Post on 22-Jan-2023
One of the literary critics who write about ethics begins an article by noting that the only people to whom we should listen on the topic are those who are evidently embarrassed by their talk. He has a point, which perhaps explains why I have tended to let my books do the talking for me over the years. For literary critics, he goes on to say, this embarrassment can, or should, stem from taking ourselves as spokespersons for self-congratulatory values in reading that are extremely difficult to state in any public language. The question of values or goods in regard to our moral agency is not something, however, that I will address today. Charles Altieri, that article’s author, identifies three primary points of intersection between ethics and the literary: 1) the moral agency and ethical situations on display in texts; 2) readers imagining or actually entering moralconversations about their own assessments, and 3) critics using texts to enter the discourses about morality carried out by professional philosophers. “Ethics and/of/in literature” names the first point of intersection; “ethical criticism” names the third. It is the second, however, “the ethics of reading,” that is my general topic here, as it has been in my work over the pasttwenty years. In what follows, I will be developing a very particular and sense of what that phrase might mean, continuing the method of dialogically paired texts that has been my signature contribution to this only slightly exotic subfield. You already have a working idea of my current project from the précis that David kindly sent out. Accompanying it were a piece by Geoffrey Harpham and an essay by David Grossman about what he calls “the principle of otherness” as a driving motivation for fiction writers, which as far as my talk goes today, I would callan ethical question about intersubjective boundaries. Finally, thanks to my wife Miriam, I included a short excerpt from Maimonides about which I will say just a little more momentarily.That’s a sort of preamble. Let me now begin in earnest.
Folie-à-deux: Le Mémorial and Realms of the Unreal
R. Parnach said in the name of R. Yohanan, “Anyone who grasps a Torah scroll with his bare hands will be buried bare [without shrouds].” Why imagine a punishment as severe as being buried
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bare? Say, rather, that the statement means, He will be buried bare, without mitzvot. Why imagine a punishment as severe as being without mitzvot? Rather, said Abaye, the statement meansthat he will be buried bare of that mitzvah [the one he performedat the time he grasped the scroll with his bare hands, for example, the mitzvah of reading from it or rolling it closed]. –Talmud Bavli, Tractate Megillah, 32a
Late at night on November 23-24, 1654, in his chambers on
the rue des Francs-Bourgeois Saint-Michel, Blaise Pascal
experienced something momentous. A spiritual ecstasy, a dream-
vision, a premonition of his own mortality: one or all these
things, Pascal’s Nuit de feu marked his so-called “second
conversion,” which was to be dramatic and lasting. Materially,
it impressed itself upon him threefold. First, he transcribed
the experience in a single page of fervent and ciphered prose; an
elliptical fusion of his own rapturous sentiments and scriptural
allusions from the Vulgate and Louvain Bibles, it has come to be
known as Le Mémorial since its publication in the 1742 edition of
the Pensées. Second, he made a fair copy of that paper document
on parchment, altering the text slightly by omitting some words,
specifying Biblical references, and adding six lines at the end.
Third and finally, he folded the original testimonial in half,
enclosed it within the parchment, and sewed the doubled text
(aptly enough) inside his doublet so that, worn upon his body, it
would always cover his heart. An interior transformation
embodied not once but twice, only to be sequestered and made
interior all over again beneath a third external layer, but
sheathed or grafted as if it were a second skin.
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Biographers speculate on the proximate cause or motivation of
Pascal’s ecstatic conversion experience, pointing to a possibly
apocryphal incident involving a near-fatal carriage accident on
the Pont de Neuilly. Whether or not Pascal’s “night of fire” on
November 24th was brought on by a brush with death shortly
before, the added detail of cause-and-effect certainly satisfies
our own desire for an even better, more dramatic narrative, for
what Alfred Hitchcock called “the Maguffin,” the story element
that catches our attention or drives the plot. I come back to
such desires at the end of my talk. Had the document not been
found in Pascal’s clothing by a servant shortly after his death
in 1662, it would very likely have remained buried with him,
albeit still interposed, the intimate companion to post-mortem
memory. For the eight years he carried these papers on his
person like an amulet, it is not clear whether he re-read them.
Evidently, he did transfer them from an older coat to a new one
when his clothing became worn out. Having internalized his own
writing (making it as much an act of memorization as
memorializing ), Pascal could, one assumes, regularly imagine the
palimpsest’s proximity burning its fire into his heart, its call
to spiritual wakefulness ubiquitous yet invisible, wholly
concealed yet indelible like a tattoo.
Pascal’s sister Gilberte Perier does not mention either the
incident or the amulet in her famous Vie de Monsieur Pascal.
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Personally, I would like to think this testifies to her
discretion. But then, I would be reading into her text.
Gilberte’s children, however, informed a priest about the
propitious discovery, and we do have his account, which ends,
“All agreed that this parchment, written with such care and in
such remarkable script, was doubtless a sort of Memorial that he
had guarded very carefully in order to preserve the memory of
something ever-present before his eyes and his mind.” Assuredly,
this first report of the discovery was meant in the spirit of
fidelity. To preserve a memory beyond the limits of Pascal’s own
as a testament to his piety was no doubt motivated by a
scrupulosity similar to that which Walter Benjamin ascribes to
mimetic truth in The Origin of German Tragic Drama: “not a process of
exposure which destroys the secret but a revelation which does it
justice.”
You are now holding a reproduction and translation of the
Mémorial in your hands. As you can see, it is a very brief
expostulation, 28 lines long, several at five words or fewer.
Now that the Mémorial has seen daylight, as a found object and
true hieroglyph, it lays itself open to all manner of perusal,
residing, as the expression has it, in the public domain. No longer
simply “Pascal’s” Mémorial, part and parcel of the proper name,
it is also interpretively and projectively “ours.”. But I don’t
wish either to read it with you or comment on its text. I prefer
to hold citation at bay. For our business here is really neither
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with Pascal nor with his exposed text, but with his readers. The
ethical problematic I wish to propose is about boundaries. The
ethical questions I wish to raise as points of entry for an
ethics of reading concern precinct and trespass, propriety and
use, consecration and profanation. The image I want to put
before you as a trope for reading is that of the “book-in-our-
hands” and for what and to whom it makes us answerable.
As a preliminary framework for what the ethical might signify in
this very particular context, I will borrow from the essay by
Geoffrey Harpham. “Ethics is locked into a relation with things—
discourses, cognitive styles, ways of evaluating—that are alien
to it and yet still its own.” It is “an x-factor,” “a hub or
matrix from which various discourses, concepts, terms, energies
fan out and at which they meet, crossing out of themselves to
encounter the other, all the others” (37). This “dynamic
engagement with otherness,” Harpham writes, “is the key to the
kingdom of ethics; where such an engagement is, there is ethics.”
“Ethics articulates rather than guides perplexity.” As far as
textual engagements, Harpham’s most important claim for me is
that the nature of literary transactions for texts, writers, and
readers alike gets disturbed, shadowed from within and without,
both clarified and obscured, by ethical interpositions.
Grossman’s essay lays claim to a similar idea when he says that
in the very act of authoring characters, writers can be written
by them in turn, when they act beyond the writer’s horizons,
redeeming some unknown option of authorial personality by bringing it
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to light. In short, for author and reader alike, literary fiction
acquires ethical mystery, an aura or penumbra. This is
especially the case, I believe, for a singular text like
Pascal’s, which I want to suggest, marks a limit case. In the
first of his lectures on literary experience written in 1948,
“Pourquoi écrire,” Jean-Paul Sartre calls the dialectical nature
of writing and reading literary texts, a “pact of generosity”
with the author’s “whole art bent on obliging the reader to create
what he discloses.” In this pact, any text is an appeal to the
reader as both exigence and gift. “The book does not serve my
freedom,” Sartre maintains; “it requires it.” Thus in a famous
passage, he says, “Raskolnikov’s waiting is my waiting which I
lend him.”
Without this impatience of the reader he would remain only a
collection of signs. His hatred of the police magistrate who
questions him is my hatred which has been solicited and
wheedled out of me by signs, and the police magistrate
himself would not exist without the hatred I have for him via
Raskolnikov. That is what animates him, it is his very
flesh.”
Or as the poet Seamus Heaney once said about Robert Frost’s
narrative poem, “Home Burial”:
“The top of the reader’s head is lifted like the latch of the
protagonist’s tormented home.’’ But
how we move from these notions of participation with or within a
text to a situation like the
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one Pascal’s text presents us with is an open question that seems
to me to problematize the ethics
of reading—what is it, what are its contours, how do talk about
it?
This is not, of course, the sense of ethical that J.
Hillis Miller sought to convey in his book composed at
deconstruction’s heyday, The Ethics of Reading, where the ethical
moment in the act of literary reading is a fundamental “I must” that
responds to the language of literature in itself (Miller’s words). If, in
Derrida’s formulation, “Ça se déconstruit,” a text deconstructs
itself, then my ethical agency becomes a matter of respect for
what the text is already doing internally. Ethics means obeying
the law of reading which will always elude me as a written
ascertainable law and which I can therefore only tell stories
about. Nor does the situation of reading Pascal’s text
correspond in any way to the sense of the ethical that Maimonides
flags in the short excerpt you also may have read. There,
ethics is synonymous with the discourse of moral didacticism—
literary texts whose subject is virtue, or concomitantly, the
denunciation of vice. Because the ethical agency of readers is
reduced by such a definition merely to assessing the moral
character of a text as either virtuous or vicious—what Martha
Nussbaum calls “judicious spectatorship”—and then ranking texts
accordingly, it won’t carry us very far at all for the
transactional sense of the ethical as it impinges upon reading a
found text like the Memorial. Let me dwell then for a moment more
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on the purely inadvertent circumstances of the document’s
discovery and the accident of its reception, which has meant an
unintended availability for comprehensive scrutiny—in a word, for
reading.
Following the precedent I mentioned above, all subsequent
biographies and critical appraisals of Pascal take note of the
Mémorial. It has received its fair share of intensive close
readings. In his Freudian psycho-biography, Pascal: The Man and His
Two Loves, John Richard Cole, for instance, proceeds decorously, as
if entering a holy of holies—“It remains powerfully attractive to
other believers,” Cole writes, “and I approach this unique
document with great respect,” (106). That doesn’t stop him,
however, from analyzing the text at length as a specimen of
separation anxiety and attachment disorder. Another reader,
Calin Mihailescu permits himself freer license:
Any time one reads it -- aware of the secrecy of the
Mémorial—one probably feels as if one is peeping through the
keyhole at a scene not meant for “representation.” This
exercise in a small yet comforting obscenity leaves the
unaware actor unprotected against the eye of the unwelcome
spectator.
Emphasizing the acoustic over the visual, what then follows is an
energetic account of the Memorial’s prosody, its secret puns,
resonances, the whole sonic drama of its sentences. Mihaliescu
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writes, “Pascal kept the Mémorial at his chest, a precious but
secret stigmatum, and also a reverse purloined letter posted to
his future selves, not to be stolen by the thieves of time. He
knew his text by heart.” And yet obviously, now we know it too.
It is laid bare before our eyes and ears; we hold it in our
hands.
Like any text, then, the Mémorial becomes infinitely
appropriable, a stimulus for hermeneutic ingenuity: transferred
out of Pascal’s hands, it ceremonially or unceremoniously passes
through ours. In his book Masters and Friends, Paul Valéry, for
example, dismissed the document outright: unlike Leonardo’s
irrepressible genius, Pascal “having changed his new lamp for an
old one, wasted hours sewing papers into his pockets at a time
when he might have honored France by discovering the
infinitesimal calculus” (365).) What Condorcet disparaged in
the 18th century as “mystic amulet,” a pietistic fetish, the
Cuban Orígenes writers (José Lezama Lima, Cintio Vitier, Eliseo
Diego, Fina García Marru), venerated in the 2oth century as a
vehicle for their own ecstatic poetry. In his short memoir, “The
Book of Memory.” Paul Auster personalizes Mémorial as an analogy
for the constraining and liberating power of memory in the space
we call literature, saying nothing, however, about how the
piously concealed text itself became exposed, thus slip-knotting
the question of original intent, of the particular kind of work
Pascal had composed (is it even a “work?”).
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So the Mémorial finally becomes a literary text in the sense we’re
familiar with—to be puzzled out for style, genre, form and
content. But every single reading that text has prompted,
literary or otherwise, is accidental, and that is the point I want
to stress here. Unlike, say, Rousseau’s Confessions, which counts
on being read and understood, or even Pascal’s own Pensees which
were fragmentary and also written on scraps of paper but never
concealed, Pascal’s Mémorial—as Mémorial—displaces itself—or
becomes displaced—from inside to outside, private to public,
without any intention to do so; like Freud’s Wunderblock or
“mystic writing pad,” it becomes writing before our eyes, so to
speak, with unforeseen horizons. Habent sua fata libelli, says a Latin
proverb: Books have their fate ,and Pascal’s text is now a book
with a fate—in the hands of literary history and interpretive
potency, and as I keep insisting, in the literal hands of others.
The admittedly naïve question I want to pose therefore is: what
does the act of reading we take for granted look like when we
bend its light through the prism of a found object like Pascal’s
Mémorial? And so more generally, what are the ethics of
literary reading? Intuitively, I feel I understand the
hermeneutic force of such a question. But that’s because it’s
one I’ve devoted some time to framing for myself. Since I
realize the valence I am giving to ethics here may be a novel one
for this audience and because I can’t assume we’re all working
from the same assumptions, I want to leave that question
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suspended by pivoting from Pascal’s Memorial at this juncture to
another tale of fortuitous discovery and unwilled entrance into
the public domain: the case of the 20th century “outsider artist”
Henry Joseph Darger, author of the longest extant piece of
imaginative fiction in world literature.
Henry Darger died on April 13, 1973 and was buried in the
paupers’ plot of All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines, Illinois.
Without formal education past elementary school, much of his
early life was confined to charitable institutions of various
kinds, including a five-year stay in the Lincoln Asylum for the
Feeble-Minded. His adolescence and adulthood were also spent in
institutions, where he made his meager living as a custodial
laborer. From 1922 until shortly before his death (in the last
of such institutions, the St Augustine Home for the Aged), Darger
lived the entirety of his penurious and isolated years in two
crabbed apartments on Webster Street in Chicago, by day working
as janitor or dishwasher in a series of hospitals on the North
Side, and when no longer able to work, attending Mass in a nearby
church several times in a single day. By night, indefatigable
and prodigious, he was engaged in an altogether different kind of
labor, as was discovered shortly after his death. For upon
entering his small two-room flat to dispose of what was thought
to be the debris of an impoverished life—piles of discarded
newspapers, books, phonograph records, cheap votive objects,
homemade balls of twine, boxes of rubber-bands and broken
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eyeglass-frames, disposable plastic maple syrup containers and
empty bottles of Pepto Bismol, shoes—an entire and astonishing
interior life given form through home-made art and seemingly
interminable prose revealed itself. You now hold in your hands
photographic reproductions of Darger’s room. And to reprise the
verdict on Pascal you heard just a minute ago, “one probably
feels as if one is peeping through the keyhole at a scene not
meant for representation’.” Besides the rubbish, the ephemera of
a lifetime’s strange archivalism, there was this: 15, 209 pages,
typed single-space, of an historical chronicle/mythic
fiction/religious epic/adventure-story/war
correspondence/apocalyptic narrative/secular scripture entitled
The Story of the Vivian Girls in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the
Gland[e]co-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion (1911-1938)
distributed over 15 bulky hand-bound volumes, some eight inches
thick; a sequel of almost 11,000 handwritten pages in 16 volumes,
Further Adventures in Chicago: Crazy House; a 5084-page autobiography, The
History of My Life (1939-1946) of which only the first 206 pages
actually narrate Darger’s bare and depopulated life, only to be
self-interrupted by a permanent swerve into densely apocalyptic
and repetitive fabulation; Weather Books (1958-1967) consisting of
seven volumes of a journal detailing ten years of amateur
meteorology; Diaries (1911-1917, 1969-1972) and miscellaneous
personal ledgers; and last but hardly least, three-hundred and
eighteen double-sided illustrations (some as large as twelve-feet
long) collected into three large albums, meant to accompany The
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Realms as a parallel visual text. Tacked to the walls or hung on
string, were also his own collages of newspaper clippings,
magazine illustrations, coloring book pages, and photographic
enlargements. The artwork is now to be found in museums from the
US to Japan. The writings, in all, over 30, 000 pages of typed
and hand-written text, have yet to be read in their entirety by
anyone. While much of it is conventionally literary, by turns
derivative, amateurish, arresting, grotesque, beautiful, and even
sublime, the rest, because of its obsessional, accretive, and
encyclopedic character, remains all but unreadable. Like
Pascal’s Mémorial only retroactively appropriated, Darger’s work,
in perhaps never being intended for eyes to scan and hands to
hold it other than its creator’s own, almost defies the very
category of literary communication.
Darger is known to have had a single close companion in his
lifetime, evidently also something of a social misfit, very
possibly disturbed. He eventually moved away and died in 1959;
whether he knew of Darger’s writing or functioned as their
audience in a sort of folie-à-deux cannot be determined; but
since he was almost certainly illiterate, he could not have read
any of it. In the time Darger lived on Webster St., his
landlord Nathan Lerner, Lerner’s wife, and fellow-tenant David
Berglund had each been afforded brief access to Darger’s
quarters, noting an artwork in progress but nothing else. Yet
Darger chose to tell none of them about his writing, an oeuvre
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that for over sixty years both filled his life and in some
essential way substituted for and constituted it. In the Realms of
the Unreal was begun in 1910-1911 and was finished sometime in the
1930s; begun in 1939, Crazy House was completed by the mid-1940s.
Darger continued to work on both texts, putting most of his
energies into illustration, and composed his other manuscripts up
until 1969, four years before he passed away. When Berglund
visited him in the hospital shortly before his death and
expressed elation at discovering his astounding feats of
authorship and artistry, Darger said simply, “It’s too late…Throw
it all away.” And in a later interview, Berglund observed, “It
was like I had punched him in stomach, taken the wind out of
him.” (19). In summing up his own narrative of discovery as
prologue to his critical exercise in Darger-like gigantism, John
MacGregor, Darger’s dogged commentator, asks the absolutely
salient question:
Henry Darger’s art was, and remained, a secret life work,
hidden from all eyes. Would he have wanted his pictures
exhibited around the world? Would he have wanted his
writings published; or books such as this one written about
his life and work? Or are we invading the privacy of this
man—wrongfully entering his secret world? This is a real
moral issue. By what right do we enter Darger’s life,
explore his room, read his books, look at his paintings?
(19).
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It wasn’t just Darger’s artwork and writings that lay open to
trespass. The cluttered apartment in which he lived, with its
collections, some haphazard, others painstakingly catalogued and
assembled (cartoons, retouched photographs), lent itself to his
recuperative imagination, too, and was in a very concrete way
continuous with his prose, collages, and illustrations—the
parallel to Pascal’s doublet that both hid and housed the
Mémorial. Indeed, MacGregor advances the trenchant and deeply
insightful explanation of the agglutinative nature of Darger’s
entire compositional and creative process---the tracings, the
collage, the surfeit of documentary detail: Henry Darger adopted what
came to hand.
To draw means to bring into existence an image which has not
previously existed….Tracing makes no such claim. It is a
mode of adopting an image that is already in existence, and
of moving it from one environment to another. It is a means
of achieving contact and of obtaining possession (162).
It seems that Darger’s lifelong project was adoption,
reclamation: for quotidian loss or lack in the world he sought
compensation by inventing a world, which then needed to be
compulsively and ceaselessly filled (even aggressively and
sadistically, at times), an intrapsychic fantasy rendered through
word and image. His was a life confined, sentenced to, but also
liberated by, the compulsive properties of invention; his drawing
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and writing permitted him the satisfactions, mastery, but also
the horror of “an endlessly prolonged and elaborated daydream”
(MacGregor, 538).
Misunderstanding the privacy at stake here was the rather
spectacular curatorial mistake made by the American Folk Art
Museum last year in an exhibition entitled, “The Private
Collection of Henry Darger,” which proposed the novel theory that
by pasting collages and drawings on his own walls, Darger “the
vernacular modernist” was not merely a secret artist but a secret
art-collector, as well. Happily enough for its own raison d’etre ,
a museum thus finds its own sanction in the work of a creator for
whom the very notions of exhibition and public display were alien
in the extreme. It’s also a telling instance of the difference
between Darger’s brand of adopting objects in order to make
contact with or hold on to them, and the academic enterprise of
appropriation we call the archive. In Archive Fever: Freudian
Impressions, Jacques Derrida writes of the archive’s infinite
regress, the way, for instance, the Biblical Moses becomes
Freud’s Moses, then becoming Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s
Moses, where each new sedimented layer is significant less for
its content than, as Derrida puts it, “the scene of reading it
provokes and in which the reader is inscribed in advance…. The
archivist produces more archive, and that is why the archive is
never closed. It opens out of the future (67-68).”
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Listen now to the hopeful exuberance of Henry Darger’s own voice
as it announces entry across the threshold of his fiction, into
the Realms of the Unreal:
The description of the great war, and its following results,
is perhaps the greatest written by an author, on the line of
the fabulous war that could ever be entitled with such a
name (Vol. I).
The accounts of the numerous stirring scenes here will, we
hope, become interesting and attractive as well as
fascinating reading to the people of our nation, but also
highly important and valuable though unreal (Vol. II).
The poet, the painter and the artists, even if they were to
seek this all out under the allurement of fiction or truth,
could not have accomplished any more (Vol. III).
The author writes the scenes in this volume as if he often
had experienced them himself, as if one time he is on the
side of the foe, at another on that of the Christians….Let
the reader follow battle after battle with the others, let
him follow every event and adventure, and then if he can, if
he sets his mind and heart on it, take it on as if he
himself was an actual participant (Vol. IV).
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A reader is often identified as such within the work, addressed
conventionally, taken inside as co-experiencer, sympathetic
witness. That may well have been only a stylistic device. More
likely, it indicated Darger himself. While we cannot be sure
that Darger had even the time to re-read what he had written,
MacGregor suggests, rightly I think, that the acts of writing and
illustrating were absolutely imperative for him, a necessity as
compelled and cumulative as his writing, as grandiose and
hyperbolic as his subject, whether or not they lent themselves to
acts of meditative reading or viewing by himself or others; he
wrote prodigiously, compulsively, because he had to, which may be
a tautology but also the underpinning of Darger’s realm of the
day-to-day real. Yet we cannot help but also observe one of the
recurrent tropes in Darger’s prose, the protestation of his
story’s untellability in any complete or ultimate sense—which is
at the same time belied by its seeming interminability, its
compulsive ongoing-ness of narration and depiction. Of war
correspondents, he says
They have written and sent in as much of the reports by
wireless and the like but it was impossible for them to tell
all and the whole world at best can and will never know all
of it for the millions of horrible tragedies written by the
flood disaster will forever remain mysteries, and if they
had really happened only Eternity could reveal all. … But if
so, the realm of the finity, the weak and staggered senses
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of mankind may gather only small fragments of the disaster
and may strive with the most incompleteness to convey what
we say is the merest impression of the saddest and most
shocking and astounding story… (Vol IV).
By now, we have ventured into the inner precincts of Henry
Darger’s writing much further than we did with Pascal’s hidden
amulet. Pascal and Darger. From the sublime to, well, to
another realm of the sublime altogether, Pascal and Henry Darger
reside unexpectedly and restively in the same, shared space.
Coupling them here as I do identifies that space as nothing
either man could have envisioned, since each thought himself
alone, unviewed, although they are now together—though my own
critical legerdemain—in each other’s company. Facing texts or
neighboring, as I’ve now come to call that method, uses
juxtaposition itself as an ethical “operation” we perform
critically. I’d to invite you to consider for our discussion
the implications not only of, exposing Darger and Pascal, so to
speak, but of juxtaposing them in this fashion, coordinating them
as strangers who have become neighbors, thus putting pressure on
my own method. Is it such a different question: to
instrumentalize two works like this in the service of an ethics
of criticism? In fact, intriguing affinities do link them,
which we can catalogue.
For example, in the introduction to his book on Darger, “Henry
Darger: Author, Artist, Sorry Saint, Protector of Children,”
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Michael Bonesteel, a counterpart to Cole, says, “He did not do
this to make ‘art’ or ‘literature.’ He did not do this to gain
fame or make money. He did it to save his life. And though he
fought with God over it and risked his soul in the process, it
worked” (7). To that degree, Pascal does not seem so very
distant, and indeed, he isn’t. In the foreword to John
MacGregor’s mammoth and definitive 720-page treatment, Henry
Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, Darger’s landlord and posthumous
patron, Nathan Lerner, says of him: “He loves God, and manages to
stand tremendous physical pain. Yet he is not prepared to accept
undeserved suffering. So he suffers, and then he taunts God. It
is not much different with Pascal, though Pascal did it very
consciously” (6).1 So even in the critical literature, some
surprising harmonics link figures as disparate as Henry Darger
and Blaise Pascal. But if Darger’s case resembles Pascal’s, it
is chiefly because both have been accidentally discovered. That
remains my basic premise.
Despite any unelected affinities, the juxtaposition remains
admittedly farfetched. Scale, form, style, authorship, cultural
authority and influence, religious sensibility (though this last
1A second instance of uncanny repetition: at the end of MacGregor’s book, in its careful appendix, “On the Problem of Diagnosis,” Darger is briefly compared with the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, whose own permeable boundaries between life and fiction (the famous “fleetingly-improvised men” that so captivated Freud and Jung), had already occurred to me in connection with Darger.
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one is tricky as Pascal and Darger were both ecstatics of a
sort): the vectors of difference only increase as any possible
commensuration between the two writers opens on to a vanishing
point. But as with Pascal, my business is really not with Henry
Darger, however tempting a subject he may be. It is with the
scene of reading that the discovery and archiving of his work now
prompts.
Let us recall MacGregor’s question again. “By what right do we
enter Darger’s life, explore his room, read his books, look at
his paintings?” One of the striking features of MacGregor’s own
Brobdignagian study of Darger is its insistent motif that such-
and-such a feature of Darger’s writing or drawing “demands” or
“requires” explanation. Notwithstanding the self-check that
introduces his inquiry, MacGregor proceeds to submit every
possible detail in sight to relentless scrutiny in the name of
verstehen, of bringing light to hermeneutic shadow. And much of
the analysis is indeed eye-opening. As with Darger’s work
itself, one feels that this particular archival project could
never properly cease, resembling as it does Borges’s famous map
that corresponds in scale and detail to the terrain it
represents.
Unlike modern attempts at a total archive of the self, the Inman
Diary for instance, or the 35 million-word daily account, still
on-going, by Robert Shields, or literary autobiographies
(Augustine’s, Witold Gombrowicz’s, among others) Darger’s work,
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like Pascal’s Mémorial, is different. It appears—too late,
however—to want no more than to keep its interiority intact,
enfolded. Even its innocent Don Quixote-like moments of back-lit
authorship seem to answer to that very limit. More than once,
MacGregor notes the curious meta-fictive moment in Volume 1 of
The Realms in which characters happen upon the very books that
narrate their adventures, and proceed to speculate about their
author, Henry J. Darger:
Soon they had them on the table. Evans proceeded to examine
them. He took the pictures first. These he examined
carefully. “Why this is very extraordinary,” he explained.
“Every picture seems to look at you straight in the face, as
if you had some secret to tell them, or as if you suspected
them of knowing your thoughts. And probably he had to use
them as company as he was childless.” “Maybe that is so,
and he wanted them all to look as if they were paying
attention to him,” said Jennie. “He must have been a very
odd man.…He certainly did make a good history of the
Glandco-Abbeiannian war… He has every battle in their
correct places, and he predicts that he served in them all,
and an account of everything you little girls went through
and of my many experiences and rescues….Here’s his full
signature, address, and everything, little girls.” They all
at once crowded around him to see, and sure enough this is
what they read.
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History of the Glandco-Abbeiannian
War
Written by Henry Joseph Darger
St Joseph’s Hospital, 2100 Burling
st
740 Garfield Avenue, Chicago,
Illinois
Yet MacGregor ignores the equally telling hint of (accidental?)
self-allegory in a passage he also cites about a “Crazy Quilt”
map that the Vivian girls have drawn: “In other words we must
hide the map when it is not in use. “
When, we might ask, is writing not meant for reading, that is, to
be grasped and taken in, apprehended by hand, comprehended?
What if “use” is something wholly private or restrictive,
ensuring that the work, when not employed, is kept out of view?
Doesn’t the fact that a work resides materially in the realm of
the publicly real as opposed to privately unreal force it hugger-
mugger into the economy of exchange and substitution, to become
part of what Stanley Cavell has called “the world viewed?” One
of Darger’s collage-illustrations of his heroines the Vivian
Girls running in advance of a storm, bears the inscription,
“Assuming nuded [sic] appearance by compulsion…” And the girls
are indeed unclothed (after Darger’s fixated penchant): evidently
the impending violence of the storm or else their own haste has
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compelled such “denuding.” But Darger’s caption can serve as a
warning generally for the twin fates assumed by his and Pascal’s
libelli alike: formerly covered up, they now manifest themselves
bare, and answer to compulsions (whichever may motivate them
authorially), not their own.
I want to offer these two instances of denuding—publicizing
Pascal’s and Darger’s private work—as limit cases for an ethics
of reading. I have chosen them deliberately because they are
extreme: they presuppose MacGregor’s question, “by what right” do
we read? Now I suppose before we grapple with an answer, I need
to revisit what I mean by an ethics of reading. Reading, in
this case, signifies primarily literary reading, which doesn’t
mean reading that is confined exclusively to literary texts but
rather a certain way we approach a given work. The element of
“attitude” was at the heart of C. S. Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism,
a book that’s probably out of fashion at this point. In a more
recent version of that experiment, Derek Attridge explains,
To read a literary work responsibly, then, is to read it
without placing over it a grid of possible uses, as
historical evidence, moral lesson, path to truth, political
inspiration, or personal encouragement, and without passing
judgment on the work or its author (although in other
accounts it may be vital to make such judgments). It is to
trust in the unpredictability of reading, its openness to
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the future. From this reading, of course, a responsible
instrumentality may follow, perhaps one with modified
methods or goals. And to the extent that reading literary
criticism or philosophy or history partakes of the
experience of the literary, the same is true: a preparedness
to be challenged by the work, an alertness to its singular
otherness, an attentiveness to the way it operates through
mobile and meaningful forms as well as by thematic
representation and conceptual argument, will result in a
fuller, more responsible response and in an enhanced
possibility of change in the future. The ethics of literary
reading is less a matter of the exercise of a certain kind
of effort on each reading—though it is that (including the
effort of disencumbering the reading self—than a
disposition, a habit, a way of being in the world of words.
Let me put before you now a much more conventional notion of what
the role ethics lays for literary reading. It comes from George
Eliot’s novel Middlemarch. It is a metaphor for egotistical
thinking, and yet, for reader trained by a novel’s own procedures
for itself, it is also a metaphor for reading. The fact that
Eliot’s text is a novel is significant for me because it is in
that genre particularly, albeit not exclusively, through its
narrative aspect, its dependence on plot and the representation
of character, the peculiar rhetorical function of a narrator’s
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discourse, and the shape of its sentences, that the ethics of
literary experience dramatically takes shape.
Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made
to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and
multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now
against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and
lo! The scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine
series of concentric circles round the little sun. It is
demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere
impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the
flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light
falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things
are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is
the egoism of any person now absent—of Miss Vincy, for
example.” (Chapter 27)
Two chapters later, this same morally instructive and
authoritative narrator gives voice to one of the great reflexive
moments of self-interruption in the modern literary canon or
outside of it,
One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick,
Dorothea -- but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view
the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I
protest against all our interest, all our effort at
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understanding being given to the young skins that look
blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded,
and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are
helping to neglect. In spite of the blinking eyes and white
moles objectionable to Celia, and the want of muscular curve
which was morally painful to Sir James, Mr Casaubon had an
intense consciousness within him, and was spiritually a-
hungered like the rest of us. (Chapter 29)
In these examples from Eliot, reading, as a hermeneutic
performance, as deciphering or even fleshing out, is the stuff of
egoism, of subjective slant. And the lessons re reflexive ones:
as the narrator collaborates intimately through metaphor and
self-interrogation with her subject and her readers, so her
readers reorient those messages towards the reading of Eliot’s
novel. Where is my candle positioned in relation to this text?
How do my own prejudices and biases determine where my
heremeneutic sympathies will go? But I think Eliot’s moralizing
still shares a tangency with Attridge’s idea. How alert are we,
she is asking, to something’s or somebody’s singular otherness?
If you’ve read works like Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice or Wayne
Booth’s The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, you’ll recognize this
version of an ethics of reading as one that has to do with
attentiveness, acuity, a training in moral and perceptual
sensibility. Its dominant move, propositionally as well as
methodologically, is towards philosophical reasoning about
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values: literary texts teach discernment and moral judgment.
This is the Maimonidean position, too. Textual encounters in
their concrete particularity are inevitably referred to a set of
more general categorical principles. Literary reading is a
species of phronesis, of practical wisdom.
The examples of Pascal and Darger are meant to invite you to help
me in thinking about the ethics of reading in different sense.
Its metaphor is that of making contact with a text, grasping it,
having it pass through the hands. And so I return full circle
to the Talmudic epigraph I began with, which appears on the very
last page of the tractate Megillah. The technical problem being
discussed is one that is treated at several points in the
tractate. As you have read, it is known as tumat yadayim and first
arises as a question about the Scroll of Esther itself, indeed
about all similar books, like Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs known
as ketuvim, writings: are they part of the Biblical canon? Are
they sacred texts—rabbinically stated, are they capable of
metamei et ha'yadayim, ritually defiling the hands? The working
subtitle to my current project, “art and ethical adventure,”
suggests a metaphorical—non-legal, or halakhic, but rather, if
you will, an aggadic—application of that same idea. How are we
answerable to and for our literary reading and in particular for
our instrumental desires—for plot, for hermeneutic mastery, for
closure? What, in short, is the ethical status of the book-in-
our-hands?
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