An Opera in Aid of the Reading of History
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center 2006 An Opera in Aid of the Reading of History B. McEvoy Campbell The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/4105 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] AN OPERA IN AID OF THE READING OF HISTORY by B. McEvoy Campbell A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2006 UMI Number: 3286469 Copyright 2006 by Campbell, B. McEvoy All rights reserved. UMI Microform 3286469 Copyright 2008 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 ii © 2006 B. McEvoy Campbell All Rights Reserved iii This manuscript hast been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. __________ __________________________________ Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum Date Chair of Examining Committee __________ __________________________________ Prof. Steven Kruger Date Executive Officer Prof. Norman Kelvin ______________________________________ Prof. Scott Westrem _______________________________________ Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract AN OPERA IN AID OF THE READING OF HISTORY by B. McEvoy Campbell Adviser: Wayne Koestenbaum This thesis consists of six chapters and a frontispiece/CD recording of a song cycle, Blue Orpheus: Hymns and Lullabies, written and performed by the author. This arrangement responds to currents within queer theory, which view questions concerning its historical and philosophical origins as diversions from its ability to determine present conditions, by reframing these “presentist” (and its close relative, “performative”) orientations in terms of “place” and the corresponding laws and freedoms that originate from its cultivation––in politics, the art of memory, and systems theory and design. Generally speaking, to each concept of place I devote two chapters. Chapter one develops the concept of “virtual place” deriving from systems theory and design to establish this text and its frontispiece––this “libretto” and its “music”––as an “opera” in six acts, i.e. chapters, with a large cast of philosophers, friends, authors etc. The next two chapters explore the politics of place in terms of conceptions of the vernacular. In chapter two I discuss the linguistic geography and religiosity of Gertrude Stein’s quotation of Paul’s letter to the Galatians with the title of her Susan B. Anthony opera, The Mother of Us All. In chapter three I discuss the vernacular in terms of institutions; most particularly, the Erie Canal, the kinetoscope, and, above all, Henry James’s New York Edition. v Chapters four and five are grounded on the idea that a “premodern” art of memory (organized by topoi––places) operates beneath, and gives meaning to, “modern” forms and events. Chapter four explores a correspondence between frontispieces, those of Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W.H. and James’s New York Edition. Chapter five discusses how a diverse set of problems, including James’s relation to Paul Joukowsky, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s relation to Richard Wagner, may be “placed” according to the art of memory we know as music notation. Finally, in chapter six I return to systems theory and design as a foundation for uniting the “places” disclosed in the forgoing chapters. These places, I conclude, return us to the philosophical and historical origins of queer theory. vi The author would like to thank: Profs. Patrick Cullen and Wayne Koestenbaum, and his recording engineer/producer, Kazumi Umeda. vii CONTENTS PAGE BLUE ORPHEUS: HYMNS & LULLABIES FRONTISPIECE/CD (inside front and back covers) ABSTRACT iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vi CHAPTER ONE: HISTORICALLY INFORMED PERFORMANCE I. Before 1 II. After 10 III. Now 22 1. The Political Theology of Paul 25 2. Land and Sea 38 CHAPTER TWO: TOWARDS A VERNACULAR OF UPSTATE NEW YORK I. Galatians 4:26 1. New Perspectives on Paul 47 2. New Perspectives on Weininger 50 3. Eliot, James, Stein—The Great Tradition 60 4. New Perspectives on Eddy 68 5. Justification 74 II. “The Chimæra” 81 CHAPTER THREE: HENRY JAMES AND THE HEART OF NEW YORK STATE (THE QUEST FOR THE MYTH OF THE KINETOSCOPE) I. Jules Michelet: History of the French Revolution 93 1. The Feudal Grandeur of Linwood 99 2. Christian Science—New York Religion 101 3. The New York Edition 104 II. Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 110 III. Joseph Cornell: Custodian (Silent Dedication to MM) 117 1. The Myth of the Kinetoscope 122 2. The Quest for the Myth of the Kinetoscope 126 3. The Feudal Grandeur of Henry James’s Deathbed Dictations 135 4. The Secret of a Secret 146 viii CHAPTER FOUR: EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE FRONTISPIECE I. Dante 150 II. Ross 151 III. Symonds 155 IV. Pater 158 V. Wilde 160 VI. James & Gosse 161 VII. The Bruno Revival & the Rosicrucian Enlightenment 170 VIII. Fuller 176 CHAPTER FIVE: OUT OF THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC NOTATION I. From Kant to Nietzsche 178 II. James and Joukowsky 180 III. Goldman and Wittgenstein 192 IV. “A Round of Visits” 219 CHAPTER SIX: “AN ESSAY IN AID OF THE READING OF HISTORY” I. The Political-philosophical Frontispiece 224 II. Natural Right and the Art of Memory 237 APPENDIX I: PROGRAM OF THE FRONTISPIECE 268 APPENDIX II: ALEXANDER JACKSON DAVIS’S LINWOOD DIARIES 271 WORKS CITED 275 1 Chapter One: Historically Informed Performance I. Before In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown Books I am surprised to find only a brief reference to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which reminds me that what must have first led me from the one book to the other––back home in Rochester, New York, (between semesters at the university in Chicago) where I looked up the Tractatus one afternoon at the old public library on the Genesee River––was that the Preface to the Blue and Brown Books was written by “Rush Rhees.” This peculiar name I knew well as it was also the name of the library towering over the University of Rochester, which I had come to know growing up as one of the more forlorn and constant echoes down the high- ceilinged hallways of the University’s Eastman School of Music. This connection—mysterious and secret (for I told no one, and no one told me)—between Rochester and Wittgenstein would long remain beyond explanation, proof, or understanding, just as that afternoon at the Rundell Library and the walk home would long remain my measure of “religious” experience. It was in truth too far to walk, but I walked somewhere—guided by something (what had “understanding” to do with it?) which most resembled air. But if asked to name what was in the air, my answer would be “Rush Rhees.” I have since learned that the Rush Rhees whose name I thought I recognized––the author of the Preface––bore the name of his father, after whom the university library was named, who in turn bore the surname of his family’s benefactor, Benjamin Rush, the signatory of the Declaration of Independence and proto-psychotherapist. In 1899, having been 2 Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Newton Theological Seminary, the older Rhees became president of the University of Rochester, where his leadership was marked, above all, by his collaboration with George Eastman, the university’s chief patron. He is buried behind the university in Mt. Hope Cemetery. His son is not, though in some ways, as will become apparent, he is even more emblematic of Rochester. The writer of the Preface to the Blue and Brown Books was born in Rochester in 1905. After attending the Choate School in Connecticut, he went to his father’s university for two years until certain of his activities and ideas were reported in February, 1924, on the front page of The New York Times beneath the headline “Radicalism of Rochester President’s Son Causes Professor to Bar Youth from Class”: The “advanced ideas” of Rush Rhees Jr., son of the President of the University of Rochester, have caused him to be barred from the second semester of his ethics class at the university. His ideas are said to have conflicted with those of Dr. G. M. Forbes, head of the philosophy department. The student is 18 years old. His father and mother are abroad. ... Young Rhees said the professor’s action was “a blessing.” “I am a radical. Dr. Forbes is not. That is why I am barred from the course,” the student said.1 Rhees then moved to England, and from 1935 to 1939 studied with Wittgenstein at the University of Cambridge, and at the philosopher’s death in 1951, became one of the three 1 “Radicalism of Rochester President's Son Causes Professor to Bar Youth from Class,” New York Times, 28 Feb. 1924, 1. 3 literary executors of his will.2 Sometime later, I would come to compare the “propositions” of the Tractatus––and the persistent if irrelevant associations of my Tractatus experience––with both the “axioms” of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and the “polyvalence of discourses” originating at “the end of the sixteenth century” of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality:3 Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy.4 Wasn’t this “circulation,” however “contradictory,” also a “weaving of a fatefully impacted definitional fabric”?5 And if I did not understand it, or rather because I did not understand it, did I not nonetheless feel its “increased definitional pressure”6 as something like “the torsion, the mutual perversion ..