Jürgen Pieters

Department of Dutch Literature and Literary Theory
University of Ghent, Belgium
jurgen.pieters@rug.ac.be

 

John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New York: MacMillan, 1998.

 

One of the most conspicuous trends in the recent history of contemporary literary and cultural theory–a field dominated since the early eighties by the so-called “historical turn”–has been the extraordinarily rapid institutionalization of the twin movements of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism within literary studies. Proclaimed by Stephen Greenblatt in 1982 as a novel reading method that would shy away from the critical deficiencies of both the traditional historical school and the various formalist movements by which it was replaced, the New Historicism as it was practiced by Greenblatt and many other Anglo-American Renaissance scholars gained the immediate interest of those who had become dissatisfied with the stringent textualist ideology upheld by most American deconstructionists. Part of the attraction of the New Historicism was the double promise which it contained for practitioners of theory who wanted to move on instead of returning to the practical–i.e. untheoretical–paradigm that had been dominant in the heyday of New Criticism. To these critics, the New Historicism seemed to have it all: not only was it based upon the best of post-structuralist thought (Foucault, Derrida, de Certeau, Barthes and so on), it also applied that thought to the broad investigative field for which it was initially devised–not just to the self-deconstructive rhetorics of canonical literary texts. As Greenblatt himself once put it, post-structuralism in its deconstructive guise “was not only the negative limit but the positive condition for the emergence of New Historicism.”¹

 

As a consequence of this double promise, then, the New Historicism was embraced by many. It became the hotly debated subject of conferences, articles, studies, and special issues of academic journals. From 1985 onwards, a number of critical collections were published that attempted to combine the practical and the theoretical focus inherent to the object of their attention.² Most of these included, on the one hand, a number of practical pieces in which the New Historicist reading method was applied and/or tested, and, on the other, a number of theoretical articles which reflected upon the critical axioms that, from the beginning, had served as the conceptual basis of the method. Most of the latter, written mainly by scholars supportive of the New Historicist project, were meant as a contribution to the ongoing elaboration of the method under scrutiny.

 

Despite this gradual proliferation of critical attention, however, it has taken quite a while for the first book-length monograph on New Historicism to appear. In 1997, Manchester University Press published Claire Colebrook’s New Literary Histories, a mainly theoretical survey of the movement’s affiliations with the work of contemporary theoreticians such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams and Michel de Certeau. One year later, Colebrook’s study was followed by the book under review here, John Brannigan’s New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. In contrast to that of Colebrook, Brannigan’s study is characterized by an attempt to couple theoretical analysis to practical reading. While the larger part of it is devoted to theoretical and methodological issues, the book also contains four “applications and readings,” in which Brannigan analyzes several literary texts–Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a number of poems by Tennyson, and Yeats’s “Easter 1916.” The purpose of these applications is not only to describe and illustrate the preferred reading tactics of New Historicists and Cultural Materialists, but also to lay bare the critical constraints with which their readings have to cope. Ideally, the latter aim is prepared for in the preceding, theoretical half of the book, which is intended to give the reader an idea of the genesis and the development of both movements and of the critical dilemmas surrounding them. Brannigan concludes his book with two briefer chapters which consider the future of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism.

 

Brannigan’s work, a critical introduction initially aimed at a general audience of students and other non-specialist readers, suffers both the positive and the negative consequences of its generalist purpose. On the one hand, the study is well written and the central line of its argument is a clear one; on the other hand, some points of the author’s exposition seem to be in need of further qualification. The title of Brannigan’s monograph is a sufficient indication of the central argument its author wants to make: while New Historicism and Cultural Materialism are two critical practices that are obviously related, both in terms of methodology and of subject-matter, they are nevertheless better kept distinct. In outlining the central differences between the two movements, Brannigan in part modifies and elaborates upon views that have been proferred elsewhere. As he sees it, the distinction is not merely a matter of geography–Cultural Materialism being, as some would have it, the British “brand” of the American-based New Historicism–but mainly a question of how one conceives of the aims and tasks of critical-historical academic praxis: while New Historicists are mainly concerned with the extent to which literary texts lay bare the existing power relations of which they are themselves a product, Cultural Materialists prefer to make clear the way in which these same texts may serve as sites of subversion and dissidence, as places, to use Alan Sinfield’s description, where a culture exposes its own faultlines.

 

If Brannigan is to be believed, the latter option is an unrealistic one to New Historicists: according to them, subversion is always contained by the power which it is supposed to undermine, if only because it results from the very framework set up by that power. “[W]ith its insistence that there is no effective space of resistance,” Brannigan writes, “new historicism often makes for grim reading” (8). Cultural Materialists, so he goes on to argue, are “slightly more hopeful” (10): the space of resistance that Brannigan finds lacking in the work of their American counterparts is opened up in the space of critical reading itself–indeed, critical reading is that space. Brannigan suggests that what Cultural Materialists argue is not, simply, that authors of literary texts are (by definition, as it were) highly critical of the culture which surrounds them–that they read the history of their own day against the grain; what they argue is that a reading of these texts along the lines of the Cultural Materialist project can make clear that things in history could have turned out differently. (To continue the analogy, one could say that New Historicists prefer to give us a clue as to why things in history went the way they did.)

 

In outlining his general distinction between New Historicists and Cultural Materialists, Brannigan rightly points to their different contexts of origination. In contrast to the American New Historicism, British Cultural Materialism was largely influenced by a tradition of (neo)Marxist historicist critics, the most important of whom, Raymond Williams, coined the term in his Marxism and Literature. From the example of Williams, Cultural Materialists also derive their firm and explicit political commitment: according to them criticism, whether or not it finds its object in the past, needs to make a difference now, in the present moment from which the critic speaks and writes. Even though a similar commitment may be found to underlie the reading practice of a number of New Historicist scholars, theirs is obviously a far less overtly political project. Brannigan does not make this point, even though he asserts (rightly so, I believe) that the chief theoretical influence behind the New Historicism is the work of Michel Foucault, a thinker no less politically inspired than Williams. In several interviews, Foucault has made clear that his work–particularly the work on the “analytics of power” that has been of such an importance to New Historicists like Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose–serves similar political goals as that of the British New Left. Brannigan, however, does not make this point in outlining Foucault’s impact on critics like Greenblatt, and I think that it’s a pity that he doesn’t. As I see it, an elaboration of this issue could have enabled him not only to differentiate more sharply between the projects of Cultural Materialism and New Historicism (after all, at its best New Historicism can be considered as an example of the non-interpretive, radical positivism Foucault attempted to devise in The Archaeology of Knowledge), but also to adjust his biased view of Foucault’s work. The portrait which Brannigan offers of Foucault (and, by extension, of the French critic’s influence on his American disciples) is largely reminiscent of that to be found in Frank Lentricchia’s well-known critique of Greenblatt’s New Historicism.³ In Lentricchia’s view, the fatal flaw running through Foucault’s oeuvre returns unchanged in Greenblatt’s inaugural Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Like his major source of inspiration, Lentricchia asserts, Greenblatt reduces history in all its complexity to a plethora of unmarked manifestations of one overarching phenomenon: power. Brannigan follows suit: “By explaining a wide range of different cultural and social forms as the functions of one single mode of power,” he writes, “Foucault imposed a monologic view of power relations on the past, and new historicists are heirs to Foucault’s faults as much as they are heirs to his innovations” (53).

 

Taking over his views uncritically, Brannigan fails to notice that Lentricchia’s reading of Foucault’s theory of power is based exclusively on Discipline and Punish, a book which has been criticized by its own author for entertaining a too totalitarian, repressive theory of power that hardly leaves any room for the possibility of resistance. However, in subsequent works (the History of Sexuality most notably, but also in other, for the most part posthumously published, essays) Foucault has tried to find new ways of thinking about power relationships that stress the inherent (not necessarily dialectic) connection between domination and resistance. In my opinion, it is this new, non-repressive theory of power that has been fruitful in Greenblatt’s attempt– primarily to be found in Shakespearean Negotiations–to find novel ways of analyzing the complex (and, indeed, often complicit) position that works of art can be said to take up within social formations.⁴ In line with the principles of Foucault’s later work, Greenblatt emphasizes the productivities of power as well as its prohibitions. Arguing that power works as an anonymous force that makes some things possible while making others impossible, he does indeed point to the fact that at times power structures seem to produce their own subversion and later contain it. But Foucault does not propose this mechanism as a universal historical phenomenon or as an intentional one, as Brannigan seems to suggest (as if power produced its subversion simply in order to contain it). While I share, in part, Brannigan’s critique of Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning as an example of the monologism which New Historicism was meant to overcome, I would argue that his reading of Greenblatt’s entire work as a monolithical project fails to notice the conceptual evolution it has clearly undergone between Renaissance Self-Fashioning and Shakespearean Negotiations. Brannigan is no doubt right in reminding us that it would be mistake to consider this evolution–as some would–in terms of a development “from new historicism to cultural poetics,” yet it is a pity that the reminder is not accompanied by a further (and better) analysis of the actual development. To some extent, one could say that such an analysis is prevented by the central argument which Brannigan uses to draw a firm opposition between New Historicists and Cultural Materialists. The argument–the former stress the impossibility of true subversion, while the latter emphasize the possibility of change–also forecloses a contrastive analysis of the work of the two key theoreticians behind both practices: Foucault in the case of New Historicism, Williams in the case of Cultural Materialism. Again, Brannigan points to the irony that Greenblatt for one has been formally taught and influenced by both, yet this piece of knowledge remains inert too. Possibly, an analysis of the exact “position” of Williams and Foucault within Greenblatt’s work might have resulted in a clearer understanding of New Historicist practice itself and of its relationship to British Cultural Materialism. Since Williams’s humanism is hard to reconcile (theoretically at least) with Foucault’s radically anti-humanistic stance, one could try and elaborate the hypothesis that Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning is marked by an attempt (a necessarily failed one, at that) to combine these two sources of inspiration. The difficulty in reconciling their approaches, I would say, becomes clear in the conflict between a view in which the signification of literary texts is determined by the discursive formation to which they belong (Foucault) and a view in which literature presents a critical view of the society out of which it comes (Williams). Greenblatt’s book, I believe, offers instances of both views without making explicit the methodological option for either.

 

What Brannigan’s book makes sufficiently clear is that the latter discussion finally boils down to the question of how one decides to read texts that have come down to us from the past. New Historicists tend to treat texts as things to be described in their own right, as “positivities,” to use Foucault’s term. Theirs is a truly historicist practice in the sense that they try, however problematic the attempt in itself may have become, to see things “as they were.” Cultural Materialists, Brannigan argues, prefer to take an explicitly “bifocal” perspective that is as much concerned with the present from which these texts are read as with the past from which they come. It is this double perspective that allows them, finally, to hold a plea for literary texts as sites of dissidence. What Brannigan does not stress sufficiently, I believe, is that to Cultural Materialists the question is not whether these texts functioned as critical and political instruments at the time of their production, but whether they can be seen, from a distance, to articulate problems that contemporary readers could not have foreseen. One of the theoreticians to have developed a reading-method that allows one to focus upon texts as sites of dissidence is the Althusserian critic Pierre Macherey, whose work has had a significant impact upon Catherine Belsey’s brand of Cultural Materialism. Unfortunately, Brannigan does not mention Macherey in his discussion of Belsey’s work. This omission contributes to my conviction that at points the format which Brannigan has been asked to adopt has unnecessarily limited the scope of the book as a whole. The author of an introductory volume addressed at the general student of literary theory cannot explore critically each and every road that can be opened for investigation. In the particular case of John Brannigan’s book this is all the more a pity, for the best parts of the book–the truly critical parts–make clear that its author can well be considered an expert in the field.

 

Notes

 

1.Personal electronic communication, June 26, 1997.

 

2. The most important of these are Dollimore and Sinfield’s Political Shakespeare, Howard and O’Connor’s Shakespeare Reproduced, Veeser’s The New Historicism and The New Historicism Reader, Wilson and Dutton’s New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, and Cox and Reynolds’s New Historical Literary Study.

 

3. First published in Lentricchia’s Ariel and the Police and later collected in Veeser’s The New Historicism.

 

4. It is interesting to note how closely Greenblatt’s definition of “social energy” resembles that of Foucault’s pouvoir in the first part of the History of Sexuality. For an elaboration of this resemblance see my “The Foucauldian Legacy Revisited: Stephen Greenblatt on ‘the Circulation of Social Energy'” (unpublished paper).

Works Cited

 

• Cox, Jeffrey N. and Larry J. Reynolds, eds. New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.
• Dollimore, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985.
• Howard, Jean E. and Marion F. O’Connor, eds. Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology. London and New York: Methuen, 1987.
• Lentricchia, Frank. Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1988.
• Veeser, H. Aram, ed. The New Historicism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
• —, ed. The New Historicism Reader. London and New York, Routledge, 1994.
• Wilson, Richard and Richard Dutton, eds. New Historicism and Renaissance Drama. London: Longman, 1992.