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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