Abstracts: MLA 2020-Seattle: Melville, Gesture, Love - Johns ...

Abstracts: MLA 2020—Seattle: Melville, Gesture, Love
   Michael D. Snediker, James Lilley, Jamie Godley, Lindsay Reckson, Theo Davis

   Leviathan, Volume 22, Number 2, June 2020, pp. 111-115 (Article)

   Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2020.0022

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/756919

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Abstracts

                            MLA 2020—Seattle

                        Melville, Gesture, Love
     CHAIR: MICHAEL D. SNEDIKER, UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON
            RESPONDENT: JAMES LILLEY, STATE UNIVERSITY
                    OF NEW YORK AT ALBANY

Participants in the “Melville, Gesture, Love” panel at MLA 2020, from left to right:
James Lilley, Lindsay Reckson, Jamie Godley, Theo Davis, Meredith Farmer. Photo
courtesy of Brian Yothers.

 J
       amie Godley’s paper, “The Unfinishable Gesture of The Confidence-Man,”
       considers the gestural openness of that novel’s final sentence, “Something
       further may follow of this Masquerade,” in terms of a “sustained temporal

Vol. 22.2 (2020): 111–115 © 2020 The Melville Society and Johns Hopkins University Press

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incongruity” that equivocally interrupts what it only nominally terminates. His
attention to Giorgio Agamben’s remarks on the commedia dell’arte—the extent
to which “Harlequin and the Doctor are not characters . . . but rather gestures
figured as a type, constellations of gestures”—illuminates gesture’s singular
interposition “between the text and our reading.” I admire Godley’s sense of
affinity between this dimensionalizing suspension and Jacques Lacan’s under-
standing of tuché as that which belies the mimetic functions of narrative auto-
maticity. The libidinal movement of this Melvillean “Something” (in relation,
for instance, to Pitch’s wondering “where was slipped in the entering wedge”)
sharpens our sense of textual and readerly desire alike as (and for) a mode of
reality beyond what narratives of “real life itself can show”: the irresolvable
“may” at once embedded within and spurring the arc that following furthers.
       Lindsay Reckson’s account, “Suspended Eros, or the Gesture of Billy
Budd,” invites us to imagine the affective contours of a “gestural criticism”
modeled on, if not less emulatively coextensive with, the gestural weather of
which the efforts and desires of the novella’s individual characters are localized
expression. Noting the charismatic economy by which the foundering con-
duct of Billy’s “fatal gesture” indexes both the comportment and liveliness of
our own gestures of critical attention, Reckson understands the medium in
which reader and character of Melville’s text are equally immersed as what
Agamben denominates the “pure gesturality” of doing “rather than being.” The
performative field of “Doing,” not least the unsatisfiable agential strain of the
novella’s exercising pulsions, opens for Reckson onto the cross-hatched field
of love distillatively voiced in Billy’s plangent disclosure, “Could I have used
my tongue I would not have struck him.” If the tongue’s subjunctively elu-
sive indeterminacy figures a gestural hinge between discipline and desire, our
own hesitant gravitation toward its suspensive mechanism holds out, Reckson
insightfully suggests, the possibility of “knowledge suspended” for the cradling
sake of an intimacy that is salubriously, definitionally incompletable: not only
the suspension of deferral, but the suspension of holding, and holding back, of
attention prolonged like a chord.
       In “Melville’s Forms of Vitality,” Theo Davis reads Melville’s “The Piazza”
alongside the work of developmental psychologist Daniel Stern. Removed as
Davis’s initial recounting of Stern’s characterization of therapeutic encounter
would seem from the customarily lavish garrulousness of Melville’s narration,
it is from within this discrepancy that Davis articulates a form of intimacy
no less germane to the gestural fields traced by Godley and Reckson. Contra
the elaborate floridity that occupies first half of “The Piazza,” Stern’s descrip-
tion of intersubjective relation posits a fastidiously spare economy of “move-
ment and expression” in which gesture and speech unfold from each other

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as commensurate substance. Davis deftly contemplates an analogous scene
embedded within Melville’s pastoral extravagance, not coincidentally marked
by that moment at which the narrator “speaks as a character rather than nar-
rating.” In the exchange that follows between the narrator and Marianna, their
tentative gestures of conversation speak to an affective relational complexi-
ty—a vulnerability if not peril—that affords for Davis a possible remediation
between criticism’s own prevailing temperaments, so often rigidly split between
the force of ideology critique and the softer (but no less simplified) choreogra-
phy of appreciation and love.
      With deepest thanks to Jamie, Lindsay, and Theo and to James Lilley and
Meredith Farmer for presiding in my absence with such manifold generosity.

The Unfinishable Gesture of The Confidence-Man
Jamie Godley
Dartmouth College

W
               hereas early critics of The Confidence-Man insisted that the noto-
               riously inconclusive novel masked an underlying allegory with
               apocalyptic import, postmodern readings went the other way, pro-
nouncing that the novel’s impasses of charity and trust amount to an open-
ended refusal of fixed significance. Yet, this indeterminate or nihilistic reading
turns out to be an equally finalizing summary judgment that remains overcon-
fident in its metafictional surety. Melville’s anti-finalism bypasses the projec-
tive field of teleological consciousness through the mobilization of an alternate
temporal logics of gesture, which plays with how the imaginary lures of show-
ing can subvert or manipulate symbolic reality. When read alongside Lacan
and Agamben on gesture, time, and the gaze, the novel’s focus on the “queer
caprices” of the “natural heart” reveals a dimension of meaning that privileges
suspension instead of conclusion, retroactivity instead of linear determinism,
and pantomime instead of character as key motifs of literary agency.

Paralyzed Eros, or the Gesture of Billy Budd
Lindsay Reckson
Haverford College
“Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?”

T
          aking up Ahab’s resonant question—which figures personhood as a
          form of gestural indeterminacy—this paper offers a reading of eros,
          punishment, and paralysis in Billy Budd. From the Master-­at-Arms to
Jimmy Legs to Billy’s “organic hesitancy,” Melville’s text lingers over language’s
undetermined intimacy with the body. Written in a moment of queer “earliness”
(Peter Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties [New York: NYU Press, 2013]: 7), Melville’s

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late novella also figuratively indexes (or fingers) a moment when descriptions
and proscriptions of gesture (via Gilles de la Tourette, Eadweard Muybridge,
François Delsarte, and others) intersected with an intensifying regime of sex-
ual subjectivity. But rather than a site of strictly choreographed personhood, I
argue the gesture of Billy Budd is one of aesthetic, ethical, and erotic hesitancy
or suspension. Drawing from Agamben and Lauren Berlant’s descriptions of
gesture as a form of affective praxis, I argue the novella figures paralyzed inar-
ticulateness less as a diagnosed impediment than as an ethos emerging within
and against the H.M.S. Bellipotent’s discursive regime, its management of what
may or may not be articulated. Even Billy’s famously inarticulate or spasmodic
gesture translates Ahab’s question of volition into a question of language’s erotic
possibilities and foreclosures (“Could I have used my tongue I would not have
struck him”), while marking the novel’s impossible-to-say desire. Spasmodic
motion and paralysis become the hinges of sexual possibility while Billy’s sus-
pended body ultimately refuses the terms of post-mortem medical, sexual, and
critical intelligibility, demanding a kind of gestural critique.

Melville’s Forms of Vitality
Theo Davis
Northeastern University

I
      n his 2010 book Forms of Vitality, the psychologist and psychiatrist Dan-
      iel Stern outlined a theory of vitality that is at the same time a theory
      of gesture. Unlike the vitalism of previous centuries, which identified life
with a vital essence separable from “all known physical, chemical, and mental
forces,” Stern defines vitality as a “Gestalt that emerges from the theoretically
separate experiences of movement, force, time, space, and intention” (5). Vital-
ity, that is, amounts to a felt impression—“a mental creation”—in which we
perceive the movement of another being’s body as generating and bringing into
our own presence a living, conscious force with distinct qualities. Grounded
in his field-defining work on infant development, Stern extended his atten-
tion to “[t]he time-based arts, namely music, dance, theater, and cinema” to
explore vitality affects in aesthetic terms. What, though, of literature? This
paper puts Forms of Vitality in dialogue with K. L. Evans’s One Foot in the Finite,
which argues that in Melville’s Wittgensteinian understanding, we can trust
language to speak of the truth. Can we also trust it to carry vitality effects? I
suggest that language uses its representative powers to convey forms of vitality
as objects of representation, not as immediate embodied presences, and look
at Melville’s writing about the body perceived as a mobile presence. Exam-
ples include Bartleby’s compelling immobility, “standing like the last column
of some ruined temple,” and Ahab’s appearance “like a man cut away from the

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stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consum-
ing them.” I pivot to explore “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” which evidences
a fascination with Hawthorne’s form as a mode of vitality. The essay continu-
ally expresses its sense of the value of the stories through phrasings that elicit
images of Hawthorne’s bodily disposition and comportment, even though at
this point Melville “never saw the man.” My focus is on arguing that the key
fact for Melville is not that language operates at a distance from the body, nor
that it might be made to work as if it were itself a body or a material thing,
but that language’s representational nature can powerfully elicit the Gestalt of
bodily vitality as a gestural impression.

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