The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 18.0157 Monday, 19 February 2007
From: Hugh Grady <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Monday, February 19, 2007 7:46 PM
Subject: SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
This week's Roundtable presents five responses to the issues raised by
my initial posting, "Why Presentism Now?" David Lindley defines two
"anxieties" he feels about Presentism, one having to do with the issue
of its newness or lack thereof, the second about the protean quality of
the idea of the "present." Andrew Wilson asks for clarification in the
form of a hypothetical confrontation between "presentist" and
"historicist" readings of the same text. Michael Lufkin expresses
astonishment that anyone is debating the idea of critical presentism,
which he characterizes as "incredibly obvious." Larry Weiss advocates
the avoidance of labels for critical methodology like "presentism" in
favor of critical debates without labeling. And Louis Swilley argues
that both presentism and historicism miss the point that what counts
about literature is its engagement with timeless issues of conscience.
I will comment on these messages, as has become the established
practice, at the end of this digest.
[1]+++++++++++++++
From: David Lindley <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Monday, 12 Feb 2007 11:25:32 -0000
Subject: 18.0092 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
Comment: RE: SHK 18.0092 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
Two observations:
First, that something very like the arguments about 'presentism' were
being debated in the arena of 'authentic' musical performance in the
1980s. (See, for example, the collection of essays edited by Nicholas
Kenyon, Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium (Oxford, 1988).) Many
of the arguments that Terry Hawkes and Hugh Grady advance about the
impossibility of knowing the past have a kind of pre-echo in the attacks
by Richard Taruskin on what he sees/saw as the fantasies of early music
performance.
But my second anxiety is that there seems a great reluctance to
interrogate whose 'present' is being invoked. Who, in short, is the
'our' in the statement by Jean Howard quoted by Julia Crockett; who is
the 'us' that Terry Hawkes frequently invokes in his Shakespeare and the
Present - a dazzling and entertaining series of essays, but one which
leaves me in a good deal of uncertainty about where 'the present' begins
and ends, and in whose name it is being created. It sometimes looks
rather depressingly like the old fantasy object, 'the reader', who
always happened to respond in exactly the way the critic desired or
needed (and was usually male - 'the reader . . . he' is a locution I
still shudder at in some of my own earlier writing).
David Lindley
[2]+++++++++++++++
From: Andrew Wilson <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Monday, 12 Feb 2007 14:02:06 -0800
Subject: 18.0130 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0130 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
I believe this roundtable discussion suffers from a dearth of down to
earth, specific examples of where Presentism comes into conflict with
its opponents. It would be a great help if someone (Hugh Grady?) could
cite a few example cases where the two sides of the conflict can be
expressed in concrete, easy to understand terms rather than in
generalized, abstract verbiage. For example, something along these lines:
In Shakespeare's play "XYZ" a Presentist might want to make the
following argument: ____________ (= something having to do with text of
the play, characters in the play, or anything an average reader of the
play could easily relate to). However, his anti-Presentist opponent
would say the Presentist's approach is flawed for the following reasons:
____________.
Thanks very much .
Andrew Wilson
[3]+++++++++++++++
From: Michael B. Luskin <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
.>
Date: Monday, 12 Feb 2007 18:37:49 EST
Subject: Presentism
>Elsewhere Fernie has emphasized the salient point that to
>encounter Shakespeare's plays as works of art is, necessarily, to
>encounter them as they exist in the "now." I would simply add that I
>don't doubt that the past has existed and that all critics of
>Shakespeare depend on that knowledge. But precisely because the past is
>Other, it can never be captured in its precise specificity-whatever that
>would mean. We can of course attempt to conceptualize it and perform the
>useful task of trying to imagine what complex cultural documents like
>Shakespeare's plays would have meant to their original audiences. But we
>will only have a series of approximations in the end, and any reading of
>the historical critics of the past will show that their "past" is not
>our "past." ... Instead, we might focus on what all of these
>commentators concede, that the pasts we construct are permeated with our
>situation in the present, are always allegories of the present in one
>form or another.
I am not a literature scholar, so am bemused by the discussion of
presentism.
It seems that the point of presentism is incredibly obvious; I don't
know why people debate it or talk about it.
And old joke: Someone is trying to explain Einstein's theory of
relativity to his grandfather and decides to offer analogies on time
dilation. "Suppose you're in the dentist's chair. Ten minutes seems like
an eternity. Now suppose you have a beautiful woman sitting on your lap,
pressing herself against you.
An hour seems like a second." The grandfather replies, "From that your
Einstein makes a living?"
We see the past through today's eyes. That's news?
In a discussion of Shylock a couple years ago, someone posted here about
Lopez' execution. Apparently the more he protested his innocence, the
more people laughed, since he was doing exactly what you would expect a
devilish, lying, Jew to do. But nowadays we read the speech
differently. What else do you need to know about presentism?
Michael B. Luskin
[4]+++++++++++++++
From: Larry Weiss <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Wednesday, 14 Feb 2007 02:10:57 -0500
Subject: 18.0130 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0130 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
Hardy accurately quoted my post to him, including my comment that the
debate has "more to do with describing what they [academics] do than
what Renaissance authors did."
I think Hardy makes my point for me when he observes in his reply that
"My remarks about the morphing of "New Historicism" are in part my
response to being unable to describe or to categorize the methodology
that Stephen Greenblatt used in his _Will in the World .... "
Why is it necessary to categorize that methodology? Does a taxonomy of
critical techniques make any of them more or less valid? Do labels add
to the persuasiveness of any given approach? Or, in other words, aren't
we really just discussing what critics do, not what the authors did?
Here is an example of how a critical issue can be debated without
reference to labels: At the conference held at Davidson College last
weekend, Stephen Greenblatt and I had a brief colloquy about what I
believe is a topical allusion in Macbeth. In the panel entitled "Clues
about Shakespeare and Religion," Prof. Greenblatt quoted a 19th Century
critic who wrote in 1819 that it was remarkable that Shakespeare never
alluded to the Gunpowder Plot. In the question period I challenged the
19th Century critic (not Greenblatt) by pointing out that the critic
evidently did not remember the porter, who offered an equivocator a
place in Hell -- "here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the
scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God's
sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in equivocator." It
seems to me that there is no escaping that this passage refers to the
Gunpowder Plot trials of 1606 (the year before Macbeth was written), and
particularly the testimony of Fr. Garnet. Greenblatt expressed
skepticism about this, although the other member of the panel, Maurice
Hunt, agreed with me. However, at no point did our entirely civilized
colloquy invoke labels. Did I adopt a classical Historicist approach?
(If I did, I would be as astounded as I was when I was first told I was
writing prose.) Was Greenblatt's skepticism a function of New
Historicism? Who cares? Would I be wrong and Greenblatt correct to be
skeptical if we decide that New Historicism is preferable to a more
traditional approach? Does the critical question cease to be
interesting if we all decide to be Presentists?
[5]+++++++++++++++
From: Louis Swilley <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Friday, 16 Feb 2007 07:16:39 -0600
Subject: 18.0151 A further question
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0151 A further question
Do Presentism and Historicism both ignore the fact that human constants
are expressed in the works, constants that make the classics meaningful
to us generation after generation? Those constants - expressed so
beautifully in great works - are characters responding to challenges by
following or ignoring their consciences. These are not lost in the
historical circumstances in which they are expressed, nor are they
dependent upon changing factors in present-day experience. However a
play may produced to reflect a current problem - Shakespeare in modern
dress - the director and actors had better be aware that the real
"stuff" of any great play is the "deep-down-diving, long-down-staying,
mud-up-bringing" matter of the characters' responses to moral
challenges, challenges and responses that remain the same for all
generations that were, that are and that will be, until we can leap from
the womb totally physically self-sufficient. Only in those circumstances
will our human nature change to the degree that the conditions of
conscience are altered and that the human image in art is significantly
changed.
L. Swilley
+++++++++++++++
Commentary by Hugh Grady
I'd like to begin with my thanks to Michael Luskin for his forthright
statement about the obviousness of the basic idea of presentism. As I
told him in a private message in which I suggested he post his idea to
the Roundtable itself, I have longed shared his incredulity at the fact
that many people find the idea objectionable or incorrect. The influence
of changing political, cultural, and aesthetic ideas on how we interpret
cultural objects like Shakespeare's plays has always struck me as more
or less self-evident. Theatrical practitioners especially generally
accept the idea of presentism as completely obvious and unexceptional.
But, alas, experience shows that the obviousness of the basic idea
escapes many people for reasons which they are better at explaining than
I am. I should add that despite what I take to be the obviousness of the
basic idea, I think there are innumerable ramifications for critical
practice that flow out of the basic insight, and these ramifications
deserve exploration and definition. The essays in _Presentist
Shakespeares_ might be considered just an opening foray in a much larger
task.
David Lindley reports that many of the issues raised in recent debates
about presentism in Shakespeare studies have a kind of "pre-echo" in
debates about "authenticity" and musical performances in the 1980s. I
wasn't familiar with this obviously relevant discussion within a
sister-art, and I thank Prof. Lindley for bringing it to our attention.
I wasn't sure whether this point was related or not to one he raised
in the "shadow" discussion of Presentism that went on, amidst much
intemperate language and ad hominems, in the thread "A Question," in
which he questioned the "newness" of presentism. But it may be
worthwhile to try clarifying an ambiguity about the issue of "newness."
Of course, the "obvious idea" behind presentism that I just discussed
is hardly a new one-as I and many others have repeatedly observed in our
publications on this issue. It goes back to at least the nineteenth
century as an issue that was unavoidable after Johann Gottfried Herder
first defined in 1773 (in an essay on Shakespeare, incidentally) and in
subsequent works, the idea of the unique cultural and historical
conjuncture behind each art-work. Thereafter, critics would need to
attempt to distinguish between the work's origins and the work's
subsequent reception. In other words, Herder can probably be counted on
as the first "historicist" critic. But debates about historical
methodology did not stop with his seminal writings. The philosopher
Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) was perhaps the earliest consistent
developer of the basic notion behind presentism in his multi-facetted
argument that all constructions of the past are created within the
intellectual frameworks of the present. Walter Benjamin, in his 1940
"Theses on History and Philosophy" continues this tradition, and even T.
S. Eliot in an article he composed for Granville-Barker and G. B.
Harrison's 1934 _Companion to Shakespeare Studies_ concedes that "The
views of Shakespeare taken by different men at different times in
different places form an integral part of the development and changes of
European civilisation during the last 300 years."
What _is_ new about today's Presentism is that these ideas are being
mobilized self-consciously by critics and scholars uneasy with the
recent direction of Shakespeare studies towards a "post-Theory"
historicism that is harder and harder to distinguish from old-fashioned
positivist historicism. It is because of this relatively recent
development that several of us have decided it is time to offer an
alternative path to the field. There has never been to my knowledge an
avowedly "Presentist" school of critics (however loosely associated and
different from each other in a number of ways) up to now.
Professor Lindley also raises a point about the slipperiness of the
concept of the "present" and the complications this raises for
Presentist criticism. Of course the present does not stand still and of
course an individual critic construes the present in a partial,
position-based way. But I see these qualities of the present as
resources for, not obstacles to, a presentist criticism. Precisely
because the present is complex, contradictory, and changing, it is a
rich concept to take as a starting point for critical interpretation.
Indeed, one way of discovering qualities of the present is through
re-reading classic texts like Shakespeare's and noticing how our
responses to them have changed since our last reading. I agree with
Professor Lindley that the pronoun "our" in a phrase like "our present"
is a rhetorical construct, in some ways akin to the convenient
rhetorical construct "the reader." But these usages are simply part of
the overall persuasive (or non-persuasive) rhetoric of critical
discourse, and I think their uses have to be judged on a case-by-case
basis, rather than attempting universal judgments about them a priori.
Defining "our times" is surely a problem-laden undertaking-but what kind
of valuable discourse in the humanities is not? We will always fail, but
that doesn't mean the attempt was not valuable or that readers cannot
learn from it.
I'm going to resist what I'm sure was a sincere and well-meaning request
from Andrew Wilson for a simple and hypothetical example of
"historicism" vs. "presentism" in interpreting some text. I do so
because, as a long-time teacher of courses introducing students to
critical methodologies, I have too often observed the harm that
well-meaning textbook writers often perform when they try to accommodate
such suggestions. The problem is, of course, that they thus treat
critical methods as pasta-making machines through which to run texts and
generate automatic readings. This is simply not good criticism in my
view. Criticism is much more of an art than that procedure suggests, I
think. What might be a better alternative would take some work on the
part of the questioner, but nothing comes from nothing, and work is
needed to understand these matters (he said professorially). Anyone
interested might, for example, start with Kiernan Ryan's bracing
presentist reading of _Troilus and Cressida_ in _Presentist
Shakespeares_ and compare it with some earlier (old or new) historicist
essay, like, say, Eric Mallin's excellent new historicist essay on the
same play "Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry," in
_Representations_ 29 (Winter 1990): 145-79 (the essay was
recontextualized in Mallin's book _Inscribing the Time_). Other pairings
are of course, possible. And in the case of comparing these two
particular methods, historicism and presentism, their dialectical links
would definitely get in the way of any clear binary oppositions.
I think Larry Weiss's preference for critical debates without labeling
is related to this issue, and it should be clear from the above
paragraph that I have sympathy with aspects of Weiss's statement here.
But again, there is the issue of rhetorical effectiveness to deal with.
Labels can be reductive, but they can also be useful. We have to make
judgments for each particular case. I and others began using the label
"presentist" because we had a point to make about the current direction
of Shakespeare studies, and the use of this label seemed a good way to
start raising the issue. I hope it is clear how complex the issues
behind critical methodology are and how a label can hide the
complexities. But in the give and take of critical discourse, I don't
see how we can do without them.
Louis Swilley voices what was once a commonplace about literary classics
like Shakespeare, that they engage us in "timeless" issues, especially
moral ones. There are semantic issues at work here as well, and
connections between our own cultural assumptions and those of the play's
originating moment, I don't doubt. To keep it short, my own view is that
the "timelessness" effect comes into play precisely when something in
the text resonates strongly with our own current cultural concerns and
that a review of the history of almost any Shakespeare text will
demonstrate how views on what ideas are most "timeless" turn out to
shift as we move through historical change. _King Lear_, for example,
was once considered a play in which a few precious bits of poetry could
be discovered in a junk pile of "barbarous" excesses and egregious
violations of poetic justice. Nowadays it is held by many to be the most
profound of the tragedies.
Thanks to all who wrote in, and I hope the discussion will continue on
these or new issues next week.
Sincerely,
Hugh Grady
[Editor's Note: We invite thoughtful responses to any of the individual
contributions to this week's Roundtable digest; responses to Hugh
Grady's commentary on them; responses to Hugh Grady's initial posting --
"Why Presentism Now?" <http://www.shaksper.net/archives/2007/0065.html>;
responses to previous digests in the Presentism thread
<http://www.shaksper.net/archives/2007/0091.html> and
<http://www.shaksper.net/archives/2007/0128.html>; as well as
observations, queries, or discussion points on the topic under
consideration, Presentism. The Editor of the list, Hardy M. Cook,
normally forwards all contributions from the week to the Guest
Moderator, Hugh Grady, on Friday evenings. The Guest's Moderator's
comments are returned to the Editor on Sundays and posted to the
SHAKSPER membership on Monday. -HMC]
_______________________________________________________________
S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook,
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net>
DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the
opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the
editor assumes no responsibility for them.
|
