Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 2021. Pp. 317.

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewAbsentees: On Variously Missing Persons. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 2021. Pp. 317.Julie OrlemanskiJulie OrlemanskiUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThose who have vanished, who have been legally diminished, or who are no longer alive: these several categories of attenuated persons help define what it is to be human within a social order. Such is the claim that undergirds the series of evocative case studies making up Daniel Heller-Roazen’s latest book, Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons. As in his prior titles for Zone Books, Heller-Roazen traces a particular topic—here, the nonperson—across a dizzying array of disciplines, epochs, and language traditions, drawing unexpected patterns into view and subtly altering the terms of understanding previously worked out in the human sciences. Absentees follows a line of inquiry started in his previous study No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming (2017). There, Heller-Roazen tracked a disturbance at the interface of logic and language, one created by the negative particle (in English, the non-) and the indeterminate reference, or “infinite naming,” it makes possible. No One’s Ways focused tightly on philosophical discourse to consider an unbounded set of negations—nonseeing, nonmortal, nonthing, nonman, and so forth. In Absentees, conceptual focus is turned upon the canceled human in particular, which is here considered across a set of archives much broader than just philosophy. Both studies admit to a fascination with Odysseus, who famously tells the Cyclops Polyphemus that his victim’s name is Oūtis, a moniker that becomes in repetition oú tis, “no one,” a misnaming and depersoning that makes possible the hero’s escape.In light of its concern with both the codification and the narration of nonpersons, Absentees’s nearest academic home may be the subfield of “law and literature,” but it also ranges compellingly into theology, philosophy, social psychology, and the history of the plastic arts. Its philological erudition is marshaled to address not specialists but the general reader, someone game to follow Heller-Roazen’s pellucid sentences across decidedly heterogeneous materials. The pleasures of the book are many: it is witty, surprising, and meticulous, and it invites its audience into all kinds of improbable corners of culture. Yet it remains difficult to evaluate upon completion. It never makes clear why its sundry parts have been selected and organized as they are—why this text appears but not that one, this negated figure instead of others. The book feels virtuosic but also elusive.Absentees falls into three parts, which together mark out a “rudimentary tripartition” among the many kinds of nonpersons (8). Part 1 considers unresolved disappearances. It begins with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s peculiar 1837 “Wakefield,” in which an unnamed narrator speculates about a news story he once read, about a man (“let us call him Wakefield”) who without explanation decided to disappear and who proceeded to live for twenty years in secret one block from his wife and London home. Wakefield counts as an “absentee” in the legal sense of “someone who has gone missing without any further specification, someone whose continued life or conceivable death remains, therefore, unknown” (19). Chapter 2 traces the anxious calibration of the absentee’s rights and duties across numerous systems of law, including Roman, Jewish, Islamic, English, French, and American jurisprudence. If such codes labor to reshape missing persons into precisely defined legal fictions, literary fiction offers the chance to consider what lies beyond such controlled juridical artifice—“For in fiction, missing persons accomplish what they cannot do in life and law: they speak and speak for themselves” (35–36). Chapter 3 traces fictions of disappearance and return in works of Honoré de Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola, Luigi Pirandello, and Franz Kafka, among others. Chapter 4 turns somewhat unexpectedly to the history of the visual image in rendering missing persons, and their absence, present. Such effigies can be the props for consoling fantasy, as for Laodamia in Ovid’s Heroides, or the objects of substitutive violence, as in the pittura infamante employed in medieval Italian city-states.The book’s second section addresses subjects whose personhood is lessened or degraded by the social order of which they are a part. Readers may expect to find a discussion of chattel slavery in the Atlantic world, or of stateless persons stripped of (in Hannah Arendt’s phrase) “the right to have rights.” But these topics are not taken up in part 2. Instead, the section begins by introducing the Roman notion of capitis deminutio, meaning literally the “decrease of the head” but referring in law to the reduction of legal personality or aptitude to bear rights. If vanishing is something of an absolute state (albeit one that admits of homecomings and substitutions), by contrast legal diminution works by degrees. It exemplifies the mixture of personhood with the nonperson. Chapter 6 tracks such diminution through Roman law onward into the phenomenon of civil death across several legal traditions. Chapter 7 riffs on ignominy, or “the condition of being deprived of a proper name—or being denied any name not undiminished by some formal process of degradation” (103). It includes an enchanting reading of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), but its greatest attention is reserved for Erving Goffman’s work on social participation and exclusion. In Goffman’s account, “accredited participants” establish boundaries for their social interactions through quotidian acts of exclusion, which vary from the “‘civil inattention’” that carves out privacy in a crowd to “the ‘nonperson’ treatment” reserved for servants, waiters, children, the sick, and the very old (112). Heller-Roazen is interested in how such everyday diminishments of person suggest “the possibility that a virtual relation to the nonperson lies concealed in civility itself” (113). The following chapter revolves around the literary character of the outlaw or antihero, largely through a reading of the 1814 German novella The Marvellous History of Peter Schlemihl. In this somewhat dizzying metafiction by Adelbert von Chamisso, we follow the story of Schlemihl, who sells his shadow to a mysterious Gray Man. Shadowless, he wanders the world in the ignominious state of being “almost no one” (137). One of Absentees’s special pleasures lies in its literary retellings, which paraphrase outlandish plots with verve and evident fondness. The chapter concludes with a delightful philological excavation of the name “Schlemihl” by way of Heinrich Heine, the Hebrew Bible, and the Talmud.The third section of Absentees concerns the dead. Chapter 9 is an exegesis of four fragments by Kafka that all revolve around the figure of a deceased hunter, Gracchus, who is “undoubtedly dead and yet also ‘to some extent’ (gewissermaßen) alive” (149). The personal pronouns of Kafka’s prose draw Gracchus toward linguistic personhood at the same time that “he is not a person but rather the indeterminate and indeterminable remains of one” (156). Chapter 10 follows the cadaver through the discourses of logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, theology, anthropology, and literary theory. What emerges most clearly is a peculiar dynamic of resemblance, in which the nonperson of the corpse becomes ontologically detached from the person, and (in the words of Maurice Blanchot) “‘the mourned deceased begins to resemble himself’” (178). Chapter 11 listens to ghosts, or “the cadaver’s newfound voice,” in a handful of very different stories, including Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, the Icelandic Saga of Grettir the Strong, and Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” (1908). The representational technology of numbers is at the heart of chapter 12. It examines the peculiar problems of counting and sorting that arise in trying to enumerate the collectives that make up social life, collectives that mingle those who are living with those who aren’t. Key texts include the Hebrew Bible, Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel Dead Souls, and William Wordsworth’s poem “We Are Seven.”The book’s final chapter stands apart from the three organizing sections that have preceded it. Memorably titled “Being It,” this coda attends to the nonsense rhymes of children’s selection games, by which someone is chosen to be “it” in (for instance) a game of tag. With quicksilver exposition, Heller-Roazen illustrates how the seemingly simple ritual has both a complex logic and a history. “Eenie, meenie, miney, mo” is a flexible formal resource for coordinating the dynamic and conflicting interests of participants. Counting-out rhymes, then, are decidedly social forms, which “respond to the challenge of our being numerous,” and “being it” offers a distinctively human and humane way to be a nonperson (236).Counting-out rhymes form one bookend for Absentees. At the start stands Hawthorne’s Wakefield, a man who makes himself vanish in an almost inconceivable blaze of whim. The two topics hardly create an obvious pair, but they share the feature of voluntarism. Children choose to join their schoolyard games, and Wakefield absents himself deliberately, in an act of perverse freedom. One challenge of making sense of Absentees is figuring out why such consensually missing persons should frame the investigation of others who are systemically denied full social existence, whose “rights and prerogatives are reduced to the point at which their social, legal, and civil personalities may be nullified” (8). Are all these nonpersons really the same kind of thing? If so, how do we weigh the consequential differences between them? There are whole fields of study built around particular conjugations of the nonperson—slave, refugee, pervert, woman—but Absentees stands at some remove from dialogue with these disciplines.Unexpected leaps across archives, through centuries, and from one text to the next are a compelling characteristic of Heller-Roazen’s scholarship. His interpretive fluency in an unparalleled range of specialized discourses has the power to conjure for readers the fantasy of a total cultural field, of Greek and Hebrew inheritances playing out across textual traditions down to the present—and of a scholarly sensibility that could comprehend them all. Such virtuosic effects remain an intellectual pleasure in Absentees. Yet the movement from part to whole on the level of argument or conceptual insight is more strained. Heller-Roazen remarks at the end of the preface that absentees are “demanding of our attention” (10). In a later chapter, he repeats, “these nonpersons, in every case, demand our attention” (82). But why and how they demand it and what kind of attention they call for remain obscure. The book cannot help but draft on the ethical and political urgency of nonpersons but declines to give direct account of it. Where one might expect a focalizing historical or argumentative claim, there is instead a roving eclecticism, compelling on its own terms but from other angles less satisfying. Still, there is much dazzlement and fascination along the way, as some of the many masks of nonpersons flash by. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 2November 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/719467 Views: 444Total views on this site HistoryPublished online May 19, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.