Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Literature

1 Making Sense(s) of Walden

Just a few pages ago I promised to deliver a book that would discuss Stanley Cavell’s readings of literary texts and that might even venture to offer the occasional Cavellian reading of its own. Given a book of this nature, and especially one entitled Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Literature, there would be good grounds for a reader to expect me to begin by setting out what it is that makes Cavell’s readings so distinctive and insightful, or, in other words, to spell out what makes a reading Cavellian. What are the distinguishing features, the strengths and weaknesses, the advantages and disadvantages, of a Cavellian reading? Pressing though these questions are, they overlook, and perhaps thereby beg, a more fundamental question raised by the idea of a “Cavellian reading”—not the question What is Cavellian? but the question What is a reading ? and, relatedly, What is reading? These questions seem to me to be the more urgent in a book examining the study of literature. In other words, a book about the relation of Stanley Cavell’s work to the studyofliteratureshouldlogicallybeginbyanalyzingtheideaofreading.There are two good reasons for this. Firstly, since the study of literature is predicated on an activity we call reading, it makes good sense to start an investigation from there. And secondly, Cavell is virtually unique among philosophers in the importance he assigns to the activity of reading. Indeed, he begins his masterpiece by giving voice to “the thought, as I express it at the opening of The Claim of Reason,thatphilosophymaybeinherited . . . asasetoftextstoberead”(IQO, pp. 14–15). Perhaps it is dangerously easy for those versed in contemporary literary theory to underestimate how controversial this idea is for traditional philosophy. The idea that, as Espen Hammer summarizes it, “philosophy, rather than a set of given problems to be solved, should be understood as a set of texts to be Making Sense(s) of Walden chapter one m a k i n g s e n s e(s) o f wa l d e n 25 read”1 is apt to underwhelm those who, trained to disregard the notion of anything hors-texte, have come to see the world and all that is in it as textual and thus reconfigure our relationship to the world by replacing epistemology with reading. This position is as in need of Cavell’s intervention as that of the traditional philosopher, for whom the textuality of philosophical concepts and problems is at best irrelevant, perhaps even a distraction. The error of the traditional philosopher—that is, of the academic philosopher , typically a professor or student—is “an idea that philosophy begins only when there are no further texts to read, when the truth you seek has already been missed, as if it lies behind you” (IQO, p. 15). Because they regard what they read merely as a vehicle for ideas and concepts, such readers find the expression of those ideas and concepts of no interest, and the journey of reading thereby becomes a necessary evil to be plodded through in order to attain a position of mastery from which they can finally begin to philosophize. For readers like these, the moment of philosophy will always come too late. It is postponed— one might also say repressed, or suppressed—in the interest of arriving at an authoritative or definitive purview, which is never actually achieved because nothing would count as achieving it. Reading, which was supposed to provide the laborious path to this viewpoint, turns out to do no such thing. That is becausetheactivityofreadinghasbeenmisconceived :itisnotaprocessofacquiring new ideas and concepts but one of generating them through a more interactive philosophical engagement with the texts one reads. It is therefore worth asking whether philosophers who avoid this engagement with their texts can really be said to “read” them. As opposed to the indifference toward reading manifested in traditional philosophy, certain literary theorists stop only fractionally short of declaring that it’s all reading, that is, that, since knowledge and understanding are “always already” filtered or even constructed through language, it is impossible to conceptualize a form of human activity that does not in some way partake of, hence amount to, the condition of reading. Decoding and interpretation simply become our mode of being in the world. What such a position misses is the speci ficity of the idea of reading, which, as the term is used in ordinary language, seemstoimplyanactivitythatisnotquitethesameas,notentirelyreducibleto, and certainly not synonymous with the idea of interpretation...