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Monday, March 06, 2006
Sexy Historicism?
Below the fold you’ll find a rough draft of a talk I’ll be giving tomorrow night. The occasion is a production of Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending
I begin with a startling revelation: every work of literature is written at some specific time, read at some specific time and represents some specific time. Call them the moment of composition, the moment of reception and the moment of representation. A person whose primary scholarly interest is in the interaction of these three moments is an historicist. I would define the term further, but at this moment in literary studies historicism is less methodology and more attitude. To paraphrase Stephen Greenblatt: historicists desire to speak with the dead, to know how it felt to live during the moment of composition. How do they acquire such knowledge?
Slowly. An historicist must be on intimate terms with his or her chosen moment of composition. This requires exhaustive study of both the primary sources produced during that moment and the secondary ones written about it. I know what you’re thinking: Where can I sign up? The answer is many of you already have. Historicism has become increasingly popular in literature departments because its appeal is inherently literary. You were interested enough in literature to sacrifice your early evening to a discussion and performance of a work of one. Ipso facto . . . I take it you need convincing. A quick example:
James Joyce famously and modestly said of his novel Ulysses: “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” A tall order for a single book. And note that he merely says Dublin can be rebuilt. He doesn’t claim that the inner lives of its citizens could be reconstructed, although many a Joycean would claim that they could have. The point is historicists aim to do what Joyce did and one better. Only instead of a single book we have archives at our disposal. We sift through thousands of seemingly pointless documents to find the one sharpened one. But that seemingly pointless sifting isn’t pointless at all. It provides us with a feel for the period, for its concerns and locutions. We inhabit the textual remains of the moment of composition with the doggedness of a Joyce in order to rebuild the culture which predictably disappeared from the earth. Unfortunately for us this is no easy matter. Consider the subject of this roundtable, Orpheus Descending:
Williams wrote in the late 1930s. But back then he called it Battle of Angels. Its moment of reception was unkind. It closed after a short run. So we have the original moment of composition. An historicist might read Battle of Angels and wonder why Williams had chosen the moment of representation he did: a claustrophobic Southern town roughly contemporaneous to the moment of composition, i.e. the late 1930s. But then he rewrote it. Seventeen times. Each time adding or stripping away a little something. How many of his revisions had to do with the changing times and how many were the result of his changing mind? This unstable moment of composition gives historicists fits. How can we situate in a particular historical moment a text continually revised over the better part of seventeen years? Even if Williams himself thought it timeless-and for reasons I’ll discuss shortly I have good reason to believe he did-the cultural situation in which he revised it was the very opposite of timeless. Time ticked forward. It always does. The culture in which Williams wrote Battle of Angels, then, is not the same culture in which he eventually finished Orpheus Descending. A quick example:
In the late 1930s the Italian Lady Torrence may be been considered a foreigner and, in the South, possibly not even white. Between the moment of initial composition and the first performance of the revised play in 1957 she would have been considered an enemy of America during WWII and eventually granted entry, even in the South, into the Caucasian club. How did Williams’ changing feelings about Italians over that period influence his depiction of Lady? Did he consider changing her national origin during WWII and if he didn’t what does that tell us about his relation to American culture at the time? Did he consider altering her heritage after mainstream American culture accepted second and third generation Italian immigrants as marginally white?
On top of the confusion posed by the shifting moment of production, we would have to account for the oddity inherent in the moment of representation. He named his play Orpheus Descending and larded it with allusions to classical literature. And the Bible. And Catholic martyrs. Carol Cutrere in Orpheus Descending, for example, had been Cassandra in Battle of Angels. In one of her monologues she describes her former self as “a Christ-bitten reformer,” “a kind of benign exhibitionist” whose efforts at political intervention were, Cassanda-like, always ignored. Should we consider the revisionary history incidental or essential? Should we entertain the idea that Williams stripped her of her namesake’s foresight for personal reasons? Cultural? Aesthetic maybe? The answer to that question depends on how closely you believe Williams followed the Cassandra mythology in the construction of Carol Cutrere. If you think it very important, you find yourself in the uncomforable position of deciding precisely what moment of representation is being represented? Transplanting a Greek moment into a Southern moment over the course of seventeen years causes some problems…
Comments
A small question, Scott. If
every work of literature is written at some specific time, read at some specific time and represents some specific time
how do you deal with situations when one or more of those “specific time[s]” are not present? I know it is a rather light question, but I’ve been reading JM Coetzee recently, and he has a very strong tendency (not peculiar to him, and probably acquired from Kafka) to mask the third, representative time. Would the historical situation in such a case be under-determined, and does that somehow decrease our understanding of the work? (That doesn’t make sense, but as a distinct non-Historicist, I’m curious).
Coetzee, Kafka, and lots and lots and lots and lots of poets. I don’t think Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14 represents any particular time or place. Even if it did, it wouldn’t ‘represent’ in the same way that Ulysses represents Dublin. I think it would take a lot of conceptual maneuvering to justify the claim that every single work of literature represents a specific time.
As for being read at some specific time--the phrasing seems a little misleading. You might be inviting debates of a more philosophical nature than maybe you expect or want.
That sounds like a challenge to me, Scott. And, judging by Jennifer’s blog, she’s been reading Wittgenstein and extracurricular details about Davidson, so maybe John can jump in too. Perhaps we can also integrate Zizek into the ensuing discussion.
Dunno, that’s not a small question, and it’s one I need to come to terms with not so much for this talk but for my work in general; because yes, when does The Castle occur? Context clues abound, and we can say things like “well, they don’t use email, so it’s probably pre-2000” or “a nuclear annihilated post-2000” (e.g. A Canticle for Leibowitz); but even when it’s unclear like it is in The Castle we can ask questions about the rationale behind the lack of clarity. What was it about the emergent bureaucratic culture that Kafka addressed? The question does make sense, and accounts for the purchase the term “Kafka-esque” still has on our vocabulary. I can’t think of another author whose name belongs to popular parlance like that, although I may be missing something obvious.
jcarr, you make a damn fine point about poetry and, in so doing, remind me how much I think in novels and how I really ought to stop that. Greenblatt writes on poetry frequently, and when he does, he tends to conflate the moment of composition and the moment of representation. When he writes about one of the “Holy Sonnets” in “Marvelous Possessions,” for example, that conflation’s incredibly convenient, since it allows him to create his homology without having to contextualize what the poem represents. He can make his argument that just as the essence of erotic or religious desire is perpetual frustration, so to is the contact narrative of Christopher Columbus--and all such narratives--never complete, because it always involves an acknowledgment of the other and the essence of the marvelous is always beyond grasp. (Speaking of acknowledgment, I think I’ve stolen that language from somewhere, since it’s tacked on to the end of my notes on the Greenblatt. So anonymous scholar whose work I’m paraphrasing, I apologize. I’d credit you if I could . . . and I promise to take better notes.)
Point being, it’s convenient that the Donne sonnet lacks the representational equivalent of the Columbus diary entry. Makes the homology that easier to make. But I’m not sure this addresses your question, however; but it’s a fine one, and one I wish I knew how to answer better than I have.
Finally, I don’t mind inviting philosophical debates. However, I’m not sure how you’re reading “read” there in such a way that’ll it invite unnecessarily philosophical debates. All I mean to say is that all works are received by readers in the moment they read them, and that that moment may be a week after publication or two thousands years. (And, of course, that that difference matters, necessitates an accounting of one’s own identitarian commitments, &c. Or those of a critic whose work on the work of literature was written 50 years ago, &c. If it weren’t for all these damns et ceterae I may have already finished my dissertation.
Oh—I didn’t have troubles with “read”; just with the singularity of “time.” I really was just harping on your phrasing there. (It seemed possible that you meant something more contentious.)
The part that confuses me philosophically is captured in your description of Greenblatt’s work: “he tends to conflate the moment of composition and the moment of representation.” Can I contrast some cases, to show where I’m getting stuck?
Ulysses contains sentences about Dublin, its taverns, cemetaries, etc. So it seems not too controversial that the novel represents Dublin—even if, like you mention, it represents a lot of other things as well.
None of the sentences of Holy Sonnet 14 is about England, or anything specific to the 17th century. If it does ‘represent’ a specific time or place, it doesn’t do so by virtue of the content of its sentences.
In normal cases, for normal sentences, it would be problematic to conflate the ‘moment of representation’ and the ‘moment of composition’—or the content of the sentence and the uttering of the sentence—or the meaning of the sentence and its social and material preconditions. I mean, we wouldn’t say that this comment I’m typing represents California, 2006. I don’t mean to say that sentences of poetry are normal sentences—but if they might not even be speech acts, then there’s no reason assume they’re about the author, that the ‘I’ of Holy Sonnet 14 indicates Donne.
It seems like you’re using some form of ‘representation’ that isn’t the same as linguistic representation. Is it just stipulated by the scholar? Is there any reason not to replace “Every work of literature represents some specific time” with “For every work of literature, we can draw interesting conclusions by comparing it with some specific point in time”?
In any case, it would be nice to have some sense of what you mean by ‘represent.’
jcarr, I think you point to a fundamental problem with my historicist model, i.e. that it presupposes the representational scheme of the realist novel. Fortunately for my inflated sense of self-importance, I think the issues you take with the rest of what I’ve written undermine Greenblatt’s argument more than mine. You’re right to question Greenblatt’s move there, because he does, in fact, the equivalent of your saying “that this comment represents California, 2006.” Only Greenblatt goes one further: he claims that the mindset represented in Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” is identical or typical to that of individuals whose lives are contemporaneous with Donne’s. In short, he skirts the problem of representation posed by Donne’s poems by situating, definitively, their content in the moment their production.
I’m with you on this one: I think that it’s a parlor trick designed to avoid the very question you’re asking. Another way to say this is that, for Greenblatt, while the “I” of “Holy Sonnet 14” doesn’t indicate Donne, it necessarily refers back to authorial stance. Even Donne’s narratorial evasions are of historical import for Greenblatt; they are as much a product of his historical moment as what he wrote in a voice not his own.
So to answer you question about what I mean by “represent,” I simply mean everything a realist novel knowingly captures plus everything else it unknowingly does. So yes, I think your formulation works. I’ll respond more coherently tomorrow, after I’ve had a little more time to process your valued critique.
Related to jcarr‘s point, how would Historicism, as defined, deal with the “represent[ed] time” of what might be called historical allegory?
Imagine a text that states “non-fictional historical personage X took action Y,” where the import of action Y is in its continued application. (Ok, so that doesn’t make much sense. Let me try over). Plutarch’s Parallel Lives are full of this, with the Lives of Aegislaus, Alexander, and Demosthenes, being nearly meaningless except as foils for the Lives of Pompey, Caesar, and Cicero (note that this is not quite the same as requiring an identical “time of reading;” knowledge of the relevant facts would suffice).
Saint’s Lives, Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel” and the biographies of the Founding Fathers that were so popular in bookstores recently I think are all instances of this, that is, they fail to drop into a unitary “represent[ed] time.”
Scott:
I believe you may have answered my concerns with your last paragraph at 11:07, which I missed while composing (did not mean to seem a troll).
This part is interesting:
An historicist must be on intimate terms with his or her chosen moment of composition. This requires exhaustive study of both the primary sources produced during that moment and the secondary ones written about it.
Presumably scholars also need to know about things, written by previous generations, that their author & that author’s cohort were still absorbing in that chosen moment?
Historicism has become increasingly popular in literature departments because its appeal is inherently literary.
The “inherently literary” bit caught my eye...largely because I don’t get it, I guess. Literariness, to me, is a sort of synonym for intertextuality - a function of the inheritance & the renovation of form. A diachronic effect as opposed to the synchronic scenario depicted in your bit about the chosen moment of composition. Not, of course, that we can have one without the other, but you seem to be saying that the “moment” trumps the tradition in terms of the formation of investigatable literariness.
I forgot to write the main thing I wanted to say, which is only to observe that this question of sexiness - Historicism: Hot or Not? - reminds me of a lot of things I’ve read lately on librarians’ blogs reporting a resurgence of that whole erotic fascination with libraries, archives, and catalogues. It seems to be about librarians taking off their glasses etc etc etc, as you might expect, but it also apparently has to do with the current craze for research, clue-hunting, systems, and cataloguing, a la user-created tags, 43 Things, and so forth. (Maybe the Da Vinci Code also.)
So perhaps the image of the scholar rummaging in archives just is a turn-on, not in need of any extra saucing up. Then again this is a conversation librarians seem to be having about & amongst themselves so there may be an element of wishful thinking going on there.
Presumably scholars also need to know about things, written by previous generations, that their author & that author’s cohort were still absorbing in that chosen moment?
You presume correctly.
The “inherently literary” bit caught my eye...largely because I don’t get it, I guess.
Then I should probably clarify that, since it’s supposed to be the “sexy” part of the talk. Essentially, I’m arguing for literature as “world-building” in the Joycean sense, with the text as a coherent New Critical object which resonates at a pleasing pitch when put beside the context in which it was first created. Not that it doesn’t resonate equally pleasing when placed in other contexts--or as dunno and jcarr noted yesterday, no context, or at least a willful contextlessness. This is obviously the weakest plank in my talk, but it’s the angle I chose to sexify the argument. Because despite what librarians may think, I don’t think rummaging in archives an inherently sexy situation, esp. when one considers the dust and silverfish.
I am unconvinced that the “moment of representation,” if there is such a thing, can simply be juxtaposed with the other two moments you’re describing. Representation seems itself to be historically determined (usually through a combination of certain philosophical precepts and technological norms), and in that determination (though not necessarily because of it), it doesn’t seem to me to be the same temporal modality at work behind composition and reception. Not because those latter concepts are particularly more discrete time zones, but because representation is always a bridging of a gap between composition and reception, and the gap is structured by things that are not purely historical.
Hope the talk goes/went well.
Ken, thanks for the comment, but as I’ve just returned from the talk, I’m a little bushed. Needless to say, I agree with you. The moment represented is always fraught with contingency in ways that the moments of composition and reception aren’t. Alright, that’s not true, but the complexities the productive and receptive moments are managable, whereas those of the representative spiral into absurdity. And because I’m primarily a literary scholar, I’m interested in the warpedness of the moment represented most of all; so, in my dissertation, I’m interested in how investments in particular systems of human evolution and progress inflect the representation of a particular moment, &c.
Like I said, I’m a little on the exhausted side, but you’re right; had I had more than 15 minutes to speak I would’ve pressed that point. The equivalence was pedagogical more than anything else. That said, I’d love to continue this conversation in a more serious vein tomorrow, since it’s central to my dissertation and I love little more than cribbing off people smarter than me.
I’d love to continue this conversation in a more serious vein tomorrow
Please do.
[H]ow investments in particular systems of human evolution and progress inflect the representation of a particular moment
seems mighty interesting.