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The New Historicism UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Previously Published Works Title The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/33v8c3xx Journal ELH: English Literary History, 56(4) ISSN 1080-6547 Author Liu, AY Publication Date 1989 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism Author(s): Alan Liu Source: ELH, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Winter, 1989), pp. 721-771 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2873158 . Accessed: 13/07/2014 01:51 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ELH. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 13 Jul 2014 01:51:25 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions - - - - - - * THE POWER OF FORMALISM: THE NEW HISTORICISM BY ALAN LIU Though it will doubtlessbe requiredsome day to change its character,semiology must first of all, ifnot exactly take definite shape,at least tryitself out, exploreits possibilitiesand impos- sibilities... it mustbe acknowledgedin advance thatsuch an investigationis bothdiffident and rash.... Roland Barthes I compare... a certainnumber of structures which I seek where theymay be found,and not elsewhere: in otherwords, in the kinshipsystem, political ideology, mythology, ritual, art, code of etiquette,and-why not?-cooking. -Claude LUvi-Strauss' I. WHY NOT? To understand the New Historicism, it will be useful to startby considering the version of rhetoricalexordium the method uses to place its argument in play. Justas Sidney solicits his audience in the Apology for Poetry by beginning upon the anecdote of Pugliano's horsemanship, so Stephen Greenblatt and others-to quote Jean E. Howard's early criticism of the technique-broach theirargument through "painstaking description of a particularhis- torical event, place, or experience" whose "supposedly paradig- matic moment" sketches "a cultural law."2 So thoroughgoing is such paradigmatism that exordium is convertible with digressio: even when a New Historicist study internalizes a paradigm as its centerpiece ratherthan its opening, the paradigm retains a throw- away quality. Serendipitous and adventitious-always merely found, always merely picked up-these models compose a brico- lage substitutingfor what was once the more methodical narratio or 721 This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 13 Jul 2014 01:51:25 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions presentationof facts in historyof ideas: the recordingof such mas- terparadigms, for example, as the Chain of Being,the Mirror,and the Lamp. Wherehistory of ideas straightenedthe worldpictures, Elizabethan or otherwise,New Historicismhangs those pictures anew-seemingly by accident,off any hook,at any angle.3 It not only cherishesparadigms thematizing obliqueness, as in Green- blatt'sanamorphic reading of Holbein's Ambassadorsin Renais- sance Self-Fashioning,4but speaks those paradigms in a vocabulary of anecdotalvirtuosity so oblique-itself tendingat timesto ana- morphosis,paradox, oxymoron, and chiasmus-thatthe resultis a kind of intellectualsprezzatura.5 To allude to the structuralist strainin the ancestryof the method,the paradigmsof the New Historicismbare a shy rashness,a supremelycavalier why not? assertiveof theirmarginality. It is mythesis that the whynot? of the New Historicismserves primarilyto repressthe urgencyof its real questionsabout litera- tureand history;and thatthe reasonthe repressionis necessaryis thatthe urgencyof these questionsis motivatednot by curiosity aboutliterature and historyin thepast so muchas deep embarrass- mentabout the marginalityof literaryhistory now. For whatmost distinguishesthe New Historicismmay be read in the brash ner- vousness with which it wears its title in an intellectualclimate commonlyprefixed "post-." As I will close by suggesting,the spu- rious,avant-garde novelty of the method(in which my own work has been as implicatedas any)is reallya rear-guardaction spurred by thepostmodern fear that in theface of history, literary history or any such mere show of intellectis passe. I wantto tracea trajectory,then, from the whynot? of the New Historicismto a whythat will allow us to set an agenda forunder- standingthe method'sanxiety of marginality.And to begin with (assuminghere a barker'svoice in advance of futureargument): view the carnivalof New Historicistparadigms; see the sideshows ofthe over-paradigm I will call-why not?-the contestof the Gov- erningLine and the DisturbedArray.6 A. Imagine Charles I seated at a courtplay-at the masque-like Florimenein 1635,for example, as StephenOrgel has reconstructed the scene. Centeredin conspicuousvisibility amid the audience, who occupy seats along threewalls facinghim, he sees along the exactmedial axis ofthe hall directlyinto Inigo Jones's stage with its stronglyillusionistic perspective effects-into the recessionalave- nue betweentrees and cottages,for instance, hung in the opening 722 The New Historicism This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 13 Jul 2014 01:51:25 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions scene. King and vanishing point: the apexes of royal presence and representationrule the universe between them.7 This scene visualizes one of the two leading paradigms of New Historicistpoetics: a culturalpoetics, as Greenblattnames it, whose donnee of interpretationis neitherthe historicalnor literaryfact but the feigned, illusional, or otherwise made structureof cultural ar- tifactencompassing both realms.8 The paradigm is that of theatri- cality, which in Renaissance studies and its Romantic counterpart (the latter increasingly influenced by French Revolution studies) startsin the actual theaterbut then aggressively spills out of doors to make "mise en scene," "social drama," "playfulness," "improvisation," "rehearsal," "tragedy," and "illusion" the master tropes of culture.9 With the possible exception of Greenblatt's study of self-made Renaissance men, theatricalityhas been used primarilyto model the mentalite of monarch-centeredaristocracy or its overthrow-the experience of the Elizabethan and Stuart courttheater as recounted by Orgel, forexample; or thatof the court spectacle (in another sense) registered by Marie-Helene Huet at the trial of Louis XVI.10 As in the case of New Historicistparadigms generally, theatrical- ity models "power."" Power, especially in Renaissance studies, designates the negotiation of social, personal, and literaryauthority thatyields a single regulation of culture. But the regulated state,we should immediately note, is so far frombeing monolithic that at every level its distinguishing feature is inner dynamism-a self- tensed, internecine action of power. New Historicism imagines an existentiallyprecarious power secured upon the incipient civil war between, on the one hand, cultural plurality and, on the other (to borrowan apt termfrom Russian Formalism), the cultural dominant able to bind pluralitywithin structure.'2Theatricality in particular is the paradigm that stresses the slender control of dominance over plurality. Thus it is that Orgel observes the plural jostle forcourt rank and ambassadorial privilege in the seating arrangementsat Florimene; and that Huet reconstructsthe multitudinousvivacity, inebriation, and sometimes plain boredom that sounded fromthe spectators at Louis's trialin 1793.13 But thus it is also thatboth authors stress the ability of the dominant,in the person of Charles or Louis, to struc- ture plurality into the show of a single state. Throned at the only point in the room perfect for viewing the perspective effects, Charles literallyruled: his being-seen-to-watch-the-show,as Orgel Alan Liu 723 This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 13 Jul 2014 01:51:25 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions conceives it,14 organized aristocracyaround a single line of per- fect vision, a single symbolic rule allowing each participantin the masque universe to calibrate his place near or far,to the rightor left of the royal lineage.'5 Justso Louis XVI, even as he was dethroned, commanded all eyes in his spectacle-court as powerfully as some Richard II asking for a mirror.The theatricalitythat once main- tained the illusion of a king was now the perfect mirrorof magis- tratesto disillusion another king-but in such a way as still to main- tain around the king's lineage the symmetryof rightand left(those who voted No and Yes to Louis's death) that was constitutive of ruled state. Only when the king had played his last performance,as Huet shows, did the Revolution then propagate plays about Marat and other heroes showing anew the People's rule. Charles and Louis, illusion and disillusion: these two states and their actors, we realize, are finallyas indistinguishable in the ana- lytic of theatricalityas the two halves of the anamorphic answer Richard II returnsBolingbroke in Shakespeare's deposition scene: "Ay, no; no, ay.''16 Once we premise
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