Perfectionist Counterpoint

Time and Place in "Thinking of Emerson"

Abstract

“Perfectionist Counterpoint” puts good books in conversation to demonstrate how such thinking enables us to overhear and affirm viable dimensions of ourselves. Plato’s Symposium, Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, and Erasmus’s “Religious Feast” set the table here since they all feature imaginary dinner parties where lively exchanges take place among engaged interlocutors.

Likewise, Cavell pursues lines of skepticism and romanticism in Emerson once they develop in tandem as modes of thinking in dialogue with one another. For Emerson only becomes interesting to Cavell after Emerson takes skepticism fully enough into account. Cavell’s initial anti-Emerson feelings parallel those of many Southern writers.

In The Last Gentleman, Walker Percy creates Forney Aiken, a high-minded alcoholic who parodically embodies the misbegotten idealism associated with the sage of Concord. Robert Penn Warren records similar sentiments in “Reading Emerson at 30,000 Feet,” a view from nowhere that Richard Tillinghast echoes in Sewanee in Ruins and turns against Percy himself: “flying Delta over kudzu fields out of Atlanta / reading The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy.”

Such dialogues between Southern writers and Emerson reflect an awareness of how skepticism and romanticism evolve in what Cavell might call “conversations” whether they succeed or fail. This essay samples a few such dialogues in terms that Cavell has made available for inquiries along those lines. Both their success and failure test the range and value of Cavell’s perceptions in this regard.