Name your favorite historical master narratives!
The other day I was looking again into Raymond Williams's The Country and the City. Of the many wonderful things about that wonderful book, my favorite is the second chapter, "A Problem of Perspective." In this chapter, Williams, in deadpan style, cites a series of laments over the decline of country or village life. The brilliant, very funny twist is that he works backwards, showing that though each generation is convinced that it is seeing the end of the old country ways in its lifetime, the previous generation expressed the very same conviction. From F.R. Leavis to Thomas Hardy; from Hardy to Eliot; from Eliot to John Clare to Goldsmith...to Philip Massinger, to Thomas More, "to the 1370s, for example, when Langland's Piers Plowman sees the dissatisfaction of the labourers, who will not eat yesterday's vegetables but must have fresh meat." This Williams calls the "escalator," a force that seems to move these laments inevitably, mechanically, backwards and backwards into history.
The threshold of that major historical change, the decline of traditional rural modes of life, turns out to be incredibly hard to pinpoint, since it seems to be always in process without ever quite being complete. And this reminds me of a whole set of historical narratives that influence our thinking about literary history. Such narratives of transition—sudden change or final decline—constantly tempt us with their explanatory power, yet they have an awkward way of being indefinitely backdateable.
So, in the spirit of Emily Thornbury's hilarious Are We in the Dark Ages Yet Handy Home Test, here are my favorite all-purpose historical transitions:
- The rise of the bourgeoisie! Goodbye to that stodgy old aristocratic order, hello to social mobility and personal striving! Ah yes, once they built up all that capital from the industrial revolution, culture was definitely in the hands of the bourgeoisie! You can tell, because of the realist novel! ...Or maybe it was the English Civil War that made all the difference. You know, Puritans! So middle-class, with their spirit of capitalism! Milton! And, uh, Jansenism in France! Well, I guess it's Shakespeare who's really the exemplary bourgeois author—no Sir Philip Sidney he, no, and can't you see it in those Sonnets? Except how about Chaucer the wine-merchant's son?
- The birth of the modern subject! Ah yes, the modern subject. Back in those olden times, the individual was not so alienated, so self-reflexive, so full of doubts and thoughts. But now that Joyce invents the modern metropolitan subject, nothing is the same any more! Or is it when Shakespeare invents the human?—or perhaps St. Augustine?—Why not Zhuangzi? Homo sapiens sapiens?
- The end of all the old certainties! Ah yes, God was in his Heaven and all was right with the world, but ever since the First World War, civilization has been a grim, disillusioned affair! Just look at all the disruptions of aesthetic modernism! Well, to tell you the truth, Prufrock was disillusioned before the War, so maybe it was really all Darwin's fault. After him, we're all in the hands of Nietzsche, or maybe Wilde… But wait--wasn't it supposed to be Enlightenment that freed mankind from its self-imposed immaturity? Look at the radical epistemic break we find in Defoe! And I thought Montaigne was a pioneer in radical skepticism. Well, and maybe the Buddha...
- Williams's own example in reverse: urbanization! Modernism is the stuff here—look at Mrs Dalloway! Or, anyway, Conan Doyle. Yes, not until Sherlock Holmes did the "great city" have its "Iliad" (Chesterton). Or, anyway, not until the rise of City Comedy under King James I (Bartholomew Fair, etc.). Or, anyway, not until the consolidation of the Greek city-states...
- The professionalization of authorship! This one hits kind of close to home, since I'm very fond of invoking the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the moment in which new ideals of literary professionalization and autonomy assume decisive importance. Except for all those pesky mid-nineteenth-century professional novelists! And those Romantic ideologies of authorship! And Pope making a living off subscriptions to his Homer translations! And Aphra Behn pioneering novelistic professionalism! And Ben Jonson compiling his own collected works! When will these authors quit working so hard?
- The disintegration of the organic community to be replaced by the confusing, wide-open societies of modernity! This is one of the transition-narratives that Williams has in his sights (along with its sometime reactionary exponents, Leavis and T.S. Eliot). Ah yes, those ethnically, ideologically unified old societies, with their rigid, self-reproducing hierarchies, their relative isolation, their shared purpose. It hurts too much to see the medievalists cry if I even begin to invoke the canonical examples, so let's just skip right to prehistory and leave it at that. Better hope paleolinguists and geneticists don't start explaining to us how frequent contact and mixing were back then!
Suggest your own favorite historical master narratives in the comments!
Naturally, I'm not implying that there is no such thing as historical change. (Nor am I implying that I don't like master narratives, especially when they're in the form of defeasible causal hypotheses.) As Williams remarks of his chroniclers of rural decline, "Some at least of these witnesses were writing from direct experience." As he argues, the real point is that the apparently endlessly reiterated terms really have historically shifting meanings. The question is how to relate cultural developments to historical changes without reducing those changes to overly schematic narratives that are vulnerable to being...escalated!
Full disclosure
It is perhaps worth mentioning that I am co-organizing an ACLA seminar on periodization. Abstracts very welcome through Nov. 1 Nov. 12.
Great topic! Here are some of my favorites: The Death of the Novel The Death of Literature The Literature of Exhaustion The Death of Poetry The Crisis of Verse The End of Master Narratives The End of Rationality All narratives that suggest that certain forms, genres, etc... are "used up" or no longer viable. That their golden age was in the past. Nostalgia for the middle-brow popularity of Victorian poetry, or for the epic novel of the 19th century. Or, from another perspective, for the "great moderns" of the early 20th century.
Good idea!
How about
The Beginnings of Postmodernity
The Loss of Naïve Simplicity
The Eighteenth Century (!)
Capitalism
Origin Myths (!)
As my own all-subsuming monster historical narrative is currently slouching towards Dissertation Deadline to be born, I doubly identify with your affection for and wariness of this particular critical genre. Taking the synoptic view is exhilarating, but careful not to overindulge the little Hegel within. Williams always seems to me someone who managed to do just that.
"The little Hegel within" is fantastic! (Slouching towards Bethlehem is pretty good too in this context.) Williams really is brilliant at this kind of negotiation (better, in his terms: mediation).
The Dissertation Deadline is more significant to the question at hand than one might think, since the big narratives serve among other things to allow literary scholars to gesture to very high stakes from what otherwise might seem to be fairly small-scale cultural vantages. Woe betide the author of any article, diss., book who doesn't make some such gesture. The point is that the instinct to raise the stakes and invoke the big historical narratives is right, but those monsters are rough beasts indeed...
Andrew, this is my new favorite game. Except I'm either too good or too bad at it, depending on your view. And in the classroom especially.
Case in point: during a lecture on Allen Ginsberg for my 101 class on Friday, I heard myself trot out, in response to a student's question, this chestnut historical narrative of American poetry: all 20th-century U.S. poetry follows the line of Walt Whitman or the line of Emily Dickinson. Emphasis on the line in all senses, yes; and I was talking about Howl, it's true. But do I want to perpetuate that linear narrative in particular, or that kind of thinking generally? (Despite ED, it is a patrilineal narrative, among other problems...) My current class is filled with bright students, many of whom fall into one of two categories: 1. seniors who feel like they should take a lit course before they graduate (amen to that) or 2. first-years or sophomores who plan to go on to advanced undergraduate literary study. Either way, I don't think I did them a disservice, particularly as they began to articulate how the poets we've read thus far complicate that handy WW/ED narrative. Still, I thought of your post and had to stop myself from lauching into a professiorial aside about your ingenious update of "Name That Tune."
As for the Hegelcule, which cracked me up: is there a pop culture analogy just waiting to be made here? I feel like dissertation proposal deadlines (or, for the newly-PhD'd, book proposals) are like that moment when a television writer decides she has to set her pilot not in a humdrum low-stakes workaday office, but rather in a life-and-death, high-adrenaline emergency room. Reflecting on Mad Men last week (and who wasn't?), Alessandra Stanley put it this way in the NYT: "Most serious shows feel the need to raise the stakes of employment to matters of life and death. It’s why “House” is set in a hospital, not a dentist’s office; “The Good Wife” celebrates criminal defense lawyers, not accountants; and “The West Wing” showcased the White House, not a California congressional district." In these terms, whose dissertation proposal isn't a little bit West Wing meets CSI: Wherever? It's ok. It's the pilot episode.
One of my best friends is an executive at one of the networks and she's asked me jokingly on and off to pitch a show to her. I would love to write a pilot for a dramedy called "English," which follows the lives of a group of literature graduate students as they make their way from first-year humiliation through professorhood (assuming the show becomes a hit and goes into the land of syndication). But really, would the show survive solely on the exciting debates around historicism versus theory, or the big question, what happens after postmodernism? There would have to be a couple of shootings in there, maybe a suicide, a lesbian conversion, various pairings and re-pairings, which gives me pause and stops me from actually following through.
Though maybe I should call it "Comp Lit" and pitch it to HBO...
Pierre Bourdieu's son, the film-maker Emmanuel Bourdieu, made a drama about literature students that I've been meaning to watch for ages: Les amitiés maléfiques.
Claire, thank you for your comment. I completely agree with your commonsense case for teaching historical narratives like the "All modern American poetry is divided into two parts" story—which is perhaps a covert rewriting of the American Renaissance narrative (another extremely useful construct). At the same time as we display and teach our highly trained interpretative skill of matching literary particulars to general historical narratives, though, we could also inculcate some version of Williams's skepticism. Does it mean the same thing to identify Whitman/Dickinson lines in the 1950s as it would in the 1930s or the 1980s? Just what does lineage consist in (homage? anxiety of influence? early reading? critical assessments)? And so on.
Dissertations as pilot episodes: I love it! I'm retitling my book proposal Modernism: Encounter at Farpoint. Except that you then have to stretch the analogy by imagining that the bulk of everything on TV consisted of pilot episodes, mostly shown only once somewhere in the upper 400s on satellite-only channels.
My particular favorite is The End of History, and its implications of modernity reaching a saturation point. I'm reminded of how this is so not true every time I try to call my grandmother in the Philippines. Would love to submit to your panel but I'm in the process of renewing my green card and can't travel outside the U.S. Doesn't the American government know that my Critic As Nomad trope is being compromised?!
Can I join the fun? I love it!
(1) The "rise of the novel"! Bit of an embarrassment that in other countries it "rose" before the 18th century. (Ian Watt doesn't mind: he just says those other things aren't really novels. Too, you know, French. Or Spanish.)
(2) Authorship! (Further to your point about those hardworking authors.) Yup, copyright was invented in the 18th c., but people cared about authorship at least as early as the 5th century BC. Think of Aeschylus and Euripides fighting it out in The Frogs, or all those debates over the authenticity of Homeric hymns.
(3) Unfairness to animals! Think it's Descartes's fault that we consider ourselves in a dominant relationship to the non-human world? Think it's all thanks to the subject-object split? Well, you might want to take another look at that cheerful line in Genesis 1:28...
(4) The Arbitrariness of the Signifier! Everyone thought words corresponded directly to concepts until Saussure came along. Er, well, until Mary Shelley came along. Er, OK, until Plato came along. (Ironically, the very same dialogue that gave its name to Cratylism also puts forward the opposite view, that words are merely conventional. To do the [fictional] guy justice, can we call it Hermogenism?)
So many lovely innovations...
...someone forecloses the possibility of thinking historically. It's sad to pick apart my own joke, but let me say that my serious intention was to provoke reflections on those historical transitions that are real and important but frustratingly difficult to bring into focus through a literary lens. Urbanization, the rise of the middle classes, secularization, processes of professionalization, the rise and fall of empires, etc.--these are some basic if dangerously teleological building blocks of modern history (and maybe premodern history too), and it would do major damage to the work of literary and cultural studies to imagine that they never happened simply because it's possible to shoot down the simplest versions of them. Down that road lies the idea that nothing ever changes.
The same goes for the generic narratives of literary history proper, like the rise of the novel. Undoubtedly the story is much more complicated than that--cf. the two thick volumes of Moretti's The Novel anthology--but if we give up on the story altogether, the joke's on us.
Hi Andrew,
Good, amusing stuff there. Who doesn't get testy with the pat explanations and boilerplate grand narratives? But your word of caution here is the more worthwhile point, I think. I studied Art History as an undergrad and to chart changes in art works one had to reference real material changes. The causal relations were always arguable, and yet that was the place where one might think a bit creatively or try to raise the stakes, as you say, for the sake of a challenge. Such arguments don't really explain anything definitively, but they make for an interesting sort of retrospective thought experiment.
Your caution that 'down that road" (i.e., belitting such efforts to explain how or why something changed or how we suspect we know that it did) "lies the idea that nothing ever changes" comes close, to my ear, to the real point: what doesn't change, much, in the examples from Williams with which you began is the method of argument, and a reliance on a certain kind of "before/after" reference that, like the "two strains," simply helps to organize the material. The fact that we teach these methods and some people become quite good at them, and persuasive, should not blind us to the fact that these familiar patterns are historical points become mere rhetoric, sometimes quite empty or reductive. This can easily happen in lectures, as some of the commentators here have remarked, and in the popular versions of complex thought (as you well know happens also all-too easily with scientific knowlege), and one can only hope that we know the difference between a pat "just so story" about how the modern subject came to birth or how harmony with nature ended, and an actual description of an idea as an experience, or of an event that provoked unpredictable responses in disparate persons living through something like the same period.
I love periodizing, just like I love making lists of dates of things and there have been more than a few "a ha's" when I note things that occur more or less the same time. At such moments I wish I had more of an Hegelcule because I believe that actual thought into such particulars--art as the form of ideas "in the air"--could yield worthwhile thought, though it might not be very useful as history. But then I've always been, as it were, driven to abstraction.
Anyway, I'm interested to see what arguments you make about the effort to periodize. A seminar I'd like to hold is on "How Modernism ended." I understand you're trying to end it anew, as a going literary critical concern, but my interest would be to look at works of the '30s/'40s produced both by "the modernist generation" and the next generation to better understand what changed from the teens and '20s. The point, for me, is to keep "first generation" modernism when it belongs, because it is in a particular historical context. Not to say, as one commentator worried, that one would try to historicize the likes of Rilke as the best way to understand his work, but still keeping in mind that his work does follow the arc of the "first generation," as do so many others.
I don't think there is too much danger in that. We seem very attached to those narratives even if we poke fun at their caricature versions. The point is to remember the danger of the caricature versions.
It's hard not to agree with Fredric Jameson--"Always historicize! This slogan--the one absolute and we may even say "transhistorical" imperative of all dialectical thought...."--but I seriously wonder, why? Why always historicize?
How about Rilke? I seem to think historicizing Rilke is not to read him (not to read him at all, or almost).
And not just poets like Rilke (it would actually be very difficult to historicize him beyond the obvious, predictable lore), but literature (human literary endeavor) in general seems to have a dimension that doesn't really belong to what we call history. Am I mistaken? (Did I miss something in my education?)
*I have been wondering about these things for a while. I'd like to hear what other people think. (Please feel free to fill me in on what I've missed.)
I now wonder whether I was mistakenly mistaken. Minutes ago I remembered reading Jane Gallop's article in 2007 MLA Profession titled "The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading." It seems Gallop's article both answered and provoked the questions I raised above. Gallop says for example about "the rise of new historicism":
And about when historicization stopped being productive and drove literary studies to "disciplinary suicide":
I think I have felt (just as Gallop does in her article) that the kind of reading new historicism encourages has become paradigmatic, or predominant, at the expense of other fruitful (in Gallop's words, "chic and smart and potent") ways of reading. Louis Menand said, in his article for Profession (I think, different year, 2008?), that the profession of literary studies is now not reproducing but "cloning" itself. Wouldn't it be strange if it doesn't, if only one critical model holds (absolute) sway for decades? Why is it that any new model starts out as powerful and fertile but soon hardens once it gets dominant?
(*I know Andrew's original post has little to do with new historicism! I somehow got to thinking whether there are times we'd better actually "stop" historicizing.)