Celebrating Old Birthdays

The first day of this month, when I started this essay, is the birthday of my dachshund Schnitzel, Chris, our friend who cuts my mother’s hair, and of Stanley Cavell, the Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. In honor of that, and because I have almost nothing not totally general to say about Schnitzel (against him) or Chris (for him), let’s talk about “The Avoidance of Love”, a very long essay by Cavell, of which I am a very big fan.

The first time I read “The Avoidance of Love”, I had just walked home, around five in the morning, from a night I had spent writing English papers at the very end of my senior year at Williams. I decided I would sleep for a few hours, couldn’t, and decided I would start in on this essay instead. I read the whole thing, and finished it at eight in the morning. The second time I read it, in a different collection of Cavell’s essays, I made special time so that I could read it all at once, without at the same time watching tennis or cooking dinner or driving to a coffeeshop, or any of the other things I sometimes do when I read. Both times, it paid off.

I have been asked, after effusing about this essay, what it is about, and what Cavell’s argument is. It is about King Lear, and it is about spectatorship, and it is about how to deal with other people as separate moral agents. Dealing with them doesn’t look real good. Quoting from it helps a little (maybe), to try to address what it is that I find so lovely about this essay, or at least to explain what points he is making:

"Certainly blame [for cruelty to Gloucester, for Cordelia's death] is inappropriate, for certainly I do not claim to know what else Lear might do. And yet I cannot deny that my pain at Lear's actions is not overcome by my knowledge of his own suffering."

"Now I can give an answer to the question: Why do I do nothing, faced with tragic events?...[I]f I do nothing because there is nothing to do, where that means that I have given over the time and space in which action is mine and consequently that I am in awe before the fact that I cannot do and suffer what it is another's to do and suffer, then I confirm the final fact of our separateness. And that is the unity of our condition."

(That last I view as kind of the punchline.) This, of course, tell only a little tiny bit of the story, especially from my point of view, because I read the essay both times that I did, in the holistic manner described above. I think that the poignancy of this essay lies in the way in which knowledge of the phenomenon it describes -- the fundamental separateness between each of us and each of everyone else -- hovers as a constant threat. And I think that the power of this essay lies in the way in which its form -- that of an essay itself -- marries into that content of separateness, and forms a kind of unspoken answer to it.

Let me try to explain this by talking about the special power of an essay compared to a novel. The novel -- like, say, Nicholas Nickleby, which I am reading now -- seems to be an act of world-building, which is to say world-replacing, which is to say a staving off of the reader's loneliness. The facsimile world (this is especially true for Dickens, I think) creates a space in which the reader can move around and, at some important level, forget that she reads alone. She reads with Nicholas, or Smike, or the Brothers Cheeryble. She can even, for cathartic anger purposes, read with Wackford Squeers. But the people she reads in the novel are themselves not alone; they have always their narrator, at least, for company. She is always reading a simulacrum of a community, which she can observe or imagine herself a part of as she pleases.

Not so the essayist, though, who carries on but by himself. The essay cannot provide a peopled, ruminative world in which its reader might (however critically) indulge. Rather, what I think the essayist offers (think of Montaigne ruminating by himself) is a fantasia of what a person can do in spite of loneliness, what a person can do sitting just by herself, writing, independent of any other consciousness. I think that I love "The Avoidance of Love" so much because of the way in which it represents a discussion of that loneliness -- that inability to successfully acknowledge another human being that is the problem of King Lear as well as the problem of tragedy -- while being, itself, the product and the glory of just that loneliness, the loneliness of the reader.