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
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