Enter Virtuosi: Erudition Makes Its Return

Michael Witmore

Department of Rhetoric
University of California, Berkeley
mwitmore@socrates.berkeley.edu

 

The New Erudition Ed. Randolph Starn. Spec. issue of Representations56 (1996): 1-143.

 

The title of the most recent special issue of Representations, “The New Erudition,” seems calculated to intrigue. Editor Randolph Starn recognizes the irony of the title in his introduction to this volume, making a broad case for the emergence of a new, more learned style of scholarship which harks back to the virtuoso learning of the Renaissance. Moving toward the future by way of the past, Starn finds several continuities between the genealogical, speculative mode of inquiry on display in this volume and an older, “erudite” strand of traditional humanities scholarship. Both approaches share an interest in intellectual controversy and specialized debates, a penchant for difficult or obscure details, and a willingness to follow out the ramifications of learned traditions. Of those writing in this volume, several are indeed fearless in their use of recondite sources and their reach across disciplines and historical periods. What seems noteworthy about the collection, however, is not so much the learning that is on display as the uses to which that learning is put.

 

Motivating this kind of work seems to be a desire to re-engage a more speculative, searching mode of scholarship. Arriving at that speculative margin, however, requires that the familiar objects of study be estranged–made to function in ways that even the specialist can only comprehend indirectly. This process of estrangement is the subject of the first article. In “Making Things Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device,” Carlo Ginzburg argues that estrangement is not a generic feature of all art, but rather a literary device with its own peculiar history. Peculiar seems the right word, since the uncertain orbit of this device takes it from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius to a sixteenth-century forger named Antonio de Guevara, through the Essays of Montaigne and popular riddles into the work of Proust, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevski. What this array of readings and citations produces is a heightened sense of the variable, contingent career of a literary convention over time. With erudition, it would seem, comes disorientation and reappraisal–precisely what Ginzburg argues is important in our engagement with the past.

 

Two essays by Michel Zink and Robert Chibka locate the source of estrangement in a place: the library. Like Ginzburg, these writers have the genealogist’s eye for contingency in the development and transmission of an idea or text. Zink’s article on Gérard de Nerval’s Angelique, “Nerval in the Library, or The Archives of the Soul” traces the way in which a novelist loses track of the characters he is researching in the library when the historical sources he is using lead him back to his own memories and experience. While Zink focuses on the intersection of archival history and personal memory–moments when a source begins to reflect the altered image of its reader–Chibka is more interested in the recursive potential of such moments. In “The Library of Forking Paths,” Chibka tries to track down a citation from one of the sources referred to in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of the Forking Paths.” Having taken the bait, Chibka searches through several translations of the story to find that there are multiple versions of both the citation itself (translators varying the page number of the source cited) and of the source, a book about World War I by Captain Liddell Hart. The scholarly passion for detail is turned against itself in this essay so that, as Chibka notes, the professional reader of the story quickly becomes mired in paradox. Erudition is a liability here, one which Borges is credited with exploiting in his hyperbolic tales about the library.

 

Another essay by Jan Assman, “The Mosaic Distinction: Israel, Egypt, and the Invention of Paganism” attempts to trace the distinction between true and false religion from the Egyptian King Akhenaten (Amenophis IV) to Sigmund Freud. Like Ginzburg, Assman traces the particular problem or device which interests him across a broad range of texts and periods. Treating such diverse figures as Moses, Moses Maimonides, Ralph Cudworth, and Karl Reinhold, Assman shows how Egyptian religious beliefs were variously repudiated and embraced by religious movements that defined themselves as the inversion (or double inversion) of earlier movements. Some of these reversals are quite striking–for example attempts in the late eighteenth century to define the God of the Bible as the Egyptian Supreme Being, Isis. While certain episodes in this history are designed to undermine what Assman refers to as “stereotypes,” the essay seems more valuable for the moving picture it provides, full of disorienting and often unprincipled turns which only a patient student could unravel.

 

One of the most interesting essays, “Art, Ancestors, and the Origins of Writing in China,” comes from David Keightley. On the face of it, the piece seems an empirical answer to an equally empirical question: why does early Chinese writing remain logographic instead of syllabified or alphabetic? As the essay unfolds, however, it becomes clear that there is an irreducibly speculative margin to the inquiry. Searching the context for archaeological clues, Keightley concludes that early Chinese characters are a form of “aural commemoration,” a visual recording of spoken utterances with which the characters would have been connected in certain contexts. Having decided that early Chinese characters refer to spoken words and not directly to ideas, he reinterprets the logographic character of the language with reference to the ritual practices through which a “code” of correspondence would have evolved. While Keightley’s piece does not scan the Western canon as some of the other essays in the volume do, its speculative intensity and focus on detail link it to the rest of the work presented here.

 

Two other pieces focus on the limits at which language ceases either to conserve or create meaning. The first, a thoughtful translation of Michel de Certeau’s “Vocal Utopias: Glossalalias” by Daniel Rosenberg, attempts to theorize the possibilities of speech without meaning. Like the other essays, this one tries to answer a difficult question not simply by reading an exemplary situation but by querying notable past attempts to understand it. Taking up Pfister’s and Saussure’s treatment of glossalalia, Certeau illuminates the ways in which these thinkers have tried to find hidden meaning in such utterances. Against this interpretive impulse, he emphasizes the resistance of glossalalic speech to determination; it is more the fact of enunciation in glossalalic speech, outside of whatever meaning it acquires, which Certeau would like to appreciate and build upon. One of the great subtleties of the essay is that instead of simply idealizing an absence of meaning in glossalalia, the author looks for an “other” kind of meaning residing in the enunciative space created by such utterances.

 

Similar issues are treated in the final essay by Aleida Assman, entitled “Texts, Traces, Trash: The Changing Media of Cultural Memory.” Here Assman examines the metaphorical “life” of a written text, demonstrating how the almost supernatural power of letters to perpetuate the thoughts of the dead erodes after the Renaissance. In the eighteenth century, posterity comes to threaten the longevity of letters, so that later on the past becomes retrievable only through historical erudition or the imagination of the historical novelist. Like Ginzburg, Assman emphasizes the disruptive potential of historical inquiry whenever the past must be apprehended indirectly, through signs or traces that are as fragmentary as they are suggestive. This emphasis on incompleteness is warranted by a view of the past which arrives via Burckhardt and Carlyle: that some of the most important aspects of the past are those which are the least visible in the historical record or which elude the conscious grasp of those who want to preserve them. Both of these views make erudition, in its more searching guise, quite appealing–a means of oscillating between two kinds of constraints, those of empirical evidence and of the precedents of inquiry which govern inferences beyond that evidence.

 

Many readers will ask, however, what the difference is between the constraints that “erudition” puts on speculation and those of “theory.” These are broad terms, perhaps too broad to support the desired comparison, but the relationship between erudition and theory becomes an issue as soon as names like Nietzsche, Foucault, de Man, and Barthes are mentioned in Starn’s introduction. The rigors of theory, at least in its post-Nietzschean guise, usually force critics to find and then interrogate their most abstract premises, often with other, equally abstract premises. Erudition, if we were to hazard a guess at its difference from theory, seems the means by which those initial premises are altered by an encounter with the particular. (One can ask how such an encounter is possible without a great deal of theoretical work, but for the most part, these essays assume that such work has already been done.) There are probably other hallmarks of erudition as it is presented in this issue–a penchant for obscure detail, interest in intellectual puzzles, a willingness to hear out the “authorities” on a given issue, the desire to follow a distinction over time–but they do not seem as new as this more self-conscious pursuit of particularity.

 

If the new erudition is not yet fully formed, one might hope for a further innovation. As an antidote to metaphysical or empirical dogmatism, the encounter with the particular and incomplete recommended here seems quite apt. There is no reason, however, why this erudite passion might not also extend to philosophical texts. Although mention is made on these pages of Kant and Marcus Aurelius, on the whole these writers seem less optimistic about the uses of such texts in the project of estrangement. (Surprising, since one could argue that the effect of many philosophies has been to estrange us from our immediate experience by putting that experience into abstract terms.) This reluctance to use philosophical sources is all the more surprising when one sees how effectively someone like Ginzburg can take up a philosopher like Aurelius, absorbing the philosopher’s meditations on the things of this world into the larger history he is attempting to write.

 

As a collection of essays, the “New Erudition” will no doubt please those who are ready to see the old apprehended as the new. Beyond the ironies of the title, however, readers will find searching, illuminating essays which do not back away from the real complexity of their subjects.