“Excerpts from Memory”:

Autobiography, Film, and the Double Existence of Cavell’s Philosophical Prose

by William Rothman
 Insofar as Stanley Cavell’s ambition, like Emerson’s, is ultimately to be known as

a writer, his prose is the measure of his philosophical achievement. My paper takes as a

starting point Cavell’s intuition, expressed at the Paris colloquium occasioned by the

publication of The World Viewed in French translation, that thinking about film had an

effect on his “ambitions for philosophical prose” and thus left “permanent marks” on the

way he writes. In particular, as he put it, the “necessity to become evocative in capturing

the moods of faces and motions and settings, in their double existence as transient and as

permanent, was, I believe, more than any other ambition I held, a basis of freedom from

the guarded rhythms of philosophy as I had inherited it.” The double existence – the

transience and permanence – guaranteed by film’s ontological conditions, has become an

aspiration of all his philosophical writing, not only his writing about movies.

When I published my first books in the 1980s, academic film study in America

was in the grip of the doctrine that its legitimacy could only be established by the “higher

authority” the field called “theory.” Students were taught that to think seriously about

film they had to break their attachment to the movies that were meaningful to them.

Happily, the reign of theoretical systematizing over film study has ended. Yet it remains

the case that when students are initiated into the field, at least in America, the picture that

is presented to them of the history of film privileges writings, such as Laura Mulvey’s

“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” that apply theoretical systems to films. Mostly,

these days, students are taught to do what the field calls “historiography,” not theory.

They are not given the tools to question the doctrines and prejudices, supposedly

legitimated on theoretical grounds, that have been, to American film study, like land

mines rendering the field so treacherous that few risked straying from what they were

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taught was the safest path. Mostly, those doctrines and prejudices have not been cleared

away, or dismantled. Thus, at least implicitly, they set restrictive agendas for the

“historiographical” research – I don’t know why “historical” isn’t a good enough word –

that has become the paradigm for the field.

Stanley Cavell writes about film in more adventurous ways, of course -- ways far

more open and responsive to the ways films themselves think, and to our ways of

experiencing them.

In my own writing about film, I have always aspired to align myself,

philosophically, with Cavell’s understanding that we cannot acknowledge the value, or

the meaning, of a film that is worthy of our interest without finding words we can stand

behind, words that give voice to our experience even as they acknowledge the film’s own

ways of expressing itself.

I have been inspired—and challenged—by Cavell’s writings to develop my own

idiosyncratic strategies, thematic concerns, and stylistic devices. I have in mind, for

example, the particular ways I use frame enlargements, and my particular reasons for

using them those ways. My first book, Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze, was written at a

time when capturing a frame from a film was a labor-intensive operation. Nonetheless, I

felt motivated to incorporate over 600 frame enlargements into my accounts of five

Hitchcock films. In writing about Hitchcock’s films, I was moved to create a format that I

have made my own over the years. Each chapter takes the form of a “reading” that

follows one film from first shot to last. Such a reading can be thought of as an

interpretation or even a kind of performance of the film, in the sense that a pianist

performs or interprets a Beethoven sonata by making his or her own sense of the notes as

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written. In the readings that make up the book, description and interpretation cannot be

separated. As this suggests, what it is that is being “read” – described, interpreted – at any

given moment is what is taking place within the film (what the characters are doing, what

the camera is doing), but it is also my experience of that moment, how that moment

moves me. And when I am motivated, as I am throughout the book, not only to describe

and interpret moments but also to think through their implications, my thinking is at once

about the film and about my experience. It is also about film itself. And it is about what it

takes to think, and write, seriously about films.

For myself, and for so many of the writers about film whose work I care about,

Cavell’s aspiration—and achievement -- in fashioning prose that succeeds in evoking the

“double existence” – the transience and permanence – of the world on film has been a

basis of freedom from the guarded – no, stultifying -- rhythms of so much academic

writing about film. Thinking about Cavell’s prose has had an effect on my aspirations for

my own prose and has left permanent marks on the way I write.

“Excerpts from Memory,” which appeared in Critical Inquiry in 2006, is the first

installment of Cavell’s autobiography, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, which

is scheduled to be published by Stanford University Press this August. I love the book’s

title, by the way, with its graceful acknowledgment, at once playful and philosophically

serious, of the intimacy of the relationships, in his understanding, among philosophy (by

alluding to skepticism), music and movies (by its nod to “How Little We Know,” the

great Hoagy Carmichael song Lauren Bacall sings in To Have and Have Not, a film that

plays a privileged part in the book’s penultimate chapter).

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 My presentation today restricts its attention to the installment already published

in Critical Inquiry, which confirms – as does the entire book, of course -- that Cavell’s

achievement as a philosopher cannot be separated from his literary achievement in

fashioning prose that captures, in unguarded rhythms (and with perfect pitch) the “moods

of faces and motions and settings, in their double existence as transient and permanent.”

Since “memories of movies are strand over strand” with memories of his life, as the

opening sentence of The World Viewed’s Preface puts it, telling the story of his life calls

for precisely the same powers of evocation as writing about movies. In turn, it is Cavell’s

hope, and faith, that in writing his autobiography he will find that, to this date, the life he

has achieved and his philosophical achievement are one.

“Excerpts from Memory” begins with this passage, which Cavell dates July 2,

2003:

The catheterization of my heart will no longer be postponed. My cardiologist

announces that he has lost confidence in his understanding of my condition, so far

based on reports of what I surmise as symptoms of angina and of the noninvasive

monitoring allowed by X-rays and by the angiograms produced in stress tests. We

must actually look at what is going on inside the heart.

And, I want to add, the autobiography these words are inaugurating, itself a “look

at what is going on inside the heart,” is a philosophical procedure, not without its own

scary risks, that will no longer be postponed.

“In a previous such period of awaiting surgery, a dozen years ago,” Cavell goes

on, “I controlled or harnessed my anxiety by reading.” At that time,

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 I had found that I resisted the efforts of a novel to attract me from my world; I

needed the absorption of labor rather than that of narrative. I discovered that

reading a book by Vladimir Jankélévitch on the music of Debussy that I had

discovered in Paris and brought back a few months earlier, meaning to read it at

once (I was planning a set of three lectures, in the last of which the Debussy-

Maeterlinck Pelléas and Mélisande would play a pivotal role), effectively

concentrated my attention.

This time, he is not inclined, as he puts it “to house my anxiety” – “house,” with

its intimations of Thoreau, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein’s “houses of card,” is a

thematically significant word throughout “Excerpts from Memory” – “as a secondary

gain of reading, but rather by a departure in my writing.” The point of this “departure”—

another resonant word, of course -- is to begin learning whether he can write his way into

and through the anxiety by telling the story of his life. Cavell likes to think of philosophy

as the education of grownups. By the philosophical procedure he is undertaking, which

he describes as writing himself into and hopefully through his anxiety, he hopes to learn

something, to further his own education. What his anxiety is is part of what he hopes to

learn. The only way to test whether he can write his way into and through his anxiety by

telling the story of his life is by telling it. By writing his way into his anxiety, he hopes to

write his way through it – that is what catheterization is for, after all -- hopefully without

finding that more invasive procedures are necessary. As in all his writing, his hope, his

faith, is that the outcome will be a greater freedom.

Cavell adds, parenthetically,

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 Or is it the other way around—that I am using the mortal threat of the procedure,

and of what it may reveal, to justify my right to tell my story, in the way in which I

wish to tell it? What could this mean—my story is surely mine to tell or not to tell

according to my desire? But of course the story is not mine alone but eventually

includes the lives of all who have been incorporated in mine.

Whose lives have been incorporated in his? Those who are to figure as characters

in the story he is telling (in this first installment, his mother and father above all). But

also all and sundry readers who may come to find themselves in his story – for a start, all

of us in this room, I would hope. Yet although this writer’s story is not his alone, it is his

alone to tell. But who is this “he”? This, too, he hopes to learn by telling his story.

Cavell observes that in recent years he had formed many times the intention to

compose a consecutive memoir that tells the story of his life. “There have been

autobiographical moments in my writing from the beginning of the first essays I still use,”

he writes, “and from the time of the book I called A Pitch of Philosophy I have sought

explicitly to consider why philosophy, of a certain ambition, tends perpetually to intersect

the autobiographical.” But he has “until now been unwilling, or uninterested,” he goes on,

“to tell a story that begins with my birth on the south side of Atlanta, Georgia…”

He still has no interest in telling the story of his life the way this

passage begins to chronicle it. For such a narrative strikes him “as leading

fairly directly to death, without clearly enough implying the singularity of

this life, in distinction from the singularity of all others, all headed in that

direction.” Rather, his interest in telling the story of his life is to see how

what Freud calls the detours on the human path to death—accidents

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 avoided or embraced, strangers taken to heart or neglected, talents imposed

or transfigured, malice insufficiently rebuked, love inadequately

acknowledged—mark out for me recognizable efforts to achieve my own

death. That, then, is what I have wanted authorization to speak of, which

includes the right to assume that something has been achieved on the paths

I have taken, obscure to me as that achievement, as I begin this story, may

be.”

What has now given him the “authorization” he was wanting, or emboldened him

to begin without it? What has made him feel he has the right to assume that “something

has been achieved” on the paths he has taken, obscure to him as that achievement, as he

begins this story, may be – where the “something” he must assume he has achieved can

be seen as “recognizable efforts” to achieve his own death? The only way to test whether

the paths his life has taken do “mark out” for him such recognizable efforts is to learn, by

telling the story of his life, whether he can recognize such markers on those paths. And

what if he finds that he cannot? Is this, then, the anxiety he hopes to write himself into,

and through – the terrible possibility that he will discover no such markers, no such

achievement, on the paths his life has taken?

And so we come to this writing’s “departure”, which is dated, significantly, July

4th,. “Trying to fall asleep last night,” the day’s entry begins, “I realized that if I had

wished to construct an autobiography in which to disperse the bulk of the terrible things I

know about myself and the shameful things I have seen in others, I would have tried

writing novels in which to disguise them.” Cavell’s aspiration in telling the story of his

life is not to “disperse” – the surgical metaphor surfaces again -- the monstrousness he

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knows in himself and the shameful things he has seen in others (both terrifyingly in

evidence, in certain of the scenes he evokes, in “Excerpts from Memory,” between

himself and his father). An autobiography courts monstrousness, shamefulness, if it

refuses some equitable balance – but what balance? -- between “forgetting and

remembering the suffering of injustice, the monstrousness of tyranny” that is an

inalienable part of its writer’s life, as it is of any human life.

Cavell suggests that his aspiration, at least in part, is to compose “a philosopher's

or writer's autobiography, which, like Wordsworth's Prelude (quality aside), tells the

writer's story of the life out of which he came to be a (his kind of) writer.”

But Wordsworth showed that that story had to be told in poetry—or rather showed

that the telling of that story was the making of poetry (Emerson calls something of

the sort a meter-making argument), keeping the promise of poetry. To do

something analogous to that work I would have to show that telling the accidental,

anonymous, in a sense posthumous, days of my life is the making of philosophy,

however minor or marginal or impure, which means to show that those days can be

written, in some sense are called to be written, philosophically.

Cavell is the kind of writer who hopes to achieve a freer, more open future by

writing himself into, and through, the anxiety that the paths his life has taken may have

brought him no closer to achieving his own death. To tell the story of the life out of

which he has come to be the kind writer he is, his autobiography has to evoke the

“accidental, anonymous, in a sense posthumous, days” of his life. (“Accidental,” because

his writing seeks significance in the “detours” exemplified by “accidents avoided or

embraced, strangers taken to heart or neglected, talents imposed or transfigured, malice

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insufficiently rebuked, love inadequately acknowledged.” “Anonymous,” because its

writer is testing his representativeness. And “posthumous” because, well, this writing

aspires to recognize, in the days it evokes, efforts to achieve his own death.)

And he must write his autobiography not in poetry but in prose, a kind of prose

that makes philosophy. (Not that philosophical prose cannot have its own kind of poetry.

“Every art, every worthwhile human enterprise, has its poetry” – what Cavell’s mother

would call its “secrets” – “ways of doing things that perfect the possibilities of the

enterprise itself, make it the one it is.”) To make philosophy, this writing must show that

it makes philosophy. It must show that his life’s “accidental, anonymous, in a sense

posthumous, days” can be written, in some sense are called to be written, philosophically.

And to show that it makes philosophy, it has to stake its claim to be philosophy. For it to

exist as philosophy, to have a further life in the world, is for this claim to be

acknowledged, accepted, where “acceptance does not mean that it is agreed with, only

that disagreement with it must claim for itself the standing of philosophy.”

“I might say that I am already halfway there,” Cavell observes, since

“Wittgenstein, more to my mind than any philosopher of the century just past, has shown

that, or shown how it happens that, a certain strain of philosophy inescapably takes on

autobiography, or perhaps I should say an abstraction of autobiography.” He goes on,

This is how I have understood Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and

Austin's procedures in their appeals to the language of everyday, or ordinary

language, namely, that I speak philosophically for others when they recognize

what I say as what they would say, recognize that their language is mine, or put

otherwise, that language is ours, that we are speakers…. As in Emerson, and in

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 Thoreau, this turns out to mean that the philosopher entrusts himself or herself to

write, however limitedly, the autobiography of a species—if not of humanity as a

whole, then representative of anyone who finds himself or herself in it.

Wittgenstein and Austin may have shown that, and how it happens that, a certain

strain of philosophy inescapably takes on an abstraction of autobiography. Yet neither

found it inescapable to write an autobiography, much less one that aspires to show that,

and how, the “accidental, anonymous, in a sense posthumous, days” of his life call for, are

called to, being written philosophically. As we have said, in telling the story of his life,

Cavell is testing his representativeness. And he is doing this, as he puts it, “from a

posture in which I may discern the identities compacted in my existence, a matter of

attaching significance to insignificance, and insignificance to significance.” For the

identities compacted in the writer’s existence to be incorporated in the story he tells, the

telling – the prose itself – must “discern” its own influences, its own sources. It’s not

enough for the writer simply to assert that he learned from his mother the importance of

posture, or that he inherited his father’s talent for improvisation as well as what his

mother calls his father’s “seriousness.” In “Excerpts from Memory,” Cavell’ writing, his

prose, must show the influences it discerns, must discern the influences it shows.

(Whenever my own writing precisely clinches an argument with crystalline logic – I wish

this happened more often -- I discern an inheritance from my own father. And whenever

my own writing makes me choke up or even brings a tear to my eye, I know this is a gift

from my mother, who loved to sing to me songs that begin with such lines as “She was a

Rabbi’s daughter” and end with words like “I wish that I could, was the man’s sad reply,

but she’s dead in the coach ahead.”)

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 The World Viewed opens with the wonderful sentences, “Memories of movies are

strand over strand with memories of my life. During the quarter of a century (roughly

from 1935 to 1960) in which going to the movies was a normal part of my week, it would

no more have occurred to me to write a study of movies than to write my autobiography.

Having completed the pages that follow, I feel that I have been composing a kind of

metaphysical memoir--not the story of a period of my life but an account of the

conditions it has satisfied.” Because the writing of The World Viewed is prompted by

memories of movies which are strand over strand with memories of his life, hence

private, particular to him, Cavell finds himself feeling, upon completing the body of the

book, that he has written a kind of memoir. The World Viewed does not tell the story of

the period of his life in which he enjoyed what he calls a "natural relation" to movies.

That story escapes him. The memoir he feels he has composed is an account of the

conditions that were satisfied by movies and movie-going for all who enjoyed the relation

to movies he enjoyed. What broke his natural relation to movies? What was that relation,

that its loss seemed to demand repairing, or commemorating, by taking thought?

Addressing these questions is the business of The World Viewed as a whole. In other

words, the book’s writing cannot be separated from what the writing is about. The World

Viewed is a metaphysical memoir.

Little Did I Know, the autobiography of which “Excerpts from Memory” is the

first installment, is a metaphysical memoir as well. But it does tell the story of its writer’s

life -- at least, of the period of his life that ends with the publication of The Claim of

Reason. Because The Claim of Reason declares, and proves, his existence as a writer, as

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his kind of writer, as the kind of writer he has been ever since, its publication brings to an

end the story that “Excerpts from Memory” begins to tell.

The World Viewed was motivated by a momentous event: the “breaking” of his

“natural relation to movies,” a loss so traumatic it “seemed to demand repairing, or

commemorating, by taking thought.” The publication of The Claim of Reason was

momentous not because it “repaired” or “commemorated” a traumatic loss, but because

it proved that by “taking thought” he had claimed his existence as a writer.

Will the project “Excerpts from Memory” inaugurated prove equally momentous

to Cavell as a writer? If so, will it be because of the further claims it stakes out? Or

because it is motivated by an event as momentous as the “breaking” of is “natural relation

to movies,” a further loss so traumatic it “seemed to demand repairing, or

commemorating, by taking thought?” Can we say, for example, that the writing of

“Excerpts” is motivated by the breaking of its writer’s “natural relation” to his own

memories, his own past, his own life? What could that mean?

Before he awakened to the realization that his natural relation to movies was

already broken, Cavell never intended to write a study of movies. The writing of The

World Viewed was never postponed. But in “Excerpts” he notes that in recent years he

had often had the intention writing his autobiography. The writing of The World Viewed

was never in the same way postponed. Why telling the story of his life will no longer be

postponed is, in a sense, the story his autobiography is telling.

In writing about movies, as we have said, Cavell recognized the need for prose

capable of evoking film’s ever-shifting “moods of faces and motions and settings” and

capable, at the same time, of capturing what remains fixed in the physiognomy of the

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world on film -- what in The World Viewed he calls the “reality of the unsayable,” the

“unmoving ground” that makes film capable of exhibiting the world. The double

existence – the transience and permanence – vouchsafed by film’s ontological conditions

became an aspiration of all his philosophical writing, not only his writing about movies.

But how could he begin to achieve this by telling the story of his life?

It was not a traumatic loss that caused him to stop postponing the telling of the

story, Cavell suggests in “Excerpts from Memory.” It was a “pre-compositional

agreement” he made with himself – one that solved the problem, which had been

stopping him, of how to begin. What freed him “to press onward with my necessity to

find an account of myself without denying that I may be at a loss as to who it is or for

whom at any time, varying no doubt with varying times, I am writing,” was his decision --

or was it his coming accidentally upon the simple thought? – to begin entries of memories

by dating himself on each day of writing.

By following this “double time scheme,” he could “accept an invitation in any

present from or to any past, as memory serves and demands to be served.” Thus his

writing could regularly bring attention back to the fact that the most he could expect to

provide would be excerpts from a life—so that he could finesse the question of beginnings

by repeatedly bringing a day's or an hour's writing to a close without anticipating when a

further time for beginning, of inspiration or of opportunity, will present itself. It is this

“double time scheme,” in other words, that enables the writing of his autobiography to be

at once improvised and composed -- to acknowledge, and to achieve, the double

existence, the transience and permanence, of the “accidental, anonymous, in a sense

posthumous, days” it evokes.

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 In a climactic passage of Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed, Marian Keane and

I wrote the following:

St. Augustine stole a pear; lots of children have. Rousseau, like lots of

little boys, got a spanking with his pants down. For years, going to the

movies was a normal part of Cavell's week, as it was for millions of

Americans. And for the writer of The World Viewed, as for most regular

moviegoers, the natural relation to movies has been broken. Why seems

this so particular to him? Because among all of us who have involved

movies massively in our lives, among all of us who have lost our "natural

relation" to movies, he is the one prompted by that loss to think

philosophically about what movies are and what makes them important.

He is the one prompted to step forward to write this book, to take upon

himself the burden of its writing, to accept the necessity of the loss it

mourns, to confess his own implication, to make himself intelligible, to

open himself, like Joan of Arc, to interrogation and rejection.

Again, who is this “he”? Whose lives have been incorporated in his life?

What identities are “compacted” in his identity as a writer? These are questions

The World Viewed postpones. “Excerpts from Memory” begins to address them

directly, opening its author’s life, his writing, to an interrogation that will no

longer be postponed. In The World Viewed Cavell writes, “I think everyone

knows odd moments at which it seems uncanny that one should find oneself just

here now, that one’s life should have come to this verge of time and place, that

one’s history should have unwound to this room, this road, this promontory. (This

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conference. This paper.) Movies bring home the knowledge, or self-knowledge,

that we exist in the condition of myth, that we do not require the gods to show that

our lives illustrate a story which escapes us; and it requires no major recognition

or reversal to bring its meaning home."

In telling the story of his life in a way that makes philosophy, Cavell hopes to

show that, and how, the “excerpts” – the days, the moments -- his prose evokes mark out

for him recognizable efforts to achieve his own death. He hopes to show that, and how,

these “excerpts”, told the way he wants to tell them, enable him to recognize -- however

partially, however belatedly -- the myth his life illustrates, a story that had escaped him –

the story of how his life should have come to this, to just these words, to telling just this

story. And he hopes to show that this is a story that is not his alone.

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