Abstracts: MLA 2020—Seattle: Melville, Gesture, Love

Abstract

AbstractsMLA 2020—Seattle: Melville, Gesture, Love Michael D. Snediker, Chair, James Lilley, Respondent, Jamie Godley, Lindsay Reckson, and Theo Davis Click for larger view View full resolution Participants in the “Melville, Gesture, Love” panel at MLA 2020, from left to right: James Lilley, Lindsay Reckson, Jamie Godley, Theo Davis, Meredith Farmer. Photo courtesy of Brian Yothers. Jamie Godley’s paper, “The Unfinishable Gesture of The Confidence-Man,” considers the gestural openness of that novel’s final sentence, “Something further may follow of this Masquerade,” in terms of a “sustained temporal [End Page 111] incongruity” that equivocally interrupts what it only nominally terminates. His attention to Giorgio Agamben’s remarks on the commedia dell’arte—the extent to which “Harlequin and the Doctor are not characters . . . but rather gestures figured as a type, constellations of gestures”—illuminates gesture’s singular interposition “between the text and our reading.” I admire Godley’s sense of affinity between this dimensionalizing suspension and Jacques Lacan’s understanding of tuché as that which belies the mimetic functions of narrative automaticity. The libidinal movement of this Melvillean “Something” (in relation, for instance, to Pitch’s wondering “where was slipped in the entering wedge”) sharpens our sense of textual and readerly desire alike as (and for) a mode of reality beyond what narratives of “real life itself can show”: the irresolvable “may” at once embedded within and spurring the arc that following furthers. Lindsay Reckson’s account, “Suspended Eros, or the Gesture of Billy Budd,” invites us to imagine the affective contours of a “gestural criticism” modeled on, if not less emulatively coextensive with, the gestural weather of which the efforts and desires of the novella’s individual characters are localized expression. Noting the charismatic economy by which the foundering conduct of Billy’s “fatal gesture” indexes both the comportment and liveliness of our own gestures of critical attention, Reckson understands the medium in which reader and character of Melville’s text are equally immersed as what Agamben denominates the “pure gesturality” of doing “rather than being.” The performative field of “Doing,” not least the unsatisfiable agential strain of the novella’s exercising pulsions, opens for Reckson onto the cross-hatched field of love distillatively voiced in Billy’s plangent disclosure, “Could I have used my tongue I would not have struck him.” If the tongue’s subjunctively elusive indeterminacy figures a gestural hinge between discipline and desire, our own hesitant gravitation toward its suspensive mechanism holds out, Reckson insightfully suggests, the possibility of “knowledge suspended” for the cradling sake of an intimacy that is salubriously, definitionally incompletable: not only the suspension of deferral, but the suspension of holding, and holding back, of attention prolonged like a chord. In “Melville’s Forms of Vitality,” Theo Davis reads Melville’s “The Piazza” alongside the work of developmental psychologist Daniel Stern. Removed as Davis’s initial recounting of Stern’s characterization of therapeutic encounter would seem from the customarily lavish garrulousness of Melville’s narration, it is from within this discrepancy that Davis articulates a form of intimacy no less germane to the gestural fields traced by Godley and Reckson. Contra the elaborate floridity that occupies first half of “The Piazza,” Stern’s description of intersubjective relation posits a fastidiously spare economy of “movement and expression” in which gesture and speech unfold from each other [End Page 112] as commensurate substance. Davis deftly contemplates an analogous scene embedded within Melville’s pastoral extravagance, not coincidentally marked by that moment at which the narrator “speaks as a character rather than narrating.” In the exchange that follows between the narrator and Marianna, their tentative gestures of conversation speak to an affective relational complexity—a vulnerability if not peril—that affords for Davis a possible remediation between criticism’s own prevailing temperaments, so often rigidly split between the force of ideology critique and the softer (but no less simplified) choreography of appreciation and love. With deepest thanks to Jamie, Lindsay, and Theo and to James Lilley and Meredith Farmer for presiding in my absence with such manifold generosity. ________ The Unfinishable Gesture of The Confidence-Man Jamie Godley Dartmouth College Whereas early critics of The Confidence-Man insisted that the...