Abstract
The sustained attention that Cavell gives to artistic modernism in his early work seems to fade from his later work. But while the specific language of “modernism” becomes infrequent, the same themes remain present. In this chapter, I argue that the modernist artist becomes a type of moral perfectionist, especially in the account of perfectionism provided in the melodramas of the unknown woman. Read together, it becomes plain that modernism is melodramatic. I then explore whether the connections between modernism, perfectionism and melodrama can help us be better readers of his memoir, Little Did I Know, a text which can sometimes seem to invite the subtitle “The Melodrama of the Unknown Man.”
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Notes
- 1.
Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 2. Subsequent page numbers will be noted parenthetically in the text.
- 2.
Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 3.
- 3.
Contesting Tears, p. 5.
- 4.
Contesting Tears, p. 6.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 9.
- 7.
Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 47.
- 8.
The reference is to Acts 9 and Paul’s confrontation with the risen Jesus on his journey to Damascus after which Paul goes through his own period of lostness somewhere in Arabia (Galatians 1.17) before returning to Damascus.
- 9.
Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, p. 6.
- 10.
Contesting Tears, p. 5.
- 11.
The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. xxii–xxiv.
- 12.
Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010).
- 13.
Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 151.
- 14.
Cities of Words, p. 10.
- 15.
The Claim of Reason, p. xxiv.
- 16.
Cities of Words, p. 240.
- 17.
Contesting Tears, p. 37.
- 18.
For Blanchot it is above all the Holocaust, a fact which alerts us, if we hadn’t noticed already, that his book by a Jew born in 1926 has said nothing about the Holocaust. This omission is too stunning to be unintentional. I read the turn to Blanchot, in part, as Cavell’s way of signaling the one disaster for which words fail him, for which he is grateful for the words of another.
- 19.
Johnson writes, “he creates indeed a kind of fugue on the theme of consideration,” MLN, 125, no. 5 (Dec. 2010): 1150. I am grateful for this image, but I find it harder to single out one fugal theme. It also seems to me a fugue on the themes of disaster, awkwardness and understanding, though Johnson might persuasively argue that these are all part of the development of the theme of consideration.
- 20.
See Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 257.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
In John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer, eds, The Literary Wittgenstein (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 21–33.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 23.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 26.
- 25.
Contesting Tears, p. 37 (italics mine).
- 26.
Compare to Contesting Tears, “The concluding position of the women of the unknown woman melodramas…now associate with an incommunicability of the transcendent, might perhaps usefully be studied in conjunction with [Nietzsche’s death of God parable]” (43).
- 27.
The Claim of Reason, p. 80.
- 28.
Cities of Words, p. 235.
- 29.
I have written at length about the closing conversation with his father in “Six Scenes of Instruction in Stanley Cavell’s Little Did I Know, Philosophy and Literature” 2016. What follows borrows from that essay.
- 30.
Contesting Tears, p. 6.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 210.
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Dula, P. (2018). The Melodrama of the Unknown Man. In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97466-8_3
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