Of Voice and Vulnerability: Experience as Inexperience in Cavell's Little Did I Know

A passage from the entry dated April 9, 2004, in Part 6 of Little Did I Know:

Today is Good Friday. Last Monday night, it happens, was the first seder of Passover. I am reminded that I have recurrently thought of my parents' lives together—and I guess almost without exception of the lives of their generation that I knew—as unleavened. . . . One midrash in the new Haggadah I used at our seder this week . . . interpreted the separating and removing of the leavening as the rejection of vanity, of excess, of every register and crumb of puffery. [ . . . ] But my invocation of the unleavened is more obviously produced by the familiar idea, as the Hebrew Bible puts the thought, that in preparing to leave Egypt the Jews had to leave in haste, eating the chaste bread of affliction and innocence ‘with their shoes on and their staff in their hand,' ready for departure. I felt of every place I ever moved to with my parents that we existed with bags packed and stuff near our hands, poised for departure.

(221–22)

Today (April 22, 2011) is also Good Friday. It also happens to be the fourth day of Passover. The coincidence is meaningful only insofar as the form of Stanley Cavell's Little Did I Know, the form of a diary, invites us to take into account the daily and particular events that provide the conditions of possibility for a memory's significance. The form invites us to consider the special meaning of particular days as well as the uncanny tendency of days in our lives to repeat and resemble one another. We ask at the seder, —What has changed, this night, from all the other nights?—while at the same time we realize that what makes this night eventful or notable is also what makes it resemble or exemplify other uneventful nights in our lives. Cavell's phrasing makes clear the significance of repetition: “I am reminded that I have recurrently thought of my parents' lives together . . . as unleavened.”

In what sense might we speak of lives as “unleavened”? First, as Cavell says, the unleavened life is fragile and uncertain, “poised for departure” at any moment. This phrase “poised for departure” suggests wariness of settling, humility in the face of a certain American desire to always be arriving somewhere (not departing), and also an unmistakable sense of dignity. To be “poised” means to have steadiness or composure—to carry one's self with self-possession, the prime virtue of Jane Austen's heroines (Elinor Dashwood or Elizabeth Bennett, self-possessed despite their lack of property, living with the knowledge that they might have to leave their homes at any moment).

To live an unleavened existence is also perhaps to live an existence devoid of excess levity. The son in this family always describes his father as subject to a “murderous melancholy” (20): “He was a serious man,” is the refrain to several episodes (20, 25, 58). This seriousness manifests itself in the desire to call things what they are. “He took some pride in several facts about his pawnshop—that it was run honestly, nothing in it, for example, called a diamond or said to be of gold unless it was a diamond and of gold” (24). Describing an encounter with his father's melancholy, Cavell writes: “My father reappeared at the arch separating this room from the dining room, and, looking somewhat recovered after a shower and in fresh clothes, drawn but not as pale, stretched out one hand for support on the side of the arch straight across the room from where I was getting up from the sofa, and said: “Mensh iz gornisht” (Mankind is nothing). He was a serious man” (25). Things must be called what they are. A diamond, a diamond. Gold, gold. Mankind, nothing. An unleavened existence is one that takes seriously its fallen state: conscious of its finitude, aware of the necessity of grace; as the grandsons in Little Did I Know movingly recall their grandfather's acknowledgment of the need...