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  • Humanism and Classical Crisis: Anxiety, Intertexts, and the Miltonic Memory by Jacob Blevins
  • Craig Kallendorf
Jacob Blevins, Humanism and Classical Crisis: Anxiety, Intertexts, and the Miltonic Memory Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2014, x + 172 pp.

This is an ambitious book. It contains some nice close readings of several early modern texts, from the Pléiade poets through Ben Jonson and his followers to Milton, but its real goal is to produce a new interpretive framework for Renaissance humanism.

For centuries, scholars have taken the Renaissance humanists at their word and described their project as a largely successful reappropriation of the classical past. Recently, however, a revisionist paradigm has evolved in which the fissures and anxieties in this rebirth have been laid bare. Using material fragments and the texts that survived, Renaissance writers attempted to recreate classical Rome as a center of cultural supremacy. The reality, however, was that the Rome of Cicero and Virgil lay in ruins, textually, materially, and ideologically, and in the effort to recover it, the Renaissance humanists came to realize that from their Christian, postclassical perspective, the ruined Rome did not offer everything they needed, even if it could be fully recovered. This realization led to a sense of crisis: the classical and the Christian coexisted in an uneasy tension, because there was no other option.

Blevins’ achievement in this book does not lie in suggesting that the humanist project is not as straightforward as Petrarch and his followers have claimed—others have already done this—but in constructing an explanation for the crisis and its accompanying anxieties that lies in modern psychological theory. In other words, “the act of literary appropriation of classical texts and culture during the early modern period, in its various manifestations, is primarily the result of a psychical process of identity construction and only secondarily a matter of historical literary development” (1). In explaining how this works, Blevins draws freely from both literary (e.g., Harold Bloom and Thomas Greene) and psychological (e.g., Sigmund Freud) scholarship, but the writings of Jacques Lacan provide his main heuristic framework. Writers, initially as readers, are first joined to their precursors in a way that is similar to Lacan’s Imaginary Order: the writer identifies with the source, just as the infant’s self-identity is defined wholly by his or her dependence on the mother, and imitates the source by projecting the self onto the text. Eventually, however, writers realize that what they are imitating is not their own and that they must separate from their “literary mother” and enter a referential system, at which point they enter the Symbolic Order of the father. The psyche’s desire to repossess the security of the Imaginary Order is now articulated through language, rules, and conventions, but the result is fragmentation and difference; similarly the writer must conform to the laws of literary convention in an effort to become a signifier in the chain of signifiers that makes up the literary tradition. Writers can never be like their predecessors, however, [End Page 380] because difference, both literary and ideological, is what provides a place within the system. The inability to be “like” the predecessor is what produces anxiety—the crisis within humanism. Within the collective consciousness of humanism, Rome serves as the Other that can never be realized; the Renaissance writer longs for the lost Imaginary Order and tries to recreate it, but can only function within a Symbolic Order that has left the classical past, in its incompleteness, behind.

Not every reader is going to like what Blevins is doing here. While literary creation in some sense has to be viewed as a psychological act, it is by no means clear that what went on in the process is recoverable by looking at a poem as its product, nor is the movement from the individual psyche to the collective consciousness of an age (or at least of an intellectual community within an age) unproblematic. But for those who are willing to follow Blevins through to the end, there are significant rewards. Lacan’s prose is notoriously inscrutable, but Blevins’ is not: I encountered an occasional sentence I had to pause...

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