The Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture (review)

The Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture. By Christopher Pye. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 200. Illus. $49.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.

In a stimulating introduction Christopher Pye presents The Vanishing as a response to the "intriguing starkness" of new-historicist and cultural-materialist accounts of early modern subjectivity (1). According to Pye, these accounts have mostly rejected an "inward" self--or a self intrinsically fractured by the very process of self-identification, as Lacan would have it--in favor of a range of social-constructivist approaches whereby the early modern subject is stamped and formed by cultural forces alone. Each chapter of The Vanishing seeks out moments--in the plays of Shakespeare, the art of Michelangelo, and Renaissance Annunciation scenes in particular--where an historicist explanation of the formation of a subject, or its situating within a matrix of sociopolitical concerns, strikes the author as particularly unsatisfying or incomplete. Pye terms these dramaturgical scenes or artistic representations "vanishing" points, insofar as critical discourses that privilege the "historical" cannot contain or enfold the early modern subject wholly within their web of materialist and/or political concerns. It is in these lacunae that Pye fixes his analysis, arguing that "subjectivity is less a social construct than it is a function of the insistent failure of society to constitute itself" (49).

Thus in the first chapter Lord Talbot's escape from the French in the opening of 1Henry VI is read only provisionally as a "victory over the depredations of exchange and theatricalization alike" (21). Talbot does not constitute himself in opposition to an inscriptive system, the power of which he has narrowly evaded; what Pye argues, rather, is that the kind of exchange we see in the play surmounts the equitable reciprocity that we might expect if we are conditioned to read the marketplace in (or into) Shakespeare. It is not Talbot, the mouthpiece for vengeance, who is killed when French soldiers turn their fire on the Englishmen who look down on Orleans but his auditor, Salisbury; and it is through his identification with his fallen comrade that Talbot reincorporates himself into a system of exchanges, now predicated not on resistance or the flouting of death but rather on its pursuit.

In his introduction Pye proposes that his reading of 1 Henry VI will show how the "early modern subject emerges not as a commodified being in a system of exchange but at the more radical and unstable point where economy establishes itself as a system" (14), but the chapter itself seems less interested in the inaugural moment of such a marketplace than in an epiphanic crisis of self-projection. The historicist straw man for the opening move of the chapter, the rejection of the "economic" as discursive field that explains everything about Talbot, never emerges; and the payoff for Pye's conclusion ("subjectivity appears at the knotted limit of an entire array of discursive forms--theater, economy, history--a point of radically failed closure" [36]) seems to be less a corrective of faulty methodological assumptions than it is a deft but open-ended formula that one could apply, without much consequence, to any number of Shakespearean characters. The conclusion also sidesteps the central issue of what Pye means by subjectivity in the first place. If the death drive replaces market force in Talbot's economy of self-identity, is Pye's vanishing point nothing more than a tabula rasa for processes of self-formulation; and, if so, would not such inscriptability conform somewhat nicely to hard-line historicist readings of the self as always otherwise constituted?

Pye's second chapter focuses on demonism and Michelangelo's self-portrait in The Last Judgment. Here the stakes in differing methodologies are clear and compelling: new historicism cannot theorize its own fascination with wonder, Pye contends, whereas Lacanian psychoanalysis readily affords its practitioners with a vocabulary and theory regarding the overdetermining affects...