Absentees

On Variously Missing Persons

Daniel Heller-Roazen

• Editore: Zone Books
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781942130482
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Literary Criticism Theory

An intellectually adventurous account of the role of nonpersons that explores their depiction in literature and challenges how they are defined in philosophy, law, and anthropology In thirteen interlocking chapters, Absentees explores the role of the missing in human communities, asking an urgent question: How does a person become a nonperson, whether by disappearance, disenfranchisement, or civil, social, or biological death? Only somebody can become a "nobody, " but, as Daniel Heller-Roazen shows, the ways of being a nonperson are as diverse and complex as they are mysterious and unpredictable. Heller-Roazen treats the variously missing persons of the subtitle in three parts: Vanishings, Lessenings, and Survivals. In each section and with multiple transhistorical and transcultural examples, he challenges the categories that define nonpersons in philosophy, ethics, law, and anthropology. Exclusion, infamy, and stigma; mortuary beliefs and customs; children's games and state censuses; ghosts and "dead souls" illustrate the lives of those lacking or denied full personhood. In the archives of fiction, Heller-Roazen uncovers figurations of the missing—from Helen of Argos in Troy or Egypt to Hawthorne's Wakefield, Swift's Captain Gulliver, Kafka's undead hunter Gracchus, and Chamisso's long-lived shadowless Peter Schlemihl. Readers of The Enemy of All and No One's Ways will find a continuation of those books' intense intellectual adventures, with unexpected questions and arguments arising every step of the way. In a unique voice, Heller-Roazen's thought and writing capture the intricacies of the all-too-human absent and absented.

PART ONE

Vanishings

CHAPTER ONE

The Removal

“In some old magazine or newspaper,” one of Hawthorne’s unnamed narrators finds a “story, told as truth,” from which he draws the matter of a work. Published in 1835, Hawthorne’s tale concerns a man — “let us call him Wakefield” — who becomes the agent of “the strangest instance, on record, of marital delinquency; and, moreover, as remarkable a freak as may be found in the whole list of human oddities.” The action is simply stated:

The man, under pretence of going a journey, took lodgings in the next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife or friends, and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment, dwelt upwards of twenty years. During that period, he beheld his home every day, and frequently the forlorn Mrs. Wakefield. And after so great a gap in his matrimonial felicity — when his death was reckoned certain, his estate settled, his name dismissed from memory, and his wife, long, long ago resigned to her autumnal widowhood — he entered the door one evening, quietly, as from a day’s absence, and became a loving spouse till death.¹

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, this “strangest instance … of marital delinquency” could scarcely have been imagined in the towns of the New World. Wakefield, conceived in Massachusetts, had to be a man of the European metropolis. Submerged in “the great mass of London life,” unseen in its crowded streets, he enjoys a newly urban opportunity: that of absenting himself “for a long time, from his wife” while remaining in secret proximity to her.² The great city alone allows him to hold fast to the place of his vanishing, going missing without ever going far.

The years of Wakefield’s “self-banishment” are almost entirely without incident. After “ten years or so” spent in the vicinity of his house, “without once crossing the threshold,” “faithful to his wife, with all the affection of which his heart is capable, while he is slowly fading out of hers,” Wakefield happens to encounter her “amid the throng of a London street.” By this point, the narrator remarks, “she has the placid mien of settled widowhood.”³ The scene is set before the reader’s eyes: “Their hands touch; the pressure of the crowd forces her bosom against his shoulder; they stand, face to face, staring into each other’s eyes.” Whether the “sober widow” registers the identity of the man who brushes up against her is a question. She proceeds along her way to church.

Ten more years pass. Now,

Wakefield is taking his customary walk towards the dwelling which he still calls his own. It is a gusty night of autumn, with frequent showers, that patter down upon the pavement, and are gone, before a man can put up his umbrella. Pausing near the house, Wakefield discerns, through the parlor-windows of the second floor, the red glow, and the glimmer and fitful flash, of a comfortable fire. On the ceiling, appears a grotesque shadow of good Mrs. Wakefield. The cap, the nose and chin, and the broad waist, form an admirable caricature, which dances, moreover, with the up-flickering and down-sinking blaze, almost too merrily for the shade of an elderly widow.

Suddenly, “at this instant, a shower chances to fall.” Wakefield is soon wet. An instance suffices for him to decide: “He ascends the steps — heavily! — for twenty years have stiffened his legs, since he came down.” The door opens. Wakefield returns to his wife and home, but “we,” the reader learns, “will not follow our friend across the threshold.”⁴

Variously ingenious men inhabit Hawthorne’s tales. Many are talented lovers or scheming husbands whose ambitions remove them, knowingly or unknowingly, from the women to whom they are attached. Young Goodman Brown leaves his Faith at home in Salem, venturing into the woods with his demonic companion, to behold her again at the congregation of the wicked at which he least expected to find himself in her company. Aylmer, the “man of science” in “The Birth-Mark,” dedicates his art to excising the Crimson Hand imprinted on the face of his Georgina before glimpsing that the two are one and that his wife, rendered immaculate at last, must die. Unwitting Giovanni Guasconti, in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” aims to cure his beloved Beatrice of her poisonous second nature, thus becoming the instrumental cause of her unexpected death. In mad pursuit of “the spiritualization of matter,” in the words of his beloved Annie, Owen Warland, “the artist of the beautiful,” succeeds only in assuring his lasting solitude, living to see the fruit of his labors crushed in the curious hand of Annie’s inarticulate child.

Wakefield, for his part, embarks on a project that, “without the shadow of a reason,” remains singularly unreadable, being, so to speak, markedly indeterminate. “He had contrived,” the narrator explains, “or rather he had happened, to dissever himself from the world — to vanish — to give up his place and privileges with living men, without being admitted among the dead.”⁵

This “contrivance” sets the scene for a tale of unprecedented blankness in which the only event that may be said to occur is a nonoccurrence: the unexpected and unregistered meeting of man and wife. “The twenty years of Wakefield’s vagary” become those of a nineteenth-century Odyssey, which is too brief to constitute an epic, yet long enough to be emptied of all significant events.⁶ Odysseus spent two decades journeying with his men from Ithaca to the siege of Ilium and back again before recovering his devoted Penelope, Telemachus, and his island kingdom. Wakefield leaves his wife’s hearth alone, unbidden and to travel nowhere, and along his way, he encounters neither foes nor friends. He lives out his years away in solitude. Odysseus, when in duress, once claimed for himself the name of Outis, or No One, a pun or nickname, to outwit a monstrous host. His act of self-renaming and self-unnaming became one of the deeds that he would recount to those he later met. Wakefield, in stubborn silence and the absence of any interlocutors, makes himself into a No One of a different kind. He is an undistinguished Outis who has no adventures, being denied even the “great negative adventure” that Henry James would grant John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle.”⁷ “Forlorn” and “good Mrs. Wakefield,” identifiable by the “grotesque shadow” of her “admirable caricature,” is a childless Penelope who neither weaves by day nor unweaves by night. Far from any court, she waits for a while, untroubled by suitors, before surmising, in the absence of any news, that her erstwhile spouse will not return.

Hawthorne’s narrator presents his tale, in conclusion, as “food for thought,” of which a “portion” alone suffices to “lend its wisdom to a moral”: “Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe.”⁸

“A man” might do so, but the one named Wakefield does not. His disappearance is only transient. Like the archaic Greek hero, he leaves and he returns; however indeterminate, his vanishing, delimited because concluded, thus becomes the subject of a complete narrative. The specter of the “Outcast of the Universe” is at once summoned and safely set aside.

Other scenarios, however, are also imaginable. Were Wakefield to “dissever himself” without doing so solely in relation to his spouse, his deed would amount to something other than an act of strange “marital delinquency.” Were he to “absent himself,” moreover, not for twenty years, but for some unmeasured duration, setting forth “under pretence of going a journey” without returning, his tale would not be that of any voyage. His departure would mark the inception of a disseverance without orient or end. The possibilities are as numerous as the wiles of Odysseus or the reasons for the “little joke” that Wakefield, according to his censoriously attentive narrator, plays “at his wife’s expense” in the tale that bears his name. The only certainty is that “amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world,” the event of absenting and self-absenting is one of uncovering. The removal clears a space. Vanishing gives way to visitation, and where there was an “I,” some No One inexorably appears. In what ways, to what effects, and with what consequences are questions to which every community responds in terms and practices at once legal and literary, mythological, ritual, and imagistic.

CHAPTER TWO

Laws of Leaving

Civil law reckons with a variety of nonbeing that is unfamiliar to ordinary speech. It pertains solely to persons, defined as those who may speak and lay claim to rights. In technical parlance, it is generally known as “absence.” To be “absent,” in everyday language, is to be missing from a place or function. People not found where they are expected to be, whether at home, at school, or at work, are commonly called “absent” in this sense. Yet as Marcel Planiol long ago remarked, “in the science of the law” and, consequently, in legislation and in legal theory, “‘absence’ has a technical sense different from its vulgar one.”¹ “For the law,” it has been noted, “one who is absent is not at his legal domicile, but he is not just away from home. He has left no clue as to his whereabouts and it is impossible to ascertain whether he is alive or dead.”² In such cases, absence is not a state definable with respect to some point of orientation (“absent from …”). It is, as it were, an absolute condition that characterizes the state of someone who has gone missing without any further specification, someone whose continued life or conceivable death remains, therefore, unknown.

Legal scholars have presented this distinction in a variety of forms. A nineteenth-century exposition of the French civil code draws a sharp line between persons who are merely “nonpresent” (non-présents) and persons who may “more properly” be viewed by the law as “absent” (absents).³ Similarly, the scholars of Islamic law distinguish between two expressions: ghā’ib, which denotes the “person who is nonpresent at his residence, but whose existence is not in doubt,” and mafqūd, which signifies the person who is absent “in the strict legal sense,” that is, who has disappeared from his residence and whose life has therefore become a matter of doubt. Islamic jurists define the mafqūd as “the missing person of whom one does not know whether he is alive or dead” or as “the missing person of whom one does not know either the location or whether he is alive or dead.”⁴ According to a lapidary formula attributed to an eminent twelfth-century jurist, such a human being is deemed to be “alive with respect to his own rights, yet dead with respect to those of others” (ḥayy fī ḥaqq nafsihi mayyit fī ḥaqq ghayrihi).⁵

There are various grounds for the establishment of such a legal category. In his 1860 Treatise on Absence, once a standard reference work in France, Charles Demolombe argues that there are three “types of interest” in the vanishing of persons, each of which demands the utmost solicitude of the law. First, there is the particular interest of the person who has absented himself. “Even if it is true in general that everyone is expected to care for his affairs at his risk and peril, the law nonetheless owes its protection to the incapacity of those who cannot govern their fortune on their own”; hence the universal statutes regarding the guardianship of minors and variously incompetent persons. Second, there is the “interest of third parties, above all those possessing rights to which the decease of the absentee would grant access.” Finally, there is the interest of society, “which demands that goods not remain long abandoned, without representative and master, in a kind of stagnation, and that the normal and regular course of their transmission not be indefinitely interrupted,” access to property “barred,” so to speak, by a missing man.⁶

Despite the reasons for the institution of such a special status, absentees have been known to cause difficulties in judicial processes. Referring to the situation in the United States, Jeanne Louise Carriere argues that “they create a morass of legal problems”:

Questions may arise concerning the security of transactions with the missing person’s estate, su...