Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo

Introduction: French Cathedrals and Other Forms of Life

 How do you seduce a heap of chiseled stones? One person who tried, at least for a while, was Henry Adams. In the “Vis Nova” chapter of The Education of Henry Adams, Adams describes traveling around France at the turn of the last century, and he depicts himself as a lover infatuated with the facades and stained glass of the country’s medieval cathedrals, whose beguiling spirit he pursues gallantly across the country. For him, the Virgin was an adorable mistress, who led the automobile and its owner where she would,to her wonderful palaces and chateaux, from Chartres to Rouen, and thence to Amiens and Laon, and a score of others, kindly receiving, amusing, charming and dazzling her lover, as though she were Aphrodite herself, worth all else that man ever dreamed. He never doubted her force, since he felt it to the last fibre of his being, and could no more dispute its mastery than he could dispute the force of gravitation of which he knew nothing but the formula.... ...The Virgin had not...altogether gone;her fading away had been excessively slow. Her adorer had pursued her too long, too far, and into too many manifestations of her power, to admit that she had any equivalent either of quantity or kind, in the actual world, but he could still less admit her annihilation as energy. q Introduction French Cathedrals and Other Forms of Life  INTRODUCTION So he went on wooing, happy in the thought that at last he had found a mistress who could see no difference in the age of her lovers.1 There is no indication here that Adams is speaking metaphorically or pulling our leg. Scrutinizing a map of the stars, the astrologer sees a spray of random lights no more than the palm reader sees a fluke arrangement of wrinkles on a hand, and the sexagenarian Adams, in a similarly earnest spirit, sees an expressive pattern in certain buildings scattered around France. Indeed, I’ve referred to the cathedrals as heaps of chiseled stone, but for the traveler Adams, this is precisely what the cathedrals were not. They were not even, as I have also implied, mere “buildings.” In Adams’s account, the cathedrals are “manifestations” of some power, not slabs of mute matter but things expressing attitudes and ideas—the body of his beloved, the sensuous lips and arms whose postures encourage his passion and charm his eyes. He stands before them not only as what Miguel Tamen has called a “friend,” offering to speak for and represent them to whoever may fail to appreciate their dazzle.2 He actually presents himself as having what today would be called an “intimate relationship” with them. Adams’s romance with the cathedrals proved not to be eternal. Touring Troyes one day,he hears a report that the Russian Minister of the Interior was assassinated in St. Petersburg. Adams is shaken by the news, and his memoir spends considerable time recording how he feels confronted suddenly by “chaos of time, place, morals, forces and motives” (Education 1050–51). Taking rest in the Church of St. Pantaleon,he contemplates a new “formula for the universe.” A “Dynamic Theory of History,” as he calls it, would be built upon a vastly different relation between humans and non-humans than the one that engenders his affair with the cathedrals. A dynamic theory,assigning attractive force to opposing bodies in proportion to the law of mass, takes for granted that the forces of nature capture man. The sum of force attracts; the feeble atom or molecule called man is attracted; he suffers education or growth; he is the sum of the forces that attract him; his body and his thought are alike their product; the movement of the forces controls the progress of his mind, since he can know nothing but the motions which impinge on his senses, whose sum makes education. (Education 1153) 1 The Education of Henry Adams, in Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education (New York: Library of America, 1983), 1148–49. Henceforth cited as Education. 2 Miguel Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), chap. 8. FRENCH CATHEDRALS AND OTHER FORMS OF LIFE  The vis nova, he concludes, compels us to face the melancholy facts: not only do “forces, sensible and occult, physical and metaphysical, simple and complex, surround, traverse, vibrate, rotate, repel, attract, without stop,” but “man’s senses...