(the) American (Novel of)

200 Karmen MacKendrick
doing, I’ll look at several senses of the term. My second objective is to
observe that grace, which seems to lie outside and even to contradict
those orderly laws, is in fact what makes them humanly possible—and
that this is key to the relation of etiquette to ethics.
Perhaps oddly, we may begin considering grace with an observation
on epistemology. It can be useful to conceive of knowledge in
spatial terms; that is, to think of realms or spaces of knowing. 1 More
precisely: imagine a system of knowing, a tabular knowledge, with all of
the kinds of things there are to know neatly laid out in their proper
places, in proper relation to one another. One fairly obvious point, at
least once we begin to think about it, is that the kinds of things there
are to know and the ways they are arranged are mutually implicated.
When we know all the things there are to know, we know too how they
fit together. Well, perhaps we don’t know all of them, but we know
where the spaces are and are confident we can fill them in (this, of course,
is before the poststructuralism undermines that confidence altogether).
Of course, space implies not merely order but also direction. Like
the tabular sense of space, the vectored sense implies at least the potential
of completion. Spaces are there to be crossed, rather like roads
before chickens. Space is a realm in which to order things, statically
according to law; or it is distance to be crossed and thereby finished
with. But neither mappable topography nor orderly container works as
spatial image for grace—wherein space is elastic, reversible, and responsive.
Here the relevant spatiality—even one as abstract as the epistemological—is
surprisingly, delightfully open. This, ever so elegantly, messes
up everything.
And in fact, among the things we know or suspect, depending
upon our disciplinary backgrounds and intellectual dispositions, is that
perfect systematicity is not only currently unavailable but in fact unattainable.
One might react to this with frustration, maybe even abandoning
whatever epistemological project might be at stake. But I recall an
article I read some months ago in the New York Times—I fear I did not
anticipate writing the current chapter and so did not save the article—
in which a scientist, I believe an astronomer, responded to the possibility
of knowledge’s being not only unsystematizable but incompletable
with great satisfaction. She (or he) said, in effect, what a depressing
possibility it would be to think that we could know it all, ever be done
with the pleasures of searching. If we can’t know it all—not by virtue