Cavell and Holsinger

Read a couple of interesting works of theory recently.
1. Cavell's 1969 essay on King Lear, the last chapter of Must we mean what we say? It now reads very much as a document in America's Vietnam-war era culture: it's marked by an unusual pessimism and animus towards government. But it's also a virtuoso piece of intellectual chutzpah and energy. What struck me most in it was its account of the distance between the play's fictional world and the spectator's world.  That account goes like this: the spectator is enable to interrupt the play's fictional world, which has therefore no 'presence' for him.  Nonetheless, the spectator is also in the ongoing 'present' of the narrative's tragic unfolding: he's there and engaged in a scripted world he can't participate in.  It's this relation to time that enables the spectator to 'acknowledge' the tragic events rather than just know them.  And that's where the tragic effect is completed too since the spectator's incapacity to interrupt a tragedy unfolding is a type of the way in which individuals can't interrupt (and comes to realize that he can't interrupt) the (also tragic) historical events around them, all the more so because Cavell sketches an account of an American democratic modernity which disperses and extends the uncontrollable social forces which shape individual lives. It's a dark 'tragic' view of democratic state capitalism.

2. Bruce Holsinger's The Premodern Condition, a rather polemical argument for the impact of medievalism on French theory in the fifties, sixties and seventies.  It's a book well worth reading because it really does shift one's sense of French intellectual life in the period.  I most liked the chapters on Bataille (who begins as a medievalist) and Barthes (who, according to Holsinger, is influenced by Henri de Lubac's work on medieval exegisis and hence by the debates over Vatican II).  More specifically, what's great about the book is that it allows one so reconceive 'post-structuralism' as a revival of rhetoric. What's not so great about it is that it doesn't deal with the reasons why this medievalism (if indeed it exists to the degree that Holsinger supposes) has been so occluded. And presumably that's for two main reasons: 1. medievalism in France was so connected to Catholicism, a connection which has immense political resonances which Holsinger downplays, and 2) post-structuralism is in the end so different from medievalism in ways which become most apparent perhaps in Blanchot's work, with its thematics of fragmentation, spacing, interminable existence beyond life and death etc (as becomes especially apparent in Levinas' remarks on him.)  Blanchot being no kind of medievalist I think ......

Anglicanism and Henry James

James does not much concern himself with the Anglican church in his fictions (or, if it comes to that, in his life) I think. But there are some exceptions.  These include 'The Author of Beltraffio" which is about a perfidious wife who effectively  murders her son to protect him against her husband, Mark Ambient, a sophisticated aesthete and novelist a la James himself.  Ambient writes in order beautifully to capture life as it is lived. He resists sentimentalism, moralizing, romantic enhancement. And his means for capturing life for beauty is, of course, form.  Or as he calls it at one point, 'execution'—in a subtle pun.

Ambient is complicit in his son's death since his aestheticism prevents him from preventing his wife's filicide.  And the story's narrator, Ambient's young Amerian admirer, is actually an agent in the murder too since his ill-considered remarks to Mrs Ambient and the child trigger the crime.

And the wife is 'religious' at least in the sense that she's a respectable church--goer and  socializes with the local Anglican clergy. Ambient himself describes his struggle with his wife as belonging to the old old war between the Christian and the Pagan.

What is at stake here is complex since Ambient's literary aesthetic is so close to that of James himself. Ambient is unlike the ideal James writer however in two respects. 1. His interest in the exotic (he is obsessed by Italy, and goes on a tour as far as Asia). And James is dead-set against the aesthete's seduction by the exotic. 2. His uxoriousness.  And Ambient's passivity in relation to wife and its fatal consequence, may mask a certain misogyny on James's part.