Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 16 Number 2, August 2015
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Eshel, Amir. Futurity. Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2013. 368pp. ISBN 9780226924953 Hardback $43.00 e-Book $43.00
Reviewed by
City College, Norwich
When I was just about to begin living on my own for a period, my elderly aunt gave me a small framed picture by Philip Gray depicting sunlight half breaking through some threatening clouds overhanging a strikingly scarlet waterline at the base of the picture. It is captioned ‘storm clouds bring the hope of brighter days’. This caption may, in reductive terms, be what Amir Eshel’s fascinating, magisterial book is about. Through compelling analyses of contemporary literatures derived from past trauma and shock, Eshel negotiates, as (as he puts it) an ‘interpretive philosophy’ (p. 259), the Arendtian notion that whatever genuine future we have occurs from the recognition of our ever-present potential for action. The book itself being brilliantly crafted, the sceptical question I shall ask, in the space available here, is, are the terms by which Eshel appropriates Arendt (and indeed the terms of Arendt herself) in fact indicative of an unideal utopia as limiting as the one which, tracing to a defunct philosophy of history, Eshel roundly rejects? In other words, because the work Eshel has put in leads to what, to all extents and purposes, amounts to an unarguable account of how literature engages modern trauma, the question the reader faces is whether to believe in the philosophy implied by this engagement. That this question should be asked in the case of this book seems justified by the consideration that, as Julia Hell says in her praising comment quoted on the sleeve cover of Futurity, the book is ‘deeply political’ – Eshel not only critiques literary and visual works of art, he uses them constructively to gesture towards a solutional vision to be applied to both dark legacies of the past and apocalyptic future endgames. In asking this question, I hope partly to participate in what Eshel, citing a published exchange of ideas of Joseph Vogl and Alexander Kluge on critique, calls a Kantian notion of Kritik, and endorses, a notion predicated on the ability of criticism to discover the potentialities arising from the work in view rather than simply its flaws (p. 255). If Eshel’s way of critiquing, thus formulated, is followed, Futurity must itself be as much subject to this kind of critique as any of the literary and visual works of art it surveys, and if there is a ‘potentiality’ of Futurity, it is surely that it reveals and facilitates not only its own position but possible critical standpoints regarding that position. Eshel’s artistic analyses not being in doubt, it is some of these critical standpoints on which I base this review.
Eshel states that Futurity originated from his own ‘internal conversation’ on why the past matters (p. ix). The book’s answer is that it does ‘not only because it weighs heavily on the present, as it surely does, but also – and crucially – because the language we forge when we engage our traumatic histories plays a vital role in considering who we would like to become’ (p. x). The capacity of literature to probe the human ability to act and to prompt reflection and debate Eshel calls ‘futurity’ (p. 4). The traumatic past can be used anew to inform the future, because present remembering is inadequate. Leaving aside the query as to why Eshel focuses on trauma in formulating his positive thesis concerning the past (what would considering William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, for example, contribute to such a thesis?), I am not entirely sure that Futurity explains exactly why the past is important. In the book it seems rather that the weight of felt testimony and literary redescription is what underscores the assertion that it is. For a book that deals with traumatic literature, Futurity covers little actual testimony, so the weight of the past is felt rather than concretized (the generalized description around the figure of the Muselmann [p. 235] is the first acute mention of traumatic conditions in the main text of the book). If nonetheless we accept that the main purpose of Futurity is not to explain the importance of the past, we still need a robust transition from the idea that the past lingers powerfully in the present to the idea that it is our imaginative reengagement with the past that prospects the future. Otherwise we are, in Eshel’s frame, unable to answer questions such as whether the recreative power of poetic art is actually a denial of the openness of the future, since, after all, the open character of future possibility is rooted precisely in uncertainty – it is what we make of that uncertainty that is important, but this cannot take away from the uncertainty itself, the excitement of which comes from the very unknownness of what lies ahead. And we are unable to answer whether utopianism is of no use at all – how else do we strive to better ourselves apart from holding to some vision, apart from tending towards utopia? Futurity, however, does not seem to present such a transition, preferring to point at either of the two opposing alternatives of retrospection (exemplified by Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’) and prospection (exemplified by Arendt’s ‘human insertion’) before advocating their integration into an informed outlook on the future. Eshel does not conceive of prospection in any way other than a purely humanistic one, and his book does not present any alternative ways of viewing it, or validate any forms of futuristic thinking beyond those that utilize as a conceptual resource the coming to terms with the past through its creative redescription. But human agency is nevertheless fragile and fallible. Can its fragility and fallibility be acknowledged by reflection occurring in a world without God?
Eshel’s quest is for a redescribed past. Certainly, to look to the future often entails or even signifies the addressing of the past. Furthermore, Eshel portrays creative appraisals of the past as having been ‘inserted’ by the literary works he considers into the prospective thinking they undertake and wants contemporary thought to do the same in its articulation of further philosophy. Thus Eshel says that it ‘is unique to the imagination…that while literature and the arts allow us to engage the world outside the work, they cannot be reduced to its reflection’ (p. 36). But, taking the core of Eshel’s ‘futurity’ as philosophy of ‘action’, is such a philosophy not achieved by simply turning one’s back on past excesses? Is it necessary to redescribe the past at all? Turning one’s back seems, for Eshel, to be a consequence of futural thinking rather than the act that sets it in motion. Eshel says: ‘I want us to see even a past as difficult as Germany’s not merely as the unbearable mark of Cain but also as a prompt for readers to ask what we would like to become. And what might a future look like that is profoundly different from the past?’ (p. 37) But cannot it also be argued that the prompt is to ask what we must never become? And that the difference of the future derives from components other than an ‘optimistic’ appropriation of the past (that the ‘optimism’ lies elsewhere)? What are the strong reasons that, the past being part of us, a future solution must engage with/account for it (or some other such formulation)? Could Eshel have ‘inserted’ into his discourse the question whether, when we annul the past, our act of doing so is authentic, genuine? Eshel’s discourse is not merely a work of literary criticism or political exhortation: the ‘insertions’ and interventions it bears constitute the fascinating conversations it generates.
It may be that, of all the writers examined in Futurity, Kluge is the one most closely aligned to Eshel’s thesis of futurity. Eshel analyzes Kluge’s work as indicating that the past is ‘a point of departure for thought, which moves freely among past, present and future’, resulting in the act of reading being ‘perceived in proximity to prospection’ (p. 55). The two paragraphs spanning pages 65 and 66, forming the conclusion of the final section of the chapter on Kluge, show clearly some of the workings of Eshel’s thought on prospection. He says: ‘To think about the past and to tell its stories in the subjunctive [to know from history what there is that I do not wish for] means to avert the temptation of regarding it, especially its modern man-made catastrophes, as the unfolding of the inevitable. It means accepting the burden of human agency in history’ (p. 65). It is not clear to me, however, that the temptation of regarding the past as having been inevitable arises as significantly as Eshel implies. The capacity to remake the meaning of the past need not depend on the possibility for that remade meaning to be reinserted in our narratives of the future. Whether or not we see the past as inevitable need not constrain the quality of our thought concerning the future. Some pasts may in fact be inevitable and have little to do with the power of choice, which Eshel later – in Arendtian terms – argues (p. 223) underlies the active framework of history.
In questioning the necessity of redescribing the past, I am not saying that the possibilities Eshel indicates this would open up are not there, but rather that they are also discoverable by means other than the considerate inclusion of the past in the process through which they are brought into being. For Eshel, the interpretive vision stems from considering both retrospection and prospection, but it may be that there are no real arguments to be found for why we cannot just look forward in order to be prospective. That Eshel does not substantially consider this comes from his preference for the past as a freely-moving orientation towards future circumstances (which, in many senses, it undoubtedly is). It seems that there is, according to Eshel, significant value in the imagination as presenter of reality – reality is multivalent. But is imagination suspect when it is a question of fact, of what we face now? We should remember that a contemporary current of thought at least equally as strong as the emphasis on ‘progress’ and ‘future’, that is promoted by philosophers such as Richard Wollheim, consists in the idea of living in the present. Indeed, some literature as discussed by Eshel seems to lay precisely this emphasis, like the focusing on the mundane and quotidian details of everyday life, rather than the political situation, in Germany of the 1930s, that is described in Martin Walser’s Ein springender Brunnen (p. 68). Also, are the writers Eshel examines equally searching in their approaches to ‘futurity’?
In the coda to Futurity, entitled ‘Toward a Hermeneutic of Futurity’, Eshel, invoking Kafka’s mouse, with whose tale he opened the introduction to the book, says that ‘we need not succumb to the idea of human history as a recurring set of storms’ (p. 258). It seems to me that this is a problem of this book, that it presents this idea of not succumbing as a strong, exclusive alternative. Making this alternative strong risks the suspicion – which would be counter to Eshel’s aims – that it is the positive drive towards human action which is actually ‘not enough’ (p. 257). Of course, the latter would lead us towards a theistic outlook, which Eshel has already denied by the manner of his quoting, at the end of the final chapter, a passage from Ian McEwan’s 2008 essay ‘The Day of Judgment’ which states that is indifferent whether God exists when it comes to our function of ‘saving ourselves’.
Whether or not one entirely agrees with Eshel’s thesis of ‘futurity’ (and I do not, because I think it is incomplete), his vast, lavish, tightly argued and exceptionally interesting book – in which every sentence, every word, is important – may be for many years to come the resource par excellence for provoking philosophical reaction (and reflection, as Eshel himself would hope for) on a concept of the future as a potentially fruitful and genuine development of the traumatic past. His work has indeed opened my eyes to a more critical consideration of how that future becomes possible.