Studies in Irreversibility

Studies in Irreversibility Texts and Contexts

Edited by

Benjamin Schreier

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

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

To Sarah, Ava, and Reuben

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Illustrations .........................................................................................................ix Acknowledgments................................................................................................x Introduction: Irreversibility in Context ................................................................1 Benjamin Schreier Part I: Readings Chapter One .......................................................................................................12 Hamlets Revenge, Luthers Repentance, and the Poetics of Irreversibility Michael Booth Chapter Two.......................................................................................................28 Reversing the Irreversible: Dickinson and the Sentimental Culture of Death Mnica 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 Bottle Robert T. Tally Jr. Chapter Five.......................................................................................................99 The Reversible Empire: Race, Technology, and Irreversible Time in the Future-War Novel Aaron Worth

viii

Table of Contents

Part II: Models Chapter Six.......................................................................................................118 Robert Rauschenbergs Undoing: Reversibility and Irreversibility in Erased 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 ....................................................................................................185 Recovering the Irreversible: Levinas and Talmudic Ethics Mathew Guy Chapter Ten......................................................................................................208 Keep Rolling: The Irreversible Lines and Reversible Cycles of Depression-Era Image-Texts Zoe Trodd Chapter Eleven.................................................................................................230 Reversing Loss in Eighteenth Century America: Insurance and Literature Eric Wertheimer Bibliography .................................................................................................... 250 Contributors ..................................................................................................... 266 Index ................................................................................................................269

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 10.1. Figure 10.2. Figure 10.3. Figure 10.4. Figure 10.5. Figure 10.6. Figure 10.7. Figure 10.8. Figure 10.9. Figure 10.10. Figure 10.11. Figure 10.12. Figure 10.13. Figure 10.14. Figure 11.1.

Arthur Rothstein, Main Street, Vermont, 1937, FSA-OWI, LOC. Russell Lee, Winner of Prettiest Girl Contest, Oklahoma, 1940, FSA-OWI, LOC. John Vachon, Proprietor of Feed Store, Kansas, 1938, FSAOWI, LOC. Walker Evans, William Fields, Alabama, 1936, FSA-OWI, LOC. Marion Post-Wolcott, Durham, North Carolina, 1939, FSAOWI, LOC. Edwin Rosskam, Negro Family and Their Home in One of the Alley Dwelling Sections, Washington, D.C., 1941, FSAOWI, LOC. Russell Lee, During the Services at Storefront Baptist Church on Easter Sunday, Illinois, 1941, FSA-OWI, LOC. Walker Evans, Interior Detail, West Virginia Coal Miner's House, West Virginia, 1935, FSA-OWI, LOC. Walker Evans, Sharecropper Bud Fields and His Family at Home, Alabama, 1936, FSA-OWI, LOC. Walker Evans, Corner of Kitchen in Bud Fields's Home, Alabama, 1936, FSA-OWI, LOC. Ben Shahn, Middlesboro, Kentucky, 1935, FSA-OWI, LOC. Ben Shahn, Along Main Street, Ohio, 1938, FSA-OWI, LOC. Arthur Rothstein, View From the Square, Iowa, 1939, FSAOWI, LOC. Russell Lee, Dark Fall Day, Vermont, 1939, FSA-OWI, LOC. Hartford Insurance Policy for William Imlay, 1794. Courtesy of the Hartford Financial Services Group.

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 the Northeast 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 Wake Forest, Dean Franco and Charles and Kim Sligh provided various forms of assistance that proved indispensable. My mother, Arlene Richman, and motherin-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 the Herculean 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.

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 an instrumentalization. In producing a virtual account that runs backward from experienced 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 vis human 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 analyzing culture 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 of narrative 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 after what they render, the moment and fact of their intelligibility by the human understanding comes to seem far from their primary or most essential quality. When culture is seen as an

Introduction

assemblage of practices averse to metaphors of return, continuity, or recollection, 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 thinking those 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, explore teleology 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

Irreversibility in Context

of The Waste Land can be, as they may be at the close of the poem, shored against 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 narratives of 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 the development of emerging forms of agency. And I was delighted to find reckoning with irreversibility enabling a greater appreciationcharged with the potentiality of the new or novelof 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 because for 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-

Introduction

longer, the post-. But irreversibility need not be the kind of backward-looking dead-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 are examined; 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, one synthetic 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, always trying to keep in mind that no one methodology or critical approach may be

Irreversibility in Context

exclusively adequate or appropriate. Im not presuming that this collections tack 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 conceptual contours 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 their respective writers last names. Michael Booth begins the Readings section by locating Hamlets 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 of subjectivity 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 midnineteenth-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 fast becoming constitutive of modern life, embracing rather than resisting

Introduction

irreparable doubt, detachment, and deprivation. In her poetry, these disturbances are 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 role of 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 to civilization 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, this fatalism 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 of fin de sicle Britain, contending that fears of racial degeneracy, evolutionary retrogression, imperial decline, and what has been termed reverse colonization might usefully be grouped beneath the rubric of

Irreversibility in Context

terrors of reversibility. Nowhere, perhaps, are these anxieties more explicitly articulated 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 into language 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 the structure 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 irreversibly undermine 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 care to 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 quality of peoples lives as well as their moral personalities, Gheaus argues that our

Introduction

own ability to give care, create bonds with other people, and lead, together with them, 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 that recovering 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 analytical concept, 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 and Evans 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 offered declensionist 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, and offered a resistance to the seemingly irreversible changes wrought to a myth of

Irreversibility in Context

unending progress by asking America to keep rolling through reversible cycles. 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 evergrowing 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 contains intense 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 to include 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
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 the novel, 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
1

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.

Part I Readings

CHAPTER ONE HAMLETS REVENGE, LUTHERS REPENTANCE, AND THE POETICS OF IRREVERSIBILITY MICHAEL BOOTH

This reading of Hamlet locates 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: Hamlet is 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, or Hamlets or Ophelias. The kings ghost, as a trope, announces the situation that is the soul of Hamlet; 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 of Hamlet 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 most historically 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 who authorized 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 at twenty-five and thirty-five, says Montaigne. I compare them with one of the present: how irrevocably it is no longer myself!2

Hamlets Revenge, Luthers Repentance

13

If Luther, Montaigne, and Shakespeare all notably emphasize the attrition of this 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 book The 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 almost as 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, anticipates and perhaps informs the thinking of Shakespeare in Hamlet, which manifests a kind of epistemological upheaval quite alien to earlier Elizabethan revengetragedy. Though I do not in a simple sense conceive of Shakespeare as a Lutheran or Protestant or Christian writer, I argue that the poetics of Hamlet 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 use repentant in something close to Luthers sense, though, indicating a certain epistemological suspension or a renunciation, without Luthers consequent adducing 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 EphesusShakespeare certainly might have invoked Luther for more specific reasons, for instance to

14

Chapter One

forestall any perception by Elizabethan audiences and censors that the play was too Catholic.4 The connection with Wittenberg having been made, and its particular emphasis preserved through revisions and performances,5 Hamlet 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 Hamlets character 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 of Doctor 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 forcing poison 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 towards an extraordinarily intense meditation on this life. I would argue, though, that in certain respects the plays early invocation of Luther remains highly relevant not 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 interpretive crisis in the mind of the culture.10 To an extent I agree with John Schwindt that

Hamlets Revenge, Luthers Repentance

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Shakespeares world, like Luthers, is manifestly unjust and can be endured only 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, is its 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 of Hamlet creates an epistemological crisis for the characters who witness it. This may be seen as a crisis 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 to reify 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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(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 kept perpetually 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 the audience 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 of the 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 an accusation. In many ways, Hamlet seems 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 highly problematic proposition. For the first half of the play, at leastthe whole part

Hamlets Revenge, Luthers Repentance

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concerned with Old Hamlets deathas the circumstances of that death fade into 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 that the public has paid to see and participate in vicariously. But the character of Hamlet, no small piece of Hamlet 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 which corresponds 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. The exceptionality of this relationship, in the larger pattern of Hamlets interactions, has often been noted and puzzled over. Who is Horatio that he should be Hamlets 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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Chapter One

Intersubjectivity is one kind of infinitely proliferating differenceone encounters 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 intersubjective sameness. 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, as the 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

Hamlets Revenge, Luthers Repentance (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

19

The pessimistic refrain no more is, ironically, more constitutive of continuing meaningbetter 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 ghosts equivocal 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 love you 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, on the 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 to participate 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 recalled by 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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Hamlet later offers a corollary: a mans lifes no more than to say one.34 The 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, sees Hamlet as a revenge tragedy that is finally against revenge, but where 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 motivationsHamlet seems 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 belie itself 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 the Ninety-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 symmetrical exchange, insisting that the purchase of indulgences is futile, worldly commerce and ensures nothing. Luthers repentance is nearly a poststructural moment in its abdications, 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 a vengeful subject would rely on for meaning.