broader renewal of attention to William’s work along with that of the broader fin de siècle intellectual milieu in which it participated, particularly its social thought, which we will consider in some detail. Very differently, then, another set of strong defenses accepts that Henry James should in some important way be understood as a novelist of consciousness or mind; in the tradition of a different set of turn-­of-­the-­century thinkers, they refuse only the assertion that this tendency means a detachment from modern social reality. Instead, as we shall see, such arguments claim that it is precisely by emphasizing thought that James’s novels are able to make the case for that reality’s supreme importance.2 In both of these lines of thinking, then, sociality, or relations, turn out to provide the key to articulating a still-­vital Henry James. As Ross Posnock, a pioneer of the first set of analyses, suggests, we should take our cue from James’s preface to his early novel The American, in which he defines his writerly subject as “the related state” (260). Robert Pippin, advocating powerfully for the second approach, cites T. S. Eliot’s appraisal: “The real hero, in any of James’ stories, is a social entity of which men and women are constituents” (quoted in Henry James 147). In fact, in these accounts, the argument is a stronger one: far from withdrawing from the landscape of social modernity, James provides a kind of map thereto, and such a project turns out to be crucial to making the case for modernity as such. Henry James as guide to social life: is this a surprising reading? In one sense, not at all. “In America in the nineteenth century,” Lionel Trilling once put it, “Henry James was alone in knowing that to scale the moral and aesthetic heights in the novel one had to use the ladder of social observation” (Moral 111).3 To say so was to affirm that James would better be placed next to Austen or Eliot than Hawthorne, Poe, or Melville; diverging from the American tendency

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toward romantic allegory, he wrote with thick detail not of the “astonishing” but of everyday life (Chase, American 12–­13). Indeed, F. O. Matthiessen long ago expressed wonder at the very banality of the material so carefully recorded in James’s notebooks: innumerable “conversations with ladies at dinner” that he was somehow able to transmute into the stuff of lasting literature (Henry James 5). Yet how, then, could he ever have seemed to so many to represent the flight from social affairs, and human sympathies, into the life of the mind? Obnoxious though it may otherwise appear, Matthiessen’s comment likely holds the key: James was, above all, a “novelist of manners,” and, hence, the question of his relation to the social turns, we might say, on what one thinks of the relation of manners to the social as such. Manners’ association with the privileged classes who formed James’s typical milieu no doubt had everything to do with why critics on the left, such as Parrington, saw him for so long as divorced from social reality as defined by the experiences of the majority of persons. Contemporary criticism evades this critique, then, by generally evading the matter of manners altogether. Rather than conceive relations as shaped by careful consideration, including by a complex and at times arbitrary set of codes, they tend to understand them as spontaneous overflows of affective response. Manners, as forms through which relations are often constrained to transpire, thus risk disappearing from view. And yet it seems, unquestionably, as a set of formal operations that the social fascinated Henry James. While James was penetratingly aware of the force of social structure at the macro level, of class above all,4 his deepest interest lay in the architecture of engagement between particular persons.5 Among James’s late twentieth-­century critics, Leo Bersani, whose extensive and pathbreaking writings on the novelist we will later consider, stands out for his appreciation of  how this sense of the social as form could, in the Jamesian text, motivate both a powerful aesthetic pleasure therein and a sense of a deeper layer being occluded, often with tragic results. Particularly in James’s writings around the turn into the twentieth century—­some of his strangest, most polarizing fictions, as well as his masterwork The Ambassadors—­the sense of the social as “double-­storied mystery” produced plots in which the byzantine intensities of Jamesian thinking resulted not from an abandonment of social reality but from the very attempt to grasp its fundamental structure. Such endeavors could appear mad; they could seem to instantiate William’s sense of abstract thought as prey to what he termed Grübelsucht, or an obsessive, impossible quest for an ultimate truth. And yet in fact, we will see, both Henry and William in his own writings from the same period—­particularly The Varieties of Religious Experience, where William spoke of this very sense of life as a “double-­storied mystery”

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(55)—­also acknowledged the beauty and meaningfulness of such quests, faithful as they were to the image of some more perfect realm, whether that of religion, art, or indeed an idealized sociality closer to either than to the difficult intricacies of our own. William’s own cheerfully pragmatic stance, I argue, must itself be understood as a response to the maladies of will with which he struggled all his life, and which, as we will see, he discussed directly in his turn-­of-­the-­century writings as well as in his famous discussion of the psychology of will. If he and his brother are to be read as engaged in a shared project, then, this chapter argues we might understand that endeavor less as a sheer embrace of “relations” as such and more as an ongoing engagement with sociality and its imperatives as a source of both joy and vexation. The flip side of this, then, was a sense of the life of the mind as an enterprise equally essential and yet perilous, and perhaps never more than when it offered a tempting alternative to the enmeshing complexities of relational life. William and the Will If any member of the James family has been persistently associated with the subject of will, it has been William, whose writings in such works as The Principles of Psychology (1890) and “The Will to Believe” (1896) made him one of the will’s most renowned American theorists. Yet William James’s fascination with and celebration of active volition could not be separated from painful personal experience: during his twenties, he suffered from an extended nervous collapse that he interpreted as a crisis of the will. His varied biographers have disagreed about whether to interpret this situation psychologically, as a familial matter, or philosophically, as an affective struggle with the meaning of modern freedom. I would suggest, in the vein of James’s own intellectual contributions, that it is also possible to refuse this divide. Beginning with Ralph Barton Perry’s two-­volume study of James’s life and thought, the philosophical perspective has held that the young man, casting about for a set of beliefs to live by, fell prey to despair, having been trained in the atmosphere of materialist determinism common in the 1860s. Confronting what he called the “void,” the sense of God’s absence, he wrote in his diary during these years, “my will is palsied. The difficulty: ‘to act without hope,’ must be solved” (quoted in “Worst Kind” 374). Since his late teens, James had experimented with multiple possible life paths, from an initial passion for painting to the study of, first, chemistry, then physiology, then natural history, before deciding, primarily for pecuniary reasons, on medical school. Despite securing a position as a surgeon, he began to feel more and more

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despondent about his prospects, and when a series of minor ailments culminated in a sudden and disabling back disorder in fall 1866, James fell into a suicidal depression that would plague him on and off for the next several years. In 1870 he recorded in his diary he had “about touched bottom” (Perry 1:322); around the same time, he was paralyzed in the midst of his daily activities by the memory of a catatonic man he had once seen in an asylum, whom James suddenly saw as a nightmare image of a possible fate. For more psychoanalytically oriented interpreters, James had been tossed to the abyss not by an indifferent cosmos but by a judgmental father—­himself a philosopher, Henry James Sr.—­who disapproved of his eldest son’s artistic inclinations and insisted he pursue a scientific career. And yet the son’s interest in science, if less in medical practice, was genuine. As he wrote in 1868 to a friend, Tom Ward, who was similarly struggling against an “inward deadness and listlessness,” the trouble could be said to arise not from lack of interest but from its excess: from the multiplicity of options available in a modernizing world. Precisely due to their “wide sympathy and mobility,” he explained, the two of them had difficulty choosing a path without once more encountering “the evil of feeling restless,” as “whatever we are not doing” inevitably came to bedevil their imaginations, casting doubt over any choice made (Letters 127–­29).6 Like others at this time, then, James had begun to consider the very opposite of willfulness—­the capacity for mental deliberation and self-­control—­as, potentially, posing the greatest moral danger. During the same years, the late 1860s, that James was experiencing his crisis, a Saturday Review writer expressed as “a special complaint in our own time, that the culture of the admirable group of intellectual virtues” known as “tolerance, or impartiality, or sympathy,” might produce a concomitant loss of “conviction” or “vigour” (quoted in Thomas 13). The linkage between reflecting prior to acting and the ideal of recognizing that “there are many sides to many questions,” as Henry Sidgwick put it around the same time, could well engender a loss, rather than a gain, in moral force, in the sense of the term that arguably became most prominent in James’s writings: that of morale, or confidence to act, its opposite the state James himself experienced, of feeling “demoralized” (Miller 57; Myers 51). From this perspective, we can better understand why, when James wrote to his brother, Henry Jr., in 1869 to confess himself “very much run down in nervous force,” he asserted he would meet the matter head on by “read[ing] as little as possible”—­in particular “nothing which I can get interested and thinking about” (October 2, 1869, Perry 1:306). Thinking itself, it appeared, had become a source of potential danger. (Indeed, he would warn Henry himself

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against the writerly life, due to its “abnormality as a matter of mental hygiene” [Edel, Life 2:157].)7 Writing two decades later in The Principles of Psychology’s famous chapter on “Will,” James would elaborate these ideas, explaining that with “mental evolution,” one found a “multiplication of the inhibitions to which every impulse is exposed” (1145). From the viewpoint of corralling willfulness, this ever-­increasing “complexity of consciousness” could only be deemed a sign of progress; James, however, feared its darker side. After all, as he wrote earlier in the same chapter, given that “consciousness is in its very nature impulsive,” there was something almost unnatural about deliberation as a process—­with its ability to transform matters that initially “seemed full of urgency and blood and life” into manipulable abstractions, things “weak and pale and dead” (1136–­37).8 Impulses, James concluded, might well be desirable in many instances, for who would wish a man of action “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” (1145)? The nod here to Hamlet was typical, not only of James’s own discussion of these matters but of others’ writing in the period; as George Cotkin has observed, the melancholy Dane became in the late Victorian era a familiar trope for the (here emasculated) individual whose “sword of the will is repeatedly blunted by overcontemplation” (42). James would cite Shakespeare’s play more than once when discussing his own condition in letters to his brother; in one, having just seen the drama performed, he joked that his own uncertain “sanity” might appear similar to Hamlet’s (April 13, 1868, Perry 1:272). Most often, however, the elder James brother strove to take his own advice to Tom Ward, and to battle his hesitations with two thoughts in particular which, he insisted, “with me outlas[t] all others”: “that [of] my having a will” and that of “my belonging to a brotherhood of men.” Even when the “purposes of God” appear elusive, he insists, “we can, by our will, make the enjoyment of our brothers stand us in the stead of a final cause” (Perry 1:130). If an insistence on will once seemed to threaten egotism, then, here it becomes the means of transcending the self, of achieving communion with one’s fellows by participating in a larger whole. Both of these ideas, will and sociability, would recur in William James’s writings; we will return to the second, but he is indubitably best known for the first, for his exaltation of the will. Writing on “William James and the Philosophy of Life” years later, fellow philosopher Josiah Royce would oppose “the Jamesian emphasis on the will” to fears of “Hamletian inaction” (quoted in Cotkin 40). Famously, in April 1870, soon after reporting “touch[ing] bottom,” James reported in a diary entry an epochal encounter with the writings on free will of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier. “I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life,” he wrote. Drawing on Renouvier’s ideas,

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he concluded, “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will” (Perry 1:323). Renewed, James threw himself into teaching, finding it a “godsend,” as he would later write to brother Henry—­the “fits of languor” receding in the face of “dealing with men instead of with my own mind,” and with “those introspective studies which had bred a sort of philosophical hypochondria in me” (August 24, 1872, Perry 1:328). The elder James brother also, later in the 1870s, began to write, as well as to correspond with others such as the like-­minded Renouvier. As he himself would note in an 1884 essay on how to confront “The Dilemma of Determinism,” there were a number of them—­including “the English disciples of Hegel, such as Green and Bradley”—­who had begun to reinvigorate the study of free will in the face of a rising materialist perspective (566). Admit we cannot plumb the deep sources of consciousness, he wrote in the similarly minded 1879 “Are We Automata?”; even so, “we are incurring the slighter error by still regarding our conscious selves as actively combating each for his interests . . . and not as impotently paralytic spectators of the game” (22). The later “The Will to Believe,” published in 1896, is premised on just such reasoning: given its claim that he who imagines his efforts will pay off will see them do so, it might reasonably have been retitled “The Belief in the Will.” As such arguments suggest, however, James’s conception of will could be deemed as rebarbative to idealism and rationalism as it was indebted to it. His crisis in the face of scientific materialism and recovery therefrom, after all, had been predicated on an escape from the labyrinths of deliberation into active social engagement (teaching); he could hardly end up by endorsing a system like Kant’s, with its suggestion that consultation of one’s private conscience or mental capacities for reason offered the best guide to the greater good. In his 1880s essays, his great bugbear was the “understanding,” a notion marrying an intellectual grasp of something to a sympathetic appreciation, and locating both within a subjective consciousness. To stress these overmuch, he fears, will obviate any need for action to change what is perceived. Indeed, at times, he more strongly suggests a certain perversity at work here, as if one cannot understand or appreciate corruption without falling prey to it. Ironically, perhaps, James’s own brother Henry had repeatedly insisted on impressions made on the mind as the most important thing in his writing. But then, William had always had difficulty with Henry’s style—­and indeed in ways that echoed some of the complaints of period reviewers. As with them, William found fault from Henry’s earliest productions with an excess intellectualism that he felt rendered the fiction “cold,” “over-­refine[d],” and over-­“elaborat[ed],” with characters and narrator alike given over to an excessive, well-­nigh “scientific” mode of “reflect[ion]” (Perry 1:263, 372, 353). He

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had made similar comments about the writing of his friend, the philosopher Shadworth Hodgson (his “wondrously delicate . . . discriminations” remain in “the air of speculation  .  .  . touch[ing] not the earth of life”), as well as that of Kant and Hegel (Perry 1:631, 725–­26). Indeed, to William, Henry and Hodgson alike (and, later, Bradley) came to embody what troubled him most about a Kantian perspective (Hodgson’s own dislike for Kant notwithstanding): a dualism in which some deeper truth—­and, even more troublingly, a moral ideal—­would forever remain inaccessible.9 Although in his Principles William announced himself to be a dualist, as he moved toward his mature philosophy in the later years of his life, he moved more and more to collapse what he viewed as problematic oppositions in ontology and epistemology alike, precisely for the moral reasons that had drawn him to idealism in the first place. At the same time, he insisted more and more strongly on his own thought as a form of empiricism. If in some respects, doing so brought William James closer to the materialism he had started out by critiquing, it is more apt to see him in his final phase as attempting to carve out a space beyond materialism and idealism alike. His work toward doing so, crucially, functioned on behalf of the less often acknowledged side of the two core ideas he had said most steadied him personally: not the will, but, rather, relatedness to other beings. In one early acknowledgment of his debt to the British empiricists (whom he continued to salute throughout his career, dedicating Pragmatism to Mill), he thus makes clear he at the same time rejects what he sees as their amoral tendency to conceive the world atomistically, as “made up of chopped-­up, juxtaposed” entities “with no bond of any sort between them” (Perry 1:553). Indeed, as James would later conceive it, such a perspective could itself be seen to necessitate Kant’s a priori categories as the only means of restoring unity to reality (Perry 1:718), such that extremes of materialism and idealism would in fact go hand in hand. In contrast to both, James offered his own “radical empiricism,” which drew directly on the psychological researches of the late nineteenth century—­ including his own notion (initially derived from the work of Hodgson) of consciousness as an indissoluble “stream.” Through the flowing modality of our perceptual apparatus, James reasoned, we were able to perceive relatedness directly as the primordial reality of all things: an “empirical many-­in-­ oneness” that obviated the need for a secondary realm of unification of a sea of sense data through conceptualization (Perry 1:564–­69, 572). Such ideas lie behind Pragmatism’s insistence that its perspective is the more rational—­ and moral—­view of the universe, for it rejects the sort of dualism that would confine justice and unity to an ideal realm rather than finding it within our

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lived experience (105, 103). In either case, we might stress the horizontality of James’s thinking; everything is able to be seen as related because it occupies the same plane. As always with James, then: as with philosophy, so with psychology. James’s radical empiricism constituted both a new ontology and a new theory of the subject, one in which what he called the “fringes” of consciousness represented a kind of peripheral vision, rather than the submerged depths of Freud (who was consolidating his theories around the same time). What had once been understood as the ideal might be thought represented by the expansive realm containing all—­a notion, again, antithetical to psychoanalysis, which conceived ego and id in conflict, unable ever simply to coexist peacefully together side by side. Rather than a narrative with the present layering over buried and perhaps problematic memories, James’s self amounted to an ongoing series of experiences.10 If James’s crisis had begun in the agonized encounter of a self desiring moral good with an indifferent cosmos, then, it ended in an elision of any meaningful boundary separating “self ” from “world.” As Judith Ryan has discussed in her groundbreaking work on the overlaps between turn-­of-­the-­ century empiricism and the era’s protomodernist literature, James played a central role in the dissemination of French and German psychology in the English-­speaking world during the 1890s. For this work, as in the writings of Franz Brentano and Ernst Mach, both the object world and the perceiving subject could be understood as composed of the same stuff, sense impressions or what James would more assertively call “experience” or, again, “relations”11—­producing a “fluid, unbounded self  .  .  . not distinct from its surroundings,” as in impressionist art (12).12 Such a perspective, fascinatingly, could appear either to aggrandize the subject—­by rendering all reality inaccessible save through a particular consciousness—­or to dissolve it, by merging it into the material perceived. In either case, however, as Hermann Bahr noted in a series of essays linking writings like Mach’s to the era’s aestheticist literature, the “new psychology” needed to be recognized as “a psychology of the senses rather than the intellect” (Ryan 20)—­thus removing any fear of the excesses of deliberation that had paralyzed the youthful James. In James’s own final phase, then, via his own language of “relations,” this psychology of merger between self and nonself edged closer to both a mystical pantheism and, fulfilling James’s most long-­standing hopes, a moral ideal of interconnected, engaged sociality. More than anyone else, the person whose work emboldened James to bid a true farewell to “intellectualism” and to embrace the perspective of his final completed work, A Pluralistic Universe, was the French philosopher Henri

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Bergson.13 Bergson was achieving the height of his transcontinental popularity in the first decades of the twentieth century, particularly following the publication of his most famous (or notorious) book in 1907.14 Creative Evolution extended to the cosmos itself Bergson’s conception of a dynamic reality graspable only intuitively rather than with our concepts, which cut the flow into parts just as James had seen empiricism as doing. The two men exchanged letters of mutual admiration,15 and by the 1908 lectures that would later appear as A Pluralistic Universe, James was ready to credit Bergson with his new certainty that a direct “dive” into “the perceptual flux” of “sensation” was the only way to know reality at its core (745–­46). This “knowing,” moreover, was in James’s hands portrayed in strikingly social terms. As he had explained in a 1905 lecture, he had learned to conceive the universe itself according to what he termed “the social analogy: plurality of individuals, with relations partly external, partly intimate, like and un-­like, different in origin, in aim, yet keeping house together, interfering, coalescing, compromising, finding new purposes to arise, getting gradually into more stable habits, winning order, weeding out” (Perry 2:442). This idea, of the universe as the “common socius of us all,” recurs throughout the later Pluralistic Universe (644). Moreover, James explained, Bergson’s work helped to facilitate such conceptions, for while materialism leaves us in “a lonely corner” in a meaningless cosmos, a perspective like Bergson’s allows us to remain in dialogue with that greater totality—­indeed, to form no less than what James termed “intimate relations with the universe” (Pluralistic 644–­45).16 As T. J. Jackson Lears and other cultural historians have discussed, James’s and Bergson’s ideas stood at the forefront of a much broader reaction against Victorian values of self-­control, one encompassing not only philosophy but more popular phenomena like the “mind-­cure” movement, with its tenet of “letting go,” and the new abundance-­based consumerism. Against the need to shore up a strong character, such theories in both their popular and academic form counseled an openness to “experience” predicated on conceptions of the porous boundaries of the self (Lears, No Place 53–­54). As Lears points out, however, the “exaltation of unconscious impulses” here often presumed these were necessarily “benign,” thereby purging the instinctive realm of its “darker dimensions” in order to celebrate it (55)—­in terms we might see as applicable to William James’s sense of the “social” universe in which the acknowledgment of differences leads only to greater order. Notably, some others writing on these themes during the same epoch, such as Nietzsche and Freud, were less inclined to do so. In our own moment, however, what might be termed the turn of the century’s “relational” thinking has become the subject of a considerable revival.

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Theoretical streams as various as affect theory, new materialism, and the “actor-­network theory” of Bruno Latour have cited Bergson, William James, and related thinkers of the period such as Alfred North Whitehead as precursors to their own conceptions of collectivized, process-­oriented, horizontalized forms of agency and ontology. With respect to the present book’s aims, these kinds of ideas have been brought to bear on the literary work of William’s brother Henry, arguing for a fundamental kinship between the two Jameses’ thought, as a means of dismissing the old notion of Henry surveying the world from his high intellectual citadel. Although these studies have recently gained an impetus from the theoretical developments mentioned above, they arguably have their origin point in Ross Posnock’s pioneering The Trial of Curiosity (1991), which stands out among a number of studies from the 1980s forward that aimed to reconceive Henry James as vitally engaged with his cultural milieu (rather than hiding away in appalled horror therefrom)—­and specifically, in Posnock’s case, to offer a “relational” account of Henry’s oeuvre, stressing his overlaps with pragmatism.17 Posnock’s intervention here was an absolutely crucial one, given that even many of these initial, more historicizing accounts continued to situate Henry in relation to mass culture as coolly attempting to shore up his professional power; in contrast, Posnock powerfully portrays him as a passionate, sympathetic seeker after life in all its forms. This latter view has since become more the norm, augmented both by the efflorescence of queer-­theory readings of James, on the one hand, and, on the other, by a more recent spate of treatments encouraged by the writings of Latour and others to reconsider Henry through William’s sense of sociality as the antidote to excesses of thought. The question, then, is whether William’s post-­1900 construal of the sociable universe actually suits his brother’s contemporaneous work; indeed, this chapter will eventually ask, it remains in question whether it suits even the broader oeuvre, during those same turn-­of-­the-­century years, of William himself. As we will now explore, how Henry’s writings understand “the social” is a question that has been given a striking variety of answers, ones that map onto theorizations of sociality in both turn-­of-­the-­century and contemporary thought alike. Beginning by considering the post-­individualist model of current relational criticism, we will then see how that model parallels those of the social theorists, themselves interlocutors of William’s, writing during the Jameses’ own day. And yet within that same epoch, alternative conceptions presented themselves that rejected these thinkers’ opposition between autonomy and relation. These more Hegelian perspectives, I join Robert Pippin in arguing, may offer a more helpful guide to the treatment of sociality and will alike in Henry James.

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Finally, however, noting the melodramatic aspects of James’s writing that the more realist perspective of the Hegelians can evade, I turn to a still different notion, that of James as preeminently a “novelist of manners.” The subject of manners, I argue, opens onto a view of social life itself as a kind of aesthetic overlay that both deflects and redirects underlying desires. Leo Bersani is the scholar who has written most powerfully about the importance of this dimension to James’s own novelistic aesthetic, arguing that James’s own fiction, by formalizing the social’s own formalizations, achieves the sense of a single, governing consciousness—­an artistic Big Will—­that the social itself forecloses. Remarkably, however, Bersani over time comes to identify this perfected consciousness with the social itself—­and thereby, I demonstrate, becomes himself a precursor to the new relational criticism. What we must finally ask, then—­and what William’s work on religion and abnormal psychology, on the one hand, and his brother’s The Ambassadors, on the other, will allow us at last to explore—­is what this all means for the ever-­vexed question of the individual will. Four Visions of Sociality: Intermingling, Fusion, Intersubjectivity, Form sensuous intermingling As stated, we can already see in Ross Posnock’s trailblazing work on Henry James the foundations for the current relational turn. For Posnock, not only should Henry be read as intellectually akin to William in his pragmatic mode; indeed, in his view, Henry represents a fuller inhabitation of William’s relational ideas, which he views as at times hampered in the latter’s case by William’s continued insistence on a self-­authorizing language of will. Moreover, he aligns both James brothers, but Henry above all, with a broad range of relational thinkers, from Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to their father Henry Sr., to, most of all, the era’s social theorists, with whom William actively corresponded, and who, as we will presently see in more detail, were beginning at this time to promulgate what James Livingston has termed a conception of the “social self.” Posnock centers his inquiry on two of the novelist’s last books, written after 1900 around when William was beginning to theorize his radical empiricism and, eventually, his pluralistic universe-­as-­socius. Henry, too, can be seen during this later period as measuring the distance between the experience of dwelling amid a rapidly modernizing present and the world of Victorian piety, and pieties, in which the James siblings were raised. The US underwent a

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remarkable degree of change in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, with the full emergence of “modernity” in the narrower sense earlier noted: urbanization, industrialization, the rise of mass media and consumer culture. In 1904, having spent two decades living in England, Henry James returned to tour his much-­altered native land and chronicled his experiences in The American Scene—­a book William, notably, singled out for a praise he rarely granted his brother’s literary productions (Posnock 86). From the vantage of those who saw James as an outmoded elitist, the travelogue bespoke his aghast recoil from the streets of his beloved New York, now teeming with a newly polyglot population and shadowed by the first looming skyscrapers. Posnock critiques this account as overblown.18 Look more closely at the novelist’s depiction of his experience on those streets, he enjoins—­and, moreover, consider his kinship with Lambert Strether, the fictional hero of James’s contemporaneous The Ambassadors (1903), who finds himself similarly intrigued by the new sorts of sensuous and moral phenomena he encounters when deputized to Paris to retrieve the wayward youth Chad Newsome (on behalf of his scandalized mother). Deemed by his creator a case of “New England conscience,” the aging Puritan Strether finds that in Paris he must, in effect, become more fully modern in the sense associated with the thought of Bergson: learn to “let [himself] go,” to “give [himself] up,” to live in the moment rather than holding back at an intellectual and morally fastidious remove. James himself, Posnock suggests, had a kindred experience upon his return to New York. Like Strether, and like the subject William James’s late writings describe, James as he navigates early twentieth-­century Manhattan becomes a vessel for “impressions,” for the effects of the “immediate and the sensible,” receiving these, helplessly and yet gratefully, at every turn (American 83; Ambassadors 470, 22). Unquestionably, the encounter with urban life is depicted, in both novel and memoir alike, in sensuous terms. Conceiving his sojourn as a veritable seduction by the “bold bad” city’s sights and sounds, James indeed adopts the same lexicon repeatedly employed by Strether, who similarly finds himself charmed by “the vast bright Babylon” of Paris as well as, on a more personal level, by its feminine inhabitants: first, the stylish expatriate Maria Gostrey, and then Chad’s own romantic interest, the intriguing Mme de Vionnet (American 83; Ambassadors 83).19 Fascinating objects like the red velvet band encircling Maria’s throat become synecdoches for the delights of city and women alike. Unsurprisingly, then, consumer desire can powerfully signify the sudden rush of “free[dom]” Strether feels as he strolls, “hungr[ily]” gazing at “lemon-­coloured volumes” in Parisian window displays (77–­81). From the moment he alights from his ship, Strether feels himself akin to the “man

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who, elatedly finding in his pocket more money than usual, handles it a while and idly and pleasantly chinks it before addressing himself to the business of spending” (22). As Rita Felski describes, such images of the modern subject as consumer often match the fin de siècle ideal of the will abandoned, in favor of giving oneself over to sensual pleasure and fantasy. And yet at the same time, as I suggested above with respect to William’s late writing, these fictional accounts can also imply that to give oneself over—­to desire, after all—­is to achieve a more authentic “freedom,” that idealized attribute of the self-­as-­will. Indeed, the emphasis on the possessor of money as yet unspent, luxuriating in the thought of what could be, implies a limitless potentiality—­an at least fleeting realization of a state of infinitized will, and, hence, a kind of romantic alternative, “flights of fancy,” to the “tense” attitude William identified with reasoned mental deliberation over actual choices (Ambassadors 77). At the same time, consumerism also generates, as in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, a selfhood predicated on imitation, one that is in Posnock’s words “not inner at all but essentially social and thus theatrical” (185)—­similar to that which the sociologist Gabriel Tarde, to whom Latour has urged a return, was theorizing around this same time. In this sense, emphasizing consumerism becomes another way to underscore what is really the main thrust of Posnock’s recasting of Henry James: its relational dimension, in which the novelist embodies the relinquishing of monadic “identity” (self, will), in favor of an acknowledgment of “permeab[ility]” to influence by others. Like Strether, who at one point states that “I seem to have a life only for other people,” Henry James in post-­Victorian New York is said to appear less a singular self than a “fluid” “nexus of relations” (Posnock 103, 227). Immersed in the crowded streets, he merges into the “multitudinous life” of the modern city (James, American 64); indeed, Posnock argues, in James’s references to the “allure” of the mass of bodies in motion, to which he “seems to surrender in a kind of homoerotic . . . fusion,” the novelist comes to suggest the writer he so often least seemed to resemble, Walt Whitman (83–­84). Overall, then, we see how Posnock’s analysis sets the stage for the “relational turn” in James criticism, but also across many other theoretical sites, at the present moment—­a turn typically conceived similarly as an alternative to the “sovereign self of liberal individualism” (Posnock 18). For these interpreters, clear lines can be drawn connecting, for example, Latour’s actor-­ network theory to William James’s insistence on the ontological primacy of relatedness to Henry James’s fiction. The Ambassadors continues to remain a privileged text, and the emphasis to lie in its author’s much-­cited dictum

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that “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere” (“Art” 260).20 In Brad Evans’s reading of James’s novel in relation to both William’s ideas and those of Latour, for example, this statement is amplified by Evans’s final line, “The more relations the better” (“Relating” 28)—­a claim that recasts James’s descriptive insight to accord with Latour’s more prescriptive one that “the more attachments [an actor] has, the more it exists . . . the more mediators there are the better” (Reassembling 217). What is happening when an admission of the ubiquity of relations becomes an endorsement of their universal desirability? In effect, I would suggest, the relational turn specifically applies the utopian mysticism of William James’s late philosophy to the writings of his brother.21 Unquestionably, as I suggested in Posnock’s case, it is a piece that was for years disturbingly downplayed by the conception of Henry James as self-­removed aesthete. The error, then, has lain more in believing these to be the only two options—­options that might be said to be based on the same notion of a salvific social, which James either flees, unfortunately, or embodies, fortunately. As we will see, other conceptions of sociality both within James’s novels and beyond them open up the possibility of other views. How, after all, can “more relations” simply serve, as for Latour, as an ideal? Surely such a statement empties “relations” to their barest minimum, offering no sense that one might wish to sever a relation, or that some relations could be defined primarily by conflict.22 It would certainly seem that Henry James had this more complicated reality of relation in mind when, in his famous preface to The American, he suggested that the appeal of romance lay in its fantasy of a state we never fully manage in actual life, one of experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it and, if we wish so to put the matter, drag upon it, and operating in a medium which relieves it . . . of the inconvenience of a related, a measurable state, a state subject to all our vulgar communities. (Art 280)

When Lambert Strether first steps off the boat in Europe, and feels “a consciousness of personal freedom” unmatched since his faraway youth, such that he imagines himself like the man with the coins in his pocket and can “giv[e] his afternoon and evening” sheerly to “the immediate and sensible,” James makes clear the conditions for this experience, which he describes as one of being “independently, unsociably, alone”: that rare instance, generally available only thanks to travel beyond one’s ordinary sphere, of “having . . . for the moment nobody and nothing to consider” (21–­22). This feeling recurs at

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just those moments in The Ambassadors when Strether most surrenders himself to the impress of his surroundings: in the Luxembourg Gardens, where he finds a “nook” from which to enjoy the proximity of “terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains, little trees in green tubs, little women in white caps and shrill little girls at play” (77), and, most memorably, when he decides to take a train alone to the countryside where he spends a day merely wandering and admiring, before ending up in an auberge whose proprietor speaks only of “what she could do for her visitor’s appetite” (416). This last lovely moment is, of course, then broken in upon, irrevocably, by Chad and Mme de Vionnet, in the revelation of their sexual entanglement that, made plain at last to Strether, constitutes the novel’s crowning catastrophe. Without in any way detracting from the meaningful personal connections Strether makes in Paris, indeed with Mme de Vionnet above all—­which we will discuss anon—­these scenes do unavoidably suggest that a certain absolute immersion in a kind of full worldedness may be most possible when actual other human beings absent themselves.23 Or, alternatively, perhaps, when one relates to them only in the “minimal” terms Gage McWeeny has described in The Comfort of Strangers, a particularly intriguing contribution to the new relational criticism. In McWeeny’s account, the distinct forms of being together made possible by the growth of modern cities, in which one is constantly in the presence of absolute strangers, become, fascinatingly, a kind of apotheosis of sociality as such. It is as if only when specific concrete relations, and the demands and constraints they entail, recede that a purified “sociability” can come forward, a concept McWeeny theorizes by drawing on the work of the turn-­of-­the-­century sociologist Georg Simmel. What is more striking is the tendency (which in McWeeny is equivocal) to construe this moment in quasi-­utopian terms, a line of thinking McWeeny actually develops via a reading of an essay by Henry James concerning his enjoyment of the city of London during the summer “when everyone he knows is out of town.” Suddenly the social world seems “infinite,” James writes; in McWeeny’s gloss, the stranger-­filled city is experienced as “a sublime of social potentiality” (1). As McWeeny notes, Leo Bersani—­one of James’s most important inter­ preters—­has taken up and extended Simmel’s sociability concept to write about gay cruising, as a fleeting encounter between strangers that evades “the messiness of intersubjectivity” (McWeeny 131). We will return to Bersani in more depth later, but for now, it is worth noting how in Bersani, too, such moments can be conceived both as evading the problems raised by social life and as purified idealizations of the impulse to associate. Unquestionably, however, they are put forward in his writing as glimpses of a utopian ideal of relationality in which self merges more fully into world.

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utopian fusion Such accounts thus portray Henry James, along Posnock’s lines, as an even more radical embodiment of the ideal sociality conceived by William in his last writings. And yet while the new relational criticism often acknowledges its debt to Posnock, it is important, too, to note a key difference here. For Posnock, William’s final turn, via Bergson, to a truly utopian socius risks leaving actual human society too far behind; in his words, the elder James brother’s “quest for ‘the immediate experience of life’ ” eschews any reference to “the power of psychological, cultural, and historical mediations to constitute the individual and enmesh him in a web of dependent relations” (97, emphasis mine; see also 106).24 For the new relational criticism, by contrast, the aim can lie in reconstruing Henry in precisely these idealizing terms. Indeed, these can strikingly verge on the mystical, just as in William’s Bergsonian turn. In Joan Richardson’s A Natural History of Pragmatism—­which, like William’s late work, transforms pragmatism from a social discourse to something more like an ecological one—­The Ambassadors may be read as a “modern allegory of illumination, a secular book of revelation,” with Maria Gostrey an angel leading Strether to a higher plane (160, 167). Richardson derives such analyses by understanding Henry’s novel not only as in direct conversation with his brother’s writings but as further imbued with the thought of their father, Henry Sr.—­a connection she makes by noting the latter’s deep investments in the mystical teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg alongside the fact that Henry Jr., names his hero, whose full name is Lewis Lambert Strether, after the hero of a novel by Balzac (Louis Lambert) explicitly indebted to Swedenborg’s ideas. As Richardson explains, Swedenborg, too, argued against the same dualism that bothered William James; for him, she states, “The spiritual world is not an other world, but this one perceived in its intensities,” as when we recognize how all things permeate each other (139). In Louis Lambert, the titular hero, himself a Swedenborgian mystic, writes a visionary Treatise of the Will that, reversing its role in Schopenhauer, makes the will the faculty that reaches forth to acknowledge that relatedness of all things. As Richardson notes, however, Balzac’s Lambert succumbs to madness as a result of his visions and perishes. Moreover, when the namesake is mentioned to The Ambassadors’ Lambert Strether by his companion Maria, he agrees with her depiction of it as an “awfully bad” novel (29). All this is to say that my own sense of James’s engagement with it, which we will consider later, is less fully affirming than Richardson’s, in ways that have everything to do with my skepticism regarding the relational project as able to speak to the

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fullness of his work—­and, indeed, we will see, even the totality of William’s—­ more generally. Their father, however, remains a different matter. He very much did, as Richardson underscores, turn to Swedenborg as a means of imagining a beatified sociality. To recognize this, indeed, is to begin to reconstruct a much broader transatlantic conversation on this subject of the social as greater Will that, I wish to argue, forms a crucial precursor to the relational criticism of the present day. And it then becomes possible to open the door to other historical voices, within the same emergent field of social thought, that can provide constructive alternatives to that criticism and, finally, to the more complex sense of the relation between social and will that, to my mind, inheres in the thought of both James brothers alike. First, however, let us return to the paternal James. In Henry Sr.’s case no less than in William’s, the hope for a perfected sociality could be said to have emerged out of a psychological crisis. As William spoke of his sudden vision of the asylum inmate as a possible other self, so did the elder James write (years after the fact) of an experience in 1844, just after the births of William and Henry, in which an ordinary domestic evening was shattered by the sudden vision of a demonic specter appearing within the room, radiating despair and woe.25 William had been grappling with the horror of an unfeeling naturalist cosmos; his father, a generation removed, confronted its theological counterpart, the Calvinist God of will. The result, in each case, was the same: “my will,” the elder James wrote, “thoroughly fagged out . . . with the formal, heartless task of conciliating a stony-­hearted Deity,—­actually collapsed” (Perry 1:21). Where William found relief from his thoughts in the company of others as a teacher, then, his father was saved by society in the form of an idea. His fascination with Swedenborg began when a politically radical neighbor, Sophia Chichester, inquired about his “malady”—­he termed it a brain “overtasked . . . in the pursuit of the highest questions”—­and told him the Swedish mystic (deemed insane by some, but already admired by James’s friend Emerson) was the “physician” he required.26 Yet James saw in Swedenborg’s teachings more than individual guidance; indeed, he saw a way out of the individualizing tendency of Calvinism altogether. These hopes were only further cemented through his discovery of the work of Charles Fourier, the then-­fashionable French reformer whose ideas, together with Swedenborg’s, played a key role in the creation of the nearby utopian community Brook Farm (later to be satirized in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance). Although Fourier’s memorably imaginative ideas about how to achieve an ideal social order were secular ones, to James they be-

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spoke the potentiality of a “Divine social order for man!” (Perry 1:33). As he elaborated in an 1849 lecture, “Socialism and Civilization”—­by “socialism,” James explained, he meant simply “the idea of a perfect fellowship or society among men”—­Fourier and the era’s other communitarian reformers were to be lauded for conceiving of a society that would express, through mutually shared property, “the divine life in man” (82–­83). This was because, as James would put it in another lecture, human sacredness was to be sought not in the individual soul but in the “sentiment of human unity,” which, at its best, the American Constitution expressed (111). Small wonder, then, his son Henry Jr.’s recollection of, as children, having been told that “we need never fear not to be good enough if only we were social enough” (Small Boy 134). The title of his father’s final book, Society the Redeemed Form of Man, made the message just as clear. By the time of William and Henry Jr.’s later nineteenth-­century maturity, the antebellum reform spirit had waned. Yet, in response to the starkly economically divided society of Gilded Age America, many communitarian views reemerged in turn-­of-­the-­century sociological ideas about the inherently social nature of humanity. At times, these could even retain a mystical tinge.27 “Society, of course, is spiritual,” wrote the sociologist Charles Cooley (Noble, Paradox 107). The problem, as for Henry James Sr., was only that contemporary society as yet failed to express this true divine nature. Undoubtedly, however, it would. Cooley’s ideas overlapped with those of his University of Michigan colleagues John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, who would decamp for the University of Chicago in 1894. Dewey had taught him, Mead wrote, to recognize that the body and soul are but two sides of the same thing, and that the gulf between them is only the expression of the fact that our life does not yet realize the ideal of what our social life will be when our functions and acts shall be not simply ours but the processes of the great body politic which is God as revealed in the universe.28

Along with the psychologist James Mark Baldwin, one of Cooley’s great influences, Cooley and Mead drew on the increasing authority of the doctrine of evolution to make their case. Where the dominant social thought of Herbert Spencer had emphasized “the survival of the fittest”—­a coinage that was his, not Darwin’s—­to put forward an individualizing version of evolution well suited to the economics of laissez-­faire, the Michigan and Chicago sociologists countered by arguing for “plasticity” and “gregariousness” as human beings’ most advanced biological traits.29 “We have quite given up the old abstraction of an . . . individualistic and egoistic person,” Baldwin wrote; the

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new social science made evident that the “self ” was “thoroughly social in its origin.” More dramatically, E. A. Ross termed individuals but “plastic lumps of human dough” to be shaped on the powerful “social kneadingboard” (quoted in Rodgers 125).30 The “social-­self ” theorists, as the historian James Livingston has dubbed them, used these arguments to counter not only Spencerian utilitarianism but other individually based conceptions from Calvinist theology to social contract theories of the rise of the modern state.31 Against the former, they denied the idea of any “inherent selfishness” in man; what appeared as “evil” was in fact a historical phenomenon, bound to disappear with the advent of a more integrated society.32 Against the latter, Dewey, citing Cooley’s ideas, argued that “the statement that ‘yesterday and ever since history began, men were related to one another as individuals’ ” was a falsehood, for American democracy itself had sprung organically and directly out of “genuine community life” (quoted in Diggins, 301). As John Patrick Diggins has summarized the Progressive sociologists’ perspective, they argued “that man is social in nature and society cooperative in spirit” (364). Hence, Mead described the social ideal they believed could become flesh as one in which one’s own “interests” and those of everyone else would effectively merge (quoted in Diggins 371). Indeed, this merger might be understood in more intimate terms yet, ones recalling those of our current relational moment; in Baldwin’s words, far from being a “single soul shut up in a body to act,” a person might best be construed as “a soul partly in his own body, partly in the bodies of others . . . so intimate is this social bond.“33 If this perspective recalled the late writings of William James, this was hardly accidental, for James was thoroughly involved with the intellectual milieu of the social-­self writers, as Posnock emphasizes in his relational treatment of William and Henry alike. Dewey, of course, famously admired Pragmatism,34 but James knew both him and Baldwin as well from their work in psychology; Mead, meanwhile, trained with James and Josiah Royce at Harvard, while Cooley, who trained with Baldwin, spoke of James as a model for his thought, along with Emerson (Noble, Paradox 139).35 In Posnock’s counterreading, William James actually fails to live up to the ideals of the social-­self theorists—­he cites critiques of him by Cooley, Mead, and Dewey (309, 93)—­while, just as unexpectedly, his novelist brother’s “intersubjective sense of identity” recalls them (173). On the one hand, such an assessment may well reopen the possibility for an account of both James brothers’ writings beyond that of the current relational criticism. After all, as Richard M. Gale has remarked, while Dewey famously credited his reading of The Principles of Psychology for, as Gale puts it, leading him “out of bondage

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in the land of Hegel,” Dewey’s positive assessment of James could be said to render his work less individualist and, indeed, less dualist than it actually was, so as to accord more fully with Dewey’s own naturalist behaviorism and “socialization of all things distinctively human” (Gale 335).36 On the other hand, perhaps the flaw lies in the tendency to presume that William or Henry would be best viewed through either an “individualist” or a “relationalist” lens.37 We saw that for William, the idealization of sociality grew out of his own tortured relation to the life of the mind, which compelled him deeply at the same time that it threatened depressive and obsessional abysses. As we will see later in this chapter, however, these experiences also left William with a lifelong compassionate interest in psychic suffering and its relation to serious questioning, as evidenced by his writings on the “sick soul” in The Varieties of Religious Experience—­a subject typically absent from recent revivals of his thought that focus only on the cosmic optimism of A Pluralistic Universe. Dewey’s reference to James leading him “out of bondage in the land of Hegel” is in fact worth dwelling on. Although Dewey in particular moved toward a more naturalist and behaviorist perspective as his career progressed, he, like Baldwin and like William James’s Harvard colleague Royce, had begun his career as an idealist, in direct dialogue with the resurgent group of neo-­Hegelian philosophers in Britain, whom William had singled out for praise in “The Dilemma of Determinism” (Cohen, Self 105). His early ethical writings thus conceived the merger of individual and social ends as the result of a developmental process of “self-­realization.”38 Although William, ever the champion of straightforward prose, deplored Hegel’s famously dialectical style, he grew more interested in Hegel over the course of his career, and he was long an admirer of the British Hegelian F. H. Bradley.39 To return the relational thought of the turn of the century to its Hegelian roots—­including exploring its overlaps with British idealism—­begins to enable what is in my view a finally more compelling account of its instantiation in Henry James’s fiction (and one truer to Posnock’s concerns regarding the late William James’s, and I would suggest contemporary relational criticism’s, dissolution of sociality into a kind of vitalism or Lebensphilosophie). As we will see in the section that follows, the contemporary philosopher Robert Pippin has explored Henry James’s work through a Hegelian lens of this kind, with salutary results. Indeed, while in the last analysis Pippin, too, remains more wedded to a kind of redemptive power of sociality than the reading I will myself be offering (focusing on The Ambassadors together with William’s Varieties), his Hegelian perspective nonetheless crucially enables autonomy and relationality to coexist. As Pippin argues, it would be mistaken to oppose

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the bounded Man of Reason to a self open to otherness: it is precisely through reason, the giving of reasons, that the self engages with otherness. A complete merger of self and other, as we see it in the American social-­self thinkers of both James’s era and today, would not allow for the space of reflection that instantiates freedom in this account. Henry’s investments in such a space finally turn out to be what are most elided by Posnock’s otherwise powerful account of The American Scene, which in its crucial recasting of the novelist as clearly fascinated and stimulated by the modernizing New York streets loses sight of the ways that those same streets can nonetheless pose a threat to reflection itself. These two features, in fact, derive in Henry’s account from the same component: the sense of an enormous dynamic energy, a “will to move—­to move, move, move, as an end in itself,” which both possesses a genuine “allure” and yet guarantees that “relief, detachment, dignity, meaning, perished utterly and lost all rights” (65).40 This difficulty of carving out a space for thought is also figured architecturally, with respect to the city’s truncated geographical footprint, as an “absence of margin” that “make[s] detachment and independence . . . an insoluble problem, preclud[ing] without pity any element of court or garden”; even the structures themselves are said to prefer “gaping arches and far perspectives” to “enclosing walls” and “practicable doors” (125). James calls this “an expression of the gregarious state breaking down every barrier” (notably exclusive of those of money and apparent “respectability,” 79). For all of these reasons, the hotel becomes the book’s emblem of “the American spirit” at this moment—­with its denizens constantly moving in and out, and all on display in the lobby-­as-­thoroughfare, a testament to a society busily “unlearn[ing] the old discrimination in favour of the private life” (79). The hotel’s twin is the skyscraper, which, too, appears a temple of the “expensively provisional,” to be thrown to the heavens only temporarily before its replacement by a yet more dazzling, of-­the-­moment construction. Here we see how Henry recasts pragmatism’s cherished sense of provisionality as a virtue as something more double-­edged, containing at once the “planned obsolescence” characteristic of capitalist modernity. Thus we see the way in which the very dynamism that could make the modernizing city resemble William James’s “pluralistic universe” might be experienced as both exciting and, from a different vantage, at times almost violent in its lack of care for anything beyond the interest of the moment. Henry’s concern here about the squeezing out of any “margin” for privacy or thought—­a term he uses elsewhere in his fiction of this period, as in In the Cage—­can help remind us that, for him, the point was less to abandon all boundedness in favor of social immersion than for both to be given their

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due. It’s this double stance that the Hegelian perspective makes possible, and to which we will now turn. liberal intersubjectivity As we saw above, the relational turn—­whether in the literary-­critical renovation of Henry James or in the social thought of James’s own era—­typically entails a rejection of the “sovereign self of liberal individualism,” or what we might call the nineteenth-­century subject defined by a self-­governing will. Where the relational critics write against this conception in favor of an ideal collectivity, the British Hegelians’ versions of “social selfhood” represent attempts to reconceive the liberal individual in ways that are not antisocial. That is to say, they aim to disentangle Spencerian from Hegelian or even Kantian liberalism. As Lauren Goodlad, Amanda Anderson, and others have aimed to point out, such an account is in many ways truer to the actual complexity of Victorian liberal thought, including that thought’s literary instantiations in the work of a writer like George Eliot. Where the contemporary academic left tends to associate liberalism as an ideology with the free market and an individualism built on the denial of social interdependencies (Anderson 4), these ideas cannot account for civic-­minded strains within nineteenth-­century liberalism that eventuated in the New Liberalism of the 1890s, with its strong arguments on behalf of state intervention to better people’s lives. Indeed, as Anderson notes, the New Liberalism can in many ways appear “the most confidently progressive form of liberalism,” precisely due to the way it draws at times on vitalist ideas (“organic development, harmony, and teleology”) to merge “self-­actualization” holistically with the good of the social whole (37).41 An example would be the late nineteenth-­century work of Bernard Bosanquet, which influenced both Dewey and James. Drawing on Rousseau’s idea of the general will, Bosanquet, who had been a student of the Hegelian T. H. Green’s at Oxford, developed his idea of the Actual Will and the Real Will. The latter, composed not of what an individual might want at a given moment but of the aim toward which that individual more broadly strived, mapped onto the greater or “common good” embodied by the larger society. Whereas for Rousseau the general will was a distinctly political concept, in the later social-­scientific era of Bosanquet, drawing on Hegel’s concept of Sitt­ lichkeit, it became a term for “the expression of a society’s values and beliefs through the whole range of its institutions and practices” (Mander 494–­96).42 Like the other British counterparts of the American “social-­self ” theorists, Bosanquet was a philosopher, not a psychologist or sociologist. And while he moved British idealism much more fully in the direction of political theory,

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the distinctive way he construed the general will owed much to Green’s and Bradley’s earlier writings, which had emphasized the “will of the society” from the specific point of view of moral philosophy (Mander 190–­91). Hence, in Bradley’s Ethical Studies, generally taken to be the movement’s foundational text, the social becomes the answer to how a finite human being can participate in the “infinite” moral life: “You cannot be a whole, unless you join a whole” (quoted in Mander 186). In Green, similarly, conscience was reformulated as society’s voice (Mander 207). Hence, while, on the one hand, writers like Bradley and Green could sound much like the American social-­self theorists—­both emphasized the impossibility of “abstract[ing]” the individual from the social context that generated that person’s “thoughts, character, and role in life” (quoted in Mander 190; Mander 6)—­for the British idealists, drawing on the Kantian legacy still active in Hegel, it remained much more important to stress the role of each individual’s participation via reasoned reflection in the larger whole.43 Put otherwise, the point was not that the individual simply merged into that whole but that she found her own freedom by affirming her role as part of it. The ideal of rational autonomy was thus retained, with only the means of achieving it changed. It was this combination of reasoned autonomy with social selfhood—­a “social individualism,” in Andrew Vincent’s words (437)—­that represented the distinctively Hegelian legacy to British idealism. (By contrast, their American counterparts, from Dewey to Mead, were, over time, much more willing to de-­emphasize “the constituting activity of the ‘I’ ” and finally to move toward a nascent environmental behaviorism [Livingston 66; Cohen, Self 149].) As Robert Pippin argues, “Hegel’s theory of recognition amounts to an unusual social theory of subjectivity  .  .  . and therewith a social theory of freedom” (Hegel’s 210). Specifically, “Hegel’s claim is that self-­definition is necessarily self-­definition in relation to and even in unavoidable struggle with an other” (Idealism 424). This emphasis on struggle makes clear that “social selfhood” does not represent here a mere fact of human biological development, but, rather, an achievement, entailing the difficult coming to terms with the fact of others’ equivalent moral claims (Henry James 24). In this understanding, individuality is retained, but rather than constituting the starting point, it represents, as we began to see in the discussion of Hegel in the previous chapter, the end point of an intersubjective process, an achievement rather than a given (Hegel’s 215). The delineations here allow a Hegelian like Pippin to carve out a position not recognized from the “relational” (pragmatic or Latourian) or social-­self theorists’ point of view, for Pippin opposes both much of what they oppose and the alternative they represent. Like them, he finds fault with Kantian

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epistemological and moral dualism—­for Hegel, Pippin states, since “we do not have the alternative to exist in a higher spirituality,” ethics must entail an engagement with “what is present and given”—­and with the Cartesian gap between the subject and what is external to it (Idealism 434, 375). The problem, as he puts it, is that while the hyperbolic notion of the individual as the “wholly self-­reliant author of his or her world” may be a fantasy, we throw the baby out with the bathwater when this critique means we can no longer speak of “reflective, rational self-­consciousness of any kind” (Persistence 17). He thus objects both to communitarian and other antimodern positions that conceive of relationality in “pre-­volitional” terms (Idealism 449), as well as to more pragmatic Wittgensteinian ones for which “ordinary language is all right or . . . our practices just go on . . . texts just circulate, social scientists just observe, and so on” (Idealism 394, 398). Both, one might say, deny the work, the serious self-­questioning, involved in attaining to the meaningful relationality that is, in his Hegelian account, indissociable from a meaningful personal freedom. As mentioned above, then, Pippin has brought these perspectives to bear on the work of Henry James in a volume titled Henry James and Modern Moral Life. The middle ground here achieved allows Pippin to read both The Ambassadors and one of James’s most celebrated earlier novels, The Portrait of a Lady, in a way that, similarly, rejects both the classic understanding of them as stories of (possibly pathological) renunciation and the critique of that reading via the relational ideal. As for the relational critics, for Pippin, it is possible to see as accessions to sociality the very gestures that had appeared to earlier readers to hold others—­and, specifically, love—­at arm’s length. Pippin differs, however, in making the promise paradigmatic of how individuals such as Portrait’s Isabel Archer or The Ambassadors’ Strether can willingly bind themselves to another through a social convention of reciprocity. Hence, while for the relational critics sociality arguably becomes indistinguishable from self-­indulgence, for Pippin a gesture like these characters’ does entail the sacrifice of a more willful freedom so as to attain a higher degree of self-­ realization through social attachment. As the similarity to the British Hegelians suggests, Pippin’s James is akin to the Victorianists’ George Eliot: a “liberal,” realist novelist in the best sense. This perspective does disavow, however, what the relational critics focus on in him, which is more a certain affective intensity—­albeit one fully positivized in their readings, as in Bergson, as a welcome “liberation” from rationality. Others, notably, have drawn on this same intensity to pressure James’s generic allegiances from a very different angle. Peter Brooks, for example, joins others in arguing for him as a melodramatist; Edmund Wilson links him to

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tragedians like Racine; and many, of course, have conceived the late works in particular as protomodernist dramas of consciousness. Since reflection is so key to what Pippin describes, the latter view need not disturb his account. It is a notable fact, though, that, unlike in the case of even Huckleberry Finn, we do not bear witness to Isabel or Strether arriving mentally at the decisions so consequential for Pippin’s readings of them. Rather, in both cases but most of all in Isabel’s, the most extended scenes of their reflection involve the revelation of a truth buried behind the surfaces of the social, disclosing a dark reality of constraint behind what had appeared as freedom. The presence of such thematics in James’s work has much to do with why it has seemed to some readers closer to melodrama or tragedy than social realism. And yet the striking thing in James seems more the co-­presence of these dimensions, the way in which all we saw at work in the preceding chapter on Melville—­power/ intensity, willfulness, the sense of a noumenal or hidden layer—­is present here alongside a much more mundane social world. How? James himself spoke directly to the generic heterogeneity of his fiction in his famous preface to one of his earliest novels, The American—­the first to treat the “international theme” of the naive American abroad that would reappear most memorably in The Ambassadors and Portrait of a Lady. In that preface, James goes so far as to suggest—­as others have as well—­that the most paradigmatically “social” novelists, at least those in Europe (he speaks of Balzac and Zola), in fact derive their very greatness from their refusal ever quite to “commi[t]” themselves to realism over romance (279). James, moreover, gives two remarkable definitions of what he means by “romance” that have considerable bearing on our concerns here. The first, as we have seen, is that romance entails “experience liberated” from “the inconvenience of a related . . . state” (280). In the second, he explains that he means by the real “the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another,” and by the romantic those that “we never can directly know: the things that reach us only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and our desire” (279). Combined, then, these suggest that the truth of our social imbrication is one that will eventually impose itself, despite all of our attempts to conceive ourselves floating free of it in a realm of sheer self-­determination, as Isabel perhaps most famously does. Such a depiction recalls that of one of the founders of sociology, Émile Durkheim, also writing in the 1890s, defining what he called the “social fact.” For Durkheim, the social fact shared with material reality the feature of “resistance” to the individual “will” (Rules 70). The melodrama of the Jamesian text seems, then, very much to take this form. More broadly, however, James’s formulation of realism and romance

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poses challenges to Posnock’s and Pippin’s accounts alike, and, hence, I would suggest, to the entire project of “relational” James as a rejection of the willful will. It does so not only by insisting on both categories (thus reintroducing realism to the Posnock account and romance to Pippin’s), but, in doing so, by reinstating an irreducible dualism of value, and insisting that this dualism is crucial to the novel as a form. This notion of the social as implacable “fact,” it should be noted, has been explicitly critiqued both by relational criticism44 and by Pippin, who insists that in the context James describes, “There are no ‘social facts’ . . . only socially negotiated and perhaps ultimately unresolvable, contesting interpretations” (Henry 147). Yet while all of these writers’ sense that James confronts a social world in flux seems unimpeachable, their complete dismissal of the “imperative” nature of sociality leaves us with little way into James’s conception of realism versus romance.45 Certainly, it is a commonplace in the criticism to note that James’s novels, particularly the three late masterpieces, tend to hum with a sense of something menacing but impalpable behind the polite surfaces of social interaction, and the plots often climax with a shocking revelation of deceptions that have been hidden, which hint at murkier mysteries still. In a particularly insightful analysis, Nancy Bentley has noted that this melodramatic mode often led period reviewers to conceive of James’s insights into human relations as less sociological than anthropological, revelations of “primitive” violence and passion below the “civilized” everyday. One review of Wings of the Dove was thus titled “In Darkest James”; another opined that he described “society as organized cannibalism” (Bentley 69, 85). At the very least, Bentley suggests, James’s subject might better be described as what the pioneering anthropologist Malinowski termed “the Mystery of the Social” (70), and his novels conceived as species of, if anything, gothic fiction (87).46 It’s this conception of the social that the more cheerful social-­self theorists and relational critics cannot address, since their pragmatist allegiances depend on replacing such depths with simply an inventive play of surfaces. Pippin’s account, too, tries to cordon off this sense of a layered social, with “ritualistic formalism” above and darkness below, as simply the residue of a decaying culture, as emblematized by figures like Isabel’s villainous husband Gilbert Osmond. And yet, if we look at novels like The Awkward Age, it can appear that the realm of elaborate social codes is precisely that of characters who believe themselves superbly “modern” (Pippin, Henry James 38). The curious way in which the strenuously up-­to-­date and the crumbling realm of Old World mores and appearances can merge is perhaps most evident in a character like The Ambassadors’ Chad, who is at once the consort and protégé

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of the enigmatic Mme de Vionnet, her past buried in romance and mystery, and, toward the end of the novel, the figure who most embodies the New York of The American Scene in his fascination with the new “science” of surfaces: that is, advertising. In sum, what seems needed here is a view of Jamesian sociality that can grasp the way its charming surfaces may both delight and obscure uglier depths. For such a view, the subject of manners must come to the fore. b e au t i f u l f o r m With its anthropological focus, Bentley’s work can help to remind us that to be a novelist of sociality has traditionally meant to be a “novelist of manners.” What happens when we reintroduce this category to the social as it has here been portrayed? Manners may be understood as a way in which we can live together harmoniously, but, as such, they always seem to suggest an overlay modulating roiling passions beneath, and, hence, potentially no more than a congenial surface that cannot simply be trusted to match actual intentions. One might say they reintroduce the problem of the “social fact” in two senses: via manners themselves as phenomena that are specifically social (as opposed to extending that category to include everything) and via the implication of some sort of occluded depth of sociality that both motors it and remains hidden at the same time. Lionel Trilling’s essay “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” from his Liberal Imagination, speaks of Henry James as these themes’ master. Manners appear here, too, in what two very different guises: as mere “appearances” hiding a “sordid, hidden reality” of historical violence, and as themselves the very site of reality, as, on the one hand, the sign of the “social fact” of class,47 and, as on the other, the place to look for “the largest intentions of men’s souls” (Liberal Imagination 247; Moral Obligation 110). Indeed, for Trilling, the danger of ignoring manners lay in such a gesture’s illiberal tendencies; by mapping the social field as a play of differences, the novelist of manners confirmed the existence of human variety (and hence, as Cora Diamond has argued with regard to James, moral variety also). The complexity of manners, their capacity to serve as sign of falsehood and of truth, in fact relates to another aspect of them, their status as what we might term the social’s aesthetic aspect: not just what is done, but how it is done, which in a Henry James novel often merits the designation “beautiful.” Thus Leo Bersani, who joins Trilling in focusing on manners as the way desires are both expressed and deflected at the same time, also writes of them as opportunities for self-­invention. For Bersani, in his remarkable account of

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James’s oeuvre in A Future for Astyanax, James should be thought of (along with Stendhal) as “one of our most sociable novelists” because of his fascination with “talk” (128). Talk as these writers depict it gains its particular charge by both conveying and diverting the intensities lying beneath: “the appeal of civilized speech comes from recognizing those detours—­of wit, of tone, of shifting rhythms and of ideas—­which ‘being civilized’ imposes on the expression of a desire,” and “find[ing] a kind of sensual pleasure” in these “indirections” themselves—­that is, in language (129).48 While one may discern some overlaps between this account and, say, a contemporary “relational” one like Omri Moses’s, which draws on Bersani’s work—­Bersani does note that society so construed offers multiple “occasion[s] for self-­inventive behavior,” “promot[ing] new versions of being” that “diversify desires and break up rigid structures of character” (129–­30, 146)—­one key difference lies in Bersani’s greater allowance for such desires’ violence. More striking is the fact that readers of novels like Portrait in their own era made comments highlighting this very aspect. “There is one general trait which all the characters have in common,” according to a review in the Critic. “They are all excessively witty and caustic. They bite, and snap, and criticise each other—­that is, they bite and snap politely” (Hayes 127). Agreed the Century, while “Mr. James is too much of a gentleman to admit snarling among ladies and gentlemen,” the fact remains that “every leading person in the book does, in a polite way, enter frequently into a form of personal criticism of someone else” (quoted in Edel, Life 2:428). Importantly, the more familiar critiques of James’s excessive intellectualism and, hence, supposedly denuded sympathies were in fact entwined with such a sense of what sociality looked like in his novels (429).49 Bersani seems drawn to the combination of manners and intensity—­or formalism and desire—­here, yet finally, it seems, the social conceived in this way cannot really serve as a realm for aesthetic invention, because “the freedom not to be” (but, rather, to create) that it offers is ultimately “threatened by the petrifying definitions of others,” as we certainly see in the case of Isabel’s marriage to Osmond (Future 130). In this sense, Bersani’s reading accords with Durkheim’s understanding of the “social fact” as that which places a restraint on the individual will. The “petrifying” aspects of sociality, Bersani explains, are, crucially, what motivate the withdrawal into a space of thought that has caused so many difficulties for James, as a means of achieving the more radicalized freedom the social world finally rebuffs. While in agreement with Pippin that James’s chief subject is “freedom,” in other words, Bersani renders that freedom in precisely the willful form Pippin eschews, yet via the same means Pippin uses to define will ethically: thought (Future 132). The

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capaciousness of Jamesian consciousness, Bersani suggests, is in fact closer to that of criticism than that of literature; as such, it embodies something like the “liberal” ideal in a mode that Bersani depicts as disturbing in its breadth: Critical interpretation is intrinsically generalizing and depersonalizing; art as it exists in criticism . . . “belongs” to the community rather than to the individual. . . . Criticism may even strike us as being between personalities, and in that unidentifiable “position” it can discover the somewhat sickening richness of disinterested conjecture. . . . The menace of criticism, in short, proceeds from its very freedom of appreciation. If it liberalizes art by “respeaking” it in a less insistent, more abstract language, it also proposes a passionless indulgence in the possibilities of design. (Future 145)

If the idea here of a withdrawal from the slings and arrows of sociality into a more magisterial space of thought and composition (“design”) is a familiar one, the association of the latter with something like Trilling’s idea of a “liberal imagination” may not be. David Wayne Thomas has, however, argued powerfully for the ways in which the liberal ideal and bugbear of “many-­ sidedness” evolved in the later years of the nineteenth century into an aestheticist one.50 As propounded by Matthew Arnold or Walter Pater, the aim of apprehending life in its fullness and variety began to appear, first, as an alternative to the viewpoint of morality and, second, as a standpoint to be valued, not denigrated, precisely for what might otherwise have seemed its “weakness of will”: its privileging of “knowing” for its own sake over the aim at action. Following this distinction, then, Trilling’s own preface to The Liberal Imagination understands liberalism’s two strands as one that upholds human “variousness” and another that, precisely due to its “vision of a general enlargement” of human possibility, begins to move toward a “rational direction of human life” that betrays that guiding impulse (8–­9).51 What is notable here is that the rationalizing and aestheticizing sides of liberalism that in Arnold had appeared opposed become in Trilling’s account two more intertwined dimensions of the same fealty to affirming the social totality in its fullness. This paves the way, it would seem, for Bersani’s otherwise curious sense of James’s social imagination as at once an enlargement and a constriction of vision at the same time. As a richer “freedom of appreciation” made possible by a more distanced, comprehensive view, it at once falls prey to the tendency toward “abstract[ion]” that that perspective engenders (Future 145).52 In Bersani’s account no less than in Trilling’s, then, the result is that the will returns: what had seemed to be an “impersonal” point of view is revealed to be one possessed by a rage for order. All that is surveyed is subjected to what Bersani terms the “tyranny” of a “single, insistent passion”—­in effect

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rendering the Jamesian narrator or protagonist as Captain Ahab, except one permitted to realize the dream of becoming “triumphantly and eerily self-­ sufficient” (Future 155, 144). Indeed, the human hope of replacing the divine Will with its own is here achieved in the aestheticist conception of life as “a product of art,” hence of “the original plan of a single creator” (whether James himself or a stand-­in like The Golden Bowl’s Maggie Verver).53 This idealized realm offers a means of escape from a social world defined as a zone of intensified desires in conflict and, hence, would appear to grant one desire alone, that of the artist, free rein. The crucial point in Bersani’s argument, however, is that “this very freedom from external and internal constraints depersonalizes and, in a sense, re-­enslaves consciousness in James.” For as “the ‘I’ itself ” becomes “merely the neutral territory occupied by language,” it disappears: it “no longer thinks or desires.” Thus, while A Future for Astyanax more broadly argues against the way the “notion of human character” can “limi[t] the imagination of desire,” in James, Bersani argues, we see a counterdanger: the way “the absorption of character into language can also be the dehumanization of desire” (146). Bersani then makes a similar argument regarding the final “dehumanization” of the characters who, James-­like, take on this more-­than-­human, stage-­managing role within the books. Hence, when Milly Theale becomes a theologized presence at the end of Wings, “dy[ing] to the world” like Clarissa, this treatment of her by the novel itself is portrayed by Bersani as in line with the “murderous” aims of Merton Densher and Kate Croy to secure her fortune, for, in each case, we see “destroy[ed]” the “real peculiarity of her presence which we feel early in the work” (145). Bersani wrote all this in 1976. Over the course of a long and marvelously rich career, he repeatedly returned to James, and to the issues treated in Future’s “The Jamesian Lie.” His work on James, particularly in that chapter, formed the subject of a special issue of the Henry James Review at a very different critical moment, in 2011—­that of the emergence of relational or “impersonal” criticism. What becomes evident in that issue, indeed, is how influential Bersani’s formulations have been on that moment’s emergence—­along with those of another important critic who made related arguments about the status of consciousness in James’s writing, Sharon Cameron. Contemporary “relational” arguments frequently cite both scholars as guiding lights.54 Yet something curious has occurred here that bears some investigation, for it will be central to our own final engagement with the later James. In essence, arguments about the expansiveness of consciousness in James that appeared in the Bersani of 1976 as strong ethical critiques have consistently become, by the present relational moment, equally strong claims on behalf of these

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texts’ ethical virtues—­including by Bersani himself. How? In effect, a spread of consciousness that once suggested a negation of social reality, a denial of the meaningful presence of others, transforms over time into a new understanding of sociality itself. The examples given are the same ones. Thus, in Wings of the Dove, as Bersani narrates it both in 1976 and again in the recent writings, Milly Theale is eliminated from the scene, only to take up permanent posthumous residence within Densher’s spirit. As we saw, in 1976 Bersani critiques this process: “The importance of Milly as a possibility internal to Densher makes James underplay the murderous implications of his hero’s treatment of her as a distinct human being. Densher’s flabby reasoning allows him to move from one spiritual allegiance to another without ever disturbing the perfect stillness of his being” (Future 143). But this is because Densher, in Bersani’s argument, is only doing what the novel itself does: belatedly saving Milly from destruction by sacralizing her, in a move that actually represents a colonization of her human particularity by the “perfect stillness” of both Densher’s and his own creator’s purified consciousness. In Bersani’s words, Densher “literally makes [Milly] his own” by “destroying” her specificity—­and this achievement is at one with Wings of the Dove’s “awkward transition from a novel of social relationships to an allegory of spiritual appreciations” (Future 145, 143). In that transition, Milly is reborn in disembodied form as a Christlike emblem of pure forgiveness and generosity, able to achieve an ideal, wordless communion with Densher unthreatened by “the dialogue which inevitably compromises intimacy.” “Densher is never closer to Milly,” Bersani points out, “than when he can no longer speak to her” (Future 154). Thus, at the end of the novel Densher, like Maggie in The Golden Bowl, can become an emblem of the Jamesian aesthetic ideal, an “image of consciousness, once again, triumphant and eerily self-­sufficient” (Future 144). What might have appeared as conflict between persons becomes instead a set of abstractions in which “human relations are seen entirely in terms of their compositional appeal”—­literally, their “geometry” (147–­48). Yet Bersani would not, it appears, critique this process quite so damningly were it not presented as the very opposite of violence: as a kind of beatification. Over a quarter century, later, then, Bersani revisits Merton Densher in an essay on “Beast in the Jungle” and in his contribution to the Festschrift in the Henry James Review, and matters now appear very different. What Densher and Milly (and Amerigo and Maggie in The Golden Bowl) achieve is now described, affirmatively, as a “wordless community of being” (“Re-­perusal” 279). On the one hand, this claim depends on a complete revaluation of what so disturbed the Bersani of 1976: to dispense with the specificity of persons,

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and even with desire itself, once more on behalf of a more abstract and even a more “spiritual” view, appears not only unproblematic but laudable. On the other hand, while this shift of register appeared in the 1970s as a move away from “social relationships” to a spiritualized aesthetic realm, in the recent writings it appears as an apotheosis of sociability. It is thus that the later Bersani fits into what I’ve called the relational turn (with its roots, as we’ve seen, in the spiritualized visions of sociality prevalent in James’s own era)—­a turn that the earlier Bersani can now allow us to question. Thus one can pose to the later Bersani the question I posed earlier with regard to that turn itself: how can an ideal relationality be achieved by getting rid of persons? The key perhaps lies in that line in the 1976 text that explains why Densher’s dreams of perfected consciousness are so well served by having the actual living, speaking Milly out of the picture: there is no risk of “the dialogue that inevitably compromises intimacy.” This is a curious phrase: wouldn’t dialogue facilitate intimacy, in the same way that liberalism conceives it will produce a shared public sphere? It is crucial, of course, that this can be its result—­but, in both of these cases, it is at the same time in no way a guaranteed one. By reminding us that there are two people present, dialogue may enable connection and/or make plain the differences that stand in its way. The later Bersani, however, seems drawn to a connection beyond difference. “In the jouissance of otherness,” he writes, “an entire category of exchange is erased: the category of intersubjectivity” (“Sociability” 61). We have thus moved several steps beyond the hope of Pippin and his fellow Hegelians that true freedom might be achieved through a genuine encounter with the specificity of others. Here, what guarantees that encounter’s success is that the others won’t actually be others, in any meaningful sense, at all. “With the fusion of being between . . . Densher and Milly’s spirit,” Bersani writes, “there is no other to be seen” (“Re-­perusal” 279). Bersani speaks instead of an “impersonal intimacy,” one in which the participants’ far more complete merger turns on their leaving all the self ’s particularities behind—­a project whose theological vector becomes clear in its repeated characterization as a form of “ascesis,” a “spiritual hygiene of stillness” (“Sociability” 61; “Re-­perusal” 280). Desire, which the younger Bersani saw as being so in need of acknowledgment, is here cast out, for it amounts to no more than the violent aim of imposing one’s will upon another, a dream of possession. In its place a “new ethics” arises, one predicated on subjects who have “willed [their] own lessness” (“Sociability” 62). And in limning this “ethics,” Bersani ventures into the territory of a number of recent critics taking their cues from the present ecological crisis to develop a stance of “liv[ing] less invasively in the world”

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(“Sociability” 62). Particularly in Bersani’s formulation here, we can see how such a formula applies to the Ambassadors’ Strether as he has been reconceived from Posnock forward, as someone who also does not impose himself but, rather, lets life wash over him—­or, even more powerfully, enjoys his own “self-­dispersal,” as Bersani terms his ideal here, into the surrounding, enveloping object world (“Re-­perusal” 280). Let me be as clear as possible here. The point isn’t at all that the younger Bersani was “right” about James and the older one “wrong”—­a position that would simply reverse the way most contemporary critics would see things. The point is, rather, to ask whether it might be possible to take seriously the insights of both, which would require carving out a view of Jamesian consciousness neither mostly critical nor mostly utopian—­and yet not one that simply adopts the descriptive neutrality of what we could term Sharon Cameron’s later purification of Bersani’s themes.55 As with all of this book’s maladies of will, it would be to conceive of a perspective alive to the dangers and the potentialities of the phenomenon here being described, the prodigious extensions of consciousness that, as we will now see, were theorized by William James, himself always both in fascination and in horror, as the “infinite Grübelsucht.” Henry James, I would argue, is himself clearly aware of both of these potentialities, which can best be grasped together if examined in their reappearance in the very text so important to the relational turn, The Ambassadors—­particularly if that novel is read together with the more clearly “obsessive” experiments that preceded it, notably The Turn of the Screw, In the Cage, and, above all, 1901’s The Sacred Fount. William James himself is read too undialectically within the present moment that so exalts him. He had as equivocal a view of the world as his brother seems to have had, with the difference that he tended to move back and forth between his opposing positions rather than, as Henry did, embodying them in all their complexity within a single text. Around the same years Henry was writing his late fictions, however, William was engaging most with the phenomena of psychological pathology that never ceased to fascinate him—­an interest clearly inseparable, as all of his biographers have recognized, from his own early experience. The danger of the purely “impersonal” view of William, then, is that it renders this topic virtually impossible to access. And yet, in an idea like the Grübelsucht, we see that William was easily as capable of Henry of construing such psychic phenomena in terms of “positions” or “styles” rather than simply the cliché of the individual Freudian narrative. It was crucial only to recognize that these positions or styles might be inhabited affectively in different ways, some causing pain it was crucial to try to alleviate, others offering joy and inspiration, and in some, the most complicated cases of all, affording both.

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William and the Sick Soul In many ways, William James’s current admirers write a new version of the story of his salvation by Renouvier and will, in which his salvation comes, rather, via Dewey and Bergson. Perhaps, however, his is not a salvation story at all. In the late 1890s, it appears, during the same years his brother was struggling away from his failures as a dramatist, through his peculiar fin de siècle phase, to what would eventually be the late masterpieces, William, too, found his old demons besetting him anew. While continuing to explore and affirm the ideas about will as action that would eventuate in Pragmatism and “The Will to Believe,” and those about relationality that would find fullest fruition in A Pluralistic Universe, he spent several years focusing on the themes of disordered will that had occupied him in the “Will” chapter of the Principles, first, by developing a series of lectures in 1896 on the topic of “exceptional mental states” and, then, in 1902, publishing one of his most memorable and hard-­to-­classify volumes, The Varieties of Religious Experience (itself based on a lecture series), which the author described as being a “study of human nature.” If so, it was a study suggesting human beings were, often in their most exalted moments, prone to maladies of the will. Specifically, together with William’s other writings, it suggested a linkage between “the infinite Grübelsucht” and the experience of the “sick soul” in modernity. In all of these texts, William James revisited the struggles he had experienced in the late 1860s—­most directly, albeit still obliquely, in Varieties, where one example given of the travails of the “sick soul” was a masked account of his own vision of the catatonic patient. The other examples given were Bunyan, with his obsessions about evil, and Tolstoy, stricken by melancholy, but also, like Bunyan, by questions—­deep questions concerning “how to live” and the “why” and “wherefore” of all things (147, 142). This questioning, James argues in his concluding chapter, forms the basis of the religious temperament, for it indicates a yearning for something beyond what is, a key to making some kind of sense of it all (448). He argues strongly here that such a perspective points to that which, in human existence, scientific reductionism can never address; it was the site through which the most subjective phenomena could open out onto our widest and deepest experiential realm. Yet did this mean that to access this richest of worlds was, necessarily, to risk the condition of the sick soul? Varieties comes closer to giving an affirmative answer to this question than perhaps anything else William James ever wrote—­except, perhaps, for the lectures on abnormal mental states, which touched on many of the same phenomena. It is no accident that these works were written at a time when James, like the young Sigmund Freud, had become aware of a tendency within

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the burgeoning field of psychiatry to classify patients as “degenerates” rather than working toward asking what their symptoms might tell us about what it meant to be a human being (thus, “a study of human nature,” or Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents). Yet while in some ways these arguments were of a piece with William James’s career-­long commitment to variety in all its forms, in another they stand out strongly both from what came before and from the now-­renascent “radical empiricism” that followed. James returned throughout his career to the opposition he had made in his diary in 1873, between philosophical thought as a breeding ground for “hypochondria” and the curative powers of teaching—­dealing with others, particularly in the realm of “concrete facts” (Perry 1:343). In 1879’s “The Sentiment of Rationality,” reflecting on “our national ontologic poet” Walt Whitman, “loafing on the grass” and feeling the oneness of things all around him, he wrote that “At such moments of energetic living we feel as if there were something diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in theoretic grubbing and brooding” (512).56 This image of the philosopher “grubbing”—­a word suggesting both digging for the deepest roots of things and a kind of lowly activity—­would recur over and over in James’s writings. He had likely encountered it shortly before writing the above-­mentioned essay in a brief 1878 write-­up in Popular Science Monthly on the work of one Oscar Berger concerning “a hitherto undescribed but well-­defined form of mental malady” that Berger termed Grübelsucht, or “metaphysical mania,” said to be particularly common in the young. It apparently manifested itself as “an irresistible current of ideas taking the form of useless inquiries into the how and why of everything,” beyond the limits that “sense” would allow. The editors joked that the prescribed cure of bromide of potassium and hydropathy might be recommended to many of their own more verbose would-­be contributors (“Brief Notes” 192). James, however, given his personal experience with it, never ceased to take the idea of the Grübelsucht more seriously. Perhaps most movingly, in an 1896 talk to the young men of the Harvard YMCA, he warned them of “that metaphysical tedium vitae which is peculiar to reflecting men.” As students of philosophy, he noted, they were likely all too familiar with “the scepticism and unreality that too much grubbing in the abstract roots of things will breed.” At worst, “Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life” (“Is Life” 485). James was thinking about all this a great deal in the late 1890s, as he grappled with the return of some of his own psychic lows. During the same year he addressed the Harvard youth, his Lowell lectures focused in on what he

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termed “exceptional mental states,” including various forms of obsessional thinking alongside such phenomena as hypnotism, multiple personality, hysteria, and demoniacal possession. On the one hand, James continued here to warn of the abyss of the “infinite Grübelsucht,” and in particular of what his own diary entry of 1873 had stressed: the dangers of abstraction. “To make the form of all possible thought the prevailing matter of one’s thought breeds hypochondria,” he had written as a youth, for it guarantees “doubt” will never cease, bringing skepticism inevitably in its train (what in the later lectures he described, via the psychiatric writings on obsession, as “the feeling that ‘things were not right’ ” [Taylor, William James 140]). The key was to recognize that one could address “the universal problems” less directly and abstractly through engaging with more “minor concrete questions” (Perry 1:343). In his 1896 lectures, James evidently mentioned Kant in relation to all this, and Eugene Taylor, the scholar who has sought to recreate those lectures from existing fragments together with James’s other writings, suggests he may have been both attacking Kant’s idea of the understanding as “mak[ing] nature possible formally” as well as implying that such notions might have played a role in Kant’s own depressions (Taylor, William James 140). In fact, however, matters may have been more vexed. Although Kant and the Grübelsucht appear as components of a lecture titled “Degeneration,” in reference to the diagnosis of inherited insanity then made popular by Max Nordau’s notorious 1894 volume of that name, the re-­creation of the lectures ends, in a chapter on “Genius,” with James’s powerful remarks, from an 1895 essay, against those sorts of ideas (remarks similar to others made around the same time by the young Freud): The trouble is that such writers as Nordau use the descriptive names of symptoms merely as an artifice for giving objective authority to their personal dislikes. . . . Call [a man] a degenerate and you’ve grouped him with the most loathsome specimens of the race, in spite of the fact that he may be one of its most precious members. . . . We should welcome sensibilities, impulses, and obsessions if we have them, so long as by their means the field of our experience grows deeper and we contribute the better to the race’s stores. . . . We should broaden our notion of health instead of narrowing it. (Taylor 164)

It is this attitude that, as Taylor himself notes, James carries over to the writing of The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which the Grübelsucht reappears as the experience of some of Protestant Christianity’s most venerated individuals. Taking its yearning for answers more seriously, James in this remarkable

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volume also ends up casting a less fully affirming eye on the Whitmanian alternative he has otherwise appeared himself to embody. The opposition between the two—­what James terms “healthy-­mindedness” and the state of the “sick soul” or “divided self ”—­forms the core of Varieties: its two primary “varieties” of engagement with the idea of spirit. Given how the two are presented, it might easily seem that James is simply presenting here yet one more version of psychic illness versus health as he has experienced it, as a version of entrapment in one’s own obsessive thoughts (concerning an elusive ideal realm, whether religion’s or that of philosophy) versus a blissful “relational” merger with other persons and with the world as it is, “living in the moment,” as once again embodied by the figure of Walt Whitman (132). Thus, the sick soul suffers precisely from an excess of consciousness; as in Bunyan’s case, his tendency to “contemplation” paralyzes him, leaving him prey to a theological Grübelsucht: “grubbing in rat-­holes rather than living in the light” (131, 151). From the healthy-­minded perspective, James writes, such an existence seems “unmanly and diseased” (152). “Stuff and nonsense, get out into the open air!” it exhorts (132)—­resembling the Carlyle whom James had affirmingly cited in “Dilemma of Determinism,” bellowing, “Hang your sensibilities . . . and get to work like men!” (587). Meanwhile, out in the open air we find Whitman, exemplar of the healthy-­minded, whom James describes through the writings of his “disciple,” an R. M. Bucke, as a man happiest “strolling or sauntering about outdoors,” enjoying everything he saw, and everyone he met. “I never knew him to argue or dispute,” Bucke insists, “and he never spoke about money” (83). This “pantheistic” spirit (97), this purely “expansive” view (83), James suggests, grows out of the liberalization of American Christianity over the course of the nineteenth century; it may be found in Emerson and in Unitarianism alike, with their rejection of the harsh Calvinist God. And at the turn of the century, it is flowering as never before, thanks to the mind-­cure movement, a homegrown breed of mysticism whose texts James cites at some length, making claims to the effect that “the coming into a conscious vital realization of our oneness with . . . Infinite Life” will allow adherents to “exchange dis-­ease for ease,” “suffering and pain for abounding health and strength” (97). (Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, was one of the era’s prophets.) The overlapping of healthy-­mindedness with mind cure can begin to get at how its philosophy both did and did not, simply, accord with William James’s own mature thought. In an 1899 Scribner’s essay, “The Gospel of Relaxation,” James had explicitly endorsed the movement’s tenets—­unsurprisingly, perhaps, given how much its emphasis on “optimism [as] power” (Varieties 103) jibed with his own arguments in “The Will to Believe” (1896). Mind cure’s

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can-­do attitude reflected, much like James’s own pragmatist philosophy, the “practical turn of character of the American people,” James noted. Indeed, despite its own emphasis on relaxation, it could even reflect his own insistence on an assertive will: “Much of what we call evil . . . can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer’s inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight” (Varieties 86). With the introduction of the question of evil, however, we see where James began to arrive at a more complex view of “healthy-­mindedness”—­and, as a result, of the opposing philosophy of the sick soul. We recall his father’s measured admiration for Emerson: while awed by the transcendentalist’s “magnanimous tenderness towards all creatures,” Henry Sr., finally decided it could mean only two things: either the man was hiding his truer “wants” (we might say, will) from view, or, if not—­if he had truly never experienced a moment’s temptation, or recoil of conscience—­then he could be said to lack any recognition of the fact of “sin” (Perry 1:42, 141). Of Whitman and the rest, then, William James finally wonders the same. Their attitude toward evil turns out to produce one of the strongest contrasts between healthy-­minded and sick-­souled; while the latter’s “morbid” tendencies derive from their belief in evil as of the world’s, and our own, “very essence” (124), for the former, in the words of one representative, sin appears merely “a condition, a disease, incidental to man’s development not yet being advanced enough,” and hence bound to disappear, evolutionarily, over time (90). Akin to the Greeks for whom akrasia simply entailed erroneous thinking, for them “evil is simply a lie,” and hence our course should lie simply in paying it no heed (103). William James, as his other writings make plain, could never have simply consented to such a perspective. Although often drowned out by attention to his exhortations to manly will and practical-­mindedness, his views on the recalcitrance of irrationality remained firm—­again, likely in part for personal reasons—­and, in fact, would best be seen as partners to the former, since, again as in his own intimate case, all of James’s insistences on strength of will resulted from his powerful sense of the demons in need of combating. The latter could take several forms, all relevant to our discussion here—­and, as we will see, these far outstripped the simple sense that the problem lay only in an excess of contemplation. “Life is evil,” James had written to Shadworth Hodgson in 1885, intending to combat what he termed the latter’s “monism,” a belief in the essentially rational form of the universe. By this James meant something we have heard before. “Two souls are in my breast,” he wrote; “I see the better, and in the very act of seeing it I do the worse” (Perry 1:632). How could Hodgson’s system speak to Paul’s dilemma, or to any of the other phenomena he grouped

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in Varieties under the notion of Homo duplex (a term used by Durkheim, but here borrowed from Daudet)? From wanting versus liking (“wish[ing] for incompatibles”), to wayward wills and excessive passions, all familiar phenomena to the sick-­souled—­how could a philosophy that saw evil as intellectual error contend with these age-­old struggles of humankind (Varieties 156–­ 57)? Daudet’s example was an especially fascinating one; he recalled, upon a brother’s death, thinking his father’s anguished cry would have made a grand impact “at the theatre” (156). In this moment James, too, seems to have recognized sociality might entail not simply brotherhood but a play of masks. And even if one did wish to merge, ideally, with one’s fellows as with the greater whole, as his father had so yearned to do, might not he find, as Henry Sr., did, and as William himself had wondered at the time of his youthful breakdown, how difficult it could be to overcome one’s “private interests and sympathies” and submit to the “total process,” in full awareness of the darker regions it contained—­to say nothing of one’s own (Perry 1:322)? By Varieties, then, considering this same question, William James was ready to admit that, given that “insane melancholy” does grow out of the evils we genuinely experience in the world, out of the realities of “sorrow, pain, and death” to say nothing of the perversities mentioned above, “It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible” (152–­54). Yet what, then, of the healthy-­minded perspective of a Whitman or Emerson, predicated as it was on precisely such a view? What is perhaps most fascinating about Varieties is the way in which James’s struggles around these issues play out across one of the terrains most central to his philosophy over three decades, that of “monism” and its others. Thus, in the “Sick Soul” chapter, James describes the sick soul’s morbid view of evil’s centrality as a consequence of its “monism”: if one sees the universe as making a whole, then evil, if acknowledged, must be woven into its very fabric. Healthy-­mindedness, he then explains, rejects this by opting for a “pluralistic” perspective—­which was of course the name James would increasingly adopt, over the first decade of the twentieth century, for his own mature philosophy (125). James explains that this means the monist, like the Hegelian, will retain the notion of evil as “an element dialectically required,” which “must be pinned in and kept” and “have a function awarded to it in the final system of truth,” whereas healthy-­ minded pluralism is free to conceive of it as “a pure abomination, an alien unreality,” “diseased, inferior, and excrementitious stuff ”—­“so much ‘dirt,’ as it were, and matter out of place” (126). He goes on, moreover, to affirm this view in no uncertain terms—­James at his most strongly moralizing, we might say. And yet how does this moment fit into Varieties as a whole, to say nothing of James’s varied writings on the subject of evil’s recalcitrance? In fact, in its

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opening “Circumscription of the Topic,” James had defined the religious attitude as such in terms that he here uses solely for the “monist” perspective. He illustrates it through a Guido Reni painting of Saint Michael with his foot on Satan’s neck—­the meaning of which, he states, is that “the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck,” which is “the very reason the religious consciousness is so rich from the emotional point of view” (52). And elsewhere, he affirms the sense this creates that the sick-­souled view, in according evil a place, affords the richer, the more “complete” view of existence (154). In this shift, then, the sick-­souled position becomes the one that is more “expansive,” despite the earlier characterization of Whitman, and the healthy-­minded the more “contractile.” (The latter, indeed, appears finally as the more repressive, both of its own darker side and of those it places in the “diseased” category [see, e.g., 80–­81, 152].) For the sick-­souled view conceives of the world as layered, as a “double-­storied mystery,” where the healthy-­minded perceives only a “rectilinear or one-­storied affair” (155). In this sense it is the healthy-­minded perspective that comes to take the position of monism, while the sick-­souled is revealed as, at its core, a dualism—­ perceiving as it does another, more ideal realm that is separated off from (and indeed, often contradicted by) the one we inhabit ourselves (see, e.g., 23). With no empirical referent, this realm can nonetheless seem the realest thing we know, and even influence our actions (59)—­a remarkable proof of the “instrumentality of pure ideas” (55). The sick-­souled stance is also that which, like Weber’s Tolstoy, asks questions: “ ‘Why?’ ‘Wherefore?’ ‘What for?’ ” (143–­44). It thus dwells in “the sphere of thought” and “become[s] profound” (448)—­a stance James finally depicts as common to the religious mind and the philosophical alike, for both seek something beyond what their senses can perceive (464). This wider realm is finally identified with what psychology was beginning to term the subconscious, which may contain what drives our neuroses, but with them “many performances of genius” along with the “mystical experiences” Varieties records (457). Taken as a whole, then, Varieties does not exorcise the Grübelsucht but rescues it from appearing merely aridly narrowed, imagining the mode James himself perhaps glimpsed but was never able to attain, one in which thought might itself be experienced as a kind of exaltation. His ideas here jibed with those of his contemporary and influence, the French psychiatrist Théodule Ribot, who had shortly before James’s Principles published his Psychology of Attention (1888). Ribot, too, wrote in this text of Grübelsucht (or, Fragetrieb, the drive to question), characterizing it as a “form of fixed idea consist[ing] in asking endless questions upon some abstract problem” (86). As a strange

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hypertrophy of the ordinary state of attention, the fixed idea could be understood either as a form of intensified will or of its absence. Ribot specifically conceptualized these two possibilities as an “exaltation of intellect” or the “annihilation of will” characteristic of mystical ecstasy. In either case, the extremity of the attention, its complete absorption by particular “ideas,” went hand in hand with a sensory blindness and deafness and an absolute absence of motion. To the outside world, the individual would thus appear very nearly catatonic—­but, within, a whirl of thought was taking place (94). This mental activity might entail the visions of the mystic, or what Ribot termed the “intellectual rapture” of great thinkers given over to “contemplation” of what fascinated them (95). As we see, then, the line between Grübelsucht and these more exalted states could appear very thin. William James had expressed it through the emphasis on abstraction, so typical of philosophy in particular. Ribot, however, focuses in on the way in which, for the sufferer from this condition, very “ordinary subjects of reflection,” concerning everyday things, may be subjected to a daunting level of inquiry more appropriate to the topics of the metaphysician (91). And indeed, as Eugene Taylor points out, James in his lecture notes somehow used “oranges and apples, lemon and quince, figs and pears,” and “greengage” to illustrate the way “common items take on a completely different significance to the man who broods upon their nature” (139). Here, the state of “intellectual rapture” seems able to result not simply from dwelling amid abstractions but in applying this abstracting technique to the materials of the everyday. This, it would appear, is Grübelsucht at its most evidently maniacal.57 And here, then, is the novelist Rebecca West’s summary of Henry James’s short 1901 novel The Sacred Fount: “how a week-­end visitor spends more intellectual force than Kant can have used on The Critique of Pure Reason, in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists between certain of his fellow-­guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people than among sparrows.” Worse than grubbing, she opined, reading it was like being in the presence of “a rat nibbling at a wainscot” (Edel, “Introduction” 3). Such opinions were far from uncommon. An infamous Bookman review of Wings of the Dove found that novel tolerable only when compared with its predecessors, The Sacred Fount and The Awkward Age, which had been given over to the “vice of introspection,” “lashed to [their] fixed idea” (Gard 339). Even James’s friend Henry Adams claimed he “recognized at once that Harry and I had the same disease, the obsession of the idée fixe,” and “must soon take a vacation, with most of the rest of us, in a cheery asylum” (Edel, Life 4:339).

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All of these responses targeted a group of Henry James’s fictions that have long bedeviled even many of his most sympathetic readers: the cluster he produced in the late 1890s, during the same period when William was returning to the subject of exceptional mental states. They typically align us as readers with a character in a state of epistemological crisis. Crucially for our discussion here, however, this crisis does not entail a withdrawal from social reality; it is instead precipitated by social reality, which itself appears as a sort of “system” of a formidable complexity. Thus, the protagonist in question seeks, from the margins of social life, to piece together something like its ultimate significance. Typically, however, this would-­be interpreter is either hindered or aided—­it seems, both—­by coming at matters from a position of what might be termed a certain innocence. Several, in particular, are girls or youthful, inexperienced women (and sometimes of a lower class position), as in What Maisie Knew, The Turn of the Screw, In the Cage, and The Awkward Age. The last of these, along with The Sacred Fount, perhaps most tests the reader’s patience, since it is not focalized, like the others, through the naïf ’s point of view. The Sacred Fount is, but then, its narrator stands out in not being a naïf, in adopting, rather, the self-­marginalizing position of the novelist, with which the reader may possess less sympathy. As is rarely mentioned, however, The Ambassadors (1903)—­the first of James’s three late-­stage masterworks, initially conceived in 1895,58 and published two years after The Sacred Fount—­in many ways possesses a similar structure. As we saw earlier in this chapter, its protagonist Strether’s drama is usually understood as a version of William James’s conversion from overthinking to “living,” as he gradually succumbs to the sensuous pleasures of Paris, forgoing his errand of bringing the prodigal Chad Newsome back to his affronted mother’s side. As we will now see, however, this understanding of the book makes it hard to see the way Paris in fact produces new forms of thinking in Strether, some of which—­in the book’s particularly little-­ studied penultimate section—­very much resemble those of the immediately preceding works just mentioned. Strether, that is, himself transforms the social into material for a mystical Grübelsucht, which, if one of the more charming in Henry James’s fiction, nonetheless retains its telltale touch of mania. Its charm is likely inseparable from what distinguishes Strether from the other naïfs just mentioned; he is marginalized from the “action” of social life by being not too young but too old. Hence, more than any of the rest of them save perhaps Longdon of The Awkward Age, what he seeks to make sense of is the very thing James’s critics do: no less than modern social reality itself.

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The Social Phantasmagoria of The Ambassadors “That young fellow knew everything, my dear sir!” said he, laying on the table a volume containing Spinoza’s works. “How could so well organized a brain go astray?” “Indeed, monsieur,” said I, “was it not perhaps the result of its being so highly organized?” h o n o r é d e b a l z a c , Louis Lambert (99)

sociology Does Lewis Lambert Strether learn to stop thinking, and instead to simply be? When he first meets Maria Gostrey, he expresses a wish of this kind, which many readers have taken as the project The Ambassadors narrates. Strether will, he hopes, learn under her tutelage to “give [himself] up,” to live in the present—­in fine, to “enjoy,” the one thing Woollett, Massachusetts, ever hesitates whether it “ought” to do (30). From New England—­where abides majestic Mrs. Newsome, whom Strether will later describe as “all . . . fine, cold thought” (404–­5)—­Strether has learned the habit of detachment he implores Maria to aid him in overcoming. “I’m always considering something else,” he explains, “something else, I mean, than the thing of the moment. The obsession of the other thing is the terror. I’m considering at present for instance something else than you” (32). “Oh you oughtn’t to do that!” she teasingly scolds. “Then,” he implores, “make it impossible” (32). Take away my obsessions, my fears, he entreats, so I might instead “live”—­in the famous advice Strether will pass along to the young artist Bilham, during the party scene that James and readers alike have seen as the novel’s core. And so then, on he and his expatriate guide will go—­to the theater, to watch femmes fatales in golden frocks seduce helpless young men; to shopwindows spilling over with the tantalizing “lemon-­coloured volumes” (81); and not least, to candlelit dinner with softly perfumed Maria, her red velvet neck band accenting her décolletage (in a striking departure from Mrs. Newsome’s Elizabethan ruff). And yet, as James tells us in his preface, we should not mistake the “revolution” occurring in our hero as “any bêtise of the imputably ‘tempted’ state”; rather, in the face of all of these wonders, he will find himself “thrown forward . . . thrown quite with violence, upon his lifelong trick of intense reflexion,” again and again (9). Strether, that is, never does stop thinking—­any more than does James himself in The American Scene—­and so the question becomes a different one. Not: Does Strether finally exchange thinking for “living” (as William James might have encouraged him to do)? But: How does Strether think, what is the form of his thinking, once he has entered the “vast bright Babylon” of Paris and left New England behind (83)?

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From the first—­when they take in, first, Chester, then London, prior to departing for Paris itself—­Europe presents a kaleidoscope of purely aesthetic pleasures, but also of differences, in which Strether takes enjoyment for their own sake. His divergence from New England presents itself in the second as much as the first, for, like James himself, he seems to receive a frisson precisely from the multiplication of complexities as such, whereas their moral attitude depends on keeping matters as crisply clean as possible. And yet Strether himself clearly finds more morally troubling the multiplication of complexities in the form of previously unimaginable sorts of human beings—­albeit, or perhaps precisely because, these call forth his particular errand there. Watching the theater with Maria, he feels conscious of a strange kinship between the “figures and faces” in the audience and those onstage (58). In such moments, the possibility that complexity means greater opportunities for deception, for willfully produced confusion, cannot help but rear its head. Here, then, his new companion can begin to come to the rescue. Consider the possibility, one more in keeping with her finally muted role in the novel, that Maria offers Strether not so much a new appreciation for appearances—­ despite her cultivated ways, accoutrements, and objet-­filled chambers, she will be outshone in all of these by Chad Newsome himself—­as a more capacious analytic eye. Indeed, a key argument of The Ambassadors lies in the way these two will ideally form a whole: now alive to a range of phenomena undreamed of in Woollett, Strether is also in a position to begin to try to reconstitute his world on their basis. Thus, if in Woollett we have, essentially, “male and female,” or nice and “not nice” (58, 142), Paris presents a seemingly infinite array of “types and tones,” which require, first, acknowledgment, and then to be parsed and understood (47–­48). Thus, as they sit together dining, and Strether describes his wonderment at “the people around him,” Maria replies, “Oh yes, they’re types!”—­furnishing a sort of Balzacian referent (“it was a world of types . . . ‘types’ he should have to tackle”) that will carry Strether throughout his adventure (57–­58).59 Maria is sure he will be an apt pupil; precisely by being on the margins, “out of it,” even “failure[s]” by social lights, they share the ability “remorselessly to analyze” (49–­50). Hence, when Strether does encounter the felicitously transformed Chad, that paragon of a youth appears to him as above all “a case” (118, 129), one he is pleased that, given his own knowledge of Woollett and Paris alike, only he will be able to have the hope of even recognizing, let alone divining, as “even Miss Gostrey, with all her science,” will not have known the younger Chad (118). And thus we see a pattern that only intensifies as the novel proceeds: Maria fading more and more into the background as Strether takes up the task of analyzing the types and cases—­a project that entails, indeed,

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recognizing there to be such in instances, like that of Mamie Pocock, that had never appeared so earlier—­before him on his own. Yet what, however, is such a task? Surely it is no more or less than that of the “science” of sociology, that newly burgeoning art of Strether’s time (overlapping that of the realist novelist, as made plain in James’s essays on Balzac). Indeed, one of the more curious features of The Ambassadors’ characterization of what Strether is faced with, what “Europe” represents, is that it can be deemed “society.” Thus, his more skeptically scowling New England compatriot Waymarsh, finding Maria and their window-­shopping a deeply unnerving experience, is said to be unnerved by “society”—­glossed here as “the multiplication of shibboleths . . . the discrimination of types and tones” (47–­48). To be faced with “society” is to be faced with a “moreness” that presents itself as a kind of math problem: “It was interesting to him to feel that he was in the presence of new measures, other standards, a different scale of relations” (101). And, again, the effect this has is to make Strether begin to think of the “society” back home in specific terms as well, and those he knows there—­even Mrs. Newsome herself—­as its “specimens” (288). Chad Newsome, then, when he first presents himself—­slipping smoothly into their box at the theater—­seems precisely to be he who has mastered these codes, whose manner merely of entering the box “taught Strether that even in so small a thing as that there were different ways” (120). Moreover, the particular “way” Chad has is “wonderful” (120). Thus, Chad initially appears simply a paragon, a consummate initiate into the ways of society, and the mystery to be plumbed that of how he became that way. Once this question has been answered, however, by Strether’s introduction to Madame de Vionnet, a deeper one begins to emerge in its place—­one that has less to do with how Chad became as he is than one of how, precisely, to think of what he is and of that becoming, and then what to do about both. Rather than an initiate into the “ways” of social fluency, then, it may turn out to make the most sense to regard Chad as nothing more or less than “the social” itself (“manners and morals, character and life,” 225), in embodied form. He is variously referred to as “the social man” and even “the social animal,” prompting Little Bilham’s query to Strether, regarding Woollett’s desire to have Chad back to run the family business: “isn’t it as a social animal that you also want him?” (138–­39, 225). Chad’s gift is magically to produce, by his “manner,” the “fathomless medium” in which they all, all the members of his “strange communities,” swim (145, 174). Equally “easy” with everyone (162), he stages the social (at his house parties) more than he himself participates in it. And the social thus staged, as a version of Simmel’s stylized “sociability,”

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is very much akin to the world of “talk” as seen in Portrait of a Lady or, most of all, The Awkward Age: one in which “violence” is sublimated into zestful bickering for its own sake, simply to keep things lively, “to avert those agreements that destroy the taste of talk” (144). Indeed, the only character who surpasses Chad in this capacity for producing sociability is the celebrated artist Gloriani, whose garden party appears a microcosm of Paris itself, crammed full with “every one—­all sorts and sizes,” from artists to “gros bonnets of many kinds—­ambassadors, cabinet ministers, bankers, generals,” perhaps “even Jews”—­and above all, “femmes du monde,” many of them the great man’s own former conquests, loyal still (163). Far more than Chad’s little bohemian gatherings, Gloriani’s assembly might have populated a Balzac novel in its breadth, with the sculptor himself as the novelist, the “deep human expertness” in his eye boring into Strether, turning him into the case on display (162). Gloriani’s party, most evidently, serves as the site for two notable encounters: Strether’s oft-­quoted advice to Bilham to enjoy his youth (“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to”) and his first meeting with Marie de Vionnet, the older woman who turns out to be responsible for Chad’s transformation. What if we were to pair these developments with the idea Gloriani’s gaze raises, of Strether himself as a kind of case? What if his own burgeoning eye for cases, in the particular form it will turn out to take, were part of what made him one? This is, after all, what so many have suggested about The Sacred Fount, or Turn of the Screw: that the transformation of the human relations on view into a case for analytic intensities makes the latter go wild, as it were, just as William James feared in the phenomenon of the Grübelsucht. And yet where the elder James brother consistently opposed that abstracting tendency, as a kind of narrowed vision, to the overspilling cornucopia of actual social relations, Henry James refuses this divide, and does so in the terms we already saw hinted at in William’s own Varieties and the writings of Ribot. The Grübelsucht, in Henry’s writings, becomes not a sorrowful abyss but the font of a strange mystical ecstasy, seemingly inseparable from the fact that it does not refuse relations but, rather, takes the copiousness of sociality itself for its material. romance The advent of Madame de Vionnet is crucial here, for it is as her increasingly close companion that Strether learns, as Maria later puts it, to “toddle alone,” to put matters together without her guidance. In what way does Chad’s consort make this possible? By having an effect nearly opposite to that of

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the briskly analytic Maria, one of re-­instilling the mystery and excitement of romance. She, among all he has met, seems a “case” of—­“well, he didn’t know what” (209), possessing seemingly a “mysterious law of her own” (216). When Strether first meets her at the party, his initial impression might be summed up as being that there seems less here than he had expected. “There was somehow not quite a wealth in her,” the “range of expensive reference” he might have expected; rather, lovely and strikingly youthful as she seems, she presents a figure oddly retiring: dressed in black, with a “dim” smile, and “eyes far apart and a little strange” (171–­73). Yet later, as Maria embroiders her former schoolmate’s situation to him, this very recessiveness becomes intertwined with a different, far deeper source of “rich[ness]” than anything Strether has yet encountered: put simply, Madame de Vionnet begins to embody “the taste of history” (183). This is true in a literal sense—­she is a woman with a past—­ but also in the way her particular past abuts onto aspects of foreign custom of unfathomable, yet fascinating depth (her husband “the product of a mysterious order,” Marie’s mother marrying her out of “dark personal motive,” the idea of divorce impossible for such “gens-­là” to contemplate [184]). This same “taste of history,” then, is what, above all, Strether is struck by upon his first visit to Madame de Vionnet’s home: both as a venerable structure and in its amassed relics and objets, it represents “the ancient Paris he was always looking for,” “the world he vaguely thought of as the world of Chateaubriand, of Madame de Staël,” of Napoleon himself (195–­96). Where both Maria and Chad have, by “rummag[ing],” “purchas[ing],” “selecting,” and “comparing,” built up a world for themselves, Marie de Vionnet “had only received, accepted and been quiet,” “beautifully passive under the scene of transmission” (196). The sense of the social as inventiveness, then, here gives way to one in which it means the individual’s placement within a web not simply of her own making, one that gains its authority through accretion. It is like Durkheim’s “social fact,” constraint not only in the form of the norms that make it possible for us to live together, but in the form of what history hands down to us—­and, as such, able to be experienced both as a different kind of constraint and as release from the need constantly to will. For Strether, while all this can be disconcerting—­in a glimmer of deceptions to come, the “air of supreme respectability” first appears to him as a sort of “strange blank wall” against which he bumps (197)—­it is also, evidently, a kind of relief. Like Trinity Church, or the stray remaining walled garden or courtyard, in The American Scene, Marie de Vionnet’s home speaks not only of continuity over time but of “the habit of privacy, the peace of intervals, the dignity of distances and approaches” (195)—­qualities mirrored in its inhabitant’s own gentle “tact” and reserve (235). In both cases, we might say, not

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everything is present. And this sense of something held back, so different from the bold presences of a party girl like Miss Barrace, finally seems to have the effect of placing Strether in a more aesthetic, dilating frame of mind. Dining with Marie—­after whose advent Maria abruptly vanishes—­he feels in a realm separate from all of Maria’s “explanations,” in which a kind of sense can be made for him simply by the scene Marie makes before him, like “some fine firm concentrated heroine of an old story,” thanking him “with the smile of a child” (233, 239). When Maria returns, then, as stated, she notes Strether, childlike himself, has learned to “toddle alone”—­he is “luminous as he has never been” (256, 260). But if Strether seems to have moved from bewilderment to a new clarity, this is not because he has learned to embody Maria’s classificatory worldliness. Indeed, the situation is in one way nearly the opposite: as Maria herself puts it, “The wonderful and special thing about you is that you are, at this time of day, youth. . . . It’s just your particular charm” (264, emphasis mine). We should, then, take “toddle alone” seriously: Strether has not moved from innocence to experience so much as he now represents a kind of innocence in motion, an ambulatory innocence ready to draw its own sorts of conclusions. (This is the result of the time he has spent with Marie; where being with Maria made him feel insufficiently worldly, being with Marie returned him to the inner state of the reader of fanciful storybooks.) Once struck dumb by what surrounded him, he begins, in this curious and underexplored third quarter or so of the novel, to all but babble—­in notable contrast to the Woollett contingent’s frigid silences, Madame de Vionnet’s reserve, and Chad’s “smooth urbanity” alike. Strether is thus returned to the state of Turn’s governess, In the Cage’s heroine, or Maisie: he is in the in-­between state of knowing enough to “toddle alone,” but still only to toddle. And yet because he is not actually young, but only regaining his youth for a time (“they’re my youth,” he says, of Chad and Marie [265]), he can see, as none of the other Jamesian naïfs mentioned can, the “case” he himself presents: as he puts it to Maria, “I’m extremely wonderful just now. I dare say in fact I’m quite fantastic, and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if I were mad” (257). The book, it seems fair to say, takes this characterization in all its senses: Strether’s sort of “madness” is both delightful and based on a certain capacity for fantasy. In this sense, he is closer to a Quixote, inspired by Marie de Vionnet and all she represents for him to remake the world in the mode of romance: a project more aesthetic than scientific. These phenomena, then, begin in the book’s second half to include the denizens of Woollett itself, for, in the face of Strether’s apparent failure to heed Mrs. Newsome’s command and bring Chad home, that worthy lady dispatches a second set of

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ambassadors to Paris, in the form of her daughter’s family. Where Maria’s more positivist mode entailed understanding apparent mysteries as types, Strether’s also moves in something like the opposite direction, understanding what had seemed mere types as “abysses.” Suddenly the familiar old denizens of New England appear “cases” very nearly as complex and intriguing as those of Europe—­even jejune Mamie, Chad’s intended bride. (One sign of this is that characters like Mamie, Waymarsh, and even Mrs. Newsome herself become the beneficiaries of the breathless strings of triple adjectives that Strether once reserved for Madame de Vionnet alone.) As Strether explains to Madame de Vionnet, regarding young Miss Pocock, “I’m studying the case, as it were . . .” She wondered. “Is it a case? . . . But haven’t you known her before?” “Yes . . . but somehow at home she wasn’t a case. She has become one since.” It was as if he made it out for himself. “She has become one here.” “So very very soon?” He measured it, laughing. “Not sooner than I did.” “And you became one—­?” “Very very soon. The day I arrived.” (317)

So Mamie, then, is a case in the same very particular sense that Strether is: opened up to new phenomena herself, she reveals depths, even if modest ones, of a sort one would not previously have imagined her capable. Specifically, Strether determines, she has developed a fascination with Mr. Bilham. And so she deepens in a way that does not threaten but, rather, enriches her type-­like status as “the pretty girl of the moment,” the belle of Woollett (335): in her bland, sweet, sociable and slangy way, she pronounces herself utterly delighted by the Parisian contingent and makes evident to Strether that she has begun to develop actual wants and ideas of her own, limited though these may still be. So finding these greater specifications for Mamie’s “case,” Strether approaches her on precisely the plane that James himself does: like Daisy Miller, she is delineated in a form in which affection and satire are thoroughly blended. This was, indeed, Trilling’s ideal for the novelist as bearer of liberalism conceived as imagination: to be able to take cognizance of the shaping force of the social (Mamie is the girl of Woollett if she is anything) and recognize that it is through it that human beings come, humanly and even at times lovably, to be themselves. Just as Strether enlarges the Chad/Marie couple to include nuances of relation far exceeding the vulgar sorts imagined in Woollett, he bequeaths a similar multifacetedness to the Woollettians

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themselves—­and, indeed, for the same reason: he conceives them all to be touched by a chaste version of Cupid’s hand. It’s as if the charm of the purported “virtuous attachment” between Chad and Marie de Vionnet inspires Strether to imagine, and even attempt to orchestrate, an entire string of equally innocent pairings: youthful Mamie and Little Bilham; upright Sarah Pocock and Waymarsh, who seem to soften in one another’s company; bumpkin Jim, Sarah’s husband, and the supremely poised Marie de Vionnet herself. And so, in a kind of climactic, comic flurry of chapters leading up to the scene that undoes everything, Strether races antically about, encouraging Bilham to marry Mamie, delighting in Miss Barrace’s reports regarding Marie and Jim, and marveling at the “genial new pressing coaxing Waymarsh,” rose in his buttonhole and boater on his head, just back from a morning jaunt to the flower market with Sarah (365). Put otherwise, he shifts from being a simple vessel for sensuous phenomena or the analyst of types Maria taught him to be, becoming instead, like Chad himself, an organizer of sociality. Only where Chad’s organizing hand remains hidden, discreet, Strether’s remains extravagantly on display—­again making him appear as much a “case” as those he surveys. And the other significant difference, related to this, is that where Chad, who has “no imagination,” is simply producing the social as it is lived (and keeping himself, self-­interestedly, at a safe remove), Strether, in a kind of fascinating paradox, becomes overinvested and overinvolved (he is up to his ears in the situation he orchestrates; thus his strange sense of being the victim of his own “interests,” which are both sympathetic and simply curious at the same time) precisely because he is involved in generating, from the ground up, a more aesthetic object, a kind of “phantasmagoric” sociality (152), as he himself puts it after all is revealed. This fantasy of sociality, then, resembles the utopian relationality of his brother William (and of some of his contemporary admirers)—­yet with a telltale intensity behind it, the mark of the Grübelsucht. abstraction This manic aspect, then, raises the crucial question: how does the same relational penchant that, for William and his readers alike, represented a welcome escape from the labyrinths of thought and abstraction become in the minds of Henry’s characters a pathway into that labyrinth? For an answer, we might turn back to the preface in which the younger James so famously opines that “relations stop nowhere”—­an observation that, as we’ve seen, tends to be construed as a rallying cry, a source of delight (Art 260). In fact, in the preface in

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question, written in retrospect about James’s first attempt at novel writing, if the proliferation of relations appears at first thrilling, it is a thrill that opens out onto an “anxiety,” even an “ache of fear,” as the “young embroiderer of the canvas of life soon began to work in terror, fairly, of the vast expanse of that surface, of the boundless number of its distinct perforations for the needle.” The only solution, then, if relations indeed “stop nowhere,” is for the artist “to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so”—­the aesthetic object, or, alternatively, the philosophical system (260–­61). With this gesture, however—­as Bersani noted—­abstraction once again enters the picture. The multifariousness of human reality may be tamed by treating its components as elements in a mathematical scheme. It’s no accident that the only moment in The Ambassadors’ entire drama when the otherwise charming Strether does seem to go off the rails a bit, to really resemble Turn’s governess or the hero of The Sacred Fount, appears when he starts conceiving of the pairings he’s orchestrated through the lexicon of arithmetic. Thus, by ensuring that Bilham marries Mamie, Strether explains, we can avoid having to count her in the “minus” column if Chad remains with Marie; as Strether explains, “It’s a thread we can wind up and tuck in” (351). When such machinations culminate in the Pococks’ departure for Switzerland, Strether waxes enchanted to Maria that “Waymarsh goes with them—­ for Sarah. It’s too beautiful . . . it’s always a fresh joy,” equaled only by the fact that “Little Bilham also goes . . . for Mamie. . . . Mamie, by that blessed law of ours . . . must have a young man.” The only loose thread, he sadly admits, lies in Marie de Vionnet’s absence: “What I would have liked to manage would have been her going. . . . For Jim, and for symmetry.” Happily, he concludes, “She will, I think,” at least see them off at the station (396–­97). We could say, then, that Strether embodies what Trilling long ago described as the peril of the liberal imagination—­its tendency, precisely due to its rare appreciation for the “variousness and possibility” in human existence, to tend toward a rational “organization” of that variety in which it becomes abstract (Liberal Imagination 8–­9). We see this in the shift from Strether’s wonderfully dense grasp of Mamie’s socially marked specificity to the conception of Mamie as a bare element in an arithmetical design. What is lost thereby, in Trilling’s account, is not merely Mamie’s Mamie-­ness but any true sense of the social as a field not only of relations but also of differences, and thus of conflicts, and thus of elements that manners not only disclose but also occlude—­a “sordid, hidden reality,” in Trilling’s very Jamesian phrase (110).60 And yet Trilling, no less than James, is ambivalent about this conception. Just a few pages earlier in the same essay—­on “Manners, Morals, and the

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Novel”—­he writes, of Strether’s kindred spirit Don Quixote, that “the real reality is the wildly conceiving, the madly fantasying mind of the Don: people change, practical reality changes, when they come into its presence” (108, emphasis mine). This is true of Strether, too. And thus The Ambassadors displays its joy in the Grübelsucht as a kind of rapture even while knowing what that state of mind must evade to produce its beautiful forms. Strether, after all, is not wrong about the new forms of relation Paris has made possible among the New Englanders; these just turn out not to be the whole story. So Sarah Pocock can find herself enjoying Paris and Waymarsh and still slam the door in Strether’s face when it comes to the question of Chad and Marie. (Among the many violences the book reveals to be intractable, the imperiousness of morality itself, as embodied by the unbudging New Englanders, deserves as much mention as the Europeans’ mendacity.)61 This leftover, and the consequence it entails—­the final break with Sarah’s mother, whom Strether himself was to marry—­sounds the death knell of the possibility that Strether’s world has simply widened, its “frame” large enough to encompass Woollett and Paris in one panoramic image. It was as if Strether had imagined Parisian sociality along the lines of a kind of gift economy, based on a sort of overspilling generosity always met with the same. What Madame de Vionnet had given Chad, he gave out to the rest of the world, and yet never neglecting her at the same time. In the vision of Chad apparently dallying with another woman in London, however, that “moreness” begins to appear in a different light. We see an appropriate kind of shift, then, when, as the scene of confrontation with Sarah Pocock looms (and again in its aftermath), Strether begins to recur to a mathematical logic closer to that of The Sacred Fount, one that is about a restricted economy rather than the overflowing possibilities of comedy: “because he was anxious . . . it worked out for this reason Waymarsh was blooming”; if others “partook,” he would have to be the one who “paid” (364). And even more tellingly, after the dustup with Sarah he conceives a setup of this sort as what lies behind Chad’s trick of “knowing how to live”: others, just as Strether himself has done, fall cheerfully in line to serve as “feeder(s) of his stream” (385).62 denouements Even as it moves in the direction of the greatest instance of abstracting the social in James’s oeuvre, then, The Ambassadors—­here, as Strether’s mind—­ seems to require, as William James did, an escape. And what Strether escapes into, then—­in his case, only briefly—­is a world resembling William’s pluralistic universe, as well as that of the relational criticism that affirms it.

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In one sense, then, “reality” returns, in the form of the most vividly scenic chapter in the book—­one brings Strether back to where he began, unencumbered by the fascinating yet exhausting mathematical dilemmas of human relations and instead merely communing, in rural solitude, with the France of strangers and landscape. Here his mental life and the world around it become impossible to distinguish, are only cascadingly mutually informing—­ “all whiteness, crookedness, and blueness set in coppery green”—­in precisely the way William James had celebrated in his theories of experience and of the “pure present.” For his part, Strether experiences it all as if he is literally inhabiting a small picture by the painter Lambinet that he long ago spent one afternoon thinking about purchasing. The memory of this state of suspension, of potentiality—­“He had dreamed—­had turned and twisted possibilities for an hour” (410)—­links this moment to two others in the book: the way Strether feels upon first arriving, as if elatedly chinking his coins before spending them (22), and, most of all, the way he had felt when he first left Paris with his now-­dead wife, seeing this departure as not an ending but a beginning, with an “elaborately innocent plan” of returning “every few years” that was never fulfilled (81). The metaphor of the Lambinet, however, returns most, such that Strether feels as if the picture’s frame keeps extending itself outward and outward for him, the entire world he inhabits in a state of pure, tranquil pleasure encapsulated within the bounds of a work of art. So say it is Strether’s world of exalted abstractions given caressing physical form: the world the will wants without the will having to exert itself. That is to say, more than any other moment in the book, it is the meeting place of the real with the romantic, where it becomes impossible to tell the difference between the two (because nothing has been, nothing ever can be lost to time). This perfection, made possible by personlessness, is why the antic intensity of the Grübelsucht disappears here. Thus, when Madame de Vionnet and Chad first appear, it is as just the sort of tiny, charming, vaguely sketched human figures who might colorfully dot such a painting: a man paddling a boat with a lady holding a pink parasol (418). As soon as they reveal themselves to be the specific persons they in fact are, however, Strether’s idyll—­not simply in this scene, but in The Ambassadors as a whole—­arrives at its end. As James Baldwin, a lifelong admirer of James’s novel, describes this moment, “The end of innocence”—­which he elsewhere defines as the recognition of “the reality of others”—­“means you’ve finally entered the picture. And it means you’ll accept consequences too” (Leeming, “Interview” 54–­55). His earlier fancies, precisely in their freedom and capaciousness, now strike him as having been a form of play: “he had dressed the

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possibility in vagueness, as a little girl might have dressed her doll” (425). But this is only to say he conceived relations along the lines of Simmel’s play-­like sociability, a pure and lovely thing devoid of interestedness. The “relations” Strether created were thus beautiful but tenuous; finally, only he embodies them fully. For, once erotically charged, pleasure can also overlap with power and thus vulnerability, as we see in the case of Chad and Marie. As a result, when “reality” comes back in, it comes in not as complication but as simplification: the bare (but, as such, always disguised-­by-­ manners) facts of sexuality and social power. The darkest moment, perhaps, occurs when Strether goes to post his response to Marie’s telegraph, saying he will meet her to discuss the aftermath. Suddenly, for the first time in what seem hundreds of pages, the Paris of the book’s outset returns: the telegraph office suggesting “the vast strange life of the town,” with its “types,” its “performers,” its “more acute . . . manners” and “more sinister . . . morals” (430). The difference, a large one, is that Strether now sees himself ranged among them, in a way that makes him recognize not only their shared culpability but the pity it might, in all of them, inspire, for “how could they all together help” being “mixed up with the typical tale of Paris” (430)? In Madame de Vionnet’s home, however, all of this is once more deepened by the feeling of history, which gives her a weight and meaningfulness he now realizes may have nothing to do with her “inten[tions]” (434). Those intentions themselves now seem to him somewhat pathetic in their own misrecognition of ordinary Chad, her own “strict[ly] human” creation, and bearer of “mere earthly joys,” as something to be “transcendently prized” (440). To see Marie herself naively romanticizing, that is, has the paradoxical effect of bringing her back down to earth—­she becomes what she never was, one of the types, merely a victim of “exploit[ation],” a “maidservant crying for her young man” (440–­41). Her need for Strether begins to look instead like neediness. In sum, she, too—­“I who should have liked to seem to you—­well, sublime!”—­is pitiful and clutching (and aging), as all of them have proven, at moments, to be (442). Strether’s final words to her, “You’ve had me,” speak both to the intensity of the hold she (and all she represented) had and his new sense of having been “had” (again, as much by what she represented) as well. At the very end of the book, then, it becomes clear that Strether, should he desire, could remain in Paris in the arms of Maria Gostrey, who has been waiting patiently for him all along. As Pippin notes, Maria’s status as bearer of a kind of realism is never itself given a more attractive representation than at this moment, as her “little Dutch-­looking dining room” promises all the comforts of civilization familiar from Netherlandish art (Ambassadors 465). And yet as we know already, Strether’s preference was always for the more

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romantic realm of Marie de Vionnet. The tragedy of love is that realist Maria wants romantic Strether, but romantic Strether wants seemingly romantic Marie (boundlessness of history and multifariousness of womanhood), who turns out to be more realist (limited) than he had thought. (Indeed, the multifariousness now can’t be thought without the desperation beneath, as in Trilling on manners as both deceptive and the way to the truth.)63 The clearest parallel between James’s Strether and the Balzac novel whose appellation he holds, then, may well lie in their heroes’ inability to think their beautiful visions of connectedness together with the material realities of human relationship. The French Louis Lambert, who initially imagines that union with his betrothed will represent the pinnacle of his Swedenborgian philosophy of sympathetic fusion—­“Love is the life of angels!” (91)—­falls into a catatonic trance the day before his wedding, never to awaken. “In fact,” our narrator muses, “he may perhaps have regarded the joys of marriage as an obstacle to the perfection of his inner man and his flight toward spiritual spheres” (100). He recalls that, long ago, he and Louis as students had contemplated cases in religious history very much like those Ribot describes, of “the total abeyance of the physical life which a man can attain to under the paroxysms of the inner life” (98). And yet the fascinating thing is that Balzac’s Louis seems to sit in his unreachable state dreaming only of the absolute relatedness of the world. Before his untimely death not long after, he continues in his trance to mutter elliptical fragments of his philosophy of an ideal social life made possible by the powers of Will, an “inscrutable locomotive faculty in the spirit” by which he is able, sitting alone in his room, to access the farthest reaches of time and space (41). For Louis Lambert, the realities of human social existence—­the role of money, the antagonisms of politics, the “thousand details of our trivial life” (31)—­suggest a lawless chaos; in his words, “The most subtle genius can discover no common bond between great social facts” (71). In Swedenborg’s vision, sociality would be governed, rather, by our angelic “inner being,” which sees “everything, and all at once” (37, 107). Finally, however, the cost of preserving that vision turns out to be the loss of any actual human intersubjectivity. Louis Lambert thus becomes a version of Wings’ Merton Densher as Bersani presents him, ascending to a higher relational plane by virtue of his withdrawal from the space of sociality as difference. Strether is a different case, in part because his idealized system of relations notably fails; it seems crucial to James’s presentation of his mode that its very real delights be inseparable from that to which it is finally, willfully blind. Recasting the Grübelsucht as the stance of the mystic, that is, James renders it a mode of intense pleasure and a certain “unworldliness,” or innocence, without which that pleasure would not be possible.

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All this, then, is equally true of Simmel’s conception of sociability, that space in which “a democracy of equals is possible without friction,” which has played such an important role in the recent relational turn. Simmel, characteristically, limns this “play” model of the social so joyfully that it is easy to overlook his insistence upon it as “an artificial world,” the result of a deliberate “reserve and stylizing” of the individual that keeps any overly “personal” elements—­significant differences of status, of talent, of experience, but also of intensity of will, of “excitement and depression”—­out of the picture (133, 130–­31). Sociability, what Simmel terms “the abstraction of association,” is as essential to human existence as the art or play on which, he suggests, it is modeled; it is in no way merely a “flight from life,” for it contains too much genuine life itself. It is, however, in very Jamesian terms a momentary refusal to think too hard about what Simmel, too, calls “the heavily freighted forces of reality,” or “any disturbing material accent” (140, 133). Hence, to imagine, as we seem now so inclined to do, that it would ever somehow become that reality may result in the very opposite of its triumph—­that is, in its ceasing to exist.

5

“Begin All Over Again”: Naturalism, Habit, and the Embodiment of the Will Little by little the passion of the gambling seized upon them. . . . The room became more and more close . . . from ceiling to floor the air was fouled by their breathing, by the tobacco smoke and by the four flaring gas-­jets. By this time a sombre excitement burnt in their eyes and quivered in their fingers. . . . Ellis was drinking whisky again, mixed with soda, his hand continually groping for the glass with a mechanical gesture; the Dummy was so excited he could not keep his cigar alight, and contented himself with chewing the end with an hysterical motion of his jaws. . . . A fine trembling had seized upon [Vandover’s] hands so that the chips in his palm rattled like castanets. f r a n k n o r r i s , Vandover and the Brute (283–­8 5)

If a person becomes (mostly) a body, what happens to his will? This is the question thought to preoccupy the novel in the waning years of the nineteenth century, with the rise of what has been termed literary “naturalism,” a movement originating in Second Empire France with the writings of Émile Zola. And yet naturalism itself cannot be thought without reference to broader intellectual currents equally tending toward a materialist account of persons, as we began to discuss in chapter 2. These included what came to be known as “physiological psychology” (or simply the “new psychology”),1 which at its most radical would model all human behavior on the stimulus-­ response pattern of the reflex,2 and evolutionary theory, which provided additional impetus for drawing connections between higher and lower forms of animal life. If, in an earlier nineteenth-­century text, to lose control over one’s bodily impulses suggested an individual moral failure, here the problem had become a more endemic one. Small wonder, then, the often melodramatic overtones of both naturalism and the era’s neo-­gothic narratives (such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) alike. Melodramatic, that is, from the earlier Victorian perspective.3 It would be mistaken, however, to read naturalism as simply a sign of the decay of what came before, its ideals for individual and social life alike—­to say nothing (yet) of will. The fruit of a transitional moment, these writings also looked forward—­both literarily to a nascent modernism, and, I will be arguing, more farseeingly still to our own present.4 For, now as then, the will seems able at once to appear a discard of a wishful belief in human potency, dashed today

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by neuroscience as earlier by physiological psychology, even as, at the same time, popular treatises on will’s attainment flourish as never before.5 A core aim of this chapter lies in understanding this paradoxical duality, grasping how both sides of it are rooted in the same phenomenon of the new (complete) embodiment of the will. One can formally grasp naturalism’s two faces—­looking back in horror at what has been lost from an earlier Victorian moment and looking forward more complicatedly or ambivalently, sometimes even excitedly, to something new—­in part by noting the double-­sided relation it possesses to narrative itself. On the one hand, naturalism is said to produce “plots of decline.”6 It’s as if, rather than tell the story of moral maturation (or even the more double-­ edged schooling in sociality of, say, a Henry James), the text decided to focus unremittingly on a person or world coming apart, dis-­integrating, rather than learning to put themselves together. We see here the influence of a particular current in the era’s psychology that spread to other disciplines as well: the theory of degeneration, or evolution in reverse, about which more presently. At the same time, however, as Georg Lukács and others have famously argued, naturalism has often appeared to decentralize narrative altogether in favor of an increasing fascination with description. In “The Reality Effect,” Roland Barthes then implies that we see here the turn toward modernism, as individual details detach themselves from the larger narrative whole and become themselves the focus of attention—­eventually (and already in the era’s symbolism and impressionism) as pure aesthetic objects. To put the matter this way, however, is to begin to see what naturalism’s two tendencies have in common. If the realist novel made up a world and made up persons through the accumulation of daily detail, in naturalism, as in, say, cinéma vérité, a hyperbolization of this very tendency seems to have the opposite effect: the center—­whether plot or protagonist—­cannot hold. Here we might return to our opening scene of the gamblers, which derives from the American naturalist novelist Frank Norris, who liked to refer to himself as the “boy Zola.” As Mark Seltzer puts it, naturalism marks a break we see in various forms of artistic and scientific representation from the 1880s forward, one for which “motion” is “unlinked” from “volition,” to become the emblem not of “agency” but of “automatism” (17). The other examples he gives are all visual ones—­Charcot’s photographs of hysterics, Eadweard Muybridge mapping the trajectory of “bodies in motion” (17)—­and, indeed, we can see in the scene here from Norris’s Vandover and the Brute the threads linking a nascent experimental psychology; the insistence on the visualizable (that is, “behavior”); the reduction of purposive “action” to small, repeated “motions” or “reflexes” (noted by behaviorism’s critics); the determinative

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role of context as stimulus (here, the overheated room); and, crucially, as Paul Ricoeur describes, the prejudice as a result for the pathological case, which by definition represents a simplification of an ordinarily complex process, that of the expression and formation of habits.7 The particular pathology of interest here is that of addiction, which was central to both naturalism’s and period psychology’s exploration of human automatisms. By “reducing a person to a bodily machine” and seeming to leave the will out of the equation, states like drunkenness and other forms of compulsion appeared to offer a window onto the reflex-­like structure underlying all human action (Smith, Free Will 38). As Walter Benjamin puts it in his account of the gambling club depicted in a Senefelder lithograph, “they are capable only of a reflex action” and “live their lives as automatons” (178). The importance of addiction can remind us that both physiological psychology and degeneration theory began as medical discourses. Specifically, they sought to think through the public health dilemmas raised by a rapidly expanding industrial capitalism.8 The new forms and increased pace of labor might encourage a leisure spent in an inebriated stupor—­or, more disturbingly, like Charlie Chaplin’s hapless worker in Modern Times who keeps repeating his movements when off the assembly line, one of factorylike repetition. As Benjamin suggests, “Factory work and gambling share much in common. . . . The jolt in the movement of a machine is like the so-­called coup in a game of chance” (177). Industrial capitalism could well be said to become a new kind of Big Will in this epoch, demanding a ruthless pace of productivity at the same time that consumerism began to emerge as an encouraged rather than morally denigrated form of economic participation. Norris’s most famous work would take these shifts up explicitly, in the form of his “Trilogy of the Wheat,” a suite of novels dedicated to the three life stages of a representative commodity—­production, distribution, and consumption, the last left incomplete at his untimely death at the age of thirty-­two. The scope of these works clearly built on his admiration of Zola, as did his interest in the symptomatology of modern life. Indeed, although Zola’s idea of the “Experimental Novel” has most often been conceived as an attempt to marry literary and scientific discourse—­as he writes, if “the body of man is a machine, whose machinery can be taken apart and put together again,” the writer could now consider “the mechanism of [a] passion” in the same terms (16, 25)—­the French novelist in fact derived his language of experimental dissection specifically from a medical writer, Claude Bernard.9 Unquestionably, however, the medicalized emphasis on taints endangering what Zola termed “the health of the social body” produced a tension, as Lukács noticed. Both pathology and its probing by

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medicine shared a formal feature: the “breakdown” of a whole. The minutely registered tics of Norris’s gamblers—­the groping, the chewing, the trembling that make them resemble “bundles of habits,” in William James’s phrase—­ thus evidence both their addiction and the microscopic, “anatomizing” gaze applied to its observation. In the era more broadly, habits became the subject of new scrutiny and management. In many ways, Progressives in the US conceived their public mission very similarly to Zola’s aesthetic one.10 Although evolutionary thought is often imagined to have struck a blow to human pride and ambition, it is important to remember how progress-oriented much of the period’s evolutionary thinking could be. To think of people as the naturalists did, as, in effect, bodies above all, became in the hands of reformers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman grounds for a radical Progressive optimism based on the promise of “human engineering,” or what a similarly minded thinker, John Dewey, called “modification of the future” (O’Donnell 77, 213). For, again like Zola, Progressives’ strong belief in the power of environment generated a remarkably literal—­even biological—­belief that reshaping environments would mean reshaping the people inhabiting them, for generations to come.11 Here, then, we begin to see one way in which the newly physicalized view of the person was not simply opposed to an optimism that could at times extend to exhortations toward the development of the healthy will, almost as if it were a kind of muscle.12 Such discourses coexisted, then, both within naturalist writing and beyond it, with others in which embodied subjectivity was granted a new grandeur via an affirming portrayal of instinct as more trustworthy than the overthinking that, as we saw in the previous chapter, some felt had begun to plague modern humanity. Here, too, both health and will could come forward in new forms even more fully dissociated from reason. When it has been recognized that the 1880s and 1890s saw a new resurgence of will-­talk as well as its diminution, Nietzsche’s writings often play a central role.13 Although he is no doubt especially associated with the instinctual mode just described, Nietzsche in fact participated in something like the Progressives’ as well; certain of his works focused strongly on questions of health, even promulgating minute prescriptions for exercise and diet. Understanding this period’s tendency to position maladies of will as matters of somatic strength and wellness can begin to make clear how strangely relevant it remains for our own present. In our obsession with the “quantified self,” ever tracking its own progress toward health—­to say nothing of the looming potential for genetic modifications—­we are, if anything, more captivated by the promise of “human engineering” than ever.14 Yet this chapter argues that, within the contemporary humanities, a similar emphasis on

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embodiment risks leaving us with few pathways for considering alternatives to these understandings of human existence. By contrast, I argue, neither Nietzsche nor naturalist fiction can finally be appreciated if their work is simply contained within their period’s, and perhaps our own, tendencies to ping-­pong back and forth between fears of denuded will and recolonizations of the idea of powerful will through recourse to bodily strength reconceived as virtue. Instead, through their fascination with everyday habits, which encompassed the addictive, both moved to reinstall some of the earlier vitalist thematics we saw at work in chapter 2 within this new physiologized context. As we will see, these held the capacity to reaffirm a sense of genuine struggles over value both within the individual and beyond. Evolutionary Economics and the Moral Danger of Doing Nothing The sense of naturalist fiction as a melodramatic disintegration of a prior order, an eruption within the well-­mannered Victorian individual of atavistic, bestial tendencies, cannot be separated from the genre’s oft-­remarked relation to the contemporaneous theory of degeneration. Within the framework of degeneration theory, devolution into merely a body, by stripping away the humanizing evolutionary additions of morality and mind, seemed to entail becoming consumed by vice, a criminal, an addict. More sweepingly, the rhetoric of degeneration offers a striking instance of the most up-­to-­date medical discoveries being pressed into the service of a paranoia about modern societies’ prospects for survival. Despite their distinct national situations, France, England, Germany, and even the US fell prey to a fin de siècle panic about social collapse—­one fed, ironically, by economic acceleration, with its by-­products of instability, labor unrest, urban growth, and smaller native-­born households.15 As Daniel Pick has written, the core question was whether degeneration represented “regression” within an overall narrative of progress or whether it exposed “the city, progress, civilisation and modernity” as, themselves, paradoxical “agents of decline” (106). One might think that the transformation of a rhetoric of moral turpitude into the language of biology would produce a far greater fatalism regarding the ability of such individuals to escape a destiny literally written into the blood. And yet this perspective proves too simple. Degeneration’s physicalization of the moral, which as we will see extended to the particular subject of the will, in fact had quite disparate effects, not all of them fatalistic. Unquestionably, however, they helped generate a very distinct kind of fictional portrayal of human struggle.

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Although degeneration theory first emerged in its modern, hereditarian form in French psychiatrist Bénédict Morel’s 1857 Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine, these ideas proliferated in the latter decades of the century during which naturalism as a literary movement began to emerge.16 Given that Zola’s magnum opus, the twenty-­ volume Rougon-­Macquart, investigated the depredations of a hereditary taint across multiple generations of a Paris family, leaving drunkenness, licentiousness, and homicidal mania in its wake, it has proved easy enough to assimilate these works to Morel’s ideas. Yet even Morel’s original Treatise, as “an inquiry into the self-­generating differentiation of an original ‘degeneration’ as it played itself out across the history of families,” “at once psychiatric, socio-­anthropological, and religious,” seemed already barely a step away from inevitable novelization (Pick 49; Bynum 3).17 These theories were also taken up across Europe and the United States by writers as disparate as the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, and the Austrian physician Max Nordau in his best seller Degeneration (Entartung), translated into English in 1895 (where it underwent seven printings that year in the US alone). With respect to maladies of the will, degeneration theory can easily appear simply to take earlier nineteenth-­century ideas about monomania and give these a heredity-­based, evolutionary (or devolutionary) cast. When Théodule Ribot, the influential French psychiatrist whose 1873 thesis combined Morel’s arguments about heredity with Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary thought, wrote his Maladies du volonté in 1883, he argued that writers like Morel and Maudsley had shown that cases of “excess of impulse” from “dipsomania” and “erotomania” to “homicidal and suicidal monomania” were “manifestations of . . . the same cause: degeneracy” (61). Given this sinful train of behaviors—­ Morel and Maudsley both partook of an apocalyptic Christian rhetoric, conceiving all humanity as “degenerated” from Edenic perfection—­one might readily imagine, as many critics have, that degenerationist thinking represented no more than a biologically inflected Victorian morality, conceiving the antidote to such degraded excesses as consisting in “willpower” in the sense of “clean thinking” and “self-­denial” (Hurley 205). Certainly, one could find in the 1880s and 1890s this sort of rhetoric. As stated, however, this chapter’s emphasis lies in the shift we have already seen begin to occur, one for which an older affirmation of morality—­and, indeed, will—­as entailing the denial of bodily urges began to appear inadequate.18 With respect to the novel, the characteristic view of naturalist writing as a kind of gothic melodrama of the emergence of the beast within proves equally limited as an account of these changing conceptions of socially approved, and

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denigrated, inhabitations of personhood—­for which, as we will see, animal­ ity and virtue are newly conceived imaginable hand in hand.19 Instead, I would argue, we must consider the fact that degeneration in the naturalist novel can just as readily take the form it does in Zola’s 1877 L’Assommoir. Consider the couple at the heart of that novel, the washerwoman Gervaise Macquart and her roofer husband, Coupeau. Both begin as earnest, hardworking strivers; both end as wasted drunks. Yet note how this process begins. In Coupeau’s case, he discovers the “delight of doing nothing” while convalescing after an accident at his job: his limbs relaxed and his muscles [sank] into a sweet lethargy; it was as if he was being slowly taken over by sloth, sloth that was using his convalescence to get inside his skin and permeate his body with a titillating languor. . . . Why in the world couldn’t it last like this for ever? (122)

Gervaise holds out longer, but she, too, seems to become gradually suffused by a “languor,” a “vague,” “dream”-­like feeling (135), which intensifies as she sits each day surrounded by the filthy garments of her trade: amid the penetrating fumes that hit her in the face as she bent over the piles, a kind of languor came over her. . . . She was stretching out her hands . . . more and more slowly and smiling vaguely, her eyes dreamy, as if this human stench was making her drunk. And it seemed as though that was where her laziness first began, that it came from the stifling reek of dirty clothes poisoning the air around her. (140)

Several things may be noted about these descriptions. First, they comport with a claim like Nordau’s that degeneration as “weakness of will” be understood above all as a kind of fatigue—­the very opposite, we might say, of the manic energy of the overly willful individual of earlier in the century. This characterization goes together with a shifting view of “primitive” man less as a wild animal than as, first and foremost, lazy.20 As Anson Rabinbach details in The Human Motor, the rapidly industrializing economies of the West saw during this period extensive investigation of fatigue’s mechanisms, including experiments with strategies like injecting workers with concentrated caffeine in the hopes of overcoming what appeared as the chief obstacle to a human workforce’s ability to keep pace with economic growth (144). Second, this weakness, in Zola, appears as an almost palpable emanation from a particular environment. This last aspect proves truer to Morel’s original conception of the etiology of degeneration in his Traité. For Morel, degeneracy resulted first and foremost from the influence of what he termed “poisons,” a term that could encompass alcohol and other drugs but also the

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toxins released in industrial environments. Modernity’s spaces became health hazards here—­whether dens of iniquity, fomenting exposure to alcohol and other intoxicants, or to syphilis via intimate contact with prostitutes, or simply the cities for which they stood as synecdoches, with their bad air.21 As we can see in the descriptions of Coupeau and Gervaise, this theory has the effect of producing distinctly passive figures literally overtaken by their surroundings. Zola’s choice of the title L’ Assommoir comports with all this: the bar, as the site presiding over all the others, is referred to with a slang term evoking its power not to whip its denizens into a frenzy, but to stun them into unconsciousness. In developing these ideas in his popular Degeneration, Nordau drew not only on Morel and Lombroso but on the work of an American neurologist, George M. Beard, who had created a sensation in the 1880s with his publications on “neurasthenia,” or what one volume memorably termed American Nervousness (1881). (Most famously, this was the condition for which Charlotte Perkins Gilman submitted to the famous “rest cure” of Beard’s fellow neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, as described in her story “The Yellow Wallpaper.”) From the outset of his volume, Beard was concerned to make clear that neurasthenia, or “nervous exhaustion”—­a “lack of nerve force” or “vital biological energy” (Schuster 17)—­needed to be confused neither with “passionateness” (which is merely an “expression of normal emotions” [Beard 5]), nor with sudden tic-­like behaviors such as those of some religious enthusiasts or the “Jumpers” of Maine. The latter, he explains, may respond in a purely automatic fashion to certain stimuli, and yet they manifest a clear “physical hardness and endurance,” rendering them in no way incapable of work (3–­4). If they represent a sort of atavism, then, this, if anything, proves to their present advantage (4). Neurasthenics, by contrast, overdrew on their currency of nerve force—­Beard was fond of conceiving embodied personhood via such economic metaphors, which Nordau adopted—­and ended in a state of collapse. Why? For Beard, the neurasthenic was a victim of modernity, in two senses: constantly buffeted by the challenging forces of modern life, from its rapid pace to its technologies to its assaults upon the senses, he was also particularly ill-­equipped to handle such intrusions, being of a more delicate nature than his forebears precisely as a result of the advance of civilization. Thus, if, again, alcohol and other drugs posed a distinct threat to the neurasthenic, the fault lay not in his excessive appetites but in something like the opposite: a greater “susceptibility” to such influences that, if anything, tended to move him toward enforced temperance in eating and drinking alike (30). Hence, we find Beard, remarkably enough, praising earlier Americans and

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contemporary Englishmen alike for being “animal[s] of tremendous alcoholic power . . . drinking is becoming a lost art” (31). When Beard referred to the then-­fashionable term of “inebriety,” then, the point was not to excoriate drinking to excess but to lament its contemporary impossibility (306). Nordau’s characterization of degeneration as a form of fatigue brought on by the tensions of civilized life, then, had strong roots in Beard’s theorizations. In Nordau’s words, “With [the] characteristic dejectedness of the degenerate, there is combined, as a rule, a disinclination to action of any kind, attaining possibly to abhorrence of activity and powerless to will,” the last glossed as “aboulia” (20). What was aboulia? As G. M. Berrios notes, the term, denoting “a form of insanity characterized by inability to exert the will,” became quite popular around the turn of the century, with various social problems from sloth to criminality attributed to its unchecked spread (Berrios and Gili 98–­99). We see here, again, how the pathology lay not in an excess of will but in its absence. One of the most extended treatments appeared in Ribot’s Maladies du volonté (1883), which would exercise a significant influence on William James’s later and more celebrated chapter on “Will” in his Principles of Psychology several years later. The psychological exploration of pathologies of will grew directly out of degeneration theory, unsurprisingly given the latter’s emphasis on failures of volition; as Ribot’s doctoral work expanded upon Morel’s ideas about heredity, so did he explain at the outset of Maladies du volonté his aim to complement contemporaneous writings on psychology in relation to evolution by treating similar issues under the rubric, rather, of “dissolution” (1). Ribot divides maladies of will into two main categories: “defect of impulse” and “excess of impulse.” “Abulia” refers to the first of these, a case in which a strange divide has appeared between the mental willing of something and its physical execution: “The I will does not transform itself into  .  .  . active determination” (28). In one case, a magistrate states that he has “no will except not to will” and can do none of the work required of him (29); in another, a recurrent sufferer “had the keenest desire” to go out into the world, but finds “his will could not command his legs to put themselves in motion” to leave the house. These cases are described as a kind of “impotence,” in the literal sense of an absence of power to act (28, 37). Frank Norris’s artist-­hero Vandover thus arguably shows the first signs of his true downfall when he stands before a canvas and experiences the sort of gap Ribot describes between his head and his hand, an “impotency of his fingers”: “some third delicate and subtle faculty that coordinated [mind and body] and that called forth a sure and instant response to the dictates of his mind, was lacking” (231, 224). This “lack of coordination” formed, for Ribot, a primary symptom of degeneracy (61).

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We need to recognize, however, the effect of such characterizations on earlier Victorian conceptions of the will. Conceived as an inhibitory force, a brake on one’s natural inclinations toward self-­interest, the will for someone like Kant was primarily an interior matter. In the later nineteenth century, with introspection itself receiving less and less credence from an increasingly scientific psychology, strong will could scarcely be conceived as a mental achievement. Instead, then, we find cases like those in Ribot, in which the sign of a defective, indeed degenerate, will lay in its ability to generate only mental aims that ended in no physical fruition. In William James’s reformulation of Ribot’s ideas in his chapter on “Will,” it is notable that “obstructed will” appears as a form of “moral tragedy,” a characterization that seems colored by James’s own experiences with depression and self-­narrativization as having been saved by the power of will. For a moment, it looks as if this might entail a greater sympathy: this is “one of the saddest feelings one can bear,” James states (309). Most strongly, however, it seems to call forth repudiation. Thus, the inability to act, already conceived as “impotence,” gets linked here much more directly to a crisis of masculinity: such “hopeless failures,” “sentimentalists,” “dead-­beats,” James writes, “never get to holding their limp characters erect” (309). Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, with James returns the view of all this through the lens of Saint Paul’s dilemma: suddenly those who do nothing have become the new version of those who “habitually se[e] the better only to do the worse” (309). The “worse,” that is, is no longer the chastised activity of sin so much as it is inaction—­lack of will rather than its predominance. Even more strongly, the question aboulia posed was whether the issue at hand lay in the weakness of impelling forces or in the presence of a strong counterforce holding the will back; at least one period psychologist, favoring the latter interpretation, suggested aboulia might be understood as a pathology of excess “inhibition” (Berrios and Gili 164).22 This opens the door to the striking possibility that aboulia might result not from a deficit but, rather, from an excess of what earlier Victorians would have understood as a healthy will: that is, one defined by self-­control. Remarkably enough, we see such an idea pursued more than once in the later writings of the British psychologist Maudsley. “Were men to carry the moral law of self-­sacrifice into rigorous and extreme effect,” Maudsley warns in the new 1895 edition of his Pathology of Mind, “they would perish by the practice of their virtues  .  .  . they would have robbed human nature of its springs of enterprise and reduced it to a stagnant state of decadence” (27). In this account, not only could an excess of Victorian virtue constitute an evolutionary liability in an era defined by industrial innovation; it might literally

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result in something akin to the degenerate’s “state of decadence.” As we began to see in the previous chapter, such concerns became surprisingly common as the 1890s progressed; other writers feared that civilization had given us “a being in whom the springs of action are . . . paralyzed or perverted” by intellectual fastidiousness, a populace “afraid to let [themselves] go, to offend the conventions” (quoted in Lears, No Place 47–­48).23 If will as self-­restraint or inhibition formed one crucial target of these writings, then—­leading, notably, to this period’s reconception of John Bun­ yan’s spiritual autobiography as a psychiatric case study—­the other was an equally “Victorian” overemphasis on sentiment.24 As we already began to see in James, the sentimentalist could be denigrated as one with dreams about action destined never to be fulfilled. Other writers, however, sharpened this critique to imply that sentimentalism constituted a kind of narcotic “languor” and “inertia” akin to that described in the naturalist protagonist, an idea already present in Morel’s Traité (Pick 50). David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford University whose writings formed an important part of the Americanization of degeneration theory (and, later, of the yet more deeply pernicious eugenic thought that formed its logical supplement), thus quoted a self-­help writer’s argument that “Emotional excess . . . is women’s form of drunkenness. Nervous prostration is her delirium tremens.” Elaborated Jordan, For emotion or sensation to go over into action is to follow the normal law of the mind. To cultivate sensation for sensation’s sake  .  .  . whether of art, music, love, or religion, is to live a sensuous life, and this is ultimately a life of weakness and decadence. . . . The influence of intense sentimentalism and emotional gush . . . is as evil as the influence of liquor. (42)

Like Maudsley—­and like Mark Twain in his Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court—­Jordan took as his ultimate example of the absurdity of forms of virtue “unrelated to external things” the self-­flagellations of a “half-­starved monk” (44). If the sentimentalist was finally will-­less in the sense of being lost in a narcotic haze of feeling, the antidote, then, in writings like Jordan’s, lay in a surprisingly physicalized construal of virtue. After all, as he explains, echoing the writers we have already cited here, “With most men sin comes not from the result of strong passion, ungovernable impulses, and revolt against conventions”—­the version of sin against which the Victorian insistence on self-­denial aimed. Giving the example of the protagonist of Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware, Jordan asserts, once more, that sin results from, rather, what we see in Zola, the tendency of overly passive individuals

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to succumb to toxic environments—­from, that is, “weak will . . . brought into contact with petty or nasty corruption or corrosion” (36). The alternative, then, can scarcely entail restraint of one’s body. And indeed, we see Jordan arguing directly that “Happiness comes from the normal exercise of life’s functions in any grade, doing, thinking, fighting, overcoming, planning, loving. It is active, positive, strengthening.” Happiness, in sum, derives from the quest not for “pleasure” but for “effectiveness”—­that is, from the exercise of the will (13–­14). As such, we arrive at a new category, and goal: what Jordan calls “rational enjoyment” (44). A number of things are notable here. To begin with, we see how the concept of will was able to be recuperated in a period that was calling much of its Victorian scaffolding into question. Jordan’s writings need to be seen within the framework of a transatlantic fascination with the will as a pure, physical power that promised to lift the nation in question out of the miring doubts and fears of decline endemic to the late nineteenth century.25 In such formulations, the emptying out of interiority became not a threat to notions of will but, at least briefly, a form of advantage.26 As the historian Roger Smith puts it, “Even when the stress on physical determinism . . . reached a peak” in writings like those of the degeneration theorists, “this did not exclude, and perhaps it even enhanced, the call to exercise will” (44, emphasis mine). The will as the inner mystery that plagued Augustine, after all, could only with great difficulty be kept in check. Will as mere “energy,” a capacity for action, simply required strengthening and channeling in order to serve the common good (Nye 314). One may extend this point further. From one vantage, ideas like Jordan’s appear direct critiques of Victorian morality in their frank insistence on “enjoyment” as a result of the expression of the bodily functions of “fighting,” “loving,” and so on. And yet, as we see from the language of sin as applied to the weak of will, the moralizing aspect of will-­talk has by no means disappeared. Rather, it has become newly attached to the will as bodily action. The locus of sin has simply shifted, from those unable to tame their unruly wills to those unable to will at all. Indeed, I would argue that the new rhetoric of will coming into being toward the nineteenth century’s end, which finds considerable echoes in our own present, holds the capacity to be a more moralizing discourse than its Victorian predecessor. That predecessor’s emphasis on self-­restraint, after all, was itself premised on a recognition of the will’s complexities and an attempt to imagine how modern society could avoid being torn apart by these. By contrast, the writings of the 1880s and 1890s are no­­ table for introducing, for the first time, the possibility that the intense individual will and a will exceeding that individual might work together as engines of progress.

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More broadly, then, what begins to emerge here is something unprecedented: a formation in which, for the first time, the individual will is conceived not as being in tension with a larger will it also cannot be thought without—­whether that of God, vitalism’s “Life,” the state, or the social; rather, it becomes possible for the two to work seamlessly in tandem, as in what T. S. Gray calls the paradoxically “individualist/organicist theory” of Herbert Spencer (253). The crucial thing making this shift possible is the conjuncture of two overarching entities conceived in such a way that order and progress are driven by internal conflict, rather than threatened by it.27 These are the market, on the one hand—­in an older idea going back to Smith’s eighteenth century—­and evolution, on the other. “Social Darwinism,” the notion that evolutionary ideas might be marshaled toward the understanding of human social life, would in its most familiar, Spencerian form be better understood as “economic Darwinism.” What makes this difference hard to appreciate is that for someone like Spencer, whose work was immensely popular in the US at this time, society itself—­at least, modern “industrial” society—­amounted to no more than the web of multiple individual economic exchanges. (Similarly, the state was conceived as a “joint-­stock protection society” citizens could opt into or out of as they chose [quoted in Gray 239].) The sociologist Émile Durkheim’s critique of Spencer in The Division of Labor in Society was based on this idea that “the sole link . . . between men” amounted to that of the individual economic contract (149–­50). As Durkheim further noted, this conception of the social as the economic meant that social progress could be conceived only as the natural by-­product of economic activity in a free market. The “conscious pursuit of social ends” represented an error under such a rubric, for solidarity would always appear as, in Durkheim’s summation, “an unconscious and spontaneous adaptation, under the immediate pressure of necessity” (150–­51). Here it begins to be clear why, rather than simply that, Spencer’s ideas about laissez-­faire as a political program (or lack thereof) could be conceived via reference to the theory of natural selection.28 Industry, he opined, was like the digestive system of the social organism, fully able to carry out its functions of fueling that organism’s growth without aid from any “higher” centers (whether brain or state); indeed, these could continue even while the latter were asleep. (Similarly, in the words of the American evolutionist John Fiske, natural selection was “a power that slumbers not nor sleeps” [quoted in Hawkins 107].) “The only thing needful,” Spencer counseled, “is to maintain the conditions under which the natural actions have fair play” (quoted in Gray 245). The American social Darwinist William Graham Sumner concurred, calling capitalism “automatic and instinctive in its operation,” which here is understood to be a

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good thing (quoted in Hawkins 112, from What Social Classes Owe). Capital itself amounted to a kind of stored quantum of will: “Capital is force, human energy stored or accumulated” (What Social Classes Owe 54). The only moral exigency amounted to growing it.29 Spencerian ideas did not die out, moreover, with the turn-­of-­the-­century advent of marginalist economics.30 As Geoffrey Hodgson argues in Economics and Evolution, they can be seen as important precursors to the “neoliberal” conceptions of Friedrich Hayek and others in the mid-­twentieth century. In particular, Hayek’s oft-­cited concept of “spontaneous order” as an evolutionary notion at work in the economic sphere echoes Spencer’s sense of a greater Will at work able to correct for all the flaws in individual decision making. Given all this, it should be less surprising that even today we routinely refer to economic “growth” and “health” as if we were describing a biological entity. The biologization here might be said to begin with the twinning of race and nation, and both with evolution, in the nineteenth century, as we saw in degeneration theory as well.31 Naturalist fiction, then, has routinely been understood as promulgating these kinds of ideas. Is this a fair characterization? Turning back now to the work of Frank Norris, the American writer most directly influenced by Zola, we will see how powerfully influenced it has been by the concepts of degeneration as physical lassitude explored here—­but also, it turns out, how it attempts to reach beyond these, or, better, through them, to a more probing set of formulations with more resonance for our own time. The Brute’s Two Faces: Frank Norris’s Vandover va n d o v e r : w e a k n e s s o f t h e w i l l It might seem a perversity worthy of Frank Norris himself to conceive of Vandover and the Brute as anything other than a textbook naturalist melodrama of human decline. In the view of one of the genre’s most thoroughgoing transatlantic analyses, the American naturalist novel seems “particularly disposed” to the theme of the rampaging “human beast” and of the broader eruption of “unbridled, libidinal . . . energy, which the present moral order can barely hold in check” (213–­14). Norris thus draws on “Lombrosian themes of atavism and degeneracy,” David Baguley writes, to create the protagonists of his 1899 McTeague as well as Vandover, showing them gradually overtaken by murderous impulses in McTeague’s case and, in Vandover’s, “a life of gambling, drunkenness, and debauchery” (214–­15)32—­most damningly, the seduction of a companion, Ida Wade, who, learning of her pregnancy, takes her life.33 And,

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indeed, Vandover’s sense toward the end that he has become a kind of wolf or dog, running about his room on all fours and barking, seems to literalize Maudsley’s sense of degeneration as a form of “dehumanization” or, in his words, “unkinding” (244, 240). I hope to demonstrate, however, that Vandover’s embodiment of the degenerate type in fact makes clear how much that type’s “weakness of will” was conceived, finally, as a matter more of inertia rather than of the rampaging pursuit of desires—­setting the stage for the reconstrual of strong will as bodily energy rather than moral self-­restraint. More significantly still, the book turns out to view the latter development, as portrayed in Vandover’s more successful “frenemy” Charlie Geary, as arguably an even greater cause for alarm than its protagonist’s slothful tendencies, which are treated at moments with real empathy. It seems meaningful that they are given an almost proto-­Freudian etiology, as we are told at the book’s outset of Vandover’s mother’s death in a train station when he is eight years old, and that he then recalls nothing from the five years following this traumatic incident.34 As such, we might easily enough view Vandover’s most characteristic habits during his young adulthood as a kind of womb-­seeking, in response to anxieties whose source he finds persistently elusive. Overall, if Vandover possesses certain defining traits that might be fatal, these are less a matter of intense appetites (he in fact repeatedly loses his appetite throughout the book) than of a certain passivity, or at most a paradoxical drive toward it. Prior to his fall into more socially disapproved modes of enjoyment, the young man’s greatest pleasures entail nonactivities like staying home on a cold day, lounging before the fire “with the lazy complacency of a drowsing cat,” and enjoying the “enervating warmth” of a bath, which eventually puts him to sleep (183).35 While one might say that from the time Vandover allows his friend Geary to manage his life for him in college, he starts “becoming indolent” in the sense of “shirk[ing]” work and duty, one might also consider the root sense of “in-­dolence” as something more like anesthesia, a state of “indifference to” or “freedom from pain,” of “rest and ease” (OED Online). Even the supposed “brute” within him, which is frequently characterized by a raging hunger, seems to want to eat primarily in order to experience the state of being “inert and supine” that occurs afterward (317, 324). Overall, then, it seems fair to say that Vandover regresses considerably less to a state of wild animality, as it might appear, than to what Norris calls at one point a “plantlike” condition: “mere passive existence” defined by an absence of movement (278). Vandover tends to merge into whatever physical space he inhabits, taking the evolutionarily desirable quality of adaptability to an unsettling extreme: “He found he could be contented in almost any

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environment, the weakness, the certain pliability of his character easily fitting itself into new grooves, rearranging itself to suit new circumstances” (27). Or, as he tells his friend Dolly Haight late in the book, in wondering horror, “Dolly, I can get used to almost anything” (305). Norris does seem particularly interested in Vandover in the idea of degeneration as the result of environmental influence. Characters in the novel are named for San Francisco’s streets: Dolly Haight, Charlie Geary. Most significantly, however, vice in this text appears as the direct outcropping of inhabiting—­habitually—­the wrong sort of space, as in the case of Zola’s “assommoir.” Returning to California after college, Vandover and his friends begin to “frequent” the Imperial, “one of the fast cafés of the city”; there Van meets “habitués” of the place like his future gambling companion, Ellis, and Flossie, a prostitute to whom he loses his virginity (29, 45, 50). The notion of the habitué—­a French word enabling the “frequenting” of a certain place to appear as the primary instance of habit formation as character formation—­ plays a key role here. By the time of the gambling scene quoted at this chapter’s outset, Vandover himself has become a true habitué of the Imperial, both in the familiar sense and also in the sense that he and his compatriots become “bundles of habits,” in William James’s phrase. The two appear linked, as if by revisiting the same site over and over again, Vandover turns into someone who can only perform the same actions again and again. Norris at one point describes one’s compatriots as a part of this process also: they become one’s “set” that “form[s] around” one, part of what makes one’s character “set like plaster,” as William James informs us it has, thanks to one’s habits, by the age of thirty (27). All this, however, cannot explain why some of the “young men of the city,” as the novel terms them, degenerate while others, notably Vandover’s friend Charlie Geary, become embodiments of socially approved success. Norris’s interest, finally, seems less in the modern city as a sea of turpitude, as a Nordau might have portrayed it, and more in the genuine moral complexities it presents. We might recall here Norris’s original conception of the novel as a social document of a transitional period, bearing the subtitle “A Study of Life and Manners in an American City at the End of the Nineteenth Century.”36 As Joseph McElrath and Jesse Crisler suggest in their biography of Norris, he might be understood as focusing on a time of “rapid transformations that called into question the values, truths, and ultimate certainties into which [middle-­class Americans] had been reared” (6). The greatest danger in Vandover, then, may lie less in succumbing to loose modern morals than in attempting to navigate these shifting waters with only Victorian morality on one’s side. Put otherwise, as we saw in the previous

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section, Victorianism, which now appears as a form of atavism, may itself set the stage for one’s degeneration. It thus becomes possible to argue that Vandover declines because of rather than despite the fact that he begins the novel a “good” boy from a good family who diligently says his prayers nightly (9). Indeed, at the book’s outset, Vandover is said to stand apart from his friends for “his temperance, his purity, and his clean living” (28). Crucially, he is introduced to the vices that later become his downfall, from drinking to gambling to spending time in the company of women of questionable virtue, simply as a result of attending college, where these behaviors are depicted as the norm (20–­22). What distinguishes Vandover, then, is not his engagement in these sorts of activities, but the fact that he engages in them and then wakes up the next morning in “a veritable agony of repentance,” an orgy of Puritanical self-­loathing in which none of the others appear to indulge (24). His father, whom he calls “the Governor,” looms largely during such episodes: a drunken binge finds him waking to gaze at himself in the mirror, wringing his hands and exclaiming, “what would the Governor say to this?” (20), while a sexual dalliance leads him to write an actual confession of guilt to the old man, “reiterating his resolve to shun such a thing forever after” (25). Most dramatically, perhaps, when Vandover once again displays his virtuousness by keeping his appointment to meet his straitlaced fiancée at church the morning after a raucous night out with the boys, the minister’s words inspire him literally to recoil in disgust at his prior actions by vomiting in the pew (62). This last event, in which the disgust itself generates an even more sacrilegious act, turns in a different direction, however. Vandover begins to excoriate himself once more—­and then, all at once, “he checked himself . . . not daring to go further.” After all, he considers, “One would have no peace of mind left if one went on brooding over such things in this fashion” (65). The remarkable thing we need to consider, then, is that the book may to an extent actually endorse this view of the matter. It is put more strongly when Vandover learns of Ida’s suicide: What would become of her now? And what would become of him? . . . His imagination was never more active. . . . But worse than all was the thought of that punishment from which there was absolutely no escape . . . Then for an instant it was as if a gulf without bottom had opened under him, and he had to fight himself back from the edge for sheer self-­preservation. To look too long in that direction was simple insanity beyond any doubt. (107)

A dichotomy begins to emerge: one may either brood on the divine punishment yet to come or privilege the evolutionary virtue of “self-­preservation” (107). The former of these now appears as leading, literally, to insanity, a

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notion Vandover reiterates when he finds he is beginning to come back to himself after this blow he imagined would be life ending. Was this “due to his youth, his good health, and his good spirits,” he wonders, or was there “something wrong with him” (121)? The question is an important one, as it takes seriously that the notion of being able to recover from the sort of event associated with moral “ruin” might, in fact, imply bodily vigor. Yes, thinks Vandover, “it was only in the books that people had their lives ruined . . . to brood over such things was unnatural and morbid. Ah, what a dreadful thing to become morbid!” (121). If Van manages to learn to avoid brooding, however, he possesses a ready capacity for the Victorian virtue of “sentimentalism” that David Starr Jordan and William James equally decried in the weak of will. This produces a curious scene in which Vandover believes his soul to be saved by a chance attendance at the opera, which even the narrator describes as a case of what is “good” in him, his love of art, attempting to reassert itself over the “wreckage” (208). “To be better, to be true and right and pure . . . these were the things that he seemed to feel in the music,” Norris writes (213–­14). These righteous messages take him away, we are told, from the “atmosphere” of the auditorium, which is “heavy with the smell of gas, of plush upholstery, of wilting bouquets” and a “fine vapour as of the visible exhalation of many breaths” (209). The opera house thus appears no less miasmic a setting than the gambling den, and what is striking is that the music then mimics rather than transcending its stupefying quality, instilling in Vandover “a vague sense of those things which are too beautiful to be comprehended, of a nobility, a self-­ oblivion” (213). Vandover might be said to stumble at the moment he most hopes to rise, that is, not because he gives into the brute but because he succumbs to the narcotizing slumber of Romanticism. That it makes sense to read Vandover in these terms—­less as a corrupt modern subject than as not modern enough, not so much willful as lacking in intensity—­can be further adduced, finally and most fully, from the book’s portrayal of his two hometown companions, Dolly Haight and Charlie Geary, who go along with him to Harvard and back (28). On the one hand, and crucially, all three participate in the same potentially chastisable nighttime activities; on the other, however, Haight and Geary appear as two (historical) extremes, with Vandover occupying an uneasy middle ground. Haight is the more Victorian, “a well-­bred boy, of good family, very quiet” and “polite,” who attends chapel nearly daily (18). Geary, by contrast, stares boldly at women in the street; he dismisses as outmoded the notion that “the average modern girl” will be as “pure and innocent” as her early nineteenth-­century precursor; indeed, he opines, sexuality ought to be “part of their education.”

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Haight strongly disagrees, insisting that “a girl is born with a natural instinctive purity”; if she errs, a man’s “duty” lies in “protect[ing]” her, “even if he has to protect her against herself ” (102). Similarly, where Haight never drinks anything stronger than beer or mineral water, Geary regularly gets drunk with Vandover (19, 50, 20). Indeed, the friends’ first truly genuine debauch, the one that ends in Vandover’s eruption in the church pew, occurs at Geary’s tipsy suggestion: “Say, boys . . . what do you say we go to every joint in town, and wind up at the Turkish baths? We’ll have a regular time” (55–­56). Yet while these details might suggest Vandover would have stayed on a better course had he followed Haight’s model, the narrative’s unfolding ends up implying precisely the opposite. The forward-­“pushing” Geary becomes its success story (18); the residual Haight, perhaps the only figure in the novel more miserable than Vandover himself. The polite young man’s fate is sealed with a kiss one night at the Imperial when, as he fumbles in embarrassment in an attempt to leave, Flossie plants one on a lip that happens to be cut; by the end of the book, he has become a syphilitic wreck. Is Haight merely a victim of pure contingency? Perhaps—­but it is worth noting the one vice in which he does indulge (at first shocking Vandover), while Geary, notably, does not: gambling (20–­21). This apparent anomaly may hold the beginnings of a key, for Haight’s very goodness seems inseparable from an essential passivity, whereas Geary can be understood as someone incapable of leaving anything up to chance. Haight, that is, turns out to be if anything even more devoid of will than Vandover himself, while Geary, by contrast, takes shape as will (very literally) incarnate—­will, again, understood not as self-­restraint in the face of vice, but as “energy and resource” (235). “He delighted to assume the management of things,” from Vandover’s college schedule to his dance card to the details of the boys’ nights out; tellingly, however, at the moment the wild evening he had proposed gets out of hand (Ellis becoming violent in a restaurant), Geary vanishes (17, 59). Understanding Geary, I want now to argue, holds the real key to understanding not only Norris’s naturalist novel but the larger shifts in the conception of will we have begun to trace—­as well as how these might be both acknowledged and at the same time called into question, then and now. For Geary turns out to exemplify both the transformation of will into a matter of sheer bodily energy and, finally, I want to claim, Norris’s broader sense that this transformation might speak to a pathology not of those unable to make the physical grade, but, rather, of the resulting model of social life. Put otherwise, we need to consider the fact that the true “brute” Vandover confronts may be less the socially condemned one within him than his own socially garlanded friend, whose proposal of that first wild night out sets the entire

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tale of Vandover’s ruin in motion, and who later delivers its coup de grace by swindling his friend out of his inheritance at the last moment he might have been saved from utter degradation. geary : t r iumph of the w ill As the emblem of success within the world the book depicts, Geary may be helpfully contrasted not simply with Haight and Vandover but with Vandover’s father, the “Governor,” who like Geary works as a real-­estate developer (in what for Geary is a side gig to his profession of attorney). Both men are consumed with their jobs; indeed, it comes as no surprise to the reader that Geary quickly rises within his firm. Geary’s treatment of all aspects of his life, from college to dances,37 in economic terms, to be carefully assessed as opportunities for “rustling,” might make him appear the image of the Homo economicus as described by Max Weber during the same period Vandover was written. Weber of course famously began his examination of capitalism’s “spirit” by turning to the US, to the founding father for whom Benjamin Franklin Norris had been named. Franklin’s admonitions concerning the “duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital” become synonymous with the voice of capitalism itself (51). And yet the purpose of Weber’s entire study, of course, was to root such beliefs in Protestantism, which alone could explain not simply the near-­religious zeal with which moneymaking was pursued, but, crucially, the fact that its pursuit bore no necessary relation to the actual enjoyment of the fruits of one’s persistent labors. The irrational core of capitalism’s rationalistic spirit became evident, Weber wrote, “if you ask them what is the meaning of their restless activity, why they are never satisfied”; in fact, “business with its continuous work” has “simply” “become a necessary part of their lives” (70). Now, in Vandover, Norris gives a remarkably congruent portrait of a figure who suits Weber’s depiction completely, but it is not Geary; it is, rather, the “Old Gentleman,” Vandover’s father, who in his youth gives him little monetary rewards for his artwork and for reading the Bible. Early in the book, we are told, when the family first settles in San Francisco, this dogged provider intends to retire, yet finds he cannot: he is, rather, “at nearly sixty years of age, forced again into the sordid round of business,” for, having “given his entire life to his business at the exclusion of everything else,” he finds “he had lost the capacity for enjoying anything but the business itself. Nothing else could interest him.” Hence, he once again begins to work all day, coming home late, “completely fagged” (6).

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Yet while the Old Gentleman may appear a textbook case of Weber’s Homo economicus, Vandover in fact presents him as being as atavistic a figure as Vandover himself. The name “Old Gentleman” already suggests as much—­but so, I would claim, does his status as the “Governor” whom, we have seen, Vandover internalizes in properly Victorian superego fashion. The notion of the will as an internalized self-­“governor,” entailing the restraint of one’s bodily desires on behalf of the good of a social totality, starts to appear in this period a quaint vestige of an earlier time.38 For Geary, hard work is not a duty, a form of self-­subordination, but a means of aggrandizing oneself by triumphing in a business world defined by conflict. As his constant references to the need to “rustle” suggest, this Homo economicus is more cowboy than Puritan. Unsurprisingly, then, Geary thinks like a social Darwinist, and we see him imagining his own will in relation to a vague, vitalist larger whole. This is what introspection generally looks like for him, in stark contrast to Vandover, who characteristically watches his two selves battle. Geary’s version entails little or no self-­reflection concerning his own behavior, but, rather a kind of ecstatic vision, “vast, vague ideas . . . that could scarcely be formulated into thought” (329). These entail an image of “life” in the form of “the infinite herd of humanity, driven on as if by some enormous, relentless engine” (329); or they take shape as a “field of action”—­the “government of a whole people,” a project “large . . . inspiring . . . something on a tremendous scale, something to which one could give up one’s whole life and energy . . . to which one could sacrifice everything—­friendships, fortunes, scruples, principles, life itself ” (328). Thus we see the way biological race and nation merge as potent abstractions, goading one into ceaseless, unthinking activity. Does Geary in this sense “think like a naturalist”? It has long been pointed out that Norris was exposed to Spencerian doctrine under the tutelage of Joseph LeConte as a student at the University of California, Berkeley.39 And certainly, Norris the novelist was capable of imagining economy and nature alike as ultimately beneficent larger processes, as most notably in The Octopus, even if their effects on individuals’ lives were often portrayed destructively.40 Put otherwise, naturalism clearly paid greater attention than Spencer and his acolytes did to the violence of these “wills,” individual and supraindividual alike, even if at times this was deemed necessary for a larger good. Vandover, however, is more critical, in a Durkheimian vein, because it is able to ask after what happens to the social when the economic becomes privileged.41 Hence, over and over, Vandover portrays people coming together only to form a united front of impassive judgment, curious scrutiny, and, in one instance, violent abjection of a less fortunate individual. We see this from the opening scene of Vandover’s mother’s death, where other passengers on the

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platform “star[e] curiously at the invalid lying back in the steamer chair” (4); when the Governor dies, later in the book, “a subdued excitement spread” throughout the neighborhood. A collectivity briefly emerges: “Women found excuses to call on each other, talking over what had happened,” “children collected in little groups on the sidewalk  .  .  . looking and pointing” (154–­55). Amid all this, however, Vandover is “left alone” (155)—­as when his former friends cease to recognize him once the scandal of Ida’s death has broken, and he imagines “the whole world . . . draw[ing] off like a refluent tide, leaving him alone, abandoned, cast upon some fearful, mysterious shore” (242). The extreme instance of all this is the stand-­alone chapter devoted to a shipwreck, in which the passengers, all driven solely by the thought of saving themselves, can momentarily unite only around the subject of refusing to allow a Jewish man onto their overcrowded lifeboat—­a scene that ends in his being beaten to death before their eyes.42 Given the prominence of the Jew as a figure of the degenerate, such a scene can be read in tandem with those of Vandover’s abjection from the social as a critique of the use of Spencerian utilitarianism—­in the form of the now-­classic lifeboat scenario—­to justify the sacrifice of those deemed less fit to survive. Like both Durkheim and Zola, then—­who were making similar-­minded arguments against the anti-­Semitic presuppositions of the Dreyfus affair around the same time Norris was completing Vandover—­Norris seems here to counter the notion of the degenerate exception with the suggestion that it is the social itself that, subordinated to the economic, is in a pathological condition.43 The most damning sign of this is also suggestive of Durkheimian anomie, in that what might otherwise appear as Vandover’s particular bent toward addictive excesses opens out into a generalized state of compulsive insatiability witnessed throughout the text, from the notary in Geary’s office who fusses endlessly with the water filter, “refusing to be satisfied,” to the girls at the pre-­Lent party where Vandover is snubbed, who take a “morbid hysterical pleasure” in being able to “dance till they dropped” (268, 198). In no case, however, is this socially encouraged addictive propensity more evident than in Geary himself. Norris’s critique of Geary is more distinctive, however—­if also uncannily familiar—­in its intensified focus on the transformation of will into a matter of the body and specifically of bodily health. Indeed, what Vandover and the Brute eventually pathologizes is not simply the absence of the social but, more fascinatingly, the discourse of health itself. It reveals the capacity of that discourse, degeneration’s virtuous other, to function as itself the locus of addiction. In so doing, however—­along with other sorts of writing emerging in this period, as we will see—­it finally opens up the possibility for habit and repetition to be thought in more complex terms.

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Arguably, Geary’s most peculiar and most characteristic trait is that which we find, once again, on display the morning he arrives at Vandover’s flat to put into play his plan to swindle his friend. Finding Vandover barely sentient on his divan, he immediately informs him that he has “ ‘been up since half-­past six; had breakfast at seven, fine cutlet. . . . I walk downtown every morning, and three times a week I take a cold shower as soon as I get up’ ” (257–­58). This litany is entirely typical; from his earliest introduction in the novel, Geary is portrayed as incessantly subjecting his friends to a precise accounting of what he has recently eaten (usually meat), how much sleep he got the night before, the good long walk he took to and from his job, and so on: “He was very careful of his health. Ah, you bet, one had to look out for one’s health” (249). This last bit amounts to something of a mantra for Geary; he repeats it in the scene in question as he upbraids the immobile Vandover for looking, himself, “all frazzled out, all pale around the wattles” (257). “Ah, you’ve been hitting a pace again . . . there’s no use talking. All night racket this trip?” he knowingly concludes, cheerfully ignorant of the fact that, racked with anxiety, Vandover has been unable to sleep to the point of recently attempting suicide (256–­57). What can we make of these repeated insistences? On the one hand, they demonstrate that Benjamin Franklin can in certain respects serve as an precursor for Geary after all, given the degree to which his famous chart of virtues similarly subjected his daily habits, from diet to sleep to engaging in “venery,” to a strict written accounting. And yet the differences between Franklin’s more traditional approach to moral education and Geary’s remain nonetheless apparent, as the latter can no longer conceive any use for the more abstract daily achievements lacking a physical correlate, such as “sincerity” and “justice.” Similarly, Franklin was enough of a proto-­Victorian to include among his virtues both “chastity” and “temperance,” applying the latter maxim to both food and drink—­hence, his brief dabbling in a vegetarian diet. Geary, in contrast, as we saw, clearly enjoys dalliances outside of marriage, drinks a good deal, and, as he is perhaps most fond of remarking, loves nothing more than an enormous steak. It might be more appropriate, then, to see Geary as radicalizing the already latent tendency in Franklin’s tabulations to conceive of moral progress in terms of the daily habits of the body. Both across Europe and within the United States, the response to the notion of a twinned moral and physical decline in degeneration theory took the form of a new commitment to health in the form of the moralized training of the body-­as-­will.44 John Harvey Kellogg, for example, followed the lead of his antebellum predecessor Sylvester Graham in advocating for a vegetarian diet based on cereal products as a way to tamp down aggressive impulses and what Franklin would have termed

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urges toward “venery.” The earlier era, however, would never have birthed a Bernarr Macfadden, a self-­made health entrepreneur whose legend encompassed not only his avid consumption of flesh at table but his sexual prowess (Whorton 298; Green 249). Both could be seen as offshoots of Macfadden’s primary concern, physical exercise, a craze with no earlier American correlate. “Weakness is a Crime,” his magazine Physical Culture proclaimed (Green 245). Initially spurred by German immigrants who introduced the “Turnen” system of gymnastics into American schools, the movement accelerated via the influence of English “muscular Christianity,” a fad for the ancient Greek ideal of “a sound mind in a sound body,” discourses of efficiency that migrated from industry to self-­help, and, last but not least, evolutionary theories. Spencer himself wrote of his failed attempts at vegetarianism, asserting it hampered his “energy of body and mind”; understanding neglect of health as a “physical sin,” Spencer in his educational writings exhorted the individual to “make his own health and virtue through energetic action.” “The first requirement to success in life,” he famously proclaimed, “is to be a good animal” (quoted in Whorton 154). Both in the US and abroad, the will figured prominently in these discourses as an emblem of a virtuous physical power. As the psychologist G. Stanley Hall explained the reasoning here, since “the muscles are the only organs of the will,” to develop the one was to develop the other (quoted in Whorton 289). As Gail Bederman has described, Hall’s writings emblematized a tendency within white intellectual thought of the epoch to advise a judicious exposure to forms of “savage” wildness in boyhood, as a means for “overcivilized” men to overcome the dangers posed by civilization’s brakes upon the will. While such programs were predicated on ideas about proper manliness, their explicitly racial dimensions may have helped to recommend a version of them to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the feminist and later eugenicist, who helped open a physical fitness center in Providence in the 1880s. Gilman recounted in her autobiography her efforts as a teenager to overcome a perceived “flaccidity of will” with “a course of exercises in which small and purely arbitrary decisions were sharply carried out,” such as, “ ‘At five thirty-­ eight I will walk around the block.’ ‘I will get out of bed at thirteen minutes to seven,’ ” and so forth (Living 56–­57). By the 1890s, she was honoring the ancient Greeks by performing daily exercises in the nude ( gymnas) before bedtime, which she winkingly described in a letter to her husband-­to-­be (Wrisley 141). What we see in all this, as in Geary’s updated version of Franklin, cannot simply be understood via the Puritan-­inflected, ascetic version of Homo economicus familiar from Weber. We might, rather, borrow Peter Sloterdijk’s conception of what he terms Homo repetitivus, “the human in training” (10).

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Also tracing this idea back to the ancients, he nonetheless focuses his attentions on the moment we have been considering, that of “the still inadequately understood sport cult phenomenon” burgeoning around 1900 (29), in which the earlier Christian (and, in the east, Buddhist and Hindu) “asceticisms” are “becoming post-­spiritually somatized” (38). Sloterdijk’s account sums up both the continuity and the difference I am aiming to articulate here from the Augustinian tradition with which this book began: On the ascetic planet, once discovered as such, the difference between those who make something or a great deal of themselves and those who make little or nothing of themselves becomes increasingly conspicuous. . . . In a world that belongs to God, human beings make too much of themselves as soon as they raise their heads; in a world that belongs to humans, they repeatedly make too little of themselves. (38)

Vandover’s failure as failure of will, then—­and Geary’s success—­can be understood through this opposition between those who self-­make and those who do not. We have here not simply the admirably independent “self-­made man” of a longer American tradition, which would include Franklin, but a man literally at work “making” his body from the ground up on a daily basis. As Sloterdijk notes, this idea is in fact in harmony with the ancient Greek meaning of áskesis: “exercise” or “training.” Hence, Nietzsche, speaking for his moment, aims to wrest the concept back from Christianity: “I also want to make asceticism natural again: in place of the aim of denial, the aim of strengthening”: what Sloterdijk terms a “gymnastics of the will” (123). It is difficult, indeed, for anyone writing on the resurgence of the concept of will in the late nineteenth century not to mention Nietzsche’s significance to this project. And, as several commentators including Sloterdijk have sought to remind us, a concern with “health” forms a thread throughout Nietzsche’s oeuvre, linking his well-­known remarks about modernity, philosophy, and aesthetics to an only apparently more marginal discourse of diet and the like. As we will see when we turn to Nietzsche’s work in more detail, however, such arguments often fail to recognize how his philosophy can also, like Paul Lafargue’s 1883 The Right to Be Lazy (which announced that “work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy”), direct withering scorn toward the notion of will strengthening conceived merely as a means of contributing uncomplainingly to the productivity of an industrial nation.45 In many ways, indeed, these developments worked toward what Anson Rabinbach, in his study of the “human motor,” calls “the daydream of the late nineteenth-­century middle classes—­a body without fatigue” (44). The Progressive-­era shibboleth of efficiency bears some attention here. From a

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word originally connoting simply effectiveness or power, efficiency, under the influence of nineteenth-­century technological developments, particularly steam and electrical engines, takes on its present meaning in which work performed is weighed against energy expended. This new conception then extends further to apply to the industrial sector in general and, finally, to the economy as a whole. During the Progressive period, however, the idea of efficiency as entailing a lack of waste, a general economy as it were, migrates from machinery to the human body (we could think “Gear-­y” in these terms).46 The result is a fetishization of perfectly channeled power, power that leaves no residue. (There is an accompanying denigration of various sorts of “useless” expenditures of energy such as—­notably for Vandover—­scratching [Whorton 166].) We begin to see, then, how the notion of will, originally quite similar to the earlier “efficiency” as sheer force, becomes newly positivized to the extent that force is conceived as able to be managed for maximum (industrial) output—­a win-­win situation, compared with the vast restraining power an earlier morality had demanded. We might then return to the era’s fascination with persons as “bundles of habits,” in William James’s memorable phrase. If to some, this would have seemed a deadening characterization, a denial of spontaneity—­“Our failure is to form habits,” wrote Pater in The Renaissance—­for James, will and habit needed to be understood as inextricably linked, as rendering certain actions automatic saved thought and energy for more important exigencies. Hence, his suggestion that no one could be “more miserable” than he for whom “the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed” are “subjects of express volitional deliberation” (126). And yet it was crucial to recognize that, as Félix Ravaisson had insisted several decades earlier, habits themselves could be understood as acts of will that, through repetition, had become nearly as irresistible as the deepest instincts of the body itself. We might understand the era’s furious drive toward exercise programs and the like, then, as both attempts to replace will with habit and as modes of enshrining volition in the apparently automatic motions of physical life, perfecting it as it were. James himself, then, takes this a step further and advises training oneself in the habit of moral behavior itself: “be systematically ascetic and heroic in little necessary points,” he exhorts. “As we become drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work” (131). Bad habits and good thus both appear here as equally subject to automatization. As the inebriate will, as it were, spring to life at the sight of a tipple, the saint will respond with equally unconscious alacrity to a cry for aid. We

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arrive at the curious (though, in fact, ancient—­specifically, Aristotelian) possibility that, in contrast to a system like Kant’s in which will in its freedom represented the other to bodily automatism, the apotheosis of willing appears when will itself has become as irresistible as compulsion. Vandover’s Geary, then, represents the dark side of such developments. In him, it is will as sheer “energy and resource,” as Norris puts it, that takes compulsive form, rendering Geary “nervous,” but in the sense of possessing a powerful “nervous energy” that enables, like the will of James’s saint, a near-­instant responsiveness to any propitious situation. We see this all most powerfully in the scene just described, in which he bursts in on the somnolent Vandover so as to put into motion his plan to swindle him. As he blusters on, making his case, Vandover continues to remain largely inert, responding with a “vague[ness]” and “indifference” that leaves Geary ever more “irritated” (258–­59). Indeed, the lawyer finds such a response so inconceivable that he begins to wonder if Vandover is hiding “some game of his own,” and this suggestion, far from unnerving him, has the opposite effect of rendering him more hopped up than ever: “The idea of playing off his cleverness against that of an opponent strung his nerves in an instant . . . his innate desire of getting the better of a competitor . . . aroused his wits and sharpened his faculties like a stimulant” (261, emphasis mine). As Vandover concedes—­“Oh, I don’t care, Charlie; I’m sick of everything . . . take it at your own figure”—­Geary “began to tremble . . . his breath grew short, his hands in his pocket twitched nervously . . . he hesitated long, pretending to deliberate as he steadied himself ’ ” (264). Is it mere accident that, at this moment of imminent triumph, Geary most resembles the Vandover we saw in the epigraph beginning this chapter: the gambling addict, given over so completely to the object of his passion that his bodily motions become those of a repetitive machine? His business dealings operating on him like a “stimulant,” Geary appears as the addict as speed freak or cokehead, the manic double to Vandover’s depressive. (We might note that the one habit he never achieves is smoking less, 326.) He might in fact have been fueling himself with Coca-­Cola, which in its initial incarnation in the 1890s included coca leaves, and was marketed as a health beverage—­both a temperance-­friendly replacement for alcohol and a tonic for those seeking relief from fatigue (Lears, Fables 159). Yet what can we make, then, of the way in which the hyperbolic willing that sought to avoid the evils of degeneration could itself look like a form of addictive behavior? Within the context of his own period, Geary looks like a strange paradox. What is surprising, then, is how commonplace, in our own present, that paradox appears to have become. The similarities are fortuitous, however, demon-

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strating the significance of the moment in question for consideration of the vagaries of will at the present time. As we will now explore, a wide swath of important work in contemporary theory might be said to follow in the footsteps of the turn of the century by conceiving of action in purely embodied terms as an alternative to the oft-­critiqued “self-­sovereignty” of the liberal subject. This creates difficulties, however, when some of the same critics wish to critique our own discourses of wellness, which are in fact based on similar principles. Ironically, what is jettisoned when “will” is finally abandoned—­as it would be in psychology after the turn of the century as well—­is any way of talking about the complexities of everyday irrationality that, this book argues, are in fact central to any serious account of the will as category. Subjects of Interest and Habit in Contemporary Theory: Sedgwick, Berlant, Foucault Can the desire for health verge into what it aims to avoid—­into pathology? Several recent books in fact argue for it as a preeminent malaise of our own era. Hervé Juvin in The Coming of the Body, Carl Cederström and André Spicer in The Wellness Syndrome, and the contributors to Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality suggest that the transformation of “wellness” into a “moral demand”—­“biomorality,” in Alenka Zupančič’s term—­may have pernicious effects in addition to the salubrious ones expected. For those who rise to the challenge, life threatens to devolve into a Geary-­like “exercise of wellness optimization,” an “obsess[ive] tracking” of one’s own behaviors and their effects on one’s vitality (Cederström and Spicer 3–­6). Those who fail to do so, meanwhile, appear as Vandovers: “lazy, feeble, and weak willed,” to be excoriated for their indulgence in newly discovered sins such as sitting too much (Cederström and Spicer 3, 36). The argument of the critics who have written on these figures is that they are mutually self-­producing. Lauren Berlant, in a powerful chapter from their book Cruel Optimism that overlaps with a contribution to Against Health, argues that the injunction to constantly monitor one’s well-­being generates the desire for “vacations from the will” that are then castigated as falls into compulsive behavior (97, 116). Berlant’s analysis seems particularly helpful for thinking the gluttonous “brute” within Vandover, who checks out, as it were, eating to induce stupor rather than to fuel action. (Berlant also cites David Harvey’s point that “under capitalism sickness is defined as the inability to work” [95].) As in Norris’s case, Berlant’s focus finally lies not on more dramatic forms of substance abuse but—­in the context of the “obesity epidemic”—­on the ordinary action of eating, which entails “maintenance”

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rather than “making,” “sentience without full intentionality,” and “a kind of self-­medication through self-­interruption” (115). In turn, then, Eve Sedgwick’s analysis of what she terms “epidemics of the will” centers on the very possibility we have been discussing for “the assertion of will itself ” to take the form of an addictive behavior (133). She draws her example from Geary’s present-­day counterpart: the “exercise addict,” who appears addicted not to any substance but simply to “the body itself,” and, more specifically, the body as locus of the will, and (circularly) the will as will to health (132). Her larger point, then, is that the notion of will itself as addictive object is built into the modern hypostatization of freedom, which produces as its inevitable counterpart “an equally hypostatized ‘compulsion’ ” that one must ceaselessly work to overcome (134–­35). The argument thus resonates with Berlant’s later claim that “episodic intermissions from personality” form the unintended result of the exaltation of “sovereignty”: the demand to function as what they term the “liberal and capitalist subject called to consciousness, intentionality, and effective will” (97, 116).47 Here, however—­in this familiar enough invocation of the “liberal and capitalist”—­is where I would want to place pressure on these otherwise highly trenchant interventions. Consider Berlant’s portrayal of the injunction to will as a command to exercise self-­“sovereignty,” to be a “liberal” subject. Liberal selfhood, of course, is defined by control over one’s bodily desires; this is what self-­sovereignty means. Yet here a problem emerges, for, as I have been suggesting, the entire discursive structure generating the “will to health” is predicated on an opposing definition of the properly willing subject, one in which that subject’s aims are completely defined by the body’s needs, and release of energy rather than self-­containment becomes the hallmark of a powerful will. As it turns out, Berlant, like a number of other critics at the present time, elsewhere in the same piece states that they are analyzing the effects not of liberalism, exactly, but of “neoliberalism” (e.g., 8).48 And yet Wendy Brown, in one of the more thoroughgoing accounts of our present as a “neoliberal” one, specifically defines the distinction between liberal and neoliberal subjectivity as one in which “self-­sovereignty” ceases to operate as the individual’s defining attribute. Under neoliberalism, she writes, “both individual and state become projects of management, rather than rule,” which is to say that the economic rather than the political sets the parameters and “the limited form of human existence that Aristotle and later Hannah Arendt designated as ‘mere life’ and that Marx called ‘life confined by necessity’—­concern with survival and wealth acquisition—­becomes ubiquitous” (22, 43). In other words, we could say, we shift from the state to the evolutionarily conceived economy as the Big Will.49

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In this context, the liberal (or Kantian) aim of subduing appetite on behalf of the common good, a project that weds individual self-­sovereignty with the political will of the democratic citizen, gives way to a vision of persons as “human capital” (Brown 33). For Brown, then, all this means that “will” would be the wrong term to describe the subject here; heir to Bentham’s utilitarianism, that subject is already conceived as “yanked about by those ‘masters within,’ pleasure and pain” (96). Of course, my argument thus far has suggested that the late nineteenth century began to redefine will in precisely these terms—­a redefinition inseparable from the disappearance of “will” from professional psychological discourse shortly thereafter.50 In suggesting that the category of will represents the problem here, then, both Sedgwick and Berlant, despite their immensely powerful interventions, risk aligning themselves with the same emergent sense of “post-­rational” personhood, as we might put it, that generates the health imperatives they decry in the first place. Dierdra Reber has critiqued contemporary affect theory along related lines, arguing that, by privileging the body, these “critics of capitalism” may inadvertently “traffic in the same conceptual terrain” as “capitalism itself.” She makes this point by returning to the eighteenth century and pointing out, via Adam Smith, that capitalism’s “originary . . . self-­legitimizing discourse was rooted in the primacy of the passions and the resultant vision of a social compact based on the moral discourse of . . . health and well-­being” (77). We saw in my discussion of Spencer how these same ideas, concerning how released rather than contained individual desires might benefit rather than threaten the social whole, reemerged in the late nineteenth century after many decades of what we might term their “liberal” subordination to a secularized version of older notions of the wisdom of self-­restraint.51 What appears in Spencer’s era as the beginnings of what we now term “neoliberalism” can thus be shown in fact to be resurgences of views that actually predate liberalism, which can then be understood as a domestication of them that, in retrospect, can perhaps last only so long.52 More surprising, then, is the conjuncture Reber brings forward, in which contemporary criticism, concerned about neoliberalism, attempts to fight it with versions of the same tools it makes available. (In this group, Wendy Brown thus stands out strongly for countering neoliberalism with a clear call to reinstate something more like liberalism: that is, the much-­maligned “self-­ sovereignty.”) It might be argued that we owe this paradoxical situation at least in part to the theorist who did the most to get everyone in the humanities talking about neoliberalism in the first place: that is, Michel Foucault. In his posthumously published 1978–­79 Collège de France lectures on “The Birth of Biopolitics,” Foucault narrates the emergence of neoliberalism in terms that

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confirm claims like Reber’s that we might see it as the originary (eighteenth-­ century) discourse only later tamed by an anxious (nineteenth-­century) liberalism. More startlingly, though—­particularly since his argument runs right up through the claims of the American neoliberal economists whose ideas have been most influential on our own present—­Foucault, true to his overall tendency to depict liberalism as the more suspect doctrine, ends up presenting what would become neoliberalism in remarkably affirming terms. We think of liberalism, Foucault writes, as limited government founded on the principle of the rights of individuals. (This conception, it is important to underscore, is foundational to most versions of novelistic individualism, such as Nancy Armstrong’s, linked as it is to the idea of the self as an enclosed interiority—­property in oneself, as it were.) And yet Foucault argues that if one looks more closely at eighteenth-­century writings—­specifically, those of the English empiricists, the French physiocrats,53 or Mandeville—­one sees that this notion of what he calls the “subject of right” is merely tributary to a far more encompassing conception, the “subject of interest” (274).54 Unlike the former, whose willed submission to the social contract synecdochizes a broader tendency toward self-­division, even “self-­renunciation,” on behalf of the larger totality, “the subject of interest is never called upon to relinquish his interest,” for it is out of that interest that the larger totality—­not the social but the market (Adam Smith’s invisible hand, taking the place of a “providential God” [279])—­is solidified (275). What is most striking, then—­though perhaps less surprising if one recalls Foucault’s critique of the liberal subject of discipline—­is the extent to which this “subject of interest” appears as a more liberatory formation. This begins to emerge already in its characterization above. We are used to thinking, Foucault writes, of the liberal subject, the subject of rights, as limiting the sovereign power. Homo economicus, however, goes farther than this: “to a certain extent, he strips the sovereign of power,” as the latter is revealed as unable to “master the totality of the economic field” (292). The subject of interest thus emerges as simultaneously able to engender radical ends while never directly intending these (277). Indeed, what seems to appeal most to Foucault about neoliberal subjectivity is that it conceives of individuals who are not, in fact, subjects, who lack depth and are therefore unable ever to be colonized by the kinds of proscriptions earlier writings like Discipline and Punish describe. As he puts it, admiringly, What English empiricism introduces . . . is a subject who is not so much defined by his freedom, or by the opposition of soul and body, or by the presence of a source or core of concupiscence marked to a greater or lesser degree by

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the Fall or sin, but who appears in the form of a subject of individual choices which are both irreducible and non-­transferable. (272)

The “choices” here described thus do not and cannot derive from the wishes of an inner self, but themselves simply constitute (rational) responses to environmental solicitations. Foucault thus cites, again rather approvingly, the work of the pioneering American neoliberal economist Gary Becker, inventor of the term “human capital,” for the neo-­behaviorism of his rational choice theory (which extends to a theory of “rational addiction”); in a prior chapter, he cites another American economist who has laudably moved away from notions of criminals as inherently “perverse” toward seeing all individuals as “ ‘responsive’ to some extent to possible gains and losses,” a fact on which penal policy may then draw (259). Michael Behrent has suggested that economic liberalism may have appealed to Foucault for being, unlike its political counterpart, a “liberalism without humanism,” without interiority (31). It seems plausible to suggest that a similar desire to avoid a subjectivity defined by a depth understood as pro­ b­ lematically moralizing motivates what Dierdra Reber describes as the overlaps between neoliberalism and affect theory as well. For a more direct instance, we might consider Michel Feher’s remarkably affirmative 2009 account of Becker’s concept of “human capital,” in which he argues that the left would do well to take such ideas seriously—­as, in his view, Foucault and Deleuze did—­and jettison the kind of old-­liberal perspective that mourns the loss of the welfare state. Similarly to Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics, Feher seems above all to object to liberalism not for its supposed privileging of “autonomy” but, rather, for the fact that what looks like autonomy amounts, in fact, to heteronomy. The problem, as we saw above, lies precisely in the foundation of liberalism (and, in his view, Marxism) in a “split being,” in at least two related senses: split between public and private, and riven from within by a secularized version of original sin. The latter construal, obviously central to the present project, is said here to be crucial for motivating the individual’s grateful turn toward a more capacious entity, whether God or the state, and, hence, his subjection to disciplinary power (36). In place of this, Feher, like Sedgwick and Berlant, puts in place a version of the subject defined by something more like behavior or habit.55 Here, then, Foucault’s final writings on the care of the self become of interest as well, particularly as they amount to revisionary versions of the Homo repetitivus Sloterdijk describes. In the final volume of the History of Sexuality and in his last College lectures on the “hermeneutics of the subject,” Foucault performs an extensive investigation into the writings on programs of the body

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he describes as having been widespread in late antiquity, particularly in the work of the Epicureans and, differently, the Stoics.56 These practices, on the one hand, lay the groundwork for the kind of examination of motives and daily training as a means of managing them often assumed to originate with Christianity (see, e.g., “Genealogy” 368). On the other hand, however, Foucault makes a strong distinction between Christian asceticism, in which the point is to discover the truth of oneself (and, again, to renounce the self in favor of dependence on God), and these earlier modes, in which one aims to “create” oneself as a “work of art” (“Genealogy” 362). Although Foucault claims he is not writing to recover these Greek attitudes toward the self, he is clearly taken with them and, in interviews on the subject, will rather wistfully remark with respect to our own present, “couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?” (“Genealogy” 350). Such ideas seem to be getting taken up in Sedgwick and in a writer like Richard Klein, who suggests as an alternative to the endless quest for “health” something closer to the programs of the Epicureans, in which health and pleasure would go hand in hand. Both Foucault himself at such moments and also commentators like Feher (and, differently, Sloterdijk) often suggest this turn as a particularly strong indication of the influence of Nietzsche, an observation that can begin to move us back to where we began, with the turn to the body in the late nineteenth century. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes of the necessity to “give ‘style’ to one’s character,” to fit oneself into an “artistic plan,” through the “long practice and daily work” of creating a “second nature” (Gay Science 164). “Second nature” has, of course, long been a synonym for the idea of habit, for that ability of the will to imprint itself so thoroughly onto the body that it appears as nature. Nietzsche holds an interesting place in Sedgwick’s habit-­oriented discussion also. On the one hand, she admires what she describes as his late work’s “rendering of human psychology in terms of an exquisite phenomenology of addiction,” while, on the other, she finds that work entirely symptomatic of her overall argument to the extent that this more descriptive mode finally staggers under the weight of a hyperbolic language of the absolutized will (Sedgwick 134). Nietzsche’s writings thus fall prey to what she describes as the essentially melodramatic mode that the notion of will seems destined to install, which renders the addiction story so paradigmatic of it: whether the gothic, or naturalist, tale of “inexorable decline and fatality” or its sentimental counterpart, the “even more pathos-­laden narrative called kicking the habit” (130). The effect of this concern regarding melodramas of the will leads Sedgwick and Berlant alike to what I would describe as a suspicion of narrative as

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such. In Berlant, for example, the fact that ordinary people find the dramatics of willing a burden should remind us that “lives are not novels” (99). What is always vanishing from our grasp, in their account, is not simply “will” in the sense of sovereignty but, we might say, “will” as marker of the future tense. Hence, our lives are not novels because novels’ familiar unfoldings of what a “life” will look like—­the marriage, the job, the move to a new place, the happily ever after—­no longer appear to map onto an experience of time in a contemporary precarious capitalism (one not dissimilar to that of Norris’s late nineteenth century) as, rather, a “stretched-­out present” that simply goes on and on (4). Sedgwick, too, moves us toward this sort of ongoing present in her suggestion we look past will to the concept of habit: “a version of repeated action that moves, not toward metaphysical absolutes, but toward interrelations of the action—­and the self acting—­with the bodily habitus, the apparelling habit, the sheltering habitation,” in short, the everyday physical world (138). Indeed, as Sedgwick recognizes, the turn of the century represented not simply the era of addiction’s pathologization and colonization by the discourses of will, but the last moment habit received sustained attention in the writings of not simply a novelist like Proust but a psychologist like William James. Yet although both she and Berlant—­and, I would suggest, many much less acute analysts of the contemporary scene—­depict these two tendencies as both formally and thematically opposed, I want here to look a bit at their capacities for overlap. Both in fact result from the same turn to the body and its practices that we have been discussing. And, as such, one can, surprisingly enough, discern in the language of habit here some of the same potentialities for a more idealized will that elsewhere result from the will’s embodiment. Just as in William James’s pragmatism either nothing or everything can appear to result from will, we can consider Sedgwick’s portrayal of what narcotic (opium) use once looked like, when it was merely “a behavior among other behaviors” (130). At that time, the drug user was “the subject of her own perceptual manipulations or indeed experimentations”; after medicalization, “she is installed as the object of compulsory institutional disciplines” (131). Similarly, in Berlant, to regard eating as “a phenomenological act,” “an exercise that violates any definition of sovereign identity,” entails recognizing it as a kind of “self-­medication,” defined as “often a fitting response to a stressful situation,” a means of reestablishing “contro[l]” (115). The striking thing, then, is that it is the turn away from the supposedly phantasmatic notion of a sovereign selfhood defined by a forward-­pressing “will”—­and toward embodiment and the present-­orientation of habit—­that produces in both of these texts the ability to assert that what we have here is a

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“subject” making her own decisions and acting rationally.57 Indeed, as the editors of a recent social-­scientific volume on “rationality and addiction” note, arguments suggesting addiction amounts to “self-­medication” in a situation of socioeconomic or other forms of deprivation assume the same kind of agent that rational choice theory does when it conceives of what Gary Becker has termed “rational addiction.”58 The alternative to both of these would be a theory of addiction that does not assume a unified self making a rational judgment. To describe such theories, the editors cite Paul’s letter to the Romans before turning to the work of the psychologist George Ainslie. Ainslie is among the most frequently cited writers on the topic of addiction, for his argument in his book Picoeconomics (later revised under the title Breakdown of Will) that addiction should be understood in distinct terms as a problem with time. The addict, that is, is commonly defined as overvaluing the present at the expense of the future: she gives into desires experienced in the moment, even when doing so will create problems and regrets down the line. Ainslie’s work codifies this portrayal within the language of behavioral economics by suggesting that the addict falls prey to a tendency toward “hyperbolic discounting,” in which, beyond a specified point, future rewards are radically devalued according to a steep (hyperbolic) slope of decline (whereas, in a more rational model, goods would more gradually appear less and less appealing the farther away in time they are said to present themselves). On the one hand, then, to the extent a theory like Berlant’s represents an argument against the nineteenth-­century “sovereign subject,” we can begin to understand its insistence on present time. That subject, as in Weber’s description of the Protestant, is defined by his ability to defer present rewards on behalf of a distant future. (Weber thus explains that the problem that needed to be overcome, historically, was that workers usually worked just as hard as they needed to in order to enjoy the fruits of their labor as soon as possible.) Disparaging this future orientation as, for most people, a fantasy currently growing ever “more fantasmatic,” Berlant relabels it a “cruel optimism”: a stance built around the impossible expectation that “a new habit” will magically produce “an improved way of being,” that “this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way” (12). Sedgwick similarly rejects the unfortunate tendency she detects in Nietzsche to look ever forward to the grand Will that, precisely by virtue of its grandeur, can never arrive. We might describe both, then, as conceiving the real problem as lying in an overinvestment in the future at the present’s expense, for which the solution lies in a revaluation of the present on its own terms. Yet in fact, however, Berlant’s approach is subtler than this mere reversal suggests, for the self-­medicators they describe seem to eat not because they

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hope it will bring about a better future but as a way of being “bound to the present rather than futures” (12). Broadly, Berlant defines their book’s interest as lying in the problem that occurs “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (1). This idea draws closer to the perspective of someone like Ainslie, whose interest in studying addiction lies in how we can be “endangered” by our own “wishes” (Picoeconomics 58). As discussed in this book’s introduction, some contemporary writers on the subject have described this as a split between “wanting” something and “liking” it. This is a dichotomy that can easily, however, redound onto the usual assertions regarding the overvaluation of the present at the future’s expense: “wanting” is treated as an automatistic, unthinking action in the moment that, if reflectively considered over a longer span of time, will prove objectively unappealing, unable to be genuinely “liked.”59 Quite strikingly, then, considering his reputation as the father of temporal theories of addiction, Ainslie himself resists such formulations. The actual complexity of his writings derives from a number of sources. To begin with, he works in the relatively recent tradition of behavioral economics, which pitches itself against rational choice theory to claim that human decisionmaking incorporates multiple forms of irrationality. Ainslie’s critique of rational choice theory is remarkably thoroughgoing: tracing a lineage running from Epicurus to Bentham to the Beckers of the present day, he argues that the notion of dependably rational choice effectively reduces the individual to what the addict is presumed to be, a machinelike automaton (Picoeconomics 200). More notably, however, these arguments lead Ainslie to the limits of economic models more broadly. Such models, he argues, founder over the question of value, and specifically the possibility for people to value things like “existential authenticity” or “salvation of the soul,” on the one hand, as well as “emotional” and aesthetic objects, on the other (Picoeconomics 10, 21–­ 23). What is most interesting about these, from our perspective here, is that they form possible objects of an outsized “wanting” potentially distinct from everyday “liking” that cannot be so easily denigrated. Ainslie fully recognizes this; the purpose of his focus on temporal discounting is finally to carve a space for genuine “ambivalence,” a serious conflict between differing desires that cannot simply be reduced to one between body and mind (Picoeconomics 15). Here, he makes clear, he writes under the influence of someone who rarely makes appearances in contemporary psychology, to say nothing of the sort crossing over to economics: Freud (not to mention Saint Paul: Picoeconomics 28, 33). Ainslie’s interest in Freud in fact turns out to form part of a larger fascination in his work with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for a

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number of reasons. Picoeconomics begins on its first page making reference to George Beard on neurasthenia as a case in which compulsions were understood as a by-­product of modernity’s enlarged freedoms (Picoeconomics 1). Overall, he writes, Victorian psychologists were “the last group to subject the will to serious analysis” (Picoeconomics 143); already by Freud, the term was becoming outmoded (Picoeconomics 189). As Ainslie notes, however, this eclipse may have been related to the phenomenon we have been examining in this chapter, in which the Victorian sense of will as self-­control began to appear subject to pathological excess (as in the case of Freud’s superego-­driven obsessional neurosis). For some writers of this period, Ainslie writes—­mentioning both William James and naturalist fiction, as well as modernist vitalists like Spengler—­it began to look more appealing to consider “abandon[ing] our complex ways of banking on the future and liv[e] for the present instant,” as premoderns were imagined as having done (Picoeconomics 57; see also 227). The richness of Ainslie’s approach to these matters, then, has a great deal to do with his ability to recognize the meaningfulness of each of these positions in turn, a fact no doubt stemming from his understanding that the split between “wanting” and “liking” may speak to genuine crises of value. Given this fact, it is surprising to find absent the late nineteenth-­century writer whose version of the subject in many ways comports most directly with Ainslie’s own: Nietzsche.60 His concept of what he calls “picoeconomics” is intended to suggest a “micro-­micro-­economics” that can describe forms of conflict or what he sometimes calls “negotiation” within a given individual. (Vandover once again comes to mind.) These warring factions are treated as distinct beings harbored within a single body that nonetheless all have “the person’s whole psychic apparatus at their disposal” (94). And “will,” then, very much as we saw in a writer like Ribot, becomes the name for the phenomenon that emerges out of these conflicts, not that which stands aloof and somehow manages them (Picoeconomics 117).61 This idea of will as the end result of an ongoing attempt at self-­unification (and one that, as Ainslie describes it, still possesses the built-­in potential for perversities of rigidity that concerned the post-­Victorians) makes Ainslie’s most pragmatic moments also his most philosophical: in his words, “Willpower is an awkward expedient, not the ultimate rationality” (70). As we will see in the final section, these ideas in many ways share much with those in contemporary philosophy who have written on the phenomenon of weakness of will, of which addiction typically forms a privileged instance. Before concluding with a brief look at those, however, which will bring us full circle to Vandover, we need finally to spend a bit of time with Nietzsche.

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Indeed, doing so can get us to a means of thinking of will, habit, and individuation in ways that resist the polarities that seem to have generated our unexpected overlaps with neoliberalism in the present day. There are ways of doing so that need not simply reinstate the liberal subject, although it may be necessary to point out that subject’s greater complexity than the potted version of the sovereign individual, as the previous chapter aimed to do. Rather, it is precisely an emphasis on the complex linkages between the subject’s reason and his or her fundamental irrationality, as the foundation of the category of will, which when seen in not simply pejorative terms can provide an alternative both to more self-­satisfied versions of liberalism and to the counterarguments here of Foucault and others alike.

Nietzsche’s Return to Vitalism A psychologist knows few questions as attractive as that concerning the relation between health and philosophy. n i e t z s c h e , The Gay Science (4)

Is Nietzsche a fin de siècle thinker? In the context we have provided here, it may appear startling how commonplace many of his apparently radical ideas had become. Broadly speaking, skepticism regarding the Victorian emphasis on will as bodily self-­restraint was on the rise, replaced by an ethos in which “will” entailed the release of energy and power. More strikingly, however, this shift often entailed a diagnostic tendency in which Christianity’s self-­ examining interiority began to appear as a form of pathological obsession, and its ideal of giving oneself over to grace and love a kind of surrender to a narcotic haze. Rather than the inspiration for resistance to appetitive urges that could lead to dangerous addictions, then, religion itself appeared as the “opium of the people” portrayed by Marx and, before him, Novalis. As we saw, such beliefs motivated a new “anthropotechnics,” in Peter Sloterdijk’s term, structured not through spiritual asceticism but by precise prescriptions for health through diet and exercise. It has rarely been recognized how important these kinds of programs were to Nietzsche also. When commentators on his philosophical ideas have come face to face with them, they have tended to dismiss them as an unfortunate sideshow—­a case of what in Nietzsche’s thinking remains hopelessly mired in its historical moment. In fact, however, more sustained attention to this dimension of his work can make clear just the opposite. It is by attending to these questions of health that Nietzsche reopens, within the turn-­of-­the-­century context, the longer trajectory of vitalist thinking about embodiment we saw at work in earlier

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Romanticism in chapter 2. This renewed vitalism, then, has crucial effects on Nietzsche’s core understanding of the category of will. The vitalist aspect of Nietzsche’s notion of will distinguishes his thought not only from others in his era who were reconceiving will as bodily power, but from many present-­day initiatives that celebrate Nietzsche for his apparent dissolution of will into multiplicity. In fact, to the extent he does emphasize the will’s nonsingularity, Nietzsche demonstrates once more his relation to the historical threads we have been examining—­specifically, to the materialist psychology of someone like Ribot. Nietzsche himself directly hailed a “physiological psychology” as the key to thinking about the human going forward. Yet where the period’s actual physiological psychologists, in tandem with many theorists today, often saw work on the multiplicity of the will as a way to undermine the concept of the individual, in Nietzsche, the vitalist influence enables these same ideas to become a way to rethink individuality in an even more insistent manner, one inseparable from the malady-­ridden will we have been exploring here. So doing, he avoids the tendency of fin de siècle and contemporary thought alike at once to dismiss the notion of will and aggrandize it in the form of a bodily power at one and the same time. As we saw back in chapter 2, the striking thing about eighteenth-­century vitalism was that it did not reject earlier pietistic beliefs about the soul but grew directly out of these, giving them a still-­startling materialist form. In this context, the will’s susceptibility to maladies amounted to not an argument against it but, rather, a constitutive element of its engagement with freedom. We need to reconsider Nietzsche’s language of health within this context. Doing so can allow us to recognize, finally, the way Nietzsche, far from simply rejecting asceticism, in fact melds earlier ascetic programs with the burgeoning thinking about habit of his era, in ways that bring to bear a crucial aesthetic dimension. Finally, then, naturalist fiction’s protomodernist aesthetics of the detail, on the one hand, and the bodily everyday, on the other, need to be understood in this context. And even more surprisingly, as we began to see in our discussion of Ainslie, some of the most powerful contemporary philosophical and psychological writings on addiction as weakness of will can be as well. nietzsche amid the tur n of the century As promulgated most notoriously in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietz­ sche’s philosophy skewers what he calls the “slave” morality of Christianity, the foundation for Victorian altruism, as an ethos founded on saying “No”—­on inhibition, whether of others or of oneself (Genealogy 473). As he puts it in the earlier Gay Science, that ethos aims, in the thought of a Saint Paul,

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at “the annihilation of the passions,” finding these “dirty” and “disfiguring”; “they have seduced us,” he complains, “into the belief that man’s natural inclinations are evil,” that they constitute a “sickness” to be routed through a ceaseless aim at “self-­control” (Gay Science 182, 166, 173). The Genealogy then turns these evaluations on their head. What Christianity says “No” to, Nietzsche argues, is precisely that which, in premodern times, had represented “the good”—­that is, the “knightly-­aristocratic” spirit that consists in yes-­saying, in joyous “affirmation of itself ” as a kind of intensified life, a “powerful physicality, a flourishing . . . even overflowing health” that glories in “war, adventure, hunting, dancing . . . all that involves vigorous, free, joyful activity” (Genealogy 469). These are the naturally highest natures; to undermine them, and to elevate the lowly, Christian morality must view nature itself, world itself, with suspicion. Unmistakably, Nietzsche expresses admiration for the audacity of this counterintuitive project on religion’s part. Returning its apparent universality to a history, however, he also gives it a more medical etiology. The true sickness lay not in the body, as was preached, but in its rejection.62 Thus, “from the first,” he states, we can see “something unhealthy” in this new reign of the priests; “turn[ed] away from action,” they are doomed to “alternate between brooding and emotional explosions”—­that is, to the pathological states of William James’s obstructed or explosive will (Genealogy 468). “Mankind is still ill” with the aftereffects of these symptoms: this “madness of the will,” this “labyrinth of fixed ideas” (Genealogy 468, 529). Providing, essentially, a diagnosis of modernity, Nietzsche’s arguments clearly overlap with those of the degeneration theorists. More specifically, they overlap with the strain within that theory emphasized here, for which degeneration constitutes weakness of will not in the moral sense of failing to restrain one’s bodily desires but in the physical sense of a fatigue, an inertia. “Nothing is as timely as weakness of the will,” writes Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. “Paralysis of the will: where won’t you find this cripple today?” (106, 101). Early in the Genealogy, in fact, Nietzsche directly cites Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s physician Weir Mitchell, suggesting that Christian morality has produced “neurasthenia” from its earliest instantiations (Genealogy 468). This is so not simply because of its privileging of the weak; more uncannily, as Nietzsche presents it, the Christian mindset, yearning to escape its bodily torment, actually strives explicitly toward a state akin to that of a hibernating animal, a “minimal metabolism”: “rest, peace, ‘sabbath,’ slackening of tension and relaxing of limbs” (Genealogy 567, 474). Such a state ought indeed, Nietzsche asserts, be deemed “essentially nar­cotic” (Genealogy 474). “What do savage tribes take over first from the Europeans?”

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he inquires in The Gay Science. “Liquor and Christianity,” the fatal “narcotics of Europe” (Gay Science 129). And, indeed, no less than the other turn-­of-­the-­ century writers we have examined, Nietzsche seems to be advocating a return to what had been denigrated as “savage”: to instinct, to animality. Once again, such arguments go hand in hand with distinct prescriptions not simply for exercise (“do not believe in any idea that was not born . . . of free movement—­in which the muscles do not also revel” [Ecce Homo 21]) but for diet. In Ecce Homo, above all, Nietzsche’s response to “Why I am So Clever” amounts to, finally, such declarations as: “No snacks, no coffee. . . . Tea beneficial only in the morning. A little, but strong,” and so forth (Ecce Homo 21). Like others of his era he argues against vegetarianism, seeing in “Indians’ excessive and almost exclusive diet of rice and the general enervation spreading from it” the seeds of Buddhism, while European discontent may be traced to potato eating and concomitant use of liquor, along with “the effects of cellar air and the noxious stove fumes in German living rooms” (Gay Science 128, 124). Did Eve Sedgwick have such notions in mind in her references to Nietz­­ sche’s “exquisite phenomenology of addiction”? As in Norris’s Geary, we might readily enough conceive the way such elaborated techniques of embodiment give way to the longing for a final “Will” of “absolute” “value and potency” that will obviate the need for such remedies—­the “great health” Nietzsche embodies in his Zarathustra, man of the future, Übermensch (Sedgwick 134). Nietzsche certainly can tend in these directions, even if, as Walter Kaufmann and others have emphasized, their importance for his philosophy generally has been overblown. Many contemporary theoretical readings of Nietzsche thus emphasize not will to power but an aspect of his treatment of will that can easily seem its opposite. Nietzsche, indeed, has been construed by Judith Butler and others as a forerunner of twentieth-­century deconstructions of the subject for his forensic take on will in, most sustainedly, Beyond Good and Evil: Willing strikes me as, above all, something complicated, something unified only in a word. . . . Let us say: in every act of willing there is . . . a plurality of feelings. . . . Accordingly, the one who wills takes his feeling of pleasure as the commander, and adds to it the feelings of pleasure from the successful instruments that carry out the task, as well as from the useful “under-­wills” or under-­souls—­our body is, after all, only a society constructed out of many souls—­. L’effet c’est moi. . . . The ruling class identifies itself with the successes of the community. (Beyond 20)

The depiction here of the self as a multiplicity, and “willing” (or, as Nietzsche puts it elsewhere, “purposes”) as a fiction covering over that multiplicity with

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the fantasy of a distinct and singular rational actor and consciousness, has proven irresistible to contemporary tastes, in a way that the muscular rhetoric of will to power decidedly has not. And yet it is evident that, first, both derive equally from the broader intellectual milieu under discussion (note the similarity of the formulations here to, say, those of Ribot), and, second, that, as such, they need in fact to be understood together rather than apart. In other words, it is the relocation of willing in the body by the physiological psychology Nietzsche so admired that enables both the dissection of willing and its apotheosis in physical form. What sets Nietzsche apart from these discourses, then, is that, where they conceive that this embodiment of will puts an effective end to the notion of will as problem and pathology that Nietzsche diagnoses in Christianity (or Victorian morality), matters remain in Nietzsche’s own writings more complex, for reasons that have everything to do with his vitalist foregrounding of bodily suffering and the significance of one’s relation, as a thinker, thereto.63 As with the naturalist fiction we have been discussing, Nietzsche’s incorporation of these ideas into his writing has the effect of generating new questions, ones that can be understood only if we recognize—­as did Nietzsche himself—­that he spoke not merely as a man of his time, but also on behalf of the far lengthier trajectory this book has been concerned to bring forward. In fact, Nietzsche wrote very directly against not only the Christian legacy that had dominated nineteenth-­century thought but, crucially, against the evolutionary/economic thinking that was beginning to overtake it during the century’s final decades. He frequently singled out Spencer in particular for criticism. Overall, one must balance Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for new forms of thought just coming into being with his insistence on being “untimely,” his insistence that “philosophers need to be spared one thing above all: everything to do with ‘today,’ ” the “market business of today” (Genealogy 545). This market-­driven sensibility is seen as something particular to the United States; no less than Weber, Nietzsche surveys with appalled fascination Americans’ “breathless haste,” the tendency—­epitomized by Norris’s Geary—­to “thin[k] with a watch in hand,” “ea[t] lunch with an eye on the financial pages,” and so on (Gay Science 199). Here the call to activity above all—­“Rather do anything than nothing”!—­appears as not as a triumph of the will but as a refusal of life understood as shaped by rhythm and form, “the ear and eye for the melody of movements” (Gay Science 183). It is, in other words, an aesthetic failure. It is on such grounds that Nietzsche, in The Gay Science in particular, critiques Spencer as the voice of the present day. “What makes . . . the pedantic Englishman Herbert Spencer rave . . . and makes him draw . . . that definitive reconciliation of ‘egoism and altruism’ ”—­Will, great and small—­“about

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which he spins fables?” he wonders. We find here no philosopher, but simply a “mechanic.” And yet, Nietzsche proposes, “Suppose one judged the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas.  .  .  . What would one have comprehended, understood, recognized? Nothing, really nothing of what is ‘music’ in it!” (Gay Science 238–­39). This critique of the calculable extends to arguments against the notion of “character” as the reduction of personhood to the status of a “dependable ever-­handy instrumen[t]” (Gay Science 168); the same can be said of utilitarian conceptions of motive, for, as Nietzsche inquires, “what if pleasure and displeasure are so intertwined that whoever wants as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other?” (Gay Science 27). Darwinism makes the same error, believing “self-­preservation” to be nature’s ultimate law, rather than a “sign of distress, of a limitation of the basic life-­instinct,” which is ruled, rather, by “abundance, squandering—­even to the point of absurdity” (Gay Science 207–­8). Finally, then, this skepticism toward the scientific dogmas of the period leads Nietzsche to a critical look at his own participation in their rejection of idealism and affirmation of physical life. “Formerly,” he writes, “philosophers feared the senses: is it possible we have unlearned this fear all too much? Today we are all sensualists,” and turn such judgments upside down, believing the true danger to lie in bloodless “ideas” that “drai[n the] senses” and the “heart.” (One hears here a precursor of the end of Weber’s Protestant Ethic.) Yet what if such modern beliefs are made possible precisely by draining the senses of what was once recognized as their double-­edged power? What if “we don’t fear the senses because—­” Nietzsche leaves off abruptly here, and, tellingly, launches immediately into the next aphorism on the mechanistic worldview of the pedantic Spencer (Gay Science 238). The chief way The Gay Science pursues this modulation of Nietzsche’s “naturalism,”64 however, is through the question of health, a question it addresses more sustainedly than any of Nietzsche’s other works—­culminating in the invocation, near the very end of the text, of the famed “great health” (Gay Science 247). One might readily enough pair this notion with that of the ultimate Will, both as embodied in the notion of Zarathustra or the coming “superhuman” figure, and consider both in light of Sedgwick’s critique of the perfected Will. And yet I want to insist one should resist doing so. The Gay Science, after all, is a text that begins, very pointedly, with an emphasis on health in the context of what Nietzsche calls “the intoxication of recovery,” which reopens the “sudden sense and anticipation of a future”—­a situation the malady-­ridden philosopher knew all too well (Gay Science 3). Yet the very “jubilation” that attends this “returning strength” cannot be thought outside

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of the privation that enabled it to be felt. “One might guess,” Nietzsche writes, “that I do not want to take my leave ungratefully from that time of severe illness whose profits I have not exhausted even today: I am well aware of the advantages that my erratic health gives me over all burly minds” (Gay Science 6). The Gay Science, then, is framed as a meditation on the coexistence of health and illness as surely as pain and pleasure and, more broadly, evil and good. And this leads Nietzsche very directly to dismiss those who propound the notion of “some severe, final, radical cure” for humanity’s ills (Gay Science 182). The great health, properly understood, constitutes an opening, a space cleared for the posing of new questions (Gay Science 247). Its greatness consists not at all in its impregnability but in its ability to reemerge, over and over again, on the far side of pathology. Its greatness, that is, lies in its relation to repetition (this is its link to the idea of willing eternal recurrence, which appears in the final section). “Finally,” Nietzsche states, “the great question would [be] whether we can do without illness . . . whether especially our thirst for knowledge and self-­knowledge do not need the sick soul as much as the healthy.” And this means, then, that we must consider whether “the will to health alone”—­the will driving Geary and all the thinking that surrounds him—­be not “a prejudice, a cowardice, and a piece of the most refined barbarism and backwardness” even as it conceives itself the flower of our modern age (Gay Science 117).65 Both the rejection of mechanism and the meditation here on illness and recovery, then, begin to suggest that Nietzsche’s naturalism might better be conceived as a renewal of the core tenets of eighteenth-­and earlier nineteenth-­century vitalism, as discussed in chapter 2 of this book.66 One can understand his vexed relation to Schopenhauer in this light, for Schopenhauer’s own philosophy of will, in which will appears essentially as drive or Trieb, grows out of the same tradition, and his turn away from it toward a mystical will-­abandonment may then be seen as an attempt to reconcile those ideas with Victorian moralism. From the outsized attention, admiring and lacerating in equal measure, granted to Schopenhauer in both the Genealogy and The Gay Science, then, we can begin to construct a fuller understanding of Nietzsche’s will-­ philosophy for which its tie to that vitalist tradition is given its due. Nietzsche, undoubtedly, has been deeply influenced by Schopenhauer’s core construal of will as the most fundamental force in the universe—­one, indeed, at work in some form in organic and nonorganic forms alike. He thus has no trouble, in Beyond Good and Evil, in relabeling “all efficacious force” as will—­or, in his own terminology, “will to power” (Beyond 35–­36). Together with that same text’s dissection of the act of willing and concomitant demotion of the role

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of the subject “I” in willing and thinking alike, such ideas might indeed appear to position Nietzsche as forerunner of the anti-­individual strain running throughout our contemporary neovitalism (as discussed, again, in chapter 2). I want to demonstrate here, however, that this is finally not a tenable reading. n i e t z s c h e ’ s v i ta l i s t w i l l Any serious account of the status of will in Nietzsche’s thought must to come to grips with his equally ferocious insistence on attacking the category of will and on installing what seems a highly Romantic version of it at the core of his project at one and the same time. Given this duality, it seems sensible to ask what version of will forms the subject of Nietzsche’s critique. Quite evidently, he is targeting the notion of will as (free) choice as we see it in a philosopher like Locke; this critique then appears, understandably enough, to extend to that of will as property of an individual subject. This line of thinking appears already in The Gay Science. There, Nietzsche dismisses the idea that our “so-­called ‘purposes’ ” or “vocations” determine the courses of action we take; rather, he writes, these ought to be understood as “relatively random, arbitrary . . . in relation to the enormous force of energy” lying behind them, bent solely on discharging itself. One has mistaken, in other words, the mere “directing force” for the “driving force,” “the helmsman for the stream”—­and even this may prove too flattering; there may be, in fact, “no helmsman whatsoever” (Gay Science 225). The replacement of the commanding agent with an anonymous “energy,” one again seen as at work in all things, would certainly seem to place us in familiar “posthuman” territory. Yet what, then, to make of Nietzsche’s critiques of Schopenhauer, which are quite similar from The Gay Science through the Genealogy of Morals? In both texts, he zeroes in on the earlier philosopher’s exaltation of “will-­less[ness],” and exclaims, most pointedly in the Genealogy, “to eliminate the will altogether . . . what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?” (Genealogy 555). Schopenhauer’s refusal of the subject-­object divide, his “denial of the individual,” and, in a telling point to which we will return, his apparently related belief that “development,” that core vitalist fascination, “is only an illusion” and that “death is actually the purpose of existence”—­all represent “mystical evasions” that render actual judgment impossible (Genealogy 554; Gay Science 95–­96). Why? Because, Nietzsche insists, “There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’ ” (Genealogy 555). Schopenhauer’s own yearning toward “liberation from the ‘will,’ ” his Kantian claim that this be seen as art’s great effect, must hence be grasped in relation to his being a young man of twenty-­six experiencing the “vile urgency of the will”

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in the force of his own sexual desires. Nietzsche contrasts this glorification of disembodied disinterestedness with Stendhal’s characterization of the beautiful as “une promesse de bonheur”: that is, as something that “arouses the will,” defined here as “interestedness” itself (Genealogy 540–­41). To will, then, is to care, to value, and as such it must form the foundation of philosophy and art alike. As Nietzsche puts it in The Gay Science, “ ‘Selfless­ ness’ has no value on heaven or on earth; all great problems demand great love,” such that only a thinker with a “personal relationship to his problems,” who “finds in them his destiny, his distress, and his greatest happiness”—­the very opposite, that is, of the “impersonal” approach demanded by the sci­ ences—­can accomplish anything meaningful in his work. Yet how to square this insistence on “personality,” and its essential tie to will, with the apparent evacuation of the subject in the discussions of will’s inner workings (Gay Science 202)? Vitalism, I want to suggest, offers one means of response, and another lies in Nietzsche’s finally quite equivocal relation to “ascetic ideals.” Here it is helpful to turn to Nietzsche’s critiques of another group of thinkers, the Stoics, who also offer up a kind of impersonal merger with world that at once represents an idealization of the will as the ability to stand such a merger (cf. Gay Science 174). “So you want to live ‘according to nature?’ ” Nietzsche demands. Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud is in this phrase! Imagine something like nature, profligate without measure, indifferent without measure, without purpose or regard, without mercy or justice . . . think of indifference itself as power—­ how could you live according to this indifference? Living—­isn’t that wanting specifically to be something other than this nature? Isn’t living assessing, preferring, being unfair, being limited, wanting to be different? (Beyond 10–­11)

Here the difference that, above, Nietzsche attaches to “personality” or individuality and, thus, to greatness of thought or of art, becomes that between life in the singular and “Life”—­or, as we saw in chapter 2, that between the notion of life as individual organization in the early vitalists and “Life” as all-­ encompassing process in Naturphilosophie. Moreover, individual “life”—­or, more particularly, “living”—­is here defined specifically as “wanting . . . to be something other than this nature,” “wanting to be different.” In The Gay Science, Nietzsche contrasts the Stoic who strives for this absolute insensibility and indifference to the Epicurean, who seeks out in life only that which “suit[s]” his distinct “constitution” (Gay Science 174). The Epicurean, in other words, lives according to his own tastes—­what the vitalists would have termed his temperament—­whereas the Stoic aims not to have any. Both can be contrasted to the embodied set of “problems” that, as we saw

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in the description above of the philosopher, form his will as a kind of “destiny.” That destiny, which we can also term his “morals,” Nietzsche explains in Beyond Good and Evil, will result from the “order of rank” in which “the innermost drives of his nature stand with respect to each other” (Beyond 9, emphasis mine). If willing, that is, entails a competition among one’s drives, that conflict itself acts as the crucible of individuality as such, of the “personal” element in any serious work. And this explains why will is experienced as an act both of commanding and of being compelled, at one and the same time (Beyond 18–­20). The result is the other aspect Nietzsche describes in the relation of the philosopher to his distinct “problems”: their responsibility for both his “distress” and his “greatest happiness.” And yet the idea that will is defined by conflict, as here, is itself Augustinian. Indeed, the very notion of refusing a metaphysical split between good and evil suggests the lesson learned by the turn away from Manichaeism.67 Nietzsche simply authorizes directly the implicit suggestion in radical Protestantism that we recognize a “link, bond, or tie” between what is “good and honorable” and the “will to deception” and “craven self-­interest” that appear their “evil opposites” (Beyond 7). This may well help to explain his fascination, both formally and thematically, with the “unmaskings” of La Rochefoucauld, whose own milieu, as we saw in chapter 1, extended to the Augustinian Jansenists and Puritan writers like Daniel Dyke.68 As Nietzsche explains early in the Genealogy, only with the emergence of asceticism does “the human soul . . . acquire depth,” hence “evil,” meaning that man becomes “interesting,” becomes for the first time “superior to other beasts” (Genealogy 469). With Christianity, that is, not with the nineteenth-­century “masters of suspicion,” “moral skepticism,” critique, is invented (Gay Science 118). Might we say, then, that this represents the inaugural moment, in Nietzsche’s account, in which illness and greatness are rendered inseparable—­itself a vitalist version of Augustinian duality?69 To explore this last point is to recognize the extent to which “depth,” of which we ourselves have now (from Foucault and others) learned suspicion, serves as the site of a remarkable ambivalence in Nietzsche (no less, indeed, than “illness”—­in fact the two may be deemed, through the vitalist lens, more or less synonymous; as Canguilhem states, illness makes one aware of the depths). The ascetic suffers in that his will to power or “instinct for freedom” is turned inward, producing “a soul voluntarily at odds with itself ” (albeit we are beginning to see this may simply be Nietzsche’s definition of will, Genealogy 523). Hence, even the “No-­saying” Nietzsche deplores can, when it does not lead to a surrender of will, represent will’s intensification, simply in an involuted form. In the Genealogy’s third section, this recognition leads to the

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remarkable assertion that, despite himself, this “apparent enemy of life, this denier” must in fact be seen as “among the greatest . . . yes-­creating forces of life” (Genealogy 556–­57). This perspective comports with two others in these same sections: first, that the ascetic be understood, like the founder of human societies, as a kind of artist (with an “artists’ cruelty”) who “delight[s] in imposing a form” on himself (Genealogy 523, emphasis mine); and, second, that his very “sickliness” be grasped as inseparable from the fact that human beings have “also dared more . . . challenged fate more than all the other animals put together”; it is as “the great experimenter with himself, discontented and insatiable,” “whose own restless energies never leave him in peace,” that man both guarantees his own susceptibility to illness and the fact that, in him, illness produces the outsized “wrestl[ing]” with life of the ascetic (Genealogy 557, 556). the ascetic and the aesthetic In what remains of this discussion, I want to focus on this idea of the ascetic as artist of and experimenter upon himself, in order to consider the ways in which Nietzsche actually reincorporates certain features of asceticism into his own philosophy. In 1886, having published Beyond Good and Evil and looking ahead to the Genealogy a year later, Nietzsche wrote new prefaces for his “middle period” works: Human, All Too Human; Daybreak; and that which has concerned us here, The Gay Science. Returning to the latter text, he chose to emphasize the thematics of illness and recovery in relation both to the history of thought as a whole and to his own self-­positioning. And yet these remarks concluded, intriguingly, with a turn toward the question of aesthetics that might be understood as The Gay Science’s other most recurrent theme. How to relate the two? Nietzsche begins, in the preface’s second section, insisting that philosophy’s tendency toward idealism be understood as the result of its rootedness in disease. After all, he writes, “the sick body and its needs unconsciously urge, push, and lure the mind—­towards sun, stillness, mildness, patience, medicine, balm in some sense.” We can see the effects of this state of mind in “every ethic with a negative definition of happiness,” all metaphysics that aims at “some finale,” “every predominantly aesthetic or religious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside” where the sufferings of this sphere will find relief (Gay Science 5). And yet having posited this, Nietzsche then goes on in the section that follows to return to his own “erratic health” and its supposed benefits. In this account, he suggests two possible responses to pain: the Schopenhauerian “withdraw[al]” into nirvana, “self-­surrender,”

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“self-­extinction” mentioned above, and another that would seem its opposite, in which we “learn to pit our pride, our scorn, our willpower” against that which torments us. More importantly still, these two reactions are depicted as two versions of the same phenomenon: “dangerous exercises in self-­mastery” that leave the individual “a different person,” a “deeper” one, in whom the “trust in life is gone,” rendering “life itself . . . a problem,” a site for the sort of uncompromising critical stance Nietzsche in fact shares with the ascetic mind (Gay Science 7). This third section thus ends by granting the ascetic stance the same complexity and link to Nietzsche’s own relentless questioning and intensified will we saw begin to emerge earlier. And yet with what follows, the final move of the new preface, Nietzsche gives matters yet one further twist. “Finally,” he writes, “lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe illness, also from the illness of severe suspicion,” one emerges into a different space. It is one defined not by depth but by surfaces, and, hence, not by truth but by art. “One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden,” Nietzsche writes, before praising the Greeks for being “superficial—­out of profundity,” in knowing the need “to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin; to worship appearance, to believe in shapes, tones, words” (Gay Science 8). Thought together, then, these three stages offer insight into how to think about Nietzsche’s project in The Gay Science and beyond. For indeed, we might say that this final moment can be brought full circle to the ascetic idealism mentioned first, if we recall Nietzsche’s suggestion in the Genealogy that the ascetic’s recoil from his own nature be recognized as “the womb of . . . beauty itself,” as a striving for something different from that nature (Genealogy 522–­ 23). We recall here Beyond Good and Evil on the Stoics, defining “living” as “wanting . . . to be something other than this nature,” “wanting to be different” (Beyond 10). Sloterdijk defines “anthropotechnics” in related terms as “the will to want differently.” As seen in the Stoics, this “permanently tense concern for the new, unaccustomed, and improbable stance,” he writes, “already heralds the Enlightenment” (307). At the same time, there is a tension here: Sloterdijk is specifically writing of anthropotechnics’ fascination with habit, with, in his words, “turning the power of repetition against repetition” (197). We can see in turn-­of-­the-­century paeans to habit such as that of William James this interest in thinking newness and repetition as one, but it is less clear they form the same kind of whole in Nietzsche’s writings, and the aestheticism he thinks together with his asceticism may offer a key to the reasons why. The series of stages traced above suggest that a path connects the ascetic’s savage depths and quest for truth to their apparent opposite, the “divinely

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untroubled, divinely artificial” art of the final section (Gay Science 8). I want to argue, however, that this path is an essentially dialectical one, in which these opposing approaches are rendered inseparable without ever simply becoming two sides of a single coin. The art that in The Gay Science becomes finally a kind of art of one’s life, of the everyday, requires both “hammer-­ hardness” and “spectator-­divinity” (Beyond 117); put otherwise, dangers lie in becoming either insufficiently serious or too much so. Another way to think this same dialectic might be as that between Nietz­ sche’s approach to these issues as an individual one of his own development and as an early instance of his genealogy of morals with a very different focus: on the everyday. “We . . . want to be poets of our lives,” Nietzsche writes, “starting with the smallest and most commonplace details” (Gay Science 170). Hence, as he elsewhere puts it, Anyone who now wishes to make a study of moral matters opens up for himself an immense field of work. All kinds of passions have to be thought through. . . . So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history: where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? . . . Has anyone done research on the different ways of dividing up the day or of the consequences of a regular schedule of work, festivals, and the rest? Do we know the moral effects of foods? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (Gay Science 34)

The notable thing about this passage, for our purposes here, is how seamlessly it moves from subjects usually associated with morality, depth, and drama (the passions at their extremes) to the minuteness of the bodily everyday we have seen emerge as a topic in this chapter. While in the contemporary critics we discussed in the previous section, these were opposed—­one the stuff of melodramatic narratives and depth-­defined subjects, the other that of an “extended present” filled only by habit—­in Nietzsche, it would appear, they are the same subject; both “give colour to existence.” This same duality then characterizes Nietzsche’s writings on his own development, with their fussing over when it is safe to drink tea and their dramatic insistence that to approach morality as a philosophical problem is to recognize it as one’s “own personal distress, torment, voluptuousness, and passion” (Gay Science 202).70 What I want finally to insist on is that, in Nietzsche, habit and repetition do not simply form the other to a certain “melodrama” of subjectivity, as they do in so much contemporary theory seemingly inspired by his example. Indeed, in Nietzsche it is the very recognition that these techniques of the self form part of an ongoing narrative,71 like illness and recovery, that enables one to take the “lighter,” more aestheticizing perspective and look down on them

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and on oneself as if from a great distance, as if one were merely part of the long train of the genealogy of the passions. This is the point of view learned from La Rochefoucauld (thus again inseparable from the self-­examination of asceticism): from the position of the artist, we can “make . . . a phenomenon of ourselves,” “have a rest from ourselves” not simply in Berlant’s sense of checking out but in that of “looking at and down at ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing at ourselves or crying at ourselves; we have to discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge” (Gay Science 104). Morality, defined through this lens, entails the refusal of self-­deception (Gay Science 200–­201), the refusal to feel shame before oneself (Gay Science 153)—­ the perspective from which one might endure the idea of eternal return. Indeed, this is the point of view from which one can recognize such follies as the refinding of something already discovered, and conceiving of it as something new, or the tendency to believe each newly adopted habit will offer “lasting satisfaction,” only to find that one day it is replaced by a “new thing” that proclaims itself  “the right thing, the last right thing” (Gay Science 134, 167). Elsewhere in The Gay Science Nietzsche links these rhythmic propensities with the will, envisioning willing as a series of waves in which each approaches with the utmost greediness, then recedes, only to be replaced by another that flings itself forward yet more “wildly” still (Gay Science 176). If, from the lofty vantage, these gyrations may appear absurd, Nietzsche insists we consider them in light of the alternatives: Would we prefer, he asks, habits that thickened around us until they fossilized us in place, or, “most intolerable, truly terrible,” “a life entirely without habits, a life that continually demanded improvisation?” (167). Habit—­conceived here not as mere routine but precisely as a rhythm of intense attachments that always prove insufficient—­here makes existence imaginable. Coda: Humanization Run Wild “We will begin all over again,” Vandover’s father tells him after Ida’s suicide. “From now on we’ll try to do the thing that is right and brave and good.” Yes, thinks Vandover: “That was it, begin all over again. He had never seen more clearly than now that other life which it was possible for him to live” (112, emphasis mine). This life, he imagines, will contain not “self-­indulgence and animal pleasures” but “sturdy, virile effort” to perfect his art (112). In a well-­known essay, “Freedom of Will and the Concept of a Person,” the philosopher Harry Frankfurt argues that what makes human beings distinct from other creatures is not the will as such, for other species appear capable of making choices and even deliberating based on prior thought, but, rather,

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our capacity to form what he calls “second-­order desires,” or desires about one’s desires. As he puts it, human beings alone have the capacity “of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are” (6–­7). Specifically, they can not simply want to do something but “want to want to” do something—­to “want the desire to X” to be their will. “Freedom of the will” emerges for Frankfurt when we successfully manage to remake our wills in the image of what we desire them to be. Vandover, then, and perhaps naturalist fiction more broadly—­though perhaps also realist fiction more broadly—­seems fairly skeptical regarding freedom defined in these terms. This does not mean, however, that a text like Norris’s is not deeply interested in the specificity of the human as Frankfurt defines it. As it turns out, the notion of “beginning all over again” itself forms one of the recurring themes of Norris’s novel (making it at times, indeed, resemble nothing so much as a spiritual autobiography). Vandover thinks of it again after his father’s death, when he settles for the first time in his own apartment: “here, if ever, was the chance to begin anew, to commence all over again” (179). When his good-­girl fiancée tells him she is breaking up with him, she implores him similarly: “But, Van, won’t you be better now? . . . It isn’t too late to begin all over again” (204). It seems fair to say, then, that if anything keeps “beginning all over again” in Vandover, it is the idea of beginning all over again. The idea of the break with compulsively repeated habits, in favor of a life structured by a steady forward motion, seems itself to generate yet another structure of repetition. More than the reduction to automatistic habits, addiction is in fact most typically defined in contemporary social science and philosophy alike by precisely this narrative structure of relapse and redoubled attempts at change. The turn-­of-­the-­century term “weakness of will” comes into play in these discussions, yet to describe not what produces addictive behaviors in the first place, but, more specifically, the failure to keep one’s resolutions: the “beginning all over again” of the attempt to “begin all over again.” Richard Holton thus asserts that philosophers have been mistaken to use the term “weakness of will” to describe what the Greeks called akrasia, or action against one’s better judgment—­a notion that might well encompass the melodramatic scenario of falling prey to addictive behaviors even as one finds them loathsome. According to Holton, laypeople, “non-­philosophers,” reserve the idea of weakness of will for more narratively structured scenarios, ones in which people “fail to act on their intentions” as previously posited (70). He asserts, moreover, that such cases in fact rarely involve actual akrasia in the sense of going against what one judges best in the moment. This is because, Holton writes, “In general we work very hard to ensure that the picture we have of

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ourselves is coherent . . . not ‘dissonant.’ Moreover we want—­are driven—­to come up with a picture that puts us in a good light” (100). For this reason, he states, most people at the moment of breaking their resolutions will decide that they are doing so because they are doing what, indeed, they now feel they genuinely do think best to do. In other words, they self-­rationalize. As another philosopher, Alison McIntyre, has noted, then, this seems to lead to a curious paradox, in that the desire for an integrated selfhood appears itself a kind of weakness, and it is thereby more morally defensible to be “lucidly akratic” than to avoid Saint Paul’s problem of acting against the good by expediently redefining what the good entails (287). Suppose, McIntyre posits, you anticipated a temptation, made a resolution to forestall it, then found yourself giving in anyway, and “observed this happening in yourself with perfect lucidity” (309). One would here, I would argue, be in a position something like that which Nietzsche describes, in which one achieves a kind of aesthetic distancing toward one’s own weakness of will. The overall aim of McIntyre’s essay is to question Frankfurt’s association of “second-­order desires” with “the depth of an agent’s commitments” and, therefore, our capacity as human beings for “deliberative autonomy.” Instead, she suggests, the making of resolutions would seem to imply “an intelligent kind of self-­doubt,” a recognition that being a person means self-­division (297). And yet, in making this claim, McIntyre provides a grounding for what appears as a kind of fascinating limit case in Frankfurt’s argument. As he admits, once our distinctive humanness has been yoked to our capacity to “want to want,” nothing stands in the way of the potential for a kind of infinite regression of desire: one may “want to want to want,” or “want to want to want to want,” and so on. Frankfurt portrays this as a paradoxical instance where being too human prevents someone from ever being human—­or, in his words, we have here a case of “destruction of a person” thanks to “humanization run wild” (16). So let’s return to poor Vandover, running amok on all fours around his barren hotel room. Might we understand his as a story less of a regression to animality than of “humanization run wild”? Geary sets goals, meets them, and sets some more, achieving Frankfurt’s criteria for freedom, yet for that very reason ends up seeming more machine than human being. Vandover, by contrast, fails because he is a particularly extreme instance of the fact that, as a human being, he is terminally ambivalent. But why, in his particular case? On the one hand, his habits clearly begin as a kind of self-­soothing in the face of a childhood trauma that the clustered disasters of the shipwreck, his father’s death, and his social abjection then repeat; to give them up thus clearly threatens an even greater dissolution. On the other hand, on a more cultural

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level, we’ve seen that Vandover relates the story of an individual raised according to Victorian conceptions of virtue through dutiful labor and self-­ control who finds himself in a (historical) situation in which those ideals lack relevant meaning. From this perspective, the fastidious horror with which he typically greets the morning-­after revelations of his moral failures speak to his inability to achieve the self-­aestheticizing distance both Nietzsche and McIntyre prescribe as the only means of rendering our human condition livable.72 Perhaps, however, this is the case in part because of the equivocal role played by the aesthetic in Vandover’s own situation. As we saw above, the book persistently opposes his “artistic side” as his “better half,” “the true man,” to “Vandover the easy-­going, the self-­indulgent . . . the lover of women” and of “animal pleasures” (112). And yet Norris will also write that Vandover’s “strong artist’s imagination” is what draws him toward Flossie the prostitute, the “sensuously attractive,” at one point even describing him as “allow[ing] the brute to thrive” precisely due to “shrinking with the shrinking of a sensuous artist-­nature from all that was irksome and disagreeable” (28, 52, 152). The real question raised here, then, seems to be how or whether art fits into a model of human activity defined by economic productivity. Vandover’s greatest moment of deliberation between alternatives occurs when he is faced with two apartments, each of which speaks to one side of his “artistic nature”: one is aesthetically unpleasant, but with a perfect room for a studio; the other exudes charm and comfort, but offers only a small, dark working space. Needless to say, perhaps, Vandover, ever sensitive to his environment, chooses the latter, more luxurious option, and “passe[s] a delightful week” out­ fitting his new parlor in style (176). Once fully ensconced, moreover, our hero falls into a life of a particularly equivocal cast, one defined neither by “dissipation” nor by “duties,” but, instead, by what Norris describes as “pottering”: “pottering about his sitting-­ room by the hour,” “rearranging,” “adjusting,” “setting it to rights,” and, “above all, tending the famous tiled stove,” “the chiefest joy of Vandover’s new life,” for it was “so artistic, so curious . . . the life and soul of the whole room, a stove to draw up and talk to. . . . There was hardly a moment of the day he was not fussing with it” (179–­82). “Pottering,” which begins its etymological life as a more specific term for what Vandover likes to do with his stove—­to poke at it repeatedly—­begins during the nineteenth century to take on a broader connotation suggesting, in essence, “dabbling”: “to work or act in a feeble or desultory manner,” to stroll “aimlessly,” to engage in activities in a “casual, unsystematic” way (OED Online). And yet the problem with Vandover’s pottering might be said to be

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exactly the opposite: he engages in trivial, domestic tasks in an excessively elaborated fashion, giving them the extended intensity of attention he should be granting his actual “work,” his art. Hence, “The mixing of his tobacco was a positive event and undertaken with all gravity. . . . He found amusement for two days” in hand-­rolling matches out of paper (181–­82). Vandover becomes, in other words, like a certain sort of domestic woman, an artist of the everyday. As the line about him lacking a “fixed routine” implies, then, he could be said in fact to fail to become habitual enough, to fall into the plight William James notes in his discussion of habit: he becomes the man unable to develop, due to the fact that “the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed,” and so on, have become “subjects of express volitional deliberation” (126). Vandover thus fails to become a productive artist, we might say, because he aestheticizes everything. Ironically, however, the depiction of these tendencies most brings Norris’s own work, fleetingly, to a “next stage” of art-­historical development in its protomodernist intimations of a Stein or Beckett. We as readers are thus able to recognize both the existential meaningfulness and the aesthetic charm of Vandover’s habits, even if, within his own story, they are seen as markers of narrative’s impossibility. Put otherwise, they represent “habit” in the complex sense Sedgwick offers from Proust: not simply experimentation, but that which both staves off dissolution and brings it closer at the same time. For Vandover’s habits here hyperbolize what Proust describes as our “attachments to the dimensions, to the atmosphere of a bedroom” (quoted in Sedgwick 140). For this reason, they are most tested late in the text when Vandover arrives in a space with nothing to which to “attach” at all. Indeed, it’s a particularly notable feature of Norris’s novel that, when Vandover is evicted from his apartment, the cheap hotel where he ends up is characterized not by grime and decay but by something like the opposite: “Everything was clean, defiantly, aggressively clean, and there was a clean smell of new soap in the air. But the room was bare of any personality. Of the hundreds who had lived there, perhaps suffered and died there, not a trace . . . remained; their different characters had not left the least impress upon its air or appearance” (270). And Vandover, who is noted for his ability to adapt to nearly any surrounding, no matter how uncongenial, finds himself at this moment most tested: “His new room . . . filled him with horror,” we are told (272). He can manage to dwell in it only by creating his perhaps most poignant “resolution,” in the form of a kind of installation—­a group of signs demarcating where each of his cherished, lost belongings would be were he to get back the habitual world he has lost.

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What is the horror of this “defiantly, aggressively clean” room? Might it have anything to do with the horror of the “defiant, aggressive health” manifested by Vandover’s successful friend Geary? The suggestion that it does is made in the book’s final chapter, in which Geary hires Vandover to clean out the cottages he rents to factory workers (thanks to having swindled his friend out of his real estate earlier in the book), and announces that his job is to make them look as new as if no one had ever lived there before. The narrator dwells quite lingeringly on the astonishing amount of filth, including a moldy ham bone and a half-­eaten dead hen, that Vandover must remove from the rental property to accomplish this task. Once again, however, the book seems concerned to demonstrate that the real awfulness of this scene lies less in the moldering debris, revolting though it is, and more in the demand for its complete eradication, which comes from not only Geary but his prospective tenant’s wife, who stands haranguing Vandover (abetted by her rather Geary-­ like four-­year-­old son, who enjoys calling Vandover “lazee-­bones”) for not working hard enough. Norris’s novel does seem interested in the way this situation could be more appalling than the state of unkemptness and physical weakness manifested by Vandover himself. Like the hotel room, the rental property is meant to present itself as entirely independent of its past, and suggests that its future will simply replicate its present. One could call it an antinarrative space. By contrast, Vandover’s tragedy is to remain a human be­ ing, by failing ever simply to close the narrative gap between his intentions and his acts.

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Narrative and Its Discontents: Racial Justice, Existential Action, and the Problem of the Past The problem here is located in temporality. f r a n t z f a n o n , Black Skin, White Masks (201)

Thus we end where we began: with the novel’s dissolution. Naturalism’s plots of unmaking, even in their less melodramatized form as accounts of habit, prefigure modernism’s turn against narration—­and indeed, at times, back in the direction of something like romance. The paralysis (of will) we saw in the preceding two chapters, in intellectualized and physicalized form, has become by, say, “The Waste Land” a vaster sense of historical stagnation—­to be revivified only, perhaps, by a return to myth. The question of whether we understand modernism as a radicalization of realism or a rejection of it can be framed by how we grasp naturalism as its predecessor—­as realism taken to a dead-­end, hyperscientific extreme or in the seemingly opposite way Frank Norris, for one, understood the innovations of Zola, as part and parcel of the much-­referenced late nineteenth-­century “revival of romance.”1 Some of the works gathered under this rubric, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, are frankly supernatural in theme while others—­the adventure tales of H. Rider Haggard—­simply eschew the novelistic everyday for the grander canvases of genre fiction. Even within the realism of George Eliot, Franco Moretti suggests, Daniel Deronda marks a shift toward “melodramatic fairy tale” as a means of solving liberalism’s dilemmas of will (the “many-­sided sympathy” that “threatened to hinder . . . action”): the old notion of a prefigured destiny reemerges as that of the hero fulfilling himself by allegiance to an ancient people (in Deronda’s case, the Jews) whose story it becomes his “vocation” to continue (Way of the World 224–­25). And yet with rare exceptions, the idea of a romance revival has played little role in our understanding of late nineteenth-­century American literature, perhaps because in the US “realism” typically appears as itself a minor subset understood as defining this same period. Alongside the possibility of

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conceiving naturalism in Norris’s terms, however, an outcropping of fiction from a previously little-­heard quarter provides some strikingly congenial candidates: that of the small but important group of African American writers who began to produce novelistic work at this time, including Pauline E. Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sutton Griggs, and, a bit later, W. E. B. Du Bois. In their work, written in the post-­slavery “nadir” of African American history following the collapse of Reconstruction and the emergent solidification of Jim Crow law amid rampant racial terrorism, precisely the question Moretti raises, of how to think the relation between present and past, takes on an urgency specific to its time and place.2 The past, in true romantic form, is here palimpsestic. How to think the legacy of slavery, of violent displacement and its haunting aftermath, casting its long shadow over the time of purported freedom? And then beyond it, beyond the void of the Middle Passage, what threads might still persist linking freed African American citizens to their forebears’ homeland? The Civil War era itself begins to appear part of a misty, Scott-­like prehistory to the rapidly industrializing US of this period, a time to be conjured in romantic terms, and while white supremacist works like those of Thomas Dixon overtly draw on this “plantation nostalgia,” Black writers, too, often employed generic conventions to produce a gulf between present and a lost, repressed, or barely glimpsed past.3 The present chapter considers a number of texts by these Black writers in order to consider both where they overlap and where they differ with respect to this question of history’s relation, or nonrelation, to the present and everyday. One way to understand the tensions they bring forward, and how these relate to the changing status of the novel around 1900, is through Fredric Jameson’s account of realism’s “antinomies,” which I here suggest structure the way the genre is typically exceeded as well. The two poles Jameson identifies are “destiny” and “the eternal present” (Antinomies of Realism 15). In his analysis, these appear as crystallizations of realism’s narrative versus descriptive impulse. If magnified, however, each can also represent a movement away from realism altogether, as when “destiny” moves in the direction of those older modes that, as Jameson notes, the novel either subsumes or overcomes (the “tale,” encompassing epic, Romanticism, the ballad, and so on), while the “eternal present” of description flowers into the radical present tense of modernist experiment. For the latter, indeed, even the nineteenth-­century novel could appear too wedded to a lockstep sense of history as progression. Thus, for a later reader and writer like Sartre, Jameson explains, the idea of the récit or events retold in the past tense, with its “insistence on irrevocability,” poses a threat to the present as “agony of decision” conceived in existential terms; he thus “calls upon

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the novel to reestablish . . . the open present of freedom, the present of an open, undecided future” (Antinomies of Realism 19, 18). And yet, as Jameson notes, the idea of the “irrevocable” may not, for all that, have lost its fascination, as, within existential philosophy itself, it recurs to characterize “the heroic, the freely chosen act, one that marks you forever” with a “ ‘life sore’ . . . something given to you uniquely to bear and to suffer: something ‘je mein eigenes,’ as Heidegger described individual death” (20–­21). In this conception, then, against all odds, the two temporalities—­destined event and everyday ongoingness—­ begin to merge, and, indeed, specifically in the form of a malady of the will. One of the more striking features of this argument about the “life sore,” a concept Jameson reiterates in other writings on the novel, is that it is derived, without any further commentary, from Brown Girl, Brownstones, a book by the novelist Paule Marshall, who grew up the daughter of immigrants from Barbados in 1930s New York. In that novel, it refers specifically to a still-­ festering physical wound left by a bygone act of racist violence. When finally told, the story of its acquisition speaks to the way the long history of such acts can render the mundane and the violent eruption hard to distinguish, as the event horrifies most, perhaps, in its very ordinariness: a group of rural white men “provoked” by a traveling Black woman’s trim appearance. And yet what we hear most, over and over, about the “life sore” is that its bearer neglects to tend to it. She has other cares and turns to her burden only when she must—­ certainly speaking hardly ever of its brutal history. The actual novelistic “life sore” thus bears only an oblique relation to existential ideas like “the heroic” or freedom—­and yet it may, nonetheless, still have something crucial to say regarding the existential as such. At least, that is the present chapter’s argument. As Lewis Gordon notes, Black writers and critics alike have long been drawn to existentialism as what Gordon terms a kind of “blues” philosophy. At the very late nineteenth-­century moment when white America looked ahead enthusiastically to “a future to conquer,” that is—­ drawing on earlier notions like Manifest Destiny to conceive History as an overarching Will toward progress—­both Black Americans and European philosophers seemed to be having related doubts (Existentia 7). “The blues,” Gordon suggests, “is the leitmotif of modernity”; “while born of Black suffering,” blues speaks of “modern suffering itself, ” and thus addresses “anyone confronting the entrails of modern existence,” the “anxiety, dread and despair” that lay on “the modern world’s underside” (“Is” 18; Existentia 8). To consider such formulations in relation to Black writing has, in fact, as Gordon notes, long been made possible by the influence of Sartre’s ideas on, in particular, the novelist Richard Wright and the Martinican theorist Frantz Fanon, but also on critics from Angela Davis to Anthony Bogues as well (Existentia 9).

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The blues might be said to register a formal as well as tonal critique of the notion of modernity as progress, of the Hegelian historical narrative that some have seen undergirding the developmental journey of the realist protagonist. In place of that linear movement forward, we find a structure governed by the repetition that James Snead has argued represents Western modernism’s rapprochement with the rhythmic modalities Hegel saw as evidence of Africa’s position outside history itself. We thus see, Snead suggests, in Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, or Faulkner, as in Freud’s discussion of “repetition compulsion,” the same “ ‘cut’ back to the start,” “the willed return to a prior series,” that played a role in Leopold Senghor’s definition of négritude through rhythm—­a two-­way street, we might note, since Senghor developed some of his ideas in tandem with the critiques of intellectualized temporality in the writings of Henri Bergson (Snead 150).4 Freud and Bergson begin their investigations into the past’s continuity into the present during the same period that concerns us here, underscoring Snead’s paradoxical recognition that modernism emerges out of a philosophical critique of modernity, the high-­water mark of which has long been identified as occurring around the turn into the twentieth century.5 The will has typically been understood as a casualty of this critique, as unconscious or irrational forces came to the fore.6 And yet as we already began to see in the case of Nietzsche, matters were in fact more complex; the resurgence of older vitalist ideas within these theories would ultimately contribute to their attractiveness from a phenomenological and, finally, existential perspective with little interest in “will” as cool deliberation but a great deal of it in will as defining moments of free action (or of break, or as fathomless abyss). As we saw above in Jameson’s account of Sartre, these could themselves recur to prenovelistic plots of destiny. And yet for the writer most central to this chapter, Charles Chesnutt, it was crucial to retain a wider sense of responsibility as well. Finally, the existential everyday we saw begin to emerge in Paule Marshall’s “life sore,” above, becomes perhaps this moment’s most important legacy—­one that, inflected through the temporal uncanniness of the quotidian in the thinkers mentioned, became a crucial way for Black writers to underscore history’s recalcitrance and its elusiveness at the same time. The “Racial Politics of Temporality,” Then and Now (Hopkins and Dunbar) Although W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk strives to imagine a better future for the United States’ Black citizens, at the core of his text lies a powerful portrait of historical inertia. Amid a newly industrializing nation obsessed

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with forward movement, Du Bois writes, the Black farmers of the South inhabit a temporal standstill. “The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt,” he explains, “is to-­day the same as in slavery days. Some live in the self-­same cabins, others in cabins rebuilt on the sites of the old,” and all “centering around some dilapidated Big House where the head-­ tenant or agent lives” (91). “After the first flush of freedom wore off,” he continues, “and his true helplessness dawned upon the freedman, he came back and picked up his hoe, and old master still doled out his bacon and meal . . . he cannot touch his own mortgaged crop, which the laws put almost in the full control of the land-­owner and of the merchant. . . . They work for board and clothes” (95–­97). “The Negro farmer started behind,—­started in debt,” is the point, and “once in debt, it is no easy matter for a whole race to emerge” (97). Du Bois writes two chapters on the Black tenant farmers. The second, from which the citations above derive, is, on the one hand, sociological; it differentiates the distinct classes of laborers, adduces their financial situation and their moral one, and duly notes the rise of a modest handful of actual Black landowners since 1870. And yet as has often been pointed out, Du Bois is persistently wary of his own role here, critiquing the “car-­window sociologist” who, glancing at a few workers resting by the roadside, dismisses the lot with “Miss Ophelia’s word,” from Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “Shiftless!” (100). In his first chapter on the Black Belt, Du Bois positions himself overtly as, potentially, just this sort of tourist from the North, who ventures inquisitively into that “strange land of shadows” (76) but will not linger long. When one farmer, devoid of a cent of profit after forty-­five years’ work, begins an “embittered” account of the murderous rages begotten in him by the violence and injustice he has witnessed, then and now, the text literally cuts him off in mid-­sentence. “And we passed on,” Du Bois abruptly states (85). A few paragraphs later the phrase is echoed, after the story of a laborer’s son who “rose in the night and killed his baby, and killed his wife, and shot himself dead,” but its compass has widened: “And the world passed on” (86). We see, then, that the journey being made traverses time as much as space, the limitation of the “car-­window sociologist” lying in an inability to “unrave[l] the snarl of centuries” that seethes behind the laborers’ present condition (100). The sociologist, that is, fails if he sees only with the eyes of the present, if he is not at once a historian. Yet what kind of history is it that gazes upon centuries not marching obediently forward but compressed into a recalcitrant “snarl”? Du Bois himself echoes Stowe, in her description of the Simon Legree plantation at the end of her book, in portraying the Black Belt in ways that prefigure what would later become Southern gothic, as a land that time forgot, left to decrepitude as the world “passed on.” “The whole land seems

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forlorn and forsaken,” he writes—­filled with ruined plantations (“the back part grotesquely restored for its Black tenant”), “tangled weeds,” “phantom gates,” pervasive decay. “In one place the wood is on fire, smouldering in dull red anger,” as if, Du Bois muses darkly, endlessly recalling the hundreds of Creek Indians slaughtered there (78–­82). In Stowe, of course, the difference was that her apocalyptically barren landscape signified slavery’s own necessary demise, or, failing that, the moral fate of America should the institution be permitted to continue. In Souls the gothic realm is populated by supposedly free men. Lying at the center of Du Bois’s book, these chapters present the text as a whole, as a story of hope and striving, with its gravest challenge; what if these individuals, literally left behind by history, are in fact going nowhere? A year before the 1903 publication of Souls, Paul Laurence Dunbar, better known as a poet and songwriter, published his novel Sport of the Gods. Dunbar’s book begins by asserting the gulf separating his cheerful Southern Black family, the Hamiltons, from the days of slavery; despite the fact that they, too, as butler and servant to the wealthy Oakley family, inhabit what are really refurbished slave quarters, their “modern,” “good-­living” state is said to provide a welcome “relief ” from fiction’s “monotony of tiresome iteration” concerning that bygone time (1). The entire book, however, then spirals steeply downward from that claim: Berry Hamilton is framed for theft by his employer’s feckless brother, and summarily jailed; the shunned family escapes north to find only even greater woe; and, when Berry finds himself at last redeemed, his reward consists in returning south with his wife to live out the rest of their days in that same old cottage, in what Abigail Aldritch calls a “living death of stagnation” (224)—­listening to the now-­mad Oakley’s ravings of despair, and feeling themselves “powerless against some Will infinitely stronger than their own” (148). Dunbar’s outsizedly mythic framing here—­the novel’s title derives from a line in King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods / Who play with us for their sport”—­has most commonly been presumed ironic. As Susan Bausch puts it, “What appears to be the immutable will of the gods is in fact the historical legacy of slavery and the virtual perpetuation of its conditions. If the Hamiltons are powerless, it is because they continue to deny the primal importance of history in their present-­day lives.” To conceive the family’s fate as in fact historical, Bausch and others argue, allows us to recognize it as not “inevitable” but, rather, “temporary and remediable” in kind (522). What if, however, we were to take Dunbar’s tone more seriously, as part of a turn away from a linear conception of historical time in Black writing of this period that can also be glimpsed in sites like the Black Belt section of Souls?

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As Margaret Ronda has pointed out, Dunbar takes up an “antiprogressive, tragic stance” in some of his essays and poetry also (871). There, too, in poems like “Disappointed,” the sense of subjection to willful gods appears, in the form of random storms that destroy all one aging farmer’s “careful efforts,” and then of a voice from out of the skies, which, in the final lines, exhorts him to “ ‘Arise . . . and plant again!’ ” (867). Why might it have been meaningful for turn-­of-­the-­century African American writers to conceive their situation through the outsized lens of tragedy? We might begin by asking whether, in a situation characterized by the apparent meaninglessness of human will (as all the patient efforts of Dunbar’s and Du Bois’s farmers are shown to come to naught), one might derive greater dignity from conceiving oneself the plaything of gods than from acceding to being merely the discards of human “progress.” From the point of view of will, after all, even a historicist framing like Bausch’s can appear equivocal, for how exactly are we to understand the notion of a “primal importance of history in [our] present-­day lives”? The idea of a divine will might be said merely to give way here to a much more modern, and indeed specifically nineteenth-­ century, one of History itself as “the Will infinitely stronger” than that of any one individual. “The voice of history is the voice of God,” wrote the Black novelist Pauline Hopkins around the same time, in an essay on the man responsible for the one slave revolution to found a nation (“Toussaint,” 10). We can see ideas of this kind crop up at times in Du Bois, directly influenced by German writers such as Dilthey, for whom “the race idea” constituted “the central thought of all history” (Writings 817). Du Bois’s indebtedness to Hegelian historical teleologies in Souls and elsewhere has provided the subject for important discussion, as by Robert Gooding-­Williams, Brad Evans, and, most extensively, Shamoon Zamir. As Zamir notes, Du Bois’s early writings leading up to Souls manifest a persistent fascination with “comforting guarantees of historical purpose,” or what Zamir terms a “flight from history into historicism” that offers “security in the face of the unmastered present” (24). While Du Bois’s commencement speech upon his 1888 graduation from Fisk thus drew in conventional Victorian terms on the heroic figure of Bismarck to conceive the sort of “force that moves history forward,” he would later, Zamir argues, turn away from such conceptions—­and from the will-­based heroics of his mentor William James—­to a more “impersonal metaphysics of history” based on the “teleological unfolding” of “universal laws” (Zamir 30, 32). Essays like 1897’s “The Conservation of Races” would then draw on these kinds of ideas to conceive a world-­historical “destiny” for the Black race (Writings 826).

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Souls, like “Conservation,” thus possesses dual temporal vectors: it speaks of both a present crisis of will and a future redemption.7 On one hand, the former of these can be traced to the “heritage from slavery” as described in the Black Belt chapters (Writings 825). On the other, however, it results from a psychic condition: the double consciousness Du Bois famously describes in his opening chapter, leading to “incessant self-­questioning and the hesitation that arises from it,” tendencies “making the present period a time of vacillation and contradiction for the American Negro; combined race action is stifled, race responsibility is shirked” (Writings 821). The subject position described here resembles that of the hero of another novel from this same period, Hopkins’s Of One Blood, whose brooding medical-­student protagonist Reuel passes for white to forward his professional and intellectual aims. It may be termed “estrangement”—­and, indeed, it often appears as a position of not quite fully inhabiting the time in which one lives, feeling at a distance from it, marooned in some liminal space beyond. Saidiya Hartman has written about “the limits of most available narratives to explain the position of the enslaved” (Hartman and Wilderson, “Position” 184)—­a position that, for her as for the writers above, extends beyond 1863 proper, indeed in her case far beyond. One thesis, then, regarding African American writing during this period of nadir would entail the suggestion that it represents a particularly intensified instance of a broader turn against the novel form, substituting romance (gothic or fantasy), tragedy, or the famously heterogeneous genres of Souls as the only way to begin to offer a portrait of Black American life circa 1900. This idea appears to be literalized by a text like Hopkins’s, in which what initially appears as a realist novel set in recognizable present-­day space is increasingly infiltrated by visitations from a supernatural realm, until in its second half the book transforms into a frankly science-­fictional account of a lost great African city that turns out to be alive in the present, and of which our stunned young student, Reuel Briggs, finds himself crowned heir. The notion of history as determinative force bearing down upon an aimless present thus here takes on, again, a redemptive cast—­albeit less in the evolutionary form seen in Du Bois’s essays than in that of a future that will circle back to a traumatically lost past. Like Du Bois in his writings on double consciousness, Hopkins portrays the situation of the post-­Reconstruction African American subject as one of psychic dualism; in her case, however, she borrows a more proto-­Freudian archaeological language of a temporally stratified psyche from William James, whose 1890 Putnam’s essay “The Hidden Self ” provides Of One Blood with both a subtitle and some interpellated text. This

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conception, in which a repressed historical truth lies at the basis of a pathologically split subjectivity in the present, allows Hopkins to suture her plot of dawning African American self-­awareness in turn-­of-­the-­century New England to her more fantastical vision of the excavated Ethiopian city of Telassar, the unearthing of which literalizes the notion Reuel offers of the “quiescent” “hidden self ” as an “undiscovered country within ourselves” (448). Like Eliot’s Daniel Deronda as described by Moretti, Reuel, who at the novel’s opening compares himself (as well as “Negroes” generally) to those “tramps” and “stray[s]” who roam without home or family, finds his calling—­both his identity and his historical “destiny”—­in giving his life over to serving his forgotten people (449, 464). As Wilson Jeremiah Moses has documented in his indispensable Afrotopia, Hopkins’s fictional project could easily be placed alongside an array of contemporaneous historiographical attempts—­including Hopkins’s own A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants (1905)—­that prefigured contemporary Afrocentrists in their goal of tying contemporary Blacks to an illustrious Egyptian past. The difficulty often turned on explaining the mighty civilization’s fall in the first place; Hopkins’s utopian conception of a perfectly preserved underground kingdom offers a means of circumventing this dilemma, as well as a rebuttal to her white character Charlie Vance’s blithe dismissal of Africa early on in the archaeological dig as a mere “pile of old ruins. . . . Nothing but the monotony of past centuries dead and forgotten” in contrast to the bright, forward-­looking activity of his native, modernizing US (526). As Yogita Goyal puts it, in writings ranging from those of Hopkins and Du Bois as well as contemporaries such as Edward Blyden and Joseph Hayford, “phantasmatic Africas” served as staging grounds for playing out core ideas associated with diasporic identity: “the loss of home, the meaning of memory, and the struggle to find a usable past” (8). Yet as we see in the case of Hopkins’s novel, fictionality here offers an especially potent means of revivifying the past in the present—­indeed of asserting, in a positivized rather than melancholic version of Du Bois’s Black Belt chapters, that the two temporalities are one and the same. As the similarity of Reuel’s trajectory to Deronda’s suggests, such projects, despite their racial specificity, can also be understood as part of a broader turn-­of-­the-­century “antimodernism”—­a term put forward by the historian T. J. Jackson Lears that Moses’s Afrotopia picks up to describe projects like Hopkins’s as well. As Goyal notes, Of One Blood’s Africa section can sound “oddly reminiscent of the period’s imperial romances by such writers as H. Rider Haggard” (29). The sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies’s influential con-

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ception of modernity as a shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, or from organic “community” to artificial “society,” expresses well the sense of a degenerative historical movement away from an original totality. The resultant dissatisfaction with a modernizing nineteenth century led to a rejection of the historical time of steady forward progress in favor of the alternatives of either paralysis or recursion evident in the texts just cited. If modernity itself borrowed from Christianity its sense of progressive time, antimodernism, in tandem with an earlier Romanticism, insisted, rather, on modernity itself as a postlapsarian disaster to be redeemed by renewed contact with a lost past. Only then would infinite meaning be restored, solving “the riddle of whence and whither” that torments Hopkins’s Reuel as he contemplates the emptiness of a life pressing ever “onward” toward nowhere (442). These “morbid thoughts” are, once more, historical and personal at once, as Reuel’s experience of his lack of “vocation,” in Moretti’s sense—­and hence, the aimlessness of his trajectory—­leads to contemplations of suicide (441). As it is important to recognize, the sense of things in the present existing in a kind of standstill for many overlooked by those in power could operate as a potent political critique, given the tendency in the US in this period in particular for celebrations of progress. “It was a day of Progress with a capital P,” Du Bois would recall in his later autobiography Dusk of Dawn: “commerce was madly seeking markets all around the earth; colonies were being seized,” and, in a point to which we will return, “above all science was becoming religion” (Writings 573).8 And yet as the tie to white antimodernisms like those of regionalist fiction or plantation nostalgia suggests, the danger lies in the way this absolutized version of present stagnation could, in other cases, fuel dreams of romantic rescue by a future that mimics a glorious past. Goyal points out the specific danger that Africa in a novel like Hopkins’s becomes a mere “phantas[m]” for the “therapeutic” visions of African Americans—­ its own present political struggles, as they emerged over the course of the decolonizing twentieth century, erased (Romance 8, 31). Hence, while Goyal, like Moses, is attuned to the utopian potentialities of this romantic mode, she attends seriously to its dangers as well. Her more powerful critique, then, lies in a querying of the reemergence of some of these same conflations of present with past in contemporary criticism—­particularly Paul Gilroy’s much-­cited work in The Black Atlantic. At one level, this might seem surprising; both there and elsewhere, Gilroy writes directly against the Afrocentric arguments that Of One Blood presents in nascent form, critiquing them as problematic rejections of modernity in favor of an allegiance to “tradition” rooted in a supposed African heritage (Atlantic 187). And yet as Goyal notes, despite these critiques, “no alternative

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figuration of Africa” can emerge in Gilroy’s discussion, because its emphasis on the “continued proximity” of “the unspeakable terrors of the slave experience” in contemporary Black writing produces a similar collapse between present and past (Atlantic 73). “In its transhistorical sweep,” Goyal writes, “the memory of slavery takes on a reified form and content” in Gilroy’s account, eventually “reiterat[ing] the essentialism of the nationalism it claims to oppose” (Romance 228). In generic terms, then, she argues that Gilroy’s notion of the “slave sublime” “marks his (unwitting) return to the mode of romance” (Romance 227).9 An argument with some overlaps with Goyal’s here has been developed in much more uncompromising terms by other scholars who identify an entire critical moment in literary and historical studies alike emerging from Gilroy’s example, as well as that of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, published around the same time. As Stephen Best puts it, William Faulkner’s famous line that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” has “settled in as a commonplace” in African American studies (“On Failing” 462), a claim borne out by more recent books with titles like The Psychic Hold of Slavery. In the words of Kenneth Warren, making a similar point in What Was African American Literature?, such notions draw on Morrison’s conception of “rememory,” in which the history of slavery is transformed into a collective shared remembrance (Warren 98). “It is my contention,” Warren asserts, “that to understand both past and present, we have to put the past behind us”—­a goal echoed by Best’s assertion of his hope of “writing the epitaph” to what he terms “the Beloved moment” and instead acknowledging the past’s “radical alterity” from our own present experience (Warren 84; Best, “On Failing” 465). Both the strength but also the limits of these critiques may be gauged, I would suggest, by turning to a group of especially radical instances of the temporally collapsing tendency they question: the more recent writings of self-­ proclaimed “Afro-­pessimists,” including Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson. Sexton, for example, defines “colored time” as “interminable, stalled time” in which “ ‘nuthin’ ever really ends’ and certainly not the past” (4). In many ways, indeed, this work can be taken as the contemporary critical analogue to the tragic and gothic mode we saw at the outset in Du Bois and Dunbar. Its premise lies likewise in what Sexton terms the “tragic continuity between slavery and freedom” (6), understood now in the longer-­durée terms that, as Gilroy puts it in his discussion of Toni Morrison, “lead back from contemporary racial violence, through lynching, towards the temporal and ontological rupture of the middle passage” (222). Modernity here is born in a gesture not of self-­determination but of enslavement, and, hence, the dilemma it presents is not how to understand human freedom but to grasp, in Saidiya Hartman’s

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words, “the very notion of [a] subjectivity . . . predicated upon the negation of will” (quoted in Hartman and Wilderson, “Position” 186). For Hartman and others, this means two things, with respect to thinking the relation of history to the novel: the enslaved exist at the very border zones of narrative itself (she is writing here about Harriet Jacobs’s memoir), and the well-­meaning progressive quest for “agency” risks obliterating, rather than illuminating, the lives it aims to uncover. Instead, Hartman argues, it is imperative to consider how “existence in the space of death” renders “negation . . . the captive’s central possibility for action” (Hartman and Wilderson, “Position” 187). It is in these terms, as for Gilroy as well, that a story like the one retold by Beloved, of Margaret Garner’s decision to kill her child to save her from a life of slavery, becomes emblematic: “The repeated choice of death over bondage articulates a principle of negativity that is opposed to the formal logic and rational calculation characteristic of modern western thinking” (Gilroy, Black Atlantic 68). The opposition to “rational calculation” here is, we might say, typical of antimodernism tout court; the emphasis on negativity and “existence in the space of death,” however, would seem to place this work in dialogue more specifically with the work of later writers like Sartre and Heidegger (as is thematized directly in Calvin Warren’s Ontological Terror). Overall, it seems fair to say, Afro-­pessimism possesses a complex relation to the idea of the existential, perhaps captured best in the fact that both these theorists and their detractors claim the legacy of Frantz Fanon, whose work, particularly in Black Skin, White Masks, was so indebted to Sartre’s example (as we will discuss in greater detail in the next section), even as it pointedly took its leave from his writings on race. Existentialism, arguably more than any other philosophy of freedom, is predicated directly on the absence or illegitimacy of any notion of “Big Will.” This stance is what makes the modernist moment of the novel’s dissolution resemble that of its prehistory (the Deus absconditus versus Nietzsche’s dead God), and explains the subjectivism common to both. For the enslaved individual, however, this experience was foundational. (Hence Gilroy’s assertion, again building on Morrison, that slavery “marked out Blacks as the first truly modern people, handling in the nineteenth century dilemmas and difficulties which would only become the substance of everyday life in Europe a century later” [Atlantic 221].) The master was arbitrary power par excellence, sheer willfulness in the absence of any legitimacy save that of a degraded human law (or, arguably, the economy as purely calculating, amoral will discussed in the previous chapter). And the suggestion of Hartman, Wilderson, and Sexton, then, is that the continuity of racism installs that same irrational power at the core of the Black experience of modern social life.

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It is in this sense, then, that we might understand Sport of the Gods’ title and reference to its protagonists’ subjection to a malignant “Will” as a literary gesture congruent with these critical premises. As we saw earlier, it has been difficult for readers to see the Shakespearean title of Dunbar’s novel as anything but ironic.10 Yet it seems worth considering, as we began to do above, that a return to the language of tragedy—­evident, we will soon see, in Charles Chesnutt’s contemporaneous Marrow of Tradition as well—­might have afforded access, for the Black writers of this era, not only to temporal modes athwart those of modernity as progress, but to a way to conceive, as in Margaret Garner’s case, a kind of defiance borne out of, rather than giving the lie to, a seemingly inescapable situation.11 When Dunbar’s unjustly accused Berry Hamilton is at last released from prison, he looks around at the pathetic fates of the purportedly free individuals around him—­and his only response is to laugh. His wife, Fannie, who has remarried to a thug who beats her, implores him to consider that perhaps there is some greater purpose to it all: “Maybe we don’ un’erstan’. ” “No,” Berry agrees, still bitterly laughing as he exits, “we don’ un’erstan’. . . . We don’ un’erstan’  ” (145–­46). Whether this sarcastic retort indicts the absurdity of racism or, on a more cosmic scale, the absurdity of Blacks’ having to be the ones to endure it, it makes space for an open-­eyed refusal to grant significance to a senseless fate. From this vantage, the stunning tableau with which Sport concludes might be taken as a kind of ne plus ultra of Afro-­pessimism, as Berry and Fannie find themselves imprisoned by the madness not of racism but of, in essence, white guilt. (Their former mistress earnestly cajoles them to return to their lost home, as a means of making amends, so they can have the privilege of listening to their master’s cries of anguish unto eternity.) As an aesthetic and rhetorical gesture, then—­one in many ways analogous to the Afro-­pessimist project—­Dunbar’s still little-­read book possesses enduring power. The question, as asked by Afro-­pessimism’s critics in the present, is what relation such conceptions bear to actual work toward racial justice. As Lewis Gordon puts it in a strong critique along these lines, pessimism can risk mirroring optimism in the abdication of responsibility to a presumed-­in-­advance “transcendent” trajectory (“Thoughts” 3–­4). From this vantage, it seems telling that the specter of a more congenial deus ex machina can turn out to hover at the margins of the Afro-­pessimist project, via references to “Revolution” and “Jubilee” as, presumably, moments when a true and absolute emancipation will finally arrive.12 No less than, finally, for both Heidegger and Sartre themselves—­albeit very differently, in the form of German destiny for one and the triumph of the proletariat for the other—­the temptation, in the face of the existential void, to reinstate the notion of a favorably disposed larger

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narrative takes here the quintessentially modern form of the Will of History itself. In this respect, we might do well to recall Fanon’s critique of Sartre on precisely these grounds, for treating the present state of Black thought as simply one stage along the way to a predetermined Marxist revolution, and thereby “destroy[ing] Black impulsiveness” by choosing “historical destiny” over the “unforeseeable” future (Black Skin 113). The alternative to such certainties, as Gordon notes, would be the slog of politics as actually practiced. In Goyal’s words, Fanon’s “commitment to freedom” was finally “grounded in realism and in a rejection of romance” (Romance 6). By this she means not only his rejection of some redemption of history by destiny—­as Fanon put it, “The past can in no way be my guide to the actual state of things” (200)—­but his involvement in the “minutiae” of politics on the ground (in his case, specifically, those of the fight for Algerian self-­determination) (Romance 6). Fearing that precisely these everyday struggles are what can get lost when Africa is mythicized as the site either of an originary unity or a shatteringly absolute break, she argues for the dangers of both turn-­of-­the-­century rejections of realist time and their contemporary critical analogues. Strikingly, then, she has been joined in this endeavor by the later writings of Gilroy himself.13 Gilroy, that is to say, similarly intervenes into what he usefully terms “the racial politics of temporality” (Against 334) by insisting on the day-­to-­day lived realities of “cohabitation and interaction,” as “ordinary feature[s] of social life,” against the “Manichaean fantasy” of race pitted against race (Melancholia xv, 6).14 “I will suggest,” he asserts, “that multicultural ethics and politics could be premised on an agonistic, planetary humanism capable of comprehending the universality of our elemental vulnerability to the wrongs we visit upon each other” (Melancholia 4). Du Bois and Fanon are both crucial interlocutors for this project, the latter in his insistence that while “the misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved,” “the misfortune and inhumanity of the white man” lie in his having “killed man” (205). Thus Gilroy joins here a broader strain of African diaspora thought that attempts to wrest the meaning of “the human” from its associations with the depredations of the West. As Gordon notes, Sylvia Wynter is a pioneer here, as her work becomes ever more fully committed to the notion of the human—­posited against colonialist “Man”—­over time.15 As such, like Gilroy’s, Wynter’s project also entails a simultaneous strong critique and affirmation of Enlightenment modernity.16 Within the romantic frames of turn-­of-­the-­century Black writing, I want to argue, Charles Chesnutt can be read as an author interested in the possibilities of this more realist perspective. As his novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901)

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demonstrates, Chesnutt resembles Wynter in conceiving racism as a form of romantic thinking, in which day-­to-­day decision making and shared life are occluded by fantasies of an immutable destiny. Marrow shows these melodramas to have become the stock-­in-­trade of journalistic accounts of race in turn-­ of-­the-­century America, leaving realist fiction as the only means of reinstating a more evenhanded view. The novel fictionalizes events that were only a few years away when Chesnutt wrote: the horror of the white supremacist uprising that decimated the town of Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898.17 Seizing on racist outrage at an editorial by Black newspaperman Alexander Manly—­ which attacked lynching by pointing out the simple reality of consensual relationships across racial lines—­the massacre burned the paper’s offices, toppled the city’s freely elected multiracial government, and sent scores of citizens of color to terrified flight if not, in many instances, the grave. As we will see, Chesnutt understands realism’s own task very much in the terms offered above by Gilroy, as a way to depict the ordinary interdependence of a community—­a hard-­won reality shattered by the supremacists’ Manichaean racial logic. Our inquiry into his text will thus begin by exploring the ways in which he uses both formal and thematic techniques to underscore the mutual vulnerability Gilroy describes, as a tool to counter both white retrogression and Black fatalism alike. And yet finally, as the chapter as a whole will explore, Chesnutt’s contribution to the “racial politics of temporality” is a complex one. His insistence on action in the absence of historical guarantee generates a concluding tableau in which the near-­total loss of mooring in day-­to-­day reality produces an existential reckoning with past, present, and future alike. And, as we will see in moving from Marrow’s finale back to some of the texts from this opening section—­in particular, those by Hopkins and Du Bois—­Chesnutt’s focus on trauma opens out onto the question of how to speak to the past’s persistence in the present without giving way to gothic visions of entrapment. One answer, it turns out, lies in the need to acknowledge history’s uncanniness as a kind of semi-­presence hovering within the space of the everyday. The Realist Insistence: Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition interdependence and the novel Scholars have thus far failed to recognize the extent to which, in a number of key respects, the British realist novel emblematized by Eliot’s Middlemarch may find its American equivalent in the striking form of Chesnutt’s 1901 The Marrow of Tradition. While Marrow no doubt may also be shown to fit the

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many other modes with which it may be associated—­documentary fiction, protest novel, regional novel, sentimental melodrama à la Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Chesnutt himself understood as his clearest predecessor—­the fact remains that, like Eliot’s masterpiece, Chesnutt’s novel tells the story of, above all, an entire community; he might easily have named it Wellington, were it not for his evident desire (akin to Du Bois’s in his Black Belt chapters) to portray the individual city as itself a piece in, and an aesthetic means into, a larger national drama. Despite this, however, the novel’s emphasis on Wellington as a whole made up of interdependent parts is clearly sustained, not only by its Eliot-­like interlocking of overlapping narratives, and a tendency to “twin” Black characters with white counterparts,18 but by its thematization of the question of community throughout. By pitting “race against race” (298), the uprising thus embodies the undoing of existing ties: within its maelstrom, the Black doctor Adam Miller, the book’s nominal protagonist, goes unrecognized by the local clerk who knows him, and even a more apologetic white neighbor does not hesitate to frisk him, per the new regime’s instructions. Most dramatically, the book’s final scene registers the potential cost for those newly empowered of that rejection of communal allegiance, as the leading white supremac­ ist finds himself forced to beg Miller, whom he had previously spurned, to help save the life of his only son. Indeed, it is the occasionally intrusive narrator’s role to, among other things, remind us amid the book’s many and carefully sown divisions that this is a community (for example, with references to “the whole people,” rather than “one class,” 92, and noting, accurately, that the racists’ campaign in fact responded directly to the burgeoning successes of the “Fusion” party that brought Black Republicans together with white Populists, 30).19 Directly in opposition to this form of thinking, then, is the idea toward which Chesnutt’s title points, that of “tradition,” which looks, rather, backward and seeks to reestablish the social prominence of families like that of Major Carteret, the motive force behind the white insurrection. As his honorific implies, the melancholic Carteret is depicted as essentially arrested in time at Appomattox, from which he returned “to find his family, one of the oldest and proudest in the state, hopelessly impoverished by the war—­even their ancestral home swallowed up in the common ruin” (1). Marriage to an heiress, Olivia Merkell, however, permits Carteret to rise once more by founding the local newspaper (like the propagandist Josephus Daniels, his real-­life counterpart); the story unfolds as he pins his hopes of a redeemed future on his only son, on the one hand, and the paper’s campaign of racial intimidation, on the other.

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At his service, in each of these endeavors, are Black characters described by the narrator as “venerable relic[s] of ante-­bellum times,” and who can indeed appear to have stepped forth from the pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “Mammy” Jane Letlow, longtime servant (and former slave) to his wife’s family, and Jane’s grandson Jerry, who works as errand runner at the Chronicle (42). As Anne Cheng puts it in The Melancholy of Race, “Like melancholia, racism is hardly ever a clear rejection of the other. While racism is mostly thought of as a kind of violent rejection, racist institutions in fact . . . wish to maintain that other within existing structures” (12). Jane and Jerry, in their unswerving loyalty to the Carterets, enable a kind of lived fiction of the persistence of slavery-­era race relations. (“If all the colored people were like you and Jerry, Jane,” the Major tells her “kindly,” “there would never be any trouble” [44.]) The Letlows appear, in this respect, in pointed contrast to the younger nurse attendant on the Carterets’ infant son, Dodie, who regards Jane with open contempt: These old-­time negroes, she said to herself, made her sick with their slavering over the white folks, who, she supposed, favored them and made much of them because they had once belonged to them,—­much the same reason why they fondled their cats and dogs. For her own part, they gave her nothing but her wages, and small wages at that, and she owed them nothing more than equivalent service. It was purely a matter of business; she sold her time for their money. There was no question of love between them. (42)

On the one hand, we might say that this framing positions the new nurse as the “modern” counterpart to Jane: where the latter conceives her care for Olivia as a matter of family loyalty, the former perceives it as purely the outgrowth of contract, or the abstract individual’s right to alienate not herself but, in this case, skills that constitute aspects of her personal property. In Hegel’s account in The Philosophy of Right, on the other hand, while contract entails the recognition of a “common” will that binds two individual wills together, it does not yet rise to the level of the truly “universal” will evident in ethical life, which begins in the family and then moves to encompass civil society and, finally, the state. Chesnutt’s equivocal portrayal of the new nurse, then, seems in keeping with these caveats. Narratively, the replacement of the sentimental construal of slavery with merely impersonal relations of contract cannot do the community-­building work he wants his book, as an updating of Stowe’s, to do. And although we will need to wait until our reading of Marrow’s denouement to see how Chesnutt resolves this divide, for now, it is worth noting that while Jane can appear an antebellum caricature, she is also the repository of the crucial Merkell/Carteret family history—­the story of Olivia’s disowned

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Black half sister, Janet, who is the wife of the doctor, Miller—­as it is relayed in the book’s opening chapter. To the extent Janet’s familial role serves as the key to the book’s attempt to envision a future for its shattered community, as we will presently see, Jane as the bearer of “tradition” in the form of historical memory has a crucial part to play as well—­one congruent with the narrator’s in establishing the reality of Wellington’s interrelated nature. Chesnutt lends further complexity to his depiction of tradition by aligning it with the community-­minded perspective of old Delamere, to Carteret “an ideal gentleman of the ideal past” (214) who “regarded himself as a trustee for the great public” (197) and, on those terms, throws his weight behind Miller’s “colored” hospital as a public good.20 This concept of the “public,” however (“to the white people themselves, the white people were the public” [184]) has been at the time of the story’s telling so degraded, for most, that the only fully inclusive entity imaginable is that of the “population” (such that “the negro is not counted as a Southerner, except to fix the basis of congressional representation” [116]).21 Notably, however, even from Delamere’s perspective, true interdependence, while privately acknowledged, must not be publicly recognized. Thus only “under cover of darkness” does “the old gentleman lea[n] on his servant’s arm with frank dependence” and the latter acknowledge the need by providing unconcealed support (26). Aside from Delamere, the character most identified with a civic spirit, and therefore with the perspective of the larger narration, is William Miller—­not coincidentally, the figure who most resembles Chesnutt himself. It is no accident that, as a Black professional aspiring to gentlemanly status—­he drives a buggy and inhabits the former Carteret home—­he finds his belief in collective identification most tested when a ride in a Jim Crow train car sorts him with a group of cheerfully loud and “malodorous” Black laborers rather than with his white friend Dr. Burns (60). Yet Miller’s very class scruples cannot be separated from the way his personal trajectory sutures a classic American story of personal social uplift—­in which two generations of “thrifty” colored men rise out of slavery and, thanks to careful saving and “shrewd investments,” send a son to professional school abroad—­to a commitment to the broader “uplifting” of “his people” (and, by extension, Delamere’s “public” as a whole) by remaining in Wellington and putting his inheritance toward both the hospital and an affiliated nursing school (50–­51). It is in the juxtaposition of this public-­mindedness, as shared by the narrative as a whole, with the personal story of uplift that Marrow most emphatically suggests the distinctive capacity of African American fiction to continue, in a US context, the “high realist” tradition of British novelists like Eliot and Dickens. As Amanda Anderson argues, while readers of that tradition often

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choose to focus on either its individualizing or its “impersonal,” sociopolitical strands, the genre may derive its greatest power from the productive tensions it generates between these two aspects (78). Described as having been forced by his dual experience of education and racialized marginalization to become “something of a philosopher,” Miller is distinctly positioned to bridge this divide. The novel suggests, moreover, that he may be able to do so as a doctor as well; it is that role, one in which sympathy and practical knowledge converge, that allows him finally to cross the threshold of the Carteret home as the book concludes, arguably closing the gap between the book’s two worlds for the first time. Anderson makes a similar argument about the doctor Woodcourt in Dickens’s Bleak House, and we may further note some of “Will” Miller’s overlaps with another figure she discusses, Will Ladislaw of Middlemarch, a man of both “ardency” and “sober realism,” who thus “becomes an active reformer by means of a practical accommodation to limiting circumstances”—­ his capacity for effective willing, that is, undergirded by his recognition of its necessary circumscription (73, 70). And yet here, however, precisely around this question of will, we may also begin to see where Chesnutt’s novel also diverges from those that Anderson describes. For, once the riot breaks out, Miller’s only course is revealed to consist of inaction. In stark contrast to the stevedore Josh Green, whom we will discuss in more detail momentarily, and who has raised up a cadre of Black men to fight back against their attackers, Miller counsels abandonment of what he views as their lost cause: “Give it up, boys,” he tells them, “and wait. Good may come of this, after all.” In response, “Several of the men wavered, and looked irresolute” (283). Indeed, even in his final act of helping the Carterets, Miller is moved not by his own “will” but by the decision of his wife, Janet—­a key feature of the text that we will also consider more closely in time. That Miller’s very capaciousness of perspective actually hinders his ability, or more accurately desire, to act renders him akin to the liberal moderns described by Moretti and others. This is even more evident if we contrast him with Josh Green, whose presence, as we shall see, has a genre-­altering effect on Marrow very similar to that which Moretti describes in the case of Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Yet Miller’s “modern” perspective may also be seen to be critiqued by the novel’s lethal course of events, to the extent that perspective depends on a fundamental sense of history as slow but steady progress. In this respect, too, we see Miller’s personal qualities dovetail with his social views: young and light-­hearted, with a “conscience void of offense,” “he liked to believe that the race antagonism which hampered his progress and that of his people was a mere temporary thing, the outcome of former conditions, and bound to disappear in time” (61, 65). As he confidently proclaims to Dr. Burns

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on the train (moments before being whisked off by the conductor to the colored car), “If our race had made as much progress everywhere as they have made in Wellington, the problem would be well on the way to solution” (51). This position with respect to Gilroy’s “racial politics of temporality”—­ one that sees a linear movement forward, leaving a sad past behind—­is not only linked by the novel to an inability to recognize that those left behind by history, like Carteret, may attempt violently to reinstate the old order. It is, moreover, inseparable from Miller’s failures of will, to the extent it entails a gradualism—­“You’d better be peaceable and endure a little injustice, rather than run the risk of a sudden and violent death,” he tells Josh (110)—­that the book links, in both Miller and his white counterpart Ellis alike, to a tendency to be a “plodder,” to ignore the present in the tendency to see only a rose-­ colored future (21). More complexly, however, we might say Miller is also wrong because he is right. It is the very reality of the gains he describes—­the successes of the “Fusion” ticket and the election of Black candidates to state offices as a result—­ that produces the campaign quite literally to turn back the clock by means not only of the riot’s mayhem but of the “grandfather clause,” which thwarts Black enfranchisement by basing present-­day voting rights on those in place before the Civil War. In this sense, what Chesnutt perhaps most incisively lays bare at work in the “racial politics of temporality” is the ability of reaction to feed upon progress, as when the Big Three (Carteret and his two like-­minded associates) work themselves into an indignant and, finally, violent lather with tales of “spectacle[s] of social equality” between Blacks and whites (a “negro justice of the peace,” a Black police officer) on the streets of Wellington (33). To the extent this is the case, however, Marrow’s overarching narrative position might in fact be encapsulated by some much darker comments made regarding the events it recounts, ones that portray history as the very opposite of progress toward any sort of collective good—­as being, rather, cyclical and always returning to an underlying constancy of “selfishness” (239). As the narrator puts it, Patriotism, humanity, or the love of God may lead to sporadic outbursts which sweep away the heaped-­up wrongs of centuries; but they languish at times, while the love of self works on ceaselessly, unwearyingly, burrowing always at the very roots of life, and heaping up fresh wrongs for other centuries to sweep away. (239)

This remarkably cynical comment is not an isolated one in Chesnutt’s novel. When the riot dissipates in the wake of the burning of Miller’s hospital, the narrator describes things thus:

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The flames soon completed their work, and this handsome structure, the fruit of old Adam Miller’s industry, the monument of his son’s philanthropy, a promise of good things for the future of the city, lay smouldering in ruins, a melancholy witness to the fact that our boasted civilization is but a thin veneer, which cracks and scales off at the first impact of primal passions. (310)

Here the novel does not appear shocked by the events it narrates, which topple a progressive worldview as in the case of Miller himself; rather, in their apocalyptic license and destructiveness, they appear merely to confirm a sense that the story told is the oldest one known to humankind. Indeed, though Chesnutt does not refer explicitly to original sin, the reference to “love of self ” would not have surprised a Pascal. In Marrow, however, we see a specifically fin de siècle take on the by now familiar notion of racism as “America’s original sin,” in that selfishness here takes the specific form of “the all-­powerful race argument” (239). (This seems Chesnutt’s riposte to the more prevalent Southern view of a Black man’s attack on a white as “the unpardonable sin,” a license to retributions no less terrible than those of the Old Testament God [303].) Indeed, Chesnutt’s one agreement with the otherwise notoriously racist Nathaniel Shaler, author of The Neighbor and Du Bois’s former professor at Harvard, seems to lie in construing the natural tendencies a civilized people must attempt to rise above as those of clannishness. The danger, of course, of such rhetoric lies precisely in its naturalization of racial enmity, even if for the purpose of casting it as a human (or animal) weakness to strive against.22 Chesnutt’s narrative commentary here may appear most striking—­and potentially disturbing—­in its resemblance to the contemporaneous arguments made by the social Darwinist William Graham Sumner, which in Sumner’s case were intended as libertarian briefs against any sort of social intervention: The great stream of time and earthly things will sweep on just the same in spite of us. It bears with it now all the errors and follies of the past, the wreckage of all the philosophies, the fragments of all the civilizations, the wisdom of all the abandoned ethical systems, the debris of all the institutions, and the penalties of all the mistakes. . . . Therefore the tide will not be changed by us. It will swallow up both us and our experiments. . . . That is why it is the greatest folly of which a man can be capable to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social world. (Quoted in Russett, Darwin in America 101)

It would seem hard to resist, once the matter is depicted in these terms, portraying any higher allegiance of a civic or human sort as so unlikely that an event like the racist coup scarcely registers as eventful at all.

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By turning toward such a perspective, Marrow’s impersonal narration in fact seems to shift away from its alignment with Miller’s progressive optimism and toward that of Josh Green, the character with whom he is interestingly paired throughout the novel. In the train scene where we first meet Miller, “simultaneously” with the latter’s disembarking we see “a great Black figure craw[l] off the trucks of the rear car,” such that Green appears to “shadow” Miller at the textual level just as he does, more literally, his great enemy, McBane (62). Usually this pairing has been understood in the familiar terms of a choice between Miller’s reformist bent and Green’s more radical resistance, and while there are undoubtedly grounds for such an argument, I hope to make clear why I wish finally to go in a different direction here. Green does, however, precisely for his embodiment of the narrative cynicism we’ve been describing, bear comparison to the contemporary Afro-­ pessimist perspective. Some of his choicest bons mots entail a world-­weary certainty that nothing is more predictable than the violent cataclysms the novel describes. In effect, this perspective entails responding to what we might term romantic events, “Events,” in the tone of realism, treating them as the everyday. Thus, when Miller counsels him to “endure a little injustice” so as to avoid a “violent death,” Green responds with a “matter-­of-­fact” shrug, regarding what he describes as “straight, solem’ fac’ ”: “I expec’s ter die a vi’lent death in a quarrel wid’ a w’ite man” (110). Or, later, as Miller despairs that all the slow and painstaking work of racial uplift can be “neutralize[d]” in a stroke by a single crime attributed to a Black man, Green is once again unmoved: “It’s mighty easy neut’alize’, ” he grumbles (190). Perhaps most memorably of all, during the brawl itself, to McBane’s barked threat to Green and his men that “If you resist, you’ll be shot like dogs,” Green’s riposte takes the form of an unimpressed “That’s no news, Mr. White Man” (302). In a novel keen to show how the actual, journalistic “news” spewed forth by organs like Carteret’s Chronicle entails a numbingly repetitive litany of sensational tales of Black violence, Green’s remark renders a powerful critique. That he makes it, moreover, in the course of mounting the only collective Black resistance to the massacre cannot help but render Green an appealing figure for readers in the present. And yet Josh’s heroism and his cynicism turn out to make the same kind of whole we saw above in our discussion of Hopkins and the antirealist stance in criticism and fin de siècle literature alike—­in both, as a means of recuperating a damaged will by rendering it a foregone conclusion. Green, in fact, has lived nearly his entire life for precisely this moment—­the one in which he will, indeed, “die a violent death at the hands of a white man,” in the same instant he intends to become a dealer of death to

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that man himself (110). As he explains to Miller, when he was a child, the Ku Klux Klan had rampaged in the area where he lived, and shot his father and terrorized his mother while young Josh looked on. His mother had told him to run, but instead, he states, “I hid in de bushes an’ seen the whole thing, an’ it wuz branded on my mem’ry, suh, like a red-­hot iron bran’s de skin. De w’ite folks had masks on, but one of ’em fell off,—­he wuz de boss . . . an’ I seen his face. It wuz a easy face ter ’member; an’ I swo’ den, ‘way down deep in my hea’t, little ez I wuz, dat some day er ’nother I’d kill dat man. . . . His time’ll be come—­an’ prob’ly mine. But I ain’ keerin’ ’bout myse’f: w’en I git thoo wid him, it won’ make no diff ’ence ’bout me.” (111)

Thus Green, too, bears the sort of “life sore” Fredric Jameson discusses—­a brand, only of a mental kind—­as does, indeed, his mother, who loses her sanity as a result of the trauma. (And his nemesis, McBane, does as well—­an eye lost when trying to whip a Black woman as a boy, an event said to have crystallized his own racial hatred [35].) As with the characters mentioned above by Jameson and those in Hopkins, the “old wound,” as Miller terms it, marks Green as a man with a destiny; in the latter’s own words, “I got my job ter do in dis worl’, an’ I knows I ain’ gwine ter die ’tel I’ve ’complished it” (63). And it is, indeed, for this reason, it seems, that he can appear heroic, for he belongs to the different kind of story Jameson and Moretti describe, one in which no decisions are necessary because all has been foreordained.23 It is thus no surprise that, at the moment Green fulfills his aim in exactly the terms he had prophesied, the novel itself shifts into a “fairy-­tale” register, in Moretti’s term. In the melee, Josh Green, the tallest and biggest of all, had not apparently been touched. Some of the crowd paused in involuntary admiration of this black giant, famed on the wharves for his strength, sweeping down upon them, a smile upon his face, his eyes lit up with a rapt expression which seemed to take him out of mortal ken. This impression was heightened by his apparent immunity from the shower of lead which less susceptible persons had continued to pour at him.  .  .  . A pistol-­flame flashed in his face, but he went on, and raising his powerful right arm, buried his knife to the hilt in the heart of his enemy. When the crowd rushed forward to wreak vengeance on his dead body, they found him with a smile still upon his face. (309)

In his superhuman invulnerability prior to the moment he himself has ordained for his death, Josh appears a figure closer to Jared Hickman’s conception of the “Black Prometheus,” a figure associated with “the undoing of novelistic form,” than a character in a realist novel (303). Alternatively, we

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might say, he appears a version of the existential figure Abdul JanMohamed articulates, in his work on Richard Wright, as the “death-­bound subject”—­he for whom the Heideggerian “ ‘ownership’ of death,” heightened and given situational force as “the political articulation and deployment of the death drive,” becomes the ultimate affirmation of Black will in a racist America (15, 26).24 And yet unlike the act of a figure like Wright’s Bigger Thomas, Josh Green’s might be said to represent less an assertion of free subjectivity in modern terms than a violent wresting of the more archaic (and, hence, arguably even more racially forbidden) form of will-­as-­duty at work in the ideology of lynching: taking vengeance on an injury to one’s clan group or family. This restoration of a more primal structuration of the scene of justice might further explain the need, at these moments, for the intervention of a nonrealist, heroic frame. As Daniel Hack (and Hegel in Aesthetics) explains, revenge re-­ personalizes the question of retribution in precisely the way that the modern “impersonal” system of law, Anderson’s civic structure, aims to evade.25 This can, once more, explain its appeal as well as what is problematic about it, particularly from Chesnutt’s public-­minded point of view.26 As Andrew Hebard puts it, “Is Green a civic hero who dies defending a public good, or is he a romantic hero avenging his father at the expense of a public good,” by “draw[ing] the ire of the mob on the hospital, leading to its destruction” (145)? Hebard’s larger point here, akin to those of the pro-­“realist” critics, such as the later Gilroy, mentioned above, is to call into question the larger critical attachment to romance that the reading of Josh Green (against Miller) as the more politically efficacious radical might be said to instantiate. As he notes, one finds in Chesnutt criticism as elsewhere in contemporary critical theory shaped by Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception” a tendency to conceive of the naked violence of lynch law as a revelation of the hidden truth of a “white supremacist” state power rather than as a flouting of law by citizens “taking it into their own hands.” On the one hand, Hebard is careful to note that such readings are made possible by a genuine equivocation at the heart of the notion of modern popular sovereignty, which sees “the people” (or “tradition,” or “custom”) either as the foundation of state power or as opposed to it. The latter conceptualization, famously, came into play in the Plessy v. Ferguson case that upheld forms of segregation such as, in the specific instance in question, “white” and “colored” train cars. In Hebard’s incisive argument, a recognition of this capacity of “the people” to colonize sites where the state cedes its power can allow us to read instances like lynch mobs as “occupy[ing] spaces the state has abandoned,” meaning the state may be said to “permi[t] violence without being its author” (316). And what is crucial about not conflating these two roles is that while the state may and should be

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considered culpable here, it remains possible at the same time to conceive it as the site of possible redress as well. The more purely “suspicious” understanding of the state clearly undergirds versions of the Afro-­pessimist project such as Hartman’s and Wilderson’s. As we can see once more in the case of Josh Green’s program of revenge, however, this dismissal of any form of legally sanctioned justice necessarily generates a temporal framework akin to that of revenge as well—­one that, rather than imagining any kind of “progress” beyond some always-­futural apocalyptic absolute, can conceive only a dismal litany of ongoing violence. Clearly this more fully “romantic” perspective cannot be ascribed to Chesnutt, who unmistakably sets up the events Marrow recounts as cases in which the reality of actual cross-­racial political gains and ordinary day-­to-­day cross-­ racial personal relations—­the successes of the Fusion party and the liaisons described by Manly’s editorial—­must be reconceived by the Big Three in apocalyptic, “romantic” terms so as to justify their equally outsized reprisals. (That is, Manly’s rhetorical gesture specifically entails attempting to recast free Black-­white sexual relations as an ordinary, everyday, consensual matter rather than a melodramatic scandal involving violent coercion.) The realist realm is thus what tragically slips from view, not what is revealed simply to be a naive liberal fiction. At the same time, however, to the extent this is a tragedy, and one that Chesnutt’s narrator describes as in some sense not a surprising one, the novel as a whole does seem to possess some commonalities with Afro-­pessimism’s bleaker perspective—­to wit, that the truth of history lies less in progress than in repetition (the temporality undergirding revenge). Here I want to return to Amanda Anderson’s Victorian literature–­based conception of realism’s aesthetic, for she in fact makes room for a double-­sided stance very like that of Chesnutt here, terming it “bleak liberalism” and seeing it as founded on a “tragic” sense of human relations (26).27 As a position in which action in the present occurs in the radical absence of foundation, this stance proves to overlap significantly with that of existentialism, in ways that will finally enable a reading of Marrow of Tradition’s powerful finale. the moment of decision: marrow’s existential tur n As Anderson notes, liberalism is more commonly associated with a perspective like that embodied by Dr. Miller in the early sections of Chesnutt’s text. That is, it is viewed as a “naively optimistic” faith in “assured progressivism,” in the march of human reason and tolerance ever forward toward a brighter

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day (Bleak 1). Moreover, as in Miller’s own case, this perspective appears inseparable from a focus on individual achievement—­the Miller family’s own triumphs over adversity suggesting African Americans hold the key to liberation in their own hands. And together with this, then, comes an emphasis on “harmonious diversity,” with Miller and his white friend Dr. Burns appearing to play the roles of the paired figures in an interracial buddy movie (the roots of which have themselves, of course, often been said to lie in nineteenth-­ century American literary models like Mark Twain’s Huck and Jim) (Bleak 3). Anderson, however, writes directly against this perspective, giving the lie to the assumption that liberal stances must necessitate such Pollyannaish views. On the one hand, she argues that in Victorian realist novels like Middlemarch, liberal claims for “reflective enlightenment” are made not simply through the moral journeys of individual characters but through the interplay between these and a more “transpersonal” perspective associated with third-­person narration (Bleak 3, 16). In Marrow, I’ve suggested, the interest in the framing of the “public” or of Wellington as community speaks to this second dimension. On the other hand, more strikingly, Anderson also offers a means of understanding Chesnutt’s narrator’s more cynical stance, by arguing for a “tragic, pessimistic” strain within liberalism itself (Bleak 1). Although already detectable in as central a liberal thinker as Mill, this tendency becomes, she notes, especially pronounced in the wake of World War II, in the mid-­twentieth-­century writings of figures such as Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Reinhold Niebuhr, whose neo-­ Calvinist writings would strongly influence Martin Luther King Jr. For such thinkers, progressivism whether of a liberal or a Marxist stripe was prone to fall prey to what the French writer Raymond Aron termed “the illusion of the orientation of history in a constant direction, of evolution toward a state of affairs in harmony with an ideal” (quoted in Bleak 27). The concern here stemmed most proximately from totalitarianism, but it could also rebuke liberal modernity by drawing on an Augustinian sense of human limitation, as in Niebuhr, or a Weberian sense of intractably opposing values, as in Trilling or Berlin. What Anderson stresses above all, however, is that this lack of sanguinity regarding progress’s prospects did not keep these figures from arguing fiercely on its behalf. They could thus appear to embody Gramsci’s famous maxim, “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” (quoted in Bleak 13). Indeed, more strikingly still, the “political commitment” could appear “somehow deepened by the subtending existential stance”—­given strength precisely by “the perceived fragility of the project,” alongside “its necessity in the historical context” (Bleak 28, 26). “Democracy,” Niebuhr would write, “is

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a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems” (quoted in Bleak 26). This framework, then, begins to offer a powerful way into the apparently opposed registers of Chesnutt’s text: its narratorial bleakness regarding the fragility of “civilization,” and yet the call to action implicit in its final lines (“There’s time enough, but none to spare”). It can also make sense out of the way in which Marrow, in its portrayals of Miller, on the one hand, and Josh, on the other, makes room, generically, for both realism and romance. The key, here, is that its doing so does not take the form Moretti describes in Daniel Deronda and which we might also understand as operative within a contemporaneous African American novel like Hopkins’s Of One Blood, in which, as for Chesnutt’s Josh, romance offers the “solution” to realism’s dilemmas of will by reinstating the temporality of destiny and fate. Indeed, the structure implied by Anderson’s bleak liberalism is essentially the opposite: the sense of the domination of “tragic” forces over human existence intensifies the fight for ordinary human values. The idea of the “existential” comes up over and over as Anderson attempts to give voice to this paradoxical position. Both (a) the sense of a bleak reality and (b) a refusal simply to accept it are described as speaking to these writers’ existential dimension. Fittingly, then, for a literary expression of the bleak liberal ethos Anderson turns to the work of Albert Camus, who, like Trilling, argues for an understanding of limitations precisely out of a sympathy with that which, Ahab-­like, rebels against these. The artist, and in particular the novelist, for Camus can be understood as saying both “no” and “yes” at the same time: “By the treatment that the artist imposes on reality, he declares the intensity of his rejection. But what he retains of reality in the universe he creates reveals the degree of consent that he gives to at least one part of reality—­which he draws from the shadows of evolution to bring to the light of creation” (quoted in Bleak 33). One can hear here echoes of the young Lukács, describing art as always saying, “ ‘And yet!’ to life” (Theory 72). For Moretti, if the nineteenth-­century novel begins to crumble as realist trajectories give way to mythic solutions, it ultimately transforms into something quite different in the turn toward modernism that, for him, Lukács’s formulations of the novel as defined by “transcendental homelessness” embody.28 For Moretti, that is, no one would define the novel in such terms prior to the twentieth century, when the genre’s earlier promises of an ideal synthesis of self and society begin to appear denuded, absurd. The age of institutions has come, he explains, and with it a yawning gap between what we might call a Big Will defined by facelessness, if not cruelty, and the yearning aspirations of youth.

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As the present book has argued from its first chapter, however, it is equally possible to see the historical situation Moretti describes as yet one more stage in an ongoing thematization of the fate of the “abandoned” individual that is defining of modernity as such. Nonetheless, it remains plausible to see that fate as given particular force by the emergence of modernism, which is of course the true subject of Moretti’s argument here. And the question then becomes, what of the will? To follow Moretti’s own emphases is to follow, in a familiar enough way, the course of that category’s disbanding, by both historical trauma (the Great War above all) and its Freudian diagnosis, which, in Moretti’s words, “pulverizes the only remaining cornerstone of the bildungsroman: the unity of the Ego” and, with it, the unity of the novel, which splinters into less and less familiarly narrative modes (Way of the World 236). If we consider matters from this book’s sense of the will as the sign as much of the division of the “Ego” as its self-­formation, however, this storyline becomes less clear. It is precisely here, then, that the existential becomes of particular significance. (Sartre, indeed, would critique Freud on precisely this point, that of the conception of the id as mere “blind conatus” rather than an aspect of the self for which one needed to learn to take responsibility [Being 94].) We might say Moretti’s is a particularly existential account of modernism (as Lukács’s is of the novel), in that it posits, much like our opening chapter here, a situation in which a generalized sense of alienation from a Big Will perceived as “thoroughly different to [one’s] personal development” generates a serious encounter with one’s own possibilities (Moretti 233). This is, on an individual level, the same structure Anderson attributes to her bleak liberals: one in which a lack of faith in larger narratives can motivate, rather than merely paralyzing, present action. What would it look like to consider the culmination of Chesnutt’s Marrow, which focuses in on Janet Miller, through the lens of these conceptions? Existential freedom can, of course, appear to heroize the moment of willing in a “decisionist” fashion. We might note, however, that Sartre actually critiqued Heidegger’s language of “authenticity” in this regard. More relevant to the denouement of Marrow is Sartre’s account of the confrontation with freedom as borne of a moment of estrangement that is thrust upon the individual, in which the world becomes revealed as uncanny (generating a sense of vertigo or nausea); the question then arises of how one responds to that revelation. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre speaks of this moment as one in which what from a novelistic perspective we might call the “realist” world—­ that of the “commonplace” and “everyday,” but also that in which we “discover ourselves” only, and always already, “in situation”—­suddenly falls away, and one finds oneself “ ‘face to face’ with nothingness” (78, 50).29

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As part of his twinned extension of and critique of Sartre’s ideas, Fanon famously describes the experience of racialization (“Look! A Negro!”) as one of a fall into Sartrean “nausea” (89, 91, 96): “I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects” (89). Marrow’s uprising essentially refigures the entire community of Wellington through such a logic, one Chesnutt through his realist lens treats as a more generalized estrangement, in the literal sense, that is, of neighbor from neighbor—­a separation that reverberates forward as, in a reversal of Fanon, “for many months there were negro families in the town whose children screamed with fear and ran to their mothers for protection at the mere sight of a white man” [274–­75]). The book’s last scene, then, thematizes, in an existential vein, this radical estrangement’s relation to the question of action. In it, as mentioned earlier, Carteret finds himself driven to beg Miller, the very doctor he had at the book’s outset forbidden to enter his home to treat his child, to do that very thing in order to save the infant’s once again imperiled life. Arriving at the Miller home, however, he finds a scene of exactly the future he most fears for himself: the Millers’ own boy has been killed by a stray bullet during the carnage Carteret’s own inflammatory rhetoric produced.30 Carteret himself thus cannot help but recognize the “elemental justice” of Miller’s refusal to help; when he returns home alone, however, his wife, Olivia, “rushe[s] wildly” out to make the plea herself (321–­22). In Miller, as the book’s proxy for the realist perspective, the estrangement here is one from an entire worldview (just as, conversely, the riot confirms and fulfills Josh Green’s). His wife, Janet, however, as we will see in a moment, becomes, rather, estranged from her own estrangement. In her attempt to move Janet to save her child, Olivia, for the first time in the novel, calls her “sister”; indeed, she goes so far as to acknowledge what she has recently discovered, that “My father was married to your mother. You are entitled to his name, and to half his estate” (327). Horribly and dramatically, then, at the very moment Janet’s world, as a mother, has shattered, her lifelong deepest desire is perversely fulfilled. For, as Chesnutt explains, “All her life long she had earned for a kind word, a nod, a smile, the least thing that imagination might have twisted into a recognition of the tie” between herself and Olivia—­a secret yearning she had shared with no one, not even her husband Will (65). Now that “recognition,” her “heart’s desire,” comes, and she finds, as it is “at her lips,” that it is “filled with dust and ashes” (329). Janet’s experience here is specifically Sartrean, not simply because, as we will see in more detail momentarily, in her alone the anguished rending of the world produces the capability for genuine freedom,31 but also because

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she thereby breaks with a lifelong tie to what Sartre describes as freedom’s opposite, bad faith, in which “consciousness instead of turning its negation outward turns it toward itself ” (87). Bad faith is a form of akrasia in the sense that it involves not lying to oneself, exactly—­for as Sartre explains, that would be an impossibility—­but a kind of choice not to be persuaded by the side of oneself that objects, such that Janet cannot help but go on feeling these feelings even though they make her angry with herself.32 In his Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, Lewis Gordon has argued that racism and its consequences might better be understood in such terms than simply as forms of “irrationality.” His Sartrean descriptions here—­“In bad faith, I flee a displeasing truth for a pleasing falsehood. . . . [I] deny having control over that of which [I] have control” and thereby “attempt to evade the human confrontation with choice”—­are, in fact, especially relevant to Chesnutt’s depiction of Olivia Carteret (Gordon 8–­9). The “moral ‘pocket,’ ” in Chesnutt’s words, in which Olivia finds herself after finding out her father had, indeed, been married to Janet’s mother is dramatized by a long scene in which, having discovered the marriage certificate, Mechanically she moved toward the fireplace, so dazed by this discovery as to be scarcely conscious of her own actions. She surely had not formed any definite intention of destroying this piece of paper when her fingers relaxed unconsciously and let go their hold upon it. The draught swept it toward the fireplace. (259)

The abrogation of responsibility Chesnutt writes into this scene is given its mental counterpart as Olivia ruminates over what she has learned: If the woman had been white—­but the woman had not been white, and the same rule of moral conduct did not, could not, in the very nature of things, apply, as between white people! For, if this were not so, slavery had been, not merely an economic mistake, but a great crime against humanity. (266)

Olivia, in Gordon’s words, is “caught up in the must be aspect of the serious attitude” (76). Since to confront her bad faith directly would be to shatter her entire reality, she chooses not to do so. Christopher Freeburg, citing James Baldwin, calls this the refusal to “pay ‘the price of the ticket,’ ” given that doing so would mean “terrifying challenges that can unravel [the] ideal self ” (Interior 87). When she bursts into the Millers’ home in the final scene, then, we see Olivia reactively attempt to assert her will in imperious terms: “Dr. Miller, you will come and save my child!” (324). “The next moment,” however, “she had thrown herself at his feet” (324). Fearing the loss of all, she begins to pray; for,

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the narrator tells us, “When the pride of intellect and caste is broken; when we grovel in the dust of humiliation; when sickness and sorrow come . . . we turn to God” (25)—­as, indeed, Miller does himself (saying that the events are now in God’s hands). We will see, however, that this turn to the divine, away from human action, is not Janet’s response. Our initial view of Janet is split, as it were, between a Josh Green–­like Romantic tragedy and a Miller-­like tragic realism.33 When Olivia first enters, we see the power of tragedy to reverse social polarities, such that “The sad-­eyed Janet towered erect, with menacing aspect, like an avenging goddess,” while Olivia cowers, and Janet “point[ed] with a tragic gesture to the dead child” (326). When Olivia begs her to help, appealing to her “human heart,” Janet’s response echoes her husband’s: “I have a human heart, and therefore I will not let him go” (326). Olivia then makes the familial appeal that, unbeknownst to her, had moved Janet’s husband: “You are my sister;—­the child is your own near kin!” (327). Indeed, in her terror, she spills forth all: “Listen, sister! . . . I have a confession to make. You are my lawful sister. My father was married to your mother. You are entitled to his name, and to half his estate” (327). Thus Janet reaches an epochal moment in her existence, one so monumental that, “for a moment, even her grief at her child’s loss dropped to second place in her thoughts” (327). “This,” the narrator writes, “was the recognition for which, all her life, she had longed in secret”—­and when it comes, it is not freely given, from an open heart, but extorted from a reluctant conscience by the agony of a mother’s fears. Janet had obtained her heart’s desire, and now that it was at her lips, found it but apples of Sodom, filled with dust and ashes! (328)

We must realize, then, that, horrific as this moment is for all the parties concerned—­the Millers, of course, above all—­for Janet it possesses a dimension missing from all the rest. The Carterets, and even more so Miller, find their world in a shambles—­what they value most either has been or threatens to be taken away. Janet, however, as the narrator states, is at this same terrible moment given what she had always most wanted, and she finds it to be empty of meaning. Thus, where the Carterets seek, as they always do, to repair their loss, and Miller stands broken, only Janet, as we will see, realizes for the first time her own power to make something new. We might consider the two sides of Janet’s experience here—­with importantly gendered caveats, to be discussed shortly—­through the lens of the two sections of the penultimate chapter of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, “The Black Man and Recognition.” The first, organized by reference to Alfred Adler’s The Neurotic Constitution, is about the degraded individual’s

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desire for recognition. The second, “The Black Man and Hegel,” discusses the struggle for freedom through the lens of the famous master-­slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit, describing it as the fight for “a human world, in other words, a world of reciprocal recognitions” (193). The Black former slave, Fanon suggests, does not fit into Hegel’s discussion, for he “did not fight for his freedom” in a struggle for recognition, but, rather, simply found himself one day “set free by his master” (194). “There is at the basis of Hegelian dialectic,” Fanon explains, “an absolute reciprocity that must be highlighted.” As Hegel states, “Action from one side only would be useless. . . . They [must] recognize themselves as mutually recognizing each other” (quoted in Fanon 194–­95). On the one hand, then, the problem with Olivia’s gesture of recognition—­ her act of calling Janet “sister”—­lies not only in its belatedness but its one-­ sidedness. It is, in effect, an offer (and a baldly interested one, at that), which Janet is meant to accept. Discussing the sort of dilemma present here, Anita Chari argues that we might see Fanon’s critique as, in fact, calling into question the entire structure of “recognition.” “Insofar as the struggle for recognition is the struggle to be recognized within the terms of a dominant and dominating discourse,” she writes (citing the work of Judith Butler), its only outcome must be “entry into another form of subordination” (113). While this is an important critique, I concur with Charles Villet that it moves too quickly to dismiss the entire concept of recognition in favor of that of “action.” Villet discusses Fanon’s turn, at the end of his section on Hegel, to a conceptualization of the human as both action and reaction, or, in Fanon’s words, a “yes” and a “no” (197). It is in this sense, I would affirm, that we should understand the complex double gesture, which she calls her single “last word,” that Janet makes in this final scene. First, her realization that she no longer wants or needs Olivia’s recognition produces the Hegelian moment of grasping her own negativity, or objecthood, as an object.34 She understands, that is, her self-­positioning as object in her lifelong desire for Olivia to grant her subjectivity: this is the “psychogenic” position Fanon’s first section describes (185). “For twenty-­five years,” she exclaims to Olivia, “I, poor, despicable fool, would have kissed your feet for a word, a nod, a smile. Now when this tardy recognition comes, for which I have waited so long, it is tainted with fraud and crime and blood, and I must pay for it with my child’s life!” (328). At this moment, Olivia turns to go. She states that she understands Janet’s perspective, and that “It is but just” (328). Janet, however, does not leave matters there. Her “no,” like Fanon’s, like that of the existentialist writer as described by Camus, is also a “yes”; even as she “throws back” the name, the wealth, the “sisterly recognition” offered her, she makes a second claim:

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“But that you may know that a woman may be foully wronged, and yet may have a heart to feel, even for one who has injured her, you may have your child’s life, if my husband can save it! Will,” she said, throwing open the door into the next room, “go with her!” (328–­29)

The challenge, then, lies in grasping the totality of what Janet is saying here. Olivia, notably, having gotten what she wanted, simply decides that this must mean Janet did not “mean all the cruel things [she] said” initially, and, reverting to her initial imperious mode, announces to her sister, before departing, “I will see you again, and make you take them back!” In its very ignorance, however, this response in fact underscores the power of Janet’s doubled “yes” and “no.” What Janet is really doing is insisting on the moment Fanon states slavery leaves out, in which the slave—­here, the child of slaves—­offers her recognition to the master. In so doing, moreover, Janet makes clear that her own “humanity,” as revealed in her decision, has nothing to do with Olivia’s acknowledgment, but is the product solely of her own action.35 With respect to the novel as a whole, then, we might see Janet as releasing her “Will” into the world to make good on the promise at the core of Marrow, that the whites may learn interdependence goes both ways and that we are all at risk of the vulnerability that demands it. Indeed, in retrospect it becomes clear that, among the book’s many instances of doubling, the Carteret baby has all along been doubled not with another character but with the Major’s campaign of violence, for the return of his family’s position and of white domination form his two, intertwined aims. Rather than marching hand in hand, however, the two “projects” appear in an antagonistic relation, such that each time the campaign moves forward, little Dodie has another brush with death (none so intensely, of course, as at this moment following the actual insurrection). In retrospect, only “Mammy” Jane, who dies in the riot calling out to her mistress, appears to have grasped Dodie’s true significance here, as she discerns a mole under his ear that seems, as a kind of mark of the “incompleteness” of whiteness, to promise a tenuous fate. With the reality of interdependence reestablished, Olivia fittingly departs clutching Miller’s arm, “totter[ing] under the stress of her emotions” (329), in a reverse visual echo of Delamere leaning on his Black servant Sandy. What we must note, though, is that the same storm of feeling that nearly topples Olivia has been activating and clarifying for Janet, enabling her to recognize for the first time that she has a will. Sartre and Fanon would agree, then, that what Janet experiences here is a moment of genuine existential freedom, one in which the confrontation with absolute anguish and estrangement makes true action possible.

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At the same time, however, Chesnutt’s portrayal also departs from theirs in one crucial respect: the struggle for recognition here involves two women. Both Sartre’s and Fanon’s accounts, indeed, seem unable to get away from a masculinist construal of the existential moment. This is perhaps more evident in Fanon, who explicitly speaks of the Black men who “want their wish for virility to be recognized,” and whose Hegelian conception of the struggle for recognition as a violent combat suggests a scene like that of Frederick Douglass’s triumph over the “slave-­breaker” Covey. Yet it seems equally telling that Sartre, all of whose examples of existential freedom are also male, suddenly turns to feminized instances (a “frigid” woman, a coquette) to describe the mechanisms of bad faith (95, 99). While these may suit Chesnutt’s Southern belle Olivia, they can offer little guidance in a case like Janet’s, who wields not a Josh Green–­like power to kill but the maternal power to give and sustain life, and whose assertion of her subjectivity to Olivia takes the form of an insistence that they are both women and mothers, “with [hearts] to feel” (329).36 Here, we might say, we see Chesnutt’s stated indebtedness to the example of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with its anti-­Kantian insistence on the meaningfulness of sentiment as a means of overcoming social divides.37 And here, I would argue, we can also see how he attempts to affirm a modern progressivism while, at the same time, on behalf of his hopes for connectedness, critiquing some of its own excesses (its reduction of persons to rationally contracting “subjects of interest,” as discussed in the previous chapter) from within. Victorian writings on community vacillated, Suzanne Graver points out, from a nostalgic longing for the values of Gemeinschaft (“folkways, concord, and community,” “tradition” rather than “convention and contract”) to a forward-­looking interest in how to foster a sense of collective purpose in a modern society (one based on “tolerance and regard for other people” unlike oneself [121]), with a corollary concern regarding tradition’s stultifying rather than energizing effects on moral life (51–­52). It is crucial, however, to distinguish the latter position from the Spencerian one, entirely laudatory of contract, in which modern societies were simply presumed to embody “the social organism at its highest stage of development” precisely because egoism and altruism could go merrily hand in hand: “we promote the welfare of others because their welfare affects our own” (Graver 163–­64). Chesnutt’s evident unease with the merely contractual as embodied by the new nurse at the outset of Marrow goes hand in hand with his genuinely equivocal portrayal of figures like “Mammy” Jane who embody the notion of familial tradition—­free entry into contracts being understood as a replacement for an understanding of what Sir Henry Maine in Ancient Law (1861) termed “rights and duties” as having “their origin in the Family” (quoted in Graver 161). With this in mind,

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we might say that Janet’s crowning act attempts to conjoin these models by depicting familial duty as an ethical choice—­one Olivia has failed to make, but that she, Janet, will.38 (Olivia acts more according to a Spencerian model, in which the ideal of mutual acknowledgment emerges only when it is evident that it will involve clear benefit to oneself—­as, Chesnutt muses, we abase ourselves and turn to God only when no other course is left to us.) Ferdinand Tönnies would graft Maine’s distinction onto Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft by conceiving these two as distinct sorts of will, each with a temporal vector of its own: Kürwille, or present deliberation, and Wesenwille, glossed by Graver as “the ‘natural,’ ‘integral,’ ‘essential will’ associated with the habit, memory, and instinctive or inherited feeling” (115). We may note that Josh Green acts on the latter also, to the extent he, again like the heroes of old, conceives his bondedness to revenge out of a loyalty to family (and the extension of “family” into “race”—­race conceived as an extension of family—­ then allows his personal goal to become collective during the riot). As Graver notes, however, in Eliot’s novels we see it is precisely the ability to choose freely, in Kürwille, that allows an individual to take his or her distance from the demands of the modern marketplace and therefore dwell in a temporal space defined by neither the past nor, simply, the present. This complex temporal positioning, then—­with its existential rejection of the logics of both progress and mere recursion—­is what the next section will explore, as a way into the question of the broader historical and psychological aftermath of the horrors Chesnutt’s novel depicts (horrors that, again, might for many appear synecdochic of, rather than exceptional to, the Black experience in America). A Certain Distance: The Uncanny Everyday (Spillers and Freud) Leaving young Dodie’s fate still uncertain, Chesnutt ends his narrative as Miller at last crosses the threshold of the Carteret home, to hear his fellow doctor call from the top of the stairs: “Come on up, Dr. Miller. . . . There’s time enough, but none to spare” (329). Concluding with these words, the novel unmistakably attempts to conjure the sense of political urgency endemic to the prewar abolitionist moment of its model, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, within its own. Yet this task, the narrative itself concedes, may well lie beyond its powers. Earlier in the novel, the nation’s present state of mind is framed in deliberate contrast to that earlier epoch of strong emotions on either side: At the North, a new Pharaoh had risen, who knew not Israel,—­a new generation, who knew little of the fierce passions which had played around the negro in a past epoch, and derived their opinions of him from the “coon song” and

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the police reports. Those of his old friends who survived were disappointed that he had not flown with clipped wings; that he had not in one generation of limited opportunity attained the level of the whites. The whole race question seemed to have reached a sort of impasse, a blind alley, of which no one could see the outlet. (238–­39)

Within this situation of generalized apathy, or lack of will, Chesnutt goes on to suggest, both pessimism and optimism appear as attractive options, for each consoles itself that the issue is out of anyone’s hands to determine, left to be decided by the inexorable trajectory of history itself. Here, then, we are back to the sense of historical stagnation we saw at the outset of this chapter in both Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods and the Black Belt chapters in Du Bois’s Souls. As Marrow notes, social Darwinist rhetorics at the time often conveniently sutured ideas about historical inevitability to the standstill of the “race question”: “Vital statistics were made to prove that [the African American] had degenerated from an imaginary standard of physical excellence which had existed under the benign influence of slavery” (238).39 As Susan Mizruchi demonstrates in a powerfully disturbing account of such arguments, claims about Black apathy provided fuel for confident assertions of predestined race “extinction” in works like the statistician Frederick Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896), a book intended to measure its subjects’ viability for insurance purposes.40 Like Chesnutt, Du Bois attempts to turn such arguments on their head, by treating as one of the preeminent difficulties facing the struggling Black population the demand for them to display signs of immediate “progress” (Souls 14). The slowness of these beleaguered people’s movement forward—­for Du Bois, the sign of its patience, hesitancy, care, seriousness, and, above all, the obstacles in their way—­becomes in a fast-­paced American modernity the emblem of a failure to “keep up.” This sense of the necessarily protracted and wayward path of progress likely influenced Du Bois in his famous opening salvo: “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-­line” (5). Where Chesnutt’s clarion cry—­“There’s time enough, but none to spare”—­attempts to moves us here and now, Du Bois’s projection of a longue durée of racial struggle seems, in hindsight, the more powerful prognostication. Marrow does, however, concur with this perspective in at least two respects. The Wellington (or Wilmington) massacre is conceived as reverberating forward, as Miller “foresaw the hatreds to which this day would give birth; the long years of constraint and distrust which would further widen the breach between two peoples whom fate had thrown together in one community” (291). More specifically, as we saw previously, this reverberation is

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described in the language of psychological trauma—­not only in the case of the children described earlier, but in that of Miller himself, whose traumatic relivings of his desperate trip through the ravaged town in search of his family are described in the present rather than past tense: Never will the picture of that ride fade from his memory. In his dreams he repeats it night after night, and sees the sights that wounded his eyes, and feels the thoughts—­the haunting spirits of the thoughts—­that tore his heart as he rode through hell to find those whom he was seeking. (286, emphasis mine)

This is, we should note, a strikingly early literary depiction of the aftereffects of trauma. As historians of psychoanalysis have written, during the 1880s psychologists began to explore the way jarring events—­most often, railway accidents—­could lead to long-­lasting concatenations of symptoms that exceeded physical explanation. The new notion began to gain traction that doctors were dealing here “not just with nerves but with ideas,” and that these less tangible mental forces might, precisely due to their elusiveness, possess a far more tenacious grip (Drinka 115). The specific observation we see in Chesnutt here, however, regarding trauma’s tendency to produce forms of psychic repetition, would not appear in Freud’s writings until after World War I, in his account of war neuroses: “These patients regularly repeat the traumatic situation in their dreams” (Introductory 274). He would, of course, go on to discuss the subject at far greater length in the late work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which plumbs the tendency to “repeat” the trauma “as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past” (19). In Chesnutt’s case, his present-­tense account of Miller’s ongoing dreams as a “contemporary” rather than recalled experience powerfully makes Marrow’s real-­life traumas reverberate forward into the time frame of whoever picks up his novel. While he likely scarcely imagined twenty-­first-­century readers doing so, they arguably grasp his project more fully than nearly any did at the time he wrote.41 And as we’ve seen, moreover, Wilmington, North Carolina’s small-­scale genocide could readily be framed today as yet one more echo of the indiscriminate violence of the Middle Passage as it threads its way forward to our own era of the state-­sanctioned killings of unarmed Black citizens. As we saw in the critical work discussed at the outset of this chapter, trauma becomes not eventful here, but ordinary and shared. This ongoing, traumatic temporality thus returns us to the Afro-­pessimism with which we began. In Jared Sexton’s words, “colored time” aligns not only with the “stalled time” of “captivity,” but “the eternal time of the unconscious,” that which stands apart from the passage of days (4–­5). “Can one mourn what

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has not ceased happening?” Saidiya Hartman asks (“Time” 758). It is unsurprising, in this regard, that the debate over the appropriateness of these critics’ insistence on the past’s presence has brought front and center the question of the pathological. For Sexton, the power of Fanon’s work lies in its “affirmation of pathological being” for the Black subject (27), and that of Du Bois, in its attention to the question, “What is the being of a problem?” (7). In a critique of such arguments, then, Fred Moten writes that they risk forming merely one more part of the “cultural and political discourse on Black pathology,” as radicals no less than those they confront ask a version of the question: “What’s wrong with Black folk?” (“Case” 177). One might think here of Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, with its confident proclamations about Black “apathy,” or even William Dean Howells’s infamous dismissal of Marrow as a “bitter, bitter book.” And yet if, as Anne Cheng writes in The Melancholy of Race, “the path connecting injury to pity and then to contempt can be very brief,” “it is surely equally harmful not to talk about this history of sorrow” (14). For Cheng, crucially, the issue here centers on the very meaning of the ascription of psychological struggle. As she notes, it is common to assume that psychic “ ‘damage’ . . . amounts to the same thing as having no agency” (15). For this reason, indeed, though earlier twentieth-­century existentialist thought drew on psychoanalysis, it also had a tendency to critique it. As Gerald Izenberg and Donald Carveth have argued, existentialists saw an inherent contradiction between Freud’s deterministic biologism, which saw psychic conflicts as caused by instincts conceived as energy flows within the organism, and his clinical practice, which encouraged patients “to assume responsibility for aspects of their being for which they have hitherto either been unable or unwilling to be responsible” (Carveth 27).42 Compounding the problem, Freud’s determination to trace such conflicts back to the past—­to scenes of infant development—­provided insufficient means of grasping symptoms’ particular significance as they took their place within adult life. The problem here, then, might be said to turn on the status of will: in Izenberg’s words, “Freud’s explanations [of irrationality] omitted a consideration of meaningful phenomena in terms of individual intentionality and motivation” (69). Such existentialist critiques may hold an important key to the fact that Fanon, for all Black Skin’s attention to the psychopathology of racialized experience, also ends his text with the famous insistence that “the density of History determines none of my acts.  .  .  . I must not look for the meaning of my destiny in that direction” (204–­5). “I am my own foundation,” Fanon insists, and the “History” invoked here expands to take in the entire past of racialized trauma, as he asserts, “I have neither the right nor the duty to

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demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no Black mission; there is no white burden” (203). As Hortense Spillers has argued, Du Bois’s famous discussion of “being a problem” in the opening chapter of Souls might similarly be understood to emphasize not the diagnosis but the response: “It was not enough to be seen; one was called upon to decide what it meant” (“All” 104). Crucially, however, for Spillers—­whose work we will consider in more detail momentarily—­this goal, of “decid[ing] what it meant,” is already implicit in Freud’s historically groundbreaking insistence on self-­narration. In her words, “Is it not . . . the task of a psychoanalytic protocol to effect a translation from . . . muteness [in the face of] what shames and baffles the subject . . . into an articulated syntactic particularity?” (“All” 108). Let me suggest, then, that Chesnutt’s Marrow makes room for this latter project, with respect to the experience of trauma, as well. He writes that Dr. Miller also experiences a kind of survivor’s guilt (described as “shame” and “envy,” 285) with regard to his decision not to fight alongside Josh Green and his men. We should remember, however, Marrow’s narrator tells us, that “those who had sought safety in flight or concealment were alive to tell the tale” (316, emphasis mine). What does it mean to be alive to tell the tale? As Dominick LaCapra writes, “The ability to give testimony is itself one important component of survival. It requires a certain distance from a past that nonetheless remains all too pressing, painful, and at times unbearable” (History 76). It is this notion of “a certain distance”—­what Freud called a necessary “aloofness” (Beyond 19)—­that the remainder of this chapter will explore, in differing senses. Here, however, LaCapra’s point seems plain: to be able to “tell the tale,” to articulate to others what has occurred, is a sign of “survival” at a deeper, psychic level—­of being able to live with such an event, without simply becoming hostage to that shadow reality. But note: we will see there are other, more reticent strategies as well. Ironically, LaCapra notes, another phenomenon that has become perhaps increasingly popular involves a movement in the opposite direction, not away from but toward the site of trauma, via what has been termed “secondary witnessing,” or the aim “to bear witness to history” (History 81–­82). Beloved appears here as one example (along with contemporary treatments of the Holocaust), as does related critical work on “racial melancholy” (History 81n41). Here, of course, the “witnessing” is of an indirect nature and entails the deliberate conjuring forth of the lost scene of a now historical trauma—­often, as LaCapra notes, as a means of working against a later generation’s tendency to forget or dismiss these events. Such work can, then, as he stresses, be of the utmost significance—­not simply as a kind of history writing but as a means

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of bringing together “communities of loss” (History 82). LaCapra’s concern, then, which returns us to the complaints of Stephen Best and others with which we began, lies only in the potential for a kind of fetishization of melancholia here, “restrict[ing] ethics and politics to the horizon of the witness to abjection” (History 83). Despite Howells’s dismissal of Marrow’s purported “bitterness,” Chesnutt’s novel in fact seems wary of exactly this form of romanticization of trauma, associating it not only with the heroic but futureless Josh Green but, more than anyone else, with the white supremacists of Wellington, who can most literally be understood as nurturing themselves on their own sense of indelible wartime loss. Anne Cheng’s theorization of racial melancholy is strongly pertinent here and indicative of why a mirroring of this positionality by Black subjects would simply create, indeed, a history as hall of mirrors. Dodie, the desperately protected scion of the Carteret family, in fact nearly dies from teething on the bone rattle given to him by the gothically preserved Polly Ochiltree—­choking on the “marrow” of tradition, as it were, in an emblematic instance of melancholy, or bitterness (or what LaCapra calls the “traumatropism”) as the inability to swallow historical reality. So what, then, of the other alternative, of achieving a distance so as to be able to “tell the tale”? As LaCapra notes, we might see the Freudian alternative to “repetition,” “working through,” as relevant here, and yet this very possibility tends to be dismissed as a kind of quietism: a form of “cure, consolation, uplift, or closure and normalization” (Writing xxiii). LaCapra, rather, enjoins that the split here between a sheerly “present” past and one that is firmly left behind (as we “move on”) is a false one—­that working through should precisely allow for the past’s presence in a form that is not simply destabilizing of all present reality. Ideally, he suggests, it should be understood as a kind of “immanent critique” of both past and present alike, one that enables “the difficult, perhaps never fully successful, movement from victim to survivor to sociopolitical agent” (History 65, 75). To think this idea in the generic terms that have concerned us in this chapter, we might say that what LaCapra begins to make room for here is an affirmation of the everyday that is neither simply the mundane (as opposed to exceptional) nor the apocalyptic as the ordinary. Rather, it suggests an investment in the everyday as site both of a certain vivifying continuity (or, at the least, doggedness) and of an abiding otherness or strangeness, temporal and otherwise, alongside.43 One literary way to think this second dimension, LaCapra suggests, would be as the uncanny as opposed to the sublime, as an immanent rather than transcendent vector of nonrational experience (History 88). To my mind, we will presently see, this offers a powerful way into the

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question of the not simply realist component of turn-­of-­the-­century African American prose. Where a stubborn melancholia can look ahead only to an endlessly deferred redemption, “working through” conceives of something more like what we saw Du Bois emphasize in Souls, the slow attainment of greater capa­ bility—­specifically, voice, as a capacity not simply for witness but for trans­ formation—­through an acknowledgment and encounter with a strangeness both without and within, one that transpires amid the terrain of the everyday. This is, then, a version of the argument that Hortense Spillers has been making, for over two decades, about the potentialities of psychoanalytic thinking for African American studies.44 Her companions in this endeavor have been, once more, as we saw, Du Bois, on the one hand, and Fanon, on the other. But despite Fanon’s importance as a clinical predecessor, hers is not the Fanon who has reappeared amid the claims of Afro-­pessimism, for his understanding of the Black man as “phobogenic object.” For Spillers, Fanon’s claims in this regard remain overly Manichaean (“All” 93), predicated on a kind of racialized primal scene in which the “ ‘normal’ Black child,” in Fanon’s terms, “will become abnormal at the slightest contact with the white world” (Fanon 122).45 In place of this temporality of the shattering Event, Spillers places an everydayness both of racism and of what cannot be reduced thereto, but where Fanon deems the latter the “normal,” for Spillers it is, very precisely, the space of the more ambivalent material that psychoanalysis plumbs: the mark of . . . human striving in terms of the everyday world of the citizen-­ person—­coming to grips with the pain of loss and loneliness; getting from point a to b; the inexorable passing of time, change, and money; the agonies of friendship and love. . . . [In sum,] the tirelessly mundane element on which ground . . . Freud placed the key to the mental theater. (“All” 107)

She thus affirms above all what we might term the more existential Fanon of Black Skin’s conclusion, with his insistence that “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man” alongside his proclamation that “The body of history does not determine a single one of my actions” (quoted in “All” 97). Like the existentialists themselves, and like LaCapra in his emphasis on working through, Spillers casts psychoanalysis as a tool for the movement toward agency, through the revelations of the workings of what she terms the “interior intersubjectivity,” or “the locus at which self-­interrogation takes place” (“All” 84). In a more recent essay, “Time and Crisis,” Spillers brings these arguments to bear to critique the Afro-­pessimist proposition that “Black subjectivity . . . does not exist at all” (28). In her emphasis on everydayness as a way to counter

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their more apocalyptic temporal frames, her arguments overlap with those of Fred Moten, whom she cites here. And yet there is a notable difference as well. Where Moten theorizes Black fugitivity as an elision of subjectivity tout court, notably by aligning the latter irreducibly with “sovereignty,”46 Spillers insists, in both of her essays, on the distinction between the “individual,” as a legal entity linked to self-­ownership, and the “one,” associating the latter, paradoxically but essentially, with subjectivity defined as psychically split, on the one hand, and as a “position in discourse”—­the “I”—­on the other (“All” 102; “Time” 29). The point here is the crucially complex one that understanding oneself as a split subject might enable speech, and even a modicum of “emancipation” (“All” 108). (As Christopher Freeburg cogently argues, moreover, we could see that same understanding of the “thingness, incoherency, and intractability of a subject” as the marker of what necessarily exceeds the racist project [Interior 45].) Spillers admits at this juncture that she surprises herself by “com[ing] out here where I least expected: Fanon  .  .  . my history must not imprison me, once I recognize it for what it is—­might well have been right” (140). Finally, however, her true guiding light here is Du Bois, who, she notes, posited his notion of “double consciousness” contemporaneously with the early writings of Freud (“All” 104). More specifically, as Bruce Dickson discusses, Du Bois was being mentored by William James at Harvard at the time that the latter published both his Principles of Psychology and, in Scribner’s magazine, his essay “The Hidden Self,” which discussed a case of split personality in which certain memories were available only to a submerged second persona. As we noted at the start of the chapter, “The Hidden Self ” would be drawn on more directly still by Pauline Hopkins in Of One Blood, which appeared in The Colored American Magazine during the same year, 1903, that Souls was published. Hopkins presents her hero, Reuel Briggs, reading from James’s article in the novel’s opening pages.47 The strange scenario of multiple personality James describes is then brought to life in the figure of Dianthe Lusk, who is subject to a “dual mesmeric trance” that separates her off from knowledge of her true (Black) identity and past. Interestingly, given Du Bois’s focus on the “Sorrow Songs” as a living “retention” of African memory for the formerly enslaved population, Dianthe’s layered personae seem to emerge in tandem when she sings “Go Down, Moses,” rising to perform as if in a trance.48 The purpose of therapy for the multiple personalities described by James (and, in Studies on Hysteria, Freud) was to find a way to merge them back into one. As Bruce Dickson notes, Du Bois writes of a similar dream on the part of the African American: “to merge his double self into a better and truer

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self ” (Souls 11). Yet Hopkins, as we saw at the outset, depicts this project in more radical terms. Reuel’s “true self ” lies not in America at all, but back in Africa, where, after having traveled there as part of an archaeological expedition, he takes up his rightful position as heir to the throne of the hidden kingdom Telassar. The “undiscovered country” he suggests lies within us all turns out, here, to be a literal lost place, and the past thus holds the key to a future that, it seems, leaves no room for the more ambivalent present to play a role (Hopkins 448). As Ranjana Khanna has argued in Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism, Freud’s early writings often construed the labor of psychoanalysis by reference to archaeology. Like the literally buried artifacts of interest to that discipline, which was consolidating itself during the same period, the analysand’s repressed past was conceived as a stratified layer to be unearthed through the talking cure.49 Doing so would guarantee wholeness; as she notes, Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge named “Continuous History” as “the indispensable correlative of the founding of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored” (quoted in Khanna 58). In Of One Blood, the lost mother appears spectrally to deliver the biblical prophecy that “there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known” (598)—­predicting at once the archaeological discovery of the lost kingdom and the full restoration of the repressed psychic and historical past. And yet, as Khanna crucially insists, “the archaeological, as a model of a positive unconscious, also cannot fully account for the psychoanalytic” (38). Specifically, it can tell us little about the stage beyond remembering and repeating, that of working through. Thus, Freud will later, as he prepares to flee the Nazis in the late 1930s, write of a crucial distinction between psychoanalysis and archaeology, stating that while “for the archaeologist the reconstruction is the aim and end of his endeavours . . . for analysis the construction is only a preliminary labor” (quoted in Khanna 36). Khanna’s own aim lies in considering this shift in Freud’s thought in relation to postcoloniality. As she notes, “Nineteenth-­century archaeology had a mission to save the artifacts” that dovetailed with the projects of colonialism and, later, fascist nationalism as well (45). The older Freud’s divergence from this paradigm, by contrast, affirmed the more entrenched reality of psychic splitness—­what Khanna herself terms a “double consciousness” that might enable a more “critical relationship with the past” (65). Although Khanna herself does not write in an Americanist context, her theorizations are clearly of interest in relation not only to Hopkins’s explicit linkage of a nascent psychoanalysis, archaeology, and colonialism—­for her

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transplanted African American immediately sets about Christianizing his African subjects50—­but to Du Boisian double consciousness as well. Du Bois’s conception renders the doubleness that Hopkins portrays in archaeological terms as, instead, a lateral, rather than verticalized, tension between “Negro” and “American” as two parts of a single whole, such that “Africa” can no longer function as the repressed true identity.51 The story of that self ’s trajectory thus cannot take revelatory form; it is, rather, the slow, stubborn progress forward Du Bois describes, inevitably pocked with failures and persistent injustice, and yet a movement nonetheless, toward “dawning self-­consciousness, self-­realization, self-­respect” (5). There is, indeed, at least one benefit to this circuitous road as Du Bois describes it: if lacking in “goal” or “resting-­place,” “the journey at least gave leisure for reflection” (5). Here, I would suggest, we return to the space of that “certain distance” LaCapra describes. And here Hopkins’s text, at least at its outset before it ventures into Africa and fantasy, is more congruent, in its related, and historically distinctive, fictional portrayal of turn-­of-­the-­century Black everydayness in the figure of Reuel Briggs. Separated from his white peers both by race and by his command of the mysterious borderlands of mental science, Briggs passes for white so as to mingle among them—­but always, necessarily, at a certain remove. And yet that remove seems not simply the result of necessity; it creates, for Briggs, with his “strong, melancholic temperament” and “keen and shrewd” intelligence, a space apart for thought (444). As the world carouses about him, he is withdrawn, “pre-­occupied” by what only his mind can access (451). Hence, in these early moments of the book, the past appears only as a mental vision of a lovely woman whom we will later learn to be Dianthe, Reu­ el’s long-­lost sister. When the real Dianthe then appears, we see the book’s main characters gradually fall, one by one, under a kind of spell cast by the past—­a state Dianthe models, with her state of mesmeric subjection, a susceptibility that marks her throughout the novel. Yet Reuel, too, seems to fall under, first, Dianthe’s spell, and then to bow later to his destiny as African ruler; even Aubrey, the third, villainous sibling, who himself plays the part of mesmerizer to Dianthe, finally commits suicide as the result of a hypnotic command from Telassar. As Of One Blood proceeds, the past thus serves to overtake and substitute for the active present will. And yet at one moment near the end, Reuel seems cognizant of something more akin to a simultaneity of temporalities, as, from afar, he “cursed with a mighty curse the bond that bound him to the white race of his native land” (594). For Khanna, “the simultaneity of the past in the guise of a symptom” formed Freud’s primary interest, powering his

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conception of Nachträglichkeit, or the way that “a repetition of an event [can] take on new form in a different historical context” (Khanna 41, 37)—­an idea that, in our own context here, can speak both to psychic traces as well as to stubborn material continuities. Finally, she suggests, despite Freud’s archaeological metaphors, “it is the manifestation of desire in relation to the dead that fascinates Freud rather than the dead (or buried) themselves” (41).52 This desire—­to “give figure to the absent”—­gives the symptom, she notes, its link to the concept of the uncanny, the sense of a kind of semi-­presence amid the ordinary time of the everyday (41). Had Of One Blood resisted the pull of the supernatural, instead remaining amid that quotidian time, it might have explored the way the latter might still be shot through with “ghosts” of a less literal sort, as in the story Reuel’s friends tell of a supposedly haunted house, where Reuel again encounters Dianthe as a vision. As we saw in LaCapra, where the idea of the present as sheer repetition of the past suggests a sublime transcendence of time, the uncanny, like the symptom, suggests more a layering of times in which what is absent can appear only in a kind of strange, disturbing half-­light. In his writings, psychoanalysis offers a way of thematizing the historian’s work in relation to these encounters with what both is and is not present—­to their productive capacities and their epistemological limits alike. At its most productive, here, as in the choice to return to the haunted house, memory becomes a way of standing apart from the demands of present time. It is a state akin to Reuel’s “pre-­occupation,” whereby he withdraws from worldly concerns in order to gather his forces. In Spillers’s words, what we seek here is “a name for the sense of time that we could call distancing, standing apart momentarily from the roll and moil of Event” (“All” 109–­10). During this same period, then, Henri Bergson began to explore this turn toward a more ongoing time in his early writings, including a text that would become immensely important for modernist literary innovation, Matter and Memory. For Bergson, “To call up the past . . . we must be able to withdraw ourselves from the action of the moment, we must have the power to value the useless, we must have the will to dream” (Matter 83). In his account, to be able to do so voluntarily represents true freedom, for it represents a movement from the realm of necessity into one marked by the duration that characterizes the reality of time. Thus memory becomes associated not with the inability to act, but with will itself (most powerfully, perhaps, in Bergson’s inaugural volume, published in the US as Time and Free Will). It suggested, in LaCapra’s words, an “immanent critique” of the truncated time of the present. And yet the older notion of nostalgia as malady of will persisted also, in Bergson’s sense that

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to be too far drawn into the realm of durée would be to dream rather than to live (Matter 155; see also 15). He did not mention the particularly terrible possibility that Marrow documents, of trying forcibly to turn the living world into that dream of a lost past. The question becomes that of how to exert both kinds of will—­the will to consciousness and that toward action—­without mis­ taking the one for the other. Bergson’s work would go on to be of signal importance for the Négritude writers so often invoked by Fanon. In their work, too, the question arises of whether it is a matter of excavating a lost homeland or of working through the significance of one’s desire to do so. Donna Jones has read the movement through the former perspective, Édouard Glissant through the latter. For Glissant, it is crucial to understand the work of a writer like Aimé Cesaire, Fanon’s Martinican countryman, not as a mode of “reversion,” the “obsession with a single origin” that “negate[s] contact,” but, rather, as a form of “diversion,” or détour rather than rétour (16). Glissant thus conceives something akin to a literal “detour” through the past as a return precisely to the beginning of the present’s pressing questions, to “the point of entanglement” that marks the advent of “creolization” both as dilemma and as a lived reality from which no redemptive exit presents itself (26). Formulated specifically with respect to the question of decolonization, Glissant’s conception here falls along the axis of the will to action. In the wake of his theorizations, others such as Françoise Vergès have conceived the question of creolization—­or, for our purposes here, diaspora—­along temporal lines closer to those proposed by Du Bois, as a time of “slowness,” against modernity’s sped-­up pace toward “progress,” in which emancipation is imagined “not only as rupture but also as ongoing practice” (43–­44). While admiring Fanon’s desire not to “burden [the present] under the weight of past wrongs,” Vergès thus faults his “temporality of heroism” for finding no room for “hesitation, contemplation, or meditation” (41, 38, 34). Thereby turning to the axis of the will to consciousness, Vergès moves in the direction of what Svetlana Boym, making a distinction otherwise akin to Glissant’s, terms “reflective” rather than “restorative” nostalgia—­a modality that dwells with the past in the clear-­eyed recognition of its ineluctable, if enduringly uncanny, absence.53 Finally, we will see, this is a crucial aspect of the temporal work of The Souls of Black Folk as well. Du Bois and the Moment of Hesitation If one response to the novel’s breakdown, by the Black writers of the nadir, is to turn toward romance, we could understand another as taking the form

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of Du Bois’s Souls, a generically heterogeneous text that nonetheless, thanks to its meditation on historical time, retains a relation to narrative form. Of its fourteen full-­length chapters, three are historical, three sociological, three polemical, three memoir—­and then the final two leap into a different register altogether, one being fiction, and the last Du Bois’s famous meditation on the “sorrow songs.” What these varied approaches have in common is a tendency, as we began to see in the account of the Black Belt chapters at the outset of the present chapter, to think the relations between present and past. These can take the form of persisting structural inequalities, as in those chapters, or that of less tangible, yet nonetheless unmistakable markings. One chapter that handles this question in a particularly complex way makes plain its subject in its title: “Of the Meaning of Progress.”54 Through this title, a new question opens—­ not whether progress has in fact occurred (which would retain “progress” as a simple given, one to be celebrated or its lack decried), but, rather, an inquiry into what progress means, a project that turns out to encompass that to which it cannot speak, or what it leaves behind. Finally, we will see, Du Bois in his writings elsewhere on the status of sociology as “human science” asks a version of this question with respect to the supersession of the category of will by a more “scientific” perspective circa 1900, and what this would mean for our inquiries into history itself. “Of the Meaning of Progress” begins in a self-­consciously “nostalgic” vein, writing in a dreamy, almost pastoral tone of two summers spent teaching in a tiny, backwater rural community. “Once upon a time,” Du Bois begins, “I taught school in the hills of Tennessee, where the broad dark vale of the Mississippi begins to roll . . .” He continues in this vein for the first couple of paragraphs: “A picnic now and then, and a supper, and the rough world was softened by laughter and song. I remember how—­but I wander” (46). “I remember how—­but I wander.” This, then, is the first of several crucial passages in Souls in which Du Bois, as our narratorial guide, breaks off his own thread of speech. Earlier, we discussed this same technique in the Black Belt chapters, where it similarly bespoke the question of time: “—­And the world passed on.” As Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda write of the dash, “Its orientation is simultaneously retrospective and prospective” (55).55 In this instance, remembering, nostalgia even, appears to take its usual form as a tempting possibility, a site of potentially endless “wandering” in the backwaters of time, that must be held off if one is to get one’s job done on behalf of the present or future. And so Du Bois gets on with his story. He gives great detail to his tiny world of long ago, the various inhabitants, and their children who populate his classroom—­but some, of course, receive more attention than

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others, and none as much as Josie. She is the reason an ardent young teacher is there: a vivid young Black girl from nowhere, “long[ing] to learn,” who is described as seeming “the centre” of her large family, “always busy,” “a little nervous,” with what Du Bois calls an “unconscious moral heroism that would willingly give all of life to make life broader, deeper, and fuller for her and hers” (47). Du Bois spends considerable time telling us about Josie, and her family, and the other farmers in the area—­some hardworking, others less so, some families who had to keep their kids from school to help with the sharecropping, others whose “old folks[’s]” “doubts . . . about book-­learning” need to be “conquered” again and again (49). He writes both of his delight and his boredom in the post, and, finally, of the questions it awakened in him concerning the future—­if any meaningful one there might yet be—­of his young charges. Common joys and hardship, above all racism, led them “to think some thoughts together,” he writes, “but these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various languages” (50). Du Bois breaks these linguistic differences down by generation: those old enough to remember the time before the war, who still, with what he calls a “dark fatalism,” hold to faith in a future redemption, and the younger ones like Josie and her siblings and friends, “to whom War, Hell, and Slavery were but childhood tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school and story and half-­awakened thought” (51). It is in this transitional moment that we—­and Du Bois—­leave these children. When he returns ten years later, traveling nearby and feeling “a sudden longing to pass again beyond the blue hill,” the memoir’s final section begins starkly: “Josie was dead, and the gray-­haired mother said simply, ‘We’ve had a heap of trouble since you’ve been away’ ” (51). For the reader, this is an almost unbearable moment. The bildungsroman we want to imagine for Josie has no historical referent; a door closes, and a narrative leaping with vibrant promise remains forever unable to be told. More awful still, however, is that this moment, too, merely passes, as Du Bois moves on to canvas the rest of the community, finding some further tragedies, some families who now own their farms but remain in debt, until, finally, he reaches the spot where he used to teach: “My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly” (52). Wherein lies the ugliness of Progress? To begin with, there is the new school: “a jaunty board house,” now with actual windows and a lockable door—­on the one hand—­and some broken window glass, and seats that remain without backs, on the other. So there is an ugliness in Progress’s lackadaisical pace, no doubt. At the same time, more uncannily, the “crazy foundation stones” of the previous school’s “poor little cabin” sit alongside their

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jaunty successor—­ugliness, then, in the juxtaposition of old and new, the lingering of a past rather than its decisive overcoming. “The county owns the lot now, I hear,” Du Bois writes, and every year there is a session of school. As I sat by the spring and looked on the Old and the New I felt glad, very glad, and yet—­ After two long drinks I started on. (52)

The chapter then ends with a mournful meditation: “How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-­faced Josie lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? . . . And all this life and love and strife and failure,—­is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-­dawning day?” (53–­54) “Thus sadly musing,” Du Bois concludes, “I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car” (54). “I felt glad, very glad, and yet—­” Let us begin, then, where Du Bois here leaves off. Or, rather, let us look more closely at this very moment of leaving off: the moment, that is, of hesitation. What does it mean to hesitate? Although one thinks of a sense of uncertainty or inability wholly to commit oneself—­the “doubt and hesitation” Du Bois elsewhere assigns to the turn-­ of-­the-­century African American individual, left abandoned by the march of History (Souls 34)—­the term in earlier usages specifically referred to a gap in the thread of speech, as when Melville in Billy Budd refers to his hero’s stammer as an “organic hesitancy” (53). Conceived in the period as a malady of will, hesitation in this form suggests a difficulty in “moving on” that manifests itself in a literal way at the level of the sentence. In this sense, it asks a kind of embodied question about the meaning of progress.56 Du Bois himself, as it happens, would make these questions of hesitancy and will in relation to the question of progress central to what remains one of his least discussed texts, the 1905 essay “Sociology Hesitant,” which was published for the first time nearly a century later as part of a special issue of boundary 2 introduced by Ronald Judy. Written in response to the Saint Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences the summer before, the essay describes the entire field of sociology—­that of Du Bois’s first book-­length publication, The Philadelphia Negro—­as defined by hesitation. Specifically, it reveals itself unable to know how to think about the existential question of will—­that is to say, of the human act. Sociology hesitates, Du Bois explains, in the sense that it is caught in between two sorts of phenomena, “the vast and bewildering activities of men” and “lines of rhythm that coordinate certain of these actions”—­or, more sim-

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ply, between human “Wills” and phenomena more amenable to scientific law (38, 41). Attempting fealty to both, “lisping a peculiar patois,” it ends up satisfying the demands of neither, and instead wanders, invoking a “mystical” entity called “Society” (38–­39). This turn toward abstraction makes plain sociology’s second hesitancy, that regarding “the real elements of Society”—­that is, the actual activities of human beings (38). Precisely due to their resistance to full calculability, these seem, finally, a kind of embarrassment to a field wishing to make a case for itself in the language of science. Du Bois is here engaged with a crucial intellectual debate of his era. As Lorraine Daston has argued, the question of volition’s compatibility or incompatibility with scientific explanation preoccupied social scientists in particular around the turn of the century, with ramifications we are still living through in the present day. Among psychologists, these discussions generally broke down, as Du Bois shows they did in sociology also, between those hoping to model the field on the physical sciences and those concerned about what would happen to the will as category if they did so. Finally, as we see in William James’s Principles of Psychology, the will was saved only by becoming “relegat[ed] to ethics”; hence, Daston states, by the early twentieth century, “the category of will had all but disappeared from the mainstream psychological literature” (111). Daston’s own interest, however, lies in precisely the kinds of argument we see Du Bois attempting to make, as a kind of road not taken within the intellectual debate of the day. That is to say, she is intrigued by the small group of figures—­James at times among them—­who, like Du Bois, attempted to conceive a theoretical framework that could make room both for what he calls the “evident rhythm of human action” and the “evident incalculability in human action” (41). One of them, interestingly, was the renowned physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who suggested—­enlarging lines we might recognize as familiar from eighteenth-­century vitalism—­that “certain systems, physical as well as mental, were unstable, such that infinitesimal perturbations occasionally produced effects out of all proportion to the cause” (Daston 108). James’s own contributions to this project, in his Principles chapter “The Automaton-­Theory,” drew on the resources of evolutionary thought, as well as on a sense of the will’s inherent vagaries of the very sort this book has aimed to emphasize. As higher beings, he notes, we possess unparalleled adaptive capacities, the ability to respond to “the minutest alterations in the environing circumstances” as possible “sign[s]” to be heeded. And yet this very “hair-­trigger organization” of ours cannot be separated from a fundamental “instability,” a governing “law of caprice”—­an imp of the perverse, we might say—­that makes us, far more than our animal brethren, “as likely to

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do the crazy as the sane thing at any given moment” (143). Here, then, James would appear to “rescue” the will very much as the eighteenth-­century vitalists did, enabling its relative freedom precisely by pointing out its Augustinian potential for waywardness. He thus turns to consciousness, in the second half of his argument, to attempt to paint a less alarming picture. The role of consciousness, James suggests, is to “inhibi[t]” our proclivities toward perversity by, in effect, introducing hesitation. “Consciousness . . . is only intense,” he explains, “when nerve-­processes are hesitant.” Whereas habitual actions are in no need of its assistance, “in hesitant actions,” where “many alternative possibilities” present themselves, consciousness must step in (145). (We notice how deliberation is marshaled here in the service of action, against the common fear of it as itself generating weaknesses of will.) Du Bois not only studied with James at Harvard during the years he was at work on Principles; he was a frequent guest at James’s home, and long affirmed his eminent professor’s influence on his thinking. It is thus unsurprising to hear echoes of James’s formulations in chapters like these in “Sociology Hesitant.” Where James makes fun of the “automaton-­theory” by referring to Shakespeare’s nervous system producing “those crabbed little Black marks which we for shortness’ sake call the manuscript of Hamlet,” Du Bois mocks the notion of “Shakespeare as pure Energy” or, even more amusingly, “Edison as electrical force” (Principles 136; “Sociology Hesitant” 40). Most significantly, it appears, Du Bois, too, was concerned with the question of how to think human action within the ascendant scientific paradigm. And for him, too, again in very Jamesian terms, will’s distinctiveness was inseparable from its being a double-­edged affair—­it could produce the “erratic by-­play” that rendered “the pliable and law-­abiding Economic Man” a questionable heuristic, but its innovative capacities also unquestionably undergirded Du Bois’s fervent faith in human progress (“Sociology Hesitant” 42). If Judy and others are correct that Du Bois by 1905 had shed his earlier flirtations with a reliable History as guiding will, it is unsurprising that he would have wished to make room for human action as a way of imagining political change. Indeed, in “Sociology Hesitant” he often moves back and forth between describing his object as “Sociology” and as “History,” terming “Descriptive Sociology” a “philosophy of history with modest and mundane ends” (which, if it eschews “eternal, teleological purpose,” still seems invested in “principles of harmony and development”) (39). Or, similarly, overcoming the “dualism” between the study of will and that of physical law is said to require “a working hypothesis which will give scope to Historian as well as Biologist” (44). (As Du Bois notes, Comtean and Spencerian history and

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sociology alike had placed much vain hope in the powers of a simple “biological analogy” for the social world [40].) Finally, however—­and as others have suggested—­Du Bois does most of his thinking regarding the specificity of history as a category in this period in the pages of Souls. “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” the second chapter, following the famous opening meditation on double consciousness, remains one of the most powerful accounts of Reconstruction’s rise and terrible betrayal; as we saw at our own outset, the Black Belt chapters limn slavery’s economic aftermath with similarly unparalleled precision. “Of the Meaning of Progress” is distinctive, however, for its marriage of memoir with historiographic musing on Du Bois’s part—­and, as we have begun to explore, for its thematization, both formally and in its content, with the question of hesitation. “I felt glad, very glad, and yet—­” Du Bois sits surveying the Old and the New side by side, genuinely pleased to see that there is improvement for the children of his little hamlet. And yet—­the time gone by, and Josie’s memory above all, remain, a solemn rebuke to the idea of time marching triumphantly forward. That rebuke isn’t meant to undermine the progress, simply; the progress, incomplete though it is, is real and welcome. Unlike the sharecroppers’ cabins simply built atop old slave quarters, the new school sits side by side with its ruined predecessor; each makes its claim. The question Du Bois’s hesitancy poses is thus only, What to say of that which, and who, gets lost along the way? Fredric Jameson describes precisely such situations as conducive, generically, to the development of romance. The form’s “ultimate condition of figuration,” he writes, appears to be “a transitional moment in which two distinct modes of production, or moments of socioeconomic development, coexist,” where we see “an organic social order in the process of penetration and subversion, reorganization and rationalization, by nascent capitalism, yet still, for another long moment, coexisting with the latter,” as in moments of rapid industrialization transforming a previously rural form of life (Political 148). We might adopt this formulation to think about the persistence of the nearly feudal situation of Southern Black sharecropping amid the most rapidly industrializing era in American history. As Lloyd Pratt suggests in Archives of American Time, there is an important point to be made here that history’s denizens may inhabit differing timescales at one and the same moment. Yet Jameson also puts forward an intriguing difference between the way romance works in older writings and in the modern novel—­a difference that recalls Svetlana Boym’s distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia. Whereas in the older tales, he writes, the everyday might be

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interrupted by some kind of magical “presence” attesting to another world or time, in modernity, instead, that to which realist time cannot speak takes the form, rather, of a “determinate, marked absence at the heart of the secular world” (134). We have an experience of what is missing. This seems congenial with Du Bois’s use of the dash here, his hesitation: How to speak about the past in the present? How to make space for it when only its foundation stones remain?57 As Alia al-­Saji writes in a moving meditation on the critical potential of hesitation, “Memories of what might have been—­of preserved and hitherto impossible or dead possibilities—­are neither retrospective nor nostalgic illusions. In affectively recentering an absence, they make felt the ghost of a different present. This ambivalent affect takes place in the interval of hesitation but does not fill it” (349).58 The uncanniness here, it is crucial to note, derives not from the past’s complete return in the present, as in Of One Blood or other more frankly supernatural texts—­or in certain modalities of contemporary criticism—­but from the fact that its absence and its presence form an indissoluble whole. To move forward, as we would wish, is necessarily to leave it further behind. And it is here, we might say, that we find ourselves finally in the space of the uncanniness of will as such.

Acknowledgments

This project has percolated far longer, and taken more unexpected forms, than I could ever have conceived at its outset. Once based in an idea about comparing contemporary novels with nineteenth-­century precursors around their conceptions of psychology, it quickly outgrew those disciplinary bounds, as the nineteenth-­century part proved more than capacious enough. Maladies began to take off in earnest during a formative National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship year at the National Humanities Center, where my inchoate arguments received invaluable care and feeding from that institution’s extraordinary staff, as well as from lunchtime gabs and the occasional cricket match with Florence Dore, David Bunn, and Joshua Landy. As the project unfolded, further funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as a New Frontiers grant and an Institute for Advanced Study fellowship from Indiana University, provided crucial research time. I am very grateful for invitations to present portions of these arguments at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Brown University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Davis; the Robert Penn Warren Center at Vanderbilt; the Heyman Center at Columbia; the University of Pennsylvania; the American Literary History Symposium at Illinois; Notre Dame; the University of Kentucky; the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin; the University at Buffalo; Duke University; the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth; the City University of New York; Rutgers University; Yale University; the Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures at Virginia; and the Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities at Indiana University, as well as to the organizers of relevant panels at C19, the Modern Language Association, and the Society for Novel Studies.

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acknowledgments

As a result, often, of these opportunities, I have been encouraged, inspired, and delighted by thinking and talking with colleagues and friends old and new: among them, Charles Altieri, David Alworth, Amanda Anderson, Nancy Armstrong, Branka Arsić, Ali Behdad, Nancy Bentley, Tim Bewes, Carrie Tirado Bramen, Stuart Burrows, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Jed Dobson, Nick Donofrio, James Dorson, Michael Drexler, James Duesterberg, Jed Esty, Meredith Farmer, Chris Freeburg, Winfried Fluck, Josh Gang, Yogita Goyal, Austin Graham, Jonathan Grossman, Danny Hack, Nathan Hensley, Paul Hurh, Gordon Hutner, Carrie Hyde, Rachel Lee, Eric Lott, Sara Marcus, Kate Marshall, Meredith McGill, Emily Ogden, Lloyd Pratt, Margaret Ronda, Ellen Rooney, Cécile Roudeau, Paul Saint-­Amour, Russ Sbriglia, Jon Schroe­ der, Mark Seltzer, Caleb Smith, Katie Snyder, Elisa Tamarkin, Matt Taylor, Len Tennenhouse, Michael Trask, Priscilla Wald, Rafael Walker, Sarah Wasserman, and Tim Wientzen. Thanks also to Rita Felski and Elizabeth Anker, for the chance to contribute a piece to their Critique and Postcritique volume that helped me in my conceptualizations for this book in ways I hadn’t expected. And, in particular, to Brad Evans, who may not realize how important a stray comment that this was really a book about the novel has turned out to be. But it is still hard to believe there can be no more long talks with the wonderful Sam See. And also with Lauren Berlant, who, among so many other formidable qualities, had a matchless gift for sending kind words at just the right moment. This book took shape in the wake of my post-­tenure arrival at Indiana University, which has provided an intellectual and convivial community of which I am fortunate to be a part. Within the Department of English, I’ve been grateful for the good company of Judith Brown, Ed Comentale, Jonathan Elmer, Don Gray, Rae Greiner, Susan Gubar, Patty Ingham, DeWitt Kilgore, Ivan Kreilkamp, Adrian Matejka, Jesse Molesworth, Monique Morgan, Walton Muyumba, Ranu Samantrai, Rebekah Sheldon, Nikki Skillman, and Alberto Varon (even if things haven’t been quite the same without Denise Cruz, Mary Favret, Scott Herring, Andrew Miller, and Shane Vogel). One of IU’s treasures is the Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities, which provided the welcome chance to get to know friends and interlocutors such as Michel Chaouli, Edgar Illas, Herb Marks, Eyal Peretz, and Johannes Türk (and, as a happy result, Maria Domene-­Danes, Perry Hodges, and Estela Vieira). It also enabled me to teach a graduate class in 2018 on “The Will in Question,” and the terrific conversations therein remain much remembered and appreciated. Special gratitude goes to some dear old friends for years of warm and wonderful conversation: Rachel Adams, Sara Blair and Jonathan Freedman,

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Anne Burt and Skye Wilson, Helen Deutsch, Faye Halpern, Molly Hiro, Ivan Kreilkamp and Sarah Pearce, Chris Looby, Julie Newman-­Toker, Sharon Oster, Ann Peters, Katy Schneebaum, and Jane Thrailkill. And to my conference coconspirators extraordinaire, David Kurnick and Paul Stasi. And to Lynn Wardley, for email exchanges that I always want to turn into long meals, and for sheltering us in style, and for the Jamesian germ back in 1988. To Jonah Willihnganz: you are missed. I’ve sat down to dinner with Mark McGurl in more cities than I can remember, but I’ll never stop regretting it’s not one where we both still live. Florence Dore is the glorious voice on the line reminding me to bring rock ’n’ roll back to the life of the mind. Sianne Ngai deserves extra props not only for being her amazing self but for surviving—­and even encouraging!—­the chapter-­by-­chapter study tour. The beloved Julie Schutzman and Bernie Rhie have been there, thankfully, through everything. A few people deserve particular mention for reading some very drafty drafts, as well as for general above-­and-­beyondness. In Bloomington, Susan Gubar has opened her home, heart, and funds of writerly wisdom. There have been far too many evenings with Sarah Knott to count, but all sustained me. Jonathan Elmer is my ideal Americanist reader, so it’s pure serendipity he’s also my local companion. Finally, Patty Ingham and Constance Furey read way too much with amazing care, and provided long and luxurious nights in and out that shaped this book in nearly all its facets. As for nonproximate readers, in the virtual world we’ve learned to inhabit since 2020, Nick Gaskill has become a reliable and highly welcome presence, providing readerly acumen and the generative nature of his own engagements. George Shulman inspired a revelatory and generous back and forth following a Modern Language Association panel in early 2021; I am grateful to Johannes Voelz and Andy Gross for making that possible. Three readers for the University of Chicago Press provided remarkably detailed, engaged, and judicious feedback that has left a significant impress on Maladies’ final form. Zoë Henry’s bibliographical assistance literally saved the day. Mark Reschke and Josh Rutner worked marvels. And Alan Thomas waited with heroic patience for a book that often seemed anything but about to appear. I have been very lucky to benefit from his support and guidance. On the home front, anyone else who has ever tried to write with a young child will know how particularly grateful I am to the help of Mary Borgo, April Hennessey, Bekah Trollinger, and Sarah Withers, who were always happy to catalog monsters or hybridize fruits as the occasion required. My family has made everything possible. Katie Fleissner is my beloved tie back to a world and time that can sometimes seem to have all but vanished.

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Judy Friedlander is my partner in crime in giant-­book-­writing, but also a cherished grandma and so much more. Joshua Kates, first and best reader and dearest sharer of my life, knows just when to tell me to stop ranting and when to egg me on, and creates both the everyday world and the festive adventures in which I most love to dwell. And last but in no way least, long talks and walks with Zeke Fleissner-­Kates helped me to see what this book was most deeply about and, during the entire process of its writing, gave me more joy than I might have imagined possible.

Notes

Introduction 1. Asad, that is, speaks in smilarly utilitarian terms of “the metaphysical idea of a conscious agent-­subject having both the capacity and the desire to move in a singular historical direction: that of increasing self-­empowerment and decreasing pain”—­a notion that, of course, he himself goes on to critique (79). 2. See, e.g., the work on the novel of Nancy Armstrong and John Bender, and on the modern individual of Ian Hunter. 3. See also Levene. 4. On apocalyptic renovation, see Trilling, Liberal 255. See Greif for a powerful account of the “Death of the Novel” genre. 5. For one of the only philosophical accounts to traverse this divide, see John H. Smith’s excellent Dialectics of the Will. 6. See both “Art and Fortune” and “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” both reprinted in The Liberal Imagination. 7. See “The Fate of Pleasure” (Moral 442). 8. For a contemporary version of this argument, see During’s Against Democracy (e.g., 10). 9. These ideas are elaborated in the preface to The Liberal Imagination, which dovetails with the remarks at the end of “Manners, Morals, and the Novel” to the effect that “we must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes” (Moral 118). We can hear here the echo of Nietzsche’s famous critique of Christianity—­that, in Trilling’s version, the “moral passions” can turn out to be “even more willful and imperious and impatient than the self-­seeking passions” (Moral 118). (Trilling’s rarely appreciated investment in Nietzsche can also be found elsewhere: e.g., Moral 395, 442.) 10. In Gordon’s words, “Europe sought to become ontological: it sought to become . . . Absolute Being” (“Questioning” 10). Wynter builds on his terminology as part of her ongoing genealogy of modern humanism in “On How We Mistook the Map” (138–­39); see also “The Ceremony Must Be Found.” 11. Greif ’s book offers an enormously important overview of this crucial period in the theorization of modernity and its discontents. Yet in my view, Greif draws too firm a line in the sand between these postwar thinkers and those whose work was preeminently inflected by the

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political upheavals of the 1960s. Wynter’s engagement with Blumenberg and Jonas is evidence of their interrelation. 12. As discussed below, Wynter’s decades-­long project “Towards the Human, after Man” is thus in direct conversation with both postcolonialists like Frantz Fanon and German Jewish thinkers like Hans Blumenberg and Hans Jonas, forced to hide or flee during the Nazi period; like Blumenberg’s in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, the language (of “reoccupation”) of which she persistently draws upon, her genealogy of Western modernity makes a forceful case for autonomy without the re-­theologizable overlay of modernity’s own varied Big Wills, from state to economy to biological life. (See, e.g., “The Ceremony Must Be Found” 21–­22 and 30.) 13. Trilling would render a similar critique of the postmodern art eager to get beyond “ego-­ values” and “the heroic concept of masterpieces”; by turning the world itself into the canvas, and thereby generating a “Total Art” without limit, did such productions not themselves speak, rather, to the desire to move beyond the individual’s necessarily bounded purview so as to embrace “the fantasy of the omnipotent will” (Moral 508)? 14. Wynter writes of the way we “projec[t] our own authorship of our societies onto the ostensible extrahuman agency of supernatural Imaginary Beings” (“Toward” 273). 15. See Moral (511) and Arendt, The Human Condition (201), describing power as “being dependent on the unreliable and only temporary agreement of many wills and intentions,” a fact that by definition keeps “omnipotence” from being “a concrete human possibility.” 16. Such concerns are echoed in the more recent work of Christopher Freeburg, and, before him, Claudia Tate in her groundbreaking Psychoanalysis and Black Novels. 17. Pippin puts the latter this way: “How a person could both be the kind of object studied with such success by modern biology and physics . . . yet also a subject, and free” (Modernism xvi). 18. On this claim, see Daston, as well as Scheerer and Hilgard. As Hilgard describes, the critique of behaviorism by later twentieth-­century cognitive science did little to change this situation: the replacement of a “stimulus-­response psychology” with an “input-­output psychology” still left scant room for more “dynamic features” such as “drives, incentive motivation, and curiosity”—­for “hot” rather than “cold” cognition, or, we might say, interested or invested forms of thought (Hilgard 115). 19. See Perry 1:632. The citation, to Ovid’s Medea, was, historically, often used interchangeably with Paul’s lament to indicate the mysteries of akrasia (see, e.g., Fiering, “Will” 528). 20. See Holton (104–­9) for a discussion of wanting versus liking. 21. Ross mentions Ainslie in this regard; we’ll hear more from him in chapter 5. 22. One could also take into account psychology’s initial development out of epistemology, which always concerned itself far more “with the outside-­in rather than the inside-­out perspective” (Sebanz and Prinz 3). 23. See chapter 4 for a discussion of James’s ideas along similar lines and of his landmark book The Varieties of Religious Experience. 24. This no doubt has much to do with the fact that one of the only places we can witness an insistence on the category of the subject in contemporary criticism is in Lacanian theory: see, e.g., Sbriglia and Žižek. 25. And yet in fact, for Trilling the very problem with the new forms of art he decries is that they have “provided the plastic will with no resisting object”—­that, unlike the Cubists, or Joyce, who “grew in naturalism,” with its sense of mere “fact,” they have lost the sense of “the recalcitrance of stupid literal matter.” Without that resistance, he explains, there is no will; the will refers not to the “fantasy of omnipotence” he critiques, but to “the dialectic between spirit

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and the conditioned,” which is ceaseless (Moral 218–­19). (This is the meaning, for him, of art’s alignment with “fortune,” which it both fosters and is fostered by, and with “necessity,” which it both resists and must always acknowledge.) 26. It seems no accident that Thomas Pavel’s like-­minded, magisterial history of the novel as split between “idealizing” and “anti-­idealizing” treatments of human life—­framed similarly as the “enchantment of interiority” coming up against the “skeptic and comic” antimimeticisms of a Sterne or Swift—­encounters these categories’ limits in the same sorts of instances (“Novel” 15). Whether dark Romanticisms (or gothicisms), chartings of existential anomie, or even the manic commodity lusts of Balzac, these texts’ worrying of the boundaries between realism and its others render ideal and frailty—­even pathology—­harder to disentangle. Making plain that what is at stake here is the status of the will, Pavel himself describes the advent of such cases as one in which “energy” detaches itself as a trait from the moral one of “constancy” (20). 27. For Moretti, nineteenth-­century England, precisely because we see in it “the boldest culture of justice,” generates “the worst novel of the West” (Way of the World 214): “It is a world that cannot and does not want to identify with the spirit of adventure of modern youth” (Way of the World 185). 28. Bersani makes clear in Future (76) that he owes his conception of the latter in part to Trilling. 29. Rita Felski’s wonderful account of character in her essay “Identifying with Characters” is very much in keeping with my point here. “Characters do not have to be deep, well-­rounded, psychologically complex, or unified to count as characters,” she writes, “nor, of course, do they need to be human. They need only to be animated: to act and react, to will and intend” (78). (She later cites Susan Sontag defining character as “a person being one very intense thing” [78].) Character here is defined by will, that is, precisely to the extent it is not defined by our usual senses of what constitutes selfhood. 30. See Ferenczi quoted in Damrosch: “Character is from the point of view of the psychoanalyst a sort of abnormality, a kind of mechanization of a particular way of reaction, rather similar to an obsessional symptom” (268). 31. The life force at its most intense, that is, applies itself to—­or is even itself generated by—­ that which may have no earthly correlate. 32. Buell, Gura, and most recently Armstrong and Tennenhouse are important exceptions, albeit lacking in the comparative dimension of the classic novel studies. 33. Philip Rahv had said similarly of Henry James that the “tension between the impulse to plunge into ‘experience’ and the impulse to renounce it is the chief source of the internal yet astonishingly abundant Jamesian emotion.” These observations have weight, however, only if one does not merely valorize the passion/experience side by idealizing it. 34. Chase also suggests that in their vacillation between extremes of large and small, individual and state, and so forth, they were more similar to European novels. 35. A note here on community (or, for that matter, family). I don’t wish to be misunderstood as construing the only alternatives here as that of the individual or a faceless totality. Obviously, the individual often has many important and formative affiliations with smaller groups, which are emphatically not faceless. This drama has its own sets of terms and is, at its best (which is certainly not to say in all instances), oriented far more around mutual affection than will. The relation to the larger abstraction, however—­“society,” say, or “life”—­remains salient precisely for being more problematic without being dispensable. That it lacks the comparative ease, givenness, and affirmative dimension of “community” or “family”—­again, at their best—­is the point.

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36. See Patterson 134. 37. Contrast Foucault’s account of the same process in The Care of the Self. 38. Kahn, indeed, asserts that the shift to Latin may actually have been crucial for the emergence of the will concept, since no one word in Greek was able to express it. As Kahn notes, while Epictetus uses Aristotle’s word prohairesus, his usage of this term is more suggestive of Seneca’s voluntas. On this version of Stoicism as self-­containment, see Foucault, Care (59–­60). 39. As Arendt notes, these are so strange and overwhelming that Augustine describes them with the word monstrum (Willing 93). Moreover, as many have noted, Augustine’s conversion does not bring these desires to an end, particularly given their reappearance in dreams. 40. The same could be said of the account of curiosity in itself, which is carefully distinguished from the quest for sensual pleasure, since it may entail lingering with things that cause pain (242). Curiosity in fact may be where Augustine’s love of God and his love of sin come closest to a direct parallel within the text, as he asserts he learned best when doing so from a “free spirit of curiosity” before quickly adding, “But your law, O God, permits the free flow of curiosity to be stemmed by force” (35). 41. The thinking here would in fact be echoed by later explorations of human irrationality such as Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse.” Poe’s narrator, too, draws a linkage between inexplicably self-­ destructive actions like being drawn toward the abyss and his own narrator’s irresistible urge, having committed the undetectably “perfect” murder, to confess to his crimes in public; such a moral act, he implies, is equally “perverse” from the point of view of rationally self-­interested behavior. 42. Taylor draws here on the earlier work of Étienne Gilson on the cogito in Augustine (Taylor 133). 43. As Doody notes, “Augustine grew up in a novelistic age,” and there is evidence he knew of early Roman novels (367). 44. Within literary studies in particular, moreover, this loose set of linkages is often anchored, as in both Watt and later novel theorists like Michael McKeon, by a turn to Max Weber, whose Protestant Ethic makes a more concrete historical argument concerning the way Puritanism opened out onto the rational calculation of the capitalist individual. 45. Arguments of this kind, most often from a Thomist perspective, can be found in Francis Oakley, Etienne Gilson, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Michael Gillespie. Louis Dupré’s is one particularly attentive to Augustine’s role in the narrative of modernity given here. 46. That the problematic features of modernity Descartes is so often thought to inaugurate—­ the self-­assurances of the cogito and the related sense of a separated-­off mind mastering na­ture—­ originate in will, in an ego volo, is an argument made elsewhere, as by Heidegger. But tracing such developments back to the fourteenth century changes the usual sense of Cartesian thought as a break, calling into question the standard distinctions between the secularizing modern world and that which came before. 47. As Michael Hanby puts it, we see in accounts like Alliez’s a “reduction of the soul to intentionality” with little resemblance to the way will actually appears in Augustine’s writings (25). For those writing on Augustine from a more theological perspective, it is crucial to recognize that will is only free for him, paradoxically, when it entails a full-­hearted submission to God’s grace. This absolute merger with the divine, however, cannot occur within the pages of the Confessions itself, which, like the later novel, is by necessity confined to the events of this world. 48. In Locke’s case, as the first chapter will discuss, this is quite literally true, as his writings explicitly cast themselves, both morally and politically, as alternatives to the religious

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“enthusiasms” that had had such chaotic effects across seventeenth-­century England (and which were influenced by Augustine). 49. As J. Paul Hunter notes, contemporary responses to Crusoe often took it very much in the spirit of Defoe’s author’s preface, with its insistence on the book’s didactic function as exemplary of “the Wisdom of Providence” (“ ‘Occasion’ of Robinson Crusoe” 343). 50. In Michael McKeon’s words, we watch our hero “progress, like Bunyan’s Christian,” toward a “long-­awaited deliverance from captivity” in the form less of assured salvation than of ascendancy to the status of “self-­possessed and enlightened capitalist entrepreneur of the modern age” (334). 51. In dismissing Crusoe’s talk of sin and repentance as the mere “mechanical” flutter of Defoe’s otherwise discarded upbringing, Watt explains he merely follows a host of economic theorists, most famously Marx himself, for whom Crusoe has stood as an exemplar of Homo economicus, the modern individual governed first and foremost by his own self-­interest (76, 81, 63). In Marx’s words, “Of [Crusoe’s] prayers and the like we take no account”; they resemble merely forms of “recreation” (“Crusoe” 274–­75). 52. Thus, when Robinson decides to leave the Brazilian plantation where he has begun to establish himself as a farmer, he describes himself as failing to use “Prudence” to “loo[k] into his own Intrest,” so as to “ma[k]e a Judgment of what I ought to have done”—­precisely the kinds of procedures that seem immediately to become second nature after the later shipwreck (31). More pertinently still, he compares this departure from Brazil to that made from home eight years previous, when he “act[ed] the Rebel to [my parents’] Authority, and the Fool to my own Interest” (31). 53. None of which, however, need make him any less successful as a capitalist. Indeed, as Moretti reminds us, where both Weber’s thesis and more recent accounts like that of Albert Hirschman—­who explains how “self-­interest” came to be seen as a force mitigating against the “passion for luxury,” thereby similarly rendering the latter ethically acceptable—­make rational calculation and self-­regulation the hallmark of modern subjectivity, other observers beginning with Marx himself characterize the “spiritual atmosphere” of capitalism in precisely opposite terms: as “the world of risk and chance,” the domain of Sombart’s bold “entrepreneur” rather than his cautious “bourgeois” (Moretti Way of the World 101–­2). 54. See, e.g., Armstrong, Bersani, and Damrosch. 55. See also Gerrish, who writes, “The thought of God’s hiddenness arises where the sheer mystery of human existence becomes the object of reflection. Questions crowd in . . . which evoke a sense of the strangeness or even the terror of being human.” Hence, “The symbol of the Hidden God, so far from being ready for the rubbish heap of discarded medieval superstitions, may even be said to have a peculiar strength, vitality, modernity about it” (290–­91). As Marius Mjaaland writes, the hidden God’s status as a “neglected topos of modernity” may result simply from the tendency to begin genealogies of self-­consciousness with Descartes rather than, say, with Reformation theology (111). 56. This depiction concurs with Perry Miller’s classic account of New England Puritanism, for which contingency is also crucial: it is the early modern individual’s daily experience of “the accidents, the diseases, and the sorrows” striking “good and bad” alike that can help explain the appeal of a doctrine that assures all has a place in God’s providence (9). And yet as Miller describes it, this assurance could cut two ways. If such events “furnished tangible evidence of God’s will,” then that will might well seem to be an “exceedingly arbitrary” one, and the “speculative certainty that God was good” could appear “secondary to the pragmatic certainty that he was

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sovereign” (18). Crusoe is thus visited on his island by a vision in which God appears, essentially, as a savage: a man who descends from the sky, with a “Countenance  .  .  . most inexpressibly dreadful,” and brandishing “a long Spear or Weapon in his Hand,” which he raises “to kill me,” on account of his lack of repentance for his sins (64–­65). 57. She cites Hegel: “the ‘negro’s lack of self-­control’ made him ‘impossible of development or culture’ ” (quoted in “Ceremony Must” 47). 58. Cesaire, that is, was inspired by both Bergson and Nietzsche (as discussed in the indispensable work of Donna Jones), and Fanon, of course, by the existential tradition he would both draw upon and (as discussed in chapter 6) powerfully critique. 59. See Löwy and Sayre and Cavell on this understanding of Romanticism; more on this issue in chapter 3. 60. Whereas in the former essay, she contrasts will as mere liberty of indifference to true freedom as the ability “to call something into being which did not exist before,” by the time of Willing it is will that is linked to this capacity for newness, in part thanks to its association—­here, made through Augustine—­with Arendt’s idea of “natality,” or the fact that “every man, by virtue of his birth, is a new beginning,” an event echoing the divine creation of the world (“What” 151, Life 7). Perhaps in part thanks to her explicit target—­the mid-­twentieth-­century behaviorism of Gilbert Ryle—­Arendt posits what we might well term a Romantic model of will as creative power for which the artistic act appears as exemplary. She thus cites Bergson: “Can anybody seriously maintain that the symphony produced by a composer was ‘possible before it was actual’?” (Life 30). 61. The overlaps between Lockeanism and sentimentality can further explain why it is possible for them to conjoin when, say, Indigenous communities are framed as the admirable but inevitable discards of progress, as in a book like Last of the Mohicans. On this issue, see Romero; Makdisi; and, for a classic framing, Rosaldo. 62. On romantic racialism, see Donovan. 63. In Stowe’s case, the book’s structure of values grows more complex in its gothic final third, wherein it introduces Cassy, the enslaved woman who takes her child’s life to save it from enslavement. (It is a notable feature of Baldwin’s “Everybody’s Protest Novel” that he apparently forgets about Cassy.) The book’s engagement with the radical intensities of the quest for freedom clearly grows here, even if, finally, a figure like Cassy could not serve for Stowe as the full-­fledged protagonist she would over a century later for Toni Morrison in Beloved, when she based such a story on the real-­life decisions made by Margaret Garner. Meanwhile, in Huckleberry Finn, there is, arguably, an even more unbreachable rift between the companionate world Huck and Jim briefly realize aboard the raft and the thoroughly Nietzschean portrayal Twain offers of the society each, for his own reasons, flees, in which bourgeois morality and the will to power are depicted as virtually indistinguishable. The book’s “positive romantic” aspect is thus inseparable from an absolute repudiation of the social as such. 64. In Trilling’s case, in “Art and Fortune.” 65. Interestingly, while for Lukács this “objectivity” is what makes Scott a realist writer (in part because he associates Romanticism with the Byronic “lyrical-­subjectivist absolute” [34]), for Isaiah Berlin, it’s what makes him a romantic, in the Herderian sense of a “plurality of ideals”—­ because he “placed alongside” the “Protestant, unromantic, industrial” world of the nineteenth century “another set of values,” and thereby “shattered the [claim] that every age is as good as it can be, and is indeed advancing to an even better one” (138, 137). On this same problem with respect to Balzac, and for a wonderful discussion of Lukács’s shifting views on romance in relation to his shifting allegiance to Stalinism, see Löwy and Sayre (11, 106–­11).

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66. In Hegel’s Aesthetics, which was so influential on Lukács, indeed, it becomes clear that the very rift between realism and romance has its root in the “cleavage between universal and individual” that marks the end of the heroic age. For the Greek hero or the medieval knight, that is, individual heroism and the greater good of community, clan, or family are effectively equivalent, creating a “totality” of character in which, as Hegel expresses it, there is not yet a separate interiority creating the potential gap between intention and act. In the terms of our argument here, then, there is not yet an individual “will” that, in its state of internal division, may or may not fulfill its aim, and, in its absence, also no split between that will and the Big Will of the larger whole (185, 188, 187). Lukács’s Theory of the Novel thus tells the story of the novel as modern form as the product of that split, which provides the impetus for the novel’s quest for form, a quest the protagonist’s life journey mirrors. 67. On monism, see Best, “Well, That Was Obvious.” 68. See my “Romancing the Real.” 69. With Augustianism’s rebirth in the Puritan era in mind, we might, alternatively, term these the “Arminian” and “antinomian” turns: one for which worldly activity can ensure heavenly reward, the other for which the divine may be directly accessed on earth in a state of mystical fusion. 70. The marshmallow test rewarded small children who could hold out and not eat a marshmallow with a second marshmallow. 71. Some such descriptions cannot help but put one in mind of Orlando Patterson’s assertion that the value of “personal freedom,” or interiorized will, may have arisen in part among enslaved women due to their subjection to bodily violation. 72. Within such a framework, indeed, the singular, bounded subject begins to be disparaged as a pathological case, prone to maladies of the will—­that is, to depression and obsessional rumination—­as we in fact see directly in both the introduction to the Affect Theory Reader and in Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, discussed below. 73. Taylor, Sources of the Self 159. Indeed, this should perhaps be unsurprising, given that famed Deist Benjamin Franklin’s early forays into what we now term the “self-­tracking” of the “quantified self ” in his Autobiography. 74. As in the work of Nikolas Rose (from a Foucauldian perspective). Catherine Malabou’s more extensive investigations into plasticity are of a more ambivalent kind. 75. Or become part of new Big Will: see Noys (71) on the multitude as God in the related work of Antonio Negri. 76. Augustine’s conception is even more directly targeted by recent work by Giorgio Agamben, who sees the Pauline split between willing and doing as able to be overcome via the “pure potential of the human body”—­a notion dependent on seeing the goal at hand as that of escaping the entire logic of purposive action (82). (For a similar, and more fully theologized, argument organized around the idea of the “event,” see Badiou.) Agamben portrays the emergence of the Christian—­and finally modern—­subject in Paul and Augustine as “a matter of transforming a being who can, which the ancient being essentially is, into a being who wills,” the possessor of a faculty split between “being able to do and not being able to do” (44, 43, 51). The result, in a modern writer like Kant, is a demand for self-­determination that “situate[s] the human being in an aporia, that is . . . a condition of the paralysis of all action” (74)—­a condition that the turn to the “pure potentiality of the human body” (he privileges dance, on the one hand, and involuntary tics like “winks” or “scratching one’s head,” on the other) is intended to overcome. Yet although such arguments are intended as a means of “think[ing] outside the logic of sovereign power,”

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they might in fact be understood as its absolutization, as “the pure capacity for arbitration,” as Gabriel Alkon has argued. Freedom understood as the unavoidable risk entailed by making a choice, by wanting a distinct outcome—­“the will understood as a desiring élan toward particular objects,” in Alkon’s words—­is what is evaded by this fetishization of potential as such (136). 77. As Ngai puts it, “Latour’s first move is to dissolve ‘society’ into a swarm of nonhuman and human actors connected only for a passing instant in time,” as he calls for “not only a radical commitment to localism and presentism but for the immediate disintegration of any concept or structure.” Drawing on the work of Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, as well as Graham Harman, Ngai notes that this “diachronic blindness” can have the curious effect of making this “philosophy of connection” appear “oddly anticonnexionist,” as the network’s multiple actants remain “island-­like” in their “utter concreteness” (quoted in Ngai, “Network Aesthetics” 377). 78. In their celebrations of plasticity and potentiality, such theories might further be seen as in keeping with the exhortations to “change and adapt” urged by the current economy, or to ceaselessly connect, as dictated by social media. Noys 71; see also Ngai, “Network Aesthetics” 381. 79. In this sense literary “realism,” in Jameson’s term, or “rationality,” in Rancière’s, becomes the name neither for human time nor for its impersonal exceeding—­Latour’s “realism”—­but, rather, for something more like Lukács’s “objectivity”: the position from which it is possible to take both perspectives seriously while insisting at once on their incommensurability. 80. Papoulias and Callard make a related point, with regard to the necessity of developmental time, in their essay “Biology’s Gift.” 81. In the special issue of the journal Novel where a version of Rancière’s essay also appeared, he also gave an interview that fleshes out some of what I’m emphasizing here. As he puts it more bluntly, there, one can conceive of literature’s subject matter as “the equality of the luminous halo within which atoms flow,” or that of “the equality of those sons of artisans, peasants, or country parsons who want to live adventurous lives,” but one has to recognize these are differing vantage points (“Writing” 306). Later in the interview, indeed, Rancière specifically questions what he terms the “monist philosophy of life” in which “what happens are always events of [the] ontological power of life” (308). These two remarks should be seen as related; Rancière is specifically opposing the new monism on behalf of a certain dualism and identifying the latter with modernity’s promise to those individuals heretofore left out of the narrative of history. 82. Certainly that was the intention of the original medical vitalists to whose work, Thomas Osborne has recently suggested, we might link the preoccupations not only of Canguilhem but of Nietzsche—­writers for whom to ask after “the living being” was to ask after “pathology, sickness, error . . . everything that makes us, as living beings, potentially weak, without power, at a loss” (185). As Osborne notes, this sense of vitalism has been obscured in recent thought, such as Jane Bennett’s, by the “affirmationist” version that draws on Bergson, Whitehead, and Deleuze to understand life as endless creativity. 83. See Andreasen. 84. See Ghaemi 126–­28. 85. See, e.g., the work of Matthew Taylor (Universes without Us) and Mark McGurl (“The “Posthuman Comedy”). 86. See, e.g., Gordon, Existentia Africana and Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, and Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia. 87. As stated earlier, this isn’t surprising given the relation of the writers she most admires, such as Fanon and Césaire, to that tradition.

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88. On bodies, see Gordon, “Thoughts” (6) and Spillers, “Time and Crisis” (27); on self-­ division, see Spillers, “All the Things” (87, 112). Spillers’s concern that Afro-­pessimism may obviate the ethical appears in her talk “Afro-­Pessimism and Its Others.” 89. In his introduction to The Liberal Imagination, Trilling notably praises Mill’s critique of utilitarian liberalism’s narrow construal of the human through reference to Coleridge. Specifically, he wonders whether Mill might have been thinking of the epigraph to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” that recommends “a judicious belief in the existence of demons” if one is to recognize that “the world is a complex and unexpected and terrible place which is not always to be understood by the mind as we use it in our everyday tasks”—­that is, by rationalism (9). Chapter One 1. Franco Moretti’s account introduces a national divide: while in British and German fiction, the threateningly centrifugal energies of modernity in the form of the questing youth are typically “caged and exorcised,” by the demand for proper integration into society through marriage, in French and Russian writers, “youth cannot or does not want to give way to maturity,” “freedom” remains a higher value than “happiness,” and, as a result, adultery becomes the characteristic theme (8). 2. In “Two Paths for the Novel,” Zadie Smith reminds us that the “lyrical realism” we associate with the novel after modernism may in fact be subject to “avant-­garde challenges” from the direction of a radicalized, self-­addressing “I” (“spirals of interiority,” in her phrase) just as much as from that of the “empt[ying] out of interiority” that tends to fascinate us at present. 3. And thus, famously, to pioneer divorce as well (see Walzer 195–­96). 4. Hence, we see Damrosch turn to an account by Trilling of the nineteenth-­century American novel to describe the British novel before Austen (12). 5. On the existential and therefore strangely “modern” ramifications of the Deus abscondi­ tus, see Gerrish and Miller, New England Mind. 6. On the latter point, see Tanner’s gloss on Foucault: “It would be misleading to say that every heroine who commits adultery finds a devious way back to the experience of the sacred, but profanation can be for her an entry into a world of meaning” (376). 7. As Blumenberg puts it, the “ ‘disappearance of order’  .  .  . pulled self-­preservation out of its biologically determined normality  .  .  . and turned it into the ‘theme’ of human self-­ comprehension. . . . In the growth of the technical sphere there lives, consciously facing an alienated reality, a will to extort from this reality a new ‘humanity.’ ” He, too, cites Nietzsche: “The destruction of trust in the world made [man] for the first time a creatively active being” (139). 8. On Clarissa as a drama of the will, see Tanner and Damrosch. 9. Consider Wahrman’s important Making of the Modern Self: only very late in a book concerned to argue that the Romantics invented interiority, and that the eighteenth-­century self that preceded it was wholly social and other-­directed (see below for my modification of these claims), do we find a brief gesture toward the existence of a “solipsistic but God-­driven Protestant predecessor” (309). 10. As Haller points out, the Restoration itself may be blamed for literary history’s tendency, Milton and Bunyan aside, to erase the “incalculable influence” of Puritanism on “the development of popular literary taste and expression,” in favor of an association of literary culture with “Anglicanism and with all that it implies” (21). 11. For Walzer, “it was the Calvinists who first switched the emphasis of political thought from the prince” to, in effect, the “citizen” (2). Christopher Hill’s is an even more thoroughgoing

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argument for seventeenth-­century religious dissent as an experiment in radical democracy, characterized by a “degree of tolerance astonishing for the age,” in which “ordinary people were freer from the authority of church and social superiors than they had ever been before” (294, 292). 12. See Walzer 2, 315 (citing Milton’s eulogy of Cromwell). 13. See also Bercovitch, Puritan Origins 17. 14. Cohen points out that Calvin himself in fact placed little emphasis on introspection; Puritans’ investment in the practice of self-­examination in fact derived from Theodore Beza (God’s Caress 11). 15. See, e.g., Iser and Spengemann. 16. See Royce, as well as James’s Varieties. As we see in Dunan-­Page and Davies, this question still divides Bunyan scholars to this day. 17. Tellingly, he writes against G. A. Starr for arguing precisely the opposite, that the text in question (the 1708 Account of Some Remarkable Passages in the Life of a Private Gentleman) appears protonovelistic, secularizing, to the extent it dwells with such intensity on the period prior to conversion (Starr 62). As Owen Watkins notes, this was in fact typical of the spiritual autobiography (50); we might indeed see it as a core instance of the Augustinian legacy. 18. On Luther’s struggles with divine determinism, see Gerrish. 19. Similar accounts appear in Gilson, Oakley, Elshtain, and Dupré. 20. As Oakley puts it, “Ockham broke [the two realms] apart and drew sharp, impenetrable boundaries,” insisting that “the structure of the human mind can tell us nothing about the essential nature of the universe” and thereby “introduc[ing] radically new dichotomies into experience” by virtue of the emphasis on God’s “unlimited sovereign will” (Wilcox 255, 257, 266). If Ockhamism lays the foundation for modern science, then, it does so in a way that makes it no longer possible to ask “why science, or human knowledge is possible at all, because the will of God is the ultimate cause of all things” (Gilson 60). 21. See Gilson (on nominalism as “the first materialism,” 229, and on Descartes, 129–­30) as well as, writing very much in his footsteps, Dupré (on mechanism, 89, and on Bacon, 72). 22. Sarah Rivett and Abram van Engen make a version of this point with respect to the Puritan castaways turned colonizers of New England, noting that they were as often filled with “discontent” and “despair” as with any sense of a “global mission” (676, 683). 23. As Donald Wilcox argues, Aquinas’s great synthesis, embodied in a “uniform code of social ethics” and epistemological universalization, could itself be understood as a move away from the more Augustinian tenor of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which emphasized faith’s primacy over reason and on the concurrently “personal and individual” experience of knowing God (232–­36). 24. From this vantage, then, it makes little sense for Levi, drawing on the view of Petrarch as the “first modern man,” to oppose his “rich curiosity about the meaning of human experience” to the purported antihumanism of Augustine and Ockham (85, 359–­64). After all, Petrarch’s most introspective text by far, My Secret Book, is structured as a dialogue between an autobiographical speaker and Augustine himself, one mirroring the Confessions in positing a struggle within the will. Moreover, its chief tone is one of unremitting anxiety over the state of the speaker’s soul—­and this anxiety does not hinder but, just as in Augustine’s own case, gener­ ates the text’s elaborated journey into self-­exploration. 25. The dark materialist Eugene Thacker, in his work on the “radically unhuman,” writes well about this doubled position, although his philosophy disallows that it might respond to a certain conception of God, rather than merely being salved thereby (96).

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26. Alexander Koyré’s seminal account of these exchanges, while superb on the two positions’ differences, does risk contributing to the tendency to blur them, for he finally emphasizes that what gains traction going forward represents a synthesis of the two (and that it was Leibniz, strikingly, who was more willing to accept the idea of an infinite universe, 273–­76). 27. As Arthur Lovejoy notes, “A contemporary, in an unpublished manuscript discovered in the Bibliotheque Nationale in the 1880’s, declared that ‘the greater part of these Maxims have been taken from an English book . . . Le Sonde de la Conscience,’ ” as Dyke’s text was titled in its 1643 French translation, which was very popular among the Jansenists whose salons La Rochefoucauld, along with Pascal, frequented (Lovejoy 31–­32). 28. A similar point can and has of course been made regarding Paradise Lost (1667); as Jesse Molesworth puts it, “in attempting to explain the existence of Evil, in granting psychological motivation to its personification, in dwelling so meticulously and so vividly on the reasons for its necessity, the narrative eventually comes . . . to glorify and glamorize Evil” (3). Or, in Michael Walzer’s words, “Only in a Calvinist system could Satan be viewed dramatically as a rebel against the arbitrary sovereign of the universe” (154). 29. On the connection to Hobbes, see also Fiering, Moral Philosophy 155. As Fiering writes, “One of the ironies of the period is that cynics and libertines borrowed Calvinist insight into the worst qualities of human nature without also borrowing the inherent optimism of the theory of conversion” (190). 30. See Theory of Moral Sentiments part 7, sec. 2; Clark, La Rochefoucauld 203–­4. 31. Relatedly, see McKeon on the “ ‘criminal’ or ‘rogue’ biography” of the English picaresque (97–­98). Bunyan’s later cautionary tale Life and Death of Mr. Badman has even been deemed by some a “Puritan rogue novel” in which Bunyan “flirt[s] with the picaresque” despite himself, precisely because its antihero keeps backsliding each time he vows to mend his ways (Sim 97, 102). 32. Hence, Beal’s account of Grace Abounding as a kind of modernized “Pauline epistle” (147–­48). “Is the law sinful?” Paul asks. “Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead.” 33. For more on this destabilization, see Ingham’s account of Blumenberg in The Medie­ val New. 34. See Manuel. 35. As Michael Heyd details, attacks on “enthusiasm” spread from a critique of German mysticism to, in the hands of English writers, one on any form of radical Protestantism seen to hyperbolize the Protestant emphasis on subjective judgment. See also Klein and La Vopa. 36. Concerns about the dangers of excessive introspection, it should be noted, were raised already in Bunyan’s time by some Puritans themselves, such as Richard Baxter (see Damrosch 52–­55). As MacDonald points out, Burton’s 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy “laid the groundwork for the Anglican attack” here, by fearing that among the consequences of Puritans’ disregard for all human institutions in favor of the teachings of “their own phantastical spirits,” and of their preachers’ relentless focus on predestination, “they so rent, tear and wound men’s consciences, that they are almost mad, and at their wits’ end” (quoted in MacDonald 224). 37. As Jerome Huyler emphasizes, the key for writers like Locke was to chart a middle ground between perceived Puritan excesses and the repressive reaction against these, clearing the way for a less threatening conception of individual right.

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38. See, e.g., the account of Richardson in Pavel’s Lives of the Novel, esp. 128. On the rise of sentiment more broadly, see Gaukroger. 39. While Hirschman, like Marx, is appropriately skeptical of claims made for a “doux com­ merce” at the time of, to begin with, the peak of the slave trade, he also emphasizes the fact that such arguments grew specifically out of the “search for a way of avoiding society’s ruin” following the upheavals of the seventeenth century (130). In his view, the genealogy of modernity critique beginning with Romanticism and continuing through Marx, Freud, and Weber risks losing sight of these aims in their nostalgia for an earlier era of passion seen as key to a fuller “human personality,” whereas Locke and the rest were quite clear-­eyed about their goal of replacing such views, for them inherently “destructive,” with what they saw as stabler formulations (132–­33). 40. See the discussion of this in Davidson. As he notes, Locke’s insistence here on the power to suspend action and deliberate on the best course has led a number of commentators to see him as in fact a kind of “libertarian” making a brief for free will or what the medieval philosophers would have called the “liberty of indifference” (214). In his own time, Davidson points out, the Arminian Philippus van Limborch read Locke this way, and Jonathan Edwards may have also. Locke’s refutations in response, however, make clear how important it was to him to stave off the Augustinian conception of a will undetermined by reason. 41. On the importance of both of these strands, see Armstrong and Tennenhouse, “A Mind for Passion.” 42. Indeed, even Hutchinson’s famously subversive critique of the New England ministry, preached to other women in her home, asserted that those divines were untrue to their own precepts—­in essence, not Puritan enough. Her notion that the clergy had drifted toward a “covenant of works,” in which human beings could assist themselves on the path to heaven, was essentially the same charge against tendencies toward Lockean self-­sufficiency that would be made a century later during the Great Awakening. 43. Although Jonathan Edwards wrote directly against the new ideas of an innate moral sense as propounded by Hutcheson and others, the Scots shared with the younger Calvinists an emphasis on religious experience and, hence, virtue as based in the “affections,” or sentiments, rather than the understanding (Noll 110). By midcentury, Edwards’s student Joseph Bellamy was casting Christ’s work as “the restoration of moral order in the universe,” opening the door to a benevolent sense of salvation as achievable by all (Noll 134–­35). Shortly after, the Scottish clergyman John Witherspoon took over the presidency of Princeton, where his outspoken promulgation of Hutcheson’s ideas reached the ears of James Madison, among others (Noll 105–­6). In sum, just as Jerome Huyler suggests that the everyday “Lockeanism” of ordinary Americans by 1763 contributed to their revolutionary fervor, so did Witherspoon’s “adapt[ation of] the Scottish school of philosophy to the requirements of American Calvinism” enable sentimental ideas to inflect that fervor as well, as Sarah Knott and others have argued (Howe 8). 44. As Noll notes, Clark makes these points as part of a broader argument his work and mine here refutes concerning the necessary ties between heterodoxy and modernity. By the late eighteenth century, however, the more down-­to-­earth understanding of Christ originally attributable to “Socinian” or “Arian” heresy had become commonplace in a burgeoning American evangelicalism. 45. See Bushman 276–­79; Huyler 204–­5; and Howe 24–­32. 46. See Ramsey (50) on this point. 47. See Gothic Text (34) and Preromanticism (68–­69). 48. The potential for a link between Puritan interiority and the gothic has at times been recognized. Victor Sage points out that Ian Watt’s relegation of Puritan interiority to the novel’s

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infancy works only if one ignores “non-­realistic” strains within the novel that continue through the nineteenth century and beyond (72). For Sage, what horrifies in the gothic is, on the one hand, the “theological uncertainty” wrought by the God of will (xvii), as emblematic of the protagonist’s existential anxiety, and, on the other, the “monstrous” revelations of the demand for self-­examination, as exemplified by the figure of the appalling double within (xix). Joel Porte makes a similar argument about American literature, including Charles Brockden Brown’s. 49. Carwin, we should note, is inspired precisely by the commitment of the Wielands and their close friends to Enlightenment principles—­and, later, by Clara’s seemingly impregnable virtue—­to test their limits. What Wieland reveals is not simply those principles’ inadequacy in the face of what exceeds their grasp; moreover, it shows how not only in Theodore but in Clara herself, the precepts of duty and virtue can coexist with more perverse underpinnings. If in the former’s case, the absence of certainties drives him to submit to a tyrannical deity, in Clara’s, we see a species of unharnessed curiosity that leads her to modalities of experiment, with her own feelings and those of others, that render her not so different from the troublemaking Carwin. 50. See, e.g., Tompkins. 51. For another take on Brown’s critique of externalism, see Ogden’s reading of his Edgar Huntly. 52. The “liberal” Kant here may also be linked to the reading of Kant simply emphasizing the role of reason and choice in his theory of the subject. Iain Morrison discusses this dominant strand in order to make the general point that the question of how the will is then motivated, rather than simply intellectually convinced, by the moral law often drops out. 53. As with Defoe, even Kant’s contemporary readers (such as Schiller and Goethe) saw this simply as residual orthodoxy on Kant’s part, “thoroughly at variance with the ‘critical’ spirit of his moral philosophy” (Allison 146). 54. The first of these is in “Kant avec Sade” in Écrits; the second in The Ethics of Psychoanaly­ sis (109–­10). 55. See Ticklish 178. 56. Hawthorne was evidently a reader of Bacon, according to his son Julian (Lundblad 35). 57. It is perhaps surprising that Bercovitch does not consider the latter to be in any way political work (would he say the same thing about a women’s shelter?). Chapter Two 1. See Fluck, “Reading Early American Fiction,” on the American version of this story. 2. Stoddard, The Morgesons 46–­47. 3. See Matlack 76–­77. 4. See her letter to Margaret Sweat, November 8, 1853 (Letters 18). “Novel of formation” is Marianne Hirsch’s apt term. 5. As James Hardin notes, Goethe did not use this term himself for his work (“Introduction,” in Reflection and Action). Fritz Martini, in the same volume, traces its first usage to two 1819–­20 lectures by Prof. Karl von Morgenstern of Dorpat (1–­4). 6. Blumenbach’s racial theories offer a complex legacy to the present day. On the one hand, he stressed the shared background of all human beings; on the other, he believed environmental differences had led to “degenerations” from an original, purportedly Caucasian type. Yet despite the use of this term, Blumenbach actually wrote strongly against hierarchical accounts of racial

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difference (which other writers attempted to draw on his theories to propound), giving especial emphasis to his view of the intellectual and artistic accomplishments of the Black African. 7. In his 1792 English translation, Alexander Crichton uses the Latin word nisus to translate Trieb, on the grounds of there being no English equivalent (An Essay on Generation ix–­x). 8. As Blumenbach states, when the wounded parts regrow, the overall animal is “always diminished in bulk,” yet clearly “renewed” (69). He notes that in “man and other warm-­blooded animals the power of reproduction is much more limited” (72) (though not absent, 73). 9. Two of the only essays in English to sustainedly explore this possibility are Thomas Pfau’s “Of Ends and Endings” and Carl Niekerk’s unpublished “Reading Goethe with Blumenbach.” 10. Focusing on the same group of characters, who turn out to be mostly women (Mignon, Aurelie, the Schöne Seele), Carl Niekerk makes a similar claim: both as physical types and in the choices they make, as well as, notably, in their sexuality, these figures are depicted as “disproportionate” or out of balance, with the result that they cannot end up as “viable life form[s]” (14, 17). 11. As Astrida Tantillo shows, his own scientific works, such as “The Metamorphosis of Plants” (1790) repeatedly stress the ill effects of imbalance, as when overwatering turns out to be as damaging to a plant as the reverse (an idea Tantillo herself extends to Elective Affinities [143]). 12. As Niekerk points out, Blumenbach spends considerable time in his essay describing in value-­neutral terms what he calls “the many deviations of the formative process from its usual course” (79), in a section that begins by refuting those who deny the reality of hermaphroditism. This interest is in keeping with what historians of science have described as the era’s more general “affirmation of nature’s variety” (Reill 74), of which Blumenbach’s writings on race formed a part. Hence, as Niekerk notes, while some of Goethe’s characters seem doomed by their biology, others, like Wilhelm himself, are granted powers of “regenera[tion]” that have an equally bodily basis—­in part by taking advantage of their ability, unlike plants, to move around through travel and thus avoid being wholly defined by any one “biological or cultural setting” (15, 18)—­much, as we will see, like Stoddard’s Cassy. 13. I must diverge here from Amanda Jo Goldstein’s construal of Goethe’s “Bildungstrieb” in her impressive study Sweet Science, which replaces Goethe’s language of “unity and freedom” (as well as “striving”) with “activity” to render an account of Goethe’s thought more in keeping with the depersonalized vitalism preferred today (81). 14. Tantillo 78, 68; see also 149 and elsewhere. Coleridge, who met Blumenbach and attended his lectures during a sojourn in Göttingen from 1798 to 1799, affirmed a similar linkage in his notebooks, stating his desire to “investigate the connection of the Imagination with the Bildungstrieb.” (See Notebooks, 1808–­1819.) Coleridge, too, seems to have wanted to understand these ideas about an “inner power” in “Nature” as synonymous with granting it a “Will” (see Levere 301). In a posthumously published essay on “The Theory of Life,” he defined “Life” as “the principle of individuation,” that which sets each organism off from “the universal life of the planet”—­a principle achieving its highest realization in man, who alone “begins a new series beyond the appropriate limits of physiology” (Miscellanies 385, 390). 15. See Wolfe, “Why” 194. 16. Rather, “G. E. Stahl” 42. 17. This isn’t to say, of course, that inorganic matter is not itself subject to gradual change, as chemistry was beginning to better understand during the same period. For, say, the rock itself, however, this process was greeted with a notable “indifference,” in stark contrast to the interestedness and urgency of the living thing. See Blumenbach (61) on this issue in crystals. 18. See Reill 124.

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19. On the return to vitalism, see, among others, Colebrook, Normandin and Wolfe, Greco, and Mitchell. As we will see in the final section, most fascinatingly, perhaps, a few recent writings make the case for a reconsideration of vitalism within the field of biology itself (e.g., Sonnenschein et al., Gilbert and Sarkar, and Oyama). 20. See, e.g., Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Coole and Frost, eds., New Materialisms; and Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson. 21. Important exceptions to this tendency can be found by critics working to reconsider vitalism from within the field of literary Romanticism itself, such as Robert Mitchell and Gavin Budge. 22. We can contrast Reill’s work, in this regard, with that of Elizabeth A. Williams on the vitalism of Montpellier in France, which she gathers under the rubric of “the medical science of man” or “anthropological medicine” (Physical 1; see also 18). 23. See Geyer-­Kordesch “Stahl” 76. 24. In fact, whether to think of fevers as to be remedied or encouraged remains debated to the present day. 25. As Lester King notes, while “corpuscular” theories like Boyle’s did acknowledge “the relationship into which the component parts enter” (which Boyle called “texture”), they saw this larger structure as a secondary concern, a mere “accident” (King xx). 26. It did so, indeed, in a way not wholly different from Kant’s later arguments in the Cri­ tique of Judgment. See Richards on this, as well as Rather (44). 27. Geyer-­Kordesch grasps this best, suggesting that “Stahl had reintroduced the soul on modernistic terms” (“Stahl” 76). 28. See Duchesneau. 29. As Elizabeth Haigh puts it, “As it must be in the final analysis for all vitalists, Stahl considered the most impressive feature of living matter to be its freedom from decay or decomposition as long as life is present” (74). 30. Again, Geyer-­Kordesch’s greater recognition of the importance of Stahl’s Pietism enables her to come closer to this understanding, as when she states that for Stahl “direction (desire and aversion) is not inherent in matter” (“Passions” 158); here the motive power of the anima is specifically described as the inclination of the will. For a nontheological version of the same claim, see Jacob, who states, “The body is thus [for Stahl], in Schopenhauerian terms, the objectification of the soul as will” (58). 31. E.g., Duchesneau 219. 32. On Hoffmann’s objections, see King, especially 126–­27, 130. 33. See Wright, “Materialism” 180. 34. I refer here to the work of Johann Heinroth and Karl Ideler; see the discussions in Otto Marx (“German Romantic Psychiatry,” parts 1 and 2) as well as in Rather (49). 35. See Rather 46; Geyer-­Kordesch, “Passions” 154. 36. If Stahl’s anima, as we saw, was capable of working both for and against the organism’s persistence, Whytt’s “sentient principle” more reliably “guarantee[d] [the body’s] functional integration” (Vickers 150). 37. As R. K. French writes, the more automatistic, nerve-­based idea of sympathy in writers like Whytt and James Johnstone allowed for a conception that “prevent[ed] the action of the soul reaching the viscera, which were thus protected against whims of the will” (Robert 162). 38. Where Haller had influentially distinguished sensibility, as a higher-­order process, from “irritability” as a merely physical one, for Whytt, “irritability depended on sensibility, and this

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upon the nerves” (French, Robert 69; see also Vickers 153). On Whytt and Cullen, see French, Robert; Wright, “Metaphysics”; Wright, “Materialism”; and Vickers. 39. See Gaukroger 389–­90. 40. As Reill points out, such ideas aimed to displace earlier vitalist ones for which differing parts—­both within and without—­were understood as more “independent participants reaching consensus within an ‘assembly of forces’ ” (213). 41. Whytt’s sentient principle, as Neil Vickers explains, “was not an autonomous force in the body in the manner of the soul in [Stahl]; rather . . . it was roused into activity by external stimuli” (150). 42. See Vickers 147; on Whytt, French, Robert 44. 43. See Baym (52) on Lydia Maria Child’s dissent from the earlier fiction of Susanna Rowson. 44. William Wells Brown’s Clotel, published in 1853, appeared from a British press, and Hannah Crafts’s more recently rediscovered The Bondwoman’s Narrative, which may have been written earlier than Wilson’s, did not appear in print at all during its author’s lifetime. 45. Indeed, in the moment where Frado threatens to strike her mistress, it is hard not to hear an echo of Byron’s oft-­quoted couplet from Childe Harold, “Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not / Who would be free themselves must strike the blow” (discussed in Hickman 355–­63). 46. See Richards 21. 47. The result was, on the one hand, a highly Stahlian approach to medical treatment in 1790s Germany, shunning things like leeches that weakened an organism’s natural “regulating powers,” and, on the other, a Romantic philosophy steeped in Brunonian notions (see Neubauer). 48. See Richards 142; Huneman 80; and Steigerwald 290. As Joan Steigerwald explains, for Schelling, even Brown’s own conceptualization of excitability suffered from its sensibility-­like emphasis on “receptivity.” In Schelling’s own account, “receptivity” was always balanced with an inner “activity” that was stimulated, and the organism had to be understood as defined by a capacity “both to respond to, and yet to distinguish itself from,” the external world (289, 288). 49. Hence, Brown’s Bichat-­like claim that “life is a forced state” and his narrative sense of the individual as possessing a given fund of life force to be expended over the course of his existence (see Lawrence, “Cullen” 19). 50. See John Neubauer, “Dr. John Brown and Early Romanticism” 370. 51. As Elizabeth Williams notes in her unparalleled scholarship on Montpellier, its vitalist turn commenced with the early eighteenth-­century work of François Boissier de Sauvages, who turned to Stahl’s ideas to formulate his thesis on body/mind linkages and “the passional origins of disease” (Cultural 81). According to R. K. French, while Sauvages admired Whytt, he actually drew directly on writers Whytt dismissed, such as Frank Nicholls, with his Stahlian conception of “the freedom of the soul . . . and its resulting anomalous behaviour. The soul is inept, imprudent and infirm; it may be mistaken, or it may panic, and it is the business of the physician to create the circumstances in which the soul can regain its normal sagacity and healing powers” (“Sauvages, Whytt” 44). Crucially, however, the passions could themselves also act as part of that healing process. As Philippe Huneman writes in his overview of Montpellier vitalism as a precursor to the early nineteenth-­century development of psychiatry in France, “Passions, being properly nested in the animal economy, could either provoke a disease, or help or delay its curation” (623). Overall, Montpellier’s broad skepticism regarding the “Enlightenment discourse of perfectibility” (and concomitant emphasis on “the variability and diversity of human phenomena” [Williams, Physical 9]) may have borne some relation to its physicians’ comfort with radical Protestant (Jansenist and Calvinist) ideas, as Williams documents (5, 83).

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52. See Charland on this aspect. 53. Cited in Bell, German Tradition 62. 54. Crichton was, on the one hand, a celebrated surgeon whose extensive discussion of the passions in his 1798 Inquiry into the Nature and Origins of Mental Derangement was prefaced by the claim that the passions would therein be considered as “mere phenomena, the natural causes of which are to be inquired into” (2:99). On the other hand, his most formative intellectual influences could be traced to a three-­year stay in Germany and Austria in the 1780s, where he first encountered Blumenbach and what Dora Weiner terms “that special German approach to the philosophy of life sciences during the Enlightenment, a combination of anthropology, natural history, psychology, and pietism”—­that is, “Enlightenment vitalism” in its particular Stahlian form (“Part II” 293). 55. Hume’s usage of “passions” and “emotions” is famously convoluted, as Charland notes; the terms can appear in his work to be synonymous rather than opposed. 56. See Brumberg. 57. The paraphrase is Stoddard’s (in a letter to Stedman); Lowell’s letter to her has not survived. 58. The first of these is Julian Hawthorne, commenting on the reissue of The Morgesons in 1889. The quotes are taken from Matlack 553, 264. 59. The quote here seems inspired by a passage in Balzac’s Louis Lambert: “There are moments when the spirit of vitality seems to abandon me. . . . At those times . . . some argumentative demon stands before me, showing me the void beneath the most real possessions. This pitiless demon mows down every flower, and mocks at the sweetest feelings, saying, ‘Well—­and then?’ He mars the fairest work by showing me its skeleton, and reveals the mechanisms of things while hiding the beautiful results” (87). 60. Cassy, after her mother’s death, says something similar: “The old-­fashioned asceticism which considered air, sleep, food as mere necessities was stupid” (224). 61. Flag root might have had a particularly sexual connotation for readers of Whitman’s Calamus poems. 62. See Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America. 63. And if in the case of Ben and Verry, this could look like the outcome of a predetermined weakness that Moretti and Niekerk critique in Goethe, Charles’s case does not fit this model. 64. For a splendid account of mesmerism’s American trajectory, see Ogden’s Credulity. 65. To Lilian Whiting, June 25, 1888, in Letters 202. Whiting had compared Stoddard to Balzac in a review of her novel Two Men. 66. To Edmund Clarence Stedman, August 25, 1860; to Stedman, August 21, 1891; to Margaret Sweat, June 4, 1852; to Stedman, August 21, 1891; to Stedman, August 25, 1860; to Sweat, March 20, 1854, in Letters 57, 218, 3, 218, 57, 20. 67. See Letters 222. 68. For a feminist reading of the role of male medical expertise in Elsie, see Davis. 69. See Clarke and Jacyna 102. 70. On Alison’s relation to Hall and Whytt, see Leys, From Sympathy to Reflex. 71. Within the history of psychology, Edward Reed’s iconoclastic From Soul to Mind stands out for its construal of both the neo-­Cartesianism of Hall and the new mechanistic monism that followed as reactions against vitalism, and, hence, as more similar to one another than the usual narrative opposing them would suggest. (For him, the question is, thus, “Why . . . did it take the transition from soul to mind for the theory of spinal reflexes to gain acceptance?” [xv].)

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72. See also Daston. 73. Cf. Scheerer (47) on William James (see chapter 4 for more on this). 74. John Dewey, whose ideas overlapped with James’s, would critique the reflex arc as an atomistic view of what in reality was always “a continuous, coordinated, adaptive activity” (O’Donnell 173). Yet Dewey’s evolutionarily and pragmatically inflected functionalism, while bringing back a version of will-­talk, was not exactly the tradition thereof that I want to argue for in this chapter, being necessarily more instrumental and less internally conflictual in kind; see chapter 5 for more on this distinction. 75. For more on Locke’s work on value, see Tamarkin. 76. See Greco. 77. Amanda Jo Goldstein, recognizing this, thus rejects vitalism as a new materialist precursor. 78. See, e.g., the “Avant-­Propos” to La Formation du Concept de Réflexe, and, on the “philosophically inexcusable” claim that life’s laws form an “exception,” an imperium in imperio, to those of physical nature, “Aspects of Vitalism” (Knowledge 70). 79. Indeed, as Giuseppe Bianco has fascinatingly shown, Canguilhem’s initially pejorative stance toward Bergsonian vitalism shifted after the years he spent training in medicine. Bianco’s in-­depth work on Canguilhem’s intellectual background helps make clear the unhelpfulness of Foucault’s famous line in the sand separating Canguilhem from both Bergson and, more broadly, phenomenology, which Foucault himself wants to link up to nineteenth-­century antivitalism in Birth of the Clinic. 80. As Canguilhem notes, psychiatrists have been more amenable to construing the norm in such terms than other physicians, perhaps because “as there are no separable elementary psychic facts, pathological symptoms cannot be compared with elements of normal consciousness because a symptom has a pathological significance only in its clinical context, which expresses a global disturbance” (Normal 117). 81. For Goldstein on the “norm” specifically, see Organism 327. 82. See Réflexe 164: “L’acte réflexe . . . n’est pas la réponse d’un élément moteur à un élément sensible (one to one des auteurs anglais); l’acte réfléxe, même dans la forme la plus simple, est la réaction d’un être vivant un et indivisible à une excitation du milieu” (164). 83. This also led to a directly Stahlian perspective on fevers (333), though Goldstein, unlike Canguilhem and later Foucault, never cites Stahl in his text. 84. This is, as we saw earlier, an idea that goes back at least to Whytt. And in discussing it, Goldstein makes use, without attribution, of Brown’s notion of “excitability” (71). 85. On will defined as attention, see also Scheerer’s discussion of perceptual control theory. 86. Nietzsche’s influence is perhaps more evident in Canguilhem, who states, in what we might see as a Nietzschean variant on Stahl, “As opposed to some doctors who are too quick to see crimes in diseases because those affected committed some excess or omission somewhere, we think that the power and temptation to fall sick are an essential characteristic of human physiology. To paraphrase a saying of Valéry, we have said that the possible abuse of health is part of health. . . . Human life must not be limited to vegetative life” (Normal 200). Chapter Three 1. As Kenneth Lynn notes, this story was famously recounted by F. O. Matthiessen. 2. For more on Moby-­Dick and the flesh, see Honig, “Charged.”

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3. Or, more recently, Jason Frank, “Pathologies of Freedom.” 4. Matthiessen 444; Chase, Melville 56; Matthiessen 456, 459. See also Pease’s conflation (in “Moby-­Dick and the Cold War”) of Ahab with the Whitman who writes “as if the general will were the sovereign will” (139). 5. See, e.g., Chase, Melville 56; more equivocally, Friedman. 6. See, e.g., Matthiessen. 7. See, e.g., Frank (“Pathologies of Freedom”) and Jonik, both of whose arguments are discussed later in this chapter. 8. Christopher Freeburg writes brilliantly about this scene, and about “blackness” in Melville’s oeuvre more generally, as a sign of the undoing of mastery that sweeps up both “oppressors” and “liberators” alike (Melville and the Idea of Blackness 12). 9. The point of Elizabeth Duquette’s reading, e.g., as well as others such as Samuel Otter’s, is that Ishmael’s no less relentless “taxonomical impulse” toward the whale, as evident in the cetology chapters, similarly imagines that “To grasp the anatomy of the whale is to lay one’s hands on the framework of the cosmos” (Duquette 36; Otter 135). For Duquette, however, the point of this overlap is once more that it allows us to distinguish our narrator (and, hence, Melville) from his captain: all of Ishmael’s attempts at mastering the truth of the whale are shown to end in his recognition of that task’s impossibility. For Otter, by contrast, Ishmael’s “repeated failures” and “incessant irony” hold less interest than the fact that he, like Melville himself, nonetheless “returns again and again to the whale,” seemingly unable to give up the ghost (134). 10. “While American sociologists are very taken with the idea of a functioning community or ‘multicultural society’ emerging from the heterogeneous crew of the Pequod, they are . . . made deeply uncomfortable by how this is achieved, namely Ahab’s charismatic charm” (Werber 53). 11. The book’s commentary on the “calculating” Nantucketers reveals Starbuck to be correct in his presumption that Ahab’s quest for revenge will get in the way of, rather than bolster, his assigned task of augmenting the market for whale oil. The Nantucketers, we are told, do not worry themselves over Ahab’s “moodiness,” for, in their view, such “dark symptoms” seem well suited to “a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales.” Yet in this they are tragically mistaken; the passage’s point lies very much in the unbridgeable gulf, not the fortunate fit, between their goal of a countable “profit” and his of an “audacious” and “supernatural” revenge (158). 12. On the former, see Milder; on the latter, Hurh. 13. Früchtl’s exploration of hyperbolic individualism in The Impertinent Self draws all of its core examples from the mythic forms of American popular culture (the Western, the gangster or detective story, and science-­fiction films such as the Terminator series that center on a version of a larger-­than-­life, typically—­though not always—­male loner figure). He does not thematize the Americanness, however, unlike Cavell, whose work on Romanticism takes many of its examples from nineteenth-­century American prose—­chiefly Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe, though Hawthorne and Melville are also alluded to (see Ordinary 183). 14. On freedom’s “pathologies,” see Frank, “Pathologies of Freedom.” 15. Indeed, these might even combine, if we consider Ahab’s persistent characterization as versions of Montesquieu’s “Oriental despot”—­he is a “sultan,” a “Grand Turk,” a “Khan of the plank”—­and consider the pull such Orientalist figurations possessed over the Romantic imagination (for more on this, see Warren, The Orient and the Young Romantics). 16. See Heimert 525; Stauffer 58–­59; and Griffin 372.

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17. Like Frye, they note that while such nostalgia may take an aristocratic or otherwise “elitist” form, the “diagnosis” rendered remains worthwhile and, indeed, may allow for a more “proletarian” mode of protest also (Löwy and Sayre 251; Frye, Anatomy 306; Frye, Secular 186). 18. See Früchtl 107. Früchtl, while characterizing modernity via the same two poles Löwy and Sayre do—­“emphasis on the willful self ” and the dream of “total integration of the Self into a cosmic community”—­goes so far as to make a version of their argument in reverse, suggesting that the “quest for unity” might be understood as a “hangover” brought on by the drama of the “quest for individual freedom” (103–­4). 19. Relying heavily on the Phenomenology of Spirit, treatments of Hegel as Romantic, such as Isaiah Berlin’s, must necessarily downplay not only Hegel’s strong critiques of Romantic philosophy and literature alike, but, in tandem with these, the powerful defense of the everyday and institutionality at work in a text like Philosophy of Right. As Hegel tartly puts it in the lecture notes appended to that work, “we do not have the alternative of existing in a higher spirituality” (139). One of the most powerful current bodies of writing on Hegel’s thought, Robert Pippin’s, thus treats it compellingly as in many ways a counterpart to literary realism, given their mutual emphasis on the individual’s necessary imbrication and self-­fulfillment within a social world. 20. On Kant’s usage of the two terms as more mixed, see Rosen 7n9. 21. Insanity in fact only arises at all in the Philosophy of Mind because Hegel understands it, in a more extended version of his discussion at the outset of The Philosophy of Right, to define the second of three stages in which the “feeling soul” raises itself to full self-­consciousness (Mind 124). The first stage is defined as one of an undifferentiated, “magical” unity between subject and object, which “dispenses with any mediation” (Mind 97). The earliest movement toward consciousness, then, requires first that the subject oppose itself to the outer world, in order to come into being at all (Mind 127). Insanity, then, entails a stuckness in this second phase, in which self and world are defined in total opposition to each other. Yet here we see how Fichtean that monomaniac interiority is: both in that it can be critiqued as merely “formal,” and (crucially) in that it is “fixed in its opposition to the non-­ego,” as Hegel put it in his critique of Fichte in the History of Philosophy (499). 22. It is with regard to the artist that Hegel makes the strongest distinction between Wille and Willkür, reserving the latter term for the will that makes a wholly personal choice, a choice Hegel goes so far as to term inherently “perverse” (Right 49). 23. This is, as Franco Moretti comments in his discussion of Stendhal and Pushkin, not the interiority as “thoughtful ‘depth’ ” evident in, say, Austen; it is, rather, a later conception, that of “novels contemporaneous with Faust,” in which “interiority appears as a principle of contradiction,” rendering its bearer not “likeable” but “fascinating” (85–­87). 24. See van Zuylen (82–­84) on Kant’s similar admiring view of “vesania.” 25. In fact, recent revisitings of Fichte’s early writings have focused precisely on this topic of the “check” in order to argue against the view of Fichtean philosophy as merely “a sort of grotesque narcissism” (Breazeale 87). The fact that the “I” is said to posit this limitation to itself has led some readers to view it as yet another affirmation of Fichte’s inherently subjectivist stance. As Daniel Breazeale points out, however, the matter in fact cuts both ways: if the check (Anstoß) affects the “I” only insofar as it is posited, its positing (as a limitation on the “I”) is at the same time necessary for that “I” to posit anything at all, including itself. Fichte’s “I” thus comes into being only as a constitutively limited entity, “a subject conscious of its own finitude” (Breazeale 92). Or, as Matthew Altman puts the same point in somewhat stronger terms, “We thus become conscious of ourselves as particular agents by reflecting on a felt limit to our freedom” (277).

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Slavoj Žižek has similarly described Fichte as “the first philosopher to focus on the uncanny contingency in the very heart of subjectivity”; Fichtean subjectivity is thus not about “mastery” but its impossibility (Gabriel and Žižek 142). 26. As Joseph Buchanan wrote in his Philosophy of Human Nature (1812), “Convince me, that there is a faculty in my mind, which is the source of all my actions, and that it is subject to neither sentiment nor reason, and I shall live in continual dread of ruin. If my will, the radical source of all my conduct, is so entirely free, that it can neither be excited by the anticipation of pleasure, nor restrained by the apprehension of pain, how shall I be certain, that it will continue to actuate me in the pursuit of happiness, and not this instant dash my head against the wall, or drive me headlong into the fire?” (314). 27. For a Lacanian account of this dynamic, see Sbriglia. 28. We might think of this through Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the “crack,” which seems particularly appropriate to Ahab given the strange “rod-­like mark” running the length of his body, which may represent an earlier encounter with the lightning storm he defiantly confronts in the chapter “The Candles.” Deleuze describes the crack as a “noisy accident” that, rather than creating a fissure in the body ex nihilo, “incarnate[s]” or “actualize[s]” a deeper, constitutive crack within (155). Ahab calls his an “earthquake life”: a life whose paroxysms are inseparable from a foundational “fault,” something far deeper and more embodied than a “tragic flaw.” It—­the crack—­thus is the “personified impersonal,” in Ahab’s famous phrase, before the latter was ever Moby-­Dick (382). As with Fichte’s Anstoß, it is the impersonality around which personhood, as an inherently conflictual will, forms; it is, as in Lacan, the symptom as both persistent and (both frighteningly and excitingly) generative. 29. Hurh gives a wonderful account of how Melville learned and explored all this with the mad Hegelian Adler. 30. For a notable exception, see Haines, “Thinking with a Wrinkled Brow.” 31. Or see, similarly, Moretti on Ishmael as the “monologic device” that contains and reduces the novel’s “polyphony” in Modern Epic (62–­63). 32. On Melville’s relation to Schopenhauer, see Pritchard. 33. In a famous 1851 letter to Hawthorne, Melville comments with characteristic ambivalence on Goethe’s exhortation to “Live in the all,” that “your separate identity is but a wretched one,” a notion Melville mildly observes to be less than helpful to, say, “a fellow with a raging toothache” (though he goes on to note that “this ‘all’ feeling” does have its moments—­as, e.g., when “lying in the grass on a warm summer’s day”; the error, he states, lies in “the universal application of a temporary feeling”) (qtd. in Jonik 82). 34. See Massumi or the introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, as well as, in Melville studies, Casarino and Jonik. Affect has become so associated with relationality that the terms are used interchangeably; as in Casarino’s reading of “Squeeze of the Hand,” “affects and bodies” are depicted as “gather[ing] up in motley, always more-­than-­human collectivity,” ever escaping the “confinement” of a “particular” self (Massumi 97; Seigworth and Gregg 13). 35. Admittedly, one sees some vacillation on this question in Spinoza himself. The only affect that is always good in Spinoza is “cheerfulness”: as if one could be like Stubb but, rather than by repressing, by thinking of everything. “Joy,” however, is more complex, defined both as “that passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection,” in contrast to sadness—­a definition of joy that subsumes cheerfulness within it as one of its modalities—­but also as most typically found in overly partial form, related only to one thing or “one part of the body” rather than “our health as a whole,” as in the case of pleasure (138, 115, 148).

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36. In a fascinating passage that mocks modernity’s sense of itself as progress (“baby man” boasting of his “science and skill”) by citing the “immemorial” force of nature to destroy us, Ishmael suggests that there has, in fact, been one significant change since “aboriginal” times: “man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it” (224). Our progress, that is—­should we choose to call it that—­rests in a kind of anesthesia. In different ways, we see how a version of this deadened feeling serves as a virtue for whale hunting in Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask—­and perhaps the harpooneers also, with their “tales of terror told in words of mirth” (327). This, then, is where the quest for Moby-­Dick differs; it seems to demand, and to call forth, a more powerful emotional response, one in which fear is stirred so as to be combated by other forms of excitement. 37. In a discussion of thymos as passion, Ricoeur writes, “We reserve the name passion for a class of feelings that cannot be accounted for by a simple derivation from the vital feelings, by a crystallization of emotion, or . . . in any way in the horizon of pleasure. Rather, we are thinking of those great ventures that constitute the dramaturgy of human existence, of Othello’s jealousy, of Rastignac’s ambition. . . . A transcending intention dwells in them. . . . Only an object capable of adumbrating the whole of happiness can summon so much energy, lift man above his ordinary capacities, and make him capable of sacrificing his pleasure while living painfully” (Fallible Man 129). 38. When Bergson, that is, seeks to describe the genesis of “indeterminacy” in human action, he recurs to a language not of open-­endedness or expansiveness but, rather, of “fix[ing],” “condens[ing],” “solidif[ying],” and intensity (Matter 210, 249). 39. We might recall Ahab’s cursing “that mortal inter-­indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books” (50). For Jason Frank in his account of Moby-­Dick from the perspective of political theory, “inter-­indebtedness” is the humane lesson “Squeeze of the Hand” teaches, in its resistance to Ahabism. And yet what then should we say about the narrator of “Cock-­a-­Doodle-­Doo!,” who is inspired by the cock’s heroic song precisely to beat up the representative of those ledgers, his bill collector? What of Moby-­Dick himself, breaching so as to declare himself “free as air” (360; see also 415)? 40. See Milder on this vacillation. 41. See Farr and Williams xvi. 42. Directly inspired by Hegel, Robert Pippin writes a version of this claim as the message of the classic Hollywood Western; in a film like John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the rule of law depends for its instantiation on an occluded—­or sublated—­moment of heroic lawlessness. That is, the transfer of power to its modern, law-­governed form, which appears to transpire as the law-­abiding Jimmy Stewart bests the rampaging “Liberty” Valance in a gunfight, in fact requires a hidden intervention by John Wayne’s character, whose shooting of Liberty from the shadows is later ascribed to Stewart’s act of self-­defense. 43. In fact, these two usages were, historically, less far apart than it might seem. The Jansenists Arnauld and Pascal, whom Riley credits with the term’s seventeenth-­century origination, already extended its reference beyond theology to include the will of bodies politic, and even purely theological discussions of the volonté générale possessed a “political” vector insofar as they concerned the justice or injustice of God. (Already in these debates, the issues at hand could appear quite similarly, as theologians sought to explain the conundrum of how God could both will, overarchingly, to treat all men equally—­by willing salvation for all, as Paul had stated—­while at the same time be willing in practice to condemn some and save others.) 44. See, e.g., the invocations of the work of Hardt and Negri in Pease and Casarino. As William Rasch argues, Hardt and Negri definitively sever constituent from constituted power

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in order to construe the former as a repository of sheer potentiality that, never permitting its coalescence into institutional form, elides the necessity of any self-­association with the evils of sovereignty. This account suggests Schmitt’s anarchistic atheism: “the right emerges by itself ” as what is immanent to “life” (66). As Rasch puts it, in Hardt and Negri the “post-­Empire political state” appears as “a quasi-­natural outgrowth of desire, labor, and productivity”—­very much as in James and Casarino alike (116). The result, as we see in James, is that any “opposition” to the submerging of all “singularities” in the “multitude” appears as “unnatural, morally perverse . . . counter to the best interests of life” itself (Rasch 116). As Bonnie Honig underscores in her reading of Moby-­Dick, “Democratic agency depends, however, not just on working our way out of the problem of sovereignty but also working our way back into it” (“Charged” 158). 45. See also Jason Frank’s arguments in Constituent Moments, which he extends to Moby-­ Dick in “The Pathologies of Freedom in Melville’s America.” 46. This is a somewhat unfair account of Arendt, however, who in fact critiques the Americans for their refusal to believe affect can have any positive role in politics. 47. See the fourth chapter of Honig’s Political Theory. 48. Boyd in Farr and Williams 260–­61; see also Williams in Farr and Williams 130. 49. It is worth noting, moreover, that in Rousseau’s argument the general will is not ac­ tive, except as a constituting power. It is the role of the magistrate or executive to carry out the people’s will (laws). 50. As George Shulman eloquently puts it, in a powerful essay I discovered only late in the writing of this book, “Ahab models not an imperial or Promethean pathology we can avoid or overcome, but a democratic paradox we must undergo” (73). 51. This is closer to Johnston’s account of the tragic (“By doing we forgo”), which we can distinguish from Frank’s. 52. In this respect, the harpooneers function rather like the apparently flawless Black “handsome sailor” in Billy Budd, as wonderfully discussed by Jonathan Elmer in “Was Billy Black?” 53. On the one hand, Hegel appears to focus most on the complaint that Rousseau’s theory begins with the individual will in the same problematic (that is, willful) form we see in the Romantics. This could be seen in the conception of the state as beginning in a “contract,” based on the “arbitrary will and opinions” of such individuals (Right 277). The event of the French Revolution, then, which Hegel praises as the first instance in human history of the re-­formation of a state “from first principles and purely in terms of thought,” as a result falls prey to the same problem identified in Romanticism: the definition of the will as arbitrary choice leads to the idealization of “the flight from every content as a limitation,” and hence the evacuation of all “difference” in “universality,” the “intolerance toward everything particular” that ends in the impossibility of forming any “institutions” whatsoever, for these turn out to be “incompatible with the abstract self-­consciousness of equality” (Right 38–­39). 54. See the discussion of the two sides here in Bersani (Culture of Redemption 147), who uses such moments to conclude that the ship must be seen as “a society wholly outside society.” Melville had been introduced to the colorful Anacharsis Clootz via the pages of Carlyle’s French Revolution. Clootz, notably, both radicalized the Revolution’s ideals beyond the political space of the nation, conceiving a Universal Republic open to all ordinary persons of the world, and eventually met his downfall at its leaders’ hands, in what Carlyle paints as a kind of grotesque parody of his own dream: “massed swiftly into a lump” in prison with a “miscellany of Nondescripts,” as the Revolution began “verily devouring its own children” (Reader 310). 55. See Mouffe 129–­38.

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56. See also her critique of the way both “moral-­universalistic” and “ethical-­particularistic” political theories can amount, in her view, to avoidances of the political as irreducible antagonism (129). 57. Fukuyama 163. 58. As Mouffe puts it, “To imagine that pluralist democracy could ever be perfectly instantiated is to transform it into a self-­refuting ideal, since the condition of possibility of a pluralist democracy is at the same time the condition of impossibility of its perfect implementation” (16). Chapter Four 1. Ironically, James himself had applied some of these same ideas in his critiques of the aestheticist movement (see Freedman). 2. Though I focus on Robert Pippin’s arguments here, similar treatments have been mounted by other moral philosophers, including Cora Diamond and Martha Nussbaum. 3. Ford Madox Ford also argued in 1913 that James, “more than anybody, has observed human society as it now is” (Edel, Essays 48). 4. Hence, Dorothea Krook-Gilead argues that the reason for his focus on the wealthy lies in their structurally determined capacity for freedom and power, as in the case of Shakespeare’s royalty. See also Paul Stasi, “ ‘The Freedom to See.’ ” 5. Dorothy Hale makes this point in Social Formalism. 6. See also Perry 1:206. 7. This despite the fact, Edel comments, that Henry “never felt better or stronger than when he had completed a morning’s work. A good day’s writing gave him a sense of strength, of control over chaos, a victory of order and clarity over the confused battle for existence” (Life 2:159). 8. As experienced, it was a state of “tension,” the necessary corollary of “doubt and hesitancy” (1137). Though later he reverses this, claiming deliberating is free and easy so as to make decision making appear “sober and strenuous” (1140). 9. See his letter to Henry (Perry 1:272); note James uses the term “monism” (Perry 2:380), but as Perry suggests on 2:364, he means dualism. 10. See Ryan 14, as well as James, “Does Consciousness Exist?” 11. James’s use of these terms allowed him to assert that second-­order reflections were no different in kind from sense impressions. 12. James’s critique of associationism’s passively receiving consciousness allowed this receptivity to be active: Perry 1:454, 459. 13. He makes this point about Bergson’s influence in Pluralistic Universe (726). 14. On Bergson-­mania during this era, see Schwartz. 15. On James’s relationship with Bergson, see Perry 2:599–­633. 16. While these citations appear in the broader first chapter of Pluralistic Universe, they are echoed when Bergson is later introduced (see Pluralistic 723–­26) as well as in James’s contemporaneous essay “Bradley or Bergson?,” where Bergson’s theory is presented as a “way to know reality intimately” and to “get our sympathetic imagination to enlarge their bounds” (1267). Bergson himself called intuition a mode of “intellectual sympathy” (quoted in Schwartz 289). 17. Albeit Hocks is a precursor: see Simon, Critical Reception 83. 18. The question of James’s equivocal, and at times disturbing, depiction of the Jewish immigrant population has received the most probing attention here (e.g., by Buelens). The perspective Posnock enjoins, however, is arguably corroborated by a famous letter James wrote to his

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much more despairing, and more anti-­Semitic, companion Henry Adams, repudiating his sense that all had gone to the dogs: “You see I still, in the presence of life (or what you deny to be such) have reactions—­as many as possible. . . . It’s, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist . . . an inexhaustible sensibility” (Letters 130). 19. For a queer reading of Strether, see Haralson and Ohi. 20. See not only Evans, “Relating,” but also Grimstad. 21. It also arguably reads these figures through the Big Will of our present moment, social media, as is made explicit in Stier. 22. See Ngai, “Network Aesthetics,” for an especially powerful critique of Latour along these lines. 23. That Strether speaks of the latter two instances as if he were within a painting amplifies James’s sense in the American preface that this is a kind of fantasy space. 24. Posnock cites Rorty making fun of Bergsonism’s nostalgia for the utopianized preconceptual (106). He also draws on Adorno’s critique of Bergson to argue that James’s Bergsonian “protest against identity logic reinstates it” in the sense that, doing away with any sense of what Adorno calls “solidified” reality (or of dialectic), it in fact shores up a more absolutized “sovereign freedom” (125). 25. See Habegger (211), on James Sr.’s Society the Redeemed Form of Man. 26. Habegger 227–­29. 27. See Bordogna on Edward Bellamy’s Religion of Solidarity, in which he spoke of overcoming the “instinct of finity” (self) and opening oneself to the “infinity” of merger with others, a “larger truer self ” in Bordogna’s words (191). After the success of Bellamy’s Fourier-­inspired utopian novel Looking Backward, John Dewey would deem him a “great American prophet” (Fesmire 104). 28. From a letter to his parents, originally cited in Neal Coghlan, Young John Dewey: An Es­ say in American Intellectual History, 148 (quoted in Diggins 368). As Dewey put it in The Ethics of Democracy (1888), given its founding on the “ultimate ethical ideal[s]” of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” democracy to him bespoke “a society in which the distinction between the spiritual and the secular has ceased, and . . . the divine and the human organization are one” (quoted in Kloppenberg 140). 29. See Noble (Paradox 82–­84) on Baldwin, who got the idea of a Christianity/evolution merger from McCosh, and Noble (Paradox 116) on Cooley. 30. See also Noble, Paradox 80. 31. One can, however, also see these arguments as coextensive with the lengthier process Foucault describes in The Birth of Biopolitics regarding the advent of civil society (see 295, 319). 32. See Noble, Paradox, on Cooley (112, 116), and Diggins on Dewey (288). 33. From Mental Development (1897), quoted in Cohen, Self 122. 34. On the relation between pragmatism and Chicago functionalism as pioneered by Dewey (a holistic behaviorism based on responsiveness to environment), see Origins of Behaviorism 171. 35. As Livingston notes, one might glean a sense of these men’s shared influence from the work of a younger scholar like Jessie Taft, a student of Mead’s who wrote of her indebtedness to all of them in a 1913 dissertation arguing for the by then familiar claim that “The freedom that was supposed to reside in the individual is seen to be realized only through society,” an idea she took in a feminist direction (see Livingston 75–­76). 36. As Gale notes, later paeans like Dewey’s 1940 “The Vanishing Subject in the Psychology of James” draw more on the late, radical-­empiricist James than on either Principles or his other earlier work (Gale 50).

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37. James Kloppenberg makes a version of this argument with respect to William, linking him to T. H. Green in this regard: these men’s “concentration on both individuals and their community characterized these thinkers’ unclassifiable attitude toward society and politics. Doctrines of social organicism, which attracted so many of their contemporaries, never appealed to them. They refused to hypostatize society and ignore individuals” (148). Contrast Dewey, who argued that the individual, as “society concentrated,” “embodies and realizes within himself the spirit and will of the whole social organism” (in Ethics of Democracy, quoted in Feffer 77). 38. See Kloppenberg 116, 131. 39. See Perry 1:150, 726–­27; 2:485, 584–­85. 40. One can hear echoes, in the double portrayal here, of other encounters with capitalist and specifically turn-­of-­the-­century American modernity: in particular, José Martí’s memorable depiction of Coney Island. 41. As we have seen, of course, that organicist element is even more present in the work of American social-­self theorists like Dewey, as well as in that of William James and, perhaps most fully, the relational critics of the present day who read these writers in tandem with the Lebens­ philosophie of Bergson. 42. Indeed, Jeannie Morefield argues that concerns about the necessity for dissension from state authority in cases such as slavery led New Liberals like Bosanquet to modify Hegel and “theorize a social whole distinct from that of the state,” such that “the moment of resolution between the universal and particular was assumed to take place within the organic body of society” (152, emphasis mine). 43. As Sandra den Otter puts it, “To Bosanquet the critical question was how freedom, the distinguishing characteristic of humanity, could be reconciled with political obligation” (153). The point was, as in Hegel, that “human personality was actualized only in society” (153). In Bosanquet’s case, however—­unlike that of more politically minded New Liberals such as Hob­ house—­this led to a problematic tendency to assign responsibility for social reform nearly completely to individual “character” (Den Otter 195). 44. Cf. Latour’s critique of Durkheim via Gabriel Tarde. 45. The key, indeed, may well lie in the role of the individual will. In Pippin, “will” always suggests a kind of cold, rigid attempt at controlling life that can only be disastrous for true human interaction. (See, e.g., his account of “willful” Maggie in The Golden Bowl, her “steel will” related to Pippin’s seeing her as a “cold,” “prim little nun” [Henry James 77–­80]. And in Wings, Kate Croy’s plan derives from the mistaken belief that things can be “stage-­managed, controlled, relied on by force of will” [Henry James 179].) His application of this idea of “willfulness” to Portrait’s Isabel, however (Henry James 83), seems to miss the complexity of James’s portrayal of that willfulness, which, as many have pointed out, derived from the memory of his late cousin Minny Temple. The similar intensity with which the invalid Minny pursued her wild final years may well have hastened her death—­and, James wrote a friend, had she lived, it could well “have been as the victim and plaything of her constant and generous dreams and dissatisfactions” (quoted in Edel, Life 1:332)—­ yet that very wildness was inseparable from what James most prized in Minny and Isabel alike, and perhaps in his American characters generally: what he called their “moral spontaneity” (quoted in Edel, Life 1:322). To recognize this quality, then, is to see that Portrait’s Ralph Touchett was not simply wrong to lament the spectacle of Isabel “ground in the very mill of the conventional,” even if it remained necessary to acknowledge both her own, and his own, role in that defeat. 46. For another landmark reading of James focusing on melodrama, see Brooks’s The Melo­ dramatic Imagination, which with regard to Portrait of a Lady points out how the decision to

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return to Osmond that Pippin applauds is textually “freighted with lurid connotations of sacrifice, torture, penance, claustration” (157). 47. See also Liberal Imagination 251. Trilling also uses this phrase to describe the way, in contemporary culture, ideas become the expression of desires (262). The danger in fact is to think of ideas, the world of mind, as simply floating free of these. 48. One might note that there has in fact long appeared a striking gap between morally minded critical accounts of The Awkward Age, including Pippin’s, which presume that the novel’s “circle” represents the height of decadence, and James’s own account of its “germ” in his preface. There, matters are described not from the point of view of concern over Nanda’s possible corruption, but that of the circle itself, forced to contend—­much like an American novelist of the same era—­with this enforced circumscription of their otherwise “free” talk, its capacities for “play of mind,” “an explicit interest in life,” “frankness and ease,” and so forth (Art 303). See Krook-Gilead (as well as Bersani) for a discussion of this sort of Jamesian “talk” that is more complex than Pippin’s account allows: while it makes possible the avoidance of “a real, deep, painful involvement in the issues” and is thus “fals[e]” and “steril[e],” this very fact speaks to its aristocratic “brillian[ce],” “vital[ity],” and “free[dom]” (Ordeal 154, 140). 49. Moreover, many of the changes James made to a novel like Portrait in revising it for the New York edition entailed substituting phrasings with a greater edge to them for more neutral ones: in the first four chapters alone, e.g., a “little terrier” became a “small beast,” “purity of outline” became “hard fineness,” “the incongruities of the season” became “cosmic treacheries,” “disagreeable” became “offensive or alarming,” “a house which presented a narrowness of new brown stone to Fifty-­third Street” became “a wedge of brown stone driven violently into Fifty-­ third Street,” and so on (Portrait 495–­97). 50. As Thomas notes, and Jonathan Freedman has discussed in greater detail, James was famously ambivalent about aestheticism in print, referring to Pater’s “wilful weakness” (46). 51. Note that while Arnold, calling these strands “Hellenism” and “Hebraism,” associates only the latter, the moral aim, with modernity, Trilling, writing after modernism, treats them as two facets of modern thought itself. As he writes in “Art and Fortune,” modern novels, “almost in the degree that they celebrate the human,” have a tendency to “falsify and abstract it” (Liberal Imagination 254). 52. Cf. Hale in Social Formalism on the “strange abstractness with which James [and Percy Lubbock] treated the . . . view that the novel is . . . a representation of society,” by “treat[ing] . . . relationality as a formal property of the novel” (14). 53. The Golden Bowl has typically served as exemplar of James’s more fully “aestheticist” mode, as in Freedman’s book. 54. For example—­and among some of the most powerful: Evans “Relating,” McWeeny, and Zhang. 55. Cameron, in Thinking in Henry James, offers a remarkably systematic unfolding of the “obsessive impulse,” in a text like The American Scene, “to make James’s consciousness all-­ pervasive. . . . People [and later, ‘objects,’ 7] are dismissed so that, socially unencumbered, consciousness is free to converse with itself ” (5, 4). Yet though Cameron concludes that, as witnessed as well in characters like Maggie in The Golden Bowl, “for James a phenomenology of consciousness is a phenomenology of its domination” (11), her account possesses neither the critical edge of Bersani’s initial treatment of it nor the ethical assertions of his later revision of that account. (Her later work in Impersonality, however, does have commonalities with the latter.) 56. The opposition here recurs in “Bradley or Bergson?”: where Bradley remains imprisoned in the “dry valley” of “abstractions” “which his will prefers,” “Bergson and the empiricists . . .

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tumble to life’s call, and turn into the valley where the green pastures and the clear waters always were” (1270). 57. Here I must disagree with Posnock on the meaning of Grübelsucht. He sees Henry in The American Scene as “the connoisseur of Grüblei par excellence” (39), ignoring that for William, the whole point is that this is about a dwelling amid abstractions, not reality—­a situation that was solved for William by getting out of his study and into teaching, as we recall. Without recognizing this, we can’t at all understand Bersani’s initial critique of James. The key is that people and life have become abstractions. It’s much better expressed by the quote Posnock himself cites a few pages later (41): William describing the James home as “people killing themselves with thinking about things that have no connection with their merely external circumstances, studying themselves into fevers”—­what Alice, noting her own lack of interest, describes as “philosophies and systems” (42). 58. See James, Notebooks 140 (entry for October 31, 1895). 59. Maria herself thus possesses what James in his essay on Balzac termed a “French mind,” conceiving the social world as diagrammable along Comtean lines (Art 68). 60. We might also think here of the possible influence of Holbein’s The Ambassadors, with its famous memento mori, on James’s novel, as discussed persuasively by Adeline Tintner. 61. See Cora Diamond on this aspect. 62. This also signals the end of Simmel’s conception of sociability, that “ideal sociological world,” in which, “by definition, no one can have his satisfaction at the cost of contrary experiences on the part of others” (132). See also Donna Jones on Simmel’s version of the social fact: the “tragic obdurateness of our social forms” (69–70). 63. The weird excuse Strether gives Maria seems like a version of his mathematical mode that shows how it can apply to moral situations also (and accounts for some views of their rigidity). Perhaps we might say Strether is here flustered not by the mysteries of the social world but by those of his own desires (one could also offer a queer reading here, as Kevin Ohi has), and turns to this “accounting” mode as a simpler way of making sense of his recalcitrance. Chapter Five 1. Popularized by Théodule Ribot, about whom more below, this term took on an array of meanings but was typically thought to distinguish the new German experimental psychology from the more philosophical, introspection-­based work of the French (Smith, Free Will 12)—­though this is, in fact, a somewhat misleading distinction if we look at the actual work of Wundt (both experimental and introspective) (see O’Donnell 19). 2. On the “automaton theory” and the reflex, see Smith, Free Will 18–­20; and Danziger, “Mid-­Nineteenth-­Century British Psycho-­Physiology.” 3. Which is the more standard perspective applied. See, e.g., Nicholas Dames’s “ ‘The Withering of the Individual’: Psychology in the Victorian Novel,” which speaks of the “demolition of volition” in the period and its natural result in fiction in the “tragic” naturalism of Thomas Hardy (108, 110). Smith describes late Victorians as “agitated” by “the loss of will power” that seemed to be in the air (Free Will 8). 4. I am not alone in making these linkages; see, e.g., Smith, Free Will 1, 28–­29. 5. In the contemporary context, see Tierney’s Willpower or Mischel’s The Marshmallow Test. 6. See Howard, Form and History.

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7. Cf. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature 298. See O’Donnell on behaviorism’s emergence out of developments in psychology in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly the reflex theory (205). 8. On the importance of alcoholism and capitalism to the development of physiological psychology, see Danziger, “Mid-­Nineteenth-­Century British Psycho-­Physiology” 132–­33, 141. 9. On Bernard’s role in the development of the reflex theory via the work of his student Ivan Sechenov, see Wickens 198. 10. See Engs on the health reform fervor of the latter decades of the nineteenth-­century US, which targeted both personal behaviors (diet, drinking and smoking, drugs, birth control) as well as public matters such as food purity. 11. On the links between physiological psychology and Progressivism, see Hale, Freud and the Americans 77, and O’Donnell 214 (focusing on Dewey). 12. See, e.g., books like Frank Channing Haddock’s popular Power of Will, which recommended “systematic exercises which shall tend to strengthen [the will] as a faculty” (68). 13. With respect to the American context specifically, Nietzsche’s writings would become available in English translation in 1896 and, as Jennifer Ratner-­Rosenhagen argues, they began to be discussed in periodicals around the same time. There is also evidence that important period thinkers like William James had already encountered, with interest, ideas like Wille zur Macht in the original German (Ratner-­Rosenhagen 122). This chapter is more interested, however, in overlaps between Nietzsche’s thinking and broader trends in the intellectual history of the era in both the US and Europe, along the lines of Michael Cowan’s German-­focused Cult of the Will. 14. On the quantified self, see Moore. 15. For the US case, see Theodore Roosevelt’s warnings about “race suicide,” as discussed in my Women, Compulsion, Modernity 98–­99. 16. Dowbiggin calls the 1880s, the decade in which Norris studied in Paris and first conceived Vandover, the “heyday of the degeneracy theory” (188). 17. In fact, Zola derived his ideas about alcohol’s effects in L’Assommoir from his reading of De l’alcoolisme (1874), a text by another French psychiatrist, Valentin Magnan, who had been heavily influenced by Morel’s theories. Small wonder, then, to find that by the 1890s, a Westmin­ ster Review essay on criminality as atavism or evolutionary holdover could cite Zola’s writings on the “criminal or alcoholic” type as readily as it did Morel or Lombroso (Foard 94). 18. Roger Smith’s distinction in Free Will  between the writings of Carpenter, on the one hand, and Maudsley and Clifford, on the other, are instructive here (see Danziger also). With Clifford we see, in Smith’s words (citing Dixon) “the transition in utilitarian moral thought of the period, from an idea of the good as the happiness of the greatest number to the health of the race,” “exhorting listeners to obey the facts of nature” (27). 19. See, e.g., Gail Bederman’s work on G. Stanley Hall in her Manliness and Civilization. 20. See Rabinbach (29–­30) on various observations of the “habitual indolence” of the “natural man.” Rabinbach speaks (ironically enough) of a “fatigue mania” sweeping concerned observers during this period (22). 21. All could be linked to modernity: distilled spirits were newly industrialized (Nye 157; Huertas, “Madness and Degeneration, II: Alcohol and Degeneration”); the syringe was developed and narcotics used in Civil War medicine, with usage peaking in the mid-­1890s (Hickman 3); prostitutes now could “attach themselves to cabarets and hotels” rather than walking the streets (Nye 161).

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22. See also Knapp 12. Indeed, Janet defined psychasthenia as “inhibition to action” (Rabin­ bach 170). 23. Unsurprising, then, to find naturalist works like Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,” in which a dog’s instincts serve it far better for survival than the elaborate mental rationalizations of its human “master.” 24. On Bunyan, see Royce. See Collini (63–­64) on the way Victorian morality both built upon but also differed from Kant’s in its emphasis on moral right as duty versus selfish inclination, on the one hand, but also on “the positive role of feeling in moral action,” on the other. This sentimentalization of morality was if anything even more prevalent in the midcentury US, as novels like Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin evidence. 25. See, e.g., on Germany, Cowan’s Cult of the Will and, on France, Nye’s Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France, particularly the chapter “Sport, Regeneration, and National Revival.” 26. After all, as Henry Adams opined, “By the majority of physiologists, Thought seems to be regarded—­at present—­as a more or less degraded act” and “Consciousness . . . only a phase in the decline of vital energy;—­a stage of weakening will” (“Letter to American Teachers” 65, 90). 27. I discuss the notion of Darwinism conceived in these terms, both at present and in the late nineteenth century, in “The Ordering Power of Disorder: Henry Adams and the Return of the Darwinian Era”—­borrowing my title from Hans Blumenberg’s account of the Darwinist intervention (see Blumenberg, Legitimacy 223). 28. Albeit it could be argued that this was an argument waiting to be made, as Keynes did in characterizing the “survival of the fittest”—­a coinage in fact owed to Spencer, not Darwin—­as a notion that “could be regarded as a vast generalisation of Ricardian economics” (Taylor, Men versus the State 85). 29. Cf. Hawkins 112. 30. On one hand, within the field of economics at the time, as well as utilitarian thought more broadly, ideas like Spencer’s could seem retrograde. As Margaret Schabas has argued, economists from Mill forward had begun to reject earlier naturalistic accounts of economic forces as best left to their own devices, a move that would pave the way for the interventionist Benthamism of the late nineteenth century, including that of the Progressives in the US. See chapter 1, “Rival Claimants to the Benthamite Heritage,” in Taylor’s Men versus the State for an excellent discussion of the conflict between “Benthamism as a creed of the rational reform of political institutions—­which were consequently regarded as artificial structures subject to human design,” and, à la Spencer and his acolytes, “as an economic creed which preached legislative impotence by treating the system of production and distribution as a ‘natural’ organization, governed by laws analogous to those of physical science” (37). On the other hand, Spencer’s reduction of the mind to, as the New Liberal L. T. Hobhouse complained, “an organ like the lungs or liver evolved [for] adjusting the behavior of the organism to its environment,” hence “a sort of glorified reflex action,” made plain how much his thought reflected the New Psychology that was ascendant in his day (quoted in Taylor, Men versus the State 99). Indeed, more broadly, without disputing the significant difference between laissez-­ faire and Progressivism, the interventions of the reformed Benthamites still conceived of social progress, for both good and ill, in what we might today call “biopolitical” terms. 31. See, again, Roger Smith on Clifford (27) on the emergence of a language of race health. 32. Norris in fact did write a story called “A Case for Lombroso,” as well as one titled “A Reversion to Type.” 33. The book seems finally most interested in understanding Ida as, like Vandover himself, a casualty of sexual norms that are shifting without yet having undergone massive transformation.

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Hence, she is portrayed throughout as curious, adventurous, genuinely ambivalent about her own desires and their consequences (she resists Vandover with a smile on her face), and yet without a space to stand once the latter are publicly revealed. 34. Freud himself would memorably attack degeneration theory directly by giving Zola as an example of an individual whose “many strange obsessional habits” did not prevent his significant contributions to humanity (Introductory 260). 35. This quality most links him to McTeague, who typically spends his leisure time in a dozing stupor. 36. See McElrath and Crisler 6. As they note, when Norris’s brother published Vandover in 1914, a number of years after Norris’s death, the subtitle was left off, perhaps because of the evident gap between the 1890s and two decades later. 37. Note at the dance, all the men are described as “calling over one another’s heads like brokers in a stock exchange” (189). 38. Even Franklin’s moral philosophy appeared, to the mainstream of nineteenth-­century American apologists for capitalism and progress, not simply an inspiration, but, indeed, in many ways suspect. Thus, for the influential Unitarian scholar and writer Francis Bowen, who both edited the North American Review and later took up the prestigious McLean Chair at Harvard, Poor Richard could be commended to the extent he linked “virtue” to “well-­being” (Howe 64); problems emerged, however, when he began to imply “actions are right because they are useful” (64). This strict utilitarianism was in fact anathema to American thinkers who, more broadly, feared Bentham’s sort of sheerly “hedonistic calculus” led to the equation of all good with “mere physical pleasure” (67). 39. See, e.g., Dan Colson, “Anarchism and the Brute” 30. 40. See Link’s essay on Norris and theodicy. 41. While Weber wrote of the triumph of Homo economicus in terms more appropriate to the Victorian self-­restrainer, Durkheim, in his Suicide, wrote both more politically and differently of the same phenomenon: For a century, economic progress has consisted in freeing industrial powers from any regulation. . . . Government power, instead of being the regulator of economic life, has become its instrument and its servant. . . . Industry, no longer considered as a means toward an end which is higher than itself, has become the supreme end of individuals and societies. What has then happened is that the appetites that it arouses have been freed from any authority that might restrain them. (279–­80) The problem, for Durkheim, was that there was no neat mathematical formula for assessing human desires (as marginalist economists were beginning to argue also); hence, these were theoretically infinite. 42. It is intriguing to consider that the Francophile Norris, who was nearly blackballed from his Harvard fraternity because of his close friendship with two Jewish students, completed Van­ dover during the period of Alfred Dreyfus’s 1894 conviction (McElrath and Crisler 112–­13). 43. Although, as Anthony Giddens writes, “few aspects of Durkheim’s work have been more universally rejected” than his tendency to construe the social in biologistic terms, Giddens makes a strong argument for these as central to his critical thought, in terms that make plain the overlaps between Durkheim’s project and Zola’s: “The role of the sociologist is to be like that of the clinician: to diagnose and to propose remedies for sicknesses of the body social. This is particularly important, Durkheim made clear, in situations of transition or ‘crisis’ in society, where

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new social forms are appearing, and others are becoming obsolete” (Capitalism and Modern Social Theory 221). Similarly, Mike Hawkins argues that although Durkheim’s metaphors have often led to his mischaracterization as a degeneration theorist, his interest in phenomena like suicide as the outgrowth of social pathologies, along with his revised conception of crime as an ordinary rather than pathological phenomenon, work against such claims. 44. See, again, Nye and Cowan, especially the latter’s chapter “Training the Will: Gymnastics and Body Culture.” 45. Lafargue, quoted in Rabinbach 34. 46. The idea of the body as efficient machine in the sense of maximizing its output (a counterpart to the profit maximization of Homo economicus or the utility maximization of his consumerist successor, the subject of rational choice theory) goes together, crucially, with the sense of an ineffable larger entity devoted to the same end: finally, that of growth, and, hence, health—­ two entities newly conceived without any natural end point. 47. The intervening term here may be the work of Marianna Valverde in her Diseases of the Will, a cultural study of alcoholism; Valverde cites Sedgwick, and Berlant in turn cites Valverde. And yet there are differences also: whereas in Sedgwick, willing becomes, as in Geary, the site of a frenetic cathexis, in Berlant, it is simply an imposition, a drag, from which any sensible person left to her own devices will always absent herself. Put otherwise, while in Sedgwick, the willer himself can resemble an addict, in Berlant, only the person on “vacation from the will” will do so, even if the entire point of their argument aims to refuse this characterization. 48. In fact, many writings on neoliberalism do not distinguish between it and Foucauldian “discipline” and, therefore, liberalism: neoliberalism simply becomes a kind of hyperliberalism, as in (arguably) Mirowski or Maasen and Sutter. The terms “self-­government” and “self-­management” are used virtually interchangeably. It would be worth trying to parse the differences here for a moment, however, as Wendy Brown attempts to do. Whereas government implies unruly forces must be kept firmly in check, management gives more of a sense that they can be pressed into worthy service if properly corralled. This fits our sense of Geary and the idea of rational addiction, as it were, to things to which it is “good” to be addicted. 49. As George Ainslie puts it, “Even as parents and rulers have less control, the logic of an increasingly comprehensive marketplace has more” (“The Dangers of Willpower,” 82). 50. On the disappearance of the term “will,” see Daston and Scheerer. 51. As Collini notes, the eighteenth century had insisted less strenuously on the moral ideal of altruism, and we might indeed conceive of some of the rhetoric of the nineteenth century’s final decades as a kind of return to its predecessor’s Smithian “subject of interests” (Collini 67). 52. Hawkins explicitly links Spencer’s reorientation of liberalism to a later neoliberalism, quoting Man versus the State’s claim that “The function of Liberalism in the past was that of putting a limit to the power of kings. The function of true Liberalism in the future will be that of putting a limit to the powers of Parliament” (98). 53. Foucault suggests earlier in the same course that eighteenth-­century thinking on government might better be termed a “naturalism” than a liberalism, “inasmuch as the freedom that the physiocrats and Adam Smith talk about is much more the spontaneity, the internal and intrinsic mechanics of economic processes than a juridical freedom of the individual recognized as such” (61, emphasis mine). These mechanics are what must be understood and “respect[ed]” (61), to the extent that the sovereign’s relation to the market resembles “that of a geometer to geometrical realities” (293). He is, that is, placed “in a position of both passivity with regard to the intrinsic necessity of the economic process and, at the same time, of supervision” (293), a project

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not so much of guiding the market, which appears as heresy, but, rather, of setting in place the conditions that will allow it to flourish most fully on its own terms. 54. Contrast, then, the apparently Foucauldian account of the “will to health” in Nikolas Rose, in which the present neoliberal demand that each citizen “become an active partner in the drive for health, accepting their responsibility for securing their own well-­being” is treated as a kind of natural next step growing organically out of the “biopolitical” state’s focus on its citizens’ biological well-­being, rather than an abrogation of that responsibility (Politics of Life Itself 3, 63–­64). 55. The appeal of neoliberalism, then, lies in the collapse of spheres that it engenders, such that “the various things I do, in any existential domain (dietary, erotic, religious, etc.) all contribute to either appreciating or depreciating the human capital that is me” (Feher 30). 56. The imperative focused on here, epimeleia heautou, or “taking care of one’s self ” (Foucault, “Interview” 359) resonates surprisingly well with Feher’s recasting of the “self-­appreciation” of human capital. 57. One can find similar strains in Foucault, as when he affirms the Stoics’ aim “not to try to decipher a meaning hidden beneath the visible representation” but, rather, “to . . . accept in the relation to the self only that which can depend on the subject’s free and rational choice” (History of Sexuality 3:64). 58. See Elster and Skog 17–­18. 59. See, e.g., the use of this distinction in Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself (107). 60. Clark and Dudrick make this comparison as well (Soul 220). 61. See also Ainslie, “Free Will” 62, 80. 62. Cf. Daybreak 52, “Where are the new physicians of the soul?”: “the worst sickness of mankind originated in the way in which they have combated their sicknesses,” with the “anaesthetising and intoxicating” measures of “the so-­called consolations” (33). 63. On this issue and vitalism, see Osborne. 64. On Nietzsche’s “naturalism,” see Cox. 65. Also Beyond 116: “Well-­being as you understand it—­that is no goal; it looks to us like an end!” 66. See also Genealogy (565), which compares experience to digestion before stating, “With such a conception one can . . . still be the strongest opponent of all materialism.” 67. Note also Nietzsche’s more fastidious moments, as in Ecce Homo or in the passage on the “enthusiasms of the senses” in Beyond (42). 68. On La Rochefoucauld, see Daybreak and Human, All Too Human (as well as a brief reference in Gay Science). On his Augustinian/Jansenist milieu, as discussed in chapter 1, see Clark, La Rochefoucauld and the Language of Unmasking. See also Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy. 69. One might describe Nietzsche as infusing this more intensified sense of internal doubleness with the physicalized referents of the later vitalists (such that the “reciprocal dependence of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ drives” in generating what we understand as will becomes the natural revelation for any “genuine physio-­psychology” [Beyond 23]). 70. See also, in one of Nietzsche’s more ascetic moments: “the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell” (Gay Science 192). 71. On narrative, compare the argument against the ideal of compassion for its inability to recognize “the whole inner sequence” leading up to and beyond the pain it seeks to ameliorate, in any given case (Gay Science 9).

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72. We might also consider George Ainslie’s point, in his work on “The Dangers of Willpower,” that the kind of “split ego” described in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—­or, we might say, Van­ dover and the Brute—­can in fact result from the overly stringent imposition of “personal rules” for better conduct, in that when the inevitable “lapse” occurs, the inability to accept it can, in an extreme enough case, produce “dissociation,” in the form of the emergence of a second self (80). Chapter Six 1. On the revival of romance, see Vaninskaya, “The Late-­Victorian Romance Revival”; for Norris on Zola, see “Zola as a Romantic Writer.” 2. The “nadir” is a term coined by Bernard Bell to describe the late nineteenth century as the low point of African American history. 3. Charles W. Chesnutt’s short fiction offers an excellent example—­not only his well-­known “Conjure Tales” but also more conventionally realist stories like “The Wife of His Youth”—­as does Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood. 4. See Donna Jones’s work here. 5. See, e.g., Pippin, Modernism, or Jameson, “The Vanishing Mediator.” 6. E.g., in Dames. 7. Zamir and Gooding-­Williams differ on the extent to which Souls draws on historicist trajectories. For Zamir, “where ‘Conservation’ projects an abstract historical schema,” Souls’ first chapter “describes the concrete experience of an actual history which is hardly progressive” (109). As Brad Evans suggests, however, one can read Du Bois’s research into the “sorrow songs” as African retention as a way to conceive a longer historical unfolding for African Americans, one that can undergird a Hegelian narrative of Bildung for the race as a whole (Before Cultures 171). 8. Du Bois’s famous rebuff, in Souls’ third chapter, of the industrial education program of Booker T. Washington cannot be separated from this larger critique. Washington’s unfortunate genius, as he describes it, lies in having “intuitively grasped the spirit of the age,” its “triumphant commercialism” and “ideals of material prosperity,” such that in his hands education becomes reduced to a “gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life” (26, 30). From such a vantage, Du Bois notes, “the picture of a lone Black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon seemed to him the acme of absurdities” (26). “One wonders,” he adds drily, “what Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi would say” to such a view (26). 9. And, indeed, citing Toni Morrison on the American tendency to erase the past, Gilroy himself explains how her desire to foreground slavery’s resonances for the present led to a rejection of novelistic realism as inadequate to her temporal task in a novel like Beloved, with its interpellation of ghosts into a historical narrative—­a decision that seems echoed by Gilroy’s own influentially “recursive” rather than linear historiographic style (see Gilroy, Black Atlantic 218, 222). On Gilroy’s style, see Brown, “Social Death and Political Life.” 10. Houston Baker is more in between here. He insists that a novel like Dunbar’s should not be read simply as “sociohistorical” but in relation to “myth” as Turner theorizes it, a space of “pure potency  .  .  . where immoderacy is normal.” The idea of “gods” here is conceived as ironic, however, as Baker reads all of the events of Sport to derive from the characters’ own ill-­ considered decisions (125). 11. On nonconservative potentialities of tragedy, see Felski and Eagleton.

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12. See Hartman and Wilderson (195, 199), and Gilroy (Black Atlantic 68). David Scott’s argument in Conscripts of Modernity is these two “romantic” sides produce one another. 13. In Against Race, he notes that “The desire to restore that departed greatness has not always been matched by an equivalent enthusiasm to remedy the plight of Africa in the present” and admits, “My own desire to see the end of raciology means that I, too, have invoked the unknowable future against the unforgiving present” (333–­34). 14. Gilroy reiterates versions of these same arguments in a more recent, post-­Trump-­era essay, “Agonistic Belonging: The Banality of Good, the ‘Alt-­Right,’ and the Need for Sympathy.” 15. One can track Wynter’s changing relation to the category of the human in her essay titles: “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism” (1984); “Towards the Human, after Man” (2003); “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-­Imprisoned Ourselves, in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désetre: Black Studies toward the Human Project” (2005). See also Moten on the “irreducible humanism in Fanon” (“Case of Blackness” 212). 16. On Gilroy in this regard, see my essay “Historicism Blues.” 17. After years of denial, the Wilmington massacre has finally begun to receive more sustained attention as part of the nation’s belated reckoning with its white supremacist history. For more on the events in question, see, e.g., Cecelski and Tyson, eds., Wilmington Betrayed and Zucchino, Wilmington’s Lie. 18. E.g., Olivia/Janet, Tom/Sandy, Miller/Burns, Josh/McBane. 19. In light of the latter, we might consider “community” perhaps more as a utopian aspiration, along the lines of Chesnutt’s essay “The Future American.” 20. Relatedly, Delamere’s servant Sandy is given the moment of making a decision based on conscience seen by many as key to the realist novel. 21. Olivia’s views on the Black right to property versus to sentiment are similar (271). 22. This is Leary’s critique of the entire “slavery as original sin” discourse (in “ ‘Original Sin,’ Slavery, and American Innocence”). 23. As Trilling writes, we display our “impatience with the self ” in preferring “that peculiar charisma which has always been inherent in death,” in (here he states he is citing Arendt) our “identification by submission to the grandeur of historical necessity which is so much more powerful than the self ” (Moral 221). 24. JanMohamed, who affirms his kinship with the line of thought on “negativity” we traced earlier from Gilroy and Beloved, cites Wright from Black Boy: “What quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity?” (34). 25. For a powerful treatment of revenge in Marrow, see Wiggins. 26. Indeed, it is possible to register Marrow’s own unresolved ambivalence with respect to the revenge plot in Chesnutt’s very decision to leave the fate of Dodie’s life unresolved at the end of the novel, suggesting the possibility of an authorial “revenge” that may or may not be taken. 27. For a different but related account of how Chesnutt combines the two attitudes here, see Laski. 28. An ironic claim, to be sure, given how much the later Lukács (of, say, “Narrate or Describe?” or The Historical Novel) would assert modernism’s political bankruptcy. 29. As LaCapra writes, since it is norms that “set limits and pose resistances to excess or pure decisionism,” decisionism’s presence can “attest to the fragility of norms in certain social contexts, especially in the aftermath of catastrophic upheavals.” Decisionism can thus appear “the last harbor of someone intellectually and emotionally at sea” (Writing History xxiv, emphasis mine).

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30. The text meditates at length on the question of responsibility in regard to Carteret’s role here (see, e.g., 305, 307, 320, 324). 31. His primary example of this is literally vertiginous, recalling Poe’s imp; it is that of being confronted by an abyss, and realizing the possibility not simply of falling but, more radically, of “throwing myself over.” While the former may generate fear, only the latter produces “anguish,” in the sense of “anguish before myself ” rather than of the external world. Only this moment, in which literally any possibility, including self-­nihilation, becomes palpable, makes possible the free act, because, as Kierkegaard states, in its very vertiginousness it represents a coming to grips with the terrifying reality of freedom (to create values) (Sartre 65). 32. It should be noted that bad faith is an understanding of “malady of will” pertinent both to the existentialist moment and to the late nineteenth century, in that the problem is one of passivity, of refusal to take responsibility. Freud, by contrast, remains more within a Victorian framework for which willfulness is the problem to be addressed by self-­control (cf. Izenberg 9). 33. On the overlap between conceptualizations of tragic and existential action, see Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet on the former as entailing, on the one hand, deliberate reflection, and, on the other, “placing one’s stake on what is unknown and incomprehensible, risking oneself on a terrain that remains impenetrable” (quoted in Scott 13). 34. Cf. Villet 6, citing Kelly Oliver. 35. Janet becomes instead, as Lloyd Pratt puts it, “a stranger who demands (and offers in return) neither charity nor incarceration but instead recognition without end” (Strangers Book 61). 36. On the maternal, see also Menzel’s critique of Afro-­pessimism via the work of Hortense Spillers. One could also say that while Miller is a doctor and Josh an agent of death, Janet is the one who decides whether the doctor will heal. 37. One might also consider here the role of the character of Annie in Chesnutt’s conjure tales. 38. Cf. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby.” 39. Chesnutt is not above harnessing these biologistic rhetorics for his own purposes—­ suggesting, that is, the weakened state of the rising white generation, whether by portraying old Delamere’s feckless son Tom as a “degenerate aristocrat” (95) or through depicting young Dodie’s ongoing failure to thrive. 40. As Mizruchi argues, the African American in such studies “appears to occupy a representative status of stranger”—­precisely the rejection of kin ties against which Chesnutt’s fiction, and before him Stowe’s, were written. Repeating the racial epithets muttered by white passersby on the morning of his son’s funeral, Du Bois in Souls, Mizruchi shows, wrenchingly recasts this refusal of universality as white America’s darkest failure. 41. Certainly, this has been my experience after teaching it over the past two decades to American undergraduates. Recent years have also seen a more thoroughgoing discussion of the Wilmington massacre both, fitfully, by the town itself and in books like Wilmington’s Lie. 42. For Sartre, Freud had “cut the psychic whole into two. I am the ego but I am not the id,” which amounted to a mere “blind conatus” (91, 94). 43. This seems, in many ways, close to what Fred Moten has proposed as an alternative to Afro-­pessimism. 44. She was joined in this endeavor by Claudia Tate, among others. In the intervening years, however, this suggestion has been followed through only with respect to the subject of melancholy. Spillers has thus revisited it more recently in the specific context of Afro-­pessimism (as

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well as Ta-­Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me), pushing back against the notion that subjectivity as such is a category inappropriate within a Black context. 45. Spillers raises an eyebrow at this notion of wholly cordoned-­off “Black” and “white” worlds, whether for the “Negro of the Antilles” or the “Negro of Memphis”—­the “neighborhood” always being “quite literally crossed by something else—­the General Motors car, for example” (“All the Things” 94–­95). 46. Cf. “Blackness and Nothingness” 739, 756, 775. 47. Albeit she retitles it, using one of James’s phrases, “The Unclassified Residuum” and attributes it to Binet, the source for the case study James describes of the split personality (Of One Blood 442–­43). Hopkins goes on to make further references to the essay, as when Briggs’s frenemy Aubrey Livingston suggests he might “be renamed ‘The Science of Trance-­States’ ” (447). 48. For an even more richly layered reading of this aspect, see Daphne Brooks. 49. She draws here on the work of Donald Kuspit. See Khanna 40. 50. See Kevin Gaines on this dimension of Hopkins’s work. 51. On this issue, see Schrager and Goyal (Romance 68). Things change, Goyal notes, by the time of Dark Princess. 52. There is a similarity here to Best’s call “to craft a historicism that is not melancholic but accepts the past’s turning away as an ethical condition of my desire for it” (None 20). 53. As Vergès notes, creolization can avoid idealizations of recovering the past, but there can also be a danger (as in Fanon) of imagining the past has no purchase. On a similar point, see also Hartman, Lose Your Mother. 54. For a strong reading of this part of Souls that is in keeping with my focus in this chapter, see Winters. 55. They draw on Adorno’s work on punctuation, which states, “In the dash, thought becomes aware of its fragmentary character.” Dashes operate in Theodore Storm, he writes, as “mute lines into the past, wrinkles on the brow of [the] text . . . the span of time they insert between two sentences is that of a burdensome heritage” (Comay and Ruda 108). 56. Rebecca Comay, writing on the dash in Hegel, compares the dash to “the scar within language itself with which the body bears witness to its own hungers” (Comay and Ruda 60). 57. We might think here also of Lukács’s account of the historical novel: Scott “affirms the result” of “progress” even as he does not hesitate to depict “the endless field of . . . wrecked or wasted heroic, human endeavour, broken social formations, etc., which were the necessary pre-­ conditions of the end result.” This indeed forms Scott’s difference from the realists, whose very attentiveness to their present keeps them from “see[ing] the specific qualities of their own age historically,” that is, as part of a “process [that] came into being” rather than merely one viewed as “already completed” (Historical 19–­21). In a fascinatingly contradictory formulation, Lukács writes that Scott’s “objectivity [toward history] only enhances the true poetry of the past” (55). 58. Also highly pertinent here is Sara Marcus’s wonderful article about the “hold” or fermata, regarding the mysterious stretched-­out hour at the core of The Marrow of Tradition.

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Index

abandonment: of Ahab (in Moby-­Dick), 171; cosmic, 52; feelings of (for Vandover), 283; God’s (of the world), 20–­21, 29, 50, 52, 162–­63; of one’s cause (in The Marrow of Tradition), 336; of one’s own life (self-­abandonment), 161, 188; by the state, 341; of will, 179, 218, 289. See also absence; alienation; God; Lukács, Georg; turning away abolitionism, 114, 116; “Byronic,” 156. See also Brown, John (abolitionist); race; slavery aboulia, 270–­7 1. See also inaction; inertia; insanity/madness; will: absence of Abrams, M. H., 156–­57 absence: of affect, 200; of appetite, 118, 121, 123; of Big Will (for existentialism), 329; and figuration (Freud), 362; of God, 56, 58–­59, 163, 208; of home, 91, 326; of interiority, 197; of limit (in general will), 192–­93; of order, 93, 176–­77; of others, 220, 258; of passion, 127; of the past, 363; and perfection, 258; of the power to act, 270; and temporality, 369–­70; of will, 87, 132, 204, 246, 270–­7 1, 306; of “will” in psychological discourse, 10–­11, 36, 137–­38, 291, 298, 367. See also abandonment abstraction: absolute (and universal willing), 161; dangers of, 240–­41, 246; and deliberation, 210; embodied, 258; and Grübelsucht, 241, 245–­46, 402n57; of the individual from the social (as impossible), 228; and insanity, 163–­65, 182; in H. James, 205, 255–­58; and W. James, 207, 211–­12, 241; and the language of criticism, 234; philosophical, xvii, 187; of race and nation, 282; and relationality, 236–­37, 255–­57, 261; and sociology, 367. See also Grübelsucht; insanity/ madness; monomania abyss: contingency of human life as (Calvin), 57; cosmic, 58–­61; the inner self as, 51, 54, 63, 91;

thought of tossing oneself down an, 11, 183, 410n31; of the unknown, 64–­65 accounting. See calculability; statistics; tracking action: and bleakness, 344–­45; for the captive (negation), 329; in Chesnutt, 346–­52; vs. deliberation, 386n40; demand for, 160, 303; vs. desire, 1, 12, 23, 45, 71, 81, 106, 127, 243, 271, 314, 381n76; drive to, 114–­15; and duty, 81, 280; and estrangement, 346; existential, 346–­52; foundationless, 342; free, 82; without historical guarantee (Chesnutt), 332; as language, 131; and morale, 209; novels of, 47; and the passions, 116; vs. perspective, 336; possibility of, 350; and reaction, 349; reason and, 201; vs. reflection, xi–­xii, xiv, 1, 28, 45; sovereign, 194–­95; vs. thought, 62, 127, 209, 234, 246; as threatened by modern emphasis on reflection, 204, 209–­10, 271–­72; after trauma, xviii; and will, 23, 72, 80, 87–­88, 116, 137, 182, 239, 270–­73, 318, 321, 363; wrong, 23. See also inaction Adams, Henry, 246, 398n18, 404n26 adaptability: demand for, 382n78; extreme (in Norris), 276–­77, 316; practical, 336; unparalleled, 367. See also environment; Vandover and the Brute (Norris) addiction, 264–­66, 283, 300, 313–­14; and automatism, 297; and behavioral economics, 296–­97; and degeneration theory, 266; and health, 283; Nietzsche and, 294, 302; in Norris, 265, 277, 283, 288; as pathology, 264, 295; rational, 293, 296, 406n48; Sedgwick on, 290, 294–­96; as self-­medication, 296–­97; sentimentalism as, 272, 279; and temporality, 296–­98; and the will, 11–­12, 288, 298, 406n47. See also akrasia; alcohol; automatism; caffeine; degeneration; habit; health; pathology

444 Addison, Joseph, 70 Adler, Alfred, 348–­49 Adorno, Theodor, 184, 399n24; on the dash, 411n55; on Kant and Sade, 84; on self-­reflection vs. action, 1; on self-­restraint and the bourgeois subject, 3. See also Kant, Immanuel; law; passion; self-­ adultery, xiii, 62, 116–­17; and the novel, 46, 49, 62, 383n1, 383n6. See also Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne); Tanner, Tony Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 16, 29, 34, 147, 230, 343, 380n63. See also Twain, Mark aesthetic: and environment, 315; failure (of American capitalism, for Nietzsche), 303; and habit, 315–­16; of intensity, 184–­87; invention, 233; irony, 162; judgment, 304; in Melville, 178, 184–­87; network/relational, 39; philosophizing, 178; social, 232–­38; and will, 306–­7. See also aestheticism; art aestheticism, 213, 234–­35; and asceticism (Nietz­ sche), 309–­12; H. James and, 401n50, 401n53; vs. will, 204. See also aesthetic; art affect, 13, 36; absence of, 200; affective turn, 41; and art, 184, 186; and the body, 38, 180; vs. emotion, 181; and freedom, 180; identification and, 194; and intensity, 184; in Melville, 180–­84; vs. passion, 181; and relationality, 395n34; theory, 38, 40, 42, 103, 139–­40, 181–­82, 184, 215, 291, 293; and thought, 169; troublesome, 180; and will, 193. See also emotion; feeling; passion Africa: as outside history itself (Hegel), 321; and memory, 359; mythicization of, 331; phantasmatic, 325–­27; as repressed, true identity, 361 Afrocentrism, 326–­28 Afro-­pessimism, 44, 328–­30, 339, 342, 354–­55; and the ethical, 383n88; and the existential, 329–­31 Against Health (Metzl, Kirkland), 289. See also health Agamben, Giorgio: on the emergence of the subject in Paul and Augustine, 381n76; and the “state of exception,” 341 agency, xii, 108, 38–­39; Asad on, 3; collectivized, 215; vs. decision, 410n36; democratic, 397; human, xii, 37–­39, 108, 159, 262, 264, 348, 350, 366–­68; inanimate “agents,” 142; lack of, 167; and psychic damage, 355; and psychoanalysis, 358; quest for, 329; rational, 28; suspended, 10. See also decision; ego; freedom; will Ahab Unbound (Farmer, Schroeder), 167. See also Moby-­Dick (Melville) Ahmed, Sara, 4, 147, 154 Ainslie, George, 296–­98, 300, 406n49 air: bad, 262, 268–­69, 279, 302; clean, 316; free as (Moby-­Dick), 396n39; as “mere necessity,” 391n60; open, 131, 242; as pure element, 185

index akrasia, 26–­28, 243, 313–­14, 347. See also addiction; Augustine, Saint; bad: faith; conflict/tension; desire; Paul, Saint; Robinson Crusoe (Defoe); will: weakness of alcohol, 96, 270, 302, 403n8, 406n47; alcoholism (in Stoddard), 122–­23, 126, 128–­29; as corrective, 121; and criminality, 403n17; drunkenness, 264, 267–­68, 272, 275, 278, 280, 287; “inebriety,” 270; and modernity, 403n21; and the neurasthenic, 269; as poison, 268; as therapeutic, 115. See also addiction; caffeine; excitability; health; temperance Aldritch, Abigail, 323 alienation: from the Big Will (existentialism), 329, 344–­45; mental, 117; of the modern subject, 20, 34, 52, 156, 345; and the novel, 50; and the will, 158. See also abandonment Alison, William Pulteney, 135 Allison, Henry, 80–­82 Al-­Saji, Alia, 370 Altieri, Charles, 184, 186 Altman, Matthew, 394n25 Ambassadors, The (James), 35, 207, 217–­21, 225, 229–­32, 238, 247–­61; and abstraction, 255–­57; and the social, 250–­52, 254–­60. See also James, Henry; sociality; social world, the ambivalence: and the anima, 109; and desire, 404n33; and freedom, 149; genuine, 297; Hawthorne’s, 88; human, 314; H. James’s, 401; Melville’s, xvi–­xvii, 149, 199, 395n33; and modernity, 191; Nietzsche’s, 308; and the novel, xi, 4–­5, 9, 16, 18, 35, 112–­13, 409n26; and the organism, 144; and psychoanalysis, 358; about self-­restraint, 112; and temporality, 297, 360; and the will, 12, 159 America, 73–­94; Civil War, 156, 204, 319, 337, 403n21; and exceptionalism, 150; and the Great Awakening, 73–­75; and the individual, xi, 47; Manifest Destiny, 7, 150, 152, 320; and the novel, xi, 4, 6, 15–­19; and self-­constitution of “the people,” 194; and the will, 3, 75, 150–­52. See also democracy; individual, the; people, the; politics; racism anatomy, 28, 48, 60–­61, 84–­85, 134, 147–­49, 186–­87, 265; pathological, 137; of the soul, 61; struggling, 119; of the whale, 148, 393n9; of the will, 153–­54. See also Burton, Robert; classification; Frye, Northrop; James, William; Moby-­Dick (Melville); Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne); vitalism Anderson, Amanda, 227, 335–­36, 342–­45 anger/rage, 164–­65, 181–­85; and action, 116; and the body, 108; as energizing, 180; Faustian “rage,” 15; of fire, 323; and the “frantic,” 196; and idealism, 84; and impulse, 165; at injustice, 181; jealous, 125; in Melville, 180–­83; pleasurable, 86;

index as precursor to will concept, 181; and primitivity, 164; rage for order, 234; and spirit, 181–­82; taming of, 92, 153; and thymos, 181–­82, 190; and wounded dignity, 190 anima, 104–­10, 114, 123, 389n30, 389n36. See also Stahl, Georg; soul; will animism, 101, 141 antinomianism, 84, 90, 381n69; Antinomian Controversy, 73. See also Hutchinson, Anne; law; Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne) anti-­Semitism, 398n18, 405n42; in Norris, 283 anxiety: and Augustinian thought, 56; in Bunyan, 65; and the child (for Kierkegaard), 83, 92; and the cosmic abyss, 58–­61; in Hawthorne, 86–­87; and the hypothetical, 11, 63, 183, 410n31; and interiority, 46, 55, 60, 62–­63, 67; and knowledge, 83; and limitlessness and moral law (Kant), 82–­83; and (ceaseless) relationality (for H. James), 256; and self-­scrutiny, 67; and solitude, xv; and spiritual autobiography, 55, 83; and the unknown, 64–­65; and wisdom, 22. See also Kierkegaard, Søren; terror apathy, 352–­53; “Black apathy,” 353, 355; and society, ix. See also racism appetite: and civilization, 123; economic, xiv, 405n41; enslavement to (as shameful), 182; everyday, 174, 181; for food, 95–­96, 121–­23, 174, 181; hereditary (of alcoholism), 128–­29; vs. hunger, 117; for knowledge (Aristotle), 63–­64; loss of (in Norris), 276; and passions, 108, 121, 123; royal, 196; as site of duplex soul, 118; as sole concern, 220; and spirit, 181; in Stoddard, 95–­96, 121–­23, 128–­29; subduing (for the common good), 291; vs. taste, 118; and vitalism, 122; will as, 117–­18. See also alcohol; digestion; eating; voraciousness appreciation: and critique, 5, 234; self‑, 407n56; spiritual, 236; sympathetic (and understanding), 211 Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas, Saint Arac, Jonathan, 184 arbitrariness, 159–­60: of community, 353; of the enslaver’s power, 329; of freedom, 110, 161; of God’s will, 379n56, 385n28; of purpose/vocations (for Nietzsche), 306; and reflection, 159; will as, 93, 160, 185, 397n53 architecture, 252; and the possibility of reflection, 226. See also home; reflection; thought Arendt, Hannah, xii, 2; on Billy Budd, 192, 199; on “mere life,” 290; on “natality,” 380n60; on power, 376n15; and progressivism, 343; on will/ freedom, 8–­9, 21–­24, 31–­32, 36, 43–­45, 158, 192–­ 200, 380n60 Aristotle: on anger, 181–­82; on freedom, 21–­22; on knowledge-­seeking, 63–­64; on “mere life,” 290. See also anger/rage; emotion; freedom; knowledge

445 Armstrong, Nancy: on interiority, 68–­70, 292; on the novel and individualism, 154; on the persistence of the gothic in the British novel, 20; on Robinson Crusoe, 28 Arnold, Matthew, 234, 401n51 Aron, Raymond, 343 art, xvii; and affect, 184, 186; creation of oneself as (in Foucault), 294; in criticism, 234; and economics, 315; vs. ego, 38; and elaboration, 177–­ 78; of the everyday, 311, 316; impressionist, 213; and intensity, 184–­87; life as a product of, 235; life as a work of, 294; and mechanism, 136; and monomania, 164; in Norris, 268, 313, 315–­16; and openness, 94; as saving grace, 279; and the saying of “And yet!” to life (Lukács), 344; Trilling on, 38, 43, 376n13, 376n25; valuation of, 297; and (imperial) will, 154; and (liberation from) will, 306. See also aesthetic; craft; Vandover and the Brute (Norris) Arvin, Newton, 147, 150 Asad, Talal, 3, 375n1 asceticism, 61, 285, 299; and the aesthetic, 309–­ 12; Bersani on, 237; emergence of, 308; for Foucault, 294; and habit, 300; for W. James, 287; for Nietzsche, 286, 300, 307–­12, 407n70; and self-­examination, 312; somatized, 286; as “stupid,” 391n60 attention: division of (as liability), 201; extremity of, 246; and intensity, 184–­85; maladies of (Ribot), 245–­46; studied inattention, 173; and will, 143, 177 Augustine, Saint: and the body, 94; Confessions, xiii, 2, 24, 50, 56, 60–­61, 65, 83, 378n47, 384n24; conversion of, 378n39; and curiosity, 83–­84, 378n40; on faith, 59; introspection of, 89; and the novel, 378n42; and Petrarch’s My Secret Book, 51, 384n24; on the quest for knowledge, 63–­64; and subjectivity/selfhood, xiii, xv, 24–­25, 35; and the will, ix–­xiii, xv–­xvi, 12, 19–­27, 30, 32–­33, 37, 47, 49, 66, 71, 73, 76, 81, 86, 92, 106, 108, 140, 273, 308, 378n47; on wanting vs. liking, 13. See also irrationality; Paul, Saint; perversity; sin; spiritual: autobiography; will Austen, Jane, 14–­15, 206, 394n23; and the bildungsroman, 97; Mansfield Park, 16; Pride and Prejudice, 10; and the social, 50 authenticity: existential, 297; for Heidegger, 345; and the interiorized will, 80; valuation of, 297 automatism: and addiction, 297; and crime, 132; critique of, 368; of desire, 87; and habit, 287–­88, 313; and naturalism, 263–­64; vs. reflex, 134; and sympathy, 389; and wanting, 297; vs. will, 263–­64, 288. See also addiction; habit; naturalism; reflex autonomy, 2–­15, 21, 31; cost of, 153–­54; deliberative, 314–­15; as desirable, 2–­9; and difference, 40; as

446 autonomy (cont.) elusive, 38; Hegel on, 159–­62; human, 7, 10, 38, 57, 314; Kant on, 80–­84; and liberalism (critique of), 293; limits of, 167; in Melville, 166–­67; moral, 18; as possibility, 10–­15; as problem, 2; rational, xii, 15, 18, 228; and relationality, 215, 225–­26; vs. sociability, 70; and spontaneity (free action), 82; and value, 32; of will, 182. See also freedom; free will; Hegel, G. W. F.; individual, the; Kant, Immanuel Babbitt, Irving, 154 Bachelard, Gaston, 138 Bacon, Francis, 58, 64, 387n56 bad: air, 262, 268–­69, 279, 302; “bold bad” city, 217; drives, 407n69; faith, 347, 351, 410n32; habits, 287; infinity (Hegel), 162, 166; novel (Balzac’s Louis Lambert, for Strether/Maria), 221 Baguley, David, 275 Bahr, Hermann, 213 Bain, Alexander, 182–­83 Baker, Houston, 408n10 Baldwin, James, 347; on The Ambassadors, 258; on the novel and freedom, 2; on the protest novel, 9; on the self (as “void”), 16; on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 380n63 Baldwin, James Mark, 223–­25 Balzac, Honoré de, xii, xvii, 5, 16–­17, 35, 250–­51, 377n26, 391n65; Louis Lambert, 221, 248, 260, 391n59; and “monomania,” 163, 165; on realism vs. romance, 230; on the will, 124. See also Ambassadors, The (James) Barthes, Roland, 263 Barthez, Paul-­Joseph, 136 “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Melville), xii, 16, 172, 174. See also inaction; Melville, Herman; refusal Bausch, Susan, 323–­24 Bayly, Lewis, 54 Beard, George M., 269–­70, 298 Becker, Gary, 297; on “human capital,” 293; on “rational addiction,” 296 Beckett, Samuel, 14–15, 19, 316 Bederman, Gail, 285 behavioral economics, and addiction, 296–­97. See also behaviorism; economy behaviorism, 137, 263; critique of, 31, 263, 376n18, 380n60; Dewey’s environmental/naturalist, 225, 228, 399n34; neo-­behaviorism (of rational choice theory), 293; and reflex, 137; rise of (in psychology), 137, 403n7 Behrent, Michael, 293 Bell, Bernard, 408n2 Bell, Michael Davitt, 66 Bellamy, Edward, 399n27 Bell-­Magendie law, 134

index Beloved (Morrison), 328–­29, 380n63, 408n9, 409n24. See also Morrison, Toni Bender, John, 28 Benjamin, Walter, 264 Bennett, Jane, 38–­39; on the Bildungstrieb, 103; on life (as endless creativity), 382n82; on vitalism and new materialism, 139 Bentham, Jeremy, 291, 297, 404n30, 405n38 Bentley, Nancy, 231 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 7, 90–­91 Berger, Oscar, 240 Bergson, Henri, 396n38, 399n24; Creative Evolution, 214; on freedom, 362; on intension, 184–­ 85, 213–­15, 217, 229; on intuition, 398n16; and W. James, 213–­14, 221, 239; as modern, 217; and neovitalism, 98, 103, 138–­39, 392n79; on possibility vs. actuality, 380n60; and temporality, 321, 362–­63; and the will, 32. See also intensity; James, William; vitalism: neovitalism Berlant, Lauren, 289–­91, 293, 295–­96, 312, 406n47 Berlin, Isaiah: on Hegel as Romantic, 394n19; and progressivism, 343; on Rousseau’s general will, 191, 198; on the will, 154, 159 Berlioz, Hector, 164 Bernard, Claude: on disease and norms, 141; as influence on Zola, 264; and the shift away from vitalism, 136 Berrios, G. M., 270 Bersani, Leo: on cruising, 220; desire (changing relation to), 232–­33, 237; on individuality and the novel, 16–­17; on H. James’s work, 207, 216, 232–­38, 256, 402n57; on manners, 232; on Moby-­ Dick, 169, 397n54 Best, Stephen, 328, 357, 411n52 Bianco, Giuseppe, 392n79 Bichat, Xavier, 107, 136 Big Will, xiv, 2–­3, 18; capitalism as, 264, 282; civilization as, 176; cosmos as, xv; economy as, xiv, 18, 273–­75, 290, 329; God as, x, xii, xiv–­xv, 2, 7, 25, 29–­30, 33, 50, 53, 56–­59, 129, 171–­72, 189, 192, 195, 210, 222, 235, 274, 293, 324, 379n56, 384n20, 385n28, 386n48, 396n43; History as, xii, 18, 324, 331; vs. individual will, x–­xii, 6–­7, 9, 13, 18, 25, 33–­37, 40, 50; Life as, xii, xiv, 18, 104, 107, 111, 144, 274; nature as, x, 2, 33, 152; rejection of, 7–­9, 329, 344–­45; social world/society as, x, xiv, xvii, 18, 33, 216, 222–­24, 227–­29, 231, 274; the state as, x, xii, xiv, 18, 33, 187–­200, 274, 290, 293, 396n43, 396n44, 397n49, 397n55. See also capitalism; economy; God; history; life; merging; nature; social world, the; state; will Bildung, 94, 97–­99, 101, 123, 126, 139, 408n7. See also bildungsroman bildungsroman, xiii–­xvi, 15, 29, 40, 92–­145, 345, 387n5; and Bildungstrieb, 97–­99, 107, 142, 145; Elsie Venner as, 131–­33; and gender, 92–­93,

index 109, 121; and happiness, 111; imagined, 365; The Morgesons as, 95–­98, 104–­5, 118, 120–­23, 126, 129; Our Nig as, 112–­13; and race, 112; and restraint, 95–­96, 99; and the social, 112, 120; and vitalism, 32, 95–­145; Wilhelm Meister as, 97–­101. See also Bildung; Bildungstrieb; child; development; Elsie Venner (Holmes); Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Morgesons, The (Stoddard); Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (Wilson); Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Goethe) Bildungstrieb, xvi, 97–­107, 114, 116–­18, 123, 138–­39, 142, 144, 388nn13–­14; relation to Freudian Trieb, 97, 109. See also Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich; development; drive; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; vitalism blasphemy, 32; Ahab’s (in Moby-­Dick), 153; “blasphemous industriousness,” 64; as thought (but unuttered), 62, 87. See also God; sin; speech; transgression blindness: “blind chance” (for mechanism), 102, 105; “blind conatus” (of the id), 345; in the darkness of a contingent cosmos, 57; “diachronic” (Ngai), 382n77; willful, xii blood: awareness of, 96; circulation of, 96, 102, 108, 123, 135; and destiny, 266; emptying of, 129; language of, 124; and race, 133; in Stoddard, 123–­24. See also Of One Blood (Hopkins); vitalism blues, the, and modernity, 320–­21 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 106, 391n54; and the Bildungstrieb, 97–­104, 114–­16, 126, 129, 138–­39, 388n8, 388n12, 388n14; on race, 97, 387n6, 388n12; and temperament, 109. See also Bildungstrieb; race; temperament; vitalism Blumenberg, Hans, xii, 2, 7, 376n12, 388n14; on anger and fear, 183; on curiosity, 83; on human self-­assertion, 51, 57; on order’s disappearance, 176–­77, 383n7; on the quest for knowledge, 63–­ 64; on “reoccupation,” 31; on the will, 20 Blyden, Edward, 326 body: addiction to the, 290; and affect, 38, 180; awareness of, 95; and the bildungsroman, 98–­105; Black subject vs. Black, 44; critical turn to, 37–­44, 291–­95; and desire, 81; and development, 94; as doctor, 140; and excess, 108–­9; and excitation, 114–­15; without fatigue, 286; and feeling, 105; and freedom, 96; “higher state” of, 86; as machine, 406n46; mangled (and curiosity), 83; as merely a body (degeneration), 266; and mind, 72–­73, 125, 176, 285; and morality, 115; and passions, 108–­9; as person, 262–­69; programs of the, 293–­94; and Puritanism, 67; rejection of the (as sickness), 301; and soul, 106, 110, 119, 122–­23, 130, 134–­35, 223–­24, 389n30; sounds of the, 122; and will, xiii, xvi–­xviii, 8–­9,

447 11, 37, 82, 95–­145, 262–­317; wisdom of the, 98, 107–­8, 110; of the world, 152. See also exercise; health; mechanism; organism, the; reflex; vitalism Bogues, Anthony, 7, 320 Bonomi, Patricia, 74 Bordeu, Théophile de, 136 Bosanquet, Bernard, 227–­28, 400nn42–­43 Boyle, Robert, 58, 102, 389n25 Boym, Svetlana, 363, 369 Bradley, F. H., 211–­12, 225, 228, 401n56 brain: disorders of the, 10; fevered, in Goldstein, 141, 143; gone astray, 248; and habit, 37; “heated,” 66, 175; infection (by vapors), 67; libertinism of the, 46, 90; mental illness as “broken brain,” 43; and monomania, 164; neurological account of human will, turn to, 10–­12, 37–­39; and neuroplasticity, 37–­39; overtasked (H. James Sr.), 222; reflex action of the, 132–­34; rewiring (neuroplasticity), 37–­39; as sacrosanct, 135; of a whale, 201. See also consciousness; mind; psychology Breazeale, Daniel, 166, 394n25 Brentano, Franz, 213 Brodhead, Richard, 154 Brontë, Emily, 163, 165 Brontës, the, 118 brooding: of God, 60; of philosophers, 240; of priests, 301; of Vandover, 278–­79. See also Grübelsucht; introspection; James, William; reflection; thought Brooks, Peter, 229, 400n46 Brooks, Van Wyck, 131, 205 Broussais, François-­Joseph-­Victor, 122 Brown, Charles Brockden, 66, 76, 78–­80, 386n48 Brown, John (abolitionist), 156 Brown, John (physician), 114–­16 Brown, Marshall, 51–­52, 55, 77–­79, 83 Brown, Wendy: on liberal vs. neoliberal subjectivity, 290–­91; on self-­government vs. self-­ management, 406n48 Brown, William Wells, 390n44 Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall), 320 Bruce, Dickson, 359–­60 Buchanan, Joseph, 395n26 Bucke, R. M, 242 Buddhism, 22, 169–­70, 286, 302 Buffon, Georges-­Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 99, 104, 124 Bunyan, John, xv, 54–­56; Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 46, 54–­55, 57, 61–­66; and interiority, 59–­67; invoked in Moby-­Dick, 189; Life and Death of Mr. Badman, 385n31; The Pilgrim’s Progress, 54–­55; as psychiatric case study, 272; scrupulosity of, 86; and terror/ dread/anxiety, 46, 55, 60, 76, 83, 84, 86–­87, 92,

448 Bunyan (cont.) 239, 242. See also anxiety; interiority; spiritual: autobiography Burn, W. L, 10 Burton, Robert, 148–­49, 385n36 Bushnell, Horace, 75, 85 Butler, Judith, 302, 349 Bykova, Marina, 160 Byron, Lord, xiv, 32, 113, 153–­56, 158, 185; and abolitionism, 156; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 390n45; and Romanticism as pathology, 154 caffeine, 121; and capitalism, 268; as inadvisable, 96, 125, 302. See also addiction; diet; habit; health Cain, William E, 188 calculability: for Nietzsche, 304; resistance to (human beings’), 367 Callard, Felicity, 38 Calvin, John, 56–­57, 60; Bunyan and, 54; on introspection, 384n14. See also Calvinism Calvinism: as “authoritarian ideology” (Fromm), 55; Calvinist God, 29, 49, 53, 57–­60, 65, 73–­74, 76, 78, 129, 222, 224, 242, 385n28, 386n43; and (“breaking the will of ”) children, 75; and the God of will, 29, 53, 58–­59, 65, 222, 224, 385n28; and human fallenness, 73, 385n29; and individualization, 222, 224; and Lockean ideas, 74–­ 75; neo-­Calvinism, 343; and political thought, 383n11; and predestination, 49; and reason, 76; as repressive, 122; and sentiment, 386n43; sermons of, 78; and social reform, 53, 383n11; turn away from (in nineteenth-­century US), 75–­76; vs. Unitarianism, 75. See also Calvin, John; spiritual: autobiography; God; Unitarianism Cameron, Sharon, 235, 238, 401n55 Camus, Albert, 344. See also existentialism; limit Canguilhem, Georg, 8, 43, 140–­45; on illness, 308, 392n86; on life, 140, 145; on the organism, xvi; on psychiatrists and norms, 392n80; on the reflex concept, 133–­34, 136, 138; on Stahl’s work, 140–­41; and vitalism, 98, 392n79. See also error; life; vitalism: neovitalism cannibalism: self‑, 149, 169; society as organized, 231 capitalism, 264, 274, 281–­82; as automatic and instinctive, 274–­75; as Big Will, 264, 282; and caffeine, 268; and health, 264, 269, 275; and Homo economicus, 281–­82, 285; human capital, 291, 293, 407nn55–­56; logic of, 26, 33; and Moby-­ Dick, 150, 152–­53; and the modern subject, 58; and narrative, 295; Norris on, 281–­83; and the passions, 291; and the rise of the novel, 26–­27; and Robinson Crusoe, 26–­27; sickness defined under, 289; spiritual atmosphere of (Marx), 379n53; and temporality, 296, 303; Weber on,

index 27, 281–­82, 285, 296, 304; and the will, 275, 286. See also consumerism; economy; Marx, Karl; mass media Carby, Hazel, 113 care: and contract, 334; as the foundation of art and philosophy (for Nietzsche), 307; and illness, 407n62; and life, 43; self‑, 125, 293, 407n56; and slowness, 353; and will, 307 Carlyle, Thomas, 156, 158–­59, 242, 397n54 Carpenter, William, 135–­36 Carveth, Donald, 355 Casarino, Cesare, 151–­52, 395n34, 396n44 castanets: and the fandango, 131; like rattling of chips in the hand, 262. See also Elsie Venner (Holmes); Vandover and the Brute (Norris) Cavell, Stanley, 158; on claims of perverseness, 168; on “death-­in-­life,” 171; on literature’s fantastic founding works, 17; on Romanticism, 155, 157, 393n13; on skepticism, 168, 170. See also Romanticism Cederström, Carl, 289 Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote, 5, 13, 16–­17, 35, 253, 257; invoked in Moby-­Dick, 189. See also Don Quixote (Cervantes) Cesaire, Aimé, 31, 363, 380n58 Channing, William Ellery, 76, 78 Chaplin, Charlie, 264 character: formation (and habit formation), 277; judgment of, 133; and the need for animation (Felski), 377n29; and the novel, 15–­16; of an organism, 142; and style (Nietzsche), 294. See also habit Charcot, Jean-­Martin, 263 Chari, Anita, 349 Charland, Louis, 116, 391n54 Chase, Richard: on the American novel, 17–­18, 34–­35; on Moby-­Dick, 150–­52 Cheng, Anne, 334, 355, 357 Chesnutt, Charles W., xi, xiv, 16, 319; biological rhetorics of, 410n39; “Conjure Tales,” 408n3, 410n37; The Marrow of Tradition, xviii, 35, 330–­57, 363, 409n26, 410nn35–­36, 411n58; and Nathaniel Shaler, 338; “The Wife of His Youth,” 408n3. See also history; Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt); progress; race; temporality Cheyne, George, 108, 111–­12 Chichester, Sophia, 22 child: anxiety and the (for Kierkegaard), 83, 92; appetite of the, 95–­96; breaking the will of the (in Calvinism), 75; childlike state (via conquering one’s will), 128; childlike state (via psilocybin), 39; death of a, 129–­30, 244, 329, 348, 365, 380n63, 410n40; desire to teach the (to curse), 87; fear (of the white man) of the, 346; and freedom/will, 92–­94; gawking of the, 283; in Hawthorne, 92–­94; normal Black (becoming

index abnormal via the white world), 358; perversity of the, 93; pickiness of the, 118; play of the, 92, 259; as “possessed” (by a desire to read), 120; seen in the eyes of others, 171; smile of a (on an adult), 253; study of the, 137; taunting by a, 317; as will (for Puritans), 93; willfulness of the, 5, 147, 152; willpower of the (“marshmallow test”), 36, 381n70. See also bildungsroman; education; father, the; games; mother, the; play; willfulness citizenship, 162, 192, 194, 358; rights of, 199; and self-­fulfillment, 47. See also politics Clark, Henry, 61 Clark, J. C. D., 75 Clarke, Edwin, 134 Clarke, Samuel, 59 class: in H. James, 207, 232; and manners, 207; and the novel, 4–­6, 207, 398n4; as social fact, 232, 401n47 classification: and dismissal (in early psychiatry), 240–­41; in H. James’s work, 249–­55, 259; of H. James’s work, 229–­30; of Moby-­Dick, 146–­49, 152; racial (Blumenbach), 97, 387n6, 388n12; rational (in Moby-­Dick), 177; in Stoddard, 125; and worldliness, 252–­53. See also Ambassadors, The (James); anatomy; Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich; degeneration; Moby-­Dick (Melville); pathologization; worldliness climate crisis, 8, 237–­38; and existentialism, 43–­44 Clune, Michael, 12 coffee. See caffeine Cohen, Charles Lloyd, 53 Cohn, Dorrit, 77 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 97, 130, 133; and Blumenbach, 388n14; “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 157, 168, 383n89; on the will, 159, 184, 388n14 collectivity, ix, xiv, 1, 37, 49, 187–­200; and affect theory, 38; collective goal, 352; collective memory, 328; ideal, 227; and the individual, 198; in Moby-­Dick, 149, 151–­52, 155, 184, 187–­200; and politics, 149; and Romanticism, 155; and tolerance, 351; in Vandover and the Brute, 283; and the will, 7, 156, 187–­88, 210. See also community; Moby-­Dick (Melville); politics; unity colonialism: and archaeology, 360; and ideologies of the will, 30; and Robinson Crusoe, 27 Comay, Rebecca, 364, 411n56 communitarianism, 223, 229 community, 377n35; and American democracy, 224; arbitrariness of, 353; and art, 234; cosmic, 394n18; crew as, 393n10; and the epic, 162; and heroism, 155, 381n66; interdependence of, 332; law of the, 84–­85; of loss, 357; in The Marrow of Tradition, 333–­35, 343, 346, 353; vs. modernity, 327; and the Romantic will, 158; service to the, 90, 92; to

449 “society” (modernity), 327; successes of (for the ruling class), 302; and tradition, 351; as utopian aspiration, 409n19. See also collectivity; heroism; Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt); relationality; social world, the; unity compulsion, 289–­90, 294–­95; and freedom, 298; hypostatization of, 290; inner (of Robinson Crusoe), 27–­28; repetition, 321; and the will, 287–­88 confession: abolishment of oral (and interiority), 53; Confessions (Augustine), xiii, 2, 24, 50, 56, 60, 65, 83, 378n47, 384n24; evasion of, 93; and intention, 65; of love (and bodily reaction), 124; tremulousness about, 86–­88. See also Augustine, Saint conflict/tension: becoming abstraction, 236; human, 32, 34, 137; and individualism, 199, 308; internal, xvii, 274, 298; vs. manners, 256, 259; in the novel, 4–­5, 9; and politics, 193; and psychoanalysis, 213; reality and, 169; and relationality, 219, 228, 256; and the social, 235, 256; and talk, 251; the will and, ix–­x, xiii, 23, 27–­28, 71, 195, 298, 308, 395n28. See also akrasia; will: as divided; politics; relationality Conrad, Joseph, 14 consciousness: “discovery of,” 51; double (Du Bois), 325, 359–­61, 369; and emotion, 181; excess of (and the sick soul), 242; fringes of, 213; and hesitation, 368; and impulse, 210; and negation, 347; novelist of (H. James), 206, 230, 234–­35, 238, 401n55; vs. perversity, 368; phenomenology of, 401n55; pure, 51–­52, 236–­37; sheer, 204; and sociality, 235–­36; as “stream,” 212; as “subtractive” (Massumi), 38; and the weakening will, 404n26; will to, 363. See also Hodgson, Shadworth; James, William; mind; reflection; self; subjectivity; thought consent: of the artist, 344; inner (for the Stoics), 22; to mad authority (in Moby-­Dick), 188; vs. will, 192. See also yes-­saying Constant, Benjamin, 192 constraint: excess of, 3–­4; and morality, xvii, 204–­ 5, 262, 277–­82, 305; by society/state, x, 4 consumerism, 214, 217–­18, 226, 232, 248, 264. See also capitalism; desire; economy; mass media; modernity contingency: and Ahab (in Moby-­Dick), 176–­77; of God’s will, 56–­57; of (mere) matter, 14; of the modern world, 30; in naturalist fiction, 280; and Puritanism, 379n56; Romantic fascination with, 31; and subjectivity, 394n25 Cooley, Charles, 223–­24 Cooper, James Fenimore, 34, 147, 380n61 Copjec, Joan, 81 corruption: civilization’s (for Rousseau), 33; and recognition of moral law (for Kant), 81

450 Cotkin, George, 210 Cousin, Victor, 97 Cowper, William, 77, 173 craft: of mothers (in The Scarlet Letter), 94; of sailors (in Moby-­Dick), 197 Crafts, Hannah, 390n44 Creek Indians, slaughter of, 323 creolization, 363, 411n53. See also Glissant, Édouard; Vergès, Françoise Crichton, Alexander: on appetite, 118; on the passions, 116–­18, 391n54; and Trieb, 388n7 criminality: and aboulia, 270; and alcohol, 403n17; and automatism, 132–­33; and degeneration theory, 266–­67, 403n17; and freedom, 90; and perversity, 293; and the (wayward) will, 30 Crisler, Jesse, on Vandover and the Brute, 277 critique: and appreciation, 5, 234; and Christianity, 308; immanent, 362; and the individual, 18; becoming interest/affirmation, 24; and Romanticism, 155–­57 Crystal Palace: Stoddard on, 118–­19 Cullen, William, 109–­11, 114 Cummins, Maria Susanna, The Lamplighter, 92, 112–­13, 152 curiosity, xiv, 63–­64; vs. ambition, 177; in Augustine, 63–­64, 83; in Blumenberg, 63–­64, 83; in Bunyan, 61–­66; of the child, 92–­94; of the daydreamer, 66, 176; and experiment, 387n49; and pain, 378n40; perversity of, 83; and solitude, xv; as will to knowledge, 178; willfulness as, 177. See also quest: for knowledge Damrosch, Leo, 28, 50, 54–­55, 67 dance: as advised, 301; balls as ill-­advised, 96, 125–­27; card (management of), 280; and endurance, 283; mad, mechanistic, 131–­32; as pure potentiality of the human body, 381n76. See also health; insanity/madness; management Danziger, Kurt, 135 Darwin, Charles, 223, 404n28 Darwinism, xvii–­xviii, 100, 136; economic, xvii, 274; error of (for Nietzsche), 304; and the novel, 10; social, 274, 282, 338, 353. See also Darwin, Charles; evolutionary theory; Spencer, Herbert Daston, Lorraine, 367 Daudet, Alphonse, 244 Davis, Angela, 320 death: “‑bound subject,” 341; and charisma, 409n23; of a child, 129–­30, 244, 329, 348, 365, 380n63, 410n40; and curiosity, 94; and decay, 102–­3, 107, 389n29; and desire (Freud), 362; as destiny, 339–­42; drive, 124, 341; of the father, 283, 313–­14, 340; funerals (as alluring), 170; of God (Nietzsche), 50, 329; happiness in, 340; by (volatile) horse, 124; individual, 320;

index “‑in‑life” (Cavell), 171; living (of stagnation [Aldritch]), 323; and love, 120; by measles, 126; memento mori, 402n60; of the mother, 128, 276, 282–­83; ownership of, 341; as punishment (for illicit passion), 96; as purpose of existence (Schopenhauer), 306; vs. recovery, 130; refusal of, 120; and the sea, 171; vs. slavery, 329, 380n63; in Stoddard, 120, 122, 126, 128; turning away from the dead, 120–­21; and vitalism, 102, 107, 120; vs. wholeness, 102; of the will, 12. See also killing; suicide debt, vs. flourishing, 322 decadence, 122; and The Awkward Age, 401n48; and degeneration, 271–­72; and pathology, 122. See also degeneration; pathology decay: cultural, 231; and death, 102–­3, 107, 389n29; indifference of, 41; quiet, 163; sites of (in the gothic novel), 77; sites of (in The Souls of Black Folk), 322–­23; in vitalism, 102, 106–­7. See also fermentation; gothic, the; Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois) decision, 342–­52; vs. agency, 410n36; in Chesnutt, 348–­51; vs. deliberation, xiv, 209, 398n8; demand for, xi, 45; and exteriority (for Locke), 69; indecision, x, xiv; and irrationality, 297; to limit personal freedom, 40, 71; vs. reflection, xiv; and temporality, 319–­20; as unnecessary (because destiny), 340; will as, 159, 161. See also agency; existentialism; freedom; Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt) decolonization, 2, 31, 363 Defoe, Daniel, 26; The Family Instructor, 26; Moll Flanders, 29; Robinson Crusoe, xiii, 26–­32, 63, 379nn49–­52, 379n56; Roxana, 29; and spiritual autobiographies, 27, 52. See also Robinson Crusoe (Defoe); spiritual: autobiography degeneration, xiv, 240–­41, 263–­64, 266–­73, 284, 288, 403n16, 405n34, 405n43; Degeneration (Nordau), 241, 267–­70; and dehumanization, 276; and fatigue, 268, 270, 301; as hereditary, 267, 270; in Nietzsche, 301; in Norris, 275–­76, 283, 288. See also addiction; eugenics; evolutionary theory; psychology; regeneration/ regrowth Deleuze, Gilles: and Bergson, 103, 139; on the “crack,” 395n28; and “human capital,” 293; on Spinoza’s plural ontology of relations, 179; on the will in Melville’s characters, 16 democracy, ix, 187–­203; Arendt on, 192–­93, 199; and community, 224; (almost) frantic (in Moby-­Dick), 196; and the general will, 188–­95, 198–­99; and God (in Moby-­Dick), 189; and liberalism, 202, 343–­44; in Melville, 187–­91, 195–­99, 203; and monarchy (in Moby-­Dick), 189–­90, 196; Mouffe on, 202–­3; and the novel, 47; pluralistic, 398n58; without politics, 198;

index and Puritanism, 74; rise of, 3, 20–­21, 68; and sovereignty, 396n44; and tolerance, 383n11; “totalitarian” (of fascism), 188; and unity (for Dewey), 399n28; and the will, 187–­203. See also political theory; politics demons, 45, 163; appearance of, 222; (judicious) belief in (as recommended), 383n89; demoniacal possession, 241; “demonic” subjectivity, 163; the “diabolical,” 85; dialectical thought (as demonic side of Hegel), 169; as in need of combatting, 243; of the sea, 200; Trilling on, 45; Weber on, 45; as will, 147 den Otter, Sandra, 400n43 Dent, Arthur, 54 depression, 381n72; as excessive realism, 43; as hidden from the social world, 261; of Hume, 175; of Ishmael (in Moby-­Dick), 148, 170; of W. James, 209, 255, 271; of Kant, 241; as obstructed will, 12; of Vandover (in Vandover and the Brute), 288, 408n72 depth: of the ascetic, 310; and Freud, 213; and illness, 308; and intensity, 185; as lacked by the neoliberal subject, 292; on neuroses, 298; seeking out, 120; of the soul (and asceticism), 308; and suspicion, 308. See also Freud, Sigmund; intensity; interiority Derrida, Jacques, 194 Descartes, René, 24–­26, 80; mechanism of, 58–­60, 101–­2, 134; and modern science, 59–­60; and the quest for knowledge, 63–­64; on reflection, 134; on the thinking soul, 68; on the will, 25, 378n46. See also mechanism; knowledge; science desire: for access to another’s interiority, 172; and ambivalence, 404n33; and anxiety, 83; automatism of, 87; for autonomy, 2–­9; Bersani’s changing relation to, 232–­33, 237; and blood, 123–­24; as cast out, 237; and civilization, 233; consumer, 217–­18, 248; and the dead (Freud), 362; deferral of (the “marshmallow test”), 36, 381n70; dehumanization of, 235; in dreams, 378n39; and duty, 132; embodied, 81; and freedom, 218; (meaningless) fulfillment of, 346, 348; for ideals, 84; implications of, 46; indulgence of every (vs. moderation), 122; as (theoretically) infinite, 405n41; for knowledge, 64, 312; for Lacan, 84; and law, 87; and madness, 96; and manners, 232–­33; for marriage, 128; and naturalism, 71; as obstacle, 297; and obstacles, 178; for the past, 411n52; and prohibition, 64; second-­order, 312–­14; for self-­advancement, 71; to sin, 62, 84; and spirit, 181; in Stoddard, 95–­96, 121–­25, 128–­29; for subjectivity, 349; and will, 3–­5; of the will, 119 destiny, xviii, 319–­21; and antinomies of realism, 319; biological, 266; in Chesnutt, 339–­42, 353;

451 death as, 339–­42, 353; in Du Bois, 324–­25; German, 330; in Hopkins, 325–­26, 361; Manifest Destiny, 7, 150, 152, 320; and mastery, 27; and the novel, 318–­19, 326; of the philosopher, 308; and race, 324–­26, 330–­32, 339–­42, 353, 355; and romance, 344 details: of life, 54, 260, 311; and modernism, 263; naturalist fiction, 300; and the novel, 54, 65, 178, 207, 263; and self-­examination, 86 determinism, 99–­100, 211, 263–­64; and biology, 355; materialist, 208; and the will, 49, 51–­58, 73, 273. See also fatalism; free will; voluntarism development: activity without, 39; and appetite, 121–­23; arrested, 123, 131; and the Bildungstrieb, xvi, 97–­104, 107; of the body, 94; and curtailment, 129; developmental biology, 139; developmental time, 103; embryonic (as a challenge to Descartes’s system), 101; and environment, 139–­40, 142; as (only) illusion, 306; and post-­ Kantian philosophy, 157; of the soul, 50; and will, 121. See also bildungsroman; Bildungstrieb; Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich; vitalism Dewey, John, 223–­25, 227–­28; on Edward Bellamy, 399n27; on democracy, 399n28; and environmental behaviorism, 228; on the individual and society, 400n37; on “modification of the future,” 265; and W. James, 224–­25, 239; on the reflex arc, 392n74 Diamond, Cora, 232 Dickens, Charles, 5, 335–­36 Diderot, Denis, 103, 110, 115, 118 diet: and moderation, 122–­23, 302; vegetarianism, 284–­85, 302. See also digestion; eating; health; moderation; vegetarianism difference: and conflict, 169; desiring, 210, 299, 307, 310, 313; and dialogue, 237; enjoyment of, 249; and general will, 198, 397n53; human, 9, 232, 234, 249, 256; individual autonomy and, 40; and insanity, 165; and life, 102; in Melville, 172; minor, 250; and the novel, 9; pluralism, 202–­3; rationality and, 31; and relationality, 256; and repetition, 362; sociality as, 260 digestion, 135; and mental disorder, 117–­18; and sleep, 274. See also appetite; eating; health; psychology; sleep Diggins, John Patrick, 224 Dihle, Albrecht, 181–­82 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 324 disease. See illness/disease distance, 356–­64; and narrative, 356; as protection, xvii; and temporality, 362; and thought/reflection, 361 Dixon, Thomas (historian), 115 Dixon, Thomas (novelist), 319 documentary novel, xiv, xviii, 333. See also Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt)

452 Doidge, Norman, 37 domestic novel, 112, 118, 126, 128 Donne, John, 60 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 13, 16–­17, 253, 257; and ambivalence, 16; relation to romance, 5, 17; and the will, 35. See also Cervantes, Miguel de; romance Doody, Margaret, xi, 21–­22, 24, 378n43 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, xi, 16–­17 doubt: of the heart, 173; and hesitation, 366, 398n8; of the mind, 170, 172–­73; and the Romantic subject, 168; self‑, 150, 314; unceasing, 241; and the will, 273. See also skepticism Douglass, Frederick, 22–­23; and Byronism, 156; The Heroic Slave, 156; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 113, 351 Dowbiggin, Ian, 403n16 Dracula (Stoker), 318 dreams, 55; “collective dream” (the state as), 194; daydreams, xiv, 39, 66, 176, 201; and desire’s return, 378n39; and fiction, 66; vs. living, 363; and mechanism, 136; of possession (desire), 237; vs. thought, 71–­72; waking dreams, 68, 77; and will, 362. See also sleep Dreiser, Theodore, 218 Driesch, Hans, 138–­39 drive: of America, 150; death, 124, 341; developmental (Bildungstrieb), xvi, 97–­107, 114, 116–­18, 123, 138–­39, 142, 144, 388n13, 388n14; development of Trieb as concept, 109; to head to the sea, 172; to live, 120; nisus, 388n7; toward passivity, 276; and plant life, 97; and self-­narration, 314; and will, 63, 114–­15, 144, 305, 308; Wissenstrieb (knowledge-­drive), 63, 85, 177. See also Bildungstrieb; quest: for knowledge; striving dualism: anti‑, 221, 228–­29; and irrationality, 45; Kantian, 212; of the novel, 35–­42; the sick soul as, 245; of value, 231. See also irrationality; monism; soul: sick soul (W. James) Du Bois, W. E. B., 319, 326, 355; “The Conservation of Races,” 324–­25; on double consciousness, 325, 359–­61, 369; Dusk of Dawn, 327; on the “incalculability” of the human will, 2; and William James, 324, 359–­60, 368; and the life of striving, 114; The Philadelphia Negro, 366; and politics, 368; and Nathaniel Shaler, 338; on the slowness of Black progress, 353, 358, 361, 363; and sociology, 322, 366–­69; “Sociology Hesitant,” 366–­69; The Souls of Black Folk, xviii, 321–­25, 328, 332–­ 33, 353, 356–­60, 363–­70, 408nn7–­8, 410n40; and the will, 368. See also race; Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois); sociology; temporality Duchesneau, François, 106 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, xi, xviii, 319; “Disappointed,” 324; The Sport of the Gods, 323–­24, 330, 353, 408n10

index Duquette, Elizabeth, 393n9 Durkheim, Émile, 282–­83, 405n43; Homo duplex, 244; on industry, 405n41; on the “social fact,” 230, 233, 252; on Spencer, 274 duty: and action, 81, 280; and desire, 132; failure of, 79; familial, 351–­52; vs. hard work, 282; to make money (Franklin), 281; of a man, 280; and moral right, 404n24; in Norris, 276, 280, 282; passion for, 128; and perversity, 387; religious, 78, 86; to self-­expansion, 7; selfishness, 404n24; shirking, 276; vs. will, 159; will as, 339–­41 Dyke, Daniel, 60–­61, 63, 65, 308, 385n27; Mystery of Self-­Deceiving, 60, 79, 84 Eagleton, Terry, 3, 150–­52, 170, 177 eating, 72, 95, 121; as cure for philosophical melancholy, 175; and drive, 98; excessive, 289–­90; and morality, 311; in Norris, 276, 289; as requirement, 169; as phenomenological act, 295; as self-­medication, 296–­97; in Stoddard, 95–­96, 120–­23, 129; stress‑, 295; and survival, 174; vegetarianism, 284–­85, 302. See also appetite; digestion; drive; phenomenology; vegetarianism economy: and appetite, xiv; as Big Will, xiv, 18, 273–­75, 290, 329; biologization of, 275; economic Darwinism, xvii, 274; and efficiency, 287; gift, 257; and growth, xvii, 266; Homo economicus, 281–­82, 285; and the (neo)liberal subject, 290–­93; marginalist economics, 275; physiocracy, 292, 406n53; and society, 274, 282–­ 83. See also Big Will; capitalism; consumerism; mass media; Smith, Adam ecstasy, 282; mystical, 246, 251; religious, 67, 78. See also enthusiasm; excess; mysticism; spiritual Eddy, Mary Baker, 242 Edel, Leon, 398n7 education: Bildung as, 97; industrial (of Booker T. Washington), 408n8; insufficient (and akrasia), 26; and morality, 72; and psychology, 137; in self-­restraint (in the bildungsroman), 96; and sexuality, 279; and will, 75. See also teaching Edwards, Jonathan, xii; and the Great Awakening, 73; as invoked in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 16; and Locke, 386n40; on moral law, 82, 386n43; on the will, 76 ego, 159; and altruism, 351; escape from (via hallucinogens), 37, 39; in Fichte, 160, 163, 166–­67; in Freud, 213, 345, 410n42; and maturity, 40; split, 408n72; vs. will, 166, 345 Eliot, George, xii, 14–­16, 205, 335–­36, 352; Daniel Deronda, 318, 326, 336, 344; and liberalism, 227, 229; Middlemarch, 16, 332–­33, 336, 343 Eliot, T. S., 205–­6, 321; “The Waste Land,” 318 Ellison, Ralph, xi; on modernity, 6, 51; on the novel, 2, 6, 51, 83

index Elsie Venner (Holmes), 131–­33, 135–­37. See also bildungsroman; Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr.; reflex Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 34, 118, 216, 224, 242–­44, 393n13; and the rejection of the Calvinist God, 242; and self-­reliance, 150, 168; on Swedenborg, 222; on the will, 150, 216 emotion, 115–­16; into action, 272; vs. affect, 181; controlling, 92–­93, 182; as energizing, 180; excess (and gender), 272; Jamesian, 377n33; and materialism, 182; and narrative, 115, 181; vs. passion, 181, 391n55; and politics, 192, 194; uncontrollable, 79; and the will, 115, 180–­84. See also affect; anger/rage; feeling; happiness; passion; sentiment; sorrow Empedocles, 169 empiricism, 20, 24, 57, 78–­79, 401n56; W. James and, 212–­14, 216, 240, 399n36; Locke and, 68; proto-­, 54; Puritans and, 58; and the “subject of interest,” 292 enjoyment: of difference, 249; vs. goodness, 121; and idleness, 218–­20, 258; of the instrumentalization of the other, 85; irrational, 281; and pain, 183; rational, 273; of sin, 24; socially disapproved, 276, 279. See also desire; happiness enthusiasm: religious, 67–­69, 72–­73, 77–­78, 269, 378n48; sensualism of, 85; of thought, 90. See also ecstasy environment: and aesthetics, 315; and affect theory, 38; and degeneration, 26, 272–­73; and development, 139–­40, 142; and the neoliberal subject, 293; in Norris, 269, 272–­73; for the Progressives, 265; and race (for Blumenbach), 97; responsiveness to (and vitalism), 110–­11, 114, 143; and sin, 272–­73. See also adaptability; affect; naturalism; organism, the; race epic, xiv, xvi. See also Moby-­Dick (Melville) Epictetus, 22, 378n38 Epicureanism, 59, 111, 297, 307; and programs of the body, 294 Epicurus, 297 epigenesis, 99 epistolary novel, 22, 70. See also interiority; Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (Richardson) error: and appetite, 118; and the body, 108–­9; in Canguilhem, 42, 382n82; of classification, 146; evil as (merely a matter of) (Locke), 80; leading to error, 198; of taking the other as oneself, 172 Esquirol, Jean-­Étienne-­Dominique: on monomania, 164–­65; on the passions, 117 estrangement, 325; and action, 350; and existentialism, 345–­46, 350 eugenics, 137, 272 Evans, Brad: on historical teleologies in Du Bois, 324, 408n7; on James’s The Ambassadors, 219 everyday, the: appetite, 174, 181; art of, 311, 316; beyond, xvii, 63, 66, 83, 181; Black everydayness,

453 361; and brooding (for W. James), 246; and Bunyan, 54; companionship, 186; description of (in H. James), 207; desire to go beyond, 83; and diffusion, 196–­97; habits, 266; and history, 319–­20, 332; irrationality, 289; vs. life at sea, 172; in Melville, 169, 172–­76, 181; moonlight and, 119; and the novel, 47, 52, 66, 207; quest for knowledge beyond, 63; and the racial politics of temporality, 331–­32; and romance, xvii, 66, 181; and spiritual autobiography, 54; temporal uncanniness of, 321; and the uncanny, 321, 352–­63 evil, xv, 243–­45; as convertible to a good (with an attitude change [W. James]), 243; and depth, 308; as dialectically required, 244–­45; as (merely) an error, 80; as (merely) a historical phenomenon, 224; inner voice (Bunyan’s), 65, 67, 239; in W. James, 243–­45; as (merely) a lie, 243; as linked with good, 305, 308; as a matter of training, 71; as perversity, 81; radical (Kant), 80–­81; and restlessness, 209 evolutionary theory, 223, 262, 274–­75, 285, 303, 367; and progress, 265; and psychology, 270; and self-­preservation, 278, 304. See also adaptability; Darwin, Charles; Darwinism; degeneration; fitness; genetics excess: of affect, 180; of beauty, 279; of being, 16; of bile (melancholia), 67; and the body, 108–­9; and civilization, 123; of consciousness (and the sick soul), 242; of constraint, 3–­4; and curiosity, 83; of curiosity, 64; of dancing, 283; of deliberation, 213; of desire, 28; emotional, 272; of freedom, xi; freedom as, 93; of goodness, 86, 112; of impulse, 267, 270; individual, 199; of inhibition (aboulia), 271; of interest (as troubling), 209; of interiority, 46–­51, 65, 67, 74, 77, 87, 154; introspection (dangers of), 86, 385n36; knowledge, 64; via limit, 64; and literature, 146; of Mandeville (for Smith), 61; and objectivity, 85; of passion, 90, 131; passion as form of, 116; pathological, 65–­66, 87, 298; of personality (as illness), 100; of realism, 43; of reason, 90; religious (“enthusiasm”), 67–­69, 72–­73, 77–­78; sanguinary (of Wieland), 79; of self-­control, 271; of sensitivity, 111; of sitting (as sin), 289; of subjectivity, 161, 168; of suffering, 111; of sympathy, 111; of thought, 204–­5, 209–­11, 213, 248; understandable (in anger), 182; of will, xiii, xiv, 4–­6, 11, 15–­17, 28, 43, 104, 109, 149, 164, 169, 187; willful, xiii, 4, 28; of willfulness, 4; of wit, 233. See also moderation excitability, 114–­16, 390n48. See also alcohol; Brown, John (physician); caffeine; Cullen, William exercise, xvii, 265, 285–­87, 290, 299; addiction to, 290–­95; Gilman on, 285. See also health; Hall, G. Stanley; Macfadden, Bernarr

454 existentialism, 42–­44, 320–­21, 329–­32, 342–­52; and action, xviii; and the Big Will, 329, 344–­45; and Black thought, 44, 320–­21, 329–­31; and the blues, 320; in Chesnutt, 345–­51; and freedom, 345, 350–­51; and liberalism, 342–­45; and nausea, 345–­46; and posthumanism, 43; proto-­, 30; and psychiatry, 43; and psychoanalysis, 355 failure: to become habitual enough, 316; to follow one’s sense of good, 1, 12, 23, 45, 71, 81, 106, 127–­29, 243, 271, 314, 381n76; human failings, xv; to keep one’s resolutions, 313; of the letter of the law, 88–­89; and sickness, 125; in the social, 249; to thrive, 123, 410n39; of volition/will, 270, 86, 337. See also Augustine, Saint; Paul, Saint; Vandover and the Brute (Norris) Fanon, Frantz, xviii, 8, 31, 44, 359, 363, 376n12; and Afro-­pessimism, 358; Black Skin, White Masks, 329, 348, 355, 358; on the desire for recognition, 348–­51; on destiny, 355, 358; on experiencing racialization, 346; and gender, 351; on pathological being of the Black subject, 355; and Sartre, 320, 329; on Sartre, 331; on temporality, 318. See also Afro-­pessimism; existentialism; Sartre, Jean-­Paul; recognition; temporality fatalism, 166; Black, 332, 365; and degeneration, 266; generational (in Du Bois), 365; in Stoddard, 129 father, the: avenging (at the expense of a public good) (in Chesnutt), 340–­41; crisis of, 222; and the crisis of the son, 209; death of (in Norris), 283, 313–­14; disobeying of, 26–­27; grief of (as stage-­worthy), 244; and guilt in the son, 278; religious enthusiasm of (in Brown), 78; sins of (in the gothic), 77; as unacknowledged (in Hawthorne), 93. See also child; James, Henry, Sr.; James, William; law; Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt); mother, the; Robinson Crusoe (Defoe); Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne); Vandover and the Brute (Norris); Wieland (Brown) fatigue: body without (as capitalist daydream), 286; and degeneration, 268–­70, 301; mania, 403n20; and stimulants, 288. See also caffeine; capitalism; degeneration; sleep Faulkner, William: on the living past, 328; and repetition, 321 feeling: and body, 105; as in control, 183; fellow feeling (in Moby-­Dick), 171, 175, 186; and the individual, xv, 14, 18–­19, 48, 67, 71, 153; instinctive or inherited, 352; and motion, 134; and progress, 396n36; and the unified will, 192; vs. will, 34, 67, 71, 111, 119, 174. See also affect; emotion; sentiment Feher, Michel, 293 Felski, Rita: on character, 377n29; on the modern subject as consumer, 218

index fermentation, 106–­7. See also decay; Stahl, Georg; Willis, Thomas Feuerbach, Ludwig, 63–­64 fevers, 127, 392n83; of the brain vs. rational thought, 78; as healing, 105, 136, 140, 389n24; of the soul (passions), 116; studying oneself into, 402n57. See also health; illness/disease; Stahl, Georg Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, xvi, 149, 157–­66, 182–­84, 193, 394n21; Hegel’s critique of (as Romantic will), 149, 159–­63, 165–­66, 168; on subjectivity, 159–­60, 162–­63, 165–­67, 169, 184, 194–­95, 394n25, 395n28; on will, 160, 194. See also freedom; Hegel, G. W. F.; intensity; subjectivity; will Fiedler, Leslie, 34 Fielding, Henry, 52 Fiering, Norman: on cynics and libertines, 385n29; on Puritan writings and the will, 71, 84 finitude, 81, 93, 228 Fisher, Philip: on the cost of the autonomy of the self, 153–­54; on the Greek concept of thymos, 181–­82 Fiske, John, 274 fitness: “survival of the fittest” (Spencer), 223, 283, 404n28; vs. unfitness, 100, 104. See also Darwinism; evolutionary theory; Spencer, Herbert; survival fixed idea. See idée fixe Flaubert, Gustave, xi, 15–­17, 88 Fluck, Winfried: on expressive individualism, 154; on Ishmael as world-­hungry narrator, 177 Ford, Ford Madox, 398n3 forgetting: of a dead child’s birthday (Stoddard), 130; of God (via “autonomous cognitive security”), 64; and trauma, 276, 356. See also memory for its own sake: contemplation/curiosity, 59; domination, 190; knowing, 234; vice, 61; zestful bickering, 251 Foucault, Michel, 8, 154, 308, 383n6; The Archaeology of Knowledge, 360; The Birth of Biopolitics, 291–­93; The Birth of the Clinic, 136–­38, 141, 392n79; and Canguilhem’s work, 43, 136, 138; Discipline and Punish, 292; History of Sexuality, 293; on neoliberalism, 291–­93, 406n53; on Sauvages’s approach, 137; on the Stoics, 407n57; on subjectivation, 3, 154; on the will to alterity, 53. See also Canguilhem, Georg; self-­: subjection Fourier, Charles, 222–­23 fragmentation: and the dash, 411n55; vs. form, 119; of The Morgesons’ style, 96 Frank, Jason, 195, 396n39 Frankenstein (Shelley), 146 Frankfurt, Harry, 312–­14 Franklin, Benjamin, 284–­86; daily habits of, 284–­85; and the duty to make money, 281;

index moral philosophy of, 405n38; Poor Richard’s Almanack, 75, 405n38; as self-­made man, 286; as self-­tracker, 381n73. See also capitalism; habit; morality; tracking Freccero, John, 24 Frederic, Harold, 272 Freeburg, Christopher: and the assertion of the human, 44; on blackness in Melville’s oeuvre, 393n8; on confronting one’s bad faith, 347; on interiority, 197; on the subject and the racist project, 359 freedom, 5: and affect, 180; and ambivalence, 149; of appreciation, 234; arbitrary, 110, 160; Arendt on, 21–­24, 31–­32; vs. bad faith, 347; from Big Wills, 2, 329, 344–­45; and the bildungsroman, 100; and biology, 38; Black (and Romanticism), 113–­14, 116; bodily (denied), 23; body (as site of), 96; and the brain, 37–­39; in Chesnutt, 345–­ 51; of choice, 159–­61; civic, 21; of conscience, 53; to create, 233; as curiosity, 66; from decay, 389n29; and desire, 218; and determinism, 56; and the dissolution of the individual, 36; vs. equality, 29; and evil, 81; as excess, 93; excess of, xi; existential, 345–­51; and fiction, 66; and finitude, 92; forced into, 191; from freedom, 90–­91; “giddiness” of (Jonas), 66, 92; and goodness, 80–­81; vs. happiness, 16, 20, 383n1; in Hawthorne, 87–­94; Hegel on, 159–­62; human, 23, 54, 57, 7, 80–­81, 90, 108, 140, 328; hypostatization of, 290; and idleness, 219; incomplete, xviii; individual/personal, ix, 21–­22, 40, 89, 153–­54, 219, 228–­29, 381n71, 394n18; instinct for, 50, 308; and interiority, 22–­23; W. James on, 211; vs. justice, ix; Kant on, 80–­84, 88–­91, 93, 160; and law, 84–­94; and liberalism, 151; limitation of one’s, 40, 71, 153–­54, 394n25; Locke on, 71–­72; as love, 34; and madness (“eleutheromania”), 154; vs. marriage, 97; and modernity, xi, 6–­7, 56, 65–­66, 89–­91, 153–­54, 298; and monomania, 165; and morality, 30, 32; “negative liberty,” 147; through original sin, 81; from pain, 276; and passion, 83–­84; Patterson on, 21–­22; and perversity, 108; political, 188, 400n43; and possibility, 65–­66, 92; as possibility, 2; purported, 319, 323, 330; quest for, xiii, xv, 380n63, 394n18; and relationality, 229; and risk, 2, 381n76; and science, 57; and self-­subjection, xvi; vs. social form, 46; of the soul, 390n51; sovereignal, 21; and specificity, 237; struggle for, 349; via Sturm und Drang, xiii; subjective, 160; and temporality, 362; and thought, 233; of thought, 88–­90, 165; and truth, 93; and universality, 89; valorization of, 71; and value, 43–­45; and wealth, 398n4; and the will, x, xiv, 23, 33, 80–­82, 164; from the will, 306; of the will, 71–­72, 75; vs. the will, 72. See also autonomy; free will; Hegel, G. W. F.; James,

455 William; Kant, Immanuel; Locke, John; Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt); Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne) Freeman, Walter, 142 free will, 12, 50, 211, 306, 386n40; belief in (by way of), 211; for Hegel, 161, 169; for W. James, 211; for Kant, 188; for Locke, 71–­72; and submission (Augustine), 378n47. See also autonomy; determinism; freedom; Hegel, G. W. F.; Kant, Immanuel; Locke, John; will Freud, Sigmund, xviii, 138, 213, 238–­41, 297–­98, 354–­62, 386n39; and archaeology, 325, 360–­62; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 354; Civilization and Its Discontents, 41, 240; clinical practice of, 355; on degeneration theory, 405n34; on ego vs. id, 410n42; and the everyday, 358; on the neuroses, 164, 354; and the reassertion of excess, 64; and repetition, 321, 354–­55, 360–­62; and self-­narration, 356; Studies in Hysteria, 359; and temporality, 321; and the will, 32, 345, 410n32; on willfulness, 410n32 Frierson, Patrick, 82 Fromm, Erich, 55 Früchtl, Josef, 155, 157, 393n13, 394n18 Frye, Northrop: and the classification of Moby-­ Dick as romance and anatomy, 147–­48; on the Romantic cult of the hero, 155; on romance and the idealization of libido, 186 Gale, Richard M., 224 Gall, Franz, 134 games: of chance (gambling), 262, 264–­65, 275, 280; as cure for philosophical melancholy, 175; and gender, 131; of life, 211; tipcat (in Bunyan’s Grace Abounding), 62, 65. See also play; Vandover and the Brute (Norris) Garner, Margaret, 329–­30, 380n63 Gayon, Jean, 145 gender: and appetite, 118; and the bildungsroman; 92–­93, 109, 121; and early American fiction, 112; and emotional excess, 272; and existentialism, 351; and games, 131; and gothic fiction, 66; and health, 242; and the inability to act, 271; and the medical profession, 96; and the novel, 21, 92–­93; and pain, 125; and rationality, 30; and reading, 66; and reason, 90; and recognition, 351; and Romanticism, 118; and willfulness, 147 general will, xvi, 187–­200, 202, 227–­28, 397n49; as constituting power, 193–­95; dangers of, 191–­93; defense of, 193. See also Moby-­Dick (Melville); politics; Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques; sovereignty; will genetics: DNA, 102, 139; modification to, 265. See also alcohol: alcoholism (in Stoddard); degeneration; evolutionary theory; repetition genre fiction, 47, 318

456 Georget, Étienne, 164 Geyer-­Kordesch, Johanna, 106, 389n27, 389n30 Giddens, Anthony, 405n43 Gilbert, Scott, 139 Gillespie, Michael Allen, 57 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 301; and fitness, 285; and “human engineering,” 265; “The Yellow Wallpaper,” 269 Gilroy, Paul, 327–­29, 409n24; on Afrocentrism, 327; and existentialism, 44; on Morrison’s Beloved, 408n9; on the racial politics of temporality, 331, 337, 409n13; and romance, 328, 341; on slavery (and modernity), 329 Glauser, Richard, 72 Glissant, Édouard, 363 God: abandonment by, 20–­21, 29, 50, 52, 162–­63; absence of, 56, 58–­59, 163, 208; address to, 23; as angry, 83; as Big Will, x, xii, xiv–­xv, 2, 7, 25, 29–­30, 33, 50, 53, 56–­59, 129, 171–­72, 189, 192, 195, 210, 222, 235, 274, 293, 324, 379n56, 384n20, 385n28, 386n48, 396n43; and the (human) body, 105; Calvinist, 29, 49, 53, 57–­60, 65, 73–­74, 76, 78, 129, 222, 224, 242, 385n28, 386n43; and creation, 98–­99, 101; as dead (Nietzsche), 50, 329; as defined by will rather than reason, 56–­57; and democracy, 189; dependence on (and self-­ renunciation), 294; and general will concept, 189, 192, 195, 396n43; grace of, 65; as “great body politic,” 223; as hidden, 30, 56, 58–­59, 61, 379n55; as indifferent, 179, 200; as infinite, 25; knowing, 384n23; as last resort (in The Marrow of Tradition), 348, 352; ‑like (Moby-­Dick as), 186; monomaniac as, 165; the multitude as, 381n75; as object of longing, 22; omnipotence of, 53, 59, 189, 195; personal, 74; and (double) predestination, 59; rejection of, 7–­8; reluctance toward, xiii, 23; as remote, 22; as replaced by another Big Will (nature, the state, etc.), x, 18, 195, 292; revelation of (in Moby-­Dick), 200; as a savage (in Robinson Crusoe), 379n56; silence of, 52; turning toward, 27; as tyrannical, 53; as vengeful, 69, 338; voice of, 78, 324; (inscrutable/ unfathomable) will of, 25, 29–­30, 50, 56–­59, 129, 171–­72, 189, 210, 222, 235, 324, 379n56, 384n20, 385n28, 386n48, 396n43; word of, 62; word of (in English translation), 53–­54; yearning for, x. See also Big Will; blasphemy; sin Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xii, 97, 158–­59, 388n12; the “all” of, 179, 395n33; and the bildungsroman, xv–­xvi, 97–­98, 114, 387n5; Elective Affinities, 100, 116–­17, 388n11; Faust, 29, 100, 146, 394n23; on Kant, 387n53; and science, 99–­ 100, 115–­16; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 97, 99–­100, 104, 116, 118, 123, 126, 131, 388n12; on the will, 159. See also Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich

index Goldmann, Lucien, 30 Goldstein, Amanda Jo: on Goethe’s Bildungstrieb, 388n13; on vitalism, 392n77 Goldstein, Jan, 164 Goldstein, Kurt, 8, 138, 140–­44; on the organism, xvi, 141–­42; on the reflex, 143; and vitalism, 98 Gooding-­Williams, Robert, 324, 408n7 Goodlad, Lauren, 227 Gordon, Lewis, 7; on Afro-­pessimism, 330–­31; on Black existentialism, 44, 320; on racism and bad faith, 347 gothic, the, xiii–­xv, 32, 76, 99, 155, 294, 323; and the American novel, 66; and the British novel, 20; and gender, 66; Hawthorne and, 48, 50–­51, 76, 78; and the horrifying, 386n48; and interiority, 51–­52, 55, 63, 67, 386n48; and madness, 67, 77; neo-­gothic, 262, 267; novel, xv, 52, 63, 76–­79, 231, 325; Puritanism rendered, 76, 386n48; and secularization, 53; Southern, 322; and the supernatural, 77, 318 Goyal, Yogita, 326–­28, 331 Graham, Sylvester, 122–­23 Gramsci, Antonio, 343 Graver, Suzanne, 351 Gray, T. S., 274 greater Will. See Big Will Green, T. H., 211, 227–­28, 400n37 Greif, Mark, 7 Greven, Philip, 75 Griggs, Sutton, 319 Grosz, Elizabeth, 185 Grübelsucht, 207–­8, 212, 238–­42, 245–­47, 251, 255, 257–­58, 269, 402n57. See also infinity; James, William; quest: for truth; truth guilt: survivor’s, 356; white, 330; in Vandover and the Brute, 278, 280 Habermas, Jürgen, 202 habit, xviii, 13, 36–­37, 264–­66, 283, 287–­99, 368; and aesthetics, 315–­16; and asceticism, 300; and automatism, 287–­88, 313; and the brain, 37; breaking the, 294, 313; bundles of (people as), 265, 277, 287; and character, 276; and contemporary theory, 289–­99; and cruel optimism (Berlant), 296; and failure, 287; and H. James, 398n7; in W. James, 287–­88, 295, 310, 316, 368; and morality, 287–­88; in Norris, 262–­66, 277–­ 85, 288, 315; of privacy, 252; and repetition, 283, 287–­88, 295, 310–­13; Ricoeur on, 264; “second nature” as, 294; Sedgwick on, 295; and the subject, 293; and the will, xviii, 287, 295, 352. See also addiction; James, William; naturalism; repetition; Vandover and the Brute (Norris) Hack, Daniel, 341 Haggard, H. Rider, 318 Haigh, Elizabeth, 389n29

index Hall, G. Stanley, 285 Hall, Marshall, 133, 135 Haller, William, 383n10, 389n38 Hallward, Peter, 193 happiness: and the bildungsroman, 112; in death, 340; vs. freedom, 16, 20, 383n1; and health, 403n18; negatively defined, 309; and repression, 175; and the will, 71, 82, 273, 308 Hardt, Michael: on constituted power, 396n44; on the “multitude,” 152. See also collectivity Hardy, Thomas, 402n3 Hartman, Saidiya, 342; on mourning that which continues, 354–­55; on slavery and the limits of narrative, 325; on subjectivity and the negation of the will, 328–­29 Harvey, David, 289 Harvey, William, 99, 102, 105 Hawkins, Mike, 405n43, 406n52 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, xi, xv, 61, 65, 73–­74, 118–­20, 157, 206, 387n56, 395n33; “The Birth-­Mark,” 62, 90; The Blithedale Romance, 222; “duplicity” of (for Lawrence), 17; as father, 93–­94; and the gothic, 48, 50–­51, 76, 78; The House of the Seven Gables, 124; and interiority, 76–­77; and The Pilgrim’s Progress, 54; and romance, 66, 119, 146–­47; The Scarlet Letter, xiii, xv, 16, 46–­51, 61–­ 62, 65–­66, 73–­74, 76, 80–­94, 118–­19, 120. See also Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne) Hayek, Friedrich, 275 Hayford, Joseph, 326 health, 96, 104, 120–­39, 241, 281–­312; and abuse of health, 392n86; and addiction, 283; aggressive, 317; and capitalism, 264, 269, 275; and Coca-­ Cola, 288; diet, xvii; and disease/illness, 115, 305; and gender, 242; and happiness, 403n18; and the law, 86; and morality, 284–­85, 289, 291; and norms, 141; in Norris, 284, 288; overflowing, 301; and partiality, 180; pathologization of, 283, 289; and philosophy, 299; and restraint, 112; and sin, 144; of the social body, 264; and will, 112, 283, 290, 305; will to, 290, 305, 407n54. See also Berlant, Lauren; Nietzsche, Friedrich; recovery; Sedgwick, Eve Hebard, Andrew, 341 Hegel, G. W. F., xii, 19, 97, 158–­70, 193, 211–­12, 225, 228–­29, 244, 349, 351; Aesthetics, 162, 191, 341, 381n66; on Africa, 321; “being in the world,” 168; and the dash, 411n56; and dialectical thought, 169; on ethics, 229; on Fichte, xvi, 158–­60, 162–­63, 165–­66, 191, 198; on freedom, 160–­62, 237; on insanity, xvi, 160, 163–­66, 182, 394n21; on irony, 162; on Kant, 159, 161–­62; on the master-­slave dialectic, 349; and the narrative turn, 40; on “the negro,” 380n57; Philosophy of Mind, 160, 163, 165–­66; Philosophy of Right, 160–­62; on revenge, 341; on the right,

457 x, 161, 334; on the Romantic hero and law, 191; and Romanticism, 157, 160–­63, 165–­66, 168, 191, 394n19; on Rousseau, 198, 397n53; Sittlichkeit, 227; on society, 400n43; on subjectivity, 149, 160, 228; on the will, xvi, 4, 40–­41, 158, 160–­62, 167, 169, 334, 394n22 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 329, 378n46; on authenticity, 345; on individual death, 320; and the Will of History, 330–­31 Heimert, Alan, 156 Heine, Heinrich, 191 Heinroth, Johann Christian, 164 heroism, xvi–­xviii, 149, 153, 187–­88, 320; and community, 155, 381n66; in The Marrow of Tradition, 340–­41; in Moby-­Dick, 153, 187–­91; vs. modernity, 188; moral, 197; and Romanticism, 155–­56, 191, 341; temporality of, 363 hesitation: and consciousness, 368; and the dash (in Du Bois), 370; and doubt, 366, 398n8; and Du Bois, 325, 366–­69; and H. James, 205; of W. James, 210; vs. the temporality of heroism, 363; and trauma, xiv Heyd, Michael, 385 Hickman, Jared: on the “Black Prometheus,” 340; on “Byronic abolitionism,” 156; on Romanticism and the struggle for Black freedom, 113 hidden: God, 30, 56, 58–­59, 61, 379n55; nature, 310; reality, 232; self, 325–­26; truth, 63–­64 higher Will. See Big Will Hippocrates, 105 Hirschman, Albert O., 70–­7 1, 386n39 history, 318–­70; absence of (for love, consciousness, etc.), 311; as Big Will, xii, 18, 324, 331; continuous (and the subject), 360; as cyclical, 337, 342; and the everyday, 319–­20; family, 334–­35; into historicism (of Du Bois), 324; and the novel, 329; and perspective, 336; and/in the present, 318–­70; as progress, xiv, 319–­21, 324, 327, 336–­37, 342–­43; and psychoanalysis, 362; and “the race idea,” 324; recognition of, 359; and repetition, 342, 357; Schopenhauer critiquing Hegel on, 169; as stagnation, xviii, 318, 321–­22, 353; taste of, 252; and will, 324, 330–­31. See also progress; race; temporality Hobbes, Thomas, 61; on the effect of English translations of the Bible, 53; on monarchical authority, 191; and nominalism, 57; on the state (as “collective dream”), 194 Hodges, Devon, 60 Hodgson, Geoffrey, 275 Hodgson, Shadworth, 212, 243 Hoffman, Frederick, 353, 355 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 119 Hoffmann, Friedrich, 108 Holbein the Younger, Hans, 402n60

458 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr.: “Crime and Automatism,” 132; on the downside of introspection, 76, 78; on Jonathan Edwards’s sermons, 76; “Mechanism in Thought and Morals,” 132–­36; on reflex theory, 131–­33, 136 Holocaust, the, and secondary witnessing, 356. See also witnessing, in LaCapra Holton, Richard, 313–­14 home: absence of, 91, 326; and history, 252, 259, 333; and illness, 126; leaving, 26, 85, 120–­21; loss of, 326, 330; as refuge, 176, 252, 276; remembering, 174, 250; returning, 28, 91, 127, 157, 171, 281, 330, 346; and (excessive) thought, 402; “transcendental homelessness” (of the novel), 49, 52, 344. See also architecture; domestic novel Homo duplex, 244. See also Durkheim, Émile Homo economicus, 281–­82, 285, 292, 378n44, 379n51, 405n41, 406n46. See also Weber, Max Homo narrans, 8. See also Wynter, Sylvia Homo repetitivus, 285–­86, 293–­94. See also Sloterdijk, Peter Honig, Bonnie: on Arendt’s view of general will, 194; on democratic agency and sovereignty, 396n44; on the “fleshiness” of whale talk in Moby-­Dick, 178 Hopkins, Pauline, xi, xviii, 319, 326, 339–­40; and William James, 359, 411n47; Of One Blood, 325–­27, 332, 344, 359–­62, 370, 408n3; A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants, 326; on the voice of history (as the voice of God), 324. See also Of One Blood (Hopkins) horizontality, 212, 215. See also James, William Horkheimer, Max: on Kant and Sade, 84; on self-­ restraint and the bourgeois subject, 3 Howe, Daniel Walker, 75 Howells, William Dean, 355, 357 hubris: of Ahab, 151; of America, 3, 151; of Heidegger, 8; and Romantic will, 160. See also Moby-­Dick (Melville) human: acting as God, 7; as action and reaction, 349; agency, xii, 37–­39, 108, 159, 262, 264, 348, 350, 366–­68; aims, 152; ambivalence of, 314; animality in, 81, 275–­76; anthropotechnics (Sloterdijk), 285–­86, 293; autonomy, 7, 10, 38, 57, 314; in Black thought, 44; capabilities, 59; capital, 291, 293, 407nn55–­56; complexities of, 2, 8, 30, 130; condition, 8, 315; conflict, 157; creation, 49; decision-­making, 69, 297; dehumanization, 235–­36, 276; depravity/fallenness of, 59, 73, 343; destiny, 22; difference, 9, 232, 234, 249, 256; dilemmas, 19; domination over nature, 58; emotions, ix, 67, 147, 180, 205, 207, 348; existence, 44, 60, 290; and existentialism, 43; experience, 83; finitude, 81, 93, 228;

index freedom, 7, 23, 54, 57, 80–­81, 90, 108, 140, 328; Gilroy on, 321; as good-­seeking, 69; in Hawthorne, 89–­90, 92; heart, truth of, 111; history/ beginning of, 83; “human engineering,” 137, 265; humanism, 2, 4, 6, 293, 321; humanities, 2, 38, 138–­39, 265, 291; humanity (shared), 153, 156, 189, 223; “humanization run wild,” 314; humanized world, 15, 30, 54; human sciences, 364; inhuman, modernity as, 94; inhuman will, 16, 59, 147, 180; law, 329; meaning of (destabilized), 50; and moral law, 81, 90, 93; moral sense of, 69, 75; motivation, 10–­11, 32; motor, 286–­87; move away from (in criticism), xii, 2, 4, 8, 13, 38–­39, 41–­42, 103–­4; mystery of the, 197; narratives, 19; nature, 10, 110, 188, 239–­40, 271; neurological account of, ix; nonhuman world, ix, xv, 103–­4, 185–­86; only human, 13; optimistic sense of, 111; perversities of, 60, 108; progress, 69, 81, 201, 324; quest for knowledge, 63–­64; reason, ix, 57, 67, 75, 81, 83, 116, 175, 201, 342; and recognition, 349; reemergence of (after posthuman), 43; reflective capacity, 42; relations, 202, 231, 236, 251, 258, 260, 342; self-­aggrandizement, 50, 59; self-­assertion (Blumenberg), 51, 57, 63, 177; self-­deceptions, 79; self-­determination, 58; self-­love, 61, 70; social nature of, 223–­24, 254, 261; solidarity, 151, 192; striving, 10, 55, 100, 114, 138, 162, 178–­79, 358; struggle, 266; tensions of existence, 32, 34; terror and strangeness of being, 379n55; in training, 285–­86, 293; transcendence (for Hegel), 161; tripartite model of, 181; understanding (limits of), 83; and value, xii, 344; in a vast universe, 173; and will, ix, xii, 1–­2, 11, 25–­26, 32, 37, 41, 49, 56–­58, 67, 71, 81–­82, 108, 111, 180, 183, 239, 262, 312–­13, 317, 324, 366–­ 68; wish to escape the human (Cavell), 168, 170; Wynter on the importance of the, 7, 31, 44, 331–­32, 376n12, 409n15. See also existentialism; posthuman; Wynter, Sylvia Hume, David, 177; on everyday companionship, 186; on passions and emotions, 391n55; on philosophical melancholy, 175–­76; on reason as the slave of the passions,” 116; on self-­ advancement, 71 Huneman, Philippe, 390n51 Hunter, Ian, 80 Hurh, Paul, 168–­69, 201 Hutcheson, Francis, 69, 75, 386n43 Hutchinson, Anne, 73, 90, 386n42 Huyler, Jerome, 385n37, 386n43 hygiene: moral, physical, and social, 115; spiritual (of stillness), 237; of the will, x idealism: and anger/rage (in Kant, for Adorno), 84; ascetic, 310; and disease, 309; and W. James, 212

index idée fixe, 163–­66, 182–­83, 197, 245–­46. See also Grübelsucht; Hegel, G. W. F.; monomania identity/nonidentity, 41–­42, 171–­72, 195 idleness: and enjoyment, 218–­20, 258, 268; in Vandover and the Brute, 315–­16 illness/disease: as advantageous (Nietzsche), 305, 309; and capitalism, 289; and care, 407n62; consumption, 124–­25; and the decoding of symptoms, 136–­37; and depth, 308; excess of personality as, 100; and health, 115, 305, 308–­12; and idealism, 309; and morality, 111, 157; and norms, 141; and passion, 96, 390n51; and stillness, 309; suspicion as, 310; syphilis, 269, 280; and thought, 240; warding off (Bildungstrieb), 99. See also fevers; health; insanity/madness; psychosomatic, the; recovery imagination, 174; active, 278; and the Bildungstrieb, 388n14; and the brain’s “default mode network,” 39; of desire, 235; and doubt, 209; lack of, 255; liberal, 234, 254–­56; and novel readers, 66; social (of H. James), 234; sympathetic, 398n16; and the will, 32, 65–­66 imitation, and selfhood (via consumerism), 218. See also consumerism impulse, x; Black impulsiveness (destroyed by insistence on destiny), 331–­32; and consciousness, 210; controlled by reason, xvii; defect of, 270; excess of, 267; impulsive insanity, 136; passionate, 133; pure (of the monomaniac), 165; social, 220; taxonomical (in Moby-­Dick), 393n9; unconscious (as exalted), 214 inaction, 23; and civilization, 272; and daydreaming, 201; Hamletian, 210; as result of modernity’s encouragement of deliberation, 201, 204, 209–­10, 318, 336. See action; inertia; laziness; paralysis; Shakespeare, William; stillness; thought incalculability, of the human will, 2. See also calculability incompleteness: of freedom, xviii; of progress, 369; of transformation, 28; of whiteness, 350 indifference: of the cosmos, 209, 213; of decay, 41; to embodied pleasures (of sentimental heroines), 121; of God, 179, 200; and “indolence,” 276; of the inorganic, 107, 388n17; as irritating, 288; liberty of, 200, 380n60, 386n40; and madness, 179; of nature, 307; to pain, 276; as power, 307; of rock, 388; Stoic, 307; of time, 338; and the will, 380n60; of the world, 50 individual, the, 1–­45; as autonomous, x–­xi, 2, 40, 57, 103, 153–­54; and the body, 105; and collectivity, 198; denial of, 306; as divided, 156–­57, 167, 242–­43, 314, 325–­26, 359–­60; and freedom; ix, 153–­54, 399n35; and God, 74; liberal vs. Romantic, 2–­3, 153–­68; Lockean, xiii, 13, 18–­20, 25–­30, 32, 35–­36, 40, 51, 55, 66–­74, 77–­81, 84, 93, 380n61;

459 as (merely) a member of society, 9; merging with world/totality/society (etc.), 3, 9, 13, 22, 33–­36, 38, 111, 152, 161, 177, 213, 225–­28, 242, 244, 307, 344, 394n18; modern, 1–­45, 46–­94, 146–­47, 150–­58, 159–­63, 163–­68; and the novel, 16–­20, 24, 26, 29, 68–­70, 146, 154; vs. the one, 359; and the organism, 142–­44; (radical) particularity of, 57; privileging of (as arrogance), 1; and Puritanism, 53, 70, 74; and reason/feeling, xv, 14, 18–­19, 48, 67, 71, 153; and revolution, 74; and Romanticism, 153–­68, 199; and self-­ determination, 48; Simmel on, 153; and the social, 49–­52, 228–­31; and the state/society, 155–­ 56, 400n37, 400n43; will, x–­xii, xiv–­xv, 6–­7, 11, 33, 38, 56, 104, 150, 158, 184, 194, 216, 233, 273–­74, 397n53, 400n45; vs. the world/totality/society (etc.), 29–­30, 54, 70, 145, 156, 162, 166–­67, 170, 178, 282, 394n21. See also autonomy; human; Locke, John; merging; nominalism; self; sentimentalism; sovereignty; unity; will inertia: dangers of, 266–­76; historical, 321; as impotence, 270; melancholic, x, xiv; in Norris, 276–­77; and weakness of will, 276, 288, 301; in Zola, 268–­69. See also apathy; degeneration; laziness; melancholia/melancholy; paralysis; stillness; will: weakness of infinity: bad (Hegel), 162, 166; of desires, 405n41; and dread (for Pascal), 60; infinite check on the ego (Fichte), 166; infinite God, 25; infinite Grübelsucht, 238–­39; infinite life, 242; infinite regression of desire, 314; infinite sea, 172; infinite universe, 385n26; infinite will; 3, 151, 218; infinitization of cosmos and individual, 50; vs. “instinct of finity,” 399n27; of possibilities (as anxiety-­inducing), 83; and the social, 220, 228; and the will, 164. See also Grübelsucht insanity/madness, xvi, 160, 163–­66; as absence of will, 87; aboulia, 270–­7 1; and abstraction, 163–­64; ambition as, 179; and brooding, 278–­79; Calvinism and, 76, 78; and dancing, 131–­32; and “degeneracy,” 267; delightful, 253; and desire/ passion, 96, 123; and difference, 165; and the “feeling soul,” 394n21; and the fixed idea, 182; and franticness, 196; and freedom (“eleutheromania”), 154; and gothic fiction, 67, 77, 119; impulsive, 136; inherited (degeneration), 241; “insane melancholy,” 244; and interiority, 63, 77; and love, 179; vs. monomania, 165; vs. philosophy, 200–­201; and the preaching of Jonathan Edwards, 76; pure consciousness as, 51–­52; and reason, 164; romance and, 66; Romanticism as, 154, 163–­64; “sane” (of vital truth), 157; vs. sanity, 188; and the sea, 179; and the self, 67; and statistics, 137; and Stoddard’s animated Crystal Palace, 119; sublime becoming, 163; and subjectivity, 160; Swedenborg’s

460 insanity/madness (cont.) purported, 222; of white guilt, 330; in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 100; of will, 119, 154, 301; woe that is, 168; of the world, 129. See also brooding; degeneration; Grübelsucht; Hegel, G. W. F.; idée fixe; illness/disease; Moby-­Dick (Melville); monomania; pathologization instinct: and capitalism, 274–­75; vs. Christianity, 203; as energy flow, 355; of finity, 399n27; for freedom, 50, 308; habits as near‑, 287; as hereditary, 132–­33; vs. overthinking, 265; and racism, 113; of “savages,” 128; and survival, 404n23 intensity, 170–­87, 196–­97; aesthetics of, 184–­87; affective (of H. James), 229; of appalling thoughts, 183; vs. involvedness, 184; as lacking, 279; of life, 301; and manners, 233; in Moby-­ Dick, 184–­85; and relationality, 259; and the spiritual world, 221; of the will, 178, 246, 261, 308–­9 intentionality: vs. act, 317, 381n66; of change (in America), 6; and form, 100; and irrationality, 355; vs. manners, 232; sentience without, 290; soul as, 378n47; will as, 42 interiority, 13, 68–­70; absence of, 197; as abyssal, 51, 54, 63, 91; desire to access another’s, 172; and drive, 114–­15; emptying out of (as advantageous), 273; excess of, 46–­51, 65, 67, 74, 77, 87, 154; vs. exteriority, 69–­70, 79; and fascination, 394n23; and freedom, 22–­23; and the gothic, 51–­52, 55, 63, 67, 386n48; in Hawthorne, 48, 88–­91; “interior intersubjectivity” (Spillers), 358; liberalism without, 293; and madness, 63, 77; mapping of, 61–­62; monomaniac, 394n21; and the novel, 47–­55, 61–­66, 77–­78, 162–­63, 292; and pathology, 65, 67, 84, 87, 154, 298; and the Puritan, 67–­72, 77–­79, 386n48; radicalized, 51–­52; revelation of, 119; spirals of (Smith), 383n2; and the spiritual autobiography, 59–­66; as suspicious, 74; and terror/anxiety, 46, 55, 60, 62–­63, 67; of victims (in gothic novels), 77; and the will, 46–­94, 271, 381n71. See also depth; individual, the; introspection; reflection; Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne); spiritual: autobiography; subjectivity intersubjectivity, 220, 224, 227–­32, 237, 260, 358. See also subjectivity introspection: backing off from (for the Lockean individual), 28; for Calvin, 384n14; circumscription of, 55; dangers of excessive, 55, 67–­68, 76, 86, 385n36; as debilitating, 76, 211; and the law, 88–­89; and narcissism, 86; Petrarch’s, 384n24; and psychology, 271; Puritan, 67, 384n14, 385n36; and selfhood, 69; and universality, 89; as vice, 246; and vitalism, 282. See also interiority; reflection; thought Inwood, Michael, 159

index irrationality: and capitalism, 281; and decision-­ making, 297; and dualisms, 45; everyday, 289; explanations of (Freud’s), 355; exploration of (gothic novels’), 78; of Proust, 42; and racism, 329; and reason, 299; recalcitrance of (W. James), 243; vs. self-­preservation, xvi. See also akrasia; Augustine, Saint; Paul, Saint; perversity; rationality Iser, Wolfgang, 63, 66 Izenberg, Gerald, 355 Jacobs, Harriet, 112, 329 Jacyna, L. S, 134 James, C. L. R., 7; on Moby-­Dick, 187–­88, 195. See also Moby-­Dick (Melville) James, Henry, xi, xvi, 16, 204–­28, 246–­61, 377n33, 398n4; and aestheticism, 401n50, 401n53; The Ambassadors, 35, 207, 217–­19, 221, 225, 229–­32, 238, 247–­61, 403n63; The American, 35, 172, 206, 219, 230, 399n23; The American Scene, 217–­21, 226, 232, 248, 252, 401n55, 402n57; on art and the (imperious) will, 5; The Awkward Age, 231, 246–­47, 251, 401n48; “The Beast in the Jungle,” 236; critiques of, 205, 207; defense of, 206; and freedom, 233; generic heterogeneity of, 229–­30; as “geometer,” 205, 236, 256; The Golden Bowl, 235–­36, 400n45, 401n53, 401n55; habits of, 398n7; In the Cage, 226, 238, 247, 253; and manners, xiv, xvii, 207, 216, 232; melodrama of, 216, 229–­31, 262, 400n46; and New York, 217–­19; pathologizing of the writings of, 205; and philosophical abstraction, xvii; The Portrait of a Lady, 66, 229–­30, 233, 251, 400nn45–­46, 401n49; and pragmatism, 215; on realism and romance, 35, 41, 66, 172, 185, 219, 230–­31; on relations (as stopping nowhere), 219, 255; revisions of, 401n49; The Sacred Fount, 238, 246–­47, 251, 256–­57; sexuality of, 206; on thought as problematic, 204–­5, 209–­10, 213; The Turn of the Screw, 238, 247, 251, 253, 256; What Maisie Knew, 247; The Wings of the Dove, 231, 235–­36, 246, 260, 400n45. See also manners; relationality; social world, the James, Henry, Sr., 216, 221–­22; on Emerson, 243; psychological crisis of, 222; Society the Redeemed Form of Man, 223; and William’s crisis of the will, 209, 244 James, William, xii, 204–­48, 251, 298, 400n37; “Are We Automata?,” 211; on attention, 143; and Bergson, 213–­14, 221, 239, 399n24; “Bradley or Bergson?,” 398n16, 401n56; crisis of will of, 208–­11, 213, 222, 225, 239–­41, 244, 247, 271; “Degeneration,” 241; “The Dilemma of Determinism,” 211, 225; and Du Bois, 324, 359–­60, 368; and (radical) empiricism, 212–­14, 216, 240, 399n36; on habits, 287–­88, 295, 310, 316, 368;

index on health, 241–­43; and Hegel, 225; on Henry’s writing, 211–­12, 217–­18; “The Hidden Self,” 325, 359; horizontal thinking of, 213; on impotence, 271; on impulses, 210; and mysticism, 213, 219, 221–­23, 242, 245–­46, 251; on Saint Paul, 11; on people as “bundles of habits,” 265, 277, 287; on a pluralistic universe (A Pluralistic Universe), 213–­14, 216, 225–­26, 239, 244, 255, 257; and pragmatism, xvii, 205–­6, 208, 212, 216, 221, 243, 295; Pragmatism, 212, 224, 239; The Principles of Psychology, 11, 208, 210, 224–­25, 245, 270, 359, 365, 367–­68; on psychology and the will, 138; and Charles Renouvier, 210–­11, 239; on sentimentalism, 271–­72, 279; “The Sentiment of Rationality,” 240; and Shakespeare, 210; and the “sick soul,” 225, 239–­47; and sociality (as curative), 210–­15, 251, 255; and subjectivity, 213; and teaching (as therapeutic), 211, 222, 240, 402n57; and thinking, 209–­11, 239–­46; on understanding, 211; The Varieties of Religious Experience, 11, 41, 207, 225, 239, 241–­42, 244–­45, 251; on the will, 11, 15, 183, 210–­11, 216, 243, 270–­7 1, 287, 295, 301, 324, 367–­38; “The Will to Believe,” 208, 211, 239, 242. See also Bergson, Henri; Du Bois, W. E. B.; Grübelsucht; pragmatism; psychology Jameson, Fredric, 15–­16, 43, 382n79; on affect, 41–­42; The Antinomies of Realism, 41–­42, 319–­20, 340; on the development of romance, 369; on “historical pathology,” 15; on Proust, 42; on Sartre, 321; on Weber’s pluralism, 45; on the will, 42 JanMohamed, Abdul, 341, 409n24 Jansenism, 30, 56, 60–­61, 70–­7 1, 77, 189, 308, 385, 390n51, 396n43 Jaspers, Karl, 43 Jefferson, Thomas, 79 Johnston, Steven, 195, 397n51 Jonas, Hans, 2, 7–­9, 376n12; on freedom, 92–­93; on Heidegger’s “Being,” 8; on inanimate “agents,” 142; on self-­scrutiny, 84; on the will, 8–­9, 36, 65 Jones, Donna, 363 Jonik, Michael, 179–­80 Jordan, David Starr, 272–­73 Joyce, James, 14, 146, 321, 376n25 Judy, Ronald, 366, 368 justice: vs. freedom, ix; rage at injustice, 181; racial, 330; and the refusal to help, 346, 349; vs. revenge, 191, 342; value as, 190. See also revenge; law Juvin, Hervé, 289 Kafka, Franz, 14–­15, 19 Kahn, Charles, 22, 378n38 Kalyvas, Andreas, 193 Kant, Immanuel, xii, 19, 55–­56, 97, 159–­62, 193, 212, 227–­28, 246, 381n76; and autonomy, 80–­84; and

461 the categorical imperative, 160; depression of, 241; on evil, 80–­81; on freedom, 80–­84, 88–­91, 93, 160; Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 80; moral philosophy of, xv, 3, 51, 80–­84, 88–­89, 211, 228–­29, 291, 404n24; Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 80–­81; and the sublime, 83; and transcendentalism, 52, 80; on wholeness, 102; on the will, x, 3–­4, 38–­39, 50–­51, 80–­84, 88–­90, 204, 271, 288, 387n52; Wille vs. Willkür, x, 82, 100, 159–­62, 166, 394n22 Kaufmann, Walter, 302 Keats, John, 133 Keenan, Alan, 194 Kellogg, John Harvey, 284–­85 Khanna, Ranjana, 360–­62 Kielmeyer, Carl, 102–­3 Kierkegaard, Søren, 83, 91–­92, 199, 410n31 killing: of loved ones (to appease a divine voice), 78; of loved ones (to save them from enslavement), 329, 380n63; as the “misfortune and inhumanity of the white man” (Fanon), 331; murder–­suicide, 322. See also death; suicide King, Martin Luther, Jr., 343 kinship: with the sea (in Stoddard), 128; with solitary souls and singers (Melville’s), 185–­86 Klein, Lawrence, 68 Klein, Richard, 294 Kloppenberg, James, 400n37 knowledge: and anxiety, 83; impossibility of directly knowing (romance, for H. James), 35, 41, 230; impossibility of not-­knowing (the real, for H. James), 35, 41, 230; personal, 46; quest for, xv, 63–­65, 78, 152, 178, 312; of reality, 214; refusal of, 173; self‑, 127, 305. See also curiosity; truth Koselleck, Reinhard, 97 Kramnick, Jonathan: on Locke and interiority, 68–­69; on novels and philosophies of action, 47. See also action; interiority; Locke, John Krook-­Gilead, Dorothea, 398n4 Kytle, Ethan, 113 Lacan, Jacques, 43, 376n24; on Kant and Sade, 84; and the symptom, 395n28 LaCapra, Dominick, 356–­58, 361–­62, 409n29 Lafargue, Paul, 286 La Rochefoucauld, François de, 60–­61, 67, 81, 308, 312, 385n27 Latour, Bruno, 382n79; actor-­network theory, 39, 215, 218–­19, 382n77; and the relational mode, 40, 228; on Tarde, 218. See also networks; relationality; Tarde, Gabriel laughter: bitter (at the state of the world), 330; at oneself, 312; to soften the rough world, 364 law, xv; beyond, 88, 152; of caprice, 367; as dependent on lawlessness, 396n42; and desire, 84; and freedom, 84–­94; Fugitive Slave Law, 156;

462 law (cont.) God’s (as begetting transgression/sin), 62–­65, 80, 87, 385n32; in Hawthorne, 84–­90; and health, 86; and heroes, 191; as “impersonal,” 341; Jim Crow, xviii, 319, 335, 366; lynch, 341; and masochism, 85; moral (and the will), 3, 82; as passion, 84; and scrupulosity, 85–­86; self-­ denial of, 80; universal (and history), 324; vs. will, 49, 195; and the wisdom of fathers, 27. See also justice; sin; slavery; transgression Lawrence, D. H., 5–­6, 17–­18 Laycock, Thomas, 135. See also psychology: physiological laziness, xviii, 23, 276, 289, 317; and primitivity, 268; The Right to Be Lazy (Lafargue), 286. See also inaction; inertia; primitivity; Vandover and the Brute (Norris) Lears, T. J. Jackson, 214, 326 LeConte, Joseph, 282 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 59, 106, 108, 385n26 letting go, 217; in The Ambassadors, 248; and the “mind-­cure” movement, 214; unconscious, 347 Levi, Anthony, 57 Leys, Ruth, 38 liberalism: bleak (Anderson), 342–­45; Chesnutt and, 342–­43; critique of, 154; and democracy, 202; and dialogue, 237; without humanism/ interiority, 293; and intersubjectivity, 227–­32, 237; neoliberalism, 275, 290–­93, 299, 406n48, 406n52, 407nn54–­55; “new,” 227; and the sovereign self, 218, 290; “third way,” 202; and the will, 318. See also Locke, John; Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt) liberty. See freedom life: apprehension of, 234; and art, 235; as Big Will, xii, xiv, 18, 104, 107, 111, 144, 274; and danger, 172; and death, 120; vs. decay, 102–­3, 107, 389n29; details of, 260; and difference, 102; as a “double-­storied mystery” (W. James), 207, 245; as endless creativity, 382n82; and error, 43, 382n82; as evil, 243; as a forced state, 390n49; and form, 105, 107; and imperfection, 144; infinite, 242; intensified, 301; vs. “Life,” 307; “life sore” (Marshall), 320–­21; love as, 130; madness of, 128; “mere,” 290; as normative activity, 140; as the principle of individuation, 388n14; as a problem, 310; as resistance of death (Bichat), 107; as (ongoing) striving, 114; and (heroic) struggle, 100, 140; as too much (for Stoddard), 129; as a value, 140. See also Big Will; Stahl, Georg; vitalism limit: absence of (in general will), 192–­93; of autonomy, 167; denial of (and American hubris), 3; of economic models, 297; and excess, 64; of freedoms, 40, 71, 153–­54, 394n25; of individualism, 147; of narratives (to explain slavery),

index 325; power without, 192; of science, 249; self-­, 143–­44, 161–­62, 166–­67, 394n25; and the will, 181, 183–­84 Livingston, James, 216, 224, 399n35 Locke, Alain, 138 Locke, John: on Descartes, 68; on deliberation, 386n40; on enthusiasm, 77, 378n48; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 68–­69, 71; on evil (and error), 80; on faith, 75; and the individual, xiii, 13, 18–­20, 25–­30, 32, 35–­36, 40, 51, 55, 66–­74, 77–­81, 84, 93, 380n61; on monarchical authority, 191; and morality, 72; and politics, 73; and practical reason, 33, 36, 75; on private property, 68; on the Puritan, 68, 385n37; and the will, 33–­34, 36–­37, 72, 82, 306. See also liberalism Lombroso, Cesare, 267, 279, 403n17, 404n32 London, Jack, “To Build a Fire,” 404n23 Looby, Chris, 79 love, 116; and angels, 260; vs. business, 334; and death, 120; and gaze, 124; giving oneself over to, 299; and happiness, 120, 130; “as heaven—­as hell,” 130; impersonality as, 43; liberty as, 34; and limitation, 162; and madness, 179; “natural lovings,” 151; self-­, 61, 70, 81, 151, 337–­38; and sociality, 229; and solidarity, 151–­52; and temperament, 130; and will, 130. See also emotion; Morgesons, The (Stoddard); passion Löwy, Michael, 32, 155–­56 Lukács, Georg, xi, 382n79; on naturalism, 263–­64; on the novel, 1, 20–­21, 29–­30, 49–­50, 52–­54, 100, 203, 344–­45, 381n66, 411n57; on the “problematic individual,” 29–­30, 40; on Scott’s objectivity, 35, 380n65; on subjectivity, 158, 160–­63 Luther, Martin, 55–­57, 60 Lynch, Deidre, 47 MacDonald, Michael, 385n36 Macfadden, Bernarr, 285 Mach, Ernst, 213 madness. See insanity/madness Maine, Sir Henry, 351 Makdisi, Saree, 32–­33 Malinowski, Bronisław, 231 management: of curiosity’s excess, 64; of desire (in the bildungsroman), 99; of habits, 265, 294; of interiority, 51, 54, 69; of the mind’s excess, 66; vs. rule (in individual and state) in neoliberalism, 290; self-­, 406n48; of things (as delightful), 280; of will, 26–­32. See also habit; liberalism: neoliberalism; will Mandeville, Bernard, 61, 292 Manichaeism, 308; and race, 331–­32, 358 Manly, Alexander, 332, 342 manners: and desire, 232–­33; and intensity, 233; novels of, xiv, xvii, 207, 216, 232; and the social,

index 207, 216, 232–­38, 256–­60, 277; and the truth, 232, 260. See also James, Henry; realism Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (Ford), 396n42 Marcus, Sara, 411n58 Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt), xviii, 35, 330–­57, 363, 409n26, 410nn35–­36, 411n58; community in, 333–­35, 343, 337–­38, 346, 353; decision in, 348–­51; destiny in, 339–­42, 353; existentialism and, 345–­52; liberalism in, 342–­ 43; modernity in, 334, 336, 351–­52; progress in, 336–­37, 342–­43; realism in, 341–­42, 344, 346, 348; recognition in, 346–­50; responsibility in, 321, 347; revenge in, 339–­42; romance in, 340–­ 42, 348; tradition in, 335; trauma in, 353–­54; the will in, 334, 336, 345–­52. See also Chesnutt, Charles W.; community; destiny; existentialism; liberalism; progress; realism; recognition; responsibility; revenge; romance; tradition; Wilmington massacre Marshall, Paule, 320–­21 Marx, Karl, 27, 386n39; on capitalism, 379n53; on life confined by necessity, 290; on religion, 299. See also Marxism Marxism: and liberalism, 343; and Romanticism, 156; and the “split being,” 293. See also Marx, Karl Maslow, Abraham, 144 mass media, 204, 215, 217. See also consumerism; economy; modernity Massumi, Brian, 38, 139, 181, 184 materialism, xiii, 13, 101, 103, 106, 159, 211–­12, 214, 262, 300, 407n66; antimaterialism, 22; dark, 384n25; and determinism, 208; and emotion, 182; festive, 174; vs. free will, 211; and idealism, 212; medical, 10–­11; and monism, 135; new materialism, xvi, 38, 42, 103–­4, 138–­40, 142, 215, 392n77; and personhood, 13, 262. See also body; brain; mechanism; nominalism Matthiessen, F. O., 150, 207 Maudsley, Henry, 267, 271, 276 Maxwell, James Clerk, 367 McCarthy, Jesse, 44 McCarthy, Tom, 14 McElrath, Joseph, 277 McGurl, Mark, 10, 382n85 McInelly, Brett, 27 McIntyre, Alison, 314–­15 McWeeny, Gage, 220 Mead, George Herbert, 223–­24, 228 mechanism, 130–­43; of Boyle, 102; in contemporary biology, 139; critique of (by Goldstein), 143; of Descartes, 58–­60, 98, 102; of Hartley, 184; and modernity, 58; Nietzsche on, 303–­5; return to (in theory of reflex), 130–­39; of Spencer, 303–­44; vs. vitalism, xvi, 32, 101–­2, 108, 133, 138.

463 See also brain; Descartes, René; materialism; reflex; vitalism medicine: and W. James, 208; medical materialism, 10–­11; medical positivism, 136–­37; medical vitalism, xii, 43, 104–­10, 119, 138, 140, 382n82; and passion, 115–­17; self-­medication, 290, 295–­ 97; and vitalism, xii, 43, 104–­10, 119, 138, 140. See also health; vitalism melancholia/melancholy, 67–­69, 78, 148–­49; fetishization of, 357; and inertia, x, xiv; insane, 244; philosophical, 175; Puritanism as, 67, 69; and race, 334, 356; religious, 67, 69; Tolstoy’s, 239; vs. working through, 358. See also Burton, Robert; inertia; sorrow melodrama: of Eliot, 318; of H. James, 216, 229–­31, 262, 400n46; of naturalist fiction, 262, 266–­67, 275, 318; of Nietzsche, 294, 313; and race, 332, 342; sentimental, 333; of subjectivity, 311; of the will, 294–­95, 313 Melville, Herman, 14, 34, 118, 130, 146, 178, 206, 393n13; “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” xii, 16, 172, 174; Benito Cereno, 149, 174, 196; Billy Budd, 149, 192, 199, 203, 366, 397n52; and blackness, 393n8, 397n52; “Cock-­a-­Doodle-­Doo!,” 185–­86, 396n39; “duplicity” of (for Lawrence), 17; on Goethe’s “live in the all,” 395n33; Moby-­Dick, xii–­xiii, xvi–­ xvii, 14–­16, 34–­35, 146–­203, 235, 344; “philosophical” writings of, xi; as reader, 178, 186, 397n54; realism of, 172; revival of, 146; skepticism of, 179. See also Moby-­Dick (Melville) memory: and diasporic identity, 326; of family, 171–­72; Freud on, 340, 354; and hesitation, 370; historical (tradition), 335; of home, 174, 250; involuntary (Proust), 42; and narrative, 50; and paralysis, 209, 222, 239; of potentiality, 258; “rememory” (Morrison), 328, 408n9; of slavery, 328; and the “sorrow songs” (Du Bois), 359; and split personality, 359; and trauma, 340, 354; and unconscious cerebration, 136; and the will, 352, 362. See also forgetting; nostalgia merging: of bodies in physical space, 1, 151; of individual and totality/world/society, xv, 3, 9, 13, 22, 33–­36, 38, 111, 152, 156, 161–­62, 166–­67, 177, 213, 225–­28, 242, 244, 307, 344, 394n18; of multiple personalities into one, 359; of narrator and crew (in Moby-­Dick), 200; of political-­spiritual opposites, 7; of races, 34; vs. standing out, 93. See also Big Will; unity Merton, Robert K., 58–­59 mesmerism, 124, 135, 359, 361 Milder, Robert, 157, 179–­80, 185, 195, 200 Mill, John Stuart, 212, 343, 383n89, 404n30 Miller, Perry, 379n56 Milton, John, 61, 383n10, 385n28 mind: as beyond law, 88–­89; and body, 72–­73, 125, 176, 181, 285; “French,” 402n59; mind‑cure

464 mind (cont.) movement, 214, 242–­43; novelist of (H. James), 206; as an organ, 404n30; organization of, 248; as restless, 176; vs. soul, 134–­35, 391n71; and will, 181. See also brain; consciousness; mind; thought Mitchell, S. Weir, 269, 301 Mizruchi, Susan, 353 Mjaaland, Marius, 379n55 Moby-­Dick (Melville), xii–­xiii, xvi–­xvii, 14–­16, 34–­ 35, 146–­203, 235, 344, 397n50; and the aesthetic, 184–­86; and affect, 180–­84; collectivity in, 149, 151–­52, 155, 184, 187–­200; and democracy, 187–­ 200, 203; epistemological project of, 179; the everyday in, 169, 172–­76, 181; and the general will, 187–­200, 203; generic status of, 146–­48, 152, 195; and the individual, 146–­47, 150, 195–­200, 204; as individual, 152; and intensity, 184–­87; and “monomania,” 163, 165–­66, 167, 171, 178, 182, 185; Orientalist figurations in, 393n15; “postcritical” critiques of, 177; and race, 156, 176, 197; as romance, xiii, xvii, 34–­35, 146–­49, 186–­87; and sovereignty, 187–­200, 203; “A Squeeze of the Hand” chapter, 151–­52, 155, 174–­75, 180, 184, 186, 193, 202, 395n34, 396n39; and the state, 152, 155–­56, 187–­200, 203; “The Whiteness of the Whale” chapter, 156, 173, 176, 178, 180, 183–­84, 200; thought in, 169, 175–­79; and the will, 147, 149, 150–­58, 165–­69, 171, 173–­74, 176–­85, 187–­90, 195, 198–­99, 201–­3. See also aesthetic; affect; democracy; general will; individual; intensity; Melville, Herman; monomania; race; romance; sea, the; sovereignty; state; will; willfulness moderation, 131; as colonial export, 27; as curative, 122–­27; and the will, 111. See also excess modernism: antimodernism, 326–­29; and details (Barthes), 263; emergence of, 345; and H. James, 205; and modernity, 321; vs. narration, 318; and the novel, 50, 344; and realism, 318; “Romanticism-­to-­modernism cycle,” 19; and temporality, 319 modernity, 204–­5; and alcohol, 403n21; and alienation, 20, 34, 52, 156, 345; and ambivalence, 191; and the blues, 320–­21; and compulsions, 298; and consumerism, 218, 226; and determinism/voluntarism, 56; and divine hiddenness, 379n55; and domestication, 94; dynamism of, 94; Ellison on, 6, 51; emergence of, 217; (awfully) expanded world of, 51–­58, 83; and freedom, xi, 6–­7, 56, 65–­66, 89–­91, 153–­54, 298; groundlessness of, 52; and health hazards, 264, 269–­70; and “Hebraism,” 401n51; vs. heroism, 188; and heterodoxy, 386n44; and the individual, ix–­xii, 1–­45, 46–­94, 146–­47, 150–­58, 159–­63, 163–­68; Lockean, 25–­26, 33, 35–­37, 69; and loss, 35; “malaise” of, 155–­57; managing

index the problem of, xv, 26, 33, 35–­37, 51, 67–­76; and modernism, 321; “modernity problem” (Pippin), 1–­4, 10, 37, 40, 56; as needing to be made human, 42; and nominalism, 57; “not modern enough,” 279; and the novel, 3–­4, 6, 20–­21, 29; perverse, 61; as progress, 66, 73, 321–­22; and Puritanism, 49, 52–­66, 70; vs. reflection, 226; Robinson Crusoe and, 26–­31; and Romanticism (as internal critique of), 31–­36, 37, 101, 153–­58, 203; vs. secularism, 74; and self-­determination, 48; and slavery, 328–­29; and the social, 80, 206, 231; as society (vs. community), 327; vs. the spiritual, 53; and terror, 55; and value, 6; and the will, ix–­x, xv, 1–­45, 57–­61, 150–­59, 301, 321; and willfulness, 394n18. See also autonomy; Blumenberg, Hans; capitalism; democracy; individual, the; modernism; Pippin, Robert; progress; Wynter, Sylvia Molesworth, Jesse, 18 monism, 35–­42, 243–­45; of Hodgson, 243; in W. James, 398n9; materialistic, 135; mechanistic, 391n71; new, 382n81, 391n71; Rancière on, 382n81; of the “sick soul,” 244–­45; of Spinoza, 180. See also dualism monomania, xvi, 149, 156, 158, 163–­67, 180, 185, 394n21; and ambition, 164–­65; and art, 164; vs. degeneration theory, 267; and freedom, 165; vs. madness, 165; in Moby-­Dick, 149, 163, 166–­67, 171, 178–­79, 182–­83; as nineteenth-­century psychiatric diagnosis, 163–­65; and the novel (Lukács), 163; suicidal, 267. See also excess; idée fixe; insanity/madness; Moby-­Dick (Melville); obsession morale, 209 morality: and biology, 266–­67; and the body, 115, 279, 289; and body/mind combination (for Locke), 72; as built-­in, 69, 81; and business, 36; and capitalism, 275; as constraint/restraint, xvii, 204–­5, 262, 277–­82, 305; and degeneration, 277–­78; and education (for Locke), 72; and empiricism, 212; and freedom, 30, 32; and gothic fiction, 79; and habits, 287–­88; and health, 284–­85, 289, 291; human vs. divine, 90, 93; and illness, 111; imperiousness of, 257; and Kant, xv, 3, 51, 80–­84, 88–­89, 211, 228–­29, 291, 404n24; moral passions, 375n9; moral sense, 110; and perversity, 378n41; and the philosopher, 308; and progress, 81, 284; and rationality, 75; and reflex action, 133; and secularization, 71; sentimentalization of, 404n24; and tradition, 351; and the will, 7, 18, 271, 272–­73; vs. will, 82; and will to power, 380n63 Morefield, Jeannie, 400n42 Morel, Bénédict, 267–­69, 272 Moretti, Franco, 383n1; on the bildungsroman, 97, 99–­100; on Daniel Deronda, 318, 326, 344; on the

index “freedom principle,” 87; on interiority, 394n23; on Moby-­Dick, 146; on modern subjectivity, 379n53; on the novel, 15–­16, 20, 29, 49–­50, 94, 344–­45; on past vs. present, 319; on stories of destiny, 340; on Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 97, 99–­100. See also bildungsroman; Eliot, George: Daniel Deronda; Moby-­Dick (Melville); Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Goethe) Morgesons, The (Stoddard), xvi, 95–­98, 104, 109, 117, 118–­31, 147; alcoholism in, 122–­23, 126, 128–­29; as bildungsroman, 95–­98, 104–­5, 109, 118, 120–­23, 126, 129; death in, 120, 122, 126, 128; eating in, 95–­96, 120–­23, 129; feminist readings of, 121–­22; illness and recovery in, 96, 124–­27, 129–­30; sexual desire in, 95–­96, 121, 123–­25, 128–­30; and vitalism, 119–­20, 122–­23, 125–­26, 129–­30. See also alcohol; bildungsroman; eating; illness/disease; recovery; Stoddard, Elizabeth; vitalism Morrison, Iain, 387n52 Morrison, Toni: Beloved, 328–­29, 380n63, 408n9, 409n24; on Moby-­Dick and race, 156, 176; on “rememory,” 328, 408n9; on slavery and modernity, 329 Moses, Omri, 233 Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, 326–­27 Moten, Fred: on Black fugitivity, 359; on the discourse on Black pathology, 355 mother, the: agitation of, 127; in Chesnutt, 350–­51; craft of, 94; death of, 128, 276, 278, 282–­83, 391n60; ghost of, 360; power of, 351; pregnancy, 98, 132, 275, 278, 283. See also child; father, the Mouffe, Chantal: and the ideas of Schmitt, 193, 202; on pluralism, 202–­3, 398n58 Müller, Jan-­Werner, 194 multiplicity: joy of, 179; of options (as troubling), 209; of the self, 302–­3; of the will, 300; of wills (the novel’s), 9 Münsterberg, Hugo, 138 Muybridge, Eadweard, 263 mysticism: and H. James, 260; and W. James, 213, 219, 221–­23, 242, 245–­46, 251; and judgment, 306; of Van Helmont, 141; and will-­ abandonment, 305. See also ecstasy; Grübelsucht; James, William; Swedenborg, Emanuel; Van Helmont, Jan Baptist myth, 148, 156, 323, 393n13, 408n10; of individualism, 147; interiority as, 14; and the Leviathan, 151–­52, 194; mythical will, 151; mythicization of Africa, 331; and the novel, 344; return to, 318; Romantic, 157; and The Sport of the Gods, 408n10. See also Africa; Moby-­Dick (Melville); Sport of the Gods, The (Dunbar) Nabokov, Vladimir, 14 narrative: antinarrative, 294–­95, 317; biology and, 99, 102, 107, 144–­45; and the body, 129; decen-

465 tralized (in naturalism), 263; vs. description, 263, 319; “diachronic blindness” (Ngai), 382n77; and emotion, 115, 181; ghosts in the historical, 408; and human beings, 8, 109, 313–­14; impossibility of, 316; and medical vitalism, 138–­39; and memory, 50; and modernism, 318; and monomania, 165; of progress, xiv, 20–­21, 57, 266, 319–­21, 324, 327, 336–­37, 342–­43; repetition, 323; self-­narrativization, 271, 314, 356; and slavery, 325, 329; and the social, 50; of the soul, 62; turn, 40–­41; and weakness of will, 313–­14. See also history; novel, the naturalism, xiv, 99–­100, 262–­65; and description, 263; and desire, 71; and economy, 404n30; literary, xvii–­xviii, 42, 262–­317, 298, 300, 303, 313, 318–­19; of Nietzsche, 304–­5. See also Darwin, Charles; Norris, Frank; Zola, Émile nature, 98–­105; as Big Will, x, 2, 33, 152; destructiveness of, 396n36; hiddenness of, 310; hostility to, 159; human domination over, 58; indifference of, 307; interconnectedness of, 114; living according to, 307; optimism about, 110; as organism, 114; second, 294, 379n52; suspicion of, 301; and the will, 25; willfulness of, 178. See also Big Will; life; Naturphilosophie Naturphilosophie, xvi, 102–­3, 109–­11, 114, 134, 138, 140, 142, 144, 159, 307. See also life; nature; philosophy; Reill, Peter; Schelling, Friedrich; vitalism Nazism, 7, 193, 360, 376n12. See also Holocaust, the; Schmitt, Carl negotiation: and difference, 40; internal, 298; and politics, 192 Negri, Antonio: on constituted power, 396n44; on the “multitude,” 152, 381n75. See also collectivity neoliberalism. See liberalism: neoliberalism neovitalism. See vitalism: neovitalism nervous: conditions/disorders, 96, 111, 208–­9; energy, 288; exhaustion, 269; language of Shakespeare, 168; nervousness (“American”), 269; nervousness (in Du Bois), 365; nervousness (in the face of the unknown), 65; nervousness (of H. James), 205; nervousness (of W. James), 208–­9; nervousness (in Stoddard), 96; prostration, 129, 272; system, 102, 110, 133–­ 34, 368. See also neurasthenia; psychology networks, 13, 39, 218, 382n77. See also Latour, Bruno: actor-­network theory; relationality neurasthenia, 269–­70, 298, 301. See also Beard, George M. neuroplasticity, 37–­39. See also brain new materialism. See materialism: new materialism new psychology. See psychology: physiological Ngai, Sianne: on fiction’s “tone,” 48; on network aesthetics, 39, 382n77

466 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 343 Niekerk, Carl, 100, 388n12 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xii–­xiii, 5, 19, 42, 144, 186, 199, 298–­312; and asceticism, 286, 300, 307–­12, 407n70; Beyond Good and Evil, 301–­2, 305, 308–­ 10; on Christian morality, 300–­303, 375n9; Daybreak, 309; fondness for La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, 61; The Gay Science, 294, 300–­312; on God’s demise, 50, 383n7; and health/diet/ exercise, 265, 286, 299–­312, 392n86; on interiority, 50–­51, 72; On the Genealogy of Morals, 300–­301, 305–­6, 308–­9, 407n66; and pluralism, 202–­3; and recovery, 126; on Schopenhauer’s The World as Will, 170; on Spencer, 303–­4; on Stoicism, 307, 310; on style and self, 294; and the suspension of value, 45; and vitalism, x, xvi, 126, 305–­12, 321, 407n69; on well-­being, 407n65; on the will, x, xvi, xviii, 4, 32, 50, 265, 296, 299–­ 312. See also health; value; vitalism Nightingale, Florence, 154 nihilism, 148, 176; and human freedom, 57 Noble, Mark, 167–­68 nominalism, 25, 31, 51, 57–­60, 62, 72–­73. See also materialism Nordau, Max, 241, 267–­70, 277 norms, 40, 140–­43; fragility of, 409n29; and happiness, 273; normlessness (of sovereignty), 193; protest against (willfulness), 4; and psychiatry, 392n80; and race, 358; sexual, 404n33; social, 252; statistical, 137, 141 Norris, Frank: and degeneration, 275–­77, 403n16; McTeague, 275, 405n35; and naturalism, xiv, xvii–­xviii; The Octopus, 282; “Trilogy of the Wheat,” 264, 282; Vandover and the Brute, xviii, 262–­64, 270, 275–­90, 298, 302–­3, 305, 312–­17, 404n33, 405n36, 405n42, 408n72; and Zola, 263–­64, 275, 318. See also degeneration; habit; naturalism; Zola, Émile no-­saying, 22, 300–­301, 308–­9; and yes-­creation, 309, 344, 349–­50. See also refusal; turning away; yes-­saying nostalgia: elitist, 394n17; imperialist, 33; as malady of the will, 362; and passion, 386n39; “plantation nostalgia,” 319; reflective (vs. restorative), 363, 369. See also memory nothingness: and existentialism, 345; and the will (Deleuze), 16 Novalis, 160, 299 novel, the: and adultery, 46, 49, 62, 383n1, 383n6; and affect, 41–­42; and alienation, 50; and ambivalence, xi, 4–­5, 9, 16, 18, 35, 112–­13, 409n26; America and, xi, 4, 6, 15–­19; ancient, 21–­22, 24; birth of, 189; and class, 4–­6, 207, 398n4; colonialist, 27; “death of,” xiii, 1, 9–­10; and detail, 54, 65, 178, 207, 263; and dualism, 35–­42; experimental (Zola), 264; and freedom,

index 320; and gender, 21, 92–­93; “Great American Novel” discourse, 146; and history, 329; and the individual/subject, 16–­20, 24, 26, 29, 68–­70, 146, 154; and interdependence, 332–­42; and interiority, 47–­55, 61–­66, 77–­78, 162–­63, 292; and irony, 162; medicated, 131; and modernism, 50, 344; and modernity, 3–­4, 6, 20–­21, 29; “neuronovel” (Roth), 10–­11; ontology of, 47; and religion, 22, 26–­31, 48–­50, 52–­55, 61–­66; rise of the, 3, 16, 19–­21, 24, 26, 29, 58, 61–­66, 68, 70; picaresque, 29–­30, 50, 385n31; and psychology, xiii, 10; and science, 10, 42; secularization of, 21–­22; seduction, 112, 126, 128; sentimental, 130, 152; and society, 401n52; and temporality, 41, 77, 103; thinness of, 6; and the will, ix–­x, 1–­45, 98; as “zombie” (McGurl), 10. See also bildungsroman; domestic novel; gothic, the; interiority; Lukács, Georg; manners: novels of; naturalism: literary; realism; Trilling, Lionel Oakeshott, Michael, 194 Oakley, Francis, 384n20 obsession, x; Ahab’s, 167; and bodily tracking, 289; of Christianity’s self-­examination, 299; and neuroses, 298; and psychiatry, 241; and sin, 65; Strether’s, 248. See also Ambassadors, The (James); Grübelsucht; idée fixe; Moby-­Dick (Melville); monomania; tracking obsolescence: of the novel (and subject), 9; planned, 226; of social forms, 405n43; of the will as concept, 36 Ockham, William of, 56–­57 O’Connor, Flannery, 28 O’Donnell, John, 137 Of One Blood (Hopkins), 325–­27, 332, 344, 359–­62, 370, 408n3; and the supernatural, 325, 361–­62, 370. See also Hopkins, Pauline Oken, Lorenz, 111 omnipotence: fantasy of, 376n13, 376n25; and God, 53, 59, 189, 195; as impossible (for humans), 376n15; of the lawgiver, 195; of willpower, for the Stoics (Arendt), 8. See also God; law O’Neill, Joseph, 14 optimism: about the American project, 75; about the body, 115; cosmic (of A Pluralistic Universe), 225; about the curability of nervous conditions, 111; about human nature, 110; moral (about progress), 11; naïve (attributed to liberalism), 342; and pessimism, 44, 330, 353; as power, 242–­ 43; radical Progressive, 265; of sentimentalism, 33; as unshared, 202; of the will, 343; about the world, 71. See also Afro-­pessimism organism, the, xvi, 9, 97, 99, 102–­7, 114, 140–­44; ambivalence and, 144; and environment, 142; as “first among physicians,” 140; Goldstein on, 144–­45; nature as, 114; Stahl on, 102; super­

index organism, 37; and temporality, 142–­45; and the will, 101. See also environment; life; regeneration/regrowth; striving; vitalism organization: of the mind (as problem), 248; of the social, 250–­51, 255; temperament as, 125; vitalist, 136. See also organism, the; temperament Ortega y Gasset, José, 10, 17, 42 Otter, Samuel, 148, 393n9 Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (Wilson), xvi, 112–­13, 116–­17 Ovid, 71 Oyama, Susan, 139 pace: of Black progress, 353, 358, 361, 363, 365; of change (for inorganic matter), 388n17; economic, 266; of modernity, 363; of productivity, 264; of reflection, xi. See also speed, and American modernity Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (Richardson), 15, 47, 50, 70 Papoulias, Constantina, 38 Paracelsus, 141 paralysis: and civilization, 272; and contemplation, 242; and memory, 209, 222, 239; and sin, 87; of the will, 301, 318. See also inertia; stillness; will Parrington, V. L., 205, 207 partiality: affective, 183; partial repetition, 99; wariness of (Spinoza), 179–­80 Pascal, Blaise, 63, 199, 338, 396n43; and the dread of infinite spaces, 60; and interiority, 59; as pathologized (in Moby-­Dick), 173; Pensées, xv, 60 passion, 70–­7 1, 83–­86, 300–­301, 391nn54–­55, 396n37; absence of, 127; and action, 116; base, 85; and birth of psychology, 117; and the body, 108–­9, 123, 126; and capitalism, 291; and disease (and healing), 390n51; double nature of, 116, 127; for duty, 128; vs. emotion, 181; as enlivening, 113; for the eradication of passion, 128; as excess, 116; excess of, 90, 131; and fear, 86; and freedom, 83–­84; illicit, 96, 123–­26; and illness, 96; insistent, 234; vs. intellect, 205; law as, 84; lust, 108; for luxury, 379n53; vs. manners, 232; mechanism of a, 264; and medicine, 115–­17; and nostalgia, 386n39; and politics, 202; problematic, 180; and race, 133; and reason, 90, 116; religion-­like, 85; and will, 116. See also emotion passivity: and bad faith, 410n32; and degeneration, 269, 272–­73; desire for, 87; drive toward, 276; and goodness, 280; of emotions, 115, 181; and racism, 337. See also desire; emotion; inaction; inertia; laziness; stillness Pater, Walter, 234, 287, 401n50 pathologization: of America, 3; of the bounded individual, 381; of Bunyan, 55, 67, 384n16; of H. James, 205, 229; of modernity (by Romanti-

467 cism), 155; of the novel, 17–­18; of Saint Paul, 11, 67; of the Puritans, 66–­67, 74, 76, 84–­86, 122, 294; of Romanticism, 154, 157, 163 pathology, 84–­87, 264–­65; and addiction, 264, 295; and ambition, 164; and anatomy, 137; and appetite, 117–­18; and the Black subject, 355; and decadence, 122; and excess interiority, 65, 67, 84, 87, 154, 298; and freedom, 155; historical, 15; and the living being, 382n82; psychic, 30; psychological, 238; and repression, 122; self-­ determination as, 48; and the social, 280, 283; as transcendence, 104; and will, 163, 165, 270, 303; will as, 160; and willfulness, 157. See also illness/disease; insanity/madness; medicine; pathologization; psychology Patterson, Orlando, 7, 21–­22, 381n71 Paul, Saint: Damascus road experience, 11, 67; letter to the Romans, 296; on the passions, 300–­301; pathologizations of, 11, 67; on proscription leading to transgression, 62, 64–­65, 80, 385n32; on the will and action, 1, 12, 23, 45, 71, 81, 106, 127, 243, 271, 314, 381n76. See also Augustine, Saint; irrationality; perversity; sin; transgression Pavel, Thomas, xi, 377n26; on the “anti-­idealist” strain in the novel, 148; on interiority and the novel, 47; on the will and freedom, 22–­23 Pease, Donald: and C. L. R. James, 187; on the (seemingly) opposite wills of Ahab and Ishmael, 177; on political solidarity in Moby-­Dick, 151–­52 Peckham, Morse, 33 people, the: vs. the citizenry, 192; discernment of, 79; of fiction, xi–­xii; opium of (religion), 299; paradox of, 194; power of, 341; as sentimental category (for Arendt), 192; as sovereign, 196; will of, 189, 191, 397n49. See also collectivity; politics Peretz, Eyal, 146 perfect: form (striving for), 100; murder, 378n41; perfectibility, 390n51; self-­perfecting (in Kant’s moral philosophy), 80; stillness, 236, 246; virtue, 199 Perry, Ralph Barton, 208 perversity: charges of Romantic (as suspicious, for Cavell), 168; of children, 93; consciousness vs., 368; and criminality, 293; of curiosity, 83; and duty, 387n49; evil as (Kant), 81; and freedom, 108; “The Imp of the Perverse” (Poe), 11, 378n41, 410n31; and intelligence, 92; of modernity, 61; of selves, 14; of (excessive) sensitivity, 111; in understanding, 211; of the will, 1, 11, 73, 76, 86. See also Augustine, Saint; irrationality; Paul, Saint Petrarch, 46, 51, 59, 384n24 phenomenology, 42–­43, 65, 321, 392n79; of addiction, 294, 302; of consciousness, 401n55;

468 phenomenology (cont.) and eating, 295; The Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 349, 394n19 philosophy, 157–­63, 304; as aesthetic act, 178; and the American novel, xi; blues, 320; and medicine, 115; as melancholia-­inducing, 175; and psychology, 213; vs. religion, 176; and temporality, 303; and the will, ix–­x, 18–­19, 158–­59. See also individual philosophers phrenology, 134, 137 Pick, Daniel, 266 Pietism, xiii, 109, 300, 391n54; and Bildung, 97; and the body, 98; and the God of will, 30, 105; and medicine, 104; for Stahl, 106, 108, 141, 389n30; and the will, 108. See also vitalism Pinch, Adela, 70 Pinel, Philippe, 117–­18 Pippin, Robert, xii, 228–­31; on freedom, 237; on Hegel and the Romantic will, 160–­61, 394n19; on Hegel’s theory of recognition, 228; on H. James, 206, 215, 225–­26, 229–­31, 233, 259, 401n48; on law and lawlessness, 396n42; on modernity and social order, 204; on the modernity problem, 1–­4, 10, 19, 40, 56; on the will, 400n45 Plato, 21–­22, 26, 63, 115 play: for a child, 92, 259; erotic, 124; of masks (and sociality), 244; planetary, 111; and possibility, 258–­59. See also child; games plot: “of decline” (naturalism), 263; “tyranny of the” (Rancière), 41. See also naturalism; Rancière, Jacques pluralism, 45, 202–­3, 398n58; A Pluralistic Universe (James), 213–­14, 216, 225–­26, 239, 244, 257; and romance, 380n65. See also James, William; Mouffe, Chantal; Weber, Max Poe, Edgar Allan, 206, 393n13; “The Imp of the Perverse,” 11, 378n41; on the will, 183 poetry: of Cowper, 77; of disorder (in the American novel), 18; of Dunbar, 324; of our own lives, 311; of the past, 35; Romantic, 32, 113. See also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Cowper, William; Dunbar, Paul Laurence; Eliot, T. S.; Novalis; Pound, Ezra; Shelley, Percy; Stoddard, Richard; Whitman, Walt political theory: of Arendt, 192–­95, 199, 203, 397n46; of Derrida, 194; of Frank, 195, 397n45, 397n51; of Hegel, 397n53; of Hobbes, 191; of Honig, 194, 397n47; of Johnston, 195, 397n51; of Locke, 191; of Mouffe, 193, 202–­3, 397n55, 398n56, 398n58; of Oakeshott, 194; of Pippin, 396n42; of Rousseau, 188–­200; of Schmitt, 193–­94, 201–­2, 397n44; of Shulman, 397n50; of Sloterdijk, 202 politics, 187–­200; and Americans (for Arendt), 397n46; biopolitics, 404n30, 407n54; and collec-

index tivity, 149; and conflict, 193; democracy without, 198; and emotion, 192, 194; and freedom, 188, 400n43; and negotiation, 192; and passion, 202; political sovereignty, 73; as practiced, 331; and spirituality, 7, 53; of the will, 187–­202. See also citizenship; collectivity; democracy; general will; negotiation; spiritual Pollan, Michael, 37, 39, 381n72 Posnock, Ross: on Grübelsucht, 402n57; on H. James’s work, 206, 216–­19, 221, 231, 402n57; on W. James’s work, 225, 399n24, 402n57 possibility: vs. actuality, 380n60; and anxiety, 83; freedom and, 65–­66, 92; freedom as, 2; of narrative, 50; and will, 23 posthuman, xii, 38–­39, 43, 114, 306. See also human poststructuralism, 43 Pound, Ezra, 205 pragmatism, 37, 229; vs. abstraction, xvii; and the avoidance of a greater Will, 33; cheerful, 174; and H. James, 215, 226; of W. James, xvii, 205–­6, 208, 212, 216, 221, 243, 295; and relationality, 228; and surface/depth, 231. See also Dewey, John; James, William Pratt, Lloyd, 44, 369 preformation, 98–­99, 101. See also God present: death of the (for Cassy in The Morgesons), 127; deliberation, 352; eternal, 319, 354; and ethics, 229; extended/stretched-­out, 39, 41, 295, 311, 411n58; and habit, 295; living in the moment, 242, 248; ‑ness (of Cassy in The Morgesons), 121; ‑ness (of the “pluralistic universe”), 226; vs. past, 328; the past in the, 318–­ 70, 408n9, 411n57; “prosaic” (Hegel), xvi; pure, 41, 258; at a standstill, 327–­28; unmastered, 324; will, 361. See also temporality Priestley, Joseph, 16 primitivity: and laziness, 268; and passions, 338; return to, 302; revealed in the work of H. James, 231. See also James, Henry; laziness Princesse de Clèves, La (La Fayette), 77 problem: of autonomy, 2, 153–­54; “being a problem” (Du Bois), 356; of existence, 29; of the individual, 11, 13, 19, 29–­30, 36, 40, 47, 55; of modernity, xv, 1–­4, 6, 10, 18–­19, 33–­34, 36, 40–­ 41, 56, 73; of the past, xviii, 318–­70; with removing the problem of the will, 19–­36; of slavery, 34; universal problems, 241; of the will, ix–­xii, 6–­8, 11–­13, 19–­36, 45, 303. See also autonomy; freedom; individual, the; modernity; slavery progress: Black, 353, 358, 361; in Chesnutt, 336–­39, 342–­43; Du Bois on, 327, 353, 361, 364–­66, 369; and evolutionary thought, 265, 274–­75; vs. feeling, 396n36; history as, xiv, 319–­21, 324, 336–­37, 363; history as not, xviii, 318, 321–­22, 327, 337, 369; language of, 19, 21–­22; meaning of, 364–­70; modernity as, 66, 73, 321–­22; and morality, 81,

index 284; and reaction, 337; vs. reason, 201; toward nowhere, 327; tragic aspects of, 6; as ugly, 365; and will(s), 273. See also history; Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt); Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois); temporality Progressivism, 224, 227, 265, 286–­87, 403n11, 404n30 protest: novel, 9, 333; “proletarian,” 394n17; and willfulness, 4 Protestantism, 46–­94: and the God of will, xv; Great Awakening, 73–­75; and modernity, 58, 380n65; nightmare of, 68; radical, 30, 48, 52, 56, 78, 104, 308, 385n35; self-­examination, 65, 77, 383n9; and spiritual autobiography, xiii; and Varieties of Religious Experience (James), 241; and vitalism, 104, 106, 390n51; Weber on, 27, 281, 296, 304, 378n44. See also Calvinism; Pietism; Puritanism Proust, Marcel, 49; and habit, 295, 316; and memory, 42. See also habit; memory psychiatry, 105, 149, 163–­65; and Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography, 272; and degeneration theory, 240–­41; emergence of, 117; and existentialism, 43; neurological, 43; and norms, 392n80; and obsession, 241; and psilocybin, 39. See also brain; degeneration; Goldstein, Kurt; Maudsley, Henry; monomania; psychology psychoanalysis, 158; and African American studies, 356, 358–­59; and ambivalence, 358; vs. archaeology, 360; on character (as abnormality), 377n30; and existentialism, 355; and history, 362; and inner conflict, 213; task of, 356; and translation, 356; on trauma, 354; working through, 357–­58. See also desire; Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques; LaCapra, Dominick; repetition; Spillers, Hortense psychology, 163–­70; abnormal, xvii; advent of modern, 109, 117–­18; and the division of the human being, 181; and education, 137; and epistemology, 376n22; and evolution, 270; Gestalt, 138, 140; materialist, 182; and neuroscience, 139; vs. the novel, xiii, 10; and philosophy, 213; physiological, 132–­35, 213, 262–­64, 300, 303, 402n1, 404n30; as science of the soul, 117; and (the absence/avoidance of) the will, 10–­11, 36, 137–­38, 291, 298, 367; and vitalism, 117–­18; of the will (W. James), 208. See also Esquirol, Jean-­ Étienne-­Dominique; Freud, Sigmund; insanity/madness; James, William; Lacan, Jacques; Maudsley, Henry; monomania; Pinel, Philippe; psychiatry; psychoanalysis; Ribot, Théodule psychosomatic, the, 109, 125–­27. See also illness/ disease pure: abomination (evil), 244; action, 193; affect as, 181; air as, 185; artistic ideal, 205; consciousness, 51–­52, 236–­37; contemplation, 161;

469 contingency, 280; forgiveness and generosity, 236; ideas (as instrumental), 245; impulse (of the monomaniac), 165; intentions, 65; potential of the human body, 381n76; present, 42, 258; theory (and reason), 63; thinking, 39; thought, 50; void, 59; will/volition, 93, 174, 183; willfulness, 113 Puritanism, 46–­94; and the adventurous life, 54; and the body, 67; and contemplation, 59, 67–­72; and contingency, 379n56; and democracy, 74; as gothic, 76, 386n48; and the individual, 53, 70, 74; and interiority, 67–­72, 77–­79, 386n48; and literary taste, 383n10; and modernity, 49, 58, 61, 70; pathologized, 66–­67, 74, 76, 84–­86, 122, 294; and self-­examination, 384n14; and the will, 49, 72, 75, 84. See also Bunyan, John; Calvinism; Protestantism; Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne); spiritual: autobiography Purviance, Susan, 190 Pushkin, Alexander, 15, 29, 394n23 quest: for agency, 329; for effectiveness (and happiness), 273; for freedom, xiii, xv, 380n63, 394n18; for the ideal, 50–­51; for the immediate experience of life, 221; for the interesting, 246; for glory (as value), 190; for health, 294; for knowledge, xv, 63–­65, 78, 152, 178, 312; for meaning, 100; for revenge, 393n11; for self-­ definition (in The Scarlet Letter), 47; for truth, 93, 207, 212, 222, 294, 310; for unity, 394n18; for the womb, 276. See also Grübelsucht Rabelais, François, 5 Rabinbach, Anson, 268 race, 318–­70; and the bildungsroman, 112–­13; and “civilization” discourse, 285; and classification (Blumenbach), 97, 387n6, 388n12; and excess passion (in Elsie Venner), 133; and Manichaeism, 331–­32, 358; and melancholy, 334, 356; and Moby-­Dick, 156, 176, 197; and nation, 275, 282; and normality, 358; and passing (in Of One Blood), 325, 361; and pathology, 355; racial politics of temporality, 331–­32, 337; and rationality, 30; and Romanticism, 34; and temporality, 318–­70; and will, 409n24. See also Afrocentrism; Afro-­pessimism; Du Bois, W. E. B.; Fanon, Frantz; Gilroy, Paul; Hartman, Saidiya; Moten, Fred; racism; slavery; Spillers, Hortense; temporality racism: absurdity/madness of, 330; as “America’s original sin,” 338; and bad faith, 347; and the Black experience of modern social life, 329; as catalyst, 365; everydayness of, 358; and instinct, 113; and irrationality, 347; and melancholia, 334; and memory, 320; naturalization of, 338; and the other, 334; as romantic thinking, 332;

470 racism (cont.) and the subject, 359; and the Western “Man,” 7. See also Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt); Wilmington massacre Radcliffe, Ann, 76 rage. See anger/rage Rahv, Philip, 377n33 Rancière, Jacques, 382n79; on literature’s subject matter, 382n81; on will in the novel, 42; on Virginia Woolf, 41–­42 Rasch, William, 396n44 rational choice theory, 293, 296, 406n46; critique of, 297 rationality: and anima, 107; and classification, 177; vs. faith, 56, 75; freedom from, 229; and gender, 30; and morality, 75; “post-­rational” personhood, 291; and race, 30; rational addiction, 293, 296, 406n48; rational agency, 28; rational autonomy, xii, 15, 18, 228; rational power, 75; rational soul, 106, 109; and self-­concern, 25; and the soul, 106; and survival, 28–­30; and theology, 31; and the will, 25, 31, 117, 298. See also irrationality; reason Ratner-­Rosenhagen, Jennifer, 403n13 Ravaisson, Félix, 287 Rawls, John, 202 reading: as (potential) danger, 209; the financial pages (while eating [as appalling]), 303; and gender, 66; the patience of the reader (as tested), 247; to pieces (of Bunyan’s Grace Abounding), 54; and the recognition of one’s condition (Douglass), 23; rereading (as analogue for recovery), 145; will of the reader, 15 realism, xv; and the American novel, 16–­17, 331–­ 52; The Antinomies of Realism (Jameson), 41–­ 42, 319–­20; and autonomy, 32; and the British novel, xi, xiii, 18, 332, 335–­36; challenges to, 20; “extreme,” 118; lyrical, 14, 16, 383n2; and manners, xiv; and The Marrow of Tradition, 331–­52; in Melville, 172, 203; and modernism, 318; vs. objectivity, 382n79; vs. romance, xviii, 18–­ 19, 34–­35, 41, 66, 118–­19, 130, 172, 203, 230–­ 31, 258–­60, 331–­32, 343, 381n66; and selfhood, 14; in Stoddard, 118–­19. See also novel, the; romance reason: and action, 201; and affect, 180; Calvinism vs., 76; and the future, ix; and gender, 90; and God, 56–­57; and the individual, xv, 14, 18–­19, 48, 67, 71, 153; and irrationality, 299; and madness, 164; and moral law, 90; and passion, 90, 116; vs. progress, 201; and self-­control, xvii, 30; and sentiment, 75, 153, 192; and sociality, 226; vs. thymos, 182; and will, 193; vs. will, 28, 34, 67, 71, 158, 167, 194, 200. See also rationality Reber, Dierdra, 37, 291–­93

index reciprocity: of drives (good and bad), 407n69; ethic of, 156; and recognition, 349–­50; as social convention, 229 recognition: in Chesnutt, 346–­50; desire for, 348–­51; endless, 410n35; and gender, 351; Hegel on, 228; of history, 359; of interdependence, 335, 350; of moral law (via corruption), 81; as not enough, 356; of one’s condition (via reading), 23; reciprocity of, 349–­50; of sin, 243; and slavery, 350–­51 recovery, 125–­30, 145; and the bildungsroman, 126–­27; vs. death, 130; W. James’s, 210–­15, 222, 240, 251, 255, 402n57; from moral “ruin,” 279; for Nietzsche, 304–­5, 309, 311; vs. reform, 129; self-­healing (in vitalism), 107; in Stoddard, 96, 124–­27, 129–­30. See also illness/disease; regeneration/regrowth Reed, Edward, 134, 391n71 Reed, John, 154 reflection, 9, 12, 30, 134; vs. action, xi–­xii, xiv, 1, 28, 45; arbitrary, 159; and the brain, 39; continuous (in The Ambassadors), 248; vs. decision, xiv; and leisure, 361; vs. modernity, 226; “reflective enlightenment, 343; scenes of (in The Portrait of a Lady), 230; scientific mode of, 211; second-­order, 398n11; self‑, 1, 9, 39, 133, 282. See also Ambassadors, The (James); consciousness; interiority; introspection; James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady; self-­: examination/scrutiny/ inspection; speculation; thought; tracking reflex, 131–­38, 140–­43, 262–­64, 391n71, 392n74; and behaviorism, 137; Goldstein on, 143; Holmes on, 131–­33, 136; influence on literature, 131–­33, 136; and mind, 135–­36, 404n30; and mood, 143; and moral responsibility, 133–­34; as power of the soul (for Whytt), 134. See also action; automatism; behaviorism; Elsie Venner (Holmes); Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr.; mechanism refusal: to accept a bleak reality, 344; of belief, 174; of death, 120; to be enslaved, 156; to face dilemmas, 173–­74; of food, 118, 121; to grant significance to a senseless fate, 330; to help, 346; of limit (and American hubris), 3; of relation (undercut by want of buddies), 147; to be satisfied, 283; to take responsibility, 410n32; of teleology (in Goethe’s nature writings), 100; of universality, 410n40; to want anything at all, 15; of wisdom/knowledge, 163. See also no-­saying; turning away regeneration/regrowth, 97; Christian, 61; of the hydra, 99, 126, 129, 388n8; for Wilhelm (of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), 388n12. See also degeneration; recovery regression: and degeneration, 266, 276; infinite (of desire), 314

index Reid, Thomas, 75 Reill, Peter, 102–­4, 109–­12, 390n40 relationality, 39–­40, 207–­61; and autonomy, 215, 225–­26; and freedom, 229; and intensity, 259; relational criticism, 36–­37, 207, 215–­25, 229–­36, 257, 261; relational thinking, 214–­15, 218, 220–­ 22, 224–­25, 227–­29. See also James, William; networks; sociality; social world, the religion. See Calvinism; God; Pietism; Protestantism; Puritanism; spiritual Renouvier, Charles, 210–­11, 239 repetition: compulsion (Freud), 321; and degeneration, 277; and difference, 362; factorylike (of Charlie Chaplin), 264; and habit, 283, 287–­88, 295, 310–­13; vs. linearity, 321, 342; in The Morgesons, 128; narrative, 323; and the new, 310–­12; partial (in the hydra/polyp), 99; against repetition, 310; submission to, 128; of trauma, 314, 354; in Vandover and the Brute, 312–­14; and the will, 305; vs. working through, 357–­60. See also Freud, Sigmund; genetics; habit; monomania; Morgesons, The (Stoddard); Nietzsche, Friedrich; regeneration/regrowth; Vandover and the Brute (Norris) repression: Calvinist, 121–­22; of historical truth, 326; in Moby-­Dick, 173–­75, 200; and pathology, 122; and psychoanalysis, 360; self‑, 85; willfulness of, 173; will to, 87 resistance: Black, 339; to calculability, 367; collective, 339; and decisionism, 409n29; to fevers, 136; to the ideal, 50; with a smile, 404n33; and the social fact, 230; to whiteness, 197; will and, 3–­4, 376n25 resolutions: Edwards’s, 97; failure to keep (and weakness of will), 313–­14; Frankfurt on, 312–­13, 316; in Norris, 312–­14, 316–­17 responsibility: in Chesnutt, 321, 346–­50; communal, 189; criminal, 132; existentialism and (as critique of psychoanalysis), 345, 355, 410n32; Holmes on, 132–­33; individualized, 400n43, 407n54; irresponsibility, 128; W. James on, 240; moral, 133; pessimism as abdication of (Gordon), 330 revenge: authorial, 409n26; as bad for business, 393n11; in Chesnutt, 339–­42; and destiny, 339–­ 42; vs. justice, 191, 342; and loyalty to family, 352; in Melville, 185, 187, 191. See also justice; Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt); Moby-­ Dick (Melville) Ribot, Théodule, 251, 300; on aboulia, 270–­7 1; on degeneracy, 267; on Grübelsucht, 245; and “new psychology,” 402n1; on the will, 298, 303 Richardson, Joan, 221–­22 Richardson, Samuel, 22, 47, 70; and Cheyne, 112; Clarissa, Or, The History of a Young Lady, 89;

471 Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, 15, 47, 50, 70; and the sentimental, 70; and spiritual autobiographies, 52 Ricoeur, Paul: on passion; 396n37; on the pathological, 264; and the “school of suspicion,” 61; on self-­abnegation vs. self-­righteousness, 65; on self-­scrutiny, 84; and the will, 43, 182 Riley, Patrick, 189, 192, 396n43 risk: and capitalism, 379n53; freedom as, 2, 381n76; and self-­endangerment, 127 Rivett, Sarah, 384n22 Robespierre, Maximilien, 192, 199 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), xiii, 26–­32, 63, 379nn49–­52, 379n56; and the modern individual, 3, 15, 20, 26, 55; and theology, 26–­30. See also Defoe, Daniel; individual, the romance: Chesnutt and, 340–­42, 348; and destiny, 344; development of, 369; Hawthorne and, 118, 146; imperial, 326; and intensity, 185; and madness, 66; Melville and, 118, 146–­49, 186–­87; and the novel, 15–­26, 77, 146–­50, 325; vs. practicality, 5; and racism, 332; vs. realism, xviii, 18–­19, 34–­ 35, 41, 66, 118–­19, 130, 172, 203, 230–­31, 258–­60, 331–­32, 343, 381n66; revival of, xviii, 318; and the social, 251–­55; and spiritual autobiography, 147; Stoddard and, 118–­19; and tragedy, 148, 199, 348; and trauma, 357. See also gothic, the; novel, the; realism; Romanticism Romanticism, xiii, xvi, 118, 146–­203; and antimodernism, 327; and (the struggle for) Black freedom, 113–­14, 116; and the body, 98; and critique, 155–­57; and heroism, 155–­56; and the individual, 153–­68, 199; Melville and, 153–­58, 166–­70, 190–­91, 197, 203; “-­to-­modernism cycle,” 19; and modernity (as internal critique of), 31–­36, 37, 101, 153–­58, 203; pathologizations of, 154, 157, 163; positive vs. negative (Peckham), 33–­34, 37; and the sea, 172; and secularization, 53; Stoddard and, 118; and value, 32–­33, 156; and vitalism, 101, 113–­17, 130; and the will, xiv, 4, 31–­36, 114, 149, 154–­70, 190, 306, 397n53; and willfulness, 188. See also bildungsroman; Naturphilosophie; romance; vitalism Ronda, Margaret, 324 Rorty, Richard, 399n24 Rosaldo, Renato, 33 Rose, Nikolas, 407n54 Ross, E. A., 224 Roth, Marco, 10 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, xii; on civilization’s corruption, 33; and “eleutheromania,” 154; and general will, xvi, 188–­89, 191–­95, 198–­99, 202, 227–­28, 397n49; on morality, 81, 115; on the paradox of “the People,” 194. See also general will

472 Rowson, Susanna, 112 Royce, Josiah, 210, 224–­25 Ruda, Frank, 364 Russell, Bertrand, 188 Ryan, Judith, 213 Sade, Marquis de, 84–­85, 90, 115 Salem witch trials, 73 salvation: Bunyan’s hope for, 65; W. James’s, 239; universal, 75, 386n43; valuation of, 297; and the will (for Puritans), 72 Sanborn, Geoffrey, 152, 185–­86 Sand, George, 46, 120 Sarkar, Sahotra, 139 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, xii, xviii, 42, 44, 319–­21, 329, 345–­ 47, 350; and the authorless novel, 8; on Freud, 345, 410n42; and gender, 351; and the Will of History, 330–­31. See also existentialism Sauvages de Lacroix, François Boissier de, 136. See also vitalism: in Montpellier Sayre, Robert, 32, 155–­56 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), xiii, xv, 16, 46–­51, 61–­62, 65–­66, 73–­74, 76, 80–­94, 120; freedom in, 87–­94; law in, 84–­90; preface to, 118–­19; responses to, 46, 48, 61, 92; will in, 86–­88, 92–­93. See also Hawthorne, Nathaniel Scheerer, Eckhart, 137–­38 Schelling, Friedrich, 157; and Naturphilosophie, 102, 114, 159; on receptivity, 390n48; and Romanticism, 157. See also life Scheuerman, Bill, 193 Schiller, Friedrich, 97; on Kant, 387n53; on the passions, 115–­16; on the will, 159 Schlegel, Friedrich, 114, 160, 162 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 160 Schmitt, Carl: “decisionism,” 193; on the self-­ emerging right, 396n44; on sovereignty, 193–­95, 201–­2; and the “state of exception,” 341 Scholes, Robert, 43 Schopenhauer, Arthur, xii–­xiii, 185, 201; Melville and, 169–­70, 178–­79, 185; and Romanticism, 157; and the will, xvi, 4, 32, 40–­41, 101, 149, 158, 169–­70, 179, 221, 305–­6; on wisdom, 178–­79; and withdrawal, 309 Schwartz, Sanford, 138 science, 104–­10; becoming religion (for Du Bois), 327; and certainty, 64; as critiqued from within, 101; and freedom, 57; and God, 60; and the individual, 9; and knowledge, 152; limitations of, 249; modern, 58–­60, 63; vs. “moral,” 30; and the natural world, 25; and the novel, 10, 42; and personhood, 2, 10; and temporality, 102–­3; and the will, 367; vs. the will, 263, 364. See also medicine Scott, Walter, 5, 319; objectivity of (for Lukács), 35, 411n57

index scrupulosity, and the law, 86–­86 sea, the: as awful, 396n36; as curative, 111, 148; as encircling the land, 172; and fear, 200; kinship with, 128; and madness, 179; as new beginning, 91; “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge), 157, 168, 383; seafaring, 63; as stateless, 191; as state-­like, 192; as suicide prevention, 170–­7 1; of turpitude (the modern city), 277. See also Moby-­Dick (Melville) secularism, 56–­58, 61; vs. the abandonment of God, 50; and Kant, 80; and liberalism, 293; vs. modernity, 74; and morals, 71; and the novel, 21–­22; and the will, 117, 194–­95 Sedgwick, Eve, 290–­91, 293–­96, 302, 304, 316, 406n47 seduction: as (potential) cure for overthinking, 248; novel, 112, 126, 128; by the passions, 301 self, the: fluid, unbounded, 213; hidden, 325–­26; impatience with, 409n23; as other, 171–­72; porousness of, 218; the “social self,” 216–­18, 223–­28, 231; taming of, 67–­94; true, 360; and the will, 159; as will, 218; willful, 394n18. See also autonomy; individual; interiority; self-­; subjectivity self-­, 53; abandonment, 161, 188; abnegation, 65, 80; abolishment (of will), 169–­70; actualization, 227; address, 383n2; advancement, 67, 71; aestheticization, 314–­15; affirmation, 301; aggrandizement, 7, 50, 59, 80, 152, 282; appreciation, 407n56; assertion, 4, 20, 51, 57–­58, 63, 150, 155, 167, 190; association (with sovereignty), 396n44; assurance (of the cogito), 25, 378n46; authorization, 216; awareness, 54, 326; cannibalism, 149, 169; care, 125, 293, 407n56; command, 98; communion (of H. James), 205; complacency, 163; comprehension, 383n7; concern (rational), 25; confinement, 185; consciousness, 322, 361, 394n21, 394n25, 397n53; conservation, 183; consolidation, 177; constitution, 194; containment, 290, 378n38; deception, xii, 60, 79, 173; defense, 396n42; definition, 3, 47, 188, 228; denial, 5, 80, 161, 267; description, 86; destruction, 378n41; determination, 48, 58, 73, 150, 166, 188, 193, 230, 328, 331, 381n76; devotion (to artistic ideal), 305; discipline, 155; dispersal (into the world), 238; dissolving, 169; division, 25, 38–­39, 76, 127, 156–­57, 314; doubt, 150, 314; emergence (of the right), 396n44; enclosure, 112; endangerment, 127; evidence, 194; examination/scrutiny/inspection, 52, 59–­ 60, 62–­65, 67–­72, 76–­77, 84–­86, 299, 312, 384n14, 386n48; expansion, 7, 186; experimentation, 130, 309–­12; expression, 96, 153–­54; extinction, 310; flagellation, 76, 272; formation, 97, 345; fulfillment, 36, 47, 394n19; glorification, 195; government, 75, 92–­93, 153–­55, 282, 406n48;

index harm, 108; healing, 107; help, 37, 108, 272, 285; indulgence, 229, 312, 315; inflation (of the Romantic artist), 161, 163; interest, 3, 27–­28, 75, 191, 255, 271, 308, 378n41, 379n53; interrogation, 358; interruption, 290, 304, 322; invention (and manners), 232–­33; knowledge, 127, 305; legitimization (of capitalism), 291; liberation (via willpower), 23; limitation, 143–­44, 161–­62, 166–­ 67, 394n25; limiting (of freedom), 40, 153–­54; loathing, 278; love, 61, 70, 81, 151, 337–­38; lust, 66; magnification, 186; (re)making, 27, 37–­39, 56, 164, 285–­86; management, 406n48; mastery, 129, 181, 309–­10; medication, 290, 295–­97; motivation (and adventure), 26; narrativization, 271, 314, 356; nihilation, 410n31; objectification (and the third-­person perspective), 25; oblivion, 279; ordination, 88; organization, 142; ownership, 156, 359; perfecting, 80; policing, 84; positing, 160, 163, 166–­67, 194, 349; positioning, 309; possession, 379n50; preservation, xvi, 30, 107, 180, 278, 304, 383n7; production, 289; protection (via distance), xvii; punishment, 76; questioning, 229; rationalization, 314; realization, 225, 229, 361; reflection, 1, 9, 39, 133, 282; reform, 75, 126, 128–­29; refutation, 398n58; reliance, 113, 150, 168, 172, 229; renunciation, 154, 292, 294; repression, 85; respect, 361; restraint/control/ regulation/inhibition, xiii–­xiv, xvii, 3, 25, 29–­ 30, 36, 95–­96, 99, 108, 112–­13, 117, 153, 175, 182, 204–­5, 209, 214, 271–­73, 276, 280, 282, 290–­91, 298–­301, 379n53, 380n57, 410n32; revelation, 118; righteousness, 65; sabotage, 25, 27–­28; sacrifice, xiv, 161, 271; separation/exile/removal, 170–­7 1, 174–­75, 205; soothing, 314; sovereignty, xvi, 289–­91; subjection, xvi, 3, 80, 153–­54, 159; subordination, 282; sufficiency, 25, 235–­36, 386n42; surrender, 128, 309; sustainment, 150; tracking, 28, 36, 265, 289, 381n73; understanding, 19, 167; unification, 298; vivisection (via the knife of the word), 60; will, 199; willed, 131–­32; writing, 59. See also selfishness; selflessness selfishness: as “the all-­powerful race argument,” 338; and civic good, 70; vs. duty (Kant), 404n24; and history, 337; man’s inherent, 224 selflessness, 88–­89; and collectivity, 155, 192; as Stoic ideal, critiqued by Nietzsche, 307 Seltzer, Mark, 263 Seneca: and inner consent, 22; on moral progress, 81; and the quest for knowledge, 64. See also Stoicism Senghor, Leopold, 321 sensibility, 110–­16; of the artist, 398n18; and civic life, 110; and freedom, 219; and the inner self, 70; and irritability, 389n38; and the James brothers, 217; and nonliving things, 111; and receptivity, 390n48; theory, xvi, 117–­18, 134,

473 138, 142. See also sentiment; sentimentalism; sympathy sentiment: culture of, 69; and the future, ix; meaningfulness of, 351; overemphasis on, 272; and reason, xv, 14, 18–­19, 48, 67, 71, 75, 153; of sociability, 194. See also emotion; feeling; sensibility; sentimentalism; sympathy sentimentalism: and the body, 98, 115, 271; critiques of, 271–­72, 279; and domestication, 94; and habit, 294; and human nature, 110–­11; and morality, 404n24; and the novel, 33, 69–­70, 92, 94–­96, 109, 112–­13; and Romanticism, 33; and the self, xv, 13, 18–­20, 36–­38, 69–­74, 77–­81, 93, 380n61; and the will, 13, 33–­34, 271. See also Richardson, Samuel; sensibility; sentiment Sexton, Jared, 328–­29, 354–­55 Shaftesbury, Anthony, Earl of: as against “enthusiasm,” 69; and interiority/selfhood, 51, 69, 80; and “self-­formation,” 97 Shakespeare, William, 5; As You Like It (Melville’s copy), 186; Hamlet (invoked by W. James), 210, 368; King Lear, 323, 330; and Moby-­Dick, 149, 168; nervous system of, 368 Shaler, Nathaniel, 338 Shelley, Percy, 113 shibboleth: of efficiency, 286–­87; of freedom, 6; multiplication of, 250 Shulman, George, 397n50 Sidgwick, Henry, 209 silence: adultery as (in the bourgeois novel), 49; of Billy Budd, 199; of the cosmos, 30, 60; of the dining table, 122; of God, 52; of life’s perils, 172; between lovers, 124; of Mme de Vionnet, in H. James, 253; near‑mute (Elsie, in Holmes), 131 Simmel, Georg, 153–­55; on individualism, 153–­54; on sociability, 220, 250, 259, 261, 402n62 sin, 84–­89; as (merely) a condition/disease, 243; enjoyment of, 24; and environment, 272–­73; of the father, 77; and fear, 86; and grace, 24; and health, 144; and knowledge, 64; and the law, 62–­65, 80, 87, 385n32; original, 26, 28, 30–­31, 70, 81, 132, 141, 293, 338; as a physical matter (Stoddard), 121; replication of, 85; self-­examination and, 62; self-­love and, 70; sitting too much as, 289; and temporality, 63, 65–­66; truth of, 87; and will, 62, 144, 273. See also blasphemy; God; law; transgression Skarda, Christine, 142 skepticism, 168, 170–­76; born of doubt, 241; moral, 308; of Nietzsche, 304; about reason, 175; about the relational project, 221–­22. See also Cavell, Stanley; doubt; Hume, David; Moby-­Dick (Melville); relationality slavery, 6–­7, 75, 112, 322–­25, 331, 334–­51, 353, 359, 369, 380n63, 381n71, 386n39, 400n42, 408n9; and the American novel, 6; as “but a childhood

474 slavery (cont.) tale,” 365; Fugitive Slave Law, 156; and inner freedom/will, 22–­23, 381n71; memory of, 328; Middle Passage, 319, 328, 354; and modernity, 328–­29; and narrative, 325, 329; and negation, 239; and recognition, 350–­51; and (obliteration of) selfhood, 23; and sentimentalism, 33–­34; “slave sublime” (Gilroy), 328. See also abolitionism; race; racism; Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois); Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) sleep: as (twelfth) commandment, 175; insomnia, 109, 284; of the just (and the assassin both), 132; and lower forms of will (for Schopenhauer), 169; as “mere necessity” (in The Morgesons), 391n60; in Norris, 276, 284; outdoors, 131, 171; talking, 165; thinking, 68; sleepwalking, 167 Sloterdijk, Peter, 182; on anthropotechnics, 299, 310; Homo repetitivus, 285–­86, 293–­94; on politics and thymos, 202 Smith, Adam, 406n53; on capitalism, 291, 292; on the excesses of Mandeville, 61 Smith, Roger, 273 Smith, Zadie: on the people of fiction, xii; on lyrical realism, 383n2; on the novel, 9, 13–­17, 19, 40 Snead, James, 321 social contract, 3, 45, 153, 224, 292; breaking the, 170; for Rousseau, 188, 191, 194 social fact, 231–­33, 252, 401n47. See also class; sociality; sociology sociality, 204–­61; and aesthetic, 232–­38; and class, 232, 401n47; and conflict, 235, 256; and consciousness, 235–­36; and depression, 261; as desirable, 223; as difference, 260; and form, 232–­38; and the individual, 49–­52, 228–­31; and infinity, 220, 228; and intermingling, 216–­20; and intersubjectivity, 227–­32; as inventiveness, 252; and love, 229; and manners, 207, 216, 232–­ 38, 256–­60, 277; and mask play, 244, 261; and mental health (for W. James), 210–­15, 251, 255; and modernity, 80, 206, 231; and narrative, 50; and norms, 252; and organization, 250–­51, 255; and pathology, 280, 283; “phantasmagoric” (in The Ambassadors), 255; and politeness, 231–­ 32; and reason, 226; and reciprocity, 229; and romance, 251–­55; sociability (Simmel), 202n62, 220, 250, 259, 261; staging of, 250–­51, 255; and strangers, 220; and temperament, 137; utopian, 221–­27; and the will, 222, 260–­61. See also social fact; social reality; social world, the; sociology social reality, 206–­7, 236, 247 social reform: and Calvinism, 53; and character, 400n43; and human engineering, 137 social self, 216–­18, 223–­28, 231 social world, the, xiv, 204–­61; as Big Will, x, xiv, xvii, 18, 33, 216, 222–­24, 227–­29, 231, 274; and conflict, 235; vs. freedom, 46; and the

index individual, 49–­50; and the novel, 1, 49–­50; and planning, 338; and self-­advancement, 71; and self-­interest, 75; and self-­restraint, 95–­97, 112. See also collectivity; James, Henry; manners; sociality sociology, 206, 215, 222–­28, 230–­31, 248–­51, 405n43; and abstraction, 367; and Du Bois, 322, 366–­68; and Moby-­Dick, 393n10. See also Bosanquet, Bernard; classification; Cooley, Charles; Dewey, John; Du Bois, W. E. B.; Durkheim, Émile; Green, T. H.; Mead, George Herbert; Simmel, Georg; social fact; sociality; social self; Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois); Weber, Max solidarity. See collectivity solipsism, 39, 160, 383n9; Proustian, 49 solitude: and anxiety, xv; as curative, 176; before God, 74; lifelong (H. James), 205; and the sea, 171, 179; (un)sociable, 219–­20 song: “coon song,” 352; as a maximization of being, 185–­86; “sorrow songs,” 359, 364, 408n7 Sontag, Susan, 377n29 sorrow, 9, 366; history of, 355; and “insane melancholy,” 244; songs, 359, 364, 408n7; and turning to God, 348, 379n56; and the will, 116. See also anger/rage; emotion; happiness soul, 104–­10; beautiful (Goethe), 123; and body, 106, 110, 119, 122–­23, 130, 134–­35, 223–­24, 389n30; and the body of others, 224; and circulation, 105; development of, 50; fevers of the (passions), 116; freedom of the, 390n51; graying (Stoddard’s), 126; immortality of, 87; materialization of, 106; vs. mind, 134–­35, 391n71; multiplex, 110, 118, 181; narrative of, 62; rational, 106, 109; sick soul (W. James), 225, 239–­47, 305, 390n51; soullessness (of the modern subject), 58; thinking, 68; for vitalists, 101, 104–­5, 110, 300, 389n27, 391n71. See also anima; spiritual; Stahl, Georg Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), xviii, 321–­25, 328, 332–­33, 353, 356–­60, 363–­70, 408nn7–­8, 410n40; and progress, 327, 353, 361, 364–­66, 369; “sorrow songs,” 359, 364, 408n7; and temporality, 363–­70. See also Du Bois, W. E. B.; history; progress; temporality sovereignty, xvi–­xvii, 13, 191, 193–­96, 218, 227, 299, 359; “decisionist” (Schmitt), 193, 345; and democracy, 396n44; and eating, 295; in Melville, 187–­200, 203; Romantic, 146–­203; self-­, xvi, 289–­91; and subjection, 153–­54; and (secularized) theology, 194–­95. See also individual, the; Moby-­Dick (Melville); political theory; politics; state speculation: as crime, 89–­90; and fear, 90; and openness, 94; as response to cosmic abyss, 58–­ 61; transcendental, 52, 148. See also interiority; introspection; thought

index speech: “civilized,” 233; and conflict, 251; and hesitation, 364, 366; lack of, 174, 236; prevented, 62, 87, 112; and the split subject, 359; vs. thought, 87. See also talk speed, and American modernity, 353 Spencer, Herbert: economic theories of, 274–­75, 282, 404n30; evolutionary thought of, 223, 267, 303–­4, 404n28, 404n30; and health, 285; liberalism of, 227, 291, 351, 352, 368–­69, 406n52; utilitarianism of, 224, 283, 351–­52, 404n30. See also Darwinism; diet; health; mechanism; utilitarianism Spengemann, William, 54 Spengler, Oswald, 298 Spicer, André, 289 Spillers, Hortense: and Afro-­pessimism, 44, 383n88; on Black subjectivity, 358–­59, 410n44; on “Black” vs. “white” worlds, 411n45; on “distancing,” 362; on Du Bois, 356, 358; on everydayness, 358–­59; on Fanon, 358–­59; on psychoanalytic thinking and African American studies, 356, 358–­59 Spinoza, Baruch, xii, 139; on affect, 180, 395n35; as evoked in Balzac, 248; on the madness of lovers, 179; and Melville, 179–­80; on partiality, 179–­80; on will as striving (conatus), 179 spiritual: aesthetic, 237; appreciations, 236; atmosphere of capitalism (Marx), 379n53; autobiography, xiii, xv, 24, 27, 52–­55, 62–­66, 83, 86, 95, 147, 272, 313, 384n17; hygiene (of stillness), 237; return of the (in the physical realm), 100; society as, 223–­24; statistics, 48. See also Augustine, Saint; Bunyan, John; interiority; religion; mysticism; soul; vitalism spontaneity, 31, 108; of action, x; and autonomy (free action), 82; denial of, 287; of economic processes, 406n53; moral, 400n45; spontaneous order, 275. See also action; Wille vs. Willkür (Kant) Sport of the Gods, The (Dunbar), 323–­24, 330, 353, 408n10. See also Dunbar, Paul Laurence Spurzheim, Joseph, 134 Stachniewski, John, 55–­56 Stahl, Georg, 117–­19, 122, 127, 133, 141–­42, 389n27, 389nn29–­30; and animism, 101, 104–­10, 114, 123, 389n30, 389n36; and blood circulation, 102; on body and mind, 390n51; on body and soul, 123, 389n30; and fevers, 136, 140, 392n83; and Leibniz, 106, 108; on symptoms, 142; on the will, 107–­9, 144. See also anima; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm; Pietism; soul; vitalism stasis, the will in, 15. See also stillness state: as Big Will, x, xii, xiv, 18, 33, 187–­200, 274, 290, 293, 396n43, 396n44, 397n49, 397n55; as collective dream (Hobbes), 194; Hegel on, 158, 162; and individual, 155–­56, 397n53; as “joint-­

475 stock protection society” (for social Darwinists), 274; Melville and, 152, 155–­56, 187–­203; vs. a social whole, 400n42; and violence, 341–­42, 354. See also Big Will; general will; people, the; political theory; politics; sovereignty statistics: and actuarial work, 353; language of, 137; and norms, 137, 141; spiritual, 48. See also calculability; norms; tracking Stauffer, John, 156 Steigerwald, Joan, 390n48 Stein, Gertrude, 316 Stendhal, 15–­16, 29, 233, 307, 394n23 stillness: and illness, 309; perfect, 236, 246; plantlike, 276; spiritual hygiene of, 237; unnerving, 15. See also inertia; paralysis; stasis Stoddard, Elizabeth, xi, xvi, 16; on the body, 96; on the Crystal Palace, 118–­19; and the death of her son, 129–­30; on love, 130; The Morgesons, xvi, 95–­98, 104, 109, 117, 118–­31, 147; as a reader, 96–­97, 118; realism and romance in, 118–­19, 130; and Romanticism, 118; on sin, 121; Temple House, 129–­30; Two Men, 129, 391n65; and vitalism, xiii, 109; vitality of, 125; on Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 118; as a writer, 118–­21. See also bildungsroman; Morgesons, The (Stoddard) Stoddard, Richard, 118 Stoicism: Foucault on, 407n57; Nietzsche on, 307, 310; and programs of the body, 294; and the quest for knowledge, 63–­64; and the will, 8, 22 Storm, Theodore, 411n55 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: evangelicalism of, 33; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 9, 33–­34, 112–­13, 156, 322–­23, 333–­34, 351–­52, 380n63, 404n24, 410n40. See also Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson), 262, 408n72 striving: bourgeois, 164; and coping, 142; human, 10, 100, 114, 162, 178–­79; plant, 97, 100–­101; of the will, 166, 169; will as, 179. See also drive; organism, the Sturm und Drang: drama, 32, 115–­16; and freedom, xiii subjectivity, 149; and Augustine, xiii, xv, 24–­25, 35; Black, 44, 355, 358–­59, 410n44; and contingency, 394n25; desire for, 349; dialectical view of, 29; and domination, 52; embodied, 265; excess of, 161, 168; and Fichte, 159–­60, 162–­63, 165–­67, 169, 184, 194–­95, 394n25, 395n28; as ghastly, 48; liberal vs. neoliberal, 290–­91; and madness, 160; and medicine, 105; and the negation of the will, 329; and objectivity, 161; radicalization of, 49; a riot of (the novel), 9; and sentimentalism, 69–­73; and values, 52; and the will, 158–­70; as will, 166. See also Augustine, Saint; Fichte, Johann Gottlieb; Hegel, G. W. F.;

476 subjectivity (cont.) individual, the; interiority; intersubjectivity; psychology; self subject of interest, 292, 406n51. See also Foucault, Michel sublime: becoming madness, 163; interiorities of the gothic, 55, 83; “slave sublime” (Gilroy), 328; of social potentiality (McWeeny), 220; transcendence of time, 362; vs. uncanny, 357 suicide: desire for (in The Scarlet Letter), 91; in Moby-­Dick, 170; murder–­suicide (in The Souls of Black Folk), 322; in Of One Blood, 327, 361; and social pathologies, 405n43; suicidal monomania, 267; in Vandover and the Brute, 275, 278, 283, 312. See also death; killing Sumner, William Graham, 274, 338 survival: of the fittest (Spencer), 223, 283, 404n28; and instinct, 404n23; and narration, 356; and rationality, 28–­30; as a unity (as organism’s goal), 142. See also fitness; self-­: preservation; Spencer, Herbert suspicion, 308–­10; of claims of perverseness, 168; the covering up of, 173; and depth, 308; as illness, 310; of narrative as such, 294–­95; of nature, 301; of one’s will, 395n26; “school of suspicion” (Ricoeur), 61; of the state, 342 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 221–­22, 260 Swift, Jonathan, 67, 85, 377n26 sympathy: and automatism, 389; and the body, 110–­11; communion of (in the yearning for family), 171; vs. intellect, 205; and the reflex concept, 134; and sentimentalism, 93; with the skeptical position (Cavell’s), 168; vs. vigor, 209; and the will, 389n37. See also body; reflex; sensibility; sentiment; sentimentalism talk: vs. intimacy, 236–­37; in H. James’s work, 233, 251, 401n48; talking cure, 360 Tanner, Tony, 46, 49, 62, 87, 383n6 Tantillo, Astrida, 100, 388n11 Tarde, Gabriel, 218 taste: vs. appetite, 118; for detail/nuance (in novels), 65; embodied (in relics and objects), 252; and the Epicurean, 307; literary (and Puritanism), 383n10; vs. objectivity, 241; of talk, 251 Taylor, Charles, 68, 70–­7 1; on the eighteenth-­ century developments of self, 71; on the “first-­ person standpoint,” 24–­28 Taylor, Eugene, 241, 246 Taylor, Matthew, 382n85 teaching: as boring (if delightful) (for Du Bois), 365; as therapeutic (for W. James), 211, 222, 240, 402n57; and value (Weber), 45 temperament: alteration of, 123; as considered, 120, 125; as embodied will, 109, 143; and love, 130; melancholic, 361; obsessive, 78; religious,

index 239, 241; reptilian, 132–­33; and sociality, 137; for Stahl, 109, 140; taste as, 307; as (key) vitalist concept, 110 temperance, 111, 269, 278, 284; and Coca-­Cola, 288 temporality: and absence, 369–­70; and addiction, 296–­98; and ambivalence, 297, 360; and capitalism, 296, 303; “colored time” (Sexton), 328, 354; and the dash, 364; and decision, 319–­20; and “distancing” (Spillers), 362; eternal present, 319; eternal time, 144–­45, 328, 354; of heroism, 363; and the human condition, 156–­57; immortality (ubiquity in time), 186; indifference of time, 338; and modernism, 319; “modification of the future” (Dewey), 265; and the novel, 41, 77, 103; and objectivity, 35; and the organism, 142–­45; and passion/emotion, 116; and philosophy, 303; present and past, 318–­70; the problem of the past, xviii, 318–­70; and psychoanalysis, 355; and race, 318–­70; and recovery, 304; and science, 99, 102–­3; and sin, 63, 65–­66; and skill-­building, 28; and sociology, 322; “time enough, but none to spare” (Chesnutt), 344, 352, 353; and tradition, 333; undoing of time, 91; usefulness of the past, 326, 331; and value, 296–­97; in Vandover and the Brute, 317; and violence, 320; and the will, 32, 36, 82, 295, 352, 381n70. See also history; present; progress terror: and interiority, 46, 55, 60, 62–­63, 67; as response to the cosmic abyss, 58–­61; tales of (told in words of mirth) (in Moby-­Dick), 396n36. See also anxiety therapeutics: in Moby-­Dick, 170–­76; and moderation, 122–­27; and phantasmatic Africa (Goyal), 327 Thomas Aquinas, Saint: on faith, 59, 384n23; on God and reason, 56; synthesis of, 384n23. See also God; reason Thomas, David Wayne, 234 thought: vs. action, 62, 127, 209, 234, 246; as action (Fichte), 160; as adventure, 148; and affect, 169; appalling (as overpowering), 183; and architecture (H. James), 226; as beyond law, 88–­89; as degraded act, 404n26; vs. dreams, 71–­72; as energizing force, 176; escape from, 175, 181, 255; escape into, 226, 234; as exaltation, 245; excess of, 204–­5, 209–­11, 213, 248; and freedom, 233; freedom of, 88–­90, 165; and illness, 240; in H. James, 234–­35, 247, 248; in W. James, 209–­11, 239–­46; in Melville, 169, 175–­79; pure contemplation (of Hindus), 161; pure thinking (and psilocybin), 39; as site of transgression, 50; social, 206, 222–­23, 227; vs. speech, 87; and suffering, 170; as valued, 234; and the will, 88, 210; as will, 170. See also consciousness; interiority; mind; philosophy; reflection thymos, 181–­82, 202, 396n37; and value, 190, 202 Tintner, Adeline, 402n60

index Tocqueville, Alexis de, 198 tolerance: of agonism, 202; and collectivity, 351; vs. conviction, 209; and democracy, 383n11; and liberalism, 45, 342; religious, 74 Tolstoy, Leo, 118, 239, 245 tone: of anxiety (in spiritual autobiography), 55, 83; of civilized speech, 233; as classification, 249; of fiction, 48, 119 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 326–­27, 352 totalitarianism, 343; of Ahab (for some), 150; and history, 343; “totalitarian democracy” (of fascism), 188; and the will, 6, 177 tracking: of the self, 28, 36, 265, 289, 381n73; of “spiritual statistics,” 48. See also calculability; norms; reflection; statistics tradition: as historical memory, 335; in The Marrow of Tradition, 331; and morality, 351; as problematic, 327; and the state, 341; and temporality, 333 tragedy: and action, 344, 397n51; and African American writers, 324–­25, 330, 342–­44; Billy Budd, 199; and H. James, 229–­30; in The Marrow of Tradition, 348; Moby-­Dick as, 195; and progress, 6; and romance, 148, 199, 348 transgression, 50–­52; and the ideal, 50–­51; and the law, 62–­65, 80, 87, 385n32. See also blasphemy; God; law; sin Trilling, Lionel, 45, 409n23; on art/theory of the 1960s, 38, 43, 376n13, 376n25; on Don Quixote, 5, 17; on “Hellenism” and “Hebraism,” 401n51; on H. James’s work, 5, 206, 232, 256–­57; on the “liberal imagination,” 234, 254, 256, 343, 401n47; on limitations, 344; on manners, 260; on Mill’s critique of utilitarian liberalism, 383n89; on the moral passions, 375n9; on the novel, 2, 4–­11, 14–­15, 18, 35, 40, 42, 104; on totalitarianism, 6; on the will, x, 4–­11, 35–­36, 43, 104, 376n25 truth: and freedom, 93; of the heart, 90; as hidden, 63–­64; and manners, 232, 260; mortally intolerable, 175; of oneself, 294; quest for, 93, 207, 212, 222, 294, 310; repression of historical, 326; “sane madness” of vital, 157; of sin, 87; will to oppose “facts,” 176–­77. See also curiosity; Grübelsucht; knowledge Turgenev, Ivan, 118 turning away: from action, 301; from the comforts of life, 174–­75; from the dead, 120–­21; from freedom, 91; from linear conception of historical time, 323, 327; of the past, 411n52; from self-­magnification, 186; from a shipmate (to address the will), 171; from sin (Augustine), 27; from sovereign selfhood, 295; from Stahlian vitalism (by neovitalists), 140; from the will, 155, 179; from will as self-­restraint, xvii; from the world, xvii, 22, 179. See also death; freedom; Moby-­Dick (Melville); no-­saying; refusal; sin

477 Twain, Mark: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 16, 29, 34, 147, 230, 343, 380n63; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 272 uncanny, the: contingency (and subjectivity), 394n25; and the everyday, 321, 352–­63; vs. the sublime, 357; and the will, 370 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 9, 33–­34, 112–­13, 156, 322–­23, 333–­34, 351–­52, 380n63, 404n24, 410n40. See also slavery; Stowe, Harriet Beecher uniqueness: individualism of (Simmel), 153; move away from human, 103; of one’s “life sore” (Jameson), 320 Unitarianism, 75–­76, 78, 405n38; vs. Calvinism, 75, 242; secular morality of, 80. See also Calvinism United States. See America unity: becoming, 151, 157, 187, 196–­98, 359; and collectivity, 198; and democracy (for Dewey), 399n28; quest for, 394n18; vs. the reality of conflict (for Empedocles), 169; self-­unification (and the will), 298; surviving as (as organism’s goal), 142; of will, 192. See also collectivity; community; merging universality: and affect, 193; and equality, 161; and individual freedom, 89; refusal of, 410n40; and salvation, 75, 386n43, 396n43; “universal willing,” 161; of vulnerability, 331–­32 utilitarianism, 58, 182–­83, 224, 283, 291, 304, 375n1, 403n18, 404n30, 405n38. See also Bentham, Jeremy; Spencer, Herbert value, 19, 32–­35, 296–­98; and autonomy, 32–­33; and class, 5; crisis of, 30, 298; destabilization of, 33; dualism of, 231; in economic models, 297; and freedom, 43–­45; and the humanities, 138; judgments of, xiii, 44, 143, 180; life as a, 140; and modernity, 6; and optimism/pessimism, 44; and pluralism, 45; and Robinson Crusoe, 30; and romance/realism, 35; and Romanticism, 32–­33, 156; and subjectivity, 52; and temporality, 296–­97; of thought, 234; and thymos, 190, 202; of the useless, 362; Wertfreiheit, 35, 45; and the will, xiii, xviii, 138, 307; will of absolute, 302. See also Nietzsche, Friedrich; Weber, Max Vandover and the Brute (Norris), xviii, 262–­64, 270, 275–­90, 298, 302–­3, 305, 312–­17, 404n33, 405n36, 405n42, 408n72; addiction in, 265, 277, 283, 288; art in, 268, 313, 315–­16; capitalism in, 281–­83; degeneration in, 268, 277, 283; eating in, 276, 281; habit in, 262–­66, 277–­85, 288, 313; health in, 283, 289–­90; modernity in, 277–­80, 315; resolutions in, 312–­14, 316–­17; the social in, 282–­83; the will in, 263–­64, 268, 276, 279–­80, 282–­83, 288, 289–­90, 313–­14, 317; work in, 268, 281–­82, 288, 315–­16. See also addiction; capitalism; degeneration; eating; economy; habit;

478 Vandover and the Brute (Norris) (cont.) health; modernity; Norris, Frank; resolutions; social world, the; will Van Engen, Abram, 384n22 Van Helmont, Jan Baptist, 141 vegetarianism: Franklin (for, briefly), 284; Graham (for, to tamp down sexual urges), 284; Kellogg (for, cf. Graham), 284–­85; Nietzsche (against), 302; Spencer (attempted, failed), 285. See also diet; eating Vergès, Françoise, 363, 411n53 Vickers, Neil, 390n41 Vila, Anne, 115 Villet, Charles, 349 Vincent, Andrew, 228 vitalism, xiii, 95–­145, 225, 299–­312, 367, 389n29; and appetite, 122; and bildungsroman, 32, 95–­ 145; and Bildungstrieb, 101; and blood, 124; and the body, 299–­300; end of, 136; Enlightenment, 102–­4, 391n54; and history, 102–­3; vs. mechanism, xvi, 32, 101–­2, 108, 133–­38; medical, xii, 43, 104–­10, 119, 138, 140, 382n82; in Montpellier, 104, 109, 115, 136, 389n22, 390n51; and narrative, 138–­39; neovitalism, xvi, 43, 98, 103, 110, 136, 138–­45, 306, 392n79; and new materialism, 139; and Nietzsche, x, xvi, 126, 305–­12, 321, 407n69; and psychology, 117–­18; and religion, 104, 108–­ 9, 389n27, 389n30, 390n51; and Romanticism, 101, 113–­17, 130; and secularization, 53; and the soul, 101, 104–­5, 110, 300; and transcendence, 101, 104; vitality of, 138; and the will, 32, 101, 124, 130, 368. See also bildungsroman; Bildungstrieb; Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich; life; materialism; Morgesons, The (Stoddard); Pietism; soul; Stahl, Georg; temperament voluntarism, 3, 56–­58, 73, 193. See also determinism; self-­: (re)making voraciousness: of appetite, 95–­96, 121–­23; of thought, 170; of will, 32 Wahrman, Dror, 70, 383n9 Walpole, Horace, 76–­77; The Castle of Otranto, 77. See also gothic, the Walzer, Michael, 53, 385n28 wanting, 12–­17; actual (if limited), 254; and automatism, 297; to be different, 299, 210, 307, 310, 313; a distinct outcome, 381n76; vs. doing (in Saint Paul), 1, 12, 23, 45, 71, 81, 106, 127, 243, 271, 314, 381n76; vs. liking, 12–­13, 244, 297–­98; to want to, 312–­14; and the will, 72. See also desire Ward, Thomas Wren, 209–­10 Warner, Susan, The Wide, Wide World, 92, 112–­13 Warren, Calvin, 329 Warren, Kenneth, 328 Washington, Booker T., 408n8 Watkins, Owen, 384n17

index Watson, J. B., 137 Watt, Ian, xi; on the novel, 3, 20–­21, 24, 41, 47, 54, 386n48; Rise of the Novel, 3, 20–­21, 68; on Robinson Crusoe, 26–­27, 379n51 Weber, Max, 35, 63, 245, 303, 343, 386n39; on the Calvinist God, 58; Homo economicus, 281–­82, 285, 292, 378n44, 379n51, 405n41, 406n46; and pluralism, 45, 202–­3; on the Protestant ethic, 27, 281, 296, 304, 378n44; “Scholarship as a Vocation,” 41, 44–­45; on the will, 138. See also capitalism; economy; education; Homo economicus; Robinson Crusoe (Defoe); teaching; value Weiner, Dora, 391n54 West, Rebecca, 246 Whitehead, Alfred North, 215 Whitman, Walt, 216, 218, 391n61; William James on, 240, 242–­45 Whytt, Robert, 101–­2, 110–­11, 114, 117, 134–­35, 389n36, 389n38, 390n41. See also reflection; reflex; soul; sympathy; vitalism Wieland (Brown), 78–­80, 387n49. See also Brown, Charles Brockden Wilcox, Donald, 384n23 Wilderson, Frank, 328–­29, 342 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Goethe), 97, 99–­100, 104, 116, 118, 126, 131, 388n12. See also Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von will: abandonment of, 179, 218, 289; absence of, 87, 132, 204, 246, 270–­7 1, 306; and action, 1, 23, 72, 80, 87–­88, 116, 137, 182, 239, 270–­73, 318, 321; Actual and Real (Bosanquet), 227–­28; and addiction, 11–­12, 288, 290, 298, 406n47; addressing the, 171; and aesthetic, 306–­7; vs. aestheticism, 204; and affect, 193; and alienation, 158; of all (Rousseau), 198; to alterity (Foucault), 53; and ambivalence, 12, 159; and America, 3, 75, 150–­ 52; anatomy of the, 153–­54; anima as (Stahl), 107; as appetite, 117–­18; as arbitrary, 93, 160, 185, 397n53; Arendt on, 8–­9, 21–­24, 31–­32, 36, 43–­45, 158, 192–­200, 380n60; assertive/“manly,” 243; and attention, 143, 177; and authenticity, 80; vs. automatism, 263–­64, 288; autonomy of, 182; as burden, 295; and capitalism, 275, 286; and care, 307; character and, 377n29; (attempted) circumvention of, 1; collectivity and, 7, 156, 187–­88, 210; as compulsion-­like, 287–­88; and conflict, ix–­x, xiii, 23, 27–­28, 71, 195, 298, 308, 395n28; conquering one’s own, 128; to consciousness, 363; and criminality, 30; crisis of, 325; death of, 12; as decision, 159, 161; deficiency of, xiv, 5–­6, 11, 15–­17, 43, 104, 109, 187, 266, 270, 285; and democracy, 187–­203; and desire, 3–­5, 119; and determinism, 49, 51–­58, 73, 273; and development, 121; discarded, 262–­64; as disordered, 119, 154, 239, 301; as divided,

index x, 12, 23, 25, 30, 32, 38–­39, 71, 87, 133, 192, 243, 263–­64, 282, 314; as (un)divided, 132; and doubt, 273; to dream, 362; and drive, 63, 114–­15, 144, 305, 308; as duty, 339–­41; vs. duty, 159; and education, 75; as effectiveness, 204; vs. ego, 166, 345; embodied, xiii, xvi–­xviii, 8–­9, 11, 37, 95–­145, 262–­317; and emotion, 115, 180–­84; as (mere) energy, 273; as (sheer) energy, 280, 288; epidemics of (Sedgwick), 290; as ethics, 367; exaltation of, 210; excess of, xiii, xiv, 4–­6, 11, 15–­17, 28, 43, 104, 109, 149, 164, 169, 187; excuses of, 144; extinction of, 12; failure of, 270, 86, 337; and fear, 86; vs. feeling, 34, 67, 71, 111, 119, 174; as “flatterer” (Goethe), 159; flexibility of, 177; forward-­pressing, 295; as foundationless, x; freedom and, x, xiv, 22–­23, 33, 80–­82, 164; freedom from, 306; freedom of, 71–­72, 75; freedom vs., 72; general, xvi, 187–­200, 202, 227–­28, 397n49; goading into existence of the, 166; God of, 25, 29–­30, 50, 56–­59, 129, 171–­72, 189, 210, 222, 235, 324, 379n56, 384n20, 385n28, 386n48, 396n43; “gymnastics of ” (Sloterdijk), 286; and habit, xviii, 287, 295, 352; and happiness, 71, 82, 273, 308; and health, 112, 283, 290, 305; to health, 290, 305, 407n54; Hegel on, xvi, 4, 40–­ 41, 158, 160–­62, 167, 169, 334, 394n22; historical emergence of (as category), 21–­26; historical move away from, 10–­12, 137–­38, 262–­64; and history, 324, 330–­31; hygiene of the, x; human, ix, xii, 1–­2, 11, 25–­26, 32, 37, 41, 49, 56–­58, 67, 71, 81–­82, 108, 111, 180, 183, 239, 262, 312–­13, 317, 324, 366–­68; hypnotized, 351; “I” as, 166; in iconography, 12; and imagination, 32, 65–­66; imperial, 154; imperious, 5–­8; incalculability of, 2; incarnate, 280; and indifference, 380n60; individual, x–­xii, xiv–­xv, 6–­7, 11, 33, 38, 56, 104, 150–­70, 184, 194, 216, 233, 273–­74, 397n53, 400n45; indomitable, 154; ineffectiveness of (in reflex theory), 135–­36; infinite, 3, 151, 218; as inhibitory, 271; inhuman, 16, 59, 147, 180; insatiable, 32, 178–­79; intensity of, 178, 246, 261, 308–­9; as intentionality, 42; and interiority, 46–­94, 271, 381n71; W. James on, 11, 15, 210–­11, 216, 247, 270–­7 1, 287, 295, 301, 324, 367–­68; Kant on, x, 3–­4, 38–­39, 50–­51, 80–­84, 88–­90, 204, 271, 288, 387n52; and language, 378n38; and the law, 87–­88; vs. the law, 49, 195; lesion of the (monomania), 164; and liberalism, 318; and limit, 164, 181, 183–­84; Locke on, 33–­34, 36–­37, 72, 82, 306; and love, 130; madness of, 119, 154, 163, 165, 270, 301, 303; maladies of the, x–­xii, xiv, 5–­6, 11, 13, 15–­17, 43, 104, 109, 187, 239, 267, 270, 300, 381n72, 410n32; management of the problem of (by eighteenth-­century thought), 26–­32; as meaningless, 324; melodrama of the, 294–­95, 313; memory and the, 352, 362; and mind, 181;

479 and moderation, 111; and modernity, ix–­x, xv, 1–­45, 57–­61, 150–­59, 301, 321; and morality, 7, 18, 271, 272–­73; vs. morality, 82; to movement, 226; vs. movement, 263; multiplicity of the, 300; as mysterious/strange, 11, 25, 32, 38–­39, 273; and nature, 25; negation of, 329; Nietzsche on, x, xvi, xviii, 4, 32, 50, 265, 296, 299–­312; nominalism and the, 57; and nothingness (Deleuze), 16; to not will, 270, 289; and the novel, ix–­x, 1–­45, 98; obsolescence of, 36; as obstructed, 12, 271; omnipotent, 376n13; optimism of, 343; organs of (muscles), 285; as paradoxical object, 17; paralysis of the, 301, 318; passion and the, 116; and pathology, 163, 165, 270, 303; as pathology, 160; of the people/society, 189, 191, 228, 397n49; perfected, 304; and personhood, 14; perversity of, 1, 11, 73, 76, 86; philosophy of the, ix–­x, 18–­19; physiology of the, x, 11; politics of the, 187–­202; and possibility, 23; to power, 34, 303–­5, 308, 380n63; as power/force, xiv, xvi–­xviii, 18, 32, 110, 112, 124, 204, 287, 305–­6; powerful, 266, 290, 323–­24; as price of capacious perspective, 201; as problem, ix–­xii, 6–­8, 11–­13, 19–­36, 45, 303; and progress, 273; and psychology, 10–­11, 137–­38, 298; psychology of the, 208; pure, 93, 174, 183; race and, 409n24; radicalization/reformulation of (via vitalism), 101, 106, 109; rationality and the, 25, 31, 117, 298; of the reader, 15; vs. reason, 28, 34, 67, 71, 158, 167, 193–­ 94, 200; recuperated, 339; reification of, 72; and relation, 221; release from, 252; and repetition, 305; and resistance, 3–­4, 376n25; and restraint, 112, 315; Romantic, xiv, 4, 31–­36, 114, 149, 154–­70, 190, 306, 397n53; roots of, 181–­82; Rousseau on, xvi, 188–­89, 191–­95, 198–­99, 202, 227–­28, 397n49; as savior, 271; Schopenhauer on, xvi, 4, 32, 40–­41, 101, 149, 158, 169–­70, 179, 221, 305–­6; vs. science, 263, 364; and second nature, 294; and secularism, 117, 194–­95; self‑, 199; self and, 159; self as, 218; and sentimentalism, 13, 33–­34, 271; and sexual attraction/desire, 124, 306–­7; and sin, 62, 144, 273; and slavery, 22–­23, 381n71; and the social, 222, 260–­61; as solution, 20; as spiritual force, 11; and Stoicism, 8, 22; as striving, 179; striving of, 166, 169; to subdue the will, 87; and subjectivity, 158–­70; subjectivity as, 166; as “subtractive” (Massumi), 38; suspicion of one’s, 395n26; and temporality, 32, 36, 82, 295, 352, 381n70; thought and, 88, 210; thought as, 170; and thymos, 181, 183; totalitarianism and the, 6; transcendence of, 178–­79; and transcendence of self, 210; Trilling on, x, 4–­7, 14–­15, 17, 104, 375n9, 396n13, 376n25; triumph of, 281–­89; ultimate, 304; uncanniness of, 370; unity of, 192; unmasking of (La Rochefoucauld), 61, 308; as unsatisfiable (Schopenhauer), 32; vacations

480 will (cont.) from (as desired), 289, 406n47; and value, xiii, xviii, 138, 307; of (absolute) value, 302; violence of, 282; and virtue, 7; vitalism and the, 32, 101, 124, 130, 368; voraciousness of, 32; and wanting, 72; in waves, 312; as wayward, xiii, 17, 30–­31, 40, 104–­11, 244, 367–­68; weakness of, xvii, 205, 234, 268, 272–­73, 275–­81, 289, 298, 300–­301, 313–­14, 368, 404n26; willful, 146–­204, 231; world as, 149; as world-­making, 20. See also Big Will; free will; Wille vs. Willkür (Kant); willfulness; willpower Wille vs. Willkür (Kant), x, 82, 100, 159–­62, 166, 394n22. See also Kant, Immanuel; will willfulness, xiii, 4–­6, 20, 113, 146–­204, 209–­10, 410n32; as ambition/curiosity, 177; of children, 5, 147, 152; corralling, 210; critique of, 154; of the enslaver, 329; general, 191; of God, 53; in H. James, 400n45; and modernity, 394n18; and protest, 4; sovereignty as, 193; of the whale (in Moby-­Dick), 185; of the world, 173. See also child; curiosity; James, Henry; Moby-­Dick (Melville); modernity; protest; sovereignty; will Williams, Elizabeth, 117, 389n22, 390n51 Willis, Thomas, 106, 134 willpower, 3–­5, 36; as antidote to degeneration, 267; as awkward expedient (in Ainslie), 298; of children (the “marshmallow test”), 36, 381n70; Christian, 23; dangers of, 408n72; and “having it all,” 36; and the Stoics, 8; struggling against itself, 42; as weapon (against pain) (in Nietzsche), 310. See also child; self-­: restraint/ control/regulation/inhibition; Stoicism; will Wilmington massacre, 332–­33, 336, 353–­54, 409n17, 410n41. See also Manly, Alexander; Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt) Wilson, Edmund, 205, 229–­30 Wilson, Harriet E., xvi, 112–­13, 116–­17, 390n44 witnessing, in LaCapra, 356–­58

index Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 229 Wolfe, Charles, 106 Wolff, Caspar Friedrich, 99, 101 Wolin, Sheldon, 198 Woloch, Alex, 9 Woolf, Virginia: Mrs Dalloway, 41; To the Lighthouse, 41; and repetition, 321; The Waves, 41–­42 working through, 357–­60, 363 worldedness, 37, 177, 185, 220; and the absence of others, 220; and truth, 179 worldliness: and Bildung, 97; classificatory, 252–­53; and doing good, 81; and the modern subject, 58; and the Puritans, 53, 67; rejection of, 40–­41, 73 Wright, Richard: Black Boy, 409n24; Native Son, 9, 341; and Sartre, 320 Wuthering Heights (E. Brontë), 16, 31, 146. See also Brontës, the Wynter, Sylvia, xii, 2; on the category of the human, 7–­8, 31, 44, 331–­32, 376n12, 409n15; on racism and romantic thinking, 332; on rationality’s reoccupation of theology, 31; on societal authorship, 376n14; on subjectivity, 52; on the will and embodiment, 8–­9 yes-­saying, 22, 301; and no-­saying, 309, 344, 349–­ 50. See also consent; no-­saying Zamir, Shamoon, 324, 408n7 Žižek, Slavoj: on Fichte, 394n25; on Lacan’s conception of desire, 84 Zola, Émile, xii, xiv, xvii–­xviii, 35, 42, 262–­65, 275, 283, 318; on the experimental novel, 264; habits of (for Freud), 405n34; L’Assommoir, 268–69, 272–73, 277, 403n17; on realism vs. romance, 230; Rougon-­Macquart, 267. See also alcohol; degeneration; naturalism; Norris, Frank Zupančič, Alenka, 289