Möbian Nights: Reading Literature and Darkness

346 Pages·2017·2.535 MB·English

by  Sandor Goodhart

Möbian Nights
Violence, Desire, and the Sacred
Series Editors:
Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge
Volumes in the series:
Vol. 1. Girard’s Mimetic Theory Across the Disciplines
edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge
Vol. 2. René Girard and Sacrifice in Life, Love, and Literature
edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge
Vol. 3. Mimesis, Movies, and Media
edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge
Vol. 4. René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991
edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, Joel Hodge, and Mathias Moosbrugger
Vol. 5. Mimesis and Atonement: René Girard and the Doctrine of Salvation
edited by Michael Kirwan and Sheelah Treflé Hidden
Vol. 6. Möbian Nights: Reading Literature and Darkness
by Sandor Goodhart
Möbian Nights
Reading Literature and Darkness
Sandor Goodhart
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2017
© Sandor Goodhart, 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Goodhart, Sandor, author.
Title: Möbian Nights : reading literature and darkness / Sandor Goodhart.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Series: Violence,
desire, and the sacred ; 6 | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017002516 (print) | LCCN 2017021566 (ebook) | ISBN
9781501326943 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501326950 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501326936
(hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Criticism. | Disasters in literature. | Crisis in literature.
| Death in literature. | BISAC: RELIGION / Philosophy. | PHILOSOPHY /
Metaphysics. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory.
Classification: LCC PN81 (ebook) | LCC PN81 .G627 2017 (print) | DDC
801/.95--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017002516
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2693-6
ePub: 978-1-5013-2694-3
ePDF: 978-1-5013-2695-0
Series: Violence, Desire, and the Sacred
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
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For my children, Joshua, Noah, and Jonah;
my grandchildren, Ethan, Benjamin,
Aaron, Gabriel, Sarah, Stella,
Max, Sophia, and Brandon;
and in memory of my mother,
Evelyn Love Goodhart,
and my father,
Abraham Goodhart
—in abiding love,
zikhronah v’zikhrono livrakha
vi
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments viii
Introduction: Möbian Turns: Difference as Continuity 1
1 After The Tragic Vision: Krieger and Criticism, Lentricchia
and Crisis 25
2 Disfiguring de Man: Literature, History, and Collaboration 45
3 Witnessing the Impossible: Laub, Felman, and the Testimony
of Trauma 87
4 Documenting Fiction: Kolitz, van Beeck, Levinas, and Holocaust
Witness 111
5 “And darkness upon the face of the deep”: Counter-Redemptive
Hermeneutics in Wiesel, Mauriac, Blanchot, Levinas, and Genesis 1 135
6 “All the story of the night”: Criticism, Literature, and the Möbian 203
7 “I died in Auschwitz”: Literary Reading, the Möbian, and the
Posthumous 263
Conclusion: Versions of Night: Reading Literature and Darkness 293
Works Cited 297
Index 319
Preface and Acknowledgments
The book that follows was born from a conversation I had in the Temple of Zeus.
“Zeus” was a coffeehouse concession that operated in the basement of Goldwin
Smith Hall at Cornell University in the 1970s where students, faculty, and
assorted others gathered before, after, and sometimes during classes to hash out
the burning issues of the day. Having landed at Cornell in the mid-1970s as an
ABD from Buffalo (where I attended courses given by René Girard on literature
and sacrifice, and studied structuralism and poststructuralism with Eugenio
Donato), I spent a lot of time in Zeus.1 Steve Knapp had the reputation of being
the brightest graduate student of his class, and I took a certain mischievous
pleasure engaging him about the deconstructive ways of thinking then making
their importance felt at Cornell and elsewhere.2 “Not every difference can be
deconstructed,” Steve asserted one day. “Name one distinction with regard to
a literary text that cannot be,” I challenged. “The inside and the outside,” he
replied. “How do you deconstruct that?”
It was a complicated moment. Steve was right, of course, to insist that decon-
struction had its limits, although it took its practitioners (including Derrida
himself) some twenty years more to acknowledge them. And I was probably
closer to Steve’s position in those days than I would have allowed, although I
would eventually learn those limits myself the way Kant was reputed to have
learned about the noumena—by bumping up against them.3 I had already been
1 “ABD” was of course the lingo for “all but dissertation” and Buffalo refers to the State University
of New York at Buffalo (where I did graduate work in English from 1968 to 1977). I completed a
dissertation with René Girard on Sophocles’ Oedipus in 1977 (Who Killed Laius? Sophocles’ Mythic
Arithmetic). Girard and Donato had recently arrived in Buffalo, fresh from the 1966 conference
at Johns Hopkins that the two had organized with Richard Macksey, and at which Jacques Lacan,
Roland Barthes, and a relatively unknown Jacques Derrida had lectured, and the names of Claude
Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault were very much in the air (see Macksey and Donato, 1970).
2 Steven Knapp went on to become, of course, one of the major players in the discussion of decon-
struction in this country. For examples of his own writing on literary theory, see his essay with
Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982), 732–42, and his
duly celebrated volume Literary Interest: The Limits of Anti-Formalism (1993). He is currently
the President of the George Washington University, a position he accepted after teaching at the
University of California at Berkeley, and then serving as Dean, Provost, and Senior Vice President
for Academic Affairs at (ironically enough) the Johns Hopkins University.
3 See, for example, Specters of Marx (1993), where, in context of a discussion of Fukyama’s reading
of Hegel and of the messianic promise, Derrida talks about the limits to deconstruction which he
identifies among others as justice, democracy-to-come, and deconstruction itself.
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
aware of them from my work with Girard on what he called “the scapegoat
mechanism” and the violent genesis of cultural differences from the “sacrificial
crisis,” and would articulate those boundaries for myself more fully at the
School of Criticism and Theory at University of California at Irvine in 1977
in courses with Murray Krieger, Stanley Fish, and Edward Said, and through
my subsequent reading in the early 1980s of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice
Blanchot, who were among Derrida’s acknowledged teachers, and, like their
younger French contemporary, somewhat critical of Heidegger’s fundamental
ontology.4
But whatever the limits of deconstruction, the difference between the inside
and the outside, I came to understand, was not among them, and in that regard
the book that follows is something of a protracted answer to Steve’s question, a
renewal, or perhaps even a continuation, of that coffeehouse discussion. It may
be, in other words, that the distinction between the inside and the outside is not
only capable of being deconstructed, but in fact must be deconstructed if we
are to understand the relation between the literary and the critical over the past
two millennia, that its dismantling holds the key to the category of the literary
as such, which is to say, to any text saying more than is said, that engages (to
borrow Levinas’s language) “the more within the less,” the container within
the contained, the infinite within the finite, that constitutes itself, in short, as a
questioning of its own performative capabilities. For a time, I considered calling
the book “Inside Out” before I encountered other volumes by that name serving
very different ends.5
The deconstruction of the inside and the outside that follows, however (if
it is still appropriate to use this characterization), differs I suspect from the
4 Cf. Levinas’s remarks in the conclusion of Existence and Existents (1978) on the “scission of being
into an inside and an outside”: “The affirmation of the ego as a subject has led us to conceive of
existence according to a different model from that of ecstasy [which is the model that Heidegger
uses]. To take up existence is not to enter into the world. The question ‘what is it to exist?’ truly
distinguished from the question ‘how is the object which exists constituted?’—the ontological
problem—arises before the scission of being into an inside and an outside. Inscription in being
is not an inscription in the world. The way that leads from the subject to the object, from the ego
to the world, from one instant to the next, does not pass through the position in which a being is
placed in existence, and which is revealed in the disquietude which his own existence awakens in
man, the strangeness of the hitherto so familiar fact that he is there, the so ineluctable, so habitual,
but suddenly so incomprehensible necessity of taking up that existence” (100). It is interesting in
this connection that Derrida has begun to examine the limits of deconstruction. See, for example,
John Caputo’s engagement with Derrida in Deconstruction in a Nutshell (1997).
5 See Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diane Fuss (1991), and Inside Out:
Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, edited by Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob
Wilson (1999). A film with the title Inside Out has appeared from Disney Pixar. For Levinas’s
remarks, see Hand, The Levinas Reader (1989), 208, and Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1969), 50.