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  • The Reality Effect:Emerson’s Speakers and the Phenomenon of Personality
  • Rachel Cole (bio)

Let us treat the men and women well:
treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Experience"1

In 1868, thirty years after meeting Emerson, the elder Henry James attempted to explain—to himself as much as anyone else—"the mystery" of Emerson's "immense fascination."2 "Mr. Emerson's authority to the imagination consists," James writes, "not in his ideas, not in his intellect, not in his culture, not in his science, but all simply in himself, in the form of his natural personality."3 That personality permeated the atmosphere during Emerson's performances on the lyceum platform: " . . . it was utterly impossible to listen to Mr. Emerson's lectures, without being perpetually haunted as to your intellect by the subtlest and most searching aroma of personality."4 But James also finds it in Emerson's texts, where the author's "personal traits" manifest themselves not as an odor, but as a kind of communicable vascular throb.5 "No writer," James says, "so quickens the pulse of generous youth; so makes his brain throb and reel with the vision of the world that is yet to be. It is as if the spotless feminine heart of the race had suddenly shot its ruby tide into your veins, and made you feel as never before the dignity of clean living."6

James's essay, which remained unpublished until 1904, is worth reading for its language alone—language that, as we shall see, is flatteringly consonant with Emerson's authorial ambitions. But it also presents a provocative contrast to more recent accounts of Emerson's style, which describe his texts as markedly impersonal, populated by speakers who abandon or fall short of personality. Donald Pease describes what he calls the "second person" of Emerson's speaking voice as "less a person than an abstraction of other persons to the position of addressee." Lee Rust Brown, using slightly different terminology, writes that "A kind of psychology, or something supplanting psychology, emerges" from Emerson's style. Most recently, Sharon Cameron observes a "weird absence" in Emerson's essays and lectures—an absence she describes as the "missing sense of a person."7 The discrepancy between [End Page 67] these accounts and James's raises the question of how we define personality, particularly as something to be recognized or experienced: What are its criteria? What do we mean when we say or think of another—"this is a person"?

This essay reconsiders Emerson's criteria for personality, looking specifically at how he describes his encounters with persons in texts, and concentrating on comments he makes in his essay on Montaigne, from Representative Men. These statements, I will argue, complicate both the recent consensus on the impersonality of Emerson's works and his own famous dismissals of persons, including the well-known passage that I have chosen as an epigraph. In that passage Emerson suggests that any recognition of other persons as present in or to our experience requires an act of generosity: to recognize a person is to give that person the benefit of the doubt with regard to his own reality. In what follows I will argue that the question of reality, and its experiential corollaries doubt and certainty, are at the heart of Emerson's thinking about persons in "Montaigne." Our experience of another, he suggests there, entails a recognition of that other's value—an experience of passion for him or her—that coincides with an experience of certainty. This in itself is unremarkable: questions of certainty and persons, or entities similar to persons, are often intertwined—not least in the thought of Emerson's recent critics. What is interesting about Emerson's understanding of these matters is that for him, in contrast to his late-twentieth-century readers, the certainty that marks the experience of another person has little to do with trust. Trust implies a kind of grammatical transitivity—we trust in the reality or sincerity of someone or something. The certainty that Emerson associates with persons is better described, I will argue, with reference to an intransitive experience that...

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