University of Chicago Press

ISBN 0226279340

216 pages $30.00

Interview by Harvey Blume

New historicists linked anecdotes to the disruption of history

as usual, not to its practice: the undisciplined anecdote appealed to

those of us who wanted to interrupt the Big Stories. We sought the

very thing that made anecdotes ciphers to many historians: a vehement

and cryptic particularity that would make one pause or even stumble on

the threshold of history.

Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, "Practicing New

Historicism

Stephen Greenblatt is the best known exponent of the approach

to literary studies that has been dubbed "new historicism." Author of

"Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture," and "Marvelous

Possessions: The Wonder of the New World," his most recent book,

co-written with Catherine Gallagher, is "Practicing New Historicism."

HB: When I try to define new historicism, I think of Elaine Scarry,

the literary critic, studying the crash of TWA Flight 007, and coming

up with a conclusion about the effects of electromagnetic interference

that the FAA has taken seriously. Is that a fair way of describing new

historicism?

SG: I wouldn't have said so myself. It's true that Elaine Scarry

writes about the TWA crash with the kind of attention to detail that

one, maybe, could expect of a literary critic, but she doesn't write

about the TWA crash as a symbolic object. She's truly interested in

technical matters having to with electromagnetic interference. Her

work on those crashes is a tribute to what it means to be a genuine

investigative reporter, figuring out what's up with a subject, even

though you're not trained in it.

The goal of new historicism for me -- it's different for

different people -- is to put cultural objects in some interesting

relationship to social and historical processes. For me, new

historicism is really about Hamlet, King Lear, Tom Jones, David

Copperfield in relation to a whole set of practices you wouldn't

normally think of reading of literature.

HB: You write about the dialogue with Marxism that was important early

on. Does new historicism missing having Marxism as a debating partner?

SG: I cut my teeth in Berkeley in the 1970s in heroic times, times

that fancied themselves as heroic, and was very dubious even then that

getting these literary readings right was going to have a direct

political effect on the world. The other extreme position, the one,

say, that Auden reached, namely that literature makes nothing happen,

is also not true. The goal is to find the middle space, in which you

understand that you're participating in a small way in an indirect and

glacially slow shift in collective understanding.

HB: There's a relationship among the chapters in "Practicing New

Historicism," but it's not easy to extract a single theme or theory

from them. There's continuity and I think a kind of intentional

discontinuity, as well.

SG: That's true. We do our work through techniques of association,

analogy, surprising connection, things contingently leaning against

each other, collage.

I could never have written this particular book on my own; it

was based precisely on the need to get more than one voice, and not to

bring those voices into a single harmonious whole. From a writerly

point of view, the most difficult task that Catherine Gallagher and I

faced in writing "Practicing New Historicism," was figuring out how to

change the personal pronoun, "I" into the collective pronoun "we," in

matters that depend so much on perspective and individual point of

view.

HB: There are obvious differences in style between you.

SG: Absolutely. We thought at first that we were going to actually

write something together -- alternate sentences, alternate paragraphs,

and so forth. We couldn't do it. Because your voice is

important. Literary criticism is on the whole almost unbearable to

read because it lacks much in the way of personal stakes and

commitment. The only way to get those qualities is to actually put

yourself on the line as somebody. So I couldn't stand back and

manipulate pieces of text as if I wasn't present in them. We did our

best, we tried to make a virtue of necessity, the necessity here being

the breaks, the splits, the seams. Instead of trying to conceal them

we tried to make them visible.

HB: It's clear that new historicism is part of the postmodern trend in

thinking. It welcomes the breakdown of genres; it invites

discontinuities.

SG: It's queasy about traditional notions of causality, and about what

is background and what is foreground.

HB: And though you don't use the term "postmodern," there's the same

desire to accent voices that have been suppressed or peripheral in the

past.

SG: Even the term new historicism wasn't my original intention. I am

queasy about jargon, I'm queasy about intellectuals, especially

literary intellectuals, writing themselves out of the

comprehensibility of a larger public. People say, well, you don't

expect theoretical physics to be transparent. But we're not doing

theoretical physics. It seems to me our first obligation is simply to

be understood outside of a tiny circle of people. Some of my best

friends write in an unintelligible way, or are in love with

difficulty. I'm not in love with difficulty.

HB: What is the relationship of new historicism to cultural studies?

SG: I'm a very ginger fellow traveler of cultural studies. One simple

way of describing new historicism is to say that it's interested in

the symbolic dimensions of historical practice, and the in historical

dimensions of symbolic practice. And that's a way of describing

cultural studies.

The trouble with cultural studies is, first of all, that it's

very easy to lose track of the point of complex readings of, say, the

contemporary barbershop or restaurant. That's connected to a second,

more telling problem, which has to do with my profession more

generally, namely the loss of the saliency, the power, the wonder of

the object. Cultural studies risks becoming fancy discourse about

nothing, or about smaller and smaller objects, objects that are not

very compelling. In terms I've used elsewhere, the danger of cultural

studies is that it can be all resonance and no wonder.

HB: In "Practicing New Historicism," you pick an object like the

potato, and unearth it on all sorts of levels. That's not so different

from a barbershop, is it?

SG: I could be revealing a split in new historicist practice if I say

that my choice of object was bread, rather than the potato, that is to

say, Eucharistic bread, the quintessential object of wonder. Cathy's

object was the potato. My original title for this book was going to

be, "Bread and Potatoes." But we thought that was too coy.

HB: This seems to me to be the book of yours which new historicism

reveals itself most.

SG: I was drawn screaming and kicking toward this. I very much resist

coming clean. But insofar as I could, this book does.

One fascinating problem with post-structuralism -- Lacanianism

most spectacularly -- is that what began as a subversive explosion

very easily becomes a school with a dogma, a party with highly defined

set of practices. I understand why it happens; it reflects the power

of the charismatic moment. But we try to resist what Weber calls the

routinization of charisma as long as possible, to leave some running

room, to keep going in whatever intellectual pursuit.

If you look around, broadly speaking, you see that it's

actually hard to keep going. People have a certain exciting moment,

and the question is how do you keep engaged, how do you keep moving

out in new ways. Once you have a position, how do you keep from

getting locked in it?

HB: You focus on the dichotomy between representation and the desire

to come to an end to representation, signification and an end to

signification. The body plays an important role here. Sometimes you

write as if the body was a sort of bedrock or ground zero of

signification. Other times you write as if the body, too, is full of

representation so that there is no end point to representation, not

even in the body.

SG: It's a little bit like Dante. You seem to circle closer and closer

in to the thing itself, the core of the thing itself, which, in your

terms, would be the end of representation. And then, in the case of

Dante, when you reach the core, you actually pass through its body,

and you are out in the circles again.

For me, if the "new" in new historicism is anything more than

an advertising slogan, as in New Fab, or New Cheer, it means

anti-historicism, in the sense trying to reach an end. If historicism

means understanding the chain of cause and effect and being able to

burrow back to the actual determining cause, then new historicism is

against it. You are driven to return the radioactive cultural object

to its source of energy, but when you get to the source of energy you

haven't found the an endpoint; you've only found a complicated relay

point.

HB: At times you write as if the desire to reach an endpoint of

representation doesn't just plague historians. You suggest that it's a

human urge.

SG: Yes, I suppose that's true. There are various ways of running that

particular story, including the psychoanalytic one that has to do with

the drive to see the primal scene, the originating moment.

My own version is political. I haven't had this fantasy as

powerfully as I used to, but I have a feeling, going into this new

administration, I'm going to have it again -- namely the desire to see

the moment when the money is actually being passed under the table,

that never completely visible moment when the exchange takes

place. It's the dream of actually stripping away the cover, and seeing

the immense power culture gives, say, to the literary object, and

asking what the object gives back in return. The desire to take a

photograph of that moment, is, for me, the enabling fantasy.

HB: Eliade says the myth of origin is the origin of myth.

SG: Your reference to myth makes me think of Nietzsche and his myth of

the eternal return. In fact, one of the many strands that leads into

new historicism is the Nietzsche of "The Genealogy of Morals," with

its impulse to drive back from a set of abstractions to some process

of hidden pain or suffering that generates powerful symbolic values.

I have lots of reservations about Nietzsche but "The Genealogy

of Morals," was a book that came to me as something of an upsetting

revelation. I remember reading it in high school and feeling my world

had been completely turned upside down. I hated it in lots of ways, I

was offended by it, but I also felt I could never live the same life

after reading it. I still keep coming back to what that book forces

one to look at.

The question is: how do we live with all knowledge that we can

dredge up about our deepest values and beliefs? One of the attacks on

new historicism, mounted most publicly by Harold Bloom, is that it's a

product of resentment. According to Bloom, the impulse to understand

the historical roots of literary objects, rather than letting them

float free in their imaginative spaces, is a way of belittling them,

of cutting them down to size.

This seems to me a preposterous claim. When we allow ourselves

to fully register the highest objects of our culture, it's not to

belittle them, it's to understand what art is giving us.

HB: Isn't it also the impulse in new historicism to say that some of

what you find in canonical literary objects is also found scattered in

outside them? And this, a Harold Bloom would not be very pleased to

hear.

SG: Absolutely! The cult of the untrammeled genius, the superman, is

the other side of Nietzsche..

To me there's no resentment in seeing that the things we find

astonishing and sublime in Joyce or Kafka or Wordsworth or Shakespeare

are actually things that we find in ourselves and in the people around

us. Otherwise we wouldn't have access to them.

HB: One of the chapters in the book focuses on the relationship

between materialism and vitalism in the nineteenth-century, and

before. How is it that materialism winds up generating its oppose,

vitalism?

SG: Let me give the Hamlet explanation. The Hamlet explanation is that

when something dies, it's not actually dead; it's alive in the form of

rot. The rot is itself a form of life.

The nineteenth-century understood that image of rot in a much

more positive sense, as the continual cycling of capital and

commodities in the world. It's an account, not of the death of the

king but of the creation of markets.

The Dickensian image moves away from Hamlet's tragic notion of

the death of the king and return of the ghost. Dickens depicts the

fishing up of bodies from the Thames at the beginning of "Our Mutual

Friend," as part of the bio-economics of poor peoples' lives in

London.

HB: Has "materialism" gone out of fashion altogether as a

philosophical term? Is it no longer reputable to identify as a

materialist?

SG: I'm glad you are asking me that. I think it's reputable. I'm

fascinated by materialism in the philosophical sense. I think there's

been a huge resurgence of studies in Epicurianism and in Lucretius.

I tell you where I'm going with this. Lucretius's

extraordinary poem, "On the Nature of Things," one of the greatest

works of late antiquity, was lost, that is to say, was not in

circulation, for about 1,000 years. Then in the early fifteenth

century, a papal bureaucrat, Poggio Bracciolini, became exceedingly

dismayed by what he saw at the Council of Constance, namely the

entrapment and killing of the reformer Jan Hus and his associate,

Jerome of Prague.

Bracciolini writes extraordinary letters back to Florence

saying that he's horrified. These people were promised safe conduct,

which was arbitrarily removed; they were arrested and executed, and he

couldn't do anything about it. In fact, the executioners tried to

leave as little bodily material as possible. They were afraid people

would take souvenirs so they burned the bodies and threw the ashes

into the water. It's at that very moment that Bracciolini recovers "On

the Nature of Things," and launches it again into the world.

"On the Nature of Things," is a text that says that individual

objects, including bodies, always pass away but also that things come

together again. Things that disperse have a way of hooking back into

each other and returning to the world. Lucretius has the astonishing

idea about the physical universe that is at the very core of

materialism, which is that matter actually doesn't die, that what

looks like an end is only a redistribution of the material of the

world. That notion of the endless redistribution of material, which is

a sublime idea and astonishing idea, is, in effect, relaunched out of

the deaths of Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague.

That's for me a perfect instance of the bizarre, resonant and

crazily accidental conjunction that can encircle a particular

historical event. The Catholic Church, as you probably know, didn't

put classical texts on the Index; you could read them. If you espoused

these ideas in your own voice, you would be executed, or severely

punished. But you could circulate and read these texts, as long as

they were safely in Latin, and kept to a small number of people. So

"On the Nature of Things," this fantastically dangerous text, which

argues against fundamental principles of Judaism and Christianity, is

launched by the deaths of Hus and Jerome. It's as if Bracciolini found

a way of putting their ashes in a new and surprising form, and

launching them back into the world.

Now, if that's materialism, I want it.

HB: You frequently introduce a Jewish motif into your studies. In this

book, it's the wicked son, the one who, according to the Passover

Haggadah, asks the most probing questions at the Seder, and gets

scolded for it.

You say we're rolling into this new millennium under the

guidance of the wicked son, the guidance of continuous doubt.

SG: Yes, or uneasiness about taking part in the meal, about being a

contented member of the community, without asking questions. I think

this is a splendid moment to identify with the Wicked Son in our own

national culture because we've just gone through a bizarre process

[the Presidential Election] in which even those who are on the whole

contented with our messy system have had the nauseating experience of

seeing how skeptical one has to be.

HB: So the wicked son is recruiting at this point.

SG: Exactly. This is a moment not to sit down and partake of the meal,

but to ask, what is this to us? Why should we participate? We want

answers that will not simply fob us off with the same stories we've

always been told.

HB: In "Toward A Poetics Of Culture," an essay in "Learning to Curse,"

you wrote: "For from the sixteenth century . to the present,

capitalism, has produced a powerful and effective oscillation between

the establishment of distinct discursive domains and the collapse of

those domains into one another."

Where are we now in the oscillation? Wouldn't it seem today's

collapse of separate genres and discourses puts us at one extreme?

SG: I would say the utility of that quotation, which I think I would

still stand behind, is in relation to our conversation today about new

historicism. A critical practice that collapses the cultural object

into the historical and social surround is not new historicism. A

critical practice that cuts the cord between the cultural practice and

the surround is not new historicism. New historicism depends upon the

uncomfortable, and what I hope is at the same time fascinating ability

to see the object coming out and going in, to see it differentiated

and also in powerful league with the world from which it has come.

The wicked son is, after all, at the table; he's not somewhere

else. At the table but not participating in the meal that everyone

else is participating in. That seems to be the situation of the works

of art that I care passionately about. That's why they survive. Works

that seem perfectly attuned to their period, actually tend not to

survive. It's the works that have an odd way of pulling free and then

establishing connections with other times and places, while still

reaching back to their original moment, that interest me.