New Historicism: A Critical Overview
Introduction
The term
‘New Historicism’ was first used by the critic, Stephen Greenblatt in the
introduction to a collection of Renaissance essays in Genre with
parallel reference to Michel Foucault’s term wirkliche Historie or
effective Historian.
These terms
refer to a historian who talks about disunity and fragmentation, disruption and
reversal, rather than the unity favoured by traditional historians which is
often the unity of the historian’s own limited vision or even bias imposed on
the past events.
New Historicism as Cultural Poetics
The other
term that Greenblatt uses for New Historicism is Cultural Poetics. This term has general and specific meanings. The
general meaning can be best described by evoking Frederic Jameson’s claim that
historicism refers to “our relationship to the past and our possibility of
understanding the latter’s monuments, artifacts and traces”.
A New Relationship to the Literary Past
The Cultural Materialists
The same
trend of work was carried out by the British critics who called themselves ‘Cultural Materialists’ – a term
borrowed from the Marxist critic, Raymond Williams. They are Jonathan Dollimore,
Alan Sinfield, Catherine Belsey, Paul Brown, John Drakakis, Francis Barker,
Peter Hulme, Simon Shepherd, Thomas Healey, Kate McLuskie and others.
These two
groups of critics have a lot in common. They came from universities that were
not privileged but iconoclastic like California, Columbia, Sussex, Cardiff and
Essex. Their Leftist leanings are well-known with their Althusserian emphasis
on subversion than containment.
Some of the major differences between NH and CM are:
• NH tend to
concentrate on those at the top of the
social hierarchy like the Church, monarchy and the upper classes While CM
tend to concentrate on those at the bottom
of the social hierarchy like the lower classes, women and the other
marginalized sections of people.
•
NH tends to draw
on disciplines of Political Science, Government and Anthropology while CM
relies on Economics, sociology and cultural studies. CM is primarily concerned
with issues of class, economics and commodification. NH is more specifically
concerned with the questions of power and culture.
Emphasis on Local Knowledge
To
understand Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor and the like, one has to know the cultural underpinnings of being
blue-blooded, anglicized, Doon-School-St. Stephen’s- Oxbridge educated,
pro-market, metro-type, globally inclined type of individuals.
Literature as the best document of the soul of a
nation
Therefore
through synecdoche a New Historicist can move from a particular cultural event
or practice to know about a nation’s way of life – the faith in the view that
literature is the best document of the soul of a nation. A major challenge to
NH is how to respond to the break-down of the organic model and especially
literature’s relation to it.
One such
response has been to replace synecdoche with chiasmus as the favourite
rhetorical figure of speech for cultural analysis. Chiasmus: A figure of speech
indicating the inversion of the second part in a parallel phrase or clause. E.g.
She went to London, to New York went he.
Placing Literature In Relation to another Specific
Cultural Practice
NH no longer
considers culture as a whole. Instead Chiasmus allows the New Historicist to
place literature in relation to another specific cultural practice. The result
has been the proliferation of such titles as “The Literature of Psychology and
the Psychology of Literature”, “The Law of Literature and the Literature of the
Law”.
The use of
chiasmus has become so widespread that the stress is not the lack of identity
between the two disciplines but the stress is supposed to be on the production
of difference between the two disciplines. It is in this perspective Louis A.
Montrose’s formulation “the historicity of texts and the textuality of history”
need to be looked into.
The
assertion is that as much as the text is historical, history is also textual.
This replacement of the difference by identity leads to another tendency – that
of disciplinary imperialism, masquerading as interdisciplinary work. The
chiasmatic coupling of two disciplines has only the appearance of
interdisciplinarity.
But if the
discipline of history can be reduced to textuality then the most perceptive
cultural critics turn out to be only readers of texts. Since everything is a
text, and literary critics are trained to read texts, some feel quite
comfortable moving to texts produced in disciplines outside their field and
telling those naïve practioners of those fields how those texts should be read.
Cultural Studies – Common Ground for Historians and
Literary Critics
Thus the
rise of New Historicism within Literature Departments has been accompanied by
the rise of New Cultural History within History Departments, producing the
common ground of cultural studies for both Historians and Literary Critics
discontent within particular constraints within their respective disciplines.
For example,
the older generation of Renaissance Critics like Dover Wilson and Wilson Knight
were guided by E.M.W. Tillyard’s enormously influential Elizabethan World
Picture which far from being universally accepted, was actually the
“ideological legitimation of an existing social order, one rendered the more
necessary by the apparent instability of that order.” – that misrecognizes the
dominant ideology of the Tudor-Stuart society as a stable, coherent and
collective Elizabethan world picture lucidly reproduced in the canonical
literary works of the age.
Althusser on Ideology
Althusser
claimed that ideology was not a real but an imagined relationship
between individuals and the conditions of their existence. The need for
ideology is felt not by the masses but by those in power. With the
disappearance of ideas came the appearance of practices, rituals,- as
ideological apparatus.
In the hands
of New Historicists and Cultural Materialists, History becomes not a set of
static and easily recoverable and easily interpretable facts and events and
people but History as dynamic, fluid, vulnerable, often disjointed process of
interpretation which are inevitably coloured by the person who recounts them.
The Past Constantly Interacts With the Contemporary
Text
New
Historicists include accounts of not only the monarch and the court but also of
marginal figures such as poor sheep farmers, witches, alchemists and travellers
to the new world. The past is never frozen in a hierarchical, inaccessible,
monological distance but it constantly interacts not only with the contemporary
text but also with the late 20th century critic who studies it.
The Literary Texts Are Not Viewed As Superior to The
Other Texts
Just as the
apparent centres of power, the monarch and the court are not privileged over
the marginal figures by the New Historicists and the Cultural Materialists, so
the literary texts are not viewed as superior to the other texts such as
journals, medical treatises, voyager’s diaries, accounts of royal progresses,
letters of out-of-favour courtiers begging to be restored to former positions
of influence, maps, emblems and portraits. In
other words, it is based on the ‘parallel’ reading of literary and non-literary
texts, usually of the same historical period. New Historicism practices a mode
of study in which literary and non-literary texts are given ‘equal weightage’,
as suggested in Louis Montrose’s definition of New Historicism as “a
combined interest in the textuality of history, the historicity of texts”.
New
Historicism has challenged the long established assumption that Art is an
autonomous aesthetic form which transcends society, ideology, and culture that
form its matrix. Denying this, NH insists upon a different methodology - as
cultural criticism that refuses to see literature and history as two distinct
entities, since such differentiation is a product of our own phenomenological
cultural conditioning, which can be altered if our perspective is shifted.
The shifting
of perspective is illustrated using Shakespeare’s play, The Winter’s Tale
in order to show how Renaissance notions of ethnicity play a crucial part in
the play’s aesthetic. The various Eurocentric views on race and ethnic
differentiation present during Shakespeare’s time and traces of their presence
in the play, The Winter’s Tale is subject to analysis.
In The
Winter’s Tale, the inexplicable jealousy of Leontes, the King of Sicily is
analysed from a geo-cultural perspective and a rather convincing explanation is
presented: The opening scene of TWT , bring together the royalty from
three different regions of Europe- Leontes, the King of Sicily is from the
extreme south, in the Mediterranean region; his wife, Hermione is the daughter
of the Emperor of Russia in the northeast and Polixenes, the King of Bohemia,
now the Czech Republic is also from the northeast region. This joining of the
geographical regions has its counterpoint in the contemporary joining of
regions and other forms of cultural discourse.
TWT has been viewed exclusively for its thematic concerns
with no attention being paid to the racist and anthropological features that
the play implicitly addresses. For instance though it has been remarked that
Shakespeare interchanges the country of origin of Leontes, the jealous husband
and Polixenes, his putative rival – Sicily and Bohemia respectively, thus
radically altering these details as given in Greene’s Pandosto is not
explained by critics.
The argument
put forward is that the superiority claimed by the Northern Europeans over
their Southern counterparts is a significant element of multiculturalism that
the play embodies. Viewed from this multicultural context, the play seems to
embody a discourse in which the populist nations are challenged, disjunction is
harmonized and irreconcilable contradictions are transcended. Still at the
play’s end total harmony is not achieved and traces of certain elements which
the narrative seems to efface are still disturbingly present.
In making
the jealous husband a Sicilian belonging to a Mediterranean type of culture,
Shakespeare may have been exercising discretion. His acting company having
become the King’s Men after the accession of James I to England’s throne,
Shakespeare may have been reluctant to offend the new monarchby showing a
northern European consumed by an irrational sexual jealousy. As is well-known TWT
was one of the plays presented as part of the festivities devised to celebrate the
marriage of the king’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, elector
palatine of the Rhine, which took place in 1613. In 1619, Frederick was crowned
King of Bohemia, the country ruled by Polixenes in the play.
Anthropologically
the Russians like the Czechs and Slovaks belong to the Slavic race and they
considered themselves superior to those hailing from the South of Europe like
Leontes, the King of Sicilia. A dark complexion often associated with the
south, carried connotations of cultural and social inferiority as may be seen
in Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing who wryly attributes her failure
to find a husband to her complexion.
Beatrice
comments, “Thus goes everyone to the world but I, and I am sunburnt. I may sit
in a corner and cry ‘Heigh-ho for a husband’” (II. i. 318-320).
Therefore
what causes Leontes’ insecurity and sexual jealousy could well be explained as
the physical and cultural affinity that Polixenes has with Hermione – both
belonging to the slavic race and sharing a sense of racial and cultural
superiority.
The affinity
between Polixenes and Hermione is more than mere anthropological differences;
it is cultural as well. Hermione’s easy familiarity with Polixenes must have
been so hateful and galling to Leontes and so she is so grievously
misunderstood by him. This springs not from just a perversity of nature but a
misinterpretation of the social mores and customs of Northern Europe to which
Hermione and Polixenes belong.
The sexual
freedom enjoyed by women of the north of Europe was something totally denied to
the women of the south. Therefore in contrast to the restrained behaviour of
the women of the south, the freedom exercised by northern women was easily
misconstrued as licentiousness by the southerners. This cultural difference
forms the basis for the intense sense of jealousy coupled with suspicion
experienced by Leontes.
Another
political interest that TWT displays is that the King having no heir to
inherit the kingdom as mentioned in the opening scene. Looked at in the light
of the contemporary political scene, this and the play’s ending, of course
would have reminded the members of Shakespeare’s audience of what they had
themselves not long before experienced: the anxiety of seeing their recent
monarch Queen Elizabeth dying without an heir and also the relief they felt at
the throne being painlessly filled by James VI of Scotland, coming to England
as James I, thus effecting reconciliation between two long- standing
antagonists, England and Scotland and uniting them under a single crown. For
that audience, - Politics and History had become drama.
NH/CM as a movement establishes itself upon four main
contentions:
1. Literature is historical, which
means that a literary work is not primarily the record of one mind’s attempt to
solve certain formal problems and the need to find something to say; on the
other hand it is a social and cultural construct shaped by more than one
consciousness. The proper way to understand it therefore is through the culture
and society that produced it.
2. Literature, then is not a distinct
category of human activity. It must be assimilated to history, which means a
particular vision of history.
3. Like works of literature, man
himself is a social construct, the sloppy composition of social and political
forces and so there is no such thing as a human nature that transcends history.
The Renaissance man belongs inescapably and irretrievably to the Renaissance.
There is no continuity between him and those of his kind in the successive
ages.
4. As a consequence, the
historian/critic is trapped in his own ‘historicity’. No one can rise above his
social formations, his own ideological upbringing, in order to understand the
past on its own terms. A modern reader can never experience a text as its contemporaries
experienced it. Given this fact the best that a New Historicist approach to
literature can hope to accomplish, according to Catherine Belsey is “to use the
text as a basis for the reconstruction of an ideology.”
“The historicity
of the text and the textuality of history.” - wrto Greenblatt's 'Invisible Bullets'
Point 1: New Historicism places the literary text
within the frame of a non-literary text:
In this context,
the non-literary text becomes Thomas Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588).
Point 2: A historical anecdote is given, relating the
text to the time:
Greenblatt elucidates
on how Harriott depicts his interactions with and racial superiority over the native
Algonquin tribes. Greenblatt starts with a discussion of atheism in the early 17th-century. Referring to Machiavelli's observations
that religion was the most effect form of civic discipline at that point in
time, that Moses was simply a learned magician, and that, as Christopher
Marlowe noted, Harriott could do better than Moses at fooling dupes into buying
into the act. [from “Invisible Bullets”]
Point 3: “historicity of texts”:
Refers to the “cultural specificity and social embedment of all modes of
writing”:
Thomas Harriott's
visit to the Virginia colony of the New World and his first contact with the native
Algonquin tribes. Through an examination of Harriott's own account of the
visit, Greenblatt posits a model through which cultural supremacy is gathered
and maintained. [from “Invisible Bullets”]
Point 4: “textuality of history”: Refers to the 'Fiction'ality and 'Constructed'ness of history:
Here, it refers to how the Indians in Virginia were
subjugated by the Europeans not only by military prowess but also by manipulating their superstitions and
falsely interpreting the Christian religion as a potent weapon of God to its
enemies. When Algonquian Indians were dying of various diseases like small,
pox, measles or influenza because of their lack of immunity to the new diseases
brought by Europeans they falsely
believed that the God of the enemy was persecuting them. They even imagined
that Europeans who were yet to arrive were in the air and shooting invisible
bullets to kill them. [from “Invisible Bullets”]
Thus New
Historicism, proposes that history is always written with the historian’s
present context and with its need in mind, and therefore the need to focus our
attention on the “location” of the historian in the ‘construction’ of history.
*****
Thanks: To Stephen Greenblatt's texts, to Aram Veeser's book The New Historicism, to my good friend Dr. Thomas, MT College, and to research articles by Niranjan Goswami & Dan Williams, both 'New Historicist' Scholars.
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