Speaking with the Dead: Explorations in Literature and History (review)

As Renaissance Studies frees itself from the New Historicism, it is bound to cast some backward glances at the texts that captivated it with that way of thinking about the past. In Speaking with the Dead: Explorations in Literature and History, Jürgen Pieters takes his bearings from the inaugural sentence of the critical period from which we are now emerging: “‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead’” (1).

Neither nostalgic for the past nor unduly confident that it may be understood, Stephen Greenblatt’s sentence serves Pieters as a gnomon of New Historicist assumptions about interpretation. To these words, he traces the fundamental distinction that New Historicists liked to make between “traditional historicism” — which was said to entail an “absolute reduction of the fundamental heterogeneity of the past” — and the New Historicism itself, which in emphasizing “the historicity of the historian’s practice” claimed to avoid both “a presentist projection of contemporary concerns into the past” and “an antiquarian obsession with the past per se” (14, 16–17). Machiavelli’s 1513 letter to Francesco Vettori, in which the author describes a moment of imaginative communion with ancient writers, is juxtaposed to Greenblatt’s meditation on the desire to speak with the dead, in order to confirm the polemical story that the New Historicism told about its predecessors. Pieters assumes that for Machiavelli the past and the present are essentially continuous with each other, while for Greenblatt “the practice of historiography does not lead to the confirmation and recognition of the way things have always been and will be, but to an alienation, of the past and the present, both being captured in a moment of mutual illumination that sheds new light on each of them” (23). This is to suggest that Machiavelli’s era lacked the awareness of its difference from classical antiquity, without which it is difficult to imagine the Renaissance occurring as such.

The cagey aversion to anachronism that Pieters identifies as the New Historicism’s distinctive virtue is not much in evidence in this book, but possibly that is the point. Though Pieters ranges from antiquity to our own period, his chapters are not organized chronologically, and they do not address themselves to questions of historical causation. The “explorations” in the book are connected by a loose, metaphoric coherence. Each ruminates central themes: dialogue with the dead, fictions of presence and memory, and the shifting sense of a difference between history and literature.

As ruminations, the essays thwart attempts to summarize them as conventional arguments. In chapter 1, Pieters reflects on Platonic ideas about memory and the importance of “speaking pictures” in Sidney’s Defence of Poetry, concluding with the figure of Constantijn Huygens, a Dutch poet and diplomat whose writings describe reading as a conversation with the dead. Chapter 2 begins with Huygens’s reflections on a painting of Medusa by Rubens and goes on to explore what Barthes called “‘the reality effect’” of representation and Huizinga “the historical ‘sensation ’” of encountering the material remains of the past (58–59). This essay ranges forward to Burke’s theories of the sublime and Shelley’s 1819 poem about a different painting of Medusa before arriving at the third chapter, which searches for the metaphor of metempsychosis in works by Flaubert, Michelet, and Keats. Chapter 4 moves backward to the underworlds of Homer, Virgil, and Dante and forward to some cursory reflections on T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Chapter 5 meditates on Roland Barthes’s theories of reading. A brief epilogue brings Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Cicero together in a final assertion of the book’s metaphorical concerns.

The book’s profuse associations are measurements of its ambition. They may also be its Achilles heel. Academic writing that foregrounds the free play of a scholar’s mind over the materials that he or she gathers for interpretation is to be celebrated, but as the...