Since Plato, philosophical thinking has been understood as something that sheds light on the dark realms of the unknown, rendering something visible, conceivable, and tellable. As I have argued throughout this book, the night’s absence of light serves in turn as the ground and vanishing point for a thinking and imaging of the world based on vision. It is the matrix against which any mode of thinking aimed at illumination must distinguish and position itself. And yet, the night resiliently returns from the margins of the map of the knowable to which the enlightenment has allocated it, particularly in aesthetic texts. As my passage through representations of the night in literature and film so far has shown, aesthetic texts are fascinated by the night as stage and state of mind during which perceptions, discoveries, and decisions different from those belonging to a world illuminated by reason play themselves out. Art performs what philosophy dreams of scattering.
The philosophy of Enlightenment may be interested in the night only as that from which it distinguishes itself by introducing into it the light of reason. Yet even rationality cannot remain untouched by other modes of thinking, especially once it engages with aesthetics. Literature consistently puts dreams on display to embellish the consequences of fantasies, fears, and transgressions coming out of the night. These dreams form a counter force to Enlightenment’s light-bearing. They unfold those areas on the map of knowledge from which rational thinking distinguishes itself but also from which it takes its advice, particularly when its own epistemological means have reached their end. As my discussion of Shakespeare’s plays shows, in love stories that play through romantic confusions, the end of the night results in either happy forgetfulness or death. In gothic narratives the end of the night leads to madness and self-expenditure, or psychic restoration. The nocturnal flaneur, having lost the ground of self-confidence beneath his feet, undergoes a rite of passage that results in a happy reintegration into the world of the everyday. The heroes and heroines of film noir either exploit their gamble with fate to the utmost or give in to a chance that could not be calculated.
One can speak of a reversal to magical thinking taking place in the nocturnal scenes of literature because the events put on display by aesthetic texts allow for an articulation of those forces that contradict and answer back to rational thinking, giving voice to a different truth. This may result in a psychic and phenomenological disorientation, even complete self-expenditure in madness or death. Yet the nocturnal literary scene is also conceived in close proximity to chaos because it offers the stage for a struggle with conceptions of the self that go in tandem with moral education. To embark on a journey to the end of the night entails a willingness to encounter states of alterity, whether love, death, madness, the demonic, or the horrific. Each of these states, although turned against the ordinary everyday, is also directed toward it. To bring a further dimension into play, I will now turn to novels in which (in contrast to Schikaneder’s libretto for The Magic Flute, with which I began) the night emerges not as the site of a transgression refuting a morality of the day; instead, plans for a new day must be made at night. An ethical attitude can be attained at night because it promises and promotes transgressions that, owing to the foreseeable end of the night, are also limited. To experience the night also means to live through it. As the following discussion shows, the journey to the darkest part of the night must be distinguished from a journey through to the other side. At the deepest end of the night, we find a turn to dawn.
Moral decisions that allow us to leave behind the fascinations and dangers the night holds are not only reached in nocturnal scenes that serve to mirror and comment on the day. The ethical reversal that makes a move into a new day possible may also require that we take upon ourselves the night that seeks us out. In the spiritual death at the heart of nights of moral anagnorisis lies the force of rebirth. The recreation of a new moral world is predicated on the dissolution of the one that must be cast off. To ask what it takes to journey to the end of the night, to arrive at its limit, addresses the fact that to awaken
from the night means reaching the decisive requirements
in and
during the night. My own passage through aesthetic nights of desire’s confusions, gothic terror, urban wandering, and
noir transgressions now moves to a reading of George Eliot’s
Middlemarch (1871) and Edith Wharton’s
The House of Mirth (1905), along with Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway (1925),
To the Lighthouse (1927),
Orlando (1928), and
The Waves (1931). I have chosen these texts to illuminate the nocturnal side of moral imagination. At issue again is the enmeshment of nocturnal scene and psychic condition, as well as a feminine encoding of the night. Two nocturnal figures serve as points of orientation for the journey to the end of the night these novels explore: Nyx, the night deity of antiquity, cradling sleep and death in her arms, and the Christian mother of God, the Virgin Mary, whose dark cloak protects all mortals while her foot crushes the snake of temptation.
The awakening that all these novels are directed toward differs radically from Schikaneder’s banishment of his star-blazing queen, who, as I have argued, is brought onto the stage as a counter force to Enlightenment reason. Vanquishing the magic of the night she represents serves to legitimate Sarastro’s new regime of power. The three novels I turn to in this final part explore a different form of awakening by seeking to think the night in the day. In his Adorno Prize lecture, Fichus, Jacques Derrida offers a philosophical reassessment of the night that goes beyond the “responsibility of the philosopher to the rational imperative of wakefulness, the sovereign ego, and the vigilant consciousness” (165). He encourages us to ascribe a clarity of insight, an enlightening illumination to oneiric discourse. The dream we are torn from when we wake up allows us to think “the irreplaceable, a truth or a meaning, that consciousness might hide from us on awakening, even put back to sleep.” Asked whether there is an ethics of the dream that is not guilty of abdication, irresponsibility, and a flight into the imaginary, Derrida comes upon the paradox of a “possibility of the impossible” that emerges when mysticism and enlightenment fuse, “as if dreaming were a more vigilant state than being awake, the unconscious more thoughtful than consciousness” (167).
An awakening that thinks the night in the day in terms of this paradox calls upon us “to wake up, to cultivate vigilance while remaining attentive to meaning, faithful to the lessons and lucidity of the dream, caring for what the dream lets us think about, especially when what it lets us think about
is the possibility of the impossible” (168). If, according to Derrida, such a “possibility of the impossible” can only be gleaned as dream knowledge, this suggests that its representation is best sought in those aesthetic texts that represent in terms of dream work what a rational imperative of waking is incapable of explaining. In the novels by Eliot, Wharton, and Woolf, the protagonists’ gradual achievement of knowledge is conceived as a dreamlike state, allowing for experiments in moral self-fashioning that are directed at an awakening
in the night, as well as a waking up
out of the night.
With their play of illuminated darkness and obscured light, the candles, gaslight, or electricity that illuminate the nocturnal scenes of moral struggle, literally underscore how, in the narrative’s peripeteia, the mystic night side of the psyche meets its enlightenment. What traces does such moral clarity of vision achieved in the night leave after wakening in the next day? How does the possibility of thinking the impossible, of transcribing that vigilance that respects the nocturnal side of morality, find a narrative resolution at the end of each of the novels? The nights of moral struggle upon which these novels turn further unfold the possibility of thinking the impossible. They put to the test moral experiments that, at the end of the night, will prove impossible to sustain in the ordinary day because they are inextricably interwoven with dreams of self-fashioning. At the end of Middlemarch, Dorothea must bury her dream of becoming a modern-day Saint Theresa. In The House of Mirth, Lily can resolve her self-performance as a precious rarity only by completely vanishing into this dream figure. Both novels ultimately kill off the dreams their heroines are identified with throughout the narrative. The moral experiment at issue thus entails a relinquishing of fiction.
To go into the night entails entering a provisionally chaotic world. In nocturnal scenes, the ordinary everyday is disbanded while actions and decisions that belong to the day can be reversed. Comparable to the cosmogonies discussed in the first part of this book, in aesthetic representations the fashioning of new worlds is also predicated on the dissolution of the one it replaces. Upon leaving the dream worlds on which fiction thrives, the clandestine desire that made a flight into the night necessary in the first place can be renegotiated. Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream enacts a narrative trajectory, in the course of which an enjoyment of violent desires threatens to completely destroy all prior self-conceptions of the afflicted lovers. The forgetting that accompanies their awakening allows the chaotic events of the night to become vague memories. Their fragments can be assembled into a coherent whole and interpreted in the interest of the day. If entering the chaos of the night entails giving up the laws of the day, the experience of dawn at the end of a journey through the night permits a conversion of the violent excess afforded by this passage into a dream narration. Losses are inevitable in the course of such translation. The price all dreamers pay for waking into a new beginning is that only fragments of the knowledge won at night can be carried over into this day. The rest falls prey to the censorship of waking consciousness, whose recollection distorts, transforms, and mitigates the night’s knowledge to fit the needs of the day. Hence, the advantage of a dream that has no bottom. Its unplumbable depth renders it resistant to diurnal rationality. It continues to live in Derrida’s paradox of the possibility of the impossible, in the sustained dream text that implicitly haunts those who have awoken.
Regardless of whether marriage, death, or the writing of a text puts closure on a journey to the end of the night, abandoning this nocturnal stage and state of mind raises the following questions: What knowledge, what choice, what attitude toward the world is achieved upon awakening? How much night can be relinquished and how much night must be carried over
into and borne
in the day? As my discussion of the nocturnal flaneur has shown, a journey to the end of the night may also play through dissolution of the world. These narratives perform the moment when doubt overrules all security afforded by the everyday, revealing the groundless abyss on which, according to Hegel, all self-knowledge is based. In a similar vein, gothic heroes and heroines walking under the sign of a night side of the psyche give voice to a dangerous desire for nothingness. They refuse the censorship of diurnal consciousness, preferring self-expenditure in madness. Both gothic fiction and film noir obfuscate distinctions between the prohibitions of the day and the transgressions of the night. Doppelgangers such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are evidence of the way each individual contains both aspects within himself or herself. Even if gothic fiction and film noir usually place death at the end of a journey through the night, Derrida’s paradox applies. These texts call for a vigilance vis-à-vis that spiritual illumination that can only appear against the backdrop of a nocturnally lit scene.
This book has isolated three mutually dependent attitudes toward the night, all of which result from the reversal of the Enlightenment project into magical thinking. The first entails the rational thinking propagated by The Magic Flute, which abjects the night by banishing the star-blazing queen into eternal darkness in an effort to overcome the dangerous magic she represents. The second addresses the night side of the psyche, first explored by romantic psychology and gothic culture, which enjoys precisely those states of madness, excess, pleasure, and destruction that rationality forbids and represses. The third involves the notion of waking up by abdicating from one’s fatal dreams. Gothic narratives and film noir in particular draw attention to the way tragic consequences inevitably catch up with those who turn away from the law of reason by indulging in nocturnal desires. According to Stanley Cavell, an abdication from such transgressive desires entails accepting the burden of being in and of the day that follows the night, only for a new night to replace it.
Cavell offers a striking critical trope for the knowledge gained at night’s end. Where mourning was, there morning shall be. The state of mourning can be conceived of as nocturnal in that it calls upon those afflicted by it to abandon the business of the everyday in favor of their personal sadness. Ultimately, however, mourning must come to an end; it must allow a new day to dawn in which one can turn toward the ordinary everyday once more. At issue in this move from mourning to morning is a mature form of awakening. One must consciously relinquish both one’s narcissistic enjoyment of nocturnal imaginings and a naïve trust in the absolute power of reason. In their journeys through nocturnal dream worlds, both Shakespeare and Freud draw attention to areas on the map of the knowable that diurnal consciousness seeks to keep dark, but that we simply cannot afford not to know. Although Cavell shares their claim that any journey to night’s end invariably results in a re-acknowledgment of ordinary reality, he stresses a different aspect of this epistemological trajectory. He sees the morning that emerges from nocturnal mourning as an ecstatic condition, a state of dawning in which something is brought to consciousness, in which a form of recognition dawns on the subject. Cavell is less concerned with a gesture of rejection or disavowal than with a gesture of transference that acknowledges the night as the precondition for and end point of a new beginning.
Because any spiritual dawn departs from nocturnal mourning, for Cavell the traces of this source can never be fully effaced. The transformation of mourning into morning forgoes a flight into eternal night (whether madness or death). By undermining any complete forgetting, this newly achieved morning continues to pay attention to the other illumination, the possibility of the impossible that is contained
by and
in the night. In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” Clara adroitly puts her finger on the murky interface between madness and psychic clarity. Although she is willing to acknowledge that there is a dark force that becomes “hostile and treacherous if we succumb to it and follow its dangerous, destructive path,” she also insists that one has the choice to forego this fate. If one has the clarity of vision or the plain prudence to “recognize that hostile influence for what it is,” then its “uncanny power must surely perish in a vain struggle to assume the form which is our own reflection” (95). To refuse the psychic chaos that Nathanael submits himself to does not mean screening out the night side of the psyche in favor of a naïve trust in rational thinking. Rather, Clara cultivates the wakefulness in the day for which Derrida argues. She acknowledges the spiritual illumination the night affords insofar as she is willing to take upon herself the responsibility for all self-knowledge.
In the final scene of the novella, Clara proposes to her bridegroom (whom she believes to be recovered from his last nervous attack) that they take an afternoon walk. Having reached the town square, she is the one to suggest that they climb the church tower. Having arrived at the top, her companion is once more seized by his wild imagination and tries to throw her off the tower, only to jump off in her stead. The fact that this madness is triggered by the sight of Clara leads Cavell to suggest it is the ordinary she embodies that ultimately triggers Nathanael’s desperate horror. He is not unsettled by the strange reappearance of Coppola, the merchant of optical instruments, whom he suddenly espies from the top of the tower, but rather by the unexpected appearance of Clara’s face at the other end of his own spyglass. Before, when he directed the spyglass at the window of his neighbor, he had always seen Olimpia, so extraordinary in her perfect stillness. Now he finds his bride, so lacking in anything out of the ordinary; a sight whose uncanniness he cannot bear. From the start, Clara had been separate from and independent of the night vision Nathanael sought to project onto her. She stands for the possibility of rediscovering the uncanny with its nocturnal traits in the ordinary day, neither screening out all nocturnal vision, nor flooding the day with its mad excess. Her attitude consists in cultivating a vigilance vis-à-vis the night side of consciousness
in the day. Nathanael’s horror that causes him to jump to his death is less a sign of a doubt as to whether Clara really exists or simply a figment of his anxious imagination; instead, it marks his fatal refusal to acknowledge Clara’s separateness.
Exploring the nocturnal side of consciousness draws us into the force field of our imagination; therefore, the night remains a solipsistic world for as long as we fail to distinguish between ourselves and the self-generated embodiments of our own anxiety we encounter there. The following readings of Eliot’s Middlemarch and Wharton’s The House of Mirth explore a corrective to the dangers of such self-absorption. Both stage the night side of moral imagination. The self-fashioning at issue uses the night to set up the conditions for relinquishing its scintillating figurations. Because the world after nightfall loses its distinct contours both in a phenomenological and a moral sense, it promises the possibility of change. In both novels, the night serves as a stage in which options can be tested, desires shaped, and decisions made such that at night’s end ethic clarity will be achieved. Recognition of how a new moral life might be forged comes at night and is carried into a new day. The dawn that follows, and with it an awakening into and for the ordinary, must already have been planned in the night.
At issue in these novels is no longer the experience of psychic self-expenditure that gothic fiction casts as a struggle between divine redemption and demonic damnation, nor the enjoyment of predetermined fate celebrated by film noir. Foregrounded instead is the seduction of moral transgression, the necessity to renounce illicit dreams as well as the emotional cost of such abdication from one’s dreams. In both novels, nocturnal scenes serve as moments of transition in a moral education culminating in an ultimate anagnorisis; as such, the stress lies on the shades of change these scenes anticipate. At night Eliot’s and Wharton’s heroines ask themselves, What is happiness? What might I change to attain it? What must I do to imagine a different world, a different existence for myself? They confess the possibility or impossibility of their desires. Their journey to night’s end culminates in the question of what it means to take responsibility for the night. Do they decide in favor of an attitude of mourning, a withdrawal from the ordinary everyday? Or can they forego the pleasure of self-absorption in favor of an ordinary that is counted in days and nights?
