Stephen Greenblatt

Mark Robson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317595229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Stephen Greenblatt is the most important exponent of 'new historicism', a dynamic critical movement which rejects the traditional reliance on individual canonical texts, exploring a multitude of other, more marginal works and voices. Questioning not just literary but social, political and cultural assumptions about knowledge and power, Greenblatt's work has had a huge impact on contemporary theory.

Mark Robson discusses ideas specific to particular works and explores the relation of Greenblatt's thought to new historicism as well as other modes of criticism including the key topics of:

• 
  
  

• context
• cultural poetics
• power, subversion and containment
• thick description
• anecdotes.

Providing a starting point for readers new to this crucial theorist's sometimes complex texts, or support for those deepening their understanding of his work, this guidebook is ideal for students in the fields of literary, history, social and cultural studies.

KEY IDEAS

1

FROM CULTURE TO CULTURAL POETICS

Central to the new historicist project is the notion that literature is related to other practices, behaviour and values, and that literature is thus always in relation to the non-literary. Consequently, the definition of culture, and of how different aspects of a culture relate to each other, becomes of prime importance in understanding Greenblatt’s work. In this chapter, I will begin by discussing Greenblatt’s sense of culture, and then move on to see how this informs cultural materialism and cultural poetics.

‘CULTURE’

At the beginning of a short essay originally published in 1990 as an entry in a dictionary of critical terms for literary study, Stephen Greenblatt asks why a concept of ‘Culture’ should be useful to students of literature (Greenblatt 2005: 11). Disconcertingly, his initial answer is to suggest that it might not be. Part of the problem lies in the vagueness of the word. What does it include? Everything? In which case, it is not of much use as a descriptive term. But if it refers instead to a more limited conception of social structures, productions or interactions, then what is to be included and what excluded?

Greenblatt’s recognition of the difficulties that surround the concept of culture is shared by one of his critical influences. When Raymond Williams comes to define the term in his book Keywords, he opens by suggesting that:

Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought.

(1983: 87)

The repeated use of the word ‘several’ gives a clue to the problem. It is not just that the word is vague in itself, it is also that it has come to mean many different things within different contexts. Context here does not just refer to changes over time, although that ‘historical development’ is a factor, but also to the varied senses of the word within different languages and to the different disciplines which have employed it within one language. Precisely because it is a term that has eluded precise definition, or which has always been open to multiple definitions, it has been used within areas as diverse as literary studies, art history, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, cultural studies (about which more in a moment), and so on, but in ways that differ in each case. This is further complicated by the fact that these discipline-specific meanings are not compatible with each other, so they cannot just be added together to arrive at a more complete sense of the term. The struggle to define culture continues, and some of the difficulties are very ably summarized in another recent attempt to work out its critical significance (see Bruster 2003).

In trying to define the concept of culture, then, Greenblatt is forced to begin by making some broad distinctions. The concept refers to two opposing ideas, which he calls constraint and mobility. On the one hand, there is the set of beliefs and practices, frequently backed up by institutions and a ‘technology of control’, that sets limits on the behaviour of individuals. By ‘technology’, Greenblatt does not mean the most common modern use of the word which would make us think of gadgets or machines that allow people to be observed and thus controlled, such as CCTV. He is using the word in a way that echoes the Greek word technē, from which ‘technology’ derives. Technē is closer to technique, it really means what we now call an ‘art’, in the sense of phrases such as ‘the art of war’ or ‘the art of diplomacy’.

RAYMOND WILLIAMS (1921–88)

Williams was one of the most prominent figures in the New Left within Britain in the middle decades of the twentieth century, teaching both in adult education and later at Cambridge University. His work influenced both literary and cultural studies, and his most significant books include Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958), The Long Revolution (1961), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) and Marxism and Literature (1977). The last book, in particular, outlined his notion of cultural materialism (which will be discussed later in this chapter). As a Marxist thinker, Williams emphasized the relationships between politics and literature, focusing on concepts such as ideology and hegemony, but remaining sceptical about many of their traditional definitions. Indeed, the project of works such as Culture and Society, Keywords and Marxism and Literature was explicitly to examine the development of the definitions of major concepts, recognizing the often radical changes in meaning that occur over time. On Williams, see Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 60–66.

While the limits placed on an individual’s behaviour need not be narrow or obvious in everyday life, the rules that govern social interaction are not infinitely flexible. It is clear in cases where people break the law and are punished where these limits lie, but Greenblatt suggests that they may also be seen in less dramatic gestures such as signs of disapproval from those around us. Equally, there is positive reinforcement of these limits through the reward of behaviour that is deemed appropriate. In these instances of disapproval or reward, there is not necessarily any direct sense of a disciplining power at work; it is not a matter of policing or legal enforcement. Instead, what these ideas suggest is that people at any level of society may play an active (if not always fully conscious) part in exercising control over others within the same society. We might understand this better by thinking about the phrase ‘law and order’. Law tends to be exercised from above, and by those empowered to do so (the police, lawyers, judges, and so on). Order, however, is less overt in its manifestations, and most of the time there is order simply because people choose to behave in a way which does not call for any control. In other words, order might be thought of as the result of society exercising self-control.

This is all contained in the idea of constraint, but it is also where Greenblatt makes the first link to literature. Literature, he proposes, is part of this cultural reinforcement of boundaries between that which is approved and not, that which is legitimate and not, that which is legal and not. This is most obviously apparent in the praise and blame that is to be found in literary genres such as satire and panegyric. Both genres tend to emphasize, for good or ill, particular actions or modes of conduct. In a satire, individuals or groups are held up to ridicule, but usually for specific reasons, and these reasons may give us an indication of the values of the writer, of the writer’s group, or of the intended audience. Of course, the more local references to, for example, a political figure or event become of less interest over time, in that their initial force will inevitably diminish as the issue at stake becomes less urgent. So jokes about the Falklands War or Napoleon or one of the favourites of Elizabeth I might not seem to have much of a cutting edge for a modern reader, although they might still be funny. But it might be possible for us still to ‘get’ the more serious aspects of the joke if we are able to work out why it seemed so challenging or shocking at the time it was written, and to whom.

MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926–84)

One of the most influential of the thinkers associated with French structuralism and poststructuralism, Foucault’s work has had a profound influence on several disciplines. In part this is because his own work was always determinedly interdisciplinary. His most famous works include The Order of Things (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975) and the three-volume The History of Sexuality (1976, 1984, 1984). Foucault sought to understand the processes by which both the objects of knowledge and the questions that we ask of those objects come into being. At the Collège de France, he was elected to a Chair (Professorship) in the History of Systems of Thought, and this title is a good way to characterize his interests. In books that investigate categories such as madness or sexuality, or the history of the hospital and of the prison, Foucault analyses the discourses that determine why a particular issue or topic is necessarily thought of in a particular way at a specific moment in history. He is interested in why the attitude expressed in texts (including literary texts), or in the functioning of an institution such as a prison, seems to be part of a collective view rather than just the opinion of a given individual. Central to Foucault’s work is the notion that knowledge is always a form of power. Thus advances in psychiatry or in the treatment of illnesses also lead to new ways of controlling the people who are categorized as mad or ill. Such control tends to reinforce the power of those in a position to impose the categories. But this does not mean that power is simply exercised from the top down. As Foucault puts it: ‘Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere’ (1990: 93). Systems of thought are part of this process of control, and so ideas are implicated in power. Foucault’s thinking also implies that working out why ideas appear in a specific form at a specific moment gives us the opportunity to think how something might be thought of in a different manner.

We need to be clear about what Greenblatt is saying here. Part of the clue as to how to interpret this essay is given by looking to the terminology that he uses. Greenblatt’s use of concepts such as ‘technology’, ‘discipline’, ‘punishment’, and so on, is heavily influenced by the work of Michel Foucault. In thinking about questions of law and order, and in suggesting that order is part of the political organization of a culture, Greenblatt echoes Foucault: ‘The state is by itself an order of things … Political knowledge deals not with the rights of people or with human and divine laws but with the nature of the state which has to be governed’ (Foucault 2002: 408). At a specific point in time, that is, within a particular culture, there will be techniques that govern the relationships between individuals and social entities, and these techniques can be analysed to give us a sense of the nature of a state.

In the light of his sense of literature’s role in the technologies of control within a society, Greenblatt outlines a series of questions that he thinks it appropriate to ask of literary works:

What kinds of behavior, what models of practice, does this work seem to enforce?

Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling?

Are there differences between my values and the values implicit in the work I am reading?

Upon what social understandings does the work depend?

Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained implicitly or explicitly by this work?

What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be connected?

(2005: 12)

Much of this points to the world or culture beyond the text, drawing literature into a series of connections with institutions and values that are not themselves strictly literary. But this should not, Greenblatt proposes, mean that we ignore the formal characteristics of texts, or forego traditional literary practices of close reading in favour of historical and cultural description. This might seem to maintain a distinction between the formal aspects of a literary work, which we might want to call its textuality, and the contextual elements that frame the text. Yet again, however, this notion of close reading takes us back to culture, since Greenblatt proposes that ‘texts are not merely cultural by virtue of reference to the world beyond themselves; they are cultural by virtue of social values and contexts that they have themselves successfully absorbed’ (2005: 12). Context, then, is not a background to the text, or a frame within which it may be read. Cultural contexts are not outside the text, but are absorbed into it, and it is this process of absorption that explains the persistence of works of art outside of the contexts in which they are originally produced.

Fundamental to this view of the relation between text and culture, then, is a refusal to allow any rigid distinction between the inside and the outside of a work. To study literature is to study culture but, conversely, to understand literature, we have to understand a culture. Literary study is of value in this account because it leads to a fuller cultural understanding but, equally, it is this understanding of culture that informs the reading of the literary text. There may appear to be a certain circularity to this explanation, but it is better to think of it as another version of the chiasmus that I quoted from Louis Montrose in the ‘Why Greenblatt?’ chapter. Greenblatt’s thinking here may be rendered as: culture produces literature and literature produces culture. Thinking of literature in terms of culture allows the critic to see the ways in which culture may be seen as both inside and outside literature.

For the moment, we need to return to Greenblatt’s dualistic sense of culture as both constraint and mobility. Alongside the reinforcement of boundaries, he suggests, culture is also what gives structure to movement. Boundaries only become meaningful if there is also mobility, if there is a possibility of their being crossed, and Greenblatt talks of this in the ‘Culture’ essay primarily in terms of ‘improvisation’ (a key term in Renaissance Self-Fashioning. See Chapter 3). What does he mean by improvisation? Most obviously, it refers to the ways in which individuals accommodate themselves to their cultural constraints. It is a structure of improvisation that provides a ‘set of patterns that have enough elasticity, enough scope for variation, to accommodate most of the participants in a given culture’ (2005: 14). Most people will thus be able to find a manner of conforming to imposed restrictions, often without even noticing that these boundaries are in place. After all, a constraint is only experienced as such in the attempt (however unwitting) to perform an action that the constraint is designed to disallow. Without the freedom to encounter a boundary, there is no way in which the boundary may be perceived. One of the functions of literature is to present improvisation as something to be learned. In other words, the process of coming to terms with the limits on social behaviour may be portrayed in a novel, for example, as part of the process of becoming ‘cultured’. By showing a character who encounters difficulties but is in the end reconciled to his or her cultural constraints, a literary text may explore thematically the process of which it is itself a part.

Literature offers a clear example of how this improvisation works. Not only are there social values which will either be reinforced or challenged by the content of a work, there are also specifically literary boundaries which have to be negotiated, such as generic conventions. The negotiation of literary boundaries entails a borrowing from the materials available in a culture at any given time. No writer begins with a clean slate, and each must form a work in the light of existing narratives, plots, linguistic resources and prior treatments of particular themes and ideas. What we think of as ‘great’ writers are those who most effectively engage in a process of cultural ‘exchange’, taking an existing item such as a familiar myth, symbol or character type and transforming it into something else, usually through an alteration in its context or by combining it with materials from another, often unexpected, source. There are many examples of this in literature, including the plays of Shakespeare, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea or J. M. Coetzee’s Foe. Consequently, rather than being evidence of the originality or genius of a particularly gifted individual (both of which are privileged in our inheritance from romanticism), works of art ‘are structures for the accumulation, tra...