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JENNIFER RICH
“The Part is the Whole:”
The Rhetoric of Historical Form in New Historicism
In an attempt to clarify their critical practice, Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher
collaborated on a manifesto of new historicist practice in 2001, Practising New
Historicism. In their first chapter, they set out the tenets of new historicist practice.
Anxious to recuperate what Greenblatt calls “the touch of the real” in literary
methodology, they announce a critical stance that resolutely valorises the particular at the
expense of theoretical comprehensiveness:
The task of understanding [a text or other form of cultural artifact] depends not on
the extraction of an abstract set of principles, and still less on the application of a
theoretical model, but rather an encounter with the singular, the specific, and the
individual. 1
Gallagher and Greenblatt’s introduction is striking for the way in which it refuses theory.
Theory, for them, appears to threaten the heart and soul of their project—what they
would characterise as the resurrection of those liminal moments in literary texts that
“conjure” the early modern “real.” 2 This avoidance of theory led Greenblatt and
Gallagher to a love affair with the anecdote, a historiographical particularity that like
Gilles Deleuze’s rhizome, rootlessly burrows in and around the theories—Marxism,
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historicism, psychoanalysis—that attempt to capture it. Eager to recover the “history of
things that did not happen,” Gallagher and Greenblatt proclaim the anecdote as that
which enables “foveation in cultural interpretation.” 3 As Greenblatt explains in his
chapter “The Touch of the Real,”
What we are calling the effect of compression enabled a literary historian like
Erich Auerbach to move convincingly from a tiny passage to a sprawling,
complex text (and finally, to “Western Literature”)…. Geertz did something
similar with cultural fragments, small bits of symbolic behavior from which he
could widen out into larger social worlds…. The interpreter must be able to select
and fashion, out of the confused continuum of social existence, units of social
action small enough to hold within the fairly narrow boundaries of full analytical
attention, and this attention must be unusually intense, nuanced and sustained. 4
By virtue of its isolatability and particularity, the anecdote serves as the ideal site for
foveation, and thus provides the mechanism by which the new historicist critic may “call
up” and “speak with the dead:” “We wanted the touch of the real in the way that in an
earlier period people wanted the touch of the transcendent,” proclaim Greenblatt and
Gallagher in their conclusion. Unfortunately, calling up and speaking with the dead is not
immune to problems of form and rhetoric. How do you call up and speak with the dead?
In what ways does the mechanism—the telephone so to speak—for such conjuring
compromise the call itself? What this study proposes is to examine issues of rhetoric in
Greenblatt’s historical project. While many critics have examined issues of content,
critiquing the “thingification” of the renaissance that occurs in analyses that rely on the
obscure and strange to give twenty-first century readers a hand-hold onto early modern
life, few have examined the way in which the rhetoric of new historicism, and
particularly its reliance on the anecdote, dislodges by its very nature any grasping onto
“the early modern real,” and instead conjures what I will call the “synecdochisation” of
history.” 5
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In what follows, I will contend that the anecdote is an epistemological
synecdoche: it relies on the part to conjure the whole. To provide a theoretical context for
my discussion of one of Greenblatt’s most famous and symptomatic essays, “Shakespeare
and the Exorcists,” I will need to descend into one of the darkest circles of Greenblattian
hell and use theory—particularly, Marxist analyses of historiography—to provide the
template for my analysis of new historicist rhetoric.
*
*
*
The correctness of such an attitude is evident, inasmuch as it is opposed to the hypostatization of
general concepts—although this does not include universals in all their forms. But it is a quite
inadequate response to a Platonic theory of science, whose aim is the representation of essences,
for it fails to appreciate its necessity…. As far as historical types and epochs in particular are
concerned, it can, of course, never be assumed that the subject matter in question might be grasped
conceptually with the aid of ideas such as that of the renaissance or the baroque….
Konrad Burdach 6
Writing in his highly cryptic work The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter
Benjamin discusses the dialectic of particularity and totality in the Western
epistemological tradition. Responding to the German philosopher Hans Burdach’s
dismissal of modern historiography as an exercise in totalisation, Benjamin attempts to
provide a philosophical middle-ground between particularity and totalisation:
As ideas, however, such names perform a service they are not able to perform as
concepts; they do not make the similar identical, but they effect a synthesis
between extremes. 7
Benjamin here anticipates some of the epistemological concerns of literary criticism
working within a materialist framework. His “Idea” is an attempt to understand the
ordering structures under which conceptualisations—historical and otherwise—take
place:
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Every idea is a sun and is related to other ideas just as suns are related to each
other. The harmonious relationship between such essences is what constitutes
truth. Its oft-cited multiplicity [see Burdach] for discontinuity is a characteristic of
the ‘essences . . . which lead a life that differs utterly from that of objects and their
conditions; and which cannot be forced dialectically into existence by our
selecting and adding some….’ 8
Through Burdach, Benjamin instantiates an uneasy amalgamation of two historically
competing conceptions operating in Marxist theory and historiography. Refusing to align
himself either within a Hegelian Marxist conceptualisation of epistemology or within a
more modern (“these are the fragments which I shore against my ruin”) epistemology of
the particular, Benjamin prefers to suggest a mediating element—the “Idea” as distinct
from the “conception” and the various phenomena which serve as the concretion of the
particular concept. Ideas for Benjamin exist within the mediation of the element and its
concept—they are both the (indirect) determination and consequence of the momentary
consummation of the two. As he notes, “ideas are not represented in themselves, but
solely and exclusively in an arrangement of concrete elements in the concept: as the
configuration of these elements…. Just as a mother is seen to begin to live in the fullness
of her power only when the circle of her children, inspired by the feeling of her
proximity, closes around her,” writes Benjamin in a surprisingly homey metaphoric
redaction of the “Idea,”
so do ideas come to life only when extremes are assembled around them. Ideas—
or to use Goethe’s term, ideals—are the Faustian ‘Mothers.’ They remain obscure
so long as phenomena do not declare their faith to them and gather round them. 9
The idea may be considered the ur-epistemology—or using Fredric Jameson’s more
appropriate spatial terminology, the ur-horizon—within which the “conception,” the
linguistic representation of the particular, takes shape. Although my definition of
Benjamin’s definition may suggest a causal relationship between “conception” and
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“Idea,” it is incorrect to consider “Ideas” as either a direct result or determination of
empirical and philosophical “concepts.” To belabour Benjamin’s cosmology, a sun, for
example, provides at best a gravitational context for the planets that circle it. In other
words, it constitutes the astronomical ordering system under which planets exhibit their
own particular orbiting behaviour. In a similar way, the “Idea” can be seen as an
epistemological ordering system; rather than the cosmos, the universe is here the
theoretical conditions of possibility for the generation of conceptualisations of the
concrete phenomena under examination.
Despite Greenblatt’s declaration of critical independence from theory, new
historicism nevertheless bears the traces of a peculiarly Marxist problematic: the dialectic
of particularity and totalisation which, as we have seen, Benjamin attempts to mediate in
the Origin of German Tragic Drama and which Theodor Adorno also considers, as
discussed below. By reconjuring this theoretical lineage, I am not trying in any way to
“catch” Greenblatt out; rather I hope I am enabling a clearer understanding of the “Idea”
underlying new historicist practice.
Synecdochising History: Methodology and Interpretation
In “‘Cultural Poetics’ versus ‘Cultural Materialism:’ The Two New Historicisms in
Renaissance Studies,” Howard Felperin mentions the dialectical relationship between part
and whole, text and context, that constitutes new historicist methodology:
For the New-Historicist act of delimiting its subject matter along older empirical
lines effectively cuts its ‘Renaissance’ out of the flow of history and turns it into a
slice or cross-section of history. This can then be studied, like a slide, under the
microscope, where it takes on the aspect of a synchronic system that is certainly
culture-specific and conventional—and displays no shortage of ‘energy’ and
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‘circulation’—but one that has been sealed off from any continuing historical
process. 10
Earlier in the same article, Felperin notes that “research” for a new historicist signifies
a cool, disinterested (indeed, invisible) interpreter bracketed off in the here and
now, and an objective body of ‘data’ sharply visible in the there and then, each
standing in a self-contained space and separated from the other by enough
distance to enable independence and objectivity in their scrutiny. 11
Benjamin’s “answer” to this positivist posture was an ironisation of linearity in writing
and thought. The goal of philosophy was not, as Martin Jay explains in Marxism and
Totality, to construct a “spider’s web between separate kinds of knowledge in an attempt
to ensnare the truth as if it were something which came flying in from outside:”
Benjamin contended that philosophy’s ‘representation of truth’ best proceeds by
immersion in the most minute details of subject-matter.’ Such an immersion was
not, however, that of the empiricists’ ‘acquisition of knowledge’ through
inductive generalization. The traits of the proper philosophical style were rather
‘the art of interruption in contrast to the chain of deduction’…. 12
New historicism engages in this “art of interruption” through its use of historical
synecdoche; through this device, historicism attempts to mediate historiographically
between the particular (the anecdote) and the total (the world “picture”).
As the latter annotation suggests, one may discern the reasons behind this desire
for mediation in new historicism’s political and academic origins, particularly in its
rejection of what is commonly called “old” historicism. Searching for an alternative
homology of the text and the social, new historicists and their more Marxist British
partners, cultural materialists, strove to recover what may be understood as a “people’s
history.” (A major historiographical forerunner and influence of cultural materialist
historiography was, of course, the Annales School in France.) This “people’s history” was
to be found in what traditional historiography ignored or left out—those liminal voices
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that were threatening, both in their own time and to recent traditional historiography.
“Materialist criticism,” Jonathan Dollimore notes in his introduction to the seminal work
of cultural materialism, Political Shakespeare, “refuses what Stephen Greenblatt calls the
monological approach to historical scholarship, of the past, one ‘concerned with
discovering a single political vision, usually identical to that said to be held by the entire
literate class or indeed the entire population.’” 13 Part and parcel of this rejection of
monological historiography was the idea that a more complex history, one that was both
multilogical and multivocal, would be more able to recover “the truth” still hidden behind
the screen of the dominant social and historical ideologies of the early modern period and
today.
The presumption of a recoverable and accurate picture of the Elizabethan world(s)
served as both motivation and rationalisation of the way in which cultural materialists
engaged with history in their critical exegesis. Convinced of the suspiciousness of
narratives that purported to encompass the breadth and process of historical movement,
critics such as Jonathan Dollimore, Stephen Greenblatt, Alan Sinfield and Leonard
Tennenhouse confined themselves to what they saw as true historical moments—petites
histoires—which, like Michel Foucault’s famous anecdotes, seemed to escape
containment within the hegemonic ideological practices of the early modern period and
today. Alan Liu describes the new historicist approach as the construction of a bricolage
of historical moments in his article, “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism:”
Serendipitious and adventitious—always merely found, always merely picked
up—these models compose a bricolage substituting for what was once the more
methodological narratio presentation of facts in history of ideas…. Where history
of ideas straightened the world pictures, Elizabethan or otherwise, new
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historicism hangs those pictures anew—seemingly by accident, off any hook, at
any angle. 14
Thus, where E. M. W. Tillyard 15 and others attempted to “speak with the dead” through
the methodology of the grand récit, new historicism contended that such a connection
with history was only possible through a process of critical sedimentation of the liminal:
only through an examination of many little moments, of many sites of the social in the
early modern period, could a properly multivocal, multilogical early modern social be
resurrected.
In its production of a multivocal and multilogical “picture” of the early modern
period, new historicism participates in a dialectic of particularity and totalisation that I
refer to above. The “Idea” of new historicism—to go back to Benjamin’s idea for a
moment—is, in the last analysis, the “Idea” of traditional enlightenment thought,
reconfigured in a literary universe. It is the totalisation of the “fragment” and the creation
of fictional homologies between text and context. Through its rhetoric of historical
representation, new historicism instantiates a mutually ordering orbit between text and
context and between anecdote (fragment) and historical/social totality.
Reification
Theodor Adorno is perhaps the most important Marxist theorist of totality and reification.
Influenced by Benjamin’s writings on totality, Adorno nevertheless refused the notion of
a mediating “Idea” which could—if indirectly—provide an ontological universe for the
abstract concretions of the concept. In opposition to Benjamin and Georg Lukács, Adorno
instantiated the notion of a negative dialectics. Instead of moving toward an ultimately
resolving dialectics of totality, a negative dialectics resists the negation of the negation,
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and instead preserves the nonidentity of identity: “Totality is to be opposed by convicting
it of nonidentity with itself—of the nonidentity it denies, according to its own concept.” 16
Although notoriously inactive in everyday political life, Adorno nevertheless saw
negative dialectics as the only philosophical resistance to the colonisation of a totalising
enlightenment epistemology. Writing about history, Adorno notes the material
ruthlessness to which such identitarian thinking inevitably leads:
After the catastrophes that have happened, and in view of the catastrophes to
come, it would be cynical to say that a plan for a better world is manifested in
history and unites it. Not to be denied for that reason, however, is the unity that
cements the discontinuous, chaotically splintered moments and phases of
history—the unity of the control of nature, progressing to rule over men, and
finally to that over men’s inner nature. No universal history leads from savagery
to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton
bomb. 17
In an oft-cited remark, Adorno contended that “all reification is a forgetting.” 18 Part of a
letter written to Walter Benjamin in 1940, this remark concerned the totalising ethos that
Adorno felt characterised knowledge-production in Western thought, particularly
Western knowledge’s prerequisite of a rigid separation of “subject” and “object.” In this
separation Adorno discerned the sine qua non of a totalising epistemology—the
domination of the analysed object by the analysing subject, a domination which entailed,
among other things, a hostile dismissal of heterogeneity within the object. Thus, the
subject “subjects” the object by apprehending it within a paradigm that bases itself on the
normative requirements of enlightenment epistemology: “Defining means that something
objective, no matter what it may be in itself, is subjectively captured by means of a fixed
concept.” 19 Definition is a process of hypostatisation of the object; thus, all definitions
are inherently violent because they erase heterogeneity. Enlightenment thought is
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predicated upon such a hermeneutics of definition, particularly what Adorno called its
“tyranny of identity.” As Martin Jay explains in Adorno,
In philosophical terms, the domination of the object by the subject is expressed
both in positivism and idealism. In the former, a subjectivity stands coolly apart
from its object in order to manipulate it; although seemingly passive, the positivist
subject really has an instrumental relationship to the world, a world on which it
unreflexively projects the scientifically ascertainable traits it claims merely to
discover. 20
This notion of subject-object domination—which Adorno calls reification—provides the
theoretical context for my examination of new historicism’s rhetoric of historical
representation, particularly the way in which this methodology posits the text’s relation to
the socio-historical context of its production. The new historicist attempt to actuate a
multivocal and multilogical early modern picture is, ironically, predicated upon the same
processes of rhetorical representation that we see in old historicism, in particular, erasure
and reification.
The only difference between the two approaches is the choice of historical
content: rather than generalising from a meta-narrative of historical progression such as
in the old historicism of Tillyard, et al., new historicists abstract from specified historical
sites. Thus, instead of a monology of the grand récit, we receive a monology of the petite
histoire, which is then posited both as an epistemological base from which it is possible
to apprehend complex socio-historical processes and as a heuristic counterpart to the
recuperation of the text’s historical sub-text. This process of abstraction of certain sites of
the social is what Adorno critiques in his pithy response to reification and its
consequence, totalisation—“the whole is the untrue.” Because of the mechanics of
reification, what is presented as the whole, as a totality, is always (already) the critical
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extrapolation from the part, and it is this process of extrapolation for the constitution of a
“universal” (of normative relations) that is the thought-process of a reifying
epistemology. 21 Reification may be pinpointed as the methodological basis of an
enlightenment epistemology precisely because such an epistemology is, in a sense, a
paralysed materialist dialectic—one that in its very ontology must not move, but
purposely stays within isolation/abstraction and through this creates an illusion of the
“whole.” It is this illusion of the whole that is precisely the forgetting of the whole.
In tracing the processes of reification, it is necessary to consider the methodology
of historical engagement, precisely because, as we will see later, the two become—in the
end—the same thing. As will become clear during the examination of “Shakespeare and
the Exorcists,” reification is both a process and an effect—reification in process effects
reification in representation. It is through the processes of reification (abstraction and its
concomitant counterpart, erasure) that the effect of reification (the creation of a false
totality and its representation as a totality) is brought about. My analysis of Greenblatt’s
work will thus centre on the representational “effects” of his particular engagement with
certain historical data and his use of this data in his examination of King Lear. What I
will be contending is that Greenblatt’s methodology of historical engagement depends
upon the reification of the particular historical data under consideration and this data’s
supposed correspondence to the dramatic text. In other words, Greenblatt in
“Shakespeare and the Exorcists” is constructing two fictions. He is constructing a fiction
of history, or more accurately, he is representing historical data in fictionalised form, and
he is constructing a fiction of the historical data’s correspondence with the dramatic text.
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This is not to say that Greenblatt means to do this. He is not out to “con” us with
some neat historical trickery. Nor do I wish to suggest that readers of Greenblatt’s critical
work view his historical anecdotes as telling the whole story. We, of course, know that
Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (London, 1603) is one historical
event among a multitude of historical events. We know this before and after we read
Greenblatt’s article. Yet while we read, this commonsensical caveat becomes murky. We
forget the complex of socio-historical processes that surround the spotlighted event
because the way Greenblatt engages with historical data gives rise, if just for a moment,
to the critical fantasy that a complex of historical processes can be apprehended by the
examination of one historical event. As we have seen, this is the essence of reification.
In order more clearly to grasp the processes of reification, I have categorised the
methodological steps under examination as follows: a. transportability; b. reflection; and
c. the collapse of historical form (the method of engagement) to historical content (the
historical data under consideration). Although I consider these methodological steps
consecutively for the sake of clarity, a more accurate portrayal would necessarily
represent a complex network of methodological and epistemological interdependency
between all three categorisations.
Transportability
In order to understand the complex cultural exchanges in which the theatre participates,
Greenblatt juxtaposes a detailed historical account of an event 22 in early modern culture
to the dramatic text that is understood to incorporate this event in its plot. In
“Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” for example, Greenblatt starts by recounting in detail
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Harsnett’s account of fake exorcism. This is followed by a textual analysis of the way in
which this historical event—Harsnett’s Declaration—is rehearsed in Shakespeare’s King
Lear. 23 These steps are important to examine for the effects of transportability and
reflection that arise from the way in which Greenblatt uses history in this article.
Let us first consider the delineation of the historical event. A historiographical
protégé of Michel Foucault, Greenblatt uses the anecdotal form to recapitulate a historical
event. 24 For literary critics, the characteristics of the anecdote make it a comfortable form
with which to engage history and with which to posit a relation between the text and its
historical context. The anecdote is narratologically self-sufficient, with a beginning,
middle and end, and its detail seems to provide a liminally placed glimpse of the
Weltanschauung of a particular historical period. As Joel Fineman has noted, the
anecdote also gives us a break from the relentless telos of traditional monological
historiography. 25 It is thus a promising methodological tool to counter the “single
political vision” of the early modern period that Greenblatt finds so objectionable in
Tillyard.
The anecdote is also critically transportable, and this is its most important feature
for our purposes. 26 As with the complexes of facts presented by Lukács in History and
Class Consciousness as the favorite goal of those he calls “blinkering empiricists,” 27 the
anecdote also is a complex of historical facts that may be critically isolated for inspection
in a variety of textual and historical contexts. This transportability is part and parcel of
the anecdote’s ontology as “reified/idealised history” and as a locus for the recuperation
of the allusive historical traces purportedly hidden within the dramatic text.
Transportability of historical data presupposes a methodological and epistemological
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paradigm under which the historical event is abstracted—rendered separable from the
socio-historical context of its production. In the same work, Lukács notes this
methodology of transportation in the critical practice of the natural sciences: “The pure
facts… arise when a phenomenon of the real world is placed (in thought or in reality) into
an environment where its laws can be inspected without outside interference.” 28 The
historical event is thus rendered into a fictional representation of historical processes as a
result of the dual processes of abstraction and transportation to a textual context—in this
case, King Lear.
Like the data of empirical study, the anecdote depends for its very definition on
its separation from the complex of socio-historical processes of which it functions as a
(partial) representation. Thus, in Greenblatt’s examination of King Lear, the historical
relations between the historical event and the textual event are reified in part because of
the anecdote’s methodological transportability. This transportability of historical data
makes possible Greenblatt’s critical and historical project, at the same time that it
inevitably compromises it. Although Greenblatt promises to consider the complex
“institutional strategies in which both Harsnett’s Declaration and Shakespeare’s are
embedded,” 29 his overall evaluation of Harsnett’s Declaration is limited to the historical
and conceptual boundaries set out both by Harsnett in this tract and by the anecdote’s
definitional boundary—a theological controversy in which the Anglican voice is the only
voice heard. The object of historical investigation thus becomes the content of the
historical investigation. There is, for example, no critical apprehension of the material
ritual of exorcism outside its textual formulation and redaction by Harsnett in his
Declaration. Nor is there any attempt to account for the ways in which the continuance of
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this ritual functions as a residual and oppositional ideological site to the consolidation of
the Anglican Church. The moveable feast of Harsnett’s denunciation of one group of
recusants becomes the banquet of early modern religious history—a banquet that
Greenblatt never manages to leave.
Reflection
A critical consideration that avoids positing a monological relation of the historical and
textual event is, in the last instance, impossible within a methodology that is predicated
upon a relation of reflection between the historical and textual event. 30 In “Shakespeare
and the Exorcists,” this reflective positioning between the historical event and the
textual event is indicated at a number of critical points, perhaps most vividly by this
note: “in 1603 when Harsnett was whipping exorcism toward the theater, Shakespeare
was already at the entrance of the Globe theater to welcome it.” 31 In the course of the
article, this reflective correspondence is everywhere and necessarily reproduced.
Referring to the way in which Harsnett’s text provides models for Edgar’s mad
personage, Greenblatt writes,
Shakespeare appropriates for Edgar a documented fraud, complete with an
impressive collection of what the Declaration calls ‘uncouth,
non-significant’ names that have been made up to sound exotic and that
carry with them a faint but ineradicable odor of spuriousness. [Emphasis
added] 32
The sense of a reflective correspondence between historical textual event and
dramatic text is further heightened by Greenblatt’s consistent use of passages from
Harsnett’s Declaration to comment on certain dramatic scenes in Lear. To
provide Gloucester’s suicide attempt with a specific historical resonance, for
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example, Greenblatt likens Edgar’s role in this scene to the psychological
manipulations of Father Edmund and his cohorts:
By the power of theatrical suggestion the anxious subjects on whom the
priests work their charms come to believe that they too have witnessed the
devil depart in grotesque form from their own bodies, whereupon the
priests turn their eyes heavenward and give thanks to the Blessed Virgin.
In much the same manner, Edgar persuades Gloucester that he stands on a
high cliff, and then, after the credulous father has flung himself forward,
Edgar switches roles and pretends that he is a bystander who has seen a
demon depart from the old man. [Emphasis added] 33
Reflection is an inevitable effect of the problematic of positing a homology of the text
and the social, and of the consequent reification and idealisation of this relation. Because
the text and the historical nexus from which it is produced are understood to be in a
relation of mutual independence—we speak of the text and history, not the text in
history—attempts to map “history” in the text result in the reduction of historical
processes to an object that the text, in its plot, in its characterisation, in its “atmosphere,”
is shown to reflect. As Raymond Williams points out in Marxism and Literature, even
Marxist literary and aesthetic methodologies succumb to the representation of historical
processes as so many objects which are reflected in the work of art. In what Williams
calls a mechanical materialist methodology, historical processes are rendered as “objects”
which it is art’s role faithfully to reproduce. The critic’s job consists of evaluating the
veracity of the work of art’s reproduction of these objectified historical and social
processes:
The making of art was incorporated in a static objectivist doctrine, within
which [my emphasis] 'reality, the real world, the base,' could be separately
known, by the criteria of scientific truth, and their 'reflections' in art then
judged by their conformity or lack of conformity with them. 34
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Collapse of Form to Content
We have remarked that the anecdote is at once the tool of literary recuperation and the
content of that literary recuperation in Greenblatt’s critical exegesis. Harsnett’s
representation of recusant exorcism is that which is further dramatised—via the character
of Edgar. At the same time, Harsnett’s Declaration functions as the archival “tool” used
for the recuperation of the allusive content of this particular dramatic section. In short,
what it uncovers is itself. In Marxist terms, this narratological moment is produced for
later consumption in the textual analysis of King Lear. 35
Both Adorno and Lukács note this collapse of methodology and
knowledge-production in the critical processes of Western social and natural science; as
Lukács explains, “facts can only become facts within the framework of a system—which
will vary with the knowledge desired.” Greenblatt’s critical exegesis falls into a similar
problematic. The “system”—what we have called methodology—underlying his
understanding of the relation of the text and the historical event determines what
particular textual knowledge is produced in his critical exegesis. This deterministic
empiricism is characteristic of all knowledge-production that occurs under capitalism. An
enlightenment/capitalist epistemology determines the form, context and content of
knowledge-productions, such that methodological form and critical content are always
ontologically and analytically one and the same thing. The process of isolation and
abstraction for critical inspection cannot lead to a critical understanding that moves
beyond isolation and abstraction. The petite histoire, much as Greenblatt would like to
believe, cannot function as the site from which the critic or historian can glimpse the
“real” early modern story: what the critic can glimpse is determined by and limited to the
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content of the historical tool, in this case, the anecdote. To end with our key analogy, a
key is made only to fit its corresponding lock. It cannot be expected to unlock any other
door than the one for which it was produced.
1
Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, Practising New Historicism (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2001), 6.
2 Of course, how we understand that “real” is left unanswered—lest Lacanians are quick to take credit,
Greenblatt and Gallagher are quick to announce their non-indebtedness to Lacan’s formulation of the
“real.”
3
Greenblatt and Gallagher, 26.
4
Ibid.
5
Since new historicism’s inaugural moments, such as the publication of such works as Greenblatt’s
Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) and Shakespearean Negotiations (1989), commentators have critiqued
the historiographical approach of this form of criticism. The analyses and objections range from a distrust
of the newness of new historicism—critics such as Richard Strier (Resistant Structures: Particularity,
Radicalism and Renaissance Texts, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) posit a clear line of
critical descent from old historicist literature and the supposedly revolutionary new historicism—to more
politicised objections to new historicism’s seemingly banal political commitment (Howard Felperin,
“’Cultural Poetics vs. Cultural Materialism:’ The Two New Historicisms in Renaissance Studies” in The
Uses of the Canon: Elizabethan Literature and Contemporary Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), to
profound distrust of the historiographical validity of the “anecdote” (Joel Fineman, “The History of the
Anecdote: Fiction and Friction” in Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism Reader, New York: Routledge,
1989; and Felperin). Few, if any, analyses attempt a sustained consideration of the epistemological ordering
system(s)—the “deep structures” of thought—which are the preconditions for new historicist analysis in
the first place.
6
Konrad Burdach, quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso,
1977), 29.
7
Benjamin, 34.
8
Ibid., 37.
9
Ibid., 35.
10
Felperin, 86.
11
Ibid.,79.
12
Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 248.
13
Jonathan Dollimore, Political Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 5.
14
Alan Liu, “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism” (ELH 56.4, 1989), 722.
15
See E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1942).
16
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1994), 320.
17
Ibid., 320.
18
Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, The Complete Correspondence: 1928-1940 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Univesity Press, 1994), 189.
19
Theodor Adorno, “Subject and Object” in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential
Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1994), 498.
20
Jay, 63.
21
It is important to note that Adorno’s understanding of epistemology was bound up with an analysis of
the effects of capitalist relations of production on epistemology. Thus, when Adorno discusses
“enlightenment” epistemology, he is, at the same time, talking about the effects of capitalism and the
division of labour on Western thought-processes and analytical paradigms. It is in this way that he can be
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seen carrying on the work—albeit with considerable variation—of Georg Lukács in History and Class
Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968).
22
It is important to note that the historical events that Greenblatt uses in many of his articles are narratives
in their own right. Thus, Greenblatt’s exegesis is in the most basic sense a comparison and contrasting of
two narratives of different genres: historical and dramatic. Because of their positioning as the historical
subtext of, for example, King Lear (“Shakespeare and the Exorcists”) or Henry IV (“Invisible Bullets”) or
Twelfth Night (“Fiction and Friction”), etc., we forget these anecdotes’ narrative derivation. All of these
articles may be found in Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearian Negotiations (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988).
23
Greenblatt suggests these two methodological steps when he writes that Shakespeare in King Lear
“stages not only exorcism, but Harsnett on exorcism” (Shakespearean Negotiations, 116).
24
We must, of course, differentiate Foucault’s use of the anecdote from Greenblatt’s use of this form.
Foucault’s use of the anecdote is a prime factor in his actualisation of a dialectical consideration of
historical processes. Foucault telescopes a historical moment, such as the execution of Damiens, to provide
a vivid historical base from which to consider a shift in cultural ideologies—juridical, sexual, etc. Usually
the historical event is presented as a liminal moment in a larger epistemological reformulation of a
particular ideology. Foucault’s use of the anecdote is effective and dialectical in form because he
contextualises the particular historical moment within a complex critical genealogy of social power
relations and epistemological shifts of which these moments are effects. Thus, Foucault moves from the
recapitulation of a historical moment to a consideration of the overall historical nexus from which these
effects/moments may be understood to emerge. This generalised consideration of historical and social
processes is not usually undertaken in Greenblatt’s critical exegesis. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and
Punish (New York: Vintage, 1977), especially chapter 1.
25
Joel Fineman discusses the anecdote as a burst of the real into the telos of traditional historiography
because of its contingent (non-narratological) form. I disagree with this characterisation. But Fineman is
correct in his characterisation of the relation between the historical and textual event as a fictional critical
production (see “The History of the Anecdote….”).
26
Transportability of social/political epistemes (particular ways of seeing and understanding the
socio/political world) is everywhere present in historiography—even in “non-traditional” forms of
historical inquiry. The oft-heard delineation of certain political and aesthetic acts as “feminist,” or the
comprehension of attitudes and behaviours as “gay” are the more unfortunate examples of such
ideological/epistemic transportability.
27
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield characterise Tillyard’s apprehension of the early modern period as
a “single political vision” in their work, Political Shakespeare, see chapter 1 especially.
28
Lukács, 6. The fictional and dramatic nature of Greenblatt’s engagement with historical data can be seen
in his remarks to Noel King. Acknowledging the sentimental nature of his methodological engagement with
history, he says, “The dream of finding the lost woman, the lost lower classes, the lost Indians, is a rather
sentimental project that is decked out in what looks like political immediacy but in fact has no political
force.” On another occasion, archival work is motivated by a desire to “see clearly the scenes… that are
shadows behind the screen of language” (both quoted in Scott Wilson, Cultural Materialism, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1995, 57).
29
Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 95.
30
Louis Althusser introduced the concept of mediation in part to avoid a Marxist methodology and
epistemology of “reflection” in the apprehension of the historical relations of the “base” and the
“superstructure.” (See Althusser’s “Marx’s Immense Theoretical Revolution” in Althusser, Louis and
Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, New York: NLB, 1970.)
31
Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 115.
32
Ibid., 117.
33
Ibid., 118.
34
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 96.
35
Greenblatt’s use of the metaphor of circulation to understand the place of the theatre in cultural exchange
reminds me of Marx’s discussion of the proxemics of commodity exchange and production. It is for this
reason that I refer to Marx’s notion of commodity consumption in understanding the use to which
Greenblatt puts history in his analysis of King Lear. As I suggest, history is a heuristic commodity whose
use-value is precisely in its interpretative consumption by the literary critic. Metaphorically, then (and this
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might be going a bit far), King Lear, the drama, consumes Harsnett’s Declaration both in its incorporation
of Harsnett into itself (its historical subtext) and in the literary critic’s later use of Harsnett to apprehend the
allusive subtext of King Lear.
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