Hayot Eric - Persistent Forms

Persistent Forms

VERBAL ARTS :: STUDIES IN POETICS

Lazar Fleishman and Haun Saussy, series editors

Copyright 2016 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Persistent forms : explorations in historical poetics / edited by Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov. First edition.

pages cm. (Verbal arts: studies in poetics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-6485-8 (hardback)

1. PoeticsHistory. 2. Literature and history. I. Kliger, Ilya, editor. II. Maslov, Boris, 1982 editor.

PN1035.P46 2015

808.1dc23

2015015745

Printed in the United States of America

18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

CONTENTS

One day someone will look back at the last few decades of U.S. literary criticism and remark on the strange trajectory of the category of the universal. Beginning with the reaction against structuralism, that person will observe a strong conceptual and rhetorical preference for multiplicity, diversity, and smallness across the major categories of the field. Among the many examples of this trend we can include the antagonism toward grand narratives, the postcolonial emphasis on hybridity, the resistance to Marxist models of totality (synonymous, briefly, with totalization) or to masculine models of desire seen in French feminism and queer theory (sex is emphatically not one), the deconstructive emphasis on systemic instability, a shift from polar (binary) categorization to the frameworks involving fields or continuums, and a general preference for pluralization (modernisms, not modernism, and so on), all of which assert against the totalizing or the ideal ontological diversity of things. All this ferment enfolded and was enfolded in turn by a consistent emphasis on the minor or the small, in practices of reading and in the adjudication of evidence, which picked up on the history of new critical close reading (and came prior, then, to post-structuralism). The critique of the general or the large received one remarkably influential elaboration in Deleuze and Guattaris book on Kafka, in which minor literature was the best literature of all; then and later, it was sustained through deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and the new historicism, each of which endowed small or seemingly inconsequential units of culture or meaning with immense cultural force, in a pattern that over and over again aimed to reduce or destroy the hierarchies of culture that would have otherwise relegated those units to irrelevance.

All this together amounted to a revolution in the history of epistemology, at least in the American academy. It helps explain the especially American desuetude of methods like narratology or genre analysis, as well as the relative lack of long-term influence of the major syncretic works of twentieth-century literary criticism, including those of figures like Erich Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius, Georg Lukcs, Lucien Goldmann, or Northrop Frye. The history of the reception of the most influential of these critics for that period, Mikhail Bakhtin, may serve to indicate its spirit: setting aside his broadest historical impulses, Bakhtins reception prized those concepts of his most congenial to the anti-universalizing spirit of the agedialogism, heteroglossia, and the carnivalesque laughter that destroys self-important categorization.

That the categories needed to be destroyed, the grand narratives put under suspicion, that everywhere the small or the particular, in all its idiographic brilliance, needed to shine its odd light through the depths and hollows of normative common sense: this is undeniable. The question before us now is whether it is possible to return to the broad and the general with these lessons in mind; or whether those idiographic impulses are so absolute, so correct in their critique of the general, that any attempt to undo them will invite a tragic return of the Enlightenments worst, most phallic aggressions. In other words: Is large-scale literary historical criticism possible again today? And, if so, on what terms?

The book in your hands is one attempt to answer those questions. It returns to a tradition that includes in its direct and indirect lineage figures like Bakhtin and Lukcs, but goes backat least hereto the work of the nineteenth-century Russian philologist and scholar Alexander Veselovsky (18381906), who called his method historical poetics.

What historical poetics was for Veselovsky matters less throughout the book than what contemporary critics might do with the concept. For now, let us loosely describe it as an attempt to practice literary criticism in large historical scales, while not forgoing the necessity of a deep familiarity with individual works (and pieces of works) and their immediate contexts (and pieces of contexts). Please assume that, like all methods, historical poetics carries with it a theory of aesthetic becoming, of culture and its relation to social and economic history, of the historical ontology of the work of art, a refined understanding of the relationship between the universal and the particular, and an awareness of the recursions that mutually modify the act of interpretation and the identification of evidence.

Those assumptions in hand, it becomes possible to read this collection of essays as an attempt to simultaneously imagine and exemplify a method whose principles and practices are still in formation. Whether or not historical poetics appeals to you will depend on whether you find the imagination compelling and the examples believable. First, will the descriptions of the ways in which historical poetics might finesse some of the critical problems that face us today strike you as having any intellectual potential? Second, will the readings, playing fairly and well with the evidence, teach you something that you didnt already know (or wish you knew) about the material they consider?

This book is not, then, a manifesto, but an experiment, or rather, a series of experiments. No single historical poetics emerges from its pages. The energy it emits testifies instead to a set of possibilities and openings, lines of consolidation and flight.

Among other things this energy highlights three ongoing methodological problems for literary criticism, most easily invoked by their conventional binary formulations: freedom and necessity; universality and particularity; future and present.

FREEDOM AND NECESSITY

The recent critiques of the near-total dominance of idiographic or close methods of literary criticism, whose most obvious avatar has been Franco Moretti, have made us aware of the ways in which our practices of reading shape the kinds of claims we tend to make about literary objects. Someone who close reads, Moretti has suggested, will naturally tend to develop a practice of criticism focused on a relatively narrow canon of works whose density of signification lends itself well to that methodand will probably, then, also develop theories of literariness and literary history that follow from it. We may from this perspective recognize that the widely accepted belief that the smallest scales of the text best escape the formative power of cultureand thus point us to literatures liberatory potentialis an ontology of literature appropriate to the method that such a belief develops (namely, then, close reading).