Philology of the Flesh

John T. Hamilton

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226572963
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

As the Christian doctrine of Incarnation asserts, "the Word became Flesh." Yet, while this metaphor is grounded in Christian tradition, its varied functions far exceed any purely theological import. It speaks to the nature of God just as much as to the nature of language.In Philology of the Flesh, John T. Hamilton explores writing and reading practices that engage this notion in a range of poetic enterprises and theoretical reflections. By pressing the notion of philology as "love" (philia) for the "word" (logos), Hamilton's readings investigate the breadth, depth, and limits of verbal styles that are irreducible to mere information. While a philologist of the body might understand words as corporeal vessels of core meaning, the philologist of the flesh, by focusing on the carnal qualities of language, resists taking words as mere containers.By examining a series of intellectual episodes—from the fifteenth-century Humanism of Lorenzo Valla to the poetry of Emily Dickinson, from Immanuel Kant and Johann Georg Hamann to Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, and Paul Celan— Philology of the Flesh considers the far-reaching ramifications of the incarnational metaphor, insisting on the inseparability of form and content, an insistence that allows us to rethink our relation to the concrete languages in which we think and live.

1

Elliptical Prolegomena

La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres.

—Stéphane Mallarmé, Brise marine

In recounting the necromantic experience of unpacking his library, Walter Benjamin offers some insights into the collector’s affection for the books acquired.1 Emphasis consistently falls on the nonfunctional, nonutilitarian value of the collection, focusing on the manner by which the bibliophile attends to the rebirth of each volume and how he thereby assumes responsibility for its singular fate. The editions, which are carefully exhumed from the crates, are not simply to be read, but rather to be adored and cherished, held and preserved. Next to nothing is said about the printed content. Even though the texts continue to represent meaningful thoughts and experiences, even though each work still refers to imagined and historical worlds beyond the page, the collector’s passion adheres to the physical medium. Certainly the books can still communicate a detachable message, but the love described here is more concerned with how they communicate themselves. For the bibliophile, the message is never distinct from the medium because the message always remains incarnate in the medium.

In the course of this brief essay, Benjamin singles out one specimen in particular: an illustrated edition of Honoré de Balzac’s 1831 novel, La Peau de chagrin, printed in Paris at the Place de la Bourse in 1838. Benjamin purchased the attractive book some fifteen years earlier at the Rümann auction in Berlin at considerable cost to the student’s limited budget. Days before the item went up for bidding, the young man fell in love with this deluxe edition, which inspired in him “the ardent wish to hold on to it forever” (93/490). What instigated the bibliophile’s loving affection (philia) for this book (biblion) was not merely what the pages conveyed: his passion was not primarily concerned with the novel’s plot or with whatever information its descriptions might provide, but rather for the book itself, for this unique exemplar. When one reads solely for the message, the means for transmitting that message become dispensable as soon as its ideational content has been received. The physical, fleshly qualities of the volume—its form and appearance, its shape and feel, its aroma and heft, as well as the concrete conditions of its acquisition—are hastily superseded once the verbal content has passed from the page to the mind of the reader. In contrast, what caught Benjamin’s eye and nourished his affection was not the novel’s usefulness, but rather the book’s potential to stand as a source of ceaseless enjoyment, as a fount of inexhaustible friendship—philia.

Strikingly, although Benjamin does not once mention the plot of Balzac’s novel, the book’s narrative can serve to illuminate the bibliophile’s loving attachment, albeit negatively. For Benjamin’s description of this youthful book buying adventure contrasts with the experience of Balzac’s protagonist, Raphael de Valentin, a young man contemplating suicide, who unexpectedly happens upon the peau de chagrin: a piece of untanned leather tucked away in the upper floors of a bizarre antiquarian’s shop. The coarse skin bears a magical inscription, which, although described as Sanskrit, is clearly written in Arabic. It was only in the illustrated 1838 edition—the one that Benjamin purchased in Berlin—that Balzac included the “original text” in addition to the French translation. The mysterious lines inform the reader that the one who possesses this talisman will be granted every wish; yet with every wish fulfilled, the skin itself, along with the owner’s life, will diminish irreparably. Despite the warning, Raphael falls in love not with the skin itself but rather with what it can accomplish for him. And so, as Balzac’s novel unfolds, every desire is indeed granted. Raphael comes to possess uncountable riches and property. He lords over worldly objects, which are discarded almost as soon as they are acquired. His life is one, grand carnivale—a “farewell to the flesh”—a steady adieu both to the uncanny shagreen and to his own vitality. The skin and Raphael’s own life quickly diminish with every gratification. Thus, the grainy leather becomes a source of “grief” and “sorrow” (chagrin). In stark contrast to Benjamin’s desire to hold on to his precious tome forever, Raphael’s insatiable will causes his inscribed possession to evanesce at an alarming rate. By using this text, he uses it up.

It is not gratuitous that Raphael discovers the unusual peau de chagrin hanging opposite a glowing picture of the Christ, the Word Incarnate, painted by his namesake, the Italian master Raphael. Before alighting upon the magical skin, the young man spent some time surveying the shop’s array of exotic objects and pondering how these “fantastic images” had been “resurrected” into the eternity of art.2 As the melancholic Raphael reflects, these pieces are “fantastic” insofar as they have conquered time; their finitude has been exchanged for a kind of infinitude or deathlessness. These curiosities only reinforce the protagonist’s resolution to take his own life, for they show that death is the prerequisite for immortality. The painting of Christ is different. Locked away in a mahogany cabinet, it is open to view only upon special request. For this reason, the shop’s owner must be called in. This older man is equally fantastic, cropping up suddenly “as if he had stepped out of a nearby sarcophagus” (77/43). The allusion to a sarcophagus—an enclosure designed “to eat” (phagein) the “flesh” (sarx, sarkos)—already points to this figure’s discarnate appearance: his “scrawny or fleshless [décharné] arm,” his “colorless lips,” his “pale and hollow cheeks” (77–78/44). When the strange man opens the cabinet’s panel to reveal the portrait of Christ, Raphael’s disposition changes radically:

At the sight of this immortal creation he forgot the fantastic objects he had studied in the shop and the wayward visions he had seen in slumber. He became human again [redevint homme], saw that the old man was merely a creature of flesh [une créature de chair], fully alive and in no way phantasmagorical. He began to live in the real world.3

Unlike the other antiquities, which represent eternal death, the painting of the Savior displays eternal life. It alerts the young man to the life around him, including the fleshliness of his otherwise fleshless guide. The dejected protagonist, who shares his name with the divine Italian artist, thereby returns to life. While indulging in the sight of the luminous incarnation, he “became human again” (redevint homme), just as the divine Word (logos) once became man. At least at this point, Raphael is a philologist of the flesh: someone who exhibits philia for the word made flesh, for the logos ensarkos.

This redemptive philology, however, does not last. The sallow antiquarian coldly disrupts the epiphany by remarking on the price paid to acquire the painting. As a consequence, the young man immediately relapses into melancholy; for he now learns that everything is exchangeable, that everything is a commodity, even the sacred portrait of the Word Incarnate. Once he catches sight of Raphael’s disillusionment, once he notices the young man plunging back into misery, the old dealer realizes that he has found a worthy subject for the frightening power of the mysterious shagreen. He instructs Raphael to turn his back to the painting of Christ and instead read the portentous inscription on the rough leather: an act of reading that will be of substantial use-value, capable of granting every wish, under the fatal proviso that with every accomplishment both the text and the life of the reader grow shorter and shorter. From this moment forward, the novel becomes a story of precipitous excarnation. Complete gratification will spell the complete loss of life.

Reading can be exhausting. The multiple and complex efforts expended to scan page after page, gathering the many visual marks and understanding their significance, require considerable amounts of mental and physical energy. However habituated, the manner by which a reader produces meaning is a laborious process. Every letter calls for attentiveness, even if only at a subconscious level, as the syllables come to form each word and as the words compose broader syntactic units. The reader then proceeds from the order of the sentence all the way to the work as a whole—that is, to the reconstruction of a verbal corpus that ultimately relates to other, similarly reconstructed works. These textual bodies, the personal libraries stored in the mind of each individual reader, result from years of continuous diligence and the cultivation of memory. One must become ever more deeply familiar with language and languages, including the infinite variations and refinements in meaning, historical, cultural, social, and individual. Such industry cannot be performed without extensive strain on the reader’s stamina: the strain on the eyes, the discomfort of remaining still, the struggle to keep distraction at bay.

The exertion devoted to creating bodies of sense therefore depletes the reader’s own mind and body. The page takes on life by drawing on the life force of the reading subject. This economy of transferred energy was already discerned in the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes: “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is wearisome to the flesh” (Eccl. 12:12 [NKJV]). It is an observation that persists across the ages, motivating for example the opening line of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Brise marine (“Sea Breeze” [1866]), cited in the epigraph above: “The flesh is sad, alas! And I’ve read all the books.”4 Mallarmé’s early poem pronounces the desire to flee the ennui of the book-cluttered desk for the open expanse of the sea despite the risk of shipwreck. Life is said to begin when the book is put to the side, when the word becomes deed. This theme spans the ages and becomes absolutely central to pictorial representations of the Christian Annunciation, which almost invariably depict the Virgin Mary with a volume folded down upon her lap as the angel Gabriel announces that she bears the Son of God in her womb.5 The fleshly labor expended by the reader to bring the scriptural word to life corresponds to the labor pains of giving birth to the Word made flesh.

Reading can be exhausting not only because it drains the physical and mental resources of the reader, but also because the method of transforming the materiality of the letter into a signifying corpus requires converting the inscribed marks into vehicles of meaning. Reading in this general sense means looking through rather than looking at the visual information on the page. Looking through the text means that the fleshly aspects of the word must finally yield to an acknowledgment of the ideational content that these inked or pixelated markings serve to represent. Cognitive operations, which begin by recognizing marks as verbal bearers of meaning and end by determining what these terms aim to transmit, calls for a degree of decarnalization, as the flesh of the text is organized into a corporate vessel of ideas, thoughts, and expression. At some point, the fleshly qualities of the word—its physical properties, its appearance and sound, but also its coloring, the way it visually and audibly rhymes with other words within and across particular languages, in brief, how a textual component communicates—at some point, these carnal characteristics must be rendered transparent, made to work for what is being transmitted. In this regard, reading entails incorporating every word into a body of sense, into a mediating container, one that is capable of delivering the represented content with minimal delays, compromises, or damage. To tarry with the flesh of the text itself would jeopardize the word’s transparency and thus threaten the delivery of meaning. The carnal seductions of the discourse would prevent readers from receiving the message intended, holding them back from arriving at the destination of meaning. Through the power and will of the subject alone, the reading process can move on. Failing to do so would amount to a feeling of discontent.

Readers have long benefitted from the fruits of philology, which ostensibly prepares a text to serve as a source of unobstructed transmission. Yet insofar as philology denotes a loving affection for the word—a philia for the logos—the scope and quality of this intimacy may be variously understood. On the one hand, there is a philology of the body, which features methods of dematerialization and decarnalization as sketched out above—methods that are committed to the immaterial idea and therefore strive to free meaning from base mediation. Conventionally, the philologist of the body, like a good textual critic, works on the printed corpus in order to render it more readable, more transparent: collating variants, achieving consistency, clarifying obscurities, resolving textual cruxes, removing anachronisms, and so forth. Like a well-trained, disciplined body, the emended text promises to deliver its message with minimal hindrances or complications. That is to say, the philology of the body perfects the written material as an instrument that facilitates the passage from page to mind. The general reader who takes advantage of these efforts is thus able to move through a text with fewer impediments, invited to abstract its sense and ultimately discard the material transmission itself. For having arrived at the idea, having reached this destination, the vehicle of sense is no longer needed. Its role has been accomplished. Its mission is completed in the referential transmission.

Texts, however, have never been exclusively reducible to merely instrumental functions. A book may be regarded as a body, but that does not mean it is exclusively a vessel of ideational transport. To think of the body beyond its vehicular status is to recall the flesh that constitutes the corpus. The flesh that exceeds the boundaries of the body transgresses corporeal limitations, resisting incorporation into some meaningful or useful system of sense. For this reason the flesh is frequently linked to the sin of lust or luxuria. On the other hand, then, in contrast to the philology of the body, there is a philology of the flesh. Whereas the former attends to the book’s instrumental capacity, the philology of the flesh exhibits a love that never wants to part with the word’s material manifestation. It effectively denies the separateness of logos and its physical form, often taking the verbal form itself as content. In the philology of the flesh, meaning is not merely a detachable kernel of sense embodied within the book’s binding—like a soul awaiting liberation from its somatic prison—but rather a nondetachable presence incarnate in the very word. For the philologist of the flesh, clutching on to whatever is perceived as de luxe, the word’s materiality matters.

What should already be apparent is that the philology of the flesh points directly to the Christian doctrine of Incarnation, which holds that the divine logos became flesh at a particular historical moment. From the outset, it bears noting that this fundamental dogmatic claim, explicitly pronounced in the Prologue to the Gospel of John, is decidedly not exhausted by its theological import. Indeed, the theme of incarnation has always spoken as much to the nature of language as to the nature of God and humankind, promising to shed some light onto the formulation, communication, and reception of any verbal message. Whereas metaphors of the body imply the separability of form and content, metaphors of the flesh suggest their inseparability—an inseparability that is exemplified by the Incarnation. The present study takes seriously the ramifications of these incarnational metaphors, considering and assessing what they might illustrate in regard to human expression, including their relationship to the cultural and historical contexts in which language circulates.

By pressing the notion of philology as the love for the logos, the readings below investigate the breadth, depth, and limits of verbal styles t...