Behold The Power Of Tweed

A couple of people have messaged me asking how tonight went, so I'll post this for all to read.  I think it went well.  I'll copy-and-paste what I didn't really read below the fold.  It's a flawed but solid introduction to historicism . . . by which I mean, Jane Newman complimented me on it after the festivities ended.  Since she's not one to compliment gratuitously, I feel my impression of my performance confirmed. 

Since I'm in such a fine mood I've decided to share my "wealth."  Since all my readers are beyond cool they certainly already own all The Replacements albums, but I since I've zipped up a couple of my favorite 'Mats songs for other purposes, I thought I'd give 'em the opportunity to re-re-acquire a couple of brilliant songs.  So enjoy!  (That link won't last forever.  Be sure to listen to "Can't Hardly Wait."  That version was the stuff of legend.  Now it's the stuff of swapping . . . but still worthy of legend.)

I begin with a startling revelation: every work of literature is written at some particular historical moment, read at some particular historical moment and represents some particular historical moment. Call them the moment of composition, the moment of reception and the moment of representation. (I should note that this it's obviously more complicated than this. It's far more difficult to situate the particular moment represented in John Donne's "Holy Sonnets" than say John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. But bear with me.) A person whose primary scholarly interest is in the interaction of these three moments is an historicist. I would define the term further, but at this moment in literary studies historicism is less methodology and more attitude. To paraphrase one of the most prominent working historicists, Stephen Greenblatt: historicists desire to speak with the dead, to know how it felt to live during the moment of composition. How do they acquire such knowledge?

Slowly. An historicist must be on intimate terms with his or her chosen moment of composition. This requires exhaustive study of both the primary sources--novels, newspapers, diaries, poems, &c.--produced during that moment and the secondary ones written about it after the fact--histories, literary criticism and what-not. I know what you’re thinking: Where can I sign up? The answer is many of you already have. Historicism has become increasingly popular in literature departments because its appeal is, I'd argue, inherently literary.  You were interested enough in literature to sacrifice your early evening to a discussion and performance of a work of one. Ipso facto . . . no I take it you're gonna need convincing. Alright then, a quick example:

James Joyce famously, and modestly, said of his novel Ulysses: “I want to give a picture ofDublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” A tall order. And note that he only says /Dublin/ can be rebuilt. Bricks and mortar. Easily represented. He doesn’t claim that the inner lives of its citizens could be reconstructed, although many a Joycean would claim that they could have. The point is historicists aim to do what Joyce did and one better. Only instead of a single book we have archives at our disposal. We sift through thousands of seemingly pointless documents to find that one sharpened one. But that seemingly pointless sifting isn’t actually pointless at all. It provides us with a feel for the period, for its concerns and locutions. We inhabit the textual remains of the moment of composition with the doggedness of a Joyce in order to rebuild the culture which, as they tend to do, has disappeared from the earth. I say rebuild, but I could easily have said "created," with the caveat that we do so from solid historical fact and sound inrepretation. Unfortunately for us, this is no easy matter. Consider the subject of this roundtable, Orpheus Descending: Tennessee Williams first wrote it in the late 1930s. Back then he called it Battle of Angels. Its moment of reception was unkind to say the least. Its reviews were hostile and it closed after a short run. So there we have the /original/ moment of composition. An historicist might read Battle of Angels and wonder why Williams had chosen the moment of representation he did: a claustrophobic Southern town roughly contemporaneous to that original moment of composition, the late 1930s. But then he rewrote it. Seventeen times. Each time adding or stripping away a little something. How many of his revisions had to do with the changing times? How many were the result of his changing mind? This unstable moment of composition gives historicists fits. How can we situate a text in a particular historical moment if it's continually revised for the better part of seventeen years? Even if Williams himself thought the work timeless--and for reasons I’ll discuss shortly I have good reason to believe he did--the cultural situation in which he revised it was the very opposite of timeless. Time ticked forward. It always does. The culture in which Williams wrote Battle of Angels, then, is not the same culture in which he eventually finished Orpheus Descending. A quick example:

In the late 1930s, the Italian Lady Torrence would have been considered a foreigner and, in the South, possibly not even white. Between that initial moment composition and the first performance of the revised play in 1957 she would have been considered an enemy of America during WWII and eventually granted entry, even in the South, into the great American Caucasian club. An historicist might ask how Williams’ changing feelings about Italians over that period influenced his depiction of Lady? Did he consider changing her national origin during WWII and if he didn’t what does that tell us about his relation to American culture at the time? Did he consider altering her heritage after mainstream American culture accepted second and third generation Italian immigrants as marginally white? These are all important questions. But there's more.

On top of the confusion posed by the shifting moment of production, we would have to account for the oddity inherent in the moment of representation. He named his play Orpheus Descending and larded it with allusions to classical literature. And the Bible. And Catholic martyrs. Carol in Orpheus Descending, for example, had been called Cassandra in Battle of Angels. In Orpheus Descending, however, Vee more resembles the Cassandra figure. But in one of Carol's monologues, she describes her self as having once been “a Christ-bitten reformer,” “a kind of benign exhibitionist” whose efforts at political intervention were, Cassanda-like, always ignored. Should we consider the revisionary history incidental or essential? Should we entertain the idea that Williams stripped her of her namesake’s foresight for personal reasons? Cultural? Aesthetic maybe? The answer to that question depends on how closely you believe Williams followed the Cassandra mythology in the construction of Carol. And Vee. If you think it very important, you find yourself in the uncomforable position of deciding precisely what moment of representation is being represented? A universal Greek one? A universal American one, maybe, such that what worked in '37 would work in '57? And even if it is a universal American moment, how is it received? How do people respond to its universality in 2006 versus 1990, when Peter Hall adapted it for television, or versus 1940, when, wrote New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson, Battle of Angels "closed amid the bedlam of scandal in Boston"? Is Atkinson correct when he says of the 1957 production that "whatever offended playgoers then must have been purged in the rewriting"? Or had the audience and /its/ expectations changed?

Comments

[Sine.Qua.Non]

Thanks for the Replacements! I downloaded as I read your presentation on historicism. I liked it and your examples which made complete sense to me. I tend to like "The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past" by John Lewis Gaddis because of his ability to use mapping because it is everchanging and due to the simplicity of his explanations. I wrote a little review of historicism myself...what various elements are and their meaning, such as it is. They may or may not interest you:

:: Evolution & Meaningfulness of History (in a Nutshell) - Part I ::
:: Evolution & Meaningfulness of History (in a Nutshell) - Part II ::
:: Evolution & Meaningfulness of History (in a Nutshell) - Part III ::

[Kenneth Rufo]

Scott, if you get bored, I've < a href="http://ghostinthewire.org/archives/2006/03/the_temporality.php">posted some comments on the temporality of representation. I'd be curious what you think.