<?page no="0"?> SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 32 Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives Edited by Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser <?page no="1"?> Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives Edited by Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser <?page no="2"?> SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature Edited by The Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (SAUTE) General Editor: Lukas Erne Volume 32 <?page no="3"?> Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives Edited by Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser <?page no="4"?> Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. Publiziert mit Unterstützung der Schweizerischen Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. © 2015 · 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 Werkdruckpapier. Internet: www.narr.de E-Mail: info@narr.de Umschlagabbildung und Einbandgestaltung: Martin Heusser, Zürich Foto: Julia Gohl Printed in Germany ISSN 0940-0478 ISBN 978-3-8233-6967-7 <?page no="5"?> Table of Contents Introduction 11 Self Tea Jankovic (Fribourg) “We should be seeing life itself”: Wittgenstein on the Aesthetics and Ethics of Representing Selfhood 23 Sämi Ludwig (Mulhouse) Real Paper Beings? On the Projection of Interiority in American Literary Realism 41 Thomas Austenfeld (Fribourg) Lowell’s Dolphin: Shame, Guilt, and the Fate of Confessional Poetry 59 Dustin Breitenwischer (Freiburg) The Aesthetics of Poetic Self-Representation: Henry James’s What Maisie Knew 73 Community Noëlle McAfee (Emory University) Freedom, Psychoanalysis, and the Radical Political Imaginary 87 Michael G. Festl (St. Gallen) Coping with Frontier Society Instead of Building the City Upon a Hill: A Novel Philosophy of Justice and its Interest in Literature 101 Winfried Fluck (Freie Universität Berlin) Literature, Recognition, Ethics: Struggles for Recognition and the Search for Ethical Principles 119 <?page no="6"?> Viola Marchi (Bern) Ethics, Interrupted: Community and Impersonality in Levinas 143 Katharina Metz (Freie Universität Berlin) Form, Reform, Reformulation: William Dean Howells’s Annie Kilburn 159 Environment Patrick Vincent (Neuchâtel) The Moral of Landscape: John Ruskin and John Muir in the Swiss Alps 175 Arnaud Barras (Genève) From a Poetics of Collision to a Hermeneutics of Discovery: Rethinking Knowledge, Ecology, and History in Rudy Wiebe’s A Discovery of Strangers 195 A. Elisabeth Reichel (Basel) Sonophilia / Sonophobia: Sonic Others in the Poetry of Edward Sapir 215 Notes on Contributors 231 Index of Names 235 <?page no="7"?> General Editor’s Preface SPELL (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature) is a publication of SAUTE , the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English. Established in 1984, it first appeared every second year, was published annually from 1994 to 2008, and now appears three times every two years. Every second year, SPELL publishes a selection of papers given at the biennial symposia organized by SAUTE . Nonsymposium volumes are usually collections of papers given at other conferences organized by members of SAUTE , in particular conferences of SANAS , the Swiss Association for North American Studies and, more recently, of SAMEMES , the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies. However, other proposals are also welcome. Decisions concerning topics and editors are made by the Annual General Meeting of SAUTE two years before the year of publication. Volumes of SPELL contain carefully selected and edited papers devoted to a topic of literary, linguistic and - broadly - cultural interest. All contributions are original and are subjected to external evaluation by means of a full peer review process. Contributions are usually by participants at the conferences mentioned, but volume editors are free to solicit further contributions. Papers published in SPELL are documented in the MLA International Bibliography. SPELL is published with the financial support of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. Information on all aspects of SPELL , including volumes planned for the future, is available from the General Editor, Prof. Lukas Erne, Département de langue et littérature anglaises, Faculté des Lettres, Université de Genève, CH -1211 Genève 4, Switzerland, e-mail: lukas.erne@unige.ch. Information about past volumes of SPELL and about SAUTE , in particular about how to become a member of the association, can be obtained from the SAUTE website at http: / / www.saute.ch. Lukas Erne <?page no="9"?> This book grew out of the 2014 conference of the Swiss Association for North American Studies ( SANAS ), which was held at the University of Basel on November 21-22, 2014. The editors would like to thank the other members of the conference team, who did an amazing job: Sixta Quassdorf, Daniel Allemann, Aline Bieri, and Johanna Schüpbach. SANAS warmly thanks the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences and the University of Basel, which generously funded the conference. While many of the talks that were given at the conference made their way into this book, others did not. As editors and conference organizers, we are grateful for everyone who presented their research in Basel. A special thanks goes out to those colleagues who participated in the peer-review process; they greatly supported our task and helped make sure that the essays which follow are of sound quality. Final words of gratitude are due to Keith Hewlett for his diligent editorial preparation of the essays, to Julia Gohl for letting us use her photograph for our cover, and to Martin Heusser for his expert design of the same. Acknowledgements <?page no="11"?> Introduction How should one address the nexus between literature, ethics, and morality? In order to do so, it seems, one would have to start out by defining all the terms in this enumeration - “literature,” “ethics,” and “morality” - and then determine the prevailing relations between them. This would entail addressing the significant amount of research on this very nexus that has been produced over the last three-and-a-half decades or so, with at least two if not even three or four “ethical turns” postulated in literary studies since the beginning of the 1980s: 1 from the Habermas- Lyotard debate about the desirability of the postmodern farewell to the grand narratives of modernity sparked by Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) 2 to Jacques Derrida’s and fellow post-structuralists’ engagement with Emmanuel Levinas’ reflections on the relations between the self and the Other (which reaches back to Derrida’s chapter on Levinas in his 1967 book Writing and Difference but assumed a new urgency in the 1980s and 1990s), 3 to Martha Nussbaum’s neo-Aristotelian defense of literature as ethical education in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990), to Paul Ricœur’s phenomenological-hermeneutic intervention that sees narrative as the primary means of understanding and relaying human experience 1 Suggested dates for such ethical turns are 1983 with the appearance of a special issue of New Literary History on the topic, 1987 with the (in)famous De Man case, and the beginning of the 1990s, which saw a significant rise in academic output regarding the issue. For good accounts of various ethical turns, see Vlacos, Heinze, Eskin, Davis and Womack, Buell, and Parker. 2 See also Lyotard’s The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (originally published in 1983) and Habermas’s “Modernity − An Incomplete Project” and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, originally published in 1980 and 1985 respectively. 3 See Baker. Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 32. Ed. Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser. Tübingen: Narr, 2015. 11-22. <?page no="12"?> Introduction 12 and life elaborated in the three volumes of his Time and Narrative (1984, 1985, 1988) and in his late magnum opus Memory, History, Forgetting (2004), to Jacques Rancière’s return to the nexus between ethics and aesthetics (which already occupied Wittgenstein) - and the relation of both to politics - in Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2004). As if this were not enough, how should one address this nexus from specifically American Studies perspectives? What is it that American Studies has to offer here, particularly if one takes into account the plural in perspectives that insists on a multiplicity of approaches? Where and how should one begin? Rather than delving directly into the pertinent scholarly debates referenced above in an attempt to enumerate, differentiate, evaluate, and thus map the many different trajectories this scholarship has engendered - a daunting task indeed -, we reminded ourselves where our real expertise lies and decided to begin with the first term of our enumeration, literature, and with one of world literature’s most famous beginnings: “Call me Ishmael” (18). As everyone knows, this is not quite the beginning of Moby-Dick. The novel starts with etymological reflections on the origin and development of the word “whale” (7) and traces it in several languages. This is followed by the extracts - 79 quotations concerning whales that are mainly from the realms of literature, science, and religion (8-17). But then the narrative proper begins, with that famous first sentence: “Call me Ishmael” (18). If we follow Levinas and Derrida in conceiving of ethics - and with this, we now also invoke the second of our three terms - as revolving around a relation between the self and the Other, as revolving around the immense responsibilities the self has toward the Other, then Melville’s first sentence takes us right to the heart of the ethical. For what the Hebrew name Ishmael means is: “God hears” or “God has listened” (Knauf 93). Thus, the name of Melville’s narrator already gestures toward one of the most crucial relations between the self and the Other - the relation between the human and the radical alterity of the divine. Yet there is more to Ishmael’s name than that. The Biblical Ishmael is an outcast of a great family, the son of the patriarch Abraham and Hagar, his barren wife Sarah’s Egyptian maid. 4 Driven away from Abraham’s household by Sarah’s jealousy, Ishmael fathers a plurality of desert tribes collectively known as the Ishmaelites, “a large confederation 4 Melville culled his knowledge of Biblical figures and stories from several King James Bibles. A large family Bible published by E. H. Butler in 1846 was Melville’s most important source during the writing of Moby-Dick (Pardes 13). <?page no="13"?> Introduction 13 of major north Arabian bedouin [sic] tribes” (Knauf 93). Traditionally, Ishmael is “identified as the ancestor of the Arabs” (Moby-Dick 18n2). Melville’s choice of name, then, is entirely appropriate not only because his novel brings together a cast of outcasts - seafaring men cut off from their families - but also because this narrator has a special relation to non-Western cultures. It is thus that we arrive at another ethical relation, another kind of relation between the self and the other. Ishmael’s name prepares us for a narrative that by and large gives us highly sympathetic representations of ethnic others: from the loving relationship between Ishmael and the South Sea cannibal Queequeg to the sentimental figure of the black boy Pip - the one character that allows Ahab to show his humanity. Of course, Melville’s presentations of ethnic others are not without their ethical quandaries: Melville digs deep into primitivist discourses - be it those revolving around noble savages such as Queequeg or those revolving around satanic savages such as Fedallah. The novel’s first sentence, then, not only prepares us for a narrative that thematizes the ethical relation of the self to a radical, incommensurable Other, be it God or Emersonian Nature; it also invites us to probe the special ethical obligations obtaining between the members of a multiethnic seafaring community. In other words, what “Call me Ishmael” announces is a novel that explores both a Levinasian ethics of radical alterity (most palpably in Starbuck’s firm belief in God, Ahab’s ungodly hubris, and his as well as Ishmael’s desire to become one with a transcendent Nature that in this novel appears in the guise of the sea) and a Habermasian ethics of communication in the public sphere (which is at work between the Anglo-Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, “Orientals,” and South Sea Islander that populate the Pequod). If we follow Habermas in glossing ethics as the theory of the good life and morality as a guide to right conduct (Habermas, Facts and Norms 154 passim), then the move from self-Other relations to self-others relations is also a move into the realm of our third term: morality. This is the realm where the conscience of individuals, the use of practical reason, and the rules that govern relations between human beings are at stake. Again, we find that Moby-Dick provides a fertile ground of inquiry. In the novel’s moral universe, it is first and foremost the friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg, which is guided by love, kindness, and mutual respect, that serves as a model for good conduct. Other characters’ actions, too, serve as guides to morally sound behavior. Consider Starbuck’s most famous rebuke to Ahab: “‘Vengeance on a dumb brute! ’ cried Starbuck, ‘that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blas- <?page no="14"?> Introduction 14 phemous’” (139). Of course, the first mate’s censure of the ship’s captain is primarily religious in nature - the charge is blasphemy - but it is also an act of moral courage in which one living being dares to challenge the hierarchy of the ship as he intervenes on behalf of another living being. At the other end of the moral spectrum, we find Ahab, who manipulates and abuses his crew and refuses to provide assistance to the captain of the Rachel, whose son is lost at sea: “Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go” (398). Ahab shows a keen awareness of his moral obligations toward another father but he consciously rejects them and decides to act immorally. Notice Ahab’s careful wording: for this monomaniac, sinisterly self-reliant man, ethical relations between the human and the divine obtain only between Captain Gardiner and God (“God bless ye, man”) while he himself dispenses with a divine third that could intervene between the inner law of his conscience, which he decides to violate, and the bereft father’s moral demand (“may I forgive myself”). This scene is also crucial in the novel’s moral universe because it powerfully evokes what Joanne Dobson calls the “emotional and philosophical ethos” of sentimentalism - an ethos that “celebrates human connection, both personal and communal, and acknowledges the shared devastation of affectional loss” (266) - to expose the cruelty of a character who rejects the claims of sympathy. While much of Moby-Dick’s modernity stems from its refusal to follow contemporaneous sentimental-domestic writers, who continue to subordinate the right to fiction to religion and morality, it does not cut all ties with that tradition. In exploring the morality and immorality of its characters’ actions, Melville’s novel does participate in what Nussbaum calls ethical education, though without the overt didactic intent of, say, Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), two best-selling sentimental novels published in the same decade as Moby-Dick. Returning once more to the first sentence of Moby-Dick moves yet another ethical relation into view. Looking at these famous three words closely, we may begin to wonder whether the figure we encounter is a straight shooter or is playing games with us. After all, the narrator does not say: “Hi, I’m Ishmael.” Instead, he says “Call me Ishmael.” And we begin to wonder: is this really his name? Or is this just what he tells us to call him? The ethical relation that such questions address is that between the teller, the tale, and those to whom the tale is told: the ethics of narration. On one level, this concerns the classic question of the narrator’s reliability, a question that is raised particularly prominently in <?page no="15"?> Introduction 15 first-person narration: from the high reliability of Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories to the infinitely eloquent manipulative evil of Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). Moby-Dick’s initial sentence raises this question of the narrator’s reliability head-on, in connection with a core attribute of human identity: Ishmael’s name. By the time we learn about his “spleen” and “hypos” (18) in the novel’s first paragraph, we are bound to wonder how reliable Ishmael is, both as a sailor and as the teller of the tale. On another level, the ethics of narration concern the very use of telling stories itself. In this vein, Ricœur not only famously theorized narrative as that human capacity which makes it possible to synthesize experience, which is always inscribed in a horizon of temporality, in the first place (Time passim), but, due to its power of temporal synthesis, also as fundamental for both human memory and history (Memory passim). Narrative thus becomes the primary means of synthesizing and of relaying experience, equally important to understanding and grasping on the level of the subject as well as that of intersubjectivity, that is, that of the individual as well as that of community. Ricœur’s ethical imperative accordingly reads “dare to give an account yourself! ” (Memory 449). This injunction is complemented with the injunction to listen attentively. Telling, making one’s experience intelligible to oneself and to others, and listening, being open to receiving such stories, thus form the capstones of Ricœur’s ethics of narration, which is a genuine narrative ethics: narration becomes the ethical relation. It is in this context that one additional observation concerning Moby-Dick’s famous beginning is in order. “Call me Ishmael” comes across as quite a colloquial - and quite an American kind of first sentence. Think of other American novels that have this colloquial tone: from John Neal’s 1817 text Keep Cool to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), to The Catcher in the Rye (1951) - and beyond. In line with such texts, what the beginning of Moby-Dick immediately establishes is an easy familiarity between the narrator and the reader. Ricœur’s injunction to listen attentively thus brings us to the final ethical conundrum under consideration here: not just that between listener and teller, narratee and narrator, but also that between readers and the very texts they read. How can we do justice to a text as voluminous, encyclopedic, and playful as Moby-Dick? Already Theodor W. Adorno’s utopian vision of the reconciliation of subject and object insisted on the primacy of the object in ways that remind readers of literature of their ethical obligation to do justice to the objects at hand (“Subject and Object”). Yet it is J. Hillis Miller who most consistently explores what he calls “the ethics of reading.” In probing readers’ responsibility - a key word in ethical de- <?page no="16"?> Introduction 16 bates since Levinas - toward the texts they read, Miller focuses on “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” (43). Miller here reconceptualizes the hermeneutic act of interpretation in terms of an ethics of almost infinite responsibility toward the literary text. Whether we are prepared to follow this deconstructive version of New Critical injunctions or not, Miller certainly reminds us of our own responsibilities toward the texts we read and teach - our own responsibilities as readers, literary scholars, and teachers. This is certainly something that most readers of the present volume have at one point or another grappled with: how to do justice to literary texts - texts that more often than not refuse to be assimilated to the languages we already have for speaking and thinking about the world. What, then, constitutes an ethically sound relationship between us and the literary texts we read? The relation of the self to the Other/ other, whether divine, natural, human, or literary, and its literary representation; the questions of practical reason and right conduct and their literary negotiation; and the possibility that narration, or literature more generally, might be the primary mode of expression of the ethical relation and of practical reason: these, then, are the coordinates which determine the nexus between literature, ethics, and morality. And it is the space determined by these coordinates that the contributions to this volume navigate while inscribing a decidedly American Studies perspective, be it by taking US and Canadian works of literature as their tutor texts and objects of inquiry, or by approaching their material through theoretical and methodological lenses predominantly in use in or fashioned by American scholarly discourses - or by combining these two foci. *** This volume is organized into three complementary sections that focus on “Self,” “Community,” and “Environment.” Reminiscent of Félix Guattari’s “three ecological registers” of “environment, social relations and human subjectivity” (19-20), which are intended to provide a comprehensive map of the contemporary realm of “social and individual practices” (28), our three sections are not to be taken as delineating strictly distinct realms or fields of inquiry. Rather, they provide different “points of view”: “It is quite wrong to make a distinction between ac- <?page no="17"?> Introduction 17 tion on the psyche, the socius and the environment” (28), Guattari writes. Accordingly, even though they emphasize the respective perspective, none of the essays can be fully reduced to the thematic section to which they have been allocated. In what follows, we provide a brief guide to these sections and the individual contributions they consist of. In accordance with the Guattarian insistence on the inseparability of the three ecologies of individual and social practices, Tea Jankovic, in the volume’s first essay, which is also the first essay in the section devoted to the notion of the “Self,” tackles head on from a Wittgensteinian perspective the crucial relation between subjectivity and aesthetic representations of subjectivity as they negotiate the subject’s ethical relation to the world. Ultimately, she argues, art in general and literature in particular enable us to reflect on ourselves and on our relation to others in ways that are not available outside aesthetic experience. In Jankovic’s account, our encounters with literature help us live the good life as they invite us to adopt a non-coercive and intersubjective perspective on the world. Sämi Ludwig’s contribution is concerned with the very same conundrum but from a different perspective. Availing himself of the American pragmatist tradition, particularly the thought of William James, and focusing on two novels by William Dean Howells and Henry James - The Rise of Silas Lapham and The Portrait of a Lady -, Ludwig inquires into the representational practices of literary realism, which he finds engaged in a decidedly pragmatist project of tracing the groundedness of representation in experience, the very reality that constitutes subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Thomas Austenfeld, in turn, is less concerned with how the self relates to the world and more with how it relates to itself as he traces the Dolphin controversy pitting Robert Lowell as a repentant Catholic who, with the publication of The Dolphin, publicly confesses his guilt, thus shedding new light on a pivotal moment in the history of confessional poetry that has garnered much critical attention. In sharp distinction from earlier critics, Austenfeld’s “Catholic” reading argues that the Dolphin controversy revolves precisely not around shame but around guilt. In the contribution that concludes the section on the “Self,” Dustin Breitenwischer explores how the indeterminate ending of Henry James’s What Maisy Knew opens up a space of wonder in the reader’s own aesthetic experience and hermeneutic endeavor. Drawing on reception aesthetics and Clemens Lugowski’s theory of narrative motivation, Breitenwischer argues that James’s novel is not motivated by the representation of characters’ psychological depths but, by means of deliberately <?page no="18"?> Introduction 18 avoiding to answer its titular question, rather initiates a readerly process of reflection on the relation between knowledge and the self. By representing the conundrum of representation as essentially open and opaque - unanswered -, the novel clears a space for and presents an ethical injunction in favor of infinite inquiry. The section on “Community” begins with Noëlle McAfee’s elaboration on the very possibility of a radical politics and political action. In order even to envision such a politics and such acting, she argues, one must first engage in radical self-questioning. Bringing together the thought of Julia Kristeva and Hannah Arendt, McAfee suggests that psychoanalysis furnishes the conditions for radical action, that the inner revolt of the psyche needs to precede and complement any outer revolt in the realm of the polis. The subsequent essay by Michael Festl takes up one of the most crucial questions of any polis, namely that of justice. Distancing himself from Rawlsian ideal accounts of justice, Festl proposes a new version of justice theory that does justice to the particular and concrete. To this end, he turns to literature as literary works present acute representations of such particularities and thick descriptions of concrete sufferings and injustices and thus put the very concrete problems of justice into relief. Granting the effectivity of literary works in providing such thick descriptions and in dramatizing injustices, Winfried Fluck probes further to ask: apart from describing ethical and moral quandaries, can literary works also provide formulations of genuine ethical principles? In a veritable tour de force through the last three decades of theorizing, Fluck pits accounts of self-alienation against theories of intersubjectivity to suggest that the concept of “recognition” might prove especially fertile with respect to his initial question. The ethics of literature, he contends, lies first and foremost in its articulation of individual, particular struggles for recognition. Viola Marchi’s essay almost works as a counter-proposal to Fluck’s emphasis on recognition as she mines the thought of Levinas for a proper articulation of community from within his philosophy of radical difference and alterity that undercuts any reciprocity and posits an irreducible asymmetry to the ethical relation. Marchi proposes that such articulation may precisely be found in the concept of impersonality with its attendant emphasis on displacement, dislocation, and interruption. What Levinas ultimately proposes, Marchi suggests, is the possibility of thinking community as a space in which infinite responsibility toward the Other prevails precisely because the relation between Self and Other <?page no="19"?> Introduction 19 is interrupted by an impersonal third, engendering what she calls a community without communion. In what constitutes the final contribution to this section on “Community,” Katharina Metz’s essay returns us to American literary realism. In contradistinction to Ludwig’s and Breitenwischer’s concerns with the self and subjectivity in relation to questions of representation, Metz focuses on the more or less overt social agenda that realist works often display. Close reading William Dean Howells’s Annie Kilburn, Metz explores the question of how the novel’s reformist and thus moralist thrust chimes with realism’s purported intent to represent reality as it is. Metz defends the novel against accusations of didacticism by emphasizing what she calls its strategies of reformulation, that is, strategies such as self-reflective irony that, in showing awareness of the conflicting nature of the novel’s realist and reformist-moralist tendencies, gesture toward their reconciliation. Patrick Vincent’s contribution inaugurates the section on “Environment,” the third and final section of this volume. In his essay, Vincent traces nineteenth-century discourses on the aesthetic and moral valence of the Swiss Alps, particularly in the writings of American environmentalist John Muir and British art critic and social thinker John Ruskin. This essay shows how their respective engagement with the Swiss landscape shaped their different programs - conservationism and nature stewardship in the case of Muir, and calls for civilizational transformation in the case of Ruskin. Along the way, Vincent analyzes little-studied travel writings by Muir. The second contribution to this section stays focused on the nineteenth century but shifts the discussion from the aesthetic and moral appeal of the Swiss Alps to the colonization of Arctic Canada. In addition, the nineteenth century comes refracted through a twentieth century literary text as Arnaud Barras presents a reading of Rudy Wiebe’s postcolonial environmental novel A Discovery of Strangers. Barras argues that, in invoking both the European colonial discourse of exploration and conquest and the indigenous discourse of storytelling, the novel stages what he calls a poetics of collision and a hermeneutics of discovery. In his account, rather than antithetically pitting these two discourses against one another, the novel in fact enacts and runs together a twofold dialogism: that of the Bakhtinian formal kind and that of a Plumwoodian socioecological kind. With the third, concluding contribution to this final section, and the volume as a whole, we move from natural to medial environment. A. Elisabeth Reichel examines the importance of sound in the poetry of <?page no="20"?> Introduction 20 early twentieth-century American linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir. Reichel argues that ambivalence between what she calls “sonophobia” and “sonophilia” - terms she develops with recourse to W. J. T. Mitchell’s earlier work in the field of visual culture - is at the heart of Sapir’s poetry as it treats auditory sense perception as the Other of written discourse, a relation that correlates with its presentation of ethnic others as the Other of the anthropologist self and thus attests to the ideological underpinnings of such semiotic, medial, and sensory dualisms. Reichel’s explorations of the ethico-medial ramifications of anthropologically informed poetic discourse constitute an apposite conclusion to this collection, we believe, as they not only emphasize some of the most pressing issues at the heart of this volume - such as the self- Other/ other relation, the moral quandaries inherent to the ideological underpinnings of such relations, and the role of literature with respect to these issues - but also point beyond literature toward mediality per se and semiotics in general thus not only opening up to a larger discourse involving a plurality of aesthetic forms and sign systems but also testifying once more to the inherently interdisciplinary scope that an American Studies perspective on ethics and morality entails. Philipp Schweighauser and Ridvan Askin <?page no="21"?> Introduction 21 References Adorno, Theodor W. “Subject and Object.” Trans. E. B. Ashton. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. Ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt. 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Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. 3-15. ―――. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. Heinze, Rüdiger. “‘The Return of the Repressed’: Zum Verhältnis von Ethik und Literatur in der neueren Literaturkritik.” Ethik und Moral als Problem der Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Jutta Zimmermann and Britta Salheiser. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2006. 265-83. Knauf, Ernst A. “Ishmael, Ishmaelites.” The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. Vol. 3. Ed. Katharine Doob Sakenfeld et al. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2008. 93-94. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ―――. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford. Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. <?page no="22"?> Introduction 22 Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita. 1955. Ed. and introd. Alfred Appel, Jr. 2nd ed. London: Penguin, 1995. Neal, John. Keep Cool, a Novel. Baltimore: Joseph Cushing, 1817. Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pardes, Ilana. Melville’s Bibles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Parker, David. “Introduction: The Turn to Ethics in the 1990s.” Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory. Ed. Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman, and David Parker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 1-17. Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Trans. Steven Corcoran. Malden: Polity, 2009. Ricœur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ―――. Time and Narrative. 3 vols. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, 1985, 1988. Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1951. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. 1852. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1884. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Vlacos, Sophie. “The Ethics of Imagination.” Ricœur, Literature and Imagination. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 177-212. Warner, Susan. The Wide, Wide World. 1850. New York: The Feminist Press, 1987. <?page no="23"?> “We should be seeing life itself”: Wittgenstein on the Aesthetics and Ethics of Representing Selfhood Tea Jankovic In connection with Wittgenstein’s remarks on theater, Michael Fried argues that art lends us a view of selfhood that would otherwise be unavailable to us, precisely because we always inhabit it. He explicates this by means of the aesthetic relation between the beholder and the beheld, between audience and theater. This essay probes the ethical implications of the aesthetic objectification of the subject by discussing Wittgenstein’s remarks on the purported unity of the ethical-aesthetic perspective in the Tractatus and through a reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Wittgenstein mentions Dostoevsky in his Notebooks in the context of considerations of ethics and aesthetics in the relation between subject and world. Central to both the Tractatus and the Brothers Karamazov is a negotiation of the ethical-aesthetic perspective in the address to the reader that establishes a relation to the reader comparable to Fried’s account of visual art and theater, as well as a notion of the good life as a right perspective and right relation to the world. In recent US scholarship, Ludwig Wittgenstein has been evoked on the paradox of the aesthetic representation of selfhood: how can a subject be an object of art? Arguably, this paradox has an ethical dimension, which is often not fully made explicit. Richard Eldridge in his “Rotating the Axis of our Investigation” and Garry L. Hagberg in “Autobiographical Consciousness” carefully reconstruct Wittgenstein’s account of the subject-object and subject-world relation. Both apply an insight of his to literature: that the world is not simply given but that it is always seen through the locus of a consciousness. Eldridge reads Hölderlin’s Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 32. Ed. Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser. Tübingen: Narr, 2015. 23-39. <?page no="24"?> Tea Jankovic 24 staging of poetic subjectivity as the ideal of living “both as independent shapers of our lives and in harmony with nature and one another” (213). Hagberg reads Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative as a growing selfawareness of the protagonist as well as increasing moral teleology in the plot, reflecting Wittgenstein’s dissolution of the false dichotomy between “inner” and “outer” world. On the American scene, Ross Posnock’s comparative study of Wittgenstein’s philosophical texts and the novels of W. G. Sebald further emphasizes the importance of relationality as a structuring principle of both selfhood and the text. In “Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday,” Michael Fried discusses art in terms of Wittgenstein’s remarks on theater, the ideal that art can show selfhood in a way we cannot usually observe it (“Jeff Wall” 517-25). Fried’s text most clearly expresses the paradoxical quality of an aesthetic representation - or objectification - of the subject. According to him, Wittgenstein upholds the ideal of the anti-theatrical, “everyday” aesthetics, in which art is able to show selfhood, or “life itself,” by allowing the beholder - or the audience, or the reader, depending on the art form - to take up an imagined perspective “from outside” the represented subject’s involvement with her world. 1 Wittgenstein’s aesthetics is informed by the tension between acknowledging the artifice of the outside perspective of the beholder (for the actor must learn to ignore the audience; literary characters are fictional) and the claim that art is a privileged means of showing selfhood. Fried mentions the ethical implication of the aesthetic objectification of selfhood only in passing, by referring to “good and bad modes of objecthood” (521). To explicate these further in Wittgenstein’s terms, I turn to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Notebooks, where I discuss his thoughts on the convergence of the aesthetic and the ethical perspective, the latter explicated in terms of good life as a perspective on the world. In my first section, I discuss Fried’s reading of Wittgenstein’s aesthetics. My second section centers on the intersubjective relation Wittgenstein seeks to establish by addressing the reader. My third section turns to a literary work, The Brothers Karamazov, to show how it performs the kind of relational ethical-aesthetic perspective Wittgenstein describes. The enormous impact this explicitly moral, even moralizing novel had on Wittgenstein’s intellectual development is largely over- 1 I am using female and male pronouns interchangeably, for the “subject” discussed here is the focal point of the (narrated) world. This means that the concept can apply to any subjectivity, including any gendered subjectivity. <?page no="25"?> Aesthetics and Ethics of Representing Selfhood 25 looked in literary studies (Klagge 135-38). 2 Through a reading of several of the novel’s key passages, I show how it performs Fried’s reading of Wittgenstein’s aesthetic conception of representing selfhood. Furthermore, I show how the aesthetic and the ethical converge in the novel’s reflections on the ethics of aesthetic objectification in terms of the idea that “life is paradise,” if only seen from the right perspective. 1. The Subject as Aesthetic Object: Culture and Value Fried’s “Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday” discusses Wall’s photography in terms of the problem of artistic representation of selfhood. The subject, being made into an object of art, runs the risk of theatricality - of merely posing for the beholder. Fried relates his own antitheatrical aesthetic ideal to an observation made by Wittgenstein in Culture and Value: Engelmann [Paul Engelmann, Wittgenstein’s close friend and faithful correspondent] told me that when he rummages round at home in a drawer full of his own manuscripts, they strike him as so glorious that he thinks they would be worth presenting to other people. (He said it’s the same when he is reading through letters from his dead relations.) But when he imagines a selection of them published he said the whole business loses its charm & value & becomes impossible I said this case was like the following one: Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing someone who thinks himself unobserved engaged in some quite simple everyday activity. Let’s imagine a theatre, the curtain goes up & we see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; as if we were watching a chapter from a biography with our own eyes, - surely this would be at once uncanny and wonderful. More wonderful than anything a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken on the stage. We should be seeing life itself. - But then we do see this every day & it makes not the slightest impression on us! True enough, but we do not see it from that point of view. - Similarly when E. looks at his 2 A friend of Wittgenstein from World War I reports: “In [March] 1916 Wittgenstein suddenly received orders to leave for the front. [. . .] He took with him only what was absolutely necessary. Among a few other books he took with him The Brothers Karamazov. He liked this book very much.” In 1929 or 1930 Wittgenstein told Drury: “When I was a village school-master in Austria after the war I read The Brothers Karamazov over and over again. I read it out loud to the village priest.” On 5 August 1949, Bouwsma reports: “This lead him to talk of The Brothers. He must have read every sentence there fifty times” (Klagge 136). <?page no="26"?> Tea Jankovic 26 writings and finds them splendid (even though he would not care to publish any of the pieces individually), he is seeing his life as God’s work of art, & as such it is certainly worth contemplating, as is every life & everything whatever. But only the artist can represent the individual thing [das Einzelne] so that it appears to us as a work of art; those manuscripts rightly lose their value if we contemplate them singly & in any case without prejudice, i.e. without being enthusiastic about them in advance. The work of art compels us - as one might say - to see it in the right perspective, but without art the object [der Gegenstand] is a piece of nature like any other & the fact that we may exalt it through our enthusiasm does not give anyone the right to display it to us. (I am always reminded of one of those insipid photographs of a piece of scenery which is interesting to the person who took it because he was there himself, experienced something, but which a third party looks at with justifiable coldness; insofar as it is ever justifiable to look at something with coldness.) [. . .] (6e-7e) In this excerpt, Wittgenstein draws our attention to the manner in which art shows a person or an object. He makes a general aesthetic statement here in the sense that he applies it to different art forms: literature (that is, the contrast between a trivial biography and artistic texts), theater, and photography. The process of publishing a text or performing it in front of a theater audience are ways of “presenting,” literally “giving” (geben) something to other people. Consequently, something presented as art is deemed worthy of being given to others (“es wert [sein] den anderen Menschen gegeben zu werden”). It is because it is “so glorious,” “remarkable,” “uncanny,” “wonderful,” and “splendid.” He quickly discredits a biased view of what would count as presentable to others: for instance, as in Engelmann’s case, the publication of his relatives’ letters, or any biography we might deem remarkable solely because we have known its protagonists. On the other hand, though art shows something remarkable, it is not in the sense of something yet unknown and unseen, as for instance, a snapshot of a hitherto unknown species of primates. Art does not inform. Rather, according to Wittgenstein’s harkening to “the everyday,” the object art presents is not remarkable in itself; it is remarkable because of the point of view we are granted on it. Wittgenstein’s theater scene is remarkable neither because it is a “chapter from a biography” of any one particular person, nor because it somehow provides new information on the human condition. It is a truly everyday scene, one observable in mundane circumstances. And yet, what we are given is a view “on a human being from outside in a way that we can ordinarily never observe ourselves.” <?page no="27"?> Aesthetics and Ethics of Representing Selfhood 27 In drawing parallels between Wittgenstein and Denis Diderot, Fried reads Wittgenstein’s remark about what it is that the aesthetic view grants us thus: it gives us a view of somebody who is unaware of being beheld, and thus going about his ways without posing for a potential audience (519-25). Diderot was particularly interested in depictions of people absorbed in some activity and forgetful of themselves. Paintings offer us an impossible perspective: we are usually never in the position to gaze at someone for as long as we want while they are completely absorbed in something else. That is how the illusion of reality is created: the painting is done in such a way that it offers a seemingly impossible perspective on the image it represents, thus formally excluding the beholder (Fried, “Jeff Wall” 502-06). Thus it creates the illusion of a self-sufficient world (Kern 171-73). Diderot expands the illusionist theory of painting to drama theory. He is famous for the conception of the “fourth wall” in theater: it is the space between the audience and the theater stage. Actors are trained to imagine an invisible wall separating them from the audience and to act as if there were nobody watching them. It is precisely the presentation of a scene in such a way that it excludes the beholder which allows for the spectator’s necessary self-forgetfulness and absorption and makes the performance function as a work of art. According to Fried’s reading of Diderot, in order to grant this outside perspective, a theater piece must not be theatrical - the audience must not have the impression of the scene being staged for their benefit (519, 522). 3 Rather, theater shows us, in Wittgenstein’s terms, someone “alone in his room,” not acting in relation to a potential beholder - a view on ourselves (as human beings) that we normally do not have. Art happens when the actor can exclude the audience in such a way that the audience is free to behold him aesthetically, as if from outside his world. The theater curtain going up presents us that view from the outside. It does not show us any new facts, for what we see is the everyday that usually “makes not the slightest impression on us! ” Rather, what art shows is “that point of view” (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value 6), the aesthetic perspective that shows us the subject’s very involvement with his everyday from an otherwise impossible perspective, from outside the subject’s involvement with his world. In Wittgenstein’s terms, it shows 3 One might criticize this as an outdated theory. On the other hand, even modern and post-modern art, which are very much based on the idea of breaking the fourth wall (as in Brecht’s theater), precisely draw attention to their own aestheticity by means of selfreflective references to their own fictionality. <?page no="28"?> Tea Jankovic 28 us “life itself”; Fried calls this “a ne plus ultra of realism, it would seem” (519). Fried continues: In other words, only a work of art, precisely because it “compels us to see it in the right perspective,” can make life itself, in the form of absorption, available for aesthetic contemplation. (524) Art shows us a person’s life, her selfhood in the world, by providing us a staging of an outside perspective, an imagined perspective where our beholding does not affect the beheld. This understanding of art is not limited to drama or to the nineteenth-century realist novel. Fried in fact applies it in his critique of minimalist art and photography, and his Art and Objecthood covers a wide spectrum of arts. Fried refers to ethics only in passing, as sharing with aesthetics the disinterested perspective discussed above (“Jeff Wall” 521). However, it is possible to spell out further the ethical implications of Wittgenstein’s aesthetics along Fried’s lines. I argue that the kind of inferior art Fried criticizes as theatrical implies an attempt to coerce the beholder (i.e., the audience, the reader) towards a specific, predetermined interpretation of the artwork. By theatrically posing, a bad actor attempts to impose an interpretation to the beholder. In order to develop an ethical-aesthetic reading along Fried’s lines, I will focus on Wittgenstein’s subtle addresses to the reader in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which allows me to read the Tractatus as a work on aesthetics that showcases the ethical category of the good life. 2. The Impossible Perspective: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Notebooks Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus discusses ethics and aesthetics only briefly. In 6.421, Wittgenstein writes, “It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and Aesthetics are one).” Despite the scarcity of material on ethics in the Tractatus, we learn from a letter to his publisher that “the point of the book is an ethical one. [. . .] My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one” (Letters 94). According to Wittgenstein, it is by remaining silent about ethics that he has shown us “the point of the book.” And remaining silent about a matter is consistent with his view quoted above - that ethics, along with aesthetics, cannot be expressed. While it would make no sense to simply go on to say what it is that Wittgenstein considered <?page no="29"?> Aesthetics and Ethics of Representing Selfhood 29 unsayable, it is possible to provide a reading of the fairly technical sense of expressibility and inexpressibility in language introduced in the Tractatus and to conclude with the implications this technical discussion has for ethics and aesthetics. In 6.43, Wittgenstein describes good and bad willing not as referring to a will to change isolable facts in the world but rather as an attitude to the world as a whole: If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language. In brief, the world must thereby become quite another. It must so to speak wax or wane as a whole. The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy. Thus, ethics involves a change of perspective on the part of the subject in his relation to the world and cannot be exhaustively defined with purported isolable “ethical” facts found in the world. Note that though Wittgenstein partly uses Kantian vocabulary, such as referring to “good willing” and to ethics as “transcendental” (6.421), thus likening it to transcendental logic (6.31), he also introduces a eudaimonic aspect. Namely, under 6.43, he treats both “good willing” and “the world of the happy.” Given the meticulousness of his numbering system, he clearly considers these terms to belong to the same topic, a notion of good life, which in eudaimonic terms considers human flourishing to be conceptually inseparable from a life of virtue. However, Wittgenstein further develops the eudaimonic conception by denying that the good life is to be found within the sum of the facts that make up the world. 4 Rather, ethics pertains to the “limits of the world” (Tractatus 6.43), a phrase Wittgenstein uses to describe the subject as well: “The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world” (5.632). Therefore, what makes ethical propositions such as “Thou shall not murder” valid pertains to the subject herself, in her relation to the world - and not to any facts such as rewards and punishments given. Ethics and aesthetics are called “inexpressible” and “transcendental” (6.421), which I gloss as not expressible in language referring to isolable facts in the world, but rather to the subject’s relation to the world. This thought recurs in the Notebooks: 4 See the Tractatus’s definition of “the world”: “1. The world is all that is the case. 1.1. The world is the totality of facts, not things.” <?page no="30"?> Tea Jankovic 30 The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics. (178) The good life and the work of art are not defined by empirical criteria isolable among the sum of facts which make up “the world”; rather, they allow us to take up a specific perspective on everything else. If the good life and the work of art were definable by a list of empirical facts from within the world, they would be expressible in language for, in the Tractatus, meaningful propositions represent possible facts in the world (4.022). However the Tractatus discourses on the world as a whole (in propositions starting with 1), on logic as representations of possible facts (in 2s and 3s), on thought as a meaningful proposition (in 4s), and on the manner in which propositions signify, including ethical and aesthetic propositions (in 5s and 6s) - even though all of these objects of investigation would, by Tractarian lights, require the subject to take up the impossible perspective from outside of her own language use and to represent her own relation to the world from outside, as a possible fact that can be empirically verified. Because saying anything about the world as a whole cannot be empirically verified with observable facts from within the world, we run up against a paradox. That the Tractatus self-destructs at the end, with the last sentence, “7. What we cannot speak about that we must pass over in silence” is merely the logical consequence, for it is a book that shows the limits of language. Several scholars have pointed out the interpretative frame of the Tractatus, contained in its foreword and ending (Diamond, Kremer), in which Wittgenstein addresses the implied reader. The foreword stresses that what follows is “not a textbook” (Lehrbuch), but that “its object would be attained if there were one person who read it with understanding and to whom it afforded pleasure” (9). The Tractatus is not meant to convey information, but apparently to provide pleasure - which is an aesthetic category. Furthermore, the second to last sentence before the silencing exhortation in 7 reads as follows: My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. (6.54; my emphasis) <?page no="31"?> Aesthetics and Ethics of Representing Selfhood 31 The reader has been led up a ladder of propositions throughout the book. Here she is asked to throw them away. Her attention is snapped away from the propositions and to an interpersonal encounter with their author, for Wittgenstein claims that the reader “who understands me” will recognize the meaninglessness of Tractarian propositions, and she will “then see the world rightly.” Taken together with the foreword, this means that the Tractatus is not meant to teach us new facts; rather, it is meant to provide the aesthetic pleasure of intersubjectively showing the reader her own subjectivity. The Tractatus is not a book of facts, rather it is, in Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege’s terms, a meeting of minds. 5 The “ethical point” (Letters 94) of the book is that the reader takes up the right perspective, the ethical perspective in intersubjective encounters, as opposed to reducing ethics to knowledge of facts. In Fried’s aesthetic terms, the reader is allowed absorption in the seemingly self-sufficient world of the Tractatus - one that at first glance purports to teach her facts about the world as a whole. The first sentences of the book introduce this impossible perspective: “1. The world is all that is the case. 1.1. The world is the totality of facts, not things.” Having read the foreword carefully, the reader may already be aware that the book that starts with these sentences is no text-book. By the end of the book, its perspective on the world as a whole turns out to be staged: Wittgenstein concludes that we cannot represent facts from outside the totality of all facts (i.e., the world). Rather, “the object of the book is pleasure” (9), namely the kind of pleasure art gives by objectifying the world in a way that allows the beholder to exercise her capacities as an interpreting subject and an organizing force of the world in her own right. By breaking the fourth wall and addressing the reader, Wittgenstein reaches beyond the “limit of the world” of his own subjectivity to meet the reader, and throws her back to her own interpretative and world-structuring powers, as opposed to offering her ready-made “ethical facts.” Arguably, the Tractatus shares affinities with the literary genre of the novel. The novel, too, shows us the relation between the subject and her world. Because it is capable of showing the protagonists’ thoughts, feelings, motives, inner conflicts, as well as their outward actions, the novel can show intersubjective ethical reflection particularly clearly - more so than a photograph. Take Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as an example. 5 Wittgenstein pays homage to Frege in his foreword to the Tractatus (9). <?page no="32"?> Tea Jankovic 32 3. “Life is paradise”: The Ethical-Aesthetic Perspective in The Brothers Karamazov In the summer of 1916, Wittgenstein fills his Notebooks with reflections on the relation between the will and the world, between happiness, good and evil (166-68) that later flow into the Tractatus (e.g. 6.43). On July 6, 1916, he notes, “Dostoevsky was probably right, when he says that he who is happy fulfills the purpose of being” (168). This recalls the notion of the good life discussed in my previous section. The good life is not definable by a list of factual criteria but rather by an achievement of selfhood that manifests itself in the right perspective on the world. The Brothers Karamazov, a novel Wittgenstein was “certifiably obsessed with” (Klagge 135-36), contains a comparable notion that “life is paradise” (288, 298, 303). As I will argue, this notion suggests that nothing needs to be added to life to achieve “good life”; rather, life is paradise when viewed from the right perspective. Dostoevsky’s novel also lends itself to an aesthetic reading that traces the role of art in the achievement of paradise along Fried’s lines. As is usual in Dostoevsky’s novels, most of the forward thrust of the plot is achieved via characters’ interactive narration, their more or less coercive “scripting” of the world of the novel (Young 22-27). The Brothers Karamazov is filled with comments on relations between readers and authors (“From the Author”) and theater actors and audiences (e.g., “The Old Buffoon”). The foreword to The Brothers Karamazov, titled “From the Author,” introduces the novel as a biography of Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov. Here we find a dialectic very similar to Wittgenstein’s remarks on theater discussed above: according to Wittgenstein, the object of art is something deemed presentable to other people and thus in some way remarkable; Dostoevsky starts by justifying his choice of Alesha as a hero of the novel in a similar vein: While I do call Alexei Fyodorovich my hero, still, I myself know that he is by no means a great man, so that I can foresee inevitable questions, such as: What is notable about your Alexei Fyodorovich that you should choose him for your hero? What has he really done? To whom is he known, and for what? Why should I, the reader, spend my time studying the facts of his life? (3) Like Wittgenstein, who denies that the object of art deserves its status because it lends us any new informative insight, Dostoevsky denies that Alexei deserves the status of a hero on account of any of his actions. It is not from any facts of his life that we might deduce his noteworthi- <?page no="33"?> Aesthetics and Ethics of Representing Selfhood 33 ness. Just as Wittgenstein insists that, despite not telling us anything new, the everyday scene in the theater is remarkable, so Dostoevsky hopes that the reader might nonetheless agree with him about Alesha’s noteworthiness. In explaining his notion of the object of art, Wittgenstein points to that particular outside perspective that art renders on an object, which distinguishes the object from any other thing in the world. In Fried’s reading, this implies a certain anti-theatricality on the part of the object: the actor is trained to present himself as if alone in his room, thus showing us his “everyday” without revealing by any of his gestures that they are staged for our benefit. Dostoevsky in turn introduces an ethical element to justify his hero, as I will argue in more detail below. Dostoevsky goes on to explain that Alesha is worthy of being the hero of the novel, for it is he “who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind” (3). Therefore, it is not any of the facts of his life that set him apart as remarkable, rather it is his relation to “the whole” - to his family, to his society, we might even say to the world. It is clear that Alesha is an ordinary person - perhaps the only ordinary person in the entire novel. From his own activity as an author - Dostoevsky makes him the author of Book Six - we learn of the ethical ideal he has inherited from Elder Zosima, whose disciple he was at the local monastery. Book Six, “The Russian Monk,” provides a philosophical key to the novel (Terras 73). Here, a notion of the good life is introduced, namely the dictum that “life is paradise”: “We are all in paradise, but we do not know it, and if we did want to know it, tomorrow there would be paradise the world over” (288). This is proclaimed by Zosima’s young brother shortly before his death, and in similar words by Zosima himself shortly before he endangers his life as he refuses to shoot at a duel (298), as well as by Zosima’s mysterious visitor shortly before he ruins his reputation and his family’s life when he confesses a crime he committed years ago, even though all the possible benefactors of his confession are long dead (303). For these characters, the closeness to death invokes a heightened awareness of the beauty of the world (297-98) and a notion of paradise as universal reconciliation and brotherhood of all (303). 6 Thus, the notion that Alesha is worthy of being the 6 The ideal of brotherhood, introduced by Zosima’s mysterious visitor (“Until one has indeed become the brother of all, there will be no brotherhood” [303]), in fact implies a universal siblinghood, for one of the key scenes of the novel shows the main protagonist Alesha being able to view Grushenka, hitherto seen as a villain, as a “true sister” (“The <?page no="34"?> Tea Jankovic 34 hero of a novel because he “bears within himself the heart of the whole” (3) should be read with this ethical ideal in mind, that of extending love to “the whole,” of maximal inclusiveness in one’s world. If this could be achieved, we would see that life already is paradise, if only people lived with the world as a whole in mind instead of asserting themselves at the expense of others. In the following, I argue that the ethical ideal of universal reconciliation and siblinghood is aesthetically performed by the novel’s various stagings of the relation between the reader and the work of art. In his foreword, Dostoevsky stages an author persona who hopes that the reader will also find Alesha noteworthy, without coercing him into any preconceived interpretation. The reader is thrown back to his own interpretative capacities - in another avid Dostoevsky reader’s terms, the critical reader is a co-author of the artwork (Bakhtin “Author and Hero” 29, 65). Dostoevsky’s aesthetic-ethical ideal can be described as noncoercive interactive authorship of the world leading to a paradisiacal community. Tension is created between the clear artifice of the text (it is, after all, a novel) and the aim of presenting an ethically worthy person, one who is brother to all. The foreword ends with an apology for its own superfluity and with a short, “And now to business” [к делу, i.e., “to deed” or “to action”] (4) . This remark has a similar function as the curtain raising in the theater or Wittgenstein’s notion of an art of showing as opposed to an art of saying. In the opening chapter, where we are introduced to Alexei’s family and his small town, we are shown his world. The perspective we are invited to take up is not entirely “from outside the world,” it is rather that of a newcomer being introduced into a community. However, the narrator’s gossipy and slightly incompetent tone, the pretense that we are being told about real people and events, only serves to amplify the artifice of our outside perspective on Alexei’s world. Similarly, an actor breaking the fourth wall draws attention to “that point of view” granted by aesthetics, namely that of a certain outsideness, precisely by violating it. In focusing on Dostoevsky’s caricature of vice, Fried’s reading of Wittgenstein’s aesthetics helps explicate the workings of coercive authorship via an investigation of theatrical art. The very first character introduced in the novel is Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, Alesha’s father. He acts as a foil to Alesha, for he is introduced as “wicked” though Onion” 351). Furthermore, this ideal transcends ethnic boundaries. As Nathan Rosen argues, a German Dr. Herzenstuben’s small fatherly gesture in Dmitry’s childhood may have been the decisive factor in preventing the latter from becoming a murderer (730). <?page no="35"?> Aesthetics and Ethics of Representing Selfhood 35 “naïve and simple hearted” (9). Fyodor seems to be a textbook example of theatricality, called “the old buffoon” throughout the novel. Everything he does is intended to induce a specific effect in all present, his “audience,” namely to outrage and enrage them. In a family gathering at the local monastery, where Elder Zosima and other monks are present, Fyodor dominates the conversation, telling jokes and fictional anecdotes about historical figures, for instance about Diderot’s alleged baptism during his stay in St. Petersburg in 1733. 7 The other guests are provoked by Fyodor’s behavior and some are about to leave. To this Fyodor responds that he is only clowning to endear himself to others because he feels “lower” than them. It is by acting the buffoon that he at least gains some control over their opinion - by being so obnoxious that they are sure to despise him. In a moment of clarity, Fyodor admits: That’s exactly how it all seems to me, when I walk into a room, that I’m lower than anyone else, and that everyone takes me for a buffoon, so Why not, indeed, play the buffoon, I’m not afraid of your opinions, because you’re all, to a man, lower than me! (43) At Fyodor’s urgent, though theatrical confession and question as to how he should change, Zosima lists overcoming his alcohol addiction, his adoration of money, and his insatiable lust. But, he adds, “And above all, above everything else - do not lie.” He does not merely mean Fyodor’s made-up stories about Diderot, but his coercive imposition of his “script” on others. At first, Fyodor is touched and admits to lying. But even this admission is theatrical: “and I’ve lied, I’ve lied decidedly all my life, every day and every hour. Verily, I am a lie, and the father of a lie! Or maybe not the father of a lie, I always get my texts mixed up (это я всё в текстах сбиваюсь); lets say the son of a lie” (44; my italics). By referring to “his texts,” which he always gets “mixed up,” he reveals, though jokingly, that his words are “texts” of others and not his own, that he is lying even in his supposed admission that he is lying. Within the logic of the novel, a lie is not the opposite of a factual truth, for Fyodor is accused of lying even when he is telling factual truth. Compare, for instance, Dmitry Fyodorovich’s exclamation in response to one of Fyodor’s comments, “It’s all a lie! Outwardly it’s the truth, but inwardly a lie! ” (72). Factual truth can be taken out of context 7 This stay is factual: Diderot was invited by the Russian Empress Catherine the Great. <?page no="36"?> Tea Jankovic 36 and reworked into a narrative that can cause great harm, for example when a crafty narrative reworking of factual evidence against the innocent Dmitry condemns the latter to hard labor in a penitential colony (Book Twelve, “Judicial Error”). Remarkably, lying is condemned as the root of all evil within the framework of a novel - which is itself fictional. This is one of a series of self-referential clues that what is at stake here is not only Fyodor’s character but the role of art in general. It is arguably not a coincidence that Fyodor’s little fictional anecdote is about Diderot, a philosopher of art. Diderot is repeatedly mentioned throughout the episode at the monastery. For instance, right after Fyodor theatrically admits to having lied all his life, he adds, addressing Staretz Zosima, “Only . . . my angel . . . sometimes Diderot is alright! Diderot won’t do any harm” (44). Fyodor Karamazov, the buffoon, is therefore via Diderot closely connected to “the West” that Fyodor Dostoevsky famously had a very ambivalent relationship to. Although Dostoevsky refers to eighteenthcentury French aesthetics as a placeholder for decadent nihilism, he notes deriving “both benefit and pleasure” in reading Diderot’s philosophy during the whole winter of 1868-1869 (Lantz 94). The figure of Fyodor Karamazov in fact performs a parody of Diderot’s illusionist ideal of art. More importantly, he offers a reflection on the role of art and the aesthetic perspective that has clear ethical implications. It is no coincidence that Fyodor shares Dostoevsky’s first name. For he, too, is an artist of sorts, somebody who seeks to present himself, other people, and events in a certain light. As an author, Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky runs the same danger of theatricality that Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov exhibits in his coercive narrative - one that objectifies both himself and his audience in a manner unworthy of the selfaware subject. Bakhtin argues that Dostoevsky’s poetics show that aesthetic objectification is inevitable in our relation to the world. However, the self-aware subject has a privileged status in contrast to all the other possible objects of art: At a time when the self-consciousness of a character was usually seen merely as an element of his reality, as merely one of the features of his integrated image, here, on the contrary, all of reality becomes an element of the character’s self-consciousness. (Problems 48) In Bakhtin’s literary terms, the privative aesthetics of theatricality can be considered monological authorship, one that coerces characters as well as readers (Problems 68). In his theatricality, his monological search of control over others’ “readings” of himself, and his imposition of ready- <?page no="37"?> Aesthetics and Ethics of Representing Selfhood 37 made interpretations of himself onto others - which are all in stark contrast to Alesha’s paradisiacal perspective of universal siblinghood - Fyodor Karamazov loses sight of the intersubjective nature of the ethicalaesthetic perspective. In conclusion, the idea in The Brothers Karamazov that “life is paradise” but that we usually “do not know it” and that this “paradise” is an ethical-aesthetic relation of non-coercive co-authorship of the world recalls Wittgenstein’s reflections on ethics and aesthetics. According to the Tractatus, accomplishing “good willing” and realizing “the world of the happy” (6.43) does not amount to achieving specific facts in the world, but pertains to the “limit of the world,” another term he uses for the subject (5.632). The idea that the good life is a right perspective on the world that is intersubjective and cannot be reduced to factual knowledge is also aesthetic. It is in this vein that Fried’s discussion of the aesthetics of representing selfhood hinges on an intersubjective relation to the implied beholder (or audience, or reader). The theatricality Fried criticizes in art involves an imposition of an interpretation on the beholder. Discussing Fried’s aesthetic critique in ethical-aesthetic terms allows us to see that controlling others’ interpretations ignores the intersubjective dimension of interpretation as co-authoring. This kind of “unethical” aesthetic objectification refuses to recognize others as limits of the world (Tractatus 5.632), it refuses to recognize them as structuring forces of co-authorship in their own right. <?page no="38"?> Tea Jankovic 38 References Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” Art and Answerability, Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. ―――. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Diamond, Cora. “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.” The New Wittgenstein. Ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read. London: Routledge, 2000. 149-73. Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. London: Vintage, 2004. Eldridge, Richard. “Rotating the Axis of our Investigation: Wittgenstein’s Investigations and Hölderlin’s Poetology.” The Literary Wittgenstein. Ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer. London: Routledge, 2004. 211-27. Fried, Michael. “Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday.” Critical Inquiry 33.3 (2007): 495-526. ―――. Art and Objecthood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Hagberg, Garry L. “Autobiographical Consciousness: Wittgenstein, Private Experience, and the ‘Inner Picture’.” The Literary Wittgenstein. Ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer. London: Routledge, 2004. 251-66. Kern, Andrea. “Illusion als Ideal der Kunst.” . . . kraft der Illusion. Ed. Gertrud Koch and Christiane Voss. Munich: Fink, 2006. 159-74. Klagge, James C. Wittgenstein in Exile. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011. Kremer, Michael. “The Whole Meaning of a Book of Nonsense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.” Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy. Ed. Michael Beaney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 451-85. Lantz, Kenneth. The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004. Posnock, Ross. “‘Don’t think, but look! ’ W. G. Sebald, Wittgenstein, and Cosmopolitan Poverty.” Representations 112.1 (2010): 112-39. Rosen, Nathan. “Style and Structure in The Brothers Karamazov.” The Brothers Karamazov. A Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. Ed. Susan McReynolds Oddo. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. 352-65. Terras, Victor. A Karamazov Companion. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. <?page no="39"?> Aesthetics and Ethics of Representing Selfhood 39 ―――. “Letters to Ludwig Ficker.” Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives. Ed. C. G. Luckhardt. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. 82-98. ―――. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958. ―――. Tagebücher 1914-1916. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. ―――. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922. Young, Sarah. Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative: Reading, Narrating, Scripting. London: Anthem Press, 2004. <?page no="41"?> Real Paper Beings? On the Projection of Interiority in American Literary Realism Sämi Ludwig This essay tries to present a sophisticated notion of realist referentiality based on William James’s philosophical pragmatism as an alternative to the solipsistic models of much contemporary representational theorizing. It does so by salvaging approaches that go back to the time preceding many of the watershed modernist changes and analyzing the ways in which ethics and contact are played out in two major works of American literary realism, namely William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. The issues at stake are both epistemological and moral, based on the assumption that representation originates in “reality” and therefore necessarily refers back to it. This shows in Howells’s treatment of “paint” as well as in his creation of Lapham’s moral imagination. Similarly supportive of individual agency, Henry James attributes subjectivity even to his humble characters, warning of objectifying formalist appropriations and impositions. Thus, although represented characters may phenomenally be mere “paper beings,” we miss out on much of the relevance and “respect” of representation if we reduce them to such. I This paper presents an American pre-modernist epistemology and its particular mode of referentiality, which I consider interesting because it is experiential, based on a long tradition of non-conformist Puritan ways of personal insights, Emersonian transcendentalism, and pragmatist phi- Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 32. Ed. Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser. Tübingen: Narr, 2015. 41-57. <?page no="42"?> Sämi Ludwig 42 losophy. These three creeds have developed a genealogy of ideas that coincides at some point with the literary work of the American realists. This genealogy marks a psychologizing development that was halted by the arrival of modernist aesthetics and, more portentous, formalist philosophies. I find the old not-so-radical realists and pragmatists interesting because rather than being scientific and detached in the sense of objective rigidity (I am here thinking of phenomenology and twentiethcentury logical positivism), they operate in an animated world of interacting subjectivities, risking the construction and projection of the Other as a subject beyond mere negativity or materiality only. This results in a fundamental dialogicity projecting agency and even motivation on both ends - psychological issues that deeply involve ethics and morality. It is important to note that this mode does not follow the syntactic logic of language and signs but instead is guided by a pragmatics of human interaction. Rather than essentialist, such a model is truly constructivist - not merely in the semiotic sense of sign-construction (or deconstruction)(Derrida passim), but as experiential reality construction, of which sign-making is merely a part. Mimesis of this old kind aims to be grounded, i.e., to be contiguous with experience, and hence aims beyond many of the “objective” assumptions of imitative representation. Rather than alienating, separate and non-referential, it sees language as connective and meaningful, as part and parcel of a particularly human prosthetic extension of physical interaction and in its application based on a necessity of good intentions - which is exactly where morality comes into our discussion. Thus I am suggesting that going back to some particular concerns in American literary realism may help us better understand the shortcomings of certain solipsistic twentieth-century representational practices and overcome the Nietzschean extra-moral logic of their many elaborate “late” (and “post”) critiques. 1 My material is mainly furnished by the Harvard physiologist, psychologist, and pragmatist philosopher William James (1842-1910), in particular his late collection A Pluralistic Universe (1909) and the posthumously published Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). His theory is then connected to The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) by the main spokesperson of American literary realism, William Dean Howells (1837-1920), and to the classic The Portrait of a Lady (1881) by William’s younger brother, Henry James (1843-1916). I will trace an argument along two lines: first, 1 . . . which have in many ways merely “critiqued,” i.e., built upon, formalism in conceptualist ways rather than rejected (“criticized”) it! One reason for this practice may be the infelicitous translation of the French word critique - which means both. <?page no="43"?> Real Paper Beings? 43 that there is, or at least can be, a connection between physics and metaphysics in a psychologized human interiority. Second, that beyond the construction of an object world, in a necessary gesture of empathy, this interiority also furnishes a projection of subjectivity in the Other - which raises all kinds of interesting questions about the nature of representation and imagination, and the issue of so-called “paper beings” in fiction. 2 In “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist? ” (1904), the opening essay in his collection on Radical Empiricism, William James denies the merely representational nature of consciousness, claiming that consciousness is not “like a paint of which the world pictures were made” (8). Instead he sees “paint stuff” as picture and material at the same time and uses this image as an analogy for experience as consciousness and matter at the same time. 3 Thus, James the elder projects a model of human cognition based on what he calls “pure experience” as the perceptual intersection of inside and outside, in which the interior “stream of thought” (of an individual human consciousness) and the exterior “stream of life” (of the dynamic outside world) coincide, just as “one identical point can be on two lines” (Radical 12): “As ‘subjective’ we say that the experience represents; as ‘objective’ it is represented,” but in “its pure state, or when isolated, there is no self-splitting of it into consciousness and what the consciousness is ‘of’” (23). 4 Hence according to the Jamesian model 2 I have already discussed all three of these authors in Pragmatist Realism, but with a slightly different emphasis. This time the main issue is referentiality and ethics. 3 Also see the only French article in the collection, “La notion de conscience” [The Idea of Consciousness] (Radical 206-33), e.g., the first thesis of his conclusion: “1 La Conscience, telle qu’on l’entend ordinairement, n’existe pas, pas plus que la Matière, à laquelle Berkeley a donné le coup de grâce” [1. “Consciousness as we ordinarily understand it does not exist, and neither does Matter, which Berkeley got rid of.”] (232; my translation). And further: “5 Les attributions sujet et objet, représenté et représentatif, chose et pensée, signifient donc une distinction pratique [. . .] qui est de l’ordre fonctionnel seulement, et nullement ontologique comme le dualisme classique se la représente” [5. “The attributions subject and object, represented and representation, thing and thought, thus stand for a practical distinction [. . .] which is of a purely functional order and not at all an ontological order, as classical dualism would have it.”] (233; my translation). 4 James gives several chiastic examples that live up to the best formulations of any postmodern French philosopher: “Experiences of painful objects, for example, are usually also painful experiences; perceptions of loveliness, of ugliness, tend to pass muster as lovely or as ugly perceptions; intuitions of the morally lofty are lofty intuitions. Sometimes the adjective wanders as if uncertain where to fix itself. Shall we speak of seductive visions or of visions of seductive things? Of wicked desires or desires for wickedness? ” (34-35). James’s point, as we shall see, is however to take the argument in a referential and thus very different, non-alienating direction from, say, Guy Debord. <?page no="44"?> Sämi Ludwig 44 of consciousness, the physical and the metaphysical coincide in perception. 5 For James, this further implies that when we “pass from percepts to concepts, or from the case of things presented to that of things remote” (Radical 15), this contiguity stays important, although “we tend altogether to overlook the objectivity that lies in non-perceptual experiences by themselves” (17). James’s “paint” idea that “thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are” (37) makes him emphasize that so-called “ambulatory relations” lead from experiences to ideas (The Meaning of Truth 245). We should not be deceived by the fact that “what is ambulatory in the concrete may be taken so abstractly as to appear saltatory” (246). 6 James even anticipates forms of operational representation in cognitive psychology when he describes an “evolution” in thought “of the psychical from the bosom of the physical, in which the esthetic, moral and otherwise emotional experiences would represent a halfway stage” (Radical 36). As he writes: “Sensations and apperceptive ideas fuse […] so intimately that you can no more tell where one begins and the other ends, than you can tell, in those cunning circular panoramas that have lately been exhibited, where the real foreground and the painted canvas join together” (30). 7 This cohesion from contiguous to detached, from concrete to represented, expressed in James’s circular panoramas much coincides with the basic assumptions about mental operations as 5 Also see James’s Principles of Psychology (243). These Jamesian conceptualizations have had a great influence on modernist literature in the form of “stream of consciousness” writing, introduced by William James’s Radcliffe student Gertrude Stein. 6 James writes: “Cognition, whenever we take it concretely, means determinate ‘ambulation,’ through intermediaries, from a terminus a quo to, or towards, a terminus ad quem” (Meaning 247). 7 Also see James’s use of the same comparison in “Humanism and Truth”: As in those circular panoramas, where the real foreground of dirt, grass, bushes, rocks and a broken-down cannon is enveloped by a canvas picture of sky and earth and of a raging battle, continuing the foreground so cunningly that the spectator can detect no joint; so these conceptual objects, added to our present perceptual reality, fuse with it into the whole universe of our belief. (Meaning 220) And again in Some Problems of Philosophy, James suggests in a long discussion of “Concept and Percept” that: [. . .] we hang concepts upon percepts, and percepts upon concepts interchangeably and indefinitely; and the relation of the two is much more like what we find in those cylindrical ‘panoramas’ in which a painted background continues a real foreground so cunningly that one fails to detect the joint. The world we practically live in is one in which it is impossible, except by theoretic retrospection, to disentangle the contributions of intellect from those of sense. (107-8) <?page no="45"?> Real Paper Beings? 45 defined by twentieth-century cognitive psychologists. Thus in Jean Piaget’s model, we find overlapping stages of representation moving from sensorimotor to pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational (i.e., abstract) modes (see Singer and Revenson 128-32). This is echoed by his younger American colleague, Jerome Bruner, who defines cognitive development along similar lines of enactive, iconic, and symbolic operations (Toward; “: Ontogenesis”). Moreover, basically the same kind of epistemological claim is made in the foundational work on cognitive linguistics by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in particular in Philosophy in the Flesh. 8 All of these scholars present a complex development of intimately connected representational practices ranging from concrete to abstract which are hierarchically grounded in the concrete. One of the main issues forming this extension of “pure experience” is time: “experience as a whole is a process in time” (Radical 62; my emphasis). Time allows for conceptual learning about an equally “real” world of objects, or what James calls the “common-sense notion of permanent things” (Meaning 219). As he writes: “Knowledge of sensible realities [. . .] is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time” (Radical 57). Here is an example of such knowledge construction - which coincides with object construction: A baby’s rattle drops out of his hand, but the baby looks not for it. It has “gone out” for him, as a candle-flame goes out; and it comes back, when you replace it in his hand, as the flame comes back when relit. The idea of its being a “thing,” whose permanent existence by itself he might interpolate between its successive apparitions has evidently not occurred to him. It is the same with dogs. Out of sight, out of mind, with them. (Pragmatism 85-86) 9 8 It is already anticipated in Metaphors We Live By: “[W]e typically conceptualize the nonphysical in terms of the physical - that is, we conceptualize the less clearly delineated in terms of the more clearly delineated” (59). 9 This is an important point that we encounter repeatedly in James’s work: The greatest common-sense achievement, after the discovery of one time and one space, is probably the concept of permanently existing things. When the rattle first drops out of the hand of a baby, he does not look to see where it has gone. Non-perception he accepts as annihilation until he finds a better belief. That our perceptions mean beings, rattles that are there whether we hold them in our hands or not, becomes an interpretation so luminous of what happens to us that, once employed, it never gets forgotten. [. . .]. We may, indeed, speculatively imagine a state of “pure” experience before the hypothesis of permanent objects behind its flux has been framed; [. . .] the category of trans-perceptual reality is one of the foundations of our life. Our thoughts must still employ it if they are to possess reasonableness and truth. (Meaning 208-9) <?page no="46"?> Sämi Ludwig 46 Again we find here that James’s pragmatism anticipates Jean Piaget’s cognitive experiments with peekaboo games and Piaget’s conclusions on the construction of “object permanence” (Origin; Essential Piaget 292). The only reason why the notion of an “objective” reality exists is because we project it from our real experiences. James’s radical empiricism of “common sense” is in this sense very different from overblown positivist claims, from which he many times distanced himself (see, e.g., Meaning 266). The “objectivity” of reality itself is merely a matter of projective “knowledge” beyond direct “perception.” 10 Hence it cannot be apprehended without constructive imagination (which is, not coincidentally I would say, one of the crucial issues in the poetry of James’s Harvard student Wallace Stevens). 11 We can summarize that in William James’s model of understanding reality, perception and knowledge constructions are intimately connected. Representations are understood as “real” across time and constructed bottom-up, based on experience. II This view that our knowledge originates in some kind of “pure experience” also appears to have influenced William Dean Howells, who, significantly, made the protagonist of The Rise of Silas Lapham, a novel about morality and honesty, a paint manufacturer whose paint originates from the earth: “My father found it one day, in a hole made by a tree blowing down. There it was, laying loose in the pit, and sticking to the roots that had pulled up a big cake of dirt with ‘em” (6). Like William James’s paint as “mind stuff,” Lapham’s paint originates in the outside world. It is natural and associated with the “roots” of a tree - an image that may indicate possibilities of development and growth. The businessman praises its durability; it is a part of nature, “like the everlasting hills, in every climate under the sun,” but he has never tried it “on the human conscience”: “I guess you want to keep that as free from paint as you can” (11). Obviously, things get complicated when you paint interiority, and the novel, with its several moral dilemmas, illustrates this very well. It is interesting to know that Lapham’s best line of paint is called 10 Think about your knowledge of a human head. You can never directly perceive both its front and its back, but you know that the person you are facing has a back of the head. . . 11 See, e.g., Stevens’s poem “The Snow Man.” It does not come as a surprise that Stevens’s work has been analyzed in terms of pragmatism. See, e.g., Poirier, or Levin’s chapter on “Wallace Stevens and the Pragmatist Imagination.” <?page no="47"?> Real Paper Beings? 47 the PERSIS BRAND , named after his wife (12). Like the most important partner in his life, this line of paint is supposed to be reliable, honest, not deceiving, even transparent: “the paint showed through flawless glass” (12). Clearly, there are all kinds of fascinating facets to this “paint” as a material of representation: an often-cited example is when Lapham even paints a rock for advertising, arguing, “I say the landscape was made for man, and not man for the landscape” (14). Rejecting the positivist precession of things, this statement reads like a utilitarian application of Wallace Stevens’s visionary imagination. 12 Lapham continues: “That paint was my own blood to me” (15), and further states: “I believe in my paint” (16); “I mix it with Faith” (17). 13 It is almost like a religion to him - at one point a character even mistakes the paint for a glass of jam (21), something to eat like a host. Like William James’s mind stuff of “pure experience,” Howells’s “paint” originates in reality, which it defines as object and subject at the same time, furnishing identity and even extending into matters of “belief” in ways that rhyme with James’s pragmatist arguments in The Will to Believe (later crucially renamed “the right to believe.” 14 ) A crucially different approach to Lapham’s vertically rooted “business” approach can be found in Bromley Corey’s dilettante approach to paint. An amateur painter, he went to Rome, and then only “painted a portrait of his father” (65). The beautiful, grey-haired Boston Brahmin with a noble Roman nose (60) is “talking more about it than working at it” (66). 15 We learn that Bromley lives on the fortune inherited from his grandfather’s China trade (65), 16 i.e., he deals in old money and stays within traditional representations. Though saved by his great sense of irony, the old man represents the dualist approach to paint and avoids getting involved in the nitty-gritty “roots” of business entrepreneurship. 12 In “The Snow Man,” Stevens discusses the existence of non-perceived landscape (i.e., “There’s No Man”): “For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Note the chiastic relation of object and subject, most probably influenced by Jamesian ideas like the one quoted in footnote 4. 13 This is very different from his incompetent and “dry” partner Rogers: “he didn’t know anything about paint” (16). Significantly, Rogers is the one who wants to draw Lapham into an immoral money-laundering scheme to save himself from bankruptcy (311). See my point below. 14 See “Faith and the Right to Believe” (Some Problems 221-31). 15 Note that Howells is taking a jab at the idle aesthetic of the Brahmin’s beauty! 16 The grandfather is described as an “old India merchant” (65). <?page no="48"?> Sämi Ludwig 48 His life “feeds” on the given realm of his inherited money, i.e., the representational tokens of wealth. Howells thus criticizes the Corey family’s sense of class superiority, which is, curiously, often defined in terms of “grammaticality,” i.e., the horizontal connection of representations: “How can you expect people who have been strictly devoted to business to be grammatical? ” (60). Significantly, Bromley’s son, Tom Corey, likes Lapham “in spite of his syntax” (61). As a member of the young generation, he can see beyond formal prejudices, and will join the business people in the end. Howells thus offers crucial stories that develop representational agency in different directions, involving vertical contiguity and horizontal structures, thereby opening up major fields of interactional tension. The main issue seems to be feedback that involves both, misunderstandings and honesty. Thus, there is a subplot in which visual clues are misinterpreted in a love triangle. Underestimating the difference between the immediacy of perception and the more complex knowledge of truth, the honest Persis tells her husband: “Well, Silas Lapham, if you can’t see now that he’s after Irene, I don’t know what ever can open your eyes” (83). Yet unfortunately, good reasoning can be blocked by perceptualist notions. Tom Corey is not after the pretty younger sister but loves the older, “plain” but more intelligent, Penelope. We find here a complication that arrives with the extension of surface into interiority, from perception to knowledge, and an elaboration of what can happen if things are not imagined correctly and there is no corrective interaction. Beyond the “paint” reality, this seems to signal a second and more complex, dynamic stage of cognitive construction, in which we have to break through the object barrier and move our conceptualizations from dead object to live subject. Significantly, the triangle misunderstanding leads to an intimate inter-subjective encounter that turns into one of the most convincing “realistic” dialogues in American literature when the two sisters finally sort out their misunderstandings (230). But more important for Howells is the main plot line, in which the honest paint merchant goes bankrupt and is tempted by his former partner Rogers and his “dry tears” (308) to sell a worthless piece of real estate to unknown English investors in order to save himself: “I want you should sell to me. I don’t say what I’m going to do with the property, and you will not have an iota of responsibility, whatever happens” (310). This is where Lapham “rises,” as the title of the novel suggests, to moral responsibility. He realizes that beyond the uncommitted façade of this business deal, i.e., beyond its formal financial nature (pecunia non olet), harm may come to the invisible and unsuspecting investors far away. <?page no="49"?> Real Paper Beings? 49 Able to imagine the real consequences of this proposal, after a sleepless night, Lapham asserts the contiguous “rooted” principle of his earthy “paint” not merely in isolated images but also in much more complex representational configurations such as business contracts. For Lapham and for the realist author Howells, as for William James, there is no truly categorical difference between perceptual and conceptual understandings - the latter are merely more difficult to figure out and to master. Beyond their formal nature, this involves the imagination of consequences when we return from representation back to experience. Significantly, the honest Persis cries at this moment of crisis, as opposed to the “dry” Rogers, who is incapable of, or maybe unwilling to act upon, empathy (263). Such empathy, though utterly projective, may precisely be the kind of necessary practice that asserts “ambulatory” connections when things look “saltatory” and seem unconnected. 17 Howells also has his moral expert, the Reverend Sewell, and his wife visit Lapham because they are “interested in the moral spectacle” (342). Though the operation of evil can be traced in the physical world, Sewell states, “I’m more and more puzzled about it in the moral world” (343). He learns that Lapham has no regrets and feels “as if it was a hole opened for me, and I crept out of it” (344). Lapham’s moral behavior makes him, like his paint, free and at the same time contiguous with the earth, reconnecting him with reality. If Howells mainly elaborates in his fiction on the rootedness of representation in outside reality and on the responsibility of moral imagination because much of our discursive behavior feeds back on the experiential world, his colleague Henry James deals with such “reality” constructions mainly in terms of interpersonal understanding and the construction of identity. In the writing of William James’s younger brother, we consistently find the psychological imagination of real things or objects extended to the interiority of other objects, which in turn become subjects themselves who are supposed to imagine other subjects as well, etc. In addition to the “it,” what becomes the main construction in Henry James’s fiction is a “you.” In short, we learn not only about objects or facts to which we attribute reality as things, but also about the existence of people, whose dialogic contributions to our own conceptualizations exist in addition to our own, making reality constructions interper- 17 In another context, I have called this necessity for projective empathy the “cognitive wager” (see “From Phallic Binary to Cognitive Wager”). <?page no="50"?> Sämi Ludwig 50 sonal. 18 We have then, in imagining a person, an interlaced construction of an object that is in addition also a subject capable of imagining relevant realities of her own. III This “reality” of multiple subjectivities is of course one of the main reasons why William James ultimately believes in A Pluralistic Universe, as it is called in a fascinating collection of his late essays. For Henry James, in The Portrait of a Lady, such multiple subjectivity becomes an issue of interpersonal respect for the Other, who is not only a thing but a person, and in turn should be allowed to project her own reality. If Isabel Archer gets this respect from the Touchett family in the form of a solid inheritance that makes her independent, she later gets ensnared by the evil Gilbert Osmond. Osmond’s definition of marriage precisely denies Isabel’s own subjectivity, a denial that seems to be one of Henry James’s main concerns in Portrait. Thus, when Isabel is reluctant to support Osmond’s scheme of marrying Pansy to the rich Lord Warburton, he immediately accuses her of “working against [him]” (507). In Osmond’s cosmos, any other opinion is framed as binary opposition, as the mere negativity of his own. 19 Significantly, Isabel’s American suitor Caspar Goodwood notices that Osmond speaks “as if he and his wife had all things in sweet community and it were as natural to each of them to say ‘we’ as to say ‘I’” (540). This sense of being “indissolubly united” (540) again shows later when Osmond tells Isabel: “You smile most expressively when I talk about us, but I assure you that we, we, Mrs. Osmond, is all I know, I take our marriage seriously” (571). It is this one-sided imposition of the “we” 20 which makes togetherness a 18 In this context, also see Berger and Luckmann’s work on the social construction of reality. 19 Also notice Gilbert’s reaction when Isabel wants to return to England and visit Ralph Touchett, accusing her of “revenge”: “If you leave Rome to-day it will be a piece of the most deliberate, the most calculated opposition” (570). Because he can only think in terms of his own framework, any dissent is considered opposition: “Your cousin is nothing whatever to me, [. . .]. That’s why you like him - because he hates me” (571). Freudians would say that Osmond projects his own views onto others. Theologians may associate him with the devil. Formalists may find his argumentation structuralist (see my observations below). 20 On the inhuman imposition of a “we” in American literary realism, also see George Washington Cable’s Frowenfeld and his criticism of “the Creole ‘we’” in The Grandissimes (151). <?page no="51"?> Real Paper Beings? 51 virtual “hell,” 21 because it denies the reality (or shall we say, the “subject construction”? ) of the Other. What is lacking is a dialogic sense of “you,” in a Jamesian concern reminiscent of the later work of the Austrian-Israeli philosopher of religion, Martin Buber. In his realist novel, Henry James takes us most deeply into this issue of dialogue, respect, empathy, and the “you” in his presentation of the love affair of Pansy and Rosier, whose subjectivities are emphatically asserted, even though neither of them is what Emerson would call a “representative,” 22 i.e., an important, person. In fact, both of them are characterized by their mediocrity. Pansy is, after all, merely a meek “pansy” flower “impregnated by the idea of submission” (258). Like Persephone, she is incarcerated, first in a nun’s convent and then in her father’s Palazzo Roccanera. 23 But although she is described as being “like a sheet of blank paper” (303) or a “small, winged fairy” that in “the pantomime soars by the aide of the dissimulated wire” (341), we also read that “her eyes had filled with tears” (258). There are moments of subjective dissatisfaction, expressed in mere unarticulated fluidity. The same limitations apply to Rosier, whom Isabel remembers as the boy who never went “near the edge of the lake” because, as he said, “one must always obey to one’s bonne” (235). Lord Warburton calls him “very harmless” and Isabel adds that “[h]e hasn’t money enough and he isn’t very clever” (476). Worse, when Madame Merle notices that “Mr. Rosier is not unlimited,” Isabel replies in a memorable slur that “he has about the extent of one’s pocket handkerchief” (440). Yet Rosier musters quite a bit of courage, insisting on his right to see Pansy. Although she tells him that “Papa has been terribly severe [. . .] he forbade me to marry you [. . .] I can’t disobey papa” (416), Rosier can come to an understanding with her. This shows when Pansy drops “six 21 See: “She had not been mistaken about the beauty of his mind; she knew that organ perfectly now. She had lived with it, she had lived in it almost - it appeared to have become her habitation. If she had been captured it had taken a firm hand to seize her” (459). And further: he had led her into the mansion of his own habitation, then, then she had seen where she really was. She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. (461) 22 See Emerson’s point about important individuals in Representative Men. 23 We read that the dark Palazzo where “little Pansy lived” is “but a dungeon to poor Rosier’s apprehensive mind” (392). <?page no="52"?> Sämi Ludwig 52 words” into the “aromatic depths” of a teapot, saying, “I love you just as much” (416). Henry James is very careful to make every single word of this formulation count, defining “love” as something very different from merely appropriative desire. It has to be reciprocal, a dialogic doubling of two subjectivities of “you” - which is very different from Osmond’s appropriative notion of marriage as a “we” defined by himself only. This binary of “you” is not a single unit of positive and negative defined in terms of subject and object (“it”), but it is positive and again positive - a William Jamesian “pluralistic” combination of subject and subject that goes beyond the definition of a single constructive cognitive center. Note that at some point, Rosier starts wearing “his glass in one eye” (469), which implies his capability of double vision. These are issues of respect and empathy, and Isabel understands “that Pansy thought Mr. Rosier the nicest of all the young men,” even though he is much inferior to Warburton, her other suitor (446). This is where the plot changes to Isabel and her responsibility for Pansy. Still trying to be loyal to her husband Osmond, Isabel racks her brain and, like the bankrupt Mr. Lapham, she stays up late, “trying to persuade herself that there was no reason why Pansy shouldn’t be married as you put a letter in the post-office” (467). Notice here that James’s formulation differentiates between definitions of Pansy as a mere thing or object, as opposed to seeing her as a subject entitled to insights and desires of her own. Isabel observes about Rosier: “He has the merit - for Pansy - of being in love with Pansy. She can see at a glance that Lord Warburton isn’t” (498). This mutuality is also emphasized by Pansy herself: “You think of those who think of you, [. . .]. I know Mr. Rosier thinks of me. [. . .]. He can’t help it, because he knows I think of him” (502). The visual metaphor of this attitude would be re-spect. Isabel is impressed with “Pansy’s wisdom” and “the depth of perception of which this submissive little person was capable,” concluding that “Pansy had a sufficient illumination of her own” (505). Her suggestion that Pansy’s father would like the girl to “marry a nobleman,” is answered by Pansy with an assertion of her subjective belief: “I think Mr. Rosier looks like one! ” (505). For Pansy, the mediocre “Rosier” is like her own rosebush, her own experience of epiphany, and she explains that she has come to an understanding with Warburton. He “knows that I don’t want to marry, and he wants me to know that he therefore won’t trouble me. That’s the meaning of his kindness. [. . .]. I think that’s very kind and noble. [. . .]. That’s all we’ve said to each other” (504-5). Notice that this attitude of kindness is associated with “nobility,” not in the sense of a degenerate upper class, but as an almost <?page no="53"?> Real Paper Beings? 53 Christ-like human acceptance and respect. It is this kind of quality that characterizes Warburton, who has been Isabel’s suitor in England, the land of angels. 24 Notice also that a similar notion of aristocracy is attributed to Isabel herself, when Pansy addresses her “as if she were praying to the Madonna” and wants her advice: “It isn’t because you love me - it’s because you’re a lady” (502). Pansy is here using the very imagery of the title of James’s famous novel - a female version of nobleman that may signal several things. To be sure, there is a mixing of secular and religious discourses, but I see this as neither a simplistic assertion of metaphysics nor one of reactionary class structure. Warburton is, after all, introduced as “a nobleman of the newest pattern, a reformer, a radical” (88). Old vocabulary is used to formulate new ethical positions - thus I find here a metaphorical extension of William James’s psychological suppositions applied to interpersonal relations, in which their complexity is elaborated from the level of projected facts - such as Isabel’s realization of what her marriage is 25 - to her realization of interpersonal respect in very particular kinds of relationship. In their last encounter, Isabel and Pansy silently embrace in an egalitarian way, “like two sisters” (592). Just as Martin Buber’s work on the “I” and the “Thou” is about religious insights that should apply to human beings, 26 James’s fiction about the “noble” behavior of a lady extends to dialogic empathy. There is a perfectly secular positive value if we “believe,” in a utopian sense, in radical Christian nobility without hierarchy. 27 Consequently, Isabel cannot stay in England but her “business” is back in Rome, in the world of human beings: “Deep in her soul - deeper than any appetite for renunciation - was the sense that life would be her business for a long time to come” (596). Moral behavior has to do with learning from experience the “lady”-like utopian qualities of respect, and it is our business to return these values to the world, or what William James would call the “stream of life.” 24 Caspar Goodwood is, in contrast, a suitor of human dimension. 25 See her observation on the “house of darkness” cited above. 26 According to Buber, facts are based on foundational verbal configurations (“Grundworte”), which define two different approaches to the world: “One of the foundational configurations is the pair I-Thou. The other is I-It; but without change of the foundational configuration, It can also stand for He or She” (7, my translation). 27 Similar aesthetic utopian elements can be found in William Faulkner and his Christlike owner of souls and bodies, Charles Bon. Also see my “From Rectangles to Triangles.” <?page no="54"?> Sämi Ludwig 54 IV The moral concerns of the realist writers, quite in tune with the pragmatist epistemology of William James, should be obvious here, and I would even suggest that the fiction writers do extend the philosophical reach of James the elder. I furthermore think that, even if you do not believe that radical empiricism can be extended from percepts to concepts, and that the “stuff” conjectured in our “consciousness” is not physically “real,” that does not matter. The argument that these projections are relevant still holds because, if concepts originate in experience, they should successfully lead back to it, be that in physical interaction or in human relations. Otherwise they are either irrelevant or can even be harmful. Although text is only “text” and fictional characters are certainly mere “paper beings,” as Roland Barthes rightly observed (261), this phenomenological assessment falls short of the true significance of realist fiction. Even though representations are not “real” and even though money does not smell across the “saltatory” chasm, we need to imagine them (it) otherwise in order to live up to our responsibility. Henry James quite literally confronts us with the “evil” of formalism in his depiction of Gilbert Osmond, who personifies all of these shortcomings. Like Rogers, the unfeeling and “dry” former partner in Silas Lapham’s paint manufacturing business, Osmond likes to stay near the fire and is also described as “dry.” As Madame Merle tells him: “You’ve not only dried up my tears; you’ve dried up my soul” (556). In that sense, Osmond is of course a downright devilish character. 28 He is also described with the terms “malignant” and “coolness” (570). He is defined by his lack of emotions and his formality. Actually, in a sense, we can even read Osmond as a parody of the extra-moral theory paradigm, where surface merely adds to surface in the sense of formalist hermeneutics. When he accuses Madame Merle: “You express yourself like a sentence in a copy-book” (558), she replies, “you’re more like a copybook than I” (559). Osmond generally stands for sophisticated artificiality; for example, “he regard[s] his daughter as a precious work of art” (567). The signature scene is probably, when we find Osmond “with a folio volume [. . .] copying from it the drawing of an antique coin [. . .] transferred to a sheet of immaculate paper” (568-69). We find here a notion of tracing and imitation that denies all ability for creation, com- 28 Also see my discussion in Pragmatist Realism (156-62). In the religious sense he contrasts with the Christ figures Warburton, whom Osmond calls an “odd fish” (506), and Ralph Touchett. <?page no="55"?> Real Paper Beings? 55 bined with the representation of money, implying the unreality of forgery. “Beware of formalism! ” seems to be the message in James’s creation. I would claim that the theoretical bottom line of this kind of realism, and at the same time its reason for moral commitment, is the utter denial of all context-free truth. There is no regina scientiarum, no formal philosophy that precedes knowledge, no matter what it applies to. All knowledge derives from experience, and therefore it necessarily applies back to experience again. It reflects on its own origins. Abstractions seem to hide this fact, and the danger is that they will be simply useless, or worse, misapplied in wrong places. Just as money merely stands for an abstract third or comparative value (“exchange value”) within a real economy, abstract concepts are in their nature like the rules of mere capitalist finance. 29 They are immensely calculable, but “saltatory,” and therefore often alienated from any real purpose. 30 To be sure, both finance and theory have their influence, but if we want to control them, we should muster our causal imagination and connect them to real experience. Because whenever there is referentiality, there is morality implied. 29 I make this point in my “Currencies and Realities.” 30 As William James writes in his criticism of “Mr. [Bertrand] Russell and Mr. G. E. Moore”: “Whoever takes terms abstracted from all their natural settings, identifies them with definitions, and treats the latter more algebraico, not only risks mixing universes, but risks fallacies which the man in the street easily detects” (Meaning 317). <?page no="56"?> Sämi Ludwig 56 References Barthes, Roland. “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” 1966. New Literary History 6 (1975): 237-72. Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City: Doubleday, 1966. Bruner, Jerome. Toward a Theory of Instruction. 1966. New York: Norton, 1968. ―――. “The Ontogenesis of Speech Acts.” Journal of Child Language 2.1 (1975): 1-19. Buber, Martin. Das dialogische Prinzip. 1962. Gerlingen: Lambert Schneider, 1992. Cable, George Washington. The Grandissimes. 1880. Intro. Michael Kreyling. New York: Viking Penguin, 1988. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Trans. Donald Nicholson- Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. 1967. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Representative Men: Seven Lectures. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1850. Howells, William Dean. The Rise of Silas Lapham. 1885. New York: Library of America, 1991. James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. Intro. Nicola Bradbury. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. James, William. A Pluralistic Universe. 1909. Intro. Henry Samuel Levinson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. ―――. Essays in Radical Empiricism. 1912. Intro. Ellen Kappy Suckiel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. ―――. Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. Intro. A. J. Ayer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975. ―――. The Principles of Psychology. 1890. New York: Dover Publications, 1950. ―――. Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy. 1911. Intro. Ellen Kappy Suckiel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. ―――. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. 1897. New York: Dover Publications, 1956. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. <?page no="57"?> Real Paper Beings? 57 ―――. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Levin, Jonathan. The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Ludwig, Sämi. “Currencies and Realities: Capitalism, Formalism, American Studies.” EAST-WEST Cultural Passage 9 (2010): 7-27. ―――. “From Phallic Binary to Cognitive Wager: Empathy and Interiority in Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers.” Writing American Women: Text, Gender, Performance. Eds. Thomas Austenfeld and Agnieszka Soltysik. SPELL 23. Tübingen: Narr, 2009. 205-21. ―――. “From Rectangles to Triangles: Faulkner’s Geometrics of Redemption.” EAST-WEST Cultural Passage 13.1 (2013): 26-50. ―――. Pragmatist Realism: The Cognitive Paradigm in American Realist Texts. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Piaget, Jean. The Essential Piaget. Eds. Howard E. Gruber and J. Jacques Vonèche. New York: Basic Books, 1977. ―――. The Origin of Intelligence in Children. 1936. New York: International University Press, 1952. Poirier, Richard. Poetry and Pragmatism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Singer, Dorothy G. and Tracy A. Revenson. A Piaget Primer: How a Child Thinks. New York: Plume, 1996. <?page no="59"?> Lowell’s Dolphin: Shame, Guilt, and the Fate of Confessional Poetry Thomas Austenfeld The Dolphin controversy is more than a footnote in American literary history: it focalizes a major post-war poet, Robert Lowell, in the nexus between the acceptable disclosures of confessional poetry and the legitimate need for privacy; it asks whether the principles of art justify violating privacy rights; and it finally calls upon us to distinguish carefully between shame and guilt. Shame is best analyzed sociologically; guilt, personally. I read The Dolphin in this essay as a confession of guilt and therefore approach the volume under the auspices of ethics more than aesthetics. If we look carefully at the trajectory of Lowell’s books from his 1959 Life Studies, which opened the confessional movement, via the closure of that epoch with The Dolphin roughly 15 years later in 1973, and beyond to his final volume Day by Day, we discover Lowell returning to the rhetorical practices of his self-chosen Catholic roots. Put differently: Confessional poetry returns to the confessional booth. Investigating The Dolphin as an exercise in ethical thinking means paying attention to its subject matter, its publication history, and the controversy that surrounds its afterlife. I therefore intend to tease out the ethical position adopted by the poet-speaker, trace the publication and reception history of the book, and conclude with some considerations about the usefulness of ethical inquiry as it pertains to confessional poetry. At the end of this process we return, surprisingly, to a place where confessions started: the confessional booth, where the penitent asks for forgiveness from God through a mediator known as a confessor. In The Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 32. Ed. Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser. Tübingen: Narr, 2015. 59-72. <?page no="60"?> Thomas Austenfeld 60 Dolphin, Lowell returns to the rhetorical practices of his self-chosen Catholic roots while closing a literary epoch. Lowell’s “confessions” in poetry are not to be mistaken for what Frank Bidart rightfully derides as “talk therapy,” of course (997). They are poetry, first and last. But Lowell chose a form and a diction for his work that invites readers to trace its origins back to the years in which the poet’s mind was steeped in Catholic thinking and Catholic ritual. Lowell’s religious temperament remains the measure of his poetic voice. The Dolphin controversy - the debate over the appropriateness of disclosing private agony in published poetry, especially by using letters from one’s estranged wife - is more than a footnote in American literary history: it situates a major post-war poet, Robert Lowell, in the nexus between the acceptable disclosures of confessional poetry and the legitimate need for privacy; it raises the question whether the principles of art justify violating privacy rights; and it finally calls upon us to distinguish carefully between shame and guilt. The key to unraveling the Dolphin mystery is therefore not primarily aesthetics but ethics. Published in 1973, The Dolphin can be said to mark the end of the first generation of confessional poetry which had begun roughly fifteen years before with Lowell’s own 1959 Life Studies. Confessional poetry, so named by M. L. Rosenthal in his groundbreaking review of Lowell’s 1959 volume, is usually associated with the work of Lowell himself, W. D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and other students of Lowell. Rosenthal uses “confession” initially in the therapeutic sense of the term as we know it from the Freudian talking cure (64). “Confessional” temporarily became associated with its Catholic sacramental sense (Lowell had left the Catholic church behind only a few years before and Life Studies could be understood as his liberation from doctrinal Catholic thinking) but more fully with the long juridical history of “confession” which Michel Foucault has documented, for example, in his History of Sexuality. 1 Some of Rosenthal’s sentences fairly brim with a strongly moralizing vocabulary that appeals to a sense of propriety presumably shared with the readership: The use of poetry for the most naked kind of confession grows apace in our day. [. . .] Whitman took poetry to the very edge of the confessional in his Calamus poems [. . .] Eliot and Pound brought us into the forbidden realm itself, yet even in their work a certain indirection masks the poet’s actual face 1 See Chloë Taylor’s study, The Culture of Confession for a cogent analysis of confessional practices from late antiquity through the Romantic age to a critical engagement with Foucault. <?page no="61"?> Shame, Guilt, and the Fate of Confessional Poetry 61 and psyche from greedy eyes. Lowell removes the mask. His speaker is unequivocally himself, and it is hard not to think of Life Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal. (64; my emphases) The notion of shame, raised here by Rosenthal, has been discussed only in passing in the many studies of confessional poetry. Shame implies a certain community standard that the poems might violate, though doing away with such largely hypocritical standards was precisely one of the goals of the liberatory thinking and artistic practice that characterized the nineteen-sixties. Yet it is crucial to distinguish between the shame that drives psychoanalytical patients to their analyst’s couch and the guilt that drives sinners to confession. The Encyclopedia of Ethics makes clear that “guilt is felt over wrongdoings, shame over shortcomings” (“Guilt and Shame” 427). We sense guilt when we transgress rules we have accepted as objective or quasi-objective; often, these are rules we trace back to a deity or other morally normative instances. We sense shame when we perceive ourselves, before a witnessing audience, to fall visibly short of our own expectations, expectations that have mostly been set up by our environment and that are subject to change. Guilt may be accompanied by shame, but guilt tends to last while shame dissipates. Shame can have guilt as a consequence, but it can also be limited to itself and never mutate into guilt. If Rosenthal is right in mixing shame and guilt - the “rather shameful” and the “forbidden realm” - as motivations behind Life Studies, then confessional poetry from the beginning must be seen as an enterprise to dismantle false shame. Yet it did not stop there. By 1973, looked at in these terms, The Dolphin emerges as a hingevolume in Lowell’s career: it closes the confessional phase that is associated with freely breaking decorum and taboos and exposing societally induced shame as sham. His next and last volume after The Dolphin, titled Day by Day, will be a summing up of his life and relationships, no longer in free sonnet form as his work of the seven or eight preceding years, but in longer ruminations that circle around the myths of Adam and Eve, Ulysses with Circe and Penelope, and filled to the brim with conventional religious references: “the light of the world,” “faith” (7), “Afterlife” (21, 23), “the Psalmist’s glass mosaic shepherd” (24), “Roman mass” (29), “Devil” (30), “belief” (43), “Immortal” (50), culminating in the astounding line “I thank God for being alive - / a way of writing I once thought heartless” (75). The dominant tone of Day by Day is that of a penitent who has completed and moved beyond the process <?page no="62"?> Thomas Austenfeld 62 of confession, absolution, and restitution, but it is no longer a confessional book on its own terms. The arc that The Dolphin concludes is the one in which Lowell made himself the practically exclusive subject of his poetry, as confessional poetry requires. Life Studies had broken with taboos both in content and form. Its meter and form differed radically from Lowell’s earlier baroque poetic density influenced by Allen Tate; Life Studies instead showed William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg as liberating influences. Life Studies took us into a poet’s private agonies, marital discord, Freudian scenarios in mother’s bedroom as well as psychological breakdowns, and added a prose memoir that skewered Lowell’s family’s pretensions to the pseudo-aristocracy of Boston Brahmin identity. Diane Middlebrook argued retrospectively in her 1993 essay, “What Was Confessional Poetry? ” that the movement was essentially anti-highmodernist “by reinstating an insistently autobiographical first person engaged in resistance to the pressure to conform” (635), and that the principal themes are divorce, sexual infidelity, childhood neglect, and [. . .] mental disorders. [. . .] A confessional poem [. . .] always seems to refer to a real person in whose actual life real episodes have occurred that cause actual pain, all represented in the poem. (636; my emphasis) Lowell’s poetry meets all these requirements but additional ones as well. Yet Middlebrook’s analysis is so firmly rooted in established literary history and, at the same time, steeped in three decades of pop psychology and self-help therapy that she loses sight of the “guilt” context of confession, whether in its religious or its juridical sense. Shame, governed by society’s ever-changing standards, can morph quickly, and the decade of the sixties thankfully finished off a lot of societal hang-ups that were falsely correlated with shame. The phenomenon of shame is best analyzed sociologically. Guilt is another matter, and generally far more difficult to analyze. The Dolphin offers disclosures that can no longer be explained as tossing overboard a false sense of shame. Lowell’s friends and critics, as we shall see, were at a loss to explain what he had done here. Lowell’s practice of mingling quotation and invention in The Dolphin invites us to look at another aspect of changing discourses in the nineteen-sixties. The sixties, as well as the years leading up to them and the early seventies at the long decade’s conclusion, were not only the heyday of confessional poetry but in general resonate with writing that turns fact and fiction into a potent broth. Fiction was dressed up as if it had become fact, suggesting an authenticity that was in itself a fictional product. The <?page no="63"?> Shame, Guilt, and the Fate of Confessional Poetry 63 sixties are the moment in which Life magazine documents daily American life in seemingly objective image and text. Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and later Joan Didion write on the borderline between fiction and fact. The sixties are the decade of a televised war in Vietnam and finally the moment in which Norman Mailer claimed to have created a new textual genre in his 1968 The Armies of the Night, subtitled History as a Novel, the Novel as History. Remarkably, it is in this narrative of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon that Mailer describes his fellow marcher Robert Lowell in exclusively ethical terms: “Lowell gave off at times the unwilling haunted saintliness of a man who was repaying the moral debts of ten generations of ancestors” (83). Looking back, it seems that the major political events of the nineteen-sixties, that is, the Cuban missile crisis, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the sense that “murder became an accepted form of political discourse” (Garrow qtd. in Monteith 1n2) galvanized ethical concerns in all forms of literature. Confessional poets were not the only ones sensing this, by a long shot. Lowell, however, would turn out to be one of the few who seriously endeavored to separate the dross of false shame from the gold of genuine guilt. When Bidart insists that Lowell’s confessional poems “were in significant ways invented” (997), he deflects too strongly from Lowell’s autobiographical impulse. There is no question that Lowell draws on his own experience and on his knowledge when he “confesses.” Significantly, though, he instinctively knows the difference between shame and guilt and creates a work of art that negotiates genuinely ethical subject matter. The 1973 Dolphin goes much further than earlier confessional poetry in its degree of intimacy revealed, but it wraps it in the wisdom of advanced age and signals a belated conclusion to the entire enterprise of the first generation of confessional poets. Lowell’s moral alertness as a poet has never been questioned, as Mailer’s account makes abundantly clear; whether his actions as a poet and a man were ethical is another question. Before attempting a judgment, let me gauge the moral relevance of emotions in general. Lyric poetry has traditionally been a vehicle for expressing strong emotions; often, the semi-private character of lyric poetry has provided the necessary shelter under which strong emotions could be aired and, by strictures of form, contained. Emotions are ethically highly relevant since they are far more than simply conditioned responses one could dismiss as mechanical. Psychologically speaking, emotions have both ontological and evaluative functions. An emotion we feel displays, first of all, our beliefs about what matters. Emotions situate us in relation to <?page no="64"?> Thomas Austenfeld 64 an event or a perception. But emotions are also judgments of value about the good or evil that is inherent in the situation which we observe or in which we find ourselves. 2 What emotions or judgments are foregrounded in The Dolphin? The story told in the sixty-some pages of loose sonnets that make up The Dolphin is easily summarized: “one man, two women, the common novel plot” (48). This line is often glossed as referring both to the stuff of fiction (“novel”), suggesting that the poet’s real-life experiences have been plotted so as to render raw experience in story form, and equally to the feeling that it is nonetheless new (“novel”) every time it happens. Lowell patterns his own life into a familiar narrative. David Laskin even thinks that “beneath this radical, daringly amoral narrative ploy, the book is deeply conventional” (269). 3 Lowell gives us repeated glimpses at the fraught relationships he has with his former wife Elizabeth Hardwick and his new wife Caroline Blackwood. Along the way, his ruminations about his daughter Harriett (with Hardwick) and the impending birth of his son Sheridan (with Blackwood) intervene to complicate the transatlantic transitoriness of his existence. If he left it at that, Lowell’s line about the “common novel plot” would sound merely self-indulgent. But Lowell engages his material ethically in what follows, as the poem’s title, “Exorcism,” has already suggested. The ethical center of the book lies in the next line in which Lowell makes an ontological claim with respect to emotions: “what you love you are” (48). The poet quotes this line from an italicized line in the preceding poem, probably quoting one of Hardwick’s letters (it is obviously her voice in the conclusion of the second poem), that postulates “What we love we are” as a fact (48). In the middle of that first poem occurs the change of perspective, referencing Hardwick as “you”: “You point your finger: What you love you are.” Pointing a finger accompanies the making of a normative statement. The same line twice on the same page, and a third instance with a different personal pronoun: clearly, the poet is agonizingly conjuring with that phrase. No other line in the entire volume is similarly attended to. Printed on the facing page of the two “Exorcism” poems is “Plotted,” in which the speaker graphs his aimless peregrinations in obsessive polyptotons, alliterations, and asso- 2 The preceding five sentences are strongly indebted to Christopher Bennett’s summary of Martha Nussbaum’s concepts, described in his article “Blame, Remorse, Mercy, Forgiveness” (575). 3 In a different context from mine, Laskin also argues, as I do, that Dolphin “marked the end of an era, not only for [Lowell] and Hardwick, but in a sense for their generation” (269). <?page no="65"?> Shame, Guilt, and the Fate of Confessional Poetry 65 nances, suggesting that he is under duress to act out a playscript, somewhat like Hamlet: Planes arc like arrows through the highest sky, ducks V the ducklings across a puckered pond; [. . .] I roam from bookstore to bookstore browsing books [. . .] as I execute my written plot. I feel how Hamlet, stuck with the Revenge Play his father wrote him, went scatological under this clotted London sky. (49) The only hold for the poet is that fateful line, “what you love you are.” It suggests a conflation of emotion and ontology, of sentiment and existence. As an ethical category, “sentiment” implies a subjective state controlled by feeling. It concerns present existence (rather than metaphysical essence) that gives moral agency to psychological states. But the sentence “What you love you are” makes a bigger claim: it takes us from existence to essence. In this, it goes far beyond its conventional alternative, “do what you love” or even its Augustinian complement, “love, and do what you will.” Augustine, of course, assumes that the love of God and neighbor will guide our ethical decisions, so the one who loves cannot go wrong. But the connection between loving and doing is not at stake here; in fact, the poet-speaker does very little in these poems, and what he does is scripted, prescripted, pre-scribed. Rather, in “what you love you are,” the “are,” a form of the verb “to be,” makes a reality claim beyond the transitory performing of an action. It suggests that love does more than make us do things: it turns us into a state of being. Lizzie’s pained accusation at the end, “Do you really know what you’ve done? ” (48), is implicitly answered, “yes.” Since the “plot” of the book here involves no criminal action but instead such interpersonal relationships as adultery, divorce, remarriage, the birth of a child, and the fraught relationship with an existing daughter from the previous marriage, the issues of guilt and shame will be transacted not primarily as objective conditions that are defined by a legal framework, according to which guilt would merit punishment and shame would result in dishonor and ridicule (“Guilt and Shame” 426), but as subjective states, in which “guilt is felt over wrongdoings, shame over shortcomings” (427), as I argued at the outset. Such “objective” conditions can be decided by a society that gives itself a moral law. The poet’s “confession” of either his guilt or his shame, or both, is rendered <?page no="66"?> Thomas Austenfeld 66 infinitely more complex by the likelihood that the act of public confession that constitutes the book will result in additional harm; namely, further emotional distress to Elizabeth Hardwick and daughter Harriett. We are past confession, past shame, here: by invoking existential questions that rise to the level of essentiality, Lowell takes us firmly into the realm of guilt and responsibility. Confessional poetry had originally been seen as related to the act of confession one performs in a confessional booth, or as analogous to a public confession before a judge, but it was quickly diverted into the realm of shame. Lowell - practically alone among the confessional poets - grappled with issues of guilt and religious normativity, though increasingly less visibly. However, few seem to have thought through the rest of what is essentially a metaphor, “confessing,” to the necessary next step: where is the judgment, the punishment imposed, or the absolution given by the priest? Lowell casts himself in the role of penitent, to be sure, but who is the confessor to whom he confesses? To complete the circle of the practice of confessional poetry, then: if “confession” is only the first step in the process that takes us from blame via remorse to forgiveness, we may start to see The Dolphin as an enactment of a penitential practice. Lowell’s act of confession began with Life Studies fifteen years earlier, but now the time for mere confessing is past. The frame of reference has shifted from shame to guilt. Now, the poet-speaker performs his own punishment, in public, by exposing his Hamlet-like indecision. At the conclusion of his confessional phase, Lowell apparently returns to his adopted Catholic heritage of the late forties and early fifties in publicly undergoing self-flagellation. The Dolphin may indeed be read as a self-punishment that begins the eventual atonement that Lowell would reach in his next, again totally different and final volume, Day by Day. How is this possible? Let us take a closer look at the controversy surrounding The Dolphin. The Dolphin is one of three books of poetry Lowell published in 1973. The large History was the final, heavily revised print form of his earlier volumes, Notebook 1967-68 and Notebook, now with a larger reach to encompass personal, familial, New England, and world history. The two smaller volumes, For Lizzie and Harriett and The Dolphin, are, respectively, addressed to his former wife and their daughter in common (i.e., Elizabeth Hardwick and daughter Harriett) and to Caroline Blackwood in England. The subtitles of sections in The Dolphin, taken together, transport a great deal of anxiety. Sections like “Doubt,” “During a Transatlantic Call,” “Exorcism,” “Plotted,” “Leaving America for England,” and “Flight to New York” (yes, he is talking about a plane ticket <?page no="67"?> Shame, Guilt, and the Fate of Confessional Poetry 67 here but the overtone of “escape” in flight is too strong to miss) lend a fragmented air to this volume in comparison to the largely nostalgic, dreamy, even majestically celebratory For Lizzie and Harriett. In The Dolphin, airplanes jet back and forth across the Atlantic; the final sequence, “Flight to New York,” eerily anticipates Lowell’s 1977 flight back to Elizabeth Hardwick which ends with his death. The poem, “With Caroline at the Air-Terminal,” also darkly suggests more than the journey itself: “terminal” in Lowell is a loaded word ever since his earlier poem, “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms,” in which the young Lowell satirically recounts his father’s death. The two shorter volumes are different in character, in poetic coherence, and in focus from History: in contrast to its encyclopedic sweep and dizzying quantity of sonnets, the shorter volumes display thematic coherence and, as Elizabeth Bishop noted about the Dolphin: “every 14 lines have some marvel of image and expression, and also they are all much clearer” (Words in Air 707). Bishop is my transition to what is generally known as the Dolphin controversy. The seventh edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature contains a cluster of so-called “Postmodern Manifestos” in which we find, surprisingly, excerpts from Elizabeth Bishop’s letter to Robert Lowell, 21 March 1972 (E: 2497-98). 4 Bishop takes her friend to task, in no uncertain terms, for violating his former wife Elizabeth Hardwick’s trust, by quoting from, and changing, Hardwick’s accusatory letters to Lowell on the occasion of their separation and divorce. Bishop’s critique is focused on four issues: 1. She feels she cannot trust the writer (Lowell) because he has mixed “fact and fiction in unknown proportions.” 2. She deplores that he was not given permission, and that he changed the letters. 3. She accuses Lowell of cruelty and of not being a gentleman - she quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins as saying that a gentleman is higher even than a Christian. And 4. She feels personally betrayed, because with Lowell, she cares: “I DO give a damn about what you write! ” In the middle of her list of complaints is an italicized statement that alone might warrant the inclusion of this letter in the “postmodern manifestos”: “art just isn’t worth that much” (Words in Air 707-08). This is hardly a postmodern manifesto, properly speaking. In the context of Bishop’s letter, however, one detects her complaint that while the confessional style of Life Studies may have been “a necessary 4 The anthology’s eighth edition maintains the letter and, charmingly but incongruously, adds a picture of Lowell and Bishop at the beach in Brazil in 1962 (412-14)! For the full text of the letter, consult Words in Air. <?page no="68"?> Thomas Austenfeld 68 movement, and it helped make poetry more real, fresh and immediate, [. . .] now [. . .] anything goes, and I’m so sick of poems about the students’ mothers & fathers and sex-lives and so on.” As I do in this essay, so Bishop reads The Dolphin in comparison with Life Studies, but unlike me, she finds the present volume wanting. To Bishop, the liberating force of Lowell’s 1959 breakthrough volume seems exhausted, having resulted in 1972 in a free-for-all shamelessness. Note that Bishop is reacting to a pre-publication 1972 version of the book! I read Bishop’s “I’m so sick of” as an expression of embarrassment rather than shame, embarrassment being the kind of emotion that is occasioned in us by an encounter with other people or in a public situation. Either they behave in a manner which violates our standard of shame (let us assume we unintentionally witness sex on the beach) or they call attention to our falling short of appropriate behavior in public (let us assume we are being observed having sex on the beach). Note, though, that the public setting is required for this reaction. Bishop feels here that Lowell, for all practical purposes, is having sex on the beach: he has disclosed altogether too much of his breakup with Lizzie. She uneasily captures her own sense of violated shame in what is essentially an aesthetic argument, “art just isn’t worth that much” (708). But Bishop, sensitive to a fault about her friend’s self-exposure, yet not a religious person, misses the point - the point being “guilt.” I do not believe that shame is at stake for Lowell in The Dolphin. Standards of shame that describe deviations from current social norms vary considerably with place and time, so our feelings of shame are likely to vary throughout our lifetimes. Society adjusts to new norms subtly, or less subtly, all the time. Narrative fiction is among the best tools we have to diagnose the changes in standards of shame over time: just think of what is socially unacceptable in Jane Austen versus Charlotte Brontë, or in Henry James versus William Burroughs. 5 Lyric poetry has traditionally been the province of self-contemplation and private utterance and has therefore been somewhat exempt from being measured by shifting societal standards of shame. However, as Ian Hamilton correctly observes, Bishop is reacting to the “first version” (422) of the Dolphin, the one that existed after Frank Bidart had worked with Lowell in England for a couple of weeks and finally left in February 1972. For example, the published version of a 5 On this topic, see Ulrich Greiner’s excellent book with reference to the Germanspeaking literary tradition, Schamverlust. <?page no="69"?> Shame, Guilt, and the Fate of Confessional Poetry 69 poem called “Voices” (Hospital II) will eventually read as follows, in Lizzie’s voice: “What a record year, even for us - last March, I knew you’d manage by yourself, you were the true you; now finally your clowning makes visitors want to call a taxi” (The Dolphin 23) Bishop, however, saw a version that read: “What a record year, even for us - last March, we hoped you’d manage by yourself, you were the true you; now finally your clowning makes us want to vomit - you bore, bore, bore the friends who wished to save your image from this genteel, disgraceful hospital” (Words in Air 708n1) Lizzie’s voice and her deep sense of being hurt are clear in this earlier version. And the principals in the controversy would “hear” those original words no matter how much Lowell might have toned down the poems eventually. In an attempt not to ruin things with Lowell, Bishop concludes her 21 March 1972 letter with a passage not reprinted in the “manifesto”: “ DOLPHIN is marvelous - no doubt about it - I’ll write you all the things I like sometime! - I hope all goes well with you, and Caroline, and the little daughters, and the infant son - With much love, Elizabeth” (709). Adrienne Rich, Lowell’s former student at Boston University, showed less forbearance. In the American Poetry Review she made short shrift of Lowell, now commenting on the actually printed volume: beginning with a diagnosis of “aggrandized and merciless masculinity at work [. . .] symptomatic of the dead-end destructiveness that masculine privilege has built for itself into all institutions, including poetry,” she winds up with this salvo, “the inclusion of the letter-poems stands as one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry, one for which I can think of no precedent” (186-87). A few months later, Diane Wakoski responded, upbraiding Rich for her “maniacal” view of literature. Wakoski says that “[the poems] present a man who is living as he feels he has to live, even when he knows he has no justification for it, but his own passions. He does not ask for pity. He asks one thing, I think, of the reader. Belief in the poems” (187). The <?page no="70"?> Thomas Austenfeld 70 starkly controversial judgments on The Dolphin are well illustrated by these diametrically opposed pronouncements. How can The Dolphin episode serve as a test case for the ethical implications that inhere in confessional poetry? We need to acknowledge that Lowell also appropriated Blackwood’s letters and her voice. At this point in time, he recognized that he had responsibilities to both women simultaneously. I disagree therefore with Stephen Yenser’s critique of The Dolphin as “more gossip [. . .] than gospel”: “Lowell’s sequence is relentlessly documented [. . .] [so] that the pattern of experience cannot emerge” (qtd. in Hamilton 432). In this sentence, the stress must be laid on “pattern.” Yenser demands that even confessional poetry should be patterned: only then has it passed through the cauldron of the writer’s mind and has become art. In contrast, I believe that Lowell’s “patterning” at the time consisted of a reorientation of his spiritual health along with his poetic craft. Today, when all of the adults involved in The Dolphin are dead, we can see that Lowell was not out to create a sensational revelation. The “common novel plot” of “one man, two women” is the beginning of a process of self-healing by way of admitting guilt. The pattern that Yenser sought emerges, perhaps, only with difficulty in The Dolphin itself, but it becomes totally clear in the sequence of Lowell’s volumes both before and after The Dolphin. Reaching the end of his version of confessional poetry, Lowell did not leave off in exhaustion or join the camp of the newly emerging LANGUAGE poets. No, he repatterned his thinking back into ethical modes of reasoning, those in which emotions are valid expressions of being and can make valid and true statements about moral essence, and in which being-in-the-world is a category that admits the judging of guilt but that also opens the door to atonement. Seen in its historical moment, that is, closing off the fifteen-year period of confessional poetry since Life Studies but serving as the gate to the calm, collected, post-confessional Day by Day, The Dolphin is both Lowell’s last confession and his first atonement. “What you love you are” is a statement that betokens ethical reasoning. Now, it is no longer the silly question of beef soup on Fridays (allegedly his bone of contention with Jean Stafford when he was a convert around 1949, see Hamilton 79); 6 rather, it is Lowell’s achievement of a semantic framework in which to articulate the guilt - not the shame! - that he feels he needs to express. 6 Hamilton’s narrative is here based on an interview with Robert Giroux (480; notes). <?page no="71"?> Shame, Guilt, and the Fate of Confessional Poetry 71 References Bennett, Christopher. “Blame, Remorse, Mercy, Forgiveness.” The Routledge Companion to Ethics. Ed. John Skorupski. London: Routledge, 2010. 573-83. Bidart, Frank. “Afterword: On ‘Confessional’ Poetry.” Collected Poems. By Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. 995- 1001. Greiner, Ulrich. Schamverlust: Vom Wandel der Gefühlskultur. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2014. “Guilt and Shame.” Encyclopedia of Ethics. Eds. Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker. New York: Garland, 1992. 426-27. Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography. London: Faber and Faber, 1983. Laskin, David. Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal among the New York Intellectuals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Lowell, Robert. Day by Day. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. ―――. The Dolphin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. ―――. Life Studies and For the Union Dead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964. Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History. 1968. New York: Penguin, 1994. Middlebrook, Diane W. “What Was Confessional Poetry? ” The Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 632-49. Monteith, Sharon. American Culture in the 1960s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym et al. 7th Ed. Vol. E. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007. Rich, Adrienne. “On History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin.” The Critical Response to Robert Lowell. Ed. Steven Gould Axelrod. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. 187-88. Orig. in American Poetry Review 2 (1973): 42-43. Rosenthal, Macha Louis. “Poetry as Confession.” The Critical Response to Robert Lowell. Ed. Steven Gould Axelrod. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. 64-68. Orig. in The Nation 189 (1959): 154-55. Taylor, Chloe. The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the “Confessing Animal.” New York: Routledge, 2009. Wakoski, Diane. “Reply to Adrienne Rich.” The Critical Response to Robert Lowell. Ed. Steven Gould Axelrod. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. 187- 88. Orig. in American Poetry Review 3 (1974): 46. <?page no="72"?> Thomas Austenfeld 72 Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Eds. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. <?page no="73"?> The Aesthetics of Poetic Self-Representation: Henry James’s What Maisie Knew Dustin Breitenwischer Henry James’s novel What Maisie Knew is essentially “motivated from behind,” which means that it follows the principle and the logic of a predetermined destiny. By referring to Clemens Lugowski’s theory of narrative motivation, this essay discusses the ways in which What Maisie Knew must be read as a performative representation of its own aesthetic and poetic premises. James not only exposes the ambiguous workings of the literary text, but also the workings of the reader’s hermeneutic endeavor. A close analysis of the novel’s final sentence (“She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew”) assembles discussions about the dissolution of the guardian figure, the self-declamation of the novel as a work of art, its form-giving agency for the space of aesthetic experience, and, ultimately, the meaning of the poetics of literary motivation. I Henry James ends his 1897 novel What Maisie Knew on the infamously ambiguous and essentially open note: “She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew” (649). On the level of the plot, “she” is Maisie’s guardian Mrs. Wix, and Maisie is, at this point, the young adolescent who, in the course of the novel, had to endure the unpleasant divorce of her parents, their respective new marriages, and their renewed breakups. Yet, and this comes as no surprise for the experienced reader of James’s (later) novels, there is more to this final sentence than the generation of closure of a most unnerving story. In fact, even though Mai- Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 32. Ed. Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser. Tübingen: Narr, 2015. 73-85. <?page no="74"?> Dustin Breitenwischer 74 sie’s decision to stay with Mrs. Wix after decidedly breaking with her parents produces a certain degree of satisfaction on the part of the reader, her rigorous elusiveness leaves us with more questions than answers. As the novel is structured by the continuous emergence of new beginnings - the succession of conflict and resolution, new conflicts, and ever-new resolutions - and the hope to finally leave behind an aggravating past, the end of the narrative cannot and, for that matter, must not be understood as the promise of a satisfiable closure, but rather as the tautological possibility of exposing ever-new emerging possibilities. The ending of the novel reveals itself as the opening of yet undefined rooms for wonder. Throughout the novel, Maisie is a close observer of her immediate surroundings. As she grows older (from being a little girl to becoming a teenager) her cognitive abilities develop impressively. She is a character who seemingly notices everything around her and, at the same time, she is one who is seldom being noticed by her surroundings. In fact, she often seems to be merely a plaything in the endless charades her parents play; tossed around but utterly neglected. It is only due to her changing guardians and, ultimately, the narrator that Maisie finds recognition as a character who so desperately tries to understand the world she lives in. Yet even though she is paid increasingly more attention by others, her parent’s rigorous negligence of her leaves her stunningly opaque - barely more than a riddle to her close ones, and only a hazy void for the imaginary longings of the reader. Maisie rarely ever acts upon her knowledge; instead, she becomes a catalyst of her stated fact that “[e]verything had something behind it: life was like a long, long corridor with rows of closed doors” (419). James’s deliberate play with Maisie’s knowledge is, as David McWhirter convincingly argues, “an aspect of his reflexive realism” (241) - a reflexivity which is substantially turned into an aesthetic principle. Despite the fact that in the beginning of the novel young Maisie “learned that at these doors it was wise not to knock” (419), the novel’s final sentence teaches us about the existence of a room whose closed door must not repel us but excite our existential will to throw it wide open. 1 Maisie lives in “a world of shifting identities and selfish utilizations, [. . .] one that by its nature obstructs her own full 1 In his attempt to discern readerly figures in James’s later novels, William Veeder refers to Maisie as “another model reader” (231), quoting the sentence about her knowledge of everything having something behind it but curiously leaving out the fact that she is afraid to knock - an anxiety that disarms her curiosity and makes her a rather questionable reader. I would rather argue that Maisie is not an allegorical reader but the gateway to a space for the trials and tribulations of our readerly experience. <?page no="75"?> Aesthetics of Poetic Self-Representation 75 understanding of it (and ours as well)” (Heller 77), and she therefore lacks the means to fully escape the logic of that world. For her, “it is the only world there is” (77). Yet in accordance with the consequences of the narrative motivation of and in James’s novel, and the aesthetics of poetic self-representation that I will introduce and discuss shortly, the reader is offered an exit strategy. II Despite the justifiable fact that we might understand the indecisiveness of What Maisie Knew’s ending both as the logical conclusion of an indecisive narrative and as the result of a causal necessity of story and plot, I argue that it is the other way around. What Maisie Knew is essentially motivated from behind, a concept I take from Clemens Lugowski’s 1932 study Die Form der Individualität im Roman, in which the author ventures into the literary history of narrative motivation. Lugowski aims at a more complex understanding of narrative motivation by way of supplementing the causal motivation with the so-called final motivation, or motivation from behind. The motivation from behind is driven by “the meaning of the moment of conclusion” (66; my translation). 2 While the motivation from the front is grounded, as Winfried Menninghaus notes with regards to Lugowski, in the “psychological motivation from the protagonists” (162), the latter refers to “an objective performance of the genre’s rules oriented toward a fixed goal” (162). For Lugowski, motivation means, first and foremost, the plausible interconnectivity of the plot and the (above all, psychological) repercussions of action-reaction-schemes. Thereby, the questions about what is motivating and what is motivated are turned into poetic play, in which the motivating exists solely for the sake of the motivated. With regards to our daily lives, this seems to be a most counter-intuitive ambiguity. In fact, by way of giving an example, Lugowski notes that normally death (as what is motivating) could not possibly occur for the sake of the pain it causes; but if we turn to motivation as a poetic device, a given narrative might very well be geared toward a character’s pain rather than driven by the death of a character that is causing the pain. The pain then becomes more important than the death causing it (Lugowski 67). And should 2 In the German original, Lugowski writes “die Bedeutung des Ergebnismoments” (my emphasis). For an extensive introduction to Lugowski’s theory, see Martínez, Doppelte Welten (13-36). <?page no="76"?> Dustin Breitenwischer 76 such evocation of pain be the plot-driving, i.e., the motivating force, we might concur that it “motivates from behind.” To put it in Lugowski’s words: “The result is not determined by the premises of the plot, but the different traits of the plot are determined by the result that demands its disclosure” (75; my translation). In modern, or, rather, post-archaic literature, the motivation from behind has been increasingly replaced by the use of the motivation from the front. “This shift,” Menninghaus comments, “conforms to the ‘spirit’ of the hermeneutical view of literature in that it allows the reader to establish a continuum of sense from the psychology of the protagonists to the course of the plot” (162). The motivation from behind operates with the force of a “higher principle,” a lawful order acting outside the actions and motifs of the characters in the plot. It is my contention that, in James’s novel, this “higher principle” is paradoxically the very “spirit of the hermeneutical view” that Menninghaus refers to. What is usually motivating from the front turns into that which is motivated from behind: the longing to know in our quest to understand. This paradox can in part be explained with Lugowski’s theory itself, simply because the final motivation is at times mimicking the causal motivation, meaning that, as Heinz Schlaffer argues, “the fateful ‘motivation from behind’ is disguised as a causality-simulating ‘motivation from the front’” (Poesie 111; my translation). Lugowski himself calls this the mythic analogon, i.e., the appearance of the mythic and archaic legacy in all postancient literary narratives. In a remarkable way, the reader of James’s novel is exposed to a great irony, for the “result that demands its disclosure” is utterly undetermined. This raises a question: What does it mean when the narrative is not causally motivated by the opening question of what Maisie knew (which may not be a question grammatically but effectively), but finally motivated and structured to arrive at the unmistakable openness of being a retroactively motivating question? III “She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew.” The final sentence is not a plea to re-read the novel in order to finally unclose the truth about Maisie’s knowledge. It is rather an emphatic circumscription of reading’s core potential to repeatedly unconceal (in the strong Heideggerian sense of entbergen) our own quest of understanding. The final sentence is thus a plea to accept and celebrate, and, in the end, to aes- <?page no="77"?> Aesthetics of Poetic Self-Representation 77 theticize the “wonder” of wondering itself, and to therefore re-venture into the mysteries of the text. The reader is not exposed to the calmness of closure but to the emergence of the fundamentally open. And as there is “still room for wonder,” the reader must understand that the peculiar openness of the novel’s ending refers to its own temporal dimension of existing still and thereby repeatedly and to an indeterminate end. The openness of the “room for wonder” is extraordinarily and performatively tautological, as it is a space of possible temporal openendedness. Hence, the experience of reading the final sentence is, in fact, a potentially open-ended event (Ereignis) of radical openness: it marks the appearance of the moment in which we have, as Hans-Georg Gadamer notes, “acquired a new horizon within which something can become an experience” (348). The title of the novel is hereby excitingly misleading, as the narrative does not disclose what Maisie knew. It is, quite to the contrary, the disguising of a most fundamental question, namely the question of what can be known after all. In fact, after one has finished reading the novel, it becomes noticeable how surprisingly dismissive the narrative has been throughout with regards to what Maisie actually knew, could have known, or did not know. It stages itself as a novel and, hence, as the aesthetic plea to keep on asking. The narrative is not driven. It is motivated by its innermost drive - its motivation from behind. This poetic scheme is not only characteristic for What Maisie Knew but in many ways constitutive for the entire oeuvre of James’s later novels and novellas. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, James practiced what Heinz Ickstadt calls “the professional exploration of the medium itself” (Roman 23; my translation). 3 Therefore, I argue that the motivation from behind that eventually accelerates the narrative to arrive at an inconclusive question, a mode of “wondering” - which had been the motivating principle all along - is James’s way of staging the poetic program that is characteristic for several of his later and late works. 4 At first, we must more closely discern the role of the “she” who “still had room for wonder.” Here, James is relying on a most dominant figure in realist literature, namely that of the guardian. But, as has already been noted, the “she” in the final sentence breaks loose from its subject of signification and takes on a rather 3 See also Britzolakis; Litvak. 4 In comparison with my claims put forth in this essay and with regards to James’s late poetics, Winfried Fluck discusses very similar issues in his reading of James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw in Das kulturelle Imaginäre (285-91). <?page no="78"?> Dustin Breitenwischer 78 analogous existence. James has the guardian figure Mrs. Wix wonder because it ultimately allows him to offer her role to the reader. The “she” thereby becomes a play-space of readerly appropriation. 5 Winfried Fluck argues that it is the task of the famous guardian figure in James’s later novels to educe the secret from the other characters (Imaginäre 287). The ambiguity of the text (and its diverse meanings) ought to be accepted as a reception-aesthetic strategy in which the role of the guardian and the role of the pupil are no longer distinguishable (287). In James’s later novels, the guardian figure is no longer analogous with the text as an educating force. As far as the novel itself is concerned, the reader has become an “equal interlocutor” (288; my translation). A didactic mode of instruction has been replaced with a hermeneutic mode of reflection. As Fluck puts it, “by way of refusing access to the ‘mystery’ of the text, James’s novels from the 90s refer the reader to her own interpretative fantasies of ownership” (289; my translation). The reader is, in short, intentionally thrown back onto her own experience, her “room for wonder.” The shift of the guardian figure from a diegetic character to the reader eventually marks the partial dissolution of that figure and its properties. What is more, the devaluation or, at least, the re-signification of the guardian figure radicalizes the emphatic self-declamation of the text as a work of art. Since the normative mode of education has turned out to be inefficient, the text stages itself as an agent of rigorous aesthetic and poetic self-representation. The reader is thereby, very much like Maisie, turned into a catalyst that is perfused by the potentiality of her experience: The experience’s potential of transformation can only be realized in the “experimental isolation” of the artwork because only the latter is able to show the self-regulatory capabilities of a system that is no longer depending on a guardian. The artwork has finally taken the place of the “educator” as a civilizing agent. (Fluck, Imaginäre 290-91; my translation) James thus provoked a paradigm shift with regards to the aesthetic and poetic premises of the novel as such. As to the final sentence and the final motivation of What Maisie Knew, we must therefore look for a possible conflation of James’s poetic program, the aesthetic potential of the 5 I am using the term “appropriation” in accordance with Heinz Schlaffer’s introduction of the term in his essay “Die Aneignung von Gedichten” (“The Appropriation of Poems”) in which he argues that the acting personae in a poem necessarily need to be appropriated by the reader, so that the latter acts as if she were that respective persona. <?page no="79"?> Aesthetics of Poetic Self-Representation 79 text as a work of art, and the appearance of the hermeneutic “spirit” in the motivating fate of the deliberately open ending. IV “She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew.” Due to the suspension and the concomitant re-appropriation of the role of the guardian, the room for wonder opens up dramatically before the reader. What is more, the practice of wondering is not aimed at an understanding of Maisie’s knowledge but is triggered by and grounded in the sheer unknowability of the latter. As we saw in Fluck’s observations, James has turned the novel as such from a classically “closed,” educating, and ultimately revealing medium into a room for wonder, meaning that he formulated a poetic program that understood the work of art as the “open” and opening appearance of an innermost secret. As John Dewey puts it: “Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment” (17). Hence, there is an essential openness in experience and eventually in the aesthetic object itself. In What Maisie Knew, we encounter the consequences of an aesthetic decision that has strong ethical repercussions, as the reader of the novel is neither in need to be educated nor merely (or yet) tied to “the hope of warming his shivering life” (Benjamin 101). James’s novel rather promotes the reader to a self-sufficient recipient of the radically open and restorative work of art. 6 Despite the fact that James is still tied to aesthetic premises of a substantially ordered and cohesive structure (and is necessarily so with regards to the larger realm of his literary project), he daringly opens that structure up to openness itself. The dissolution of the diegetic guardian figure and the quasipragmatist (Deweyan) reconsideration of experience and aesthetic object put us, as readers, into a two-fold state split between the role of our narrative assignment and the active poetic appropriation in which we are made to understand the fact that we “still had room for wonder.” In almost modernist fashion, James turns the poetics of his novel from meta-commentary into a performative act, leading to the point where the novel itself actively and playfully reveals its own being. By doing so, 6 The novel as a work of art “signals the transition of a realist project that is aimed at the civilizing completion of the American into literary modernity with its international emergency association of individual readers who are, by now, no longer united by a national promise but by the belief in the artwork’s civilizing potential of renewal” (Fluck, Imaginäre 291; my translation). <?page no="80"?> Dustin Breitenwischer 80 it turns itself into a room for wonder, i.e., a space in which the experience of our immediate life-world and the potentiality of our imaginary faculties clash most noticeably and creatively. Hence, the “room for wonder” turns out to be the self-representation of the novel as a work of art. Yet if we want to understand and ask for the meaning of this very self-representation, we need to discern the innermost workings of the work of art itself. V In “The Origins of the Work of Art,” Martin Heidegger (in)famously argues that the work of art - as what is essentially unconcealing the Truth - is characterized by a conflict, in which, Heidegger writes, “the Open is won within which everything stands and from which everything withholds itself that shows itself and withdraws itself as a being” (59). The “Open” clears when the conflicting opponents decisively “move apart” (59) and confront each other. The conflict and, hence, the “Open” must be understood as the appearance of a “rift (Riss)” (61). But “the conflict is not a rift as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather it is an intimacy with which opponents belong to each other” (63). Wolfgang Iser turns to Heidegger’s idea of the rift but strips it from its Truth-driven pathos, claiming that as the rift opens up, it becomes “a sign of what by nature is irreconcilable: being and nonbeing” (Fictive 292), of what is (i.e., the properties of the work of art) and what is not (i.e., the appearance of the imaginary’s gestalt). By turning to yet another Heideggerian concept, Iser claims that those irreconcilable opponents are engaged in an intricate mode of so-called “dual-countering” (Gegenwendigkeit 234). If we consider the aesthetic semblance of James’s “room for wonder” to be reminded of the novel’s newly discovered potential of poetic self-declamation, that very “room for wonder” most literally appears as the self-staging of the rift. Thereby, the work of art becomes the representation and declamation of its essence. It stages the horizon to which it points at the same time. To recapitulate, the “room for wonder” opens a space that allows us to observe the self-reflective workings of James’s poetic strategy. But since Iser has not yet considered the rift to be of aesthetic quality but used it as a structural analogon for the workings of the work of art, I claim that the very “room for wonder” is significantly self-exposing and, as such, the aesthetic appearance and the performance of the novel’s poetic principle in the spirit of the aforementioned “experimental isola- <?page no="81"?> Aesthetics of Poetic Self-Representation 81 tion.” This, furthermore, means that the room is not simply a space to which we are metaphorically exposed, but that it is also and, most excitingly, a space in which we are exposed to the form-giving processes of our aesthetic experience. The “room for wonder” is a space of experience. VI Every work of art is constitutive of a space in-between through which it is capable to represent its own spatiotemporal performance, thereby making the self-representation itself available for the aesthetic experience of the recipient. The work of art playfully finds ways in which it is always already the representation of its own aesthetic premises. 7 As my analysis of James’s novel has shown so far, it is by way of aesthetic selfdeclamation that art and literature must be considered extraordinary forms of communication in and for modern culture, for it is in the work’s emphatically playful manner where we understand that “knowledge of what man is can only come about in the form of play” (Iser, “Representation” 245). James manages to show that the work of art is a most extraordinary way for the self-representation and recognition of this “form of play.” 8 By leaving the reader with a deliberately hazy image of Maisie and the all-encompassing “room for wonder” which is constitutive of her, What Maisie Knew exposes the reader to a space of unexpected but ultimately motivating possibilities, a space of imaginary immersion - a space in-between. I claim that the reader is closing the act of reading the novel by entering or, to be more precise, by being made aware of having always already been roaming through a radically self-reflective space of aesthetic self-representation, which is itself predicated on James’s poetics of individual “experimental isolation.” As we are isolated in order to radically expose ourselves to the aesthetic presence of our own imaginary “room for wonder,” we are in many ways instructed to look at our- 7 In my dissertation Die Kunst dazwischen zu sein, which is currently being prepared for publication, I have dealt with this issue more intensively. With regards to the aesthetics of poetic self-representation in modern literature, see my “‘Look at this tangle of thorns.’” 8 See also Iser, “Play of the Text.” <?page no="82"?> Dustin Breitenwischer 82 selves looking into the potential and the appearing gestalt of that very room. 9 In “Representation: A Performative Act,” Iser most generally claims that aesthetic experience constitutes a space in-between, in which we are “both ourselves and someone else” (244). To some extent, the inbetween could be understood as the translation of the physical space between the place of reception and the place of the work into an imaginary third space that synthesizes both these places. This is the spatial practice of a “halfway state” and, as such, the venue for “an interplay between its constituents” (Fluck, “Search” 181). The space in-between is a space without borders, a space that is radically open both to the physical reality and the depicted world. 10 With regards to a literary text, the reader is thus able to immerse herself into the fictive “as if” world without fully losing herself to the playfully deceiving reality of the text. The aesthetics of poetic self-representation - the staging of the inbetween as the motivating final cause - is appealing to James because his later works are distinctly marked by a curious “position of indeterminacy, which activates both the reader’s enhanced act of imagination and interpretative engagement” (Fluck, “Individuum” 1005; my translation). It is in and through this readerly enhancement that the “room for wonder” is turned from an agent of “experimental isolation” into a spatial practice that becomes an aesthetic testing ground for the reader’s experience, but that also captures “the affinity between the aesthetic, the moral, and the social imagination” which has significantly shaped “latenineteenth century America” (Ickstadt, “Concepts” 97). 11 9 In many regards the self-reflective meta-conception of ourselves as observers - as bystanders to ourselves - ties in with James’s overall concern with the representation of visuality in his later novels. As Christina Britzolakis puts it quite pointedly: “If What Maisie Knew places at its center the question of representation itself, it also imbricates that question with processes of spectacle and commodification specific to the emergent discursive order of the late nineteenth-century imperial metropolis. The novel’s investment in spectacular forms of performance and display addresses the industries of the image that were dynamically reshaping urban experience“ (“Technologies” 370). 10 As Elizabeth Grosz argues, the in-between is a space “without boundaries of its own, which takes on and receives itself, its form, from the outside, which is not its outside” (Architecture 91; my emphasis). 11 At this point, it is only appropriate to briefly mention and acknowledge the ways in which What Maisie Knew is also a performative representation of its twisted contemporary morality, for it “considers modern child custody arrangements and the plight of children whose divorced parents remarry with unprecedented, dizzying speed” (McWhirter 239). <?page no="83"?> Aesthetics of Poetic Self-Representation 83 VII Implementing the motivation from behind allows the novel’s narrative to be driven by the self-representation of its poetic strategy, its aesthetic premises, and its hermeneutic openness. And in order for James to use the motivation from behind as a poetic performance of the workings of literary hermeneutics and as an aesthetic principle for the self-staging of the reader’s experience of the former, he initiates a cunning scheme: he does not expose what is motivating from behind as the final knowledge of a most certain fact, but as the open and concentric process of eternal inquiry. Yet his novel is not the (proto-postmodern) celebration of an ironic exposition of utter meaninglessness. Quite on the contrary, What Maisie Knew exposes and thereby celebrates human Dasein as a deficient being essentially and existentially engaged in a lifelong quest for meaning. This quest must propel the reader to long for ever-new aesthetic experiences because, as Iser tells us, it is in and through aesthetic experience where that which is and that which is not engage in a most productive, i.e., meaningful conflict. In What Maisie Knew, James dramatizes the novel as the aesthetic placeholder for that quest. This is, most significantly, the reason why he dares to undertake such a paradoxical move and turn hermeneutic openness into the destined goal that is fundamentally motivating the progress of the narrative. This is why he dares to turn infinity into the ending and the ending toward infinity. <?page no="84"?> Dustin Breitenwischer 84 References Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969. 83-109. Breitenwischer, Dustin. “‘Look at this tangle of thorns’: Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita und die Appellstruktur des Geständnisses.” Kriminalliteratur und Wissensgeschichte: Genres - Medien - Techniken. Eds. Clemens Peck and Florian Sedlmeier. Bielefeld: transcript, 2015. 197- 214. Britzolakis, Christina. “Technologies of Vision in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew.“ NOVEL : A Forum on Fiction 34.3 (2001): 369-90. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Penguin, 2005. Fluck, Winfried. Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans 1790-1900. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997. ―――. “Das Individuum und die Macht der sozialen Beziehung: Henry James.” Geschichte und Vorgeschichte der modernen Subjektivität. Vol. 2. Eds. Reto Luzius Fetz, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Peter Schulz. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998. 993-1019. ―――. “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in the Literary Theory of Wolfgang Iser.” New Literary History 31.1 (2000): 175- 210. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2006. Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origins of the Work of Art.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Alfred Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 15-86. Heller, Lee E. “The Paradox of the Individual Triumph: Instrumentality and the Family in What Maisie Knew.” South Atlantic Review 53.4 (1988): 77-85. Ickstadt, Heinz. Der amerikanische Roman im 20. Jahrhundert: Transformation des Mimetischen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998. ―――. “Concepts of Society and the Practice of Fiction: Symbolic Responses to the Experience of Change in Late-Nineteenth Century America.” Faces of Fiction: Essays on American Literature and Culture from the Jacksonian Period to Postmodernity. Eds. Susanne Rohr and Sabine Sielke. Heidelberg: Winter, 2001. 97-113. <?page no="85"?> Aesthetics of Poetic Self-Representation 85 Iser, Wolfgang. “Representation: A Performative Act.” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 236-48. ―――. “The Play of the Text.” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 249- 61. ―――. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. James, Henry. What Maisie Knew. 1897. Novels 1896-1899. New York: Library of America, 2003. 395-649. Litvak, Joseph. Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Lugowski, Clemens. Die Form der Individualität im Roman. Introd. Heinz Schlaffer. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976. Martínez, Matías. Doppelte Welten: Struktur und Sinn zweideutigen Erzählens. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996. McWhirter, David. “‘Saying the Unsayable’: James’s Realism in the Late 1890s.” The Henry James Review 20.3 (1999): 237-43. Menninghaus, Winfried. In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard. Transl. Henry Pickford. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Schlaffer, Heinz. Poesie und Wissen: Die Entstehung des ästhetischen Bewusstseins und der philologischen Erkenntnis. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005. ―――. “Die Aneignung von Gedichten: Grammatisches, rhetorisches und pragmatisches Ich in der Lyrik.” Poetica 27.1-2 (1996): 38-57. Veeder, William. “James and the Consolations of Time.” The Henry James Review 17.3 (1996): 230-41. <?page no="87"?> Freedom, Psychoanalysis, and the Radical Political Imaginary 1 Noëlle McAfee In this essay I argue that an Arendtian politics of speaking and acting requires a radical political imaginary that can only be had by inner revolt and radical questioning of ourselves. In making this case, I first engage Hannah Arendt’s views on freedom, especially her argument that inner freedom is derivative and mistaken. Second, with Drucilla Cornell, I articulate a post-Freudian understanding of desire and freedom. Third, I turn to the need to address the many obstacles in the contemporary world to exercising this freedom, from a narrow conception of freedom to malaise and neoliberalism. To show how we can overcome these obstacles, fourth I will argue that the inner revolt of psychoanalysis and radical questioning can help create a radical political imaginary that can create new alternatives. Finally it is this capacity born of inner questioning that can help the subject become a “who” in Arendt’s sense and engage in the kind of speaking and doing that she thought were quintessential of politics. In this essay I argue that political freedom requires psychic freedom, or in other words, that politics - the practice of speaking and acting with others to decide what to do and create something new - requires a radical political imaginary that can only be had by inner revolt and radical questioning of ourselves. In making this case, I will first engage Hannah Arendt’s views on freedom, especially her argument that inner freedom 1 This essay is closely linked to and expands on my argument in an earlier publication in the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy (“Inner Experience”). Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 32. Ed. Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser. Tübingen: Narr, 2015. 87-99. <?page no="88"?> Noëlle McAfee 88 is derivative and mistaken. Second, with the help of Drucilla Cornell, I will articulate a post-Freudian understanding of desire and freedom. Third, I will turn to the need to address the many obstacles in the contemporary world to exercising this freedom, from a narrow conception of freedom to malaise and neoliberalism. To show how we can overcome these obstacles, fourth I will argue that the inner revolt of psychoanalysis and radical questioning can help create a radical political imaginary that can create new alternatives. Finally it is this capacity born of inner questioning that can help the subject become a “who” in Arendt’s sense and engage in the kind of speaking and doing that she thought were quintessential of politics. So while this essay begins as a critique of Arendt’s notion of freedom, in the end it aims to show that in the contemporary world, the choice between inner freedom and outer freedom is a false one. 1. Arendt on Freedom For Arendt, freedom is a political concept that arose in the ancient world with the Greek democrats, went missing with the fall of the Roman Empire, and only resurfaced in the revolutions of the late eighteenth century. To fully appreciate her point, let us be clear about who she thinks are the Greek democrats: definitely not Plato, likely not Aristotle, but very much Pericles and even the Sophists, all with the help of a worldview that began with Homer (Between Past and Future 17-40). Our modern tradition of political thought, she writes, “began when Plato discovered that it is somehow inherent in the philosophical experience to turn away from the common world of human affairs” (25). The twentieth century philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis makes the same point; in an essay comparing the Greek and the Modern political imaginaries, he writes: So, Greece. Which Greece? Here we must pay attention and be rigorous, I will even say severe. For me, the Greece that matters is the Greece extending from the eighth to the fifth century BCE. This is the phase during which the polis created, instituted, and, in approximately half the cases, transformed itself more or less into the democratic polis. This phase came to a close with the end of the fifth century; important things still happened in the fourth century and even afterward, notably the enormous paradox that two of the greatest philosophers who ever existed, Plato and Aristotle, were philosophers of the fourth century, but were not philosophers of the Greek democratic creation. (“The Greek and the Modern” 106) <?page no="89"?> Freedom, Psychoanalysis, and the Radical Political Imaginary 89 Not only were they not of the Greek democratic tradition, Plato and Aristotle were very much outside it, with Plato being quite hostile. The Greek polis, as a space of freedom to act and create elicited the antipathy of the philosophers. Or as Arendt puts it, “Our philosophical tradition of political thought, beginning with Parmenides and Plato, was founded explicitly in opposition to this polis and its citizenship” (Between Past and Future 157). It was during freedom’s demise from the public sphere, especially with the end of the Roman Empire, Arendt argues, that philosophers and Christians borrowed the term and internalized it as a matter of free will. But “freedom as related to politics is not a phenomenon of the will,” Arendt writes (151). It is not a matter of, say, choosing between something good and something evil, having the will power to choose the right thing. Quoting Shakespeare, Arendt writes that it is better understood as the freedom of Brutus: “That this shall be or we will fall for it,” or, in her words, “the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before” (151). For Arendt, political freedom is something that political actors presume they have or something they fight for in the public sphere. It is the raison d’être of politics. This freedom needs the company of others and “a common public space to meet them - a politically organized world” into which free people could insert themselves “by word and deed” (148). For the ancient Greek democrats, political freedom was seen as a matter of acting in the company of others, either beginning with the assumption that one had the status of a free person or in engaging in politics to achieve that status. It was not in any manner a philosophical puzzle in itself. Contrast this to the problem of free will in the interior life of the solitary subject. Interior will could hardly be free because one always has motives, which cause one to will one thing or the other. “Hence freedom turns out to be a mirage the moment psychology looks into what is supposedly its innermost domain” and that is because, Arendt says, quoting Max Planck, “the part which force plays in nature as the cause of motion, has its counterpart in the mental sphere in motive as the cause of conduct” (144). Now this philosophical puzzle that might seem to be a problem of the highest order, is according to Arendt rooted in a historical mistake. As the era of ancient Greek cities gave way to eras of empire, the political public sphere withered away, but not the memory of freedom. The memory of being free in the world turned inward into the hope that, no matter how unfree or even shackled one was in the world, one could be free within. Contrary to the ancient political idea that human beings could only be free if they had a place in <?page no="90"?> Noëlle McAfee 90 the world, Arendt writes, “Epictetus transposed these worldly relationships into relationships within man’s own self, whereby he discovered that no power is so absolute as that which man yields over himself” (148). To be free within meant having the power of will over desire, a concept totally foreign to the ancient democrats - though not to the ancient philosophers whose work was largely in opposition to democracy’s foundationlessness. Christianity resurrected the philosophical Platonic partitions between the worldly and the ideal to insert a new idea: that being free meant acting contrary to one’s desires. “For will, as Christianity discovered it, had so little in common with the well-known capacities to desire, to intend, and to aim at, that it claimed attention only after it had come into conflict with them” (156). With the medieval invention of free will, construed as the power of virtue and then later reason to rule over desire and passion, all matter of difficulties come into play. How do I know whether what I am willing is willed freely or not? Kant’s answer was to make sure that our will was motivated by reason rather than inclination and emotions like love. But even he also saw that the motivation to be ruled by reason was a kind of desire - respect - that had an affective dimension. The pursuit of free will led to a serious morass. Kant’s solution, Arendt writes, pitting the dictate of the will against the understanding of reason, is ingenious enough. [. . .] But it does little to eliminate the greatest and most dangerous difficulty, namely, that thought itself, in its theoretical as well as its pre-theoretical form, makes freedom disappear. (145) Moreover, it must be “strange indeed,” she writes, “that the faculty of the will whose essential activity consists in dictate and command should be the harborer of freedom” (145). Arendt’s observation that medieval notions of free will parted company with - and indeed opposed - desire is quite right. This division of the soul between a will ruled by reason and an appetitive part enslaved to desire goes back to Plato and Aristotle. In the history of philosophy, reason has always had pride of place; and desire seems to be the absence of freedom. Arendt is also right that the very notion of inner freedom coupled with will quickly falls apart. To the extent we are motivated, then our actions are all caused. With this move Arendt wipes her hands of inner freedom and turns to the political. But what about those causes, namely desires? <?page no="91"?> Freedom, Psychoanalysis, and the Radical Political Imaginary 91 2. On Freedom and Desire Arendt makes a strong case that freedom is first and foremost a political concept. But at the same time it is curious how much she derides psychological inquiry. “Psychology, depth psychology or psychoanalysis,” she writes in her late volume on thinking, “discovers no more than the ever-changing moods, the ups and downs of our psychic life, and its results and discoveries are neither particularly appealing nor very meaningful in themselves” (The Life of the Mind 35). What matters to Arendt is not what she deems the “monotonous sameness and pervasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology” but “the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and outside of the human body” (35). Inside we are all the same, she thinks; only in relation with the world, through our deeds and actions, can we individuate ourselves. We can only become someone unique and memorable in the space of appearance, not in the ugly and monotonous sameness of the body and its desires. Writing in a post-Freudian era, Arendt’s views on individuation are curiously pre-Freudian, which becomes manifestly clear when one puts her thought in conversation with that of the post-Freudian thinker, Drucilla Cornell. First, in Arendt’s thought there is no notion of how society socializes people. But, as Cornell writes, “our destiny as desiring beings is inherently social since we are produced as the unique subjects we are through our relations with the primary others in our lives, who are in turn shaped by the symbolic order into which they are thrown” (145). Second, in Arendt’s texts there is no conception that we might be strangers to ourselves or have an unconscious. Yet, notes Cornell, “all of us are traversed by unconscious entanglements with primary others” (145). Third, there is no appreciation for how inner inquiry such as psychoanalysis might uncover desires and motives that could fuel our words and deeds in the public sphere, or as Cornell puts it, “the ethical goal of psychoanalysis - to help us see that there is no absolute Others whose jouissance threatens us - can return our desire to us” (145). Cornell argues persuasively that psychoanalysis “can help us reshape the ideas of autonomy and freedom, thereby salvaging dignity from a pre-Freudian understanding of desire” (145). And what about those desires? For Arendt, where did they go? Arendt certainly does not seem to find them “particularly appealing” (The Life of the Mind 35), maybe they are even ugly. But what else is there to <?page no="92"?> Noëlle McAfee 92 fuel our speech and action in the world but our desires to make the world different than it is, our desires to create something new? 3. Obstacles to Freedom Before going further into the place of desire in political freedom, I should briefly take stock of some significant obstacles to political freedom. Today these include a narrow understanding of negative and positive freedom; neoliberalism and the surveillance state; our society of the spectacle; and malaise and the ideality syndrome. Philosophically, the question of freedom has been approached in two classical ways, summed up by Isaiah Berlin: as negative and as positive freedom, that is, as freedom from (e.g., harm, barriers, and oppressive conditions) or freedom to (e.g., act, participate, or develop one’s talents and aims) (Four Essays 118-72). Liberal capitalist societies tend to embrace negative liberty, whereas those with a social-welfare tradition value (though this is diminishing) positive liberty or, as Kant put it, the possibility for self-beginning, or, as Julia Kristeva puts it with Arendt, the freedom to revolt against conventions and begin something new. Emanating from Hobbes and the social contract theory, the ideal of negative liberty focuses on the absence of coercion or interference and the freedom of the individual. The conception of positive liberty focuses on developing the self and shaping society. It is central to the civic republican tradition. But some worry that it easily slips into social, collective mandates, from free and compulsory education to the suppression of individual liberty in the name of the collective good. This is what worries libertarians and social conservatives. Some on the left might tend to dismiss the value of negative liberty in comparison to positive liberty, for in the West, especially in the United States, this negative liberty is seen as almighty, to the detriment of those who have been marginalized and are in need of social services. But the dichotomy is a false one, for without the zone of privacy central to negative liberty there is no space for human flourishing central to positive liberty. Moreover, even in societies that value negative liberty more than positive liberty, this zone of privacy is eroding with the rise of the national security state and its politics of surveillance and control. If freedom is merely the ability to do as I please when I have not interrogated whether what I think pleases me really pleases me or is the effect of subjugating and socializing norms and Others, then this freedom is hardly worth the name. Additionally, if it is merely the freedom <?page no="93"?> Freedom, Psychoanalysis, and the Radical Political Imaginary 93 to be left alone, freedom from obstacles, freedom to hold my unreflective preferences, then it is quite impoverished. One way to rethink the tangle of negative and positive liberty is through psychoanalysis, by which a zone of privacy allows us to revolt and question social norms, to find our own desires. As Kristeva writes, Let us say without false modesty: no modern human experience aside from psychoanalysis offers man the chance to restart his psychical life and thus, quite simply, life itself, opening up choices that guarantee the plurality of an individual’s capacity for connection. This version of freedom is perhaps the most precious and most serious gift that psychoanalysis has given mankind. (Intimate Revolt 234) Following Kristeva, freedom can be understood as finding one’s desires and transcending one’s condition, that is, as revolt. But if it is to revolt, then it cannot only entail negative freedom. It will also call for positive freedom to change myself and change the world, or at least my own corner of it. Kristeva marshals the power of psychoanalysis in particular and revolt more generally to address the other obstacles I now turn to. One is our neoliberal era within the society of the spectacle. Kristeva draws on Guy Debord’s 1967 Society of the Spectacle manifesto to point to the ways that crass consumer culture has robbed us of our inner life, a “psychic garden” in which we can reflect on and recreate meaning in life (New Maladies). The problem of the society of the spectacle is compounded by neoliberal politics and economics (Intimate Revolt 255-68). In a neoliberal era, the logic of the market and technocratic solutions to political problems tend to render lives aimed at creating meaning unthinkable. Instead of lives of revolt and world-building, people are encouraged to elect representatives who will tend to public affairs, freeing up “citizens” to go shopping. In a neoliberal era, negative liberty could hardly liberate anyone. In a neoliberal era - and one that is also post-metaphysical - we need to create the meaning of our own lives. If we do not take up this momentous task, we will lead empty and perhaps even dangerous (to ourselves and others) lives. With Arendt, Kristeva laments the rise of a kind of non-thinking idealization that looks for pat answers or idealistic panaceas. Where Arendt found the unwillingness to think as the root of evil, Kristeva finds the syndrome of ideality of the perpetual adolescent as a source of extremism and its flip side, nihilism. Eichmann’s evil was that he would not think; the adolescent’s downfall is the need to believe. <?page no="94"?> Noëlle McAfee 94 In many respects, Kristeva’s analysis of the adolescent ideality syndrome parallels Arendt’s account of totalitarianism. For Arendt, a country at risk of falling under the spell of totalitarianism has replaced real thinking that is often fraught with ambiguity with ready-made answers and a belief that the state is itself the answer to all questions. For Kristeva, the adolescent cannot tolerate imperfection and holds out for something that will be ideal. In both cases, there is no more need to think for some grand narrative magically lays out all answers. That Kristeva’s view parallels Arendt’s is hardly a coincidence. Note Kristeva’s description of Arendt’s project in her volume on Arendt: In the wake of the terror of the totalitarian regimes that destroy thinking and life, it is politically paramount [. . .] to insist on freedom, which Arendt identifies with birth: “This freedom [. . .] is identical with the fact that men are being born and that therefore each of them is a new beginning, begins, in a sense, the world anew.” Terror, on the contrary, eliminates “the very source of freedom which is given with the fact of the birth of man and resides in his capacity to make a new beginning.” (Hannah Arendt 141) Real freedom for Kristeva, drawing on Arendt, is freedom to make a new beginning. The adolescent can do this through analysis, transference, thinking, and questioning. On a political scale, freedom means resisting the allure of the society of the spectacle as well as any ideology that comes with pat answers, such as neoliberalism, which can lead to “the variants of our civilization’s new malaise and the renaissance of the ‘need to believe’” (“New Forms” 17). What is this “new malaise”? Like the adolescent who falls into nihilistic despair when any ideal falls short, a society becomes melancholic when its idealizations are lost. As Elaine Miller describes in a recent book on Kristeva’s aesthetics, countries that have lost their status as a great power can, if they do not properly mourn this turn of affairs, become depressed. Miller describes this “new malaise” as our depressed times, especially in the United States following 9/ 11 as well as in France where the people have lost their image as a great power. Hence, quoting Kristeva, the country is reacting no differently than a depressed patient. [. . .] People withdraw, shut themselves away at home, metaphorically and literally don’t get out of bed, don’t participate in public life or in politics, and complain constantly. [. . .] French people today, on her account, are both arrogant and self-deprecating or lacking self-esteem because of the ‘tyrannical ideals’ of the inflated ego of the depressed. (10) <?page no="95"?> Freedom, Psychoanalysis, and the Radical Political Imaginary 95 In depressed times it is easy to lose any habits of revolt, thinking, critique and so to succumb to the allure of neoliberal mantras and formulas (McAfee, “Neoliberalism”). The obstacles to real political freedom to shape our world together are many. Overcoming these obstacles, I argue now, involves creating a radical political imaginary. 4. Toward a Radical Political Imaginary So let us consider: where might we find the seeds of radical thinking, questioning, and creation? Should we focus on our inner experience psychoanalytically or our worldly experience politically or both? In an autobiographical essay, Kristeva recalls a 1974 trip she took to China with other avant-garde intellectuals many of whom were entranced by the Cultural Revolution but not she for it seemed likely to become another variation of socialism and nationalism. “It marked my farewell to politics,” she writes, including feminism. [. . .] I can say, however, that for most of the Paris- Peking-Paris travelers (Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Marcelin Playnet, François Wahl, and myself), this arduous journey, one that from the outset was more cultural than political, definitively inaugurated a return to the only continent we had never left: internal experience. (My Memory’s Hyperbole 19) Here, Kristeva seems to set up an opposition between politics and inner life. “The psychoanalytic experience struck me as the only one in which the wildness of the speaking being, and of language, can be heard” (19). Becoming engaged in politics struck her as ways of avoiding the “desire and hate that analysis openly unveils” (19). Yet there is a lynchpin between inner experience and politics, and that is her concept of revolt. In most of her work, revolt has been primarily for the benefit of the psychic life of the subject in process. For Kristeva, revolt-as-rebirth has been for the inner life of the subject. In some of her recent writings Kristeva has argued that psychoanalysis and inner revolt are crucial tools to resist technocratic solutions and oppressive conditions. Kristeva expands on the word “revolt” to uncover its various meanings as “return / turning back / displacement/ change” (“New Forms” 4), which is vital to a culture of rethinking and renewal. This is neither to return to some lost origin nor to reject all values. “This inner experience is meant to escape the shortsightedness of the technicians of political governance, to fight against the fundamentalism <?page no="96"?> Noëlle McAfee 96 that seeks to eliminate corruption but starts by repressing fundamental liberties” (”New Forms” 2). Unlike nihilists who reject old values, those who radically question are able to innovate and renew values. In other words, nihilism is the flip side of absolutism; they are two sides of one foundationalist coin in which there is either everything or nothing. 2 Against this, the radical questioner, like the pragmatists before, seeks to create something new. For Arendt, the foremost creation of something new is oneself, to go from being a “what” to a “who” through words and deeds that make a difference in the world. This rebirth is a public affair that takes place in what she calls the space of appearance. Arendt follows the idea of the ancient Greek democrats that being a part of the political realm was a necessary condition for being truly human. For Arendt, it is a rebirth, natality, of both oneself and of political events. Arendt argued that the only condition we could really call human is one in which we can take part in a world with others and initiate things radically new. To start anew is key for Arendt and the center of her focus on natality. A key part of rebirth, of becoming someone and not just anyone, is thinking for oneself, which for Arendt is always a plural affair. There is a two-in-one of thinking, an internal dialogue with myself. I see this as a door to Kristeva’s own work on revolt, which is the activity of radically questioning norms and presuppositions and hence creating a capacity to imagine new alternatives. Arendt would surely agree with Kristeva’s claim that “revolt, then, as return/ turning back/ displacement/ change constitutes the internal logic of a certain culture, whose acuity seems quite threatened these days” (“New Forms” 4-5). For both Arendt and Kristeva, there is no given reality or truth of the world. As speaking beings who radically question whatever is taken as given, we create the meaning of our lives. Living without foundations does not lead to nihilism. To the contrary, it leads to conditions and opportunities for creating meaning. The task is to create values in the perilous absence of certitude. 2 Or as William James writes, “The theory of the Absolute, in particular, has had to be an article of faith, affirmed dogmatically and exclusively. [. . .] The slightest suspicion of pluralism, the minutest wiggle of independence of any of its parts from the control of totality would ruin it. Absolute unity brooks no degrees” (Pragmatism 73). <?page no="97"?> Freedom, Psychoanalysis, and the Radical Political Imaginary 97 5. Individuation and Politics Finally it is this capacity born of inner questioning that can help the subject become a “who” in Arendt’s sense and engage in the kind of speaking and doing that she thought were quintessential of politics. So while this essay began as an argument critical of Arendt’s notion of freedom, now I think we can see how it complements Kristeva’s idea of inner revolt and see that any choice between inner freedom and outer freedom is a false one. Arendt’s concept of natality comes into play the moment one is born and, as a newcomer into the world, quickly receiving the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you? ” The answer is not found by “knowing thyself,” as if there was some inner essence to be discovered. Rather it comes about existentially, by what we say and do. We individuate ourselves through our words and deeds. For Arendt, the “who” is something that emerges from the performance of a life and the stories others will tell of it. In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world. [. . .] This disclosure of “who” in contradistinction to “what” somebody is - his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide - is implicit in everything somebody says and does. It can be hidden only in complete silence and perfect passivity, but its disclosure can almost never be achieved as a willful purpose, as though one possessed and could dispose of this “who” in the same manner he has and can dispose of his qualities. On the contrary, it is more than likely that the “who,” which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters. (The Human Condition 179-80; my emphases) It is interesting that in this passage on individuation Arendt notes that we are in many ways strangers to ourselves and that we can only really individuate ourselves in the company of others. Nowhere is this phenomenon more manifest than in the psychoanalytic encounter between analyst and analysand - though Arendt does not want to go there, worried about the “monotonous sameness” of what lies within. But what Arendt failed to see is that it is nearly impossible to call for something new in public unless one engaged in radical questioning, whether through the transference/ countertransference relationship of psychoanalysis or some other form of intimate revolt. <?page no="98"?> Noëlle McAfee 98 For the “who” to emerge, I am arguing, many conditions need to be in place, more than what Arendt called for: not only a public space of appearance in which one sees and is seen by others, a realm of plurality and a common world, but also an intimate space for radically questioning matters both public and intimate which can free up, as Castoriadis has written, a radical imagination of what might be: The element of existence belonging to the unconscious is unrelated to truth or non-truth, radically different from these determinations, it belongs to another region of being. As unconscious, the radical imagination brings itself into being, makes be that which exists nowhere else and which, for us, is the condition for anything at all to be able to exist. (Imaginary Institution 291-92) Without a radical imagination, our political words and deeds would be repetitions of the same, lacking any ability to bring something new into the world. If this is so, then Arendt’s theory of natality needs to embrace intimate revolt. In Arendt’s work, the human condition takes place in the context of living in plurality, seeing and being seen by others, speaking and acting in concert with others, having a place in the world that “makes opinions significant and actions effective” (Origins 296). With Kristeva, Castoriadis, Cornell, and other post-Freudians, we can add that the human condition also needs the cultivation of our inner psychic gardens helped along by transference and countertransference relations with our analysts - and friends, colleagues, neighbors. Becoming human and living a human life is thoroughly interpersonal. Only a beast or a god, as Aristotle noted, could live a fully human life apart from our lives with others. Instead of posing an internal/ external dichotomy, we can pose, as Kelly Oliver has (Witnessing), a continuum from the psyche to the social and, I would add, to the political (McAfee, Democracy). In this way our own daimon can be revealed on a couch but will not really be remembered until revealed in the polis. <?page no="99"?> Freedom, Psychoanalysis, and the Radical Political Imaginary 99 References Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. ―――. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin Books, 1968. ―――. The Life of the Mind. One-Volume Ed. New York: Harcourt, 1978. ―――. Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1985. Berlin, Isaiah. Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Castoriadis, Cornelius. “The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary.” Salmagundi 100 (1993): 102-29. ―――. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Cornell, Drucilla. “Autonomy Re-Imagined.” JPCS: Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8.1 (2003): 144-48. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1977. James, William. Pragmatism. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981. Kristeva, Julia. Hannah Arendt. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. ―――. Intimate Revolt. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. ―――. “My Memory’s Hyperbole.” The Portable Kristeva. Updated edition. Ed. Kelly Oliver. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 3-22. ―――. “New Forms of Revolt.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 22.2 (2014): 1-19. ―――. New Maladies of the Soul. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. McAfee, Noëlle. Democracy and the Political Unconscious. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. ―――. “Inner Experience and Worldly Revolt: Arendt’s Bearings on Kristeva’s Project.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 22.2 (2014): 26-35. ―――. “Neoliberalism, the Street, and the Forum.” Reclaiming Democracy: Judgment, Responsibility, and the Right to Politics. Ed. Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai. New York: Routledge, 2015. 165-83. Miller, Elaine. Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Oliver, Kelly. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. <?page no="101"?> Coping with Frontier Society Instead of Building the City Upon a Hill: A Novel Philosophy of Justice and its Interest in Literature Michael G. Festl Based on an investigation of recent developments in justice theory - a sub-discipline of philosophy - this essay delineates a new perspective on the relation between literature and philosophy. Against the backdrop of the still dominating account in justice theory - here called “city-upon-ahill-conception” -, which has, since its initiation, been eager to shut out literature, the essay sketches the outline of a novel account in justice theory - called the “frontier-society-conception” -, which is not only open to stimulation from literature but even in need of literature. The latter account needs literature because literature can be of help in identifying normative shortcomings of society, which in turn serve as the starting points for normative inquiries. Furthermore, literature is of value to the frontier-society-conception of justice theory when it provides thick descriptions of individual suffering from concrete injustices, which are crucial for eliciting in individuals the altruistic sentiments necessary for comprehending and appreciating normative progress. Last but not least, it is expounded why literature permeates the new account in justice theory all the way down to its conceptual work in general. Philosophy consists of nothing but footnotes to Plato, so a famous saying ascertains. Unfortunately, one of the things Plato said is that philosophers should stay away from poets because poets tell lies (607b). Taking a look at this admonition it really seems the famous saying is true: it is, as a matter of fact, the case that major streams in philosophy are eager to shut out literature. This has been especially true for justice Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 32. Ed. Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser. Tübingen: Narr, 2015. 101-117. <?page no="102"?> Michael G. Festl 102 theory, a sub-discipline central to practical philosophy, which has experienced a recurrence triggered by John Rawls’s 1971 publication (Justice, expanded in 1999). As the current state of justice theory provides, in my view, a good example for pinpointing why philosophy often feels the urge to exclude literature but also shows where possible areas for fruitful exchange might lie I will explore justice theory’s relation to literature. What is also interesting about the case of justice theory is that a new way of conceiving this discipline is currently elaborated that tries to break down the iron curtain justice theory has erected against literature. I begin with the old way of conceiving justice theory and the reasons why it had no role for literature and then elaborate on the currently emerging type and its relation to literature. 1 As I have already implied, justice theory in its modern form starts with John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice published in 1971. Rawls’s guiding idea is to take up the tradition of contract theory, which justifies political power by invoking an imagined situation without a state, the so-called “natural state.” Based on the various conceptualizations of this natural state, different theorists within this tradition came up with a number of reasons why this natural state is not durable and, hence, needs to be overcome by the formation of state power. Thomas Hobbes, for example, argued, in Leviathan, that the natural state necessarily leads to a war of all against all and needs to be overcome for this reason. John Locke, on the other, more optimistic hand, did not share Hobbes’s bleak outlook on the state of nature but, in his Second Treatise of Government, nevertheless maintained that state power is a necessity because only state power ensures adequate punishment of crimes. Rawls appropriates contract theory’s core idea of deducing the legitimacy of state power from an imagined natural state but at the same time lends a new tinge to it. He not only uses the thought experiment of the natural state to justify political power per se but invokes it as a device for delineating the principles, laws, and institutions a state thus founded ought to adopt if it wants to be fair to all its members. Rawls asks how a state would be conceived, from a normative perspective, if its members could start, from an ex nihilo situation, all over again. Such a state, according to Rawls’s self-set ambition, would be a fully just and, therefore, ideal state; his theory provides an understanding “sub specie aeternitatis,” bears validity 1 Rawls’s work still provides a good starting point for entering this philosophical debate; it also offers glimpses into neo-Kantian practical philosophy as one of the major streams of philosophy to have erected a barrier against literature (Justice). Amartya Sen offers a recent overview of the debate on justice as well as important cues on the novel conception of justice theory (Idea). <?page no="103"?> A Novel Philosophy of Justice and its Interest in Literature 103 “not only from all social but also from all temporal points of view” (514). This program gathers momentum when Rawls expands his thought experiment by outlining the qualities the individuals in the state of nature as the ones fictitiously molding the new state are equipped with. It is crucial for Rawls to ensure that these individuals do not have an incentive to construct a state that is beneficial to their personal well-being only - for example, that individuals who know that they have huge talents for making money advocate a state that renounces on social security - but that it is rational for them to construct a state that is just to all its members, no matter where their talents lie and if they have any. The safest way to do so, according to Rawls, is to render individuals ignorant of what is beneficial for their personal well-being. This is where the famous Rawlsian idea of the “veil of ignorance” enters the stage. Thanks to this veil, individuals do not know anything about their individual features, such as their talents, their desires, their propensity to take risks, their health, their conception of the good life, etc. In this way, Rawls intends to ensure that individuals are not influenced by a promotion of their personal - egoistic - well-being when deciding on the features of the state they design. Based on this initial situation Rawls applies this procedure all the way to the point where it supposedly reveals the countenance of the perfectly just state. The rationale behind this kind of justice theory is that only the model of the perfect state thus ascertained provides the ground for determining what the right thing to do is in real-life situations with a normative bearing. The ideal state serves as the yardstick for assessing the normative value of actions. It allows determining with regards to every action whether the action in question would bring society closer to the ideal or not and consequently whether the action is normatively justified or not. Although Rawls’s justice theory has been criticized many times it is fair to say that its general procedure of first determining an ideal that is then applied for assessing real-life situations is still dominating the discipline. I call this type of thinking about justice the “city-upon-a-hillconception.” Just as in the Bible the city upon a hill serves as the ideal the rest of mankind needs to aspire to (Matthew 5: 14), in Rawls’s theory the ideal state serves as the blueprint the real world needs to approximate. Thus, the main task for justice theorists of the Rawlsian bent is to erect - if only in thought - the summit of justice, an epistemic summit <?page no="104"?> Michael G. Festl 104 from which the milk and honey of justice can be poured into the valleys of the status quo, purifying what is touched by them. 2 It is no surprise that such a way of conceiving justice theory leaves no room for literature. Justice theory along the lines of Rawls gets its edge from isolating the construction of the ideal state from any sort of real-life influence. The isolation concerns, on the one hand, the epistemic status of the theory: a theory of universal validity is erected, a state that is ideal not only for a special people at a special time but ideal for human beings as such. The isolation fully permeates, on the other hand, the construction of the theory: all kinds of particularities are eclipsed by invoking an idealized situation, the natural state, and by filling it with individuals entirely stripped of individual attributes. Literature is at odds with both parts of this strife for seclusion. 3 Contrary to the epistemic intention pursued by Rawls, literature, realist literature especially, is often deeply enmeshed in the status quo. As especially, but by far not exclusively, new historicism emphasizes, literature is a response to cultural contexts as well as a shaper of these contexts. Literature is therefore not particularly interested in aiming at universal truths; on the contrary, it is often at odds with such an ambition. Moreover, from a literary perspective, it is hard to believe in the feasibleness 2 I am, of course, aware that the concept “city-upon-a-hill” as well as the concept “frontier society” (see below) carry considerable weight in American studies. Nevertheless, within the confines of the essay at hand I want these two concepts to be understood in the rather innocent way I define them here. If my tags provided a starting point for American studies scholars to embed this philosophical debate, which emanated from and is still dominated by philosophers working in the USA, in broader cultural discussions, such as discussions on American exceptionalism, all the better. Maybe the cityupon-a-hill-conception of justice theory which initiated the philosophical discussion in the early 1970s can be seen as an epiphenomenon of America’s perceived calling to make the world a better place. I thank Ridvan Askin and the anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on this point. 3 This is at least true for the kind of literature justice theorists usually rely on in the seldom cases when they do refer to literature (see for example what I say on Richard Rorty below). Although philosophers thus work with a relatively lax understanding of literature it is observable that they usually have realist fiction in mind. For reasons of my own exposure to literature, a lay-person’s one, I also mostly rely on realist fiction. However, I do not see a general impediment why other, less conventional forms of literature might not also serve some of the purposes literature is needed for I suggest towards the end of this essay from the point of view of justice theory. It is not inconceivable, for example, that literature which is not concerned with what is possible in the real world, due to natural laws for example, might not also bring to the fore social developments in the real world, maybe even in a better, more pointed way (see also below, n16). Although I do not know whether he shares this hunch I have to thank Ridvan Askin for critical comments on this question. <?page no="105"?> A Novel Philosophy of Justice and its Interest in Literature 105 of the Rawlsian program because, in the last instance, also theories, philosophical ones especially, emerge within historical contexts and are, hence, just like literature, not completely separable from such contexts. Seen from this perspective, Rawls’s program is an illusion, a dangerous illusion even: it pretends to be of universal validity while being - necessarily! - the product of a specific time and people. Contrary to the eclipse of particularity in Rawls’s theory, literature is, for the most part, attentive to concreteness. The difference between the work of literature and Rawls’s justice theory is, I think, starkest when it comes to the interest in the individual. Starting from the individual, literature and Rawlsian justice theory go into opposite directions: whereas Rawls - being concerned with the universal in the individual - goes to the ever more abstract and general, literature - being concerned with the individual in the individual - goes to the ever more concrete and particular. At least according to Philip Roth’s character Leo Glucksman from I Married a Communist literature is “the great particularizer” and must, hence, not “erase the contradiction, not [. . .] deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being,” it must “allow for the chaos,” must “let it in” (606). Literature thus locates the human in the mess that is the real, hence, imperfect individual. 4 Rawls, on the other hand, intends to find the perfect state within the tidiness that is the idealized, hence, impeccable individual. Rawls creates humans without qualities. Literature immerses itself in the qualities of humans; and this is true even when it focuses on a “man without qualities” - then it is all about becoming engrossed in the quality of having no qualities. 5 Consistent with this genuine discrepancy, literature does not occupy space, let alone meaningful space, in Rawls’s justice theory. Even in his broad treatment of individuals’ acquisition of a “sense of justice” (§§ 69- 72) Rawls does not refer to literature. 6 In a program concerned with 4 With this “mess” that characterizes the real individual I mean, among other things, the often irrational decision procedures individuals base their actions on as well as the contradictory impulses, habits, and preferences human beings often rely on - facts that are suppressed by Rawls’s idealizing, rational choice philosophy. 5 My juxtaposition of Rawls with literature is consistent with Michael Hampe’s critical dissociation of a kind of philosophy that aims at making assertions (“behaupten”) from literature with its aim of narration (“Erzählung”) (11). 6 References to literature would be most natural to this part of Rawls’s theory because the assertion that literature is important for moral education is the most extensively elaborated relation between literature and philosophy as demonstrated among others by Nussbaum (236-37) and Rorty (Objectivity 21-34). At one point Rawls, at least, refers to <?page no="106"?> Michael G. Festl 106 deducing the countenance of the perfect state from ideal conditions, literature and the human messiness it deals with is nothing but a gadfly and therefore needs to be excluded at all costs. But it is Jürgen Habermas’s silence on literature that serves as the most blatant symptom for the high degree the separation of justice theory from literature has assumed. Not that Habermas would surpass Rawls’s striving for idealizations - quite the opposite. 7 Rather, the point is that justice theory’s silence concerning literature must surprise all the more when it comes from a philosopher of Habermas’s vintage, the vintage of the Frankfurt school. Like no others, philosophers of this school took for granted that political philosophy and literature - the arts in general - are inextricably entangled. It suffices here to mention Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and young, pre-communist Georg Lukács. But in Habermas’s oeuvre - arguably the richest of all Frankfurt school philosophers - literature is the squalid child. And the observation that Habermas’s break with his forebears when it comes to the role attached to literature has received close to no attention rounds out the charge that justice theory has taken Plato’s warning against poets to heart. However, in competition to the Rawlsian, and still dominant, type of justice theory another type is currently emerging. Proponents of this type, the author of the essay at hand included, argue that by confronting a world as diverse, complicated, and full of vagaries as the world of the twenty-first century with an ideal conception of the just state, Rawls’s cityupon-a-hill-conception misses the mark: the challenge modern-day society poses for normative thinking is exactly that there can be no such thing as the just state and that even if this were possible, such an ideal would be unhelpful in dealing with the normative problems of a world that is, maybe with some regional exemptions, characterized by ongoing societal flux in the form of technological, economic, political, migratory, and further change, a globalized world dominated by a social (dis-)order which has recurrently proven immune to intentional reconstruction. In such a world, justice theory based on the city-upon-a-hill-conception is too detached from the status quo to offer any sort of guidance. The new type of justice theory, therefore, begins in the here and now and accepts, from a normative perspective, the world as it is unless there is reason for doubt; but not doubt in the abstract or vis-à-vis the status quo in general but doubt that refers to a concrete aspect of society. To prevent Dostoevsky but not to Dostoevsky as a novelist but to a philosophical argument given in The Brothers Karamazov (398n1). 7 On the exact relation between Habermas’s and Rawls’s justice theory see Festl (Gerechtigkeit 160-72). <?page no="107"?> A Novel Philosophy of Justice and its Interest in Literature 107 an approach that commences this way from collapsing into mere acceptance of the status quo, or worse, into sheer adulation, this start is complemented by a willingness to track down, spell out, and operationalize problems with a bearing on justice that are implicit in the status quo. Taking the Unübersichtlichkeit (“complexity”), to use a term from Habermas, of today’s globalized world into account this new type regards justice theory as a discipline which is, on the one hand, supposed to improve the conceptual means for coping in more successful ways with the normative challenges posed by a society in perpetual flux and, on the other hand, supposed to use the means thereby attained for conducting concrete normative inquiries. This is why I dub this new type “frontiersociety-justice-theory” - it accepts that the real world as the one and only world we can have the ambition to improve faces us with the conditions of what is sometimes, fittingly, called a frontier society in the broad sense (not in the narrowly historical sense initiated by Frederick Jackson Turner), a society forced to deal with perpetual change, forced to overcome ever new challenges. Today, the whole world is, in that sense, a frontier society, albeit when it comes to justice, especially global justice, a rather unsuccessful one, one that has hitherto been incapable of even remotely replicating in justice the progress that was accomplished in, say, technology. And this lack of success when it comes to justice may have been brought about not least because considerations of justice mostly rely, to the present day, on a kind of normative thinking that was initiated at a time when there was still reasonable hope to significantly slow down societal change. 8 Opposed to building on this now frustrated hope, the frontiersociety-conception, by starting in the concrete, with society as it is, overcomes the largest impediment for being permeable to literature. As a matter of fact, it is not only open to literature but in need of it. I will demonstrate this by briefly referring to Axel Honneth’s theory of justice and at more length to my own approach. Honneth’s theory builds on a concept of individual autonomy which, despite its historic emergence, is irreversible - or reversible only “at the price of cognitive barbarism” 8 Just like Turner in his original frontier thesis, the new type of justice theory assumes that new societal circumstances breed new norms and ideals and that, hence, justice theory cannot hope to delineate, once and for all, a hierarchically structured set of norms to call on when evaluating real-life problems with a normative bearing. Turner’s seminal essay concludes with a reflection on the clash between the new, “stubborn” environment of the American frontier and “the inherited way of doing things” and explains that this clash broke “the bond of custom,” offered “new experiences,” and called for “new institutions and activities” (38). <?page no="108"?> Michael G. Festl 108 (Right 17). In modern society this concept of autonomy can be lived meaningfully only if understood as “social freedom,” which in turn is manifested in three complementary societal spheres: “personal relationships,” “market economy,” “democratic will-formation.” Based on this conceptual framework Honneth conducts “an analysis of society” which is supposed to delineate the concrete forms social freedom has currently assumed in each of the three spheres and, in doing so, to put into relief the practices and values that presently need to be actualized from a normative perspective. The material thus garnered is eventually called on by Honneth to criticize aspects of the status quo that fall short of it. 9 Literature enters this theory of justice - the latest to come out of the Frankfurt school, reconnecting with the generation of its grandparents - at the point where Honneth outlines the concrete manifestations of social freedom. Here, literature is of significance because it provides a view on society that is, according to Honneth, capable of revealing aspects of the status quo that cannot be captured by the sciences. Honneth makes this explicit when it comes to the revelation of certain moods that could hint at deeper social distortions: The analytical tools used by sociological researchers are generally too blunt to capture such diffuse moods or collective sentiments; therefore, the best approach for diagnosing such pathologies remains, just as in the time of Hegel or young Lukács, the analysis of indirect displays of these symptoms in the aesthetic sphere; novels, films or works of art [are] still the best source of initial insights into contemporary tendencies toward higher-order, reflexive deformations of social behavior. (Right 87) We may assume that Honneth regards this special capacity of “novels, films or works of art” to also be of pertinence to his analysis of society in general. In any case, he refers to literature at numerous points in order to strengthen normative arguments, for example to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010) and Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991) for recent developments in family relations (Right 171n116 and n117), and to, among others, Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1896) for the emergence of a society in which feelings are taken more seriously (Right 144n46) - this list could be easily expanded. 10 All in all, literature is invoked in Honneth’s theory as a representative force; it needs to be investigated because it frequently “shine[s] the clearest light” (Right 144) on and often is “the 9 For a good example of this procedure see Honneth’s The I in We (56-74). 10 There are many further passages in the very same book in which Honneth invokes literature for the same purpose (116ff., 138, 143, 167, 201, 214, 225, 226). <?page no="109"?> A Novel Philosophy of Justice and its Interest in Literature 109 most accurate indicator” (Right 151) of normative developments in society which, in turn, guide the normative judgments of the theory. 11 Staying devoted to Honneth’s linking of a normative theory with an analysis of contemporary society the justice theory I propose - “justice as historic experimentalism” - intends to delineate the way to pursue normative inquiry best fitted to the improvement of a frontier society in the above sense. 12 The central difference on which “justice as historic experimentalism” builds is the difference between the aspects of the status quo in need of revision and those worthy of preservation. As it would be impossible to list all the aspects of society currently not in need of critical inquiry, it is, for practical matters, most conducive to launch a normative inquiry by identifying an aspect of society that is, in fact, in need of revision. This can be done in a direct way by scanning society for aspects that do not live up to the normative level a society has already attained in other areas. But more importantly, it is done in an indirect way by lending an open ear to utterances of dissatisfaction coming from within society. Such complaints, as well as behavior hinting in this direction, can be an indication of existing injustices and thus provide guidance for launching a concrete normative inquiry. Due to the often inchoate form utterances of dissatisfaction assume in real society, one of the justice theorist’s main tasks is the transformation of such utterances into concrete and workable problems with a normative bearing. As it can be shown that democratic societies are more likely to provide the proper conditions in which such criticism as the starting point of a normative inquiry can thrive than any other political form we know of, these considerations can be further developed into the outline of what I call “creative democracy,” which therefore lends the name to the first out of four components of my frontier-society-justice-theory. 13 After a concrete normative problem has been identified by the first component, the theory’s second and central component intends to bring to the fore a number of different possibilities for coping with the problem under consideration, including a rating of these very possibilities. The driving idea behind the second component is that history can be regarded as a laboratory for experiments in justice. I thus reject the notion - so characteristic of the city-upon-a-hill-conception - that the best 11 These reflections on Honneth are indebted to discussions with Winfried Fluck and to Fluck’s recent essay “The Concept of Recognition and American Cultural Studies.” See also his contribution to this volume. 12 I can here only sketch the most central aspects of this theory. For an in-depth explanation refer to Festl (Gerechtigkeit). 13 I borrow the term “creative democracy” from John Dewey (224). <?page no="110"?> Michael G. Festl 110 way to deal with concrete problems in justice is to, first, outline the opportunities for action a society has and then to determine which of these brings society closest to the ideal of justice which has been conceived a priori. Rather, the idea is to learn from the past - a possibility much downplayed in philosophy over the last decades - by taking a look at the genealogy of a problem with a bearing on justice and at how people have coped with similar problems in the past, and why they were successful or not. Such former ways of dealing with problems can be regarded as experiments in justice - “explorative experiments” instead of “test experiments” to use a differentiation by Friedrich Steinle (18), which emphasizes that experiments are not only needed to test already established theories but also to trigger an innovative process of identifying new, alternative ways of coping. The second component of my justice theory which is, due to its central character, labeled “historic experimentalism in the narrow sense,” proposes therefore to make use of experiences already made in order to burst the box of the currently dominant ways of coping, ways that have been identified as problematic by the first component of the theory. The theory’s third component forecasts the consequences for society if the action that is suggested by the second component of the theory as the most just way to cope with the normative problem under consideration would really be implemented. Special consideration is devoted to the question whether the second component’s suggestion would in the end really garner the effects it is meant to garner. Hence, in the third component justice as historic experimentalism assumes the form of an applied ethics or sectional ethics, as I prefer to call it, as it intends to make use of the state-of-the-art tools of the scientific field(s) that has (have) a bearing on the normative problem investigated, e.g., economics when dealing with a normative problem with regard to the distribution of income. However, the aim of the third component is not to curb the significance of normative thinking by circumscribing the area of the reasonably possible. Quite the opposite, the third component is supposed to increase the normative room for maneuver in that it investigates what needs to be done additionally so that the measure which is deemed just by the second component really yields the desired effects. Only if the second component’s prior suggestion can really not be put into effect, the third component is forced to reject it and to check the feasibility of the second suggestion in the ranking compiled by the second component. I call this third component “instrumentalist sectional ethics” because its aim is to instrumentalize the knowledge attained in other scien- <?page no="111"?> A Novel Philosophy of Justice and its Interest in Literature 111 tific disciplines, but also in other areas of life if these prove helpful to promote the demands of justice. However, even if components two and three elaborate a way to replace the aspect of the status quo that was criticized by the first component with a new, better way of coping, and even if this new way has been implemented, justice as historic experimentalism is not yet finished with its concrete normative inquiry. In this rare but pleasant case it still needs to deal with the effects the new conduct generates. The main problem here is that the institution of a new way to handle things, a way that is deemed more just, usually also generates people who feel, and maybe as a matter of fact are, disadvantaged. If a normative inquiry has to grapple with a real problem in justice, it is likely that the alternative way of coping it suggests is to some extent a compromise: the resolution is reached by arbitration between at least two normatively justified values that came in conflict with each other in the case under consideration. Hence, the theory will often be obliged to lend priority to one value over the other and, as such, to reject a value that at least to a certain extent is also justified. The Rawlsian city-upon-a-hill-justice-theory fails to see the extent to which the problems of a frontier society bear traces of such a dilemmatic nature. But due to the dilemmatic nature of most normative problems in real life new ways of coping, even the most just ones, often generate people who have, from an individual, possibly egoistic perspective, reason to complain about the new, from an allthings-considered perspective more just way of coping - and be it only for the reason that they cannot understand why a way of coping they have been initiated into needs to be superseded. Therefore, justice as historic experimentalism comes equipped with a fourth component. This fourth and final component tries to reconcile the ones who feel disadvantaged by a normative progress of society to the new way of coping. It intends to achieve this by expounding why the new way how things are done is necessitated by the comprehensive angle of justice, an effort that includes remembering where the society in which the problem of justice has emerged comes from, what this society stands for, what obstacles to justice it had to overcome in the past, and what are, based on all this, the possible general roads of justice open to it. In addition, this component often has to search for possibilities that offer the individuals who feel at a loss under the new way of coping a novel role and a novel self-description under the altered and, according to a normative inquiry, more just societal constellation. This is of special pertinence after a massive and/ or swift remodeling of the respective <?page no="112"?> Michael G. Festl 112 practices. 14 I call this component “reconciliatory memory culture” as it is concerned with reconciling individuals to the new way of coping by outlining why, based on this moment in history at this specific place, the new practice is a necessity from the point of view of justice. 15 Success in this final endeavor of a normative inquiry is indispensable for improving society based on criticizing current ways of coping because the individuals’ reconciliation with the newly enhanced state of justice not only completes the inquiry in question but also provides the basis for a society in which each member can feel free to criticize her fellow citizens and can, at the same time, accept being criticized. Reconciliation is the necessary safety belt for people who need to be quick in deciding which of the ever unfolding new roads they want to take - roads that perpetually open up in a frontier society. Literature, as I see it, is of less importance to the second and the third components of my justice theory - the normative nitty-gritty - but all the more pertinent to the first and fourth components - the fringes of normative inquiries. The table below provides a glance at my theory of justice’s relation to literature. Justice as Historic Experimentalism Components Tasks Need for Literature 1) Creative democracy Initiates normative inquiry via critique High 2) Historic experimentalism in the narrow sense Suggests and ranks alternative ways of coping Low 3) Instrumentalist sectional ethics Accepts or declines suggested ways of coping Low 4) Reconciliatory memory culture Finalizes inquiry and lays the ground for new inquiries High To get its normative inquiries going, justice as historic experimentalism is dependent on criticism of the status quo. As it is usually the least- 14 For a historic case study of such a massive change, see F. M. Turner’s investigation of the impact of Darwin’s theory of natural selection on religious people. 15 My concept of memory culture is somewhat indebted to Aleida Assmann’s work. <?page no="113"?> A Novel Philosophy of Justice and its Interest in Literature 113 advantaged members of society that have most reason to complain, this theory needs to be attentive to them - it needs to listen to the “cries of the wounded,” as William James put it (210). Literature is pertinent here for two reasons. First, cries of the wounded are often hard to understand, let alone to interpret - they signify suffering, not its causes. But some literary texts come into such close proximity to how real people perceive societal circumstances and to how they perceive the sufferings society inflicts on them (to an extent philosophy cannot achieve as a discipline that is not primarily concerned with individual feelings; maybe psychology could compete with literature here) that they are capable of translating these cries into a diagnosis, often even into a powerfully articulated one. Taking a look at literature can therefore alleviate the justice theorist’s task to detect problems with a bearing on justice that are already felt but not quite on the public agenda yet. Second, literature is of relevance for the first component of my justice theory because people can get so used to a certain kind of suffering that they no longer feel the pain it causes. Hence, they do not cry although they are wounded. 16 Literature often has healing effects here because, by virtue of its role to cast a revealing light on society, it makes evident diseases that do not cause pain. In literary works justice theorists might therefore find hints to injustices that exist but are not felt by those that are affected. Literature, in other words, helps to track down blind spots of justice. For both of these endeavors - providing diagnoses and tracking down blind spots - literature has proven to be of special value to justice theory. This is why justice as historic experimentalism pays attention to literature when it tries to point out existing injustices in order to trigger a normative inquiry. 17 Furthermore, literature is of especially high relevance when completing a normative inquiry and hence for the fourth component of my theory, the reconciliatory memory culture. Often individuals show a lack of reconciliation with a more just way of coping because they fail to take into account how others had to suffer under the previous way of doing things. In its effort to reconcile the ones who feel disadvantaged by a new societal constellation it pays for justice theory to take a closer look 16 Sen provides a very illustrative example in this respect when referring to women in rural India who are incapable of answering the question “How are you? ” because, due to their initiation into the societal role they are supposed to play, they can only provide an answer that pertains to the well-being of their families but not to their own well-being as individuals (Gender 126). 17 In a forthcoming paper I hint at the relevance of Philip Roth’s The Plot against America for criticizing certain tendencies in contemporary Swiss society (“Despair”). <?page no="114"?> Michael G. Festl 114 at literature as literature often enough provides descriptions of the negative effects the old way of coping generated for many people, descriptions that are personal and thus thick enough to make this suffering comprehensible for the ones who were not exposed to it, the ones who might even have thrived under the old regime. By lively and profoundly depicting deficiencies triggered by a now superseded habit, literature has the competence to usher people into the new way of doing things. In addition, literature frequently invents new descriptions of the self, and some of these might be pertinent to cases of massive societal change, cases in which reconciliation with society necessitates finding a new role for people who are, without help, incapable of comprehending, let alone appreciating a normative progress in justice. 18 All in all, a look at literature can prove beneficial for justice theory’s task of ensuring that as many people as possible keep pace with the normative transitions recurrently initiated by a frontier society because it has more powerful means to win the hearts of people, means that justice as historic experimentalism hijacks for its purposes. But literature permeates the justice theory I suggest on yet another, deeper level. Its influence is not limited to being invoked in normative inquiries. Literature also proves valuable for enriching the conceptual means with which these inquiries are undertaken. Not despite but because of its focus on normative inquiries, justice as historic experimentalism amounts to more than merely conducting inquiries. It also needs to deal in the abstract - meaning without a specific inquiry in mind - with how normative inquiries are to be conducted. This is necessary because there are conceptual means, such as typologies, categories, distinctions that are of enduring value for quite a number of concrete inquiries. In light of the performance of these means in concrete inquiries my justice theory has to extend, to adapt, and sometimes also to drop these conceptual means. In doing so a justice theory for a frontier society can get valuable input from literature (just like from other discourses and disciplines) because in literary texts, too, concepts are crafted, elaborated, and criticized. Thereby, literature’s core contribution to my justice theory lies in dealing with concepts that concern the individual and her feelings. Accordingly, in an essay on the philosophical relevance of the work of Roth I try to distill from his works a preliminary typology of general impediments that can hinder individuals from getting recon- 18 Richard Rorty did not tire of making explicit the special potential of novels when it comes to the endeavor I call reconciliation with new societal conditions (see for example Contingency 80). <?page no="115"?> A Novel Philosophy of Justice and its Interest in Literature 115 ciled to society in the first place, and that thus always need to be taken into account in the last component of my justice theory (“Sanity”). By opening the door that leads from literature to justice theory as widely as I do, I hope to contribute to a major increase of the goods that flow between philosophy and literature. Such exchange is, I think, not optional but crucial for a justice theory that wants to be of relevance to society’s effort to improve life in a world as demanding as the frontier society of the twenty-first century. Whether this will also prove fecund for literature I have no way of saying, but it should be emphasized that my efforts in philosophy do not challenge literature in any way - literature is fine for the purposes of justice theory just the way it is. But my efforts do challenge the assumption that philosophy will forever be forced to deliver nothing but footnotes to Plato. <?page no="116"?> Michael G. Festl 116 References Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999. Dewey, John. 1939-1941: Essays, Reviews, and Miscellany. Vol. 14 of The Later Works, 1925-1953. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Festl, Michael G. Gerechtigkeit als historischer Experimentalismus: Gerechtigkeitstheorie nach der pragmatistischen Wende der Erkenntnistheorie. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2015. ―――. “From the Depths of Despair to Castles in the Air: Critique in a Pragmatist Theory of Justice.” Studia philosophica 74 (2015): forthcoming. ―――. “Four Pathologies and a State of Sanity.” Unpublished manuscript. Fluck, Winfried. “The Concept of Recognition and American Cultural Studies.” American Studies Today: New Research Agendas. Eds. Winfried Fluck, Erik Redling, Sabine Sielke, and Hubert Zapf. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014. 167-207. Hampe, Michael. Die Lehren der Philosophie: Eine Kritik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2014. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Honneth, Axel. The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition. Cambridge: Polity, 2012. ―――. Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. James, William. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longmans Green, 1899. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Plato. The Repuplic. Ed. G. R. F. Ferrari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ―――. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. <?page no="117"?> A Novel Philosophy of Justice and its Interest in Literature 117 Roth, Philip. The American Trilogy 1997-2000: American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain. New York: The Library of America, 2011. Sen, Amartya. “Gender and Cooperative Conflicts.” Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development. Ed. Irene Tinker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. 123-49. ―――. The Idea of Justice. London: Allen Lane, 2009. Steinle, Friedrich. Explorative Experimente: Ampère, Faraday und die Ursprünge der Elektrodynamik. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005. Turner, Frank Miller. Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The Frontier in American History. Ed. Frederick Jackson Turner. New York: Henry Holt, 1920. 1-38. <?page no="119"?> Literature, Recognition, Ethics: Struggles for Recognition and the Search for Ethical Principles Winfried Fluck How can American Studies, and more specifically, American literary and cultural studies, remain relevant as a field? Can a turn to ethics be helpful? Literary texts and aesthetic objects may be effective in dramatizing injustice but in what way can they contribute to the formulation of ethical principles? Questions about the possibility of ethical foundations have not been restricted to fictional texts and aesthetic objects but have become a central philosophical topic in the wake of postmodernism and poststructuralism. In each case, theories of the subject have provided the point of departure. In its first part, this essay focuses on narratives of self-alienation, ranging from Marxism to poststructuralism, but also including some unexpected protagonists like British cultural studies and reception aesthetics, and discusses the ethical principles derived from the assumption of the subject’s self-alienation. In the second part, theories that see the subject constituted by intersubjective relations are discussed as a possible alternative. In this context, the concept of recognition may open up a new perspective on the search for ethical principles in literature and art. I How can American Studies, and more specifically, American literary and cultural studies, remain relevant as a field? Can an ethical turn provide the solution? To be sure, this turn has by now produced an impressive body of work. For literary studies, one problem remains, however: critics often make the case for a particular ethics first and then look for ways Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 32. Ed. Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser. Tübingen: Narr, 2015. 119-141. <?page no="120"?> Winfried Fluck 120 to apply it to literature. One result is that only certain literary texts qualify as being relevant for ethical considerations, ranging from Henry James for Martha Nussbaum to Herman Melville’s Billy Budd for deconstruction. In this way the ethical turn must become prescriptive: if literary studies want to remain relevant and aim at an ethical function, they should focus on a particular kind of literature - one, for example, that is useful as a training ground for ethically desirable attitudes like empathy or one that can help to deconstruct stable moral dichotomies. In this essay I want to take another direction. In order to discuss an ethical function of literature we do not have to move into philosophical discussions of ethics, where we may not be firmly at home anyway. Instead, we may turn towards the ethical foundations of our interpretive frameworks in literary and cultural studies, since no approach can be without (an explicit or implicit) moral vision. It is thus, in the final analysis, ethically constituted. This is my starting point in the present essay. Ethics is our word for a philosophy to determine right or wrong moral behavior, and for such a philosophy we need to presuppose a theory of the subject, that is, a view of how free the subject is to determine its actions or whether we see significant constraints on the subject’s potential for self-determination and agency. If so, we need a theory of what these constraints are and whether and how they can be overcome. All influential approaches in literary and cultural studies have been generated by such (often tacitly held) assumptions about the state of the subject; in fact, one may argue that these subject-theories have been the starting premise for literary and cultural studies throughout the twentieth century. Going one step further, one may even claim that literary and cultural studies, as well as other fields in the humanities, have been created with the intention to help the subject overcome the constraints to which it is still subjected. This is their ethical project: they want to help the individual realize its potential as a subject. II Once one focuses on the question of underlying premises, it is striking to realize to what extent modern literary and cultural studies have been dominated and shaped by one theory of the subject in particular. I am referring here to narratives of self-alienation. These narratives see the subject in a state in which it is kept from fully knowing itself and determining its own fate, frequently with the result of a damaged sense of self or an inner division. It is fitting to speak of these theories in the plural, <?page no="121"?> Struggles for Recognition 121 because self-alienation, just like any other theoretical concept - such as, for example at present, transnationalism or the other - is not a stable signifier but can be used in different contexts for different purposes. 1 In an essay on “Philosophical Premises in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives of Self-Alienation,” I have traced different uses of the idea of self-alienation in four especially influential approaches in literary and cultural studies: the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, as it manifests itself most forcefully in the chapter on the culture industry in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, British cultural studies as it has been envisioned by its founder Raymond Williams, Wolfgang Iser’s reception aesthetics, and an exemplary poststructuralist position articulated by Judith Butler. 2 At first blush, it may come as a surprise that all of these very different approaches should be grounded in the starting premise of selfalienation. But the common point of departure can be helpful in pinpointing the differences. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the selfalienation of the subject is the result of a long-drawn historical process in which reason has been reduced to instrumental rationality, and instrumental rationality has gained an ever increasing hold over the subject - reaching, in their view, almost totalitarian dimensions in the American society they encountered in the 1940s. This development must also affect literature and culture. In those philosophies of history in which the idea of a growing instrumental rationality has provided the central narrative, (high) culture has usually been considered one of the few remaining counter-realms in which instrumental rationality had not yet taken hold. The exposure to culture, understood as the highest manifestation of the human mind, was thus seen as a crucial antidote, if not the only remaining hope. The sense of shock pervading Horkheimer and Adorno’s chapter on the culture industry is caused by the fear that this last bastion of resistance may now also have been invaded by instrumental rationality. In the form of American mass culture, culture has become merely another industry with standardized production processes in which even Culture is now instrumentalized for profit purposes. For Raymond Williams, on the other hand, it is not instrumental rationality but industrialization that provides the key for understanding the self-alienation produced by modern society. Industrialization has led to class societies and 1 For helpful recent overviews, see Rahel Jaeggi, Entfremdung and Peter Zima, Entfremdung. 2 See Fluck, “Philosophical Premises” (forthcoming). The present essay draws on arguments developed in greater detail there. <?page no="122"?> Winfried Fluck 122 thus to a seemingly insurmountable distance between the classes that threatens democracy and its promise of equality. In contrast to Frankfurt School critical theory, however, the social misrecognition (and, hence, self-alienation) resulting from class society is not yet seen as the result of an irreversible historical process. It is still reversible. Once culture and society are redefined as a whole way of life, as British cultural studies have done programmatically, and interpretations focus on structures of feeling as key manifestation of a culture (and not on standardized mass culture), the working-class subject may still be successfully reconstituted as non-alienated. Somewhat surprisingly, Wolfgang Iser’s reception aesthetics also has its starting point in the premise of human self-alienation, in this case derived, however, not from Max Weber’s theory of instrumental rationality or a Marxist analysis of the dehumanizing consequences of industrialization, but from Helmut Plessner’s anthropological claim that human beings are constituted by a lack. 3 We therefore need fictions to make up for what we are lacking (and can never fully recover). In this context, self-alienation, defined as an anthropological condition, can, paradoxically, become a source of creativity, because our efforts to overcome our lack of self-knowledge can never be entirely successful and will thus stimulate ever new attempts. In poststructuralism, finally, identity is, following Jacques Lacan, formed by misrecognition, so that the subject is arrested in a permanent state of self-alienation. Not dissimilar to Iser’s reception aesthetics, the starting point is a lack, an incompleteness, but in contrast to Iser, this lack does not become a source of creativity through which the subject tries to fill the gap. Rather, it leads to a state of illusionary self-perception that prevents the subject from ever knowing itself. Consequently, in poststructuralism selfalienation has reached the point where the subject is alienated from itself, not merely by forces like industrialization or instrumental rationality, but, much more fundamentally, as the paradoxical result of identityformation. Without identity, the subject cannot know who it is, but the search for self-knowledge will inevitably lead to misrecognition and, hence, to renewed self-alienation. There is an inextricable link in literary and cultural theory between a founding theory of the subject and an ethics of literature. Thus, the different narratives of self-alienation I have traced must also lead to very 3 There is hardly an essay or book by Iser in which he does not refer to Plessner’s key claim about the human condition, summarized in the words: “Ich bin, aber ich habe mich nicht,” a sentence that is translated in The Fictive and Imaginary as “our existence is incontestable, but at the same time inaccessible to us” (81). <?page no="123"?> Struggles for Recognition 123 different views on what the ethical function of literature can and should be. If we start from the assumption that self-alienation is caused by the relentless progression of instrumental rationality, then literature can hope to have an ethically desirable function only where it keeps the possibility of a non-instrumentalized counter-realm alive; however, literature can preserve a utopia of non-alienated existence only where it is organized by certain aesthetic principles that negate instrumentalization and can thus be defined as an aesthetics of negation. It is thus important to distinguish between a culture of affirmation and a culture of negation, for only then can we identify the kind of literature that will be able to set up barriers against instrumental rationality. 4 If, on the other hand, we understand self-alienation as the result of a process of industrialization that divides social worlds into classes and thus establishes new, commercially-based status orders, then the challenge must be to reverse this development. By treating literature as part of a whole way of life, one will have to pay attention to the cultural practices of other classes and learn how to read these practices as manifestation of particular structures of feeling. The goal must be to prevent culture from replicating industrialization’s division of labor and becoming a separate sphere of its own. 5 One way to do this is to extend literary studies into cultural studies. British cultural studies was, in the final analysis, an ethically motivated new approach to the interpretation of literature and culture. Some may prefer to call it a politically motivated new approach, because it clearly had the intention of strengthening working-class identity. But this support of the working-class was an ethical imperative for Williams and provided the key motivation for his reconceptualization of literary studies as cultural studies. If, to move on to our third example, we attribute the self-alienation of the subject to an anthropological lack that can, unexpectedly, also stimulate human creativity, because it pushes the subject to engage in ever new attempts to overcome this lack, then literature can become a privileged medium for a transformation of self-alienation into creativity. From Iser’s point of view, this can be most effectively done by texts 4 On the different uses of the terms “negation” and “negativity” in this context, see my essay “The Search for Distance.” 5 In Marxism and Literature, Williams characterizes aesthetic theory as a form of evasion, that is, an instrument of obfuscation: “Art and thinking about art have to separate themselves, by ever more absolute abstraction, from the social processes within which they are still contained. Aesthetic theory is the main instrument of this evasion. [. . .] Thus we have to reject ‘the aesthetic’ both as a separate abstract dimension and as a separate abstract function” (154-56). <?page no="124"?> Winfried Fluck 124 structured by blanks and suspended connectivities, that is, by modernist or proto-modernist texts that use aesthetic strategies to defamiliarize or negate realistic modes of representation, because these prevent us from becoming aware of what we are lacking as human subjects. But modernism now has a function different from that in Frankfurt School critical theory, namely to keep the channels of creativity open, and Iser therefore replaces an aesthetics of negation by an aesthetics of negativity. (Fluck, “Search”). Again, it is important to realize how aesthetic choices are inextricably linked to an ethical function in the context of this argument. Reception aesthetics focuses on modernism, not because modernism is an avant-garde movement. Modernism is of special importance because its aesthetic strategies challenge readers to exercise their own creativity and thus help to make readers aware of their own creative potential. The distinction between high and low remains crucial, but not because Iser was an incurable snob, but because only a particular kind of literature can transform self-alienation into a productive force. If we ask what possibilities a poststructuralist theory of the subject opens up for the formulation of an ethical function, Judith Butler’s essay “Giving an Account of Oneself” can provide an instructive answer. At first sight, one might assume that there can no longer be any ethical function, since Lacanian self-alienation cannot be overcome by any means. But, ironically, the assumption of a permanent state of selfalienation leads to exactly the opposite conclusion. For if a singularity that can never be fully expressed (and is therefore always misrecognized) is my tacit premise, it becomes even more important to keep that singularity alive by accounting for it through narratives (for example in the form of life-stories). These accounts will be incomplete and, in the final analysis, they will be failed accounts in terms of self-knowledge. But if a subject gave up accounting for itself, then it would be doomed to exist only in the form of cultural narratives that are imposed on its identity by others. Hence the emergence of a deeply paradoxical constellation. On the one hand, accounting for oneself will lead to misrecognition and contribute to its constant reinforcement. On the other hand, this situation of being trapped in an imposed identity can only get worse if I do not give any accounts of myself. Aesthetics is not of special importance in this context, although some poststructuralists would argue that certain formal features or aesthetic qualities are more effective in deconstructing an imposition of identity than others. However, the main reference points are no longer fictional texts or aesthetic objects but narratives, and these narratives can be of all kinds and genres; at the end of the day, <?page no="125"?> Struggles for Recognition 125 they will all enact the same dilemma. The main sources of insight are thus not the narratives themselves but readings that reveal to what extent misrecognition is at work and draw attention to the rhetorical means and narrative devices through which this misrecognition is established. However, these readings cannot but create another misrecognition and this process will continue ad infinitum. In fact, there is only one way out and that would be to give up the founding premise of selfalienation altogether. And indeed, if we turn to another influential body of work in critical theory, this is precisely what has happened. Theories of the self-alienation of the subject are directed against the idealist claim that the use of reason will open up a realm of freedom for the subject. Few would argue that we can go back to this claim. But what are the alternatives, then, to the premise of a self-alienated subject, and what are the consequences for a discussion of the ethical function of literature, since, as we have seen, claims for an ethical function can be seen as a logical consequence of a priori assumptions about the state of the subject. This prior assumption will determine what role literature can play in subject-formation, what ethical function it can have, and, in some cases, even what aesthetic forms are needed to realize that potential. III The central claim of this essay is that there exists an inextricable link between a theory of the subject and an ethics of literature. Narratives of self-alienation have been the dominant theory of the subject in literary and cultural studies in the twentieth century. It is therefore notable to realize that scholars of the second and third generation of Frankfurt School critical theory such as Jürgen Habermas and in the following generation Axel Honneth, have taken their point of departure from a rejection of theories of self-alienation and have replaced them by a different theory of subject-constitution. Indeed, this repositioning is different to such a degree that the term paradigm shift may be appropriate here. For example, the second volume of Habermas’s major study Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Theory of Communicative Interaction) begins with an explicit rejection of the premise of self-alienation, here evoked in its Lukácsian version of reification (Verdinglichung): A look at the reception of Weber’s theory of rationalization shows that the social consequences of rationalization are always conceptualized in terms of <?page no="126"?> Winfried Fluck 126 reification; the many paradoxes resulting from such a conceptualization indicate that the issue cannot be discussed satisfactorily in the context of a philosophy of consciousness [Bewusstseinsphilosophie]” (9; my translation). Following this line of argument, Honneth has provided an in-depth discussion of the concept of reification in his Tanner Lectures at the University of California in Berkeley. The goal of his discussion is “to reformulate a significant issue in Western Marxism” (91) that, in the wake of Lukács’s seminal study History and Class Consciousness, “moved an entire generation of philosophers and sociologists to analyze the forms of life under the then prevailing circumstances as being the result of social reification” (92). In both of these cases, Habermas as well as Honneth, a programmatic rejection of theories of self-alienation is designed to pave the way for an alternative theory of subject-formation: the shift is one from selfalienation to intersubjectivity, from a theoretical framework in which the subject is cut off from self-knowledge, either by forces of modernity or by an anthropological lack, to a theory of subject-formation in which the subject is constituted through intersubjective relations. The theoretical gain is obvious. In a state of self-alienation we cannot fully know each other. In theories of intersubjectivity, we cannot possibly not know each other because we only learn who we are in interaction with others. Where a sense of self is formed in ongoing acts of communication and social interaction, subjects thus can no longer be defined by being helplessly exposed to outside forces. The social nature of subject-formation requires the subject to continually respond and hence to act; it is, in other words, a source of quasi-inbuilt agency, however limited, because subjects have to define situations and adapt their definitions in an ongoing flow of interactions in order to be able to act. Hans Joas, who played a crucial role in establishing the paradigm of intersubjectivity in German social theory, can thus speak of an inherent creativity of action and entitle one of his major studies Die Kreativität des Handelns (The Creativity of Action). Habermas links communicative exchange and action in programmatic fashion already in the title of his study Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Honneth, offering still another version of a critical theory based on the premise of intersubjectivity, has moved to a theory of subject-formation in which the formation of a non-alienated sense of self is dependent on successfully achieved intersubjective relations for which Honneth uses the term “recognition.” In the literature on recognition, Honneth’s position is thus classified as an intersubjective theory of recognition, in contrast to an intercultural <?page no="127"?> Struggles for Recognition 127 concept of recognition, as it has been most influentially propagated in Charles Taylor’s multicultural politics of recognition. From a different theoretical position, influential contributions to discussions of the concept are also provided by poststructuralists like Butler or, in the field of American Studies, by New Americanists who consider recognition as a form of subjection and continue to base their arguments on premises of misrecognition and self-alienation. I will return to this challenge at the end of this essay. At this point it is important to note that different concepts of recognition also imply different ethical consequences. From a poststructuralist perspective, the subject cannot know itself because its identity is based on misrecognition. This means that it cannot really know the other either, so that the recognition of others cannot be based - and made dependent - on particular ethical principles, since we can never be certain whether we understand the other adequately or not. Recognition, this is the central ethical imperative of poststructuralism, thus has to be unconditional. From the point of view of an intercultural politics of recognition, on the other hand, we “know” the other as a member of an ethnic group or gender-based community, and since we postulate that this membership is a key constituent of subject formation, groups constituted by cultural difference have to be recognized in their difference in order to keep the subject from being damaged or humiliated. From the point of view of an intersubjective concept of recognition, this argument is valid but tells only half of the story since membership in a group is not the only and often not the main constituent of subject-formation. Even if my cultural difference is fully acknowledged, I may still lack sufficient recognition as a subject. Groups constituted by cultural difference may present a united front to the outside world, but internally they are also characterized by status orders and struggles over status, that is, by struggles for a full recognition as a subject. An intercultural concept of recognition, important as it may be, thus refers us back to an intersubjective concept of recognition and hence to the crucial role intersubjectivity plays in the process of subject-formation. IV Thus, we have to return to the premise of intersubjectivity which Habermas and to a certain extent also Honneth have derived from the work of George Herbert Mead. Joas, who has played a crucial role in the rediscovery of Mead, has called Mead “the most important theorist of <?page no="128"?> Winfried Fluck 128 intersubjectivity between Feuerbach and Habermas” (G. H. Mead 2). 6 Accordingly, Joas has entitled his own dissertation Praktische Intersubjektivität (Practical Intersubjectivity). Mead’s starting assumption is eminently plausible: without the interaction with others, we could not possibly know who we are. In Mead’s theory, the subject can only be formed in social interaction. It can only gain a sense of self by looking through the perspective of others unto itself. 7 As an inherently social being, the self is not something that exists first (for example, in a state of selfalienation) and then enters (or fails to enter) into relationships with others. It is, on the contrary, only realized in relationship to others. It is important to note, however, that this interaction can take place on two different levels and that the term interaction can therefore refer to two different kinds of interaction. One level is that of the direct faceto-face encounter with others which can be conceptualized as an ongoing interactive process: “It is the social process of influencing others in a social act and then taking the attitude of the others aroused by the stimulus, and then reacting in turn to this response, which constitutes a self” (Mead 171). As Habermas points out, the organism does not simply react to the other in behavioristic fashion. It acts in anticipation of what the reaction of the other will be (Theorie 13). This is most likely the type of interaction that we have in mind when we regard the subject as constituted by intersubjective relations. However, a comprehensive social theory cannot be based solely on face-to-face encounters. Mead therefore adds a second kind of interaction to his theory of self-formation which he calls interaction with a generalized other. This generalized other is not a person but something like a social consensus; in this case, the self, in order to anticipate the 6 Mead’s intersubjective model of self-formation became relevant for critical theory because it promised to show a way out of the dead-end of subject philosophy with its focus on the autonomy of the subject, without, on the other hand, giving up an idea of rational agency. Concepts like communicative action and intersubjectivity could thus become the normative basis for a non-radical, non-Marxist progressive vision of democracy. Interesting discussions of the challenges that poststructuralist thought poses to Mead’s theory can be found in Robert Dunn, “Self, Identity, and Difference” and Hans Joas, “The Autonomy of the Self.” 7 To describe the phases of the self’s interaction with the other more precisely, Mead introduces the concepts of “I” and “Me” as two different components: “The ‘I’ is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the ‘me’ is the organized set of attitudes of others which one self assumes. The attitude of the others constitutes the organized ‘me,’ and then one reacts toward that as an ‘I’” (175). In order to emphasize this social dimension of self-reference by taking the attitude of the other, theories of intersubjectivity often replace the concept of the subject by that of the self. <?page no="129"?> Struggles for Recognition 129 other’s response, looks at itself through the perspective of society’s values and norms. Since the self cannot first take a poll before it acts in order to find out what these values and norms are, it must have incorporated or internalized them. To be sure, the “I”-component of the self provides a spontaneous, often unpredictable response to the attitudes of others, including that of the generalized other. But the claims of the “I” are evaluated and channeled by the “Me,” that is, the set of social and cultural attitudes that have been incorporated into the self. This is the point where minorities raise the question whether an intersubjective theory of selfhood does not imply that identity is defined by a “repressive sameness” that may be used to justify exclusion. Thus, Markus Verweyst speaks of a “me,” as “the sum total of internalized social norms” and thus the product of interpellation [übernommene Fremdzuschreibungen]” (378; my translation). As far as I can see, Habermas and Honneth have responded differently to this problem - Habermas by insisting on the ultimate rationality of a public process of communicative interaction, Honneth by concentrating almost exclusively on forms of personal interaction as the constitutive basis for selfhood. The self is constituted in intersubjective relations of recognition, and only personal encounters can provide an experience of genuine intersubjectivity. Moreover, these personal relations have to have a certain quality in order to be normatively significant. In his Tanner lectures on reification, Honneth speaks of an empathetic engagement, defined by affective sympathy and existential care towards other persons. This explains why almost all of the examples with which he wants to establish the constituent role of intersubjectivity are taken from studies of infant-parent relations, that is, from a phase in life in which close affective relations are indeed formative and indispensible. The fact that children soon afterward enter a phase where other influences, including cultural values, practices, and representations become more and more important in the process of socialization and subjectformation seems to have been forgotten at this point. It is of course true that the small child needs recognition by parent-figures in order to develop a positive self-reference. But what sense of self it develops once it has grown older and begins to search for independence will depend on a whole array of social and cultural influences, including literary texts and cultural representations, that can play an increasingly important role as sources of self-definition and identity. <?page no="130"?> Winfried Fluck 130 V This brings us to an important point: in the case of Honneth (but in the final analysis also Habermas) the price for exchanging a narrative of selfalienation by a narrative of intersubjectivity is to analytically disregard the realm of culture (in the sense of cultural practices and cultural representations) as a sphere of subject-formation. In Honneth’s intersubjective theory of recognition, culture plays hardly any role at all. This is indeed a striking reversal in the development of critical theory. While culture is of central importance for Horkheimer and Adorno, both as a key source of self-alienation, but also as one of the few remaining realms that may still have the power to resist the forces of instrumental rationality, literature and culture are now relegated to occasional footnote references. In a way, one may consider this a logical consequence of Honneth’s starting premise. For if intersubjective relations are constitutive of the subject (so that they can keep the subject from selfalienation), then it must be of central importance to focus on instances of fully achieved intersubjectivity and make them the normative basis of one’s social theory. And intersubjectivity is most successfully achieved when it is based on mutuality and relations are reciprocal. From the perspective of literary and cultural studies, this creates a major problem, however, since literature is regarded, by definition, as non-reciprocal. Many descriptions of the act of reading have described the pleasures of being completely absorbed in a book and forgetting about the rest of the world. In reading literature, we do not encounter others who actively respond. What role can literature have, then, in theories of intersubjectivity? In his own scattered references to literature, Honneth is of little help. In his major books and essays on recognition, these references remain limited almost entirely to Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, which has been used on several occasions, albeit only in short references, as an illustration of the damaging consequences of invisibility (Honneth and Margolit; Honneth, Unsichtbarkeit). In his more recent study Das Recht der Freiheit, which aims at a comprehensive social theory, references have become more frequent, and include a number of well-known authors, ranging from Henry James, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, and Victor Hugo to contemporary writers like Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen. However, these references are scattered in unsystematic fashion over the 600-page volume and obviously have the function to provide additional anecdotal evidence for particular points of <?page no="131"?> Struggles for Recognition 131 social analysis. 8 From the perspective of literary studies, this outdated “illustration of”-model of literature is disappointing; it certainly cannot help us understand what role literature could play in intersubjective relations. Interestingly, however, there is a passage at the end of Honneth’s Tanner lectures where he grapples with the question of how his “recognition-theoretical” perspective can be extended to include “nonhuman objects” (134), for example in nature. Similar to literature, these objects cannot “talk back,” so that genuine reciprocity is not possible. This raises the interesting problem for Honneth how the idea of intersubjectivity can still be applied, “if, until now I have demonstrated only that we must preserve the priority of recognition in our relations toward other persons” (132). The question is important for Honneth’s argument because if an empathetic intersubjective recognition is crucial for moral development, then the development of a morally responsible attitude toward nonhuman objects would have the best prospects if it could be grounded in intersubjective relations. But how is that possible if the object cannot respond and intersubjective relations therefore seem impossible? This problem can be tied to an even more basic question: if recognition is essential for preventing self-alienation, and if recognition is seen as “a kind of antecedent interaction that bears the characteristic features of existential care” (114), constituted by an “emotional attachment or identification with another concrete person” (118), then this definition departs from Mead’s concept of intersubjectivity. Indeed, as Honneth puts it, “what is notable about all these development-psychological theories - which like either G. H. Mead or Donald Davidson emphasize the necessity of taking over another’s perspective for the emergence of symbolic thought - is the extent to which they ignore the emotional side of the relationship between children and their figures of attachment” (Reification 115). In order to introduce a normative dimension, Honneth takes recognition - and thus the formative powers of intersubjectivity - back to a “primordial” level of existential care and emotional attachment in the relation between an infant and “a loved figure of attachment” (117). 8 The same can be said for a footnote reference in Reification where a number of authors and literary texts are mentioned in support of the topicality of the theme of reification (93n5). <?page no="132"?> Winfried Fluck 132 How can the concept of recognition then be applied to “nonhuman” objects? Only by extending our attachment to a loved figure to an object in order to endow it “with additional components of meaning that the loved figure of attachment perceives in the object” (133). In other words: for the relation to a nonhuman object to become intersubjective, the subject has to identify first, not with an object (such as a literary text), but with a loved figure, so that the relation is not merely one to an object but to a person-mediated object. In this case, the object does not have to be able to talk back. The loved person has already spoken on its behalf! The relation to a nonhuman object can thus gain a moral dimension if a figure of attachment suggests that the nonhuman object should be made an object of recognition. However, this also means that our relation to literature would be dependent on the perspective of another person with whom we identify - that is, that it would be dependent on “childish” uses of literature. Facetiously, one could argue at this point that it is one of the advantages of literature that it can cut out the middle man. Honneth’s concept of recognition has often been misunderstood (I include myself here). Along the lines of a politics of recognition, it has been seen as a correction of a liberal concept of justice which argues that criteria of justice have to go beyond legally guaranteed individual rights. From this perspective, the difference between an intercultural and an intersubjective concept of recognition seemed to lie merely in the extent and focus of recognition. But as Honneth points out at the end of his Tanner lectures, his attempt “to reformulate Lukács’s concept of reification from a recognition-theoretical perspective” is designed to establish a new normative basis for judging society (135). As he argues, “violating generally valid principles of justice is not the only way in which a society can show itself to be normatively deficient” (135). A society is normatively deficient when it produces social practices that are pathological. Social practices will become pathological when the origins of subject-formation in empathetic recognition and the existential primacy of care are forgotten or denied. Reification is the result of such forgetfulness, it is failed intersubjectivity, so to speak. 9 9 Honneth’s reorientation of critical theory towards the analysis of social pathologies may also explain why he focuses on reification within the larger Marxist narrative of alienation. As a rule, discussions of alienation are embedded in larger theories of social development or in a philosophy of history; in contrast, pathology is not a general condition produced by a historical process but a breakdown in particular social constellations. <?page no="133"?> Struggles for Recognition 133 However, if intersubjectivity is defined by recognition and recognition, in turn, is defined by the primacy of care, then literature cannot contribute to recognition. All it can do - and this is where its ethical function may be seen from Honneth’s point of view - is to register the failure of fully achieved recognition. In other words, it can serve - as Honneth’s own use of literary examples also indicates - as a barometer of social pathologies. 10 Literature cannot constitute a fully achieved intersubjectivity, and, hence, it also does not function as an important element in the constitution of the subject. At best, it seems, it can have the function of registering the failure of intersubjectivity where it has occurred in society. VI For literary and cultural studies this cannot be a satisfactory solution. How can we then meaningfully discuss literary texts within the paradigm of intersubjectivity? One way to liberate the concept of recognition from the narrow normative focus to which Honneth has relegated the term is to go back to the concept of intersubjectivity and to Mead’s understanding of it. In contrast to Honneth’s use of intersubjectivity as antecedent empathetic engagement with a loved person, Mead uses the term in the much more neutral sense of any interaction with others. Moreover, by introducing the concept of the generalized other, he also concedes that the perspective through which we look at ourselves is not always that of a real person. It can also be a perspective provided by cultural norms or attitudes. Since we cannot possibly meet all of the other others who form society, we have to mentally construct their perspective. One may even go one step further and argue that the difference between face-to-face encounters with “real” persons and abstract others is not that clear-cut either: although we may see a person directly in front of us and may be able to observe its responses, there will nevertheless also be a certain degree of imaginary construction at work 10 Somewhat surprisingly and unexpectedly, in a recent essay, “Organisierte Selbstverwirklichung,” Honneth at one point goes beyond the “illustration-of”-model when he concedes that the emergence of cultural ideals of self-realization “may have been influenced by the reception of certain novels, for example by Hermann Hesse or Henry Miller and the rock music that was emerging just at that time” (212; my translation). In Honneth’s essay, this footnote remains an isolated observation made in passing, but it is significant, because it inverts the relation between reality and culture and thereby assigns cultural representations a different function. However, so far no conclusions seem to have been drawn from this seemingly casual comment. <?page no="134"?> Winfried Fluck 134 through which we try to make sense of the thoughts, feelings, and motivation of this other person. We “take the attitude of the other” in an imaginary anticipation of his or her response, and the image to which we respond already presents an interpretation and not simply an encounter with a “real” person. In the final analysis, we act on the basis of a mental image of the other person. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Honneth takes interaction back to the infant/ parent-level where emotional attachment does indeed precede cognition, as he claims. However, as I have argued, we do not remain at this infantile level. Subsequent forms of interaction will not be limited to relations with loved ones, and the affective dimension will be spread out to others the older we get. Our development as a person will then also include the search for other sources of recognition and these sources have increased and multiplied in modern societies. Literature is one of these possible sources of recognition - at least if we do not reduce it to the status of being merely another “nonhuman object.” Rather, the growing importance fictional texts and aesthetic objects have gained in modernity can be attributed to the fact that literature (and art more generally) have established their own characteristic mode of interaction. In an essay on literary representation, Iser provides a helpful suggestion by using the example of reading Hamlet. Since we have never met Hamlet and do in fact know that he never existed, we have to come up with our own mental images of him. This mental construct will follow textual guidance but, in the act of doing so, it will also have to draw on our own associations, feelings, and bodily sensations in order to bring the abstract letters on the page to life and to provide the text with meaning. If a character is said to be melancholic, this characterization will not make any sense to us, unless we can draw on our own knowledge, or our own feelings, of melancholia. In the act of reading, the literary text thus comes to represent two things at once: the world of the text and imaginary elements added to it by the reader in the process of reading. Our characteristic mode of reading will therefore be a constant movement back and forth between the world of the text and our own world, since we will continuously have to reconcile our own construct of the figure of Hamlet with its representation in the text - and vice versa. This ongoing interaction puts us in a position “in-between” two worlds. And it is exactly this double positioning of the reader that can be seen as an important source of aesthetic experience, because it allows us to do two things at the same time: we can, in the words of Iser, be “both ourselves and someone else at the same time” (“Representation” 244). The literary text allows us to enter a character’s perspective and perhaps even <?page no="135"?> Struggles for Recognition 135 his or her body; on the other hand, we cannot and do not want to completely give up our own identity. In reading, we thus create other, more expressive versions of ourselves. This is achieved, however, in a much more complex way than suggested by the term “identification.” 11 One may assume for the sake of the argument that it may be possible to “identify” with a character, but one cannot identify with a whole text. It is the text, however, that provides the reading experience, not just single characters in it. In actualizing the text in the act of reading, all aspects of the text have to be brought to life by means of a transfer from our own life-world, including the text’s language, its plot, mood, and structural features. The “more expressive version of ourselves” is thus not a simple case of selfaggrandizement through wish-fulfillment but an extension of our own interiority over a whole (made-up) world. Such a model conceptualizes reading as a process of making selections through which readers create meaning and significance by transfers between the world of the text and their own world. Since we cannot possibly relate to all aspects of the text in equal measure, we will focus on aspects to which we can relate in one way or another. The explanation why there will always be new readings of any given literary text, not only in different historical periods but also among readers or viewers of the same period, society, or class, lies in the fact that readings (including professional interpretations) work by means of structural or affective analogies. This is, in fact, one of the reasons why in reading literature we can relate to figures like outlaws or misfits, or even criminals and murderers from which we would shy away in real life - that is, characters who meet Honneth’s definition of the pathological. We do not identify with such a character but establish analogies to those aspects of his persona that we want to incorporate. We take the defiance or heroism of the gangster and ignore the criminal context. 12 Depictions of pathologi- 11 On the confusions surrounding the term “identification” in the interpretation of literary texts, see Rita Felski: Identification can denote a formal alignment with a character, as encouraged by techniques of focalization, point of view, or narrative structure, while also referencing an experiential allegiance with a character, as manifested in a felt sense of affinity or attachment. Critiques of identification tend to conflate these issues, assuming that readers formerly aligned with a fictional persona cannot help but swallow the ideologies represented by that persona wholesale. (34) 12 Using the term “analogy” to grasp the relations that can be set up between reader and text means to go beyond mimetic assumptions of direct likeness or resemblance, but even beyond metaphorical affinity. Thus, readers’ responses can be unpredictable: <?page no="136"?> Winfried Fluck 136 cal behavior in fictional texts can thus not be taken literally, and therefore its representation in literature cannot be read in literal fashion as a barometer of social conditions. A sinking ship and the representation of a sinking ship in literature or painting are two very different things; what may be tragic in reality, can be a source of altogether different aesthetic experiences in the reception of art. Representations of pathologies can have very different functions in literature. It would therefore be reductive to locate the ethical function of literature in the depiction of social pathologies, that is, in the illustration of instances of failed intersubjectivity. But in what way can the term “intersubjectivity” be applied in the context of a discussion of the ethical function of literature? As we have seen in the case of Honneth, the link to a theory of intersubjectivity can be provided by the concept of recognition as a form of subjectformation that is inherently dependent on interaction with others. But in contrast to Honneth, the use of the concept of “recognition” should not be restricted to forms of an antecedent empathetic engagement. On the contrary, such a reduction fails to take into account the central role recognition plays in modern life and the different forms it can take. Recognition can mean respecting others (Achtung), but it can also mean merely paying attention to others (Beachtung), for example in social and professional contexts. Finally, recognition can also be used as a word for a positive self-reference (Selbst-Achtung). I therefore suggest a use of the concept of recognition in which our understanding is broadened so that the plurality of possibilities can be included. The transfers that are at work in our reception of literary texts could then be seen as a form of intersubjective relations that offers particular possibilities in the search for recognition (Fluck, “Reading”). To understand the reading process as a form of intersubjectivity (in the sense of Mead), two aspects have to be kept in mind. One is to acknowledge the inherently interactive nature of the reading process constituted by the need to create meaning by means of transfers. The result is a complex interaction of perspectives in which we construct another world by drawing on our own world, and then look at our own world through the perspective of our imaginary construct. Seen this way - and following Mead - the reading subject is thus intersubjectively consti- Antigone has intrigued straight men and lesbians, Norwegians and South Africans; you do not need to be an Irishman to admire James Joyce. [. . .] We all seek in various ways to have our particularity recognized, to find echoes of ourselves in the world around us. The patent asymmetry and unevenness of structures of recognition ensure that books will often function as lifelines for those deprived of other forms of public acknowledgment. (Felski 43) <?page no="137"?> Struggles for Recognition 137 tuted in the act of reading: we can be both ourselves and somebody else at the same time. Secondly, what is important to stress in this context is that this interactive process will not leave the two perspectives unaffected that intersect. Our construct of the text will not be identical with the literary text itself; it will already provide an interpretation and extension of it. At the same time, looking at our self through the perspective of our reading experience will affect and possibly change our own selfreference. The reading process thus brings a dimension to our self that we have been lacking, and this self-extension can be seen as a call for recognition on new grounds. VII Still, we should add that this literary call for recognition has a particular status. This qualification can draw our attention to a special role literature plays in the ethical world. I think its special contribution does not lie so much in the formulation or legitimation of ethical principles - in that sense, literature is rarely a philosophical genre - but in the articulation of individual claims for recognition. Its starting point are often experiences of misrecognition, of inferiority, weakness, injustice; and its plots consist in the struggle against these experiences, a struggle that can be either successful - often, in fact, triumphantly successful - or end in defeat, which, in a paradox typical of aesthetic experience, can nevertheless provide strong experiences of recognition. But the key point here is that these claims for recognition can be - some would even say should be - radically subjective, self-centered, and partisan. One of the main challenges for social theories, for example of theories of justice or recognition, consists in the task of integrating different claims into generally acceptable norms of equality, fairness, and justice. The search for recognition in literature, on the other hand, may often be highly effective in dramatizing severe cases of social injustice, but their depiction represents the views of an individual or group that want to call attention to their own, often highly subjective experiences of misrecognition. In contrast to philosophical or social theories, literature can articulate individual claims for recognition that need not necessarily be reconciled with other claims and need not be normatively justified (Fluck, “Fiction”). Hence, one of the major differences between literary texts and normative accounts is that literary texts can base the legitimacy of their claims on the power of aesthetic experience and its seemingly self-evident authority. If a novel is skillfully crafted, we may even find <?page no="138"?> Winfried Fluck 138 ourselves on the side of a killer, as, for example, in Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy, because Dreiser claims that what goes on in Clyde Griffiths gives us insights into the human condition that are normally repressed. This unashamed and unrepentant partisanship is actually one of the strengths of literature because literary texts can articulate aspects of individual experience that are erased by broad social classifications, so that new dimensions of subjectivity can be revealed. Thus, while normative accounts try to integrate different claims in order to arrive at a convincing normative principle, the subjective accounts of literature go exactly in the other direction by producing an ever expanding plurality of claims. We encounter normative accounts on the one side, open, and often unashamedly subjective calls for recognition on the other. It would be a mistake, however, to posit one side against the other. Both operate on different levels and are, in the final analysis, complementary. As a form that encourages individual expression, often of a transgressive nature, literature is a social institution with a special potential and privilege to articulate individual claims for recognition. As an institution, it has played a crucial role in introducing such claims into culture. Philosophical and social theories, on the other hand, are involved in an ongoing debate about the legitimacy and normative implications of such claims. In a time of pluralization, fictional texts constantly introduce new claims; in doing so, they put pressure on philosophical and social theories to reconsider and, where necessary, extend their normative accounts. Thus, both discourses can be seen to nourish each other. Literature is an important medium in which new claims for recognition can be articulated, just as, on the other hand, the concept of recognition provides a perspective on literature that can provide new and better explanations of its potential and imaginary power. But what about the poststructuralist claim that this articulation effect is only possible at the price of an imposition of identity? It is true that cultural narratives position us in culturally prefigured plots and norms, and that these are often the only forms in which we can articulate ourselves. But these cultural plots have to be adjusted and re-written to fit a person’s self-narrative, so that his or her own narrative identity can be provided with a certain, at least minimal, degree of continuity and coherence. This appropriation is more than a mere reiteration of always the same subject-position. Inevitably, it leads to a re-writing, and rewriting also opens up the possibility of a reconfiguration in which norms can become subject to resignification. That which constantly puts constraints on our particularity, the stories that connect us, can thus also become a valuable resource for the assertion of singularity. On the one <?page no="139"?> Struggles for Recognition 139 hand, then, recognition is one of the stabilizing forces of the social system since it is based on certain norms of recognizability, but, on the other hand, it is also a continuous threat to the stability of a social system, because it constantly revives and refuels individual claims. The poststructuralist argument that rejects recognition as an identity imposition and, hence, another constraint on the subject, is thus at a closer look an argument in which claims for individual recognition (in this case of the singularity of the subject, its “difference”) are further radicalized. VIII Let me end on a personal note: When I was active in the student movement in the Sixties, one of the questions with which we were constantly confronted as students of literature was that about the relevance of literature and, by implication, what we were studying and why we were studying it. I did not realize at the time that I could have provided an easy answer taken from my own childhood in a working-class household in what was then a mean working-class district in Berlin called Kreuzberg. Five people lived in two rooms with no bathroom and an outdoor toilet. I spent most of my days on the streets and played soccer but what really saved me at the time was the discovery of literature, that is, the possibility to encounter the individual claims and lives of others that helped me get a sense of the possibilities of the world. Simply put, it is this articulation effect in which the ethical function of literature lies. Of course, with one caveat: these claims then have to become part of a cultural conversation in which their merits are being discussed and assessed. But they can only be meaningfully discussed if this discussion takes the specific function and potential of literature into account. <?page no="140"?> Winfried Fluck 140 References Butler, Judith. “Giving an Account of Oneself.” Diacritics 31.4 (2001): 22-40. Dunn, Robert. “Self, Identity, and Difference: Mead and the Poststructuralists.” Sociological Quarterly 38 (1997): 687-705. Felski, Rita. “Recognition.” Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 23-50. Fluck, Winfried. “Fiction and Justice.” New Literary History 34.1 (2003): 19-42. ―――. “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory.” New Literary History 31.1 (2000): 175-210. ―――. “Reading for Recognition.” New Literary History 44.1 (2013): 45- 67. Habermas, Jürgen. “Individuierung durch Vergesellschaftung: Zu George Herbert Meads Theorie der Subjektivität.” Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988. 187-241. ―――. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988. Honneth, Axel. “Anerkennung und Vergesellschaftung: Meads naturalistische Transformation der Hegelschen Idee.” Kampf um Anerkennung: Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 114-47. ―――. “Organisierte Selbstverwirklichung: Paradoxien der Individualisierung.” Das Ich im Wir. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010. 202- 21. ―――. Das Recht der Freiheit: Grundrisse einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011. ―――. Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View. The Tanner lectures on Human Values. Delivered at University of California, Berkeley, 14 to 16 March 2005. March 10, 2015. <http: / / tannerlectures.utah.edu- / _documents/ a-to-z/ h/ Honneth_2006.pdf >. ―――. Unsichtbarkeit: Stationen einer Theorie der Intersubjektivität. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. ―――. Verdinglichung: Eine anerkennungstheoretische Studie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005. ――― and Avishai Margalit. “Recognition.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 75 (2001): 111-39. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 2002. <?page no="141"?> Struggles for Recognition 141 Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. ―――. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. ―――. “Representation: A Performative Act.” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 236-48. Jaeggi, Rahel. Entfremdung: Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005. Joas, Hans. “The Autonomy of the Self: The Meadian Heritage and Its Postmodern Challenge.” European Journal of Social Theory 1.1 (1998): 7- 18. ―――. G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Reexamination of His Thought. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. ―――. Die Kreativität des Handelns. Frankfurt am Main, 1992. ―――. Praktische Intersubjektivität: Die Entwicklung des Werkes von G. H. Mead. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Vol. 1 of Works of George Herbert Mead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934. Taylor, Charles, “The Politics of Recognition.” Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Ed. Amy Gutman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. 25-73. Verweyst, Markus. Das Begehren der Anerkennung: Subjekttheoretische Positionen bei Heidegger, Sartre, Freud und Lacan. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2000. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780-1950. New York: Harper and Row, 1958. ―――. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. 151-57. Zima, Peter V. Entfremdung: Pathologien der postmodernen Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Francke, 2014. <?page no="143"?> Ethics, Interrupted: Community and Impersonality in Levinas Viola Marchi Despite the influence of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics on the rethinking of community in post-identitarian terms (most prominently in the work of Maurice Blanchot, Alphonso Lingis, and, to a lesser extent, Jean-Luc Nancy), the question of community remains a problematic spot in Levinas’s own philosophy. I would argue that, instead of grounding a new thinking of community, the dyadic relation of Same and Other poses a structural problem when trying to open the ethical relation to the wider realm of others while keeping radical difference in place. As external observer and guarantor of justice, for instance, is the Third excluded a priori from the ethical relation? Is community always only another term for the political? Or, as Levinas himself puts it in Otherwise than Being: “What meaning can community take on in difference without reducing difference? ” Identifying in the notion of impersonality a way to access Levinas’s thought on community, this essay aims at rethinking the scene of address and the ethical relation in terms of displacement, dislocation, and interruption. The exigency of a new thought of community has become a moral imperative of contemporary philosophy. The resurgent interest in the concept of community and its ethical underpinnings appears to be deeply rooted in a widespread feeling of cultural decline, a malaise that has been connected alternatively to the rampant individualism promoted by contemporary society and to the experiences of the totalitarianisms and murderous conflicts of identities - be they religious, ethnic, or national - that characterized the twentieth century and that the early twenty-first century seems only to have exacerbated. Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 32. Ed. Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser. Tübingen: Narr, 2015. 143-158. <?page no="144"?> Viola Marchi 144 The American version of the debate in recent years has set around the contraposition between a Liberalism à la John Rawls and, on the other side, the theoretical current of the so-called “communitarians.” The main point of contention between the two positions lies in their different understandings of the formation of the moral and political self, with Communitarianism privileging what Michael Sandel calls the “encumbered self” 1 against Liberalism’s atomistic conception of the individual, detached from social entanglements and communitarian bonds. At the level of community, while Liberalism stresses the idea of voluntary, temporary, and reversible bonds - based on a dialectical movement between association and dissociation, dispersion and “periodic communitarian correction” (Walzer 21) - Communitarianism’s main goal is to rediscover and revive the experience of a community that has been overrun by fragmentation, alienation, and anomie, and that alone can constitute the source of stable, shared moral values as well as ethical meaning. The European discussion, on the other hand - inaugurated in 1986 by Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “The Inoperative Community” - has offered us an image of community that has remained almost unthought in the American context. Disjointed from notions of identity, immanent fusion, and teleological development, it appears to be completely removed from the traditional understanding of “community” as a web of meaningful relationships and commitment to a set of shared values. Instead of the nostalgic image of a harmony and unity belonging to a past that we now strive to retrieve, as the only remedy against the contemporary nihilistic drift, community has become, in Nancy’s rewriting of Martin Heidegger’s being-with, the primordial and inescapable condition of existence, a space for the articulation of singularities characterized by the utter vulnerability of finitude and radical exposure. Similarly, in the work of Maurice Blanchot, absolute relation [le rapport sans rapport] is at the heart of his negative community, where the term “absolute” merely indicates the absence of all relations except that, perhaps, of the insurmountable distance between the terms involved. As Roberto Esposito suggests, the “in common” of community is defined by nothing more than lack and the obligation of an ontological debt [munus]. What we are left with is, I think, a community without ethos, understood here as the series of shared practices, beliefs, and behaviors 1 See Michael Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. <?page no="145"?> Community and Impersonality in Levinas 145 that would regulate and confer meaning upon our being in common. 2 And this cannot but immediately raise the question of ethics. If every idea of community implies an underlying concept of ethics, whether explicitly sketched or just hovering in the background, then the first and foremost effect of a community without ethos would be that of deactivating the possibility of both a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics approach, as well as a Habermasian model based on the establishment of validity claims through intersubjective recognition. That is to say, the idea of a community in which nothing is “in common” - except perhaps the sheer space of cohabitation - calls for a different approach to the ethical question, an approach beyond identity and sameness. One of the main candidates here is certainly Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of radical alterity. Moving in a new direction with respect to the main cornerstones in the history of moral theory, Levinas grounds his whole philosophical edifice not on what we share as moral beings (the Aristotelian telos toward the “good” - also in its contemporary refashioning at the hands of virtue ethics philosophers - Kant’s reason, and so on), but on the concept of a radical Other that, in its irreducible exteriority, defies any possibility of comprehension. Refusing the very idea of an ethics of reciprocity, Levinas foregrounds instead the radical asymmetry inherent to every ethical encounter and the ensuing call for an infinite, non-mutual responsibility. Despite the influence and the strong connections that can be traced between a Levinasian approach to ethics and the cited attempts at rethinking community in post-identitarian terms, however, the question of community remains deeply problematic in Levinas’s own philosophy. On the one hand, Levinas’s stance toward community seems to adhere closely to what I call a community without ethos. As his overall philosophical project testifies, he is particularly ill at ease with a philosophical tradition - stretching from Plato to Heidegger - that understands the collective in terms of fusion, unity, and the One. As Michael F. Bernard-Donals succinctly puts it, Levinas is a philosopher “whose writing made clear that any attempt to establish a collectivity (a ‘we’) worked against ethics” (62). In this regard, two names in particular figure in his work: Hobbes and Hegel. In “Peace and Proximity” Levinas sees the main flaw in what he calls “the dialectical project in the Hegelian style” in its indifference toward the necessary evils of war and suffering; necessary, as it were, to 2 Before I proceed, I must clarify that, although the concept of ethos is not abandoned in Nancy’s philosophy, it is never employed in the sense in which I am using it here. On this topic, see Hutchens, Jean-Luc Nancy. <?page no="146"?> Viola Marchi 146 “the unfolding of rational thought, which is also a politics” (164). The references to Hobbes are, I think, even more interesting, as they appear in different places in Levinas’s work, functioning as a sort of counterpart to his own thinking of community but never receiving an explicit articulation. What is at stake in the discussion of Hobbes is the question of the natural state of man as, on the one side, “a war of all against all” and, at the other pole, what Levinas would call an infinite responsibility of the one for the other. This, I would argue, is a dilemma that is never resolved throughout his oeuvre. 3 While Levinas’s distrust of the totalizing power of the State makes him a suitable candidate for rethinking ethics in the context of the type of community that I have briefly outlined above, the complex relationship between politics and ethics in his thought, famously addressed by Jacques Derrida in Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas, brings to light the difficulties of extricating a thought of community from Levinas’s moral philosophy. 4 One of the problems I would like to mention in this regard is that grounding an idea of community on the dyadic relation of Same and Other, as proposed by Levinas, poses a structural problem when one tries to open the ethical relation to the wider realm of others while keeping radical difference in place. The structural asymmetry of the ethical relation, in fact, is taken back into the realm of equality with the intervention of the “Third” as the wider community of others. A series of questions thus arise: As external observer and guarantor of justice, is the Third excluded a priori from the ethical relation? Is community always only another term for the political? Or, as Levinas himself puts it 3 For a detailed analysis of the relation between Hobbes and Levinas, see, for instance, Cheryl L. Hughes, “The Primacy of Ethics.” However, I have to point out that, despite the incontestable differences between the two philosophers that Hughes highlights in her essay, in my view Levinas never seems to set for a final position on the matter. As he states in an interview with Richard Kearney: “Ethics is, therefore, against nature because it forbids the murderousness of my natural will to put my existence first.” A few lines later, then, he defines “ethical conversion” as “a reversal, of our nature” (Cohen 24-25), explicitly embracing a Hobbesian view of the natural state of man. 4 As Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco suggest in their introduction to Radicalizing Levinas, in recent years the investigation of the difficult relationship between ethics and politics has become the new tendency in Levinas scholarship: If the first wave of scholarship was aimed primarily at commentary and exposition, and the second wave was focused on situating Levinas within the context of poststructuralism and deconstruction, the third wave is an explicit attempt to situate and explore Levinas’s work within the context of the most pressing sociopolitical issues of our time (x). <?page no="147"?> Community and Impersonality in Levinas 147 in Otherwise than Being: “What meaning can community take on in difference without reducing difference? ” (154). There are two claims and a suggestion that I would like to make in this essay. First, despite the importance usually given to the personal Other (Autrui) or to the concept of the Third, I would argue that one privileged way to access Levinas’s understanding of community would be via the notion of impersonality. While impersonality famously occupies a central role in Levinas’s early work, it is often disregarded in connection with the later texts, where it keeps coming back despite repeated attempts to exclude and contain it. 5 As a consequence, and this is the second claim, through the acknowledgment of the centrality of the impersonal, the ethical as well as the political relation in Levinas turn out to be not dyadic, that is, an ethics and a politics of dialogue, but always constituted via a third term (be that illeity, the il y a, the Third, and perhaps even the son that makes his appearance at the end of Totality and Infinity). The obliquity of the relation is thus not simply a result of its asymmetry, that is, of the Other always approaching the I from above - from height - but also, and especially, of its being a relation that is always already opened by and to a third term. The third and final suggestion that I would like to make is that, instead of surrendering to the total dissolution of moral and political agency in Levinas’s work - as many scholars have argued by emphasizing, and rightly so, the centrality of passivity in his ethics - his philosophy, and the approach that I try to sketch through the notion of impersonality, might indeed help us rethink agency beyond the agent/ patient opposition, especially if considered in relation to Levinas’s break with Husserlian phenomenology. This is how the argument proceeds from here. I start by drawing some connections between the il y a (or impersonal existence) and Levinas’s account of infinity in the process of the formation of ethical subjectivity to show how the opposition between the horror of impersonal being and “the good” of the experience of transcendence 5 Of course, the question of impersonality has already been tackled by other scholars although, to my knowledge, not in specific connection with the problem of community. A few recent examples are Kris Sealey’s “The ‘Face’ of the il y a,” Michael Marder’s “Terror of the Ethical,” Merold Westphal’s “The Welcome Wound,” and “Il y a” by Simon Critchley, who will constitute my main interlocutor here. The reason I privilege Critchley’s account is that Sealy and Marder, despite their insightful and valuable contributions, give mainly what I would call a “horror reading” of the impersonal existence that lies at the heart of Levinas’s ethics. Critchley is able to keep in place a zone of neutrality that resonates more with my own position on the topic. <?page no="148"?> Viola Marchi 148 toward the “otherwise than being” ultimately fall back into each other. Taking as an important point of reference Simon Critchley’s discussion of Blanchot and Levinas around the concept of the il y a, I consider the structure of the intersubjective relation beyond its rigid dyadic formulation. I then continue by investigating the impersonal by drawing on Simone Weil’s essay “On Human Personality” and by highlighting its connections with Levinas’s work. 6 1. The Night of the Il y a The notion of the il y a represents the main instance of impersonality in Levinas’s work as well as his approach to ontology and to the question of being. In “There is: Existence without Existents” the il y a is described as “impersonal” and “anonymous,” as utter exposure: “Before this obscure invasion it is impossible to take shelter in oneself, to withdraw into one’s shell. One is exposed. [. . .] the nocturnal space delivers us over to being” (31). The il y a is not an object of perception; it cannot be grasped nor intentionally constituted as it breaks down the distinction between subject and object. Its neutrality and impersonality soon acquires the traits of horror, menace, and insecurity. In the night of the il y a “the subject is depersonalized” (32). The phenomenological analysis that accompanies the il y a is that of insomnia: The impossibility of tearing the invading, inescapable and anonymous rustling of existence is manifested in particular through certain moments where sleep escapes our appeals. [. . .] The bare fact of presence oppresses: one is held to being, held to be. (Existence and Existents 61) The state of insomnia is apparently characterized by a complete passivity, but, I would argue, of a different kind from that which would oppose an active agent to a passive patient: the insomniac does not wake in the night; she is kept awake by something that is at the same time inside and outside of herself. It is the night that is awake in me, it is impersonal being that keeps me hostage. Once the existent is hypostatized, separated, that is, from impersonal existence, the phenomenological articulation that Levinas proposes is 6 For different approaches to the similarities between Levinas and Weil, see, for instance, Michelle Boulous Walker’s “Eating Ethically” and Tanya Loughead’s “Two Slices of the Same Loaf? ”. <?page no="149"?> Community and Impersonality in Levinas 149 that of nausea: “this despair, this fact of being riveted, constitutes all the anxiety of nausea” (On Escape 66). What is worth pointing out here is that nausea “does not come from outside to confine us. We are revolted from inside” (66). Once again the distinction between inside and outside, activity and passivity, is problematized. We are totally passive in the moment of nausea, but again this is not a passivity opposed to the activity of an external agent. Immersed in the dead weight of existence, in the moment of queasiness, we only long for an escape, and “escape is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break the most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I [moi] is oneself [soimême]” (55). Interestingly enough, the chains that bind us to ourselves and to being can only multiply in community or, more precisely, in a traditional understanding of community as essence, where “[e]ssence as synchrony is togetherness in a place” (Otherwise than Being 152). The description of the community of essence that Levinas offers is that of a community of slaves, all held fast to being: Essence, the being of entities, weaves between the incomparables, between me and the others, a unity, a community (if only the unity of analogy), and drags us off and assembles us on the same side, chaining us to one another like galley slaves, emptying proximity of its meaning. Every attempt to disjoin the conjunction and the conjuncture would be only clashing of the chains. (Otherwise than Being 182) With these thoughts in mind - especially the identification of essence with “synchrony” and “togetherness” - I now turn to Levinas’s account of subject formation as presented in his 1975 essay “God and Philosophy.” 2. Approaching the Other . . . with Descartes To formulate the moment of the constitution of subjectivity, Levinas draws on the Third Cartesian Meditation. What interests him in Descartes’s account is not the proofs of God’s existence but the “breakup of consciousness” (“God and Philosophy” 136) provoked by the idea of infinity. With the idea of infinity, in fact, the certainty of the cogito is disrupted since “the cogitatum of a cogitatio which to begin with contains that cogitatio signifies the noncontained par excellence” (“God and Philosophy” 136). To put it in phenomenological terms, the noematic content of the intentional act incorporates the noetic act itself. <?page no="150"?> Viola Marchi 150 By thinking infinity, that is, I think more than I can think or grasp. It is a thought that overflows thought. Again, the way in which the I thinks infinity is not an active process, but it is a confrontation with an idea that is put into it, that slips into it in its passivity. This is not, however, simply a case of the “inverted intentionality” that Merold Westphal identifies as the fundamental element of Levinas’s phenomenology. In the constitution of ethical responsibility, Westphal’s argument goes, the self emerges from the il y a through intentional acts that, instead of being directed by me toward the outside, are directed toward me by the other as the only real agent. Through a reading of Levinas in connection with Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of the gaze, Westphal tries to explain the former’s conceptualization of the inversion of identity in the moment of substitution: 7 In what seems to be original intentionality the ego constitutes, objectifies, represents, identifies its object; the hunter wounds the stag. In inverted intentionality the subject is seen, addressed, defined by the other; the hunter is wounded by the stag. (222) Yet, Levinas’s use of Descartes’s Third Meditation as a purely formal paradigm for the encounter with the other and for the constitution of ethical subjectivity seems to suggest a different interpretation. By this I mean that what allows the ego to become a subject is not merely a reversal of positions between an objectifying (gazing) ego and an objectified (gazed at) Other. Rather, the idea of infinity introduces an “inassimilable surplus” that exceeds and absorbs any notion of intentionality: The Other who provokes this ethical movement in consciousness and who disturbs the good conscience of the Same’s coincidence with itself compromises a surplus which is inadequate to intentionality. Because of this inassimilable surplus, we have called the relation which binds the I to the Other (Autrui) the idea of the infinite. (“Transcendence and Height” 19) What emerges here is then an “intentionality of a wholly different type” (Totality and Infinity 23) that cannot be exhausted by the simple exchange of roles between self and other, agent and patient. It is significant to notice that, at this moment, we are again turned inside out “like a cloak” (Otherwise than Being 48), as in nausea and insomnia, as well as fully immersed in a nocturnal scene that is very 7 Cf. the chapter “Substitution” in Otherwise than Being, especially page 115. <?page no="151"?> Community and Impersonality in Levinas 151 close to the night of the il y a. The uncontained, ungraspable otherness slips into me, undermining the unity of the same and awakening it. In “God and Philosophy” Levinas writes: The irreducible categorical character of insomnia lies precisely in this: the other is in the same, and does not alienate the same but awakens it. Awakening is like a demand that no obedience is equal to, no obedience puts to sleep; it is a “more” in the “less.” (132) Thus, whereas insomnia and the possibility of sleep belong, respectively, to the anonymous vigilance of the il y a and to consciousness itself (Existence and Existents 70), it is the fact of awakening that enters in all respects into the order of the ethical. It is here, in the exposition of the alterity of God, that Levinas suddenly makes a really striking move that is worth quoting at length. He undermines the opposition between the horror of the there is and the good of absolute transcendence: God is not simply the first other (autrui), the other (autrui) par excellence, or the absolutely other (autrui), but other than the other (autrui), other otherwise, other with an alterity prior to the alterity of the other (autrui), prior to the ethical bond with other (autrui) and different from every neighbor, transcendent to the point of absence, to the point of a possible confusion with the stirring of the there is. (“God and Philosophy” 141; my emphasis) That the radical transcendence of “illeity” - of the good beyond being - ends up merging, strangely enough, with the impersonality of the il y a is a point already stressed by Critchley in his “Blanchot-inspired re-reading of Levinas” (89) in Very Little . . . Almost Nothing. The acknowledgement of such confusion and of the recurrence of the trace of the il y a that haunts Levinas’s oeuvre leads Critchley to the question of ambiguity, ultimately the “felt ambiguity between the transcendence of evil and that of goodness” (93). In this ambiguity he recognizes the ineradicable resource for the preservation of ethical sense and, resorting to Blanchot, he asserts the possibility and productivity of a reading of Levinas that, by suspending “God” and the “good beyond being,” is able to linger in the third space of the neuter. Critchley concludes by proposing an, albeit summary, definition of what he calls “atheist transcendence” (97) that, not surprisingly, has stirred quite a lively debate. 8 8 For Lis Thomas, Critchley’s “notion of ‘atheist transcendence,’ in its affirmation of Blanchot’s third, misinterprets Levinas’s position” (161) or, as Christopher Watkins puts it, “such secularization is in vain for it can never rid itself of the inaccessible God be- <?page no="152"?> Viola Marchi 152 I will return to the question of atheist transcendence in the conclusion, after my Weil-inspired re-reading of Levinas. Presently, I concentrate on the one point at which my argument departs significantly from Critchley’s, namely in the interpretation of Levinas’s account of the intersubjective relation and, more specifically, of the significance of the neutrality of the third-person position within that same relation. Let me begin by referring to a sentence that immediately follows the passage quoted above from “God and Philosophy.” “In this confusion” Levinas states, referring to the possible merging of illeity with the il y a, “substitution for the neighbor gains in dis-interestedness, that is, in nobility” (141). The confusion, then, far from being just a mistake on the part of an inattentive or ignorant subject, is located at the very heart of the ethical experience of substitution, the main core of Levinas’s Otherwise than Being. In other words, this ambiguity is - as Critchley himself suggests - not contingent but crucial to Levinas’s ethics. Yet a question remains: Why would this confusion bestow nobility on the experience of substitution? The key term here is “dis-interestedness.” Leaving aside the obvious Kantian overtones, it is worth concentrating on the direct equivalence that Levinas establishes between essence and interestedness as well as with “the extreme synchronism of war” (“Essence and Disinterestedness” 110-11). As previously mentioned, “[e]ssence as synchrony is togetherness in a place” (Otherwise than Being 152). If this is the case, then it becomes clear that disinterestedness in the experience of substitution has to be understood in terms opposed to both synchrony and togetherness and that, as a result, the relation between self and other, to be ethically meaningful, cannot do without a movement of transcendence that, I would argue, needs to be interpreted also as displacement along the lines of diachrony and distance. In his delineation of Levinas’s (and Blanchot’s, one might add) understanding of the “relation without relation,” Critchley maintains: yond its limits. There is no such thing as ‘atheist transcendence’” (192). This position closely recalls Alain Badiou’s argument against Levinas’s philosophy as a mere “category of pious discourse” (23) in Ethics: “[t]here can be no Other if he is not an immediate phenomenon of the Altogether-Other. There can be no finite devotion to the nonidentical if it is not sustained by the infinite devotion of the principle to that which subsists outside it. There can be no ethics without God the ineffable” (22). As it will be made clear in the remainder of this essay, my argument is deeply indebted to Critchley’s formulation of “atheist transcendence,” although I will arrive at it by following a rather different path. <?page no="153"?> Community and Impersonality in Levinas 153 The relation between myself and the other only appears as a relation of equality, symmetry and reciprocity from a neutral, third-person perspective that stands outside that relation. When I am within the relation, then the other is not my equal and my responsibility towards them is infinite. It is such a non-dialectical model of intersubjectivity that Levinas has in mind, I think, with the notion of the “relation without relation.” (Infinitely Demanding 59-60) What I would like to draw attention to, in this passage, is not so much the formulation of the absolute relation in terms of non-dialecticity, with which I would agree. My main concern here is with the reduction of the third, as the element external to the dyadic relation, to a secondary, merely accessory position that acquires significance only within the realm of politics. Conversely, what I have tried to argue for in this paper is a view of this third element (les tiers of the political dimension, but also the confused and confusing double instance of the il y a and illeity) as operating within the ethical relation itself, as a central instance of interruption and displacement. As anticipated in the introduction, my claim is that the obliquity of my relation to the other is not simply a result of its asymmetry and irreciprocity, but also of its being a relation that is always already opened by and to a third term. A relation that, because of this, never leads to fusion but disrupts the logic of dialogue between the I and the you - a logic that, as it were, presumes their reciprocal presence at the moment and place of enunciation - through the spatial opening of a distance and diachronic displacement. 9 And this opening could be thought, to quote Levinas, as a “third direction of radical unrectitude” (“Meaning and Sense” 61), an absolute obliquity that interrupts the dyadic relation opening up a field that could, I would argue, actually constitute the liminal and precarious space for the event of “a collectivity that is not a communion” (Time and the Other 94). 10 9 As Adriaan T. Peperzak suggests in a footnote to “Meaning and Sense,” tracing the etymological derivation of illeity, the French il or the Latin ille indicate “that one there, at a distance” (117n72). 10 The community of lovers that Blanchot describes in The Unavowable Community resonates closely with what I envisage here. It is only a third space of “empty intimacy,” for instance, that preserves the lovers “from playing the comedy of a ‘fusional or communal’ understanding” (49). Similarly, in his reference to Georges Bataille’s récit Madame Edwarda, the infinite passion of the protagonist can enter in relation with Edwarda as “the absolute that rejects any assimilation” (48) only by means of the interposed and utterly contingent presence of the driver. On the spatial and temporal displacement of the relation, as well as the presence/ absence of the third, see also the opening dialogue of Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation: “They take seats, separated by a table, turned not <?page no="154"?> Viola Marchi 154 3. Ethics in the Absence of God: Levinas and Weil In her essay “On Human Personality,” Simone Weil attacks the philosophical discourse of Personalism - with direct reference to the writings of Jacques Maritain - and the tradition of human rights that Personalism founds and sustains. For Weil, the notion of rights is strictly dependent on power, as any claim or demand must be enforced by some power already in place behind it. Differently stated, in the paradoxical mechanism of human rights, it is exactly the powerless that are excluded from their exercise. Furthermore, according to Weil, positing the person as the inviolable core of human beings will not be able in any way to stop the violence and the atrocities that are committed against the powerless. “What exactly prevents me from putting out the eyes of this man if I am allowed to and I feel like doing it? ” (12), Weil asks. It certainly is not because I would damage or violate his “person”; on the contrary, although bloody and blind, he would still be a person. What would stop my hand - what is “sacred” about this man, according to Weil - is not his person or personality but the impersonal cry, silent and at the same time devastating, that would emerge from him as the result of a contact with injustice through suffering. In a similar vein, for Levinas, the nudity of the face does not have much to do with the concept of the person, but emerges from “the cracks in the mask of the personage,” in the “wrinkled skin” of the Other (“God and Philosophy” 181). In a further move, which is again strikingly similar to that of Weil, the being of the Other “‘without resources’ has to be heard like cries not voiced or thematized, already addressed to God” (“God and Philosophy” 181). Or, as Levinas puts it again in “Transcendence and Height”: “I alone can perceive the ‘secret tears’ of the Other” (23). My infinite responsibility toward the Other, then, does not stem from the face of God - the Altogether-Other - that would shine forth through the face of the personal Other. The absolute transcendence of illeity, as Levinas himself points out, turns into an absence, an echo chamber, the empty space where the call of the Other - also Weil’s impersonal cry - reverberates. toward one another, but opening, around the table that separates them, an interval large enough that another person might consider himself their true interlocutor, the one for whom they would speak if they addressed themselves to him” (xiv). <?page no="155"?> Community and Impersonality in Levinas 155 Conclusion: Beyond Passivity The readings of nausea and insomnia that I have tried to sketch have shown how Levinas’s phenomenological approach breaks with Husserlian intentionality not in the direction of an “inverted intentionality” but in the sense of a more complex interplay of activity and passivity that could possibly open up space for further reflections and a rethinking of agency not necessarily limited to the work of Levinas. What this discussion has tried to highlight is the process through which consciousness becomes an object of perception itself instead of consciousness of something - controlled, watched over, radically passive, and yet inextricably implicated in what is happening to it, thus attesting to the too often concealed constitutive ambiguity that, I believe, lies at heart of any ethical claim, or claim about ethics. The uncanny coincidence between the night of the il y a and the radical transcendence of illeity has, in its turn, offered the possibility to imagine the dyadic relation of Self and Other in a more “communal” sense, as always already disturbed, displaced, and interrupted by a third term. And it is in this moment of interruption and in the space opened by the obliquity of the relation that I have located the possible field of a community without communion or ethos. To conclude, let me briefly come back to the idea of “atheist transcendence.” Whether understood as “the absence, disaster, and pure energy of the night that is beyond the law” (Critchley, Ethics 161) or, in my interpretation, as the third, empty space that opens up between Self and Other and in which the impersonal cry as ethical demand reverberates, it does not need to consign us to the detached (nihilist) passivity of “pious discourses,” as Badiou would have it, nor to a meaningless paralyzing terror. Perhaps, beyond the horror of this starless night, the “dis-aster” that Blanchot (and Critchley) ascribe to the il y a and Levinas’s unfulfillable metaphysical “de-sire,” as the oblique trajectory of longing that takes the Self out of itself and toward the Other, without goal nor destination, might have more “in common” than their simple etymological roots. <?page no="156"?> Viola Marchi 156 References Atterton, Peter and Matthew Calarco. “The Third Wave of Levinas Scholarship.” Radicalizing Levinas. Ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. xi-xviii. Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. New York: Verso, 2012. Bernard-Donals, Michael F. “Difficult Freedom: Levinas, Language, and Politics.” Diacritics 35.3 (2005): 62-77. Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ―――. The Unavowable Community. Trans. Pierre Joris. Barrytown: Station Hill, 1998. Cohen, Richard A., ed. Face to Face with Levinas. New York: State University of New York Press, 1986. Critchley, Simon. Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought. New York: Verso, 2012. ―――. “Il y a: Holding Levinas’s Hand to Blanchot’s Fire.” Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing. Ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill. London: Routledge, 1996. 108-22. ―――. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. New York: Verso, 2012. ―――. Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. New York: Routledge, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Esposito, Roberto. Communitas. Trans. Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge: Polity, 2012. Hughes, Cheryl L. “The Primacy of Ethics: Hobbes and Levinas.” Continental Philosophy Review 31.1 (1998): 79-94. Hutchens, Benjamin, ed. Jean-Luc Nancy: Justice, Legality and World. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Levinas, Emmanuel. On Escape. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. ―――. “Essence and Disinterestedness.” Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. 109-28. ―――. Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. <?page no="157"?> Community and Impersonality in Levinas 157 ―――. “God and Philosophy.” Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. 129-48. ―――. Otherwise than Being. Or, Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008. ―――. “Peace and Proximity.” Emmanuel Levinas. Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. 161-69. ―――. “There Is: Existence without Existents.” The Levinas Reader. Ed. Seán Hand. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 29-36. ―――. Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1994. ―――. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008. ―――. “Transcendence and Height.” Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. 11-32. Loughead, Tanya. “Two Slices of the Same Loaf? Weil and Levinas on the Demand of Social Justice.” Ethical Perspectives: Journal of the European Ethics Network 14.2 (2007): 117-38. Marder, Michael. “Terror of the Ethical: On Levinas’s il y a.” Postmodern Culture 18.2 (2008). Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Sandel, Michael J., Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Sealey, Kris. “The ‘Face’ of the il y a: Levinas and Blanchot on Impersonal Existence.” Continental Philosophy Review 46 (2013): 431- 48. Thomas, Lis. Emmanuel Levinas. Ethics, Justice, and the Human Beyond Being. New York: Routledge, 2004. Walker, Michelle Boulous. “Eating Ethically: Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76 (2002): 295- 320. Walzer, Michael. “The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism.” Political Theory 18.1 (1990): 6-23. Watkins, Christopher. Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Weil, Simone. “Human Personality.” Simone Weil: An Anthology. Ed. Sian Miles. London: Virago Books, 1986. 49-78. <?page no="158"?> Viola Marchi 158 Westphal, Merold. “The Welcome Wound: Emerging from the il y a Otherwise.” Continental Philosophy Review 40 (2007): 211-30. <?page no="159"?> Form, Reform, Reformulation: William Dean Howells’s Annie Kilburn Katharina Metz William Dean Howells’s later critical and fictional work, in which he approaches issues of social reform, is concerned with a distinct formal problem: How can a realist text stay true to the maxim of objective, truthful representation while fulfilling its moral(istic) or reformist objectives? This essay argues that the conflicting aims of the reformist realist novel inspired a necessity of reformulation. Reformulation is conceived of as an endeavor to reconcile competing epistemological claims about human nature and the human good, and as a reinvestigation of sentimentalist literary strategies of reform that Howells considered unproductive for his conception of literary realism. A close reading of a scene from Annie Kilburn (1888) illustrates how the notion of reform is consistently linked to an exposure of a representational crisis of realist literature, and how this problem is tentatively reconciled by strategies of reformulation, among them selfreflective irony. This essay’s focus on reformulation challenges an important strand of criticism which holds that the novel’s overt reformist agenda runs counter to Howells’s own claims about realist aesthetics because it results in occasional instances of (sentimental) didacticism. The agenda of reform influenced, and, arguably, co-constructed the literary movement of realism. I conceive of realist reform as both an ethical and an aesthetic project: The idea of “reform” points toward a desired social, cultural, or political function of the realist text, and, at the same time, “reform” can be understood as a header for a larger project of reinvestigating literary form. William Dean Howells’s oeuvre can be seen as a paramount example of the double-edged issue of reform. The Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 32. Ed. Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser. Tübingen: Narr, 2015. 159-173. <?page no="160"?> Katharina Metz 160 author’s realist program became more concerned with issues of social inequality and the growing conflict between capital and labor in the 1880s and 1890s. Many biographers and critics emphasize Howells’s shock and alarm about the 1886 Haymarket Riots in Chicago as a turning point in his literary and critical work, leading him to write his socalled “economic novels” starting in the late 1880s, among them Annie Kilburn (1888), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), and A Traveller from Altruria and its sequels (1892-1907). 1 Howells’s reformist realism has been discussed in terms of its social function, which is conceived of as “critical realism” (Carter 190), as symbolic enactment of an underlying ideal of a “right shape of society” (Ickstadt 77), as a form whose (desired) function is to raise awareness about deficiencies in society’s endeavors to fulfill its civilizational potential (Fluck, Inszenierte Wirklichkeit 20), or as “novels of purpose” (Claybaugh 7). In terms of literary form, Howells defined the realist novel of reform first and foremost by distinguishing it from the preceding, but still highly popular form of the sentimentalist reform novel. 2 In American sentimentalism of the mid-century, a text’s educative purpose, its “cultural work,” was deemed to be generated by the powers of the faculty of sympathy. 3 Accordingly, many sentimentalist writers employed strategies of sympathetic identification and didacticism in the hope of educating their readers. Howells, in his advancement of the new literary program of realism, was highly critical of the sentimentalists’ reformist literary strategies; he considered didacticism unproductive for his own project of reformist realism. Rather than participating in didactic moralizing, 1 Winfried Fluck explains the markers “economic” and “social” for Howells’s later novels (Inszenierte Wirklichkeit 308). Cady (67-91), Carter (179-85), and Christianson (175) elaborate on the importance of the Haymarket affair for Howells’s later work. 2 More often than not, Howells defines realism by negation, but he is inconsistent in naming his adversaries. Howells’s criticism of the kind of literature identified as “sentimentalism” in this essay bears parallels to his rejection of what he refers to as “romance” or “romanticism” in other instances of his critical writing (see, for example, Selected Literary Criticism 19-21, 124-26). Howells’s often-polemic denunciation is probably not directed at the canonical writers scholars today associate with American romanticism, but rather at the popular trend of sentimentalist writing. This noticeable confusion about generic markers lends support to my argument about a problem of literary form in Howells’s later work. 3 Jane Tompkins’s influential Sensational Designs explores sentimentalism’s political potential for (feminist) interventions by conceiving of the novel as “cultural work.” A large body of criticism has since then stressed the importance of Scottish moral sense philosophy and the concept of “sympathy” for the (desired) reformist and political function of sentimentalist novels. See, for example, Hendler. <?page no="161"?> Form, Reform, Reformulation 161 Howells and others claimed that the reformist function of their novels should be activated through a truthful representation of society. The dictum of “truthful representation” lies at heart of Howells’s conception of the form of the realist novel as one of aesthetic reform. It is framed by a discursive distinction that became increasingly more prominent for literary criticism in the advance of Anglo-American realism at the end of the nineteenth century, namely that between “realism” and “idealism.” In an essay from 1887, John Addington Symonds argues that the rising influence of the social sciences and evolutionary philosophy at the end of the century resulted in an increasingly political urgency of the conflict between a positivist notion of the “real,” defined as “the presentation of natural objects as the artist sees them, as he thinks they are” and as an “attempt to imitate” according to “senses” (123), and an interpretivist notion of the “ideal,” defined as “the presentation of natural objects as the artist fain would see them, as he thinks they strive to be” and as an “attempt to imitate” according to “interpretation” (123). 4 Symonds, however, claims this distinction to be unproductive, even false and “illogical” (125) for literary criticism and consequently argues for an interdependent relationship between realism and idealism. The realism/ idealism debate assessed by Symonds had significance for Howells’s conception of American realism. In one of his columns for Harper’s Magazine, the Editor’s Study from December 1887, Howells contributes to Symonds’s distinction (74) with his famous example of the grasshopper. Howells differentiates an “ideal” grasshopper, formed after pre-conceived notions of what is beautiful and what is culturally perceived as typical or artful, from a “real” grasshopper, which is linked to Howells’s frequent evocations of “commonness” and “truthfulness” (74). While the representation of an “ideal” grasshopper, endowed further with the attributes “heroic,” “impassioned,” “adventureful,” and “good old romantic” (74), relates to an idea of uncritically taking into account premises about what literature is supposed to be, the representation of a “real” grasshopper is described as “simple, honest, and natural” (74), characterized by “life-likeness” (73), a qualification that gestures toward immediacy and objectivity. Howells thus conceptualizes his literary program of “truthfulness” as contingent upon the distinction between the real and the ideal. This distinction, though, 4 The essay “Realism and Idealism” first appeared in The Fortnightly Review and was republished in a separate essay collection in 1890. I quote from this later publication. For further information on the realism/ idealism divide and its significance for early definitions of literary realism, see also Watt (10). <?page no="162"?> Katharina Metz 162 is profoundly complicated by the formal problem that concerns this essay: how can a “real” grasshopper be enlisted in the service of reform? In the Editor’s Study from December 1888, which deals with the notion of “Christmas Literature,” Howells addresses the problematic relationship between reform and realism more explicitly. He begins his column with an attack on the recurring (and hypocritical) urgency in the practice of almsgiving around Christmas time. This gives way to the main target of Howells’s criticism, namely that kind of literature which prides itself on “celebrating the bestowal of turkeys upon the turkeyless” (103). Howells’s sarcasm continues in the first part of his column, in which he condemns the sentimental literature of yore for its failure to address the social and political realities of the times. Howells proceeds to endorse a “new Christmas literature,” one that is spearheaded by Tolstoy and “appeals to no sentimental impulse, but confronts its readers with themselves” (104). 5 He continues, “Turkey to the turkeyless [. . .] - yes, these are well, and very well; but ineffably better it is to take thought somehow in our social, our political system” (104). On the one hand, Howells upholds his belief in the transformative power of “taking thought,” an expression he repeats at the end of the column, where he proposes to “take thought for [society’s] healing” (106) and connects the truthful representation of reality to the revelation of the social wrongs of “the system” (104). However, Howells’s choice to entitle his discussion of ethics in literature “Christmas Literature” introduces an additional issue, one that is not immediately compatible with the realist aim of truthful representation, of a rational way of conceiving of and representing society: Howells claims Christ himself to be “the forgotten factor” (104) in literature’s dealing with reform. The teachings of the New Testament and Christ, presented as the epitome of self-sacrifice, are elevated to an exemplary, ideal status in Howells’s notion of reformist literature. To rationally engage with the socio-economic reality is thus not Howells’s only concern. Rather, he advocates a moralization, a Christianization of literature (105). The sacrificial, ideal figure of Christ is thus conceived as a programmatic standard for art itself. 6 5 On Tolstoy’s influence on Howells’s later work, see Cady (7-10) and Daugherty (22- 25). 6 Howells negotiates his indebtedness to the Social Gospel, a reform movement within some American churches at the end of the nineteenth century. In the task of reformulating Protestant doctrine and the project of reorientation towards issues of social justice, parts of the movement also embraced socialist thought (and were, accordingly, referred <?page no="163"?> Form, Reform, Reformulation 163 The problematic relationship of these two maxims - to “take thought” and to take Christ as an example - make up the main formal tension that is at stake in Howells’s project of reformist realism. The conflicting aims of the reformist realist novel inspire the necessity to reformulate various seemingly incommensurable paradigms - the real and the ideal, the rational and the religious, the realist agenda of truthful representation and the sentimentalist interest in educating and influencing the reader. In my conceptualization of reformulation, I draw on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), in which he understands processes of “translation” or “reformulation” as semantic and conceptual changes accompanying and prefiguring the development of a crisis preceding a scientific revolution (55). Accordingly, I use the term “reformulation” in order to foreground a desired reconciliation or an endeavor of adjusting one paradigm to another, of a combination or inclusion of two paradigms that are perceived as incommensurable. Applied to Howells’s formal problem, this means: The realist novel negotiates its interest in reform by reconciling the desire to ameliorate society and the rejection of existing models of (sentimental) literature that explicitly announce their reformist function. The realist novel of reform thus embodies various endeavors to reconcile competing paradigms. My following reading of a scene in Howells’s Annie Kilburn (1888) further explains and develops the realist novel’s thematic and formal concern with the three key concepts that guide the present essay: form, reform, and reformulation. Annie Kilburn, not coincidentally published in the same year as Howells’s Christmas column, is an exemplary text that deals with the problem of reformist realism introduced above. Annie, the protagonist of Howells’s novel, is already on the first page of the novel described as a character with altruistic inclinations that lack both direction and an object after the death of her care-dependent father. Her “habit of giving herself” (643) motivates Annie, who has spent most of her adult life in Rome, to return to her hometown in Massachusetts with “high intentions” (646) to “do some good” (645). The novel’s plot is driven by Annie’s various endeavors to translate her altruistic intentions into to as “Christian Socialism”). See, for example, Ahlstrom (785-804) and Vidich and Stanford (53). The highly popular genre of the Social Gospel novel, classified either as propagandist literature designed to popularize the teachings of the movement (Hopkins 140), or as an accompaniment of literary realism (Jackson 14), shared many formal features with sentimentalism. It is thus possible that Howells’s criticism in the Christmas column is also directed at the emerging literary form of the Social Gospel novel. <?page no="164"?> Katharina Metz 164 action. However, most of Annie’s charitable actions remain ineffective due to their inapplicability to the seemingly impenetrable complexities of her recently industrialized and modernized New England hometown. This is precisely the problem that lies at heart of the novel’s thematic concern: the practical, that is, individual, institutional, and organizational application of good intentions in light of the ongoing radical transformation of American society at the end of the nineteenth century. Annie’s conflict negotiates the necessity of adaptating sentimentalist and religious conceptions of “doing good” to a changed social world: She had always regarded her soul as the battlefield of two opposite principles, the good and the bad, the high and the low. God made her, she thought [. . .]; but she would not have said that He made the evil in her. Yet her belief did not admit the existence of Creative Evil; and so she said to herself that she herself was that evil, and she must struggle against herself; she must question whatever she strongly wished because she strongly wished it. It was not logical; she did not push her postulates to their obvious conclusions; and there was apt to be the same kind of break between her conclusions and her actions as between her reasons and her conclusions. She acted impulsively, and from a force which she could not analyse. She indulged reveries so vivid that they seemed to weaken and exhaust her for the grapple with realities; the recollection of them abashed her in the presence of facts. (647) In the first half of the quote, the narrator presents to us Annie’s reflections about her divided soul, about the good and the bad in her. Annie is certain that her goodness is God-given, and, as a good Protestant would, she excludes the possibility of “Creative Evil,” that is, an independent Satanic power or entity, concluding that all evil must originate from within herself, and that this evil must be contained. On the one hand, Annie tries to make sense of her complex moral character, on the other hand, she internalizes religious commandments (“she must struggle,” “she must question”) as a consequence of her realization that “she herself was that evil.” In this quote, Annie’s moral and religious questions are accompanied by a sense of self-disciplining: Her wish to be good is interestingly and somewhat paradoxically paralleled with the self-imposed task of a “struggle” against her “wishes.” In a curious manner, Annie’s religious considerations are thus rationalized. <?page no="165"?> Form, Reform, Reformulation 165 Interestingly, the religiously motivated division between good and evil presented in this quote is mingled with a theory of human nature that stems not from a religious paradigm, but from a scientific, evolutionary one: Annie conceives of her soul as a “battlefield of two opposite principles.” The narrator’s reference to the “battlefield” and to the “struggle” Annie takes on, a struggle that is further said to be directed against an internal “force” that makes her act “impulsively,” frames her questions by way of a rhetoric that is clearly influenced by early psychological and evolutionary studies. 7 As the narrator tells us, Annie’s attempt to “logic[ally]” engage in an “analysis” of her impulses fails. But the very fact that the narrator deems a positivist approach toward understanding one’s self and one’s religion important hints at the notion that Annie’s reflections about her soul-as-battlefield are likewise directed by “opposite principles,” namely by two different epistemological paradigms. Strikingly, however, these two paradigms, the religious and the scientific, usually conceived of as dichotomous, or in Kuhnian terms, incommensurable, are presented to be only partially at odds with one another. In fact, the problem of how to reconcile religious belief with evolutionary logic and positivist epistemology is one of the main themes of the novel: In various other instances in the novel, the theme of evolution, and more importantly, the influence of “Science” on religion and Christian reform is approached, mainly via the figure of Reverend Peck, who functions as a representative of the Social Gospel movement. On the level of language, one could thus conclude, the seemingly incommensurable paradigms are, tentatively, reconciled by the mingling and mixing of registers. The quote first and foremost embodies a wish for reconciliation and posits a demand for articulating an idea of adjustment. It is exactly the curious reformulation of religious truths and ethics in a scientific rhetoric that lies at the core of the novel’s negotiation of how to do good and, in this instance especially, how to be good. 7 Among many other representatives of the early social sciences, Howells references William James’s Principles of Psychology (1870) and John Fiske’s studies on Darwinian theory in his critical writings (see, for example, Selected Literary Criticism 16-18, 174-77). For Howells’s use of psychological and evolutionary rhetoric, see Alkana (82-102). My argument about Annie Kilburn’s negotiation of different epistemological orders could be complemented by a detailed discussion of the various strands of late nineteenth-century pragmatism. Two studies about pragmatism’s influence on American literary realism should be mentioned here: Sämi Ludwig reads Howells and other realist authors through the lens of a pragmatic “cognitive paradigm”; Susanne Rohr approaches literary realism with a theory of pragmatist semiotics informed by Charles Sanders Peirce’s writings. <?page no="166"?> Katharina Metz 166 Moreover, the question of how to do good, of the possibilities and limits of reform, is extended from the level of representation to a selfreflective discussion of literary form: it addresses the realism/ idealism debate introduced above, that is, the problem of a reconciliation of aesthetic demands of “the real” with formulations of an ethical “ideal” of altruism. Annie’s reflections about her wish to be good, so the narrator informs us, prompt her to “reveries so vivid that they seemed to weaken and exhaust her for the grapple with realities.” The use of the plural in this instance is telling, hinting at once at the narrator’s understanding of a multiplicity and heterogeneity of human experience of reality, and of the repeatability and plurality of acts of imagination that are presented as unavoidable distractions. Howells’s description of Annie’s character thus serves to expose a conflict between the real and the ideal, elucidated by the narrator as “a kind of break” between “conclusions and [. . .] actions” and “reasons and [. . .] conclusions,” respectively, that is, between the “facts” of reality, and the moral principles and ideas by which reality is ideally shaped and framed. This conflict is not merely a moral one. In fact, it can be read as a selfreflective commentary on realist literary form: do only idealists engage in moral(istic) reflection, in “vivid reveries”? Does an idealist or moral(istic) agenda have an impact, does it “weaken and exhaust” the realist form? How can a novelist eager to be both realist and reformist abstain from “vivid reveries” and thus be victorious over the “grapple” with reality? Annie Kilburn reflects on its own realist form, reflects on the conflict between the real and the ideal, an aesthetic conflict that is, in turn, framed and inspired by a desire to reformulate sentimental and religious notions of reform. 8 The problem of a practical application of Annie’s good intentions directs the novel’s plot. Episodically, the reader learns about Annie’s failures, which are sometimes caused by her naivety, but are, more often, a consequence of the fact that Annie’s moral ideals no longer correspond to the reality of her recently industrialized hometown. As a visiting outsider who returns to a drastically changed social environment, Annie is a quasi-utopian traveler, and the descriptions of her hometown resemble a case study. 9 This is not only implied in the 8 In the novel, the question of reform is also reflected in discussions about appropriate terminology: both the concept of “philanthropy” (736) and the model of sentimental sympathy (684) are discarded. Here, too, the problem about how to frame and to phrase moral principles is extended to self-reflective discussions of literary form. 9 An intertextual reference to the figure of the philanthropist Hollingsworth of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (686) suggests that Howells borrows from the <?page no="167"?> Form, Reform, Reformulation 167 town’s telling name - “Hatboro” is a nickname derived from the town’s straw hat industry that has replaced its agrarian economy - but it can also be seen in the fact that most other characters in the novel function as representatives of different contemporary approaches toward social reform: Annie meets and consults with a group of charity ladies, whose attempts at reform are revealed as exclusionary and hypocritical. Annie is most strongly influenced by Reverend Peck, who functions as a representative for a more radical, Christian-socialist approach towards the problem of reform, but he experiences an untimely and symbolical death at the end of the novel. Finally, Annie’s love interest, Dr. Morrell, stands for a rational, “realistic” approach towards social reform, but his endeavors, too, turn out to be mostly futile. The novel thus emphasizes not a psychological portrayal of Annie’s altruistic character but rather the problem of social injustice and the devastating effects of modernization and industrialization on a small American town. One could therefore read Annie Kilburn as an allegory on the problem of reform, or at least as a text whose primary interest lies in conveying a moral message. In fact, its perceived plotlessness, as well as its episodic and schematic illustration of the problem of social injustice partially explains why Annie Kilburn has, in much of the literature available on the novel, been discussed as a text whose reformist agenda is in conflict with the main formal characteristics presented in Howells’s own conception of realist aesthetics, most importantly with his rejection of didacticism. Edwin H. Cady detects a “new economy of movement and directness of development” (83) in the novel’s form that he later describes as “forceful” (88). In Inszenierte Wirklichkeit, Fluck reads the novel as exhibiting a somewhat “purposeful” or “controlled” narrative (316; my translation) and this, in turn, as a sign for Howells having partially sacrificed his already-established realist model of communicative interaction for a conception of literature as exemplary, symbolic space of action. Alan Trachtenberg claims to perceive a forced “symmetry of form” (201) in Howells’s reformist writing; he reads his “morally pleasing” endings as an indicator for the author’s resort to the form of the romance (192). The fact that Annie Kilburn has been placed within the canon of the Social Gospel novel (Suderman 50), and thus has been received as an example of sentimentalist fiction, provides further utopian form. It can also be read as an ironic critique not only of reformist philanthropy, but also of the utopian form itself, since Hawthorne’s novel, too, bears elements of satire and parody concerning the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of “reform.” <?page no="168"?> Katharina Metz 168 support for reading the novel not only as an exhibition of the problem of realist reform, but also as a testament to its insolubleness. A second look at the quote seems to substantiate such a reading: In the first half, the narrator presents Annie’s private reflections. The insight into Annie’s consciousness is made explicit by inquits like “she thought” and “she said to herself.” Annie’s experience is here directly and immediately quoted. However, this mediation is interrupted: In the second part of the quote, the narrator’s voice becomes more and more audible, starting with his evaluative comment “It was not logical” and continuing the commentary until the end of the quote. What function does this shift to a more authorial narrative mode perform? If we follow narratologist Dorrit Cohn’s insights, authorial narration can provide the reader with a more “panoramic view” (Transparent Minds 34) of a character’s inner self; it shows a tendency toward “typifying,” and finally, to “explicit, didactic evaluation” (23). If one were to read the shift in narration - which is not an isolated case but rather a strategy that is paradigmatic for the narrative style exhibited in the novel as a whole - as a sign of the narrator’s didacticism, then this would indeed provide grounds for a reading of the novel as a mere allegory on the issue of social reform. With such an interpretation of the novel’s narrative structure, Annie Kilburn would not stand the test of Howells’s formal problem: moral meaning would trump form. But to use narratological insights in order to jump to conclusions about the politics of a novel is a questionable endeavor. The rather heated scholarly debate between Cohn and a group of literary critics around Mark Seltzer, published in a volume of New Literary History in 1995, emphasizes this problem. Seltzer’s provocative Henry James and the Art of Power can serve, due to the argument’s tenacity in ensuing criticism on realism, as an example of a larger trend of revisionist literary criticism taking shape in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. 10 In his book, Seltzer examines the idea of a “politics of the novel” in Henry James’s work, claiming that inscriptions of power are not only present in political claims represented in James’s texts but also, and even more influentially so, in the very techniques of realist representation themselves. In an analysis highly influenced by Foucault, Seltzer interprets formal characteristics of the realist novel, for example that of omniscient narration, as constitutive of a politics of surveillance and control: “The realists share, with other colonizers of the 10 Comprehensive criticism of Seltzer’s reading is provided, for example, by Fluck, “Radical Aesthetics” and Kaplan. <?page no="169"?> Form, Reform, Reformulation 169 urban scene, a passion to see and document ‘things as they are,’ and this passion takes the form of a fantasy of surveillance” (52). Omniscient narration thus exerts power and discipline in Seltzer’s reading of James’s novels. Cohn criticizes this approach harshly in her essay “Optics and Power in the Novel,” which was republished as the last chapter of her The Distinction of Fiction (1999). Cohn argues that Seltzer and related “ideologically-oriented” critics misuse and misunderstand basic insights of fictional form and narrative poetics (173). To combine the Foucauldian reading of the panopticon, which underlies Seltzer’s theory, with claims about the narrator’s position is, as Cohn rightfully observes, flawed: Power “can only exist between entities that coexist, ontological equals that share the same space and the same time” (171), and authors, narrators, characters, and readers simply and decisively do not exist on the same ontological plane - after all, the narrator is the product of the author’s own imagination, is part of the fictional universe. Finally, Cohn extends these important observations to a reinvestigation of the history of literary criticism on the genre of the realist novel. The gradual shift from authorial narration to figural narration, enabled by the introduction of the device of free indirect style at the end of the nineteenth century, has been foundational for tracing the development of the realist novel in literary history. As Cohn claims, this shift has been accompanied by corresponding interpretations: while authorial narration is usually said to be “designed to propagate clear and absolute values, beliefs authoritatively held and didactically targeted” (177) and is thus often read as “conservative,” the latter type has been read as illustrating “a liberal stance that believes in normative flexibility and allows for multiple and ambiguous meaning” (177). This “mode-meaning correspondence” is also clearly at work in Seltzer’s study. However, as Cohn concludes, it is important to complicate this distinction. If one recalls that narrators themselves embody a fictional voice, one must also concede an inherent ambiguity to the narrator’s presumed reliability and normative attitude. Cohn therefore suggests a “potential reversal of the mode-meaning correspondence” in the final paragraph of her book (180). Howells’s reformist novels certainly engage to a large degree with a mode of authorial narration, with what Cohn identifies as the historically older type. In Annie Kilburn, the rare moments of intro-, of figural narration, are frequently interrupted, evaluated, and guided by the narrator’s commenting voice, which explains why the novel has been subject to accusations of didacticism in much of the literature available <?page no="170"?> Katharina Metz 170 on the text. However, the “mode-meaning correspondence” can be complicated, and Howells’s presumably moralizing narrative strategies can be reinvestigated by a last look at the quote that is at the center of this essay. Interestingly, the above-discussed shift in narrative voice, the break with the introspective mode observed in the second half of the quote, is, in a final manoeuver, literally spelled out by the narrator. The quote continues: With all this, it must not be supposed that [Annie] was morbidly introspective. Her life had been apparently a life of cheerful acquiescence in worldly conditions; it had been, in some measure, a life of fashion, or at least of society. (647-48) The reassurance about Annie’s lack of “morbid introspection” must be read as ironic. On the level of content, the reference to Annie’s “cheerful acquiescence in worldly conditions,” and the evocation of a “fashionable” society recalls Howells’s charges against the shallowness of charity put forward in his Christmas column. It thus ironically calls into question the genuineness of Annie’s good intentions, and the validity of her ensuing reformist endeavors - and therefore, arguably, the probability of successful social reform in general. How, then, should a reader trust in the representation of the narrator’s moral authority if their presumed normative stances are repeatedly called into question? Howells’s ironic distancing from the reformist objectives of his novel makes it difficult to sustain an accusation of moralizing didacticism, or a “conservative” reading of the novel. More importantly still, the narrator’s reference to “introspection” is, of course, also a self-reflective comment on the very narrative mode that precedes the quote. The introspective glance into Annie’s consciousness has, due to the shift toward authorial narration, already been proven unstable, and is now ultimately and irreversibly broken by the evaluative comment of the narrator in the continuation of the quote. If one takes into account that the form of the nineteenth-century realist novel is often said to be dedicated to the representation of individual experience by engaging in a mode of introspection (Watt 13), the reference to Annie’s lack of “morbid introspection” is an ironic stance on a narrative strategy characteristic for a literature that is received as realist. Distancing irony, finally, is yet another strategy in an ongoing process of reformulation. 11 The novel’s ambiguous ending, too, can be 11 Sarah B. Daugherty reads the irony in Annie Kilburn to an opposite effect, namely as a strategy that undermines both the question of reform and “the central tenets of <?page no="171"?> Form, Reform, Reformulation 171 read in favor of Howells’s interest in pointing out both the possibilities and the limitations of reform: Annie establishes a “Social Union” which, far from being a “brilliant success [. . .] is still not a failure; and the promise of its future is in the fact that it continues to have a present” (863; my emphasis). In these last paragraphs of the novel, the narration switches into the present tense, thus emphasizing, again both on the level of content and form, the persistent present-ness of the problem of realist reform and the perpetual continuation of the problem of reformulation. This is further emphasized by yet another quote that can be read as responding to the debate of the real and the ideal, as a selfreflective comment on realist literary form: “[Annie] is really of use, for its [the Social Union’s] working is by no means ideal” (862; my emphasis). In the last paragraphs of the novel, the ironic evocation of the conflict between the real and the ideal, the aesthetic demands of realist form, and the ethical dimension of social reform in the late nineteenth century, is reformulated, and it is crucially linked to an opening up of literary form. Howells’s literary criticism and fictional work of the 1880s and 1890s implicitly and explicitly revolves around the formal problem of realist reform. Howells points out, and tentatively endeavors to resolve, competing epistemological claims about the human condition, as put forward by religion, by sentimentalist ethics, and by new scientific findings of psychology and sociology. The negotiation of the problem of reform, however, extends beyond the level of content. In Annie Kilburn, Howells continuously links the idea of (failed) reform to an exposure of a representational crisis of realist literary form. This exposure is often enabled by ironic self-reflection, a mode that would also figure heavily in his next novel A Hazard of New Fortunes and in his Altrurian Romances. In Howells’s reformist literary work, reformulation is enabled by the mixing and mingling of scientific and religious rhetoric, by a repeated attempt to reconcile diverging interpretations of human nature and the human good, and, finally, by self-reflective ironic statements not only about the question of reform, but also, and importantly so, about a mode of representation that calls itself “realist.” Reformulation can thus be seen as an endeavor to reconcile, or, at the very least, a way of negotiating the formal problem of reformist realism. Howells’s realism” (25). Daugherty, however, does not consider Howells’s self-reflective discussions of the process of alleged realist narration, which I read as an endeavor to point out and reconcile the formal problem of reformist realism. <?page no="172"?> Katharina Metz 172 References Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. Alkana, Joseph. The Social Self: Hawthorne, Howells, William James, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Cady, Edwin H. The Realist at War: The Mature Years 1885-1920 of William Dean Howells. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1958. Carter, Everett. Howells and the Age of Realism. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1950. Christianson, Frank. Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot, and Howells. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Claybaugh, Amanda. The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. ―――. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Daugherty, Sarah B. “Howells, Tolstoy, and the Limits of Realism: The Case of Annie Kilburn.” American Literary Realism 19.1 (1986): 21-41. Fluck, Winfried. Inszenierte Wirklichkeit: Der amerikanische Realismus, 1865- 1900. Munich: Fink, 1992. ―――. “Radical Aesthetics.” REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 10 (1994): 31-47. Hendler, Glenn. Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Hopkins, Charles Howard. The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism 1865-1915. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940. Howells, William Dean. Novels 1886-1888: The Minister’s Charge, April Hopes, Annie Kilburn. New York: Library of America, 1989. ―――. Selected Literary Criticism. Volume II: 1886-1897. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Ickstadt, Heinz. “Concepts of Society and the Practice of Fiction: Symbolic Responses to the Experience of Change in Late- Nineteenth Century America.” Impressions of a Gilded Age. Eds. Marc Chenétier and Rob Kroes. Amsterdam: Amerika Institut, 1983. 77- 95. <?page no="173"?> Form, Reform, Reformulation 173 Jackson, Gregory S. The Word and its Witness: The Spiritualization of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Ludwig, Sämi. Pragmatist Realism: The Cognitive Paradigm in American Realist Texts. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Rohr, Susanne. Die Wahrheit der Täuschung: Wirklichkeitskonstitution im amerikanischen Roman 1889-1989. Munich: Fink, 2004. Seltzer, Mark. Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Suderman, Elmer F. “The Social Gospel Novelists’ Criticism of American Society.” Midcontinent American Studies Journal 7 (1966): 45- 60. Symonds, John Addington. “Realism and Idealism.” Essays: Speculative and Suggestive. 3rd ed. London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1907. 108-27. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. Vidich, Arthur J. and Stanford M. Lyman. American Sociology: Worldly Rejections of Religion and Their Directions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. <?page no="175"?> The Moral of Landscape: John Ruskin and John Muir in the Swiss Alps Patrick Vincent This essay reads American writer and conservationist John Muir’s unpublished letters and journal produced during his 1893 tour of the Swiss Alps in dialogue with British writer and social critic John Ruskin’s better-known views on Switzerland in Modern Painters and elsewhere. It places their writings within the context of four nineteenth-century transatlantic polemics, all of which involve Switzerland and consider landscape aesthetically but also morally. The first of these was the exceptionalist argument, popular among Transcendentalists, which claimed that American nature was superior to its European counterpart. The second controversy revolved around the movement of glaciers, engaging John Tyndall, James Forbes, Josiah Whitney, Muir, and Ruskin. In the 1860s, Ruskin spearheaded the third dispute in response to Alpine tourism. The fourth debate emerged in Muir’s California in tandem with attempts to preserve Yosemite. It surrounded the notion of wilderness and is still alive today. Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of “cultural landscape” helps me understand how Muir’s visits to the Swiss Alps enabled him to move beyond the idea of pristine wilderness and begin to consider tourism an integral part of nature stewardship. This distinguishes him from Ruskin, for whom the Alps symbolized the civilizational transformation necessary to save man and nature. The celebrated American writer and conservationist John Muir (1838- 1914) visited Switzerland and the Alps between 10 and 27 August 1893. His biographers have written practically nothing on this tour, nor have the eight letters and the twenty-eight-page travel journal that Muir produced in Switzerland, masterfully digitalized as part of the online John Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 32. Ed. Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser. Tübingen: Narr, 2015. 175-193. <?page no="176"?> Patrick Vincent 176 Muir Papers held at the University of the Pacific, received any attention. 1 This essay examines these unpublished writings in dialogue with the work of John Ruskin and in conjunction with four nineteenthcentury transatlantic polemics, all of which involve Switzerland and consider landscape aesthetically but also morally. The first of these polemics was the exceptionalist argument, popular among Transcendentalists including Thomas Cole and Ralph Waldo Emerson, which claimed the superiority of American over European nature. The second controversy concerned the movement of glaciers, pitting John Tyndall and James Forbes, but also Muir, Ruskin, and Josiah Whitney. It was Ruskin who spearheaded the third dispute in the 1860s in response to tourism’s impact on the Alps. The fourth, finally, was the debate on wilderness, which originated in Muir’s home state of California in response to the preservation of Yosemite and which remains a sensitive policy issue touching on moral and ethical principles. 2 Borrowing Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of “cultural landscape” from his Aesthetic Theory, I show how the Swiss Alps helped Muir move beyond the idea of wilderness as pristine and promote tourism as a way to encourage nature stewardship, whereas for Ruskin they came to symbolize the civilizational transformation necessary in order to save man and nature. Nineteenth-century commentators on natural landscape often combined the Christian tradition of moralized landscape, which viewed nature as a divine second book open to typological interpretation, with Romantic aesthetic theory, enabling them to draw analogies between the experience of nature and moral perception. In paradigmatic Romantic poems such as William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (1798) or The Prelude (1805, 1850), love of nature famously leads to love of mankind, whereas the age’s greatest authority on landscape aesthetics, John Ruskin, influentially argued in “The Moral of Landscape” (1856) that love of nature or “pure landscape instinct” is an “invariable sign of goodness of heart and justness of moral perception,” in other words of the viewer’s own moral compass (5: 376). Kantian aesthetic judgement had formalized Rousseau’s association between sensibility and morality by suggesting that correct landscape appreciation or taste, which implies mastering the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the beautiful, con- 1 Turner devotes half a line to the Swiss trip (296), Miller one line (160), and Worster three, managing to wrongly place Louis Agassiz’s hometown in Chamonix, and Chamonix erroneously in the Rhone valley (337). 2 See Callicott and Nelson (1998, 2008). <?page no="177"?> The Moral of Landscape 177 tributes to our moral feeling. 3 This moralizing of landscape could in turn lead to the intuitive or explicit formulation of an environmental ethic. In an excellent essay on Ruskin and ecology, for instance, Brian J. Day shows how the writer interprets landscape as a “moral index” that reflects human moral activity, reminding the viewing subject of his own moral feelings but also of the Biblical injunction to act as the steward of God’s creation (919). Because they were imagined as signs of moral feeling, natural beauty and sublimity also became closely linked with nascent ideologies of nationalism, serving as indices of a nation’s moral exceptionalism. As a result, American and European landscapes were frequently compared, a stock analogy symptomatic of the young republic’s anxiety toward the Old World. The plot of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), an early American novel often interpreted as an allegory on the fragility of the republic, is triggered for instance by a dispute on the comparative merits of an American versus a Swiss waterfall (34). In William Cullen Bryant’s sonnet “To Cole, An American Painter, Departing for Europe” (1829), the poet instructs his friend, incidentally of British origin, to gaze on but not be seduced by Europe’s “fair scenes,” which even high up in the Alps show “the trace of men, / Paths, homes, graves, ruins” (ll. 10- 12). The coda then urges him to “Keep the earlier, wilder image” of his native land “bright” (l. 14), in other words to remember America’s pristine landscapes, free of all historical associations and hence more expressive of the young nation’s glory, virtue, and freedom. Six years later, Thomas Cole in turn published his “Essay on American Scenery,” in which he too celebrated the moral possibilities of America’s landscapes without lessening the value of those he discovered in Italy. Disputing the commonplace criticism that the New World is not picturesque, the painter identifies wildness as the distinctive attribute of American nature, imparting to the mountains, lakes, waterfalls, and forests of New England their outstanding character (4-10). Cole concludes that America’s “want of associations” should be interpreted not as a defect but on the contrary as an invitation to imagine the nation’s glory in the future tense (12), a transcendental solution to the problem of Europe’s histori- 3 I am grateful to my anonymous reviewer and to the volume’s co-editor, Philipp Schweighauser, for their helpful suggestions regarding the relationship between moralized landscape, aesthetic theory, and ethics. For the relation between aesthetics and moral feeling, see, for example, §29 and §59 in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. <?page no="178"?> Patrick Vincent 178 cal precedence that echoes Emerson’s Nature, also published in 1836. 4 In “Walking” (1862), finally, Henry David Thoreau compares a panorama of the Rhine with one of the Mississippi in order to foreground his famous declaration that “in Wildness is the preservation of the World” (238-39). Despite the efforts of Cole, Emerson, and Thoreau, Americans at mid-century were still not convinced of the comparative advantages of their wild scenery, handicapped by what James Fenimore Cooper calls its “greater want of finish” (52). American taste was still modeled on a “transatlantic standard” (Pomeroy 32) derived from the discourses of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque and marketed toward genteel Eastern audiences (Cohen 244). Furthermore, in “The Moral of Landscape,” Ruskin had pronounced that only nature filled with historical and cultural associations, or what Adorno later named “the cultural landscape” (64), could give rise to moral feeling, and hence could “hardly be felt in America” (5: 298-9). 5 Marked by these European prejudices, Cooper compares American and European landscapes in a posthumously published essay, noting that “any well-delineated view of a high-class Swiss scene, must at once convince even the most provincial mind among us that nothing of the sort is to be found in America, east of the Rocky Mountains” (64). In other words, while landscape aesthetics made it possible for Americans to begin appreciating their natural scenery and to compare it with that overseas, it also gave Europe an unfair advantage, drawing tourists to seek out “the image of the old world” in the new (Pomeroy 33), or better yet, to make the obligatory Grand Tour to the Alps. In The Yosemite Book, published in 1868, Josiah Whitney thus estimates that ten times more Californians had travelled 4 The passage in Cole is very similar to Emerson’s metaphor of the transparent eyeball: “Seated on a pleasant knoll, look down into the pleasant valley [. . .]. And in looking into the yet uncultivated scene, the mind’s eye may see far into futurity [. . .] poets yet unborn will sanctify the soil” (12). James Fenimore Cooper also concludes his essay on a transcendental note: “To conclude, we concede to Europe much of the noblest scenery, in its Alps, Pyrenees, and Apennines; in its objects of art, as a matter of course; in all those effects that depend on time and association [. . .]; while we claim for America the freshness of a most promising youth, and a species of natural radiance that carries the mind with reverence to the source of all that is glorious around us” (69). 5 Adorno defines the “cultural landscape” as an “artifacticious domain” that arose in the nineteenth century in between nature and art, where nature is not perceived as inviolable, and in which historical traces such as ruins contribute to the perception of beauty (64-65). <?page no="179"?> The Moral of Landscape 179 for pleasure to Switzerland than in their own mountains (78; see Worster 185). 6 The Swiss Alps were of course one of the nineteenth-century benchmarks by which to measure one’s taste for scenery. Switzerland, Whitney writes, is “the very focus of pleasure travel for the civilized world,” making the comparison of the Swiss and Californian scenery “not easy” (78-79). The comparison was nevertheless used extremely frequently as a means to give American landscape its lettres de noblesse. Cole, for example, calls New Hampshire’s White Mountains the “Switzerland of the United States” (6), an analogy transferred to the Colorado Rockies, even to Alaska (Pomeroy 33-34). Like Cooper, Whitney felt that the Sierra Nevada were not as picturesque as the Alps, and hence “will not invite as frequent visits, or as long delay among its hidden recesses,” yet still urged “those who wish to see nature in all her variety of mountain gloom and mountain glory” (79) to come to Yosemite. In the same chapter, he rejects the “absurd theory” that glaciers could have shaped the Valley: “Nothing more unlike the real work of ice, as exhibited in the Alps, could be found” (79). At the same time that Whitney was writing his guide, a thirty-year old Scottish-born inventor and machinist named John Muir was spending his first summer in the Sierra, tending sheep, then operating a sawmill. Yosemite became his base for solitary excursions into the “high temples” (Nature Writings 842) of the backcountry where he explored at length “the hidden recesses” (Whitney 79) that Whitney felt did not deserve attention, and where he quickly acquired his legendary sobriquet of “John o’ the Mountains.” In 1871 Muir toured the Valley with Emerson, trying to make him passionately feel the divine sublimity of the place, but also criticizing tourists as “barbarous” (qtd. in Worster 211). Later that year, he discovered a living glacier in the Sierra and published his first article, “Yosemite Glaciers.” This essay, influenced by Swiss- American geologist Louis Agassiz’s ice-age theory, the uniformitarian geology of Charles Lyell, and physicist John Tyndall’s work on Swiss glaciers, rejects the catastrophist hypothesis advanced by Whitney, 6 Landscape comparison in America was not simply an ideological expression of Manifest Destiny. It was also a practical way of attracting Eastern tourists to the Golden West. The Romantic interest in sublime scenery, combined with the so-called closing of the American frontier, led to the setting aside of Yosemite in 1864 as the first wildland park (Cronon 72). Whitney, a Harvard professor who was serving as California’s state geologist, published his guide to attract these tourists to the newly protected valley, calling “the higher region of the Sierra Nevada, the Alps of California” (78). <?page no="180"?> Patrick Vincent 180 which explained the formation of Yosemite as the result of a sudden upheaval and collapse of the earth’s crust (Nature Writings 579-80). 7 Attacked as a result by Whitney as an “ignoramus” and a “mere sheepherder” (Miller 82), Muir wished to publish a credibly scientific book to defend his idea; to do so, however, would have required a visit to the Alps, a trip for which he had neither the money nor the time in the early 1870s (Worster 197). Muir not only rejected Whitney’s geological catastrophism, but also his apprehension of mountains as a mixture of “mountain gloom and mountain glory” (Whitney 79). It was not Whitney, of course, but Ruskin who had coined the expression in the fourth volume of Modern Painters (1856). While Muir and Ruskin shared the same Scots Presbyterian origins, venerated mountains as natural cathedrals resulting from a divine providentialism, and looked not only at landscape but through it to the presence of God (Muir, Nature Writings 238; Ruskin, 6: 425), they did not see eye to eye regarding the moral worth of human nature or the desirability of historical change: whereas the first welcomed progress, the second vehemently rejected it. These differences may be apprehended in their respective positions in the celebrated Forbes-Tyndall controversy, in which the two scientists openly debated the origins of glacier movement. 8 Allying himself with John Tyndall, who was himself inspired by Emersonian transcendentalism and rejected the authority of theology (DeYoung 16, 69-71), Muir often uses the metaphor of music to describe the glaciers’ long work of erosion and the many traces it left in the granitic Sierra landscape, a slow process of “change from icy darkness and death to life and beauty,” which perfectly corresponded to his own secularized Calvinism. Nature, and especially mountains were “predestined” to show the universe’s essential beauty and goodness (Nature Writings 323-24; see Terrie). Ruskin also celebrated mountain beauty and experienced several epiphanies in the Alps, but he increasingly associated the geological work of erosion with divine wrath and what he perceived as the Alps’ gloomy culture. On a sunny summer afternoon in Zermatt, for example, Ruskin notices a white chapel containing moldering bones, one of many signs in the Alps of human “torpor” and “anguish of soul” that the writer represents as the cultural correlative of the mountains’ ineluctable decay (6: 385). Informed by Forbes’s research, which he preferred over 7 It is of course Muir’s explanation that was closest to current explanations of Yosemite’s formation, and which eventually prevailed in the early twentieth century (Worster 195). 8 For Ruskin’s role in the controversy, see O’Gorman. <?page no="181"?> The Moral of Landscape 181 Tyndall’s because of its religious underpinnings, he transformed this “instruction of the hills” (385) into a theologico-scientific myth in which mountains served as emblems of God’s glory but also of man’s fallen state. For Ruskin, mountain life, marked by an endless cycle of “black bread, rude roof, dark night, laborious day, weary arm at sunset,” served as an apocalyptic manifestation of divine power (388). Muir’s biographers have seized on Ruskin’s chapter on mountain gloom to argue that the American writer regarded his own age with more optimism and read nature less ambivalently than did his European counterpart (Cohen 39; Turner 222; Worster 85). Although one may attribute Ruskin’s pessimism to his Biblical reading of geological proesses, his melancholy vision of the Alps’ primitive Catholic culture, or old age and incipient mental illness, an even more compelling explanation lies in his acute awareness of modernity’s destructive impact on the natural environment, which he believed reflected man’s moral corruption and alienation from God. In “The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” (1884), after attacking the reliability of modern science by again challenging Tyndall, Ruskin blames what he perceives as a change in the climate on a combination of industrial and moral pollution, which he calls “Manchester’s devil darkness” (34: 17-18, 37). Identifying “the signs of the times” (40) ominously with “blanched sun, - blighted grass, - blinded man,” he calls in jeremiad fashion on his fellow humans to mend their ways (40-1; Day 918-22; see also Gifford 78). Day labels this holistic vision of divine, human, and natural economies Ruskin’s “moral ecology,” an intuitive apprehension of nature that is aesthetic and moral rather than scientific, and requires of the moral agent or viewer a correct ethical practice to harmonize the three economies (918, 928). Like industrial pollution, tourism was one of those phenomena Ruskin considered a blasphemy against God and hence also a bane on both man and nature. Because the Alps were one of the earliest modern tourist destinations, Ruskin makes them into a bellwether for modernity’s impact more generally, regularly criticizing tourism’s negative effect on Switzerland’s noble scenery and virtuous manners, starting in Modern Painters: “I believe that every franc now spent by travelers among the Alps tends more or less to the undermining of whatever special greatness there is in the Swiss character” (6: 454-55). 9 Beholding the 9 Among the many other examples, one can cite an 1860 letter in which Ruskin writes that “Chamouni itself and all the rest of Switzerland are completely spoiled by railroads, huge hotels, and architects out of employ” (36: 340), and his 1865 Preface to Sesame and Lilies, in which he famously regrets the loss “of all real understanding of the character and beauty of Switzerland, by the country’s being now regarded as half-watering place, c <?page no="182"?> Patrick Vincent 182 Alps in 1869, the same year that Muir discovered the California Sierra, he decries modernity’s defilement of the divine landscape he first set his eyes on twenty-five years beforehand. For him, this landscape no longer symbolizes light, purity, and hope (19: 292-93). Mountains in Ruskin’s later writings are demoralized if not de-moralized, geological erosion serving as an apt metaphor for the age’s decaying values and faith, which he associates with the devil’s work. Thus, in Fors Clavigera III, written in October 1873, he compares the melting of the glaciers to the passing away of traditional Swiss life, an omen of the evil to come (27: 635). When John Muir did finally make it to Europe in the summer of 1893, he was a well-respected author of articles on natural history and the president of the newly founded Sierra Club in addition to being a family man and owner of a large fruit ranch. The principle aim of the trip was to study glaciers in Norway and the Alps in order to finally confirm his theory of glacier formation in the Sierra (letter to Louie Strentzel Muir, 28 August 1893). 10 But by contrasting his own Range of Light, still wild and pure, with Ruskin’s later vision of the Alps as a defiled, de-moralized landscape, Muir also had a golden opportunity to assert the comparative advantage of American versus European scenery, to decry the ill effects of tourism, and to make a powerful argument in favor of wilderness preservation. On his voyage to Europe he stopped at the Chicago World’s Fair, then made a pilgrimage to Walden Pond (Turner 294-95), both sites revealing in their own distinct way the author’s characteristically American confidence in human improvement, the first outer, the second inner. After visiting his native Scotland, then Norway, he left London on 8 August for a seventeen-day whirlwind solo tour of Switzerland. 11 half gymnasium” (18: 25). The best study of Ruskin’s rich and complex relationship with Switzerland is Hayman. 10 See also John Muir’s letter of 17 September to David Douglas, his letter of 19 December 1893 to Mary Muir, and the letters of 31 December 1893 to Alfred Sellers and to Charles Sargent, all of which confirm that Muir went to Switzerland to collect scientific facts on glaciation. 11 Based on his journals and letters, one can roughly reconstruct Muir’s itinerary in Switzerland: 10 August, arrival in Basle; 11, Lucerne and Rigi; 12, Lucerne, Meiringen, Interlaken; 13, Grindelwald; 14, Lausanne; 15, Lausanne, Martigny, Zermatt; 16, Zermatt, Gornergrat; 17, Zermatt, Martigny, Chamonix; 18, Chamonix; 19, Geneva, Neuchâtel; 20, Basle, Zurich; 21, Chur; 22, Splügen Pass, Chiavenna; 23, Chiavenna, Menaggio; 24, Chiavenna, St. Moritz; 25, St. Moritz; 26, St. Moritz, Rhine Falls, Basle; 27, Basle; 28, arrival in London. <?page no="183"?> The Moral of Landscape 183 The unique combination of wild nature, historic culture, and modern infrastructure that Muir discovered in Switzerland, so different from his own still primitively developed Yosemite Valley, might well have disturbed him, as it did Ruskin. Instead, the man famous for hiking alone for weeks on end with only a blanket and dry bread admired the picturesque towns, which he qualified as “quaint” (letter to Wanda Muir, 25 August 1893), and took full advantage of all the tourist conveniences, even if he sometimes cast a bemused eye on these. At Lucerne’s luxury Hotel Victoria, for example, he relished the incongruity of having to spend the night on a cot in a bathroom, and after ascending the Rigi, jotted down in his journal: “Queer steam and cograil mountaineering” (Journal 48: 5). The speed of modern travel did not dazzle him, however, even if he complained of not being able to climb the mountains around Chamonix due to time constraints and blisters (letter to Louie Strentzel Muir, 17 August 1893). In Como, he even enjoyed the presence of fashionable tourists, particularly of the female variety (Journal 48: 24). His main complaint was not being able to speak French in order to better communicate with the locals (letter to Wanda Muir, 25 August 1893). Like Switzerland’s juxtaposition of wildness and domesticity, Muir’s twenty-eight-page Swiss journal and eight letters, which on occasion repeat verbatim the former, mixes sometimes staid aesthetic formulae with the author’s own trademark style based on scientific observation, scripture, and lyric expressiveness. The picturesque mode, in particular, helps him frame many of his descriptions in the same manner that illustrations frame the text in his postcards. In a card sent to his daughter Wanda from the Rigi, Switzerland’s most visited peak (Fig. 1), Muir writes for example that the view is one of the very finest I ever enjoyed - hundreds of peaks and hills and mountains and glaciers with hundreds of little farms and cottages and lakes in the valleys far below, clouds of every form and color lingering, marching, rising, sinking, forming, fading. (postcard of 11 August 1893) This conventional scene painting shows how Muir’s experience of the Alps is mediated by technologies of the picturesque such as postcards, photographs, panoramas, and relief models that helped frame, domesticate, and commodify wild nature through miniaturization and mechanical reproduction. Deploring tourism’s transformation of natural beauty into a sentimentalized and commodified caricature of itself, Adorno writes that nature loses its critical edge and becomes “a nature reserve and an alibi [. . .] disguis[ing] its mediatedness as immediacy” (68). <?page no="184"?> Patrick Vincent 184 Muir’s own cards and letters adhere in many places to such conventional tourist practices, as do the flowers collected as sentimental keepsakes for his children on the Rigi, then at Grindelwald, Zermatt, Chamonix, and the Rhine Falls (letters of 12, 15, and 28 August). Fig. 1: Postcard from John Muir to Wanda Muir, 11 August 1893. Mss. 201 Shone, John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library. ©1984 Muir-Hanna Trust. Reprinted with permission. The writer breaks away from this picturesque frame in his journal, however, when he doodles details of various glaciers and waterfalls in the margins, and adds geological descriptions whose tone of awe is more representative of Muir’s style. The Rigi, Muir writes, is “one mass of coarse stratified glacial conglomerate [. . .] never before saw gravel deposit 6000 feet thick and 1000 of miles in extent. What a sublime expression of glacial action and of running singing water. What sheets of music are these gravel beds. Sermons in stones, ay and songs in stone” (Journal 48: 7-8). While the author’s portrayal of natural sublimity seeks to recapture what Adorno calls the “essence of the experience of nature” (69), his blending of nature and culture echoes the latter’s remark that “in natural beauty, natural and historical elements interact in a musical and kaleidoscopically changing fashion” (71). For Adorno, the appreciation of natural beauty requires cultural or historical memory. As in his writings on the Sierra Nevada, Muir literally inscribes that story in <?page no="185"?> The Moral of Landscape 185 the stones, suggesting that even in wild scenery he makes no distinction between nature and culture. As with music, these historical, or in this case Biblical associations give natural beauty its enigmatic and expressive character (Adorno 65, 72-73), interpreted by Ruskin but also by Muir as moral truths. That Muir was able, thanks to his previous studies, to draw on the same musical metaphor and to recognize the same geological processes in the Alps as in the Sierra Nevada enabled him to regard Switzerland as “familiar ground” (letter to Louie Strentzel Muir, 16/ 17 August 1863) and, despite its patent lack of pristine nature, to intuit in the Swiss landscape the same moral laws as back home. As he traveled from London to the Alps, the writer carefully scanned the landscape for signs of glacial action, providing answers to some of the geological puzzles of his age, including the causes of the sudden bend in the Rhone valley at Martigny (letter to Louie Strentzel Muir, 15 August 1893), 12 or the mistaken relation between the beauty of Lake Como and its height (letter to Wanda Muir, 25 August 1893). Switzerland’s “wilderness of gigantic peaks” (letter to Louie Strentzel Muir, 15 August 1893), which had left its mark all the way to the plains of Belgium, not only confirmed the author’s theory of glacial formation of the California Sierra. It also allowed him to consider the Alps to be as wild and glorious as his native mountains despite their modern development and the fact that he found its glaciers almost everywhere receding. Muir noted the unique wildness and strangeness of the Matterhorn, for example, “a huge savage pyramid a triumphant monument of nature’s glacial sculpture piercing the heavens in a lonely serene majesty” (letter to Louie Strentzel Muir, 15 August 1893). 13 Even where glaciers rubbed shoulders with hotels and where roads crossed mountains, at the Tête Noire and Splügen Passes for example, he was struck by their wild sublimity (“the wildest pass and the wildest road I ever saw”) and expressed his frustration at not having the 12 In this letter, Muir writes that he had solved the problem of the bed in the Rhone valley that Tyndall had presented even before leaving California by simply looking at a map of Switzerland. Based on his wide reading of all the leading geologic theories, Muir was therefore able to interpret the glacial formation of the Alps before his European tour, presenting his conclusions in “Living Glaciers of California” (1875), much of which was then reprinted in chapter two of The Mountains of California (1893), whose prospective title was The California Alps (Cohen 80). This included his discussion of Swiss glaciers, which he derived in part from his reading of the German geologists Adolf and Hermann Schlagintweit, as well as from his own first-hand experience of the Sierra (Nature Writings 326, 626). 13 Muir’s description of the Matterhorn merits comparison with Ruskin’s epiphany in front of the Dôme du Gouter (4: 364). <?page no="186"?> Patrick Vincent 186 time to write about all the things he had seen during his tour. Nowhere, in other words, did Muir seek to belittle the Alps in order to magnify his own Californian mountains’ unspoiled wilderness and sublimity. When he does compare the two, it is to argue for geological parallels between the ranges, and more particularly between Yosemite and various alpine valleys, including, most obviously, Lauterbrunnen (“Lauterbrunnen is a Yo valley,” Journal 48: 9) but also the valley of Chur, the Via Mala and the cliffs around Chiavenna (letter to Louie Strentzel Muir, 25 August 1893). 14 The Alps’ familiar geology allowed Muir to regard Switzerland with the transcendental optimism he viewed his own Sierra, both ranges symbolizing the universe’s divinely willed goodness. At the same time, he could also use them to express his disapproval of Ruskin’s darker religious and moral vision. Muir’s descriptions of the indigenous population, in particular, are altogether positive, Ruskinian gloom nowhere to be found. At the Kleine Scheidegg, for instance, Muir sympathetically takes note of the children and young people happily playing (Journal 48: 10), while the mountain peasants who work slowly along its steep slopes are equally viewed as happy (11). On his way to Chamonix he lovingly describes a twelve-year old fruit seller who walks in front of his carriage with a basket on her head (14). Even Muir’s reaction to the swarms of tourists in Zermatt, Chamonix, and elsewhere is surprisingly upbeat. In a remarkable letter to his wife Louie, he writes: I hardly ever saw a grander mountain view than the one I enjoyed from this famous standpoint of Gorner Grat. I met and passed hundreds in ascending and descending, many women were bravely going afoot, though the day was warm, and young girls and boys, - a climb of 5,000 from Zermatt. A dozen or so of sick or weak men and women were being carried up by four porters, as if this mountaintop were a healing fountain or sacred shrine where sins and diseases were sure to be washed away and healed. Certainly a hopeful sign of the times - such love of mountain beauty and wildness [. . .] The crowds of all kinds of tourists I have found everywhere in Switzerland shows a wonderful growth in love of nature. (letter to Louie Strentzel Muir, 16 August 1893) Muir’s Whitmanian embrace of the crowd is very different from his earlier criticism of Yosemite tourists or from the romantic image we have 14 Waterfalls were another common feature of comparison between Swiss and American landscapes. Muir compares the Staubbach falls to Bridal Veil, and Lake of Brienz to Lake Tahoe (Journal 48: 7, 9). <?page no="187"?> The Moral of Landscape 187 of him as a solitary nature worshipper. The fifty-five year old writer here finds spiritual succor in the hundreds of tourists climbing or being carried up the Gornergrat, an image meant to remind us of a medieval pilgrimage or ritual bath. As the pioneer historian of alpinism Claire Eliane Engel writes, “the great peaks were brought down to the level of humanity” in the second half of the nineteenth century (99). For Ruskin, as we saw, this democratization of mountains was an ominous sign of the age’s moral and physical corruption, whereas here it fills Muir with joy and hope in humanity. 15 Muir very likely had “The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” in mind when writing this passage. He not only interprets this “sign of the times” antithetically to Ruskin, but also rebuffs the latter’s association of progress with devilry (34: 40). As he wrote in his journal on the same day, “Some belief in the virtues and charms of clean wildness is to be found in some measure in everybody and it is surely growing however confused with frivolity and sham and fear of the devil” (Journal 48: 14). In sharp contrast with Ruskin, Muir re-moralizes the Alps, imagining them both as the literal and symbolic setting for humanity’s progressive ascent toward psychological, moral, and aesthetic well-being. This is what Michael P. Nelson has called the “Cathedral argument” for wilderness conservation (420). As biographers and critics have frequently remarked, Muir came in later years to accept tourism as essential to this conservation argument. Daniel Philippon in particular associates his shift in his thinking with his embrace of family life and realization that nature had to be humanized in order to be protected: “Muir makes wilderness seem more like home in order to show that sacred places were inseparable from domestic places” (149-52). While he began to think of wilderness in terms of home starting in the 1870s, his life on the Martinez ranch in the 1880s gave additional weight to the analogy (Philippon 151-53; Cohen 221-22). I would like to suggest, however, that Muir’s 1893 Swiss tour contributed to his conviction that wilderness needed tourists, and this for two reasons. As we have seen, the Alps enjoyed more cultural authority than American landscapes, and therefore would have served as a model in Muir’s mind, notably giving him added confidence to publish his ideas. Second, as we saw, Muir enjoyed the Alps’ mixture of wildness and culture, the fact that glaciers cohabited with hotels, and farms enameled the mountain landscape, a humanized environment that no doubt reminded 15 It would be worthwhile to compare Muir’s forthright account of the Gornergrat with Mark Twain’s splendid satire of alpine tourism in A Tramp Abroad, in which his “expedition” takes seven days instead of three hours to reach the summit of the Riffelberg, where they discover a luxury hotel filled with tourists (213-43). <?page no="188"?> Patrick Vincent 188 him of his native Scotland and where he felt immediately at home. Muir indeed perceived no essential difference between Switzerland’s “cultured landscape” and the so-called virgin landscape of the Sierra Nevada: mountains for him, as for Ruskin, constituted a text whose meaning was derived from nature, culture, and God. Much like Ruskin, he believed that “love of mountain beauty and wildness” would inspire his fellow citizens to get closer to God and obey his moral injunction by becoming better stewards of the land. Unlike Ruskin, however, he felt that for this to happen, they needed to go into the hills rather than to admire them from a distance. In his first book, The Mountains of California, which he fully rewrote upon his return from Europe and finished on 3 April 1894, affectionately calling it “his little alpine thing” (Letter to Robert Underwood Johnson, 3 April 1894), Muir famously states of the Sierra Nevada that “every feature became more rigidly alpine, without, however, producing any chilling effect; for going to the mountains is like going home” (Nature Writings 352). He now recognized the Alps in the Sierra, just as he had recognized the Sierra in the Alps, 16 neither of the two landscapes producing the “chilling effect” or mountain gloom described by Ruskin. Upon his return to California, Muir also began to sell the idea of parks to the American public, what Michael Cohen has called his “spiritual lobbying” (298). Despite being under state protection, Yosemite Valley was in a desolate condition in 1894, overgrazing and lumbering having made it unattractive to tourists (Letter to Robert Underwood Johnson, 1 October 1895). Muir wanted to place the park under Federal management, and for this to happen it needed more visitors. In his 1895 speech to the Sierra Club, he recycles some of the images and diction from the Zermatt letter to praise a hundred-fold increase in young men and women visiting the Yosemite backcountry “with the sparkle and exhilaration of the mountains in their eyes - a fine, hopeful sign of the times” (“National Parks”). Muir’s conviction that tourism would encourage land stewardship, and was therefore essential to the conservation cause is set forth most forcefully in Our National Parks, published in 1901, in which he generously welcomes the “thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people who are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home,” yet again a “hopeful sign of the times” (Na- 16 Cohen argues that Muir cut the Alps from the book’s title because he no longer needed to rely on picturesque conventions after his European trip: “He had learned not to make this false comparison” (285). I would claim on the contrary that he changed the title because he felt sufficiently at ease with the analogy to consider the Alps and the Sierra as interchangeable. <?page no="189"?> The Moral of Landscape 189 ture Writing 721). Indeed, Muir became so convinced of the need for more people in the wilderness that by 1912 he was advocating roads to improve access to the Yosemite backcountry (Cohen 308; Philippon 161). Both the Sierra Club and Muir saw the car, ironically, as way to expand support for parks, and hence to preserve wilderness. 17 Although some recent environmental writers, including Cohen, have attempted to defend Muir’s position, arguing that tourists, after all, “were better than sheep” (257), most today agree that Muir’s encouragement of wilderness tourism contributed to what William Cronon has titled the “trouble with wilderness.” According to the historian, Muir helped promote the idea of wilderness as a pristine, safe place separate from and above civilization, offering visitors the illusion of escape, while allowing them to ignore their own backyards. As Roderick Nash has argued, this is a quintessentially American notion, which, in the end, proved too successful: “the very success in appreciation of wilderness threatened to prove its undoing” (264). 18 The “Great New Wilderness Debate” (Callicott and Nelson) of the late twentieth century not only challenged Muir’s conservation philosophy, which had enabled the creation of the national park system and the 1964 Wilderness Act, but also the idea of wilderness upon which such conservationism was founded. A leading voice in this debate, environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott has criticized the exceptionalist myth of America as virgin land that we saw in Bryant and Cole, among other reasons, for ignoring the historical and biological evidence that man has never existed apart from nature. He reasons that it is better to integrate humans harmoniously into the natural world through ecological concepts such as the biosphere reserve than to keep them out (Callicott 438-40). Much like Terry Gifford, who has argued for a “post-pastoral” Muir, who, in his later writings, does not set up wilderness against culture (19- 36), I believe Muir also realized that the human/ nature dualism was detrimental to nature, notably through his discovery of Switzerland’s integration of wild and domestic landscapes. Such a discovery would have confirmed what Ruskin had argued in “The Moral of Landscape,” what Muir no doubt had already intuitively perceived in California’s so-called wilderness, and what Adorno later theorized: the aesthetic appreciation 17 According to Roderick Nash, Eric Julber, a Los Angeles attorney, again used the comparison with Switzerland to make the case for more wilderness access before a Senate subcommittee on Parks and Recreation in 1972, pointing to the tension in the Park Service Act of 1916 between preserving nature and advancing public recreation (264-65). 18 Despite extensive fires, 3,691,191 people visited Yosemite National Park in 2013, or just under half the number of visitors to the Eiffel Tower. <?page no="190"?> Patrick Vincent 190 of natural beauty is necessarily mediated by culture, and even the most pristine landscapes are historical. As we have seen, Ruskin and Muir applied the same human-centered, aesthetic and moral outlook to natural landscape, the purpose of which was to encourage humans to become more spiritual and to act more humbly. Because they disagreed on the moral status of humans and on the value of their own age, however, they prescribed two different approaches to nature that might today be understood as two different environmental ethics. Thanks to his more optimistic vision of man and history, Muir believed it was sufficient to democratically invite his fellow citizens to visit nature as if at home in order to protect nature, a formula close to what we would call “light Green,” or environmentalist thinking. Ruskin, on the other hand, would now qualify as a “dark Green” or deep ecologist (Bate 36-37). He believed that a radical moral transformation was needed in order to redress the blighted human and natural environment; until then, people had to admire wild nature at a distance, or else live in it frozen in time, somewhat like in today’s biospheres. If Ruskin’s moralized, or rather demoralized reading of the Alps is much gloomier and more elitist than that of John Muir, our current ecological crisis unfortunately makes it the most prescient. <?page no="191"?> The Moral of Landscape 191 References Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. London: Picador, 2000. Brockden Brown, Charles. Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist 1798; 1803-05. Ed. Jay Fliegelmann. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. Bryant, William Cullen. “Sonnet - To an American Painter Departing for Europe.” Poetry of the American Renaissance. Ed. Paul Kane. New York: George Braziller, 1995. 34. Callicott, J. 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Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. <?page no="195"?> From a Poetics of Collision to a Hermeneutics of Discovery: Rethinking Knowledge, Ecology, and History in Rudy Wiebe’s A Discovery of Strangers Arnaud Barras In this essay, I argue that Rudy Wiebe’s A Discovery of Strangers (1994) contributes to destabilizing and dissolving the rigid boundaries set up by monological and dualistic epistemology. This novel of historiographic metafiction illustrates well the dialogical nature of postcolonial environmental literature. The novel represents the exploration of Arctic Canada in the nineteenth century both from the storytelling perspective of the indigenous Dene community, the Tetsot’ine, and from the historical perspective of the English explorers. This narrative configuration is not antithetical, for it causes the reader to reexamine the hyperseparation of history and story, fact and fiction, and colonial and indigenous ecological knowledge. Instead of separating these binaries, Wiebe’s novel unites them through a poetics of collision and a hermeneutics of discovery. In this context, the act of reading is both creative and critical: it consists in piecing together this polyvocal storyworld, and by doing so, to question North American colonial history from a double perspective. In reading A Discovery of Strangers, one enacts dialogism and is made to reflect on it. Ultimately, the reader’s responsibility is twofold: it consists in unveiling the harmful exclusion of differences while asserting the need for creative dialogue. Introduction Colonial history is a contested field of enquiry as usually the events of the past are told from the perspective of the victors, and because the voi- Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 32. Ed. Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser. Tübingen: Narr, 2015. 195-214. <?page no="196"?> Arnaud Barras 196 ces of the victims of colonization are too often marginalized, homogenized, idealized, and appropriated - when they are not altogether silenced. In this context, fiction offers an alternative to history; it offers the possibility of telling the ineffable, of narrating the untold, of capturing the meeting of communities and people who are long gone. This tension between history and fiction lies at the core of Rudy Wiebe’s novel A Discovery of Strangers. First published in 1994, this work of historiographic metafiction provides an ethical matrix that destabilizes the rigid boundaries imposed by colonialism on indigenous epistemologies. Rudy Wiebe was born in 1934 from “Dutch-Prussian-Russian Mennonites who immigrated to Saskatchewan in 1929” (Beck 856). As a descendant of settlers, Wiebe’s position within the colonial history of what is now Canada may be seen as problematic, especially in regard to his recreation of a set of indigenous voices in A Discovery of Strangers. However, as Ervin Beck rightfully points out, Wiebe has been received positively by Canadian First Nations (860), not the least because he strives “to call attention to the injustices that indigenes have endured and thereby to foster social justice for them in contemporary society and politics” (862). Beck explains that “[e]xhaustive, creative research lies behind every one of Wiebe’s historical novels about Canada’s indigenous people” (859-60), and that the writer “gives the indigene a leading voice in his fiction, but in the context of many other competing voices, both indigenous and European” (860). Wiebe’s efforts in dramatizing the entanglement of voices that characterizes the history of Canada become evident in A Discovery of Strangers: the tension between history and story, between fact and fiction, and between exploration and indigeneity is aestheticized to an extent impossible to overlook. “A discovery of strangers” is not only the title of the book; it is also the subject matter of the narrative, as well as the creative principle that lies at its core. The re-creation of indigenous voices by a contemporary author can itself be understood as a literary re-discovery, as a textual ripple caused by the initial encounter between English explorers and Tetsot’ine hunters. Seen in this light, A Discovery of Strangers does not appropriate or violate an indigenous voice, but rather enacts the meeting of voices; it enacts a fleeting moment in the continuum of history where two conflicting communities discover each other’s ways of knowing, being, and telling and in so doing dramatically affect each other. The novel dramatizes the triadic relationship between individuals, communities, and their environment. It does so by dramatizing the process of reading one’s environment and by establishing a poetics of collision wherein the colonial epistemology and ontology of the explor- <?page no="197"?> From a Poetics of Collision to a Hermeneutics of Discovery 197 ers seem at first to clash with the indigenous system of knowledge and way of life. The story takes place between 1819 and 1822 and describes the Franklin expedition to chart the Dene lands in the Northwest Territories of what is now Canada. Contrary to colonial history, the novel offers two perspectives: it juxtaposes the fictional perspective of the indigenous Dene community, the Tetsot’ine, and the historical and factual perspective of the English explorers. The narrative system is therefore based on what seems like an antithetical configuration where contradictory modes of knowing collide; this is what I call the poetics of collision. However, instead of separating these modes into binaries, Wiebe’s narrative unites them through the motif of interpretation; by making individuals of each community interpret the other’s knowledge system and environmental practice, the novel displays a veritable hermeneutics of discovery. The narrative configuration makes the reader reexamine the hyperseparation 1 of history and story, fact and fiction, and colonial and indigenous ecological knowledge: the reader encounters a de facto situation of collision and has to make up their own mind. This is the principle of dialogism that subtends A Discovery of Strangers: the reader is confronted with a complex situation - the encounter of indigenous peoples and explorers - that the formal aspects of the work enact - the encounter of history and fiction. In the act of reading the novel, one refashions the colonial history of North America, but this time from a critical perspective that subverts imperialism and that does not exclude indigeneity: the reader enters into a dialogue with Wiebe’s work of historiographic metafiction and discovers the liminality of the situation of collision, where European stranger and indigenous other paradoxically enter into contact. In this context, the reader occupies a critical and creative role that consists first, in acknowledging the socioecological differences in the depicted systems of knowledge and ways of life, and second, in piecing together a plural and polyvocal storyworld. In colonial history, the encounter between English explorers and indigenous Tetsot’ine can only be told from the perspective of the members of the Franklin expedition, whose journals were the only source documenting the event. These journals are however not entirely reliable, for not only are the explorers writing for posterity and with their readership in mind, but their attitude towards both the Arctic environment and the Dene population is biased by a colonial ideology that considers 1 In Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Australian philosopher Val Plumwood coins the term “hyperseparation” to criticize the process whereby “the other is to be treated as not merely different, but inferior, part of a lower, different order of being” (49; my emphases). <?page no="198"?> Arnaud Barras 198 “native” populations “primitive” and thus inferior, of less moral value, and subject to instrumentalization. The complex interaction between these two very different communities whose systems of knowledge and ways of life are barely compatible therefore demands an approach that reflects on the colonial (mis)representations of land and indigenous peoples. Ecofeminism, and particularly its Australian version, critically confronts monological impositions of “truths” in the context of settler societies and thus provides a good starting point for analyzing A Discovery of Strangers as the locus of dialogue between Tetsot’ine and English, storytelling and history, and reader and text. 1. Ecofeminism, Dialogism, and Hermeneutics As Australian philosopher Val Plumwood says, ecofeminism is situated at the edges where the “four tectonic plates of liberation theory - those concerned with the oppressions of gender, race, class and nature - finally come together” (Feminism 1). Plumwood envisions ecofeminism as a movement arising from the critique of patriarchal, imperialist, and anthropocentric modes of thinking. She argues that these modes of thinking use “reason” as a discursive strategy to separate men from women, Europeans from indigenous peoples, and humans from nature (42). More than a mere separation, this dualism creates what Plumwood calls a “hyperseparation“ (49), which is really a system of Othering based on a radical exclusion of the other, the latter being always constructed as inferior. Hyperseparation “establishes separate ‘natures’” (49) between self and other, and thus “prevent[s] their being seen as continuous or contiguous” (49). Hyperseparation does not only create “a difference of degree within a sphere of overall similarity, but [it produces] a major difference in kind, even a bifurcation or division in reality” (50; my emphases). Building on Plumwood, Deborah Rose explains that ecofeminism criticizes those types of discourse that create a “matrix of hierarchical oppositions [. . .] where the ‘other’ is effectively an absence” (176). In this rather perverse discursive strategy, inferiority, absence, and silence are used as justification for monologism. In monologism, Rose explains, “communication is all one way, and the pole of power refuses to receive the feedback that would cause it to change itself, or to open itself to dialogue” (176-77). In that way, Rose continues, “[p]ower lies in the ability not to hear what is being said, not to experience the consequences of one’s actions, but rather to go one’s own self-centric and insulated way” (176-77). As will be shown below, if hyperseparation <?page no="199"?> From a Poetics of Collision to a Hermeneutics of Discovery 199 and monologism characterize the attitude of some explorers in A Discovery of Strangers - they instrumentalize and silence both the land and its indigenous inhabitants - socioecological dialogism characterizes the indigenous protagonists’ way of knowing. By recreating Tetsot’ine voices, Wiebe moves away from the principle of hyperseparation that pervaded colonization and makes English and Tetsot’ine enter into dialogue through his work of historiographic metafiction. The ethical role of the novel then becomes to offer in dialogism and discovery an alternative to monologism and hyperseparation. It is to be noted that the dialogism set out in Plumwood’s ecofeminism is a socioecological dialogism that “is aimed not at selfmaximisation but at negotiation and mutual flourishing” (Environmental Culture 33). This socioecological dialogism “requires a basic level of mutuality and equality, give and take, response and feedback, that is not available in monological systems” (33) such as those of imperialism. In that sense, Plumwood’s dialogism provides a framework that sheds light on how the collision of communities in the diegetic world of A Discovery of Strangers can be read as dialogue rather than monologue, and how one’s interaction with the environment can be envisioned in less dualistic terms. To study the relation between history and fiction at the structural level of A Discovery of Strangers, however, requires another type of dialogical approach that presupposes an acknowledgment of the function of the reader in the production of meaning. In this context, Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin provides an interesting perspective on textual dialogism. In “Discourse in the Novel,” he mentions two forms of dialogism: he differentiates between a “form of dialogism [. . .] within the object [i.e., the work] itself” (282) and a form of dialogism between the work and the “subjective belief system of the listener” (282). Bakhtin explains: [A]n active understanding, one that assimilates the word under consideration into a new conceptual system, that of the one striving to understand, establishes a series of complex interrelationships, consonances and dissonances with the word and enriches it with new elements. (282) Bakhtin’s “active understanding” amounts to a mutually enriching dialogue between context, reader, and text. This dialogism is nicely summed up by Michael Holquist, who edited and translated The Dialogic Imagination: in the glossary, Holquist explains that in a dialogical perspective, “[e]verything means, is understood, as a part of a greater whole - <?page no="200"?> Arnaud Barras 200 there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others” (426). The power of A Discovery of Strangers lies in the fact that through selfreflexive episodes of interpretive practices, Wiebe combines a “Bakhtinian” dialogism inherent in the narrative configuration - that is, the juxtaposition of the discourses of history and story - with a “Plumwoodian” dialogism of the Tetsot’ine in the diegetic world. In turn, this strategy enables the reader to perform a postcolonial revision of colonial history; the very process of reading A Discovery of Strangers thus subverts the monologism of colonial history by presenting a plural storyworld where competing voices intermingle. 2. Modes of Knowing and Allegories of Understanding Knowledge features as a crucial aspect of the novel. At the diegetic level, Wiebe depicts the Tetsot’ine and the explorers’ communities as being different on many sociocultural levels, and these differences in sociocultural processes manifest themselves in the text: the communities know differently; they live differently; they tell differently. It is important to keep in mind that Wiebe does not impose one way on the other, but rather juxtaposes them and describes each community’s reflection on the other’s similarities and differences. The reader is then made to understand the colonial knowledge exhibited in the science and practice of exploration in light of the traditional 2 ecological knowledge manifested in the Tetsot’ine way of life, and vice and versa. In this textual configuration, the two discourses echo each other to offer a dual perspective on colonization. In the fictional chapters, Wiebe represents the Tetsot’ine traditional knowledge as relational - it is situated in an evolving web of relations. Relational knowledge is underwritten by a form of socioecological dialogism; that is, it is immanent in the land and emerges from the dialogue of organism and environment, from one’s dynamic and mutual relation- 2 “Traditional” is used in a peculiar way here; it does not denote a type of knowledge that is “of the past and unchangeable” (Pierotti 11). On the contrary, traditional ecological knowledge “is based on empirical knowledge that has been collected over long periods of time and incorporated into an organized way of understanding how the world functions based on relationships observed and understood at a local scale” (14). <?page no="201"?> From a Poetics of Collision to a Hermeneutics of Discovery 201 ship with one’s surroundings. 3 Relational knowledge could be called “ecological knowledge” - it is tied to a given ecology - or it could be called “situated knowledge,” for it is always embedded in a given situation. Relational knowledge is necessarily humble since limited - the very name “Tetsot’ine,” Wiebe tells us, means “Those Who Know Something a Little” (4). Relational knowledge is not fixed, but relative. There is no end to relational knowledge, for it is dependent on the environment and is subtended by a care for the land and its beings. 4 The relational knowledge of the Tetsot’ine is transmitted in the form of oral stories that capture the dynamism of the land. Thus, the text explains that “every place was its true and exact name. [The Tetsot’ine elders] Birdseye and Keskarrah between them knew the land, each name a story complete in their head” (24). In the novel, this “storied knowledge” is contrasted with categorical knowledge and with the colonial practice of naming that tends to rigidify the land. The Tetsot’ine conception of knowledge as evolving means that the arrival of the Europeans will change the stories that subtend the Tetsot’ine way of life: in a sense, relational knowledge is always inclusive of the stranger. Paradoxically, Wiebe portrays this radical inclusion as one of several reasons that, combined together, cause the downfall of the Tetsot’ine people: the hospitality exhibited by the Tetsot’ine, the adoption of firearms and of a trade economy by some hunters, which alters the “animal circle that gives [them] life every day” (129), as well as the “strange and various sicknesses” (315) - amongst which smallpox - unwittingly imported by the explorers, exert too strong a pressure on the Tetsot’ine population and ultimately provoke their disappearance as a people. In contrast to the Tetsot’ine, the fictional chapters present some of the explorers as valuing a form of knowledge that is monological: 5 it imposes meaning onto the world; it tends to be disconnected from the world; it is essentially a one-way movement. In Wiebe’s depiction, the explorers’ knowledge is not relative, but universalist; it is also positivist, for Franklin and his men think they know with certainty, and thus sometimes pass as arrogant. In the 1820s, at the time of the Franklin 3 This mutual relationship is exemplified when a Tetsot’ine elder named Keskarrah says that the “stories the land told [. . .] and the sky over it in any place, were the stories of all People who had ever lived there” (24; my emphasis). 4 In the novel, the Tetsot’ine consider the caribou as kin (18) and their hides as gifts that belong to the caribou only (133). 5 Mostly, this rather negative view of the explorers is given from the perspective of the Tetsot’ine, but it is also visible in the few episodes where Wiebe reconstructs the perspective of explorers such as Midshipman George Back and Doctor John Richardson. <?page no="202"?> Arnaud Barras 202 expedition, this monological knowledge is geared towards fulfilling the goals of the expedition: subjecting the indigenous population, mapping the Canadian Arctic, and evaluating the natural resources of the land. The explorers’ monological knowledge is dominated by an instrumentalization 6 of the land and its beings. This is made clear when George Back, one of the explorers, reads the “proclamation,” an agreement that defines how Tetsot’ine and Europeans will interact: This, our great flag, is the sign of the King of England’s power, who is your king also! [. . .] We are not traders, we are the King’s warriors. [. . .] We are not come to trade, but to establish good relations between us and yourselves, and to discover the resources of your country. [. . .] [I]f you show us the way of the other great river to the Northern Ocean, and if you hunt for us as we follow it, the King will be very thankful. (42) By asserting that the Tetsot’ine are under the authority of the King of England, and that the explorers are warriors whose aim is to “discover the resources of [the] country,” 7 the proclamation makes manifest how the environment is but an object of study and a potential resource to exploit. In the same vein, the passage positions the Tetsot’ine not as independent beings, but as instruments to the service of the exploration and exploitation of Arctic Canada. This point is reinforced when another member of the expedition, Doctor John Richardson, is talking with John Franklin about the sense of duty and discipline of the “Yellowknife Indians”; he explains: We will never control any Indians [. . .] until we teach them the absolute, practical necessity of money. [. . .] [T]he fundamental problem in the economic development of primitives [is that they trade for what they need]. They must want more than they need. That is civilization. (59) Richardson’s conversation with the leader of the expedition illustrates the paternalistic attitude of the doctor, and betrays the explorer’s assumption that the indigenous population is inferior and thus open to instrumentalization and “civilizing.” This instrumentalist consideration of the Tetsot’ine goes hand in hand with a denial of their intimate 6 In Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Plumwood defines instrumentalism as the process whereby “those on the lower side of the dualisms are obliged to put aside their own interests for those of the master or centre, that they are conceived of as his instruments, a means to his ends” (53). 7 Wiebe is here deliberately playing with the notion that in a colonial context discovery is the initial step that precedes exploitation. <?page no="203"?> From a Poetics of Collision to a Hermeneutics of Discovery 203 knowledge of the Arctic ecosystem. Indeed, monological knowledge entails by definition that the self is deaf to input by the other, and Wiebe implies that this refusal to listen to the indigenous community, for example regarding the unavailability of food near the sea in winter, is what causes the demise of the expedition. This refusal to listen appears in a conversation between Keskarrah and Bigfoot about the explorers’ demands regarding food supply for the expedition. Keskarrah begins: “They want sacks of meat for summer, they want it dried now.” “No one dries meat in dark winter.” “They don’t know what we do.” “I’ve told them, again and again, when the sun returns there are always other caribou.” “Not along the Everlasting Ice, where they want to go.” “But why will they go there? ” Bigfoot is almost shouting. “We’ve told them, there’s nothing there but ice! ” “I know,” Keskarrah says quietly. “I think we have to understand this: Whitemuds hear only what they want to hear. [. . .] Nothing, nothing. For them the world is always wrong because they never want it to be . . . the way it is.” (131-32) In this conversation, the two Tetsot’ine elders are frustrated by the explorers’ behavior, which seems erratic, “wrong,” and altogether dangerous to them. Despite Bigfoot’s repeated warnings that food will be unavailable in winter near the sea, the English will nonetheless go on their expedition and in the process will suffer dramatic losses. Keskarrah’s last speech reveals the silencing of the indigenous voice and the objectification of the land that underlies the explorers’ behavior. At the level of diegesis, numerous such episodes stage the tension between monological and dialogical ways of knowing. Mostly these episodes present an indigenous critical perspective on the English explorers’ way of interacting and understanding the land, though it is to be noted that some explorers also reflect on the indigenous way of life and of knowing. For instance, chapter 3 is a monologue that features Midshipman George Back’s thoughts on the Tetsot’ine: he describes them as a “primitive people” (42); he explains that “the idea of wealth [. . .] is too much for their minds to grasp” (43); he states that “these natives live in a dreadful land with more than enough space quite empty around them. With no discernible social organization - and wandering at random” (44); finally, he affirms that “the Indian mind rejects accident” (45). Wiebe’s rhetorical strategy is to exaggerate Back’s fallacious understanding of the indigenous community so as to expose his colonial ide- <?page no="204"?> Arnaud Barras 204 ology and to underscore its relegation of indigenous peoples to an inferior, silenced, and hyperseparated order of being. Back’s monologue also shows how, in his mind, the environment is but a territory to explore (48). It would not do justice to the polyvocality of the novel, however, to think that all explorers display a monological attitude that instrumentalizes the Tetsot’ine. Midshipman Robert Hood is a character that challenges the explorers’ monologism: in a dialogue with Back, Hood questions the morality of hiring the best hunters of the Tetsot’ine community and wonders, “who will feed all their families this winter? ” (49). He then explains that the Tetsot’ine women will necessarily have to help to “skin and cut and dry all that meat before it rots” (49). Interestingly, Hood’s “moral imperatives” (50) irk Back, who describes them as “insufferable rectitude” (50). Hood critiques imperialism from within the group of explorers, which establishes him as a figure that transgresses the dualism of colonial knowledge. This is important, for this attitude is what will allow Hood to overcome the conflict of community and face the indigenous woman Greenstockings in a non-dualistic way (see below). It is important to bear in mind that with A Discovery of Strangers, Wiebe seeks to counter the dominance of monological imperialism in history; to do so, he presents and emphasizes numerous indigenous critiques of European interpretive practices. This includes making manifest the socioecological dialogism of the Tetsot’ine, and, by extension, to suggest to the reader another way of understanding text and place. Indeed, these episodes present the indigenous perspective on Europeans’ understanding of the land reflexively, that is, in such a way that the text “points to its own mask and invites the public to examine its design and texture. Reflexive works [. . .] call attention to their own factitiousness as textual constructs” (Stam 1). The reflexivity of these episodes enables the reader to connect the socioecological dialogism of the Tetsot’ine with the textual dialogism of the novel. In a dialogue with his wife Birdseye, Keskarrah, a Tetsot’ine “mapmaker” (45), criticizes the colonial practice of cartography and reflects on how the explorers fail to understand the environment through writing and technology: Everything changes when they come, and yet they mark it down as if it will always be the same and they can use it. [. . .] They’re always making marks, marks on paper that any drop of water can destroy. As if they had no memory. [. . .] They always have to hold something in their hands, something to make marks on, or to look at things or through unknowable instruments. They aim their eyes across every lake and river with instruments that the <?page no="205"?> From a Poetics of Collision to a Hermeneutics of Discovery 205 sun distorts first, and then they draw something of it onto paper, with names that mostly mean nothing. As if a lake or river is ever the same twice! When you travel and live with a river or lake, or hill, it can remain mostly like it seems, but when you look at it with your dreaming eye, you know it is never what it seemed to be when you were first awake to it. [. . .] [Thick English] and his men always stare at [the sun] through something else, and I think the sun uses their instruments to blind them. To make them think living things are always the same. (75-76) Colonial cartographic practices constitute an allegory of bad interpretation 8 that invites the reader to question the act of reading. Here, Keskarrah reflects on the explorers’ failure to read place and write text. In Keskarrah’s view, this inability to interpret correctly comes from a misunderstanding of the dynamism of the ecosystem and from a misuse of technology and writing. To him, colonial cartography is problematic because it is based on an understanding of the environment as a finite object that can be measured exactly; 9 he thinks that this is erroneous because it blinds the explorers to the dynamism of the environment, and instead purports to control and seems to congeal and silence it. For Keskarrah, the explorers’ mode of knowing is unable to capture the complexity of the Dene lands, which brings about an inability to represent it correctly. As the explorers perceive the environment as static, they can only repeat this stasis in their textual representations. Through Keskarrah’s critique, Wiebe creates a connection between the understanding of place and the production of text. Through reflexivity, the allegory of interpretation thus connects socioecological dialogism and textual dialogism, which opens up an interpretive field that encourages the reader to envision an alternative hermeneutics based on the relational knowledge of the Tetsot’ine: one ought not to congeal the text and think that it is “ever the same twice,” like the explorers do concerning the land. By extension, this suggests that understanding a novel demands respecting the dynamism and heteroglossia that is so characteristic of this genre (Bakhtin 263). By showing the Tetsot’ine response to the explorers’ practice of understanding, Wiebe draws the reader’s attention to the differences between the socioecological dialogism inherent in the way of 8 In chapter 3 of his Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man reminds us that it is crucial to question whether a “passage on [. . .] reading [may] make paradigmatic claims for itself” (58). 9 In Nature’s Economy, Donald Worster lays out the origins of this “mechanistic materialism” inherited from the eighteenth century, a mechanism that “reduc[ed] plants and animals to insensate matter, mere conglomerates of atomic particles devoid of internal purpose or intelligence” (40). <?page no="206"?> Arnaud Barras 206 knowing of the indigenous population and the monological imposition of knowledge of the explorers. Because the character of Keskarrah is described as sympathetic and wise while the explorers are depicted as arrogant and careless, the reader is invited to adopt a way of knowing that does not radically exclude the environment as an inferior object, and a way of reading that does not consider the text as static. Keskarrah’s questioning of the Europeans’ dysfunctional interpretive practice is developed when his wife Birdseye, who is also a respected and knowledgeable elder, tackles the explorers’ way of knowing through written text: the Whitemuds [i.e., the European explorers] can so easily sit on the water and observe the immense land pass inside the tubes they hold to their eyes, and see nothing except the folds of papers they always clutch in their hands, the tiny marks they continuously accumulate heap upon heap between straight lines, down in columns. What they lay out flat and straight and hold in their hands in these marks, which only they will know how to interpret, will be enough to guide them; that is how they know everything, and will know whatever happens to them. Sometime, somewhere, they have decided to believe this simplicity of mark, and they will live their lives straight to the end believing that. (147) What the character of Birdseye criticizes is not necessarily writing in itself, but the written text as a source of knowledge that severs people from their environment - including other beings - and silences the land and indigenous people. The fact that only the colonizers can read written marks demonstrates how exclusionary writing can be. However, it is the self-sufficiency of writing as it guides any inquiry and makes “everything” known to the colonizer that is most problematic. Indeed, Birds eye describes the Europeans as having “decided to believe this simplicity of mark,” rather than the Tetstot’ine’s repeated advice; this suggests, as shown above, that in Birdseye’s understanding the explorers are also denying the traditional knowledge of the Tetsot’ine as a valid way of interacting with the land. Ultimately, this refusal to listen to the Tetsot’ine and to perceive the dynamism of the land is presented as the cause of the failure of the expedition. Indeed, despite the Tetsot’ine advice that “there’s nothing but ice” (131), no food, where the explorers want to go, the latter do so anyway, because they “hear only what they want to hear” (131). Because the explorers are taken up with their cartographic practice, they end up not paying enough attention to the land and its inhabitants. Blinded by the power of measuring, the explorers fail to see the complexity and unpredictability of the Arctic ecosystem. - <?page no="207"?> From a Poetics of Collision to a Hermeneutics of Discovery 207 What Birdseye’s view makes manifest is that interpretive practices that are disembodied from the environment to which they relate and that objectify the environment they seek to understand are senseless. Indeed this type of monological reading is not attuned to its surroundings, which is clearly a fatal mistake when one travels in unfamiliar and arid territory. Through Birdseye’s view on the practice of writing the environment and of reading text, the novel enables the reader to reflect on their own process of reading and, more generally, on the effects of “science as the writing of the world” (Massey 25): the reader ought not to believe in the “simplicity of mark” (Wiebe 141) and think they know “everything”; the text should not sever organism from environment, and it should not exclude the indigenous voice; the text is not a container of meaning. Through Wiebe’s literary work, one is made to understand that colonial scientific writing is no substitute for traditional ecological knowledge. Both Keskarrah and Birdseye criticize the explorers’ attitude towards the environment. From their perspective, the colonial practice of cartography both seals off the organism from its environment and congeals the world into stasis. However, the novel is not a unilateral critique of colonialism and a mere praise of indigenous knowledge. The criticism of the explorers’ way of knowing is also echoed by a critique of the Tetsot’ine’s storytelling practice. Indeed, if the novel suggests that imperial science has shortcomings in its radical exclusion of the other, it also points out that indigenous orality poses problems in regard to the arrival of strangers. This problematic is brought forth through Greenstockings, Keskarrah and Birdseye’s daughter, and in her criticism of her mother’s mode of knowing. 10 The young girl is very critical of her people’s radical inclusion of the expedition and of the inability of the Tetsot’ine to cope adequately with the arrival of the English explorers: As the sun sinks completely into winter, Greenstockings watches for the lengthening line of Whitemud story that her mother’s voice draws up out of darkness. [. . .] She wants to hear her mother tell why all the People stood there so heedlessly, as if nothing but curiosity was happening, and watched These English arrive But Birdseye’s murmured story explains nothing about what happened to the People then. (148) 10 Greenstockings repeatedly voices her criticism of her people’s blindness to the fact that their hospitality and willingness to transform their hunting practices will result in their extinction (36; 149). Particularly, she criticizes Bigfoot’s servile attitude towards the explorers (133-34). <?page no="208"?> Arnaud Barras 208 Greenstockings wonders why her mother does not weave into story the rest of the encounter with the explorers, for she intuitively knows that the refusal to face the reality of the Europeans’ presence is problematic: it places Birdseye and her family in the position of disempowered witnesses to an immutable and unstoppable force. This passage offers an interesting perspective on the internal politics of the Tetsot’ine, 11 who do not blindly follow arbitrary authority, but discuss their way into action. This form of collaboration is stressed earlier in the text when the narrator explains that “[w]ithin the shifting groups of Tetsot’ine for a time agreeing to live together, as necessity arises, one person decides finally where they will travel, where they will stop - but that implies nothing like boss. They have no word for ‘chief’” (34). In light of the collaboration inherent in Tetsot’ine decision-making, the episode where Greenstockings questions her mother’s story acquires a deeper significance: it functions as an allegory of good interpretation that shows that listening to a story does not necessarily mean accepting the narrative as an authoritative truth, but that on the contrary it consists in interrupting, questioning, and dialoguing. Silencing the presence of the Europeans is a mistake that Greenstockings picks up on as she refuses to take her mother’s story at face value. Metafictionally, this passage suggests that receiving a narrative is not a unilateral assimilation of information, but a dialogue between reader and text - or listener and speech - where the reader is made to question the textual configuration and to refigure proactively their horizon of understanding. The novel proposes that good interpretation entails interacting actively with history and story: good interpretation ought to fill in the blanks in the text and to question the deliberate silences that punctuate it. The numerous diegetic episodes of self-reflexivity invite the reader to conceive the narrative system in a dialogical way. In this context, the collision of epistemes that pervades the whole novel can be read in a new light: not as a radical exclusion of the other and a radical inclusion of the stranger, but as a mutual discovery of difference and a responsible dialogue with alterity. History and fiction, as well as the writing of science and the telling of stories can mutually enrich one another, if one allows them to enter into dialogue. 11 This internal politics is to be contrasted with the hierarchical system of the English Navy, where authority - as opposed to necessity - is the primary factor that regulates social organization. <?page no="209"?> From a Poetics of Collision to a Hermeneutics of Discovery 209 3. The Poetics of Collision and the Hermeneutics of Discovery In A Discovery of Strangers Wiebe creates a situation wherein seemingly contradictory epistemes are voiced. After the initial moment of encounter the two systems - English explorers and indigenous Tetsot’ine - gradually collapse. Their respective community, knowledge system, way of life, way of telling and of interpreting the world begin to decline as the narrator’s description of the moment of encounter attests to: suddenly a fireball smashed through the sky: crash! - here are the Whites! Now! And immediately the world is always on fire with something else, something [the Tetsot’ine] have never thought about or had to do before; always, it seems, burning out of its centre and rushing, destroying itself towards all possible edges. Strangely, for ever, different. (17) If at first glance it may seem that the encounter between explorers and indigenous people is a collision - the explorers being a fireball smashing and crashing into the world of the Tetsot’ine, making this world “destroy [. . .] itself towards all possible edges” - the last sentence of this passage opens up an alternative interpretation that emphasizes the discovery of the implications of the collision: the stem “strange” functions as an echo of both the title of the novel - A Discovery of Strangers - and the novel’s epigraph by Rainer Maria Rilke - “Strangely I heard a stranger say,/ I am with you” (i). This repetition connects three characteristics of the colonial encounter: the discovery of the stranger mentioned in the title, the presence of the stranger expressed by the epigraph, and the permanence of this presence, which is expressed in the irrevocable transformation of the world in the passage quoted above. If this irrevocable transformation can be seen as a direct consequence of the collision of communities, the novel rather chooses to emphasize the first aspect of the colonial encounter: the discovery of the stranger. By emphasizing not the dualistic hyperseparation of colonizers and colonized, but rather their initial collaboration, 12 the novel suggests that the collision of binaries may also be interpreted as the gradual understanding - i.e., the discovery - of the other. When one adopts a dialogical approach to the text, the 12 This collaboration is exemplified in the hospitality of the Tetsot’ine and in the “agreement” between indigenous people and explorers that spells out the modalities of the trading of fur and meat against firearms and the transport of the explorers on canoes (265, 299, 42). From a postcolonial perspective, of course, this collaboration is really one-way: what Wiebe makes the Tetsot’ine call hospitality the explorers consider servility. <?page no="210"?> Arnaud Barras 210 conflict between explorers and indigenes, history and story, fact and fiction, and scientific and storied knowledges recedes into the background while the collaborative processes that can be seen at the narrative’s structural, diegetic, and linguistic levels take center stage. The reader’s real discovery in A Discovery of Strangers is the unveiling of a common ground that is based on an ecocentric understanding of the world and on a dialogical approach to life. This common ground recognizes alterity but does not create a hierarchical system out of difference. At the diegetic level, this common ground allows collision to be envisioned as discovery. At the extradiegetic level it allows to move beyond poetics and towards hermeneutics. In other words, instead of conceiving the novel as a fixed narrative configuration where polarized communities, ways of knowing, and discourses collide, the reader is made to conceive of the novel as the process whereby Tetsot’ine and English, traditional and scientific knowledge, and story and history discover and interpret each other. The most obvious element in A Discovery of Strangers that enables the move from a poetics of collision to a hermeneutics of discovery is the juxtaposition of narrative modes in the structure of the novel: history and fiction enter into conversation with one another. The novel is incomplete if one dismisses either discourse, or if one envisions them in isolation. This entanglement of modes of telling is alluded to in the paratext. First, before the narrative proper begins, appears the Rilke epigraph, in translation: “Strangely I heard a stranger say,/ I am with you” (i). This quote is but loosely translated, however: the subject in the German version is a third-person feminine “sie,” and the line reads “und hörte fremd einen Fremden sagen: / Ichbinbeidir” (Rilke 132). The poetic license taken by Wiebe in the translation draws attention to the process of re-creation that subtends his fictional account of the historical moment. Second, after the epigraph, two historical maps of the explored area are provided (ii-iii), with the dates, places, and journeys of the expedition. Interestingly, the maps present both the Tetsot’ine and the English nomenclature: the label “Everlasting Ice” is followed by a parenthesis indicating that it is also the “Coronation Gulf”; the “River of Copperwoman” is also the “Coppermine River.” This juxtaposition of Tetsot’ine and English names shows how the two knowledge systems are to be read in relation to one another. Third, a prefatory note follows the maps and warns the reader that excerpts of the journals of two explorers are interspersed between chapters (iv). Wiebe makes manifest the creative dialogue between history and fiction, for he cleverly notes that the “dated selections between chapters are quoted (with some minor <?page no="211"?> From a Poetics of Collision to a Hermeneutics of Discovery 211 rearrangements)” (iv; my emphasis). Overall, the paratext combines poetry, geography, and history and prefigures the combination of poetic metafiction and historiography in the main text. This juxtaposition of fictionalized journal excerpts and historicized fiction forces the reader to examine the relationship between history and fiction in the production of storyworlds. This interpretive examination thus echoes the diegetic encounter of colonial and traditional knowledge. Moreover, the narrative configuration gives a voice to both parties, thereby avoiding presenting a one-sided account of exploration and colonization. The book consists of thirteen fictional chapters and thirty historical journal entries. If most chapters are separated by clusters of one to three entries, there are eight journal entries that separate chapters 9 and 10. The unusual presence of historical discourse at this point of the narrative is striking, especially since this profusion of history is placed at the climactic moment of the story where the “Expedition has begun to break into pieces” (220). These eight entries indeed cover the beginning of the expedition per se, on 4 June 1821, and its gradual failure as ice thickens and food becomes scarce. As for chapter 10, as if to remind the reader of the horror of the expedition, which is somehow idealized in the historical account, it details the protagonist Midshipman Hood’s slow and agonizing starvation before the Mohawk Michel murders him. In this narrative configuration, the journal excerpts and the fictional chapters work in concert to offer a kaleidoscopic representation of the failure of the expedition. Wiebe’s novel thus functions as a dialogical matrix that is performed in reading. However, like Greenstockings in the allegory of good interpretation above, and unlike some of the explorers, the empirical reader is not to take the narrative at face value, but rather is to engage critically with it, to ask questions of it, to actualize it creatively. In this sense, colonial history is not to be thought of as a separate realm of knowledge more apt than fiction to represent the expedition, for colonial history is never purely objective: it is written by men who have a particular agenda and a particular audience. Ultimately, by conflating historical and fictional discourses, Wiebe draws attention to the constructedness of both fictional and historical work. As William Closson James argues: [Wiebe may be] suggesting that the role of the storyteller is not merely to record and report past events, nor to imagine in unfettered fashion a radically open future. The narrator is more like the prophet or dreamer who activates or helps make happen what is happening, but who is also present as an ingredient of the narrative itself and determinative of what will happen. (81) <?page no="212"?> Arnaud Barras 212 In this sense, the textual dialogism that makes story and history converse with one another can be seen as a narratological technique that performs and “make[s] happen” the socioecological dialogism of the Tetsot’ine that Wiebe hopes to reproduce in the reader’s mind. There are numerous other elements in the novel that exemplify the primacy of dialogism over monologic dualism: for instance, the love story between the midshipman Robert Hood and the indigenous girl Greenstockings enacts the move from collision to discovery in a sensuous way that allows the reader to experience the corporeal discovery of the other. As was shown above, Hood and Greenstockings both constitute subversive figures that question their respective community. Their relationship thus acquires a particular significance. Moreover, their relationship transgresses the military code of conduct, contradicting Franklin’s orders not to interact with indigenous women. Hood is aware of this transgression, for during his intimate encounter he is flooded with analepses reminding him of his “imperial duty under oath” (176). Despite Hood’s subversion of his rank as English naval officer, under the lodge of Keskarrah and Birdseye’s family, around a fire, Greenstockings and he tell each other stories; they learn to know each other; they feed each other and finally they make love. In the intimacy of the firelight, the two youths laugh together and in this intense personal moment they begin to form one being. As Greenstockings tells Hood a story about caribou, “Hood’s body [is] intense, listening. No one intrudes with an acceptable understanding, and her happiness begins to dance with him” (161-62). In this episode, storytelling is not about content, nor is it about the transmission of information, for Hood is not “understanding a syllable of any word she has ever spoken” (157). The relationship shows us that understanding stories is about discovering the other: sensuously, empathically, listening with the whole body, and not with a separate transcendental “reason.” In this dialogical dance, Hood and Greenstockings learn to accept the ineffable complexity of Other and Stranger, as well as their irreducibility in language. Monologic dualism is overcome and replaced by dialogism, for in their case communication is not about exchanging information between two distinct entities, but about sharing an experience together. It is about including the other into your midst and about letting the stranger in. After all, Hood is invited inside the lodge, and in an explicitly sensual way, he is invited into Greenstockings, for as the final words of their meeting conclude: “Forehead and skin, and lips, and tongues” (177). Obviously, this relationship is not about instrumentalizing the indigenous woman, who here would embody an Other-figure, nor is it about subjecting her into obe- <?page no="213"?> From a Poetics of Collision to a Hermeneutics of Discovery 213 dience. 13 On the contrary, the function of this scene of love is to show that if there is an apparent clash of cultures at a certain level, as this situation of collision trickles down to the level of individuals it transforms into an intimate meeting of beings who meet on equal grounds. In this meeting of entities enacted by dialogism the boundaries of what constitutes the Other shift, thereby transgressing the colonial imposition of meaning and shedding light on the power of the novel to transform collision into discovery. Conclusion: Encountering the Other, Discovering the Stranger The narrative configuration of A Discovery of Strangers juxtaposes history and stories, historical facts and poetic fiction, colonial and traditional knowledge. By interacting with this configuration in the act of reading, the reader is made to perform dialogism. In this context, the reading process is twofold: it consists in unveiling the harmful exclusion of differences while asserting the need for critical dialogue. This dialogical perspective then serves to question the nationalistic narrative of exploration as heroic undertaking. By telling the untold story of sorrow, death, and extinction alongside the official history of exploration, conquest, and settlement, Wiebe not only subverts the national narrative, but he also undermines the hyperseparation of European and indigenous communities as well as that of colonial and traditional knowledge systems. The dialogism that Wiebe weaves into existence allows us to move away from a hyperseparating narrative and to get closer to a dialogical understanding. 13 Here Hood contrasts with other male figures, such as George Back, the Tetsot’ine hunter Broadface, and the Mohawk Michel who all treat Greenstockings violently. <?page no="214"?> Arnaud Barras 214 References Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Beck, Ervin. “Postcolonial Complexity in the Writings of Rudy Wiebe.” Modern Fiction Studies 47 (2001): 855-86. De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. James, William Closson. “‘A Land Beyond Words’: Rudy Wiebe’s A Discovery of Strangers.” Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures. Ed. Jamie S. Scott and Paul Simpson-Housley. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. 71-89. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Pierotti, Raymond John. Indigenous Knowledge, Ecology, and Evolutionary Biology. New York: Routledge, 2011. Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge, 2002. ―――. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993. Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Best of Rilke: 72 Form-True Verse Translations with Facing Originals, Commentary, and Compact Biography. Trans. Walter Arndt. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989. Rose, Deborah Bird. “Indigenous Ecologies and an Ethic of Connection.” Global Ethics and Environment. Ed. Nicholas Low. London: Routledge, 1999. 175-187. Stam, Robert. Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean- Luc Godard. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985. Wiebe, Rudy. A Discovery of Strangers. Toronto: Vintage Books, 1995. Worster, Donald. Nature’s Economy: The Roots of Ecology. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977. <?page no="215"?> Sonophilia / Sonophobia: Sonic Others in the Poetry of Edward Sapir A. Elisabeth Reichel One of the key findings in early visual culture studies is a profound ambivalence toward images, which is intricately tied up with hegemonic conceptions of cultural, racial, and sexual Others. Starting from W. J. T. Mitchell’s diagnosis of iconophilia and iconophobia for visual culture, I argue that recent sound studies yield parallel conclusions with regard to sonic culture, as scholars such as Jonathan Sterne point to a long tradition of writing on sound that is also characterized by attraction to and repulsion of media and sign systems other than written language. On the basis of a theoretical conception of what I term sonophilia and sonophobia, then, this essay asserts that it is precisely the ambivalence toward sound that is at the center of the poetry of anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir. In their treatment of auditory sense perceptions as the Other of written language, Sapir’s poems “Music” and “Zuni” attest to the fact that not only images but notions of sound, too, are shaped by ideological associations embedded in semiotic and sensory oppositions. I In his seminal Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, W. J. T. Mitchell sets out to examine “the way in which differences between the arts are instituted by figures - figures of difference, of discrimination, of judgment”: In suggesting that these judicious discriminations are figurative I do not mean to assert that they are simply false, illusory, or without efficacy. On the Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 32. Ed. Ridvan Askin and Philipp Schweighauser. Tübingen: Narr, 2015. 215-229. <?page no="216"?> A. Elisabeth Reichel 216 contrary, I want to suggest that they are powerful distinctions that effect the way the arts are practiced and understood. [. . .] The differences [. . .] are riddled with all the antithetical values the culture wants to embrace or repudiate: the paragone or debate of poetry and painting is never just a contest between two kinds of signs, but a struggle between body and soul, world and mind, nature and culture. (49) While firmly rejecting simplistic claims of a difference in essence between poetry and painting, Mitchell acknowledges that “there are always a number of differences in effect in a culture which allow it to sort out the distinctive qualities of its ensemble of signs and symbols” (49). Crucially, though, these “literally false” but “figuratively true” distinctions are fraught with value judgments derived from culturally prevalent dichotomies such as body/ soul, world/ mind, nature/ culture. Through a discourse analysis of Nelson Goodman’s, Ernst Gombrich’s, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s, and Edmund Burke’s writing on images, Mitchell explores the tendency in visual culture to construe the image as an Other 1 which is associated with nature (Gombrich); space and stasis (Lessing); irrationality, the feminine, and the primitive (Burke), a key difference being whether this association is celebrated, indicating “iconophilia,” or seen as a threat, leading to “iconophobia” (3, 151 passim). Clearly an iconophobe in this sense, Lessing asserts that to make use of painterly techniques as a poet is “as if a man, with the power and privilege of speech, were to employ the signs which the mutes in a Turkish seraglio had invented to supply the want of a voice” (68). “The tongue, of course, was not the only organ that the mutes in the Turkish seraglio were missing” (155), Mitchell comments pointedly in his essay “Ekphrasis and the Other,” exposing a twofold gesture that associates images with both cultural and sexual Others. Conversely, written and spoken words - the very medium Lessing uses - emerge from this proc- 1 This term, however, is less emphatically used in Iconology and never marked by capitalization. Other is prominent in this essay for two reasons: It offers a convenient shorthand for Mitchell’s core observation that differentiations between one medium and another always come with ideological baggage and “seem[ ] inevitably to fall back into prior questions of value and interest that could only be answered in historical terms” (Iconology 3). Secondly, by lending itself easily to definite and indefinite singular, plural, and gerund forms, the term Other is also able to capture the flexibility and contingency of these processes of differentiation and valuation, which is of great value to this essay’s line of argument. Even more, in its capitalized form, the term hints at the paradox that, despite the large number of Others and Otherings, the respective object of discrimination is never treated as one among others but as the Other in a dyadic relationship between the generic Self and its Other. <?page no="217"?> Sonic Others in the Poetry of Edward Sapir 217 ess as the supreme sign system, suitable to a central European man endowed with heterosexual prowess. Ekphrasis, defined as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (Heffernan 3; qtd. in Mitchell, “Ekphrasis” 152), in fact serves as a key platform for Mitchell, as he turns from describing to explaining processes of medial Othering. For “[t]he answer,” he notes, “lies in the network of ideological associations embedded in the semiotic, sensory, and metaphysical oppositions that ekphrasis is supposed to overcome”: These oppositions [. . .] are neither stable nor scientific [. . .]. They are best understood as [. . .] allegories of power and value disguised as a neutral metalanguage. Their engagement with relations of otherness or alterity is, of course, not determined systematically or a priori, but in specific contexts of pragmatic application. The “otherness” of visual representation from the standpoint of textuality may be anything from a professional competition (the paragone of poet and painter) to a relation of political, disciplinary, or cultural domination in which the “self” is understood to be an active, speaking, seeing subject, while the “other” is projected as a passive, seen, and (usually) silent object. (“Ekphrasis” 156-57) Representations of images coincide with representations of cultural and sexual Others, then, because the same relations of domination that inform the treatment of the latter are projected, in pragmatic contexts, onto “differences between visual and verbal media at the level of signtypes, forms, materials of representation, and institutional traditions” (“Ekphrasis” 161). That images as well as cultural and sexual Others have been frequently construed as particularly natural, for instance, is neither a mere coincidence nor a necessary consequence of essential characteristics but the product of historically and culturally specific conditions that need these Others to be passive, silent, and exploitable objects. Iconophilia and iconophobia, Mitchell shows, express anxieties about merging with an inferiorized Other. On the basis of this visual culture studies account of how the problematics of gender and cultural relations come to manifest themselves in dominant notions of the image, I argue that the field of sound studies, despite having emerged in a climate of shifting emphasis from ideological concerns to material aspects of meaning production, points to an entwinement of discourses of Otherness and media conceptions as well. The result of the complex interplay of cultural alterity and medial alterity in this case amounts to an ambivalence between what I term sonophilia, the fascination with the Otherness of sound and auditory perception, and sonophobia, the rejection of sound and auditory perception as a threat <?page no="218"?> A. Elisabeth Reichel 218 because of their presumed Otherness. To substantiate these claims, I draw on Jonathan Sterne, whose definition of sound studies as a field that interrogates any preconceived knowledge about sound for its cultural and historical functions, parallels Mitchell’s early understanding of the epistemological and political potential of visual culture studies. The third part of this essay analyzes Edward Sapir’s poetry. Sapir (1884-1939), a student of Franz Boas at Columbia University and the mentor of Benjamin Lee Whorf at Yale, played a central role in both the formation of cultural anthropology and the early development of linguistic anthropology. What is far less known is that he is also the author of over two hundred poems, a large number of which were published in such renowned magazines as Poetry, The Dial, The Nation, and The New Republic. Focusing on two poems out of an oeuvre that is characterized by a sustained interest in sonic phenomena, auditory perception, and musico-literary intermediality, I probe the dynamics of an ambivalent relationship toward sound. Whereas “Music” (1925) thematizes and imitates the effects of a symphony orchestra’s musical sound on its listeners, the poem “Zuni” (1926) stages a confrontation with the sounds of another, “primitive” culture. My analysis shows that the two poems represent two different strategies for “a man, with the power and privilege of speech” (Lessing 68), of how to deal with sounds, the “semiotic ‘others,’ those rival, alien modes of representation” (Mitchell, “Ekphrasis” 156): appropriation and domestication on the one side and rigorous exclusion on the other. II While in the early 2000s studies of sonic culture and auditory culture often covered roughly the same area of inquiry, the name sound studies has recently established itself, with editors now using it self-confidently to entitle large anthologies such as Sterne’s The Sound Studies Reader (2012), Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld’s The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012), and Michael Bull’s Sound Studies (2013). Within this “interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival” (Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations” 2), Sterne’s work is part of an extensive branch that explores the development of hearing cultures and the history of audio technology. It is grounded on the premise that “there is no knowledge of sound that comes from outside culture” (6) and that, “[b]y analyzing both sonic practices and the discourses and institutions that describe them, it [the field of sound <?page no="219"?> Sonic Others in the Poetry of Edward Sapir 219 studies] redescribes what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world” (2). Reviewing recent writing on sound, Sterne compiles a list of sensory oppositions that are ritually cited to idealize sound, while denigrating vision and, by extension, written language: - hearing is spherical, vision is directional; - hearing immerses its subject, vision offers a perspective; - sounds come to us, but vision travels to its object; - hearing is concerned with interiors, vision is concerned with surfaces; - hearing involves physical contact with the outside world, vision requires distance from it; - hearing places us inside an event, seeing gives us a perspective on the event; - hearing tends toward subjectivity, vision tends toward objectivity; - hearing brings us into the living world, sight moves us toward atrophy and death; - hearing is about affect, vision is about intellect; - hearing is a primarily temporal sense, vision is a primarily spatial sense; - hearing is a sense that immerses us in the world, vision is a sense that removes us from it. (The Audible Past 15) Sterne calls this list “the audiovisual litany” because he sees it as being clearly derived from Christian dogma: It is a restatement of the spirit/ letter distinction, with the spirit being living and life-giving, leading to salvation, and the letter being dead and inert, leading to damnation. Since auditory perception is associated with the former and thought to contribute to the soul’s salvation, it holds an elevated position (The Audible Past 15-16). 2 Sterne thus traces an often-cited set of seemingly innocent sensory oppositions back to a specific context of pragmatic application, in which they were imbued with meanings and values to reinforce the preeminence of Christian spiritualism. In light of Mitchell’s findings, though, it also seems worth asking whether, in a different pragmatic context, this contingent process might not evoke sonophobic sensations, that is, the repudiation of sound precisely because of its immersiveness, directionlessness, physical immediacy, and emotional intimacy. In fact, Sterne’s reading of this list as sonophilic serves a political function, too, namely to put in their proper place the large number of scholars who at the end of the twentieth cen- 2 For a more comprehensive account of the Christian spiritualist origins of the audiovisual litany, see Sterne’s “The Theology of Sound.” <?page no="220"?> A. Elisabeth Reichel 220 tury felt the need to “salvage” sound. 3 Sterne’s critique is firstly targeted at Walter J. Ong and his divide between oral culture and modern, literate culture, in support of which the audiovisual litany is cited as evidence for a distinctly alienating disposition of literate society. 4 Yet one only needs to shift the focus slightly, from Ong to the second major proponent of the orality/ literacy divide, Marshall McLuhan, to find confirmation that oral society, characterized by the predominance of hearing and its supposed immersive, directionless, physical, and affective nature, can just as well become a site of fear and terror: For McLuhan, “[t]error is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time” (Gutenberg Galaxy 32). “Until WRITING was invented,” he declares elsewhere, “we lived in acoustic space, where the Eskimo now lives: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark in the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror” (“Five Fingers” 207). Again, ambivalences toward Others are reproduced while referring to medial and sensory oppositions. Note that McLuhan’s demarcation of a terrifying “boundless, directionless, horizonless” space of orality comes with cultural discrimination and assigns cultural Others, such as “the Eskimo,” to a realm that “we” inhabited until progress took place. Thus, not only sound and auditory perception are placed in a prior stage of human development but also people who are thought to “still” live in “acoustic space.” In other words, while defining orality as the preliterate stage in the evolution of human society, theorists of the orality/ literacy dyad move spaces that they mark as “oral” into temporal antecedence and, in the process, turn their inhabitants into primordial Others. As Johannes Fabian has shown in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, such a fabrication of temporal differences out of spatial distinctions is a practice commonly used in the social sciences 3 The field of sound studies has certainly gained much momentum from scholars deploring the fact that “the epistemological status of hearing has come a poor second to that of vision” (Bull and Back 1). However, this longing for a heightened awareness and appreciation of auditory perception is far from new. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, for instance, it provided impetus to R. Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape Project and acoustic ecology, “the study of the effects of the acoustic environment [. . .] on the physical responses or behavioral characteristics of creatures living within it” (Schafer 271). Since the publication and translation of Michel Chion’s groundbreaking Audio- Vision, film scholars have also strongly promoted research into sound, even laying claim to the origins of sound studies as a result (Altman 4). 4 This argument from phenomenological characteristics of the visual and auditory sensoria to psychological traits and the generic makeup of different societies is articulated most clearly - and simplistically - in Ong’s study Orality and Literacy. <?page no="221"?> Sonic Others in the Poetry of Edward Sapir 221 to negate the coeval existence of different cultures and to perpetuate evolutionary racist thinking under such concepts as cultural relativism. Let me conclude this section by quoting at length a passage from Sterne that captures what is at stake when attention is paid to instances of medial Othering, which require considering cultural and medial alterity together rather than as isolated objects of investigation, to be analyzed in different fields of research: It is time we left aside antiquated notions of sensation and cultural difference and built a global history and anthropology of communication without a psychosocial, developmental concept such as orality. We must construct new studies of early media and new ethnographies that do not posit the ascendency of the White, Christian West as the meaning of history. In the process, we must re-read our own historical and anthropological archives, but it is also time that we reach beyond them. (“Theology of Sound” 222) While this essay is content with re-reading given accounts and does not reach beyond existing archives to generate new media studies and new ethnographies, it is also informed by the belief that such new archives are ultimately necessary. It is further written in the conviction that not only historical and anthropological archives but the annals of literature, too, offer influential accounts and a significant testing ground for modes of sense perception and medial experience. III After moving from Mitchell’s diagnosis of iconophilia and iconophobia to Sterne’s audiovisual litany and what I have called sonophilia and sonophobia, the third part of this paper analyzes Edward Sapir’s poetry, specifically, its representation of sound and sonic media. Take “Music” as an example: MUSIC “What is our life? ” profoundly gesturing, “Let us forget! ” they said, unanimous. - The strings are the most chastely amorous Of dreamers, ʼtis the watery flutes that sing Of the lily-footed girls, the oboes bring The mountain sleep to the voluptuous, Romancing horns. Round this oblivious Desire drums threaten and the trumpets ring. <?page no="222"?> A. Elisabeth Reichel 222 Who are these forty gentlemen of toys, Graver than dolls, graver than pirate boys? Who are these shining gentlemen of brief Commotion? What is their intense belief? - “Now what is life? ” Take then the dream of joys! “Let us forget! ” Take but the lilt of grief! At the most general level, the poem portrays an acoustic experience as pure, unadulterated pleasure. Sounds of strings, flutes, oboes, and horns let the poetic persona escape from questions of meaning, offering instead a “dream of joys” and the comforts of oblivion, which even remain untouched as “drums threaten” and “trumpets ring.” The passage from a meaning-centered existence, with its “profound gestur[es]” and weighty concerns, into this untroubled, sonic realm is signaled by a brief exchange of words, in which the question about life’s meaning is answered with a forceful command to let it fall into oblivion. Importantly, “Let us forget! ” includes and is directed at the reader as well, who then, from the next line onwards, is presented with a literary text that not only thematizes but also imitates an acoustic experience through “verbal music” (Steven Paul Scher) or, to use Werner Wolf’s framework, “evocation” (“(Inter)mediality”) and “imaginary content analogies” (The Musicalization of Fiction passim). By attributing imaginary contents to the sound, for instance, through the metaphorical language of “The strings are the most chastely amorous / Of dreamers” and “the oboes bring / The mountain sleep to the voluptuous, / Romancing horns,” the text tries to evoke the effect that the sonic experience has on the persona in the reader. Because of the accumulation of images of sleep, this effect may be described as a pleasant drowsiness or somnolence, yet the very pervasiveness of the imagery suggests that the failure of descriptive language in the face of it is part of the point. However, only because the poem is unable to render the sonic experience without recourse to figurative language, the “prowess” of written words is by no means diminished. Quite on the contrary, precisely because of their ability to avail themselves of figurative language as well as descriptive language, written words provide a powerful medium that - in the logic of the poem at least - is capable of rendering, and in this way co-opting, the effects of sound despite their resistance to description and “unruliness.” In fact, as it turns out, written language is also able to do so in a very succinct manner, by use of merely three words: As the imaginary content analogies unfold, it becomes clear that “they,” the “unanimous” voices in the second line of the poem, are the “amorous” strings, the “watery flutes,” <?page no="223"?> Sonic Others in the Poetry of Edward Sapir 223 the “voluptuous, / Romancing horns,” and so forth, and the command “Let us forget! ” a very concise rendering of their overall sound. Given the binarism between sonophilia and sonophobia that I just outlined in the preceding section, it may be tempting to put this poem in the box with the sonophiles, who are fascinated with the immersiveness and affectiveness of sound while at no point granting it equal status. Yet, crucially, what is depicted here is not sound but music, Western, classical music, to be precise, with “these forty gentlemen of toys, / Graver than dolls, graver than pirate boys” of course forming a typical symphony orchestra with its woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings sections. While all music is sound, it is important to bear in mind that not all sound is music and that music requires by necessity a structuring of sound. Even John Cage’s most iconoclastic piece, 4’33’’, consists of three movements, during which all instrumental sounds are suppressed by the instruction tacet for four minutes and thirty-three seconds sharp. 5 Further, as thinkers such as Jacques Attali have compellingly shown, music has at all times served political functions, even, and especially, when it was taken to be exempt from processes of meaning construction. It is sound structured to fit the needs of a power system, first of all, its need to establish order and a sense of community by signaling that an integrated society is possible: Everywhere [in music] codes analyze, mark, restrain, train, repress, and channel the primitive sounds of language, of the body, of tools, of objects, of the relations to self and others. All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality. (Attali 6) If, as Attali argues, music is the appropriation and domestication of sound, symbolizing the totalitarian ideal of a harmonic society in control of its Others, Sapir’s poem and its celebration of classical music cannot be read as sonophilic; for it is the vanquishing and mastering of sound that is celebrated here. 6 5 While the performance of the piece is usually strictly limited to this length of time, the score contains a note by Cage saying that “the work may be performed by any instrumentalist(s) and the movements may last any lengths of time” (20). Almost needless to say, though, only because the lengths of the piece’s three movements are open to variation, this does not mean that 4’33’’ permits unstructured sound. The mere fact that the piece and its movements are marked by a beginning and an ending implies that each sound (and silence) that occurs during the performance is subject to a temporal regime. 6 Note, too, that classical orchestral music, the only kind of music actually featured in Sapir’s poem on “Music,” is often singled out in writing on the politics of music as most <?page no="224"?> A. Elisabeth Reichel 224 Another strategy to reinforce superiority and control over sound and to assert, as it were, one’s position as “a man, with the power and privilege of speech” (Lessing 68), is represented in the poem “Zuni,” which stages a direct confrontation with sound outside the realm of Western, classical music. The poem was written to Sapir’s peer and friend Ruth Fulton Benedict before she went on a field trip to study the Zuni, a Pueblo culture then considered primitive by anthropologists. ZUNI To R.F.B. I send you this. Through the monotony Of mumbling melody, the established fall And rise of the slow dreaming ritual, Through the dry glitter of the desert sea And sharpness of the mesa, keep the flowing Of your spirit, in many branching ways! Be running mirrors to the colored maze, Not pool enchanted nor a water slowing. Hear on the wing, see in a flash, retreat! - Beauty is brightest when the eye is fleet. The priests are singing softly on the sand, And the four colored points and zenith stand; The desert crawls and leaps, the eagle flies. Put wax into your ears and close your eyes. The poem issues a clear warning against more than fleeting exposure to sound. While its persona draws a distinct line between the Zuni and the addressee, circumscribing “the monotony / Of mumbling melody,” “the slow dreaming ritual,” and “the dry glitter of the desert sea,” and setting them off against the vigorous “flowing / Of your spirit, in many branching ways,” it attributes to sound the potential to blur this boundary by “enchant[ing]” or “slow[ing]” the spirit’s flow. Prolonged exposure, it is assumed, would bring the addressee indistinguishably close to the “softly” singing Zuni priests and the slowly “crawl[ing]” desert, that is, to the side opposed to the dynamism of the creative mind. “Retreat! ” representative of music’s oppressive bent. According to R. Murray Schafer, for instance, orchestral music shows “an imperialistic bias” (109), which reached its peak in Wagnerian music, a music that “constantly threatened to drown the singers” and was “designed alternately to thrill, exalt and crush swelling metropolitan audiences” (110). Schafer thus suggests that orchestral music not only consists of “codes [that] analyze, mark, restrain, train, repress, and channel” (Attali 6) certain sounds but also possesses the power to “drown,” “crush,” and completely annihilate others. <?page no="225"?> Sonic Others in the Poetry of Edward Sapir 225 the persona therefore emphatically commands. Only if sensory experience takes place “on the wing” and “in a flash,” and auditory impressions are ultimately excluded, the mind continues to flow “in many branching ways,” as “running mirrors” to the primitive Other, mimetically describing and observing from a distance rather than merging with it. The protective measure, then, that is proposed in the concluding line of the poem, to “[p]ut wax into your ears,” is inspired by the myth of Odysseus and the Sirens, one of the earliest literary manifestations of sonophobia. Odysseus, as the Homeric tale famously relates, urged his sailors to bind him to the mast and to put wax into their ears so that the Sirens’ song would not seduce them to go astray and shipwreck. Sapir’s “Zuni” as well as this myth presume notions of hearing as immersive, as physically and emotionally intimate and immediate, to treat sound as an existential threat which must be warded off. Even more, they warn against sonophilic sensations, that is, against feeling attracted to sounds and thus being deceived into overlooking their threat. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the spatial setting of the two texts, which in each case juxtaposes “brightest” “[b]eauty” and enticing sensory perceptions with signs of imminent danger. While the singing Zuni priests are encircled by eagles and placed in a desert that “crawls and leaps,” the Sirens in Homer “enchant all with their clear song” while “[a]round them there is a great heap of the bones / of rotting men, and the skin shrivels up around / these bones” (234). Written and spoken words, on the other side, the signs through which both Homer’s myth and Sapir’s poem are commonly perceived, appear as a safeguard against the threat of sound, being instrumental in the attempts of both Odysseus and the persona of “Zuni” to preserve focused, rational thinking in their companions. In this way, sound comes to represent an Other of written and spoken language, which has to be kept at a distance together with the cultural Others who are accused of producing it: the Zuni and the Sirens. 7 In fact, in one of his many letters to Benedict, Sapir himself comments on “Zuni” and its intertextual reference to Homer: “You see I am 7 Jon Elster’s Ulysses and the Sirens offers an interesting addendum to my argument here, by focusing on Odysseus’s reaction to the Sirens’ sound, that is, his request to be bound to the mast. Importantly, this act serves as the primal scene for a theory of “imperfect rationality” in Elster’s study. It is thus shown that the action that is able to oppose the sound of the Sirens is directed by rational thought. When connecting this argument, then, to the claim that written and spoken language function as counterforces to the Sirens, too, it can be argued that this is because they are considered to be governed by rationality as well. <?page no="226"?> A. Elisabeth Reichel 226 warning you against the Desert Siren. It would be terrible to have you come back overpunctuated with Oh and Ah like any well-behaved acolyte of the Santa Fé school” (Sapir, Letter). Although the letter was obviously written in a humorous vein, it testifies to the poem’s underlying notion that auditory perception is particularly susceptible to foreign influences. The sounds of “the Desert Siren” are assumed to be able to turn someone into a “well-behaved acolyte” who serves the priests on what is construed as “the wrong side.” One crucial difference between Sapir’s letter and “Zuni” remains, though: While this side is identified with a locality and a school of writing in the former, 8 the latter ostracizes a Pueblo people. IV By way of conclusion, I want to deliver on the promise of this essay’s title to provide insight into the “sonic Others” in Sapir’s poetry: Firstly, and maybe most commonsensically, these “sonic Others” are the groups of people that are depicted as avid producers of sound, such as the Zuni and the Sirens. Sound, however, as I claim in this essay, appears itself as an Other, which evokes either fascination or fear and is opposed to written language. After all, “Zuni”’s warning against sound comes in written words: “I send you this,” its opening states explicitly, rendering the poem’s mediality as a written, sent, and read text part of its indictment against sound from the outset. Analogies between representations of cultural Others and medial Others are not coincidental but result from the projection of dominant power relations onto basic semiotic and sensory oppositions, which then inform the treatment of different media as well as forms of cultural discrimination. Hence the injunction that children should not be heard - to use Mitchell once again - is transferable from children to women to colonized subjects to images (“Ekphrasis” 162), and to sounds, I would add, unless they have been structured to adhere to Western musical standards. To be as clear as possible, this is not to suggest that silencing marginalized groups of people is qualitatively the same as suppressing the sonic or the iconic. To be sure, it is not. My point is rather an interrelatedness between the two, which generates practices of Othering that feed back into each other: With 8 The reference to the “Santa Fé school” remains unclear in Sapir’s letter. As one of several possible interpretations, it can be read as alluding to Susan Shelby Magoffin’s influential diary Down the Santa Fe Trail, in which Magoffin narrates - in a style punctuated with “Oh” and “Ah” - her travels on the Santa Fe Trail in the late 1860s. <?page no="227"?> Sonic Others in the Poetry of Edward Sapir 227 sound itself constructed as alien and threatening, shutting out and shutting up the oppressed becomes an even more urgent task and absolute silence of Others a social ideal. <?page no="228"?> A. Elisabeth Reichel 228 References Altman, Rick. “Sound Studies: A Field Whose Time Has Come.” Iris 27 (1999): 3-4. Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Bull, Michael, ed. Sound Studies. London: Routledge, 2013. ――― and Les Back. “Introduction: Into Sound.” The Auditory Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg, 2003. 1-18. Cage, John. 4’33’’. 1952. New York: Henmar, 2012. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Elster, Jon. Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality. London: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Heffernan, James. Museum of Words: The Politics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Homer. The Odyssey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Boston: Roberts, 1887. Magoffin, Susan Shelby. Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico: The Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846-1847. Ed. Stella M. Drumm. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. McLuhan, Marshall. “Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath.” Explorations in Communication: An Anthology. Eds. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan. Beacon Hill: Beacon, 1960. 207-08. ―――. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Ekphrasis and the Other.” Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 151-81. ―――. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Pinch, Trevor and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Sapir, Edward. Letter to Ruth Fulton Benedict. 26 August 1924. MS. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington. ―――. “Music.” The Measure 47 (1925): 11. <?page no="229"?> Sonic Others in the Poetry of Edward Sapir 229 ―――. “Zuni.” Poetry 27.4 (1926): 18. Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester: Destiny, 1994. Scher, Steven Paul. Verbal Music in German Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. ―――. “Sonic Imaginations.” The Sound Studies Reader. Ed. Jonathan Sterne. London: Routledge, 2012. 1-18. ―――, ed. The Sound Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2012. ―――. “The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality.” Canadian Journal of Communication 36 (2011): 207-25. Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. ―――. “(Inter)mediality and the Study of Literature.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.3 (2011): 1-9. http: / / docs.lib.purdue.edu/ clcweb/ vol13/ iss3/ 2/ (20 January 2014). <?page no="231"?> Notes on Contributors R IDVAN A SKIN is Postdoc in American and General Literatures at the University of Basel. He is co-editor of Aesthetics in the 21st Century, a special issue of Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism (2014). Differential Narratology, his first book, is forthcoming in 2016. He is the current treasurer and SAHS delegate of the Swiss Association for North American Studies. T HOMAS A USTENFELD is Professor of American Literature at the University of Fribourg. His teaching and research are focused on regional American literatures - the West and the South - as well as on American poetry. His latest publication is an edited volume, Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools: New Interpretations and Transatlantic Contexts (2015). A RNAUD B ARRAS is a PhD candidate at the University of Geneva, where he works as a research and teaching assistant. His research focuses on postcolonial representations of the relationship between organism and environment. His thesis draws on ecology, anthropology, and reader-response theory to study metafictional representations of the organism-environment process. D USTIN B REITENWISCHER is Assistant Professor (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) for North American Studies at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. In 2015, he received his PhD from Freie Universität Berlin. In his dissertation Die Kunst dazwischen zu sein he developed a theory of twentieth and twenty-first century American artworks as form-giving agents for the self-expression of aesthetic experience. M ICHAEL G. F ESTL has studied Philosophy in Munich, St. Gallen, and Chicago and graduated with a PhD thesis on the intertwining of justice <?page no="232"?> 232 Notes on Contributors theory and epistemology. He currently serves as permanent Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St. Gallen. W INFRIED F LUCK is Professor emeritus of American Culture at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of Freie Universität Berlin. His books include Inszenierte Wirklichkeit: Der amerikanische Realismus 1865-1900 (1992) and Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans (1997). He is Co-Director of the “Futures of American Studies”-Institute at Dartmouth College. His most recent book publication is American Studies Today: New Research Agendas, ed. with E. Redling, S. Sielke, and H. Zapf (2014). T EA J ANKOVIC studied Philosophy and English at the University of Basel, the University of Fribourg, and Harvard University. She is a PhD candidate at the Department of General and Comparative Literature at the University of Fribourg with a Swiss National Science Foundation stipend. She is also an associated member of University of Basel’s Doctoral Program “Literary Studies.” S ÄMI L UDWIG is professeur des universités at the Université Haute-Alsace in Mulhouse, France. He got his education at the Universtity of Bern and is the author of CONCRETE LANGUAGE (1996), which analyzes intercultural communication in Maxine Hong Kingston and Ishmael Reed, and Cognitive Realism: The Pragmatist Paradigm in American Literary Realism (2002). Together with Rocío Davis, he edits Contributions to Asian American Literary Studies, the only European book series on Asian American cultural studies (LIT Verlag, Germany). V IOLA M ARCHI is a PhD candidate at the University of Bern and is currently working on her dissertation on “Contemporary Literature and the Ethics of the Impersonal,” in which she approaches philosophical and literary conceptualizations of community and their ethical underpinnings via the concept of impersonality. N OËLLE M C A FEE is Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. Her writings include Democracy and the Political Unconscious (2008); Julia Kristeva <?page no="233"?> Notes on Contributors 233 (2003); Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship (2000); and numerous articles and book chapters. She is co-chair of the Public Philosophy Network and co-editor of the Kettering Review. K ATHARINA M ETZ holds a Master’s degree from the John F. Kennedy Institute at Freie Universität Berlin and has been a PhD Candidate at the Graduate School of North American Studies (Freie Universität Berlin) since October 2013. In her dissertation project, she analyzes representations of altruism in late nineteenth-century American literary realism. A. E LISABETH R EICHEL is a PhD candidate in American and General Literatures at the University of Basel. Her thesis is entitled “Sonic and Visual Others in the Poetry of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead.” She has published and presented on the political functions of music and Richard Powers’s novels. P HILIPP S CHWEIGHAUSER is Associate Professor and Head of American and General Literatures at the University of Basel. He is the author of The Noises of American Literature, 1890-1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics (2006) and co-editor of several essay collections, among them Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo (2010) and Haunted Narratives: Life Writing in an Age of Trauma (2013). He is the current President of the Swiss Association for North American Studies. P ATRICK V INCENT is Professor of English and American literature at the University of Neuchâtel. In addition to his research in the field of British Romanticism and Anglo-Swiss relations, he has co-edited American Poetry: Walt Whitman to the Present (2006) and published articles on James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Louis Agassiz, and Gary Snyder. <?page no="235"?> Index of Names Adorno, Theodor W., 15, 106, 121, 130, 175-176, 178, 183-184, 189 Agassiz, Louis, 176n, 179 Arendt, Hannah, 18, 87-94, 96- 98 Aristotle, 11, 88-90, 98, 145 Assmann, Aleida, 112n Attali, Jacques, 223 Atterton, Peter, 146 Augustine, 65 Austen, Jane, 68, 130 Badiou, Alain, 152n, 155 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 19, 36, 199- 200 Barthes, Roland, 54 Batailles, Georges, 153n Beck, Ervin, 196 Benedict, Ruth Fulton, 224, 226 Benjamin, Walter, 106 Bennett, Christopher, 64n Berlin, Isaiah, 92 Bernard-Donals, Michael F., 145 Bidart, Frank, 60, 63 Bijsterveld, Karin, 218 Bishop, Elizabeth, 67-69 Blackwood, Caroline, 64, 66, 69, 70 Blanchot, Maurice, 143, 144, 148, 151, 152, 153n, 155 Boas, Franz, 218 Brecht, Bertolt, 27n Britzolakis, Christina, 82n Brontë, Charlotte, 68 Brown, Charles Brockden, 177 Bruner, Jerome, 45 Bryant, William Cullen, 177, 189 Buber, Martin, 51, 53 Bull, Michael, 218 Burke, Edmund, 216 Burroughs, William S., 68 Butler, E. H., 12n Butler, Judith, 121, 124, 127 Cable, George Washington, 50n Cady, Edwin H., 167 Cage, John, 223 Calarco, Matthew, 146 Callicott, J. Baird, 189 Capote, Truman, 63 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 88, 98 Catherine the Great, 35n Chion, Michel, 220n Cohen, Michael, 188, 189 Cohn, Dorrit, 168-169 Cole, Thomas, 176-179, 189 Cooper, James Fenimore, 178, 179 Cornell, Drucilla, 87, 88, 91, 98 Critchley, Simon, 147n, 148, 151-152, 155 Cronon, William, 189 Darwin, Charles, 112n, 165n Daugherty, Sarah B., 170n-171n Davidson, Donald, 131 Day, Brian J., 177, 181 De Man, Paul, 11, 205n Debord, Guy, 43n, 93 Derrida, Jacques, 11, 12, 146 <?page no="236"?> Index of Names 236 Descartes, René, 149, 150 Dewey, John, 79, 109n Dickens, Charles, 130 Diderot, Denis, 27, 35-36 Didion, Joan, 63 Dobson, Joanne, 14 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 23, 31-34, 36, 106n Douglass, Frederick, 24 Dreiser, Theodore, 137-138 Eichmann, Adolf, 93 Eldridge, Richard, 23 Eliot, George, 130 Ellison, Ralph, 130 Elster, Jon, 225n Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 13, 41, 51, 176, 178-180 Engel, Claire Eliane, 187 Engelmann, Paul, 25-26 Esposito, Roberto, 144 Fabian, Johannes, 220 Faulkner, William, 53n Felski, Rita, 135n Fiske, John, 165 Fluck, Winfried, 77n, 78-79, 109n, 160n, 167 Fontane, Theodor, 108 Forbes, James, 175, 176, 180 Foucault, Michel, 60, 168, 169 Franzen, Jonathan, 108, 130 Frege, Gottlob, 31 Freud, Sigmund, 60, 62, 87, 88, 91, 98 Fried, Michael, 23-25, 27-28, 31-34, 37 Gifford, Terry, 189 Ginsberg, Allen, 62 Gombrich, Ernst, 216 Goodman, Nelson, 216 Grosz, Elizabeth, 82n Guattari, Félix, 16-17 Habermas, Jürgen, 11, 13, 106- 107, 125-130, 145 Hagberg, Garry L., 23-24 Hamilton, Ian, 68, 70 Hampe, Michael, 105n Hardwick, Elizabeth, 64-69 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 166n- 167n Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 145 Heidegger, Martin, 76, 80, 144, 145 Hobbes, Thomas, 92, 102, 145- 146 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 23 Holquist, Michael, 199 Homer, 88, 225-226 Honneth, Axel, 107-109, 125- 127, 129-136 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 67 Horkheimer, Max, 121, 130 Howells, William Dean, 17, 19, 41-42, 46-49, 159-163, 165n- 171 Hugo, Victor, 130 Husserl, Edmund, 147, 155 Ickstadt, Heinz, 77 Iser, Wolfgang, 80, 82-83, 121, 122-124, 134 James, Henry, 17, 41-42, 49-55, 68, 73-83, 120, 130, 168-169 James, William Closson, 211 James, William, 17, 41-47, 49- 50, 52-55, 96, 165n Joas, Hans, 126, 127-128 Johnson, Mark, 45 Julber, Eric, 189n Kant, Immanuel, 29, 90, 92, 102n, 145, 152, 176, 177n Kristeva, Julia, 18, 92-98 Kuhn, Thomas, 163, 165 <?page no="237"?> Index of Names 237 Lacan, Jacques, 122, 124 Lakoff, George, 45 Laskin, David, 64 Lessing, Ephraim, 216 Levinas, Emmanuel, 11, 12, 13, 16, 18, 143, 145-155 Lingis, Alphonso, 143 Locke, John, 102 Lowell, Harriett, 64, 66 Lowell, Robert, 17, 59-70 Lowell, Sheridan, 64 Ludwig, Sämi, 165n Lugowski, Clemens, 17, 73, 75- 76 Lukács, Georg, 106, 125-126 Lyell, Charles, 179 Lyotard, Jean-François, 11 Magoffin, Susan Shalby, 226n Mailer, Norman, 63 Marder, Michael, 147n Maritain, Jacques, 154 McLuhan, Marshall, 220 McWhirter, David, 74 Mead, George Herbert, 127-128, 131, 133, 136 Melville, Herman, 12-14, 120 Menninghaus, Winfried, 75-76 Middlebrook, Diane, 62 Miller, Elaine, 94 Miller, J. Hillis, 15-16 Mitchell, W. J. T., 20, 215-219, 221, 226, Muir, John, 19, 175-176, 179- 190 Nabokov, Vladimir, 15 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 143, 144, 145n Nash, Roderick, 189 Neal, John, 15 Nelson, Michael P., 187 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 42 Nussbaum, Martha, 11, 14, 64n, 120 Oliver, Kelly, 98 Ong, Walter J., 220 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 165n Peperzak, Adriaan T., 153n Pericles, 88 Philippon, Daniel, 187 Piaget, Jean, 45-46 Pinch, Trevor, 218 Planck, Max, 89 Plath, Sylvia, 64 Plato, 88-90, 101, 106, 115, 145 Plessner, Helmut, 122 Plumwood, Val, 19, 197n, 198- 200, 202n Posnock, Ross, 24 Rancière, Jacques, 12 Rawls, John, 18, 102-106, 111, 144 Rich, Adrienne, 69 Ricœur, Paul, 11, 15 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 209, 210 Rohr, Susanne, 165n Rorty, Richard, 104n, 114n Rose, Deborah, 198 Rosen, Nathan, 34n Rosenthal, M. L., 60-61 Roth, Philip, 105, 108, 113n, 114, 130 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 176 Ruskin, John, 19, 175-178, 180- 183, 185-190 Sandel, Michael, 144 Sapir, Edward, 20, 215, 218, 221, 223-226 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 150 Schafer, R. Murray, 220n, 224n Schlaffer, Heinz, 76, 78n Schlagintweit, Adolf, 185n Schlagintweit, Hermann, 185n <?page no="238"?> Index of Names 238 Sealey, Kris, 147n Sebald, W. G., 24 Seltzer, Mark, 168-169 Sen, Amartya, 102n, 113n, Sexton, Anne, 60 Shakespeare, William, 89 Snodgrass, W. D., 60 Stafford, Jean, 70 Stein, Gertrude, 44n Steinle, Friedrich, 110 Sterne, Jonathan, 215, 218-221 Stevens, Wallace, 46-47 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 15 Symonds, John Addington, 161 Tate, Allen, 62 Taylor, Charles, 126 Thomas, Lis, 151n Thoreau, Henry David, 178 Tolstoy, Leo, 162 Tompkins, Jane, 160n Trachtenberg, Alan, 167 Turner, Frank Miller, 112n Turner, Frederick Jackson, 107 Twain, Mark, 187n Tyndall, John, 175, 176, 179- 181, 185n Veeder, William, 74n Verweyst, Markus, 129 Vidal, Gore, 63 Wagner, Richard, 224n Wakoski, Diane, 69 Wall, Jeff, 25 Warner, Susan, 14 Watkins, Christopher, 151n- 152n Weber, Max, 122, 125 Weil, Simone, 148, 152, 154 Westphal, Merold, 150 Whitman, Walt, 186 Whitney, Josiah, 175, 176, 178- 180 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 218 Wiebe, Rudy, 19, 195-197, 199- 205, 207, 209-213 Williams, Raymond, 121, 123 Williams, William Carlos, 62 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 12, 17, 23-34, 37 Wolf, Werner, 222 Wordsworth, William, 176 Worster, Daniel, 205n Yenser, Stephen, 70 Zola, Émile, 130 <?page no="239"?> Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature (SPELL) Edited by The Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (SAUTE) General Editor: Lukas Erne Already published: 1 Anthony Mortimer (ed.) Contemporary Approaches to Narrative 1984, 129 Seiten, €[D] 16,- ISBN 978-3-87808-841-7 2 Richard Waswo (ed.) On Poetry and Poetics 1985, 212 Seiten, €[D] 21,- ISBN 978-3-87808-842-4 3 Udo Fries (ed.) The Structure of Texts 1987, 264 Seiten, €[D] 26,- ISBN 978-3-87808-843-1 4 Neil Forsyth (ed.) Reading Contexts 1988, 198 Seiten, €[D] 21,- ISBN 978-3-87808-844-8 5 Margaret Bridges (ed.) On Strangeness 1990, 239 Seiten, €[D] 23,- ISBN 978-3-8233-4680-7 6 Balz Engler (ed.) Writing & Culture 1990, 253 Seiten, €[D] 24,- ISBN 978-3-8233-4681-4 7 Andreas Fischer (ed.) Repetition 1994, 268 Seiten, €[D] 34,- ISBN 978-3-8233-4682-1 8 Peter Hughes / Robert Rehder (eds.) Imprints & Re-visions The Making of the Literary Text, 1759-1818 1995, 241 Seiten, €[D] 34,- ISBN 978-3-8233-4683-8 9 Werner Senn (ed.) Families 1996, 282 Seiten, €[D] 36,- ISBN 978-3-8233-4684-5 10 John G. Blair / Reinhold Wagnleitner (eds.) Empire American Studies Selected papers from the bi-national conference of the Swiss and Austrian Associations for American Studies at the Salzburg Seminar, November 1996 1997, 275 Seiten, €[D] 36,- ISBN 978-3-8233-4685-2 11 Peter Halter (ed.) Performance 1998, 226 Seiten, €[D] 36,- ISBN 978-3-8233-4686-9 12 Fritz Gysin (ed.) Apocalypse 2000, 130 Seiten, €[D] 29,- ISBN 978-3-8233-4687-6 13 Lukas Erne / Guillemette Bolens (eds.) The Limits of Textuality 2000, 204 Seiten, €[D] 34,- ISBN 978-3-8233-4688-3 14 Martin Heusser / Gudrun Grabher (eds.) American Foundational Myths 2002, 224 Seiten, €[D] 39,- ISBN 978-3-8233-4689-0 <?page no="240"?> 15 Frances Ilmberger / Alan Robinson (eds.) Globalisation 2002, 193 Seiten, €[D] 39,- ISBN 978-3-8233-4690-6 16 Beverly Maeder (ed.) Representing Realities Essays on American Literature, Art and Culture 2003, 228 Seiten, €[D] 39,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6040-7 17 David Spurr / Cornelia Tschichold (eds.) The Space of English 2004, 322 Seiten, €[D] 58,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6122-0 18 Robert Rehder / Patrick Vincent (eds.) American Poetry Whitman to the Present 2006, 238 Seiten, €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6271-5 19 Balz Engler / Lucia Michalcak (eds.) Cultures in Contact 2007, 210 Seiten, €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6272-2 20 Deborah L. Madsen (ed.) American Aesthetics 2007, 241 Seiten, €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6372-9 21 Martin Heusser / Andreas Fischer / Andreas H. Jucker (eds.) Mediality / Intermediality 2008, 170 Seiten, €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6457-3 22 Indira Ghose / Denis Renevey (eds.) The Construction of Textual Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Literature 2009, 222 Seiten, €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6520-4 23 Thomas Austenfeld / Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (eds.) Writing American Women 2009, 232 Seiten, €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6521-1 24 Karen Junod / Didier Maillat (eds.) Performing the Self 2010, 196 Seiten, €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6613-3 25 Guillemette Bolens / Lukas Erne (eds.) Medieval and Early Modern Authorship 2011, 323 Seiten, €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6667-6 26 Deborah L. Madsen / Mario Klarer (eds.) The Visual Culture of Modernism 2011, 265 Seiten, €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6673-7 27 Annette Kern-Stähler / David Britain (eds.) English on the Move Mobilities in Literature and Language 2012, 171 Seiten, €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6739-0 28 Rachel Falconer / Denis Renevey (eds.) Medieval and Early Modern Literature, Science and Medicine 2013, 256 Seiten, €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6820-5 29 Christina Ljungberg / Mario Klarer (eds.) Cultures in Conflict/ Conflicting Cultures 2013, 209 Seiten, €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6829-8 30 Andreas Langlotz / Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (eds.) Emotion, Affect, Sentiment: The Language and Aesthetics of Feeling 2014, 268 Seiten, €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6889-2 31 Elisabeth Dutton / James McBain (eds.) Drama and Pedagogy in Medieval and Early Modern England 2015, 304 Seiten €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6968-4 31 Elisabeth Dutton / James McBain (eds.) Drama and Pedagogy in Medieval and Early Modern England 2015, 304 Seiten €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6968-4 31 Elisabeth Dutton / James McBain (eds.) Drama and Pedagogy in Medieval and Early Modern England 2015, 304 Seiten €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6968-4 <?page no="241"?> SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 32 This timely volume explores a wealth of North American literary texts that engage with moral and ethical dilemmas. It ranges from William Dean Howells’s and Henry James’s realist novels to Edward Sapir’s intermedial poems, and from John Muir’s unpublished letters and journal of his 1893 tour of the Swiss Alps to Rudy Wiebe’s A Discovery of Strangers and the poetry of Robert Lowell. Many of the contributions also critically engage with and reflect on some of the most prominent voices in contemporary theoretical debates about ethics such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jürgen Habermas, Em manuel Levinas, Axel Honneth, Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, and Julia Kristeva. This volume thus aptly covers the panoply of contemporary ethical and moral interventions while at the same time providing distinctively American Studies perspectives. -