Mark Robson, Stephen Greenblatt

Mark Robson, Stephen Greenblatt, Routledge Critical Thinkers, London and New York, 2008.

Hayden White (1928—) . In a series of influential books, White proposes that history (or History) is to be thought of primarily as a form of writing, and is thus open to analysis as narrative. (10)

Trying to sum up some of the principals of new historicism, H. Aram Veeser proposes the following: … that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable human nature (11)

Because criticism is a practice that is also part of a culture, and because it might have to use the same ‘tools’ as those to whom it is opposed, there is always the potential to end up reinforcing dominant values even if the intention is to oppose them. (11)

What we think of as ‘great’ writers are those who most effectively engage in a process of cultural ‘exchange’, taking an existing item such as a familiar myth, symbol or character type and transforming it into something else, usually through an alternation in its context or by combining it with materials from another, often unexpected, source. … Consequently, rather than being evidence of the originality or genius of a particularly gifted individual (both of which are privileged in our inheritance from romanticism), works of art ‘are structures for the accumulation, transformation, representation, and communications of social energies and practices. (2005: 15) (page 23)

Stressing neither the creativity of the author, nor the imaginative engagement of the reader, Greenblatt here emphasizes accumulation, transformation, representation, and communication. The artwork draws from the culture in which it emerges, but it also reproduces that culture in a modified form that can travel, across the boundaries within a culture, between cultures, and across time. (24)

The anecdote, which we might also call a petit recit or petite histoire (‘little story’), interrupts the historical grand recit (or grand narrative), that is, the large and ordered story of historical progression from a determinate beginning to a definite end. As Fineman points out, if we think of new historicism as one of the attempts to break up or break out of the constraint that such an ordered view of history entails, then this is also one of the reason why new historicism should not be thought of as conforming to Jameson’s trans- or ahistorical injunction to ‘always historicize’ (Fineman 1991: 71). Jameson’s injunction is wedded to a political position that relies upon a certain view of history as a logical progression. (40)

‘counterhistory’, that is, a history that is both different from existing histories in its specificity of evidence and in its narrative form, and is also able to take into account what might have happened at a given historical moment rather than simply what did. (41)

Geertz: Culture is thus not a power that can be seen as the cause of events, but rather the context in which those events happen and become meaningful. (43)

Geertz: ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods…); they study in villages’ (Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, London, Fontana. First published 1973. 1993: 22)

While there is a significant distance between Adorno’s critical practice and that of the new historicists, nonetheless his characterization of the essay form clearly echoes the new historicist insistence on a practice that is resistant to the overarching systems of thought that dominate much critical writing. As Adorno goes on to say, the essay suggests a challenge to the idea that truth and history are opposed, in which truth would be historically invariant—what is true is always true, in any given context and for all time—claiming instead that truths are always historical produced: / ‘If truth has in fact a temporal core, then the full historical content becomes an integral moment in it… The relationship to experience—and the essay invests experience with as much substance as traditional theory does mere categories—is the relationship to all of history. (Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York, Columbia Univ Press, 1991: 10) (46)

…the essay but its nature has to offer a more partial view. It makes no claim to state the whole picture, and by doing so it asks the reader to make connections, to see where this piece would fit. This does not serve to reduce its truth content but, instead, echoes the partial nature of our experience of the world. (46)

from Shakespearean Negotiations: “If I never believed that the dead could hear me, and if I was nonetheless certain that I could re-create a conversation with them. … It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead had contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces make themselves heard in the voices of the living… It is paradoxical, of course, to seek the living will of the dead in fictions, in places where there was no live bodily being to begin with.”

Greenblatt: 1990: In literary criticism Renaissance artists function like Renaissance monarchs: at some level we know perfectly well that the power of the prince is largely a collective inventions, the symbolic embodiment of the desire, pleasure, and violence of thousands of subjects, the instrumental expression of complex networks of dependency and fear, the agent rather than the maker of social will. Yet we can scarcely write of prince or poet without accepting the fiction that power directly emanates from him and that society draws upon this power.” This collective dimension is particularly acute in the case of theatrical texts, which are always animated by a sense of collaboration in production and a collective audience. (68)

In terms of artworks, the interest in this for Greenblatt lies especially in those works (or those moments within works) which seem to retain the power to move someone, to laughter or tears, anger or anxiety, beyond the confines of a given cultural moment, allowing the texts to be effective in other places or times. For Greenblatt this power comes not from the hand of the artist but, instead, from a series of negotiations, exchanges and movements. (69)

Viewing the recovery of an authentic vision of the past as impossible (and noting Kastan’s use of the word ‘restore’ to mark his sense that this might be possible), Terence Hawkes proposes that one problem lies in the appeal to facts about the past conditions of production and reception of literary texts. As Hawkes says, facts do not speak for themselves, and neither do texts. It is always the critic who selects the facts and selects the texts, and who puts them to some use. As such, there is no direct, unmediated access to the past that is not to some extent shaped by the concerns of whoever is investigating the past. Better than, says Hawkes, to make explicit the perspective that shapes such investigations. Here, however, emerges a different emphasis in Greenblatt’s work. As Hawkes slyly remarks, a Shakespearean criticism that takes account of the impact of the present on critical discourse about the past ‘will not yearn to speak with the dead. It will aim, in the end, to talk to the living’. (Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present, London and New York, Routledge, 2002: 1-4). For Hawkes, then, new historicism is not presentist enough, just as for Kastan, or for Jane Marcus, it is too presentist. (126).