Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading O'Hara, Daniel T. Published by The Ohio State University Press O'Hara, T.. Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009. Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/27786 No institutional affiliation (17 Jul 2018 21:33 GMT)
preface She went in silence to where her friend never in intention visibly so much her friend as at that moment had braced herself to so amazing an energy, and there under Amerigo s eyes she picked up the shinning pieces. Bedizened and jeweled, in her rustling finery, she paid, with humility of attitude, this prompt tribute to order only to find however that she could carry but two of the fragments at once. She brought them over to the chimney-piece, to the conspicuous place occupied by the cup before Fanny s appropriation of it, and after laying them carefully down went back to what remained, the solid detached foot. With this she returned to the mantel-shelf, placing it with deliberation in the centre and then for a minute occupying herself as with the attempt to fit the other morsels together. The split determined by the latent crack was so sharp and so neat that if there had been anything to hold them the bowl might still quite beautifully, a few steps away, have passed for uninjured. As there was however nothing to hold them but Maggie s hands during the few moments the latter were so employed, she could only lay the almost equal parts of the vessel carefully beside their pedestal and leave them thus before her husband s eyes.... She had taken him for aware all day (that she knew); but what had been wrong about was the effect of his anxiety.... [I]t was shut there between them, the successive moments throbbing under it the while as the pulse of fever throbs under the doctor s thumb? (James, The Golden Bowl 435 36) 1 How do we learn to read such a complex passage as this? How do we recognize and address its rich and various contexts? Perhaps most important: in our emerging post-human global society, what is there to be gained from such an experience of reading? That is the vii
subject of this book. The final chapter of this book is intended to demonstrate the inter-animating experience of reading such a passage; the intervening chapters are the ways in which I have learned how to do it. For a more detailed account of my argument and the book s organization, please see the introduction. For convenience, I have organized these chapters into three parts: The Critical Apparatus, The Literary Culture of Global America, and The Exalted States of Reading. By elaborating the framework of part 1 through a continuing analysis of contemporary fundamentalism, I also implicitly discuss the sublime experiences of reading that is possible for the culture of global America. Similarly, my introductory and concluding chapters explore and complete the book s theoretical agenda. The interrelationship of the book s parts is thus deliberate, as the reading entailed by passages such as that cited above require just that brand of interpenetrative process of textual self-interpretation I recommend. As good critical readers, I believe that we discover the truth of reading, in reading. The essential premise of this book is that there is indeed an American difference to reading. In saying this, I do not assume that this difference lies in the optimistic and chauvinistic versions of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny, nor do I accept that identity politics are necessary or sufficient to the human condition in the early twenty-first century. Quite the contrary: I believe the American difference entails the specific dream of the human being transcending itself here on this continent in accordance with the romantic visionary desire for spiritual and material apotheosis. As such, this American dream is a terrible contingent nightmare for the rest of the human species, as well as for most of the other species on the planet. In this admittedly hyperbolic light, Mormonism, with its doctrine of eternal progression to divinity, is the most American of religions in our global American empire. An American Christian fundamentalism, on the other hand, claims that only the quality of one s personal relationship with Jesus warrants a free trip to heaven, all the while allowing the practice of a radical antinomianism here below. The first chapter argues that the way this traditional romantic American version of liberated human nature plays itself out today is via the seductions of the post-human imagination. In this chapter, I viii
marshal Alain Badiou s theory of truth and its implications for the transformative role of the critic in the face of such strong allures. While I admit that the post-human includes both popular sci-fi representations and scientific innovations that are making human biogenetic engineering increasingly possible, this book deals exclusively with the former. Since the mid-1970s, America has become a sci-fi culture, while those of us who are human (all-too-human) are living in poverty on, what I call, after Badiou, the edge of the void of representation. Chapter 2 continues the elaboration of Badiou s militant theory of truth in relationship to what looks, at first blush, a lot like it the contemporary fundamentalist imagination. What I point out here, however, is that where Badiou s militant truth is put to the test by its very own subject, the experience of fundamentalism better resembles what Freud recognized in the Schreber case: namely, that the psychotic mind can recover part of its balance in the mad myths to which it publicly testifies, regardless of their falsifiability. By using Badiou to analyze a specific case of the fundamentalist imagination in this chapter, I demonstrate what I call the American madness at work, even as I separate the experience of the authentic subject of truth from the profoundly self-deceived. The final chapter of this first part on the critical framework of the book completes the elaboration of Badiou s theory of truth in a relationship to global terrorism and the source of the terror in its threat, especially after 9/11. It is here that the Lacanian dimension of my critical framework emerges more fully. Here I examine how and why the American subject must both disavow ever being split, while at the same time taking the most elaborate steps to repair the damage of that disavowed split. In the context of 9/11, the traditionally dominant forms of American culture have enacted this battle explicitly, but the structure of this struggle has been pervasive in American culture even before the event. The psychotic anxiety of this schizoid situation of disavowal and identification is the defining trauma of being an American; it is the real of American culture, and it has been confirmed with a vengeance by contemporary history. Part 2, The Literary Culture of Global America, lays out why and how this is the case. In chapter 4, I analyze the logics of the American visionary experience with respect to two representative ix
cases of these logics at work: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James. Emerson, whatever else he contains, espouses a vision whose logic makes a virtue of the incapacity to love by promising an apocalyptic self-transformation a rebirth of self as a creative genius, even an apotheosis into a divinity all in the name of Emerson s vision of the new, yet unapproachable America. James writes consistently against this romantic vision of creativity, dramatizing the limits of the imagination, what he calls (in The Middle of the Journey ) the infirmity of art, in the candour of affection, an often tragically impossible love expressed best, most fully, in the parent-child relationship and its diverse avatars (347). 2 Chapter 5 then discusses how the catachresis of America, the metaphorical figure of America, plays both a symptomatic role in contemporary American studies, and can be made to play the role of what Lacan in his late work calls le sinthome. I reference James s The Beast in the Jungle to show how the symptom of the protagonist s fundamental incapacity for love can become, for James and his reader, a material thread of jouissance that animates and enhances their identity beyond gender or sexuality in the service of a truth of an ultimate impersonal intimacy a prophetic vision by James of Lacan s le sinthome. My chapters on James Purdy and James s The Golden Bowl conduct similar experiments in critical reading to work out more fully how through self-reading we may transform what threatens our psychic dissolution into that which holds ourselves together. Chapter 6 closes out part 2 by suggesting how reading for le sinthome so as to discover the subject of truth, amidst the (self-)terrorizing experience of the real, is in fact best accomplished by the art of reading as practiced by philology, especially as performed by Erich Auerbach. By taking this brand of reading to two literary texts of the 1970s, John Cheever s Falconer (1977) and John Ashbery s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), the theory of reading as the truth event of the modern split subject s self-recognition here connects Badiou on truth and Lacan on le sinthome with Auerbach on Ansatzpunckten and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht s notion of Stimmung. To put this chapter s argument in a nutshell, as it were: just as global America is the catachresis for the emergence of an unprecedented modern form of imaginative hegemonic empire, so x
these terms of philological art provide an instance of the unprecedented event of reading my theory proposes and asks contemporary critical practice to perform. Part 3 focuses on three forms of sublime (but not divine) exaltation in and through self-reading, in which reading is explicitly highlighted as such. Chapter 7 uses two artist-tales by Henry James to bring out the self-destructive experience of radical jouissance as the legacy of the Emersonian tradition. Chapter 8 then shows how Foucault s The Hermeneutics of the Subject recasts the Stoic vision of amor fati so that we may see it creatively repeated in James Baldwin s surprisingly Jamesian vision of the democracy of love as the best most authentic future of humanity. And chapter 9, putting into play to the fullest the Lacanian vision of the real and le sinthome, then argues that the vision of the subject in James Purdy s work is one where human subjectivity may be legitimately sacrificed in a self-overcoming unto death that testifies to the strength, not the weakness, of being human, and so gives the ultimate lie to global America and its grandiose post-human phantasms. The book s conclusion then provides the reading promised by the preface. It gives the truth of the American madness that my reading of The Golden Bowl made possible through the progress in reading of this book would critique and temper via the tough love of James s tragic vision of life. xi