Review ofImpersonality: Seven Essays by Sharon Cameron. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. 272. $65.00 cloth. $25.00 paper.

Ross, Kelly

English

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CriticismVolume 50 | Issue 2 Article 92008It's Nothing PersonalKelly RossUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticismRecommended CitationRoss, Kelly (2008) "It's Nothing Personal," Criticism: Vol. 50: Iss. 2, Article 9.Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol50/iss2/9Criticism, Spring 2008, Vol. 50, No. 2, pp. 327–332. © 2009 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201. ISSN: 0011-1589.IT’S NOTHING PERSONALKelly RossImpersonality: Seven Essays by Sharon Cameron. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. 272. $65.00 cloth. $25.00 paper.In everyday usage, “impersonality” denotes an absence of personality, often fi gured as a machinelike or robotic manner, such as the imper-sonality of customer service call-center operators. It also refers to something that is not particular-ized, not connected to specifi c indi-viduals but dispersed more gener-ally, suggesting disinterestedness. The Oxford English Dictionary em-phasizes this set of meanings, which describes a person who is not acting like a person. In Impersonality, on the other hand, Sharon Cameron presses hard on the texts under examination to elucidate another, more radical sense of the word. In each of the seven essays, imperson-ality denotes not just a person who is not acting like a person, but the erasure of the “personal”: the effort to eradicate persons entirely. For most of the authors in this study, the payoff of such effort is enlighten-ment, variously defi ned. Radical impersonality shares features with the nonhuman and the inanimate, but as Cameron is continually at pains to demonstrate, the boundar-ies between these categories become themselves unstable and permeable. Once one takes seriously the con-cept of “impersonality” as more than just a descriptive term for ab-normal behavior and makes it an end in itself, it ruptures all other categories that depend on the stabil-ity of the personal.This essay collection is undeni-ably challenging, but it amply re-wards the reader’s investment. 327328 KELLY ROSSCameron’s close readings are stun-ning in their precision and penetra-tion. Moreover, her consideration of the ethical stakes of the texts is exemplary, as she strikes a careful balance between generous reading and conscientious interrogation. Each essay focuses on one author: Wil-liam Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson (who is the subject of two essays), Simone Weil, T. S. Eliot, and Herman Mel-ville. Although there are resonances among these authors’ representa-tions of impersonality, each formu-lates it differently, and each has a different view of whether and how it can be achieved. Cameron’s analysis of these multifarious under-standings has broad-ranging impli-cations, particularly for the study of nineteenth-century American lit-erature. While reading the book, additional authors leaped to mind—Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass—whose texts would complement or complicate Cameron’s analysis.Impersonality is a departure from Cameron’s earlier monographs on nineteenth-century American au-thors such as Dickinson, Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Tho-reau, and Henry James. In those studies, Cameron limited her data set to a single author—or a pair, in the case of Melville and Hawthorne—in order to anchor her investigations of such vast and abstract concepts as “time” and “thinking.” This circum-scription resulted in a deep, thor-ough, complex engagement with her material. Treating a similarly vast concept in the new book, Cam-eron comes at it obliquely and par-tially, treating a range of authors from different times and places. It is not a tradeoff between depth and superfi ciality, certainly, as Cameron is as rigorous and nuanced as ever. Yet the collection lacks the synthesis that characterizes Cameron’s pre-vious book-length studies. Cam-eron repeatedly acknowledges this difference in her preface, calling her essays “provisional” (xvii) and con-ceding that the various genres of the texts “invite different kinds of con-sideration” (xv). Rather than taking that insight as a prompt to a system-atic approach that contemplates the limits or conditions that genre places on representations of impersonality, Cameron uses it to excuse herself from comparative analysis of the authors at hand. This lack of an overarching argument is merely a disappointment, given the impres-sive powers of synthesis on display in Cameron’s earlier work, but the lack of refl ection on exclusions that her selection criteria permit is a more serious weakness, one to which I shall return.Chapter 1, which also serves as an introduction, treats Empson’s fascination with the asymmetrical faces of Buddha statues. Empson argued that Buddha faces recon-ciled seemingly incompatible oppo-sites, such as “complete repose” and “an active power to help the wor-shipper,” by separating these attri-butes onto either side of the face.  ON SHARON CAMERON’S IMPERSONALITY 329Cameron contrasts Empson’s posi-tive view that impersonality can arise from a unity of contradictions with the recognition articulated by the other fi ve authors she treats, each of whom dwells on the costs of imper-sonality. There is no sense of vio-lence or loss in the achievement of impersonality in Buddha faces; af-ter all, Empson is analyzing images of a divine being, not a person. This counterexample underscores the pathos embedded in the writing Cameron examines in the remain-der of the book, as persons struggle with the fact that “impersonality (as a practice, as an ethic, as a repre-sentation), since it is undertaken by persons, could only be contradictory by defi nition” (7). This contradic-tion takes a toll on persons who “surrender” to “a force that effaces what individuates them” (12); speci-fying the effects of that toll on vari-ous authors is Cameron’s aim in the following six essays.In chapter 2 Cameron argues that Edwards differs from Empson, Emerson, Weil, and Eliot (Melville is a special case) in rejecting the possibility that persons can achieve impersonality—even fl eetingly and as a result of rigorous training. Ed-wards’s last work, The Nature of True Virtue, closes off this possibil-ity, which had remained open in his earlier works. For Edwards, “true virtue” consists in ideal love, in which one loves things impartially accord-ing to the degree of being they pos-sess, rather than according to their relationship to oneself. Cameron claims that Edwards makes this impersonal love, which is intuitive for God, categorically impossible for persons because it would al-ways be based on calculations per-formed within a self-interested frame of reference.The fi rst of two essays on Emer-son is a brilliant reading of “Experi-ence,” yet it is only tangentially related to impersonality. Cameron argues that “Experience” enacts the recognition that a particularized, individual experience (grief at the death of a son) is equivalent to all experience, and that both are de-fi ned by dissociation. Emerson re-sists this impersonal grief by refusing to mourn Waldo, his son, directly; instead, he pushes his personal grief over Waldo’s death to the margins of the essay so as to “preserve what is dismissed from anything that might threaten it—specifi cally . . . to empower the grief that the essay has marginalized” (78). The “tri-umph” (78) of the personal over the impersonal in this essay is at odds with the overwhelming force of the impersonal in the other essays in Cameron’s collection.Cameron argues in chapter 4 that Emerson’s essays dramatize the transformation of the personal into the impersonal, a transformation that Emerson calls “ravishment.” In most of his essays, Emerson con-structs an impersonal voice that lacks embodiment or individuality, whose source is unrecognizable, and whose contradictory propositions preclude summary. “The Poet” is a 330 KELLY ROSStelling exception because ravishment does not occur; the person who calls the poet into existence is visible as a person and does not transform into the poet, who would be impersonal. “The Poet” is thus a productive fail-ure for Cameron, since it illumi-nates the problem at the core of the other essays, a problem critics have previously formulated in terms of Emerson’s ethical failure. While ravishment, in its dual meaning of violation and rapture, implies an intense mixture of pain and pleasure at the moment of transformation, the impersonal voice represents only the nondifferentiated serenity that follows the annihilation of the per-son. Since there is never a person—except in “The Poet”—for the ravishment to happen to, there is never a convincing representation of that ravishment, which is ostensi-bly the goal of the essays. The im-personal voice, with its utter lack of ambivalence about the destruction of the person, cannot speak for any person, and thus, ultimately, cannot speak to any person.In contrast to Emerson’s disre-gard for the costs of impersonality, Weil was minutely aware of the vi-olence that self-annihilation exacts on the person. In chapter 5 Cam-eron elaborates Weil’s theory that attention constitutes real being. At-tention is a practice that strips away the illusions of will, personal point of view, motive, even basic discrimi-nation, until being becomes simply interminable waiting, without ob-ject and without hope. In the latter part of the essay, Cameron meditates on Weil’s death from starvation, positing that the extremity of Weil’s commitment to attention seems to necessitate a commitment to death. The sixth chapter, on Eliot’s Four Quartets, also centers on the repre-sentation of death, but Eliot blurs the line between the living and the dead. This effacement of distinction permeates the entire poem, eroding any sense of individual identity. Re-turning to the Buddhist doctrine that being is momentary, not con-tinuous, Cameron argues that Eliot extends this insight to experience. Making “experience” independent of “persons who experience,” Eliot depicts phenomena as unbound and mobile.The fi nal chapter, on Melville’s Billy Budd, is the clearest and most systematic account of impersonality in the collection. This clarity might derive from the fact that Cameron’s analysis here focuses on fi ctional character, already a category not equivalent to person, whereas else-where in the collection she examines examples of genres—essays, note-books, and lyric poetry—that are traditionally presumed to give access to an authorial subjectivity. First, Cameron shows how characters who seem to be opposites, such as Claggart and Billy, reveal that dif-ferentiation cannot be sustained, thus destabilizing the very concept of character. More radically, Cam-eron demonstrates that characters share features with entities in the non-characterological realm, such  ON SHARON CAMERON’S IMPERSONALITY 331as light and stones. This latter insight collapses any distinction between persons and other phenomena. The violence of this version of imper-sonality is not legible on the surface of the writing, in Melville’s elegant, seductive prose, but rather in the shocking imperative Melville places on his reader to accept the radical erasure of categories without the promise of any consolatory enlight-enment.While most of the authors in-cluded in Impersonality are Ameri-can, traditional organizing rubrics of geography and time period are incidental to Cameron, who instead emphasizes a qualitative component to her principle of inclusion. She chose to study these six authors be-cause of the “uncompromising na-ture of [their] writing” (viii), the “intensity of their engagement with this topic” (vii), and their “resistance to impersonality” (xvi). The value system encoded in those descriptors—uncompromising, intense, resistant—reveals a problem with the collection. Cameron’s narrow focus on au-thors whose main concerns are spiritual or philosophical excludes instantiations of impersonality that might complicate her emphasis on the individual. Although Cameron occasionally raises issues of the so-cial, her selection criteria have ex-cluded, almost by defi nition, writers who negotiate the compromises necessary for the social world. More-over, Cameron does not engage with the sense of impersonality that arises in relation to masses of persons—the impersonality of the mob, for example. This omission is all the more surprising given her stress on violence; the impersonal mob’s proclivity to violence in Poe’s or Baudelaire’s imaginations liter-alizes the metaphorical violence that Cameron elucidates in Ed-wards or Emerson. These counter-examples invert the representations of impersonality that Cameron traces, as Poe, for example, por-trays the submission of individual will to mob rule as pleasurable (in a brutish, sensual way) and sponta-neous rather than an arduous sac-rifi ce requiring extensive training.Further, while Cameron treats bondage and freedom as religious concepts in her essay on Weil, she never addresses the material real-ity of chattel slavery in the United States. Although the texts Cam-eron discusses celebrate the perme-ability of the boundary between human and nonhuman as a source of philosophical and intellectual pleasure, sometimes even as an idea that promises an end to personal suffering, many slave narratives worked to reinscribe those divi-sions and to reject proslavery ide-ologies that would blur the distinction between enslaved per-sons and animals. The “resistance” Cameron observes in her authors—their recognition that, to a person, impersonality feels like a loss—pales in comparison to the urgency of Douglass’s resistance, for exam-ple. Joan Dayan and Maurice Lee, whose work overlaps with many 332 KELLY ROSSof Cameron’s concerns, offer ex-amples of a more historically grounded philosophical criticism, attuned to the social ramifi cations of abstractions. Eschewing a con-clusion to the disparate essays, Cameron never refl ects on her de-cision to include only privileged authors who are free to contem-plate and practice the types of radi-cal impersonality that, whatever their psychic cost, nevertheless are sought by the practitioner.—University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

It\u27s Nothing Personal

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It\u27s Nothing Personal

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