The genre of the memoir is interesting not because of what the author is required or expected to say, but in discovering what the author chooses to say, and then the manner and authority in which he/she manages to say it. I can’t be the first to feel that Stanley Cavell’s recollections of conversations past (in particular his intellectual ones about philosophy) sound a bit too polished, as though complex ideas were on the tip of tongues and uttered with great efficiency and precision. Here is an example, an exchange of his with Thomas Kuhn:
In an early formative conversation between us I told him that his considering instruction in a field as part of the, I might have called it, essence of the field, part of its defining structure (roughly what Wittgenstein called grammar), along with his insistence on the nature of agreement within a field as playing a similarly defining role within it, were ideas to be found in Austin and in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and this conjunction of his work and theirs helped me see the depth of the ideas on both tracks …
In the conversation I have in mind now Kuhn, perhaps after a department meeting, accompanied me home for a drink, and talking past midnight Tom was becoming agitated in a way I had not seen. He suddenly lurched forward in his chair with a somewhat tortured look that I had begun to be familiar with. “I know Wittgenstein used the idea of ‘paradigm.’ But I do not see its implications in his work. How do I answer the objection that this destroys the truth of science? I deplore the idea. Yet if instruction and agreement are the essence of the matter, then Hitler could instruct me that a theory is true and get me to agree.”
My reply I cast as follows, using words I remember using then. “No he could not; he could not educate you in, convince you of, show you, its truth. Hitler could declare a theory to be true, as an edict. He could effectively threaten to kill you if you refuse to, or fail to, believe it. But all that means is that he is going to kill you; or perhaps kill you if you do not convince him, show him, that you accept and will follow the edict. I don’t say this is clear. But it is something I cannot doubt is worth doing whatever work it will take to make clear.” Tom’s response was startling. He arose almost violently form his chair, began pacing in front of the fireplace, saying something like, “Yah. Yah.” What causes conviction? What, perhaps rather, may undo an unnoticed conviction? (354-55)
Of course, it could be that conversations actually do happen this way at Harvard, that this is what a certain breed of conversation is supposed to sound like. If Stanley Cavell (or Thomas Kuhn for that matter) cannot embody or perform this manner of conversation, then who else could?
I don’t mean the exchanges sound scripted; but surely Cavell is writing ahead of himself, as all good writing must do (433). So his recollections of conversation capture an accuracy of a different sort. Not “verbatim” (though Cavell, in several forceful assertions (not unwarranted) insists on something like a recall of “exact words” (395)), but an attempt to express, in full, the anxieties, fears, frustrations, reliefs, breakthroughs, and joys that surround the utterance of words and then, not by moving forever in circles (as prose has the luxury to do, as Cavell’s prose does when not recounting speech) in order to capture this or that emotion, until the full gamut of expression has indeed been, however cumbersomely, expressed.
Rather, the straight linear exchanges (I gather) are, for lack of a better word, embellished. But how can the flight of an arrow – say an arrow of an utterance, moving at a certain speed – be embellished at all? Arrows, like speech, make from the shaft, pass by the ear quickly, so the trick is to move one’s ear closer to the sound of the trajectory slicing through the air, i.e., closer to the sound of the words. Because Cavell has the luxury of thinking on paper (i.e., writing), he may have more time indeed to circle around the words he recalls—but not all that much, as he is, nevertheless, recalling speech, complete with quotation marks, and he cannot put words in people’s mouths.
He can, however, try to bring out (on the page that is) what it was exactly that he perceived in the exchange (like a conversion, or a “conviction.”). So Cavell is trying to make the words sound (on the page) the way they sounded (to Cavell) as he lived through them—something like performing them. This has more to do with accuracy, not less.
But if not verbatim, how can we trust him? The easy answer is that it is not likely that anyone else would claim to know what verbatim is, the conversations here being as private as they are. Cavell is free to claim or arrogate not only his own voice but also his interlocutor’s. This is his particular claim to community (his own) and the reason I trust him is because he has achieved a certain standing in my moral imagination. I cannot say why I trust him anymore than I can convince you that his is a voice worth trusting. I could say something like, “What reason has he to lie?” But no one is accusing him of lying. The charge is (or could be), simply, that no one speaks that way. Cavell is remembering conversation as (written) texts.
But how else, other than getting up on stage and mimicking or acting out the exchange, is Cavell to recall the experience? Words on a page are his chosen medium, and his “embellishments” I see less as a contrivance than a full on authoritative claiming of the speech or the exchange that either caused his own, or his observation of another’s, (mini) paradigm shift. The onus is on Cavell to relay this.
Even if Kuhn remembers not a bit of the conversation, or, more scandalously, remembers something of the words spoken but none of the sentiment, Cavell is perfectly within his right to not only mark the exchange, but mark it as capital-T-true. Such claimings, such achievements, are the stuff on which lives ought to be made. Otherwise, recall and memory become merely the stuff on which dreams are made.
I am increasingly aware that memories of my life are so often unforgettably no longer mine, not mine alone, so I have repeatedly to concern myself with considerations of propriety beyond those that are functions merely of my awkward self-revelations. (518)
This particular revelation, made near the end of the book, shows us that Cavell is aware of possible mismatches between testimonies of events; but I am more heartened by this passage than dismayed by it not because it counters the notion that Cavell is indeed (again, merely for lack of a better word) “embellishing,” but because it shows that whatever embellishing Cavell does is carried out under the greatest respect for other voices.
Arrogation is not done lightly, so the force with which, say, certain conversations are put forward is done after careful pedagogical consideration. Cavell goes on:
What concerns me more is what, after a while, happens to memory, that it becomes as routine as perception, conventional, unquestioned, serving merely to recall, not to reconsider. (518)
Indeed, this sort of recall (i.e., recall as convention) is the type some of us (too many of us) come to expect when we read, if not memoirs, then certainly testimonies, first-hand accounts, histories, as though disinterested accuracy of fact ought to trump experience.
But what makes a memoir successful, on the other hand, is the author’s ability to claim one’s experience – not too brazenly, obviously; but it seems more likely (these days) that good memoirs are less likely to be written because people are too afraid to take responsibility for their own recollections, content merely to recall a string of facts or a chronological list, as if by convention. These facts and lists, that is, ought to tell the whole story. (This is the historicist’s folly.) Indeed, why embellish at all when writing something called a memoir?
This takes me to a bit on reading that Cavell brings up—as though one could read either to accumulate facts and events or, more valorously, to discover oneself and then relay these discoveries. This discussion, on the “two myths of reading” (where one reads everything, on the one hand embodied by Heidegger, and, on the other, where one reads nothing, embodied by Wittgenstein) comes at the end of another Cavellian conversation (this time with Rogers Albritton):
I once asked Rogers … to read the first, recently published, response to the first pair of papers I had put in print and hoped to take into the future (the opening pair of Must We Mean What We Say?), an unmitigatedly vicious attack, including the summary evaluation that the work my writing represented was, I believe I still remember the phrase exactly, “deleterious to the future of philosophy.”
I was unable on my own to put aside the pain of this attack. Rogers took the documents away with him, my papers and the response they had elicited, and, returning with them the following midnight bearing one of his by then familiar frowns of exasperation, but modified with a direct displeasure unfamiliar to my experience of him, he threw the documents on a chair and said with a vehemence I think I will never again see the equal of in him: “Well of course the response doesn’t touch you. But it is you I do not understand. How could you possibly have left yourself vulnerable to such ill will?”
The gratifying liberation of his challenge produced a certain corresponding challenge in return from me. “I see no alternative. And you of all people cannot expect any assertion to make itself invulnerable. So in my state of perfect gratitude to you I have to warn you of something. If I can find a way to write philosophy that I can believe in day after day I am going to go on doing it. The alternative I can see is to cultivate a private sense of the public world’s intellectual vulgarity. However essential that may be it is not enough for me.”
Naturally I am alternately attracted to both myths or practices of reading—to have read everything or read nothing—but naturally also most drawn to a view of reading, no doubt illusory, that seeks to capture the wish for breadth in the one myth and for fastidiousness in the other, as for example in Thoreau’s determination to test all intellectual importunateness. On the opening page of Walden he accuses most authors of displaying an egotism without revealing the state or the stage of the self responsible for it.
In the chapter entitled “Reading,” his test for whether to read what comes your way is not so much to judge the worth of the text but to judge the quality of your reading. If you know how to read “with valour and magnanimity,” then a fragment of newspaper found on the floor of the woods will do you good, expand the world. If you will not know how to read, how to give the best of yourself, Homer will not save you. You might as well, Thoreau clearly enough implies, use Homer’s pages for the hygienic purpose for which newsprint may be used after a meal in the woods. (491-92)
One could think of a memoir (that is a successful memoir) as a collection of cogitos, myriad ways of saying “I am,” and “I exist.” The question then becomes, why aren’t more people willing to make or utter or say such things, to be honest with experience rather than fact?
My answer would be a fear of being struck down, so that just as one brings a certain amount of stability to bear upon one’s view of the world, one suddenly finds that it is (indeed) open to (re)interpretation, reconsideration. Rogers’ question is pertinent: Why indeed would anyone make oneself so vulnerable to the ill will of others? One way to play up one’s strength in face of possible ill will is to read more, to bank on another’s authority instead of one’s own, so as to deflect criticisms and reconsiderations rather than embrace them.
Another strategy is indeed to “circle” around a singular moment of experience (not unlike picking up a scrap of newspaper) and demand from it the world. Both are feats of memory. The first might be something like conventional memory, the second, affective memory. Employing the latter simply makes one more vulnerable, hence gathers its particular strength or influence not from, say, verification in the field, but from one’s éclat or authority—and there is no prescriptive way to cultivate this.
So such a strategy, of claiming words for oneself, is often set aside, especially when one is subject to a “marketplace” of words and ideas and the time to capture another’s attention is short. Hence agreement and instruction go hand in hand. That is, to hope to instruct another (to influence another, and then, for what cause?) requires immediate agreement which means forgoing private matters and engaging right away with public ones, ones that will, so to speak, work. And who would commit to language that wouldn’t (or might not) work?
Instruction and agreement define a paradigm, which, it could be argued, destroys the truth of science, an idea deplorable to Kuhn because it takes away from science’s ability to discover not what is, but what can be right now. This is a compromise in knowledge, the sort we make in the moral realm every day of our lives.
Obviously science demands results; so does language. But when language reaches this level of convention (so that all authority is deferred to the marketplace or science or rationality) then what happens is that society suffers from a dearth of individuals and we are no longer responsible for the language we speak and its effects in the world. It is no longer worth asking (or thinking about) what our words actually mean (or do, say, in the long run).
If Cavell’s “embellishments” are precisely a fight against this sort of conventionality, how much authority are we willing to give him for doing so? The first step is to recognize not the daring of his feat, but the rarity of it and then to ask ourselves how sincere we take Cavell to be. Is he, indeed, reaching too far, putting words in people’s mouths unfairly,? And even in response to those who howl he might be, what are we to answer? That Cavell’s interpretations are to be dismissed? So there is a responsibility for the reader as well in deciding how much of the world (a world that is, of individuals, of individuality) we are willing to kill off. The academy (a good portion of it) stands armed and ready to do so:
I decided that I must simply accept, what had been obvious enough before now, that my work creates infectious ill will among an imposing body of professional philosophers who know of it (among professional literary theorists ill will is more individual), while at the same time there is no (other?) profession that can simply be asked to welcome it. Even though I had fought this reaction in the cases of hostility against Austin and Wittgenstein, I somehow imagined—perhaps it can be seen as another phase or face of the petulance I am describing in myself—that I would be exempt from such treatment. (497)
The wager academics must make is not a new one, but one that goes back to ancient times:
If, on the road into existence, or, as in Plato’s Myth of Er, into rebirth, you could choose either to receive a high gift of creativity that would be insufficiently appreciated in your lifetime, or else receive a still notable but lesser gift that, however, would be more widely and fully appreciated (that is, will reach in your lifetime as high as it ever will), which would you pick? This will hardly serve as a test of immortality, but perhaps as a proof that we live transcendentally. (435)
So why write a memoir? For comfort? Yes. To bear witness? Yes. To assert not one’s dominance in the world but one’s understanding of it, so that to forgo dominance entails transcendence of the world?
But to do the opposite (to dominate others) is to transcend a moral habitat within the world, to claim it does not matter (we all know it does) and then not because one is evil, but because why risk being unintelligible to others, to be given instruction only to reply with disagreement? That is the easiest way to get flattened, hence the quickest way to want revenge on the world.
In order to avoid an all consuming revenge, it might simply be easier to understand the parameters within which it operates and exact it (in this lifetime) within good measure. So this is not a transcendence of the evil of the world but a compromise with it, a transcendence of the burden to act morally, to take responsibility for our words.
It is worth noting, then, the effort of someone who insists on transcending the world’s evil, who reaches out for (Emersonian) perfection—one who understands that in doing so, he will be subject to the world’s wrath yet is still willing to renounce his own vengeful desires to assert instead his intimacy with the world and others in it. This remarkable feature of Cavell’s thinking (avoiding, near flawlessly, rancour) is grounds to begin to think of Cavell as Saint-like—like Saint Stanley. Some will call this refusal of rancour, this need for comfort, self-indulgent. Cavell knows the charge well:
There came a time during the Vietnam War when I interrupted myself during a lecture, moved to say that could no more ignore that morning’s news, at least to notice it in common, than I would e able to withhold attentions to the cry of a child. At the same time I registered my sense that this very acknowledgement signaled the victory of violence over thinking.
Then sometimes thinking must turn to destroy its peace, to observe havoc, in order to attract its own protection. Having spent more than two years furthering this memoir (to give myself more peace than in any way other than exchanges with friends) in this time of what so many of my friends regard as the most unsparingly lugubriously impaired administration in American history, I ask for mercy on my soul. (478)
Cavell knows that thinking cannot protect the moral order; it merely thrives within it. As the world becomes increasingly violent, it is far likelier that we will hear fewer Cavell-like voices, that his lessons will ring increasingly hollow as thinking must now destroy its peace in order to create the conditions for moral questions and concerns to once again ring true.
Does this mean the world is no longer interested in claiming its own authority, writing its own memoirs? It means something like the world is no longer capable of asserting or demanding knowledge of itself, of asking why it is headed in one direction and not another.
Do we attack Cavell, then, for merely thinking, for freely allowing his desires to achieve something like full (or fuller) expression in a city of words where cogitos are taken up as an order of business—even as he pleads for (our) mercy? Marxists may call for his blood; Cavell shows them not rancour but love because for his sort of thinking to thrive, revolution may very well be in order.
