From the issue dated May 23, 2003
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Literary Theory and Historical UnderstandingBy MORRIS DICKSTEINOne of the momentous developments in criticism in the past two decades has been the revival of the historical method as a way of studying literature, the arts, and the world of ideas. Scholars who once might have focused on the linguistic patterns of Shakespeare's plays or Wordsworth's poetry have tried instead to explore their roots in the social history of their times. Art critics who, in the very recent past, analyzed Impressionist or Cubist canvases as configurations of light, color, line, and texture are looking more closely at their content and its links to the artists' lives. Critics once obsessed by theoretical problems of methodology and representation are now engaged with minute details of history and biography. A revolution has brought criticism back to the historical interests that were dominant in the late 19th century, the golden age of literary history and biography, before the rise of modernism and the New Criticism. Exclusive attention to the text has given way to a new concern for context as a key to critical interpretation. Now some scholars are applying this historical approach to criticism, especially the waves of literary theory that completely altered the academic study of literature between the late 1960s and early 1990s, including the re-emergence of historicism itself. As we look back at the theory years today, now that the fierce polemical passions have waned, the transformation of literary studies through several phases in a single generation seems astonishing. Where did it come from? Are its sources to be found in the 1960s, the tumultuous decade in which it emerged? In the poststructuralist phase, scholarship and criticism that had been focused on individual writers gave way to a skeptical approach to all interpretation. Soon, under the influence of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and a rediscovered Marxism, scholars became critics of ideology more than interpreters of literary texts. They examined the instruments of criticism itself, or the social or linguistic conditions that brought literature into being. By the 1980s that hermeneutic self-consciousness had been subsumed by the social history characteristic of the New Historicism, by the political commitments of radical feminism and queer theory, and by the ideological scrutiny that was the hallmark of cultural studies. Literature and history were denied their power to convey truth or depict the world. Instead they were seen as ideological formations and discursive constructions. The new history turned away from sequential narratives that told stories and made causal connections. Instead it shifted toward excavations of deep-seated assumptions, projects designed to strike through the mask and expose rhetorical devices of control and representation. As one who remains at heart an old historicist, devoted to finding a balance between the social context of literature and the power it achieves through language, voice, and formal expression, I am not the ideal person to map that sharp turn. But I'm intrigued by the answers proposed by the contributors to Historicizing Theory, a volume edited by Peter Herman, who teaches English at the University of California at San Diego, that will be published in December. These critics search out the historical basis of theory itself by examining the social circumstances that may have contributed to the work of Foucault, Paul de Man, Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and even the New Historicists, such as Stephen Greenblatt. Herman begins by echoing Fredric Jameson's first commandment, "Always historicize." To which I'm tempted to respond, "Why historicize?" -- especially when these theorists deliberately take no account of the extraliterary influences that may have shaped them. And why "always," when the evidence can be quite slim, when some historical explanations are more revealing than others, and when competing models of historical understanding can differ dramatically in their results? Nowadays, politically minded scholars tend too readily to think of the shift from the historical approach to a formalist approach after 1945 as a function of the cold war, a recoiling from politics that can be observed not only in literary studies, but also in sociology, art criticism, analytic philosophy, and law. But it is worth recalling the serious weaknesses of historical criticism that contributed to its decline. Modern poetry and painting could be exceptionally difficult. They broke sharply with 19th-century traditions of narration and visual representation. They took on forms of distortion or abstraction that seemed bent on effacing their origins. Historical criticism, on the other hand, except in the hands of an astute critic like Meyer Schapiro or Edmund Wilson, seemed badly suited to the formal complexity and sheer bravado of modern art. Some leading historical critics, like Georg Lukacs and Van Wyck Brooks, rejected modernism outright as a form of reactionary obscurantism. But even more-sympathetic critics could be reductive or obtuse about art, just like some New Historicists who would later turn away from aesthetics as a formation of middle-class ideology. Other historically oriented critics simply failed to get deeply into the work or rise to its challenge. Marxist critics betrayed their subjects by dealing with them in terms of predictable formulas. Some historical critics dissolved the work of art into its background, with its undigested facts and broad generalities, in much the same way that unimaginative New Critics sometimes reduced it to mechanical patterns of imagery, or in the way that psychoanalytic critics could reduce it to the neurotic conflicts of its author. Just as formal methods could be subtle but narrow, as if the critic were wearing blinders, the historical approach could be expansive but superficial, eschewing the close-up for the wide-angle view. Historical criticism supplied the big picture, but often only routinely, in terms of movements and periods that hardly accounted for what truly mattered in the work of individual artists. With some exceptions, like the work of the Frankfurt school or a few key art historians, historical criticism stood bewildered before the artistic revolutions of the 20th century, with their premium on novelty, their demand for a radical transformation of consciousness. In the face of this challenge, many historical critics could offer little more than fierce resistance or soothing clichés about art movements, period styles, and social backgrounds. Although it avoided many of the mistakes of its predecessors, the revived historical criticism after 1980 did not entirely escape such simplifications. Often it relied on interesting but remote social anecdotes that pointed up an ingenious parallel to a literary work without convincing the reader that it was truly relevant or decisive. Sometimes the criticism proposed an analogy between the text and its designated context that was little more than a structural resemblance, a pattern of inference rather than a genuine source or point of origin. By avoiding the chronological approach of earlier historicists, it ran the risk of looking arbitrary or merely clever. In an essay he contributes to Historicizing Theory, Ivo Kamps, an associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi, contrasts the new and old historicism very effectively. He shows how an analysis focused on small "particulars" has served as a counterweight to the sequential narratives favored by social historians, which claimed access to history wie es eigentlich gewesen, as it actually happened. These traditional accounts have been seen as "pre-encoded" by the historian's own assumptions and categories of understanding, as in part they no doubt were. Yet the older history was just as likely to be tentative, empirical, and open to contingency. The sequential kind of narrative history is not simply a claim about how things happened but a method of interpretation, a way of shaping data and engaging the reader through story, identifying causes and effects, and weaving disparate strands together. At its best, it remains open to correction and transformation, to another account that will supersede it. In recent years, Renaissance-studies and American-studies scholars have done valuable work recovering what had been ignored or suppressed by earlier critics, including the viewpoints of outsiders -- women, people of color, subjects of colonialism -- but they could not always convince us of the importance of that material to the literary work in question. Apart from their political motivation -- the hint of special pleading -- the approach of these scholars relied too much on what was missing or unexpressed in the work itself. That kind of argument by inference or analogy can be found in some very good essays in Herman's book. Jacques Derrida's emphasis on the break or rupture is traced to his own expulsion from school (and eventual departure from the country) as a young French Jew in Algeria; Paul de Man's pessimism and sense of futility is linked to the sudden and catastrophic fall of Belgium to the Nazis; and Foucault's stress on totalitarian control within social institutions like asylums and prisons is attributed to his own boyhood in occupied France during World War II. Yet those men adamantly resisted such connections and denied that their work was grounded in their personal histories. Since they often argued that the self was a social construction or a linguistic formation, they balked at seeing their ideas peeled back to their biographical roots, especially when, in de Man's case, they had much to conceal about their earlier lives. These respectful probes by younger scholars confirm the waning of theory since the '80s and especially since the mid-'90s. Belonging to what Jeffrey Williams calls "the post-theory generation," they take a detached view of the landscape from which theory emerged, but remain committed to the historical approach that supplanted theory in the 1980s. For European thinkers, they argue, the background of their work is dominated by World War II, a period of defeat, occupation, ruthless brutality, moral compromise, and near-total control under German occupation. For American critics, the story goes, the '60s, the Vietnam War, and the emergence of the New Left provided the political crucible from which theory came forth. Certainly the leftist politics of most theorists seems to reflect the radicalism that marked that turbulent decade. More broadly, the attacks on traditional forms of historiography and literary scholarship might well owe something to the debunking spirit of the '60s, its mockery of authority and disdain for tradition, including the liberal tradition. An astute critic of literary theory, Eugene Goodheart, a professor emeritus of humanities at Brandeis University, gives us an incisive summary of that viewpoint in his recent memoir, Confessions of a Secular Jew: "The radical students who made careers in the academy sublimated their radicalism in the various disciplines they occupied, particularly in the humanities. Radicalism became theories of interpretation, its targets literary and philosophical texts and social and political institutions. Having failed to transform society, it also became disillusioned, and already, beginning in the '70s, the most radically skeptical of theories, deconstructionism, became the rage. Its aim was to unsettle our convictions about the possibility of objective truth, spiritual transcendence, authoritative discourse. It asserted a doctrine of uncertainty in the most certain of tones. Is it fortuitous that its originator was a French Jew, Jacques Derrida?" In this partly ironic account, theory was both a product of radicalism and a marker of its defeat, which resembles the crushing sense of failure experienced by Europeans during World War II. Theory set out to revolutionize the academy, where it had taken refuge from an unsympathetic society. It aimed at a radical transformation of the interpretive disciplines, only to burden them with a sense of skepticism, disillusionment, and broken connections. During the backlash years of Nixonian demagoguery and Reaganite restoration, theory became catastrophe theory, a way of compensating for the sense of impotence, or of recouping failure by showing that it was inevitable, even as critics asserted their power over the text, their refusal to be dominated by its structures, themes, or rhetorical patterns. Emphasizing ideology over interpretation, literary scholarship became a way of seeing through literature, of not being taken in by it. This linkage between literary theory and the 1960s is far more subtle than both Allan Bloom's attacks on relativism in The Closing of the American Mind, which could be applied to virtually all modern thought since the Enlightenment, and the neoconservative argument that postmodern theory is simply revolutionary nihilism run amok. Neoconservatives always exaggerate the influence of the '60s as the source of all social and moral evil, even evils attributed to capitalism itself. But even Goodheart's version, reminiscent of the English essayist William Hazlitt's witty argument that Wordsworth and Coleridge applied the leveling principles of the French Revolution to poetic diction and literary characters, raises some elusive historical issues. We can leave aside the objection that, to my knowledge, no major student radicals became literary theorists, and that those who did give theory its big push were generally older, had few political involvements, and (both in Europe and America) began publishing their work well before the '60s revolution hit its stride, in 1968. Foucault's Les Mots et les choses appeared in France in 1966; Derrida published three major books in 1967, including De la grammatologie. Unlike their more committed predecessor, Sartre, they did not get engaged in the uprising of students and workers the following year. Back in the United States, most of those who became theory stars in the 1970s, including Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, Edward Said, and Stanley Fish, had done their graduate work in the 1950s at Harvard or Yale. Their ambitions were academic and relatively traditional, and they were already becoming known for innovative work in their fields. None of them was especially political in the '60s. They had no links to the student uprisings. But we might argue that it was not their own politics that linked theory to the '60s but the enthusiastic reception of their work among the foot soldiers of the younger generation. Even so, serious problems remain in tracing the historical roots of theory to the 1960s. First of all, the politics of the time varied enormously through the course of the decade. The movement in the early '60s, grounded in civil-rights marches and the campaign against nuclear weapons, was humanistic, utopian, and democratic. The Port Huron Statement, with its emphasis on participatory democracy, was most influenced by the work of C. Wright Mills, John Dewey, and the American pragmatists. Poststructuralist theory, on the other hand, was nothing if not a critique of Western humanism, including the existential humanism of the '60s, across which it cast a large epistemological shadow. The radical students I taught in the late '60s were scarcely bent on deconstructing the residues of metaphysics in Western humanist texts. On the contrary, they responded with passion to the classics as subversive works whose humane promise remained unfulfilled. They connected with art and philosophy not because it was canonical but because it felt so fresh, so immediate -- and so visionary. Blake, Dickens, Ruskin, and Lawrence seemed like their contemporaries, not the authors of musty classics. Never had the Great Books felt more relevant than when the whole direction of society was in play. The lineage of deconstruction takes us back not to the politics of the '60s but to its ultimate betrayal and blockage. A better case for the roots of theory can be made from the sour political mood of the late '60s, when the smashed hopes of earlier years turned to anger, skepticism, and suspicion. According to Ivo Kamps, Vietnam was "a war in search of a narrative," at least until the surprise Tet offensive early in 1968, when media accounts of American embarrassment and failure overwhelmed the mundane facts of the defeat of the Viet Cong on the ground. In the battle for public opinion waged on television, America suffered a humiliating and finally decisive setback. The antiwar movement gained its greatest victories in the media, not in the halls of Congress, the White House, or the voting booth. As the government repeatedly lied to the people with optimistic predictions, phony successes, and exaggerated body counts, a vast reservoir of disbelief built up in American life, a deep distrust of official information, which could have contributed to the later appeal of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" in interpretation. At the same time, as official pronouncements lost credibility, the virtual reality shaped by the media began to dominate public perception. In that sense, the rise of cultural studies might be linked to the darkening political climate of the late '60s. Cultural studies in America embraced popular culture along with the high arts. It took off from the ever-expanding media scene and was licensed by the subtle and powerful pop culture of the '60s, especially the music, which made the hierarchical distinctions of mass-culture critics untenable. Cultural studies was also indebted to the rise of identity politics in the late '60s, beginning with black nationalism, feminism, and the gay-pride movement. Rejecting the notion of a unified culture for an emphasis on diversity and difference, cultural studies was caught between an ethnically derived notion of group affirmation and a postmodern sense of fluid or constructed identity. For scholars who came of age in the '60s and '70s, issues of race and gender, like pop culture, were part of the air they breathed. Since that was also true for young writers, painters, and filmmakers, cultural studies developed in concert with an eclectic postmodernism in the arts, just as the earlier formalist criticism had responded to the strenuous innovations of modernism. The pitfalls of using history as a key to explaining culture are clear enough. Even when it has freed itself of Hegelian notions of the zeitgeist or Marxist certainties about historical inevitability, historical criticism is rarely as rigorous as formal analysis. In the words of John Kerrigan, writing recently in the London Review of Books: "As the heat goes out of the theory wars, the literary critical mainstream has settled into a historicism that has never properly established which principles of relevance should apply." Historicist readings too often seem idiosyncratic, empirically tenuous, or merely suggestive. In addition, they are often all too predictable in their political sympathies. Eager to weigh in on the side of the insulted and the injured, they seem determined by their well-meaning political agendas. Yet compared with other ways of reading, they call upon a larger knowledge of the world, and often do more to link literature or theory to the actual flow of human life. The historical approach can be used polemically to belittle writers and movements by reducing them to the circumstances of their origin. But it can also serve to enhance them by anchoring them in actuality. To be reminded of how the "shaping nightmare" of World War II might have affected the young Foucault, how the sudden "decapitation" of Belgium by the Germans might have influenced de Man, or how the trauma of the Algerian war might play itself out in the work of Derrida, who spent his early years in that country, can be a way of validating their abstractions, rightly or wrongly, by associating them with great social movements and deeply felt personal experiences. But that kind of interpretation leaves open the question of why such formative, perhaps traumatic, events would take these theorists in one direction rather than another. If Foucault was so deeply affected by the totalitarian climate of the Nazi occupation, why did he later apply that template almost exclusively to progressive institutions and liberal societies? There are diametrically opposed ways of reading the relationship between de Man's late work and his early collaborationist articles. Partisan scholars bring their own agendas to those issues. No serious thinker can be reduced to his or her biography, no matter how much the life illuminates the work. In the end, the great justification for a historical approach to literature and criticism is that we must know everything -- the life, the times, the intricate internal argument, the shape of the language. When a subject truly engages us, every detail is precious, every shred of evidence is worth considering. We want to know how life feeds into art, not simply how art feeds on itself. But it's important that we bring to bear as much information and insight as we can, not just the curious sidelight or the odd, quirky, arresting analogy that takes an unexpected turn. Professional historians, who often find the work of New Historicists unconvincing, mostly remain committed to empirical canons of evidence, to narratives that emphasize beginnings and endings, cause and effect. They feel obliged to weigh competing explanations, as the best interpretive work has always done. That does not mean confining criticism to a dispassionate, elusive objectivity. By the end of the 1950s, American academic criticism had fallen into a deadly and narrow common-sense approach that was constrained not by a rigorous formalism but by a deep failure of imagination. Themes were summarized, characters characterized, images scrutinized, but the questions being asked had grown less interesting. New Criticism's methods of close reading had contributed as much as they could but now had reached a point of seriously diminishing returns. They were being applied to the wrong texts or to works that had already been exhaustively read. They were ferreting out subtexts where none needed to be found. They had grown mechanical and pedantic. This is what made the essayistic approach of Blanchot, Barthes, and Benjamin seem so exciting at the time. Like the best critics of the past, they made arresting connections through paradoxical leaps of intuition and insight. They were essentially writers, not critics -- writers whose aphoristic prose enforced its own suspension of disbelief. They were as imaginative, as gifted, as much fun to read, as most of the writers they wrote about. They rose to the challenge of their subjects. This was what bold, unclassifiable American critics like Kenneth Burke and Alfred Kazin had been doing all along, but it hardly satisfied the demands of academic work as then construed. What these critics did could be emulated but not imitated: Their approach offered no "method," and its effects could be disastrous in the hands of less agile practitioners. With such idiosyncratic critics, the reality check, the empirical constraints, came in the shock of recognition on the part of the reader, the shaft of illumination their essays provided. Less gifted critics -- we ourselves -- can operate only through argument and evidence, the drama of persuasion and assent. Like other forms of criticism, historical interpretation can be well done or badly done, loopy or acute, ingenious or ingenuous. Yet setting things in context is always worth doing, always illuminating. It helps us enlarge the picture. It peers behind the masks that writers and theorists take up to convince us that they have given birth to themselves. There are always risks involved in searching out the figure in a carpet or shaping the multitude of possibilities into a single coherent narrative. The return of historical criticism was an invigorating breath of fresh air. It released a burst of interpretive energy beyond the limited horizons of formalism and deconstruction. At a moment of intellectual exhaustion, it offered provocative new readings for old. Drawn to political advocacy, sitting in judgment on the power relationships it perceived in the past, it sometimes served as a well-meaning vehicle for its own preconceptions. Yet finally, historical interpretation is an indispensable way of shedding light on culture and weighing the theories and practices through which it has always tried to make sense of itself. Morris Dickstein is a distinguished professor of English and senior fellow of the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His most recent book is Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 (Harvard University Press, 2002). This essay is adapted from the afterword to Historicizing Theory, edited by Peter Herman, to be published in December by the State University of New York Press. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 37, Page B7
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education