BY DANIEL T. O'HARA
Temple University
and JML co-editor
Harold Schweizer. On Lingering and Literature. Routledge, 2021. 124 pp. $59.95 hardcover.
I take my title question from the book’s self-description: “Drawing on a wide range of philosophic and literary texts and examples, [this book] exemplifies in its style and accessible argumentation the new genre of post-criticism, and aims to reward anyone interested in slow reading, daydreaming, or resisting our culture of speed and consumption” (i). Intrigued by the “post-criticism” lure, I have decided to review it, even though I do not like the use of “post.” I was antsy with it even when I was associated with a journal whose former subtitle included the term “postmodern.” (By the way, the best “post” title or subtitle was that of a Duke series: “post-contemporary.” You cannot go beyond that, unless one goes straight into the pure past.)
The best way to encapsulate the argument of this throwback phenomenological study of the aesthetic quality of lingering and its component relationship to literary experience (creative and appreciative) is to cite Emily Dickinson, poem #657, as the book does on page 70:
I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
More numerous of Windows—
Superior—for Doors—.
As Gaston Bachelard might say—his books are cited approvingly throughout the book, especially On Poetic Imagination and Reverie (1971)—lingering is not waiting, which as Schweizer’s last book On Waiting argues, is a state of ever awaiting action, one’s own, or another’s, as it bears on oneself. Beckett’s hapless clowns in Waiting for Godot while away the time but act as if they would prefer Godot to come to end their endless, pointless playing, since they cannot decide, it appears, to do so for themselves. Instead, as Schweizer rehearses here, lingering is indeed dwelling almost self-indulgently, even almost auto-erotically luxuriating, in possibilities, bathing in imaginative potential, no matter how strongly moved we are by this quality to make a definitive response.
We could describe Hamlet as possessed by lingering, perhaps, but this anxious indecisiveness is not the idea Schweizer wants the reader to take away from his book. The prolonged and delightful immersion in the aesthetic dimensions of experience is what he wants us to think of first and most of all. Given that Schweizer is a well-published poet— The Book of Stones and Angels (2015), Miriam’s Book (2017), and The Genealogy of Elevators (2018)—I immediately think of that moment leading to imaginative vision which inaugurates and shapes a poetic work of art, lyric poems particularly.
Such lingering in inchoate temporality is like what Keats calls famously in a 1817 letter “negative capability.” The difference from lingering is that Keats’s quality is the distinguishing feature of a poet of distinction, such as Shakespeare, and so, more definitively marked as ideal in its potentiality than mere everyday lingering. In fact, Schweizer cites Benjamin from “The Image of Proust” (1938) precisely on this everydayness (28-29), and cites Adorno on lingering’s astounding aping of the Creator’s “Sabbath gaze” (34-36), when after six days of creating from nothing—hard work indeed!—God rested. In this romantic and metaphysical combination of the ordinary and the supra-ordinary, we can also hear an allusion to the would-be secular miracle of Wordsworth’s visionary quest, that sense sublime of something evermore about to be.
The book’s chapters most engrossing for me are six through ten, which are, respectively, on the temporality of Whitman’s grass; the ecstatic slowness of Rilke’s looking; Woolf’s indescribable pause, particularly in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), when Clarissa Dalloway notes a falling drop; Proustian interludes of all kinds, especially in the first three books of In Search of Lost Time; and the paradoxical empty weightiness of Sebald’s presentation of time throughout his four hybrid fictional memoirs, with The Rings of Saturn (1998) and Austerlitz (2001) receiving the most attention.
Schweizer is specifically attuned, following Sebald’s lead, to the opposition between the forgetting and remembering of the dead. He opens “The Weight of Sebald’s Time” chapter by quoting The Rings of Saturn where it quotes Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial (1658): “To set one’s name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best men have gone without a trace?” (93). Schweizer then quotes the narrator’s lament in Austerlitz:
. . . how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on. (Qtd. in 93)
Lapsing into oblivion is less a past or future state than the eternally moving present in Sebald’s fictions.
Mrs. Dalloway in her novel reflects as she sits down to her dressing table in the morning on time’s passage, and reads her current fate in her created image for the moment as a falling drop she dives into the day to hold it tenderly in her close attention:
She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fifty-second year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July, August! Each still remained almost whole, and, as if to catch the falling drop, Clarissa (crossing over to the dressing table) plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it, there—the moment of this June morning . . . . (Qtd. in 64)
This is the essence of On Lingering and Literature: Clarissa Dalloway’s savoring of the moment and all its chosen and contingent experiences, including its passing. Schweizer explains:
The inversion of time and duration, of narrative and lyric time is here represented en miniature. Clarissa’s inner life dominates the brief narrative of this paragraph to such an extent that the visible, external action—“(crossing to the dressing table)”—needs to be mentioned only in parentheses. Compared to the temporality of “the moment of this June morning, the spatial crossing of the room and table, appear banal and merely circumstantial. While the paragraph exemplifies the modernist novel’s focus on duration rather than spatial linearity, this duration only emerges as Clarissa abandons her fixation on measurable time, the years and months of her life, and yields to “the very heart of the moment." (64)
I do not know if informed and appreciative reflection on such formative moments of literary inspiration constitutes a new genre of post-criticism, especially if one remembers Woolf’s beloved predecessor Walter Pater and his once famous collection of essays Appreciations (1889), but I am happy to embrace this volume closely for its accessible insights and considerable achievements of style.
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Daniel T. O’Hara, emeritus professor of English and humanities at Temple University, is the author of nine books, including Virginia Woolf and The Modern Sublime: Invisible Tribunal (Palgrave/Macmillan: 2015), and editor or co-editor of six collections, most recently Humanistic Criticism: A William V. Spanos Reader (Northwestern UP, 2015).
