[novel] Ben's Response

[Benjamin Joseph Fidler]

Socrates and the Notion of Absence:
A Look at What it Means to Write in Epistolary Form

Dear Class, 

	Lovelace writes “I know thou likest this lively present-tense 
manner, as it is one of my peculiars” (305 emphasis his).  He writes 
of a present-tense moment, one that cannot be escaped.  Or is there a 
present tense moment?  Is writing the only act that lends itself to 
the creation of a history?  It comes after the fact, always, never 
during.  It is the hand that crafts the present in a perpetual past, 
an escapable future only realized in the past.
	Perhaps we should look ahead to the next of our novels.  
Tristram Shandy in several instances refers to the Greek sophist 
Zeno.  I am thinking of a particular philosophy of his that lends 
itself to this present situation of ours.  He claims that no 
destination is ever reached, for example a walk across the room.  
However we recognize that this is preposterous, for we have all walked 
across the room, in fact we have even ventured far enough to leave the 
room.  Yet the claims that to reach an objective, one must first go 
half way.  Once one is half way, the remaining half he must then go 
another half way before completing the whole.  Anyone willing to state 
how far one is?  Three quarters across the room.  We seem to be nearly 
there.  But wait.  Now we must again go half way before completion, as 
another eighth.  then again, add a sixteenth.  I could draw this 
explanation out perpetually, for that is the nature of numbers—to 
avoid the temporality of man—but the cynosure is an idea the one can 
never reach the present, for it is always exponentially closer and 
closer without ever reaching completion.  Let us think of history and 
the present moment as such.
	While we are on the subject of dead white male philosophers, 
lets talk about Socrates.  One of the few literary references to 
philosophy in Clarissa, Bedford writes “Could the divine SOCRATES, and 
the divine CLARISSA, otherwise have suffered?” (306).  It seems rather 
obvious that Bedford is alluding to the downfall of Socrates, his 
drinking of the hemlock and comparing it to the downfall of Clarissa.  
But the text reveals more.  Socrates never wrote anything down, rather 
we get his philosophies via Plato.  This is also seen throughout 
Clarissa.  We get multiple points of view from the characters about 
situations.  Who are we to trust?  Or do we only look for someone to 
trust because we have been trained to view history, and in this case 
narrative history from an objective omniscient narrator or from a 
single source first person narrator.  This is how we have digested 
history, yet Richardson offers us the epistolary form, in which we are 
immersed in multiple perspectives with a constant shift in the text 
from Clarissa to Lovelace to Bedford.  (Interestingly, the most sacred 
and authorative text of Western culture, the New Testament, Is 
primarily written in epistolary form.  It isn’t until recently that it 
has come under public examination about its authenticity (of course 
one could argue that public examination dates back to its conception 
(yet its authorativeness is relative only to the politico-religious 
climate in which it operates  ( an interestingly it is viewed in 
contemporary terms as a narrative, not a pure history)))).
	But to the point.  What I would like to state (whether or not 
it is accurate is another topic) is that presence, or the illusion 
thereof, is valued more then absence, and in return, structures our 
understanding of the absent.  We do not study India during the Second 
World War as much as we do Britain simply because the latter had a 
more significant presence.  But to this I will add that was the 
population of India larger or smaller then that of Britain.  I am 
stepping out on a branch here (and I must admit, it looks rather weak 
and thin), but I am willing to state that it was larger.  So who has 
more presence now eh?  If there are more Indians then Britons why do 
we focus on the British?  For a somewhat obvious answer, they were a 
larger factor in the turning of the war (not to mention they wrote the 
majority of history). The point is that presence is never presence, it 
is the construction of a infinitely possible future shaped by the 
absent or the writers, for the very act of writing is the epitome of 
the absent.  Therefore we can gather that the absent, the writers, the 
Plato’s, the walkers of Zeno’s room, Clarissa and cast, are the 
perpetuators of the present by its creation within the absent chaotic 
space of pre-writing.
	Warner seems to support this claim, stating that the book, or 
the novel, had its idea that it was constantly being pushed into the 
past when it first arrived (579). In addition he states that presence 
and absence are predicated on the forgetting of other novels, 
forgetting of other stories that have come before with those that 
follow more complete (582).  So if we are to understand him, 
Richardson’s novel has already beat it self to the point.  The novel, 
or any written matter for that matter (confusion intentional) is 
always subjected to the next, sometimes invisible future novel or 
writing, only because in the act of a future or past’s infinite 
possibilities, that the writing becomes stable enough to function 
within the genre.  We need a perpetual flow of text to understand the 
last.  This is Clarissa.  This is the novels premise, that we 
understand the present trace if you will, in accordance to the last 
writing, as I tried to show with the conversation between Bedford and 
Lovelace.  This, in my humble opinion, is the function and the role of 
an epistolary novel in a sea of other writings.  It has already 
destabilized itself within itself, not needing to wait for the future 
texts to do so.  Yet Richardson so completely realizes this 
(consciously or not) within the text that it is now becoming a more 
relevant text in contemporary literary studies.  Therefore, I should 
close, or will./ Your humble servant,/and most humble fellow-servant/ 
and Abby, thank you for not making us read Fielding/ BEN