The Sacred James

 I'm reading Henry James's bizarre last unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past, which I guess he started around the time of The Sacred Fount and just after Turn of the Screw.  Anyhow, the way it treats its central character's relation to a cousin whose intelligence waxes and wanes during a single conversation reminds me of The Sacred Fount, which treats intelligence and insight as a kind of fluid quantity that flows back and forth between characters.  That's what literally happens in each chapter, as characters go from complete imbecility to supersubtle analysts, back to imbecility: with the observing narrator also needing to worry about his own susceptibility to this coming and going of accurate insight in himself.

And it occurred to me today (maybe this is a brief waxing of insight) that James is explicitly parodying what happens in all his novels, parodying the way Isabel or Strether or Milly Theale or Maggie Verver go from being less intelligent and insightful than those around them to being far more so.  It's as though James thought to give this another, how shall I say?... turn of the screw, in order to see what would happen if the dynamic would shift back and forth.

Why would he do this?  Well, partly for fun, mainly for fun, but partly as an experiment in style, since it's style alone that can suggest insight that then becomes so fine that (as Eliot says) no idea can violate it, at which point it becomes obtuseness, an obtuseness so intense that it can't help becoming self-aware and turning into insight again, in an incessant dialectic that can go nowhere except into the subtlety of its own endlessly elaborating, endlessly self-modifying sentences.

Nous autres

In class today we were talking about the differences between Vergil and Homer. The difference between the deep administrative state that Vergil is describing, and the eternally contextualizing hierarchy against which Homeric personal relations play out. Dr. Johnson sees the silence of Dido in Book VI of The Aeneid as one of the clearest ways in which Vergil ornaments his poem with sparkling Homeric lusters that he can't resist, and complains of how much less affecting it is than the silence of Ajax in Book XI of The Odyssey. But he misses the lesson of one of his own points: Vergil unites the beauties of The Iliad and The Odyssey, yes, but he reverses the order: the intense personal experience that burgeons throughout The Iliad and culminates in The Odyssey is in Vergil a turn away from that experience to the violence that the always emerging possibilities of political violence that state develops from and resists.  The end of the Vergilian Odyssey is in Book VI of The Aeneid, at which point Aeneas turns away from the Homeric characters in the underworld and leaves them behind forever.  Dido's silence is a recognition of this, and a forerunner of Lavinia's equally conspicuous silence in the last six books.  It's not about her, and barely about Turnus or Pallas or even Lausus and Mezentius, the Vergilian equivalents of Hector and Priam.  (We get something like Achilles's point of view, remembering his own father when Priam supplicates him, as Aeneas thinks of his own son when he kills Lausus and sees Mezentius's intense mourning and desire to die. Achilles threatens to kill Priam but takes pity on him and gives him safe-conduct back to Troy; Aeneas takes pity on Mezentius by killing him, so he needn't out live Lausus very long.  Another farewell to the Homeric characters.)

The deep state administers and monopolizes and so restricts the violence that threatens everywhere. That insight is what leads to the proto-Miltonic moments in Vergil, the moments when the narrator speaks, for the only time, from the perspective of the first person plural: we Romans, in Vergil, we fallen humans ("all our woe") in Milton.  And the place where I saw that today is in this moment which, of all people, Henry James may be picking up on in The Golden Bowl.  Vergil's narrative insight is to narrate any intense incident, more and more as The Aeneid progresses, from the perspective of those in distress or pain or despair. This is particularly true in the shifts in perspective in the last moment of The Aeneid, the loss and death of the supplicating Turnus.  We go from his perspective to Aeneas's when he sees Pallas's belt: of course the very last moment is the flight of Turnus's indignant (indignata) soul down to the shades.

But even before that Turnus has the nightmarish experience of being unable or barely able to hold his own:

...velut in somnis, oculos ubi languida pressit

nocte quies, nequiquam auidos extendere cursus

velle videmur, et in mediis conatibus aegri

succidimus  (XII.908-911)

...as in dreams, when languid rest has pressed our eyes at night, we seem in vain to wish to stretch forth our eager running, and in the middle of our efforts we sink down exhausted.

As has been pointed out (e.g. by Christine G. Perkell), this is a Vergilian recasting of a description of dream-frustration in The Iliad (22.199-200)

James's omniscient (or near omniscient) narrator uses the first person far more frequently (singular and plural, though the plurals are a bit more specific, designating narrator and readers, not all human beings), but not like this, except perhaps for this passage near the end of The Golden Bowl:

He was so near now that she could touch him, taste him, smell him, kiss him, hold him; he almost pressed upon her, and the warmth of his face--frowning, smiling, she mightn't know which; only beautiful and strange--was bent upon her with the largeness with which objects loom in dreams.  (Chapter XLI)

The first person here is latent but all the more powerful for that: James knows, and we know, what our experience of dreaming is like.  This is James’s version of the Proustian nous, as impersonal a first person plural as we ever find in Proust, since it applies to all of us in our lonely and isolated dreams: a universal loneliness, a universal separation.  So too is Turnus all alone, as all are. For Vergil this is the birth of the administrative state, the real entity that has replaced Homeric human relation.  Blanchot says the choice in Homer is violence or speech.  In Vergil, in the modern state, our choice is only violence or silence.

Names of Works: Names ("Turn of the Screw," for example)

What does Reservoir Dogs mean?  Everyone knows: it's that movie that established Quentin Tarantino's reputation for gripping pulp violence, for a kind of pop pleasure in the interactions of large, primary-colored characters (figuratively as well as by way of their names) punctuated by violence, but where the violence isn't quite our central anxiety but part of the stakes in the story.  Before you go see the movie, you assume you'll find out the significance of its title in the movie; afterwards you do know the significance: it's the perfect title for that Quentin Tarentino movie.

Yet, if you've seen it you know that there's no reservoir, no dog, no reference to their concatenation in the movie.  Somehow the completely gripping story so fills your mind that when you've watching it, you don't notice that it skips the part where the meaning of the title gets explained.  By the end, it just means that Quentin Tarantino movie, Reservoir Dogs.

Tarantino does this so effectively that we can see something really wonderful: an idiom aborning.  The title has the same linguistic effect as an idiom: a piece of language that means the way words mean, but not by virtue of the combination that it comprises.  The whole phrase easily dissolves into the flow of meaning, just like any other word.  The hotly contested philosophical distinction between names and definite descriptions (cf. Russell, Kripke) comes undone in the case of what we could call the idiomatic name, the name that starts out looking like a description and then, after a while, doesn't.

I was thinking about this because I was thinking about The Turn of The Screw, and what the title means.  Everyone knows, right? that Henry James novel, and also the sense of twist after possible twist.  But why "turn of the screw"? The phrase appears in the novel twice, in that strange way that James has of treating bits of language as though they're common coin, even though they're not ("hang fire" being perhaps the most notorious).  In the frame narrative, Douglas remarks about the ghost story that Griffin has just told,

"I quite agree—in regard to Griffin's ghost, or whatever it was—that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch. But it's not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children—?"

"We say, of course," somebody exclaimed, "that they give two turns! Also that we want to hear about them."

And then later (though earlier in time), towards the end, the Governess describes yet once more the line she's had to pursue throughout her time at Bly:

Here at present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.

Sure, Douglas could have picked up the phrase from her, but that seems to be considering it too curiously, as though we're suddenly supposed to think back to the way she's influenced Douglas at this moment when she's praising the ordinary, confronting the ordinary against the ordeal.  It feels more as though the phrase itself has become virtuously, valorously, ordinary, idiomatic, something that people do, in that wonderful offhanded praise (so like James) of "ordinary human virtue."  What is a turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue? Even with just this context, these contexts, it means something like a tightening up of the apparatus, to make it more "rigid" (her word), more capable of resisting the stress or push it undergoes.

Anyhow, the phrase is not an idiomatic one before James made it one.  It does have an origin though: it's the title of a chapter in Bleak House ("A Turn of the Screw") in which Phil calls Joshua Smallweed "a screw and a wice in his actions."  Thus the turn of the screw is the gradual increase of pressure, tightening what is already tight, turning a structure into nothing but itself, the way an idiom comes to mean only that untranslatable thing that the idiom captures so well.

This is essentially Blanchot's reading of the story. His great insight (greater even than what he was the first to remark: that the story is studiously and relentlessly ambiguous, not only about the real existence of the ghosts, but about whether it's ambiguous at all, an ambiguity which requires Miles to die) - his great insight is the importance of the fact that the governess is the narrator.  What this means, he says, is not only that we don't know whether she's reliable, but that the subject of the story is its own narration, the narration of the fact that the narration is at issue. It's her story, which means that the content of the narrative is that it is a narrative: as with Proust it is, in the end, the story of the narrator as narrator.

Blanchot doesn't want to make this into some standard circular paradox of self-referentiality, any more than Proust does.  He wants to see this collapsing of the difference between narrative and thing narrated as the pressure of narrative itself, increased sufficiently to squeeze out of narrative everything inessential, everything that isn't, finally, narrative pressure, so that the pressure of narrative is finally what it is: a pressure to be found only in the irreality of fiction because no fact of the matter, no truth, can come to resolve and relieve that pressure.  The turn of the screw tightens the fiction to itself, makes of the work its own idiom or idiolect, a language you can learn but not one that you can translate, not in any literal, vulgar way, as we are warned from the start:

Mrs. Griffin, however, expressed the need for a little more light. "Who was it she was in love with?"

"The story will tell," I took upon myself to reply.

"Oh, I can't wait for the story!"

"The story won't tell," said Douglas; "not in any literal, vulgar way."

Waggish's recent post on MacGuffins put me in mind of this.   For Hitchcock (and others) the MacGuffin is the mechanical narrative rabbit (hence the rabbit's foot of MI 3, perhaps), that the greyhounds of plot baying after it.  But for Blanchot (and, if ironically, for Blumenberg) the MacGuffin isn't just (to change the metaphor) a catalyst, some reagent that gets things going and then withdraws.  It's the work itself, the fact of narrative or of fiction, the thing that fiction wants to be able to tell: the significance of its own existence.  And that's what it can't tell in any literal, vulgar way: if it could, its existence wouldn't be significant.  If you chase the MacGuffin in James, or in Proust, or in Kafka (Blanchot compares the three of them) you may indeed go over to the world of parable.  Is this in reality possible?  Of course not.  Only in parable.  You have to learn another language and make its idioms your own, even if they don't translate into anything in your native tongue.

Time and the Other in Proust and Shakespeare, part II

“Father!” “Son!” “Father I thought we’d lost you
In the blue and buff planes of the Aegean:
Now it seems you’re really back.”
"Only for a while, son, only for a while.”

                                                               --Ashbery

What does awkwardness really mean (to continue my previous post)?

Say that what drives a scene in fiction, in any fiction, is some encounter which counts, an encounter that starts something going, introduces a tension. Or it resolves a tension, brings something to a close.  So the awkwardness I ended my last by invoking is an encounter that does... nothing.  It doesn't count for anything beyond its own discomfort. The dreaded or dreamt of moment doesn't change things, except to erode our sense that anything can change this unresolved relationship anymore, that anything will change it.  We've had, like another, our story ("Elle avait eu, comme une autre, son histoire d'amour." --"Un Coeur Simple").  And then what?  Not much. Because all of that's now in the pluperfect, and what's left, one way or another, is intermittent awkwardness.

I think psychoanalysis is supposed to teach you to accept awkwardness, to stop expecting that transferential relations will allow you to make up for the past.  Think of the awkwardness of meeting your shrink later in life (or teacher or coach or whomever).  For psychoanalysis that's the goal: "the ordinary unhappiness of everyday life."  You come to accept awkwardness, intermittence and all, not as a local accident, but an ontological condition, the only form of ontological possibility left.  It's a kind of genuinely resigned hopelessness, hopelessness which doesn't retain the hopefulness, the desperately energetic willing, the exigent need to be wrong, that is part of the grammar of the word hopelessness, part of what that self-description conceals and cherishes.  Awkwardness is hopelessness without hope.

So I don't mean the awkwardness we feel early in life during the so-called awkward age: a form of intense transference onto the person one's awkward before: "I am shy, bring this right, make it happy." I mean posterior awkwardness: if and when this awkward moment is over, that will be a middling improvement, a reversion to the mediocre.  That's what we fear in the awkward age, but what comes true later in life, and isn't even worth fearing. And, writers like Henry James (think of Caspar Goodwood's ridiculous, pointless return to Isabel Archer) or Cormac McCarthy keep showing, this kind of awkwardness occurs at the level of a life or even of history.

Thus, at the end of Blood Meridian, the Kid (a kid no longer) meets the Judge again, having escaped the fate the Judge threatened him with when the Kid was still a kid.  He escaped that fate for a while, anyhow.  But now the Judge is back, and to the Kid's penultimate outburst -- "You aint nothing" -- he responds, "You speak truer than you know."  The Judge is the embodiment of Nothing; he is Marías's "Sir Death" (Marías' English phrase in Tu Rostra Mañana; he claims to get it from medieval English drama but I certainly can't find it).  Like Sir Death, the Judge is the narrative opposition to all narrative possibility, to the bargaining that makes narrative. He doesn't bargain. Nothing is remembered, nothing escapes obliteration. The Judge and Sir Death stand for narrative impossibility, the complete and utter end of the story.

It was inevitable that the Kid should meet the Judge again (the Judge dances and he is everywhere and he will never die), and that no escape can shape the story's end.  That's the Judge's final lesson for the Kid:

A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.

He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men’s memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

He took up the tumbler the judge had poured and he drank and set it down again. He looked at the judge. I been everywhere, he said. This is just one more place.

The Judge arched his brow. Did you post witnesses? he said. To report to you on the continuing existence of those places once you'd quit them?

That's crazy.

Is it?  Where is yesterday? Where is Glanton and Brown and where is the priest? He leaned closer. Where is Shelby, whom you left to the mercies of Elias in the desert, and where is Tate whom you abandoned in the mountains? Where are the ladies, ah the fair and tender ladies with whom you danced at the governor's ball when you were a hero anointed with the blood of the enemies of the republic you'd elected to defend? And where is the fiddler and where is the dance?

No witnesses but the Judge who witnesses in order to obliterate (as we learn in an early scene).  There is nothing and no one left to show that Shelby or Glanton or Brown or Tobin (to quote Marías again) "trod the earth or traversed the world" before ending up in "one-eyed oblivion."

So let's say, then, that this is Cormac McCarthy's view of tenses : "The past that was differs little from the past that was not" (his view of punctuation is for a later post).  Then the end of Blood Meridian, despite all of McCarthy's contempt for Proust, and presumably for Flaubert, is not essentially different from the end of that other helpless, hopeless coming-of-age novel L'Education sentimentale (the Kid too knows the melancholy of waking up in tents).  The Judge's words gloss that ending: "The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together?"  This is Holden's version of Flaubert's tremendous blank.

The straight and winding way end at the same place.  Dickinson knew this, knew that Shakespeare knew it.  "Since Cleopatra died," says Antony, "I have lived in such dishonor, that the gods / Detest my baseness."  She died, he thinks, moments ago, and so he too has invented a new tense: the passé composé of perfect difference from the past.  "That engulfing since" Dickinson calls it.


But Cleopatra hasn't died.  Unlike Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra are to see each other again, to speak to each other again.  The forlorn hope of reunion comes true.  Their way to death is more winding than they think.  And yet, like Ashbery's skaters, they are only elaborating their distances to a common and inescapable end.

I remember reading a study which graphed anxiety about medical tests against the likelihood of their coming out positive (likelihood of bad news, that is).  Essentially as you get older, your anxiety about any specific test decreases, even as the likelihood that what you're worrying about actually will be true increases.  You get less anxious (you get used to the routine, you become less of a hypochondriac), but the negative results become more and more uncertain.  You're pretty confident, maybe too confident, that this test will come out negative.  But what about the next one? How much good does it do you to get this negative result? Considering the alternative, a lot.  But life becomes more and more filled with the sense of a temporary reprieve, not a happy ending.

"Every catching of the breath / Is the sickness unto death" writes John Bricuth in his great poem "Hypochondria as the Basis of Conversion," each stanza of which ends with a Kierkegaard title.  In fact hypochondria of the soul increases as you grow older.  Every crisis of anxiety passed only brings you deeper into the world of crisis.

In Shakespeare the worry is not hypochondria but anxiety about other people, about love and loss.  A Midsummer Night's Dream ends in blissful ignorance about the coming disaster: that "the issue there create," in Theseus and Hippolyta's bed, will lead to Senecan tragedy.  So too Henry V ends the second Henriad with hopeful marriage, Hal and Kate's happiness undimmed by what we know is coming, the scene that takes place only a year or so later, and which Shakespeare wrote ten plays or so earlier at the beginning of The First Part of Henry VI.  Marriage is about everything's working out.  The fact that nothing works out for good is beside the point.  For the young.

But the parental generation (the later Shakespeare's generation) is always aware things work out only for a while, son, only for a while.

For "the worried well" (to go back to hypochondria for a moment), the equivalent of things' working out is the negative test result.  That's what we want: let it be negative this time.  As we get older, we know the positive result will come.  But we bargain: let it come later, but not now.

Heidegger (as John Limon points out) -- the early Heidegger, anyhow -- had contempt for this kind of bargaining, which he thought characteristic of "They-being," the mode of being of the fearful evaders of truth who cannot attain an authentic being-towards-death.  Kierkegaard thought of this sort of bargaining as one of the kinds of despair

But what I'm interested in here is narrative, not the anti-narrative stance of being-towards-death.  Narrative is about bargaining, and the question is what you get out of the bargain.  In life, and in narrative that seems adequate to our experience of life, we start out bargaining for some quit-claim, but later on what we want, what we know as the only possibility, is deferral.  Let the moment be awkward, not final.

Sure, all bargaining, in even the most naive stories, can involve characters' deaths; it often does, but death there means a bad narrative outcome, which we'll accept, if we have to, along some of the byways narrative takes as long as we get what we want at the end of other pathways.  Babar's mother, Bambi's: they die.  Little Paul Dombey may die, if he must, but then their father had better give Florence the love she needs and deserves.  And we do have to accept the bargain.  We have to accept the fact that we're bargaining if we're to participate (as we do) in any narrative experience beyond pure wish-fulfilling daydream: the interest, the emotional involvement in narrative comes from the bargaining and negotiating we put our souls into.  (It's characteristic of Shakespeare's generosity in the comedies, by the way, that at the end he tends to throw in some added gift we hadn't bargained for.)  If we could get everything we wanted, we wouldn't be bargaining; narrative experience is the experience of bargaining, ergo we can't get everything we want.  One of the manifestations of what we don't get may be death.  But death here just stands for an element of the bargaining outcome, where what's important is the bargaining.  At least in most narratives.

The bargains we make with narrative are often more gratifyingly framed versions of the bargains we make in real life.  We worry, and we are willing to give up some of our happiness in order not to lose it all.  We think in terms of negotiated satisfaction; we signal our willingness to accept lesser but still saving and even gratifying states of affairs.

(My mother was once very anxious about where my father was - he was terribly, unaccountably, uncharacteristically late.  The phone rang and it was the police!  They identified themselves and made sure who she was.  Then: "Your husband's in jail."  Her response: "Oh, thank God!"  Because he wasn't dead.  [He'd cussed out a cop who had pulled him over for speeding.]  The phone's ringing, and I'll accept a compromise: bad but not terrible news.  I'm a reasonable person, a serious man.)

Tragedy and comedy represent two different bargaining equilibria: we give up a little in comedy to get a solution we're satisfied with (maybe even a better solution than we ever expected: we get a surplus reward).  We give up a lot in tragedy to get to a solution that at least leaves us calm of mind, all passion spent.

I think Aristotlean unity is about the straightest way to whatever equilibrium is achieved.  (There's a reversal, yes, but the reversal is the start of that straight path.)  Shakespeare is interested in the winding ways.

And this is where things change, this is where he thought his way through to a new narrative representation of real experience -- the representation later to be found in Flaubert and Proust, e.g.  In his later plays, the winding ways become more and more his subject, and not only the itinerary of its exposition. Romeo and Juliet part, never to converse again.  But in the later plays, look what happens: Lear is reunited with Cordelia! Antony with Cleopatra! The Macbeths reign for a long time, longer than they ever dared to hope: everything they sought they get, except the immortality they never believed in anyway.  And then, there's the original for Dombey and Son, The Winter's Tale.

Mammilius, a senex puer like Paul Dombey (and Miles), has to die, but for that loss we get the recompense of Perdita's happiness, and the reunion of Hermione and Leontes in overplus.  And yet, they're old. The play begins with a lamentation over lost youth: how much more lost is it at the end!  The happy ending of the play isn't the real, true end, final end of everything, but that final ending isn't far away from the parental generation there.

I think what Shakespeare was thinking about more and more was the way all our real-life bargains with fate (or life or God) become modes of temporizing, seeking extensions on the loan, a raise of the credit limit, not the impossible forgiveness of the debt.  As we become aware of time in the Proustian, Flaubertian sense - as we become aware that the future is continuous with the present and not something whose existence is absolutely deferred (which is how we thought of is as children) - we become aware that all that our bargaining achieves is, at most, renewals on harsher and harsher terms and for shorter and shorter periods of the crushing debts we owe.  There is no happy ending for Antony and Cleopatra, or Paulina and Camillo (far from it) or Lear and Cordelia or the Macbeths, despite their unexpected reunions. The Kid can escape Judge Holden for years, for as long as he could possibly hope for, and yet he cannot escape.

We bargain and bargain and usually get the extensions we want; we usually get more than we'd allowed ourselves to hope for. Usually. Until we don't. It's all okay! Until it isn't.

That's what's awkward about getting the terms of the extension.  It's the awkward gratitude you express to the debt collector for giving you another month.  The awkward fact that we can more or less clumsily affect not to notice, in order to save the moment, is that the debt is still due, and harder to pay than ever. Maybe we can save the day. But only the day. How awkward for the poor servant to meet Death in the marketplace in Baghdad.  But the man manages to get out of the situation, and lives to keep his appointment in Samarra.

And it seems that for Proust, maybe for McCarthy, the only cure for that is remembering, which is to say writing - being lost in another world.  But is that a cure that lasts? How long?  A lifetime? Why did Shakespeare stop writing?

[A bit more on Proust, in my next which will be, I promise, shorter.]

Time and the other in Proust and Shakespeare, I: transcending the parasitism of anecdotes and the dross of the story

Proust rests his arch defense of Flaubert's style almost entirely on the novelty of his use of grammar, and especially of tense; Flaubert is:

un homme qui par l'usage entièrement nouveau et personnel qu'il a fait du passé défini, du passé indéfini, du participe présent, de certains pronoms et de certaines prépositions, a renouvelé presque autant notre vision des choses que Kant, avec ses Catégories, les théories de la Connaissance et de la Réalité du monde extérieur.
------
a man who by the entirely new and personal usage that he has made of the past definite, of the past indefinite, of the present participle, of certain pronouns and of certain prepositions, has renewed our vision of things almost as much as Kant, with his Categories, the theories of Knowledge and of the Reality of the exterior world.

Still more archly (this is 1920, after all, and he's already famous for the first two volumes of A La Recherche), Proust alludes to his own modest researches into the representation of Time, which helps underscore the great ending of L'Education sentimentale (he writes at some length about the odd definite article in the title), with its sudden juddering jumps to the end of life, or, at least for Proust, to a region close enough to the end to require only an etc. or a series of them:

Je ne me lasserais pas de faire remarquer les mérites, aujourd'hui si contestés de Flaubert. L'un de ceux qui me touchent le plus parce que j'y retrouve l'aboutissement des modestes recherches que j'ai faites, est qu'il sait donner avec maîtrise l'impression du Temps. A mon avis la chose la plus belle de l'Education Sentimentale, ce n'est pas une phrase, mais un blanc. Flaubert vient de décrire, de rapporter pendant de longues pages, les actions les plus menues de Frédéric Moreau. Frédéric voit un agent marcher avec son épée sur un insurgé qui tombe mort. « Et Frédéric, béant, reconnut Sénécal! » Ici un « blanc », un énorme « blanc » et, sans l'ombre d'une transition, soudain la mesure du temps devenant au lieu de quarts d'heure, des années, des décades (je reprends les derniers mots que j'ai cités pour montrer cet extraordinaire changement de vitesse, sans préparation) :

     « Et Frédéric, béant, reconnut Sénécal.

     « Il voyagea. Il connut la mélancolie des paquebots, les froids réveils sous la tente, etc. Il revint.
     « Il fréquenta le monde, etc.
     « Vers la fin de l'année 1867, etc. »


Sans doute, dans Balzac, nous avons bien souvent : « En 1817 les Séchard étaient, etc. » Mais chez lui ces changements de temps ont un caractère actif ou documentaire. Flaubert le premier, les débarrasse du parasitisme des anecdotes et des scories de l'histoire.

------

I could never tire of bringing to notice Flaubert's merits, so contested today.  One of those which touch me the most because there I find the culmination of the modest researches I myself have undertaken, is that he knows how to give the impression of Time masterfully.  In my opinion the most beautiful thing in The Sentimental Education is, not a sentence, but a blank.  Flaubert has just been describing, just been reporting for many long pages, the slightest acts of Frédéric Moreau.  Frédéric sees an officer march with his sword upon one of the insurgents, who falls dead.  "And Frédéric, gaping, recognized Sénécal!"  [Sénécal is the officer.]  Then a "blank," an enormous "blank," and, without the shadow of a transition, the measure of time suddenly becoming instead of quarter-hours years, decades (I pick up the last words that I have quoted to show this extraordinary change of speed, coming without warning):

      "And Frédéric, gaping, recognized Sénécal.

      "He traveled.  He knew the melancholy of packet-boats, cold awakenings in tents, etc.  He returned.
      "He went out in society, etc.
      "Towards the end of the year 1867, etc."


     No doubt in Balzac we often get: "In 1817 the Séchards were, etc."  But in him these changes of tense have an active or documentary character.  Flaubert is the first to liberate them from the parasitism of anecdotes or the dross of the story.

Proust says he's quoting from memory, which allows him to reframe Flaubert a bit: the enormous blank is actually the end of a chapter; but that's just another way of saying that Proust wants us to be stunned by the ending of a chapter where Flaubert ends it, without any continuation of the anecdote in the next chapter, or ever.  James probably learned this from Flaubert: the moment of recognition feeling like a kind of social awkwardness, but in a far larger context.  There's nothing more to know than this awkwardness, even when it occurs on the scale of a human life (as in James or Rimbaud: "Par délicatesse / J'ai perdu ma vie"), even when it occurs on a world-historical scale (as in Flaubert and Proust).  After that awkwardness there's really nothing left to do or to hope for.

And that changes your relation to time.

Nous autres, or: The peculiar semi-circular stare

A short post on narratees to keep my hand in, until I get this cursed review off....

It's difficult to find a vivid way of explaining narratees to students.  Well, to explain the last narratee, the figure who corresponds to the first narrator, the author-as-narrator or impressario of the fiction, the narrator not meant to be ironized -- who, if ironic, is in control of the ironies we readers savor.  Obviously history has its own ironies, and authors are often their butts.  But in the fictional world, the final narrator is not ironized - not necessarily the first person narrator in a first person fiction, but the third person narrator who presents the first person narrator to us, the writer, as it were, of the speech prefix to the whole narration.

So who corresponds to this narrator on the receiving end? What is the narratee?  The narratee is the figure not meant to be ironized either -- who, if ironic, is in control of the ironies the narrator offers him or her to savor.  Just as obviously as with authors, narratees and readers may be the butt of some historical joke, but not in the fictional world.  But it's very hard to clarify the distinction between readers and narratees, partly because the distinction is so obvious.  People see that they're not the narratee, and they regard this as a failure, structural it may, be of the author.  Structural because no writer can know me!  I survive, a jolly candidate for a future that the author could not dream of - if only because of the lag time between her writing and my reading.  The author may have gone cool-hunting, but didn't anticipate what turns out to be cool today.  What a n00b!

But the obviousness is misleading.  All reading is vicarious (even of history, even of letters): only a fictional reader -- the narratee -- reads with direct and perfect interest and absorption.  Only a fictional reader imagines herself the addressee of the fiction.

It suddenly occurred to me, reading Nightwood, that one way to make the distinction clear is to think of narrator and narratee as belonging to the exclusive we -- nous autres, and not nous tous.  The narratee seems to use the inclusive we, but doesn't.  This moment in Barnes will illustrate what I mean -- she is talking about Felix and the disturbing element of Jewishness in his presence:

He was not popular, though the post-humous acclaim meted out to his father secured from his acquaintances the peculiar semi-circular stare of those who, unwilling to greet with earthly equality, nevertheless give to the living branch (because of death and its sanction) the slight bend of the head - a reminiscent pardon for future apprehension, - a bow very common to us when in the presence of this people.

Leave aside the question of how ironic Barnes is being, and how ironic history is being at her expense (that is the question of the nature and extent of her own prejudice against "this people").  The us is what interests me here: that "us" embraces nous autres, those who are of a certain aristocratic class for whom "earthly equality" means something, and who think in terms of familial branches (Felix, like his father, passes himself off as a baron); and also those who are male, and who would bow or bend their heads as a token of respect.  Her "us" makes clear who the narratee is -- who the narratee always is: someone who belongs to the same group as the narrator, plays the same language games the same way.  (Language games: we readers of a chess column and its annotations are credited with the exclusive understanding of the significance of moves that the master writing them has worked out for us.)

That "us" is particularly prominent in Barnes, but is to be found passim in Eliot, in Trollope, in Proust most of all.  ("Quand nous aimons une Gilberte, une Albertine....")  It's a genial, empirically philosophical "us" -- read any page of Hume or of Johnson or of Adam Smith to see what I mean.  In a philosophical context it offers qualified people entry into the circle of nous autres: men, say, or Englishmen, or Scotsmen of leisure.  It can of course be ironized even in such contexts: read practically any sentence of Gibbon.  It can be ironized in philosophy and fiction, but it's always ironized, however lightly, in fiction.

I think, paradoxically, that this is why such sentences, containing any form or mode of the word we, are so vanishingly rare in Henry James, that is in his narrators' addresses to the narratee reading the fiction.  He fictionalizes with such radical assiduity that he doesn't want us to confuse inclusive and exclusive we's, as we might if he used them.  The only real counterexample I can think of is a moment at the end of The Golden Bowl, when James's narrator tells us how Amerigo appears to Maggie as she is approaching her final triumph:

he almost pressed upon her, and the warmth of his face--frowning, smiling, she mightn't know which; only beautiful and strange--was bent upon her with the largeness with which objects loom in dreams.

James's tortured, artificial, metaphysical analogies give way, for this once, to an appeal to the experience of the reader.  Objects loom thus largely in all our dreams, dans les rêves de nous tous.  The narratee knows just what the narrator means, and we readers know just how it is that the narratee would know just what the narrator means.  This is an effect all the more powerful and spectacular because James has held it in reserve for, well hundreds of pages and indeed (it is not too much to say) dozens of years.  James's narratees are in general part of the extremely rarefied society of his narrators, those who can trade anecdotes like Henry James.  That's an exchange among an exclusive us that the rest of us take pleasure in following, as the child takes pleasure in the adult conversation of its parents.

One final example of the uses to which this difference may be put, again not from a fictional context, where the difference is always present, but from a sociological one.  In Stigma (and everywhere, but most obviously in Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity) Goffman distinguishes categorically between "us normals" and the variously stigmatized persons he treats as his categories and examples.  But the point of the book is that "at some point in...life" everyone is stigmatized.  There is no such thing as the "normal" individual (useful, to some extent, only as a medical category), only the stigmatized person's belief in that norm.  "We normals" are normal only with respect to whatever specific stigma is under discussion, but in the end we find that it is only the narratee who is normal.  In non-fiction, like Goffman's, there isn't a fictional narrator (the irony is the author's, not the narrator's); but there is a fictional narratee.  That's his point.  To be normal is a fiction.

And in fiction, the narratee is the figure the narrator takes as normal: the two of them are ordinary denizens, perhaps the only ones, of a non-existent world, looking at it with their peculiar semi-circular stare.

Ghost stories

"Récit de fantôme où meme le fantôme est absent...."  --Blanchot ("Ghost story where even the ghost is absent")

"Schreiben aber heißt, sich vor den Gespenstern entblößen" --Kafka ("Writing means, denuding yourself before the ghosts")

"Frate, / non far, ché tu se' ombra e ombra vedi." --Dante (Virgil to Statius: "Brother, / don't [try to embrace my legs], for you are a shade, and are seeing a shade.")

As one of those quick heuristic claims, I found myself saying the other day that every good short story is a ghost story.  We'd done Turn of the Screw, so that was the context: ghost story or not, it's a ghost story.  So we quickly went through the syllabus of stories we'd read, proving the point and identifying the ghost.

"Hills Like White Elephants"? The fetus. Their love. Their past. Their future. (Of course: since the fetus represents all those things.)

"A Day's Wait": The boy. (His mother too: what do you say about two people and two ghosts?)

"Gift of the Magi": The hair, the watch.

"Miss Lonelyhearts": Miss Lonelyhearts, Shrike.  "They were not worldly men." Sick-of-it-all's mother.  Mrs. Shrike's mother. Any of the letter writers. Christ.

"Slave on the Block" (Langston Hughes): The "wonderful colored cook and maid" who sleeps in the basement and takes sick and dies.

"Wash," Faulkner's short story version of the death of Sutpen: Sutpen himself, riding home from the War.  The past.  The missing daughter, the dead son.  And much, much more.

Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour": The dead husband.  Who turns out not to be dead.

Hammett's great pair of stories: "The Big Knockover" and "$106,000 Blood Money": Papadapolous.  The Old Man.

"The Swimmer"?  The swimmer.

Anything by Alice Munro: what more needs to be said?  Anything by Dennis Johnson: likewise.  Ditto Javier Marías.  And Bolaño.  Hawthorne.  Melville. Carver. Alistair Macleod, Borges.  Flaubert.  Chekhov.  Tolstoy.  Megadittoes to Isaac Babel. No need to mention Duras or Blanchot.

I wondered a little about comic stories - farce, really - but all you have to do is read "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."  Or Saki.

Salinger: "See more glass" could be the epigraph to this entry.

Listing it like this makes the game too easy, maybe, but it shouldn't be quite that easy. The ghosts haunt the stories, come to haunt them, make the stories haunting.

That's as far as we got in class, but later I found myself trying to think in a literal-minded way. The lesson I thought this game taught me was that stories play off of an interesting juxtaposition of anecdotal specificity and the generic world.  Novels have time to invent their world, invent background and context for their characters. Unhappy families are represented as unhappy families in an unhappy world, in a world which reflects and explains their unhappiness.  But in stories, everyone else is just "reasonably waiting for the train."  So the juxtaposition between the characters and the generic world always, in one way or another makes the characters into survivors.

Survivors: those who outlive a world or space or time or community or family or love or hope in which they're in sync with the world.  The story begins when they're no longer in sync.  This idea is generically related (how else should it be related?) to Warshow's description of "the gangster as tragic hero":

Thrown into the crowd without background or advantages, with only those ambiguous skills which the rest of us—the real people of the real city—can only pretend to have, the gangster is required to make his way, to make his life and impose it on others. Usually, when we come upon him, he has already made his choice or the choice has already been made for him, it doesn't matter which: we are not permitted to ask whether at some point he could have chosen to be something else than what he is.

The short story character is faced with a generic world: a world become generic for him and her, however rich and specific it is for everyone else.  The rich and specific have become generic, and the character doesn't belong to that generic world.  It's a ghost for her or him, or the character is a ghost in that world.  Those two ideas are the same: the character's relation to the world is what's ghostly.  The ghost is the relationship, and whoever represents that relationship in the story: fetus or husband or dead first wife (Edith Wharton's "Pomegranate Seed") or Shrike or Mr. Sappleton ("The Open Window) or Billie, the Oiler (Crane's "Open Boat"), or the child in the dream of the burning child reported to Freud is the ghost.

Anyhow, I was wondering whether this was fair and accurate.  Is that what a real ghost is like?

What a question!

Why would I even ask it?  Why would I think I could think about a real ghost? And the answer that came to me was that it's in stories that you interact with ghosts. These characters you interact with: they don't stay. And unlike lyric poetry, they don't repeat themselves either, in endless songs of love or longing or farewell.  Lyric is about the generic as the place we can continue to live, interact with, belong to, take comfort in.  But the stories are not our stories.  They're ghost stories.

Narrative and information - part I: kibbitzing, rooting, side-bets

An idea basic to game theory is that players will play their best moves, if there is one, that what defines your best move is in part determined by what defines the other player's best move, and vice versa. This means that playing a move in a game in which the players have incomplete information (most of them: Old Maid, Stratego, Bridge, Blackjack) always conveys some information: not only the trivial fact that a player has made this move, but that this move is the best one they could make in their position.

Interesting games, then, are those in which players have to balance their provisional best move against the valuable information that making any move, no matter what it is, will divulge.  Bidding in bridge provides a good example of this dynamic: the cost of getting trumps in your long suit is a declaration of what cards you're likely to have, based on how much you're willing to pay to make those cards trumps.  But Clue is essentially the same (what information are you looking for, what are you pretending not to have, what are you pretending you do have?) as is poker: even five-card draw: are you taking two or three cards? two cards might mean three of a kind, but if it's a bluff based on a pair and a third card, you've also reduced your chances of drawing to three of a kind considerably.

Bluffing is a way of trying to convey disinformation: part of what will make a player decide that bluffing is her best move is that it's disguised as a different 'best' move.  If it looks like my best move is to take two cards, then it looks like I have three of a kind.  Conversely, I might pay to keep information secret, for example by taking only one card with three of a kind to try to convince you that I only have two pairs: doing this cuts my chances of getting four of a kind in half (to 1/47).

Now, the game I am interested in is that between story and audience.  Stripped down this is a two-person game, but that may be too idealizing since we have to take into account Author, narrator, narratee, other audience members, and (following David Markson) Reader.  Have to take them into account because the question of rooting comes up.  In fact I think that one of the most important tasks of the mildly game-theoretical account of narrative I am trying to work out is to figure out the game that rooters and kibbitzers are playing.

I want to press the similarity between rooting and making a side-bet, that is to say, playing a game.  Rooting for a preferred outcome in a fiction and rooting (as the faithful do) for the Red Sox are different, but they do share a structure: those whose faith in their preferred outcome is vindicated get bragging rights over those who wanted something different, but also over those whose preferred outcome was the same but who were of little faith.

So there are two different types I might make a side-bet against: the serenely confident malevolent (those who wish the wrong thing); and the benevolent faithless (who wish the right thing but doubt it will happen).

In narrative, the malevolent (leaving Oscar Wilde's laughter aside) tend to be villains in the piece (including sometimes author and narrator).  Whereas those of little faith will often be found in the piece, but also found on our side of the narrative divide, in the narratee and in other audience members.  Obvious examples of the malevolent include the head-suitor Antinous in the Odyssey, Don John in Much Ado, Oswald and Edmund in King Lear, Blifel in Tom Jones, Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park, Mr. Elton in Emma, Mr. Grimwig in Oliver Twist, La Cousine Bette, Madame Merle in Portrait of a Lady, Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) in Casablanca, and also Captain Renault (Claude Rains), and Father Gomez in The Amber Spyglass.  These examples show that there are various ways that the malevolent may lose their bets: they may consciously have to realize and suffer the judgment the narrative gods visit upon them (Antinous, Don John, Blifel, Strasser, Mary Crawford, Mr. Elton, Madame Merle); they may change their bets, often just in time (Edmund, Grimwig, Captain Renault, also Mary Crawford); they may think that their bets will eventually be vindicated, even after their deaths (Oswald, Father Gomez, Major "King" Kong [Slim Pickens, riding the bomb like a cowboy hellbent for hell] in Dr. Strangelove).  And sometimes the malevolent win their bets -- which is to say that the outcome of the story does not confute the obnoxious line they take: (Rodolphe in Madame Bovary, for example, possibly Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra).  And sometimes, especially in Shakespeare, you get characters who seem to combie all these seemingly incompatible positions simultaneously, like Edmund and, the villain of villains in Shakespeare, Iago.¹

What makes Flaubert Flaubert is that we have to live with that. And this fact, the fact that Emma isn't vindicated, as we in our Balzac-trained naïveté might have bet she would, the fact that we've lost our standing bet on novelistic satisfaction helps shed light on a feature of side-betting that might at first make it look somewhat different than the main game. When I bid one heart in bridge I'm suggesting something like being long in hearts (depending on the convention, of course; but as my bids get higher, they become more straightforward declarations of the hand I'm holding); when I bid one heart reading Flaubert (after all I've loved Un Cœur Simple), I don't seem to affect the play - either in the main game Emma and Rodolphe are playing, nor in the side-bets between me and the more cynical reader, nor between me and the narratee.

Well does my bet, my play, convey any information?  A move needn't convey information, but I think that in any interesting game it does, so now the question would be, are the side-bets that I make, against the more cynical reader or the narratee, the only moves that I make?  Or might these side-bets also convey information to the author or the narrator?  And if so, how?  How do I affect the past, the already written text, the already scripted play, the already filmed movie?

Notice that this question also pertains to the narratee, who inhabits a peculiar temporal space, more peculiar than the narrator's, since she is learning the story as I learn it, even though she's an already completed creation of the story.  The narrator is like the Augustinian God in Paradise Lost: outside of time, having arranged the whole story, so that any moment of the telling includes what is to come as well as what has happened and what is occurring now. Indeed Augustine compares God's command of the whole of time to the knowledge of a psalm, that is a literary text, where every moment contains within it the compression of the whole.²  But the narratee knows only what has come before, and what is happening now, though she will certainly be predicting and anticipating how the story will unfold.

Let's begin by asking the slightly easier converse question: what information does the narratee's taking the opposite bet convey to me? For one thing the narratee (and more subtly, the other audience members) represent for me a possible outcome to the story - a possible pathway which helps map the terrain the actual pathway finds its way through.  Now, I can sometimes get this information very explicitly, from a narratee as character (e.g. Belford or Anna Howe, receiving a letter from Lovelace or Clarissa), or from a worrying or gloating window character (Horatio, Enobarbus, Poins), or from a Chorus, sometimes continuous with the other audience members (as in some of the sly induction scenes in Elizabethan drama).

But sometimes I can only get this information from narratees (and also from other audience members, in the silence of a theater) who say nothing and indicate nothing about what their own anticipations are.  I have to understand what they -- the narratees, the expected interpreters -- must be thinking.  The author or narrator has to give me to understand their thoughts or reactions.  James may be the writer who most explicitly makes this into a theme: we need to think like Isabel Archer or Merton Densher or Maggie Verver, to understand exactly what the silences of Madame Merle and Osmond, of Milly Theale, of the Prince and indeed of Adam Verver, must mean.  Adam Verver is of course the crowning case here: everything depends on Maggie's understanding everything his complete inscrutability (inscrutable to the point of its not being clear whether he's inscrutable or not) might signify.

So the side-bets are bets between me and a silent narratee (the last narratee, the person over whose shoulder I am always reading or watching, is always silent).  Since the interest of narrative always includes wishful thinking (if I weren't wishing I wouldn't be interested), I bet that there's still a way for things to work out.  I take some vicarious pleasure in thinking the narratee thinks there isn't a way for things to work out.  That pleasure is generous, at least seen from the right perspective: the narratee will, I am sure, be delighted that things work out, and I anticipate that delight with delight. The narratee will be delighted to lose, so in a sense it's a win-win situation.

But on the other hand, the narratee is betting against me, in her stony, silent, hsst-don't-bother-me way.  She doesn't think things will work out at all.  She thinks I'm naive.

So we're both conveying information in our bets, in our moves.  This information is moral, you could say, or characterological.  I show my naivete, perhaps, my naive love of fiction, or my bent towards the fictitious. I stand for wish-fulfillment and fantasy.  The narratee shows her disabused knowledge of reality.  The world doesn't work in the lovely-to-think-so way I want it to work.

This information is important to the fictional interaction.  It sets up the stakes of the fiction.  In the conflict between life and wish-fulfillment, will wish-fulfilment find a way?  How much reality can I know is true, can the narratee emblematize, without the destruction of the wish?  The balance is different in different genres, along different dimensions of ambition: commitment to truth, to life, to hope, to cleverness, to seriousness, to verisimilitude, etc.  Our side bets bring out these different dimensions, bring them into relief, so that they become part of the story, part of the stakes of the story.  The information these moves reveal is part of the story-information.

-----

¹ Who, Trilling points out, is the only character identified as a villain in the original dramatum personae.  (Trilling doesn't point out that only seven of the First Folio plays have lists of the "Names of the Actors" as it calls them.)  Here's what the Othello list looks, like:

[Brandeis University First Folio]

You ask, What's right under "The Names of the Actors"?  X-P

² Leonardo will later point the same thing out about the focal point in a camera obscura: the entire image is compressed into a single point before decompressing upside down.  That spatial point in the camera obscura is analogous to the temporal instant in Augustine's and Milton's thinking.

How literary transference ends

Reading a great note of Jeff Nunokawa's (you may have to friend him on Facebook to read it) -- two notes, actually -- got me thinking about the moment when, seeing Beatrice's presence flame up before him, Dante attains to the full sublimity of the earthly Paradise that Eve has lost and turns to share the transport with Virgil, who's been silent these last cantos, lost in his own awe and wonder. (The higher they go in Purgatory, the more Virgil's authority reduces to his still-parental capacity to ask intelligent questions of the guides they meet and to interpret their answers, even if he can't answer those questions himself as he'd done below.)  She's not only a counter-Eve; she's a counter-Dido too, meeting him "vestita di color di fiamma viva," dressed in the color of living flame, in contrast with the flames of Dido's funeral pyre which Aeneas sees as he abandons Carthage.

This is indeed a return to Eden for Dante: Beatrice has been dead for ten years now, and it's ten years since he felt the awe that now overcomes him again in her presence.  Virgil has seen him through the lowest depths of hell and to this glory, and so now:

Tosto che ne la vista mi percosse
l'alta virtù che già m'avea trafitto
prima ch'io fuor di püerizia fosse,

volsimi a la sinistra col respitto
col quale il fantolin corre a la mamma
quando ha paura o quando elli è afflitto,

per dicere a Virgilio: 'Men che dramma
di sangue m'è rimaso che non tremi:
conosco i segni de l'antica fiamma'.

Ma Virgilio n'avea lasciati scemi
di sé, Virgilio dolcissimo patre,
Virgilio a cui per mia salute die'mi;

né quantunque perdeo l'antica matre,
valse a le guance nette di rugiada,
che, lagrimando, non tornasser atre.  (Purgatorio 30, 40-54)

----

As soon as all my sight was driven wild
by that same force which, timelessly archaic,
transfixed me then while I was yet a child,

I turned back to the left, with hopes as quick
as when a little boy runs to his mama
if he's afraid of something or is sick,

To say to Virgil, "No drop of blood is calm: a
trembling has rapt me: I see all about
the returning fire of that blazing drama."

But Virgil was not there. We were without
him now. O Virgil! sweetest father,
to whom my soul I'd trusted without doubt!

Nor could the world, recovered, our first mother
lost once in Eden keep my dew-cleansed cheeks
unstained by tears I now wept for the other.

Dante lost his mother when he was five years old, and he has already seen that Beatrice must have taken her place in his soul, especially once she too has died. But Virgil has been so tender, and it's to Virgil he turns, as to a mother, as to his childhood, away for a moment from the Godlike blaze of Beatrice.  It's to Virgil that he entrusts his own wondrous and direct acknowledgment that he recognizes the archaic feeling he'd once felt in Beatrice's presence on earth: "conosco i segni de l'antica fiamma," I recognize the signs of that ancient flame (my translation above sacrificed the directness of this line for the even more important rhyme on mama) -- words which directly translate Virgil's Dido -  "Adgnosco veteris vestigia flammae".  Her ancient flame had been for her husband Sichaeus, now dead, and now she fears (accurately) that she will betray his memory and turn from him to Aeneas.

So for a moment Virgil and Dante take on the rolls of women, of Dante's mother and of Dido, while Beatrice takes the role of Aeneas. Since Dante will follow her, he abandons Virgil, perforce, and so he disappears, another abandoning himself before he is abandoned for Beatrice's living flame.  Over now, the fictive world that returned Dante to childhood, and gave him back a mother in Virgil.

If Dante is thinking of the Aeneid he must also be thinking of the binding of Isaac, the moment John Limon aptly describes as Isaac's adulthood.  For Abraham leads him to this terrible pass, seemingly knowing what he's doing but hiding his own terror and bewilderment.  We know this because Isaac asks his what's going on:

And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?

And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.

He doesn't trust Isaac with (what he thinks is) the truth.  (Note that his intended lie isn't going to turn out to be the truth either, since it's a ram, not a lamb, that God provides, falsifying the inadvertent prophecy.)  But then he binds Isaac.  After this episode (as is notorious) Isaac disappears for several years, and we see him again only as an adult, after his mother dies.  The binding of Isaac is the end of his childhood: he has turned to his father in anxiety and trust, and his father has betrayed him.  God intervenes, but that's hardly recompense for the loss he indemnifies.

I don't mean to suggest the Virgil should be equated with Abraham, only to say that Dante is underlining the terrible moment when the child turns to the parent to find that the parent cannot help.  That's in Eden too.

As I say, I was thinking about this because I'd put together the moment in Dante with that in the frame to Turn of the Screw, the story of Griffin's ghost which is about

an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him.

He turns to her and she can't help him.  What scene more archaic than the child turning to a parent when haunted by ghosts? What comfort more primal than that which the parent gives? And when she can't -- that's the failure of Abraham, of Virgil, of Wordsworth in "Surprised by Joy" ("I turned to share the transport, O with whom, / But  thee, deep-buried in the silent tomb"), of the mother in Griffin's story (and of the Governess), of the father dreaming of his burning child whose story Freud reports (how often Abraham must have had this same dream, on his way to Moriah, and on his way home too!), and indeed of Gertrude, that inaugurates adulthood and its ultimate failure to be able to lay the ghosts of mortality that haunt our children.