Literature and varieties of history

[ Part 9]

So far, in this series of columns on varieties of history, I have been focusing on the work, formulations and agendas of historians. Today I wish to highlight the work of a group of literary scholars who have a deep and abiding interest in history. Their body of work goes under the generic name of New Historicism. The term New Historicism was coined by Stephen Greenblartt, a well-known literary scholar who has earned a place of eminence as a Renaissance scholar.( I have heard him speak at many venues including the University of Hawaii). His own preference for this body of work is cultural poetics; however, the term New Historicism caught on, and that is how the work of Greenblatt and his group is now described by the academic community.

New Historicism has emerged as a very powerful mode of inquiry, displacing deconstruction in many English Departments in North American universities. The following assessment by Philippa Kelley in her book titled The Touch of Evil, which is a collection of essays in honor of Stephen Greenblatt, captures convincingly the importance of New Historicism.

‘Since Stephen Greenblatt coined the term a new historicism in 1981, no movement has been more influential in the study of literary history, and no literary thinker more admired, more cited or, indeed, more often challenged, than Greenblatt himself. Drawing together ideas from cultural anthropology, literary theory and historicist theory, Greenblatt brought to the study of literary texts an awareness of the subversive forces that emerge from the very powers which seek to contain them.’ she goes on to make the assertion that in his cultural poetics (his preferred term), history has become a shifting, self-reflective concept that brings to the center of attention the act of reading in any determination of the past, recognising texts as negotiating the fabric of the past that claim to give rise to them.

She points out that Greenblatt and others see history as a culturally grounded activity the volatile nature of which is underscored in the very act of reading.

Significance

To understand the true significance of the term New historicism, we need to first examine the meaning of Historicism. This term began to circulate in the nineteenth century Europe to characterize an approach to the writing of history and literary study that highlighted the fact that each period should be evaluated in terms of its own specific values, attitudes and fames of understanding, rather than in terms of what is available at present. In the 1950s, the philosopher Karl Popper took over this term and gave it a newer meaning. He employed it to define macro-laws of historical development; he was particularly concerned with those that aimed to foretell the future and conceived of history as purposively travelling towards a predefined goal. Clearly, he had in mind the formulations of Hegel and Marx.

As a literary movement, New Historicism took root in the early 1980s and by the 1990s it had established itself as a mode of inquiry of the highest importance.

Apart from Stephen Greenblatt, there were other distinguished scholars such as Catherine Gallagher, Louis Montrose, Alan Liu, Stephen Orgley, Richard Helgerston whose names were closely linked with this movement. Greenblatt also founded a journal titled Representation which was devoted largely, though not exclusively, to scholars who were sympathetic to New Historicism.

New Historicism was a clear reaction against the dominant literary creed of the 1960s and 1970s – New Criticism. The New Historicists felt that the New Critics focused too heavily on the uniqueness of a literary work and its formal properties to the exclusion of the social and historical context which gave rise to it. They were keen to restored the balance by focusing on the historicity of texts

The New Historicists were also interested in distancing themselves from another dominant school of criticism that was highly influential in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Yale School which included Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman and J,Hillis Miller (there were, to be sure, differences among them).

The Yale School was by and large, influenced by the work of Derrida, and new Historicists wanted to carve out a new path of inquiry although they did draw on some of his concepts such as circulation In addition the New Historicists were also critical of Marxist approaches – so called vulgar Marxism which posited a simplistic division between the base and superstructure.

Marxism

Although they found the general orientation of Marxism instructive they felt that they had to refine it in keeping with their tenets and priorities..

There are a number of features which give New Historicism its distinctiveness. Among them are the emphasis on inter disciplinarity, the importance of social, economic, political contexts of culture, the need for a self-reflective gaze on the practices of the scholars themselves, the importance of everyday life which can conceal many interesting facets beneath its mask of banality, the constant interplay between texts and contexts. Indeed, some call contexts co-texts.

In addition New Historicists are keen to reconstruct literary texts as objects of history by bringing into focus documents and forms of analyses ignored or excluded by earlier scholars of literary history and aesthetics.

The need to recognise literary and historical texts as cultural phenomena is an idea that these scholars have succeeded in putting into circulation. I said in an earlier paragraph that the New Historicists were unhappy with the methodologies and agendas of the New Critics who focused on the words on the page as if they were self-contained and self-begotten and had no palpable connection with history and the wider cultural discourses of society.

The New Historicists rejected this approach by calling attention to the fact that words derive their life from history. However, New Historicism did agree with New Critics on one thing – the need to do close readings of texts. The difference between the New Critics and the New Historicists in this regard is that the latter performed close readings of texts in the light of history.

Indeed, history was the silent horizon for their close readings. Hence, the historicity of texts and textuality of history were both important to them.

Similarly, while New Historicism is opposed to structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction, it also has not shied away from drawing on some of the concepts associated with these critical schools and refining them and using them for its own pre-determined purposes.

The ideas of signifying practices, the problems of representation, the fissured nature of texts, the inescapable conjunctions of knowledge and power that are associated with some of the schools I referred to earlier find articulation in the writings of new historicists.

They are also opposed to standard Marxist approaches to cultural analysis which privileges economics, modes of production, over all other spheres of social activity. They reject the simplistic binary of base and superstructure and call attention to the centrality and determinate power of culture. They also repudiate the linear and goal-oriented progress of history outlined in Marxism. At the same time, they take very seriously the Marxist notion that human beings and their artifacts are brought into being by historical and social forces operating in society

Themes

Although one can identify a broad group of literary scholars who are associated with New Historicism, they do not constitute a rigidly unified school. They do subscribe to a recognisable theoretical program which is vitally connected with the cultural production of texts. As one commentator aptly remarked the New Historicist project is not ‘a doctrine but a consolidation of themes preoccupations and attitudes.’ I think it is more profitable to regard New Historicism as signaling a broad orientation to the study of texts and history rather than a group unified by a fixed agenda.

As I will explain later, there are certain features such as the constant deployment of anecdotes as opening a productive analytical space that many of the New Historicists endorse. H.Aram Veeser has identified five such common features. The first is that every expressive act needs to be seen as being embedded in a network of material practices. The second is that every act of critique, demystifying and opposition employs the tools it condemns and risks falling victim to the practices it de-values.

Third, that literary texts and non-literary texts circulate inseparably. Fourth, that no discourse gives access to truths that are unchanging, nor do they articulate timeless human nature. Fifth, a critical method and a vocabulary adequate to explicating culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe. These five features underscore the complexity of the project under taken by New Historicists.

One useful way of uncovering the distinctiveness of New Historicism is by contrasting it with Historicists; after all the very title urges us to do so. There are three dominant features associated with Historicism that I would like to highlight. First, there is a conviction that runs through the generality of historicist writings that there is process in operation in history that human beings cannot master or transform.

This approach to history has the unfortunate consequence of robbing human beings of a sense of agency. The specificities of choices, actions, decisions that human beings make are minimised and they are lumped to gather under the broad rubric of man. This man can do little to alter the march of history and hence he is rendered helpless.

Focus

The New Historicists categorically reject this view. They emphasize the fact that rather than focus on the generic category of man, the emphasis should be on individual human beings, how they make choices, initiate actions in specific historical circumstances engaging the culture that they inhabit; by engaging I refer both to the ways they affirm culture and to the ways in which they challenge and subvert culture. It is important to bear in mind the fact that these individual human beings who are conditioned by expectations of race, gender class, ethnicity, religion and so on do not hesitate to being about change in history.

As Stephen Grenblatt observes, ‘indeed, if there is any inevitability in the new historicism’s vision of history, It is the insistence on agency, for even inaction or extreme marginality is understood to possess meaning and therefore to imply intention. Every form of behavior, in this view, is a strategy; taking up arms or taking flight are significant social action, but so is staying put, minding one’s own business, turning one’s face to the wall. Agency is virtually inescapable.’

What New Historicists emphasize is not the inevitability and inexorability of the processes of history but thefact that through an analysis of these processes one can identify the constraints and restrictions encountered by individuals. What we take to be unitary actions turn out to be manifold, and the power associated with an individual is found to be intermingled with the collectively generated social energies.

This focus on human agency by New Historicism has misled some to thinking that the practitioners of this mode of historical and literary analysis are advancing a kind of Nietzschean will to power. This is indeed a misreading of their intentions and practices. The notion of human agency espoused by the new historicists is vitally connected to the social energies produced by social collectivities and which flow through society.

Second, historicists argue that it is of paramount importance that historians distance themselves as far as possible from all value judgments in their investigations into the past and cultures that existed in earlier periods. The New Historicists reject this view outright. They underline the inescapability of value judgments. Stephen Greenblatt candidly states that his own critical practices are decisively shaped by the America of the 1960s and early 1970s; he cites in particular the opposition to the Vietnam War and all that it entailed.

It is his deeply held belief that historical and literary writing that is not engaged, that is not socially committed, that withhold judgments, that is unable to enforce connections between the present and the past is worthless. Greenblatt himself has done much pioneering work on the Renaissance period (His book Renaissance Self-Fashioning is revered as a classic).. The study of the culture of this period, for him, is not a flight from the turbulences of the present, but rather an intervention to it, a way of relating to it newer ways. Therefore, value-neutrality and detachment are not goals cherished by the New Historicists. The third distinguishing feature of Historicism is the inordinate reverence for the past that it displays. There is a kind of celebratory streak to this kind of thinking. What is interesting to note here is that while Historicists argue against value judgments, they also in the same breath affirm the values connected to the past. Clearly, there is a contradiction here. Again New Historicists depart radically from this approach. They are not interested in celebrating the past; they are interested in critically investigating it.

While Historicists focused on unity, harmony and progress, New Historicists were more concerned with conflicts, tensions. Instead of harmony and integration they were more drawn to contradictions. While the Historicists dealt largely with the center, New Historicists were addressing issues related to the centre and the periphery. The Historicists displayed a great interest in depicting the achieved aesthetic orders and unities as opposed to the New Historicists who were grappling with the material and ideological foundations of this achieved orders and unities.

The Historicists were circumspect in their choice of themes and topics for exploration focusing largely on the elite; the New Historicists, on the other hand, were not hampered by such limiting concerns and sought to examine the everyday life in all its many-sidedness. Clearly, then, the approaches of the Historicists and New Historicists diverged significantly.

Walter Cohen commenting on the procedures of the New Historicists makes the following interesting observation. ’New Historicists are likely to seize upon something out of the way, obscure, even bizarre, dreams, popular or aristocratic festivals, denunciations of witchcraft, sexual treatises, diaries and autobiographies, descriptions of clothing, reports on disease, birth and death records, accounts of insanity.’ Despite the mildly critical tone, this description focuses on a prominent preoccupation of New Historicists – their deep interest in the ordinary; the so-called strange and unusual in daily life and explore them imaginatively in such a way that important truths about a given culture are revealed.

What Greenblatt and others like him argue is that these out of the way incidents and documents shed light on the inner workings of cultures in ways that had not been anticipated. He goes on to the make point that New Historicists are interested in such miscellaneous cultural articulations as medical manuals, clothing or witchcraft accusations as reflectors of the imaginative and ideological structures that gave rise to them. For New Historicists the idea of historical background carries special resonances.

Relationship

The relationship between a text and its historical circumstances, as New Historicists see it, is an extremely complex and multi-faceted one. As Greenblatt said, ‘My concern with literary texts has been to recover as far as possible the historical circumstances of their original production and consumption and to analyse the relationship between their circumstances and our own. I have tried to understand the intersecting circumstances not as a stable prefabricated background against which the literary texts can be placed but as a dense network of evolving and often contradictory social forces.

The idea is not to find outside the work of art some rock to which literary interpretations can be securely chained but rather to situate the work in relation to the other representational practices operative in a the culture at a given moment in both its history and our own.’. This comment nicely encapsulates an important research dimension of new historicism. An important aspect of the work of New Historicists is the way in which they make use of anecdotes for analytical purposes. Greenblatt excels in this effort. For example in his book Marvelous Possessions he tells us an anecdote related to Bali.In the night, he walks on narrow paths through silent paddy fields.

They are glittering with fireflies. He reaches a tiny village in the semi-darkness and is greeted by barking dogs. He sees a light emanating from a communal pavilion and he goes there hoping to observe a Balinese dance, which has gained universal visibility thanks to the work of Western anrhropologists.

As he drew near he realised that the light came from a television set and a large number of villagers sat around the set watching a show. Greenblatt , understandably, is disappointed with what he saw; this is not what he expected to see. He was invited by the villagers to see the show with them on the communal VCR; interestingly, they were watching a colorful religious ceremony, and he saw in the crowd some of the ecstatic celebrants that were performing on the television screen.

Greenblatt tells this anecdote so as to offer highly insightful comments on capitalism, subjecthood, representation. As he says, the villagers had purchased a sophisticated version of international capitalism’s representational machinery, its leading device at the moment for the production, reproduction, and transmission of cultural texts- the immense transformative power of that device, its ability to diminish difference by initiating relatively isolated and autonomous cultures into the imagery and values of the world system.’

He makes use of this anecdote to probe into the complex dynamics of cultural modernity. The use of anecdote as an analytical device is a hallmark of New Historicism. One of the best essays on anecdote and history that I have read was written by the late Joel Fineman who was closely associated with New Historicism. In an essay titled, ‘The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction’ he makes extremely valuable observations on event and context. For example speaking of Thucydides, who is generally credited as the first historian in western culture, Fineman points out how in his art of history-writing the anecdote figured prominently. So, it appears, this predilection of the New Historicists has a long history.

New Historicism, like other fields of inquiry, did not fall from the sky; the practitioners of this mode of historical and literary investigation drew on various existing theorists and intellectual traditions. In this regard I wish to identify three main theorists. When I say that the New Historicists were influenced by the following three scholars, I am not suggesting that they uncritically followed in their footsteps.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In each case, the New Historicists displayed a high level of critical acumen in sorting out what was relevant and what was not for their theoretical agendas. The three theorists I have in mind are Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz and Raymond Williams. There were, to be sure, other influences such as Althusser, Bourdieu and de Certeau. However, it seems to me, these three thinkers exerted a far greater influence in shaping the field of New Historicism than any others.

Why were the New Historicists attracted to Foucault? I would like to give five reasons. First, unlike Marx, Foucault was opposed to ideas of, and efforts at. totalization. This was an aspect of his thinking that held a great appeal to the New Historicists. They abhorred all master narratives and like Foucault focused on micro-histories, local narratives.

Second, Foucault was deeply interested in the experiences and predicaments of the marginalized, oppressed, the excluded. The New Historicists too were interested in those that were made invisible in society. Third. Foucault, as I had pointed out in my earlier columns, sought to establish a link between knowledge and power and how they proceed to define each other. This is again a pathway of thinking that the New Historicists found attractive.

Fourth, Foucault argues that in each period there is a certain episteme that controls the thinking patterns and modes of behavior of people; while not totally agreeing with this assertion, the New Historicists incorporated aspects of this formulation into their thought patterns. Fifth, Foucault constantly emphasised discontinuities and ruptures in history, and this is an area in which the New Historicists had evinced a great interest.

Features

These, then, are some features of Michel Foucault that appealed to New Historicists like Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose. However, they also departed in some ways from Foucault’s thinking. For example they felt that Foucault did not give adequate investigative space to the agency and creative powers of citizens. The second major theorist who influenced the thinking of the New Historicists and enabled the emergence of this field of study is the distinguished American Anthropologist Clifford Geertz.

His concept of culture as a text, the focus on local knowledge, and above all, his idea of thick descriptions which he borrowed from philosophy are particularly important. Geertz defined culture as webs of significance that man has spun around himself. He saw the importance of studying cultures as texts. He also saw art which constitutes an important segment of society not as an isolated or autonomous activity but one that was closely related to other activities in society.

As he perceptively observed, ‘the definition of art in any society is never wholly intra-aesthetic, and indeed but surely marginally so. the chief problem presented by the sheer phenomenon of aesthetic force, in whatever form and in result of whatever skill it may come, is how to place it within other modes of social activity.’ This approach to culture and art was one that stuck a ready chord of response in the New Historicists. Clifford Geertz also championed the idea of local knowledge. In fact the title of one of his books is Local Knowledge. This again is concept that was privileged by practitioners of new historicism. Furthermore Greenblatt and others were significantly persuaded by Geertz’s idea of thick descriptions. Greenblatt’s desire to erase the division a between background and foreground by locating all social practices including theatre and literature on the same plane, connects very nicely with the notion of thick descriptions. Similarly the idea of anecdotes that we discussed earlier gains strength through the frame of thick descriptions. Thick descriptions, according to Ryle who coined the term, entails a description of the intentions, expectations, circumstances, settings, and purposes that invest actions with meaning,

As H.Aram Veeser said, ‘taking their cue from Geertz’s method of thick descriptions they seize upon an event or anecdote…..and re-read it in such a way as to reveal through analysis of tiny particulars the behavioral codes or, logics, and motive forces controlling a whole society.’ Now what did Geertz mean by thick descriptions? Drawing on the writings of the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, he fashioned an ethnographic method that focused in providing as much details as possible for explain human action.

For him, it was not the enunciation of universal laws or formulae, but the offering of thick descriptions that mattered. As he stated, ‘thick description is the sorting out the structures of signification…..and determining their social ground and import.’ He saw thick descriptions as a way of understanding and representing complex symbolic systems and patterns of behavior that anthropologists habitually explore. The New Historicists saw in this concept a source of great strength and investigative power.

The third theorist who, in my judgment, influenced the thought-patterns of New Historicists is the British cultural critic Raymond Williams. His emphasis on the need to study culture in terms of the material transformations found a ready response in New Historicism. His idea of the structure of feeling, too, I believe stirred the imagination of New Historicists. The structure of feeling can, in broad terms, be defined as the recognizable cultural contours of a given period. It is the outcome of multiple elements of social life acting and reacting in an organised way.

Commenting on his notion of the structure of feeling Williams asserted that, ’in the study of a period, we may be able to reconstruct with more or less accuracy, the material life, the social organisation, and to a large extent, the dominant ideas. It is not necessary to discuss here, what if any, of these aspects is in the whole complex, determining; an important institution like the drama will in all probability, take its color in varying degrees be useful, but it is a common experience in analysis to realise that when one has measured the work against the separate parts there yet remains some element from which there is no external counterpart. This element, I believe, is what I have termed the structure of feeling.’

The New Historicism, like all other cultural creeds and movements, has its share of critics and denigrators. There are those who criticize them for demoting literature.

Harold Bloom, for example, said that New Historicists have reduced literature to a footnote of history. Some find the New Historicists too political. Others find them not political enough. Gayatri Spivak once said that New Historicism is a media hyped counter position to deconstruction.

The fact that in many English Departments in North America, New Historicism has displaced deconstruction as the analytical mode of choice is clear. New Historicists, no doubt and with reason, have come in for some criticism. However, to my mind, they have been able to usher in a new agenda for literary and historical analysis that is reverberating through the academy..

Relevance

Does New Historicism have any relevance to our own literary and cultural preoccupations? How can we profitably draw on their formulations, interests and methodologies? These are questions well worth pondering. There are a number of ways in which meaningful links can be established between modern Sri Lankan literature and New Historicism. Let us first consider the general theoretical orientation that guides New Historicism.

It is one, as Louis Montrose has pointed out, in which is refigured the socio-cultural field within which canonical, literary works are produced; and there is also a desire to locate such works not only in relation to other genres and forms of discourse but also in relation to contemporary social institutions. This is indeed an approach that, say, modern Sinhala literary critics and literary historians can pursue with profit. It enables us to map Sinhala literary production in newer and more stimulating ways. Let us consider an example.

The Matara period was marked by a kind of poetry that manifested the rise of individualism. Admittedly, the poetry that was produced during this period was not of the highest rank, and much of it was easily forgettable. However, in this poetry we see the emergence of the individual as a literary figure. This is a phenomenon that can be explored productively.

This poetry represents an individualisation of personal identity as it emerges from the shadows of collective bonds. This theme can be explored not only by close readings of poetry, some of which were highly personal and confessional, but also in relation to other non-literary documents produced at the time – a practice that New Historicists mastered with great skill and persuasive power. The New Historicists manifested a desire to re-negotiate the long-established and heavily-fortified borders between historical study and literary study. This re-negotiation is one that we in Sri Lanka can pursue to our advantage as we explore new pathways of literary analysis.

To be continued