This creative-critical project is a trying out of Emersonian transcendental reconceptions of aesthetic experience. I have written a “draught of a draught” of a novel with a sequence of events and a main character, Darshan Kehama, based loosely on the struggle Ralph Waldo Emerson describes in his great essay, “Experience,” to “realize” the “self” by recovering indigenous feelings of serenity native to the self as Emerson comes to terms with the loss of his son. I take the title of my Emersonian novel - At Interminable Oceans – from a crucial Emersonian passage in the essay to refer to homes found within and on the shores of seas and oceans, the metaphorical and literal setting for the Kehama family. The panoramic view of the Arabian Sea and Pacific Ocean and their horizons from Indian and American homes on the Bombay and Carmel, California coasts is a reminder of the inexhaustible oceanic powers the Kehamas draw from, as they find their “true romance” in Emersonian moments of calm in the face of incalculable grief. This irenic mood enacted in a serene pitch of third person narration and description crucial to conjure up the “tone” of family life in this lost Indian American world is one way to envision that Emersonian slogan of transforming loss into “practical power.” Wai Chee Dimock’s reading of a crucial passage on ownership in Emerson’s moving essay, “Experience,” inspire my modified notion of “aesthetic ownership” as I attempt to dramatize this struggle of transformation in this “draught of a draught” of a novel. I could only express what I found in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s account of having, getting, and keeping irenic feelings, his essential story of self-renewal offered in that indispensable essay, in novelistic form. I draw inspiration for my Emersonian novel from my first attempt to read aspects of Emersonianism I find in Emerson’s “Experience” in the great American novels by Herman Melville, Henry James, and Frank Norris.
In “Aesthetic ownership as Self-Renewal,” I read Emerson’s “Experience,” taking into account one recent reappraisal of experience that gives a prominent place to Emersonian concepts of “ownership” and “property.” Since Wai Chee Dimock’s idea of ownership grounds an interpretation that goes against contemporary materialistic definitions or restatements of Emersonianism it is worth foregrounding a model of self-renewal consistent with an Emersonian idealism and dualism that is more in sync with the transcendentalism of 1842-44. Dimock, in an unforgettable and overlooked reading of this essay, posits a self, “sovereign within itself,” as a consequence of “division” between an “inner locale” of experience with its own measures of “scarcity, sufficiency, superfluity” “separate and apart” from “objective reality” with its economic measures of what is or is not sufficient. The inner aesthetic economy Dimock describes rests on a specific claim about ownership that equates property with poverty. The self that is a consequence of this surprising “commoditization” of poverty or scarcity is in a mode of “aesthetic ownership,” a cooler register of subjective experience shorn of intensities. The ghost-like, soporific, illusory glow, the stunned depleted quality of experience Emerson complains about in the first half of the essay, I argue, also brings its shine and is claimed as a virtue in the second part of “Experience.” This wisdom found in the closing of Emerson’s essay is brought about by a shift from observation conducive to scientific scrutiny of paltry empiricism to Emersonian moments of seeing crucial to renewing awareness of the self’s constitutional indigence or emptiness. The emptiness or poverty claimed in this inner aesthetic mode of ownership is also a first step in reclaiming the recuperative powers of surprise/wonder in the Emersonian self.
In Chapter 1, “Transcendental Resistance: Emersonian Irenic Thinking and the Passage to India in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick,” I argue that members of the crew in the Pequod, as they struggle to move away from the rising forces of capitalism sweeping the eastern shores of America, also offer transcendental resistance to the possessive/pillaging drive of the whaling business they have unwittingly committed themselves to. The resistance of the Pequod crew is a reminder of how indigenous thinking [the nature of it] of William Apess, a nineteenth century religious figure from the Peqout tribe, resists the paradoxes/hypocrisies in the political/religious arena in colonial America. In Apess’s words: “the pious fathers wrestled hard and long with their God, in prayer, that he would prosper their arms and deliver their enemies into their hands.” This hypocrisy, according to Apess, the “foundation” of “all the slavery and degradation" in the American colonies, was also the basis of the laws for Indian Removal. Even when openly legal crimes were being passed off as part of God's great design, Apess suggests cleaving to what is nobler, and finding ways to resist, not react, to the lower moral orbit of hypocrisy. The parallel between the great Pequot’s example of indigenous thinking, an early precursor to Emersonian irenic thinking, and the hypocrisies/paradoxes of imperialism/racism it uncovers in colonial America and what Melville’s voyage discovers in the role played by Queequeg, Pip, Fedallah, Tashtego, suggests that an Emersonian aesthetic ownership is being offered in this novel to allow the duplicitous nature of this full scale slaughter on the high seas to become clearly visible. When the Pequod’s eastward movement across the oceans orients the ship towards America’s western shores this whale hunt transforms to a quest romance, an obvious reversal of the Columbian voyage and its aspirations. Melville finds a passage to India not to claim the material wealth of the Indies but to reclaim the worth of dispossession, an austere mode of aesthetic ownership, modeled on ancient worship in India’s Elephanta Caves, where Melville’s narrator claims the oldest known portrait of a whale can be found on one of its cave walls. This invocation of a more serene relationship to the non-human world makes starker the tragic fall/lapse in perception that underlies the brutal slaughter/business of whales. Blood flows freely in this oceanic hunt but the brief passage to India offers another renunciatory space, after Apess’s example, to help transcend the grasping tendencies of this business on the oceans.
In Chapter 2, Austere Aestheticism and Emersonian Renunciation in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, I begin with a quick overview, following Jonathan Freedman, of the motivations of the British aestheticism movement. Freedman discusses British aestheticism in the late nineteenth century as the historical context for introducing an aspect of Emersonianism I call austere aestheticism, which brings back Stuart Sherman’s reading of Henry James’s aesthetic idealism and his overlooked essay on Emerson as another way to look at the late nineteenth and early twentieth century revival of aestheticism, a carry over of the American version of the aesthetic project to mark out a special sphere, “a locus of value and a guarantee of authority” to “Art.” I argue that this motivation to allot art its autonomy is derived from an aspect of Emersonianism where aesthetic ownership’s idealistic registers counterbalance the materialist registers of Paterian aesthetic experience. Aesthetic ownership, first shown/described in the “transparent eyeball” passage and its afterlife in moments of seeing in the Emersonian literary tradition, as THE master metaphor for the impersonal/irenic aesthetic dimension of ownership, contrasts with the charged intensity of aesthetic experience defined by Walter Pater in his conclusion to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. The calmer, more detached, mode of aesthetic ownership in Henry James’s austere aestheticism achieves the ambition of “Art” (the source of the autonomy and authority that marks the special sphere of “Art” - uppercase “A” as Richard Poirier and F.O. Matthiessen explain this difference) by introducing “ascesis” as the basis of the American writer’s implicit critique and fulfillment of what the British aesthetes attempted to but could not quite achieve in art. I argue that this austere aspect of aestheticism is born out of an overlap between Pater’s ascesis and Emerson’s renunciatory ideals. This conception of life/experience in that defining Emerson essay, “Experience,” is brought about by a beautiful balance in aesthetic ownership and aesthetic experience, the vantage of austere aestheticism that makes renewal possible.
In Chapter 3, “Emersonianism West: Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Ownership,” in Frank Norris’s novel, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, I begin by noting how the use and exchange value of things remain the most obvious measures of worth in the novel. But these values ascribed to possessing things only superficially account for McTeague’s obsessive attachment to what he owns and refuses to part with. I argue that the aspect of aesthetic experience most called for in the novel goes beyond what Gavin Jones has called “the embarrassment of naturalism,” or the feeling of being “stuck” that has come to dominate McTeague’s lived experience in Polk Street. Emersonian compensatory consolations of aesthetic ownership in reimagined property relations take the place of lost material conditions of ownership when McTeague is forced to dispossess his most valued things. This displacement radically transforms McTeague’s longing and the sense of the novel’s unusual ending. A hidden, more dominant, measure of worth reveals itself in these renunciatory moments giving McTeague’s possessive drives an expansive scale. I present a Norris we have not yet fully appreciated, a naturalist working within the tradition of Emersonian aestheticism that was first conceived in Richard Poirier’s A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature and that has recently found new articulation in Wai Chee Dimock’s Emerson.
