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| 1 | YES INDEED, IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN,
and is perhaps now more so than ever. For the most part our approach has
been compulsively inclusive; nothing human or inhuman is alien to us. As
a matter of moral and/or professional impulse, scholars and teachers of
literature have always wanted to read a world through a text and in a text,
even if some have insisted that such is not their business. Efforts at limiting
the scope of our professional attentions, whether by textual editors, by
deconstruction with its formal-linguistic "rigor," or by the New Criticism,
have always been resisted as pure definitions of the discipline, and have
survived principally by being allowed into the company of other and wider-ranging
interpretive conventions, as parts of an ever-expanding whole. Old fashioned,
restricted literary history conceived as the influence of one writer upon
another has lately flourished most visibly in the form of polemical pastiche,
in the work of Harold Bloom, rather than as an agreed-upon norm for the
present conduct of criticism. Intellectually and philosophically, with or
without moral impulse, there seems to be next to nothing that can be safely
excluded in an a priori way from the historicization of a literary
work. The dazzling, unforseen connections of the best of the "new historicism"
merely carry to the max a principle of all literary history. |
| 2 | But then, if literary history is
the history of everything, is it definable as a specific occupation, different
from the rest of history? If so, how? And if not, what are the professional
consequences of dissolving the figment of disciplinary identity into an
undifferentiated method applying to all historical inquiry and perhaps all
inquiry whatsoever? |
| 3 | This is a question particularly pressing within
an academic culture marked by what we might call a "new general method"
in the humanities and social sciences. This I take to involve an acceptance
by other disciplines (history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology) of the
practices (deliberately not "methods") of literary criticism. Everything
now is described as storytelling, as local knowledge, as conversational,
and as reflexive and even autobiographical.1
Sometimes the project of attending to the past is completely supplanted
by the literary critic's urge to tell us about him or herself: hence the
current spate of autobiographies by academics who lead, for the most part,
alas, not very interesting lives. At other times there is a wholesale retreat
into the past as if it were the present—the diary, the conversation,
the dense empirical field, the illusion of "being there." Thus we have
either no history at all or the image (it is only ever that) of total history:
history as full presence, and thus no longer history. |
| 4 | Many of us still work somewhere
in between, with all the problems thereby entailed. But there is a perceptible
drift away from engaging those problems. The appeal of cultural studies
is partly to be explained by its veneer of relevance; it seems to
be about the here and now, and about the experience of everyone and not
just that of the devotees of a high literacy based in the reading of complex
written texts. But the "presentism" that now dominates the current version
of cultural studies (very different from the early prototypes of Raymond
Williams; perhaps more like that of the Birmingham School) is also a relief
from history, and from the very real problems of doing history. Leavened
by the familiar postmodern notion of the end of history (in the liberal
version) or its redundancy for a new global culture of spatial simultaneity
(in the more common leftist-anarchist version), much of cultural studies
has no need for history, which tends to appear, if it appears at all, in
parodic or reductive form as a history of some uncontested hegemony (orientalism,
sexism, homophobia, Eurocentrism, and so on) which it is the critic's task
to expunge from the present by the fierce light of radical intelligence. |
| 5 | All of us, then, who worry about
the tasks required of literary history are by definition, in the present
academic culture of the United States at least, to be counted among the
old farts. My aim here is not to offer a brave new way forward for literary
history, Indeed, I currently believe that the project is characterized by
an insoluble antinomy. Instead, I will try to remind us of the labors of
doing literary history before they are forgotten completely in the drive
toward presentist affirmation that may be our inevitable professional profile
as we respond to a decline in high-cultural capital and political-financial
resources. This reminder will probably not then have the effect of inspiring
any new directions. But I hope it will serve as an example of the continuing
value of certain sorts of skepticism and inconclusiveness; homage not to
the ineffable complexities of literature itself (we've had plenty of that,
though it is still at times useful to hear it again), but to the very describable
difficulties of thinking of literature as historical. |
| 6 | These difficulties are not to be
solved or avoided by invoking the hitherto least controversial sorts of
historical formations: publishing histories, textual variants, genres and
rhyme schemes, writerly influences. But neither are such topics to be ignored.
Indeed, they may be more useful than ever for a generation of students more
resistant than before (often for reasons beyond their control) to the experience
and cultivation of patience. The slow accumulation of apparently uncontingent
information—that is, information whose contingency is not immediately
evident—is not to be dismissed. It is this more than anything that
gives us, if it can be had at all, a sense of the past as past. To do this
work, and to do it well, is much. And it is the source of whatever basic
training we are going to give or get in formal and historical skills and
vocabularies, and in the analysis of complex documents. These talents as
taught to undergraduates are, moreover, still very marketable in the very
employment sectors we tend to blame for the current demise of traditional
literary studies, and to fail to teach them is to disadvantage our students
in these quotidian ways as much as it is to rob them of the experience of
challenge and difference that the university ought, in my view, to provide. |
| 7 | This retrieval of information not
instantly validated by presentist urgencies may seem to belong to what Nietzsche
called "antiquarian" history: the indiscriminate preservation of everything
just because it is old (73-74). We should not feel it that way, however,
because nothing can be deemed, in an a priori way, irrelevant to
some context or other for literature, whether in its mechanical production
or in its referential aura. So we have to gather it in just in case, like
Boswell recording every item he could find about and around Samuel Johnson,
knowing that what seemed trivial to him might seem important to someone
else. This process is indefinite, whether we organize it by moving out from
the meanings and allusions of writing, or by way of an account of the material
and cultural situations impinging upon writing (editions, reading publics,
social affiliations, and so forth). |
| 8 | We think of these kinds of history
as relatively stable, because we can latch on to some relatively uncontroversial
facts once in a while, and because such facts are so much more precise than
the other kind of history we try to write, that of the subject, the "author."
Their apparent precision allowed Gustave Lanson, in an essay recently translated,
to believe in apprehending "the past in the past—and as the past,"
in a way uncontaminated by what he calls "subjective criticism" (224-25).
If we are not engaged in evaluating the relation of past literature to ourselves,
nor in describing individual writers or writings in terms other than those
of "social configurations" and "collective life" (228, 234), then we can
hope for an objective sociological method. |
| 9 | It is easy to query this position
from within a contemporary orthodoxy that understands all history,
no matter how minute, as motivated history. It may, for example, be indisputable
that the first edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1798 and
cost 5 shillings. But what we make of this item of information is still
motivated by an interest in making a certain sort of sense rather than another
(the price of the book was, after all, deemed uninteresting to generations
of readers and critics). At the same time, we cannot claim that it actually
cost 12 shillings, without indulging in perversity. And so, it seems, Lanson
is right. This is the past in the past, and as the past. What we make of
the information is subject to all the familiar hermeneutic conundra, but
the accumulation of this kind of basic information should not, it seems,
cause us to worry overmuch. |
| 10 |
Or should it? Lanson describes literary history as operating below the
level of "laws and generalizations," content with the "preparation of
facts and particular relations" (225). But at what point does the one
turn into the other? There is no simple answer. I am not going to suggest
that Lyrical Ballads did not cost 5 shillings. Nor that there are
not other indisputable items of a similar nature—the size of the
print run, of the advance, the nature of the contract, the format of the
volume, and so forth. But we run out of these relatively soon. (All the
more reason why we should hang on to them.) Alas, even apparently uncontroversial
details can be deceptive: that is why there is a tradition of forgery,
and why forgery can always be attributed even when it has not occurred.
In other words, if there is a powerful motive for misrepresentation, nothing
is out of bounds. |
| 11 |
Following on from this, we might say that the credibility of a supposed
historical fact increases in direct proportion to its perceived irrelevance,
its standing outside any apparent field of motivation. In its literary
form this is analogous to the realism effect, the technique of vraisemblance:
it is the irrelevance of certain items in a story to its narrative that
communicates the effect of the real: why would they be described at all
if they were not "true"? Thus you believe me when I say that Lyrical
Ballads cost 5 shillings, because you can find no motive for my not
telling the simple truth. But I could be fooling you. Or I could have
made a mistake, thus inadvertently repositioning the volume in its economic
field. Time and again, we critics rely on the authority of other people's
facts as the raw material for our interpretations, because we cannot imagine
that they could be lying, or that they made a mistake. There are not that
many lies in the relatively unimportant sphere of literary history, though
there have been some.2
But there are a lot of mistakes, enough to suggest that the division of
labor proposed by Lanson cannot be relied upon by careful literary historians.
If the goal of this kind of historical inquiry is absolute knowledge (absolute
because the terms are very simple and limited—like the cost of a
book), then everything has to be checked again and again. (Textual editors
are used to the reproduction of mistakes in successive editions, each
taking its predecessor as its source). My point: that the simplest level
of historical information takes a lot of work to verify, even before we
ponder its significance. Mostly we trust each other. But then we are back
in the realm of consensual, constructed knowledge based in guild solidarity.
As soon as we realize this, then we have left the comforting rhetoric
of indisputable information for a life of constant vigilance. And, again:
the most secure knowledge may be the most useless, its security dependent
on its uselessness. |
| 12 |
Lanson, we remember, guaranteed his kind of literary history by avoiding
"subjective criticism." By this he meant the presentist evaluation of
writing as good or bad, enlightening or not, in the eyes of whoever is
reading. But he was also avoiding, by implication, the subject who is
the writer, the human being from and through whom writing occurred in
the past. This person can be talked about insofar as s/he is symptomatic
of a communal tendency, a sociology. But not otherwise. Roland Barthes
made this clear, again, in 1960: "history will never tell us what is happening
inside an author at the moment he is writing" (156). Thus "literary history
is possible only if it becomes sociological, if it is concerned with activities
and institutions, not with individuals" (161). Notwithstanding the efforts
of a number of theorists to dissolve this individual into activities
and institutions—efforts we refer to with false affirmation as the
"death" of the subject—Barthes's point remains the critical point.
(The subject was never dead, only asleep.) |
| 13 |
Literary works and individuals can only ever be related by adverting
to some or other psychology or sociology. Each may carry some conviction,
but it cannot be absolute and cannot contain that "excess" of literature
that is the product of untraceable motivations. The psychological approach,
Barthes proposes, substitutes the critic-analyst's motives for those of
the subject, and produces only false coherence and hypothesis; hence,
we might add, the unwieldy pseudo-comprehensiveness of Sartre's account
of Flaubert in The Family Idiot. The sociological approach, correspondingly,
will produce a different sort of coherence, but it will not be that of
literature, but of the discipline of history (itself now controversial
in literary ways); hence, perhaps, the Baudelaire who emerges from Benjamin's
Passagenwerk as, necessarily, incomplete, available only in pieces. |
| 14 |
Barthes concludes by pointing out the inevitability of frustration for
any literary history that seeks to describe literature: literature is
the institutional form for subjectivity, and subjectivity is itself
defined as indescribable, as the space of freedom within a culture tending
otherwise to containment. As an incoherent assemblage of biological and
cultural energies, each open to indefinite mutual recombinations or failed
combinations that can register at various points on the scale from general
experience to complete idiosyncrasy, the "subject" can never be apprehended,
however often it is interpellated and in whatever terms (language, desire,
class, gender and so on). Criticism, when it has not allowed itself to
believe in the dissolution of the subject, has made major efforts to track
it down, but the goal of absolute knowledge is always betrayed both by
the antinomian nature of the subject described and by that of the subject
doing the describing. Coherence and new sense often come, indeed, from
a conjunction of the one with the other, so that a strongly motivated
present interest "discovers" (with all the questions thus raised) a new
motivation in or context for past writing.3 |
| 15 |
But we are always engaged with the part and not the whole. |
| 16 |
Literary history, then, has to be the history of everything and in this
way risks being the history of nothing. It tends toward that condition
described by Nietzsche: "a man who wanted to feel historically through
and through would be like one forcibly deprived of sleep, or an animal
that had to live only by rumination and ever repeated rumination" (62).
The "facts" that we do have in our projects thus function both as items
for good faith interpretation and as sleeping pills, sources of temporary
release from the nightmare of total recall, life without forgetting. Along
with the "antiquarian" history that preserves everything for its own sake,
and the "monumental" history that produces a simplified series of exemplary
moments (for us this usually means "great books"), Nietzsche identifies
a "critical" history that functions by destroying and forgetting pieces
of the past and in this way allowing life to go on (75-76). |
| 17 |
This critical history is the most familiar to us now and the most frequently
validated; it is what licenses our use of the past as raw material
for the present. But it is also what "destroys," being "always unmerciful,
always unjust" (76). This critical history is what fuels our attributions
and assumptions of monolithic inheritances and simplified traditions,
all the negative "isms" whose displacement is our current work in the
academy. As such, it is no less reifying than monumental history, and
shares with it the tendency to level everything to the same standard.
The fight between the "great books" defenders and the "political" critics
is often one between equals and opposites, the one faction believing in
eternal standards of excellence and the other in historically uniform
expressions of culpability. Both, perhaps, need a good dose of antiquarian
history: an excess of unassimilated information. |
| 18 |
But our professional situation is, as I have said, not conducive to
the sorts of patience required for the assimilation of such information.
The culture of postmodern presentism that makes the past itself dubiously
relevant is also anti-theoretical, in the extended sense of theory, the
exploration of which requires similar reserves of space, time and disinterest
to those called for by the antiquarian archive with which, indeed, such
theory must be intimately involved. Add to this the professional urgency
felt by a sector of the academy (literary studies) that is only insecurely
hegemonic—that is, omnipresent in the new general method within
the humanities sector of the universities, but under sustained inspection
and even attack both from without and within precisely for the presentism
I have been describing—and you do not have a climate for the sustained
and inevitably slow growth of a new literary history, especially one characterized
by the apparent methodological dead ends I have also been describing. |
| 19 |
To resurrect such visibly non-conclusive knowledge as the goal of higher
education would be hard going indeed in an age of accountability, though
it can perhaps be supplied with its own kind of charisma that we would
be ill-advised to ignore and have hardly begun to explore. (Veblen opined
a hundred years ago that the appeal of professional humanities study lay
precisely in its uselessness, and thus in its availability for the arbitrary
signification of excess wealth and leisure.4
We would probably now have to do better than this, by arguing, for example,
for the uses of inconclusive and nonapplied knowledge, as I.A. Richards
and others have done.) |
| 20 |
What kinds of literary history can we then expect, if any, and what
have we recently had? The spate of textual editing generated by the "boom"
years will likely slow down, and already threatens to do so. Biography,
as a profitable sector of the book market affording the pleasures of coexistence
with the great and the good, will likely survive. But high-level literary
history has not been a flourishing genre. In 1970, Hans Robert Jauss noted
the decline of the grand-narrative style of literary history, with its
roots in nation-state formation and justification and its confidence in
the power of literature to represent those forces.5
This is quite reasonably deemed unsuited to our present age, with its
commitment to deconstructing the nation and resurrecting those voices
silenced by myths of national destiny. (Our grand narratives are thus
those of negation.) |
| 21 |
We have of course had the "new historicism," of which much has been
written in praise and blame. More neutrally, its inevitability, or at
least its symptomatic status for a generation generally hostile to history
itself, should be recognized. New historicists have been noticed for their
eschewal of grand theory and their alternative reliance upon anecdote
and happenstance; for their immersion in the empirical plenitude of antiquarian
history, from which items are plucked like rabbits from a hat, which turn
out to illuminate a more traditionally "major" text or topic; and for
their general effacement of hermeneutic problems about doing history in
favor of the sheer vividness of the data of history. Nietzsche
hoped for just such a history, one whose value would not lie in "general
propositions" but in its "taking a familiar, perhaps commonplace theme,
an everyday melody, and composing inspired variations on it, enhancing
it, elevating it to a comprehensible symbol, and thus disclosing in the
original theme a whole world of profundity, power and beauty" (92). William
James remarked also the "innumerable little hangings-together of the world's
parts within the larger hangings-together" and made them typical of the
way the world works (64). |
| 22 |
It is within this climate of expectation, wherein grand narrative is
morally discredited and (perhaps more important) massively difficult to
perform, that the anecdote and the contingent connection do their work.6
Levi-Strauss wrote of biography and anecdote as "low-powered history,"
requiring subsumption within a "form of history of a higher power" for
significant intelligibility. But he also noted that while low-powered
history is the least explanatory, it is "the richest in point of information,
for it considers individuals in their particularity and details for each
of them the shades of character, the twists and turns of their motives,
the phases of their deliberations" (261). Low-powered history—a very
"literary" history in that it is like literature itself—has been
the preferred history of recent years. So that the emphasis in recent
literary history has been on the literary and not the history.
Could it have been otherwise? Should it have been otherwise? Opinions
have varied and will vary, according to the degree to which they preserve
an anachronistic faith in the totalizing project of a single history as
outlined by Sartre and by the European Marxist tradition, whereby low-powered
history must always move to a higher power, or as they believe that low-powered
history is all we can hope for in an age for which history in general
is anathema—for a variety of persons and for a variety of reasons.
It may be that those of us who want a history at all, of any kind, are
hopelessly remote from the minds of the new generation: old farts one
and all, Marxist or new historicist. But in this little spot of earth
that is the research university, we still have space and time, for the
time being, to think about these things, and to argue about them as if
our conclusions had serious consequences. Perhaps they do. I hope so. |
| 23 |
We want a history: we—some of us—desire one, whether for the
legitimation of our efforts within a narrative of progress or at least
of coherence; or for the temporary release from present pressures in the
contemplation of a past shorn of all its discomforts; or from a strangely
subjective and therefore ultimately indescribable fellow-feeling for those
long-dead who left us their writings, the most concentrated form of what
we, too, try in our low-powered way to perform. So we want a history in
that other sense: we lack one, as everyone does, and thus we have before
us a space for infinite composition and endless mediation and meditation
(and perhaps, even now, for professional accreditation and advancement). |
| 24 |
There are many literary histories, with innumerable foundations, all
shaky in the ways I began by describing, but all indispensable to us,
insofar as we remain traditional scholars and critics. Whether they matter
to others, I'm not sure, so I predict uncertain futures. But it may be
that the most trivial and least accountable motive for wanting history,
that pertaining to ancestor-worship (in its desacralized but not always
diminished forms) and to the authorization of one's present situation,
has not disappeared. I was surprised to see that, in the legal debate
surrounding the passing and subsequent suspension of Amendment 2 to the
constitution of the state of Colorado (a measure singling out gay and
lesbian persons as not covered by certain protective clauses—the
definitions themselves were hotly contested and unclear), there erupted
a passionate exchange, complete with expert witnesses, about what Plato
did and did not say about homosexual love. In other words, the cultural
capital of Plato and ancient Greece still counted for something, even
if opportunistically, in the clarification of a present condition. |
| 25 |
Most of us scholars and critics, I suspect, do not fully know why we
are preoccupied with the past, and thus with literary history. The aptness
of Stephen Greenblatt's famous identification of a "desire to speak with
the dead" lies precisely in its imprecision.7
Certainly, the conviction that history (and therefore literary history)
matters must now have become rather shaky. So that we are left
somewhat insecure in our legitimation procedures. It is perhaps in its
entanglement with the history of everything that literary history finds
its best justification. |
| 26 |
Pedagogically speaking, the pursuit of a careful literary history offers
not a confident narrative (others will do that) but an experience of limited
satisfaction and frequent arrestation in saying things about the past
and, now more than ever, a continual and always (by definition) unsatisfactory
speculation about the origins and implications of acts of mind in the
present. The perceived gap between past and present is greater than it
used to be thought in the days when we could, with good ethical and epistemological
conscience, chronicle either the emergence of a national culture or its
obverse in class struggle and roads not taken. We can no longer claim,
as Husserl still could in the crisis of the 1930s, that the perception
of a "unitary meaning" to history would be consonant with the posture
of "radical self-understanding," each following from the other (14, 17).
Unitary meaning and radical self-understanding have both been exposed
as myths. Understanding, then, is going to be defined in terms of possible
or multiple meanings and radical self-doubt. |
| 27 |
We cannot fetishize "antiquarian" history as a solution to our problems,
but it is a restraint upon despair or chaos. It is the more intellectually
fertile the more resistant it remains to appropriation within monumental
or critical histories. At a time when history in general is increasingly
deemed irrelevant, the explicitly conservationist mission of antiquarian
history may be our best hope for having something to work with should
history ever again become a matter of urgent concern. Against the explicitly
but restrictively political mandates of critical and monumental histories,
antiquarian history holds out the ideal of disinterest, even as disinterest
is deemed no longer possible. As such, it is minimally political and therefore
available for alternative and unpredictable politics in an imagined future. |
| 28 |
Faced with a generation inclined to believe in an end to history, the
task of historians of all kinds is first of all one of preservation. Literary
historians are especially pressured because of the subsistence of "literature"
within an ethos of presence and presentism whose effect is always to dissolve
the historical into the immediate. Given the general disposition of literary
criticism toward advocacy, prophecy and testimony, even of chaos itself,
literary history enacted under the banner of antiquarianism, skepticism
and hesitation may not win many converts. Never mind. If we can hang on
to its practice in this age of accountability, we may have the satisfaction
of holding out an option for an intellectual activity not generally available
in the education sector. |
| 29 |
Moreover, if we are indeed about to return, in our weariness at the
pursuit of microscopic localisms in approved postmodern style, to a new
kind of grand narrative—that typified, for example, by a faith in
something called global culture (a faith that was perhaps never completely
abandoned) and in an end to history,8
then there might be a useful polemical function to our inconclusive literary
histories. I, at least, cannot quite think the thing farewell. I am not
betting on futures, but there is nowhere I'd rather be for now. |
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Romantic Circles - Home / Praxis Series / Romanticism and Contemporary Culture / David Simpson, "Is Literary History the History of Everything? The Case for 'Antiquarian' History" |