A Manifesto for Literary Studies

Historical Correctness: The Use and Abuse of History for Literature

Historical Correctness: The Use and Abuse of History for Literature The unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people and of a culture. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” —What useful discovery did Socrates learn from Xanthippe? —Dialectic, Stephen answered. James Joyce, Ulysses 45 I We who profess literary studies have been living through a time of infatuation with history. This is not the first such crush, to be sure, but it is a heady one. And like all infatuations, it carries with it a certain overestimation of the object. History seems to know everything that we want to know, and to oªer “answers” to knotty textual questions: questions of context, interpretation, and indeed meaning. Earlier in this century articles and footnotes about Macbeth lay emphasis on the facts of the Gunpowder Plot and the lineage of James I. An entire mini-industry in what might be called “Essex Studies” grew up around the Earl of Essex, his marital connection to the circle of Sir Philip Sidney and his sister the Countess of Pembroke, and his ill-fated rebellion—all in service of readings, not only of Shakespeare’s history plays, but also of his tragedies, comedies, and romances. Readings of The Merchant of Venice still routinely incorporate the unhappy story of Queen Elizabeth’s Jewish doctor, Roderigo Lopez, and, informed by a growing interest in race, analyses of Othello detail the numbers and social occupations of Moors and Africans in sixteenth-century London. But where these inquiries focused on political history, today’s scholars of early modern literature and culture are more likely to turn to conduct books, mothers ’ manuals, and medical and rhetorical treatises. We have seen in recent years an intense interest in court culture, literacy and reading practices, the printing house, sexuality and the stage, and witchcraft and colonial encounters, all “grounded in material and social determinants.”1 This is the counterpart of the earlier infatuation on the part of historians for literary theory, the so-called “linguistic turn”—a passion now strenuously disavowed, like so many other love aªairs gone wrong. Whereas historians were once struck by the nontransparency of their medium and the need to study it rather than simply to look at the past through it, today’s literary scholars are fascinated by the task of reconstructing “the real” that must lie behind any of its representations. My topic is the way that “history” has emerged as a byword for a certain kind of truth-claim in literary studies. New Historicism, nourished and nurtured Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities Short Studies 46 by interdisciplinary work, by historians and art historians as well as by literary critics , had an enormous impact upon the way emerging younger scholars taught and wrote about literature in the late twentieth century. But the very point that New Historicism tried to stress—that history, or histories, could not be understood as determinative or lineal causes but rather as complex networks of cultural eªects— has been eroded by its success. Spawned by postmodernism, New Historicism tried to avoid or complicate causality: it preferred words such as resonance, circulation, poetics , and social energy. But through its very avoidances this strategy whetted the appetite for causation. To put it another way, New Historicism began by reading history as a text, but it created, despite its best eªorts, a desire for history as a ground. In the wake of postmodernism and the general questioning of foundations, a longing to find causality—the priority of history, history as explanation—seems to have come back to literary study more strongly than before. For many scholars of literature, causality is the unfulfilled desire, the projected or introjected fantasy, the prohibited wish. The question these scholars ask is often a version of why—not a version of how. Indeed, recent critiques of New Historicism have taken it to task for not being historical enough: it is faulted for “its anecdotal notion of what counts as history ; its dependence on loose analogies; its evasiveness when it comes to causal argument ; its tendency to adduce a Zeitgeist from an accident,” as one friendly critic has put it.2 In other words, precisely what distinguishes New Historicism from history, its interest in “the literary,” has seemed to some scholars—both historians and literary scholars—to be its weakness rather than its strength. It occurs to me that some...