Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity by Vivasvan Soni (review)

In this ambitious, theoretically reflective, and potentially transformative study, Vivasvan Soni takes up the question of happiness in eighteenth-century Europe and America not only to recount its history and to underline its signal role in modernity—and in this respect to advance forcefully the work of scholars such as Robert Mauzi, Darrin McMahon, and Adam Potkay—but also, more radically, to rethink the terms and retell the story of happiness in memory of its original political promise. Noting the apparent paradox that eighteenth-century writers vociferously refer to happiness as the aim of all human striving and even as an inalienable right but rather feebly address, if at all, its socio-political conditions and public actuality, Mourning Happiness provides a critical genealogy of modernity that counterpoints classical Greek conceptions of happiness (eudaimonia) as well-being, flourishing, or good fortune with its predominately individualist and psychological understanding in the eighteenth century to show that the ubiquity of the question of happiness in modernity serves, in effect, to erase its political potential and to suspend or to foreclose its material, secular realization—which nonetheless continues to haunt modernity as a memory or a hope. To recall the political promise of happiness, Soni returns in part 1 to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle but, above all, to Solon’s pre-philosophical proverb “Call no man happy until he is dead” so as to elaborate what he calls a “hermeneutic of happiness” in which the question of happiness solicits a public judgment of whether a particular life might in the end be called a flourishing one and raises the issue of public responsibility for the happy life. In the more expansive part 2, Soni traces the transformation of the question of happiness into a private, affective, and indefinitely deferred state in the moral, political, and aesthetic writings of Rousseau, Smith, Schiller, Kant, Jefferson, and Madison, even if these authors might acknowledge and affirm the revolutionary implications of the claim to happiness.

Soni’s critically engaged, analytically precise, deeply thoughtful, nuanced, illuminating readings of this philosophical tradition are impressive in their own right. Yet Mourning Happiness is also a literary history, and it is the way in which Soni links philosophy with literature that makes this book such an innovative study. For, in the hermeneutic of happiness, Soni stresses, a life must become a narrative in order to be available for public judgment. Happiness as a question of narrative and temporality requires the totality or the whole of a life delimited by death, and so contingent experiences of suffering or misfortune are no more incompatible with a happy life—and experiences of pleasure and success no more reliably indicative of it—than is the mourning of that life by others who judge whether it has been fortunate. Hence the two-pronged history, literary and philosophical, in Mourning Happiness: the funeral oration (as incipient biography) and tragedy are singled out as literary forms appropriate to a hermeneutic of happiness in ancient Greece, whereas the trial narrative and the novel—especially the sentimental, domestic fiction of Richardson, Rousseau, and Goldsmith—are associated with modernity and the shift to happiness as a feeling or existential state that now becomes the reward of those who must demonstrate through trials of suffering their worthiness to be happy, their uncloistered and nonfugitive virtue, but that is increasingly presented as unobtainable. In his readings of Pamela, Clarissa, The Vicar of Wakefield, and Julie, or the New Heloise, Soni shows how the association of happiness with the social institution of marriage serves to reify happiness, making it dependent upon deserving and possessing some “good” (Pamela), to abstract happiness from the temporality of a life and hence to denarrativize it (conclusion of Pamela and all of Pamela ii) and ultimately to locate happiness outside of time altogether (Clarissa and Julie). In these novels, the demand for individual happiness finally resorts to theology, as finite...