By Sharon Cameron
Philosophers have lengthy debated the topics of individual and personhood. Sharon Cameron ushers this debate into the literary realm through contemplating impersonality within the works of significant American writers and figures of foreign modernism—writers for whom own identification is inconsequential or even imaginary. In essays on William Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil, Cameron examines the impulse to hole out the middle of human forte, to build a voice that's no one’s voice, to model a personality with out significant attributes, a being that's almost nameless. “To consent to being anonymous,” Weil wrote, “is to endure witness to the reality. yet how is that this appropriate with social lifestyles and its labels?” all through those essays Cameron examines the friction, even violence, set in movement from such incompatibility—from a “truth” that has no social origin. Impersonality investigates the uncompromising nature of writing that suspends, eclipses, or even destroys the individual as a social, political, or person entity, of writing that engages with own identification for the time being while its traditional markers vanish or dissolve.
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Example text
What allows for the “enlargement of the heart whereby self takes in existence in general” (W 8:551) is a recognition of the limited nature of the personal and—with regard to one’s being immediately produced out of nothing at each moment (W 3:402)—the illusory nature of the personal, a recognition that expresses itself, or would, were it possible, as love without particularity. 8 Charity and Its Fruits puts it in these terms: edwards’s True Virtue ° 23 You should not seek your own things only, for you are not your own.
With respect to persons (or, in Edwards’s nondiscriminating examples, with respect to the body of the moon), which “can’t be the effect of [their] existence at the last foregoing moment” (W 3:400), Edwards reiterates: “The antecedent existence is nothing. . 3 Assuming that this “nothing” is not just a figure of speech—and Edwards does assume that, since the hypothetical “as if there had been nothing before” pertains to the fact that the something the person mistakes for himself did exist before, not to the certainty of the annihilation and recreation—it is difficult to see the mechanics of existing and then being nothing.
The passage documents a sense of how words which have no immediacy come to have conviction and force when a suddenly experienced sense brings them to mind. While the capacity to distinguish the perdurability of the earth from which we are removed (“clean gone off from the face of . . in sixty or seventy years’ time”) is not identical to the capacity to discern the being/ Being distinction made by True Virtue, it nonetheless represents the same relativizing of being in relation to manifestations of Being whose substance is enduring.