Historicism Once More: Problems and Occasions for the American Scholar

by Roy Harvey Pearce

Overview

A collection of some of Pearce's best-known essays on historical criticism in which he suggests a way of going beyond positivist historiography and formalist explication de texie toward a criticism which vitally engages the reader in what he reads and puts him m a position of judging himself and his culture, past and present.

Originally published in 1969.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691621845
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	12/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #2055
Pages:	372
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

Read an Excerpt

Toward a New Historicism

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By Wesley Morris

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1972 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06155-9

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CHAPTER 1

Toward a Discrimination of Historicisms

A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments.

T. S. ELIOT,Four Quartets

I am tempted to begin this study with an apology, for here is yet another book that proposes to argue what we all already know: that literature has a significant relationship with its cultural-historical milieu. Since the high tide of the New Criticism the profession has been inundated by treatises that would return us to the sanity of historical perspective; it is difficult to conceive how anything can be added. But few of these works propose to offer a systematic philosophic analysis of this "newer" criticism, and as a consequence I fear we are not much nearer understanding the claims we want to make. We have still to develop a viable critical methodology, one that balances consistency with adequacy. What the last decade accomplished was the destruction of the chimaera of absolutes; few critics today would claim that the meanings and values of literary works are either wholly determined by historical context or wholly independent of that context. Most critics range themselves somewhere between radical historical relativism on the one hand and subjectivism on the other. Unfortunately, this spectrum of critical stances often forces us to make innumerable fine distinctions that serve only to magnify differences and to obscure similarities, yet beneath these distinctions lie surprisingly few crucial aesthetic principles. It is my purpose here to bring these aesthetic questions to the surface that we may better grasp the full implications of our literary judgments.

The literary critic who argues that literature has a significant relationship with its historical milieu must explain how meaning and value are a product of that relationship; that is, he must determine the meaning and value of any individual human expression as it exists in the evolving context of other human expressions. This critic must concern himself with epistemological questions of how man perceives and knows the world around him, and even more fundamentally he must assume that there is or can be a meaningful continuity between human activities. Essentially these are the concerns of "historicism," but this term is not so easily defined. There are apparently a variety of historicisms. An article in the American Historical Review lists five types of historicism; Carlo Antoni distinguishes at least seven; Hayden V. White, Antoni's translator, argues for two basic types although he makes distinctions between five variations on those basic forms. René Wellek, concentrating exclusively on the literary implications of historicism, works within a single definition but also calls our attention to important variations.

Largely because of this general disagreement John Lukacs claims that the term has become "so broad as to be useless"; but if we can define it in its relation to the philosophic tradition from which it springs and apply it to the study of literature, I think the term may be made very useful indeed. To do this, of course, is merely to recognize that historicism has its origins deeply in aesthetics, dating particularly from the Romantic period Moreover, if the term is carefully defined it escapes the vagueness o£ a phrase like "historical-mindedness"; historicism, as I hope to establish, is a more profound and enduring philosophy than the mere sense of one's time-bound existence.

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To help sort out the confusion it is instructive to look at two extreme definitions. Karl Popper, who sets up a straw man in his effort to justify what he calls the "open society," accuses historicists, specifically Hegel and Marx, of fostering "an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction ... is attainable by discovering the rhythms' or the 'patterns,' the 'laws' or the*'trends' that underlie the evolution of history." According to Popper, historicism establishes a universal historical point of view through which the meaning and value of any particular event is determined; the fixed nature of the historical scheme ultimately makes for an historical relativism. Diametrically opposed to this, J. Hillis Miller argues that historicism is a development of "subjectivist" philosophy and is characterized by the absence of "any one point of view." Obviously both of these definitions reflect the personal convictions of their authors. For Popper it was the "closed" historicist society that was used to justify the twentieth-century atrocities of Communism and Fascism. Miller, a neo-subjectivist himself, sees historicism largely in the context of Husserlian phenomenology.

Most historians completely reject these narrow definitions. Hans Meyerhoff contends that Popper's use of the term "is somewhat odd and misleading," while Fritz Stern says that historicism and relativism cannot be equated. René Wellek argues that any form of subjectivism (he is thinking particularly of certain skeptical existentialist philosophies) contradicts historicism. But in fact the definitions of Popper and Miller are both defensible, although Miller is closer to the essential philosophic commitments of what I will call the "historicist attitude." There are, I believe, two prime sources for this attitude. First, historicism is a product of Romanticism; as a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment it absorbs much from the Romandc belief in individualism, the conditioning of ideals by time and place, and the doctrine of progressus in infinitum. Hayden White characterizes the movement by its sense of "dynamics" as opposed to the static nature of the neoclassical world view; its "emphasis [centers] upon the idea of change itself, and everything, including ethics and religion, [is] subjected to analysis on the basis of a logic not of being but of becoming." Second, the impact of post-Kantian epistemology seems to restrict man's process of knowing to the contemplation of the activity of his own mind as he confronts the flux of experience. But the historicist, no matter how influenced by subjectivist philosophy, never completely relinquishes his desire to discover or construct a meaningful continuity in history. This is a broad principle, but it is fundamental. The awareness of the fleeting nature of things gives a greater sense of urgency to the search for continuity, and historicism expresses itself as a liberating epistemology. No longer able to sustain the rational confidence of the Augustan age, the historicist turns away from neo-classical metaphysics and reaches for principles of meaningful relationships which are the products of man's mind.

There are, as a result, conflicting tendencies in the movement. One, supported by Idealistic philosophy, persists in the belief that man can transcend the Heraclitian flux either intuitively or rationally, either by sensing the inexorable laws of history or by discovering them in the evolution of the rational Human Mind. Another, not so unlike the first, seeks to find the determining principle of continuity within the social organism, substituting for the transcending Mind some empirically discovered concept of enduring social or economic relationships. Any of these could be rigidified into Popper's "closed society," yet along with the desire for transcendental laws, or, perhaps more accurately stated, for patterns of meaning, there is an everpresent subjectivism. The historicist attitude demands that any meaningful, transcendental continuity be itself ultimately subject to the logic of becoming and, hence, be incomplete. This is admittedly a subjectivist point of view, but its spirit is not necessarily the skeptical Weltanschauung of Hillis Miller.

It is the tension between these conflicting tendencies in historicism, between transcendental Idealism and subjectivism, that in the final analysis prevents it from becoming either. Meaning, for an historicist, cannot be determined wholly by relative position in the grand scheme nor resigned wholly to the capricious will of the individual beholder. The historicist resists determinism, what Wellek calls the "dogma of continuity," by asserting the primacy of his concern for the individual, for the particular which is seen not merely in terms of the whole but in its own particularity — as a generating principle of the whole. This relationship between the historicist, as interpreter, and the particular historical event, as object of interpretation, is most crucial. Following the lead of Goethe, the German historian Friedrich Meinecke says that the historicist's approach is "to enter into the very souls of those who acted, to consider their works and cultural contributions in terms of their own premises and, in the last analysis, through artistic intuition to give new life to life gone by — which cannot be done without a transfusion of one's own life blood." The historicist transcends his own present perspective. A continuity extends from the present into the past, and in this transcendence the past is known through its meaningful relationship with the present. History, as Dewey says, "cannot escape its own process. It will, therefore, always be rewritten. As the new present arises, the past is the past of a different present." Meinecke, however, does not see this leading to a subjectivist despair, for the act of historical awareness presupposes an act of self-awareness and an affirmation of the mind's creative power to wrest meaning from the manifold.* Historicism "consists in nothing more than the corroboration of the infinitely creative power of the spirit, which although it does not guarantee us rectilinear progress, yet promises an eternally new birth of valuable historical individualities within the bounds of nature."

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Meinecke here curiously sounds like Hegel; only the disclaimer of "guarantees" of "rectilinear progress" separates them. But this is, of course, a vast separation. Meinecke presents a twentieth-century development of historicism based essentially on Goethean aesthetics. Goethe had resisted the appeals of both transcendental Idealism and a wholly subjectivist view of the world, yet historicists have not always been able to maintain such a balance. Actually, as we move through the nineteenth century into the modern period the emphasis swings from a strong historical relativism affixed in a transcendental scheme to a subjectivist rejection of such schemes and an assertion of the need to construct meaningful patterns in time. Consequently there is an emergence of a "new historicism" but one that has strong ties with the older and more traditional forms. Because of this continuity in historicist theory it seems particularly advantageous to discuss these more traditional manifestations in order to make clear the specific problems that a new historicist must face. In this section, therefore, I will describe four types of traditional historicism as a new historicist might see them. These types will represent neither all of the possibilities nor absolute categories that could not be reshuffled to suit a different point of view. Each of the types reflects the particular historical or philosophic interests of its originator. In each, the unifying scheme of history is founded on a specific element in the mass of historical-experiential data which is molded into the first principle of a meaningful continuity. The historicist, in his search for the dynamic relatedness of all human experience, fixes upon a special category of experiences around which he can organize all of the other and more disparate elements.

The broadest and perhaps most traditional form of historicism we may label "metaphysical."* Here the unifying principle is sought in transcendent timelessness which can be known only by means of intuition or rational projection, and the continuity of history is characterized by its drive toward an ultimate telos. Hegel, of course, is the best known exponent of this theory; his concept of dialectical movement in history was a rational construct through which he attempted to interpret the variety of the world. More recently Reinhold Niebuhr has borrowed this dialectical scheme in order to assert his faith in a transcendent, Christian meaning in history. Niebuhr's theory is considerably narrower than Hegel's, but in both the aim is to arrive at an understanding of the final fulfillment of historical progress and thereby to have available the criterion of meaning for every individual moment in history. Such a system does provide for certainty of interpretation, though it must buy this certainty with what Rene Wellek calls a "crippling [historical] relativism and an anarchy of values." Meaning, contrary to radical subjectivism, is ascertainable but always reflects the universal; values, because the individual is bound to one position in the total scheme, are really unimportant. I do not intend by this oversimplification to suggest that Hegel made no attempt to preserve some balance in the relationship between the existential and the universal. Rather I suggest that for the metaphysical historicist, particularly when he functions as literary critic, the ascendancy of the universal is unavoidable.

A second variety of historicism, which frequently sets itself in conscious opposition to the metaphysical interpretation of history, may best be called "naturalistic" although it has been referred to as "positivistic" and "scientific." Its fundamental principles are characteristically borrowed from the sciences or pseudo-sciences; anthropology, biology, psychology, economics, and sociology are the most popular sources. The naturalistic historicist often violently attacks any theory of transcendent order, preferring to locate his meaning-structure in empirically observable facts. This attitude most immediately reflects the widely known but often narrowly interpreted dictum of Leopold Ranke that the historian must strive to depict history wie es eigentlich gewesen. Hence, the methodology tends to classify all human expressions as mere documents, keys to sociological understanding. The literary work, a new historicist would argue, is wholly transparent; having no substance of its own, it merely reveals the conditions which produced it.

To the extent Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and Brunetiere were influenced by nineteenth-century Positivism they provided a basis for this theory, but we must not dismiss these men too quickly for their "scientism." Only a few lesser lights, like Henry Thomas Buckle, expressed an undiluted confidence in the scientific methodology, a confidence, we should note, that far outstrips the Augustan's faith in reason.

I entertain little doubt that before another century has elapsed, the chain of evidence will be complete, and it will be as rare to find an historian who denies the undeviating regularity of the moral world, as it is now to find a philosopher who denies the regularity of the material world.

A more recent development of positivistic historiography has come from analytic philosophy. Karl Popper and C. G. Hampel have offered a rigidly logical methodology of historical explanation, and W. B. Gallie has mingled Collingwood and analytic philosophy to achieve yet another positivistic approach.

Two specific manifestations of the "naturalistic" historicist attitude are the insistence on the historian's "objective" stance and, though less frequently, a glorification of statistical methods which substitute quantitative measure for true critical analysis. Like the metaphysical historicist, the naturalist tends to lose sight of the particular in his haste to see what lies behind it, but whereas in the former the particular is subordinated to the "idea," in the latter it is frequently subordinated to social or political action.

A third type of historicism is best entitled "nationalistic." It stands most directly opposed to Ranke's ideal of Universal History, and draws support from the most disparate sources including Michelet, Goethe, and Comte. In America its purest representation is found in the "frontier" nationalism of Frederick Jackson Turner. Yet essentially it tends to assume two forms: the political as is evidenced in the liberal polemics of George Brandes and the folk-oriented study as was espoused by many nineteenth-century German historians and linguists. Neither, of course, demands that the historian confine himself wholly within the boundaries of a single nation, yet the political or racial unit is taken as the key to all larger evolutions. It is the interaction of nationalistic interests which drives history in clearly definable directions. Too often the obvious value of such an approach is clouded by the historian's own nationalistic pride. Meaning can be distorted by convenient black and white distinctions or lost in the vagaries of a "national soul." Again, too hasty a simplification here would unfairly reduce such powerful thinkers as Herder or Brandes to narrow nationalistic propagandists. What I am suggesting in this category, rather, is a complex of attitudes which locates the meaning of historical expressions within the confines of the national interests. It is a concept of particular importance to American literary theory.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Toward a New Historicism by Wesley Morris. Copyright © 1972 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Foreword, pg. vii
• Contents, pg. xiii
• I . Historicism Once More, pg. 3
• 2. Literature, History, and Humanism, pg. 46
• 3. Mass Culture/Popular Culture, pg. 64
• 4. Robin Molineux on The Analyst's Couch, pg. 96
• 5. The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating, pg. 109
• 6. Hawthorne and The Sense of The Past; or, The Immortality of Major Molineux, pg. 137
• 7. Hawthorne and the Twilight of Romance, pg. 175
• 8. Whitman, pg. 200
• 9. Henry James and His American, pg. 240
• 10. Wallace Stevens, pg. 261
• 11. Theodore Roethke: The Power of Sympathy, pg. 294
• 12. Whitman and Our Hope for Poetry, pg. 327
• Index, pg. 351