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There are probably any number of
ways to honor presentist influences on literary criticism in general, and
on literary history in particular, without necessarily contributing to an
"end to history" or to "despair or chaos." David Simpson has recently associated
both of these apocalyptic outcomes with presentist work in cultural studies,
work that in his view "has no need for history" except in the "parodic or
reductive" forms granted to it by recent inquiries into the operations of
such "uncontested" hegemonies as orientalism, sexism, homophobia, and Eurocentrism.
As someone who has always considered it both intellectually and politically
vital to articulate the fundamental connections between my scholarly efforts
and my own sense of ethics and social values as an out, gay man, I confess
that my own work strikes me as precisely the kind of presentist scholarship
that Simpson sets out to critique. Assuming I understand and indeed practice
presentism as Simpson defines it, I'd like to explain here at least a few
of the assumptions about history and reading that motivate recent presentist
work in literary criticism and history. In clarifying some of these some
these basic beliefs, my aim is to articulate both the historical and the
more personal or subjective value of presentist scholarship.
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Since it is the status of history
itself that most interests Simpson, allow me to begin with a specific, literary-historical
concern that has been central to my own work: the complex relationship between
discourses of illness and sexuality in late nineteenth-century American
literature. I'm thinking here of writers such as Henry and Alice James,
Mary Wilkins Freeman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who used illness as an
occasion to think critically about the body and about the relationships
between physical sensation and self-knowledge. Seeking to understand the
full range of corporeal and mental experience, writers of nineteenth-century
illness narratives often combined, in ways that seem foreign to us today,
depictions of pain and suffering with depictions of real or imagined episodes
of self-fulfillment, many of which included experiences of sensual and even
sexual pleasures. These narratives of illness have much to teach us about
nineteenth-century intellectual history and about the shared discursive
or narrative contexts in which thinking about illness and pleasure intriguingly
coexist.
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From a presentist point of view, I'm interested
in the history of illness precisely because I'm a real person living in
a real world that still seems to be inordinately confused about its relationships
to illness and to sexual pleasure, both separately and together. Many Americans,
for example, have trouble thinking about sexuality in general, and non-procreative
sexuality in particular, outside of epistemologies of pathology. Moreover,
many of us still go about our lives drawing from a deeply impoverished repertoire
of cultural and social responses to life-threatening and chronic illness.
Consider, in this regard, President Bush's liberal politics of "compassion."
In contemporary American culture, compassion now functions as the single
most appropriate response to anything and anyone that is not straight, white,
male, middle-class, middle-aged, healthy and able. A politics of compassion
challenges us not to think differently about ourselves or anybody else,
but encourages us to think exactly the same as we always have—that
is, not to think at all about the vast demographic and social changes currently
underway in this country, or about the dramatic rise of chronic and potentially
deadly illness, such as cancer, AIDS, and tuberculosis, but to shore up
"our" ontological, national, and hygienic distinction from all those
other people out there who desperately need and deserve "our" compassion
because of "their" national, sexual, racial, or physical difference.
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As it turns out, then, reading illness
narratives from the nineteenth century has quite a lot to do with the politics
of "compassionate conservatism," among other presentist concerns. In the
current political climate it seems like the very act of reading may actually
be one of the most profoundly political acts we have left as individual
citizens. Maybe reading nineteenth-century literature isn't political in
the most immediate sense of the term—I hardly expect Mary Wilkins Freeman
to become a major counter-culture icon, although it's fun to imagine exactly
what that would be like—but I do think that literary study provides
one way to grasp the complex and contradictory currents of American social
and intellectual thought that are increasingly lost to us in the ongoing
homogenization of our politics and public discourse. In this light, reading
in response to any particular presentist concern—such as the experience
of discrimination or violence—seems less indicative of a desire for
the end of history than it does precisely for the opposite: a desire to
know history as such, and to experience whatever pleasures and disappointments
such familiarity with history might bring. If anything, it is the present
moment itself that feels like an end to history, a white-washing of America
that threatens us with its own illusion of atemporality, of being frozen
in place despite a desire by many Americans to move ahead. It is this feeling,
and fear, that renews my sense of reading as a political act and that makes
history so vital to my own work.
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Having grown into adulthood in the
1980s, a time when many popular and scientific understandings of queer sexualities
were violently yoked to theories of contagion and to fears of bodily corruption
and death, I'm more than a little sensitive to how ideas about sexuality
and illness have very real impacts on people's lives. We still live, for
example, in a society where roughly twenty percent of the population believes
that people with AIDS have "gotten what they deserve."1
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Literary history provides one important
access point for exploring the history of ideas, and for learning how it
this that we have come to know the "things" we call sexuality and illness
in the first place. The value of this intellectual history lies in the possibilities
it offers for thinking differently about things, like illness and sexuality,
that we often take to be stable, natural aspects of our "being." Knowing
that our ideas and that our ways of understanding our bodies and our identities
have very dynamic histories can help us, at certain times, to call into
question some of the most violent and deadening ways of thinking about sexuality
and illness, and I don't just mean our thinking about homosexuality as a
disease. I also think that our contemporary cultural responses to the rise
of chronic illnesses such cancer, AIDS, and tuberculosis are too limited
by fear and by paranoia. Writers from the late nineteenth century seem far
more able and willing to write engagingly and productively about illness
and death than most writers in recent decades have been, though that seems
to be changing somewhat today. In any case, we have a lot to learn from
nineteenth-century writers' more familiar, less constipated and less metaphorically
sterile relationship to chronic ill-health. Acknowledging this fact hardly
seems a threat to history itself; if anything, any threat contained here
is directed toward the present, since in reading tales from the past, we
might learn to read our present experiences differently.
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Reading the present differently
is, I confess, a reward I value highly in critical work, and I suspect that
it is precisely this subjective, presentist relation to literary scholarship
that has Simpson worried. I wonder, though, if what Simpson wants from reading
and from literary history is really all that different, in the end, from
what I want. "We want a history," he writes, "we—some of us—desire
one." In literary history, he adds, we find "a space for infinite composition
and endless mediation and meditation." If Simpson is suggesting here that
reading literature and doing the work of literary history are first and
foremost manifestations of desire, desires to compose, to meditate, and
to do the much more difficult work of crafting and sustaining the self,
then I certainly agree with him; and if he is suggesting this much,
then what is really at stake in his critique of presentism may not be "history"
itself, but how it is that we, as literary scholars, understand our collective
and individual relationships to reading. How is reading an exercise of our
subjectivity? To what extent is it an expression of our selves? And what,
after all, is literary criticism, or literary history, if not the manifestation
of a desire to tell compelling stories about our own past, our present,
and our future?
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Asking these questions of Simpson's
critique leads me to the conclusion that his antiquarianism may not really
be so different from the presentist-inspired historical projects he critiques.
The former is less explicit about its dependence on narrative than the latter,
yet both are equally motivated, and indeed excited by, the promise of present
or future meaning. This similarity may not be an obvious one, since Simpson's
antiquarianism advocates a kind of history that might almost be thought
of as decadent—that is, as history for its own sake, history that tries
not to care about or perhaps tries to disavow its ideological, political
or identificatory significance in favor of an ostensibly less subjective
and more intellectually altruistic agenda that paradoxically values both
randomness and thoroughness. The curious thing about this history, however,
is that it values seemingly insignificant details for a very particular
reason: namely, that someday those details might become important by being
incorporated into a narrative of the past that is actually useful to someone—that
is, to a particular subject. Thus Boswell, Simpson writes, included even
the most trivial bits of information in his account of the life of Samuel
Johnson, "knowing that what seemed trivial to him might seem important to
someone else." It seems, then, that we can only speak of knowledge as being
"nonapplied" or "unassimilated"—that is, as being the kind of "minimally
political" knowledge that Simpson's antiquarianism purports to offer—when
we use those terms in relation to the interests of particular subjects.
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Given this fact, it strikes me as
a little ironic that it is the scholarly interests of few particular subjects
from our own time that troubles Simpson the most. He seems to be expressing
his unhappiness not only with the monolithic and anti-historical nature
of presentist reading practices, but with the equally objectionable worldviews
of presentist readers themselves. He imagines a whole generation of scholars
"generally hostile to history itself" and, as mentioned before, takes an
especially critical view of writers who, in his view, vainly attempt to
expunge various "isms" from the present "by the fierce light of radical
intelligence." Yet if it's fair to say that the critical menace posed by
presentism and its practitioners is, for Simpson, the threat posed to history
by a kind of all-assimilating critical subjectivity, then that threat seems
far less real if subjectivity isn't always the imposing and monolithic force
that Simpson sometimes makes it out to be. While the "antiquarian" methods
that Simpson urges us to adopt invite us to experience reading as a "meditative"
act in which our epistemological and ultimately our ontological relations
to historical material are both tentative and multi-directional, he doesn't
afford this kind of flexibility to presentist readers. It is precisely this
flexibility, however—this possibility for exploring new forms of subjectivity—that
makes presentist work so compelling. We might think here of Eve Sedgwick's
recent description of queer subjectivity as "stretched" and "ragged," and
of her description of queer reading as a rather unstable cluster of desires,
interests and "competences."2
In this view, queer reading—like presentist reading more generally—is
not nearly as "monumental" or as "monolithic" as Simpson would have it.
With Sedgwick's understanding of subjectivity in mind, perhaps the most
important question Simpson raises is ultimately one about how we might address,
and come to respect, different understandings of the relationships among
reading, knowing, and being. The "end to history" Simpson fears might only
be a shift in how we, as literary critics, understand knowledge, and a corresponding
change in the kinds of historical information we deem relevant, interesting,
or serviceable. For the time being, at least, Simpson has little cause for
worry. As readers we are not monumental, but historical, and queer.
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