Philosophy and Literature

This issue is provided by

The Johns Hopkins University Press Journals Division

and powered by Project MUSE®

Terms and Conditions of Use

Thank you for purchasing this Electronic J-Issue from the Journals Division of the JohnsHopkins University Press. We ask that you respect the rights of the copyright holder byadhering to the following usage guidelines:

This issue is for your personal, noncommercial use only. Individual articles from this J-Issue may be printed and stored on you personal computer.

You may not redistribute, resell, or license any part of the issue.

You may not post any part of the issue on any web site without the written permission ofthe copyright holder.

You may not alter or transform the content in any manner that would violate the rights ofthe copyright holder.

Sharing of personal account information, logins, and passwords is not permitted.

Leland de la Durantaye

EICHMANN, EMPATHY, AND LOLITA

I

Sometime in late 1960 or early 1961 Adolf Eichmann, jailed and awaiting trial in Jerusalem, was given by his guard a copy of Vladimir

Nabokov’s recently published Lolita, as Hannah Arendt puts it, “for relax-ation.” After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant: “Quite an unwholesome book”—Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch—he told his guard.1 Though we are not privy to, and nor does Arendt speculate upon this officer’s intentions, it is difficult to imagine that they were limited to procuring Eichmann a little “relaxation.” The tale of a homi-cidal madman writing under observation and awaiting a trial that will consign him either to death or prolonged imprisonment—which fate spares him by felling him with a heart attack—could hardly have been very relaxing for someone at that moment writing his own memoirs and himself awaiting a trial with similar stakes.

We might imagine other intentions on the part of Eichmann’s guard. Could the gesture have been ironic? Or was it motivated by a dark curios-ity—something of the order of an experiment? The sulphurous halo of Nabokov’s book was still burning brightly in the popular consciousness of 1960.2 Might Eichmann’s guard have seen Lolita as a sort of litmus test for radical evil, and wanted to see whether the real-life villain—he who impassively organized the transport towards certain death of countless innocents—would coldly, even gleefully, approve the various and vile machinations of Nabokov’s creation?

This is all only speculation. In Arendt’s account, she congratulates Eichmann for his indignation and moves on to other matters. In any event, given Eichmann’s radical conventionality one could hardly imag-ine him liking—or even very well understanding—much of the book. As

Philosophy and Literature, © 2006, 30: 311–328

312 Philosophy and Literature

Eichmann himself avowed, during his adult life he had read only two books, one of them being Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State. But whatever the motivations of Eichmann’s guard, whatever Eichmann’s degree of comprehension, and whatever congratulations Eichmann might have deserved for his disgust, the incident raises a question for the study of Nabokov’s finest work which has yet to be answered.

II

Before turning to this question, let us remain with Arendt and her notorious reader for a moment. Arendt notes elsewhere that it appeared to her that Eichmann was nearly “aphasic.” She comments that, “when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché,” and that, “his inability to speak was closely con-nected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.” Arendt offers here nothing less than a definition of thought itself. “To think” is glossed (“. . . namely”) by Arendt as, “to think from the standpoint of someone else.” Though as a definition of thought, it is hardly impressive, it nevertheless expresses something essential about Arendt’s conception of thought and thinking. (3) In her view, thought is to be placed under the sign of intellectual empathy, under the sign of living in the strangeness and wonder of another’s world. (Though Arendt does not mention the connection, both the language she wrote Eichmann in—English—and her native one—German—make special provision for such a sense, as he or she who is “thoughtless” is not her or she who is incapable of some form of cognition or calculation, as “thoughtless” people can indeed be very clever and very clever people have been capable of great “thoughtlessness.”)

Thought is thus a communal, not individualistic, thing.4 This point is important as, though Adolf Eichmann was unlikely to have seen much of himself in the irreverent and urbane genius of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, nor in the latter’s strange eloquence, Eichmann the man and Humbert the character of the first part of the novel (to leave the repenting Humbert of the book’s last pages out for the moment), share an essential trait. What Eichmann the man shares with Nabokov’s liter-ary creation is the inability or unwillingness “to think from the standpoint of somebody else.” The evil they share is the evil of thoughtlessness. But here the student of history or the student of literature endeavoring to uncover a parallel between Adolf Eichmann and the narrator of the book he found so distasteful is confronted with a troubling difference.

313Leland de la Durantaye

In Arendt’s account, though she never says so in such unambiguous terms, Eichmann is incapable of thought at least in part because he is incapable of living in a creative and authentic relation to language. His near “aphasia,” considered as a particularly stubborn stupidity, is not without relation to his blind allegiance to the Führer’s words-become-law—it is in this, in fact, that his singularly “banal ” evil, as she describes it, is so profoundly unsettling. The relation between these two ele-ments—Eichmann’s “aphasia” and his blind “thoughtlessness”—is left to Arendt’s reader and Eichmann’s judges to consider. To turn now to the matter that will occupy us in these pages, Humbert Humbert, while, in Arendt’s terms, perhaps equally thoughtless, is a far cry from aphasic. His “evil” is more classical, more recognizable—at once simpler and more complex in that it follows the Satanic path of persuasion, adorned with the roses of ruse, guile and pricking wit. The Mephistophelean wedding of fine rhetoric and foul designs is one with which we are well familiar. If Humbert’s sin is a new one, of sort, his evil is as old as Adam and Eve. The unanswered question mentioned above is the nature of this evil: its ways, its means and its place in art.

III

Lolita does not have just one precedent in Nabokov’s work—in the Russian novella The Enchanter—but a host of them.5 Perhaps even more important for the final form that Lolita took than the thematic pre-echoes of pedophilia in The Enchanter is Nabokov’s 1934 novel Despair. Like Lolita, Despair is presented as the “memoir” or “confession” (both narrators use both terms to describe their narratives) of a madman. In Despair, we first find the device later employed in Lolita to such effect: the authorial eye peering over the shoulder of the narrator and employ-ing a mixed-bag of tricks to express himself—tricks that involve the narrator, in one way or another, disclosing or transmitting an essential detail without being aware of its import. Despair also marks the begin-ning of Nabokov’s productions in English: Nabokov himself translated the work from the Russian and wrote in the foreword, “Although I had been scribbling in English all my literary life in the margin, so to say, of my Russian writings, this was my first serious attempt . . . to use English for what may be loosely termed an artistic purpose.”6

In a bit of awkward preening in Despair’s foreword, Nabokov recounts the circumstances attending to this first translation of the work. “I asked a rather grumpy Englishman,” says Nabokov, “whose services I obtained


through an agency in Berlin, to read the stuff; he found a few solecisms in the first chapter, but then refused to continue, saying he disapproved of the book; I suspect he wondered if it might not have been a true confession” (Despair, p. xi). Nabokov’s explanation appears to be the one which we will find in nearly all of his later works: Hermann, like his scions in Nabokov’s later fiction, is carefully crafted by the author to be unpleasant. That one is put off, annoyed, and shocked by him is, for the author, to be desired. There is the well-known case of Pale Fire, where Nabokov is at some pains to provoke doubt and disdain as regards his overbearing narrator Kinbote. In Ada, or Ardor, a heavy dosage of Byronic brio is added to the brew and we are supposed to at once admire and disapprove of Van Veen as one admired and disapproved of Byron in his day. In Lolita, we dispose of a formula to describe this dynamic which we will have cause to reflect upon: we are to be, as John Ray Jr. tells us, “entranced with the work, while abhorring its author.”7 Had the novel been Lolita, we would easily believe this to have been the case. An examination of Despair, however, renders such a hypothesis unlikely.

What can be learned from this early novel? On the very first page of his story Hermann employs a metaphor which becomes, for him, a guiding one. Half-sketching his argument, he states that, “. . . at this point I should have compared the breaker of the law [and he is soon to begin breaking laws LD] which makes such a fuss over a little spilled blood, with a poet or a stage performer” (Despair, p. 3). Hermann then adopts (without referring to) Thomas DeQuincey’s playful position from his essay “On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts” (1827), and himself comes to treat murder as, in his own words, one of the “creative arts” (p. 122). He likens the mental going-over of his crime to that of, “an author reading his work over a thousand times, probing and testing every syllable”; of his crime he later explains his lack of remorse with the simple self-evidence that, “an artist feels no remorse” (p. 171; 177). Of the investigating officers of the crime in question Hermann tells his readers that, “they behaved just as a literary critic does” (p. 191). Nabokov is being none too subtle in setting clearly before us Hermann’s mal, and that red line running through the book’s pages is difficult to miss. In case we did miss it, however, we find a later remark made by Nabokov of no small importance.

In a letter regarding the translation and publication of this revised translation of Despair, Nabokov wrote in 1945: “My book [Despair] is essentially concerned with the subtle dissections [sic] of a mind anything but ‘average’ or ‘ordinary’: nature had endowed my hero with literary


genius, but at the same time there was a criminal taint in his blood; the criminal in him, prevailing over the artist, took over those very methods which nature had meant the artist to use” (SL, p. 57).8 Here is a passage from the foreword to Despair.

I am unable to foresee and to fend inevitable attempts to find in the alem-bics of Despair something of the rhetorical venom that I injected into the narrator’s tone in a much later novel. Hermann and Humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble each other. Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann. (p. xiii)9

The first question the reader is inclined to ask is why the two books, and the punishment of their protagonists, should be linked in the first place? Humbert’s rhetorical venom, a dangerous substance, is indeed related to Hermann’s, but only in the way that poisonous venoms can be related to non-poisonous saliva which can digest, but not stun. Is this the only reason to link their fates? Both are whimsical first-person narrators who tell their own story of crime in blithe, irreverent fashion. Both are murderers. Is this, then, all?

Perhaps more important than this collected trivia of plot and pre-sentation is a deeper, more fundamental link binding the two works together—one which comes to the fore in the letter cited above. In Nabokov’s verbs and vision, “nature” gives gifts of “literary genius,” and intends them for use toward certain ends (“. . . which nature had meant the artist to use”). Hermann succumbs to the sin of allowing the “methods” “meant” for art to be taken over by the “criminal” in him—he is guilty of applying the “methods” destined for art to life. In doing so, however, he is not alone.

Nabokov’s first major critic (after himself) has proved perhaps to be his finest—his countryman and fellow exile Vladislav Khodasevich. In a review of Nabokov’s The Defense from 1930 Khodasevich wrote:

The artist is doomed to a sojourn in two worlds: the real world and the world of art created by him. A genuine master always finds himself situated on that line belonging to both worlds where the planes of each intersect. The separation from reality, the total immersion in a world of art where there is no flight but only and endless fall is madness. It threatens the honest dilettante but not the master possessing the gift of finding and thereafter never losing the line of intersection.10


It would be hard to find a more elegant and more precise description of the drama and dilemma that lies at the heart of Nabokov’s creation. Though it precedes the publication of Lolita by some 25 years, no later analysis more accurately describes the motor driving that dark romance. The special tension in Nabokov’s work, as Khodasevich notes, is that between “the real world” and “the world of art created by him [the art-ist],” between a way of seeing and feeling which one has in common with others and “total immersion in a world of art.”

In an article from 1984, Edmund White located what he saw as an impish, perverse, and even cruel streak running through Nabokov’s writings in his habit of creating “grotesque versions of himself.11 Noth-ing, in fact, has been so baffling to critics of Nabokov as precisely this habit. But might not such a tendency, instead of something narrowly personal, be an exercise and a lesson in the dangers of art? Might we not see Nabokov’s habit of creating “grotesque versions of himself,” of the artist, neither as impish or perverse, as did White, nor as an exercise in radical dissociation, as did Nabokov’s biographer, Brian Boyd, but as an intimate part of his thought and art? Might we not see them as monsters and demons carefully carved into the façades of his works to better reveal its mission?

IV

Nabokov’s first novel offers a description of the nature of artistic vision:

And in those streets, now as wide as shiny black seas, at that late hour when the last beer-hall has closed, and a native of Russia, abandoning sleep, hatless and coatless under an old mackintosh, walks in a clairvoyant trance; at that late hour on those wide streets passed worlds utterly alien to each other: no longer a reveler, a woman, or simply a passer-by, but each one a wholly isolated world, each a totality of marvels and evil.12

A few years later, the narrator of Nabokov’s Russian short story “Per-fection” (1932) says of a character therein that, “he had a passionate desire to experience everything, to attain and touch everything, to let the dappled voices, the bird calls, filter through his being and to enter for a moment into a passerby’s soul as one enters the cool shade of a tree.”13 Sebastian Knight’s brother, at the close of his narrative, speculates that, “the hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any


chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden.”14 In a front page appeal to aid the unem-ployed printed in the Russian émigré newspaper Poslednie Novosti from January 2, 1932, Nabokov wrote, “it takes a person idle, cold and with an untenanted heart to turn from another’s need or simply not notice it. Fortunately such people are few.”15 The Gift’s Fyodor is described at a party as engaging in the following exercise:

. . . while the others talked on and he talked on himself, he tried as he did everywhere and always to imagine the inner, transparent motion of this or that other person. He would carefully seat himself inside the interlocutor as in an armchair, so that the other’s elbows would serve as armrests for him, and his soul would fit snugly into the other’s soul . . . .16

This brief barrage of example can serve to show the kind of mental activity Nabokov imagined as proper to the artist (the characters named above are, if not in every case literal artists, consistently compared by Nabokov to ones)—one of imaginative empathy. This empathy is not meant to be merely a cold, analytical one where one understands the chess-like coordinates of another’s position, but one where that position is felt by the artist—like the cool shade of a tree he or she might enter into. It should then come as no surprise that, years later, in his Lectures on Literature, Nabokov will go so far as to define art itself as: “beauty plus pity.”17 And indeed had Nabokov searched for a Latin tag to place upon his literary coat of arms, he could hardly have found a better one than Terence’s tag Humani nihil a me alienum puto.18

In a lecture on Chekhov, Nabokov once offered the observation that, “criminals are usually people lacking imagination.”19 Might we apply this remark to Nabokov’s most notorious criminal—Humbert Humbert? Certainly not. Humbert’s creator may have refused to grant him a great many things, but imagination was not one of them. And yet, despite his lively imagination and singularly precise perception, imaginative identification of the sort Nabokov associated with the artist’s calling is something that he does not, at least until very late in his days, engage in. Up until the end of his story, he does not endeavor to regard each individual as “a totality of marvels and evil,” does not, “enter for a moment into a passerby’s soul as one enters the cool shade of a tree,” and it is precisely because he does not engage in this mobile identifica-tion and imagination that he can possess such extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity and yet act so brutally and insensitively in his dealings


with others—and above all, with she whom he professes to love above everyone and everything in the world—his Lolita.

In understanding how all this came about, let us start—like empiri-cists and sensualists—with the senses. If what most determines the artist’s perspective is his ability to feel his way into another’s world, can we learn more about how it is that the artist feels, at given moments, that which infuses his sensibility and suffuses his senses with something promising art?

V

Humbert Humbert owes his fame to the discomfort he has caused his readers. Like most deep discomforts, this is neither a simple nor a straightforward one. At the outset of his memoir, and for quite a few pages thereafter, Humbert endeavors to dismiss or discredit the cares and concerns of others with no small success. But how? In the name of what values, by what reasoning, or by playing upon what weaknesses or vanities does he effect this?

Milton, the inventor of the sensuous, says of his darkest creation that, “his tongue / Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear / The better reason.”20 Humbert’s tongue is itself not without a Manna which also makes the worse appear the better reason. Is this not, in fact, what the book’s most sensitive, intelligent, and shocked readers have remarked with absolute regularity? One of the book’s finest readers and first defenders, Lionel Trilling, wrote as early as 1958 that in read-ing Lolita, “we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents . . . . we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting.”21 As if surprised by his own choice of words, Trilling, when he reprinted the article some years later, replaced the term “seduced” with “subdued” (without noting that the article in question was in any way revised), but the experience is hardly dampened. However one terms it, how could Humbert persuade one of the century’s most gifted and judicious critics to “connive” in a “violation” he “knows” to be “revolting”?22

The first and best answer to the question is that Humbert is eloquent. He possesses fantastic verbal range, depth, and dexterity. Perhaps most importantly, he also possesses the capacity, in his rapid changes of reg-ister, to surprise. As we all know, eloquence is not a blank slate await-


ing persuasive words to fill it, and not an inert substance waiting to be used for adornment. It is a reactive. It can only be made to function by coming into contact with the specific desires and fears, ambitions and anxieties of those exposed to it. What then are elements involved in this reaction? What chords does Humbert strike, what fears or desires does he evoke, what ambitions does he flatter?

The first minor chord is pity. Humbert begins by telling us of love and loss at a tender age. In the triple tradition of the confession, the case study and the court case, he makes use of a sad past to explain and excuse a deplorable present. With freakish and acidic irony he tells us of the loss of his mother: “(picnic, lightning)” (AL, p. 10). This loss is followed by that of his first love, Annabel Lee, the description of which is a bewildering and bravura mixture of lyricism and merciless self-parody. The self-parody is essential. It serves Humbert’s purposes particularly effectively by immunizing, so to speak, his description. If you find his story unbelievable, his complaints mawkish, his reasoning faulty, he is protected, so to speak, from the criticism by the irony and parody which light up his text. If you find his story credible, his complaints compelling, his reasoning sound then this irony and parody becomes something else. It becomes the moving sign of the depth of his pain. All are familiar with the phenomenon of a pain so great it can only be spoken of in a mocking tone used to protect the teller. Humbert calls upon this phenomenon. His urbane self-parody is kept up in the opening sections of his memoir with such delicate intensity that by so keeping his own guard up, he tempts us to lower ours a notch.

Alongside of this delicate game, Humbert plays another one with his reader: a game of letters. Readers are notoriously vain—above all about reading. We all know the experience of finding value and interest in a phrase because it contains an allusion we think only ourselves, and a select group of others, recognize. We also all know the experience, upon re-inspection, of realizing that the phrase had nothing to speak for it except for its hidden heredity. In unpredictable fashion, Humbert invokes the literary sensitivities and education of his reader. From the first lines of his memoir, he begins to weave lines—and names—from the only poem that Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote for his first cousin and child-bride (Virginia Clemm was 13 and Poe 25 when they married in 1836), and which he wrote only after her death: “Annabel Leigh.” The poem has a child-like, hypnotic repetitiveness (the distinctive rhythm which led Emerson to unflatteringly dub Poe “the jingle man”) that well suits Humbert’s hypnotic purposes. More allusions follow. He invokes,


in more cryptic fashion, the adult sorrows and longings of Rousseau, Baudelaire, and Proust.23 In pedophilic proclivity, Poe is followed by Dante and Petrarch: “After all,” Humbert reasons with us, “Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in the merry month of May. And when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight, in the beautiful plain as descried from the hills of Vaucluse” (AL, p. 19).24 (Humbert does not of course mention that Dante himself was but 8 years old when he met the, in reality, 8-year old Beatrice [or Bice] Portinari [Boccaccio attributes Beatrice to the Portinari family], or the fact that the Laura of Petrarch’s love was roughly 6 years younger than the poet.)

Humbert’s artistic comparisons do not, however, stop on the level of biographical parallels and literary allusions. He tells us that to perceive a nymphet, to recognize her in a crowd, you must be an “artist and a madman” (AL, p. 17). One of the principal things that artists and mad-men share in Nabokov’s world is their indifference to what others think of their inspired or deranged state. Nabokov loans a great many of his characters experiences and opinions which were also his own, and this giving of very personal gifts is not limited to likeable fellows such as Glory’s Martin and The Gift ’s Fyodor, but extends to characters Nabokov himself singles out as “scoundrels” and “wretches,” such as Ada’s Van Veen, Pale Fire ’s Charles Kinbote, and, of course, Lolita’s Humbert. Humbert indeed receives such a gift from his creator—a mighty and a dangerous one: the gift of artistic vision. Nabokov graces Humbert with not only the perceptual and linguistic powers necessary for art, he lends him the credo that a true artist creates in sublime isolation and owes account only to his own genius. And it is here that things begin to go badly.

Nabokov spoke of the similarity between Despair and Lolita, and of Despair ’s Hermann being given gifts of “literary genius . . . which nature had meant the artist to use”—and which he turned to other ends (murder). Humbert is also given gifts of literary genius—and on a far grander scale. Despair is not Crime and Punishment, and no reader of the book has yet gone on record as having felt anything like a real or compelling identification or complicity with Hermann, as Trilling and a host of others have for Humbert. As Nabokov makes clear from the


outset, we are to have contempt for Hermann—and for this reason he is not dangerous. Humbert, however, is another story.

Humbert’s eloquence also depends on a further element which unifies the ones mentioned above—something not at Hermann’s disposal—love. For all his blindness and madness and hurt, Humbert loves. And for the Humbert of the first part of the novel, the lover and the artist see the world in the same all-enlivening, all-consuming way. This is the heart of his eloquence and the essence of his alibi: his justifications for his love and his pursuit of it despite the rules of society and reason, are in every way analogous to Nabokov’s justifications for art. In the descrip-tions of his love, he calls upon the inner vision, the sudden image, the irrefutable call of the senses that are all hallmarks of Nabokov’s vision of art. His most crucial and subtlest reasoning is the careful parallel he establishes between the proud creation of great art and the proud pursuit of love. By subtly describing and avidly pursuing Lolita as one would the inspiration of a work of art, Humbert tempts the reader to look at her as precisely that—and it is this most slippery step which allows for readers as sensitive and schooled as Trilling to be seduced or subdued. We are led astray because we are offered the wrong optic through which to see Lolita—the optic of art—and we are too eager to be worthy of it to suggest that it should not here apply.

VI

As we saw earlier, in the preface to his revision and re-translation of Despair, Nabokov says of the resemblance between Despair ’s Hermann and Lolita’s Humbert, that, “both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year.” Why does Humbert merit this brief reprieve? What does he do that allows him an annual walk in Paradise?

The deceptively perceptive John Ray Jr. tells us that what we are to read is “a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis” (AL, p. 5). The epithet is doubtless inflationary, but it should not prevent us from seeking its referent. Humbert is hardly promoted to divine status, and does not make a strong case for canonization. But he does appear to do something laudable. This “moral apotheosis” is best sought for in Lolita’s tenderest chapter, where we read:

Somewhere beyond Bill’s shack an afterwork radio had begun singing of folly and fate, and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult,


rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen . . . and I looked and looked at her and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds . . . [Nabokov’s ellipses] but thank God it was not that I worshiped. What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart, mon grand pêché radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I canceled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine. . . . No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn—even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita. (AL, p. 278; Nabokov’s emphases)

Nabokov was to remark of this scene years later that in reading it, “le bon lecteur devrait avoir un picotement au coin de l’œil ” [“the good reader should feel [here] the forerunner of a tear.”25 In another interview, Nabokov confessed to himself having felt more than a forerunner, and to having written the passage through his own tears.26

The moral turn, and we might indeed call it that, that Humbert here takes is easily expressed—he has recognized his sensuous adulation as “sterile and selfish vice”; beneath and beyond his lust is a radiant love. He realizes that he loved her, and loves her, and will always love her—however she might change and whatever she might become. He loves her not for senses she might have fired, but simply and fully for herself. In a line as simple as it is tender, Wallace Stevens once wrote, “and there you were, warm as flesh, / Brunette, yet not too brunette.” To love someone is to love them for exactly as brunette as they are, and to love them as they change in a way that can only be their own. “I don’t think Lolita is a religious book,” Nabokov once stated, “but I do think it is a moral one. And I do think that Humbert Humbert in his last stage is a moral man because he realizes that he loves Lolita like any woman should be loved.”27 Humbert’s change in tone and his turn in thinking is one, simply, towards love, and the rich empathy and boundless tender-


ness which accompany it. To do such, to love, merits, even in the darkest of stories, attention, care, and a special, if slight, dispensation. Francis Bacon wrote of, “that which the Grecians call Apotheosis,” and which he described as “the supreme honour, which a man could attribute unto man.” If we recall that there is no greater grace and no higher honor which we might be offered than love, might Humbert not deserve his extraordinary epithet, and his crepuscular stroll, after all?

VII

Nabokov wrote to his friend and colleague Morris Bishop in 1956, that, “Lolita is a tragedy.”28 The story is a tragedy for the same reason as Humbert is granted a brief stroll in paradise—because Humbert real-izes the fault in his character and the crime of his conduct—but does so, alas, too late to halt the progress of the poison. The tragedy is the loss of Lolita—and she is lost from virtually the beginning of Humbert’s memoir. She can be said to be absent from the book which bears her secret name (only to Humbert is she “Lolita”—she is “Lo” to her mother, “Dolly” at school, “Dolores on the dotted line,” and so forth) because of the ultimately less than safe solipsism to which Humbert subjects her. She is everywhere referred to, everywhere described, everywhere poetically loved, but as to her thoughts, and feelings, Humbert offers us scarcely a glimpse. Humbert is able to take advantage of her, to “deprive her of her childhood,” as he says, because of his refusal to think from her standpoint—to think beyond the lyricism of his love and the practi-cal precautions of maintaining a tractable little concubine (AL, p. 283). Near the end of the novel, hearing a chance remark that Lolita makes to Eva Rosen, Humbert remarks:

. . . and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me. (AL, p. 284)

A few pages later, enumerating his indignities, Humbert continues: “Now, squirming and pleading with my own memory, I recall that on this and similar occasions [the occasion is Lolita’s mourning her mother’s death LD], it was always my habit and method to ignore Lolita’s states of mind while comforting my own base self,” and finally adds, “I must


admit that a man of my power of imagination cannot plead ignorance of universal emotions” (AL, p. 287). Humbert makes it clear that he cannot plead ignorance. Despite his gift of artistic perception, he does not enter into the souls of others as one enters into the cool shade of a tree. He never ventures out from under the tree of his own desire, and his interactions with Lolita involve nothing so much as his pulling her into that darkness.

In his reconstructed diary recounting Humbert’s first days in the Haze House, we find the following entry: “Monday. Delectatio morosa. I spend my doleful days in dumps and dolors” (AL, p. 43). The annotated edition of Lolita glosses this abstruse beginning of the week as follows: “Latin; morose pleasure, a monastic term” (AL, p. 357; note 43/2). This is not false, but it is also not what Nabokov is referring to. More can be said: it s a technical term in Christian theology and denotes a problem which goes to the heart of the Christian conception of sin. Delectatio morosa is pleasure taken in sinful thinking or imagining which comes to the sinner unbidden, which is involuntary.29

Up to the very end of Part One of his memoir when he sleeps with Lolita, Humbert has endeavored to limit his sin to an “internal” and involuntary one, to engage in nothing much worse than delectatio morosa. As he says, he has tried to “preserve the morals of a minor.” Nabokov once remarked of his creation that, “you can defend what [Humbert] feels for Lolita, but you cannot defend his perversity” (“on peut défendre son émotion devant Lolita, mais pas sa perversité ”) (Interview with Anne Guérin). In these terms then, it is only when Humbert acts, when his fantasies take on flesh that they become cause for a denunciation. Though one might well question the propriety of sharing them with others,30 fantasies per se are not to be condemned. Cause for denunciation comes with acts. Such a denunciation, however, should be accompanied by a desire to understand how a man not insensitive or unimaginative or generally unable to control himself effects this passage from pardonable fantasy to unpardonable act. It is for this reason that the intermediate or chrysalis stage of Humbert’s passage to the act should be of such interest to the attentive reader. The mental operation which allows the in other respects sensitive and intelligent Humbert to proceed to such cruel and indif-ferent acts is crystallized in the Sunday masturbation scene where it is with an “image” of Lolita that Humbert interacts, a Lolita which was, in Humbert’s words, “my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita—perhaps more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness—indeed, no life of her


own” (p. 62). Even when their contact is no longer phantasmatic, it remains so in an important sense in that though it is with Lolita’s body that he makes love, it is with the moving image he has created of her that he engages—and that image is credited with having, like all images, “no will, no consciousness, no life of its own.” And it is for this reason that it can be the passive subject of anything he likes.

As we just noted, until the very end of Part One, Humbert has endeavored to, “preserve the morals of a minor.” In his narration, how-ever, he has not done much to preserve the morals of his reader. He has passionately dedicated his remarkable rhetorical resources towards seducing or subduing the reader into an acceptance of, or complicity with, his dark fantasies and darker acts. Bertrand Russell once noted that there is nothing so useful to democracy as the immunization against eloquence.31 Might we not see Humbert’s memoir in a similar light? Does not Humbert’s memoir ultimately tell his reader: “What I have done is monstrous, let no amount of eloquence ever convince you that such acts are anything but: look at them for what they are, look at them for the pain they cause.” Stated somewhat differently, Nabokov’s book tells us that the artist cannot live in the world as he lives in the world of words—and this is a lesson worthy of expressing in the world of words.

Harvard University

1. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, revised and enlarged edition (New York: Penguin, 1964), p. 49.

2. Given Eichmann’s nearly nonexistent English, the copy in question was doubtless the German translation of the novel published the preceding year (1959).

3. On December 4, 1975 Arendt began writing a text she entitled “Judgment” and which was to round out the trilogy The Life of the Mind which she had been at work upon for many years. Arendt had often stated her sense that Kant’s Third Critique, The Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft), contained the kernel of a radical political philosophy. It was this project on which she last embarked. In §40 of this work Kant outlines some-thing simple and essential—“common sense” (“Gemeinsinn”; “sensus communis”). In the years leading up to this work Kant put ever more emphasis on the role of maxims and here he bases this sense common to us all upon three maxims: “1. Selbstdenken. 2. An der Stelle jedes anderen denken; 3. Jederzeit mit sich selbst einstimmig denken” (Kant X.226). The second of these is the maxim which Kant isolates as the maxim of “judgment” and it


is, it seems, with this passage in mind that Arendt began her work of that same name. Her death the following day prevented her from shedding more light on the matter. It is none the less likely that this maxim is one which had concerned her for some time and, in all likelihood, as early as her writing Eichmann in Jerusalem.

4. This is indeed the aspect in which her thought most radically distances itself from her first teacher and first love, Martin Heidegger—so much so that the definition is itself, among other things, a polemical commentary on Heidegger’s conception of thought and thinking.

5. As regards The Enchanter, Nabokov wrote the novella in Russian in 1939, but never published it and believed it lost when he referred to it in “On a Book Entitled Lolita.” He notes therein that the work was a precursor to Lolita in matter of plot but that he “was not pleased with the thing and destroyed it sometime after moving to America in 1940.” (See Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, edited with preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel Jr., 1970; revised and updated edition [New York: Vintage, 1991], p. 312; hereafter AL.) Nabokov was later to come across a copy of the story among his papers, in 1959 and found that it was not as bad as he’d remembered. However, he did nothing with it. The manuscript came to Nabokov’s son Dmitri’s attention after Nabokov’s death and the former translated and published it in 1985. As for the host of other minor and major precursors in Nabokov’s work, the best summary of them avail-able is in the German critical edition of Nabokov’s works. See “Zeittafel zur Entstehung des Romans,” Vladimir Nabokov, Gesammelte Werke. Band VIII: Lolita, ed. Dieter E. Zimmer (Reinbeck bei Hamurg: Rowohlt, 1989), pp. 696–700.

6. Vladimir Nabokov, Despair (1966; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1989), p. xi. The “loosely” appears in context not to refer to a modesty or a later dissatisfaction with the work on Nabokov’s part, but to the fact that what he had undertaken there was not the composition of a creative or artistic work, but a translation of one. Nabokov revised this translation and republished the work in 1966.

7. AL, p. 5.

8. Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters 1940–1977, ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Broccoli (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), p. 57.

9. It is a curious fact that though Nabokov rejected the idea of a heaven, purgatory and hell for men, he accepted it for literary characters. Another example may be found in the person of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary who before she makes off with Léon, hears “the last gust of the beadle’s parrotlike eloquence” which “foreshadows the hell flames which Emma might still have escaped had she not stepped into that cab with Léon.” See Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 164; hereafter LL.

10. David M. Bethea, “Nabokov and Khodasevich,” in Alexandrov, ed. (1995), p. 456.

11. Speaking of the Russian short story “Spring in Fialta” (1938), White refers to Fer-dinand therein as, “one of those many grotesque versions of himself Nabokov planted throughout his fiction” (White, p. 7).

12. Vladimir Nabokov, Mary, trans. Michael Glenny in collaboration with the author (1970; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 27.


13. Vladimir Nabokov, Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Knopf, 1996), p. 336.

14. Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 202.

15. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 376.

16. Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, trans. Michael Scammell with the collaboration of the author (1963; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1991), pp. 35–36.

17. LL, p. 251. Elsewhere in that same work he defends Dickens against charges of sentimentality through recourse to that purest of experiences, that of, “the divine throb of pity” (LL, p. 87).

18. “Nothing human is alien to me.” The remark is from Terence’s play Heauton Timo-rumenos (I.i.2). Incidentally, Nabokov’s linguistic nemesis Roman Jacobson (who Nabokov was [wrongly] convinced was a KGB agent) re-tailored the expression to describe him-self, declaring on several occasions that, “linguistici nihil a me alienum puto” (cf. Roman Jacobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Style in Language [Cambridge: Technology Press & John Wiley & Sons, 1960], p. 377).

19. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 376.

20. John Milton, The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 234; Paradise Lost, II.113–114.

21. Lionel Trilling, “The Last Lover—Vladimir Naboko’s ‘Lolita’” (reprint in Page, 1982), pp. 93–94.

22. Trilling is far from the only reader with this reaction—it has been, in fact, more the rule than the exception. To cite a few principal instances, Nabokov’s student and annotator Alfred Appel Jr. wrote in equally severe terms that, “what is extraordinary about Lolita is the way in which Nabokov enlists us, against our will, on Humbert‘s side. Humbert has figuratively made the reader his accomplice in both statutory rape and murder” (“Lolita: The Springboard of Parody,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 8 [1967]: 204–24, p. 224; my italics). More soberly, Toker notes that, “the rhetoric of Lolita is the rhetoric of reader entrapment”—Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 199. Norman Miller states that Lolita “can be quite simply described as an assault on the reader” who “softened by the power of appeal is . . . ready to forgive all.” The Self-Conscious Narrator-Protagonist in American Fiction Since World War II, unpublished dissertation (University of Wisconsin, 1972), pp 188, 198. This passage is cited, and this line of argumentation is continued in Nomi Tami-Ghez, “The Art of Persuasion in Nabokov’s Lolita,” in Roth, ed., Critical Essays on Vladimir Nabokov, pp. 157–76.

23. In noting the frequency of French referents we should recall that French is the memoirist’s native language—the presence of Poe being fully compatible with this prefer-ence given that only later in Humbert’s fictional lifespan does Poe’s English influence begin to eclipse his French one.

24. More indirect references to another unhappy literary lover, Lewis Carroll, might be found in the work, but they are slight, if they could be said to exist at all (i.e., AL,


p. 26; AL, p. 39 and other references to Carroll’s dubious hobby: photographing young girls). In a remark communicated to Lolita’s annotator Alfred Appel Jr., Nabokov stated, “I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll because he was the first Humbert Humbert” (AL, p. 381, note 131/1). Humbert, of course, does not fail to call an extra-literary cultural relativism to the bar in evoking distant times and places where sex between people vastly separated in age was not only not condemned, but was encouraged [i.e., “Hugh Brough-ton, a writer of controversy in the reign of James the First, has proved that Rahab was a harlot at ten years of age. . . . Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds” (AL, p. 19).

25. Vladimir Nabokov, interview with Anne Guérin, L’Express ( January 26, 1961), p. 27.

26. Vladimir Nabokov, interview, Les nouvelles littéraires (October 29, 1959).

27. David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1984), p. 202.

28. Letter from March 6, 1956, Morris Bishop Collection of Nabokov Letters, Cornell Uni-versity Rare and Manuscript Division. Cf. also Bishop’s widow, Alison Bishop’s remark, “Nabokov described Lolita to us [to her and her husband LD] as a tragedy” (in Gibian and Parker, p. 217).

29. It is thus classified alongside of gaudium, dwelling with complacency on sins already committed, and desiderium, the desire for what is sinful as what are classified as so-called “internal sins” in orthodox Catholic theology.

30. Lolita’s eccentric first publisher, Maurice Girodias, saw in the work an endeavor to alter parent-adult relations in modern society—a project which he heartily approved of. (Nabokov couldn’t but have been rather consternated at learning through his European agent Doussia Ergaz that Girodias thought that the book “might lead to a change in social attitudes towards the kind of love described in Lolita” [letter from 1955 cited by Boyd, 1991, p. 266].)

31. “To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy” (Atlantic Monthly, October 1938).

Eric G. Wilson

MATTER AND SPIRIT IN THE AGE OF ANIMAL MAGNETISM

During the Romantic period, writers on both sides of the Atlan-tic explored the sleepwalker as a merger of holiness and horror.

Emerging when scientific thinkers for the first time were connecting spirit to electricity and magnetism, the somnambulist became to certain Romantics a disclosure of the difficulty of harmonizing unseen and seen, agency and necessity. This problem prominently arose in Anton Mesmer’s late eighteenth-century experiments in animal magnetism, in which the sleepwalker proved a paradox: an opaque revelation of transparent cur-rents and an unconscious vehicle of sophisticated thought. Romantics such as Coleridge embraced the somnambulist as an embodiment of these troubles involved in relating motion and meaning. Coleridge and those who responded to him saw in the hypnotized human this sobering possibility: the invisible requires the visible to make itself manifest while the visible needs the invisible to become significant.1 This is sublime and sinister: to elevate a material form to spiritual power is transcendence; to sink the boundless into a body is grotesque.

Here I explore the philosophical implications of animal magnetism, the place of the sleepwalker in the history of ideas, and the role of the hypnotized human in Romantic writers, especially Coleridge. I also meditate on relationships between matter and spirit, machine and human, word and thing. Along the way, I place the history of ideas and the works of Romantic writers in mutually illuminating dialogues. The literary texts shed fresh light on philosophical problems while the ideas reveal hidden literary elements.

The somnambulistic trance had been around long before Mesmer’s magnetic sleeps. For centuries, shamans had used auto-hypnosis to sound



their souls and other-hypnosis to cure their tribe-members’ ailments. However, somnambulism could not become a scientific phenomenon until Europeans in laboratories began to study electricity and magnetism. In the early modern period, Paracelsus argued that a vital fluid courses through the cosmos. The human being draws this flow like a magnet attracts force. When the body pulls to itself evil effluvia, it falls ill. To return patients to health, Paracelsus placed magnets on painful areas. He hoped to extract the unwanted current and return it to the cosmic swirl.2 In “magnetizing” spirit, Paracelsus opened a door for empirical inquiry into the invisible world. In 1600, William Gilbert claimed that magnets correspond to the earth: both are animated by universal attrac-tion and repulsion.3 By the end of the seventeenth-century, Newton proposed that things are impelled by a force that draws and repels. Newton’s theory of gravity inspired natural philosophers of the next centuries to search for a principle of which the magnet and the spark are manifestations.4

During the second half of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth, natural philosophers explored electricity and magnetism with unprecedented precision. In 1752, Benjamin Franklin revealed the mystery of lightning and perhaps the spark of life.5 Inspired by Franklin, F. C. Oetinger, J. L. Fricker, and Prokop Divisch developed a theology of electricity, based on the belief that God is the electrical current.6 Later in the century, Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta debated over whether the galvanic flow might be the origin and principle of life itself.7 A few years before Franklin harvested lightning, John Michell argued that the magnetic force is not constrained to lodestones but is possibly pervasive. Some years later, Franz Aepinus suggested that magnetism and electricity manifest a deep energy. Soon after, C. A. de Coulomb discovered the mathematical law by which electrical and magnetic forces operate (Whittaker, pp. 50–59).

These findings led to the breakthroughs of the nineteenth century.8 In 1807, Humphry Davy hypothesized that chemical elements interact through electromagnetic affinity or repulsion.9 In 1820, H. C. Oersted demonstrated the correspondence between electricity and magnetism. The same year, A. M. Ampere formulated the laws by which electrical and magnetic currents interact (Whittaker, pp. 81–86). Michael Fara-day in 1831 revealed electromagnetic induction and thus inaugurated a second Copernican revolution: he showed that matter is not solid and discrete but a field of electromagnetic energy.10 The dreams of

331Eric G. Wilson

Paracelsus had been realized. Matter is a pattern of invisible energy. Material is spirit.11

In this welter appeared Mesmer. In 1775, Mesmer unveiled his theory of animal magnetism, a merger of ancient speculations on spirit and recent demonstrations of currents. He claimed that a principle of attrac-tion harmonizes heaven and earth, nature and human. The medium of this attraction, he stated, is animal magnetism, a “fluid which is uni-versally widespread and pervasive.” He further stated that all diseases result from disequilibrium in magnetic flow. His cure involved putting the patient through a “crisis.” Mesmer massaged the patient’s magnetic “poles” until he induced a trance. Bereft of self consciousness and will, the patient lived in a violent moment what had been enervating him for weeks. After this convulsion, the perverse forces were exorcised and healthy fluids flowed.12

A delegation led by Franklin in 1784 claimed that Mesmer’s magnetic fluid does not exist and that his cures issue from imagination.13 However, mesmerism nonetheless exerted a strong influence on serious thinkers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and spawned a fascina-tion with somnambulism.14 In the year Franklin discredited Mesmer, the Marquis de Puysegur hypnotized a young peasant from Busancy named Victor, sick with inflammation of the lungs. While in the somnambulistic state, Victor spoke with more elegance than he did when awake and showed an aptitude for diagnosing his diseases as well as those of others in his presence. Later, Justinus Kerner traveled to Prevorst to study the trances of Frau Frederica Hauffe. As Kerner reported in The Seeress of Prevorst (1829), Frau Hauffe in her somnambulistic states conversed with a dead preacher and recorded these interchanges in gracefully simple verse (Gauld, pp. 39–162). Five years later, in America, L. W. Belden, a physician from Yale, told of one Ms. Rider, a servant from Springfield, Massachusetts. In The Case of Jane Rider, the Somnambulist (1834), Belden described how this young woman would rise in the night and, while still asleep, undertake her chores. Once, while in her trance and blindfolded, she accurately read and legibly wrote.15

These are only three of the many instances of clairvoyant sleepwalking that thrilled and terrorized the age of electromagnetism. Whether the magnetic sleep was artificially induced or naturally occurring, the feats of the somnambulist drew converts and detractors throughout the salons, lyceums, and carnivals in Europe and America (Winter, pp. 15–162). For some of the religiously minded, the magnetic sleep revealed the spiritual


potential dwelling in everyone but realized only by a few (Gauld, pp. 141–52, 174–203). For other spiritual seekers of a more scientific bent, the trance proved that what was once called spirit could now be called magnetism or electricity and be empirically measured. But more tough-minded natural philosophers, steeled by Enlightenment skepticism, saw magnetic sleeps as instances of quackery or conundrums to be solved. Some of these incredulous empiricists took an even more negative stance. They suspected the morals of the men dealing in mesmerism, fearing that the large number of magnetized young women were easy victims of sexual predators (Darnton, pp. 10–12).

These contradictory responses reveal the problem vexing mesmeric practices as well as the sciences of electricity and magnetism. This is the difficulty of representing the invisible. Ever since Plato, incarnation has been a serious problem: how can boundless, eternal spirit relate to and shine through limited, temporal matter? The history of Western philosophy, vacillating between dualism and pantheism, is a response to this question. Until the electromagnetic revolution of the early nine-teenth century, philosophers had to assume that the invisible world is ultimately a mystery. This presupposition made it difficult to understand the relationship between invisible and visible, but it also offered wide expanse for speculation. This lack of clarity in the study of spirit also allowed some thinkers to deny the invisible world. However, lacking empirical data proving for or against spirit, the materialist suffered the same ambiguity as the idealist. Before electromagnetic science, neither could verify speculation with fact.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, the relationship between invisible and visible gained fresh illumination but also suffered new trouble. Faraday revealed two startling facts. One, what visionaries for centuries had called spirit is electromagnetic energy, a current vitalizing the cosmos. Two, what idealists and materialists for ages had termed matter is spirit, a field of electromagnetic waves. These two findings materialized spirit and spiritualized matter. They reversed the traditional relationship between these entities, proving that the unseen world is comprised of physical powers and the perceived cosmos is insubstantial. These revelations also overcame the time-honored split between mat-ter and spirit; they showed that matter is spirit, and spirit is matter.16 But in suggesting this monism, the theories of Faraday resulted in an unsettling conclusion: there is no spirit—electromagnetism crosses the cosmos—and there is no matter—currents comprise things. If electro-

333Eric G. Wilson

magnetic induction thrilled spirit-seekers hungry for proof, then this same discovery upset these initiates by annihilating the spirit for which they pined and reducing individual agents to conduits of impersonal flux.

Faraday granted unprecedented insights into the interiors of matter. In his vision, everything, from the crystal quartz to the quick wind, is a pat-tern of vital energy. Spirit is not vapor but lightning, heaven’s humming fire; matter is not gross but fluid, a current in the stars. Rifts between subject and object, human and nature are healed. The Romantic poet holds a bit of coal and feels its vibrations. The coal shard, not a dead thing, responds to the poet’s palm. This is a universe of mutual interde-pendence, parts affecting the whole while the whole alters the parts. In this galvanic expanse nothing is ever alone—each atom interpenetrates all others and extends to infinity. Empirically rendered is the vision of a power whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. In the laboratory, one finds a net of jewels, each crystalline angle reflecting and refracting all others.

But this vision can turn horror. All is blind force. Everything becomes everything else. People and trees are haunted by electricity. This leads to nightmare: solipsism or alienation. Wherever one looks, one sees only himself. Looking anywhere, one views otherness. Either way, the world is a double, a stifling mirror. Whether world is reduced to self or self to other, all beings are vessels of unconscious powers. This is a cosmos of automatons. A further danger emerges. Some men har-ness the energy and manipulate it to create slaves. Pantheism converts to nihilism. The harmony of subject and object becomes blurring of categories. The blending of whole and part is one thing infecting the collective. This is the paranoia incipient in the vision of a God whose boundary is nowhere and center everywhere: one is never alone. This is the conspiracy of the net of jewels: the world is a hall of mirrors, a carnival of voyeurism.

Appearing at the same time that scientists were beginning seriously to study electricity and magnetism and persisting through the development of the science of electromagnetism, the somnambulist manifested this tension between holiness and horror. Those who embraced mesmerism and the clairvoyant possibilities of the trance generally exhibited the fer-vor of mystics. They saw in the vital flow God on earth. Those opposed to mesmeric practice and the sleepwalkers it produced often expressed ter-ror over the improprieties of one person controlling another, frequently


a woman in dishabille. This suspicion over the erotic overtones of the magnetic sleep likely clothed more serious fears over the possibility that humans are secretly cogs and levers that walk and talk.

The puppet is a version of the somnambulist and illuminates the holy side of the sleepwalker.17 In “The Puppet Theatre” (1810), Heinrich von Kleist meditates on the uncanny theology of marionettes.18 The piece features a dancer, Mr. C., describing to an unnamed narrator the grace of puppets. C. claims that these mechanical dolls dance with more elegance than humans for this reason: inanimate figures lack the “affectation” that thwarts the aesthetic designs of people. Freed from the self-consciousness that forces humans to think about what they are doing, puppets never lose their “centre of gravity” and remain unhindered by the “inertia of matter.” Puppets, seemingly dumb stuff, approach gods, intelligent spirits. Here, C. claims, is “where the two ends of the round earth meet”—where absence of consciousness meets omniscience (“PT,” p. 414).

C. clarifies by invoking the fall. He claims that dancing puppets recall the innocence of Adam and Eve before they ate from the tree. Human dancers, however, suffer from the post-fall experience: melancholy self consciousness. C. suggests that there exist two paths by which fleshly dancers—and all humans—might return to the graceful state from which they have declined. The backward path requires a return to unthinking matter, the unconscious puppet; the forward way necessitates an ascent to total consciousness, the condition of a god.

C. exemplifies this double vision in two ways. Two lines “intersecting at a point after they have passed through infinity will suddenly come together again on the other side.” Likewise, the “image in a concave mirror, after traveling away into infinity, suddenly comes close up to us again.” C.’s conclusion: “When consciousness has . . . passed through an infinity, grace will return; so that grace will be most purely present in the human frame that has either no consciousness or an infinite amount of it, which is to say either in a marionette or in a god” (“PT,” p. 416).

The magnetized somnambulist is doubly graced. Drained of self- consciousness and individual will, the somnambulist is, on the one hand, little different from the marionette. The sleepwalker is not hindered by rifts between knowing and being; he enjoys a unified existence, a harmony of intention and inclination. Yet, though the mesmerized man lacks the faculty of reflection, he, on the other hand, frequently possesses a clairvoyant power and approaches the complete consciousness of a deity. Aware of invisible events within and without his body, the waking

335Eric G. Wilson

sleeper does not suffer the gap between ignorance and knowledge. He comprises a concord between vision and apprehension. He is a material form of spiritual omniscience.

Another form corresponding to the sleepwalker is the automaton. In E. T. A. Hoffmannn’s “The Sandman” (1816), this kind of android reveals the darker side of the somnambulist.19 This story focuses on Nathaniel, a young man who suffered terrible childhood trauma. One night, he witnessed his father and a solicitor named Coppelius constructing a mechanical boy. When Coppelius discovered the peeping Nathaniel, he threatened to use the youth’s eyes for his doll and then talked as if Nathaniel himself were artificial. Overwhelmed, the boy fainted into a fever. When he recovered, his father was killed in an explosion and Coppelius disappeared.20 Traumatized, the adult Nathaniel believes that Coppelius has returned as a lens-maker named Coppola. His shock over this supposed reappearance has kept him from writing to his beloved, Clara. When Clara discovers why Nathaniel is silent, she tries to persuade him that his vision of Coppola is a projection of forces in his own mind. Believing that he is persecuted by external evil, Nathaniel rejects Clara’s explanation. He wants a woman who will agree with his every thought. This desire is revealed when he begins his relationship with Olympia (“TS,” pp. 103–4).

One day while looking through an eye-glass purchased from Coppola, Nathaniel notices a beautiful woman in the next building. He becomes fixated on her image. Soon after he learns that she is the daughter of Professor Spalanzani, Nathaniel receives an invitation to a ball at the professor’s home. During this affair, he meets Olympia. While others find her stiff, Nathaniel sees in her a perfect grace. When he dances with her, he feels her cold hand warm to his touch. When he talks to her, he takes her repeated response of “Ah” to mean that she under-stands him. He falls in love, seeing her as an extension of his interiors, his amorous and intellectual ideals.

After Nathaniel decides to propose to Olympia, he discovers that she is an automaton. He finds her father and Coppola fighting over her. In the melee, they pull her in two. Nathaniel falls into a fit of insanity. Soon after his return to health, he and Clara climb a tower to enjoy a view. When they reach the top, Nathaniel believes that he sees Coppe-lius below. Maddened, he first tries unsuccessfully to hurl Clara to her death. He then leaps to his own demise.

Freud in “The Uncanny” (1919) claims that Nathaniel’s madness springs from a return of his repressed fear of castration—Coppelius


and Coppola are associated with eyes detached from sockets.21 But another explanation for Nathaniel’s undoing is the uncanny nature of automatons. Freud notes that Ernst Jentsch in “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906) argues that the root of horror is the doubt over whether “an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.” This explains the uncanny effects of wax figures, life-like dolls, and automata. But the theory also glosses the uncanniness of epileptic fits and insanity—the human becoming mechanical (Freud, pp. 220–21). To apply Jentsch’s theory to Nathaniel’s situation is to conclude that the young man is unhinged by automata.

Nathaniel fears that he might be Coppelius’ android. Thus, he cannot know if he is free or fated. But Nathaniel is beset by a more unsettling ambiguity—he cannot figure out whether he loves mechanical or human females. These contradictory conditions—Nathaniel fears and loves the machine—result in a third confusion: Nathaniel is unsure over whether he wants to be alive, an organism who loathes the automatic, or dead, a lifeless anatomy attuned to cogs. Nathaniel’s condition reveals the com-plexities of somnambulism. Sleepwalking generates fears over whether we are autonomous or determined, awake or asleep. But sleepwalking is also seductive, for it intimates scenes unconstrained by the will or morality: languorous tranquility and sexual lassitude. Eliciting these impulses—fear of coma, lust for lotus—somnambulism throbs between bewildered life and careless death.

Coleridge is attuned to the ambiguities of somnambulism and its scientific contexts. From early on, he was fascinated by the spiritual pos-sibilities of the science of electromagnetism. In 1796, he wrote that he was a student of chemistry.22 His study of chemistry blossomed in 1799, when he met Davy in Bristol. At this time, Davy was exploring the electro-magnetic base of chemistry. Coleridge took to Davy immediately, seeing a mirror image: while he was a poet looking for electromagnetic facts to substantiate intuitions, Davy was a chemist questing for the ubiquitous light in beakers.23 By 1802, Coleridge was recording Davy’s chemistry lectures, hoping to “increase [his] stock of metaphors.”24 Almost twenty years later, Coleridge concluded that Davy’s experiments provided proof of the invisible world. In 1823, he called Davy “the Father and Founder of philosophic Alchemy,” a seer capable of substantiating visions with facts (CL, vol. 5, p. 309). Two years later, he praised Davy for converting fancies into “facts”—for revealing the physical grounds of the “unseen Agency” that empowers all natural metamorphoses. By 1832, Coleridge

337Eric G. Wilson

claimed that alchemy and chemistry had found harmony—after Davy, the tangible and intangible reveal the “common law, upon which all can be each and each can be all” (CW, vol. 14.1, p. 169).

But Coleridge was of two minds concerning the current. Always walking in fear of pantheism, he in other instances suggested that the reduction of spirit to matter, no matter how imponderable, annihilates the transcendent and turns the cosmos to a machine.25 Even though Coleridge could in 1811 praise Davy for uncovering one law of mind and body, a year later he denounced Davy for purveying Newtonian atomism (CW, vol. 12.1, p. 572). This unfair assessment of Davy might have issued from a rupture of the friendship in 1809. However, this condemnation most likely expressed Coleridge’s ambiguous attitude toward electromagnetism, his suspicion that Davy’s work resulted in the determinism that he had been criticizing since the 1790’s (Levere, pp. 173–75).

In those days, Coleridge was studying Joseph Priestley, a historian of electricity who believed that both spirit and matter are manifestations of physical force.26 Thrilled over the idea that one principle might control phenomena, Coleridge in 1795 confessed that he was commit-ted to Priestley—as well as to David Hartley and William Godwin—and thus a “compleat Necessitarian” (CL, vol. 1, p. 37). But when Coleridge discovered Kant and Schelling at the turn of the century, he rejected these heroes. He realized that the spiritual life requires a power beyond the world. Moving from Kant to Platonism and the Gospel of John, Coleridge became increasingly troubled by empiricism. Though he always valued what he called the objective pole, he held that life could only issue from a metaphysical source.27 While Davy from one angle proved an objective interpreter of this unseen realm, from another perspective he constituted a mechanist interested only in stuff.

Coleridge also takes a double stance toward mesmerism.28 In an 1816 essay, Coleridge reiterated a sentiment that he had published in The Friend (1810) and printed in his letters.29 He claimed that “Mesmer’s Gesticula-tions” are on par with other instances of quackery, including the idea that scrofula can be cured by royal touch (CW, vol. 11.1, p. 470). This criticism is grounded on Coleridge’s hope that one can discover proof for invisible events. He requires evidence for such occurrences. If too many people hold naïve faith in these happenings, then the distinction between appearance and reality dissolves.

In 1817, Coleridge changed his position. In an essay on animal mag-netism, he asks why many have rejected mesmerism without examining


it. Wondering if animal magnetism is the heliocentrism of his age—a theory initially held to be erroneous but later evidenced—Coleridge claims that the basis of mesmerism is not farfetched. “Magnetists” simply assert that the “will . . . of Man is not confined in its operations to the Organic Body” but under certain “Conditions” is “capable of acting and producing” “Effects” on the “living bodies external to it” (CW, vol. 11.1, p. 590). Coleridge even suggests that the human will is galvanic energy. Given this potential parallel, Coleridge asks not that people blindly accept animal magnetism but that they review the facts. He states that the best way to prove for or against Mesmer is to try a magnetic session. He describes the conditions required and the sensa-tions that should occur (CW, vol. 11.1, pp. 591–94). The particularity of Coleridge’s account intimates that he might have witnessed the per-formance of a mesmerist.

The same year Coleridge composed this neutral account, he published a positive description of mesmeric phenomena. In Biographia Literaria, he describes how the admiring reciter of a poem can incite in his audience a respect for the piece equal to his own. This transmission is “a species of animal magnetism, in which the enkindling reciter, by perpetual com-ment of looks and tones, lends his own will and apprehensive faculty to his auditors. They live for a time in the dilated sphere of his own being” (CW, vol. 7.2, p. 239) Though rhetorical hypnosis might make a poor poem appear beautiful, it suggests that animal magnetism not only exists but also constitutes eloquence.

Coleridge’s ambivalence over electromagnetism and somnambulism falls into three categories: the ontological, the ethical, the poetic. For Coleridge, electromagnetism and animal magnetism are theories of being. Both hypotheses ask: what is the ground of existence? This inquiry leads to another: what is the invisible? The being underlying beings is unseen; it hides as it brings its productions to light. Thinking of elec-tromagnetism and mesmerism, Coleridge wonders: Is the hidden source of existence physical or spiritual? Is the invisible world fact or fantasy? Is the current of existence immanent or transcendent? At stake is the existential question: am I matter, a machine, or spirit, an agent?

Related to this last inquiry is agency. Fearing that electromagnetism results in mechanism and animal magnetism compromises the will, Coleridge has in mind the question: are we fated or free? If human beings are continuous with blind electromagnetic currents, they are as waves in the sea. If, however, people are manifestations of a conscious galvanic spirit, they might direct the flow. In the same way, if animal

339Eric G. Wilson

magnetism reduces a man to an automaton, then the moral will is non-existent. But if the somnambulist relinquishes the ego to divine knowledge, the magnetic sleep is an awakening to holy will. These issues cut to the quick: Who gestures, and who intones?

These last questions point to eloquence. As Coleridge claims in Bio-graphia, the accomplished reciter is a mesmerist. On the one hand, this idea suggests that eloquence is not creation but channeling. The speaker does not conjure personal forces but draws invisible currents crossing the cosmos. As conduit instead of source, he shares with his audience powers that he does not own but borrows. Eloquence is communion. But the poet as magnetizer intimates that eloquence is a matter of one individual bending listeners to his will. The orator possesses a charis-matic power unavailable to others and deploys this potency to dominate. Eloquence is mastery. In the first case—eloquence as communion—the orator is a clairvoyant somnambulist fallen into auto-hypnosis. In the second instance—eloquence as mastery—the rhetorician proves a willful hypnotist, perhaps sinister.

Coleridge explores these issues in “Kubla Khan” (1798; 1816), pub-lished when he was recording his thoughts on animal magnetism.30 In the poem’s preface, he claims that he composed the lyric in a somnambu-listic state. Whether this account is true or not, it highlights Coleridge’s interest in the possibilities and problems of sleepwalking. Apparently Coleridge in the summer of 1797 retired to a “lonely farmhouse.” There he ingested an anodyne to relieve a “slight indisposition.” This sedative led him into a deep sleep as he was reading of Kubla Khan’s constructions in “Purchas’s Pilgrimage.” But this slumber did not shut down consciousness. For three hours, he suffered the sleep only of his “external senses.” His internal faculties came alive to a mental world so vivid it seemed empirically real. Moved by this apparition, the sleeping Coleridge “composed” between two and three hundred lines of verse. This internal writing required no mental will. The “images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.” When he awakened, he recorded the poem he had witnessed and intoned. But before he could finish, a visitor detained him. When this person departed, Coleridge retained only a “vague and dim recollection” of his vision. He could conjure eight or ten more “scattered lines and images.” The rest had “passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast” (CW, vol. 16.1, p. 234).

This account is fraught with crisis. First of all, the nature of his


somnambulistic vision is unclear. Coleridge does not know where the images come from or if they are real. He suggests that these appearances arose from a source resembling a stream. Is this current spiritual or physi-cal? Whatever its essence, it appears to generate ephemeral images. Are these images integral to the flow, manifestations of its mysteries, or are these pictures reflections on the surface, illusions with no relationship to reality? This confusion is compounded: are these images autonomous, are they things that act on Coleridge from a realm beyond his ego; or are these phenomena products of his personal unconscious, vapors rising from his dim memory of Purchas? If the answer to the former question is affirmative, Coleridge during his composition is a vehicle for an external principle, a passive recipient of vision. But if the response to the latter question is yes, he can exert control over his somnambu-listic constructions through his waking thoughts and actions. These two problems—the nature of the images and their agency—connect to a third: the difficulty of analyzing Coleridge’s eloquence. Does his lyrical ease issue from the invisible stream on which the images float? Or does the beauty of his poem come from his own store of words activated by the logic of dream? At stake in these questions is origin and essence of poetry itself, the old debate over whether the poet is vessel or source, spontaneous or studied.

Coleridge’s preface, far from lucidly introducing his wild poem, serves as an unruly poem itself. Reversing the typical order of preface and poem, Coleridge attempts to resolve these conundrums in the poem proper. The opening stanza features a ruler bent on representing the eternal in temporal form. Kubla’s pleasure dome aspires to be a new Eden, a manifestation of spiritual harmony. Like Jehovah the demiurge, Kubla decrees that his dome be constructed in abysmal currents. He breaks ground near the sacred river “Alph,” a name suggesting the initial letters of the Hebrew and Greek alphabets. This holy river is connected to first things, to the “caverns measureless to man” to which it flows and from which it likely originates. In these caverns roils a “sunless sea”—con-stant death (dead water) and everlasting life (waves beyond biological rhythm). Beyond the ken human measurement and the divisions of space and time, this cavern intimates the infinite, the eternal, the invis-ible. In constructing his dome, Kubla, like Jehovah, concocts a vault in the midst of waters, a circumference of order that both excludes and includes the currents. He circumscribes with his walls a diameter of ten miles. Through these barriers, he allows pleasant streams to flow into

341Eric G. Wilson

luminous gardens. These “sinuous rills” recall in miniature the dimen-sionless waters booming beyond the walls. In the same way, the “forests ancient as the hills” remind of the timeless qualities of the sunless sea (ll. 1–11). However, in both cases, these forms recollect the infinite and the eternal not through what they are but through what they are not. Rill and wood prove paltry reductions of the abysmal currents.

Like a mesmerist, Kubla tries to control holistic powers. But the molds into which he wants to fit these powers are inadequate. His problem is that faced by anyone bent on incarnating imponderable energies. To embody the invisible, one must ignore the ubiquity beyond one form and flatten the whole into one part. While this activity is the ground of benevolent magic and theories of symbol, it is also an attempt to imprison what must remain unfettered. Not only Jehovah, Kubla is also Urizen.

The second stanza throws into relief Kubla’s ambition to represent eternity as well as his dubious urge to reduce the whole. Coleridge focuses on the sacred flux mentioned in the opening, a tumultuously ordered flow that recalls the current that coursed through the somnam-bulistic author in the preface. In contrast to Kubla’s order is a “deep romantic chasm” out of which the primal river springs and then flows as an unexhausted geyser. This portal to the abysmal waters is “savage,” associated with demonic lovers, but also “holy,” a threshold between chthonic darkness and Olympian light. The fountain pouring from this bipolar border likewise constitutes a discordant concord. Though fraught with “ceaseless turmoil,” the water also suggests the undula-tion of breathing. Even though it hurls immense stones as if they were bits of grain, the bursting current brings into concord the destructive (exploding rocks) and the creative (gentle harvesting) as well as the male (the ejaculatory geyser) and the female (the nourishing spring). After its original gush, the geyser transforms into the Alph. This river meanders in a “mazy motion,” labyrinth and temple, through wood and dale before reaching the measureless caverns and sinking into the ever-living yet moribund ocean. While the exact location of the river and its descent is unclear—does the river flow within or without Xanadu’s walls?—the rapids boom into the ears of the Khan. He hears “Ancestral voices prophesying war”—ancient energies strange, violent, and clairvoyant to his measured disposition. These powers are capable of annihilating Kubla’s grotto, turning it to a shade—on the waves floats “the shadow of the dome.” Interspersed with these fluid oscillations is the “mingled measure” of the geyser above ground and the ocean


beneath. This combination of above and below, of dome and spring, result in a “miracle of rare device”: a “sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice” (ll. 12–36).

This second stanza attempts to represent what Kubla’s stately dome ignores: an abysmal force that transcends and contains matter, that is unconscious yet prophetic, that constitutes juggernaut and dance. But this power is beyond representation. Neither order nor chaos but both at once, neither invisible nor visible but seen and unseen in the same glance, this principle cannot be captured in language. This concor-dantly discordant flux overruns structures that try to control it—not only Kubla’s dome but also Coleridge’s stanza. Such a situation strikes Kubla as an invitation for violence. He perceives the currents as enemies auguring his demise. Coleridge’s poet reacts differently. In preface and poem, this author essays to understand the mysteries of a power that has touched and inspired him. He creates Kubla as a negative example of how to relate to the spirit, an egocentric mesmerist attempting to bend the invisible to his will. He counters with more positive examples: his own poetic language, open to paradoxical currents and wild music; and a somnambulistic vision of a female poet attuned to the undula-tions of the abyss.

Though all of “Kubla Khan” possibly issued from a sleepwalker’s apparition, the author emphasizes the visionary aura of one of the final figures of the poem. Shifting from the tumult of the Alph and Kubla’s fears, the poet claims that he once saw in a “vision” a “damsel with a dulcimer.” She was “an Abyssinian maid / And on her dulcimer she played, / Singing of Mount Abora” (ll. 37–41). This dreamy songstress contrasts with Kubla. First, unlike Kubla, who emerges from history as much as from the poet’s imagination, this damsel is a pure product of reverie, a tenuous intoner who flashes and then fades before the inward eye. Appearing once before a hypnagogic poet and content to sing of an exotic mountain not found in geography, the maid, despite her attunement to the abysmal origin, comprises a phantom saved from shades only by the poet’s words. Second, where Kubla orders the waters, this maid inflects the flux. “Abyssinia,” her main descriptor is the spring of the Nile and contains the word, “abyss.” A pattern of these energies, she embodies them in her music; she sings of “Abora,” which is associ-ated with the Mount Amara of Milton’s Paradise Lost, possibly the site of Eden, and linguistically analyzes into ab, from, and ora, mouth—from the source.

343Eric G. Wilson

Like the currents she expresses, this maid hovers between order and chaos. She is the formless abyss, but she sings a “symphony.” She hints at the muddy Nile; she chants of an unmoving mountain. Synthesiz-ing, she succeeds where Kubla fails. She builds in her song a structure capable of momentarily merging form and energy. She is a version of the somnambulist in the preface. However, while the author’s sleepwalking produced a fragment, the maiden’s channeling results in symphony. She constitutes an ideal somnambulist, a mixture of unconsciousness and consciousness, nature and art, fate and freedom, spirit and matter.

There are problems. The maid suggests that the most suitable rep-resentation of enduring spirit is an apparition. The maid’s antinomy, Kubla, intimates the opposite: unsuitable embodiments of the courses of life are monuments. To incarnate the abiding principle of vitality, one requires a haunt. Reality can only come to presence through the insubstantial. The portal to the power behind everything is nothing. In contrast, the most solid stuff excludes substance. Durable symbols block out the eternal. Things are the most unreal thing in the universe.

Coleridge is aware of these troubles. He highlights the unlikelihood of the maid’s marriages of opposites by ending his lyric in the opta-tive mood. If he could revive within his mind his vision of the maid’s song, he would build the sunny dome and the caves of ice, would harmonize these antimonies in a flexible edifice. If he could construct such artifices, he would become a vatic presence, with “flashing eyes” and “floating hair.” If he could turn prophet, auditors would fear yet worship his powers. But the logic of grammar requires us to conclude that he has not revived the harmonious maiden, merged fire and ice, or turned prophet.

He probably has not achieved these goals—has not become a clair-voyant somnambulist, miraculous and monstrous—because this image of the poetic sleepwalker is, like the maiden, an ideal, a virtual condi-tion. The clairvoyant sleepwalker is less a historical phenomenon or scientific specimen and more like David Chalmers’ zombies or James Clerk Maxwell’s demon: beings of a possible world that illuminate problems that the particulars of this earth cannot. If an embodiment of spiritual cannot exist in annals or laboratories, it can thrive in the pages and programs content to dwell, like Emily Dickinson, in “possibility,” a “fairer house than Prose.”

Wake Forest University


1. Romantics interested in sleepwalking are De Quincey, the Shelleys, and Keats; Emer-son, Poe, Fuller, Hawthorne, and Whitman.

2. Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renais-sance (Basel: S. Karger, 1958), pp. 50–125.

3. William Gilbert, De Magnete, trans. P. Fleury Mottelay (New York: Dover, 1958).

4. Sir Isaac Newton, “Query 31,” Optics, Newton: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. I. Bernard Cohen and Richard S. Westfall (New York: Norton, 1995), pp. 50–55.

5. Sir Edmund Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity: Volume I: The Classical Theories (New York: Harper, 1951), pp. 42–53.

6. See Ernst Benz, Theology of Electricity: On the Encounter and Explanation of Theology and Science in the 17th and 18th Centuries, trans. Wolfgang Taraba, intro. Dennis Stillings (Allison Park, Penn.: Pickwick Publications, 1989).

7. See Marcello Pera, The Ambiguous Frog: The Galvani-Volta Controversy on Animal Electric-ity, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

8. See Rhys Morus’s Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

9. Sir Humphry Davy, The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, 6 vols., ed. John Davy (London: Smith, 1839–40), vol. 4, pp. 39–40.

10. Michael Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity, Great Books of the Western World, vol. 45, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins, et al. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), paragraph 27.

11. See Eric Wilson, Emerson’s Sublime Science (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 50–97.

12. See Robert Darnton, Mesmerism at the End of the Enlightenment in France (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 2–45; Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 6–16; Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Pow-ers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 1–14; Robert C. Fuller, Mesmerism and the Cure of American Souls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), pp. 1–15.

13. Alain Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 25–38.

14. Benjamin Reiss, “The Springfield Somnambulist: Or, The End of the Enlightenment in America,” Commonplace 4, 2 (2004).

15. L. Pearce Williams, Michael Faraday: A Biography (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 53–94.

16. Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 450.

17. Heinrich von Kleist, “The Puppet Theatre,” Selected Writings: Heinrich von Kleist, ed. and trans. David Constantine (London: J. M. Dent, 1997), pp. 413–14. Hereafter, “PT.”

345Eric G. Wilson

18. Christoph Asendorf’s The Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 19–21.

19. E. T. A. Hoffmannn, “The Sandman,” Tales of Hoffmannn, intro. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1982), pp. 88–92. Hereafter, “TS.”

20. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth, 1959), pp. 220–25.

21. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 Vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–1971), vol. 1, p. 260. Hereafter, CL.

22. See Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 19–24.

23. See Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 5 vols. (New York: Pantheon/Princeton University Press, 1957–2002), vol. 1, pp. 1098–99.

24. Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols. to date (Princeton: Bollingen Press, 1969–2002), vol. 9, pp. 395, 398. Hereafter, CW.

25. See Thomas McFarland’s Coleridge and Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press Press, 1969).

26. Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (London: J. Johnson, 1777; reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1977), p. xxxviii.

27. Biographia Literaria, chapters 8, 9, and 12 (CW, vol. 7.1, pp. 129–67, 232–94).

28. As H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson point out in their introduction to the essay in Coleridge’s Collected Works, vol. 11.1, Coleridge had read at least three books and numerous articles on the subject. See Frederick Burwick, “Coleridge, Schlegel, and Animal Magnetism,” English and German Romanticism: Cross-Currents and Controversies, ed. James Pipkin (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1985), pp. 275–300.

29. For The Friend, see CW, vol. 4.1, p. 59. For the Letters, see CL, vol. 4, pp. 730–31, 745, 751.

30. I cite paraphrases and quotations from “Kubla Khan” by designating line numbers in parenthesis. I use the version in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume 16: The Poetical Works, Part 1. Poems, ed. J. C. C. Mays (Princeton: Bollingen, 2001).

Joyce L. Jenkins

The PuzzLe of fanny Price

it is common to open a work regarding the merits of Mansfield Park by noting that fanny Price is very difficult to like. nietzsche might

have described her as a “moral tarantula.”1 She sits, making negative moral judgments about the actions of others, while doing nothing herself. fanny spends most of her time, literally, sitting or lying down. austen describes her character as “supine.” comparing fanny with her sister Susan, austen says that “Susan was only acting on the same truths, and pursuing the same system, which her [fanny’s] own judgment acknowledged, but which her more supine and yielding temper would have shrunk from asserting. Susan tried to be useful, where she could only have gone away and cried” (MP, p. 395).2 and fanny cries all of the time. She cries at least thirteen times over the course of the novel. So, there are two questions about the novel that need to be answered. Why did austen create a heroine who is so clearly distasteful? Why do some critics and philosophers see fanny as a moral ideal or cultural icon? Some (alasdair Macintyre, Gilbert ryle, Lionel Trilling) argue that fanny is so unappealing just because austen wants to be didactic3 and force us to focus on virtue. according to Lionel Trilling, for example, Mansfield Park has a different moral message from Pride and Prejudice. “its praise is not for social freedom, but for social stasis. it takes full notice of spiritedness, vivacity, celerity and lightness, but only to reject them as having nothing to do with virtue and happiness, as being, indeed, deterrents to the good life.”4 others think that the infelicities of the novel and its heroine make it a parody of traditional feminine values and conservative moral thought in general.5 here, i shall argue that a path between these two extreme ways of reading the novel is cor-rect. i shall argue, using alasdair Macintyre’s discussion as a starting


347Joyce L. Jenkins

point, that austen does not cast fanny as a moral ideal. if austen is aristotelian (a common view among philosophers) fanny cannot be an ideal. and, although i agree with Johnson’s view that those who have read the novel as morally conservative are wrong, i do not think that the novel exhibits global skepticism about traditional standards for the beautiful/feminine. austen condemns the idea that women should be passive dolls who do not think for themselves, but she does not parody the traditional idea that women should be sweet, gentle, and caring. in my view, fanny’s character constitutes a criticism of passivity, and of rigid adherence to moral rules.

alasdair Macintyre’s view is that austen is an aristotelian moral-ist with a christian slant on the make-up of the virtues. he describes fanny’s character as an ideal of virtue. he argues that fanny is pretty much lacking in charm just because austen wanted to focus on the nature of virtue, which charm can obscure and which fanny is meant to epitomize.

for charm is the characteristically modern quality which those who lack or simulate the virtues use to get by in situations of characteristically modern social life . . . and the charm of an elizabeth Bennett . . . may mislead us . . . fanny is charmless; she has only the virtues, the genuine virtues to protect her . . . and when she disobeys her guardian, Sir Thomas Bertram, and refuses marriage to henry crawford it can only be because of what constancy requires. in so refusing she places the danger of los-ing her soul before the reward of gaining what for her would be a whole world. She pursues virtue for the sake of a certain kind of happiness and not for its utility.6

So, Macintyre thinks that fanny Price is meant to be a stripped down model of virtue, with constancy being the keystone virtue that she exhibits. “constancy is crucial in at least two novels, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, in each of which it is a central virtue of the heroine . . . and without constancy all the other virtues to some degree lose their point” (AV, p. 242).

But when constancy is discussed in Persuasion, it is, clearly, the narrow virtue of maintaining romantic fidelity, not a more general faithfulness or loyalty. in Persuasion anne elliot argues that constancy is a virtue that women are more likely to exhibit than men. Men tend to forget their lovers when parted from them. “‘We [women] do not forgot you, so soon as you forget us . . . we live at home, confined, and our feelings prey upon us’” (PN, p. 232). in Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas wishes henry


crawford to be a “model of constancy; and fancied the best means of effecting it would be by not trying him too long” (MP, p. 345). again, the virtue of constancy is, here, romantic fidelity. and fanny is certainly constant in that regard. it is her love of edmund, her cousin, which drives her to refuse henry crawford’s proposal. We are told that she certainly would have accepted crawford if not for her love of edmund. “Would he have persevered, and uprightly, fanny must have been his reward—and a reward very voluntarily bestowed—within a reasonable period from edmund’s marrying Mary” (MP, p. 467). it seems more plausible to suppose that fanny is constant in the hope that she can have the lover she wants than to suppose that she is exercising virtue for its own sake (or to retain her soul) and not for its utility.

if constancy in fanny and anne is romantic constancy, making it the central virtue, or the virtue on which all the others depend, is counter-intuitive. for one thing, austen sees romantic attachments as unreliable. People marry for the wrong reasons and find their lives at least partially wrecked by this. Sir Thomas gets a pretty wife whose main occupation is to sit nicely dressed on couches with her pug (MP, pp. 19–20). Mr. Bennett’s (Pride and Prejudice) choice of a pretty, but scatterbrained nitwit is also a disaster. and, lest one think that these kinds of romantic errors are confined to males, one should remember Mrs. elliot (Persuasion), who has the misfortune of marrying, for his looks, a man who turns out to be a vain idiot. a little inconstancy would have been a great benefit to these characters, at least before marriage. one might, however, think that romantic constancy is a central virtue only when combined with the virtue of choosing the object of love for sensible reasons. But given how skeptical austen was about romantic attachments, and given how easy it is to imagine people living fully virtuous lives without romantic/sexual attachments, i do not think that romantic constancy is a keystone for the other virtues without which they tend to lose their point.

it may be that Macintyre thinks that romantic constancy is central in austen because he thinks that for austen, the telos is marriage. “She turns away from the competing catalogues of the virtues of the eigh-teenth century and restores a teleological perspective. her heroines seek the good through seeking their own good in marriage” (AV, p. 240). he says that for austen “the touchstone of the virtues is a certain kind of marriage and indeed a certain kind of naval officer” (AV, p. 186). The question is why Macintyre thinks that marriage is women’s telos in austen’s works. The only evidence seems to be that all of her heroines get married to decent men at the end of her novels, and all of

349Joyce L. Jenkins

her heroines are in love with someone. But since these are traditional literary conventions, one should be loath to use them as evidence for marriage-as-telos, unless one is willing to grasp the nettle by supposing that all writers of romantic comedy take marriage to be the telos. and there are ample reasons to suppose that austen was quite skeptical about marriage as the best outcome for women in general. When, for example, charlotte Lucas marries Mr. collins, elizabeth Bennett is not at all sanguine about her future. She has “the distressing conviction that it was impossible for that friend to be tolerably happy in the lot she had chosen” (PP, p. 86). charlotte is described as not “thinking highly either of men or matrimony.” She marries only because “it is the only honourable provision for well-educated women of small fortune” (PP, p. 83). The implication is that it would, clearly, be better if there were some other honourable provision. There is no hint that it would be a good thing for widows such as Lady russell to lose their financial independence by remarrying. her failure to remarry “needs no apology” (PN, p. 5). of course, austen thinks that a certain kind of marriage, albeit rare, could be a fine life for a woman. The marriage of the crofts (the older naval couple of Persuasion) stands out as an example. They are a team even when riding in their carriage. “‘My dear admiral, that post!—we shall certainly take that post.’ But by coolly giving the reins a better direction herself, they happily passed the danger; and by once afterwards judiciously putting out her hand, they neither fell into a rut, nor ran foul of a dung-cart” (PN, p. 92). anne elliot reacts with “amuse-ment at their style of driving, which she imagined no bad representation of the general guidance of their affairs” (PN, p. 92). So, marriage can go right, but given the plethora of bad marriages that are central plot devices in austen’s work, it is plausible to suppose that she thinks that many people would be better off doing something other than getting married if they could. austen chose against it for herself.

Still, even if Macintyre is wrong about the centrality of constancy and marriage for austen, he may be right that fanny Price is uncharming because austen is trying to make us focus on fanny’s virtue and on the nature of virtue itself. one might protest that it is self-defeating to package virtue in the most unappetizing possible package. however, it is true that in both Persuasion and Mansfield Park, austen is concerned to distinguish “manner” from “principle.” in Persuasion, Lady russell mistakenly prefers William elliot to captain Wentworth as a husband for anne because she is blinded by elliot’s beautiful manners. Because “captain Wentworth’s manners had not suited her own ideas, she had


been too quick in suspecting them to indicate a character of dangerous impetuosity . . . because Mr. elliot’s manners had precisely pleased her in their propriety and correctness, their general politeness and suavity, she had been too quick in receiving them as the certain result of the most correct opinions and well regulated mind” (PN, p. 249). and the action of Mansfield Park revolves around the distinction between man-ner and principle. The Bertram daughters (Maria and Julia) come a cropper because Sir Thomas teaches them manner, not principle. “he had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition; and of the necessity of self-denial and humility, he feared they had never heard from any lips that could profit them” (MP, p. 463). edmund says of Mary that hers “are not faults of temper . . . her’s are faults of principle . . . of blunted delicacy and a corrupted, vitiated mind” (MP, p. 456). fanny is received by her sisters “with no advantage of manner. But manner fanny did not want. Would they but love her, she should be satisfied” (MP, p. 377). The Bertram sisters are described as “entirely deficient” in self-knowledge, generosity, and humility (MP, p. 19). But their “van-ity was in such good order, that they appeared to be entirely free from it” (MP, p. 35). charm of manner makes the nature of the underlying principles difficult to discern.

Mary, Maria, and Julia have nice manners but no principle. They charm others and others like to be in their company. fanny has no such appeal for people. This is not to say that she is entirely without manner, but she is, at best, sweet and delicate rather than witty or charming. and fanny, who is avowedly uncharming, is often portrayed as principled. edmund describes fanny as “‘firm as a rock in her own principles’” (MP, p. 351). henry crawford wants to introduce fanny to his jaded, roué uncle who believes that no such woman could exist (MP, p. 293). crawford’s thoughts of her character, both manner and principle, are fulsome.

The gentleness, modesty, and sweetness of her character were warmly expi-ated on, that sweetness which makes so essential a part of every woman’s worth in the judgment of man, that though he sometimes loves where it is not, he can never believe it absent. her temper he had good reason to depend on and to praise. he had often seen it tried . . . her affec-tions were evidently strong. Then, her understanding was beyond every suspicion, quick and clear; and her manners were the mirror of her own modest and eloquent mind. nor was this all. henry crawford had too

351Joyce L. Jenkins

much sense not to feel the worth of good principles in a wife, though he was too little accustomed to serious reflection to know them by their proper name; but when he talked of her having such a steadiness and regularity of conduct, such a high notion of honour, and such an obser-vance of decorum as might warrant any man in the fullest dependence on her faith and integrity, he expressed what was inspired by the knowledge of her being well principled and religious. (MP, p. 294)

So, fanny is perceived by henry and edmund as sweet and modest in manner; honourable, decorous, and religious in conduct; she is a femi-nine ideal. The narrator describes her as possessing purity of principle (MP, p. 428). So, is she a moral ideal? it is hard to see how someone with “purity of principle” might not be an ideal.

There are at least three reasons for thinking that fanny is not to be taken as a moral ideal in spite of her purity of principle. first, her principles may be good, but her sentiments are suspect. Second, she is a model of passivity and inaction. Third, she is a rule-governed wet blanket.

i discuss, first, the suspicious sentiments. The novel ends in unhappi-ness and misfortune for almost all the characters but fanny. consider claudia Johnson’s impressive summation of the moral comeuppances experienced by the denizens of Mansfield Park.

from the Bertram’s point of view, the novel closes with a vengeance of reactionary formulas derived from conservative fiction: the demon aunt is cast out as a betrayer of the good man’s trust, and the offending daughter banished to the hell of her perpetual company; the impious seductress is righteously spurned by the man of God, and her reprobate brother forever barred from happiness; the giddy heir apparent is sobered by instructive affliction, and the modest girl, in a triumph of passive aggres-sion, is vindicated and rewarded with everything she wanted but never presumed to ask for.7

Some of the unfortunates are even left out of the list. Mary crawford’s genuine attachment to edmund comes to naught. Julia marries a rattle, Mr. yates, to avoid the wrathful patriarch. only Mrs. Bertram, the couch decoration, suffers no real grief. “her affections were not acute, nor was her mind tenacious” (MP, p. 449).

So, in the midst of all this, fanny feels joy and delight. here is austen’s comment about fanny’s state of mind after the series of disasters expe-rienced by her foster family.


My fanny indeed at this very time, i have the satisfaction of knowing must have been happy in spite of every thing. She must have been a happy creature in spite of all that she felt or thought she felt, for the distress of those around her. She had sources of delight that must force their way. She was returned to Mansfield Park, she was useful, she was beloved, she was safe from Mr. crawford, and when Sir Thomas came back she had every proof that could be given in his then melancholy state of spirits, of his perfect approbation and increased regard; and happy as all this must make her, she would have been happy without any of it, for edmund was no longer the dupe of Miss crawford. (MP, p. 461)

austen clearly implies that fanny feels no real distress (“she thought she felt” it) at the situation of those around her. one might think that it is human and understandable for her to be happy that the man she loves is not going to marry someone else, and one might also expect anyone in such a position to have hopes for the future. however, for fanny to be so entirely satisfied that she is delighted when she is surrounded by so much misery makes it seem that she really cares only for herself. austen tells us that fanny’s sorrow is such that “there are few who might not have been glad to exchange their greatest gaiety for it” (MP, p. 461). This is reminiscent of nietzsche’s description of the joys christians expect to feel when they see the happy and powerful brought low in hell.8 one might protest that fanny does not take pleasure in the misfortunes of others; her happiness is merely untouched by their misfortunes. even if this is so, indifference to the pain of others is no virtue.

Second, suppose we set aside concerns about fanny’s moral senti-ments. another worry about taking fanny as a moral ideal arises from her passivity, her cowardice and lack of fortitude. for aristotle, the ideal life involves rational activity in accordance with virtue. But, fanny is afraid of everything, and even where she is not afraid, her primary desires are for peace, tranquility, and inertia.

as fanny is first introduced to Mansfield Park, so is her fearful nature. “fanny, whether near or from her cousins, whether in the school-room, the drawing-room, or the shrubbery, was equally forlorn, finding some-thing to fear in every person and place . . . she crept about in constant terror of something or other” (MP, p. 14). a little girl comes to a strange place, is separated from her family, and is afraid. Perhaps this is no surprise. She has a touch of homesickness. But the extremity of her condition is rather severe. and her state is not just the product of temporary alienation. Being fearful is an entrenched part of her make-up. She is afraid to ride, and afraid when her brother wants to ride.

353Joyce L. Jenkins

edmund has to coax her out of her terror on her own behalf, henry out of her terror on her brother’s. She is happy to be left with no social life in exchange for a tete-à-tete with her vacuous aunt. it is “unspeakably welcome to a mind which had seldom known a pause in its alarms or embarrassments” (MP, p. 35). The thought is even entertained that if she and edmund go out star gazing, she may be afraid to venture onto the lawn. “‘We must go out on the lawn for that. Should you be afraid?’” (MP, p. 113). one wonders what there is to fear on the lawn of a house in rural england, even if it is night.

That fanny is fearful of just about everything, dovetails nicely with her favourite pastime: sitting quietly. She is invited to a party that henry crawford unexpectedly attends and is pleased because “every addition to the party must . . . forward her favourite indulgence of being suffered to sit silent and unattended to” (MP, p. 223). for her “‘to sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure, is the most perfect refreshment’” (MP, p. 96). compare Mary crawford who must move because resting fatigues her (MP, p. 96). “What was tranquility and comfort to fanny was tediousness and vexation to Mary” (MP, p. 285). The uncouth, dirty, and noisy parental home compares unfavourably to Mansfield, above all because of the lack of peace: “The elegance, propriety, regu-larity, harmony—and perhaps above all the peace and tranquility of Mansfield, were brought to her remembrance every hour of the day” (MP, p. 391). Luckily, she is able to establish, in Portsmouth, an oasis of sitting in company with her sister. “By sitting together upstairs, they avoided a great deal of the disturbance of the house; fanny had peace, and Susan learned to think it no misfortune to be quietly employed” (MP, p. 398).

a danger of this fondness for quiet and inaction is that one tends to disappear from the lives and notice of others. and it seems clear that although fanny wants tranquility, she does not want it alone. The rehearsals of Lover’s Vows cause fanny much unhappiness, not only because she thinks that her uncle would disapprove of playacting, or because edmund is acting with Mary crawford, but also because her pathological desire to be quiet makes her an outsider. “She was full of jealousy and agitation . . . every body around her was gay and busy, prosperous and important . . . She alone was sad and insignificant; she had no share in any thing; she might go or stay, she might be in the midst of their noise, or retreat from it to the solitude of the east room, without being seen or missed. She could think almost any thing would have been preferable to this” (MP, pp. 159–60). and, indeed, she makes


herself a clandestine part of the play. unlike the others, she does not have the courage to defy Sir Thomas’s wishes in his absence, but she is willing to participate behind the scenes in order not to be left out. “She knew that in general Mr. yates was thought to rant dreadfully, that Mr. yates was disappointed in henry crawford, that Tom Bertram spoke so quick he would be unintelligible, that Mrs. Grant spoilt every thing by laughing, that edmund was behind-hand with his part, and that it was misery to have any thing to do with Mr. rushworth, who was wanting a prompter through every speech” (MP, p. 164). This attempt to par-ticipate, however, is unsuccessful. rehearsing with Mary and edmund “she finds herself becoming too nearly nothing to both, to have any comfort in being sought by either” (MP, p. 170). in the end, fanny is saved from the moral degradation of actually taking part in a play only by the arrival of Sir Thomas. She yields to the pressure of others and agrees to act (MP, p. 172). So, fanny is a dubious example of someone with aristotelian virtue. She is not interested in virtuous activity at all, and when she is finally convinced to act, she is doing something immoral by her own lights.

now, it could be argued that fanny’s brand of virtue differs from the aristotelian in that it is christian. That is why she is so passive. So, Macintyre, though he thinks austen is aristotelian in her focus on a telos, describes her as christian in the virtues she finds central: humility, constancy. and Trilling, though he is not so interested in the aristotelian roots of austen’s moral position, also holds that fanny is meant to embody a christian heroine, someone inevitably uncongenial to modern readers. “if we are to understand what Jane austen meant by creating such a heroine, we must have in mind the tradition which affirmed the peculiar sanctity of the sick, the weak, and the dying.”9 But this kind of extremism is just the sort of thing that austen seems to have scorned. unless we read Mansfield Park as simply anomalous, as Trilling does, it cannot be read as praise for an extreme version of the traditional christian virtues. and later work supports the view that austen disapproves of fanny. Persuasion, for example, condemns pas-sivity in women, along with being too headstrong. captain Wentworth sees anne elliot as the “loveliest medium of fortitude and gentleness” (PN, p. 241). anne is the one who does not panic when Louisa strikes her head on the cobb. She tells everyone else, including the men, how to act. She commands when she must and (maybe) obeys when she should. in Persuasion, Louisa is the character who refuses to listen to others. She acts without thought for the consequences. She pays the

355Joyce L. Jenkins

concussive price. if one looks internovel rather than intra, fanny can be seen as at the other extreme from Louisa’s. She would never dream of jumping from the stile and if she saw Louisa fall from the stile, she would cry, not act, as anne does.

So, fanny’s character is an extreme in its passivity. That kind of lack of balance is not austenian. a central passage used to support of the view that austen had something close to a doctrine of the mean comes from Persuasion. “anne wondered whether it ever occurred to him now, to question the justness of his own previous opinion as to the universal felicity and advantage of firmness of character; and whether it might not strike him, that, like all other qualities of the mind, it should have its proportions and limits” (PN, p. 116). Gilbert ryle argues that this shows that austen’s moral position is aristotelian in the sense that it rejects bipolarity, and calvinist black and whites. her work embodies the “aristotelian pattern of ethical ideas as differing from one another in degree and not in kind . . . in respect not just of a single Sunday attribute, Goodness . . . or else Wickedness, but in respect of a whole spectrum of specific week-day attributes.”10 This idea, that austen saw virtue and the good life as a matter of getting the right mix of human qualities, of emotion and rationality, of sense, sensibility, pride, biddable-ness, is plausible.11 But then, again, on the surface at least, Mansfield Park seems an anomaly because it is hard, unforgiving, Kantian, and retributivist in a way that the other novels are not. compare Maria’s fate with Lydia’s. Both these women run off with men, disgracing their families. Maria is condemned to the “no exit” of living with the evil Mrs. norris in some place where the Bertram’s neighbours will not be subjected to her bad influence. Lydia fares much better. her marriage is arranged by Darcy and she is accepted back into the family. Trilling thinks that this difference is because Mansfield Park operates according to a stricter moral code. it stands alone. The “judgments of Mansfield Park are not dialectical. They are uncompromisingly categorical. alone among Jane austen’s novels, Mansfield Park is pledged to the single vision of the ‘honest soul.’”12 But we have already noticed two flaws in the sup-posedly seamless virtue of the heroine: her passivity, her selfishness. and there is reason to believe that she has a third flaw: too much strictness of principle. in a sense Trilling is right that the novel stands alone. it displays, for example, retributive outcomes that austen’s other novels do not. But one way to condemn such outcomes is to show how distasteful they are by making them a part of the action of the novel.

Think of fanny and edmund—the two representatives in the novel


of rule-governed behavior. Both of them are humorless prigs who seem joyless and incapable of laughter. They like to gossip about other people’s moral flaws. When Mary crawford complains about her uncle’s (an admiral) untimely home renovations and makes a joke about the number of “Vices and rears” in the navy, the two unite to disapprove. “‘But was there nothing in her conversation that struck you fanny, as not quite right?’ ‘oh! yes, she ought not to have spoken of her uncle as she did. i was quite astonished’” (MP, p. 63).

fanny has learned her principles from edmund. They are reflections of one another. They even look alike sometimes (MP, p. 169). “having formed her mind and gained her affections, he had a good chance of her thinking like him” (MP, p. 64). Typically, fanny defers to, or thinks that she should defer to, edmund’s moral view. even when edmund is being particularly lunk-headed by recommending that fanny should live with her aunt, the unpleasant Mrs. norris, fanny says “‘i cannot see things as you do; but i ought to believe you to be right rather than myself’” (MP, p. 27). So, one expects fanny and edmund to be united in their disapproval of vice. The exceptions to this all involve Mary crawford. for example, edmund, who initially declares that he will never act, agrees to a part in Lover’s Vows to please Mary. fanny cannot approve supposedly because Sir Thomas would not approve. and Sir Thomas does not approve. But fanny is, at least partially, opposed to the play because of jealousy (MP, p. 156). edmund makes excuses for Mary crawford that fanny cannot. his admiration for her leads him “where fanny could not follow” (MP, p. 64).

The question here is this: where is edmund being led? is he being led into a life of wit and joy or into a life of moral corruption? is fanny virtuous in her adherence to the rule that edmund violates? it is hard to see Mary as an evil seductress. Though edmund later describes her as corrupt, austen tells us that Mary is almost purely governed by really good feelings (MP, p. 147). The relationship ends because Mary is not as judgmental about people’s sexual peccadilloes as edmund would like. She describes her brother’s seduction of Maria as “folly.” Perhaps he thinks that a proper woman should rend herself and wail about the horror of it all (as fanny feels horror).

The promise of life, laughter, and gaiety represented by Mary is defeated by the sour dourness of Mansfield Park. after the incident of the play, edmund complains about the excessive somberness of the family party. fanny corrects him. The somberness is normal. Sir Thomas values quiet just as fanny does. “i think he values the very quietness you speak

357Joyce L. Jenkins

of, and that the repose of his own family-circle is all he wants. and it does not appear to me that we are more serious than we used to be . . . as well as i can recollect, it was always much the same. There was never much laughing in his presence . . . i cannot recollect that our evenings formerly were ever merry, except when my uncle was in town” (MP, pp. 196–97). and this sepulchral lifestyle is the one with which the book ends after Mary has been finally discarded. it is a life with fanny and her once-again-morally-upright husband edmund the clergyman.

That view that fanny’s character is seriously imperfect gains further support from the similarity of her character to Mrs. Bertram’s. Both are supine in their physical habits. Their favourite position is sitting. Both take their moral stance from the men with whom they are associated: Mrs. Bertram is formed by Sir Thomas, fanny by edmund. fanny is more intelligent and has more sense and feeling than Mrs. Bertram, but one can easily imagine her living a similar life, sitting surrounded by her work basket and her pug, with the tedium broken by an occa-sional book. if austen is lampooning a certain ideal of feminine virtue in Mrs. Bertram, she does the same with fanny. fanny is, in a sense, worse than Mrs. Bertram. her greater intelligence and perception should make her shudder at the lifestyle. if marriage is the telos, Mrs. Bertram achieves it: she produces four children; she takes her precepts from her husband so she thinks properly; she is quiet, sweet and not to be accused of being useful. Mrs. Price, fanny’s mother, has a similar character. She is a “dawdle, a slattern . . . whose house was the scene of mismanagement and discomfort from beginning to end” (MP, p. 390). “her disposition was naturally easy and indolent, like Lady Bertram’s; and a situation of similar affluence and do-nothing-ness would have been much more suited to her capacity . . . She might have been just as good a woman of consequence as Lady Bertram” (MP, p. 390). one might almost think that the women of fanny’s family have a genetic predisposition to sit about.

other critics have thought that fanny is not wholly good. for example, Kingsley amis notes many problems for fanny’s character.

if edmund’s notions and feelings are vitiated by a narrow and unreflecting pomposity, fanny’s are made odious by a self-regard utterly unredeemed by any humour . . . She is mortified at being excluded—at her own obstinate insistence—from the theatricals. She pities herself and does others the kindness of hoping that they will never know how much she deserves their pity . . . She indulges in righteous anger . . . She is disinclined to force


herself to be civil to those—a numerous company—whose superior she thinks herself to be; such people she regards with unflinching censorious-ness . . . and in the closing stages, her ‘horror’ at the wretched Maria’s elopement is such as to exclude pity in any thought or deed.13

This litany of unpleasant traits does not lead amis to conclude that fanny’s moral character is portrayed by austen as bad in at least some respects. rather, he concludes that austen sold out. “What became of that Jane austen (if she ever existed) who set out bravely to correct conventional notions of the desirable and virtuous? from being their critic, (if she ever was) she became their slave. That is another way of saying that her judgment and her moral sense were corrupted. Mansfield Park is the witness of that corruption.”14 The puzzle here is why amis, with his catalogue of fanny’s flaws, would think that fanny is meant to serve as a moral example. Given how undesirable she is as a person, the obvious thing to conclude is that she is no example at all.

i can see two reasons to reject the obvious conclusion. Both concern the end of the novel. first, one way to read the end of the novel is as an endorsement of fanny, and a rejection of Mary. after all, fanny gets everything that she wants. Mary, on the other hand, is left with “vacant” affections, living with her sister Mrs. Grant. The second reason concerns the lack of correction. in every other austen novel (with the possible exceptions of Persuasion—because it is unclear whether anne is too biddable--and Lady Susan—because the primary female character is an unrepentant femme fatale), the heroine has flaws that are corrected by the end. She sees the error of her ways and she marries successfully. fanny also marries successfully, but there is no correction.

consider, first, the difficulty of the ending. Mansfield Park ends with the marriage of the central female, as do the rest of austen’s novels (with the exception of Lady Susan). Perhaps the novel ends with the “triumph” of the heroine because that is what convention dictates. and one can add that the heroine wins in an extremely implausible, and, of course, passive way. henry crawford inexplicably runs off with Maria; Mary blows it with edmund. fanny does nothing. no merit or attraction of hers makes edmund look to her. having failed to obtain the object of his love, he eventually transfers his affections to fanny “exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so” (MP, p. 470). Little is made of this sudden change from filial to romantic affection. it is a prudent affection unlike the previous one for Mary. The virtuous, solemn, judgmental fanny gains her love by accident. Since her moral

359Joyce L. Jenkins

character is victorious only by happenstance, this should be taken as a signal that it is imperfect, not an ideal.

now, take the lack of correction in the novel. i suggest that fanny is not corrected, not because she is perfect, but rather because she is not correctable. The problem with her character is deeply entrenched. her habits of mind are passive and rigid. it would be impossible to teach her to enjoy being active. She would suffer a collapse. a correction of fanny would require a change in her basic character, rather than a modification of an already solid basic character as we see in catherine (Northanger Abbey), elizabeth (Pride and Prejudice), elinor (Sense and Sensibility), emma (Emma), anne (Persuasion). in Mansfield Park austen follows aristotle’s view that once the basic adult character has been formed, it cannot be changed.

fanny is neither an angel, nor a demon. one critic compares her to the classic romantic villain, and sees her as akin to frankenstein’s monster.15 i think that this is overblown. fanny is a vapid person whose character has some serious problems. austen’s criticism of her is subtle and neither black nor white. Like Lady Susan, who is unremittingly bad, she’s bad enough to be unfixable. unlike Lady Susan, she’s good enough to get the guy. The extreme of traditional feminine passivity is ridiculed, but sweetness and gentleness are approved. austen follows her own Northanger Abbey observation that among “the alps and Pyrenees, perhaps there were no mixed characters. There, such as were not as spotless as angels, might have the dispositions of a fiend. But . . . among the english . . . there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad” (NA, p. 200).

university of Manitoba

I would like to thank Ben Caplan, Carl Matheson, and Robert Shaver for their comments on this paper.

1. friedrich nietzsche, Daybreak (cambridge: cambridge university Press, 1982), Preface, sec. 3, p. 3. rousseau is described as a moral tarantula in virtue of his moral fanaticism.

2. all page references to austen’s novels are to The Novels of Jane Austen, 3rd edition, 5 vols., ed. r. W. chapman (London: oxford university Press, 1932–34). i use these abbreviations: MP = Mansfield Park, PP = Pride and Prejudice, Pn = Persuasion, na = Northanger Abbey.


3. Gilbert ryle calls it her “profoundest, but . . . most didactic novel.” See Gilbert ryle, “Jane austen and the Moralists,” in Critical Essays on Jane Austen, ed. B. c. Southam (London: routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 112.

4. Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park,” in The Opposing Self (new york: Viking Press, 1955), p. 211.

5. See, for example, claudia Johnson, “Mansfield Park: confusions of Guilt and revo-lutions of Mind,” in Jane Austen: Women Politics and the Novel (chicago: university of chicago Press, 1988).

6. alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue, 2nd edition (notre Dame, ind.: university of notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 242; hereafter abbreviated AV.

7. “confusions of Guilt,” p. 114.

8. friedrich nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (new york: Vintage Books, 1969), essay i, sec. 15, p. 49.

9. “Mansfield Park,” p. 213.

10. “austen and the Moralists,” p. 115.

11. See David Gallop, “Jane austen and the aristotelian ethic,” Philosophy and Literature 23 (1999): 96–109 and Theodore Benditt, “The Virtue of Pride: Jane austen as Moralist,” Journal of Value Inquiry 37 (2003): 245–75 for further discussion of the view that austen should be seen as an aristotelian moralist.

12. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (cambridge, Mass.: harvard university Press, 1972), p. 77.

13. Kingsley amis, “What Became of Jane austen?” The Spectator 199 (1957): 439.

14. “What Became?,” p. 440.

15. nina auerbach, “Jane austen’s Dangerous charm: feeling as one ought about fanny Price,” in Jane Austen: New Perspectives, ed. Janet Todd (new york: holmes & Meier Publishers, 1983), pp. 208–23.

Daniel Berthold

LIVE OR TELL

Two of the more notoriously elusive authors writing in the first half of the nineteenth century—a century noteworthy on the European

continent for producing more than its fair share of elusive authors—are the German idealist Georg Hegel and his posthumous tormentor, the Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. Their elusiveness is such that to read either of them is much like taking a Rorschach test: what we find tells us as much about ourselves as it does about Kierkegaard or Hegel themselves. But to think through the relationship between the two is a yet more challenging task, perhaps like seeking to align the ink-blotted lenses of a Rorshachian kaleidoscope. Some commentators have found no alignment of the lenses to produce anything resembling a meaningful picture, and have concluded, as Niels Thulstrup puts it in his study of Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, that, “Hegel and Kierkegaard have in the main nothing in common.”1 With equal forthrightness, Richard Kroner suggests in his essay on “Kierkegaard’s Understanding of Hegel” that “Hegel and Kierkegaard are separated from each other by an abyss which no agreement can ever succeed in bridging.”2

Such a reading of the Kierkegaard-Hegel relation is in fact made tempting by Kierkegaard’s own construction of the relation as one of radical difference. Hegel is the archetypal Other, the perpetual foil whose philosophic values and whole way of thinking and writing Kierkegaard devotes his own authorship to perfectly inverting. If Kierkegaard’s Hegel is the philosopher of the “objective spirit” and the champion of reason, more interested in the logical relations between concepts than in the actual reality of existing individuals, Kierkegaard presents himself as the adherent of subjectivity, of faith, of existence.

In what follows, I wish to explore one of the most recurring of



Kierkegaard’s representations of his difference from Hegel, the contrast between action and thinking about action, existing and contemplat-ing existence, living and philosophizing about living. “In the objective [Hegelian] sense,” Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus writes, “thought is understood as being pure thought, . . . [and] this objective thought has no relation to the existing subject; and while [it is difficult to know] how the existing subject slips into this . . . pure abstraction, . . . it is certain that the existing subjectivity tends more and more to evaporate.”3

As the contrast gets developed, we will come to focus on Kierkegaard’s phrasing of the difference in terms of the role of language. Kierkegaard portrays himself as speaking (writing) in order to act: “to be an author is to act.”4 Hegel, on the other hand, is presented as writing so as to merely speak about acting; hence Hegel is a “mere scribbler” and his philosophy occurs “only on paper” (CUP, p. 176, 375f). In many ways, Kierkegaard understands his contest with Hegel in terms of the ultimatum of the tormented diarist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novella Nausea, Roquentin: “you have to choose: live or tell.”5 Roquentin is doubly cursed, first by a need to write so as to escape his sense of the nausea of existence by distancing himself from the cloying taste of reality, but second, by a recognition that his writing removes him from the possibility of truly existing. His ultimatum, “live or tell,” is the constant reminder he carries with him of his inability to reconcile his fear of existence and his self-disgust at his escapism.

The contrast between action and thinking leads to a question about the ethics of authorship: how is one to use words, to write, in such a way as to act—and to elicit action from one’s reader? I will suggest that a readjustment of Kierkegaard’s alignment of the kaleidoscope lenses which display the image of his relation to Hegel allows for a more rewarding dialogue between the two. In this altered image, there is as much telling as living in Kierkegaard as in Hegel (indeed, as we will see, in some respects more so), and as much a choice for living in Hegel as in Kierkegaard. Perhaps most importantly, this reorientation invites us to see the either/or construction of “living or telling” (exist-ing or merely speaking about the “logical categories” of existence) as a false dilemma. As Roquentin (perhaps!) discovers as Nausea reaches its enigmatic denouement, it is worth committing oneself to the idea that there is a way of writing in which one gains existence.

While Hegel falls far short of the almost obsessive project of meta-authorial reflection that Kierkegaard engages in, there are indications to

363Daniel Berthold

be found in Hegel’s style of authorship that he too writes not in order to lure others to become like Hamlet, of whom Hegel writes that he “persists in the inactivity of a beautiful inner soul which cannot make itself actual or engage in the relationships of his present world,”6 but on the contrary in order to bring the reader to a transformation of the self by which existence is made more than “a mere matter of words.”7

I

Hegel haunts Kierkegaard’s authorship like a phantom, at once comical, like Aristophanes’ philosopher who hovers in cloud-like and misty imperturbability above reality, and as a figure of danger, a specter haunting the age. The conceit of the Hegelian philosophy, according to Kierkegaard’s narrative, is that it discovers the long sought after elixir of objective truth. Objective truth is a magical truth which transcends the chaos of merely subjective perspectives and the endless multiplicity (what Hegel dismisses as the “bad infinite”) of individual human circumstance. Difference—uniqueness, particularity, subjectivity—is thus overcome, aufgehoben, by sameness—universality, totality, objectivity. The alchemy Hegel uses to achieve this standpoint is a method of abstraction from the “merely” particular, and hence false, aspect of individual existence, so that a space is opened from which existence may be observed sub specie aeternitatis, without the distracting inconvenience of subjective standpoints (CUP, pp. 270–74).

All this is a bold and ingenious project, Kierkegaard admits tongue in cheek, and Hegel carries it off with brilliance.8 Yet he strikes a devil’s bargain: he seeks to purchase objective truth and Absolute Knowledge at the expense of existence. For actual human beings are not “fantastic creatures who move in the pure being of abstract thought,” but are nailed to their own particularity and consigned to subjectivity. Hegel “proudly deserts existence, leaving the rest of us to face the worst.” There is thus a sort of extraterrestrialism to the Hegelian system, which promises an “emancipat[ion] from telluric conditions, a privilege reserved for winged creatures, and perhaps also shared by the inhabitants of the moon—and there perhaps the System will first find its true readers” (CUP, pp. 268, 267, 113).

However amusing the picture of Hegel soaring in outer space, giddily unencumbered by the gravitational force of the earth, there are seri-ous ethical consequences to his lunar philosophy. Hegel’s promise of absolute knowledge is irresistibly seductive in an age already weary of


itself and longing for anything that might make the burden of existence easier to bear (CUP, p. 216, 228f). It assures us that we need not go to the trouble of actually living in such a way as to bring truth about, but must only think (and tell) in the appropriately abstract way. For Kierkeg-aard, though, truth is not in fact a property of thought at all, nor of language, since for finite human beings objective truth always founders in the gap of separation between consciousness and its world, between words and lived experience (CUP, 169ff ). As Vigilius Haufniensis, the author of the Concept of Dread, puts it, “truth exists for the individual only as produced in action” (123). Whatever our personal understand-ing of reality may be in a given situation—and understanding is always personal and situational for Kierkegaard—for this understanding to become a truth we must live it, not merely think it or tell it: “If a man does not become what he understands, then he does not understand it either” ( JP, 4: 4540).

The contrast between thinking and living, or understanding and doing, is equally a contrast between words and action. Kierkegaard sees Hegelianism as inextricably bound up with words, with speaking about what for Kierkegaard must be lived. In his autobiographical novel Les Mots (Words), Sartre speaks of how “I began my life as I shall no doubt end it: amidst books.” He relates how he “found the human heart . . . insipid and hollow, except in books,” and how he would take his books to the roof of his grandfather’s apartment, “the roof of the world, the sixth floor, . . . [where] the Universe would rise in tiers at my feet and all things would humbly beg for a name; to name the thing was both to create and take it.” Words became “the quintessence of things,” so that “in Platonic fashion, I went from knowledge to its subject. I found more reality in the idea than in the thing . . . [and] it was in books that I encountered the universe.” Finally, language became the substitute for existence, and life was a matter of words: “I wanted to live in the ether among the aerial simulacra of things.”9

The image Sartre presents of his youth is precisely the lens of the kaleidoscope through which Kierkegaard views Hegelian philosophy. Hegel’s extraterrestrialism, his flight through the zero-gravity atmosphere of abstraction, is made possible through the displacement of the weight of existence by the ethereality of pure thought and the lightness of words. Reality is exchanged for its simulacrum, propositions about reality, which weigh no more than the gossamer sheets of paper they are written on. “Nowadays existence is even produced on paper,” Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus laments, and the Hegelian philosophy is nothing but a well-

365Daniel Berthold

oiled “paragraph machine” (CUP, pp. 376, 224). The great deception of the Hegelian philosophy, Kierkegaard writes in a journal entry, is that “the powers of the human world have been fantastically extracted and a book world has been produced” ( JP, 1: 649). In another journal entry, Kierkegaard fantasizes about a strip search of Hegel:

The police thoroughly frisk suspicious persons. If the mobs of speakers, teachers, professors etc. were to be thoroughly frisked in the same way, it would no doubt become a complicated criminal affair. To give them a thorough frisking—yes, to strip them of the clothing, the changes of cloth-ing, and the disguises of language, to frisk them by ordering them to be silent, saying: “Shut up, and let us see what your life expresses, for once let this [your life] be the speaker who says who you are.” ( JP, 3: 2334)

Kierkegaard’s authorship is just such a police frisk of Hegel, a disrobing of his disguise of words and an exposure of the guilt of his philosophy, that once all the grand talk of “existence” and “truth” and “Knowledge” is unclothed, the reader is left with no sense of how to actually exist, for the truths of the System are unlivable fantasies.

II

It is now time to explore a quite different response to the Rorschach test of the two inkblots of Hegel and Kierkegaard and to turn the kalei-doscope to view an image which problematizes the simple dichotomy we have seen so far of “live or tell.” Odd though it may seem, the first step towards a counter-image of Hegel is to admit that there is an undeniable sense in which Kierkegaard’s portrayal of him as sacrificing the particular individual is entirely correct. The very first shape of self-consciousness Hegel considers in his Phenomenology is precisely that of the particular individual, the inwardly absorbed “I am I” (pp. 104–5). Here indeed, “truth is subjectivity,” in the sense that the self has despaired of finding truth outside itself, or more precisely, in any correspondence between its sensations, perceptions, or understanding of the world and the external world itself. Its response is to withdraw into itself, and to seek truth in its own subjectivity: “the existence of the world becomes for self-consciousness its own truth” (PS, p. 140). Hegel seeks to demon-strate, however, that this stance is forever doomed to collapse: the self can never be its own foundation, can never supply a content for itself without the mediation of an other. The inwardly turned self, we might


say, is turned inside-out, and Hegel names the agency of this transfor-mation desire. “Self-consciousness is desire,” which is a sign of our own lack and need for an other (PS, p. 109).

So the solitary, unique, particular self is indeed abandoned by Hegel, or rather is forced to abandon itself, since it is destabilized by its desire. And this abandonment is a recurring movement throughout the Phe-nomenology. Hence, to cite just one example, the stance of the stoic, who retreats from the world in which he feels forsaken and not-at-home, and seeks a wholly inward peace and freedom—“I am not in an other but remain simply and solely in communion with myself” (p. 120)—points beyond itself precisely because its self-communion, a thought-thinking-itself, is impotent. “What count[s] for [the stoic is] merely the form of thought as such” (p. 321), but freedom in “thought alone” is a “truth lacking the fullness of life” (p. 122).

Here we see that the dichotomy Kierkegaard uses to reveal his basic difference from Hegel is radically complicated, indeed inverted: live or tell, act or merely think about action. For Hegel, thought without action, without “the fullness of life,” is utterly ineffective, an inchoate language, and results from a sort of desperate nostalgia for self-sufficiency—a nostalgia which, it seems worth noting, calls to mind Kierkegaard’s devo-tion to “the passion of inwardness” (CUP, pp. 177–82). Prior to action, thought is a mere intention, a private meaning, an interior lacking any exterior, and is what Hegel sometimes calls the self’s “innocence.” But the ontology of innocence is not a human ontology, for we must act in order to become human: “innocence, therefore, is merely non-action, like the mere being of a stone, not even that of a child.” Action is our guilt: “by the deed, . . . [the self] becomes guilt.” Note well: Hegel does not say, the self becomes guilty, but that it becomes guilt. As creatures who act, we are guilt in our very being, responsible and culpable for bringing the merely inner and private nature of our thought into the world, where what we do inevitably comes into conflict with the inten-tions and values of others (PS, p. 282).

So Kierkegaard is correct: the very nature of action for Hegel entails the loss of the pure inwardness of the self—a negation of particularity—by bringing the self into relation with others, and hence into the space of a public domain of meaning. But to call this an “abstraction” away from “the self” is to beg the question. For Hegel, the self is not in its essence a particularity, and it is precisely the inwardly absorbed particular self, the “I am I,” which is abstract, because hollow, without the substance of experience which emerges only through the encounter with others.

367Daniel Berthold

The desire for the other which unsettles the solipsistically enclosed “I” moves Hegelian philosophy into its exploration of a social construction of the self, where meaning ceases to be private but is rather contested and negotiated in the interaction between selves.

Kierkegaard’s maxim that “truth is subjectivity” appears to decline all such negotiation. Indeed, “with respect to every reality external to myself,” Johannes Climacus informs his reader (who is, ironically, pre-sumably a reality external to himself), “I can get hold of it only through [imagining] it. In order to get hold of it really, I should have to make myself into the other . . . and make the foreign reality my own, which is impossible” (CUP, p. 285).

In his own recognition of the difficulty of reaching the “foreign real-ity” of the other, Kierkegaard tends to let go of the other as an essential component of self-identity. The sacrifice of his relation to his fiancé Regina Olsen is only the most glaring biographical sign of this perfor-mance of renunciation, but it is inscribed thoroughly in the exposition of his ethics, whose principles include these:

• There is only one kind of ethical contemplation, namely, self-contemplation. Ethics closes immediately about the individual.

• The ethical is concerned with particular human beings, and with each and every one of them by himself.

• One human being cannot judge another ethically, because he cannot understand him except as a possibility.

• Each individual is isolated and compelled to exist for himself.

• It is unethical even to ask at all about another person’s ethical inwardness.

• To be concerned ethically about another’s reality is . . . a misunderstanding.

• The ethical reality of the individual is the only reality. (CUP, pp. 284, 286, 287, 291)

True, Kierkegaard still retains a place for the other, but as Emmanuel Levinas suggests, he seeks to short-circuit his need for the human other by displacing it onto a desire for the absolute other, God.10 “I perfectly understand myself in being a lonely man,” Kierkegaard confides in his journal, “without relation to anything, . . . with only one consolation, God who is love.”11 The journals are filled with the ideal of “dying to


the world, in order to be able to love God” ( JP, 1: 538, 1006). From a Hegelian perspective, it is not at all surprising that Kierkegaard lists as reasons for his own “great need” of faith—in addition to his sufferings and his sins—“my terrible introversion” ( JSK, 1056). The implications of such a terrible introversion for the project of authorship seems rather troubling, if we accept Hegel’s logic that the introvert is “finished and done with anyone who does not agree” with his own subjective truth: we “only have to explain that [we] [have] nothing more to say to anyone who does not find and feel the same in himself” (PS, p. 43).

But surely something is awry with this logic, for it hardly seems plau-sible so easily to dismiss Kierkegaard’s prodigious authorship as having “nothing to say” to anyone who does not already agree. Moreover, Kierkegaard’s authorship is not l’art pour l’art meant for the sake of daz-zling or amusing his readers—even if Kierkegaard suspected that this was precisely the effect it had on many of his fellow citizens of Copenhagen who, if they read his works at all, never got much beyond a feeling of titillation at the sheer eccentricity of his pseudonymous authors. Rather, it is meant to be exactly what Hegel seems to think is excluded by the position of subjectivity, an authorship dedicated to “the art of helping others,”12 a maieutic authorship.

III

If Kierkegaard’s Hegel tells without living—by producing a “book world” in which existence becomes a sheer fantasy—then Hegel’s philoso-phy would seem to consign Kierkegaard to the situation of one who lives without telling—one who exists in his private sanctuary of subjectivity, without having anything to say to others, who are unreachable in their own sanctuaries. Kierkegaard’s Hegel is like the Sartre of Les Mots, who had fallen “head first into a fabulous universe and of wandering about in it . . . without hope of getting back [home] to the Rue le Goff” (p. 56). The reader of Kierkegaard’s Hegel, too, has no hope of getting back to the Rue le Goff, since Hegel has created for his reader only a fantasy world. Ironically, though, one may find places in Kierkegaard himself where he laments his own tendency towards fantasy. In a journal entry striking for its closeness to the passage just cited from Les Mots, Kierkegaard confesses that,

For many years my melancholy has had the effect of preventing me from saying ‘Thou’ to myself, from being on intimate terms with myself in the

369Daniel Berthold

deepest sense. Between my melancholy and my intimate ‘Thou’ there lay a whole world of fantasy. This world it is that I have partly exhausted in my pseudonyms. Just like a person who hasn’t a happy home spends as much time away from it as possible and would prefer to be rid of it, so my melancholy has kept me away from my own self while I, making discoveries and poetical experiences, traveled through a world of fantasy. ( JSK, 641)

The melancholy Kierkegaard admits to here, like the fear Sartre expresses about his fall into a fabulous universe where he wanders about without hope of returning home, is tied up with his ambivalence about words, his being caught up in the tension between living and tell-ing. In a haunting passage from Sartre’s Nausea, Roquentin tells of his experience in a park, observing the roots of a chestnut tree, a “black, knotty mass, entirely beastly.” He comes to understand the source of his nausea, that “it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I,” since he intuits in a “horrible ecstasy” that his own existence is as unjustifiable and superfluous as that of the chestnut tree: “to exist is simply to be there; . . . I was the root of the chestnut tree, . . . born without reason, prolong[ed] out of weakness and [destined] to die by chance” (pp. 126–33). The key point, for our purposes, is not Roquentin’s horrible vision itself, but the diary entry which records it. As Roquentin writes down his vision, he notices that “the word ‘absurdity’ is coming to life under my pen,” but recalls that “a little while ago, in the garden, I couldn’t find it [the word], but neither was I looking for it, I didn’t need it: I thought without words, on things, with things . . . Absurdity: another word; I struggle against words; down there I touched the thing.” And yet, after standing against the gate of the garden seeking but failing to understand what he had encountered, “I left; I went back to the hotel and I wrote” (pp. 129, 135).

Kierkegaard too struggles against words. He wishes to exist beyond the telling of stories about existence, to “remain silent and act.” And yet he writes. Indeed writing, for all the danger of its seduction into fantasy, became for both Sartre and Kierkegaard what it was for Roquentin, an attempted cure: “I lived only in order to write,” Sartre told de Beauvoir,13 and for his part, Kierkegaard confesses in his journal that “only when I write do I feel well.”14


IV

In his study of Jean Genet, Sartre speaks of how language destroys the reality of things in order to reproduce them.15 Kierkegaard’s own philosophy of language expresses a similar idea: “immediacy is reality and speech is ideality . . . How does the Word annul reality? By talking about it.”16 And yet both Sartre and Kierkegaard know that language cannot be avoided. Thus while Nausea is in part a scathing critique of the naïve faith in the power of words to cure us, at the same time it is a critique of Roquentin’s attempt in the garden, as we saw, to “think without words.” As for Kierkegaard, on the very same page of Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus Dubitandus Est where he speaks of language annulling reality, he asks, “cannot consciousness then remain in immediacy? This is a foolish question, for if it could, . . . man would be an animal, or in other words, he would be dumb” (p. 148). Meaning emerges only through language. Thus in the garden, Roquentin notices that “the words had vanished, and with them the significance of things” (Nausea, p. 127).

Hegel’s whole philosophy can be understood as a philosophy of lan-guage—and in this sense Kierkegaard is right that Hegel is a philosopher of words. Language is the performative act by which the self comes to exist or “be there” (Da-sein) in the world: “in speech, self-consciousness, qua independent separate individuality, comes as such into existence, so that it exists for others. Otherwise the “I,” this pure “I,” is non-existent, is not there” (PS, p. 308). Hegel, like Kierkegaard, understands language as involving a certain “annulment of reality,” as we saw Kierkegaard put it in Johannes Climacus, or a “destruction of reality,” as Sartre put it to de Beauvoir. In particular, language entails the negation of the private reality of the speaker. For, as Hegel says, language is “at once the externaliza-tion and the vanishing of this particular “I,” and this “I” “dies away” as it is reborn into the communal space of being-with-others (PS, 308f).

While Kierkegaard never disputes Hegel’s view of language as being-for-others, he laments just what Hegel celebrates. If for Hegel the “divine nature of language” (PS, p. 66) is precisely its redemption of the purely subjective “I” by its emergence into community, it is just this loss of privacy which troubles Kierkegaard, not only because of his well-known distaste for “the public,” but more fundamentally, because for him truth is subjectivity. Kierkegaard’s task as an author, then, will be to experiment with a style of writing which undertakes a precarious balanc-ing act. His authorship must, on the one hand, initiate a relationship to the other, the reader, and yet simultaneously maintain the privacy

371Daniel Berthold

and subjectivity of both the author and reader. This style, is, of course, Kierkegaard’s practice of “indirect communication,” his alternative to the obtrusively “direct communication” of Hegel, which blares out its Absolute Truths for all to marvel at as though through a megaphone or “speaking-trumpet” ( JP, 1: 650).

I have no intention of delving into the mechanics or stage work of Kierkegaard’s methods of indirect communication—his use of irony, the strategies of “double reflection” and “reduplication,” the role of the pseudonyms—but only of briefly sketching out some key features of the ethical framework within which he practices this style of communication. As the name implies, in “indirect communication” the author never speaks directly of her meanings, but conceals them behind the masks she wears to conceal her true intents. “All indirect communication is differ-ent from direct communication in that indirect communication first of all involves a deception.” Indeed, “to deceive belongs essentially to [my method of] communication,” Kierkegaard writes in his journal, “and the art consists in . . . remaining faithful . . . to the deception [throughout]” ( JP, 1: 649, 653). The author conceals himself in such a way that the more we look for him, the more he vanishes behind yet another layer of disguises. Locating the author is thus “as baffling as trying to depict an elf wearing a hat that makes him invisible,” as Kierkegaard says in another context in The Concept of Irony.17 The entire pseudonymous authorship is produced as an “enigmatic mystery,” filled with “double entente,” “ambiguity,” “riddle,” and “duplicity” (PV, pp. 5, 8, 10).

Thus far, Kierkegaard’s indirect communication fits the quite cynical picture Sartre draws of the language of seduction in Being and Nothing-ness very neatly. For Sartre, the tragic character of language, that it aims at love (unity with the other) and yet inevitably ends in conflict (the struggle against the danger of the other’s freedom to “steal” the mean-ing of what I say), lures the speaking self into the project of seduction as a desperate attempt to achieve some simulacra of love. Seduction is a kind of play-acting in which I mask my subjectivity, presenting myself as object for the other’s freedom, seeking to “fascinate” and to “captivate” the other and thereby “capture” what I need from her, her freedom (since only a free other can affirm me). “In seduction, language does not aim at giving to be known,” but at “concealing” my subjectivity from the other. The aim is thus to entice the other’s freedom by pretending to forfeit one’s own, while actually retaining it behind the disguise of my seduction.18

And let there be no mistake, Kierkegaard’s authorial style is aimed


at seduction, at what he calls the “beguilement” of the reader19—the “prospective captive” (PV, p. 25)—into the text through the methods of deception and self-concealment.20 Yet Kierkegaard’s use of seduction is grounded in an ethics of authorship which seeks to establish a radi-cally different relation to the reader from the ultimately self-serving motivations of Sartre’s seducer. Kierkegaard is no Johannes the Seducer, whose diary of his seduction of the sixteen-year-old Cordelia in Either/Or perfectly fits the glove of Sartre’s account. Johannes “weaves [Cordelia] into [his] plan,” shaping her into his own image of “woman” as the “handiwork” of male desire.21 Like Sartre’s seducer, key to Johannes’ strategy is to present himself as though he were the object of Cordelia’s free desire: “[I must] so arrange it that [the] girl’s only desire is to give herself freely, . . . when she almost begs to make this free submission, then for the first time is true enjoyment, but this always requires . . . influence” (E/Or 1: 337).

Kierkegaard’s seductive authorship, on the contrary, is meant to use the influence of deception so as to awaken the reader’s independence. Kierkegaard learned from Socrates that to awaken the other through proclamation, declaration, or lecturing—the pedanticism of direct com-munication—is both tactically futile and, more importantly, ethically problematic. The ethical power of Socrates’ maieutic method is that the other, the interlocutor, becomes the subject of the dialogue, and Socrates the learner. In a journal entry where Kierkegaard speaks of the ethics of indirect communication, he writes that the author “must always [recall] that he himself is not a master teacher but an apprentice . . . because ethically the task [of indirect communication] is precisely this, that every man comes to stand alone” ( JP, 1: 649). “The art” of indirect communication, Anti-Climacus says, “consists in reducing oneself, the communicator, to nobody, . . . an absentee.”22

All that is left behind of Socrates, or the Kierkegaardian author, is a question mark. The interlocutor or reader is left to seek answers on her own. While the reader may be lured into the text by the author’s attempt at producing fascination, the disappearance of the author is the ethical act of indirect communication by which the reader comes face to face with her own freedom and responsibility for constructing a meaning of her own—and ultimately, for living it. Indirect communication is Kierkegaard’s way of telling which points to the necessity of living.

Both Hegel and Kierkegaard would agree with Sartre’s claim in Being and Nothingness that language is a “flight outside myself” ( fuite hors de moi) (BN, p. 373), but for Kierkegaard this is precisely what makes the

373Daniel Berthold

ethics of gift-giving possible, and what underlies his conception of his authorship as a “service” (PV, 8, 16). Moreover, Sartre is right that in language “I can only guess at the meaning of what I express” since “the other is always there as the one who gives to language its meaning” (BN, pp. 373–74). This is why Kierkegaard is so committed to the idea that he himself is “only a reader” of his own works, having “no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader.” He is careful not to fall into the conceit that “an author [is] . . . the best interpreter of his own words, as if it could help a reader [to know] that an author had intended this or that” (CUP, pp. 551, 225).

But the author’s revocation of authority over her texts not only sup-ports the reader’s liberty; it also protects the freedom of the author. The ironic foundation of indirect communication, that what is meant is not said, safeguards the author from what Sartre calls the “danger” of the other and the fate of the speaker to have his meanings “stolen” (BN, pp. 373–74). As Josiah Thompson puts it, “the ironist is the man absent from his words.”23 Kierkegaard explains it this way: “The ironic figure of speech conceals itself,” in that the meaning is hidden; thus “if what is said is not my meaning, . . . then I am free . . . in relation to others” (CI, p. 265, emphasis added). Notice that the ethics of Kierkegaard’s authorship is thus based on a practice of seduction which resolves what for Sartre is the “impossible ideal” of love—that a self be simultane-ously for-itself and for-another (BN, p. 365)—not by fulfilling any actual “unity” with the other. For Kierkegaard as much as for Sartre, I am always separated from the other by “an insurmountable nothingness” (BN, p. 376). Rather, what we might call the structural requirement of love, the relation between two free subjectivities, is provided for by Kierkegaard’s indirect communication through, on the one hand, an act of authorial abandonment by which the reader comes to stand on her own, and on the other, a preservation of the free subjectivity of the author. The reader’s freedom is a private freedom, and so too is the author’s: as Kierkegaard writes in The Two Ages, “an author certainly must have his private personality as everyone else has,” which is his “inner sanctum,” guarded by a practice of self-concealment that serves as a “barrier that prevents all access.”24

As for Hegel’s authorship, Hegel does not face the same question that Kierkegaard must, namely how his authorship is possible at all given his commitment to the radical aloneness of every individual subject. Since Hegel’s ontology sees the self as an inherently intersubjective being, the relation between author and reader is in principle simply one instance


of this intersubjectivity. No, the question for Hegel is about the ethics of his authorship, given Kierkegaard’s characterization of his style as the direct declaration of objective truths. By this view, Hegel’s philosophy is inherently authoritarian, and leaves the reader at the author’s mercy. Yet however notoriously imposing and intimidating Hegel’s style of writing no doubt is, it is a style whose effectiveness depends not, as Kierkegaard would have it, on the sheer authority of Hegel’s godlike wisdom, but on the contrary precisely upon the decentering of that authority.25

In the first place, Hegel’s style of communication is grounded in a philosophy of language in which “language is more truthful” than mere intention. That is, the self’s intentions become effectively meaningful only when expressed and appropriated by others (PS, pp. 60, 66, 296). This implies that it is impossible for the author to hold a privileged position of authority. Indeed, quite the contrary, the site of meaning is shifted onto the reader’s response. And second, Hegel views language as performative : “the power of speech” is that it “performs what has to be performed” (PS, p. 308).26 Hegel’s texts do rather than proclaim. The series of forms of consciousness that are the dramatis personae of Hegel’s Phenomenology, for example—the master and the slave, the stoic and the skeptic, the unhappy consciousness, and all the others—are not subjects Hegel lectures about, or even, strictly speaking, tells us about at all: they are themselves the active subjects of the text; they perform or enact themselves; they speak. The reader, for her part, cannot rely on Hegel, who is merely a spectator; she must enter into the world of the master, the slave, and the others who enact the text, and experience them from within. What it actually means for the “master,” who reduces the other to a mere object of his desire, to be subject to an inevitable reversal such that the master becomes the slave of his desire, cannot be found in the sentences Hegel writes about the master-slave dialectic. This meaning must be experienced or performed by the reader: conscious-ness must “suffer this violence at its own hands” (PS, p. 51). Hegel’s telling, like Kierkegaard’s, is a telling which locates the meaning of the text in the way the reader lives what she reads.

V

In some ways, Hegel and Kierkegaard are quite unlikely subjects for an essay exploring Roquentin’s injunction to “live or tell.” Kierkegaard essentially lived as a hermit, going out onto the streets of Copenhagen only to sit on a bench in Deer Park and smoke a cigar, letting his fellow

375Daniel Berthold

citizens observe his meticulously designed disguise as an eccentric and silly man who would then return to his rooms and live his true life as a brilliant writer everyone ignored. He was, as we have seen, tormented by the thought that he had become so lost in the “world of fantasy” of his pseudonyms that he was no longer able to say ‘Thou’ to himself. While Hegel certainly lived a more obviously public life than Kierkeg-aard, he too suffered periodically from a malaise he called, in a letter to the philosopher Karl Windischmann, his “nocturnal” side in which he suffered from an “inability to come out of myself.”27 In a review of several biographies of Hegel in the London Review of Books which he titles “Baffled Traveller,” Jonathan Rée remarks on Hegel’s “compulsion to wander off in his imagination and take refuge elsewhere. His sense of self was diffuse and distracted, and he would identify with almost anything except his own immediate situation, . . . seeing things from points of view other than his own”28—a portrayal uncannily close to Kierkegaard’s self-description as one who voyaged through a world of fantasy.

But the interest of Hegel and Kierkegaard is not whether they them-selves became so absorbed in their telling that they forgot, at times, to live—like Thales, who was always tripping over the bucket his wife placed in front of him in frustration at his excursions into philosophic reverie—but the significance of their authorships for their readers. Not-withstanding Hegel’s excruciatingly technical style, and Kierkegaard’s subjective isolationism, both develop methods of writing which, in their different ways, experiment with modes of telling where meaning emerges only to the extent that the reader recreates and lives it.

Bard College

1. Niels Thulstrup, Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, trans. George Stengren (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 12.

2. Richard Kroner, “Kierkegaard’s Understanding of Hegel,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 21 (1966): 234. See also Kroner’s “Kierkegaard or Hegel?” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 19 (1952): 79–96.

3. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 112. Henceforth abbreviated CUP.


4. Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 6 vols., ed. and trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967ff), 1: 637. References are to the entry numbers, not pages. Henceforth JP.

5. Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 39.

6. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975): 1: 584. And see Aesthetics 2: 1225–26. Henceforth A.

7. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 403. Henceforth PS.

8. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1957), p. 12n; and see JP 1: 1605.

9. Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 1964), pp. 40, 56, 59f, 141f, 51, 61. Henceforth Words.

10. See Levinas, “A propos de Kierkegaard Vivant,” trans. Jonathan Rée, included as “Two Notes” in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, ed. Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 33–38. See also Levinas’s “The Trace of the Other,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Mark Taylor, ed., Deconstruction in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 345–59.

11. Kierkegaard, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. Alexander Dru (Lon-don: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 738. References are to entry numbers, not pages. Henceforth JSK.

12. Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as An Author: A Report to History, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 27. Henceforth PV.

13. Simone de Beauvoir, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), p. 484.

14. Kierkegaard, The Diary of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. Peter Rohde (New York: Philosophi-cal Library, 1960), p. 64.

15. Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: G. Bra-ziller, 1963), p. 512; and see pp. 364–65.

16. Kierkegaard, Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est, trans. T. H. Croxall (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), p. 148.

17. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, trans. Lee Capel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 50. Henceforth CI.

18. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1965), p. 370. Henceforth BN.

19. Kierkegaard, My Activity as a Writer, trans. Walter Lowrie, included in The Point of View, p. 144.

20. See my article on “Kierkegaard’s Seductions,” forthcoming in Modern Language Notes (Fall 2005).

21. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 2 vols., trans. David and Lillian Swenson (Princeton: Prince-ton University Press, 1971), pp. 420, 439. Henceforth E/Or.

377Daniel Berthold

22. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 132–33.

23. Thompson, “The Master of Irony,” A Collection, p. 116.

24. Kierkegaard, Two Ages, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1978), p. 99.

25. See my article, “A Question of Style: Hegel and Kierkegaard on Language, Com-munication, and the Ethics of Authorship,” forthcoming in Clio (Fall 2005).

26. See Joseph Flay’s excellent discussion of how Hegel “virtually inaugurates a com-pletely new theory of language as essentially performative in all of its modes.” Flay, Hegel’s Quest for Certainty (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), p. 187.

27. In Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 561.

28. Jonathan Rée, “Baffled Traveller,” London Review of Books (30 November 2000): 3.

Karen Stohr

PRACTICAL WISDOM AND MORAL IMAGINATION IN SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

There is no single virtue more important to Aristotle’s ethical theory than the intellectual virtue of phronesis, or practical wisdom. Yet for

all its importance, it is not easy to make sense of this virtue, either in Aristotle’s own writings or in virtue ethics more generally. Insofar as Aristotle defines it, he does so opaquely, saying it is “a state grasping the truth, involving reason, concerned with action about things that are good or bad for a human being.”1

Practical wisdom is a form of knowledge aimed fundamentally at acting well. It requires both a general understanding of what is worthwhile in human life and the ability to act in ways that reflect that understanding.2 My goal in this paper is to explore the latter aspect of practical wisdom in its application to ordinary social behavior. The circumstances that will interest me here are often thought to be the domain of manners or decorum, rather than morals proper. Although no one who takes Hume seriously can deny the moral significance of manners, the rela-tionship between one’s inner state of character and how that character is expressed in seemingly mundane behavior has received insufficient attention from moral philosophers.3 In such a task, there can be few better places to begin than with Jane Austen, whose novels reveal the intricacies of ordinary moral behavior with extraordinary acumen.

I shall use Austen’s Sense and Sensibility to examine the skill associ-ated with knowing how to behave rightly in the sense we associate with propriety or decorum. This skill is essential to pleasant social life, and hence, on the Aristotelian view, to human flourishing. Yet it is often lacking, even among those who have sound moral principles and good hearts. Well-meaning people frequently say or do what is inappropriate.


379Karen Stohr

Consider, for instance, how common it is for kindly disposed people to say to bereaved friends things like, “it’s all for the best” or “be thankful for your other healthy children” or “you’re young, you’ll marry again.” The intricacies of offering sympathy are hard to get right, and otherwise good people can unwittingly leave behind disasters in their wakes.

The skill of acting well in complex social situations has interesting links to the capacity for moral imagination. Engaging in imaginative identification with others is essential to empathy.4 Without suggesting that empathy is at the root of all fluid social interactions, I shall argue that certain characteristic failures to act well in that sphere are imagina-tive failures. In other words, insofar as the exercise of practical wisdom is present in the realm of manners, it requires moral imagination.

Failures of moral imagination, however, can take different forms and have different social effects. I shall use two of Austen’s characters in Sense and Sensibility—Marianne Dashwood and Mrs. Jennings—to illustrate different ways in which inadequate imaginative capacity can impede the exercise of practical wisdom. The contrast I shall draw is with Elinor Dashwood, to whom I ascribe practical wisdom in full.5 This contrast is especially interesting because it is not always very sharp: all three characters have fundamentally good moral principles and warm hearts. Yet unlike Elinor, Mrs. Jennings and Marianne routinely fail to act well, and in characteristic ways. Despite the differences in their characters, they have in common an inability to use moral imagination appropriately. The moral errors of Marianne and Mrs. Jennings occur in relatively insignificant circumstances, but the errors themselves point to something deeper about how the virtue of practical wisdom functions in ordinary moral practice.

In exploring the link between moral imagination and moral practice, it will help to remember Aristotle’s emphasis on the reciprocity between practical wisdom and the moral virtues. Aristotle held that that practi-cal wisdom is necessary for the exercise of the moral virtues and that conversely, the moral virtues are necessary for the exercise of practical wisdom.6 The justification for the first of these two claims is clearest in the context of Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean. Since what counts as a virtuous action depends on features of an agent’s circumstances, she must be able to identify right action along a highly variable continuum of action and feeling. Right action is a moving target, and so it requires an exercise of judgment to know what counts as virtuous here and now. Moral virtues are not blind habits precisely because they require practi-cal wisdom for their exercise.


The second claim, that moral virtue is necessary for practical wisdom, is based on the premise that habituation into the moral virtues affects our evaluation of ends, along with our ability to act in light of those ends. What a person finds worthwhile is shaped by her upbringing and reflected in her emotional attachments. The child brought up in habits of generosity comes to see helping others as a worthwhile human end and her attachment to that end affects her view of the world. It is by now a standard thesis in virtue ethics that properly directed emotions are essential for virtue, not simply because emotional responses are valuable in themselves, but also because they play an important role in cognition.7 Emotional responses make certain things salient in certain contexts, and what things are made salient depends on what one views as worthwhile. Attachment to the right ends—the very thing acquired through habitu-ation into moral virtue—makes practical wisdom possible.

Yet since it is possible for an agent to be attached to the right ends but still not know how to act in a way expressive of that attachment, the exercise of practical wisdom requires something more. It demands a kind of cleverness about the means necessary to achieve the ends already established as good, expressed in an agent’s ability to say or do what is proper in a given circumstance.8 My thesis is that Elinor has this kind of cleverness and that Marianne and Mrs. Jennings do not, despite their generally good characters. To understand how Marianne and Mrs. Jennings fail to act well is to understand something about practical wisdom.

Sense and Sensibility is centered on the Dashwood family, consisting of a widow and her three daughters, with the two elder daughters, Elinor and Marianne, serving as the main protagonists of the story. Forced by economic constraints and the selfishness of a half-brother to move away from their family home, they take a house near some of Mrs. Dashwood’s relatives, one of whom is Mrs. Jennings.9 The novel follows Elinor and Marianne through love affairs, betrayal, illness, and eventually marriage. There is a happy ending—the heroines marry virtuous men and in doing so, find both marital bliss and economic security.

Austen’s account of the acquisition of virtue is broadly Aristotelian.10 Like Aristotle, she emphasizes the significance of habituation into actions and emotional responses characteristic of virtue, and like Aristotle, she thinks a good upbringing is crucial. Vice is generally explained as the result of negligence with respect to moral education and training, since a parent’s failure to inculcate good habits or check bad habits in a child causes problems down the road.

381Karen Stohr

This is particularly evident in Pride and Prejudice, where Darcy explains his moral failings to Elizabeth in this way: “As a child, I was taught what was right; but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. . . . I was spoiled by my parents who, though good themselves . . . , allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing. . . .”11 Both because of his sound principles and because of his good fortune in meeting Elizabeth, Darcy is able to reform his character before all is lost.12 Lydia Bennet is not so fortunate. One of the novel’s morals is that Lydia’s scandal-ous elopement with Wickham might have been forestalled by proper parenting, in that it would have both restrained her impulsive behavior and also provided her with better tools for ascertaining Wickham’s real character before placing her fate into his hands.

A good upbringing is not foolproof; even good parents can make mistakes with respect to their children, as Darcy’s example shows. Nor, apparently, is it strictly required, since Elizabeth and Jane Bennet some-how managed to escape the bad habits that their parents permitted in their younger sisters. In general, however, a properly brought up man or woman will not only develop inwardly good principles but will also present himself or herself to the world in a way that exemplifies that inner worth. Although it is not true in Austen’s world that outward behavior is always a reliable indicator of inward merit, it is true that there is a close link between good moral principles and their expression in ordinary social interaction. Wickham does an excellent job of charming all of Longbourn and Meryton into believing him virtuous, but Austen makes clear that at least some of the clues to his real nature were there from the beginning, if only Elizabeth had paid proper attention. After learning of his vicious propensities, her perspective changes: “She was now struck with the improprieties of such communication to a stranger, and wondered it had escaped her before. She saw the indelicacy of putting himself forward as he had done, and the inconsistency of his professions with his conduct” (p. 207).

Importantly, Austen is not suggesting that good manners take priority over moral principles. This is apparent in Sense and Sensibility through Mrs. Jennings’s daughter, Lady Middleton, who is impeccably behaved, but who has almost none of the concerns that would characterize her as genuinely virtuous. And although at one point, Elinor recognizes that “she was sometimes worried down by officious condolence to rate good breeding as more indispensable to comfort than good nature,” it is evident that this is not her considered view, nor is it a view that


Austen condones.13 There is no doubt that the often rude and tactless Mrs. Jennings is morally superior to her perfectly polite, but shallow daughter. Yet the remark indicates how important it is that good moral principles be accompanied by behavior that is consciously attuned to the moral dimensions of ordinary social interactions. Nowhere in the novel is this capability better demonstrated than in Elinor herself.

Despite her youth, Elinor has sound moral principles and a keen appreciation for their relevance to ordinary circumstances. This is largely because of her emotional maturity and stability, as we learn in this passage, where Austen introduces Elinor to the reader:

Elinor . . . possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judg-ment, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother, and enabled her frequently to counteract, to the advantage of them all, that eagerness of mind in Mrs. Dashwood which must generally have led to imprudence. She had an excellent heart;—her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong: but she knew how to govern them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn, and which one of her sisters had resolved never to be taught. (p. 6)

Throughout the novel, Elinor is the exemplar of moderation, propriety, and moral rectitude. She fulfills every major social duty without ever being obsequious or false. Always conscious of the demands of grati-tude and family relationships, she defends people according to, but not beyond their true merits. She is honorable in fulfilling her obligations, even when doing so is disagreeable, such as when she must keep a promise to Lucy Steele or carry on tiresome social pleasantries.

Ever mindful of the effects of her behavior on others, Elinor maintains a tight grip on her emotions, both for the sake of propriety and also to avoid giving pain to her friends. To her emotionally overwrought sister and mother, Elinor appears reserved and sometimes even unfeeling, illustrating Aristotle’s point that to the person who lacks virtue, a virtu-ous action may seem to demonstrate an actual vice (1108b 24–28). Mrs. Dashwood calls Elinor “ungracious” for expressing reasonable concerns about Willoughby’s character and once refers to her as prudent with a note of contempt (pp. 80, 156). When they leave behind both their home of many years and the man who is the object of Elinor’s affec-tions, Marianne interprets Elinor’s mastery of her emotions as a sign of indifference: “And Elinor, in quitting Norland and Edward, cried not as I did. Even now her self-command is invariable. When is she dejected

383Karen Stohr

or melancholy? When does she try to avoid society, or appear restless and dissatisfied in it?” (p. 39). It is not until the end of the novel that Mrs. Dashwood and Marianne learn to appreciate Elinor’s carefully directed emotions and the extent of the effort she has consistently put into maintaining that direction. Indeed, Marianne’s eventual character transformation is a vindication of what Elinor has been all along.

Despite her considerable mastery of her feelings, Elinor is nevertheless capable of intense emotional responses. She empathizes with her sister in her romantic suffering, and when Marianne becomes dangerously ill, Elinor’s fear and grief are just as we would expect from a loving sister. Upon learning that Edward is free to marry her, Elinor responds by bursting into tears of joy (p. 360). Her success at restraining her emotions when propriety demands it does not prevent her from either having intense emotions or from expressing them when appropriate. The key is that she is capable of guiding the expression of her emotion according to her correct judgments of what particular situations demand from her, and her ability to do so is essential to her capacity to act in accordance with the dictates of practical wisdom.

Elinor’s behavior throughout the novel is in sharp contrast to that of Marianne and Mrs. Jennings. Despite being in possession of good moral principles, neither is routinely capable of acting in a way that reflects what they correctly hold to be valuable. Their failures, I suggest, are traceable to defects in their respective abilities to exercise moral imagination effectively.

Austen initially describes Mrs. Jennings as “a good-humoured, merry, fat, elderly woman, who talked a great deal, seemed very happy, and rather vulgar” (p. 34). A widow, she has successfully married off her two daughters and has “now therefore nothing to do but to marry all the rest of the world” (p. 36). Her favorite activity is to tease people about their real or perceived (or imagined) romantic attachments. Both Eli-nor and Marianne understandably find her annoying from almost the moment she appears on the scene.

She is not merely annoying, however, for she causes considerable embarrassment through her teasing, and often descends into outright rudeness. She demonstrates almost no regard for privacy with respect to the most intimate issues. When Colonel Brandon must cancel plans for an outing for reasons that he clearly does not want to make public, she attempts to badger him into revealing them anyway (pp. 64–65). She spreads a damaging rumor about him that, while false, cannot help but lower his character in the eyes of others. Lacking either permission or


evidence, she tells the world that Marianne is engaged to Willoughby, thereby worsening Marianne’s social position when Willoughby eventu-ally forsakes her for another woman, and her ill-considered attempts to console Marianne have the opposite effect. Through her rudeness and lack of insight, she mortifies her friends, puts them in awkward positions, and sometimes causes real pain.

Yet for all this, Mrs. Jennings is a woman of considerable moral worth, something that becomes increasingly clear as the novel progresses. She judges as she ought in all the important things and usually shows more backbone than other characters when it comes to defending the moral high ground. Unlike the appearance-minded Lady Middleton, she is willing to cut the undeserving Willoughby and stand by the deserving Edward in his troubles. She also takes pains to prevent herself from overhearing a highly interesting, but private conversation between Eli-nor and Colonel Brandon, though she might well have eavesdropped without being caught (p. 281).

Along with her sound moral principles, Mrs. Jennings has a thoroughly kind heart. In contrast to Mrs. Ferrars, her maternal affections run wide and deep. Notably, she routinely takes in, or offers to take in, those who have been scorned by the Ferrars, including not only Elinor and Marianne, but also the Steele sisters and even Edward. Her behavior toward everyone is always aimed at increasing their happiness so far as she can, and her attempts to aid them, though usually misguided, are demonstrative of a genuine concern for their welfare. When Marianne falls seriously ill, Mrs. Jennings grieves as if Marianne was her own daughter, and proves herself to be a committed and capable nurse:

Mrs. Jennings, however, with a kindness of heart which made Elinor really love her, declared her resolution of not stirring from Cleveland as long as Marianne remained ill, and of endeavouring, by her own attentive care, to supply to her the place of the mother she had taken her from; and Elinor found her on every occasion a most willing and active helpmate, desirous to share in all her fatigues, and often, by her better experience in nursing, of material use. (p. 308)

The events at Cleveland Park leave no doubt of Mrs. Jennings’s sterling moral character.

We thus come to be of two minds about Mrs. Jennings. Despite her essential goodness, she is hardly a role model for good behavior in cer-tain morally charged contexts. She has the right moral concerns, but

385Karen Stohr

she often fails to appreciate their relevance in particular circumstances. Although she would never deliberately hurt anyone’s feelings, she does so as a matter of course through her teasing. Mrs. Jennings never offers an apology for anything she does, not because she is too proud to admit she is wrong, but because she never recognizes anything she does as warranting an apology. She clearly believes that other people enjoy being teased about romantic matters and never reflects on the possibility that others might be more sensitive than her with respect to their private affairs and hence, humiliated by such teasing. It is not that she is unemotional; one suspects that her capacity for the pleasanter emotions is quite considerable. But there are some emotions to which she appears to be immune, and her immunity to them often interferes with her judgment.

A useful way to explain her failings is to say that Mrs. Jennings suffers from an impoverished moral imagination. Insofar as she imagines the effects of her actions on others at all, she does so only minimally, and she doesn’t attend to any evidence that would disconfirm her views of her remarks as being generally well-received. As she is not malicious, we must suppose that she simply doesn’t notice the responses she provokes in others—fails to see embarrassment in their faces or in their voices. Impervious to embarrassment herself, she is unable to appreciate its manifestation in others. The embarrassment of others does not touch her otherwise considerable sympathies because she cannot put herself in the position of the target of her raillery.

Even where she does correctly identify the emotion being experienced by someone else, Mrs. Jennings is often unable to behave appropriately with respect to it. Consider her response upon learning that Willoughby has forsaken Marianne for another woman:

Mrs. Jennings came immediately to their room on her return, and without waiting to have her request of admittance answered, open the door and walked with a look of real concern. ‘How do you do, my dear?’ said she, in a voice of great compassion. . . . ‘How is she, Miss Dashwood?—Poor thing! She looks very bad.—No wonder. Aye, it is but too true. He is to be married very soon—a good-for-nothing fellow! . . . I wish with all my soul his wife may plague his heart out. . . . But there is one comfort, my dear Miss Marianne; he is not the only young man in the world worth having; and with your pretty face you will never want admirers. Well, poor thing! I won’t disturb her any longer, for she had better have her cry out at once and have done with it. The Parrys and Sandersons luckily


are coming to-night, you know, and that will amuse her.’ She then went away, walking on tiptoe out of the room, as if she supposed her young friend’s affliction could be increased by noise. (p. 192)

In a very characteristic way, she later offers Marianne the best wine in the house, under the impression that it might cure the latter’s romantic affliction as it used to cure her husband’s episodes of gout. Clearly, she is deeply concerned about Marianne’s grief, but she has no real under-standing of that grief, perhaps because her grief in such a situation would not run anywhere near as deep. No doubt, this explains why she supposes that some visiting neighbors or some wine might cure it.

By contrast, Elinor, who correctly believes that Marianne’s grief is overblown, is nevertheless capable of responding more fully to her sister’s suffering. She can imagine better what it is like to be Marianne in those circumstances, even though Elinor herself would behave differently in those same circumstances. This makes Elinor capable of acting in a way more characteristic of virtuous sympathy here than is Mrs. Jennings, despite the latter’s thoroughly kind heart.

The following passage shows the differences in Elinor and Mrs. Jen-nings with respect to moral imagination. Marianne has just received a letter from Willoughby, which Elinor rightly surmises will contain devastating news:

. . . a letter was delivered to Marianne, which she eagerly caught from the servant, and, turning of a death-like paleness, ran out of the room. Elinor, who saw as plainly by this, as if she had seen the direction, that it must come from Willoughby, felt immediately such a sickness at heart as made her hardly able to hold up her head, and sat in such a general tremour as made her fear it impossible to escape Mrs. Jennings’s notice. That good lady, however, saw only that Marianne had received a letter from Willoughby, which appeared to her a very good joke, and which she treated accordingly by hoping, with a laugh, that she would find it to her liking. Of Elinor’s distress, she was too busily employed in measuring lengths of worsted for her rug, to see anything at all. . . . (p. 181)

Clearly, if Mrs. Jennings had any idea of what the letter contained, she would have reacted differently. But she has no idea, because she cannot conceive of Marianne’s relationship with Willoughby as having any emo-tional depth. She does not anticipate Marianne’s reaction to the letter, and so she cannot imagine that Elinor might be feeling anything on her sister’s behalf. Of course Elinor has the advantage of more information

387Karen Stohr

here, but Mrs. Jennings could see more than she does, if only she could recognize that there is something more to see.

Importantly, when Mrs. Jennings can engage in imaginative exercises about someone else’s situation, her actions turn out quite differently. When Marianne’s illness becomes life-threatening, Mrs. Jennings’s sen-sitivity to her friends’ distress is considerable:

Her heart was really grieved. The rapid decay, the early death of a girl so young, so lovely as Marianne, must have struck a less interested person with concern. On Mrs. Jennings’s compassion, she had other claims. She had been for three months her companion, was still under her care, and she was known to have been greatly injured and long unhappy. The distress of her sister too, particularly a favourite, was before her;—and as for their mother, when Mrs. Jennings considered that Marianne might probably be to her what Charlotte was to herself, her sympathy in her suf-ferings was very sincere. (p. 313)

Here Mrs. Jennings is fully aware of the enormity of the tragedy loom-ing for her friends. She can readily imagine Mrs. Dashwood’s fears for Marianne because she can imagine what it would be like for her to lose her own favorite daughter, Charlotte. Not only is she a helpful nurse, but she restrains her proclivities to foretell Marianne’s doom in Elinor’s presence. Thus, where Mrs. Jennings’s moral imagination is effective in enabling her to recognize the emotions experienced by others and the corresponding need for sympathetic responses from her, her moral practice matches the genuine kindness of her heart.

Mrs. Jennings suffers from a lack of moral imagination in those cases where her own emotional responses are absent or underdeveloped. Her insensitivity to embarrassment, her total unconcern for privacy and discretion, her dismissal of romantic disappointment—all these things prevent her from recognizing the true needs of others as they present themselves to her in specific cases. Despite always wishing to be kind, she is oblivious to features of her situation are relevant to acting kindly, features that someone with better imaginative capacities would notice.

Like Mrs. Jennings, Marianne is often unable to exercise practical wisdom in particular social contexts, and like Mrs. Jennings, this is a result of a malfunctioning moral imagination. Rather than being oblivious to morally salient features of her circumstances, Marianne has emotional sensitivities so pronounced that she sees those features as having far more significance and hence, requiring a much more


dramatic response, than the circumstances actually warrant. It is not that she lacks imaginative capacities altogether, but she lacks the ability to aim them properly.

Marianne is introduced to the reader in the following passage, which displays the kind of mixed attitude the novel has toward her character from the beginning: “Marianne’s abilities were, in many respects, quite equal to Elinor’s. She was sensible and clever; but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting: she was everything but prudent” (p. 6).

Marianne is clearly supposed to have our sympathy. Austen calls her ‘amiable,’ which is an important commendation. Like Mrs. Jennings, Marianne judges as she ought on all the important things and her eventual transformation following her illnesses reinforces the belief that she had sound moral principles all along. She is deeply loyal to her mother and sisters and her proper regard for them often enables her to overcome her own inclinations for their sakes. When Willoughby offers to give her a horse, although she will not acknowledge the impropriety of the gift, she does care enough about inconveniencing her mother to decline it on that ground, though Elinor must point it out.

It is evident in the novel that Marianne’s emotional responses are marked by immoderation and excess.14 The problem is not merely that she feels things too deeply; her strong passions pose obstacles to good moral behavior, despite her explicit commitment to morality. In some cases, Marianne’s feelings lead her to act in ways that, while not perfectly appropriate, aren’t clearly morally problematic, even by Austen’s standards. Marianne has excessively strict views about how poetry ought to be read and how drawings ought to be admired, and maintains she could never love a man who did not exactly share her literary tastes. Her immediate, open, and unrestrained affection for Willoughby offends against accepted standards of behavior for young, unmarried women, but it is hard for a modern reader not to have at least some sympathy for her, even if we agree she is behaving foolishly. We also see an appreciation for Marianne’s artless passion through the eyes of Colonel Brandon, who defends her against Elinor’s criticisms by arguing that “there is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions” (p. 56).15

But Marianne’s strong passions and sensitivities create in her a kind of rigidity that prevents her from bending according to the needs of the situations she faces, resulting in far more serious moral transgres-

389Karen Stohr

sions.16 Despite her delicate opinions, she is often as rude as the much less sensitive Mrs. Jennings and like Mrs. Jennings, Marianne usually does not recognize what she does as being rude. Believing that her feelings are a good indicator of the moral soundness of what she does, she insists that: “if there had been any real impropriety in what I did, I should have been sensible of it at the time, for we always know when we are acting wrong, and with such a conviction I could have had no pleasure” (p. 68).

As it turns out, Marianne does not always know when she is acting badly, and her feelings turn out to be a poor guide to proper moral practice precisely because her feelings themselves are out of proportion to the significance of their objects. She believes Elinor to be offended when Mrs. Jennings teases them about having left their hearts behind them when they left Norland, but Marianne’s response is overblown. “Marianne was vexed at it for her sister’s sake, and turned her eyes towards Elinor, to see how she bore these attacks, with an earnestness which gave Elinor far more pain than could arise from such common-place raillery as Mrs. Jennings’s” (p. 34). Because of her own emotional sensitivity, Marianne takes the admittedly bad behavior of Mrs. Jennings far too seriously. She would be mortified by such an implication; hence, she assumes that Elinor would be (and indeed, should be) equally morti-fied and so responds accordingly. The mortification, however, is out of place, given the insignificance of the cause. Elinor is annoyed by the raillery, but Marianne makes Elinor’s own discomfort worse by giving its source far more importance than it warrants or that Elinor herself is inclined to give it.

Marianne’s self-absorption, when combined with her strong opinions, prevents her from stepping out of her own quite constricted conception of the moral universe. Thus, despite her greater appreciation for social nuance, Marianne tends to behave worse than Mrs. Jennings, whose selflessness gives her better moral aim. Marianne’s feelings direct her to be rude toward those whom she dislikes. Her dislike is of a quasi-moral sort; she is disgusted by what she often correctly perceives to be bad behavior and she believes that this moral disgust takes priority over accepted standards of propriety. Marianne uses her disgust as a kind of general excusing condition for having to engage in any distasteful social tasks. Not only does this encourage her to behave rudely toward Mrs. Jennings and others through repeated snubs, but it also leads her to act selfishly by placing all the burdens of unpleasant social interaction on her sister, including paying required visits to disagreeable relatives


as well as “the whole task of telling lies when politeness required it” (p. 122).

Moral disgust has its place, but only when properly directed, and throughout the novel, Marianne’s disgust is either inaccurately aimed or overly pronounced. When Mrs. Jennings hands her a letter from her mother expressing a hope that it will cheer her up, Marianne, believing at first the letter is from Willoughby, is devastated by Mrs. Jennings’s perceived heartlessness: “The cruelty of Mrs. Jennings no language, within her reach in her moments of happiest eloquence, could have expressed; and now she could reproach her only by the tears which streamed from her eyes with passionate violence—a reproach, however, so entirely lost on its object, that after many expressions of pity, she withdrew, still referring her to the letter for comfort” (p. 202).

Despite Mrs. Jennings’s own inability to offer Marianne appropri-ate sympathy, what transpires during these scenes after Willoughby’s treachery reflects worse on Marianne than on Mrs. Jennings. Mrs. Jen-nings engages in well-intentioned missteps, but Marianne is cold and unforgiving. Her oversensitivity to slights and innuendo render her completely incapable of responding appropriately to her friends. Mrs. Jennings embarrasses, but Marianne wounds. Indeed, the novel implies that Marianne’s character, unlike Mrs. Jennings’s, is in need of major transformation.17

One of Marianne’s major intellectual failures is that she refuses to see emotional reserve as valuable, or even possible. This leads her to behave uncharitably toward Elinor, assuming that her sister’s unexpressed feelings are weak and hence, not worthy of particular regard. Although she loves Elinor dearly and wants nothing more than her happiness, she cannot believe Elinor to be unhappy when she doesn’t show it. She is so caught up in her own misery that she cannot see the price that her beloved Elinor pays for having to witness Marianne’s emotional outpourings. Her attitude toward emotional reserve produces not only inaccurate perceptions of what is happening in the world around her, but also outright selfishness. Though Elinor urges her to rally for the sake of those she loves, Marianne, while claiming that for the sake of her mother and Elinor, “I would do more than for my own. But to appear happy when I am so miserable—Oh! who can require it?” (p. 190). Even when she comes to learn of Elinor’s own romantic sorrow, Marianne cannot, or perhaps will not, lift herself out of her own concerns enough to provide any comfort to her sister.

Because Marianne’s emotional responses to people are quick and

391Karen Stohr

strong and because she is guided by those first responses to them, she makes hasty generalizations about others. More seriously, these impas-sioned responses lead her to see their merits and weaknesses in a par-ticularly highlighted form, which obscures other important factors. Her favorable emotional reaction to Willoughby is so strong that it makes his appealing characteristics more salient than anything else, including not simply social norms, but also his faults. Likewise, her distaste for Mrs. Jennings makes her see nothing else but her tactless and boorish behavior. She is quick to render lasting judgments about a person’s character, but her initial impressions tend to be wrong. Unlike Mrs. Jennings, she is not generally unaware of the behavior of those around her; rather, she often reads into that behavior what is not there. She projects feelings onto people that they do not hold, and dismisses the significance of feelings she does not share.

Although in some ways, Marianne’s capacities for imagination are considerable, she is ineffective in the direction of her imagination. Because of this, she often acts badly, misjudging the motives and behavior of others and expressing inappropriate attitudes in response. In doing so, she behaves in ways that are in fact inconsistent with her own moral views. For instance, Marianne believes that kindness is a virtue and that love and loyalty are the proper responses to kind friends. Yet she cannot see Mrs. Jennings as kind-hearted because with respect to her, Marianne’s imaginative capacities are too constricted.

It might be thought that Marianne’s failure is a species of incontinence, but I don’t think this would be quite right, or at least not entirely right. Until her moral conversion brought on by her illness, she usually believes that she is acting on sound moral principles. Where her principles dif-fer from Elinor, they tend not to be on significant points. She believes, along with Elinor, that it is important not to be rude, but she fails to see her behavior to Mrs. Jennings and others as constituting rudeness. On her overly romantic view, ordinary manners do not apply in the face of major failings in others. She thinks—perhaps rightly—that a snub is the proper manifestation of disgust toward someone else’s behavior, but she is disgusted too easily and by too many things. Although she believes she is behaving in accordance with her own ideals, she cannot see that this behavior is incompatible with her other moral concerns, such as her devotion to her sister. Marianne is sensitive to breaches of propriety, but those very sensitivities make her unable to conform to its dictates.

Mrs. Jennings lacks the imagination necessary to see beyond the


surface of her immediate circumstances, where those circumstances are not ones that captivate her own sensibilities. Marianne too often lacks the imagination to see beyond surface appearances, but Marianne makes the additional mistake of believing that her surface impressions are always an effective indicator of what lies beneath, as her comment on Mrs. Jennings indicates: “Her kindness is not sympathy; her good nature is not tenderness” (p. 201). The sharpness of Marianne’s mind and the depth of her sensibilities set her apart from Mrs. Jennings, but because Marianne cannot believe that the world is other than as she sees it, she turns out to be just as limited—or more so—in her imaginative powers. Neither Mrs. Jennings nor Marianne is capable of acting with full practical wisdom. This is true despite their sound moral principles and fundamentally good hearts. Neither can see the world properly because seeing the world properly requires the appropriate exercise of moral imagination, which neither Mrs. Jennings nor Marianne can manage. And since seeing the world properly is a precondition for acting properly in it, it is no surprise that their actions so often miss the mark.

Given Austen’s overall Aristotelian picture of moral education and moral development, we can probably assume that she would trace these failings to a deficiency in moral education. We know too little about Mrs. Jennings’s background to be able to say how her education went awry. Marianne’s imaginative capacities, we can surmise, were not properly directed by her similarly disposed mother. Mrs. Dashwood, though lack-ing in full practical wisdom, is nevertheless more capable of acting well in practice than Marianne, no doubt because of her better experience of the world. We can expect Marianne’s own capacities for good moral practice to improve over time. Her illness serves as a kind of revelatory moment for her, and although her moral reform is not immediate, we can see toward the end of the novel that Marianne’s imaginative capacities with respect to Elinor, Colonel Brandon, and Mrs. Jennings are much beyond what they were before.

My goal in this paper has been to draw a lesson about what it means for a virtuous person to “get things right” by illustrating, through Aus-ten’s characters, the importance of moral imagination for good moral practice. Practical wisdom, if it is to make possible fully virtuous action, must reach down to the level of minute details about behavior, for much of moral life is conduct via the mundane. Good moral practice is a demanding enterprise, and it is hard to get it right, as Aristotle reminds us repeatedly and as Austen’s characters demonstrate (1109a25–20). The imaginative capacities that make possible virtuous action are not

393Karen Stohr

easy to acquire, and many things pull us in other directions. Most of us are more like Marianne or Mrs. Jennings than like Elinor. In the end, perhaps Elinor’s character is nothing more than a moral ideal, but it is an ideal to which we have moral reason to aspire.

Georgetown University

An earlier version of this paper was presented at “Values and Virtues: Aristotelianism in Contem-porary Ethics” at the University of Dundee, May 2004. I am grateful for the helpful comments of an audience there.

1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 1140b5–7. All references hereafter are to this text and use the standard Bekker pagination.

2. One of the most extensive recent discussions of practical wisdom in Aristotle is by Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 179–265. Another useful source is John Cooper, Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986).

3. Some notable exceptions include the following: Felicia Ackerman, “A Man by Noth-ing Is So Well Betrayed as by His Manner? Politeness as a Virtue,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy Vol. XIII, ed. P. French, R. Uehling, and H. Wettstein (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988); Sarah Buss, “Appearing Respectful: The Moral Significance of Manners,” Ethics 109 ( July 1999): 795–826; Julia Driver, “Caesar’s Wife: On the Moral Significance of Appearing Good,” The Journal of Philosophy 89.7 ( July 1992): 331–43; Nancy Sherman, “Virtue and Emotional Demeanor,” in Feelings and Emotions: Interdisci-plinary Explorations, ed. A. Manstead, N. Frijda, and A. Fischer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

4. On this point, see especially Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Nancy Sherman, “Empathy and the Imagination,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy Vol. XXII, ed. P. French and H. Wettstein (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998).

5. I recognize that this is a controversial ascription. Gilbert Ryle memorably says that “Elinor sometimes collapses into a Head rather loosely buttoned on to a Heart, and then she ceases to be a person at all.” See Ryle, “Jane Austen and the Moralists” in Critical Essays on Jane Austen, ed. B. C. Southam (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 108. One can understand why a reader might prefer Marianne to Elinor, but my view (and Ryle’s) is that Austen intends us to think that Elinor has gotten it right; however, I shall not argue for that thesis here.

6. The reciprocity thesis appears most prominently at 1144b 30–35, though 1144a 5–10 is also important. It is common to refer to it as the “unity thesis” but I think this


creates unhelpful confusion with the Socratic thesis that all the virtue are really just forms of knowledge.

7. See for instance Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

8. Aristotle, of course, draws a distinction between virtue and “mere” cleverness. My use of the term is thus a departure from his.

9. She is the mother-in-law of Mrs. Dashwood’s cousin, Sir John Middleton.

10. See Ryle, 1968. This point is reinforced by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). For a fuller exploration of Aristotelianism in Austen, see David Gallop, “Jane Austen and the Aristotelian Ethic,” Philosophy and Literature 23 (1999): 96–109.

11. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 369.

12. Anne Crippen Ruderman implies that Darcy’s character is not substantially in need of reform at all, suggesting that the problem lies almost entirely in others’ perception of him. See her The Pleasures of Virtue (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), pp. 100–101. I disagree.

13. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 215.

14. For a very interesting discussion of the concept of sensibility in the novel and in Marianne’s character, see Inger Sigrun Brody, “Adventures of a Female Werther: Jane Austen’s Revision of Sensibility” Philosophy and Literature 23 (1999): 110–26.

15. That such a statement should issue from the lips of sensible and good Colonel Brandon serves, I think, as evidence that Austen means us to take it seriously. In Austen’s novels, truly foolish views tend to be expressed by characters that are themselves foolish. But Elinor does have the last word in this conversation, and the novel probably proves her right.

16. I am indebted to Brody’s insights here, as well as those of Susan Morgan in her book, In the Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen’s Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

17. Ryle (p. 107) claims that Mrs. Jennings’s character changes as the novel progresses. I disagree. Like Darcy, Mrs. Jennings “improves upon acquaintance.”

Mark R. McCulloh

DESTRUCTION AND TRANSCENDENCE IN W. G. SEBALD

I

For all the Saturnine pessimism of W. G. Sebald’s application of Walter Benjamin’s view of historical process (an attitude toward

history expounded upon at length in an influential work by Susan Sontag), the author’s sense of irony about the human predicament is irrepressible.1 Human beings seem destined to remain prisoners of various paradoxes—they both create and destroy, they are capable of acts of love as well as bitterness and hate, they make efforts to docu-ment and communicate, but at the same time they tend to forget and are given to suppressing the truth, they are driven by ideals, yet remain hobbled by imperfection. Art and music, passed on from generation to generation, seem to be the most common way that human beings transcend the strictures of their imperfections, inadequacies, and their finitude. And to the extent that art indeed survives over time, and continues to be perceived and appreciated by beholders, the aesthetic enterprise succeeds. However, ultimately, as the Book of Ecclesiastes and Shelley’s “Ozymandias” remind us, all human endeavor is in vain, and, to assume the perspective of physical cosmology for a moment—and in this regard Benjamin’s cosmic vision appears painfully accurate—our speck of earth, dwarfed by a vast universe the true immensity of which has been revealed by the Hubble Telescope, will one day be ground to dust and debris like the rings of Saturn, and our sun will exist only as a burned-out hulk. But such a future world, devoid of beholders, and devoid of creators and their artifacts, is not Sebald’s primary subject, even though it clearly forms the teleological backdrop for his third novel, The Rings of Saturn (1995, English version 1998). Rather, Sebald pursues his art in spite of a terminal prospect that will ultimately confront our



planet and solar system. His primary subject, the effect of trauma on individual and collective experience, is instead closely linked with the passing of Europe as a tradition, as an idea—as an idiosyncratic and innovative, but inherently corrupt contributor to cultural history. In the course of his narratives he also addresses the redemptive role of art in memorializing the past and attempting to capture the passing present. In both respects he attends to the humane and the sublime as well as the tragic and the grotesque.

Paraphrasing the art historian Svetlana Alpers, one early reviewer of Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2001) points out the self-contradictory nature of preserving the transient moment in art:

Why create visual art at all when everything on earth must be represented in its inexorable transitoriness; why paint earthly scenes with such incred-ible care and precision as if they were permanent?2

The care and precision of the painter’s craft (in this case, the Dutch still-life painter David Bailly) are devoted to the representation of a scene that is by its very nature transient and even tenuous—like the scenes of sublime beauty in Sebald’s fiction, the artist’s depiction “courts and admits” its own fragility. What Bailly does visually, Sebald attempts in words. Take, for instance, the following passage from Vertigo, Sebald’s first novel, which was titled in German (with considerably more irony) Schwindel. Gefühle 3:

At a hairpin bend I looked out of the turning bus down into the depths below and could see the turquoise surfaces of the Ferstein and Smaranger lakes, which, even when I was a child, on our first excursions into the Tyrol, had seemed to me the essence of all conceivable beauty. (p. 176)

The author has already prepared the reader for this moment of awe by remarking on the otherworldly “slow-motion quality” of the waterfalls descending from the mountain cliffs and on the boulders in their screes spreading downwards into the wooded hillsides, “screes which reached from the mountains down into the forests like pale fingers into dark hair . . .” (p. 176). Examined closely, the passage in question suggests both the enduring power of natural beauty and, especially with its precise reference to an automobile long since out of production and unfamiliar to many readers, the transience of human experience (the make of the car is omitted entirely in the English version). Moreover, the childhood

397Mark R. McCulloh

memory of the same transcendent scene serves to underscore simultane-ously the relative permanence of nature in contrast to the temporal limi-tations of individuals and artifacts; I use the term “relative permanence,” an oxymoron, of course, because the boulder-strewn screes and constant waterfalls are signs that nature itself is in constant flux, although the geological scale of time is vastly more gradual. The other side of beauty and sublimity, then, is the ongoing “calamity” of all history, be it human, geological, or ultimately, cosmic. Benjamin illustrated the destructiveness of history in his brief essay on Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus,” the painting which prompted Benjamin’s metaphor of the “angel of history” simultaneously facing the past as it is blown backwards into the future by a “storm from paradise.”4 In no other book by Sebald is Benjamin’s influence more palpable than in The Rings of Saturn, which begins with the narrator confessing that the feeling of liberation he experienced on his walks in Suffolk was overshadowed by “the paralyzing terror” that arose in him as he encountered everywhere “traces of destruction” (p. 3). In Sebald’s summation of Sir Thomas Browne’s ideas on mortality and transience there is this related observation:

On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation. For the history of every individual, of every social order, indeed of the whole world, does not describe an ever-widening, more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which, once the meridian is reached, leads without fail down into the darkness. (pp. 23–24)

Though Browne professed a belief in the Resurrection, Sebald’s secular narrator wonders aloud if the author didn’t as a physician have secret doubts. Oblivion seems to be the fate of everyone and everything. And yet Sebald, for all his attention to crumbling cities, burning forests, violent storms, and deteriorating health, speaks in a voice that is at the same time affirming, reassuring. He seems almost consumed by his own aesthetic sensibility and his sympathetic fascination with people and nature. The influence of Benjamin’s fatalistic materialism does not extend to negate the spiritual or more precisely, the metaphysical in Sebald. In an article on Peter Handke’s novel Die Wiederholung (1986; Repetition, 1988). Sebald openly laments the modern refusal to grant metaphysics a place in art and criticism. Handke’s writing, according to Sebald, is intent on accomplishing “the exposure of a more beautiful world by means of the word” founded on “a [highly] developed meta-physics that sets out to translate the seen and perceived into writing.”5


The important point that Sebald argues, and what is relevant here, is that art traditionally had an intimate connection with metaphysics. He reiterated this point in an interview not long before his death, saying “I’ve always thought it very regrettable, and, in a sense, also foolish, that the philosophers decided somewhere in the nineteenth century that metaphysics wasn’t a respectable discipline and had to be thrown overboard.”6 One senses an affinity with Coleridge’s aesthetic sensibility in Sebald’s acute longing for a return to metaphysics. In his essay “The Statesman’s Manual” (1816) Coleridge even went so far as to argue that the processes of art are analogous with those of religion; just as the divine will realizes itself in acts of creation, so individual artists create their symbols by fusing the universal and the particular.7 By contrast, modern literary scholarship can be thoroughly reductive and even dismissive when it comes to the goals of the artist and the “processes of art,” as in the case of its treatment of Handke, according to Sebald, Handke’s sensitive and affecting stories have been treated as mere grist for the critic’s mill (“Jenseits,” pp. 163–64).

One finds still more on Sebald’s views concerning art and metaphysics in an article on Handke and his fellow countryman from the nineteenth century Adalbert Stifter. In this essay, the title of which can be translated as “Bright Images and Dark: on the Dialectic of Eschatology in Handke and Stifter.”8 Sebald identifies one of the two writers’ common purposes in their respective novels Langsame Heimkehr (1979; Slow Homecoming, 1985) and Nachsommer (1856; Indian Sommer, 1985) as “die schöne Beleuch-tung der Welt.”—the aesthetic illumination of the world (“Helle Bilder, p. 168). Sebald does not suggest the two authors pursue this aesthetic of objectifying illumination exclusively, however; there are certainly more (and darker) dimensions to these authors’ prose. Moreover, Stifter’s attempt to describe a beautiful world is motivated by a desire to keep the demons of his past at bay, and actually arises, Sebald argues convincingly, from a flawed, pathological perception of reality, in which the Austrian’s neuroses and fears alter what he sees and experiences.9 Thus, whereas the sublime is counterbalanced or accompanied by the destructive process of history in Sebald’s fiction, so too the horrific (originating in the pre-verbal childhood experience of darkness) represents the other side of fixed, idealized (quiescent) nature.10 The very personal experi-ence of the act of writing itself provides the relation between the three authors—Stifter, Handke, Sebald—and their metaphysics of art. Trans-cendence of the finite moment through the perception and experience of beauty must be remembered and then told (and retold); this is the

399Mark R. McCulloh

purpose imbedded in the urge to write about such things. Elsewhere, Sebald suggests writing is the natural outgrowth of reflection, and the desire to recapture “the nervature of past life in one image. . . .”11

Our brains, after all,are always at work on some quiversof self-organization, however faint,and it is from this that an orderarises, in places beautiful and comforting, though more cruel, too,than the previous state of ignorance.

(After Nature, p. 83)12

Again we recognize that there exists a polarity associated with reflection necessary for writing—one finds comfort, but also a cruelty in the over-coming of ignorance, the reordering of past experience. The cruelty is found, at least in part in the realization that a plateau, an idyll, is never really reached, even in a rarefied pastoral aesthetic such as Stifter’s. The critic Robert Pyrah sees in Sebald a juxtaposition of Kulturpessimismus (Benjaminian historical pessimism as it affects culture) and artistic method; his observation dovetails well with what we have observed so far. He cites the character Michael Hamburger’s assertion in The Rings of Saturn that “we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life,” and asks, “why write if all answers are futile?”13 Recognizing the nature of the paradox inherent in Sebald’s approach to his method, Pyrah rephrases the question and posits an answer:

If our efforts to comprehend existence really are flawed and doomed, why engage in this luxuriantly written, transporting and affecting narrative enterprise in the first place? Precisely because we either infer or intuit [that] there is a higher value in the poetic undertaking itself, a redemp-tive value in the quest. (“Kulturpessimismus”)

A writer’s will to record the experience of sublime beauty, even though that record is more or less self-consciously reconstructed, is one of those human necessities we may never understand, but it is in Sebald’s case clearly welcomed by a critical readership that comprehends, if only implicitly, the “redemptive value in the quest.” Despite the certainty of our demise and the cosmic prospect of ultimate annihilation, that quest goes on, typified by the utterly sad as well as the utterly sublime, and


not without moments of humor. This patterning of the poignant, the terrible, the sublime, and the humorous provides the reason for Adam Zachary Newton’s remark that Sebald’s prose is “aggressively rhetorical in two senses: as a formal patterning that sifts the data of the world through its own system of tropes, and as an art of persuasion that aims ([Harold] Bloom prefers ‘plays’) at transcendence. . . .”14 Independently, Jonathan Long also highlights the notion of comfort predicated upon the transcendent in literature, or “redemptive repair” as Newton would have it.15 The degenerative processes of history, paradoxically, can be countermanded, or at least “overleapt,” metaphysically speaking, by human consciousness attending to them and wherever possible preserv-ing memory (even in acknowledgment of memory’s unreliability) as well as preserving images of the ever fading, receding present. Speaking of The Emigrants, Long writes the following concerning the relation of his-tory and aesthetics in Sebald’s prose, specifically in The Emigrants:

[Sebald’s] view of historical process . . . is characterized by a negative teleology in which entropy, both literal and metaphorical, results in the decline of cultures, the diasporic scattering of peoples, environmental destruction, and the inexorable decay of matter . . . the combination of narrative and photography in Die Ausgewanderten [The Emigrants] can . . . be seen as an attempt, at the level of form, to counteract the dispersal, dissipation, and rupture inherent in the historical process. For Sebald . . . it is only through such aesthetic strategies that history can possibly be redeemed. (“History, Narrative, and Photography,” p. 137)

Jason M. Baskin is even more direct in asserting the value of literature composed in spite of our putatively dismal plight as mortals in a world moving inexorably toward oblivion:

Ultimately, we are doomed to lose the struggle, but to deny the timeless, redemptive quality of art . . . is not to renounce its efficacy and useful-ness. By creating a space in which individual thought converges with the physical world, art does help us live.16

Sebald’s writing was done “in spite of” the doom we recognize in nature and history; its value is existentially efficacious and useful, to paraphrase Baskin’s thoughts.

401Mark R. McCulloh

II

The two main characteristics associated with transcendence in Sebald’s writing are, as might be expected, loftiness, and, as mentioned before, Zeitlosigkeit, i.e., atemporality. Again and again, Sebald’s narrators reach great heights, from which they peer down on exquisite undisturbed landscapes. Conversely, the sensation of transport into the heights is the effect on the reader of the most compelling prose, as Sebald indicates in his remarks on the literary style of Sir Thomas Browne. Though Browne’s seventeenth-century diction is grammatically complex and highly scholarly, he succeeds in “levitating” the reader’s perspective:

. . . when he . . . succeeds in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiraling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air, even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation. The greater the distance, the clearer the view: One sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity. It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time. (Rings, p. 19)

Transcendence, as its literal meaning suggests, requires upward move-ment, and ideally affords a panoramic view of utmost clarity. The experi-ence produced is metaphysical, characterized by Sebald in an essay in his book about Austrian literature, Unheimliche Heimat (Alien Homeland), as “selbstvergessenes Schauen” a term not easily rendered into English, meaning something like “gazing upon something while completely for-getting one’s identity as a self.”17 In the same article he explains:

The metaphysical moment and its surveying perspective have their ori-gins in a profound fascination in which our relation to the world is for a time reversed. In the process of looking [gazing] we sense that things are looking at us, and we begin to comprehend that we are not here to look piercingly at the universe, but rather to be looked at piercingly by it. (“Jenseits,” p. 158)18

The heights provide the panoramic setting for the metaphysical experi-ence of oneness, of the dissolution of identity and its unselfconscious absorption into the cosmos—in that moment the act of perceiving is overwhelmed by the experience of the penetrating presence of the universe.

The exceptional viewpoint afforded by altitude exhilarates, and great prose, Sebald’s narrator suggests, resembles that exhilaration in


its cumulative effect. One literary model for this levitation is clearly the balloon ride in Stifter’s story “Der Condor,” which is discussed in Sebald’s scholarly prose and even quoted verbatim in his fiction.19 And in Logis in einem Landhaus (1998; Lodgings in a Country House) Sebald quotes the following lines from Robert Walser’s depiction of a trip in a balloon, lifting off from Bitterfeld at night:

The lovely moonlit night appears to take the splendid balloon in its invisible arms and the round craft silently rises into the heights . . . and one hardly notices that it is being driven northward by gentle winds. . . . Curious patches of flatlands, all with the same polished white sheen, alternate with gardens and small wildernesses of foliage. . . . How vast and unfamiliar the world is!20

The transcendental, extraterrestrial perspective is for Sebald the aesthetic perspective par excellence (see his commentary on Jacob van Ruisdael’s “View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields” in The Rings of Saturn (p. 83; Ringe p. 102), and levitation affords spiritual (and physical) freedom as well. Sebald writes of Walser’s fiction: “In all of his prose writings he strives to transcend earthly life; he attemps to gently, softly rise up into a freer realm” (Logis, p. 166). In Sebald’s own fiction, a notable example of the liberating appeal of flight occurs when he character Gerald Fitzpatrick in the novel Austerlitz decides to take up the study of astronomy after learning to fly, and tells the protagonist how much he longs for the heights: “The further you can rise above the earth the better” (p. 110). The aerial perspective is, to use Martin Chalmers’s words, “a giddy-making vantage point . . . but also an angel’s perspec-tive.”21 But remaining aloft is always precarious; Gerald’s destiny is to die in a plane crash.

Levitation of the spirit, like physical levitation, has its dangers too, as the novelist and critic Franz Loquai points out:

These high-altitude flights of language, in revolt against spiritual inertia, are a dangerous métier, and not only for the author. For even in the ecstasy of levitation evoked by literature, sudden descent into emptiness and its horrors threaten the reader.22

Though the intended effect of “literary ascension,” exemplified by panoramic views of earthly beauty below and sidereal majesty above, is transcendence of the bonds and power of melancholy as well as, I would add, the fatalism of history, the reader teeters on the verge of

403Mark R. McCulloh

descent into, using Loquai’s expression, “emptiness and its horrors.” Mostly, however, it is Sebald’s own characters that must experience such moments when, as fellow professor of German and novelist Claudio Magris writes in his travel book Danube, “the nullity of life” is revealed, its “void, privation and horror.”23 By the same token, we suspect Sebald would agree with Magris’s contention the writer’s craft is a form of resistance to the powerful undertow of emptiness: “The mere fact of writing in some way fills that void, gives it form makes the horror of it communicable and therefore, even if minimally, triumphs over it,” Magris concludes (Danube, p. 118). A similar argument is at the heart of Sebald’s book on melancholia and Austrian literature, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (Describing the Dismal Plight):

Melancholy, the contemplation of the dismal plight we are in . . . has nothing in common with the death wish. It is a form of resistance. And on the level of art its function is anything but reactive or reactionary. . . . The depiction of our dismal plight includes the possibility of our overcoming it.24

The depiction of the experience of the kind of “existential melancholia” to which Sebald refers is not, then, the opposite of the depiction of the experience of ascent and transcendence. The depiction of melancholia shares a positive impulse and—counter to intuition, perhaps—actually represents an attempt to resist and overcome depression related to the human predicament, especially the prospect of extinction. Thus, the sublime experiences as well as the dark nights of the soul in Sebald’s stories are part of the same spiritual quest being undertaken by the author in his writing, and by his narrators in theirs.

Atemporality, the second conspicuous feature of the literary depiction of experiences of transcendent beauty, is described by Magris as the wanderer’s reward, that is, the experience of “the pure present” (Danube, p. 87). This notion is also prominent in the aforementioned Walser’s writings. After an especially effusive lyrical description in the story “Der Spaziergang” (The Stroll), Walser writes that even mental associations with previous strolls cannot impose themselves on “the wondrous image of the mere present.”25 On the same page he continues:

The future faded and the past disappeared. I myself glowed and bloomed in the glowing, blooming present. From nearer and farther distances appeared the great and the good in glory, bright silver blessings and enrichments, and I dreamed, in the midst of the beautiful landscape,


of nothing but that landscape. All my many other dreams merged as one and vanished in their own meaninglessness. The whole rich Earth before me was mine while I examined only the minutest and the most humble things.

While there is a romantic, naïve quality to this passage that one would never expect to find in Sebald’s prose, the stress on the powerful aes-thetic immediacy of the moment is nevertheless much the same in both writers, as is the inclusion of “the minutest” and “the most humble” detail as part of “the marvelous picture” at hand. One is reminded of the scene in Austerlitz in which the protagonist and his Welsh host Adela are transfixed by the late afternoon play of light and shadow on the wall of Andromeda Lodge (pp. 112–13). But the atemporal immediacy experienced in moments such as Walser describes has little to do with the theoretical ruminations about the nature of time itself, such as are found in Austerlitz especially on pages 100–101. Rather, these aesthetic moments are by their very nature fleeting and brief, symbolized by the aforementioned scene in Austerlitz, in which shadows flit and fade, merge and re-merge to form a myriad of shapes in instantaneous succession. As the protagonist recalls earlier in the book, at the Fitzpatrick home he would often look down from his window at the parting mists and the changing surface of the Bay of Barnmouth: “it was the very evanes-cence of those visions that gave me, at the time, something like a sense of eternity” (p. 95). Paradoxically, it is transience itself that seems a necessary part of the sensation of timelessness afforded by intense and immediate aesthetic experience.26

III

Finally, it should be observed that Sebald’s aesthetic of transcendence remains a skeptical, undogmatic one. Even as the sublime beckons him, there is an ever present uncertainty.27 The suspicion that emptiness lies behind the veil of the material world seems reinforced by the narrators’ occasional experience of “immobility,” as well as the intellectual recogni-tion of blind destructive forces at work in human and natural history. On the individual level, those of Sebald’s characters who do not acqui-esce to the urge to destroy themselves carry on stoically. Arthur Lubow recalls an anecdote told him by Sebald, in which scientists conduct a sequence of three experiments.28 In the first one they place a rat in a cylinder full of water. There is no way out, and once the desperate rat

405Mark R. McCulloh

realizes this, it dies of cardiac arrest. A cylinder with a ladder to the top is substituted and a new rat placed in the water. It escapes. But when it is subsequently placed in the original ladder-less cylinder full of water it swims until it dies of exhaustion. “He chuckled,” Lubow remembers, “Disconsolately, merrily, companionably, bitterly, resignedly, darkly, theatrically, dourly, inconsolably? One is in no position to say.” Such was Sebald’s cheerfully melancholy sense of the human predicament; his standpoint is one of irony, irony at its most surreal.29

I would like to return, in conclusion, to the subject of representing immediacy, the pure present, in art. In his essayistic and highly allusive “walking tour” of the Danube, a book which anticipated Sebald’s in form and content, and preceded it by about a decade, the aforemen-tioned Claudio Magris identified the essential paradox of reconstruct-ing immediacy in prose, whether that immediacy has features of the transcendental or not. In reality the immediate moment is seldom as pregnant with authentic meaning as we might like:

the essayist’s craft displays the agonizing, ironical vicissitudes of the intel-lect which is aware how far immediacy lacks authenticity, and how far life diverges from its meaning; and yet the intellect aims, however, obliquely, at that ultimately unattainable transcendence of meaning—whose flicker-ing presence is to be seen in the very awareness of its absence. (Long, “History, Narrative, and Photography,” p. 262)

If the “flickering presence” of meaning is located precisely in the aware-ness of its absence, then we must admit the dilemma is insoluble, that the intellect is doomed to continue pursuing the unattainable, and that the horizons of meaning will never cease receding. And yet that realization in itself provides some comfort, at least in the sense of a provisional explanation of the conundrum in which human conscious-ness finds itself. An acceptance of uncertainty emerges as one of life’s constants, one of the few things about which one can be certain. The very reasonableness of Sebald’s acknowledgment of uncertainty, com-bined with his meticulous and deliberate narrative style, contribute much to what many regard as the paradoxically “reassuring” tone of his unsettling works. In Sebald’s literary monism, the concept of coinciden-tia oppositorium rules, predicated upon a dialectic in which destruction and creation (among other opposites) are inextricably linked. The result is an aesthetic of non-dogmatic reassurance in the face of doom, a “doubting pilgrims happy progress,” to borrow the words of Gareth


Howell-Jones.30 One continues to create because one must continue to engage with one’s world, external and internal, one must continue to attempt to understand by whatever creative means—by painting in the case of the character Max Ferber, by reconstructing the past in the case of Austerlitz, and by writing in the case of Sebald himself as well as a host of others who are or have been throughout history similarly inclined. Yet what Howell-Jones calls Sebald’s glimpses of “compensatory beauty” is not substantial enough for some, such as Ruth Franklin, who wrote in the autumn of 2002 that Sebald’s literary efforts always yield the same disappointing result, namely:

a work of art that vanishes almost as soon as it appears, undone by the opposing forces that it seeks to mesh. And so Sebald’s struggle against oblivion ends ironically in evanescence. The art that he created is of near-miraculous beauty, but is as fragile, and as ephemeral, as a pearl of smoke.31 (“Rings of Smoke,” p. 39)

Franklin’s objection is raised largely on moral grounds, and Sebald was certainly not unaware of the double bind authors put themselves in when they attempt, as he did in his treatment of Jewish victims in The Emigrants and Austerlitz, to reconstruct memories never personally experienced.32 The attempts of authors such as Sebald to reconstruct the past may be entirely sympathetic, even partisan, but such writers run the risk of being accused of using the misfortunes of others in the creation of a “Penelope-like embroidery” of the past, to use Franklin’s expression (“Rings of Smoke,” p. 39). In a review of Austerlitz, the prominent German critic Iris Radisch was considerably harsher in her criticism, suggesting that Sebald’s “collector’s” approach to his subject—“paving the way to the sites of expulsion and annihilation with antiquarian curiosities,” as she puts it—effectively relativizes and cheapens the sufferings caused by the Holocaust.33 It is a painful irony for admirers of Sebald that such critics as Radisch find in his work exactly the characteristics he studiously sought to avoid: inauthenticity, melodramatic sentimentality, and finally, moral insubstantiality. The obliqueness of Sebald’s approach to the suf-ferings of others, to what is not directly representable, is for some the very feature that saps Sebald’s writings of meaning and import. There is a symmetry of conflict in these opposite perspectives that is reminis-cent of features of theological language, in particular, once remarked on by George Steiner in Real Presences: “Negative theology, this is to say the postulate of His non-being, is as legitimate in respect of word and

407Mark R. McCulloh

proposition as is the dogma of His presence. Hence the symmetrical abyss within genuine faith and genuine denial; hence the potential anar-chy of spirit on either side of the free spaces of utterance.”34 Whether language is used to assert or refute—and in Sebald’s case the choice is between stylistic methods, that is, whether to confront directly or to evoke—there remain “free spaces” on “either side . . . of utterance” that allow the disorder from which opposing interpretations emerge.

Davidson College

1. Sebald refers explicitly to Benjamin’s view of history in The Rings of Saturn. The subject of Benjamin’s views on history and aesthetics is taken up by Susan Sontag in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1980). My thesis is that Sebald is an author who plays with ideas such as Benjamin’s, accepting the ultimate truth of transience and finality, but convinced that man has no existential choice but to accept life, affirm it, and to explore, create, and remember.

2. Svetlana Alpers, The Description of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 381.

3. Sebald published his first novel Schwindel. Gefühle in 1990, but it was not released in English until 1999. The title is a play on words involving the two meanings of “Schwindel” in German—“dizziness” and “swindle.”

4. The quotation is from the ninth section of “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (On the Concept of History) in Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 697–98. A rendering in English titled “Theses on the Philosophy of History” first appeared in Hanna Arendt’s book of selections from Benjamin’s essay, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), pp. 255–69.

5. “Jenseits der Grenze—Peter Handkes Erzählung Die Wiederholung.” Unheimliche Heimat: Essays zur österreichischen Literatur (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994), p. 163; hereafter abbreviated as “Jenseits.”

6. Joe Cuomo, “The Meaning of Coincidence: An Interview with the Writer W. G. Sebald,” The New Yorker (3 September 2001).

7. See James Livingston’s discussion of Coleridge’s metaphysics in the Encyclopedia of Literary Critics and Criticism, vol. 1, ed. Chris Murray (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), pp. 244–47. For an interesting excursus on Sebald’s connection to British Romanticism, see James Chandler, “About Loss: W. G. Sebald’s Romantic Art of Memory,” South Atlantic Quarterly 102 (2003): 235–62. Chandler makes much of Sebald’s affinities with Wordsworth, note especially pp. 248–51.


8. See “Helle Bilder und dunkle—Zur Dialektik der Eschatologie bei Stifter und Handke,” Die Beschreibung des Unglücks: zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994), pp. 165–86; hereafter abbreviated “Helle Bilder.”

9. Sebald cites Goethe’s observation that hypochondriacs impose visions of spiders and wasps on otherwise mundane, harmless objects in their environment. See “Helle Bilder,” p. 168.

10. Sebald mentions Stifter’s autobiographical essay “Mein Leben,” in which the author attempts an “evocation of the first visual experiences of his own life” prior to the acquisi-tion of language. In that state the inner and outer worlds are not differentiated.” See “Helle Bilder,” p. 166.

11. After Nature, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 83; subsequently referred to simply as After Nature.

12. The poem “Dark Night Sallies Forth,” translated by Michael Hamburger, appeared in The New Yorker on 17 June 2002. It was actually an excerpt from Hamburger’s transla-tion of Nach der Natur (1989).

13. Robert Pyrah, “Kulturpessimismus, Art and Redemption in The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald and an Encounter with the Author,” which was once available at http://honestdog.com; Hereafter abbreviated as “Kulturpessimismus.”

14. See Newton, “‘Mind the Gap’: W. G. Sebald and the Rhetoric of Unrest,” in A Com-panion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (London: Blackwell, 2004), p. 368.

15. J. J. Long, “History, Narrative, and Photography in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten,” Modern Language Review 98 (2003): 137; hereafter referred to as “History, Narrative, and Photography.”

16. Jason M. Baskin, Review of Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian by Gitta Honneger, Boston Review 27 (Summer 2002): 33.

17. See Sebald’s article “Jenseits der Grenze—Peter Handkes Erzählung Die Wiederhol-ung ” in Unheimliche Heimat: Essays zur österreichischen Literatur (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994), p. 158.

18. I have taken liberties in translating this passage, partly out of necessity, and partly to clarify the gist of Sebald’s observation, which in a more literal translation might not come through. On the former count, there is no good way to render Sebald’s play on words in “Augen- und Überblick, so I have chosen a periphrastic “explanation” of what is meant. On the latter count, “durchdringen” most frequently means “to penetrate,” but I think it is clear that Sebald is speaking of “looking piercingly” or “looking penetratingly,” an auxiliary meaning of the word.

19. Sebald’s description of the sensation of floating above the earth and seeing the starry firmament above is taken from Stifter’s story “Der Condor” (1840); see Rings of Saturn, p. 17 (“At times billowing masses would part and I gazed out at the indigo vastness and down into the depths where I supposed the earth to be, a black and impenetrable maze”). For an example of Sebald’s scholarly treatment of “Der Condor,” see “Bis an den Rand der Natur: Versuch über Stifter,” Beschreibung des Unglücks, pp. 15–37.

409Mark R. McCulloh

20. W. G. Sebald, Logis in einem Landhaus: Über Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Robert Walser und andere (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000), p. 158. Abbreviated Logis hereafter.

21. Martin Chalmers, “Angels of History,” New Statesman (12 July 1996): 45.

22. Franz Loquai, “Erinnerungskünstler im Beinhaus der Geschichte,” W. G. Sebald, ed. Franz Loquai (Eggingen: Klaus Isele, 1997), p. 265.

23. Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Harvill, 1990), p. 118; hereafter referred to as Danube.

24. W. G. Sebald, “Vorwort,” Die Beschreibung des Unglücks: Zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994), p. 12.

25. Robert Walser, “Der Spaziergang,” Dichtungen in Prosa, vol. 5, ed. Carl Seelig (Frank-furt: Kossodo, 1961), p. 319.

26. Obviously I am equating the concepts of eternity and timelessness, but I do so primarily because the equation seems fitting in discussing Sebald. What the theologian Paul Tillich called the “Eternal Now” seems to hold affinities with the view expressed by the protagonist near the end of Austerlitz, namely that all time—past, present, future—is in a sense already there, in one vast place (see p. 363). This idea appears to have gained currency in theoretical physics as well, due in large measure to Einstein’s dismantling of the notion of contemporaneity with his theory of special relativity.

27. See James Woods, “Sebald’s Uncertainty,” in his collection of essays titled The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 232–41.

28. See Lubov, et al., “Symposium on W. G. Sebald,” Threepenny Review 89 (2002): 21.

29. Susan Sontag writes: “Surrealism’s great gift to sensibility was to make melancholy cheerful.” See her introduction to Walter Benjamin: One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 20.

30. Howell-Jones, “A Doubting Pilgrim’s Happy Progress,” Spectator (30 May 1998): 34.

31. Ruth Franklin, “Rings of Smoke: After Nature by W. G. Sebald,” The New Republic (23 September 2002): 39; hereafter referred to as “Rings of Smoke.”

32. It is precisely the problem of instrumentalizing the past—and the misfortunes of others—that Sebald hoped to transcend with his attempts to memorialize, in an empathetic fashion, little-known past lives that had captured his attention. Sebald acknowledged the moral dilemma inherent in the creation of any literary reconstruction of real experiences. “Is it permissible to invent anything?” he asks. “May one put the sufferings of others on the market? Fiction is a form of popularizing, with the advantage that its topics reach a much wider audience than a historical monograph, for instance.” See the interview “Ich fürchte das Melodramatische,” Der Spiegel (12 March 2002): 228–34.

33. Iris Radisch, “Der Waschbär der falschen Welt,” Die Zeit (5 April 2001): 56.

34. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 37–38.

Simon Stow

READING OUR WAY TO DEMOCRACY? LITERATURE AND PUBLIC ETHICS

“I believe,” wrote Franz Kafka, “that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not

rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?”1 Almost all of us who read books for a living and/or pleasure have undoubtedly expe-rienced that most delightfully troubling of phenomena: a novel that forces us to think differently about the world and the way that we live. In recent years, literature’s capacity to generate in its readers “a rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by”2—what Stanley Fish calls its “dialectical” potential—has drawn the attention of a number of liberal-democratic theorists, most notably Martha Nussbaum and Rich-ard Rorty. By “liberal-democratic” is meant here, of course, that system of government with popular rule, regular elections, a commitment to individual rights and the rule of law; one that draws on a tradition of political thought that includes the work of John Locke, John Stuart Mill and John Rawls. Although their exact formulations of the claim differ in important ways, Nussbaum and Rorty are united in the belief that reading can enhance the practice of liberal-democracy by expanding the moral imaginations of a citizenry. Such an expansion will, they believe, promote the values of tolerance, respect for other viewpoints, and a recognition of the contingency of one’s own perspective, in short, the values of civil society. Whilst there is undoubtedly something intuitively appealing about their claim, there is much that is philosophically and politically problematic about their respective formulations of it. Both seem to rest for example upon an implausible theory of the impact of literature upon its readers, and an illiberal tendency to treat reader-citizens as means and not as ends. Attempting to capture what is of value


411Simon Stow

whilst jettisoning what is problematic, I will briefly set out their claims; identify the difficulties within them; and offer an account of how their project might be operationalized in a way that is both more philosophi-cally plausible and more politically consistent with liberalism. My aim will not be to offer another detailed account of the connection between literature and democracy—not least because I believe that the current accounts are overly deterministic—but rather to suggest some ways in which we might nevertheless build upon the current work to capture the potential benefits of reading for liberal-democratic societies.

Although Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty hold quite different views about the proper role of literature in philosophy—Nussbaum believes that literature is merely a valuable addition to philosophical Reason traditionally conceived, whereas for the postfoundational Rorty, the literariness goes all the way down—both suggest that reading will promote two values that they regard as essential to liberal-democratic practice. Following Rorty we might label these values contingency and solidarity.3 Contingency arises from the recognition that even one’s most deeply held beliefs are always only a perspective. It is connected to civility in that it serves, Nussbaum and Rorty believe, to undermine the vehemence of individual claims. Although this claim about the partiality of individual perspectives sounds dangerously postmodern for thinker such as Nussbaum—Rorty, who calls his political philosophy “postmod-ernist bourgeois liberalism,”4 has no such qualms—there are limits to this insight in her thought. Nussbaum is simply concerned to show that an excessive and over-confident reliance on philosophical Reason is likely to generate an incomplete understanding of a given situation. For this reason, she suggests, “storytelling and literary imagining are not opposed to . . . but can provide essential ingredients in a rational argument.”5 She argues, for example, that Hard Times by Charles Dickens will alert its readers—in particular “the person brought up solely on economic texts” who “has not been encouraged to think of workers (or indeed anybody else) as fully human beings, with stories of their own to tell” (PJ, p. 33)6—to the condition of the working classes. Similarly, she suggests, Richard Wright’s Native Son and E. M. Forster’s Maurice will alert their—presumably straight, white and middle-class—readers to the plight of African-Americans and homosexuals. In each instance, Nussbaum believes, literature will help its readers overcome the “com-mon human tendency to think of one’s own habits and ways as best for all persons and all times” and open up their minds to the possibility of alternative perspectives.7 Such an approach is entirely consistent with


Classical Liberalism. Although Nussbaum labels her political philosophy “Aristotelian Social Democracy,”8 she nevertheless makes it quite clear that she regards it as complement to the liberal tradition of Immanuel Kant, John Rawls and Adam Smith (PJ, p. 19). Indeed, Nussbaum’s work on literature is committed to reviving Adam Smith’s long-dormant notion of “fellow feeling” as an emotional underpinning essential to the successful functioning of liberal-democratic society.

The suggestion that liberalism requires some recognition of its own social context is, somewhat surprisingly perhaps for a political philoso-phy that places so much stress upon the individual, a perennial theme of liberal discourse. We see it, for example, in the work of John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, and Adam Smith.9 Indeed, Smith’s notion of “fellow feeling” is an account of the concern for one’s fellow citizens that must underpin liberal-democratic society. It is not enough on this account simply to see the “other” as a rights-holder, one must also care about that status in order for it to have any meaning for, or impact on, one’s actions. Rorty’s notion of solidarity is in many ways a more recent formulation of the same idea. Both Rorty and Nussbaum believe that literature is a way to generate such fellow feeling, and that it will, furthermore, lead to more effective liberal-democratic institutions. Citizens will, they believe, be empowered to make better decisions through the empathetic insight that comes from the act of reading. Empathy emerges from reading in a similar way for both theorists.

According to Nussbaum, reading puts us in the position of Adam Smith’s “judicious spectator” (PJ, pp. 72–77): one who feels the emotions and predicament of another, but whom, nevertheless, manages to retain her own detached perspective. In reading about characters from whom we differ in significant ways, suggests Nussbaum, we come to share their predicament whilst simultaneously maintaining our own detachment. “The compassion of the spectator” writes Smith, “must arise altogether from the consideration of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation and, what is perhaps impossible, was at the same time able to regard it with his present reason and judgment” (cited in PJ, pp. 73–74). It is this position, says Nussbaum, which culti-vates in us the capacity of “fancy” (PJ, p. 36), an expansion of our moral imaginations which enables us to empathize with all sorts of different people whilst rationally evaluating their position. Similarly, Richard Rorty holds that reading novels by writers such as Dickens, Orwell, Schreiner and Wright permits us acquaintance with lots of different ways of liv-ing and “gives us details about the kinds of suffering being endured

413Simon Stow

by people to whom we had previously not attended” (CIS, p. xvi). It is this which, he says, enables us to see people from whom we differ in a multitude of ways as nevertheless connected to us by similar hopes, desires and commitments. Reading generates solidarity, Rorty believes, by showing us what we have in common with those we have previously considered as “other.”

In addition to generating solidarity, however, Rorty also believes that literature can transform us as people: making us more sensitive to the needs of others. In reading a novel such as Lolita, he says, we become so caught up in the charmingly vicious Humbert Humbert that we momentarily forget about the eponymous heroine of the text: the abused little girl who has lost her father, her mother and her brother. We forget, writes Rorty, “because Nabokov arranged for us to forget temporarily. He programmed us to forget first and then remember later on—remember in confusion and guilt.”10 The impact of this text and indeed Nabokov’s other masterpiece, Pale Fire, is he asserts, dialectical. We “emerge from the final pages of each novel rubbing our heads, worrying about whether we are all alright, wondering whether we like ourselves” (PF, p. xiii). Such an experience, Rorty suggests, allows us to see a particular type of cruelty—the cruelty of incuriosity—of which we ourselves are capable. It is this experience, he argues, that enhances the practice of liberal-democracy by generating an awareness of the contingency of our position, and by reminding us always to consider the situation of our fellow citizens.

Given the broad similarities in Nussbaum’s and Rorty’s work, it is unsurprising that their textual readings follow similar patterns: both read the novels that they identify as useful to liberal-democratic society and tell us what lessons the readers will or should derive from them. Thus, Mr. Gradgrind, we learn from Nussbaum, will teach us about the dangers of excessive abstraction and a reliance on formal modeling (PJ, p. 42); while Charles Kinbote, according to Rorty, will teach us about the need to be more sensitive to the suffering of others (CIS, pp. 164–65). In this both Nussbaum and Rorty seem to be advocates of what we might call a “supply-side” theory of the novel: neither seems terribly concerned about the role of the reader in the process of deriving the relevant lessons from literature. This is especially true of Nussbaum who declares that the very form of the novel “constructs compassion in readers, positioning them as people who care intensely about the suffering and bad luck of others, and who identify with them in ways that show possibilities for themselves” (PJ, p. 66). Nevertheless, in their


supply-side approach to the novel both thinkers seem to be guilty of what Jonathan Rose has called the “receptive fallacy”: the attempt to discern the message that the text transmits to its audience by examining the text rather than the audience.11

Somewhat implausibly, both Nussbaum and Rorty seem to suggest that there is but one valid interpretation of the text, and one lesson or set of lessons to derived from each novel. It is an approach that flies in the face of the history and practice of literary criticism and the experi-ence of reading. Very few, if indeed any, literary critics now regard their job as being to discern a text’s intrinsic meaning, and even lay-readers seem to content to permit the coexistence of competing interpreta-tions. Equally problematically, both Rorty and Nussbaum place a good deal of emphasis on the dialectical power of literature to transfigure its readers, but dialectic is, as Rorty himself notes, a somewhat fragile matter, “the sort of thing which only writers with very special talents writing at just the right moment in just the right way, are able to bring off” (CIS, p. 160). As he points out in his introduction to the Everyman edition of Pale Fire, such dialectical effects can be easily nullified, and depend, in part at least on the way in which the reader reads the text (p. v). Almost all of us have probably had the experience of a friend who has urged us to read a book that changed his or her life, only to find ourselves distinctly underwhelmed by the text in question. Indeed, Rorty himself acknowledges that different readers can have decidedly different responses to the same text: “it is no surprise,” he writes, “that some putatively great works leave some readers cold.”12 As such, both Rorty’s and Nussbaum’s account of the dialectical power of literature seems to be overly robust and implausibly deterministic. In Rorty’s case it also appears contrary to his previously stated philosophical position, that which seems to commit him to some sort of reader-response theory.13 The “supply-side” theory of the text is, however, not only methodologi-cally problematic, in the context of liberal-democracy it also seems to be politically problematic. For, implicit in the claim that texts have clear meanings that they transmit to their readers is the assumption that a failure to see the text in the prescribed way arises from a deficiency on the part of the reader. This is, perhaps, no way to conduct our business in a liberal-democracy.

Liberalism, no matter how one conceives of it—as the product of metaphysically derived principles in the manner of the early Rawls, or simply as the most pragmatic way to reduce cruelty in the approach of Richard Rorty—demands certain basic commitments. Foremost among

415Simon Stow

these perhaps is that we treat people as ends and not means. This has generally taken the form of respecting individual rights. Literary liberals have, however, been anxious to expand upon this conception of respect: to see the person not just as a rights-holder, but as someone with hopes, dreams and desires situated in a particular context. Paradoxically, how-ever, in seeking to build this fuller notion of respect by theorizing about the impact of a well-read citizenry on the practice of liberal-democracy, such theorists seem to have forgotten that respect—treating people as ends in themselves—might also require listening to the voices of these individuals.14 Indeed, reading, which is presented as a source of contingency and empathy by Rorty and Nussbaum, seems to generate neither in the theorists themselves. Each seems compelled to champion a particular interpretation of a given text at the expense of all others. Whilst Nussbaum is prepared to accept that different readers might draw different experiences from the text, she is, nevertheless, determined that through the process of coduction—a sort of conversational reflective equilibrium—such readers will come to agree on the proper interpreta-tion of the novel, that is, the one identified by Martha Nussbaum (PJ, p. 76). For Rorty too, there is a definite sense that his political project requires agreement on a particular interpretation of a given novel. In his introduction to Nabokov’s Pale Fire, for example, he seems—rather like a latter day Kinbote—to be an advocate of a “boo-hooray” theory of literary criticism: awarding bouquets to those whose interpretation of the novel agrees with his, and brickbats to those whose does not. This tendency towards imposing a textual interpretation on the citizenry also suggests a certain lack of faith in the theorists’ own approach. For, if reading novels is indeed supposed to be useful for expanding the moral imagination of a citizenry, it is not clear why Nussbaum and Rorty spend so long setting out their own readings of texts. Reading about reading is not the best way to enlarge our moral capacities: it is rather like expecting to benefit from watching somebody else exercise. The dialectical impact of literature is not, that is to say, something that can be experienced second-hand. As such, the work of Nussbaum and Rorty seems to be rather more of an attempt to use literature to convince others of their pre-existing commitment to liberal-democracy than any genuine attempt to harness literature’s dialectical power.

That Martha Nussbaum’s and Richard Rorty’s attempts to theorize a relationship between literature, reading and a public ethics for liberal-democracies seem to flounder on a problematic account of the way in which texts impact upon their readers, and a rather top-down model of


literary interpretation that runs contrary to the central tenets of liberal-ism does not, of course, mean that there is nothing to the posited rela-tionship between literature and liberal-democracy. Reversing Immanuel Kant’s well known observation on the common saying that what might be true in theory is not necessarily true in practice, it might be argued that the connection between literature, public ethics and democracy is true in practice, but not true in theory, for there does seem to be some-thing intuitively and phenomenologically appealing about the claim that literature can expand our moral imaginations in ways that might indeed be useful to liberal-democratic societies. Novels can and do lead us to think differently about our lives and relationships. Indeed, in her recent work Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Azar Nafisi suggests that it is not only liberal-democratic societies that might benefit from the values generated by reading certain works of literature, but that such improvements are possible whatever the prevailing political regime.15 The problem is then one of reverse engineering: how to capture what is of value for public ethics in liberal-democracies in the act of reading in a way that is both philosophically plausible, and politically consistent with liberalism. The questions at hand become then how should we read literature politically in order to capture its transformative potential for liberal-democracy? How should we conduct literary-political debate so as best to enhance democratic practice? How best to capture the solidarity and contingency Nussbaum and Rorty, and indeed, moral intuition, seem to suggest that literature can offer?

The most obvious solution to some of the problems posed by Nuss-baum’s and Rorty’s approaches would, perhaps, be to promote a literary criticism that recognized its own contingency; thereby removing the politically problematic tendency towards imposing an interpretation on a citizenry for their own good. The problem here is, of course, that such an acknowledgement—“this is only an interpretation”—would soon become a trope, and an empty one at that. Alexander Nehamas argues that Nietzsche was concerned with just such a problem, and that he chose to solve it by adopting a multiplicity of styles that constantly drew attention to himself as the author of the views expressed in his work.16 Nevertheless, even Nietzsche was to find himself misinterpreted with his ironic, provocative, cajoling and deeply subjective assertions coming to be seen by many as claims to fact, or worse still, the outlin-ing of a program. In the history of literary criticism we see a similar process at work. In the case of New Historicism, for example, claims to being above issues of “authorial intent” or “textual meaning,” soon became bogged down in just such questions.17 The problem with these

417Simon Stow

approaches is that the textual critics seem to be searching for some sort of methodology which they believe will lift them out of their subjective readings into a realm of inter-subjective or even objective reality. The solution to this problem is, perhaps, to recognize that when we talk about literature we are talking about our own responses to it, and that as such, we are, in a way, talking about ourselves; and, rather than trying to find some methodology which will emancipate us from this perspec-tive, simply to embrace it.

Literature, on this theory, might generate a potentially useful public ethics for liberal-democracy by providing an opportunity for citizens to talk about their fears, concerns and desires. They would do so, however, at a level of abstraction that arises from being seen to talk about liter-ary events and literary characters rather than directly about themselves, thereby facilitating rather than truncating conversation about politically sensitive topics. Anybody with any experience of a reading group can confirm that the topics raised are seldom if ever confined to the liter-ary.18 Azar Nafisi, for example, notes that in her own reading group of ethnically, religiously and politically diverse women in Tehran: “the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so hopelessly speechless” (pp. 38–39). There is, furthermore, an historical pedigree for this approach. In his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas argues that a similar discussion of literary works was a crucial factor in the development of Western civil society in the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries. This practice, he argues, “provided a training ground for critical public reflection still preoccupied with itself—a process of self-clarification of private people focusing on the genuine experiences of their novel privateness.”19 Jettisoning Habermas’s agreement -model of conversation—that which suggests that the outcome of public discussion is or ought to be agreement—and replacing it with a weaker recognition-model—one that suggests that there is something beneficial about the process of discussion that negates the need for absolute agreement—might provide the basis for plausible theory of literature and public ethics in liberal-democratic societies.20 Such an approach draws on the dual notions that public discussion of literature provides a way for a citizenry to discuss politics in a manner that facilitates dialogue, and that such discussion is—as recent literature suggests—indeed beneficial to liberal-democracy.21 The potential benefits here are twofold.

In the first instance, by talking about literary characters and events, citizens will be able to reap the benefits of abstraction. Although their concerns may be personal, participants in the discussion will, perhaps,


be able to talk about them in a way that detaches the topics from the citizens’ innermost selves. The double-mechanism here might be to allow citizens to talk about issues that they would not normally bring to a public forum; and secondly, to talk about them in a way that allows for a more considered approach to such matters than might emerge if they were seen to be talking about their own concerns. The second potential benefit, paradoxically perhaps given that the first is abstrac-tion, is context. Traditional liberal theories of politics and society have relied upon thought experiments such as the “State of Nature” or the “Original Position” to generate critical discussion of matters political. The problem with such Lockean or Rawlsian models is that—in addition to generating unhelpful and misleading debates about the ontological status of such devices—they also promote a “how would you feel about this issue if you were somebody else” approach to political thought. It is precisely this that draws the ire of communitarian and feminist critics of liberalism. Such models, they argue, do not fully capture the complexities of a situated agent’s existence. The new model of literature and public ethics being sketched here—what we might call “Contextualized Abstraction”—might go some way towards addressing these concerns by opening up the possibility of a dialogue which is both removed from the participants, but informed by their interpretations of the literary context.

The liberal-democratic model of literature in politics that is being outlined here, though considerably different from either that champi-oned by Rorty or Nussbaum, is not, however, entirely unconnected to their approaches. Both rely, to some extent, upon a dialogic model of politics, and upon a discussion of literature as a source of critical lever-age. Rorty conceives of society as an ungroundable conversation into which he seeks to draw various different groups through story telling; whilst Nussbaum, borrowing from Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep. An Ethics of Fiction, offers a theory of critical literary discussion called “coduction.” In Nussbaum’s account, however, the aim of this process is to come to an agreement on the proper understanding of the text, so that we might use it to inform our understanding of the situated agents often obscured by liberal reasoning. Such a theory seems to work against the element of contingency that Nussbaum and Rorty both wish to transplant from literature to politics: it simply seems to replace one category with another. Equally, there appears to be something illiberal about the process—at least as far as it is presented by Nussbaum, Booth’s account is rather more circumspect—for it simply seems to be a matter

419Simon Stow

of bringing other readers around to the critic’s interpretation of the text.22 Abandoning the need for agreement, however, might enable us to capture the contingency that Rorty and Nussbaum see in literature for the public ethics of liberal-democratic society. Literature might then function as the ostensible subject matter in an ongoing, potentially transfiguring dialogue about politics in which the contingency arises from the recognition that differently situated people may interpret the same text in different ways. Recognizing that another’s reading may emerge from a different life experience might well be a step towards reaching some kind of recognition of another’s status as “fellow citizen” or “fellow human being,” something that might serve to temper poten-tially hostile of incommensurable debates by breaking down some of the moral distance between otherwise disconnected citizens.

In such circumstances, in addition to contingency, we might also derive the other important value Rorty and Nussbaum seem to desire: solidar-ity. For, if we do indeed see any moral improvement arising from the act of reading in politics, the most likely source of that improvement is the discussion about the texts rather than the texts themselves. Coming to see another as a fellow citizen may well emerge from the process of coming to see her as a fellow reader, even perhaps a fellow reader of a favorite author. Such a process does not, of course, require that individuals come to an agreement on the meaning of a text. Such soli-darity can emerge simply from finding a fellow enthusiast. Discussing the now defunct Stanford University Great Books course of the late 1980s—a program that was derailed by public protests over “dead white male” hegemony—the political theorist John E. Seery declared that the project there was “simply to read and try to make sense of” the books. “That minimalist project” he writes, “somehow created a community of readers, of questioners, of Socratic seekers. Students drew together in this common project and discovered that it was enjoyable to think together. These texts . . . fostered reading communities.” Indeed, Seery, a teacher in the program, declares “these little classes were the closet thing I have seen to successful liberal communities in practice—little educational utopias.”23

The most obvious objection to the theory of literature and public ethics outlined here is, of course, K. K. Ruthven’s famous observation that: “Despite their familiarity with the classics, professors of literature do not appear to lead better lives than other people, and frequently display unbecoming virulence on the subject of one another’s shortcomings.”24 Literature in these circumstances does not appear to promote civilized


discussion, contingency, nor even solidarity. Nevertheless, such debates may serve to obscure the perfectly civil interactions that make up the corpus of critical literary discussion but which do not draw as much public attention as a good literary feud. Furthermore, there is clearly a difference between the way professional literary critics and lay read-ers approach and talk about texts. In his novel Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes’s fictional Geoffrey Braithwaite offered a potential explanation for this difference: “I can’t prove that lay readers enjoy books more than professional critics, but I can tell you one advantage we have over them. We can forget.” Professional critics “are cursed with memory: the books they write about can never fade from their brains. They become family. Perhaps this is why some critics develop a faintly patronizing tone towards their subjects.”25 Having less invested in the texts, lay read-ers would perhaps be more able to use them constructively in political discussion. They are, perhaps, less likely to be practitioners of method-ological reading—any approach which simply lays an analytical grid over texts in order to categorize them as examples of another phenomenon, be it class, gender, ethnicity or some other political value—something which must be avoided if a transformative conversation about politics through literature is to occur. As Richard Rorty notes, “you cannot . . . find inspirational value in a text at the same time you are viewing it as a product of a mechanism of cultural production” (IV, p. 13). In this we are reminded of the role of the reader and indeed, the way in which she reads as an important element in determining the likely success of the role of literature in enhancing the public ethics of liberal-democracies. In this, literary critics have an essential role to play, particularly in the context of our educational institutions.

As a professor of literature at Cornell in the 1950s, Vladimir Nabokov was known for setting examination questions such as “List the contents of Anna’s handbag” or “Describe the wallpaper in the Karenin’s bedroom.” Although few students were ever able to identify such details—Nabokov is said to have awarded bonus marks to the student who suggested that the wallpaper pattern might be “little trains”—they were, nevertheless, forced to pay close attention to the details of the text and to enter the world of the novel. Whilst there are many who would dismiss Nabokov’s attention to detail as fetishistic fastidiousness, this approach to literary criticism may provide a model for an approach to literature that will enhance the practice of liberal democracy whilst remaining consistent with its principles. In asking his students to pick out such details, Nabo-kov was in effect asking them to break out of whatever “methodological

421Simon Stow

reading” habits they had developed and see the world of the novel as an alternate reality:

Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.26

Such an apparently aesthetic approach to reading is, of course, likely to draw the ire of many a school of literary criticism, especially those such as Marxists, feminists, post-colonialists and even ethical critics who are concerned with connecting the world of the text to the world in which it is written. Such an approach would seem to obscure what is crucial to these schools of criticism, be it the identification of hierarchy and exploitation, or the political and ethical content of a given text. There is a twofold response to such an objection. First, that the argument being made here is a specific one about reading literature in a specific context for a specific purpose: seeking to use literature as a means of generating a public ethics for liberal-democracy. It is not an assertion that all other politically and ethically motivated critics should desist from practicing their own approaches to the text; merely a suggestion that if we are to operationalize the sort of project outlined by Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty, this is a way in which we might do it. Sec-ond, that this Nabokovian approach to texts is not inconsistent with the self-consciously ethical or political approaches identified above. Indeed, the sort of two-stage process advocated by Nabokov might actually serve to enhance such ethico-political work. Coming to the text with a pre-conceived notion of its content, a critic is likely to find little else in it; coming to it as another world to be explored then contrasted with our own is, perhaps, likely to be a more fecund source of genuine insight than the “knowing” readings of much political literary criticism.

“Schools and universities,” wrote Italo Calvino, “ought to help us understand that no book that talks about a book says more than the book in question.”27 If we are indeed to capture the transformative power of literature for the purposes of generating a public ethics for liberal- democratic societies, then we would do well to remember Calvino’s


advice. Theories of literature in politics that rely on the theorist’s read-ing of the text to tell us how to react are literally preposterous: the end comes before the beginning. If we are to use literature to generate a public ethics that will enhance democratic practice then we need to find an approach which generates contingency and solidarity out of the multiplicity of possible textual readings, and one in which the reader-citizen is ultimately treated as an end and not a means. To achieve this we might need, it has been suggested here, a pedagogy of indirection, one that teaches us to read first, and to think and talk about politics second.

The College of William and Mary

This paper was completed with the assistance of a Faculty Summer Research Grant from The Col-lege of William and Mary. The author wishes to thank Mark Bevir, Eric Naiman and Shannon Stimson for their comments on earlier drafts.

1. Franz Kafka quoted in Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 200.

2. Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 1.

3. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); hereafter abbreviated as CIS.

4. Richard Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” in Richard Rorty, Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 198–99.

5. Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. xiii; hereafter abbreviated PJ.

6. This is, of course, probably something of a null set. I am grateful to Eric Naiman for this point.

7. Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 156.

8. Martha Nussbaum, “Aristotelian Social Democracy,” in R. Bruce Douglass, Gerald M. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson, eds., Liberalism and the Good (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 203–52.

9. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 70; John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” in John Rawls, Collected Papers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 413; Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2000).

423Simon Stow

10. Richard Rorty, “Introduction,” in Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1992), p. viii; hereafter abbreviated PF.

11. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 4.

12. Richard Rorty, “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature,” Raritan 1 (1996): 15; hereafter abbreviated IV.

13. This certainly seems to be the implication of Rorty’s claim that the reader’s relation-ship to the authors of such texts as In Search of Lost Time, Finnegans Wake, or Postcards, “depends largely upon her being left alone to dream up her own footnotes” (CIS, p. 127). See also Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1982), p. 151. For a discussion of this tension see Simon Stow, “The Return of Charles Kinbote: Nabokov on Rorty,” Philosophy and Literature 23 (1999): 65–77.

14. For a fuller discussion see Simon Stow, “Theoretical Downsizing and the Lost Art of Listening,” Philosophy and Literature 28 (2004): 192–201.

15. Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random House, 2003).

16. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

17. See, for example, I. Dollimore and A. Sinfield, eds., New Essays in Cultural Material-ism (Manchester: University of Manchester University Press, 1994), especially the essay by Margaret Heinemann.

18. I am grateful to Kip Kantelo for his insight into reading groups.

19. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 29.

20. For a counter argument, see Patchell Marken, Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

21. See, for example, Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

22. Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

23. John E. Seery, America Goes to College: Political Theory for the Liberal Arts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 43.

24. K. K. Ruthven, Critical Assumptions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 184.

25. Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), p. 75.

26. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (New York: Harvest Books, 1980), p. 1.

27. Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature (New York: Harcourt & Brace & Company, 1986), pp. 128–29.

David L. Smith

THE IMPLICIT SOUL OF CHARLIE KAUFMAN’S ADAPTATION

I don’t know what else there is to write about other than being human, or, more specifically, being this human.

I have no alternative. Everything is about that, right? Unless it’s about flowers.

—Charlie Kaufman1

There are some things that cannot be observed directly, even in principle: a single quark, the present moment, ones own eye. What

Richard Rodriquez calls the “one subject” of literature—“What it feels like to be alive”2—is perhaps another one of those things. A writer struggles to be true to something central about life—to catch it on the fly, to get it right. Some have reified this “something” as “the soul” or “the human spirit.” Today, though, we mainly rely on placeholders: “it,” for example, as in “do you get it?” or “what’s it all about?”—a usage that flirts with the vanishing “it” of “it is raining,” implying a source or substance behind phenomena in which we do not really believe but with-out which we cannot do justice to experience. In any case, the writer’s attempt to represent this elusive heart of things is typically frustrated, done in by the slipperiness of words, the cludginess of the conventions of communication, and the waywardness of the imagination. Writing inevitably falls short of its deepest aims.

Nevertheless, there is something deviously affirmative in this state of affairs. For if life is a thing that refuses to be observed, then isn’t the very failure of literature, if consciously acknowledged, a way of stay-ing true to it? Isn’t the writer’s disappointment an especially telling feature of “what it feels like to be alive?” Emerson, more clearly than most, understood how this trick is turned: “We grant that human life is


425David L. Smith

mean; but how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim?”3 As noted above, “the soul” is a disposable term here. If you prefer, say simply “the human,” “life,” or “it.” The point, in any case, is that the elusive subject which cannot be stated or represented directly may nevertheless be implied. If the human cannot be caught in a formula, it may be embodied or enacted in the ongoing work of creation.

Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation is both an argument for and an example of this implicit realization of the human in art. Many viewers and even reviewers might see it as a poor candidate for humanistic interpretation along these lines. Most, in fact, have seen the film as little more than a clever postmodern puzzle-box, albeit one with great acting, deft direction, and a generous sense of humor. Its theme, after all, is the representation of representation. A book is being rewritten or adapted to become the film we are watching. The subject of that film is its own author’s struggle to create it. The film further calls attention to its own artificiality by changing the rules of representation on us midway through. Its tone, style, and basic genre conventions shift when the author/protagonist begins to rethink his original purposes, undermining the credibility of all representational schemes in the process. Adaptation, in short, seems to be what the graduate-educated a decade ago might have felt comfort-able calling “an endless play of simulacra,” a text absorbed in its own textuality, a snake that eats its own tail.4

All of this is true enough, but it is not the whole story. The point of Adaptation, I will argue, is not simply the pleasure it takes in playing with issues of representation, but its clear sense of the human issues at stake in that play. Adaptation, that is, is not only about the way words tend to float free of the world. Rather, it is also a demonstration of the way a writer’s basic goal can survive the wreck of her intentions, or the way that failed attempts to be true to life find their end and fulfillment in the energy that inspires the attempt. Lynn Hirschberg in The New York Times notes her suspicion that Kaufman’s postmodern ironies here may in fact be “inching toward some post-ironic point of observation.”5 I agree, and my aim in this paper is to show how that stance is achieved.

Adaptation, then, is a meditation on the extent to which a story can do justice to a human life. The anxieties that consume “Charlie Kaufman,” the film’s central character and its author’s stand-in, are rooted in his basic sense of mission: his desire to be true to himself and his subject,


to “get it right.” Specifically, he has taken on the job of adapting a book he admires—The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean—as a screenplay. The book is a non-fictional, largely non-linear essay on flowers and the kinds of people who become obsessed with them—hardly the sort of property that is normally optioned by a major Hollywood studio. It is precisely the book’s eccentricities, though, that draw Charlie to it. There is something original in the spirit of its author and something about life as the book represents it to which Charlie wants to be true. His worry is whether Hollywood story conventions, or indeed, any form of narrative art, will be adequate to the task.

A statement made by Charlie early in the film to the studio executive overseeing his work brings his concerns into focus: “I’d want to let the movie exist rather than be artificially plot driven” (A, p. 5). Charlie sees a tension, that is, between the conventions of story and something else that he wants to capture in his writing: namely, the quality of things that simply “exist,” of life in its pure immediacy. The book, after all, is about flowers. A film about a book about flowers, in turn, should “exist” in the same way that a flower exists. And flowers, as has been famously said, have no stories. “They make no reference to former [flowers] or to bet-ter ones . . . ; they exist with God to-day . . . in the present, above time” (EEL, p. 270). In Charlie’s view, then, to impose a story on his subject would be to falsify it. To an extent, one expects that the audience will be with him on this, for everyone knows how difficult it is to squeeze extraordinary events—“moments out of time”—into conventional formulas. However, one is also likely to sense something unbalanced and overstated in Charlie’s apparently global suspicion of the ability of stories to do justice to his subject. For what is life, and what is film in particular, if not a story—a sequence of events unfolding in time? What is it, exactly, that stories leave out? What is it that Charlie is holding out for? These questions require closer attention before we can get on with an analysis of the film.

The claim of stories to represent experience rests on two fundamental facts about human life and awareness. First, our lives unfold in time, and so they lend themselves to being structured by temporal markers: before and after, now and then. Second, our awareness is reflexive. We employ language in the interior monologue of self-consciousness to represent remote facts (even the present being one step removed from immediacy) and to imagine counterfactuals (alternative acts and possible outcomes). In these respects, a human life simply is a story. The self, thus defined and sustained by the reflexive conversation we carry on in our

427David L. Smith

heads, is a “narrative self.”6 It has its beginnings, middles and ends; it has a dramatic arc of possibilities achieved or foregone, and of conflicts resolved or endlessly repeated. Insofar as this is what we are, then to know oneself is to know ones story. Insofar as this is the kind of meaning a life has, a story should be able to represent it transparently.

There is also something in us, however, that is not satisfied with this account—something that might even be said to evade the fundamental structures of time and reflection. We say of certain extraordinary experi-ences—for example, the selfless raptures of love or beauty, or moments of insight and ecstasy—that they are “beyond words” or “above time.” We may not know what we mean by such locutions, and we may not even approve of their metaphysical implications. Nevertheless, some moments strike us as having this compelling, irreducibly odd quality, and the attempt to be true to that quality drives us to formulas (like “above time”) that are an affront to the idea that all of life can be sub-sumed under the conventions of story. Thus, on the roster of things about human life that need to be taken into account, in addition to time, there is immediacy. In addition to reflexive linguistic awareness, there is communion. In addition to the kind of meaning we find in the shape and rhythm of a plot, there is the meaning of the pure moment of being, the wholeness that presents itself to us as a birthright rather than as an achievement. Charlie’s desire to let his film “exist,” I believe, carries the full weight of this alternative mode of meaningfulness.7

Charlie begins the film, then, declaring his idealistic desire to capture life in its immediacy. In a similar spirit, he wants to be “original.” It is a writer’s duty, he believes, to approach a subject with perfect transpar-ency, free from preconceived categories or formulas, in utter deference to its nature. Films, however, especially when they are being produced by large Hollywood studios, typically require a plot, and plots are by nature conventional and formulaic. An audience comes to a film with generic expectations, and what they typically want to see, as Charlie puts it, is “characters learning profound life lessons. Or growing, or coming to like each other, or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end.” This is what stories typically give us. But in Charlie’s view, “life isn’t like that” (A, p. 6); “people don’t change, they don’t have epiphanies. They struggle and are frustrated, and nothing is resolved” (A, p. 68). Thus, something as essentially undramatic as life, so conceived, cannot be represented through the dramatic conventions of story; it requires originality. Still, Charlie is writing a screenplay, and screenplays have their own conventions. Hence his dilemma: to reach an audience—to


communicate effectively—he must tell a story; but to impose a conven-tional formula on the world is to falsify it. What’s a writer to do?

At the start of Adaptation, these two imperatives are neatly represented in the relationship between Charlie and the twin brother the film invents for him, Donald. If Charlie feels stifled by convention, Donald thrives on it. An aspiring writer himself, Donald is a disciple of real-life screenwriting teacher Robert McKee, who asserts in his magnum opus, Story, that genre conventions are the necessary, time-tested keys to good screenwriting, and that an author’s first task is simply to choose among the conventions. (“My genre’s thriller,” says Donald to Charlie, “What’s yours?” [A, p. 42]) McKee’s principles—the “Ten Command-ments” that say “this works and has through all remembered time” (A, p. 11)—come packaged with vast promises (“Do that and you’ll be fine” [A, p. 70]) and an air of quasi-religious authority. It seems to be, and is, a confidence game. But for Donald, at least, it works splendidly. If simply getting along in life is the game, then Donald seems to have the winning strategy.

For Charlie, by contrast, McKee’s approach is poison, the antithesis of what he hopes to achieve in his work. In relation to what simply and purely “exists,” that is, conventional story forms are the enemy. Likewise, any teacher who thinks he has “the answer,” whether in art or religion, is the bane of originality. “Those teachers are dangerous if your goal is to try to do something new,” says Charlie. “And a writer should always have that goal. Writing is a journey into the unknown” (A, p. 12). Charlie, after all, wants to write about flowers, and only an utterly original writer can do justice to something that exists “above time.”

In addition to immediacy and originality, a third ideal that defines Charlie’s sense of mission as a writer is passion. Passion, as the term is used throughout Adaptation, is not principally an emotion, but a state of total, unselfconscious absorption in a particular course of action. It is the desire, as has been said, “to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why.” In this sense, passion is the antithesis of story. If story relies on memory and reference—careful attention to past and future—passion is forgetful and improvident. Its essence is a total immersion in the present moment; it is self-transcendence achieved through a refusal to cling to the past and a willingness to move on. Or as the quote above concludes, “the way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment” (EEL, p. 414).

429David L. Smith

In The Orchid Thief, it is principally John Laroche, the oddly admirable con man whose exploits give the book its title, who exemplifies passion. Like the great orchid hunters of the colonial era, Laroche is a fanatic, a man totally devoted to his scientific and commercial schemes. What’s more, he is a serial fanatic. He shows an uncanny ability to move on, to slough off his “sempiternal memory” and switch allegiances. “I once fell deeply, you know, profoundly in love with tropical fish,” he tells Orlean. “I had sixty goddam fish tanks in my house. I’d skin dive to find just the right ones. . . . Then one day I say, fuck fish. I renounce fish. I vow never to set foot in that ocean again. That’s how much ‘fuck fish.’ That was seventeen years ago, and I have never since stuck so much as a toe in that ocean” (A, p. 28). In addition to orchids and fish, Laroche at various times has collected turtles, fossils, and nineteenth century Dutch mirrors. The object of his interest hardly matters, even to him, for the point is simply the clarity and focus that having a passion confers, the way it “whittles the world down to a more manageable size” (A, p. 54). Passion, that is, is its own reward.

Passion is also more deeply characterized in The Orchid Thief as the way of nature itself—the means by which all creatures live, adapt, and discover how to thrive. In a wonderful passage on the relation between orchids and insects, Laroche makes the crucial connection:

There’s a certain orchid looks exactly like a certain insect, so the . . . insect is drawn to this flower. Its double. Its soulmate. And wants nothing more than to make love to it. After the insect flies off, it spots another soul mate flower and makes love to it, thus pollinating it. And neither the flower nor the insect will ever understand the significance of their lovemaking. I mean, how could they know that because of their little dance the world lives? But it does. By simply doing what they’re designed to do, something large and magnificent happens. In this sense, they show us how to live, how the . . . only barometer you have is your heart. How when you spot your flower, you can’t let anything get in your way. (A, pp. 23–24)

The way of life celebrated here, in other words, is by abandonment. Orchids, bees, and the rest of nature act passionately, “without know-ing how or why.” The secret of their adaptability, in turn, as Orlean says elsewhere, is that “they have no memory. . . . They just move on to whatever’s next” (A, p. 35). By contrast, the human capacities asso-ciated with narrative only get in the way of the process of getting on. Memory and reflection not only falsify life; they impede it. Life calls for


spontaneous recklessness, not the anxiety of the backward glance. Or as Nietzsche once said (quoting Emerson quoting Oliver Cromwell): “A man never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going.”8

Several of the film’s central characters, then, hope to overcome their reflective and reflexive inhibitions through passion. Charlie, for example, longs for passion partly because it promises him a way out of the obsessive, circular preoccupations that characterize him from the first words of the film: “Do I have an original thought in my head? My bald head? Maybe if I were happier, my hair wouldn’t be falling out. Life is short. I need to make the most of it. Today is the first day of the rest of my life. . . . I’m a walking cliché” (A, p. 1). Charlie is painfully aware, that is, that he needs to get over himself. He is drawn to The Orchid Thief precisely because passionate absorption—or more specifi-cally, the longing for it—is one of its subjects. Susan Orlean, in turn, as a character in the film, describes herself as a detached spectator of life with a wistful longing for a deeper connection. Her one “unembar-rassed passion,” she says, is the desire “to know what it feels like to care about something passionately” (A, p. 26). The film further describes her by reference to her social set, which we observe at a dinner party (A, pp. 24–26). Her world is witty, sophisticated, and impossibly remote from the kind of simple, self-forgetful intensity that her contact with Laroche has her longing for. Orlean is drawn to Laroche, then, because he represents the things she feels she lacks. Charlie is drawn to Orlean, in turn, because he recognizes in her his own longing for immediacy, his own sadness.

Orlean and Charlie are thus alike. Both find themselves in false positions, one step removed from the direct engagement with life they desire. Both, moreover, hope to achieve this immediacy through a writing project. Like the characters in Kaufman’s first film, Being John Malkovich (the making of which is actually woven into the plot of Adaptation), they hope to make up for something lacking in themselves by getting close to an imagined “other.” For Orlean, it is Laroche; for Charlie, it is Orlean’s book about Laroche and the author he glimpses through it. Both hope to get the benefit of a purer, more intense life than their own by writing about it. Or in other words, both have set themselves up to fail. The futility of all such attempts to reach life through the distancing medium of words is one of the film’s central themes.

This relatively familiar impasse is not Kaufman’s final point, however. We are all too accustomed, perhaps, to the idea that real life is else-where—to the poignant paradox that immediacy presents itself to us as

431David L. Smith

an object of yearning or desire. Kaufman’s achievement, however, is to turn this romantic commonplace inside out. Real life, he will suggest, is not elsewhere after all, for the simple reason that there is nowhere else for it to be. Nature, which stands in the film for the seemingly remote ideals of immediacy, originality, and passion, is also where we live. As such, it is the all-inclusive point at which the dichotomy between ideal and actual, life and story, begins to unravel.

It happens like this: Charlie’s desire to understand flowers on their own terms leads him to read Darwin, which in turn leads him to the realization that story and the being of nature are not necessarily as incompatible as he first supposed. Even a flower has an “arc,” a story-line that is in turn part of a larger evolutionary drama. “It is a journey of evolution,” says Charlie in voiceover. “Adaptation. The journey we all take. A journey that unites each and every one of us” (A, p. 40). His preoccupation with pure “existence” had led him to see each thing, each person, as unique and incommensurable, and to feel himself isolated in consequence. Evolution, by contrast, as the story of stories, seems to him to bridge the gaps between individuals who otherwise appear “all trapped in our own bodies, in moments in history” (A, p. 41). In the rough sketch of four billion years of cosmic history that he excitedly stammers into his voice recorder, unity promises to trump isolation (A, pp. 41–42). But of course, he is quick to feel the hollowness of his enthusiasm. The story, at least as he has imagined it, is just another artifice; his cinematic imagination has once again betrayed his commit-ment to lived experience.

Nevertheless, from this point on, something begins to change in Charlie’s fundamental apprehension of his problem. Evolution, after all, is more than just an artifice; it is a fundamental truth about how the world works. Thus, the idea dawns for Charlie that conceptual gen-eralizations or story-forms may not always be at odds with the truth of things. Stories falsify, but perhaps not all stories are false. Nature itself seems to be of two minds on the matter, operating at once as a creator of unique individuals and as a repeater of tried-and-true formulas, pure poet and shameless hack.

In tandem with this realization, then, Charlie begins to rethink his own original position. His aversion to story, his insistence on originality, his dedication to an impossible ideal of artistic purity—all this was only making him miserable. He had become painfully aware, for example, that his perfectionism was interfering with his human relationships, especially his romance with the musician Amelia. By contrast, he watches while


his brother, Donald, through shameless use of the crudest tried-and-true pick-up lines, attracts and charms women in ways Charlie cannot help but envy. While Charlie drowns in the sea of life, Donald swims. Thus, it becomes increasingly clear that, in evolutionary terms, Charlie is maladapted—a wanker, no less—while Donald represents the genius of nature itself, the tautological triumph of what works.

Charlie’s growing realization that he has hit a dead end thus begins his own evolution or adaptation in the direction of Donald. It is not a matter of choice at first but of necessity. The pursuit of purity had left him hopelessly blocked. Out of desperation, then, Charlie attends one of Robert McKee’s seminars for screenwriters, where he finds himself both intellectually and emotionally vulnerable. His thinking has progressed to a point where he is ready to be shaken out of his one-sided assumption that the real world is a place where “things don’t happen.” Emotionally, he has become desperate enough to need the kind of answers he had previously scorned. Thus, when McKee publicly ridicules his opinions about life in the seminar, Charlie quietly takes it to heart.

McKee: “. . . nothing happens in the world . . . ? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There’s genocide, war, corruption. . . . Every fucking day someone somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People find love: people lose it! For Christ’s sake, a child watches a mother beaten to death on the steps of a church . . . ! If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life!” (A, p. 69)

That Charlie is willing to sit still for this amazing mixture of wisdom and bombast is a measure of his defeat. At the end of the seminar, Charlie literally falls into McKee’s arms, and from this point on the characters of Charlie and Donald begin to merge.

The changes in the mood and style of the film that accumulate after this turning point are blatant, ludicrous, and gleefully perverse. Every plot device that Charlie had originally pledged to avoid tumbles into the mix: sex, drugs, murder, car chases, and profound epiphanies. The themes introduced early in the film are systematically cheapened, paro-died, and assimilated to Hollywood stereotypes. Significantly, though, they are not utterly lost in the process. For instance, Laroche’s passion-ate fascination with orchids is “explained” by the revelation that the elusive ghost orchid is the source of a drug that “seems to help people be fascinated” (A, p. 81). It has power to induce a kind of passionate

433David L. Smith

self-transcendence all right, but its power is chemical and prosaic. Simi-larly, the insect’s unconscious attraction to the orchid, which Laroche had seen as “showing us how to live,” is echoed and degraded in the self-help apothegm delivered by Donald toward the end of the film: “You are what you love, not what loves you” (A, p. 93). Nature’s ecstasy is thus adapted to the medium of Donald’s clueless sentimentality. Finally, the text on-screen at the movie’s close—ostensibly a quote from Donald’s screenplay for a film called The 3—is a parody of the ideas of unity and multiplicity, connection and isolation, that play throughout the film: “We’re all one thing, Lieutenant. That’s what I’ve come to realize. Like cells in a body. ’Cept we can’t see the body. The way fish can’t see the ocean. And so we envy each other. Hurt each other. Hate each other. How silly is that? A heart cell hating a lung cell” (A, p. 100). It’s cheap wisdom, cheap entertainment, and we’re meant to see it as such. Nev-ertheless, it is entertaining and it is, in a Hallmark sort of way, wise—a falsification, but not utterly false. The film ends, then, in a flurry of the kind of half-truths that allow life to go on. Charlie is at last able to show his love for Amelia and to see his way clear to finish his script. “I like this. This is good,” he says (A, p. 100). Can we deny it?

What, then, does the film’s movement from thesis to antithesis—from the ideals of “existence” to the imperatives of story—add up to?9 Certainly nothing so neat as a new synthesis emerges, but at least one comes to the end of Adaptation with the feeling that the two visions do not entirely cancel each other out. In Kaufman’s earlier films, Being John Malkovich and Human Nature, similar thematic paradoxes left his central characters paralyzed. Here, however, paradox functions more open-endedly as a way to uphold and sustain competing truths. The view suggested by the film as a whole, that is, is that art, like nature, is of two minds—dedicated at once to the one and the many, to the familiar formula and the eternal surprise. Each moment of life is unique and immediate, challenging us to originality. But as long as we are creatures of language, we will also go on framing our experiences by means of the same old stories.10 The situation is inherently unstable. The contrary impulses refuse to add up, each undermining the tendency of the other. The task of the writer, then, is likewise interminable. As Emerson said of the writer’s vocation, “We must reconcile the contradictions as we can, but their discord and their concord introduce wild absurdities into our thinking and speech. No sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie” (EEL, p. 585). Kaufman seems to be on the same wavelength, for Adaptation is a film


that gives itself the lie.11 It structures itself around “wild absurdities” but always for the purpose of suggesting a truth that cannot be stated directly. As Kaufman has said of his own work, “I try to write in the midst of confusion and be strong enough to stay there” (A, p. 127). Truth to life, in other words, means being true to something inherently confused, unresolvable, and elusive.

Thus, Charlie’s dedication to the pure poetry of things is not denied or delegitimized by the way the film ends. Rather, it is preserved as part of the film as a whole. The early, irresolute moments of the film become part of a larger arc, a story that could not itself exist apart from the problematic yearning for purity that inspires it. Like The Orchid Thief, Adaptation is on one level a story “about disappointment” (A, p. 70)—about the failure of all attempts to get close to the world through writing. It resounds with the wistfulness of Orleans’s climactic statement in her own text, a declaration of her unrequited romance with things “wonderful to imagine and . . . easy to fall in love with, but a little fantastic . . . and fleeting . . . and out of reach.”12 Ultimately, however, Adaptation moves beyond Orlean to demystify and domesticate this thing that seems so elusive, identifying it with the very energy that inspires the writer’s quest. Real life is not elsewhere; it is immanent in our restlessness. Something, it seems, has a claim on us. Because of it, we become idealists and resist the comforts of convention; and because of it, we are drawn nevertheless back into the dramas of time. (As Donald, the hack, says to Charlie, the purist, “your integrity inspired me to even try” [A, p. 72].) Something about life inspires our effort, demands its own critique, and survives the failure of its own realization. So what is this thing to which we want to be true? What elusive idea of the human could satisfy us? For all its trickiness, the simple “post-ironic” aim of Adaptation is to raise this question, and so to invoke the human spirit at the heart of the puzzle-box.

Central Michigan University

1. Quoted in Rob Feld, “Q & A with Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze,” in Charlie Kaufman, Adaptation: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press, 2002), p. 130; hereafter abbreviated A.

435David L. Smith

2. Richard Rodriquez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 12.

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 385; hereafter abbreviated EEL.

4. In general, the tone of early reviews was appreciative but skeptical. The film was judged to “work” wonderfully well as a pure technical performance—a “juggling act,” as P. Travers put it (“Adaptation,” Rolling Stone, December 12, 2002: p. 105). However, it was widely felt to be too clever or too “ironic” for its own good. See David Sterritt, “If You Can’t Write It, Join In,” Christian Science Monitor (December 6, 2002). The image of a snake eating its own tail, which the film’s “Charlie Kaufman” uses to characterize himself (A, p. 60), is used by both Sterritt and J. Hoberman to characterize the film as a whole. (“The Truths About Charlie,” The Village Voice, Dec. 4, 2002). Stephanie Zacha-rek in Salon has an especially scathing take on the film, accusing it of cowardice and essential inhumanity, and holding its self-referential games to be no more than a ruse “to distance us from our deepest emotions” (Stephanie Zacharek, “Adaptation and the Perils of Adaptation,” Salon, December 16, 2002).

5. Lynn Hirschberg, “Being Charlie Kaufman,” The New York Times, March 19, 2000, L80.

6. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1991), pp. 416ff.

7. A similar, even more extreme contrast between language and lived experience is found in a nearly contemporaneous work by Kaufman, the script for Human Nature. Charlie’s suspicion of stories appears here in Lila’s sweeping condemnation of all language in favor of instinctive primitivism (Charlie Kaufman, Human Nature: The Shooting Script [New York: Newmarket Press, 2002], 90). In general, the tension between language and lived experience is a persistent theme in Kaufman’s work.

8. Nietzsche’s version of the quote appears in Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 129. I give Emerson’s original English (EEL, p. 414), which Nietzsche appropriated by way of a German translation of the Essays.

9. Hegel, by the way, is mentioned in an earlier draft of the script. See Charlie Kaufman, Adaptation. Second draft, revision dated November 21, 2000, http://beingcharliekaufman .com/adaptationnov2000.pdf, pp. 12–13.

10. The echo here of “As Time Goes By” is not at all far-fetched. Adaptation brings up the film Casablanca several times, and once alludes directly to its signature song (A, p. 52).

11. In fact, Kaufman’s screenplays provide as close an analogue as anything I know in modern literature to the movement of ideas in an Emerson essay. My frequent use of quotes from Emerson throughout this paper is intended to make a quiet case for this association.

12. Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 41; quoted in A, p. 63. The film represents this as the last line of Orlean’s book (A, p. 70). It is not. Kaufman bends the truth here, I suspect, in order to emphasize the thematic importance of the sentiment.

Joseph G. Kronick

THE ANCIENT QUARREL REVISITED: LITERARY THEORY AND THE RETURN TO ETHICS

The modern quarrel between theory and practice, like the ancient one between philosophy and poetry, is at once a practical one—at its

heart is the question how we should live—and a pedagogical one—who or what is the proper teacher of virtue? Today, the quarrel is between theory and literature rather than between philosophy and poetry, a change that has not been beneficial. The modern complaint against the abstractions of theory reflects a diminution in the quality of the argument. For the ancient Greeks, to ask about the virtuous life was to inquire into what it is to be human, for aretê, which is typically translated as “virtue,” but is understood to mean “excellence” or “goodness,” meant acting in accordance with what it is to be fully human.1 The notion that “real issues,” as one prominent theorist argues, belong to the realm of action and epistemological and ontological questions to the abstract realm of theory is a simplification of the more serious question of the relation of particulars to universals. It reverses the Platonic and Aristo-telian hierarchy that makes thinking the highest form of activity. But something else is going on in this call to action: in denigrating think-ing as abstract, it elevates doxa, opinion, in its place. Under the regime of doxa, two things occur: philosophy and poetry are looked upon as useless because utility becomes the criteria for measuring value, and singularity is looked upon with disdain, if it is, indeed, acknowledged at all, because to the extent the world as it appears is common to us all, doxa is not distinct or individual but uniform or the same. Philosophy and poetry share not only the stigma of being deemed useless, but they are dismissed as odd, singular, not common.

This essay is concerned with the status of the singular in philosophy


437Joseph G. Kronick

and poetry. The ancient quarrel has not been settled, which may indeed be a good thing because the quarrel keeps alive the question, who is to speak for that which cannot be spoken of, the singular? Silence may be the appropriate response, yet to preserve the experience of that which resists language is the task of philosophy and poetry, hence the quarrel. A long tradition has it that the philosopher seeks universals, while the poet offers particular images of virtue, but at the heart of this argument over ethics is the question of how to account for the singular or unique. To do so, I turn to Socrates, whose singularity remains unac-counted for to this day.

Socrates may be said to embody the very problem of the relation between philosophy and literature, for he left us no writings and exists for us primarily through the writings of Plato. Yet there is widespread acceptance of Plato’s portrait of him, particularly as to Socrates’ method, the elenchus, and his principle of the priority of definitions. However, Socrates’ insistence upon the priority of definition is not an example of the philosopher elevating theory over experience but a practical issue involving the care of the self. Furthermore, in ancient Greece, moral and philosophical questions concerning the soul were as much the provenance of poetry as they were of philosophy. The search for truth is a practical matter concerning the conduct of life, but the Platonic philosopher wishes to give a rational account, or logos, that would link conduct to knowledge, whereas the poet’s examples are bound to their representations. Nevertheless, to presume that Socrates was seeking a definition of virtue on the grounds that possession of the definition would translate into a good life is an absurdity, for he could never have sought after the knowledge of virtue if his mode of life depended upon the definition rather than on his character.2

The error is to accuse Socrates of placing abstract knowledge before virtuous conduct. When Socrates asks for a definition of the beautiful, for instance, he does not reject the answer, “the beautiful is a beauti-ful woman,” because it confuses a particular with a universal (when compared to the beauty of the gods, the woman is not beautiful), but because the answer does not provide a single explanation for all beauty. As Alexander Nehamas argues, Hippias does not confuse a particular with a universal, nor does Euthyphro confuse an example of piety with a universal. In seeking a definition, Socrates is not saying that before I recognize a particular instance of virtue I must know in an absolute sense what is virtue. At issue is not the fact that there are many instances of the beautiful or ways of being pious but that such instances are being offered


as explanations of what makes something beautiful, beautiful. The point of Socrates’ questions is “never the abstractness, but the uniqueness, of the pious, of courage, of justice, of virtue, or of the beautiful.”3 In other words, Socrates asks for a definition of the beautiful in order to know what it is that makes the beautiful, beautiful. Such a procedure cuts across anything like an opposition between theory and practice or the universal and the particular; it is philosophy, but not philosophy only; it is, as I hope to demonstrate, something like literature, as well. The two converge in the question of how to recognize the singular.

With the possible exception of the Socratic problem, there may be no more vexed question in Plato than that of the relation of the particular to the universal insofar as it involves the doctrine of the Forms. Aristotle’s interpretation of the Platonic Form as a universal and as self-predicat-ing has held sway over most interpretations. The problem, according to Aristotle, is that the Form F is not only a paradigm of the particulars a, b, and c, but it, too, has the characteristic of F -ness, so that we might say that what is Tall, Tallness, is itself tall. Tallness, which is predicated of many things, is also something besides the thing it is, tall, as in, “Tall-ness is tall.” This notion of self-predication was ridiculed by Aristotle in his Third Man argument, which states that if what is predicated of Socrates, he is a man, is also something in addition to Socrates, being separated from the many (it being said the Form Man is an idea), and self-subsistent, then there will be a third Man, for Man is predicated both of the particular, Socrates, and the idea, Man.4 It is not my inten-tion here to pursue this argument, which has a vast literature, but to point out its connection to the ancient quarrel.

The problem, when speaking of the self-predication of the Forms, is how to understand what Plato means when he says, Beauty is beautiful. It appears to mean that beauty partakes of what it is to be beautiful. We would seem to be in the realm of the example, except that a beautiful thing is not so much an example of Beauty but is uniquely beautiful, that is, a particular beautiful thing. Yet the beautiful thing, like the boy in the Phaedrus, is a reminder of Beauty. The error would be to think of the boy as a flawed instantiation or representation of Beauty or an approximation of ideal Beauty. Approximation suggests degrees, and the principle of separation is incompatible with this (if it were not, then some beautiful things would be less separated from Beauty than others). Nor should the notion of mimesis lead us to think of the beautiful thing as flawed, just as it would be an error to think of the carpenter as trying to imitate the Form of the bed but failing to realize


in his execution what he possessed in his mind. This not only would return us to the idea of approximation but also turns the doctrine into the ludicrous picture of every carpenter vying to reproduce the Form and coming up with different models that somehow, and to different degrees, are off the mark. At the very least, the idea of imitating the Forms means producing objects that belong to a lesser order of reality; in other words, the particular beautiful thing is not beautiful in all its aspects. If it were, it would be a second Beauty, and even God cannot make a second real bed, or Form. Even if he did so, says Socrates, “an extra one would emerge, and both the other two would be of that one’s type. It, and not the two beds, would be the real bed.”5 This is an argu-ment against an infinite regress.

It is not, then, imitation per se that Plato condemns but what the poet’s imitations teach. In Book III of the Republic, he entertains the idea of reforming poetry and admitting into his polis poetry that can serve the moral education of the citizens. The argument is primarily cultural and moral; in Book X, it is metaphysical and epistemological, as well. He accuses the poet of imitating appearances, not producing objects, and condemns all poetry (see 598b). Whereas the carpenter in looking to the Form in making his bed has before him the use to which a bed is put, the painter, in looking to the sensible bed, has before him only the look or appearance of the bed, not its use, which is what makes the painter two removes from reality. The metaphysical argument turns ethical when Socrates turns from the painter’s imitations to the poet’s. While the painter may only fool children into thinking his imitation is actually a bed, he produces a product that “forms a close, warm, affectionate relationship with a part of us which is, in turn, far from intelligence” (598c, 603a–b). How much worse, and dangerous, is the poet whose imitations not only represent that part of us which is “far from intelligence” but also appeal to that same part? Moreover, the poet works in the medium of words, the same as the philosopher, thereby making the rivalry all the greater.

The condemnation of mimesis, as is well known, turns upon the poet’s pretense to knowledge, but we should also keep in mind the poet’s claim to make or form listeners or readers. Central to the Greek paideia was the recitation of poetry.6 To recite the speeches of Achilles was to incorporate his qualities. In attacking the poet’s claim to knowledge, Plato is both condemning the poet as educator and as user. Lacking technê, the poet, like the rhapsode, cannot be said to use anything, which is to say he is incapable of realizing the end for which his “product”


is made, an end which is traditionally claimed to be excellence, arét. Poets write on many subjects, but because they deal with appearances (phantasmata) and not reality, they do not possess any true knowledge. This is the argument, already familiar to us from Book III, that a doctor knows more about health than Homer, just as a charioteer knows more about racing, even though both arts are described in his poetry. But the argument goes on to condemn the poet for expounding upon the most important of human endeavors—warfare, politics, education—but making no improvements in any of these fields nor even introducing anything that has touched upon reality. No war has depended upon Homer’s leadership or advice, no legal code has been founded by him, and he has left behind no school in a particular Homeric way of life (see 598d–601a). Finally, the representational skill of the poet has nothing to do with that part of the mind that is consistent and unchanging, the part that looks to the Forms (604e–605a).

Criticisms of Plato’s argument are too abundant to mention, except to point out that it is generally agreed that his argument is moralistic and his aesthetics deficient. Yet if we take even a cursory view of liter-ary theory today, we can see that what Plato called the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy still persists in the moral and political arguments that dominate discussions of literature, even to the point that present day moralists still connect mimesis with the objects or persons represented in the literary work as did Plato before them. Furthermore, the frequency with which representation is coupled with power reflects a distrust of mimesis that is as much moral as it is epistemological. I am not suggesting that returning to Plato will set us right on such problems but that the very persistence of the quarrel testifies to the close bond between ethics and aesthetics. In his condemnation of poetry for appeal-ing to the irrational and appetitive parts of the soul, Plato compares the bad government of the polis to the bad government of the soul: the poet “destroys the rational part by fattening up this other part, and this is equivalent to someone destroying the more civilized members of a community by presenting ruffians with political power. There’s no difference, we’ll claim, between this and what a representational poet does: at a personal level, he establishes a bad system of government in people’s minds by gratifying their irrational side, which can’t even recognize what size things are . . . by creating images, and by being far removed from truth” (605b–c).

The analogy between a system of government and the individual conforms to the discussion in Book I, where Socrates also draws analo-


gies between the polis and the individual in arguing that morality is knowledge and a good state. For Socrates, the moral individual is one who exists in harmony with himself, which is what it means to be a good state, whether we are speaking of the individual or the polis. Our basest urges awake when reason sleeps, and so the tyrant lives a waking dream, giving reign to the lawless pleasures and desires that appear in dreams (p. 571c). The part of the soul that should be watched over by reason when asleep is the theatrical part.7

The “most serious allegation against representational poetry” fol-lows from this: “It has a terrifying capacity for deforming even good people.” Plato’s example is of the representation of grief in “Homer or another tragedian.” When we listen to the hero “deliver a lengthy speech of lamentation” or hear him “sing a dirge,” we feel pleasure. “We surrender ourselves, let ourselves be carried along, and share the hero’s pain” (605c–d). Behind this argument lies his observation that it is easier to imitate the “petulant part of us” than it is “the intelligent and calm side of our character,” which, because it is “pretty well consistent and unchanging,” is “not only difficult to represent, but also difficult to understand when it is represented in the theater” (604e). Insofar as the good life is rational, constant, and unchanging, it makes for boring drama. Or does it? Not if we take Plato’s Apology as an example.

Rather than denying what would later be called aesthetic distance, wherein we enjoy a “zone of pleasure divorced in principle from ethi-cal consequences,” Plato, G. F. Ferrari argues, directs his attack against it.8 Ferrari argues that the audience lets itself go when viewing a spec-tacle because it thinks there is no shame in expressions of grief or in laughter when one has company, whereas this is precisely what Plato rejects. Yet I think this argument, insightful as it is, imposes a modern interpretation on the text. For Plato, it is the lure of pleasure that lets the audience indulge itself. A mark of “manly behavior” in Plato’s society is “to endure pain without being upset.” We would not publicly display grief “when tragedy strikes our own lives” because of the shame such a display would bring upon us, but we freely indulge these emotions when they are represented by the poet (605d–606a). The issue then is not aesthetic distance because for Plato there is none. Instead, we are absorbed by what we see and succumb in our identification with the tragic action. The poet gives us a wrong model for imitation. Rather than imitate the one who is well governed, the philosopher, we imitate the ill governed, one who “has been inadequately trained in habits enjoined by reason” (606a).


If tragedy asks us to reflect upon the distance between human knowledge and divine power, then it is quite legitimate to expect the learning to be as much an emotive experience as it is a rational one. Plato, in fact, provides the evidence, confirmed by much scholarship, that the experience in ancient Greece was emotive and not rational.9 It is Aristotle who introduces the rational element and anticipates the modern concept of aesthetic distance, which encourages us to believe in the evolution of human consciousness and autonomy. In objecting to Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s argument that Greek tragedy represents a stage where human autonomy has not yet acquired the status of self-sufficiency, Bernard Williams warns against evolutionary accounts of morality. He writes, “Our ideas of action and responsibility and other of our ethical concepts are closer to those of the ancient Greeks than we usually suppose.”10 The disappearance of the daimonic from the modern world has not altered the tragic confrontation between the conscious agent and unknown and incomprehensible forces. Greek tragedy, Williams says towards the end of his book, presents the gap between the tragic character “and the way in which the world acts upon him” (pp. 164–65).

In the modern world, this would be the gap opened by human agency itself, for as historical beings we act upon the world and in so doing produce unforeseeable consequences that, at certain moments, destroy our sense of ourselves as autonomous and rational beings. The power of tragedy is to remind us of human contingency, but this power is negated by aesthetic distance. This phenomenon is well represented by Terry Eagleton, who concludes After Theory by appealing to the moral power of tragedy, which forces us to look upon not-being–that is, all that is contrary to a full and good life—and “reminds us that a way of life which lacks the courage to make this traumatic encounter finally lacks the strength to survive. Only through encountering this failure can it flourish.”11 Hope in the future is what tragedy can give us, he says, but surely such hope is possible only if the audience recognizes its distance from the fate that befalls an Oedipus or a Lear. For King Lear, there is nothing to meliorate his loss, and our ability to take from his suffer-ing the hope that life must go on even when it cannot go on—to gain knowledge rather than sink with him into grief—is proof that aesthetic distance is yet another attempt to provide a logos for what is alogos.

Aesthetic distance allows us to transform the incomprehensibleness of human destruction into a legitimation of human reason, and it does so by transforming particularity into the universal. Against those who hold


that tragedy teaches those “truths about human experience [that] can best be learned by living them in their particularity” by allowing us to apprehend them intellectually and emotionally in stories and images,12 Plato argues that it pretends to know particulars and forgets the particular that matters most, the individual. What poetry takes for particulars are the mere look of things, appearances, which by their nature are partial or incomplete. If they were not, the poet would make things as does the carpenter. In Plato’s eyes, to praise the poet for giving us particulars is like praising a carpenter who can make a good headboard but cannot make the bed’s frame. The poet gives us the appearance of a human being but leaves out the life.

Plato’s attack represents something quite different from the condem-nation of works of fiction and poetry for their incomplete representa-tion of, for instance, women’s lives. While it is very much an ontological and epistemological argument, it is an ethical viewpoint that takes as its object what it means to be a human being and to live a good life. There can be no question that for Plato this life is that of the philosopher. But what is it about the life of the philosopher, as conceived by Plato, that puts him into conflict not just with the poet but with the polis, as well? He gives us an answer in his seventh letter. I refer not just to his condemnation of the democratic government that put Socrates, “the justest man of his time,” to death, but to his condemnation of those who, like Dionysus, feign to know philosophy and even write upon it but who “have no real acquaintance with the subject.” Plato makes it clear that this knowledge comes not from “natural intelligence and a good memory” but from “an inborn affinity,” which can only be measured by how one conducts oneself. Therefore, he says, “I certainly have composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in the future, for there is no way of putting it in words like other studies. Acquaintance with it must come rather after a long period of attendance on instruction in the subject itself and of close companionship, when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining.”13 For Plato, it is not the autonomous individual who is self-sustaining but the practice of philosophy.

This letter has been the source of theories about Plato’s “unwritten doctrine,” but it is better to take the passage quoted above as referring to a problem inherent in philosophy itself; indeed, it refers, as Hannah Arendt says, to the philosophical life itself.14 She links the seventh let-ter to the moment in the Theaetetus where the eponymous interlocutor confesses to be made “quite dizzy” by Socrates’ discussion of being and


becoming. Socrates takes this as a sign of Theaetetus’ possessing the inborn nature that makes a philosopher: “This sense of wonder [thau-mazein] is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.”15 Philosophy begins in wonder and ends in it. Arendt opposes thaumazein to opinion, doxazein: we form “an opinion about something. The wonder that man endures or which befalls him cannot be related in words because it is too general for words. . . . This wonder at everything that is as it is never relates to any particular thing, and Kierkegaard therefore interpreted it as the experience of no-thing, of nothingness.” This generality, Arendt makes clear, has nothing to do with abstractions but is “a concrete and unique experience which marked off the Socratic school from all former philosophies.” This “speechless state of wonder” before everything that is as it is when translated into words leads us to “what we call the ultimate questions—What is being? Who is man? What meaning has life” (pp. 97–98)? The problem with doxa is that it is never at a loss for words; we always have opinions about matters because, as Plato puts it, we entertain beliefs only about something; it is impossible to have a belief and “to be believing nothing” (R, 478b). We always encounter something and there is no end to our doxa. Belief or doxa is the province of common standards and common sense, of the world as we commonly encounter it. This is a type of generality that allows us to negotiate our way through the world, and it explains our common agreement about the world, but it does not answer to that generality which is the province of philosophy and to which common sense does not apply; that is, it is silent before the universal.

Tragedy has the power to shatter our beliefs by confronting us with the nothing, but the experience of nothing that comes upon the phi-losopher who is seized with wonder is not death but Being, that which is without relation. It was not common sense that led Socrates to pursue the good. He was notorious for standing speechless, but it is speech, Arendt says, that “makes man a zo on politikon, a political being. The philosophical shock,” she continues, “strikes man in his singularity, that is, neither in his equality with all others nor in his absolute distinctness from them. In this shock, man in the singular, as it were, is for one fleeting moment confronted with the whole of the universe, as he will be confronted again only at the moment of his death” (p. 100). There is the singularity that we each possess as a human being, but it is one we have in common with all human beings, and even with animals. Then there is the singularity that not only marks us off from all others, it marks us off from ourselves, sets us beside our selves and leaves us in


wonder. This is a singularity that cannot be shared for it is too general for words; that is, it cannot be predicated. We can only ask, “what is,” but can never say, “it is” other than to call it the One or that which is (to ho esti).

In the Parmenides, Plato writes, “For if each of the parts [or things other than the One] is a part, the word ‘each’ implies that it is other than the one, for if not, it would not partake of the one, but would actually be one; but really it is impossible for anything except one itself to be one.”16 Things participate in the One and each thing is itself one, but are not the One, which is to say things have an identity but are not the true or the real. We can have no image of the One, the real or true, but can only experience it in wonder. The philosopher will explain what he can, and to do so, he will use definitions, models, examples, and analogies, but the aim of these is not to depict the One nor even, strictly, to mold the life of the listener/reader.17 As the seventh letter suggests, the One will not be defined; it can only be experienced.

Yet Plato wrote of the One and tried to explain it. If we accept the seventh letter and his statement that “no serious man will ever think of writing about serious realities for the general public,” and that what he writes about “cannot have been his most serious concern,” then we might conclude that Plato’s most serious concern is his “unwritten doctrine,” but I would suggest instead, it is the experience of wonder, that which leaves Socrates, that most garrulous of men, speechless (L, 344c). Moreover, I should emphasize he writes not of his own wonder but that of Socrates, and in so doing he is claiming to be the best of poets, for rather than imitate the experience, let alone represent the One, he describes Socrates standing mute and gazing into space (see Symposium, 174d).

If we agree with Charles Kahn and construe the Forms neither as a “pioneering study in the theory of predication” nor as “a theoretical solution to specifically philosophical problems . . . but as a practical ideal, of vital importance for every human being’s conception of what makes life meaningful,” then we are led to reading the dialogues as literary forms.18 This does not require that we look upon the dialogues as literature rather than philosophy, or as representations rather than reasoned arguments, but that we reconsider once again the ancient quarrel and the example of Socrates.

I am proposing that ethics and literature are linked together by the singularity of what I began by calling “singularity” and later defined, after Arendt, as wonder. This singularity is exemplified in the life of Socrates.


In the Apology, Socrates tells how he set about to refute the priestess at Delphi who said that no one was wiser than himself. Unable to find a person whose wisdom exceeds his own, Socrates concludes, “It seems to me that he [the god] is not referring literally to Socrates, but has merely taken my name as an example (paradeigma), if he would say to us, The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless.”19 One of the charges against Socrates is that he has, indeed, become an example, but a bad one, to young men, but Socrates is proposing here that his “name” (the Greek onoma is commonly used for a noun, a vocal representation according to the Cratylus 423b), not the person, is the paradigm the gods hold up to tell humankind “that real wisdom is the property of God, and . . . that human wisdom has little or no value” (A 23a). The god literally refers not to Socrates the individual but to the name, which Socrates would have us accept is a paradigm of a wise ignorance: he alone knows he knows nothing. Socrates tells us, in short, that he is an example or paradigm insofar as he is a name for a type of life, which is that of philosophy, but as an individual, he is merely another ignorant mortal. The singularity of the virtuous life sets him against the plurality of the polis. But he is literally “Socrates” and belongs to this plurality, which is why he accepts the sentence passed and drinks the hemlock. If we take Socrates literally as to what the oracle meant, then the Socratic problem—who was Socrates?—becomes less a question of discovering the historical figure behind his philosophical and literary representa-tions but a paradigm of that which binds poetry and philosophy and set them in opposition to politics. The life of thought denigrates the life of action; this is as true of Aristotle as it is of Socrates and Plato. From the ethical perspective, the life of contemplation is inhuman for it places theoria above phronesis, practical wisdom. Yet this life is not attainable for a human being: for Aristotle, we imitate God in contemplating, but we are at best only God-like. For Socrates and Plato, the philosophical life is preparation for death, for wisdom cannot be possessed in this world. All three denigrate politics, but all three see politics, or rather, the polis, as the place where human beings can achieve excellence. We are faced with an aporia and apparently cannot pass beyond a conflict wherein the philosophical life and the political oppose each other and are equally necessary for a good life.

Socrates is, yet again, paradigmatic. His insistence upon the examined life as the only life worth living put him at odds with the polis. The ques-


tion, then, is if the pursuit of wisdom is the good life, why did Socrates put himself at the mercy of the polis? He tells us in the Crito that he has an obligation to the state and must abide by its laws. He tells his follow-ers we must do what the state commands unless we can persuade it of its injustice.20 Socrates’ means of engagement is the elenchus, the cross examination, but the elenchus is a special type of argument ad hominem: its goal is not to bring the character of an individual into disrepute but to change that person’s life, to set him on the path of philosophy or the examined life. Having failed to do this with his judges, he must submit to their sentence. This leads us to another question: if Socrates did not possess wisdom and did not teach anything, then why would he undertake as an act of piety the search for a wise man? He tells us that whenever he finds someone who is wise or someone who is not, “I try to help the cause by proving he is not. This occupation has kept me too busy to do much either in politics or in my own affairs” (A, 23b). Alexander Nehamas writes that the problem is the same for Socrates as for the gods: how were the gods to know Socrates would follow their com-mand, and how is Socrates to “make himself understood to his fellows? The situation, for the gods and for Socrates, is parallel: only one good agent can recognize another.” Nehamas concludes that if Socrates were to recognize a good man, “he will thereby show himself to be good as well, and will be recognized as good by that other good human being.”21 Only the just man can recognize a just man. But in Socrates’ case, no such recognition occurs. Socrates cannot know that he is good. The virtuous life is lived, not known; it can only be confirmed for oneself if it is confirmed by another human being. I insist upon this last point, that he seeks wisdom in another human being and not in the gods, for not only is wisdom of the gods barred to mortals, but Socrates would have known himself to be wise if he had accepted the oracle.

Socrates’ life is an aporetic life: as in the early dialogues, it is lived and concluded without resolution of the problem it set out to solve: what is the life of virtue? This aporia did not prevent him from living his life, nor did it remove him from the polis, until the polis removed him. He pursued a good life in indifference to politics and his own affairs, which is to say he lived the singular life that begins and ends in wonder. In between, he talks on and on trying to convey to others the spark that, to return to the language of Plato’s seventh letter, is generated in the soul. The virtuous life, wisdom, is not to be put in words. We get an image of it in the good act as much as in the good example, and this


is the particular singularity of Socrates, to be a figure of a the virtuous life, which makes as much a part of literature as he is of philosophy.

Louisiana State University

I wish to thank Michelle Zerba for her meticulous reading of the manuscript and for her many helpful suggestions.

1. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes that eudaimonia, happiness or well being, “turns out to be activity of the soul in conformity with excellence (energia kat’aretên).” Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, rev. J. O. Urmson, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series LXXI, 1984), p. 1098a17. All citations from Aristotle are from this edition.

2. Socratic intellectualism is a much debated issue. P. T. Geach formulates the Socratic fallacy succinctly: “(A) that if you know you are predicating a given term ‘T’ you must ‘know what it is to be T,’ in the sense of being able to give a general criterion for a thing’s being T; (B) that it is no use to try and arrive at the meaning of ‘T’ by giving examples of things that are T. (B) in fact follows from (A).” See “Plato’s Euthyphro: An Analysis and Commentary,” rpt. in Socrates: Criticial Assessments of Leading Philosophers, ed. William Prior, 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 1996), 3: 153. First published in The Monist, 50 (1966).

3. Alexander Nehamas, “Confusing Universals and Particulars in Plato’s Early Dialogues,” in Virtues of Authenticity, pp. 159–75, esp. pp. 163, 170.

4. The doctrine of Forms is introduced by Plato in the Phaedo and the Republic. His own critique of the Third Man argument is to be found in the Parmenides. Aristotle’s criticisms of the Forms appears in many places throughout his work, but see Posterior Analytics, trans. Jonathan Barnes, p. 83a1–33; Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, pp. 987a29–988a16; 990a31–993a10. The most influential modern treatment of Forms as a theory of universals is Gregory Vlastos’s “Plato’s ‘Third Man’ Argument (Parm. 132A1–B2): Text and Logic,” Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1969): 289–301, reprinted in his Platonic Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 342–62.

5. Plato, Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 597c; hereafter abbreviated R. Also see Alexander Nehamas’s critique of the notions of approximation and imperfection in his “Plato on the Imperfection of the Sensible World,” in Virtues of Authenticity, pp. 138–58.

6. The classic study of Plato’s assault on the oral and mimetic grounds of Greek educa-tion is Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato (1963; rpt. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1967). For a broader study of orality in Greek culture, see Bruno Gentili, Poetry and Its Public in Ancient Greece: From Homer to the Fifth Century, trans. A. Thomas Cole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).


7. This point is made by G. F. Ferrari, “Plato and Poetry,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 1. Classical Criticism, ed. George A. Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 139.

8. See Ferrari, p. 138.

9. The fundamental book on this subject is E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951).

10. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 18–19. He cites Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 16 and 37.

11. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 221.

12. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 186.

13. Plato, Letters, trans. L. A. Post, in Plato: Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series LXXI (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 344a, 341c–d; hereafter abbreviated as L. All citations from Plato’s works, other than the Republic, will be from this edition, unless otherwise noted.

14. Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research, 57, no. 1 (1990): 97.

15. Plato, Theaetetus, trans. F. M. Cornford, 155c–d.

16. Plato, Parmenides, trans. H. N. Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 158a.

17. On the problem of Being and predication, which I am merely phrasing in existential terms, see G. E. L. Owen, “Plato on Not-Being,” in Plato I: Metaphysics and Epistemology, ed. Gregory Vlastos (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), pp. 223–67, and “Plato and the Undepictable,” in Exegesis and Argument, ed. E. N. Lee, et al., Phronesis, suppl. Vol. 1 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1973), pp. 349–61. Also see, Alexander Nehamas, “Participation and Predication in Plato’s Later Thought.”

18. Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 341–42.

19. Plato, Socrates’ Defense (Apology), trans. Hugh Tredennick, 23a–b; hereafter abbrevi-ated as A.

20. Crito, trans. Hugh Tredennick, 49e–51c.

21. Nehamas, “What Did Socrates Teach?” in Virtues of Authenticity, p. 77.

Jonathan Gottschall and Marcus Nordlund*

ROMANTIC LOVE: A LITERARY UNIVERSAL?

I

To love someone romantically is—at least according to innumer-able literary works, much received wisdom, and even a gradually

coalescing academic consensus—to experience a strong desire for union with someone who is deemed entirely unique. It is to idealize this person, to think constantly about him or her, and to discover that one’s own life priorities have changed dramatically. It is to care deeply for that person’s well-being and to feel pain or emptiness when he or she is absent.

But is this intense emotional experience a universal experience, something that is characteristically and quintessentially human, or is it merely a sociocultural construct that belongs to a particular time and place? On this point there is less agreement, both within and between different academic disciplines. The audacious question we want to raise in the pages that follow is whether literature—or more specifically, a large-scale, multiple-coder content analysis of thousands of folk tales drawn from different parts of the planet—can contribute something to this difficult question about love, culture, and human nature.

Let us first look briefly at the theoretical problem that we aim to address. A widespread view among literary scholars and social scientists over the last decades has been that romantic love is a social construc-tion specific to Western culture. This is part of a relentless skepticism

*Research collaborators for this project include Liana Boop, Lance Branch, Daniel DeLorme, Mackenzie Ewing, John Forrette, Jared Fostveit, Erica Guralnick, Julia Jones, Sarah MacFarland, Maia Moyer, Kevin O’Connor, Spencer Paige, Ann Sargent, Linnea Smolentzov, Michael Stafford, Adam Tapply, Lindsey Taylor, and Sammie-Jo Therrien.


451Jonathan Gottschall and Marcus Nordlund

toward assumptions that important categories of human psychology and emotion—romantic and parental love, gender, sexual orientation, and so on—are “natural” rather than constructed. This position is often, if not always, linked to an ideological concern to demystify (or at least problematize) what is perceived as an essentially destructive or oppressive emotion or belief. Taking her cue from Simone de Beauvoir, Marilyn Friedman gives no less than ten reasons why it may be problematic for women to fall in love with men.1

Of course, no argument of any kind can be strictly ideological in nature since it always involves empirical assumptions—either explicit or implicit—about the nature of things. For example, the psychoanalyst E. S. Persons opines that the “best evidence that romantic love is not hard-wired into the emotional repertoire of humanity but is a cultural construct is the fact that there are so many cultures in which it is vir-tually absent.”2 Another frequent argument for love’s constructedness has been that “there is no definition that describes love throughout the ages or across cultures.”3

In some literary-critical accounts, it is even argued that romantic love is a cultural invention that can be traced back with precision to the courtly troubadour culture of twelfth-century France.4 According to yet another school, represented by the influential literary theorist Jonathan Culler, “the notion of romantic love (and its centrality to the lives of individuals) is arguably a massive literary creation.”5

While the social constructivist position on romantic love typically involves a strong commitment to cultural specificity, a weaker version is held even by some cognitive theorists who grant more to biology and panhuman traits. From the perspective of their communicative theory of emotion, Philip Johnson-Laird and Keith Oatley argue that the “compo-nents [of romantic love] exist separately in different societies, but their integration into a recognizable complex is a cultural accomplishment [by the West].”6

At the other end of the romantic love continuum we find those who argue that this emotion belongs to a universal human nature: or, more specifically, that it can be attributed to specialised neural circuits whose ultimate purpose is to enhance reproductive success. Not surprisingly, this has been a favorite position among evolutionary psychologists, and it has recently received some support from neuroscientific studies.

For example, the neuroscientists Andreas Bartels and Samir Zeki claim to have uncovered a “functionally specialised system” that lights up in fMRI (magnetic resonance) scans of brains whose owners claim to be


enamoured.7 Among other things, these studies lend unexpected sup-port to the proverbial idea that “love is blind” since the experience of romantic love can be correlated with the deactivation of brain regions concerned with critically assessing other people’s intentions and making moral judgements.8 Another research team (Helen Fisher and associates) has drawn extensively on similar neuroscientific evidence in support of the hypothesis that human beings come equipped with a tripartite system of attraction, attachment, and sexuality.9

The neuroscientific perspective certainly promises strong support for love’s universality. If our emotional experience can be correlated with distinct neural circuits that, in turn, are continuous with our mammalian heritage, then it seems likely that this experience is also somehow part of an evolved human nature. However, given the considerable environ-mental plasticity of the human brain, pointing to specialised circuits in the brains of Western subjects will hardly persuade anyone who believes that romantic love itself is a Western innovation. At least in principle, a neurophysiological trait can be genotypically continuous with other species and still be heavily modulated by environmental factors.

For this reason, a successful case for love’s universality would also seem to require solid cross-cultural studies that disproved the standard social constructivist argument that romantic love is absent in a large number of cultures. The matter can only be resolved by integrating cross-cultural analyses with neuroscientific evidence.

Some cross-cultural arguments to this effect have already been put forward. In 1992, the anthropologists Jankowiak and Fischer scrutinised the ethnographic record and uncovered instances of romantic love in almost 90% of the cultures studied.10 Three years after the study, Jankowiak published a collection of essays that fleshes out the argu-ment and adds more empirical material in the form of case studies, but whose title still ends with a quotation mark: Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? 11

II

The lead authors of this study (Gottschall and Nordlund) are strongly committed to the view that romantic love must be understood with refer-ence to an evolved human nature. This is not to say that the emotion can necessarily be reduced to a hard-wired instinct, impervious to cultural influence, but rather that any satisfying explanation of its nature—includ-ing the rather improbable view that it arose in twelfth-century France,


alongside the game of tennis—would need to be anchored in evolved psychological dispositions that are common to Homo sapiens.

Nevertheless, more precise questions about love’s nature and origin can be bracketed here since they do not impinge directly on the empiri-cal question of its prevalence. Our precise objective has been to further test the hypothesis of romantic love’s universality, and thus to attempt to replicate the findings of Jankowiak and Fischer in a different cultural medium, through a systematic content analysis of dozens of collections of folk tales drawn from diverse world populations.

Using folk tales as empirical evidence about human nature is not an uncomplicated matter. The stories people tell across the world—particu-larly in oral literature, or ‘orature’ as it is sometimes called—unabashedly mix factual events with the stuff of fiction, myth, and legend. Many tales are about animals rather than humans, albeit animals endowed with human attributes. This naturally makes it impossible to read these tales as straightforward representations of human emotions. On the other hand, it would be equally unwise to assume the opposite: that this global repository of cultural wealth is entirely undependable, as if the stories people tell can tell us nothing about the people who tell them.

It is our view that folk tales can give valuable information about the ideas, beliefs, dreams, wishes, and fears of people around the world. As long as we respect the complexities involved there is an important role for literature departments to play in the scientific study of human nature.

Indeed, this study is not the first empirical exploration of love in world literature. In The Mind and its Stories, Patrick Colm Hogan surveys a large swath of world literature and suggests that “romantic union” may be a universal generic prototype.12 Strictly speaking, our study is not an attempt to replicate Hogan’s findings since we are not in search of a literary subgenre but representations of a human emotion. We also hope to contribute a somewhat more systematic and transparent methodol-ogy. But in spite of these differences we think of both studies as joint contributions to the larger question of love’s literary universality.

To suggest that romantic love may be universal naturally requires a definition of the emotion itself. In their ethnological study, cited above, Jankowiak and Fischer understood romantic love as “any intense attrac-tion that involves the idealization of the other, within an erotic context, with the expectation of enduring for some time into the future.”13 This is a practical definition that covers three important aspects of romantic love (idealisation, desire, commitment), but it also appears to leave out


as much as it includes. A more complete account is offered in Helen Harris’s detailed synthesis of previous academic definitions:

1. Desire for union or merger, both physical and emotional2. Idealization of the beloved3. Exclusivity (reciprocal)4. Intrusive thinking about the love object5. Emotional dependency6. Reordering of motivational hierarchies or life priorities7. Powerful empathy and concern for the beloved14

In our view this is an impeccable definition, but for the benefit of our content analysts we also produced a more concrete and accessible version that would not require additional definitions of the key components. Romantic love is “a feeling expressed in a romantic context between two people; it has a dimension of sexual attraction, even lust, but it is not limited to that; it is an emotion that is typically reserved for only one person (though romantic love is not necessarily inconsistent with sexual promiscuity); it carries the expectation of lasting duration; it involves intense attraction to the beloved’s whole person and is not just about attraction to the body.”

The qualifier about sexual promiscuity was intended to detach the emotional content of romantic love from its moral implications and evaluations. Since recent neuroscientific research lends support to the view of romantic passion as an intensely goal-oriented state whose initial phase may even be at cross-purposes with empathy, we also decided to remove this dimension as a necessary defining criterion.15 While empathy and concern typically play important parts in romantic love—to love someone romantically is also to care for that person—extreme states of infatuation may inhibit them.

Perhaps less obviously, a study of this kind also presupposes a con-cept of universality, and we have used the word in accordance with two basic distinctions. The first distinction is that between cultural and human universals, where a cultural universal is one that can be found in all cultures while a human universal characterizes all humans. The second necessary distinction is that between absolute universals (that admit no exceptions) and statistical universals (that admit exceptions and hence constitute broad patterns rather than absolute rules).16 Even though we suspect hypothetically that romantic love may be a statistical human universal (more specifically, a biological potential in almost every human being)—and therefore most likely an absolute cultural universal


(that exists in all cultures)—a study of this scope and nature can only produce evidence that is indicative of statistical cultural universals.

III

Data and Methods. Collections of tales were chosen with the intent of producing a maximally diverse sample. Our sample is comprised of seventy-nine folk tale collections from all inhabited continents, from different historical periods, and from societies vastly differing in ecology, geography, ethnic composition, religious beliefs, and degree of political organization (for a list of all collections see Appendix).

Because our method required digitized tales, approximately two-thirds of our sample is comprised of copyright-expired collections that are freely available through an assortment of reputable internet libraries (e.g., gutenberg.org, sacred-texts.com, and various university collections). We filled the final third of our sample by using a scanner to digitize collections of folk tales from traditions that were under-represented online. All collections were of traditional tales, originally transmitted through the oral tradition. All non-English tales had been translated into English, and the sample ran the gamut from polished fairy tales to literal transcriptions of tales told in traditional contexts. Once our sample was compiled, coding proceeded in two steps.

Step one. With the help of a thesaurus, we generated a list of all the words we could think of which, in English, are regularly associated with romantic love: love, longing, romantic, dear, beloved, married, adore, affection, and so on. Then, using our word processor’s “find and replace” function, we “tagged” all of the fifty nine keywords in the collections, and all of their relevant variants (e.g., love, loved, lover, loving, etc). Finally, seventeen undergraduate members of a St. Lawrence Univer-sity seminar in research methods coded roughly equal proportions (in page counts, not numbers of collections) of the total sample. Coders were able to move with speed and precision through the collections by using our word processor’s “find” function to locate the keyword tag (>>). After locating a tagged keyword, coders then used as much of the surrounding context as was necessary to judge (1) if the reference met our definition of romantic love, (2) if it did not, or 3) if the reference was ambiguous.

Coders were, in content analysis parlance, kept “naïve”: they were not appraised of the theoretical controversies about romantic love or about


its relationship to larger debates about human nature, and they were not privy to the expectations of the lead authors. They were only told that our investigations—whatever we discovered—would help to resolve questions about the prevalence of romantic love across cultures. It was emphasized that there was no favored outcome: whatever we revealed would represent a valuable contribution. Coding decisions were made independently; coders were told not to discuss judgments with col-leagues. Coding was conducted in one-hour lab sessions to allow for procedural questions, to minimize inter-coder discussion, and to limit coder fatigue and distraction.

Step two. Content analysis depends on the fallible judgments of human coders. Coders were repeatedly reminded to hold closely to our shared definition of romantic love and to avoid the tendency to respond based on personal intuitions. But the possibility remains that the judgments of individual coders were compromised through subjectivity bias or simple errors. To guard against this possibility, all 536 potential references to romantic love identified in the first stage of coding were subjected to additional scrutiny.

In the second phase of coding, all potential references (including the key words and all relevant context) were cut and pasted into three documents of equal length. Then three teams (two with six members, one with five) considered all potential references and simply indicated whether they believed that the reference was clearly consistent with our definition of romantic love or whether it was not. We applied a strict standard: references to romantic love were accepted as authentic only if coders were unanimous or if there was only one dissenter.

All of these steps were designed to minimize various kinds of bias. The coding task was performed by a team of naïve coders, rather than by the lead authors, to minimize the likelihood that the results would be shaped—consciously or not—by the biases of interested professional researchers (in other words, for the same reason that social scientists do not fill out their own surveys). We formalized our definition of romantic love and included the second coding phase to ensure that our results were based not on the potentially idiosyncratic responses of individual coders but on a rigorous standard of intersubjectivity. Potential biases remain in our results, some of which will be discussed in more detail below. We hope, however, that the principal bias in this study is a con-servative bias purposefully introduced by the researchers. In seeking to shield against the possibility of false positives (accepting a false refer-


ence to romantic love) we have heightened our vulnerabilities to false negatives (overlooking legitimate references).

IV

Results. For the purposes of data analysis collections were grouped into 7 major cultural areas, ranging in size from 5–25 collections and 11 sub-groupings (variance in sample sizes are a result of availability of collections, not a methodological choice). Collections were placed into sub-groupings only if there were at least 3 collections from that cultural area. Cultural groupings were based on salient geographic, linguistic, and cultural affinities and was guided by anthropological convention.17

In the 79 collections coders identified 263 references that met our shared definition of romantic love: 55 collections had at least one refer-ence to romantic love; 39 of the collections included multiple references. On average, there were 3.32 references to romantic love per collec-tion. Two-thirds of the accepted references enjoyed unanimous coder agreement; for the other third there was one dissenter. References to romantic love were not limited to European tales but were found across highly diverse and isolated culture areas (see Table 1). In fact, while not every collection included an unambiguous reference to romantic love, every culture area did except for the Philippine subgroup. While the European total of 3.75 references per collection was slightly higher than the sample average, several cultural areas included more references on average. By far the highest averages were not found in Europe but in large samples of tales from Japan, from North West Coastal Indian populations, and from India. Among the collections that could not be efficiently placed into cultural sub-groups, the single Ainu collection (with ten references to romantic love) and the single Western Yugur collection (with five) stand out.

V

This study therefore offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal. It would also seem to increase the probability that romantic love may be an absolute cultural universal. While the coders found no clear romantic love references in the three collections from the Philippines it would be rash to conclude, on this basis, that romantic love either does not exist in this culture or


is of minimal importance. Obviously, not every collection of folk tales will convey information about every aspect of a given culture. It could be that if we had considered more Philippine collections we would have discovered unambiguous examples. After all, Japan had the most romantic love references per collection, but if we had only considered three Japanese collections (as in the Philippine case) we might have found no love references at all. Every one of the Japanese examples accepted by coders was found in just three of our six collections.

In a similar vein, while we have taken the trouble to produce statistics on the number of references per cultural grouping, it would be unwise to assume, based on these numbers, that romantic love is, for instance, three times as central to Japanese culture as it is to Hawaiian. Folk tales

Table 1. Results by broad cultural groupings and sub-groupings

References to Average References Romantic Love Per Collection

OVERALL (N=79) 263 3.32Asia (N=16) 94 5.88 India (N=8) 28 4.67 Japan (N=6) 37 6.17Africa (N=5) 8 1.60 Hausa (N=3) 6 2.00Europe (N=8) 31 3.75Middle East (N=6) 23 3.83Oceania (N=10) 19 1.90 Aboriginal Australia (N=4) 7 1.75 Hawaii (N=3) 6 2.00 Philippines (N=3) 0 0.00North Amer. Indian (N=25) 75 3.00 Arctic Coast (N=5) 4 0.80 Northwest Coast (N=11) 68 6.18 Pueblo (N=3) 3 1.00South America (N=9) 13 1.44 Maya (N=4) 8 2.00 Yanomamö (N=3) 3 1.00

N=Number of collections per grouping.Note: The sample size for the broad cultural grouping is often larger than the sum of the sub-groups. This is because many collections could not be efficiently placed in sub-groups. For results for each collection contact the lead authors.


can be used as one source of data to see if romantic love is represented in a culture, but they are a relatively poor index of cultural importance. Variance in numbers of love references across culture areas may reflect cultural importance, but it is also likely to reflect random variance in the contents of collections, non-random variance (e.g., collections happen-ing to focus on tales of young lovers versus those focusing on myths of cosmology and origins), and variances among individual coders during the first coding stage.

VI

The fact that we have used English translations raises some questions, one of which concerns the quality of the translations used. Due to the extent of our material and the sheer variety of original languages rep-resented there we have simply been at the mercy of our translators. A second and perhaps more interesting issue is that of potential linguistic incommensurability. Is it even possible in principle to translate success-fully from one language to another if the languages in question differ markedly in their terms for love and affection?

As we saw above, different cultural definitions of love have been used as a central argument for love’s status as a social construction. In our view, the important grain of truth in this position—that the way a culture talks about love can reveal important things about how the emotion is understood, conceptualised, and even experienced—is too often buried under a mound of overstated inferences. To posit anything like a direct link between love and linguistics, between what people say and what they feel, is to suggest that (i) human thought and emotion are solely or mainly determined by language and that (ii) cultures are unlimited in their capacity to regulate and define individual experience and behaviour by linguistic means. While precisely these notions have been widely propounded by humanists, they enjoy little in the way of empirical support or scientific credence.18 A culture may prescribe strict “feeling rules” for its members, but life will always be lived in tension with prescription.19

According to William Jankowiak, cultural attitudes towards romantic love are indeed highly diverse, with some cultures simply rejecting romantic love “as an evil and frighteningly emotional experience. In others it is tolerated but not celebrated or asserted, and, in still others, romantic passion is praised as an important and cherished cultural ideal.”20 The important point here is that even someone who does not


concede Jankowiak’s empirical argument will be hard pressed to refute its logical consequences for the translation problem under scrutiny here.

If Jankowiak is right, then we can certainly expect notable differ-ences between the languages of love in different cultures, particularly as concerns love’s moral status and implications. But for the very same reasons it will also be extremely hazardous to extrapolate emotional realities from linguistic realities. If it is the case that different cultural attitudes generate different vocabularies for the same emotion, then focusing on language is just as likely to obscure as to clarify the question of love’s universality. Linguistic diversity is simply an insufficient argu-ment for love’s supposed constructedness.

On a practical level, however, the problem of translation still remains, and this is the case regardless of whether we ascribe it to faulty transla-tions, cultural bias, or linguistic incompatibility. Since our study is based on key-word-in-context analyses of short passages rather than summarised accounts of entire texts, it follows that the precise meaning of individual words becomes all the more important. It matters, for example, when a Chinook storyteller informs us that a man has married several women but “loved only the youngest one,” and our coders interpret this pas-sage as an instance of romantic love (albeit with reference to a broader textual context than the quotation reproduced here).21 If the original Chinook word was closer to “like” than “love” this would drastically change the significance of the passage. One way to assess how serious this translation problem has been is to move from statistical analysis to closer, more qualitative consideration of a few examples.

VII

Considered as a whole, our material covers all the attributes of romantic love. “Falling in love” is described as a distinct and recognizable process in tales from regions as diverse as West Africa, Japan, North and South America, the Middle East, Polynesia, China, and Europe. Our instances of intrusive thinking come from cultures so diverse as Hawaii (where a young woman professes to love the King so much that she thinks of him day and night, and even in her dreams, and another woman weeps bit-terly because the thought of her absent lover never leaves her); Punjab in northern India (where an enamoured youth cannot eat or sleep for love of a beautiful princess); and the Western Yugur steppe of China (where a boy suffers from “lovesickness” and is eventually cured). Wherever lovers are separated for long, intrusive thinking is attended by pain or


even despair. This emotional dependence takes on cosmic proportions in a Maori tale of creation where the Sun weeps so hard over his separation from his mistress Earth that his tears eventually turn into oceans.

We have also found examples of emotional commitment, empathy, and exclusivity so strong that lovers are either prepared to sacrifice their own lives for their loved ones (as in a Japanese tale) or continue their relationship beyond death (in a tale from the Heiltsuk Nation of Brit-ish Columbia, two lovers swear that the one who dies first will return to bring the other to the kingdom of the dead). Other examples are more complex. One tale from the Middle East provides a particularly unpleasant example of how strong love can coexist, without apparent contradiction, with moral judgements that seem diametrically opposed to it. A husband loves his wife so much that he is “ready to sacrifice his life to satisfy her whim.” He is, however, also prepared—on the advice of none other than his trusty dog, who has ten wives and controls them all perfectly—to take a heavy stick and give her a good beating across the back because she is too curious about his secrets.22

In most cases, at least two or more of the defining characteristics of romantic love can be found in a given passage. But an important limitation of this study has been that our coders were provided with a multi-factor definition of romantic love but were not given detailed instructions about which, or how many, factors had to be present in order for a particular emotional representation to qualify as “romantic.”

On the one hand, it seems unreasonable to expect that a single passage must exhibit all seven factors in the full definition (desire for union, etc.) in order to qualify as fully “romantic.” On the other hand, it is likely that our investigation would have benefited from a formalised multi-factor approach of the kind employed, for example, in clinical psychology: that is, if a person’s emotional experience meets a specified number of criteria associated with romantic love, then that person can be said to be experiencing romantic love. Perhaps future studies will want to pursue this approach in order to increase the scientific preci-sion of their findings.

What are the consequences of this methodological limitation? At first sight, it would seem that our findings can still be explained in terms of the moderate constructivist hypothesis espoused by Johnson-Laird and Oatley above: that while the components of romantic love exist across the planet, the integration of these components into a complex whole is a distinctive Western achievement. When we proceed to examine individual passages, however, the case for the “Western integration”


hypothesis becomes shakier and the case for universality stronger. Consider, as an example, this charming story from a collection of Aus-tralian Aboriginal stories, originally documented by the anthropologist W. Ramsay Smith. Since the original story is several pages long we give a condensed version of its plot here:

A male peewee (a species of small magpie) returns to his nest after a long day of food gathering and is surprised to find a beautiful female peewee sitting there. She is lost and very tired, so he offers her to take a nap in his nest. As he watches her sleep he falls in love with her. When she wakes up she is first distraught at finding herself alone with a stranger and starts to cry. He comforts her with kind words and then helps her find her way back to her parents in the south before returning back home. Three months go by, and all this time the male yearns for his loved one as we watches other animals mate in his surroundings. One night he thinks he hears her voice in a dream and finally decides to fly south again to woo her with his song. When she doesn’t appear he worries that she may have been claimed by another peewee, but then he reassures himself. Her eyes spoke clearly of love for him when they first met, so how could she possibly forget him and marry someone she did not love? Finally, to his great joy, the female appears again, and they sing a hymn to the Sun Goddess before spending the night together in silent commun-ion. In the end they become husband and wife and raise a large family whose grown-up members migrate to other parts of the country.23

In this story about bird love—which is well worth reading in its entirety—not one of the seven key ingredients of romantic love is missing. The male peewee finds the female beautiful and desires her, but his feelings clearly go beyond mere physical attraction. He is concerned for her well-being, he depends on her for his own happiness, and her absence is accompanied by intense feelings of loneliness. He thinks constantly about her for three months, and since his feelings appear to be requited he is also convinced that she cannot love anyone else. How appropriate, then, that after this idealization, exclusivity, intrusive thinking, emotional dependency, powerful empathy, and desire for union, these avian-Australian lovers should also rearrange their life priorities by consummating their love in marriage!

What we have here, then, is a near-perfect example of romantic love from a Native Australian tribe. The anthropologist who collected it at the beginning of the twentieth century claims to have made only “few and slight” alterations to it, and these were deemed necessary “to make clear the meaning, or to give some degree of grammatical correctness to


the text without changing the ‘aroma’ of the story when using equivalent English terms or phrases.”24 In spite of these precautions, it is of course impossible to control fully for the manifold cultural influences and biases that may have crept into its contents. But such doubts—like any proposed certainties or probabilities—must also be put into perspective, and this will be our final objective in this essay.

VIII

Science, including literary science of the kind we have practiced here, is not a method for providing metaphysical certainty. It is a systematic and probabilistic way of determining where the preponderance of evi-dence lies. The best science can do is provide evidence that exceeds all reasonable doubts—as in the cases of evolution, heliocentricity, and continental drift. At the conclusion to this study, however, reasonable people may still doubt that romantic love is an emotion that has emerged independently in all human populations. For instance, while it is for many reasons unlikely that cross-cultural diffusion of folk tales or western socio-political hegemony can explain the full breadth of our findings,25 we cannot absolutely rule out these possibilities. What we can assert is that a clear preponderance of evidence derived from systematic studies of ethnography, neuroscience, folk tales, and even ethology converges to support romantic love’s universality.

We began this paper with “an audacious question.” Can a systematic study of literary works make a significant contribution to a scientific question? It is obvious by now that we think it can. But an equally auda-cious question can be formed by rearranging the original question: Can scientific analysis make important contributions to literary analysis? Again, we think it can, and we intend for this research to serve as one model of how a scientific approach can provide more reliable and effi-cient responses to certain broad classes of literary questions.

Many literary scholars are wary of scientific approaches to literary study. There are good reasons for this. Foremost among them is the inescapable truth that for more than a hundred years almost every self-described “scientific” or “more scientific” approach (Russian formalism, psychoanalysis, structuralism and so on), while importing concepts and impressive vocabulary, has lacked the one truly indispensable element of science: the method. While scientific methodology is all but absent in the mainstream of literary study, there are a substantial number of good studies demonstrating that there is no epistemological brick wall


dividing the realms of the humanities and the sciences, so that all the power of the scientific method wilts to nothing when confronted with humanities questions. Moreover, psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists have developed an improving suite of methods for dealing with text data in a quantitative, scientific fashion.26 On this point we agree with the structuralist literary scholar Tzvetan Todorov: “the crude opposition” that the sciences are objective and the humanities subjective (and therefore almost wholly outside the reach of scientific method) “is untenable.”27

The sciences have been spectacularly successful in their slow accu-mulation of reliable and durable knowledge. No comparable fund of accumulated knowledge exists in literary study. Our proposal is that by applying the scientific method where it can be applied, literary scholars can make long strides toward building a more impressive fund of accu-mulated, testable knowledge. This is very far from arguing that scientific quantification is, as a rule, superior to traditional humanistic methods of careful reading and reasoning. Both sets of methods are tools: like hammers and screwdrivers they are exquisitely fashioned to address specific and narrow ranges of tasks. For the scholar and the scientist, the challenge is to select the right class of methodological tools for the given problem. Sometimes the hammer is called for, sometimes only the screwdriver will do, and for complex problems a diverse methodological toolkit is often needed to do the job right.

The present study also serves as a reminder that qualitative and quantitative methods are complementary and mutually dependent. The quantitative elements of our investigation were designed to do what sci-ence does best: systematically address and diminish the power of various species of bias (e.g., selection, confirmation, subjectivity) to radically distort perception. On the other hand, the qualitative elements were also indispensable since they allowed us to pursue and problematize aspects of our question that could not be represented in numbers. While there are classes of literary investigation that resolutely resist scientific methodology, we believe that there are other classes where questions can usually be given testable formulations and addressed, at least in part, in a methodologically scientific fashion. We hope that our investigation, for whatever shortcomings it possesses, will serve as a testament to the potential of this approach.

Washington and Jefferson College ( JG) Göteborg University (MN)


1. Marilyn Friedman, “Romantic Love and Personal Autonomy,” in Philosophy of Emotions, ed. Peter French and Howard K. Wettstein, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 22 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), pp. 162–81.

2. Ethel Spector Person, “Romantic Love: At the Intersection of the Psyche and the Cul-tural Unconscious,” in Affect: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, ed. Theodore Shapiro and Robert N. Emde (Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1992), pp. 383–412, 383.

3. Ann Beall and Robert J. Sternberg, “The Social Construction of Love,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 12 (1995): 417–38, 433.

4. See, for example, R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 8. For a critique of this position, see Marcus Nordlund, “The Problem of Romantic Love: Shakespeare and Evolutionary Psychology,” in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. 107–25. Irving Singer gives a more accurate account of courtly love in The Nature of Love, Vol. 2: Courtly and Romantic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

5. Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. 1997 edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 68.

6. P. N. Johnson-Laird and Keith Oatley, “Cognitive and Social Construction in Emo-tions,” in Handbook of Emotions, 2nd edition, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones (New York: Guilford, 2000), pp. 458–75, 462.

7. Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, “The Neural Basis of Romantic Love,” Neuroreport 11 (2000): 3829–834, 3833.

8. Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, “The Neural Correlates of Maternal and Romantic Love,” Neuroimage 21 (2004): 1155–66.

9. Helen E. Fisher, Arthur Aron, et al., “Defining the Brain Systems of Lust, Romantic Attraction, and Attachment,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 31. 5 (2002): 413–19; Helen Fisher, Arthur Aron, and Lucy L. Brown, “Romantic Love: An fMRI Study of a Neural Mechanism for Mate Choice,” Journal of Comparative Neurology 493 (2005): 58–62. For further perspec-tives on the functional independence of sexuality and attachment processes, see also Lisa Diamond, “What Does Sexual Orientation Orient? A Biobehavioral Model Distinguishing Romantic Love and Sexual Desire,” Psychological Review 110 (2003): 173–92.

10. William Jankowiak and Ted Fischer, “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love,” Ethnology 31 (1992): 149–55. Rpt. in Human Emotions: A Reader, ed. Jennifer M. Jenkins, Keith Oatley, and Nancy L. Stein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 55–62.

11. William Jankowiak, ed., Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? (New York: Colum-bia University Press, 1995).

12. Patrick Colm Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emo-tion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

13. Jankowiak and Fischer, p. 52.

14. Pace Helen Harris, “Rethinking Polynesian Heterosexual Relationships: A Case Study on Mangaia, Cook Islands,” in Jankowiak, Romantic Passion, pp. 95–127, 102–3.


15. According to Bartels and Seki (2004) romantic love is correlated with deactivations in brain areas associated with assessment of other people’s intentions and moral judg-ment. A literary reading of this phenomenon in Shakespeare’s works will be offered in chapter four of Marcus Nordlund, Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution (forthcoming, Northwestern University Press, spring/summer 2007).

16. For discussion see Donald Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991). For discussion of various kinds of literary universals see Patrick Hogan, “Literary Universals,” Poetics Today 18 (1997): 223–49. Also see Jonathan Gottschall, “The Heroine with a Thousand Faces: Universal Trends in the Characterization of Female Folk Tale Protagonists,” Evolutionary Psychology 3 (2005): 85–103.

17. See G. P. Murdock, “World Ethnographic Sample,” American Anthropologist 59 (1957): 664–88.

18. For diverse and penetrating critiques of these positions see Daphne Patai and Will Corral, eds., Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

19. Peter Stearns, “History of Emotions: Issues of Change and Impact,” in Lewis and Haviland-Jones, Handbook of Emotions, pp. 16–29, 20.

20. Jankowiak, “Introduction,” Romantic Passion, p. 17, n2.

21. Charles Cultee, ed., Chinook Texts, trans. Franz Boas (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1894), unpag.

22. Louis Ginzberg, ed., The Legends of the Jews (New York, 1909), unpaginated.

23. W. Ramsay Smith, Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1970), pp. 41–44.

24. Smith, Myths and Legends, pp. 7–8.

25. Experts in folk tales consider diffusion to be a highly unsatisfactory explanation for folk tale universals. For references, and discussion of the possibility of western biases in a data set very similar to the one used here, see Jonathan Gottschall, “Quantitative Literary Study: A Modest Manifesto and Testing the Hypotheses of Feminist Fairy Tale Studies,” in Gottschall and Wilson, The Literary Animal, pp. 199–224.

26. For methodologically scientific studies demonstrating the permeability of the wall separating the sciences and humanities see, for example, Colin Martindale, The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change (New York: Basic Books, 1990); Brian Vickers, Shakespeare Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Gottschall, “Quantitative.” For a small sample of the scientific analysis of text data in the social and human sciences see Kimberly Neuendorf, Content Analysis Guidebook (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2002); R. Popping, Computer Assisted Text Analysis (London: Sage, 2000).

27. Tzvetan Todorov, “Structural Analysis of Narrative,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 3 (1969): 70–76.


Appendix: List of Folktale Collections

Aesop’s Fables. (1870s). George Fyler Townsend, trans. New York: McLoughlin.Asbjørnsen, P. C., Moe, J. E., and Thorne-Thomsen, G. (1912). East o’ the sun and west o’

the moon: With other Norwegian folktales. Chicago: Row, Peterson.Ashliman, D. L. Folktales from Japan and Japanese legends of supernatural sweethearts. http://

www.pitt.edu/~dash/japan.htmlBatchelor, J. (1888). Specimens of Ainu folklore. Yokohama, Japan: Transactions of the

Asiatic Society of Japan,16, 111–150, 18, 25–86, 20, 216–277.Benedict, R. (1931). Tales of the Cochiti Indians. Washington: U.S. Government Printing

Office.Boas, F. (1894). Chinook texts. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office.Boas, F. (1902). Tsimshian texts. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office.Boas, F. (1910). Kwakiutl tales. New York: Columbia University Press.Boas, F. (Ed.). (1932). Bella Bella tales. New York: American Folk-lore Society, G. E.

Stechert.Bogoras, W. (1910). Chuckchee mythology. New York: G. E. Stechert.Bogoras, W. (1913). The Eskimo of Siberia. New York: G. E. Stechert.Bogoras, Waldemar. (1918). Tales of Yukaghir, Lamut and Russianized Natives of Eastern

Siberia. New York: Anthropological Papers of The American Museum of Natural His-tory vol. XX, part 1.

Brett,William Henry. (1880). Legends and Myths of the Aboriginal Indians of British Guiana. London: W. W. Gardner.

Burton, R. F. (1850). The Arabian nights. http://www.sacred texts.com/neu/burt1k1/.Carmichael, A. (1922). Indian legends of Vancouver Island. Toronto: Musson Books. Cole, M. C. (1916). Philippine Folk Tales. Chicago: A. C. McClurg.Colum, P. (1925). The Bright Islands. New Haven: Yale University Press.Cove, J. J., and MacDonald, G. F. (1987). Tsimshian narratives I: Tricksters, shamans and

heroes. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization.Cove, J. J., and MacDonald, G. F. (1987). Tsimshian narratives II: Trade and warfare. Ottawa:

Canadian Museum of Civilization.Crawford, J. M. (1888). The Kalevala: The epic poem of Finland. New York: J. B. Alden.Cushing, F. H. (1901). Zuñi folk tales. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Dorson, R. M. (1961). Folk legends of Japan. Rutland, Vt.: C. E. Tuttle.Epiphanius, H. and Leonidas, L. (1901). Babylonian and Assyrian literature comprising the

epic of Izdubar, hymns, tablets, and cuneiform inscriptions. New York: Colonial Press.Giddings, R. W. (1978). Yaqui myths and legends. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press.Gill, W. W. (1876). Myths and songs of the South Pacific. London: Henry S. King and

Co.Ginzberg, L., Szold, H., Radin, P., and Cohen, B. (1909). The legends of the Jews. Philadel-

phia: The Jewish Publication Society of America.Glew, R. S., and Babalé, C. (1993). Hausa folktales from Niger. Athens: Ohio University

Center for International Studies.Goetz, D., Morley, S. G., and Recinos, A. (1950). Popol Vuh: The sacred book of the ancient

Quiché Maya. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Griffis, W. E. (1918). Dutch fairy tales for young folks. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.Grimm, J., Grimm, W., and Hunt, A. W. (1944). Grimm’s fairy tales. New York: Pantheon

Books.


Grinnell, G. B. (1892). Blackfoot lodge tales: The story of a prairie people. New York: Scribner.

Hall, E. S. (1998). The Eskimo storyteller: Folktales from Noatak, Alaska. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press.

Jacob, P. W. (1873). Hindoo tales or the adventures of ten princes. London: Strathan and Co.

Jacobs, J. (1898). English fairy tales. New York: G. P. Putnam.Jacobs, Joseph. (1892). Indian Fairy Tales. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.Johnson, P. E. (1926). Legends of Vancouver. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.Johnston, H. A. S. (1966). A selection of Hausa stories. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Lang, A., and Gregory, D. L. (1948). The green fairy book. New York: Longmans, Green.Laughlin, R. M., and Karasik, C. (1988). The people of the bat: Mayan tales and dreams from

Zinacantfin. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.Leland, Charles, G. (Ed.). (1884). The Algonquin legends of New England. Cambridge:

Riverside Press. LeRoy, J. (1985). Kewa tales. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.Lloyd, J. W., Comalk-Hawk-Kih, and Wood, E. H. (1911). Aw-aw-tam Indian nights: The

myths and legends of the Pimas of Arizona. Westfield, N.J.: Lloyd Group. Lummis, C. F. (1910). Pueblo Indian folk-stories. New York: Century.Markham, C. R., and Valdez, A. (1910). Apu Ollantay: A drama of the time of the Incas sov-

ereigns of Peru about A. D. 1470. In C. R. Markham, Incas of Peru. New York: Dutton.McLaughlin, M. (1990). Myths and legends of the Sioux. Lincoln: University of Nebraska

Press. Miller, J. M. (1904). Philippine folklore stories. Boston: Ginn.Mindlin, B. (2002). Barbecued husbands and other stories from the Amazon. New York:

Verso.Mindlin, B. (1995). Unwritten stories of the Suruí Indians of Rondônia. Austin: University

of Texas.Mitra, S. M. (1919). Hindu tales from the Sanskrit. London, England: Macmillan.Montejo, V. (Ed.).(1991). The bird who cleans the world and other Mayan fables. Willimantic,

Conn.: Curbstone Press. O’Bryan, A. (1956). The Dîné: Origin myths of the Navaho Indians. Washington: U.S. Gov-

ernment Printing Office.Orczy, E. Old Hungarian fairy tales. (1969, 1895). New York: Dover Publications. Ozaki, Y. T. (1905). Japanese fairy tales. New York: A. L. Burt.Parker, K. L., and Lang, A. (1897). Australian legendary tales: Folklore of the Noongahburrahs

as told to the Piccaninnies. London, England: D. Nutt. Peck, C. W. (1925). Australian legends: Tales handed down from the remotest times by the autoc-

thonous inhabitants of our land. Sydney: Stafford.Petrie, W. M. (1895). Egyptian tales. London: Methuen.Pino Saavedra, Y. (1967). Folktales of Chile. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ramanujan, A. K., Blackburn, S. H., and Dundes, A. (1997). A flowering tree and other oral

tales from India. Berkeley: University of California Press.Rasmussen, K. (1921). Eskimo folk-tales. London.Redesdale, L. (1871). Tales of old Japan. London: Macmillan.Royall, T. (1987). Japanese tales. New York: Pantheon.Sadhu, S. L. (1962). Folk Tales from Kashmir. New York: Asia Publishing House.


Sanyshkap, A., Khunjis, Xiuzheng, A., Yùméi, Z., Serin, A. K., Asyrma-Wanda, et al. Western Yugur Folktales. Retrieved February, 2005, from http://home.arcor.de/marcmarti/ yugur/folktale/folktale.htm

Sexton, J. D. (1992). Mayan folktales: Folklore from Lake Atitlán, Guatemala. New York: Doubleday.

Shaihua, Maalam. (1913). Hausa Folk-lore. R. Sutherland Rattray, trans. Oxford: Claren-don Press.

Smith, W. R. (1930). Myths and legends of the Australian Aboriginals. New York: Johnson Reprint.

Steel, F. A., Kipling, J. L., and Temple, R. C. (1894). Tales of the Punjab told by the people. London, England: Macmillan.

Swanton, J. R. (1905). Haida texts and myths. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Swanton, J. R. (1909). Tlingit myths and texts. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Swanton, J. R. (1929). Myths and stories of the southeastern Indians. Washington: U.S. Gov-ernment Printing Office.

Theal, G. M. (1886). Kaffir folklore: A selection from the traditional tales current among the people living on the eastern border of the Cape Colony. London, England: S. Sonnenschein, Le Bas & Lowrey.

Thomas, W. J. (1923). Some myths and legends of the Australian Aborigines. Melbourne: Whitcombe & Tombs.

Thompson, S. (1929). Tales of the north Native American Indians. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Voth, H. R. (1905). The traditions of the Hopi. Chicago: Field Columbian Museum.Westervelt, W. D. (1910). Legends of Ma-ui, a demi-god of Polynesia and of his mother Hina.

Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette.Westervelt, W. D. (1916). Hawaiian legends of volcanoes: Collected and translated from the

Hawaiin. Boston: Ellis Press.Wilbert, J., and Simoneau, K. (Eds.). (1978). Folk Literature of the Gê Indians. Los Angeles:

University of California Latin American Center Publications.Wilbert, J., and Simoneau, K. (Eds.). (1982). Folk literature of the Mataco Indians. Los

Angeles: University of California Latin American Center Publications.Wilbert, J., and Simoneau, K. (Eds.). (1985). Folk Literature of the Chorote Indians. Los

Angeles: University of California Latin American Center Publications.Wilbert, J., and Simoneau, K. (Eds.). (1986). Folk Literature of the Guajiro Indians. Los

Angeles: University of California Latin American Center Publications.Wilbert, J., and Simoneau, K. (Eds.). (1987). Folk literature of the Chamacoco Indians. Los

Angeles: University of California Latin American Center Publications.Wilbert, J., and Simoneau, K. (Eds.). (1987). Folk literature of the Nivakle Indians. Los

Angeles: University of California Latin American Center Publications.Wilbert, J., and Simoneau, K. (Eds.). (1989). Folk literature of the Caduveo Indians. Los

Angeles: University of California Latin American Center Publications.Wilbert, J., and Simoneau, K. (Eds.). (1991). Folk Literature of the Cuiva Indians. Los

Angeles: University of California Latin American Center PublicationsWilbert, J., and Simoneau, K. (Eds.). (1991). Folk Literature of the Makka Indians. Los

Angeles: University of California Latin American Center Publications.


Wilbert, J., and Simoneau, K. (Eds.). (1992). Folk Literature of South American Indians. Los Angeles: University of California Latin American Center Publications.

Wilbert, J., and Simoneau, K. (Eds.). (1992). Folk Literature of the Sikuani Indians. Los Angeles: University of California Latin American Center Publications.

Wilbert, J., and Simoneau, K. (Eds.). (1982). Folk Literature of the Toba Indians. Los Angeles: University of California Latin American Center Publications.

Young, E. R. (1903). Algonquin Indian tales. Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye.

Michael Fischer

STANLEY CAVELL AND CRITICIZING THE UNIVERSITY FROM WITHIN

Stanley Cavell has spoken often of his “lifelong quarrel with the profession of philosophy” but he has said less about the university

as a whole and its pressures on all academic disciplines, philosophy included.1 In Cavell’s work, “academic” or “professional” philosophy takes shape in an institutional context he has not yet fully analyzed. I want here to extrapolate from Cavell’s work a critical, yet sympathetic, response to the university that I think is especially needed today, when the rise of the so-called corporate university is intensifying some of the professional pressures that Cavell resists.

Cavell’s discomfort with academic philosophy stems in part from what he regards as its narrowness, specifically, its marginalization of Ludwig Wittgenstein and other philosophers, not to mention Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the comedies of remarriage, and other work that Cavell cares about. In his view, the professional mar-ginalization of these writers partly results from their exemplifying what can seem to be a vague moral seriousness, even at times a prophetic urgency, that calls for something akin to conversion rather than issuing in specific conclusions or reforms. According to Cavell, academic phi-losophy, by contrast, subsumes moral concerns under ethics, a separate field in which the “point of conversation is getting the other to agree to, or to do, something.”2

Although Cavell does not systematically analyze the institutional pressures on academic philosophy, he does drop some hints. As befit-ting a subject seeking legitimacy in the university, academic philosophy has aligned itself with teachable subjects such as science, as opposed to more elusive pursuits such as painting and creative writing, which



have been less at home in the university and where the necessity of university instruction may be less clear and the line between success and failure harder to draw.3 What can be taught in academic philosophy is a method of analysis, mastery of which can be certified in students by professors and in professors by journals, promotion and tenure com-mittees, and administrators. Subdividing philosophy into discrete fields such as ethics makes it even more manageable, or less susceptible to sweeping pronouncements that cannot be tested by experts. Finally, the interest in getting “the other to agree to, or to do, something” associ-ates academic philosophy, or at least ethics, with measurable results and maybe even progress.

The rise of the so-called corporate university has exacerbated the emphasis on teachable expertise and definable outcomes that I have been describing. Take the largest private university in the United States—the University of Phoenix—as a model that some state and non-profit pri-vate universities may be emulating as they struggle to cut costs, meet external expectations, and work with reduced budgets. At the University of Phoenix, the interest in measurable results gets recast as learning outcomes that teachers enable students to reach as efficiently as pos-sible. Specialization narrows these learning outcomes to sharply defined skills, such as writing business memos, which students can master and build on. Finally, the emphasis on method does not simply depersonal-ize instruction; it reduces the need for instructors. Each instructor is tasked with teaching as many students as possible, sometimes through distance learning, with class size reaching a limit only when the learning outcomes cannot be delivered. Lacking tenure, these instructors can be replaced, like interchangeable parts, when they wear out or their student customers become too dissatisfied with them. At another rapidly grow-ing for-profit university, DeVry, students unhappy with their instructors are assured, in the words of a campus dean, that “weak links” will be “fixed” in a “total quality management” environment.4

Along similar lines, Lindsay Waters has recently explored how “the corporate makeover of the university” and “the commercialization of higher education” have affected academic publishing.5 Universities compete in an increasingly cutthroat marketplace and face an escalating insistence on results from state legislatures, federal agencies, accrediting associations, and boards. Capitulating to this “accountability culture” (EP, p. 20), bottom-line driven administrators have stepped up demands for faculty productivity, measured in quantitative terms by numbers of students taught, grants won, and, what most concerns Waters, books and

473Michael Fischer

articles published. These administrators have “outsourced” tenure and promotion decisions to journal editors and academic publishers, much like Ford buying batteries from Delcro (EP, p. 25). In Waters’ polemic, everyone is implicated in the loss of “any transcendental element” (EP, p. 11), any element of judgment or imagination, in the corporatist university: “greedy deans and provosts” (EP, p. 37); undiscriminating journal and university press editors who abandon standards “to keep the assembly-line moving” (EP, p. 22); librarians who fail to protect “book budgets from rapacious commercial presses who gouge them on journals” (EP, p. 37); and ambitious faculty members, “captains of academic industry” (EP, p. 67), who pursue star status instead of insti-tutional change and who remain oblivious to the suffering of exploited adjuncts, like smug corporate CEOs insulated from their less well off employees (EP, p. 29).

I am not suggesting that academic philosophers are responsible for these tendencies or would endorse them. My point is that the remak-ing of universities along corporate lines has exacerbated pressures that have long impinged on disciplines seeking university legitimacy. Some of these pressures result from universities being institutions with limited resources that will always have to set priorities and justify what they do. There is nothing new or even necessarily objectionable about calls for accountability, productivity, and efficiency. Universities should be inter-ested in containing costs, assessing the effectiveness of their programs, and thinking through their choices. What is new and objectionable is reducing the goals of universities to immediate, quantifiable results.

The question remains, however, what are those of us in universities to do about these corporatist tendencies besides vent, like Waters, or give in, like the DeVry dean? For some guidance, I want to return to Cavell’s dissatisfaction with academic philosophy. Cavell does not categorically reject academic philosophy. Instead, he recognizes it as “the genuine present of the impulse and the history of philosophy, so far as that pres-ent takes its place in our (English-speaking) public intellectual life” (TS, p. 32). As a writer, he wants neither to bypass academic philosophers as an audience nor limit his writing to their models. He admits to a “career-long wish” for his work “to be answerable to professional phi-losophy.”6 Cavell’s accountability to professional philosophy has puzzled some of his readers, among them Richard Rorty, who detect in Cavell an institutional timidity at odds with the boldness of his preference for Thoreau and other writers. As Cavell paraphrases Rorty’s concern, “to go on to worry whether certain of the texts I promote are philosophy


or are something else (say literature) is unnecessary; or rather, it is something deans worry about.” Cavell responds,

Would it have helped to add that what I care about in a work is what the work shows itself to be, to let happen, to care about, and that this is not something that can be known by how a dean, or anyone else, decides to classify texts and thereupon to invest in them?7

The works that interest Cavell show themselves to be steeped in philo-sophical issues (such as skepticism), committed to philosophical goals (such as liberation from false necessities), and capable of philosophical rigor in their thinking and writing.8 By calling these works “philosophi-cal,” Cavell is claiming that they reward a deep level of attentiveness and seriousness in our approach to them. Instead of giving up on aca-demic philosophy, he wants these works to put pressure on it, and for him that means continuing to call them “philosophical” and persisting in writing “at once inside the profession of philosophy and outside” (PDAT, p. 193).

Potentially even more worrisome to a dean, Cavell has long wondered not just whether the writing that he most values belongs in philosophy or literature departments but whether it is teachable at all. The limits of instruction, the inability of teachers to guarantee the effectiveness of their teaching, is a major moment in all the writers that interest Cavell, expressed sometimes from the point of view of a student (for example, Emerson’s remark in his “Divinity School Address” that “truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul”)9 and sometimes from the point of a view of a teacher, as in Wittgenstein’s Investigations #217: “If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’” (quoted in CHU, p. 70). In wanting their work to be taken up and continued voluntarily, in wishing to prevent understanding which is unaccompanied by profound inner change, in thus asking so much of their readers, including trust and an openness to uncertainty, self-doubt, and self-scrutiny, Emerson and Wittgenstein admit that the effectiveness of their teaching depends on the always unpredictable consent of their students or readers.10 Although this con-sent can be provoked, it cannot be forced, taken for granted, or reduced to routine without violating the autonomy that it depends on. In The Claim of Reason, after noting the lack of impact made by Wittgenstein and Austin on academic philosophical culture, Cavell adds, “I do not

475Michael Fischer

say that this is a bad thing”11—that is, a thing that can be moralized or easily fixed. Later, in This New Yet Unapproachable America, after making a similar point about the “insufficient” reception of Wittgenstein by professional philosophy, Cavell says, “I am not interested in expressing or assessing blame for this situation, either of those who may neglect the spiritual fervor [of Wittgenstein] as philosophically impertinent or of those who may insist on the fervor impertinently” (NYUA, p. 30). It is an open question for Cavell “whether the soul’s journey is any part of a university’s business, hence to what extent, if it is an essential part of philosophy’s business, philosophy is left out of the university,” or should be (CHU, p. 32). In short, he is not sure “whether any sky remains a canopy for philosophy” (NYUA, p. 8).

Even as Cavell refuses to demonize academic philosophy or philoso-phers, he often expresses his gratitude to the universities that he has been associated with—to the intellectual community he enjoyed at Berkeley, to teachers like J. L. Austin, to colleagues and students, to the teaching fellows of a particular course (Cities of Words, a book, he says, “that was born in a classroom” [CW, p. 163] is dedicated to the teaching fellows in Moral Reasoning 34). In an early essay on film in the university, he asks, playfully paraphrasing Marx,

Isn’t a university the place in our culture that enables us now to teach one thing today and learn another tomorrow, to hunt for time to write in the morning, fish for a free projector in the afternoon, try to raise money for projects in the evening, and after a seminar read criticism? To some this will not seem a Utopian set of activities, but in the meantime, and for those with a taste for this particular disunity, why not have it?12

As someone who has benefited from being in a university, he speaks with conflicting emotions of “gifted philosophical sensibilities deflected from pursuing their love of philosophy by their unwillingness or inca-pacity to face institutionalized disapproval” (NYUA, p. 6). Although he empathizes with their isolation, he never romanticizes it. He notes “how one grows weary of oneself with only oneself for conversation; and one gets cranky as well as hoarse . . . . But the worst is that isolation causes uncreativeness and parochialism more often than it makes for anything better” (PH, p. 273–74). At any rate, despite his ongoing doubts about whether as a university professor in a philosophy department he is in the right place, he writes The Claim of Reason as “the record of one who stayed” (CR, p. xviii).


I am interested here not in why Cavell has stayed but in what staying means. For one thing, staying, whether in academic philosophy or the university, means being fortunate enough to having gotten in. To bor-row from Cavell’s analysis of moral perfectionism, having gotten in puts Cavell among the advantaged in our society—not the most advantaged, to be sure, but not the least, either. In Cavell’s case, or, I would argue, in the case of any tenured university professor (i.e., not just one with an endowed chair at Harvard), “advantaged” means working in an institu-tion that permits a degree of autonomy, security, and critical thinking rarely found in other American workplaces.

For all their many benefits, however, universities are not perfect, the remaking of universities along corporate lines being only one example of ominous tendencies most of us would criticize. It would be easy to turn Cavell’s dissatisfaction with academic philosophy into a wholesale indictment of a spineless profession that has curried institutional favor by excluding what it most ought to value (I can imagine Waters tak-ing this path). It would also be easy to fault Cavell for not making this indictment—for seeming to set aside his grievances and ignoring the injustices, omissions, and shortsightedness of the university environ-ment that supports him. From this point of view, Cavell’s decision to stay, his consent to remaining a member of the academic profession, compromises him and nullifies the value of his work for those who are not so privileged or content.

Cavell not only understands the alienation and anger that fuel this critique; he shares them. One of his most frequently quoted comments is from Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” “Every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right” (quoted in NYUA, p. 69), which speaks of an intellectual isolation so deep that it could lead to despair and fuel dreams of escape. In Emerson, it does not, partly because he realizes that some measure of isolation—he calls it “poverty and solitude”—attends all serious philosophical work, wherever one undertakes it. Eschewing conformity, the scholar, in Emerson’s words, “takes the cross of making his own [road]” and with it “the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society.”13 Neither Emerson nor Cavell can imagine a society or even a relationship where these feelings will once and for all way give way to acceptance, recognition, and unconditional support. As Cavell puts it, some measure of misunderstanding and social

477Michael Fischer

rejection is “a characteristic fate of philosophy, at least in any somewhat novel form” (CW, p. 163).

Acknowledging the inevitability of rejection and neglect tempers our search for community and may incline us to concede, however begrudg-ingly, that the place we inhabit—in this case, the university—is good enough: maybe not perfect but better than any conceivable alternative, especially when we take into account, as Cavell does, the costs of more radical forms of isolation, such as bitterly leaving the academic profession or sadly not getting in. This acceptance of the university as the best place we can find (for now) is hardly a ringing endorsement and can lead to various strategies for adapting to an environment one cannot flee or change, a place where, in Cavell’s words, our consent “can neither be given nor withdrawn” (CW, p. 198). These adaptive responses include silent melancholy, quiet desperation, indifference, cynicism, aloofness, or adopting what Cavell calls, following Emerson, the “forced false smile of conformity” (CHU, p. 28), pasted on to survive conversations that do not interest us and situations where we do not feel at home. All of these help us survive a world where we feel stuck, invisible, lost, power-less to make ourselves intelligible to others, let alone influence them, and uncomfortably aware that our privileges may be somehow bound up with the sufferings of others but not sure where our responsibilities lie or how we can carry them out.

For Cavell, inheriting the writing of Emerson, Wittgenstein, and others, going on with it in our own often dark time, means above all showing us how to withstand moral cynicism, or how to respond to the inevitable failures of our institutions—universities included—and our complicity with them, “otherwise than by excuse or withdrawal” (CHU, p. 18). I think a key move on his part is to shift our attention from persuading or defeating the scoundrels in our lives, which can seem futile, to releasing the good in ourselves and in others, as Austin did for him (Cavell says he owes Austin “whatever is owed the teacher who shows one a way to do relevantly and fruitfully the thing one had almost given up hope of doing”).14 As Cavell puts it, “a philosopher will natu-rally think that the other has to be argued out of his position, which is apt to seem hopeless. But suppose the issue is not to win an argument . . . but to manifest for the other another way . . . a shift in direction, as slight as a degree of the compass, but down the road making all the difference in the world” (CHU, p. 31). Cavell’s ongoing quarrel with academic philosophy becomes what Emerson might call an aversive conversation with what, for all Cavell knows, may be an implacable


force but a conversation which other individuals may pick up on and sustain because it represents a shift in direction they also are wishing to take. By continuing his conversation with academic philosophy without any guarantee of institutional impact, by exemplifying another way of doing philosophy, Cavell is acting on the hope that some individuals somewhere will find in his words their own repressed thoughts returned to them and be encouraged to continue. The force of his words lies in their power not to compel agreement but to attract, provoke, or awaken the interest of individual readers. The individuals touched by Cavell may still find themselves incomprehensible and isolated in their immediate institutional surroundings, yet they have found in Cavell’s writing a reprieve from their disillusionment and the stirrings of a new kind of intellectual community—not “the overcoming of [their] isola-tion, but the sharing of that isolation.”15 For these readers, Cavell has filled the role that moral perfectionism assigns the friend, or someone “whose conviction in one’s moral intelligibility draws one to discover it, to find words and deeds in which to express it, in which to enter the conversation of justice” (CHU, p. xxxii).

Cavell decides to stay rather than withdraw; in choosing to stay, he accepts his membership in an admittedly flawed institution. With that membership, however, comes many responsibilities, among them tak-ing an interest in what happens to you and others; being sociable (as opposed to disengaged); participating; staying open to personal change and self-criticism; listening; remaining endlessly responsive to differ-ence; engaging in meet and happy conversations with those around us (adapting Milton, Cavell notes that “a certain happiness, anyway a certain spirited and orderly participation, is owed to the commonwealth by those who have sworn allegiance to it” [CHU, p. 105]). In stressing these responsibilities, Cavell is reaffirming that “I owe to my society a meet and cheerful exchange to reaffirm my consent, or a else a willing-ness to articulate the public causes of my unhappiness. That there is no measurable limit to my responsibility for the way things are, or to how far the effect of my unhappiness mars the possibility of the gen-eral happiness, hence brings into question the fact of our communal existence” (CW, p. 68)—brings it into question by suggesting that it leaves someone out. “Meet and cheerful” here mean not “bubbly and happy”—remember, we have wiped off the fake smile of conformity—but “spirited,” which in turn means engaging in exchanges rather than dia-tribes or one-sided attacks, exchanges where we seek to learn as well as demonstrate something.

479Michael Fischer

Just as Cavell is not retreating in silent melancholy within or outside the university, neither is he declaring immediate or even eventual victory. There is no guarantee that things will get any better: hence the need for ceaseless responsiveness and “eternal vigilance” (CHU, p. 125). Fol-lowing Emerson, Cavell is continually counseling patience, persistence, waiting, resourcefulness, improvisation, hope, in the face of discouraging odds and the inevitability of disappointment. He is asking us to conduct our work with “an attitude to our pursuits that is precisely unimposable and unrewardable” (CHU, p. 10): unimposable, because it cannot be forced on ourselves or on others but has to come from within each of us; unrewardable, because it finds fulfillment in every step of the way, not in some ultimate pay off or triumph that may never materialize.

The uncertainty of success returns me to what I earlier called the limits of teaching, or those moments when, as Wittgenstein describes them, justifications come to an end and “my spade is turned.” At these times, I feel I have done everything, or at least enough, to make myself clear. Adding to what I have already said is not getting me anywhere—in advancing my own understanding, in spurring on my apparently stalled students. It is time now for my students to respond, not just to regur-gitate what they have heard but to go on with it, on their own, maybe in a direction that I cannot anticipate. These are the anxious moments that the remaking of education along corporate lines seeks to minimize by limiting instruction to the most manageable tasks and installing mechanical check points along the way, such as annual standardized tests in American high schools, which sustain the illusion of lock step progress from level to level.

Cavell, by contrast, does not evade the unpredictability of teaching but values it. Again, in the scene of instruction depicted by Wittgenstein, after I have said everything I can, “Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’” Commentators like Saul Kripke have treated “this is simply what I do” as resolving the teacher’s dilemma along the lines of saying to the student, “take it or leave it,” or, as Cavell paraphrases Kripke’s reading, “after I have done everything to guide you, I am licensed to say, ‘do it my way or suffer the consequences,’” with “licensed” carrying the full weight of institutional authority. Cavell, however, takes “this is simply what I do” as something that the teacher is only inclined to say, maybe in the authoritarian, frustrated tone heard by Kripke but maybe in a more passive or personal way: a teacher confessing what he or she does without invoking any institutional authority, admitting to the student “‘I cannot see here where or how to make myself plainer, but here I am,


doing what I do, whenever you find you are interested again” (PDAT, p. 204). Waiting like this, giving the student time, means accepting the right of others to contest what I say, to teach me. It means “letting my confidence be challenged, anyway become hesitant in, thoughtful about, expressing itself” (CHU, p. 76), not assuming or mandating concurrence but asking myself “how important it is that we agree, and how thoroughly, in various strains of our form or forms of life, and where we may, or can, or ought to, or must, tolerate differences, even perhaps be drawn to change our lives—or suffer the consequences” (PDAT, p. 204).

What some academic philosophers regard as the most annoying fea-tures of Cavell’s writing turn out to exemplify the pedagogical values I have been describing. The confidence “hesitant in, thoughtful about, expressing itself” informs seemingly endless sentences that circle back on themselves, qualifying their key points and setting in motion possible further revision. Acknowledging that “this is simply what I do” amplifies Cavell’s personal voice in his writing, by which I mean his references to his own earlier work, his promissory notes to himself on topics that one day he hopes to pursue, and his careful tracking of where he stands and how he feels (“I come back to earth,” “I feel like saying,” and so on). Inviting readers to continue his thinking leads to essays that often end in open-ended questions or in provisional statements that function more as gathering places than as final destinations, as if he is not only summing up what he has said but encouraging further work on the part of the reader. The overall point of the essay admittedly may seem vague, though only when measured against calls for specific actions that Cavell neither precludes nor issues.

I am not suggesting that all teaching and writing must all the time be this tentative and exploratory. Patience has its limits, as does anger. Much as we can move too fast, we can wait too long in reaching conclu-sions, making decisions, and taking a stand. My point is that the scene of instruction described by Cavell captures a possibility that universities ought to treasure rather than steamroll away in the name of narrowly defined efficiency and productivity. The humility represented in this scene validates the university as place where coercion gives way to con-sent, judgments can be contested as well as made, and students and teachers can take their time, exchange places, reconsider where they are headed, and remain open to change, in themselves and in others.

Staying in the university, continuing to teach and write, despite all the discouragements that come one’s way, all the problems one feels somehow responsible for but cannot solve, thus does mean granting

481Michael Fischer

some legitimacy to the university. It means ratifying universities as places that remain, if not perfect, at least open to reform, conducive to aversive conversations, places where “happiness and liberty can be pursued and, to whatever extent such a thing is possible, preserved” (CW, p. 75). As Cavell observes, in one of his most explicit statements of support for the university and the academic freedom it should stand for, “I do not have to claim that everything is possible in every period in order to plead this much for universities: that while they may suffer every failing of the institutions of which they partake, they are unique among institutions in preserving the thought that nothing is the only game in town, or that if something is, then there are habitations outside the town where it is not. For that reason, before any other, they have, as they stand, if not my devotion, my loyalty” (PH, p. 274). Devotion here would imply uncritical allegiance; loyalty can, and sometime should, take the form of loyal opposition.

For some critics, I would imagine that claiming even this much for the openness of universities is conceding too much or settling for too little. The unhappiness of these individuals has reached a point where they feel diminished by continuing to stay or participate. In institutions like universities that depend so heavily on consent and engagement, it must always be an open question, subject to collective discussion and personal judgment, whether the evasions, injustices, and exclusions of universities have gone so far as to discredit them altogether. I do not feel that way, at least not now, however much those of us who have decided to stay must remain open to letting our confidence be tested. In any case, to paraphrase a comment by Cavell on Wittgenstein, this much seems to me true: imagine a university without Cavell’s writing and the voices he has encouraged. It is a place where our danger to one another grows faster than our help for one another.16

Trinity University

1. Stanley Cavell, Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), p. 31. Cited in text as TS.

2. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cam-bridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 235. Cited in text as CW.


3. See Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? : “It is hardly an accident that creative scientists are on the whole at home in a university and that creative artists on the whole are not.” (1969; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1976), p. xxvii.

4. Quoted in David L. Kirp, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 243.

5. Lindsay Waters, Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), p. 5. Cited in text as EP.

6. Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 210. Cited in text as PDAT.

7. Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgen-stein (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989), p. 4. Cited in text as NYUA.

8. See Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), where Cavell takes up, “Why does Emerson care, why ought we to care, whether he is a philosopher?” (p. 60; see also p. 137). Cited in text as CHU. In Cities of Words he also asks, “if we can say that Emerson is a useful, interesting, moving, provocative writer, whose powers increase with increased attention to them, why bother about whether he is called a philosopher or something else, or nothing but a writer?” (p. 21).

9. Quoted in Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, ed. David Justin Hodge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 146.

10. Cavell says of Wittgenstein’s Investigations, “In asking for more than belief it invites discipleship, which runs its own risks of dishonesty and hostility. . . . And like Freud’s therapy, it wishes to prevent understanding which is unaccompanied by inner change.” “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” Must We Mean What We Say? pp. 71–72.

11. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. xvi. Cited in text as CR.

12. Stanley Cavell, “Film in the University,” Pursuits of Happiness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 265. Cited in text as PH.

13. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 95–96.

14. See Cavell’s acknowledgments to Must We Mean What We Say? p. xiii.

15. I adapt here a comment by Cavell on modern art: “It promises us, not the re-assem-bly of community, but personal relationship unsponsored by that community; not the overcoming of our isolation, but the sharing of that isolation—not to save the world out of love, but to save love for the world, until it is responsive again.” “A Matter of Meaning It,” Must We Mean What We Say? p. 229.

16. Here is the complete statement that I am paraphrasing: “What is true is: In the culture depicted in the Investigations we are all teachers and all students—talkers, hearers, overhearers, hearsayers, believers, explainers; we learn and teach incessantly,

483Michael Fischer

indiscriminately; we are all elders and all children, wanting a hearing, for our injustices, for our justices. Now imagine a world in which the voices of the interlocutors of the Investigations continue on, but in which there is no Wittgensteinian voice as their other. It a world in which our danger to one another grows fasters than our help for one another” (NYUA, p. 75). The kind of university that I have been affirming resembles the culture described here.

Ermanno Bencivenga

THE CAUSES OF WAR AND PEACE

Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a magnificent work; as any such work, it can be read in a variety of ways and be found to teach us important

lessons at a number of independent levels. Here I want to look at it as an extended meditation on historical causality—and, by implication, on causality, period. So I will not be taking it for granted that it is a novel; I will be treating it as if it were an outcome of the conceptual reflection philosophers engage in—though, when all is said and done, I will be able to shed light on some of its structural features as a novel (including the fact that it is a novel).

There is no question that Tolstoy is looking at a majestic and terrifying historical event, and that he is deeply puzzled both by what is majestic and by what is terrifying about it:

On the 12th of June 1812 the forces of Western Europe crossed the frontiers of Russia, and war began: in other words, an event took place counter to all the laws of human reason and human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, decep-tions, treacheries, robberies, forgeries, issues of false monies, depredations, incendiarisms and murders as the annals of all the courts of justice in the world could not muster in the course of whole centuries, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as crimes. (p. 715)1

One obvious candidate for how this event came about, and one that gets repeatedly torn apart throughout the work, is the Hegelian refer-ence to world-historical individuals, who at key times within the universal narrative of Spirit get to impersonate that very Spirit and carry the rest of the passive universe in their powerful wake. On the contrary, Tolstoy thinks, kings and emperors and great generals are like the proverbial


485Ermanno Bencivenga

fly sitting on a racing horse, which thinks that, just because it’s sitting there, it is also riding the horse: “[Rostopchin] tried with his puny hand now to speed and now to stay the prodigious tide of popular feeling that was bearing him along with it” (p. 989). “Napoleon, who is presented to us as the leader of all this movement backwards and forwards (just as the figure-head over the prow of a ship seems to the savage to be the power directing the vessel in its course)—Napoleon in whatever he did throughout this period was like a child holding on to the straps inside a carriage and imagining that he is driving it” (p. 1193). “The powers of any commander-in-chief are very inconsiderable” (p. 1218). Kings and emperors and great generals, of course, think that a lot depends on their will, and so do, often, the historians accounting for what took place; but such evocations of individual wills are vain. “It only seemed to Napoleon that it was all happening because he willed it so” (p. 933). “The theory of the transference of the collective will of the people to historical per-sonages may perhaps explain much in the domain of jurisprudence and be essential for its purposes, but in its application to history, as soon as revolutions, conquests or civil wars make their appearance—as soon as history begins, in fact—this theory explains nothing” (pp. 1416–17). As with the fly (or the child) going for a ride on the horse (but definitely not riding it), all there is (at best) is a coincidence between the mental contents of these important characters and what happens anyway (in total independence of those contents): “to say that Napoleon sacrificed his army because he wished to, or because he was very stupid, would be as inaccurate as to say that he brought his troops to Moscow because he wanted to, and because he was very clever and a genius. In both cases his personal activity, which was of no more consequence than the personal action of the meanest private, merely coincided with the laws that guided the event. Quite falsely (and simply because consequent happenings did not vindicate his action) the historians represent Napoleon’s faculties as having failed in Moscow. He employed all his ability and powers to do the best thing possible for himself and his army, just as he had always done before and as he did afterwards in 1813. . . . His genius operated as fully and amazingly in Moscow as elsewhere. Order after order and plan after plan were issued by him from the time he entered Moscow till the time he left it” (pp. 1185–86). But, of course, to no avail.

Tolstoy makes it sound silly that something as small as a single indi-vidual could have as much of an effect on something as large as an army, or a nation. And the same silliness shows up in many other circumstances in which we similarly take a limited aspect of a process to be responsible


for the evolution of the whole process. To begin with, there is no better reason to think (as we naturally tend to do) that an individual’s will is responsible for what he does than for what anyone else will do: countless habits are ready to be activated at any time and, when they are, they can take over a person’s behavior as much as a crowd’s, and guide it irrespective of his will, or even of his consciousness. “[Napoleon] had plainly entered on his speech with the intention of pointing out the advantages of his position and indicating that he was nevertheless will-ing to negotiate. But he had begun talking, and the more he talked the less able was he to control the tenor of his words” (p. 736). “There is a well-known after-dinner mood which is more potent than any rational consideration in making a man contented with himself and disposed to regard everyone as his friend” (p. 741). “[Natasha] glanced at Pierre again with the unconscious coquetry which had come back to her with the return of better spirits” (p. 795).

Second, if the impulse manifested in a person’s will, however strongly felt, is too little of a base for explaining his behavior, given how much else is going on with that person, the same applies to the main tool people use in making their voluntary impulses known: words. Once again, the uttering of words cannot be seen as what makes people do things; it is certainly one of the things they do, but how can this one thing have such an effect on everything they do? “Ideas and the words which serve to express them are not what move men to action” (p. 1286). “On the one hand reflection shows that the expression of man’s will—his words—are only part of the general activity expressed in an event, as for instance, in a war or a revolution; and so without assuming an incomprehensible, supernatural force—a miracle—it is impossible to admit that words can be the immediate cause of the movements of millions of men. On the other hand, even if we admitted that words could be the cause of events, history shows that the expression of the will of historical personages in the majority of cases does not produce any effect—that is, their commands are often not executed and sometimes the very opposite of what they order is done” (pp. 1418–19).

And, finally, the most typical way in which people try to assert the power of their verbal expressions on the determination of events is through theorizing before the fact and predicting how the future will unfold. And, again, this is a vain pretence; though, by all means, so many differ-ent predictions are made at any one time that it is hard for one of them not to be proven right—thus deceptively and disingenuously legitimat-ing the whole enterprise of theorizing and predicting. Or, alternatively,


the people engaged in theorizing may become so enamored with their fictions that they get their priorities mixed up and start thinking that there is something wrong with reality—that reality is “irrational”—when it does not fit their predictions. And, with such mixed-up priorities, it is no wonder that they are typically most ineffective. “Pfuhl was one of those theoreticians who are so fond of their theory that they lose sight of the object of that theory—its application in practice. His passion for theory made him hate all practical considerations, and he would not hear of them. He even rejoiced in failure, for failures resulting from departures in practice from abstract theory only proved to him the accuracy of his theory” (p. 758). “Had the event not occurred these intimations would have been neglected, as hundreds of thousands of contrary intimations and surmises are forgotten which were current at the period but are now consigned to oblivion because the event falsi-fied them. There are always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that, however the matter may end, there will invariably be people to declare: ‘I said so at the time,’ entirely forgetting that among their numerous hypotheses were some in favour of quite the opposite” (p. 811). “[Barclay de Tolly] thought everything out beforehand; and that is why he is no good. He is no good at the present juncture just because he plans it all out in advance, very judiciously and accurately, as every German has to” (p. 918).

The attributing of a single cause to any event is but the result of a backward-looking rationalization, which makes it appear as if the event were an inevitable consequence of that cause—where the sense of inevita-bility is reconstructed after the fact, in the light of how things turned out and especially of how successful or disastrous this outcome was. “Here, besides the law of ‘retrospectiveness,’ which makes all the past appear a preparation for events that occur subsequently, reciprocity comes in, confusing the whole matter. A good chess player who has lost a game is genuinely convinced that his failure resulted from a false move on his part, and tries to see the mistake he made at the beginning of the game, forgetting that at each stage of play there were similar blunders, so that no single move was perfect. The mistake on which he concen-trates attention attracts his notice simply because his opponent took advantage of it” (p. 843). “In giving and accepting battle at Borodino, Kutuzov and Napoleon acted contrary to their intentions and their good sense. But later on, to fit the accomplished facts, the historians provided cunningly devised proofs of the foresight and genius of the generals, who of all the blind instruments of history were the most enslaved and


involuntary” (p. 896). “The profoundest and most splendid dispositions and orders look wretched, and every military expert can criticize them with a consequential air, when they have not resulted in victory, and the feeblest dispositions and orders seem excellent, and learned people devote entire volumes to demonstrating their merits, when they relate to a battle that has been won” (p. 933).

To use a slogan, Tolstoy rejects the practical syllogism as an explana-tion of individual or collective action. That I will X and that I know Y may well be undeniable features of my situation; but they have in general little relevance to my (or anyone else’s) doing Z ; indeed, it is most likely that if I spend my time articulating X and Y I will make no significant contribution to Z . Talkers and theorizers are precisely the people who do the least—if by “doing” we understand anything other than talking and theorizing. “Men are hauling a log. Each of them may be expressing opinion as to how and where it should be hauled. They haul the log to its destination, and it turns out that it has been done in accordance with what one of them said. He gave the command. This is commanding and power in their primary form. The man who laboured hardest with his arms was the least able to think what he was doing, or reflect on what would be the result of the common activity, or give a command; while the man who was doing the most commanding was obviously the least able of the party, by reason of his greater verbal activity, to perform direct manual labour. In a larger aggregate of men directing their efforts to a common end the category of those who, because their activity is devoted to giving commands, take less part in the joint enterprise stands out still more prominently. When a man is acting alone he always keeps before him a certain set of considerations which, so he believes, have regulated his action in the past, justify his action in the present and guide him in planning future activity. In exactly the same way amalgamations of people leave those who do not take a direct part in the activity to devise considerations, justifications and projects concerning their collective activity” (p. 1423).

So much for debunking conventional views of (historical) action. What about positive suggestions now? Well, to use current jargon, the structure of human action, individual or collective, is for Tolstoy a deterministic chaos. First, it is deterministic: it is regulated by inflexible laws. “In historical events (where the actions of men form the subject of observation) the primeval conception of a cause was the will of the gods, succeeded later on by the will of those who stand in the histori-cal foreground—the heroes of history. But we have only to look below


the surface of any historical event, to inquire, that is, into the activity of the whole mass of people who took part in the event, to become convinced that the will of our historical hero, so far from ruling the actions of the multitude, is itself continuously controlled. It might be thought that it is a matter of indifference whether historical events are interpreted this way or that. But between the man who says that the nations of the West marched into the East because Napoleon wished it and the man who believes that it happened because it had to happen, the difference is as wide as between those who maintained that the earth is stationary and the planets revolve round it, and those who admitted that they did not know what holds the earth in place but knew there were laws directing its movement and that of the other planets. There is, and can be, no cause of an historical event save the one cause of all causes. But there are laws governing events: some we are ignorant of, others we are groping our way to. The discovery of these laws becomes possible only when we finally give up looking for such causes in the will of any one man, just as the discovery of the laws of the motion of the planets was possible only when men renounced the conception of the earth as stationary” (p. 1168). Free will is only how each of us feels from the inside: when we are subjected to dispassionate observation (possi-bly by ourselves), we are found to be as necessitated as the tides. “The problem [of freewill] lies in the fact that if we regard man as a subject for observation from whatever point of view—theological, historical, ethical or philosophic—we find the universal law of necessity to which he (like everything else that exists) is subject. But looking upon man from within ourselves—man as the object of our own inner conscious-ness of self—we feel ourselves to be free” (p. 1427). “If the will of every man were free, that is, if every man could act as he pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected accidents. If one man only out of millions once in a thousand years had the power of acting freely, i.e. as he chose, it is obvious that one single free act of that man in violation of the laws would be enough to prove that laws governing all human actions cannot possibly exist” (p. 1426).

But determinism does not imply predictability. Despite Tolstoy’s approving mentions of the calculus (“Only by assuming an infinitesimally small unit for observation—a differential of history (that is, the common tendencies of men)—and arriving at the art of integration (finding the sum of the infinitesimals) can we hope to discover the laws of history,” p. 975), the laws in question here are highly non-linear, constant prey to the butterfly effect: “To us the willingness or unwillingness of this


or that French corporal to serve a second term has as much weight as Napoleon’s refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the duchy of Oldenburg; for had the corporal refused to serve, and a second and a third and a thousand corporals and soldiers with him, Napoleon’s army would have been so greatly reduced that the war could not have occurred” (p. 716). “The success of a military action depends not on . . . [generals] but on the man in the ranks who first shouts ‘We are lost!’ or ‘Hurrah!’ And only in the ranks can one serve with the assurance of being useful” (p. 763). “A hundred million incalculable contingencies, which will be determined on the instant by whether they run or we do, whether this man or that man is killed . . .” (p. 919). At one point, we even have a vivid image of a chaotic dance in Pierre’s dream, which can thus be seen as the metaphorical center of gravity for the whole book: “‘Wait,’ said the little old man [in the dream], and he showed Pierre a globe. This globe was a living thing—a quivering ball of no fixed dimensions. Its whole surface consisted of drops closely squeezed together. And all these drops were shifting about, changing places, sometimes several coalescing into one, or one dividing into many. Each drop tried to expand and occupy as much space as possible, but others, striving to do the same, crushed it, sometimes absorbed it, at others melted into it” (p. 1261). And, in conclusion, though inflexible, the laws of history and of human action in general are not for that reason to be regarded as at all transparent. On the contrary, “the mysterious forces that move humanity . . . [are] mysterious because the laws that govern their action are unknown to us” (p. 1339).

It looks desperate. There is just too much going on in any situation, there are too many competing factors and conflicting points of view, and they are impossible to rank by importance because any one of them, at any time, could explode; there is no way we can bring this mess under any kind of conscious, rational control—whether that be in terms of efficient or even of final causes. “Just as the sun and every particle of the ether is a sphere complete in itself and at the same time only a part of a whole too immense for the comprehension of man, so every individual bears within himself his own aims and yet bears them so as to serve a general purpose unfathomable by man. A bee poised on a flower has stung a child. And so the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees are there to sting people. A poet delights in the bee sipping honey from the calyx of a flower and says the bee exists to suck the nectar of flowers. A bee-keeper, seeing the bee collect pollen and carry it to the hive, says that the object of bees is to gather honey. . . .


But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first or the second or the third of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect soars in the discovery of possible purposes, the more obvious it becomes that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension. Man cannot achieve more than a certain insight into the correlation between the life of the bee and other manifestations of life. And the same is true with regard to the final purpose of historical characters and nations” (pp. 1349–50). At times, Tolstoy seems ready to give up: “We are forced to fall back on fatalism to explain the irratio-nal events of history (that is to say, events the intelligence of which we do not see). The more we strive to account for such events in history rationally, the more irrational and incomprehensible do they become to us” (p. 717). And, when not directly resigning to fatalism, or making empty references such as the one quoted above from p. 1168 to “the one cause of all causes” which would provide the only adequate (but, alas!, ineffable) explanation, he often brings in equally unhelpful causal agents like “the spirit of the troops”—essentially a code name for the very butterfly effect that creates the incomprehensibility problem in the first place. “How such a feeling [of confusion and mismanagement] communicates itself [to a marching army] is very difficult to explain; but there is no doubt that it is transmitted with extraordinary accuracy and rapidity and spreads, imperceptible and irresistible, like water along a mountain valley” (p. 314). “Through the mysterious indefinable bond which maintains throughout an army one and the same temper, known as the ‘spirit of the troops,’ and which constitutes the chief sinew of war, Kutuzov’s words, his order for renewing the battle on the follow-ing day, immediately became known from one end of the army to the other. The words—the exact form of the order–were by no means the same when they reached the farthest links in the chain. In fact there was not a syllable in the accounts passing from mouth to mouth at dif-ferent ends of the lines that resembled what Kutuzov had actually said; but the drift of his words spread everywhere because what he had said was not the result of shrewd calculations but the outflow of a feeling that lay deep in the heart of the commander-in-chief and deep in the heart of every Russian” (p. 960).

The spirit of the troops or of the people might indeed be thought to simplify matters somewhat, because whatever looks random and cha-otic in the atoms’ behavior, one might say, becomes orderly and orga-nized when we move to larger (composite) bodies. There are passages where Tolstoy seems to go this route: “this affair of the war continued


independently of . . . [the generals’ plotting], following the course it had to—that is, a course that never corresponded to the schemes of these men but was the outcome of the intrinsic reaction of the masses. Only in the higher spheres did all these schemes, thwarting and conflicting with one another, appear as a true index of what must inevitably come to pass” (pp. 1173–74). But, ultimately, the greater reassurance derived in this way is delusive: we are being told, once again, that history is regu-lated by inflexible laws, and it is made clearer that these laws act at a collective rather than at an individual level. It continues to be the case, however, that any concrete application of the laws (even assuming that we know them, which of course Tolstoy has denied) will be extremely context-sensitive: that we will never be able to tell which particular cry of which particular soldier initiated the “inevitable” defeat of the army he belonged to. If we get far enough from the battlefield of everyday life, we might be able to issue such vacuous generalities as theorizers have always been fond of; if we try to be more detailed (and helpful) than that, we are back in the old chaotic soup.

And yet. The embarrassment we have thus fallen into may be less an expression of our incapacity to deal effectively with human action and history than with our insistence in dealing with them in a specific man-ner. There is something intrinsically right about moving to large bodies of people and events of overwhelming proportions; not because with those wider-scale phenomena we have a better chance of finally “get-ting” the relevant causal factors, but because in their presence, struck by sublime awe, we might finally give up trying to “get” anything of the sort. What we should learn from our being unable to exercise rational control on human events is not that there is something wrong with us, but that there is something wrong with the notion of rational control we have been trying to apply here. That is, in the end, why history, and especially the history of an event as enormous as Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, is such a helpful way of studying the logic of action: faced by something that enormous, we are more likely to let go of our “rational” pretences and to bring out the attitude that really works, in this case as in every other one—large or small—where we are trying to understand, and possibly influence, what people do.

Kutuzov is a master of this art. He knows that the forces in play are too strong for any individual to oppose; but that very awareness, paradoxically, makes him able to guide them better—indeed, to guide them at all. “Long experience in war had taught . . . [Kutuzov], and the wisdom of age had made him realize, that it was impossible for


one man to direct hundreds of thousands of others waging a struggle with death, and he knew that the outcome of a battle is determined not by the dispositions of the commander-in-chief, nor the place where the troops are stationed, nor the number of cannon or the multitude of the slain, but by that intangible force called the spirit of the army, and he kept an eye on that force and guided it as far as lay within his power” (pp. 956–57). How does he do it? The chief word, in answering this question, is “self-denial”: “Such is the lot, not of great men—grands hommes—whom the Russian mind does not acknowledge—but of those rare and always solitary individuals who, divining the will of Providence, subordinate their personal will to it. The hatred and contempt of the multitude is their punishment for discerning the higher laws. . . . Kutuzov . . . presents an example, exceptional in history, of self-denial and present insight into the future significance of what was happen-ing” (p. 1285). Kutuzov’s individual will is never in the way; he is not trying to impose a view, a theory, or a strategy of his own; he remains open and sensitive to everyone around him; by refusing to identify with himself—with a single, coherent “himself”—he lets the chaos outside be reflected as much as possible within his “privacy.” That very privacy, indeed, becomes an echo for the powerful forces outside, and gives him more power to meaningfully relate to them: “how came that old man, alone, in opposition to universal opinion, so accurately to appreciate the import of events for the nation that never once throughout his career was he untrue to it? This extraordinary power of insight into the signifi-cance of contemporary events sprang from the purity and fervour of his identification with the people” (p. 1287). By letting himself be caught in the stream of those forces, he can indeed “guide them as far as lay within his power”—which amounts, and can only amount, to making little adjustments here and there, always at surface level, never rising above the melee to contemplate it with a delusive eagle’s eye.

It will be useful to summarize our conclusions so far. Human actions, and human history, are ruled by inflexible laws (they are deterministic); but they are also extremely sensitive to context (they are chaotic). It is impossible to put an upper bound on the number of relevant causal factors, and reference to collective agencies like “the cause of all causes” or “the spirit of the people” is not going to provide any specific help; consequently, prediction and control are impossible. But prediction and control only express the laughably self-important attitude of those who think that a limited portion of (their) being (the will, words, theories) can determine everything else that is; if that attitude is abandoned,


one accepting his position in the midst of the world will be able to be with the world, and sense it, and occasionally even redirect it, if ever so slightly.

These conclusions, however, might all be very well for Kutuzov: for history as is lived. And they might allow for a natural generalization to cases in which the awe is less natural—though just as essential if anything is to be done: one will not deal successfully with the most innocent move of the weakest human if one is not prepared to regard it in awe. But suppose now you are not a general leading an army, or for that matter an ordinary person trying to understand his neighbor, or to cope with him. Suppose you are an intellectual who wants his trade to provide some tool that generals and ordinary people and their neighbors can use to better lead armies and cope with one another. What kind of tool would that be?

We know it could not be a theory: it could not single out a few specific parameters in a situation and attribute to them what causal efficacy is played out in that situation. Is there anything else you could do? If you want the tool to give your interlocutors practice with the bottomless complexities of human chaotic behavior, and you want them to try their hand at running with (not just running) this uncontrollable process, and to be properly overwhelmed by its scope and properly passive in taking it in and sensitive in resonating to its countless facets, then you are not going to have much luck if you limit yourself to telling official, capitalized History. Several generations of intellectuals acting as you recommend might provide you with some of the necessary detail, but at the moment (at Tolstoy’s moment) you are looking at a historical tradition built on the theorizing mode: on the selecting of a few privi-leged individuals—even worse, of their wills or of their speeches—as the true movers and shakers of their world. And, even after those several generations of enlightened intellectuals, you know that chaos is compat-ible with large niches of apparent order, and that nothing is learned by reposing in them: nothing other than self-complacency, that is. What you need instead is deep, troubling crises to reveal the fractal character of being; and the best way to satisfy your need, and to offer the only service someone like you can give to others in this respect, is to make them up—to whatever level of depth and trouble you find appropriate. Even the Historical characters you will fictionalize, because you don’t really care about how Historical they are: you care about the subterranean sources of human (inter)action, care about making such (inter)action look more like itself, and less like a simpleminded joke.


So you will write a novel, and not a sketchy one: not one to be exhausted at a single sitting, one that leaves us with a clear sense of how it goes from beginning to end, and encourages the hybris that is most damaging—the idea that we understand how it works, that we have penetrated its secret. No: it will have to be an ocean of a novel, a laby-rinth of one; your readers will have to lose themselves in it, experience the thrill of being immensely far from either shore of a cover, going one knows not where. It will have to be a gigantic whale of a book that overwhelms them with awe, so that they stop even trying to exercise their pathetic will and get in touch with the sinews of war: not with its causes, mind you, insofar as those are hierarchically positioned above their effects. Rather, with the ligaments of war, with the tendons of war, with the myriad little capillaries that have each, democratically, a chance of becoming the next major artery of war. Or, maybe, of peace.

University of California, Irvine

1. All quotes in this article are from Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London: Penguin Books, 1982).

Symposium: Shakespeare

Mary Moore

WONDER, IMAGINATION, AND THE MATTER OF THEATRE IN THE TEMPEST

Ariel occurs. Recounting his performance of “the tempest” in Act I, scene 1 of The Tempest, he presents himself as being and

action, fracturing grammar, spatial and temporal logic in ways that amaze and confound:

I boarded the King’s ship; now on the beak,Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,I flamed amazement. Sometime I’d divide,And burn in many places; on the topmast,The yards, and bowsprit would I flame distinctly,Then meet and join . . .

(1.2.195–201)1

“I flamed” means that Ariel emits or is flames, which in the normal order of things would consume him. His very narration, however, proves his survival, evoking wonder through the utterance itself. Forceful and compacted syntax, a recognized source of wonder in Classical and Renais-sance accounts of style (Biester, pp. 14; 35–40), magnifies this effect.2 Shakespeare’s transitive use of the usually intransitive verb flame reflects a not uncommon practice, as E. A. Abbott shows;3 but this syntactic device also reflects The Tempest’s own logic. Ariel crosses boundaries between


497Mary Moore

deed and being, verb and noun, subject and object, matter and spirit: he both is and does flames. What could be more jarring to syntax and semantics than a singular subject whose utterance claims that he can flame, divide, meet and join? Just as “a” fire consists of many flames yet functions grammatically as a singular substance in English, just as the Christian Trinity is both singular and multiple, Ariel burns in many places at once. Meanwhile, this extraordinary language seems belied by the actor’s very embodiment. Ariel cannot have done what he claims; yet the prior scene has represented the very storm in which Ariel flamed. In that sense, the actor’s embodiment represents what we imagine to be matter’s intractability, while Ariel’s claims, coupled with the storm we have just witnessed, reveal matter’s fluidity and permeability to imagina-tion. Fluidity and intractability co-exist, another source of wonder. Sound mimics these paradoxes: the assonance and consonance in flame and amazement create a near rhyme that echoes the near identity of fire and human amazement. If, as Gurr and Ichikawa observe, a Renaissance audience expected to hear more than see a play, this echo calls atten-tion to Ariel’s marvelous powers.4 Lest the noises and pleasures of the Renaissance theatre, which recent scholarship deems to be considerable, distract audience members from this bit of language, similar moments reinforce Ariel’s play in and with language and matter throughout the play. Marvelous poetic language is of a piece with a “fever” that is of “the mind,” with music that “creeps,” actors who vanish, new found goddesses who speak the discoverers’ own language.

Amazement provides our cue: it and its cognates name the appropri-ate response to Ariel, his language, and to The Tempest itself. Attention to Ariel’s poetic language reveals that it, like the plot, conforms to the marvels of the play and to the period’s well documented love for mar-vels in several ways. Wonder, an aesthetic “‘object of desire’” in itself, and a response to the inexplicable in classical and early modern views, may be evoked by the unexpected in style (and through other strategies that the era’s handbooks taught).5 The clause “I flamed amazement” epitomizes the unexpected in syntax as well as differing from one of the few sources found for The Tempest, William Strachey’s 1610 letter, which describes just such a storm.6 While St. Elmo’s fire itself may elicit wonder, Shakespeare’s syntax and diction reinforce that marvel. And no wonder: rhetoric and theatre alike depend upon audience attention, and wonders naturally evoke it. Jarring language also harmonizes with The Tempest’s structural marvels—loose ends, disrupted actions, unforeseen futures—issues several critics explore.7


The wonders of The Tempest, however, also involve imagination—in early modern psychology, the human faculty that permits perception of the world and invention of images.8 Wonder responds to how the perceived differs from the expected, how the imagined supplants the usual, how an event makes us wonder. Imagination, however, is tricky. The play’s characters insistently wonder: they question whether they have imagined or seen what appears before them, while off-stage, “the” audience imagines the marvels that the embodied actors and the stage’s material resources hint at but cannot represent entirely. Imagination itself, then, becomes a source of wonder.

The play’s frequent theatrical metaphors call attention to acts of imagination and the wonder they evoke by reminding the audience that embodied humans in a material theatre use written manuscript and visible props to enact the fiction. The Tempest presents poetic language in drama as creating a globe, as making the word matter, and flesh. Theatre becomes the ground where language provokes imagination to make, evoke and penetrate materiality. While all theatre makes matter from words, few plays so insistently call attention to this phenomenon. Seen from this perspective, The Tempest’s multivocality may renounce theatre, as has often been argued,9 but it also represents the play as a site of what can only be imagined, what cannot otherwise be, let alone be known.10 Hence, the play takes playing as its topic, and the matter of playing as its material. It celebrates playing. It makes the play play, in much the way that Martin Heidegger will imagine the work of art makes its own materials more material: “. . . the temple-work does not cause the material to disappear. . . . The rock comes to bear and rest and so first becomes rock; metals come to glitter and shimmer, colors to glow, tones to sing, the word to speak.”11 Both asserting and testifying to its creation of matter, the epilogue is the play’s ultimate play: so powerfully have language and its enactment created place, person, and event, made words and images into matter, that the play’s protagonist finds himself trapped on “this island,” the material stage, from which he cannot depart without the audience’s “prayers,” its applause. Imprisoned in the matter that theatre has made, Prospero in his epilogue both affirms theatre’s power to invent and seeks release from it.

The motifs of wonder and imagination, and the havoc they play with categories of language, perception, and matter thus demand, I think, an approach that attends to The Tempest both as poetry and drama, espe-cially in light of recent studies (some already cited), which demonstrate the importance of language, style and aurality in creating wonder.12

499Mary Moore

Furthermore, at least one Renaissance stylist of some note who certainly was known to Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, explicitly associates a kind of “moralized wonder” with poetic language as opposed to spectacle (Platt, pp. 105–8). My consequent focus on poetic language (especially syntax) as well as theatrical materiality distinguishes this article among recent studies of wonder in The Tempest of which I am aware.

The very first lines of Act I, scene 2, even before Ariel’s entry, evoke wonder by alluding to the “art” of the storm represented during Act I scene 1, calling attention to materiality and the role of imagination. This self-pointing is especially relevant to Renaissance theatre: the era’s relative paucity of props and special effects means that audience must flesh out matters always already present for modern audiences. Audience imagination creates detail, images, places, objects, weather, times. The storm of Act I scene 1 would have required considerable suspension of disbelief; although public theatres like the Blackfriars, where the play may have been staged first, owned “machinery” (Orgel, p. 2), such tech-nology would have left much to the imagination. “Enter mariners wet,” for example, a stage direction during the tempest, implies that the storm involves real water. Anne Barton reads this direction as quite “naturalistic” (p. 8), a point that implies that the actors be doused—whether on- or off-stage is irrelevant. This indication, slight though it is and in need of qualification from a textual perspective,13 implies an expectation that the audience “believe in” the storm: the storm should strike the audience at first as a believable fictional event, not as an illusion.

Against this belief, Prospero’s first utterance on stage14 undermines the audience’s belief in the storm’s materiality even as it reassures Miranda that the “spectacle” she has just witnessed was the result of his “art.” It also establishes a model or process of wonder. That paradigm begins with his first words: “Be collected. / No more amazement” (1.2.13–14), and further:

The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touchedThe very virtue of compassion in thee, I have with such provision in mine artSo safely ordered that there is no soul,No, not so much perdition as an hairBetid to any creature in the vesselWhich thou heard’st cry, which thou saw’st sink.

(1.2.26–32)


Short-circuiting a naïve involvement in the fiction, Prospero’s words distance Miranda emotionally from the “spectacle” of the wreck and deflect attention from pity to the wonder of the storm’s creation and the narrative being unfolded.15 Words as narrative become one object of wonder immediately, and considering Ariel’s subsequent feats of exposition, become a central locus of wonder in the play.

Not surprisingly, Prospero’s words identify “amazement” as a key part of Miranda’s experience, and metaphorically, of our own. No wonder, since her name itself suggests admiration, a Renaissance synonym for wonder, and as a pun in the Italian is a feminine gerund, watching: she is a wonder, even a spectacle, and also an ideal audience, visual by nature and prone to wonder. Her very susceptibility to wonder may explain Prospero’s command, “be collected.” The implied metaphor of dispersal suggests one of wonder’s dangers; it opens, scatters or frag-ments self, echoing an implied metaphor in Miranda’s initial speech, “O, the cry did knock /Against my very heart. . . .” As “knock” implies, the sound of the wreck metaphorically seeks admittance to Miranda’s heart, even as it “knocks into” her with a kind of violence. Both frag-mentation and opening, then, are part of wonder, as is violence. The omitted verb in Prospero’s sentence (“lost”), a structure identified by the Oxford editors as the figure of speech anacoluthon, also represents fragmentation: Prospero’s art causes no soul to be lost, only the verb “lost.” The absent verb delays understanding and fragments meaning, making the assurance of safety momentarily unclear. The syntax’s brev-ity and force wonderfully reinforce the expected response. At the same time, Prospero emphasizes that the storm was sensory: “a spectacle” and something Miranda “heard’st” and “saw’st.” The latter phrases, seemingly redundant, serve to point the source of the error; Miranda has believed her mere sensory perceptions of materiality.

Wonder, in fact, seems the immediate object of the sequence of action here: the Mariners who “enter wet” during the storm in scene 1, we now learn, cannot have been wet since we assume that the storm as an effect of art would not evoke actual water, but they were. The storm, then, both is and is not material in that it causes physical and sensible “facts,” yet it may derive from art. Is water wet? Or do words merely “whet” the mariners’ fearful brains and moisten the audience’s corporate imagination? Are theatrical costumes, though made of “real” fabric, wetted by imaginary storms?

This issue foregrounds the way that a staged fiction embodies and founds itself on and in matter—fabric, bodies, wood, paint—enabling

501Mary Moore

theatre to interrogate matter in ways that Renaissance paradigms of wonder illuminate. Opening and disrupting categories and assumptions, dynamic and dialectical, pleasurable and painful, violently moving toward recognition of ignorance and namelessness, wonder strikes, fragments, moves, and penetrates, as etymologies and metaphors associated with wonder in classical and European languages demonstrate (Biester, p. 6): hence its association during the Renaissance with travel narrative and its cultivation as an aesthetic end, even its reification in collectors’ wonder cabinets.16 The emotion of wonder easily gives way to fear since it emerges in response to the unknowable, the unexpected, new and numinous; inspires scientific thought (Platt, pp. 36–55); and marks in Aristotle’s and Plato’s views the opening to philosophy:17 “Wonder is like the sting of the gadfly, driving men out of their pretense to know, setting them adrift in their ignorance, as if paralyzed by a stingray. It is in order to escape the ignorance made manifest through wonder that men pursue philosophy” (Sallis, p. 194).

Wonder’s telos, its end and purpose, differ in what Platt and Bishop describe as two Renaissance traditions of wonder derived from classical sources on metaphysics and rhetoric and reinforced by Renaissance rhetorical and stylistic texts. Plato’s Theatetus, and Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Poetics, and Metaphysics as filtered through Medieval and Renaissance writers promulgate what Platt calls “the dominant tradition” of wonder in Renaissance scholarship (Platt, p. 2). In this first tradition wonder should ultimately resolve or dissipate through reason, explanation, dis-course; reason is the “end” of wonder in two senses. Just as John Sallis suggests that linking Aristotle only with a closed, rationalistic view of wonder misrepresents his perspective, Platt’s study explores an alterna-tive Renaissance tradition, which understands wonder as an end itself, an emotion that can enrapture, leading to recognition of the a-logical, irrational and yet true. Wonder’s second tradition, based on Longinus and developed in The Poetics of the Italian Renaissance philosopher Francesco Patrizi (Platt, pp. 2, 12, 66–98), points beyond the truths of material cause and effect to the numinous. Bishop’s Chapter 1 and 2, furthermore, reread classical sources to also reveal a numinous and open sense of wonder. The gestural human reaction to wonder—mouth open, eyes wide—actually connotes opening. In that sense, wonder both allures and threatens: while it suspends us for a moment in openness, it also signals vulnerability to something unintelligible. Platt argues that wonder in Shakespeare’s late plays may point, in fact, to “a differ-ent way of knowing,” as in Cymbeline, and that The Tempest epitomizes


Shakespeare’s own interest in and questioning of wonder, exploring “at some level nearly every aspect of the marvelous” (p. 169).

Shakespeare conveys wonder in poetic language that can flame and enflame amazement, enact amazement, making flame of an emotion. Ariel’s first words in the play prepare for his feats of expository storm-making, and in doing so, blur the categories through which it seems we know and can speak the world:

All hail, great master, grave sir, hail! I comeTo answer thy best pleasure, be’t to fly,To swim, to dive into the fire, to rideOn the curled clouds; to thy strong bidding taskAriel and all his quality.

(1.2.189–193)

Ariel immediately distinguishes himself from human beings: “to fly” implies the mythic powers of gods or at least the powers of birds, as Garber notes (pp. 56–87), while “riding on” the clouds reveals a kind of pleasurable passivity and ease in air, a virtual sprezzatura (Biester, pp. 73–76). Ariel’s language constructs him as lyric, poetic, musical: it is rich in alliteration and assonance—the liquid l’s of his name echoing in lines 1–2 like the long i in lines 2 and 3—and sensuous in its descrip-tion—“curled clouds” evoking the look of clouds as well as their beauty. Meanwhile, the claims he makes imply omnipresence and immortality: he not only “swims” but “dives” in fire. This metaphor assumes the like-ness of fire and water, both appearing liquid—fluid and fluent—blurring distinctions between mutually consuming material elements. Ariel’s ability to live in and travel through the elements suggests his likeness to all things, which are composed of the elements, even to all “types” of humans, whose natures, in commonplaces of the time, elemental mixtures defined. Meanwhile, Ariel’s third-person self-presentation suggests a divided, self-conscious self, one aware of his being even as he is being, aware too of his self-display and worthy of being heralded for his “quality.” Ariel presents himself as, and based on the “evidence” of the storm, we accept that he is superhuman, even inhuman, potent, lively, and powerful.

Prospero’s own greeting to Ariel further reinforces Ariel’s wondrous material and immaterial qualities through its syntax: Prospero’s question, “Hast thou, spirit, / Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee?” blurs categories of language and things, reinforcing the implication of Prospero’s statement to Miranda that the storm was the result of his

503Mary Moore

“art.” The word “spirit” explains, in one sense, how Ariel transcends human, material limits, but this follows Ariel’s boastful self-heralding. The sequence of event and appellation defers this subtle revelation of Ariel’s nature and thus enables the audience to wonder at his feats. The word spirit itself plays with imagination, wonder, and materiality. In the usual dualisms of the time, a spirit can play “in” matter, but not be “of” it. Likewise, “spirit” can denote the material that conveys images through the human body to the brain or heart, thus representing a key component of imagination and perception in Renaissance faculty psychology. It also may mean alcohol, such as the spirits consumed by Trinculo, Stephano and Caliban, whom the almost immaterial spirits of alcohol intoxicate. Finally, as “soul,” spirit connotes something higher than the body, a moral entity that receives sensuous “facts.”

Prospero’s question also furthers the deconstruction of material real-ity through grammar. “Performing to point the tempest” makes “the tempest” the direct object of the transitive verb “perform,” thus creating a disjunction between syntax and logic: while nouns can, in general, act as direct objects for transitive verbs, usage then and now makes the usual object of the verb “perform” a human act, not a thing, except on stage. What Ariel does then, like theatre itself, fractures grammar and logic, blurring boundaries between things and acts. The nature of a tempest lends itself to this liminality: an event-thing made of fluid elements—water, air, and fire—it does what it is, just as “the tempest” enacts the play’s title, The Tempest. Suggesting that being is performed rather than substantial, such syntactical strategies foreshadow modern philosophy’s uses of syntax, especially verbals, which enable it to query and/or avoid to some extent the metaphysical and logical assump-tions embedded in language.18 Language’s structures, where utterance creates or performs being, must change. This performance of things, however, parallels divine creation in Genesis, suggesting one profound reason for religious tracts against theatre: performance, enacting words transgresses on the deity’s own creative methods. No wonder theatre scared the Puritans.

Drawing matter itself into the The Tempest’s storm, the contradictions between Ariel’s activities and the storm’s material staging involve the double nature of the imagination as well as wonder’s duplicity. Acting within the very difference wonder reveals, imagination presents the perceptual problem, the unintelligible thing that evokes wonder. Cen-tral to spectatorship as well as to the matter of theatre in The Tempest, imagination’s powers are transgressive and irrational, traits understood


in Renaissance treatises and explored in John Sallis’s recent study Force of Imagination.19 Pico della Mirandola’s influential Renaissance work On the Imagination, for example, shows that Pico (like the Stoics, and Pico’s other classical and Medieval precursors), accepted Aristotelian views of the imagination as replicating the external world in the subject’s soul, permitting knowledge (Sallis p. 63). It also, however, can “distort and conceal all things” (p. 64) and hence (ultimately) undermine the soul’s ability to distinguish truth, and thus know moral acts. Perceptual error could lead to moral error.20 But imagination can accommodate both the comforts of familiarity and the wonders of the strange and new. It actually can and often does transgress a central and ancient assump-tion about truth, “the law of non-contradiction” (p. 128): “. . . When, by force of imagination, the horizons both are and are not there with the upsurge of a presence, there is infraction of the very law of law and of discourse itself” (Sallis, p. 128). Imagination itself, then, shares an affinity with wonder for the logic of both-and, not either-or.

Although we cannot argue that Shakespeare knew Pico’s work on the imagination, we do know that he probably had read much of Michel Montaigne, including his essay “The Force of Imagination,” which recounts imagination’s powers to change and “incorporate” desire in material bodies. Its transgressive linking of mind and body, its break-ing down of categories, its doubleness, also make imagination a source of wonder in the essay. Montaigne opens the essay with consideration of how those susceptible to imagination such as himself may become ill through exposure to sick people: “Je saisis le mal que j’étudie, et le coucher en moi”; “I catch the disease I study and lodge it in me.” That force, which he likens to “secousses,” or “blows” in this passage might have killed Montaigne or his fictive speaker (Montaigne, p. 149; Frame, p. 68). The imagination, he implies, affects the body, even dominates it against our will and has the power to transmit knowledge of other bodies to us, quite literally, and thus, to heal or kill. As in Ariel’s phrase, “a fever of the mad,” Montaigne’s imagination may sicken, its powers engendering illness, not health.

Not surprisingly, the knowledge of other bodies can change matters, even the matter of sex in Montaigne’s paradigm—though as often with Montaigne, irony complicates my claim. The famous incident of Marie Germaine, a young lady who discovers a new virile member as she leaps over a fence, explored for other purposes by Thomas Laquere in Mak-ing Sex, exemplifies imagination’s power. “Apreté de désir,” “pricked by desire,” imagination has lead some persons “incorporer, une fois pour

505Mary Moore

toutes, cette virile partie aux filles” that is, “once and for all . . . to incor-porate this masculine member in girls” (Montaigne, p. 151; Frame, p. 68). Clearly, Montaigne’s “Montaigne” claims ironically that the imagination has the capacity to literally create or embody its desire. Its creation is a kind of monster, and as such evokes wonder. Montaigne’s view would imply that desire may masculinize a heterosexual female, a subordinate political, legal and economic subject, and thus empower her. That would indeed be threatening. The essay’s emphasis on will underscores this point: the imagination repeatedly counters human will, conveying its independence. Of course, even in the narrative he tells, Montaigne rep-resents an ironic aporia: his speaker apparently notices that her beard predated the leap but not that her member must likewise have existed before desire “incorporated” it. Furthermore, a homoerotic subtext plays against other routine assumptions: Marie’s embedded, latent physical sex should have led her to desire women, not men; perhaps it did, but this part of the story has not been told. Like the virile member it to some extent controls, imagination produces bodies, events and things, including social and political chaos, and comedy. These effects surely justify its bridling.

Considering the very material effects Montaigne attributes, parodi-cally or seriously or both, to imagination, it should come as no surprise that Shakespeare’s play literally performs imagination’s effects on mat-ter. Imagination penetrates materiality, evoking wonder in The Tempest through acts of creation and the decreation. By showing this process transparently in action, Shakespeare calls attention to the materiality of the play, in much the same way that Heidegger suggests works of art do as opposed to other fabrications. Two famous speeches exemplify the way that Shakespeare makes the play play, that is, makes the play demonstrate its theatricality: Prospero’s explanation of the masque to Fernando and Miranda, and the epilogue.

Read through the lens of wonder and imagination, Prospero’s lan-guage as he explains the art of his masque implies material dissolution but also suggests that the stage’s fictive material is more “real” than the substance of what we call reality:

You do look, my son, in a moved sort,As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir;Our revels now are ended. These our actors,As I foretold you, were all spirits, andAre melted into air, into thin air,


And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,The solemn temples, the great globe itself,Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuffas dream are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed.Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled. . . .

(4.1.146–169)

Fernando’s preceding speech of course justifies Prospero’s assumption that Fernando is “moved” or “dismayed”: “This is strange,” Fernando says, as if confused, responding to a spectacle of “wonder.” Miranda too evokes the unfamiliar: “Never till this day / Saw I him touched with anger, so distempered.” The stage direction “a strange, hollow, and confused noise” will evoke business that ensures that the audience shares Fernando and Miranda’s reaction. The shared reaction of internal and external audience here affirms an analogy between the theatre audience and the play’s internal audience that has been implicit from the opening storm: the commentary that follows applies both to the masque and to the play within which the masque occurred. It also extends, however, to the relationship of human life to the stage. This connection arises from the deictic language in the speech and its punning metaphors—“These our actors,” “this vision” and finally “the great globe itself”—make the actors, the vision they provide or enact, and the globe theatre, and its performances analogous to the world. This Renaissance commonplace is dramatized and teased out quite literally in Prospero’s speech. For example, “the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples” which in the speech’s syntax append as noun phrases to “this vision,” handily evoke the places in which human power is enacted—churches, courts, towers. All these vanish, and thus appear as vanities. The speech’s occurrence, just after or perhaps during the scurrying and disappearance of actors, will indeed perform the very disappearance Prospero names. Ironically, disappearance will appear, will be enacted as the words of the speech evoke it.

Diction and imagery make this disappearance relevant to matter itself, however, just as earlier actions by Ariel have confounded material and immaterial, real and fictional things and deeds: patterns of dic-tion—“Melted into air,” “into thin air,” “baseless fabric,” the verb “dis-solve,” “insubstantial,” “faded,” “not a rack”—suggest that the matter just

507Mary Moore

seen by both internal and external audiences—the embodied persons, costumes, and props—is itself fictive, that like clouds and air, it lacked density, weight and substance. Yet we and Fernando and Miranda will have seen embodied actors pretending to be spirits pretending to be gods, in any case, inhabiting and being themselves matter. Sound and syntax complicate and suspend and defer meanings here. For example, the referent of “it” in the phrase “all which it inherit” evades quick iden-tification: is it globe, vision, baseless fabric, air? Containing an echo of “air,” the word “inherit” suggests tangible assets, ironically counterpois-ing sound with meaning: an inheritance of “air” is an inheritance of nothing, or is it? Perhaps air is everything—what is spoken, heard, seen, what inhabits and is transmitted through and in the air. In de Anima, air is the medium of vision, transmitting the transparent image to the transparent fluids of the eye. Thus vision and the vision, which is itself “baseless,” that is “matterless,” “groundless,” and “without grounds,” in air, is air in several senses. Indeed, the towers, palaces, and temples have been present to imagination only now, only through the words naming them as they disappear. Language thus both provokes the appearance of and recounts the vanishing of things.

Prospero’s shifting pronouns here also undermine certainties and expand the metaphor to a stunning end in the clause “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; And our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” Suddenly the spirits who have vanished, the actors who play Prospero, Miranda, and Fernando, and even the audience who sees and hears are encompassed through the plural personal pronoun in the dissolution and disappearance which Prospero has evoked. To be “stuff,” would be to be inchoate, chaotic matter, or to be fabric, but in either case to be unformed matter, not fashioned into a thing or being. For “dreams” to be “made on” such stuff is puzzling. Short of textual incongruities, the sense here is that “dreams,” meaning visions during sleep, as well as illusions, hopes, and fictions, are made on top of us or that we form the basis and/or “stuff” for their making. In the physical image evoked, our dreams ride on, are worn or borne by us. In light of the meta-theatrical puns, “our little life” refers to the relatively short “life” of a play’s or masque’s enactment, to “our” relatively brief stint on the stage of life, and to a character’s “little life,” on stage, to brief duration and small size. “Rounded with a sleep,” hence, does not evoke a Christian afterlife nor does the image’s circularity fit the usual linear progress of the Protestant soul in life towards heaven and God. Instead, the circle implies eternal return, and the sleep that “rounds” it is what


“surrounds it,” that is, all the rest of life. The stage and life on it, then, are more real, more conscious, more awake, than the sleeping life that surrounds it. The globe theatre full of consciousness floats on a sea of sleep. The globe theatre full of actors voicing words, of spectators hearing, seeing, and imagining deeds those words evoke, contains full consciousness. What it knows, though, its own frailty and brevity, involves matter’s own mysterious disposition towards vanishing.

Air, the inheritor, is critical to all of this. Like the imagination and space, it mediates between material things, bridges the gap between inner subject and outer world, actors on stage and audience, inner theatre and outer world. Indeed, it also touches all else. It both joins and separates persons and things, the material real and the immaterial imaginary. It permits vision and is breath, spirit. The air thus unifies fictional and other spaces. The air signals then both the disruption of and the maintenance of all categories because it surrounds, underlies, fills them all. Like the imagination, its logic is both/and.

I am tempted once again to rely on “no wonder” as the transition to Prospero’s epilogue where the matter of theatre is left open, left then, in my argument’s terms, subject to wonder. The epilogue, like Prospero’s speech to Fernando and Miranda, directly treats the matter of theatre, addresses matter, so to speak, in its theatrical manifestation. Even in its apparent adieu to the play and the stage, the epilogue, however, can both celebrate and continue the matter of theatre by representing Prospero as trapped on the material stage, by the material language of the play. Remembered, the play and characters still exist, despite their “little sleep.” Logically, then, the classical unities Shakespeare so uncharacteristically and carefully confines himself to in this play (Barton, Berger, Garber) lose definition here, become liminal:

Now my charms are all o’erthrown,And what strength I have’s mine own,Which is most faint. Now ‘tis trueI must be here confined by you,Or sent to Naples. Let me not,Since I have my dukedom got,And pardoned the deceiver, dwellIn this bare island by your spell,But release me from my bandsWith the help of your good hands.Gentle breath of yours my sails

509Mary Moore

Must fill, or else my project fails,Which was to please. Now I wantSpirits to enforce, art to enchant;And my ending is despairUnless I be relieved by prayer,Which pierces so that it assaultsMercy itself, and frees all faults.As you from crimes would pardoned be,Let your indulgence set me free.

(5.1.319–338)

The deictic “now” establishes the moment of speech as the present, during which the character addresses the theatre audience directly, breaking the fourth wall, although words have tapped and nibbled at it throughout the play—starting with Prospero’s question to Ariel, “Hast thou, spirit, performed the tempest that I bade thee?” Does “now” indi-cate a fictional present, still part of the play, or does it represent the actual present within the playhouse, now that the fiction has ended? Is the embodied person who speaks the Epilogue in or out of character? The play has not ended in several senses: the prior scene concluded with Prospero saying he will “deliver all,” including “the story of my life, / And the particular accidents gone by / Since I came to this isle.” But the play’s ending suspends this promise, presenting the narration as incomplete, superceded by the stage direction “Exeunt all.” In one sense, the speech makes the stage’s “here” analogous to “this bare island” (Bates, p. 175), signaling that the play has not ended entirely, or applause would already have occurred.22 In another sense, though, the speech situates itself outside the play by naming its purpose in the past tense, “. . . or else my project fails / Which was to please.”

These points suggest that the epilogue itself is liminal, straddling both globes, a segment of speech projected into the emptiness after the play like a poetic envoi, continuing the fictive utterance. The deictic “now” points to this continuity, naming as it does the moment of the character’s speak-ing. Much of the speech’s diction involves linguistic entities or objects: “charms,” “spell,” “art to enchant,” “prayer” and the way it “pierces,” a punning sense of “indulgences” all make the content of the speech reflect on Prospero’s magic and on religious practices, but also on the verbal power that the playwright and the play have practiced. If charms and spells are analogous to language in plays, and the island analogous to the stage, then the epilogue continues being that spell which it claims is “o’erthrown.” In that sense, Prospero’s plea for pardon to “release him”


directly represents the play’s power to create the matter of theatre; if the stage had not indeed become the island, Prospero would merely exit.

In the context of The Tempest’s crossing of boundaries and deconstruc-tion of categories, the epilogue performs the very paradoxes that, I hope, this article has exposed. It makes fictional matter “real,” and makes matter fictional. As a marker of The End, the epilogue instead marks endlessness. It reinforces not boundary but boundlessness, and finally enacts the theatre’s power to invent and reify the matter of imagination. Evoking wonder, the epilogue performs it. So materially has the play created its world that the character must beg release from the fiction. In this sense, the epilogue asserts and celebrates the powers of language to perform apparition—to conjure the matter of theatre.

Marshall University

1. Quotations come from William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

2. For an account of wonder in Renaissance poetics, see James Biester, Lyric Wonder, Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

3. E. A. Abbott, A Shakespearean Grammar (New York: Dover, 1969), pp. 135, 203.

4. Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 8.

5. See James Biester, Lyric Wonder, Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry. For his discussion of cognates, see p. 6, and on the desire for wonder, see p. 24.

6. Strachey’s letter is quoted in Peter Platt, Reason Diminished, Shakespeare and the Marvel-ous (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 171.

7. See Anne Barton and Anne Righter, eds., in “Introduction,” William Shakespeare, The Tempest (London: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 26, 30, 35, 49; Harry Berger, “Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest” in Modern Critical Interpretations, The Tempest (New Haven: Chelsea House, 1988), pp. 9–41; Stephen Orgel, “Introduction,” to The Tempest, pp. 1–87; and Marjorie Garber, “The Eye of the Storm: Structure and Myth in The Tempest,” Harold Bloom, pp. 43–63.

8. This view reflects the powerful influence of Aristotle’s de Anima on Renaissance faculty psychology: “whenever one were to contemplate it would be necessary at the same time to behold an image” (432a) in de Anima, Aristotle’s On the Soul, trans., intro., and comm. Joe Sachs (Santa Fe, N.M.: Green Lion Press, 2001). Also see 430a, 431a.

511Mary Moore

9. See Berger, “Miraculous Harp,” pp. 10–12, for how readings that rely on the suspi-ciously autobiographical tradition that Shakespeare’s main concern is renouncing theatre in The Tempest cannot account for the play’s contradictions and complexities.

10. For similar claims, see Kenneth Semon, “Fantasy and Wonder in Shakespeare’s Last Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 25 (1974): 89–102, particularly as he discusses The Tempest’s lack “of pretensions to reality” (p. 102). Also see Jurgen Pieters, “The Wonders of Imagination: The Tempest and its Spectators,” European Journal of English Studies 4 (2000): 141–54.

11. Martin Heidegger, Poetry Language and Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (New York: Harper and Row, 1971; rpt. Perennial Classics, 2001), pp. 44–45.

12. See Biester, pp. 103–7. Also see T. G. Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 34. On the “aural register” in theater, see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 79–80.

13. Orgel states that the printer Ralph Crane may have inserted stage directions, which, if proven, would mean that they must be used with caution and that claims based on them need other support as well (pp. 56–61).

14. Since one tradition places him aloft, observing the storm, I avoid defining his first appearance.

15. See Platt, Reason Diminished, p. 179. For Prospero’s need for control and on critical distances see p. 183.

16. For discussion of wonder cabinets displaying “marvelous” objects as typical of early modern attitudes to wonder, see Platt, pp. 44–46, and Biester, p. 9.

17. See John Sallis, Double Truth (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995) on wonder as integral to classical philosophy (pp. 193–209).

18. Heidegger makes nouns act as verbs, as in the phrase “world worlds” (p. 43), har-monizing with one sense of being as “being-at-work-being-itself.”

19. John Sallis, Force of Imagination, The Sense of the Elemental (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 63.

20. Sallis, p. 64.

21. French is quoted from Michel Montaigne, “De la force de l’imagination,” Essais, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie Generale Française [Le Livre de Poche], 1972), pp. 149–61; transla-tions are Donald Frame’s; see “Of the Power of the Imagination,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

22. Jonathan Bates remarks the analogy in “Caliban and Ariel Write Back,” in Shakespeare and Race (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 165–76.

Sandra Bonetto

COWARD CONSCIENCE AND BAD CONSCIENCE IN SHAKESPEARE AND NIETZSCHE

George Bernard Shaw once observed that the whole of Nietzsche was expressed in three lines that Shakespeare puts into the mouth

of one of his greatest villains, Richard III1: “Conscience is but a word that cowards use / Devised at first to keep the strong in awe / Our strong arms be our conscience; swords, our law” (5.6). More specifically, per-haps, these lines invite a comparison between Shakespeare’s repeated association of conscience with cowardice in Richard III,2 and Nietzsche’s negative evaluation of bad conscience, notably in On the Genealogy of Morals.3 The aim of this article is to offer such a comparative analysis in order to demonstrate that Shakespeare’s coward conscience anticipates Nietzsche’s understanding of the bad conscience (das schlechte Gewissen) as “the consciousness of guilt” (GM, II, p. 67), including its involvement with the notions of debt, sin, punishment, and God.

I

Nietzsche devoted the Second Essay of his Genealogy to the discussion of bad conscience, its origins, and related matters, notably guilt (Schuld) and its relation to duty (Pflicht) and debt (Schuld). The German term Schuld denotes both guilt and debt, and both senses are inextricably linked in Nietzsche’s analysis. The bad conscience as consciousness of guilt is also


513Sandra Bonetto

the consciousness of a debt owed—to another individual, society, and above all to the Christian God. The debt owed to God is one that can never be repaid, so that Christian morality necessitates guilt as “eternal punishment” for man’s original transgression (see GM, II, pp. 91–92). Thus, Nietzsche argues, the descriptive equivalent of bad conscience, in the language of Christianity, is sin—“this is the priestly name for the . . . bad conscience” (GM, III, p. 140). In other words, sin is essentially a debt contracted with God. This is evident, for instance, in the substitu-tion of the word “sin” for “debt” (ophéilema) in the formula of the Our Father as found in St. Luke. Even in the more general description, e.g. in the passage of St. Matthew where Jesus is explaining the implications of the petition “Forgive us or debts as we forgive our debtors,” where the expressions paràptoma (fault, error) and armatia (aberration, failing, defect in relation to a norm or whole) are the more common terms used to denote sin, the sense of debt is implicit—we only accept our failure in relation to the Christian norm or whole if we accept that we “owe it to God” to live up to that norm in the first place. Moreover, the notion of debt brings with it the debtor’s fear of failing to repay the creditor, so that a fear of punishment results from the sense of not living up to the contractual relationship with God.

According to Nietzsche, the basis for the bad conscience and guilt, which he further defines as “anger directed against the self” (GM, I, p. 45), is cruelty, a natural human disposition that is displayed unabashedly in punishment. Bad conscience, he argues, is cruelty turned inward and essentially amounts to self-punishment or “psychical cruelty”—a form of subliminal suffering we impose on ourselves. Speaking of the “psychology of conscience,” Nietzsche emphasises therefore that conscience “is not ‘the voice of God in man’—it is rather the instinct of cruelty that turns back after it can no longer discharge itself externally” (GM, “A Polemic,” p. 312). Bad conscience, or sin, is cruelty directed backwards, at oneself. In short, Nietzsche holds that the bad conscience, experienced by us as the “bite” or “sting” of conscience (morsus conscientiae; Gewissensbiss), results from the internalisation of instincts, notably the instincts to cruelty. Rather than acting on natural impulses, man has come to stifle and repress them: “Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction—all this turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the “‘bad conscience’” (GM, II, p.85).

Anticipating Freud’s theory of repression and pre-empting his psy-chological interpretation of conscience as superego (Über-Ich), Nietzsche argues, “all instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn


inward —this is what I call the internalisation (Verinnerlichung) of man” (GM, II, p. 84). And he regards this internalisation as “the greatest event so far in the history of the sick soul—we possess in it the most dangerous and fateful artifice of religious interpretation,” an interpretation based on “the exploitation of the sense of guilt” (GM, III, p. 140). Indeed, “man has all too long had an ‘evil eye’ for his natural inclinations, so that they have finally become inseparable from his ‘bad conscience’” (GM, II, p. 95).

When the external discharge of natural instincts and inclinations is no longer morally, socially and legally acceptable, these instincts are suppressed, but they do not vanish. They require another outlet. So this is what Nietzsche means when he tells us that the bad conscience is “the serious illness that man was bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever experienced—that change which occurred when he found himself finally enclosed within the walls of society and of peace” (GM, II, p. 84). For, as he states elsewhere, “under conditions of peace, the warlike man attacks himself.”4

In this context, Nietzsche discerns a direct link between pleasure and the infliction of cruelty: “to see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more” (GM, II, p. 67). The instincts of hunting, cruelty, hostility and destruction that characterized man’s pre-historic lives had to be suppressed when he entered into society. As a result, he turned all this violence in toward himself, made himself a new wilderness to be struggled against and conquered. In so doing, man developed an inner life and bad conscience. Nietzsche characterizes the war man wage against his own instincts as “man’s suffering of man, of himself ” (GM, II, p. 85). Because ‘socialized man’ is denied the overt expression of his natural instincts, he begins to find enjoyment in suffering from himself (see GM, III, pp. 127–28).

For Nietzsche, this self-imposed suffering is nothing less than a “mad-ness of the will”:

the will of man to find himself guilty and reprehensible to a degree that can never be atoned for; his will to think himself punished without any possibility of the punishment becoming equal to the guilt; his will to infect and poison the fundamental ground of things with the problem of punishment and guilt as to cut off once and for all his own exit from this labyrinth of “fixed ideas”; his will to erect an ideal—that of the “holy God”—and in the face of it to feel the palpable certainty of his own absolute unworthiness. Oh this insane, pathetic beast—man! What ideas

515Sandra Bonetto

he has, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestiality of thought erupts as soon as he is prevented just a little from being a beast in deed! (GM, II, p. 93)

Nietzsche maintains that the bad conscience (or sin) is an “illness” and, consequently, that every guilty person is “sick.” The cure he pro-poses is the elimination of the concepts of sin and punishment from the world—“may these exiled monsters live somewhere else henceforth, and not among men. . . .”5 However, while the “bad conscience is an illness,” it is “an illness like pregnancy is an illness” (GM, II, p. 88). This implies that a little bad conscience can help us to overcome our-selves, or give birth to more life affirming values. But we should not settle down with a nagging bad conscience as a kind of Ersatz cruelty. For this will invariably lead to self-consummation by ressentiment and an addiction to the pleasure of suffering from and enjoyment of being at odds with oneself.

Nietzsche, in short, rejects the entire concept of punishment and hence reflects negatively on bad conscience, which metes out punish-ment in the form of guilt. Punishment, he observes, “does not cleanse the criminal, it is not atonement; on the contrary, it pollutes worse than the crime does.”6 Instead, Nietzsche speaks of justice as “love with seeing eyes.”7 Real justice involves a greatness of soul that considers all forms of punishment petty, and which does not feel lessened by show-ing mercy. The strong are merciful, but from a position of strength, not weakness. This echoes Shakespeare’s assertion in Measure for Measure : “O, ‘tis excellent to have a giant’s strength / But it is tyrannous to use it like a giant” (2.2).

Moreover, Nietzsche believes that “the sting of conscience teacheth one to sting” (Z, “The Pitiful,” Sec. 25, p. 86). In other words, the more repressed our instincts, and hence the more punitive our bad consciences are, the more pronounced is our desire to see others punished. Bad conscience nourishes feelings of resentment, envy and revenge. As Shake-speare put it in King Henry VIII : “Men, that make / Envy and crooked malice nourishment / Dare bite the best” (5.3). The man of ressentiment cannot stand to see others happy while he suffers from himself. As Iago, the man of resentment par excellence, who represents the levelling jealousy of all superior attainment, says of Cassio: “he hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly” (Othello, 5.2). And just as Iago is responsible for the downfall of the ‘noble Moor,’ Christianity, the slave morality based on resentment, is held responsible for perverting all ‘natural instincts’


and ‘noble values’ into their opposites. Indeed, “the Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.”8

II

In Richard III the association between conscience and cowardice is repeatedly emphasised and may even be said to constitute one of the main themes of the play, culminating in Richard’s (remarkably Nietz-schean) statement, “conscience is but a word that cowards use / Devised at first to keep the strong in awe / Our strong arms be our conscience; swords, our law” (5.6).

Richard regards conscience as a device by which the ‘cowards’ (the weak) defend, avenge, and assert themselves against the stronger. It is ‘but a word’ used for this very purpose. Richard, like Nietzsche, rejects the traditional Christian understanding of conscience as the “voice of God in man,” an interpretation that derives from Socrates’ daimonion (see Apology, 31d), and regards it instead as a human construct created for its usefulness as control-mechanism. And it is associated with cowardice because it is motivated by weakness, not strength, insofar as it fetters the strong from pursuing the kind of action the weak are incapable of.

Thus, pre-empting Nietzsche, Shakespeare posits that conscience may not be an innate moral sense but a human invention that functions as a form of psychological punishment (or psychical cruelty) engender-ing feelings of guilt, manifest in Richard III in the internalisation and repetition of various condemnatory voices (conscience is polysemous, not monosemous): “My conscience hath a thousand several tongues and each condemns me as a villain” (5.5).

I maintain that Shakespeare, like Nietzsche, was interested in uncover-ing the motive forces behind generally accepted moral ideas and values. In the case of ‘coward conscience,’ he addresses the ‘dark side’ of con-science insofar as he explores its negative effects on the individual.

This becomes particularly apparent not only in Richard’s comments on conscience, but also in the ‘discussion’ of conscience by the two murder-ers send to kill Clarence. It is worth quoting their exchange at length:

First Murderer : The urging of that word ‘judgement’ hath bred a kind of remorse in me.

Second Murderer : What, art thou afraid?F.M.: Not to kill him, having a warrant, but to be damned for killing

him, from the which no warrant can defend me . . .

517Sandra Bonetto

S.M.: How dost thou feel thyself now?F.M.: Some certain dregs of conscience are yet within me.S.M.: Remember our reward, when the deed’s done.F.M.: ’Swounds, he dies. I had forgot the reward.S.M.: Where is thy conscience now?F.M.: O, in the Duke of Gloucester’s purse.S.M.: When he opens his purse to give us our reward, thy conscience

flies out.F.M.: ’Tis no matter. Let it go. There’s few or none will entertain it.S.M.: What if it come to thee again?F.M.: I’ll not meddle with it: it is a dangerous thing: it makes a man a

coward: a man cannot steal but it accuseth him; he cannot swear, but it checks him; he cannot lie with his neighbours wife, but it detects him; it is a blushing shame-faced spirit that mutinies in a man’s bosom; it fills one full of obstacles; it made me once restore a purse of gold that I found; it beggars any man that keeps it; it is turned out of all towns and cities for a dangerous thing; and every man that means to live well endeavours to trust to himself and to live without it.

(1.4)

Conscience makes man a coward insofar as it forbids him to follow his natural inclinations, especially when they run counter to accepted social and moral norms, and thus stifles his “courage”; it is described as a “blushing shame-faced spirit” which fills one full of “obstacles.” In addressing two of the Ten Commandments (‘Thou shalt not steal’ and ‘Thou shalt not covet they neighbour’s wife/possessions’), Shakespeare explicitly refers to the Christian moral law and implies that it has, at best, a tenuous hold on individual agents because conscience—as the instrument whereby that law is said to manifest itself to the individual (“the voice of God in man”)—seems to prevent action only insofar as the prospect and fear of punishment prohibits it, not because the action itself is deemed wrong or immoral by the agent. He does so by address-ing how this fear is often overcome, if not actively sought out (notably in the case of criminals; see GM, II, p. 81), when it is outweighed by self-interest.

Shakespeare thus makes two important points in relation to our understanding of conscience in anticipation of Nietzsche’s later views: firstly, conscience may not be the “voice of God in man,” but may rather have its origins in the internalisation of a social and moral order, with which the individual often finds himself at odds. Secondly, action (as


well as non-action) is generally motivated by self-interest. The subsequent conversation between the murderers and Clarence highlights that even those who claim to believe and consequently appeal to the Christian moral law flout it when self-interest is at stake. Clarence, appealing to another of the Ten Commandments, tries to persuade the murderers that they should relent and not kill him, because their souls will be damned by God: “Erroneous vassals, the great King of Kings / Hath in the table of his law commanded / That thou shalt do not murder. Will you then / Spurn at his edict, and fulfil a man’s? / Take heed, for he holds vengeance in his hand / To hurl upon their heads that break his law” (1.4). The murderers reply respectively, reminding Clarence of his part in the Wars of the Roses:

F.M.: And that same vengeance doth he hurl on thee / For false for-swearing, and for murder too. / Thou didst receive the sacrament to fight / In quarrel with the house of Lancaster.

S.M.: And, like a traitor to the name of God / Didst break that vow, and with they treacherous blade / unripped’st the bowels of thy sov’reign’s son . . . How canst thou urge God’s dreadful law to us / When thou hast broke it in such dear degree?

(1.4)

It becomes apparent that Shakespeare here also addresses the theme of moral hypocrisy, which pervades the entire play and leaves none of the main characters untouched. Moreover, he suggests that morality is a matter of interpretation. Clarence states that, if he is to be punished for the murder of the Plantagenet, God “doth it publicly / Take not the quarrel from his pow’rful arm / He needs not indirect or lawless course / To cut off those that have offended him” (1.4). To this the First Murderer replies: “Who made thee then a bloody minister / When gallant springing brave Plantagenet / That princely novice, was struck dead by thee?” (1.4). In other words, who determines who acts on behalf of God as an instrument of His will? Perhaps the murderers, acting on Richard’s orders, are the instruments of God’s revenge as much as Richard’s ambitions? The problem of (religious and moral) interpreta-tion is thus evident. Indeed, given the blood on virtually everyone’s hands in this play, we must ask: who actually believes in God and an afterlife? If the prospect of everlasting punishment in hell is not sufficient to deter people from breaking God’s law, why believe in it? Many of the dramatis personae in Richard III are guilty of murder and thus equally

519Sandra Bonetto

“sinful” of breaking God’s law. Consider also Richard’s statement about Clarence in this regard: “simple, plain Clarence / I do love thee so / That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven . . .” (1.1). Would the true Christian believer, which Clarence professes to be, not welcome death and ascension to the Eternal Kingdom? Of course, we might reply, if he truly believed in it! What is implied is the fact that most of us do not actually believe in God (and all that such a belief would entail) or else our actions would reflect such a belief. Rather, the characters in Richard III frequently act as though God did not exist.

If there is no “divine background” that informs our actions, it follows that our consciousness of guilt resulting from contemplated or per-formed deeds is really a matter of interpretation, a matter of perspective. The First Murderer ultimately interprets his action as “a bloody deed, and desperately dispatched / How fain like Pilate, would I wash my hands / Of this most grievous, guilty murder done” (1.4), whereas the Second Murderer says: “So do not I,” and refers to his colleague as a “coward” (1.4). The First Murder’s conscience “bites back” and results in guilt as punishment. The Second Murderer, on the other hand, is not troubled by his conscience. Guilt and remorse as punishment are really forms of self-inflicted cruelty depending on the individual’s interpretation of himself in relation to his actions in the context of generally accepted social and moral norms.

As noted above, Nietzsche identifies bad conscience with what he frequently terms the “bite” or “sting” of consciences (GM, II, p. 81). This “consciousness of guilt” is further described as “a kind of evil eye” and a “species of gnawing worm.” We find the same association of bad conscience with the image of a “gnawing worm” in Richard III: “The worm of conscience still beknaw thy soul” (1.3), is one of Queen Margaret’s “quick curses” directed at Richard. To be afflicted by coward conscience in Shakespeare, or to be “conscience-stricken” or “worm-eaten” in Nietzsche (GM, III, p. 125), thus means being punished through feelings of guilt, which, “like the bite of a dog into a stone,” Nietzsche regards as a “stupidity.” Instead, he advises:

Never give way to remorse, but immediately say to yourself: that would merely mean adding a second stupidity to the first.—If you have done harm, see how you can do good.—If you are punished for your actions, bear the punishment with the feeling that you are doing good—by deter-ring others from falling prey to the same folly. . . .9


Shakespeare gives repeated expression to similar sentiments: “Bid the dishonest man mend himself; if he mend, he is no longer dishonest” (Twelfth Night, 1.5); “Cease to lament for that thou canst not help / And study help for that which though lament’st . . .” (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 3.1).

Bad conscience also tell us something about the character of the agent and his intended or performed deed—as Nietzsche said: “The bite of con-science: a sign that the character is no match for the deed.”10 However, “the deed is everything” (GM, I, p. 45), which echoes Shakespeare’s “joy’s soul lies in the doing” (Troilus and Cressida, 2.2). Similarly, conscience is cowardly in Shakespeare when it makes the agent shrink from an action (consider e.g. Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy) or retrospectively makes him regret his deed. Coward conscience either prevents one from embarking on a certain course of action (in the case of Hamlet, due to excessive reflection on the consequences of action) or punishes one for having acted in a certain manner. However, Nietzsche urges us “not to be cowardly in face of our actions! Let us not afterwards leave them in the lurch! . . .”11 Similarly, Richard states (in response to Catesby’s plea to “withdraw” from the field of battle): “Slave, I have set my life upon a cast / And I will stand the hazard of the die” (5.7).

III

It is interesting to explore what Nietzsche refers to as the “involvement of the bad conscience with the concept of God” (GM, II, p. 91) in Richard III: in no other Shakespearean play is God evoked more often—seventy-three times, to be exact—than in this one.12 Indeed, the play is rich in religious (i.e. Christian) allusions (see 1.1), notably Richard’s frequent oath “by Saint Paul,” “by holy Paul,” or “by the Apostle Paul” (see 1.1; 1.2; 1.3; 3.4; 5.5), a figure particularly despised by Nietzsche (see GM, p. 340). Indeed, what Nietzsche says of Paul can equally be applied to Richard: he speaks of faith but acts from instinct alone. Richard’s actual behaviour flagrantly contradicts the traditional Christian values: he is neither meek, nor humble; he rejects the Christian understand-ing of brotherly love: “I have no brother; I am like no brother / And this word ‘love’ which greybeards call divine / Be resident in men like one another / And not in me: I am myself alone” (Richard, Duke of York, 5.7).

Richard pretends to be religious when it suits him—“he wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat” (Much Ado About Nothing, 1.1). As he says:

521Sandra Bonetto

“I clothe my naked villainy / With odd ends stol’n forth of Holy Writ / And seem a saint when most I play the devil” (1.3). We, the audience, know that it is a sham when Richard presents himself ‘holier than thou’ to the people for coronation. The Mayor’s exclamation “see where his grace stands ‘tween two clergymen,” and Buckingham’s assertion, “two props of virtue for a Christian prince . . . and see, a book of prayer in his hands / True ornaments to know a holy man” (3.7) can only make us laugh. For this “Christian prince,” as Richmond rightly proclaims, has “ever been God’s enemy” (5.5). The superficial Christian attitude adopted by Richard in order to conceal his ‘true nature’ as a means to achieve his end—the crown—and gain public approval thus exemplifies the “modern man” of Nietzsche’s day (and Kierkegaard’s): the seem-ingly pious believer who does not behave as if he believed in God at all. This is “devotion’s visage”—the mere outward appearance of religiosity and morality hiding the reality of nihilism. Yet, as Robert Spreaight has pointed out, Shakespeare’s Richard III “illustrates the ambiguity of a character who cannot escape from his inherited beliefs however flagrantly his behaviour contradicts them” (Spreight, pp. 52–53). While Richard acts as though “God is dead”—the traditional religious-moral interpretation has lost its meaning for him and is merely useful in fur-thering his ends—he is unable to fully divest himself thereof. Like the First Murderer, he discovers that he still has “some dregs of conscience” (1.4) within him, even though he believes that conscience is nothing but a word invented by cowards. Ultimately, Richard is unable to rid himself of the internalised norms prescribed by the Christian moral interpretation—he lacks the courage and belief in himself to come to the conclusion that the norms themselves are wrong. Consequently, he feels guilty. His conscience ‘bites back’ and turns out to be “a more formidable foe than Richmond” (Spreight, p. 49):

O coward conscience how thou dost afflict me:The light burns blue. It is now dead midnight.Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh . . . Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? for any goodThat I myself have done unto myself?O no, alas, I rather hate myselfFor hateful deeds committed by myself . . . All several sins, all used in each degree,Throng to the bar, crying all ‘Guilty! Guilty!’I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;And if I die, no soul will pity me;


Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself Find in myself no pity for myself?

(5.5)

Here, Shakespeare clearly represents coward conscience as the “con-sciousness of guilt,” in the sense of something that afflicts the individual, like an illness. Indeed, it becomes apparent that the very loud curses of Margaret—the bad conscience in persona, hovering through the castle like a shrieking ghost, regurgitating the past by reminding everyone what they owe her, and “hungry for revenge” (4.4)—have become internalised by Richard, and now his own conscience repeats them, condemning him “for a villain.” Richard, so “determined to prove a villain” (1.1) at the beginning of the play, turns against himself. Now he suffers, and guilt is his sole source of suffering; as such, he exemplifies Nietzsche’s “new type of invalid,” the sinner (GM, III, p. 141). Thus, in his soliloquy before the battle of Bosworth Field, Richard is “the sinner breaking himself on the cruel wheel of a restless . . . conscience” (GM, III, p. 141). However, “man’s sinfulness is not a fact, but merely an interpretation of a fact,” according to Nietzsche. Indeed, “that someone feels “guilty” or “sinful” is no proof that he is right, any more than a man is healthy merely because he feels healthy” (GM, III, p. 129). As we are told by Hamlet: “There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (2.2). Initially, Richard interprets himself to be guilty, not because he actually believes he is guilty—he does not relent his past actions, since he can find no “pity” in himself (not even for himself)—but because the “quick curses” of others have come to inform his interpretation and moral evaluation of himself. That is, he has internalised the various condemnatory voices, which now inform his conscience and denounce him “as a villain.” He wants to “stand the hazard of the die” (5.6), but the “gnawing worm” tortures him. In the light of Richard’s earlier realisation that “conscience is but a word that cowards use / Devis’d at first to keep the strong in awe” (5.6), the wheel has come full circle because Richard begins to believe in his guilt. Richard is incapable of overcoming the traditional, Christian moral order he rejects and despises. But, the imaginative, the daring, the bold, the courageous, the curious, the brave, must be free of the “slave morality” by which their natural instincts and talents are stifled. Richard turns out to be weak and cowardly. He is not a “strong and well constituted man” who “digests his experiences (his deeds and misdeeds included) as he digests his meals, even when he has to swallow some tough morsels” (GM, III, p. 129).

523Sandra Bonetto

IV

Richard clearly does not conform to either Shakespeare’s or Nietzsche’s ideal type of human being, who, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Pericles, would “neither in his heart nor outward eyes / Envy the great nor the low despise” (2.3). For Nietzsche, this would be Aristotle’s “great-souled man” or the type of Shakespeare’s Brutus, the “noblest Roman of them all” because he, unlike the other conspirators, did what he did not “in envy of great Caesar” ( Julius Caesar, 5.5). Shakespeare outlines his ideal perhaps most succinctly in Sonnet 94 :

They that have power to hurt and will do none,That do not do the thing they most do showWho moving others are themselves as stone,Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow—They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,And husband nature’s riches from expense;They are the lords and owners of their faces,Others but stewards to their excellence.The summer’s flower is to the summer sweetThought to itself it only live and die,But if that flower with base infection meetThe basest weed outbraves his dignity;For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

As Walter Kaufmann rightly notes, “Shakespeare’s evildoers do not merely flout convention, they become ignoble and base.”13 And this is precisely what happens to Richard. His potentially noble qualities—strength of will, courage, wit, and ambition—have been perverted by resentment and bad conscience. Here we have a ‘lily’ that has met with ‘base infection’ and ends up smelling ‘far worse’ than any weed.

Richard, in short, is not a “man with a soul of high order” (GM, I, p. 28), but is rather a man of resentment who can find no joy in the world. Consider his remarks in Richard, Duke of York, the play that precedes Richard III in narrative sequence:

Since this earth affords no joy to meBut to command, to check, to o’erbear suchAs are of better person than myself,I’ll make my heaven to dream upon the crown,And while I live, t’account this world but hell,


Until my misshaped trunk that bears this headBe round impaled with a glorious crown.

(3.3)

Richard’s ‘will to power’ is not “the enthusiastic drive to enhance vitality to act on the world,”14 but rather a reaction to it. In his ‘No’ to life, Richard is certainly most seductive: just as he wins Lady Anne to be his wife over the dead bodies of her husband and father-in-law, “having God” and “her conscience” against him (1.3), he wins the audience over many other dead bodies by what Coghill calls “his fellow-conspirator wit in soliloquy.”15 We know that Richard’s piety is put on, that he is “an enemy of God” when he evokes the name of the Almighty, and that he is motivated by resentment and the spirit of revenge.

“Resentment itself,” Nietzsche says, “if it should appear in the noble man, consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and therefore does not poison” (GM, I, p. 39). But Richard is poisoned by resentment—his discontent is announced in the very first line of the play, and is evident in Richard, Duke of York. He is not a ‘noble man’—he plots and schemes, pretending to be something he is not: a “Christian prince.” His instinct is “for devious paths to tyranny,” and he is eaten by “the worm of vengefulness and rancour” (GM, III, p. 123). Ultimately, Richard is the all-too human monster consumed by ressentiment and power-hunger. And, according to Nietzsche, this kind of power makes stupid. Richard’s resentment is borne of impotence, but it is also obsessed with power. It is not the same as self-pity; it is not merely awareness of one’s misfortune (i.e. Richard’s deformity and lack of status in the “pip-ing time of peace” (1.1) following the Wars of the Roses) but involves a kind of personal outrage, an outward projection, an overwhelming sense of injustice. Richard’s resentment is obsessive, strategic, prudential and also ruthlessly clever. And irony is the chief weapon of his resent-ment. Richard’s high-spirited wit suggests that he is not so pained by his deformity as he is contemptuous of the social and moral code that thwarts his war-like nature and political ambition, and condemns him to “amble nimbly in a lady’s chamber” (1.1). But, as he tells us, he is “not made for sportive tricks” (1.1). We sympathise with Richard because we recognise in him the nobility of a strong character under unfavourable circumstances (Nietzsche’s definition of a ‘criminal’); we reject him not only on account of his foul deeds, but also because of his inability to ‘overcome’ himself. The very ideas that Richard had mocked earlier end up destroying him, for he finally begins to believe in conscience

525Sandra Bonetto

and revenge. Richard had used them for his own devices at the begin-ning of the play. Now, he says “I shall despair” (5.5), thus fulfilling the prophecies of the ghosts that come to visit him on the eve of Bosworth Field, wishing him to “despair and die,” as well as Margaret’s earlier hope that the “worm of conscience” may yet “beknaw” his soul. Indeed, Richard even suggests that he may be a curse on himself when he states “. . . lest I revenge. Myself against myself?” (5.5). Richard has cursed himself both by his deeds and by finally coming to believe in the idea of sin and retribution. He shifts from believing, as the First Murderer does, that conscience is a “blushing, shame faced spirit that mutinies in a man’s bosom . . . every man that means to do well endeavours to trust to himself and live without it” (1.4), to seeing it as something that can “afflict” and “condemn” (5.5) him.

V

Shakespeare and his contemporaries were caught between old and new ways of determining the realities upon which moral values rest. When the secularism and humanism of the Renaissance—with its anthropocentrism and emphasis on this world rather than some heavenly beyond, and the concomitant waning of the “medieval distrust of sexual relationships, the grudging Pauline concession that it is ‘better to marry than burn’” (Spreight, p. 20)—superseded the theocentric Middle Ages, moral val-ues began to be re-examined. And Shakespeare was often critical of the religious and moral values and sentiments of his time. As Sen Gupta notes, with reference to Henry IV : “When Falstaff ridicules Puritanism by describing his sins in scriptural phraseology, he does it with so much grace and with such inverted appropriateness that we feel that here, if anywhere, we hear the voice of Shakespeare himself, inveighing against the cramping effect of religion and morals.”16

According to Solomon and Higgins, Nietzsche greatly admired Shake-speare’s “willingness to probe the full range of human character without compromising his vision to pacify moral sensibilities. In this respect, Nietzsche identifies with Shakespeare, whom he took to share many of his own insights about the tragic dimension of human experience” (Solo-mon and Higgins, p. 144). Indeed, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche implies that the Bard recognised much that the West’s great philosophers failed to notice. The present exploration of coward conscience, which, it was argued, pre-empts much of what Nietzsche had to say about the bad conscience, is a case in point. Shakespeare was willing to explore the


negative or “dark side” of conscience by positing that it may not be “the voice of God in man,” but rather a psychological form of self-punishment for perceived violations of a given religious, moral, and socio-political order. In doing so, Shakespeare anticipates both Nietzsche and Freud: if conscience is not innate, it follows that it is a human construct. As such, its negative manifestation in the form of guilt, understood as self-punishment, is explored in terms of its negative effects on the individual. Moreover, in Richard III the theme of moral hypocrisy plays an important role. All of the main characters are guilty of professing one thing and being or doing another. Adherence to the Christian moral law is tenu-ous at best. And this, of course, raises another profound question: if a moral standard is not actually followed or meaningfully informs action, wherein lies its use? Does the superficial Christian attitude adopted by the main characters, notably Richard himself, not hide the reality of nihilism? Or at least an ambiguity that reveals the interpretative and perspectival nature of morality and law? Nietzsche urged us to “come clean”—“God is dead,” so let’s move on and create better values than the one’s we have long discarded. Richard’s tragedy is that he sets out on a course that he is incapable of seeing through, because he begins to believe in guilt and sinfulness—“the bite of conscience—a sign that the character is no match for the deed.”

County Laois, Republic of Ireland

1. Shaw’s observation is referred to by Bryan Magee in The Story of Philosophy (London: Dorling & Kindersley, 1998), pp. 177–78. See also “Richard III,” in Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw’s Writings on the Plays and Productions of Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1961).

2. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 185–220. References to all other Shakespearean plays are from this edition.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (with Ecce Homo), trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989); hereafter abbreviated GM.

4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 92.

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn, Sec. 202, as cited in Walter Kaufmann, ed., The Portable Nietzsche (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 86.

527Sandra Bonetto

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn, Sec. 236, as cited in GM, p. 190.

7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1997), “The Bite of the Adder,” Sec. 19, p. 65; hereafter abbreviated Z.

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, as cited in GM, p. 192.

9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow, as cited in GM, p. 185.

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (London: Vintage Books, 1968), Sec. 234.

11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003), “Maxims and Arrows,” chap. 1, sec. 10, p. 33.

12. Robert Spreight, Shakespeare: The Man and his Achievement (London: J. M. Dent, 1977), p. 49.

13. Walter Kaufmann, ed., From Shakespeare to Existentialism (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1980), p. 119.

14. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, eds., What Nietzsche Really Said (New York: Schocken Books, 2000), p. 16.

15. Nevill Coghill, “Shakespeare’s Professional Skills,” in Othello: A Selection of Critical Essays, ed. John Wain (London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 229.

16. S. C. Sen Gupta, Shakespeare’s Historical Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), as cited in Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), vol. 19, p. 131.

William O. Scott

“A WOMAN’S THOUGHT RUNS BEFORE HER ACTIONS”: VOWS AS SPEECH ACTS IN AS YOU LIKE IT

About a decade ago Susanne Wofford discussed As You Like It from the viewpoint that Rosalind uses a “proxy,” her guise as Ganymede,

in uttering “the performative language necessary to accomplish deeds such as marriage.”1 Thus Wofford complicated and qualified the suc-cess-oriented assumptions about performative usage of language as envisioned in Austin’s speech-act theories.2 Her starting point was that (as Austin himself said) these performative usages don’t have the same kind of force if they are included in a play; and so she proposed to take Rosalind’s uses of vows as playful, both theatrically and personally. Her notion of the proxy, which raises questions too about the binding force of the speech act through the identity and tactics of the speaker, is especially apt in describing exactly what Rosalind does. Understandably Rosalind’s performative manqué may be a prelude to the perfected form. Another complication suggests itself if one is going to attend to nice-ties of language usage: given that for Austin a performative procedure is founded on conventions of language, shouldn’t one also examine such linguistic forms historically? For this play the most relevant form to consider historically is the vow.

The precise formulation of vows, in espousal or marriage (both legally enforceable in church courts), was very important in early-modern England. One may wonder, then, what the formal requirements of


529William O. Scott

vows were, how much the analysis of them resembled and diverged from modern speech-act philosophy, and how the vows functioned. And one might ask such questions both about this play and about real-life practice. A more exact notion of vows may enrich our notions of Rosalind’s playfulness with them and broaden our sense of the uses and tactics of performatives; and to the extent that this playfulness contrasts with Rosalind’s serious (re)iteration of vows at the end of the play, we should give due weight to Carol Neely’s suggestion that much of the pleasure for early-modern audiences lay in the body of the play rather than its conclusion.3

The actual vows between lovers would indeed lend themselves to histo-ricized analysis of the speech acts that constitute them. The early-modern ecclesiastical court judge Henry Swinburne made something like that in his Treatise of Spousals, with his section “By what Form of Words Spousals de futuro are contracted,” and similarly on the form of words in “Spou-sals de praesenti.”4 The implied time of effectiveness in the commitment to marriage is crucial in church law of the time, because it determines whether the vows are, respectively, a betrothal that promises a future marriage, or a present binding (whether inside or outside church) that becomes an instant marriage upon carnal consummation. Both these declarations of commitment are performatives (once reciprocated), and they are normally established by social convention, what Swinburne calls “the Common use of Speech or Custom” (p. 83). Swinburne also concerns himself with what amount to the conditions of “felicity” that are requisite to make the speech valid—for instance, who is allowed to contract spousals (cp. Austin, pp. 14–24).

Both of these issues of timing and eligibility are important to Rosalind in the pretense of wedding in Act 4, Scene 1. As it is for Swinburne, the context is important: when Celia as priest asks, “Will you, Orlando, have to wife this Rosalind?” his answer “I will” is not good enough for Rosalind until he adds at her direction, “I take thee, Rosalind, for wife.”5 Likewise Swinburne considers at length the arguments whether there is a distinction between “I will” and “I do,” and whether the future-sounding verb refers only to the beginning of a process and not its completion (pp. 8–9, 57–61). Though in general he allows the distinction (so that “I will” makes a spousal and “I do” a marriage), one of his exceptions sounds like the question that Celia first puts: “The Man demanding of the Woman whether she will take him to her Husband, she answereth [I will]: And the Woman likewise demanding whether he will take her to his Wife, he answereth [I will], in this Case Matrimony and not Spousals


is Contracted” (p. 70, brackets and italics in original). In this instance Rosalind is more precise in her insistence on an unambiguous “do,” even though it was she who put Celia up to saying “will.”

But one may wonder whether matrimony is truly contracted, for Orlando is unaware that what he is saying (which would have been binding with Rosalind actually taking part) is directed to her herself. Though a third party might be a go-between in betrothal and marriage, Ganymede him/herself seems not to meet the felicity conditions of eligibility for marriage. Yet, as Valerie Traub says, “As the woman and the shepherd boy merge, Orlando’s words resound with the conviction that, for the moment, he (as much as Rosalind and the audience) is engaged in the ceremony as if it were real. As both a performative speech act and a theatricalization of desire, the marriage is both true and fictional at once.”6 And throughout, Rosalind shifts ground: after mocking Orlando for being dilatory and then warning that wives in general give their husbands horns, she encourages him that she is “like enough to consent” to his wishes—and yet tells him “I will not have you” (lines 64, 86). Next, making light of his profession that then he will die, she turns once more and offers to be Rosalind “in a more coming-on disposition,” ready to consent to any request (lines 105–6). His request for love leads to both their vows of marriage in the pres-ent tense; but even then she fills in, afterward, her professions that she will be jealous, giddy, and unfaithful. If Swinburne were to take all this with a straight face, he might say that her suggestions go against the substance of faithful marriage (and so have no force), as he does when he invalidates one of his examples, a contract that has the condition “until I find a better” (p. 135). But he also throws out agreements that are simply made in jest with no intent to marry (p. 105).

Yet although the scene is filled with jesting, it is not in jest; marriage is being deferred, but Rosalind invokes the prospect. She may herself not be fully clear in her intent: as B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol say, “Perhaps the crux of the matter lies in the question of whether or not Rosalind is wholly serious despite her love-jesting, and it may be implicit that this may be not yet fully known to herself.”7 In her turnings she tests Orlando’s equanimity and persistence. At the same time, as Neely points out, she enacts the charges of capriciousness and infidelity that were made against women, displaying them in behavior and promising more after marriage (pp. 292–93). Although this comes after their commit-ments to each other, it may continue to test Orlando; still more, though, it may test Rosalind’s concept of herself and her ability to reckon with

531William O. Scott

pledging herself. But it is still questionable as a commitment, and she controls what it may lack of being one. Yet, from the viewpoint of an audience reacting to Orlando’s words with Rosalind’s desires in mind, the half-jesting promise may have a force beyond its legality and its correctness as a speech act: as T. G. A. Nelson says of such vows in imaginative literature generally, “The utterance of the correct formula does something. It is like saying the words of a spell by accident; the spell will take effect whether you mean it to or not.”8

Of course the whole process turns on Rosalind’s disguise, and she describes herself while in disguise as a way of performing what might be called “meta” speech acts, without yet carrying through to the conse-quences of speech. That is, by characterizing self-referentially the relation between her thoughts and her actions or efficacious speech, she creates in herself the situations she describes (making the verbal connection in herself by speech as she calls attention to the whole relationship) and foretells her eventual words and deeds. Verbal actions of this sort, by performatively creating the realities that they describe, go beyond the simpler covert self-allusion in her mocking comment to Orlando (in their first meeting in the forest, in Act 3, Scene 2) that “the whippers [of love] are in love too” (lines 393–94). For instance, in that same passage, after casting doubt whether his appearance betokens love and after hearing him wish that he could convince her (i.e. Ganymede) of his love, she tells him that “You may as soon make her that you love believe it, which I warrant she is apter to do than to confess she does. That is one of the points in the which women still give the lie to their consciences” (lines 377–81). Of course the two persons that he is to convince are identical; and both of them are reticent about confessing their conviction of his truth. And is she herself apter to believe him now than she avers? Perhaps not yet; but her very description of herself in this way gives her leverage to change herself. Still more, could giv-ing the lie to one’s conscience, as she says women do, imply that she holds back, in self-deception, from confessing even to herself what she believes? But the fact that she openly admits all this makes for a kind of paradoxical honesty with herself in self-deception and offers the hope of an eventual understanding between them.

To return, then, to the fictitious exchange of vows in Act 4, Rosalind commits herself by saying, “I do take thee, Orlando, for my husband. There’s a girl goes before the priest, and certainly a woman’s thought runs before her actions” (4.1.130–133). This is another “meta” speech act, articulating a thought in words so that in both thought and speech


it precedes action. The “girl” anticipates the priest by making her vow in de praesenti form like a marriage rather than a betrothal. And the word-ing “goes before the priest” may also mischievously suggest a physical consummation (in her mind) that anticipates the wedding vows. In a combined reading, then, thoughts would precede the action of making vows, and vows (taken now as thoughts) would most properly precede the act of consummation. But by invoking two or three temporal stages, Rosalind both raises the hope of the later process and suggests that she has not reached it yet. She is still acting like a proxy; and recognizing that in those times one could actually be married by having a proxy take part in the ceremony, the Sokols ask, “Could Ganymede/Rosalind serve as a proxy for herself?” (p. 25).

Like Swinburne, she has in mind a full and continuous process of making and fulfilling a commitment. Of that process, she had earlier told Orlando that Time “trots hard with a young maid between the contract of her marriage and the day it is solemnized. If the interim be but a se’nnight, Time’s pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven year” (3.2.308–311). Although Swinburne focuses legalistically on moments of commitment in spousals and matrimony, and defines spousals strictly as “Promises of future Marriage,” he points out that the word is often extended to such continuing activities as “Love Gifts and Tokens” between the parties, transfer of goods in consideration of impending marriage, and the marriage banquet (p. 1). A similar account of ongoing early-modern courtship practices is given by Diana O’Hara, including notably “a whole sequence of privy promises” and “repeated ‘rehearsals’ of promises.”9 Binding though the promises of spousal and marriage were, in an emotional and almost theatrical sense they were not the only performances.

The ending of the play, once Orlando insists that he “can live no longer by thinking” (5.2.49), returns to vows; they are explicitly de futuro and conditional, and they are to be resolved tomorrow by Rosalind’s self-disclosure. In offstage situations, vows that named a specific date for marriage were often in fact tied to expectations for that date, such as receipt of an inheritance or emergence from apprenticeship.10 Among the most likely conditions to be attached to vows were the approval of parents or other relatives or friends;11 but other conditions might relate to the ability of the couple to secure a house.12 In the play, the constraints relate rather to negotiation among the parties’ choices as individuals, apparently free in their own minds of social or economic restrictions (though some characters certainly face hardships). To the interlocking

533William O. Scott

vows that Rosalind secures, she adds the promise of her father to consent to her marriage with Orlando, thus fulfilling the frequent condition of parental approval. The solution of conflicting desires makes at least a nominal show of the canonical role of choice in marriage; but it is placed in a societal context that befits the compromises that people sometimes had to make in life.

The vows at the beginning of Act 5, Scene 4 depend in turn on the promises Rosalind has made to three of the characters at the end of 5.2; but there are some twists in the later of the scenes that merit attention first. The Duke’s promise to bestow her on Orlando gives a point to all the rest, assuming she wants her father’s consent to her marriage. Orlando and Silvius make vows to follow up on their professions of love, and in this Orlando (who naturally matters most to her) has already been tested. Phebe’s promise is important to Rosalind’s achieving as much harmony as is possible among the characters.

An inducement to Phebe is the conditional promise that Rosalind has made to her in 5.2: “I will marry you, if ever I marry woman, and I’ll be married to-morrow” (lines 109–11). This sounds like a conditional spousal, and Swinburne does concern himself with one instance that approximates the first part of it. He formulates the wording variously, including “I will not Marry any other Woman to my Wife” and “ I will not have any other to my Wife except thee” (pp. 83–84, 88–89). In this latter he detects a logical escape provision, by comparing a promise not to sell one’s house to anyone except a specific person: the owner normally can’t be compelled to sell the house at all, so the negative promise doesn’t guarantee the other person anything (pp. 90–91, 93).13 His more complete paraphrase of a spousal promise, taking account of that problem, is “If hereafter I shall resolve to lead my life in Wedlock, of which thing I am not yet resolved, I do here promise thee, that when I am so resolved, I will have thee to my Wife, and not any other Woman” (p. 95). (At one time the New Yorker column-filler editor would have titled something like that “Promises we doubt were ever promised.”) Finally he decides that any of the versions containing “exceptive words” such as “I will have none other to my Wife, except thee, or than thee, or but thee” are really equivalent to “I will have thee to my Wife” (pp. 103–4). However, a sentence without those words, one in which “the words be meer negative” such as “I will not have any other Woman to my Wife,” does not lead to either spousals or matrimony and so is of no force (p. 105).

But, to return to Rosalind, she makes an apparent commitment


without the house-sale logical trick by including the positive assertion “I’ll be married to-morrow.” Thus the sole escape clause from what seems to be a de futuro vow is the gendered proviso (which implicates a felicity condition) “if ever I marry woman.” This enables her to refuse Phebe so conclusively that Phebe refuses her and must accept Silvius. It is the mechanism of the conditional spousal that enables a solution to conflicting desires that at least nominally satisfies all parties. Rosalind gives a fair signal to Phebe how things will go, since her contribution to the linked professions of love is that she loves no woman.

A frequent bearer of conditional meaning in As You Like It is the word if ; in her essay “Much Virtue in If,” Maura Slattery Kuhn noted its frequency in the play.14 She also distinguished between uses of the word to express “unreal condition” (or counterfactuals) and “real condition” (p. 45). This is helpful, but it may be extended. One of her examples of a counterfactual is Touchstone’s analogy to show that a knight who swore by his nonexistent honor could not be forsworn:

Touchstone : [to Rosalind and Celia] Stand you both forth now. Stroke your chins, and swear by your beards that I am a knave.

Celia: By our beards, if we had them, thou art. Touchstone : By my knavery, if I had it, then I were; but if you swear by that

that is not, you are not forsworn. No more was this knight, swearing by his honor, for he never had any.

(1.2.69–75)

Celia’s counterfactual if calls attention to the women’s beardless state—which gains pertinence when Rosalind goes into male (if beard-less) disguise and acts out a counterfactual concealment. Touchstone uses the word if twice, with functions that differ: in the second, about swearing by that that is not, his if asserts a quasi-logical entailment. This reasoning allows him to point out that Celia’s counterfactual disables her assertion of his knavery, and likewise to treat knavery as a coun-terfactual in his own “if I had it” assertion. Truth is implicated in the validation of performative oaths by their speakers; but its applications are relative and linked.

Kuhn’s quoted title, “Much Virtue in If,” alludes overtly to another episode in the play, Touchstone’s avoidance of a quarrel with a court-ier, again about a beard; and here conditionals figure differently. If Touchstone asserts repeatedly that the courtier’s beard is not well cut, the courtier can answer according to different verbal formulas as the quarrel proceeds in its status. Touchstone generalizes about the process

535William O. Scott

thus: “I knew when seven justices could not take up a quarrel, but when the parties were met themselves, one of them thought but of an If, as, ‘If you said so, then I said so’; and they shook hands and swore broth-ers. Your If is the only peacemaker; much virtue in If” (5.4.97–102). In this case, truth is not at issue; and neither is the actual assertion of any-thing as if it were true. The parties make a sort of peace by never going through with an unqualified speech act. Likewise the other conditionals in the play suspend commitments at least until the end: Traub says that “The dependence on the conditional structures the possibility of erotic exploration without necessitating a commitment to it,” as in Orlando’s “if ” wooing and his vow “as if the marriage were real” (p. 128).

In Rosalind’s conditional promise to Phebe in an earlier scene, which induced Phebe’s cooperation, the distinction of actual and apparent situations is crucial: “I will marry you, if ever I marry woman, and I’ll be married to-morrow” (5.2.109–111). The if clause in the promise encourages Phebe to continue her mistaken assumption about Rosalind’s gender. Although formally the vow meets Swinburne’s requirements, its counterfactual element breaches a felicity condition. On the assumption of heterosexual marriage Rosalind implies the possibility of a union that would be actually impossible, and therefore gives the appearance of a valid promissory speech act that she cannot and does not want to fulfil. (She does go so far, though, as to warn Phebe in saying “I would love you, if I could,” lines 108–9.) The limits of possibility for marital union in this society are the grounds for a socially-sanctioned sorting-out of the couples.

In her own guise Rosalind gives a fixity to what had been fluid before. She places herself within the norms of society by telling father and lover, “To you I give myself, for I am yours” (5.4.115–116). Their recognition of her in those relationships, as “my daughter” and “my Rosalind,” fol-lows as a seeming consequence from an if describing perception (of personal identity as well as gender), “If there be truth in sight.” She concludes that movement by a Swinburne-approved use of if for both of them, “I’ll have no husband [or father], if you be not he.” Wofford’s reading of Rosalind’s giving of herself to the men is that, as a woman, she already belonged to them (pp. 165–66); but from Wofford’s own account of plural identities, one might also say that Ganymede did not belong to them and still has the power of free action. The ostensibly free pronouncement of spousal (according to churchly legality) becomes a self-abdicating speech act that gives up this last assertion of agency for a position in family and society. Nelson finds in the sanctioning of


speech acts under the law of spousals “a recognition of the integrity of the speaking subject, the ‘I’ that performed—or sought to perform—a change of civil status by means of a verbal utterance” (p. 372). But Rosalind deliberately fractured that integrity and qualified the speech act, actually to test and ultimately strengthen that freely chosen change of status.

To understand the liberty within which Rosalind operates (at least until the end), it is worth considering some definitional moves made by both Austin and Swinburne. When Austin is trying to establish that performative verbal formulas actually do do something (rather than just describe a doing), he confronts the possibility that they are “uttered as (merely) the outward and visible sign, for convenience or other record or for information, of an inward and spiritual act: from which it is but a short step to go on to believe or to assume without realizing that for many purposes the outward utterance is a description, true or false, of the occurrence of the inward performance” (p. 9). He rejects this distinction of outward and inward, though, on the grounds that it would too easily license “fictitious inward acts” made in bad faith (pp. 10–11). But his allusion to religious language is suggestive: might the formalities of either betrothal or marriage be only signs of an inner reality (though subject to bad faith)? Clearly not for Austin; but one must ask for Swinburne.

His answer is double. Consent is requisite for spousals (pp. 4–5); and consent, as distinct from either “Publick Solemnization” or “Carnal Copu-lation,” is of the essence of marriage (p. 14), and is thus inward. However, the law (even church law) must deal with observable evidence. Hence, in considering the difficulties of interpreting the intentions of couples who are not learned in the niceties of spousal and nuptial agreements, he offers maxims such as “how can we know a Man’s meaning but by his words?” and “We must not otherwise depart from the signification of words, but in case it be manifest, that the Speaker meant otherwise” (pp. 63, 64). Like Austin, he is concerned over bad faith, as in the case of a couple who seek to overturn the public betrothal of one of them to another party, by alleging their own prior unwitnessed spousals. He says it is too easy to fake such a claim, to cover a change of mind by the publicly-betrothed party; so he allows the public commitment and not the private one (pp. 197–99). Or if a couple exchange words contract-ing matrimony but “the Mans purpose was no other but to deceive the Woman, and procure her to yield to his Lust,” the ecclesiastical judge must consider them married according to their words (whatever the

537William O. Scott

professed intentions of either now). But Swinburne adds the proviso, “(before God) they be not Man and Wife; for he which is the searcher of the heart doth well know their deceit and defect of Mutual Consent.” The principle is that “mortal Man cannot otherwise judge of Mens meanings, than by their sayings, for the Tongue is the Messenger of the heart; and although it sometimes delivers a false Message, yet doth the Law accept it for true, when as the Contrary doth not otherwise law-fully appear” (pp. 84–85). Thus by default one must interpret speech acts and take them as major evidence; but for Swinburne it is morally important to have an infallible judge of intentions who will give an ultimate verdict.

This gap between speech and intent ironically gives Rosalind scope for a quite other use, the playful distortion of professions and vows. And the audience in effect plays God, being privy to her conversations with Celia and her disguise, and hence to her private meanings. To know these is in turn to know what she learns and to see how she uses as yet incomplete or deceptive speech acts, in order to solve all (as well as it can be solved) and to accomplish her purposes.

In the Epilogue the male actor who plays Rosalind (in Tudor stage practice), still in a gown, toys again with the counterfactual about gen-der that caught Phebe. But this bit itself plays off against quite another use of if, an analogy that masquerades as logical consequence: “If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue” (lines 3–4). Then in the sleight-of-hand about gender, the counterfactual if inverts and parodies the situation in the play: “If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me [still harping on beards], complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not” (lines 16–19). Gender has become quite openly a matter of performance, and the playing of it may cross over, and cross-dress, in either direction. And that performance may affect what we are to make of the commitments that gendered speakers seem to undertake. Perhaps, with this Epilogue, the socially-approved closure of roles in marriage that concluded the play itself is not at that totally beyond question. Rosalind the actor/-tress may still have a freedom that Rosalind the character seems to have promised away (unless her mocking predictions about wives still do have a place in her mind after all).

As Austin broadened the philosophical concept of language function-ing beyond constative uses, in turn his notion of performative language (which ultimately he found problematic to distinguish from consta-tives) can be given more complexity, in both its history and workings.


In different ways, both Swinburne and Rosalind are models. For Rosa-lind, the temporarily “defective” speech act is both a means of deferral (pending a test for the right conditions) and a hint of a promise. Her “meta” tactics of skewed self-description, safely behind her disguise, both suspend and disclose (or create) the thoughts that run before the act of commitment.

University of Kansas

1. Susanne Wofford, “‘To You I Give Myself, For I Am Yours’: Erotic Performance and Theatrical Performatives in As You Like It,” in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, ed. Russ McDonald (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 147.

2. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 4–7, 14–18.

3. Carol Thomas Neely, “Lovesickness, Gender, and Subjectivity: Twelfth Night and As You Like It,” in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 285.

4. Henry Swinburne, A Treatise of Spousals (London: S. Roycroft, 1686), sections X (pp. 55–73) and XI (pp. 74–108). Swinburne died in 1624 with this treatise unpublished; his Brief Treatise of Testaments and Last Willes dates from 1590–91, with another edition in 1611. His account of spousals is the most comprehensive early one in English, and the usual one to refer to for this period.

5. 4.1.122–124, 128–129. Quotations are from Shakespeare, Complete Works, ed. David Bevington, 5th ed. (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2004).

6. Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (Lon-don: Routledge, 1992), p. 127.

7. B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol, Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 26.

8. T. G. A. Nelson, “Doing Things with Words: Another Look at Marriage Rites and Spousals in Renaissance Drama and Fiction,” Studies in Philology 95 (1998): 356.

9. Diana O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 64.

10. Ralph Houlbrooke, Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation, 1520–1570 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 57–58.

11. Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 202–3.

539William O. Scott

12. Eric Josef Carlson, Marriage and the English Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 116.

13. Swinburne often makes comparisons between courtship or marriage and commercial transactions. I discuss the significance of these in my essay “Conditional Bonds, Forfeitures, and Vows in The Merchant of Venice,” English Literary Renaissance 34 (2004): 286–305.

14. Maura Slattery Kuhn, “Much Virtue in If,” Shakespeare Quarterly 28 (1977): 44.

Daryl W. Palmer

MOTION AND MERCUTIO IN ROMEO AND JULIET

There is nothing permanent that is not true, what can be true that is uncertaine? How can that be certaine, that stands upon uncertain grounds?1

It is by now a commonplace in modern scholarship that drama, particularly Tudor drama, poses questions, rehearses familiar debates,

and even speculates about mere possibilities.2 In 1954, Madeleine Doran spelled out some of the ways in which debate “affected the structure of Elizabethan drama.”3 In turn, Joel B. Altman, having eloquently extended Doran’s examination, concludes that “the plays functioned as media of intellectual and emotional exploration for minds that were accustomed to examine the many sides of a given theme, to entertain opposing ideals, and by so exercising the understanding, to move toward some fuller apprehension of truth that could be discerned only through the total action of the drama.”4 Altman points to Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres (c. 1490) as an exemplar of this practice. Although the interlude instructs and entertains, “the center of interest has shifted from demonstration to inquiry. The action develops not from an abstract assertion, but from a specific question: who is the nobler man, Cornelius or Gaius?”5 By the time William Shakespeare began to write his plays, inquiry was an essential part of dramatic construction. So Juliet asks, “What’s in a name?”6 Hamlet opens with the question: “Who’s


541Daryl Palmer

there?” (1.1.1), and achieves a kind of apotheosis in the figure of its hero: “To be, or not to be, that is the question . . .” (3.1.55). Everyone recognizes these familiar questions, and we know (or think we know) how to describe the most viable answers. I want to suggest, however, that this familiarity has dulled our appreciation of the drama’s inter-rogative range. As a way of resisting this tendency, I want to argue that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet takes up an ancient conversation about motion, a dialog that originates with the pre-Socratics. This is not to say that the play is ultimately about motion. It obviously engages a panoply of thematic materials. I have simply chosen, in this limited space, to concentrate on the way the playwright stages his questioning as a kind of fencing lesson. My goal is to produce neither a “reading” of the play nor an allegory of philosophy, but rather to recollect the ways in which Shakespeare’s drama qualifies and extends an ancient interroga-tive tradition. In so doing, I follow Stanley Cavell who maintains “that Shakespeare could not be who he is—the burden of the name of the greatest writer in the language, the creature of the greatest ordering of English—unless his writing is engaging the depth of the philosophical preoccupations of his culture.”7

Some of the most venerable documents of Western philosophy fix on the problem of motion. If we go back more than 2,300 years, we come upon Plato’s Theaetetus, in which Socrates explains a “first principle” to the title character, namely that “the universe really is motion and nothing else.”8 A kind of history lesson in ontology and epistemology, this tentative explanation has its origins in Heraclitus or Empedocles or Protagoras or some combination of the aforementioned. Perhaps the most famous expression of this ideal comes from Heraclitus: “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go ever flowing on.”9 More to the point is the following declaration from the same philosopher: “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.”10 In this spirit, Protagoras declares, “All matter is in a state of flux.”11 Such precedents provide the backdrop for Socrates in the Theaetetus as he summarizes: “The point is that all these things are, as we were saying, in motion, but there is a quickness or slowness in their motion” (Thea, 156c). In this historical spirit, he identifies “a tradition from the ancients, who hid their meaning from the common herd in poetical figures, that Oceanus and Tethys, the source of all things, are flowing streams and nothing is at rest” (Thea, 180d–e).

To be sure, the dialog depends on the rehearsal of such positions,


but far more important for our purpose is Plato’s attempt, through the figure of Socrates, to grasp motion through dialog. More inclined toward Parmenides’ distrust of motion, Socrates has, from the outset, been setting up the terms of inquiry in a form that anticipates the dra-matic shape of the Renaissance play by fixing the (ineffable) object of study so that it gives up its essence, its being. Contemporary critics and philosophers will of course raise many objections to this motive,12 and rightly so; but in the conversation I want to trace, the motive endures dramatically. Plato even pays attention to character. From the outset, Theaetetus marks himself as a green pupil, charming and polite. The young fellow finds Socrates’ talk hard to follow. He becomes wary: “Really, I am not sure, Socrates. I cannot even make out about you, whether you are stating this as something you believe or merely putting me to the test” (Thea, 157c). As Shakespeare will always emphasize, character emerges out of dialog. Human disposition inflects inquiry. Maturity affects analysis.

Assuming that every change is a “motion,” Socrates proceeds to con-front his pupil with the difficult task of studying motion only in terms of motion, change in terms of change. That which fixes undoes what we study, but how difficult to adhere to such an injunction! Later in this dialog, Theodorus complains of thinkers who attempt such a task: “Faithful to their own treatises they are literally in perpetual motion; their capacity for staying still to attend to an argument or a question or for a quiet interchange of question and answer amounts to less than nothing . . .” (Thea, 179e–180a). According to his plan, Plato is preparing his readers to admit that they can only have knowledge of being. That which is ever becoming (something other) may be perceived, but not known. Motion, if it can be probed at all, will register as perception, not knowledge, a crucial distinction for what follows because literary scholarship often conflates perception and knowledge (Thea,186e).13

This is not to say that Shakespeare read a given dialog by Plato as a source the way he read Ovid. To approach the Renaissance is to encounter Plato in every nook and cranny. We know, in general, that early modern thinkers read Plato, but his presence was more ubiquitous than simple citation would indicate.14 Paul F. Grendler explains that “The Renaissance drew upon a centuries-old tradition whose roots went back to Plato’s Laws and Republic, as well as Christian antiquity . . .”15 With more particular application to Shakespeare’s world, Sears Jayne declares, “at no time during the Renaissance were the English people ever limited, as the myth suggests, to a single conception of Plato; rather, they knew

543Daryl Palmer

about Plato from many different sources, and entertained several differ-ent conceptions of his work.”16 Finally, Melissa Lane describes the way the philosopher’s heirs have understood their role in the conversation: Plato “was, after all, Aristotle’s teacher and a key source for Ciceronian Rome and Augustinian Christianity. And this status made him a magnet in the search for originality—both as the beginning and as the inspired genius.”17

I take this “search” to be paradigmatic for subsequent centuries as it pops up in learned books and busy streets, even among the rapiers and daggers of Elizabethan London. As J. D. Aylward puts it in The English Master of Arms, most Englishmen of the period wanted to asso-ciate themselves with the practice of swordplay.18 Theater audiences relished the expert fencing of actors. 19 London buzzed with talk of Continental fencing masters who claimed followings in their schools and in print. To these masters, fencing was both physical and mental, a palpable conflict and the basis for intellectual dialog. Vincentio Saviolo illustrates this motive in his Practice (1595). For Saviolo, combat comes down to discernment. He complains that “There are many that when they come to fight, runne on headlong without discretion.”20 In this same spirit, Giacomo Grassi warns his readers of the need for judgment, noting that, “amongst divers disorderlie blowes, you might have seen some of them most gallant lie bestowed, not without evident conjecture of deepe judgment.”21 Disorder must be avoided; the point, in other words, is to approach the physicality of combat through reason honed by reading. George Silver, Saviolo’s main English competitor, remarked the project’s difficulty by foregrounding motion: “The mind of man a greedie hunter after truth, finding the seeming truth but chaunging, not alwayes one, but alwayes diverse, forsakes the supposed, to find out the assured certaintie: and searching every where save where it should, meetes with all save what it would.”22 No Socrates, Silver nonetheless shares a certain skepticism with the ancient philosopher.

More confidently than Silver, Saviolo pursues his inquiry in keen prose carefully tied to illustrations. The combatants appear on a grid that suggests geometric attention to their motion. The diagram, like the words in a dialog, seems to stabilize motion and permit thoughtful evaluation. In this manner, Saviolo scrutinizes the “cut.” An obviously dramatic maneuver, the cut adds a thrilling sound to motion in ways that modern directors of action films take for granted. An audience can easily appreciate a cut, and an opponent must respect the obvious wound. Such satisfactions, however, cannot be the test of a movement. In


order to grasp this argument, the student will want to make the motion answerable, fixing it in some manner, questioning it, and responding to it. Saviolo does precisely this when he outlines the cut in a mathemati-cal diagram.23 With the aid of his illustration, the author explains the move’s limited effectiveness, numbering positions so as to better fix the represented motion. In the end, he concludes that the cut may satisfy the passions, but it will not win the combat.

With this lesson and many others like it, Saviolo returns to his pri-mary theme, warning his reader about motion inspired by “e-motion.” Indeed, everything in the treatise aims at distancing the pupil from his passions. Master and pupil sit on a riverbank. Urging calm attention, this sage spokesman takes advantage of the stillness to advocate deliberate attention to speed and slowness. Not unlike Socrates, Vincent encour-ages his young pupil to “expounde questions.”24

For some time now, scholars have recognized that Shakespeare and his contemporaries were reading these manuals. Indeed, as Joan Ozark Holmer explains, Saviolo’s “articulation of the ethic informing the truly honorable duello . . . significantly illuminate[s] the tragic complexity of the fatal duels in Romeo and Juliet.”25 What has not been fully appre-ciated is the way the manuals’ emphasis on Platonic dialectic informs the practice of questioning at the heart of Shakespeare’s great love story. Depending on the drama’s inquisitive tradition, Shakespeare could center his love story on scenes of combat in order to expound questions about motion because he knew that his principal players were capable swordsmen.

Juliet wants to know what is in a name. Shakespeare, in writing Romeo and Juliet, might well have answered, motion. We know that “Romeo” suggests the wandering pilgrim; but long before Shakespeare, Plato emphasized the physics of such a name. In the Cratylus, Socrates muses about the letter “r,” suggesting that the great “imposer of names” used the letter “because, as I imagine, he had observed that the tongue was most agitated and least at rest in the pronunciation of this letter, which he therefore used in order to express motion. . . .”26 No mere allusion, the name Romeo demands that players agitate their tongues so as to play a part in the main character’s motion. Moreover, the rough “r” of Elizabethan speech would have heightened this effect. There is, after all, no rest in Romeo, and so it makes sense that his cherished friend is named Mercutio. As we have already noted, the Greeks thought of any change as motion. Mercutio embodies that sense of the word as

545Daryl Palmer

he restlessly engages his friend’s sphere of activity, even threatening to displace Romeo as the play’s real interest.

All of this activity takes shape in the streets of Verona, where the play’s initial questioning turns on the nobility of moving versus standing. Stand-ing, it turns out, is a kind of obsession in this play: the words “stand” and “stands” occur some 30 times. Throughout the drama, the words signal a nexus of male identity in combat, sexual arousal, and simple motionlessness. Sampson and Gregory quickly announce the theme:

Gre.: I strike quickly, being mov’d.Sam.: A dog of the house of Montague moves me.Gre.: To move is to stir, and to be valiant is to stand; therefore, if thou

art mov’d, thou run’st away.Sam.: A dog of that house shall move me to stand!

(1.1.6–11)

With breathtaking alacrity, Shakespeare initiates his tale of “star-cross’d love” with a dialog devoted to motion. Gregory puts his faith in speed, and does not doubt that he can be moved to anger. Yet he willingly abandons this formulation in order to sport with Samson’s expression of resolution. Does motion or fixity define the valiant man? More clown than philosopher, Samson chooses to stand even as he boasts of his desire for maidenheads:

Sam.: Me they shall feel while I am able to stand, and ’tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.

Gre.: ’Tis well thou art not fish; if thou hadst, thou hadst been poor-John. Draw thy tool, here comes [two] of the house of Montagues.”

(1.1.28–32)

That all this talk of motion evolves inevitably into talk of manhood may seem forced to a modern audience, and the playing of this trans-lation on the stage can easily elide the way that Gregory baits Samson through these stages of “thought.” A pitiful imitation of Socrates, Gregory adopts that old Platonic device of the dialog, but his instruction ends in an ambiguous validation of “standing.” Because of the way it merges with male sexuality, this “proof” becomes an integral part of the play’s deadly orchestrations.

Of course the real assay of this discourse in Romeo and Juliet (as in Saviolo’s treatise) will demand “swords and bucklers” (1.1.1SD). For this


reason, Samson’s battle cry deserves attention: “Draw, if you be men. Gregory, remember thy washing blow” (1.1.62–63). Primed by his partner, Samson draws his “tool,” confident that he can determine his manhood by doing so. The caesura concretizes the character’s recogni-tion that his manhood is linked to “washing blows” and other sorts of codified motion.

Such is the world inhabited by Romeo, Tybalt, and Mercutio, the main interlocutors of the play. Extensions of Samson and Gregory, these young men confound all attempts to tutor them. When Mercutio rhapsodizes of Queen Mab, Romeo tries in vain to lead him home (1.4.95). For his part, Capulet fruitlessly tries to teach Tybalt about hospitality (1.5.76–81). Benvolio fails to lead Mercutio out of the hot day (3.1.1). This list goes on and on, leaving Shakespeare’s audience with real doubts about the possibility of successful pedagogy and utter suspicion of all attempts to make motion answerable.

At the play’s beginning, Romeo and the Friar seem to embody the old Platonic model as they discuss Romeo’s new love on a “grey-ey’d morn” (2.3.1). Romeo propounds his notions with an “early tongue” (32). In this pastoral setting, the counselor challenges his young pupil’s passion with an energy worthy of Socrates and Saviolo. Adopting the language of fencing that already permeates the play, the Friar expresses a certain self-confidence in his analytical abilities: “then here I hit it right— / Our Romeo hath not been in bed to-night” (41–42). In early modern England, the study of motion seems to hinge on being able to “hit it right.” Having done so, the Friar presses on: “And art thou chang’d? Pronounce this sentence then: / Women may fall, when there’s no strength in men” (2.3.79–80). Galvanized by the sudden appearance of Romeo’s change, the teacher wants to make the motion answerable. He seizes on the passion with a question followed by a caesura, indicating the instructor’s cogitation before he attempts to fix the phenomena with a legalistic phrase: “Pronounce this sentence.” As in Saviolo’s dialog, this pastoral pedagogy ends up being about “strength in men.”

As it did in Plato’s dialog, the scene also takes shape through the old tension between youth and experience as the pupil attempts to come to terms with motion: “O let us hence, I stand on sudden haste” (2.3.93). Romeo here casts himself in a comic version of the manly debate between Gregory and Samson. Shakespeare’s audience would have understood what Romeo meant, but many probably laughed at the callow bawdy and the embedded contradiction. Literally, Romeo insists on haste, but his “standing” would also suggest an erection and/or a

547Daryl Palmer

kind of standstill that frustrates haste. The typical pupil, Romeo’s pas-sion will frustrate his execution.

And what of the Friar? His wisdom fits neatly into the second line of a couplet: “Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast” (2.3.94). In his own imperfect way, more Heraclitus than Socrates, Friar Lawrence tries to respond to this turmoil by attending to the question of speed. He urges slowness, and it remains his constant focus. A little later in the play, he insists on the due and proper speed: “Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow” (2.5.15). To be sure, the play’s critics have been divided over how they view the Friar’s sagacity, but I think Socrates provides the perfect measure for his advice. Instead of knowledge, the Friar deals in perception; and this focus has the ring of common sense even though it lacks knowledge. It is worth noting that praise for Friar Lawrence’s mental faculties comes from the Nurse (3.3.160).

In the end, the Friar is so fearful of speed that he orchestrates stand-still. When faced with Romeo’s murder of Tybalt, he counsels waiting so “we can find a time” (3.3.150). (One could contextualize the Friar’s taste for slowness by pointing out that the fencing community endorsed it with its formal requirements for a duel alla stoccata.) Sizing up the lover’s situation, he concludes, “here stands all your state” (3.3.166). How appropriate then that his plan for peace involves a vial of “distill-ing liquor” that will leave Juliet fixed, in a state like death (4.1.95). Frightened by motion, the Friar’s passion for fixity seems to poison the whole play. When Paris and Romeo each arrive at the Capulet tomb, they tell their men to “stand” aloof (5.3.1; 5.3.26), and the two lovers destroy each other. How ironic that the Friar, having discovered the carnage, misreads the motionless forms and abandons the sleeping Juliet. The Friar’s absurd reason flows through a single line: “Come go, good Juliet, I dare no longer stay” (5.3.159). Unable to make motion answerable, the counselor is reduced to “Come go.” At the play’s end, he reckons his own part in the action with these words: “here I stand both to impeach and purge / Myself” (5.3.226–227).

At the other end of the spectrum, Tybalt buzzes about the stage, all motion and little scrutiny. Saviolo might have invoked Tybalt as the perfect illustration of the fighter doomed by his own passions. When Benvolio would part the contestants in the play’s first scene, Tybalt cries, “What, drawn and talk of peace?” (1.1.66–67). The very presence of the sword and buckler in his culture seems to truncate all dialog. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the Capulet’s ball, when the host must rage in order to get his attention: “What, goodman boy? I say he shall, go


to! / Am I the master here or you? Go to!” (1.5.77–78). In a culture of combat that revered the role of master, Tybalt has no time for authority. When he announces that he goes “to speak to them” at the beginning of 3.1, we know that he really seeks what Mercutio offers, namely “a word and a blow” (3.1.40). The inherently bad pupil explains that, for this, “You shall find me apt enough” (3.1.41).

Mercutio, by contrast, has more of the philosopher in him, and this aspect takes shape in terms of fencing. Unafraid of motion, he can, nonetheless, step back and observe. In ways no other character in the play does, Mercutio recollects knowledge; he understands numbers and technical terms. As the Queen Mab speech brilliantly shows, he has the capacity to reflect on the nature of motion and Shakespeare indulges him with impressive set speeches: “Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck, / and then dreams he of cutting foreign throats, / Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades” (1.4.82–84). Whatever we make of Queen Mab, we may admit that she instantiates, for Mercutio, a deadly dreaming realm of perception where passion leads men to their doom. If the soldier gives into passion, we may lay the blame on Queen Mab. Mercutio’s auditors cannot follow such a poetical lesson. “Peace,” Romeo pleads, “peace, Mercutio, peace! / Thou talk’st of nothing” (1.4.95–96). We may hear in this complaint (and not for the only time in the play) something of Theaetetus: “Really, I am not sure, Socrates. I cannot even make out about you, whether you are stating this as something you believe or merely putting me to the test.” Whereas Romeo and Tybalt embody motion, Mercutio puts motion to the test, but his pupils always fumble over the examination.

Nowhere are Mercutio’s aspirations on this score more apparent than in 2.4. The scene opens with Benvolio and Mercutio discussing the where-abouts of Romeo, but it turns quickly into a fencing lesson. Mercutio expands on his theme with Tybalt as his subject: “He fights as you sing prick-song, keeps time, distance, and proportion; he rests his minim rests, one, two and the third in your bosom: the very butcher of a silk button, a duellist, a duellist; a gentleman of the very first house, of the first and second cause. Ah, the immortal passado, the punto reverso, the hay” (2.4.20–26). Mercutio offers a complex lesson here, laden with techni-cal vocabulary, real and invented. His reference to “the very first house” identifies Tybalt with both a family and a school of fencing. As though he were consulting Saviolo, Mercutio sets forth the terms that always organized a critique of fencing, namely time, distance, and proportion.27 Meanwhile, words such as “passado,” “punto reverso,” and “hay” give the

549Daryl Palmer

instructor the opportunity to demonstrate each technique, animating the pictures Saviolo made popular. Mercutio even coins the term “duellist,” a feat that suggests the teacher’s original mind. Yet for all of this learning and bravado, Mercutio frames his lesson in the most thoughtful of ways by returning to the Platonic concern “with due occasion, due time, due performance.”28 For Plato, a life lived among perceptions would have to aim for the “right” time, occasion, etc. Mercutio notes (rather enviously, I think) that Tybalt embodies this attention, and so finds his point “in your bosom.” In ways a modern audience will find difficult to follow in performance, Mercutio aims to dazzle his auditor with a discourse as applicable to life as it is to fencing. A veritable Theaetetus, Benvolio tries to follow this brilliant account. He says, “The what?” (2.4.27). A better teacher would listen to his pupil’s question, perhaps pause to recollect the matter and begin anew. Mercutio merely presses on in his pedagogi-cal fury, halting only when he sees Romeo approach.

At this point, Mercutio spies a more intriguing pupil and commences a history lesson: “Laura to his lady was a kitchen wench . . . Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gipsy . . .” (39–41). When Romeo attempts to make an apol-ogy for having missed his friends the night before, noting that “in such a case as mine a man may strain courtesy,” Mercutio diagnoses Romeo’s strain: “That’s as much as to say, such a case as yours constrains a man to bow in the hams” (50–51, 52–53). Mercutio believes that Romeo has so indulged in amorous motions that he can no longer perform the simple courtesy of a bow. Romeo catches on, and Mercutio declares, “Thou hast most kindly hit it” (55). In ways that Benvolio cannot manage, Romeo proceeds to take up this challenge; and the two exchange verbal hits until Mercutio cries, “Come between us, good Benvolio, my wits faints” (67–68). Romeo, for his part, demands more intense motion: “Switch and spurs, switch and spurs—or I’ll cry a match” (69–70). Brighter than Benvolio, Romeo knows how to play, but he lacks a certain capacity for reflection. Mercutio, by contrast, has the prescience to embrace motion and draw away in the same instant. “Nay,” he chides Romeo, “if our wits run the wild-goose chase, I have done; for thou hast more of the wild goose in one of thy wits than, I am sure, I have in my whole five” (71–74). In this lively exchange, we come to understand Mercutio’s aspirations. Like the Friar, Mercutio wants to be a kind of pedagogue. At the same time, he envies Tybalt’s passion and remains too interested in the competition to drive his point home. Mercutio wants to know if he has won the verbal duel: “Was I with you there for the goose?” (74). Like the Friar, Mercutio fails. Romeo never learns his lesson.


In fact, Mercutio’s insights into motion were probably lost on the audi-ence members as well. As Adolph L. Soens remarked some time ago, Mercutio, who seems to fight by the Italian book after the English habit, identifies Tybalt with the “Spanish book of fence as mannered and artificial as that book of poetics by which Romeo makes love and sonnets.”29 Soens argues convincingly that Shakespeare’s audience would have wanted to dislike Tybalt’s brave manner even as they respected his technical expertise (Soens, p. 125). What fascinates me about this set of identifications is less their relative accuracy than their effectiveness in (apparently) fixing motion in ethnic stereotypes for the Elizabethan audience. Silver announces this combative agenda in his treatise when he complains that Englishmen “have lusted like men sicke of a strange ague, after the strange vices and devises of Italian, French, and Spanish Fencers. . . .30

To his credit, Soens avoids this trap and offers a stunning description of motion that I quote at length in order to suggest a more formalistic appreciation for the way motion matters to Mercutio’s death. At the beginning of 3.1, Shakespeare envisions a hot street that ensures motion. Soens explains:

The efficient and popular Italian fencing of Mercutio contrasts in posture and motion, as well as implications with the formal, deadly, and pedantic Spanish fencing of Princox (I.v.84) Tybalt. Mercutio and Tybalt circle each other, Tybalt upright, his arm outstretched, rapier and shoulder in a line, trying to keep his point in Mercutio’s face; Mercutio, crouched in stoccata, holds his rapier low, by his right knee, cocked back for a thrust. Both extend their daggers toward the opponent to parry thrusts or to beat aside a threatening rapier in preparation for a thrust.

Their motions contrast as effectively, though not so absolutely, as their postures. Tybalt dances to and fro, attempting to evade his opponent, to catch him off balance and to gain angular advantage, while Mercutio moves with wider steps (and both move a great deal) and rushes in a series of tangents to the circle whose radius is Tybalt’s outstretched rapier and sword-arm. Mercutio, in other words, rushes rapidly in and out of distance, hoping to catch Tybalt unprepared, and to throw a thrust from stoccata or imbroccata (in which the sword is held, knuckles up, over the head) while Tybalt is both off balance and within distance. Both parry with the dagger as a rule, although stop thrusts combined with parries can be found in both the Italian and Spanish manuals. The difference in styles suggests the mechanics of Mercutio’s death. Mercutio takes his

551Daryl Palmer

fatal thrust, not by accident, but in a situation where the advantage is all with the Spanish style . . . (Soens, p. 126).

In ways that no other scholar has done for this scene, Soens helps us to grasp Mercutio’s death as a matter of contrasting motions. For Soens, this difference is the point: Romeo’s intervention puts Mercutio’s fighting style at a disadvantage. More compelling still is Romeo’s well-meaning yet clumsy attempt to bring all this complex motion to a standstill in the name of “reason” (3.1.62, 70). In Platonic terms, reason would be precisely what these men need, but Romeo is talking about “reason” colloquially as “cause,” specifically his marriage to Juliet (Holmer, p. 182). Romeo wants to stop the motion, but lacks the reason to do so. For Holmer, this confrontation recalls Saviolo’s condemnation of ill-considered quarrels spurred on by fury (Holmer, pp. 181–85).

Just as important, I contend, is Saviolo’s pragmatic recognition that some of the most compromised of motions, say combats between friends and kin, do not permit analysis. For the teacher who longs for truth and justice in quarreling, certain situations nonetheless demand an end to thought. In a description that seems to anticipate the conflict in Romeo and Juliet, Saviolo urges his pupil to abandon reflection:

consider that he which challengeth him, dooth not require to fight with him as a freend, but as an enemye, and that he is not to think any otherwise of his minde but as full of rancour and malice towards him: wherefore when you see one with weapons in his hand that will needs fight with you, although hee were your freend or kinseman, take him for an enemy. . . .31

Saviolo’s account neatly exposes Romeo’s error. Faced with such a predicament, Romeo appeals to the “minde” and encourages Tybalt and Mercutio “to think any otherwise,” contrary to Saviolo’s advice. As Holmer has noted (Holmer, p. 174), Mercutio’s dying words come straight from Saviolo: “They have made worms’ meat of me” (3.1.107). Only when it is too late does Romeo grasp at the master’s injunction: “take him for an enemy.”

Even as Shakespeare offers his audience a veritable laboratory of fencing mechanics and the geometric spectacle of Mercutio’s death, the playwright spins out a mechanics of catastrophe that cannot satisfy the rational mind. Romeo’s teacher sends “a friar with speed,” but the messenger arrives too late (4.1.123). Romeo chooses “quick” drugs that enable him to die before Friar Lawrence arrives and Juliet awakes. A


moment too late, Friar Lawrence exclaims, “how oft tonight / Have my old feet stumbled at graves!” (5.3.121–122). In time to see that the “lady stirs,” the counselor determines he can “no longer stay” (5.3.147, 59). If we step back from this action, I think we can describe this early tragedy anew: Shakespeare has created a work that teases us with the possibility of making motion answerable. Who can watch such motions and not demand an inquiry? Yet with Mercutio dead, who will expound the questions?

For centuries, audiences have been mesmerized by the character that inspired Coleridge to write the following encomium:

O! how shall I describe that exquisite ebullience and overflow of youthful life, wafted on over the laughing waves of pleasure and prosperity, as a wanton beauty that distorts the face on which she knows her lover is gaz-ing enraptured, and wrinkles her forehead in the triumph of its smooth-ness! Wit ever wakeful, fancy busy and procreative as an insect, courage, an easy mind that, without cares of its own, is at once disposed to laugh away those of others, and yet to be interested in them. . . .32

Generations of readers have agreed with this appraisal, but what we have failed to appreciate is the pedagogical (and therefore interrogative) motive behind all this “exquisite ebullience.” When Plato bequeathed his brilliant dialogs to posterity, he left behind more than questioning: the philosopher left us with the idea of the brilliant teacher whose radiance would always authenticate the asking. This is precisely the role Socrates gives to himself in the Theaetetus : “And the highest point of my art is the power to prove by every test whether the offspring of a young man’s thought is a false phantom or instinct with life and truth” (Thea, 150c). For a dramatist like Shakespeare, the old conversation about motion must have held all sorts of attractions, but the implications for character must have been tantalizing. Aspiring to both embody motion and test it, Mercutio longs to be the young man’s guide: he is the obvi-ous product of Shakespeare’s musing over motion, on the page, on the stage. Although his lessons never approach the rigor of Socrates, his “wit ever wakeful” energizes audiences with ambitions worthy of the ancient Greeks. Were we able to make motion answerable, we would be very close to the origins of life itself. Mercutio aspires in this direction. Perhaps Romeo and Juliet feels so profound because we experience this aspiration and mourn its failure.

Regis University

553Daryl Palmer

1. George Silver, Paradoxes of Defence (London, 1599), A3r, v.

2. The author would like to thank Jose Ramón Díaz-Fernández and Peter S. Donald-son for organizing A Boundless Sea: Shakespeare’s Mediterranean on Film at the Seventh World Shakespeare Congress in Valencia, Spain, where the initial version of this essay was presented. And special thanks to my colleague in philosophy Alan Hart for his wise reading of the work in progress.

3. Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954), p. 312.

4. Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 6.

5. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind, p. 21.

6. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blake-more Evans (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 2.2.43.

7. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, updated ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 2.

8. Plato, Theaetetus, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 156a; hereafter abbreviated Thea.

9. Heraclitus, The Presocratics, ed. Philip Wheelwright (New York: Odyssey Press, 1966), p. 71.

10. Heraclitus, The Presocratics, p. 70.

11. Protagoras, The Presocratics, p. 239.

12. See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, Disseminations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 65–84.

13. On this fundamental distinction between perception and knowledge, see Gail J. Fine, “Knowledge and LOGOS in the Theaetetus,” Philosophical Review 88 (1979): 366–97.

14. Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Humanism,” The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 129.

15. Paul F. Grendler, “Printing and Censorship,” The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, p. 42.

16. Sears Jayne, Plato in Renaissance England (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), p. xiii.

17. Melissa Lane, Plato’s Progeny (London: Duckworth, 2001), p. 9.

18. J. D. Aylward, The English Master of Arms (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), pp. 17–31.

19. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 4.

20. Vincentio Saviolo, Vincentio Saviolo His Practice (London, 1595), I4r.


21. Giacomo Grassi, DiGrassi His True Arte of Defence, trans. Thomas Churchyard (Lon-don, 1594), A2r.

22. Silver, Paradoxes of Defence, A3v.

23. Aylward, The English Master of Arms, p. 58.

24. Saviolo, Vincentio Saviolo His Practice, B4v.

25. Joan Ozark Holmer, “‘Draw, if you be Men’: Saviolo’s Significance for Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 163; hereafter abbreviated Holmer.

26. Plato, Cratylus, 426 d,e.

27. On Mercutio’s “debt” to Saviolo, see Holmer, p. 173.

28. Plato, Statesman, 284e.

29. Adolph L. Soens, “Tybalt’s Spanish Fencing in Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 20 (1969): 121, 123–25; hereafter abbreviated Soens.

30. Silver, Paradoxes of Defence, A4v.

31. Saviolo, Vincentio Saviolo His Practice, E2r,v. On Saviolo’s recommendation not to part combatants, see Holmer, p. 183.

32. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 515.

Notes and Fragments

THE TRAGIC AS AN ETHICAL CATEGORY

by Robert Guay

Tragedy is at the center of Nietzsche’s conception of his mature philosophical project as the only alternative to the ascetic ideal,

and thus as the only avenue for affirmation. It is not merely an aes-thetic category, but one that encompasses the very character of self- determining (or “self-creating”) agency. The tragic character of self-determining agency, I shall claim, stems from the conflict between the local, practice-dependent character of our normative commitments and their transcendent purport. My argument will run as such. Becoming what one is, according to Nietzsche, is a matter of taking a particular place in a narrative of self-creation. Such narratives are teleological: they are structured by a kind of directionality (or, more broadly, by “ideals”) that cannot, practically, be taken as arbitrary. But these narratives are inevitably incomplete, and so therefore are the norms and selves that depend on them.

The very project of a genealogy of morals supports my first claim, that becoming what one is involves a matter of taking a particular place in a narrative of self-creation.1 The Genealogy of Morals begins with the declaration that we are unknown to ourselves, and the explanation it provides of this shortcoming, that we have never sought ourselves, is expanded by means of a temporal metaphor: the bell-strokes of our life that we do not think to reckon until after they have passed. What we have failed to accomplish, and what the genealogy attempts to recover, is a diachronic account of who we are. This missing story covers the singular as well as the collective “we.” The end of the story, Nietzsche



claims, is the “sovereign individual,”2 and this notion is presumably governed by his general claim: “all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically drawn together elude definition; only that which has no history is definable” (GM, 2.13). Of course it does not follow from this that everything indefinable has a history, but the special elusiveness of modern individuality seems due to the complexity of its narrative source. And not only individuality in general, but also the particular individual, seems to have a narrative basis. In the book subtitled “How one becomes what one is,” in the section that promises the “real answer to the question, how one becomes what one is” (EH “clever,” 9), Nietzsche offers this account of personal development:

One must keep the entire surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface—clean of any great imperatives. Beware even of every great word, every great posture! Sheer danger, that the instinct comes to “understand itself” too soon—meanwhile the organizing “idea” with a calling to rule grows and grows deep down—it begins to command, it slowly heads back from detours and wrong ways, it prepares single qualities and competencies that will one day prove to be indispensable as means to a whole—it in turn trains all subservient faculties before giving any hint of the dominat-ing task, “goal,” “end,” “meaning.”

The individual, Nietzsche suggests, cannot be understood in terms of anything available to her consciousness, and not even in terms of any “great imperative” or “great word.” Instead Nietzsche accounts for individuality, and in fact his own individuality, in terms of a meaning-fulness available in terms of the familiar tropes of journeys and roads, and growing and commanding.

This passage from Ecce Homo suggests not merely a narrative, but one with a teleology, even if only a retrospectively apparent one. Narratives of self cannot be random or arbitrary; their meaningfulness depends on the structure provided by some kind of directionality: in Nietzsche’s words, a dominant “task” or “goal.” This directionality is invoked by Nietzsche, for example, with the “teachers of the purpose of existence” of The Gay Science’s opening section and with the famous “formula of our happiness” of The Antichrist’s opening section: “a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.” The Genealogy of Morals provides a general account of this directionality in terms of a “progressus.”

I would like to say that even partial becoming useless, atrophying and degen-erating, loss of meaning and purposiveness, in short, death, belongs to the

557Robert Guay

conditions of a genuine progressus, which always appears in the shape of a will and a way to greater power and is always carried through at the expense of numerous smaller powers. The extent of an “advance” can even be measured by the mass of what must be sacrificed to it . . . . (GM, 2.12)

Nietzsche’s account here suggests that all teleology is retrospective, since the progressus is governed by the most recent power-relation rather than the original one. And the appeal to the “way to greater power” suggests a further condition on the directionality of narratives. The directionality must be governed by something that transcends any particular incident or feature internal to the narrative, all of which are “sacrificed.” In the context of the individual, a normative commitment that must seem compelling and unrevisable—a kind of “fatum” (AOM, preface; BGE, 231; CW, 2; TI “morality,” 6; EH “wise,” 6; A, 1)—plays this role. “The individual,” says Nietzsche, “should be consecrated to something supra-personal—that is what tragedy demands” (RWB, 4; compare GS, 346). Ideals with transcendent purport furnish the horizon of meaning upon which the narrative whole depends. One’s life can only make sense in terms of commitments that transcend the individual person.

My third claim, that narratives of self are inevitably incomplete, is supported by Nietzsche’s frequent claims that he is not erecting any new idols or creating a new morality.3 The narrative structure relies, for its integrity, on its governing normative commitments. But those commitments do not derive from anything beyond their provisional status as determining the structure of the narrative. In this case, these commitments can never be fully redeemed. They function as wagers about what will effectively structure our personal narratives, but the outcome of such wagers must be perpetually deferred; some greater power might yet arise and usurp the teleology. Thus, in the absence of idols, the status of our narratives and accordingly our selves is always provisional. This is perhaps what Nietzsche had in mind when, in the first passage I quoted from Ecce Homo, he said that the tragic pathos involves “Yes-saying to opposition and war, becoming, with a radical rejection of the very concept ‘being’” (EH BT, 3). There is no stable human telos; against time, nothing stands firm. Human existence is fundamentally “an imperfect tense that can never become a perfect one” (HL, 1).4 A past which is not wholly ours, a present which is not a conclusion, and a future which is yet to be determined contribute to making our narra-tives unstable and incomplete. The integrity of the individual and her agency is thus an aspiration that can never be fully realized.5


Nietzsche therefore insisted that any possible affirmation will be “tragic” in character: it will provoke unavoidable conflicts which under-mine self-understanding and thus cause a failure to “become what one is.” The meanings of our lives depend on many factors outside of our control—the past, the future, the contingencies of the public realm—and these suffuse any self-understanding with a plurality of irreconcilable narratives that render a stable and coherent identity impossible. Trag-edy is accordingly not merely a mode of emplotment or an allegorical imposition on the genealogy of values.6 Rather, just as tragedies “have to do with precisely what is incurable, unavoidable, inescapable in human character and destiny” (AOM, 23), the tragic in life is inextricable from distinctively human aspiration. The issue is a practical one, rather than a metaphysical one; the belief in a “moral world order”(A, 25–26) is just, what, according to Nietzsche, fails to ground any meaningfulness. But making sense of one’s life, giving it a direction, shaping it for oneself, are all conditioned by the ultimate destruction of whatever order can temporarily be established.

The tragic destruction of individual integrity manifests itself, on an “ideal” level, in all the familiar torments of a rarefied consciousness: perplexity, disappointment, lacunae in one’s self-image, anomie, despair. But there is a more basic experience of what Blondel has called “the contradictions of becoming,”7 namely pain:

In the mystery teachings, pain is pronounced holy: the “labor pains of the woman” sanctify all pain—all becoming and growing, everything that guarantees a future requires pain . . . So that there may be the eternal joy of creating, so that the will to life may eternally affirm itself, there must also be the eternal “labor agony.” . . . All this is what the word “Dionysus” means: I know of no symbolism higher than this Greek symbolism of the Dionysian. In it the deepest instinct of life, that toward the future of life, the eternity of life, is experience religiously—the very way to life, procre-ation, as the holy way . . . . (TI “ancients,” 4)

Pain has no intrinsic value, and it is not inevitable.8 But it is inextri-cable from creation: making a life for oneself involves pain, so when life is hallowed, pain must be hallowed, too. An ethical outlook that promises the potential eliminability of pain takes away the resources to make sense of the future. And this is precisely the problem with the moral outlook: in producing its meanings it destroys the conditions for future meaningfulness. So the point of a tragic philosophy is neither to embrace pain as meaningful, nor to seek true worth in a life apart from

559Robert Guay

pain. The point of a tragic philosophy is that the very experience of profound lack and loss can also be the erotic promise of future life.9

That pain is inextricable from becoming and growing is not, for Nietzsche, some sort of unfortunate physiological fact, but part of the conditions of what it means for us to grow: “The most spiritual persons, given that they are also the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but just for that reason they honor life, because it sets the greatest opposition against them” (TI “skirmishes,” 17, empha-sis added). We who have made ourselves “spiritual” are thereby more susceptible to pain. The commitments that we hold leave us caring about matters that would otherwise not affect us; modern personality is accordingly “very easily hurt” and “tender” (TI “skirmishes,” 37). But this susceptibility grants us the resources to distinguish what is worth our honor: only against the background of opposition are accomplishments meaningful as such, and only against the “greatest opposition” is life meaningful as such.10 Tragedy is thus the condition in which we may suf-fer, but we may also triumph, and indeed triumph in the mere availability of triumph: “Bravery and freedom of feeling before a powerful enemy, before a sublime disaster, before a problem that arouses horror—this triumphant state is what the tragic artist chooses, what he glorifies. Before tragedy, what is warlike in our soul celebrates its Saturnalia; whoever is used to suffering, whoever calls on suffering, the heroic person praises his being with tragedy . . .” (TI “skirmishes,” 24). One comes to one’s own first-personhood by standing up against opposition, and the sublimity of that opposition is more important than any conclusive victory. “The free person is a warrior ” (TI “skirmishes,” 38), according to Nietzsche, and tragedy provides the battlefield on which to find oneself. We thus gain ourselves by confronting our tragic conditions.

The contingency and open-endedness of our narratives allow for dan-gerously unpredictable but meaningful transformations; in the words of Zarathustra, “midnight too is noon” (Z, 4.19.10): the inevitable darkness is what conditions possibility.11 Our attachments and our agency take their shape under conditions which lie menacingly beyond our control. Much of what we are is the unchosen determination of fate—necessity, whether natural or otherwise.12 This forms a limitation, but without such limitation there would be no such thing as a want, no such thing as a desire, and nothing held dear. These only emerge as possibilities in an intractable world. And as much as we manage to satisfy our desires, there is always something left to want, and therefore some direction to give to our activity. But if we were relieved from contingency, we would


not want anything; there would be nothing to move us, and nothing could turn on our successes and failures.

This is why Nietzsche’s model of tragedy is an erotic one. Life is attrac-tive, ultimately, because of an erotic attachment to it. Eros sometimes finds satisfaction, sometimes is responsible for immense, painful longing, and is sometimes simply destructive. Tragic wisdom incorporates the recognition that this situation is inevitable: there is no stable equilibrium between desire and satisfaction. Eros cannot be satisfied once and for all: satisfaction only leads to new cravings; any quest for a complete and per-manent satisfaction that does not look past itself is bound to fail. There is no end to desire, no way to contain the destructive power of eros. Or if there were, it would at the least make us shallow and uninteresting in succeeding; conclusive success there would produce the “last men” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for whom desire is a question mark, and who without desire quite literally have no future.13 So more fundamental to any tragic ethics than achievement or satisfaction would be an account of the purposiveness of future “self-overcoming” (BGE, 257).14

There are inevitable shortcomings in becoming what one is; the contin-gencies of this existence and the boundlessness of desire guarantee that there can be no satisfactory conclusion to the process. But our ability to stand apart from our own fatality and nevertheless endure, if only for a while, only confirms the integrity of this existence and its ideals. We may be destroyed, ultimately, but we are the ones who are destroyed, and who can recognize our destruction. Tragedy is affirmative: it confirms the integrity of our agency and the value of this existence.15

Binghamton University

I wish to thank audiences at Warwick, Auburn, and the American Society for Aesthetics Eastern Division for helping me to clarify and improve this paper, and in particular: Paul Crowe, Richard Eldridge, John Gibson, Carol Gould, Jody Graham, Kelly Jolley, Dave McNeil, Eric Marcus, Matt Meyer, and Sarah Worth.

1. For support of a similar claim, see A. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), chap. 6.

2. F. Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, 2.2, quoted from Kritische Studienausgabe, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, eds. (New York: de Gruyter, 1980), volume 5; translation is mine. Works by Nietzsche are cited in the text by fragment or section number; transla-

561Robert Guay

tions are mine and emphasis is original unless otherwise noted. Works are identified by the standard North American Nietzsche Society abbreviations, namely: A (Der Antichrist), AOM (Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche), BGE ( Jenseits von Gut und Böse), BT (Die Geburt der Tragödie), CW (Der Fall Wagner), EH (Ecce Homo), GM (Zur Genealogie der Moral), GS (Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft), HL (Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben), KSA (Kritische Studienausgabe), RWB (Richard Wagner in Bayreuth), TI (Die Götzendammerung), and Z (Also Sprach Zarathustra).

3. See, for example, EH pref 2.

4. See V. Gerhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche (München: Beck, 1995): “Tragedy results merely from the fact that the human being has a history and must further make history” (p. 96).

5. Contrast G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 17, for whom “the essence of the tragic” is “joy of multiplicity.” Identifying the tragic with joy seems one-sided by neglecting, ironically, the Dionysian sparagmos for Dionysian rebirth or Oedipus as scapegoat for Oedipus as hero. And any one-sidedness, if the main point concerns “multiplicity,” would be a substantial flaw: “joy” at “anguish and disgust” probably obliterates rather than mediates multiplicity.

6. See H. White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), and Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

7. E. Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, trans. Seán Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 49.

8. For a contrary view, see W. Dudley, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 198–205.

9. Also see BGE 225, cited by David Owen, “Nietzsche, Re-Evaluation, and the Turn to Genealogy,” European Journal of Philosophy 11.3 (2003): 259.

10. For a similar discussion of tragic susceptibility from Aristotelian and Kantian per-spectives, see R. Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 147–51 and 160–63.

11. One can find a parallel metaphor, in which cyclical time is represented as overlap-ping itself at the points of growth/opportunity and decline/completion, at BGE 257: “calamitous simultaneity of spring and fall.”

12. For an extended discussion of the relation of “natural facts about people” to the conditions of their agency, see David Owen and Aaron Ridley, “On Fate,” International Studies in Philosophy 35 (2003): 63–78.

13. Z pref 5; compare the commentary on “destroying the passions” in TI “morality” 1.

14. Compare the ideal of “great health,” as expressed in GS 382 which is also quoted by Nietzsche in EH Z 2: “such a health that one does not merely have but also con-tinually acquires, and must acquire, because one always relinquishes it again, and must relinquish it!”

IS OEDIPUS SMART?

by Charles B. Daniels

What does it amount to, to ask whether Oedipus is smart, intel-ligent, clever? I take this to mean that he is quicker than most

to gain understanding about difficult matters. Now, does Sophocles in Oedipus Rex portray Oedipus to be an intelligent, clever man?

The Yes Answer

A “yes” answer to the title question may rest upon three grounds:Y1. Everyone in the play, including Oedipus himself and the citizens

of Thebes who have been his subjects for some 15 to 20 years, everyone, that is, save Teiresias, thinks that Oedipus is intelligent.

Y2. In both legend and Sophocles’ play, the only person smart enough to solve the Sphinx’s riddle is Oedipus. Everyone in the play, as well as in the play’s audiences, knows that Oedipus has solved the Sphinx’s riddle. This is a major reason why everyone in the play, again except-ing Teiresias, believes Oedipus to have a first-class mind. Oedipus is renown for this deed and thought by his subjects to be very clever in doing of it.

Y3. John P. Carroll, in his interesting study of the extraordinary num-ber of questions posed by Oedipus in Oedipus Rex (one in each nine lines of text uttered by him), concludes, “King Oedipus was endowed at birth with the heritage of the ‘riddler’s mind,’ which by constant use throughout the course of his life he sharpened and brought to greater


563Charles B. Daniels

perfection than it ever had had in his parents.”1 Oedipus is clever because he has a “riddler’s mind”: he asks lots of questions.

Y1, Y2, and Y3, I believe, constitute the sole evidential textual base for the “yes” response to the title question.2

The No Answer

The “no” answer, the view that Oedipus is not clever, rests upon four grounds:

N1. The first consists of events from Oedipus’ past that took place prior to the opening scene of the play and hence do not occur on stage. These are disclosed as the play progresses and its characters relate in dialogue what they believe to have taken place. We discover that Oedi-pus has lived his entire adult life with unresolved doubts about who his parents are. Worse yet, at the very beginning of his adult life, his inquiry at the Delphic Oracle met with terrible, enigmatic pronouncements that raised the ante on these doubts and made the tenor of his whole subsequent life up to the present worrisome to say the least. We learn of six questions of high moment to Oedipus—questions that touch him as profoundly as did the Sphinx’s riddle, “What walks on two, three, and four legs?”—questions which he continues to be aware of and yet has not resolved, or in some cases even probed. A truly clever person, one with a “riddler’s mind,” would have done so. But the mature Oedipus we meet at the beginning of the play has yet to puzzle out correct answers to the questions:

(1) Where did the scars on my feet come from?(2) Who are my real parents, Polybus and Merope, or some other

couple?(3) How can I best avoid doing the terrible things the Oracle foretells

I shall do—killing my father and marrying my mother—given I am not sure who my father and mother really are?

(4) Is this old man who has just forced me off the road and arrogantly swatted me from his passing carriage my father?

(5) Who killed the king whose throne I have just been given?(6) Is this widow I am about to marry my mother?

The Oedipus we see at the beginning of the play is a man who has solved the riddle of the Sphinx, but has not solved a single one of these six questions from his own past life, which, it turns out, are easily of comparable importance to him.


N2. Another source of evidence in support of a “no” answer consists of failures on Oedipus’ part to evince a quick wit concerning two puzzles that arise in the dramatic present among the events we see unfold on stage:

(1) The riddles posed to Oedipus by Teiresias. Teiresias is by no means all knowing, but he at least knows the answers to the six questions from Oedipus’ past. This may explain in part why he is so averse to helping Oedipus in his investigation of Laius’ death. It is not a good idea to enter a powerful, proud, easily angered king’s court where one will be put in a position of having to accuse him of loathsome acts and being responsible for everything that has recently gone wrong. Doing so is likely to get one charged with conspiracy! But Oedipus finally gets Teiresias’ goat, and Teiresias responds by cast-ing his accusations as a string of riddles that put Oedipus’ supposed “riddler’s mind” to the test.

(2) The oracular puzzle posed at the beginning of the play: who is the killer of Laius, whose presence in Thebes is responsible for the plague and blight that now befalls the city?

Despite the fact that Teiresias’ riddles echo those put forward to Oedipus years before at Delphi, Oedipus still fails the test completely; he does not penetrate or even recognize them. And as to the riddle that drives the play, Oedipus is agonizingly slow at coming to the realization that his own presence in Thebes is responsible for the ills that now plague the city.

N3. The third source of evidence on the “no” side is akin to the first on the “yes” side. While all the personages of the play, save Teiresias, believe Oedipus to be intelligent, Teiresias thinks the opposite, that Oedipus is not intelligent. And Teiresias is acknowledged to be the best of all when it comes to discerning the truth. Teiresias is not omni-scient. At times he fails to have an opinion; he had no answer to the Sphinx’s riddle. But we find in the play not a single instance where he is mistaken and holds erroneous opinions. When the prophetic mood is on him, he sees the truth. Teiresias knows the answers to the six questions about Oedipus. Although he does not dare say so directly, he has a low opinion of Oedipus’ mental powers—probably based upon his knowledge that Oedipus throughout his whole adult life has been unable to answer the six questions. That is why, when goaded to anger by Oedipus, and by Oedipus’ crowing about his own cleverness when confronting the Sphinx, Teiresias ironically shows Oedipus up by casting

565Charles B. Daniels

them as puzzles which Oedipus and his vaunted intellect are unable to see through and resolve.

N4. The final source of support on the “no” side derives from Oedipus’ desperately defensive behavior during the course of the play. He simply does not act like a man with a rational, quick-witted mind. Without a shred of evidence, he hastily, irresponsibly, and publicly accuses first his brother-in-law, Creon, and then Teiresias, of masterminding Laius’ murder. He later accuses his wife, Jocasta, of caring mainly about her own social status and the pedigree of the man she is married to, without twigging to what is really of concern to her, his own welfare.

When one weighs the evidence Sophocles presents, the “no” side wins hands down. Oedipus is definitely not the clever man he thinks himself to be. The preponderance of evidence argues that Oedipus’ correct response to the Sphinx’s riddle should be viewed as a fluke and not as a sign of Oedipus’ intellectual prowess.3

Further Argument

Let me now return to the “yes” answer and respond to additional argument that might be raised in defense of Y1, as well as Y3.

Many of Oedipus’ fellow citizens have watched him govern for fifteen to twenty years. They are not fools. In their opinion he is an intelligent, clever leader. This is how Sophocles chose to portray his countrymen’s view of him. How can a responsible reader take exception to the evi-dence Sophocles clearly provides and claim that this widely-held view is wrong?

Sophocles also clearly provides other, conflicting evidence to read-ers, the bulk of which is unavailable at the beginning of the play to all but one of Oedipus’ subjects. The Theban citizens who are pres-ent when the play opens all believe that the mystery of Laius’ murder remains unsolved, and hence has not been solved by Oedipus. But apart from question 5, that Oedipus has not solved 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 of N1 is unknown to everyone save Teiresias. No one else knows what Teiresias knows about Oedipus’ role in Laius’ death, and furthermore nobody is clever enough to understand it when Teiresias comes out publicly and tells it—in riddle form. So no one in the play at the beginning, save Teiresias and Oedipus himself, has access to the contrary evidence which gradually emerges as the play progresses and supports the view that Oedipus is not smart.

If he had chosen, Sophocles could easily have provided reference


in the opening of the play to other exploits, apart from solving the Sphinx’s riddle, in which Oedipus is believed by the citizens of Thebes to have acted cleverly. Sophocles opts not to do this. I conclude that, so far as Sophocles wishes us to think, Oedipus’ intellectual fame among his subjects rests entirely upon the Sphinx encounter. So far as we have evidence, his reputation among his fellow citizens has coasted along on its own momentum since that time.

As to the interesting technique of question counting, the short reply is simply to note that clever people need not puzzle over lots of questions, and those who do pose lots of questions need not be clever. Oedipus takes on the job of investigating an old murder. An important part of this job is seeking answers, hence posing questions. So we can expect investigators, good and bad, to do this. Doing it does not show the inves-tigator to be smart. Too bad Oedipus was not sufficiently intellectually motivated earlier in his life to press ahead posing questions, investigat-ing, and trying to resolve the doubts that troubled him concerning his parentage. If he had been, it might not have taken him a good portion of his adult life and an amazing conflux of circumstances before the truth about his parents belatedly came home to him.

Vancouver, British Columbia

1. John P. Carroll, “Some Remarks on the Questions in the Oedipus Tyrannus,” Classical Journal 32 (1936–37): 415.

2. I do not count the almost universal acceptance of the ‘yes’ answer by commentators as providing a fourth source of support for that view.

3. Much more detailed discussion of these points and others concerning Sophocles’ Theban plays will be found in Charles Daniels and Sam Scully, What Really Goes on in Sophocles’ Theban Plays (Lanham, N.Y. and London: University Press of America, 1996).

THE GERM OF A SENSE

by Matthew Teichman

I find the account of metaphor offered in Donald Davidson’s “What Metaphors Mean” fascinating for a number of reasons. The overall

argument, that metaphors mean nothing other than what they mean literally, strikes me in many ways as absolutely right, and corrective of a certain tendency both in the humanities and in more popular forms of criticism to use the word “meaning” where it doesn’t apply. Of course, the other M word also has its history of abuse, whereby it often becomes a sort of last resort for closing down all discussion or counterargument: “You’re missing the point—I was only being metaphorical.” In these con-texts “literal-mindedness” seems to take on a pejorative flavor, as though appealing to some clichéd stereotype of the math nerd whose every attempt to read a poem leaves him dumbfounded. While it is certainly true that metaphoric usages of words are more difficult to understand than their non-metaphoric counterparts, that there is something “extra” required in order to make sense of them, it is easy to fall into thinking that when we do succeed in making sense of them we are making use of a second species of meaning. Davidson’s proposal is that we correct this sort of false picture by, as it were, uncrossing the wires; directing our attention to literal meaning is perfectly appropriate because it gives us a way of understanding more fully what metaphor is not.

In what exactly this extra machinery might consist is of course the impossible question, on which Davidson remains understandably silent. One would suppose his model to fit more or less exactly with a picture of language that takes meaning to be the currency of compositional



semantics, and that nameless “something else” (“use,” or “implied mean-ing,” or whatever) to be the currency of pragmatics. Let metaphors “mean” only what it is that they mean regardless of their context, and leave the question of what it is that they “do” to your preferred theory of implicature or performative acts, or relevance. Fair enough. We will return later to how this larger perspective leads his theory to be cast in the particular way that it is. What he does end up saying about this mysterious something extra is along these lines: metaphors invite us to make a comparison between two things; they direct our attention to a similarity between them, in much the same way as similes.1 This is obviously not the first time that similes have been invoked as a way of explaining metaphor; indeed, the formula “simile – ‘like’ = metaphor” has even made it into the grammar school curriculum. And how does this work, exactly? Let us imagine the most banal of examples: The Bard writes, “Those are pearls that were his eyes,”2 and we are invited to make a comparison between eyes and pearls, noticing all sorts of similarities; roundness, whiteness, immense value, etc.

Further comparison between metaphors and similes yields the interest-ing observation that all similes are literally true, whereas their metaphoric counterparts are literally false. Our heavily schematized example, “His eyes are (like) pearls,” seems to hold up to this claim. The idea appears to be that “similar” is really a trivial or vacuous predicate, because it is true of any pair of things that they are alike in some way. The way David-son puts it, “This is like that—Tolstoy is like an infant, the earth is like a floor. It is trivial because everything is like everything, and in endless ways.”3 The problem is the following: when I say to you, “His eyes are like pearls,” I am not really saying anything, because everything is like everything. All I am saying is that there exists some similarity between his eyes and pearls, when it is a given that there exists a veritable infinitude of rapports between any pair of things.

Davidson’s claim about similarity opens onto a fundamental problem, for which he doesn’t try to propose any solution. On the one hand he appears to have hit upon an important insight, one that for instance explains why genre theory’s rhetoric of “repetition and yet difference” really isn’t saying anything. The idea that “there exists a relation” is a predicate that can be true of some pairs of things but not others, though extremely awkward, is a prevalent one in many schools of art criticism and aesthetics, particularly as regards questions of hermeneutics. In the face of certain texts it is sometimes claimed in all seriousness that there is no relation between one unit and the next; that, for instance, there is

569Matthew Teichman

no relation between certain pairs of words in the plays of Tristan Tzara or Roger Vitrac. But has this century not proven the critic capable of building a viable exegesis out of virtually any juxtaposition? In cases where the text does not bother to make any meaningful contributions of its own, the only possibility is to place the burden of interpretation on the reader.

On the other hand, can “AreSimilar(x,y)” really be vacuous predicate? For it would seem to be the lynchpin of many a philosophical claim. Are we to conclude that, for example, the analogy in §11 of the Philosophical Investigations between the functions of tools and the functions of words is merely an inconsequential statement? That would certainly be a pity, for it is one of the book’s most illuminating remarks on the range of ways in which we use the term “meaning.” It must be doing something of value. So then should we reject the idea that all similes are literally true on the ground that it unfairly trivializes the simile? I don’t think we have to do that either; the fact is that we use similes meaningfully all the time, and what the observation that everything is like everything should reveal is that rather than pointing out the mere existence of a similarity (which is all they do literally), similes draw our attention to a specific similarity (or set of similarities, possibly).

To turn once again to the similative half of our admittedly boring example, the question then remains about how exactly the one significant or important similarity between pearls and his eyes is to be extracted from the mere declaration that similarities between them exist. On this matter all Davidson has to offer is that to which likeness our attention is directed depends upon the context of the uttered comparison. And so common sense furnishes us with two possible explanations for the functioning of similes: a) When I say “His eyes are like pearls,” I am thinking of one correspondence in particular, say that they are white, and your job is to reconstruct my thought, and b) When I say “His eyes are like pearls,” a specific relation between the two (that they are white; let’s say that in this example we were discussing the dynamic range of a photograph) can be made to fit the context in which I said it, and your job is to compute the best fit. The metaphoric half of the example should work in nearly the same way, except that where the simile is true, the metaphor “His eyes are pearls” is false. The search for the relevant similarity between his eyes and pearls, however, should be the same. (a) holds the listener to rather unreasonable expectations; (b) seems to work, but it relies on a theory of meaning that separates truth-conditional content, which is ahistorical and context-independent, from the use to


which that meaning is put. I will not attempt to overthrow this view, as it certainly has its attraction, but only to suggest a possible alternative.

There is a third explanation, which I find appealing because it brings out an underlying tension within this picture of metaphor and points to a larger overhaul of the theory that can resolve the tension while preserving its insights. The late Wittgenstein leads us straight to it.4

I

§85 of the Investigations offers us the dilemma of the signpost:

A rule stands there like a sign-post.—Does the sign-post leave no doubt open about the way I have to go? Does it shew which direction I am to take when I have passed it; whether along the road or the footpath or cross-country? But where is it said which way I am to follow it; whether in the direction of its finger or (e.g.) in the opposite one?—And if there were, not a single sign-post, but a chain of adjacent ones or of chalk marks on the ground, is there only one way of interpreting them?

The implications of what “stands there like a signpost” might mean are spelled out in §454: “How does it come about that this arrow → points? Doesn’t it seem to carry in it something besides itself? . . . The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.” What is it exactly that we bring to this splotch of ink in order to determine which way it points, or even that it points? An interpretation, perhaps? As we soon find out, that temporary solution has its problems.

The rule-following passages go against a certain idealization of lan-guage (possibly Tractarian), one that assimilates the rule to its expression (which is probably why it could just as well have started off by saying, “The expression of a rule stands there like a signpost”5). When I write, “1, 4, 9, 16, 25” I have an understandable temptation to say that the rule to which I am adhering is y = x2. But is “y = x2” the rule itself or only an expression of it? A second glance reveals that it in itself is not the rule, because anything with which we cannot say that a new input chosen at random either will or will not be in accord has to lose can-didacy for being a rule. We would like to think that there is only one way of understanding the formula y = x2, that it describes a continuum of moves already made in advance; but the fact is that we only arrive at an idea of what “x2” might mean through our everyday experience with examples of quantities squared. And it is clear, from §185 or any

571Matthew Teichman

argument of the “quus” persuasion,6 that those examples in themselves describe not merely one continuum, but as many as we please.

The idea that the expression of a rule “just stands there like a sign-post,” as Kripke suspects, poses a threat not only to the act of writing numbers in a series, but of meaning anything at all. For clearly it is not only expressions like “x2” that we learn to use through example, but also expressions like “is a cherry.” Language acquisition data attests to the fact that the situation in §185 can reproduce itself in the case of learning any word; a child will seem to have grasped its meaning, then suddenly an unforeseen situation will lead him to use it incorrectly. So how is it that we ever mean anything?

Is this not exactly the sort of dilemma that Davidson raised with regard to metaphor? The purpose of a metaphor is to draw our attention to a similarity between two things, but on the question of what similarity, the metaphor in itself tells us very little; in a way it does seem to stand there like a signpost. I say, “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” but there is absolutely nothing encoded in that statement that can direct me to how those pearls “were” his eyes. To use the language of §201, no one similarity can be determined by a metaphor, because every similar-ity can be made out to accord with it. This is how the skeptical paradox presents itself, but of course Wittgenstein doesn’t stop here, and neither should we. In practice, of course words have meanings; expressions of rules do not just stand there like signposts. We read them all the time and are able to grasp their sense; able to determine what accords with them and what conflicts.

Wittgenstein’s solution to the signpost problem comes in §201, which I will present slightly out of order. At the end of the passage we have an attractive redefinition of the very idea of interpretation: “But we ought to restrict the term ‘interpretation’ to the substitution of one expres-sion of the rule for another.” Innocent as it may seem, this remark is rather helpful in avoiding confusions around terms like “interpretation,” “meaning,” “understanding,” etc., which frequently have a way of being thrown around as synonyms. Here “interpretation” is given a much more specific meaning (something closer to “glossing,” it seems) whereby my interpreting the word “crimson” consists not in understanding it in a certain way, but merely in replacing the word with another expression, like “deep red.” Since an expression of a rule also stands there like a signpost, making recourse to an interpretation in order to grasp the meaning of an expression is only replacing one signpost with another; if we claim that this is the only path towards understanding, we have


indeed led ourselves into an infinite regress. The solution comes at the beginning of the passage:

This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.

It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases.

So there is a way of grasping a rule that is not an interpretation; a way of grasping it that is not a substitution of one expression of the rule for another. This notion of interpretation helps us to see the difference between the written formula “y = x2” and the rule that it represents, just as it helps us to see the difference between “deep red” and what that constituent of words means. Substituting one expression of a rule for another helps to make clear how we are understanding it, but the expression itself is not to be confused with our understanding. It isn’t as if the moment when I know how to go on is the moment when I think of the formula “y = x2.”

And what is this way of grasping a rule that is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call “obeying the rule” and “going against it”? §198 suggests that we should think of it as a custom: “. . . I have further indicated that a person goes by a sign-post only in so far as there exists a regular use of sign-posts, a custom.” So it is a custom that allows us to make actual use of signposts, rather than merely leaving them to stand where they may; it is a custom that determines whether I am pointing in the direction of my fingertip or my wrist. To this idea John McDowell adds the following coloring:

I have been urging that we should avoid the threat by not letting the regress start—by not letting it seem that the concept of interpretation must be in play if the concept of accord is to be secured its application. [§198] suggests that we can avoid that appearance by insisting on a bit of common sense about following a sign-post. When one follows an ordinary sign-post, one is not acting on an interpretation. That gives an overly cerebral cast to such routine behavior.7

573Matthew Teichman

What this passage argues explicitly is that an appeal to custom is an appeal to training in a technique, but what it also suggests to me is that following a custom can be thought of as following a set of habits (which habits are put into place by earlier training). If claiming that we need to make use of interpretations in order to follow signposts is a sort of over-intellectualization or over-theorization of the way in which we actually use them, then perhaps what we want to say is that the process of following a custom is something habitual or automatic. The notion of the custom as habit fits rather well with commonsense intuitions about how meaning actually works; when parsing a typical sentence I do not have to reflect on it critically in order to understand it; rather, my grasping of it is almost a reflex. This face of the question will come to have its worthwhile ramifications.

If the problem of interpreting the signpost is at all analogous to the problem of reading a metaphor, the obvious next question is whether Wittgenstein’s solution to the regress of interpretations also applies. After all, metaphor is burdened with its own problems of infinite regress, as evidenced by the frequent complaint that accounts of metaphor them-selves are never anything but metaphorical, or more generally that in philosophy we can never escape metaphor. I would say the possibility of bringing in the appeal to custom looks promising. But first we have to sort out a tangle that has been threatening to germinate ever since we began noticing the similarities between the workings of meaning and the workings of metaphor. What of Davidson’s central thesis, that there is no specially metaphoric meaning? Will noting the simile/signpost parallel bring us forcibly to the conclusion that there is nothing left at all to distinguish metaphor and meaning?

Yes and no. It is not necessary to resort to so strong a conclusion, but there are notable counterexamples to Davidson’s hypothesis that meta-phoric usage is located strictly outside the domain of meaning; namely, intermediate cases—usages that are particularly colorful and suggestive, but for which it is difficult to decide firmly whether we are dealing with metaphor. Think, for instance, of the various equivalents for “kill” and try to decide whether they are metaphors or synonyms: dispose of, do (someone) in, liquidate, terminate, take care of, eliminate, etc.8 When I say, “I took care of Bob,” am I speaking poetically, or am I just saying that I killed him? I almost want to say that there is a tendency in any skilled writer to produce texts that teem with such borderline cases. Consider the following passage:


As we all know our own faults, and know them commonly with many aggravations which human perspicacity cannot discover, there is, per-haps, no man, however hardened by impudence or dissipated by levity, sheltered by hypocrisy, or blasted by disgrace, who does not intend some time to review his conduct, and to regulate the remainder of his life by the laws of virtue.9

Are “hardened,” “sheltered,” “dissipated,” and “blasted” being used literally or as metaphors? It is difficult to say.

II

At the moment we seem to be in a bind, but all that is required to extricate us from it is an ordinary fact about diachronic semantic change: that over time, metaphoric usages become meanings. A few examples for the unconvinced: French feuille “leaf, sheet of paper” is derived from “leaf,” French entendre “to hear” from “to understand,” French fermer “to close” from “to fix, make firm or fast,” English chill “to calm down” from “to cool,” and English stud “good-looking man” from “a male animal used for breeding.”10 Indeed, it is revealing that so many of the terms used traditionally to describe lexical semantic change are the tropes of classical rhetoric (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, litotes, hyperbole, etc.).

The phenomenon referred to as “grammaticalization” is perhaps a more extreme example. Lyle Campbell characterizes it as follows: “. . . where an independent word with independent meaning may develop into an auxiliary word and, if the process continues, it ends up as a grammatical marker or bound grammatical morpheme.”11 A noun, let’s say, might start off with an ordinary sense, begin to widen its meaning into something more metaphorical, and eventually become purely grammatical. For example, the French “pas” originally meant only “step.” Next it began to populate expressions like “not one step,” which through repeated usage came to mean “not one bit.” Finally, it was absorbed completely into the morphology of the language’s negation, today meaning “not.” Here the term in question really seems to have gone from one extreme to the other.12

So it seems as though we have good reason to think of metaphors as meanings in the making; as “proto-meanings.” What I am suggest-ing is that we change the flavor of Davidson’s suggestion by adding to “whatever metaphors are up to apart from their literal meaning is not

575Matthew Teichman

itself a variety of meaning” a modest “. . . yet.” What had its debut as a synchronic theory about which metaphorical reading best fits the context of the metaphor’s utterance now becomes a story about how new meanings are spawned. And the late Wittgensteinian picture of language turns it into a fascinating one.

What §201 can bring to these considerations is the idea that a meta-phor is the beginning of a practice; that it lays the groundwork for the eventual blossoming of a custom. It is the kernel of a usage which, if it catches on, will solidify into an institution; a custom into which one can be initiated by training. If, on the other hand, it is not put into continual use, it will remain a metaphor. The sense in which a custom is habitual is useful here, because it explains why metaphors require more work in order to be understood. The more consolidated the custom, the more habitual it becomes; therefore the less the exertion required to make sense of an expression that relies on it. My suspicion is that this is exactly why formulations of the sort proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson rely on notions such as “processing effort”; under their view humans automatically aim at maximal relevance, which is maximal cognitive effect for minimal processing effort. Metaphoric usages, in a way, strive to be non-metaphoric; though they require more in the way of mental labor, they strive to come as close to meaning as they can (given that meaning involves almost no processing effort, at least com-paratively). The principle of relevance could be said to be the driving force behind the shift from metaphor to meaning.13

There is a tension in Davidson’s original account: on the one hand there seems to be a natural inclination to explain metaphor in terms of “a second meaning,” but on the other hand whatever it is that meta-phors seem to accomplish beyond their literal meaning really can’t be understood as any kind of meaning at all. His thesis does a good job of explaining what some would take to be the defining property of a metaphoric usage: its inability to be paraphrased (i.e., if a metaphor has a second meaning, it should be perfectly glossable). But incorporating Wittgenstein’s solution to the infinite regress preserves this explanation, recognizing what distinguishes metaphor from meaning (or at least what distinguishes it for the time being), while also giving us a way of understanding why it is so tempting to think of metaphoric usage as a second meaning. It isn’t quite a second meaning, but something rather like it: a second meaning in the offing.

Davidson of course insists on the distinction between meaning and use, a distinction that would appear to be very much at odds with the


Wittgensteinian notion of meaning, which is nothing other than “the use of the word in a language” (§43). I will do my best, however, to hold back from fully contrasting the two, for it is neither clear to me whether Davidson intends his term “use” to mean anything like Wittgenstein’s, nor whether Wittgenstein is categorically opposed to anything we might want to call compositional semantics (though passages like the end of §49, and, if Cora Diamond is right, the austere conception of nonsense do make it seem that way).14 As far as I can tell, focusing on the fact that metaphors evolve into meanings does not necessitate our adopting one of these models of meaning and rejecting the other, so I suppose that for now I will leave the question of which is more useful up to the preference of the reader.

Interestingly enough, Davidson makes an allusion to the scenario I am considering, under the rubric of the “dead metaphor”:

Once upon a time, I suppose, rivers and bottles did not, as they do now, literally have mouths . . . when ‘mouth’ applied only metaphorically to bottles, the application made the hearer notice a likeness between animal and bottle openings. (Consider Homer’s reference to wounds as mouths.) Once one has the present use of the word, with literal application to bottles, there is nothing left to notice. There is no similarity to seek because it consists simply in being referred to by the same word.15

This is a particularly pregnant example. As if a galaxy filled with stars at different stages in their life cycle, “mouth” is a constellation of three usages, none of which has vanished entirely from the cosmos: (a) its first literal meaning (mouth of an animal), (b) a second literal meaning which was once a metaphor (mouth of a river or bottle), and (c) a usage that is still metaphorical (the Homeric mouth-wounds). The data are all here; each meaning has been preserved side by side. The language of “death” is interesting here; in what sense has the metaphor died? We may be inclined to picture the following scenario: in the era during which “mouth” had only one meaning, I say to you “Meet me by the mouth of the river.” My saying this to you invites you to make a comparison between some part of the river and mouths. There are an infinite number of possible cor-respondences; was I talking about the part of the river that “talks,” or the part of the river that “eats,” or the part of the river that “breathes,” etc.—which similarity did I mean for you to notice? Suddenly, something allows you to grasp what I was probably talking about: the part of the river that opens onto the sea. What was this mysterious force that allowed you to grasp it? In the end it wasn’t mysterious at all; it was the same instinct

577Matthew Teichman

that allowed you to determine which way my finger was pointing, only much more faint. The metaphor continues to be put into use; to weave itself into everyday practice, and once its usage has become so definitive that the search for similarities shrivels to (to borrow once again from the lexicon of the Tractatus) an extensionless point, it passes from metaphor to meaning. What was once a faint inclination has now become a reflex or (we might say subconscious) habit.

Davidson’s next remark is a bit strange: “Novelty is not the issue. In its context a word once taken for a metaphor remains a metaphor on the hundredth hearing, while a word may easily be appreciated in a new literal role on the first encounter” (p. 499). Not only is this a rather abrupt dismissal of the idea that a metaphor lays the rudiments for a future meaning, but it doesn’t make sense. How can a metaphor be uttered hundreds of times in the same context, any more than Heracli-tus can step into the same river on a hundred separate occasions? Will each utterance not of necessity usher in a new context? Also, I don’t see how it can be anything but unintuitive to say that a word may be easily appreciated in a new literal role on first encounter. Certainly there exist such things as neologisms, but it just seems too indefensible to hold that they can come into use full-blown, as we say, from the head of Zeus.

Neologisms need a significant degree of outside help before they can be understood, and even then it probably wouldn’t be accurate to call the act of computing their meaning “easy,” at least not in the sense that understanding “I tie my shoes” is easy. Consider “yahoo,” for instance, or “nostalgia.” There had been a place waiting for “yahoo” within the larger cultural myth of the explorer who hits upon a land of savages long before the writing of Gulliver’s Travels. The idea, more or less, was already there; this was only a new name for it. “Nostalgia,” originally a medical term, was coined by Johannes Hofer in 1688 as part of a dissertation on his patients’ unfathomable desire to return to their native land.16 But as I understand it (I’ve not read the document), he doesn’t just begin using the term out of the blue with no clarification; it is surrounded by a fair amount of explanation regarding the phenomenon it is supposed to be designating. These are two of many ways in which new words might be kneaded into a language-game (or the game kneaded around them).

Similarly, new metaphors can only be intelligible with the help of the customs or habits that are already in the process of circulating. When Harold Arlen sings about “that same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine” for the first time (supposing that he was the first, in any case), we only have access to the proto-customs that allow us to understand how


“witchcraft” is being used here in virtue of other expressions already in use, ones which draw our attention to the parallels between romance and bewitchment that have been propagating through Western consciousness since Shakespeare and probably before. Likewise, the groundwork for making sense of something like “love is a volcano” will have a difficult time being brought into general use unless something on the order of “love is a flame” has already been in use. It is as if I am encountering a new style of arrow, and can only begin to think about which way it’s pointing by reflecting on my previous experiences with arrows.

§199 seems to be relevant here: “It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood; and so on.” An interesting remark, and one which seems to set up a sort of Catch-22 dilemma for the neologist or coiner of clever metaphors. And what of hapax legomena, words of a language that are attested only once? If there cannot only be one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule, how can anyone have obeyed it for the first time? Does this mean that a group of people must have obeyed it simultaneously? That sounds unlikely. The only explanation that comes to mind is the sort of thing I have been suggesting; that the customs or institutions governing the use of existing words and metaphors must make a place for it in advance, as though letting a new vehicle onto the highway.

University of Pittsburgh

1. Here referring to similes of the “x is like y” rather than of the “as x as a y” variety.

2. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, eds. W. G. Clark and W. Aldis Wright (New York: Halcyon House, n.d.), p. 1055. I will take the liberty of ignoring the complications raised by tense in this quotation.

3. Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in Pragmatics, ed. Stephen Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 500.

4. All Wittgenstein citations are from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1958), and are given by section number.

5. John McDowell made this suggestion during a seminar on Wittgenstein in 2003.

579Matthew Teichman

6. See Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), chap. 2, passim.

7. John McDowell, “Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 276.

8. These examples are cribbed from Lyle Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (Boston: MIT Press, 1999), p. 258.

9. Samuel Johnson, Rasselas: Poems and Selected Prose (New York: Reinhart and Company, Inc., 1958), p. 113.

10. Historical Linguistics, pp. 258–59.

11. Historical Linguistics, p. 238.

12. See Paul J. Hopper, “On Some Principles of Grammaticization,” in Approaches to Grammaticalization, eds. E. C. Traugott and B. Heine (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1991), pp. 24–27.

13. See Dan Sperber and Dierdre Wilson, “Loose Talk,” in Pragmatics, ed. Stephen Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

14. See Cora Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination, and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tracta-tus,” in The New Wittgenstein, eds. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).

15. “What Metaphors Mean,” p. 499.

16. See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 3.

Critical Discussion

SCienCe WarS anD BeyonD

by Harold Fromm

Barbara H. Smith, a professor of comparative and english literature at both Duke and Brown, has read widely in philosophy and the

sciences. “Scandalous knowledge” is her phrase to describe not the “sci-ence wars” (to use the title of the notorious Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text) but the epistemology wars. The chief antagonists in these wars consist, on the one side, of traditional proponents of “classical” philosophy’s normative, analytic, justifying, and stable methodologies and proponents, on the other, of such twentieth-century constructivist epistemologies as those of Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Fou-cault, David Bloor, and Bruno Latour. “The scandal,” Smith explains, is classical philosophy’s “apparent inability to show how, when and why we can be sure that we know something or, indeed, that we know anything” (p. 1). in her well-executed introduction, perhaps the best chapter in the book (for its panoramic picture of today’s “Theory of Knowledge” conflicts), Smith prepares us for her espousal of construc-tivist methodologies but first distinguishes between “epistemological constructivism”—a philosophical methodology with an antagonism toward universal rationalities, philosophical “realism,” in-itselfness, or

Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human, by Barbara Herrnstein Smith; viii & 198 pp. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, $21.95 paper.

Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, by Paul Boghossian; 139 pp. oxford: oxford University Press, 2006, $24.95.


581Harold Fromm

the Correspondence Theory of Truth—and the cultural critique often called “social constructionism,” a distinction she acknowledges to be sometimes difficult and hazy. Social constructionism, a highly political activity, is critical of traditional notions of the normative and is engaged with the workings of cultural critics, ethicists, feminists, gender theorists, critics of institutional power, and the “goes without saying” of mainstream assumptions in the treatment of race, sexuality, the “natural” and the innate. in a word, the global conflict she describes is between “reason” (a contested term) and politics (not very contested, except for who and what are political), between the putative eternal verities of thought and the contingencies of daily life. Whereas a “constructivist” sociologist of science would stress the social, collective, intersubjective, institutional aspects of scientific knowledge, questioning “the standard understandings and treatments of such terms as fact, discovery, evidence, proof, objectivity and, of course, knowledge and science themselves” (p. 7), the “social con-structionist” would be more likely to focus on class, politics, economics, and culture seen as a congeries of power structures.

Smith is particularly distressed by the claims of traditional philosophy when she asks, “May it not be the case that the strict distinctions and divisions of labor that underwrite philosophy’s self-honoring role in the study of science and knowledge beg all the relevant questions and, where maintained, insure philosophy’s self-confinement?” (p. 10). She sees knowledge as assembled from multiple sources: philosophy, sci-ence, social sciences, human animality and subjectivity but she is not suggesting an abandonment of the notion of “truth,” just a curbing of the notion of absolute knowledge, or knowledge of things-in-themselves (though even traditionalists believe being known can’t be an aspect of a thing-in-itself.) in the process of constructing truths, “reason is not ‘abandoned’ for ‘irrationalism’; scientific knowledge is not ‘equated with’ myth or ideology; and so forth . . . but are reconceived as variable gradients rather than fixed, distinct and polar opposites” (p. 11). She prefers to speak of the “superiority” of certain claims rather than their fixed universality via “rationalist-realist-positivist epistemology.” as her overall theme, Smith wants to defend constructivist epistemology as the appropriate one for the twenty-first century and, to a slightly lesser extent, the goals of social construction, while deriding as unfounded the attacks against their purported relativism, nihilism, fatuous egali-tarianism, and political correctness. Her performance is undeniably impressive but her success is mixed.

The stronger first half of the book mounts a plausible defense of


constructivist epistemology. Starting off with a quick survey of “Pre-Post-Modern” relativists from Heraclitus to Wittgenstein, Smith moves on to twentieth-century modernist questioners of objectivist-universalist epistemes, from Heidegger and einstein to Franz Boas, edward Sapir, Lenin, and in the arts Woolf, Stravinsky, Joyce and Picasso, in order to support her contention that revisionist epistemology is nothing new. But it is unclear how far she really wants to go when she summarizes the position of Ludwik Fleck, her main spokesman, as “the scientist’s perceptions of the physical world are no more objective than those of anyone else since, like anyone else’s, they are shaped by a particular experiential history in a particular social-epistemic community” (p. 27). Before devoting a major chapter to this early twentieth-century neurobiologist and medical historian, Smith briefly reviews some of the intellectual and political attacks against the “relativity” of modernism’s revolutionary figures in order to typify the attackers’ conservative objec-tions (objections that today seem obsolete as applied to these now canonical figures) and points out the similarity of these objections to the ones raised by philosophers such as Donald Davidson and Jürgen Habermas against constructivist epistemologists such as Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, nelson Goodman, and richard rorty. Later, she will take on “conservative” (this time i require scare quotes) critics of the science wars, but with much less success, because we are still living in the midst of an everyday politics that turns evenhandedness in dealing with the past into polemics in dealing with a present.

The chapter on Ludwik Fleck is a richly instantiated account of this still little known thinker’s view of facts as “events in the history of thought.” in his Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935) Fleck espoused a “comparative epistemology” whose truths are the emergent develop-ments of interpretive communities that can think only the thoughts for which their histories have primed them (e.g., Plato could not have described reality in terms of artificial intelligence). an independent external reality is not denied but, as a thing-in-itself, it is inaccessible to direct thought and must be approached in a roundabout way, the roundabout in question consisting of an historical methodology that shapes thought but inevitably becomes refined or superseded, a process not even newton nor einstein could escape. (Though perhaps i should add that “historical methodologies” themselves do not develop from a blank slate or the merely social but, rather, from a brain with indigenous structures and propensities produced by an evolved body.) in Smith’s words, “The central ontological/epistemological implication of Fleck’s

583Harold Fromm

work and of constructivist thought more generally is not that there is nothing ‘out there.’ it is, rather, that the specific features of what we interact with as reality are not prior to and independent of those inter-actions but emerge and acquire their specificity through them” (p. 51). But is this really so radical a point of view? in fact, to me it seems like the increasingly standard one, whether expressed or implied. it certainly doesn’t mean that the sciences never get things “right,” but that “right” is a relative term. Planes fly and stay in the air because engineering problems have been solved. The engineers have got it right, i’d say. But right can never mean final knowledge that exhausts all the potential descriptions or improvements of things, since the potentials are infinite, coming as they do from brains with timebound knowledge produced through bodily faculties of seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking. except perhaps for the axioms of math and logic, things can always be gotten more right. nor does “right” really mean, i’d continue to say, that even those who get it right understand the in-itselfness of the phenomena in question. So from literary criticism to molecular biology, disciplinary conclusions are in constant flux from right, to more right, to even more right. if they reach stasis they’re dead.

even the Correspondence Theory of Truth, Smith tells us, does not have to be entirely rejected because “it is serviceable in a wide range of informal contexts: for example, in justifying one’s statements or beliefs to associates, children, untutored laypersons and perhaps oneself (‘yes, it’s true, the car keys are on the hall table—go and look for yourself’). The notion does present difficulties, however, when invoked under conditions of seriously conflicting truth claims joined with seriously disparate grounds of epistemic authority and seriously divergent prior beliefs, general assumptions and relevant aims and interests” (p. 47).

Smith traces Fleck’s influence or congruence in Thomas Kuhn’s notion of radically new paradigm shifts and Michel Foucault’s idea of epistemes and regimes of truth but keeps assuring us that truths are not simply made up or invented from personal fantasies, that they are descriptions of reality. Her conclusion is modest: “it seems unlikely that any one view of truth—realist, positivist, pragmatist or any other—will be universally established as true, at least not very soon” (p. 77).

The second half of Scandalous Knowledge crosses into the more stormy and conflicted fields of “Science Studies” or the sociology of science, which in turn melt into social constructionism, which further dissolves into frequently nasty politics. Science Studies are not so much concerned with a pure epistemology and theory as with the presuppositions and


worldly practices of the various science disciplines, with the conflicts between the older and younger generations insofar as these live by dif-ferent epistemes, and with the everyday politics of life in hierarchical professional disciplines. This conflict can be seen even in the title of Smith’s “Cutting-edge equivocation: Conceptual Moves and rhetorical Strategies in Contemporary anti-epistemology” (p. 85). in its cautious way the chapter could even be taken as a battle guide for the academi-cally oppressed professional caught between traditional and radical constituencies, forced into equivocal “moves” and “strategies” of display and concealment that simultaneously try to win over or merely not offend avant and derriere gardes by appearing to walk in the middle of the road. But equivocal hybrid positionings, Smith feels, are likely to end up as mutually canceling.

one can begin to see stress lines in Smith’s situation as a woman torn between loyalty and support for other feminist academics while trying to remain even more loyal to accuracy, truth, and honorableness. it’s a tough tightrope to walk. She notes how even the most eminent anti-traditionalists (rorty, Latour, Damasio) engage in a “ritual exorcism” in which they try to disparage aspects of their own extremes to seem more moderate. and so, less surprisingly, she sees certain feminists as tormented between Charybdis and Scylla, for if they disparage traditional rationality (as distorting and parti pris) they themselves lose a vehicle for criticizing the traditional positions they can’t abide and for defending themselves against charges of relativity, thereby forfeiting the “claims made for the intrinsically privileged knowledge of women as such” (p. 98). and toward some of their more equivocal claims Smith can be forthrightly negative. in the end, her recommendation to feminists is to have the guts to pursue their agendas anyhow but from a position of alertness to the professional vectors, reminding us that the “constructed” in “constructivism” doesn’t mean any old cockamamie idea that enters your head, even if the popular press tends to see it that way.

as Smith turns to the conflicts between the humanities and the sci-ences, the center fails to hold and her discourse becomes increasingly precarious. Her characterization of the ways in which the humanities and the sciences view each other with suspicion and condescension is both amusing and convincing. To the humanists, the sciences seem sim-plistic, reductive, philistine, and conservative—and the Science Studies that emanate from the humanities strike scientists as ludicrous, ignorant, and disrespectful. But it goes without saying that despite Smith’s ability much of the time to treat both sides fairly, there are limits to empathy

585Harold Fromm

and though her handling of Gross and Levitt’s Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels With Science concedes the authors may now and then deviate into sense, she writes off their critique of Science Studies as uninformed and based on the equivalent of pop media soundbites. Furthermore, Smith dismisses out of hand alan Sokal’s hoaxing parody of Science Studies (a mere “caper” as she sees it) in the aforemen-tioned issue of Social Text, as if it were not a damaging performance of rhetorical virtuosity and had nothing whatever of value to say about the smoke screen of vacuous jargon that conceals so much humanistic contempt for science. Summing up their purported malfeasance with a dismissive wave of the arm, she writes: “What, then, remains of these charges [from Levitt, Gross, and Sokal]? Very little, it appears. indeed, the ‘science wars’ can be seen as something of a mirage: arising from ignorance and arrogance; amplified by opportunism, both academic and journalistic; and fought against a largely phantom enemy with much artillery fire but few strikes. The sensational charges were clearly scattershot and often, on inspection, empty.” alas, when i reviewed the science wars issue of Social Text in “My Science Wars” (Hudson Review, Winter 1997), what i found (my own solipsistic mirage?) in article after article of Science Studies attacks against Gross and Levitt was political correctness, fatuousness, and mendacity. (nor can Bricmont and Sokal’s Fashionable Nonsense, their later substantiation of Sokal’s claims, simply be swept aside by yet another arm wave.) on the subject of the science wars the reader will do much better by turning to Ullica Sederstråle’s Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (oxford, 2000).

on e. o. Wilson’s Consilience, an attempt to unify all the arts and sciences within one grand science-structured epistemological cosmos, Smith aligns Wilson with Tooby and Cosmides (“The Psychological Foundations of Culture” in The Adapted Mind), whom she accuses of “complacent condescension,” scientific arrogance, and general philis-tinism. “Contrary to the arguments of Wilson or Tooby and Cosmides, there is no reason to think there is some single all-purpose ‘best’ way for human beings to get to know their worlds . . . .” i think, despite the attractions of “consilience,” she is reasonable that to banish all the “‘soft’ understandings and open-ended ponderings” of the humanities and replace them “with ‘hard’ causal explanations” from the sciences would be a serious net loss (p. 126), and it will never happen in any case unless human brains can be redesigned. But Wilson, one must remember, was in large part reacting to the humanities-generated


intellectual mush driving the science wars. and today, with ignorance and anti-science views being politically legitimized from the top down in the United States, a Wilsonian perspective is sorely needed.

Smith’s attack on evolutionary psychology shifts into high gear in her penultimate chapter, “Super natural Science,” already showing its age since its original publication in 2000, given the complex develop-ments and refinements of recent years. She again has it in for Tooby and Cosmides but is particularly hard—too hard, i would say—on Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, though some of her quarrels with Pinker hinge on his carelessness or his inconsistent use of figures of speech. So she needles him for metaphors that make the mind appear as an entity in its own right (which he doesn’t believe) rather than a function of the brain, singling out (from Tooby and Cosmides as well) the metaphysical spookiness of the concept of “modules” that purport-edly account for mental predispositons. are they “real” or are they just words? and if real, of what substance are they made in a non-dualistic system that has foregone Cartesianism? She is particularly exercised by the computational theory of mind, which can explain chess games or the calculation of income taxes, “But activities of that sort constitute only a fraction of what might reasonably be understood as intelligent behavior . . . ” (p. 136). This is the territory in which Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers have been skirmishing for years. Like Chalmers, Smith wants to account for consciousness as “experience,” something that computers don’t enjoy (though Dennett would have words about this). This is the “Hard Problem” of consciousness studies that she feels (without naming it as such) has been neglected by these evolutionary psychologists and their just-so stories produced by “reverse engineer-ing.” There is a world of introspection, aesthetic experience, ethics and whatnot that does not seem to be entailed by modules or computers. Smith concedes that reverse engineering may help to explain “various features of human social behavior” but “in the case of the humanities, current self-distinctions from the natural sciences reflect, among other things, the continued power of the idea that articulating and understanding the world of human experience is irreducibly different from describing and explaining the phenomena of human behavior” (p. 146). Unfortunately, Chalmers’ elevation of “experience” into a category of cosmic reality strikes me as a solution as bad as Cartesianism, a new kind of ghost in the machine—and the problem of “experience” remains unsolved.

experience is ultimately the achilles heel of this highly-charged book. it causes Barbara Smith to aim all her guns at the sciences and their

587Harold Fromm

defenders, with almost total exculpation of the humanities, since the humanities represent the disciplines whose raw materials are human “experience.” (What would she do with right-wing fundamentalist reli-gious “experience”?) She writes off Gross and Levitt, Wilson, Tooby and Cosmides, Pinker, Sokal and others who criticize the humanities for the belief that culture can graft just about anything onto a blank-slate brain, caricaturing them as engaged in a war against phantoms of their own imagination. But the actual reality of this supposed phantasm has recently been given a demonstration of almost platonic ideality.

The May, 2005, issue of PMLA, the literary profession’s flagship journal, reproduced the presidential address that robert Scholes delivered at the 2004 convention of the Modern Language association. The talk, entitled “The Humanities in a Posthumanist World,” dealt with the declining prestige and power of the humanities. Because it had little more than a passing remark on the sciences, namely a reference to George Steiner’s pungent observation that unlike the sciences, in the humanities anybody can say anything, i wrote the journal a letter of complaint that appeared in PMLA’s issue of January 2006: “reading Scholes’s address, one would hardly know that the intellectual universe has been turned upside down over the past twenty-five years by Darwinian evolution’s ‘modern synthe-sis’ and the latest developments in the cognitive neurosciences. Like the head-buried proponents of intelligent design, academics in the humani-ties don’t want to know that literary texts, far from being autotelic or merely a part of cultural history are—like everything else produced by organisms—the products of biological history, which means the history of the body and its materially constituted brain.” Scholes’s shocker of a reply pulls the rug right out from Smith’s exculpation of the humani-ties: “yes, we were natural for eons before we were cultural—before we were human, even—but so what? We are cultural now, and culture is the domain of the humanities” (p. 299).

it’s hard to believe that Barbara Smith could be happy with this reply. Because when the then president of the chief professional organization in the literary humanities can state such a view to its thirty thousand members (not to mention all the nonmembers who read the journal), the problem is more real than mere “phantoms.” it’s once again the top-down ignorance that Wilson was at pains to address in Consilience.

Paul Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Construc-tionism, by some fluke of pre-established disharmony, reflects a rumble between Barbara Smith and himself that took place in South Atlantic Quarterly in 2002. replying to Smith’s “Cutting edge equivocation,” now


a chapter in her book, he in turn provoked a hectoring and verbose reply from Smith that was essentially a trashing of analytic philosophy. He alludes to this rejectionist mentalité when he writes of “the grow-ing alienation of academic philosophy from the rest of the humani-ties and social sciences, leading to levels of acrimony and tension on american campuses that have prompted the label ‘Science Wars’” (p. 8). Boghossian’s brief book makes some use of his SAQ reply in order to develop his stance as an analytic philosopher looking at constructiv-ism (or constructionism). it was the very existence of this professional discipline that Smith wrote off as obsolete.

Fear of Knowledge opens with reference to a denial by native ameri-cans of the “extensively confirmed archaeological account” of their aboriginal arrival in north america via the Bering strait about 10,000 years ago. Boghossian quotes an official of the Cheyenne river Sioux as saying, “We know where we came from. We are the descendents of the Buffalo people. They came from inside the earth after supernatural spirits prepared this world for humankind to live here.” Boghossian then quotes roger anyon, a British archaeologist who has worked for the Zunis: “Science is just one of the many ways of knowing the world.” The Zunis’ world view is “just as valid as the archaeological viewpoint of what prehistory is about” (pp. 1, 2). Boghossian is not intimidated by the fact that an academic can always be found to embrace absurdities (consider, for example, Michael Behe and intelligent Design) and he uses this conflict of “truths” as the germ of his book.

although he is largely responding to the concept that Smith called “social construction” and its belief that knowledge can never be sepa-rated from the social, cultural, and political context out of which it arises, Boghossian actually is testing the limits of her “epistemic con-structivism.” While he acknowledges many occasions on which social construction is a valid and plausible procedure, as when it “exposes the contingency of those of our social practices which we had wrongly come to regard as naturally mandated” (p. 129), his main concern is with mind-independent reality and the logical procedures that enable us to justify our sense of factuality and truth about that reality, even if we cannot know things as they are in themselves. Wittingly or not, even social constructionists, he reminds us, make use of these ineluc-table constraints of rationality in their own anti-rationalistic defenses. although the heart of his book consists of the examination and critique of sentences and propositions having to do with truth—and the ratio-nality that lies behind them—there are numerous areas of agreement

589Harold Fromm

with epistemic ideas proposed by both Smith and Ludwik Fleck. Still, everything has its limits and Boghossian’s job here is to point them out , sometimes devastatingly, as when he observes, “for if the powerful can’t criticize the oppressed, because the central epistemological categories are inexorably tied to particular perspectives, it also follows that the oppressed can’t criticize the powerful.” Shall we accept a double stan-dard, he asks: “allow a questionable idea to be criticized if it is held by those in a position of power—Christian creationism, for example—but not if it is held by those whom the powerful oppress—Zuni creationism, for example”? (p. 130).

reading two books about truth and culture as antagonistic as these makes Wilson’s attempted reconciliations, mutatis mutandis, seem more plausible and needed than ever. (a number of the documents referred to in this review may be seen online at http://hfromm.net/ professional.)

University of arizona

Fiction and theory oF Mind

by Brian Boyd

Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction aims “to put the cognitive- evolutionary concept of the theory of Mind on the map of con-

temporary literary studies” (p. 84). any literary critic who has stumbled upon this active research program in recent clinical, cognitive, compara-tive, developmental and evolutionary psychology will have realized that theory of Mind (toM)—our intuitive systems for understanding the minds of others—must be relevant to literature. as someone who has long deplored its neglect in literary studies (often on the very pages of this journal) i regret to report that as a cartographer of this new terrain Zunshine has an unsteady hand.

as its title suggests, her book makes a large claim: that we read fiction in order to give ourselves a cognitive workout, to exercise our capac-ity for toM. We normally understand readily four levels of embedded intentionality (you doubt that Brian accepts that Lisa knows what robin says), but we find it rapidly more difficult to handle further levels. Fiction often pushes “our ability to process embedded intentionalities beyond our cognitive zone of comfort” (p. 130). Why We Read Fiction also makes a second, implicit but no less central, claim: that analyzing fiction in terms of toM offers criticism greater explanatory power, precision, and clarity.

Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, by Lisa Zunshine; 198 pp. columbus: ohio State University Press, 2006. $59.95


591Brian Boyd

Zunshine’s explicit claim seems unlikely. all peoples tell and attend to fictions, but as Zunshine sometimes concedes not all these fictions push the boundaries of toM. Many individuals and groups, perhaps most, especially enjoy fiction that does not involve high-level toM, such as myth, fairy tale, and action adventure stories from epics to Westerns or martial arts movies. children already engage in pretend play and enjoy stories compulsively long before they attain a uniquely human, yet still imperfectly developed, level of toM in their fifth year. how can fiction be explained in terms of setting stiff challenges to our capacity for toM, when so many children and adults enjoy fiction that makes no exceptional demands?

Fiction can experiment with toM, with, for instance, multiple levels of embedded intentionality. Barth’s virtuoso exercise “Menelaiad” (1968) involves seven degrees of embedding, but the story feels, and is meant to feel, comically overloaded. Less flamboyant but more searching experi-ment with our capacity to comprehend minds, like tolstoy’s in Anna Karenina, may involve at its most original only one, two or three levels of intentionality: Stiva’s thoughts alone, brilliantly evoked in the opening chapter, or his thoughts about dolly’s feelings or his own thoughts, or his thoughts about dolly’s thoughts about his feelings.

Zunshine acknowledges that fiction places varied emphases on toM, but dwells only on examples that support her case, and ignores many kinds of fiction that do not. More damaging still, the examples she does draw on fail to provide the support she thinks they do, thus undermin-ing both her first claim, that fiction provides an intense toM workout, and her second, that analyzing fiction through toM sharpens and strengthens criticism. interpreting fiction with an explicit awareness of toM can have this effect, but Zunshine inadvertently reveals dangers rather than opportunities.

Since texts are the hard evidence in literary study, we need to see in detail how Zunshine handles them. her first display example comes from Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. She cites:

and Miss Brush [Lady Bruton’s secretary] went out, came back; laid papers on the table; and hugh produced his fountain pen; his silver fountain pen, which had done twenty years’ service, he said, unscrewing the cap. it was still in perfect order; he had shown it to the makers; there was no reason, they said, why it should ever wear out; which was somehow to hugh’s credit, and to the credit of the sentiments which his pen expressed (so richard dalloway felt) as hugh began carefully writing capital letters with rings


around them in the margin, and thus marvelously reduced Lady Bruton’s tangles to sense, to grammar such as the editor of the Times, Lady Bruton felt, watching the marvelous transformation, must respect.

Zunshine makes explicit the levels of intentionality that she sees embed-ded in the passage, ending, at the deepest level, with:

Woolf intends us to recognize [by inserting a parenthetical observation, “so richard dalloway felt”] that richard is aware that hugh wants Lady Bruton and richard to think that because the makers of the pen believe that it will never wear out, the editor of the Times will respect and publish the ideas recorded by this pen (6th level). (p. 33; brackets in original)

her enterprise depends crucially on the quality of her readings, and this first extensive reading is simply wrong. in her eagerness to apply the template of embedded intentionality she both misreads the passage and overlooks other and more valid insights.

By this point in Woolf’s novel we recognize hugh Whitbread as pompous and self-satisfied. When he brandishes his pen and extols its reliability, he does not expect that Lady Bruton and richard dalloway will therefore suppose that the editor of the Times will publish the letter. he may not be the brightest of characters, but he is not that dim; he has, after all, we know from half a page previously, mastered “the art of writ-ing letters to The Times.” he assumes merely that his solid, dependable pen and its makers’ affirmation of its lasting serviceability confirm him as a solid, dependable chap, who knows quality and is recognized for it. Second level of intentionality, then: he boasts that the makers say there is no reason it should ever wear out. richard dalloway witnesses hugh’s display, and feels that the pen and its makers’ affirmation are “somehow to hugh’s credit, and to the credit of the sentiments which his pen expressed.” Fifth and fourth levels (counting generously): richard feels that when hugh reports that the manufacturers say that the pen will last (or when he demonstrates that it is reliable) it will help confirm what the pen expresses. the passage nowhere states or implies that richard thinks that hugh thinks that Lady Bruton will think that, because the makers say the pen is reliable, the editors of the Times will therefore think that they can respect what the letter says (counting generously, again, seventh level, with an eighth if we add Zunshine’s “Woolf intends”). Since Zun-shine offers no reason to think that she has not misread the passage, this constitutes a fatal flaw in her claim.

593Brian Boyd

So too does the fuzziness of the counting. elsewhere, Zunshine writes: “depending on how we count, this sentence embeds from four to six levels of intentionality” (p. 89)—a crucial difference, since four is supposed to be within our cognitive comfort zone and six well beyond it. here, considering the Mrs Dalloway passage, do we rate that because clause as an additional level of embedded intentionality or a separate causal enchainment? if so much depends on the counting, why is it not unequivocal?

Zunshine continues: “Woolf is able to imply that her representations of hugh’s, Lady Bruton’s, and richard’s minds are exhaustive and cor-rect because, creatures with a theory of Mind that we are, we just know that there must be mental states behind the emotionally opaque body language of the protagonists” (p. 34). Woolf in fact reports no body language at all, unless we include hugh’s “carefully writing capital let-ters.” creatures with a reasonably full toM—humans in their fifth year or older—by definition understand false belief, that is, understand that they or others may entertain mistaken representations. For that very reason Woolf could not imply that because we have toM we must accept the particular thoughts she imputes to her characters as correct: an awareness of toM means an awareness of the possibility of error. indeed Zunshine writes elsewhere, rightly: “we routinely misread, misinterpret, and misrepresent other people’s states of mind” (p. 59). if we believe in Woolf’s accuracy in evoking the attitudes of her characters, we do so only because, after all, she invented them.

By analyzing the passage in terms of the multiply embedded intention-ality she claims common in fiction, Zunshine overlooks Woolf’s unique hallmarks. Woolf repeatedly blurs the boundary between objective and subjective (or authorial and character) perspectives, and between person and person, while also recognizing their distinctness. the elaboration “which had done twenty years service” proves only after the fact to ren-der what hugh says, as “it was still in perfect order,” though without quotation marks or speech tag, again proves to record his speech, while the next phrase, “there was no reason,” proves in turn to report the remarks of the pen’s makers, and the next “which” clause, “which was somehow to hugh’s credit,” turns out to report richard’s feeling. tags are suppressed and have to be inferred, or even where explicit, follow phrases that seamlessly succeed what precedes. Woolf in other words leads us, without our realizing it at the moments of transition, from her own external perspective and through the representations, spoken or thought, of a succession of characters.


the surreptitious segues between her own authorial report and the expressions or impressions of her characters differ emphatically from our real-life experience, where each of us remains within our own per-spective. at the same time the muted movements from mind to mind reflect our real-life ability to imagine a scene around us as if partly through the eyes of others. Woolf deploys our sense of the naturalness of considering the perspectives of others—our recognizing how swift our toM can be—to slide us, within the scene, from person to person, action to reaction, without warning but without jarring. as throughout Mrs Dalloway, she stresses the connectedness between discrete and dis-parate people. rather than the multiple embedding of thought within thought that Zunshine thinks she finds, Woolf shows thought gliding almost seamlessly from person to person, like a trolleybus sliding from one set of live overhead lines to another and then another as it changes direction, as if we could all tap into a common current of thought despite our separate journeys.

By counting as embedded within one another thoughts that Woolf actually lets fluidly succeed one another, Zunshine misreads the passage, unwittingly impugns its characterization, aligns it unwarrantedly with more routine fictional effects, and overlooks the singularity of Woolf’s vision and voice. She appears to have focused on this sample passage in numerous presentations. one can only think that the apparent authority of language like “cognitive adaptations” and of a new “scientific” revela-tion has diverted auditors from the multiple flaws in her analysis.

although Zunshine observes that “simply counting levels of inten-tionality in Mrs Dalloway will never supersede other forms of critical inquiry into the novel” (p. 39), she seems to think she has transformed our awareness of what Woolf achieves in the novel. alas, she has only confused and obscured what was better understood before.

in Part 1 of Why We Read Fiction, Zunshine draws principally on Kin-derman, dunbar et al.’s findings about our difficulties in handling more than four levels of intentionality. in Part 2, she draws on cosmides and tooby’s “scope” hypothesis, which proposes that human thought, unlike that of other animals, can come almost automatically tagged with truth delimiters: that X is true only at time p or in place q or under condition r or in the opinion of S or on the claim of T, and so forth. Zunshine interprets unreliable narration in Clarissa and Lolita in terms of the difficulty of assigning a confident value to the source tags in utterance after utterance.

595Brian Boyd

on Lolita Zunshine fares far better than on Mrs Dalloway. Because of her interest in the sources of representations in Lolita, she pays attention to a feature of the novel that no one has previously subjected to systematic scrutiny: humbert’s attributing to others perceptions of Lolita and himself that he quietly incorporates into his own case for his defense. deftly characterizing this ploy as his “attempts to ‘outsource’ his flattering representation of himself” (p. 108), she argues that humbert evokes others’ perceptions of himself and Lolita, which we do not have the computational energy to discount, even if they are only his versions, and for his purposes, of their perceptions.

no one has hitherto cocked so attentive an ear to this recurrent note in the complex chords of humbert’s confessions. But again when Zunshine proffers examples they undermine rather than support her case. She first summarizes a prototypical instance:

typically, we would get humbert’s report of what happened to him and Lolita (e.g., they were stopped for speeding), followed by a representa-tion of participants’ thoughts and feelings (e.g., what the patrolmen who stopped the couple thought of them). the representation in question is supplied by humbert in such calculatedly quick, casual and assured man-ner that we rarely pause and attempt to separate the observed behavior (here, of the patrolmen) from humbert’s interpretation of a mental stance behind the behavior. instead of registering the information as “humbert claims that” (one crucial source tag) “when patrolmen stopped their car they thought” (another source tag) “X” (the representation itself), we instead register it as a representation with just one agent-specifying source tag: “when patrolmen stopped their car they thought X.” (p. 104)

But if we turn to the passage itself—the sole occasion when humbert and Lolita are stopped for speeding—the text fails to bear out Zunshine’s description. in the midst of an angry harangue from Lolita, humbert

drove through the slumbering town at a fifty-mile-per-hour pace in con-tinuance of my smooth highway swoosh, and a twosome of patrolmen put their spotlight on the car, and told me to pull over. i shushed Lo who was automatically raving on. the men peered at her and me with malevolent curiosity. Suddenly all dimples, she beamed sweetly at them, as she never did at my orchideous masculinity; for, in a sense, my Lo was even more scared of the law than i—and when the kind officers pardoned us and servilely we crawled on, her eyelids closed and fluttered as she mimicked limp prostration. (ii.3)


humbert’s only representation of the patrolmen’s thoughts is that they “peered at her and me with malevolent curiosity,” an attribution we readily take as a comic reflection of humbert’s stealth and guilt. the comedy becomes still broader with the abrupt and absolute, point-edly foregrounded reversal of humbert’s attitude two lines later, the moment the danger has passed: “the kind officers pardoned us.” not only does nabokov want us to enjoy the comedy of humbert’s emotions coloring his attitudes to the patrolmen, so too does humbert himself, surely—after all, one of his principal ploys in establishing a sense of our kinship or complicity with him is by inviting our shared laughter now (shared by humbert the writer and his readers) at the plight of humbert the character then. the source tags, far from being suppressed, are amusingly apparent.

describing a somewhat different effect, Zunshine cites humbert:

all at once i knew i could kiss her throat or the wick of her mouth with perfect impunity. i knew she would let me do so, and even close her eyes as hollywood teaches. a double vanilla with hot fudge—hardly more unusual than that. i cannot tell my learned reader . . . how the knowledge came to me. . . .

Zunshine comments: “the plausibility of humbert’s claim that Lolita is waiting for him to kiss her is bolstered by the pounding repetition of the words ‘knew’ and ‘knowledge.’ imagine substituting these particular words with their close correlatives, for example, ‘all at once i thought i could kiss her throat . . . i cannot tell my reader how the idea came to me’” (p. 110). Fair enough, but why then does she suppress the fact that the sentence following her citation reads: “a modern child, an avid reader of movie magazines, an expert in dream-slow close-ups, might not think it too strange, i guessed, if a handsome, intensely virile grown-up friend—too late,” as real life suddenly disrupts wish-fulfilment. “i guessed”: humbert’s own phrasing calls into question the unwarranted assurance of “knew . . . knew . . . knowledge.” even within her citation, Zunshine omits the awkward counter-evidence of “my learned reader (whose eyebrows, i suspect, have by now traveled all the way to the back of his bald head)”: humbert can quite pointedly undermine, rather than invite us to accept unquestioningly, the status of the responses he attributes to bystanders and readers.

Few would dispute Zunshine’s “we need to keep reapplying a very strong source tag” (p. 102) to humbert’s assertions, but does such

597Brian Boyd

phrasing take us any further than simply saying “we need to be wary of what humbert writes”? By focusing on source tags throughout her dis-cussion of Lolita, Zunshine does highlight how much nabokov achieves through humbert’s “outsourcing” responses, although she seems to overrate the difficulty of assessing the attitudes humbert attributes to these “outsources,” and to undervalue the self-conscious comedy he often deploys.

at the same time she misses so much more that toM could contribute to an analysis of Lolita. Biologists explaining the origins of intelligence largely concur that the most powerful amplifier of intelligence is social-ity, especially in the need to infer what others of one’s own species want and intend so that one can react and plan accordingly. this hunch, which provided the first impetus for the study of toM, was once called the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis: that we compete to know as much as we can of the desires and intentions of others who matter to us, even as we often conceal our own desires and intentions.

there are few figures in fiction who keep their desires more hidden from those around them than humbert, who conceals his real self from, among others, Valeria, charlotte and Lolita, until he has her in his power at the enchanted hunters. But at that hotel, someone spies him who can read his wishes, because his own are so similar: clare Quilty. if humbert manipulates charlotte and Lolita through what he does not allow them to know, he confronts the most distressing of the many reversals he faces in the novel when he senses Lolita concealing something from him at Beardsley, realizes he does not know anything about the person following them westward to elphinstone, and then, as the crowning insult, learns that this unknown person has deliberately taunted him, concealing but half-revealing his identity and mocking humbert’s bafflement. humbert finds Quilty’s manipulations of knowl-edge and ignorance enragingly insufferable.

approaching Lolita through toM can allow us to appreciate more of the peculiarly mesmerizing force of the novel and to see its relation to other nabokov fiction where epistemological questions appear more obviously to the fore. there are many ways in which toM can open up new perspectives on fiction—like a contrast between Woolf’s sense of the close nexus between mind and mind, despite our essential isolation, and nabokov’s sense of the privacy of the self, except in truly reciprocal love—but we still need to respect the particulars of the texts, and not to force them into compliance with our theory of toM.

in Part 3 of Why We Read Fiction Zunshine considers the case of


detective fiction. She posits as the key characteristic of the detective story its “tendency to engage in a focused way our evolved cognitive ability to store information under advisement” (p. 127), her apt term for the uncertainty some information sources warrant. By considering the computational cost of suspecting everybody in a detective novel, of seeing every source-tag as a marker for potential doubt, she can account for both the appeal of writing such fiction and the enduring surprise it can offer even experienced aficionados. She astutely discusses the relationships between the cognitive universal of toM and the local, historical phenomenon of detective fiction, and between the strong appeal the genre has to some and the indifference it arouses in others, even if all share the same cognitive architecture.

Finally she considers why detective fiction can rarely accommodate romance. this she explains in terms of the different cognitive adapta-tions romance stories and detective stories appeal to, the parts of the mind specialized to cope with mate selection (romance) and predator detection (detective fiction). in fact we do not yet know what if any specialized features of the mind are engaged in these different genres, or to what extent these features correspond to particular adaptations traceable to sustained selection pressures. and Zunshine’s connecting detective fiction to predator avoidance mechanisms seems inappropri-ate—though, as Mathias clasen suggests, these may well help explain horror fiction.

how well does Zunshine know the science she enlists to account for fiction? She appears not to have grasped the range of evidence and argument, and relies on only a few findings, Kinderman, dunbar et al. (1998) on the human capacity to handle readily only four levels of intentionality, cosmides and tooby (2000) on the “scope hypoth-esis,” and cosmides and tooby (1992) and others on the difference between ancestral selection pressures such as predator detection and mate selection.

Zunshine claims that “studies of autism were crucial for initially alert-ing cognitive scientists to the possibility that we have an evolved cognitive adaptation for mind-reading” (p. 11). actually, toM was first investigated by comparative psychologists and cognitive ethologists like Premack and Woodruff (1978), then by developmental psychologists from the early 1980s, and only then by clinical psychologists like Baron-cohen in the mid-1980s. Zunshine could have learned much from the conceptual clarifications of toM, as well as the developmental findings, of Josef Perner (1991), and from Baron-cohen’s last ten years’ of research. in

599Brian Boyd

other areas, she might also have profited from other work by cognitive linguists, psychologists and philosophers, like ruth Berman, richard Gerrig, noël carroll, Maria Bortolussi and Peter dixon, and catherine emmott.

to what extent has Zunshine benefited from the methodology, rather than the results, of science? alas, she appears to have learned less than one would have hoped. She produces only positive evidence, as if she has not recognized science’s awareness that potentially negative evidence can be far more decisive, and ignores the telling evidence that can be used against her claims. her formulations are often weak and indecisive, hedgings, rather than strong testable hypotheses. rather than apply scientific stringency to her literary analysis, she seems more interested in exploiting than testing what she can find.

But the key question to ask is: how can toM in particular, and an evolutionary-cognitive perspective in general, help explain fiction? toM has much to offer literary analysis, especially as part of a wider understanding of event comprehension, which includes non-social as well as social elements, and in the social, non-toM as well as toM elements. characterization, for instance, has little to do with toM but builds on capacities for discrimination and comparison widespread in the animal kingdom. our default empathy with the fate of characters does not depend on advanced toM, and has counterparts in many other species.

toM can aid us in many ways to understand how we understand fic-tion: in clarifying processes taken for granted and even invisible because they have evolved to work so automatically and effortlessly in humans; in assessing the relative roles in narrative comprehension of species-wide natural cognition and local social and narrative conventions; in explain-ing how children develop fictional comprehension; and in terms of the historical development of fiction, the experiments with toM and other aspects of event cognition that writers have made in order to capture audience attention. (here Zunshine’s work on detective fiction may have most to offer, in its theorizing the relation between cognitive uni-versals and historically particular conventions.) toM should also help in assessing the costs and benefits of authorial invention and audience comprehension, and in examining the cognitive preferences to which storytellers appeal.

Zunshine claims in Why We Read Fiction that we read fiction to give a workout to our toM capacity, yet she skirts the many kinds of fiction that involve no such workout. She pays almost no attention to fictional


stories outside written ones, or to why people everywhere tell stories to one another, or to aspects of fiction, like character and event, that need not involve toM, or certainly not more than our usual everyday toM experience. toM will prove an indispensable piece in the puzzle of fiction; but to declare it the one piece we need hardly solves the puzzle. cognition and evolution in general, and toM in particular, do augur deeper explanations of fiction, but Zunshine’s Why We Read Fic-tion is not only a provisional but also an often wrong-footed step in this promising direction.

University of auckland

Philosophy and Literature

Documents

Transcript of Philosophy and Literature