B O R I S V E J D O V S K Y Ethics and Topos in American Literature Ideas of Order Ideas of Order Boris Vejdovsky Ideas of Order Ethics and Topos in American Literature Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über <http: / / dnb.d-nb.de> abrufbar. Umschlagabbildung: ©Pollock-Krasner Foundation/ 2009, ProLitteris, Zurich. Publiziert mit Unterstützung des Schweizerischen Nationalfonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung und der Fondation du 450 e Anniversaire de l'Université de Lausanne. © 2009 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Gedruckt auf säurefreiem und alterungsbeständigem Papier. Internet: http: / / www.francke.de E-Mail: info@francke.de Druck und Bindung: Laupp & Göbel, Nehren Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-7720-8186-6 To you, Kim and Naomi. May you grow up and live in a world where reading has not stopped. This is the time that I have been both looking for and fearing for all the years that I spent imagining, reading, and writing this book. This is the time when I turn round and look at something that does not belong to me anymore—that is, that belongs to me even less than it ever did. “L’écriture est voleuse,” Jacques Derrida writes in the post-preface to La dissémination, and I, by stealing this aphorism from him, con-firm and co-sign it. Like prefaces, acknowledgements are always written last and yet they are always read first. By creating a temporal and logical distortion of the expected teleology of the book, these estranged portions of the text (do they really belong to it? ) seem to remind the reader that the only time that exists in life is the always already by-gone now of reading. Now, then, I would like to thank the numerous persons who invested their time, energy, and confidence in me so that this can be read. These generous individuals include Peter Halter, J. Hillis Miller, Ronald Schleifer, Beverly Maeder, John Blair, Steven Mailloux, Wolfgang Iser, Michael Clark, Richard Waswo, Elizabeth Kaspar, Lawrence Buell and, il miglior fabbro, Roelof Overmeer. And there have been all those who helped with a smile, a nice word or their sense of humor and who I recall today—and all those who I now scandalously forget; may they all forgive me my shortcomings and my inconsequence. It is also my honor to express my gratitude to the Fondation du 450 e Anniversaire de l’Université de Lausanne, the Fond National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique and the Société Académique Vaudoise, which all generously supported the publication of this book. Their support gave me a better sense of belonging to the scholarly community of the place where I live and work, and that was, in itself, very much to be prized. My family was my everyday support, my conduct of life, and the reflection of everything I desired. Marianne, Kim, Naomi, Rade, et les autres, this happened because of you, for you, thanks to you. Lausanne, July 2009 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IDEAS OF ORDER IDEAS OF ORDER TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface THE LINE AND THE LAW .......................................................................... 3 Chapter 1 INSCRIBING Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World ..................................... 21 Chapter 2 UTOPIA & OXIDIA Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods ................................... 65 Chapter 3 OUR FABULOUS PLACE Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man ........................................................ 103 Chapter 4 DESCRIPTION Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” .................................... 147 Chapter 5 THE TOPOGRAPHY OF INTERPRETATION J. Hillis Miller’s Versions of Pygmalion ........................................................... 187 Postscript PENELOPE’S FABRIC .................................................................................... 235 Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 245 PREFACE THE LINE AND THE LAW “… Die abschließenden Entscheidungen des Gerichts werden nicht veröffentlicht, sie sind nicht einmal den Richtern zugänglich, infolgedessen haben sich über alte Gerichtsfälle nur Legenden erhalten. Diese enthalten allerdings sogar in der Mehrzahl wirkliche Freisprechungen, man kann sie glauben, nachweisbar sind sie aber nicht. Trotzdem muß man sie nicht ganz vernachlässigen, eine gewisse Wahrheit enthalten sie wohl gewiß, auch sind sie sehr schön, ich selbst habe einige Bilder gemalt, die solche Legenden zum Inhalt haben.” “Bloße Legenden ändern meine Meinung nicht,” sagte K., “man kann sich wohl auch vor Gericht auf diese Legenden nicht berufen? ” Der Maler lachte. “Nein, das kann man nicht«, sagte er. »Dann ist es nutzlos, darüber zu reden,” sagte K. […] Sehen wir also von der wirklichen Freisprechung ab, Sie erwähnten aber noch zwei andere Möglichkeiten.” “Die scheinbare Freisprechung und die Verschleppung. Um die allein kann es sich handeln,” sagte der Maler. 1 —Franz Kafka, Der Prozess It is possible that to seem—is to be, As the sun is something seeming and it is. —Wallace Stevens, “Description Without Place” This book will not attempt to grow like a tree with roots planted in “early American literature” and with upper limbs in post-modern criticism. The texts presented here should be more like leaves of grass, linked by their subterranean rhizomes: they are all linked, yet each is independent and non-subordinated to any other. They are all equally capable of propagating that which gave them birth, but they are related to no definable Ur-grass. 1 “ … The final decisions of the Court are never recorded, even the judges can’t get hold of them, consequently we have only legendary accounts of ancient cases. These legends certainly provide instances of acquittal; actually the majority of them are about acquittals, they can be believed, but they can’t be proved. All the same, they shouldn’t be entirely left out of account, they must have an element of truth in them, and besides they are very beautiful. I myself have painted several pictures founded on such legends.” “Mere legends cannot alter my opinion,” said K., “and I fancy that one cannot appeal to such legends before the Court? ” The painter laughed. “No, one can’t do that,” he said. “Then there’s no use talking about them,” said K. […] “Let us leave definite acquittal out of account, then; you mentioned two other possibilities as well.” “Ostensible acquittal and postponement. These are the only possibilities,” said the painter. (The Trial 193-194) 4 Preface Like a tree, grass has roots, but unlike the limbs of a tree, the blades of grass are not related to one another vertically. While they are obviously allied and share a common history, they are not ordered hierarchically. “Such a system may be called rhizome,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “[as] a subterranean stem, a rhizome is absolutely different from roots and radicles. […] [A]ny point of a rhizome can be connected to any other and ought to be. This is very different from the tree model or the root which determines a starting point and an ensuing order” (Mille Plateaux; my translation 12). For the present book, I am very much attached to this principle that Deleuze and Guattari call “of connection or of heterogeneity.” One of the aims of this book is to question principles of dichotomy and binary opposition, and work in an interpretative mode in which “semiotic links of all nature are connected with multifarious encoding modes—biological, political, economic, etc.—involving not only different systems of signs, but also a different ontological status for each of these things” (Mille Plateaux 13; my translation). 2 While it is always possible to find thematic and ideological common points among the texts presented here, it would certainly be a mistake to consider The Wonders of the Invisible World, Walden, The Confidence Man, “The Man with the Blue Guitar” and Versions of Pygmalion, as branches that would have grown out of a common trunk. It would be an even worse mistake to think that they are the direct consequence of one another. My reading of these texts is not detached from history, but it does not aim to reflect or represent it. None of the texts presented here was chosen as a representative of the economic or political events that were taking place in America at the time when it was written. Here, texts will not be looked at as the product of their times, but as having productive effects in history. Such an approach cannot be thematic; I am not interested in the anxiety of influence these texts may have produced in their authors or their readers. It would be very idle and naive to think that texts have productive effects because readers do what the books “tell” them to do. Texts crystallize acts of reading: they bear witness to these acts and to the fact that their authors and readers are in language. They are the trace acts of reading left in history. They are also the trace of the acts of reading that codetermined history— that is, the writing of our history. Thus, this book creates its own order, draws its own lines of force, but neither these lines nor the order is the result of a descending genealogical line that would go from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. So, Ideas of Order is about textuality and reading. I want to examine how the acts of reading—and writing—considered here have contributed to shaping what I call the “American topos,” and that others may prefer to 2 My idea of order for this book owes much to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s grass metaphor, but I also like the inevitability of its Whitmanian echo. The Line and the Law 5 call “things as they are,” or “reality” in America. The “New World”— called thus with a binary opposition in which “old” and “new” have antithetical and complementary values—became “America,” but it did not exist as “America” before it was colonized by Western literacy at the end of the fifteenth century. “America” as we know it today is the result in its toponymy, its topography, its political organization, or social struggles of its being shaped by literacy, in other words, by acts of writing and reading. As it was moving west, Western literacy eradicated the indigenous cultures. The “Indians” could have invented techniques to fight against horses and fire weapons; they could have resisted in impregnable mountains; they could have developed immune defenses against venereal diseases and small pox. They could have, and to some extent they did. Not all the native inhabitants of the Americas were slaughtered, but none of them survived culturally the arrival of literacy. All “Native Americans” 3 are now encompassed by, and read into, the civilization of the written line, and they are submitted to its law. When it imposed itself on the new continent, European textuality imposed its myths of origins. The “New World” started to generate its own mythology linked to the new territories that had recently been discovered. Western literacy and the very particular mode of interpretation that was attached to it colonized a vast portion of the planet where it had been totally unknown before. These acts of reading and writing had been shaping the European topos for centuries before landing on the shores of the New World, and America became for a while the last frontier of Western metaphysics and literacy. That frontier has since then been pushed much farther as Western literacy kept acquiring new territories, to the point where it is becoming global today—it is now looping back with a vengeance to where it first started. The tree needed a seed, roots, and a trunk that would rise towards the sky: the colonizing project needed a teleology, and textuality readily provided one. The New World was seen—that is, not really seen, but interpreted, read—as a tabula rasa. 4 For the Europeans, nothing existed before 3 I am using the designation “Native Americans” because it is the one currently accepted and used instead of “Indians” which was, of course, absurd. (By whom, for whom and in the name of what is the current designation accepted? These are questions that would call for much more questioning then can be done here.) The current term is, however, no less absurd then the previous one: how could anyone be a native of a land that does not exist, or whose existence is posterior to one’s birth. What is at stake in the present case is not simply the political appurtenance of a (group of) civilization(s) to one state or another, but also their belonging to a completely different reality. There is no pre-textual “America,” so nobody can be said to an “American” without being a native of textuality. 4 The new territories were “emptied” psychologically by the colonizers well before they did so physically. From Columbus’s first journals to the writings about U.S. 6 Preface their arrival, that is before the arrival of the civilization of the line. On the other hand, textuality tended to impose this myth of origins on itself. Here again it could be very tempting to make America appear out of the blue, and declare that it is literacy that endows it with existence. Unacceptable as it may seem today, this myth is one of the causes of the invention of the American topos. * * * Western literacy crystallizes the separation between the knower and the known. By suggesting that there is such a thing as an ego different from the body or the corpse, literacy poses the model of a world where the objects seen and perceived can be different from what they seem to be. The world can no longer be memorized as it is; it calls for an interpretation, no longer in terms of what it is but in terms of what it means. Written words are not simply signs that represent an oral production of meaning; written words always present themselves for themselves. They do not represent anybody or anything: they are what they appear to be, whatever additional (allegorical) signification they may carry from time to time notwithstanding. The written line is the only reality of the text we have access to, and it is the crystallized metaphor of reality at large and of the way we have access to it. Thus, reading and writing are necessarily metaphorical activities that imply transport from one space into another; in that sense too the book is (always) already the image of the world. The texts I consider here are linked to the problematic of making sense of the world and of shaping the topos in which we live accordingly. Textuality structures and polices the world through acts of reading: the world is perhaps what we make of it, but it is certainly that which we read it into. I want to suggest that the laws ordering our topos and delimiting what is “real” and what is not are the visible result of acts of “reading” modeled on the objectified trope of text-reading. One can say that reading precedes writing, inasmuch as signs have always existed, and all living creatures, human, or animal, have always interpreted entities belonging to their world, and composed the reality of their topos according to them. It is the written line that imposes on us our line of conduct, and because these acts of reading and writing have productive effects in the world and affect the lives of all individuals, they need to be heeded from an ethical point of view. The five texts of this book are the outcome of five different ways of “Indian Wars,” one can see how metaphors are stronger than physical reality and effectively proceed to turning the place into an empty space that can be disposed of. Columbus’s journal shows for instance that while he sees “Indians innumerable,” he completely suppresses their presence and their importance. The Line and the Law 7 reading the American topos; they describe an American topography, even when, as in The Confidence Man, physical topography is only a set for a metaphorical act of reading, or when, in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” the description is without place. I want to suggest that these texts are all distinctly “American,” insofar as they are the traces of acts of reading of the American topos they contributed to organize and rule. When Western literacy arrived in the New World, it imposed there an interpretative mode in which signs had a completely new value because they were governed by a law which was immanent to the semiotic system that encompassed them. In what would become “America,” textuality was confirmed in its ruling function by Protestant semiotics derived from the Scriptures. With the first North-American Colonies, the (Biblical) text became the cornerstone of interpretation in the New World. While it would be wrong to say that the American topos was modeled on a Biblical pattern—even if such may have been the original intention of the first Puritan colonists—, it was shaped by the law of textual interpretation which imposes on the reader the necessity to read and to read right. The Puritans identified this law as the law of God, and situated its presence in the Word of the Scriptures. By doing so, the Puritans were only ascribing a name to a law that exists in all texts and turns them all into legislative texts. The Puritans 5 arrived in a new world they did not know, and turned it into a world of textual signs that demanded to be read. They imported to the American continent a mode of interpretation based on Calvinistic theses which had at their center the principle of representation. 6 For the Puritans, signs were ontologically connected to God; they interpreted the American continent with the discovery that “the sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth. The age of the sign is essentially theological. Perhaps it will never end. Its historical closure is, however, outlined” (Derrida, Grammatology 14). The colonization of the New World by textuality brought it into the age of textual semiology. The Puritans did not simply import signs into their new world; what they brought along was a semiology governed by the law of the text. The indigenous populations of Amer- 5 The “Puritan Party” was founded in England in 1572 by Cartwright, Field and Wilcox. They reacted to what they considered to be a degeneration of faith and religious practice; they addressed their Admonition to the Parliament to make things change. Perry Miller notes that “the word ‘Puritan’ was as problematic and confusing then as it is today.” In the beginning it was used to mock those that criticized the liturgy and the vestments of the Church. Later, “Puritans” started calling themselves by that word, emphasizing the positive connotation of purity of faith and religious practice. See Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 21-24. 6 Richard Waswo shows very clearly how Calvin reinterprets St Augustine to arrive at his theses relative to the representative but also the performative power of words. See Language and Meaning in the Renaissance, 207-284. 8 Preface ica had their own semiotic systems, but these could not depend on he same interpretative mode as that of the newcomers. It was not the signs that were new and difficult to apprehend for them, but rather the invisible law that governed them. It is probably correct to say that the era of the sign is essentially theological, inasmuch as textual semiology, such as our Western world knows it, depends for its efficacy and even its existence on the exis ence of a superior law that guarantees it and stands behind it. What the law must guarantee is not so much any particular meaning of any particular sign, but rather the capacity of the sign to mean: it is the status of the sign qua sign which is always endangered and which must be defended by and in the name of the law. On the other hand, there is a permanent risk that the law that sustains the semiotic system should become totally unavailable if its signs became indecipherable. In such a case, the whole topos policed and organized by signs could dissolve and be turned into a destructive chaos. In the relationship between the sign and the law, it is the sign which is the weak link but also the only guarantee for the existence of the law. When a civilization experiences a crisis in its values, it is not so much those values governed by the law which are at stake, as the signs of the law. When the Reformation instituted the lines of the Scriptures as the visible sign of the authority of God, it established a link between the law and the line, and, maybe, outlined its historical closure. Protestant semiology crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower, the Arbella, and on many successive ships. The seeds of the semiology issued from the Reformation developed and grew; they subdued the American continent where no cultural indigenous plant could compete with them. This competitive and biological balance is reminiscent of the economic pattern connected from the start to the way the Reformers determined the value of signs. In my reading of Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World, I examine this pattern in which words are accounted for like coins within an economic system, and where their value is a function of the monetary and economic equilibrium of that system. Indeed, Mather’s text presents us with a semiotic economy that had to be put to work in the strange new place where it had landed. Economic metaphors and even whole economic parables are frequent in the Bible, just as in everyday language there are innumerable tropes related to “work,” “production,” “gain,” “loss,” “capital,” and so forth. Accordingly, it is not surprising that theologians, and the Reformers in particular, should resort to such metaphors. At the time of the Reformation the economic trope governing the use of words had already materialized in Europe in rather unexpected ways. Nicholas Copernicus (Martin Luther’s contemporary) was pondering about the loss of the intrinsic value of coins due to their representative value. 7 On the market place, the metaphor of the 7 See Nicholas Copernicus, “Writings on Money.” t The Line and the Law 9 signifier that can become more important than the signified had already materialized. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault proposes that the great cause for the devaluation of minted money was the arrival in the European economy of the gold and silver from the New World: “This is the explanation of the Spanish disaster: its mining possessions had, in fact, increased the nation’s coinage—and, consequently, prices—to a massive degree, without giving industry, agriculture, and population the time, between cause and effect, to develop proportionately” (188). One may be tempted to see a sort of poetic justice in the fact that conquering Spain should be ruined by its very conquests and domineering conduct, but what is particularly striking here, is that, after developing in the New World, a regime of signs came back, already at the time of the Reformation, to modify and alter the European topos. Centuries before the phrase was coined, the empire was writing back, as it were. The striking analogy established between signs and currency by such thinkers as Calvin, Luther, or Copernicus, indicates the importance the theory of representation had in the semiotic system they were elaborating. 8 It was a system in which signs had a value, that is the power to signify, which was directly determined by desire and availability. Signs, like coins, were valuable only if they represented the law, i.e. if they could be read as standing for the power and the law that instituted them in the first place as signs. Thus, the economic trope that Calvin had read in the Scriptures was crystallizing at the time on the European market place. The economic world was ruled by the theory of representation that ensued from the centrality of the representative function of God’s Word in the Bible; similarly, “money becomes real wealth only to exactly the same degree to which it fulfills its representative function” (Foucault, Order 178). Signs could only be powerful as a function of their representative capacity. But in this configuration, the sign could no longer mean alone: it needed a reader to endow it with its representational capacity. The sign became powerful; but that power was a double-edged sword because it threatened to replace the values it stood for and it was threatened by its own multiplication and obliteration which could make it unreadable. Thus, the value of signs depended on the desire they could rouse and on their 8 Richard Waswo traces the economic metaphor down to Quintillian and examines its development in the writings of Lorenzo Valla. He writes: “Valla proposed the first explicit alternative to the dominant matrix of Western assumptions about language and its relation to meaning, the world and its users, since Plato’s victory over the Sophists.” This questioning of the way in which language means is at the heart of the Reformation, and Valla’s contribution to the controversy was very significant, as Waswo shows when he underscores “Luther’s admiration of [Valla’s] theology and the general adventitious utility of parts of his work for Protestantism; the textual discipleship of Erasmus; and the rapid expansion of the domain of rhetoric under the dual aegis of Cicero and Quintillian” (110-111). 10 Preface being identifiable as signs. 9 The functioning value of signs and of words in particular was being defined while the crises that the sign would have to overcome were becoming more tangible. In Copernicus’ “Writings on Money,” we can read an anticipation of the problems the representational system would encounter: assessment of validity, loss of confidence in the semiotic system, end of the readability of the sign, and loss of the value of the sign qua sign. These are all effects that Cotton Mather would have to confront a century later and that he described in The Wonders of the Invisible World where he tries to interpret the signs of the simultaneous presence of Christ and of the devil in the colonies. In the sixteenth century, the Reformation appropriated the economic trope of currency and sustained it with the absolute authority of the Bible. The Scriptures became the gold and the silver that were to guarantee the value of the Word, and through an effect of synecdoche, of all words. The Reformation endowed words with an extraordinary power by turning them into self-sufficient and performative signs, while making them the image of an unimaginable transcendental force. At the same time, they exposed them to the risk of being devalued, of “seeing [their] coinage debased […] and their fatherland decline” (Copernicus 191). 9 Copernicus’s reflections on the subject and his applying the metaphor to the mechanism of capitalist exchange provide a wonderful illustration of the question. These are some examples: Money can lose its value also through excessive abundance, if so much silver is coined as to heighten people’s desire for silver bullion. For in this way the coinage’s market value vanishes when it cannot buy as much silver as the money itself contains, and then I find greater advantage in destroying the coin by melting the silver. The solution is to mint no more coinage until it recovers its par value. […] The value of a coin deteriorates also by itself as the coin is worn down through long use. Only for this reason should it be renewed or replaced. (179) […] But maybe someone will argue that cheap money is more convenient for human needs, forsooth, by alleviating the poverty of people, lowering the price of food and facilitating the supply of all the other necessities of human life […] But they will have regard for the common good, they will surely be unable to deny that sound money benefits not only the state but also themselves and every class of people, whereas debased coinage is harmful. […] For we see that those countries flourish the most which have sound money, whereas those which use inferior coinage decline and fall. […] [W]here cheap money prevails, through listlessness, lethargy, and slothful idleness the development of the fine arts as well as of the intellect is neglected, and the plentifulness of all goods is also a thing of the past. (191) What Copernicus calls “slothful idleness” is a very important and preoccupying subject for Cotton Mather and the other Puritan preachers in America. The so-called Puritan work ethics is linked to the fact that the value of things—of words, of coins, of any object—depends on the “amount” of work it represents. If words should become “cheap,” the whole social and political system that rests on the theory of representation could collapse. The Line and the Law 11 Well before the law of textuality crossed the ocean, Reformers such as Cambridge scholar William Whitaker (1547-95) had established that the Law of God was embodied in the “Sacred Page”: Scripture hath for author God himself; from whom it first proceeded and came forth. Therefore, the authority of Scripture may be proved from the author himself, since the authority of God shines forth in it. 10 Although the American Puritans of Cotton Mather’s generation may have suspected that the lines of the Bible were only “the human and laborious, finite and artificial inscription,” and that they were very different from “natural, eternal, and universal writing” (Derrida, Grammatology 15), they also realized that they had to save the representative status of these lines if they wanted to save the law—the law of God—which sustained these lines. In that respect, their endeavor did not differ from that of the early European Reformers who sensed that what they considered as the divine law was in danger of being superseded by the institutionalizing of Catholic hermeneutics. 11 The text of the Scriptures had to be saved in order to save God Himself and save the civilization of the New Jerusalem based on textual interpretation. Saving the text was the only way of saving the civilization that was based on it. An act of reading is an appeal to the law. Readers manifest their belief in a law that guarantees that the signs they are decoding and encoding have some sort of significance. If they were to lose their faith in the fact that signs can mean, they deny the existence of the law that makes that meaning possible. It is one of my starting assumptions, then, that there is an ethical demand put on me every time I read. I can change the meaning of a sign, I can even modify the laws that organize the signs within a semiotic system, but I cannot get rid of the law that institutes the metaphorical transfer of the law into the sign. When the sign is in danger, the responsible reader has to defend it in the name of the law. It is an ethical act because it aims at supporting, or possibly changing for the better, the order of the topos where this act of reading takes place. 12 10 William Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scriptures (ed. W. Fitzgerald, Cambridge, 1849) 289. In G. R. Evans, The Language and Logic of the Bible: the Road to Reformation 9. 11 “William Tyndale describes the Church’s leaders as having engaged in a conspiracy. ‘They have feigned false books and put them forth. […] Even so would they have destroyed it also, if they could, rather than the people should have come to a right understanding of it[.] […] For as they have destroyed the right sense of it with their leaven; and as they destroy daily the true preachers of it[,] […] even so would they rather destroy it also, could they bring it about, rather than that we should some day live by the true understanding of it.’” William Tyndale, Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, ed. H. Walter (Cambridge, 1850), quoted in Evans (27). 12 This does not mean that acts of reading are necessarily conservative and aim at preserving the status quo of an existing order. Terry Eagleton, who is very preoccupied by the socio-political impact of literary studies and reading in general, claims in 12 Preface * * * An act of writing is an inscription of a line. A reader may thus follow the hyperbolical line of my writing and reading as it cleaves its way through the space of the texts considered here, thereby creating the space of the book. A line is a very elusive and remarkably immaterial entity. It is that which divides, severs, and cuts; but at the same time it constitutes the merging and the coming together of two realms that could not touch each other without the cleaver that joins them. A river and its tributary are divided by such a line, as are also the yin and the yang. They are absolutely different from one another, and they are deprived of sense and existence without the line that defines the independence of their heterogeneous natures but also their dependence on each other and their indispensable complementing each other. The line traces an imaginary border: it is imaginary because of its elusiveness and its shiftiness, and because its existence cannot be ascribed either to an ontological state that would make it be, or to a theoretical state that would allow it not to be. Jacques Derrida comes rather close to a non-definition of the border(line) when he writes: “It is always being crossed, erased and retraced by being erased. I dare not to say of this border that it is ‘ideal,’ ‘regulating’ or ‘theoretical’[.] […] However ‘il y en a,’ ‘there is something of it,’ ‘il y a’ (‘there is’) this border which doesn’t exist, either as real or ideal” (Derrida, “Some Statements” 76). The line is that which allows the existence of otherness but at the same time it condemns all existence to being “other”: “I” and “you,” “I” and “it,” “I” on one side, and je [qui]est un autre on the other. Without the line the world would be one and there would be no gap between the world of experience and the meaning of the world. In the Biblical myth of Genesis in which man has dominion over the earth, his word, which stems from and has its origin in the Word of God, readily provides an understanding of man’s world and serves as its immediate and unmediated explanation for everything. In the myth there is an ontological link between God’s word and man’s word. In this father-son relationship, man functions as both a Literary Theory: An Introduction that “the great majority of the literary theories outlined in [his] book have strengthened rather than weakened the assumptions of the power system” (190). Eagleton’s assertion is partly correct, insofar as when reading becomes a world-shaping activity, power is held by master-readers who tend to preserve the existing order by confirming the status and the validity of a semiotic system. On the other hand, one can note that an established order cannot be changed from the outside of the semiotic system that sustains it. Such work can only be attempted from within the semiotic system, as I shall try to show through the writings of the authors presented here. The Line and the Law 13 metonymy and a synecdoche of God. The tropological transformation also applies to man’s language: God creates the world by speaking, and so does Adam when he creates the reality of his world by naming it. He thus repeats the performative speech-act through which he was created himself in God’s “image and after [His] likeness.” The allegory of Genesis presents us with a world in which there is no line between man and God. God’s redundant phrase “in our image, after our likeness” insists on the fact that Adam’s “birth” is an act of creation where the same reflects the same. 13 In the biblical text Adam is essentially the same as God, and as His creature, Adam finds his raison d’être and his origin in God’s essence. This may well be the most fantastic aspect of the myth of Paradise: it is a space where language has intrinsic meaning and immediate performative power. Genesis presents the illusion that while being submitted to his father in a hierarchical way, Adam is not essentially different or “other” from his father and his creator. This is the dream of a language in which what the words represent and what they mean is the same thing. The immediacy, that is the absence of medium, of God’s language is the dream of an absolutely literal language always avant la lettre. God’s language is a no-sign, not simply the absence of sign but, as Wallace Stevens attempts to formulate it in “The Snow Man,” “a nothing that is.” In this book, I examine how American Puritans, with their dream of an “invisible church,” wanted to relive that dream and were lulled by their own rhetoric into believing that an absolutely literal language could still exist après la lettre. Thus, Adam’s language is in the image of the language of God; its significance and its validity are immediately justified by God’s supreme authority and universal meaning. There is no need for interpretation when God speaks. His words and the effects of his words on the world are immediate and require no transformation to be applicable. The same is true for Adam who understands directly what God tells him: no need for him (as it is the case for Moses) to veil his face, to cover his eyes, or interpret God’s voice. Until the Fall, God speaks and Adam understands; there is no dividing line between the languages they both speak. Adam does not have to “translate” God’s incommensurable knowledge into his own human terms because there is a common space for both languages where they are essentially one. The language and the performative power of language are one. There is, therefore, no need for any representation of language since the words shape the world immediately and simultaneously with their utterance. The spoken word of God creates and animates the world; it is an unwritten world where His will has no need to be mediated or represented to 13 Consequently, a male creation (by God the Father) is mirrored in a male ordering of the world. Genesis foreshadows the history of the written line, the introduction of language into chaos traces a line; Adam’s naming of the parts of the world creates the first others who become avatars of his own otherness. 14 Preface have effects in the world. Man and God reign over the same domain, and they have dominion over it through language. The myth of Genesis claims to chart a world where the word is present, but the wonderful text of Genesis also makes us realize that that presence is an illusion from the start: as soon as He speaks to create the world, God draws a line between humanity and Himself. After the Fall, humanity and God no longer share the same masculine territory or topos. They no longer speak the same language and they are no longer the same. In the Garden of Eden the line could still be ignored by all (except the serpent), but after humanity has lost its innocence, God draws an invisible but all prevailing line between the “ground whence [man] was taken” and the garden of Eden. In the Old Testament the condition of fallen humanity is that it will no longer be able to lull itself with the dream that it lives in a direct relationship with God’s voice, and its words will no longer be guaranteed by any supreme authority. Our world—unlike Eden—is not a place where words have an immediate effect on the world, and we must till a ground where every furrow is another line that marks the limits of our territory and our understanding of that territory. Our place is not one with the place of God: we live on the other side. Whatever that side may be called—earth, hell, limbo, the material world, reality—its main characteristic is to be always other, never the one. Because we were chased away from the presence of the word, we also lost the privilege of our union in sameness with God or with any kind of essence that would justify our existence. It is our doom to be other and have to confront otherness. The world created in Genesis by a masculine god is a male topos whose charting and nomenclature are masculine. The unmediated power of language can exist there only as long as the illusion of this monolithic maleness can be preserved. Our words, unlike the male Word of the Biblical myth, have to live with and take into account a principle of otherness which always disrupts any monolithic character their authors might be tempted to endow them with. It is in the performative character of our words to always create difference and otherness instead of a repetition of the same. * * * Our world is a place where our territory is always (already) defined by the line. But as it delimits one space, the line always defines another space at the same time. No space can exist alone: what it is can only be defined in relation and in proportion to what it is not. On a map the borderline is often dotted as if to suggest its immateriality. The ghostly demarcation seems to underline its theoretical status, that of a place where it is impossible to The Line and the Law 15 stand and where it is equally impossible not to stand. The line on the paper represents all that: because of its own existence, it can no longer be said directly. There was a time when colonial empires divided continents with a map and a ruler: they cut up Africa and America in smaller squares. This orthogonal organization of space is still visible on maps today: the right angles bear witness to the cold determination and the deliberation of the land surveyors of the time. As it veers abruptly on the map to mark the border, the pen of the cartographer leaves no trace in the African equatorial forest. Yet the line makes all the difference. By the time the ink on the paper is dry two states will be born. The line on the paper is a (hi)storical act that creates two peoples who will (re)name their world and themselves according to this new organization of their topographies. The new line will need an army to defend it and a government to promulgate its laws. It may be changed, moved one way or another. One may try to erase it, or bend it, as the case may be; but whatever action is taken, it will always be linked to that first line drawn on the paper. Such is the fatality of the line: it cannot remain alone. Once it is there, it organizes the space of the page or of the continent and whatever is done about it, it will always be irremediably a consequence of the first line that can be modified, denied, contested, but only with more lines, more acts of cleaving and joining, resulting in always more embrace, and more blood. On both sides of the line two nations or two worlds will live, almost touching each other—that contact being made more impossible as it is closer to being established. The translatio in space that makes it possible to cross the line is in many cases a translation in language. The idiom on one side is very often not the idiom on the other side and translation will be necessary for the trespassers if they want to understand the world on the other side of the imaginary line they have crossed. But this readily comprehensible translation is only the most apparent manifestation of the line. In every act of reading the metaphor of translation crystallized a long time ago—since the appearance of the first line whose history has neither beginning nor end, except in our utopian myths of Paradise lost and regained. There would be no history without the history of the line and we have all fallen into what Milan Kundera calls the “well of history” (Kundera, Testaments 21), that is the well of language, which implies that every act of reading means crossing a borderline. Before—had there been a before—there was a line on the page there was no border, no limit: the map, the page, the territory, the world entire was boundless and one. However, the line, the border, does not exist only on the page or on another material representation that substitutes for it. The line on the paper is only the metaphor of the line as it materializes in the phenomenological world. When He speaks to create the world, God’s language is already metaphorical and His speech already draws a line 16 Preface whose materiality becomes increasingly obsessive as it becomes the only thing we are left with. The line must be read, seen in the sand, followed like steps in the snow, felt in the dark by a groping hand like one groping for the thread Ariadne uncoils behind her. What is the line then? Is it direction or cleavage? The line is in space; it must be read and interpreted to acquire a sense, sometimes a direction. After the line is drawn, it is impossible not to be a trespasser. A line on paper or in the sand always tells a story: a story of separation and reunion, a narrative of copulation and death. Even more importantly, the line tells its own story: the story of the border and of the other side. The other side is also the side of the other, so close we could touch “it,” yet out of reach. When the line becomes the storyline, it delimits our reality by fictionalizing it, and it then becomes impossible to be born on the “right” side of the border. Western literacy maps out a territory whose inhabitants have to become readers and trespassers in order to become the inhabitants of that territory. Each of us is thus a bit of an exile and an illegal alien in a territory that we have had to enter unlawfully in order to discover its law. We have to venture across the border, try to slip across it to discover where it is. We thus delimit our topos, that territory where we live. We must cross the fictionalizing story-line to invent and inscribe in the world our topos, that which we call our reality, or maybe, “things as they are.” Even if the line is difficult to see, even if it may seem blurred or partly erased, we must constantly redefine it by crossing it so that we can define the real territory where we live from the unreality that we do not inhabit, but whose otherness allows our own world to exist. Every act of writing and reading tells the story of the construction of the wall and affirms its intangible necessity and, at the same time, our desire to climb over it, pass through it, dig under it, tear it down. Acts of reading and writing repeat the tragedy of mankind, their exile, and their claustrophobic confinement behind the wall. The line maps out our topography; we have to follow it and to read it in order to understand the world in which we live. It delineates the walls of the cell, it repeats a capital sentence that we never get to hear, and it shows us the judge that condemned us—“half his gesture, half / his speech” (Stevens, CP 170)—but never his face. The line organizes and structures space. From a historical point of view, Western civilization was deeply affected when it became literate and the reading of texts became a performative speech act on which other performative acts were based. It was an enormous upheaval, and it is probably correct to think that, “more than any other single human invention, writing has transformed human consciousness” (Ong 78). Such was the case, for instance, in pre-Socratic Greece which was colonized by writing around 700 BC. Literacy imposed itself in Greece; it conquered the territory previously held by the oral narrative tradition. By doing so, it completely upset The Line and the Law 17 the way the Greek—and hence the entire Western culture—was structured and ordered. This was the point in time and space where the new technique was improved and made even more dangerously efficient with the invention of the alphabet. It took the new choreographic civilization much time to impose itself, and for some time it may even have appeared uncertain which of the two would establish its primacy over the world. 14 In a way, the technical invention crystallized and rendered more visible the tropes of the line and the act of reading, but it was foremost a theoretical revolution on which there was no going back: once reality had been expelled from orality, the first line was drawn and the real world would never be the same. While orality is still present in many rites and habits of our Western world, it has definitively lost to writing and reading its status as a privileged mode of interpretation of the world. Furthermore it can only exist in a totally marginalized position where it is always interpreted in terms of text; because it was defeated by writing in its territorial fight, orality too can only be read. The clash between the two types of civilization was commensurate with the stakes. When the first written line appeared, it cut off forever the old oral world from the newly born choreographic and textual world. It meant that the master-interpreters whose pronouncements had ruled the world would have to yield their place to a new class of makers and rulers: the readers. This was only the first of the consequences of the written line; many more would follow. It would not be right, however, to consider that all writing did was to turn sounded (and falsely present) language into silent (and falsely absent) language. What changed with writing was the apparition of symbolic and technological recognition of a mode of interpretation of the world. The written text became the symbol of the fact that reading had imposed itself as the mode of interpretation and therefore imposed on Westerners the civilization of the written text. Textuality makes visible and objectifies the metaphor of language turned into space: the evanescent occurrence of oral language is no longer an event but becomes a place, a topos with its own economy. Textuality occupies and colonizes space. It is in the character of textuality to be preemptive and to attract into its orbit all the elements that approach it, including textuality itself. What we call “literary history” is also the result of the way textuality organizes its own space. Writing turns language into a means of appropriating space. Therefore writing is necessarily a political and imperialistic action that modifies the topos in which it is produced; Deleuze and Guattari remark that “writing has nothing to do with meaning, it is an act of land-surveying, of charting territories even if they are still 14 Eric Havelock interprets Plato’s confrontation with the Sophists in the Dialogues as the result of the clash between two civilizations: the dawning age of writing and reading and the dying age of oral tradition. See Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato. 18 Preface à venir” (Mille Plateaux 11; my translation). To follow the line as a reader is a way of inscribing one’s territory within a topos which is always à venir, that is, a becoming. The space this book aims to create is not a Utopia where my readings could cohabit under an artificially created consensus that would be the reflection of a democratic state, and where the texts would be the democratic representatives of American literature. The link between these chapters is no run-on-line; a deep hiatus both separates and unites them. It is not so much the points that these texts have in common that I would like to foreground, as their differences and the differences they produce, and I want to see how they differ from one another. The topos this book seeks to chart is not so much a common place as the heterotopia in which these texts cohabit. No matter where we cast our eyes, we see the world of the line: when we look at a starry sky and recognize the Big Dipper, we supply the lines in the places where we are used to “seeing” them, and thus chart a portion of the night. My study presents a constellation of texts; they are stars that shine with their own light, and my attempt is to connect them with an imaginary line that will make a new constellation visible. In this sky-surveying, I am at least as much interested in the black stretches of night that allow the stars to shine as in the stars themselves. * * * The two authors that mark the discernible ends of my hyperbolic line are Cotton Mather and J. Hillis Miller. Very little seems to relate these two thinkers. In addition to the three centuries between them, it immediately appears that their intellectual and philosophical premises are radically different. They share, however, a preoccupation with the same topos and a propensity to feel responsible for the defense of the law that maintains the existence of that topos. Of course, J. Hillis Miller does not hope to build the city on the hill, but he defends with the same vehemence and conviction as Cotton Mather the law that authorizes reading—gives it (moral, social, political) authority. Mather does so in the name of God, the “author” of the Scriptural text, while Miller does it in the “name” of the act of reading itself. After the proclaimed death of the author, Miller cannot appeal to any supreme authority, yet he cannot avoid the fact that signs “belong to metaphysics” (Derrida, Grammatology 17). Miller resorts to a legislative system that justifies his reading. His position may seem more unstable than that of Cotton Mather, but this is only a first impression. Both of them defend an ethical stance, not only for the validity of their reading, but also for the fact that they should read in the first place. Both project onto the American topos the law they read in The Line and the Law 19 texts—the Bible for Mather, and Henry James, Maurice Blanchot and others for Miller. They are writers who openly claim that their reading and writing acts have deliberate ethical importance for the society in which they live, that they act in response to a call, and because they must face their responsibility. Thus, Mather starts his texts with these words: I live by neighbours that force me to produce these undeserved Lines. … ’Tis possible that among this Body of People, there may be few that love the Writer of this Book; but give me leave to boast so far, there is not one among all this Body of People, whom this Mather would not study to serve as well as to love. (Wonders 8) Miller’s concern for his neighbors is not stated in the paternalistic way that characterizes Mather; however, he asserts that “the rhetorical study of literature has crucial practical implications for our moral, social, and political life” (Versions 16). Similarly, but with a very different strategy, the author/ narrator/ protagonist of Walden affirms in the epigraph of the book that “[he does] not want to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as Chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up” (Walden 1). I shall try to show that what Thoreau is concerned with is the reading of American reality. As for Mather and Miller, it is a vital question for him, one upon which the human topos depends: “Be it life or death, we crave only reality” (Walden 99). For Thoreau, this is related to “serious reading” (99), and though he claims that he does not “mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures,” Walden is a confrontation with “Higher Laws” (210) in the name of which the neighbors are to be drawn from their slumbers. Our aptitude to read reality and the signs that compose it is seriously questioned by Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man. The narration takes the reader to a world forsaken by the laws of representation and transcendental confidence in which Mather, and to a certain degree, Thoreau, could still believe. In Melville’s masterpiece, the identification of the “confidence man” becomes impossible; all the characters of the novel try to assign him a name and a voice but they all fail. Similarly, the numerous critics who have tried to determine who the confidence-man was have all failed in their attempts. The metaphorical process of identification at work in The Wonders of the Invisible World and Walden is of no avail for the characters and the readers of The Confidence-Man. On the other hand, it would be idle to deny Melville’s novel’s links with reality and treat it as a mere escape into a realm of fantasy unrelated to things as they are. The narrator’s words sound like a warning: True, it may be urged that there is nothing a writer of fiction should more carefully see to, as there is nothing a sensible reader will more carefully look for, than that, in the depiction of any character, its consistency should be 20 Preface preserved. But this, though at first blush, seeming reasonable enough, may, upon a closer view, prove not so much so. For how does it couple with another requirement—equally insisted upon, perhaps—that while to all fiction is allowed some play of invention, yet, fiction based on fact should never be contradictory to it; and is it not a fact, that, in real life, a consistent character is a rara avis? (69) Melville’s text points to the discrepancy between the world of consensus and representation in which the characters of the novel, and some readers, may believe they live, without realizing that “reality” has a lot to do with fiction, the performative power of words, and the act of reading. How does one make sense of things and people in a world where the notion of representation can be questioned? What is the law that prevents the world of The Confidence-Man from returning to chaos? What is the basis of the necessary “confidence” that makes reading possible at all, when even Emersonian “self-reliance” offers no stable guideline because the self starts to lose its stability and unity? The dispersion of the “I” is also what renders the relation to reality so difficult for the avatars of the narrative voice of “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” Reality was Wallace Stevens’ constant quest and craving. For him, poetry was not a flight from reality but into reality. The powerful poem that I propose to read grapples with the world and shows the necessity to believe: the poem goes as far as it can before a necessary leap of faith. Stevens writes in a letter: “I believe in pure explication de texte. This may be my principal form of piety.” The piety Stevens expresses so touchingly here, is the thorough, the “serious,” act of reading—that which J. Hillis Miller calls “reading in the highest sense.” Cotton Mather answers the call of God’s law and acts in its name to try to make it survive. J. Hillis Miller can no longer act in the name of that same law because his acts of reading are the result of the “subjection to a law that is invisible but sovereign” (Versions 17). For modern readers, the nature of the law changed, but it is still here, even in its own absence. The five texts that I selected for this book have in common their attempts to come to terms with “the act of reading itself” and its consequences for reality, for “things as they are.” What are the consequences of (mis)reading one’s reality in terms that are no longer adequate? What is the punishment for not reading right, not doing justice to what is read? And what law is broken when justice is not done? Who suffers from the mistake and who should bear the brunt of the possible disaster? These questions are put to the reader of each text presented here. Their importance is not thematic but only exists in the process that gives a sense and a reality to these texts: reading. CHAPTER 1 INSCRIBING Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World In any writing somewhere there is an act of violence, a blow, a cut, cleaving or stamping, perhaps even a division between cause and effect. In writing the effect is not commensurate with its cause. —J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread Inscribing is a very dramatic act; it involves a transgression, the passage from one realm into another. The stamping, the violent impression of a sign on a new support—the white page deflowered by the pen, or the bark of a tree scarred by the knife—implies the crossing of a borderline and the forceful annexation of a new space. The inscribing also definitively separates the sign from its meaning. The inscription becomes the redundant and visible supplement to the sense of the sign. At the same time, it becomes the trace of a lost sense, and the sign of its absence: the sign signals its own senselessness. Three centuries ago, in 1692, when Cotton Mather wrote The Wonders of the Invisible World, many things had already changed in the Puritan enterprise and their settlement experience in the New World. Mather and the men of his generation already stood very remote from the first two waves of colonizers that had set foot on the American shore. Seventy years had been enough to produce the dramatic changes that gave to the colonists of Mather’s generation a sense of failure and abandonment in an incredibly deep and obscure continent: New-England was a true Utopia. But, alas, the Children and servants of those old Planters must needs afford many, degenerate Plants, and there is now risen up a Number of People, otherwise inclined than our Joshua’s, and the Elders that out-liv’d them. ... [T]hose Interests of the Gospel, which were the Errand of our Fathers into these Ends of the Earth, have been too much neglected and postponed, and the Attainments of an handsome Education, have been too much undervalued, by Multitudes that have not fallen into Exorbitances of Wickedness.... (12) Two generations was all the time it took to break the wonderful assurance of their grandfathers who had come to the colonies to found an ideal soci- 22 Chapter 1 ety where they could live in harmony with God. At a time when the jeremiad was becoming a form of ritual incantation, Mather wrote a text which is a form of justification for the sense of failure he shared with many thinkers of the time. 15 It only took seventy years for this change to occur, and that was enough time for the Puritan community to pass from enthusiastically landing in America to lamenting their exile on the borderline of the new last frontier. This span of three generations also corresponds to one fourth of the interval that was to separate this landing in America from Neil Armstrong’s unfurling the American flag on the moon, the last new frontier. Whereas the first writers who came to the New World were Europeans in their thinking and their writing, 16 Cotton Mather is an “American” writer. He belongs to a generation of writers who realize—or are forced to realize—that New England will not lend itself to interpretation in the same terms as Old England. He is not the “first” American writer, but with him and the writers of his generation, the question of what an American writer is can be posed. Mather belongs to the movement that inscribed and thereby invented the American civilization on the new continent, but at the same time Mather is made “American” by the place where he writes. These first waves of colonists had no intention of inventing America, much less of founding The United States of America; they had come to set a new model for society that the rest of the world, and particularly England, was supposed to adopt. Mather proposes this model as a setting for The Wonders of the Invisible World: America’s Fate, must at the long run include New-England in it.... [I]f God have a purpose to make here a seat for any of those glorious things which are spoken of thee, O thou City of God; then even thou, O New England, art within a very little while of better days than ever yet have dawn’d upon thee. (76) 15 The jeremiad developed in America as a mode of interpretation of the Puritans’ “errand.” Like other modes of interpretation that will be discussed in this book, the jeremiad took a new form in The New World where it adapted itself to its new topography and developed differently than in Europe. As Sacvan Bercovitch has it: The European jeremiad developed within a static hierarchical order; the lesson it taught, about historical recurrence and the vanity of human wishes, amounted to a massive ritual reinforcement of tradition. Its function was to make social practice conform to a completed and perfected social ideal. The American Puritan jeremiad was the ritual of a culture on an errand—which is to say, a culture based on the faith in process. Substituting teleology for hierarchy, it discarded the Old World ideal stasis for a New World vision of the future. (Jeremiad 23.) 16 In his desire to situate historically the sources of American literature, Perry Miller writes: “The finest creations of the founders—the disquisitions of Hooker, Shepard, and Cotton—were written in Europe, or else, if actually penned in the Colonies, proceeded from a thoroughly European mentality, upon which the American scene made no impression whatsoever” (Errand 9). Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 23 Mather expresses the hope of the advent of the New Jerusalem, but in the same passage he also evokes the possibility of failure when he writes: “Of what use or state will America be ... [i]f it must all be the Devils propriety, while the saved Nations ... shall be Walking in the Light of the New Jerusalem” (76). The city on the hill, as it had been planned in the imagination of European Puritans and announced by their divines was to mark a new beginning in Christian history and most importantly it was to redeem the rest of the world, but the confrontation of this ideal blueprint with the reality of American topography caused these plans to be dramatically revised. The doubts expressed in Mather’s text were those of the second and third generation colonists who realized that “having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the hill, they were left alone with America” (Miller, Errand 9). It followed that they had to shape the new place according to models that could no longer be those imported from the Old World they had left behind and by which they felt forsaken. They had to find new models to shape an American topos where they could survive. Bercovitch writes on this process of adaptation to the new conditions of America: “When ... they felt that history was undermining their ideal, they had no choice but explain history away. They did so by asserting the priority of prophecies over appearances, by absorbing a backsliding generation into their myth of ordained progress, and, in a daring ‘application’ of their genetics of salvation, by extending the legend of the fathers to the story of America itself” (Origins 15). A new generation had to be invented and the new place, the American topos, had to be generated in ways that implied the different and new modes of interpretation. This meant that the history of America could no longer be written like European history. Writing itself, as a way of making history, had to undergo dramatic changes if the Puritans wanted to write their history on the American continent. In The Wonders of the Invisible World, Cotton Mather writes for people who are banned from the habitual topography of their lives, and who are also banned from the laws that policed that topography. The errand into the American wilderness is a heroic enterprise carried out in the name of God, but it is also a painful exile: The first planters of these Colonies were a chosen Generation of Men, who were first so pure, as to disrelish many things which they thought wanted Reformation elsewhere; and yet withal so peaceable, that embraced a voluntary Exile in a squalid American Desart [sic], rather than to live in Contentions with their Brethren. (11) Mather’s text builds on the typological reading of the Scriptures that made of the Puritans “a people of God settled in those, which were once the Devil’s Territories” (13). The Reformation—especially Luther—had emphasized the literal sense of the Scriptures, which allowed the return of an ancient mode of interpretation codified in the third and fourth centuries AD: 24 Chapter 1 typology. This mode of interpretation developed in later Calvinism and was extremely influential for the development of Puritan semiotics, and thereby, for the shaping of the American topos. The Puritan’s experience was shaped by their belief in what Bercovitch calls “ordained progress,” but at the same time they were settlers, and settling meant that they had to find a way of ordering and policing that space. This is where their reading of the Scriptures played a decisive role. Their typological reading of the Bible—which they read as a book of law—made them consider the New World to be their territory. It gave the Puritans not only the right but also the obligation to settle there. Their reading of the Scriptures had summoned them before the law contained in the Scriptures, and it was their duty to be responsive to the call because their response would have ethical and political consequences for them and for the rest of the world. Typology made of them not only the tropological representation of the Israelites, but their embodiment: they were the physical sign of their reading of the Bible, and their acts crystallized the law of God. Like the Israelites of the Old Testament, they were God’s people, and they thought that they had been chosen by Him. By transferring metaphorically the experience of the founders of ancient Israel of whom they read in the Old Testament onto their own in the New World, the Puritans found a common ground or a sharable topos that justified their enterprise from an ethical and historical point of view. It was for them a way of situating their experience and validating it by inscribing it in the very words of God and by legitimizing their endeavor by His law. Like all Puritan divines, Mather resorts to typology to give his text the weight of Biblical authority. He follows the Puritan tradition in which the Old Testament remains in force, qua law, and allows the identification of the figures and topoi of the Old Testament with the figures of New England and its topos. The “New-English Israel” (69) is to follow the steps of Moses’ people, both in their colonizing the visible realm of the “devils country” (67), and in their spiritual progress “Heaven-ward”: Our Pace in our Journey Heaven-ward, must be Quickened, if our space for that Journey be shortened, even as Israel went further the two last years of their Journey Canaan-ward, than they did in 38 years before. (65-66) A typological interpretation is for him the attempt to map out the Utopian New England he refers to (12), and where the spiritual space of the Bible could be superimposed on the physical topographies the colonists were confronted with. The foundation of the city on the hill would result from the language of their lives and the language of the Bible blending in one unique and inaugural discourse. 17 But while typology was a commodious 17 The American topos was to be this Utopian common space where the meeting of the order of God and the order of men would come together. Foucault describes a Utopian space very much akin to the Puritans’ dream: Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 25 rhetorical device they could resort to in order to explain and justify their “errand into the wilderness,” it could not account for the totality of that experience, and Mather’s text shows that the ideal pattern derived from a typological reading was insufficient. The third generation of settlers realized that there was a formidable epistemological gap between their everyday experience and their reading of the Bible that gaped in front of their eyes like the desolate, infinitely vast, and devil-infested American continent on the brim of which they found themselves exiled. The Puritans repeated the story of the flight from Egypt, the confrontation with the desert, and the arrival in Canaan. They were called to fulfill this mission, but the nature of the call was very different from that of the Israelites. In the Bible, Moses is actually called by God, he is physically summoned by the divinity and brought into His presence. Despite the fact that he is often referred to as the “American Moses,” nothing of this sort happened to Cotton Mather or to any other American Puritan divines. The call the Puritans answered did not have the spectacular feature of a miracle, nor the magic aura of the Old Testament myth. In the Puritan experience, there are no more miraculous occurrences, no flaming bushes. For them, the direct contact with God was interrupted and the signs of God have no intrinsic value as signs. They needed to be selected and instituted as signs before becoming interpretable. There is no place in the Bible that refers specifically to the Puritans in one way or another; no divination that announces their colonizing of the New World, no promise for their building the New Jerusalem. The call they answered, the call they had to answer, was the result of their reading. As a result, they inscribed their civilization, inventing thus the American topos. We read in the Old Testament that Moses had the privilege of physically facing the Law and was even blinded by the splendor of God. The case is very different for Cotton Mather and the other Puritans who are left with the traces of the law in the form of the Word of the Bible. Not only is the Truth not blinding, but it is so remote and thickly veiled that they had to grope in darkness. Their answering the call was the result of an act of interpretation, i.e. of an attempt to bridge the gap between material signs and the essence of the Word. The text of the Scriptures is a go-between, the Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region where they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical. Heterotopias are disturbing [les hétérotopies inquiètent], probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy “syntax” in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to “hold together.” (Foucault xviii) 26 Chapter 1 only remaining link between a fallen humanity and God. In the words of Thomas Hooker, there is a correspondence between the “crucified man and the crucified phrase”(Clark 36) and the latter is man’s only access to the law of God. As in St John’s Gospel, the text is present as a witness for the presence of Christ: 37 And the Father him elf, which hathe ent me, beareth witnes of me. Ye haue not heard his voyce at anie time, nether haue ye ene his hape. 38 And his worde haue ye not abiding in you: for whome he hathe ent, him ye beleue not. 39 Searche the Scriptures: for in them ye thinke to haue eternal life, & thei are thei which te tifie of me. (The Geneva Bible) The text remains as a witness; its presence replaces the presence of the departed law. It functions as an act of testimony in court; the text is a witness and bears witness to its being a witness. The text testifies to that which cannot be brought before the law because it has disappeared. At the same time, the text bears witness to its own existence and signifies the contemporary presence and absence of the Law. * * * Because the law that was to govern the “American Desart” and turn it into a New Canaan was only accessible through acts of reading, the problematic of reading and writing is the cornerstone of the construction of the American topos. It is necessary to examine at this point some of the theoretical premises that the Puritans found themselves equipped with when they landed in the New World. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Reformation had a tremendous impact on the interpretation of the written word, that is, on the way the Bible was read. This led in turn to the development of a radically new semiotics that was later imported into the New World. When he wrote in the Institutes of the Christian Religion that God had “inscribed” 18 His glory in the world, John Calvin established a connection between the signs of the divinity of God and writing. The presence of God could be read in the world through the presence of God in the Scriptures. For the Genevan reformer, the Scriptures put their readers in the presence of God. In fact, what Calvin (and Luther) did, was to initiate a movement that started the progressive but irremediable disappearance of God, His absence forever. For the Puritan writers, who by and large followed Calvinistic doctrines, this meant that, “once a thing [was] put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into 18 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion. Quoted in Michael P. Clark, The Crucified Phrase 48. Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 27 the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it…. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parents [father] to come to its help, being unable to defend itself” (Phaedrus 520). Signs, primarily words and the written text, had acquired their independence but at the same time they had become totally devoid of sense, helpless without the assistance of the author, their father. The dissemination and the independence of the text that resulted from the theoretical upheaval of the Reformation was accompanied by a technical invention—the invention of print—which confirmed the new unstable status of the text. When in 1455 Gutenberg published the “forty-two-line Bible,” the text of the Scriptures left the precincts of convents and universities to become the greatest bestseller ever. While it is obvious that not everybody was able to read and understand the text of the Bible, the sixteenth century saw the birth of a new civility: the civility of individual readers. The invention of print was more than a technological change, for it sustained the theoretical upheaval of the Reformation and the two together comforted the Judeo-Christian civilization in its literate vocation. By leaving the walls of the convents and the churches, the Scriptures became profane, that is, as the etymology of the word suggests, ‘before,’ or ‘outside’ (pro) the ‘temple’ (fanum). They were now unprotected by the walls of convents and universities and would need readers to bear witness for them while bearing witness to the Law of God. When Western literacy arrived in the New World, the Scriptures were completely “profane”: they were left like the people who brought them along, free of the precincts they had left behind, but unprotected and alone. The helplessness of the written Word without the support of its author (God) was an essential issue for the preachers of the Reformation because it deprived the words composing the text of a magical power they threatened to gain. For the theologians of the time, semiotics was getting dangerously close to feeding on superstitious and idolatrous beliefs, as the numerous attacks on Luther for his “Biblicism” clearly show. 19 The awareness of the danger is also traceable in Calvin’s attempt to limit the autonomy of words. He complicated their status by translating, as Erasmus had done, “word” as sermo, and not as verbum. Sermo is primarily an economic word that has to do with accounting and calculation. As the word “economy” suggests, sermo implies a relation between words within a system, with an indication 19 The reformers had to deal with what Richard Waswo calls the “immemorial sense of a magical connection between words and things.” This sense of magical power could have turned the Bible into an idolatrous object. They managed to avoid “[t]he naive magic that frankly seeks to exercise the power of words over the world [, but] has at least the virtue of not dividing them.” However, by doing so they submitted the text to “[t]he sophisticated magic that seeks to exorcise that power by making that division [, but] must then exercise itself in backhanded ways in order to overcome the division it has made.” See Language and Meaning in the Renaissance, 28-29. 28 Chapter 1 that the system has to be managed and administered like a household. Calvin’s translation put the emphasis on the fact that words belonged to a semiotic system in which they had a value and a performative power. Thus, words were not—as verbum might have suggested—isolated signs endowed with magical or incantatory powers. 20 For Calvin, words were like the coins stamped by a state. They represented the state, pointed to its economic and political power and to the laws that guaranteed the value of the currency. By the same token, they only retained their value within the economic system of that state. As for words, this meant that one could not make sense of them without grasping the whole of the system; on the other hand, that whole could not be grasped without an understanding of all its individual elements. This circular pattern, which is a tautology for man, could only be resolved by the unaccountable wisdom of God. 21 The hermeneutic circle was Calvin’s answer to try to limit the disastrous effects of Protestant semiotics on the text of the Scriptures. He desperately tried to prevent the Word from becoming independent from the authority of God who, like the state standing behind its currency, guaranteed and legitimated its value. It was necessary to preserve the value of this “currency” because religious, social, and political structures depended on it for their functioning. This particular aspect became of utmost importance for the Puritan emigrants because Protestant reading of the Word and the semiotics derived from it crossed the Atlantic on the same ships as they did. Linking words within an economic pattern was essential, for it introduced the problematic of representation. In a system in which words represented the law, they lost their intrinsic value and became significant only for what or whom they represented. The new representative system affected all levels of social and political reality. Nicolas Copernicus, another shaper of the round world as we know it, saw that golden coins lost their 20 Words, as the material representation of God’s divinity, threatened to become a visual image of the kind that Protestants, and Puritans in particular, had been shattering in churches. Ann Kibbey reports that in their fright of magical objects— derived I believe from their fear of the magical power of the Scriptural words— Puritans turned “Altar stones ... into paving stones, bridges, fireplaces, or even kitchen sinks[; ] basins for holy water were used to salt beef, and a triptych was used as a pig trough” (48). Kibbey does a remarkable analysis of Puritan iconoclasticism and their fear that they might endow objects with divine power through an erroneous interpretation leading to what Calvin calls “that fictitious and fantastic transubstantiation.” 21 “Hence the history of Reformed thought in the late sixteenth centuries reveals the poignant inability of Calvin’s disciples to bear up under the exaction he had laid upon them. He demanded that they contemplate, with steady, unblinking resolution, the absolute, incomprehensible, and transcendent sovereignty of God; he required men to stare fixedly and without relief into the very center of the blazing sun of glory. God is not to be understood but to be adored.” (Perry Miller, Errand 51) Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 29 “essential” value, that is, the value of the metal that composed them, and exchanged it for a representative value. 22 He understood that the economic phenomenon of inflation was due to the loss of the intrinsic value of money and its acquiring representational value. 23 What Calvin feared for the Word, Copernicus feared for coins and their power as signs. “Gold was a sign for measuring wealth, insofar as it was itself wealth,” Foucault writes, “[i]t possessed the power to signify because it was itself a real mark” (Order 169). Representation introduced the problem of faith in the signs. Martin Luther, the first instigator of the Reformation, had faced the same difficulty of, on the one hand, affirming the value of the Word, and on the other, in preventing it from acquiring a magical power that any good reader of the Scriptures could have found there. He maintained that the written Word was a link between man and God, but the nature of that link could not be clearly assessed: “That which is nothing represents nothing. That which represents something must first have an essence and a figure of another essence” (136-37; emphasis added). Luther was cautious to refuse the autonomous value of the Biblical text and re-establish the primacy of its author (God) as well as the necessity of inspiration and faith for a correct interpretation of the sacred texts. Christ was to be the source of the signs and their product, therefore the meaning of the text had to be referred to its author and not to the text itself. Thus, the Reformation 24 established a new relation between signs and their meaning which was a relation of both distance and proximity. In the case of the text, the sign became, on the one 22 See Nicholas Copernicus, “Writings on Money,” 169-208. 23 Speaking of the “intrinsic” value of a golden coin is to fall into the same tropological trap. Gold has, of course, no “intrinsic” value but only the value always already endowed to it by metaphor which makes it “pure,” “precious,” “rare,” etc. Gold is “intrinsically” precious because we “read” it to be so. 24 From a theological point of view, it naturally is a sweeping generalization to speak of the “Reformation” and of its influence on the way the Bible was read and understood in America. It is impossible to pay all necessary attention to the subtle religious disputes that separated the various movements within the Reformation and their main thinkers: Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Bucer, etc. It is also impossible to include here the importance and the influence of major thinkers and philosophers such as John Wycliffe or Erasmus who were already influential in times preceding the Reformation. Henning Graf Reventow is certainly right to stress the differences that existed between the Anabaptists, the Spiritualists, the Shabbatarians and others. He concedes however that “[t]hese interpretations certainly stress important differences in the spiritual approach and also in the attitude of the various groups to scripture, without doing away with the intrinsic connection between the various trends” (49). As far as my subject is concerned, I concentrate on the “common trends,” in particular in connection with the attitude of the reformers to the written (printed) text and its relation to the Word of God. For a complete discussion of the various currents and undercurrents of the Reformation and their impact on the establishment of the Puritan Church, see Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World. 30 Chapter 1 hand, more intimately linked to its author on whom it ultimately depended, but on the other, there was an unfathomable gap between the two that no human intellectual construct could ever bridge. 25 Moreover, the problematic of the written word was intimately linked to the question of incarnation, which was one of the major objects of dispute of the Reformation. In the phrase hoc est corpus meum, Luther insisted that the “sacramental union” of body and bread established by the verb est meant a union of two “diverse substances” both in “reality and in name” (298-300). Ann Kibbey eloquently shows how scared Luther was of seeing the Scriptures become something that could be interpreted too freely. Luther “insisted repeatedly,” she writes, “that tropes had nothing to do with sacramental interpretation, that one had only to understand the simple grammar of the text and accept the words literally.... Luther emphasized the physical presence of Christ, ‘that Christ’s body and blood are distributed in the bread and the cup...’”(74). 26 For Calvin, the question of the presence of Christ is here again linked to an economic metaphor. For him, the sacredness of the bread was purely derivative and depended on the act of consecration—this means that the bread becomes sacred when it is “read” as sacred. Its sacredness consists in displaying the spiritual presence of the Lord. 27 The tension between presence and absence was something which both Luther and Calvin had to come to terms with when they tried to give the Scriptures their status and function. Despite their reservations on the autonomy of the Scriptures, they established an “analogy … between Christ himself and Scriptural language, and this analogy is generated by a theory of inspiration that is closely associated with, and at times merges into, a theory of incarnation” (Clark 25-26). The Scriptures were the words of Christ, but at the same time they “represented” him, spoke for him, instead of him, in his absence. They functioned as a witness and as such they bore witness to his living presence. Luther writes: The Holy Scriptures is the word of God, written (as I might say) lettered and formed in letters, just as Christ is the eternal Word of God cloaked in human 25 “The literal ‘miracle’ that accomplishes this unification [between words and things] was, before its post-Romantic secularization, The Word of God.... The vocabulary of the critic—the image that is both ‘sign’ and ’thing’—is as old and as durable as St. Augustine; its traditional use in Western Christianity was to describe the incarnation and the sacraments” (Waswo 28). 26 Kibbey quotes from Martin Luther’s Works (vol. 37, 329). She notes that this particular interpretation of the sentence “this is my body” earned Luther the “denunciation of ‘literalist’” from Calvin. 27 Kibbey notes: “Calvin’s analysis of sacramental bread is very similar to Karl Marx’s analysis of commodities in the capitalist market. In Marx’s theory, exchange value is the counterpart of the spiritual presence” (52). Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 31 flesh. And just as Christ was embraced and handled by the world, so is the written word of God too. 28 The relation between what words are and what they represent signals a tension between ontology and epistemology in Protestant semiotics reflected in the tension between presence and absence. The bodily presence of the sign is parallel to the bodily, and therefore visible, re-presentation of Christ. On the other hand, both Luther and Calvin insist, each in his own way, that the words of the Bible, such as they are available to man, are insufficient and devoid of both ethical value and religious signification. In spite of all their cares they had read themselves into a situation where “the sign was ontologically equivalent to God’s Word, [but] epistemologically insufficient” (Clark 31). Waswo clearly sums up the situation when he writes: “The argument over how the body and blood of Christ are present in the bread and wine are arguments about how language means and how we apprehend it” (243). By acquiring corporeal consistence the Word was both revealed and veiled. It was the indication of the presence of God—“this is my body”—, and His eternal absence, for “this” is not —Luther’s protests notwithstanding—Christ’s body. The incarnate quality of the written word must have given the Reformers the sense of an extraordinary proximity to God, but at the same time they must have felt the necessity to keep Him at bay, lest they should be destroyed by the magic they had created. 29 Such is the paradoxical status of the written text and more generally of the sign as it emerges from the theoretical upheaval of the Reformation: on the one hand it was on the eve of its independence, and on the other it was going to be bound for a long time to the essence from which it had been separated. This is also the status with which it landed on the American continent. Perry Miller writes that “In the historical perspective, [the New Englanders’] way of interpreting the Bible must be called Calvinist. The Federal theology was not a distinct or antipathetic system: it was simply an idiom in which these Protestants sought to make a bit more plausible the mysteries of the Protestant creed” (49). 30 The Puritans were faced with a visible phenomenological world, which they had to take as ontologically true, but that same world was also a veil that made invisible the epistemological links in which they placed their faith. Between the two, the Reformation had opened a yawning chasm that they knew they could not bridge, and 28 Martin Luther, D. Martin Luther Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ([Weimar: 1833ff] 48, 31; quoted in Clark 25-26). 29 They could not approach God too much, “for in doing so, what do [they] else but draw neere to God, as the stubble or the wax should draw neere to the fire? ... He is a consuming fire to the sonnes of men, if they come to him immediately.” (John Preston, The New Covenant, or the Saints Portion [London, 1629] 503; quoted in Errand 52). 30 See also Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts 1630-1650, especially 13-20. 32 Chapter 1 yet had to keep trying, for their entire ontology depended on its epistemological justification. 31 The builders of the New World had to establish the link somehow, lest they should be abandoned both by God and men in their howling wilderness. It is in this attempt to bridge the chasm that is to reconcile the presence of the Word with their presence in the New World, that they became “American.” Even their “election” was but a meager comfort in their dreary situation because it too depended on the same instability of the new regime of signs they were living under. Calvin had warned them: Let them remember that when they inquire into predestination, they penetrate the inmost recesses of Divine wisdom, where the careless and confident intruder will obtain no satisfaction to his curiosity, but will enter a labyrinth from which he will find no way to depart. For it is unreasonable that man should scrutinize with impunity those things which the Lord has determined to be hidden in himself; and investigate, even from eternity, that sublimity of wisdom which God would have us to adore and not comprehend, to promote our admiration of his glory. (Institutes, II, xxi, 1; quoted in Miller, Errand 54) Yet this strict Protestant model had to be adapted to the new place: the European theoretical revolution had to be Americanized to suit the purposes of the Puritan polity. The Americans had to find their Ariadne’s thread out of the labyrinth alluded to by Calvin. They had to find the line that would guide them through, or perhaps out of, God’s “sublimity of wisdom” and transform it into a more partial but more human wisdom: “In some fashion the transcendent God had to be chained, made less inscrutable, less mysterious, less unpredictable—He had to be made, again, understandable in human terms” (Miller, Errand 55). The American topos was built in the space left open by the Reformation, between the text and its meaning. American civilization appears like a bridge between two infinitely remote banks, which it tries to connect without resting on either of them. The gap between the ontological and the epistemological value of the sign opened up by the Reformation was the major source for the Puritans’ hermeneutics of doubt. They were confronted with the guilt of being in the presence of the spirit of God and yet being unable to see Him. The Reformation had granted that man 32 could transcend the limits of his knowl- 31 “The Puritans were always on the move, on the way to a goal of which they were ignorant and which was therefore always unattainable because it was dualistically separated from the real world” (Reventlow 98). 32 Women were—of course—excluded from the question of interpretation. My necessarily polemical use of the masculine and of the word “man” is “representative” of the way representative interpretation determines the topos we inhabit and determines itself. The synecdoche “man,” used for “humans,” the “human race,” or “humanity,” went unchallenged for the longest time because “man,” thanks to a Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 33 edge, lift a corner of the veil and have at least a dimmed vision of Truth, but at the same time he would never be sure that what he sees is actually the Truth. The discrepancy between ontology and epistemology made necessary a permanent construction and deconstruction of the semiotic system. When it arrived in America, semiotics, as derived from Calvin’s reading of the Scriptures, developed along new lines because the space where it grew was different and new: “Calvinism could no longer remain the relatively simple dogmatism of its founder. It needed amplifying, it required concise explication, syllogistic proof, intellectual, as well as spiritual focus. It needed, in short, the one thing which at bottom it could not admit—a rationale” (Miller, Errand 53). Cotton Mather and other American divines participated in this process of the “intellectualizing of faith.” They diverged from the Calvinistic model, but they kept as the cornerstone of the edification of the American topos Calvin’s preoccupation with language and the act of reading. They now had to read the American continent and turn it into their world by submitting it to the law that had instituted them as the owners of the land. The law they had to deal with was not the blinding light of truth: it was a permanent twilight where progress meant groping, stumbling, fear, guilt, and remorse. They built a topos where the impossibility of ever ascertaining the validity of their interpretation of their new phenomenological world resulted directly from the disquietingly paradoxical status of the Word. The pervasive and sometimes dramatic effects of that status that always made interpretation moot can be observed in many instances of Puritan writing. In captivity narratives, for instance, “the landscape of the Puritan mind replaces the real wilderness” (Slotkin 99) and the captives try to determine by “reading” their world whether they are among the elect. 33 John Winthrop recounts in his journal the tragic story of a woman named Hatt who beat her child to death while knowing that her crime would be discovered. She explained during the trial that led to her execution that she tropological transfer, was endowed with a representative power that allowed the word to stand for and signify the general and more inaccessible concepts it was supposed to embody. In society, the same tropological transfer occurred and gave rise to the Western Judeo-Christian male-dominated societies in which man, as in my use of the word “man,” is both the sign and the holder of the power that the sign represents and embodies. 33 There were of course real captivities and there can be no doubt that the captives suffered enormously both physically and psychologically. My interest here is on the myth-making process that immediately started around those narratives; “Puritan ministers and men of letters were quick to realize the polemical and theological potential in these tales and began to exercise direct control over [their] composition.” ... “Even the writing that emerged from the witch hysteria of 1692 derived images and narrative patterns from the captivities.” See Slotkin, 95-96. 34 Chapter 1 preferred the certainty of damnation to the permanent doubt of belonging to the elect. Anecdotal as it may be, Hatt’s case shows how momentous the state of uncertainty was for the Puritans. By “moving theology into the realm of semiology” the Puritans assessed that there was a relationship between the visible world and the invisible one. The link was of the same nature as the one that united the written words of the Scriptures to the Word of Christ; however, the exact nature of that link was unknowable, and only a leap of faith could confirm them in a belief that no hermeneutic operation could sustain. Their reading had to be semiological 34 in nature to allow them to deal with the radical otherness of the unknown space opened up by the words of the Bible and the unknown space of the American topos. The Puritans had to build their topos starting from premises they had inherited from the Reformation which rejected the belief that man’s works could contribute to salvation; man’s mundane activity was of no avail, nor were his laws. The only real law was to be discovered in the Scriptures where it was available but also hidden. What the Reformation actually did by giving the law this paradoxical status was to exile the law and make it absent. It removed it from the commentary 35 where it had been callously installed for several centuries and veiled it, making it wandering and permanently absent. It became suddenly unavailable, estranged from the confines where it had been kept for everyone to contemplate. It was pushed into an in-between: between the “body of the text”—its visible presence—, and the “reading” of the text—a multifarious and ever changing topography. The open space of the law was very much like the topos of the Puritans on the edge of the new continent: open, vast and mysterious. It was a space where relations of meaning had lost any kind of stability. It became as important for the Puritans to settle down and subdue the American earth as it was to settle down in the law and establish a set of fixed relations between the phenomenological and the epistemological worlds; a place for this interaction had to be found, and the only place where it was 34 “Let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to make the signs speak and to discover their meaning, hermeneutics; let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to distinguish the location of signs, to define what constitutes them as signs, and to know how and by what laws they are linked …” (Foucault, Order 29). 35 While the authority of the commentary was based on the collective authority of the Church and consequently under the responsibility of that institution, the individual reader who appeared after the Reformation had to assume alone the responsibility for his or her act of reading. This aspect is particularly important for Puritanism in America; much of what has been said on American individualism, the apparition of the American “I,” ought to be (re)considered from this viewpoint. It is also linked to the question of responsibility and responsiveness of the Puritans in the frame of their “calling” and “election.” Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 35 possible was “the page transcribing” them, “the non-place of language” (Foucault xvi-xvii). * * * The central part of The Wonders of the Invisible World, devoted to the Salem witch trials, dramatizes the tension between the visible and the invisible worlds and emphasizes the problem of absence and presence emphasized by the theoretical debate of the Reformation. Mather recounts the witch trials as a witness: he is not an active member of the courts that condemned the “witches.” The act of bearing witness is one of the key elements of the trials and of the book. Judging, testifying, condemning, and sometimes executing are acts that form the crux of Mather’s narrative. All these acts are related to an epistemological quest that leads the people staged here to taking dramatically important decisions from the ethical, social, and religious point of view. The trials posed the question of the “visible” proof of a person’s guilt, and of the validity of testimony as signs standing for, representing, persons, facts, or deeds. I shall not indulge in a detailed analysis of the juridical and socio-political consequences of these proofs, but I shall concentrate on their semiotic aspect and their ethical consequences for the American topos. Mather’s book shows how judiciary action which consists in enforcing the law results from fictionalizing acts, that is, from acts of reading that institute certain elements of phenomenological reality as signs and transform them into “proofs” of that reality. Mather wrote The Wonders of the Invisible World because he was called upon to testify. Although he acts and lives in the visible world, he responds to a call whose import has to do with both the visible and the invisible world: the call is issued by the law itself. It is the law that demands that the epistemological links between the visible and the invisible world be maintained. Mather claims that he is acting for the “children of New England,” but it is not primarily the preservation of the people that makes him act— even if such is his intention. It is rather the absolute necessity of the preservation of the law without which the community would dissolve. The ethical justification of the response to the call is in defense of the “body of the people,” although it is not from the people that the call is issued. The call comes from the law derived from the Puritans’ reading of the Scriptures, which orders their topos; in Jacques Derrida’s words, c’est la langue qui appelle (‘language calls’). 36 36 The phrase is a reformulation of Martin Heidegger’s difficult statement in Unterwegs zur Sprache where he writes: “Language speaks; ... Language forms man and makes him happen. When we think of him thus, man results from a promise of the lan- 36 Chapter 1 Mather must answer this call of language to bridge the gap between the visible and the invisible world, lest the community should be left with a world made of empty signs whose meaning could become totally arbitrary. The world would no longer be ordered by the spirit of God but by chance and arbitrariness, which is totally unacceptable from the religious, ethical, and political point of view. To be responsive to the call implies Mather’s responsibility because that response to the law is also a legislative act. It is a performative act of reading that has to do with ineffable epistemological links but has consequences for the “body of the people,” for the very bodies composing that people. In other words, it is an act of reading which has direct and possibly tragic consequences for the “real” world. The call emanates from the void created between the sign and its meaning. For Mather, the relationship between the two has to be brought within the confines of reason and be kept there, even if it always exceeds it. The community needs to colonize the epistemological space left open by the Reformation and turn it into an inhabitable topography. This process is parallel to the one that progressively turns the wild and hostile new continent from what Mather calls the “squallid American Desart” into what he comes to call “our land” (15), and “our country” (74). In The Wonders of the Invisible World, the toponymic and topographical conquest of the American continent, and the ruling of the epistemological space of the sign serve as a metonymy for one another. When cases of “witchcraft” start to plague the New England community, Cotton Mather acts as a witness, and the first reason for the publishing of the book in 1692 was to fight the incredulity of the public toward the reality of witchcraft in the colonies. The text was written in the aftermath of the Salem trials which led, as Richard Weisman confirms, to a very serious institutional and political crisis: Governor [Phips] and his supporters faced a test no less severe than that which had been imposed upon the confessors. To acknowledge error was to invite political disaster…. In his letter of October 12 [1692] Phips had complained that his enemies were already using the Salem trials to challenge his authority. (Weisman 167) Cotton Mather has to respond in that dreary situation: he does not act by choice, but because he is obligated by and to the law that linked up the “American Desart” and the “wonderful” world of God. The Wonders of the Invisible World appeared in June 1693 together with a text by Increase Mather (Cotton Mather’s father) purporting to bring “infallible proofs” of guage (Die Sprache spricht; ... Die Sprache erwirkt und er-gibt erst den Menschen. So gedacht wäre der Mensch ein Versprechen der Sprache) (my translation). Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 37 witchcraft. 37 Cotton Mather’s declared intention is ethical; he acts for the benefit of the community: To send abroad a book among such Readers, were a very unadvised thing, if a Man had not such Reasons to give, as I can bring, for such an Undertaking. Briefly, I hope it cannot be said, They are all so: No, I hope the Body of this People, are yet in such a Temper, as to be capable of applying their Thoughts, to make a Right Use of the stupendous and prodigious Things that are happening among us: And because I was concern’d, when I saw that no abler Hand emitted any Essays to engage the Minds of this People, in such holy, pious, fruitful Improvements, as God would have to be made of his amazing Dispensations now upon us. THEREFORE it is, that One of the Least among the Children of New-England, has here done, what is done. None, but the Father, who sees in secret, knows the Heart-Breaking Exercises, wherewith I have composed what is now going to be exposed, lest I should in any one thing miss of doing my designed Service for his Glory, and for his People; but I am now somewhat comfortably assured of his favourable acceptance; and, I will not fear; what can a Satan do unto me! (4) The call Cotton Mather answers is not a specifically addressed to him: he is not invested with a special mission, what he must do is maintain some sort of relationship between the “stupendous and prodigious things that are happening” within the Salem community and the divine law that governs these things. Cotton Mather must bear witness for the law, lest it should disappear completely, which would mean abandoning the community to dissolution and chaos. Clark analyses this predicament and writes: The Puritans had to find a way of bridging the epistemological gap between what they could discover in the signs available to them and what their faith told them lay beyond the ontological domain those signs defined, but they were faced with a science that based its conclusions on the failures of its systems and a hermeneutic that conflated meaning with mystery and definition with desire. (Clark 165) Clark’s statement shows that what is at stake for Mather (and other divines) is not only the immediate danger for the community, but the very existence, the very survival of the law. By reading the signs of “witchcraft” in the phenomenological world, Mather tries to make sure that the connection between these signs and the law that governs them is not interrupted. The sign represents the law in complex and intriguing ways, but Mather must believe that there is such a link because otherwise the law would become totally unavailable. The only way he can establish the validity of signs is to read them as signs of the law; he must bear witness for the law to make it present in its absence, for the sign that veils the law is also the only thing that reveals it. 37 See Increase Mather, Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men; Witchcrafts, Infallible Proofs of Guilt in such as Are Accused with that Crime. 38 Chapter 1 One of the first signs of the presence of the devil is the slackening of social and religious bonds in the community. Mather appeals to them to resist the devil through a greater cohesion of the members of the community: Since the Devil is come in great wrath upon us, let us not in our great wrath against one another provide a Lodging for him. … I am ashamed when I read French Authors giving this Character of Englishmen (Ils se haissent Les uns les autres & sont en Division Continuelle.) They hate one another, and are always Quarrelling one with another. And I shall be much more ashamed, if it become the Character of New-Englanders; which is indeed what the Devil would have. (89-90) For Mather, as for other Puritans, the collapsing of the social order is an indication of the collapsing of the divine order. Mather also conflates the divine order with the political order by accusing the French—a hereditary enemy at the time—of presenting the English with flaws that are the direct reversal of the words of the Bible, 38 i.e. a twisting of the law. His quoting in French the words of those who are “the enemies of [his] language” (74) is a further way of linking up the two orders. One could try a sociological and utilitarian explanation for Mather’s attitude by saying that he threatens people with burning in hell as a way of preventing them from running amuck on the new continent where the social and political system had yet to be built. Mather, however, does not appeal to solidarity among the colonists in utilitarian terms, or for what we might call “practical” reasons. Once again, it is not the immediate security and comfort of the community which is on his mind, but its survival in their world and the survival of that world itself. If people do not act together, Mather writes, the devil will take advantage of the simultaneous collapse of the social and divine order, which will lead to the disappearance of the topos governed by God’s law. If it does not prevail, the order of God will be replaced by the (dis)order of the devil. Mather’s interpretation of the signs of the devil takes place within Calvinist semiology, which means that he reads them as belonging to an economy of signs. In his reading, a breach of the economic system of the community works, in a metonymical displacement, as a breach of the economy of the sign. Even though there is no direct correspondence between a sign of corruption of the economic system (a breach of solidarity) and its meaning (“witchcraft,” presence of the devil), for Mather the bad functioning of the system in the phenomenological world means that the epistemological 38 Compare with John 13: 34 A new commandment giue I unto you, that ye loue one another: as I haue loved you, that ye al o loue one another. 35 By this hal all me knowe that ye are my di ciples, if ye haue loue to one another. (The Geneva Bible) Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 39 links that make the possibility of ordering that world in the name of the law is endangered. In a communal economic system where solidarity is the tacit rule, the accusation of “witchcraft” can befall an individual as a result of an incident apparently so slight as someone’s refusal to lend a tool or a horse to a neighbor. Thus, Elizabeth How is charged with “witchcraft” by some villagers “who were grievously tortured by sensible and evident Witchcrafts, and ... complained of the Prisoner as the cause of their Trouble” (149). Cotton Mather describes the testimonies at How’s trial: One Isaacc Cummings refusing to lend his Mare unto the husband of this How, the Mare was within a day or two taken in a strange condition ... [U]sing a Pipe of Tobacco for the Cure of the Beast, a blue Flame issued out of her, took hold of her Hair, and not only spread and burnt on her, but it also flew upwards towards the Roof of the Barn, and had like to have set the Barn on Fire: And the Mare dyed very suddenly. (152-53) Elizabeth How was found guilty and executed. What might appear as an extraordinary disproportion between cause and effect—a petty dispute between neighbors and a death sentence—must be considered in the perspective of an epistemological quest whose outcome is of utmost importance for the community. It is impossible to imagine that the economic loss or the social harm can be even remotely big enough to justify an accusation which leads to the execution of a person. Weisman writes appropriately that “it is only when the accusation is conceived in terms quite different from those in which it was presented that its plausibility as well as its structural basis become accessible to the historical observer” (Weisman 78). A relatively small disruption of the economic system is not important per se but for Mather it can be the trace of an offense of cosmic dimension because it jeopardizes the economy of a system whose foundation is the validity of signs qua signs. To understand the importance of the signs of witchcraft we must not look at what they are, but at what they represent: what they mean is not as important as how they mean. For Cotton Mather, the danger of “witchcraft” is that the world might become unreadable. As soon as he tries to ascertain its presence, “witchcraft” loses its materiality. It escapes from the realm where signs stand for an ontological domain to escape into epistemology. The materiality of facts dissolves in a tropological construction where these facts become spectral. Cotton Mather “reads” the presence of the devil in the colonies within a semiotics derived from the act of reading. The world is textualized on the model of the Bible. The reading of signs, like the reading of the Word, is a way of bridging the gap between the visible world and the “wonders of the invisible world.” The Scriptures provide that sort of bridge because they both are and represent Christ. They allow men to “read” the world, i.e. make sense of it by establishing a link between their phenomenological reality and the onto- 40 Chapter 1 logical domain that sustained it. Thus, Calvin regarded the Scriptures as something that allowed men to read in general: Just as old bleary-eyed men and those with weak vision, if you thrust before them the most beautiful volume, even if they recognize it to be some sort of writing, yet can scarcely construe two words, but with the aid of spectacles they will begin to read distinctly; so Scriptures, gathering otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God. This, therefore, is a special gift, where God, to instruct the church, not merely uses mute teachers but also opens his own most hallowed lips. (Institutes, I, vi.1; quoted in Clark 58) For Calvin as for Mather, the reading of the world is based on the reading of the sacred texts. However, as both Calvin and Luther had made clear, there is a non-correspondence between the ontological and epistemological status of the Word: Christ is present in the Scriptures by the very Word which has to come to bear witness for (absent) Christ. Similarly, the signs that compose the world are not epistemologically sufficient to endow the world with meaning: only when they are read are they linked up with the order of God, and thus given a sense. For Luther and Calvin, the ultimate value of the Word depended on faith which made it possible to connect the Word and Christ as one. Similarly, for Mather who deals with the witch trials, these problems of reading and faith are intimately linked. Here, it is the presence of the witness which has to replace what is testified for. In the proceedings of a court, the validity of a testimony depends on an act of faith: it can only be valid if the court is ready to believe in it, or as I may put it in the frame of the present discussion, if the court is ready to “read” it as valid. The belief in someone’s bearing witness implies a willing suspension of disbelief: the deposition of a witness becomes the presence and the visible sign of an absent and invisible truth. It is the blocking in time of the truth, or rather of a truth: the one that can be construed at the moment of the trial through the evidence brought to bear by the witness(es). In the witch trials described by Cotton Mather, conviction is always attained by using the testimonies of the witnesses, and they are always considered as proof. This is not, in itself, something very particular: a witness can make all the difference in a case. Before the Court of Oyer and Terminer, as before other courts, the witness must have certain characteristics of good reputation and trustworthiness if his or her testimony is to be retained by the court. There are quite a few instances in Mather’s text where he insists that all precautions in that direction are taken, and that the people who are called to the bar are not just dishonest or interested. What is totally unusual is the fact that people are convicted and sentenced— sometimes to death—on the basis of so-called “spectral evidence.” This particular form of proof was an important and controversial juridical issue both in Europe and in America. In Mather’s text it is strongly related to the Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 41 issue of the epistemological bridge he is trying to build between the visible and the invisible world. “Spectral evidence” allowed a tribunal to condemn someone on the basis of a testimony stating that a “witch” had appeared to the witness. “[T]his form of evidence,” Weisman writes, “was founded on the belief that demons could assume the identity of a person, and, as a specter, inflict harm on the body of another person or simply perform general mischief. If this evidence were admitted, the accused would be left with virtually no means of challenge. If she were miles away from the crime or even in a large public gathering at the time of the assault, the accuser could claim that it was her specter rather than her person that established her guilt” (Weisman 104). Modern readers will probably find it hard to admit that someone could be sent to jail or indeed hanged on the basis of this sort of evidence. Mather recounts that in order to “fix witchcraft on the prisoner” the first thing used is the testimony of the “Bewitched”: the Shape of the Prisoner did oftentimes very grievously Pinch them, Choak them, Bite them and Afflict them; urging them to write their Names in a Book, which the said Spectre called, Ours. … One of them [the “bewitched”] did further testifie, that it was the Shape of this Prisoner, with another, which one day took her away from her Wheel, and carrying her to the Riverside, threatened there to Drown her, if she did not Sign to the Book mentioned: which she refused. … Another testifi’d, the Apparition of Ghosts unto the spectre of Bishop, crying out, You Murdered us! About the Truth whereof, there was in the Matter of Fact but too much suspicion. (130) The apparitions are “spectral” but their effects are extremely concrete and physical, and the persons are affected by them in their bodies: the ghosts “pinch” them, “bite” them, and even kill them. One may be tempted to challenge the “reality” of these apparitions and their effects and accuse Mather of making it all up, that is, of turning historical reality into “fiction.” Even if we yield to the temptation of dismissing Mather’s text as the narrative of a neurotic divine and ideology-ridden writer, we still must confront the fact that people were killed on the basis of that “fiction.” Not only is testimony the main element of proof in the cases described by Mather, but it is the only one. It is always the construction of a fiction depending on the willing suspension of disbelief which leads to sentencing people. Even when other proof is mentioned by Mather, in the end they always boil down to the testimony of one or several persons. Mather mentions extraordinary cases where the “bewitched” are said to have vomited nails, but mysteriously this material proof can never be produced before the court. It is nevertheless retained as proof because of the testimony of people who say they have seen the nails. The text shows that Mather is aware of the fragility of his argument. He strives to show that although the nails themselves cannot be shown, the 42 Chapter 1 testimonies that replace them are just as valid. The tangible proofs always disappear before the court can examine them. In Mather’s text the same thing happens: the proof is announced, presented, promised by Mather, but in the very last moment it is to be found nowhere. The material proof is absorbed by the “fiction” of the text in the same way as it is purloined by the devil in “reality.” Bridget Bishop’s trial is a case in point. After several persons have borne witness to say that she was a witch, Mather announces: To render it further unquestionable, that the Prisoner at the Bar, was the Person truly charged in THIS Witchcraft, there were produced many Evidences of OTHER Witchcrafts by her perpetrated.... (131) At this point we expect that Mather is going to “produce” the visible sign of Bishop’s guilt. As readers who take Cotton Mather seriously and try to do him justice by assessing his responsibility, we would like to “see” these “many evidences.” What follows instead is a list of further witnesses all testifying more or less the same thing: Samuel Gray testifi’d, That about fourteen year ago ... he saw plainly a Woman between the Cradle and the Bed-side. ... The Child in the Cradle gave a great screech, and the woman disappeared, It was long before the Child could be quieted; and tho’ it were a very likely thriving Child, yet from this time it pined away, and, after divers months, died in a sad Condition. (132) In an accumulation of pathetic disquieting elements characteristic of Mather’s descriptions, the next witnesses form a succession of stories with a build up of dramatic tension (132-38). Finally, the irrefutable material proof promised by Mather is “shown” by him after ten pages devoted to the scrupulous reporting of testimonies: One thing that made against the Prisoner was, her being evidently convicted of gross Lying in the Court, several times, while she was making her plea; but besides this, a Jury of Women found a preternatural Teat upon her body: but upon a second search, within 3 or 4 hours, there was no such thing to be seen, There was also an Account of other people whom this Woman had Afflicted; and there might have been many more, if they had been enquired for; but there was no need for them. (137-38) For a brilliant rhetorician such as Mather this is a poor paragraph. Apart from the fact that it is not even remotely as well structured and organized as the paragraphs that precede it (the confusion of arguments is extreme here), it is worth noting that the passage about the “preternatural teat” that is to confirm the charge of “witchcraft” is squeezed between the prisoner’s “gross lying” and the peremptory conclusion: there was no need of further proofs. The “preternatural teat” disappears but this does not affect Mather’s certainty. For the reader, the mark on Bridget Bishop’s body is almost as evanescent as the mention of it in Mather’s text, let alone in the Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 43 reader’s memory, overwhelmed as it is by the accumulation of testimonies and the definitive conclusion of the paragraph. After reporting on the trials themselves, Mather adds as a post-script of sorts a few pages that are to evidence that his account of the trials is trustworthy. In these pages he purports to present some “Matchless Curiosities” of witchcraft. He claims that he “shall Report nothing but with good Authority, and what [he] would like to invite all [his] Readers to examine, while ‘tis yet Fresh and New, that if there be found any mistake, it may be as willingly Retracted, as it was unwillingly Committed” (159). Maybe because he feels that he has come dangerously close to “gross lying,” Mather insists once more on material proofs of witchcraft. But as in the previous cases the material proof dissolves just as it seems closest at hand: First, One of our bewitched people, was cruelly assaulted by a Spectre, that, she said, ran at her with a spindle: tho’ no body else in the Room, could see either the Spectre or the spindle. At Last in her miseries, giving a snatch at the Spectre, she pull’d the spindle away, and it was no sooner got into her hand, but the other people then present beheld, that it was indeed a Real, Proper, Iron spindle, belonging they knew to whom; which when they lock’d up very safe, it was nevertheless by Demons unaccountably stole away, to do further mischief. (162) Maybe because this process repeats itself several times, Cotton Mather tampers with what he calls “all these evidences” (147), or the “sum of Evidence” (116), and is less affirmative about these proofs. He repeats so many times that there are proofs for the conviction of the suspects that a distracted reader may end up taking his word for it: Secondly, another of our bewitched people, was haunted with a most abusive Spectre, which came to her, she said, with a sheet about her. After she had undergone a Deal of Teaze, from the Annoyance of the Spectre, she gave a violent snatch at the sheet, that was upon it; wherefrom she tore a corner, which in her hand immediately became Visible to a Roomful of Spectators; a palpable Corner of a Sheet. Her Father who was holding her, catch’d that he might keep what his daughter had so strangely seized, but the unseen Spectre had like to have pull’d his hand off, by endeavoring to wreast it from him; however he still held it and I suppose has it, still to show; it being but a few hours ago, namely about the beginning of this October, that this Accident happened; in the family of one Pitman, at Manchester. (162-63) Cotton Mather insists on the materiality and the corporeal reality of the phenomena. Things become “visible” to a multitude of ocular witnesses; the spindle is “real, proper, iron,” etc. However, all that “reality” tends to dissolve inexplicably, under the influence of the devil presumably. In the end, the “unquestionable” proof rests in the testimonies of the witnesses alone and never exceeds its spectral status. In the witch trials as in any trial, the witnesses at the bar represent the only proof; they “re-present” it, that is, they make it present again. The 44 Chapter 1 judges have only two possibilities: either they accept the testimonies as valid and make the leap of faith that will bring about a condemnation, or they reject it because their reading does not materialize in the real world. In The Wonders of the Invisible World, the act of bearing witness is the only trace of witchcraft the judges—and the reader—can “see.” It is its only reality and actuality, but this act which is an act of reading, makes Mather write: “the very Devils are walking about our Streets, with lengthened Chains, making a dreadful Noise in our Ears, and Brimstone even without a Metaphor, is making an hellish and horrid stench in our Nostrils” (95). Like the law in whose name the “witches” are sentenced to death, “real” witchcraft is forever gone and it is unavailable to Mather and the judges of the trials. Their effects, however, are tangible, material, and visible. * * * In the above testimonies against Bridget Bishop, as in other instances described by Mather, the visual elements are predominant: the witches “appear” as “shapes.” These visual and bodily aspects are important to understand what is at stake in the Salem trials. Even though it is ultimately their souls which are in danger, the fact that the people involved in the affair suffer in their bodies is an essential element. The process that leads to the embodiment of the devil, to his presence “without metaphor,” becomes for Mather a way of controlling his “wonderful” and irrational manifestations. In all the cases Mather reports, not only do the victims go through physical ordeals, but in most cases the devil demands that they sign their name in his “book.” Thus the devil takes possession both physically and spiritually of his victims. On the other hand, from the other perspective, as it were, by declaring that a person is “bewitched” the judges ascribe a human body, a face, and a name to the devil: the “witch” embodies the devil. That which could only be designated in a metaphor acquires a corporeal and visible reality. The “witch” materializes the “evil spirits” very much in the same way in which Christ materializes the Word of God, or in which the Word in the Bible materializes Christ’s presence. The trials consisted in proving the intrinsic link between the malefic and “wonderful” acts of the devil and the body of a person: “To the villagers who presented their evidence before the court, the witch was not merely the doer of evil deeds, she was the perfect physical and moral embodiment of these deeds” (Weisman 91). 39 This ascription of a body and a name to the devil turns the “bewitched” into living prosopopoeias of the devil. 39 Significantly, Weisman uses the feminine pronoun “she” for the witch; see my remarks on the subject below. Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 45 This tropological transformation is used by the judges and by Cotton Mather to rule and order a space where certain signs cannot not be accounted for otherwise. “Witchcraft” allows them to put a name and a shape on entities and phenomena that their hermeneutics cannot encompass and explain. It is significant that witchcraft and the devil are associated with the new continent and its native inhabitants; according to Weisman, “the colonial response to witchcraft was fundamentally the product of the transplantation of European beliefs in folk magic to the North American Frontier” (16). The prosecution of witchcraft is inextricably linked to the Puritan enterprise, the imperatives of Puritan semiology, and the topos the Puritans founded on it. In Mather’s text, “witchcraft” is the name and the shape they give to a form of otherness for which the Puritans have no other theoretical tool. For Cotton Mather, “witches” are the embodiment, the visible sign of the spiritual dangers that threaten the inhabitants of the colonies. They manifest the presence of the devil, but although they are “real” people with “real” bodies, they are also signs that must be “read” within the semiotic system to which they belong. The witch trials epitomize the tension between the visible and the invisible world, between body and spirit. The Puritans knew that there was a definitive discontinuity between the two realms and that the only thing that was important, ultimately, was the salvation of their soul. Their world was essentially spiritual and the vicissitudes of their mortal bodies and the material world had no influence on that. But this division of the world that led to the very strict separation of body and soul was a permanent source of debate and dispute among the Puritan intellectuals. For the Puritans, the Word in the Bible and the material world belonged to the same epistemological domain. This meant that both of them had to be “read” because they both reflected the divine order. In The Wonders of the Invisible World, the issue for Mather is to figure out the way the mundane order reflects or diffracts the divine order. Some of the victims of the devil reaffirm the division between body and soul as an image of the division between the visible and the invisible. One of the persons “bewitched” by Elizabeth How declares that: Tho’ How could afflict and torment her Body, yet she could not hurt her Soul: And, That the Truth of this matter would appear, when she would be dead and gone. (153) A statement of this kind should be a definitive one: if it can be established that the devil only affects the mortal coil of the bewitched, then Mather has fulfilled his mission by reassuring the public. However, the rest of the book shows that matters cannot be settled so easily and that the relations between the visible and the invisible as they result from acts of reading needs permanent attention and revaluation. 46 Chapter 1 This semiotic problem of the visible and the invisible staged in The Wonders of the Invisible World also feeds on the overwhelming question of election. For the Puritans, every individual was for all times either among the elect or the reprobate, and there was nothing he or she could do about it. While this could lead to a very fatalistic attitude, a “come what may” of sorts, Mather’s text shows that it leads on the contrary to a desperate desire to know. Over the first decades of the settlement in America various attempts had been made to ascertain how the visible and the invisible interacted, and thereby, ascertain one’s salvation. William Perkins came up with a scale of ten points, ten signs along which individuals had to progress towards salvation. It does not come as a surprise that this scale was rapidly under attack by other divines such as John Cotton who considered the scale to be too worldly: hypocrites could feign signs of salvation and Cotton concluded that only the presence of the Holy Spirit could save a soul. Others, such as the “Plymouth Separatists” headed by Thomas Hooker, were close to Cotton’s position but claimed that man’s finite perception could not perceive with certainty the presence of the Holy Spirit. The interaction of the two realms crystallized in the issue of election determined social and political life for the Puritans on the new continent. They had left the cities and villages of Europe and arrived in what they perceived as a totally unstructured space. It was urgent to order that space so as to establish the rules of communal life and avoid the complete breaking down of these rules. Order had to be imposed on the “howling wilderness” and on the people who were to inhabit it. 40 It was necessary to establish a link between the divine and the mundane order in a relation- 40 The necessity to come up with an ordering of the new topos appears in the somewhat “improvised” aspect of the Puritan enterprise; it also shows how little equipped, both theoretically and practically, the first colonists were before launching on their formidable enterprise: Few details are known about the arrangements made for this [John Winthrop’s] expedition.... A group of prominent Puritans, largely from the eastern counties of Norfolk, Essex, and Suffolk, controlled a trading company which acquired commercial rights to a large tract of land in New England. By a remarkable oversight, the charter granting these rights did not stipulate where the headquarters of the firm should be located. ... The group took unexpected advantage of it: they distributed the company’s remaining shares among the people who were planning to make the journey or willing to sponsor it, and simply set sail for America with the charter on board. In effect, they had moved an entire corporation—its books, offices, stockholders, and directors—to a new location outside the country and were preparing to use that business instrument as the basis for a civil government. The charter would serve as their title to the land and as their fundamental constitution. ... John Winthrop was called “Governor” even before the party sailed from England, not because he anticipated election to that high office but because he occupied a position in the corporation equivalent to what we now designate as “chairman of the board.” ... This document provided the government of the Bay with its only legal claim for almost sixty years. (Erikson 37-38) Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 47 ship of resemblance and sameness. Ordering the American topos, turning it into an inhabitable topography, required reducing the otherness of witchcraft to the sameness of the law. Foucault comments: “The history of madness would be the history of the Other—that of which, for a given culture, is at once interior and foreign, therefore to be excluded (so as to exorcize the interior danger) but by being shut away (in order to reduce its otherness); whereas the history of the order imposed on things would be the history of the order of the Same—of that which, for a given culture, is both dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be collected together by identities” (xxiv). The “reading” of a semiotic system based on the reading of the Scriptures was to provide the community with its social and political structure and shape the topography in which this society was to interact. If it was not ordered, the semiotic space would dissolve into a free for all where anything goes and where no ethical, social, or political structure could exist. Cotton Mather is well aware of that, and the entire book is a desperate attempt at organizing a semiotic system which would sustain the ethical demand of the survival of the community. His response to the call of the law of men and to the law that makes his interpretation mandatory is not an intellectual speculation; it is a performative act of reading decisive for very real aspects of the citizens’ lives in the colonies. 41 Mather understands that he must deal with the worldly signs, he must “read” them, otherwise the community will lack the mundane foundation it needs to function and will yield to a mysticism that could threaten the equilibrium of both Church and State. It is Cotton Mather’s constant preoccupation to single out and positively identify the signs of the devil. Most people—especially today— would agree that Mather was wrong, that what he mistook for the presence of the devil was actually a case of collective hysteria or something that had its origin in political and social disorders. It may seem very easy to find a more reasonable or a more scientific explanation for what happened in Salem by looking at it from the vantage point of our technology-ridden world. Some readers might even suspect Mather of pursuing personal interests, monetary or hierarchical; yet, whatever we may think of the credulity of Cotton and Increase Mather there can be no ground for charging them with acting otherwise than conscientiously, and they had claims on the gratitude of their countrymen sufficient to counterbalance their error of judgment on this occasion. If we admit indeed that Cotton Mather acted conscientiously, always trying to preserve the best interest of his people, 41 Weisman is right to point out that “to acknowledge the errors of the Court of Oyer and Terminer was to risk the collapse of Phip’s regime. To deny error was to erode the moral pledge that had sanctified New England’s special relationship with God” (167). 48 Chapter 1 then this poses a disquieting question about the way the Puritans constructed the topography of their “real” world through acts of reading, and also about the way we construct what we call our “real” world. Alternative explanations for the 1692 crises—just like Cotton Mather’s account of it—all try to come up with a rationale that would make it possible to encompass the “witchcraft cases” within the boundaries of our understanding. The twentieth century has ways of explaining things that Mather did not have at his disposal: psychiatry, linguistics, anthropology, and so forth. 42 This does not mean at all that he, and the other intellectuals of his time, were only doing what they could with the limited means at their disposal. The Wonders of the Invisible World was written by a highly educated man, a very subtle thinker, and a man who knew what he was doing, in full awareness of the risks he was taking and of his incumbent responsibility. 43 When modern critics dismiss Cotton Mather’s analysis of the situation in Salem at the end of the seventeenth century, they do so because they oppose their conclusions to his: they are right; he was wrong. While I am not trying to argue that Mather got it right—I am firmly convinced that he was deceived—, I would like to propose that his conclusions, and consequently his writing, were based on an act of reading, different in its procedure but rather similar in its ethical intention and its epistemological aim, to the act of reading that leads to modern interpretations of what happened in Salem in 1692 or of what is happening in the world in 2009. This does not mean, in any sort of way, that all the different conclusions are equally valid, let alone that they all mean the same thing. All the (hi)stories we can tell, and even more importantly write, about the Salem trials become signs that must be read in turn and made sense of within a semiotic system. Every new act of reading will imply the responsibility of the reader: the ethical import of every sign is not in the sign itself but in the act of reading. The Wonders of the Invisible World is a text that shows the obligation put on Cotton Mather to “read” the signs that inscribe the presence of the devil in the colonies and lead to the witch trials. Mather has to commit himself, 42 “We should not shrink from concluding that Elizabeth Knapp [later executed as a “witch”] was truly ill—by our standards if not theirs. The psychiatric concept of conversion affords an appropriate starting point. ... The literature of clinical psychiatry is full of cases evincing symptoms immediately analogous to the bizarre acting of Elizabeth Knapp” (Demos 117). 43 Numerous pieces of writing—aside from The Wonders—show that Mather had weighed his role and his responsibility in the trials. He co-signed with eleven eminent clergymen the document entitled “The Return of Several Ministers Consulted” and started a long-lasting dispute on the subject of the trials with another intellectual of the time, Robert Calef, the author of More Wonders of the Invisible World. The latter text, published in 1700, was a response to Cotton Mather’s Wonders and the beginning of the intellectual strife between the two men. Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 49 for if he does not, the devil will take over the New World and that world will dissolve in chaos. He tries to construct the topography of the New World while the devil tries to annihilate it. The battle Mather fights against the devil is a battle about making sense of the world: he is trying to come up with a rationalized, comprehensive, and orderly reading, while the devil is trying to return the world to—or keep it in—senselessness. Throughout his narrative of the trials Mather insists on how the devil confuses man by displaying tokens that normally belong to God. This has to do of course with Manichean tendencies at work in Protestantism, but is not simply a substitution game where the “bad” values are symbolically replaced by the “good” ones. The real threat is that the whole semiological system should crumble. Signs lose their orthodox meaning when, for instance, the “bewitched” make apparent their commitment to the devil in would-be baptisms: [The Bewitched are] Baptized by a Fiend, using this firm upon them, Thou art mine, and I have full power over thee! afterwards communicating in an Hellish Bread and Wine, by that Fiend administered unto them. (87) By using signs for his own purpose, the devil endows them with an arbitrary nature which makes them dangerously independent: according to how they are used, i.e. “read,” they can be signs of God or signs of the devil. It is Mather’s extraordinarily important task to prevent the devil from purloining those signs and from colonizing the epistemological space these signs cover and delimit. If the devil were to succeed, these visible signs would become a diffraction of his invisible world and not of the invisible world of God: it would mean that the devil would actually take over the world, his victory would be complete. For Mather, however confusedly and indirectly, the world is a reflection of God’s order. Following the line of propagation of Calvinism in the New World, Mather re-establishes the links between the hidden and the accessible; for him, the world of man must resemble God’s realm: “There are no resemblances without signatures. The world of similarity can only be a “world of signs”—a world Foucault calls un monde marqué” (27). The Scriptures are the warrant of that order and they testify to the presence of Christ among the elect, but the devil is present as well in the community. There are “incarnate legions” (14) of devils that threaten New England, and in a reversal of God’s incarnation in Christ “the Devils are ... in Person come down upon us with such a Wrath, as is justly much, and will quickly be more, the Astonishment of the World” (75). Both the devil and Christ are present in the community. It is therefore vital to read the signs of the presence of each of them correctly, lest the devil should deceive the people by appropriating the signs of Christ: 50 Chapter 1 We must no more be Haughty, because of the Lords Holy Mountain among us; No it becomes us rather to be, Humble, because we have been such an Habitation of Unholy Devils! (89) T he double presence of Christ and the devil renders the semiotic system shaping the Puritans’ world very fragile and unstable. Every single sign must be interpreted cautiously, always keeping in mind that it is meaningful only when used properly and integrated into the right kind of system. The devil is for Mather a great deceiver: he appears for what he is not, and he tries to tempt people into sin by introducing a confusion of signs: The Devil will make a deceitful and unfaithful use of the Scriptures to make his Temptations forceable. … When the Devil would poyson men with false Doctrines, he’ll quote Scriptures for them; a Quaker himself, will have the First Chapter of John always in his mouth. (187-88) Even the most holy signs are at the mercy of the devil if they are not supported by a link that relates them to the ontological realm they stand for. Even the Scriptures, that is, the text of the Bible, the most visible sign of Christ’s presence, are helpless without the help of their author-father. As a son stepping in for his deceased or absent father, Mather provides that help by replacing the stranded signs within an orderly topography. Following Calvin’s metaphor, he uses the Scriptures as the optical instrument that allows him to “see” the divine order: As for ourselves this Day, ’tis a Fire of sore Affliction and Confusion wherein we are Embroiled; but it is no inconsiderable advantage unto us, that we have the Company of this Glorious and Sacred Book the REVELATION to assist us in our exercises. (38) Mather has to struggle with the “confusion” of the world, and his text bears the traces of that fight against senselessness and the arbitrariness of signs introduced by the devil. These are the times when he realizes that he is facing a chasm which, as it were, folds onto itself to become double. Not only can he not face the devil who tries to deceive him with “Blasphemous Imitations of certain Things recorded about our Saviour or His Prophets, or the Saints in the Kingdom of God” (161), but he also constantly has to perform a leap of faith into the chasm because the all-prevailing law of God does not seem to put a halt to the activity of the devil. In the leap of faith he is forced to perform Mather’s tragic equivocation is to take resemblance for proof. If signs have no value that can be securely attributed to them, then interpretation in terms of simile becomes inadequate and dangerous. In his analysis of the confusion of signs, Cotton Mather needs the warrant of God’s law and that of men’s law; he needs the support of his “(F)ather,” someone (or “something”) who would authenticate His signature and declare thereby that these are His signs. Cotton Mather reaches a stage where “[s]imilitude is no longer the form of knowl- Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 51 edge but rather the occasion of error, the danger to which one exposes oneself when one does not examine the obscure regions of confusions” (Foucault 51). Mather has to decipher the signs of the presence of the devil, but in addition to that he has to come to terms with the fact that the devil can only afflict the community with God’s permission, which leads him to say that the devil is himself a part of the divine order: The Devil, in the prosecution, and the execution of his wrath upon them, often gets a Liberty to make a Descent upon the Children of men. ... But as ’tis said, A sparrow of the air does not fall down without the will of God; so I may say, Not a Devil in the Air, can come down without the leave of God. (48) But this horribly complicates the situation. At the beginning of the text, it was at least rather clear that the Puritans were an elect people that fought a just war against the devil in the name of God. They were the “High Priests of the World,” and whatever afflictions they had to endure were the signs of the devil. When the situation is no longer so obvious, when signs of the presence of God can equally be the signs of the presence of the devil, much caution and deliberation must be used, lest the ordering of the world should be ascribed to the wrong lord. Cotton Mather goes to all sorts of lengths to explain this paradox: the members of the community are to fight against an enemy thrown upon them by the very God for whom they are fighting. Convolute syntax and a lexical range where the same words are applied—often within the same sentence—both to God and the devil seem to show Mather’s confusion and his sense that what is at stake is of vital importance: The Great God is about a Great Work at this day among us: Now, there is extream Hazard, lest the Devil who by Compulsion must submit to that Great Work, may also by Permission, come to Confound that Work; both in the Detections of some, and in the Confessions of others, whose Ungodly deeds may be brought forth, by a Great Work of God; there is great Hazard lest the Devil intertwist some of his Delusions. (104) The devil can “[transform] himself into an Angel of Light, and may pretend justice and yet intend mischief” (164). This is the kind of transformation that also contaminates Mather’s text. Both the devil and Christ are given bodily materiality in the passage that follows this description, and, in a fantastic way, they are both given the same attributes. Once again, the same sign could very easily slide from one side to the other, and Mather is at the mercy of the slightest slip of the pen: The Birds of prey (and indeed the Devils most literally in the shape of great Birds! ) are flying about. Would we find a Covert from these Vultures? Let us then Hear our Lord Jesus from Heaven Clocquing unto us, O that you would be gathered under my wings! (102) 52 Chapter 1 Both the devil and Christ are described as winged creatures, they both try to draw people towards them, and it could be tragically easy to mistake one for the other. To avoid such fatal mistakes all these signs must be “read” with utmost attention; the sense of solidarity in the community must prevail and the colonists are to present a common front against the devil. This means that the “reading” of signs must be codified so that everybody can stick to a common rule of interpretation. The battle against the devil is fought on the field of reading and semiology, it has to do with “fiction,” but it has ethical, political, and social consequences. It is a battle in which strategic decisions have to be taken, and this is particularly the case for the judges of the witch trials who have to decide whether a person shall live or die: Arguments from the Providence of God, on the one side, and from our Charity towards Man on the other side, have made this now to become a most agitated Controversie among us. There is an Agony produced in the Minds of Men, lest the Devil should sham us with Devices, of perhaps a finer thred, than was ever practised upon the World. The whole business is become hereupon so Snarled, and the determination of the Question one way or another, so dismal, that our Honourable Judges have a Room for Jehoshphat’s Exclamation, We know not what to do! (83-84) The ultimate step in the devil’s appropriation of signs is that they are no longer signs of the presence of God that Satan uses deceitfully: they become free agents that can fall on either side if much discrimination and deliberation is not used. The Wonders of the Invisible World shows that no matter how careful the judges are, the workings of the invisible world are always out of the compass of man’s understanding; accordingly it is impossible to be sure of one’s reading. But Cotton Mather is not ready to go so far: he needs to believe in the laws of supernatural causation that allow courts of law to proceed with confidence in their determination of responsibility for acts of “witchcraft.” Mather thinks within the frame of God’s Law that guarantees the validity of signs. Denying that validity would set the devil free; he would “[cease] to be an agent of God and [act] on his own initiative,” gaining thereby his independence from the law. 44 * * * 44 On this complex issue of the independence of the devil, see Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth, especially “The Satan in the Old Testament.” In More Wonders of the Invisible World, Robert Calef charged Cotton Mather with having made of the devil an independent being that no longer submitted to the law of God. Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 53 The controversy surrounding the Salem witch trials was not limited in time to the seventeenth century. Over the years, the trials have triggered much debate as to their meaning; critics and historians have tried to assess what “really” happened and who was actually responsible for what may appear as a tragic “delusion.” Another major source of disagreement about the trials has been to assess whether they had any importance at all, and whether it was worth considering them as a major event in the history of the American nation. Were they a pivotal point in American history, or were they just one of these trivial incidents, one of the hiccups of history that fill the pages of chronicles? Certain scholars, like Perry Miller, give them no importance at all. For Miller, they are only the expression of the Puritans’ attraction to the irrational, and he claims that “the intellectual history of New England up to 1720 can be written as though no such thing [as witchcraft and the trials] ever happened.” He adds, “It had no effects on the ecclesiastical or political situation, it does not figure in the institutional or ideological development” (Miller, New England 191). Miller is probably right, insofar as it cannot be shown that the trials dramatically changed the course of American history. After all, tragic as they may have been, the trials only affected a very small portion of the population and corresponded to a phenomenon (“witchcraft”) which soon disappeared. Although there were quite a few victims, epidemics, battles, and natural catastrophes were far more murderous. When considered from this naturalistic point of view, the trials are easy to dismiss as secondary. I believe, however, that they are extremely important because they highlight and crystallize interpretative modes that had a prevailing influence on the way a country (that did not exist yet) developed. They reveal how ethical decisions are directly derived from acts of reading, which engage the readers’ responsibility, and entails important consequences for their neighbors. The trials show the necessity felt by the Puritans to relate the untamed topography of the New World to the rules of the Divine order. To achieve this, Puritan semiology that had been let loose by the Reformation had to be brought before the Law and ruled by it. It had to be brought before the Court of Reason. The Puritans had to protect themselves from the “howling wilderness” behind what Slotkin calls a “palisade of language” (115). The irrational needed to be rationalized, which means that it had to be integrated within the bounds of logos. In The Wonders of the Invisible World, we find a mise en abyme of a juridical process. The text features Cotton Mather’s deliberation on the trials and their ethical import, but also his report on human affairs, ruled by human laws. The main aspect is, however, his confrontation with the law that makes him read the events of Salem in terms of a struggle of the divine law with the devil. He seeks a common place for all these entities to coexist. The desire he expresses through his account of the trials is to order the topos of the New World according to God’s Law, “in its image and its resem- 54 Chapter 1 blance.” Thus, the communal topos becomes the common place where the laws of men and God’s law cohabit within a relationship in which the same reflects the same. But Mather can never confront, not even envisage, God’s law because it has left the space that he is roaming. He wants to rule and order the topos of the colonies so that it can work like the realm of God, but the law of reading never produces similarities, it only produces differences, and “witchcraft” is one expression of those differences. The signs of “witchcraft” are textualized, that is, turned into a text by Cotton Mather, but it may be more appropriate to say that they are “re-textualized” since they never really left the realm of textuality. Mather’s reading “takes place” in the American colonies, it “occupies space, and makes that space into a place, with orientable coordinates” (Miller, Versions 22). Mather’s reading “takes place,” that is, it takes up the place, colonizing it and organizing its topography. The undifferentiated wilderness acquires coordinates and landmarks that delineate the advance of the colonization. The trials are an act of colonization: this time not a territorial colonization but an ideological and a semiotic one. “The Devils’ Territories” are claimed by the English language and the realm of logical reasoning. The furrows of the ploughs and the lines of writers such as Cotton Mather forever change the aspect of the American topography. All the proceedings of the trials, such as they are reported by Mather, are the story of a triple conquest: the aggressive encompassing by reason of phenomena that were beyond its territory; the conquest by textuality of a space that had been thus far beyond its reach; the annexation of gender-defined, racial, and religious otherness to the realm of the same. While Mather and other Puritan divines may appear today as people who yielded to superstitious fears and uncontrolled impulses, the text shows paradoxically Mather’s concern to rationalize witchcraft. The “witches” were judged by a court which represented the law and reason. Mather believes—or tries to believe—that a logical and reasonable procedure will do away with the undecidability of signs and thus reduce to a minimum the risk of making mistakes. He writes: The Devils may sometimes have a permission to Represent an Innocent Person, as Tormenting such as are under Diabolical Molestations: But that such things are Rare and Extraordinary; especially when such matters come before Civil Judicature. The Opinion expressed with so much Caution and Judgement, seems to be the prevailing sense of many others, who are men Eminently Cautious and Judicious; and have both Argument and History to Countenounce them in it. (18) He insists on how prudent the judges are. In another passage, where he compares the events of Salem to comparable events in England, he writes that the American judges were even more cautious and appealed even more to reason in their deliberations than their peers—and models—in Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 55 England. Mather firmly opposes all attempts of interpreting the signs of the devil that are not strictly grounded in logical reasoning, and he protests against astrology, for instance, which he calls a superstitious and idolatrous belief. He also vehemently attacks all the superstitious rituals that aimed at keeping the devil at bay and that were probably not unusual practice in the rural world of the early colonies. What these superstitious interpretations have in common is their establishing a direct and immediate relationship between cause and effect, between the sign and its signification. Mather, on the contrary, pleads for the court model where signs need to be verbalized and reasoned upon; they must be brought within the confines of a logocentric system. The Salem trials recounted in The Wonders of the Invisible World are the narrative of a judgment which is not limited to a number of individuals. It is actually the trial of a whole civilization attempting to impose itself on a new territory. While a relatively small group of people is in danger of losing their own lives, Mather describes the trials as a foreshadowing of Doom’s Day for the entire community: The Devil is called in 1. Pet 5. 8. Your Adversary. This is a Law-term; and it notes An Adversary at Law. The devil cannot come at us, except in some sense according to Law; but sometimes he does procure sad things to be inflicted, according to the Law of the eternal King upon us. The Devil first goes up as an Accuser against us. He is therefore styled The Accuser; and on this account, that his proper Name does belong unto him. There is a Court somewhere kept; a Court of Spirits, where the Devil enters all sorts of Complaints against us all; he charges us with manifold sins against the Lord our God: There he loads us with heavy Imputations of Hypocrysie, Iniquity, Disobedience; whereupon he urges, Lord, let ’em now have the death, which is their wages, paid unto ’em! If our Advocate in the Heavens do not now take off his Libels; the Devil, then, with a Concession of God, comes down, as a destroyer upon us. Having first been an Attorney, to bespeak that the Judgements of Heaven may be ordered for us, he then also pleads, that he may be the Executioner of those Judgements…. (48-49) When they stand as defendants in court, Martha Carrier, Elizabeth How, Suzanna Martin, and the other “witches,” are prosopopoeias of the devil, but they are also synecdoches of the community standing before the law. It would be too simple to reduce their role to that of scapegoats: they actually work as signs within the Puritan semiology and they have to be instituted as signs in order to be read. They are the sign of the devil’s ontological reality, and what the court tries to assess is the epistemological link between those bodies and the evil “spirits.” The court needs to ascertain the relationship between these visible bodies and the invisible law that governs them. The striking density of law terms in the above passage is indicative of Mather’s strategy in the rest of the book. The aim is both ethical and juridical: while acting for the good of society, Mather imposes order on it and 56 Chapter 1 justifies that order. Condemning certain members of the community to be “hung up as a sign, and a wonder, and an astonishment for others with sad hearts to [look] upon,” 45 was a way of imposing control by proving the validity and necessity of the law. In the passage quoted above, the whole process is justified by the reading of the Scriptures—the Bible is the trace or the specter of the law before which the community as a whole is summoned, and for whom Cotton Mather responds. In spite of the juridical and social dimensions of Mather’s text, it would be inappropriate to take the “witches” of Salem as symbols of internal disorder within the Puritan society. It seems equally inappropriate to describe the trials in terms of exorcism 46 because in that case as well, it would imply that the “witches” stand as signs, or symbols in a one-to-one correspondence. The presence of “witches” in New England in the seventeenth century is not the result of a symbolic but a tropological transfer. The “witches” function as metaphors of a form of otherness that the Puritans could not cope with without transferring them into the realm of textuality. They get rid of “witchcraft” by resorting to a particular form of catachresis, that is, by turning the devil into a prosopopoeia. The devil can only be defeated if he can be confronted, i.e. if he can be made present. Catching the “witches” is a way of presenting the devil before the law. It follows that in order to be expelled from the topos of the community, the devil first must be invoked, made bodily present in a catachresis: only then does he become manageable. This tropological transformation is a way of encompassing a form of otherness within the boundaries of the Puritans’ interpretation; it is a way of turning signs that were out of control, unidentifiable, into signs that can be read and made sense of. They become material signs that can be brought within the confines of the law: “Witchcraft seems to be the skill of Applying the Plastic Spirit of the World, unto some unlawful purposes, by means of a Confederacy with Evil Spirits” (161). Catachresis and prosopopoeia are very efficient means of control: to ascribe a name and a face to the devil is a way of identifying the adversary and thus giving oneself the means of facing him. Ultimately, it is a way of policing one’s topography by meeting head on an alien presence and then purging it of all forms of otherness that threaten to disrupt the orderly arrangement of the space one inhabits. 45 Samuel Willard, “Useful Instructions for a Professing People in Times of Great Security and Degeneracy” (Cambridge, Mass., 1673) 30-31. Quoted in Demos 308. 46 Slotkin writes for instance: “One of the ransomed girls [liberated after the 1690 Quebec Expedition against the Indians] brought back with her the seeds of the virus that was to infect New England with its witchcraft hysteria. As a patient of the spiritual physician Cotton Mather, this girl, Mercy Short, was to become the test case of Puritan psychoanalysis and ritual exorcism, a symbolic example to be employed in justifying the Matherian captivity mythology, and ultimately a Fury who accused and destroyed innocent men and women for being ‘witches’” (Regeneration 116). Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 57 The witch trials epitomize the Puritans’ need to find a sense of security against the prevailing doubt that dominated them. They were exiled into an undifferentiated epistemological space by the theoretical revolution of the Reformation and they were exiled into an equally unsafe and menacing physical topography: “The situation of the Puritan soul, for all its outward security, is thus extremely precarious. His farm is rich, and the landscape is bright and open, but it sits on the brink of the abysmal woods, within whose shadows devilish Indians move” (Slotkin 104). The Wonders of the Invisible World is an attempt to settle in both topographies, i.e. an attempt to order them according to a set of fixed rules that would establish a reliable transcendental connection between them. This is expressed in Mather’s text through the already mentioned conflict between body and soul. For Mather, the resolution of the conflict must rest in the victory of the spiritual over the bodily realm. This is the sense of the sentence of one of Elizabeth How’s “victims,” when she says that the “witch” can torment her body but cannot affect her soul. While this may appear as a standard Christian statement, in Mather’s text it assumes an additional function. In Puritan hermeneutics dominated by binary oppositions, 47 the soul can be associated with the invisible world; it is that which governs the body: the body only serves as the visible sign of the soul, as its trace. As the ruling agent, the elect soul is also on the side of reason, the organizing principle which allows the judges of the trials to do justice to the “witches.” The Puritans very much mistrusted the body and its inexplicable impulses. Such diffidence is expressed, among other things, in their aversion to dancing which is one of the recurrent features of diabolical Sabbaths. The “witches” are said to gather in the woods (out of the controlled space of the village) to perform all sorts of rituals where the body played a predominant role. These gatherings are often described as “orgies,” where drinking, eating, and sexual frenzy are the first striking features of these rites, well before their spiritual dimension. One of the major features of “witchcraft” is its breaking of all the taboos related to the body. In The Wonders of the Invisible World, “witchcraft” is associated with extraordinary physical deeds, and one of the defendants is, for instance, described as having a “Preternatural Strength” (126). Unsurprisingly in this context, Mather opposes “promiscuous dancing,” and adds that “to go presently from a sermon to a Dance, is to do a thing, which doubtless the Devil makes good Earnings of” (180). 48 47 For a discussion of Cotton Mather’s Manichaean tendency, see Robert Middlekauf, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 327-328. 48 Captivity Narratives provide a good insight into the Puritans’ tormented relationship to the body, in particular its primary needs: food, clothing, and sexuality. See 58 Chapter 1 The Wonders of the Invisible World reports on this tension and conflict, which, for its author, must result in the victory of logos, reasoning, and controlling judgment over the body. It is overall a victory of the head—not so much as a bodily part but as the siege of a function—over the rest of the body. The place of the conflict is the body and more particularly the female body. Mather mentions in two instances the “preternatural teat” that “bewitched” women supposedly developed. The female breast relates to the issue of birth, sexuality and feeding, “a cluster of ‘primitive’ concerns centering on the ‘bodily zones’ of the mouth and its intrinsic ‘modalities’” (Demos 179). All these must have been elements foreign and vaguely taboo for the male Puritans. The trials are an attempt to encompass otherness within a controlled topography, and femaleness is certainly a form of otherness that a male (and even female 49 ) Puritan writer had to come to terms with. The dominance of the head and reason corresponds to the necessity of abiding by the law of Scriptural textuality. The law that rules the Puritans’ topos is related to textuality and a male interpretation of textuality. It is enacted in the discourse of a patriarchal culture where “writing ... is the active intellect, the ‘male principle’ of language. It alone harbors the truth” (Foucault, Order 39). 50 Like all Puritan divines, Mather strives to accommodate God’s law with the laws of reason and arrives at the practical conclusion that although, “by virtue of his absolute sovereignty God might have promulgated any laws He chose, those which He has voluntarily invested with moral significance are exactly the same laws which reason finds ethical, precisely as the terms to which He has voluntarily consented in the covenant are humanly understandable ones” (Clark 179). The understanding of these laws depends on the “male principle” of writing, and therefore of textuality in general. If reason is male in Mather’s world, so is textuality which presides over and structures reason. Male dominance was an assumed principle in seventeenth-century Salem. Men held all the important functions in political and economic life, they were the owners of most property, and they alone could vote. Thus, it Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, in particular chapter 4, “Israel in Babylon: The Archetype of the Captivity Narrative (1682-1700)” 94-116. 49 Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative evidences that the issue of the relation to the body— and the woman’s body in particular—is very problematic, even for a women. In her poems Ann Bradstreet presents another case that shows how overwhelmingly influential the Puritan male mind is. 50 Interestingly, l’écriture is feminine in French; it/ she (elle) creates a tension with the “male principle.” This tension disappears in the English translation but it remains there, hidden, and shows its pervasive power in instances such as the one described by Mather. The neutrality of “writing” is suited for Cotton Mather’s purposes but will inevitably become more problematic with other authors. Please see my remarks on this subject in the following chapters. Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 59 does not come as a surprise to see that among the “witches” presented by Cotton Mather, only one is a man, which confirms that “Puritan legal regimes across New England unquestioningly cast women as witches and condoned a prosecutorial double standard for accused men and women such that twenty-eight women and only seven men were hanged for the crime of witchcraft.” 51 This uneven distribution is consistent with the role distribution between sexes in Puritan society. John Demos implies that it would be a mistake to see in the condemnation of many more women than men a “sexist” reaction, because, he writes, “there is little sign of generalized (or “structural”) conflict between sexes. Male dominance of public affairs was scarcely an issue, and in private life there was considerable scope for female initiative” (63). It may be correct to say that the persecution of women was not “sexist,” insofar as it cannot be concluded that it was intentionally directed against one of the sexes by the other. But the obvious prejudice against women also shows that the situation of social and political imbalance was internalized in Puritan society by men and women alike to the point where it became “invisible.” Thus, the gender issue follows from the rhetorical construction of the Puritan topos and the tension between visible/ invisible, body/ soul, presence/ absence, and all the other binary oppositions in which Puritan society was caught. The trials also epitomize the tension between the sexes. It would be inaccurate to say that women served as scapegoats for the occasion, for their victimization results from their being selected as signs of the presence of the devil; their significance as such results from the series of tropological transformations that I have been trying to identify. They become the victims of a metaphorical and linguistic crux at work in the construction of the Puritan and American topos. It is worth noting that although there is a masculine word for “witch” in English (warlock, wizard), it is never used to designate the few men accused of witchcraft. Mather (and all the authors of the time with him) coin expressions such as “the male witch” to refer to men. 52 51 On this issue see Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789 (9). On the same question John Demos states that this disproportion corresponds to the general figures such as they appear in the juridical chronicles where one can read that “Females outnumbered males by a ratio of 4 : 1.” … “Furthermore [these figures] likely understate the association of women and witchcraft as can be seen from a closer look at the men accused.” ... “Twenty of the male witches were rendered suspect either by ‘association’ (with an accused woman) or else in a distinctly limited way (as part of a larger sequence of hostilities)” (60-64). 52 The word “warlock” would be more appropriate for the case: it is etymologically linked to the devil: Warlock < ME warloghe, < O LD E NGLISH wærloga ‘one that breaks faith,’ ‘the Devil’ (Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary). It is also worth noting that modern critics do not differ from the seventeenth-century authors and use the same 60 Chapter 1 The quasi-exclusive femaleness of witchcraft is due to the male dominion over interpretation and the intrinsically male quality of the link between the law and the world: the act of writing and the act of reading. We must keep in mind that the stage of the Salem drama is a courtroom where male judges were in charge of enforcing a male law. I have showed that the sentences depended exclusively on testimonial acts of the witnessing. “To testify” for the existence of the law is a male act, as the origins of the word (from the Latin testis, ‘witness’ from which “testicle” is also derived) seem to point to the very male quality of the act. 53 Mather is the witness who testifies to the presence of the law or to the presence of the father, so that he may help the “children of New England.” In this genealogical descending line, Mather acts as the son of the male law or of the father, recalling him and perpetuating his memory so that his heritage (the territories of the New World) are not lost in the hands of the devil. From this genealogy where the son replaces the father in the name of the law women are naturally excluded. It follows from this exclusion pattern that they embody the devil, i.e. the difference that threatens the male law which allows the son to succeed his father and the same to be replaced by the same. Thus, in a world whose topography is shaped by acts of reading, otherness is disposed of tropologically. The embodiment of the devil in the “witches” not only makes it possible to consecrate the victory of the soul over the body and of reason over the irrational impulses of the body, it also makes it possible to dominate and control the enemy. What he cannot do with God, Mather believes he can achieve with the devil: to know him. * * * The opposition which is staged in The Wonders of the Invisible World, and— differently—in other Puritan texts is the opposition between two types of space modeled on the tension between the visible and the invisible world. The conflict has at its source the competition of two interpretative modes for the same territory. The Salem trials allegorize that conflict and displace the (battle)field of contention from the political body of the nation-to-be to the bodies of the “bewitched.” Mather’s text shows that the question of the “reading” of signs can by no means be reduced to “mere” philosophical or cultural issues. The way the Puritans “read” the Word, and consequently the world, had a prodigiously strong impact on the topography of the New World, and by extension on the world at large. For the same topos there words. Partly, no doubt, for the sake of clarity but also because “witch” and “witchcraft” seem to have become characteristically female. 53 See my remarks on this issue in Chapter Three, “Our Fabulous Place.” Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 61 were two very opposed ways of disposing of it. There was that of the Puritans who were trying to impose themselves and turn the wilderness into a controlled and sedentary topos, striated by the furrows of their ploughs and the lines of their writing. On the other hand, there was the wilderness, the realm of the devil, an unstructured and unreadable space roamed by “witches” and Indians. The stakes at the witch trials is the appropriation or the annexation of territories by the male law both inside and outside the community. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have described the way in which the undifferentiated space is submitted to the law that seeks to control it: Smooth space and striated space—nomad space and sedentary space—the space in which the war machine develops and the space instituted by the State apparatus—are not of the same nature. No sooner do we note a simple opposition between the kinds of space than we must indicate a much more complex difference by virtue of which the successive terms of the opposition fail to coincide entirely. And no sooner have we done that than we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space. In the first case, one organizes even the desert; in the second, the desert gains and grows; the two happen simultaneously. (Thousand Plateaus 474) Mather feels justified in his attempt to create the political space of a state and to employ aggressive strategies to protect it. Many years were to pass before the colonies became an independent state, but the creation of a sovereign state (the USA) on the “American” continent can be seen as the result of the colonizing of the American topos by an interpretative mode based on the reading of signs based in turn on the interpretation of the written text. The civilization based on the interpretation of the “sedentary” (written) sign imposed itself on what was seen as a chaotic and undifferentiated space. Puritan semiology imposed itself as the dominant theoretical discourse in an empty space, rapidly displacing or annihilating the indigenous discourses. It gained space almost in a Darwinian sense, as a species that multiplies because of the absence of competition. In Mather’s fear of the attacks on the community we can see the first traces of the fear of conspiracy against a state that does not exist yet. The devil is not only a spiritual but also a political enemy. The cohesion of the community has to do with much more than a utilitarian rule in a relatively undeveloped rural society; Mather warns his readers: “We are to keep one another from the Inroads of the Devil, by mutual and cordial wishes of prosperity to one another” (49). The “devil” threatens the cohesion and the stability of the state; he disrupts the semiotic coherence on which the state is founded. This gives rise to the fear of conspiracy against the state and a fifth column of sorts: “yea that we never assemble without a Satan among us” (57). 62 Chapter 1 His appeal to unite against the devil is a constitutive act. As it has become typical since, 54 the devil is said to be “strange,” i.e. both geographically foreign, and an incomprehensible power that endangers the nation-to-be: “‘Tis to be supposed, That there is a sort of Arbitrary, even Military Government, among the Devils” (44). This statement can be paralleled with Mather’s references to the persecution of the Huguenots in France (54) and to the passage where devils are compared to “vast Regiments of cruel and bloody French Dragoons” (45). For the Puritans of the seventeenth century, Mather’s text is a call for solidarity, and it is his response to the ethical call of the law, but, in addition to that, the text becomes an important political and legislative act. Like all texts, Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World is a trace of the law, it testifies for it and summons the readers to bear witness in their turn to the existence of the law. The text is a legislative and political piece, which is not the product of the past, of “history,” but a constitutive part of its own future. Mather’s text shows how direct and real the relation between the body of the people and the body of the text is, for, as J. Hillis Miller puts it: “Works of literature do not simply reflect or are not caused by their contexts. They have a productive effect in history” (Hawthorne 152). It is not because people blindly follow what the texts say that the texts perform such a role in history; it is because they are the results of acts of reading which in turn call for future acts of reading. It is those acts of reading that shape the topography of the world we inhabit. For many modern authors, witches and witchcraft belong either to the domain of pathological psychic disorder or to the realm of fiction. Could it be that what has come to be called “the terrible witchcraft delusion at Salem” was just a “fiction,” 55 something that never “really” existed? Were the “witches” imprisoned, tortured, and executed as the result of a “story” in which we would have good reasons not to believe? Cotton Mather’s text is included today in anthologies of “American Literature.” Words are often misleading: Mather was not “American,” or was he? His text does not belong to “literature,” i.e. to “fiction,” or does it? Can we so easily trace the borderline between the striated topos of the real and the “wild,” uncontrolled” topography of “fiction”? If we take “literature” in its stricter sense 54 Mather’s text presents a model of enemy that flourished in the pre-revolutionary eighteenth century and is still very much alive. What became later the USA was often described as threatened by foreign powers that did not live by the moral and political rules of America and that because they lacked this ethical and political structure were ready to send their hordes of destruction against the country. 55 See Weisman: “Perhaps, though, it is less important that Phips and the Mathers promoted such easily deflatable fictions than that these fictions went unchallenged by their contemporaries.” ... “The failure of the Salem trials left members with questions not only about the methods of the court but also about the entire framework of meanings by which they had interpreted the misfortunes that befell them” (171-72). Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 63 of “written text,” then we are closer to what Mather’s text is or rather does. It is an inscription, a trace of the law, and it imposes reading as the only possible but also mandatory confrontation with the Law. Could it be then that the trials are only a series of speech-acts whose consequences are the result of (mis)reading? To many a reader such possibilities will seem highly unethical and unacceptable: “the post-structuralist confounding of fiction and non-fiction is important but inadequate. ... The existence or absence of a real world, real body, real pain, makes a difference” (Greenblatt 15). Saying what that difference is was precisely Cotton Mather’s endeavor. He strove to trace a clear line between the “devices” of the devil who turns the world into the “as if” mode and the “real” world guaranteed by the presence of Christ. He tried to draw a line between the striated space of the “real” and the smooth space of fiction. This attempt is certainly the source of his most tragic mistakes for which we hold him responsible today, and the reason why we read him. CHAPTER 2 UTOPIA & OXIDIA Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods If it is true that the most abstract painters paint herrings and apples, it is no less true that the poets who most urgently search the world for the sanction for life, for that which makes life so prodigiously worth living, may find their solution in a duck in a pond or in the wind on a winter night. —Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous There is no difference between marks and words in the sense that there is between observation and accepted authority, or between verifiable fact and tradition. The process is everywhere the same: that of the sign and its likeness, and this is why nature and the word can intertwine with one another to infinity, forming, for those who can read it, one vast single text. —Michel Foucault, The Order of Things Of all the texts this work deals with, Thoreau’s Walden is certainly the one where the issues of ethics and topos are most emphatically related to one another. Thoreau’s most enduring book is an account of a surveying and ordering of a topography where he and his “neighbors” are to live. It is also a translation from the language of nature, a language Thoreau searched for on the shores of Walden Pond, into the language of his neighbors. In Thoreau’s narrative, nature is conceived of both as the habitat of man and as a specifically American reality. 56 After the failure of A Week on the Concord 56 While “I” tend to read my wording “habitat of man” as “human habitat” or “the habitat of humanity,” it may be mooted that the author of Walden would not agree with such a definition. “Man” is often a generic term in the narrative and encompasses humanity entire, but it often has very strong male and overtly masculine overtones. John Carlos Rowe also understands “man” as “humanity” (see below); I shall show that while this reading is mostly adequate, the center of consciousness 66 Chapter 2 and Merrimack River (1849), Thoreau renounced his voyaging for a while and reconsidered his understanding of the notions of place and language. His four major books are voyage narratives of sorts: A Week was the result of a two-week trip to the White Mountains of New Hampshire; Walden reports on Thoreau’s two-year stay in a hut by Walden Pond; The Maine Woods was written as a narrative of three successive trips to Maine; Cape Cod, published posthumously, like The Main Woods, is the conflation of three trips Thoreau took to the place. A Week was his attempt to escape from the sedentariness of his life, and, I suggest, from the sedentariness of language. In Walden, his next book, Thoreau seems to have come to the realization that “no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another” (133). As a result, he settled down “at Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts” for “two years and two months” (3). It is certainly correct to say with John Carlos Rowe that Walden “betrays the desire for an established metaphysical center to determine human behavior and organize knowledge” (29). Walden holds a particular position among Thoreau’s books in that it is a still voyage; as Daniel Peck has it, it is an immobile pursuit of nature and a process “of continuously mapping the world and locating the ‘self’ thereby” (quoted in Buell 116). This craving for order and ordering results in Thoreau’s synecdochal reading of space at Walden Pond as the center of a newly discovered cosmogony, and to the advent of an “I” as the center of universal consciousness. Thoreau affirms this in the opening paragraph of the narrative: “In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference” (3). Thus, the Walden Pond project is a research on nature and on the nature of the self; in his narrative Thoreau tries to sort out the competing claims of nature shaping the self and those of the self imposing on nature its ordering patterns. Thoreau’s first move, then, is the constitution of a self which appears as “I” in the narrative, and which serves as a point of reference and measurement for the construction of the topography of Walden—both the narrative space and the physical place. The construction of that topography comprises many acts of building: a house, a place, a neighborhood, a language, a narrative, and the project with its ethical and topographical dimensions is announced in the epigraph: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as Chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbor up.” The Coleridgean echo is both acknowledged and rejected while the neighbor is drawn into the project. The first chapter “Economy” (“management of the house”) is also a chapter about ego-nomy (constitution and management of the self). The beginning of the that polices Walden Pond and Walden is very much male, and that this maleness often threatens to turn the whole “experiment” into an solipsistic or even onanistic failure. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 67 narrative is marked by an ironic dissociation between the author of the narrative, Henry David Thoreau, and the acting and narrating “I” in the text. The ironic distance between the two varies throughout the narration, but it never disappears. While there is always a separation and a distance between the historical author and his or her narrator (even in the most “historical” autobiographies), in the case of Walden the irony which creates a distance between the two “I”’s is used as a guiding trope throughout the narration. The distance grows larger, Lawrence Buell points out, “as Walden unfolds, [and as] the mock-serious discourse of enterprise, which implicitly casts the speaker as the self-creator of his environment, begins to give way to a more ruminative prose.…” “The prose begins,” Buell writes, “to turn significantly in this contemplative direction as it moves from the heroic classicism of ‘Reading,’ with its pedagogical didactics, to ‘Sounds,’ where the ‘language’ of ‘all things and events’ (111) impresses itself on the speaker” (122). Although it is tempting to refer to the center of consciousness of the narrative as “Thoreau,” one must constantly bear in mind that this designation is always both an exaggeration and an understatement. Indeed, the “I” of the narrator always exceeds the “I” of Henry David Thoreau, yet the latter never disappears completely behind that “I” which is never completely a rhetorical construct. It is therefore impossible to take at face value the experiment carried out by Thoreau and reported in the narrative, and read it for its referential and biographical value. On the other hand, the tendency one may have to reach lofty conclusions about the nature of man or the nature of language is constantly—ironically—undermined by the pragmatic simplicity which led a man to actually build a cabin by a pond and live there “by the labor of [his] hands only” (3). The difficulty of sorting out Thoreau’s different “I”’s in the narrative shows that “[t]o imagine a literary history comprised of textual objects, or discursive practices, without responsible individual agents is as problematic from an environmentalist perspective as imagining a beautiful landscape without the traces of human shaping that tailored it to the standards of the picturesque” (Buell 372). In Walden (again, both the narrative and the place), the shaping cannot be dissociated from the shaper, and “Thoreau” is an ironic projection of Henry David Thoreau. There is no telling, however, who displaces whom. 57 57 In several places Jacques Derrida wrote that the author is only a function of the text. In “Signature Event Context” (Glyph, 1 [1977]: 172-197) he claims that “by definition, a written signature implies the actual or empirical non-presence of the signer.” I agree with Derrida, but I think that Thoreau believes (erroneously, maybe) that what he calls “link[ing] [his] facts to fable” (184) is still possible. Walden moved through almost one decade of revisions and rewriting from a biographical and referential narrative on nature toward an increasingly rhetorical reconstruction of it, and the text bears the traces of both narrative practices. If one follows Derrida in saying that the author is always displaced by the text, then I would say that Walden 68 Chapter 2 Whenever the reader may think that the “I” can be identified either as the referential character or as the rhetorical construct, “Thoreau” escapes into the obscurity of the woods again. Speaking or singing aloud in the morning—as the mythic cock Chanticleer that represents the “I”—is not only a way of waking people up, it is also a mode of imposing oneself; “the lord's clarion” dominates the yard and the chapter “Sounds.” The cock’s male boasting on the farmyard is emphasized by the overwhelming presence of the personal pronoun “I” in the opening of the narrative. It is the very first word of the epigraph and it opens the first four paragraphs of the chapter “Economy” where it is repeated no less than twenty-three times. 58 “I” also appears phonetically in many words, as for example in the title Walden, or Life in the Woods. 59 Thoreau presents himself as detached from the rest of “men [who] honestly think there is no choice left” (8), and gets ready for his chivalric quest which he undertakes for and in the name of his neighbor: “If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement” (49). The separation between the empirical self who writes the book Walden—“We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking” (3)—from the rhetorical “I” makes it possible to offer opinions that emanate from the “I,” and which are nonetheless presented as if they were true for everyone: “What is true for one is even truer for a thousand” (71). Thoreau proposes to reconstruct neighborhood, that is, a sense of common space, in a new understanding of what the word means. This is the sense of his moving “a mile from any neighbor.” But neighborhood cannot be defined in spatial terms only, and Walden also consists in an “aggressive remapping of Concord history from the social margin” (Buell 265). By con- presents two different levels of displacement of its author, and that the narrative is inscribed within that gap between these two levels of displacement. 58 Lawrence Buell comes up with impressively minute statistics of the occurrence of “Thoreau’s favorite pronoun, ‘I’ [which] appears in the two opening chapters an average of 6.6 times per page; in the next six (through ‘The Village’), 5.5 times per page; in the next five (‘The Ponds’ through ‘House-Warming’—the last chapter in which the speaker modifies his environment through plastering), 5.2; in the final five (‘Former Inhabitants’ through ‘Conclusion’), 3.6.” Buell, p. 122. 59 When Walden was to be republished by Ticknor & Fields, Thoreau wrote to his publishers (March, 4, 1862) requesting them to “leave out from the title the words ‘Or Life in the Woods’” (The Writings 639). Thoreau may have felt by then that the name “Walden” alone contained all the allegorical meaning of his work, just as Walden Pond gave shape to the ideal place he presented as a new paradigm of the human ethos. For all questions concerning the history of Walden and its publishing, see J. Lyndon Shanley, The Making of “Walden.” See also Linck C. Johnson, Thoreau’s Complex Weave, Stephen Adams & Donald Ross, Jr., Revising Mythologies: The Composition of Thoreau’s Major Works, and Robert Sattlemeyer, “The Remaking of Walden.” Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 69 trasting A Week and Walden, Rowe finds that in Walden “there is remarkably little reflection upon language itself, as if the natural phenomena were sufficient for the grammar of our lives” (30). 60 I shall argue that the whole book is precisely the realization that for Thoreau the grammars of human lives, be they the grammar of history or the grammar of nature, always need to be exceeded. Like a prophet in the Christian tradition, the cock is the watch who is responsible for waking people up. Nobody called Chanticleer to his mission; it is the cock’s special talent, or his calling, to give the alarm and rouse neighbors from their slumbers. Thoreau states: “How many mornings summer and winter before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! ” (17). He affirms thereby that the mystery of his presence rests in his “infinite expectation of dawn” (90). But even as Thoreau writes that morning brings back the heroic ages, that moment cannot be taken as an origin in time. Dawn is always already there in him; it always precedes the moment of expression symbolized by the song of the cockerel, and the expectation of dawn must be translated into the language of the neighbors. Unlike Ezekiel or Jeremiah, Thoreau is not called upon by God or by any other transcendental force; he does not say anybody’s words but those that are the product of his “internal industry” (24). He surveys the land where he sojourns with his neighbors: So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear it and carry it express! … At other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch something, though I never caught much, and that, manna-wise, would dissolve again in the sun. (17-18) The tone here is half religious, half ironic as it mixes the Good News with modern technology. If no one appointed him, then we may wonder why the narrator of Walden should feel responsible for his neighbor: why does he have to read what is in the wind and carry it express? This dramatic “why? ” mines Thoreau’s confidence, and Walden may be read as an attempt to answer that question. The Quixotic character of the project comes out clearly in passages where Thoreau engages his responsibility. He proposes that his duty is not only to preserve the pristine landscape of Walden Pond, but also to “read” 60 Rowe writes that “in Walden Thoreau seems to give up the reflection on language that organizes A Week for a more immediate dialogue with the sound of nature” (51). I disagree with the conclusion of Rowe’s otherwise remarkable chapter on Thoreau’s Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. It may be true that in Walden “Thoreau [is] impatient for clarity” (51), but this re-ordering of his physical, mental and poetic topography implies a fundamental reflection on language, for Thoreau realized—perhaps because of the failure of A Week—that the political order of the village was also the result of a linguistic ordering. 70 Chapter 2 it. The reason why his neighbors cannot do it themselves is not because it is hidden or ciphered, but because they overlook it. They see it but they cannot read it, Thoreau states: For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility. (18) In addition to being about “surveying,” this paragraph is also about passage, passing, crossing, traversing, but also translating. The constructions of the place (Walden Pond), of the narrator (“I”), and of the narrative (Walden) are intimately related to these notions of bridging and passing. The “I”-narrator and the narrated topos are both located in a space-in-between and constitute the bridge or the passage itself. The ethical “utility” of the enterprise is emphasized in a quasi-mystical tone with the narrator performing his “duty faithfully.” The narrator transports to, transacts with, and translates into the language of the village, “not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! ” (17). His “duty,” that is, the ethical commitment he “deliberately” chooses is to translate the sounds of nature into the sounds of men; Walden is a book of translation and a book in translation, for as while the narrator seeks to “anticipate … Nature herself” (17), his readers are belated and arrive after dawn. With this sense of anticipation he writes, “I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods where I was better known” (19), and his quest is to move away from the language of the law of men which is spoken in the court-house or in the church, to confront the universal law that precedes them all. With possibly feigned Emersonian self-reliance, Thoreau states that the language of nature remains unnoticed and un-read, as “Much is edited, but little printed” (111). The self that emerges from Thoreau’s ego-nomy is that of a master reader, an editor-in-chief, and an archtranslator. Thoreau realizes that his neighbors (his readers) who have to get up as early as him in the morning to work in their fields to support their families may be irritated by his dealing with nature as “the pasture … seen from the hall window” (Journal 488). His growing beans does not make much difference in that respect, for as Buell notes, “it was faddish among affluent nineteenth-century Bostonians to take an active interest in farming methods” (130). Thoreau starts off as an observer of nature for whom nature serves as a ground to build an Emersonian bridge of correspondences between the natural and the spiritual world, and he slowly develops into a reader and writer of nature for whom nature is no longer a mere reference or an object of observation. Nature becomes a text, and Thoreau’s writing increasingly becomes an act of translation of a text written in a foreign language into his own. This also leads him to realize that his own language is Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 71 no less foreign than the language of nature, or rather that he is as foreign to it as to nature itself. In the chapter “The Bean-Field,” when he weeds his plantations, the “I”-narrator is cast in the role of Achilles: “Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust” (161). There is ironic distance to the hero/ hoer giving battle to a Trojan army of weeds in his bean-field of Concord, Mass. But less so to the hero/ hoer working at his chapter “The Bean- Field.” Though there may be no heroism in living at Walden Pond and growing beans—it may even be “faddish”—but what is heroic is the undertaking of reading/ writing Walden. Even as the “I”-narrator is a metonymical deflection of the historical character who lived at Walden Pond, the “I”narrator is constantly distracted and diverted from his metaphysical quest by this ironic image of the hoer of beans. This distraction continues throughout the book where the hoer and the hero can never be completely told apart and ironically contaminate each other’s image and each other’s tropological and symbolic functioning modes. The ironic mode of the narration undermines the possibility of a historical account of Thoreau’s life in the woods. Although it involves funny episodes where the reader can enjoy the puns and Thoreau’s antics on the pond, this schizophrenic disjunction of the narrator’s self is not a serene process. Something very serious happens in this disjunction of the “I” under the effect of irony. As Paul de Man remarks, “The moment the innocence or authenticity of our sense of being in the world is put into question, a far from harmless process gets underway” (215). The ironic disjunction of Thoreau’s self is a necessary process of revision of language, but it is also a threat and a disquieting process for the integrity of the self. This schizophrenic splitting of the narrative voice cannot be conceived of in terms of a dialectical opposition between superiority and inferiority—such as the soul and the body or nature and culture. In Walden both aspects have to coexist. De Man comments on this ironic process which we see at work in Walden: “Superiority and inferiority … become merely spatial metaphors to indicate a discontinuity and a plurality of levels within a subject that comes to know itself by an increasing differentiation from what it is not” (213). For Thoreau, there is an absolute necessity to attain through the narrativization of nature that architectonic order that de Man outlines, lest irony should be carried to its extreme and should destroy the empirical self of the author/ narrator and destroy him. The splitting of Thoreau’s self happens in the emancipation of the imaginative and creative hero from the empirical hoer; Thoreau writes: “Self-emancipation even in the West-Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination,—what Wilberforce is there to bring that about? ” (7-8). The target of irony is the conceptions of the neighbors who consider that physical reality is a given. He attempts a deconstruction of the belief that human 72 Chapter 2 matters are facts of history: “Most men, even in this relatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them” (6). By the same token, he boasts: I sometimes wonder how we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called negro slavery, … It is hard to have a southern overseer, it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all is when you are the slave driver of yourself. (7) It might be tempting to demystify the trope by turning to the satirical mode. But “frivolous” and “foreign” sound strange in a text written at a time when slavery was common practice in all the southern states of the Union. Negro slavery is not “foreign” geographically but it is foreign because it is not part of the self; hence it is “frivolous” to attend to it instead of deconstructing its origins in “our own scurvy selves” (34). The discovery of the fact that he is living in a “comparatively free country” leads to an estrangement from empirical reality and to its refusal as a historical fact. Stanley Cavell writes: Concord is stranger to him, and he to it, than the ends of the earth. … The first step in attending to our education is to observe the strangeness of our lives, our estrangement from ourselves, the lack of necessity in what we profess to be necessary. The second step is to grasp the true necessity of human strangeness as such, the opportunity of outwardness. 61 (55) The case of slavery is exemplary, for it shows that historical facts cannot be accepted as givens, not even as metaphors of man’s condition. This means that metaphors themselves have to be resisted. “Awaking” in this context is a metaphor that deconstructs itself: “morning” cannot be a simple metaphor for the time of the day commonly called morning. Dawn is not when the sun rises but: “morning is when I am awake and there is dawn in me” (88). Awakening is a process that demands the splitting of the “I” and the 61 Cavell follows the Thoreau of Walden in shifting to the “we” (“our education...”) as Thoreau had done by shifting from the “I” (“I sometimes wonder...”) to the “we” (“we are so frivolous...”). The confusion between the author/ narrator/ reader initiated in Walden and prolonged by Cavell’s reading participates in the instability of the narrative voice and in the ironic distancing from its empirical reference. At the same time, it starts to jeopardize the narrative process which demands that this separation be established at least heuristically. Buell comments on Cavell’s calling Thoreau “the writer”: “‘The writer’ composing ‘his book’ becomes movingly personalized…. Cavell retrieves Walden from the antiseptic operating room of textuality to become work, the labor of a complicated living person about whose losses we are required to think…” (374). I believe that Buell is right: in his otherwise enthralling reading of Walden, Cavell is very worried about the fact that Walden and his author/ narrator/ protagonist might become a “mere” set of textual functions. Therefore he insists—heavily at times—on Thoreau’s empirical self and on the reader’s empirical self. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 73 possibility for the “I” to “consider” itself from the outside at an ironic distance. 62 The perilous questioning of the empirical self aims at discovering “words addressed to our condition exactly, which if we could hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning and the spring to our lives” (107). “Morning” and “spring” are the metaphors on which the whole enterprise of waking the neighbor up is constructed, but these metaphors must be deconstructed in turn. Thoreau claims that “[he has] lived some thirty years on this planet, and [he has] yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from [his] seniors” (9). The whole enterprise consists in unearthing the proofs of truth, with at heart a petty misery, the nagging suspicion, that in the end there might be no truth to discover. * * * Walden is an examination and a deconstruction of the social, political and above all linguistic conventions of the village. Rowe sums up the situation when he writes that “[t]he achievement of Walden is the result of [Thoreau’s] confidence that the natural origin of language escapes the symbolism of words and remains eternally and creatively present” (30). Hence the explicit subject of “Economy” is the economical and ethical construction of a sharable topography. Thoreau proposes to show that the topography he occupies with his neighbors results from rhetorical transactions among men who “[b]y a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, … are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves steal” (5). The ironic reference to Matthew points to neighbors who lead a life of “quiet” or even “confirmed” desperation (8). “The mass of men,” “most men,” or “we” are subjected to ideologies that are taken to be natural phenomena, and the common mistake consists in taking these rhetorical or tropological constructions for natural reality. Thoreau takes the distance that enables him to become a reader/ narrator. It is that distance that irony necessarily implies that makes it possible for him to map out a new ethical topography. Only outside the social frame can he can start to review what he calls the “true necessaries and means of life” (8). “Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel” are metonymies for language and Walden consists in deconstructing the rhetorical process that has led them over time to become catachreses, i.e. dead metaphors. Clothes veil the natural image of man, and like the fallen Adam in Genesis, 62 “To consider” is a recurrent verb in Walden. It always means ‘to think,’ ‘to ponder,’ but most importantly it has a topographical resonance. In order to consider something, a distance must be taken from the object considered. The neighbor is put one mile away, the house is removed and language is displaced. 74 Chapter 2 the fallen American Jonathan presents himself in his clothes of shame. Thoreau does not merely satirize the attitude of his neighbors who seem to think that it is the cowl that makes the monk, but he also presents clothes as a metonymy for the general condition of individuals in society. Like the loon, Thoreau retires to the solitary pond to undergo his process of moulting (sic), and he refuses to change clothes, which would allow his being part of society. The moulting of the loon also introduces the theme of Thoreau’s separation and divesting from his empirical self. It also point to the distraction from that self and the permanent threat of solipsism. Thoreau, becomes a “solitary loon[y]” as many of his neighbors and some of his readers called him. 63 The question of “Shelter” is probably even more relevant, for the management of the house is an essential structural feature of Walden. The exemplary house is as simple as possible—“consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary” (28)—as Indian tents and the huts that cost little cash and little time. Indeed, the currency of the economical model proposed in Walden is life: “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it” (31). In an extended metaphor, men may have the feeling they possess the house of language while they are committed to it. They tend to forget their condition by falling asleep in comfort, like lotus-eaters. While “In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best” (31), “[w]here civilization especially prevails” (31) comfort is the trap in which man got caught. Because of his misreading of rhetorical constructs as natural necessities, “he who … enjoy[s] these things is so commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage” (31). Because he takes rhetorically constructed conventions and habits for natural laws, man has become the hunter of his own freedom; what he calls necessities must be considered again, read differently: An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars, these are the country rates, entitles him to the benefit of the improvements of centuries, spacious apartments; clean paint and paper; Rumford fireplace; back plastering; Venetian blinds, copper pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar and many other things. (30-31) All these things could certainly be considered as substantial advantages by the neighbors, and Thoreau himself might not have argued against them on a strictly practical level—but, as he points out, “our whole life is startlingly 63 It took a long time before Thoreau was accepted as a great writer of the American tradition. Even today there is no consensus on how “canonical” his works (or some of them) are. See Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (339-370), and “Thoreau Enters the American Canon.” See also Steven Fink: Prophet in the Market Place: Thoreau’s Development as a Professional Writer, and, Bradley P. Dean and Gary Scharnolst, “The Contemporary Reception of Walden.” Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 75 moral” (218). The house becomes very different, Thoreau proposes, if we look at it with the required ironic distance: the uselessly spacious rooms of these extravagantly large apartments; the “Rumford fireplace” that encloses the fire and replaces the hearth that is so propitious to communication; the “plastering” that hides the naked and raw material of the house; the “blinds” that literally blind the house keeping the sun out; the “copper pump” that mechanically brings the water from the pond depriving it thereby of its quality. The sole purpose of the “spring lock” seems to be to lock spring in and prevent its arrival and expansion. “It may be guessed,” Thoreau continues, “that I reduce almost the whole advantage of holding this superfluous property as a fund in store against the future … mainly to the defraying of funeral expenses. But perhaps man is not required to bury himself” (31). This remark closes the description of the house and makes it clear that the “commodious cellar” mentioned above is really a grave. Through their ideological reading, men have committed themselves to the mad-house of language that they have built themselves and that they keep expanding brick after brick; they find themselves in “a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum” (28). This situation results from man’s misunderstanding and lack of respect for economic rules: “economy is a subject that admits of being treated with levity, but cannot so be disposed of” (28). “[O]ur lives are domestic in more senses than we think” (28), which is why he escapes from the house of language to which his neighbors are committed. He keeps no “dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hen” and lives in a house that has a “deficiency of domestic sounds” (127). Domestic sounds (i.e. sounds of the domus) are so familiar that they are taken for natural sounds by the slumbering neighbors. Buell elegantly shows why reading Thoreau’s narrative difficult at times: “One of Walden’s more frustrating charms is that it so easily loses the reader of the text” (134). Walden too lacks “domestic sounds,” i.e. the habitual and conventional features of Romantic or transcendentalist narratives, which is why it is possible and necessary to get lost in it. At the same time, Thoreau looks ironically at his own attempt to break loose from domestication. Walden is the dream of conveying the language of nature in the domestic idiom of the neighbor. “[C]ats and dogs,” he says, are “acquiring the same second [domestic] nature” (13). They lose all their natural instinct when they share the same house as man. Thus when Collins’ cat returns to the woods, it first becomes “a wild cat” but because it is has forgotten the language of nature, Thoreau bitterly comments, “[it] trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last” (44). Failure to read the language of nature is as fatal to man as it is to Collins’ cat, that is why in Walden Thoreau wants to preserve the language of nature, and Walden expresses hope but also doubts about the enterprise. Doubts come from the fact that Thoreau feels that he may be coming too 76 Chapter 2 late, and that Walden will always be a supplement to the language of nature and never the thing itself. There is a sense of belatedness that haunts the writing of the narrative, and the sense that the writing of Walden may be an attempt to recapture something which is irremediably lost. * * * In the neighborhood Thoreau wants to construct, people may be able to live according to the “higher laws” of nature. In the chain of substitutions that exchanges the necessities of life for its superfluities, different laws and a different language are needed. The political organization of the topography of the village itself is a superfluity. In “Life Without Principle” Thoreau states: “what is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that, practically, I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all” (117). Thoreau states, “when I first took my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as my days there, which, by accident, was on Independence Day, or the fourth of July 1845, my house was not finished for winter” (84; my italics). “[B]y accident” and the superfluous specification of the date destroy its political symbolism. Thoreau moves to the woods in order to become independent from the ideological language that fetters down his neighbors. As he later explains to poor John Field—with an ironic reference to the “Boston Tea Party”—, America is not the country where you can get tea or coffee everyday, but “the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these” (205). The ironic echo of the Jeffersonian triad—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—refers to symbols that “men [who] labor under mistake” (5) take for granted. The “only true America” is a place where true freedom can be achieved. As Thoreau points out in “Life Without Principle,” “America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that is meant. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant” (174). Political events are but temporal and vain, even when honorable causes are at stake. He dismisses politics as too limited, when he writes, “If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French Revolution not excepted” (95). To read political events whose influence does not modify the order of things as the basis of the organization of one’s topography is a grievous mistake. Thoreau appeals to his readers’/ neighbors’ responsibility, warning them that “[c]onventionalities are at length as bad as impurities” (“Life Without Principle” 168). In a serious pun he urges his readers to go for the essential: “Read not the Times. Read Eternities” (“Life Without Principle” 174). To Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 77 find the eternal and always present language of nature is the sole purpose of Walden: “My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles” (19). The obstacles are the ideological readings on which the society at large is built: “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous” (95). Walden is the attempt to find and bring back to the village this oxymoron: fabulous reality. In “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau affirms: “I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward” (67). Gregory S. Jay writes that one might be tempted to read “we” as meaning consensually “humanity.” Jay posits, however, that Thoreau is seized by “gender anxiety,” and that he ascribes failure to rebel against wrong and iniquitous law “as a failure of masculinity” (18); that is, those who accept to live under shams and delusions are no real men. In Walden the theme of the rooster had already introduced that notion of masculinity, and the hardiness and rusticity of life Thoreau promotes is also linked to it. Thus “men” ought to be stripped of the clothes that hide their true nature, just as food, fuel, and shelter, ought to be simplified and stripped of devices “invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the name of” (37). No man (that is, no real man) worth his salt can stay in one of those houses that are built on wrong assumptions and that threaten his virility: “the traveler who stops at the best houses, so called, soon discovers … [that] the publican presumes him to be a Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he would soon be completely emasculated” (36-37). Masculinity is important, as Nature is the only major feminine figure in Walden. It/ she is the receptacle for the male seeds Thoreau brings to Walden Pond, hoping to bring back an abundant crop to the village for his neighbors to share. Thoreau sees himself as the father who produces and selects the seed he plants in nature’s womb while she offers her fertility. He is the “husband” to nature; she gives birth, and with his intervention she can give re-birth. That is why husbandry is not just an economical, agricultural, or merely “faddish” activity, but “was once a sacred art” (164). At Walden Pond, Thoreau is both a reader of texts as nature and of nature as text; the two aspects mingle in a vast metaphor where it is often difficult to distinguish whether Thoreau is referring to hoeing lines of beans or tending lines of writing, and the language he seeks is to be the result of the union of his hardy masculinity and the virginal female principle of nature. This is the reason why seed play an important role in the narrative. 64 In the episode of the Hollowell place, even before he has chosen a place for 64 In his allegorization of intertextuality between the text of nature and nature in the text, Thoreau constantly pursued a meditation on seed: “Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have faith in a seed. Convince 78 Chapter 2 his experiment, Thoreau says, “I had begun to sort my seeds” (82), and later, “I had my seeds ready” (83). He goes to Walden Pond to make the “soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms … making the earth say beans instead of grass” (157). This is the subject of the chapter “The Bean-Field”; he heroically defends his seeds against two contradictory, but equally lethal dangers: on the one hand, the chaotic and uncontrolled forces of nature that threaten to make his beans return to a savage and brutish form: “my enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks” (155). On the other hand, he must contend the dogmatic views of husbandry and its quest for “large farms and large crops merely” pursued with “irreverent haste and heedlessness” (165). The crop he hopes to harvest is to spring up from the mystical wedlock of his male principle and “the dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself” (155). The participation of the whole universe in his work is made clear when his pen/ hoe “tinkle[s] against the stones, [and] that music echo[es] to the woods, and the sky and was the accompaniment to [his] labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop.” He adds: “It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans” (159). Walden aspires to be the echo of that echo, that is, the result of the multiple concussions and repercussions containing the whole of nature. Its ultimate goal would be to carry directly, like the wind, all the sounds of nature. Thoreau realizes that his crop is quite small in comparison to the “value of the crop which Nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man” (158). But these riches of nature are not immediately accessible; they first have to be translated into “bean-language.” The narrator’s bean-field is “the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields” (158). In all these metaphors of husbandry, reading, writing, and hoeing mingle to the point where they become indistinguishable; at the same time as the “I” of the hoer and the “I” of the hero narrator begin their oscillation under the vibration of the echoed sound. Like hoeing, writing is manual work, and like writing, “it … bear[s] some iteration in the account, for there [is] no little iteration in the labor” (161). Between husbandry, reading, and writing there occurs a crossing of sensory attributes in a pattern of substitution made possible by proximity or quasi-analogy. The crop of words and the crop of plants come together in sentences typical of the chapter “The Bean-Field”: me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.” (Faith in a Seed 53). This manuscript, published in 1993, is an almost Jamesian reflection on the “germ,” the initial flame that contains all the elements of life and makes the “earth say beans instead of grass” (157) and in writing makes poetic language possible. More than an organic teleology, the reflection on the seed is for Thoreau (as later for James) the center of infinite expansion, to the point where it is impossible to locate that “original” centre. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 79 The crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the moisture calculated, the silicates and the potash; but in all dells and pond holes of the woods and pastures grows a rich and various crop only unreaped by man. (158) The insistence on “English” (Thoreau underlines it) makes English hay mingle with the English language, while “weighed” reminds the reader that the whole enterprise is motivated by the desire to live “deliberately,” i.e. by weighing [libera: ‘scale,’ ‘balance’] each decision. 65 The sentence is also ironic for those who “calculate,” come up with scientific statements, and think that because they know that the rose is red they shall have the mastery. Similarly, in the beginning of the chapter “The Village” that follows “The Bean-Fields,” Thoreau says: “after hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing in the forenoon, I usually bathed” (155). The sentence makes it— deliberately—unclear whether reading and writing are to be equated with hoeing or if they are different actions. At all events, they are united in the final ritual purification in the sacred waters of Walden Pond. Thoreau is the hero of the bean-field campaign; he is Antæus working barefoot (155) and drawing his energy from the earth and nature. Beans are not a variety of plants whose sole destination is to be used and eaten; he declares that it was “a singular experience that long acquaintance which [he] cultivated with beans” (161), and the question he asks himself is: “[what] shall I learn from beans or beans from me” (155). The play on the word “culture” is a reminder for the reader that his experiment is not to be a new form of ideology like Christianity which is merely “an improved method of agri-culture” (37). Here the distinction between “corn and beans” (agri-) and “seed” (culture) is made clear. While growing beans, he announces: “I said to myself, I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like” (164). Selecting and growing beans is also intimately linked to the allegory of language. Husbandry—but also the building of the house, fishing, walking—is used as a metalinguistic meditation on language. Walden is an exploration of the notions of mother-tongue and father-tongue. The mother- 65 “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately” (90), Thoreau famously writes. “Deliberately” is certainly a keyword in Walden; it accompanies all the major aspects of the constitution of the self, and is present in all the facets of the shaping of its ethical topography. Deliberation characterizes ethical acts, insofar as the latter are executed freely and with the conviction that they are the only possibility; a deliberate act is something I am free to do, and yet not free not to do. Not to do it would be contradictory with my deliberation and therefore unethical. See for example: “It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than I did…” (45); “Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature…” (97); “With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers…” (99); “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written” (100). 80 Chapter 2 tongue is the language of (mother) nature, in its primal innocence and original meaning: But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. (111) The opening of the chapter “Sounds” (which follows the chapter “Reading”) leaves the reader no doubt that men live in a fallen language where literal access to reality (“without metaphor”) is denied them. The “provincial” aspect of the language “we” read also emphasizes the fact that this exile from a topography where language has unmediated meaning is linked to an “American Fall.” Like the American nation which suffers from a provincial complex, Thoreau suffers from his belatedness, i.e. from the fact that he always comes too late, at a time when the language he is striving to recapture is no longer present. Men are born with their mother tongue but they have forgotten it and there is no redemption: The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. (101) The mother gives birth; but rebirth, and awakening to a new life, which is what Walden is all about, depends on the father. The laborious work, the sense of valor, liberty, and responsibility recall the actions of the hoer/ hero working on his beans. However, the passage above does not come from the chapter “The Bean-Field” but from “Reading.” When Thoreau “become[s] much more intimate with [his] beans” (157), and cultivates a “long acquaintance” with them, he refers to his knowledge of nature. He “knows” nature and the fruit of that union is Walden, the instigator of a rebirth and of a new life. Although he refuses the forceful and binding authority of the fathertongue by saying, “I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures” (16), he nonetheless assumes the role of a father figure in the rebirth. Gregory Jay writes: “[Thoreau’s] discourse thus repeats the very structure of the patriarchal fidelity he condemns in his neighbor. This style of disobedience conforms to a rhetorical and ideological tradition which the mass of men recurrently invest in, either by defying their patriarchs or by engaging in an Oedipal rivalry with them…. Thoreau’s recourse to the transcendental male constrains the play of his text and gives his address a “phallogocentric” destination” (19). The repeated confidence crises in Walden are evincive of Thoreau’s awareness that the rhetorical ground on which he is building his “I”-(narrator), his house, and his neighborhood is Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 81 most unstable. While shying away from a masculine attitude of the heedless farmer or the transcendentalist moralizer who forcefully turns nature into a parody, and “know[s] Nature only as a robber” (166), he feels that the rebirth might not happen, and that in spite of his singing as lustily as Chanticleer, his neighbors might go on slumbering. It might be tempting to anchor Thoreau’s position in a solid shore and find some firm common ground whence the “lord clarion” could sing his song. Michael Fisher says in this respect: [Thoreau’s] conviction that “we are asleep nearly half our time” is underwritten by his confidence that he knows what it means to be really awake, much as he purports to know truth from falsehood, necessity from accident, simplicity from unwarranted complexity, purity from contamination, fact from fiction, nature from artifice, freedom from slavery, and reality from appearance…. (97) The set of “hierarchical distinctions” identified by Fischer in Walden are central to the book, but Thoreau—or his narrator—never acquires the confidence that would make it possible to radically separate the terms of binary oppositions. The narrator doubts the efficacy of his rhetorical position as a father figure and his (re)-productive abilities. In “The Bean-Field,” we find one of the rare occasion where Thoreau directly addresses the reader, as he sadly states: “I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up” (164). Sterility and death instead of rebirth and life, this is what Thoreau suspects to have produced. 66 It would be vain to try to decide whether Thoreau’s experiment is a success or not by trying to assimilate his discourse to the ethical and political positions of our time. 67 It would be equally foolish to condemn Thoreau 66 The passage from “The Bean-Field”, as well as the chapters “Higher Laws” and “Conclusion” were added by Thoreau to Walden during the years he spent reworking the manuscript after his publishers first turned it down. When it was finally published in 1854 (Boston: Ticknor and Fields) the narrative ended with the chapter “Conclusion,” and not with the chapter “Spring” as Thoreau had initially designed it. The sexual connotation of the word “Conclusion” evokes death and loneliness; thus instead of ending with life in the rebirth promised by spring, the narrative now ends with death. See J. Lyndon Shanley, The Making of Walden. 67 Michael Fischer seeks to redeem Thoreau from contemporary attackers who doubt his ethical and political correctness. Quoting a passage from the chapter “Conclusion,” Fisher comments: “Thoreau claims to know the ‘soundest truth’ and to anchor his argument in ‘what is inevitable and has a right to be’….” Fisher goes on to anticipate criticism from those who could hold against Thoreau his universal claims: “Deconstructing truth claims … has almost become a reflex in contemporary theorists…. Whenever someone boasts of speaking ‘without boundaries,’ we rush to uncover the social boundaries he unwittingly respects…. Though Thoreau’s apparent pontificating invites such a critique, he is not finally preaching to his readers from 82 Chapter 2 because he failed to inscribe his discourse outside the dialectic structure of Western metaphysics, as to praise him and try to make of Walden a sola scriptura and the basis of our ethical and political action. It is time we returned to the text to see how Thoreau never gets rid of either term of the dialectic opposition. He does not place himself in what Jay calls the “transcendental male” and he never achieves the consensual synthesis that Fischer is hoping for. In Walden the terms of the many contradictions constantly contaminate one another, just as the hoer always undermines and questions the position of the hero. The two never come together but define one another as a set of differences. Walden is a transcript of that set of differences. * * * In his examination of the necessities of life, Thoreau writes of the railroad: “We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside” (118). The railroad is an example of man’s obedience to a “blundering oracle” (5), on high…. [S]peaking without bounds is a desire, not an achievement, and needs to be reconciled with his conspicuous attempts to place himself in a self-constructed dwelling at a particular time beside Walden Pond” (98; emphasis added). While Fischer’s sympathy with Thoreau’s endeavors is justifiable, necessary even, I believe that he ignores the dark side of Walden, which may be that there is no reconciliation between the particular and the universal. Ironically, the successive versions of Walden made the narrative increasingly remote from such an ideal. The chapters “Higher Laws” and “Conclusion” were added to promote an order that would reconcile what Fischer calls Thoreau’s “flaunting of his situatedness” (98) with his bragging for humanity entire. These attempts to attain synthesis always circle back to the bitter realization of its impossibility. Buell writes that “Thoreau is the patron saint of American environmental writing” (115), but admits that as a youth Thoreau “had a relatively modest level of eco-consciousness,” and that “one could deconstruct [his] interest and [his] works that express it, by questioning whether environmental literacy was unequivocally of the first importance to [him]” (108). Fisher is interested in the socio-political issues while Buell focuses on environmental issues and their impact on today’s world. Even as he calls him a “patron saint,” Buell does not defend Thoreau’s sainthood, and declares that the above questions that have to do only with the intentions of Thoreau’s empirical self are irrelevant. To Buell, “[t]he most obvious answer … is that [Thoreau] makes a difference in the way one reads” (109). Narratives produce effects when they are read and not before. To describe texts in terms of intention only is to invent a pre-linguistic moment of performance and endow them with a performative power that would exist before the moment of writing or reading. Sharon Cameron opposes two types of writing in Thoreau. She praises the Journal, which she takes to be Thoreau’s true and spontaneous self while she dismisses Walden, which she considers as a (debased) product that Thoreau destined for the market place. In spite of the many admirable aspects of her book, I find Cameron’s dichotomies difficult to accept. For a complication of Cameron’s distinctions, see Henry Golemba, Thoreau’s Wild Rhetoric. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 83 where technology has become a new mythology. In Thoreau’s eyes, men are unable to decide whether they should accept those myths because they are unable to read them for what they are, that is, myths. In a development of the railroad metaphor, he adds that men should “keep on their own track” (118); but men refuse to take the risk and the responsibility for finding their own track. In an often-quoted passage, Thoreau seems to designate those for whom the book is to be most profitable: “Perhaps these pages are most particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them” (4). This statement announces that the book is not a doxa, but that it must be read. Beyond the tautology which consists in saying that a book cannot be understood unless it is read, it means that the language of Walden is a written language—an écriture. The narrative depends on the interval created by the difference between the equally necessary mother tongue and father tongue. As in the case of the classics, that essential difference between the two can only be written or read, for “what the Roman and Grecian multitudes could not hear, after the lapse of ages a few scholars read, and a few scholars are still reading it” (101; Thoreau’s emphasis). In Walden, Thoreau writes what the necessaries of life are, but unless the text is read—“seriously” read—by his neighbors, nothing will take place. Not only must people be able to read—“It is not enough to be able to speak the language of that nation by which [books] are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language…” (100)—, but even more importantly, they need to realize how essential this act is to the shaping of their world, for “With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers” (99). Only good readers can escape from atropi, blundering oracles, and from laboring under mistake. Thus, there is a whole chapter in Walden devoted to the apology of reading. It is mostly theoretical, insofar as Thoreau comments on the act of reading but does not do any reading himself. He states that his “residence was more favorable … to serious reading,” which is an activity he associates with the highest virtues he has identified thus far. Reading is “heroic” and related to morning and awakening to a new life: “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book” (107). Fallen nineteenth-century America appears again as “provincial,” and it is compared to the Europe of the dark ages before the Renaissance, when the Europeans were “illiterate.” Thoreau re-historicizes Europe to say that only when “the several nations of Europe … acquired distinct though rude written languages … then first learning revived” (101). Along the same line, he satirizes “easy reading” (104) which results in “dullness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties” (105). 84 Chapter 2 In Walden, reading is clearly an ethical activity, for reading is the very basis of what Thoreau purports to do, i.e. wake his neighbors up. If “[m]oral reform is the effort to throw off sleep” (90), then reading is the act which makes this moral reform possible: Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to. (104) This passage, like many others in the chapter, associate awakening, morning, light, (re)birth, intellect, and life in a vast metaphorical network which has reading at its intersection. The chapter “Reading” also freely associates religious texts (the Bibles [sic], the Vedas); philosophical texts (Plato’s Dialogues); and “classics” (Greek, Roman, English, French or Hindu). For Thoreau, they all have in common that they were written in the “select language of literature” (101), and as such must be read. Reading in “a high sense” is defined as a metonymy for the ethical acts that must be performed for the sake of one’s neighbor; Plato is Thoreau’s “townsman,” his “next neighbor” (107). It is people’s responsibility to read those books— “the treasured wealth of the world” (102)—, lest they should participate in the condition of a fallen America where the neighbor stands as a synecdoche for America’s society at large. Thoreau affirms that only “serious reading” can produce the redeeming change, because: There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. (107) As convincing and high-toned as they are, these declarations echo Puritan preaching. 68 Though the narrator says he will not prescribe rules and speak in the language of authority, he uses the Christ-like language of prophets and preachers. Though he warns his readers that “every path but [theirs] is the path of fate” (118), he runs the risk of becoming another prophet whom his neighbors may follow blindly. 68 Compare with Matthew, 13. 13-14: Therefore speak I to them in parables; because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall not perceive…. (King James) Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 85 The “select language of literature” (101) of Walden proposes to be a profane version of the Scriptures that promise salvation to those who read them. Thoreau was certainly aware of this predicament, and that is why he insists that readers must be “noble,” “adventurous,” and “heroic,” and must take responsibility for their own reading. With his acute sense for epigrammatic statements, Thoreau asserts that in shaping his topography through acts of reading “[a] man sits as many risks as he runs” (153). Thoreau cannot tell his readers how to read the narrative; Walden is the result of a series of deliberate acts of reading and it can only be read deliberately. He cannot tell his readers what to do, because he can only tell them in the voice of authority. Assigning responsibility to the reader is a way of enacting Walden’s proposal, but it is also a way of admitting the limits of the narration’s possibilities. Thoreau realizes that he cannot bring the unmediated language of nature to his neighbors, and Walden is a translation and a transcript; thereby it is also a transgression and a defacement of the language of nature: Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. (103) The classics were available in translation by the middle of the nineteenthcentury. What Thoreau points to is that they must be read in a way which “requires the training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object”(101), and not be simply referred to in general terms as “classics.” Walden is written in the “select language of literature” and readers have to engage it with all their faculties and capabilities. However, Thoreau promises no help, as he warns the reader early in the narrative: “You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, inseparable from its very nature” (17). The readers/ neighbors have to go on their own adventure, build their own self, their own house, their own neighborhood, and their own Walden Pond. Ultimately, they alone will be responsible for the topography they have created for themselves and others. Thoreau uses the responsibility of the reader as the crux of another metaphorical network where different activities conducted near the pond intersect. Fishing is one of them. He writes that fishing is “the true industry for poets,” and adds that it “is the only trade [he has] learned” (224). In an ironic allusion to Christ, the fisher of men of the New Testament, fishing becomes the center of a new metaphor for reading. When the “poet” visits him and wants to go fishing with him, Thoreau—who then calls himself a “Hermit”—accepts despite his desire to conclude “a serious meditation.” 86 Chapter 2 As the “poet” digs the bait, viz. worms, Thoreau says to him that he has “found the increase of fair bait to be nearly as the squares of the distances” (225). In a reminder of the bean-field episode, he adds that the “poet” should “look well in among the roots of the grass, as if [he] were weeding” (225). The pun on distance brings back to the reader’s memory Thoreau’s isolation from the village and the chapter “The Bean-Field” where he hoes his beans, that is, extracts his word from among the weeds that threaten to cover them. The metaphorical interchange relates the worms/ words to the seeds of the bean-field, or to the woods/ words Thoreau searches in his experiment. In order to catch the fish/ reader, he must find the right worms/ words and the farther (in the woods) he goes for them the better they are; he cannot use those immediately at hand in the village: “those village worms[/ words] are quite too large; a shiner [/ sinner? ] may make a meal of one without finding the skewer” (225). The “poet” says that he found thirteen worms/ words in a perfect state and others undersized but that will do for the smaller fry because “they do not cover the hook[/ book] so much” (225). Finally, the two men decide to go to Concord where there is “good sport ... if the water be not too high” (225). The fish and the readers get mixed in this metaphorical play. While there is no doubt that the discussion bears on angling, it also bears on Thoreau’s essential preoccupation in the narrative: words, reading and language as the habitat of men. 69 Thoreau is meticulous in his observation of the fish. They do not have the singular advantage of emitting sounds and having a behavior as easy to observe as foxes or jays; fish are dumb, deaf, and blind. But such is also the neighbor’s condition in his state of dejection as it appears in Thoreau’s portrait. In his Journal, Thoreau makes the parallel between men and fish even more explicit: “we [fish and men] are so much alike. Have so many faculties in common! —I have not yet met with the philosopher who could in a quite conclusive undoubtful way—show me the and if not the then how any difference, between a man and a fish” (Journal 2: 108). Thus, the fish/ readers he wants to catch enter the metaphorical substitution game in which the Latin names of the fish themselves lose their apparent scientific neutrality and participate in the rhetorical game; the eel is used as an implicit critique of the overfed, overheated, overdressed city inhabitants through its Latin name: Muraena Bostoniensis (Journal 2: 112). Similarly, the “Pomotis obesus” or “Pomotis vulgaris” (Journal 2: 109) represents the reader in his dejected state, as a gross slumbering animal that is particularly difficult to stir. The pout is also the pouting readers who try to 69 This unique case of dialogue in Walden, in which fishing is mixed with literary terms, makes us irresistibly think of a mock-Platonic Dialogue—it is reminiscent of The Sophist, for instance, where the “angler” and the sophist are the simultaneous subject of the dialogue between Thaetetus and The Stranger. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 87 find their way through Walden, stumbling at every image, stopped by every metaphor, and rebuked by the difficulty of the enterprise. From where he is, Thoreau imagines “some life prowling about its extremity [of his fishing line], of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind” (175). In the Journal “The horned Pout (Pimelodus nebulosus)” is described as: A dull blundering fish—like the eel vespertinal in its habits—fond of the mud. ... They are taken at night with a light to attract them—and a mass of worms stung on thread and coiled up. (Journal 2: 111) Like the fox, the pout is attracted by Thoreau’s light, but its stubborn dullness and its “vespertinal habits” show that, like the reader, it is not ready for morning yet. * * * While much of the chapter “Reading” may be seen as a theoretical exposition of what reading is to be, the chapters that immediately follow seem to implement the practice of reading. Thoreau reads Walden Pond and the mother tongue of nature in order to translate it into the father tongue of Walden. Thus, he writes that “there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read” (101). The narrative of Walden takes place between the brutish language of (mother) nature and the father tongue of literature: The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. (101) Thoreau is aware, however, that the mother tongue cannot be simply disposed of because someone says so. The mother tongue does not disappear: it has to be translated into the father-tongue of literature. The oscillation between the mother tongue and the father tongue is reflected in the numerous antiphonal movements of the narrative, as for instance in the order of the chapters or their openings: (3) “Reading” —> (4) “Sounds” (5) “Solitude” —> (6) “Visitors” (7) “The Bean-Field” —> (8) “The Village” (9) “The Ponds” —> (10) “Baker Farm” (11) “Higher Laws” —> (12) “Brute Neighbors” 88 Chapter 2 commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds” (“Reading,” § 4) books, though the most select and classic, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things speak without metaphor….”(“Sounds,” § 1) “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude” (“Solitude,” § 9) —> “I think I love society as much as most” (“Visitors,” § 1) The order created by Walden resists dialectical oppositions. It is an order that develops between the spoken language of nature and the written language of literature, and it collapses the opposition between Thoreau’s perception and observation of nature and his intellectualizing it in his writing. 70 Walden is indeed a strange place. The return to the original language of nature in the chapter “Sounds” after the exhortation to read the “classics” in “Reading” might seem to indicate that Thoreau opposes the language of nature and written language (“literature”). The former would be the original and pure “voice” of nature “which all things and events speak without metaphor” (111; my italics), while the latter, in spite of its “noblest words,” (100) would be exterior to nature and artificial. John Carlos Rowe writes that “every schoolchild knows that Walden is about innocence, the auroral Adam bathed in the primal light of nature” (35). This idea has imposed itself on much criticism, and it presupposes that Thoreau tries to recover his child-like innocence through his mother tongue which he is able to remember at Walden Pond. The written language—the father tongue—of Walden which he brings back to the village (he wrote “the bulk of it” [3] in the woods), would merely represent or adumbrate the mother-tongue. It would be only “[d]erivative because representative: signifier of the first signifier, representation of the self-present 70 Jacques Derrida’s différance is that order which resists what is a founding opposition in philosophy, namely the opposition between perception [le sensible] and understanding [l’intelligible]. I believe that Derrida’s description of that order is a useful way of thinking of the topography that the reading of Walden shapes configures. In Walden, there is [an] order which resists the opposition [between perception and understanding]; it resists it because it bears it in itself [parce qu’il la porte], and announces its advent in an always distracted and deferred movement [dans un mouvement de différance (avec un a)] between the two differences or between the two letters [e and a]; this différance which belongs neither to voice nor to writing in their common sense: it takes place [se tient comme l’espace étrange], in lieu of the strange space … between spoken and written language [entre parole et écriture]. (“La différance” 5; my translation) “The noblest written words are —> “But while we are confined to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 89 voice [de la voix présente à soi], of the immediate, natural, and direct signification of the meaning….” (Derrida, Grammatology 30). The written language transvestites the language of nature as the superfluities denounced by Thoreau prevent man’s elevation and hide his true nature. When he warns against “all enterprises that require new clothes” (23) he seems to be announcing his reflection on language. Derrida points out that from Plato to de Saussure writing (écriture) has always assumed the role of a transvestite. Such seems also to be its status in its fallen state in Thoreau’s America. Derrida comments: [H]as it ever been doubted that writing was the clothing of speech? For Saussure it is even a garment of perversion and debauchery, a dress of corruption and disguise, a festival mask that must be exorcised, that is warded off, by the good word: “Writing veils the appearance of language; it is not a guise for language but a disguise. (Grammatology 35) De Saussure’s words are reminiscent of what Thoreau says in Walden of the necessaries of life. Whatever exceeds them, heaves men down and makes them fall: they are “positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind” (14). If the narrative of Walden is an attempt to return to the original state of the mother tongue, then it is necessarily destined to fail; just as Collins’ cat “becomes a dead cat” when it makes for the woods. Thoreau writes that he “went to the woods because [he] wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life” (90). Literature could in this respect appear as one of the many superfluities humanity has to get rid of; men should remember where they come from and return to that original state by recovering their original language. But we read in Walden that “It is not enough to be able to speak the language of that nation by which [books] are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language” (100; emphasis added). What has to be remembered is that—contrary to what schoolchildren might think they know—there is no original and innocent language. In Walden, language is always already written; it is always already an écriture and must therefore always be read. The mother tongue is not read: men learn it “from their mothers,” “like brutes” (100), without understanding it. The unmediated presence of the voice of the mother gives an illusion of truth, as the unmediated sounds of nature give the illusion of its/ her presence. It follows that the attempt to recover this presence and immediacy is another way of complying with a blundering oracle, the oracle of metaphysics. Walden deconstructs the myth of the original language of nature and contests the assumption that the father tongue of literature is necessarily the language of authority that imprisons men in a rigidified topography. The language Thoreau goes to seek at Walden Pond is not an original pre-written idiom that he transcribes; Walden is about the realization—formalized by Derrida—that “There is an originary violence of writ- 90 Chapter 2 ing because language is first, in a sense that I [Derrida] shall gradually reveal, writing” (Grammatology 37). Where one might have expected a romantic divagation about nature and its original language, Walden becomes a long and systematic—sometimes finicky and even boring—lesson in rhetorical reading. Nature is read by Thoreau as text. When he is in his bean-field, writing and reading cannot be dissociated from hoeing, weeding, harvesting, because it would make the narration fall back into a distinction between perception and intellect, between being and thinking. 71 The delineation of a topography where men can live “deliberately,” i.e. live by assuming ethically the liberty of their pursuits depends “upon the interdependence of physis and logos” (Rowe 49), or upon what Thoreau calls in Walden “link[ing] [his] facts to fable” (184). * * * Thus it is not only books that must be read “as reservedly and deliberately as they were written,” but everything must be “read” in the same way. He keeps exposing through the first three chapters of the narrative how failure to do so results in mixing up the linguistic and natural reality of things. Walden becomes an adventure of literary semiology where “the referential function of language is not being denied—far from it; what is in question is its authority as a model for natural or phenomenal cognition” (de Man 11). Thus, the name of the place of Thoreau’s residence is deconstructed. According to Thoreau, Walden Pond could draw its name from an Indian fable and the name of an Indian maiden. He also surmises that the name of the pond may result from the metaphorical reading of a natural event: “one might suppose that it was called, originally, Walled-in Pond” (183; Thoreau’s emphasis). Like the pond, Thoreau is walled-in in words. When he builds his chimney, he uses the stones of the pond’s shore. Thereby he pulls down the wall of words that circles and imprisons the pond to deliberately build something new. Unlike a wall that separates, isolates, and divides, the hearth assembles and attracts visitors, especially during the cold but necessary settling down during the winter. The words of divorcement that formed the wall are used by Thoreau to build something that connects and makes it possible to build his self during the long winter, as well as a new neighborhood in a new understanding of language. 71 In his reading of A Week, John Carlos Rowe points out that for Thoreau (as for Heidegger), “the divorce of word and deed is the subject of the true poet in a ‘destitute time.’ It is a separation that points toward a fundamental violence: the distinction between Being (physis) and thinking (logos) that is the target of Heidegger’s destruction of Western metaphysics and Thoreau’s more modest criticism of civilization and its discontents” (45). Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 91 The Canadian woodchopper (“Visitors”) is a child of nature. Thoreau who is against cutting trees nevertheless admires the skill of the Canadian: “In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine or the rock” (146). The woodchopper’s brutish language fetters him to his animal condition. Though he never finished a single book, he tells Thoreau, “if it were not for books [he] would not know what to do on rainy days” (144). His language dissociates physis and logos by yielding him access to the physical act of reading, but not to understanding: “to him Homer was a great writer, though what his writing was about he did not know” (144-45). Similarly, he understands “writing” as meaning “hand writing” (“labor of the hand”), and when Thoreau tells him that he writes “considerably,” the woodchopper answers that he writes “a remarkably good hand himself” (147). By living in the midst of nature he escaped society’s contamination, and Thoreau states that he does not display the Yankees’ heedlessness and prejudices: “he could defend many institutions.... [H]e gave the true reason for their prevalence, and speculation had not suggested to him any other” (149). But despite his aspect of a sensible man bound down to nothing, he is an irresponsible and purely instinctive brute: “the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as an infant” (147; my italics). This retarded state which prevents the Canadian from questioning his life keeps him in permanent mirth and bewilderment. His being tied down to his mother tongue gives him “the degree of consciousness, … of trust and reverence, [in which] a child is not a man but kept a child” (147). Thoreau seems puzzled by this man who seems happy in his brutish state, though he admits that he does not “know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity” (148). The Canadian woodchopper is a feral child in whom Thoreau reads the impossibility of going back to “wildness” 72 because it does not lead to actual freedom but to onanistic idiocy; Thoreau comments: I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion.... Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though more promising than a merely learned man’s, it rarely ripened to any thing which can be reported. (150) “‘How I love to talk! By George, I could talk all day! ’” the lumberjack exclaims (149), But although he can talk, he is merely loquacious and his writing—“the name of his native parish handsomely … in the snow by the highway” (147)—only expresses his blind obedience and commitment to dogma and tradition, and Thoreau bitterly reflects that 72 Rowe remarks that “In both A Week and Walden, ‘wildness’ is the word Thoreau uses to indicate the un-nameable in nature that the modern American has forgotten” (42). 92 Chapter 2 there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate … who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy. (150) The depth of the pond is irrelevant if it lacks the essential qualities which are its color and its purity. “Deep” thoughts are equally irrelevant if they cannot be extracted from the primeval clay of illiteracy. The case of the woodchopper, who says that he would die if he had thoughts of his own, shows that a new language can only be recovered in the death of the old one. This symbolic death is figured in Walden by loss and disorientation. There are several important moments in the narrative in which Thoreau “loses himself” before “finding himself” again. Those scenes seem to be linked to the title of the central chapter of the narrative, “The Ponds,” which echoes the verb “to ponder” (Latin ponderare: ‘to weigh’) and the deliberation of Thoreau’s acts. The narrator goes deliberately to the woods, accepting the risk of getting lost. He leaves the village, or rather “escape[s] to the woods” (167), thus making manifest his break from society and its language. He expresses the necessity to “front” danger, be responsible for himself, and “launch … into the night especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room” (169). In the ten lines following this statement the pair dark/ night occurs no less than five times. Although he might know the route perfectly well, he cannot rely on his intellect to find his way, so he writes: “my feet felt the path which my eyes could not see” (170). He walks in that manner, almost unconsciously, “dreaming and absent minded,” assuming that “perhaps [his] body would find its way home if its master should forsake it” (170). Thoreau develops a metaphorical center of gravity which attracts everything including language into its orbit. He escapes from the light of a “bright” parlor to which he prefers the disquieting darkness of the Walden woods. Ironically, the narrator loses his bearings in “The Village.” The allegorical displacement from losing and finding one’s way to losing and finding one’s language begins almost imperceptibly when he flees the “lecture room” of the village. “Lecture” has preaching and moralizing overtones, and above all, proclaims its origins in the Latin word lectura: ‘reading.’ Leaving the village “parlor” is for him a way of leaving behind the “gossip”(165) of the village. 73 73 “Parlor” is derived from French parler (‘to speak’); it is also rooted in the Greek parabolê which gave the Latin parabola (comparison), hence “parable,” “parabola,” “parlor,” “parlance,” “parlando,” “parlay,” “parle,” “parley,” but also “parliament,” “parliamentarian,” “parliamentary,” and so forth. In his Journal, Thoreau comments: “Consider the endless tide of speech—forever flowing in countless cellars and garrets—parlors—that of French says Carlyle, ‘only ebbs towards the short hours of night.’ And what a drop in the bucket is the printed word” (2: 206). Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 93 He prefers the apparently unstructured space of the woods to the false security offered by the regulated topography of the village streets: It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road, and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round, —for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, —do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. (170-171) The long quote above is one of the several metaphorical Gordian knots that order the narrative. The tropes form a maze in a long—fifty-eight-line— paragraph where it is very easy to get lost. 74 Getting lost is said to be a “valuable” experience—it is so because it participates in the economic process that sorts out the necessities of life. It is a “memorable” experience too, that is, something one will remember, but also an experience in remembering. To get lost is to peruse the “memorable interval” that separates the mother tongue from the father tongue; it also consists in remembering that which the intellect (logos) has forgotten in its separation from the body and from being (physis). Getting lost is an experience that consists in remembering that in the “originary sense that links physis and logos … action and word are integrally bound together” (Rowe 46). The defamiliarization of language turns Concord into Siberia and trivial walks can engage the life of the traveler. The distance between Siberia and Concord is as small as the distance between empirical reality and languageshaped reality. The overlapping of word/ wood/ world in the sentence is so close that “we” get lost as much in the woods as in words: “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find 74 Characteristically the chapter “The Village” has only three paragraphs (it is the shortest chapter in Walden), but all these paragraphs where Thoreau “loses himself”—as he loses the reader—are long and dense; they form a total of two-hundred and two lines. Conversely, the following chapter, “the Ponds,” where he “finds himself” and awakens to a new reality and language, there is a succession of short, rapid, at times almost epigrammatic paragraphs. While in “The Village” the rhythm of reading is slow, almost oppressive at times, in “The Ponds” the alternation of short and long paragraphs make the reading quite a different experience. 94 Chapter 2 ourselves.” To find oneself implies to lose the world but also to lose one’s words. Losing one’s language, however, does not imply returning to a prelinguistic condition of innocence, for language keeps piloting the body even “unconsciously.” For Thoreau, leaving the village and its language to live in the margin of its society and make for the woods, is not to enter blank and unstructured space, but to have access to a place where sounds are already a language, though not yet dissociated from being. The (im)possibility of finding one’s way in those labyrinths of words becomes one of the major themes of the book. In the passage above “steering,” “pilots,” “beacon,” “headland” or “cape” echo the wording of several other passages where navigation and exploration are used as central metaphors. The metaphor of exploration announced in “Economy” with the exploration of the self is now used for the exploration of language. Thus, the names of animals refer to exploration and navigation: the loon is a Colymbus glacialis; the red squirrel a Sciurus Hudsonius; the hare a Leprus Americanus. Walden purports to be the Northwest Passage between what seems deceptively close and unmediated (Concord, nature, neighbors) and what seems so remote (Siberia, literature, animals). * * * Thoreau often reports apparently non-referential sounds but their writing is never purely phonetic. They are always re-textualized and drawn into the space of the written page. Thus, the “u-lu-lu” of the screech-owl becomes reminiscent of “mourning women”; the “dismal scream” is even said to be “Ben Jonsonian” (124). The hooting owl and its “Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo” also lends itself to “pleasing associations” (125) and sounds like “who hoer, who? ” Of course, the birds ask no such questions, but when their sounds are committed to the space of the page, they become the expression of Thoreau’s doubts and “represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts” (125). But nature also provides its teachings with a-contrario examples. The language of the frogs, for instance, is “ejaculated” by “patriarchs” or “masters of ceremony” with a feeling of satisfied superiority. The colloquy goes on, vain and unmodified, through the night like a concert of lost energy, until the spring of day puts an end to the cacophony. Significantly, Thoreau says, “The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night” (129). Their language is in radical contradiction with that of the birds, in particular the cockerels, which are the ushers of morning. In “Brute Neighbors,” Thoreau asks, “Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world? ” (225), and Daniel Peck calls this “the central question Walden seeks to answer and to which Walden itself is an answer” (117). The patient and meticulous considerations on animals bring Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 95 answers to this question by providing a reading in which being and meaning are one. The famous scene of the chase with the loon is one of the most memorable episodes of the narrative. In this passage Thoreau is at one and the same time the observer and the observed. The loon and its “demoniac laughter” form an opportunity for Thoreau to confront his father tongue (logos) to the purely brutish and instinctive mother tongue of the fowl. He finds out very rapidly that it is useless to “endeavor to calculate where [the loon] [will] rise” (235). Again and again, the bird dodges all of his moves based on his reasoning and his intellect; the loon's reactions are as unpredictable as those of a madman. The intellect cannot beat the instinct, but the instinct alone is not enough either: “after displaying so much cunning, … [the loon] invariably betray[s] himself the moment he [comes] up by that loud laugh” (235). The loon is not the only animal in the narrative unable to resist its instinct. The adjective “demoniac” suggests uncontrolled and destructive forces that point toward a pre-linguistic chaos. The loon’s behavior is chaotic and destroys what it has elaborated. As long as it is only a game of pursuit on the pond, then Thoreau’s conclusion—“it was a silly loon, I thought”—belongs to sports and it is good fun. But these lapses of sequence in the linguistic continuum bear in them the implication of death as the ultimate chaos. When Thoreau tries to read the intentions of the loon by using his reason he fails, but when the loon and Thoreau, the observer and the observed, are united in “a lovely dance between nature and the self” (Peck 121), then the scene becomes significant and makes a world. The dance that unites the irreducible otherness of the loon with Thoreau also reveals that part of otherness (wildness, madness) that exists in him. The dance by uniting being and understanding is a way of reading which makes the encounter of the two possible. In the dance, Thoreau is reminded of his closeness to nature and of his otherness from it. Instead of remaining separate, the two are united, not in a synthesis, but in a “dance.” * * * Physis and logos that were disjoined, are re-membered in the “dance,” and the construction of the topography of Walden is also an act of remembering. Reading is a way of world-making, of building one’s world, but that building is never made with new material. As Thoreau’s hut which is built with what we would call today recycled materials, the language of nature is never there virginal and waiting for him. It is a re-used language that has to be dismembered and remembered. In this Thoreau’s work is like the work of Wyman the potter of whom he says: 96 Chapter 2 I had read of the potter’s clay and wheel in Scriptures, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those days…, and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practiced in my neighborhood. (261) Peck points out shrewdly that “the most ‘fictile’ art practiced in Thoreau’s neighborhood is … his own” and he adds, “[Thoreau] takes the ‘broken’ images of the past and moulds them in a new configuration, … and his ‘fictile’ art is also ‘fictive’; it is the art of storytelling” (149). In this reconstructed topography, Thoreau can establish a new topos (i.e. a common space) that he can share with his neighbors. In the world where he lives, Thoreau says, “We have the St Vitus’ dance and cannot possibly keep our heads still” (93). This fidgety heedlessness is replaced in Walden by a form of immobile nomadism which finally “[makes] some progress toward settling in the world” (85). Settling in the world/ woods/ words implies an exploration, a remembering of one’s self, especially during the long winter when few visitors call, and when the cold and solitude slow down his restlessness. Thoreau allegorizes animals that fly away during the winter to find some milder weather elsewhere. They seem to parody men who are unable to rely on their own capabilities and always hope for some better and hypothetical future and better climes. The clangor of the geese contrasts with the hooting of the hooting-owl, whose cry is “the very lingua vernacula of Walden Pond” (272). That is the language Thoreau is anxiously looking for in the song of the evening robin of which he writes: “If I could ever find the twig he sits upon! I mean he; I mean the twig. This at least is not the turdus migratorius” (312). The song he is looking for cannot be sung by a migrating bird; Walden is dictated to Thoreau in the local dialect spoken by the inhabitants of Walden Pond, and read in the neighborhood reconstructed by Walden. “There is,” Thoreau says, “some of the same necessity in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest” (46). Once again, the loon serves as the intersection of several metaphorical avenues. The bird’s Latin name—Colymbus glacialis—suggests that it serves for the discovery and the exploration of Thoreau’s (American) self, but also it makes of him a “winter animal” who stays at Walden Pond to learn its lingua vernacula. During winter men sit around the hearth that was built with the stones that once walled-in the pond. The new neighborhood built around the hearth makes it possible to escape from “winter and unspeakable cold” (240; my italics), that is, the cold that kills language. Walden echoes the Promethean myth when Thoreau writes that man’s fire “allows him to maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter,” and go “a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the fine arts” (253-54). To go beyond instinct is the task of Walden which “revises mythology,” “sounds a fable here and there,” and “builds castles in the air for which the earth offer[s] no Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 97 foundation” (269-70). Learning to write the language of Walden Pond, the language of “wildness,” is for Thoreau the construction of a topos for which there can be no firm ground. The narrator, however, must take the responsibility for the topos his narrative act constructs and he often trembles under the weight of this task. Derrida comments on the responsibility of writers who cannot inscribe their own words but can only transcribe the words of a language that always precedes and overwhelms them: The act of writing says the anguish of the Hebraic Ruah as it was felt by the lonely human being responsible for its transcription; it says Jeremiah’s anguish when he bowed under the burden of God’s dictation (“Take a book and write in it all the words I have told you”), or Baruch’s when he took down Jeremiah’s dictation, etc. (Jeremiah 36-2,4)…. That is the time when we have to decide whether we should write everything we hear. (“Écriture” 19; my translation) Winter represents an important crisis that must be overcome by the process of self-exploration which implies self-reliance but also perpetual doubt. The rebirth of spring depends on his capacity to situate himself in his newly reconstructed world. The two-part chapter “Former inhabitants; and Winter Visitors” focuses on those who dwelled for a while at Walden Pond, but never succeeded to become naturalized. Unlike Thoreau, these failed inhabitants did not succeed in living on the meager resources that form the “necessaries of life.” Cato Ingraham (a slave) was replaced by a dweller far more indigenous and appropriate to the place, “one of the earliest species of golden-rod (Solidago stricta) grows there luxuriantly” (257). The name of the bush seems to suggest that Cato (though a Stoic) was not as solitary and as strict as the place requires its inhabitants to be. Zilpha (a colored woman) also had a dwelling at Walden Pond, and her dwelling was as well replaced by “sturdy oaks.” The chapter features Thoreau as the only human survivor at Walden Pond. His evocation of the former inhabitants of the place is a way of establishing the history of the place and reconstructing its past. As the “only survivor” (260) of the fire that destroys Breed’s hut, he is the heir of the genealogy he traces. One may wonder why in a book that insists so much on avoiding fatal mistakes, an entire chapter is devoted to failure. The answer rests probably in the value of the past in the narrative. His mythical rebuilding of a past world which is now forever lost serves primarily to contrast with the present condition of Walden Pond. The narrative opens, as Peck points out, with Thoreau’s statement: “at present I am a sojourner in civilized life again” (3), which means that from the very beginning he is himself a “former inhabitant.” While A Week celebrated the past and valued human past, Walden emphasizes the present as the moment of one’s self- 98 Chapter 2 presence. As Rowe remarks, “the text of A Week celebrates the return to Concord as a ‘fall’ into that language that has forever displaced the nature it set out to discover,” on the other hand, Rowe continues, “the text of Walden celebrates its departure from Walden as the realization of the natural experiment” (32). Despite his describing Walden Pond as a sacred place propitious to the discovery of the new self, Thoreau leaves the place and returns to Concord. The point is not to find Walden wonderful but to be able to leave it. For the readers the problem is the same: whether they profit from the narrative by reading it becomes irrelevant if they become “former inhabitants” of Walden after they have closed the book. The narrative is to remain present even after it has been read; a reader of Walden ought to be able to say, like Thoreau, after laying down the book: “at present I am a sojourner in civilized life again,” i.e. I found myself in Walden, and the narrative is present in me even though I am no longer present in it. “When I wrote the following pages,” Thoreau writes, “I lived alone, in the woods” (3). The narrative is a reconstruction of his experience from its start to its end. Accordingly, thirteen out of the eighteen chapters, as well as numerous paragraphs, in Walden begin with indications marking the passage of time. This rather emphatic rhetorical structuring of the text seems to point to the chronological progress of the narrative. The chapter “The Ponds,” for instance, is divided into four sections clearly separated by typographical gaps; the first section consists of four paragraphs which open as follows: “Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society...”; “Occasionally, after my hoeing was done...”; “In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat...”; “Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor....” The time adverbs, as is often the case in the narrative, introduce occasional activities or events. Thoreau reports on these activities or events using past tenses (past simple; pluperfect). But in the next three paragraphs describing Walden Pond, we read: “The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale…” (175; emphasis added) “The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be discerned…” (177; emphasis added) “The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white tones…” (178: emphasis added). Along the same line, he speaks of the “perennial spring” of the pond to anchor it in an eternal “now.” The privileged stance of the “now” undermines the temporal situatedness of the narrative and tries to make of Walden Pond an eternal place immune to the passage of time. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 99 Walden's ambition and belief is that it is possible to be a successful former inhabitant, that is, to make present what is past and absent. This appears very soon when Thoreau writes: “I do not mean to prescribe rules ... to those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the present condition of things; ... I reckon myself in the number” (16; emphasis added). Walden ceaselessly repeats Thoreau’s faith in a present constructed with the ruins of the past and the shattered hopes of the future. “The present was my next experiment of this kind” (84; emphasis added), he writes in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.” Grammatically, “present” refers to the construction of his house; but the placement of the sentence at the beginning of a paragraph, and after a typographical gap demands an effort to recollect the previous sentence. The immediate meaning of “The present was my next experiment of this kind” reads as if the present was the thing he was experimenting with by writing Walden. But time penetrates the woods despite Thoreau’s bold affirmation: My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that “for yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow they have only one word….” (112) As long as it is only the “whistle of the locomotive [which] penetrates [his] woods” (115), Thoreau can lull himself with the illusion that he is protected in his timeless refuge from the devilish Iron Horse by which the farmers “set their clocks” (117). He could pretend to ignore these dark forebodings as if they did not belong to his reality anymore. Time, however, insinuates itself more insidiously into the woods. The rise and fall of the pond which apparently has neither outlet nor tributary and which Thoreau observes attentively (181-183) leaves indubitable traces of the passage of time. Both for the author/ narrator and the reader/ neighbor, time penetrates the topos outlined by Walden just as it penetrates the apparently self-enclosed and securely encased topography Walden Pond. The sacred character of the written word (scriptura) is affirmed in the chapter “Reading” where Thoreau posits: “A written word is the choicest of relics” (102). A relic is a trace of that which is no longer present; it is the sacred sign of the departed sainthood and it stands in its place. The written word, in this case Walden, is inscribed in the traditional dichotomy between absence and presence. Literature replaces the departed topography or the deceased neighbor. It presupposes that there is an initial presence—of a sacred man or a sacred pond—that is. Thus the word “relic” is full of promises, but it also has strong morbid overtones. “Relic” refers to death and cadaver—to a dismembered cadaver. This does not bode well for the prom- 100 Chapter 2 ise of bringing us into the presence of Walden. 75 Under these conditions one may wonder whether it will ever be possible to remember the topos Thoreau strove so hard to find. The first version of Walden, whose “bulk” Thoreau wrote in the woods, ended with the exuberant chapter “Spring” and its last sentence reads: “Thus was my first year’s life in the woods completed.” 76 Later, he added: “and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th, 1847” (319). It is difficult not to feel the bitter tone of dismissal, as well as the finality of the adverb “finally” in this addenda written at a time when Thoreau had definitively become a former inhabitant of Walden. Over the years of rewriting Walden, Thoreau realized the past had never been present, and that the hope to recreate a presence was vain because there had never been a presence in the first place. 77 Although Shanley writes that “it is fairly safe to assume that [“Reading”] was practically in its final form” (94) in the first version, there are some significant changes. Thus, in version one, the passage quoted above read: “A word fitly written is the most choice and select of things” (Shanley 148). There is no mention of the word “relic,” and the rhetorically marked phrase “written word” was also added later. With the introduction of death associated to writing and reading, the life-giving promise of Walden is seriously undermined, for it introduced the possibility that the “relic” to re-member does not belong to a warm and living body but to a rigid corpse. Thoreau seems to question the status of the literary work as a witness to what once was and no longer is. By undermining the sacred and redemptive character of the written word, he questions the very possibility of an original presence and its authority. The authority of nature, God, the author as a unified and solidified self is moot. Derrida points to the unsettling consequences of this radical move: [T]he authority of presence is thus undermined, and the authority of absence—if considered merely as its symmetrical opposite—is undermined as well. Thus is questioned the borderline by the tyranny of which we, the in- 75 Peck comments on this point: “The rhetoric of Walden works to limit the possibility of loss. By its rhetoric I mean those things that belong generically to the book’s pastoral and utopian purposes—its stated program for moral reform, its determined buoyancy, its commitment to the future, its desire to sing like Chanticleer and wake Thoreau’s neighbors up” (153). 76 Shanley observes: “This is clearly the end of version I. Two additional leaves … contain material that Thoreau developed further in “Conclusion,” … but the material is in no respect an integral part of version I” (208). 77 Many stories added to Walden in its successive versions show that Thoreau grew very disillusioned about his initial hopes. The story of the Indian basket-weaver— which recalls that of Wyman the potter—is a case in point. This story was added into version IV of the manuscript which Thoreau reworked “at various times in 1852” (Shanley 31; 72). Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods 101 habitants of a language and of a system of thought, have always been, and still are, being constrained to form the general sense of being as either presence or absence…. (“Différance” 10; my translation) Consequently, there is no ground on which Thoreau can stand when he affirms that Walden Pond is. Walden only takes place in the literary acts of reading and writing, but it never is, for it is impossible to invoke the law that would guarantee its ontological status. It is correct then to say that Walden does not preach, for it has nothing to preach. It does not speak in the name of anything or anyone. There is a vacancy of the transcendental law in Walden, which deprives either nature or Thoreau of their authority. Nature in Walden is never present and therefore the present-ness of Walden Pond as physical topos can never be posited. The Utopian topos Thoreau dreams to find or to reconstruct in language is always already gone—not because he is late but because language is late or belated. Nature in Walden can be compared to what Derrida says of différance: She [la différance] never gives herself in the present to anybody. She keeps to herself, she does not reveal herself, and thereby exceeds on that very point the order of the truth. She does not conceal herself for all that, like something, like a mysterious being. She does not hide in some occulted nonknowledge, nor does she lurk in a cave of which one could find the mouth. (6) On the other hand, and by the same token, Walden can never be said to be absent. Its nature is solicited by Thoreau’s acts of writing and reading, which turn it into a topos that always exceeds the boundaries of presence and absence. It always exceeds the boundaries of its name (Walden) that its self-appointed land-surveyor (Thoreau) would like to ascribe it. The topos created by Walden is always radically other; it takes place in the margin of our understanding where we encounter both the otherness of our neighbors and the otherness of our own self. Thoreau’s text often betrays a certain form of nostalgia of the times of the first version of the manuscript when he could still believe in the presence of nature, and in the certainty of rebirth through the mediation of the literary text. As Peck comments, “Walden appears not as the culmination of Thoreau’s career but as a pivotal book” (156). It still bears the traces of its disillusions, but it offers hope as well. Even though Walden may not be the final redemptive word, it offers its readers a topography in which they can live while knowing that: There can be no single and unique name, not even to name being. This must be thought without nostalgia, that is, without referring to the myth of a pure mother tongue or a pure father tongue, without referring either to the forlorn homeland of pure thought. One must, on the contrary, affirm it—like 102 Chapter 2 Nietzsche who gambles everything on such an affirmation—in a certain laughter and a certain dance. (Derrida, “Différance” 24) CHAPTER 3 OUR FABULOUS PLACE Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man One morning as Vassili awoke, Death entered his chamber and said: “tonight I shall come to take you.” Vassili was faint with fear, but he was a brave man, and he decided that he would not give in so easily: he would fight. He jumped out of bed and without saying good-bye to his friends, or taking any of his belongings, without even kissing his wife and children, he saddled his best horse and galloped out through the gates of the town were he was born into the open plains. He rode all day as fast as his horse would carry him, relentlessly trying to put as much distance between him and the place of the morning’s fatal encounter and the evening’s sinister appointment. Finally, after dusk had already set, when the journey had made him so weary he could barely stand, he stopped at an inn, many a verst away from his home. As he was going to blow out the candle and turn to sleep, he heard a rap on the door. He thought that it was the old innkeeper who was coming for instructions for the next day, but instead Death entered into his foreign chamber. It stepped gently into the room and said to him: “How considerate you are, Vassili, to have come all this long way to meet me here tonight.” —Czech folk tale (my translation) “Look at me,” he said. “I have no doubts or remorse. Everything I do is my decision and my responsibility. The simplest thing I do, to go for a walk with you in the desert, for instance, may very well mean my death. Death is stalking me. Therefore, I have no room for doubt or remorse. If I have to die as a result of taking you for a walk, then I must die.” “You, on the other hand, feel that you are immortal, and the decisions of an immortal man can be cancelled or doubted. In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is no time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.” —Carlos Castañeda, Journey to Ixtlan How can I, or anybody else, read The Confidence-Man? Can I satisfy myself with a wary and provisional statement about the book, and say, as some critics have, that “Even the closest student of The Confidence-Man admits that it ‘still keeps many, or most, of its secrets’” (Parker, “Metaphysics” 104 Chapter 3 323-31) . Have I fulfilled the implicit promise I have made to my readers who have placed their confidence in me when I declare that the text is (almost) as mysterious after my reading it as it was before? More importantly, what does such a statement say about my, or anybody else’s, capability to read? What about the “readability” of a work of literature and of the world in general? The consequences of the answers to these questions will greatly influence what I can say about my interpreting of the world on the basis of my acts of reading and my capability to take the right ethical or political decisions in the physical world I inhabit with my neighbors. One can doubt whether instructors of literature who state that they cannot read a work of fiction—something which is by definition simpler than what may be called the world of action, the “real” world, or “reality”—should be entrusted with the education of young men and women who attend their classes, let alone be left to manage larger social bodies such as a Department, a Faculty, or a University. From such a perspective, one shudders at the thought that the people who declare themselves unable to decode, decipher and demystify a novel are professional readers: they were trained by their peers, they are the heirs of a whole literary tradition and they are supposed to have the tools that ought to make it possible for them to “crack the nut.” From such a perspective also, reading The Confidence-Man may appear as a “vicarious,” almost “laughable” activity” 78 ; it might appear indeed that readers of literature can probably be left alone with their toys, but should not be left to interfere with serious business. Because of its cryptic and challenging aspect, The Confidence-Man has drawn a lot of critical attention. To write about Melville’s last novel is a piece of bravura which most critics of American literature impose on themselves, or which is imposed on them by the pressure of academic writing. The Confidence-Man has become part of a rite of initiation of sorts, and it would even seem that one cannot be an “Americanist” unless one has accepted to lose oneself in the abyss of the book in search of the always elusive confidence-man and the final word about The Confidence-Man. The reading of the book is an epistemological quest that re-enacts the quest for knowledge in a wild and unconquered territory, and it stages the confrontation with a mysterious danger. Thus, to write about the novel, to tie it down within the confines of an interpretation, smacks of male conquering spirit and macho accession to manhood. These are familiar themes in Melville’s fiction. The absence of any significant female figure in The Confidence-Man, as well as the latent homosexuality that characterizes many Melvillian personages may confirm the hypothesis that the reading of the novel is a masculine trip of initiation. 78 See Tobin Siebers, The Ethics of Criticism (7-8). See also my remarks on this question in Chapter Five. Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 105 To embark on the Fidèle is, for the reader of the novel, like embarking with Captain Ahab on a quest that will serve as the ultimate test for the valor of the bold voyager. The theme of the quest is recurrent in Melville’s novels. From Typee to “Billy Budd,” Melville’s novels stage male voyagers who launch on what turn out to be trips of initiation. They are stories taking place mostly on the water, which means that their characters have had to leave behind the terra firma of their lives, relinquish the landmarks of their structured topographies, and confidently launch onto the nonstructured space of the sea. As in these earlier novels, the sustaining motifs in The Confidence-Man—journey, quest and discovery—seem primarily masculine. So, not only are there no major female characters in The Confidence-Man, but the narrative themes of the novel seem to exclude femininity, and cultural or socio-economical patterns do not suffice to explain this absence. I wish to suggest that femininity is present paradoxically as a form of absence in the novel. However, this is not a “paradox,” inasmuch as presence and absence are not mutually exclusive terms in the narrative. Femininity as a form of absence belongs to the rhetorical construction of the epistemological quest that takes place aboard the Fidèle. For a long time, the key issue for most critics was the identification of the title character of the novel. The central question critics have asked has been: who is the confidence-man? Variations on that question included whom or what does he represent? 79 When Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, he put a central character in his novel whose progressive delineation through his actions and speech-acts organizes the text and structures the story. The protagonist gives its name to the novel, and the narration consists in individualizing him; the accidents and incidents recounted in the novel enable the reader to constitute the “character” of the protagonist. There are of course as many Oliver Twist’s as there are readers, but all of them come up at the end with a personage, defined by acts and speech-acts, that can be ascribed to “Oliver Twist,” i.e. to a personage that can be referred to by name, physical characterization, tone of voice, ideological and cultural background, economic provenance and aesthetic values. The process of identification that leads to the outlining of the “character” of Oliver Twist is of no avail in Melville’s novel. While one may resort to prosopopoeia to evoke Dickens’s character, such tropological transfer is 79 It is impossible to give here an exhaustive list of the numerous articles and books in which the confidence-man has been ascribed extra-textual and intra-textual identities. Among the candidates for the role are Emerson and Thoreau (see Egbert S. Oliver, “Melville’s Picture of Emerson and Thoreau in The Confidence-Man”; Hershel Parker, “Melville’s Satire of Emerson and Thoreau: An Evaluation of the Evidence.” Other candidates are Plato, the devil and St John. Other characters of the novel have also been referred to characters outside the Fidèle such as Frank Goodman, or Goneril who was “identified” as actrice Fanny Kemble (see Egbert S. Oliver, “Melville’s Goneril and Fanny Kemble”). 106 Chapter 3 impossible for the confidence-man whose speech-acts—his only “acts” in the novel—refer to nothing but themselves and the “moment” of their utterance. 80 For instance, one can say that the confidence-man who speaks to the “Charitable Lady” is the confidence-man who speaks to the “Charitable Lady.” This tautological affirmation is all we can do in terms of identification in the strict sense of the word; beyond that we are on very thin ice. Even as we call “confidence-man” the different guises of a character that animate the story, we have no assurance that this catachresis is appropriate. We cannot be sure that it is always the same “actor” who conceals his “true” appearance under the mask of the confidence-man. The actor metaphor itself is already misleading, for it suggests that there is one actor playing different parts with different masks on, but that the origin of the acting is always the same. The other suggestion is that the other roles are played by other actors always other and independent from the one playing “the confidence-man.” Also—but not finally—, the metaphor seems to suggest that there is one play that is being performed, that there is one director, and one script. It supposes that under the kaleidoscope of masks there is, in one way or another, a true character that will be revealed at the latest when the masquerade ends. It is certainly more correct to ask what the confidence-man is rather than asking who he is. 81 However, even this better question opens another trap under our feet, for a “what” implies that there is a definite object or entity which can be referred to as an answer to the question; it also suggests that one can determine what the confidence-man is not. But here again we have no indication from the novel that there is anything the confidence-man could not be—the words “something further may follow of this masquerade” that close the novel seem to indicate that there is no end to the proliferation of masks and (dis)guises. The act of reading is problematized in the novel because it proposes that even the most basic questions that every act of reading poses are not valid in this case. How can an act of reading be performed if the questions 80 While we write, by convention, of the “time” when something happens in a text, we are actually referring to that event in terms of space. It is more adequate—albeit equally misleading—to say (as we sometimes do) “where” things happen: “in chapter 6” or “in line 245.” The act of reading is by definition a temporal activity; it takes a certain amount of time to follow the narrative line, and the steps taken along the line can never be retraced. In Sein und Zeit, Martin Heidegger shows how the development of Western metaphysics passes through the development of spatial metaphors to render the temporal dimension of human activities and human thought. The illusion created by these spatial or topographical metaphors is that it is possible to retrace one’s steps. Works of fiction such as The Confidence-Man suggest, on the contrary, that this is impossible. One cannot simply return to the same “place” in a text and expect to find it where it was, unchanged and faithful to itself. 81 See Roelof Overmeer, “‘Something Further’: The Confidence-Man and Writing as a Disinterested Act.” Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 107 that institute it as a valid epistemological act are moot? This could make the task of the critic impossible: if it is impossible to define the confidenceman, how can we say what The Confidence-Man is all about? This puts the critic in an ethical predicament, not only vis-à-vis his readers to whom s/ he has promised to hand over a handcuffed confidence-man, but also for the rest of his or her life if the novel serves as an allegory for a world which has become unreadable. The novel seems to invalidate and disqualify the act of reading as a means of organizing the topographies in which we live; and yet there is an order in The Confidence-Man and that order is instituted and maintained by reading. It may even be difficult to decide whether The Confidence-Man is still a novel, and whether it contains a narrative that can be followed as a line from beginning to the end when elements that should give it its stability and its unity seem to be missing. Not unlike the contiguous rooms that delineate the topography of Kafka’s The Trial, the appearances of the confidence-man communicate in mysterious and subterranean ways. They are all connected but not with hierarchical and logical links that enable the reader, as in the case of Oliver Twist, to follow the development of a character and a narrative line. In The Confidence-Man, even secondary characters (the barber, the boon companion or the charitable lady) are infected by the confidence-man’s instability. While we cannot define him against these characters they, in turn, become unreliable because their only ground of identification is precisely the confidence-man. The book radically undermines the vertical organization of a Platonic topos structured by Western metaphysics. It also questions a more Aristotelian or organic vision of the world, in which a core—a “seed” in Thoreau’s words, or a “germ,” in James’ words—would determine the life and the cosmogony of the whole narrative. The topography of the Confidence- Man is horizontal and unstable, and relations there are always relations of discontinuity and contiguity. This also applies to the plot in which there is no climax, no dénouement that would justify its being called a novel. 82 In 82 Hence the very cold welcome the novel received when it was first published. For instance, the unsympathetic review in the Philadelphia North American and United States Gazette (4 April, 1857) read: A sketchy affair, like other tales by the same author. Sly humor peeps out occasionally, though buried under quite too many words, and you read on and on, expecting something more than you ever find, to be choked off at the end of the book like the audience of a Turkish story teller, without getting the end of the story. (Reprinted in the Norton Edition 269) Hershel Parker presents an anthology of hostile reviews of the novel. We may be tempted to smile at the unsophisticated readings of these critics of the time and think that we are much better equipped today to deconstruct the mechanisms of the novel. However, in spite of their clear naiveté, these reviews point to the uneasiness that many a reader feels when confronted with the confidence-man. The hasty as- 108 Chapter 3 Moby-Dick, Ishmael self-reflexively comments on the structure of his narrative when he says: “out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters” (332). The case is very different in The Confidence-Man which is not a book that grows like a tree. It is a not tree-book, but what Deleuze and Guattari call a “rhizome,” that is, something that grows like grass, whose blades are all related without any identifiable point of origin. This structure also determines the relationship of the world of the narrative with the world of the reader: it is neither above “reality” as an idealized version of it, nor below “reality” as a debased copy of it. By paraphrasing Deleuze and Guattari, one may say that The Confidence-Man is not an image of the world: it forms a sort of rhizome with the world, and there is an a-parallel evolution of the book and the world. Even as the world effects a reterritorialization of the book, the book, in turn, deterritorializes itself in the world. The Confidence-Man is a novel named and constructed on something that is never present. The one thing the confidence-man can be legitimately said to be, is a form of absence, and this absence is the corner-stone on which the whole novel is constructed. The signs of the confidence-man in the novel are epistemologically insufficient to ever establish his presence for the reader. This makes of The Confidence-Man a radically American novel, for it is built on the absence, or at least the insufficiency, of an epistemological link between the visible and readable world in which the confidence-man manifests “himself,” and an invisible and meta-physical world that would give his physical presence a meaning. When “searching for” Dickens’s Oliver Twist, or George Eliot’s Dorothea, a reader can launch on a hunt comparable to that of Socrates in The Sophist when he tries to identify the notorious title character. Oliver Twist or Dorothea can be defined in terms of what they are, but also negatively in terms of what they are not. These characters are constituted in what they are through the reader’s establishing clearly that they are different from the other characters of the novels. Would it be possible to corner the confidence-man in the same way as the “Stranger” tries to corner “the sophist” in Plato’s dialogue? An examination of the hunting theme in The Sophist and of comparable methods in The Confidence-Man may tell us more, if not about the nature of the “man,” at least about the narrative strategies and the ethical decisions at stake in Melville’s narrative: cription of a name and a face to the confidence-man may also be revealing of a desire to get rid of something that might become too destabilizing and too dangerous. From that point of view the last words of the novel—“something further may follow this masquerade”—may sound like an ominous omen to many readers. What if the confidence-man really left the Fidèle? What if he started wandering in our topography? To avoid that, he must be arrested: he must be encompassed in a form that stops his proliferation and his contamination of logical reading. Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 109 STRANGER: Agreed then that we should at once quarter the ground by dividing the art of image making, and if, as soon as we descend into that enclosure, we meet with the Sophist at bay, we should arrest him on the royal warrant of reason, report the capture, and hand him over to the sovereign. But if he should find some lurking place among the subdivisions of this art of imitation, we must follow hard upon him, constantly dividing the part that gives him shelter, until he is caught. In any event there is no fear that he or any other kind shall ever boast of having eluded a process of investigation so minute and so comprehensive. THAETETUS: Good, that’s the way to go to work. (235c) The “art of image making” is the explicit subject of three chapters in the novel (14, 33, 44), but quartering the ground proves to be an arduous task. The confidence-man appears in Melville’s writing as that which cannot be represented; it is a trace of that which can only be alluded to metaphorically. The confidence-man has no shape and no name because he lives in everything, everywhere, all the time. He is radically nomadic in nature and cannot be cornered in a topography where the reader could come face to face with him. We can appeal to no law—no “royal warrant of reason”—in the name of which we could fetter down the confidence-man by naming him and assigning him a residence in a well-defined topography. Catching the confidence-man, or the sophist for that matter, supposes that he can be identified to be presented—Plato says “handed over”—to the sovereign in his presence. Contrary to what Socrates purports to do with the sophist, the confidence-man cannot be “presented”: he remains absent and his absence contaminates, that is, “absents” the whole narration. Yet in his absence he is absolutely everywhere; he is a determining factor for everything in the narrative, and his “art of image making” produces “all things” 83 in the narrative. It is a whole that is not represented in the signs he offers to the sight of the characters he engages, nor in the signs on the page. The signs on the page refer to what is not there, like the epitaph on a tomb, they do not evoke the presence of life but the absence of death. 84 The confidence-man, like death, is everywhere between the signs on the page, or, for the passen- 83 See The Sophist, 233d-234a. Plato writes that someone who claims to “produce all things in actual fact by a single form of skill ... can hardly be taken in earnest.” Plato is very diffident, apparently, of that art (the art of fiction) which can produce everything, which is everywhere, and which “not only speak[s] and profess[es] about everything,” but has performative effects in the world. 84 Consciously or unconsciously, Plato tries to eliminate death from his dialogue and trace a never-ending genealogy that would always postpone death. He tries to believe in a text of perfect presence. He enacts the masculine dream of not growing old, not dying, perpetuating the race, the genealogy, and tracing an uninterrupted line. Plato might well be painfully aware that the “sophist” he tries to hunt down, kill, and eliminate throughout his dialogues by reducing his territory to a space he could control, is actually death. 110 Chapter 3 gers of the Fidèle, between the times and the places of his appearances. Without the blanks on the page or without the absences of the confidenceman during which he transforms himself into something else, there would be, there could be, no novel. The absence created by the blanks on the page, and the absence of the confidence-man in the narrative is what shapes and orders it. It would be a mistake, however, to say that the confidence-man “symbolizes,” or “stands for” death, for nothing can “stand for” death. The confidence-man exists outside of the signs of the book and yet he is inseparable from them. His relation to the narrative is comparable to that of life and death, in the sense that it is undecidable whether death belongs to life, or whether it is outside of it. To try to answer the question “who is the confidence-man? ” is to try to eliminate death by ascribing it a face and a voice of presence and life. Death is the ultimate other and the ultimate sophist in The Confidence-Man; it constantly eludes both what it is and what it is not. As death, the confidence-man is the negation of being; yet who would dare to affirm that there is no confidence-man and that there is no death? * * * The universe of the Fidèle, as it appears to the reader, is totally ordered by the movements of the confidence-man aboard the ship. While we may assume that other characters meet and interact, we are left to conjecture about this, for no report is given about them: nothing happens in the narration without the participation of the confidence-man. He is the crux of all performative exchanges—verbal, monetary, ethical—that take place on board. Through his speech-acts, he makes things “happen” in The Confidence-Man and aboard the Fidèle. The importance of exchanges and the importance of performative speech-acts have led several critics to identify the world of the Fidèle as a vast allegory of the (capitalist) market place. For these critics, the market place is one of the driving metaphors of the novel, and the Fidèle becomes “the site and the embodiment of a dual economy, at once linguistic (or narrative) and monetary, symbolic and economic” (Kaenel 213). In this economic topography, the omnipresent absence of the confidence-man, through whom all exchanges must pass, determines the functioning of the “market place.” One of the ways of identifying the confidence-man would be to understand what makes him act. As some readers of the novel have noted, the petty amounts embezzled by the confidence-man can hardly serve as a plausible sustaining motive for the novel. Money is certainly not the reason of the operations on the Fidèle, as the one-legged man says early in the narration: “Money, you think is the sole motive to pains and hazard, deception and deviltry, in this world. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve? ” (32). Money forms, however, the crux of many tropes that articu- Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 111 late the topography of The Confidence-Man. It serves to illustrate the parable (identified by Hershel Parker and others) of the devil defrauding mankind of their faith. In a neo-Marxist version of the parable, the confidence-man embodies “the immoral Wall Street spirit” (Dimock 187) and the defrauding of unsuspecting investors. The question which arises then is, what is at stake in the confidence-man’s “operations”? “Confidence” might seem to be the most obvious answer, and the exchange of confidence is clearly paired off in the novel with commercial exchange. Such is the case, for instance, when the confidence-man tries to allure Pitch, the diffident Missourian, by telling him that Confidence is the indispensable basis of all sorts of business transactions. Without it, commerce between man and man, as between country and country, would, like a watch, run down and stop. (128) The centrality of the market place trope and of confidence as the value of exchange, can make us think that money is the visible sign of a transcendental value which it expresses and materializes. Taking cue from the wellknown metaphor of the capitalist market place, Kaenel writes: “Confidence is not only a shortcut to a man’s purse, it is another word for money” (214). Investors risk their money in proportion to the desire aroused by the commodity that can be purchased and in proportion to the confidence they have in the market. In this strictly economic pattern where confidence and money are the two sides of the same coin, the microcosms of the boat could be divided into two categories: the dupers who demand and receive confidence, and the duped who are tricked into giving away that precious commodity. Confidence works as a sign, but as any sign it cannot be reduced to its representative value: signs are exchanged because they are desirable. 85 Confidence is the sign of desire for the other, and what is at stake is the desire the other can arouse. Thus, confidence is not only an economic metaphor: it is a loaded term from the ethical point of view. We may consider that granting someone our confidence is a generous act, and we readily give it to people we esteem worthy of it: our partners (both in private life and in business), our parents, our teachers, our ministers or our government. Therefore, confidence is a sign that goes well beyond the limits of commercial exchange and affects the sentimental, libidinal and moral aspects of our lives. It follows from this that it is essential that confidence should be given; by the same token, we tend to consider that a breach of confidence is an ethically disreputable act that produces the above-mentioned categories of 85 The belief that signs are exchanged because they are a necessity is, Jean Beaudrillard writes, “a false empiricist hypothesis.” He adds: “what is fundamental is the exchange value of the sign—its practical value (sa valeur d’usage) is often merely a handy excuse, or even a simple rationalization” (8; my translation). 112 Chapter 3 dupers and duped, or, of victims and victimizers. In addition to this, there is a feeling of injustice for those who fall victim to their trust and good faith. It may even be that we feel more resentment against a person who deceives us or who lies to us than against any other offender. In a way, of all (un)ethical speech-acts, lying and verbal deceiving appear as the worst because they are not detectable by the victim. “The particularity of a false promise, and of lies in general,” J. Hillis Miller writes, “is that … no linguistic sign distinguishes them from sincere statements. Lies are like irony: no outside procedure makes it possible to affirm that a given statement is ironic and not sincere” (“Le mensonge” 405). Every speech-act depends on an act of faith; the speaker makes a promise in which the addressee is asked to believe. When someone introduces herself as Deborah Reynolds, she implicitly says: “I swear that it is true; this is really my name; trust me.” She also invokes a law in the name of which she is now and forever “Deborah Reynolds” and can always be identified as such in the name of that law. Thus, people who give their confidence after a wary examination of the situation (as is almost always the case in The Confidence-Man) appear to be innocent victims of an artful and unethical “operator.” Strangely enough, no commentator seems to mind what the confidenceman is doing on the Fidèle. For some reason, that which would appear highly unethical to most people in their everyday lives, and would certainly upset them if they were the swindled ones, seems not only to leave them indifferent, but they even seem to enjoy the game. None of them seems to empathize with the characters who give away their confidence and their cash. They side on the contrary with the confidence-man, as if this strategic move could allow them to reap some of the benefit of his operations. By identifying the Fidèle as a capitalistic market place with its losers and its winners, these readers put themselves on the side of those who win. In what appears as the result of Protestant and capitalist (work) ethics, they seem to suggest that to win is to be right; consequently, if your opinion is right, you should win. The readers who decide to “side” with the confidence-man believe they can identify with the side of the winners and stay on that side—even if it is at the cost of their moral convictions. However, such partition of the world in two watertight compartments does not exist on the ship. Confidence does not work as a stable sign for a transcendental value (ethical, monetary, symbolic) which it would represent and which one could identify as such. The equation of confidence with money is correct only insofar as confidence—like money—has no value outside the system in which it functions. It has no intrinsic ethical valence. Confidence—like words—is constantly an object of exchange on the Fidèle: its total amount always remains roughly the same; it changes hands and produces in turn winners and losers. Thus, in the second part of the novel the transactions around the cosmopolitan involve no money (with the exception of the free shave obtained by the cosmopolitan from the barber). Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 113 The instability of the exchange sign (confidence) collapses the binary opposition between the “victims” who give confidence, and the “victimizers” who receive it. Far from demanding confidence from the other passengers, the cosmopolitan often offers it. When he meets Charlie Noble he assures him that it is his character which made him “throw [himself] upon [his] noblesse; in one word, put confidence in [him], a generous confidence” (178). Before that, the man with the weed interrupts the series of demands of confidence by effusively declaring to the good merchant (Mr. Roberts): “I want a friend in whom I can confide” (21). By so doing the confidence-man introduces an anacoluthon in what Dimock aptly calls the “syntax of confidence” (189) which underwrites the logic of the ethical exchange system. Thus, to side with the laughers is no guarantee of having made the right choice. Giving confidence can be a fatal mistake in one case, receiving it may prove equally fatal in another. Dimock appropriately comments that “[c]onfidence appears to be a highly mercurial substance [which] produces drastically different effects” (190). It is therefore correct to assume that what is really at stake on the Fidèle is confidence, but it is misleading to equate confidence and money. If this were the case, then one could conclude that the amounts lost (or gained) are in both cases (cash or confidence) very small and hardly worth considering at length. The importance of confidence in the exchanges rests with the fact that confidence is “the indispensable basis” of all transactions “between man and man.” What is at stake is not how much someone gains or loses in an operation, but the fact that if these exchanges (economic, symbolic, ethical and narrative) stopped completely, the world of the Fidèle would disappear. The exchanges ordered by the absence of the confidenceman must continue: The Confidence-Man exists only if they take place, and we are constituted as readers only if they take place. If they stop for lack of confidence, if the confidence-man is arrested, then the topos of the novel and our own topos will disappear with them. What we see happen to confidence happens to all the semiotic systems used aboard the Fidèle. They do not seem to correspond to the value one could expect from them. Money itself seems to be affected by this radical instability. Even as the herb-doctor claims that “[he is] pledged to a oneprice-system, [which is] the only honorable one” (105; emphasis added), the medicine sold “half-a-dollar apiece” (100) goes up to two dollars when the coughing man wants to buy some (104). This may, of course, be a deliberate strategy to get as much money as possible from an offer and demand capitalist market situation, but the incident also undermines the belief that objects—like confidence—can have an intrinsic value that can be relied on. This is what the herb-doctor tries to convince his interlocutor of by referring to apparently unassailable values, telling him that he “may be confident” and that the medicine “is pure nature.” To further establish the 114 Chapter 3 authenticity of the medicine he invites the other to “[r]efer [himself] to Mr. Truman” (105); in other instances the confidence-man will refer to the “True Book.” One of the strategies of the confidence-man consists in convincing the voyagers he approaches that he knows something they do not because he has privileged access to certain information. Paradoxically, it is the occult aspect of his knowledge which is to elicit their confidence. He promises them that, as in the stock-exchange, he can help them to be on the side of the winners. This is what the confidence-man tries to sell to Mr. Roberts, the merchant, when he says: A month since, in a panic contrived by artful alarmists, some credulous stock-holders sold out; but, to frustrate the aim of the alarmists, the Company, previously advised of their scheme, so managed it as to get into its own hands those sacrificed shares, resolved that, since a spurious panic must be, the panic-makers should be no gainers. (22) As in other cases, the encounter between the two men is very discreet, almost private. It takes place after the crowd “melted away” in “one of the side balconies astern”(18). 86 The confidence-man invites Mr. Roberts to profit from that insider information. He places himself in the position of the reader whose angle of vision allows him/ her to have access to knowledge the characters cannot have. Mr. Roberts is invited to side with the winners and the laughers of the confidence game played on Wall-Street. Here the “panic-makers” form, as Dimock says, the “greedy, gullible, moronic” laughing stock of the masquerade of which Mr. Roberts could be (or so he is to believe) a safely and comfortably seated spectator. Readers who laugh at the victims of the masquerade think they can establish for themselves the same kind of transcendental position that will enable them to watch the game without taking part in it. By promising them privileged information about the market, the confidence-man tells his clients that they can win without having to take any decision, i.e. without entering the confidence game that any semiotic exchange system presupposes. Similarly, critics who promise that they can give the identity of the confidence-man promise their readers first-row seats to watch the masquerade while keeping at safe distance. Unfortunately for them, it is not possible to be a mere spectator and stay outside of the confidence game. When toward the end of the novel the old man (Mr. Foreman) examines what “looks to be a three dollar bill on the Vicksburg Trust and Insurance Banking Company” (248) with the “Counterfeit Detector” that he has just acquired, the stakes are higher than the three dollars the man might lose if the bill is counterfeit. The episode 86 The private, almost secretive, character of the encounters with the confidence-man is an essential feature of his strategy. As all acts of reading, the encounters force the person approached to take decisions for which they alone are ultimately responsible. See below. Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 115 seems to be about the identification of the three dollar bill, but ironically, it is not the sign (3$) that designates the Company which is at stake. The unreliability of the sign threatens, by metonymy, what the Company is supposed to stand for: Trust and Insurance. Unlike money, confidence cannot be capitalized or stored: it only works when it is used, when it is exchanged, that is, when confidence, as a sign is read. This is what the old man refuses to do: rather than read, he prefers to use the “counterfeit Detector.” The promise made to him is that he can withdraw from the confidence game where confidence must be exchanged. The final scene between the old man and the cosmopolitan contrasts two attitudes. On the one hand, the old man purports to confront the fictions of signs (the note “looks to be” authentic) with what he takes for a reliable measure of reality. On the other hand, the cosmopolitan keeps reading: So, while the old man with much painstakings resumed his work, the cosmopolitan, to allow him every facility, resumed his reading. At length, seeing that he had given up his undertaking as hopeless, and was at leisure again, the cosmopolitan addressed some gravely interesting remarks to him about the book before him.... (249) The parallelism of the situation is emphasized by the verb to “resume” used for both actions. The cosmopolitan does not want a Detector, for he knows full well that it is a useless instrument to save his money (and implicitly himself). The Detector offers no safety and foreshadows the final scene of the life preserver in which the old man tries to remember some advice given to him by his son: … “let me see, let me see; —is there anything I have forgot,—forgot? … something for safety. Oh, my poor old memory! ” “Let me give a little guess, sir. Life-preserver? “So it was. [My son] told me not to omit seeing I had a life-preserver in my state-room; … What are they like? ” “They are something like this, sir, I believe,” [the cosmopolitan answered] lifting a brown stool with a curved tin compartment underneath; “yes, this, I think, is a life preserver, sir; and a very good one, I should say, though I don’t pretend to know much about such things, never using them myself.” (250-51) This cruel scene in which the cosmopolitan gives the old man a chamber pot instead of a “life-preserver” echoes the old man’s confusion and the confusion of signs that must be read and can never be taken for granted. As the “life preserver” the cosmopolitan gives to the old man, the Detector is of no avail for the preservation of anyone. The scatological and saucy joke marks the last step of escalation in grim and contemptuous humor directed against those who take refuge in technical or ideological devices to avoid assuming the responsibility for their epistemological decisions. 116 Chapter 3 In this final joke, we readers laugh at the expense of its victim. As a matter of fact, this is what we have been doing from the very start: we laughed at the expense of the confidence-man’s victims. We may have thought that the way he embezzled their (little amounts of) money was supremely funny. The last incident brings home that what is at stake is not only the money, but really the life of the characters. To take a chamber pot for a lifejacket is a mistake that could prove fatal, and the impracticality and implausibility of the case only stresses men’s blind obedience to oracles that promise them salvation. The perplexed readers of The Confidence-Man may find themselves confronted with a projection of their own doubts in the figure of Mr. Foreman. Armed with what he believes to be the ultimate weapon to fight trumpery, the old man tries to establish the authenticity of the bill he has in his pocket: Laying the Detector square before him on the table, [Mr. Foreman] then, with something of the air of an officer bringing by the collar a brace of culprits to the bar, placed the two bills opposite the Detector.... After watching him a while, the cosmopolitan said in a formal voice, “Well, what say you, Mr. Foreman: guilty, or not guilty? —Not guilty, ain’t it? ” “I don’t know, I don’t know,” returned the old man, perplexed, “there’s so many marks of all sorts to go by, it makes it kind of uncertain. Here now, is this bill,” touching one, “it looks to be a three dollar bill on the Vicksburg Trust and Insurance Banking Company. Well, the detector says—.” (248) The ferocious irony and the enjoyment of the reading might obfuscate the fact that once more—and for the last time before the dim light of the scene is definitively put out by the cosmopolitan—the scene presents us with a crux of metaphors that have been intertwining throughout the narration. Central to the old man’s investigation is the economic metaphor of the validity of signs which have a value only if they are guaranteed by a superior and transcendental law—the law of the state, the “sovereign”’s law. The cosmopolitan’s ironic question, “guilty or not guilty? ”, is to be taken more seriously than mere derision at the expense of the poor old man. There is indeed a question of impending guilt that informs the novel, and one of the issues is to decide who is guilty and of what. Even though they show little or no sympathy for the “victims,” commentators of The Confidence-Man present a fairly united front when it comes to deciding that the confidence-man is a criminal. 87 It is a (petty) crime to 87 John Blair, in The Confidence-Man in Modern Fiction, clearly identifies the “confidence-man” as a criminal and purports to distinguish him from “vague catch-alls like ‘swindler’, ‘operator’, or ‘wheeler-dealer’” (12). By so doing, Blair confirms that the confidence-man is a deceiver, i.e. someone who breaks the law—moral, civil, pe- Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 117 defraud people of a dollar or two, but the real crime is to pass off that which is not for that which is. The confidence-man, it would seem, is the one who turns truth into a transvestite of truth and who thereby infects the hermeneutic system that orders the topos of the ship. This is why, in The Sophist, Plato very carefully tries to keep in two watertight compartments what is on the one hand, and copies of what is—and by consequence is not—on the other. The Stranger clearly explains that mixing the two would be a crime for which they would be held responsible before their male “sovereign,” logos: STRANGER: We saw that “not-being” is a single kind among the rest, dispersed over the whole field of realities. THEATETUS: Yes. STRANGER: We have next to consider whether it blends with thinking and discourse. THEATETUS: Why that? STRANGER: If it does not blend with them, everything must be true, but if it does, we shall have false thinking and discourse, for thinking or saying “what is not” comes, I suppose, to the same thing as falsity in thought and speech. THEATETUS: Yes. STRANGER: And if falsity exists, deception is possible. THEATETUS: Yes. STRANGER: And once deception exists, images and likenesses and appearances will be everywhere rampant. (260c) “Deception” (a “crime”) is possible as soon as discourse is infected by falsity. The sophist, for Plato, as the confidence-man for most critics, is the falsifier, i.e. the culprit who should be brought before the sovereign logos to be judged, condemned and executed. While the travelers approached by the confidence-man are often referred to as his “victims,” there is a sense in the novel that, less than victims, they are really culprits. What, under these conditions, are the other characters guilty of? It seems too simple to declare them guilty in the name of some poetic justice by saying that they are “[l]ess victim[s] than culprit[s],” and that “they are taken in only because they are greedy, gullible, moronic.… They are what we might call ‘deserving victims’ (Dimock 185).” 88 Some of these adjectives may apply to some of the characters but nal. The guilt lies clearly with the wearer of the mask who acts in disguise: “The reader can watch the various characters adopt temporary masks but he can never see them unmasked” (43). “The con man’s distinguishing characteristic,” Blair writes, “lies in the uncommon relationship he maintains with the victim he exploits” (17). 88 Apart from the fact that these qualifiers do not apply to all the character encountered by the confidence-man, they also fall into very different categories. “Greedy” implies a moral flaw related to the economic metaphor of the market place; “gulli- 118 Chapter 3 certainly not to all. Is the “Charitable Lady” greedy? Is Pitch gullible? Is Charlie Noble moronic? With their limited experience, their general caution, and above all their limited critical distance to their environment and the confidence-man, one may argue that there is no way they can act differently. Unlike the reader of the novel, they cannot compare the different guises of the confidence-man and come up with a series of common features, which would allow them to make out his strategy. Even when they are, as Mr. Roberts, the Sophomoric Collegian or Pitch, confronted with the confidence-man (under different appearances) more than once, they always encounter him for the first time; “one cannot ride the same Fidèle twice: both its structure, the boat itself, and its contents, the boat’s passengers, are in perpetual motion on a Heraclitean flow of water whose flux they mirror” (Kaenel 213). Even if they realized that they have already met the confidence-man, they would not be able to act on the basis of that experience. Thus, when Pitch thinks he has seen through the schemes of the PIO man, and compares him to “Talleyrand, that impoverished Machiavelli, that seedy Rosicrucian … [f]ain in [the PIO man’s] disfavor would he make out a logical case” (130). But the “logical” analogies Pitch comes up with are of no avail—as the narrator remarks with a wonderfully ironic play on likeness in the word “likelihood” preceded by a double negative: “Fallacious enough doctrine when wielded against one’s prejudices, but in corroboration of cherished suspicion not without likelihood” (130). This passage full of judiciary vocabulary makes it clear that no “experience” can prepare the travelers for their encounter with the confidence-man. They are like Oedipus encountering his father: there is no way they can know. So, the question of the possible guilt of the characters encountered by the confidenceman cannot be resolved at this point—it must be kept in mind or in the margin ready to be recalled. While left in the margin, their potential guilt will remain as a lump in our throats as in the throat of the judge who has to utter the verdict—guilty or not guilty? The question must be asked with the anguish which, as the etymology of the word indicates, 89 puts the judge ble” has to do with intelligence and the aptitude to take decisions based on an adequate “reading” of the situation; “moronic” is a value judgment on the characters placing them in the general category of those who are just not up to taking their place among the ranks of responsible and reputable individuals. What these terms have in common, however, is that they emanate from a transcendental position whence it is possible to decide what the moral, intellectual, or human values ought to be. Of course none of the characters has access to any such position, and I would like to suggest that any such position is also denied to any careful reader of the narrative. 89 “Anguish” < ME angwisshe, < Old French angoisse, < Latin angustiae, pl. ‘straits,’ distress < angustus ‘narrow’; akin to Old English enge ‘narrow,’ < Latin angere ‘strangle’; akin to Greek anchein. (Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary) Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 119 in narrow straits and strangles him to the point where the answer to the question becomes almost inaudible. The cosmopolitan asks: “Well, what say you, Mr. Foreman? Guilty, or not guilty? ” (248). The legal overtones of his question are very much at the heart of the novel. Confidence is linked throughout to the fact that various characters judge the confidence-man and bear witness to their trust in him. By so doing, they testify that they believe in the law that grants them a hermeneutic access to his identity and the veracity of his assertions, and thereby says who he really is. Like the bills examined by Mr. Foreman, the confidence-man is examined by them through their “counterfeit detectors,” that is, through what they believe to be their capacity to discern the real from the fake, reality from fiction and what is from what is not. Even as they think that they are on the “right” side of the bar, that is, on the side of those who have the power to judge and decide, ironically they find themselves in the position of those who are being judged and found guilty by the confidence-man in the novel and by the readers who laugh at them and at their expenses outside of the novel. Their judgment fails, and in the eyes of many readers they are to be held responsible for this failure and are declared guilty of a transgression of the masculine law of logos that is alone entitled to reign over reality. The entire ship is a courthouse of sorts where people appeal to the law of reason to interpret the signs offered by others. The negro cripple is “judged” in this manner by the passengers who institute themselves as a court of law which is to declare the man guilty or innocent of the crime of deception: [T]hey began to scrutinize the negro curiously enough; when, emboldened by this evidence of the efficacy of his words, the wooden-legged man hobbled up to the negro, and … to prove his alleged imposture on the spot [he would] have stripped him…. When the rest of them finding themselves left sole judges in the case, could not resist the opportunity of acting the part: not because it is a human weakness to take pleasure in sitting in judgment upon one in a box, as surely this unfortunate negro now was, but that it strangely sharpens human perceptions, when, instead of standing by and having their fellow-feelings touched by the sight of an alleged culprit severely handled by some one justiciary, a crowd suddenly come to be all justiciaries in the same case themselves. (13; emphasis added) The by-standers put the cripple “fairly and discreetly to the question,” and ask for “documentary proof,” or “any plain paper” (13) where they could read that he is not a liar. They seek a legal document (such as a bill) that would proclaim the law and the real nature of the cripple. As the cripple can produce no such document, the passengers look for a trace of the law in someone who could bear witness to the cripple’s real nature. This initial incident serves as a discrete background for the rest of the narrative; the appearance and the disappearance of several characters is 120 Chapter 3 prompted by the young Methodist clergyman’s search for a witness “who can speak a good word” for the cripple negro. In the above passage the narrator emphasizes how the “perception” of things is sharpened for people who have to judge and take a potentially important decision involving the existence of another person. In the judiciary process put into place aboard the ship, witnesses play an essential role, for they serve as an articulation between the law that will make it possible to release or condemn the accused on the one hand, and the courts improvised on the different decks on the other. To be a witness, to “testify,” is to be the “third person,” the one who stands for the law, before the law, and between the law and the case. The word derives from the Latin testari ‘to be a witness,’ ‘to call for witness,’ ‘to make a will.’ Testari is derived in turn, from testis ‘witness’; akin to tres ‘three’ and to stare ‘stand’ (Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary). The witness is the third party who stands between the universality of law and the uniqueness and particularity of the case. As for the passengers who are called to testify for (or against) the confidence-man (here in the appearance of the cripple) nothing prepares them for the experience of testifying. Even as witnesses promise to speak the truth, they actually bear witness to the impossibility of testifying, for all they can say is what they believe to be true, what they have “read” to be true. The role of the witness in the interpretation of the case is both metonymical and synecdochal. Bearing witness serves as a displacement of the law; it presents the silhouette of the law. As the passengers who ask for “documentary proof” or for a witness indicate, a testimony is a testament: it proclaims the death and the absence of the law for whom the witness now stands. 90 He who testifies stands as a “testament,” that is as a “covenant,” a legal document that should speak the last will of the absent sovereign law. To testify (under oath) is to promise to speak the words of the law and of the father logos: it is the act of the son speaking on or from the tomb of the father, and thereby also defacing it. This is one of the reasons why there are no female “characters” in The Confidence-Man: the narrative is about a series of male “third persons” who testify. The verb itself reminds us that “testament” and “testimony” are cognate and are derived from testis, just like the words “testicle” and “testis.” Thus, to testify is primarily a masculine activity consisting in executing the last will of the father. In the novel, Mr. Foreman closes a long procession of testis who all respond to their obligation to bear witness to the existence of the law without ever “fronting” the latter. Ironically, Mr. Foreman comes last, but as the “foreman” (i.e. the chairman and spokesman) of the jury assembled on the Fidèle, he is unable to bear witness to the law. When asked the famous question “guilty or not guilty? ” his answer is 90 “Testament” has the same etymology as “testify” < Testamentum ‘covenant with God,’ ‘holy scripture,’ ‘last will’ < testari. (Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary) Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 121 “I don’t know.” He too bears witness to the impossibility of bearing witness; as a foreman he is unable to validate the process that should make exchange “between man and man” possible in the name of the law. It appears that a witness is also a judge, and the narrative questions the characters’—and implicitly the readers’—capability to judge who someone is and to take the right ethical decision. In a mise en abyme typical of Melville’s narrative style, the incident of the crippled Negro is illustrated by the story of those who saved a man from hanging, but who, upon judging him themselves found him “even guiltier than the court had done” (13). The end of this story within the story has to be read as a foreboding for the readers of The Confidence-Man: “so the gallows presented the truly warming spectacle of a man hanged by his friends” (13). This initial incident should be taken very seriously by the readers who may have somewhat hastily decided to befriend the confidence-man. For the crowd assembled around the cripple, the witnesses searched for on the Fidèle should enable the reader to decide logically and reasonably whether the cripple is an impostor or not, and as a corollary, to establish who is behind the appearances of the confidence-man. In a logical examination process where what is will be dialectically separated from what is not, reason and judgment should make it possible to tell apart the true from the false. 91 But reason fails because the evidence brought to bear is always the result of individual acts of reading. All the characters of the novel end up being manipulated by the confidence-man. It is not, however, because they are not aware of the danger: on the contrary they are warned by all sorts of signs (as for instance the placard at the beginning of the novel) against thieves and operators. All are aware that they are part of that court of justice of sorts where every individual is a potential confidence-man, and where anything can be a piece of evidence. The misanthrope is probably the one character whose perceptions are most vividly sharpened but he still gets duped. On the Fidèle, it is impossible to distinguish the real from the fake, the original from the counterfeit, because there no point of reference that would allow the characters (or the readers, for that matter) to establish the two categories and say which is masquerading as the other. The Fidèle is a topos where “images, likenesses, and appearances” are “everywhere rampant,” but they are not derived from an original; they are images and likenesses that recall other images but not a true or real origin. The topos of the Fidèle has been forsaken by the law of non-contradiction, and the recurrent appearances of the confidence-man are logically (if not materially) impossible. They are a breach of the law of sovereign logos. The 91 This is the elementary principle of logic, the law of non-contradiction, which is used by the Stranger in The Sophist. The identification of the “sophist” passes through the law that says: “either A or not- A.” 122 Chapter 3 narrative recounts the depositions of the witnesses crowding the tribunal and desirous to speak for that law to re-establish its presence in their topos. They try to stand for it, but they always stand between it and the case: their displacement of the law ends up displacing them themselves. This law which Gilles Deleuze calls “Platonic” is unavailable on the ship where images and likenesses do not refer to an origin, but to a set of different images and likenesses. Deleuze proposes: Let us consider two formulations: “only that which resembles itself differs,” and, “only differences resemble one another.” It is a question of two readings of the world in the sense that one asks us to think of difference on the basis of pre-established similitude or identity, while the other invites us on the contrary to think of similitude and even identity as the product of a fundamental disparity. The first exactly defines the world of copies or of representation; it establishes the world as icon. The second, against the first, defines the world as simulacra. It presents the world itself as a phantasm. (Logique 302; my translation, emphasis added) 92 The Fidèle is a topos ordered by Deleuze’s second proposition, but most passengers on the ship (and many readers of the novel) are not ready to face the responsibility this fact implies. At the same time, it would be illusory to think that only the second proposition operates in the narrative: without the first, no reading of the novel would be possible. While Deleuze’s second proposition orders the narrative through the recurrent appearances of the confidence-man, the first allows a certain fidelity to its topos—The Fidèle. The a-logical articulation of the two propositions above may well be the very character of the novel. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche ascribes to Plato the invention of a new genre, that of the novel. In the novel the two propositions identified by Deleuze cohabit in spite of Plato’s desire to keep them apart: If tragedy had absorbed into itself all the earlier types of art, the same might also be said in an eccentric sense of the Platonic dialogue which, a mixture of all extant styles and forms, hovers midway between narrative, lyric, and drama, between prose and poetry, and so has also broken the strict old law of the unity of linguistic form…. The Platonic dialogue was, as it were, the barge on which the shipwrecked ancient poetry saved itself with all her children: crowded into a narrow space and timidly submitting to the single 92 Deleuze’s irregular spelling of the French word fantasme as “phantasme” seems to show that he is taking cue from the Greek word phantasma (akin to phantazein ‘to present to the mind’) which designates appearance, and which Plato distinguishes from the eikon (akin to eikenai ‘to resemble’) meaning ‘likeness.’ Plato calls phantasma the degraded copies—writing in particular. Deleuze proposes for the foundation of a world precisely that which Plato rejects; I propose that the world of The Confidence- Man, and maybe what comes further of the masquerade, is also founded on that which Plato (feigns to) reject(s). Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 123 pilot, Socrates, they now sailed into a new world, which never tired of looking at the fantastic spectacle of this procession. Indeed, Plato has given to all posterity the model of a new art form, the model of the novel—which may be described as an infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable. (90-91) The world of the Fidèle is the world of the novel, i.e. a world that can only be made sense of when and if it is read. Reading cannot be confined to the sorting out of logical possibilities. 93 It must be a poetic act of reading, which is not an elegant possibility or a privilege granted to some: (poetic) reading is an impending obligation put on all those who come to testify for the confidence-man. The obligation to read poetically appears right at the beginning of the narrative. A placard posted near the captain’s cabin warns the passengers against a “mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently arrived from the East; quite an original genius in his vocation, as would appear, though wherein his originality consisted was not clearly given” (3). The poster states the problem that all the intervening parties of the narrative have to face: while everybody seems to understand and agree that imposture and falsity consist in disguising the truth, no one knows what that truth is supposed to be. This means that decisions are taken on the Fidèle in the name of a law nobody knows, even though the passengers are called to stand for it. Like the bachelor who declares presumptuously that “no appearances can deceive [him],” the characters want to believe that their decisions are based on what is essentially true, and not what is apparent and phantastic. This dichotomy between truth and decoy, or the real and the feigned, is very much present in the minds of all the characters. For instance, when the Methodist minister intercedes for the negro cripple and appeals to the charity of the bystanders, the latter makes it clear that they consider themselves to be keen readers of reality and that they will not be deceived so easily. “‘Charity is one thing, and truth is another’” (14) and, “‘Looks are one thing, and facts are another’” (19) are thus the responses the minister gets from the crowd. Prior to the minister’s intervention, the narrator had com- 93 Of all the dialectical divisions undertaken by the Stranger in The Sophist, the most important and complex is the one that is to establish the art (techné) of “discerning or discriminating”: 226b-236a; this is what Plato writes: STRANGER: And besides these there are a great many more, such as carding, spinning, adjusting the warp and the woof, and thousands of similar expressions are used in the arts. … I think that in all of these there is implied a notion of division. (226c) While the Platonic world is dominated and ordered by the dichotomy either/ or, it is interesting to note that the word techné is akin to the Greek word tekton ‘builder,’ ‘carpenter,’ and to the Latin word texere ‘to weave,’ which seems to suggest that the art of discriminating is also, already, the art of re-constructing and weaving together. 124 Chapter 3 mented on this dichotomy in which, the reader is told, instinct “is a teacher set below reason” (15). The narrator illustrates the statement by quoting from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (2. 2. 121): “‘The will of man is by his reason swayed’” (12). In the play, the two hemistiches and the strong caesura oppose will and wit within an either/ or dichotomy. The same kind of caesura is experienced by the characters of The Confidence- Man who after a moment of indecision—during which the cripple is involved in a “charity game” (11)—increase in seriousness, and the confidence game in which they decide to “judge” the cripple begins. In the lines that follow the narrator’s quotation from A Dream, Lysander who is awakening (or so he thinks), rejects Hermia for Helena, and declares that only now is he awake and sees the real world: Things growing are not ripe until their season; So I, being young, till now not ripe to reason And touching now the point of human skill, Reason becomes the marshal to my will. (2. 2. 124-26) In the comedy, even Bottom is well aware of the fact that “reason and love keep little company together nowadays” (3. 1. 120-21). Resorting to logos is as ironic in Shakespeare as it is in Melville. The irony of the (incomplete) Shakespeare quote makes it clear that the topos of the Fidèle cannot be ordered by an either/ or dichotomy. Like Lysander, the passengers are presumptuous enough to believe that they can determine what part of their experience belongs to the realm of sunlight and reason and what part is determined by the light of the moon and the darkness of their dreams. They also believe that the law can be re-presented, that is brought forth into the present-ness of a now. Both A Dream and The Confidence-Man question the relationship between the real and the fictive, and both show that it cannot be understood within the binary opposition where the two terms are mutually exclusive. Puck’s final lines could conclude Melville’s novel just as well: If we shadows have offended Think but this, and all is mended: That you have but slumbered here While these visions did appear; And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream (5. 1. 401-05) No serious reader of Shakespeare can feel quite reassured by Puck’s words: in this case too “something further” comes of the comedy. The Confidence- Man could be a merely “interesting” book, an entertaining comedy, if, like the spectators of A Dream, we could be sure that the comedy ends with the last words spoken on stage. However, like the spectators of the play, we Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 125 cannot be sure that the ghostly absence of the confidence-man can be confined to the multiple decks of the Fidèle. The tension between the real and the fictive is both implicitly and explicitly dealt with in the novel. Thus, in Chapter 44, one of the chapters devoted to the art of fiction—or art of “image making”—the narrator takes up, as an echo of the words of the placard, the last words applied to the cosmopolitan by the barber’s friends: “QUITE AN ORIGINAL” (237). “[T]he sense of originality,” the narrator comments, “exists at its highest in an infant, and probably at its lowest in him who has completed the circle of the sciences” (238). The search for origin is infantile—infans, i.e. without language; but the reality we (readers) have access to is always already linguistic, which means that it cannot be original. The narrator goes on to reject various forms of what can be mistaken for “original,” and which is merely strange (“odd” [238]), unusual (“singular” [239]), or is taken to be original because it is so idiosyncratic (“something prevailingly local” [239]) that it has never been seen anywhere before. It is their infantile tendency to look for origins which puts and keeps the readers of the confidence-man (both inside and outside the text) in their difficult predicament. The apparition in fiction of a character original in the “thorough sense” (238) would, the narrator affirms, “make him almost as much a prodigy [in a work of fiction], as in real history is a new law-giver, a revolutionizing philosopher, or the founder of a new religion” (239). The candidates for such an eminent position are, in the narrator’s speech, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Milton’s Satan, but also because such a character would produce effects “akin to that which in Genesis attends upon the beginning of things” (239), Christ or God Himself. There seems to be a contradiction in terms between the two propositions above: on the one hand the Platonic notion of origin is rejected by the narrator, while on the other, he seems to propose that there are indeed some thoroughly original characters. He says: “the original character, essentially such, is like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself round it—everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it” (239). In many ways the definition seems applicable to the confidence-man, which would confirm that the character marks a new “beginning of things.” However, this is only valid as a negative definition of the confidence-man, insofar as he does not shed light in the novel: the narrative goes on the contrary from a sunrise (where the sun is unable to reject darkness) through an increasingly dimmed light to total obscurity when the cosmopolitan blows out the last burning lamp. The confidence-man absorbs the light around him to the point where he makes it disappear altogether; by the same token, his absence/ presence cannot be said to “shed any light” on our reading of the novel either. The trip of the Fidèle starts at sunrise and the advent of the sun and the Manco Capac-like character might have announced the advent of order 126 Chapter 3 under the true light of the sun, the true light of logos. Instead, the arrival of the confidence-man marks the un-foundation of a world whence the true light of the sun is gradually expelled, as the morning star gradually climbs and then declines in parallel with all the failed attempts of reason to ascertain the true nature of the confidence-man. Just before the end of the first half, Pitch tells the miser: “Because a thing is nat’ral as you call it, you think it must be good. But who gave you that cough? Was it or was it not nature? ” And he adds: “Natur [sic] is Good Queen Bess; but who is responsible for cholera? ” (106-107). In this chapter that serves as turning point for the narrative and a bridge between the first and second part, natural light and nature itself are definitively dismissed by Pitch. So, Chapter 23 (“In which the powerful effect of natural scenery is evinced in the case of the Missourian, who, in view of the region roundabout Cairo, has a return of his chilly fit”) takes place after the sun has set, and the second part of the narrative takes place in the dim splendor of artificial light. The rise of the sun has not managed to order the universe, and God, logos, and the true light are dismissed just as Manco Capac is relegated to the rank of old Peruvian legends: his advent has not divided darkness and ignorance from light and knowledge. Ironically, when chapter 23 divides “the light from the darkness” (Gen. 1. 4) the latter succeeds the former. It is also the only chapter that “let[s] the dry land appear” (Gen. 1. 9) but it is marshy and barely distinguishable. Just as the cosmopolitan reappears, the ship leaves the landing. The novel becomes increasingly dark, and it is in this increasing darkness that characters and readers alike have to grope their way. In his conversation with Charlie Noble (Chapter 29, “The Boon Companions”) the cosmopolitan ruthlessly says: In the press, as in the sun, resides, my dear Charlie, a dedicated principle of beneficent force and light. For the Satanic press, by its coappearance with the apostolic, it is no more an aspersion to that, than to the true sun is the coappearance the mock one. (166) It is in the light of a “mock sun” that the second part of The Confidence-Man takes place. Thus, the man who tells the cosmopolitan the story of the Indian-hater approaches him under a lamp that “[sends] its light vertically down, like the sun at noon” (139). It is like the sun, but it is not the sun. The lamp casts light on the fact that there is no true light, and that everything seen aboard the Fidèle is seen as if it were in the light of the sun at its zenith. Instead of a Genesis, the creation of a world, The Confidence-Man features the de-creation of a world. The confidence-man cannot be said to be original; he becomes something original every time he appears and every time the novel is read. The confidence-man is not Black Guinea or John Ringman, nor the man with a weed and the man in a grey suit at one and the same time, but he is always becoming one or the other—he is always Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 127 becoming a little bit less of one while he is becoming more of the other, and this process is always simultaneous. He is an image always differing from itself and becoming thereby a different image. He escapes thereby all testimonies and judgments that aim to say who he is and to hand him over to sovereign logos. The confidence-man can be said to be original only inasmuch as he is the origin of the creation and de-creation process of the novel to which he metonymically gives its title. So, he is also the origin of a different understanding of the act of reading and of the way reading orders topography. The narrator comments on how an original character orders the topos of a work of fiction: For much the same reason that there is but one planet to one orbit, so can there be but one such original character to one work of invention. Two would conflict to chaos. In this view, to say that there are more than one to a book, is good presumption there is none at all. (239) The confidence-man is the origin of the world of the Fidèle and that of The Confidence-Man, and both constitute a perpetually moving chaosmos. It is a topos where “[t]he issue is no longer the distinction between essence and appearance, or between a model and its copy, for this distinction precisely operates, as a whole, only in the world of representation.” In The Confidence Man, “The issue is on the contrary the subversion of that world [of representation], a ‘twilight of the idols.’” The confidence-man is not the disguised appearance of a truer model; he is a ghostly simulacrum, but one must consider that “[t]he simulacrum is not a debased copy; it possesses a positive force which denies both the original and its copy, the model and its reproduction.” (Deleuze, “Platon” 302; my translation). The confidenceman is a fictional construct attached to no referential reality outside itself. It is very important to note, however, that the move away from the essence/ appearance opposition is not a “nihilistic” motion toward a purely contingent and lawless world of appearances where “anything goes.” That move is—as Deleuze points out when he describes what he calls “the upsetting of Platonism”—a positive force; thus the confidence-man constitutes the origin of judgment and decision-taking aboard the Fidèle and in the narrative, in spite of the fact that it is impossible to ascribe the source of that judgment and those decisions to any identifiable essence. This has led some readers to consider that the characters, the narrator, or the author could act irresponsibly. They have suggested that because the law of logos was inaccessible or unavailable, the characters—and through a metonymical displacement, Melville himself—found themselves in a position where they could not be held responsible for their judgment and their 128 Chapter 3 decisions. 94 The narrative shows, I believe, that this is a serious mistake, and that as readers we would be judged very severely for our ethical inconsequence if we allowed this to happen. On the contrary, the narrative poses responsible reading as the cornerstone of its understanding; for the passengers of the Fidèle, this is the (often unfulfilled) condition necessary for an understanding of their world. * * * The Confidence-Man is a narrative constructed over an abyss. It is a gobetween, a bridge between two infinitely remote banks. Like the characters of the novel, its readers find themselves standing on a bridge formed by the multiple decks of the Fidèle, constantly navigating between two banks, touching land here and there, but never making the two sides meet. One of the discreetly self-reflexive images of this aspect of the novel may be in the narrative the “transfer-book” which the stock-agent of the Black Rapid Coal Company (who reappears later as Mr. Truman) conspicuously carries under his arm. He shows it to the Collegian saying, “[this is] [my] transferbook, I am subpoenaed with it to court” (47). When the banks of referentiality and essence are forever out of reach, when no boat can ferry us 94 It is important to note that the subversion of the notion of essence (which Deleuze calls “the upsetting of Platonism”) does not imply—at all—that the world of the novel is “chaotic” or dominated by pure contingence, let alone irresponsibility. It would be a naive and gravely mistaken to consider that the Platonic world is the totalitarian world of the Idea while its subversion would lead to a utopian world of unbound liberty. I cannot agree with Kaenel who writes that Melville “postponed making a decision about final details until the last minute”; and that, “Reversibility and repetition, the novel’s key narrative principles, extend to its structure as well. Chapters repeat one another, they can be traded off for one another” (217). “Repetition” and “reversibility” is hardly the same thing, and the order of the chapters in a book can hardly be called a “final detail.” No matter how late, how conscious, or how well informed a decision is when it is taken, he or she who took it will always be held responsible for it. The editors of the Newberry Edition write that for Melville “the filling-in of the work was not hard and fast in his mind or on the paper but open to changes as it grew under his hand” (“Historical Note” 308). This remark (also quoted by Kaenel) is far from reducing the responsibility of the author; it shows, on the other hand, that writing proceeds from writing and not from the (Platonic) idea of writing—this is why, in the Phaedrus, Socrates opposes writing which, he says, kills memory, i.e. the memory of logos. Wai-Chi Dimock sees the novel as the end of Melville’s authorial trajectory where he “has finally found a model of freedom that suits him, a model after which he can fashion his own authorial hand. This explains … the book’s peculiar opaqueness, in which the author appears both as inscrutable and irresponsible” (206). On this question of supposed “irresponsibility,” see also Warwick Wadlington, The Confidence Game in American Literature, and Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture. Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 129 across to the “other side” of origin and the voyage is pursued in parallel to the banks rather than from one bank to the other, than the bridge, the ship, or the transfer-book, is the only topography both characters and readers are left with. Like the Fidèle, whose mentioned and implicitly promised destination we never reach, the “transfer-book” seems to be voided of its meaning of “carrying over.” 95 As readers, we are also subpoenaed to court: we are to judge and decide, and The Confidence-Man is our transfer book which we are to use as a witness, and as a trace of the law that orders the topos of the Fidèle. Legally the transfer-book is the document that bears witness to the transactions that have taken place in a company. The book records, that is, blocks in time, something that took place as a long and complex process of analysis and decision taking. In the end the transfer-book is the only trace of those operations whose aims and intentions can sometimes be partly reconstructed and surmised but never actually seen. The book is a differed iteration of the “thing itself” to which we have no access, and to which the “author” himself has no access: the book becomes the book when it is written: it does not exist before it becomes écriture, which is always already acts of reading. So, the book is a witness, a crystallized act of reading which remains as the trace and the only access to the acts of men, and it is the only thing the judges and the jury of a trial have to take their decision. The latter will depend on their reading and their interpretation of the document, so that only the mise en abyme of acts of reading will allow them to catch a glimpse of past actions. Our judgment of the confidence-man can only result from a series of readings of his “avatars.” 96 We answer the “voiceless” call of the law in a universe that seems to be deserted by it. We respond to the call because we have to: testifying (on the basis of our acts of reading) is what constitutes us as responsive readers but also responsible selves. We respond to the 95 The verb “to transfer” belongs to the same family as the verb to “to prefer” which appears in Bartleby’s notorious phrase “I would prefer not to.” J. Hillis Miller shows in Versions of Pygmalion how Bartleby empties the word of its referential substance and turns it into a purely performative sign. See my discussion of Miller’s book and of this particular point in Chapter Five. 96 Many commentators of the novel use this word to speak of the appearances of the confidence-man. The word is problematic because the confidence-man, is never, as the word “avatar” suggests, an “embodiment” of a concept or a notion: to ascribe him a human voice and shape, is precisely the mistake the passengers of the Fidèle make. The “confidence-man” is always a synecdoche or a metonymy: to turn him into a catachresis (and a prosopopoeia) is dangerous. What seems to qualify the word “avatar” to designate the confidence-man is the Sanskrit etymology of the word which comes from avatari, ‘he descends’ < ava, ‘away,’ and tarati, ‘he crosses over’ (Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary). The confidence-man is a ferryman of sorts who “crosses over” the river toward the bank of the law, but he crosses “away” from it, that is, he never gets to the other side. 130 Chapter 3 disembodied and voiceless call of the confidence-man. We are summoned by a law that makes judgment possible, that is, “a law designed for judgment, a law which tells [us] and universally dictates [us] that we must judge” (Nancy 19; my translation). 97 It would be a grave misunderstanding to think that we call for and are called by the law because we decide to. When we answer the call, we testify to our being in language, as the heirs of language endorsing its testament—we come to the bar by the will of language. As witnesses we speak under oath, we promise to speak the truth, as I implicitly promised that I would tell the truth, the whole the truth, and nothing but the truth about The Confidence-Man. Language always already defines, determines and judges; it is not the medium for judgment; it is judgment. This also means that there is nothing before the law: as soon as there is language there is the law and the law ascribes me an identity when it calls me and dictates me to tell the truth. So, what urges the passengers of the Fidèle to gather around Black Guinea and to judge him? What gathers the community of readers around the confidence-man (and The Confidence-Man, of course) to judge them? The narrator says that “it is a human weakness to take pleasure in sitting in judgment” (16). As any reader of The Confidence-Man will know, pleasure is at the heart of the art of fiction and storytelling. This is what the cosmopolitan plainly shows in his telling the “boon companion” “the story of the gentleman-madman” (183-86). To the naive query whether the story is true, the cosmopolitan replies: Of course not; it is a story which I told with the purpose of every storyteller—to amuse. Hence, if it seems strange to you, the strangeness is the romance; it is what contrasts it with real life; it is the invention, in brief, the fiction as opposed to the fact. (187) The Confidence-Man is of the same nature as the “story of the gentlemanmadman”: it is a work of fiction whose function is to amuse and give pleasure. But we would run—or sit—the risk of making the same mistake again, if we tried to understand the narrative as meaning to give pleasure on the surface, while more deeply it sought to express the law. The pleasurable part of the literary work is not an “aspect” whose role is to conceal or encode a deeper, graver, and more significant level, or to sell the book to “shallower” readers who would stay on the surface while critical pearldivers would confront its abyssal profundities. 97 I take cue from Nancy, argument to propose that we do not judge by choice, or in the name of a necessity imposed on us by our subjectivity. The name of the law is always displaced, differed, repeated with a difference, and it is the name we have for the law. It is the poetic displacement of the name of the law that creates the law, and we judge because we must, because judgment through reading defines not only who we are, but also what we are. Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 131 Judgment, the obligation to judge and the pleasure linked to the sharpening of the senses co-exist in The Confidence-Man on the same surface level, that is, on the surface of the text and in the pleasure of the act of reading. 98 In our pleasure of reading Melville’s text, we judge, release and condemn on the basis of textual evidence, as the characters of the novel do, and as we do every day when we examine, condemn or release men and women by granting or denying them our confidence. We have pleasure in being the judges of those “characters” who are embarked on the same ship as we are and whom we read. Pleasure does not erase responsibility and cruelty at times, and we suffer from the cruel and mistaken decisions we take; “[we] are, as it were, exposed or given to the pleasure of duty” (Nancy 25). The Confidence-Man establishes a mysterious tension between the pleasure of judging and the obligation to judge. This appears in the chapter which precedes the story of the gentleman-madman; the narrative flow of the novel is interrupted by one of the marking interventions of the narrator who presents a preamble to the story. It consists, as is the case with the other long digressions, of a reflection on fiction and story-telling. The narrator anticipates the cosmopolitan’s remark on storytelling by wondering at those readers who might exclaim after discovering the narrative: “How unreal all this is! ” (182). The narrator says he “sides” with those “who sit down to a work of amusement tolerantly as they sit at a play,” and who are ready to consider “characters unlike those of the same old acquaintances they meet every day in the same old street” (182). The passengers of the ship are bewildered by the confidence-man because they fail to understand 98 In Le plaisir du texte, Roland Barthes comments on the disregard pleasure has often suffered from in literary studies: There is a whole little mythology that would like to make us believe that pleasure in general (and the pleasure of the text in particular) are right-wing ideas.… [T]hereby right-wing writers ascribe to the left whatever is abstract, boring, politically significant, and keep pleasure for themselves…. The right claims pleasure against intellectualism and the clergy of reason: it is the old reactionary myth of the will vs. wit debate of sense and sensibility, of (warm) “life” against (cold) abstraction…. The left opposes knowledge, method, engagement, and fight to “mere enjoyment” (but what if knowledge itself was bliss? ). On both sides we find that strange idea that pleasure is that simple thing, which is the reason why pleasure is either claimed or scorned. Pleasure, however, is not an element of the text; it is not a naive residue; it does not depend on the logic of understanding. Pleasure is a lateral drift, something which is both revolutionary and asocial, and cannot be taken in charge by any idiolect. Is pleasure neutral for all that? The scandalous aspect of the pleasure of the text appears in that it is not scandalous because it is immoral, but because it is atopical. (38-39; Barthes’s emphasis; my translation) Although the argument must be replaced in the context of the Parisian post-1968 ideological climate, I follow Barthes in many of the points he makes here, in particular the last one. Pleasure casts the text in a wandering and un-assignable topography; it is a no-man’s-land, but it is never neutral—in the sense of inactive, innocuous and innocent. 132 Chapter 3 that the confidence-man and the world of the ship in general are not governed by the rules of consistency of the Platonic division between the “thing itself” and the deceitful appearances of fiction: And as, in real life, the proprieties will not allow people to act out themselves with that unreserve permitted to the stage; so, in books of fiction, they look not only for more entertainment, but, … even for more reality, than real life itself can show. (182-83) Fiction and reality are related in ways that are both disquieting and pleasurable: “the law is not pleasurable, and pleasure is not an obligation: the pleasure is in the law itself, as an excess to the exacting nature of the law” (Nancy 26; my translation). Whether our senses are sharpened because we enjoy being summoned up by the law, or whether is it the pleasure of the call that turns us into keener “perceivers,” that is, more acute readers, we cannot decide. Our position is in language, like the passengers’ position is on the Fidèle; we can never rise above that position (or dive under it) to acquire the necessary critical distance, therefore the question is forever undecidable. 99 Melville’s novel suggests that our access to “reality” is conditioned in the same way as that of a reader of fiction. Thus, the passengers of the Fidèle sleep in bunks “resembling, on a large scale, rope book-shelves” (73). In a mise an abyme of the act of reading, the passengers are the characters of a book (The Confidence-Man), and at the same time they are volumes whose characters are awaiting reading—something the confidence-man is very good at. In this intensely self-reflexive passage on the act of reading, the narrator comments on the shaky bunks: “In consequence,” he says, “one less inexperienced, essaying repose on the uppermost shelf, was liable to serious disturbance, should a raw beginner select a shelf beneath” (73). The implication seems to be that the awkward reader might shake the whole edifice of knowledge and understanding, but the greatest danger is that the bunks are said to be “Procrustean beds” that standardize the characters. Putting them into “Procrustean beds” might allow the reader (or the “author”) to produce “consistent characters” (69), but as several passages of the novel confirm, this is a severe case of misreading. 100 The cases of the 99 In The Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysic der Sitten), Kant calls our relationship to the law unbegreiflich: (“inconceivable”), i.e. literally ‘impossible to seize’: “And so even though we do not indeed grasp (begreifen) the practical unconditioned necessity (das unbedingte Notwendigkeit) of the moral imperative, we do nevertheless grasp its inconceivability (Unbegreiflichkeit). This is all that can be fairly asked of a philosophy which strives in its principles to teach the very limit of human reason” (62). 100 There are several instances in the novel that indicate that such consistency is clearly incompatible with the ethical demands put on the novel: Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 133 passengers encountered by the confidence-man show that we misread our topos whenever we take it to be something essentially different from the world of fiction. The ethical act of reading engages the reader performatively in a judgment that causes pleasure and contests any pre-existing “reality.” The characters of the book bear witness—as we readers do—before a law they can never confront. The law itself remains silent, and the confidence-man who helps us to sketch its silhouette does not represent it, nor “speak” for it. I have been using a banal convention from the beginning of this chapter, which consists in writing such things as “the confidence-man ‘tells’ the merchant that—”, or, “in this passage the confidence-man ‘says’—”. Of course, the confidence-man “says” nothing, because books do not speak; books demand to be read. This tautological statement appears in several forms in the novel for the benefit of characters and readers alike who might be oblivious of this evidence. The chapter titles are conspicuous examples of this. Thus, Chapter 14 [is—the narrator (? ) says] “Worth the consideration of those to whom it may prove worth considering.” 101 Such True, it may be urged that there is nothing a writer of fiction should more carefully see to, as there is nothing a sensible reader will more carefully look for, than that, in the depiction of any character, its consistency should be preserved. But this, though at first blush, seeming reasonable enough, may, upon a closer view, prove not so much so. For how does it couple with another requirement—equally insisted upon, perhaps—that while to all fiction is allowed some play of invention, yet, fiction based on fact should never be contradictory to it; and is it not a fact, that, in real life, a consistent character is a rara avis? (69) William B. Dillingham argues that “The by-product of true consistency, which only the confidence-man possesses, is, ironically, an impenetrable surface. Though the people with whom he converses frequently consider him transparent, they are blind to his real nature” (337; emphasis added). Consistent identifications of the confidenceman, be they intra-textual such as Hershel Parker’s devil, or extra-textual such as Oliver’s identification of Thoreau or Emerson, are attempts to in-scribe the character(s) of the novel in a Procrustean bed and fit The Confidence-Man on a Procrustean shelf. 101 The titles of The Confidence-Man are interesting and problematic in many ways. One of the difficulties consists in identifying their “source,” that is, defining who “says” “Chapter 14,” and who “says” “Worth the consideration of those to whom it may prove worth considering.” There is a necessary run-on-line between the first and the second part of the title, and it links together elements that one might want to ascribe to different spheres. While the second part seems to come from the narrator and can be read as the conventional “off-‘voice’” commenting on the text, the indication “chapter 14,” which is part of the clause that forms the title, is, as it were, twice removed. It conspicuously belongs to the book, i.e. to the material object made of cellulose and ink, and not to the “book,” i.e. to that which we also call the “text” when we are really referring to our reading of the text. The word and numeral “Chapter 14” seem to belong to the same world as that of the publisher’s address or the printer’s indications on the quality of paper used, printed on the very first (usually 134 Chapter 3 titles are a form of synecdoche of the novel which can be said to be “worth reading for those who read it.” A tautology is also a mysterious and uncanny (albeit funny) way of defining the ethical act of reading. It is something one can do and at the same time it is something that one cannot do otherwise than the way one does it; this is another way of saying that the ethical liberty of the can is also a must. The only way one can understand the tautology of reading is to read it; once one has done so, there is no going back: one cannot un-read what has been read. The knowledge brought to bear by the The Confidence-Man is that we inhabit a written world, a world of écriture to which we have access only through reading. There is no way out of this world, just as there is no way into it, because we are always already in it. The beginning of the narrative on April first is naturally an appropriate starting point for a “masquerade”; but the irony of the title is that—as the ineffective rise of the “true light” of the sun suggests—the masquerade has always already begun: as there is something further that comes of it, there is always something that precedes it. The course of the Fidèle is regulated by acts of reading, or as in the case of the bunks/ shelves, by acts of reading that have crystallized or “materialized” in the physical world. The first appearance of the confidence-man in the guise of a mute, introduces the key-trope for the whole novel. Throughout Chapter 1, not a single word is “spoken.” It is a mute (who also turns out to be deaf) who introduces the reader to the world of the unnumbered) pages of the book and which we practically never read because they do not “belong” to the text. Here an uncanny sort of enjambment or bridging takes place between what seems to be the world of the novel and our readers’ reality which is also the material world where books made of cellulose and ink are produced. Another spectacular enjambment links the already quoted last words of Chapter 43 (“QUITE AN ORIGINAL”) with the (sub-)title of Chapter 44 (“In which the last three words of the last chapter are made the text of the discourse, which will be sure of receiving more or less attention from those readers who do not skip it”), and the beginning of the chapter where the last three words of Chapter 43 are indeed repeated. The run-on-line thus traced might make us forget that we have passed in that one line from the words of the barber, to those of the cosmopolitan, then to those of the narrator, to those of a commentary on fiction (by the narrator? by the author and reported in free indirect speech by the narrator? ), via the words (“Chapter 44”) of the author(? ), the publisher(? ). A variation on the run-on-line can also be observed between Chapters 23 and 24, where the line steps over the title, continuing with no interference the conversation started in the last words of Chapter 23 on “the other side” of the title, in Chapter 24. Similarly, (“)Chapter 11(”) which consists of a few pages only, is called “A few pages only,” recalling in the materialization of language and the crystallization of the act of reading the “black page” in Tristram Shandy. The effect of the enjambments or the Sterne-like materialization of the trope of reading is to ironically displace, or allegorize, the act of reading and draw attention to the self-reflexive character of the narrative; more than that, it puts in contact two incompatible realities—that of the novel and that of the reader—, and orders them a-logically as the upper and lower sides of a surface of water. Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 135 Fidèle and who “chances,” 102 we read, to come upon the placard warning the passengers against the mysterious impostor. The only cases of spoken language in the chapter are some “inarticulate” (for the reader) hails and summons which remain “without effect” (6). In the meantime the passengers—and the readers of the novel—read the slate the deaf mute exhibits. In spite of reported “conversation” and “speech” in the rest of the novel, the situation remains the same throughout. In the “speechless” chapter that opens the novel, spoken language is reduced to phatic language (hails, summons), and the presence of a “voice” is reduced in the novel to the phatic function of a descriptive convention. The confidence-man is a man of many words, but they are voiceless words—he is, like the novel that somewhat incongruously bears his name, a man of written words, a man of écriture. 103 102 While “chances” suggests that the action is totally contingent and gratuitous, it leads to the designation of one of the main themes and narrative threads of the novel. There is a constant play in the narrative of “chance events” which are actually the result of important decisions. Thus, when the man with the weed encounters the collegian, the text reads: “[the man with the weed] was leaning over the rail at the boat’s side, in his pensiveness, unmindful of another pensive figure near…” (25; emphasis added). Similarly, the stock-agent after “Sauntering and chatting here and there … seems fatigued,” and strikes up a conversation with “his chance neighbor, who happens to be the good merchant” (54; emphasis added). Not only do these instances taken among many others blur the line between the contingent and the strategic, but they also make it undecidable where strategy or contingence come from. Is it the narrator who comments as an invisible spectator (as the “off-‘voice’”) on the acts of the confidence-man? Is the narrator “inside” the character’s mind and reporting in free indirect speech what the confidence-man, who never “addresses” the reader, cannot “say”? Is it the author “Melville” who intervenes from his Mount Olympus-like position? The instances above are cases of ventriloquism—another recurrent theme in the narrative—but it is impossible to say who lends his/ her voice to whom. All these enunciating possibilities (co)-exist in the narrative at different points of it and cannot be separated from one another. 103 The title of the novel with its definite article, “The” Confidence-Man, would need much further interrogation. What transforms the series of appearances of the novel into “the” confidence-man? By the same token it is worth noting that “‘the’ man with the weed” appears out of the blue at the beginning of Chapter 5. The fact that he has not been introduced in the narrative before should make of him “‘a’ man with the weed,” as there is “‘a’ mute,” “‘a’ charitable lady,” “‘a’ gentleman with gold sleeve-buttons.” Other appearances of the confidence-man, on the other hand, are announced by a definite article which cannot be justified by the course of the narration: “‘the’ man with the travelling cap” (Chap. 13); “‘the’ herb doctor” (Chap. 17); “‘the’ Cosmopolitan” (Chap. 25). It would be incorrect to try to trace a regular pattern or a development in the use of the definite and indefinite article. So, is it a coincidence, a mistake, a neutral or fortuitous collocation of words—does it just “happen” to be so? The presence of the definite article seems to point to the fact that no matter how open-ended, undecidable or unreadable we might declare the novel to be, we still must come up with that which happens to be, that is, with that which takes place as an event—with that which takes place as the confidence-man. 136 Chapter 3 As the other passengers, the sophomore is unable to read the confidence-man, but the encounter between the two characters shows that he has no other choice but do so anyway: In vain had [the sophomore] more than once sought to break the spell by venturing a deprecatory or leave-taking word. In vain. Somehow, the stranger fascinated him. Little wonder, then, that, when the appeal came, he could hardly speak…. (27; emphasis added) The passage points to the inevitability of the act of reading and bearing witness. The sophomore is helpless when the summons, the “appeal,” comes. These words are somewhat enigmatic at that point of the narrative, because the confidence-man, ironically described as “being apparently of a retiring nature,” “abruptly retires”! The “appeal” referred to here comes later (in Chapter 9), when the sophomore approaches the stock-agent whom he does not recognize, whom does not know as the confidence-man although he has encountered him “not twenty minutes” before. 104 Had he been a better reader, the sophomore might have realized that the “acutest sage often [is] at his wits’ ends to understand living character,” and that “those who are not sages [cannot] expect to run and read character in those mere phantoms which flit along a page, like shadows along a wall” (69). We are “only” in the fictional world of Melville’s novel, but the world of the Fidèle is disquietingly akin to ours—“It is with fiction as with religion,” the narrator grimly comments, “it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie” (183). Whether it is the topography put in place by the characters of the Fidèle which simulates ours, or whether our place resembles a further expansion of the ship is moot, for “before we even arrive at fiction ... Melville has created for us a singular fiction of what the real world is” (Ziff 66). The Fidèle is a commercial ship; it is a public and common space, shared by a sampling of the people that constitute the expanding American nation of the mid-nineteenth century. The encounters between the confidenceman and the other characters take place by strategic chance in the midst of the crowd on the decks and in the cabins, but the conversations themselves 104 The case of the sophomore illustrates the case of the “voiceless” call that summons the characters. The “appeal” does not come from the man with the weed in the first encounter (he leaves the scene), nor from the stock-agent in the second encounter who tries to dissuade the collegian (or pretends to do so? ) from buying shares from him, telling him that “it would hardly be the thing to convert this boat into the Company’s office,” and adds that the sophomore “had better differ investing” (47). The past simple of the verb linked to the “appeal” (“came” [27]), really announces a future action in the narrative; it indicates that the story was written (as is of course always the case) after the fact, but it indicates also that these facts take place in time and form (a) history which is always already narrative. Thus, the economic transaction of the second encounter reminds us that without narrative, facts cannot be recounted and thus exist as facts. Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 137 take place, as I pointed out before, in a quasi-private sphere. They happen on a one to one basis, like the encounter between a reader and a book. The encounters with the (confidence-)man of words are as solitary as acts of reading are. Indeed, though they may be performed in the midst of a crowd, during a subway commute for instance, acts of reading are solitary. Thus, the businessman “escort[s] his companion into a private little haven removed from the brawling swells without” (49). Similarly, the sick man is approached by the confidence-man while he is sitting in a “withdrawn corner” (77); and, the cosmopolitan strikes up a conversation with the misanthrope in “the semicircular porch of a cabin, opening a recess from the deck” (139). In the encounters for which the surroundings are not specified, the latter are completely blotted out by the encounter itself, isolating the characters, and leaving the readers alone with them. All these private acts of reading have a performative result in the public sphere of the Fidèle, inasmuch as they contribute to delineating the silhouette of the confidenceman and consequently the word-made world of the novel. The encounters create a tension between the private and the public consequences of the act of reading. On the Fidèle, every (mis-) reading of the confidence-man codetermines his next image, which in turn co-determines the following encounter. The topos of the Fidèle is shaped both internally and externally by acts of reading: on the one hand by those staged on the decks of the ship, and on the other by those of the readers of the novel in their rooms of their own. The confidence-man is read into existence in this manner through this double articulation of the act of reading. It might be, however, that we have succumbed to the same mistake again by locating in the text the topos of the confidence-man—we may have ascribed him a topographical identity the way immigrants, refugees, and exiles are identified and classified by local authorities according to their places of origin. It might, therefore, be a mistake to speak of the Fidèle as “the confidence-man’s world.” When the mute comes aboard, the focalization of the text makes him stand out as a character against the multifarious and motley crowd of the ship; the narrative immediately becomes organized around his voiceless appeal to charity. The focalization seems to qualify the mute as an appearance of the confidence-man. But trying to distinguish the confidence-man from the other characters by delineating his textual nature against the corporeal solidity of the other characters, would mean falling into the same old Platonic trap again. We have no indication whatsoever that the other characters in the narrative have any sort of stability. One may even say that the easiest appearance to recognize is that of the confidence-man. He is the only one who has a formal—though a-logical—unity. In the second part of the book (Chapters 24-45), when he appears as the cosmopolitan, he becomes the center of reference for all the other characters who are, in turn, guises who appear against the harlequin background of his world-stage-like-costume. 138 Chapter 3 The difference between the confidence-man and the other characters is that he seems to know—taking cue from Jacques in As You Like It—that on the Fidèle encounters take place between mask and mask. 105 In the strife between the wooden-legged man and the Methodist minister, the latter says: “I could call you by names you deserve”; the other retorts insolently: “could you indeed? ” (15). The pleasantry cannot conceal the insinuation that in these encounters of masks man is a stranger to man, and neither the confidence-man nor any other character can be called by their proper name. In an access of inconclusive lucidity, Mark Winsome tells the cosmopolitan: “What are you? What am I? Nobody knows who anybody is. The data which life furnishes, toward forming a true estimate of any being, are as insufficient to that end as in geometry one side given would be to determine the triangle.” (193) As the text repeatedly asserts, the Fidèle is a “strange” world full of “strangers” who are, as Winsom remarks, estranged from one another and 105 Jacques’ speech closes the series of chapters (39-41) devoted to the masquerade within the masquerade played by the cosmopolitan and the boon companion, and including the grim morality tale of China Aster: All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players, Who have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts. (As You Like It 2. 7. 139-42.) The definition applies to the confidence-man but not only to him. The mise en abyme of the masquerade motif, which also includes the narrative (of China Aster) within the narrative, shows again that the masquerade has always already started. Thus, the Fidèle stages a masquerade within the broader masquerade going on all around the ship on the embankments, in the towns, on the landings, of which the characters are a synecdoche. That broader masquerade is always already imbedded in the even earlier and broader masquerade of the reader’s world. At the end of the chapter “Ending with the rupture of hypothesis” (Chap. 41), the cosmopolitan “turn[s] on his heels, leaving his companion at a loss to determine where exactly the fictitious character had been dropped, and the real one, if any, resumed” (223). Dimock comments that “what the confidence-man sells most of his victims is in fact a promising version of the victim’s own self” (195). Like a Shakespeare play whose staging moots the fiction/ reality division materialized but also problematized by the space of the theatre, the confidence-man appears to the characters he meets as an image in a distorting mirror in which they look, but where they fail to recognize him and to recognize themselves. It is, therefore, naively simplistic—albeit reassuring—to say, as Dillingham does, that “the book is in essence a fantasy, a waking dream of the sort highly imaginative people sometimes have when they begin to wonder what they might do if they could become invisible or if they could fly.” The novel certainly does not merely “reverse the usual order of appearance and reality”: the (dis)order created by the narrative is far more troubling than that (Dillingham 300; 304). Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 139 from themselves. The Confidence-Man is a strange narrative initiated by the mute who is said to be “in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger” (3). As the narration develops, it becomes increasingly clear that the word has Shakespearean overtones that indicate both topographical and personal unheimlichkeit. 106 The ship is full of people in motion. All are detached from the place to which they think they belong and which would habitually define them in terms of who they are. Travelers, nomads, strangers in general lack this means of definition. The emigrants on the Fidèle who left the east coast or even more remote places in Europe find themselves suspended between a past and lost origin and a future destination. The twelve hundred-miles trip of the ship suspends the passengers both in time and space, and while they are on the Fidèle they cannot be defined in terms of what they are but only in terms of what they are becoming—for instance, they are becoming increasingly less Irish as they are becoming more American. The world of masks and simulacra is the world of strangers who cannot be present to the process of their own estrangement. Deleuze writes: “Pure becoming, the absence of boundaries, such is the realm of the simulacra because it dodges the action of the Idea, and because it contests both the model and the copy” (Logique10; my translation). The passengers are caught between the model and the copy; not unlike today’s jet-lagged travelers aboard planes, they are linked by a common destiny and fated to share for better or worse the topos to which they committed themselves. The passengers are go-betweens caught between departure and destination by the narrative process initiated by their encounter with the confidence-man. Very seldom and only vaguely do they allude to where they come from and to where they are going. There are only two identifiable geographical points in the portion of the trip covered by the narrative, 106 In Othello, the protagonist is also, “in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger,” and in the play the word connotes both topographical displacement and something which is unknown or/ and unknowable. See 1. 3. 161-62; 2. 3. 231-35. It is so for Desdemona who is unaccountably drawn to Othello’s strangeness, as well as for Othello himself who succumbs to Iago’s uncanny and forever unknowable strangeness when he says: I know, Iago, Thy honesty and love doth mince this matter, Making it light to Cassio. (2. 3. 231-34) The cruel irony of the line would not be out of place in The Confidence-Man. Othello’s first words to Iago are isolated by meter at the end of the line and read: “I know Iago”; but of course Iago’s strangeness, like the confidence-man’s strangeness, is forever strange—that is, unaccountably from out of this world while haunting it disquietingly. 140 Chapter 3 namely the point of departure (St Louis) and the brief stop-over in Cairo. 107 No indication (apart maybe from the “something further” that closes the novel) is given to indicate that the Fidèle has, or ever will, reach New Orleans, its purported final destination. The landings where the ship stops are referred to generically, and we have but an imprecise idea of what happens on these occasions. As if to settle the question, a generic description of the landing scene is given at the beginning, and we are left to assume that something of the same sort is repeated later, or continues as an on-going process: [A]t every landing, the huge Fidèle still receives additional passengers in exchange for those that disembark: so that, though always full of strangers, she continually, in some degree, adds to, or replaces them with strangers still more strange; like Rio Janeiro fountain, fed from the Corcovado mountains, which is ever overflowing with strange waters, but never with the same strange particles in every part. (8; emphasis added) The description emphasizes that the ship is a place of exchange where the intentions, the goals, the destinations, the dreams, the fears and the desires of the passengers collide with and are exchanged for those of other passen- 107 Although The Confidence-Man is set in the well-documented topography of the Mississippi, this natural and referential data acquires an exotic and unfamiliar touch. The man in cream-colors (the mute) appears as “Manco Capac at the Lake Titicaca,” and his appearance turns the familiar city of St Louis into a strange place where something extraordinary might happen. Many a reader must have experienced a sense of anti-climax when he who is compared to the founder of a new empire, turns out to be a mute who begs for charity. St Louis has a mock-mythical dimension with this aborted advent of the founder of a kingdom. The name of the city of Cairo gives it an outlandish character, and relates it to American typological myths of foundation. Pitch’s inconclusive meditation ends in Cairo, in the only terra firma passage of the narrative, and it seems to indicate that this was the last time the Fidèle touched the ground of referentiality. This is further sustained by the central position of the chapter in the narrative and the fact that it marks the entry of the cosmopolitan whose ironic, almost prescient, apostrophe—“A penny for your thoughts”—that closes the chapter brings Pitch back from his reverie where the sight of nature had made him slide into a typological reading of the confidence-man and of himself. The inspiration of that reading may have come to him from the Biblical echoes and associations of the Egyptian name of the town; but that sort of reading is of no avail on board. Nature gets completely evacuated from the narrative, and only appears in mythical or mock-mythical aspects. In That Cunning Alphabet, Richard S. Moore comments on the disappearance of nature in The Confidence-Man and on “Melville’s refusal to admit any sensuous or pictorial detail in a voyage down America’s greatest river and her greatest topographical symbol”; he adds: “After Moby-Dick … the treatment of outward nature undergoes a gradual diminution until, in The Confidence-Man, the sense of place is utterly obliterated” (177; 200-01). What gets completely obliterated is the sense of referential physical space; the only topography is the topography of the text itself, where things happen “in Chapter 25,” or “in the second appearance of the cosmopolitan.” Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 141 gers. The Fidèle is a ferry, but it does not transport people; its sole function, it seems, is to estrange them from themselves, to turn them into avatars of themselves—that is, to carry them “across and away” from themselves. Such is the case of Mr. Roberts the merchant who is manipulated three times by different appearances of the confidence-man. The first time, he asks Mr. Roberts to look at one his of own business cards to check whether he is the man who goes by the name printed on it. The aggravated merchant answers, “I hope that I know myself” (19). But the confidence-man retorts: “And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy.” The problem of self-knowledge and its Greek and Emersonian echoes of “know thyself” runs through the narrative; in their meetings with the confidenceman, the characters grow nervously aware of the fact that they cannot identify the self of their interlocutor, but fail to “realize that the same reasons which make knowledge problematic, make self-knowledge problematic as well” (Overmeer 49). To judge someone you do not know will put you in a serious predicament, but to judge others while you do not know who you are yourself is even worse, for it deprives you of any ground for your judgment. Melville’s novel anxiously interrogates the way our worlds of words, our fabulous topographies, are constructed. Like the characters of the narrative we have to give an account of who we are when we want to act. This case is staged in the pseudo-Platonic dialogue between Mark Winsome and the cosmopolitan about the rattlesnake : When charmed by the beauty of that viper, did it never occur to you to change personalities with him? to feel what it was to be a snake? to glide unsuspected in grass? to sting, to kill at a touch; your whole beautiful body one iridescent scabbard of death? In short, did the wish never occur to you to feel yourself exempt from knowledge, and conscience, and revel for a while in the care-free, joyous life of a perfectly instinctive, unscrupulous, and irresponsible creature? (190) As Wai-Chi Dimock rightly shows, the knowledge the rattlesnake lacks is self-knowledge (176-87). The snake and man have in common their lack of self-knowledge, but what makes the snake different is that it is apparently left at liberty to ignore its “self” and is thereby (like the “consistent Indianhater” [155]) left at liberty to act irresponsibly. Both the snake and the Indian-hater are consistent characters, which makes them utterly inhuman because their consistency keeps them out of language and écriture. The snake and the Indian-hater are Platonic ideals; in that sense they are the only ones who are really foreigner to the Fidèle. Even though there is no moral statement given about them, the consistency of these “scabbard[s] of death” makes of them unethical animals, for, as the narrative has demonstrated throughout, the “consistency” of the Indian-hater inevitably leads to unethical actions. One must not think that this leads to a sentimental 142 Chapter 3 conclusion that would romantically privilege life over death, or manifest indignation against the racism of the Indian-hater. What is at stake is neither snakes nor Indians, nor even the question whether it is good or bad that there be snakes or racists. What is at stake is that a Procrustean, “consistent,” reading of the world will produce a world of rattlesnakes and Indian (or other) haters. The snake and the Indian-hater cannot respond to the ethical call and they cannot bear witness to themselves. They do not need to do so because they are exactly what they appear to be. They are irresponsible because they cannot respond and engage their responsibility. The characters of The Confidence-Man are in a different situation: they have to respond to the call and give an account of themselves. They protest their innocence, but in vain: to be responsible is to be—at least potentially—guilty. The examples of the snake and the Indian-hater seem to suggest that neither the characters nor the readers of the narrative can escape their responsibility and their guilt. On the other hand, they also seem to indicate that the only ethical attitude consists in accepting and living with a lump in one’s throat, the anguish of one’s guilt. The characters bear witness to the confidence-man as I have promised to bear witness to The Confidence-Man. From the beginning, I have tried to follow the many narrative threads of the novel, which are constantly broken and taken up again by the appearances of the confidence-man, forming a narrative that is both linear and repetitive. Melville’s narrative tells many stories at one and the same time, but they are all told through the encounters with the confidence-man. All these stories, however, never come together to draw the genealogical line of the narrative. The different episodes bear witness to an order, but it is not a logical descending order—the kind of order that makes a son the testamentary heir of his father. In The Confidence-Man, the genealogy is interrupted because the act of bearing witness which should ensure the continuation of the logical lineage is ineffective. The multiple narrative threads in The Confidence-Man “are not at all different points of view on a story one might suppose to be the same, for in such a case the points of view remain submitted to the rule of convergence. What we see, on the contrary, are divergent and different stories, as if an absolutely distinct landscape corresponded to each point of view” (Deleuze, “Platon” 300; my translation). The multiplication of lines and the entwining of narrative and genealogical lines is also the subject of The Sophist. In The Sophist, Socrates steps back, and leave his role as center of consciousness and focus of the dialogue to a stranger. The introduction of this new character estranges the dialogue from its usual topography by making the stories in it proliferate. One might think that Plato is putting a mask on Socrates, or that the stranger is a “ventriloquist” for Socrates or Plato himself; the nameless “stranger” could also be “a” sophist. But a more interesting possibility—the Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 143 possibility that Plato invents and for which Nietzsche designates him as the inventor of the novel—is that Plato can endorse any of the above possibilities at different points in the dialogue. The “dialogue” with its reference to speech and to the presence of the voice (of the father) as well as the implicit dialogical argumentation articulated in dichotomies, is thus pushed out into the open, voiceless, boundless, and strange space of écriture where the pleasure of the hunt, but also its cruelty and its fear can begin. Such is the kind of topography proposed by The Confidence-Man. There seems to be no end to the multiplication and multifariousness of appearances and passengers aboard, as there seems to be no end to the nooks and crannies where new encounters can take place. The boat seems to drift rather than to navigate down the river. It is piloted by a captain and a crew who are occasionally alluded to, but like Socrates in The Sophist, they are always absent, silent, and invisible. 108 The words of the wooden-legged man sound like a dark foreboding when he shouts at the crowd that is driving him away: “you flock of fools under this captain of fools, in this ship of fools! ” (14). Nobody seems to know who is in charge of the “ship”: the “captain” has vanished in the crowd and cannot be distinguished from the other passengers. The misanthrope sums up the situation of all the passengers on the Fidèle when he unwittingly says to the confidence-man: You don’t mean what you say. Else you are like a landsman at sea: don’t know the ropes, the very things everlasting pulled before your eyes. Serpent-like, they glide about, travelling blocks too subtle for you. In short the entire ship is a riddle. (119) The passengers do not “know the ropes” of the confidence game precisely because they are landsmen, and because their landmarks have no value on the water. The cruel irony of the misanthrope saying that even the thickest trick pulled in front of those “green ones” does not draw their attention, is really directed against himself. The sophistries of the serpent that can make ropes look like serpents turns the entire ship into a riddle. The ropes that form the riddle of the ship are also like the many narrative threads, with their interruptions, their run-on-lines, and their Gordian knots. It is very difficult to feel “at home” in the novel, and like the passengers of the ship estranged from their “old everyday street” by the Fidèle, we are estranged by the unheimlich narrative. As every reader has experienced, it is very difficult to situate oneself in this novel. The reconstruction of the “argument” is no easy task and even paraphrase is problematic: who speaks? Of what? Under what circumstances? To whom? The labyrinthine Fidèle is the image of a labyrinthine novel. The cosmopolitan says: “The best way … to get out of a labyrinth, is to retrace one’s steps. I will accord- 108 Socrates opens the dialogue with Theodorus then disappears from it (217d), but nothing indicates that he has “left”; his shadow hovers over the text. 144 Chapter 3 ingly retrace mine, and beg you will accompany me” (194). Of course, such a thing is impossible in the world of The Confidence-Man where no Ariadne’s thread, no narrative line can be followed to any kind of point of entry or origin. By accompanying the confidence-man we only get more lost, and it appears that he is our true labyrinth. In The Sophist, the purported aim of the dialogue is to trace a genealogy from logos, the father, to his male heir the philosopher. The genealogy seeks to establish the purity of the lineage and eliminate deviant interlopers and bastards of all kind who could make the line wander, allow it to be interrupted or repeat itself. The actors of the dialogue are to bear witness to the presence of the logos and assure its survival in them in an uninterrupted genealogy. In Phaedrus, Socrates is estranged from Athens by the written discourse Phaedrus has brought along, and for which, Socrates says, Phaedrus “can cart [him] along all round Attica, and anywhere else he please[s]” (230d). Writing estranges logos, drives it (him) out of the walls of reason, or as in The Confidence-Man, out of the landmarks of referentiality and consistency. The act of reading is the witness to this exile, but far from retracing the path back to the striated space of the “old everyday streets” or the orthogonal streets of Athens, it wanders off into the smooth space of fiction. The breaking and the entangling of the narrative line make it impossible to return to the masculine origins of logos. Écriture introduces an irretrievable difference in the lineage, whereby it is not the son that succeeds the father, but an always radically different child. Writing is not only the “forlorn son” of logos (Derrida, “Pharmacie” 182; my translation), it is the negation of the masculinity of the father. This may be why so many masculine myths and symbols are attached to the act of writing: If writing is initially a form of scratching or engraving, … it may also, after the invention of pencils and pens, be thought of as the pouring out on a surface of a long line or filament, … contaminating or deflowering the virgin paper. (Miller, Ariadne 6-7) This masculine symbolism conceals the anguish caused by the fact that writing (and reading) always affirms the other, not the same. 109 In The Confidence-Man, the title character is our Ariadne, that is, a feminine thread that can never lead to the identification of the confidence-man as the son of logos, that is, to someone or something that can be identified and arrested in its name. 109 Feminist critics have challenged these myths and symbols exposing not only their phallogocentric aspects, but revealing even more importantly the fear caused by the possible interruption of the (genealogical) line that these myths aim at protecting (male) writers against. See, for instance, Susan Gubar, “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issue of Female creativity.” Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 145 The absence of the confidence-man who will not, who cannot, stand for logos as his son forms the feminine principle which is absent in The Confidence-Man. But as for the confidence-man who is everywhere while being absent, this feminine principle is what polices the narrative. There are no female characters 110 or female figures in the novel, but femininity exists there as the absence that always estranges the masculine archetypes that seem to sustain it. The narrative is written on the tomb of logos, but it is not its official testament or its last will. It comes from the margin, like the postscriptum on China Aster’s tomb where the “chiseled words [are] so arranged, after the usual manner of such inscriptions, that nothing [can] be interlined” (220). The tombstone in China Aster’s story serves as a displacement of the novel where that which is written cannot be un-written or unread. That is why the addendum to the epitaph, which changes its whole meaning, is “chiseled at the left-hand corner of the stone, and pretty low down” (220). The post-scriptum changes the epitaph and it defaces the tomb. The passengers of the Fidèle think they can not commit the crime of defacing the tomb of logos. They try to speak with the voice of reason, but they too are men made of words, and the result of acts of reading and writing. The defacement and the subversion of the last will of logos for which all readers are always already guilty, proceeds from the margin, from the supplement to the voice of the father that silences him and replaces him in his absence by someone who is not his legitimate son. When “Plain Talk” wants to modify the epitaph, it is too late to add (or subtract) anything. Writing comes always too late, it is always a postscriptum, a dead letter. It kills logos for a second time by not executing his last will. In the last pages of Melville’s narrative, the cosmopolitan leafs through the Bible and reads: “With much communication he will tempt thee; he will smile upon thee; and speak thee fair…. If thou be for his profit he will use thee.” As he is apparently reading out loud, strange voices come from the berths saying: “Who is that describing the confidence-man? ” (242). As the confidence-man continues his reading, the voices continue their ironical comments. They too seem to be post-scripts to the testament the confidence-man is reading. These mysterious and unidentifiable voices of strangers occupying the berths subvert the Scriptural text, and if Mr. Foreman were a better reader he would understand that they expose the manipulations of the cosmopolitan. But to Mr. Foreman, these voices remain cryptic. They are unintelligible because the cosmopolitan is reading by the dim light kept “burning till the natural light of day should come relieve it” (240). The voices he hears come from the dark that conceals the 110 The “charitable lady” (Chapter 8) is the only exception in the series of male characters. 146 Chapter 3 half-asleep speakers; the voices seem to come out of a cave, a crypt or even a tomb. These doubly cryptic words announce the cosmopolitan’s appeal to the old man when he laments that the text he is reading preaches diffidence in man. Mr. Foreman is, of course, most willing to bear witness to the Testaments, and he neatly separates for the cosmopolitan the “authentic” Scriptures from the apocrypha: “Ah! ” cried the old man, brightening up, “now I know. Look,” turning the leaves forward and back, till all the Old Testament lay flat on one side, and all the New Testament flat on the other, while in his fingers he supported vertically the portion between, “look, sir, all this to the right is certain truth, and all this to the left is certain truth, but all I hold in my hand here is the apocrypha.” (243) The old man tries to sort out the Testaments of the Father from the apocrypha, i.e. from their cryptic post-script, without realizing that, as this passage and the whole novel suggest, the New Testament is in itself a repetition, a post-script to the Old Testament, but even the latter is already a post-script to the Word. The old man holds the apocrypha like the culprit he has identified and against whom he is ready to testify, repeating thus the crime of defacement for which he condemns himself. The position of the apocrypha in the volume he is holding also suggests that it is placed between the Testaments, as a bridge, or a ferry that would make the two communicate in mysterious ways on the thin surface of its pages. Such repetitions, duplications and exchanges are operated in the cryptic and apocryphal Confidence-Man that transforms the most “certain truth” into something other that no previous experience prepared us to encounter. The non-genealogical line of the narrative extends into our world and what Nietzsche calls the “infinitely enhanced fable” transforms our own world, and turns it into a fabulous topography. The knowledge brought to bear by the novel is that after the death of the father and the son, we are left alone in a world of difference with no ascertainable origin and no fathomable future, a world which we have to order by testifying to our belonging to that world. For that we must judge and decide even though we know that this responsibility always condemns us to never quite fulfilling the promises we made to others and to ourselves. CHAPTER 4 DESCRIPTION Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” Inexplicable sister of the Minotaur, enigma and mask, although I am part of what is real, hear me and recognize me as part of the unreal. I am the truth but the truth of that imagination of life in which with unfamiliar motion and manner you guide me in those exchanges of speech in which your words are mine, mine yours. —Wallace Stevens, “The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet” Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble. —Wallace Stevens, Adagia Walton A. Litz shrewdly sums up the predicament of Wallace Stevens’s poetry—his particularly American predicament—when he writes that “Stevens was both a modern skeptic who believed that we live in the margins or the space between the lines, knowing only disparate sensations, and a highly traditional writer who longed to find a central text, to give his intimations and sensations the authority of received truth” (65). 111 “The Man with the Blue Guitar” marks Stevens’s suspension of belief in canonical or scriptural poetry where truth can be judged according to a canon or scriptures, and where the world can be shaped as a neat topography of words. For Stevens, words order the world but they cannot silence it. They translate some of its sounds and its noises and transport them—metaphorically— 111 Litz writes about Stevens’s particular taste for aphorisms that competed with his desire for a central and unique text: “Many of these [collections of aphorisms, proverbs, etc.] were purchased in the 1930s and 1940s, when Stevens was refashioning his poetic aims and had an almost obsessive interest in recording his daily pensées” (57). Thus, the years that correspond to the composition of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” coincide with the development of Stevens’s particular taste for adages, aphorisms and proverbs. 148 Chapter 4 into an accessible space, but they cannot replace them completely. 112 Chaos and order have to share a topography which they inscribe and describe at one and the same time. The words of the poet are “ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds” (CP 130) 113 that mark the bounds of a territory that can never be surveyed from a single vantage point. The “poems” in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” are not “a series of different points of view on a narrative one might suppose to be constantly the same. They are, on the contrary, different and diverging stories, as if a completely distinct landscape could correspond to each point of view.” Gilles Deleuze proposes that this may ultimately be the character of the modern work of art: This is probably the very character of modern works of art. In them, there is not a series of different points of view on a narrative one might suppose to be constantly the same because in that case they would remain determined by a converging perspective. The stories on the contrary differ and diverge from one another, as if a completely distinct landscape could correspond to each point of view. (Logique 300; my translation) The voice of the man with the blue guitar comes as an echo of the voice of the woman in “The Idea of Order at Key West” who sings “beyond the genius of the sea,” but cannot silence the sea and replace its “voice” with hers. One needs to keep in mind these lines, with their quasi religious cadence and tone, to feel the somber solemnity with which Stevens endows them: She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. (CP 128) The anonymous narrator of the poem who later addresses “pale Ramon” insists that “The sea was not a mask. No more was she” and that the two voices, that of the woman and that of the sea are never “medleyed”; each of them organizes a different space mutually incompatible. The unstructured—“inhuman”—space of the ocean defines the human world of the listeners, the poet and Ramon Fernandez. Yet the two spaces need each other. Indeed, in his reading of the poem, J. Hillis Miller remarks that the visual and phonetic resemblance of “she” and “sea” is emphasized by Wallace Stevens in his public reading of the poem (Topographies 286). The disappearance of a canonical order that could be trusted does not free the poet, or for that matter any of us, from the need to construct another type of order in which we can believe. Stevens could never be content 112 J. Hillis Miller identifies this conflict as the confrontation of several theories of poetry in Stevens’s writing. See The Linguistic Moment, especially 3-15 and 390-422. 113 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems. Hereafter cited as CP. Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 149 to write “poems of plums” (CP 30) vaguely reminiscent of realistic still lives; what he needed to tackle was life in motion. The topographies of his poems can be called more “democratic,” inasmuch as the supreme authority of their creator cannot be established firmly, let alone taken for granted, but both his poems and his commentaries show how constant his preoccupation with order is: If one no longer believes in God (as truth), it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else. Logically, I ought to believe in essential imagination, but that has its difficulties. It is easier to believe in a thing created by the imagination. 114 (Letters 370) In “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” God, the sun, truth, the idea, and other male symbols of creation and control are invoked only to be discarded. Even though it is a man with a blue guitar who is the protagonist of the poem, the voice of the poem cannot be solely the voice of a man. Much of Stevens’s poetry is steeped in the somber meditation started in “Sunday Morning.” The quiet day-dream of the woman in the poem who tries to enjoy the earthly pleasures of a late and lazy Sunday breakfast is disturbed by such nagging thoughts as “She dreams a little, and she feels the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe” (CP 67). The rest of the poem and much of what Stevens would write later is dominated by the question that opens the second stanza of the poem: “Why should she give her bounty to the dead? ” (CP 67). But if she does not give it, will “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair” compensate for the loss of religious feelings, that is, for the death of God and His absence? Can Crispin in “The Comedian as the Letter C” go on writing “poems of plums”? In his commentary on “Sunday Morning,” Robert Rehder appropriately writes that “[a]lthough religion is rejected, she searches her experience of the world for something to take its place,” and he adds: “She wants a secular religion based on transitory things, ‘comforts of the sun’ and moods. She desires the emotion of religion without the theology” (69). It is this feminine desire for an order that would not be that of the onto-teleology of male creation which organizes the disposition of stanzas in “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” This happens in “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” a poem in which the woman and her Sunday morning day-dream is replaced by a man and his Monday serenade. The woman of “Sunday Morning” and the poet/ singer of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” live not only in a post-lapsarian, but also in a godforsaken world. God is absent and there is no bringing Him back. It is impossible for us to be brought back into the presence of God, but we cannot help feeling the necessity for something to take his place. If there is no God 114 As it was often the case in that period (1940), this letter to Hi Simons consists of a short prefatory note and then a long gloss of a poem or a group of poems. Here, Stevens comments on section IV of “The Greenest Continent.” 150 Chapter 4 to tell us how to live and what to do, how are we to live after the devastating loss of some truth on which we can rely? In the “Comedian as the Letter C” the predicament in which we find ourselves is stated plainly by Crispin: Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex, Rex and principium, exit the whole Shebang. Exeunt omnes.… (CP 36-67) Is it possible to live in a place without “lex, rex and principium”? Stevens writes in his Adagia, “The death of one god is the death of all” (OP 191). In “Wallace Stevens’s Poetry of Being” J. Hillis Miller comments: “When nature becomes outlandish the gods disappear. They do not withdraw for a time to an unattainable distance, as they did for de Quincy or Matthew Arnold. They vanish altogether, leaving nothing behind” (144). There is no god to speak the law, nor is there a son of god to do it for him: nature, culture or poetry are all equally unavailable and cannot be used as safe and solid ground. Crispin tries to escape from this predicament to answer the above question with his “Idea of a Colony,” whereby he proposes to reestablish that which he has previously dismissed: “Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare / His cloudy drift and planned a colony” (CP 36). The colony Crispin intends to found is grounded on the bombastic statement that opens the poem and which proclaims that “man is the intelligence of his soil, / The sovereign ghost” (CP 27). In a division of body and soul, it is man—the male principle—who gives his intelligence (soul, spirit) to the inanimate, blank, soil. The male principle of intelligence animates the soil and turns a virgin and chaotic space into a colony, i.e. an organized and policed world. The opening of the poem seems to confirm man’s total control over the soil which can only exist in man’s expression. However, later in the poem the variation on the opening phrase importantly revises this bombastic statement: “Nota: his soil is man’s intelligence. / That’s better. That’s worth crossing seas to find” (CP 37). On the one hand, this second “note” produces an ironic distance between the narrative voice of the poem and Crispin who boldly affirms that the syllogistic change he manages to articulate is worth crossing seas for. On the other hand, the repetition of the phrase introduces a genitive that subjects man to the soil and contradicts the initial statement of the poem. This discovery is indeed worth crossing oceans for and Stevens uses it in “The Man with Blue Guitar” where man is no longer the “Sovereign Ghost” of the place he inhabits. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” presents the temptation of a totality where the male principle of the poet/ singer could be the lawgiver; the man with the blue guitar harmonizes for a while and then rejects that temptation. The order created in the poem cannot merely exist next to the world or as a part of the world, it must become the world, take its place. Thus, the Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 151 poem is to meet the challenge of building a topos that will hold together as a topos while escaping from the totalizing tendencies of a unified male voice. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” shares with “The Comedian” Stevens’s attempt to come to terms with a specifically American reality. It was a task that some of his contemporaries could not cope and live with, a task which drove T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound into exile. Stevens did not flee. Although he almost quit after Harmonium and its testament poem “The Comedian,” he stayed to confront the task. The American topos called for an explanation, an ordering, and Stevens, unlike Pound or Eliot, answered the call. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” also poses the question of the poet’s responsibility and of the place and the role of poetry in the world. As a Crispin of sorts, Stevens, even though he never traveled much farther away beyond Key West, had to cross his private ocean to discover the American topos and be able to produce poems that would split his self from the influence of European poets that can still be felt in Harmonium. He had to produce a poetry that would enable him to tackle the American reality in specifically American terms: ... The sea Severs not only lands but also selves. Here was no help before reality. Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new. The imagination, here, could not evade, In poems of plums, the strict austerity Of one vast, subjugating, final tone. (CP 30) “The Comedian” was Stevens’s most ambitious poem around 1920, but paradoxically it almost terminated his poetic career. 115 After this mockheroic poem in which a mock-heroic conquistador crosses the ocean to found a colony in the New World, Stevens immersed himself in a poetic silence which, seen retrospectively, may have been his final tone. But he had to confront the New World himself, and his next two collections of poems, Ideas of Order and The Man with The Blue Guitar are such confronta- 115 1922 was certainly a turning point in Stevens’s poetry. That year, he wrote the “Emperor of Ice-Cream,” about which he said ten years later: “[‘The Emperor of Ice- Cream’] wears a deliberately commonplace costume, and it seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it” (OP 212). As is often the case with Stevens’s commentary on his own work, this statement is only moderately helpful. It seems to indicate, however, the importance for its author of a poem written around the same time as “The Comedian” and that could have been one of his last: “That so outrageous a poem [“The Comedian”] should be an authentic crisis-poem is surprising, but Stevens seems to have intended it as his farewell to poetry. It almost did end him as a poet, and though he went on writing throughout the next year, 1923, he went on with a self-inflicted wound, which effectively silenced him from 1924 to 1930” (Bloom, Poems 70). 152 Chapter 4 tions. “Here” (as Crispin would have it)—in “The Man with Blue Guitar”— the imagination cannot “evade” in “poems of plums.” Stevens becomes an American poet, an intelligence produced by the American soil of which he is a “native.” Unlike the initial note that opens “The Comedian,” the opening of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” offers no unifying statement on which it can grow. As the man with the blue guitar starts strumming his instrument, polyphony, not to say discord, is already present in the poem. The most striking feature of the first stanza is a plurality of voices, and it is also one of the most important features of the poem, insofar as it sustains the tension between order and disorder, or, between inscribing and describing. This tension appears in the fact that in his commentaries on the poem Stevens insisted on calling the sections of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” “poems.” 116 It may indicate that each of them was to be, in Litz’s words, a “particle of order,” independent and free, but at the same time strictly dependent on the whole of the poem. This pattern, which is reminiscent of a Calvinistic hermeneutic circle, illustrates the tension between Stevens’s need of a scripture, a central text (a “thing produced by the imagination”) in which truth could be inscribed, and, at the same time, the impossibility to believe in this idea of order. Every time there is an attempt in the poem to establish some kind of order—provisional as it may be—, it is immediately undermined by another voice. The topography thus delineated remains moving and uncertain. In the opening stanza, there are two voices that are in stark opposition. As the man bends over his guitar, one voice says to him in an accusatory tone, “you have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.” The rather feeble reply of the man is that “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar” (CP 165). A narrative voice describes the action, reporting on the gestures and the circumstances of the opening of the poem. The short paratactic sentence of the beginning, followed by the plain declarative tone of “The day was green,” provides something like stage directions in which the blue of the guitar contrasts with the green of the day. Blue was for Stevens the color of imagination par excellence; the green day will have to be sung on a blue guitar and therefore it will have to be changed as the man’s reply suggests. It takes very little for the color blue to veer to green, or the other way around. From the start there is a chromatic difference between things as they are and things changed on the blue guitar, but that difference is also the sign of their kinship and intimate relationship; blue and green exist on either side of an invisible line that makes them differ from one another and makes each other’s existence possible. Many readers of Stevens have commented on the confrontation between the poet and his audience in a “poem [that] continually reflects upon 116 See Letters, 358-364. Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 153 an audience that makes the wrong demands upon a poet” (Bloom 119). Who are “they” is an important question in this context. It could be an actual audience that the poet (Stevens? ) imagines he is addressing and contending with. I think that it can also be the voice of the poet himself whose “I” starts to split at the very moment he tries to organize the world around him. The guitarist’s song falls victim to the instability of the narrative “I” whose voice, unlike that of a god, has no resounding unity and unifying power. When he plays/ sings his tune, he cannot rely on a tonal system that will keep his voice one and the same throughout the poem. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” starts like a Genesis of sorts—a reordering of topos is necessarily a Genesis because after the new order has been imposed on it, the new world is radically different from the old world. In Genesis God speaks and things are. In Stevens’s poem the guitarist is not a god, not even a creator, he is a just a “shearsman of sorts” whose task is to tailor an acceptable garment in which reality could appear. He cannot even impose a clear-cut distinction between night and day. The sentence “The day was green” evokes the uncertain twilight just before dawn or just after sunset, when the direct light of the sun does not strike the world yet, or when it only lingers in diffuse opalescence. Light plays an essential role in the poem, which may seem paradoxical considering its title which has to do with sound and music. In Adagia, Stevens notes that “Wine and music are not good until the afternoon. But poetry is like prayer in that it is most effective in solitude and in the times of solitude as, for example, in the earliest morning” (OP 189). Here the color of the light that makes the world assume a bluish or greenish hue is related to the sun which should make things appear as they are. However, the poem does not dawn on a newly created world. The poem is said to be a “serenade” (II, 9), which indicates that the background for the song is a twilight of gods and does not herald the victory of the light of truth and order. A “serenade” designates a piece of music usually given outdoors at night. “Serenade” seems to indicate that the poem is immersed in darkness until it emerges in “Monday’s dirty light” (XXXIII, 2), and the whole of it takes place “In a chiaroscuro where / One sits and plays the blue guitar” (XIV, 11-12). The creation of the new topos means the death of the old one whose stability was guaranteed by the voice of its creator and inscribed in his creation. The inscribing of a new topos implies the de-scribing, the unwriting, of another. Stevens is haunted by this instability which the poet’s voice, unlike God’s voice, is not strong enough to order and stabilize: There must be no cessation Of motion, or of the noise of motion, The renewal of noise And the manifold continuation 154 Chapter 4 And, most, of the motion of thought And its restless iteration, In the place of the solitaires, Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation. (CP 60) 117 In “The Place of the Solitaires,” the act of creation is evoked in terms of movement and iteration, like waves running to the shore. The expression is reinforced by the sound in “undulation” which seems to evoke the waves running to the shore, but also creative action “undulation” which animates the poem with a positive force while suggesting “undoing.” In “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Stevens returns to his ideas of “noise of motion” and “the motion of thought,” to try to sing beyond the genius of the sea he had confronted in “The Place of the Solitaires,” and turns it into a tune, a serenade. Just as he was going to produce the song that was to order the world, the poet/ singer realizes that his poetry will affect that world and change it. Hence the accusatory tone of the audience, or of that part in him that demands and still wants to believe in a controlled topos. Another paratactic structure leaves the reader guessing about the link between “‘You have a blue guitar’,” and “‘You do not play things as they are’.” Is the link a “therefore,” or is it an accusation on the part of the empirically oriented audience, as Beverly Maeder suggests, that the guitarist “deforms the ‘green day’ on his ‘blue guitar’ and thus does ‘not play things as they are’” (128)? Whichever emphasis we prefer, it is important to note that the primary demand “they” insist on is that the poet must play. The peremptoriness of “must” appears six times in the poem (I, 7; v, 7, 9; XII, 12, XXXI, 15; XXXII, 8), and it is always linked to an important aspect of things as they are. In the first stanza, the syntax and the meter put particular emphasis on the “must.” What is stressed, as much as the content of the song, is the fact that the musician must play—as if, in the interval indicated by “then,” he had shown signs of being rebuked by the audience and started to pack up his instrument. But he cannot leave the stage: he must interpret the song of things as they are. As soon as he starts strumming the instrument, he is responsible and he cannot not play, and his song must be an interpretation of things as they are, that is something that concerns both him and his audience and which they now must share: he is to be the shearsman of that sharing. This is where the responsibility of the poet is involved. Robert Pinsky writes that “society depends on the poet to witness something, and yet the poet can discover that thing only by looking away from what society has learned to 117 There are other places where Stevens expressed himself on the subject. In 1935, in the letter quoted above to the publisher of Ideas of Order, Ronald Lane Latimer, he wrote: “The only possible order of life is one in which all order is incessantly changing” (Letters 291-292). Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 155 see poetically” (426). Why is he responsible (why can he not simply quit? ) and what is the poet responsible for are some of the questions posed by the poet/ singer and his “audience.” If we broaden the view and consider Wallace Stevens, we may also wonder why he decided to again write poetry after stopping for so many years. What is the imperative must that drove him not to leave the stage? “The poet needs to feel utterly free, yet answerable,” Pinsky writes (423), and this is exactly the paradoxical situation between utter freedom and absolute responsibility where the poet/ musician of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” finds himself. In “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” the speaker of the poem could say: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange. (CP 65) The self of the poet is the measure of the world—“I was myself the compass of that sea,” the poet says. The last line of “Hoon” expresses a tension within the narrative “I” of the poem which remained unsolved for Stevens for many years. “There,” in “Hoon,” the poet “finds himself,” but at the same time that true self he finds is “strange”; he is a stranger in “Hoon,” not a native, and the poetry he must write is not to estrange him from his native world. A young, self-reliant, and idealistic poet can live with the temptation to escape to “Hoon” once in a while, but this is no longer the case in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” written in 1937 in the gloom of the Great Depression and the dark foreboding of war. Here the poet does not manage to adopt the voice of a unified narrative “I.” What the “audience” demands is a resolution of the crisis in the romantic terms of “Hoon” that would inscribe the world in “one laconic phrase”: “Things exactly as they are.” The iambic regularity enhanced by the rhyme is obtained with—at the expense of—the word “exactly” which modifies the phrase “things as they are.” It is a costly addition, for instead the phrase now suggests mimetic reproduction of the world. The formulaic rhythmical pattern lulls us into following this voice which “is something continuous, murmuring or muttering, sometimes a singsong rhyme or a stammering alliteration,” (Miller, “Linguistic” 13) and that might give us the feeling that the pleasure of the song can us make forget the demands of the audience. However, the opposition between the two voices (“I” and the “audience”) is irreconcilable, and the poem cannot continue with either one of them alone. So, the inverted commas of direct speech disappear and the narration is assumed in free indirect style for the rest of the poem (with the exception of XXIX). One should not assume, however, that the narrative voice achieves some sort of Hegelian synthesis of the two antithetical voices. Instead of letting the two voices fight for the control of reality, the “poet” can now assume any narrative position in the poem at any time. The 156 Chapter 4 narrative voice imposes a disjunctive order dominated by hiatus and surprise, which forbids any explication of the poem by its source. The form of the poem is paradoxical: it is totally free insofar as it has no unified voice behind it, but it is ordered and shaped by “That which momentously declares / Itself not to be I and yet / must be. It could be nothing else” (XII; emphasis added). The voice/ sound of the man with the blue guitar becomes the unidentifiable “it” of stanza XII, and that “it” is the sole possibility for the poem to continue. Stanza II continues the process of fragmentation of the singer’s “I” that leads up to this “it.” The second stanza opens with “I” and there are nine repetitions (either phonetic of visual) of the pronoun in the stanza. As soon as the “I” appears in the poem, it marks its own limitations. It seems natural to identify the “I” as the voice of the man with the blue guitar of section one, but the dropping of the inverted commas “enables the poet to equivocate silently about the degree of his own presence or absence in what the guitarist has to say” (Patke 82). The guitarist’s voice is now mediated by the narrative voice that partakes of the nature of that “I” and yet differs from it. The hero’s “large eye” seems to be a direct echo of Whitman’s celebration of the self, while the hero’s eye is a deflection of the poet’s “I” which indeed contains contradictory multitudes. Most importantly, this multiplicity contradicts the monolithic heroic status of the poet. At the end of the poem the boasting “I” disappears, leaving its place to “a man.” The dismembered man appears in synecdoches but none of them is representative enough to represent the essence of man. Those parts are like the fragments of a hero’s statue that has once stood as the symbol of the union of the aesthetic and the heroic nature of man. The falling apart of the statue is parallel to the falling apart of the world and patching “it” and patching “him” is the same enterprise. The measure of the world, of things as they are, is the mythic hero, Ulysses or Aeneas, who governs the world he inhabits, and whose sole presence makes that world quite round. The man with the blue guitar patches both man and the world as he can, that is, with his limited talent and possibilities. He realizes full well that he cannot create a hero who could order the world in the name of his creator, like Adam in Paradise or Aeneas the founder of Rome. In an ironic echo of Virgil’s mythopoietic creation in The Aeneid, the poet/ singer says “I cannot bring a world quite round,” and the ensuing play on can and sing evokes both possibility and epic poetry. The stanza plays on singing a hero who would bring a world quite round, a word of things exactly as they are. This, however, the poet declares he cannot do: he can come up with bits and pieces but not a whole. His declaration brings about two opposite statements, though. On the one hand, he says “I cannot sing” (echoed in “I cannot bring”), and on the other, his words echo the Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 157 opening of The Aeneid and Virgil’s cano (I sing) “of a man of war....” So, the man with the blue guitar is saying, I cannot sing, yet I sing. Virgil sings the hero founder and ruler of an empire arriving in a new land that submits to his law. Stevens’s Crispin had done something similar, but Crispin had not fallen into pieces as the would-be hero sung and unsung (cannot) by the man with the blue guitar. Virgil sings “of a man of war” who orders the world so that the world resembles him. At the end of this genealogical line, the created world becomes the sign of the singer’s creation and celebrates his power and creative genius. The impossibility to sing a world quite round indicates that the singer is not potent enough to engender that genealogical line. The “hero’s large eye” bears echoes of Whitman’s large “I,” but the opening of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” features no celebration. The world created and controlled by the singer has fallen to pieces and the heroes who ruled their empires are shattered statues. The repetition in stanza III of “almost to man” seems to be a direct answer to the phrase “things exactly as they are” in which the mimetic exactness is replaced by the tentative ordering of the serenade. The dissuasive last couplet takes up this motif and seems to find it reasonably satisfactory to say that the only order poetry can impose on the world is provisional and in motion. The opening of the third stanza, its exclamation, and the strongly adversative “but” picks on the “but play you must” of stanza I. The proposition reconstructs a male hero and places him at the center of newly-patched world, but the emotional reaction that opens the poem shows that this is highly problematic. In his gloss, Stevens rejects a Shellyan notion of poetic leadership: “man number one” poses the problem of a world organized around a mythic hero/ poet, but the self—like the statue of the hero—has fallen to pieces and can only be patched. “Man number one” appears as a working hypothesis, and the purely theoretical aspect of the poem is emphasized by the absence of any conjugated verb. It consists of a series of incomplete sentences, a set of formulas, all beginning with an infinitive clause, to which no unambiguous meaning is ever given. The hypothesis turns out to be violent with the vivid—almost surgical—precision with which it is presented. Man is not re-membered. On the contrary: to “express man in the liveliness of lively experience” (“to strike his living hi and ho”), and “make an exact record of the liveliness of the occasion” (“to tick it, tock it”) (Patke 85), leads to more anatomizing dissection (“To drive the dagger in his heart” and “pick the acrid colors out”). The regularity of the iambic beat picks up on the demand of “things exactly as they are,” and couplet four serves as a conclusion to the extravagant demands of the stanza. The stanza ends in a sort of hysterical hyperbole in which the referential value of words is left aside and replaced by 158 Chapter 4 the savage rhythm of the verse. The mounting violence of the stanza reaches a peak with the banging of man’s essence from the savage blue of the imagination, as the adagio of the serenade becomes a forte assai with the jangling of the strings of the guitar. The rhythmical regularity of the iambic tetrameter that peaks in couplet four dissolves in the last couplet as an enactment of the lost order in which the harmonizing of the song becomes a mere “jangling.” The most striking image of the stanza may be the crucifixion of sorts in the third couplet: “To nail his thought across the door / Its wings spread out to rain and snow.” Stevens associates the line with personal memories; he writes to Simons, “[o]n farms in Pennsylvania a hawk is nailed up, I believe, to frighten off other hawks” (Letters 359). The evocation of this cruel custom participates in the climate of violence of the section that seeks to define man “beyond us, yet as we are.” To crucify a bird on a barn is not simply supposed to frighten off other birds but the very human cruelty of the act relates it to the irrational and the fantastic. Such emblems are to keep at bay the irrational fears of the farmers. Nailing man across the door is to sacrifice him like Christ. To turn “man number one” into the world where he walks is to sacrifice him. “To play man number one,” that is, to reduce him to his male and heroic dimension can only be achieved by sacrificing him. The barbaric ritual aims at purifying the male character of man from any kind of disruptive elements. After musing on the possibility of creating a male hero that would master the poetic universe of the song, the poet abruptly returns to the demand of poem I in an ironical response. All of stanza IV is a disenchanted, almost resigned, response to the demands of the opening poems. The cold determinism of stanza III “picks its way” on the guitar. The imagination surrenders to representation and its death-dealing attributes—“picking” refers to the sounding of individual notes plucked on the guitar but also to the fact that representation breaks into the world of imagination, making its way there, slowly spreading and occupying the field. Accordingly, the blue guitar becomes “the thing” and the repetition of “and” expresses the poet’s doubts about the accumulation and the lumping up that are supposed to make a man in the end. The song played on the strings of the guitar cannot subsume man’s essence and existence; all these elements cannot be put like beads on a string and kept there in the same order for everybody to contemplate. “Man” remains the central issue of stanza IV with “people” and “manner” repeated three times. The pairs “right and wrong” and “weak and strong” offer human alternatives to the extravagant transcendence of the “hi and ho.” Even more importantly, what is at stake is “life.” The word appears for the first time in the poem as a response to the images of death of the previous stanza. Life cannot be just “that.” The flies buzzing one last time before dying in autumn anticipate the buzzing of the guitar and that is all there is left of Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 159 the serenade. Feelings call desperately for life but the situation seems very dreary at this point: “[b]etween the buzzing of the feelings and the buzzing of the guitar there is a gap that Stevens, and his poem, need to close or at least to cross” (Bloom 123). Stanza V takes up again the role of the poet and the responsibility of his art toward society (“ourselves”). Although poetry has been the central issue of the poem from the beginning, poetry as such discreetly appears for the first time, and it is immediately taken to task: how can the poet face his responsibility? The “greatness of poetry” is rejected together with the heroic subterranean journeys made by Orpheus, Aeneas, or Dante. “Poetry number one” cannot replace “man number one.” The memory of the mythic and heroic past is structured into a burial vault “where the imagination is not acknowledged to be alive,” and is reduced to “balancing the whole fragile structured concept of the vault on a point of light” (Patke 86). The relationship between poetry and “exceeding music” is problematic because the danger of a new Whitmanian transcendence looms large. Nonetheless, at this point it seems inevitable, and the poem seems to have reached a new impasse. “Ourselves” is slightly different from “us,” insofar as it introduces the plurality of the self into the up to now disincarnated humanity which must replace the divine order of heaven. The voice claiming the necessity of this poetic reordering is the same as the one that opened the section and seemed to answer stanza IV. The underground, almost necrophiliac, Götterdämmerung of stanza V calls for the installation of a new order, the de-scription of heavenly laws, and the de-scription of mimetic poetry and its laws of representation. The poet writes his poem, which consists in the unwriting of the old certainties of man’s heliocentric topography: “A tune beyond us as we are, / Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar / …” (VI, 1-2). Poetry imposes a new order and thereby creates a new topos. In that new place where order is no longer guaranteed by God, the situation of man is like that of poetry. Their situations are strikingly similar, inasmuch as they are both forlorn and alone in a topos deserted by the gods: It was their annihilation, not ours, and yet it left us feeling that in a measure, we, too, had been annihilated. It left us feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted, in which the amical rooms and halls had taken on a look of hardness and emptiness. (OP 260) That topos where man is forsaken by his gods is a place where these gods can no longer be represented. “Man,” the forsaken son of the gods, is doomed to wander in a deserted house that has become a labyrinth. The whole poem becomes a labyrinth where the man with the blue guitar is left alone in need of the unavailable help of his father. Something must take the place of the male heroism of the son and of the transcendental presence of 160 Chapter 4 the father. For the poet, as for the reader of the poem, the sense of abandonment also results in an increased sense of responsibility. Man is not to be an outside gazer, but a part of the thing itself—we are “ourselves in the tune as if in space.” The tune becomes the new topos. The thinking of art may seem final but it never is: it is a heuristic interpretation of the world where things remain in “perpetual undulation.” Thus, line six takes up again the idea of “as I can” (II, 2; 5) in “as you play them,” which acquires a temporal and progressive quality. That heuristic mode seems to contaminate even the irresistible ontological status of things as they are. From the first line on, we are in the tune, and as the tune develops the verb to be becomes a function of the tune. To be becomes being as the latter is patched in the developing song. Poetry acquires its heuristic finality (its “final atmosphere”) when the thinking of God —that had materialized for a while on the surface of things—becomes smoky dew. However, this change is not necessarily very reassuring for the man who finds himself in a new and hostile environment because “The death of the gods coincides with a radical transformation in the way man sees the world. What had been a warm home takes on a look of hardness and emptiness, like the walls, floors, and banisters of a vacant house. Instead of being intimately possessed by man, things appear to close themselves within themselves. They become mute, static presence” (Miller, “Wallace” 144). The de-scription of the topos guaranteed by the law of representative referentiality, implies a new responsibility for the man who must read a world that no longer speaks in the name of something or someone else. “The blue guitar / Becomes the place of things as they are,” and it is in that becoming that the form “are” of the verb to be will now be “a composing of senses of the guitar” (VI, 14). In a world where he finds himself orphaned by the loss of many a certainty, the poet turns to the “comforts of the sun” provided by the paternal image of the morning star. The Platonic symbol of the sun is undermined in the first line of stanza VI—“It is the sun that shares our works.” “To share” implies that the sun is not only a transcendent value but also something that partakes of the “works” of men, that is, of the appearance of things as they are. This relative function of the sun is a first step in an oscillation between the maternal symbol of the moon and the paternal symbol of the sun that had informed “The Comedian.” The poet is—in a pun—the new son of the paternal symbol, the sun. But he wonders whether he is indeed the heir, whether he is entitled to a “share” of the inheritance. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” imposes a type of order that is the consequence of the poet’s burning of the bridges of representation and romantic transcendence. This process is a difficult and at times painful molting on which Stevens commented in a letter: Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 161 My impression is that these [poems] are printed in the order in which they were written without rearrangement. There were a few that were scrapped. I kept them in their original order for my own purposes, because one really leads into the other, even when the relationship is only one of contrast. (Letters 358) 118 The order the poem establishes little by little is not an order without shadows. It is not—despite the bold affirmation of stanza VII—an order of the father and the son. The imagination is given free leave in stanza VIII which opens with a virtuoso flourish of internal and final rhymes; here again the iambic rhythm recalls “things as they are.” Many more rhymes (something rather uncharacteristic for the rest of the poem) keep up the “vivid,” “florid” (VIII, 1) atmosphere of the poem. The illusion does not last long, though. The poet is aware of the fact that his “leaden twang” can “bring the storm to bear” (VIII, 7, 9) but it cannot get rid of the storm of thoughts. IX And the color, the overcast blue Of the air, in which the blue guitar Is a form, described but difficult, And I am merely a shadow hunched Above the arrowy, still strings, The maker of a thing yet to be made; The color like a thought that grows Out of a mood, the tragic robe Of the actor, half his gesture, half His speech, the dress of meaning, silk Sodden with his melancholy words, The weather of his stage himself. Stevens thought that stanzas VIII and IX were meant to work together like “companion pieces” (Letters 362). Here the imagination is confronted with a kind of universal dullness which tends to dominate it to the point where the blue guitar is but “a form” and the player no longer a shearsman, but 118 Stevens was very particular about the order of his poems and seemed to consider that they had echoes and correspondences with one another. When Harmonium was republished, he sent instructions to Alfred A. Knopf concerning the order of the poems: “[t]he order of the poems in the original edition of Harmonium is satisfactory.” ... “The new material is to be inserted in the following order... after this the book is to be closed with the two poems in the original edition...” (Letters 259-260). The scrapped poems (or some of them? ) can be found in OP 101-04. 162 Chapter 4 “merely a shadow hunched” (IX, 4) over strings that have become immobile and silent. The “overcast blue” (IX, 1) of the imagination gives way to a world that becomes a masquerade and loses all significance; this is reflected in the two long clauses that compose the poem and that do not have a main verb. The “color” seems to be the subject of a verb that never comes, and whose absence works like an unfulfilled promise. The poet portrays himself as someone who made a tacit promise, who stood up to take up a task which has “yet to be made” (IX, 6). The unfulfilled promise causes a disappointment of the sort one may feel seeing only “the dress of meaning” (IX, 10) and not meaning itself; like early Puritans who were never sure whether they were in the presence of Christ or only of his “tragic robe” (IX, 9). In these poems, the question of the interpretation of reality remains at the heart of what Stevens called his “reality-imagination complex.” On the one hand, imagination is powerless; on the other it cannot be left out, lest we should no longer have access to reality. Imagination is to organize the world and poetry is the power “the man” believes in to fulfill this task. However, poetry must be native of this world. For Stevens, this meant that it had to be the American world. America had to be explored and discovered and not invented. It was no longer “inaccessible Utopia” (XXVI, 10) but the everyday world of everyday America. No new frontier could be reached, and the reality Stevens had was the one and only reality. If it could not be escaped, it had to be organized so that it would remain inhabitable. Later in the poem, destruction looms large but for the time being the poet still contemplates the possibilities offered by his art. The tone becomes more threatening and violent in the poem that follows. Stanza X seems to offer the alternative of a poetic revolution: change the world abruptly, sweep away the old reality embodied in the “adversary” (X, 11) the heroic poet confronts. The guitar becomes a war-like drum that leads the troops to battle. Old poetry, possibly the old Platonic world, must be torn down and destroyed. The old religion of the world must be dismantled, and the poet, no longer a player but a revolutionary, leans from the steeple to herald the new order the world is to live by. God, Plato, old European poetry, all of them are dead—exit the whole shebang! Like stanza V, stanza X is a vindication of the role of poetry, which seems to be confirmed by the fact that Stevens published stanza X as an independent piece in the review Poetry and had then an additional stanza inserted between couplets 3 and 4: “Subversive poet, this is most rare. / Forward into tomorrow’s past! ” 119 Stevens wrote to Simons: “I thought that subversive poets a la mode were getting nowhere fast” (Letters 360), which may be why “subversive” poetry as it is presented in stanza X yields no results. Reality has to be ex- 119 “Stanzas for ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’” (OP 101-04). See Letters, 360, note 8. Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 163 plored and made sense of: there will be no savior, no beginning from scratch and no return to some redeeming origin. The new pagans can lean from the steeples of the old cathedrals, they know that they have won no battle: their cries are but the prelude to their end; it takes something else to topple men and rock, i.e. reality. XI Slowly the ivy on the stones Becomes the stones. Women become The cities, children become the fields And men in waves become the sea. It is the chord that falsifies. The sea returns upon the men, The fields entrap the children, brick Is a weed and all the flies are caught, Wingless and withered, but living alive. The discord merely magnifies. Deeper within the belly’s dark Of time, time grows upon the rock. The opening of stanza XI—“Slowly the ivy on the stones / Becomes the stones”—imposes its solemn rhythm, and an aura of definitiveness seems to befall the poem. This sounds indeed like it might be the final part of the poem. Imagination and reality have to be reconciled and it is the work of the poet to do so, as Stevens commented: As between reality and the imagination, we look forward to an era when there will exist the supreme balance between these two, with which we are all concerned. The idea can be extended socially, but this is not what is intended. It can also be extended in philosophy, but, again, this is not what is intended. (Letters 363) If the new order is neither social, nor political, nor philosophical, it may be that the idea of order Stevens is aiming to find is poetic. But here again, he seems be caught in a blind alley of language. Patke writes that as “opposed to the men caught alive in the discord of change, [Stevens] uses a mysterious fecundating metaphor for a potential cure of the ground: ‘Deeper within the belly’s dark / Of time, time grows upon the rock’” (Patke 90). And in “The Rock,” Stevens writes: It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves. We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness. (CP 525) 164 Chapter 4 It might seem that the last couplet of stanza XI could be the cure that proclaims the victory of a poetry that is able to contain the changing character of life. It might seem that the poem could end here, but as Miller writes, “the poem [“The Rock”] is a cure of the ground which never succeeds [and] criticism is a yielding to the temptation to try once more for the ‘cure beyond forgetfulness,’ and then once more, and then beyond that, in an everrenewed, ever-unsuccessful attempt to ‘get it right,’ to name things by their real names” (“Stevens’s” 117). In “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” every stanza is such a new attempt to “get it right.” The stanzas form a mise en abyme of individual poems/ songs that constantly re-interpret one another but which are not linked by any narrative figure. To continue, to pass from one stanza to the next, the poet cannot rely on his male conquering heroism, or on any logical progression. He has to resort to an “Ariadne’s thread as she might be imagined to have rescued it from the too rational and betraying Theseus, or have incarnated it in herself as the clue to an escape from the abyss by a cure of the ground” (Miller, “Stevens’s” 122). In order to continue, the poem proceeds by surprise: “Tom-tom, c’est moi. The blue guitar / And I are alone” (XII, 1-2). The French phrase both announces and tones down the conclusion of the poem which insists that the poem or the song “must be” the responsibility of its maker/ singer, even though one might have the feeling that the arrangement of the song is gradually dissolving in total contingency. The reassuring regularity of the tetrameter that opens the next stanza seems to restore a regular rhythm and a reliable and stable structure. But the respite is short and the Spanish-sounding “ay di mi” (“poor me”) undermines even the timid affirmation of “c’est moi.” The repeated suspension marks seem to confirm that the poet/ singer is trying to breathe in. Uncertainty dominates with the “corrupting pallors” and the semantic, metaphorical, and sensorial crossing constituted by the “pitchy blooms” (XIII, 3). The poem has moved from the sound of the guitar to the evocation of the color of the guitar and its symbolic association, and then to the smell of (blue) blooms. “Pitchy” is not the association one might expect for the smell of the flowers of imagination—but “pitchy” also refers to the sound of the musician trying to pitch his song, i.e. to set it in a particular musical key; and so the pitchy-patchy process continues. While the “shuffling men” (XII, 3) of an imaginary audience are still filling the hall, or maybe while they are fidgeting impatiently, the guitarist is still trying to tune his instrument and he is still trying to tune in with his performance. The previous section had concluded that “things as they are” must be ordered by and around man, that is by the male singer in front of a male audience (“shuffling men”). With its repetitive syntax and the dominance of the plosives / p/ / t/ / k/ , the poem seems to be stuttering. There Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 165 are only two sentences in the poem; if one tries to reorder the syntax perturbed by the “intrusions into blue,” the second sentence reads: Be content Be content to be Be content to be the unspotted revery To be the heraldic center of the world To be the center of the world of blue The center of the world sleek with a hundred chins The amorist Adjective aflame. Each proposition seems complete but it is always “adjectivized,” that is, modified by the adjunction of a new element. The poem makes language stammer and each repetition renders the status of the only verb of the sentence, the verb “to be,” uncertain. What is questioned by this stammering is “being”; it makes that which is moot and thereby problematizes the ontological status of the singer’s “I” and his “c’est moi” comes closer and closer to meaning “je est un autre.” The radiant opening evocative of sunrise in poem XIV seems to suggest that the light of reason dissipates darkness and makes the world complete in a cosmic union of “star and orb” (XIV, 3). Self-reliantly, the dazzling Kantian light of pure reason shed by the “German chandelier” (5) is rejected in favor of “the solitary candle of the scholar in his simplicity of objects arranged in a Cézanne-like still life around him, tokens of the true essence of the world” (Patke 93). The poet/ scholar wants to believe that his single candle can do what the fishing boats do in “Ideas of Order at Key West,” Arranging, deepening, enchanting night” (CP 130). In “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” the constellation is reduced to a single star, so bright that it imposes itself “even at noon” (7) by creating an “essential” (8; emphasis added) dark around the true essence of the world. The new beginning presents a world reduced to a few essential elements, and purports to place the singer in its center, like a new sun from which all life irradiates. Heliocentricity is replaced by poetry, the force that designs a new cosmogony on a tabula rasa where the word and the bread of a new Eucharist are harmonized by the priest/ poet. In a letter in which he glosses “The Greenest Continent,” Stevens writes to Hi Simons: One way of explaining this poem is to say that it concerns the difficulty of imposing the imagination on those that do not share it … The idea of pure poetry, essential imagination, as the highest objective of the poet, appears to be, at least potentially, as great as the idea of God, and, for that matter, greater, if the idea of God is only one of the things of the imagination. (Letters 369) The light of the imagination is even more essential than the essence of God. The male son replaces the father in his “one-ness” and sits and plays the world; he inscribes the score on the blank page, deflowers it, and his voice 166 Chapter 4 fills the silence. Susan Gubar writes that “female authors exploit [the trope of the blank page] to expose how woman has been defined symbolically in the patriarchy as a tabula rasa, a lack, a negation, an absence” (259). In this section of the poem, the male affirmation only attains an uncertain “chiaroscuro” that no “glistening” seems to dissipate. The poet does not manage to make the world revolve around the candle which does not irradiate light like the spokes of a wheel from a center. In “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” the principle of order is feminine and the principle that constantly threatens to end the poem, to stop its necessary mise en abyme is male. Stevens wrote to Renato Poggioli, who wanted to reproduce a painting of Picasso on the cover of his Italian translation of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” that he “had no particular painting of Picasso’s in mind” when he wrote the opening lines of stanza XV—“Is this picture of Picasso’s, this ‘hoard / Of destructions,’ a picture of ourselves, / Now, an image of our society? ” (Letters 786). In another letter, he acknowledged, however that “The words hoard of destruction … were either from a group of dicta by Picasso which were published some years ago by Christian Zervos or from comment by Zervos on Picasso” (783). The tropological nexus shifts from music (“one plays”) in the last lines of XIV to painting (“picture of Picasso’s”; “picture,” “image,” “seeing”), though in both cases the poet “sits” to play/ hear or paint/ see—or write/ read. 120 Thus, the reference to Picasso and Cubism has more to do with the fractioning of the world into senses than with a particular painting. The fractioning of the world which cannot be only seen, or only heard, participates in the patchy character of the poem which “Becomes the place of things as they are, / A composing of senses of the guitar” (VI, 13-14). It would be a mistake, however, to sentimentalize this and consider it as a liberating and exhilarating movement from the one-ness of things as they are. “Things as they are have been destroyed,” and we might be tempted to cheer for that event from the vantage point of our God-less, author-less post-modern world. For the poet/ painter, this creates an intense sense of anxiety: “Have I [been destroyed]” as well? The candle of the imagination lit by the poet is like the candle held out by the hand belonging to a dismembered body in Picasso’s Guernica (1937, Madrid). It is not enough to bring the world together, and the grim light it sheds only makes more blatant and jarring the horror of the destruction of the world that no act of imagination can make up for. 121 120 Music does not disappear completely, though. Stevens comments on line 5 for Poggioli, “the words Catching at Good-Bye refer to a popular song entitled Good-Bye, Good-Bye Harvest Moon. I suppose I had in mind the way that particular line kept coming back to mind” (Letters 783). 121 There are no references by Stevens to Guernica, and I am not trying to suggest that the painting might have served as the “source” for the lines of the poem in the (very) unlikely case that Stevens had known of the painting in 1937, or heard of it in the context of the dramatic events in Spain. Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 167 The distress caused by the composing/ confusing of senses leads to a great rhythmical disorder. Stanza XV ends with a pentameter and the following section hardly succeeds in restoring the incantatory four beat line of the beginning. The earth is not the earth but a stone, Not the mother that held men as they fell But stone, but like a stone, no: not The mother, but an oppressor, but like An oppressor that grudges them their death, As it grudges the living that they live. “Metaphors of maternal love never sufficed after Harmonium” Patke quite aptly writes (95), and this stanza confirms this insufficiency. Men are fallen gods that have no mother to “suckle” them and “no sweet land” to welcomes them when they fall. The poet is one of the men frustrated both by the impossibility of being his father’s worthy son and the impossibility of returning to a nurturing mother nature. In “Sunday Morning” already, Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Their boisterous devotions to the sun, Not as a god, but as a god might be, Naked among them, like a savage source. (CP 49-50) The passage is full of homoerotic images and joins in what Frank Lentricchia calls “mainline American visions of male utopias.” The nakedness and orgiastic brutality of the men chanting to the sun contrasts with the mannerism of the peignoired, leisurely, and unoccupied woman. By contrast, the men in the poem are at work; Lentricchia remarks that “as a keen etymologist, Stevens would have known the relationship of ‘orgy’ with an ancient Greek word related to ‘work’” (167-589). At least the men are performing their devotion, unlike the woman who is lazily at home while realizing that she should be where workers are at this time of day: in church. Stanza XVI tries the same kind of rejection of mother nature for a father sun in the lines that propose to launch on exhilarating projects, halfmythical and violent, half-utopian and absurd. The succession of infinitive clauses, “To live war, to live at war, / To chop the sullen psaltery, / To improve the sewers in Jerusalem, / To electrify nimbuses—”, indicates a haste to come up with ideas that could justify the turning to chanting to the sun. But all this is hasty and inconclusive, so that the poem never reaches the solemnity and ritual circularity of section VII of “Sunday Morning.” In stanza XVI, the catalexis and the ellipsis in line 10 (“To electrify the nimbuses—”) abruptly stops the fuite en avant. The stanza stages Stevens’s failed effort to phallisize poetic discourse, which is for him, as for his poet in the poem, “the economical modernist issue of poetic authority: the cul- 168 Chapter 4 tural power—or, increasingly, for the poetic modernist—the cultural powerlessness of poetry in a society that masculinized the economic while feminizing the literary” (Lentricchia 168). To be a poet may mean being expelled from the chanting fraternity of working and chanting men. It may mean becoming a strange interloper, a lady in a peignoir; it may mean renouncing one’s manhood. Early in his life and poetic career, Stevens was affected by the thought that poetry was not “real work,” something a real man should do. He wrote to his wife-to-be: I sit at home o’ nights. But I read very little. I have, in fact, been trying to get together a little collection of verses again; and although they are simple to read, when they’re done, it’s a deuce of a job (for me) to do them. Keep all this a great secret. There is something absurd about all this writing of verses; but the truth is, it elates and satisfies me to do it. It is an all-round exercise quite superior to ordinary reading. So that, you see, my habits are positively ladylike. (Letters 180; emphasis added) The poetry of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” is an attempt to live like a man while accepting the “lady-like” activity of poetry writing. The whole question is how to turn poetry into something which is an ethically defensible activity and not only a “complacency of the peignoir.” Between the publication of Harmonium (1923) and Ideas of Order (1930), Stevens’s acquisition of a laboring manhood took place at the price of his literary sterility. As an executive of the Accident and Indemnity Company, Stevens, as a person, or as an impersonator of “man,” fell into the mould of the American middle-class male who sees to it that he has a decent home and that he can feed his children and put them through college. The “anima(l)” in Stevens, however, was never molded by American middle-class patriarchy. This is what appears, or starts to appear in this stanza XVII where “The person has a mould. But not / Its animal” (1-2). The contrast between the body and the soul cannot be reduced to “angelic” (2) terms: the “animal” that announces the “monster” of stanza XIX has claws and fangs and contends with a world of a “hoard of destructions.” While the “person” hides in his shell, the animal in him—with an added “l” which makes all the difference with anima—threatens the shape, the shell, the mould: “All men have essentially the same form. But the spirit does not have a form,” Stevens glosses (Letters 360). The violence disappears in Stevens’s gloss and Rehder appropriately re-introduces it when he writes that “[t]he curving fingers of the guitarist and the hawk’s talons become the predatory claws and fangs, and this predator is within” (163). The “predator” is the violently poetic self of the poet; it scavenges on the shards or the patches of the world left behind by the man in him or by the father (“the monster”) he has defeated. With these he re-builds his topos. The fangs and claws do not tear the world to pieces; on the contrary, Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 169 they violently project the bits and pieces into the space of the page and “articulate” the “desert days” of everyday labor of an insurance executive. Stevens wrote in a letter: … I do not feel that I have yet said what I have to say. The few things that I have already done have merely been preliminary. I cannot believe that I have done anything of real importance. The truth is, of course, that I never may, because there are so many things that take up my time and to which I am bound to give my best. Thinking about poetry is, with me an affair of week-ends and holidays, a matter of walking to and from the office. This makes it difficult to progress rapidly and certainly. (Letters 333) The slowness and uncertainty of progress he refers to is characteristic of the man with the blue guitar (both the singer and the song). Even more striking, maybe, is the “desert” that surrounds the words on the page: the words of the poem articulate the desert of the page, but leave most of the page empty. The “north wind” (XVII, 8) is not a messenger of God, a “Comforter” (John, 14.16), but the cold north wind and the claim of victory are chilling and self-deprecatory. The suspicion that the blue guitar might be a mould as well explains Stevens’s writing in 1938, one year after “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” that he “cannot believe that [he has] done anything of real importance.” Every stanza of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” is a new composition and an interpretation of the stanzas that precede it. This process goes on throughout the poem and can even be seen as a “preliminary thing” for “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” where Stevens writes “They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.” The readers of the poem will get the poem right some day—it will also be the day when the poet gets it right, when, Stevens says, “I call you by name my green, my fluent mundo, / You will have stopped revolving except in crystal” (CP 406-07). At this stage, however, there is no attainable certainty. The central image of stanza XVIII is tentatively called a dream, but even this classification immediately breaks down and the shards of the mirror where the poet could contemplate the image of his self as a “worm composing on a straw” (XVII, 10) diffracts that image. A “dream” in which “I can believe” (XVIII, 2) the poet/ singer says reminds us is reminiscent of “can” as singing, but also of the ethical imperative caught between what “I” can and “I” must do. Thus, “I can believe” also means “I must believe.” To believe in the dream is not a luxury for the effeminate and the unoccupied: the real is only accessible through the dream, as J. Hillis Miller writes: The real and visible rises, exhales, from the unreal, or it is the unreal appearing as the always intervening veil or substitute for the absent real ... The daylight, the visible and nameable, is always doubly deprived, secondary. It rises from a sea and then is further displaced by its mirroring from the cliffs ... This movement make the source itself unreal, a “sea of ex.” (“Ariadne’s” 75) 170 Chapter 4 The dream of locking up the world in a dream causes a moment of relaxation between two violent poems. The day-dreaming of stanza XVIII is interrupted by the encroachment of thoughts that had been left behind for a while, or taken care of in a neat distinction between dream and reality. The violence that tears the self apart resumes in the next stanza: XIX That I may reduce the monster to Myself, and then may be myself In face of the monster, be more than part Of it, more than the monstrous player of One of its monstrous lutes, not be Alone, but reduce the monster and be, Two things, the two together as one, And play of the monster and of myself, Or better not of myself at all, But of that as its intelligence, Being the lion in the lute Before the lion locked in stone. In letters to Hi Simons and Renato Poggioli, Stevens equates the monster with “life” and with “nature.” (Letters 360, 790). To “sing man number one” is to sing “like” a man, that is, like a man whose “mind …, if strong enough, can become the master of all the life in the world” (Letters 360). 122 Against the forces that turn the world of things as they are into a senseless mosaic, the poet/ musician wants to believe he can impose his monstrous power and “mould” the world so that he is not a part of the world but that the world becomes a part of him: in a parthenogenesis the world becomes him; it is shaped in his image and after his likeness. The dream is to capture the monster in the lute (the guitar, the imagination) and turn him into a statue with the force and violence of the sculptor chiseling the rock. On the occasion of a public address, Stevens commented on the role and the significance of poetry: 122 The letter to Simons is dated August 1940 and the one to Poggioli 7 December 1953. It is noteworthy that while the exegesis proposed by Stevens remains essentially the same and glosses only what one may want to call the “intention” of the poem, the tone of the letters changes. In 1940 (three years after the poem), Stevens adopts the impersonal form “one” throughout the gloss of poem XIX. In 1953 (sixteen years after the poem), Stevens uses ten times the personal pronoun “I” and seven times the verb “to want” (plus once “to desire”) in the eleven lines of his gloss (Letters 790). Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 171 The important question is: what is the significance of the poetic act or, in short, what is the philosophy of what we are talking about? I am thinking of it in terms of meaning and value for the poet. Ordinarily the poet is associated with the word, not with the act; and ordinarily the word collects its strength from the imagination or, with its aid from reality. The poet finds that as between these two sources: the imagination and reality, the imagination is false, whatever else may be said of it, and the reality is true; and being concerned that poetry should be a thing of vital and virile importance, he commits himself to reality, which then becomes his inescapable and ever present difficulty and innamorata. (OP 256) Locking “the lion in stone” is precisely the “vital” and “virile” “poetic act” the poet wants to perform. In a metaphor reminiscent of the “amorist Adjective aflame” (XIII, 8), the poet is to possess through his poetry the everelusive, and therefore falsified, feminine reality. It is only fair to object that the public address can be, at most, an indirect commentary on the poem and not an exegesis in the strict sense of the word. Because it is a public address delivered to a real audience—real “they”—, the above-quoted text is peremptory: it avoids the stammering, the hesitations and the forceful syntax the poem resorts to. In the shortest stanza of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” the femininity of poetry, associated with the imagination and poetry, is cast aside: “poor pale, poor pale guitar . . . ” (XX, 8). The vital importance of “good air” and of good (ideas) in which the poet can believe makes the guitar of imagination in which he cannot believe look pale. In “How to Live. What to Do,” Stevens rehearses the idea when the “The man and his companion” (CP 125) stand before the rock erect in its absolute solidity, in the wind and its “heroic sound / Joyous and jubilant and sure” (CP 126). In stanza XX, the poet can believe in the breathing in of reality and in the un-translated sound of the world because they have not been manipulated or falsified (“It is the chord that falsifies,” X, 5) by any other “voice nor crested image” (CP 126), some “chorister” or “priest” (CP 126). The poet’s will-to-power is also a will-to-believe. The self-reliant self stands alone on the rock of here and now; it is “this” self that breathes and feels the earth under its feet. The loneliness of the self, its detachment from all the gods, makes of the poet’s self “A substitute for all the gods” (XXI, 1). The last line of the stanza, made of monosyllabic words—“ The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone” (XXI, 12)—, “roll[s] a drum upon the blue guitar” (X, 9) and reality solidifies: it is hammered down by the last line and the assonances that tighten up (a)lone, (a)loft, land, lord, live. The lord and land are one; life, the land, and the lord are one. This stanza, like the three stanzas that precede it, tries to reconstitute an “I” after the question of stanza XVI has been expressed, “Things as they are have been destroyed, / have I? ” (XV, 8-9). 172 Chapter 4 In his review of The Man with the Blue Guitar, William Carlos Williams wrote: Stevens is a troubled man who sings well, somewhat covertly, somewhat overfussily at times. … Stevens goes on and unfortunately overemphasizes what he has to say, relative to the function of a poet, making a defense of the poet, an apology for the poet, for Stevens himself facing his world. (Quoted in Doyle 174) It is true that the volume published by Stevens in 1937 is a twentiethcentury “defense of poetry” and a petition for the role and the responsibility of the poet. Rehder aptly writes—despite Williams’ criticism—that “No statement is more important for the understanding of Stevens’s work than his declaration, ‘Poetry is the subject of the poem’” (173). “The Man with the Blue Guitar” is indeed a thought revolved, a rumination on this statement. Can the poem be a responsible response to the poet’s being in the world if the poem is like a serpent that eats its own tail? Solipsism looms large in what might have appeared as a strong affirmation. Indeed, “Poetry is the subject of the poem, / From this it the poem issues and / To this returns” (XXII, 1-3). XXII Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are. Or so we say. But are these separate? Is it An absence for the poem, which acquires Its true appearances there, sun’s green, Cloud’s red, earth feeling, sky that thinks? From these it takes. Perhaps it gives, In the universal intercourse. The writing of the poem does not affirm its presence in the world and the poet’s presence in it. It is constructed on absence: the absence of “things as they are” and the absence of the imagination. Reality and the imagination are like two stars emitting light, and the poem is like that light: no longer part of the first, the stars, and not yet illuminating the other. Quite appropriately, many commentators place particular emphasis on the role of imagination in Stevens’s poetry; but the poem often expresses the fear that “Imagination is not capable of any power over things as they are. Things as they are explain themselves; power stands apart” (Bloom, Map 66). Stevens’s poem affirms that writing (poetry) does not consist in rearranging Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 173 the elements of experience and transforming them into something else or better. From that point of view Bloom is totally right: things that are, are. No effort of the imagination can transform the misery of the world into bliss. The influence of the poem can only be felt when the poem departs from reality thus turning things that are into things as they are. 123 In the world of things as they are, the only form of presence in the world is in the absence of the poem, which is not the negation of presence but the delineation of a topos where things are caught in the process of becoming things as they are, for, as Stevens writes in “Description Without Place”: “It is possible that to seem—it is to be, / As the sun is something seeming and it is” (CP 339). It takes the light of the sun two and a half minutes to reach the earth. Thus when we look at the sun we never see the sun that is, but the sun as it is. The sun we see is a star becoming something we see, and we can never see it as it is but only as it is becoming what we see. Things as they are in the light of the sun are affected by this: the light of truth is always differed and different from what it seems to be. Poetry is the subject of the poem but it is also the subject of all activities under the sun—“It is the sun that shares our works” (VII, 1). Poetry constructs a world where to seem is to be, and where it is useless to look at the sun for its “true” light because it has always already departed. In “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” poetry creates the world and the language of the world: a language not grounded in things that are, but in “Things as they were, things as they are, / / Things as they will be by and by. . .” (XXV, 15). The language of becoming is absented both from “reality” and from the redeeming imagination. Like the light of the sun, the poem constructs a delayed version of reality; “by and by” things become things as they are, that is, things that will have been. The exaction of exactitude of the beginning becomes totally preposterous: the original light that would make it possible to contemplate things that are is, and forever will be, unavailable. The poem acquires its true appearances in the absence of the true light, in the gap between the origin of light and its reception, and rejects the possibility of returning to the father-sun and fleeing into the imagination. The poet realizes (at last) that “It is the same thing to sin through an excess of 123 One of the rejected poems of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” reads: I read. “The subject of poetry Is poetry, things as they are.” We hear them on the blue guitar. The poet picks them as they are, But picks them on a blue guitar, A guitar that makes things as they are. (OP 102-103; emphasis added) 174 Chapter 4 reality as through an excess of the imagination. In both cases it is the eternal daddy-mommy, an Oedipal structure that is projected onto the real or intro-projected into the imaginary. In this infantile conception of literature, what we seek at the end of the voyage, or at the heart of the a dream is a father” (Deleuze, “Literature” 227). The realization that there is no Oedipal escape leads to the effort of the next poem to reconcile in a collage of voices the masculine principle of the real with the feminine principle of the imaginary. This takes place as “A few final solutions, like a duet / With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds, / Another on earth…” (XXIII, 1-3). The difficulty of allying the two antithetical voices in the “refrain” (XXIII, 10) played on the guitar covers up another paradox that has been at work from the beginning of the poem, namely that of representing music in the silent space of the page. In an examination of modernist painting where the themes of music and musicians are often used by artists such as Picasso, Braque or Cézanne, Patke writes: If music is the true subject, both musician and instrument are metonymies standing in for a subject which is not present itself. Neatly the paradox underlines the illusion (or falsity) of the pretence of depiction (representation). It affirms music as sacrosanct and inviolable. Music cannot be seized and fixed like a fly in amber on the canvas. The paradox urges the painter to reexamine the scope and the limits, and thus the function of his art. (74) In a fit of grim and self-deprecatory humor, the poem suggests that “final solutions” all result in duets with death. “The imagined and the real” (XXIII, 10) are fused in the refrain echoed in the undertaker’s song whose “swell” increases the feeling of remoteness. In their final form both “thought and the truth” are taken under. The dialectical discussion on the nature of poetry in the poem ends in a “universal intercourse” (XXII, 12) and perhaps with the hope that the sexual union of the male principle of the poet present in the sun, and the sky with the feminine imagination present in the cloud and earth will give birth to something new. Stanza XXIII presents these hopes ironically: the serenade of a man that plays the blue guitar is only echoed in “serene” and becomes the swelling song of an undertaker, a dealer of death. The end of the stanza is revealing of the impossible union of “Dichtung und Wahrheit” (XXIII, 11). “[A]ll confusion solved” (12) might seem to indicate, on the contrary, that a “solution” has been found, as when we say that “we have solved my problem.” The collocation “Confusion solved” is, however, an oxymoron where that which is “con-fused,” i.e. “melted together” (Latin confusus, pp. confundere) is “solved,” that is, “loosened” or “taken apart.” Instead of performing the expected union of body and soul, spirit and matter, logos and physis, the poem disjoints them irremediably and sends them into two separate worlds. The last line of poem XXIII introduces one of the rare rhythmical variations on the phrase “things as they Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 175 are.” The usual iambic beat is replaced by anapests that draw attention to the “nature of things as they are,” and to the statement that it is in the nature of things that the real and the imaginary are not one. “[C]oncerning” introduces an oxymoron that builds on the metaphor of mingling and sorting out, for it means “to sift together,” “to mingle” (Latin com + cernere, “to sift”), and denounces the impossibility to play a song concerning things as they are, for things as they are cannot be concerned by the poem. “The poem like a missal found / in the mud” (XXIV) suggests it is a gobetween, a translation, that both gives and takes both from the real and the imaginary while—as the etymology of the words “missal” and “mass” suggest—dismissing them both at the end of the office, separate and unconcerned, but changed by the office. The poem found in the mud is a like a little shard of poetry found by an archaeologist who reconstructs the world out of an insignificant trifle. “The monastic man is an artist,” Stevens would write in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (CP 382); in stanza XXIII, it is the young scholar who is the artist looking yearningly for the words that will make sense of the world. In a letter Stevens wrote about this stanza, “I am writing what appear to be trifles, I intend these trifles to be a missal for brooding-sight: for an understanding of the world” (Letters 790). In spite of the presence of the young man, the nature of the yearning has changed. Lentricchia comments that it enacts not the sensuous immediacies of perception (‘the spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun’), nor erotic linguistic festivity (‘concupiscent curds’ whipped in ‘kitchen cups’), but the immediacy of a kind of thought indistinguishable from desire; pleasure reimagined now as something almost final, almost ultimately good, the fruit of fulfillment yet to be gripped; the pleasurable object of desire semi obscure, barely but forever out of reach. (201) The poet takes the reader along in his stammering, in his continual process of re-writing the poem, and finally accepts to relinquish the pleasure of possession. Stevens described this pleasure in his journal during his Harvard years: “it is a great pleasure to seize an impression and lock it up in words: you feel as if you had it safe forever” (quoted in Holly Stevens 48). In stanza XXIV, the question of possession through knowledge, or “cure beyond forgetfulness” is problematized. “To know” is isolated between a colon and a semi-colon, which turns it into a verb with neither subject nor object. The poem that makes this unconjugated knowledge possible is a poem “found,” not a poem written, that is, mapped out, planned; it is found by chance and it happens as a surprise. When, in an abrupt crystallization of the stammering trope, the phrase becomes the hawk’s eye, the 176 Chapter 4 poet does not flinch at the eye (and the “I” behind the phrase) but at the joy of the surprising encounter. In a letter to Simons, Stevens confirms the necessity of letting it go, that is, of letting the improvisation on the guitar continue, even if it is only a succession of trifles. He writes: “To know a thing is to be able to seize it as a hawk seizes a thing. The sort of scholar to whom one addresses oneself for all his Latined learning finds in ‘brooding-sight’ a knowledge that seizes life with joy in his eye. A paraphrase like this is a sort of murder” (Letters 360). Stevens insisted repeatedly that “what one says in a letter has an unhappy way of seeming to be a good deal more fixed than what one says in talk,” and of his comments on “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” he wrote to Simons: “These comments would have been better in conversation” (Letters 354, 351). The (masculine) desire to fix things kills them, and Stevens, as the poet in “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” is anxious to be able to continue his improvisation. The next stanza celebrates the newly-found liberty: things can be appreciated by the poet/ juggler without being possessed by him. The world in the hands of the man of imagination can be twirled this way or that to the sound of exultations—“ay-yi-yi.” “He” is the poet whose reading/ interpretation of the world makes the world with words—with a play on worlds. Like an acrobat juggling with reality, he strives to maintain it in balance on his nose—the exercise is perilous and difficult but also implies a playful dimension—“this-a-way he gave a fling” (XXVII, 2). The painstaking enterprise is also the enterprise of the poem: it must give pleasure. His “robes” (XXVII, 3) are reminiscent of the robe of the tragic actor in stanza IX. The crowd that attends the performance is now very far from the demanding audience that called on the poet at the beginning of the poem. Now they are confused by the robes and the symbols that are exhibited in front of them. “Thing” rhyming with “fling,” which in turn echoes the “think” that closes stanza XXIV, participates in the playful atmosphere of the poem; it also seems to imply that a mere fling will make the thing different, depending on the direction in which the poet, a juggler of sorts, wants to fling it. Black cats are moving rapidly like ants on an ant-hill; people are moving around in the grass, in what they think is grass, without realizing that what they think is grass is their world (it goes around). They move without sound: they are dumb, without expression. And round and round the world goes. The next couplets lead us in a ritornello in which the rhythm and the playfulness are emphasized by the numerous alliterations. It becomes a vicious game where everything is carried away due to the imbecile participation and admiration of the stupid crowd beating the accelerating rhythm of decomposition: “They did not know the grass went round.” The dumbness of the crowd initiates the vicious spiral: “without sound” introduces “round” which in turn initiates the whirling motion of turning (like Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 177 the world, like the words, cast in the air by the juggler). In this motion, everything is mixed up, made indifferent—time, things, people. Only the nose of the juggler is eternal. The world is always what we make of it, what we read it into. Too many do not realize that: and they beat the rhythm without realizing what is happening. The gaiety of stanza XXV is grim and it is a severe reflection of the role and the responsibility of the poet. For a little while it seems that, like Crispin, the poet can write “poems of plums,” or as Stevens once wrote in a letter to his wife-to-be: I swear, my dear Bo-Bo [Elsie Moll], that it is a great pleasure to be so poetical. —But it follows that the intellect having been replaced by the emotions, one cannot think of anything at all. —At any rate, my trifling poesies are like the trifling designs one sees on fans. I was much shocked, accordingly, to read of a remark made by Gainsborough, the great painter of portraits and landscapes. He said scornfully of someone, “Why, the man is a painter of fans! ” —Well, to be sure, a painter of fans is a very unimportant person by the side of the Gainsboroughs. (Letters 171) The poet cannot be a mere painter of fans: the heavy and lugubrious comical effect of stanza XXV is reinforced by the poetic image of the “liquid cats” (5)—the “simple paraphernalia used to produce an effect of comedy” (Letters 361)—which turns the world into a senseless rigmarole, and the poet into a new version of the “Comedian”: a man who is poetically, sexually, socially and politically inadequate and insignificant. Escaping into fantastic juggleries will not do, as the concluding eight stanzas affirm through a much greater solemnity of tone and through the closer relations established between the world of the poem and the everyday material world, in particular through the figures of Utopia and Oxidia. Stevens wrote repeatedly in his letters and essays of the 1930s and 1940s that poetry had nothing to do with social or political issues, and many critics follow Stevens’s emphatic affirmation that poetry is about poetry, period. It would be preposterous to try to see in Stevens an artist engagé, let alone a social or political thinker. Riddel, Vendler, Bloom, Rehder, et al. are perfectly justified in seeing in him a poet, that is, a man whose primary concern is to write poems, and whose intention when he has begun a poem is to finish it. All critics (including myself) examine how Stevens’s poetry articulates what he terms his “reality-imagination complex,” that is, how Stevens meditates through multifarious deflections of his poetic voice on how “things as they are” are “changed by the blue guitar.” Poems turn things that are into “things as they are,” into things they are not: poems. In that sense Stevens prolongs, revises, re-interprets, deforms, disguises, a Western reflection on the art of poetry that has been going on since Plato and Aristotle. It has struck everybody, on the other hand, that the zealous defender of pure poetry certainly was not a “pure poet.” Stevens worked as an insur- 178 Chapter 4 ance company executive well beyond retirement age as if he did not trust poetry to be a sufficiently important activity to fill his days. Stevens’s early poetry, as well as many a stanza of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” suggests that for him to write poetry is not what a responsible man should be doing. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” was written at a time when Stevens’s financial, social, and family situation should have confirmed to him that the middle-class-hard-working ethics he had adopted were right. However, this poem, which was written at a time when the world was shaken by the first throbs of what would become the greatest conflagration of ideologies ever, emits doubts about the ordering of a world where the real world was in charge of “real” men, while poetry remained a “ladylike” activity. While the poem certainly revolves around the miraculous how of the poetic imagination, it is permanently haunted by a why which underlies the patching of the poem and becomes really pervasive in the last poems. “Why poetry? ” is an almost indecent question; so indecent that it is never explicitly asked in the poem. On the other hand, Stevens posits in his essay “The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet”: At what level of the truth shall he [the poet] compose his poems. That is the question on which he is reflecting, as he sits in the radiant and productive atmosphere, which is his life, surrounded not only by double characters and metaphysicians, but by many kinds of men, by many women and many children and many kinds of women and children. The question concerns the function of the poet today and tomorrow, but makes no pretence beyond. He is able to read the inscription on the portal and repeats: I am myself a part of what is real and it is my own speech and the strength of it, this only, that I hear or ever shall. (62; emphasis added) The “virile poet” is a part of the real, “a native of this world,” and is therefore responsible for it. In his gloss of stanza XXVI, Stevens wrote: “We are constantly aware of what we might have been. … We imagined things that we failed to realize.” The letter is dated 10 August 1940. In an earlier letter, mostly devoted to discussing a translation of Rimbaud’s poetry, and addressed to Leonard C. van Geyzel (24 May 1940), Stevens concludes: “I make no reference in this letter to the war. It goes without saying that our minds are full of it” (Letters 364, 356). The last line of the letter, not unlike stanza XXVI, poses the obscene question of the pertinence and the responsibility of poetry: how can one discuss poetry while the “Final Solution” is about to decimate the world? Real men, bankers, politicians, insurance brokers, even philosophers had led the world to havoc by 1937. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” tries to find its way by following the constantly interrupted narrative thread of the poem as it juxtaposes pieces of necessarily incompatible realities by patching them together, no longer like the arch-architect of a world he can rebuild by casting its plans from the top of Olympus, but by groping for expression in the chiaroscuro “where one sits and plays the blue guitar.” Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 179 The poem is like the world: a dark labyrinth dominated by a male Minotaur, the poet’s alter ego that always threatens him with annihilation. His only hope is the narrative line of the poem uncoiled by his alter ego’s sister; the line of the poem, “the quilting bee,” that patches it and makes sense of a world that has become senseless. Ariadne’s poetic line is the feminine principle that makes it possible to restore sense where male reason and male absurdity have failed. Where male reason and male absurdity make the reading of poetry stop—“To live in war, to live at war”—the feminine poetic line makes the poem continue; it surprises you. Stevens’s letters to Elsie and Renato Poggioli trace his yearning to write something “of real importance,” something that would “mean as much, as deeply as a missal” (Letters 171, 790). “The Man with the Blue Guitar” is Stevens’s first “note” toward that “something significant”; Lentricchia rightly argues that Stevens hoped that “The long poem would be the benchmark of a culturally significant poetry, a poetic proof of manhood because a proof of social power” (200). The long poem is certainly Stevens’s attempt to impose a virile ordering on the world, but very rapidly the long poem teaches him that the price to pay for the achievement of a coherent long poem is the renunciation of his manhood and the acceptance of the feminine line that will allow the poem to go on groping in the labyrinth instead of being destroyed by the Minotaur. While his masculinity is constantly exacting “a few final solutions” that turn the poem into the undertaker’s song, the feminine line with all its inconsistencies, repetitions, and contradictions makes it possible to escape into the next chamber. The poet sings, but it is not he who makes the poem go on; it is the poem, the serenade that plays him, that makes him go on, and it makes him a poet. The “washing” of the world in his imagination is a baptism of sorts through which the imagination tries to recover those “things that we have failed to realize” (Letters 364). The “swarm of thoughts, the swarms of dreams” echo the “buzzing of flies in autumn air” (IV, 7); and that’s life then, this buzzing of thoughts and dreams about the world which make a ordered and meaningful world an “inaccessible Utopia” (XXVI, 10) to which language—the “murderous alphabet” (XXVI, 8) yields no access. The synesthesia in “Mountainous music” (XXVI, 11) evokes both the ineffable quality of sound and the impression of the sound going “up and down” like waves breaking on the shore. The poet feels this is all real, physically real, like a mountain (or a “rock”), and he is a part of that real. Yet the real world remains as absent as music is in the poem. “Mountainous” is the metaphorical physicality of music, its only possible representation, like any representation of “inaccessible Utopia.” Every undulation of the music does and undoes the world in a process that cannot be arrested, like music that has been or will be, but never is. The redundant syntactic structure “it is the sea that...” and the five endstopped lines that open poem XXVII create an effect of surprise and brutal 180 Chapter 4 peremptoriness which contrasts with the musical theme of poem XXVI. The five declarative sentences seem to say somewhat trivially, forget about washing the world in imagination. This is what the world is, as its landsurveyors, “the geographers and philosophers” (6), will attest. They “regard” (7) the world, they “look at it,” but they also “guard” it and defend it to prevent it from changing by freezing the sea and freezing the meaning in a formulation. The temptation for the poet may be to escape, to go on a quest like Ulysses. But the peremptory statements that close the poem ridicule in hissing sibilants the poet (“the demon”) who cannot be himself in a world from which he is estranged by those who know and possess the world in their maps and who tell him that he does not belong there, condemning him to wander aimlessly in the solipsistic final line of the poem. Only now can the poet affirm who he is: he is not the overseer, the land-surveyor of the world, he is “a native” of it. The poem/ world gives birth to the poet and the poet lives in the poem that transforms the world. Poetry precedes the poem, and the poet’s words never are the fiat lux of the male god: XXVIII I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks, Gesu, not a native of a mind Thinking the thoughts I call my own, Native, a native in the world And like a native think in it. It could not be a mind, the wave In which the watery grasses flow And yet are fixed as a photograph, The wind in which the dead leaves blow. Here I inhale profounder strength And as I am, I speak and move And things are as I think they are And say they are on the blue guitar. The newly gained confidence is not the arrogant authority of the philosopher or the geographer. It comes from the feeling of belonging to the place he inhabits; the imagination cannot create a world ex nihilo, but it can integrate the poet into the world, make him part of a topos where he can “Inhale profounder strength.” The sense of reality of his being is conveyed in associations that recall the “mountainous music” of the previous stanza; Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 181 here “watery grasses flow / And yet are as fixed as a photograph.” The self-reliant poet can look at the world and—like someone looking at the picture of a friend—recognize it as his own in spite of the world’s perpetual flow and undulation. The poet addresses “Gesu” (Christ), and the archaic form transforms the purely colloquial or purely Christian “Jesus.” 124 The poet pleads his appurtenance to this world, now that he has gained a new self-reliance: “And things are as I think they are / And say they are on the blue guitar.” His words are not commands but an acceptance of the world with its flaws and all its shadows in the sun. The world is what he says it is on the guitar not because he has decided so, but because he has discovered that being a poet allows him to comprehend the incomprehensibility of the world. The new confidence is strong enough to modify the formula “things as they are” which is no longer a fatality imposed on the poet, and it no longer jeopardizes his manhood as it was the case in the opening of the poem when the phrase was uttered by the male “audience.” The massive stony presence of the cathedral is an another version of the rock and it dominates the end of the stanza: “In the cathedral, I sat there, and read, / Alone, a lean Review (XXIX 1-2). Its vaults are like “mountainous music” that suspends tons of solid material in mid-air and unites it “with nuptial song” (XXIX, 6) with what is outside the cathedral. The material espouses the imaginary, the inside (spiritual) the outside (the worldly), the material (the stone) the ineffable (the song). The line traced by the vault is the imaginary line of the architect that balances the world “to the point of still,” even as the poet/ architect balances things, but as the stammering line indicates—“To and to and to the point of still”—, the balancing never stops. Like the poet/ musician who could never sound the keynote of his song, the poet/ architect cannot find the keystone that will balance his structure. His construction is always wobbly: the shapes are wrong, the cathedral he builds threatens to crumble at any moment and even the bells sound like bellowing bulls. The world is a world of masks, always “like” the world but always strange. One can only speak of things as they are; the world is always already a metaphor of the world and the only access to it is the mask which can never be removed. This is what the poet can use to evolve man from: “to evolve” suggests that he has to renounce the mythopoietic creation of an Aeneas or Ulysses who engender the world they inhabit. Man evolved from a succession of masks is an old windy fantoche, a puppet, whose essence is to be without an essence and whose world has become a stage— 124 “Gesu is a perfectly good English word just as it stands. I remember looking it up because it was a word with that particular spelling that I wanted. That particular spelling is, of course, obsolete” (Letters 784). 182 Chapter 4 with or without “conscious reference to Shakespeare” (Letters 791). 125 “Man number one” is ridiculed like those actors who have been playing the same old part for too long and believe they are the center of the world/ stage without realizing that they are just employees of the theatre, or as Stevens puts it, “employee[s] of the Oxidia Electric Light & Power Company” (Letters 791). The anthropocentrism exacted at the beginning and paralleled with male logos and heliocentricity yields its place to a world constructed from the margin of a “banal suburb,” “Oxidia” (XXX, 16). Man’s eye/ ”I” stands erect (“A-cock” [XXX, 7]) no longer as the “large eye” containing multitudes; it supports the heavy cables that seem to run through the orbit of his eye and anchor him cruelly to his rusty and sooty world. The male master of the world is now a poor seedy worker (“Onehalf of all his installments paid” [XXX, 10]) among noisy, smoky machines (“Dew-dapper clapper-traps” [11]), toiling in the hell-like sooty atmosphere of Oxidia; but he is no Prometheus, and the fire is only soot. Man is a native of Oxidia, an always already oxidized world from which there is no escape. Hence the definite resignation but also the great strength in the line that closes the poem, “Oxidia is Olympia.” This final statement is not vain. Instead of sinking into deep despair because of the bleak vision of the world that comes out of stanza XXX, the next stanza relaxes into an acceptance of the world. “Occasionally I put something from my neighborhood in a poem,” Stevens wrote to Simons, adding, “We have wild pheasants in the outskirts of Hartford. They keep close to cover, particularly in winter, when one rarely sees them” (Letters 362). The biographical data is interesting not so much in itself, or as the identification of the poem’s lyric source, but rather for the fact that the poem is now a neighbor of the poet; they share the same topos. The neighborhood theme appears in the “employer and the employee,” in which, Bloom writes, “the social theme that strained Owl’s Clover is set aside as the repetition of a droll affair” (Poems 133). 126 The “droll affair” (XXXI, 3) seems to de-dramatize the “com-bat” and turns it into a “composition”—much ado about nothing, it would seem. Lentricchia writes provocatively: “The fundamental hope in Stevens is political—though nei- 125 ` “[Man] becomes, in short, one of the fantoccini of meditation or as I have called him, ‘the old fantoche’. No conscious reference to Shakespeare” (Letters 791). 126 Bloom calls “Owl’s Clover” Stevens’s “largest failure” (113), and sees the poem as “the poet’s ambivalent response to social disorder and the Marxist challenge” (111). While Lentricchia agrees with Bloom to say that “Owl’s Clover” is probably Stevens’s least successful poem, he adds that “the deep unity of [Stevens’s] later career was produced by his encounter with radical thought in the thirties” (214). Lentricchia believes that Stevens was impressed by the “intelligent and probing” reading of his poems by the Marxist critic Stanley Burnshaw, and that Stevens “emerged [out of the thirties] believing in the social responsibility of his poetry, everything he says to the contrary notwithstanding” (214). Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 183 ther Stevens nor his critics are comfortable with that word [I count myself among them]” (217). “Political” or “social” seems out of place, yet what is at stake here is the life of the polis, and the possibility of a productive participation of the poet in the life of the neighborhood. The poet must find a way of being in the polis, a member of the community. The poem takes place in and as an auroral and inaugural moment: “The bubbling sun will bubble up,” and a Thoreauvian “cock-bird” will “claw sleep.” The image of dawn is of course a cliché, but here the oxidized cliché turns the solemnity of sunrise into a “bubble” and the cock (in a reminiscence of “A-cock”) replaces both the “hawk” and the Shelley’s “[sky]lark” which is now stored in a dusty museum (with a reference to the muses) of the sky, no longer of the earth or of this world. “Spring sparkles” in the cry of a local, almost domestic bird—the pheasant—, who sleeps “long and late.” All these assonant images anticipate Stevens’s Adagia where “The poem is a pheasant,” and also “Poetry is a pheasant disappearing in the brush” (Adagia, OP 194, 198). The pheasant is the common bird that lives with the poet; familiar but difficult to catch, surprising and evanescent. The domestic bird also indicates that poetry is a domestic activity, an activity of the house. To be a poet is to be able to accept to stay in the house and not go to war or to the office—like a man. “The iceberg settings satirize / / The demon that cannot be himself” (XXVII, 10-11), that is, the man who, like Aeneas or Ulysses, has to run the world to find it and find himself. The poem is the morning of the day; it rhapsodizes the world and brings together the patches of reality. Dawn is the time of the poem; it is “Penelope’s hour,” as Lentricchia puts it in an admirably perceptive metaphor (228); it is the time when the poet describes the world. He is not Aeneas or Ulysses, he is Penelope or blind Homer (“a blunted player” [XXXI, 14]), constantly doing and undoing the narrative that might some day bring the hero home. The only possible song is this “rhapsody of things as they are” (XXXI, 16); Stevens must have known that “rhapsody” is a Greek word that comes from rapsoidia, “recitation of selections from epic poetry,” but that the poetic form is a metonymy, for rhaptein means “to sew,” “to stitch together,” that is, to patch as you can/ sing. The world and the poem only make sense when the poet renounces playing “man number one” and accepts his feminine role which consists in sewing and patching, the poem and the world. The poet/ hero must get to the point where he accepts to replace the sword by the needle. In the penultimate stanza, the world is lit by the dim light of dawn again. It is not the essential dark in which Homer sings man, or the glorious sunrise of the advent of reason and truth, only the uncertain luminosity in which Penelope undoes once more her tapestry. 184 Chapter 4 Throw away the lights, the definitions, And say of what you see in the dark That it is this or that it is that, But do not use the rotted names. The poet/ shearsman urges his reader to throw away the male light of logos that enshrines the world, and affixes it in “rotted names.” The pheasant (poetry) constantly announces the renewal of the world through a renewal of language; to accept to wait for “Penelope’s hour” when the pheasant wakes up, to have “a mind of winter,” is the necessary condition for this renewal. Only then can one walk in the topos (re-)created by the poetic act and become one of “The jocular procreations” of that space: a native of this world. Stevens commented on this, saying that “The point of the poem is, not that this can be done, but that, if done, it is the key to poetry, to the closed garden … of the fountain of youth and life and renewal. This poem depends a good deal on its implications” (Letters 364). In the poem, as the letter seems to confirm, Stevens reverses the pattern of poetry as source of eternal life, youth and continuing genealogy. The poet does not father the place that will ensure his survival; he is renewed, reborn out of the poetrycreated place that gives him birth. He is not an Olympian god that creates Arcadia, he is an “Oxidian,” an inhabitant of a marginal place that shapes him and that he has to shape in turn by inhabiting it. Despite the symbolic numeral that announces it, stanza XXXIII offers no grandiose sunrise, not even the somber meditation of a Sunday morning. The poem concludes in a movement away from nostalgia and toward a more genuinely courageous acceptance of the quotidian. “Monday’s dirty light” stands here for any morning of poet’s/ patcher’s life, or for any of our mornings, for that matter. There are no other mornings: Oxidia is Olympia. The sun rises on a world that is never quite ours, which always precedes us, and where we nonetheless have to live. XXXIII That generation’s dream, aviled In the mud, in Monday’s dirty light, That’s it, the only dream they knew, Time in its final block, not time To come, a wrangling of two dreams. Here is the bread of time to come, Here is its actual stone. The bread Will be our bread, the stone will be Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 185 Our bed and we shall sleep by night. We shall forget by day, except The moments when we choose to play The imagined pine, the imagined jay. The bread is bread of flour, water, and yeast, not the transubstantiating bread of the Eucharist, and in an image where the Stevensian “rock” recurs, the poet affirms “the stone will be / / Our bed.” The earth is a stone, yet it is our bed—the poem does not make it any less hard but shows how to repose on it. Day, the realm of the sun, is not the realm of action and bravura but that of oblivion, work, war, “hoard of destructions,” and death. Night, on the other hand, under the reflected and refracted light of the moon is the realm of the imagination and of dream, no longer deprecated, but kept pure as a source of hope and renewal, secured in its chiaroscuro from the “dirty light,” “the lights, the definitions,” and the “rotted names.” During the day most of this is forgotten, concealed by the real work of real men who go to the office and take care of serious business, build cars and refrigerators; Stevens wrote to his friend Henry Church: When I get up at 6 o’clock in the morning (a time when you are first closing your novel, pulling the chain on the lamp at your bedside) the thing [the idea of supreme fiction] crawls all over me; it is in my hair when I shave and I think of it in the bathtub. Then I come down to the office and … have to put it to one side. (Letters 431) Early in the morning, Lentricchia remarks, “Henry Church—who is really rich, who buys what he wants, reads what he wants, all night if he likes— can go to sleep…. He does not have to report to the office. He does not work” (229). For Stevens, on the contrary, dawn is that crucial time of the day when the desire for the feminine supreme fiction and the pressure exerted by his male socio-political environment intersect. The green hues of the imagined pine and the blue hues of the imagined jay conclude the poem as the recognition of this perpetual undulation between the two. CHAPTER 5 THE TOPOGRAPHY OF INTERPRETATION J. Hillis Miller’s Cicero dit que Philosopher ce n’est autre chose que s’aprester à la mort. C’est d’autant que l’estude et la contemplation retirent aucunement nostre ame hors de nous, et l’embesongnement à part du corps, qui est quelque aprentissage et ressemble de la mort; ou bien c’est que toute sagesse et discours du monde se résoult en fin à ce point, de nous apprendre à ne craindre point à mourir. — Michel de Montaigne, Essais, I, XX. STRANGER : It strikes me that Parmenides and everyone else who has set out to determine how many real things there are and what they are like, have discoursed to us in rather an offhand fashion. THAETETUS : How so? STRANGER : They each and all seem to treat us as children to whom they tell a story. —Plato, The Sophist The previous chapters of this book examine a set of acts of reading and their influence on what I have been calling the American Topos. I have suggested that acts of reading and writing were primarily ethical acts of interpretation that determined, sometimes with dramatic consequences, the topos inhabited by the readers. In this chapter devoted to J. Hillis Miller’s Versions of Pygmalion, I want to see if this applies to literary criticism as well, that is, if there is such a thing as an ethics of criticism. The question is also to see if critical theory may enable me to act ethically on the basis of my reading, and if my reading itself can constitute an ethical act. Many studies in the field of ethics and language have appeared in reaction to what zealous defenders of morals lumped together under the denomination of “post-modern” critical theories. One of the questions that I shall examine in the present chapter will be the reason(s) for the multiplication 188 Chapter 5 of essays and books on the problem of ethics at the turn of the century. 127 The ethics of criticism focuses on how literary criticism—that is, acts of reading performed by professional and institutionalized readers—affect the relationship between literature and human life, and create thereby what I shall call the topography of interpretation. I shall argue that the topography of interpretation results in an allegorization of the world. As the world of action is itself the result of an allegorization, the topography of interpretation is a place, or rather a no-place, where this allegory is in turn allegorized. In this paradoxical structure, mimesis becomes a rhetorical figure among others, while allegory is that figure of speech which can never represent, in the sense of totalizing it, the represented object, but is “the possibility that permits language to say the other and to speak of itself while speaking of something else; the possibility of always saying something other than what it gives to be read, including the scene of reading itself” (Derrida, Memoires 11). What Jacques Derrida calls “saying the other” is one of the key issues of Miller’s Versions of Pygmalion. Taking cue from Miller, the issue of this chapter is: “if the study of literature does so much good and demonstrates that language has this humane value as creator and sustainer of civilization, does my reading diffuse that good to others, to my students if I am a teacher, to my readers if I am a critic? What good is reading? ” (14). The whole point of this chapter will be to see whether there is indeed some good in reading, or if it is, after all, only a trope, only an allegory; could it be that life is elsewhere? 128 In what follows my aim will not be to decide about Miller’s “validity of interpretation” 129 of James, Kleist, Blanchot, or Melville, but to see the pos- 127 See David Parker, Ethics, Theory and the Novel; Tobin Siebers, The Ethics of Criticism; Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction; J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading; Murray Krieger, “In the Wake of Morality: The Thematic Underside of Recent Theory”; Julia Kristeva, “The Ethics of Linguistics,” Desire in Language; Edward Said, “An Ethics of Language.” 128 Several critics have expressed their doubts about what they considered to be an inane activity; thus Tobin Siebers writes: “[The] isolation [of literary criticism] in the little rooms of academia makes it a tame occupation, and many of the dangers now associated with criticism by those in search for a vicarious thrill would be laughable, given the state of terrorism and brutality in the world, if they were not so misguided. And yet language is an instrument of human violence, and in that respect literary critics have a responsibility not only to supervise their own unjust practices as critics but to think about the ways in which language carries on the work of human prejudice, racism, sexism, classism, and nationalism. Even the most ethically oriented critics must remain watchful in this regard” (7-8). 129 I am borrowing Hirsch’s over-determined phrase. Miller replies to Hirsch’s book in his essay “Literature and Religion.” Miller takes up, not without humor, the image of the “cigarette package” which Hirsch uses to illustrate the difference between the “meaning” and the “significance” of a (literary) text; Miller writes: “Most students of literature today [1967] would agree that the aim of their discipline is elucidation of the intrinsic meaning of poems, plays, and novels. They want to know exactly what J. Hillis Miller’s 189 sible validity of interpreting literary texts as an ethical theory and practice, as a way of opening up a space, charting a communal topography, and drawing the map of a non-orthogonal polis. In my reading of Miller I want to evidence that his criticism works on two axes which constitute two fundamental possibilities of language: on the one hand language represents (no language is possible without some frame of reference), and on the other language performs (speech-acts make things happen in the world). The two axes are also two forces at work within language; they are not opposite forces that annihilate each other: they pull in permanently different directions. The result of these tensions is allegory which says the world while saying something else; while saying the other. But it can never say the other without chaining the other to the world, without bringing the other within the bounds and the limits of the world. The originality and the ethical interest of Miller’s criticism rests in the combination of these two axes and the confrontation of these two forces. For a long time the ethics of the Western Judeo-Christian world was based on hermeneutics and theories of representation that called for a reference outside language, assuming the existence of a transcendental signifier that could justify the choices operated in and by language. Once the Word was the incarnation of Christ and re-presented Him in his absence. The priest, in turn, represented the Word to pass it onto the community. The written text, its interpretation and its interpreters were a series of representations each of which was there to stand for an absence to which it was subservient. This ethics of representation is a form of ethics based on substitution and compensation for an absent object, for an otherness that is replaced in language. In the act of naming the sign as signifier replaces the signified and turns it forever into the inferior and pale reflection of a missing entity—as now I write the word “table” to represent an object which I cannot actually present in front of my readers’ eyes. This division and opposition between absence and presence, signified and signifier, is a fundamental principle of Western metaphysics—from Plato to De Saussure—, and it is this principle that Miller’s critical theory questions. By combining representation and the performative power of language, Miller questions—deconstructs—this binary opposition. It would be vain, however, to say that Miller announces what is sometimes called “the end of representation.” The tension between representation and performance has to continue to exist, for without it translation, among other things, would become impossible. a sonnet by Shakespeare, an ode by Keats, or a novel by Trollope mean.… But though the words of a poem contain its meaning, they do not do this in the way a cigarette package contains its cigarettes, ... a flower its aroma. A poem is not just black marks on the page or sonorous vibrations in the air” (63-78). 190 Chapter 5 The mode of interpretation that privileges the division between inside and outside had a decisive influence on the development of the American literary and physical (political and economic) topography. The advent of deconstruction and Miller’s criticism does not mean that hermeneutics will disappear abruptly, to be replaced just as abruptly by a totally heuristic mode of interpretation that will collapse the boundaries between the signifier and the signified. Through the deconstruction of pairs of binary opposition (signifier/ signified; parole/ langue; writing/ speech; space/ time) hermeneutics is questioned by modes of interpretation that do not rely as heavily on notions of representation and on the tension between absence and presence. Miller’s reading both interrupts and continues the tradition of American interpretation, i.e. it continues the mise en abyme of interpretations of the American topos that this book has been examining thus far. Even as it marks the end of hermeneutic investigation, deconstruction prolongs its existence under a different form. The difficulties of this ungrounding of Western metaphysics and the interpretative modes that both derive from it and define it can turn literary theory into a very abstruse, remote, and ethereal discipline. Miller’s work of the last two decades of the twentieth century presents an acute awareness of the problematic issue of the relation between literary studies and the life of the polis. He wrote repeatedly that despite its metalinguistic abstruseness, critical theory is not to isolate literature from the community of readers but to restore its actuality there. This is what Miller insists on in Hawthorne and History where he confronts the question of historical and social responsibility of professional readers. He warns against the attitude of the “teacher [who] teaches the student to read ... in a certain way [with] the implicit claim that everything should be read analogously” (48). He affirms with conviction that literary theory is not to enshrine the meaning of texts but on the contrary to liberate us from ideology, even from the ideology of theory itself. Critical theory performs an ethical and political act. It has institutional and social force. Critical theory is, then, no longer “merely theoretical”. Rather, it makes something happen. It does this by disabling the power of the works read to go on proliferating the ideology that traditional canonical or thematic readings of them have blindly asserted. Critical theory, seen from this point of view, earns its label of “critical”. It becomes within our educational institutions one of the most powerful and indispensable means of unmasking ideological assumptions. (48) Much of Miller’s theoretical program is contained in this paragraph. Miller announces that he wishes to react against “thematic,” “canonical,” and “ideological” readings. They are all modes of interpretation in which the same repeats the same, even when it claims to say the other. In the end those readings merely confirm the ethnocentric and logocentric assumptions of the interpreter. On the other hand, Miller proposes, performative reading does not take place within a fixed frame of reference because read- J. Hillis Miller’s 191 ing becomes an event, something that happens. In this understanding of the act of reading, that which is happening or is about to happen can have no frame of reference outside itself. By insisting on the “institutional force” and on “educational institutions,” Miller asserts that the ethical act of reading is not “just theoretical,” but that it takes place in the midst of public affairs, in the agora. He also affirms that critical theory is to have an educational and pedagogical value. This last point shows that while Miller is trying to trace a new avenue for literary criticism and critical theory, he remains attached to many metaphors that define the position of the master in hermeneutics, that is, to the position of the arch-reader who transposes literature into the language of the community. Miller does not refer to his “neighbor” or the “people of New England,” as Thoreau or Mather do, but his purpose of educating people might well extend beyond the limits of the academy. Critical theory is that which allows students/ readers/ neighbors to see, and not to follow blindly what they take for the assumptions of the texts. In Hawthorne and History in which he reads Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Miller claims that: [his] reading differs in principle from all [the interpretations that argue “that the story is made definite in meaning when placed in the context of nineteenth century ideas about sexual secrets”] in being an unveiling and putting in question of the ideology of unveiling that inveigles Hooper, his community, and most readers of the story into believing that there must be something definite behind the veil—both Hooper’s veil and the veil of the text as the words on the page—and that our business as readers in to identify it. (104) “Unveiling,” like “deconstruction,” carries in itself one meaning and its opposite. For Miller, a good reader is not to search for identification—that is for the deconstruction of the idea, the theme or the canon—, yet the reader must “identify it.” The “it” here is not the veil, but the “ideology of unveiling.” The syntactic complexity of Miller’s statement pushes his language to the limit; the complexity is made even greater with his using the (rare) verb “inveigles” which both repeats and contradicts “unveils,” and brings in the notions of deceit and forgery. Miller is caught between what he must do and that which he cannot not do: he cannot, and yet must unveil the fact that he cannot unveil the meaning of the story. This is the predicament that gives its force to Versions of Pygmalion: the book stages a circular language in which the aporias lurking in words such as “deconstruction” or “unveiling” always threaten to lead to tautology or solipsism and to the dissolution of any kind of meaning. Miller’s book takes the risk to feature these dangers while being a defense against them. Versions of Pygmalion purports to be an ethical response to a call that involves Miller’s responsibility and the responsibility of Miller’s readers. 192 Chapter 5 * * * In 1986 Miller published The Ethics of Reading, a book which was primarily designed as an answer to the many attacks on deconstruction. The latter was under attack for being an a-moral theory that took away responsibility from the writer and implicitly from the interpreter. Miller’s book was an answer to those that claimed that the interpretations of literary texts proposed by critics and theorists such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida or himself, did not create a space, an ethical topos, but merely a chaos where everything was permissible because the interpreters were no longer responsible in the eyes of anyone for the cognitive and ethical validity of their reading. Critics categorized as “deconstructionists” found themselves under attack because, their attackers claimed, they had displaced, marginalized and even negated knowledge, truth and history. Miller devoted three books to answering these charges of alleged “nihilism” and ahistoricism. 130 Versions of Pygmalion is the most important of the three, insofar as it is the book where Miller spends most time reading other authors, implementing thus the theory of ethics that he proposes in The Ethics of Reading and in Hawthorne and History. In these books reading appears as the act of resistance to ideology and canonization. Even as they are books about reading others, all three works are also about Miller re-reading himself as other. Each book offers a commentary on and an expansion of the book that precedes it. Thus within Miller’s work itself there is a mise an abyme of his thought, and his topography of interpretation also results from this mise en abyme. In the last pages of The Ethics of Reading, Miller announces the continuation of his project on ethics saying that to pursue it, “it will be necessary to read novels and tales by Eliot, Trollope, James and others, perhaps Kleist, 130 John M. Ellis, among (many) others, commented that “deconstructionist rhetoric does not advance serious thought or inquiry but gives an impression of profundity and complexity without the effort and skill that would be required to make a substantial contribution to the understanding of the matter under discussion” (7). David H. Hirsch’s The Deconstruction of Literature is a vehemently polemical book on this subject. It is interesting to note that he charges the theoretical movements of the 70’s and 80’s with the same dangers which Cotton Mather—often with the same words— had ascribed two centuries earlier to “witchcraft.” For Hirsh, first of all, the “exotic modes of reading that go under the name of ‘deconstruction’” (1) jeopardize the founding values of America as a community and as a nation. Hirsh writes for instance: “[w]hat is clear, I believe, is that American cultural criticism did not need the French Antihumanist, Heideggerians, and Marxists to alert them to the evils and dangers of a postindustrial technological society and the threat against democracy and the integrity of the individual constituted by a technocratic culture” (13). J. Hillis Miller’s 193 Hawthorne” (127). With this remark Miller prepares the grounding—or the un-grounding—of his further work, but he also places the act of reading at the center of the enterprise. He also opens up the chasm that he will later have to bridge in Versions of Pygmalion—“[t]he book [that] continues [his] investigation of the ethical side of writing, reading, and teaching literature (vii).” He also implements what he had started to sketch in The Ethics of Reading, namely that ethics or ethical forms of behavior do not come from history, tradition or ethics (as a philosophical discipline), but from acts of reading. Miller proposes that reading conditions an inalienable ethical moment. This does not occur only when the theme of ethics is dealt with, when it is represented; it takes place all the time for it is an inherent feature of language; Miller exposes this in his first chapter: By “ethics of reading” … [I mean] that aspect of the act of reading in which there is a response to the text that is both necessitated, in the sense that it is a response to an irresistible demand, and free, in the sense that I must take responsibility for my response for the further effects, “interpersonal,” institutional, social, or historical, of my act of reading, for example as that act takes the form of teaching or of published commentary on a given text. (43) As in other texts examined so far (Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World or Thoreau’s Walden) Miller presents himself as answering an “irresistible demand” to which he must respond. He too casts himself in the his role of the angelic critic; he is summoned up, and he is to convey to the “institutions” and to his interpersonal relations the meaning of his reading. For all its wonderfully orbicular and rounded qualities, the passage above begs at least two important questions. First, how can readers be responsible for their reading if it is impossible to determine who took the decisions: is it themselves, or is it the “other” in them? Secondly, it is all very well to say that we are to be held responsible for the ethics of our acts derived from reading, but the second term of the implicit contract is missing: who or what is going to reward us for “getting it right,” or as the case may be, make us pay for not getting it right? Versions of Pygmalion is an attempt to answer these questions. The complexity of the book echoes what Miller had analyzed a few years before in a poem by Stevens: [the] textual richness [of Stevens’ poem] opens abyss beneath abyss, beneath each deep a deeper deep, as the reader interrogates its elements and lets each question generate an answer that is another question in its turn. (Linguistic 422) Thus Miller’s definition of the ethics of reading proposes an allegorical model, that is, a model that must be read and not a type that can be applied. The affirmation of the book is that there is no solid ground, no Stevensian rock and no Emersonian self-reliance that could serve as firm ground to his topography of interpretation. The topos we enter with Miller is not chaotic; it is a place where decisions taken and responses given constantly modify 194 Chapter 5 the landscape according to rules derived from those very modifications. It is a topography which is delimited by acts of reading, and, as this delimitation goes on, a de-limitation—a trespassing of limits, a removal of limits— takes place at the same time. As a first step of this mise en abyme of reading, Miller re-writes his definition of the ethics of reading in the opening pages of Versions of Pygmalion: But, first, what do I mean by “ethics” in the phrase “the ethics of reading”? I mean more or less what Henry James means in that preface to The Golden Bowl, when he says that “the whole conduct of life consists of things done, which do other things in their turn.” If James is correct to say that writing, say writing The Golden Bowl, is a thing done that does other things in its turn, my question is concrete and specific. In what sense is reading novels, poems, or philosophical texts, teaching them, or writing about them a thing done that does other things in its turn? Does reading have a proper and unavoidable ethical dimension, along with its cognitive or epistemological one, and if so, what is it? How does reading differ from other ethical acts, such as making promises and keeping them, proffering a true report, giving and receiving gifts, or greeting my neighbor? (15) Miller piles up rhetorical questions (sixteen on one page) that work as forms of promise and refer to putative answers. Also, the “definition” given here results from a succession of acts of reading which interrogate one another. Instead of providing a solid ground on which a comprehensive (totalizing) theory could be constructed, each of them is an ungrounding of the one that follows. Miller (Versions of Pygmalion) re-reads Miller (The Ethics of Reading); the redefinition, in turn, comes from a reading of James’s The Golden Bowl, but the reference is to James’s Preface to the New York Edition, which means that it is the product of James reading James, and so forth. The pattern developed here is not, as one might be tempted to hastily conclude, an infinite regression of readings, but rather a “noncircular circle or nonspiraling spiral” (Miller, Linguistic 423) that always brings the reader back to the ethical moment of his or her present reading; it always brings the reader back to the construction of the topography he or she inhabits at the moment of reading. In Miller, the act of reading is the access to ethics. This is what Miller writes and reads about in Versions of Pygmalion where he proposes that we can only act ethically with our neighbors in acts of reading, in what he calls “reading as such.” (13). Not unlike Thoreau, who claims that Walden is perhaps meant for “poor students” and that “books should be read as deliberately as they were written,” Miller’s writing addresses the “careful reader” (25); in the line of Friedrich Nietzsche he proposes that “perhaps one is a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading” (quoted in Miller, Linguistic xiii). This is what we must do then: a slow reading of Miller’s Versions of Pygmalion. J. Hillis Miller’s 195 * * * Miller’s allegorical model for his book is Ovid’s story of Pygmalion in the Metamorphoses. Miller takes the story to be the prototypical act of creation in which something inanimate and dead (here a statue) becomes alive and modifies the life of the person who created it. This act of creation is, Miller claims, what happens when we read: we turn that which is inanimate, dead, absent into something that becomes alive and can influence our lives. Thus, in the first chapter Miller identifies prosopopoeia as the central trope that governs both narration and reading: [Versions of Pygmalion] presents readings of a series of stories that exemplify the relation between ethics and narrative. I do this with special attention to prosopopoeia as the fundamental generative linguistic act making a given story possible. (13) Miller turns reading into a creative act which finds itself at the same level as narration. Various theorists had already proposed that the act of reading was as important as the act of writing in the production of the text, but Miller goes further, insofar as reading and writing become “versions” of one another, and they are subjected to the “invisible but sovereign” law of ethics. Chapter Two is devoted to Henry James’s What Maisie Knew where Miller re-tells the story and recounts “what Maisie knew.” By “recounting” the novel, Miller changes the economy of James’s text. If we take the word “economy” as seriously as Thoreau suggests we should, with its meaning of “management of the house,” then the economy of the house (of language) administered by James is changed. This economic metaphor is central to Miller’s reading of James because it allows him to bridge the gap between what he perceives to be in James “the highest good, the truly moral act” (24), and the act of writing and reading. In turn, I shall use this economic trope to examine Miller’s act of reading James. Miller states that Maisie performs what appears to be her most courageous moral deed when, at the end of the novel, she gives up what could have been the price of their victory over the other characters. “[I]t may be,” Miller remarks, “that renunciation gives the one who renounces something even more precious than worldly success and happiness” (25). This important remark about ethics in James’s novels should lead, the reader might expect, to a closer examination of that particular aspect. Instead, in a contrapuntal movement of deferral, Miller proposes “to identify the economic and social realities that set the rules for human behavior in What Maisie Knew” (25). Accordingly, he sketches the ambiance of Victorian England, its laws of divorce and the cultural assumptions of its upper middle-class. As a good economist, Miller builds the house he now has to manage; it could 196 Chapter 5 appear that he is walling-in the book by framing it in its context. Though interesting and useful for the reading of the novel and of Miller’s book, this excursion into what might appear as the realm of pure referentiality and cognition might surprise the reader who could suspect that the text is entering a form of archivism or documentalism. Is Miller covering up his traces, or is he playing to those who will claim that he disregards history and context in his interpretation? I shall return to that. At this point, one must keep in mind the “sense of renunciation” which Miller emphasizes in James’s novels, and which he aligns with the economic conditions of “writing and publication of fiction in James’s day,” which were, “subject to all sorts of further social, technological, and economic restraints” (30). The “economic restraints” evoked by Miller bridge the gap between the sense of renunciation (“the highest good, the truly moral act”) which the narrator in Maisie calls “something higher than [Maisie’s] moral sense,” and the “restraint” of which James was incapable in his writing. Indeed. Miller points to James’s extravagance with words and his failing attempts to be more thrifty with them in order to make his stories more marketable. As if he needed to write his resolutions down in order to make them effective, James jotted in his notebooks decisions that he was repeatedly unable to follow: “The very essence of such a job is—let me with due vividness remember it—that they [the stories he wanted to write] consist each, substantially, of a single incident, an incident definite, limited, sharp. I must cultivate the vision, the observation and notation of that—just as I must sternly master the faire, the little hard, fine repeated process” (Notebooks 146). As a consequence of these non-kept promises to himself, What Maisie Knew, which James did not mean to exceed 5,000 words, became “this interminable little Maisie” (Notebooks 167) a lengthy novel of thirty-one chapters. Anyone who has found himself or herself reading The Golden Bowl or The Wings of the Dove late at night, striving to get to the end of a chapter before turning the light off will have experienced the interminable nature of James’s writing; it is as if the book were growing in one’s hands, and becoming longer and longer as one reads. James is not a unique example of such limitless expansion of the text; James Joyce’s Ulysses, Herman Broch’s Schlafwandler, or Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften are cases in point. Like James, these writers were unable to implement in their writing the sense of renunciation and of self-sacrifice that Miller identifies as the highest moral quality, and that James too tried to apply to his writing. It appears that James was not able to manage his house of language with all the necessary thrift. His writing, as soon as it starts, enters a mise en abyme that compels him to write more and more; every act of writing calls for other acts of writing and every line calls for another line. He is unable to define a topography which would be “definite,” “limited, ” with “sharp” edges like a neat geometrical figure that could frame his expression. J. Hillis Miller’s 197 Miller’s critical theory consists in using James’s proliferation of writing as a metonymical displacement of the necessary proliferation of the act of reading: This apparently limited act of reading [Maisie] is accomplished by a deliberate asceticism that gives up, for the moment, reading all other books. Nevertheless, in spite of its apparent limits, it may be an interminable task. … The reading of Maisie, moreover, leads to the reading of its preface of 1908 and then to a reading of the entries about the gestation and writing of Maisie in James’s notebooks. … Before we know it, we have incurred the obligation to read all of James and all of the criticism about James before daring to write one sentence about Maisie (23). This obligation we—readers—incur conflicts with the theoretical impossibility to read all the material Miller mentions—when can I say that I have read everything by and about James? It also conflicts with a physical impossibility—how many lives would I need to carry out the task? What would then happen to a reader of Versions of Pygmalion? In addition to the book itself, the reader would have to read the five texts Miller reads in the book, the rest of Miller’s books and articles, the rest of the works of the authors presented in Versions of Pygmalion, the criticism relative to these works, the critical and theoretical material either referred to or used by Miller—this ranges from Pre-Socratic thinkers to theorists such as Paul de Man or Jacques Derrida. It is obviously an impossible task. So, do I dare write another sentence about Versions of Pygmalion? The question will not go away; it insists and forces its way in. There is no avoiding it: Why should a fragment of Derrida not be an adequate sample or synecdoche of the whole? Does one have to read all of a writer to understand him? If not, how much? One would like to know when to be free to stop. What about translations? Surely it must be possible to put Heidegger or Derrida into English so that they “say the same thing” in English as in French or German? Is there any way, some coming and going between languages, for us monolingual Americans, to recover what is lost of Heidegger if his German is left behind? The problem is not made any simpler by the fact that so many of Heidegger’s most important essays are interpretations of Greek terms. Must we learn Greek too? (Miller, “Deconstructing” 98) In the above fragment, as in Versions of Pygmalion, Miller presents the ethical predicament in which all readers find themselves. As readers, we are torn between what we must do and what we cannot do. Miller’s reading (and writing) in Versions of Pygmalion is a metonymical displacement of this predicament from James to Miller and from Miller back to James. The only way either of them can stop the dissemination of their acts of reading and writing is by trying to impose on themselves a line of conduct, exert their sense of renunciation: give up. They must trace a line that could circum- 198 Chapter 5 scribe and delimit this proliferation, and allow them to know when they are free to stop. But like James, Miller is unable to give it up. He keeps trespassing the line he traces to delimit his task. The Ethics of Reading led to Hawthorne and History, which in turn led to Versions of Pygmalion. A monograph on Miller would have no difficulty tracing down the hyperbolic line in Miller’s next books, Ariadne’s Thread and Topographies and beyond where the mise en abyme continues and where the deep opens up onto a deeper deep. Both James’s and Miller’s theoretical lines are defeated by their practices; they both step over the line and venture into a territory where they are not supposed to be. The metonymical displacement of James’s writing onto Miller’s reading whereby Miller repeats in his own language the language of Henry James is also a transfer of James’s theory of writing onto Miller’s critical theory. A trace of this transfer—which is a mise en abyme of James’s ethics of writing—can perhaps be found in Miller’s repeating in his own language Henry James’s words who writes that the act of writing is for him a part of “the conduct of life” (Golden; Preface 1340); “so I claim,” Miller rejoins “that the act of reading is also part of the conduct of life” (14). That conduct of life implies that James’s interminable writing is echoed allegorically and metonymically displaced in Miller’s interminable and always delimited critical theory. One may object that this remains, precisely, very theoretical. However, the allegorical transformation of James’s writing into Miller’s reading extends further and in more complicated and also more pragmatic ways. In his analysis of What Maisie Knew Miller examines the main thread of the story line by regarding Maisie as a reader of signs. Thus what Maisie knows, what she does not know, when and how she gets to know, is the result of a series of acts of reading on which Maisie’s ethical decisions are based: Such signs can be subtle gestures, if the reader of them is, like Maisie, sensitive and intelligent. The reader’s evaluation of what Maisie ultimately does is determined in part by answering the question of whether Maisie reads the characters around her correctly, or whether her reading is to any degree projective, transformative. (40) The question Miller poses for Maisie also opens his own investigation: how can I get it right? What happens if it is not the case? Miller reads Maisie allegorically as a theoretician who has to trace the line of her own renouncement very much in the same way in which both James and Miller have to trace theirs. Maisie is not a hermeneutic reader, that is, she does not decipher a world which is a priori significant, and whose meaning could be unveiled through an epistemological operation. In a strange distortingmirror image Miller regards Maisie as a reflection of James who can “turn the ugly facts of the germ anecdote into ‘the stuff of poetry and tragedy J. Hillis Miller’s 199 and art,’ … only because he imputes to Maisie or discovers in her a corresponding imaginative power, her capacity for wonder. By this faculty she measures things by her own scale and transforms Ida, Beal, and the rest into something ‘appreciable,’ into ‘striking figured symbols’” (53). James can be creative thanks to Maisie, and in the concatenation of prosopopoeias thus created, Miller in turn, can transform the germ of ethics and reading, through the trope of prosopopoeia, into a book where his wonder can be exposed and put to work. It is ivory for Pygmalion, the germ of a story for James, the print characters of the New York Edition of James’s novels for Miller. All this is useless material, rough stuff, unless someone comes along and repeats that material, reiterates it, says it again, that is, reads it in such a way that it remains the same thing and yet a different thing. It remains to be seen how Miller manages to blur the distinction between inside and outside so that he can be both outside observer (a critic/ observer with critical distance), and inside the allegorical operation that turns all the texts of Versions of Pygmalion—including his own text in the book—into versions of one another. Miller pays particular attention to the narrator of Maisie. As in many nineteenth century novels, James’s narrator has the wonderful and magic power to penetrate the minds of certain characters and to know what they think or what they feel. The narrator can also enunciate these feelings and thoughts in a language which is often indistinguishable from that of the character. For the readers there is often no telling for sure whether it is the character’s thoughts or the thoughts of the implied narrator they have access to. There are times also when the narrator comments openly on the protagonist’s actions or reasoning—that is, the narrator’s commentary can be isolated from that of Maisie. In those cases the narrator demonstrates a greater knowledge than Maisie whose vision and understanding is limited by the confines of her self. The narrator can be (as it were) several persons at once. We are so used—as Miller points out—to this convention that we almost take for granted that “someone” should be able to penetrate another person’s mind. Conventions and themes force consensus upon readers who no longer read the oddity of the situation for what it is: a totally extraordinary thing. Miller remarks: It seemed to me when I began the study of literature, as it still seems to me now, that one of the most obvious characteristics of works of literature is their manifest strangeness as integuments of words. Poets, novelists, and playwrights say things which are exceedingly odd by most everyday standards of normality. Any way of interpreting literature would need to account for that oddness. (Fiction 18) One should not forget that in Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion it takes the intervention of a goddess to transform the block of ivory into a sentient being. Here again we might be tempted to take this as a mere metaphor character- 200 Chapter 5 istic of the mythological genre. But this naturalizing tendency must be resisted and reading must continue. The historical or sociological data that forms a convention whose “oddness” is no longer recognizable is transformed by Miller into “striking living symbols.” Thus he identifies as the “second rigorous law of the novel” (39) another convention we have become accustomed to, namely the limitation of the narrator’s knowledge. The narrator who has access to Maisie’s mind, is just as ignorant as she is of what is going on in the minds of the other protagonists. The narrator is both an insider and an outsider; he knows more about Maisie than she knows herself, yet for the other characters he is as much an outside observer as she is. This dual status makes it possible for the narrator to give language to the thoughts and the emotions that Maisie is unable to formulate. Miller writes that Maisie’s emotions remain not sharable because, like pain, they are by definition personal and private. The intervention of the narrator makes it possible for the novel to develop. It is his intervention, his reading of Maisie, which keeps Maisie’s language from remaining private and walled-in within the limits of her self. The gap in knowledge between what the narrator knows and what Maisie knows generates the novel and it is also the gap that generates Miller’s reading of the novel. * * * For readers used to nineteenth-century novels, free indirect speech belongs to the norms of the genre; it is no surprise to see “passages in which the narrator speaks in the third person, past tense, for what Maisie thinks, feels, and sees” (Versions 44). Miller observes about the narrator that his “language always to some degree exceeds Maisie’s language, though it is the medium of their closeness. The narrator’s words are the means of the narrator’s masterful knowledge of Maisie” (45). The ability to penetrate and to control—up to a certain point—Maisie’s mind and language turns the narrator into an archetype of a male figure (father, brother, minister) who tries to find out and control a female character. As master-reader of Maisie’s mind, the narrator is the surveyor of Maisie’s topography. The analysis of the role of the narrator questions the trope of prosopopoeia as master(ful) trope in narration and problematizes the question of control of the other through language. The inquisitiveness about a young woman by a male narrator poses the problem of phallogocentric power when one might have thought that narration as it is presented by Miller would have avoided that trap. Miller’s phrase—“the masterful knowledge of Maisie”—evokes not only control but also desire. The phrase presents the reader with a set of conflicting socio-economical, political, linguistic and libidinal, forces that are present in all acts of read- J. Hillis Miller’s 201 ing and that define reading. On the one hand, the control exerted by the narrator in his attempt to master a child is most problematic from an ethical point of view; on the other hand, it is desire for the otherness of the child-woman that prompts him in the first place to try to find out more about her—how much does she know? Is she a virgin? —, and that creates the space in-between that makes narration, reading, and finally an ethical decision possible. As in Miller’s reading of the novel, it is desire for the other that leads to the invention of the other, that is, to a discovery and a creation of the other. The apparently free creative act that makes the other “happen” is evocative of the trope of discovering and unveiling. It is reading and narration that lead to both Maisie’s and Maisie’s independence and to their breaking away from what Miller calls a vicious circle of interpretation. The forces at work in Maisie’s, in the narrator’s, in James’s and in our own reading constitute the theoretical network that organizes the topography of interpretation. These forces cannot be represented mimetically; they can only be displaced, de-centered or toppled by moving their center of gravity. It would be useless to seek in James’s novel, in his Notebooks, or in archives of his time, the original pattern of reading that would give readers the definitive clue to what Maisie knew. The forces at work can never be identified as such; they crystallize in tropes that call for more tropes to be read. As a reader of What Maisie Knew, Miller finds himself in the same position as the narrator who is a reader of what Maisie knew. In the novel Maisie’s language seems inadequate for her knowledge, and one would think that the narrator would compensate for that deficit. However, Miller observes that, “[l]ike Maisie, the narrator knows more than he has language for” (43). Miller, not unlike the narrator of the novel, knows more about the Maisie than he has language for, and finds himself very much in the same predicament as the narrator with Maisie. There are certainly many difficult and mysterious things in a “relatively short” and “simple” (23) novel such as Maisie. The book is helpless, silent and inarticulate without the help of readers who have to provide it with a language common to them and the novel. Miller points out that “Maisie remains until ‘the death of her childhood’ infans in the etymological sense of ‘without language’” (46). I would say, paraphrasing Miller, that the “generative law” 131 of Versions of Pygmalion—and by synecdoche of every act of reading as defined by Miller—is that the narrator has the power to 131 Miller uses comparable phrases in Versions: “The second rigorous law of the novel [Maisie] is a limitation in the narrator’s access to the minds of the characters” (39); and, “I have said that the first generative law of What Maisie Knew is the narrator’s perception of what is going on in Maisie’s mind, along with his ability to describe it in a language superior to hers…” (43). 202 Chapter 5 describe Maisie in a language which orders and polices Maisie’s infantile feelings and orders them for the reader. Like the narrator who “gives words to much that was apparently silent for Maisie” (44), it is Miller’s responsibility to read Maisie right and to give words to much that is apparently wordless there. That space in-between is the topography of interpretation of which the critic is the land surveyor. Miller writes that “The novel must end when the gap closes between what the narrator knows and what Maisie knows” (VP, 47). This question of closure, of bringing home within the walls of the house of interpretation that Miller is (de)constructing, must be suspended for the moment; an additional gap must be opened between the now of the question and the possible then of its being answered. But by giving Maisie a language, in the same way in which the fatherly figure of the narrator gives Maisie words and “create[s] for the reader, in retrospect, a new Maisie, a Maisie who can live again for the reader each time the novel is read” (46), Miller puts himself in the problematic position of a father-figure who has to speak for a child. The voice of the narrator is the voice of reason and order that seeks to master the “intuitive and intelligent” voice of Maisie. Maisie is not really an orphan—both her genetic parents are alive—but her being either rejected or used by them as a value for exchange puts her filial situation in an affective and social limbo. 132 She is literally a wandering child moving from one home to the other, never knowing how much time she will spend at either place, how suddenly she will be removed from there, who will take her away and under what pretext she will be removed. In addition to being a lost child, Maisie is also a feral child of sorts who is —as in James’s “The Awkward Age”— disqualified for a proper position in society by the inadequacy of her language. One can even say that her status of free-floating signifier results from the disparity between her knowledge and her language. The narrator 132 James writes about Maisie: A child … was divided by its parents in consequence of their being divorced. … The court for some reason didn’t, as it might have done, give the child exclusively to either parent, but decreed that it was to spend its time equally with each—that is alternately. Each parent married again, and the child went to them a month, or three months, about—finding with the one a new mother and with the other a new father. Might not something be done with the idea of an odd and particular relation springing up 1st between the child and each of these new parents, 2nd between one of the parents and the other—through the child—over and on account of and by means of the child? (Notebooks 71; emphasis added) I emphasize words that mix the economic metaphor with the ethical question of what is going to happen to the child. These words show that useless unless she is used Maisie becomes a free-floating signifier, like a coin forgotten in a pocket. At this point of his thinking about Maisie and Maisie, “the slip of a girl,” as he calls her, has not become usable for James. She still lacks elements that will allow him to use her. J. Hillis Miller’s 203 acts in compensation for Maisie’s deficiencies and recreates the order that she upsets. 133 Miller’s narrative voice in Versions of Pygmalion also creates a new order. It is sponsored by the order of James’s novel but differs from it in many respects—the passages read, the sequence of the quotations or the alternation between quotations and commentary. Miller asks whether “the relation between the narrator and Maisie figure[s] an ideological presumption about the superiority of male knowledge and language over female powerlessness to speak” (46). The same question must be asked about his role as critic: is the critic always male (independently of gender) insofar as s/ he always brings a fatherly (phallogocentric) support—the support of reason, political support, economic support—to a childish and orphaned text? Is the idea of order that shapes the topography of interpretation necessarily phallogocentric and authoritarian? How can “the conduct of life” that represents “a calling to read works of literature, as many as possible in all languages, and a commitment to talking and writing about what you have read” (19) put Miller in such a predicament? It might seem that the role of theory is to be a Socrates of sorts, to prevent acts of reading from wandering and always exceeding the limits of the topography where they were meant to be kept. Miller’s writing might be a compensation for the role of the absent father; Derrida writes about this compensation complex: It is a certain voice that urges Socrates to stand in for the father or the elder brother with the Athenians—but he also thinks that someone could likewise stand in for him in this role. The voice forbids, more than that, it dictates; and he obeys that voice spontaneously, like the good horse in Phaedrus, for which the orders of the voice are enough: such is the voice of logos … Socrates is the bearer of the voice of the father, he is the spokesman for the father. And Plato writes from the standpoint of Socrates’ death [Platon écrit à partir de sa mort]. (“Pharmacie” 183-85; my translation) Here again Derrida helps us to understand the position of the narrator in the novel who restores the order upset by Maisie after the disappearance/ doubling-up of her parents. Derrida’s text also helps us to read Miller who repeats allegorically ( maybe ironically) the doubling-up of Maisie’s parents; he too writes from the standpoint of or after the death or the absence of Maisie’s father. He writes from the standpoint of James’s absence, 133 Miller links the problem of compensation to prosopopoeia. By giving Maisie words for what she cannot express herself, the narrator resorts to the trope, that is to “[the] making of a person, in compensation for a loss, out of what James calls ‘figures’ (in both the economic and rhetorical sense),” and which repeats Pygmalion’s gesture in creating Galatea” (46). I shall return to the question for if one pursues the allegorical doubling of James’s narration in Versions of Pygmalion and admits that Maisie is for the narrator an act of compensation, then we have to wonder if Versions of Pygmalion is also an act of compensation and what the loss it seeks to make up for is. 204 Chapter 5 that is, standing between the ( always past) “then” of the father’s voice and the (always repeated) “now” of the ethical moment of reading. Miller’s response to the novel is that of a man for whom the father (the author, God, the Law) has disappeared and whose calling is to stand in for him in his acts of reading and to keep and impose an order for which he is now responsible—“The call is directed to me personally and with equal force by each text” (18), Miller writes. The difference between Maisie’s language and that of the narrator is, Miller points out, that of irony. The ironical distance—“the ‘shade of a difference’ between Maisie’s language and the narrator’s language [which] allows James to write What Maisie Knew” (46)— becomes, in the case of Miller, the critical distance vis-à-vis James’s text which allows him to write Versions of Pygmalion. This difference is also a Derridean différance, i.e. a deferral of the language of the text; the delay implies reading—and reading causes it. Between the absence of writing and the presence and present of reading is the bridge of theory. The realization of what Maisie knew is postponed for the reader by the fact that he or she has to read Miller (at least) in addition to James. But reading will never say what Maisie knew and Miller’s book will not do it either. There is always a point where Maisie escapes the control of the narrator; and Maisie escapes the control of the reader. This echoes the words of Henry James: “I am face to face with several little alternatives of work, and am in fact in something of a predicament with things promised and retarded. … It’s idiotic, by the way, to waste time in writing such a remark as that! As if I didn’t feel in all such matters infinitely more than I can ever utter! ” (Notebooks 129; my italics). Writing for James and reading for Miller can only repeat the gap by building bridges that never take us to the other side of the unknown. The voice of the absent father can never be reclaimed and we come to realize that it has never existed. The father is always already missing. Reading and writing can never render the father’s voice which can only be written or read in an allegorical displacement of one another. Theory is a form of promise, but as all promises it means that there is a projection into the future, hence a deferral of knowledge, revelation and salvation. Miller’s critical theory speaks for Maisie, and as a theory it seeks to take into account the totality of its phenomena. Miller answers the call “directed to [him] directly” by the novel, and he tries to accomplish the impossible task of giving an account for every sign spent on the book. As Maisie who foresees “Most,” “Everything,” “All,” he must say it “all.” But the extravagance of James’s writing always exceeds his capacities as it overcomes the capacities of any reader. Thus Miller proposes a hegemonic theory which he defeats himself. There are contradictory forces at work in Miller’s “act of reading itself” that contribute to give that reading the comprehensive con- J. Hillis Miller’s 205 tours of an act, while constantly erasing those contours. In his defining the way theory is at work, Derrida called these forces “jetties”: The closest type, the stabilizing jetty which resembles the destabilizing jetty most, is what is called poststructuralism, alias deconstructionism. It’s not bad, it isn’t an evil, and even if it were one, it would be a necessary evil. It consists in formalizing certain strategic necessities of the deconstructive jetty and in putting forward—thanks to this formalization—a system of technical rules, teachable methodological procedures, a discipline, school phenomena, a kind of knowledge, principles, theorems, which are for the most part principles of interpretation and reading.… (“Statements” 88) Even as reading is the teachable, definable, principle of Miller’s theory, that theory is contaminated by the iterability, the proliferation and the dissemination that the act of reading implies. The act of reading establishes an order which is subverted by the very act that instituted it; Miller writes: “An act of reading takes place as an event. It is something that happens, with the same inaugural violence, breaking any predictable concatenation, as other events in the real world like birth, copulation, death, or declaration of independence” (21). 134 The theoretical line is always crossed, for it is in the nature of reading and writing to always call for other acts of reading and writing. The act of reading and the act of writing work as tropes that crystallize the very nature of écriture which is—as Derrida proposes—wandering and transgressive. Miller commits his theory to an act which condemns his criticism to always exceed the line he has traced. As he comments himself: “What happens when I read, when I really read, which does not happen all that often? What happens is something always fortuitous and unpredictable, something surprising, however many times the book in question has been read before, even by me. … Another way to describe what is unpredictable about a genuine act of reading is to say that reading is always the disconfirmation or modification of presupposed literary theory rather than its confirmation” (Versions 21-22). All reading always turns against its user. Deconstructive reading is like the rebellious son Derrida describes in Plato’s Phaedrus, or the bad son Miller evokes when he speaks of deconstruction. Like the readers who preceded him, Miller constructs his act of reading on a theory that deconstructs it even as he seeks to edify it. * * * 134 Miller’s definition of the “act of reading” echoes Jacques Derrida’s definition of écriture: “Because [writing (l’écriture)] is inaugural, in the primary sense [au sens jeune] of the word, it is dangerous and disquieting.” (L’écriture 22; my translation). 206 Chapter 5 We must now return to the question of closure. Miller suggests that the narration in What Maisie Knew is based on a discrepancy between what the narrator knows and what Maisie knows. There is an implicit promise in this structure: thanks to his capacity to penetrate Maisie’s mind, the narrator will provide the reader with the necessary knowledge that will make it possible to bridge the gap. The promise is also that “[t]he novel must end when the gap closes between what the narrator knows and what Maisie knows” (Versions 47). Finally, the promise is that the reader will get to know Maisie; she will be brought home and become familiar. Can this also be the case for the reader of Maisie—must Miller’s chapter on the novel close when the gap between his language and that of the text closes? The difficulty to answer this question rests in the difficulty to determine when this gap has been bridged, when, as Miller says, justice has been done to Maisie. In order to do Maisie justice, Miller must, as any judge faced with an accused person, determine who he is faced with. It would seem totally unprincipled ethically to judge someone without knowing who the person is. The process of identification which is a prerequisite to do someone justice, consists in ascribing someone a face, a name, and define the individual within a set of personal circumstances. It is impossible to judge someone who cannot be defined and whose story cannot be told: If there is no ethics without story and no story without prosopopoeia, then understanding that figure of speech is essential to the understanding of ethics and especially to the ethics of reading. (13) If we try to follow this tight syllogistic passage we shall find that it gets increasingly narrow, to the point where it becomes a dead end. The trope that was to give us access to “The Ethics of Reading” opens up onto a transgression of the law it was supposed to serve. The narrator of James’s novel wants to know what Maisie knows; similarly, I suggested, Miller wants to know What Maisie Knew. Both of them tell a narrative in which Maisie appears thanks to the transgression of prosopopoeia that derives tropologically the existence of a person from a set of signs. The combination of these signs gives birth both to Maisie and Maisie; it creates an order where they can exist; it frames their lives within the lines of the narrative and endows them with a certain stability. But in the end, at the moment of knowing her, Maisie escapes the control of the male narrator, just as Galatea escapes the control of her male creator, Pygmalion: Maisie escapes James’s knowing, even though he has made her. In the end, at the moment when she becomes an adult, a fully responsible, knowing, ethical subject, James, or his delegate the narrator, can no longer know what Maisie knew.” (70) Miller adds that James and his narrator “can only know Maisie with full intimacy so long as she remains a wondering child” (71); he confirms the father-figure role played both by James and his narrator vis-à-vis the fe- J. Hillis Miller’s 207 male character. In Versions of Pygmalion, Maisie plays the role of the other in the transformation through prosopopoeia; Miller tries to encompass the totality of Maisie within the limits of the theoretical line defined by what he calls “the ethics of reading.” But just as “Maisie escapes James’s knowing,” Maisie ultimately escapes Miller’s knowing and the novel proliferates beyond the limits of Miller’s topography of interpretation. But just as it seems that the life-giving trope of prosopopoeia endowed Maisie with life by telling her story, she withdraws from the realm of the living. She no longer “embodies” a character, and she returns to what she was, a set of signs. Miller and his readers must give up the hope of finding in Maisie the personification of what ethical behavior should be. Miller writes that for James “renunciation is the highest value” because [it] expresses “symbolically” the impossibility of any adequate “embodiment” of the universal. It expresses, moreover, the incommensurability between the demand made on the unique individual by the universal moral law and any expression of this demand that would convey it perspicuously to others—so I could, for example make what Maisie does (or what James does) the known basis of my doing. (70) Miller also has to renounce making Maisie, that is his reading of the novel, the basis of his own doing. His reading was a promise to come face to face with Maisie, but just as he was going to get there Maisie returns to the limbo of “entities not really alive” that can never be faced. Because they can never be called to the bar, these complex rhetorical figures can never be judged and thereby become the standard of future ethical decisions and judgments. There comes a moment—the ethical moment—when the narrator cannot judge what Maisie knew (e.g., was she an innocent virgin? ) and base his behavior to her and other people on that decision. Similarly, Miller cannot do justice to Maisie: he cannot commit the novel to the closed frame of a theory of ethics that would serve as the jurisprudence for future readings. The whole project Miller announces at the beginning of Versions of Pygmalion may seem radically undermined if the conclusion about the ethical law of reading is: let’s face it, you cannot face it. One might think that very little has been achieved and one might feel very uncomfortable in this unwilling suspension of belief. But this slow movement—as slow as slow reading—, this patient metaphor, is very much the working principle of Miller’s criticism whose writing traces the allegory of his reading. On the one hand, Miller announces that ethics “involves narrative as its subversive accomplice,” and he adds that “[s]torytelling is the impurity which is necessary in any discourse about moral law as such, in spite of the law’s austere indifference to persons, stories, and history” (Ethics 23). On the other hand, our careful reading of Miller shows that the reading of narratives results in an indefinite postponement of the law, in its concealment 208 Chapter 5 and in a series of missed appointments with it because the reader went astray or mused along the way just at the wrong moment. As the narrator with Maisie and Miller with Maisie, the reader of narratives, no matter how well informed or astute, gets to the point where “the grammatical decoding of a text leaves a residue of indetermination that has to be, but cannot be, resolved by grammatical means” (de Man, Resistance 15). The moral law cannot be faced; it cannot be represented (in a parable or as a theme); it can only be a violent projection and appear as a metonymy or a synecdoche of the act of reading. Only reading could answer the question: what is the ethics of reading? But reading ironically repeats the absence of the law. This leaves the reader of Versions of Pygmalion in a serious predicament, for Miller claims that “ethical judgment and command is a necessary feature of human language”; but through the reading of Miller’s texts that “necessary feature” cannot be located in language, nor can it be extracted from language by analysis. The moral law cannot be called to life by prosopopoeia the way Galatea or Maisie are. The moral law becomes apparent as an act of interpretation and not as the result of it. In that respect the moral law is always theoretical, i.e. marginalized and other to a central and totalizing knowledge that could be formalized in a doxa of ethics. The law is always different and its enforcement is always deferred. This is what Pygmalion in Ovid’s myth does not understand: “[w]hat Pygmalion does is a usurpation of divine power as manifested in the sun god’s sovereignty over shapeless matter” (Versions 9). Pygmalion acts as if he knew the law and as if he were the source of the law. He forgets that it took the intervention of a goddess to turn the block of ivory into the woman he desired, and what he takes for a male act of creation is only an act of midwifery. 135 It would be a mistake to take this as 135 Like sculpting, writing is a violent creative act which reminds us that “an act of reading takes place as an event. It is something that happens, with the same inaugural violence, breaking any predictable concatenation, as other events in the real world like birth, copulation, death, or declaration of independence” (Versions 21). Both reading and writing are essentially male forms of violence: they break the moral law by repeating and proclaiming the absence of the father; they are a form a rape or sexual abuse when they aim at knowing and controlling Maisie, Galatea or Desdemona: If writing is initially a form of scratching or engraving, the cutting of a line, penetration of some hard substance with a marking tool, it may also, after the invention of pencils and pens, be thought of as the pouring out on a flat surface of a long line or filament, lead or ink making a cursive line of characters stamping, cutting, contaminating, or deflowering the virgin paper, according to a not very “submerged” sexual metaphor. Which is the metaphor of which? Is the pleasure of scribbling the “sublimated” or “displaced” pleasure of sex or is the pleasure of writing, the pleasure (male? ) of penetrating, furrowing, or marking a blank page, the pleasure of extending the genetic line and of making a copy of oneself, saving the seed from fruitless scattering. (Miller, Ariadne’s 6-7) J. Hillis Miller’s 209 a simple myth and to feel protected by the great amount of time that separates us from Ovid. What Miller shows is that the law always produces differences; narratives allow the reader to have access to those regions where the other or otherness can be encountered. This encounter can only be the result of invention and as such it always implies “some form of inequality, the breaking of an implicit contract [which] upsets the peaceful ordering of things, [and] perturbs propriety” (Derrida, Psyché 11; my translation). Before inventing Galatea, Pygmalion refused to marry. The prosopopoietic creation of Galatea transforms Pygmalion’s self: something produced by the imaginary transformation of prosopopoeia and the labor of his hands springs up to modify his real world. In his reading of Ovid’s tale, Miller finds Pygmalion guilty of self-love. This is not simply a personal moral judgment on his part, for he shows how Pygmalion tragically mistakes the performative power of language for his own and how this leads him to refuse the necessary movement towards the other: Pygmalion avoided the painful encounter with the otherness of other persons in ordinary human relations. But a relation in which there is no otherness, in which the same mates with the same, is, precisely, incest. Poor Myrrha pay for the sins of her great-grandfather by repeating his crime in her violent infatuation with her father. Her punishment is to be turned into a perpetually weeping myrrh tree. (11) Icarus, Pygmalion’s descendants, and other protagonists of the Metamorphoses pay the highest price for disregarding this invisible but sovereign ethical law of reading. The ethics of reading of Versions of Pygmalion means that we have a tropological access to the law; it is, however, only tropological. The interpretation of signs serves as the necessary supplement to the law but it must not be mistaken for life itself. This is the mistake that Pygmalion makes and it is the mistake that always threatens the literary critic. At this juncture Miller puts his readers (and himself) in a very uncomfortable situation. He proposes that all narratives result from a metonymical displacement of the Pygmalion myth. All narratives are “versions of Pygmalion,” insofar as they repeat the transgression of the moral law that governs language, which “does not bode well for the hope that the reader of these stories can be exempt from the error the tales describe. In order to understand the ‘crime,’ it may be necessary to commit it again” (12). Although “we must think of Pygmalion, Galatea, Cinyras, Myrrha, and even Venus to some degree as if they were real persons, not just black marks on the page” (11-12), it would be a grave mistake—a “crime,” certainly—to take prosopopoeia literally and believe that we can animate shapeless matter or call persons back from the dead. Miller’s writing permanently echoes the necessity to believe in the creative power of language, and yet it is a permanent admonition that repeats the Biblical epigraph of the book: 210 Chapter 5 “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” There is a permanent tension in Miller’s criticism, which may be the result of his belonging to the American Puritan tradition and his desire to overcome this tradition: on the one hand he must get the text right, “do it justice,” and on the other, there is never any sense of security that will establish the correctness of the interpretation. Miller’s distrust of the “graven image” is the secular reinterpretation in ethical terms of the sacred admonition of the Commandments. Yet, he makes us tragically aware that we cannot not commit the crime the Scriptures warn us against: we cannot not read. Since there is no hidden Truth to be discovered in the texts that will guarantee the morality of the reading, it is only the individual ethical responsibility of the reader which can serve as a safeguard. Not only must I read, but I must read right. I cannot afford to make errors of reading because I expose myself to the punishment provided by the moral law of language. There are (at least) two fatal mistakes that I must avoid at all costs: taking the signs just as black marks on the page, and, “the error of taking prosopopoeia literally” (7). As long as this exile from life remains the realm of ancient legends, it has something almost reassuring. However, Miller identifies this situation as being not only that of Pygmalion, but as that of any reader and he seems to follows de Man when the latter warns his readers that “fictional narratives are ... part of the world and of reality; their impact upon the world may well be all too strong for comfort. What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality” (Resistance 11). 136 In our reading of Versions of Pygmalion we have reached what de Man calls an “[a]poria, impasse, malconfort, in which one can neither sit nor stand” (Allegories 119). As readers, we must enter one more time the game of différance, look even harder at the “act of reading.” We must call it into question again, for “[t]he act of reading undermines its own status as ‘act,’ since it is unable to efface wholly the referentiality of the text in question and also unable to return in peace to a naive mimetic interpretation. The repetition with different texts of this act or non-act of deconstruction leads to a gradual clarification, as the reading comes back again and again, with different texts, to the ‘same’ impasse” (Miller, “Deconstructing” 112). On the other hand (the act of reading seems to take away from us with one hand the knowledge its other hand gave us), we need to reach a place where we can sit or stand or live; we must arrest and order the proliferation of narratives and acts of reading. Here again the reassuring principle promised by Miller proves deceptive, for in its strife to understand and say it “all,” reading always exceeds the boundaries and the “orienting coordi- 136 Miller expresses a similar belief in the interaction of narrative and what he calls “the world of action”: “A final conviction, for me, is crucial here. Works of literature do not simply reflect or are not simply caused by their contexts. They have a productive effect in history” (Hawthorne 152). J. Hillis Miller’s 211 nates” of the topography it delineates. We need, on the contrary, a knowledge that can diminish the potential of truth to a manageable size, a knowledge which, unlike Maisie’s, does not encompass it “all.” * * * When the painstaking process of slow reading leaves us breathless, and when we have reached that point that Jacques Derrida calls the point d’essoufflement (“breathlessness”) of reading, we must still continue its exploration. It is when we have exhausted the question of what reading does that we must ask it again. I have suggested that in Miller’s book reading is the only access to the “invisible but sovereign” law of ethics. Allegorical writing and reading function as midwives that make the representation of the law possible. If all reading turns texts into allegories, then we may say that Miller’s interpretation of texts is allegorical. Allegory is the trope that stabilizes Miller’s theory of reading and provides his writing with a theoretical line. 137 Just as it seems that we have reached a point where we have established what the central trope of Miller’s theory is, we might be tempted to forget that the ironical force of allegory is that it always says at least two incompatible things at the same time. Thus, reading cannot be reduced to a symbol, nor even to a metonymy or a synecdoche of a totality—the law, the voice of the father/ author, Ethics. Reading has on the contrary a disjunctive 138 and detotalizing power which causes it to proliferate and expand without limits. To make some headway in this difficult question, it may be useful to take some distance from Miller’s book and consider how the trope is at work in other places. In his Memoires for Paul de Man, Derrida reads Hegel’s 137 The danger of any theory is that it becomes so heavy that it succumbs under its own gravity. To speak of Miller’s reading without using terms that are over-determined and heavy because they are so loaded is impossible. Derrida speaks of this necessity of a meta-language and of the necessary awareness that this meta-language is always already contaminated by the deconstructive and allegorical process at work in language. Miller’s “reading” does not escape what Derrida says of “deconstructionism.” He writes that as a stabilizing concept or force (Derrida says “jetty”), “It’s not bad, it isn’t an evil, and even if it were one, it would be a necessary evil. It consists in formalizing certain strategic necessities...and in putting forward...a system of technical rules, teachable methodological procedures, a discipline, school phenomena, a kind of knowledge, principles of interpretation and reading...” (“Statements” 88). 138 In one of his long meditations on allegory, Paul de Man attributes this characteristic to allegory in his discussion of Schlegel’s “Gespräch über die Poesie”: “It could be shown that, precisely because it suggests a disjunction between the way in which the world appears in reality and the way it appears in language, the word “allegory” fits the general problematic of the “Gespräch,” whereas the word “symbol an alien presence in the later version” (“Rhetoric” 190). 212 Chapter 5 treatment of allegory as a way of remembering his deceased friend Paul de Man. Derrida reads Hegel who identifies allegory as “the defective cornerstone” of the system that makes meaning possible. 139 Derrida remarks that the “defective cornerstone” has a dual and strange relationship with the “entire system.” I would like to suggest that something similar is at work in Miller’s writing and his insistence on “reading.” To regard reading as the cornerstone of Miller’s interpretative system is to submit it to a deconstructive move and inscribe it in “what some might be tempted to see as the dominant metaphorical register, indeed the allegorical bent of ‘deconstruction,’ a certain architectural rhetoric” (Derrida, Memoires 72). As “the defective cornerstone,” allegory has two architectonic functions in Miller’s interpretation. On the one hand, it supports the entire edifice of interpretation; on the other hand, it is its weak link that constantly threatens the structural coherence of the whole system. Furthermore, a cornerstone is a marginal but indispensable element of the construction. Reading does not have the brilliant prestige and the remarkable centrality of a keystone, nor can it be said to provide a foundation for the system: “it is, and it says the other; it is an allegory” (Derrida, Memoires 79). Reading for Miller might well be only an allegory, only a figure among other figures. Moreover, it might well be the most vulnerable of them all. In spite of this, this little corner is the converging point of the all forces that allow the edification of the system. This peripheral point where meaning seems to be exhausted and challenged by the fragility of this rickety stone represents the whole in a representation which is not mimetic but which nonetheless stands for, and shapes the whole. The peripheral position of this point of support makes it challenge the dialectical opposition between the outside and the inside, while its essential supportive function undermines the opposition between center and margin. By implication the dialectical and ontological opposition between the original and central one and the marginal and marginalized “other” is called into question. In Miller’s case it means that his writing blurs the line between the texts he writes “about” and his own writing. Miller‘s reading makes these texts enter into the game of différance where they are repeated while they say something else. Miller’s allegorical reading disjoins the texts he reads from his own. However, his criticism does not oppose primary texts, which would be the locus of the original voice of the father/ author, 139 Derrida’s comments are on a passage from Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, paragraph 20: What the [sic] allegory narrates is, therefore, in Hegel’s own words “the separation or disarticulation of subject from predicate (die Trennung von Subjekt und Prädikat).” For discourse to be meaningful, this separation has to take place, yet it is incompatible with the necessary generality of all meaning. Allegory functions, categorically and logically, like the defective cornerstone of the entire system. (Memoires 72) J. Hillis Miller’s 213 of truth, of ethics, to secondary texts, which would be a mere repetition and a pale imitation of the original text and a supplement to its absence. The terms “secondary” and “secondary literature” suggests that criticism is a belated act and that writing about “primary” texts is memorial. The critic writes after, from the death of the author to preserve his or her memory. This assumed temporal gap is that which sets it on the other side of the dialectical line—the line that separates the original from the copy, the inside from the outside, the true from the false and the voice of the father from the writing of the son. “Theory” has often been accused of being hegemonic and trying to take over power. 140 Once again the pre-text of the attacks is the violence to which theory submits the “primary” texts it deals with. Thus theoretical writing is perceived as a form of violence and appropriation of the text. Critics are sometimes described as vampires feeding on the blood of their innocent victims in an imagery which allies the primacy of childhood, the age of innocence as the origin of all civilization and culture. The primary text seems to be a depository of those values of innocence, truth, original beauty and essential significance. Any tampering with these values appears to some as a sacrilegious act that undermines the very foundations of physics and metaphysics. Such is the uncomfortable position of a critic like Miller in Versions of Pygmalion, which is inscribed within an attempt to explain and justify the ethical role of the criticism: [T]he word “deconstruction” has misleading overtones or implications. It suggests something a bit too external, a bit too masterful and muscular. It suggests the demolition of the helpless text with tools which are other than and stronger than what is demolished. The word “deconstruction” suggests that such criticism is an activity turning something unified back to detached fragments or parts. It suggests the image of a child taking apart his father’s watch, reducing it back to useless parts, beyond any reconstitution. A deconstructionists is not a parasite but a parricide. He is a bad son demolishing beyond hope of repair the machine of Western metaphysics. (Miller, “Critic” 169) 140 Tobin Siebers writes for instance: “Deconstruction seeks the reversal of values, conferring a new kind of meaning on those elements of literature that critics have traditionally ignored.... Deconstruction can be said to have marginalized the reading of literature” (98; emphasis added). Siebers conceives of deconstruction in terms of binary opposition; his declared sympathy for what he sees as an achievement for deconstruction notwithstanding. No matter what ethical value he ascribes to deconstruction, the latter remains always exterior to the primary text: “This emphasis on the marginal, however, takes on moral overtones in its opposition to relations of power and systematic thought. Deconstructive marginalization has the ethical value of siding with the underdog in the system; it upsets traditional systems of power…” (98). 214 Chapter 5 Miller takes up again and vivifies the image of the aggression against the father(figure) and against the symbols and the signs of his power. The watch is a strong metaphor representing a perception of the universe where everything would be unified functionally in the supreme machinery designed by the supreme architect and supreme engineer. The dialectical opposition is between the deconstructive and secondary writing of the critic and the supreme fiction of the poet. What Miller proposes is that critical writing is writing as such, inasmuch as all writing is creative (constructive) and critical and theoretical, that is deconstructive. Miller’s criticism points out that criticism repeats even before there is anything to repeat; it acts from the margin even before the constitution of a center. Writing is a form of repetition, and critical writing, because it is writing as such, constantly interrogates its own repetitive nature: In what sense could the discourse of the critic, set side by side, with his citations from the poet, “say the same thing” as the poetic texts say? Is there a difference between paraphrase, explication, citation, and “interpretation”? Even though one may agree that both citation and commentary do violence to the original, it may be that there are different forms of that violence. (Miller, “Deconstructing” 97) Whether critical writing colonizes the space of the literary text and seeks to substitute for it is a possibility that must be examined. Like ivy, criticism colonizes the book-tree, imitates its movement and feeds on the same substances, while at the same time slowly stifling the tree and killing it in the end. Miller certainly presents this possibility as he writes that criticism may indeed be parasitic, as every form of colonization is, nevertheless this parasitic activity also needs to be submitted to allegorical reading: “Para” is a double antithetical prefix signifying at once proximity and distance, similarity and difference, interiority and exteriority, something inside a domestic economy and at the same time outside it, something simultaneously this side of a boundary line, threshold, or margin, and also beyond it, equivalent in status and also secondary or subsidiary, submissive, as of guest to host, slave to master. A thing in “para,” moreover, is not only simultaneously on both sides of the boundary itself, the screen which is a permeable membrane connecting inside and outside. It confuses them with one another, allowing the outside in, making the inside out, dividing them and joining them. It also forms an ambiguous transition between the one and the other. (Miller, “Critic” 144-45) By including Versions of Pygmalion in the present book, I want to suggest that one should not establish a difference between critical theory and poetry on the basis of what is original and what is secondary. All texts engage the reader in an act that has ethical and political consequences on their topos. The topography of interpretation is not an attempt to establish a theoretical basis on which the rest of the book can be constructed, but to J. Hillis Miller’s 215 propose that a text, literary or not, “performs on itself the act of deconstruction without any help from the critic” (Miller, “Deconstructing”). Miller’s statement is essential, for it suggests that Versions of Pygmalion and “the act of reading itself” deconstruct themselves as soon as they start forming a coherent whole. This puts “reading,” as a unified concept or “theory,” under a double pressure. On the one hand, reading will be accused of forming a system as systematic and totalizing as any other; on the other hand, it will be accused of being unreliable because it never reaches a stable and permanent position. This double pressure was systematized in what Paul de Man called “the resistance to theory”: Technically correct rhetorical readings may be boring, monotonous, predictable and unpleasant, but they are irrefutable. They are also totalizing (and potentially totalitarian) for since the structures and functions they expose do not lead to the knowledge of an entity (such as language [or ethics]) but are an unreliable process of knowledge production that prevents all entities, including linguistic entities, from coming into discourse as such, they are indeed universals, consistently defective models of language’s impossibility to be a model language. (Resistance 19) “Reading” for Miller has the particularity de Man ascribes to theory when he writes that nothing can “overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself resistance … [because] the language it speaks is the language of self-resistance.” 141 In Versions of Pygmalion reading continuously resists itself: it keeps opening up new topographies and pronouncing new declarations of independence. Similarly, Miller sees that there is a danger in “reading” becoming an arch-trope that could stand for and explain everything. Miller suggests that the critic “must be on guard against the dangers of unwittingly making works of literature over in his own image”(“Literature” 70). Miller’s admonition foreshadows the epigraph of Versions of Pygmalion and emphasizes the tension between the order created by the book and the independence of 141 Siebers writes that de Man’s conclusion leads him to “philosophical martyrdom” in which de Man “expose[s] the violence of power, but does not partake of it, by sacrificing [himself] to its fury” (99). Siebers continues: “Once martyrdom becomes a theory, however, it fails to direct its aggression either toward its enemies or toward itself. It becomes a system bent on its own destruction as the first step in destroying the violence that it associates with others. Its motivations are ethical, but ethically misguided because it trades a less sure form of violence for one that strives to encompass everything. Nihilism in the modern world may be defined as the preference for nothingness over the risk of committing violence” (105). Siebers’s reaction is emblematic of attacks on theory which charge it with being “pure verbalism, as a denial of the reality principle in the name of absolute fictions.” As de Man points out, “The attacks reflect the anxiety of the aggressors rather than the guilt of the accused” (Resistance 10). What is most important in the context of the present discussion is de Man’s assertion about reading: “It turns out that the resistance to theory is in fact a resistance to reading” (Resistance 15; emphasis added). 216 Chapter 5 the works it deals with. If What Maisie Knew escapes the control of Miller just as Maisie escapes the control of the narrator in the novel, we could say that the in-built resistance in the act of reading never makes it possible for Miller to identify with James and replace him. The texts Miller reads always resist his reading and keep their independence. This leads Miller to proclaim his own resistance to (his own) theory. He comes up with a declaration of independence which echoes the American Declaration of Independence. Like Jefferson’s inaugural text, it serves both as a form of resistance, a detachment from authority, and as a legislative act and an appeal to the law. In an echo of Jefferson’s words, Miller writes that “[he] hold[s] these truths for self evident” (Versions 34) that literature is not a by-product of history because “A work of literature intervenes in history whenever it is read. Literature is productive, performative. It makes something happen” (Versions 33-34). Miller presents us with three versions of an allegory of reading which leads each time to the independence of the reader and the object read. Maisie who is a good reader achieves her independence from the narrator’s and even James’s fatherly authority. Both Maisie and Maisie become unknowable in the end; therefore they exceed Miller’s language and become independent of his authority: “Maisie… remains a blank, a floating signifier. In the end she refuses to be employed in the game of substitution that would make her a living catachresis” (66; emphasis added). In a prosopopoietic move Miller says that Maisie resists; she refuses to enter the game of catachresis, of dead metaphor. Instead Maisie escapes into the game of différance in which her meaning, the meaning of her acts cannot be ascribed to a catachresis. She will not take her place in the society game of which her parents and step-parents are a part: “Maisie escapes the vicious circle. She cannot fit herself in, even when she tries (VP, 64). Version of Pygmalion does not say what Maisie means, and accordingly it is impossible to derive a line of action from her ethical decision. How should the reader decide between several incompatible interpretations of what Maisie does; what do we, as readers, know of what she really knows? Miller affirms that the “vibration of undecidability, however, is by no means the endpoint of the reading of the novel, nor is it a permanent aporia of interpretation” (65). The end is not the end; Miller himself breaks the “vicious circle” of traditional interpretation which would have demanded that his reading respect the frame of the historical or sociological context in which the novel was written. He resists the temptation of closure by adding just as the reader might have thought his reading was drawing to its end, another turn of the screw, another remove. Miller breaks loose from those constraints by refusing an ideological frame where he could confound linguistic and natural reality. As an allegory of Maisie’s emancipation, Miller liberates himself from the “vicious circle” of theory. His reading “takes place” or “happens” but it does not have a permanent status J. Hillis Miller’s 217 as a theory 142 ; Miller’s reading does not ordain its constitution, and like James for whom “connections stop nowhere,” Miller does not trace the borders of his topography. * * * So what is the cornerstone of “the act of reading itself”? In an uncharacteristically syllogistic passage Miller links up in one single tropological network the reading of narratives, prosopopoeia and ethics: If there is no ethics without story and no story without prosopopoeia, then understanding that figure of speech is essential to the understanding of ethics and especially to the ethics of reading. (Versions 13) Thus “Narratives” constitute the interface that makes the world of fiction (rhetoric) communicate with the physical world (nature, politics, economy). We have seen so far that no rhetorical model can be used as a basis for ethical action in the physical world; reciprocally no natural model can be used as having an a priori meaning that can justify ethical or political decisions. It remains then to be seen how the world of rhetoric can have effects in the world of physical or natural reality, in particular in view of the reader’s role: is the ethical importance of narratives determined by the way the readers read them, or is the readers’ ethical reaction determined by them? Prosopopoeia ascribes, Miller proposes, a name to non-human entities. Naming is an act that relates the work of prosopopoeia to an ordering force in the world. When a name is given it is always given in the name of the law that forbids that another name should be given. The law that allows me to tell apples from oranges is appealed to whenever I say this is an orange, or this is an apple. Similarly, when someone is given a name, say Maisie, the name is implicitly given in the name of God who represents the transcendental power that guarantees a transcendental meaning to the name “Maisie” and which makes it possible to always know Maisie as Maisie, no matter what she looks like, behaves, says, or does. Naming is a performative speech-act that orders, organizes, and polices the world: it traces a line between what something or someone is and is not. When Miller writes that “Maisie is different each time the story is read,” he challenges the existence of a transcendental meaning that would give once and for all a stable identity to Maisie. He challenges the belief that acts of reading or writing are acts in which men and women use lan- 142 To the objection that “for twenty years deconstruction [had] not existed, or more precisely, that it [had] consisted of a ‘mist’ hiding everything,” Jacques Derrida answered that it was true in a way, for deconstruction “has neither consistency nor existence, and besides, it wouldn’t have lasted long anyway if it had” (“Statements” 93-94). 218 Chapter 5 guage in order to determine what their topography is going to be like. Maisie is different each time the novel is read, but the instability does not begin or end there. “Maisie” differs from Maisie as every word differs from every other word, including from itself when used again. It is as impossible to determine who Maisie is, even as it is impossible to determine what, for instance, a blackbird is. A dictionary definition gives us a system of differences and not to a unified and totalizing meaning. The instability of meaning, the malconfort experienced by the reader of Maisie or the reader in search of the “ethics of reading” in Versions of Pygmalion is due to the radical instability of language itself. Even etymology proves of very little help, for “all words are metaphors—that is, all are differentiated, differed, deferred. Each leads to something of which it is the displacement in a movement without origin or end” (quoted in Leitch 595). Every noun—both proper and common— results from a tropological transformation; it is a catachresis which enables us to name that which had no name. But unlike the Adamic naming in which God guarantees the validity of the names, and where the names invoke His presence and authority, in this case: Each word inheres in a labyrinth of branching invertebral relationships going back not to a referential source but to something already, at the beginning, a figurative transfer, according to the Rousseauistic or Condillacian law that all words were originally metaphors. (Ariadne’s 19) Words—even the most ordinary—are the result of tropological transformation: every word is a narrative. Every word tells the narrative of its separation from what it is not and the narrative of the line traced to make it different from other words. As a result of this always already absent unified meaning and reference, “language is not an instrument or tool in man’s hands, a submissive means of thinking. Language rather thinks man and his ‘world…’” (Miller, “Critic” 158). This statement leads Miller to what is maybe the boldest move in Versions of Pygmalion. While we might have assumed thus far that the relationship between the male narrator and the female character in James’s novel repeated the primal scene of Pygmalion creating and controlling Galatea, Miller writes: “The narrator is de-personalized and unsexed by the act of narration, as the reader is by reading, the author by writing” (Versions 73). Maisie’s breaking free from the narrator, or the ultimate meaning of Maisie escaping Miller cannot be understood as romantic rebellion against and a victory over oppressive laws of referentiality and logocentricism. They lead to the questioning of the author, the narrator and the reader as a reliable source of what Maisie or Maisie is. For Miller, all three are tropological constructs that result from the reading of the novel: the critic does not produce his reading, but he is produced by it. J. Hillis Miller’s 219 Prosopopoeia is also a trope that makes a promise, namely to bring alive the dead or the absent. The trope promises an encounter akin to the one that occurs between Pygmalion and Galatea. Prosopopoeia ascribes life in the narrative process it demands: Maisie becomes “alive” when we read the novel; by analogy we tend to say that the practice of intuitive and intelligent criticism keeps the texts we read alive. It may seem that such is one of the most important ethical aspects of prosopopoeia: by bringing it (back) to life, the trope prevents the texts of a literary tradition from becoming stale and dead. All narratives, according to Miller, resort to prosopopoeia, the trope which shapes our topographies by constituting us as readers while constituting the thing read. As the cornerstone of reading, prosopopoeia is a transgression of the moral law; there is something “self-deceitful and idolatrous” (8) about it, and we might always be condemned for “the error of taking prosopopoeia literally” (7). Miller argues convincingly through the analysis of Maisie’s ethical choice that language is both referential and differential and that being in the prison-house of language necessarily entails reading the world as a text, taking decisions, making choices, and accordingly being submitted to a law we cannot face. As readers we find ourselves in the ironic situation of would-be creators. We might succumb to the temptation of believing that we can usurp the God-like power of calling back the dead from the grave, but it is our own life as readers which becomes “an effect of the text” (Miller, “Ariachne’s” 59). Like the narrator in Maisie or “Miller” in Versions of Pygmalion, the “reader” is the creation of language through his or her acts of reading, and each reader becomes the metonymical displacement, the differentiated embodiment and the deferral of the ethics of reading. In a allegorical representation of James’s sense of renunciation we may have here what is for Miller “the highest ethical act” (56) for readers: being able to accept that the text we read will never be the mirror image of our desire; reading must not be “a reciprocity in which the same loves the same” (4), but always should imply an opening onto otherness. The sense of renunciation comes, then, from the fact that I shall never know my neighbor or my lover: he or she will always remain other and they will always remain to some degree absent. Accepting this resistance, this malconfort, and living with it, in it, renouncing “All,” is the “ethics of reading” as it happens in Versions of Pygmalion. * * * While prosopopoeia seems to proclaim the superiority of life over death and a possibility of defeating the latter by forever bringing back deceased beings, it in fact constantly foreshadows death. Every narration takes place 220 Chapter 5 in the foreshadowing of the death of the author, the narrator, the characters and the readers. There is a sense of tragic irony in this trope which always says death while apparently pointing to life. By ascribing names, prosopopoeia differentiates and individualizes entities but it also proclaims that they are going to die. The ascription of a name is always already memorial; Miller writes: “The irreducible otherness of my neighbor or of my beloved may be expressed by saying that he or she may die” (4). Narratives and the trope that governs them constitute a “cover-up of death or of absence, a compensation, its power is needed even in my relation to my living companions. My neighbor is always somehow absent even in moments of most intimate presence” (4). Narratives are, in effect, dead letters, or more accurately letters of death. As in “Bartleby,” the story Miller reads in Chapter 4, “On errand of life, these letters speed to death.” We may have had the feeling that our rhetorical reading of Maisie enabled us to remove her from the traditional and conventional interpretations that heaved her down and made her absent behind that mask of intentions and conventions. In a way we may have had the feeling that Maisie became more present for us, and that we kept her alive by keeping our reading of the novel alive. However, Miller points out that “When Maisie grows up she escapes our knowledge, and in that it is as if she had died” (74). Here again the tragic irony of prosopopoeia manifests itself. It might have been Miller’s good intention to bring both Maisie and Maisie alive for the readers of Versions of Pygmalion. But ironically just as we were going to know “All” we are reminded of the irreducible part of otherness in everything and everyone around us; instead of experiencing a new life, we get a foretaste of the experience of death. Miller writes that “though [Maisie’s] act exemplifies what is apparently the highest value for James, the traditional Christian virtue of renunciation, that virtuous act has sorry effects on those around her” (59). Like James, Miller cannot and yet must renounce “Most,” “Everything,” “All.” If we think of Miller and the effect on his readers of his act of renunciation something similar to what happens in Maisie’s case may be observed: “Maisie’s renunciation, like that of the others [like that of Miller in Versions of Pygmalion] is at the same time an act of ferocious aggressiveness against those around her” (65). There can be no rest: as soon as the reading has stopped it must resume and start all over again, always questioning its own premises and functioning modes. It means that as an interpreter—a reader—I can never establish, ground, my power and my authority in any totalizing concept. Miller identifies this de-localization of the topography of interpretation in his reading of “Bartleby” where the narrator is expelled from his own walls (of language) by Bartleby and has to live in his carriage. Likewise, a rhetorical reading keeps turning us out of our own house and condemns us to be- J. Hillis Miller’s 221 come nomads. Miller’s deconstructive criticism does not constitute itself into an ideology, “it dislocates the borders, the framing of texts, everything which should preserve their immanence and make possible an internal reading, or merely reading in the classical sense of the term” (Derrida, “Statements” 92). Reading leaves us homeless and unprotected, which can be felt as scandalous and, above all, it seems to be a non-fulfillment of the promise that had been made to us by Miller at the beginning of the book. Far from being an ideal utopia, the topography of interpretation becomes a no-place, a chasm, or a mise en abyme, into which we fall and fall. With the best intentions in the world, Miller’s book does not shelter us from the attacks of doubt and uncertainty. Many assumptions of Western metaphysics were called to the bar but none of them was really condemned or definitively discarded. An informed reader of Miller could have anticipated this: “[D]econstruction … annihilates the ground on which the building stands by showing that the text has already annihilated that ground, knowingly and unknowingly” (“Stevens” 126). What is the result of this un-grounding for the reader? Can we say with Vincent Leitch that “the goal of rhetorical analysis [is] the deconstruction not only of individual literary texts but also of the general system of traditional metaphysics”? (606). This economic formulation poses many questions, but I shall stick here only to the problem of the “goal” or the intention of rhetorical or deconstructive criticism. To ascribe it a goal means turning “deconstructivism” into a tool, like a sculptor’s chisel, that would enable a crafty artist to shape some given material. Miller’s Versions of Pygmalion show on the contrary that the intentions or “goals” are of little relevance for the final result. Rhetorical reading “takes place,” it “happens” like a storm or an avalanche and it cannot be ascribed a reason or a cause without resorting to metaphysical forces such as God or Fate. This vibration of undecidability does not mean, however, that we are dispensed from reading. 143 Prosopopoeia which governs the act of reading casts light on the question of life and death that governs the whole question of ethics. In Chapter 4, “Who is He? ,” dedicated to Herman Melville’s “Bartleby,” Miller takes issue one more time with the position of the narrator of the short story. Here again the narrator is a “reader,” but unlike what happens in Maisie, that narrator has no privileged access to the subjectivity of the protagonist of the story, Bartleby. Actually, the narrator finds himself in the position of someone whose task is to report a story to his best knowledge, the way a witness summoned to court would. As a witness of some- 143 “One cannot make ethical judgment or perform ethical actions, such as teaching a poem, without first subjecting oneself to the words on the page, but once that has happened, the ethical operation will already necessarily have taken place” (Miller, “Theory” 613). 222 Chapter 5 thing that happened, the narrator has to do Bartleby justice, i.e. to act ethically towards him. What Miller’s reading of the story evidences is that such ethical behavior is impossible because the narrator is unable to “read” Bartleby. In the context of Versions of Pygmalion, Bartleby becomes a metonymical representation, a re-reading, of Maisie’s unknowablility. Like Maisie, Bartleby cannot be encompassed tropologically within the sphere of prosopopoeia. One may remember, as an echo, one of the opening sentences of Miller’s book: “what happens in the story may suggest what happens when we read it.” In the case of Melville’s story, this means that as readers we are faced with the same problem as the narrator: it is as much our impossible task to read and make sense of the story “Bartleby” as it is the narrator’s obligation to “read” and make sense of the character Bartleby. What happens in Melville’s story is no doubt an example of what Miller calls the “ethics of reading,” or more exactly in this case the story is about what happens when the process of reading is interrupted. When the rhetorical functions of language disappear, the narrator’s topography is jeopardized: The narrator has the most urgent need to contain Bartleby, to reduce and encompass him, to read him, so that he can get on with his work and repossess his own integrity. (162) It cannot suffice to say of Bartleby that he is “a little deranged,” or in the case of the story that it is “strange” or “undecidable”: some decision must be taken. The uncanny aspect of the story cannot be used to mask the necessity to come to terms with it: “If uncanniness is characteristic of literature, the critic needs all the canniness he can get in order to name the special mode of uncanniness in the work in question” (Miller, “Theory” 610). The narrator “wants to be able to tell a rounded and orbicular story about anyone, as the law can be made to apply to all cases” (152). Miller and the narrator alike have to perform the ethical act of reading that may enable them to restore Bartleby’s integrity and find a place for him in a topography of interpretation they can share. The narrator proposes to tell the narrative of Bartleby’s life, but admits that he knows practically nothing about him. When the narration develops we realize, as Miller points out, that “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is not so much the story of Bartleby, as the story of the impossibility of telling Bartleby’s story. The part of death that exists in Bartleby all along is an otherness that can never be confronted by the narrator. This allegorical reading, or rather, non-reading of Bartleby does not bode well for what Miller sees as the chances we have to ever understand our neighbor or our beloved. For Miller, Bartleby is unaccountable/ dead because he is exiled from language/ narration. While the narrator serves as a witness in the story, all J. Hillis Miller’s 223 he can bear witness to is his own human condition of being in language. He tries to relate ethically to Bartleby whom he erroneously assumes to belong to the same human condition, that is, linguistic condition as himself. The tragic irony of allegory seizes the story at this point. Instead of being the story of Bartleby—as the title had promised—it is the story of the impossibility to tell the story, and the protagonist is no longer Bartleby but the narrator himself who recounts himself while trying to recount “Bartleby.” The risk of solipsism looms large and Miller, who has undertaken the impossible task of accounting for an ultimately unknowable character and story, is running the same risk. Miller, the metonymical representation of the narrator, testifies like the latter to his cogito ergo sum, but his ratio—his “canniness”—is totally incapable of encompassing Bartleby. He belongs to a condition of language which is both referential and differential, both cognitive and rhetorical, but Bartleby does not. Through the reading of the story Miller begs the question whether we share a common language. We may take it for granted that we share a continuous and unified language that would function as a universal reference for all linguistic transactions. The allegorical reading of “Bartleby” evidences that there is no such thing; there is no unified language any more than there is a unified “reality” we could all refer to. Not only are the people around me radically different from me, but the only means of access I have to them is made of a chain of differences and deferrals. In his chapter on “Bartleby,” Miller radicalizes the question of reading. Like Melville’s The Confidence-Man, the text consists of a patchwork of rhetorical figures, an intricate game of differences that never stops. Bartleby is unknowable, which means that he has no identifiable self. As a result of the shaping of the reader by the object read, the status of the self as self of the narrator is being questioned. Miller’s title, “Who is he? ”, which echoes the narrator’s “In mercy’s name, who is he? ”, is an implicit “who am I? ” posed by a critic who sees himself risking solipsism and trying to avoid it. A solipsistic attitude is unacceptable from the ethical point of view; it would not lead the narrator (and Miller) to a confrontation with otherness. Like Pygmalion, he would be “guilty … of Narcissism and a strange kind of onanism” (10). To avoid what Miller calls an “autoerotic” process, the narrator has to be able to know who Bartleby is; in other words he must be able to tell his story. Bartleby’s appearance in his employer’s office produces a lapse in sequence, it introduces a mistake that invalidates the process of identification of what is happening; Miller writes: “This impossibility means a permanent gap in fulfilling the general responsibility of literature for a full accounting in language for everything that has happened in the real historical world” (146). Bartleby comes up or “happens” one day but no one can tell what happened. 224 Chapter 5 When Bartleby refuses to proofread the copies he makes for his employer he again makes nil the value of language. Miller shows that Bartleby eliminates any sort of validity from his work by refusing to check it, but more importantly he reduces the narrator’s words on the page to the status of meaningless black marks on the page. They become free signifiers, pure signs, but signs of nothing in the world of the narrator. They acquire the same status as Bartleby himself: even though they are physically there, they are nothing but dead letters. For the narrator Bartleby is like an abstract sign on the page. A mistake in a legal document, or a lapse of sequence—a “mistake”—such as the personage of Bartleby “strangely cast[s] doubt” (157) on the whole. 144 Bartleby is the cornerstone of Melville’s story: without him there would be no “Bartleby,” but there would be no narrator either, no “Melville,” no “Miller” and no “reader” reading “Miller” reading “Melville” and so forth. Bartleby is a form of event that has tremendous consequences and yet it cannot be understood in any dialogical system of cause and effect or right and wrong. The narrator cannot tell his story because he cannot come up with the tropological transformation that turns 144 Miller writes that mistakes seem to “disable a document from performing its function of conveyance” (157). He continues with a personal example: “On the title page of my copy of the Library of America volume that contains The Piazza Tales, the name Melville is misspelled ‘Meville’ … ”; and Miller asks: “How many more mistakes does the volume contain? ” (157). There seems to be something exaggerated in Miller’s statement when he says that the mistake in his volume of Melville’s writings feels as if it were the work of an impostor. Can we really doubt that the book is by Melville? On the other hand, Miller’s anecdote says something important about the feeling a community has that the language they speak (both in the sense of langage and langue) is their common property and represents the identity of the community. Any tampering with it is felt as an aggression against the community itself. Miller speaks of “his” copy of the Library of America. One can suppose that the mistake was reproduced in hundreds or even thousands of copies. What is it then that gives Miller this sense of possession? Of course, the particular volume was his personal belonging, but more importantly it shows that the language it contains is his personal belonging too. If someone abuses the language we speak, it is like the defacing of a funeral monument: we feel personally aggressed; there seems to be something sacrilegious in that act, something that violates the memory of who we are. In an uncanny way, on the even page facing Miller’s remark about mistakes (156), the name Bartleby is misspelled as “Bartlebay.” The invalidating process initiated by Bartleby seems to contaminate Miller’s own writing. The example given by Miller and the mistake that one discovers on the page next to it work in ambiguous ways: on the one hand, it makes Miller’s point; on the other hand, it makes it so well that if we follow him to the end, it invalidates what he is writing. “Bartlebay” is not the only coquille in Versions of Pygmalion. There is at least one more on page 165, and the excerpts in French from Blanchot contain many mistakes. What does it mean? Is Miller sloppy? Is his proof-reader sloppy? Is his publisher? I think that what appears here is the in-built resistance of language to being encompassed in a fixed and regular topography, even if it is simply the topography of the printed page. The latter functions as the crystallization of rhetorical figures which make reading possible. J. Hillis Miller’s 225 signs into living entities. Bartleby is a monument of mourning, a pure sign whose physical presence is really an absence, the absence of death: Bartleby is the invasion of death into life, but not death as something from outside life. He is death as the other side of life or the cohabitant with life. “Death,” nevertheless, is not the proper name for this ghostly companion of life, as if it were an allegorical meaning identified at last. Nor is “Death” its generic or common name. “Death” is a catachresis for what can never be named properly. (172) Like “Bartleby,” “Death” is always an improper name for what cannot be properly named. Thus Bartleby’s famous phrase “I would prefer not to” is shown by Miller to totally annihilate sense by removing it thus from articulate language and depriving it of any sort of referentiality. Bartleby’s words are a “no-language” something that exists at the level of animal or natural sounds, comparable to the sound of the wind in the trees. The phrase is neither black nor white. There is nothing you can do with it. It is like an endless loop in the process of reasoning. The disruptive energy of this extraordinary group of everyday words is limitless. A shorthand way of describing that power is to say that Bartleby’s sentence cannot be assimilated to any dialectical or oppositional way of thinking. You can neither deny it nor accept it. It is neither constative nor performative, or perhaps it might be better to say that it is an exceedingly disquieting form of performative. (156; emphasis added) I have italicized in the above paragraph the marks of hesitation, negation and vacillation that Miller uses when trying to describe Bartleby’s phrase. The paragraph suggests that the narrator’s nervousness is contaminating Miller’s writing. Bartleby is the lapse in the sequence that makes it impossible to write an orderly description of what the sentence means, and hence who Bartleby is. Bartleby’s phrase is purely rhetorical and performative; it does not refer to anything. Nevertheless, the fact that it cannot be ascribed a meaning does not imply that it has no significance. Its undecidability, as the undecidability in other texts read by Miller, makes it an aggressive and exceedingly disquieting performative that has devastating effects on the life of the narrator and on Miller’s topography of interpretation. Miller’s analysis of the story points to the double articulation of the problem of reading. The narrator is incapable of reading his employee and yet he realizes that he has no other choice: he must “read” him even if this results in the narration of a non-story. The narrator’s case shows that we must read even when we would prefer not to and maybe cannot. The same thing happens to Miller (and the other critics who have spent a lot of time trying to encompass Bartleby in the realm of language) who must read 226 Chapter 5 “Bartleby” just as the narrator has to read the character. Both are faced with their responsibility to get it “right,” to do it justice. The ethics of reading as it emerges from Miller’s text demands that the process of reading be not interrupted because the consequences would be the interruption of the dwelling of man in language. From that point of view, every book is a monument of mourning, a sign that demands to be read: “The published book we hold in our hands is the surviving tombstone of the living act of writing” (190). A text is a witness that testifies to man’s condition as being in language. It is also the embodiment of a speech-act. Texts are the presence of an absence and only their reading can remove them from death to place them within the process of living/ dying. The numerous references to tombs and funeral monuments in Versions of Pygmalion seem to attest that books are traces of the otherness of death and probably also the other of life; it is a version of otherness that can never be represented by a presence but only enacted or performed by an absence. This undermines the semiotic and symbolic structure in which the text evokes and invokes the presence of the mourned beloved or the dead author. The text is the eternal absence of the law; it is not really the mourned absence of a deceased or departed law, but rather the absent law that was never present and that cannot be made present because it cannot be named. Thus, every book is a witness and turns the reader into a witness. Reading is an act of bearing witness for the living world. This is the ultimate meaning of “Bartleby”’s narrator: he tries, in vain, to bear witness to Bartleby’s humanity and thereby to his own. It is a moot point whether the human race is the only one that has a language, but we are probably the only race that lives in a world whose topography is shaped by language. The ethical and political rules of our societies are the result of acts of reading, i.e. of speech acts which are always already fictionalizing acts that turn every word into a catachresis, every phrase into a metaphor. It is the eternal absence of the law that shapes the world, for such is the law of the law: you can never face it, yet you can never avoid it. In Melville’s story the narrator must perform the speech-act of reading in order to face the requirement of the law. He tells the reader that he tries to get direct access to the law or to what he takes the law to be: he wants the texts of Puritan divines to tell him what the law is. But texts do not speak; texts do not say anything. Like Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to,” their law is impenetrable not because it is veiled but because it is absent. No subtle analysis will yield any result as to what this phrase means. Its sense is hidden neither by Bartleby’s malevolence nor by his stupidity. All the narrator can do is precisely narrate, if not Bartleby’s story, which is impossible, at least a story as close as possible to the story he must tell, which may be the same necessity that forced Herman Melville to write the story “Bartleby.” Similarly, Miller’s text can never name the law of the ethics of reading, he can never J. Hillis Miller’s 227 tell its story, I mean the story of the law; he must keep telling “versions” of the story of the law. All readers participate in that Arabian Nights-like process which is both lifeand death-dealing: Just as any naming substitutes for the presence of what is named and presupposes some form of unavailability, personification kills just as it ascribes life. (223) All are texts of law, independently of their contents. Thus their reading always has ethical, political and social consequences. However, they do not tell their readers how to live and what to do,” but they participate in the narrative and fictionalizing process through which readers shape the topographies they inhabit. Through his analysis of the tropological transformations elicited by all acts of reading, Miller blurs the limits between the so-called literary and non-literary texts, and implicitly the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional.’ He does not do so in a transcendental mode which would isolate the critical text as a sort of interpretation of interpretation—thus assuming a transcendental stance outside the narrative discourse—but he does it within the narrative mode itself: Versions of Pygmalion is a “narrative” text telling five subsequent versions of Ovid’s tale, but the text itself is, in a sort of looping movement, the permanently new additional version of the tale. It is not the definitive last version of the tale, that which would represent them all, but the always repeated enactment of the tale of Pygmalion. * * * One of the characteristics of Miller’s criticism is that he deals with texts in several languages. In Versions of Pygmalion a Latin text (Ovid’s Metamorphoses), a German text (Kleist’s “Der Findling”) and a French text (Blanchot’s L’arrêt de mort) are read together, facing American canonical texts (James’s What Maisie Knew and “The Last of the Valerii” and Melville’s “Bartleby”). This contributes to Miller’s deterritorialization of his interpretation; he does not search for things that these texts have in common. It would be a mistake to attempt to “discover” common features in these texts that would transcend the cultural and linguistic territories in which they were produced. What Miller concentrates on is not what the texts “say, ” but rather on their capability to make “something” happen in the world through the process of reading. His interest rests in their performative power in the physical world, and not in the idiosyncratic message or meaning of a text in a given cultural milieu. This multilingual aspect of Miller’s work brings in the question of translation as another inevitable instance of breaking of the law: 228 Chapter 5 And what of translation, for example the translation of L’arrêt de mort into Death Sentence? Does it not both add and take away, desecrate the text by adding all those new words in a foreign language while at the same time obliterating, defacing the original? (194) Translation always poses the question of the relationship between the “translated” and the “original,” but it also poses the question—as Miller points out referring to Walter Benjamin—of the status of the “original”: The shoulders of the translators always bend and break under the burden, the “Aufgabe.” This, according to Benjamin, is because the “original” is not original. It is already a wandering of language in perpetual exile from a lost original language. (195) In the exegetical tradition, interpretation is already a form of translation. The priest uncovers the truth of the Word hidden in the words of the Scriptures for the benefit of the community. It is an ethical act of reading, inasmuch as the community is to profit from the guidance offered by God’s law transcribed by the minister into the language of the community; in this case too, reading is to provide a “conduct of life.” In the translation that makes the Word of God pass into the language of the community, the divine law is exchanged for another law or set of laws that are to shape the life of the congregation. Something similar takes place in Versions of Pygmalion. Here the critic is presented by Miller as a sort of go-between; s/ he is the articulation between the literary text and the community of readers: The critic attempts to translate the original into other terms, into one or another of the languages of criticism, while at the same time remaining faithful to the text, repeating the truth in another tongue. (198) “Faithful” is a word that can only be understood in ethical terms. Similarly, “truth” (probably one of the most disputed words in criticism) also has a moral value. Most people will agree that the aim of translation is to produce two texts out of one and both have to be equally “good.” This usually means that the translation has to be as “faithful” as possible to the original. Miller quotes a comment on the subject by Walter Benjamin: The well-translated work is praised in two opposed ways: one would not believe it to be translated, people say; or again, it is truly the same work, one rediscovers it again marvelously the same; but in the first case, one effaces, for the sake of the new language, the origin of the work; in the second case, for the sake of the work, the originality of the two languages; in both cases something essential is lost. (196) What Benjamin’s comment evidences is that there can be no “faithful” translation because there is no way of ascertaining that the “original” is sustained by any sort of truth that would, precisely, make it original: every text is always already an “unfaithful” translation. While the minister of the J. Hillis Miller’s 229 church could render visible the “wonders of the invisible world,” the postmodern critic can no longer do so because his interpretation is no longer backed up by the sort of certainty that supported the reading of the priest. Following Walter Benjamin’s intuition, Miller suggests that every act of reading—and consequently writing—is a form of translation. However, he asks whether reading in translation can ever be a “serious task” or whether it is “always irresponsible.” The filigree assumption in Miller’s question is that we have no other choice: our reading is always a translation of sorts, even when we only read texts “in the original.” The legal and moral implications of the vocabulary used by Miller remind us that we stand in front of our reading very much in the same way as the narrator of “Bartleby” stands in front of his employee. We are to be faithful in our “accounting for” something we cannot know and cannot identify, which constantly places us in a difficult position from the ethical point of view. Because we do not know the “original” that is to be “read,” all we can do is to turn it into a narrative which we read in translation. Our only way to deal with whatever original truth there was or is, is to turn it into the “as if” mode. It follows from this predicament that no reading can be done outside the “as if” mode and no access to the “real” is possible without an act of reading of a narrative. Miller deals with this question through his reading of Blanchot’s L’arrêt de mort. In a very intriguing dialogue Blanchot’s narrator proposes to a female character, N., in a foreign language: Just such a dialogue takes place between the narrator and N. the narrator speaks N.’s language, which he knows only imperfectly, and N. answers him not in that language, which she knows, but in French, which is an alien language to her. The result is a strange irresponsibility or gaiety. Each partner in the dialogue says things he or she would not otherwise have said or could say in “an unknown language.” Each speaker more or less invents either language on the spot, stammering creating impossible or ridiculous idioms, speaking like a child who is learning to talk. (203-204) However lightly and “innocently” uttered, these words have an efficacious effect in the characters’ world. The characters of Blanchot’s text epitomize the situation of individuals capable of speech-acts in spite of the fact that language is always foreign to them. This seems to suggest that for Miller we never speak in our “mother tongue” or in our “father-tongue,” but always in a tongue which is removed from its original meaning and the truth that might sustain it. We accede to meaning as we speak (or perhaps read or write) “[r]ather than being the expression of a thought, [our words] create thoughts and feelings” (204). However, this lack of control over language certainly does not mean that we are discharged from our responsibility. We are in an Oedipal situation; we are to assume the responsibility for our speech-acts, and we will always be held accountable for them even though we “did not know.” 230 Chapter 5 Miller often repeats that the choice of a book or a passage is not “innocent.” This conveys the intentionality of every speech-act, which makes of each of them a strategic act. But even more importantly, it points to the fact that every speech-act implies potential guilt for our breaking a law we can never face. The law is never present. It cannot be situated in the book— contrary to the Calvinistic interpretation of the incarnation of the Word. Because of its always being removed, the law cannot be translated into rules of conduct that would directly apply to our lives; our inability to pin down the law means that we cannot transform it, break it down, as it were, through tropological transformations that would allow us to make a graven image of it. Where are we to search for (the law of) the ethics of reading, then? If it is not “contained” in the texts we read, it means that it cannot be contained in our everyday practice in a jurisprudence of sorts. It appears that the topos of the law is not a fixed topos comparable to a anthropomorphizing transformation of a statue. It is a topos which is always removed, in the sense that it is always displaced and also taken away, transported elsewhere like the tent village of a nomadic tribe; it is taken apart and destroyed by the very forces that created it. The law as we can “read” it occupies the in-between, the space opened up by every text. It is not a sedentary but a nomadic topos: it cannot be charted nor situated in a Euclidean or a metaphysical space. It “takes place,” it “happens” within the process of reading; it starts with it and ends with it. Miller’s anxiety about “graven images” shows that it is impossible to assign to the law any kind of territorial fixity where it could be applied, as it is the case— allegorically—with the laws governing a nation. The responsibility passes from the superior authority (God, the State, the Institution, the Essence) to the individual and his responsibility vis-àvis her/ his neighbor. The nomadic space of the law is submitted to the cruel rules of nomadic life: whatever/ whoever cannot be mobile and adaptable enough to keep up with the multifaceted, multifarious and swiftly moving law must be abandoned. “Practically” speaking, this means that Miller’s interpretation is always a heuristic method that cannot be reified and encompassed within the anthropomorphic shapes of a mermaid or a statue. The “ethics of reading” is a constant of our lives. It will not go away. It is a “Bartleby” of sorts, something we cannot dismiss either by chasing it away or by trying to wall it in within a given territory. The fact that we can never be in the presence of the law does not mean that we are allowed to ignore it and be ignorant of it: “nul n’est sensé ignorer la loi,” (“ignorance of the law is no excuse) the French civil code peremptorily affirms. This is the situation which applies to the ethical law of reading. We are not to “ignore” the law. The meaning of “to ignore” and ignorer do not exactly overlap, and this translation problem might be of interest here. The primary meaning of the French phrase is that it is every citizen’s duty J. Hillis Miller’s 231 to know what the law is; nobody is to be ignorant of it. A second meaning, closer to what the verb ignorer came to mean when it passed into English suggests that nobody can act while “ignoring” the law, i.e. without taking it into account when determining the course of their actions and decisions. Miller’s Versions of Pygmalion shows that while we are constantly acting under penalty for breaking the law, we cannot not obey it. Once we were born into a world of the written line, we have to “read” it and take the risks that are involved in that process. Miller acutely analyses this question through the situation of Count Camillo in James’s “The Last of the Valerii.” Camillo is a protagonist whose avatars people James’s late production: he is the aristocratic but ruined European man who marries a rich American woman. Camillo shares with Prince Amerigo in The Golden Bowl a great physical attractiveness, but he is also described as being a sort of Barbarian: [H]e is all body, a body perhaps without a soul, splendid no doubt in the physical sense as a lover for Martha but good for little else. “He had no beliefs nor hopes, nor fears,—nothing but senses, appetites, and serenely luxurious tastes. … He had moods in which his consciousness seemed so remote and his mind so irresponsive and dumb, that nothing but a powerful caress or a sudden violence was likely to arouse him.” (233) The Count is totally controlled by his wife who manages to turn him into a stereotype—a kind of catachresis. But, “[t]he digging up of Juno changes everything” (233), and Camillo becomes a “reader.” He applies to the statue the tropological transformation that turns it into his lover. He thereby escapes from the ruled topos of his wife to flee into the open and nomadic space shaped by his reading. Martha, his wife, succeeds in having him bury the statue again during a mock-funeral ceremony and Camillo returns to her. As Miller shows, this is an apparently simple allegorical piece: The moral of the story, the ethical command the reader seems to receive from it, is apparently clear enough: Be faithful to your lawful wedded wife, and do not go whoring after strange gods or committing that version of the error of prosopopoeia that leads to the personifying of stones in which worship cannot be distinguished from sexual desire. (217) Camillo confronts the ethical law of reading and “reads” the statue of Juno the way Pygmalion read his statue of Galatea. The emotion and the infatuation for the statue is as “real” as the emotion they could have felt for a living person. The statue is transformed into a lover by the process of fictionalizing, because “[r]ather than being the expression of thought, [words] create thoughts and feelings” (204). Camillo’s wife feels threatened by this new embodiment of the law that she formerly incarnated. From the stronghold of her economical power and her matrimonial right she was in control. The story shows once again that 232 Chapter 5 “reading” is a subversive activity because it always removes the male law (even when it is enforced by a woman) and destroys the possibility of its presence. Martha uses her power to stop her husband’s “reading” the statue in terms of a lover: she has the object (in this case a sculpture, not a piece of writing) buried in what Miller aptly calls a funeral but which is also an auto-da-fé. At first sight she has it her way, but Miller points out that Camillo’s subversive reading activity continues despite his wife’s intervention: The Count buries his own head as if it were a marble bust. He buries it, moreover, in his wife’s lap. This image of birth in reverse or of a sexual act suggests that he has transferred to his wife his submission to the Juno as majestic and emasculating mother, just as the falling on his knees echoes his prayerful submission by moonlight to the statue. (236) Camillo submits to the incarnation of the law, to the “emasculating mother.” Miller suggests, however, that he does not accept her as such but transforms her into a statue in turn. In Miller’s reading, Martha becomes another monument of mourning, like the myrrh tree in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. She pays the price for destroying an object of reading; she did not hear, or probably did not want to hear (in her desire to regain the affection of her husband) the admonition that all texts bear in themselves, and which is expressed in Blanchot’s L’arrêt de mort, which Miller quotes: “These pages can end here, and nothing that follows what I have just written will make me add anything to it or take anything away from it. This remains, this will remain until the very end. Whoever would obliterate it from me, in exchange for that end which I am searching for in vain, would himself become the beginning of my own story, and would become my victim.” (188) The Count’s wife becomes the victim of the statue, or rather of the tropological transformation resulting from the Count’s “reading” of it. In an echo of Genesis, Martha is turned into a statue by her husband as a punishment for defacing a tomb and trying to face the law by impersonating it. Her sacrilegious attempt to impersonate the law turns her into a monument of mourning because she ignored the ethical law of reading and the “disturbing reciprocity between statue-making and person-making” (225). Camillo is a man who, like the rest of us, cannot not read once he has learnt to do so. He must obey, for “The first law of reading which is that we must do what we read” (241). Miller points to the ethical consequences of this statement: The formulation of a moral for the fable is not the place to locate the ethics of reading narrative. The ethical act in question here is rather personifying the inanimate. This act must occur as a presupposition whatever the overt ethical themes of the story may be. (241) J. Hillis Miller’s 233 Thus the morality expressed by James’s text is a far cry from the ethical import of the story: The unequivocal happy ending is (also) shadowed by the way the Count’s return of affection for his wife is described, not as a shift back to wholesome feeling, but as a shift from one illusion to another. (220) What matters for Miller is the situation of the Count as a “reader.” In “The Last of the Valerii,” as well as in the rest of the texts he writes on, Miller concentrates on the narrator. This particular attention indicates that the act of reading is also an act of storytelling. In James’s story the irony of the “unreliable narrator” makes it impossible for readers to apply any of the overt ethical conclusions of the text to their own lives. Martha tries to do so and apparently succeeds, as “Martha and the narrator see to it that Camillo the pagan dies for good, that he becomes the survivor of his own death, the last of the Valerii” (237). However, Miller points out that this conclusion is unacceptable for a “serious reader.” As readers, we evade this conclusion just as Camillo escapes from his wife’s control when she thinks she controls him. The more we try to make a “graven image” of the law unto ourselves, in this case in the form of an apparently easily applicable moral, the more remote and removed we are from the ethical law of reading. Miller’s reading of James’s story shows again how vain it is to try to fix, to assign a territory to the law, to try to enclose it in an orthogonal space: The attempt to read “The Last of the Valerii” leads the reader in the end to the experience of a radical suspension of unequivocal meaning. The text becomes unreadable, dead words on the page, provocative hints at meaning that cannot be satisfactorily put together in a totalizing act of comprehension. The text may be read this way or it may be read that way, but the text itself justifies the reader neither in choosing between the two nor in reconciling them in some dialectical synthesis. (237) The text becomes unreadable and yet we must read it. We come face to face with a Bartleby of sorts to whom we cannot assign an unequivocal meaning and yet we must try. If we are to behave ethically we must avoid “calling the police” by encapsulating the meaning of the text within a safe space where we can control it. This is what happens to Bartleby who is thrown in jail or to Camillo who is symbolically unmanned by his wife and the socioeconomical forces she embodies. Thus, like in Blanchot’s narrative, James’s story never ends with the last word on the page. We must read and re-read the text over and over again. Every text leads to other texts that must be read and re-read in turn. Every act of reading/ writing is the confrontation with a form of otherness with which we can never come face to face, and every serious act of reading can only give us a “foretaste” of that one encounter at which we can never be present. Miller’s text is another act of reading, another version of what 234 Chapter 5 Blanchot calls “‘le même,’” “la pensée.” We can never pin it down because it only exists in the nomadic in-between opened up by every act of reading, that space which “serious readers” explore day after day, after day, after day—after. POST-SCRIPT PENELOPE’S FABRIC “Young men who after Odysseus’ death have come here to woo me, you are eager for this marriage with me; nevertheless I ask your patience till I have finished weaving this robe, so that what I have spun may not be wasted and go for nothing; it is King Laertes’ burial robe….” From that time on she would weave the great web all day, but when night came she would have torches set beside her and would unravel her work. For three years this trickery foiled the trusting suitors; but when seasons passed and the fourth year came, one of her maids who was in the secret revealed the truth, and we came upon her undoing the glossy web; so with ill grace she finished the work perforce. —The Odyssey (2. 93) The post-script to this book should be the place where we pick up the fallen threads that form the woof of the fabric of the text or the stitches of the patchwork that constitutes the book. There are threads which we have followed for a while and in a moment of forgetting have let go and lost; there are those to which we have clung so hard that they broke; and those that were so tenuous and slim that they slipped trough our fingers and disappeared in the dark. In a non-circular loop I come back to some of the propositions announced in the introduction and to some unexpected ones proposed in the chapters. At this time when I finish—perforce—my work, when it seems that the present of the doing has finally caught up with the undoing of the past and re-membered it, I should try to present the “whole thing” to my readers. This is the time when Ulysses, the ruler of the world, is back; the odyssey is ended—what happens next? Homer’s Odyssey recounts the extravagant deeds of a hero who travels all over the human world and even beyond its limits. His adventures are strange and mysterious but all these narratives are like motifs or embroideries on a simple, almost prosaic woof, that of a mariner who stays away from home for too long leaving his wife and young child behind waiting for him. While Ulysses weaves his way back to Ithaca, and while Homer weaves the many threads of his narrative, Penelope weaves and un-weaves a piece of cloth, which allows her to keep at bay the suitors who would like to take Ulysses’ place. To avoid this, Penelope invents a story for them: the 236 Postscript story of King Laertes’ burial robe. It is a story of weaving, but Penelope makes it a story of un-weaving, which allows her to extend the fiction she has invented and thus await Ulysses’ return. Penelope, like Scheherazade, is an artful woman and a skilful fiction maker. Night after night she does and undoes the threads of her narrative and deceives thereby the men who want to possess her life. Her fictile and fictive art keeps her alive and free. As in Scheherazade’s case, the fiction she invents makes the law of her male master-to-be go astray; it causes a vacancy of the male law. It does not mean for all that the law disappears or that there is no law. The storyline of her narrative imposes another law, but not the one in the name of which Telemachus succeeds his father, nor the one that says that Penelope will be known by another man chosen by Ulysses’ son (Odyssey 1, 182). The law enforced by Penelope’s narratives is an ethical law which imposes its tropes (weaving, un-weaving) on the real world and subverts the laws of genetics and genealogy. Penelope’s artful fiction shows that the law imposed by the story line always prevents the same or the copy from succeeding the same. The law of the story line is that no genealogy will be respected: the son shall not succeed his father and he shall not speak the same language. Narratives introduce differences which take place whenever they are read, and those differences can only be expressed in another language. The ethical law of fiction always speaks a foreign language and constantly calls for translation. This has been one of the attempts of this book: to translate the ethical law of narratives, so that Penelope’s fabric can be seen. But of course by doing so, I tell a new narrative which in turn calls for a translation and my present attempt to anchor it in the language in which I have written so far in this book may be vain. Even as I am trying to retrace in this post-script the line that would present the spirit and the letter of the law ordering the topos of this book, I realize that it is escaping from me to the other side of the line where it already speaks a new language—the language of fiction. Thus, I am forced to admit that instead of following up the previous parts of this book, this concluding part tends to tell its own story in utter disrespect for the chapters that fathered it. It may be that instead of bringing them out into the light of day, this final part shrouds the preceding chapters and takes them back into the night where they are undone, their threads un-woven—some might be tempted to say deconstructed—by the artificial light of torches. This book, written by a male writer, is about five male authors who write of male themes and recount the stories of male protagonists. In each of these stories there seems to be division of the topos between the doers and the makers and the done and the made. The first chapter deals with the difficult enforcement of a male law by a hero/ legislator and his attempt to turn a space into a topos that would be a metonymy of the masculine law. The hero/ hoer of the next chapter tries to impose himself as the land- Penelope’s Fabric 237 surveyor and ruler of a topography that would be governed by the “Higher Laws” (as Thoreau might have it) issued from his mastermind. The third chapter is about a confidence man who defines the topography of a narrative in spite of the fact that his actual presence in the narrative can never be ascertained. A man with a blue guitar tries to order the space of the fourth chapter, while “versions” of the life-endowing acts of another male hero/ creator, Pygmalion, are under scrutiny in the last chapter. From one chapter to the next there is a line of law givers, rulers, landscapers and creators who model life out of inert matter—clay, marble or ink. Each of these makers shapes the American topos through acts of reading that result in the writing of a narrative. They try thereby to impose their law on a topography; but the law that in the end orders that topography is not their law, but the law of narrative. Like Penelope’s suitors these men are submitted to the law of fiction that undoes them and the male law they try to enforce. It appears from this that this book is also—or maybe primarily—about the “other” of these male heroes and the “other” of these male creative myths. The other in these narratives is not just a foil used to emphasize the personality and the deeds of the hero, nor is it a background against which these deeds would appear in their magnitude. The other is not either the alter ego, a simple subliminal projection of fantasies, let alone the embodiment of some suppressed anxiety or complex. The other is the source of desire which makes possible those narratives and the delineation of the worlds they occupy. Desdemona makes the existence of a play entitled Othello possible, and she entitles Othello to become the tragic hero of the play. If Penelope did not undo her fabric every night, Ulysses would never have time to make it back to Ithaca after becoming the hero of “wideranging spirit” (Odyssey 1.1). The thread Penelope uses to make the woof of her fabric is the line of Ulysses’ life, so that one understands better why she claims to be weaving “a burial robe.” Her indefatigable stitching and unpicking, her weaving and un-weaving traces the route of Ulysses’ journey and pieces together The Odyssey, preventing it from falling apart. For all his cunning and his strength, Ulysses would be but a stranded mariner, a soldier whose sword would rust in his hand, if it were not for his wife’s shuttle and needle. It is not so much Penelope’s doing as her undoing that holds the narrative together and allows it to continue. Ulysses goes to war, fights with monsters, defeats innumerable enemies, conceives battle plans and steers his ship through storms thrown upon him by angry gods. Meanwhile, Penelope sits at home and waits. 145 The same sort of thing happens in the 145 Ulysses presents himself and defines his role in the narrative; he is the doer, the man who intervenes in the public sphere, a shaper of the world. Furthermore as King 238 Postscript narratives I read in this book: men are the doers, the legislators, or the creators. Women seem to belong to the “created,” the “legislated,” the “known,” or simply the absent, the non-existent. I have tried to show, however, that “femininity”— something sexually different from men, but not only that; something socially, linguistically, psychologically different from men, but not only that—is always at work in these texts. “It” makes the created topos ultimately escape the control of its male creator or legislator. 146 The “witches,” “(the language of) nature,” “the confidence ‘man,’” or Laertes’ son and Telemachus’s father he represents the continuation of a genealogical line that must not be interrupted: “I am Odysseus, son of Laertes; among all mankind I am known for subtleties, and the fame of me goes up to heaven….” (9. 9.) Penelope, on the other hand, seems to have a very subsidiary role in the narrative: she is to stay home and take care of domestic tasks: With sudden tears [Penelope] spoke to the heaven-taught bard: “Phemius, you know many other lays to beguile men’s hearts, deeds of heroes and deeds of gods that the bards sing of; choose one of those and sing it among the suitors here while they drink their wine in silence, but cease from this melancholy lay that always wrings my heart within me, because I more than any other am pierced by sorrow beyond forgetting; so peerless a man is he I mourn for, he I remember always, a man whose fame has gone through the length and breadth of Hellas and Argos.” But thoughtful Telemachus answered her: “… Odysseus is not the only hero whose day of return was blotted out in the land of Troy; many another fell there also. No, go up to your room again and look to your own province, distaff and loom, and tell your women to ply their task; public speech shall be men’s concern, and my concern most of all; authority in this house is mine.” At this she withdrew to her room in wonder, laying to heart her son’s wise words. (1. 340-66) The line she is concerned with is that of the loom and the distaff, but even as her “natural” task would be to prolong the line formed by the thread, her decisive contribution consists in interrupting it. 146 I am aware of my problematic use of the words “feminine” and “femininity,” and my using them in different contexts only de-fines them. “Feminine” obviously covers a larger field than “female” which is related to sexual difference in a biological sense. The word includes however a sexual and gender issue because it is to offer an alternative to male sexual identity which is a great part—maybe the greatest part— of masculinity. That’s why I propose that the “feminine” law (akin to fiction, narrative, and ethics) is an alternative to the “male” law (akin to logos, natural order, divine order). I do not respect the taxonomic division that would require that “male” is opposite of or can be contrasted with “female,” “masculine” with “feminine” just as “big” is the opposite of “small,” “light” of “heavy,” etc. While in my readings the “male” law is enforced by male characters/ heroes/ authors, the “feminine” law is not embodied or represented by female characters or authors. Most importantly, the a-logical contrast between “male” and “feminine” should signal that the feminine law is not the contrary of the male law, it does not substitute for it or succeed it. It is its “other” which creates a vacancy of the law, a discontinuity in the line of the law. Penelope’s Fabric 239 “Maisie” (both the character and the novel), always end up undoing by night what their creators did by day while refusing to become objects of knowledge, creation, or legislation. This distribution of roles in which men are the makers who run the world and do things seems to cast women in the role of the perturbing or even destructive “other” who undoes things. My saying that it is “undoing” that holds the fabric of the narratives together could be another rhetorical ploy to emphasize the male hero. A rhetorical way out (“rhetorical” in the sense of a figure of language, not a figure of speech) would consist in saying that the role assumed by the “feminine” in these stories—like Penelope’s role in The Odyssey—is “paradoxically” creative. But to refer to the “common opinion,” to judge something which is contrary to it (para, ‘contrary to,’ ‘against’; dokein, ‘to think good’), is already a way of establishing that there is rightful (orthodox) creation on the one hand, and another (paradoxical) creation on the other. Such is the “common opinion” which in our Western culture has always valued the doing—for reasons that have not been sufficiently examined—and ignores the positive force and the necessity of undoing. In the first two chapters of this book the “feminine” assumes the form of female characters (“witches”) or of a female symbol (“nature”). Even as I refer to the “feminine” in the other three chapters, that form of femininity can no longer be associated with female characters nor even female symbols or figures. Femininity there is not crystallized in a representation of the female or the feminine. I have tried to show that in spite of the absence of representation of the feminine, “it” is not non-existent there. Although she is not represented most of the time in the words of The Odyssey, Penelope is certainly not absent from the narrative—it is the woven and un-woven woof of her fabric that holds the narrative together. It may even be that in her undoing she is the miglior fabbro of the narrative poem. She introduces through her story a language into the narrative which speaks the law that prevents the narrative from falling apart: it is a constitutive and legislative act, but it is not “written” in the language of Laertes, Ulysses or Telemachus. She is “il miglior fabbro del parlar materno,” which means that the language she introduces through her narrative, and the act of undoing it implies, is an alternative to the male language of fathers and sons. However, even when we consider it positively, otherness still seems to be on the wrong side of the line. My calling that otherness “feminine” could once again result from the same prejudice which in Western culture acclaims doing and considers undoing as a disruptive and unproductive element. The topographies of Western culture are constructed on male myths of doing which define in turn myths of femininity. The only reason, Ultimately, it is easiest to refer to the feminine law as “it,” which does not mean that it is neutral. 240 Postscript therefore, for calling otherness in the stories I read “feminine” is because it questions and dismisses both the myths of masculinity and the myths of femininity, as well as their supposed opposition. When I examine the otherness that appears in the discourse of these narratives and call it “feminine,” I designate something that is not exclusively nor specifically linked to the female gender, but something that resists the masculine and the feminine mythopoietic ordering of a topos. Otherness as I try to understand it through my readings is always already other, and it is expressed in a language that always differs from the “received language” even before a Babel-like catastrophe that opposes it to the unifying language of God. The “other” voice in these stories reveals a confusion of voices that always cover the voice of the (male) creator and shaper of their topos. In a fascinating piece on this subject, Aleida Assman writes: The story about the tower of Babel as told in Genesis II.1-9 has a key-word. This is “one” (ekhad). In the original state, the whole earth was united in one language, and this language consisted of “one” ( = invariable? ) words [sic]; the Hebrew text here uses “one” in the plural. … The insistence on words like “one” and “name” makes it obvious that the divine prerogatives are about to be usurped by man. A point of the story seems to be that the One is reserved for God, while the Many is the proper dimension for man. (90) In the stories I read, the prerogative of speaking in one unified voice and the power of organizing a topography by naming is male. I try to show that this prerogative is always usurped by what I call the “feminine,” as “it” is at work within the writing of the male authors themselves. It follows that otherness cannot de defined in terms of gender, just as it cannot be defined in terms of race, age, religion or sexual preference. Admitting any such criterion would make us relapse into the pitfall of binary oppositions that I have tried to question throughout this book. It would be naive, however, to think that I have been able to avoid all binary oppositions, all exclusive dichotomies. My very reference to them, my attempt to find alternatives, my reference to gender, for instance, shows that I remain subservient to the language of the culture of the line that always separates one side from the other. On the other hand, I claim that my readings here do more than analyze and thereby maybe condone the one-sidedness of discourse by recognizing the forces that prevent language from ever functioning in binary oppositions. I hope that my readings deconstruct or undo some of the legislative or creative myths presented here by suggesting that there is within the apparent oneness of the language of these myths a form of otherness that is at work there, and which is what I have called in diverse places—after Derrida writing after Hegel—the “cornerstone” of the American topos. To this I must hasten to add that I do not seek to “debunk” myths; they do not Penelope’s Fabric 241 need me or anybody else for that. Myths need no debunkers, for contrary to what those zealous debunkers think (or feign to think), myths are very well known and accepted for what they are: myths. Those who want to tear them down usually want to replace them with other myths better suited to their personal (or collective) agendas. What I seek here is not to replace “male” myths by “feminine” myths, but to understand how these myths are constructed and how they are used as material for the construction of the topos called the real world. In a book devoted to order and place, it seemed important to look at how doing is the positive constructive term associated to man (Ulysses), while undoing is the negative deconstructive term associated to the woman (Penelope). “Thoughtful Telemachus” dispatches his mother to “distaff and loom,” her “own province,” and reserves for men and for himself, as his father’s heir, “public speech,” that is the ordering of the world. In my readings, I examined how the expelled, or suppressed, “feminine” in the narrative is that which allows the narrative to continue and thus participates in the ordering of the topos. Like Penelope withdrawing to her room and to her loom, the “feminine” in the narratives undoes the male law but thereby also allows it to survive. Undoing is a positive action; it is not the opposite of doing. It cannot be understood as negatively “destructive,” romantically “subversive,” let alone as “paradoxically positive.” Undoing is the “other” of doing: it is another doing. It is a doing that does not imitate, copy or emulate. It is an (no) action that instead of producing a continuity and genealogy, produces discontinuities, differences and atavisms. As in The Odyssey or The Arabian Nights, this otherness is introduced by a narrative act. This speech-act is productive but it does not produce that which one originally expected from it: it always exceeds the intention; it always does and undoes the intended work at one and the same time. In this book I suggest that the American topos has been constructed through such narrative acts. Thus, the American topos has been kept in existence by the narrative line, that is, by the “invisible but sovereign” (Miller, Versions 27) law that constitutes it and maintains it in existence—the “founding fathers of the nation” notwithstanding. The topos that results from an act of reading is always “other” than it was intended to be. Because it results from a tropological construction, the American topos is submitted to the law of difference that prevents it from being an “ideal” topos. The real world never corresponds to our ideas of order, for these ideas are always altered and deferred by the very (un)doing that was supposed to set them in place and put them to work: the act of reading. To indulge in a jeremiad and consider this as a failure would be making the same kind of mistake Cotton Mather made. The ordering of a topos through acts of reading is an ethical act which results in the delimitation of a topography where otherness cannot only exist, but must be- 242 Postscript come the ordering principle of the place. The topography of this book should be ordered by that other law, the law of the always other. All the texts I read closely, as well as those to which I allude more distantly were written by authors—Plato, Melville, James or Miller—who had to submit to this law which they could never face and whose pronouncements were always in a foreign language for them. The discovery they make through their writing is that—like Ulysses in The Odyssey—they are perforce dependent on the feminine otherness of the narrative line and submitted to its law. They may discover this late (Stevens), not realize what they have discovered (Thoreau), try to take advantage of it (Melville or Miller) or seek to suppress and eliminate it (Mather). While the law is at work in all the chapters, there is certainly a progressive increase of awareness of this issue in the writers dealt with here. The importance of otherness, including one’s own otherness, leads from one chapter to the next to an increased self-reflexivity of the act of reading. This may well be the only teleological movement of this book: not from the origins to the invention and the development of the other, but from an emerging awareness that a topos is constructed tropologically and that this construction must take into account otherness, even when it has withdrawn to a room of its own. * * * But then again.… It may seem that in this Post-Script where I promise to finish—at last—the work and conclude the odyssey, instead of welcoming Ulysses home at the end of his journey, I send him off to sea by cutting again through the woof of the text. By suggesting that the law of ethics enforced through the narrative line is related to undoing or un-weaving, I do not want to suggest that the narrative cannot be ended. What must not be ended is the reading of the narrative that will keep producing differences all the time. Plato compares the art of good economy with weaving; I would like to propose Penelope as a case of exemplary management of topos through un-weaving. The law of the narrative line and fiction does not function on binary oppositions which are ingrained so deeply in Western culture as to lull us into believing that weaving is the contrary of un-weaving. These beliefs are the product of phallogocentric discourse that tries to convince us that language follows the rules of natural phenomena where doing is, in effect, the contrary of undoing. This desire to see language follow nature, or God as the case may be, is itself already a tropological transfer of the desire to see the same succeed the same and the son succeed his father. Though we are sometimes made to believe so, we do not construct our world on binary oppositions; the topos where we live is not constructed like a house with Penelope’s Fabric 243 stones that we can pile up or tear down. This is one of the great realizations that the delineation of the American topos has brought to bear. The American space has played a decisive role in the awareness of the function of otherness in the ordering of human topographies. The encounter with radical otherness in the New World had to be understood and coped with, requiring the invention of new theoretical but also technical means. American literature has been a decisive participant in the fashioning of these new tools—even if some of them were imported, they acquired a new character in America. Phallogocentric discourse which defines Western metaphysics pushes us—men and women alike! —to believe that our world should emulate physical laws and that we should read it thus. Phallogocentric discourse is not a given, though; not anymore than our “perceptions” of natural phenomena. The former makes us believe that the latter exists only to pass itself off for one of them. But both this discourse and these perceptions are the result of tropes and of the reading of tropes. Because it is so, the laws of thermodynamics, genetics or botany (as Thoreau finds out in Walden) give us no access to how our human topos is ordered, and thereby to how we can ethically live in it. Therefore, our societies are not pyramids, our families are not trees and our lives are not rivers that run to the sea. The “real” world where we live is not ordered by “natural” laws and it is a mistake and an unethical act to read them in those terms. The otherness of narratives resists the pressure of phallogocentric discourse and this act of resistance is enacted in the ethical act of reading. The ethical act of reading does not seek to establish a new regime, but as an act of resistance it ensures that what happens in every inaugural act of reading is not a reproduction of likeness but a production of difference. If our topos is indeed ordered tropologically, then the only access to that topos and to an ethical behavior is the reading of the tropes that order our world. If these tropes do not correspond to the central of phallogocentric discourse, then we may be justified in calling the law that orders the topos where we live “feminine.” In order to reduce the confusion, or perhaps increase it, it might be better to call this idea of order the other of phallogocentric discourse. 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Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de Walt Whitman’s place in the history of modern American poetry is unlike that of any other poet and this can be said to distinguish American poetry from all other poetries. Poets after Whitman have had to come to terms with him, one way or another. His decision to discard all of the established poetic conventions of his time in favour of his “new free forms” makes him a permanent source of new ideas and techniques. Leaves of Grass is a Declaration of Independence for all subsequent poets. The eleven essays in this volume explore Whitman’s work and his legacy, both direct and indirect, in modern American poetry. Covering poets as diverse as Whitman, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Frank O’Hara, and Lorna Dee Cervantes, this collection also has the merit of bringing back into view a number of less well-known works by Ruth Benedict, Wallace Berman, Hilda Morley, and Joanne Kyger. Robert Rehder / Patrick Vincent (eds.) American Poetry: Whitman to the Present Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 18 2006, 238 Seiten, € 49,00/ SFr 84,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-6271-5 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de This volume brings together a selection of papers read at the 2006 Geneva conference on »American Aesthetics«. Contributors address the question of how, from our contemporary perspective, the heavily-theorized historical categor y of the aesthetic can be used. The investment of American writers and thinkers in the concept of the aesthetic, from the eighteenth century to the present, is discussed from a diversity of positions ranging from the colonial American novel, through the work of such canonical writers as Emerson and Thoreau, to contemporar y »minority« ethnic and feminist texts. Indeed, the notion of »minor« literatures is interrogated here. In these essays contributors ask how the recent critical move away from the canon, from American Literature to American literatures, shapes our understanding of aesthetic issues. While the focus is on American cultural production, the primary intellectual contexts of the book are provided by the rise of Enlightenment aesthetic theory and the so-called »crisis of representation« that is Modernity. Deborah L. Madsen (ed.) American Aesthetics Swiss Papers in Language and Literature 20 2007, 242 Seiten € 49,00/ SFr 77,50 ISBN 978-3-8233-6372-9 089007 Auslieferung November 20011 11 15.11.2007 8: 14: 48 Uhr