Studies in Irreversibility

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Studies in Irreversibility


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Studies in Irreversibility

Texts and Contexts

Edited by

Benjamin Schreier

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING


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Studies in Irreversibility: Texts and Contexts, edited by Benjamin Schreier

This book first published 2007 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright 2007 by Benjamin Schreier and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 1-84718-205-4; ISBN 13: 9781847182050


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To Sarah, Ava, and Reuben


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Illustrations .........................................................................................................ix

Acknowledgments................................................................................................x

Introduction: Irreversibility in Context ................................................................1

Benjamin Schreier

Part I: Readings

Chapter One .......................................................................................................12Hamlets Revenge, Luthers Repentance, and the Poetics of Irreversibility

Michael Booth

Chapter Two.......................................................................................................28

Reversing the Irreversible: Dickinson and the Sentimental Culture of DeathMnica Pelez

Chapter Three.....................................................................................................61

Ethnic Poetics and the Irreversibility of Jewishness in Delmore Schwartz

Benjamin Schreier

Chapter Four ......................................................................................................83

The Poetics of Descent: Irreversible Narrative in Poes MS. Found

in a BottleRobert T. Tally Jr.

Chapter Five.......................................................................................................99

The Reversible Empire: Race, Technology, and Irreversible Time

in the Future-War Novel

Aaron Worth


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Table of Contentsviii

Part II: Models

Chapter Six.......................................................................................................118

Robert Rauschenbergs Undoing: Reversibility and Irreversibility

inErased de Kooning Drawing

Nicholas Chare

Chapter Seven ..................................................................................................134

Frankenstein, Bioethics, and Technological Irreversibility

Shane Denson

Chapter Eight ...................................................................................................167

Irreversible Moral Damage

Anca Gheaus

Chapter Nine ....................................................................................................185Recovering the Irreversible: Levinas and Talmudic Ethics

Mathew Guy

Chapter Ten......................................................................................................208

Keep Rolling: The Irreversible Lines and Reversible Cycles

of Depression-Era Image-TextsZoe Trodd

Chapter Eleven.................................................................................................230

Reversing Loss in Eighteenth Century America: Insurance and Literature

Eric Wertheimer

Bibliography ....................................................................................................250

Contributors .....................................................................................................266

Index ................................................................................................................269


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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 10.1. Arthur Rothstein, Main Street, Vermont, 1937, FSA-OWI,

LOC.

Figure 10.2. Russell Lee, Winner of Prettiest Girl Contest, Oklahoma,

1940, FSA-OWI, LOC.

Figure 10.3. John Vachon, Proprietor of Feed Store, Kansas, 1938, FSA-

OWI, LOC.Figure 10.4. Walker Evans, William Fields, Alabama, 1936, FSA-OWI,

LOC.

Figure 10.5. Marion Post-Wolcott, Durham, North Carolina, 1939, FSA-

OWI, LOC.Figure 10.6. Edwin Rosskam, Negro Family and Their Home in One of

the Alley Dwelling Sections, Washington, D.C., 1941, FSA-

OWI, LOC.

Figure 10.7. Russell Lee, During the Services at Storefront Baptist Church

on Easter Sunday, Illinois, 1941, FSA-OWI, LOC.Figure 10.8. Walker Evans, Interior Detail, West Virginia Coal Miner's

House, West Virginia, 1935, FSA-OWI, LOC.

Figure 10.9. Walker Evans, Sharecropper Bud Fields and His Family atHome, Alabama, 1936, FSA-OWI, LOC.

Figure 10.10. Walker Evans, Corner of Kitchen in Bud Fields's Home,

Alabama, 1936, FSA-OWI, LOC.

Figure 10.11. Ben Shahn, Middlesboro, Kentucky, 1935, FSA-OWI, LOC.

Figure 10.12. Ben Shahn, Along Main Street, Ohio, 1938, FSA-OWI,

LOC.Figure 10.13. Arthur Rothstein, View From the Square, Iowa, 1939, FSA-

OWI, LOC.

Figure 10.14. Russell Lee, Dark Fall Day, Vermont, 1939, FSA-OWI,

LOC.

Figure 11.1. Hartford Insurance Policy for William Imlay, 1794. Courtesy

of the Hartford Financial Services Group.


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An innocent ambition to turn a modest conference panel into a book turned

out, in hindsight, to be out of all proportion to the amount of labor required to

transform the idea into an actuality. I have been able to complete this project

only with the assistance of many others. First of all, I would like to thank Zoe

Trodd and Aaron Worth (in alphabetical order) for their participation in the

original panel, Culture and Irreversibility, at the annual conference of theNortheast Modern Language Association in spring 2005 and for their

encouragement of this book project. Jeff Gore at the University of Illinois at

Chicago provided an invaluable sounding-board while I thought out this books

guiding ideas. During the spring semester of 2006, the Wake Forest University

English Department was good enough to grantand I was lucky enough to

receivethe services of a graduate student, James Russell Rusty Rutherford,

who conscientiously assisted me in editing the submissions. Also at WakeForest, Dean Franco and Charles and Kim Sligh provided various forms of

assistance that proved indispensable. My mother, Arlene Richman, and mother-in-law, Maria Matthiessen, provided important care for my children more

frequently during this projects development than I can recall. Brian Hesse and

the Jewish Studies Program at Pennsylvania State University funded theHerculean efforts of Samuel Marius Kurland, who helped me (i.e., did

himself) prepare the final manuscript for publication; without Sam, this book

would have been long delayed. Finally, Id like especially to thank my wife,

Sarah Koenig, for bearing gross negligence while I put this volume together; her

love is sustaining far beyond this mere book. All errors, oversights, and

misprisions remain mine.


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INTRODUCTION:

IRREVERSIBILITY IN CONTEXT

BENJAMIN SCHREIER

This book begins with a fairly straightforward observation. Patterns,

processes, phenomena, and events can be called irreversible when they cannot

be repeated, undone, altered, or revised. The essays in this volume attempt, in a

variety of ways, to theorize, account for, or otherwise attend to this idea.

Considered in this sense, this book can be seen as part of an effort to put the

irreversibility back into narratives ofand indeed into the act of narrating

cultural experience. For whatever else it is, narrative is also, at least at one,

important, level, essentially an irreversible paradigm. Even if narrative often

serves to describe how some particular state of things came to be, and therefore

recovers a past to be put to explanatory use by a present, it can appear so,

obviously, only by being put in service to a specific end, only as a result of aninstrumentalization. In producing a virtual account that runs backward fromexperienced phenomena, associating an imputed genesis with a recognized

outcome of narratives, this instrumentalization betrays an anthropomorphic bias

insofar as it reorients experience around particular, historically specific, and

above all already legitimate articulations of human intelligence, perception, and

capacities. In collectively interrogating how this already functions vis vishuman intelligence (not least by looking at the processes by which it comes to

be, appears legible, and/or authorizes various interpretative frameworks and

outcomes), the essays in this collection attempt to correct this bias by analyzingculture from the perspective of an ineluctable linearity, be it temporal,

structural, or conceptual, that exists outside an interpreting human intelligence.

We might generalize to say that this collection has been gathered under the

banner ofnarrative selection (a relative of natural selection), a process that, no

longer anthropocentric, no longer by necessity locates human desire as the sine

qua non of cultural analysis: once we realize that the narratives we tell (and the

practices we engage) in order to make sense of our place in history and society

are intelligible and in fact constituted as such only afterwhat they render, the

moment and fact of their intelligibility by the human understanding comes toseem far from their primary or most essential quality. When culture is seen as an


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2 Introduction

assemblage of practices averse to metaphors of return, continuity, or re-collection, averse indeed to anchoring in humanistic categories, the task of the

critic should not be to look for patterns of progression, identity, and

morphological equivalence. The procedures, forms, and developments examined

here reveal humanity as estranged from its socio-historical contexts as it is

productive of them, and therefore reveal also human beings charged with the

task of critically thinkingthose contexts.

Work remains to be pursued about irreversibility and especially how agents

experience, think about, and become aware of it. Predictably, time is a fairly

common concern in these essays, but it is a concernwe might say engaged

under the auspices of Norbert Eliasthat asks what it is that time measures,

and suspects that time refers far more to a relating together of positions

humans occupy than to any coherent subjective or objective reality.1 Ideas about

entropy surface here and there in these essays, as do related ideas about decay,

intention, and inevitability. In the backward glance that accompanies their

attention to irreversibility, these essays, one could therefore say, exploreteleology as outside the orbit of human agency. I will leave it to the papers

collected herein to approach a definition of what irreversibility is; here at the

outset, however, I would like to point to two things which irreversibility is not.

Importantly, whats examined in this volume is different from nostalgia, which,

aside from being a subjective mode, derives its characteristic charge fromand

is underwritten bya fantasy of return; indeed, as Svetlana Boym has written,

Nostalgia. . . has a utopian dimension, but it is no longer directed toward the

future. . . . The nostalgic desires to obliterate history. . ., to revisit time like space,

refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human

condition. . . . It [nostalgia] is the promise to rebuild the ideal home.2

If nostalgia promises redemption in its appeal or virtual return to a lost ideal, in

its rehearsal of a revocation of that loss, the papers in this book are concerned

precisely with the acknowledgment, rather than the denial, of irreversibility,

and so challenge nostalgic forms (and this holds even when, as some papers

show, nostalgia is militated against the threat embodied in irreversibility to

authoritative contexts like national epistemology). In addition to running

contrary to nostalgia, an analysis of irreversibility is also incompatible with

existential concern with memory centered on the individual or collective subject

as a kind of anchor or focus of historical significance; again, it is the challenge

to agency (which is often also a challenge to anthropomorphism) that is under

investigation here (and this holds even when, as more than one contribution

suggests, the subject remains a record of irreversibility).

To acknowledge irreversibility is to be skeptical about howor whether

the heap of broken images that threaten anomie and dissolution at the opening


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Irreversibility in Context 3

ofThe Waste Land can be, as they may be at the close of the poem, shoredagainst my ruinsat least in any kind of useful, which is to say normative,

manner. It is to question howor whetherthe space between, in the poems

words, memory and desire can ever be charged more with agency than with

frustration. If messianic structures posit a future to justify the present, this

collection is devoted to examining the present of experience from the

perspective of its uncompromising and irreducible past. The essays in this

volume analyze culture as a transformative field that cannot necessarily be

reduced to the demands of instrumental knowledge, but is instead productive of

the ground on which knowledge becomes a functional possibility. Together,

these papers outline a method of examining experience that moves beyond

analytical reliance on tropes such as functionalism, teleology, and chance. The

goal of this collection is not to assert that knowledge of culture is an impossible

ideal, but it is to suggest that culture should be considered something moreor

at least otherthan the anthropological desire to know it; attention to

irreversibility, that is, exposes the powerful role of normativity in our narrativesof culture.

One of the pleasant surprises of working on this book has been that so many

of the contributions extract from the analysis of irreversibility not despairing

fixity and determinacy, but pregnant unpredictability and possibility, finding in

irreversibility a key to an interpretation of futurity. According to more than one

of the contributors, irreversibility seems to be a principle underlying thedevelopment of emerging forms of agency. And I was delighted to find

reckoning with irreversibility enabling a greater appreciationcharged with the

potentiality of the new ornovelof the shortcomings of traditional theories of

justice. I think now that this emphasis on potentiality is not accidental. We

should not confuse an acknowledgment of irreversibility with the catastrophic

absurdity Sartre famously found in Faulkners work, where there is never any

progression, never anything which comes from the future. We remember that

the problem with Faulkner (for Sartre) is that his

vision of the world can be compared to that of a man sitting in an open car and

looking backwards. At every moment, formless shadows, flickerings, faint

tremblings and patches of light rise up on either side of him, and only afterwards,

when he has a little perspective, do they become trees and men and cars.3

Sartre objects to Faulkners refusal of a present full of future possibility becausefor the humanist Sartre, reality reveals itself only in its forward-looking

potential to redeem the present. As I suggested at the outset, irreversibility

undeniably brings into focus the possibility that the human agent is no longer

the center or arbiter of experience, no longer the pivot on which existence or

intelligibility turns, and without doubt it insists on the posteriority, the no-


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4 Introduction

longer, the post-. But irreversibility need not be the kind of backward-lookingdead-end Sartre found in Faulkner; it can be also a summons to a future.

* * *

I want here to claim the editors prerogative and offer a bit of explanatory

autobiography. My interest in irreversibility is really a stab at a much larger and

more diffuse interest in the irreconcilable, an interest that was first spawned in

graduate school when I had what I took then to be the insight that literary

criticism pursues its work with what looks to be a kind of bad conscience,

insofar as critics often seem only to write about literature they like or can put to

some already-legitimate use, and developed after graduate school into a belief

fueled not least by my own frequent practice in graduate schoolthat literary

criticism (including the desires and assumptions of the literary critic) prevails

over its objects far more than literature prevails over its criticism.4 My initial

insight and later belief thus fed a drive to find literary and cultural phenomena

that resist productivist readings. This volume therefore builds on my interest in

modes of cultural inquiry that challenge or question the instrumentalist

distinction between text and criticism (even if the individual papers do not

always share this interest). Irreversibility, therefore, is not always a quality of

the texts explored in this volume (whatever such an attribution might mean), nor

is it strictly speaking a lens through which otherwise coherent or stable texts areexamined; it should perhaps rather be considered a model that brings together

texts and the thinking of them.

The contributors to this volume, as any reader can see, are writing from

perspectives, methodological frameworks, and institutional assumptions that are

often quite at variance with one another. But Im a little wary of calling this

collection interdisciplinary because Im a little wary of the concept of

interdisciplinarity, at least as it might pertain here. Too often, I suspect,

interdisciplinary doesnt mean a whole lot more than a term like new

historicist. That is, interdisciplinary seems often to indicate, really, onesynthetic methodological approachan albeit powerful one, including a whole

host of critical tools, including Marxist, historicist, deconstructive, exegetic,

biographical, thematic, and poetic ones, for examplebrought to texts proper to

what may have been (in what would have to have been a fairly small-minded

past) considered the exclusive purview of a number of isolated disciplines. I

am fairly certain that this volume doesnt exclusively or primarily do that (even

if some of the constituent papers do individually employ such a method).

Instead, it collects a number of essays that respectively employ a wide and

various array of methodologies in order to approach a single concept, alwaystrying to keep in mind that no one methodology or critical approach may be


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exclusively adequate or appropriate. Im not presuming that this collectionstack is any better in general than an interdisciplinary approach, and for all I

know, this tack (and this book) may be revealed to be inappropriate, misguided,

or even ridiculous in the near future, if and when the concept of irreversibility

spawns more critical work. But in order to explore a concept which remains

relatively unexplored so far, and perhaps only partly legible, this approach

which may, in the interest of naming, perhaps be called multidisciplinary

seemed the best alternative, at least for now. Accordingly, I have made little

effort to integrate or make consistent the varying styles, perspectives, and

methodologies of the contributors or their essays.

The papers in this volume are split into two sections, Readings and

Models. Most of the work on irreversibility I have seenand as collected

heretends to attempt one of two things: it either brings the constellation of

ideas radiating out from this topicincluding irretrievability, irreparability, and

irrevocabilityto texts in an effort to illuminate heretofore underappreciated

lineaments of those texts and criticism of them, or it explores the conceptualcontours of this assemblage of ideas in the interest of articulating a theory or

paradigm of irreversibility. This demarcation is obviously arbitrary to an extent,

and all the essays included here expand their argumentative reach in both

directions, but the division serves a provisionally useful heuristic purpose. I

have deliberately steered clear of obvious historical or national demarcations;

hence the essays in each section are arranged in alphabetical order of theirrespective writers last names.

Michael Booth begins the Readings section by locatingHamlets unusual

power in its stark study of time as disintegration. Booth argues that the play

promotes a repentant mental disposition; Shakespeare, like Martin Luther (in

a comparison authorized by the plays conspicuous citation of Luthers

hometown, Wittenberg), broods upon the problem of relation to others and to

the past. For Luther, the disintegration of reason becomes itself the warrant for

justification by faith and hence for the reversibility of our fallen, mortal state.

But for Shakespeare, in Hamlet, it is pure disintegration, an entropy ofsubjectivity and the world. Hamlets fidelity to our unidirectional experience of

time, more truthful than time-reversing fantasies of vengeance or of salvation, is

what has made the play a kind of secular scripture.

Mnica Pelezs paper considers Emily Dickinsons resistance to the

sentimentalism that dominated American popular literature by the mid-nineteenth-century. Pelez argues that Dickinsons belief that To relieve the

irreparable degrades it constitutes a rejection of the genres attempts to relieve

the irreparable by sentimentalizing death. Dickinsons version of death offers a

rejoinder to this degraded approach by confronting the uncertainties fastbecoming constitutive of modern life, embracing rather than resisting


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6 Introduction

irreparable doubt, detachment, and deprivation. In her poetry, these disturbancesare concomitant to death as a symbol of societal disintegration. Dickinsons

death poems thus exhibit a progressive aesthetic that critiques sentimentalisms

regressiveness, yet they simultaneously betray an indebtedness to the

sentimental tradition by offering what amounts to an alternative form of

consolation.

Through an examination of scenes of recognition in three texts from across

Delmore Schwartzs career, Benjamin Schreier argues that Schwartz offers a

way out of degrading essentialisms in the study of recognizably ethnic literature.

In each of the texts, recognition creates conditions in which Jewishness can be

apprehended in the first placewhether it be anti-Semitisms provision of a

context in which Jewish identity becomes visible as an identity among others,

modernitys debasement of language offering the non-referential means to

gesture toward that identity, or knowings alliance with desire and the

vocabulary of the image fixing an object only in acknowledging its absence.

Schwartzs is an understanding of Jewishness that, marking the constitutive roleof recognition in identification, preserves Jewish identitys irreducibility without

essentializing it. Insofar as his Jewish identity can only catachrestically be

considered the starting point for an analysis of Jewishness in his work, Schwartz

points, irreversibly, toward a non-instrumentalized ethnic literary criticism.

Rob Tally takes on one of the most popular nineteenth-century literary

forms, the narrative of return, in which a familiar narrator returns tocivilization with an account of events in parts unknown, thus colonizing and

homogenizing distant experiences for readers at home. But Tallys essay asks

what if, as in Poes MS. Found in a Bottle, the story is just that, found,

floating in a bottle. There is no return: the narrative exists, apparently, because

the narrator does not. The characteristics of irreversible narrative function to

undermine the personal and national narratives that were to dominate American

literature during Poes career. Not only does the individual narrator lack the

agency to control his environment, but the events are ineluctable, the necessary

results of causes set in motion without his input or even knowledge. In Poe, thisfatalism is reinscribed in the narratives form, which proceeds first deliberately,

then hurriedly, and finally with panicked frenzy. Unlike the popular personal

narratives of the mid-nineteenth century, it does not offer an occasion to

domesticate the foreign experience, to know it or make it familiar. The

imagery is not of rebirth and rise but of descent, ineluctable and irreversible,into the unknown.

Aaron Worth in his essay reconsiders commonplaces about the characteristic

millenarian anxieties offin de sicle Britain, contending that fears of racial

degeneracy, evolutionary retrogression, imperial decline, and what has beentermed reverse colonization might usefully be grouped beneath the rubric of


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terrors of reversibility. Nowhere, perhaps, are these anxieties more explicitlyarticulated than in the genre of future war or final war fiction which

flourished in late Victorian Britain, a genre whose eponymous cataclysms seek

to exorcise the specter of imperial and racial reverses by dramatizing global

victories for the Saxon race. Strikingly, these texts typically conclude by

attempting to imagine or instantiate a new and discontinuous mode of

temporality itselfa static or irreversible chronotope that Worth shows to be

a formal, generic attempt to frame an imaginary solution to a series of perceived

dangers that so exercised the late Victorian imagination.

Beginning the Models section, Nicholas Chare revisits Willem de

Koonings 1953 agreement to provide the artist Robert Rauschenberg with one

of his drawings. Rauschenberg spent several weeks erasing the work, which

extended process of deletion resulted in Erased de Kooning Drawing. Chare

argues that Rauschenbergs act of negation forms a representation of both

linguistic and temporal irreversibility. Through a psychoanalytic reading, Chare

sees the act of erasure as a failed attempt to reverse the subjects entry intolanguage and access what Jacques Lacan calls the real. Drawing on the notion of

entropy, Chare understands the erased artwork as a representation of the

irreversible effects of the forward movement of time. Thus the technique of

erasure which produces these two representations of irreversibility forms the

subject of Rauschenbergs workand of Chares analysis.

Shane Denson analyzes how Mary Shelleys Frankenstein anticipates thestructure and stakes of recent bioethical debates about genetic engineering.

Exploring how emergent relations between humans and biotechnologies

undermine recognizable, subject-centered theories of knowledge and justice,

Denson is interested in examining what he calls an irreversible reconfiguration

of the human entailed by chance consequences unforeseeable and uncontainable

by a goal-oriented conception of technological endeavor. Eschewing superficial

thematic connections between Frankenstein and biotechnology, Denson

articulates a theory of technological irreversibilityuncovering the dynamics

by which material technologies and their impact on the body irreversiblyundermine the relations of nature and artifice he finds central to normative

humanity.

Defining care as the disposition to identify and respond to concrete needs (be

they ones own or anothers), Anca Gheaus reflects on how failures of care

result in irremediable moral damage. Gheaus claims an acknowledgment of careto be indispensable to an analysis of the pervasiveness of moral luck, a type of

contingency that determines who we become and thus deeply shapes our

character, personality, life choices, and internal resources. Finding that failures

of those who are supposed to give care irreversibly shape the emotional qualityof peoples lives as well as their moral personalities, Gheaus argues that our


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8 Introduction

own ability to give care, create bonds with other people, and lead, together withthem, meaningful livesqualities so important to ones moral profileare thus

dependent on luck.

Matthew Guy investigates Emmanuel Levinass conception of the founding

of consciousness as a moment of irreversibility that cannot be accounted for

within the metaphysics of language or reason. For Levinas, reversibility

denotes the capacity for something to become rational, analyzed, and exploited

by logic, and the term appears only in Levinass criticism of Western

philosophy as a war waged on the other. Within a reversible order, things can

be arranged, rearranged, redefined, or even effaced. Irreversibility, however,

is more than merely the resistance to such exploitation and analysis. Levinas

uses the term irreversibility not to show the limits of reason, but rather its

foundations. Reason begins not as the power that I have over the other, but as

the response to the ethical command which comes from the other. The first

encounter with the other, an event which Levinas shows to be the beginnings of

consciousness and language, is this irreversible event. Guy argues thatrecovering this eventand its ethical orientationis for Levinas the obligation

of philosophy and the heart of the Talmud. To rediscover consciousnesss

original, irreversible, moment is not only to rediscover the essence of Judaism,

but to rediscover an ethos that enables a powerful critique of Western

metaphysics and philosophy.

If many of the papers in this volume employ irreversibility as an analyticalconcept, the final two contributors address irreversibility from a different angle,

looking at examples in which it emerges as an object of cultural representation

or figuration. Zoe Trodd examines how image-texts from the 1930s responded

to an apparent end in the long-cherished American narrative of irreversible,

linear progress. Observers noted that experience felt out of joint, defined by

incongruity, accident, and disjunction, and image-texts displayed the fragile

myth that had been Americas dream of irreversible progress. But Trodd shows

how, in the wake of lost narratives and shattered myths, collaborators like

Anderson and Rosskam, Lange and Taylor, Wright and Rosskam, and Agee andEvans also tried to manage the new indirection. Some tried to contain

uncertainty and others embraced it. Still others tried to restore the irreversibly

forward line, carefully sequencing their image-text collaborations to emphasize

a progressive, linear movement. However, in acknowledging the possibilities of

the image-text medium to recreate irreversibility, some artists offereddeclensionist narratives of an irreversibly vanishing Americaexpressing the

irreversibly corrosive impact of time. Finally, Trodd demonstrates, if the

irreversible line could be one of declension as well as progress, then image-text

collaborators needed another solution altogether. They found it in nostalgia, andoffered a resistance to the seemingly irreversible changes wrought to a myth of


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unending progress by asking America to keep rolling through reversiblecycles. If unable to move irreversibly forward out of the Depression, America

could perhaps move back.

Eric Wertheimer approaches irreversibility obliquely through an

investigation of the attempt to fit reversibility into commercial life. Specifically,

Wertheimers essay addresses the purported reversibility of material loss

through insurance contracts in the American eighteenth century; an analysis of

the rise of insurance underwriting allows him to view property and texts

referencing one another with new-found imaginative authority, requiring ever-

growing networks of text and value that define modern commercialism and

governmentality. Perhaps most interesting, Wertheimer shows, insurance

contracts anticipate a textual function by doing the notional work of material

replacement. The methods of reversibility and replacement Wertheimer traces in

the poetics of insurance reveal the final inability of these legal and poetic

fictions to accomplish satisfactorily the goal of imaginative and economic

underwritings. As Wertheimer shows in this essay, underwriting containsintense narratological contradictions, areas of ongoing symbolic uncertainty,

and a quality of loss that its representational methods cannot ultimately secure.

* * *

I feel compelled to admit that there are many papers I would have liked toinclude in this book that arent herepapers that were not proposed, papers that

were proposed but never actually written, papers that were only half-written

but at the same time, there is so much here that I could not have imagined or

expected when I first set out to put this collection together. This book has been

more than just a labor for me: it has also been a discovery. My hope is that it can

serve as the origin of many more discoveries.

Notes

1 Norbert Elias, Time: An Essay, trans. in part by Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell,

1992), 10.2 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. xiv-xvi.3 Jean-Paul Sartre, On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner,

Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Criterion

Books, 1955), 86-7.4 Both insight and belief were bolstered when I came across, some years later, Delmore

Schwartzs observation about Lionel Trillings argument from moral realism that thenovel, in order to be sufficiently social and thus to raise questions in our minds not

only about our conditions, but about ourselves, [to] lead us to refine our motives and ask


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10 Introduction

what might lie behind our impulses, must take as its subject manners, which Trilling

famouslytoo vaguelydefines as a cultures hum and buzz of implication, those

not-quite-articulated values that draw the people of a culture together and which,

represented adequately in a novel, produce a sense of social texture:

The truth, I would guess, is that Mr. Trilling likes novels about society, and about

the social world, better than other kinds of novels; and he makes it clear that he

wants novelists to write about manners and the social world, presenting a thick

social texture. There is no reason to question this as a personal preference; but it

is erected by Mr. Trilling into a standard of judgment and a program for the

novelist, and it leads Mr. Trilling to suggest, indeed almost to insist, that novels

about society and the social world are the best vehicles of understanding,

forgiveness, and love, while other novels are inferior vehicles, if indeed they are

capable of supporting those qualities at all.

It is this more or less unacknowledged move from preference to normative standard that

is so conspicuous. See Schwartz, The Duchess Red Shoes, Selected Essays of

Delmore Schwartz, ed. Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1970), 206, 208, 211.


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Part I

Readings


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CHAPTERONE

HAMLETS REVENGE,LUTHERS REPENTANCE,

AND THE POETICS OF IRREVERSIBILITY

MICHAEL BOOTH

This reading ofHamletlocates the plays unusual power in its stark study of

time as unremitting and irreversible disintegration, its testimony that things

cannot remain the same. Same is thus a key term for my discussion:Hamletis

tragic because it dramatizes how self-sameness, the presumed integrity of

individual subjectivity, is subject to disintegration through time, and the play is

also tragic because the erosion of interpersonal or social sameness, of

consensus, makes an impossible problem of justice, love, or meaning, but does

not at the same time, or at the same rate, mitigate our need for these things, orHamlets or Ophelias. The kings ghost, as a trope, announces the situation that

is the soul ofHamlet; the ghost is a figure for the problem of being attached

either to self-sameness or to intersubjective communion, or communality, in a

temporal world that relentlessly ruins and belies sameness.

My reading ofHamlet is in part informed by Martin Luthers Ninety-Five

Theses as intertext; I take Shakespeares rather emphatic invocation of the city

of WittenbergWhat make you from Wittenberg, Horatio?. . . But what, in

faith, make you from Wittenberg?1as an invitation to consider the

cosmological insights of the play in relation to the doctrines of Luther, the mosthistorically conspicuous of Wittenbergers. The collocation of Shakespeare and

Luther seems warranted by their comparable stature as founders of

discursivity in Michel Foucaults phrase, and by the cultural, conceptual and

experiential world they shared as early-modern European men of letters whoauthorized themselves to treat the whole of the human condition in their writing.

Another such was Montaigne, whom Shakespeare read, and who sits

companionably on the periphery of this essay, helping in his very cheerfulness

to show by contrast what Shakespeare and Luther have in common: their

apprehension of time as an unendurable fact. I have portraits of myself attwenty-five and thirty-five, says Montaigne. I compare them with one of the

present: how irrevocably it is no longer myself!2


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Hamlets Revenge, Luthers Repentance 13

If Luther, Montaigne, and Shakespeare all notably emphasize the attrition ofthis worlds dependable samenesses, it will be relevant to notewithout

wandering too far into this theorists influential and intricate analysis of power,

ideology, etc.that they generally fit a pattern observed by Foucault and noted

in his bookThe Order of Things:

We must pause here for a while, at this moment in time when resemblance was

about to relinquish its relation with knowledge and disappear, in part at least,

from the sphere of cognition. How, at the end of the sixteenth century, and even

in the early seventeenth century, was similitude conceived?. . . The semantic web

of resemblance in the sixteenth century is extremely rich: Amicitia, Aequalitas

(contractus, consensus, matrimonium, societas, pax, et simila), Consonantia,

Concertus, Continuum, Paritas, Proportio, Similitudo, Conjunctio, Copula. . . .Such, sketched in its most general aspects, is the sixteenth-century episteme.3

The passing away of this episteme is borne witness to by Shakespeare in

Hamlet, by Montaigne in his Essays, and, if more obliquely, by Luther in his

Ninety-Five Theses.

The dour theologian is almostas unflinching as the other two in his view of

temporality, though Luther blinks; for him there is salvation, another world,

whose importance to him is the measure of his horror at the impermanence of

this one. But let us set this difference aside to note that Luthers envisioned

means of rescue, a sweeping mental act that he calls repentance, anticipatesand perhaps informs the thinking of Shakespeare in Hamlet, which manifests a

kind of epistemological upheaval quite alien to earlier Elizabethan revenge-

tragedy. Though I do not in a simple sense conceive of Shakespeare as a

Lutheran or Protestant or Christian writer, I argue that the poetics ofHamlet

reflect a repentant mental disposition, inasmuch as Shakespeare, like Luther,

brooded intensely upon the human subjects problematic relation to others and

to the past. I am not using repentant here in quite the sense of wishing an act

undone, for Luther and Shakespeare both acknowledged that no deeds can be

undone, just as they saw that every sublunary thing must come undone; I userepentant in something close to Luthers sense, though, indicating a certain

epistemological suspension or a renunciation, without Luthers consequentadducing of divine rescue.

What we are to make of Wittenberg, in Hamlet, is something of an open

question. That Hamlet has been studying there is the first thing we learn upon

meeting him (I.ii.112-119), besides that he dislikes his uncle, is angry with his

mother, and persists in mourning his father. Though Wittenberg may simply

be meant to lend Hamlet an air of grave contemplation from the starta

brushstroke, as when other plays are set in Verona or EphesusShakespearecertainly might have invoked Luther for more specific reasons, for instance to


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14 Chapter One

forestall any perception by Elizabethan audiences and censors that the play wastoo Catholic.4 The connection with Wittenberg having been made, and its

particular emphasis preserved through revisions and performances,5Hamlet

comes down to us as a text in dialogue with its Reformation context. So what,

we may ask, does the play say to or about that context?

The city of Luther, though foreign, is a familiarizing detail; Shakespeare could

draw upon generally sympathetic associations with it to establish Hamletscharacter expeditiously. As Jamey Hecht notes, the metonymic invocation of

Luther (and Faustus) imports the tormented conscience, the war against

authority, ambivalent heroics, and a vastly expanded role for inner feeling and

decision.6 Raymond B. Waddington has gone so far as to argue that Luther is

the prototype for Hamlets character.7 The suggestion of Hamlets Wittenberg

education may in any case heighten our sense of his and our distance from the

unreconstructed Danish court, and it may even underscore his resistance to

taking at face value the entity claiming to be a soul in purgatorya resistance

that becomes a crucial factor in the plays moral calculus.

Early on, Hamlet is, like Luther and Faustusat least at the end ofDoctor

Faustusacutely concerned about the fate of the soul after death. For a play that

emphatically raises such a concern, though, Hamlet seems to end with an

emphasis remarkably far removed from it. What are we to assume about the

state of Hamlets soul after his murder of Polonius and his gratuitous

dispatching of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? His dying exultation in forcingpoison down Claudiuss throat after stabbing him hardly seems indicative of

Christian salvation. This change might conceivably reflect a shift from the

Catholic view, that salvation and works are connected, to Luthers Protestant

view that they are not; in a strongly Lutheran reading, the point of the play

might be that Hamlets salvation or damnation does not depend on what he

does, but only on his faith. The weakness of such a reading would be the

scarcity of evidence that Hamlet has any such faith. The change in Hamlet and

in the play may simply be what it appears to be: a development of the authors

thought away from any kind of religious concern with the afterlife and towardsan extraordinarily intense meditation on this life. I would argue, though, that in

certain respects the plays early invocation of Luther remains highly relevantnot in a theological sense, but in what we may call a phenomenological sense.

Hamlet, like Luther and Montaigne, has much to say on the insufficiencies

of human reason: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are

dreamt of in your philosophy.8 I agree with Jamey Hecht that Hamlets remark

there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so9 represents a

radical version of Luthers epochal shift of the site of meaning into the

person, and that both Luther and Shakespeare give evidence of an interpretivecrisis in the mind of the culture.10 To an extent I agree with John Schwindt that


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Shakespeares world, like Luthers, is manifestly unjust and can be enduredonly by an abandonment of reason and an awakening of faith.11 I am not sure

that an awakening of faith is Shakespeares method or his aim, but the

abandonment of reasonI would say the exhaustion of itseems a fair

characterization of his common ground with Luther. For Luther the depraved

flesh means everything that is born of the flesh, i.e. the entire self, body and

soul, including our reason;12 the cause of the failure of reason, on this view, isits rootedness in the temporal rather than the eternal. Montaigne says, of

temporality, there is no existence that is constant, either of our being or of that

of objects. And we, and our judgment, and all mortal things go on flowing and

rolling unceasingly. Thus nothing certain can be established about one thing by

another, both the judging and the judged being in continual change and

motion.13 Where Montaigne and Shakespeare part company with Luther is over

the matter of faith in a world besides the temporal one. For Luther, the

disintegration of reason becomes itself the warrant for justification by faith

and hence for the reversibility of our fallen, mortal state; for the skeptical

Catholic Montaigne, it is the source of mankinds fascinating and absurd

behavior, worth watching whether there is another world or not; for

Shakespeare, in Hamlet, it is pure disintegrationirreversible, inexorable,

irremediablean entropy of subjectivity and the world.

The apparition of the old king in the first scenes ofHamlet creates an

epistemological crisis for the characters who witness it. This may be seen as acrisis of temporality; the old man is supposed to be no longer in existence. The

experience provokes from them a rationalizing discourse of likeness.

Bernardo: Looks a not like the king? Mark it, Horatio.

Horatio: Most like. . . .14

Marcellus: Is it not like the king?

Horatio: As thou art to thyself.15

Horatio: . . . I knew [the king]/ These hands are not more like.16

Horatio: It would have much amazed you.

Hamlet: Very like. Very like. Stayd it long?17

The ghost is very much like the old kingalmost so much as to make the

relation one of identity; the ghost almost, almost is the old king. Horatios

remark to Marcellus, reaching for the most extreme degree of similarity short of

identity, crosses the line and stumbles into an unsettling equation: Marcellus

relation to himself is the ghosts relation to the king. If the equation helps toreify the apparition, it tends to de-reify the living Marcellus, making him the

ghost of himself. Horatio thus loses for us the distinction between same


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16 Chapter One

(Marcelluss relation to Marcellus) and similar (the ghosts relation to the king),which is to say, the relation between same and different. Selfsameness is a

vexed issue in this play from the opening challenge: Bernardo? He!

The overdetermined resonance of Hamlets very like, very like intimates

not only the way that probability is a kind of sameness or similaritywhats

most like to happen is whats most like what happens mostbut also the way

that sameness and similarity are kinds of probability, apparent patterns keptperpetually indeterminate by the fact of time. I shall not look upon his like

again, says Hamlet of his father, a remark that becomes structurally ironic in

light of his immediately succeeding encounter with the ghost. Since the ghost is

construable either as a continuance of the king or as merely his like, the

ambiguous logical truth-value of Hamlets remark would seem to hold, in the

balance, the moral weight of the plays revenge plot. That is, if Hamlets

prediction proves literally true, and what he soon looks upon is the genuine

article, the actual murdered father and not his like, then exacting revenge

upon Claudius is at least countenanced by dramatic conventions of poetic

justice, if not by any Christian theology, and the harm or disruption represented

by Old Hamlets death is to this extent reversible. But if the ghost is merely a

counterfeit of Hamlets father, his like(The spirit that I have seen / May be

the devil. . . And perhaps. . . /Abuses me to damn me18) then any violence

against Claudius merely compounds a prior and irreversible harm.

Hamlets dilemma is, it transpires, insoluble, which may present theaudience with a quietly uncomfortable sense, as the tragedy proceeds, that in

fact forbearance from revenge-murder remains incumbent upon himat least

until Act V brings in the consideration of self-defense that effectively moots the

moral quandary. True, Claudius confesses the murder of Hamlets father, but he

does so in soliloquy, and it is made clear to us that Hamlet does not hear the

confession. And true, Claudius recoils from The Murder of Gonzago as

Hamlet had hoped he would (The plays the thing/ wherein Ill catch the

conscience of the king19), but the evidentiary value of his reaction is strongly

undermined by the fact that Claudius has been told hes watching a depiction ofthe murder of an uncle by a nephew (This is one Lucianus, nephew to the

king20) and may very reasonably be interpreting the play as a threat, not anaccusation. In many ways,Hamletseems conscientiouslyand perversely, for a

revenge-tragedyinterested in undermining the grounds for revenge.21

Granted, Claudius shows himself villainous enough by the end, and never

more so than when, for fear of exposure, he allows Gertrude to drink from the

cup he has poisoned for Hamlet. But the swift and unproblematic retributions of

Act V, Scene ii serve all the more starkly to emphasize the fact that, until that

point, for perhaps four hours of staging time, revenge has been a highlyproblematic proposition. For the first half of the play, at leastthe whole part


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concerned with Old Hamlets deathas the circumstances of that death fadeinto the past and ever farther beyond the possibility of evidentiary elucidation,

Hamlet finds that there can be no satisfactory reckoning. The moral weight of

revenge can only be an additional burden and not a counterweight to his grief.

The ghost is a recognition (re-cognition) that, for want of a temporal continuity,

fades to the mere cognition that so strikingly characterizes Hamlet as a dramatic

creation. Granted the play ends with the showdown and the righteous wrath thatthe public has paid to see and participate in vicariously. But the character of

Hamlet, no small piece ofHamlet the total work of art, gives himself to

posterity asmost exceptionally for an Elizabethan tragic avengeran

inveterate questioner of his own perceptions, one who might say with

Montaigne, He who remembers having been mistaken so many, many times in

his own judgment, is he not a fool if he does not distrust it forever after?22

A principle of sameness underlies concepts of self, character, coherence, and

meaning, because it inheres in any kind of recognition, including the recognition

of difference. Sameness is not undone by difference; both, as relations, depend

on the continuity of an observing self in time. Sameness is undone, rather, by

particularity. Why seems it so particular with thee? asks Gertrude,23 cajoling

Hamlet to settle his differences, share her equanimity and make common sense

with her of the transience of life and meaning. Seems, madam? Nay, it is, I

know not seems.24 The words same and seem are cognate, by way of Old

Norse, appropriately, and neither is far from the sense of seemly, that whichcorresponds to the standards of a community. With regard to intersubjectivity,

Hamlet knows not sames. With his fathers death and his mothers remarriage,

soon followed by Ophelias removal of herself from his company in filial

obedience, Rosencrantz and Guildensterns show of loyalty to Claudius,

Yoricks observed return to the dust and Laertess new implacable hatred,

Hamlet no longer finds any community of discourse or meaning available to

him or adequate to his experience.

Or rather, he finds almost no community adequate; the exception, for the

duration of the play, is that which consists of himself and Horatio. Theexceptionality of this relationship, in the larger pattern of Hamlets interactions,

has often been noted and puzzled over. Who is Horatio that he should beHamlets confidant? One answer is that he is almost nobody, a character almost

wholly uncharacterized, the only kind of character for whom there can be room

in a play that will barely contain Hamlet himself. Another answer, taking

Horatio more in earnest as a definite personality, and taking Hamlet at his word,

is that Hamlet recognizes in Horatio the only other possessor in Denmark of a

moral intelligence resistant to times alterations: For thou hast been/ as one in

suffering all that suffers nothing.25


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18 Chapter One

Intersubjectivity is one kind of infinitely proliferating differenceoneencounters in life the inexhaustible alterity of other mindsand this

intersubjective difference is intelligible, finally, only with reference to ones

own sense of selfsameness or temporal continuity; in thinking or even sensing

that they differ from me, one posits a me, an entity with cohering identity

over time. Time, on the other hand, another kind of infinitely proliferating

difference, can only be made sense of through intimations of intersubjectivesameness. To apprehend either difference, a subject needs at any moment the

epistemological footing of one or the other unstable sameness.

Time is a kind of difference; it is known to us only through change, even if

only the changed position of the second hand on a clock. Time, as difference,

implies a continuity of site or subject upon which difference can be registered,

and it must be marked or recorded in the ultimately social phenomenon of

discourse; concepts, including time and intersubjective difference, imply a

discursive community of subjects to conceive them. When there is no discursive

community, then time is not an orderly system. The time is out of joint when

things are no longer connected by any relation of sameness or difference, when

they are not articulable in discourse, when they are particular.

The watchmen in the opening scene, already haunted by the anticipation of a

ghost, ask Horatio to watch, with them, the minutes of this night.26 Again

Shakespeares perception accords with that of Montaigne, who says I do not

portray being: I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another, or, asthe people say, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from

minute to minute.27

The ghost enters at a moment that is, by Bernardos differing accounts,

shortly after 12 a.m. and shortly before 1 a.m.28 It departs, moments later, at

dawn.

{The cock crows}. . .

Marcellus: Shall I strike it with my partisan?

Horatio: Do, if it will not stand.Bernardo: Tis here!

Horatio: Tis here!

Marcellus: Tis gone!29

The broken pentameter line tracks the fleeing ghost by a kind of echolocation

through repeated assertions of presence; it emphasizes not only the passing of

time but the immediate obsolescence of frames of reference.

The same dying echo haunts another internally stichomythic line, when

Laertes warns his sister, rightly enough, to understand whatever community of

meaning she might share with Hamlet as


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(Laertes): Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,

The perfume and suppliance of a minute

No more.

Ophelia: No more but so?Laertes: Think it no more.30

The pessimistic refrain no more is, ironically, more constitutive of continuingmeaningbetter able to remain truethan the positive, bulletin-like Tis

here!31 The double negation in no more, of amount and duration, prefigures

and epitomizes Ophelias eventual crisis of meaning. The mimetic economy of

love in which her understanding is invested, like that of revenge which figures

more prominently in Hamlets case, is one of reciprocation, which relies on a

temporally continuous subjects stable relation to the past. Just as the ghostsequivocal temporality is Hamlets epistemological problem, Hamlets equivocal

temporality is Ophelias problem:

Ophelia: My lord, I have remembrances of yours

That I have longed to redeliver.

I pray you now receive them.

Hamlet: No, not I,

I never gave you aught.

Ophelia: My honord lord, you know right well you did, . . .

Hamlet: . . . This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did loveyou once.

Ophelia: Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

Hamlet: You should not have believd me. . . . I lovd you not.32

Like Hamlet, Ophelia is prevented from being free of, or effective in, an

exchange economy that means everything. Her sanity founders not simply on

the fact of a change in Hamlet, but also on the insufficiency of retrospection, onthe inability to judge same or different because the meanings that construct self

and memory have collapsed with Hamlets withdrawal from cosponsorship of

them. Her insanity is a lapse into radical particularity, the end of her ability toparticipate in common sense generality. Her count has been thrown off because

something shifted. The time is out of joint.

The roughly minute-long stay of Old Hamlets ghost is not so much recalledby the stunned watchmen as recounted. It is described with recourse to the act of

counting.

Hamlet: . . . Stayd it long?

Horatio: While one with moderate haste might tell an hundred.

[Marcellus & Bernardo]: Longer, longer.Horatio: Not when I sawt.33


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20 Chapter One

Hamlet later offers a corollary: a mans lifes no more than to say one.34The erosion of sameness, of which I have spoken, is also the theme and, as it

were, the hero, of Rene Girards essay Hamlets Dull Revenge,35 which

regards the breakdown of Hamlets ability to transact social meaning as an

achievement, an escape from the compulsory mimesis or unconscious imitation

that structures human interaction and discourse. Girards reading, like the

present one, seesHamletas a revenge tragedy that is finally against revenge, butwhere I have considered sameness as a fleeting desideratum (We are born into

the world and there is something within us which from the instant that we live

and move thirsts after its likeness, says Shelley36), sameness for Girard is a

nightmare that eventually overtakes everything, even the attempt to escape it by

describing it. Both interpretations partake, like Hamlet and the writings of

Montaigne and Luther, of Foucaults modern mode, where thought is haunted in

a dynamically indeterminate way by the unthought: What is essential [in

modern experience] is that thought. . . should be both knowledge and a

modification of what it knows, reflection and a transformation of the mode of

being of that on which it reflects.37 If the revenge-tragedy genre is about certain

kinds of samenessa closed economy of causality, the temporal symmetries of

poetic justice, the self-sameness of characters, the logical adequacy of their

motivationsHamletseems to refuse these samenesses. 38 The revenge and love

it presents are frustrated, ambivalent, and continually compromised by

irreversible time. Thought, in Hamlet, seems most characteristically to belieitself and trace not a revenge plot towards closure and satisfaction, but what we

could call, following Luthers special usage of repentance, a repentance plot

towards epistemological insufficiency.

Luthers term repentance in theNinety-Five Theses, far from implying the

regret or contrition normally associated with the word, denotes an unconditional

surrender to divine presence or present-ness, divine atemporality. It involves a

relinquishment of the samenesses that structure and allow relational thought and

certainty: No one is sure of the integrity of his own contrition, much less of

having received plenary remission.39 It entails an abjuration of symmetricalexchange, insisting that the purchase of indulgences is futile, worldly commerce

and ensures nothing. Luthers repentance is nearly a poststructural moment in itsabdications, but rather more solemn; it is not so much about remembering what

one did wrong as about knowing that one is continually wrong, with the added

force of in the wrong. Luther makes clear that repentance is not finite: 1.

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said Repent [Matt. 4:17], he willed the

entire life of believers to be one of repentance. This repentance is not a

relinquishment of suffering,40 but a relinquishment of having suffered. For

Luther, the only answer to time is a relinquishment of the having been that avengeful subject would rely on for meaning.

Studies in Irreversibility

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