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The premise of historical continuity plays a slightly awkward
role in literary studies. Not that many scholars are now challenging
the idea of continuity as directly as Michel Foucault challenged
it in the 1970s. The majority of recent books on literary history
seem to assume, in practice, that it is possible to trace one discourse
or ideology as it gradually metamorphoses into another. But although
we haven't transcended the premise of continuity as it once seemed
we might, it remains a principle of good scholarly manners to write
as though we had transcended it. Words that explicitly foreground
assumptions about continuity—words like "tradition," "origin," and "development"—retain
a distinctly ham-handed sound. As graduate students, we learn
to master a set of euphemisms that allow us to make the same assumptions
more discreetly: one talks about the "provenance" of
an idea, for instance, rather than its "source," and
about a "practice" rather than
a "tradition."
No apology is necessary, on the other hand, for structuring an argument
around the juxtaposition of discontinuous historical moments. Well-known
works like James Chandler's England in 1819 (1998) and Ian Baucom's Specters
of the Atlantic (2005) have illuminated present-day concerns by
connecting them directly to Romantic-era antecedents, while scrupulously
resisting the temptation to connect a series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
dots that would link the two periods under discussion. Friedrich Kittler's Discourse
Networks 1800/1900 (1985) announced a similar project in its title,
and the reader may have noticed that the title of the present article
(to compare small things with great) leaps without explanation from unspecified
contexts of the 1840s to Michel Foucault. -
Of course, all of these works also reason about influence and development.
Continuity and discontinuity are both necessarily involved in
any attempt to understand change; as Zeno's paradox demonstrates, one gets
nowhere by treating them as absolutes. Moreover, as Chandler himself suggests,
both concepts are relative to the scale of analysis: the same
evidence that counts as continuous "explanation" in a year-by-year
narrative might become discontinuous "information" in a more coarsely-grained
study (51-74). But however complementary continuity and discontinuity
may be in principle, literary historians do invoke one of these
principles with more fanfare than the other, and although our preference
has become especially marked in recent years, it is not an artifact of recent
cultural theory. Source-study and influence-peddling were already disreputable
at the beginning of the twentieth century; even a literary historian
like Edwin Greenlaw, who defended the utility of source study in 1931, did
so with a profusion of apologies (107-09). The surprising juxtaposition
of remote eras, on the other hand, had already become standard
procedure for cultural critics in the early nineteenth century (Carlyle,
Pugin). This article will examine the academic study of English literature
in the second quarter of the nineteenth century in order to suggest that
literary scholars' preference for metaphors of discontinuity
is rooted in long-standing educational practices that have given the concept
of literary culture its institutional form. But since Michel Foucault did
make an argument about history that is now widely understood
as a rationale for our resistance to the vocabulary of continuity, it makes
sense to begin by looking at his argument.
The critique of continuity remained central to Foucault's definition
of his own historical method whether he was calling that method "archaeology" or "genealogy." His
strategy also remained fairly consistent: he attacked the premise of continuity
by reading it as a symptom of historians' investment in the stability
and permanence of subjectivity. In a 1968 article, "On the Archaeology
of the Sciences," Foucault remarks,
[I]f history could remain the chain of uninterrupted continuities . .
. it would be a privileged shelter for consciousness: what it
takes away from the latter by bringing to light material determinations,
inert practices, unconscious processes . . . it would restore in the form
of a spontaneous synthesis; or rather, it would allow it [consciousness]
to pick up once again all the threads that had escaped it, to reanimate all
those dead activities, and to become once again the sovereign subject in
a new or restored light. Continuous history is the correlate of consciousness.
(300-301)
In "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" (1971), Foucault pushes
this symptomatic reading a step further, arguing that continuous history
attempts to establish not only the stability of "the sovereign subject" but "the
immortality of the soul" (379). By contrast, Foucauldian genealogy
is devoted to "the systematic dissociation of our identity." Foucault
explicates this contrast in a passage studded with quotations from Nietzsche: For
this rather weak identity, which we attempt to support and
unify under a mask, is in itself only a parody: it is plural; countless
souls dispute its possession; numerous systems intersect and dominate
one another. The study of history makes one "happy, unlike the
metaphysicians, to possess in oneself not an immortal soul but many
mortal ones." And
in each of these souls, history will discover not a forgotten
identity, eager to be reborn, but a complex system of distinct
and multiple elements, unable to be mastered by the powers of synthesis: "It
is a sign of superior culture to maintain, in a fully conscious way,
certain phases of its evolution which lesser men pass through without
thought" (386,
quoting Nietzsche 4.3 no. 17 and 4.2 "Vermischte Meinungen" no. 274).
For Foucault, in short, the choice between different ways of writing
history is a choice between different models of immortality. In place
of the old model of a single immortal soul, he offers a loose compound
of distinct historical elements, each of which is in one sense dated and
in another sense timeless. He also quotes, with apparent approval, Nietzsche's
view that this dissociation of identity is a paradoxical form of personal
cultivation. By separating out the diverse cultures that compose the self
one becomes a man of "superior culture." Throughout "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault's reliance
on quotations from Nietzsche playfully dramatizes the dissociation of
his own identity. The historical method he calls "genealogy" turns
out to be built with materials borrowed from a nineteenth-century philosopher's
critique of historians. So it would hardly have surprised Foucault that
this essay's argument against metaphors of continuity has some connection
to nineteenth-century ideas. But the connection may be stronger and broader
than the essay recognizes, because the passages that Foucault borrows
from Nietzsche are in fact quite typical of a certain late-nineteenth-century
discourse about history. Nietzsche may criticize the aspirations of "scientific" historians,
but he does so in large part by embracing another use of the past that
already dominated histories of literature and art. The decentered immortality
that Nietzsche attributes to the man of "superior culture"—who
preserves in his own body fragments of a vanished past—closely resembles
the immortality that Walter Pater, for instance, famously attributed to
La Gioconda:
She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she
has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has
been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked
for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother
of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this
has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in
the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged
the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together
ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived
the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all
modes of thought and life. (Pater 129)
The cultivation of the Paterian aesthete, like the experience contained
in this mysterious visage, comes from unsystematic browsing rather
than continuous narrative. La Gioconda has found herself immersed in widely-differing "modes
of thought and life," and she is said to sum them all up in herself.
But she "sums things up" more as a collector does than as dialectical
reason does. By reducing incongruent mythologies
to "the sound of lyres
and flutes," she strips away the vectors of causality and change
that would otherwise be implicit in Pater's catalogue, replacing
them with the sort of non-linear synthesis embodied in weary and delicately-tinged
eyelids. -
Pater was by no means the first writer to suggest that personal cultivation
requires internalizing history's contradictions and fractures
rather than its unity. As it became clear that even basic assumptions could
change from one era to another, a certain number of eighteenth-century readers
embraced contingency and mutability themselves as the best available
symbols of collective permanence. The ghosts of James Macpherson's Ossian
poems, for instance, embodied readers' aspirations to a kind of immortality
produced not by fame, or the continuity of tradition, but by difference and
datedness (Underwood 237-242). Culture (in the normative sense) comes to
depend on the incommensurable multiplicity of cultures (in the descriptive
sense). In these circumstances, the instability of national identity could
become a cultural advantage. Ina Ferris has recently suggested that the protagonists
of Lady Morgan's later national tales construct their identities
through role-playing that dramatizes conflicting versions of Irish history
and even conflicting models of time; personal Bildung depends on what Ferris
calls "hyper-hybridity" rather than on the unity of national
culture (81, 84). By the early nineteenth century, in short,
cultivated readers began to feel that they possessed something
that was timeless, not because it was unchanging, but because it transgressed
the ordinary laws of temporal connection. Culture was a mode of historical
déjà vu.
Sometimes I feel I have known Shakespeare, wept with Tasso, and
journeyed through heaven and hell with Dante. A name from ancient
times awakens emotions in me that resemble memories, as certain perfumes
from exotic plants recall the land that produced them. (Sand 71)
In this description of a historically-refracted self (from George Sand's
1833 novel Lélia), the names of Shakespeare, Tasso, and Dante
are admittedly connected by the tacit hypothesis that great authors from
different nations and periods all feed into a single "European" culture.
Lélia's mysterious "emotions . . . that resemble memories" are
subjective correlates for the power of that cultural patrimony.
The discontinuity dramatized by historical déjà vu thus often depends,
in practice, on a suppressed premise of continuity. But some sort of continuity
always has to be posited to make discontinuity rhetorically interesting.
Foucault does the same thing: his epistemic shifts, however abrupt, take
place against the implicit background of a European unity that makes it
meaningful to contrast Bentham's Panopticon against, say, an execution
in Paris in 1757. It is nevertheless fair to observe that the rhetorical
emphasis falls, in Pater and Sand as in Foucault, on the differences and
gaps that separate the radically disparate parts of this hypothetical
unity.
For Pater, then, the cultural purpose of history (at least the history
of art and literature) was not to emphasize continuities, but to form
a mind capable of embracing disparity and difference. "He will remember
always that beauty exists in many forms. To him all periods, types, schools
of taste, are in themselves equal" (xii). I have suggested that this
strategy of mapping historical discontinuity onto cultivated "immortality" articulates
a consensus that was dominant by the later nineteenth century—a consensus
that Nietzsche and Foucault later reproduced, having mistaken it for a
rebellion against nineteenth-century history. But George Sand and Walter
Pater don't in themselves constitute a representative sample of nineteenth-century
writers; how can we know whether their cultural investment in discontinuity
was typical or idiosyncratic? -
Institutional history makes it easier to locate the moment when literary
cultivation began to depend on the idea of discontinuity, because
the number of educational institutions that taught vernacular literary history
in the nineteenth century was much smaller than the number of
authors who wrote about it. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, vernacular
literature was still taught under the aegis of rhetoric at all
levels of the educational system; texts were usually organized by genre or
by audience rather than by period. This first began to change in the second
quarter of the nineteenth century at the new London universities:
the institutions we know today as King's College and University College,
London hired professors of "English Language and Literature" rather
than "Rhetoric and Belles Lettres," and encouraged them to combine
the teaching of literature with the study of history (Court 87-88).
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But the nature of the connection between literature and history changed
significantly and rapidly in the early stages of this project.
Through the 1830s, syllabi and exams at both institutions emphasized connected
and continuous development. The whole story of English literary
history was invariably compressed into a single term. Courses were also structured
to foreground the progressive development of both language and
literature. Thomas Dale, for instance, taught literary history at both London
institutions at different points in the 1830s. A summary of his literary
history course has been preserved at the back of a catalog; subheadings like "Incipient
English" and "Imperfect but Progressive English" speak
eloquently about his emphasis on gradual progress (King's College
Calendar 1835-36, 49-51). Dale's exams, preserved in the same catalog,
similarly emphasize connection and development. Students are
asked, for instance, to "give some account of the Mysteries, or Miracle-Plays;
and show in what manner they operated to prepare the minds of
the people for the Reformation" (King's College Calendar 1835-36, 182).
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That emphasis on connected progress began to change in the 1840s, when
the study of literary history at King's College was reorganized
around courses that spent a whole term surveying an isolated period. These
were the first "period survey" courses offered in Britain, and,
as far as I can tell, in any Anglophone context. (The teaching
of English literature may have developed precociously in India and America
in other respects, but it doesn't seem to have anticipated this development.)
The change took place first at King's College, I believe, because Dale was
replaced by someone who had already worked out a new theory about
the role history should play in personal cultivation. Frederick Denison Maurice
later became well known as a theologian and Christian-socialist
educational reformer. Hired at King's College in 1840, he began by spending
a term on the Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. In the following eight
years he taught courses on, for instance, the Elizabethan period,
Jacobean literature, and the reign of George III. This marked contraction
of the syllabus was accompanied by a change in the historical content of
courses, as revealed in Maurice's final exams. Teaching Jacobean literature
in 1842 Maurice asks, "In what respect do the writings of Ben Jonson
bear the impress of this period?" (Calendar 1842-43, item
6) Teaching the Tudors he asks, "Write an essay on the connection
between the politics and the literature of Queen Elizabeth's
reign" (Calendar
1848-49, 247). Maurice consistently asks students to grasp the social
specificity of a period. Teaching Chaucer, for instance, he asks
his class to explain the words Knight, Courtesie, and Chevalrie (Calendar
1840-41, item 7). The emphasis of that question doesn't fall on
Chaucer's contribution to the development of English; instead, Maurice
is using Chaucer's language to reveal differences that separate his social
world from everyday life in the nineteenth century.
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This was a dramatic change not just from Dale's practice but from the
practice of other professors at King's and University College
in the 1830s. Moreover, Maurice didn't have additional staff until very late
in the 1840s, when he did get to hire one assistant. For most of the decade
it was still a one-man show, and (since he also had to teach
composition) focusing on one period a semester compelled Maurice to abandon
the goal of producing a connected narrative of literary history. He seems
to have abandoned that goal rather blithely, since he made no effort to offer
his period courses in anything like a chronological sequence.
But how was it possible for Maurice to justify this departure from existing
practice? What did he think he was accomplishing by focusing on literary
periods in isolation?
Fortunately for us, Maurice had already written extensively on education,
and in particular on the importance of historical education. Has the
Church, or the State, the Power to Educate the Nation? (1839) intervenes
in a debate about state-supported education, and does so from a distinctly
Anglican perspective. But it also contains a striking and precocious manifesto
about the social function of English literary history. Maurice argues
that the English middle classes need instruction in literature in order
to counteract a modern tendency for middle-class interests to contract
to the domain of immediate, personal, commercial gain. In this respect,
Maurice prefigures an argument that would be made twenty years later and
more famously by Matthew Arnold. But where Arnold is notoriously vague
about the effects he expects literary culture to produce on the middle
classes ("sweetness and light"), Maurice is extremely frank.
The middle classes are hungry for a sort of distinction founded in collective
permanence rather than private property. They need something equivalent
to aristocratic pride in the antiquity of family. Lacking "ancient
halls" and "venerable trees," they will need to find permanence
in literature—and more specifically, in literary history (203). But
the permanence they find there will paradoxically depend on the particularity
of isolated moments. "The facts of a particular history are those
which awaken the historical feeling, are those which make a boy feel that
he is connected with acts and events which passed hundreds of years ago,
thousands of miles away. The spirit of a particular poem, is that which
awakens the poetical spirit in answer to it" (58). This is a different kind of relationship to history than Thomas Dale
had envisioned. Dale thought literary history mattered mainly as a connected
narrative of improvement, and he accordingly asked students to explain
causal connections in that narrative. What aspects of medieval drama operated
to prepare the minds of the people for the Reformation? Maurice's reasons
for teaching literary history, by contrast, didn't necessarily require
a student to grasp the whole story.
[T]he moment you bring the townsman of one age to feel himself connected
with the townsman of another . . . that moment this meanness and narrowness
disappear. The busy member of the particular corporation . . . belongs
to burghers of another day, his corporation takes its place in the history
of corporations, and bears upon the life of the nation. (205)
The goal was simply to "bring the townsman of one age to feel himself
connected with the townsman of another," through a point-to-point
connection that leapt over the intervening centuries. The intellectual
effort required to bring this about is not the effort of comprehending
a causal process. It's rather an exercise of historical imagination, analogous
to the sort of exercise Walter Scott demanded of his readers. Students
are asked to imagine how the ordinary social life of another era differed
from their own, while remaining conscious that it was inhabited by flesh-and-blood
creatures like themselves—and specifically like themselves as middle-class
Englishmen. This model of historical experience—history as an imaginative connection
with another age, founded on a simultaneous consciousness of difference
and of similarity—had become widely diffused by the 1830s. As I have hinted,
it closely resembles the way Scott described his own practice, and Maurice
acknowledges Scott's example. He believes that his proposal improves on
Scott by exploring the antiquity of a "commercial hall" and
not just a "baronial castle" (203-204, 206), but this means
only that Maurice had probably read Ivanhoe more recently than The
Antiquary.The latter novel contains an important dream that brings
the "townsman of one age" face-to-face with "the townsman
of another" precisely as Maurice would desire (74-80). Many of Scott's
other novels are designed to operate in an analogous fashion on their
middle-class readers. There is an even closer precedent for Maurice's
project in the 1828 historical lectures of François Guizot, which
confer new dignity on the middle classes by sending a nineteenth-century
bourgeois back to confront the armed camp that was a twelfth-century urban
commune. In short, Maurice didn't invent the theory of cultivation by
discontinuous historical imagination that he advanced in his 1839 lectures.
But he did invent an institution that gave that theory an enduring social
presence: the period survey course, which even today guarantees that cultural
credentials are distributed only to students who have studied the distinctive
character of isolated segments of time. -
This pedagogical experiment was not notably successful with its immediate
classroom audience. Looking back as adults, Maurice's students
invariably remembered his passion for literary history. But many of them
also remembered profound confusion about the reason for that passion (Court
94, Brose 159). Maurice's period surveys nevertheless took root; the professors
who followed him at King's College sustained the curricular structure
he had created, and it was imitated by English professors at
University College in the 1860s. Meanwhile a period-centered approach to
the teaching of history itself had become established at University College
in the 1840s, and was adopted at Oxford by 1872 (Murray 536). When Oxford
and Cambridge established their own English schools toward the end of the
century, they also created curricula that focused on the quiddity
of individual periods rather than the cumulative logic of development—an
approach to literary history that by century's end had come to seem self-evident.
By that point, the same approach also held sway in the United
States.
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Since late-nineteenth-century English departments were no longer limited
to one or two instructors, they could pursue a period-centered
approach without entirely sacrificing the idea of development. It was possible
to require students to take period courses in a chronological
sequence, for instance, or to devote the first term (or year) of instruction
to a general survey that would then be followed by courses on individual
periods. Both patterns were common at U.S. universities in the
1890s (Graff 101-02). But the compromise implied by this curricular
structure was an unequal one. Where comprehensive survey courses were taught,
they were always scheduled early in the major. In the 1890s, and for that
matter where they still exist today, these courses are understood as an orientation
that prepares students for the real work of literary study, not
as a capstone or summation of the major. This positioning is not self-evidently
necessary: it is possible to imagine a pedagogy that would begin with case
studies and move toward broader conclusions. But the discipline of literary
history has not (since the first half of the nineteenth century) felt that
broad historical conclusions were really its raison d'être.
Whatever prestige attached to continuous evolution in society at large,
the competitive advantage of literary history has seemed to lie in emphasizing
the radical differences between past and present. "Thoughts, fashions,
ideals change," as one frequently-reprinted manual for early-twentieth-century
British students put it; "the fashion of their utterance changes
likewise; chasms yawn between us and bye-gone generations; and many a
book which once held its readers spellbound seems a vapid and futile thing
to us who belong to another age, and are touched by other modes of passion
and other manners of speech." Only by acknowledging this chasm, and
emphasizing the "relativity of literature" to its age, do we "gain
a point of view from which every aspect of literary art becomes quickened
for us into fresh significance." The dated book becomes a living
thing again "as a record of what men once found potent to move, charm,
console, inspire"—or in other words, as a symbol of the timeless
life contained in cultural discontinuity (Hudson 54-55). * * *
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I don't want to understate Michael Foucault's importance, either as a
historian or as a philosophical ironist. My own work has been
substantially indebted to him. But I think Foucault's reflections on historical
method itself are not the occasions for his most original contributions—certainly
not, at any rate, to the discipline of literary history. One
has to go back to the 1830s to find a moment when the model of continuity
criticized by Foucault was actually central to the study of literature. Since
the middle of the nineteenth century, literary history has tended to emphasize
instead its special relationship to relativity and discontinuity.
The concept of the literary "period" has provided a way to validate
the contingency that historicism recognizes in all collective
life, and even a way to find a kind of timelessness in that mutability. The
institution of the period survey has ensured that this concept remains central
to the distribution of cultural credentials, and literary cultivation has
frequently been represented as Foucault represents genealogy:
as a historical refraction of the self that locates a paradoxical sort of
immortality in dispersion. In short, Foucault's "genealogical" method
has never posed a fundamental challenge to our discipline's historical assumptions.
On the contrary, it supports a prevailing disciplinary logic;
it gives literary historians a new way to explain why they emphasize case
studies and surprising contrasts—as we have, for about a century and
a half, preferred to do.
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But enough criticism; what positive conclusions, if any, follow from
my argument? Since this article itself trades on a few surprising
juxtapositions, I am evidently not suggesting that literary historians ought
to renounce the sinister pleasures of discontinuity, or the cultural profits
they return. But I suppose I am hinting that it would do us little harm to
relax our vigilance against the language of continuity. There
are certainly ways of misusing that language. I think it's accurate to say
that F. D. Maurice designed the first courses that
focus on a single period of literary history. If I added that the period
survey is thus "in origin" an Anglican idea, I would be sidling
toward the sort of fallacy that assumes that the persistence of one thing
also implies the persistence of anything associated with it. Where fallacies
of this kind are at issue, we have good reason to be wary of
words like "origin" and
the continuities they posit. But the point of this wariness is
to discern real continuity and real change, not to avert the idea of continuity
itself. Our disciplinary rhetoric doesn't always facilitate that distinction.
I at least have often found myself erasing "origin" or "tradition" and
typing "provenance" or "practice" in contexts where
it made no substantive difference, out of a hazy recollection
that the concept of origin is supposed to be a shelter for the
sovereign subject. In these situations I suspect I have neither
avoided a fallacy, nor decentered subjectivity. I have merely affirmed
my discipline's long-standing belief that questions about causation and
gradual change are not as properly literary as questions about the unrepeatable
singularity of each historical moment.
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