Pieces of Mæl: Confession, Soliloquy, and the Subjective Memory of Forms in Augustine and Shakespeare

50 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies Pieces ofMseh Confession, Soliloquy, and the Subjective Memory of Forms in Augustine and Shakespeare Deneen Senasi piece: 1. A fragment or part separated from thewhole in any manner -meal: 1. A suffix used in forming adverbs and signifying the measure or portion taken at one time, as in piecemeal. From maelum, original dative plural ofmeet m l: 1. Old English, mark, measure, fixed or appointed time. The measure of time is like drawing breath, something almost imperceptible, invisible; something received and then repeated, again and again, until it seems inevitable. In this way, time and its measure are themselves "homoge nized," collapsing into one another since, as Heidegger sug gests, "only in so far as time is constituted as homogenous is itmeasurable" (2). Nevertheless, while units of measure are, by definition, "homogenous," time itself is not; in fact, it is just the opposite, a heterogeneous mosaic ofmoments and metonymies, which resists the reifications of its measure. How then are we to "constitute" heterogeneous time without reducing it to the homogenizing effects of the methodology employed in its apportionment? In the fields of cultural studies and literary historiography, the New Historicist approach might, at first, seem to alleviate such problems, since such a methodology acknowledges and indeed is pred icated upon the heterogeneous nature of cultural production and historical "progression." Yet while New Historicism Senasi 51 seems to rectify the homogenization of the heterogeneous, it does so only up to the limit of its own field of inquiry, as what is acknowledged as heterogeneous within a period is transposed back into its homogeneous register, once that same period is considered in relation to another. In this way, each period of literary history is rendered "homogeneous" in its "heterogeneity." In other words, all periods are implicitly "alike" in their temporal and cultural estrangement from one another. That uniform periodic "identity" is then situated within the connect-the-dot matrix of conventional periodicity, drawing a straight line in the sands of time beyond which heterogeneous forms and fig ures are either explicitly disavowed or implicitly ignored. In this curious confluence of questions of identity and meas ure, historical time is constituted as inextricable from the means and methodologies through which it is remembered? standardized, stabilized, and sequestered?even as the gen res and forms of a single period regularly exceed and exten uate such methodological limits. The recurrent movement of a variety of forms across such boundaries not only calls into question the scope of certain historicist methodologies, but also raises questions about the ways in which the forms themselves accumulate a kind of iterative cultural "memory," drawn from innumerable indi vidual performances, which may be read as a trans-historical supplement to conventional periodic analysis. In particular, what do the content and composition of such "memories," represented in the forms of confession and soliloquy, reveal about the relationship between subjectivity and time? For in Heidegger's terms, "if we achieve clarity about what a clock is, then the kind of apprehension thriving in physics thereby becomes alive, and so does the manner inwhich time gets the opportunity to show itself (2). In this way, Heidegger sug gests, both physics and time materialize in the clock's formal re-presentation of each passing moment. So too, the speak ing subject materializes in relation to a lifetime of passing moments, past, present, and future, as the heterogeneous tides ofmemory, experience, and expectation are "measured" in the formal speech acts of confession and soliloquy. The central question Iwant to consider in this essay then is how time takes the "opportunity to show itself" in these forms, 52 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies where, as Iwill argue, through the mark or measure of those discursive "pieces ofmael," what is remembered and revealed is the transitive dynamics of subjectivity itself. Confronting the question Heidegger formulates as "are we ourselves time?" (22), a reading of confession and solilo quy in the work of Augustine and Shakespeare illustrates the ways inwhich the conceptual constituencies of personal memory, cultural history, and the speaking subject are inex tricably interwoven, and how each of these elements coa lesce, collapse, and reconfigure themselves...