Prof: So today we turn
to a mode of doing literary
criticism which was
extraordinarily widespread
beginning in the late seventies
and into the eighties,
called the New Historicism.
 
It was definable in ways that
I'll turn to in a minute and,
as I say, prevalent to a
remarkable degree everywhere.
It began probably at the
University of California at
Berkeley under the auspices,
in part, of Stephen Greenblatt,
whose brief essay you've read
for today.
Greenblatt and others founded a
journal,
still one of the most important
and influential journals in the
field of literary study,
called
Representations--always
has been and still is an organ
for New Historicist thought.
 
It's a movement which began
primarily preoccupied with the
Early Modern period,
the so-called
"Renaissance."
 
The New Historicism is,
in effect, responsible for the
replacement of the term
"Renaissance"
with the term "Early
Modern."
Its influence,
however, quickly did extend to
other fields,
some fields perhaps more than
others.
 
It would be,
I think, probably worth a
lecture that I'm not going to
give to explain why certain
fields somehow or another seem
to lend themselves more readily
to New Historicist approaches
than others.
I think it's fair to say that
in addition to the early modern
period,
the three fields that have been
most influenced by the New
Historicism are the eighteenth
century,
British Romanticism,
and Americanist studies from
the late colonial through the
republican period.
 
That age--the emergence of
print culture,
the emergence of the public
sphere as a medium of influence,
and the distribution of
knowledge in the United States--
has been very fruitfully
studied from New Historicist
points of view.
 
So those are the fields that
are most directly influenced by
this approach.
 
When we discuss Jerome McGann's
essay, you'll see how it
influences Romantic studies.
 
Now the New Historicism
was--and this probably accounts
for its remarkable popularity
and influence in the period
roughly from the late seventies
through the early nineties--
was a response to an increasing
sense of ethical failure in the
isolation of the text as it was
allegedly practiced in certain
forms of literary study.
 
Beginning with the New
Criticism through the period of
deconstruction,
and the recondite discourse of
Lacan and others in
psychoanalysis,
there was a feeling widespread
among scholars,
especially younger scholars,
that somehow or another,
especially in response to
pressing concerns--
post-Vietnam,
concerns with globalization,
concerns with the distribution
of power and global capital--
all of these concerns inspired
what one can only call a guilt
complex in academic literary
scholarship and led to a
"return to history."
 
It was felt that a kind of
ethical tipping point had been
arrived at and that the modes of
analysis that had been
flourishing needed to be
superseded by modes of analysis
in which history and the
political implications of what
one was doing became prominent
and central.
I have to say that in debates
of this kind there's always a
considerable amount of hot air,
perhaps on both sides.
In many ways it's not the case
that the so-called isolated
approaches really were isolated.
 
Deconstruction in its second
generation wrote perpetually
about history and undertook to
orient the techniques of
deconstruction to an
understanding of history,
just to give one example.
 
The New Historicism,
on the other hand,
evinced a preoccupation with
issues of form and textual
integrity that certainly
followed from the disciplines,
the approaches,
that preceded them.
Also to a large degree--and
this is,
of course, true of a good many
other approaches that we're
about to investigate,
approaches based in questions
of identity also--
to a large degree,
appropriated the language of
the generation of the
deconstructionists and,
to a certain extent,
certain underlying
structuralist ideas having to do
with the binary relationship
between self and other,
and binary relationships among
social entities,
as opposed to linguistic
entities;
but still, as I say,
essentially inheriting the
structure of thought of
preceding approaches.
So, as I say,
it was in a polemical
atmosphere and at a moment of
widespread self-doubt in the
academic literary profession
that the New Historicism came
into its own--
a response, as I say,
to the isolation of the text by
certain techniques and
approaches to it.
 
Now very quickly:
the method of New Historical
analysis fell into a pattern,
a very engaging one,
one that's wonderfully
exemplified by the brief
introduction of Greenblatt that
I have asked you to read:
a pattern of beginning with an
anecdote,
often rather far afield,
at least apparently rather far
afield,
from the literary issues that
are eventually turned to in the
argument of a given essay.
For example:
a dusty miller was walking down
the road,
thinking about nothing in
particular,
when he encountered a bailiff,
then certain legal issues
arise,
and somehow or another the next
thing you know we're talking
about King Lear.
 
This rather marvelous,
oblique way into literary
topics was owing to the
brilliance in handling it of
Greenblatt,
in particular,
and Louis Montrose and some of
his colleagues.
This technique became a kind of
a hallmark of the New
Historicism.
 
In the long run,
of course, it was easy enough
to parody it.
 
It has been subjected to parody
and, in a certain sense,
has been modified and chastened
by the prevalence of parody;
but it nevertheless,
I think, shows you something
about the way New Historicist
thinking works.
The New Historicism is
interested, following
Foucault--and Foucault is the
primary influence on the New
Historicism.
 
I won't say as much about this
today as I might feel obliged to
say if I weren't soon be going
to return to Foucault in the
context of gender studies,
when we take up Foucault and
Judith Butler together--
but I will say briefly that
Foucault's writing,
especially his later writing,
is about the pervasiveness,
the circulation through social
orders,
of what he calls
"power."
 
Now power is not just--or,
in many cases in Foucault,
not even primarily-- the power
of vested authorities,
the power of violence,
or the power of tyranny from
above.
 
Power in Foucault--though it
can be those things and
frequently is--
is much more pervasively and
also insidiously the way in
which knowledge circulates in a
culture: that is to say,
the way in which what we think,
what we think that it is
appropriate to think--
acceptable thinking--is
distributed by largely unseen
forces in a social network or a
social system.
Power, in other words,
in Foucault is in a certain
sense knowledge,
or to put it another way,
it is the explanation of how
certain forms of knowledge come
to exist--
knowledge, by the way,
not necessarily of something
that's true.
Certain forms of knowledge come
to exist in certain places.
So all of this is central to
the work of Foucault and is
carried over by the New
Historicists;
hence the interest for them of
the anecdotes.
Start as far afield as you can
imaginably start from what you
will finally be talking about,
which is probably some textual
or thematic issue in Shakespeare
or in the Elizabethan masque or
whatever the case may be.
 
Start as far afield as you
possibly can from that,
precisely in order to show the
pervasiveness of a certain kind
of thinking,
the pervasiveness of a certain
social constraint or limitation
on freedom.
If you can show how pervasive
it is,
you reinforce and justify the
Foucauldian idea that power is,
as I've said,
an insidious and ubiquitous
mode of circulating knowledge.
 
All of this is implicit,
sometimes explicit,
in New Historicist approaches
to what they do.
So as I said,
Foucault is the crucial
antecedent and of course,
when it's a question of
Foucault, literature as we want
to conceive of it--
perhaps generically or as a
particular kind of utterance as
opposed to other kinds--
does tend to collapse back into
the broader or more general
notion of discourse,
because it's by means of
discourse that power circulates
knowledge.
 
Once again, despite the fact
that New Historicism wants to
return us to the real world,
it nevertheless acknowledges
that that return is language
bound.
It is by means of language that
the real world shapes itself.
That's why for the New
Historicist--
and by this means,
I'll turn in a moment to the
marvelous anecdote with which
Greenblatt begins the brief
essay that I've asked you to
read--
that's why the New Historicist
lays such intense emphasis on
the idea that the relationship
between discourse--
call it literature if you like,
you might as well--
and history is reciprocal.
 
Yes, history conditions what
literature can say in a given
epoch.
 
History is an important way of
understanding the valency of
certain kinds of utterance at
certain times.
In other words,
history is--as it's
traditionally thought to be by
the Old Historicism,
and I'll get to that in a
minute--history is a background
to discourse or literature.
 
But by the same token there is
an agency, that is to say a
capacity, to circulate power in
discourse in turn.
Call it "literature":
"I am Richard II,
know you not that?"
 
says Queen Elizabeth when at
the time of the threatened Essex
Uprising she gets wind of the
fact that Shakespeare's
Richard II is being
performed,
as she believes,
in the public streets and in
private houses.
 
In other words,
wherever there is sedition,
wherever there are people who
want to overthrow her and
replace her with the Earl of
Essex,
the pretender to the throne,
Richard II is being
performed.
 
Well, now this is terrifying to
Queen Elizabeth because she
knows--
she's a supporter of the
theater--she knows that
Richard II is about a
king who has many virtues but a
certain weakness,
a political weakness and also a
weakness of temperament--
the kind of weakness that makes
him sit upon the ground and tell
sad tales about the death of
kings,
that kind of weakness,
who is then usurped by
Bolingbroke who became Henry IV,
introducing a whole new dynasty
and focus of the royal family in
England.
Queen Elizabeth says,
"They're staging this play
because they're trying to
compare me with Richard II in
preparation for deposing me,
and who knows what else they
might do to me?"
 
This is a matter of great
concern.
In other words,
literature--Fredric Jameson
says "history
hurts"--literature hurts,
too.
 
>
 
Literature, in other words,
has a discursive agency that
affects history every bit as
much as history affects
literature: literature "out
there," and theater--
especially if it escapes the
confines of the playhouse
because,
as Greenblatt argues,
the playhouse has a certain
mediatory effect which defuses
the possibilities of sedition.
 
One views literary
representation in the playhouse
with a certain objectivity,
perhaps, that is absent
altogether when interested
parties take up the same text
and stage it precisely for the
purpose of fomenting rebellion.
Literature, especially when
escaped from its conventional
confines,
becomes a very,
very dangerous or
positive influence,
depending on your point of view
on the course of history.
So the relationship between
history and discourse is
reciprocal.
 
Greenblatt wants to argue with
a tremendous amount of stress
and, I think,
effectiveness that the New
Historicism differs from the Old
Historicism.
This is on page 1443 in the
right-hand column.
John Dover Wilson,
a traditional Shakespeare
scholar and a very important
one, is the spokesperson in
Greenblatt's scenario for the
Old Historicism.
The view I'm about to quote is
that of John Dover Wilson,
a kind of consensus about the
relationship between literature
and history:
Modern historical scholarship
[meaning Old Historicism]
has assured Elizabeth
>
 
that she had [this is the
right-hand column about two
thirds of the way down]
>
nothing to worry about:
Richard II is not at all
subversive but rather a hymn to
Tudor order.
The play, far from encouraging
thoughts of rebellion,
regards the deposition of the
legitimate king as a
"sacrilegious"
act that drags the country down
into "the abyss of
chaos";
"that Shakespeare and his
audience regarded Bolingbroke as
a usurper,"
declares J.
Dover Wilson,
"is incontestable."
But in 1601 neither Queen
Elizabeth nor the Earl of Essex
were so sureâ€¦
Greenblatt wins.
It's a wonderful example.
 
It's the genius of Greenblatt
to choose examples that are so
telling and so incontrovertible.
 
We know Queen Elizabeth was
scared >
on this occasion,
which makes it quite simply the
case that John Dover Wilson was
wrong to suppose that Richard
II was no threat to her.
 
It's not at all the point that
a broad, ideological view of
Richard II was any
different from what Wilson said;
that was perfectly true.
 
Bolingbroke was
considered a usurper.
It was considered tragic that
Richard II was deposed;
but that doesn't mean that the
text can't be taken over,
commandeered and made
subversive.
Wilson doesn't acknowledge this
because his view of the
relationship between history and
literature is only that history
influences literature,
not that the influence can be
reciprocal.
 
You see, that's how it is that
the New Historicism wants to
define itself over and against
the Old Historicism.
If there is a political or
ideological consensus about the
legitimacy of monarchy,
the divine right of kings,
the legitimacy of succession
under the sanction of the Church
of England and all the rest of
it--
all of which is anachronistic
when you're thinking about these
history plays--
if there is this broad
consensus, that's it,
that's what the play
means according to the Old
Historicism,
even though plainly you can
take the plot of the play and
completely invert those values,
which is what the Essex faction
does in staging it in those
places where Queen Elizabeth
suspects that it's being staged.
 
Okay.
 
Now another way in which the
Old Historicism and the New
Historicism differ--
correctly, I think-- according
to Greenblatt is that in the Old
Historicism there is no
question--
I'm looking at page 1444,
the right-hand column about a
third of the way down--
of the role of the historian's
own subjectivity.
"It is not thought,"
says Greenblatt,
"to be the product of the
historian's
interpretationâ€¦"
History is just what is.
One views it objectively and
that's that.
Now notice here that we're back
with Gadamer.
Remember that this was
Gadamer's accusation of
historicism,
the belief of historicism--what
Greenblatt calls the Old
Historicism--
that we can bracket out our own
historical horizon and that we
can eliminate all of our own
historical prejudices in order
to understand the past
objectively in and for itself.
This is not the case,
said Gadamer,
remember.
 
Gadamer said that
interpretation must necessarily
involve the merger of horizons,
the horizon of the other and my
own horizon as an interpreter.
 
I cannot bracket out my own
subjectivity.
Okay.
 
If that's the case,
then Gadamer anticipates
Greenblatt in saying that the
naïveté
of the Old Historicism is its
supposition that it has no
vested interest in what it's
talking about--
that is to say,
its supposition that it wants
history to accord in one way or
another with its own
preconceptions,
but isn't aware of it.
The anecdote--again,
wonderfully placed in the
polemical argument--
that after all,
John Dover Wilson delivered
himself of these opinions about
Richard II before a group
of scholars in Germany in 1939
is,
after all, rather interesting.
Hitler is about to be the
Bolingbroke of Germany.
John Dover Wilson wants his
audience to say,
"Hey, wait a minute.
 
Stick with vested authority.
 
>
 
You have a weak democracy,
but it is a democracy.
Don't let it get away from
you."
And so he is speaking,
the horse already having
escaped from the barn,
in this reassuring way about
German politics as a means of
sort of reinforcing his own view
of the politics of Elizabethan
England.
But this, Greenblatt supposes,
is something about which he has
very little self-consciousness.
 
That is to say,
his own interest,
as of course it should be on
this occasion,
is in the preservation of
vested authority,
and his own interest then folds
back into his understanding of
Elizabethan ideology in such a
way that it can conform to that
interest.
 
He has, in other words,
as we say today,
a hidden agenda and is very
little aware of it,
unlike the New Historicist who,
following Gadamer in this
respect,
is fully cognizant of the
subjective investment that leads
to a choice of interest in
materials,
a way of thinking about those
materials,
and a means of bringing them to
life for us today and into
focus.
In other words,
it's okay for Greenblatt,
as it was for Gadamer--much to
the horror of E.
D.
 
Hirsch--to find the
significance of a text,
as opposed to the meaning of a
text.
The significance of the text is
that it has certain kinds of
power invested in it.
 
Those kinds of power are still
of interest to us today,
still of relevance to what's
going on in our own world.
All of this is taken up openly
as a matter of
self-consciousness by the New
Historicists in ways that,
according to Greenblatt and his
colleagues,
were not available consciously
in the older Historicism.
Now the world as the New
Historicism sees it--
and after I've said this,
I'll turn to McGann--
is essentially a dynamic
interplay of power,
networks of power,
and subversion:
that is to say,
modes of challenging those
networks even within the
authoritative texts that
generate positions of power.
 
The Elizabethan masque,
for example,
which stages the relation of
court to courtier,
to visitor, to hanger-on in
wonderfully orchestrated ways,
is a means--because it's kind
of poly-vocal--
of containing within its
structure elements of
subversion,
according to the argument
that's made about these things:
the same with court ritual
itself,
the same with the happenstance
that takes place once a year in
early modern England,
in which the Lord of Misrule is
so denominated and ordinary
authority is turned on its ear
for one day.
Queen for a day,
as it were, is something that
is available to any citizen once
a year.
These are all ways of defusing
what they,
in fact, bring into visibility
and consciousness--
mainly the existence,
perhaps the inevitable
existence,
of subversion with respect to
structures and circulatory
systems of power.
It's this relationship between
power and subversion that the
New Historicism,
especially in taking up issues
of the Early Modern period,
tends to focus on and to
specialize in.
 
Now it's not wholly clear that
Jerome McGann has ever really
thought of himself as a New
Historicist.
He has been so designated by
others,
but I think there is one rather
important difference in
emphasis,
at least between what he's
doing and what Greenblatt and
his colleagues do in the Early
Modern period.
 
McGann doesn't really so much
stress the reciprocity of
history and discourse.
 
He is interested in the
presence of history,
the presence of immediate
social and also personal
circumstances in the history of
a text.
His primary concern is with--at
least in this essay--textual
scholarship.
 
He himself is the editor of the
new standard works of Byron.
He has also done a standard
works of Swinburne,
and he has been a vocal and
colorful spokesperson of a
certain point of view within the
recondite debates of textual
scholarship: whether textual
scholarship ought to produce a
text that's an amalgam of a
variety of available manuscripts
and printed texts;
whether the text it produces
ought to be the last and best
thoughts of the author--
that's the position that McGann
seems to be taking in this
essay--
or whether the text,
on the contrary,
ought to be the first burst of
inspiration of the author.
 
All the people who prefer the
earliest versions of
Wordsworth's Prelude,
for example,
would favor that last point of
view.
In other words,
McGann is making a contribution
here not least to the debates
surrounding editing and the
production of authoritative
scholarly texts.
It's in that context that the
remarks he's making about Keats
have to be understood.
 
I think the primary influence
on McGann is not so much
Foucault,
then, with the sense of the
circulation of power back and
forth between history and
literary discourse,
as it is Bakhtin,
whom he quotes on pages
eighteen and nineteen;
or whose influence he cites,
I should say rather,
in a way that,
I think, does pervade what you
encounter in reading what he
then goes on to say at the
bottom of page eighteen in the
copy center reader:
What follows [says McGann]
is a summary and extrapolation
of certain key ideas set forth
by the so-called Bakhtin School
of criticism,
a small group of Marxist
critics from the Soviet Union
who made an early attack upon
formalist approaches to poetry
[just as he,
McGann, is, and as the New
Historicists are themselves,
in their turn, doing].
 
The Bakhtin School's
socio-historical method
approaches all language
utterances--
including poems--as phenomena
marked with their concrete
origins and history.
 
That is to say,
phenomena voiced by the
material circumstances that
produce them or phenomena,
in other words,
in which the voice of the
Romantic solitary individual is
not really that voice at all,
but is rather the polyglossal
infusion of a variety of
perspectives,
including ideological
perspectives,
shaping that particular
utterance and also,
in the case of the textual
scholar,
shaping which of a variety of
manuscripts will be chosen for
publication and for central
attention in the tradition of
the reception of a given text.
So all of this McGann takes to
be derived from Bakhtin rather
than from Foucault.
 
I do think that's a significant
difference between our two
authors.
 
Now McGann's most important
contribution to the return to
history of the seventies and
eighties is a short book called
The Romantic Ideology,
and this book--well,
what it is is an attack on
Romanticism.
At least it's an attack on
certain widely understood and
received ideas about
Romanticism--
ideas with which,
by the way, I don't agree,
but this course isn't about me.
 
The Romantic Ideology is
an amalgam of two titles.
One of them is the important
early critique of Romanticism by
the German poet and sometime
Romantic Heinrich Heine called
Die romantische Schule,
or The Romantic School,
in which the subjectivity,
even solipsism,
and the isolation from social
concern and from unfolding
historical processes of the
Romantic poets is emphasized and
criticized.
 
In addition to that--that's
where the word
"Romantic"
comes from in the title The
Romantic Ideology--
the other title that it
amalgamates is Marx's book
The German Ideology,
which is about many things
but is in particular about
Lumpenproletariat
intellectuals who think with
Hegel--
still following Hegel despite
believing themselves to be
progressive--
who think with Hegel that
thought produces material
circumstances rather than the
other way around:
in other words people,
in short, who are idealists and
therefore,
under this indictment,
also Romantic.
 
McGann's title,
as I say, cleverly amalgamates
these two other titles and sets
the agenda for this short book,
which is an attack not just on
Romanticism but on what he
believes to be our continued
tendency still to be
"in"
Romanticism,
still to be Romantic.
 
There his particular object of
attack is the so-called Yale
school, which is still under
attack in the essay that you've
read for today.
 
Paul de Man and Geoffrey
Hartman's well-known essay on
Keats's "To Autumn"
are singled out for particular
scorn and dispraise,
all sort of on the grounds that
yes,
it's all very well to read
Romanticism,
to come to understand it,
and even to be fascinated by
it;
but we can't be Romantic.
 
In other words,
our reading of Romanticism--
if we are to be social animals,
politically engaged,
and invested in the world as a
social community--
must necessarily be an
anti-Romantic critique.
This is, as I say,
still essentially the position
taken up by McGann.
 
All right.
 
So I've explained the ways in
which he differs from Greenblatt
in leaning more toward Bakhtin
than toward Foucault.
I have explained that McGann is
engaged primarily in talking
about issues of textual
scholarship in this particular
essay,
that he defends Keats's last
deliberate choices,
that he believes the so-called
"indicator"
text of 1820 of "La Belle
Dame Sans Merci"
is Keats's last deliberate
choice,
as opposed to the 1848 text
published by Monckton Milnes in
the edition of Keats's poems
that he brought out at that
time.
Now I think that in the time
remaining to sort of linger over
McGann, I do want to say a few
things about what he says about
Keats.
 
I want to emphasize that his
general pronouncements about the
historicity of texts,
about the permeation of texts
by the circumstances of their
production,
their conditioning by
ideological factors,
is unimpeachable.
 
It seems to me that this is a
necessary approach at least to
have in mind if not,
perhaps, necessarily to
emphasize in one's own work of
literary scholarship.
The idea that a text just falls
from a tree--if anybody ever had
that idea, by the way
>
--is plainly not a tenable one,
and the opposite idea that a
text emerges from a complex
matrix of social and historical
circumstances is certainly a
good one.
So if one is to criticize,
again it's not a question of
criticizing his basic
pronouncements.
It seems to me nothing could be
said really against them.
The trouble is that in the case
of McGann--
who is a terrific,
prominent Romantic scholar with
whom one,
I suppose, hesitates to
disagree--everything he says
about the text that he isolates
for attention in this essay is
simply,
consistently, wrong.
 
It's almost as if by compulsion
that he says things that are
wrong about these texts,
and the reason I asked you in
my e-mail last night to take a
look at them,
if you get a chance,
is so that these few remarks
that I make now might have some
substance.
Take for example "La Belle
Dame Sans Merci."
In the first place,
who says we only read
the 1848 text?
 
A scholarly edition--and his
main object of attack is Jack
Stillinger's scholarly edition
of Keats--gives you basically a
variorum apparatus.
 
Yeah, maybe it gives you a
particular text in bold print,
but it gives you the variant
text in smaller print in a
footnote.
 
It doesn't withhold the variant
text from you.
It says, "No,
look, there's this too.
Take your choice."
 
Really the atmosphere of a
variorum scholarly edition is an
atmosphere of take your choice,
not a kind of tyrannical
imposition on the public of a
particular version of the text.
Everybody knows the 1820
Indicator text.
"What can ail thee,
wretched wight?"
is at least as familiar to me,
as a Romanticist,
as "What can ail thee,
knight at arms?"
the way in which the 1848 text
begins;
and frankly how many people who
aren't Romanticists know
anything about either text?
 
What are we talking about here?
 
>
 
The Romanticists know what's
going on.
They're not in any way
hornswoggled by this historical
conspiracy against the 1820
indicator text,
and people who aren't
Romanticists don't care.
That's what it comes down to;
but, if it's not enough simply
to say that, turning to the
question of which text is
better--well,
it's hard to say which text is
better.
 
McGann's argument is that the
1820 version is better because
it's a poem about a guy and a
girl who sort of meet,
and the next thing you know
they're having sex and that
doesn't turn out so well.
 
In other words,
it's about the real world.
These things happen.
 
It's not a romance,
whereas the "What can ail
thee, wretched knight?"
 
in the 1848 version--and all of
its other variants,
the "kisses four"
and so on--
the 1848 version is a kind of
unselfconscious--
in McGann's view--romance
subscribing to certain medieval
ideas about women,
simultaneously putting them on
a pedestal and fearing,
at the same time,
that they're invested with a
kind of black magic which
destroys the souls and
dissipates the sap of deserving
young gentlemen:
all of this is ideologically
programmed,
according to McGann,
in the 1848 version.
 
Why?
 
Because Charles Brown behaved
despicably toward women,
he didn't like Fanny Brawne,
and because Monckton Milnes,
the actual editor of the 1848
edition,
loved pornography and was a big
collector of erotica.
So that's why the 1848 text
with its fear of and denigration
of women, in contrast to the
1820 text, is inferior.
Well, two things:
first of all,
who's to say the 1848 text
wasn't Keats's last thoughts?
In other words,
yes, he was already ill when
the Indicator text was
published in 1820.
It is pretty close to the end
of his ability to think clearly
about his own work and to worry
very much about the forms in
which it was published,
but at the same time we don't
know when Brown received his
version of the text.
We can't suppose,
as McGann more than half
implies, that Brown just sort of
sat down and rewrote it.
>
 
Nobody has ever really said
that, and if he didn't rewrite
it, then Keats must have given
it to him in that form.
Who's to say that wasn't his
last and best thoughts?
Who's to say Keats didn't
really want to write a poem of
this kind?
 
After all, the title,
taken from a medieval ballad by
Alain Chartier,
"La Belle Dame Sans
Merci," bears out the
"What can ail thee,
knight at arms?" version.
 
It's about a Morgan Le Fay-type.
 
For better or worse,
whatever we think of that
ideologically,
it is about,
if the title is right,
the kind of woman who is evoked
in the 1848 version,
as opposed to the kind of woman
who is evoked in the 1820
version.
So the 1848 version is simply
more consistent with the title.
That's one point to be made,
but the additional point to be
made is that taking advantage of
the New Historicist
acknowledgement that one's own
subjectivity,
one's own historical horizon,
is properly in play in thinking
about these things,
McGann is then able to infuse
Keats's text and therefore
Keats's intentions with a
pleasing political correctness.
 
That is to say,
Keats can't possibly have
thought in that demeaning way
about women.
By the way, everything-- I like
Keats,
but everything in his letters
suggests that he did--
but back to McGann:
Keats can't possibly have
thought in that demeaning way
about women.
Therefore, the 1820 text is the
text that he intended and
preferred.
 
Okay.
 
That, of course,
makes Keats more consistent
with our own standards and our
own view of the relations
between the sexes,
but does it,
in other words,
make sense
vis-à-vis the
Keats whom we know and,
despite his weaknesses and
shortcomings,
love?
 
There is a great deal,
in other words,
to be said over against
McGann's assertions about this
textual issue,
not necessarily in defense of
the 1848 text but agnostically
with respect to the two of them,
saying, "Yeah,
we'd better have both of them.
We'd better put them
side-by-side.
We'd better read them together;
but if by some fiat the 1820
were somehow subsequently
preferred to the 1848,
that would be every bit as much
of an historical misfortune as
the preference,
insofar as it has actually
existed,
of the 1848 or the 1820."
I think that's the perspective
one wants to take.
Now I was going to talk about
"To Autumn."
I'll only say about his reading
of "To Autumn"
that McGann,
who doesn't seem to like the
poem very much--
he likes "La Belle Dame
Sans Merci,"
so he makes it politically
correct.
 
He doesn't like "To
Autumn" because he thinks
that "Autumn"
was published in collusion with
Keats's conservative friends in
the Poems of 1820,
which bowdlerized everything he
had to say of a progressive
political nature.
 
He thinks that "To
Autumn" is a big sellout,
in other words,
and that yes,
1819 happened to be a year of
good harvest,
and so Keats turns that year of
good harvest into something
permanent,
into a kind of cloud
cuckoo-land in which the fruit
falls into your basket and the
fish jump into your net and
everything is just perfect.
Well, do you think the poem is
really like that?
You've read the third stanza,
which McGann totally ignores
apart from "Where are the
songs of Spring?
Ay, where are they?"
 
In other words,
he gives you the opening but he
doesn't give you any sense of
the rest of the stanza,
because for him "To
Autumn" is all about the
first stanza.
 
For him, Keats seems to
identify with the bees who think
warm days will never cease,
"for Summer has
o'er-brimmed their clammy
cells."
Keats is like a bee.
 
He's all into the sensuous.
 
Well, again just in terms of
historical evidence,
this is outmoded by at least
eighteen months if we consult
Keats's letters.
 
He was like that early in his
career,
but he has had severe
misgivings about a point of view
which is represented in what he
said in an early letter:
"Oh,
for a life of sensations rather
than thoughtsâ€¦"
That's no longer Keats's
position when writing "To
Autumn."
Keats's position when writing
"To Autumn"
is the position of a guy who
has a sore throat just as his
tubercular brother did,
who is increasingly afraid that
he's going to die soon and is
trying to confront mortality in
writing what is in fact--
and I say "in fact"
advisedly--
the most perfect lyric ever
written in the English language,
and which is most certainly not
a celebration of sort of
wandering around like an aimless
bee,
thinking that the autumn is
perfect but that autumn is
always perfect,
that warm days will never
cease, and that everything is
just lovely in the garden.
 
It is not that kind of poem,
and it's really a travesty of
it to suppose that it is simply
on the grounds that it was
published in the Poems of
1820 as a kind of sellout to the
establishment under the advice
of Keats's conservative friends.
All right.
 
So much then for McGann's
remarks on Keats,
which I want to say again in no
way impugn or undermine the
general validity of the claims
that he's making about taking
historical circumstances into
account.
Precisely, we need to take them
into account and we need to get
them right.
 
That's the challenge,
of course, of working with
historical circumstances.
 
You have to get it right.
 
With that said,
let me turn quickly to a review
of Tony from Bakhtin to
the New Historicism.
I may glide over Tony
according to Jameson,
because we did that at the end
of the last lecture,
so let me go back to Bakhtin.
 
You can see the way in which in
the structure of Tony the Tow
Truck the first part of the
poem is absolutely saturated
with the first person singular:
I do this,
I do that, I like my job,
I am stuck-- I,
I, I, I.
 
Then as you read along through
the text you see that the
"I"
disappears,
or if it still appears,
it's in the middle of a line
rather than at the beginning of
a line.
In other words,
the "I,"
the subjectivity,
the first person singular,
the sense of having a unique
voice--
this is gradually subsumed by
the sociality of the story as it
unfolds.
 
I am no longer "I"
defined as a Romantic
individual.
 
I am "I,"
rather defined as a friend--
that is to say,
as a person whose relation with
otherness is what constitutes
his identity,
and in that mutuality of
friendship,
the first person singular
disappears.
What is spoken in Tony the
Tow Truck, in other
words,
in the long run is not the
voice of individual subjectivity
but the voice of social
togetherness,
the voice of otherness.
According to Jauss,
the important thing about
Tony the Tow Truck is
that it is not the same story as
The Little Engine that Could.
 
In other words,
in each generation of
reception, the aesthetic
standards that prevail at a
given time are reconsidered and
rethought, reshuffled.
A new aesthetic horizon
emerges, and texts are
constituted in a different way,
much also as the Russian
formalists have said,
only with the sense in Jauss of
the historical imperative.
 
The Little Engine that Could
is all about the inversion
of power between the little guy
and the big guy,
so that the little guy helps
the big guy and that is
unequivocal,
showing, as in Isaiah in
the Bible,
that the valleys have been
raised and the mountains have
been made low.
That's not the way Tony the
Tow Truck works.
The little guy himself needs
help.
He needs the help of another
little guy.
There is a reciprocity not
dialectically between little and
big,
but a mutual reinforcement of
little-by-little,
and that is the change in
aesthetic horizon that one can
witness between The Little
Engine that Could and
Tony the Tow Truck.
In Benjamin the important
thing, as I think we've said,
is the idea that the
narrator is the apparatus.
The humanization of a
mechanized world,
through our identification with
it, is what takes place in
Tony the Tow Truck.
 
In other words,
all these cars and trucks,
all these smiling and frowning
houses,
of course, have as their common
denominator their non-humanity,
but the anthropomorphization of
the cars and trucks and of the
houses constitutes them as the
human.
They are precisely the human.
 
We see things,
in other words,
from the point of view of the
apparatus.
Just as the filmgoer sees
things from the point of view of
the camera,
so we see Tony the Tow Truck
from the point of view of
the tow truck,
right?
 
And what happens?
 
Just as the camera eye point of
view leaves that which is seen,
as Benjamin puts it,
"equipment-free"--
so, oddly enough,
if we see things from the
standpoint of equipment,
what we look at is the moral of
the story: in other words,
the humanity of the story.
What we see,
in other words,
surrounded by all of this
equipment, is precisely the
equipment-free human aspect of
reality.
So Tony the Tow Truck
works in a way that is
consistent with Benjamin's
theory of mechanical
reproduction.
 
For Adorno, however,
the acquiescence of this very
figure--
the apparatus of mechanical
reproduction,
of towing again and again and
again--
in the inequity of class
relations,
rejected as always by Neato and
Speedy,
proves that the apparatus which
Benjamin's theory takes to be
independent of the machinations
of the culture industry,
that the apparatus in turn can
be suborned and commandeered by
the culture industry for its own
purposes.
 
All right.
 
I will skip over Jameson.
 
The Old Historicist reading of
Tony simply reconfirms a
status quo in which virtue is
clear,
vice is clear,
both are uncontested,
and nothing changes--in other
words,
a status quo which reflects a
stagnant,
existent, unchanging social
dynamic.
The New Historicism in a lot of
ways is doing this,
but let me just conclude by
suggesting that if literature
influences history,
Tony the Tow Truck might
well explain why today we're
promoting fuel-efficient cars,
why the attack on the gas
guzzler and the SUV or minivan--
remember the car that says
"I am too busy"--
is so prevalent in the story,
and why if we read today's
headlines we need to get rid of
the Humvee if GM is to prosper,
and we need to downsize and
streamline the available models.
The little guys,
Tony and Bumpy,
reaffirm the need for
fuel-efficient smaller vehicles
and you can plainly see that
Tony the Tow Truck is
therefore a discourse that
produces history.
All of this,
according to the prescription
of Tony, is
actually happening.
All right.
 
Thank you very much.
 
One thing that needs to be said
about Tony the Tow Truck
is it has no women in it,
and that is the issue that
we'll be taking up on Thursday.
 
