Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature [1 ed.] 0823254771, 9780823254774

Citation preview

Quiet Testimony

This page intentionally left blank

Quiet Testimony A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature

shari goldberg

Fordham University Press new york 2013

Copyright © 2013 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13

5 4 3 2 1

First edition A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Arriving at Quiet

vii 1

1

Emerson: Testimony without Representation

22

2

Douglass: Testimony without Identity

57

3

Melville: Testimony without Voice

87

4

James: Testimony without Life

120

Conclusion: Staying Quiet

149

Notes

155

Bibliography

179

Index

191

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

I would never have found as much quietness as I did without the generosity of professors, colleagues, friends, and family. I am grateful to Paul Kane, who caught me as a freshman at Vassar and taught me to read closely. The English department at the University at Albany is not known for being quiet, but its feistiness made scholarship feel urgent and consequential. I particularly benefitted from the challenging and warm environment fostered by Rick Barney, Bret Benjamin, Helen Elam, James Lilley, and Jennifer Greiman. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared in Arizona Quarterly 65.2 (2009): 1–26; the editorial comments I received helped me to grow my ideas. When upstate New York was my home, Jenn Marlow and Tara Needham provided tea, friendship, and smarts in doses that I miss almost daily. Matthew Pangborn and I spent several important hours with Melville one day, and he has been a supportive friend since graduation. In Dallas, the literary studies writing group has engaged with and improved my thoughts and my prose. I owe Lisa Siraganian special thanks for reading and prompting me to clarify many pages of this book. I am also appreciative of Marta Harvell and Mona Kasra, who have kept me close despite my hectic schedule, and Nicole Jacobs, who came to be my neighbor in a summer when I needed one and who is still willing, after many years, to read my work. I am especially indebted to some of the scholars whom I most admire. Eduardo Cadava was gracious enough to serve on my dissertation committee, and his kindness, patience, and sense of responsibility continue

viii / acknowledgments

to impress themselves upon me. Mitch Breitwieser has been an exceptionally generous mentor; his confidence in this book’s premise as well as his comments upon its pages have made it exponentially better. David Wills reads like no one else—precisely, surprisingly, and with great joy— and he inspires me to think ever more carefully and to use words ever more deliberately. Branka Arsić gave me Agamben to read when I knew very little about testimony, and she has shown me where to go next, and how to sharpen my thinking, many times since. I offer a big published thanks, after many little written ones, for her devotion, her friendship, and her continual insistence that I could do even better. Without my parents’ commitment to my education, none of these encounters would have been possible. I am forever appreciative of their love and that of my wonderful sisters, who have made sure that I always have something to laugh about and someone to call. Finally, and with more heart than I can put on this page, I thank Dave, who always listens.

Introduction: Arriving at Quiet

Testimony tends to be thought of as loud: it is associated with declarations, depositions, and confessions, issued from courtrooms and soapboxes, and charged with exhorting, proclaiming, establishing, and convincing. Nineteenth-century America produced no shortage of testimonies possessing these characteristics of loudness, especially within its several reform movements. Yet testimony also circulated, in texts of this period, as something subdued, muted, and elusive. This quieter strain of testimony could be as staggering and life changing as its louder counterpart, even without any fanfare. The premise of Hugh Miller’s 1857 The Testimony of the Rocks, for instance, is that geology reveals theology. Miller’s revelatory rocks are not framed as laboratory specimens or material evidence but speaking sources, vibrant witnesses. This subtle distinction evades testimony’s loud characteristics; for Miller’s readers, testimony is not the exclusive purview of human beings or their institutions, and so the voice of truth may come from entities more likely to be stepped on than heard. Once the very earth is understood to testify, the soapbox and the exhortation become testimony’s sometimes associates, not its essential trappings. In more explicitly political writings, too, testimonial force could derive from less auspicious sources, from slips, pauses, and fragments as much as from coherent narrative arguments. Hospital Transports, an 1863 account from volunteers caring for Civil War soldiers, is one such work of witness. It features “observations made at the time, and on the spot,” by those in service, in order to “show the scope of the enterprise”

2 / introduction

and thereby to promote “the deepest solicitude that all unnecessary suffering should be avoided in carrying out the war.”1 This introduction to the book and subsequent reviews of it appear to regard it as testifying loudly, through stirring, illustrative text. As the Continental Monthly put it, “The book is full of vivid interest, of true incident, of graphic sketches . . . and recommends itself to all who love and would fain succor the human race.”2 Upon close inspection, however, Hospital Transports turns out to be a disjointed and even obscure work. It is composed of extracts of letters, the writers of which are designated only by initials, and no editorial voice intervenes to smooth the lapses between accounts, so that dates and times, locations and events can be only shakily surmised. As a testimony, Hospital Transports lacks the clear imagistic narrative it seemed set to deliver. And yet the book’s reviewers appear not to have noticed what was missing; they read it as accomplishing its purpose, as making a testimonial impression, despite its incoherence and perhaps even because of it.3 While no rocks speak in Hospital Transports, what does speak is nothing that could be at home in a courtroom or made to resemble a proclamation. The Testimony of the Rocks and Hospital Transports suggest that testimony’s loud identity is too constrictive, for they lay claim to testimonial engagements that exceed direct speech and even discrete entities. This suggestion—that testimony as a concept must be enlarged to account for its various manifestations—belongs not only to these two, relatively minor period texts. In my view, opening up testimony is a task at the heart of the work of four key nineteenth-century American writers, each of whom theorizes its quieter dimensions. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Henry James find rocks as well as gaps to potentially claim the position of the witness, and they are even more expansive, collecting a series of entities, some everyday, some portentous, all of which allow them to reconfigure testimony’s usual outfit. These engagements proceed from the four writers’ collective investment in writing truthfully, reporting faithfully, and regarding the world with an eye to its surprising and generative formations, even as each inflects his understanding of testimony with a more intimate set of concerns. Like Miller, they recognize sources that claim their attention and devotion without literally proclaiming anything, and like the Civil War collection, they suppose obscurities sometimes more compelling than reasoned arguments. Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and James wrote in a historical context in which The Testimony of the Rocks would not have seemed weirdly animist and in which reviewers of Hospital Transports did not need to

introduction / 3

position themselves as reading against the grain in order to make sense of its textual oddities. The four writers work, then, under assumptions that are particular to their historical period, especially with regard to the idea that ostensibly silent entities could be construed as testimonial sources. At the same time, their insights should not be understood as antique relics. On the contrary: in stripping testimony of its loudness, I believe, each writer more nearly approaches the kernel of testimony, the central point in which its meaning resides. They therefore develop positions that speak to contemporary conversations about bearing witness, those inflected toward literary analysis as well as those focused on urgent political concerns. In particular, each writer confronts the limitations of the core attributes of testimony conceived as loud: the idea that it involves a representation of the past, delivered in the first person by one who was there, performed in speech or recorded in writing, and meant to draw together a community of live listeners. For Emerson, testimony need not represent the past—indeed, it need not represent at all; he proposes a testimony that issues from simply being rather than composedly narrating. For Douglass, one’s past bodies as well as one’s present body never actually coincide with the terms that would designate them, so that testimony exists in the absence of the act of identification. Melville insists that the truth dwells in the world’s silences and, as a result, testimony must elude voice. Finally, although James’s career occupies later decades than the other three writers’, he draws from the ideas of his father’s generation to insist that the dead, too, participate in the communicative world. Testimony without representation, testimony without identity, testimony without voice, and testimony without life—however unusual this array, it signals a flexibility that may be as germane to the twenty-first century as it is characteristic of the nineteenth. A 2012 collection titled After Testimony seeks, its editors explain, not to designate a new, testimony-less frontier but to suggest that because “[in] a few years, there will be no living survivors of the Holocaust,” writing on the subject cannot claim immediacy but must still “in some way come to terms with the historical reality that the accounts of survivors have tried to communicate.”4 In other words, without the first-person voices of survivors, and without their lives, there must be a way for something with the power of testimony to be produced. A 2007 study of human rights fictions, Beyond Terror, concludes by suggesting that the reader’s responsiveness may not consist in a loud action so much as a “change of consciousness, begun in outrage or an activated sense of pathos” and initiated not always by more representation but often by less.5 Finally, in a 2011 volume featuring

4 / introduction

prominent literature scholars focused on life narratives, Leigh Gilmore looks to “bring out those selves and stories that might otherwise seem impossible to hear because they are difficult to hear, insufficiently transparent, and thus untranslated.”6 Gilmore indicates that voiceless testimony may be that which most demands our attention. This brief collection of recent and representative works implies that a space must be carved out beyond loud testimony, for testimony today must be theorized, for several reasons, on a quieter register. Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and James, in texts that are at least a century old, did this work painstakingly, with assumptions and ideas that are inextricable from their cultural matrix and that, nonetheless, continue to speak to ours. These four writers are not the only ones of their era to propose dynamic and fruitful approaches to testimony, but together they provide a coherent theory, a point from which to begin thinking again, and thinking anew, about bearing witness.7

American literature, critical theory, and human rights As I have begun to indicate, this book engages three scholarly discourses to address its concern with bearing witness: nineteenth-century American literature, critical theory, and human rights. To develop my central claims, I want to explain how the study speaks from and to each discourse and, perhaps more importantly, how it understands them to overlap and converge. Quiet Testimony may be primarily situated as a reading of nineteenthcentury American literature. Its focus on testimony partakes of a long critical tradition of studying truth, language, and subjectivity in the works that compose the American canon. Starting with F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, questions about what constitutes the self of an American writer, such as how such selves come to know the world and how they come to express it, have been lasting and generative. The answers have evolved, especially in response to key events that followed Matthiessen’s 1941 book, namely, the perpetration of the European genocide, the advent of the civil rights movement, and the concomitant and continuing growth of critical theory, which may be understood as responding to such signal occasions in the developing history of Western power and personhood. Perhaps the most major shift in analyzing truth, language, and subjectivity has resulted from increased attention to the social, historical, and political contexts in which American literature was written and disseminated. While Matthiessen, for example, excuses himself for neglecting facts about average Americans in his study,8 many

introduction / 5

of his successors have been invested in shifting the weight of the canon to accommodate writing from nondominant cultures and social positions. As a result, it has become clear that Emerson’s approach to what it means to speak the truth must not be conflated with, or broadly applied to, Douglass’s and, moreover, that Douglass’s experience provides a perspective on truth, language, and subjectivity that demands recalibration of the entire field of study. It is irresponsible, if not impossible, to read and think today without attending to such shifts in the field. Yet I worry that delimiting Emerson’s scope according to his racial and material privilege risks missing the provocative philosophy offered within his texts.9 In fact, what might be missed is Emerson’s understanding that all things testify, including vegetables and trees in one essay and dust and stones in another. The idea that what appears to be without language not only speaks but speaks the truth already effects—or ought to effect—a substantial change in our reading practice. For Emerson’s formulation alerts us to a major literary and ethical question that surfaces throughout the nineteenth century, the question of whether things can speak. As I read Douglass’s autobiographies, he understands his own body as a thing that cannot speak its experience—because the words are as yet unavailable that would make such communication possible—but that might be brought closer and closer to language and might one day produce the testimony that Emerson tells us can exist. Together, the two writers suggest that American literature develops not through a voice in the wilderness (as Perry Miller had it) or even through competing voices in a complex society (as more recent criticism emphasizes) but through essential questions about precisely what, in addition to whom, has voice at all. Moreover, the possibility that the voice of the “what” was a serious literary concern, one that is also woven through Melville’s writing and that of Henry James, suggests that the “stutter in American literature” to which Susan Howe refers, the sound of “what is silenced or not quite silenced,” may not be found exclusively among marginalized persons.10 Or, put differently, the stutter may be constitutive of the literature, not only because certain voices were silenced to produce it but because the dimensions of voice and silence, person and thing, are being negotiated within it. In weighing the questions put by the text more heavily than the experiences circumscribing the writer’s life, I follow the gesture of many recent works that have the canonical converse with the less canonical and the privileged with the subjected.11 My aim is to extend the pathways that may consequently be forged, and one way I do so is by hewing to the advice of Edgar Dryden in his recent Monumental Melville: The

6 / introduction

Formation of a Literary Career (2004). Dryden calls for scholarship that is unobstructed by an erstwhile fashionable distaste for close reading, that performs “the painstaking process of examining a primary text with patience and care, taking into account its seemingly unaccountable and inexplicable details with the intention of discovering its law, that which marks it as unique or special.”12 Dryden’s position is that such a patient and generous process is in no way at odds with—that it rather serves—an investment in realizing a text’s historical or social or political import.13 In the case of my study, this method brings to light forms of testimony that might not otherwise be considered. These new forms of testimony, while particular to their American context, emerge most starkly in comparison with signal works on witnessing from the more European discourse of critical theory. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1991), Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), and Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (2002) have delineated an important field of testimonial study that responds to the Shoah as a limit situation.14 These works begin with the premise that testimony has historically been understood to require the presence of a first-person subject who recollects and reports past events for archival wealth or juridical judgment. Under such criteria, the massacre of millions, as well as the shattering of the psyches of those who survived, renders witnessing the Shoah an impossibility. The critical task thus becomes studying how, given ostensibly devastating conditions, testimony may still be understood to take place. Accordingly, an “in spite of” logic has come to frame the field: the studies just listed ask how testimony can still be a meaningful category of speech or experience in spite of the historical and psychic violence that has challenged it.15 Dori Laub’s example of this “in spite of” logic has become paradigmatic. He writes of an Auschwitz survivor who describes the explosion of four chimneys during an uprising, even though there is no other evidence of such an insurrection. In spite of the inaccuracy, Laub understands the survivor to testify “to the reality of an unimaginable occurrence. . . . She testified to the breakage of a framework. That was historical truth.”16 In effect, this conclusion does not reevaluate the conditions for testimony so much as the conditions for recording history. Laub makes “the breakage of a framework” equivalent to events that more usually generate historical representation, admitting as testimony what might otherwise be considered personal recollection (or invention). Laub’s cowriter, Shoshana Felman, turns to Freud to reevaluate the conditions for producing testimony, again in order to conceive of

introduction / 7

testimony as taking place in spite of traumatic experiences that seem to prevent direct representation of events. She writes that psychoanalysis “profoundly rethinks and radically renews the very concept of the testimony, by submitting, and by recognizing for the first time in the history of culture, that one does not have to possess or own the truth, in order to effectively bear witness to it; that speech as such is unwittingly testimonial; and that the speaking subject constantly bears witness to a truth that nonetheless continues to escape him.”17 In proposing knowledge that belongs to the unconscious while also being broadcast by it, Freud undoubtedly presents an important model of subjectivity that frees testimony from certain juridical and archival constraints. Yet I must protest that his “renewal” of testimony is hardly the first “in the history of culture.” If we look back to Freud’s American predecessors, we find that neither Emerson nor Douglass, Melville nor James understand truth as owned, they negotiate the terms of testimony in all kinds of text, and they do not assume that testimony can be read by its speaker. Moreover, these four figures do so without the “in spite of” formulation that has come to seem essential today.18 Just as the reviewers of Hospital Transports never argue that the text is testimonial in spite of its incoherent form, the earlier writers do not position themselves as rescuing an endangered form of truthful speech. Thus, they do not reconsider testimony so much as offer a reading of testimony consistent with nineteenth-century thought from which we have become estranged. Emerson, for example, fascinated by Swedenborg, understands natural objects to testify by virtue of being, and James extends his premise to the dead. This intellectual lineage allows testimony to circulate among entities that are not generally distinguished as human, let alone fully self-conscious. Nonetheless, the nineteenth-century circumvention of the “in spite of” formulation with something closer to a testimony of plenitude is not totally irrelevant to the critical theory that appears to exclude it. The drive to find text that bears witness beyond the strictures of first-person speech underpins work on testimony in both contexts. It is common to both a thinker like Agamben and one like Douglass. Following Douglass past their common undertaking reveals a hopefulness that Agamben does not quite propose but also does not prohibit. Similarly, I find that Emerson’s and James’s ideas resonate with Emmanuel Levinas’s situation of testimony in the ethical encounter, even as they extend testimony’s purview to include entities he would never have considered. Melville, too, engages the idea of silence laid out by Roland Barthes, developing the silence of the wind beyond Barthes’s brief note. The more flexible,

8 / introduction

extensive reach of the earlier thinkers may be construed to challenge but also broach the concerns of the later. I am suggesting that reading through the nineteenth century may enrich our current theoretical approaches to studying testimony. The American writers speak to the concerns of critical theory, even if they do not speak from them. Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and James thereby provide us with an opportunity to rethink the very process of our thinking, and to emphasize or draw out less familiar strains of it that still have the potential to be isolated and developed.19 That same opportunity may also be available in the field of human rights. Hospital Transports invokes the language of humanitarianism, and it was produced by the volunteer-driven Sanitary Commission just one year before the first international Geneva Convention, which created provisions for neutral care-taking of wounded soldiers. Indeed, a representative of the Sanitary Commission attended that convention and, to hear him tell it, virtually established the International Committee of the Red Cross on the model of the U.S. civilian organization.20 Thus, one could position Hospital Transports in a genealogy that includes the text of the fourth Geneva Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To make the connection would be to situate the odd, fragmented testimony of Hospital Transports within a movement that now assumes bearing witness to horrible events to be the condition for eradicating them. The older text might not be quite at home there, since directly, graphically representing atrocity has been, at least since the middle of the twentieth century, the signature of the human rights movement.21 Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith describe how explicit accounts are pivotal: “Rights workers and rights campaigns make use of life narratives as they bring forward claims of human rights abuses. Stories provide necessary evidence and information about violations. They put a human face to suffering.”22 Without narrative testimony, from this perspective, suffering is illegible, unrecognizable. Yet the book I mentioned earlier, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg’s Beyond Terror, suggests that we may have arrived at the limit point of the logic of exposure. She explains that “the dull nullity of response” to the circulation of images of torture from Abu Ghraib indicates that the human rights movement’s fundamental commitment to testimonial exposure “has been seriously compromised, if not outright negated.”23 If those horrific photographs circulated without prompting demands for the eradication of American torture, then perhaps, she reasons, presenting evidence and information about suffering no longer suffices to induce indignation about it. The alternative, literary

introduction / 9

approaches to narrating torture that Goldberg considers may signal, or call for, a turn away from directly representational text and toward the relative obscurity that seems to have been compelling to 1863 readers. While only my chapter on Melville engages explicitly with human rights discourse, all of my readings have been undertaken with a sensitivity to the urgent questions Goldberg raises. Since there is a strand of thought within human rights discourse that always wants to know, as James Dawes puts it, “When does the story become real enough to change you?”24 my readings of what may testify and how testimony registers are necessarily, if often implicitly, in conversation with that field.25 If, as my reading of Goldberg suggests, nineteenth-century texts have something to contribute to a conversation about whether aggressively “loud” testimony has reached its limits, I hope this book can participate.

Identifying the testimonial The testimony I am describing may be contextualized in terms of bearing witness—a testimony bears witness, and to bear witness is to produce a testimony. This of course begs the question of how to define the witness, since the testimony is essentially the witness’s text. Paul Ricoeur provides a useful formulation, which is that the witness performs a “triple declaration: (1) I was there; (2) believe me; (3) if you don’t believe me, ask someone else.”26 The witness is one who has been present at a past event, who solicits belief as to his or her account of it, and whose account is believable because it is accurate rather than idiosyncratic. By the same token, the testimony—the “declaration”—is a first-person account of a past event which promises a fidelity to reality. Jacques Derrida elucidates the implicit paradox in these formulations. The first-person perspective is always, he explains, and constitutionally at odds with the promise of broad applicability. The declaration might be reformulated accordingly: “I swear to tell the truth, where I have been the only one to see or hear and where I am the only one who can attest to it, this is true to the extent that anyone in my place, at that instant, would have seen or heard or touched the same thing and could repeat exemplarily, universally, the truth of my testimony.”27 The witness is called to the stand because he or she is the only one able to give an account of an event, but the account is expected to deliver a perspective that is general rather than particular. The witness’s solicitation of belief turns out to depend on a promise to be both “singular and universal,” as Derrida puts it.28 One believes a witness, one accepts a text as testimonial, under the premise that two apparently antagonistic registers—on the one hand, the subjective, the

10 / introduction

personal, and the idiosyncratic and, on the other, the objective, the certain, and the verifiable—meet in a single entity. Testimony exists, then, as a perpetual point of tension. It asks us to extend faith to another being in order to establish reality, in order to know the truth. My focus here is on the literary formulations that demand and secure this risk, that procure a willingness to have one’s understanding of truth revised or even replaced. What distinguishes, for me, all texts that meet Ricoeur’s criteria from texts that bear witness is their capacity to alter, in potentially devastating ways, the truth of their audiences. Thus, I differentiate between, for instance, the deposition that composes part of Melville’s Benito Cereno and the aspects of that deposition that arrest its readers and change, however subtly, the way that they thereafter approach the text or even the world. The former derives from a firstperson account that provides information; the latter demands assessment as testimony, I am suggesting, because it produces a change in the very basis through which information is thereafter assessed. To recall Dawes’s formulation, the former is the story, whereas the latter is the “story . . . real enough to change you.” My emphasis might seem to be extremely invested in personal response or extremely reflective of the nineteenth-century circulation of moral suasion, but it is actually consistent with the witness’s practical function in juridical and historical contexts. The witness exists not to say what is known but to participate in the restructuring of knowledge. Isolating the point when structure gives way to restructure is what makes a witness’s testimony “key”; that key, then, is the explicit purview of this book. Such testimony bears a heavy requirement. Audiences tend to protect old, accepted truths at all costs, as William James explains in Pragmatism: “by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.”29 In other words, hearing a potentially life-changing testimony might not be extraordinary, but taking it to heart is a rarity; as a consequence, understanding what distinguishes a text that demands such “rearrangement of our preconception” is a most serious challenge. The contours of this distinction may be familiar to readers of Douglass’s famous speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” When, as he puts it, “the time for . . . argument is passed”30—when logical points have been made, when information has been amply provided—what can be said that will reconfigure the slaveholding United States into a nation committed to liberty? Douglass seems to have had two routes available to him for attempting to effect the change. He could have followed the

introduction / 11

American Anti-Slavery Society in producing a text such as the Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. That publication is characteristic of the Society’s method of providing more and more facts—so many facts, indeed, as to saturate any context for debate (and, in the process, to exhaust the reader). The alternative to providing more facts is the route that Douglass takes; it may be described as providing more literature.31 He insists that “scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed”:32 instead of shoring up his logical points, he introduces a literary frame for assessing the situation. As text that means in two registers at once, irony destroys the very premise of “getting to the bottom of things” on which facts rely. Once the major terms in Douglass’s speech, revolution and freedom and America and man, are all deployed ironically, no criterion is final for determining whether Douglass and his brethren ought to inherit the revolutionary freedom of American manhood. Moreover, the revolutionary freedom of American manhood ceases to be solid ground held by Douglass’s audience members: they can no longer rest in their own identities and assess Douglass accordingly. They have, then, been constitutionally changed by his speech, and Douglass may, as a result, claim to partake of their founding Constitution. By aligning literary language and constitutional change, Douglass creates a text with the potential to testify in the “key” way outlined earlier. Yet if that text is testimonial, it does not strictly cohere to the tripartite formulation set out by Ricoeur. Douglass does introduce the speech with the explanation, “the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable,”33 which may establish him as a witness who was “there.” But Douglass’s having been on the plantation is not quite material to his deployment of irony, and he hardly solicits belief on that basis; if anything, the irony makes belief impossible to finally secure. Hence, once testimony is refocused in terms of the text’s potential to reorient its audience, bearing witness loses its traditional ground in first-person speech, in accounting credibly for the past, and in soliciting belief. It becomes possible for testimony to resemble literature more closely, as abstractions or figures or fictions may be used to express compelling truths (for example, that manhood is not the sole property of white Americans) that meticulous accounts cannot. The intimacy between testimony and literature or literary thinking accounts for Emerson’s contention, introduced earlier, that vegetables and trees, and dust and stones, can testify. They certainly do not do so as one would in a court of law, but for Emerson, they express the fact that they exist; at our best and most receptive, he contends, we may be affected and changed by encountering them. Douglass works not only

12 / introduction

with irony but the as-yet-unsettled meaning that it reflects. He constantly looks forward to a time when his testimony will comprise words that perfectly express his body’s being—when the persistent gap between his experience and the language he uses will be healed. Melville is also frustrated by the way that the truth is always obscured by the language that attempts to tell it, and so what testifies in Benito Cereno is ultimately not its many stated facts but the breeze that indicates without declaring the history of colonization and death that conditions the fate of the San Dominick. For Henry James, testimony belongs not only to his live characters but to his dead ones—to visions and ghosts and candles that give the dead meaning for the living. Thus, these writers modify testimony’s wager that a single human may utter a new truth, proposing that a single small entity, too, might be the witness that changes everything. These entities—Emerson’s vegetable, Douglass’s body, Melville’s breeze, James’s ghosts—all belong, as Emerson would have it, to “the common, . . . the familiar, the low.”34 If deserving of notice at all, they are generally accorded background status, for the world would become crowded indeed if every vegetable and body and breeze and ghost convinced us to stop everything and reorient our conceptions of the truth. And yet that is precisely what Emerson is proposing in “The American Scholar” when he writes, “What would we really know the meaning of?” and answers, “The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body . . .”35 By taking the unceremonial as testimonial, Emerson suggests, opportunities are constantly presented for discovering the kind of meaning that we seek but rarely discover in more usual archives. Douglass, Melville, and James are less sweeping in their purview, but they too suggest that testimony always exceeds the archive that purports to hold it and that the most dizzying encounters with truth may be delivered by the most unprepossessing of vehicles. My reader might be a bit puzzled here, wondering how to take my assertion that things such as vegetables, bodies, breezes, and ghosts testify—wondering whether I mean it literally and whether I assume the writers to mean it literally. It likely seems to be one thing to note the limitations of loud testimony and quite another to veer toward the supernatural realm of talking things. Similarly, as literary scholars, we understand that Emerson’s vegetable bears textual meaning, but we are probably less certain that we ought to extend that notion of significance to whatever occupies the crisper. I see these concerns as questions, ambiguities to be explored rather than objections to be sustained. I aim to stay, accordingly, at the border of the rational long enough to consider

introduction / 13

their potential value even in light of their unsettling effects. It seems to me that Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and James soundly recognize that there are ways in which the world impresses itself as meaningful upon the observer, ways that resemble, even rival, the work of the traditional witness but do not categorically match it. This ambient testifyingness of the world36 nudges them toward making suggestions that, I would say, they probably know to be, properly speaking, unrealistic. Yet because they are motivated by a sense of truth conveyed, they are willing to open what usually remains closed, to force holes in the chinks of the armor of the real.37 Such gestures leave them—as well as myself and, I hope, my readers—with glimpses of the benefit that might be had from their excursions: a challenging and invigorating sense of testimony and a broadly inclusionary community of entities. Whether it is Emerson’s “vegetable” or a household carrot that ultimately claims significance, an unexpected presence will have been accommodated and an ordinary relation charged. In the final analysis, then, I cannot say for sure whether to take the writers’ suggestions literally or figuratively, though I am certain that there is something to be gained from taking them.38 Further, any inroads that Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and James make toward the subtly magical may be less outlandish or far-fetched in the context of their own period. Although they no longer inhabited the world that Michel Foucault describes as mystical, in which “the face of the world is covered with blazons, with characters, with ciphers and obscure words” that reveal the divine “original Text” that underwrites all things,39 a susceptibility to extratextual meaning would not have been uncommon. As Leigh Eric Schmidt explains, suspicion of the mystical circulated in nineteenth-century American thought but did not necessarily define it. Schmidt is especially attentive to the presumption that the world stopped speaking once Enlightenment philosophers established their views: Within a broadened perspective, Lockean ways of assessing divine speech look far more local and contingent than their pretense to universality suggests. And so do the endlessly reiterated narratives about modern absences, ruptures, and silences. Those tales, too, have turned out to be quite limited and particular stories—sometimes little more than intellectuals mistaking their social world for the world as a whole.40 Schmidt suggests that we may be used to reading American Renaissance figures as responding to “modern absences, ruptures, and silences” that were not actually impressed upon them with undeniable force. In his

14 / introduction

account, it would not have seemed totally irrational or antiquated for them to investigate the ways in which things might still be understood to communicate.41 Mitchell Breitwieser has recently approached Melville from a similar perspective, with regard to Ishmael’s professed illiteracy before the whale’s brow: “It is useful to ask,” he writes, “if in such passages Ishmael might not be reviving an ancient tension, rather than articulating a modern or postmodern predicament, and to wonder as well if, for Melville at least, the modern or postmodern condition differs from the ancient tension not in having transcended naive certainties but in having forgotten a precious resource for managing experiences that imperil clarity.”42 If discerning meaning is a challenge for Ishmael, Breitwieser observes, it need not indicate his confrontation of more recently perceived silences; instead, Melville may be looking backward toward the operations of ancient systems, and, as Schmidt writes, he may not have had to unearth buried traditions to do so. In reading Melville, as well as Emerson, Douglass, and James with such possibilities in mind, we may be able to perceive the straddle of the modernizing but not quite modern nineteenth century, as well as the flexibility of thought it made possible.

The realm of quiet testimony I use the term quiet to designate and develop the assumption that a vegetable might bear the “story . . . real enough to change you.” Quiet means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “making no stir, commotion, or noise; causing no trouble or disturbance; remaining at rest; not moving or acting.”43 What is quiet is always just below the proverbial radar, noticeable, if at all, not for its clamor but for its restraint. Quiet testimony thus describes the disturbance in truth or knowledge or understanding created by what does not, as a matter of course, disturb. It figures an encounter that does not register as a confrontation but that serves as the catalyst for a new approach to the world. I draw for these provisional definitions on a line of Melville’s that describes how one “alone on the prairie feels unrest from the repose of the noon.”44 The repose here produces unrest—it is too quiet, one might say, and such quiet must mean something, must demand an attentiveness at odds with the usual impulse to ignore it. This advent of restlessness would mark the testimonial encounter, the point at which the common, the familiar, and the low begin to be perceived as demanding an audience. The courtroom thus loses its prominence as the privileged site for bearing witness; instead, the prairie—or any other apparently lonely spot—becomes testimony’s habitation. For Douglass, one such place is Arlington Cemetery

introduction / 15

in 1871. He quotes a speech delivered there in Life and Times: “There is, in the very air of this resting-ground of the unknown dead a silent, subtle, and all-pervading eloquence, far more touching, impressive, and thrilling than living lips have ever uttered. Into the measureless depths of every loyal soul it is now whispering lessons of all that is precious, priceless, holiest, and most enduring in human existence.”45 Those “lessons,” springing silently from the earth, are not generally considered testimonial. (For that matter, they are not generally considered lessons, either.) But if we remove the expectation that testimony must be produced by a first-person speaker who solicits belief in a credible account of a past event, if we follow the nineteenth-century possibility that things and abstractions and impressions that do not properly have language may express the truth, then the ground that has buried the veterans—or even the space surrounding it, its “very air,” as Douglass’s image suggests— may be recognized as bearing witness. This is not to say that the dead would produce depositions, if only we knew how to listen. “All that is precious, priceless, holiest, and most enduring,” as Douglass puts it, is not spelled out as one strolls through the cemetery. His emphasis in this passage, and mine in this book, is not on the content contained by a testimony—the particular truth or information relayed—but on the unexpected ways that meaning may be conveyed. That is, I am less invested in discovering what message Emerson’s vegetable, Douglass’s body, Melville’s breeze, or James’s ghost is bearing; I aim primarily to understand how it is possible that they may be regarded as bearing meaning, especially life-changing meaning, at all.46 In exploring this theory of quiet testimony, I should in no way be read as discounting the value of the loud testimony I introduced at the outset—of first-person accounts of past events—or of studies of testimony that focus on informational content. Memoirs that explicitly testify ought not to be compared to fictional breezes that implicitly testify. And historical scholarship on witness accounts, some of which interrogates their veracity, ought not to be understood as in contest with my more literary approach. Yet one historian’s work, Annette Wieviorka’s The Era of the Witness, suggests a possible dovetailing of the concerns of quiet and loud testimony. Wieviorka argues that the public hunger for survivor testimonies after the Shoah has obscured the historical reality of the event, which was “the total abolition of a collectivity, of a culture, of a way of life, of what is called yiddishkeit.”47 Relative to the amount of destruction sustained, few witnesses survive, and emphasizing the accounts of those witnesses leads, for Wieviorka, to an inaccurate association of “total abolition” with survival. As a result, the meaning of “total

16 / introduction

abolition” becomes increasingly difficult to study in itself. Wieviorka wants to think, then, of how to read an apparent negativity as producing a compelling expression of reality. “Literature,” she writes, “may do this better than a historical account”;48 it is my hope that the literary thinking that follows may offer a small contribution to such valuable work.49

Testimony without . . . The following chapters elaborate the theory I have sketched here by each developing one strain of quiet testimony. The chapter titles are phrased privatively and decouple testimony from its usual bases; as I mentioned earlier, Emerson offers testimony without representation, Douglass testimony without identity, Melville testimony without voice, and James testimony without life. These apparent paradoxes frame discussions of how testimony without . . . was virtually a matter of course, a way of thinking and even a practice, for each writer. Taken together, then, the four iterations of testimony without . . . are designed not to produce an image of testimony that is fundamentally lacking or one that persists “in spite of” being stripped of its usual components. In contrast to that approach, the testimony without . . . phrasing aims to recalibrate the twenty-first-century mind to consider how testimony emerges in a nineteenth-century context that does not proceed from our presuppositions about what it ought to exist “with.” The earlier testimony sprung from a ground that did not have what we now think is essential, and yet it worked, with complexity and nuance and even beauty, as if it were missing nothing at all. I rely throughout the book on critical theory to provide points of reference, to draw out nuances, or to frame the stakes of my more primary sources. If there is, as a result, a tension between two worldviews, or even the perpetual possibility of anachronism, these seem to me necessary risks of reading historically. I follow here Eduardo Cadava, who explains that reading historically requires, on the one hand, a loyalty to the idiom of historical texts, their particular and inextricable location in a moment of time that is not our own. On the other hand, reading historically requires an understanding of how such texts have already formed the moment in which we read them, which involves an assumption of continuity. We are obligated, according to Cadava, to both of these potentially oppositional ways of reading if we hope to understand the texts of the past in the present in which we encounter them.50 I have aimed to follow Cadava’s formula in each chapter, providing the context that establishes how testimony without . . . was thought of, quite simply, as testimony and

introduction / 17

then situating that seemingly “new” perspective according to the current critical landscape. One more note is worth making in advance of the chapter summaries. The four writers I read offer their theories in varied forms: Emerson’s genre is the essay; Douglass’s is the autobiography, speech, and article; Melville and James write fiction. In attending to the concerns that are salient within the various texts, I have also aimed to reflect each writer’s investment in his chosen form. Hence, I approach Emerson’s essays as providing purviews onto key topics and at the same time knitting together an evolving philosophy. Because Douglass engages systematically and explicitly with the government and law that regulates his personhood, I read his position in relation to legal texts, following but also tracking further some of his references. Melville’s late prose seems to me to call for analysis of the specific tensions surrounding significance and conclusiveness. Finally, I take seriously James’s professed devotion to representing the world, reading his fictions in that testimonial light. The variations among the chapters work to be responsive to these different emphases without assuming that any genre is, de facto, more or less testimonial than any other. Chapter 1, “Emerson: Testimony without Representation,” develops Emerson’s claims, in Nature, “Self-Reliance,” and “Spiritual Laws,” that the natural world—including humans and objects—produces testimony insofar as it exists. This testimony may be construed as revealing fundamental truths about the universe; a fruit falling off a tree, for instance, testifies to nature’s preference for “short ways.”51 I focus, however, on Emerson’s idea that persons as well as things testify to their own being. That is, persons constantly write the testimony of their own character, and by the same token, things constantly write the testimony of their own “character.” This writing of, say, a vegetable does not account for anything; it never represents the past or its speaker, and yet—by virtue of its foreignness—it demands that we pause before it, that we think in response to it. I attend to Emerson’s struggle to bear witness to this life-changing testimony, since to directly represent it or one’s encounter with it is to overwrite and lose its nonrepresentational quality. “The Poet” and “Experience” describe the writing that potentially preserves testimony without representation, and the less-discussed second-series essay “Nature” provides a demonstration of how to share with others an encounter with the vegetable that turns on being surprised and arrested before its speech. Chapter 2, “Douglass: Testimony without Identity,” spins out the idea that Douglass did not find it necessary to foreground and explain his

18 / introduction

racial identity until late in life, as he suggests in the 1892 supplement to Life and Times. I understand two ways to account for this apparently odd possibility. One, antebellum legal culture was not invested in regulating the identities of its citizens, and so the meaning of identifying terms, such as “black man,” may have been contested but was also left largely unspecified. Thus, Douglass’s identity could slip by uninterrogated, much as he slipped away from Baltimore with another man’s (unmatching) identity papers. Two, Douglass seems to rely on a thinking close to Agamben’s reading of Émile Benveniste, which suggests that the living body always remains silent while, in another register, the speaking body enters the world of discourse. Agamben reads the split between bodies as conditional for testimony; Douglass, however, consistently sought a vocabulary that would express his once-enslaved body and allow it to be recognized as, simply, that of a citizen. Douglass’s testimony thus looks beyond Agamben, toward an identity between living body and speaking body and toward a legal climate that would instantiate the language that was always just out of his reach. Chapter 3, “Melville: Testimony without Voice,” works to understand how one might adequately engage the “voiceless end” that Melville attributes to Babo in Benito Cereno. On the one hand, the weight of the story, including all of its omissions and oddities, seems to land in this phrase, rendering it a final testimonial claim. On the other hand, Melville is insistent (especially in Pierre) that silence cannot be translated into voice, which means that Babo’s voicelessness can make no claim at all. I rely on Roland Barthes’s work on silence to deepen this paradox, in which the things that bear the truth must be respected as constitutionally separate from the language that generally makes them evident. In this respect, I find Melville, as well as his critics, to occupy a position similar to that of human rights writers, who would protect the voiceless without disregarding an obligation to bear witness. In the end, I propose that Melville exceeds these strictures by eliding the expectation that testimony be correlated to the category of voice and allowing narrative entities besides Babo to register the truth of the text. I focus in particular on the air around the San Dominick, which like the wind in Moby-Dick circulates without saying anything, even as it disturbs the characters and, potentially, the reader with its very serenity. Finally, chapter 4, “James: Testimony without Life,” brings into relief the ordinarily inanimate entities that James understands to speak— from the hotels of The American Scene to the candles of “The Altar of the Dead.” I understand James to inherit Emerson’s assumption that the world testifies and to develop a related premise that written images,

introduction / 19

representations, and metaphors become part of the world of expressive things. James’s images of the dead become, in turn, not simply a way of figuring death but a conduit that ties dead to living, that allows the dead to participate in the language of life. Tracking the reverberations of one particular image of a dead woman, which appears in The American Scene, through The Wings of the Dove, “The Friends of the Friends,” and “The Altar of the Dead,” I end up finding her virtually indistinguishable from her living counterparts, speaking and testifying just as they do. With reference to James’s nonfiction writings on death and life after it, I suggest that the continuity proposed by testimony without life offers an alternative to the emphasis on loss that has often be read into his later work. In the conclusion, “Staying Quiet,” I aim to spell out how the quiet testimony of the nineteenth century, taken as a whole, might provide a model for more contemporary thinking about bearing witness. Instead of assuming that testimony is motivated by the unspeakable, I contend, we might orient ourselves toward investigating how the world continues to manifest itself as meaningful. It appears almost irreverent to propose that Emerson’s vegetable might bear on an account such as Hospital Transports, let alone more recent atrocities, yet I think that putting these entities in conversation, re-viewing them as part of a genealogy, may allow us to hear them all more acutely.

Arriving at quiet To close this introduction, I want to emphasize that quiet testimony— the theory but more particularly the adjectival phrase—comes from the nineteenth century. Quiet continues to be used today, but currently it is largely restricted to a low level of noise; it circulated more plentifully and more expansively in the nineteenth century.52 Hence, Emerson refers to an “open channel to the highest life” that is “so subtle, so quiet, yet so tenacious” that, he writes, “I know the whole truth is here for me.”53 Douglass writes that “the fathers of this republic . . . were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression.”54 Melville’s Ishmael distinguishes his response to the “damp, drizzly November” in his soul: “With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”55 And when, in The Wings of the Dove, Merton Densher tells Kate Croy, “I pledge you . . . every spark of my faith; I give you every drop of my life,” the narrator tells us, “That was all, for the moment, but it was enough, and it was almost as quiet as if it were nothing.”56 In each of these representative but by no means exhaustive

20 / introduction

instances, quiet signals a great potential change even as it refers to what is subdued. Emerson’s channel is the barely discernible key to the universe; Douglass’s fathers are characterized by a peacefulness that will yet revolt. Ishmael’s taking to the ship is undramatic and quotidian, though it produces the masterpiece he introduces. James’s line almost precipitates the strange tension in these accounts: “every drop of my life” is undoubtedly everything, yet it is “as quiet as if it were nothing.” The quietness appears to certify the magnitude of the promise beyond the promise’s actual content, to serve as its necessary notary. Quiet allows everything to be delivered under the cover of nothing. One more instance of nineteenth-century quietness, one which stresses that the stakes of this everything are ultimately life and death, seems necessary to conclude. I thus return for a moment to Hospital Transports and to the pivotal section in which quietness is assigned the weight of that text’s strange record of suffering. The section is attributed to A., an administrator: “One of the strange effects,” he writes, “upon all concerned as workers on these hospital ships, in the heart of all misery and pain, and part of it, seems to have been the quieting of all excitement of feeling and expression,—a sort of apparent stoicism granted for the occasion.”57 The quiet here is in the “heart of all misery and pain,” the core reserve in the midst of suffering, but also “part of it”: the core reserve is the heart, is the misery and pain. The writer illustrates this overlap—in the heart and of the heart—through an unusually scenic letter of one of the female volunteers: It seems a strange thing that the sight of such misery, such death in life, should have been accepted by us all so quietly as it was. We were simply eyes and hands for those three days. Great, strong men were dying about us; in nearly every ward some one was going. . . . Last night Dr. Ware came to me to know how much floor-room we had. The immense saloon of the aft cabin was filled with mattresses so thickly placed that there was hardly stepping-room between them, and as I swung my lantern along the rows of pale faces, it showed me another strong man dead. N. [another volunteer] had been working hard over him, but it was useless. He opened his eyes when she called “Henry” clearly in his ear, and gave her a chance to pour brandy down his throat; but all did no good; he died quietly while she was helping someone else, and my lantern showed him gone. We are changed by all this contact with terror, else how could I deliberately turn my lantern on his face, and say to the doctor behind him, “Is that man dead?” and then stand coolly

introduction / 21

while he examined him, listened, and pronounced him “dead.” I could not have quietly said a year ago, “That will make one more bed, then, Doctor.”58 The quiet acceptance described refers to a calm in the midst of disturbance; but that calm has become “a strange thing,” therefore itself a disturbance worth noting. Further, quiet seems to be the intimate companion of “death in life,” constituting it as well as abiding with it. The slipping of life into death happens quietly, and it procures an imitative responsiveness, a quiet substitution of life into the place that was death’s. The “change” that issues from “all this contact with terror” is a becoming quiet, becoming as quiet as death, as quiet as life. A. finds in this work “a sort of apparent stoicism,” and the inexactitude of “stoicism” is underscored by his uncharacteristically tentative designation.59 The scene hardly reflects stoicism; it reflects a deep attentiveness to what the abstraction of wartime death actually means, what it looks like and feels like and how it alters one’s whole being to witness it. If quiet is the right word for such an encounter, if Hospital Transports is then a quiet testimony, the following chapters work to open a path by which we can read it as such. Without representing the dead man’s face, without identifying the speaker, without voicing the volunteers’ terror, and without excluding death from life, the text may yet arrest us, perhaps as it arrested its 1863 reviewers. My task is to help us find such texts, as they did, absorbing and unpretending and true.

1 /

Emerson: Testimony without Representation

The passage with which I begin will likely be familiar to Emerson’s readers, if only because of its proximity to one of his most famous and challenging images, the transparent eyeball. The paragraph that follows it in Nature is, I propose, just as unexpected and just as revealing of a major strand of thought in Emerson’s work—and therefore just as worthy of study. If the eyeball starts to sketch his complex idea of subjectivity, the next sentences point to his related but still distinct understanding of the natural world as communicative:1 The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.2 It sounds, indeed, delightful to nod at the vegetables and to have them nod in return. But how, or how literally, are we to take this image of greeting? If the nod is representative of “an occult relation between man and the vegetable,” then Emerson might be suggesting a secret or magical exchange, an interaction inexplicable by ordinary laws. Yet he might also be read to specify that the vegetable nod is to be imagined as “the waving of the boughs in the storm.” Since boughs can wave in response to the wind, perhaps the nod describes a usual movement in the woods that facilitates a

emerson / 23

human response, and the image invokes concordance more than conversation. While this second explanation tempers the suggestion of the occult, it cannot subsume the sense that Emerson is attributing to the vegetal world a certain agency, a certain ability to produce meaning for a human interlocutor. This meaning remains outside of, a stranger to, the human’s logic, and yet it interrupts that logic to affect its recipient: “Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.” The nod comes over him, like a mood or a chill, and even though it thereby surprises him, it gives him something positive, something like a sense of justice or rightness that exceeds his previous conceptions. In promising an intimacy between man and vegetable that encourages him to think in new and better patterns, the intent of Emerson’s image remains just beyond the simply explicable. As the premise of the meaningful vegetable develops in Emerson’s first-series essays, the reason for its cryptic hovering between ordinary and extraordinary becomes clearer. As I demonstrate, Emerson proposes that fields and woods and vegetables—that all natural objects—testify, that they register their being and existence such that the human takes notice and responds. Attributing to natural objects the capacity to testify appears, especially at first glance, extraordinary, drawing from a supernatural or mystical register. Yet Emerson also contextualizes such testimony as a thoroughly ordinary, everyday affair, both because he allies it with a similar type of human testimony and because he identifies it as the initiator of human thought. The testimonial nod becomes a way to figure the point at which nature pricks human consciousness, setting it on a new train of thought or, even more basically, causing it to have a responsive thought. By linking the vocabulary of testimony, with its resonance of legality and proof, with the ostensibly unconstructed realm of nature, Emerson effects an extraordinary marriage to pinpoint and magnify an ordinary, though often unremarked on, event. In particularizing his vegetable nod, Emerson unfolds as well the complexity of that early image. As I began to suggest, it is unsettling in part because it characterizes vegetable and human as communicating with a common gesture. The image becomes somewhat easier to assimilate when the bough waves rather than nods because it creates a distinction in the registers of communication (he nods, they wave), not because the word is essentially less anthropomorphizing (if the boughs waved and he waved back, the image would again be unsettling).3 At stake here is one primary question: granting that natural objects testify, how do they do so? That is, what form or language do their testimonies take that renders them recognizable and legible to the human? As this chapter’s title indicates, I

24 / emerson

argue that natural objects testify not by narrating past events in first-person speech—not through representation.4 I explore the idea that natural objects testify, for Emerson, by making the fact of their being known, as an emanation of their existence. Nodding would be one way to figure, then, such an emanation. Yet this answer raises an additional concern—namely, the problem of whether and how testimony without representation may subsequently be recorded. If Emerson has witnessed the vegetable’s testimony, and if he wants to publicize this fact because it explains for him something important about the way thinking is responsive to the natural environment, then he would seem to require representational language— the image of the nod—to do so. But by representing his encounter, he would subsume testimony without representation within representation, and his readers would potentially miss the chance to understand what he had seen—to understand, that is, the particularity of nature’s testimony. The nod begins to give one a headache, as it initially appeared too indefinite and now begins to seem too cultivated. And yet, if my reader is still nodding along, there must be some way in which Emerson’s nodding vegetable expresses what it would seem to foreclose. There must be some way in which it “nods” to us—testifies to us, through him—and enlists us as witnesses to its testimony without representation. This chapter will ultimately work to explicate such a possibility. It begins by following Emerson’s theory of testimony without representation as he articulates it in the first-series essays, especially “Self-Reliance” and “Spiritual Laws.” I then turn to the second-series essays to expand the theory’s nuances and the concurrent complexities I have begun to name here. While studies of testimony in Emerson’s writing have generally focused on “Experience,” I draw as well, and attend more thoroughly, to the less renown “Nature.” I think that in separating the two topics, Emerson points to the confounding heart of his theory: nature elicits its own writing; it cannot necessarily be filed under experience, in part because it sets experience in motion. “Nature” speaks to this sense of nature’s existence at the border of, or just beyond, experience’s scope. “Nature” also offers several images that echo and revise the nodding vegetable of the earlier Nature, and it thus allows for an investigation of how both compositions preserve the representationlessness of the testimony to which they bear witness.

The primary testimony of “I actually am” In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson begins to isolate the aspect of testimony I am calling testimony without representation. A few pages into the essay,

emerson / 25

he explains that men generally perform virtuous actions, such as giving to charity, to excuse their less laudable behaviors: “Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world,—as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances” (263). In part, Emerson complains that the virtuous actions are executed demonstratively rather than genuinely. He has already asserted, “If I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil” (262), which recommends acting in accordance with the self regardless of the virtue contained therein.5 Yet Emerson also notices that virtuous actions are done demonstratively because they function as a way to prove oneself. As apology or penance, virtuous actions assert that one possesses more virtue than would otherwise be apparent, and in this way, they are offerings of evidence. They assume that a record of charitable gifts can prove an individual’s worth. It is this point that Emerson finally rejects: I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony. (263) Emerson’s initial demand precipitates his critique: if one wants to demonstrate his manhood, one ought not require a supplementary list of actions one has performed. Such extra proofs are “secondary testimony,” presumably, because they are extraneous to the essential status that one ought to possess. Instead, Emerson asks for “primary evidence,” a premise that appears to be realized in his final assertion: “Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am.” He suggests that one may obviate the need for assurances, preempting any further evidentiary exhibits, if one perceives that one exists, simply but truly. It does not matter what actions one does or what gifts one has, then, if one can recognize the more primary fact that one is. Emerson’s apparently direct exchange of doing for being is somewhat more complicated, however, because “I actually am” is not only an indication or offering of being—it is a statement of it. That is, Emerson seems to reject doing anything beyond existing, especially doing anything with the assumption that an audience exists to evaluate it. But as a written claim, Emerson’s “primary evidence” is still a form of evidence; in fact, as Stanley Cavell explains, “I actually am” is a testimony. Cavell argues that Emerson may be read as referring to Descartes’s Meditations,

26 / emerson

specifically its realization “that my existence requires, hence permits proof (you might say authentication)—more particularly, requires that if I am to exist I must name my existence, acknowledge it.”6 In other words, Emerson finds that existence itself is inadequate as a replacement for the profession of deeds, because existence, too, must be professed. Hence, although Emerson’s terms, secondary testimony and primary evidence, are not exactly parallel, his final claim conflates the two, as “I actually am” occupies the implied zone of primary testimony. As it turns out, what is primary about it is not that it is stripped of everything beyond existence but that it is conditioning, initializing. It is the first declaration, the one that makes all others possible: testimony to the self issues not from a list of deeds but from the instance in which existence is put into words. Testimony always begins with “I actually am.” Emerson is not, I would argue, stating the obvious here: rather, he is exposing the dimension of presence that may be overlooked in testimony as it is commonly conceived. We tend to focus, Emerson may be understood to say in this passage, on testimony as defined by the information that it relays, but testimony cannot take place unless, first of all, someone is there to utter it, to set the speech act in motion. To draw from the vocabulary of speech act theory, Emerson is highlighting that testimony is constative (it says that I am, that I am virtuous, or that I am the Devil’s) but also performative (it happens and takes effect only by virtue of being pronounced). “I actually am” is accordingly a tricky and revealing case in point. The information it relays is that testimony must be performed. Emerson appears to subordinate the constative element of testimony to the secondary position and to raise the performative element of testimony to the primary or first position. Yet when he concludes his paragraph by writing, “I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony,” he also refuses whatever information would follow the “I [actually am]”—eradicating constative testimony rather than diminishing its importance. He implies that testimony can be purely performative, that it can drop its constative aspect, its informative mandate, to consist solely in the announcement of the self’s presence. And this is where Emerson’s theory of testimony, with its bizarre and challenging contours, begins to come into relief. Emerson’s cultivation of a purely performative testimony wreaks havoc on what Derrida refers to as testimony’s “bifid structure.”7 Derrida is also concerned to recognize testimony beyond its value as information. A testimonial statement, he writes, “is not merely recounting, telling, informing, describing, remarking—it does this as well—it does what it says at this very instant; it cannot essentially be reduced to a

emerson / 27

relationship, to a narrative or descriptive relation. . . . It is first a present act.”8 Testimony cannot be exclusively connected to the event or fact that it narrates, according to Derrida, and like Emerson, he gives primacy to the fact of its delivery: “it is first a present act.” But Derrida does not say that it is first a present act and so it needs no secondary actions. Emerson is not only prohibiting the reduction of testimony to the relay of information; he is willing to let that relation go. He knows that testimony has a bifid structure; he bifurcates it and decides he only really needs the one strand. The act reverses the privileging of the other, constative strand that both Emerson and Derrida recognize as more common, and in doing so highlights how that tendency ought to strike us as odd as well. If people can (and often do) treat testimony as purely informative, Emerson might be read as making the counterpoint that he can just as soon treat testimony as purely performative.9 Emerson’s counterpoint is revealing, for it draws our attention away from testimony’s historical value and toward its ethical implications. The testimony that Emerson wants to isolate does not relay anything useful—or anything at all—about the past; it only presents itself to its audience, thereby demanding that its import reside in the basic fact of its speaker’s presence. Of course, Derrida instructs us that the fact of presence is deferred, and made different, when it is described in a statement, such as “I actually am.” In this sense, “I actually am” is representational: it re-presents, works to make present again, in language, the being who enunciates it. As a testimony, however, “I actually am” does not provide the representational language or represented information usually associated with bearing witness. It does not tell what I saw or what I did; it does not let the audience imagine any event or past with which the “I” ought to be linked. This is why I designate Emerson’s theory testimony without representation and how I understand the passage from “Self-Reliance” to constitute its kernel. Before moving on toward the promised testimonial vegetables, I want to stay a moment longer with the claim that testimony without representation privileges ethics over history. If we imagine the scene of testimony that Emerson sketches in “Self-Reliance,” he pushes aside the man acting virtuously in favor of the man who is, well, who is just there, not doing much of anything at all, neither preferring to “do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent.” That is, he might be performing an excellent action, or he might be performing a devilish action, or he might only be standing and announcing that he actually is. To come upon this scene as readers is to be prohibited from gathering information about Emerson’s “I,” because it does not testify to anything except the fact of

28 / emerson

its existence. The reader cannot generate a narrative about Emerson’s virtuosity or devilishness; the reader cannot appropriate events or experiences associated with Emerson into a historical account. The only way to report on the reader’s encounter with this testimony—the only way to bear witness to it—is to note that Emerson exists and thereby to subordinate the reader’s accumulation of knowledge to his being. “I actually am” interrupts the story one would tell about its speaker. It forces one to think about who or what that “I” is, what it “actually” means to listen to it testify.

Engravings on faces and other testimonial texts “Spiritual Laws” embellishes the rather sparse scene of witness I have sketched, both by offering more detailed images of the testifying human and by extending testimony to other entities. In fact, the essay as a whole may be understood as spiraling out of and widely expanding the premise of primary testimony explored in “Self-Reliance.” It is easiest to see this connection and its ultimate scope by narrowly focusing, at first, on the account “Spiritual Laws” offers of human testimony. One key way in which “Spiritual Laws” develops the idea of human testimony from “Self-Reliance” is in shifting it from an elected performance to a mandatory one. Whereas the man who says “I actually am” makes a choice, declaring his primary testimony and so refusing to be judged by his actions, in “Spiritual Laws,” the act of testifying is a basic condition of life. Whether or not one intentionally pronounces the words “I actually am,” in “Spiritual Laws,” one always projects one’s being beyond any action or information associated with it. For instance, Emerson is still peeved by compensatory virtuous actions, but here he is not advocating their eradication, because “as much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as there is, so much reverence it commands. . . . A man passes for what he is worth. What he is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing; boasting nothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the grasp of hands” (319). No one is fooled by the virtuous actions of devilish persons, in this account; regardless of how one proffers an action, one’s essential virtue or devilishness is ultimately revealed. It does not matter, then, if one does the deeds unwillingly—his true being will be found out. But it also does not matter if one calls attention to the deed as evidence, for such exhibitions are necessarily overwritten. “What he is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light” suggests that the man’s

emerson / 29

being registers itself of its own accord and that it does so on everything associated with him. There is here a type of writing that performs the work of “I actually am” in excess, or regardless, of any statement to that purpose.10 If it was odd to imagine a scene of witness composed of a single man verbally announcing his existence, it is odder still to imagine a scene of witness composed of a single man not verbally announcing his existence. But Emerson’s point here is subtle: announcements can take the form of glances of eyes, smiles, salutations, and grasps of hands, and those announcements are at least as precise and lasting—as engravings—as any willful declaration. Thus, Emerson is not abandoning the requirement identified by Cavell, that existence be proven through naming and acknowledgment. He is suggesting that the naming and acknowledgment that convert being into testimony happen in ways that are not always verbal but that retain the force of a stark and commanding statement. Such testimonial transactions are to be understood as linguistic even when they circumvent words, as in this account: “Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the mere air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character. If you act, you show character; if you sit still, if you sleep, you show it” (“Spiritual Laws,” 318). Publish, like engrave, is a verb that emphasizes that the testifying character becomes available for reading, like a circulating text. Even expresses, if traced to its root (which we can assume Emerson to have done), can connote an action of printing, the opposite of an impress. These verbs corroborate Cavell’s observation that their subject, human character, resonates as a form of writing (as letters are also called characters) and calls attention to the way that “both writing and writer are to be read, which is about to say, both are texts, perhaps testing, contesting, one another.”11 We should hear “text” in a strong sense here, given Emerson’s collection of words cohering around the process of publication and circulation. To read a human character is not to assess or judge but to confront it as one would a text, presumably a text that, like Emerson’s, is full of interesting words and resonant connotations. Such reading takes time and attention and even devotion. I am trying to be exact about this process of human publication in order to home in on precisely what it means to assert, as Lee Rust Brown does, that for Emerson, life writes.12 Brown posits that there is a part of experience that works “at a point ahead of all our capacities for direct inspection. It is what we do before turning to take stock of things, and what we do, in advance of ourselves, even when taking stock of things.”13 To consider this component of life experience as writing is to imagine

30 / emerson

that the constancy of intimate thoughts constitutes not an incidental mental process but the formation of an obscure yet indelible text. This is what Emerson’s image of the person who sits still or sleeps and still publishes his character, in the quote earlier, forces us to consider. The first part of his claim—“The most fugitive deed and word, the mere air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character”—seems easy to assimilate, because it points to things that can be or have been catalogued. A fugitive deed or word may not be fully public, but the reader can imagine a furtive action that reveals character; Emerson hinted that these true exhibitions lie under the false in “Self-Reliance.” But the challenge in “Spiritual Laws” is to imagine that even when the individual performs no action at all, his life still writes—produces his character, produces characters. Emerson’s split sentence insists on this point: “If you act, you show character; if you sit still, if you sleep, you show it.” Deriving character from actions is relatively straightforward; the compulsive charity givers of “Self-Reliance” know this and aim to exploit it. When one is sitting still, however, or sleeping, and apparently doing nothing at all, Emerson says, there is still character being shown, being made available for reading. The “evermore” in “Human character evermore publishes itself” is not a careless adverb; it signals a constant and perpetual transmission. Brown’s reading of life and Emerson’s sleeping publication point to the possibility that there may be a testimony even more primary than the primary testimony of “Self-Reliance.” Because it is constant and independent of one’s will, there is a level of testimonial expression that exceeds not only actions as evidence but even declarations as proof. The most basic exhibitions of existence—sitting, sleeping—are commensurate with the production of testimony, which is to say that (simply) being produces testimony. Again, this claim is not reductive or indiscriminately grandiose; it specifies, rather, that a testimony with as much textual force and capacity for legibility as “I actually am” is the necessary output even of a comatose state.

Dust and stones write too Since a vegetable is one way to figure a comatose state, my argument can now move to consider how Emerson regards other natural entities, besides the human, as testifying. For it turns out that the explication of human testimony in “Spiritual Laws” is an excellent example, one important aspect, of the essay’s broader delineation of testimony as a writing of being beyond intentional language. Indeed, one central point Emerson

emerson / 31

makes about spiritual laws is that they write their own being throughout the universe. As Albert J. Von Frank observes: “Spiritual laws . . . are not hidden or occult or past finding out: although they are, to be sure, about as intrinsic as anything can be, they do nothing from day to day but announce themselves.”14 Spiritual laws are intrinsic because they are the laws to which the universe most centrally, most automatically hews; they are laws, as Emerson puts it, “which execute themselves” rather than demanding that they be followed (“Spiritual Laws,” 307). As Von Frank notes, the deep centrality of the laws does not imply that they are beyond observation—if anything, the reverse is true. For example, one spiritual law is that falling trumps manipulating, and Emerson finds it depicted throughout nature: “When the fruit is ripe, it falls. When the fruit is despatched, the leaf falls. The circuit of the waters is mere falling. The walking of man and all animals is a falling forward. All our manual labor and works of strength, as prying, splitting, digging, rowing, and so forth, are done by dint of continual falling, and the globe, earth, moon, comet, sun, star, fall for ever and ever” (308). In this account, there are very few things that one could observe that do not illustrate the law of falling. The law of falling is on constant display, writ large, announcing itself quite loudly for anyone who looks up (or, as it were, down). If announcing oneself constitutes testimony in “Self-Reliance,” then “Spiritual Laws” takes as its subject not only what announces itself but what testifies. On the one hand, as Von Frank notes, what testifies is always the spiritual law, which finds its outlets throughout the universe. On the other hand, we would have to say that the fruit and the leaf and the waters and the walking and the labor and the solar system testify too: they testify to the law that insists on falling. Yet there turns out to be a third hand, an additional component to this already plentiful discourse of testimony. Emerson is not explicit, in the essay, about when he is naming a spiritual law and when he is explaining it. The starting sentences of many paragraphs appear to declare a law and the remainder to explore how it is illustrated. But if this is the case, then the remarks about the human who testifies to his own being—“Human character evermore publishes itself”; “As much virtue as there is, so much appears”—are to be counted as spiritual laws. This means, in turn, that spiritual laws not only announce themselves; they mandate that humans announce themselves. In doing so, the human also announces the law, since the law is that he announce his being. Yet I want to insist that while the testimony of the law of falling and the testimony of the fruit on behalf of the law of falling coincide in a single action, the law that humans testify introduces a separate text, the unintentional yet forceful text of character examined

32 / emerson

earlier. A walking human testifies to the law of falling, and the law of falling testifies through the walking human; but that walking human also produces the testimony associated with “the mere air of doing a thing,” what Brown calls life writing. If the demand to self-publication extends to nonhumans, then, the fruit would also compose life writing, would also testify to its character. I think that the essay can be understood to make such a claim. The key passage appears as Emerson moves to summarize some of his observations about how spiritual laws announce themselves. One of these is, “The man may teach by doing, and not otherwise. If he can communicate himself, he can teach, but not by words” (316). If the first sentence formulates a law, the second not only describes how it is announced; it also refers to the published character of beings. The man can testify insofar as he can “communicate himself.” He is the vehicle through which the law announces itself, and he produces a communicative trail that speaks to and records his particular being. The reader thus has these two senses of the testimonial man in mind when he or she encounters Emerson’s summary remarks: These are the demonstrations in a few particulars of the genius of nature; they show the direction of the stream. But the stream is blood; every drop is alive. Truth has not single victories; all things are its organs,—not only dust and stones, but errors and lies. The laws of disease, physicians say, are as beautiful as the laws of health. Our philosophy is affirmative, and readily accepts the testimony of negative facts, as every shadow points to the sun. By a divine necessity, every fact in nature is constrained to offer its testimony. (318) One way to understand the testimony in the last sentence is through Von Frank’s interpretation, in which laws testify through things like men and fruit. “Every fact in nature” could be another way to name the spiritual laws that are the essay’s explicit subject, so they too would testify in the sense of announcing themselves. This reading accords with the first sentence, which describes Emerson’s process of reading “a few particulars”—such as the teaching man—to discover the underlying tendency of nature. But I think there is a more radical, provocative implication at work in the middle sentences, one that proposes that facts are things, things which communicate themselves like the teacher does. When Emerson writes, “But the stream is blood; every drop is alive,” he emphasizes that the “few particulars” are, indeed, few, and he encourages us to read the many as part of an organism, a being whose life force circulates within and enlivens all the cells that belong to it. He then identifies the

emerson / 33

life force not with laws but with truth, and he names as its organs apparently inanimate entities: dust and stones. The dust and stones here are not demonstrating any particular law; they seem rather to emphasize that the lowliest of “all things” are still to be understood as the truth’s organs. Thus, Emerson’s philosophy is affirmative because it includes the apparently ugly or negative (the laws of disease) but also because it proposes affirmation as a universal action. Testimony becomes an act of affirming the truth as it flows through the thing, and “every fact in nature” refers to all the things, the magnitude of entities signaled earlier by “every drop” and the catalogue that ranges from dust and stones to errors and lies. Each of these becomes a fact, an end in itself, an entity charged with the mandate of saying, “I actually am.” This reading is strengthened by the fact that the passage is followed by the paragraph that begins, “Human character evermore publishes itself.” The progression suggests that human character, like every fact in nature, testifies by publishing itself. Thus, the essay challenges its reader to include human character as one exemplary instance of the natural tendency to testify, not only to laws but to being. The human testifies to its own facticity—like the fruit, like the waters, like the solar system. Branka Arsić writes that Emerson may be read “as a vitalist and a pantheist,”15 and the inclusive testimony I am outlining here hews to that view. If the overarching lesson of “Spiritual Laws” is that everything emits a testimonial text, then the world Emerson describes is full of writing and full of things that write, like humans, even when they do not intentionally author documents. “Life writes” means, then, that human lives produce texts to be read but also that life at large—everything enlivened by the blood of truth, which is to say everything—writes too. We live amid testimonies, in an ever-expanding universe of text. We see this vision later in Emerson’s career, in his essay on Goethe, in a passage that accords with the sentiments in “Spiritual Laws” and underscores the connection between testifying human and testifying world: “Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints, which speak to the intelligent. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal” (“Goethe; or, The Writer,” 746). The idea that nature participates in “self-registration” is one way to encapsulate the strain of thought I have been working to isolate. Nature not only gives us information about nature; it signs itself (through signatures), and it expresses itself for the observant as text that insists on its own existence. Or, put differently, if “the narrative” produced by nature

34 / emerson

consists of information—spiritual or scientific laws—it must follow the initial “seal,” the impression that renders it visible. There is a concordance, in sum, between the primary or performative aspect of testimony described in “Self-Reliance” and the testimony of every fact in nature theorized by “Spiritual Laws.” When a natural entity writes, it makes itself known as an “I.” It has a character that is emitted as text that testifies foremost to its own existence, the fact of its being. Whatever else is deduced from nature accompanies or succeeds the fundamental encounter with this affirmative, self-assertive testimony. Thus, if Emerson’s privileging of the performative aspect of testimony emphasized it as an ethical transaction, he proposes, as well, an ethical dimension to our encounters with things. He also proposes that such encounters are to be understood as textual. While the performative aspect of testimony might seem to consist in simply being present, or in the initial statement “I . . . ,” Emerson imagines engravings, publications, and expressions that translate presence into text. I turn next to consider what it means to ethically encounter, to read such “primary” texts.

Everyday oracles As I have argued, Emerson’s word choice insists that the primary testimony of being, the testimony common to all of nature’s beings, is to be understood as textual. Yet it is difficult to conceptualize the act of reading that approaches such text, which relays presence without representing accumulated experience. Since there are no words, no sentences or paragraphs—only, certainly, characters—this testimony seems to demand a particular process of recognition and sense making, one that is different, for instance, from that with which we approach a deposition published on paper. Emerson stretches the word reading to apply to both processes in “The American Scholar,” in which he writes, “Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings” (58). Here Emerson indicates that books bear reading, but they are qualified as derivative accounts of the more elemental experience of reading God. Books are testimonial, then, in the constative sense—they contain a “transcript” of one’s reading—while reading God directly seems to involve a more primary encounter. This emphasis on the more primary encounter appears later in the address, with regard to the ostensibly ungodly realm of “the near, the low, the common” (68). Preferring the everyday to the elevated, Emerson asks, “What would we really know the meaning of?”

emerson / 35

His answer figures ordinary entities as eliciting the direct reading previously affiliated with God: The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and gait of the body;—show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the leger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing;—and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench. (69) This list adds a series of items—meal, milk, street, boat, glance, gait, shop, plough, and leger—to the dust and stones that appear unremarkable and yet contain testimonial power. As he does in “Spiritual Laws,” Emerson refers to the “highest spiritual cause” to which the everyday items can attune the observer, even as he also draws attention to their own magnetism. Indeed, in naming the “suburbs and extremities of nature,” Emerson converts them into facts, objects of study that offer the scholar the knowledge, and more particularly the meaning, that he “really” wants. Emerson picks up on this idea of knowing the meaning of apparent incidentals in “Circles,” and in that later composition, he omits their valuation in terms of their link to spiritual causes or laws or an encompassing “one design.” He figures them, instead, as tiny oracles: In common hours, society sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty,—knowing, possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god, and converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest. . . . All that we reckoned settled shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions, leave their foundations, and dance before our eyes. (408) “God,” the end in itself, the ultimate text in “The American Scholar,” here becomes “the god,” who is rather rogue. He does not smash idols but “converts the statues into fiery men,” and like a magician more than a prophet, he burns up shrouding veils. Importantly, too, he unsettles “literatures, cities, climates, religions”—which is to say capital-G God—in

36 / emerson

favor of meaningful furniture. Emerson’s list of items here is cheeky and worth noting; while “furniture” can designate general equipment, therefore simply the things that outfit the world, Emerson’s “very furniture” includes, literally, household furnishings, “cup and saucer,” “chair and clock and tester” (a tester is a bed canopy). He zeroes in on the items that are usually conceived as only there for our use, and he asserts not only that they have meaning in themselves but that when such meaning becomes manifest, it changes the meaning of other, apparently more major, systems. If the potentially manifest meaning of furniture in “Circles” is allied to the primary testimony of natural entities in “Spiritual Laws,” then what it means to read vegetables and dust and stones, along with meals and milk and cups and saucers, begins to become clearer. First, it seems required that we approach those trivial objects as, instead, “mighty symbols.” This entails apprehending the fact that the objects have beings which cannot be subordinated to our use of them. But it also encourages us to regard them as texts over toys: as having the originary power of relaying meaning attributed to God in “The American Scholar.” An encounter with the bookcase would become, then, what inspires book writing rather than book shelving. This act of inspiration may not be as strangely mystical as it at first likely seems. That meaningful furniture supplants religion may be taken to suggest that the chair issues a secret of the universe. Yet it can also be understood to claim that simply recognizing the furniture as meaningful is transformative, as transformative as a learned secret of the universe. Once “the near, the low, the common” is regarded as significant, the usual assumptions about what is important and how things work—the ideas we draw from “literatures, cities, climates, religions”—are necessarily upset. Things start to “dance” rather than await our appropriation of them. The dancing things prompt a lovely image, one that is challenging to reintegrate into standard ontology. For once we imagine the cup as dancing, we are confronted with a thing that behaves in a way we had not expected it to, a thing that not only refrains from explaining itself but unsettles our standard contexts for apprehending it.16 And that would be, precisely, evidence that the god had done its work—had converted the ordinary object into a mighty symbol that changed its reader’s thinking with the authority of a serious book. Thus, reading the text that performs the object’s existence—reading its nonrepresentational, primary testimony—amounts to becoming aware of its insistent existence, much as one would become aware of a man emphatically announcing, “I actually

emerson / 37

am.” Testimony without representation defines reading as an ethical encounter that apprehends and receives others, persons and things, as life changing insofar as really meaningful, and really meaningful insofar as really there.17 Being there to be so read depends on the circumvention of representational thinking, as Gregg Lambert demonstrates. Lambert suggests that nature, for Emerson, is akin to “what Deleuze defines as the very ‘Being of the Sensible,’ which functions as a sign and not as an object of recognition.”18 The sign is “unexpected, . . . and the first effect [it brings] is one of shock, which is identified with a force that causes us to think. These signs are not natural, meaning that the natural intelligence is not up to understanding them, which is why they must, in turn, be interpreted, deciphered, translated, in short, created.”19 Lambert opposes Emerson’s nature to objects of recognition: because no information is already affiliated with nature, the intellect must create a thought for it. This is to say that if nature can be recognized, it can be filed away and passed over; it is only when it shocks that it “causes us to think.” Lambert’s reading resonates with the distinction I have been making here, between secondary testimony that represents actions, experience, and the past and primary testimony that instead performs its speaker’s existence. His perspective suggests that what is arresting about primary testimony is that it is a text that is not recognizable. It is not only not a representation; it is not representable. If it were representable, we would not need to think about it. It would be a “prose and trivial toy,” as Emerson puts it in “Circles,” rather than a mighty symbol that demands our ethical attention and makes the world dance. Hence, the world only dances when we have not yet represented it; once it has been represented, the shabby furniture no longer possesses its own rhythm. Reading primary testimony or testimony without representation is thus as simple, and as complex, as encountering things before classifying them, before having information or even a thought that conceptualizes them. Lambert associates such a gesture with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and there are other thinkers with whom to contextualize Emerson’s intervention, some contemporary with his time and some with ours. It is worth taking a moment to examine these resonances, for they help to tease out the nuances in his theory.

The possibilities and limitations of Swedenborgise Emerson inherits the idea of a meaningful world from a conglomeration of the mystical thought, German philosophy, and British

38 / emerson

romanticism that circulated among and was interpreted by his Boston contemporaries. Tracing the resonances between his potential source texts and the theory I have outlined reveals that Emerson drew from this inheritance quite precisely, extracting the plenitude of meaning it suggested while forgoing the doctrines of divinity it implied. For instance, a more theological version of his testifying vegetables is evident in Sampson Reed’s 1826 Observations of the Growth of Mind. Reed’s book is credited with introducing Swedenborg to a Harvard audience, and his image begins to demonstrate how Emerson favored but also adapted the mystic’s work.20 “Every thing which is,” Reed writes, “whether it is animal or vegetable, is full of the expression of that use for which it is designed, as of its own existence. If we did but understand its language, what could our words add to its meaning? It is because we are unwilling to hear, that we find it necessary to say so much; and we drown the voice of nature, with the discordant jargon of ten thousand dialects.”21 Reed implores the reader to listen to the vegetable’s language, and Emerson amplifies his claim in Nature and “Spiritual Laws.” Yet Reed’s Swedenborgian context emphasizes that the vegetable expresses “that use for which it is designed,” a content that places it in a systematic world and that limits its testimony to illuminating the system. Hence, to listen to the vegetable is to realize one’s relation to it, the divinely assigned use it bears. As “Spiritual Laws” demonstrates, Emerson echoes the premise that natural objects reveal truths about human purpose—for example, when he advises the reader to “draw a lesson from nature” about falling over manipulating. Nonetheless, Emerson also develops the more radical theory that things in the world testify to their own being, writing their characters as much as their relations or places in a system. Emerson’s subtle recasting of Reed is emblematic of his approach to Swedenborgianism as a whole; he both relies on the mystic’s thought and crucially tweaks his fundamental premise. Barbara Packer explains Emerson’s attraction to Swedenborg: “We will find it difficult to understand the eagerness with which Emerson—and many of his contemporaries—embraced the doctrine of correspondence unless we remind ourselves how strong the hunger for raw significance had become after the starvation diet of the Lockean-Unitarian tradition in which they had been raised. Not that the world presented by Lockean empiricism and Unitarian theology was, strictly speaking, meaningless. It simply did not mean enough.”22 Harvard left Emerson hungry for meaning—for a theory of meaning that made meaning plentifully available—and the doctrine of correspondence provided sustenance. Correspondence meant, as Emerson quoted in his essay on Swedenborg, “that the physical world was

emerson / 39

purely symbolical of the spiritual world” (“Swedenborg; or, The Mystic,” 673). Every physical entity indicates a spiritual truth. Yet this summary implies a one-to-one correlation, and Swedenborg’s system, as the quote from Reed begins to suggest, is significantly more complicated than that. That physical and spiritual correspond, for Swedenborg, means that the physical and the spiritual make each other evident: one reveals the other, but at the same time, they reveal their interdependence. Thus, to read the physical to know the spiritual is not ever a one-way trip, since one knows the spiritual in part through its manifestation in the physical. One could not simply read the vegetable to learn about what Reed calls the Divine Mind, then, because that vegetable would, at the same time, be manifesting its relation to the Divine Mind. This mind-boggling idea is presented as introductory material to Swedenborg’s An Hieroglyphical Key to Natural and Spiritual Mysteries by Way of Representations or Correspondences: “all divine things are exemplars; intellectual, moral, and civil things, are types and images; but natural and physical things are resemblances: thus exemplars, types, and resemblances, must fully represent each other.”23 The physical symbol is not unilaterally referential here, because not only are all things “exemplars, types and resemblances,” but these “must fully represent each other.” To a twentyfirst-century reader, exemplars, types, and resemblances are all different forms of representation: exemplars are both singular and universal; types consolidate similarity and blot out difference; resemblance draws likeness together. These terms derive their meaning from representing something, an idea or entity outside of themselves. But Swedenborg’s correspondence insists that they “must fully represent each other,” which means that the “outside” to which, for example, an exemplar would refer is a type—and what the type represents is a resemblance, which in turn represents the exemplar (as well as the type, and so on). These representations work in a circuit, vitalizing and revitalizing, so that no instance can arrest, can objectify and make static, the meaning of the others. It is thus an antirepresentational representation that Swedenborg invokes; the emphasis is on the re-, the presentation that is made again and again. This aspect of Swedenborg’s thought captivates Emerson. He imagines its potential: One would say, that, as soon as men had the first hint that every sensible object,—animal, rock, river, air,—nay, space and time, subsists not for itself, nor finally to a material end, but as a picturelanguage, to tell another story of beings and duties, other science would be put by, and a science of such grand presage would absorb

40 / emerson

all faculties: that each man would ask of all objects, what they mean: Why does the horizon hold me fast, with my joy and grief, in this centre? Why hear I the same sense from countless differing voices, and read one never quite expressed fact in endless picturelanguage? (“Swedenborg; or, The Mystic,” 674) Through Swedenborg, Emerson glimpses an “endless picture-language” of primary testimonial text. It is the vehicle through which “every sensible object” tells a story, one that lets man know that the objects have meaning to bestow and promises that such meaning will answer for his existence. Animal, rock, river, and air thus resemble Reed’s vegetable: their richness of meaning speaks to the human’s relation to them. Yet this image of a unified message—“the same sense from countless differing voices”—ultimately gives way, for Emerson, to an emphasis on the differing voices, as the last clause of the passage suggests. That he reads “one never quite expressed fact” retains a nonrevelatory remainder, a speech that refrains from giving the answer promised by the certitude of an all-encompassing Divine Mind. Packer pinpoints Emerson’s adjustment. “What he calls religious luster, the poetic sense of things,” she writes, “is this susceptibility to multiple interpretation. . . . What something signifies matters less than the fact of significance itself. In the end, what the doctrine of correspondence does for Emerson is to transform nature into a text, mysteriously encoded but potentially decipherable, like a dream or a symptom to a Freudian analyst.”24 Packer argues that Emerson was less enthused by the idea of corresponding a thing to a discrete meaning and more by the basic premise that things could have meaning in excess of their apparent objectivity. Nature is like a dream or a symptom, then, that has not been analyzed but that exists, after Freud, as a site of potential meaning.25 To broaden this distinction to correspondence as it circulated in German Romanticism, Emerson may have learned from Carlyle Fichte’s theory that “there is a ‘Divine Idea’ pervading the visible Universe; which visible Universe is indeed but its symbol and sensible manifestation, having in itself no meaning, or even true existence independent of it.”26 Yet while Emerson is attracted to the premise of the universe bearing a pervasive idea, his focus is not on its divine origins, and his symbols have meaning in themselves. Hence Emerson’s critique of Swedenborg: Swedenborg limits the meaning he makes possible, foreclosing the potential “poem of the world” with his overarching theological structure (“Swedenborg; or, The Mystic,” 676). “He fastens each natural object to a theologic notion . . . and poorly tethers every symbol to a several ecclesiastic

emerson / 41

sense” (676), Emerson writes, specifying, “All his types mean the same few things. All his figures speak one speech. All his interlocutors Swedenborgise” (682). The types and figures do not speak for themselves, of themselves—they speak (for) Swedenborg, or at least for his theology. A glance at the British Romantics confirms Emerson’s attraction to meaning that proliferates instead of definitions that solve. Coleridge’s distinction between symbol and allegory potentially informs Emerson’s naming of the furniture as “mighty symbols”; for Coleridge, the symbol “always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative.”27 Coleridge’s symbol, like Emerson’s cup and saucer, both speaks for itself and changes one’s perception of the world in which it participates.28 By contrast, allegory “[translates] abstract notions into a picture-language”;29 in other words, the allegory codifies meaning, while the symbol participates in manifesting it. Coleridge, too, prefers the symbol, yet his preference ultimately works to uphold the Bible as a revelatory document.30 Hence, it is as if Emerson draws out the suggestions of relation—from Swedenborg, from Fichte, from Coleridge—as they promote a meaningful world, without accepting the stable organizing entity on which those thinkers also depend. As Leon Chai observes, Emerson’s idea of correspondence “is not a rigid and immutable set of hierarchical relations governing the structure of the visible universe, but a kaleidoscope of endless possibilities, responding to the inspiration and receptivity of the individual psyche.”31 To make Chai’s distinction more strongly, Emerson forgoes the “rigid and immutable,” even when it appears essential, in order to cultivate the “kaleidoscope of endless possibilities.” Emerson’s intervention amounts to an unwillingness to have the world’s testimony underwritten or, derivatively, to have it overwritten by its readers. When Emerson notes natural objects as meaningful, full stop, he preserves their essential difference from the human who nonetheless finds them so. That is, although the vegetable may have information for the human, the vegetable also speaks (unlike Swedenborg’s figures) for itself, and Emerson is without the power or knowledge to adapt that speech to his own language or schema. Put differently, his schema includes meaning that, erupting from everywhere and surprising its interlocutors, absolves itself from belonging to, from merely broadcasting, the terms of that schema. In the quotation from “Spiritual Laws,” “By a divine necessity, every fact in nature is constrained to offer its testimony,” we can see a version of this nuance. The divine necessity is that testimony is offered, whereas in a strictly Swedenborgian account, the

42 / emerson

constraint would be to testify to the divine. Emerson’s thinking introduces radical alterity, being and speech irreducible to human knowledge, to the inherited model of a world composed of things speaking to humans. Observing Emerson’s intervention brings into relief a key issue in his second-series essays. If the testimony of things is without representation—meaning that it is an expression of being and that it remains, as Lambert puts it, necessarily “outside” human comprehension32—then it also resists being represented after the fact. If one would want to give an account of one’s experience of this testimony, one cannot both represent it and maintain the crucial distinction that makes it worth reporting. Emerson articulates a version of this required restraint when he remarks of the oversoul, “I dare not speak for it” (“The Over-Soul,” 386). But the same restraint would have to be present with regard to the more incidental objects of everyday life: the vegetable, the dust and stones, the milk and meal. At stake is the question of how one bears witness to, in the sense of recording, testimony without representation.

Otherness, saying, and the said To more exactly glimpse what is involved in bearing witness to testimony without representation, it is helpful to examine the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’s work resembles Emerson’s in that it undertakes to bear witness to the encounters that make the world meaningful. Although Levinas writes only about encounters between humans, his theory of what constitutes an encounter bears a particular likeness to Emerson’s, and his concurrent definition of testimony similarly isolates its performative dimension. For Levinas, the self is conditioned by its being subject to another, a human who for Levinas always stands in for the ultimate otherness of God. This means that the self is in no way a self-sufficient agent, since it only lives and acts in response to the presence of the other; it is from the start responsible to the endowing other. Hence, an apparently trivial encounter with one’s neighbor instantiates the self’s thoroughly responsive state. To imagine this relation, Levinas writes, “is to catch sight of an extreme passivity, a passivity that is not assumed,” because it forms the very ground on which any assumption could take place.33 This absolute subordination of self to other resembles Emerson’s desire for the natural fact to overwhelm him, and what he knows and thinks, with its own writing. There is a more acute connection between the two thinkers, however, for Levinas also extends language to the ostensibly basic fact of existing.

emerson / 43

Since existing is for him the state of being constituted by, responsive to, responsible for, and passive before the other, Levinas finds meaning— he calls it signification—not in the discrete self but in the relation that for him makes existence possible. He distinguishes between such signification, which he names “saying,” and “the said,” and the two terms correlate quite closely to the performative and constative dimensions of testimony considered earlier: “saying” refers to the encounter of the self with the other, and “the said” refers to the recuperation of the encounter, any subsequent account of it. Saying is the more primary form of expression, just as it was for Emerson, and Levinas ultimately makes saying synonymous with testimony. Like Emerson, Levinas refuses the conventional emphasis on testimony as “the confession of some knowledge or of an experience by a subject,”34 because such thinking presupposes a self-sufficient speaker; like Emerson, he proposes instead that the word testimony come to designate the fact of one’s being, which for Levinas means being assigned by otherness. Levinas writes, “Saying without said, apparently a talking for nothing, a sign given to the other, ‘as simple as “hello,”’ and, within the Saying, a sign given of this giving of a sign—the pure transparency of a confession—testimony.”35 An ostensibly incidental gesture, a wave or a simple “hello,” is for Levinas testimonial because it is a sign that reveals that we give signs because there are others to give them to. Testimony is the recognition that the text of being exists thanks to the reader who encounters it, Levinas might say if he were to invoke Emerson’s register. Consisting of “hello,” Levinas’s testimony is also without representation, and when he writes that it is “saying without said,” he indicates that converting it into the said—representing it—means losing its value as testimony. He thus provides a vocabulary for the problem of bearing witness to primary testimony. The challenge is to continue to say the saying, not to let it drop into the said, even when composing an account. The challenge is to write without representation, then, to write not of an encounter or about an encounter but, instead, to convert writing to encounter in order to make the fact of its happening known. When Emerson opens his Essays: Second Series with “The Poet,” he invokes the terms of this challenge and proposes a writing that meets it. Emerson asserts, “There is no man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun, and stars, and earth, and water” (448), attributing to persons at large the capacity to read the world’s testimony without representation, to have an ethical encounter with its elemental text. The poet exceeds the average person in that he not only has such an encounter; he bears witness to it:

44 / emerson

Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick and compel the reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and impart. (448) The poet is touched deeply by the world’s testimony, and it is the testimonial “rays or appulses” that work in him to “compel the reproduction of themselves in speech.” The poet’s “power to receive and impart” thus amounts to an openness to serve as the world’s host, in the sense of a parasite’s host: he makes it possible for sun and stars and earth and water to reach language and employ it. To bear witness is, then, quite literally an obligation borne, undertaken—as if the poet carried the witness (the one who testifies but also the act of witnessing) from the natural world to his less sensitive compatriots. Emerson provides a corollary image later in the essay, when he writes that the poet “puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inanimate object” (456). The poet makes the objects speak, or makes their speaking evident, reviving them from apparent silence. Emerson’s poem remains, like the testimony, without representation, because the poet expresses nature like fugitive deeds and words express character. He amplifies the world’s testimony without representation, extending its reach, rather than representing and thereby transforming it. This means that he does not write a constative account that Levinas would classify with the said. Instead, he produces a nonrepresentational poem, a text that is the consort to the primary text of being. The poem continues, or extends, to return again to Levinas’s register, the saying. Emerson writes to this end that the poet’s “expression, or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree” (457). He explains what “the first” nature is: “What we call nature, is a certain self-regulated motion, or change; and nature does all things by her own hands, and does not leave another to baptise her, but baptises herself; and this through the metamorphosis again” (457). Because nature is self-regulating, it expresses itself, and the poet facilitates this baptismal impulse rather than overwriting it. Hence, reading the poem means reading nature’s testimony, and the poet’s text of witness becomes synonymous with the testimony that inspires it. What is remarkable about this poem is that it produces testimony without representation even though it is composed of words. The

emerson / 45

primary testimony in which life writes itself, examined earlier, is textual—it is an engraving, it is published—but it is not identical to the series of words printed on pages that more regularly receive that designation. In the case of the poem, it appears identical while behaving otherwise. Levinas calls this type of writing “the poetic said.”36 He explains that in the case of a written or spoken text, the totalizing said always threatens to overtake the testimonial saying, the fact of encounter that grounds it; in his view, “the poetic said, and the interpretation it calls for ad infinitum” work to resist this tendency by demanding that its reader think and rethink it.37 Emerson’s poetic words also unsettle, but they do so for reasons distinct from Levinas’s and derivative of his earlier historical moment. For Emerson, words used to be expressive, used to testify, and their former incarnations remain hidden within them.38 Hence, even if a word is printed as part of a text and even if, more pertinently, the word is one that appears to represent, it remains tied, for Emerson, to its originary expressive purpose. This idea first appears in the early Nature, in the assertion “Words are signs of natural facts” (20). The “sign” to which he refers does not indicate the fact from which it remains separate; rather, it has come from the fact, has grown out of it. Emerson continues, “Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance” (20), and the borrowing suggests an intimate relation whereby the referent lends itself to a term that manifests it as much as designates it. “The Poet” details how these expressive roots may be recovered through the poem. “Language is fossil poetry,” Emerson writes. “As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin” (457). The “secondary use” of language aligns with the said, with the constative relay of information, with, in short, representational writing. But Emerson suggests that the poet can excavate words like a naturalist excavates stone, revealing their poetic origins. When he then describes, as I quoted earlier, how the poet follows nature’s self-baptism, expressing nature as nature expresses herself, he implies that the poetic origins are not merely exhibited as a curiosity; unlike other fossils, poetic origins may be recovered, released from their preserved state, and put to work. Every word presumably contains this potential, which means that the poet works to reverse the petrifying tendency of language, to reanimate it. The poet exchanges the word that represents the world for the word that expresses it.39

46 / emerson

Emerson the poet One catches a glimpse of how words may be poetically manipulated in the image which with this chapter began, of Emerson’s nodding vegetables. The sentence gives one pause, I suggested, because it hovers between occult and ordinary connotations: it might indicate a conspiratorial nod in which the tree comes alive or a movement resulting from windy weather that stirs the passing human. In fact, the OED permits both readings. Its first definition for the verb nod is “to make a brief inclination of the head, esp. in salutation, assent, or command, or to draw attention to something,” an “extended use” of which may apply to animals, but it later offers the definition, “Of a thing (esp. a plant): to bend or incline downward or forward with a swaying or jerking movement.”40 Emerson’s sentences—“The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them”—not only render both definitions possible; they encourage a jostling between the two, as the implication of reciprocal acknowledgment presses up against the sense of quotidian bending. Although neither bears the weight of originary meaning, their conjunction unsettles the word’s normal constative currency, effecting a movement not unlike the release of the fossil from its petrified form. As a result, the quotidian becomes remarkable and strangely suggestive; the fields and woods become uncommon, become worthy of notice. The reader is drawn, if not to the world’s neologizing impulse, at least toward its expressiveness. That is, “nod” may not express the vegetable, but it shows the vegetable as expressive, therefore as intractable by a static representation. In this sense, Emerson’s language may be understood to reach the originary not through etymology but by demonstrating the expressiveness of the world, its capacity to demand attention or thought. Thus, the nodding vegetable passage encourages the reader to attend to, to be arrested by, his or her everyday surroundings, not only because of what Emerson says (“the suggestion of an occult relation”) but because of how he says it. His word choice makes the text reach out to the reader, nodding (to invoke another sense of the verb) at the fields and woods that have something to relay. I return to this passage from the early Nature because the remainder of this chapter is concerned with how the work of the poet is Emerson’s work too. To consider Emerson as a theorist and not a witness is to miss the fact that he has come to the theory that things testify because he has witnessed them testifying. Yet to approach Emerson the witness conventionally, as

emerson / 47

a speaker of secondary or constative testimony, is to miss the fact that representational writing can only do disservice to the primary testimony he would want to share. Hence, the apparently testimonial language that precedes the transparent eyeball passage—“Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration” (Nature, 10)—with its first-person speaker narrating a past event, falls short of the larger task assigned to the poet, of making the common, the puddles and the sky speak. “The rich poets,” Emerson writes, “resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of every created thing” (“The Poet,” 467). The poet never appears in the mirror, even as he facilitates its transport, so “every created thing” takes the place of his “I.” Counterintuitively, the sentences that appear most obviously testimonial are those that depart most starkly from the radical theory of testimony without representation I have outlined here. Scholarship on testimony in Emerson’s writing has tended to privilege the more common, constative sense of the term, analyzing the relatively infrequent “I have . . .” statements and revealing the complications involved in doing so. The first part of “Experience,” in which Emerson writes, “In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me” (473), becomes an important site of inquiry, both because it is a relatively rare example of Emerson speaking in the essays of his personal past and because the essay promises an account of experience, which is, after all, practically a definition of testimony, if not the one I have drawn out here. Sharon Cameron, for instance, reads “Experience” as “a testament to the pervasiveness of a loss so inclusive that it is suddenly inseparable from experience itself”;41 the essay testifies to Waldo’s death as having definitively altered Emerson’s understanding of experience. Cameron argues that Emerson “creat[es] a powerful and systematic representation of grief,”42 yet what she means by “representation” is not completely at odds with the writing against representation I have been pursuing. Addressing the fact that Emerson seems to drop the topics of Waldo and grief after the essay’s initial section, she argues, “the child who is banished from most of its pages nevertheless affects those pages as an incompletely displaced presence,” and she specifies with reference to Freud, “The theoretical understanding of introjection as a phenomenon that occurs in such a way as to leave the introjected object both unavailable and invisible to the self in which it is encrypted offers a means to picture the way in which Waldo dominates the essay from which he has disappeared.”43 Emerson’s grief is represented, then, in the way that he

48 / emerson

does not represent Waldo; Emerson testifies to Waldo’s death by writing an essay from which the boy is ultimately kept apart. What is revealing about Cameron’s analysis is that her assertion that the text is a testament in the constative sense comes to mean that it keeps its content, the originary experience for which it ostensibly accounts, hidden. Emerson testifies to his grief by giving us other things to look at. He trades, that is, the ostensibly constative impulse of the start of the essay for the performative sentences that direct the reader elsewhere. Emerson’s “Experience” demands, in this sense, that the reader give up meticulous attention to Emerson’s “I have . . .” statements in order to consider him as a writing witness.44 As Julie Ellison notes, the question driving “Experience” is not how to testify to grief by representing it, since Emerson demonstrates his capacity to do so in the poem “Threnody.”45 The essay may be understood, instead, as concerned with how to write about experience that absolves itself from representation, including but not limited to certain reverberations following the death of a son. The essay explores how to testify, then, in the sense of intentionally bearing witness by recording, without representation. Its statements that least resemble confessions may be those that keep language most motile and in that way perform the poet’s work of drawing language toward the expressive world. The relentless present tense of the essay’s “I  .  .  .” statements, for instance, circumvents any attempt to constatively know Emerson’s personal experience and ultimately deflects attention from him to his surroundings. Even when Emerson initially describes his son’s death and his grief, there is hardly reference to the past. We are told that the death took place more than two years ago, but Emerson locates his dissociation from the event precisely in the present when he writes, “If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me,—neither better nor worse. So it is with this calamity” (473). The example of what might happen tomorrow indicates that Emerson writes from today and that he looks, if anything, toward what might happen rather than what has happened, even as he grapples with the past’s effects on the present. As the essay continues, the present tense grows even more insistent, and it continues to slip toward the unknown, the surprising, and therefore the unrepresentable. Emerson writes, “A day is a sound and solid good. . . . I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but leave me alone, and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the pot-luck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room. I am thankful

emerson / 49

for small mercies” (479). Emerson is technically referring to an accumulation from the past when he notes, “I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental,” but the reader has to strain to see the statement as reflective because of his substitution of “I am grown” for the more common “I have grown.” The growing comes to seem like a present-tense action, as if it happens “every hour” in response to “the pot-luck of the day.” Emerson’s “I” slips out of the past here, meeting up with a present in which one is continuously at the mercy of the pot-luck.46 As “I am” replaces “I have,” Emerson’s definition of experience begins to approximate the poet’s mirror carried through the street. It reflects what the “I” is confronted with at every moment, what it encounters, minimizing any content that would predetermine or otherwise influence its movement through the world. “Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking, or keeping, if it were not” (483) means that life can only be taken and kept on condition that it cannot be taken or kept— or that it is taken and kept only until its next iteration replaces the one formerly had. This position makes virtually impossible a constative testimony that would endure, that would maintain a consistent “I,” for, say, the length of an essay. If the “I” is always encountering a surprise that makes the world dance, then the “I” never possesses a sure philosophy that would permit a deliberate and faithful narrative. As Arsić writes, “we change more quickly than the time needed for words to be uttered.”47 Producing a constative account of this change means constantly writing a new “I”—means performing, then, the new being that one is at every moment. “To be truthful now means to be faithful to change,” Arsić continues. “The truth would thus have the features of a weather report; instead of reaffirming the content of what has been said—thus confirming the value of consistency, which Emerson believes is ‘foolish’—it would require loyalty to the variable.”48 The weather report ostensibly tells us what to expect but more accurately and reliably tells us what is going on right now, and it is charged with changing as, so to speak, the wind changes. Thus, the only testimony Emerson’s experience—Emerson’s “Experience”—permits is the mirror that reflects movement, that lacks the power to fix.49 It is for this reason that I think any consideration of the full consequences of Emerson’s testimony without representation must analyze not only “Experience” but also “Nature,” the second-series essay, often referred to as the second “Nature,” to distinguish it from the early book Nature (and its chapter “Nature”). In “Experience,” Emerson mobilizes his “I,” and his writing jumps from point to point, liquidating our sense of “experience” and “testament” so that we turn away from the

50 / emerson

informative, appropriating “I” and, expectantly, toward the pot-luck world. Yet if we can thereby see Emerson as the man holding the mirror, the essay is less concerned with showing us what is in the mirror. We can reason that the pot-luck world must be there, must have been testifying, for Emerson to develop his radical understanding of experience, but we do not quite see it. “Nature” exists as another essay in the series because it still remains for Emerson to depict the world, to depict nature, testifying—to compose an essay that is the mirror. The challenge of “Nature” is to reflect Boston common, the puddles and the sky, without narrating his experience of them, as he did in Nature. The later essay is the full test of Emerson’s theory; it is his poem. It must write of what can only be encountered by effecting encounter; it must use words that will call up the expressive world rather than represent it.

Encountering nature At first glance, the second “Nature” seems to echo, more than revise, the first.50 In Nature, Emerson wrote of a feeling he had sometimes had: “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.” “Nature” also begins with a claim that surmises, apparently from a collection of past events, a remarkable tendency: “There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring” (541). Emerson continues in an archival mode, “These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of the Indian Summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough” (541). That the components of these days are to be read as testimonial becomes evident at the end of the paragraph: The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures, and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of

emerson / 51

the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by nature. (542) The key question of “Nature” is rendered in this series of remarks: if nature entices and solicits us to forget where we have been familiar (“the recollection of home”) and what we have known (“all memory”), then in writing about it, do we not fix as certain and dependable (“There are days which occur, at almost any season”) what ought to absolve itself of our ability to do so? How does Emerson write about the nature that has, in testifying to him, led him to rethink and retheorize testimony, without giving it the lie and thus losing the opportunity to further his readers’ encounters? For if Emerson’s readers simply consume the essay as chronicling or celebrating nature (as, of course, his popular reputation recommends), then one major point of his first-series essays, and even one important proposal of “Experience,” dissolves. Testimony without representation becomes testimony with representation, and the change, toward fixity and stability and solidity, is not of the productive progressive variety. One way “Nature” maintains its topic as surprising is by holding out, rather than spelling out, its significance. Emerson reminds the reader that any relation had with nature will be unequal, since nature will be, as in the quote above, triumphant over human comfort and knowledge. Nature “takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our nonsense” (542); yet her triumph takes the form of signifying to us: “we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us into solitude, and foretell the remotest future”; we consider the value in days “in which we have given heed to some natural object” (542). In characterizing the stars as calling and foretelling, and objects in general as worthy of being heeded, Emerson discourages any tendency to read them as representations. Because their significance is outstanding—because he tells us, to paraphrase Packer, that rather than what they mean—the terminology cannot refer directly to entities that we already know, that we already have in mind. They necessarily have more meaning than we yet know, which is why we seek them out and, by extension, why we read Emerson’s essay devoted to them. Hence, Emerson’s words, while representational to the extent that they provide images to picture (such as heavenly bodies and warm October days), also resist finality. Emerson is clear that he is extending the emphasis on being over having from “Experience” when he describes the “hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves” that are the “dangerous auxiliaries” of the wealthy (543). The power in such ostensible objects, Emerson writes, resides not in how

52 / emerson

much they cost but in how much they have yet to disclose: “These bribe and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises” (543). The wealthy do not have the landscapes they officially own; what they have are “secret promises,” a phrase that suggests either promises unknown as such or promises of what will continue to be unknown. It is this uncertainty—both of what will be told and, I am suggesting, of what Emerson has told—that keeps his reader at a distance from the essay’s images. Emerson augments his account of nature as enlivened beyond our expectations as the essay continues. He stages a fabulous scene to demonstrate that “if we look at [nature’s] work, we seem to catch a glance of a system in transition”: Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upwards towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice and probationer of a more advanced order. The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated: the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt, when they come to consciousness, they too will curse and swear. (547) Emerson’s list appears to invoke the great chain of being—plants, trees, animals, men—but because his is a “system in transition,” each apparent class is motivated to exceed itself. Plants want to be conscious; trees wish that they could use their height to greater advantage. Emerson turns the standard trope even further when he suggests that such transfigurations do take place. In the first sentence, trees “seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground”; the “seem” offers a light personification, an image in the mode of as-if. But in the last sentence, it is presumed that the trees will “come to consciousness” and that they will do so with a vengeance, “will curse and swear.” The suggestion is that plants, yearning for consciousness, become trees, and trees, bemoaning their imprisonment, become cursing young men. The suggestion is, in a certain sense, that the reader may be a conscious tree. In demanding a new thought—what does it mean that I may be a conscious tree?—“maples” and “ferns” slip out of their expected representational function, surprising the reader, allowing him to “catch a glance,” indeed, “of a system in transition,” nature’s and his own. The suggestion of a continuity between human and tree recalls the interconnectedness of the correspondence system that Emerson both drew from and particularized, and as the essay moves toward closing,

emerson / 53

he specifies his simultaneous claims for relation and radical alterity. The figures I have analyzed here all depend on otherness for their surprising power, yet Emerson notes that they may thereby seem so distant that interaction with them is impossible: “The cool disengaged air of natural objects, makes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they, if we camp out and eat roots; but let us be men instead of woodchucks, and the oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of silk” (548). The difficulty of considering natural objects as aloof, guarding secrets, or as shocking, waiting to curse, is that they then develop a “disengaged air”: our engagement with them—our connection and our plans for relation— comes to seem unlikely, less assured. Yet Emerson’s image is complicated, because intentionally becoming more like the natural objects, by camping, does not guarantee engagement; rather, Emerson proposes, one can use and consume nature, by sitting on ivory and silk, and still assume a relationship with it. Being men, he suggests, means being different from the trees, even if one has evolved from them, and it is only by insisting on this difference that any relation may be broached. Tracking Emerson’s naming, in the essay, of different varieties of trees provides further nuance to this claim: at first, “the stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam like iron on the excited eye.” Then, “the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt, when they come to consciousness, they too will curse and swear.” Finally, “the oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of silk.” One can narrate a progression, from the tantalizing tree to the speaking tree to the serving tree, yet this would obliterate the differences among them—between pine and maple, between maple and oak—that Emerson specifies. Each tree, every single tree, Emerson suggests, testifies differently, and drawing them toward commonality must not obliterate their individual testimonies of being. To write “tree,” then, is to collect the group, while to write “pine” is to dissolve it; and this interplay, by which man is also involved in and yet absolved from nature, keeps Emerson’s language oriented toward inexhaustible expression. It insists that nature’s implacable otherness exceeds every word that designates her. Thus, “Nature” takes the reader on a strange tour, calling him or her toward an object and giving what appears to be an account of it, only to tease language into revealing its essential otherness. As the essay moves toward its conclusion, this apparent switchbacking coheres into a poetic pinnacle: the otherness comes to define, to condition, any potential encounter. Emerson returns to the image of nature’s aloofness and our concurrent envy of her realm:

54 / emerson

There is in woods and waters a certain enticement and flattery, together with a failure to yield present satisfaction. This disappointment is felt in every landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the summer-clouds floating feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as forelooking to some pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy: but the poet finds himself not near enough to his object. The pine-tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. (553) Emerson’s emphasis on nature as waiting in the future with “secret promises” has, it seems here, turned on him, for nature occupies a future at which we, always in the present, never arrive. We are disappointed at this failure to coincide, to get nature “near enough” (echoes, here, of the privileged “near” in “The American Scholar,” as well as Waldo’s death: “I cannot get it nearer to me”). The pine tree “does not seem to be nature,” and no wonder: Emerson has insisted that pine is different from tree is different from natural object, and so the individual specimen must absolve itself from the generalizing “nature” that means to encompass it. On the one hand, one must encounter the pine tree “before him”; one must read its testimony of being. On the other hand, to do so is to miss nature at large, that enormous catalogue of testimonies that courts and tantalizes and promises to make everything dance. The result, as Emerson puts it, is that “Nature is still elsewhere.” In other words, we never actually encounter nature. There is always another object, which is to say, another testimony, that we have not yet heard. “Nature is still elsewhere” marks the realization of the theory I have been tracking here, not its ultimate demise. It sets nature perpetually out of our reach, which means that its testimony remains permanently unassimilated, hence unrepresented and unrepresentable. The information we would file under “nature” is always incomplete, always awaiting another site of excavation which will only ever promise another site of excavation. There is never a finished thought of nature because her testimonies continue to be spun and spun and to surprise and surprise. “Nature is still elsewhere” directs the reader to the next tree; it also directs the reader to the next “nature” or to Emerson’s previous Nature and “Nature” (and even “The Method of Nature”). The second “Nature” cannot coincide with itself, because the word has already been used to designate a separate, complementary but not identical, theory of nature. There is always another oak and another “oak,” as the second “Nature”

emerson / 55

tells us, and there is always another nature and another “Nature.” The words never solidify themselves as representations because they are always in use elsewhere, and the interplay between here and elsewhere itself makes them, hence our thought, dance. This, ultimately, is why there must be a second “Nature,” to extend “Experience” and to unsettle the first. The nodding trees direct us to see as a secret sign the subtle shifting of branches. But the returning nod is not, must not be, the later Emerson says, the conclusion of the encounter. The challenge is to nod to the next tree and the next—the pine and the hemlock and the oak and the maple and the elm, and then another pine—to know that one will never stop nodding, will never stop acknowledging what is testifying and what has yet to testify.51 “The movement of his language,” as Eduardo Cadava writes, “always encourages us to experience what is about to vanish—life, time, nature, spirit, history.”52 These elements are always before us and yet always on the move, being themselves, being other to us, and Emerson’s language follows, follows suit. Emerson’s testimony without representation is testimony that is about to vanish and that we have yet to hear, that we bear witness to by letting it entice and escape through our words. It reverses the tendency to associate testimony with archives and narration and information about the past, giving it a new set of cognates: futurity, surprise, dancing, onwardness. It tells us that there is always more meaning in the world because meaning is never finally settled. It asks us to read more, and to read more closely, and to be changed by what we read. It requires that we never own what we write, that our accounts stretch and move with the truth rather than confirm it. The remainder of the readings in this book are informed by Emerson’s discard of secondary, constative testimony and attention to primary, performative testimony. They are all oriented toward recognizing new sites of meaning and toward understanding how our thinking changes when seemingly uncommunicative entities are met as meaningful. Because these entities can only appear so, as the book’s title indicates, quietly— because their revolutions pass under cover of quiescence—they challenge us not only to newly attune our testimonial instincts but also to reconsider our sense of responsiveness to what testifies. Emerson writes in expanding his point, “Nature is still elsewhere,” “It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and a satisfaction” (“Nature,” 553). If this statement confirms Emerson’s theory, it also highlights its confounding import: things never tell us quite enough, never satisfy our search for the testimonial truth, because it remains without representation.

56 / emerson

And yet, the very last lines of Emerson’s essay suggest that this does not mean that our dancing thought does not still follow the rhythm of those things constrained to testify: “Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence, until after a long time” (555). Even the feeling of disappointment among the “silent trees,” Emerson implies, slips into our thinking and quietly speaks, becoming an intimate. In the rare instance that Emerson gives us of looking back—“we did not guess its essence, until after a long time”—we find that we have been listening all the while.

2 /

Douglass: Testimony without Identity

Frederick Douglass wrote three autobiographies, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), and then he decided that he had more to say. His supplement expanding Life and Times (the new version was published in 1892) was, he writes, the result of a call: “I find myself summoned again . . . to come a second time upon the witness stand and give evidence upon disputed points concerning myself and my emancipated brothers and sisters who, though free, are yet oppressed and are in as much need of an advocate as before they were set free” (LT, 939).1 This second summons to the witness stand, late in his life, follows his first appearance there in the case against slavery. The metaphor is remarkable because it suggests that Douglass understood his entire antislavery career as the performance of a witness, an offering of testimony, even though his writings encompass a range of genres, from autobiography to political speeches and editorials, and even though no court of law would have recognized them as binding. What qualifies them as testimony, in this passage, is his obligation to deliver them: “Time and events have summoned me to stand forth both as a witness and an advocate for a people long dumb,” he writes, specifying that his most recent summons comes from “the popular voice and . . . what is called the negro problem” (938, 939). “Time and events,” “the popular voice,” and “what is called the negro problem” have designated Douglass a witness, and he responds as if they were subpoenas and not abstractions. Douglass was reluctant to take the stand again; he had “laid aside [his] pen with some such sense of relief as might be felt by a weary

58 / douglass

and over-burdened traveler when arrived at the desired end of a long journey” (LT, 938). He had just gotten off the stand, to continue the metaphor, in arguing for emancipation, and it is clear in the original closing chapters of Life and Times that he did not think he would be called again: “The anti-slavery platform had performed its work, and my voice was no longer needed” (LT, 811). His voice was needed, however, in what turned out to be a far more complicated case, one that is still being argued today. Heretofore Douglass had essentially argued that he was a man and not a slave. Yet once the status of slave was abolished, he was pressed to explain how his race delimited the kind of man he was and the kind of voice with which he spoke. “There is no disguising the fact that the American people are much interested and mystified about the mere matter of color as connected with manhood,” he writes. “When an unknown man is spoken of in their presence, the first question that arises in the average American mind concerning him and which must be answered is, Of what color is he? and he rises or falls in estimation by the answer given” (LT, 939). If Douglass registers “Of what color is he?” as the question that brings him out of retirement, he suggests that it had not been raised previously, or at least that it had not been raised in such a way as to compel his addressing it. Further, the newness of this development suggests that prior to 1892, an unknown man could be spoken of without the audience interrogating his racial makeup. And as Douglass continues the passage by detailing the questions increasingly demanded of him—questions such as “In what proportion does the blood of the various races mingle in my veins, especially how much white blood and how much black blood entered into my composition?” (LT, 940)—he suggests that before he was recalled to the witness stand, he too could speak without first establishing his racial identity. The idea that the question of racial identity did not exist through most of Douglass’s career no doubt seems a naive assessment of a culture committed to totalizing race theories derived from hubris, fear, and amateur evaluation of skulls. Yet surely Douglass is right to note a shift in what accounts for the oppression he faces. As one 1883 legal decision put it, while the “badge of servitude” was once servitude, after emancipation, “discrimination, based merely upon race or color . . . is a badge of servitude.”2 In other words, following the Civil War and Reconstruction, oppression is grounded in racial discrimination rather than legal status.3 Of course, racial discrimination was not a new phenomenon; it had been rampant in the antebellum north, as Douglass notes upon his arrival in New Bedford, Connecticut (N, 95). Still, Douglass understood this discrimination as tied to the institution of slavery, and something about

douglass / 59

the duration of that institution seems to have allowed him to speak with less restriction than he would encounter later. His suggestion that for many years he could speak, as a free black man, without ever producing a schema of his bloodlines marks an understanding of himself as a witness who did not have to foreground his racial identity. In part, I understand Douglass’s remarks to pinpoint the oddity of the antebellum political climate, which was organized around race but not invested in regulating personal identity. I explore this unevenness in the course of the chapter by analyzing how, in the process of crafting the Fugitive Slave Act, senators met the question of how the identities of alleged fugitives would be confirmed. While the senators eventually acknowledge that their legislation will have to include procedures for identification, they fail to produce an exacting set of requirements. In this context, Richard Henry Dana was able to argue that the slaveholder claiming alleged fugitive Anthony Burns had the wrong man—not because he had wrongly identified him but because, far more broadly, “identification is matter of opinion.”4 Identification is a contingent act, Dana insists, not subject to guarantees and not determined by the state. His remarks reflect a culture in which questions about Douglass’s biological composition would not have arisen because so identifying him would have been neither a priority nor a science. As Dana’s claim suggests, an inexact legal climate has consequences for how identification is imagined as well as who is identified by which procedures. I read Douglass’s final autobiographical installment not only as a comment on the times, then, but as part of a career-long consideration of what it means to be identified, by the state and also by one’s own writing. Identification was not necessarily a matter of opinion for Douglass, but it was flexible rather than determined, characterized by open-endedness and possibility rather than certainty and accuracy. This understanding becomes most evident in his self-referential writings. Unlike Emerson, who was devoted to testimony without representation as a means to bearing witness to the world’s otherness, Douglass regularly takes himself as his subject, vividly representing the scenes of his life. As many scholars have noted, Douglass does not do so unthinkingly: he foregrounds the act of turning a textual apparatus toward the self that becomes as a result split, writing but also written.5 Yet Douglass also foregrounds, I would suggest, the extent to which the ostensibly “written” self remains outside of the text that would describe it. In listing the questions that drive him to retake the stand, for instance, he figuratively separates “himself” from the terms he is expected to use to identify it. He implies that this self is completely unconcerned with the

60 / douglass

racial composition that, supposedly, would define it, which leaves the reader wondering what does concern it, and how it might define itself outside of imposed structures. This unstoried, unspeaking body occupies me here, for it seems always to remain, like Emerson’s vegetable or furniture, other to the discourse that seeks to render it.6 In Douglass’s case, I argue, this other body never becomes equivalent to the terms that would seem to define it, so that Douglass’s testimony, despite its frequently autobiographical form, amounts to a testimony without identity. His texts theorize a relation between speech and body, in which the body always approaches but is never quite subsumed by the language designed to represent it. I begin the chapter by detailing this reading of Douglass as elided by his own writing. Émile Benveniste’s helps to fathom how Douglass can say “I” without making himself instantly legible, and Giorgio Agamben builds on this analysis to theorize testimony as conditioned by the discrepancy between the living body and the speaker who works to express it.7 Douglass’s hesitancy, in his autobiographies, to connect his writing body to the slave body becomes as a result more lucid, and it begins to appear that not identifying was a crucial technique in certain of his political speeches. When I turn to the historical context, it is to situate the gap between life and speech in the unusual circumstances of antebellum America, which operated with an ambiguity and an openness for which Agamben cannot account. In my reading, Douglass exploits the curiously nonidentificatory conditions of his midcareer, claiming designations that are neither designed for nor prohibited from him. As the century comes to a close, Douglass’s body seeks a better linguistic fit, yet it remains, like so many bodies, still without a language that has been formed to meet it.

A flash of feet In opening up the relationship between Douglass’s text and the self it purportedly records, I aim to read his work as testimonial in an expansive, rather than a narrow, sense. It is a commonplace to regard Douglass’s work as testimonial insofar as it truthfully reports facts from a first-person perspective. Often, as in this passage from the fifth chapter of the Narrative, such reportage reads as Douglass’s primary aim, one he accomplishes in exemplary form: I suffered much from hunger, but much more from cold. In hottest summer and coldest winter, I was kept almost naked—no shoes, no

douglass / 61

stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing on but a coarse tow linen shirt, reaching only to my knees. I had no bed. I must have perished with cold, but that, the coldest nights, I used to steal a bag which was used for carrying corn to the mill. I would crawl into this bag, and there sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in and feet out. (N, 33) The reader can imagine Douglass’s near nakedness, his inadequate shirt, and his small body curled into the food sack. Yet Douglass interrupts himself to present another striking image, one that has the unsettling effect of displacing the original scene: “My feet,” he writes, “have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes” (N, 33). Suddenly, the diminutive slave burrowing for warmth is invisible; what the reader sees instead are the scarred feet of a grown man. Further, this grown man is gauging his scars with a pen, the pen that he writes with, the pen that has just been employed in designing the vision of his cold younger self. Douglass has not necessarily broken his conventional testimonial frame: he still offers information about the life of the speaking self. Yet he has let his reader see his document as written, deliberately crafted by a man who gauges the precision and effect of his words with, presumably, the same exactitude that measures his scars. Further, he has provided an almost photographic, flash-bulb image of a body that remains outside of the major narrative trajectory. The story progresses from Douglass’s birth to his free life with few temporal breaks; if the reader is aware that the piece is reflective, the product of a present-tense remembering (as in lines such as “I was probably between seven and eight years old when I left Colonel Lloyd’s plantation” [N, 33]), the actual present-day being, his physical form and his experience of writing, is virtually unreferenced. Douglass’s body also seems, in the image of his feet, strangely static, still caught in or defined by his manner of sleeping in his early life. However free he now is, however luxuriously he may spend his time writing, however adequate his current bed, his feet remain the feet of a slave, of a boy “probably between seven and eight years old.” The boyhood event has marked the body of the adult who does not even know when it took place. I would suggest that the image of Douglass’s feet is arresting not only due to its startling content (the enormous size of the gashes) but to its sudden presentation of a body that has not frequently appeared and that, more importantly, remains unsubsumed by the neat autobiographical form of the text. Douglass might, in this passage, be writing the account of how he came to be scarred, rather than how he came to be free, and

62 / douglass

the nearly instant abandonment of the former option leaves it lingering as a rejected possibility. What about the rest of Douglass’s body— the reader may wonder—his hands or his back? And, more pertinently, where is that other story, the story of how the body came to be the body that it is, the body that began to crack at a young age and that still suffers, unable to free itself of its cracks? This body never comes to be narrated by the text; however thorough Douglass’s details, however devotedly he continues to expand his autobiographical collection, the charged experiences of the living body seem to hover beyond the scope of the work. They seem to remain outside of Douglass’s powerful first-person voice. The flash of feet thus brings to light the strange relationship between Douglass’s text and his body: the body accompanies the text, perhaps even motivates it, but rarely actually enters its explicit narrative work. This is to say that while the text generally does not testify to the body—in the conventional sense of recounting or representing its experiences— text and body still collude in order to produce a work of witnessing. In what follows, I seek to explain how such collusion operates, how Douglass’s body haunts his testimony without being identified by it. This chapter builds from recent scholarly work on how Douglass complicates, even while ostensibly in the process of ratifying, the idea that an autobiographical claim transparently represents a self who speaks it. Much of this work is also concerned with identity, but with a different emphasis from my own: the focus is on how Douglass does not possess a single identity, a coherent and unchanging position, so that his writing documents a being in transition rather than establishes a stable self. For example, Maurice S. Lee opens the 2009 Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass with Douglass’s 1851 quip on renaming his newspaper—“I shall lose my reputation for being unstable if I don’t change soon”—and remarks, “Change is indeed a major feature of Douglass’s life and writings.”8 Contributors to that volume highlight, accordingly, how no one true “Douglass” exists as the consistent undersigned of his texts. Robert S. Levine explains, “Identity is never stable in Douglass; it is tied to the contingencies of the historical moment and to the problematics (and challenges) of the autobiographer’s art.”9 Analyzing Douglass’s relation to the law, Gregg Crane notes his “protean self-transformations.”10 John Stauffer is included in the Cambridge Companion as well, though his definitive summary appears elsewhere, in his book that reads Douglass as a Radical Abolitionist. Stauffer isolates the philosophy that underpinned the autobiographical as well as the legal writings: “A fluid and subjective conception of the self greatly facilitated [his and his colleagues’] efforts to break down racial hierarchies and envision an

douglass / 63

egalitarian and pluralist society.”11 “A fluid and subjective conception of the self” is, indeed, where the critical consensus on Douglass seems to have settled; it appears almost requisite to read his writing as tracking something pliable and therefore or thereby unsettling the idea that his texts speak for a coherent unity. What I am after, however, is something more elemental: not the question of whether his texts speak for a unified being but of how they speak for any being at all. That is, instead of considering whether each “I” indicates a different position Douglass occupied, I am concerned with the way that Douglass—any Douglass—remains stubbornly distant from the succession of “I’s” he uses. The idea is that Douglass fails to be identified by his own text not because his identity is complex but because the text is a permanent stranger to the body. Dwight McBride formulates this condition in arguing that the Narrative is composed of various codes, each of which responds to “the complex discursive terrain that is abolitionist discourse and the numerous demands it placed on the rhetorical strategies used in slave testimony.”12 In other words, Douglass’s Narrative may be read as motivated, and formed, as much by the discursive expectations of his audience as by any event that he actually experienced. By contesting the idea that Douglass’s only concern is the representation of his person, McBride asserts that what one reads in Douglass’s work is not the man (or even the several positions he occupied) but the context that defined his narrative opportunities. Eduardo Cadava takes McBride’s premise of dissociation even further, in tracking Douglass’s reliance on the language of other texts. For Cadava, “Douglass often enacts his sense of dispossession and displacement by dispersing his voice across several voices, thus suggesting that his voice is never simply his own. . . . [He offers] a writing that also is composed of the arguments, vocabularies, and texts he has read, which, borne by his own language, prevent it from ever being simply his language.”13 Cadava suggests that Douglass can neither claim nor possess the language that he uses; even his most characteristic phrases are, in this reading, not “his,” since they are tempered by their associations with other texts. The dispossession Cadava notes is framed as representative: it indicates Douglass’s dispossession, his alienation from the language that ostensibly awaits his purposeful arrangement yet already coheres around determined legibilities. Hence, Douglass may be understood as identified by the text—but only as one who finds that the text cannot identify him. Cadava’s analysis allows the glimpse of Douglass’s scarred feet to be read not as a slip in narrative cohesion but as an articulation of the condition of his writing. That is, the failure of Douglass’s body to coincide with

64 / douglass

his narration may not be an aberrant instance so much as an exemplary image of his constant alienation. From this perspective, even the apparently direct statements that depict the suffering slave boy would reflect a certain and necessary disjunction between being and text. When, for instance, Douglass adds to his account of the boy by noting that he “was probably between seven and eight years old” when he left the harsh conditions of Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, he actually blurs the image he would polish: the boy becomes no older than seven—or no older than eight. The discrepancy is small and not wholly germane to what appears to be the impetus of the chapter, the relating of his early neglect. Yet the uncertainty adds to the list of items that fall outside of Douglass’s precision: neither the adult feet nor the unknown age can quite enter the story that seems so tightly to control its subject. Put differently, the demands of Douglass’s form (as McBride explains) mandate that his writing be imagistic, but certain aspects of his experience refuse to be rendered in sharpened scenes. In turn, the inaptitude of even the slave narrative form for this slave narrative becomes evident. The fact that “probably between seven and eight years old” registers as an interruption reveals how determined by the assumptions of his (free, white) audience Douglass’s language is and, consequently, how little suited it is for the vagaries of the slave’s experience. A language that could actually identify that boy would be a language in which not knowing one’s age was presumed as integral to the speaking subject. There are other aspects of Douglass’s writing that highlight the distance between being and text, and these suggest that not self-identifying was not only his condition but, sometimes, his deliberate political strategy. In his speeches, especially his constitutionalist arguments, Douglass sometimes claims for himself a social identity that he does not actually possess. These identifications are thus misidentifications, constituting, as Stauffer notes, misstatements.14 Here, for example, is one from an 1854 Chicago speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act: “I claim to be an American citizen. The constitution knows but two classes: Firstly, citizens, and secondly, aliens. I am not an alien; and I am, therefore, a citizen. I am moreover a free citizen. Free, thank God, not only by the law of the state in which I was born and brought [bought?] but free by the laws of nature.”15 Douglass posits citizen and alien as the only two terms available to him, and because alien is an impossible one, he uses citizen. This is an extraordinary gesture, for his criterion would presumably make not only free black men but slaves, too, citizens on the basis that they are not aliens, a logical progression that makes one wonder why he could not just as easily have reasoned the reverse: “I am not a citizen; and I am,

douglass / 65

therefore, an alien.” For “citizen”—an inhabitant of a state or the nation with protected rights and privileges—simply does not provide an accurate representation of Douglass’s self, as he was very well aware. Earlier in the same speech, he had insisted, “Every inch of ground occupied by the colored man in this country is sternly disputed. At the ballot box and at the altar—in the church and in the State—he is deemed an intruder.”16 Hence, Douglass, as a colored man, is an intruder—and, at the same time, a citizen, and a free citizen at that. On the one hand, Douglass uses his text to explicitly identify himself, and on the other, he does so in such unbelievable terms that it is impossible to take him at his word.17 The Kansas-Nebraska Act speech exposes what is at stake in understanding Douglass to testify without expecting his text and his person to coincide. To notice how the scarred body or the uncertain age haunts the straightforwardness of the Narrative is to understand that there is more to Douglass’s story than what is ultimately told. As I began to suggest, that “more” may be much more, may be the whole of a being that lacks a language appropriate to his experience. Yet when Douglass professes to identify himself in the simplest terms possible (“I am a . . .”) and ends up making a misstatement, it becomes clear that the disjunction between self and language also permits him to speak falsely or, at least, to stray from a rigorous commitment to telling the truth.18 Once we acknowledge the attenuation between Douglass and his text, then, we would seem to risk allowing the two to become so dissociated as to disqualify his work as testimonial, as charged by the force of truth. But Émile Benveniste and Giorgio Agamben refuse this logic; in fact, they articulate precisely the reverse position: it is because Douglass’s texts do not identify him, in their view, that they can testify at all. Benveniste and Agamben are productive interlocutors for Douglass, as I hope to demonstrate, because they understand his testimony as conditioned, rather than refuted, by the circumstances of the ex-slave who remains uncircumscribed by his text.

“I” Benveniste’s short essay “The Nature of Pronouns” does not directly address the topic of testimony, but it makes a linguistic claim that crucially shifts how testimony is understood to work. Benveniste argues that I is, in fact, never identical to a self, that it never proclaims an identity. This is because I is not a representational word at all, because it does not refer to any one thing or group of things, as do other nouns and certain other pronouns. Citizen is one such ordinary noun: although it does not

66 / douglass

have a one-to-one correlation with a single object, it refers generally and consistently to a person recognized as holding national or state rights. He may refer to more than one male beings, but in any given conversation, he refers to a limited number of distinctive entities. By contrast, I does not refer to anything outside of the act of discourse that produces it. Benveniste writes, “What then is the reality to which I or you refers? It is solely a ‘reality of discourse,’ and this is a very strange thing. I cannot be defined except in terms of ‘locution,’ not in terms of objects as a nominal sign is. I signifies ‘the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I.”19 There is no I, Benveniste insists, waiting with an assigned meaning to be invoked in speech (as there would be for “nominal signs,” such as citizen and he), because I only has significance in the act of being spoken.20 This conclusion is indeed “a very strange thing.” It means that I does not exist outside of the present-tense event of utterance, which means that even a succession of I’s cannot refer to a continuous identity. The I that I utter now refers only to myself in that act of utterance, and the I that I utter five minutes or five seconds later refers anew to myself in a different, and not inherently related, position in time and possibly in space or gesture or mind-set. Hence Benveniste’s theory would contest even the idea of a fluid self, if that fluidity were to be represented with an I, because fluidity suggests a continuity of substance with a changeable form, and Benveniste is pointing to the structural impossibility of using I to refer to any continuity. I dismisses all previous acts of utterance, all previous references, to complete its one-time-use work. Benveniste’s theory provides a useful model for a writer who was generally attentive to the circumstances in which he enunciated his claims and who would expose, as in the passage from the Narrative discussed earlier, the distance between the writer and his subject. The first chapter of My Bondage and My Freedom magnifies the intricacy of Douglass’s situation in recalling his past. The chapter closes with what is meant to be a general summary of boyhood—“[one] is, for the most part of the first eight years of his life, a spirited, joyous, uproarious, and happy boy, upon whom troubles fall only like water on a duck’s back”—and Douglass’s tentative affirmation that it matches his own: “And such a boy, so far as I can now remember, was the boy whose life in slavery I am now narrating” (MB, 145). The awkwardness of the formulation results from the dissociation between the boy and the “I” who now narrates, a dissociation that causes Douglass to imagine a standard life for the boy who is not more particularly or intimately related to him. Two pages later, Douglass seems to assert a contrasting continuity between

douglass / 67

the boy and the writer: “I was a slave—born a slave—and though the fact was incomprehensible to me, it conveyed to my mind a sense of my entire dependence on the will of somebody I had never seen” (MB, 147). Here Benveniste’s theory is both most counterintuitive and most insightful. The “I” who was a slave, and the “me” to whom the fact of slavery was incomprehensible, still refer to the person who now narrates, even though Douglass means to signify through them the mind of the boy who no longer exists to narrate for himself. This signification is not identical to representation; indeed, Douglass cannot represent a continuity of self because of the limitations of the grammatical structure noted earlier: it is always “I” who “am now narrating.” Thus, at the moment when Douglass declares, “I was a slave,” he affirms his present-tense speaking self, the one who no longer is a slave, who is thereby just as separated from his boyhood as in the formulation “such a boy . . . was the boy,” for such a phrase cannot logically be followed by “who I am” but must be met with “whose life in slavery I am now narrating.” Douglass works to write his way into a past that will always refuse to become the enunciative subject of his writing.21 In Agamben’s view, this disjunction between Douglass’s enunciating self and the slave boy is what qualifies his work as testimony. Agamben, like Emerson in the previous chapter, presents a perspective on what it means to bear witness that shatters the presumption that it consists of narrating one’s past experiences. But whereas Emerson’s main contention is that things can and do speak for themselves, Agamben focuses on persons, and he argues that they remain silent and require a voice to speak in their stead, even if they have full use of their vocal apparatus. This is because for Agamben, a single person is always split into two beings: one that lives, that has experiences, and another that speaks, that takes up a discursive position. He explains that no seamless expression is possible: when one wants to make an I statement, one leaves the silent living being (the body wanting to make an I statement) and becomes a speaking being (a body that can enunciate I). Agamben thus emphasizes Benveniste’s distinction between enunciation and representation, arguing that the act of speaking entails entering a realm regulated by language rather than feeling or being.22 This is the first part of Agamben’s reading of testimony as not relying on an assertion of identity. He insists that the being that lives and the being that speaks never coincide. The living being does not enter discourse, because the production of discourse signals the arrival of the speaking being; and by the same token, the speaking being never lives, because, as Benveniste explains, language relies on enunciation,

68 / douglass

the appropriation of signs in a discursive realm. Like I, the words one uses have no identity with the living being. It is one who uses them, then, only to the extent that one is always two. The two remain, of course, intimately connected, as the living being motivates the upsurge of the speaking being, and the speaking being relies on the living being to have something to say. As Agamben writes, “It is certainly true that the two series flow alongside one another in what one could call absolute intimacy. But is intimacy not precisely the name that we give to a proximity that also remains distant, to a proximity that never becomes identity?”23 That the two series are so close means that they are not one, that the text is not tied to and so does not immediately say the self. This fundamental premise allows for the second part of Agamben’s theory of testimony that refuses recourse to identity. The flowing alongside, the intimacy, the proximity between the two series is not a negative space: it is the space of testimony. Testimony happens in between the living being and the speaking being: it is the “living being’s becoming speaking and the logos’ becoming living.”24 That is, testimony refers neither to the experience nor to the language but precisely to the process of their connection, which must happen in the space that keeps them apart. As the living being leaves the experience to become the speaking being with access to language, testimony is produced; and as the speaking being returns to the living being to learn what else to say, testimony is again produced. A testimonial text is the sum of these leavings and returnings. It is the evidence of the impossibility of making experience speak that is, in the final analysis, what comes to be read as transcribed experience. Reading testimony means attending to how the words bear with them but cannot present the self. For Agamben, then, there is no one speaker of testimony or witness, because the testifying always happens in a moment of transition or suspension, between the one series—living, experiencing, and having something to say—and the other series, to which speaking, language, and discourse belong. The moment of transition or suspension is the emergence of the witness. Agamben’s theory would understand Douglass to bear witness not by using language to represent the complex self he bears but by entering a language that remains separate from that self. The man who sits down to write his story finds a limited vocabulary available to refer to his living being, the scarred body ready to write: there is “boy” and “slave” and “citizen” and “alien,” and at the moment that any of them appears on the page, they signal his abandonment of the body that motivated their use.25 “I was a slave” does not mean that when my body expresses itself,

douglass / 69

the word slave appears. Rather, the sentence signifies that a certain body has been abandoned in order to take up the register of language that is its only path to communication.26 This is the sense, too, in which Douglass’s proclamation of citizenship may be understood as testimonial rather than fictional. Citizen is not the perfect representation of his body, but its testimonial use would not be dependent on such a match. Instead, citizen would testify precisely insofar as it indicates the distance between the living body and the register of linguistic terms that the speaking body may appropriate. Still, it must be admitted that Douglass’s body is very different from citizen, perhaps more different than some of the other terms that are used to invoke it. Agamben’s theory certainly does not allow for the appropriation of any discursive terms to refer to the silent body; it is supposed to be the living being that makes the speaking being speak, presumably as truthfully as possible.27 To some degree, then, Douglass might seem to be manipulating language rather than testifying in Agamben’s sense. Yet what becomes most evident in Douglass’s simplified question—“Am I citizen or am I alien?”—is that he really is neither, that neither term is worth appropriating insofar as both necessitate serious deviance from the life of the body. The body becomes legible, then, as what is not equivalent to language, as what must remain separate from language even as it strains to be recognized through language. That is to say, Douglass’s use of a word that is misrepresentational actually highlights his body’s suspension between living and speaking. He makes legible the noncoincidence of those two registers, drawing the reader away from the text and toward the body that is not quite at home in it. In this way, Douglass’s apparent lie becomes a way to actually read his body (bodies) in the process of testifying. Agamben’s theory of testimony is especially rich for reading Douglass’s texts, because it translates his earnest misstatements into the suspension of a body experiencing what it cannot name. Douglass can be understood as highlighting the living being’s movement to come to speech and its foundering when the speaking being finds no appropriate words. An argument of Douglass’s in an 1852 speech in Pittsburgh benefits from such a lens and seems particularly illogical without it. Addressing the Fugitive Slave Act’s institution of summary hearings instead of jury trials, Douglass summarizes, “The colored men’s rights are less than those of a jackass. No man can take away a jackass without submitting the matter to twelve men in any part of this country. A black man may be carried away without any reference to a jury.”28 This is an especially vivid and quite accurate depiction of the facts. Douglass moves, however,

70 / douglass

rapidly away from such sure ground when he asks the audience, “Could a law be made to pass away any of your individual rights? No. And so neither can a law be made to pass away the right of the black man.”29 The logic here is that although a positive law has rendered the black man less significant than a jackass, the positive law is at odds with the more fundamental laws of the universe that guarantee all persons ownership of their bodies, and therefore the positive law is illegal. The irresistible conclusion would be that the black man does have more rights than a jackass. But of course, this is patently untrue.30 If it were true, no audience would be gathered in Pittsburgh to hear Frederick Douglass speak, because Douglass would have no urgent political speech to deliver. If the audience realizes this—if they realize that the man before them speaks thanks to a legal identity that he invokes and cannot adopt—then they begin to actually see, to bear witness to, the life of Douglass’s body, which is legally free and yet threatened by the (fugitive slave) law. The contradiction exposes the body that cannot seamlessly become language, that moves toward a language that never quite expresses it. By seeing it so move, as it were, by hearing it speak without an identity that perfectly denotes it, the audience receives Douglass’s testimony.31 Put differently, in this example, hearing Douglass testify (or reading his text as testimonial) is contingent on not identifying him. The “colored man” without rights, invoked at first, is not identical to the “black man” with rights invoked subsequently, and neither is identical to the man who invokes them. Douglass is arguing, in effect, that identifying him with either term loses the import of the other designation: to see him as threatened obscures his manhood, while to see him as simply free ignores his lack of protection before the law. Douglass is neither colored nor black, then, or he is both colored and black. Because the two terms are used oppositionally, Douglass’s body must be seen as shuttling between them, as alternately signifying through both even as such a coincidence is logically impossible. His body must be seen as not only suspended before language but suspended between identifying designations, in order for his words to mean as testimony and not as mere misstatements. Agamben thus helps to explain, in a theoretical register, how Douglass may be understood as testifying to an audience without identifying himself. Agamben’s entire approach is contingent on verbal labels remaining noncoincidental with living selves, and certain of Douglass’s texts exploit and even require acknowledgment of this separation to be meaningful.

douglass / 71

What remains outside of Agamben’s purview are Douglass’s specific historical circumstances. I have mentioned thus far several terms that Douglass may have found available to his writing body: boy, slave, citizen, alien, colored, and black. The items on Douglass’s list at any time reflect the concerns of the culture in which he writes. Hence, the list evolves, which becomes clear if the 1852 passage on the Fugitive Slave Act is compared to the remarks about racial identity in Life and Times, cited at the opening of this chapter. In 1852, Douglass’s use of colored and black appears somewhat arbitrary; it does not seem to be significant that the “colored” man does not have rights while the “black” man does, and it seems to be less important that two different words are used than that two different identities, a nonfree and a free one, are invoked. Yet when he is called a second time to the metaphorical witness stand, it is because he cannot speak without first answering, “Of what color is he?” an exacting demand which implies that he may not have been able to be so free with his terminology. He would perhaps have had to pick colored or black, to have foregrounded the choice and to have chosen rightly. That is to say, Douglass’s list undergoes a significant change; whereas in 1852 his options may have seemed reducible to slave or free, citizen or alien, in 1892, they include degrees of complexion. The header of Douglass’s Life and Times supplement chapter describes the demands of the latter moment as “the race problem” (LT, 938), which suggests, as I mentioned earlier, a new knotty difficulty that he has decided to confront. I would propose, accordingly, that Agamben’s model of the witness as suspended seems particularly apt for Douglass’s earlier career; once the race problem becomes dominant, Douglass may lose the ability to manipulate language in his characteristic way, demonstrating how fitting or unfitting various terms were for his living body. He would become black, or half black, or some other minute measurement, full stop. This timeline calls for further investigation. If the expectations of the 1890s are familiar (they presage segregation and xenophobia, not to mention racial profiling), then the openness of the 1850s may appear strangely indefinite. Hence, I turn now to examine the historical conditions, especially the legal climate, that permitted Douglass’s testimonial suspension. Understanding why citizen and alien or colored and black could be used so freely, why Douglass’s audience could follow his fast-and-loose shuffling of these terms that might otherwise mean so concretely, helps to fill in the image of his unstoried, indefinitely colored body as it bore witness through the middle of the nineteenth century.

72 / douglass

Fugitives Although citizen and alien were not the only legal terms on Douglass’s 1850s list, his simplification exaggerates only slightly. In the Civil Rights Cases that came before the Supreme Court in 1883, Judge Harlan’s dissenting opinion reflects on the lack of accurate terminology Douglass faced: “Before the adoption of the recent [Thirteenth and Fourteenth] amendments it had become, as we have seen, the established doctrine of this court that . . . one might have all the rights and privileges of a citizen of a state without being a citizen in the sense in which that word was used in the national constitution, and without being entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens of the several states.”32 In other words, a person like Douglass lived as a citizen without holding the legitimizing designation of citizen and without bearing any other status in its stead.33 In this context, Douglass could not have been anything but suspended, could not have correctly identified himself even if he had tried. Yet what is most revealing about the limitations of the list is that its inexactitude seems not to have bothered anyone very much. The Supreme Court, as Judge Harlan says, had an established doctrine of not establishing how free black persons ought to be classed. Leaving Douglass undefined may not have been an oversight, then, so much as the consequence of carelessness, of lack of urgency. Douglass seems to worry about this state of affairs when he observes that the Fugitive Slave Act permits any black person to be seized, since “it is only necessary to claim him, and that some villain should swear to his identity.”34 If swearing were definitive, then it may have been because no more certain regulatory procedures existed. Indeed, Douglass’s relation of the details of his 1838 escape suggests that hardly any did: My means of escape were provided for me by the very men who were making laws to hold and bind me more securely in slavery. It was the custom in the State of Maryland to require of the free colored people to have what were called free papers. This instrument they were required to renew very often, and by charging a fee for this writing, considerable sums from time to time were collected by the State. In these papers the name, age, color, height and form of the free man were described, together with any scars or other marks upon his person which would assist in his identification. This device of slaveholding ingenuity, like other devices of wickedness, in some measure defeated itself—since more than one man could be found to answer the same general description. Hence

douglass / 73

many slaves could escape by personating the owner of one set of papers. (LT, 643) Douglass draws attention to the contingency of the system of free papers. Before reproducible photographs began to circulate widely, identification cards were literally sketchy, and the expectation did not exist that their written descriptions ought to approximate a more exacting technology. While the free papers consistently required renewal, they never became more accurate, because they only ever included a general description that could apply to multiple persons. It was in the State of Maryland’s interest to collect fees on the filing of papers more than it was in its interest to know exactly who was filing them. The claim that regulating identity largely did not matter to antebellum governmental institutions requires more space to fully develop than the remainder of this chapter will allow. Yet even picking up on the points just raised—the Fugitive Slave Act’s evasion of an identifying system, the contingency of “general descriptions”—begins to describe a social and legal climate in which “Of what color is he?” was far less urgent than it later would be. The question is not exactly unanswerable in the 1850s, but it is also not assumed to always have a single and certified answer. The Senate discussions of the Fugitive Slave Bill and the legal defense of one fugitive in particular, Anthony Burns, suggest that part of the reason that Douglass could remain suspended, could testify without identifying himself, is that no one quite expected him to do otherwise. What is striking about the congressional transcripts is that, while issues of identification arise and are addressed, they appear to be tangential rather than critical, and the senators do not totally resolve them. The question of the alleged fugitive’s status, for instance, emerges almost subtly, despite its considerable ramifications. The Fugitive Slave Act was meant, as one southern senator put it, “to give some sort of satisfaction to the people of the slaveholding States,”35 so that its prospective provisions were considered from the perspective of the slaveholder and not the slave. But as Senator John Winthrop of Massachusetts points out, slave and slaveholder were terms with limited geographical currency. According to his southern colleagues, Winthrop explains, “there is but one question to be decided with regard to a person claimed as a fugitive from labor; and that is the question whether he belongs to, or owes labor or service to, the party who claims him? But it seems to me that there is another and a preliminary question, and that, whether he is a fugitive at all; whether he belongs or owes service to anybody? It must always be a question whether such a person be your slave, or whether he

74 / douglass

be our freeman.”36 In a state that does not recognize slavery, Winthrop is arguing, there are no fugitive slaves. Once a person has crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, he or she retains the rights of a free person and must be treated accordingly by the judicial system.37 Winthrop loses the point: alleged fugitives are granted no jury trials and are, famously, prohibited from speaking during any hearings. Yet Winthrop’s argument usefully exposes the law’s willful blind spot. Because a slave would receive completely different treatment than a free person, the law is unable to allow for both possibilities and still to dictate a single regulatory procedure. Even if, prior to the hearings, the fugitive is admitted to be an alleged fugitive, then, the law cannot truly recognize the contingency of the designation.38 Giving some satisfaction to the slaveholding states thus turns out to mean that every alleged fugitive will be treated as, and assumed to be, a slave. The legal status of the alleged fugitive is thus determined from the start, and the possibility of proving otherwise is made very narrow: one would have to demonstrate, having been denied the rights of a free person, and without speaking and with the commissioner’s pay scale working against him or her,39 that one is entitled to the rights of a free person. This is precisely the constraint that Douglass identifies as abrogating the rights of all black persons, for anyone brought before the law as an “alleged” fugitive is treated as, and effectively becomes, a slave. In terms of legal status, then, the fugitive’s identity is virtually written into the law. Yet the issue of personal identity arises subsequently and ends up substantially less determined. Senator Butler of South Carolina understands (or misunderstands) Winthrop to be charging that the bill appears to sanction the random kidnapping of northern black persons on the basis of southern certificates of ownership. In other words, Butler hears “whether he belongs or owes service to anybody?” to be asking whether the alleged fugitive might not be someone who is legitimately free by southern law, not simply free on the basis of residing in a northern state. Butler “venture[s]” that he “may safely make the broad assertion that [since 1793] not a single case has occurred where a person has pursued and taken a fugitive, or a person as a fugitive, who was not his property, or the property of one for whom he was acting as an agent.”40 As Butler probably knows, this assertion is far from “safe”: cases of mistaken identity dot American newspapers at this point in the nineteenth century, and some of the most spectacular (and most appealed) revolved around freedom suits.41 Perhaps accordingly, Butler’s cohort appears to earnestly consider how the law could verify an alleged fugitive’s personal identity. Of concern,

douglass / 75

says Senator Joseph Underwood of Kentucky, is the possibility of a claimant making a fraudulent record of a missing slave and then using that record to kidnap someone. Underwood refuses to consider the possibility that even a legitimate record could be used as a vehicle for kidnapping, and this may be because he believes in what Douglass knows he should not: the efficacy of records. He argues that claims should be filed “in the county whence the slave fled,” and “with that record in his hand by the owner, if your magistrates were appointed by the Federal court, what would they have to do? Nothing but to decide the question of identity. Here is the record—the description giving the character of the slave, whether male or female, his or her age, and appearance, and color, and all necessary particulars. Then your commissioner or magistrate—call him what you please—has nothing to do but to decide the question of identity. And why do you want a jury for that purpose?”42 Underwood maintains that a written description of one slave could never match that of another; the matter is so direct and simple, for him, that it would not require a second or twelfth opinion. He apparently has faith in the system of “general descriptions” that, Douglass demonstrates, is so permeable as to facilitate escape. It is impossible to know whether Butler and Underwood actually believed that mistaken-identity cases were rare or that documents with “all necessary particulars” could prevent them. Nonetheless, it is evident that their discussion opens questions that it was in their interest to have kept closed. If a case of mistaken identity were even possible (and Winthrop’s colleagues instruct Butler that they certainly were), then Winthrop’s “preliminary question” had to be entertained, for the alleged fugitive might in fact be a federally free person. And if slaves had the character Underwood wants described, then, as Ariela Gross points out, they were not only property but persons and again should have been treated accordingly.43 Thus, in the process of planning, somewhat breezily, to certify personal identity, the senators end up unraveling their assumption about legal status. Who or what the slave is becomes increasingly vexed, rather than determined, as their discussions unfold. The senators proceed as if they have solved what they have in fact confused, and their inexactitude eventually finds its way into the text of the law. The act’s most notorious feature is its mandate, “In no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of [the] alleged fugitive be admitted in evidence.”44 This phrasing seems to admit that although there could be no jury, some kind of “trial” might still ensue. Another example appears in section 10 of the act, which provides for a claimant to make a local record (of the type that Underwood outlined) that may be shown to a

76 / douglass

northern commissioner, who would in turn authorize seizure and transport of an alleged fugitive. The record ought to contain, the act states, “a general description of the person so escaping, with such convenient certainty as may be”45—a formulation that hardly inspires confidence. The northern commissioner is to take the record as “full and conclusive evidence” of the fact of escape by one who owes labor. Nonetheless, “further evidence if necessary, either oral or by affidavit, in addition to what is contained in the said record” may be required to finally determine “the identity of the person escaping.”46 In other words, the record and its “convenient” “general description” may not be sufficient to prove the alleged fugitive’s personal identity. Other, oral or written, proofs might be necessary, which is to say that the law ultimately does not “believe” in the power of its provisions and records to anticipate and ensure accurate knowledge of identity. Identity remains a question, and a question that was to be turned over to the commissioners to individually determine it. Identity would, then, be multiply determined, which means that it would cease to be identity at all—or at least that personal identity would not be centrally regulated with unequivocal standards.47 Douglass could exploit this strangely asystemic system, by impersonating a man with free papers or by claiming to be something that he was not. Yet he was also subject to its consequences: the conductor who does not read Douglass’s papers as closely as he might still bears the power to decide whether the man matches the description, and, similarly, the commissioner is charged with determining who, exactly, is brought before him. As Dred Scott v. Sanford demonstrated in 1859, Douglass’s claims to be a citizen were ultimately contingent on judicial rule. Hence, Douglass’s situation is quite odd: he perceives the open-endedness of identity on which the legal climate depends (or, at least, which it does not take steps to refute) and at the same time understands that truly taking advantage of that open-endedness lies just beyond his reach. When he articulates the threat to all black men under the Fugitive Slave Act—“It is only necessary to claim [one], and that some villain should swear to his identity”—he pinpoints the problem: swearing to the man’s identity remains the job of the “villain,” the kidnapper, the slaveholder, and then the commissioner. However loose the criteria on which such swearing takes place, in the final analysis, authority rests with anyone other than the man himself. Given this historical context, Douglass could never speak in anything but a suspended state, for even claiming his own personhood was contingent on other persons (whether the conductor or his former master or the Supreme Court judges) approving his decision. One could, it seems, be virtually anything in the legal climate of

douglass / 77

the 1850s—unless, or until, one was determined to be a slave or, what amounted to the same thing, a fugitive. The 1854 Boston case of alleged fugitive Anthony Burns brings this ambivalence about identity to the fore.48 The case turns on the issue of swearing, as Douglass presents it: a “villain,” Charles Suttle, swears that the alleged fugitive is his slave, and ratifying or rejecting his statement falls to the commissioner, Edward G. Loring. Yet there is another person claiming authority or, in effect, theorizing authority, and his theory makes swearing to another’s identity a highly contingent event, one that can never be certified in the way intended by the southern senators. Richard Henry Dana Jr. acts as the alleged fugitive’s counsel,49 and he demonstrates that if identity could be sworn by anyone (or any villain), then it could never be definitively decided. Dana’s defense is that the claimant has the wrong man, and his evidence is fairly straightforward. The claimant’s witness, a man named Brent, had testified that he had last seen Burns in Richmond on March 20, 1854, and guessed that he had escaped between the twentieth and the twenty-fourth. Dana produces nine witnesses who testify to having seen the prisoner in Boston on or before the eighteenth. One, “a colored man well known in this city,” reports that he met the then-homeless Burns on March first and arranged for him to wash windows in a factory where several other people saw him working.50 Dana’s challenge is to explain why his nine witness ought to prevail over the claimant’s one, and in meeting this challenge, he offers a radical theory composed of two major assertions. First, he argues, “Identification is matter of opinion. Opinion is influenced by the temper, and motive, and frame of mind.”51 There can be no final certificate on a person’s identity, Dana implies, because the act of identifying someone is always a subjective act—indeed, an act so subjective as to be “matter of opinion.” One identifies based on motive, not the objective existence of the person identified, and, says Dana, if the commissioner will but “reflect that every reading man in Virginia, with all the pride of the Old Dominion aroused in him, is turning his eyes to the result of this issue,” he will realize that “no man could be more liable to bias than a Virginian, testifying in Massachusetts, at this moment, on such an issue, with every powerful and controlling motive on earth enlisted for success.”52 The claimant and his witness identify the prisoner as their slave because their honor depends on it, not because they have any conclusive knowledge about who he is. The second part of the argument explains why, if identification is only ever a declaration of opinion, Dana’s witnesses may be read as less

78 / douglass

motivated than the claimant. “On the question of identity,” he states, “numbers are every thing”—and it is crucial to attend to his reason: One man may mistake, by accident, by design or bias. His sight may be poor, his observation imperfect, his opportunities slight, his recollection of faces not vivid. But if six or eight men agree on identity, the evidence has more than six or eight times the force of one man’s opinion. Each man has his own mode and means and habit of observation and recollection. One observes one thing, and another another thing. One makes this combination and association, and another that. One sees him in one light or expression, another a tone, another the gait, another the gesture. Now if a considerable number of these independent observers combine upon the same man, the chances of mistake are lessened to an indefinite degree. What other man could answer so many conditions, presented in so various ways. On the point of time and place, too, each of those witnesses is an independent observer. These are not links in one chain, each depending on another. They are separate rays, from separate sources, settling on one point.53 Dana does not minimize the role that opinion plays for his witnesses, who arguably have the reading public of Massachusetts’ eyes trained on them. If anything, he makes the act of identification even more subjective, even more contingent, than it first appeared: it is only a single small detail—an expression, a tone, a gait, a gesture—that impresses itself on an observer’s mind and serves to ground an assessment of identity. Each act of identification remains independent and isolated, so that Mr. Jones (who befriended the alleged fugitive) never bases his on more than, say, a tone, and Mr. Drew (who paid him for his work) never bases his on more than a gesture. When the two men collectively identify the alleged fugitive, their separate viewpoints or “rays” are settling on the same man, but their criteria remain their own. Jones cannot add Drew’s glimpsed gesture to his own noticed tone such that they would form “links in one chain, each depending on another,” that would “lock up” the prisoner’s identity. Jones and Drew each see, Dana implies, a distinct being when they see the prisoner. What guarantees his identity, then, what makes him the same man, is that he is composed of several different men, and nine of them are visible in the courtroom. A tenth witness would have seen a tenth man but still could have helped Dana’s case by asserting that the alleged fugitive seemed to be that tenth man. Dana’s argument makes the act of identification so tenuous as to appear beyond the scope of legal regulation, except by a crude majority-rule

douglass / 79

standard. His perspective is far more radical than any of the senators’, but it is the product of a legal climate in which general and convenient descriptions are understood to solve the problem of identity, which is not really acknowledged as a problem; it is the product of a legal climate in which Douglass obviously was not a citizen but was not quite not a citizen either. What is noteworthy about Dana’s intervention is that he takes these ambiguities and maximizes their potential, demonstrating what a truly open-ended idea of identification they allow. No one—no villain—can have the final word, in Dana’s view, because his theory is that identification is ultimately a composite act: a single being is designated thanks to the multiple ways in which he is seen. There exists no more reliable assessment than this collected multiplicity, or at least none that he accounts for in his defense. By this logic, there really is no single man that Commissioner Loring could set free. There is also no single slave that the commissioner could return to Virginia, even though this is what he does. Loring does not contest Dana’s points, and he even seems to proceed from Dana’s theory in the very process of ruling against him: “In every case of disputed identity there is one person always whose knowledge is perfect and positive, and whose evidence is not within the reach of error, and that is the person whose identity is questioned, and such evidence this case affords.”54 Loring refers to a conversation reported to have taken place between the alleged fugitive and the claimant, the first night that the former was imprisoned, in which he acknowledged that he recognized and legally belonged to the latter. The alleged fugitive is, of course, never given the opportunity to speak for himself, to confirm or deny his perceived admission. Thus, Loring’s “perfect and positive” evidence is hearsay.55 Further, Loring’s decision forecloses the flexibility and undecidability intrinsic to Dana’s argument. Loring attributes perfect and positive knowledge to the alleged fugitive, but it is his own position of power that allows him to make such an attribution, which is to say that it is himself and not the individual that finally makes the determination. Loring’s decision is nothing more, in the end, than an act of swearing that prohibits the black man from swearing for himself. His declaration of the alleged fugitive’s identity is the ringbolt on which all other assessments will subsequently rely, as “links in one chain, each depending on each other.” Loring inches toward 1892 when he bestows authority on the black man only to vest it more fundamentally in his own voice, the voice of the law. He moves away from the senators’ willingness to rely on “general descriptions” because no better technology existed, and he moves away from Dana’s radical interpretation of their uncertainty. He foreshadows

80 / douglass

the moment when Douglass ought to be able to speak for himself, to have perfect and positive knowledge of what and who he is—but when he instead finds himself, once again, or perhaps even more so than before, dependent on the criteria of other, belligerent authorities.

The voice of the law When Douglass restarts his testifying career, it would seem that testimony without identity was no longer available to him. The expanded version of Life and Times was published in 1892, the same year as Francis Galton’s Fingerprints; the thesis of the latter was dramatized soon after in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which no villain is needed to swear to Tom Driscoll’s true (slave) identity, because the scientific record of his own fingers incriminates him. The era of open-endedness, of misstatements revealing truths, would seem to have been replaced by the beginning of the era that we still inhabit, of state-issued identification cards, not to mention DNA testing. Nonetheless, Douglass’s understanding of his position at that time is quite nuanced and suggests that testimony without identity never expired for him. He “come[s] a second time upon the witness stand,” as I quoted earlier, even though he “was no longer young” and had retired with the relief of a “weary and over-burdened traveler” ten years earlier (LT, 938). It seems that Douglass had wanted to leave the witness stand permanently, to stop testifying altogether. This desire can now be understood in two senses. Obviously, he wished to be finished advocating for abolition. But Douglass also wished, I think, that he would no longer have to testify in Agamben’s sense of the word. That is, Douglass no longer wanted to be split into two bodies, one that lived and one that spoke. While for Agamben the split is fundamental, Douglass seems to have understood it as a temporary situation, a gap enforced by unfortunate historical circumstances. As a result, he imagined that the space between his two bodies might ultimately be healed. Once slavery was abolished and the designation citizen became genuinely available to him, it seemed, he could simply speak as himself, as a man with rights, not a man suspended. The language would have turned to allowed him to declare a positive and perfect, and entirely accurate and legitimate, identity for himself. What his living body had to say would be exactly what his speaking body said, so that expression would be seamless and identification fully achieved. In other words, Douglass supposed that when identification became a real and uncontested possibility, it would eradicate the need for testimony.

douglass / 81

Of course, identification did not become a real and uncontested possibility—at least not in the sense that he wished for it. Instead, there was nothing but the demand for identification, which again split Douglass, leaving his living body out of the discourse that only wanted to know “Of what color is he?” And Douglass is as a result nostalgic for the old times; he writes, “Though this [new work] is not altogether as agreeable to me as was my first mission, it is one that comes with such commanding authority as to compel me to accept it as a present duty” (LT, 939). During his first mission, Douglass looked forward to getting off the stand with a new word, citizen, to heal his two bodies. In the second, at least it seems in this passage, there is no such end in sight, only the continued rearrangement of terms into which his body did not fit. Hence, he looks back to the time when he was testifying and looking forward to testimony’s end. Charles Mills thinks that Douglass was naive to have imagined that being granted the status of citizen would allow him to speak unquestioned and fully vested with the rights of an American. Such an idea assumes that “the Constitution, original intent, and the Enlightenment polity itself, were all colorblind,”56 so that outlawing slavery establishes an equal society. Mills explains that Douglass thought that racial prejudice was an effect of the system of slavery, when in fact it was a deeply rooted part of the American law and economy that sanctioned that system: “he failed to fully recognize this structure itself, to realize how deeply race and racial self-interest had entered into the creation of the polity and its citizens’ identities, so that he would later underestimate, and be astonished by, the extent of white resistance to racial equality.”57 Citizen was never available unmodified to Douglass, as he had thought it would be; he would only ever be a black citizen, and that would be not a perfect expression of himself but another inadequate term. Mills’s point is that Douglass misjudged the fundamental cause of racial discrimination; it was not legal status (citizen, alien, or slave) but race itself. The abolition of slavery unmasked Douglass’s mistake. It initiated a social and cultural climate of segregation that aimed to preserve the white polity, and it did so by emphasizing race as biological, as an indelible part of the body. Gross tracks this shift from “race as documented ancestry to race as essential identity,” locating emancipation as a pivotal point: “Once a black man could become a citizen and even a landholder, whites had to find another means of racial definition. They found it in racial segregation.”58 While she agrees with Mills’s basic thesis, she emphasizes that the white polity rendered Douglass’s mistake an easy one to make, because it was not until after the Civil War that “racial definition” came to mean “racial segregation” and “essential identity.”59

82 / douglass

From the perspective of Agamben’s theory of testimony, the consequences of this transition are devastating. The living body becomes irrevocably tied to a word—black—that signals its identity; the living body is thus in itself, in its very silence even, a speaking body. Douglass could still speak, that is, and he might have much more to say than the designation of race “said,” but he would be speaking for a living body that had always already said something, something that “colored” everything else. The space of testimony was not empty save for the shuttling of the living body and the speaking body; it had race in it. To testify was to testify as a representative of the race. Like Loring’s decision that the law determines legal identity, this mode of testifying within the framework of identity politics is familiar to twenty-first-century readers. But it is crucial to notice that it represents a shift, a shift that astonished Douglass, and that it therefore was not the model that grounded his speech for much of his life. The way he tells it, “Of what color is he?” became the question that preceded all others. To read him as testifying without asking what question circulated earlier (or to understand why no question circulated) is to miss how thoroughly suspension between experience and language was possible in and formative of his writings. That Agamben’s theory is not compatible with a climate of forced identification—that he might be understood to say that there is no testimony in such a climate—is perhaps not surprising.60 What might be unexpected, however, is Douglass’s implicit agreement. As I suggested earlier, Douglass wishes to surpass Agamben’s model—to forever join living to speaking with the right set of words, with a better understanding of citizen—but until such words become available, he also wishes for that model. He needs the suspension it allows to keep his living body separate from the bloodthirsty classifications of “scientific” authority. Priscilla Wald recognizes this future-oriented position that must look past the immediate future. She notes, “As a free black man, Douglass has a preferable but less definable place in the nation than he had before. Here is a self betwixt and between, poised to be named into an identity not yet available to him.”61 Douglass’s “poise” remains without identity, deflecting the false identities presented to him and earnestly seeking the true one that might one day arrive. Douglass articulates how he holds this delicate position soon after he takes the stand the second time, in his discussion of the Supreme Court’s 1883 decision that the 1875 Civil Rights Act against discrimination was unconstitutional.62 Douglass at first seems to squarely confront the facts that Mills insists always eluded him: “It is said that this decision would make no difference in the treatment

douglass / 83

of colored people; that the Civil Rights Bill was a dead letter and could not be enforced. There may be some truth in all this” (LT, 978). But that was not “the whole truth”: “That bill, like all advance legislation, was a banner on the outer wall of American liberty; a noble moral standard uplifted for the education of the American people. There are tongues in trees, sermons in stones, and books in the running brooks. This law, though dead, did speak” (LT, 978). The idea of “advance legislation” seems to connote a law that is passed not because it can be executed, but because it allows people to think that it might be possible to execute it in the future. Douglass sees the Civil Rights Act as promising a future possibility, as existing to encourage hope for a world in which it could actually function. The law appears to him suspended between its iteration and its adoption, poised, like Douglass, for what will come to pass but has not yet.63 The quotation’s second metaphor, the sentence from As You Like It, further elucidates Douglass’s view of the progressive law. In Shakespeare’s play, the line is spoken by the Duke, banished to the forest, to convince his lords that their ostensibly unwanted location is just as desirable as the court. The passage begins, “Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,  / Hath not old custom made this life more sweet  / Than that of painted pomp?”64 Their new setting might be “exempt from public haunt,” the Duke continues, but it contains its own virtues: “our life . . . / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”65 The lines are farcical in context and slightly misquoted by Douglass, who, nonetheless, appears to use them earnestly. It may be worth noting that Thoreau also adopted the line with variation and with serious intent in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1845). Describing the stones that produced the potholes at Shelburne Falls, he writes, “They teach us lessons, these dumb workers; verily there are ‘sermons in stones, and books in the running streams.’ In these very holes the Indians hid their provisions; but now there is no bread, but only its neighbor stones at the bottom.”66 Thoreau reads the stones as containing voice and annals of the past where written accounts are not available.67 Douglass’s misquotation is literally closer to the text, though his reading is just as imaginative. Whereas Thoreau is thinking about how stones can speak the past, Douglass is theorizing a future society where a law that is a dead letter may yet thrive. The Duke is not referring to actual laws that have new meaning in the forest; he is plainly asking his cohort to view their surroundings as promising rather than desolate. Douglass writes, by contrast, as if the law had been living in a place where it could

84 / douglass

be appreciated and, ultimately, returned to the proverbial throne. “This law, though dead, did speak.” The implication is that it did not speak from Washington to the country (there it was dead) but that it still spoke in another time or place—an Arden—signifying its spirit even without becoming enforceable, and recognizable, law. The image is close to that of Douglass’s body, testifying by being suspended between what it had to say and the speech that could only imperfectly realize it. The law, like the body, wants to be recognized in speech, but its language fails to represent its intentions to an audience that would truly understand it. Thus, the law, like Douglass, hopes for a point in time when it will not need to be “advance legislation,” will not need to exist as two “bodies”: when what it has to say will be equivalent to what it says, when citizen will mean “citizen” and not “black citizen” or “white citizen.” And yet because the form that this hope takes is the insistence that the law or Douglass still has more to say, more than can come to language in the present, he also sees the future in terms of the two bodies that remain intimate but never coincide. If they ever did coincide, Douglass or the law would not have anything more to say; there would be nothing more to hope for. Douglass brings to light this particular feature of Agamben’s framework: what the speaking being testifies to—in the sense of makes evident—is the living being that cannot come to speech. And that process of making evident takes the form of a promise, because what is evident is that there is more to say that has not yet been said. There is therefore the possibility that what has not yet been said might be said in the future, that the silent might be made to speak. Douglass seems to imagine that the distance between living and speaking could become smaller and smaller, that one day his living body would be equivalent to the word citizen. That such a future never arrives for him says something about American law and history. But it also says something about the form that Douglass’s writing takes. His point, it seems, is not to arrive at that union but to keep it ahead. It remains ahead because there is always more living being—and there are always more living beings—that have not yet been brought to speech. Hence, Douglass’s writing, which is to say his testimony, is issued as a hope. He hopes for an expression that would be more perfect than testimony, that would conjoin living to speaking. He hopes, that is, for nothing less than the possibility of words that meet experience exactly, of words fastened lovingly to things. And yet he never sustains a vision of such a reality actually coming to pass. In other words, Douglass hopes, and he does not stop hoping. His testimony is composed of a vision of the future that will always be a vision of the future.

douglass / 85

For Douglass, to testify is to forever evade identification while forever approaching it. It is a forward-moving process, not a backward-looking one, oriented toward the moment in time when language and culture will make available the terms for the self to say what it has to say. In this way, Douglass’s thinking is more closely connected to Emerson’s theory of testimony than first appeared. While Emerson insists that ostensibly silent entities do speak, and Agamben’s premise is that they do not, Douglass’s intervention is to accept that they do not while hoping that they one day might. And Douglass’s collection of waiting entities turns out to be at least as large as Emerson’s, and even more momentous.68 Douglass writes about the Civil Rights Act, “It told the American people that they were all equal before the law; that they belonged to a common country and were equal citizens” (LT, 978). He invokes millions of bodies, long unheard, that might have been allowed to speak—to declare themselves citizens without attracting any scrutiny. He looks forward, accordingly, to a future in which the silence of oppression gives way to the voice of the vested citizen, arriving finally to claim a proper name.69 This theory of Douglass’s may seem abstract, but it accounts for his relentless writing, his taking the stand again and again. The four iterations of his autobiography may be read not as repeated gestures of selfadvertising or self-memorializing but as signaling an unwillingness to stop testifying, to stop imagining that a better way to say the self might still arrive.70 Such a perspective would help to make sense of Douglass’s full description of his reluctance to take the stand again in 1892. “I have,” he writes, “been embarrassed by the thought of writing so much about myself when there was so much else of which to write. . . . I write freely of myself, not from choice, but because I have, by my cause, been morally forced into thus writing” (LT, 938). It seems untenable, almost a disguised boast, for Douglass to profess at this point in his career that he would rather not have written so much about himself. Yet if he writes by a “moral force” that may be understood as the obligation to testify, then it becomes possible that he writes less for himself and more in the service of the cause that requires him to work toward a better way to express the life of a black man. This is the logic by which he prematurely calls himself a citizen and nearly equates himself with a jackass: he uses the only terms available in order to let his audience know that better terms need to be made available, that his living being has not come to language yet. Hence, what may seem like a mistaken assessment at the end of the original Life and Times—Douglass’s assertion that “a new dispensation of justice, kindness, and human brotherhood was dawning not only in the North, but in the South. . . . The rising generation are turning their

86 / douglass

eyes from the sunset of decayed institutions to the grand possibilities of a glorious future” (LT, 884)—may not have warranted correction a decade later; instead, Douglass may have wanted to renew and revise his hope in light of more recent events. After thousands of pages, his legacy is that he never stops hoping.71 I would thus slightly revise Mills’s final assessment of Douglass’s value. Douglass’s irrepressible optimism may not signal his blinded naiveté but may be his mode of testifying. Although Mills rejects Douglass as an acute political thinker, he advocates reading him because his “courage, moral outrage, and political intransigence are still inspirational.”72 If the courage, outrage, and intransigence are inspirational, I would suggest that it is precisely because they take the form of “inspiration,” of hope. Douglass writes with the hope that outrage and intransigence might one day not be necessary—an outrageous ideal perhaps, unless one recalls that he never abandons it as a hope. The ideal is constitutionally unrealizable; the point is to keep it ahead. Emerson writes at the conclusion to “Experience,” “I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think,” and then asks, “why not realize your world?”73 For Douglass, a very similar gap exists, and the realizing consists in showing what has yet to be realized. Douglass looks forward so that his readers will look forward, and he keeps writing to make evident that more writing needs to be done to realize what may yet come to voice. He writes because there is always more living being, and there are always more living beings, that require a new culture or language in which to be heard. And that culture or language can only remain a possibility if one continues to write toward it, to hope for it. Writing, hoping, testifying, Douglass forever approaches the day when everyone will be a citizen, when no one will be a jackass, and when Arden will become America.

3 /

Melville: Testimony without Voice

Melville’s later works begin quietly. They may describe momentous actions—such as Ishmael’s plan to join a whaling crew or the arrival of a mysterious ship in a lonely port—but rather than herald ensuing plots, the texts tend to focus on an observation of something or someone that does not speak. At the outset of Moby-Dick, for instance, Ishmael reports, “Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries” (MD, 18).1 The silence of the dreamy men recurs elsewhere: “Bartleby” begins with the note that the lawyer has no materials about him, and Billy Budd’s first decision is to make no demur.2 The landscape of Pierre is extravagantly still and silent: “Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to have ceased to grow; and all Nature, as if suddenly become conscious of her own profound mystery, and feeling no refuge from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose” (P, 3). The sea at the start of Benito Cereno is similarly uncommunicative: “The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray” (BC, 46). Collected here, these remarks suggest that Melville opens his narrative thinking by noticing the speechless entities that compose his fictions. Melville closes his narrative thinking this way, too, and this strangely static feature of his writings marks his difference from Emerson and Douglass, as well as his particular relationship to testimony. Emerson would also take note of a motionless tree, and Douglass would have attended to the silent man imagining the future. Their analysis, as I have argued, counters the assumption that these entities are essentially

88 / melville

speechless: for Emerson, simply noticing the tree might be a way to listen to it, and for Douglass, the potential sailor might one day be able to utter his ocean reverie. Melville, however, never assumes that testimony entails an overtaking of speechlessness by speech. Instead of bringing the silent men and the silent nature and the mute sea to voice, Melville’s texts progress in a contrary direction: they feature the world’s silences as stubborn and unyielding, and they problematize the idea that the text could reverse this essential condition. Hence, the concluding paragraphs of Benito Cereno do not make the sea speak; they rather expand the catalogue of silent things chronicled by the story and emphasize that they will remain so after the reader turns the final page. The sun, the sea, and the sky, says ship captain Delano, have “turned over new leaves” (BC, 116), preserving no trace of the events they may seem to have witnessed. Benito Cereno ceases to tell his story and soon dies, and Babo, the slave revolt leader, meets his “voiceless end” (BC, 116): he is dragged to his own hanging, his body is burned, and his head is displayed, grotesquely, on a pole. Melville seems to follow the story until its major elements have each fallen—or been tortured into being—silent, at which point there is nothing more to say. As the increasing muteness of the conclusion to Benito Cereno demonstrates, these apparently meaningful yet emphatically silent entities endanger a conception of testimony as spoken or written record. They seem to seal their knowledge within them, suggesting, as Babbalanja notes in Mardi, that “truth is in things, and not in words: truth is voiceless, so at least saith old Bardianna.”3 The sun, sea, and sky, Cereno and Babo, only bear the truth, in this formulation, when they become voiceless things, when they lose their claim to words. Or, from another perspective, the fact that they are silent indicates their alliance with truth. In either reading, the truthful entity is the silent one, and testimony seems impossible if it is to be vocalized.4 Nonetheless, it would be wrong to say that Melville dismisses the idea of testimony; his texts seem, instead, obsessed with it. Ishmael must bear witness to the whale; Benito Cereno testifies in his feebleness; Babo stands out for being excluded from the court proceedings.5 It is perhaps most accurate to say that Melville’s texts seem motivated to try to figure out what testimony might mean, might consist of, given the constraint of a world filled with unrelentingly silent, truthful things. I focus primarily on Benito Cereno in this chapter, because the text acutely demonstrates the stakes of Melville’s coupling of a deep suspicion of testimony with an abiding reverence before what demands it. If Melville is to imagine, as this chapter’s title promises, testimony without

melville / 89

voice, it will not only consist of a dissociation of testimony from vocalized representations of the past (as Emerson theorized) or from a discrete vocalizing self (as Douglass proposed), although “without voice” might also indicate those breaks. Melville’s particular contribution is the premise of a testimony that allows the silent world to stay silent. His texts allow us to ask, What if the entities—including persons and things—we would most like to hear from are irreversibly, constitutionally silent? In what would testimony then consist? I especially attend to Babo, extending the idea suggested by Douglass’s writing that the slave body’s testimony ensues from its status as a silent, truthful thing. In Melville’s oeuvre, an unraveling of the expected conjunction of the human and the voice allows testimony to open to things and things to lose their inhuman stigma. As a result, I argue, it becomes possible to trace how a breeze bears witness to the elusive truth of Benito Cereno. Its testimony without voice is different from that of Emerson’s vegetable or Douglass’s physical body: rather than impress itself upon its interlocutor as having something to say, Melville’s breeze is barely discernible; it crosses Delano, and the text, with just so much force as to disturb it and just so little as to make its path untraceable. It does not speak—it only allows one to wonder if a nonspeaking has suddenly made itself present. As I tease out my argument, I aim, as well, to demonstrate the relevance of Melville’s pursuit of a testimony without voice for current conversations about bearing witness, in particular, those that take place within the discourse of human rights. At the conclusion of Benito Cereno, Babo’s mangled head is voiceless in an importantly literal sense. When scholars of human rights attend to those who are without the capacity to narrate—sometimes, like Babo, because they are dead but also because they have suffered trauma or because they have no audience—voicelessness that cannot, and perhaps ought not, be made to speak is also at issue. Hence, Melville’s theory may not turn our heads, as Emerson’s and Douglass’s do, toward the entities of the world to which we might listen more closely, but he helps us to consider, instead, how we might confront the situations in which such listening is not an option.

On voiceless ends Part of the impetus for this chapter is a desire to read the final two paragraphs of Benito Cereno, which feature Babo’s “voiceless end,” in a way that gives adequate emphasis to the idea of voicelessness. The reader arrives at these paragraphs after dozens of pages that turn on the premise of disclosing what is initially presented as unclear or confusing, starting

90 / melville

with the opening scene, in which American sealer captain Amasa Delano spies an unknown ship, “a stranger” (BC, 47), that has joined his own off the coast of Chile. At first, it seems to Delano that the ship, carrying a cargo of slaves, is in distress, and he boards the San Dominick to offer assistance. Yet Delano is repeatedly arrested by the ship’s oddities, in particular, a listless and uncommanding captain, Benito Cereno; a servant, Babo, who acts like a “privy-counselor” (BC, 67); and the lax disciplining of the largely unrestricted slave “cargo.” Delano finally realizes that Cereno is being held hostage by the slaves, who have revolted, and he has his own crew violently subdue the rebellion. Hence, one could say that the story brings to voice, in the sense of makes evident, the truth that is at first concealed. The text, however, does not end with this revelation; it continues with further explanations: it offers the deposition that Cereno gave at the colonial court in Lima, wherein Babo was sentenced to death, to “shed light on the preceding narrative” (BC, 103), and it even offers another scene, of Delano and Cereno on the way to Lima, to more definitively “conclude the account” (BC, 114). There is a forcefulness to these additions, as if they would disclose more and more completely the story of the slave ship turned hostage ship, as if such a story required, and needed to be satiated with, more and more voice. At the same time, each new promise to tell the tale more completely draws attention, subtly but increasingly, to the challenge of such a task, and it begins to seem as if the text might be chasing, sincerely but hopelessly, a saturation it will never achieve. Thus, Benito Cereno’s conclusion, with its emphasis on the slave leader’s voicelessness, seems especially urgent to consider. What kind of a last word, it asks, is voicelessness? There are actually two remarks about Babo’s voicelessness that concern me here. The first closing paragraph summarizes what happened after Delano captured Babo: As for the black—whose brain, not body, had schemed and led the revolt, with the plot—his slight frame, inadequate to that which it held, had at once yielded to the superior muscular strength of his captor, in the boat. Seeing all was over, he uttered no sound, and could not be forced to. His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words. Put in irons in the hold, with the rest [of the slaves], he was carried to Lima. During the passage Don Benito did not visit him. Nor then, nor at any time after, would he look at him. Before the tribunal he refused. When pressed by the judges he fainted. On the testimony of the sailors alone rested the legal identity of Babo. (BC, 116)

melville / 91

Once Babo has been divested of his power, he “uttered no sound”—not even, presumably, a cry but also not an explanation: “His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words.” The “seemed” is troubling, for it implies a possible inaccuracy, as if the aspect could have said something else or even nothing at all. Still, Babo’s not voicing anything is foregrounded, and the progression of the paragraph emphasizes that even if he had spoken, his account would not have been legally significant. The narration switches from watching Babo to watching Cereno, who avoids Babo entirely and who will not confirm his identity. The “sailors alone” who do it for him do not compensate for Babo’s silence, then: they compensate for Cereno’s, for it fell to him, as the ranking European, to bear the truth of the account. If Babo’s silence is willful, it seems quite justified, for neither the tribunal nor Cereno would have listened to him anyway. Nonetheless, there is the sense that the story, that Melville’s Benito Cereno, might listen to him, and this possibility is the weight that the final paragraph bears. Although the tale is titled for the San Dominick’s captain, it is Babo who fascinates throughout: attention is drawn to his face (BC, 51), his comportment and conduct (BC, 52), his speech (BC, 57), his dress (BC, 57), and, of course, his unstinting commitment to the attempted takeover. In fact, Melville creates Babo as a character in his adaptation of the text on which Benito Cereno is based, in which a “reallife” Amasa Delano recounts his experience with a “real-life” Benito Cereno without developing the slave leader as a central figure.6 Thus, one way to read the “seemed” in the quoted paragraph—“His aspect seemed to say . . .”—is as preserving the possibility that Babo might still communicate, somehow, before the story closes. The reverse case, however, is presented: Some months after, dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule, the black met his voiceless end. The body was burned to ashes; but for many days, the head, that hive of subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites; and across the Plaza looked towards St. Bartholomew’s church, in whose vaults slept then, as now, the recovered bones of Aranda; and across the Rimac bridge looked towards the monastery, on Mount Agonia without; where, three months after being dismissed by the court, Benito Cereno, borne on the bier, did, indeed, follow his leader. (BC, 116–117). The “voiceless end” might imply that Babo, who had not spoken since his capture, continues unspeakingly until his death. The link occurs because

92 / melville

“voiceless” is actually a curious word to use here; several other adjectives might correlate more exactly to the kind of “end” Babo experiences: violent, horrific, brutal, or vengeful, to name a few. “End” seems, indeed, to suggest the ending of his life by the law, not his own experience of death, which extends the sense that Babo’s perspective is lost midway through the preceding paragraph. This reading renders “voiceless” even more odd, since it is as if what has been done to him has been done voicelessly or in silence, which does not seem quite right, since he was presumably to be made into an example. The “voiceless” seems to belong to Babo, even as Babo is executed, while the “end” seems to point to the law and to the mirroring death of Cereno. Yet perhaps the juxtaposition within the phrase “voiceless end” articulates a sense of voicelessness that does not exclusively draw from the account of Babo ceasing to speak. If the end is notable not for its violence but for its voicelessness, then the most crucial aspect of his execution may be its final prohibition, its ultimate squelching, of any voice that might still have been. The import of the end, in other words, is in its silencing, in the silence that it creates with such devastating precision (the dragging of the body, the hanging, the mutilation, the display). To go even further, Melville may imply that the “end” was designed in order to silence, to make sure not only that Babo never revolts again but that he never voices the reasons he did so or the methods he used. This would be to say that the end disallows Babo to exist as a being, as a man (even a dead man) with a history, with something to tell, with a story that might yet, in some imaginary final analysis, come to voice. From this perspective, the court does not sentence him to death—indeed, the word death does not appear—it sentences him, instead, to voicelessness. Despite the link between the two closing paragraphs of Benito Cereno, then, I would propose that the “voiceless end” constitutes a distinct figure for a silence that cannot be read as conveying information, even potentially (as in, “His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words”). Because the latter silence is imposed and because its finality connotes an absolute, irreversible state, it must be considered on its own terms. I am thus reluctant to follow the critical tendency to translate the final image of Babo into one that communicates his, or the narrator’s, last comment. It is somewhat compelling, because so hopeful, to imagine with Maurice S. Lee that “this silence speaks volumes.”7 But such a reading implies the very opposite of the ultimate voicelessness I have traced here: the point is that it cannot speak volumes. The point is that all it “says” or “speaks” is that there will be no more saying or speaking, and if that fact is significant, it certainly does not amount to volumes of information. It

melville / 93

amounts, instead, to a gap, a blankness, and to an echo of Babbalanja’s remark: “truth is in things, and not in words.” Babo has become, by the end of the story, a thing with no access to words. If he, or his body, could at one time have borne witness to the life of a slave and the experience of risking everything to revolt, then that potential testimony has been sealed in the thing he has become: an object, an entity, out of which it would be foolhardy to imagine a verbal account might be produced.

The silence of stones I have suggested that there is an important distinction to be made between the silence of Benito Cereno’s penultimate paragraph and that of its last one: in the first case, the possibility of speech is preserved, while in the second, it is foreclosed. In my reading, it is this second, literally more final, silence that demands serious consideration, for it raises the question of how testimony that is truly and wholly without voice might be imagined. To trace more finely the contours of this second silence, in order to understand the ground from which testimony without voice would have to proceed, I turn to Roland Barthes’s The Neutral, which explains etymologically the distinction I am making here. In classical Latin, Barthes explains, there are two synonymous terms for silence, silere and tacere, both of which mean “to keep quiet, to be silent.”8 But in earlier texts, there appears an “interesting nuance,”9 one which we might understand as the difference between the silences in the two concluding paragraphs of Benito Cereno: the silence of taciturnity and the more elemental silence of things—what I call stone-silence. What is taciturn-silent has fallen silent but might ultimately speak. When Babo “uttered no sound” following his capture, he becomes taciturn-silent, because the possibility of his speaking is still preserved. Taciturn-silence includes silences in conversation and the silence that follows a troubling question. This is because these silences are, so to speak, reversible: the conversation could start up again, an answer could be produced. Taciturn-silence withholds and refrains, then, but it always reserves the right to enter the realm of speech again. It maintains an open border with speech, and for this reason, it may be read as a choice that signifies something. As the narrator’s reading of Babo’s initial withholding indicates—“His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words”—taciturn-silence is legible, as bound to be interpreted as its louder counterparts. Stone-silence, by contrast, is not associated with live humans or their language. It is associated with a realm of things that are constitutionally

94 / melville

silent, that never stop being silent. (These stones do not, as Emerson would have it, announce themselves all day long.) In Barthes’s summary, stone-silence is affiliated with “stillness, absence of movement and of noise. Is used for objects, night, the sea, winds. . . . In short, [it] would refer to a sort of timeless virginity of things, before they are born or after they have disappeared”; he notes that silentes accordingly means “the dead.”10 Stone-silence is total, is ongoing, is an essential, inherent property of things the way color is a property of things, and just as it would not make sense to wait for a gray stone to become red, it does not make sense to wait for a silent stone to become loud. It is this quality of silence that I proposed attaches to Babo’s “voiceless end,” for speech has become for his body an impossibility. Barthes’s definition recommends that stone-silence not be understood in contrast with voice; he aligns it, rather, with stillness, timelessness, and absence. Not only does stone-silence refuse an open border with speech, then; it refuses any border with speech: it never bumps up against it as an option. And because stone-silence has no counterpart in speech, because it does not mark a choice, it cannot function, as taciturn-silence did, as a sign (“His aspect seemed to say . . .”). Stone-silence, the silence of the voiceless end, cannot be brought to signify or made to mean. Barthes describes the idea of stone-silence as having died out in classical Latin, subsumed afterward by a broad understanding of taciturn-silence. Yet I find stone-silence circulating in Melville’s texts with a certain regularity, even a persistence. In addition to Babo’s ultimate stone-silence, Benito Cereno features the stone-silence of the “bright sun . . . and the blue sea, and the blue sky,” as I mentioned at the outset of the chapter; “these have turned over new leaves,” in Delano’s metaphor, but Cereno corrects him: “they have no memory, . . . they are not human” (BC, 116). The sun, sea, and sky can no more testify to what they have seen than Babo’s head can maintain a claim to voice. I will attend to some further examples of stone-silence in Benito Cereno in what follows, but first I want to survey instances of total voicelessness, a constitutional otherness with regard to speech, in some of Melville’s other late texts. These instances not only demonstrate stone-silence as a recurring concern; they expose the complexity of its appearing in text at all. In Moby-Dick, the whale might be classified as stone-silent, for Ishmael confronts it as a radically other being that resists the language he bestows on it. The chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in particular, claims that the whale’s whiteness is terrifying because it is so fundamentally blank; there is no way for Ishmael to gain a purchase on, to

melville / 95

formulate an approach to, what contains no contrasting mark. Put differently, the whiteness fails to become legible as a sign. It is attached to words such as “vague,” “nameless,” “ineffable,” “indefiniteness,” “voids,” “annihilation,” “dumb blankness,” and “absence,”11 which characterize it as receding from, but also rejecting, any discrete significance. Ishmael explains, “so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught” (MD, 159). Ishmael positions himself as the scholar who senses that the inarticulate whiteness must “speak volumes,” and his own ambivalence about transcribing it is revealing: on the one hand, he “almost despair[s]” of his task; on the other, it seems to him his only course. As Eyal Peretz glosses the chapter, “the writing of whiteness seems to involve an essential ambiguity that perhaps cannot be overcome. Its central problem is how a language can testify to the enigma of whiteness without actually becoming a language of mastery that covers over whiteness in the very attempt to witness it.”12 Understanding Ishmael as a witness, as one who would testify to what resists “comprehensible form,” helps to situate stone-silence as not only an ontological designation but an ethical challenge. That is, the elusive whale or the executed Babo not only demand, as I argued earlier, that we recognize their total voicelessness and their subsequent disqualification from any normative idea of testimony. They also require us to consider how one responds to their otherness in the realm of speech. The threat of refusing such otherness precisely by responding perpetually haunts the imperative to acknowledge stone-silence. As Peretz suggests, Ishmael’s will to explain begins to render comprehensible the blankness he insists remains intractable, and so even Ishmael’s earnest commitment to its elusiveness may effect its undoing. Hence, the challenge posed by stone-silence implicates Ishmael, implicates the scholar-reader, and even implicates Melville, who sets himself the task of writing what eludes his pen. The would-be witness must figure out how to testify to the silent entity, how to create some sort of record or trace that it had existed. Pierre also theorizes this situation of the writer as a potential witness to the stone-silences that surround him, ultimately concluding that the writer is not challenged but doomed. In the chapter “The Journey and the Pamphlet,” silence and speech are opposed more categorically, more paradigmatically, than they were in Moby-Dick, and the consequences for the writer are devastating. The chapter begins,

96 / melville

All profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence. What a silence is that with which the pale bride precedes the responsive I will, to the priest’s solemn question, Wilt thou have this man for thy husband? In silence, too, the wedded hands are clasped. Yea, in silence the child Christ was born into the world. Silence is the general consecration of the universe. Silence is the invisible laying on of the Divine Pontiff’s hands upon the world. Silence is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in all nature. It speaks of the Reserved Forces of Fate. Silence is the only Voice of our God. (P, 204) Here, silence is not localizable to a whale or even to a whale’s whiteness; while it begins as a taciturnity (the bride’s pause), it becomes an absolute referent, something that describes the essence of the world, its otherness, in total. Silence belongs to all things (or at least “all profound things”), ordinary and human, it seems, as well as divine. It is also originary— Melville goes on to note that “at the unimaginable time when before the world was, Silence brooded on the face of the waters” (P, 204). Silence appears to be everywhere and in everything, and that sense accounts for the awkward description of Pierre clutching Plinlimmon’s pamphlet “for an hour or more of that wonderful intense silence, which the rapid coach bore through the heart of the general stirless morning silence of the fields and the woods” (P, 205). It is as if the “wonderful intense silence” refers to the taciturn-silence in which the passengers refrain from speaking, and the surrounding “general stirless morning silence” refers to the stonesilence of profundity and God. The latter meaning becomes the central subject of the chapter. More specifically, the incompatibility of the latter meaning, of stonesilence, with the text that records it becomes the chapter’s focus. The narrator claims, at first, that the Sermon on the Mount reads as an irresistible record of divinity: “Such emotions as that Sermon raises in the enthusiastic heart; such emotions all youthful hearts refuse to ascribe to humanity as their origin. This is of God! cries the heart, and in that cry ceases all inquisition” (P, 207–208). It is impossible for Melville’s hypothetical youth to suppose that the text derives from anything less perfect than God. Yet the youth’s perspective changes when he “again gazes abroad upon the world” and is met—and Melville puts quite a fine point on it—with “an overpowering sense of the world’s downright positive falsity . . . ; the world seems to lie saturated and soaking with lies” (P, 208). The world is totally false, whereas the divine realm supposed by the sermon is absolutely true, and this raises the problem of how

melville / 97

communication between the two could ever have been managed. This is a version of the problem Peretz identifies as Ishmael’s—how witness may be borne to what is other than the means I use to bear witness—and the narrator begins to suspect the idea that a text legible in the false world could ever bear witness to the truth above it. Referring to philosophers who have “pretended” to transcribe the divine, the narrator ultimately rejects any such act: “That profound Silence, that only Voice of our God, which I before spoke of, from that divine thing without a name, those impostor philosophers pretend somehow to have got an answer; which is as absurd, as though they should say they had got water out of a stone; for how can a man get a Voice out of Silence?” (P, 208). This sentence condenses the divine/world and truth/lie oppositions into the difference between silence and voice. It thus specifies that divine truth is unspeakable and that voice is the false world’s contaminant, its would-be facilitator that can only ever function as a ruse. For voice can never, no matter how earnestly or eloquently it performs, approach the vast reach of silence without destroying it, without converting it into something else. The professed absurdity of getting water out of stone marks the total limit that separates voice from silence. Just as water and stone are understood as elementally different, nontransferable, unable to be reconciled or transmuted without some sort of black magic, so too must silence and voice be conceived as unrelated. My own nomenclature becomes a little more transparent here, as what is stone-silent may be understood as what truly shares no border with voice—what is as unlikely to speak as it is to gush water.13 Pierre thus intensifies Ishmael’s concern in Moby-Dick. In Pierre, Ishmael’s valiant effort would be classified as the work of an impostor, for only impostors propose that voice can bear witness to silence. Pierre, too, is characterized as an impostor, implicated in particular in the business of poking at stones with the imagined talisman of voice. The word pierre means “stone,” and Pierre turns out to be a namer of stones (a hobby that may now be recognized as risky, if not treacherous). One strangely architectural rock form he calls Memnon, or sometimes the Terror Stone, if he is “wrought into a mystic mood by contemplating its ponderous inscrutableness” (P, 134). The alternative gently contests the accuracy of either name: if it may be called either Memnon or Terror, then neither captures its essence. Further, if “Terror” signifies inscrutability, then the latter name derives precisely from the sort of Voice that pretends to speak for what is persistently evasive. Yet rather than acknowledge the futility of the act of naming, Pierre’s narrator makes an effort to justify “Memnon” as appropriate. Memnon was an Egyptian boy-king who died

98 / melville

prematurely, a fact that, we are told, seems prophetic in light of Pierre’s fate (P, 135). The original Memnon Stone was a monument for the boy that, each day at sunrise, would emit “a mournful broken sound, as of a harp-string suddenly sundered, being too harshly wound” (P, 135). But Pierre’s derivative stone issues no such communication: “now all is mute,” the narrator explains, which renders the form precisely stonesilent (P, 136). Thus, even if Memnon is an apt name for the stone in some respects, the very act of naming it still works to voice what is known to be inscrutable and voiceless. In this sense, every time the text renders the word “Pierre,” it provides an exemplary instance of the key problem around which Pierre turns: it calls a boy by a stone’s name, which is not really the stone’s name at all, for stones no more have names than they suddenly produce water spouts.14 Pierre proposes that even calling a stone a stone does not amount to an act of bearing witness to the silent world. Nonetheless, the novel insists that it can do nothing but attempt, fruitlessly, to produce such testimony. Because it is a text, Pierre cannot allow the stone to simply exist, unchronicled, in its fundamental silence: as soon as it recognizes the stone, it bears false witness. Pierre thus foregrounds how any entity considered in text is immediately shifted, inaptly and even violently, into the realm of speech. In this way, Melville echoes the division that Agamben and, as I argued, Douglass attribute to testimony, between what demands testimony and what has the capacity to speak it. Yet the very structure that makes testimony possible for Agamben and Douglass indicates for Melville its perpetual failure. The question Peretz formulates for Moby-Dick—“how a language can testify to the enigma of whiteness without actually becoming a language of mastery that covers over whiteness”—does not seem to resonate with Melville by the time he writes Pierre, for there is in that text no language that is not “a language of mastery” that forcibly undoes and misrepresents, that “covers over,” the silent existence of its object. Pierre thus enables a more precise rendering of the problem that stonesilence poses and to which testimony without voice would respond: the challenge is not necessarily to imagine how the stone would testify but to theorize how its voicelessness might be preserved in the text that bears witness to it.15 The idea would be to withhold in a way that Ishmael and Pierre cannot, because to say silence or to indicate or propose it is already to destroy it. Melville’s stringent paradigm exposes how silence’s constitutional otherness is constantly endangered, as its articulation must always effect its disappearance. Recognizing this structure helps to clarify the magnitude of Benito Cereno’s wager to tell the “true history of the San Dominick’s voyage” (BC,

melville / 99

103). Benito Cereno acknowledges how that history is not limited to Delano’s puzzlement or Cereno’s entrapment or even the murders performed by the revolting slaves: it is not limited to the events that transpired before the ship sailed into the Chilean port where the story opens. As the closing image of Babo’s voiceless end suggests, Benito Cereno might also bear witness to the ship’s silenced “cargo” and to the transactions and compromises that make the slave system run. But such an act would require a voice that somehow maintains, rather than cancels, the silences that are its subject. The question that Benito Cereno asks is not the rhetorical one from Pierre—“How can a man get a Voice out of Silence?”—but precisely the reverse: How can a man get Silence out of a Voice?

Babo’s end and human rights In shifting the terms of Melville’s question, I wish to reframe the assumption on which critical appraisals of Benito Cereno generally operate. As I noted earlier, Lee’s assertion that Babo’s silence “speaks volumes” represents a tendency to translate the text’s marked silences into commentary or critique. Joyce Adler offers one of the most literal of these exchanges: “The slave, Melville seems to be telling America, has yet to be heard from; it would be well to imagine his condition and his mind.”16 As Benito Cereno was published five years after the Fugitive Slave Act, such an admonition would have been well placed. Yet to imagine the American slave’s experience shifts the reader’s attention away from Babo’s voicelessness and toward speech, or at least toward potential speech.17 Eric Sundquist makes a similar gesture, understanding Babo as silent only in the sense of taciturn-silence, not with regard to the more elemental stone-silence (the silence of death) that I have been tracking. Sundquist reads the story as repeatedly referring to “a silence or refusal to speak and act that both expresses and withholds authority by keeping it readied for possible implementation.”18 He assumes that the silence is to some extent voluntary and, paradoxically, the sign of authority, or authorship, which again points to the eventual deployment of voice. Sandra Zagarell bypasses the idea that silence indicates imagined or future speech, arguing that it is present speech, as Babo’s “silent communication comprises a richer language than Delano’s spoken platitudes.”19 None of these studies is exclusively concerned with voicelessness, but each reads a radical, or at least progressive, politics into the text by figuring its insistence on the unsaid as a kind of vocal testimony. Indeed, such scholarship seems unable to conceive of the text’s political force except by locating in it a voice that speaks for what is actually nominated as voiceless.

100 / melville

This tendency to filter the political through the vocal is not limited to scholarship on Benito Cereno; it haunts, as well, studies of human rights, especially of the discourse of human rights, and it is worth following the comparison to perceive the scope of the problem that Melville’s text presents. While current human rights discourse seeks to recognize and demand redress for persons who, like Babo, have no voice (legally, physically, or practically), it operates by advocating voice rather than considering or theorizing the voiceless state. As Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg explains, the act of bearing vocal witness to atrocity was a founding principle of the international twentieth-century effort to prevent atrocity: “The contemporary human rights movement was, in a sense, built upon the shame of Nazi collaborators or of those ‘innocent bystanders’ who remained silent and complicit and claimed not to have known about the atrocities being carried out around them. Countering that degraded silence with a vehement ‘Never again!’ the movement vowed that once atrocity had been unearthed, it would be acted against.”20 From this perspective, silence is what allows human rights abuses to take place; unmuting, as it were, the victims enables them to reach a public that then takes steps to end oppressive practices.21 As Goldberg points out, the devotion to eradicating silence ends up circumscribing the victim’s humanity, since what it takes to be recognized as human (and deserving of rights protection) is the exercise of speech: “the underlying link between seeing, speaking, and acting [has] remained as an epistemological and ethical foundation for global humanity.”22 In other words, without the public’s capacity to see and the victim’s capacity to speak, no action can take place in the name of human rights; global humanity does not exist if global humans are not so endowed. Silence becomes an enemy complicit with atrocity and inhumanity, while voice or speech becomes a mark of the human and the potential for human progress. The same assumption governs the readings of Benito Cereno that I have cited, and they, too, respond to a perceived climate of silencing with regard to the experience of the oppressed: early criticism of the text quite literally silenced Babo as a character, insisting that his position as a slave was irrelevant to the story’s import. Yvor Winters, for instance, argued in 1947 that “the morality of slavery is not an issue in this story; the issue is . . . the fundamental evil of a group of men,”23 and Rosalie Feltenstein similarly asserted in the same year, “Slavery is not the issue here; the focus is upon evil in action in a certain situation.”24 These critics perhaps protest too much, and reversing their hierarchy—or recognizing the inextricability of slavery and evil in the text—is a necessary corrective. But understanding slavery to have a “voice” in the text, or understanding

melville / 101

the slave to voice what the later critic perceives, ends up adhering to the model of humanity that allowed the slave’s to be foreclosed in the first place. That is, arguing for the slave’s humanity by asserting that he has a voice implicitly rejects the idea that his humanity might exist in a voiceless state. James Dawes offers a useful formulation for this difficulty of recognizing humanity without equating it to voice. Dawes explains that when a human rights organization empowers the oppressed to speak, it does so on its own, usually Western, terms, which may dominate and even eclipse—effectively silencing—the actual experience or desires of the victim. He thus identifies “a split at the heart of human rights advocacy”: “giving voice can also be a matter of taking voice.”25 Yet I would subvert the assumption that voice always exists to be taken (or given): in my view, the problem, the split, is that giving voice can also be a matter of taking silence away. This split, the chasm that threatens to swallow and dissolve the effort to hear the unheard, names precisely the ground that Melville’s readers must navigate. Brook Thomas seems, in my view, to begin such work. While his reading is contextualized by the Fugitive Slave Act, Thomas deliberately withholds the ventriloquizing gesture that marks the political readings I have discussed. Babo, he writes, “is a figure whom Melville, in treating slavery, must represent, but for whom, as the alien other, Melville can provide no voice.”26 In making the distinction between representing Babo and giving him a voice, Thomas manages to foreground the slave’s ambiguous status—rather than arguing for his humanity—and to preserve Melville’s insistence on his voicelessness. He thus works to get silence out of a voice, finding in Melville’s voice, or the voice of the text, an ineradicable, irreducible voicelessness. In what follows, I aim to do the same. Ultimately, however, I discover the voicelessness to exceed Babo and to exceed even the other characters, slave and otherwise—and thereby to demand a reading practice that further destabilizes the presumed coupling of politics with voice, and voice with humanity.

Muteness One way to track how silence emerges from voice in Benito Cereno is to collect the text’s references to undisclosed information. Although many details are revealed in the course of the story—from Babo’s actual position as slave leader to Cereno’s unwillfully worn colonial costume—there is much more that remains unrevealed, and there are many instances in which silence appears in a place where additional truthful details ought

102 / melville

to have been. The word that often marks these instances is “mute.” The OED definition for mute comes very close to Barthes’s definition of taciturn-silence: “In extended use,” it reports, “applied to things normally capable of making a sound or usually associated with a sound,” mute means “quiet, having fallen silent, making no sound.”27 Muteness designates the interruption of voice with silence and thus makes a particularly apt figure for getting silence out of the narrative voice that delivers it.28 In scenes marked by muteness, silence becomes recognizable because the text indicates it—not because it translates it. I want to insist on this distinction. Because muteness is similar to taciturn-silence, it may seem only to hold speech in reserve, thereby producing within the narrative a silence that one can “read,” out of which one can get a voice.29 Yet in Benito Cereno, the silence to which muteness refers is always, to an important extent, “unrelieved”: even once Delano unravels the mystery before him, even after his mind is illuminated, what was previously unsaid largely remains so. The introductory description of the setting initiates this logic. “Mute” appears there, as I mentioned, in relation to the sea: “The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter’s mould” (BC, 46). The transition from “mute and calm” to “cooled and set” rightly suggests that the sea will never speak; any possible movement has already been foreclosed, petrified. Muteness does, indeed, go to the grave in this text, emphasizing the domination of the logic of stone-silence, the stillness of things “after they have disappeared” and of dead persons. For example, one of the first descriptions of Cereno characterizes him as an “undemonstrative invalid gliding about, apathetic and mute,” so much so that “no landsman could have dreamed that in him was lodged a dictatorship beyond which, while at sea, there was no earthly appeal” (BC, 53). (Of course, it would be best for the landsman—and for Delano—not to dream of the dictatorship, since in this text it does not exist.) The word “reserve” then replaces “mute” as a signal epithet for Cereno, appearing five times in the subsequent two paragraphs. Reserve, like mute, might seem to indicate only a temporary withholding, a quality that could be reversed once Cereno regained his position as captain. Again, some aspects of his experience are revealed in his deposition, but it contains several ellipses, a remark that “in some things his memory is confused, he cannot distinctly recall every event,” the assertion that he “can never divulge” one particularly gory detail, and the concluding claim that he is “broken in body and mind” (BC, 110,

melville / 103

112, 114). Cereno continues to be rendered unforthcoming; in the short narration that follows and provides an ending to the text, a conversation between him and Delano ends with the phrase “there was silence,” followed by a single-sentence paragraph: “There was no more conversation that day” (BC, 116). The narrator goes on to clarify: “But if the Spaniard’s melancholy sometimes ended in muteness upon topics like the above, there were others upon which he never spoke at all; on which, indeed, all his old reserves were piled” (BC, 116). Up until this point, the reader would be justified in assuming that the “old reserves” were not constitutional to Cereno; they were not “his” and they were not “old,” in other words—they were a temporary reaction to the uncomfortable role of performing while being held hostage. In tying the free and even vindicated Cereno to the “mute and apathetic” invalid to whom the reader is initially introduced, Melville makes the story’s gesture of illuminating anticlimactic and maybe even false, since it seems that with regard to Cereno, at least, the unmasking of his performing self reveals a self not significantly different. The connection also insists that there is much to Cereno’s story that will remain forever reserved, that he could not tell as either hostage or freeman, that will be enclosed, with his dead body, in the vaults that contain his bones and those of his murdered friend Aranda. Thus, the muteness and the reserve, which might be brought to voice under the sign of taciturn-silence, seem more precisely governed by stone-silence, held in the fundamental stillness of death. The repeatedly remarked-on muteness of Atufal also delivers a total silence out of voice, a potential taciturnity that, in ultimately being buried with him, is emphasized as stone-silence. Upon first glimpsing him in the charade designed to demonstrate for Delano Cereno’s authority (and at the same time to humiliate Cereno), Babo as much as declares that Atufal is only pretending, quite successfully, to be mute: “How like a mute Atufal moves,” he remarks (BC, 61). But it ends up being immaterial whether Atufal is “like a mute” or actually is a mute, since his muteness is never reversed. At one point, he is described as “monumentally fixed at the threshold, like one of those sculpted porters of black marble guarding the porches of Egyptian tombs” (BC, 92)—an image of stonesilence which already associates his muteness with the finality of death. Although the reader learns from Cereno’s deposition that Atufal was Babo’s chief conspirator, he is killed while Delano’s men are capturing the San Dominick, so that what he knows or might have said is finally swallowed by the sea. A return to the sketch produced at the beginning of this chapter, of repeated promises for explication that are never quite fulfilled, suggests

104 / melville

that a movement toward muteness and then ultimate silence characterizes Benito Cereno’s whole structure. The narration refers to “secret signs” (BC, 66), “enigmas and portents” (BC, 67), and “imperfect gesture” (BC, 74) to characterize what Delano witnesses but does not move to interpret. These indications, coupled with the more explicit promises to decipher them that appear toward the conclusion of the story, appear at first as Atufal appears: mute in keeping with the demands of a suspenseful story, not silent and never to be revealed. Yet they end up swallowed as well, in part because Delano’s realization of his situation is so sudden and sweeping: “That moment, across the long-benighted mind of Captain Delano, a flash of revelation swept, illuminating in unanticipated clearness his host’s whole mysterious demeanor, with every enigmatic event of the day, as well as the entire past voyage of the San Dominick” (BC, 99). “Every enigmatic event” may have been made clear in the mind of the fictional Delano, but the text does not explicate these revelations for the reader’s benefit. The sentence reads as if further details will be specified, and an image of the black people aboard the ship “in ferocious piratical revolt” follows (BC, 99); but the text does not, for several pages, turn to address the oddities of the preceding narrative. When it does, as I have suggested, Cereno’s “whole mysterious demeanor” will remain mysterious. Further, those later passages as much as admit that the heralded illumination fails to enlighten the reader. Cereno’s deposition is offered as an extract from the official investigation of the affair, in order to, “it is hoped, shed light on the preceding narrative, as well as, in the first place, reveal the true port of departure and true history of the San Dominick’s voyage” (BC, 103). After the long quotation of the deposition, the “light” appears, for a moment, to have adequately told what needed to be told: “If the Deposition have served as the key to fit into the lock of the complications which precede it, then, as a vault whose door has been flung back, the San Dominick’s hull lies open today” (BC, 114). But such confidence, conditional as it is, lasts for exactly one sentence, for the next one returns to the need to illuminate further: “Hitherto the nature of this narrative, besides rendering the intricacies in the beginning unavoidable, has more or less required that many things, instead of being set down in the order of occurrence, should be retrospectively, or irregularly given; this last is the case with the following passages, which will conclude the account” (BC, 114). Insofar as the story ends two pages later, the passages undoubtedly do “conclude the account.” But insofar as they continue the process of obscuring that they have ostensibly been included to reverse, the details mentioned therein only serve to highlight how many more things still stand to be given.30 As in the examples of

melville / 105

Cereno and Atufal, the muteness ends up being final and absolute; the text acts as a vehicle pointed to arrive at its ultimate referent, voicelessness. This image appears in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” when Melville rejects the idea that English writers have exhausted literary subjects: “Nor has Nature been all over ransacked by our progenitors, so that no new charms and mysteries remain for this latter generation to find. Far from it. The trillionth part has not yet been said; and all that has been said, but multiplies the avenues to what remains to be said.”31 Benito Cereno takes us to that vista where the avenues of the unsaid spread out in a seemingly never-ending maze.32

Inscrutable signs Such a vista is a strange place for a study of testimony to come to rest. Instead of enhancing the reader’s understanding of what happened on the San Dominick, the instances of muteness testify to the unknown, indicating the silences that pool in stubborn pockets throughout the text. Yet the dimensions of these pools remain difficult, if not impossible, to gauge, for once voicelessness or the unsaid or silence is acknowledged, it becomes potentially ubiquitous, circumscribing every voice and every said. References to muteness may show the reader that Cereno never tells his full story or that Atufal’s experience goes to the grave, but why stop there? Certainly there are many other details, and many other individual accounts (for instance, that of the knot maker), that by the broadest criteria would fit within the scope of “the true history of the San Dominick’s voyage” but that are never exposed or explained by the text. In the attenuated version of testimony I have been tracking, in which the text bears witness by giving rise to silence, a potentially endless mass of silences accumulates, threatening to overshadow or even overtake what the text actually “says.” Distinguishing between what the text pointedly does not say and the entirety of what it leaves unsaid becomes challenging work. The idea that such work must be undertaken, however, also belongs to Benito Cereno. I gestured earlier to the way that, in the first section of the story, Delano is occupied not only by unraveling the mysterious events before him but by figuring out which events constitute mysteries to be unraveled. His situation is not identical to that of the reader tracking silence, but it is importantly analogous: he, too, must isolate what stands to be interpreted from what is not productive to remark. Sometimes, Delano seems to feel certain that what he has seen requires his analysis; for instance, after Atufal’s performance, Delano reasons, “The singular alternations of courtesy and ill-breeding in the Spanish

106 / melville

captain were unaccountable, except on one of two suppositions—innocent lunacy, or wicked imposture” (BC, 64). Delano isolates Cereno’s strange behavior and then develops two plausible explanations for it, each of which would guide him in his subsequent course. At many other moments, however, Delano cannot tell if what is before him bears interpreting at all. As the scene continues, it repeatedly highlights this more fundamental insecurity. Cereno, huddling with Babo, questions Delano about whether his crew will be aboard in the night and what kind of arms they bear, and then Delano sees a sailor he has seen before, who wears an unaccountably fine linen garment beneath his shirt: “At this moment the young sailor’s eye was again fixed on the whisperers, and Captain Delano thought he observed a lurking significance in it, as if silent signs of some Freemason sort had that instant been interchanged” (BC, 66). The text acknowledges that Delano “thought he observed” rather than directly observed the transaction, and it remarks that it was “as if” signs were exchanged, not that there certainly was any significance lurking. These hesitancies emphasize the possibility of significance, rather than the interpretation of it, and Delano remains stymied on this point. He does not decide whether the sailor’s glance or Babo’s and Cereno’s whispering coheres into a sign, and he becomes only less sure about the texture of the events he witnesses. He spies “a sparkle in the shadowy hatchway, and . . . one of the Spanish sailors prowling there hurriedly placing his hand in the bosom of his frock, as if hiding something” (BC, 67). Delano briefly imagines tracking the sparkle but ultimately comes to wonder if he has, in the past several minutes, seen anything at all: What was that which so sparkled? thought Captain Delano. It was no lamp—no match—no live coal. Could it have been a jewel? But how come sailors with jewels?—or with silk-trimmed under-shirts either? Has he been robbing the trunks of the dead cabin passengers? But if so, he would hardly wear one of the stolen articles on board ship here. Ah, ah—if now that was, indeed, a secret sign I saw passing between this suspicious fellow and his captain awhile since; if I could only be certain that in my uneasiness my senses did not deceive me, then— (BC, 67) If Delano could be certain that he had seen a sign, then he might, it seems, know something more about the sparkle, but any connection between those two points remains unarticulated and, in the end, moot, since the paragraph breaks off. His state is then described as “pressed by such enigmas and portents” (BC, 67), though it seems that he is pressed

melville / 107

as well by the business of distinguishing between enigmas and portents, of knowing where the puzzle ends and the hint begins. Delano’s encounter with ambiguity helps to pinpoint what distinguishes an asserted silence from all of what the text never mentions. Even if the sparkle or the undershirt turns out to be nothing worth investigating, an unaccountable set of circumstances rather than a clue to be deciphered, the detail still impresses itself upon Delano’s field of observation. Even if, then, what he sees is not a sign, it is still something that enters the realm of the text, changing it however slightly. The scene thus identifies a liminal space wherein what resists generating significance may nonetheless register as present. The instances of muteness I examined earlier also occupy this edge: they almost immediately, but not quite immediately, yield to the unknown. They remain just long enough to be acknowledged, but not long enough to be comprehended. Thus, while my initial discussion of taciturn-silence and stone-silence attributed legibility to the former and withheld it from the latter, the difference turns out to require further nuance. A stone-silence may not bear any discernible meaning—it may be, in this sense, unreadable, illegible—but it still participates in the text as a whole. It hovers at the limits of the sign, coalescing into an entity without introducing significance, impressing itself as the marker of absence. Pierre’s categorizing narrator may have rejected any such liminality, but Melville experiments with it in Moby-Dick and “Bartleby,” proposing the inscrutable sign as an unusual but not impossible species of text. In Moby-Dick, hieroglyphics figure the oddity, referring to what may be classified as a sign but not read. Ishmael asserts that the marks on the whale’s skin “are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connection” (MD, 246). Ishmael implies that the marks on the pyramids may be regarded as, simply, marks, but counterintuitively, nominating them hieroglyphical turns out not to establish them as meaningful. In fact, it establishes them as illegible: referring to “the famous hieroglyphical palisades” of Illinois, Ishmael concludes, “Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable” (MD, 246). Ishmael similarly designates Queequeg’s tattoos as hieroglyphical to emphasize that he cannot decipher them: “And this tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphical marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries

108 / melville

not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them” (MD, 367). One can no more read the whale or Queequeg’s body than one can, in Melville’s taxonomy, read the rocks or pyramid drawings.33 Yet the fact of this illegibility is essential: the whale is “undecipherable,” rather than a weirdly skinned creature, because Ishmael has supposed that its body is composed of mysteries, and Queequeg is a riddle written to, presumably, someone else. The hieroglyphic belongs to the realm of reading, even if the reader remains illiterate of its import. In the case of “Bartleby,” his signature phrase becomes a hieroglyphic, imposing itself while refusing logical efforts of deciphering. At first, “I would prefer not to” indicates something definitive: Bartleby’s lack of interest in, and then his declining to perform, comparison of the copies. As the story progresses, however, “I would prefer not to” becomes more and more inscrutable; its effects become less and less certain; and analysis by either the characters or the reader yields only a growing gulf between the apparently simple words and the increasingly outlandish events that result from speaking them. Gilles Deleuze asserts, therefore, that “Bartleby’s formula ravages language as a whole,”34 which suggests that despite the fact that his formula exists in language, it manages to undo its status as language. This would be to say, as well, that “I would prefer not to” does not signify in any recognizable sense; it dismantles the sign system, which would seem to be an effective way to erase any significance that it might have. Nonetheless, Bartleby and his formula remain figures that yield discussion, that stand to be isolated as entities that collect a certain maddening ambiguity. In this sense, Bartleby may ravage language by becoming the most inscrutable sign that his fellow characters, and that many of his readers, can imagine.35 The examples from Moby-Dick and “Bartleby” demonstrate that Delano’s confusion, as well as the reader’s concern about muteness’s tendency to peter out beyond recognition, respond to what is, for Melville, an indefinite yet persistent and strangely plausible textual event. In Moby-Dick and “Bartleby,” Melville arrests the event in a figure: the hieroglyphic or Bartleby is the inscrutable sign. In Benito Cereno, however, what Delano sees vacillates between sign and inscrutability, and the appearances of muteness dissolve into absence. Benito Cereno does not emphasize the inscrutable sign as a single and discrete form. Instead, it focuses on the sign as it retreats into inscrutability, on the process wherein the legibility of one is exchanged for the void of the other. Muteness may give way to the unknown, then, but the end result, the vista from which the unsaids spread infinitely, may be less important than the giving way itself, the movement in which what begins as an assertion

melville / 109

becomes an intractability. Indicating mutenesses may therefore be only the initial gesture through which the text proposes that testimony may emerge without compromising essential silences. To go further, to discover how testimony without voice most completely unfurls, requires attending to the instances in which sign and inscrutability just barely hold together, in which the point of their meeting becomes visible so briefly that it can hardly be traced. In these instances, nothing is flagged as unfulfilled promise or possible portent even as something happens to the scope of the narrative. The text seems to hover outside of itself, rising beyond sign, approaching inscrutability, and finally receding completely, and its testimony leaves behind the grounding of voice for a pressure so slight as to be almost indiscernible.36

Quietude From muteness, then, I turn to track another word in Melville’s constellation of terms connected to silence: quietude.37 Quietude leads away from muteness’s concern with what would normally speak but does not and toward an unruffled calmness: it refers to a state generated by what “caus[es] no disturbance” and what is “peaceable or tranquil by nature; placid, gentle; reserved.”38 Quietude is associated with the weather in Moby-Dick, and while the association remains in Benito Cereno, the latter text is characteristically more ambiguous about its significance. Following the transition between the two texts reveals how the import of the weather’s quietude very nearly escapes Benito Cereno, just barely cohering as a sign before fleeing into inscrutability and just barely registering as testimony before abandoning its power to speak. In Moby-Dick, quietude functions almost exclusively to presage its opposite. This is especially the case in the chapter called “The Gilder,” which describes a bout of particularly lovely weather that, at first, is noted to color the characters’ outlooks. “These are the times of dreamy quietude,” Melville writes of the gorgeously calm conditions (MD, 372), and for Starbuck and Stubb, this dreamy quietude is soothing, an end in itself: Starbuck looks “deep down and do[es] believe,” and Stubb “takes oaths that he has always been jolly!” (MD, 373). For Ishmael, however, and in a contested paragraph that may be Ishmael’s or Ahab’s, the quietude is not simply suggestive of the tranquility it bears. Instead, the quietude surreptitiously carries—it “gilds”—a disturbance. From the contested paragraph: “Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm” (MD, 373). The calms here are

110 / melville

seductive, but their very calmness should make one wary, since the calm brings its opposite, the storm. In the paragraph that is narrated by Ishmael, a similar reasoning interrupts his enjoyment of the day’s plentitude: At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearthstone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang. (MD, 372) The lull produced by the sun and the waves discourages the search for meaning in favor of the exuberance voiced by Starbuck and Stubb. When its meaning is suggested, however, the quietude is characterized as a disguise, indicative only of the danger it contains. The purring of the “hearth-stone cats” becomes the panting of the “tiger heart,” and the gilding is characterized as disingenuous, the exhibition of a “velvet paw” to distract from the “remorseless fang.”39 The golden layer of “dreamy quietude” hence becomes less and less visible as the characters insist that it anticipates its opposite. As the chapter begins by situating the weather as occasioned by the ship’s “penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising ground” (MD, 372), the text appears directed to this work of penetrating, of approaching the concealed violent heart of the quietude. The seductive calm of the sea becomes legible only as a threat, the significance of its initial charm disappearing. As Melville puts it in “The Line,” “the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself” (MD, 229). The calm “only apparently precedes” the storm; in reality, it holds it and thereby presents the storm in the very act of presenting itself. Properly speaking, then, there is no calm at all. As Ishmael formulates it later with regard to the whale’s apparent mildness, “that quietude [was] but the vesture of tornadoes” (MD, 409). There seems to be no quietude in “The Gilder,” then, for its initially professed calmness is almost immediately reversed. In Benito Cereno, quietude again rubs up against its opposite, yet it is not the storm but the less definitive “inquietude” that forms its border. The model of exchange featured in Moby-Dick disappears, and quietude and inquietude commence, unexpectedly, to meld.

melville / 111

The first image that reveals this shift recalls the “velvet paw” from Moby-Dick, which in that text was a disguise (“this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang”). In Benito Cereno, the velvet refers explicitly to the captain’s dress but also figures a disingenuous paw: “To think that,” Delano considers, “under the aspect of infantile weakness, the most savage energies might be couched—those velvets of the Spaniard but the silky paw to his fangs” (BC, 65). This description appears to simply repeat the gilding through which weakness is played to disguise violence. Yet Delano’s suspicion that he sees what Ishmael sensed rapidly disappears—in fact, it simply “vanishes”: “From no train of thought did these fancies come; not from within, but from without; suddenly, too, and in one throng, like hoar frost; yet as soon to vanish as the mild sun of Captain Delano’s good-nature regained its meridian” (BC, 65). Nothing explicitly accounts for the vanished suspicion, although something seems to have induced it, to have recalibrated Delano’s “good-nature,” in the manner of changing weather. The first image presented is hoar frost, which refers to a deposit of ice crystals on small objects, formed when the night air cools so rapidly that the water vapor it contains is converted directly to a solid structure.40 When the cold air warms during the day, the vanishing occurs, as the frost is melted and ultimately returned to atmospheric vapor. I note the climatological process behind Melville’s metaphor because it indicates both that he had in mind a specific formulation for the exchange and that it was one far less tractable than the “a storm for every calm” formula from Moby-Dick. Here, the shift is as subtle as a gradual change in air temperature, and while the effect is sudden and arresting—the transubstantiation of gas to solid and back again—all that has really occurred is the loss or gain of so much water vapor. When the binary storm/calm is replaced by frost/sun, the dynamic referred to is less oppositional than cyclical, less dramatic than minute. The suspicion or frost yields to confidence or sun in a manner as unobtrusive as the warming of the air. I would like to suggest that the quietude of Moby-Dick becomes this changing atmosphere in Benito Cereno, becomes, that is, increasingly subject to vanishing or evaporation. If in Moby-Dick quietude indicated a form of weather that has no significance in itself, referring only to its opposite, in Benito Cereno the imagery returns, still bearing a force that moves the plot but not referring, it seems, to anything. The “velvet paw” from Moby-Dick that appeared as the “silky paw” in Benito Cereno becomes, later in the story, a sea breeze, called a cats-paw, that gently touches Delano. Waiting in the windless weather for the boat that will

112 / melville

ultimately return him to his ship, the breeze at once meets and eludes him: To change the scene, as well as to please himself with a leisurely observation of the coming boat, stepping over into the mizzenchains he clambered his way into the starboard quarter-gallery; one of those abandoned Venetian-looking water-balconies previously mentioned; retreats cut off from the deck. As his foot pressed the half-damp, half-dry sea-mosses matting the place, and a chance phantom cats-paw—an islet of breeze, unheralded, unfollowed— as this ghostly cats-paw came fanning his cheek, as his glance fell upon the row of small, round dead-lights, all closed like coppered eyes of the coffined, and the state-cabin door, once connecting with the gallery, even as the dead-lights had once looked out upon it, but now calked fast like a sarcophagus lid, to a purple-black, tarredover panel, threshold, and post; and he bethought him of the time, when that state-cabin and this state-balcony had heard the voices of the Spanish king’s officers, and the forms of the Lima viceroy’s daughters had perhaps leaned where he stood—as these and other images flitted through his mind, as the cats-paw through the calm, gradually he felt rising a dreamy inquietude, like that of one who alone on the prairie feels unrest from the repose of the noon. (BC, 73–74) Although the narration describes three things happening simultaneously—as his foot pressed the matting, as the cats-paw fanned his cheek, and as his glance fell—it suggests as well that the cats-paw directs his glance to objects that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Recalling the earlier image of the velvets concealing fangs, this cats-paw exhibits “dead-lights.” The dead-lights are portholes closed for stormy weather, and they appear to Delano not protective but ominous: they are “closed like coppered eyes of the coffined” and lead to a shut door that is reminiscent of death, “calked fast like a sarcophagus lid,” and another “tarredover panel.” These obstacles are sealed rather than gilded, and what they hold is not stormy but finally, silently dead. The passage’s closing image deviates further from the logic of gilding or concealing, since the “dreamy inquietude” is figured as if emitted from the calm or from repose: the inquietude rises “as the cats-paw through the calm” and “like . . . unrest from the repose of the noon.” Apart from these comparisons, the particular catalyst for the rising inquietude is not named, and so while it seems to be the product of, precisely, a quietude, that quietude may be said to be so quiet that it is unpronounced. Further,

melville / 113

this quiet quietude delivers, rather than presages, the inquietude, and the inquietude affects Delano not as a storm but as a gentle disturbance, an unrest in the mode of repose. Thus, despite the fact that in MobyDick the phrase is “dreamy quietude” and in Benito Cereno it is “dreamy inquietude,” the difference between them is ultimately elided, as both refer to a calmness that ought not be taken for a sign that all is well. Yet again, in the latter text, no alternative meaning is assigned, and it is quite difficult to take “dreamy inquietude” as a sign for anything at all, since it contains no clear boundaries; it is as difficult to say where quietude ends and inquietude begins as it would be to determine the origin and conclusion of the sea breeze.41 The quietude, the inquietude, and the cats-paw all seem to combine here as a figure for a movement that changes the text without saying anything itself.42 And that change is very important, since within the quoted passage Delano arguably understands more about his situation than he will even after his mind is “illuminated.” Seeing the ship as a coffin and a sarcophagus, seeing the “time” of the Spanish king, the imperial history of the transatlantic slave trade appears to Delano with a singular starkness. He potentially glimpses not only the local relationship between slave and master, cargo and captain, that he has observed throughout the day but also the larger structure of conquest and murder that was effected through the very vessels he knows so well how to manage. He can be understood to occupy, as Melville was to put it in a poem in Battle-Pieces, “the after-quiet—the calm full fraught”: the calm that still bears the violence that it follows.43 The cats-paw breeze, or the air current that exchanges quietude for inquietude, evokes the history without quite making it known, without introducing it to the archive of Delano’s consciousness. It is occasioned through a simultaneous temporality similar to that invoked in the beginning of the passage—as his foot pressed the matting, as the cats-paw fanned his cheek, as his glance fell—yet more complex. The images flit through his mind as (meaning “like”) the catspaw through the calm, but this happens as (meaning “at the same time as”) the dreamy inquietude rises. The cats-paw breeze connects the flitting to the rising, showing Delano what he does not yet know, without itself seeming anything more than an incidental weather condition. Of course, it is more that that: the breeze is what permits the truth about the San Dominick to be read with an unprecedented and unrepeated accuracy. But it would also be impossible to assert that the breeze says that truth, that it signifies a particular history, because it only moves through the passage, occasioning, without ever making, connections. The breeze introduces the inquietude that Delano and the reader ought to feel; but

114 / melville

it is not itself a sign, and it does not signal its opposite. It is produced unaccountably (“unheralded, unfollowed”), and it deflects attention from itself, echoing the warm air that made the hoar frost disappear, disappearing itself as the narrative continues. To follow the movement of air in this passage is ultimately to watch it depart, evaporating into silence. The air transforms itself, beginning as a sign (allied with paws velvet and silky and their accompanying fangs) and becoming less and less recognizable, more and more inscrutable, until it simply vanishes, no longer to be referred to by the text.44 It seems, as Maurice Blanchot puts it, to find a way into “speaking without either saying or being silent,”45 which perhaps is like testifying without either voice or refusal. Blanchot explains how such writing might operate: “I am seeking a way, without getting there, to say that there is a speech in which things, not showing themselves, do not hide. Neither veiled nor unveiled: this is their non-truth.”46 Parrying the binaries of showing/ hiding, veiling/unveiling, and truth/lies, Blanchot suggests that the success of the text ought not to be measured according to its fulfillment of the promise to disclose the “true history of the San Dominick’s voyage.” Rather, if, at the story’s end, it is impossible to say where the truth has left its mark on the story, if the reader is only aware that something, “neither veiled nor unveiled,” has flit through the text and disturbed him or her, like an inquietude that rises from the repose of the ordered words on the page, stymying their explanations and illuminations, then it may have testified, almost in spite of itself, after all. The cats-paw breeze may seem to be a slight detail on which to hang the testimonial weight of Benito Cereno. While the cats-paw breeze appears and disappears within a sentence, however, Benito Cereno is to no small extent a story about waiting for the wind: it follows Delano’s almost sensory attentiveness to the movement of air that will release the leadlike surface of the sea with which the text begins. Despite Cereno’s disinterest, Delano is confident that the “slight rippling of the sea” he perceives will allow him to maneuver the San Dominick to anchor: “Poor fellow, thought Captain Delano, bitter experience has taught him that one ripple does not make a wind, any more than one swallow a summer. But he is mistaken for once. I will get his ship in for him, and prove it” (BC, 91–92). The bravura belongs to that aspect of Delano’s character that always skims over difficulty, but he happens to be correct about the wind. The wind is, in this sense, the one thing Delano seems able to read adeptly. Indeed, in the context of sea stories, the wind can never be trivialized; the plot will always depend on its vagaries and the adeptness with which

melville / 115

they are perceived. Even in Moby-Dick, in which the Pequod is driven by the whale, a sensitivity to weather, as I noted earlier, is constant and crucial. Ahab may appear to be exclusively focused on Moby-Dick, but he is also, and even more subtly, attentive to the wind’s uncanny presence. At one point, he classifies the night breeze as part of a stone-silent seascape: “Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe; in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still rolled on speechless and unspoken to . . .” (MD, 376). Ahab describes the elements around him as wonderfully released from language, bearing no resemblance to Ishmael’s illegible hieroglyphics or to legibility at all. Yet at the close of the novel, in “The Chase—Third Day,” Ahab offers a far more nuanced appraisal of the wind, characterizing it as an elusive medium: A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!—it’s tainted. Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, ’tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing than that. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. (MD, 420) Ahab moves through a series of propositions, each of which worries his ability to decide whether the wind is a dumb element or nature’s most cunning force. The vile and tainted wind acts as if it has been nowhere, as if its appearance on the sea is its debut—which is, no doubt, the way the wind is usually encountered: it does not cause concern until it is upon us. But Ahab notes the inaccuracy of this impression, as the wind has been places—to prisons and hospitals—and thereby bears that experience with it even when it reaches the sea that had seemed so blameless and far from human institutions. If the wind were confined to a cave, as Ahab then proposes, it would not form such invisible networks between entities that, he suggests, ought not to be connected. Or, perhaps, the wind in a cave would eliminate the difficulty of assessing whether wind does bear with it a past, does tie its present to other locations and events.

116 / melville

For it is the wind’s ambiguity that continues to occupy Ahab: on the one hand, it is noble and unconquerable; on the other, cowardly and evasive. Yet Ahab’s final judgment on the wind takes a slightly different turn, from judging the wind’s character to determining its form. “All the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless,” he says, which is a remarkable statement from a man who has been frantically chasing a whale that is about to kill him. The distinction that follows is even more perceptive: “all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents.” The wind does not have the sort of body that the whale has, but it has a force, a being, that demands one reckon with it and that throws, as a consequence, the very idea of embodiment into question. The wind’s ambiguous status echoes the waffling cats-paw breeze. Both currents are quite certainly there and yet in no way yield a fingerpointing certainty (“there!”) or a methodical deliberation of boundary (“the wind is located there”). Hence, I cannot “hang,” in the metaphor I used earlier, the weight of testimony on a breeze, because a breeze will not stand to be so used. But this is precisely the point: to think of a testimony that cannot be confined to a cave, that cannot be definitively connected to where it has been and where it is going—that manifests itself so voicelessly that its body never becomes an object, a reference in a deposition that gets filed away.

Disquieting I may seem to have strayed from the concern I identified at the outset of this chapter: how to adequately read Babo’s “voiceless end.” Turning away from Babo’s human body, however, and toward what is bodiless has allowed me to separate the testimony generated by the text from the voice that Babo or any other character may be understood to possess.47 Once testimony’s scope has been opened to include the pointedly mute but also the barely discernible, Babo’s voiceless end need not amount to a prohibition of the testimonial power of his death. As I insisted earlier, this is not because it may be understood to speak. On the contrary, it would take part in bearing witness precisely because the criteria for doing so have ceased to rest on the reclamation of voice. Like the sea breeze, it cannot and does not say anything, it only indicates a horrific event; but that may also, in Melville’s text, constitute a species of bearing witness. My trajectory has also sought to dismantle the expectation in human rights discourse that the exercise of voice, in the form of testimony, serves

melville / 117

as a guarantor of the human. If testimony is not the exclusive property of what has access to voice—indeed, if testimony extends much further to include the inscrutable—then it cannot be used to elect the oppressed as human or, importantly, to downgrade them in the reverse direction. Affiliating Babo’s dead body with the breeze about the San Dominick does not dehumanize the former, from my perspective; it rather allows for a broadening of the entities considered “bodied” and therefore a more nuanced understanding of the way his particular body impresses the reader without nominating itself as a liberal speaking subject. In the final analysis, the inscrutability of the phrase “voiceless end,” the question I initially raised about whether the person or the death was meant to be so described, may itself bear witness, elusively, to the text’s slave story. What I have yet to do, however, is to account for the deposition in Benito Cereno, which would appear to provide a testimony as deliberately loud as Babo or the breeze is quiet. It seems to depend on a single voice that methodically explains hitherto-unknown events, providing “the true history of the San Dominick’s voyage” as it might be understood in an utterly ordinary sense. I have suggested that the deposition’s limitations are not difficult to discern, as it often highlights its own omissions and it fails to disclose some key details. Yet to conclude that Melville included the deposition solely to demonstrate its failure attributes to him a rather extravagant gesture, one that makes his tale dense and obscure for the sake of a point legible elsewhere. For the deposition is, undoubtedly, a challenging read: bereft of short paragraphs and underpopulated by sentences without semicolons, it is an ungainly, unattractive interruption framed by legalistic formulations. Largely quoted from the deposition included in Melville’s source text, it not only substitutes informational list for elegant narrative; it imports a text from a foreign discourse. A “stranger,” as the San Dominick first was to Delano, it unleashes a whole new system of conventions and vocabularies, paradigms and signs into Melville’s carefully woven web of suggestive tropes. Regarding the deposition as a “stranger,” one at first sees something like what Delano saw when he initially spied the San Dominick: it is an entity that ought to have order, that even appears to have order, but that has, too, ragged edges48 and inconclusiveness. For instance, in the process of accounting for the human cargo of the ship, the deposition is parenthetically interrupted: “[Here, in the original, follows a list of some fifty names, descriptions, and ages, compiled from certain recovered documents . . . from which portions only are extracted]” (BC, 104). Only fifteen names follow, and so the structure of listing information peters out into uncertainty, both about those other (approximately)

118 / melville

thirty-five names and about why certain ones are included and others are not. Yet on closer inspection, the deposition turns out to resemble less the disturbed ship than the endless, inscrutably calm sea that delivers to Delano the cats-paw breeze. In submerging the reader in an unfamiliar discourse, it becomes figuratively hard to fathom; it appears to respond to specific questions, but one does not know, exactly, what information the tribunal sought or the protocols by which it was organized. Further, the entire deposition is meant to follow a prefatory “he said” (BC, 104), so that nearly every sentence and phrase begins with “that,” and the effect is of a rhythmic, almost wavelike repetition. In the midst of an especially long paragraph, one reads, “that the negro Babo afterwards told [Cereno] to carry them to Senegal, or to the neighboring islands of St. Nicholas; and he answered, that this was impossible, on account of the great distance, the necessity involved of rounding Cape Horn, the bad condition of the vessel, the want of provisions, sails and water; but that the negro Babo replied to him he must carry them in any way; that they would do and conform themselves to everything the deponent should require as to eating and drinking . . . ; that . . . ; that . . . ; that . . .” (BC, 105), and so on—the sentence does not actually end for pages, even though it is occasionally broken off with ellipses. Even as this valuable narrative information is being provided, the reader has trouble assimilating it, due to the stylistic contrast with Melville’s narrative and due to the repetitive rhythm of the successive clauses. All the “thats” start to run together, and the reader can become lulled by the form despite the incendiary content. It is all disquieting information, but it is presented in such a quieting manner that the disquiet and quiet run together, much as they did in Melville’s careful prose. The reader’s challenge with regard to the deposition, then, is the same as Delano’s was as he stood on the balcony: to be disquieted precisely by the quiet, to understand how disquieting the quiet actually is. The deposition serves as a strange break in the text; on the one hand, it represents a pause between two tense and fraught narrative sections, delivering information rather than clues in a structure and style that is, as I suggested, more lulling than suspenseful. Yet on the other hand, the deposition might be the stormiest, so to speak, part of Benito Cereno, since it is there that the actions of the slaves, their desperation and their violence, are most clearly reported. The deposition is, in other words, both lulling and satisfying and, at the same time, disturbing and provocative. This double position has been characterized as symptomatic of the human rights narrative of the past several decades. Explicit, loud testimonies

melville / 119

like Cereno’s deposition may have become as difficult to assimilate as those that resist narrativization, precisely because they have become somewhat familiar, somewhat less shocking, as more and more have been produced. As Joseph Slaughter writes, they may let us know something, but “the act of knowing . . . is disappointing in its feeble ability to translate knowledge into outrage, action, or even acknowledgment.”49 We may be lulled by information, lulled even by an intimacy, however reprehensible, with the outrageous.50 Like Delano, then, we wait for a breeze. It may seem odd, even insulting, to affiliate myself and my readers with this prototypical stupid American who for so long cannot see the truth of the scene he enters. Even if he is an adept seaman, Peggy Kamuf’s judgment of him as “a bad reader,”51 especially of the human conditions that surround him, seems warranted, and Jonathan Elmer notes the absurdity of certain “facts” that Delano takes for granted, such as Cereno’s claim that Atufal begs his forgiveness every two hours: “Can it really be the case that this scene has been repeated 720 times?”52 Yet Elmer is also sympathetic to Delano’s hesitation to accept the seemingly unsecret signs of the barbering scene: “We may wish to fault Delano here again, but he is not blind: he sees both solicitude and menace, alternately, and who could do otherwise in any other situation? The servant’s raised blade, in any situation governed by domination and subjection, will always open onto this same radical ambiguity.”53 Solicitude and menace, quiet and inquiet, may take the same form—a mute slave, a poised razor, a text that tells and a text that lulls. Confronted with such “radical ambiguity,” we are fortunate if, like Delano, a change in the air gives us pause, allows us to sense something we have not been able to see.

4 /

James: Testimony without Life

There is a dead woman in Henry James’s account of his visit to Charleston in The American Scene. He introduces the image as a point of comparison, but it startles the reader nevertheless; it is as if James has stumbled on a corpse in the midst of the sleepy southern city. This corpse, it turns out, is quite extraordinary: it testifies to the city’s lifelessness, and on careful examination, it thereby turns out to be not quite dead, to have enough life in it to speak. Unlike Melville’s vision, in which the dead sink like stones from the text’s purview, James’s image arises as if from the text’s depths, bringing with it an understanding of testimony that disturbs the assumption of death’s finality. The image appears after James has noted that although he had “caught the wide-eyed smile of the South” in Charleston, “a deficiency was clear, which was neither more nor less than the deficiency of life; without life, all gracefully, the picture managed to compose itself. Even while one felt it do so one missed the precious presence; so that there at least was food for wonderment, for admiration of the art at play.”1 A hint of paradox informs these sentences: the city suffers from a deficiency of life, but, nonetheless, it manages to compose a picture of itself. It somehow accomplishes what ought to require the “precious presence,” and James proposes that the unusual occurrence resembles the suggestiveness of a corpse: To what, all the while, as one went, could one compare the mystification?—to what if not to the image of some handsome pale person, a beauty (to call her so) of other days, who, besides confessing

james / 121

to the inanimate state from closed eyes and motionless lips, from the arrest of respiration and gesture, was to leave one, by the day’s end, with the sense of a figure prepared for romantic interment, stretched in a fair winding-sheet, covered with admirable flowers, surrounded with shining tapers. That, one reasoned, would be something to have seen.2 The mystifying ability of Charleston to compose itself without life is likened to the way that a corpse offers a sense of the gorgeous funeral arranged for it. Neither has the life that is usually responsible for composing or offering, yet, despite their inanimateness, both convey meaning. The paradox is rendered in a microversion with regard to the corpse’s face: the “closed eyes” and “motionless lips,” “the arrest of respiration and gesture,” are things of death, but we know this because they tell us so—they “confess to the inanimate state.” What is without life, then, pronounces its lifelessness. Thus, perhaps James is observing that testimony does not exclusively belong to the living, to what is alive. Yet it is not quite accurate to say that the dead city or the dead woman or her dead features remain wholly on the side of death, rather than life. If an inanimate part of an inanimate body confesses, then it must have become, at least to some small degree, animate, endowed with a vitality that permits it to speak. In fact, not only are the corpse’s body parts so animated: the woman herself also slips from inanimateness into animation, from death into life. The telltale word in the passage is “who”: to render the sentence grammatically sensible, “the image of” must be elided in favor of the “handsome pale person . . . who . . . was to leave one, by the day’s end, with the sense of a figure prepared for romantic interment.” She leaves James with a sense of her funeral, and this act of leaving, like the act of confession, indicates that although she is about to be buried, she is not absolutely inanimate. If James is noticing that testimony may exist without life, then his observation has as much to do with the boundaries of life as it does with the boundaries of testimony. James suggests that apparently dead entities testify by crossing into animateness—without, however, ceasing to be dead. This apparent contradiction becomes viable, I want to suggest, if one reads James as inheriting the intellectual tradition of Emerson and Swedenborg—in which things speak—and extending the realm of things to include the dead. Contextualizing James through his mystically inclined forebears reverses the more common tendency in current criticism, to read him as anticipating modernism by questioning the efficacy of signification.3 From that perspective, death challenges representation,

122 / james

and the language associated with it indicates the impossibility of accurately writing about it. Yet as the example from The American Scene demonstrates, representing the dead is hardly unimaginable to James, and the image of the dead woman in particular reverberates through his fiction. By reading those reverberations in The Wings of the Dove, “The Friends of the Friends,” and “The Altar of the Dead,” I propose in what follows that death may be linked, for James, not to abysmal loss but to life. Consequently, what is without life is only so in a matter of degree, and the images of dead women testify not only in the sense that they make death evident—they may also be understood to speak, to express themselves to the reader and even to each other.4

The testimony of the hotel (and other buildings) Although my discussion of James follows that of Douglass and Melville, I understand the later writer to avoid both of their proposals: the optimistic hoping for language and the somewhat more pessimistic gravitation to elusiveness. Instead, he loops back to Emerson’s logic, extending it so thoroughly that neither hope nor elusiveness is necessary. My argument is founded on the idea that James takes for granted what Emerson labored to demonstrate: that things testify, that the world expresses itself before and beyond the meaning we attribute to it. Explicit examples of this assumption are not difficult to identify in James’s work, especially in The American Scene, in which there are sections titled “The Testimony of the Clubs,” “The Testimony of the Park,” and “The Testimony of the Hotel.” In “The Testimony of the Hotel,” James initially proposes that the hotel and its counterpart, “the hotel-like chain of Pullman cars,” provide “the supreme social expression.”5 It sounds, at first, as if he uses “testimony” loosely, to signal that the hotel and train reveal certain characteristics of American society. Yet as the passage continues, it appears that James means “testimony” in a far more literal sense; the hotel and the train are linked to the city at large, and all are figured as addressing him. They speak for themselves; they make their own case: “it is as if,” James writes, “every one and everything said to you straight: ‘Yes, this is how we are; this is what it is to enjoy our advantages; this moreover is all there is of us; we give it all out. Make what you can of it!’”6 And James, calling himself “the restless analyst,” acts as if their speech, and their demand for his response, is the most natural thing in the world: “‘Yes, I see how you are, God knows . . . for nothing in the world is easier to see, even in all the particulars. But what does it mean to be as you are?’”7 James is engaged here in a dialogue, an exchange of ideas,

james / 123

with the ordinarily inanimate entities that constitute a city, and he never pauses to justify this apparent oddity. The fact that the city speaks is for him obvious, a matter of course: “nothing in the world is easier to see.” W. H. Auden notices James’s extension of testimony to objects in his introduction to The American Scene. “Outside of fairy tales,” Auden writes, “I know of no book in which things so often and so naturally become persons.”8 “Buildings address James,” he explains. “James addresses buildings. . . . Buildings address each other.”9 There is a sharp observation in the somewhat wry situation of the book in a tradition of texts that rely on magic: The American Scene does not produce readings of buildings so much as make them speak and offer responses. It reads, as Auden implies, less like Benjamin on Paris than Carroll on Wonderland.10 When Bill Brown draws on Auden’s observation, it is similarly to situate James’s text as a relic from a faraway realm: “[James’s] animation of the world might even be said to hark back to those premodern times and places where objects were anything but inert.”11 Yet if James does hark back, it is perhaps not so far back as Auden and Brown suggest, for he follows a nineteenth-century American tendency to do so, providing a late instance of that “premodern” impulse. The testimonial hotel, for instance, may be the progeny of Emerson’s objects in “Circles.” As I discussed in chapter 1, Emerson describes how ordinary things surround us, apparently mute, until they are approached by a receptive mind and suddenly turn meaningful. He writes, “We all stand waiting, empty,—knowing, possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god, and converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest.”12 It is possible to read James’s “restless analyst” as a version of Emerson’s “god”: he is the one who regards the hotel and the city not as trivial toys but as entities that make their meaning manifest, that testify to him. James situates himself in the preface to The American Scene along these lines, arguing that what distinguishes his account is his great aptitude for responding to the country’s “expression of character.”13 In the opening of the chapter on Philadelphia, he details how this responsiveness operates: “To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it, analytically minded . . . is to be subject to the superstition that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out: to give out, that is, to the participant at once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the matter.”14

124 / james

To be analytic, for James, is to regard himself as subject to his “subjects,” the “objects and places” of which he will write. The analyst never mistakes a mighty symbol for a toy, because he believes that those subjects have their own sense, “a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out,” and they reward him, in turn, with food for report. Although Walt Whitman was quick to grab the title, James too may be the poet Emerson envisioned, the one who “names the thing because he sees it,”15 who sees it because he knows there is something to see. James’s writing on Emerson corroborates this connection, even suggesting that he intentionally emulated his father’s friend. Reviewing a volume of Emerson’s correspondence with Carlyle, James writes, “Emerson, who was the perfection of a listener, stood always in a posture of hopeful expectancy and regarded each delivery of a personal view as a new fact, to be estimated on its merits.”16 James describes Emerson here in a particularly Emersonian fashion. The eager openness to others recalls Emerson’s account in “Experience” of how he meets a profound mind: “I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what was there already. I make! O no! I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement, before the first opening to me of this august magnificence.”17 James sees in Emerson the arriving, receptively clapping persona of the essay, and he calls him “the perfection of a listener.” The designation suggests that Emerson’s theory of reception, as well as his constant attentiveness, may have served as models for James’s own exercises in listening to the world’s testimony. James writes in a different review that Emerson’s “system was to practise a kind of universal passive hospitality—he aimed at nothing less,”18 and the idea of a system composed of a patient practice recalls as well the methodical reminder at the start of James’s Philadelphia chapter of what it takes to maintain the analytic mind. What James values in Emerson, I am proposing, reflects not only the later writer’s appreciation of what the earlier writer had done but a common assumption about the positioning of the impressionable observer within the world. Both James and Emerson assume that adopting a posture of receptivity yields the testimony that they devote their lives to recording. James may call himself an analyst rather than a listener (or a poet or a god), but his analysis seems to be of a piece with his appreciation of Emerson’s approach to others, other persons as well as other objects. If both writers are willing to extend the realm of testimony beyond humanity, then Emerson as well as James may be understood to unbind testimony from the limits of organic life. The dust and stones that Emerson insisted could testify are ordinarily no more animate than the

james / 125

eyes and lips of the corpse with which this chapter began. Yet the particular possibility of the dead testifying emerges in James because he is willing to do what Emerson was not: James not only notices that the world means; he finds it incumbent on himself to explain that meaning. James specifies that the closed eyes and motionless lips confess to the inanimate state, whereas Emerson would only ever have remarked that they confess. James picks up, in this sense, where Emerson leaves off: the world’s expression is only the beginning, only the preliminary assumption for the restless analyst, whose real work begins when he converts that expression into a representation that makes its meaning intelligible to readers. Hence, James can respond to the testifying elements of Charleston, “Yes, I see how you are, God knows. . . . But what does it mean to be as you are?” It was never for Emerson to say what it means to be as you are: that something is—that it says, “I actually am”—was the primary testimony on which he was focused. James’s venturing to ask a follow-up question amounts to a major distinction between the two writers, for if Emerson’s signature theory was testimony without representation, for James there is no writing, and no testimony, that does not consist of representation. “The Art of Fiction” makes this claim: “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.”19 The work of the novelist, like the work of the painter, consists in providing “his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle.”20 The formulation of a “look” that conveys the meaning of things is precisely what may be seen in the eyes and lips that confess to inanimateness, as well as in the complete dead woman who glosses Charleston’s deficiency of life. The dead woman may be understood to testify, then, in the sense that the image speaks “for” the world. The image is charged with showing the look of the city, with explaining what it means to be as the city is, and thus it bears witness to Charleston. In this sense, any image or figure James employs to represent the world also testifies to it. Such a conclusion may appear too sweeping, implying that all of James’s fiction may be considered testimonial. Yet as J. Hillis Miller observes, James writes in his prefaces as if this is quite literally the case—as if he is a notary who bears witness by faithfully reporting and not an inventor who creates worlds out of whole cloth. He sees himself, as in “The Art of Fiction,” less as a spinner of tales than as an integral part of the expressive universe. Miller describes James’s relationship to what he calls “the matter of the novel,” noting that “he speaks as though that matter did not depend on his consciousness or on his words for its existence. . . . It is not a matter

126 / james

of free invention, but a revelation dictated to him by the matter itself.”21 This idea is “radically contrary to commonsense assumptions,”22 and yet it grounds the connection between the dead woman and Charleston, casting the image as an emanation from the world rather than a creation on its behalf. In this counterintuitive line of thought, James’s writing testifies by manifesting the meaning of the universe, not merely by acting as its proxy. Such a possibility emerges, and becomes more fully explicable, in a closer look at the Swedenborgian thinking that streamed around James throughout his career.

Representing through Swedenborg James had, of course, a more intimate Swedenborgian predecessor than Emerson, as well as a more devoted one: his father, Henry James Senior. My argument is not a biographical one that understands James to imitate his father or even to have swallowed, however unconsciously, his father’s ardent beliefs. Rather, I am suggesting that Swedenborgian thinking was still in the air—in James’s air but also in the intellectual air in general—as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth and that acknowledging it is key to glimpsing how radically and yet thoroughly James includes the dead in his idea of testimony.23 As I explored in chapter 1, Swedenborg’s schema offers an unusual perspective on what it means to represent the expressive world. This is because representations are always entangled, for Swedenborg, with what they represent—they cannot be separated into the familiar sign and referent. James’s father was energetically precise, if not always perfectly clear, about this distinction. One useful image that James Senior provides appears as he is arguing that the problem with science—in particular, Darwin’s—is that it confuses aspects of nature with nature’s cause. In other words, mutation may be something that nature does, but this does not mean that it explains how nature comes to be. James Senior insists that nature exclusively devolves from God and, more specifically, that it may thereby be understood as a mirror for divinity. The passage is worth quoting at length: Nothing originates and nothing ends in nature. Why? Because nature is not being nor existence, but only, and at most, appearance. Hence all of nature’s forms or species are purely relative or phenomenal; that is to say, they presuppose an intelligence which is capable of comprehending them, and to which alone they exist. And the scientific evolutionist consequently, in so far forth as he

james / 127

invents a natural origin even for the larvae of our existing marine ascidians, let alone for the mind of man itself, proceeds upon a total misunderstanding of what nature means, and so turns the actual truth of things upside down. In fact he discharges the mind of all freedom of life; for he makes nature no longer the obedient mirror of truth, but its absolute source and arbiter.24 If nature is “only, and at most, appearance,” “the obedient mirror of truth,” it cannot be conceived as a single, self-contained entity. As a form, it is only relative to the truth or divinity in which it truly originates, so that one sees in it both its being and the being that it reflects. Put differently, if nature were to look at herself in a mirror, she would always see God in the background. To miss the reflection of divinity is, as James Senior insists, precisely where science goes wrong. Nature cannot be assessed as a system unto itself, and the broader point is that man and the spiritual world, like the marine ascidians in the natural world, bear an intersubjective relationship to their creator. As James Senior puts it in another book, man’s “actual life or being . . . inhere[s], not in himself, but exclusively in his creator.”25 Thus, to even discuss one’s “own” being is to slightly misrepresent the case, since man’s self, like nature’s forms, is individual only to the extent that it reflects the divinity that is its ultimate source. The paradox, in short, is this: the fact that one has a self reveals the boundless and selfless divinity that has created it.26 What I want to suggest is that James’s process of analysis, in particular his understanding of the continuity between the expressive world and his representations of it, resembles the involuted structure his father so vigorously defends. James does not regard his representations as figures or signs that are essentially untethered to their referents. Rather, in a way that is structurally similar to nature’s intrinsic reflection of its creator, the representations are inextricably tied to the expressions that they were invented to manifest. Miller points out that the verb invent is appropriate for James in “the older sense of inventio as discovery of something hitherto hidden that has nevertheless always been there, waiting to be brought out into the light.”27 This connotation suggests that James does not create from nothing or even imagine from an opening blankness; instead, it is as if his representations were suggested by the world itself, so that he simply brings them to meet the reader. He is a medium, an intermediary, who facilitates the world’s expression in text. This is why, as I quoted earlier, Miller insists that James conceives of his writing as “a revelation dictated to him by the matter itself.” Accordingly, and importantly, representations in the text cannot be considered separately from

128 / james

the world; they remain extensions of, therefore a part of, “the matter itself.”28 The interconnectedness of the world and its representation may be read further in the tendency of James’s images to slip from their positions as metaphors and join the litany of things demanding metaphors. For example, when James introduces the image of the dead woman to represent Charleston’s expression of its deficiency of life, he concludes with the remark, “That, one reasoned, would be something to have seen.” It is unclear whether her bygone life or the funeral that her corpse anticipates is the antecedent of “that.” In any case, the idea of determining what one wishes one could see becomes for James a way to further his account of Charleston. Charleston is almost, he goes on to say, a city of ruins, except that it has no ruins; it was “but the historic Desert without the historic Mausoleum.”29 He can hardly see in it the past—“the ‘old’ South,” as he puts it elsewhere30—he supposed it would contain. Like the corpse whose life and funeral one has missed, the city shows you what you wish you could have seen. But is it the corpse that is glossing the city here or the city that is glossing the corpse? The question is impossible to answer, as the two entities somersault around each other, further developing the precise wistfulness they inspire.31 It is as if the corpse has become part of Charleston, as if, as I mentioned at the outset of the chapter, it was really there, in the street, part of the cityscape that James finds himself obliged to describe. This accumulation makes sense if the representational image and the city are not separate entities but related expressions of a common world. From a Swedenborgian perspective, the representation reflects the city, just as the human and the marine ascidians reflect divinity. And this means that the representation is unthinkable without the city; if the corpse could look in the mirror, she would see the Charleston that she was designed to represent. Hence, she is not an uninvolved figure. She, too, is an “insider”: she brings the city with her; she expresses it as much as she represents it. The process is circular or, more accurately, spiraling: the world calls out for an image, and the image it receives joins the world calling out for an(other) image. Every further image, every further representational phrase, contributes to expressing the world and to the expressiveness that constitutes the world. To regard James’s text in this light is to substantially revise the assumptions about meaning that usually guide assessments of his work. My focus on how the inanimate comes to testify resembles Bill Brown’s emphasis on things in The Golden Bowl, in particular, his claim that the novel demonstrates “the way that objects collect meaning, the way an object can seem to crystallize events, relations, situations.”32 Brown

james / 129

argues that objects in the novel convey meaning more explicitly and economically than do the characters to whom they belong, providing James with a way to “organize and stabilize knowledge and power, human emotion and human history.”33 Yet Brown’s analysis ultimately moves in a direction other than the path I have been paving. While he observes about The American Scene, as I noted earlier, that its animation “might even be said to hark back” to premodern times, he is more confident about James’s place in a “modernist trajectory” that runs from Heidegger to Lacan.34 Brown argues that the central object of the novel, the golden bowl, “incarnates a constitutive void, an absence of knowledge around which all the characters circulate;”35 in other words, although the bowl is centrally positioned and thereby grounds possibilities for meaning, in itself it has no meaning. The bowl “seems to signify so much,” Brown summarizes, “while it in fact signifies so little.”36 The deflation of the bowl’s meaning from much to little is a consequence of its fundamental separation from the “events, relations, situations” it makes evident. The bowl is not, in Brown’s reading, essentially related to what it signifies. But in the Swedenborgian thinking I have outlined here, the bowl does not figure its world so much as come from it, expressing it, and it cannot lose the meaning with which it is necessarily imbued. Rather than empty signifiers, Swedenborgian representations suggest an ever-increasing fullness, as they draw from the world and become part of it and then call out to be represented anew. Thinking through this expansive, interconnective logic provides an alternative to Brown’s focus on the void. It allows the text to bear witness as an “insider,” from a position of plenty. A corpse with confessional eyes and lips may be read as testifying, accordingly, not only because it is imagined as suggestive but insofar as it carries meaning from the expressive world—in particular, the aspect of the world that has a deficiency of life and yet circulates among the living. The corpse speaks for and also of death; it speaks as part of the death it represents. Hence, if it is possible to read enfolded in this single image from The American Scene three more dead women from James’s fiction, it may be because it reflects the others, and reflects death itself, when we put, as it were, the mirror up to its face. In The Wings of the Dove, the portrait of a dead woman joins with dozens of less literal figures to preserve and to carry, to offer generously to the reader, the death that haunts almost all of its pages. To testify to death may not, one may conclude, be tremendously different from testifying to anything else in the expressive world. Through “The Friends of the Friends,” James develops the premise that death is not, in fact, a very special case at all, for the story’s dead woman

130 / james

appears indistinguishable from a live one. “The Altar of the Dead,” too, includes dead women who seem to survive, and it features one who calls out so that a dead man may be represented, may be granted a candle that prolongs his contact with the living. By moving from the most recent image (The American Scene’s in 1907) to the earliest (that of “The Altar of the Dead” in 1894),37 I ultimately arrive at this call, a literal testimony that suggests, in more senses than one, that the dead have spoken.

Milly’s portrait The terms used to describe the corpse in The American Scene are scattered among the images of dead women from James’s earlier texts. The candles of her funeral echo the tapers of “The Altar of the Dead”; the “motionless lips” resemble the ghost who holds a finger to hers and never speaks in “The Friends of the Friends.” “The handsome pale person, a beauty (to call her so) of other days” follows the account of the Bronzino portrait that Milly Theale encounters in The Wings of the Dove, which depicts a woman with “eyes of other days.”38 To a certain extent, death itself (as opposed to a lifeless city) constitutes the primary subject of each of these texts, the aspect of the world to which they respond. Each of these harbinger images, accordingly, participates in expressing the abstraction of death, in making it speak. As I suggested earlier, this means that the dead women cannot be understood to neatly signify finality or impossibility; their inanimateness must be the product of an impulse to animate, in particular, an impulse to animate death. My perspective may not seem controversial with regard to the relatively minor corpse that appears in Charleston, but it reads Milly and her portrait in ways that are largely oppositional to critical trends. I begin with The Wings of the Dove, then, in order to spell out how assuming that death stands to be expressed finds vivacity where it is not usually thought to dwell. The scene in which Milly sees the Bronzino portrait is not the first to suggest death as a central subject of the novel, but it is often read as turning the plot definitively toward Milly’s own impending demise. She is told that she resembles the woman in the portrait, and Lord Mark brings her to see it. Milly “found herself,” James writes, “for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears.”39 He continues, Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair— as wonderful as he had said: the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed; a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a

james / 131

mass of hair, rolled back and high, that must, before fading with time, have had a family resemblance to her own. The lady in question, at all events, with her slightly Michael-angelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full red lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage— only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead.40 The process by which the wonderful painting brings the narrative to “dead, dead, dead” is not simply algebraic, such that the painting means death. As I noted, the phrase “of other days” resonates with the image from The American Scene; there it is an attribute of the beauty and here the attribute of the eyes. Yet there is a similarity, too, between the interplay of the portrait, the woman it depicts, and Milly and the slippage among Charleston, the image of the corpse, its life, and its funeral. In The Wings of the Dove, at first it is the painting—“it”—that seems “so strange and fair,” but it soon becomes difficult to tell whether painting or woman is commanding description: is it that the hair of the woman once resembled Milly’s own or that paint representing the woman’s hair was once more vibrantly close to Milly’s? The “eyes of other days” may be subject to the same type of question, for the eyes may suggest to Milly the sixteenth-century scenes that the woman depicted saw, or they may suggest a style of painting that dates the portrait. Finally, when Milly determines that “she was dead, dead, dead,” she seems to refer to the lady depicted rather than her image, yet the deadness also seems certified by the image that has long outlived the lady. The image says that “she was dead”; it brings the life once lived to Milly, and in this way it becomes at least as animate as the woman who “was a very great personage— only unaccompanied by a joy.”41 The combination of wistfulness and certitude—wistfulness for the other days and certitude about the fact of death—recalls the tone of the passage from The American Scene and in particular James’s remark, “That, one reasoned, would be something to have seen.” For Milly may be read, like James in his analytic role, as seeing in the portrait the end of a life she would like to have witnessed. The passage brings to light a complex contest between life and death: the woman is known to be dead as soon as one sees the image, which renders the image dependent on death, but the image also holds the animating function of recalling the life that the woman once possessed. The image allows one to see the life in what is known as dead. This idea of seeing life in what is recognized as dead might also extend to Milly herself. As many critics have noted, Milly becomes less and less pictured by the novel as her death becomes more and more assured. Yet

132 / james

even the earliest image of her, before her own sickness has been mentioned, shows her red hair and vitality streaming through mourning clothes, enlivening them: [Her] hair was somehow exceptionally red even for the real thing, which it innocently confessed to being, and [her] clothes were remarkably black even for robes of mourning, which was the meaning they expressed. It was New York mourning, it was New York hair, it was a New York history, confused as yet, but multitudinous, of the loss of parents, brothers, sisters, almost every human appendage, all on a scale and with a sweep that had romantic isolation, and, beyond everything, it was by most accounts, in respect to the mass of money so piled on the girl’s back, a set of New York possibilities.42 Milly is weighted here; literally, the hair or clothes are piled on her back, and James twists the image to reveal as well masses of money. At the same time, she is starkly free of family, and her final attribute, “a set of New York possibilities,” seems as if it would render her buoyant rather than heavy. Milly bears death, then, but also bears what it means to live with death, to live amid it. Thus, if the image must be acknowledged to announce, from the start, that death will cling to Milly, hunting her despite her peripatetic journeying, James also renders her the force that death must follow. She gives invisible death a course in the novel, a way to be seen, like a dressmaker’s form on which black cloth is draped in order to become a sign for mourning.43 Although Milly’s death is central, then, the novel may be understood to make death evident rather than to be consumed by its powerful intangibility. Such a suggestion is directly contrary to the critical tendency to conflate the fact of death’s elusiveness with James’s mode of representation. Recent evaluations insist that the loss of Milly is analogized in the text’s inability to capture her death; since as the event approaches the narrative turns definitively to follow Densher, it is read as displaying the impossibility of fixing death, of portraying it in direct illustrations, of appropriating it. Such studies understand her death, somewhat like Brown’s reading of the golden bowl, as an event that fails to register its own significance. Kenneth Reinhard, for example, connects Milly’s death to what he calls “the Jamesian Thing,” which “names the object whose proximity is registered only in the penumbra of signifiers left by its withdrawal from the text” and “can be discerned in the anamorphic disturbances it leaves in representations,” disturbances he links to Freud and (as Brown did) to Heidegger and Lacan.44 Such an object is,

james / 133

in Reinhard’s reading, barely legible as such, since it is only in its “withdrawal,” its escape or retreat, that it leaves any trace in the text. Reinhard reads the evidence of such withdrawal in “the precious figures” late in the novel that refer to Milly’s death without explicitly representing the dead woman.45 In his view, the reader looks at them only to say, with James, “That . . . would be something to have seen,” knowing, however, that the text never draws him or her closer to it than the “would-have-been.” From the Emersonian or Swedenborgian perspective I have been exploring, however, even the figures for loss, even the gaping and unsatisfied emptiness in the novel’s end, may be understood as animating. Reinhard argues that figures and signifiers stand in for the loss, replacing rather than representing it; in recognizing the fact of replacement, the reader feels the force of the loss so lost, as it were, that it cannot be shown in itself. The meaning of death is thus made subject to an impossible economics whereby death can only be represented by what does not adequately represent it.46 Yet the Swedenborgian structural logic I outlined earlier would not find James’s figures to fall short of their representative charge. The figures would instead participate in the enlivening of the death: they would serve the death; they would not be able to look in the mirror without seeing it. Just as mourning was “the meaning . . . expressed” by Milly’s black clothes, in this reading, the other figures for her death are devoted to manifesting its meaning—to “expressing” it in the sense that one expresses the juice of a lemon.47 It would be impossible to say, then, that the loss is lost in the process of representation, since that is, rather, how it comes to be registered. The figures thus become, like Milly in her dress, enlivening and expressive: they fill the text, populating it with additional entities, rather than being drawn in, quicksand-like, to an engulfing abyss. One of the “precious figures” Reinhard mentions comes from the description of how Milly’s would-be lover thinks about her death and the final words from her that he was never to have. James writes, “He took [the thought] out of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one, handling them, handling it, as a father, baffled and tender, might handle a maimed child.”48 For Reinhard, the maimed child is a child lost, a child in whom one can see only irreparable violence suffered. Yet I read this new figure introduced to the world of the text as adding to the already multiple entities devoted to testifying to the meaning of Milly’s death. Rather than an engulfing abyss, her death is like a “sacred corner,” generating figures that, animating and animated, begin to spill out into the room of the text. The reader would then have the opportunity, like Densher, to unwrap and cherish each image, to respond to their painful testimonies.49

134 / james

To regard death as corner rather than abyss revises the expectation that an image of death must indicate inaccessibility and convey wistfulness. If one can see figures that carry death with them—if one can hardly read a sentence of The Wings of the Dove without making such an encounter—then death is not quite lost, not really inaccessible. The next text to which I turn, “The Friends of the Friends,” renders death even more assertively present. The similarities between The Wings of the Dove and “The Friends of the Friends” have been noted: most obviously, both involve two friendly but competing women and a man who chooses the dead one over the live one.50 In the short story, however, it is not a memory of the dead or a figure for her death that serves as his choice; it is the woman herself, a woman who, though dead, visits him nightly and maintains a love affair. Life and death are thus difficult to differentiate, and as a result, it becomes impossible for wistfulness and the abyss to dominate. It is James’s dissolution of the expected opposition between life and death on which I want to focus next. In “The Friends of the Friends,” the dead appear so lively that isolating death as an event or state that would require a special understanding of testimony begins to seem unnecessary.

“The Friends of the Friends”: Not too late The intimacy between life and death that appears in “The Friends of the Friends” is not evident in James’s preliminary sketches of the story. In fact, the premise James initially had in mind while conceiving “The Friends of the Friends” seems strikingly similar to “That . . . would be something to have seen”: he asks himself in his notebook in February 1895, “What is there in the idea of Too late—of some friendship or passion or bond—some affection long desired and waited for, that is formed too late?—I mean too late in life altogether.”51 He specifies, “It’s a passion that might have been,”52 and when later in the entry he sketches a story that resembles “The Jolly Corner,” he writes that the two are connected in that both deal with “might-have-beens.”53 The “might have been” seems to name, in these cases, an event that becomes strangely split: what does happen and what has been foreclosed from happening make their appearance together. This split, James decides with regard to the developing “The Friends of the Friends,” bears “the implication of death.”54 When he more deliberately plans the plot of the story, he imagines “2 persons who have constantly heard of each other, constantly been near each other, constantly missed each other. . . . At last it has been arranged—they really are to

james / 135

meet. . . . But before the event one of them dies—the thing has become impossible forever. The other then comes, after death, to the survivor— so that they do meet, in spite of fate—they meet, and if necessary, they love.—They see, they know, all that would have been possible if they had met.”55 The recurrence of the verb to meet here reveals the strange temporality of the idea James is working out: “they do meet,” they even “meet [to] love,” but this only makes them see that they have not actually or fully or really met. The distinction seems to be that because “they do meet” in death, after one has died, they have not met in the way they would have in life. They are too late to love each other in life, and so they can love each other only across the line of death. This condition implies an insurmountable distance between life and death, a distance that keeps the postmortem connection from realizing the potential of the more naturally expected premortem one. In order to keep “the idea of Too late” in tact, that condition or distance must remain in place; if the relationship that involves death is equal to the one of life, then the connection has not been formed too late at all, and the “passion that might have been” deflates into an ordinary passion. It is remarkable, then, that the dead in “The Friends of the Friends” appear exactly as the living do and that while meetings between life and death are distinguished from the more normal variety, they are not characterized as particularly disappointing or inadequate. They have, rather, a certain air of plenty: as if the living are fortunate to receive death’s overflow in their lives. The story ends with the suggestion that the man, who sees the woman only after she dies, commits suicide as “the result of a long necessity, of an unquenchable desire, . . . a response to an irresistible call”56—not, then, in despair but as if, once both are dead, they will be able to quench the desire that has long been brewing. Their meeting was not, in this sense, too late at all; or, if it was too late for life, ample time or at least union seems to be promised in death. The presence of death speaks less to deficiency than to potential. The idea that visits from the dead are gifts for the future as much as missed opportunities is established early. The story is narrated by a woman who has two friends, a man and a woman (referred to only as “he” and “she”) “whom fate had distinguished in the same weird way” and whom, she reasons, therefore ought to be brought together (F, 330): she had seen a vision of her father at the moment of his death, and he had seen a vision of his mother at the moment of her death. The narrator later refers to the would-be couple’s capacity for such visions as a “little prodigy” (F, 328), an “extraordinary privilege” (F, 347), and a “magnificent distinction” (F, 361), and the accounts of the two sightings

136 / james

emphasize the unlikely wonder of a meeting prohibited by the usual rules of time and space. His is especially magical: “He had been in the August afternoon on the river. Coming back into his room while it was still distinct daylight he found his mother standing there as if her eyes had been fixed on the door. . . . At the sight of him she smiled with extraordinary radiance and extended her arms to him, and then as he sprang forward and joyfully opened his own she vanished from the place” (F, 327–328). The vanishing is poignant, as is the suggestion that a warm relationship between mother and son has ended with her death. Yet the vision does not, strictly speaking, evoke the temporality of “too late”: the death was sudden and unexpected, so the case is not that he was on his way to see her and ran out of time. Instead, despite the unexpectedness, and despite the fact that he is in Oxford while she is in Wales, they have a meeting that serves as a punctuating good-bye. The other telling feature of the initial accounts is the characters’ inability to recognize what they see as a vision, in particular, a vision from death. In the narration, “he found his mother,” not the ghost of his mother, not even a vision of his mother, and the woman character is similarly mistaken as to the appearance of her father: “The instant her eyes rested on him . . . she beheld to her amazement her father” (F, 326). It becomes clear to the two within moments that they have not seen their parents in the flesh, yet death or the harbinger of death is, for some seconds at least, indistinguishable from life. What “The Friends of the Friends” establishes in its first chapter, which provides these two accounts, is that crossings between life and death are wonderful, and— or but (it is difficult to know which is the appropriate conjunction)—the crossings may not be perceived as crossings. The very line separating life from death is thus smudged from the start,57 and it will become more and more difficult to reconcile the notebook’s image of death prohibiting connection in life with the text as it came to be written. The possibility of life looking exactly like death becomes crucial as the plot moves toward the woman character’s death. The narrator has been unable to arrange for her two friends to meet, and while they are not meeting, she becomes engaged to the male friend. She then decides to guarantee a meeting, but she becomes jealous at the thought that the two may connect so strongly that her engagement will be put in jeopardy. She thus contrives the meeting so that her fiancé arrives at her house several hours after the woman had been there; but she feels guilty about her sabotage, and she apologizes to him. When she goes to apologize to the woman the next morning, she finds out that the woman had died upon returning home the night before. Shocked, she tells her fiancé, who insists

james / 137

that upon his return home that night he had seen the woman: she had found him despite the narrator’s attempt to keep them apart. At first, he maintains that she had visited him before taking the train home—while she was still alive. Toward the end of the story, however, as the narrator’s relationship with her fiancé deteriorates, it seems much more likely that he had seen her in death, as he “so beautifully saw [his] mother” (F, 347), and, moreover, that he continues to see the dead woman and to love her. There is an important ambiguity, then, about whether what he saw was alive or dead, and for several pages both explanations seem serviceable. The narrator hopes to establish that he had seen a vision, for, as she explains, “I was moved . . . to prefer with apparent perversity an explanation which only deepened the marvel and the mystery, but which, of the two prodigies it had to choose from, my reviving jealousy found easiest to accept” (F, 351). The narrator wants to believe that “they had still never ‘met,’” as she puts it later (F, 357), because she believes that his having seen a live woman would threaten her engagement, whereas his having seen a dead woman would not. She wants, that is, to insist on the line that keeps her and her fiancé on the side of life and the woman on the side of death—the line that, as I suggested earlier, had already been smudged. The narrator ultimately cannot make it hold: the dead woman destroys the intimacy between the two live beings, and the narrator ends up revealing her own inability to maintain a separation between life and death. This revelation occurs in a conversation that recalls, and more emphatically asserts, the continuity between a sighting in life and a vision of death established with the opening of the story. It takes place as the narrator and her fiancé are reviewing the details of the woman’s visit to him, trying to ascertain whether she was alive or dead when she paid it. But the conversation requires contextualization from an earlier event: when the narrator’s female friend, still definitively alive, had arrived at her house for the meeting that had been (unbeknownst to the friend) sabotaged, the narrator noted, “she wore mourning—no great depths of crape, but simple and scrupulous black. She had in her bonnet three small black feathers. She carried a little muff of astrachan” (F, 340). The mourning is for the woman’s estranged husband; the fact that she will die wearing it recalls Milly’s black-clothed entrance. The repetition suggests that James understood the garb of mourning not as the privilege of the living who mourned the dead but as a mark of death’s closeness, perhaps even a conduit from death to life. Death has virtually, in these texts, seeped into the clothes themselves: they function not only as a sign that indicates an instance of death but as a bearer of death itself. Thus,

138 / james

it is not surprising that the fiancé claims that he had seen her in her mourning clothes; the logic of the texts seems to assume that the dead may also be so dressed.58 What is surprising is that his account of her outfit is identical to the narrator’s. When the narrator asks, “And how was she dressed?” her fiancé answers, “In mourning, my own dear. No great depths of crape, but simple and scrupulous black. She had in her bonnet three small black feathers. She carried a little muff of astrachan” (F, 353–354). The duplication is in no way acknowledged by the text, and this makes it, I would propose, the tale’s uncanniest moment. It suggests that an ordinary woman bears witness to the living in exactly the same manner that an extraordinary man has visions of the dead. And it suggests, further, that this circumstance warrants no comment. Death’s indistinguishability from life is presented as thoroughly unremarkable. Yet if death does look exactly like life, if there is, indeed, no way to describe a vision of death except in the terms one uses to describe a presence in life, then “the idea of Too late” that James initially imagined has given way to a logic of duration, of continuity. The narrator later charges that her fiancé’s “accessibility to forms of life,” his “command of impressions, appearances, contacts, closed—for our gain or our loss—to the rest of us,” has interfered with their intimacy (F, 361). The fact that she describes his sensitivity to the dead as an “accessibility to forms of life” says almost as much as the duplicated description, for it encloses death within life—makes death a form of life—that leaves even “the rest of us” quite intimate with the dead. The narrator continues to argue, “She missed you for five years, but she never misses you now. You’re making it up!” and finally exclaims, “You see her—you see her: you see her every night!”—a charge that he seems to grant when he asks, “How on earth do you know such an awfully private thing?” (F, 361–362). If the dead woman can “make it up,” if she sees the man every night, then she may be late, but she certainly is not too late. Rather, she has extended the limits of time that “the rest of us” had assumed to be in place. If the fiancé wishes to be still closer to the dead woman, if the narrator suggests that he ultimately kills himself in order to satisfy this otherwise “unquenchable desire,” then he ends his life so that he can continue it, and death speaks not to the might-have-been but the still-may-be. From The American Scene to “The Friends of the Friends,” “That . . . would be something to have seen” becomes “That is something still to see.” The story acknowledges that death renders the woman partially out of reach, but it also promises that she can still be seen, that she continues to engage the world of the living. Her image is animate in the most literal sense of the word: it acts with life, it is a form of life. The dead

james / 139

person, the corpse, is not here expected to be inanimate. This idea is key for understanding how the dead become subjectified in “The Altar of the Dead,” how they look at and speak to the living. Before I move to that story, however, it seems appropriate to glance at a nonfiction text by James that also suggests that death is a form of life and, consequently, that late is never too late. It is a letter to his brother William after the 1870 death of their beloved cousin Minny Temple. Minny has long been identified as having inspired Milly Theale, and it is possible, although I would not strongly argue for it, that her death creates the impression that James repeatedly works to represent in the several images studied here.59 His letter contains a request for an image of her— “I should like one of her last photos, if you can get one,” he writes60—but James creates a quite startling one of his own. He speaks as if her life has not completely ended: although he initially refers to the “complete extinction of a vitality so exquisite . . . as Minny’s,”61 he later revises the connotation of finality. “The more I think of her,” he writes, “the more perfectly satisfied I am to have her translated from this changing realm of fact to the steady realm of thought. There she may bloom into a beauty more radiant than our dull eyes will avail to contemplate.”62 He continues in a famous passage, If we can imagine the departed spirit cognizant of our action in the matter, we may suppose it much better pleased by our perfect acceptance of the void it has left than by our quarreling with it and wishing it filled up again. What once was life is always life, in one form or another, and speaking simply of this world I feel as if in effect and influence Minny has lost very little by her change of state. She lives as a steady unfaltering luminary in the mind rather than as a flickering wasting earth-stifled lamp. Among all my thoughts and conceptions I am sure I shall never have one of greater sereneness and purity: her image will preside in my intellect, in fact, as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose.63 James seems here to be a man who, like the fiancé in “The Friends of the Friends,” has the “extraordinary privilege” and “magnificent distinction” of maintaining an open border between life and death. Minny not only continues to “bloom” (an organic metaphor); she is imagined as potentially cognizant of James’s musings on her death. His phrasing is explicitly not of the “what-she-would-have-wanted” variety: he considers what would please her now, as a departed spirit still capable of assessing the logic of the living. Further, he refers to Minny as living: “She lives as a steady unfaltering luminary.” The dead woman is, then, not only

140 / james

animated but alive. She has taken a new form, the form of an image, but that image keeps her alive rather than marking her irrevocable end. This twist on the Charleston image resembles the version of it in “The Friends of the Friends”: what is without life is something that continues to live. “The Altar of the Dead” extends the idea implicit in the phrasing in James’s letter. A dead woman who “lives” in a man’s mind does not simply occupy his thinking, in that short story, but participates in his life, lives in it. The promises of the texts explored heretofore are thus borne out in “The Altar of the Dead.” At the conclusion to The Wings of the Dove, death is evident in the metaphors describing Densher’s encounters with Milly’s memory; in “The Friends of the Friends,” the reader sees more clearly the ghost with whom the man is obsessed. Yet because of the narrator’s perspective, the ghostly woman visits the text in quick, static images—as if, through a lightning or camera flash, she suddenly becomes visible with her hand to her lips, then with her bonnet and muff. In “The Altar of the Dead,” the light shed on the dead is more gentle, more continuous, and they inhabit, with some duration, the text, living in it for both the live characters that populate it and the live reader who pursues it. The dead testify to the nearness of death, its pressure and its presence, but they also testify to their desire to stay near, to continue to breathe the air of life.64

Just one more: “The Altar of the Dead” James’s preface to “The Altar of the Dead” frames the tale as a plea against what he calls “the awful doom of general dishumanisation.”65 It will perhaps not surprise the reader (at least at this point in the chapter) that the humans involved are dead ones. James finds that the “monstrous masses,” especially the masses of London, are unable to countenance an intense respect, much less an intimacy, for the continuing presence of the dead.66 “The sense of the state of the dead is but part of the sense of the state of the living;” James protests, and he thus offers “The Altar of the Dead” as “an invoked, a restorative reaction against certain general brutalities.”67 The story’s aim is thus in line with that of its main character, as both work to perceive the dead as being human by creating something for them. The character is George Stransom, who finds ways to continue to care for those whom he had known in life. The narrator refers to “the ghost of Mary Antrim,”68 his most missed fiancée, but unlike “The Friends of the Friends,” nothing supernatural appears to be at work. His dead do not haunt him, they do not make demands; more simply, “They were there

james / 141

in their simplified intensified essence, as personally there as if they had only been stricken dumb” (A, 5). Stransom commemorates the death of Mary Antrim with an annual visit to her grave, but he is mostly occupied in hanging out with his dead; for instance, after meeting a Mr. Creston, who has too quickly, Stransom believes, replaced the late Mrs. Creston, he insists, “He could spend an evening with [the late] Kate Creston, if the man to whom she had given everything could n’t” (A, 10). He is described as literally spending the evening with her: “his eyes, in the swarming void of things, seemed to have caught Kate Creston’s, and it was into their sad silences he looked” (A, 11). The two could be at a party, with him catching her eye to acknowledge her husband’s infidelity. Her eyes are active, indistinguishable here from the eyes of the living, evoking the continuity of “The Friends of the Friends” more than the “closed eyes” of Charleston or the Bronzino’s “eyes of other days.” In fact, James writes, that night Stransom “thought for a long time of how the closed eyes of dead women could still live—how they could open again, in a quiet lamplit room, long after they had looked their last” (A, 11). This arresting image of the eyes of dead women opening, months after having been closed—of the eyes (only the eyes?) living in the future—suggests an extension even more animate than those explored heretofore. The other texts focus on the living observing or imagining the dead, and if the dead as I have tracked them become more and more living, they have not yet been witnessed at the moment of becoming themselves observers who have, it seems, not looked their last at all. Although “The Altar of the Dead” will follow George Stransom rather than Kate Creston, this early scene establishes its world as one in which a certain agency, a certain subjectivity, is common to the dead as well as the living. The major plot of the story revolves around Stransom’s creating an altar to the dead in a church, an altar composed of candles perpetually burning in “a mountain of fire” (A, 15). “Now they had really, his Dead, something that was indefeasibly theirs,” says the narrator, and it is implied that Stransom’s “pilgrimage[s]” to the church replace his evening visits (A, 17), for he creates the altar with the expectation that he will “find his real comfort in some material act, some outward worship” (A, 15). The altar contains one candle for each of his “Dead”; the only mentioned omission is Acton Hague, who was once Stransom’s intimate friend but later caused an irreparable breach between them. In the course of Stransom’s worship, he becomes aware of, and later friends with, a woman dressed in mourning, who also appears devoted to his altar. When they discover that she has used it to memorialize her former lover, Acton Hague, the cross-purpose upsets their erstwhile shared

142 / james

commitment. The woman insists on a candle for Hague, Stransom cannot countenance it, and their friendship as well as their mutual practice crumbles. As the woman puts it, “the spell ’s broken” (A, 40). There is a little more to the plot of the story, but I want to pause here to consider the details enumerated thus far. One major scholarly evaluation of the story is Andrzej Warminski’s, which offers a de Manian reading of the altar as a signifying system.69 Insofar as each candle represents a dead person, the altar, as Sigi Jottkandt glosses Warminski, is “based on a simple, one-to-one correspondence of signifier and signified,”70 delimited by the exclusion of Hague. Warminski understands the crisis of the story as brought on by the woman’s reading of the altar, which not only is different from Stransom’s but includes the very element that his cannot—Hague. She finds precisely the meaning that the signs do not allow, a meaning that the signs cannot, in a sense, have, when she ties them to a signified that is assumed to be outside of the system. Jottkandt’s summary is precise: What Warminski is alluding to of course is the inevitable gap that results from all signifying activity, the gap produced when the signifier and signified fail to fully coincide with one another. This gap is the inevitable result of any attempt to make objects of the material world representatives or stand-ins for an external meaning. For on every occasion that some material object becomes “marked” as a sign, something—namely, the object’s materiality—falls outside the intending subject’s grasp.71 The one-to-one correspondence, Jottkandt concludes, was a system doomed from the start, since the candle can never be inextricably tied to the dead person. The candle was loosened from its intended object as soon as the woman perceived in it a symbol for her own loss, and it is further wrenched when it is discovered that she has retied it to Hague. The candle as a candle, rather than as a sign, then begins to be evident. Metaphorically speaking, the two characters are pulling the candle between them (“It’s mine, it can’t be Acton!” “No, it’s mine, it must be Acton!”) when they realize they are fighting over a stump of wax and a string, which suddenly does not feel very significant at all. In contrast to this reading, on which Jottkandt also builds, I would like to consider the candles as representatives of the dead, not as their signifiers. Emerson uses the term representative to describe a person who is not elected out of a constituency but part of it: “The reason why [the representative] knows about them is, that he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or from being a part of that thing.”72 If the candles are,

james / 143

similarly, entities that are of the dead, that come from the dead, then they can never be reduced to wax and string. They are, rather, responding to the expressions of the dead and bringing them to circulate among the living. In this reading, the candles make the dead evident, and if they also become themselves evident (as “material” candles), their representative value is not destroyed. It is, rather, assumed within the Swedenborgian perspective that the candles as well as any other metaphors all contribute to the testifying world. The breach between the two characters would not follow from a contest over signification, then; at stake would be the call of Acton Hague, the expression he produces that insists to the woman, but not to Stransom, that it be acknowledged.73 The two are a pair of restless analysts who turn out to be mismatched, the one perceiving mystic meaning where the other does not. Hague is not one of Stransom’s Dead, and so the live man never senses the dead man’s need, never sees his eyes open. To represent him with a candle would be, accordingly, truly absurd— it would be to invent representations that do not respond to the world, when the world’s expressions ought to be the only reason the representations exist, their essential cause. Giving Hague a candle would be analogous to creating fictions unconnected to reality, which, as any reader of “The Art of Fiction” knows, Henry James considers a “terrible crime.”74 Hence, while Stransom considers the possibility in order to draw the woman back to his altar, he notes, “more and more he could see that he had never introduced an alien. He had had his great compassions, his indulgences—there were cases in which they had been immense; but what had his devotion after all been if it had n’t at bottom a respect?” (A, 53). This respect, this responsiveness to the call of his dead (Stransom’s humanization, as per the preface), is the “bottom” from which his devotion grows, and nothing can substitute for that fundamental source. If the text proposes a potential discrepancy between one analyst’s mystic meaning and another’s, it does not revise the assumption that representations follow from the meaning’s apprehension. The end of the story offers reconciliation when the two analysts come to read each other’s world. Stransom’s “bottom” is subtly shifted when he himself is near death. After a long absence due to illness and regret for his argument with the woman, Stransom returns to his altar, and the language from the beginning of the story, the language of dead women looking, is revived: The whole altar flared—dazzling and blinding; but the source of the vast radiance burned clearer than the rest, gathering itself into

144 / james

form, and the form was human beauty and human charity, was the far-off face of Mary Antrim. She smiled at him from the glory of heaven—she brought the glory down with her to take him. He bowed his head in submission and at the same moment another wave rolled over him. Was it the quickening of joy to pain? In the midst of his joy at any rate he felt his buried face grow hot as with some communicated knowledge that had the force of a reproach. It suddenly made him contrast that very rapture with the bliss he had refused to another. This breath of the passion immortal was all that other had asked; the descent of Mary Antrim opened his spirit with a great compunctious throb for the descent of Acton Hague. It was as if Stransom had read what her eyes said to him. (A, 55–56) The somersaulting pattern I traced in The American Scene, whereby figure and referent accumulate meaning from each other, is evident here as well: Mary Antrim is the altar’s “source,” but her “vast radiance” may also be manifested in the candles, such that they give her the form with which she appears to Stransom. Further, Stransom reads Mary’s eyes, just as he earlier looked into Kate Creston’s, and rather than offering a more pure communication than the candles, they provide an additional figure from which meaning may be gathered: the eyes give him a way to understand his refusal (to add Hague’s candle), just as the candles gave him a way to understand his dead. Nothing here is, strictly speaking, alive, and yet nothing is inanimate either; indeed, the dead had been, during Stransom’s argument with the woman, “unable to breathe” (A, 50), and now they once again flourish—even more expansively than they had before. For Stransom’s experience of “another wave” that feels like pain, the hotness of his face that signals “some communicated knowledge,” is a certain call, not unlike the “irresistible call” that concludes “The Friends of the Friends.” Whether he is directly admonished by Mary or ashamed by the comparison of his own rapture to the woman’s loss, he effectively has heard Acton Hague’s call; he has received the mystic meaning that asks him to shepherd Hague as one of his dead. While it is possible to read “This breath of the passion immortal was all that other had asked” as referring to the woman who asks for a candle, I think “that other” may refer to Hague, who asks for breath, who asks to go on living with Stransom, in the same way that Mary does. The remainder of the sentence supports this parallelism, as “the descent of Mary Antrim opened his spirit with a great compunctious throb for the descent of Acton Hague.” They are both calling him, Mary to carry him to heaven and Hague to draw himself, and the woman who has mourned him, into Stransom’s final circle.75

james / 145

This call is more directly verbalized when Stransom explains it to the woman. For she, too, has experienced a shift: “something changed in my heart,” she tells him (A, 57). Hague, she explains, no longer calls to her for one of Stransom’s candles, and she now returns to the church and the altar to respond to Stransom’s dead: “It’s not for my own—that’s over. But I’m here for them” (A, 57). Thus, at the very moment when she no longer asks for Hague’s candle, Stransom is willing to provide it. And as he is dying, he insists on his changed heart by asking her to listen to the dead: “They’re here for you,” he says, “they’re present to-night as they’ve never been. They speak for you—don’t you see?—in a passion of light; they sing out like a choir of angels. Don’t you hear what they say?—they offer the very thing you asked of me” (A, 57). He continues after she protests, “They say there’s a gap in the array—they say it’s not full, complete. Just one more . . . is n’t that what you wanted? Yes, one more, one more” (A, 57). The woman suddenly understands that the “one more” might turn out to be, in fact, Stransom, whose face, a moment later, “had the whiteness of death” (A, 58). But the plea seems to me as striking for its delivering the dead as speaking beings—as candles arranged in an “array” but also as present and singing and offering to enlarge their community. The dead and the candles have been conflated and call with one voice. Stransom hears them testifying and in his own closeness to death carries their message to the world of the living. He opens widely the channel between death and life. Put differently, when he crosses the line, there is no longer a line to cross. The dead can finally speak. This conclusion is only possible, as I hope I have demonstrated, when the altar and the dead are read as intertwined in an intimacy that Swedenborg sanctions but Warminski forbids. Without the assumption that the text James produces responds to the dead and contributes to making them heard, the story can only fail to secure the alignment of signs with referents. There is a historical difference to be acknowledged here: reading according to the older, more mystical model allows the dead to be represented in ways that more recent paradigms find problematic. Writing in 1894 or 1896 or 1902 or 1907, James presumably had both frameworks available to him: the enchantment of the mid-nineteenth century as well as the suspicion of the early twentieth. Hence, it may be that “The Altar of the Dead” hews to the older thinking, deliberately, in order to give full rein to the premise that the dead continue to live. That is, James may have kept the older thinking within his text, as his character keeps the dead in his home and later in the church. I am thinking again of the remark that Stransom “thought for a long time of how the closed eyes of dead women could still live—how they could open again, in a quiet

146 / james

lamplit room, long after they had looked their last.” The “quiet lamplit room” seems designed to welcome his dead, to unobtrusively and gently invite their appearance. I think one may read James, in this story as well as in the other texts I have considered here, as constructing such a quiet room, a place of the past in which the dead could open their eyes.

Is there a life after death? As I mentioned at the outset of this chapter, my analysis of the increasingly animated dead moves from the late The American Scene back in time to “The Altar of the Dead,” published thirteen years earlier. The call of Mary Antrim and the eyes of Kate Creston come to be refigured, if we instead read forward in time, as more and more quiet and closed, respectively, until we arrive at the suggestive but not speaking corpse in Charleston. Thus, the reader may wonder how stable James’s metaphorical lamplit room was toward the end of his career. Advancing not only toward modernism but toward the end of his life, he witnessed the death of two brothers (William and Bob, both in 1910), and it is plausible that the dead seemed to live less and less with him the further he got from the moment when Minny Temple was his single, great loss. James’s essay “Is There a Life after Death?,” from 1910, both acknowledges this possibility and responds to it, affirming, I think, the existence of the lamplit room, and even expanding its dimensions. The first part of the essay articulates sentiments that would seem to inspire more the monstrous London masses who forget the dead than the sensitive author who would write them as characters in his stories. The reason one would answer the question at hand negatively, he writes, is that the dead appear to be lost. “How can we not make much of the terrible fashion in which the universe takes upon itself to emphasize and multiply the disconnectedness of those who vanish from our sight?” he writes.76 He adds that aging “contributes to the confirmation, within us, of our seeming awareness of extinct things as utterly and veritably extinct, with whatever splendid intensity we may have known them to live.”77 In these sentences, knowing someone as living is contrasted with death’s final distancing; if a dead woman lives in one’s mind, it would here be more figuratively than literally, as memory, not as continuation. Although James observes that the case may be that the living vanish from the sight of the dead rather than the other way around,78 he does not dwell on what sort of seeing the dead would do or imagine the realm that they occupy. It becomes clear as the essay progresses that James is invested in life after death as one who might experience it, not only as one in contact

james / 147

with those who have. While this focus, like the quoted sentences, seems to insist on the line between life and death that the fiction dismantles, James’s ultimate vision prizes openness and connection. He returns, in fact, to a version of the idea he had posited in The American Scene, in which “objects and places . . . have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out.” James considers his receipt of such meanings, the way that “consciousness gives us immensities and imaginabilities wherever we direct it,” and concludes, “The very provocation offered to the artist by the universe, the very provocation to him to be . . . an artist, and thereby supremely serve it; what do I take that for but the intense desire of being to get itself personally shared, to show itself for personally sharable, and thus foster the sublimest faith?”79 In The American Scene, the universe communicates mystically when one expects it to; here, one’s expectation responds to, and emerges from, the universe’s intention to form a relation with those whom it appoints. And if the universe forms such a relation, James cannot imagine that the universe would simply abandon its investment. Thus, he reasons, consciousness must continue after what he calls “the laboratory-brain” has expired.80 This logic appears to be a strange rejoinder to the first part of the essay: if dead persons are disconnected and extinct, how does affirming consciousness—not theirs but his—render them any closer? The relationship between the living and the dead seems to have been elided in favor of that between James’s artist consciousness and the universe. Yet perhaps the apparently selfish conclusion remains invested in the humanizing gesture of “The Altar of the Dead.” In characterizing the universe as intimate with consciousness, rather than as a mysterious other, James allows for lines of communication that extend, literally, over every thing and every being. Put differently, without a universe as invested in James’s consciousness as the novelist is invested in transcription, it would be impossible to maintain a relationship with what is beyond his immediate context. And James specifies, “I find myself—I can’t express it otherwise—in communication with sources; sources to which I owe the apprehension of far more and far other combinations than observation and experience, in their ordinary sense, have given me the pattern of.”81 The universe provides James with extraordinary access—with a capacity to reach and write of experiences or ideas that the laboratory-brain has yet to own. In this sense, it is because he is so susceptible to the universe, because he cultivates this susceptibility so that the universe will cultivate him, that listening to the dead, and letting them live in his work, becomes possible. In the final analysis, the dead live when the universe testifies.

148 / james

I want to press just a bit harder on this conclusion, because using ghost stories to think through the relationship between testimony and the dead may seem irreverent. In my analysis of Benito Cereno, Melville’s guiding logic was that the dead may know the truth, and may even be the truth, but they do not speak. To imagine them as speaking meant ignoring the fact of death and imagining a traffic between two worlds that were by definition closed to each other. Yet if hotels testify, the testimony of the dead presents no such logical obstacles. If the whale speaks, James might have said to Melville, the dead can too—and James would likely have understood Ishmael’s account of Moby-Dick as recording the speech of the whale, as responding to the universe’s vying to share, even when it must exceed ordinary experience to do so. It was only human, for James, to listen to the dead, because they were for him part of the testimonial world that constantly involves the living. Testimony, for James, works through life—but that is to say that it works with the universe, and no one and no thing is excluded from that wide-open domain. James does not introduce a theory of testimony that particularly belongs to the dead or enables the living to read them; he rather erases the distinction that would make such a special theory necessary. This chapter’s title, in this sense, is a ruse, for I have arrived at the conclusion that there is no “without life” for Henry James. As the image with which I opened suggested, even what appears to be without life manages to compose itself, manages to testify to the observer. It wants to get itself shared, which reveals that it is not really, not totally, without life after all.

Conclusion: Staying Quiet

The narrative that this book’s chapters implicitly tell may initially have seemed familiar: while Emerson hails the testimony of all natural things, Douglass is more measured and limited in his optimism, and Melville rejects exuberance completely, resting instead in elusiveness. The figures become progressively less willing to assert that the world makes itself known in ways that may enter the realm of human speech. But then James appears, and in writing published more than fifty years after Melville’s, he reverses the course. Instead of further attenuating the limits of testimony, instead of moving us closer to the twentieth-century discourse of the unspeakable, he offers a testifying hotel. Moreover, his understanding of testimony bleeds into his idea that the universe is invested in the writer, which proposes that literary text draws the world ever more securely into its scope. In making the witness again a plastic and democratic category, James does the same for the literary. He leaves us with the impression that the literary world is crowded, actual, and, in the end, not separable from the universe at large. James’s final inclusiveness emphasizes that broadening testimony’s purview is the gesture common to the writers I have made his temporary cohort. His “testimony without life” amounts to a testimony that includes the dead—a testimony with death—and in the final analysis, all of the chapters of this book expand rather than constrict the scope of what it means to bear witness. If I have demonstrated that testimony may happen without representation, without identity, without voice, and without life, then the requirements we generally attribute to testimony are more accurately limitations to our understanding of how it operates.

150 / conclusion

For the nineteenth-century writers I have studied, a sense that truth could be found in entities lacking in human language meant that testimony encompassed a range of encounters undistinguished by official recognition. Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and James encourage us to find testimony where we have been least disposed to look for it—in a tree, in a hope, in the air, in a candle, and in all the corollary entities that have helped bring these into focus: the dust and stones, the undefined body, the hoarfrost and stillness and dead women who insist as images and as ghosts. Such testimony is indeed testimony with . . . , testimony with the tiny and the fleeting, testimony with the usual and the unimposing. What has allowed me to glimpse the theory of quiet testimony suggested by these writers is a suspension of the expectation that their approach to meaning exactly matches ours. In each chapter, I have sought to unearth the premise that things may be expressive, may carry meaning with them, whether in the form of words or experience or, perhaps more simply, in the way that they comport themselves, the way that they interrupt one’s field of vision or shift the atmosphere around an otherwise inattentive observer. Again, I recall Barthes: their meaning is expressed “like the juice of a lemon”;1 it comes forth, it emanates from within, it is not represented from without. This premise, this possibility of meaning vested in entities as much as in language, underpins Emerson’s project of producing a mirror-text of nature, as much as Douglass’s hope for a vocabulary that would allow his living body to write. It is what accounts for Melville’s floating the truth of his story in and out on a breeze and James’s ability to lift the dead from their inanimate silence. There are, of course, important differences among these writers: in addition to their varying levels of confidence in expression, Emerson and Melville are reluctant to export their language to what does not possess it, while Douglass and James are devoted to refining speech in the service of communication. Yet these divergences may be characterized as responses to what was an apparently compelling idea, rather than interrogations about its fundamental validity. The question that arises for me from this historical phenomenon is its very historicity. The premise of expressive things seems fantastic to the sober reader, reminiscent of ancient traditions and the enthusiasm that contemporary thought generally eschews. If I have suspended certain semiotic strongholds in order to glimpse such a premise, I would seem to have aligned the nineteenth century with a more distant past, to have pointedly distinguished it from the present. At the same time, if this book has managed to slip into an older realm of thought, then such thought cannot be totally alienated from what appears to have replaced

conclusion / 151

it. To the extent that my argument is legible, a connective continuity must exist. Perhaps, then, the quiet testimony I have laid out here is not solely a relic but, truly, a theory, a way of seeing from the past that yet remains accessible. But what does it mean to so see, now, today? How can quiet testimony participate in understanding what it means to bear witness, within a group of discourses—literature, critical theory, and human rights—that might seem committed to disinheriting it? For one possible answer, I return to my four writers. Although I have not emphasized it heretofore, each registers a moment of doubt as to whether things actually are expressive. They hold the fantastic supposition at arm’s length, and then they decide to accept it—not absolutely but arguably with more confidence than tentativeness. Emerson’s skepticism, for instance, is evident in his exhortation in “Experience” to “treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.”2 If Emerson spells out here the ethical imperative of his essays, he reserves the possibility that its grounding is misguided: perhaps the men and women are real, and then again, perhaps they are not. Douglass’s uncertainty as to whether his body will come to voice may be read in the shadows of his repeated assertions that it will; in his Narrative, however, he also flirts with a more literal experience of the powerful thing. When carrying Sandy’s root coincides with the cessation of Covey’s threats, Douglass notes, “this singular conduct of Mr. Covey really made me begin to think that there was something in the root which Sandy had given me. . . . I was half inclined to think the root to be something more than I at first had taken it to be.”3 Douglass obviously wants to declare his distance from the superstitious slave, but his “half” inclination indicates a willingness to entertain, at least, the compellingly simple idea of a magic root (an echo, perhaps, of Emerson’s occult vegetable). In Melville, I recall Delano’s wondering if what he saw “was, indeed, a secret sign,”4 which marks the difficulty of determining what is a legible clue and what may be, like Sandy’s root, mere matter. Finally, James’s account of his receptive writing process entails being “subject to the superstition that objects and places . . . must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out.”5 James labels his fundamental supposition a superstition, and yet he does not thereby discount it or his dependence on it. James seems, curiously, not to doubt what he admits may be doubted. It is this willingness to accept what reason suspects that allows quiet testimony to exist in nineteenth-century American literature, with its one foot in the signs and wonders of Puritanism and its other in the godless empiricism of the future. I have suggested that we may find ourselves similarly straddling two worldviews—able to understand the signs and wonders I have recorded

152 / conclusion

in this book yet maintaining a foothold in more recent, skeptical or empirical thought. And if that is the case, then I think we can, like Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and James, risk balancing on the less certain foot, the more magical one. Making such a shift today would not even be totally unprecedented. It would follow, for instance, Jane Bennett’s resistance to the idea that the modern world is disenchanted. In Bennett’s view, “the contemporary world retains the power to enchant humans,” and “humans can cultivate themselves so as to experience more of that effect.”6 Bennett’s claim is not that the world is divinely underwritten or designed but rather that it contains entities that might be looked upon as fascinating and inspiring—as, I take it, meaningful—despite the philosophical frameworks that seem to render such projections impossible. “To be enchanted is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday,”7 she writes, recommending a position that echoes those I have just delineated. We can see the world as enchanted, she reasons, and we might feel more generous and ethically disposed if we do; and so, even if enchantment is “just” an attitude, why not cultivate it in our thinking and writing? The value in such thinking, for Bennett, is a willingness to give of oneself to the enchanted universe: “The wager is that, to some small but irreducible extent, one must be enamored with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.”8 In terms of testimony, one might extend her argument to assert that a willingness to broadly or attentively listen might follow from imagining that unknown things exist to be heard. More precisely, keeping the expressiveness of things available in the twenty-first century may be valuable insofar as it could shift the discourse of bearing witness away from unspeakability and toward quiet.9 As I have suggested elsewhere, the register of psychoanalysis, in particular, tends to focus discussions of testimony on what resists communication, aiming to recover the chances of legibility that remain. Hence, pivotal works such as Felman and Laub’s Testimony and Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience rely on an overwhelmingly negative set of terms to frame their studies: Felman’s subject is what “does not enter, and cannot be framed by, any existing frame of reference”; she writes of a “mute acknowledgement of a radical loss—or death—of truth.”10 Caruth refers to “an inherent gap of knowing” and “the enigmatic language of untold stories—of experiences not yet completely grasped.”11 No doubt the connection between trauma and speech, and experience and representation, is a fraught one; yet this does not have to mean that our understanding of testimony proceeds from a negative ground or

conclusion / 153

that testimony takes places only obliquely or obscurely. By accepting— however tentatively, however playfully—the premise that things may be expressive, testimony may be understood as basic to an experience of everyday life and as thereby grounded positively in what does happen, what does speak. Becoming attuned to the quieter manifestations of testimony, and connecting these to a network of possibilities rather than impossibilities, shows the world not as speaking transparently but as speaking, and it encourages us to begin to see it from that generative vantage point. In closing, I would like to suggest that following Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and James may not be quite as challenging as it at first seems. Caruth defines the literary as “language that defies, even as it claims, our understanding.”12 I have tried to sketch here an alternative sense of literariness, one that is attentive to the myriad sites of meaning available within any textual encounter. This is not to say that the literary does not defy our understanding, that we do not have to think anew to wrap our heads around how a breeze may testify. But if, after a long day of teaching Benito Cereno, a changing pattern of wind seems just a little bit significant, we may already be on our way to practicing the literary theory that has occupied these pages. Perceiving the gossamer but indissoluble connection between text and world, word and thing, we may do no more than wonder whether the one has truly touched, or been touched by, the other. Our momentary question is the low murmur of quiet testimony, whispering still.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Introduction 1. Hospital Transports, 48. 2. Review of Hospital Transports, Continental Monthly, 478. 3. In addition to the Continental Monthly’s review, the Atlantic Monthly observed, “In this little volume we have, photographed, a single phase of [the relief] operations. It consists simply of extracts from letters and reports. There is no attempt at completeness or dramatic arrangement; yet the most elaborate grouping would probably fail to present one-half as accurately a picture of the work and its ways as these unpretending fragments” (review of Hospital Transports, 399). Zion’s Herald and Wesleyan Journal wrote that the extracts “give a lively idea of the horrors and humanities of war” (review of Hospital Transports, n.p.), and the North American Review declared, “They tell a simple and deeply interesting story of modest and faithful services in diminishing the sufferings of the sick, wounded, and dying soldiers in that memorable campaign, and show in the most conclusive manner how admirably the operations of this noble charity have been conducted” (review of Hospital Transports, 567). A Harper’s Weekly advertisement for the book offered this description: “more absorbing than a novel, written in a very graphic and animated style, and has the great merit of telling facts” (Harper’s Weekly, 5 Sept. 1863, 576). 4. Lothe, Suleiman, and Phelan, introduction to After Testimony, 1, 2. 5. E. Goldberg, Beyond Terror, 187. 6. L. Gilmore, “What Was I?,” 83. 7. Other opportunities for studying surprising formations of testimony in nineteenth-century America are plentiful. In the canon, one might turn to Thoreau’s listening to natural things and reading the rocks (it was through Lewis Hyde’s note on Thoreau’s “Wild Apples” that I located Miller’s book [Thoreau, The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, 365]); one could look to Hawthorne’s interest in what images can say (in The House of the Seven Gables, for instance, and “The Prophetic Pictures”); one could read Dickinson’s poetic attention to abstractions as living entities. Archival research might

156 / notes focus on slave narratives more deliberately testimonial than Douglass’s or on legal depositions that are not as transparent as they may at first seem. While I examine the transcript of a fugitive slave case in chapter 2, I have primarily stuck to texts likely to be read in literary studies classrooms. I have also chosen prose texts, because reading poetic forms as testimonial seemed to introduce a separate set of complications. The theory of quiet testimony I present is not meant to be totalizing; I have aimed to present a centralized study useful for further investigations. 8. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, ix. 9. I am thinking in particular of the sweeping suggestion of John Carlos Rowe in At Emerson’s Tomb that “Emersonian transcendentalism and Emerson’s political commitments from 1844 to 1863 are fundamentally at odds with each other” (25), as well as his larger thesis: “the respective intellectual impasses reached by Emerson, Melville, and Whitman—the inapplicability of transcendentalism to the politics of abolition and the complicity of literary authority with the ideological authorities of modern America—are overcome in Douglass’ and Jacobs’ uses of literature for explicit political ends” (x). Rowe’s dismissal of the apparent contradictions within Emerson’s thought precludes reading his transcendentalism as political in nontraditional ways (as I do in “From Quietism to Quiet Politics”). Rowe also seems to think it impossible to read Emerson, Melville, and Douglass as all questioning the very idea of literary authority, as I do here. 10. Howe, The Birth-mark, 181. 11. One major study that has recently aligned the privileged with the subjected is Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, edited by Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter. Kenneth W. Warren’s afterword notes that most of the pieces in it “locate the question of the relatedness of Frederick Douglass to Herman Melville on grounds better described as political or ideological (sometimes ethical and moral) than literary” (436). I diverge from this tendency, situating my reading as primarily literary and consequently, implicitly, political. The concern that Warren identifies as motivating scholars “for some time now”—“whether the central texts of American literature (and the criticism and scholarship that have sustained this literature) have served primarily as a dissent from or an endorsement of American triumphalism” (437)—is, then, not my own; instead, I follow more closely the “emerging, or reemerging, interest in close reading and ethics” that Otter posits in a recent book review (“A Different Formalism,” 352). 12. Dryden, Monumental Melville, 5. 13. Ibid., 7. 14. I indicate here influential texts that explicitly attend to the limitations of testimony after, as Agamben puts it, Auschwitz. Derrida’s Sovereignties in Question and Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster, and Levinas’s essay “Truth of Disclosure and Truth of Testimony” (in Basic Philosophical Writings) are also key texts in the critical theory conversation about testimony. 15. J. Hillis Miller explicitly uses this formulation in his reading of Kertész in After Testimony: “The aporia in this case perhaps blocks the project of bearing witness to Auschwitz in a novel or indeed in any other form of words, even the most factual or autobiographical. . . . The narrative form Fatelessness took was, this essay argues, [Kertész’s] way of dealing with this double obstacle and making his way forward in spite of it” (“Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness,” 24, emphasis mine). 16. Laub, “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Felman and Laub, Testimony, 60.

notes / 157 17. Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in ibid., 15. 18. It is of course possible to read these writers in a psychoanalytic context, and Felman in Writing and Madness and Eyal Peretz in Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power have done so with explicit regard to testimony. Yet my goal here is to discover the approaches to testimony that were already circulating, and already radical, before Freud came on the scene. 19. My approach differs somewhat from that of Sara Guyer, whose Romanticism after Auschwitz considers testimony by putting British literature of the early nineteenth century in conversation with theorists such as de Man, Derrida, and Agamben. Guyer traces “a silent passage from romanticism to post-Holocaust writing” (20), attending more primarily to the connection of the two discourses than to their potentially distinct assumptions. 20. Self-congratulation practically oozes from Charles Bowles’s report: “I was [at the Geneva Convention] as the real and palpable representative of an institution which they had all heard of (by means of the numerous pamphlets and other documents distributed by our Branch), but which, nevertheless, they were still half disposed to consider a myth, or at least as the unreal creation of an, to them, incomprehensible people. But I was able to prove to them that this same ‘mythical’ institution—the United States Sanitary Commission—had long since met with and overcome the very difficulties which they were now predicting and recoiling before; had long since solved, and practically too, the very problems which they were now delving over” (Report of Charles S. P. Bowles, 9). 21. E. Goldberg, Beyond Terror, 11. 22. Schaffer and Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives, 3. 23. E. Goldberg, Beyond Terror, 10, 11. 24. Dawes, That the World May Know, 7. 25. The chapters on Emerson and James are least explicitly political, yet their premises, that natural objects and ghosts testify, still speak to the concerns of human rights discourse. The epilogue to Goldberg’s book turns on the idea of nature as witness to human catastrophe: “The notion of the traces left upon the natural world by the violent follies of man, the idea that the natural world serves as a kind of witness reflecting the consequences of those follies in its landscape, is particularly powerful in the context of the human failure to engage in the processes activated by witnessing” (Beyond Terror, 190). With regard to James, one can look to Colin Dayan’s argument that in the common-law world, “the supernatural serves as the unacknowledged legislator of justice” (The Law Is a White Dog, 40). Dayan’s point is that the law depends on the logic of spiritualism in suspending its criminals in a civilly dead, though biologically alive, state; her book recommends that anyone invested in understanding how justice operates be familiar with the fineness of the line separating death from life. 26. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 278. 27. Derrida, Demeure, 41. 28. Ibid. 29. James, Pragmatism, 35. 30. Douglass, “What to the Slave?,” 371. 31. Emerson similarly rejects the fact-providing route during the war, in an Atlantic Monthly piece: “To what purpose make more books of these statistics [about slavery]? There are already mountains of facts, if anyone wants them. . . . In this national crisis, it is not argument that we want, but that rare courage which dares commit itself to a

158 / notes principle, believing that Nature is its ally, and will create the instruments it requires, and more than make good any petty and injurious profit which it may disturb” (Emerson, “American Civilization,” in Masur, “. . . The Real War,” 128). 32. Douglass, “What to the Slave?,” 371. 33. Ibid., 360. 34. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Essays & Poems, 68–69. 35. Ibid., 69. 36. I borrow this delightful phrase from Mitch Breitwieser. 37. Jane Bennett calls this willingness to deviate from the strictly real in order to think anew about things “ambitious naiveté” (Vibrant Matter, 19). 38. I revisit this ambiguity again in the book’s conclusion. 39. Foucault, The Order of Things, 26, 41. 40. Schmidt, Hearing Things, 30. 41. The idea that things might testify has been taken up, in a different register, by Bruno Latour. In We Have Never Been Modern, the section entitled “The Testimony of Nonhumans” narrates how objects involved in laboratory experiments became credible guarantors of facts: “These nonhumans, lacking souls but endowed with meaning, are even more reliable than ordinary mortals, to whom will is attributed but who lack the capacity to indicate phenomena in a reliable way” (23). Latour’s interest in destabilizing the separation between the nonhuman and the mortal is to some extent a desire to understand their testimony as cooperative rather than oppositional. His project also seems resonant with my own in “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” in which he identifies a need for critique that could recognize and duly engage “the things really close to our hearts, . . . the God to whom I pray, the works of art I cherish, the colon cancer I have been fighting, the piece of law I am studying, the desire I feel, indeed the very book I am writing” (168). The list reads to me as a version of Emerson’s common, familiar, and low things that we would “really know the meaning of.” Although Latour names more obviously important entities, both he and Emerson (and I) seek a theory that would account for the meaning unidentified by traditional patterns of thought. 42. Breitwieser, “Pacific Speculations,” 20. 43. Oxford English Dictionary, online ed., s.v. “quiet.” 44. Melville, Benito Cereno, 74. 45. Douglass, Life and Times, 850. 46. I am indebted in claiming this focus to two thinkers, one a literary critic and one a philosopher, both of whom are discussed further in chapter 1. Barbara Packer explains how Swedenborg’s system of correspondence seduced 1830s Boston by quoting Nietzsche—“That something signifies, delights”—and pinpointing, “What something signifies matters less than the fact of significance itself” (Emerson’s Fall, 40). Emmanuel Levinas insists that the content of any testimonial encounter is subordinate to the fact that it consists of one subject accommodating, interrupting himself for, the other. Testimony can thus be, he writes, “apparently a talking for nothing, a sign given to the other, ‘as simple as hello’” (“Truth of Disclosure,” 103). Studying how the signs are given, or that they are at all, is the cue I take from Packer and Levinas. 47. Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, 25. 48. Ibid., 53. 49. It is important to note here that my purview does not encompass work on Latin American testimonio. This genre is defined by a purpose that cannot unify my range of

notes / 159 texts—it “lives from the hope and will to effect change or at least raise consciousness” (Gugelberger, “Introduction,” 4)—and tends to be deliberately separated from canonized literature in order to preserve its specific “outsider” status (ibid., 10–13). 50. Cadava summarizes this imperative with regard to reading Emerson’s sentences, which he finds to function like photographs in that they are simultaneously self-sufficient and perform an act of reference. “The photograph offers itself to be read at the same time that it declares to you, ‘You will never read me,’” he writes. “This is why the act of reading a photograph always requires two simultaneous gestures: to seek to reconstruct the context in which the photograph was produced and to pay attention to the way in which every photograph appears as a force of decontextualization. The photograph demands that we contextualize and decontextualize at the same time” (“Irresistible Dictations,” 8). 51. Emerson, “Spiritual Laws,” in Essays & Poems, 308. 52. Not only did the word quiet have a broader meaning in the nineteenth century, but it was also used more frequently than it is today, according to data tracking its incidence in American texts published between 1800 and 2008. The years of the Civil War saw the publication of quiet climb to its highest level within the longer period; it substantially rises in 1860, reaches its zenith in 1866, and thereafter begins to drop. British texts also use quiet more beginning in 1860, but the spike in the American context is less evident across the ocean; incidence stays higher there through 1890. If I were to speculate, I might guess that quiet was desired but also, as I suggest later in the introduction, unexpectedly encountered, in the years of America’s bloodiest war. Data from Google Books Ngram Viewer, http://books.google.com/ngrams. 53. Emerson, “New England Reformers,” in Essays & Poems, 607. 54. Douglass, “What to the Slave?,” 364–365. 55. Melville, Moby-Dick, 18. 56. James, The Wings of the Dove, 72. 57. Hospital Transports, 64. 58. Ibid., 65. 59. A. is recognizable as Frederick Law Olmsted, chief administrator of the Sanitary Commission, whose name was affiliated with the distribution of the book. His style reflects his aptitude for his post: it is generally direct and exacting. Although Olmsted was to some extent responsible for Hospital Transports, it seems incongruous to me that Drew Gilpin Faust cites him as its author when she attributes to the text the title of her recent book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.

1 / Emerson 1. On subjectivity and the eyeball, see Donald Pease’s meticulous reading of the image in “Emerson and the Law of Nature,” in Visionary Compacts. Pease describes it as figuring “a seeing seen through” (225) and attends to the implications of such simultaneous agency and passivity for the writing self. 2. Emerson, Nature, in Essays & Poems, 11. Subsequent references to Emerson’s essays are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 3. I hesitate to refer to Emerson’s terms as anthropomorphizing because, as Sharon Cameron suggests in her book on Thoreau, a vision that renders the human the equal of the natural object is not sufficiently humancentric to interpret nature through reference to humanity (Writing Nature, 12). Perhaps it is better to say that Emerson’s

160 / notes image is disturbing in part because it is impossible to tell whether the human gesture interprets the natural one or vice versa. 4. I follow many of the scholars I cite in this chapter—especially Pease, Cavell, Lambert, Arsić, and Cadava—in reading Emerson as resisting representational thought or writing. 5. Emerson leans in the first-series essays toward the idea that the person cannot be extricated from his actions, and in the later essay “Fate” (1860), he theorizes it explicitly: “The secret of the world is, the tie between person and event. Person makes event, and event person. . . . Thus events grow on the same stem with persons; are subpersons” (789). 6. Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 84. 7. Derrida, Demeure, 38. 8. Ibid. 9. J. Hillis Miller’s recent work on testimony heads in this direction as well. In an essay in After Testimony, he notes his “emphasis on the performative aspect of [Shoah] representation” (“Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness,” 49n. 3). In the related, longer chapter in his book The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz, Miller is more pointed: “Testimony is a performative enunciation, not a constative one” (201). 10. Emerson formulates this idea, with more explicit illustration, in his 1838 journal: “See how truly the human history is written out in the faces around you. The silent assembly thus talks very loud. The old farmer like Daniel Wood or David Buttick has carries as it were palpable in his face stone walls, rough woodlots, the meadows & the barnyard; the old Doctor is a gallipot; the bookbinder binds books in his face; & the good landlord mixes liquors yet in motionless pantomime” (The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, vol. 6, 11). 11. Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 55. 12. See Brown’s chapter 3, “Life’s Writing,” in The Emerson Museum, especially pages 169–174. 13. Ibid., 173. 14. Von Frank, “Essays: First Series,” 110. 15. Arsić, On Leaving, 93. 16. See also Arsić’s attention to the dancing thought as germane to Emerson’s figure of the dream (ibid., 126). 17. In arguing for an Emersonian ethics that includes things, I am trying to nudge the critical field toward acknowledging the question of the object as one that is as important to his writing as that of the subject. The latter has been privileged for decades, and it continues to be the focus in debates about whether Emerson can be progressive or whether he ultimately recuperates the liberalist idea he would critique. 18. Lambert, “Emerson, or Man Thinking,” 240. 19. Ibid., 244. 20. For further information about Emerson’s relation to Reed’s Swedenborg, see the headnote to “Genius” in Myerson’s Transcendentalism: A Reader (21), as well as Hotson, “Emerson’s Sources for Swedenborg.” 21. Reed, Observations, 44. 22. Packer, Emerson’s Fall, 39. 23. Swedenborg, An Hieroglyphical Key, 18. 24. Packer, Emerson’s Fall, 40.

notes / 161 25. There are resonances between Emerson’s expressive things and Freud’s symptoms in Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. For example, confession engraves itself on faces and bodies for Freud too: “When I set myself the task of bringing to light what human beings keep hidden within them, not by the compelling power of hypnosis, but by observing what they say and what they show, I thought the task was a harder one than it really is. He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore” (69). The resemblance is not an equivalency, for it is crucial for Freud that the secret is “what human beings keep hidden within them,” the knowledge that unconsciously drives them and that he sets out to find. Emerson’s unintentional writing expresses the truth of the universe rather than the secret of the individual, and this expression extends to all things rather than the particularly human psyche. 26. Qtd. in Packer, “The Transcendentalists,” 363. 27. Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, 437–438. 28. See chapter 4 for my related discussion of “representativeness,” which Emerson develops in “The Uses of Great Men,” as it appears in James. 29. Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, 437. 30. Ibid., 438. 31. Chai, The Romantic Foundations, 67. Chai also uses the terminology of the German Romantics to explain Emerson’s subsuming of the constative into the performative. “With Romanticism,” he writes, “consciousness or the apprehension of the object (whether the I or the external world) becomes itself the content of the thought” (2). 32. Lambert, “Emerson, or Man Thinking,” 235, 239. 33. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 47. 34. Levinas, “Truth of Disclosure,” 100. 35. Ibid., 103. 36. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 170. 37. Ibid., 170. 38. See John Irwin’s American Hieroglyphics, which contextualizes Emerson’s idea of a recoverable originary language with reference to the Rosetta stone (3–13). Matthiessen’s American Renaissance discusses a related tangent, the desire for words to grow nearer to things, with reference to Coleridge (30–43). 39. See also Cadava’s Emerson and the Climates of History, which emphasizes the historical implications of the fossil more than I do here, especially in the second chapter. Cadava’s basic premise that Emerson writes about history by attending to how words have been used and may be used, rather than by recounting a series of events (9–10), helped me to see how testimony circulates as his concern even in texts that are not explicitly political. 40. Oxford English Dictionary, online ed., s.v. “nod.” 41. Cameron, “Representing Grief,” 18. 42. Ibid., 17. 43. Ibid., 34. 44. Donald Pease’s essay on Emerson and testimony also focuses on the introductory passages of “Experience.” He invokes psychoanalysis to argue that Waldo’s death generates in Emerson a personal trauma that affects his understanding of the historical trauma of slavery (Pease, “‘Experience,’ Antislavery,” 163). Like Cameron, Pease ends up moving away from constative statements about Waldo’s death to consider Emerson’s metaphors.

162 / notes 45. Ellison, “Tears for Emerson,” 149. 46. The section from which I draw this passage is replete with present-tense “I” statements: “I found that I begin . . .”; “In the morning I awake . . .”; “I think I will . . .” (480). See also the paragraph leading up to the statement, “I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West” (485): “When I converse . . .”; “I have good thoughts . . .”; “I do not at once arrive at satisfactions . . .”; “I do not make it . . .”: “I arrive there . . .”; “I make! O no! I clap my hands . . .”; “I feel a new heart beating . . .” (484–485). Emerson’s America is “unapproachable,” perhaps, because one never advances to the future to meet it or grasps it as a past experience. 47. Arsić, On Leaving, 139. 48. Ibid., 140. 49. I recall here Arsić’s attention to the closing lines of “Spiritual Laws,” which begin, “We are the photometers, we the irritable goldleaf and tinfoil that measure the accumulations of the subtle element” (323). Arsić writes, “instead of being a stable sign like a photograph, we are the sheer sensitivity to light, the goldleaf medium, which makes the ‘encounter’ between the photographed and the photographer possible” (On Leaving, 138). 50. The opening poem makes some distinction, suggesting that although nature’s secrets remain unknown to “baffled seers,” the human heart throbs “with Nature’s throbbing breast” (539). The idea of responsiveness despite nature’s otherness is perhaps implicit in the early Nature, though I aim to spell it out through the later text. 51. There is a line to this effect in the “Spring” chapter of Thoreau’s Walden: “O the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day! If I could ever find the twig he sits upon! I mean he; I mean the twig” (312). 52. Cadava, “Irresistible Dictations,” 3.

2 / Douglass 1. Quotations from Douglass’s autobiographies are cited in the text with the following abbreviations: N =  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies (New York: Library of America, 1994), 1–102; MB = My Bondage and My Freedom, in ibid., 103–352; LT = Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, in ibid., 453–1048. 2. Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883). 3. See Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell (specific references to her argument follow). 4. Boston Slave Riot, 409. 5. See, for example, Priscilla Wald’s reading, in which Frederick Bailey is a different being from Frederick Douglass and in which Douglass emphasizes that he revises his own work in order to “call attention to himself as a writer in the act of revision” (Constituting Americans, 99). 6. My focus in this chapter is on the slave body, primarily Douglass’s, as the unspeaking entity that yet generates testimony. I attend to Douglass’s relationship to the vegetable—the root that Sandy gives him as protection against Mr. Covey—at the end of the book, in the conclusion. 7. I rely here on a particular set of theoretical texts that have not traditionally been brought to bear on Douglass’s work. The rich body of criticism that contextualizes his writing through theories of the slave narrative (such as Stepto, From Behind the Veil) or of African American literature (such as Gates, Figures in Black) also engages with

notes / 163 questions of authentication, truth telling, and testimony. I depart from that body in order to consider Douglass in a more comparative context, as a contributor to postHolocaust and human rights thinking. For a more specific account of my use of Agamben, see note 22. 8. Lee, introduction to The Cambridge Companion, 1. 9. Levine, “Identity in the Autobiographies,” 31. 10. Crane, “Human Law and Higher Law,” 92. 11. Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men, 38. 12. McBride, Impossible Witnesses, 158. 13. Cadava, “The Monstrosity of Human Rights,” 1559. 14. Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men, 25. 15. Douglass, “Slavery, Freedom, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act,” 540. 16. Ibid., 539. 17. Even if the claim is read as a performative declaration of what he ought to be, it must be admitted that he is using limited categories of identity in order to do something other than accurately identify himself. 18. One might argue that I am stressing literal readings of a phrase meant to be read rhetorically. But as Gregory Jay makes clear, regarding Douglass as a rhetorician only makes it more difficult to read his texts as self-identifications or self-representations, since such a perspective would focus on how he deliberately aestheticizes or relies on literary figures instead of speaking directly (America the Scrivener, 238–239). Once the “literary” is admitted to a reading of Douglass’s testimonial texts, they cease to be legible as simple representations and for that reason declarations of his identity. 19. Benveniste, “The Nature of Pronouns,” 218. 20. Ibid., 219–220. 21. Eric Sundquist attends to the irresolvable discrepancy between Douglass’s narrating self and the slave boy in his related analysis of the slave songs described in chapter 2 of the Narrative. He notes that the young Douglass is “implausibly” situated “as both oblivious to the songs’ double meaning [as a slave boy would have been] and yet aware that in them lies some dim message of freedom [as the reflecting writer could note]” (To Wake the Nations, 92). 22. Agamben frames his theory as “a perpetual comment on testimony” (Remnants of Auschwitz, 13) that aims to explore the ethical consequences of Auschwitz. Despite his work’s professed historical specificity, I employ it here for two reasons. First, as becomes clear by the end of Agamben’s study, “to be a subject and to bear witness are in the final analysis one and the same” (158). The speaking subject is constituted for him by the same split condition, the same impossibility of enunciation appropriating experience, as the witness is, which means that to be a subject is to bear witness, and vice versa. There is a universal claim here about subjectivity that seems difficult to restrict to a discussion about Auschwitz. Second, part of the impetus of my book is to understand how nineteenth-century literary texts interact with a body of theoretical writings on testimony that, on the one hand, are largely generated by the specific events of the Holocaust and, on the other, have influenced the study of what it means to speak about experience in general. As the last section of this chapter demonstrates, I am invested in what Douglass makes evident about Agamben’s theory as much as I rely on what Agamben reveals about Douglass’s writing. I understand the relationship between the two thinkers to be informed and mediated, but not ultimately delimited, by the constraints of historical

164 / notes circumstance. Indeed, to the extent that testimony is generally taken to indicate truthful speech about past events, it seems impossible to consider the concept except by standing, however unusually, with a foot in both theory (to understand what it means, most basically, to speak and speak the truth) and history (to understand how the past functions in and defines any account). This chapter, and the book as a whole, is an experiment in so standing. 23. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 125. 24. Ibid., 135. 25. I shift here from Agamben’s living and speaking “beings” to Douglass’s living and speaking “bodies” to emphasize the material difference between Douglass’s physical experiences and his textual representations. 26. In my discussion so far, the living body that Douglass abandons is his own, but his speaking body may also be understood to testify for the bodies of others. When Douglass states, for example, in a speech in Rochester in 1850, “But ask the slave what is his condition—what his state of mind—what he thinks of enslavement? and you had as well address your inquiries to the silent dead. There comes no voice from the enslaved,” he indicates a set of living bodies that are constitutionally silent and that therefore require his speaking body to voice what they cannot (“The Nature of Slavery,” in MB, 421). Kenneth Warren writes that such proxy speech may be damaging: “The intelligent, articulate spectator, while attempting to reveal the details of these mute, silenced lives, distances himself from those he represents, making them other than himself, and confines them to a realm outside of that inhabited by the spectator” (“Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times,” 257). One of the most provocative aspects of Agamben’s theory, I think, is that the distancing that may result, as Warren notes, in confinement instead of revelation is nonetheless the necessary condition of any testimonial speech act. 27. I take this to be Agamben’s point in his critique of the designation of Auschwitz as “unsayable”: he cautions against “transform[ing] Auschwitz into a reality absolutely separated from language” (Remnants of Auschwitz, 157). An entity (the living body, the dead victim) that speaks only through the voice of others still does not live outside of the norms and structure of language. If it did, it could become available as a void on which to apply a variety of meanings—a problem that arises for Melville, as discussed in chapter 3, and that Primo Levi articulates in noting his distaste for the term “incommunicability”: “Except for cases of pathological incapacity, one can and must communicate, and thereby contribute in a useful and easy way to the peace of others and oneself, because silence, the absence of signals, is itself a signal, but an ambiguous one, and ambiguity generates anxiety and suspicion. To say that it is impossible to communicate is false; one always can” (The Drowned and the Saved, 89). 28. Douglass, “Let All Soil Be Free Soil,” 390. 29. Ibid., 393. 30. Part of my point is that positive law and higher law become confused here in a way that makes it impossible to simply understand Douglass’s logic as insisting on the latter as opposed to the former. If “individual rights” are guaranteed by higher law, then they are untouchable by human intervention; they bear no relationship to the actual legislative process. Accordingly, the Fugitive Slave Act would not be illegitimate or illegal or unlawful; it would not be law at all. Surely, however, Douglass means for his audience to recognize that a law has been passed and that such law makes it impossible for him to exist as if higher law reigned. This is why, in the same speech, he advocates violence:

notes / 165 “I believe that the lines of eternal justice are sometimes so obliterated by a course of long continued oppression that it is necessary to revive them by deepening their traces with the blood of a tyrant” (ibid., 391). Again, the idea that positive law could interfere with or restore higher law conflates the two in a way that fundamentally muddles their distinct meanings. I would argue that Douglass’s entire constitutionalist career might be regarded as haunted by this conflation, insofar as he insists on the founding document as fundamental to the extent that it expresses a supradocumentary, divine vision. 31. Much has been written on Douglass and irony, and a connection might be made here between testimony and irony by following Jonathan Culler’s definition: irony “presupposes two orders which are in contrast with one another and in whose contrast lies whatever value the form can generate” (Flaubert, 187). Douglass’s sense of himself as free and the impossibility of his so living would be the two orders that cannot be reconciled, and the text would mean precisely insofar as they remain in conflict. This is to say that Douglass’s texts cannot be read as ironic rather than testimonial, because their use of irony reveals them as testimonies. 32. Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883). 33. Ariela Gross points out that the designation of citizen and its accompanying rights were themselves ambiguous through the nineteenth century: “While nativeborn white women were assuredly citizens, in most states they could not vote or hold office, and married women lost many civil rights in addition, such as the ability to form contracts or bring suit in court” (What Blood Won’t Tell, 8). 34. Douglass, “Let All Soil Be Free Soil,” 390. 35. Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., 1850, appendix, 19, pt. 4: 1586. Subsequent references to this source are cited as Globe. 36. Globe, 1585. 37. Winthrop’s position is not uncontested, but it is also not invalid. In Commonwealth v. Aves (1836), Lemuel Shaw established a precedent of freeing enslaved servants brought into Massachusetts. See Edlie Wong’s Neither Fugitive nor Free for more detailed analysis of travel cases and “the incoherence of the law in a country divided into slave and free” (5). 38. Dayan’s discussion of Bailey v. Poindexter (1858) explains how the law resisted definitively determining whether slaves were persons or property. She writes that judges in the Bailey case and others sought “not to affirm the slave as property, but to articulate the personhood of slaves in such a way that it was disfigured, not erased” (The Law Is a White Dog, 140). My discussion in this chapter works to think through the unwittingly left holes in the law’s regulation of slave identity; Dayan’s study is an important complement, as it attends to the deliberate (though not rational) crafting of spaces from which escape was impossible. 39. I think that Douglass’s summary of this clause is the best: the federal commissioners who execute the law are each paid “ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so” (“What to the Slave?,” 375; emphasis in original). 40. Globe, 1585. 41. One famous set of trials aimed to discover whether enslaved Sally Miller was kidnapped German immigrant Salomé Muller; the story ended up fictionalized in William Wells Brown’s Clotel (Wilson, The Two Lives of Sally Miller, 107). Gross’s What Blood Won’t Tell historicizes a series of trials in which identity was established by jury when slave status or free inheritance was at stake.

166 / notes 42. Globe, 1586. 43. In legal practice, Gross notes, the premise that as property, slaves had no personal identity was continually undermined: “in witnesses’ testimony as in private slave lists, descriptions of slaves went far beyond the simple ‘Sambo’ and ‘Nat Turner’ stereotypes; while they may not have recognized the full range of human personality, they did include comments on slaves’ intelligence, playfulness, and pride” (Gross, Double Character, 5). 44. Fugitive Slave Act, 31st Cong., 1st sess., 18 September 1850. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Central regulation with unequivocal standards was not a great feature of antebellum American law. It was not until the 1880s that legal practitioners turned to a scientific model, instituting processes of observation and determination that would allow for minute facts to be compiled into universal principles. Prior to that turn to codification, as lawyer and politician Robert Rantoul complained in 1836, “No man can tell what the Common Law is; therefore it is not law: for a law is a rule of action; but a rule which is unknown can govern no man’s conduct” (“Oration at Scituate,” 318). He explained the extent to which the law was unknown with the following rough, but still startling, statistic: “In forty per cent of the cases carried up to a higher court, for a considerable term of years, terminating not long ago, the judgment was reversed” (ibid.). See also Grant Gilmore, The Ages of American Law; and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law. 48. The case was a Boston sensation with national reverberations: when the man ruled to be a fugitive was removed from the court house to board the ship that would take him back to Virginia, order was kept by an escort of a marshal’s guard, three companies of the U.S. Marines, a company of U.S. Infantry, a local group of lancers, and a cannon manned by six men (Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns, 212). As many as fifty thousand people watched the procession (ibid., 206). The force of the case resulted less from the particular facts associated with it and more from the fact that the judgment rendered and the violence associated with it announced, as Thoreau put it later that summer, that slavery had arrived in Massachusetts (see his essay “Slavery in Massachusetts,” in The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau). Still, the details of the case cast an insightful glimpse into how a law designed to make testimony impossible and identity unambiguous actually allowed its practitioners to demonstrate the reverse. See Von Frank’s book for another, more historical, assessment of the implications of the case. 49. No, the Fugitive Slave Act does not provide for counsel for alleged fugitives, but the law was so completely without precedent that commissioners did not always know how, exactly, it ought to be executed. Commissioner Loring tells the alleged fugitive he has the right to counsel, and the prisoner, “somewhat amazed” (indeed!), takes it (Boston Slave Riot, 349). 50. Ibid., 407. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 409. 54. Ibid., 425. 55. Burns later in life relayed his memory of the conversation, in which he never acknowledged the man who presented his words to the court (the claimant’s witness,

notes / 167 Mr. Brent) and never professed his willingness to return to Virginia: “Burns emphatically denied the correctness of Brent’s report of the conversation, and declared his readiness to make oath to the correctness of his own” (Stevens, Anthony Burns: A History, 88n. 1). Because the claimant in the case, Anthony Burns’s owner, Charles Suttle, ultimately signed an affidavit sponsoring the truthfulness of the later account of the events, “the reader will have at least his sanction for believing the statement of Burns in preference to that of Brent” (ibid.). 56. Mills, “Whose Fourth of July?,” 128. 57. Ibid., 128. 58. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 27, 78. 59. The dissenting opinion of the Supreme Court decision on the 1883 Civil Rights Cases, which I mentioned earlier, observes this shift toward discrimination based on biology. The majority opinion determined that the Fourteenth Amendment could not uphold a federal law protecting persons of color from discrimination in inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement, for the federal government could not regulate “the conduct of individuals [in] society towards each other”; that was the domain of local and state jurisprudence (all references herein to Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 [1883]). Judge Bradley, writing for the majority, asserts that implicit in the Thirteenth Amendment is congressional power to “enact all necessary and proper laws for the obliteration and prevention of slavery with all its badges and incidents.” But denial of accommodation, Bradley explains, does not subject a person to servitude, nor does it “fasten upon him any badge of slavery.” According to Bradley, there was no way to construe an act of racial discrimination as an extension of a now-obsolete status. Judge Harlan’s dissenting opinion differs on precisely this point. He draws from a logic similar to Mills’s, assuming that the “badges and incidents” of slavery remain relevant as they are reprised in acts of racial discrimination. When a person of color is prohibited from public conveyance, he writes, “a freeman is not only branded as one inferior and infected, but, in the competitions of life, is robbed of some of the most necessary means of existence; and all this solely because they belong to a particular race which the nation has liberated.” The term “branded” is not accidental, for what Harlan wants to argue is that “such discrimination is a badge of servitude”: it extends the condition of being kept from access to the rights and privileges of public life. The status of slave may have been eliminated, as Bradley recognized, but the means of discrimination had only taken a new form. The form was one of disease, infection: it was found at the level of the body; it identified the body before it could speak or identify itself. 60. In 2003, Agamben canceled plans to teach at two American universities, in order to protest the Bush administration’s policy of fingerprinting and photographing foreign visitors. He explained that the policy alarmingly resembled in form and nature the mandatory tattoos that identified prisoners at Auschwitz. 61. Wald, Constituting Americans, 90. 62. See note 59. 63. Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Carla Peterson read Douglass’s journalism in similar terms, arguing that Douglass “assert[ed] himself as a man, that is, as a speaking and writing subject” not because he was recognized as one but because such subjectivity was essential to the society he envisioned (“We Hold These Truths,” 192). 64. Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.1.1–4. 65. Ibid.

168 / notes 66. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 248. 67. Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun also makes use of Shakespeare’s lines, in terms that are similar to Thoreau’s but inflected toward the expressivity of artistically carved marble: “‘There are sermons in stones,’ said Hilda . . . ‘and especially in the stones of Rome’” (979). 68. Perhaps it is impossible to compare the effect of making things dance with that of bringing citizenship to millions. I imagine that the world of the observer, the witness, changes more profoundly when the latter comes to pass. A speaking person is likely always more challenging to confront than a speaking tree is. 69. Robert Hayden’s poem “Frederick Douglass” imagines this revolutionary future: “When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful / and terrible thing, needful to man as air, / usable as earth,” he writes, Douglass will be remembered “with the lives grown out of his life, the lives / fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing” (1528). 70. A productive comparison may be made here between Douglass and Primo Levi, whose testimonial writings and writings on testimony propel Agamben’s book. Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved begins with an epigraph that suggests that he, too, felt that he could not not write his own story; it is from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: “Since then, at an uncertain hour, / That agony returns, / And till my ghastly tale is told / This heart within me burns.” Levi’s compulsion in part derives from the Nazi goal of exterminating not only Jewish (among other) people but the history of that extermination; as he puts it, “testimony was an act of war against fascism” (18) because “what really mattered [to the Nazis] was that [the prisoners] should not tell their story” (13). Such a systematic obstruction of evidence is quite different from the context in which Douglass bore witness to the oppression of slavery; southern slaveholders were remarkably open about their behavior, as Charles Dickens was shocked to notice (American Notes, 258) and as Hinton Helper and George Fitzhugh’s Ante-Bellum makes clear (see also LT, 734). It seems that while Levi is focused on the implications of memory (he keeps returning to the same events), Douglass writes to meet or anticipate the future (his autobiographies keep growing longer and longer to include recent events and their suggestions about what is to come). 71. Although Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign may seem to be the shadow text of these concluding remarks, I want to establish a crucial difference between that message of hope and Douglass’s. Essential to Obama’s claim was the idea that the hoped-for America could be realized by his presidency; “yes we can” said not only that the election could be won but that a more socially conscious America could come into being. What is fascinating about Douglass’s theory of testimony as hope is that I cannot imagine him saying, definitively, “yes we did.” That is, while I do believe Douglass would have been astounded at how long it took for the civil rights movement to become (at least to some degree) effective, I am proposing here that the election of a president with roughly the same racial makeup as himself would not have signaled to him a conclusive victory. As the ever-lengthening autobiographies suggest, for Douglass, there were no conclusive victories; he always had more to write about because what he had hoped for still needed to be hoped for in new ways. 72. Mills, “Whose Fourth of July?,” 134. 73. Emerson, “Experience,” in Essays & Poems, 491–492.

notes / 169 3 / Melville 1. Quotations from Moby-Dick, Pierre, and Benito Cereno are cited in the text with the following abbreviations: MD  =  Moby-Dick, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2002); P = Pierre, or The Ambiguities (Evanston, IL: Northwestern-Newberry, 1971); BC  =  Benito Cereno, in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, 46–117 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern-Newberry, 1987). 2. Melville, “Bartleby,” 13; Melville, Billy Budd, 45. 3. Melville, Mardi, 283. 4. As Edgar Dryden glosses the “truth is voiceless” quote, with particular reference to Pierre, “any act of speaking or writing is therefore a lie. . . . The truest man is the silent one and the truest book the unwritten one” (Melville’s Thematics of Form, 123). Dryden’s book is instrumental for thinking about silence in Melville’s work, as it develops the consequences of Melville’s insistence on a constitutional separation between silent, truthful things and the narrator dependent on voice. 5. In the other texts mentioned, testimony is also central. Billy Budd, of course, contains a trial scene, but Billy’s speechless blow to Claggart, the lawyer’s account of the elusive Bartleby, and Pierre’s desire to accurately write are also framed as testimonial. 6. Amasa Delano’s Narrative of Voyages and Travels refers to a “negro” introduced as “captain of the slaves” (324), but it does not name him, follow his actions, or observe his relationship with Cereno. 7. Lee, “Melville’s Subversive Political Philosophy,” 498. 8. Barthes, The Neutral, 21. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 21–22. 11. The first three terms appear in Moby-Dick on page 159, the last five on page 165. 12. Peretz, Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power, 76–77. 13. Barthes’s list of what never approaches speech includes objects, night, the sea, and winds, as I quoted earlier, and not stones. Yet articulating the motionlessness that is key to absolute silence in a register consistent with Melville’s imagination seemed to require a different term. Despite the initially mute sea in Benito Cereno, oceans and winds in Melville’s work are rarely wholly still or unsuggestive. It is almost as if the fluidity of sea and wind make possible Ishmael’s engagement with language, while the impassivity of stone marks Pierre’s inability to weave, however tentatively, truth and text into a coherent form. 14. See also Dryden’s Monumental Melville, which teases out the way that the mute stone marks the limit of Pierre’s ability to write and thereby circumscribes his life (25). Dryden more broadly discusses the stone as a figure for literature. 15. This challenge is quite close to the one I referred to by quoting Emerson’s remark about the oversoul: “I dare not speak for it” (“The Over-Soul,” in Essays & Poems, 386). In both cases, recognizing the ostensibly (for Emerson) or essentially (for Melville) silent thing is preliminary to discovering a writing that bears witness to the fact of one’s recognition. Emerson and Melville seek to minimize the impulse to write on behalf of the silent thing (to “speak for it”), while Douglass’s testimony depends on such proxy representation. 16. Adler, “Benito Cereno,” 89. 17. Saidiya Hartman’s analysis of imagined suffering is also pertinent. She argues that the imagined slave becomes reified as an object of imagination rather than recognized as a pained being: “the other’s pain is acknowledged to the degree that it can

170 / notes be imagined, yet by virtue of this substitution the object of identification threatens to disappear” (Scenes of Subjection, 19). The actual slave who has yet to be heard from, in this line of thinking, will still have yet to be heard from after the reader has imagined his condition and his mind. 18. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 182. 19. Zagarell, “Reenvisioning America,” 136. 20. E. Goldberg, Beyond Terror, 11. 21. Part of Goldberg’s point, as I mentioned in the introduction, is that this fundamental premise may have been revealed as inoperative by the failure of the circulation of photos from Abu Ghraib prison to elicit a “Never again!” with regard to American acts of torture. See ibid., 5–12. 22. Ibid., 11. 23. Winters, In Defense of Reason, 222. 24. Feltenstein, “Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’” 254. 25. Dawes, That the World May Know, 9, 8. 26. Thomas, Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature, 112. 27. Oxford English Dictionary, online ed., s.v. “mute.” 28. For a more systematic evaluation of muteness in Melville’s late works, see my article “Benito Cereno’s Mute Testimony.” The present discussion aims to consider more extensively my contention there that muteness may be testimonial (14). 29. The stammer that Billy Budd self-translates may be an example of silence made legible: “I did not mean to kill him,” Billy insists. “Could I have used my tongue I would not have struck him. But he foully lied to my face and in presence of my captain, and I had to say something, and I could only say it with a blow, God help me!” (Melville, Billy Budd, 106). What Billy had to say, it seems, was that he was quite angry and deeply offended. Still, Melville’s language resists presenting the unuttered sentiment: Billy “had to say something,” an “it” that is figured by a blow and never becomes a definitive message. See also my discussion of the silence at Billy’s execution, which is disrupted but not quite replaced by a “sound not easily to be verbally rendered” (ibid., 126), in note 42. 30. Maurice S. Lee makes a similar point about Melville’s poetry: “While Emerson (like William Wordsworth) celebrates open-endedness by urging his words ever onward, Melville’s poetry (more like Emily Dickinson’s) dramatizes partiality by looping back on slightly altered refrains, . . . as if the speaker cannot resolve his thought and so repeatedly tries and fails again before finally leaving off. So many of the poems in Battle-Pieces—from ‘Ball’s Bluff’ to ‘Shiloh’ to ‘A Meditation’—end in a kind of exhausted hush. . . . The unfinished quality of Melville’s poetry does not feel infinitely unfolding so much as incomplete” (“Melville, Douglass, the Civil War, Pragmatism,” 398–399). 31. Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 525. 32. In a figurative sense, the text’s arrival at silence might be understood as its stammer. Peter Szendy’s recent reading of Moby-Dick notes that clinicians recognize two types of stammering, tonic and clonic (Prophecies of Leviathan, 25). Tonic stammering denotes “a spasmodic uttering of words, with blocks of varying gravity both at the beginning of and during speech”; this condition, in which a silence is followed by more fluid speech, is Billy Budd’s (European Institute for Stammering and Psychology of Communication, “Stammering,” http://www.stammerinstitute.com/balbuzie.php). In clonic stammering, the blocking consists of words that must be slowed down or

notes / 171 tempered with a pause in order to be deliberately expressed. Clonic stammering refers, then, to speech that must end in silence in order to be effective, which aptly describes the general movement of Melville’s late works. See also Deleuze, “He Stuttered”; and Savarese, “Organic Hesitancy.” 33. As John Irwin writes, “indeterminacy is the essential characteristic of the hieroglyph for Melville” (American Hieroglyphics, 286); the discussion of the hieroglyph in the first chapter of his book makes clear that an opposite interpretation would also have been available to Melville. 34. Deleuze, “Bartleby,” 73. 35. The tension between the illegible abyss and the indicated absence also informs Branka Arsić’s multiple readings of Bartleby’s passivity. Some of her readings are generated by the premise that Bartleby’s own narrative is literally the “irreparable loss to literature” described by the lawyer (Melville, “Bartleby,” 13): “The character who didn’t write dies without leaving any writing to be copied, without leaving any trace” (Arsić, Passive Constitutions, 50). From another perspective, however, in writing the loss, the lawyer preserves Bartleby’s trace: “far from claiming that literature will be endangered by certain characters that cannot be written, it is as if he maintains that literature will be about writing the impossibility of writing certain people” (ibid., 32). 36. See also Jonathan Elmer’s claim about Benito Cereno: “The inscrutableness of [Melville’s] tale, its ever-present liability to be misconstrued, is both its message and its method” (“Babo’s Razor,” 79). Elmer is concerned with the way that the inscrutableness of the text correlates to the inability to discern a historical event in process (in his discussion, the Haitian Revolution). I follow him in finding Melville’s text to demonstrate a theory in the process of telling (or not telling) a story and in moving away from information as the mode of determining the truth about the past. 37. The word and its cognates appear in Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno, as I discuss, and elsewhere in Melville’s late works: “quietude” and “disquietude” form a pair in Pierre; “quietude” appears in Israel Potter, “Bartleby,” “The Encantadas,” and “The Bell-Tower.” 38. Oxford English Dictionary, online ed., s.v. “quiet.” 39. A few chapters later, in “The Candles,” this image repeats, again to indicate deceptively calm weather that conceals and indicates a storm: “Warmest climes but nurse the cruelest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in the spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands” (MD, 379). 40. National Snow and Ice Data Center, “Hoarfrost,” http://nsidc.org/arcticmet/ glossary/hoarfrost.html. 41. A fascinating iteration of the strange relationship between quietude and inquietude appears, via an editorial uncertainty, in the “Agatha” letter Melville wrote to Hawthorne in 1852. The text outlining the story reads, “Filled with meditations, she reclines along the edge of the cliff & gazes out seaward. She marks a handful of cloud on the horizon, presaging a storm tho’ [thro’?] all this quietude” (The Letters of Herman Melville, 156). The difference between a storm coming “though” the quietude and “through” the quietude is virtually sublated by the passage in Benito Cereno. 42. Silence also cedes to something not quite its opposite and not quite a sign following the execution of Billy Budd: “The silence at the moment of execution . . . was gradually disturbed by a sound not easily to be verbally rendered. . . . The seeming remoteness of its source was because of its murmurous indistinctness, since it came

172 / notes from close by, even from the men massed on the ship’s open deck. Being inarticulate, it was dubious in significance further than it seemed to indicate some capricious revulsion of thought or feeling such as mobs ashore are liable to” (Billy Budd, 125–126). The syntax is awkward in the last sentence, but the implication seems to be that the inarticulate sound was more dubious in significance than meaningful. The syntax may even result from the difficulty of expressing the sound as it ceases to become a sign, as it disappears. 43. Melville, “An Uninscribed Monument,” in Battle-Pieces, 173. 44. I like Winters’s phrase as a way to describe this elusiveness: he refers to the text’s “silky quiet” (In Defense of Reason, 222). 45. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 31. 46. Ibid., 29. 47. Paul Downes analyzes voice in Benito Cereno in a way that also destabilizes it as the criterion for the human recognized by human rights discourse. He reads the text’s free indirect discourse expansively: “the third-person, omniscient voice of Benito Cereno belongs as much to the African revolutionary, Babo, as it does to either Herman Melville or Amasa Delano” (“Melville’s Benito Cereno,” 480). But Downes’s point is not that Babo thereby gains power or speaks or bears a message. On the contrary, he insists, “To claim a narrative voice for Babo, after all, is also to claim a voice from beyond the grave, or, what is the same thing, to claim language’s relationship to death, for a politics of human rights” (482). Including Babo in the voice of the text amounts to calling into question what it means to “have” a voice, since being able to narrate becomes contiguous with being dead. Dispersed among the dead and the living, voice can no longer be what distinguishes human from inhuman. 48. The phrase is from Billy Budd: “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges” (128). 49. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 11. 50. A nice example of how “loud” testimonies still rely on, or even call out for, quiet testimony may be read in Dave Eggers’s What Is the What, which recounts over five hundred pages the experiences of a Sudanese refugee. The book ends with the claim that the narrator will go on telling his story, surrounding even the reader who does not want to hear any more: “I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don’t want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who will run. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist” (535). These stories of the future have not been recorded, and yet the text insists that they are still out there, in the air, circulating in excess of the archived narrative. That the book cannot conclude without this open-endedness suggests that even explicit accounts are not simply testimonial. 51. Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 186. 52. Elmer, On Lingering and Being Last, 95. 53. Elmer, “Babo’s Razor,” 79.

4 / James 1. James, The American Scene, 690. 2. Ibid. 3. Peter Brooks’s 1976 reading of The Wings of the Dove introduced a thesis that is generally accepted as a presupposition for studying that work and others: “The apparent blankness of referential meaning repeatedly becomes a central issue in the drama”

notes / 173 (The Melodramatic Imagination, 172). In 1977, Tzvetan Todorov argued similarly, and influentially, that the unnamed is essential to James’s writing: “The Jamesian narrative is always based on the quest for an absolute and absent cause. . . . Thus the secret of Jamesian narrative is precisely the existence of an essential secret, of something not named, of an absent and superpowerful force which sets the whole present machinery of the narrative in motion” (The Poetics of Prose, 145). This idea of an absence or blankness made present is at work in scholarship from Shoshana Felman’s reading of The Turn of the Screw (“Henry James: Madness and the Risks of Practice”) to Deleuze and Guattari’s of “In the Cage” (“1874: Three Novellas”). My aim here is not at all to disregard these readings, which have been critical to my understanding of James. Rather, I want to put an alternative genealogy alongside the more pervasive one, to open up the possibility that a testimony not founded on absence is legible in his thinking. 4. Although I am focusing on images of dead women, I am not mounting a critique with gender at stake. This is in part because the relatively fewer images of dead men also exhibit the likeness to life that I am examining—for example, following the death of Roderick Hudson, “what Rowland saw on first looking at him was only a noble expression of life. The eyes were the eyes of death, but in a short time, when Rowland had closed them, the whole face seemed to revive” (James, Roderick Hudson, 524). I am not asserting, then, that the dead women exhibit qualities particular to their gender; rather, there are simply more of them from which to draw conclusions. For studies that consider death in James with regard to gender, see Jottkandt, Acting Beautifully; and Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body. 5. James, The American Scene, 688. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 689. 8. Auden, introduction to The American Scene, xi. 9. Ibid., xii. 10. In fact, the political analysis Auden includes in the introduction is presented almost as a corrective to James’s text, which is made to seem quaint and sociologically uninformed in turn. Auden suggests that he is “enlarg[ing] upon” James’s observations (ibid., xv), but Auden’s argument neither relies on James nor seems to find his perspective particularly relevant. 11. B. Brown, A Sense of Things, 188. 12. Emerson, “Circles,” in Essays & Poems, 408. 13. James, The American Scene, 354. 14. Ibid., 579. 15. Emerson, “The Poet,” in Essays & Poems, 457. 16. James, review of The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 245. 17. Emerson, “Experience,” in Essays & Poems, 485. 18. James, review of A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 260. 19. James, “The Art of Fiction,” 46. 20. Ibid., 53. 21. Miller, Literature as Conduct, 159. 22. Ibid., 158. 23. The views of Henry James Senior have more often been read as influential in William James’s thinking than in Henry Junior’s, although a few studies argue for the novelist’s reliance on his father’s thought. The most comprehensive of these is Quentin

174 / notes Anderson’s The American Henry James, which, as another study summarizes, proposes James’s works as “allegory presenting his version of his father’s Swedenborgian theology” (LeStourgeon and Nearing, “The Swedenborgian Figure in the Carpet,” 331). Anderson’s work is systematic, and it takes as James’s source text the system painstakingly detailed in his father’s account of the Swedenborgian universe. My approach to linking the two is closer to Joan Richardson’s; she understands James (as well as his brother and Emerson) as having “loosened Swedenborg’s cosmology from its theological moorings” (A Natural History of Pragmatism, 139). Richardson’s focus is on the way that words for James function like Swedenborg’s angels, expressing the invisible (ibid.), which draws from the Swedenborgian entanglement of the representation and the represented thing that I am studying here. On William James’s relationship with Swedenborgian philosophy, see Croce, “Mankind’s Own Providence”; the notes broadly catalogue the connections between Swedenborgian philosophy and pragmatism. 24. James Sr., Society, 228. 25. James Sr., The Secret of Swedenborg, 176. 26. I am drawing here from James Sr., “Letter XXIV,” in Society, 352–381. 27. Miller, Literature as Conduct, 159. 28. There might be a way to read the typewriter—even James’s typewriter—in these terms. It appears to bypass the author by mechanizing handwriting, but perhaps it also bypasses the author by connecting matter to matter: the matter of the text to the matter of the machine. See Matson, “The Text That Wrote Itself,” which reads Twain’s typewriter as automating. 29. James, The American Scene, 690. 30. Ibid., 685. 31. Theo Davis notices this interplay between James’s subject matter and the apparently separate image invoked to represent it, although she ultimately emphasizes their disconnection (“Out of the Medium in Which Books Breathe,” 411–418). 32. B. Brown, A Sense of Things, 171. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 172. 37. The Wings of the Dove was published in 1902, “The Friends of the Friends” in 1896. 38. James, The Wings of the Dove, 137. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Sharon Cameron’s reading of the scene also attributes agency to the painting or the death in the painting: “It is as if, after Milly has looked at the Bronzino and thought of the girl as dead, her own life is put in jeopardy. As if, to put it glibly, the thought of death could kill” (Thinking in Henry James, 130). See also note 49. 42. James, The Wings of the Dove, 77. 43. I refer to the connection between mourning clothes and death again in my discussion of “The Friends of the Friends.” See also James’s early short story, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” in which the ghost of a jealous woman abides in a trunk of gowns and mauls the living sister who attempts to take possession of them. 44. Reinhard, “The Jamesian Thing,” 117.

notes / 175 45. Ibid., 134. 46. See also Julie Rivkin, whose reading of the economy at work in The Wings of the Dove emphasizes the impossibility of making any exchange come out equal (False Positions). 47. The gloss on “express” is from Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Carol Armstrong argues persuasively that Barthes invokes the term in a sense more Swedenborgian than structuralist: “Camera Lucida is atavistic in its inclinations,” she writes. “[Barthes’s] aliveness to the strangeness of the photograph is much more in tune with the nineteenth century’s ‘primitive’ views on the matter than it is with our latter-day understanding of the medium” (Scenes in a Library, 9). The “‘primitive’ views” include the idea that an image is an emanation rather than a replacement. For other discussions of photography that invoke the approach to meaning making that I am tracing here, see Rosalind Krauss, “Tracing Nadar”; and Alan Trachtenberg, “Photography.” 48. James, The Wings of the Dove, 398. 49. Cameron proposes that thinking becomes externalized in the novel: instead of being limited to interior consciousness, the thought of death is manifested in outward forms (Thinking in Henry James, 136). I follow her in imagining the idea of Milly’s death as a kernel broadcast in multiple dimensions. Cameron characterizes such externalization as magical and asserts, “James’s magical thinking about a life after death is also inevitably magical thinking about writing” (159). My conclusion at the end of this chapter similarly links the superseding of the limits of life with those of the writer’s mind. See also Cutting, Death in Henry James, 123. 50. See, for instance, Matthiessen and Murdock’s note in James, The Notebooks of Henry James, 244–245. 51. James, 5 February 1895, in The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, 112. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 113. 54. Ibid., 112. 55. James, 21 December 1895, in The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, 144. 56. James, “The Friends of the Friends,” 364. Subsequent references to this work are abbreviated F and cited parenthetically in the text. 57. In The Wings of the Dove, James refers to “the great smudge of mortality across the picture” (347). I follow his suggestion in imagining death to constitute not a territorial line but something blurrier, less definitive: something that approaches its surroundings. 58. The ghost of Miss Jessel, in The Turn of the Screw, is described as wearing mourning (31): she is “dark as midnight in her black dress” (57). The earlier chapters of this famous story might fit into my argument, since Peter Quint appears at first to be a live person, to therefore have no features distinguishing him as dead. In that text, too, it is possible to view the line between life and death as smudged, as allowing at least one-way traffic. Yet the ghosts of The Turn of the Screw seem aptly characterized by James in his preface as “goblins, elves, imps, demons as loosely constructed as those of the old trials for witchcraft; if not, more pleasingly, fairies of the legendary order, wooing their victims forth to see them dance under the moon” (Prefaces to the New York Edition, 1187). The ghosts, that is, interfere in life without seeming to destabilize the logic by which we understand them as dead. Perhaps James’s more categorical ghost stories are scary, rather than, as in the “The Friends of the Friends,” wonderful (in the literal sense) because their ghosts haunt the living but not the very idea of life.

176 / notes 59. I would not strongly argue for Minny as the original source of all of James’s images primarily because he witnessed the deaths of many women close to him: his mother, Mary Walsh James (1882), his sister Alice (1892), and his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson (1894), among others (see Edel, The Life of Henry James, 384). An image of the dead was perhaps always overdetermined in the nineteenth century, which may account in part for that period’s investment in conceiving testimony without life in movements such as spiritualism and technologies such as photography and embalming. 60. Henry James to William James, 29 March 1870, in Matthiessen, The James Family, 262. 61. Ibid., 260. 62. Ibid., 261. 63. Ibid., 262. 64. The idea of the breathing dead is presented at two points in the text; see James, “The Altar of the Dead,” 50, 56. 65. James, Prefaces to the New York Edition, 1248. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 1249. 68. James, “The Altar of the Dead,” 4. Subsequent references to this work are abbreviated A and cited parenthetically in the text. 69. Warminski, “Reading Over Endless Histories,” 272. 70. Jottkandt, Acting Beautifully, 105. 71. Ibid., 106. 72. Emerson, “Uses of Great Men,” in Essays & Poems, 619. 73. When Stransom first finds out about Hague’s death, it leaves him “cold, suddenly and horribly cold” (A, 12); when he later surmises that Hague must in some way have mistreated the woman who mourns him, he understands the behavior as cold and is himself cold to reconciliation: “In one way or another this creature had been coldly sacrificed. That was why at the last as well as the first he must still leave him out and out” (A, 8). There is no warmth or breath such as Stransom associates with his other dead. 74. James, “The Art of Fiction,” 46. 75. Alice James wrote to Henry that Henry James Senior’s last words were “There is my Mary!” (Matthiessen, The James Family, 130). 76. James, “Is There a Life after Death?,” in Matthiessen, The James Family, 606. 77. Ibid., 607. 78. Ibid., 606. 79. Ibid., 610, 611. 80. Ibid., 614. James Senior deliberately contrasts his idea of immortality with the postmortem existence imagined in “The Friends of the Friends” and “The Altar of the Dead” (see James Sr., Society, 373). Nonetheless, there is an almost identical formulation of James’s concluding logic in “Is There a Life after Death?” in his father’s Society. James Senior writes, “I could not conceive of the creator of men once endowing them with conscious life or freedom, and then conceive of Him as again under any possible circumstances revoking His gift” (James Sr., Society, 372). 81. James, “Is There a Life after Death?,” 611.

notes / 177 Conclusion 1. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 81. 2. Emerson, “Experience,” in Essays & Poems, 479. 3. Douglass, Narrative, 63. 4. Melville, Benito Cereno, 67. 5. James, The American Scene, 579. 6. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 4. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Other studies working to question the discourse of unspeakability include Naomi Mandel’s Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America and Ruth Leys’s Trauma: A Genealogy (see pages 266–297). 10. Felman, “Camus’ The Plague, or a Monument to Witnessing,” in Felman and Laub, Testimony, 103; Felman, “After the Apocalypse: Paul de Man and the Fall to Silence,” in ibid., 135. 11. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 39, 56. 12. Ibid., 5.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography

Adler, Joyce Sparer. “Benito Cereno: Slavery and Violence in the Americas.” In Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” edited by Robert E. Burkholder, 76–93. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992. Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books, 2002. Anderson, Quentin. The American Henry James. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1957. Armstrong, Carol. Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Arsić, Branka. On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. ———. Passive Constitutions, or, 7½ Times Bartleby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Auden, W. H. Introduction to The American Scene, by Henry James, v–xxiii. New York: Scribner, 1946. Baker, Houston A. Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Noonday, 1981. ———. The Neutral. Translated by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. ———. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Benveniste, Émile. “The Nature of Pronouns.” In Problems in General Linguistics, 217–222. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971.

180 / bibliogr aphy Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ———. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Boston Slave Riot, and the Trial of Anthony Burns. In Slavery, Race, and the American Legal System 1700–1872, series 2, Fugitive Slaves and American Courts: The Pamphlet Literature, edited by Paul Finkelman, vol. 2, 345–428. New York: Garland, 1988. Bowles, Charles S. P. Report of Charles S. P. Bowles, Foreign Agent of the United States Sanitary Commission, upon the International Congress of Geneva for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Sick and Wounded Soldiers of Armies in the Field, Convened at Geneva, 8th August, 1864. London: R. Clay, Son, and Taylor, 1864. Breitwieser, Mitchell. “Pacific Speculations: Moby-Dick and Mana.” Arizona Quarterly 67.1 (2011): 1–46. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic. New York: Routledge, 1992. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Brown, Lee Rust. The Emerson Museum: Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Cadava, Eduardo. Emerson and the Climates of History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. ———. “Irresistible Dictations: A Conversation with Eduardo Cadava Featuring David Kelman and Ben Miller.” Reading On 1.1 (2006): 1–17. ———. “The Monstrosity of Human Rights.” PMLA 121.5 (2006): 1558–1565. Cameron, Sharon. “Representing Grief: Emerson’s ‘Experience.’” Representations 15 (1986): 15–41. ———. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. ———. Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996. Cavell, Stanley. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Chai, Leon. The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. Cobb, Thomas R. R. Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: T. & J. W. Johnson, 1858. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Statesman’s Manual. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853. Congressional Globe. 46 vols. Washington, DC, 1834–1873.

bibliogr aphy / 181 Crane, Gregg. “Human Law and Higher Law.” In The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, edited by Maurice S. Lee, 89–102. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Croce, Paul Jerome. “Mankind’s Own Providence: From Swedenborgian Philosophy of Use to William James’s Pragmatism.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 43 (2007): 490–508. Culler, Jonathan D. Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974. Cutting, Andrew. Death in Henry James. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Davis, Theo. “‘Out of the Medium in Which Books Breathe’: The Contours of Formalism and The Golden Bowl.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 34 (2001): 411–433. Dawes, James. That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Dayan, Colin. The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Delano, Amasa. A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round the World; Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands. 1817. Reprint, New York: Praeger, 1970. Deleuze, Gilles. “Bartleby; or, The Formula.” In Essays Critical and Clinical, 68–90. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ———. “He Stuttered.” In Essays Critical and Clinical, 107–114. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. “1874: Three Novellas, or ‘What Happened?’” In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 192–207. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. ———. “Living On.” In Deconstruction and Criticism, edited by Harold Bloom, 62–142. New York: Continuum, 1999. ———. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. 1842. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 2001. Douglass, Frederick. “Let All Soil Be Free Soil: An Address Delivered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 11 August, 1852.” In The Frederick Douglass Papers, series 1, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, edited by John W. Blassingame, vol. 2, 388–393. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. ———. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. In Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies, 453–1048. New York: Library of America, 1994.

182 / bibliogr aphy ———. My Bondage and My Freedom. In Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies, 103–452. New York: Library of America, 1994. ———. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. In Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies, 1–102. New York: Library of America, 1994. ———. “Slavery, Freedom, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act: An Address Delivered in Chicago, Illinois, on 30 October 1854.” In The Frederick Douglass Papers, series 1, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, edited by John W. Blassingame, vol. 2, 538–559. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. ———. “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York on 5 July 1852.” In The Frederick Douglass Papers, series 1, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, edited by John W. Blassingame, vol. 2, 359–388. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Downes, Paul. “Melville’s Benito Cereno and the Politics of Humanitarian Intervention.” South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2004): 465–488. Dryden, Edgar A. Melville’s Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968. ———. Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. Vol. 3. New York: Avon Books, 1978. Eggers, Dave. What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. New York: Vintage, 2007. Ellison, Julie. “Tears for Emerson: Essays, Second Series.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, 140–161. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Elmer, Jonathan. “Babo’s Razor; or, Discerning the Event in an Age of Differences.” differences 19 (2008): 54–81. ———. On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays & Poems. New York: Library of America, 1996. ———. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 16 vols. Edited by William H. Gilman et al. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1960–1982. Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Vintage, 2009. Felman, Shoshana. “Henry James: Madness and the Risks of Practice (Turning the Screw of Interpretation).” In Writing and Madness (Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis), 141–250. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1991. Feltenstein, Rosalie. “Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno.’” American Literature 19 (1947): 245–255. Fisher Fishkin, Shelley, and Carla L. Peterson. “‘We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident’: The Rhetoric of Frederick Douglass’s Journalism.” In Frederick

bibliogr aphy / 183 Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, edited by Eric J. Sundquist, 189. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Freeman, John. Herman Melville. London: Macmillan, 1926. Freud, Sigmund. Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. New York: Touchstone, 1997. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Gilmore, Grant. The Ages of American Law. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. Gilmore, Leigh. “‘What Was I?’: Literary Witness and the Testimonial Archive.” In Profession, edited by Rosemary G. Feal, 77–84. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011. Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson. Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Goldberg, Shari. “Benito Cereno’s Mute Testimony: On the Politics of Reading Melville’s Silences.” Arizona Quarterly 65 (2009): 1–26. ———. “From Quietism to Quiet Politics: Inheriting Emerson’s Anti-slavery Testimony.” Paragraph 31 (2008): 281–302. Gross, Ariela J. Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. ———. What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Gugelberger, Georg M. “Introduction: Institutionalization of Transgression: Testimonial Discourse and Beyond.” In The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, edited by Georg M. Gugelberger, 1–19. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Gutierrez, Cathy. Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Guyer, Sara. Romanticism after Auschwitz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun. In Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels, 849–1242. New York: Library of America, 1983. Hayden, Robert. “Frederick Douglass.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Nellie Y. McKay, William L. Andrews, Houston A. Baker Jr., Frances Smith Foster, Deborah E. McDowall, Robert G. O’Mealley, et al., 1528. New York: Norton, 2004. Helper, Hinton, and George Fitzhugh. Ante-Bellum: Three Classic Works on Slavery in the Old South. New York: Capricorn, 1960. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. The Common Law. Boston: Little, Brown, 1881.

184 / bibliogr aphy Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862. 1863. Reprinted with an introduction by Laura L. Behling. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Hotson, Clarence. “Emerson’s Sources for Swedenborg.” New-Church Messenger, February 3, 1932, 89–94. Howe, Susan. The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Irwin, John. American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980. James, Henry. “The Altar of the Dead.” In The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17, 1–58. New York: Scribner, 1909. ———. The American Scene. In Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America, 351–736. New York: Library of America, 1993. ———. “The Art of Fiction.” In Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, 44–65. New York: Library of America, 1984. ———. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Edited by Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———. “The Friends of the Friends.” In The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17, 321–364. New York: Scribner, 1909. ———. The Notebooks of Henry James. Edited by F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947. ———. Prefaces to the New York Edition. In Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, 1035–1342. New York: Library of America, 1984. ———. Review of The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, 233–249. New York: Library of America, 1984. ———. Review of A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by James Elliot Cabot. In Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, 250–271. New York: Library of America, 1984. ———. Roderick Hudson. In The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 1. New York: Scribner, 1907. ———. “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes.” The Ladder: A Henry James Website. Edited by Adrian Dover. http://www.henryjames.org.uk/romococ/ home.htm. ———. The Turn of the Screw. Edited by Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren. New York: Norton, 1999. ———. The Wings of the Dove. Edited by J. Donald Crowley and Richard A Hocks. New York: Norton, 1978. James, Henry, Sr. The Secret of Swedenborg: Being an Elucidation of His Doctrine of the Divine Natural Humanity. Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1869. ———. Society, the Redeemed Form of Man, and the Earnest of God’s Omnipotence in Human Nature: Affirmed in Letters to a Friend. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1879.

bibliogr aphy / 185 James, William. Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Jay, Gregory S. America the Scrivener: Deconstruction and the Subject of Literary History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Jottkandt, Sigi. Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Kamuf, Peggy. The Division of Literature: or the University in Deconstruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Krauss, Rosalind. “Tracing Nadar.” October 5 (1978): 29–47. Lambert, Gregg. “Emerson, or Man Thinking.” In The Other Emerson, edited by Branka Arsić and Cary Wolfe, 229–250. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. ———. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” In Things, edited by Bill Brown, 151–173. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Lee, Maurice S. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, edited by Maurice S. Lee, 1–12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ———. “Melville, Douglass, the Civil War, Pragmatism.” In Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, edited by Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter, 396–415. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. ———. “Melville’s Subversive Political Philosophy: Benito Cereno and the Fate of Speech.” American Literature 72 (2003): 495–520. LeStourgeon, Diana E., and Homer Nearing Jr. “The Swedenborgian Figure in the Carpet: Henry James’s Critical Point of View.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 7.4 (1975): 328–341. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being; or, Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. ———. “Truth of Disclosure and Truth of Testimony.” In Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, 97–108. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Levine, Robert S. “Identity in the Autobiographies.” In The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, edited by Maurice S. Lee, 31–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Levine, Robert S., and Samuel Otter, eds. Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000. Lothe, Jakob, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and James Phelan. Introduction to After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future,

186 / bibliogr aphy edited by Jakob Lothe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and James Phelan, 1–19. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. Mandel, Naomi. Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Masur, Louis P. “. . . The Real War Will Never Get in the Books”: Selections from Writers during the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Matson, John. “The Text That Wrote Itself: Identifying the Automated Subject in Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins.” In Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, edited by Sidney E. Berger, 347–370. New York: Norton, 2004. Matthiessen, F. O. The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941. ———. The James Family. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. McBride, Dwight A. Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony. New York: NYU Press, 2001. Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” In The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, 13–45. Evanston, IL: Northwestern-Newberry, 1987. ———. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. 1866. Reprint, Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2000. ———. Benito Cereno. In The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, 46–117. Evanston, IL: Northwestern-Newberry, 1987. ———. Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Edited by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. ———. “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” In Moby-Dick, 2nd ed., edited by Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford, 517–532. New York: Norton, 2002. ———. The Letters of Herman Melville. Edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960. ———. Mardi. Evanston, IL: Northwestern-Newberry, 1970. ———. Moby-Dick. Edited by Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford, 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2002. ———. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. Evanston, IL: Northwestern-Newberry, 1971. Miller, Hugh. The Testimony of the Rocks; or, Geology in its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. New York: Hurst, 1857. Miller, J. Hillis. The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. ———. “Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness: Fiction as Testimony.” In After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future, edited by Jakob Lothe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and James Phelan, 23–51. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. ———. Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956.

bibliogr aphy / 187 Mills, Charles W. “Whose Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass and ‘Original Intent.’” In Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, edited by Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland, 100–142. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. Morris, Thomas D. Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Mumford, Lewis. Herman Melville. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929. Myerson, Joel, ed. Transcendentalism: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Otter, Samuel. “A Different Formalism.” Review of Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century, by Theo Davis. Novel 43 (2010): 350–353. Packer, Barbara L. Emerson’s Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays. New York: Continuum, 1982. ———. “The Transcendentalists.” In The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 2, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, 329–604. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pease, Donald E. “‘Experience,’ Antislavery, and the Crisis of Emersonianism.” In The Other Emerson, edited by Branka Arsić and Cary Wolfe, 131–166. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. ———. Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Peretz, Eyal. Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power: A Reading of MobyDick. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Rantoul, Robert. “Oration at Scituate.” In American Legal History: Cases and Materials, edited by Kermit L. Hall, William M. Wiecek, and Paul Finkelman, 317–319. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Reed, Sampson. Observations on the Growth of Mind. In Transcendentalism: A Reader, edited by Joel Myerson, 26–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Reinhard, Kenneth. “The Jamesian Thing: The Wings of the Dove and the Ethics of Mourning.” Arizona Quarterly 53.4 (1997): 115–145. Review of Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862. Atlantic Monthly, September 1863, 398–399. Review of Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862. Continental Monthly, October 1863, 478. Review of Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862. North American Review, October 1863, 567. Review of Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862. Zion’s Herald and Wesleyan Journal 34 (12 August 1863): n.p.

188 / bibliogr aphy Richardson, Joan. A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Rivkin, Julie. False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Rowe, John Carlos. At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Savarese, Ralph James. “‘Organic Hesitancy’: On Speechlessness in Billy Budd.” In Secret Sharers: Melville, Conrad and Narratives of the Real, edited by Pawel Jedrzejko, Milton M. Reigelman, and Zuzanna Szatanik, 307–318. Zabrze, Poland: MStudio, 2011. Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Stevens, Charles Emery. Anthony Burns: A History. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1856. Sundquist, Eric. To Wake the Nations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Swedenborg, Emanuel. An Hieroglyphic Key to Natural and Spiritual Mysteries, by Way of Representations and Correspondences. Translated by R. Hindmarsh. London: R. Hindmarsh, 1792. Szendy, Peter. Prophecies of Leviathan: Reading Past Melville. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Thomas, Brook. Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Thoreau, Henry David. The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau. Edited by Lewis Hyde. New York: North Point, 2002. ———. Walden. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. ———. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Trachtenberg, Alan. “Photography: The Emergence of a Keyword.” In Photography in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Martha A. Sandweiss, 17–47. Forth Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum; and New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991.

bibliogr aphy / 189 Von Frank, Albert J. “Essays: First Series (1841).” In The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, 106–120. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ———. The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Wald, Priscilla. Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Warminski, Andrzej. “Reading Over Endless Histories: Henry James’s Altar of the Dead.” Yale French Studies 74 (1988): 261–284. Warren, Kenneth W. Afterword to Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, edited by Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter, 436–442. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. ———. “Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times: Progressive Rhetoric and the Problem of Constituency.” In Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, edited by Eric J. Sundquist, 253–270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Weaver, Raymond M. Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic. New York: Pageant Books, 1961. Wieviorka, Annette. The Era of the Witness. Translated by Jared Stark. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Wilson, Carol. The Two Lives of Sally Miller: A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity in Antebellum New Orleans. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Winters, Yvor. In Defense of Reason. 3rd ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1947. Wong, Edlie L. Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel. New York: NYU Press, 2009. Zagarell, Sandra. “Reenvisioning America: Melville’s Benito Cereno.” In Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” edited by Robert E. Burkholder, 127–145. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

absence, 13, 55, 94–95, 107–108, 129, 164n27, 171n35, 172n3 Abu Ghraib, 8, 170n21 Adler, Joyce, 99 After Testimony, 3 Agamben, Giorgio, 6–7, 18, 60, 65–70, 80, 82, 84–85, 98, 163n22, 164n26, 167n60 agency, 23, 141 air (breeze, wind), 7, 12, 15, 18, 22, 33, 39–40, 46, 50, 89, 94, 111–119, 140, 150, 153, 169n13, 172n50 alterity. See otherness America. See United States American Anti-Slavery Society, 11 Anderson, Quentin, 173n23 animation, 2, 35, 45, 121, 123–124, 129, 130–131, 133, 138, 140, 141 anthropomorphism, 23 antislavery movement, 57–58, 63, 80–81 archive, 6–7, 12, 55, 172n50 Arden, 84, 86 Arlington Cemetery, 14–15 Arsić, Branka, 33, 49, 160n4, 162n49, 171n35 As You Like It, 83 Auden, W. H., 123 autobiography, 17, 57, 59–62, 85 Barthes, Roland, 7, 18, 93–94, 102, 150, 175n47 bearing witness: conceptions of, 3–4, 7–11, 14, 19, 27, 67–68, 89, 116, 149, 152; to

the dead, 15, 20, 138, 143–145; falsely, 30, 64–65, 98; to the future, 51, 54, 82–87, 99, 135, 141, 151, 162n46; through imagery, 122–124, 129; to nature, 44–47, 49–55, 105, 150; to oneself, 64, 67–71, 82; to other persons, 8, 20–21, 70, 84, 99–101, 164n26; to testimony, without overwriting, 17, 24, 28, 34, 41, 42–56, 59, 67, 89, 97–99, 101–102, 105, 109, 113–114, 117, 119, 169n15 Bennett, Jane, 152, 158n37 Benveniste, Émile, 18, 60, 65–67 Blanchot, Maurice, 114, 156n14 body, 3, 5, 12, 15, 18, 60, 68–71, 80–81, 84–85, 89, 103, 107–108, 117, 150, 161n25, 164n26; bodilessness, 115–116; of corpse, 121, 132; of law, 84; of slave, 60–62, 85, 91–93, 94, 117 breeze. See air Breitweiser, Mitchell, 14, 158n36 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 173n4 Brooks, Peter, 172n3 Brown, Bill, 123, 128–129, 132 Brown, Lee Rust, 29, 30, 32 Burns, Anthony, 59, 73, 77–79 Butler, Andrew, 74–75 Cadava, Eduardo, 16, 55, 63, 160n4, 161n39 Cameron, Sharon, 47–48, 159n3, 174n41, 175n49 Carlyle, Thomas, 40, 124 Caruth, Cathy, 6, 152–153

192 / index Cavell, Stanley, 25–26, 29, 160n4 Chai, Leon, 41 character: as expressed, 17, 29–34, 38, 44; of slaves, 75 citizenship, 18, 64–66, 69, 71–72, 76, 79–86 Civil Rights Act, 83–85 Civil Rights Cases, 58, 72, 82–85, 167n59 Civil War, 1–2, 20–21, 58, 81, 157n31, 159n52 close reading, 6, 55, 156n11 clothing, 132–133, 137–138, 141 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 41 common. See everyday confession, 1, 28, 43, 48, 121, 129, 161n25 Constitution, U.S., 11, 64, 72, 81–82, 164n30 corpses, 120–121, 125, 128–131, 139, 146 correspondence, 38–41, 52 Crane, Gregg, 62 Culler, Jonathan, 165n31 Cutting, Andrew, 175n49 Dana, Richard Henry, 59, 77–79 Darwin, Charles, 126 Davis, Theo, 174n31 Dawes, James, 9–10, 101 Dayan, Colin, 157n25, 165n38 death: in Benito Cereno, 12, 89–92, 103, 112, 116–117, 172n47; Henry James’s view of, 3, 7, 12, 19, 120–122, 125–126, 129–141, 143, 145–149, 173n4, 176n64; of law, 83–84; life after, 19, 21, 135–141, 143–147; as marked by silence, 94, 102–103; in the nineteenth century, 176n59; Waldo Emerson’s, 47–48, 54; wartime, 15, 20–21 Deleuze, Gilles, 37, 108, 172n3 depositions, 1, 10, 34, 90, 102–104, 117–119 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 26–27, 156n14 Descartes, René, 25 Dickinson, Emily, 155n7, 170n30 discrimination, 58, 81–82, 167n59 divinity, 13, 32, 38–42, 50, 96–97, 126–128, 152, 164n30 Douglass, Frederick: antislavery work, 57–58, 64–65, 69–70; and the body, 3, 5, 12, 18, 60–62, 68–71, 80–81, 84, 89; on citizenship, 18, 64–65, 69, 71–72, 76–86; and expression, 18, 60, 67–68, 70, 80–81, 84; and hope, 83–86, 168n7; literary approach to testimony, 10–11, 14–15, 69–70, 83–86; and representation, 59, 63, 65, 67, 69, 169n15; slave experience, 60–61, 151; and voice, 57–58, 63, 85–86, 164n26

Douglass, Frederick, works by: “Let All Soil Be Free Soil,” 69–70, 72, 74, 85; Life and Times, 15, 18, 57–58, 71–73, 80, 82–86; My Bondage and My Freedom, 57, 66–67; Narrative of the Life, 58, 60–61, 63, 65–66, 151; “The Nature of Slavery,” 164n26; “Slavery, Freedom, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act,” 64–65; “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” 10–11, 19, 165n39 Downes, Paul, 172n47 Dred Scott v. Sanford, 76 Dryden, Edgar, 5–6, 169n4, 169n14 Eggers, Dave, 172n50 Ellison, Julie, 48 Elmer, Jonathan, 119, 171n36 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: on evidence, 25–26, 30; on expression, 24, 29–30, 34, 38, 40, 42, 44–46, 50, 53; on nature, 17, 23–24, 31–38, 40–55, 88, 150; relation to Henry James, 123–125; on representation, 17, 24, 36–37, 39–56, 89, 160n4 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, works by: “American Civilization,” 157n31; “The American Scholar,” 12, 34–36, 54; “Circles,” 35–37, 123–124; “Experience,” 17, 24, 47–49, 51, 54–55, 86, 124, 151; “Fate,” 160n5; “Goethe,” 33–34; Nature, 17, 22–24, 38, 45–47, 49–50, 54–55; “Nature” (secondseries essay), 17, 24, 49–56; “New England Reformers,” 19; “The Poet,” 43–45, 47, 49, 124; “Self-Reliance,” 17, 24–28, 30–31; “Spiritual Laws,” 17, 24, 28–36, 38, 41, 162n49; “Swedenborg,” 38–41; “Uses of Great Men,” 142 encounter, testimonial, 7, 11–12, 14, 17, 21, 24, 28, 32, 34, 36–37, 42–43, 49–51, 53–55, 107, 115, 134, 150, 153, 158n46 Enlightenment, 13, 81 enunciation, 27, 41, 65–67 ethics, 5, 7, 27, 34, 37, 42–43, 95–98, 100, 151–152, 156n11 everyday (ordinary, common), 2, 12–14, 22–23, 34–37, 42, 46, 48–50, 96, 122–125, 138, 147–148, 150, 152–153 evidence, 1, 6, 8, 168n70; in the Anthony Burns case, 78–79; in the Fugitive Slave Act, 75–76; primary, in Emerson, 25–26, 30 expression: definition of, 29, 133; and quiet testimony, 150–153; and testimony,

index / 193 in Douglass, 18, 60, 67–68, 70, 80–81, 84; and testimony, in Emerson, 24, 29–30, 34, 38, 40, 42, 44–46, 50, 53; and testimony, in Henry James, 19, 122–123, 125–130, 133, 143 falsity, 30, 65, 82, 96–98, 103 Felman, Shoshana, 6, 152, 172n3 Feltenstein, Rosalie, 100 Fingerprints (Francis Galton), 80 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, 167n63 fossil, 45–46 Foucault, Michel, 13 free papers, 18, 72–73, 76 Freud, Sigmund, 6–7, 40, 47, 132, 161n25 frost, 16, 111, 114, 150. See also weather Fugitive Slave Act, 59, 69, 72–76, 99, 101, 166n49 fugitive, status of, 73–77 furniture, 35–37, 41, 123 future, 51, 54, 82–87, 135, 141, 151 Geneva Convention, 8 gesture, 23, 43, 78, 104, 121 Gilmore, Leigh, 4 Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson, 3, 8–9, 100, 157n25 Gross, Ariela, 75, 81, 165n33, 166n43 Guattari, Felix, 172n3 Guyer, Sara, 157n19 Harlan, John Marshall, 72, 167n59 Hartman, Saidiya, 169n17 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 155n7, 168n67 Hayden, Robert, 168n69 Heidegger, Martin, 129, 132 hieroglyphics, 107–108, 115, 161n38, 171n33 history, 4, 6, 10, 12, 15–16, 27, 50, 55, 60, 62, 71, 76, 80, 84, 92, 98–99, 104–105, 113–114, 117, 145, 150, 160n10, 161n39, 163n22, 168n70 Holocaust. See Shoah hope, 83–86, 122, 150, 168n71 Hospital Transports, 1–2, 8, 19–21, 155n3 Howe, Susan, 5 humans: as collective (humanity), 2, 15, 85, 96, 115, 119, 128, 148, 150, 152, 159n3; dead ones, 140, 143, 147; engagement with nonhumans, 23, 38, 40–42, 46, 51–52, 123–125; as vocal, 89, 93–94, 100–101, 116–117; as witnesses, 1, 12, 17, 28–33, 148 human rights movement, 3–4, 8–9, 18, 89, 100–101, 116–119, 151, 157n25, 172n47

identity: cases of mistaken, 75; as fluid, 62–63, 66; government regulation of individual, 59, 71–76, 80; legal determination of individual, 76–79, 90; racial, 18, 58–59, 71, 82; of self with writing, 63–70, 80–86; testimony without, 3, 16–17, 59–60, 63, 68, 80, 82, 149 inanimateness, 18, 33, 44–45, 55, 121, 123, 125, 128–131, 139, 144, 150 inscrutability. See significance, and inscrutability International Committee of the Red Cross, 8 irony, 11–12, 165n31 Irwin, John, 161n38, 171n33 James, Henry: on death, 3, 7, 12, 19, 120–122, 125–126, 129–141, 143, 145–149, 173n4, 176n64; and expression, 19, 122–123, 125–130, 133, 143; on quiet, 141, 145–146; relation to Emerson, 123–125; on representation, 19, 121–122, 125–129, 132–133, 142–144 James, Henry, works by: “The Altar of the Dead,” 18–19, 122, 130, 139–147; The American Scene, 18–19, 120–125, 128–131, 138, 143–144, 146–147, 151; “The Art of Fiction,” 125, 143; Complete Notebooks, 134–136; “The Friends of the Friends,” 19, 129–130, 134–141, 144; The Golden Bowl, 128–129, 132; “Is There a Life after Death,” 146–148; “The Jolly Corner,” 134; Roderick Hudson, 173n4; The Turn of the Screw, 175n58; The Wings of the Dove, 19–20, 122, 129–134, 140, 172n3, 175n57 James, Henry, Sr., 126–127, 176n75, 176n80 James, William, 10, 139, 146, 173n23 Jay, Gregory, 163n18 Jottkandt, Sigi, 142, 173n4 justice, 23, 85, 157n25, 164n30 Kamuf, Peggy, 119 Lacan, Jacques, 129, 132 Lambert, Gregg, 37, 42, 160n4 language: and death, 172n47; of Douglass’s Narrative, 63; enunciative, 67–69; evolution of, 45, 80, 82, 85; expressiveness of, 5, 18, 64–65, 69–71, 82, 84–85, 122; of nonhumans, 5, 15, 23, 30, 38–41, 84; poetic, 45–48, 53, 55,

194 / index 124; representational, 18, 24, 27, 45, 60; resistance of, 93–95, 98, 108, 115, 122, 150, 164n27 Latour, Bruno, 158n41 Laub, Dori, 6, 152 law, 17, 57, 63–64, 70, 80–85, 92, 157n25, 164n30; antebellum legal climate, 59–60, 72–77, 79, 166n47; court of, 1–2, 11, 14, 57, 78, 88, 90–92; legal status, 58, 72–75, 81; positive, 70, 164n30. See also testimony, juridical formulations Lee, Maurice S., 62, 92, 99, 170n30 Levi, Primo, 164n27, 168n70 Levinas, Emmanuel, 7, 42–45, 158n46 Levine, Robert S., 62 Leys, Ruth, 177n9 life: as actual, 91, 125, 153; after death, 19, 21, 135–141, 143–147; as ephemeral, 49, 55; as experience, 60–61, 66–67, 69–70, 85, 93, 153; as opposed to death, 19–21, 92, 109, 120–122, 127, 131; testimony as changing, 1, 17, 37; testimony without, 3, 16, 18–19, 120–122, 124, 134, 140, 148–149; as unlimited by death, 121–122, 124, 128–129, 134–140, 145–149; vitalism, 33; as writing, 28–30, 32–33, 45 literariness, 149–153 Locke, John, 13, 38 Loring, Edward G., 77, 79, 82 magic, 13, 22, 35, 151–152, 175n49 Mandel, Naomi, 177n9 Matson, John, 174n28 Matthiessen, F.O., 4, 161n38 McBride, Dwight, 63–64 meaning: as core of testimonial transmission, 15, 37, 42, 51, 55, 126, 150, 152, 158n41; and hieroglyphics, 107; post-structural, 142; pre-modern ideas of, 14; as property of world, 12–13, 19, 23, 34–43, 46, 51, 88, 122–126, 129, 133, 143–144, 147–148, 150–153. See also expression; significance Melville, Herman: on quietude, 87, 109–116; and signification, 93–95, 104–111, 113–114, 117, 119; on silence, 18, 88–89, 93–99, 101–107, 109; on truth, 80, 83, 88–91, 93, 97, 101, 107, 113–114, 119; on voice, 18, 88–99, 101, 109, 116–117, 172n47; on voicelessness, 18, 88–95, 99, 101, 105, 116–117

Melville, Herman, works by: “Agatha” letter, 171n41; “Bartleby,” 87, 107–108, 169n5, 171n37; Battle-Pieces, 113, 170n30; Benito Cereno, 10, 12, 14, 18, 87–94, 98–114, 116–119, 148, 151, 153; Billy Budd, 87, 169n5, 170n29, 171n42, 172n48; “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 105; Mardi, 88; Moby-Dick, 14, 18–19, 87, 94–95, 97–98, 107–111, 115–116, 148; Pierre, 18, 87, 95–98, 107, 169n4, 171n37 memory, 51, 66, 94, 102, 134, 140, 146, 168n70 Miller, Hugh, 1–2 Miller, J. Hillis, 125–128, 156n15, 160n9 Miller, Perry, 5 Mills, Charles, 81–82, 86 modernism, 14, 121, 129, 146 modernity, 13–14, 123, 152 mourning, 132–133, 137–138, 141, 144 muteness, 1, 87–88, 98, 101–105, 108–109, 116, 119, 123, 152, 164n26, 169n13 mysticism, 13, 23, 36–40, 97, 107, 121, 123–124, 144–145, 147, 151 narrative, 1–2, 4, 8, 13, 27–28, 33, 49, 61–65, 87, 90, 102, 104, 109, 117–118, 132, 149, 172n3, 172n47 nature: bearing witness to, 44–47, 49–55, 105, 150; as divine, 38–40, 126–127; as force, 23, 87, 115, 157n31; laws of, 31–34, 88, 96; objects of, 5, 11, 17, 23–24, 30–34, 38, 41, 46–47, 51–56, 149, 160n17; as testimonial, 7, 17, 22–24, 30, 32–37, 40–42, 149, 157n25 objects, 7, 17, 23–24, 33, 35–42, 44, 47, 51, 53–54, 56, 93–94, 112, 115–116, 123–124, 128–129, 132, 142, 147, 151, 158n41 obligation, to bear witness, 18, 44, 57, 85, 128 occult. See supernatural ocean. See sea Olmsted, Frederick, 20–21, 159n59 ordinary. See everyday otherness (alterity), 42–43, 53, 59, 94–96, 98 Packer, Barbara, 38, 40, 51, 158n46 passivity, 42–43 Pease, Donald, 159n1, 160n4, 161n44 Peretz, Eyal, 95, 97–98, 157n18 Peterson, Carla, 167n63

index / 195 photography, 8, 61, 73, 139, 155n3, 159n50, 162n49, 167n60, 175n47, 176n59 politics, 1, 3–4, 6, 99–101, 156n9, 157n25, 161n39, 172n47, 173n10; identity politics, 82; political writing, 57, 59–60, 64–65, 69–70, 86 postmodernity, 14 present, 16, 39, 48, 51, 54, 61, 66, 84, 150 primary testimony. See testimony, as performative proof, 23, 25–26, 30, 76 psychoanalysis, 6–7, 40, 47, 152–153, 161n25. See also Freud, Sigmund Puritanism, 151 quiet: as disquieting, 118–119; in Henry James, 141, 145–146; in Hospital Transports, 20–21; as kind of testimony, 1–2, 4, 14–16, 19, 55–56, 109–114, 149–153; Melville’s use of, 87, 109–116; nineteenth-century definition of, 19–20, 159n52; relation to muteness, 102, 109; relation to silence, 93, 114 quietude. See quiet, Melville’s use of race, 5, 18, 58–60, 62, 65, 69–73, 75, 81–83, 167n59 Rantoul, Robert, 166n47 reception, 11, 41, 123–124, 151 Reconstruction, 58 Reed, Sampson, 38–40 Reinhard, Kenneth, 132–133 representation: in Douglass, 59, 63, 65, 67, 69, 169n15; in Emerson, 17, 24, 36–37, 39–56, 89, 160n4; in Henry James, 19, 121–122, 125–129, 132–133, 142–144; in Swedenborg, 39, 126–129; in testimony, 3, 6–7, 9, 27, 152; in thought, 37, 42, 46, 52, 160n4; testimony without, 3, 16–17, 24, 37, 42–44, 47–49, 55, 59, 149 reserve, 20, 102–103 Richardson, Joan, 173n23 Ricoeur, Paul, 9–11 Rivkin, Julie, 175n46 rocks. See stones romanticism: British, 37, 41, 157n19; German, 37, 40 Rowe, John Carlos, 156n9 Schaffer, Kay, 8 Schmidt, Leigh Eric, 13–14

sea (ocean), 87–88, 94, 102–103, 110–116, 118, 169n13 Shoah (Holocaust), 3, 4, 6, 15, 100, 157n19, 163n22, 164n27 significance: of first person, 66–69; and inscrutability, 104–111, 113–114, 117, 119; in Levinas, 43, 158n46; nonsemiological models of, 126–127, 129– 130, 137, 142, 145; of ordinary objects, 36, 40, 45, 129; outside of language, 12–13, 33, 151; post-structural, 132–133, 142–143, 145; process of discerning, 12–13, 17, 37, 51, 55, 94–95, 97, 104–109, 113–114, 151, 164n27; of race, 82; and silence, 93–95, 99. See also meaning silence, 5, 7, 15, 18, 88–89, 93–99, 101–107, 109, 114, 164n27, 170n29, 171n42; of bodies or beings, 67, 69, 82, 84, 87–88, 91–93, 99, 102–103, 150, 164n26, 164n27; and human rights, 100–101; as modern, 13–14; relation to stuttering and stammering, 5, 170n32; silent entities (also apparently silent entities), 3, 18, 44, 55–56, 67, 85, 87–88, 97–98, 103–104, 112, 115, 169n15 skepticism, 151–152 Slaughter, Joseph, 119 slavery: in Benito Cereno, 88–91, 93, 99–101, 113, 117–119; as condition, 10–11, 168n70; demands on testimony, 59–71, 161n44; Douglass’s experience, 60–61, 151; Douglass’s work to abolish, 57–58, 64–65, 69–70; government regulation of, 72–77, 79–80; institution of, 58; legacy of, 81–82; slave trade, 99, 113. See also Burns, Anthony; Civil Rights Cases; Fugitive Slave Act sleep, 29–30 Smith, Sidonie, 8 speech: attributed to nonhumans, 33, 40–41, 44, 47, 114, 123, 125–126, 148–149; divine, 13, 41; as enunciative, 60, 65–67, 69, 82; as exclusively human, 88, 94–98, 100, 115; first-person, 3, 6–7, 9, 11, 15, 24–30, 47–49, 60–65, 68–69; as genre, 17, 57; non-fluid, 5, 170n32; as opposed to silence, 93–95, 98–99, 102; as testimonial requirement, 2–3, 6–7, 84, 150, 152, 163n22 speech act theory. See testimony, as performative speechlessness, 84, 87–88, 93–95, 98–99, 115

196 / index spiritualism, 157n25, 176n59 Stauffer, John, 62, 64 stones (rocks), 1–2, 5, 11, 32–33, 35–36, 39–40, 42, 45, 97, 102–103, 107–108, 115, 120, 124, 150, 160n10, 169n14; Rosetta, 161n38; sermons in, 83, 168n67; stone-silence, 93–99, 102–103, 107, 115, 169n13 subjectivity, 4–7, 22, 43, 62–64, 76, 117, 124, 127, 139, 158n46, 160n17, 163n22; of the dead, 141; as opposed to objectivity, 9–10, 77 Sundquist, Eric, 99, 163n21 supernatural (occult), 12, 22–23, 31, 46, 140, 151, 157n25 superstition, 123, 151 Supreme Court, 72, 85, 167n59 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 7, 37–41, 121, 126–129, 133, 143 Szendy, Peter, 170n32 taciturnity, 93–94, 96, 99, 102–103, 107 Temple, Minny, 139, 146 testimonio, 158n49 testimony: as constative, 26–27, 34, 37, 43–49, 55; of the dead, 19, 93, 121, 129–130, 134, 138, 148; definitions of, 1–3, 6–7, 9–10; and genre, 17, 57, 60, 116–119; historical frameworks, 6, 15–16; of humans, 1, 8, 12, 17, 23–33, 63, 89, 100–101, 116–117, 140, 148, 161n25, 172n47; and irony, 165n31; juridical formulations, 10–11, 14, 57, 70, 79–80, 90 (see also law); as literary, 9–16, 44–56, 67–70, 83–86, 105, 114–116, 123–126, 132–133, 147–148, 152–153, 155n7; loud, 1–4, 12, 15, 31, 88, 93, 95, 117–118, 160n10, 168n70, 172n50; of nonhumans, 1, 5, 11–12, 17–18, 24, 30–34, 36, 38, 41, 43–45, 47, 51–56, 89, 101, 116–117, 122–126, 128, 149–150, 153, 158n41; as performative, 26–27, 37, 43, 45, 47, 55, 160n9; and the Shoah, 3, 6, 15; theoretical frameworks, 6–7, 18–19, 42–43, 65–69, 80–82, 84–85, 88–89, 98, 109, 149–152, 156n14, 157n19, 163n22, 172n3. See also bearing witness Thomas, Brook, 101 Thoreau, Henry David, works by: “Slavery in Massachusetts,” 166n48; Walden, 162n51; A Week, 83; “Wild Apples,” 155n7 thought, nineteenth-century American, 13, 38, 126; non-representational, 37

Todorov, Tzvetan, 172n3 torture, 8–9, 88, 170n21 trauma, 6–7, 89, 152, 161n44. See also unspeakability trees, 5, 11–12, 46, 50, 52–56, 83, 87–88, 150, 168n68 truth: in Agamben, 60, 65, 69; as animating the world, 32–33, 38–39, 49, 55, 127; in Benito Cereno, 80, 83, 88–91, 93, 97, 101, 107, 113–114, 119; comparison of viewpoints on, 148, 150, 152; as testimony’s purpose, 1–7, 9–15, 17–19 Twain, Mark, 174n28; Pudd’nhead Wilson, 80 Underwood, Joseph, 75 United States, 1, 4, 6, 8, 10–11, 13, 58, 60, 74, 81, 83–86, 122, 156n11, 159n52, 162n46, 168n70, 168n71, 170n21 United States Sanitary Commission, 8, 157n20, 159n59 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 8 unspeakability, 19, 91, 97, 149, 152, 164n27 voice: in Benito Cereno, 18, 88–99, 101, 109, 116–117, 172n47; of the dead, 145; Douglass’s, 57–58, 63, 85–86, 164n26; of the law, 79–80; testimonial, 1–5, 38, 40, 83; testimony without, 3, 16, 18, 89, 93, 98, 109, 113–114, 116; for the voiceless, 67, 84–85, 100–101 voicelessness: in Benito Cereno, 18, 88–95, 99, 101, 105, 116–117; as condition, 4, 84–94; critical readings of, 92, 99–101; ethics of, 95–98; and human rights, 89, 100–101, 172n47; stammering, 170n32 vegetables, 5, 11–15, 19, 22–24, 27, 30, 36, 38–42, 46, 60, 89, 151, 162n6 violence, 6, 90, 92, 98, 110, 113, 118, 133, 157n25, 164n30, 166n48 von Frank, Albert, 31–32, 166n48 Wald, Priscilla, 82, 162n5 Warminski, Andrzej, 142, 145 Warren, Kenneth, 156n11, 164n26 weather, 49–50, 109–116 whiteness, 58, 64, 81, 84, 91, 94–96, 98, 145, 165n33 Whitman, Walt, 124 Wieviorka, Annette, 15–16 wind. See air Winters, Yvor, 100, 172n44 Winthrop, John, 73–75

index / 197 witness, 1, 9–13, 15, 44, 46, 48, 57–59, 68, 71, 77–78, 80, 88, 95, 149; nature as, to human events, 88, 157n25. See also bearing witness writing: anonymous, 2, 20–21; as identificatory, 59–60, 63, 72–73, 75–76; illegible, 107–108; as nonidentificatory, 64, 66–68, 84–86,

150; as physical act, 61; as produced by nonhumans, 17, 33–34, 38, 42; as requirement for testimony, 3, 25; responsive to testimony, 17, 24, 41–51, 53, 55, 95, 114, 123–124, 126–127, 151; as unintentional, 28–30, 32–33 Zagarell, Sandra, 99