The More One Reads...

I've been reading Maurice S. Lee's Slavery, Philosophy, & American Literature, 1830-1860 in addition to my explorations into Lacan and Althusser. In the introduction he offers this assessment of the latest work in the American Renaissance:

Just as the American Renaissance proved amenable to political interpretation, more recently canonized traditions appear increasingly open to philosophical inquiry. Such inquiry need not entail deconstruction, neo-Marxism, or psycholinguistics, which have for decades been projected back on nineteenth-century texts. The more historically minded can turn to ideas available at the time to invoke, for instance, Hobbes before Foucault and Schelling instead of Lacan, and to view language not through Derrida but through someone like Thomas Reid. In this way, the literature of slavery can be read within the philosophical history not to attenuate theory or cultural studies but rather to advance them through an effort of synthesis that does not exclude philosophy from the domain of politics and culture. (Lee 9)

Oy. Just when I think I'm on the right track, I come across something like this and it sends me back to the drawing board. Lee's book is something I probably should have read before writing my dissertation proposal since he gets at a bunch of different things I'm interested in exploring, namely that literature of this period is invested in vexed philosophical questions regarding the position of slaves in the post-revolutionary moment. Lee does talk about some Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Kant but he's also looking the contemporary German philosophers like Schelling, people I don't even have a passing acquaintance with. I guess I'm not sure which is the most logical place from which to draw my definition of the Imaginary. Should it be from Lacan's concept of The Imaginary or should I drawing from contemporary concepts of the imaginary? Concentrate on Emerson, Kant, and the like? A little of both perhaps...use the Lacanian concept and look how the philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries enacts it? 

Reading Lee's book is both great and panic-inducing because he hits several of my pet points and does it really well. His chapter on Melville even as a section called "The Almost-Ship of State." "No political philosopher of the antebellum period was more provocative then Herman Melville" (134).  This is where I begin my thinking and where the dissertation ends. Of course to get there I have to get through Dred, so I better set Melville aside for now.

In his chapter on Stowe he discusses how Stowe's training in metaphysics manifests in her writing and how the violence of the abolition debates in the 1850s challenged her sentimental theory.  Dred, in depicting not just the plotting of a slave insurrection but partisan violence between whites, challenges her own theories on sentiment and enlightenment in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Violence is seen as inevitable given the limits of moral sympathy and also, in some ways, desirable. This is mostly in line with Levine's analysis but with more emphasis on the way in which Stowe and her contemporaries used literature to explore and critique Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). 

I haven't really thought of Dred as engaging with Enlightenment philosophy in the same way that Billy Budd does. My conception of this chapter has been primarily in terms of abolitionist debates of the 1850s and in the way that representations (or non-representations) of slave insurrections and their actors echo historical anxieties regarding insurrection. In terms of the limits of reason and sympathy I've mainly seen Stowe as in denial about it. But I think Lee's offering a way to engage Dred with something beyond the debates and the echoes of Haiti, etcetera. In terms of my own argument, or what I hope my argument is shaping up to be, the way that Dred both looks at the present and the future in terms of the debate, it also looks at the past, hence the coastal nature of the title character and his tendency to meditate in the hulks of ships. I think given both Stowe's trip to Europe and this concept of her own grappling with Smith I might have something else upon which to build on my concept of the Maritime Imaginary. 

Of course that means I'll have to re-read Adam Smith. Oy squared. 

Fragments

It's been a disjointed couple of days. I've been simultaneously trying to get a handle on Dred reception history and dabbling into Lacan (or rather Eagleton's interpretation of Lacan) which makes for kind of muddled reading. The Dred stuff is useful just in terms of nuts and bolts research. Of course it gives me things that seem like they should fit in somewhere but where isn't completely obvious. One of the places it's led me is to her memoir of her travels to Europe after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin and before writing Dred, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands in Two Volumes (1854). In it, she devotes a whole chapter about her sojourn at Playford Hall, formerly the residence of the late Thomas Clarkson. The purpose of the chapter does little except give a brief history of Clarkson's early career lifting heavily from Clarkson's own memoirs. In terms of what it might mean for the chapter, at this point, not much save that Stowe's own awareness of the British legacies of transatlantic slavery and the early abolitionist movement. If Stowe herself is haunted by Clarkson's slave ships than the presence of empty hulks of ships makes sense.


A more interesting tidbit courtesy of Audrey Fisch is that shortly after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in England and in response to its immense popularity an anonymous text appeared called Uncle Tom in England or Proof that Black is White. This book appeared in 1852 and according to Fisch was written out alarm that Stowe's original was gaining in popularity amongst the lower classes. I'm trying to decide if it's worth it add this to my already teetering tower of reading.

The Lacan readings are interesting but I need to read more, and read slowly. My brain has never readily absorbed this kind of thing and time hasn't done me any favors. Strangely it's leading me into Althusser's work ideology. Or maybe not strangely since I've been playing fast and loose with the term in Chapter 1. But I think both in terms of the problem of literary representation and positing that something about language changes with the rise in Transatlantic trade both approaches will end up framing my thinking well. If the definition of self transforms in the wake of the Glorious Revolution and with the implementation of race slavery what you have is both the illusion on the part of the British that this vast colonial empire constitutes a whole even if they can only see it in parts, and the misrecognition of that whole for something that it is not, colonists as subjects and not as potential revolutionaries. With regards to the slave the opposite thing happens. Self becomes fragmented into parts and use-value. This makes Equiano's work all the more interesting in that he needs to reconstitute the fragmented self into a whole. A maritime imaginary is perhaps one in which both ideologies and subjectivities are reflected and refracted by oceanic crossings.

A clumsy thought experiment but better to try it out now than a month from now when I'm trying to write coherently. I also don't want to end up doing an awkward psychoanalytic reading of texts like this throughout the whole dissertation.

"There shall be no more sea"

I think the approach to Dred as a whole is going to concentrate on two things: the space of the swamp as an interstitial place caught between land and sea, and Dred as a figure where both past and present insurrectionist figures. Stowe ties Dred to the marshy areas of the south, the coast and the sea in this really amazing moment towards the end of the novel when Clayton finally speaks to Dred.

"The Lord bade me go from the habitations of men, and to seek out the desolate places of the sea, and dwell in the wreck of a ship that was forsaken for a sign of desolation unto this people. So, I went and dwelt there, and the Lord called me Amraphal, because hidden things of judgment were made known to me. And the Lord showed unto me that even as a ship which is forsaken of the waters wherein all flesh have died so shall it be with the nation of the oppressor...Every day is full of labor, but the labor goeth back again into the seas. So that travail of all generations hath gone back, till the desire of all nations shall come, and He shall come with burning and with judgment, and with great shakings; but in the end thereof shall be peace. Wherefore, it is written that in the new heavens and the new earth there shall be no more sea."

Places like the hulk of the ship, the Everglades, and the shore provide the spiritual surrounds for one "destitute of the light of philosophy." In the quote above Dred cites the shipwreck both in terms of the past and the present, the past being the legacy of the Transatlantic slave trade-- the "a sign of desolation unto this people"--, and the present, probably both the dependence of the US economy on transatlantic trade of cotton, and the prevalence of Ship of State metaphors within debates between abolitionists and pro-slavery groups. The ship, an emblem of the initial site of bondage, is now the nation on the course for wreckage.

"There shall be no more sea," is taken from Revelation 21.1, but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that Stowe also uses the sea to talk about slavery's persistent hold on the South. The empty hulks of the ships are specters of the past and warnings about the future. The shore and the swamp are transitory spaces where the boundaries between land and water are blurred and changeable. On the one hand there's the threat of being mired down and stuck. On the the other hand, the swamps are places of refuge. Dred, in being tied to those places also brings past and present together, in the invocations of Vesey, Turner, and the fainter echo of Brown, and the references to Toussaint( I need to look at Southerne's Oroonoko again to see if there are is anything useful there in Oroonoko's language).

Of course finding moments like these always reminds me of the overwhelming problem of this dissertation which is how to define a maritime imaginary. When I was first telling people about this project, several people immediately asked about Lacan's Imaginary. I've been resisting using Lacan because, for one, it's Lacan, and for another, I'm suspicious of letting a single theoretical application lead my work. I tend to work best when I'm working mostly from the primary material. But I've noticed some of my major keywords--fragmentation, subjectivity. and, to a certain extent, my concept of negative doppelgangers--are taking bits and pieces from Lacan. Today, I detoured into some introductory reading on the basics of the Mirror Stage thinking it might clarify things. I have a feeling I'll end up doing what I usually do. "I take my concept from Lacan's Imaginary in part by using X, Y, and Z. Where I depart is...."

Tomorrow I might start with a few close reading exercises using Lacan and see where it goes.