Jewish and American, Historical and Literary: The (Un)ifying Experience of Reading Text

I normally resist the impulse to play with orthography, but the strange word in the title of this essay, "(Un)ifying," speaks to the disconcertingly entrenched barrier (an un-unifying, or dis-unifying) that I would argue too often, and at great expense, separates literary and historical analysis. At a conference I attended in March 2011, my panel was composed of two literature scholars and two historians. The theme had been carefully worked out and, in theory at least, the topic of each panelist's work was well suited to that being presented by the others. We all spoke about the contractual obligations involving women in the nineteenth century, and our work was based in textual analysis of fiction and historical records; collectively, our work revolved primarily around marriage and its dissolution. As if wanting to participate in the subject at hand, the panel (though not the panelists, who remain friendly) failed to cohere. I daresay that each presentation had its merits, but ultimately the uneasy union between literary and historical values fractured the panel beyond repair.

The question I wish to raise here, beyond defining the differences, and points of intersection, between literary and historical values, is whether the two can meaningfully be brought into conversation with each other: what does it mean to read text historically or literarily? There is a long and well-established tension between the two genres, one that Aristotle, in the Poetics, quietly recognizes by ranking tragedy ahead of history. By his reasoning, history is less philosophical, relating, as it does, to real and past actions. Tragedy, in contrast, pictures the possible "according to the law of probability or necessity." History, then, records the particular; tragedy the universal. In the centuries following, a gradual shift takes place among the reading (European and American) public until, by the 1800s, in large part fueled by the rise and success of the novel, history texts are deemed to constitute a healthier, more morally sound reading diet than just about any other genre. In 1880 the American author and librarian Frederick Beecher Perkins, in an essay entitled "What to Read," a piece advising readers how to sift through the overwhelming number of newspapers, magazines, novels, and nonfiction texts available for consumption, concludes by urging readers to select carefully and to select history:

History is the backbone [to reading], natural science excepted. Unless historically, upon the basis of the utmost possible historical knowledge, there can be no thorough acquaintance with theology, philosophy, political economy, social conditions and affairs—in short, with all human life and progress and activity on earth. . . . Let the general rule, therefore, be to have all your reading and all your thinking upon the best and fullest body of historical knowledge that you can acquire. . . . Historical methods are the only sound ones in most lines of reading.

(29-30)

In spite of the recommendations of Perkins and other like-minded experts, novels constituted the majority of what readers checked out of public libraries at the time: two-thirds of books borrowed were, much to the chagrin of many essayists, moralists, and perhaps historians, too, novels (Sweetser 7). And, reflecting the public's taste, novels were easily the publications that had the best sales and profit margins. By the late 1800s even those who decried against fiction realized, however reluctantly, the importance it played in shaping public tastes, behaviors, and the imagination (Sicherman 143).

The question, however, concerning the intersections between literary and historical reading remains. How these two disciplines, and two genres, can be moderated successfully, where they can yield productive thinking, and where they may obstruct each other, often goes unaddressed—and this despite the fact that devotees of one or the other genre quite willfully and publicly jostle for greater recognition. Can historians and literature scholars meaningfully read texts that are typically designated as belonging to "the other" (or "another") discipline? The operative word, I believe, is not other, with all its concomitant burdens of difference and outsider status, but, rather, read. The act of reading is, in its most basic sense, the underlying commonality between...