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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 Burdach6

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. Tillyard15 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 event22 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

Jennifer Rich: Historical Form in New Historicism 107 EnterText 6.3 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. 19Theodor 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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