#14 Michael J. Colacurcio

さる 2018年 6月 27日(水)に慶應義塾大学三田キャンパスにてマイケル・J・コラカチオ先生(UCLA)による特別講演会 “Consciousness and Ascription: Emerson and the Lonely Subject” が開催され、巽先生が司会、大学院在籍の冨塚亮平さんと小泉由美子さんがリスポンダントを務められました。今回の Panic Literati #14は、本講演会の一部を特別再録。院生レポートと併せてお届けいたします!

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CONTENTS

■マイケル・J・コラカチオ先生特別講演会一部再録
1. Introduction
Takayuki Tatsumi

2. “Beneficent Illusion” and “sharing” in Emerson’s essays
Ryohei Tomizuka

3. Dwight and the Lonely Subject
Yumiko Koizumi

写真

■院生レポート
4. エレベーター・ミュージック、ナニソレ?と思ったのは内緒
内田大貴(博士課程)

5. Godly Lettersの重み 
榎本悠希(修士課程)

6. Baby stepの行方 
石川志野(修士課程)

関連リンク
関連書籍

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Introduction
Takayuki Tatsumi

I feel very honored to be able to introduce to you Distinguished Professor of UCLA Michael Joseph Colacurcio, who has taught American Literature for more than 50 years. Professor Colacurcio was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1939. He studied philosophers John Locke and David Hume at Xavier University for his B.A. and received Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1963, when he started teaching at Cornell University.

It is in the Fall semester of 1984 at Cornell that I took Professor Colacurio’s graduate seminar on Puritans, immediately after he published the first giant monograph on Hawthorne’s short story The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales published from Harvard University Press. In this class I made friends with Samuel Otter, a famous Melvillean who is now teaching at UC Berkeley and Christopher Newfield, a noted Emersonian who is now teaching at UC Santa Barbara. I sill cherish the memory of the day our reading group once invited Professor Colacurcio to talk with us about his recently edited book New Essays on The Scarlet Letter just published from Cambridge University Press in 1985. His epoch making essay on The Scarlet Letter, “Footsteps of Ann Hutchinson” has very often been reprinted in the Norton Critical edition of the novel and now included in his own book Doctrine and Difference: Essays in the Literature of New England (Routledge, 1997). Without his intensive seminar and our reading group I could not have read Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana. In the Spring semester of 2015 his seminar focused upon Ralph Waldo Emerson, leading me to write a paper on Representative Men, which was radically revised and printed in my second book in English Young Americans in Literature: The Post-Romantic Turn in the Age of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville (Sairyusha, 2018). However, according to his chronology, it is right after this Emerson seminar that he made up his mind to move from Cornell to UCLA where he was to teach excellent students like Martin Kevorkian and Mikayo Sakuma, professor of Gakushuin Women’s College, who sponsored yesterday (June 26, 2018) Professor Colacurcio’s lecture on John Winthrop at the meeting of the Japanese Association of Early Americanists.

In the 21st century, Professor Colacurcio published another elephantine magnum opus Godly Letters: The Literature of the American Puritans (U of Notre Dame P, 2006), which induced the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to elect the author to its ranks in 2007. Recollecting this honorable election, Professor Colacurcio himself writes in the festschrift dedicated to him A Passion for Getting It Right (Peter Lang, 2016): “A happy event except as it marred his near-perfect record of scholarly non-recognition.” Of course, this statement itself exemplifies his peculiarly Puritanistic rhetoric of humiliation.

Therefore, it is a great pleasure for me to enjoy reunion, after the lapse of nearly 30 years, with my old teacher Professor Colacurcio at the International Poe and Hawthorne Conference held at Kyoto Garden Palace from June 21st through 24th, where he gave an exciting keynote lecture “Supernal Loveliness and Fantastic Foolery: The Aesthetic Dimension in Poe and Hawthorne” on 23rd, while I myself gave a plenary lecture “In Footsteps of Pym: Poe, Ooka and Ballard” on 22nd. I hope approximately 170 participants all enjoyed the whole conference produced through the collaborative efforts of four academic associations Poe Society, Hawthorne Society, Poe Society of Japan and Hawthorne Society of Japan, with Sandra Hughes and Masahiko Narita as chief organizers.

However, in today’s lecture “Consciousness and Ascription: Emerson and the Lonely Subject” Professor Colacurcio will expand his own essay included in the festschrift to Sacvan Bercovitch The Turn Around Religion in America published from Ashgate in 2011. Professor Colacurcio told me that he plans to develop it into his forthcoming book, which might consist of a couple of volumes.

For today’s discussion, graduate students of Keio University Yumiko Koizumi majoring in Connecticut Wits and Ryohei Tomizuka studying Emerson will serve as respondents.


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“Beneficent Illusion” and “sharing” in Emerson’s essays
Ryohei Tomizuka

Thank you very much for the insightful special lecture, Professor Michael Colacurcio. My name is Ryohei Tomizuka, doctoral student at Keio University. I major in 19th century literature, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson’s major essays. I plan to take up in my doctoral dissertation his principal essays such as “Experience,” “Friendship,” and “Love.” So it is really an honor to be here and respond to your speech “Consciousness and Ascriptions: Emerson and the Lonely subject” today.

Professor Colacurcio’s presentation and essay “Religion and the Lonely Subject: A Note on Emerson’s Idealism” impressed me a lot, especially regarding two points. First one is the concept of mood, and second one is the theme of illusion, particularly about what you called “beneficent illusion” in Emerson’s essays.

Using the metaphors of glass, Emerson describes the relationship between moods and illusion in “Experience.” Please look at the quotation no 1:
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. . . . Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. (228)
Moods as a string of beads connected with temperament have many colored lenses within them. According to this allegory, we can only touch the illusion, which is hued and distorted by different indexes of refraction, through the lenses as moods inseparable from our own temperament. Emerson also suggests the connection between temperament, illusion and glass by using similar expression in quotation no 2:
Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions and shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. In truth they are all creatures of given temperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries they will never pass . . . . (230)
Metaphors of glass relates the system of mood, temperature and that of illusion. This image, “prison of glass,” “whose boundaries every person we meet never pass,” is analogous to the quote about “the figure of the cave” from Emerson’s other late essay “Illusions,” which is the ninth chapter in The Conduct of Life (1860). Please look at quotation no.3:
As if one shut up always in a tower, with one window, through which the face of heaven and earth could be seen, should fancy that all the marvels he beheld belonged to that window. (“Illusions” 453) 
These metaphors of glass perhaps have two connotations. First one is a limitation of reason or consciousness, which may be related to the concept of “privacy,” namely the modern model of “lonely subject” (and Imanuel Kant’s concept of pure reason and practical reason), implied in the image of “prison” or “tower with one window” shut us. Second one is an unconsciousness related to the “system of mood,” implied in the transparency of glass. Emerson emphasizes particularly at the first section of the essay “Experience,” “this evanescence and lubricity of all objects,” he states a mood like grief he had after he lost his dear young son Waldo does not touch him directly, teaches him nothing, has relationship with him only through the lenses made of the glass. Emerson concludes the first section of “Experience,” “Our relations to each other are oblique and casual” (228). As Professor Colacurcio notes, “Our self we see directly, all others as in a mirror. This primary, “epistemological” version of idealism Emerson took to be simply true” (118).

In “Thinking of Emerson,” Stanley Cavell---it is really sad that he passed away just a week ago---states that Emerson’s essay “Experience” “is about the epistemology, or say the logic, of moods” (Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes 11). For example, Cavell directs his main attention to the metaphor of a quicksand in “Experience”:
The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero si muove. (“Experience” 231) 
For Cavell, this metaphor of quicksand is the basis of the self (12). He writes, “The fact that we are taken over by this succession, this onwardness, means that you can think of it as at once a succession of mood (inner matters) and a succession of objects (outer matters). This very evanescence of the world proves its existence to me; it is what vanishes from me. I guess this is not realism exactly; but it is not solipsism either” (emphasis original; 13). Cavell values “not realism, solipsism, but an epistemology, logic of mood” which consists of various illusions as main theme of essay “Experience.” This epistemology of mood draws a conclusion that one cannot keep the stable link or a certain mood with an object for a long time. Emerson wrote in “Experience”:
We need change of objects. Dedication to one thought is quickly odious. We house with the insane, and must humor them; then conversation dies out. (231)
Like the book or painting we once absorbed in, we also need to change relationships with friends or lovers. As professor Colacurcio mentioned that “so that Romantic Love rather than penetrating the last vail of illusion, seems more a mistaking of the particular for the general” (114). This stance of Emerson is sometimes regarded as cold and embarrasses us. However, Emerson thought about lofty, ideal relationships with friends and lovers in older essays like “Friendship” and “Love.”
 
“How should we recollect memories of the lost friend?” Latest researchers of Emerson’s essay about friendship show that this subject that Emerson did not and perhaps could not discuss in “Friendship” was to be developed in “Experience.” They take “Experience” as some kind of sequel to the preceding essay “Friendship.” I think this connection between “Experience” and “Friendship” is significant because both essays are of importance for professor Colacurcio’s today’s lecture and the essay.
 
As you mentioned “In one or another sense the individual consciousness may indeed be all alone; in yet others the sharing we all experience seems real and meaningful” (117), Emerson’s one of the main concerns in essay “Friendship” and “Experience” seems to be the “ebb and flow” of, or shifting mood between realism and solipsism, or sharing and withdrawing, friendship and Self-Reliance. To think about your word “sharing” in Emerson’s essays, his argument on the conversation, exchanging words with friends. is significant.
 
So next I move to discuss another essay of Emerson, “Friendship.” For example, as George Kateb shrewdly points out: “Only friendship establishes the true reciprocity between society and solitude—a reciprocity that cancels the question as to which of them is a means and which is the end. Society and solitude exist for each other, as friends do” (101). Namely, for Emerson, conversations between Self-Reliant subjects were really essential element to think about relationship between “society and solitude,” or the lonely subject.
 
As professor Colacurcio explained, “the idea of the uniquely receptive and necessarily creative subject” (117) is crucial for the encounter with the stranger in essay “Friendship” and “Love.”

For Emerson, the event of meeting strangers arouses both an uneasiness and “the nameless charm” that differs from a visit from intimate companions because it is uncertain what kind of a person has appeared at the front door or on the street (“Love” W II 179). This ambivalent moment of meeting strangers also causes the self a “palpitation”: “See, in any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which the approach of a stranger causes” (“Friendship” 192). The palpitation of the self that accompanies the encounter of a stranger is, as Branka Arsić and Masaki Horiuchi indicate, a concept that brings the passive and flexible self into the light, contrary to the rigid self that scholars normally take for granted as one of the main characteristics of the author of “Self-Reliance,” Emerson. Aristotle’s model of friendship is one in which one’s own ideal or emotional attachment to the object of love and friendship is based on the impression the self has already had. In contrast, Emerson’s passive palpitating self is open to the transformation of self, and to borrow Arsić’s expression, it “announce[s] [a] collapse of representation” (181).
 
The encounter with the stranger in “Friendship” also causes fear and has a traumatic impact on the self: “A commended stranger is expected and announced, and an uneasiness betwixt pleasure and pain invades all the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to the good hearts that would welcome him” (“Friendship” 192). Emerson also represents the new person he sees in the moment of meeting as “a great event, and hinders me from sleep” (“Friendship” 195). To Emerson, the moment is “a delicious torment” (“Friendship” 198). At the same time, Emerson is well aware that these ideal relationships are hard to realize and, if achieved, must be seen as quite momentary and ephemeral. Friendship and love draw to a close when an ideal conversation cannot be maintained as an event. In “Love,” Emerson uses the metaphor of “scaffolding” to explain this ephemerality (“Love” 187), and in “Friendship,” the moment of ending a lofty friendship is compared to the turning of a friend into “no stranger” (“Friendship” 193). Emerson knew people could rarely maintain a respectable distance from others for a long time, so he respected the stance that “[w]e will meet as though we met not, and part as though we parted not” (“Friendship” 212).
 
Rather than applying rigid theory or model to real experiences and relationships, Emerson kept giving new words retrospectively based on his own feeling or affect, experiencing “palpitation” from the encounter with strangers. This means he pursued the thought driven by the emotion, against the segregation of the thought and the emotion. Emerson wrote twice about the union of Intellect and Affection in the lecture before he wrote essays like “Friendship” and “Love”: Please look at quotation no 6:
The first Society of Nature is that of Marriage, not only prepared in the distinction of Sex, but in the different tastes and genius of Man and Woman. This society has its own end which is an integrity of human nature by the union of its two great parts, Intellect and Affection. For, of Man the predominant power is Intellect; of Woman, the predominant power is Affection. (EL, II, 102)
In this quote, Emerson apparently paralleled Intellect and Man, Affection and Woman. However, it does not mean he thought men should only pursue Intellect. This “marriage of the intellect and the affections,” in other words a marriage of the consciousness and mood was a kind of role model Emerson thought we should aim at.
 
After the initial moment of encounter, two people in love or friendship cultivate their relationship mainly through conversation. Although you indicated quote “human subjects can do no more than ‘converse’ with other subjects; and when the limits of human subjectivity are finally transcended, God may indeed be all in all” (113). For me, not by God but by the conversation itself, we can constitute a kind of "transcendental friendship."
 
In his lecture “The Heart,” Emerson says that conversation is the “first office of friendship” (EL II 292). Arsić provocatively suggests Emerson’s ideal conversation as “a process of mutual depersonalizing,” which “happens on condition that it triggers the abandonment of egotism and the suspension of self-reflexibility” (195). She insists that not only the moment of encounter, but “conversation should itself be an event.” In the same line of thought, she concludes that “[t]he conversation Emerson has in mind is less informative than transformative” (196). In quotation 7, to feel a radiance “which you know not in yourself and can never know” (“Love” 180–81) inspires one’s passive, depersonalizing transformation. This process of conversation can be analogous to “a marriage of the intellect and the affections . . . distinguishes it from the lonely hours of thought” (EL, II, 292),
 
It is certain that this marriage or sharing, namely the ideal conversation has to have an end in due course. However, you suggested the possibility in quotation no 8:
If we find this sharing simply does go on—this love of the precious one or this sacrifice for the overwhelming all— it may indeed be in the mode of some “beneficent illusion.” Not a nice word, in any parlance, as Emerson surely knew. Yet perhaps that is the alternative to be preferred. . . . the mind’s road to God or not, moral consciousness remains a constitutive element of human experiences as such. Ourselves, a little weary from the attempt at virtue . . . might opt instead to be the fool of some humanistic belief in love and friendship; or even in the democratic fiction of the unity of man, made of one blood if not possessed of One Mind. (emphasis mine; 121) 
The phrase “beneficent illusion” you quoted twice in the essay, derives from the essay “Illusions,” just before the lines of quotation no 3. So Please look at quotation no 9:
There are deceptions of the senses, deceptions of the passions, and the structural, beneficent illusions of sentiment and of the intellect. There is the illusion of love, which attributes to the beloved person all which that person shares with his or her family, sex, age or condition, nay, with the human mind itself. (“Illusions” 452–53)
As you hinted at, I also think “beneficent illusion” is not a nice word because for me this word perhaps reflect more pessimistic or sceptic stance of so called late Emerson than earlier stance in essays like “Experience” and “Friendship.” For me, and perhaps for early Emerson, the ideal conversation does not offer “beneficent illusion” as the alternative to be preferred, but “announced uneasiness betwixt pleasure and pain,” transforms and depersonalizes Emerson.

According to the essay “Friendship,” one must retain a proper distance from others to feel radiance or to transform a conversation into “an event.” In fact, Emerson uses an attractive metaphor to portray this sense of distance. Please look at the quotation no 10: “Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency [sic] to be soon outgrown and cast aside” (emphasis mine; “Friendship” 210). A friend as “beautiful enemy”—this metaphor splendidly describes Emerson’s mixed feelings about distance. To behold the beauty of an enemy, one must “[g]uard him as thy counterpart,” and keep a certain distance.
 
The phrase “beautiful enemy” must be one of the most vital phrase in the essay. However, this expression symbolizes Emerson’s “a poetic of distance” could not be seen in the prototype of the passage in the journal of 21th June, 1840. The phrase resembles this metaphor most could be found in the letter from Margaret Fuller to Emerson on same year, 29th September: please look at quotation no 11: “But did not you ask for a ‘foe’ in your friend? Did not you ask for a ‘large formidable nature’? But a beautiful foe, I am not yet, to you. Shall I ever be? I know yet” (Fuller 160). At that time, Fuller demanded Emerson deeper relationship than ever. However, she announced that she took certain distance from him in this letter because Emerson had kept away from facing her claim. Here Fuller took the image of “beautiful foe” she seemed to hear from Emerson before and fiercely criticized him as “I am not yet” a beautiful foe “to you.” How can Emerson reply to this Fuller’s reprimand in the text of “Friendship”? “A poetics of distance” Emerson unfolded in the final manuscript sent to the printing office on next New Year’s Day in 1841, quotation no.10. It can be interpreted as a response to Fuller’s calling as a whole.
 
Emerson and Fuller developed intimate but complex relationships. Their “relations to each other are fierce but oblique and casual” like through the prison of glass. However, they can only be mutual beautiful enemy, with a certain distance, through the illusion like “a marriage of the intellect and the affections. For me, this illusion is more precious than beneficent. That’s all for my response. Thank you for listening.

***
Besides, I have two questions for your special lecture. My first question is, how can the illusions in Emerson’s essays be “beneficent”? And how do you value the “beneficence” of the illusion? I will be grateful if you explain the implication of the word “beneficence,” it may have religious connotation (like “ascription” in your today’s lecture’s title) a little more detailed.

Second question also has something to do with the first one. Do you think there is any shift in Emerson’s stance on illusions between early work like “Divinity School Address,” “Friendship,” or “Experience” and later essay “Illusions.” If so, please tell us the difference a little more specifically.

It would be wonderful if this sharing or conversation with us today will be at least beneficent, or a little more inspiring for your thought. Thank you again for this splendid opportunity.


Bibliography
Arsić, Branka. On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson. Harvard UP, 2010.
Cavell, Stanley. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian
     Perfectionism. U of Chicago P. 1990.
---. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. Stanford UP, 2003.
Colacurcio, Michael J. “Religion and the Lonely Subject: A Note on Emerson’s Idealism” 
     The Turn Around Religion in America: Literature, Culture, and the Work of Sacvan 
     Bercovitch, edited by Nan Goodman and Michael P. Kramer. Ashgate, 2011, pp.107–22.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Annotated Emerson. Edited by David Mikics. Harvard UP, 
     2012. [Abbreviated as AE]
---. The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. 2. Edited by Stephen E. Whicher, 
     Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams, Harvard UP, 1961. [Abbreviated as EL II]
---. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Concord Edition. Vol. 2. Mifflin, 
     1903-04. [Abbreviated as WII]
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller, Vol. II 1839-41. Edited by Robert N. 
     Hudspeth, Cornell UP, 1983.
Kateb, George. Emerson and Self-Reliance: New Edition. Rowan and Littlefield, 2002.
Lysaker, John T., and William Rossi, editors. Emerson and Thoreau: Figures of 
     Friendship. Indiana UP, 2010.
Robinson, David M. “‘In the Golden Hour of Friendship’: Transcendentalism and 
     Utopian Desire” Lysaker and Rossi pp. 53–70. 


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Dwight and the Lonely Subject
Yumiko Koizumi

As Professor Michael J. Colacurcio points out, Ralph Waldo Emerson moved “from the exhilarating doctrine that the world is God’s lively and immediate idea to the unhappy conclusion that the self is essentially alone” (“Religion and the Lonely Subject: A Note on Emerson’s Idealism” 116). According to Emerson’s essay “Experience,” the lecture title “consciousness and ascription” is explained as follows: “[n]ever can love make consciousness and ascription equal in force. There will be the same gulf between every me and thee as between the original and the picture” (243). Before the gulf, Emerson turns out to be the lonely subject.

I am fascinated with the words “the lonely subject” Professor Colacurcio observes in Emerson. If Emerson’s essay “Experience” is crucial for his unhappy conclusion that the self is essentially alone and if the loss of his son was crucial for “Experience,” then the same kind of experience—the loss of his father—is also crucial for the post-revolutionary poet Timothy Dwight when he wrote one of the representative American epics The Conquest of Canaan.

From here, I would like to consider how Dwight frames the lonely subject in The Conquest of Canaan, focusing on a character named Irad, with whom Dwight’s own experience are significantly overlapped.

1. DWIGHT’S EXPERIENCE & THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN
First off, I would briefly introduce The Conquest of Canaan. Dwight started writing this work in 1771 when he was nineteen years old and published it 1785. During the Revolutionary War, in the field Dwight wrote a letter to George Washington to ask for permission to dedicate his work to the future president; it succeeded (Washington, “Letter to Timothy Dwight” 105–06). Another founding father John Adams wrote a letter to his son John Quincy Adams to recommend to read The Conquest of Canaan; he praised it (Adams, “Letter to John Quincy Adams” 96). Thanks to Adams, The Conquest of Canaan was eventually published in London in 1788, which means that it was accepted as the representative American epic, at least for Adams and the London publisher.

According to Sacvan Bercovitch, “American Joshua” comes into the forefront in The Conquest of Canaan. “Dwight’s hero is Joshua; his subject, the battle for the promised land. But the action itself . . . is part of a grand figural process culminating in the Revolution. the Israelite leader serves finally as harbinger of a ‘greater dispensation,’ to reveal Washington as the Christ-like ‘Benefactor to Mankind,’ directing a ‘more fateful conflict’ on ‘new Canaan’s promised shores’” (italics original; 130).

Dwight thus offers the typological narrative on “new Canaan’s promised shores” but at the same time inscribes his personal experience, too. Previous studies have seen in Irad the author Dwight. For instance, Kenneth Silverman finds in the romance between Irad and his lover Selima Dwight’s marriage with Mary Woolsey in 1777 (24–25). If Irad is based on the author Dwight, Irad’s loss of father is also based on Dwight’s loss of father. According to John Fitzmier, Dwight’s father was a well-known person in Northampton but a sincere loyalist. As the patriots went to extremes during the Revolutionary War, in 1775 Dwight’s father was forced to be jailed. Fortunately, he was soon released but he saw difficulty in Northampton; then, decided to move to the southern frontier, where he would help his sister and her husband with a new enterprise; and finally, he departed in May 1776. Unfortunately, in the middle of this venture, he died. Hearing it in the battlefield in 1778, Dwight came back home soon to support the rest of family (Fitzmier 34–36). The chronological gap between 1776 and 1778 suggests that the body of his father was already lost when Dwight knew it. Here please look at the following quotation from The Conquest of Canaan when Irad comes to know the death of his father Hezron:
Nor knew fair Irad how his parent lay,
But, fir’d with glory, steer’d his careless way;
Near the great Chief he mov’d with conscious grace,
And conscious blushes crimson’d o’er his face;
When, pale and ghastly, on the bloody ground,
Stain’d with black dust, and pierc’d with many a wound,
Stiff gore besprinkling all his locks of snow,
And a cold cloud around his reverend brow,
Hezron appear’d: at once his nerves congeal’d;
His frozen lips a dumb, dead silence seal’d;
A moveless statue, o’er the sire he hung,
Nor streaming tears release’d his marbled tongue.
Then round the corse impassion’d arms he threw,
And wash’d the clotted gore in filial dew;
Glu’d to the form with strong embraces lay,
And kiss’d, with quivering lips, the senseless clay. (Book VI, ll. 689–704)
This is a sad scene. But given the fact that Dwight could not meet his father, the scene where Irad “[g]lu’d to the form with strong embraces” might be the poet’s hope; if so, it is fulfilled here. Nonetheless, after this moment, Irad comes to grieve as if he were a lonely subject.

2. WHEN IRAD COMES ACROSS HIS FATHER
Book VII of The Conquest of Canaan begins with the description of “unhappy Irad” (l. 14). When “[a] death-like slumber seal’d his [Irad’s] tearful eyes” (l. 18), the dream vision comes to Irad:
Through lonely fields, in russet gloom array’d,
Lost in mute grief, with weary steps he [Irad] stray’d.
A shadowy light, like evening’s dusky ray,
Spread o’er the world, and form’d a twilight day.
Before his wandering path, a northern grove
Shed midnight round, and pierc’d the clouds above:
Slow wav’d the tall, dark pines: a hollow sound
Roll’d through the wood, and shook th’ autumnal ground.
Dull-murmuring fell the sullen, swelling streams,
Lulling to sleep, and blue in glimmering beams.
With broad, black horrors o’er its bosom spread,
An eastern mountain rear’d its shaggy head;
High hung the hoary cliff; the cedars height,
Less seen, and less, withdrew beyond the sight.
Strange unknown scenes the regions wild display,
And solitary music slowly dies away. (emphasis added; Book VII, ll. 20–34)
In this dream vision, Irad is wandering through the lonely fields with his weary steps. The terms “shadowy,” “dusky,” “hollow,” “dull-murmuring,” and “glimmering” show the scene Irad wanders looms between day and night, or between the real and the unreal worlds. Indeed, when “the cedars . . . withdrew beyond the sight,” “the regions” display “[s]trange unknown scenes.” After wandering through this lonely fields, Irad comes across his father Hezron:
From the thick grove, in dark-brown robes reveal’d,
A form stalk’d solemn o’er the shuddering field;
Of other worlds he seem’d; nor cast an eye
On the brown plain, or on the gloomy sky.
Regardless of the scenes that round him mourn’d,
On Irad’s path his sad, slow steps he turn’d;
Pale stood the Youth; the stately shape drew nigh;
Gash’d was his cheek, and fix’d his lofty eye;
Like a light flame, low hung his beard of snow,
And death’s cold terrors hover’d on his brow.
’Twas Hezron’s self. (emphasis added; Book VII, ll. 35–45)
Irad and we readers cannot know who is “a form” in the second line at first; still, this form pays attention to Irad (“On Irad’s path his sad, slow steps he turn’d”). Then, in the seventh line, “the Youth” and “the stately shape” meet with each other. However, given that it is the eleventh line when Irad identifies the form with his father Hezron, the seventh line suggests some cognitive distance between them. Or, given that he is called “the Youth,” not Irad, and his father is also called only “the stately shape,” it gives an impression that it is an abstract encounter without their own names. Or, given that Dwight uses no word that means “encounter,” one could think that it is the distance itself between them that Dwight would depict. Instead of such words, he uses the semicolon “;” in the line “[p]ale stood the Youth; the stately shape drew nigh.” Of course, this sign may represent the encounter between them because it connects two sentences two persons belong to, but at the same time “;” does stand upon the line as if it were the mark of gulf between them.

This is an unhappy moment, indeed. It makes Irad horrified because his father’s cheek was “[g]ash’d,” his “lofty eye” was fixed, and “death’s cold terrors hover’d on his brow.” These descriptions lead him to a sense of guilt on the death of his father. In fact, Irad says: “Why, O thou [Hezron] righteous Mind? but cease my tongue, / Nor blame the dread decree, that cannot wrong. / Mine the sole fault—and mine the single blame” (Book VII, ll. 99–101). Also, he says: “Pale, in the visions of the guilty bed, / Thy [Hezron’s] form affrights me, and thine eye upbraid” (Book VII, ll. 115–16).

3. “THE LOVELY FORM AROSE TO SIGHT”
It is too simple that Dwight only puts his guilt about the death of his father on Irad. What matters is that he makes Irad killed in the battlefield, transforming the lonely subject into the lovely object in the following lines:
Far from the fight, despoil’d of helm and shield,
Slept beauteous Irad on the mournful field;
Deaf to the groans, and careless of the cries;
His hair soft-whistling o’er his half-shut eyes.
On either side his lifeless arms were spread,
And blood ran round him from the countless dead.
Even there, two warriors, rushing o’er the plain,
O’er crimson torrents, and o’er piles of slain,
Stopp’d, when the lovely form arose to sight,
Survey’d his charms, and wish’d no more the fight. (emphasis added; Book VIII, ll. 499–508)
Because Irad is killed in the middle of the battle and somewhere in the field, he has been left behind for a while. Here, Dwight offers Irad’s body as the “lovely form.” Moreover, regardless of the countless dead and its blood around him, this lovely form exerts a great influence on “two warriors.” Through the bloody scenes, they encounter and stop before the body of Irad, and then, change their minds, wishing “no more the fight.”
   
It is easy to observe in it Dwight’s pacifism; the memory of the Revolutionary War was still fresh. It is also easy to consider such aspect as too idealistic. Yet, this scene casts another question about the unhappy world when we consider the ways in which two warriors respond to the lovely form:
Ah! hapless Youth! cried one, with tender voice,
The Gods’ fair offspring, form’d for milder joys!
A face like thine the gentlest thoughts must move,
The gaze of Beauty, and the song of Love.
Sleep on, fair hero! for thy corse must lie
Bare to the fury of a stormy sky.
Thus he. His friend, by softer passions warm’d,
By grief afflicted, and by beauty charm’d,
Cries sadly—No; for when my steps return,
This bleeding breast thy early fate shall mourn;
The melting song declare thy hapless doom,
And my own hand erect thy head a tomb. (emphasis added; Book VIII, ll. 509–20)
Here, two warriors respond to “beauteous Irad” in their ways. The apparent difference lies in between exposure (“thy corse must lie / Bare to the fury of a stormy sky”) and burial (“my own hand erect thy head a tomb”). But the most important is their different recognition of “beauty”: the former warrior sees in the body of Irad as an ideal of “Beauty” with the capital “B” while the latter does not. The former observes a represented, abstracted one, not Irad himself. In contrast, the latter finds a mortal body in Irad, promising to build a tomb. Both warriors mourn Irad, but the former believes that “the world is God’s lively and immediate idea” while the latter is stepping into “the unhappy conclusion.” Of course, the former’s confidence may result from deep grief while the latter’s mode may be nothing but sentimentalism. Significant is that Dwight writes down these different attitudes and remains oscillated between these separated attitudes.

***
Through this opportunity, I reread Dwight’s Conquest of Canaan from Professor Colacurcio’s perspective of “the lonely subject” or “consciousness and ascription” based on his profound knowledge and experience. Thus, I was once again impressed with Dwight’s grief, fragility and toughness, gaining a key to grasping these aspects in an academic frame of reference.


WORKS CITED
Adams, John. “Letter to John Quincy Adams.” 19 March 1786. Adams Family 
     Correspondence, vol. VII, edited by Margaret A. Hogan, C. James Taylor, Celeste 
     Walker, Anne Decker Cecere, Gregg L. Lint, Hobson Woodward, and Mary T. Claffey, 
     Harvard UP, 2005, p. 96.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. 1978. U of Wisconsin P, 2012.
Colacurcio, Michael J. “Religion and the Lonely Subject: A Note on Emerson’s Idealism.” 
     The Turn Around Religion in America: Literature, Culture, and the Work of Sacvan 
     Bercovitch, edited by Nan Goodman and Michael P. Kramer, Routledge, 2011, pp. 
     107–22.
Dwight, Timothy. The Conquest of Canaan. Elisha Babcock, 1785; Joseph Johnson, 1788. 
     Rpt. The Major Poems of Timothy Dwight: with A Dissertation on the History, 
     Eloquence, and Poetry of the Bible. Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1969. pp. 13–326.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Experience.” The Annotated Emerson, edited by David Mikics, 
     Harvard UP, 2012, pp. 223–47/
Fitzmier, John R. New England’s Moral Legislator: Timothy Dwight, 1752-1817. Indiana 
     UP, 1998.
Silverman, Kenneth. Timothy Dwight. Twayne, 1969.
Washington, George. “Letter to Timothy Dwight.” 18 March 1778. The Writings of George
     Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources 1745-1799, vol. XI, edited by John 
     C. Fitzpatrick, U.S. G.P.O., 1934, pp. 105–06.

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写真

講師:マイケル・J・コラカチオ先生(UCLA)
司会:巽孝之先生






下段左から:巽先生、コラカチオ先生
上段右から:成田雅彦先生(専修大学)、
小泉由美子さん(院生)、冨塚亮平さん(院生)

懇親会@地中海









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エレベーター・ミュージック、ナニソレ?と思ったのは内緒
内田大貴(博士課程)

マイケル・コラカチオ教授が特別講演で取り上げたのは、アメリカン・ルネサンスの大家のひとりラルフ・ウォルドー・エマソンのエッセイ「経験」だった。冒頭からピザの話を皮切りに、現代的な言葉を駆使しながらエッセイ「経験」についてお話しくださった。
 
夭折した息子を悼んで書かれた「経験」は、とりわけエマソンの著作に関してほとんど門外漢である私のような読者には、その全容は一読しただけではにわかには掴みがたいところがある。その一方で明らかなのは、エマソンが人間の主体がどこまで孤独であるかということを問い続けていることだ。この問いは私たちにも決して無関係ではないだろう。私たちは、主体として他の主体とは究極的に隔絶しているのだろうか。答えは少しのイエスとたくさんのノーだ。教授の言葉を借りるならば、人間それぞれの主体とその関係性は「エレベーター・ミュージック」と表現できる。エレベーターとその中で流れる BGMは、人とその脳内の比喩だ。エレベーターそれぞれは形や機能もほとんど共通しているが、その中で流れる BGMが他のエレベーターの中で聞こえることはない。それぞれのエレベーターにはそれぞれ別の音楽が流れている。
 
私たちは究極的には孤独な存在である。各々が見ている世界観は、まさに映画や漫画においてその言葉が指す通り、異なったものである。しかし、相互のやりとりが可能な程度には、あるいは日常生活を共に過ごすことが可能な程度には、個々の世界観は共通している。流れる音楽は違えど、それが少なくとも音楽であるという点において、エレベーターたる私たちは互いの内部へ想像力を届かせ、生を共有できる。少し昔のポップソングがお好きらしいコラカチオ教授風にいうならば、私たち人間主体のあいだには、“There ain’t no mountain high enough . . . to keep me from getting to you babe” ということになる。
 
あらゆる点で私と教授とのあいだにも大きな隔たりがあるだろう。私たちの中で流れている音楽は全く異なるものだろうが、しかし私はその音楽がどのようなものなのか、完全ではないにしても、それに想像力を巡らすことはできたように感じる。

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Godly Letters の重み
榎本悠希(修士課程)

作品を読む際に書き手の人となりを、何となくだけども、想像してしまう。そして、それは Michael Colacurcio先生の Godly Lettersも例外ではなかった、というより、むしろ 600ページ以上のその大著から醸し出されるスタイルは、「このような書物を書くことのできる人とは一体どのような人物か」と、関心を刺激する一方だった。17世紀のピューリタニズム分析に、突如として挿入される 19世紀のアメリカン・ルネサンス文学論から、20世紀ポップソング、果ては連続テレビドラマまで、Colacurcio先生は必要に応じ、あらゆる文化領域を縦横無尽、自由自在に横断する。それだけでも十分に興味深かいのだが、時折、引用にページ数や引用符が書かれていない箇所が稀にある点も面白いスタイルだった。無論、単なるつけ忘れなどではないことを、私は先生の講演にてその真相をまざまざと知らされる。

言うまでもなく、講演内容は、多種多様なアリュージョンやジョークで溢れ、あの Godly Lettersの世界がそのまま体現されていた。しかし、より気を引いたのは、冨塚さんと小泉さんとのディスカッションでの応答において、先生は本やメモを見ることなく、エマソンのテクストを、暗唱して見せるのだ。引用しているという事を聞き手に意図的に気づかせることなく、換言すれば、引用と引用者のナラティヴが一体化するような感覚で、なのだ。常日頃思うのは、「引用の言葉」は「研究者の言葉」を一方的に裏付けるものであってはならないという事だが、Colacurcio先生の肉声から感じられたのは、もはや「引用の言葉」と「研究の言葉」とが、限りなく自然に溶け合った神業の如き「言葉」だった。どれほどのテクスト精読を積み重ねたのか、私では想像もつかない道程の一瞬を垣間見たような気がする。今一度、Godly Lettersを読もうと手に取った時、私はその「重さ」の本当の意味にたじろぐのだった。

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Baby step の行方
石川志野(修士課程)
 
6月下旬酷暑の中、マイケル・コラカチオ先生の講演が行なわれた。Godly Lettersや The Province of Piety 等の大部な御著書の重量感に触れると、近寄りがたく峻厳なイメージを持つが、難しい内容にも関らず随所にウィットに富んだコラカチオ先生独特の表現方法を読みすすめるにつれ、どのようなご講演なのかを楽しみにしていた。京都で行なわれた国際ポー・ホーソーン会議でお話を聞いたときと同様、御著書での語り口がそのままで、ジョークも交え、長いセンテンスを一息にパワフルに話す姿に圧倒された。

懇親会では、拙い話に真摯に耳を傾け「いつでもメールで質問して」と言ってくださった。ホーソーンの研究を始めたばかりで、孵化したてのひよっこのわたしだが、作品にみられる歴史観が面白いと思い、“transhistorian Hawthorne”という話をしたのだ。コラカチオ先生は歴史とホーソーンという研究は大切で、真剣にやる価値があるとおっしゃり、David Levinの History of Romantic Art (1964) を薦めてくださった。William Prescott, John Motley, Francis Parkmanや George Bancroftら、19世紀ニューイングランドの歴史家とロマン主義文学の関係を探るもので、“He used history”とコラカチオ先生は表現なさったが、ホーソーンの歴史「利用」の方法を考えるのに役立つ本だと思う。本の情報の手書きのメモを手帳に大切にしまった。そのおおらかな字に再び先生を感じている。

エマソン研究の集大成の御著書が出るとのことだが、研究の着手時と最近の読みの違いはあるだろうか。様々な人生での経験をへて、長い研究の時間を越えて、それは変化したのだろうか。その始まりの一歩はどんなだったのか、ひよっこのわたしは考える。移動や講演続きのお疲れの色も全くみせず、次の日から香港に移動するというコラカチオ先生は、書いた文章がそのまま本から立ち上がって人の形になって歩いているような巨大な人だった。「巨人」コラカチオ先生の姿を仰ぎみつつ、わたしの baby stepが次へつながっていくようにしたい。

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関連リンク
06/27: マイケル・J・コラカチオ先生特別講演会 “Consciousness and Ascription: Emerson and the Lonely Subject” のお知らせ@慶應義塾大学 三田キャンパス 北館第二会議室 16:00–(CPA: 2018/06/05)
【写真更新】06/27: マイケル・J・コラカチオ先生特別講演会 “Consciousness and Ascription: Emerson and the Lonely Subject” @慶應義塾大学 三田キャンパス 北館第二会議室 16:00–(CPA: 2018/06/29)
06/21-24: 国際ポー&ホーソーン会議の特別 HPが開設&プログラムが公開されています!(CPA: 2018/06/05)
【写真更新】06/21-24: 国際ポー&ホーソーン会議@京都ガーデンパレス(CPA: 2018/06/29)

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関連書籍
Michael J. Colacurcio, Godly Letters: The Literature of the American Puritans (U of Notre Dame P, 2006)

Michael J. Colacurcio, Doctrine and Difference: Essays in the Literature of New England (Routledge, 1997)

Michael J. Colacurcio, The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales (1984; Duke UP, 1995)