I like literary history as much as the next person. It’s just that mine is made up of human beings, not logs.
In a response to an earlier post of mine, the always brilliant Lee Konstantinou cited the following line from Burke:
Mr. Q writes a novel. He has a score to settle with the world, and he settles it
on paper, symbolically. Let us suppose that his novel is about a deserving individual
in conflict with an undeserving society. He writes the work from the standpoint of his
unique engrossments. However, as Malcolm Cowley has pointed out, there is a whole
class of such novels. And if we take them all together, in a lump, "statistically," they
become about as unique as various objects all going downstream together in a flood. They
are "all doing the same" -- they become but different individuations of a common
paradigm. As so considered, they become "symbolic" of something -- they become
"representative" of a social trend.
I want to push back against this line a little, though I want to make clear, first, that I don’t take myself to be disagreeing in the slightest with Lee, and second, that I strongly feel the attraction of the Burke, which surely applies very nicely in all kinds of contexts. Burke is right that most of our actions are both idiosyncratic (when considered on their own terms) and representative (when considered in relation to other objects). It’s just like that lovely line in Proust about love affairs—from the inside, each is special; from the outside, they’re all the same:
One can of course reduce everything, if one regards it in its social aspect, to the most
commonplace item of newspaper gossip. ... But I know very well that what is true, what at
least is also true, is everything that I have thought, is what I have read in Albertine’s eyes, is
the fears that torment me, is the problem I have set myself with regard to Albertine. The
story of the hesitant suitor and the broken engagement may correspond to this, as the report
of a theatrical performance made by an intelligent reporter may give us the subject of one of
Ibsen’s plays. But there is something beyond those facts that are reported.
This is beautiful and powerful stuff; who hasn’t, on occasion, taken a step back from her apparently unique concerns to see them, all of a sudden, as just the millionth variant on an age-old theme? I’m just not sure that when it comes to literary studies, we should draw the conclusions Burke does. Burke seems to believe that it’s just a matter of a happy choice between criticism (focus on the idiosyncrasy) and history (focus on the trend); you pays your money, you takes your log. This just can’t be right, and here’s why.
First of all, many “trends” are initiated by individual literary works. The Odyssey begat the Aeneid (in different cultural circumstances) which begat the Divine Comedy (in different cultural circumstances again). This would be the equivalent of a log creating a stream.
Second, literary works tend to belong to many “trends” at once. (What is In Search of Lost Time: a confessional novel? a bit of belated Balzac? a reaction to the fin de siècle? a piece of “queer” fiction? a reaction to Schopenhauer? all of the above!) This is a log being carried by five different streams.
Third, cultural context is never a monolith. Even where it’s possible to isolate a problem of particular importance to a strand of culture, the solution offered is almost always multiple. Ancients and moderns, whigs and tories; naturalists and decadents; avant-garde and modernism... The same stream pushes its various logs in different directions.
Not so good for the metaphor. As far as I know, real-life logs do not create streams. Real-life logs are not carried by multiple streams. And real-life logs are not pushed in different directions by the same stream. Good literary historians—and there are plenty—understand all these things; their histories are made up of human beings and their intentional products, not logs and streams. A history of literature without agents is like a history of the solar system without the sun.
Josh: My response to this great post would be to say that I don't entirely agree with Burke's understanding of literary history. That is, I agree with much of what you say. The problem with studying social and cultural trends is that cultural producers are often themselves astute trendspotters. So Messrs. R, S, and T, and Mrs. U have probably read Mr. Q's novel, and are in many cases highly self-conscious of their position in a literary "field." Indeed, the practice of "reflexive" sociology is based on this insight: that we're often participants in the systems we're seeking to document. In your description, say of Proust's resistance to being reduced sociology, is there room for reflexive sociology? That is, sociology is not some alien force imposed on humans from outside our practices. Sociology and history are what we do to make sense of ourselves, and literary artists are often astute observers of their environments, and often respond to amateur or bad sociology of their own. Eg., Albertine is not just an object of love but the occasion for or spur to self-conscious reflection on how this love transcends, responds to, and grapples with the stochastic nature of human life, life considered beyond the individual. And, not to put too cute a twist on it, does the disavowal of the social not bring in the question of the social, even if only in negative form?
Lee, I like this proposal -- which I take to be very different from the agentophobic approach of the log-mongers -- very much. If the idea is to take into account what agents themselves think about their place in one or more social systems, then I have no problem; on the contrary, this line seems highly promising to me.
At the same time, I still want to push back a little. I don't think I'd go so far as to say that "sociology and history are what we do to make sense of ourselves." They may be part of what we do to make sense of ourselves, but they aren't all we do, and I think at times they just aren't relevant to the motivations we have. When I go out and buy milk, I'm not busy thinking to myself that I'm in a culture in which people put milk on cereal, or that I'm a member of a cereal-eating field; I'm just thinking "we're out of milk." Similarly, and pace Harold Bloom, creators of aesthetic artifacts are not always asking themselves how they can stand out from their predecessors; they are also asking themselves what the best way of generating a particular effect might be. Of course you can only generate effects from within a field, but this doesn't mean an artist has to be reflexively conscious at all times of her position within it.
Forgive me for breaking my reply into two, but it felt as though there were two separate points here. The second is the issue of "the social," which I take to be distinct. On this what I'd want to say is that I don't take Proust et al. (or myself!) to be disavowing the social. Aesthetic artifacts are of course very often about relations among people and they are of course always for other people (Emily Dickinson notwithstanding). So I wouldn't want to be taken to be saying that artworks are designed to stand in glorious narcissistic isolation in that sense.
My point was simply that artworks are not the helpless product of social forces; they are not just carried down streams, their pathetic authors paddling futilely in the other direction. Conan Doyle, for example, didn't just come up with his stories by "trial and error," driven unwittingly by a Darwinian struggle for life. Sometimes people have a bit of an idea what they're doing.
But I'm pretty sure you agree about this!
It seems to me, Josh, that this is (also) a problem in cultural genealogy: what are the cultural ancestors of a given work? Well . . .
When I was doing my book on music I found two or three attempts at a genealogy of pop music and/or African American music. The interesting, and obvious thing, about these genealogies is that they didn't have the tree form you find in the phylogeny of multicelled animals (but not multicelled plants, nor single-celled organisms). A given musical style was likely to have multiple ancestry. I'd think the same would be true of literary genres (which is why genre theory is so messy).
Here are my two shekels, Josh: it seems to me that what you describe as a problem with the object of literary history, is rather the question of a choice of critical genre. When writing about the history of books, we usually come down on the side of one of two options. Either we go for the really precise and careful analysis of a small chunk of text - lovingly outlining all those delicate levers and pulleys that our author uses to work her magic. Alternatively, we cast our bold, synoptic, Burkian gaze on the whole, and describe processes, movements, fields.
I wouldn't describe one of these options as being about human beings and the other about impersonal "logs" and "streams." Why get bogged down in this subjective-objective debate? We could just agree that it's all human: the reflexive poet roaming the Lake District and the the movement to which he belongs (usually comprising a handful of his contemporaries). It's all people, simply under different descriptions.
If you transfer your worries about the object (literary criticism) to worries about genre, you can circumvent theory altogether. That is, you can overcome the felt need to justify what is more real or more true: the micro or macro, the inside or the outside, the tortured individual soul or the stomp of historical forces, and instead focus all your energy on saying something new, or useful, or inspiring about a deserving piece of writing.
Thanks, Nir, for these great thoughts (worth well more than 2 shekels!). I think you and I are in perfect agreement, and I for one am a fan of both kinds of writing (the patient encounter with a single work, like Bersani's book on Proust, or the overview from 30,000 feet, like Pavel's book on the novel). For some reason, though, it's become fashionable to think that it's not all people (or if it is all people, then none of them is making anything happen--founding a movement,for example). So it may still be worth saying, as you do so eloquently, that the effort to tell an agentless story of a cultural domain is a bit of a dead-end.
One thing I should have talked about in my original post is the psychology of log-mongering. Why do some people want to write agents out of histories of cultural phenomena? Answer: because it makes the historian look like the real genius in the room.
You might think people like Woolf and Austen and Mallarmé and Goethe and Beckett and Doyle were brilliant minds; you'd be wrong, says the agentless historian: they themselves had no idea what they were doing, but just proceeded by trial and error. Or in the Burkean formulation, they took themselves to be doing something particular when in fact they were merely logs in a general stream. Since it's the historian to gets to name the "stream," clearly the historian has a much better understanding of the forces that are actually operative than did the benighted littérateurs.
I realize these points are not new, but they may be worth recalling, since a good part of what's so troubling in agentless histories is the posturing. Woolf and Austen and Mallarmé and Goethe and Beckett and Doyle were way ahead of us critics, and we should, I feel, really just admit that.