It's Nothing Personal

In everyday usage, "impersonality" denotes an absence of personality, often figured as a machinelike or robotic manner, such as the impersonality of customer service call-center operators. It also refers to something that is not particularized, not connected to specific individuals but dispersed more generally, suggesting disinterestedness. The Oxford English Dictionary emphasizes this set of meanings, which describes a person who is not acting like a person. In Impersonality, on the other hand, Sharon Cameron presses hard on the texts under examination to elucidate another, more radical sense of the word. In each of the seven essays, impersonality denotes not just a person who is not acting like a person, but the erasure of the "personal": the effort to eradicate persons entirely. For most of the authors in this study, the payoff of such effort is enlightenment, variously defined. Radical impersonality shares features with the nonhuman and the inanimate, but as Cameron is continually at pains to demonstrate, the boundaries between these categories become themselves unstable and permeable. Once one takes seriously the concept of "impersonality" as more than just a descriptive term for abnormal behavior and makes it an end in itself, it ruptures all other categories that depend on the stability of the personal.

This essay collection is undeniably challenging, but it amply rewards the reader's investment. Cameron's close readings are stunning in their precision and penetration. Moreover, her consideration of the ethical stakes of the texts is exemplary, as she strikes a careful balance between generous reading and conscientious interrogation. Each essay focuses on one author: William Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson (who is the subject of two essays), Simone Weil, T. S. Eliot, and Herman Melville. Although there are resonances among these authors' representations of impersonality, each formulates it differently, and each has a different view of whether and how it can be achieved. Cameron's analysis of these multifarious understandings has broad-ranging implications, particularly for the study of nineteenth-century American literature. While reading the book, additional authors leaped to mind—Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass—whose texts would complement or complicate Cameron's analysis.

Impersonality is a departure from Cameron's earlier monographs on nineteenth-century American authors such as Dickinson, Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Thoreau, and Henry James. In those studies, Cameron limited her data set to a single author—or a pair, in the case of Melville and Hawthorne—in order to anchor her investigations of such vast and abstract concepts as "time" and "thinking." This circumscription resulted in a deep, thorough, complex engagement with her material. Treating a similarly vast concept in the new book, Cameron comes at it obliquely and partially, treating a range of authors from different times and places. It is not a tradeoff between depth and superficiality, certainly, as Cameron is as rigorous and nuanced as ever. Yet the collection lacks the synthesis that characterizes Cameron's previous book-length studies. Cameron repeatedly acknowledges this difference in her preface, calling her essays "provisional" (xvii) and conceding that the various genres of the texts "invite different kinds of consideration" (xv). Rather than taking that insight as a prompt to a systematic approach that contemplates the limits or conditions that genre places on representations of impersonality, Cameron uses it to excuse herself from comparative analysis of the authors at hand. This lack of an overarching argument is merely a disappointment, given the impressive powers of synthesis on display in Cameron's earlier work, but the lack of reflection on exclusions that her selection criteria permit is a more serious weakness, one to which I shall return.

Chapter 1, which also serves as an introduction, treats Empson's fascination with the asymmetrical faces of Buddha statues. Empson argued that Buddha faces reconciled seemingly incompatible opposites, such as "complete repose" and "an active power to help the worshipper," by separating these attributes onto either side of the face. Cameron contrasts Empson's positive view that impersonality can arise from a unity of contradictions...