Is Literary History Possible? by David Perkins (review)

Book Reviews247 DAVID PERKINS. Is Literary History Possible? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. 186 p. As Alvin Kernan has pointed out in TAe Death ofLiterature, "literature" is neither a Platonic Form nor a tangible thing like shovels, but a social construction made "real" by such things as school curricula and textbooks, the PC library classification, critical editions, handbooks, bibliographies, and literary histories. As we know, a relentless postmodern skepticism has deconstructed each one of these props, exposing the flimsiness of literature's claims to "reality." David Perkins takes another whack at this rickety edifice by disputing the theoretic rigor and taxonomic credibility of literary history. Perkins has written literary history himself (History of Modern Poetry, Theoretical Issues of Literary History), but he is now "de-convinced" (11) that it can be done with intellectual respectability. Happily, that's no reason not to write it, for literary history, he argues, still has social and aesthetic value. Perkins' critique of the fundamental assumptions of literary history is worked out in eight closely reasoned chapters that blend postmodernist theory with empirical examination of representative literary histories. Essentially, he argues that literary history cannot do a "plausible" job of fulfilling its two fundamental aims: to represent the past and to explain it—to tell us how it was and why. Literary history's goal of representing the past deconstructs under the pressure of contradictions inherent in organizing, structuring, and presenting the subject in either a narrative or encyclopedic form. There is also a conflict between the need to describe the past and the need to explain it. A plausible literary history must capture as much as possible of the heterogeneity and copiousness of the past. But explanation requires imposing narrative and organizational patterns on the past, which amounts to drawing lines across a flowing river. The more diverse the organization, the less intelligible . Moreover, the syntheses that make literary history possible in the first place have been exposed by postmodernism to be "baseless" (111) and "arbitrary" (31), "contingent" and "irrational" (68). Texts that are contradictory , indeterminate, and uninterpretable cannot be classified with cogency. Literary history's efforts to explain literary continuity and change (through historical contextualism or immanent theories) are "always unsuccessful " (21) because it is unable to credibly explain why works written at the same time are different aesthetically (and in other ways), why they have the characteristics they do, and why literature developed as it did. Those who still believe in the intellectual respectability of the discipline acknowledge that literary history must be written from a point of view—that the historian selects evidence to satisfy his/her personal tastes, needs, values, and assumptions, which are formed by his/her times. But this admission, they hold, does not undermine the discipline. Literary histories are simply provisional statements in a continuing dialogue with the past and with each other about the past, with each new version of the past—so long as it is a plausible version—adding to the deposits of accurate information and 248Rocky Mountain Review reasonable interpretation to be synthesized by the next, along with the deposits of other previous histories. But even the concept of "plausibility" deconstructs under pressure. Perkins points out that "plausibility" is socially and temporally grounded. The term means adhering to the currently accepted rules of historiography, and to current assumptions about human character and motivation, about the probable causes of events, about the structure of reality, and so on, and these change, making the past itself change. And "plausibility" requires a social consensus within the discipline of literary history. To Perkins this means that "plausibility must ultimately mean plausibility for me and for whoever thinks as I do" (17), one of many "hermeneutic circles" that plague the discipline. Yet, the discipline should continue to try to write "plausible" literary histories even though it can't be done. Such histories, Perkins argues, are valuable because they familiarize us with distance. Literary history familiarizes us with works we otherwise would never have known, but it also places them in a world and mentality that is not our own. "Thus, to learn to read with the perspective of literary history is like growing up. We encounter a...