Practicing the New Historicism

STEPHEN GREENBLATT: THE WICKED SON

Practicing the New Historicism

New historicists linked anecdotes to the disruption of history. as usual, not to its practice: the undisciplined anecdote appealed to those of us who wanted to interrupt the Big Stories. We sought the very thing that made anecdotes ciphers to many historians: a vehement and cryptic particularity that would make one pause or even stumble on the threshold of history.

Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, "Practicing New Historicism"

Stephen Greenblatt is the best known exponent of the approach to literary studies that has been dubbed "new historicism." Author of "Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture," and "Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World," his most recent book, co-written with Catherine Gallagher, is "Practicing New Historicism."

HB: When I try to define new historicism, I think of Elaine Scarry,the literary critic, studying the crash of TWA Flight 007, and coming up with a conclusion about the effects of electromagnetic interference that the FAA has taken seriously. Is that a fair way of describing new historicism?

SG: I wouldn't have said so myself. It's true that Elaine Scarry writes about the TWA crash with the kind of attention to detail that one, maybe, could expect of a literary critic, but she doesn't write about the TWA crash as a symbolic object. She's truly interested in technical matters having to with electromagnetic interference. Her work on those crashes is a tribute to what it means to be a genuine investigative reporter, figuring out what's up with a subject, even though you're not trained in it.

The goal of new historicism for me -- it's different for different people -- is to put cultural objects in some interesting relationship to social and historical processes. For me, new historicism is really about Hamlet, King Lear, Tom Jones, David Copperfield in relation to a whole set of practices you wouldn't normally think of reading of literature.

HB: You write about the dialogue with Marxism that was important early on. Does new historicism missing having Marxism as a debating partner?

SG: I cut my teeth in Berkeley in the 1970s in heroic times, times that fancied themselves as heroic, and was very dubious even then that getting these literary readings right was going to have a direct political effect on the world. The other extreme position, the one,say, that Auden reached, namely that literature makes nothing happen,is also not true. The goal is to find the middle space, in which you understand that you're participating in a small way in an indirect and glacially slow shift in collective understanding.

HB: There's a relationship among the chapters in "Practicing New Historicism," but it's not easy to extract a single theme or theory from them. There's continuity and I think a kind of intentional discontinuity, as well.

SG: That's true. We do our work through techniques of association, analogy, surprising connection, things contingently leaning against each other, collage. I could never have written this particular book on my own; it was based precisely on the need to get more than one voice, and not to bring those voices into a single harmonious whole. From a writerly point of view, the most difficult task that Catherine Gallagher and I
faced in writing "Practicing New Historicism," was figuring out how to change the personal pronoun, "I" into the collective pronoun "we," in matters that depend so much on perspective and individual point of view.

HB: There are obvious differences in style between you.

SG: Absolutely. We thought at first that we were going to actually write something together -- alternate sentences, alternate paragraphs, and so forth. We couldn't do it. Because your voice is important. Literary criticism is on the whole almost unbearable to read because it lacks much in the way of personal stakes and commitment. The only way to get those qualities is to actually put yourself on the line as somebody. So I couldn't stand back and manipulate pieces of text as if I wasn't present in them. We did our best, we tried to make a virtue of necessity, the necessity here being the breaks, the splits, the seams. Instead of trying to conceal them we tried to make them visible.

HB: It's clear that new historicism is part of the postmodern trend in thinking. It welcomes the breakdown of genres; it invites discontinuities.

SG: It's queasy about traditional notions of causality, and about what is background and what is foreground.

HB: And though you don't use the term "postmodern," there's the same desire to accent voices that have been suppressed or peripheral in the past.

SG: Even the term new historicism wasn't my original intention. I am queasy about jargon, I'm queasy about intellectuals, especially literary intellectuals, writing themselves out of the comprehensibility of a larger public. People say, well, you don't expect theoretical physics to be transparent. But we're not doing theoretical physics. It seems to me our first obligation is simply to be understood outside of a tiny circle of people. Some of my best friends write in an unintelligible way, or are in love with difficulty. I'm not in love with difficulty.

HB: What is the relationship of new historicism to cultural studies?

SG: I'm a very ginger fellow traveler of cultural studies. One simple way of describing new historicism is to say that it's interested in the symbolic dimensions of historical practice, and the in historical dimensions of symbolic practice. And that's a way of describing cultural studies.

The trouble with cultural studies is, first of all, that it's very easy to lose track of the point of complex readings of, say, the contemporary barbershop or restaurant. That's connected to a second, more telling problem, which has to do with my profession more generally, namely the loss of the saliency, the power, the wonder of the object. Cultural studies risks becoming fancy discourse about nothing, or about smaller and smaller objects, objects that are not very compelling. In terms I've used elsewhere, the danger of cultural studies is that it can be all resonance and no wonder.

HB: In "Practicing New Historicism," you pick an object like the potato, and unearth it on all sorts of levels. That's not so different from a barbershop, is it?

SG: I could be revealing a split in new historicist practice if I say that my choice of object was bread, rather than the potato, that is to say, Eucharistic bread, the quintessential object of wonder. Cathy's object was the potato. My original title for this book was going to be, "Bread and Potatoes." But we thought that was too coy.

HB: This seems to me to be the book of yours which new historicism reveals itself most.

SG: I was drawn screaming and kicking toward this. I very much resist coming clean. But insofar as I could, this book does. One fascinating problem with post-structuralism -- Lacanianism most spectacularly -- is that what began as a subversive explosion very easily becomes a school with a dogma, a party with highly defined set of practices. I understand why it happens; it reflects the power of the charismatic moment. But we try to resist what Weber calls the routinization of charisma as long as possible, to leave some running room, to keep going in whatever intellectual pursuit.

If you look around, broadly speaking, you see that it's actually hard to keep going. People have a certain exciting moment, and the question is how do you keep engaged, how do you keep moving out in new ways. Once you have a position, how do you keep from getting locked in it?

HB: You focus on the dichotomy between representation and the desire to come to an end to representation, signification and an end to signification. The body plays an important role here. Sometimes you write as if the body was a sort of bedrock or ground zero of signification. Other times you write as if the body, too, is full of representation so that there is no end point to representation, not even in the body.

SG: It's a little bit like Dante. You seem to circle closer and closer in to the thing itself, the core of the thing itself, which, in your terms, would be the end of representation. And then, in the case of Dante, when you reach the core, you actually pass through its body, and you are out in the circles again. For me, if the "new" in new historicism is anything more than an advertising slogan, as in New Fab, or New Cheer, it means anti-historicism, in the sense trying to reach an end. If historicism means understanding the chain of cause and effect and being able to burrow back to the actual determining cause, then new historicism is against it. You are driven to return the radioactive cultural object to its source of energy, but when you get to the source of energy you haven't found the an endpoint; you've only found a complicated relay point.

HB: At times you write as if the desire to reach an endpoint of representation doesn't just plague historians. You suggest that it's a human urge.

SG: Yes, I suppose that's true. There are various ways of running that particular story, including the psychoanalytic one that has to do with the drive to see the primal scene, the originating moment. My own version is political. I haven't had this fantasy as powerfully as I used to, but I have a feeling, going into this new administration, I'm going to have it again -- namely the desire to see the moment when the money is actually being passed under the table, that never completely visible moment when the exchange takes place. It's the dream of actually stripping away the cover, and seeing the immense power culture gives, say, to the literary object, and asking what the object gives back in return. The desire to take a photograph of that moment, is, for me, the enabling fantasy.

HB: Eliade says the myth of origin is the origin of myth.

SG: Your reference to myth makes me think of Nietzsche and his myth of the eternal return. In fact, one of the many strands that leads into new historicism is the Nietzsche of "The Genealogy of Morals," with its impulse to drive back from a set of abstractions to some process of hidden pain or suffering that generates powerful symbolic values.

I have lots of reservations about Nietzsche but "The Genealogy of Morals," was a book that came to me as something of an upsetting revelation. I remember reading it in high school and feeling my world had been completely turned upside down. I hated it in lots of ways, I was offended by it, but I also felt I could never live the same life after reading it. I still keep coming back to what that book forces
one to look at.

The question is: how do we live with all knowledge that we can dredge up about our deepest values and beliefs? One of the attacks on new historicism, mounted most publicly by Harold Bloom, is that it's a product of resentment. According to Bloom, the impulse to understand the historical roots of literary objects, rather than letting them float free in their imaginative spaces, is a way of belittling them, of cutting them down to size.

This seems to me a preposterous claim. When we allow ourselves to fully register the highest objects of our culture, it's not to belittle them, it's to understand what art is giving us.

HB: Isn't it also the impulse in new historicism to say that some of what you find in canonical literary objects is also found scattered in outside them? And this, a Harold Bloom would not be very pleased to
hear.

SG: Absolutely! The cult of the untrammeled genius, the superman, is the other side of Nietzsche.. To me there's no resentment in seeing that the things we find astonishing and sublime in Joyce or Kafka or Wordsworth or Shakespeare are actually things that we find in ourselves and in the people around us. Otherwise we wouldn't have access to them.

HB: One of the chapters in the book focuses on the relationship between materialism and vitalism in the nineteenth-century, and before. How is it that materialism winds up generating its oppose,vitalism?

SG: Let me give the Hamlet explanation. The Hamlet explanation is that when something dies, it's not actually dead; it's alive in the form of rot. The rot is itself a form of life. The nineteenth-century understood that image of rot in a much more positive sense, as the continual cycling of capital and commodities in the world. It's an account, not of the death of the king but of the creation of markets. The Dickensian image moves away from Hamlet's tragic notion of the death of the king and return of the ghost. Dickens depicts the fishing up of bodies from the Thames at the beginning of "Our Mutual Friend," as part of the bio-economics of poor peoples' lives in London.

HB: Has "materialism" gone out of fashion altogether as a philosophical term? Is it no longer reputable to identify as a materialist?

SG: I'm glad you are asking me that. I think it's reputable. I'm fascinated by materialism in the philosophical sense. I think there's been a huge resurgence of studies in Epicurianism and in Lucretius.

I tell you where I'm going with this. Lucretius's extraordinary poem, "On the Nature of Things," one of the greatest works of late antiquity, was lost, that is to say, was not in circulation, for about 1,000 years. Then in the early fifteenth century, a papal bureaucrat, Poggio Bracciolini, became exceedingly dismayed by what he saw at the Council of Constance, namely the entrapment and killing of the reformer Jan Hus and his associate, Jerome of Prague. Bracciolini writes extraordinary letters back to Florence saying that he's horrified. These people were promised safe conduct, which was arbitrarily removed; they were arrested and executed, and he
couldn't do anything about it. In fact, the executioners tried to leave as little bodily material as possible. They were afraid people would take souvenirs so they burned the bodies and threw the ashes into the water. It's at that very moment that Bracciolini recovers "On the Nature of Things," and launches it again into the world.

"On the Nature of Things," is a text that says that individual objects, including bodies, always pass away but also that things come together again. Things that disperse have a way of hooking back into each other and returning to the world. Lucretius has the astonishing idea about the physical universe that is at the very core of materialism, which is that matter actually doesn't die, that what looks like an end is only a redistribution of the material of the world. That notion of the endless redistribution of material, which is a sublime idea and astonishing idea, is, in effect, relaunched out of the deaths of Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague. That's for me a perfect instance of the bizarre, resonant and crazily accidental conjunction that can encircle a particular historical event. The Catholic Church, as you probably know, didn't put classical texts on the Index; you could read them. If you espoused these ideas in your own voice, you would be executed, or severely punished. But you could circulate and read these texts, as long as they were safely in Latin, and kept to a small number of people. So "On the Nature of Things," this fantastically dangerous text, which argues against fundamental principles of Judaism and Christianity, is launched by the deaths of Hus and Jerome. It's as if Bracciolini found
a way of putting their ashes in a new and surprising form, and launching them back into the world. Now, if that's materialism, I want it.

HB: You frequently introduce a Jewish motif into your studies. In this book, it's the wicked son, the one who, according to the Passover Haggadah, asks the most probing questions at the Seder, and gets scolded for it. You say we're rolling into this new millennium under the guidance of the wicked son, the guidance of continuous doubt.

SG: Yes, or uneasiness about taking part in the meal, about being a contented member of the community, without asking questions. I think this is a splendid moment to identify with the Wicked Son in our own
national culture because we've just gone through a bizarre process [the Presidential Election] in which even those who are on the whole contented with our messy system have had the nauseating experience of
seeing how skeptical one has to be.

HB: So the wicked son is recruiting at this point.

SG: Exactly. This is a moment not to sit down and partake of the meal, but to ask, what is this to us? Why should we participate? We want answers that will not simply fob us off with the same stories we've
always been told.

HB: In "Toward A Poetics Of Culture," an essay in "Learning to Curse," you wrote: "For from the sixteenth century . to the present, capitalism, has produced a powerful and effective oscillation between the establishment of distinct discursive domains and the collapse of those domains into one another."

Where are we now in the oscillation? Wouldn't it seem today's collapse of separate genres and discourses puts us at one extreme?

SG: I would say the utility of that quotation, which I think I would still stand behind, is in relation to our conversation today about new historicism. A critical practice that collapses the cultural object into the historical and social surround is not new historicism. A critical practice that cuts the cord between the cultural practice and the surround is not new historicism. New historicism depends upon the uncomfortable, and what I hope is at the same time fascinating ability to see the object coming out and going in, to see it differentiated and also in powerful league with the world from which it has come. The wicked son is, after all, at the table; he's not somewhere else. At the table but not participating in the meal that everyone else is participating in. That seems to be the situation of the works of art that I care passionately about. That's why they survive. Works that seem perfectly attuned to their period, actually tend not to survive. It's the works that have an odd way of pulling free and then establishing connections with other times and places, while still reaching back to their original moment, that interest me.

Interview by Harvey Blume

Clio's Favorites: Leading historians of the United States, 1945-2000

Superheroes of the Historical Profession

Clio's Favorites: Leading historians of the United States, 1945-2000

A panel of twenty-five historians picked the best scholars of American history since 1945. Thirteen made the grade. For each of these thirteen, a historian with a relevant background was commissioned to write an essay describing his or her life and career. The University of Missouri Press then made the virtuous decision to publish this work with footnotes. The result is Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945-2000. Such a book is unlikely to ever top the bestseller lists (with or without footnotes), but it is an irresistible read for anyone fascinated by the careers of great historians. Robert Allen Rutland, the editor of this collection, notes that the biographical essay for one of the selected historians did not arrive in time to meet the publication deadline. All those who feel that they should have been included in this list of superstars can console themselves with the thought that they were probably the thirteenth historian.

Although limited to an examination of the careers of elite historians, this book provides insight into the growth and development of the American historical profession more generally. One receives the impression that institutional loyalty was stronger a half-century ago. Famous historians seem to have switched employers less often than they do now. The essays also provide a sense of the extent to which a small number of schools--Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Columbia--dominated the field of American history during the years before the GI Bill. Looking back, that world seems small and intimate. Historians, if they were industrious, could read every major work of scholarship that dealt with their broad area of specialization. For example, one could conceivably gain mastery over the most important research in the fields of colonial America or the antebellum era.

The years after the Second World War witnessed significant expansion in the size and funding of the American historical profession. The individuals described in these essays took full advantage of this trend. They worked to establish new fields of inquiry, many of them paying careful attention to the lives and influence of previously neglected groups. It is difficult to imagine, for example, that anyone would now seek to narrate the course of American history while ignoring the activities of women and African-Americans. Most young historians take this for granted. Yet this more expansive notion of history resulted in part from the trailblazing efforts of teachers such as John Hope Franklin, a scholar of American race relations, and Gerda Lerner, a vigorous proponent of women's history. At the same time, hiring practices slowly evolved. The biographical portraits in this book provide evidence of the struggles waged by Jews, women, and African-Americans as they sought positions in America's most esteemed universities. From the standpoint of the historical profession, the progress made in opening the field to a wider diversity of talents will undoubtedly be seen as one of the most significant trends of the post-1945 era.

Focusing on the most successful scholars of American history, this book simultaneously illuminates some of the weaknesses of the profession. Historians tend to be nationalistic in their research interests, most focusing their expertise on a single country. Historians who study their own nation--especially when it is as large and self-absorbed as the United States--tend to be parochial. Such solipsism is unfortunate since the ability to compare the United States to other societies facilitates efforts to zero in on questions of underlying causation in American history. Many of the scholars described in these essays have been leading practitioners of cross-national comparison, which has provided useful perspective on their own areas of specialization. Consider C. Vann Woodward's grasp of Southern history, Howard Lamar's revision of myths about the Western frontier, Gerda Lerner's examination of American women, and Bernard Bailyn's insights into the origins of the American Revolution: all benefited greatly from a willingness to look for answers beyond the United States.
I initially found the inclusion of Arthur Link the most surprising selection in the list. Most of Link's research centered on a single individual, Woodrow Wilson. This is a remarkably narrow compass upon which to found a major reputation. Link's scholarly output, although impressive in terms of both quality and quantity, did not directly shape the historiography of his field to the same extent as did most of the other historians included in this book. Yet John Milton Cooper's splendid essay about Link (marred only by a lack of footnotes) convinced me to revise my opinion. Link's oversight of the project to publish the papers of Wilson, which eventually amounted to sixty-nine volumes, demonstrated that such enterprises can be accomplished with remarkable dispatch (less than thirty years) while maintaining the highest standards of scholarship. All historians who have conducted significant research on the early twentieth century are in his debt. Link is truly a historian's historian.

The authors of these biographical portraits have generally known their subjects personally, either as teachers or colleagues. This proximity proves to be both an advantage and a disadvantage. The willingness to share anecdotes makes the chapters more vivid and entertaining. Jack Rakove's essay gives a glimpse into Bernard Bailyn's famous Harvard seminar on colonial America. Bailyn parodied a course on research methodology that he had once taken, describing in agonizing detail each step in the selection and use of notecards, until the final step, which is to "throw the whole thing out the window." A fine chapter on Edmund Morgan, another scholar of colonial America, reveals him to be a non-believer. It is humbling to consider that Morgan and Perry Miller, the two most influential explicators of the thought of the New England Puritans, were both atheists. Their empathy, willingness to suspend their own beliefs, and historical imagination (disciplined by evidence) continue to set high standards for intellectual historians.

The most obvious drawback of the authors' affection for their subjects and their professional courtesy toward them (especially toward those who are still living) is, in a few of the essays, an unwillingness or inability to maintain critical distance. In the introduction, the editor declares, "The twelve historians covered herein are virtual heroes in the effort to revive history as an important academic discipline." Much of the rest of the book tends to maintain this hero-worshipping attitude. As a result, the essays sometimes fail to raise potentially important connections between the lives and scholarship of their subjects. For example, John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward, both great historians of race relations in the United States, spent decades battling against the conservative scholarly consensus that underpinned the system of racial segregation in the South. But by the early 1970s, their liberal views and support of integration seemed out of step with the increasing popularity of black nationalism and a more polemical style of writing history. Did this sudden shift in the predominant sort of criticism they faced--from being called communist to being called racist and reactionary--affect their scholarship? Likewise, David Donald, a leading historian of the Civil War era, was born in Mississippi a couple of years after the First World War. He presumably grew up with the "Southern view" of the war between the states, then dominant within the American historical profession, which asserted that the Civil War had been needless and avoidable, that the abolitionists and radical Republicans had been villains, and that the efforts to "reconstruct" a South in which African-Americans exercised political power had been foolish and diabolic. How did Donald's own views evolve as historians turned all of these assumptions on their head? Or, to pick one more example, is it pure coincidence that Bernard Bailyn worked on a biography of Thomas Hutchinson, the Loyalist governor of Massachusetts deposed by the start of the American Revolution, at a time when student activism called into question all forms of authority on his own campus? We expect historians to consider such questions when they place intellectuals within a historical context. Insufficient attention in some of the essays to the relationship between the setting and the scholar is the most serious disappointment in this otherwise stimulating and enjoyable volume.

It is not as though the historians that the book describes were ivory tower eggheads oblivious to the societies in which they lived. Gerda Lerner helped found the National Organization of Women. John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward played significant roles in the Civil Rights movement. Richard Hofstadter took public stands at the time of the controversies over McCarthyism and the student left. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., placed his considerable narrative skills at the service of the Kennedy family and thereby, in the eyes of some observers, created doubts about his integrity as a scholar. Less publicly, during the late-1930s, Edmund Morgan's conscience was as tortured as that of Michael Wigglesworth, one of the Puritans he studied. Morgan hesitated between the need to oppose Hitler and his belief in the immorality of war. The fall of France in 1940 finally convinced him to abandon efforts to obtain conscientious-objector status. For the most part, such commitments did not impair the professional activities of these historians. Of course, historical scholarship suffers when historians crudely shape it to suit current political needs. But it also suffers when historians gain abstraction at the expense of completely detaching themselves from human experience.

Review by David Paull Nickles

BUY NOW

The Bitch Is Back

The Bitch Is Back

by Sarah Appleton Aguiar

I have spent some time staring at the cover of Sarah Appleton Aguiar’s The Bitch Is Back. The word ‘bitch’ is fracturing in white over a dull background of maroon and black, four times the size of any other word. Are the blocky cubes at its edges vestiges of quotation marks, or a knowing pointer to Elton John for the pop-savvy reader? Are they gestures to irony? Are they?

Sarah Appleton Aguiar has written a book proclaiming the return of "that vital woman, empowered with anger, wit, ruthless survival instincts – the bitch" into the pages of contemporary fiction. The slim volume seems aimed at a readership somewhere between English Literature (of which Aguiar is assistant professor), and Women’s Studies – and aims, through discussion of a medley of literary texts, to analyse the problem that the bitch has posed for feminists, and for feminist novelists in particular. After all, as Margaret Atwood was asking in 1994 "is it not, today – well, somehow unfeminist – to depict a woman behaving badly?".

Aguiar’s argument is that the ‘second wave’ of feminist writers were so keen to present female characters who provided rich and edifying role models that they shied away from the potent stock figure of the wicked woman. "Alas, what happened to the village gossips, calculating gold diggers, merciless backstabbers, sinful sirens, evil stepmothers, deadly daughters, twisted hags, bags, and crones?" And, beyond the realm of fairy-tale, where were the Gertrudes and Gonerils, the Scarlett O’Haras and Miss Havershams, in the earnest successes of female writers of the sixties and seventies? Her criticism of these writers is that they tended to portray "scores of virtuous victims of oppression"; and that the characters they created were, frankly, rather dull. After all, as many readers of Jane Austen have observed, it is Lizzie Bennet’s flaws that make her lovable as well as complex. Mary Crawford would make a far more entertaining dinner companion than worthy little Fanny Price – and to the extent that we are asked to pretend otherwise, Mansfield Park is the most ‘difficult’ of Austen’s novels.

Analysis of more than a hundred literary texts leads Aguiar to the conclusion that the ‘bitch’ is far from being merely a product of a distorting male imagination. Many of the most terrifying female characters in literature have been dreamed up by women – from the "sadistic and torturous" Miss Minchin in Frances Burnett’s children’s classic, A Little Princess, to the "enormously malignant" Rebecca in Du Maurier’s eponymous novel. Does this prove that female authors have subscribed to oppressive or patriarchal paradigms about the way in which women are supposed to behave? Aguiar prefers to believe that "the bitch’s ubiquitous presence in all – not just male-written literature – attests to her lasting endurance": this character, she suggests, is a key Jungian archetype ("the woman dominated by animus"), and not a figure who can be so lightly written out of literary history. Her study ends with a celebration of the ‘return of the bitch’ in the work of contemporary feminist writers, focusing closely on two recent novels – Toni Morrison’s Paradise, and Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.

The distinction between the practice of ‘second wave’ and contemporary feminist writers frames this book, and seems to me both interesting and plausible. The final section, ‘Syzygy’ provides detailed analysis of two books that Aguiar sees as symptomatic of recent practice – Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride – both books where "the bitch is found to have vital existence". Aguiar is clearly well-acquainted with Margaret Atwood’s fiction and her critical pronouncements; the latter, in fact, become a key motif threading through the book. And, it strikes me, Aguiar’s reading of The Robber Bride, is interesting precisely to the extent that her approach coincides with, or derives from, Atwood’s own. So, there is a logic behind discussing the four female characters as representative of "the four structural forms of female archetypes: Amazon, Mother, Medium, and Hetaira" because Atwood is herself a writer working within this tradition of Jungian typology. To the reader of Margaret Atwood who is unversed in Jung, Aguiar may be a useful guide – particularly to the reader who is interested in questions of intentionality.

The reader who wants literary criticism or evaluation of The Robber Bride, however, would be better advised to look elsewhere. Aguiar’s approach to reading characters, deftly achieved though it may be, falls far short of providing a thorough reading of texts. We might consider, as an example, a sentence that comes at the end of Aguiar’s discussion of The Robber Bride: "Yet, this time, Zenia’s machinations are boringly transparent". The word ‘boringly’, if intended as literary criticism, would usually be inflected in the writer’s direction – suggesting that the novel’s ending was dully or mechanistically achieved; that Atwood had not managed to make Zenia a continually engaging character. Aguiar, however, is always more interested in questions of morality than technique: her criticism is directed not at Atwood as writer, but Zenia as character – as someone who has failed, all along, to truly possess the female "life force".

Aguiar’s desire to read characters rather than texts is the problem that haunts this book; at least from the standpoint of literary criticism. I find it hard to see how anyone could expect to be able to treat a hundred and thirty texts within as many pages (and among these, King Lear, Madame Bovary, Heart of Darkness ...) and find something of interest to say about any of them. Hard even to see how anyone could intimately know this number of canonical works. The two central chapters (‘The Male Perspective’ and ‘Women Reading and Writing the Bitch’) offer us a lightning tour through literary history by positing a typology of female character types – from ‘the femme fatale’, via ‘the domineering shrew’ to ‘the devouring mother’. Texts are introduced in one or two sentences; invoked in support of a particular point; and then abandoned in the pursuit of system-building and classification. Inevitably, factual mistakes occur, as when Aguiar refers throughout to ‘Lady’ Caroline Bingley, in Pride and Prejudice. More frequently, complex texts are reduced to crude formulas – "In Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, for example, Serena Merle, is condemned far more in the novel than is the self-serving, villainous Gilbert Osmond". Frequently the writing is ugly: "the self-desexed Miss Havisham uses her seemingly elemental knowledge of the masculine in her overtly developed animus to expertly train Estella as an apprentice who will manipulate Pip...". Can you bear me to continue?
To judge The Bitch Is Back by the standards of traditional literary criticism – with its aims of reflectiveness, ‘close reading’, and generosity to the text – is in some ways unhelpful. The problem is perhaps more with presentation than content: the book has been dressed up, with a few rhetorical flourishes, as literary criticism, when all its impulses lie elsewhere. In this respect, the first full chapter (‘To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type’) seems the most honest: Aguiar is here explicitly setting up her intellectual project, which is "feminist revision of Jungian archetypal theory". As a contribution to a closed dialogue conducted among feminist Jungians The Bitch Is Back becomes immediately a more respectable and understandable piece of work – although not one with a very broad appeal.

To a reader outside this tradition, however, Aguiar’s methodology is awkward in the extreme. In support of her project, Aguiar quotes Bettina Knapp on the value of an archetypal criticism "which takes the literary work out of its individual and conventional context and relates it to humankind in general". It does not seem to occur to her that many readers – not only committed historicists – might think this a Bad Idea; that to this common reader it makes little sense to discuss Jean Rhys by saying "In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette/ Bertha has a chance to tell her own story", as if Charlotte Bronte’s invention, Bertha, had some independent and permanent existence beyond the pages of Jane Eyre. A reader who is not a Jungian is, after all, unlikely to believe that the characters in a novel, any more than its descriptions of the weather, or average length of sentences have any ‘reality’; any ability to be separated from the rest of the text. This need not, I think, mean that Jungian criticism is uninteresting to anyone who is not a full-blown subscriber: but one might wish that, if she does want to engage with a broader discipline, Aguiar were more theoretically self-conscious, more aware that her own beliefs are – if not quite cranky – at least unusual among modern critics. Annis Pratt (to whom Aguiar refers a good deal), and who may be considered pretty much the godmother of this type of criticism was, in 1981, much more theoretically ruminative and explanatory – "I want to reiterate the pragmatic basis of my approach...A dogmatic insistence upon preordained, invariable sets of archetypal patterns would distort literary analysis...".

Aguiar would have strengthened her overarching argument, which makes a fine distinction between ‘second wave’ feminist writers and contemporary practice, if she had been willing to plump for the pragmatism of close reading, rather than hazy schematization. In a world where readers and writers emerge from ever more disparate theoretical backgrounds, it is surely this broad commitment to close and careful reading that keeps ‘Eng. Lit.’ as a valuable umbrella term. And I suspect that the odd pair of quotation marks - a dollop of light-heartedness, a soupcon of irony - would have made this polemical book a little less "stone cold sober as a matter of fact".

by Hannah Sullivan

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Timothy Tunny Swallowed a Bunny

FROM THE WINDOW SEAT: CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Timothy Tunny Swallowed a Bunny by Bill Grossman

I do a lot of squawking when it comes to rhyming in picture books. People all too frequently just don’t know what they’re doing and end up unleashing poetic monstrosities on poor, unsuspecting children. However, I’m more than willing to admit (and frankly, overjoyed) when somebody gets it right. Timothy Tunny is a little different, since it’s a collection of poems rather than a rhyming story, but it can easily take its place on the shelf next to a book like Where the Sidewalk Ends. Each poem is about a different hysterical character, each with his/her own wonderful eccentricities. Obviously, there’s Timothy Tunny, the bunny-swallower of the title, but there’s also the man who insists he doesn’t exist, who uses his trait to covort in the mud ("I’m glad I’m not here," / He says, "for I fear / If I were I’d be covered with crud."), Kevin T. Moses with his 17 noses (Kevin T. Moses / Has seventeen noses, / Each birthday he grows a new nose), and a host of others, all completely delightful to read.

As funny as each poem is, amazingly Kevin Hawkes’ illustrations manage to take the humor even farther. My favorite is his painting of the woman in town who is afraid that she’ll drown. Grossman hits us with a poem about a woman so afraid of drowning that she affixes a small scuba suit to her nose. Hawkes then does him one better by showing us the woman sitting in a boat in the middle of the desert. Fantastic.

Dog’s Colorful Day by Emma Dodd

Counting books are usually pretty dull. Sure, they serve a great purpose, but ho-hum. Yeah,, 1-10, got it. Emma Dodd, however, seems to have done the impossible – she’s made a counting book that’s fun, and actually tells a good story in the process. Our main character, Dog, is white with one black spot. As he goes about his day, he manages to acquire new spots here and there. Red jam under the table – now he’s got 2 spots. Accidental tail dip in some paint – 3 spots. This simple but clever conceit continues until Dog has ten spots, and then we get a recap. And the really sneaky thing is that Dodd manages to get a color lesson in here as well (each of Dog’s new spots is a different color). But, since the counting and colors come in the course of a story, a fun story, you don’t feel like a lesson is being crammed down your throat, which is the way learning should be.

Since the title is Dog’s Colorful Day, obviously the illustrations are going to be colorful. They’re bright and happy, and as simple as the story. A perfect match, and a good read.

Pepito the Brave by Scott Beck, Dutton

Ah, the time in life when one has to leave home. Some people find it easier than others, but no one seems to have as hard a time with it as Pepito. Pepito is a little bird who needs to leave the nest, but the problem is, he’s afraid of heights. This makes flying away a bit of a problem. (I’d imagine that it would make living in the nest no picnic too, but this never gets addressed.) So like most people (or birds in this case) he avoids it. When he finds himself in a new situation, someone happens by to give him some advice. A fox suggests he run to where he’s going (I got nervous when he came across a fox, but fortunately the food chain doesn’t apply here), a frog tells him to hop, a gopher to burrow. After his various attempts to not fly, he makes it to his brothers’ and sisters’ new tree, and realizes that what he’s done is much harder than actually trying to fly. It’s a charming story with a good message – often facing up to our fears is much easier than running from them.
Beck’s illustrations are simple and fun. Pepito is a red, round little thing, and despite his apparent simplicity, Beck is able to convey a wide range of emotions on Pepito’s face. We see fear, determination, and the desire to succeed despite his fears.

The Stray Dog by Marc Simont, HarperCollins

As someone who has taken in his share of stray animals, I can totally relate to the family in The Stray Dog. While picnicking one day, they befriend a dog that wanders by. Everyone immediately falls in love, but they leave him behind, figuring he belongs to someone else. But as the week goes by, none of them can get the dog, that they’ve named Willy, off their mind. So naturally the next Saturday they go back to that same spot to see if Willy’s still there. They find that not only does he not have an owner, but they’ve arrived just in time to avert a catastrophe. Kids who love animals will definitely get caught up in the action, and even those who don’t will appreciate the quick thinking children who save the day.
Simont’s watercolors have a nice softness that complement the appealing story. They give the pictures a sort of dreamy feel, almost like a long-remembered story, which it turns out this is. Simont based the book on an experience his friend had, and knowing this, it all makes perfect sense.

Car Wash by Sandra Steen and Susan Steen, illustrated by G. Brian Karas, Putnam

When I was little I used to love to go to the car wash. All the suds and big fuzzy scrubbers always provided a fun opportunity to imagine all sorts of adventures. Sandra and Susan Steen apparently felt the same way, and they have done a great job of capturing this experience in Car Wash. They portray a trip through the car wash as a submarine mission, and not only that, they do it using very few words. "What’s that? Giant arms. Octopus. Whomp! Thomp!" It’s a very impressionistic story, and the words they do use are ones that make for a fun read-aloud. Who wouldn’t like yelling "Whoosh! Whoosh! Hurricane!"?

G. Brian Karas had his work cut out for him. How can you make the weird mechanisms of a car wash look fun? Well, he somehow pulls it off. Jets spraying water pop out from all angles, air jets form convoluted patterns, and the addition of some nontraditional media to his paintings, such as felt and starfish make for a unique look as fin as the text.

By Erik P. Kraft

Justice as Fairness: A Restatement

"Faith, Social Hope and Clarity"

Justice as Fairness: A Restatement

John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (TJ) appeared three decades ago, in the heyday of analytic moral philosophy. (Analytic moral philosophers, to generalize incautiously, disparage systematic, constructive ethical theorizing in favor of inquiry into the meaning and cognitive status of moral judgments.) TJ immediately won widespread acclaim because it was as technically sophisticated as most work then being in done in the analytic tradition, yet highly constructive and fully substantive in its concerns. The book showed that philosophical ethics could legitimately aspire to be much more than the logical "clarification" of moral concepts recommended by philosophers like R.M. Hare. Perhaps what impressed Rawls’ early readers most was that he seemed to present a workable alternative to utilitarianism, widely accepted when TJ made its debut. "Each person," he asserted on the book’s first page, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." No utilitarian could accept that proposition, but it lay at the heart of the theory Rawls called "justice as fairness."

Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (JAF) is a concise, self-contained, and up to date presentation of Rawls’ views. The book originated as a set of lectures for a political philosophy course that Rawls taught for many years at Harvard. In their most revised form, the lectures fully incorporated the reformulation of the theory of justice as fairness put forward in Political Liberalism (PL) of 1993. While JAF does not present any theoretical departures from PL, it deals with important topics Rawls never fully addressed before such as Marx’s critique of liberalism and the moral short-comings of welfare state capitalism. (A welfare state, unlike a property-owning democracy or a liberal democratic socialist regime, he says, is incapable of realizing the main values of justice as fairness.) Rawls’ long-time readers will also be pleased to find that JAF includes careful replies to Sandel, Sen, Okin and other critics on issues ranging from health care to the legal status of gender differences. Much less dense than TJ, and far more perspicuous than the PL, JAF will surely be the text henceforth used to teach Rawls in political philosophy courses.

Justice as fairness has strong ties to the social contract tradition: principles of justice conceived of as basic terms of social cooperation are to be selected in a fair choice situation (the "original position"). The justification of the principles proceeds in two stages. In the first, the principles are provisionally selected as specifying basic terms of social cooperation. In the second, it is demonstrated that the conception of justice codified by those principles has the required property of being stable. Rawls characterizes a conception of justice as stable when those brought up in a society effectively regulated or "well-ordered" by its principles would (by known laws of moral psychology) acquire a strong allegiance to basic social institutions. The need to meet this requirement has motivated Rawls in his recent thinking to pursue what he describes as a "political" conception of justice.

According to Rawls, a pluralism of incompatible, yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines is characteristic of a society with liberal democratic institutions. (A philosophical, religious, or moral doctrine is described as "comprehensive" when it includes "conceptions of what is of value in human life, and ideals of personal character, as well as ideals of friendship and of familial and associational relationships, and much else that is to inform our conduct, and in the limit to our life as a whole." Since no one comprehensive doctrine is endorsed by all citizens in a pluralistic society, no such doctrine can be used to justify terms of social cooperation that will be acceptable to all. Instead, a conception of justice must be purely political or "freestanding," drawing only upon certain fundamental ideas of personhood, society, and reason implicit in the public, political culture of a democratic society. These ideas are used to structure the original position. They are the shared point of departure for deliberation on principles; it is presupposed that all those who enter into the original position accept them. Only a political conception of justice, Rawls thinks, will be able to win the support of what he calls an "overlapping consensus" of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. The support of an overlapping consensus is necessary condition of a conception’s stability in a pluralistic context.
In what follows below I shall very briefly argue, first, that the notion of an overlapping consensus does not seem actually to contribute to the justification of a political conception already accepted in the first stage of justification; and second, that, contrary to Rawls’ suggestion, what mandates a political approach to the problem of specifying principles of justice cannot in fact be the issue of stability.
To reiterate, one of the main features of a political conception of justice is that its content is derived from certain fundamental ideas implicit in the public political culture of a democratic regime. They are sufficiently complex and so widely accepted that Rawls thinks it possible to work up an acceptable political conception of justice for a constitutional regime on their basis. Among these fundamental ideas, that of society as a fair scheme of cooperation for mutual advantage, and that of citizens as free and equal persons are central to the construction.

Implicit in both of these ideas, Rawls says, is the notion that a citizen is politically reasonable when she is willing to propose and abide by terms of social cooperation so long as they are acceptable to all other reasonable citizens. Principles of justice and the exercise of power they authorize are legitimate only when they can be freely endorsed by all reasonable citizens. Reasonableness, in this sense, is the expression of the criterion of reciprocity, identified by Rawls in PL as the "intrinsic normative and moral ideal" of his political conception justice.

Now, as mentioned above, Rawls thinks it is an important requirement in any conception of justice that it should be able to win the support of an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. This is necessary if a conception accepted in the first stage of justification is also to be accepted in the second. Jürgen Habermas, however, has argued that Rawls’ notion of an overlapping consensus does not seem to contribute to the justification of a conception of justice already accepted in the first stage of justification. I think Habermas is right. For it is hard to see how a conception might win the support of citizens in the first stage, yet nonetheless turn out to be incompatible with their philosophical, religious, or moral views in the second. Since it is assumed that citizens who enter into the original position (and thus conceive it as a fair choice situation) accept the fundamental, democratic ideas, principles of justice derived from those ideas ought to be compatible with any reasonable comprehensive doctrine they might also espouse. In fact, Rawls generally characterizes a comprehensive doctrine as reasonable if it is compatible with or incorporates the fundamental ideas in question. A comprehensive doctrine that, for instance, rejected the idea of citizens as free and equal, would not be reasonable, and a citizen espousing such a doctrine could not be expected to accept the set-up of Rawls’ choice situation as fair. Further, in PL (p. 149), Rawls says that the "depth" of an overlapping consensus does not go beyond common acceptance of the fundamental ideas in question. So, if a (rational) citizen holds a comprehensive doctrine that is genuinely reasonable, there ought to be no grounds emerging from that doctrine for rejecting principles of justice that are worked up from the fundamental ideas.
Rawls says that "the problem of stability in a democratic society leads us to specify a political conception of justice and the domain of the political so as to make it possible for a political conception to be the focus of an overlapping consensus… Otherwise, the institutions of a constitutional regime will not be secure." However, the question of whether a conception of justice is stable (posed in the second stage of justification) arises only after a society effectively regulated or "well-ordered" by its principles is assumed to have come into being. Since it belongs to the notion of a well-ordered society that all its citizens publicly accept the institutionalized principles of justice, and since no non-political conception of justice could be accepted by reasonable citizens, the question of stability can arise only for a political conception of justice. Thus, from an intra-theoretic standpoint, it cannot be the problem of stability that motivates the specification of a political conception of justice. Rather mere reasonableness requires of citizens (in the first stage of justification) that they select freestanding or comprehensive-doctrine-independent principles of justice. The anteriority of the issue of reasonable acceptability to that of stability precludes construing the latter as what mandates a political approach to formulating principles of justice.

I am grateful to Juliet Floyd, Bernard Prusak, and T.M. Scanlon for their helpful criticisms of an earlier version of this review.

Review by Robert Brisco

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