The Theoretical Limits of the New Historicism Richard Lehan THIS ESSAY is a prolegomenon to a longer study on which I am presently at work. I could just as well have entitled it "The Consequences of the Synchronic--or the Dangers of Spatializing Time." This alternative title is somewhat larger than my given title, which I keep because it helps me to focus my ideas by examining a limited number of writers--especially the "repre- sentation" school at Berkeley, as it has come to be known, with their effort to combine the rhetorical and tropological with the element of documentary and the Annals School kind of archival and historical research. In this essay, I shall offer a brief historical background of how we got ourselves into the present situation, shall try to illustrate some of the theoretical dangers of the new historicism by focusing on one fairly representative example of that method- ology, and, lastly, I shall try to offer an alternative to such readings by suggesting the way we can restore process to our use of history. I would like to suggest at the beginning that since the seventeenth century our ways of talking about history have come off of three dominant models. We have had Enlightenment history with its emphasis upon the empirical and its built-in belief in Progress. Behind such a view of history resides an essentially mechanistic view of nature: we must study matter in motion as such matter unfolds in a cause and effect process, the process itself subject to the understanding of scientific law. Behind this view of history is the Robinson Crusoe experience. Like Crusoe, man must go to nature, examine it empirically, turn those empirical observations into a system of laws by which we understand how nature works, and then turn that understanding into forms of control; this finally leads to wealth by exploiting the riches of the wilderness and to the justi- fication of intensifying such a system of thought in the name of Progress. Defoe's three volume Tour Through England reworks these assumptions, as do Hobbes's Leviathan and the positivistic writings of Comte. We have also had Romantic history with its emphasis upon cyclical theory, the organic nature of being, and a belief in Destiny. Romantic history was in part a reaction to Enlightenment history. The idea of science was challenged by the idea of myth, the idea of mechanistic matter gave way to the belief that matter was infused with mind, which encouraged a belief in a vitalistic nature on the one hand and a sense of historical destiny on the other. The processes of history and nature seemed to be at one. Birth, maturity, and death found a parallel in sunrise, noon, and sunset as well as in life as seasonal change. The individual recapitulated movement through spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Nature was always unfolding, symbolically there to be read. This view of history can be found in Vico and with some shades of difference in Hegel, Spengler, and Toynbee. It is the very basis of a romantic view of time and holds together the vision of what Harold Bloom has called the visionary company, which takes us from Blake, through Shelley, to Emerson and Whitman, into such moderns as Yeats and Hart Crane; the poetic organization of time here parallels the historical. We have finally a postmodern view of history with its emphasis upon structure and paradigm. The postmodern assumption is that we do not "know" history but only the paradigms that we bring to the explanation of what we call history. The postmodern view resists the belief that meaning is built into time. In this context, nature no longer unfolds or reveals meaning symbolically: nature is no longer a mirror of reality. Instead, substance gives way to signs, reality to relations, and meaning to hermeneutics; we create rather than discover meaning. While their beliefs are hardly of a piece, many of the ideas here can be found in the writings of Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault. As my caveat suggests, the above categories need refinements within refinements before they can carry much of the extreme complexity connected with these modes of thought. I offer them here because I believe that these are the basic modes of modern historical thought and that with such refinements they can be useful ways of looking at the kinds of history that we have entertained since the seventeenth century. At that time, religious and scientific discourse came into conflict; the scientific impulse was later carried on in the name of Enlightenment optimism; the religious impulse was carried on in the name of Romantic myth and symbolism and a belief in the vitalistic energy of matter. One can see the former urge expressed by the Encyclopedists; the latter urge by someone like Flaubert who, in Bouvard et Pocuchet, satirizes this bourgeois, quantitative state of mind. Joyce picks up exactly where Flaubert leaves off and, in Ulysses, shows the protean reaches of matter, especially as it flows through and is re-energized as new life in the female body. It is this process of life to which Molly Bloom says "yes" at the conclusion of the novel. In a reverse of the Encyclopedist Flaubert/Joyce experience, Karl Marx drained spirit from the idea of Hegel, insisted on a materialistic interpretation of history, and yet maintained that such a process would take us to an idealized state of communism. In practice, these historical modes are seldom pure, and the way they get mixed is always fraught with ideology. And it is precisely my belief that ideology is built into modes of time that I want to address here. Postmodern history has been most energetic in suppressing this view, has been trying to break down the belief that history involves a "flow" of time by substituting paradigms for process. But the use of paradigm itself, as I hope to show, involves forms of representation which contain a sense of time as having direction or, equally revealing as in the case of Foucault, of history as being static, a matter of representation that is equally ideological. Much of the new historicism assumes that history has no direction even as it takes the idea of direction as its object of attack. Thus no theory of history--or of literary criticism- is neutral but carries within it an ideology that consciously or unconsciously fixes one's relationship to a culture and is reinforced by principles of power--academic, political, and legal forms of power. I am particularly interested in what happens when we substitute sequential or diachronic time for synchronic or spatial time. In this context, I should like to raise two questions concerning the new historicism, one methodological, the other substantive. First, it is my belief that the new historicism is without a methodology that gives coherence to it as a movement. What we have from this group is a series of discrete and diverse readings of literary texts and cultural periods as if these readings were bound by doctrine. Second, as the new historicism is applied to literary (especially narrative) texts it often creates a disjunction between what the text is saying about history and what the historian is saying about the text. It is exactly this inability to come to terms with the diachronic nature of some of our main literary and historical texts that presents for me the main problem in both new historicism and representational] kinds of reading. What I am suggesting is that the direction we believe time takes has a political quotient to it, even (perhaps especially) when such a belief is denied or displaced by the idea of synchronic time. And third, I believe that even structuralists and poststructuralists historicize even as they disclaim history. Semiotics for example, depends totally on reading signs in a historical/cultural context. And as the historical moment changes, so does the meaning of the sign. A burning American flag means something different after the Vietnam protest than it did before, just as the Berlin Wall means something very different in November of 1989 than it did in August of 1961. It does matter textually that T. S. Eliot comes after Shakespeare, because he brings 350 years of historical reference to his text that Shakespeare did not have. We cannot think of warfare after Hiroshima as we did before it, anymore than we can think of the novel after Ulysses in the same way as we did before it. And we can never read modern novels in quite the same way after Borges, Nabokov, and Robbe-Grillet, any more than we can think of the text in the same way after Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault In denying history, we affirm it, because our denial can never be separated from a historical context--a historical moment that can never be totally eclipsed by the dictates of language, rhetoric, and tropological play, or by a theory of the synchronic. I I The idea of the synchronic is inseparable from our obsession with form, and the germ of the idea can be found in the works of such Russian Formalists as Shklovsky, Tomashevsky, and Eichenbaum and Roman Jakobson who left Moscow for Prague, then Prague for Paris, and then Paris for New York, where he and Levi-Strauss were instrumental in laying the theoretical basis of structuralism in such Joint essays as their seminal study of Baudelaire's "Le Chat." Levi-Strauss has maintained that his method is not antihistorical, and it is true that he deals with the surface structures of society and culture; but he ultimately believes that these surface structures are controlled by deep structures that abide in the human mind, which makes historical difference both accidental and redundant. Universal structures underpinned an essential reality that bound different cultures together without their knowing it. History gave way to the archaeology of the mind. This idea in turn did not long remain unchallenged. Michel Foucault--in a series of brilliant books on such subjects as illness madness, sexuality, crime and punishment, economics and exchange--challenged the very idea of any period organized around central ideas, whether they were the ideas that came from L vi Strauss's deep structures or Arthur Lovejoy's history of ideas methodology. Every period of time was more complicated than the paradigm which ordered it; the eighteenth century was as much an age of madness as of reason; cultural signifiers never quite added up to a fixed sense of the signified. Foucault shook the literary temple by enlisting the likes of the Marquis de Sade, H lderlin, and especially Nietzsche to challenge the old, easy truths. The social margins challenged the center, and the disrupted center challenged the very idea of historical origin. In an essay entitled "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" (1971), Foucault asks the question that becomes central to the postmodern attack on history: Why does Nietzsche challenge the pursuit of origin (Ursprung), at least on those occasions when he is truly a genealogist? First, because it is an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their perfect possibilities, and their carefully protected identities, because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession. This search is directed to "that which was already there," the image of primordial truth fully adequate to its nature, and it necessitates the removal of every mask to ultimately disclose an original identity. However, if the genealogist refuses to extend his faith to metaphysics, if he listens to history, he finds that there is "something altogether different" behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.l What Foucault is discussing here is the basis for the difference between eighteenth and nineteenth century faith in essences (whether it be the "essential" reality we find in the novels of Fielding, Dickens, Balzac, or Hugo or in the history of Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, or Burckhardt), and the twentieth century challenge of essences that we find in the novels of Sartre, Robbe-Grillet, Nabokov, and Borges or in the antihistory of Nietzsche, Freud, Roland Barthes, and Foucault himself. What Sartre had done to the idea of human nature (there is no essential nature: man is only the sum of his actions) Nietzsche, maintains Foucault, did to the idea of history (there are no essential events or ideas in history: only a random, mutually exclusive sequence of documents). Foucault thus begins where Nietzsche leaves off. This is the Nietzsche who challenged both enlightenment optimism and Christian morality; he bewailed the discrepancy between man and nature, especially man inhibited by Christian doctrine and practice. He wanted to return to a "natural" man; yet he did not want to return to a natural universe because that would replicate Rousseau's world, complete with God. So he suggested that man must define himself in relation to a universe without God--to consciousness confronting an unmade universe. Man thus became the agency of his own being. Foucault takes us one step further: by eliminating the realm of subjectivity between man and the universe, man becomes part of a codification system a sign among other signs. Madness is no longer a pathological state of being but a way of discourse within a system of discourse in separable from other forms of representation. If for Nietzsche, God is dead; for Foucault, man is dead, at least metonymically. Within the structuralist/poststructuralist context, any theory of modern history must come to terms with what appear to be the contradictory claims of Levi- Strauss and Foucault. Levi-Strauss, who comes closer to the nineteenth century assumptions of history believes in a kind of essential reality buried in the deep structures of culture and inseparable from mind. Foucault, on the other hand, establishes the foundation of postmodern history by challenging a fixed order as well as an authority--human or divine--that would give history meaning. And as Foucault drains meaning from history, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida drain meaning from the literary text--and for the same reason: the failure to find an authority that can arrest the flow of signifiers. Derrida, as we know, begins by attacking the logocentric in western metaphysics. He begins with the sturdy assumption that some form of truth--separated from error--does not precede our thinking. Embedded in language is not only a sense of difference but also of deferral. Derrida leaves us suspended between a "presence" and a "trace," always in transit between two poles of any journey, in a world without origins and without ends: we are "between promise and memory, thanks and fidelity, thought and the promise of truth."2 Derrida's world depends on not having either sequence or consequence; it is a world robbed of process and agency. His position, taken to its conclusion, leads to the dead end of ethical time, a realm of being where there is thought without action, where hymens are never penetrated, where the disseminated seed never impregnates, where Hegel and Genet undo each other in perpetuity, where being is robbed of both subjectivity and materiality, where the narrative moment is emptied of human dimension, and where our sense of the human actor and historical unfolding is negated by the suspended presence of the text and intertextuality. Derrida has chosen to dwell in the realm of suspension between dialectical poles of choice rather than engage alternatives; he must defer his sense of difference rather than engage it, an exercise that turns the human predicament into a rhetorical aporia, freezes time, and surrenders to the synchronic. What Derrida does on the level of discourse, Paul de Man accomplishes on the level of rhetoric. What is interesting about de Man's practical criticism is that much of it is given over to examination of lyrical poetry (Rilke, for example) or to the expository (Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy"). When de Man is interested in a novel--as, for example, in his essay on Proust--he does not deconstruct the language of the text; rather he deconstructs selected passages. Now what can this mean? Are the passages meant to embody the meaning of the novel as a whole--part for whole, as in the old New Criticism? Hardly. And are the passages chosen at random, undirected by the subjectivity of the chooser? Obviously not. The passages de Man looks for are ones in which the grammar and the rhetoric are in conflict, where there is a discrepancy between paradigmatic and syntagmatic, metonymy and metaphor, or where the literal simply upends the figural. Such an exercise collapses the language of the text in a very privileged way and suspends the narrative flow of the text by locating meaning in a kind of rhetorical frieze. What gets repressed in de Man's reading of texts is, of course, time; flux is frozen static by a preoccupation with rhetorical forms of play; and, perhaps more important, de Man substitutes a rhetorical unfolding based on an examination of discrete passages for the narrative unfolding of the novel as a whole. As Hayden White has pointed out, language I or someone like Ernst Cassirer was viewed as a mediating agency between categories of the mind and the world given to thought in perception.3 The postmodernist, on the other hand, views language, according to White, "as constitutive both of the categories and the perception ordered by them" (233). Poetry becomes the authority here, especially as defined by Nietzsche and Mallarme, and gives way to what Foucault calls a "revel of forms" (233). As White shrewdly points out, Foucault's epistemes replace narrative line, become "diagnoses" or contexts for historical discourse, and hence function much like Kuhn's paradigms. They do not succeed one another dialectically or aggregate; they simply appear by accident. Thus we have no basis for thinking of history as a "revolution" in thought consciousness. One kind of discourse simply replaces another, and Foucault denies a continuity to both history and consciousness. His epistemes--the late Middle Ages to the late sixteenth century; the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; 1789 to the early twentieth century; and a fourth period just emerging--suggest no development or causal connection between or among them, but rather "ruptures in Western consciousness, disjunctions or discontinuities so extreme that they effectively isolate the epochs from one another" (235). Foucault's books thus have theme but not plot. "Their theme is the representation of the order of things in the order of words in the human sciences. If [they are] about anything at all, [they are] about 'representation' itself" (235). White not only penetrates into the logic of the new historicism, at least as practiced by Foucault, but he convincingly shows how embedded in this new history is a theory that has now fashionably emerged as the representation school. White alludes to a different subset of books that might be confused with representational history--such as Gombrich's Art and Illusion, Auerbach's Mimesis, Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and Dilthey's Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften. But Foucault's work differs from these because he refuses to think of representation as "developing" or "progressing," and because he denies the "reality" of these epochs except as categories of mind. There is thus no way that we can represent reality "realistically." Our wedge into history is through tropes or rhetorical figures that generate provisional kinds of discourse. Such discourse is supposedly a realm unto itself, devoid of temporal implications and ideologically neutral. Here is the crux of the argument conveyed by much of the new historicism and the representational school of criticism, and it is to these assumptions that we now must turn. III What Hayden White has allowed us to see is that much of the new history-- especially the representational school--has collapsed the idea of history and the idea of the text. Both are reduced to the tropological, and when we enter a text we fix on the metaphorical: we substitute tropes for reality; we spatialize time and rob it of sequence, direction, and agency. But texts are not so easily controlled, and their narrative force will undo such readings if we give heed. The naturalistic novel works off a mechanistic notion of time. In a novel like Dreiser's Sister Carrie, for example, reality is reduced to matter in motion controlled by causality. If one reverses any one scene in Sister Carrie the action of the novel simply stops and nothing happens. If Carrie had met Hurstwood before Drouet, for example, she would simply have walked past him, gotten off the train, and that would have been the end of the novel. Such causality--and the politics of consequence it implies--is simply ignored in one of the first representation studies of naturalism, Walter Benn Michaels's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Michaels believes that Sister Carrie embodied a sense of desire which he sees as inseparable from capitalism and opposed to an anticapitalistic novel like Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham which advocated the suppression of desire. In order to arrive at this reading, Michaels must account for a character like Robert Ames as an aberration in Dreiser's novel. Michaels tells us that Ames embodied "a state of equilibrium in which one wants only what one has" (35), and he equates Ames with the aesthetics of William Dean Howells. Once the character of Ames is negated, Michaels can continue with his argument, which is that men stimulate the desire for worldly goods in women like Carrie, who in turn believe that they can defy time and old age by remaining constantly young by desiring the commercial goods that money intrinsically embodies. The meaning of Carrie in this novel is for Michaels ultimately metaphorical or tropological; she comes to embody the spirit of capitalism, the embodiment of money and self-perpetuated desire, forms of meaning that find their physical equivalent in the corporation, which, like the futures market, is simply a fiction, a way of positioning oneself in relation to the world. So Carrie becomes a fiction of self within the fiction of the novel: that is, she becomes a fiction of a fiction, and what she fictionalizes--the relationship between money, desire, and the fictional systems which keep them in place--explains why we so deeply identify with her as well as explaining the popularity of Sister Carrie as a novel. Such a reading of Carrie is both lively and provocative and engenders enthusiastic praise from other critics of literary realism that we find on the dust jacket. But such a reading gives me pause for a number of reasons. First, by concentrating so heavily on one trope, Michaels represses as much narrative meaning as he explains. Dreiser brought a strong sense of Spencerian evolution to the novel which never included the system of American capitalism as its ending point. Such a reading negates Dreiser's criticism of the sweatshops that he so graphically described at the beginning of the novel, and such a reading belies a kind of higher beauty that the novel is constantly glimpsing and toward which Ames points. Michaels's handling of Ames seems to me the most serious lapse in his reading. Ames does not uphold "a state of equilibrium" (Dreiser spent almost his whole career denying such ontology), and his advice to Carrie does not lead to a belief in a static world. What he tells Carrie is that she should strive for something higher than her roles in popular stage comedies and musicals. The ending of the novel reinforces his position when Dreiser tells us that "Ames had pointed out a farther step, but on and on beyond that, if accomplished, would lie others for her."5 Michaels's use of money and desire as tropological 542 wedges into the novel does not open it up as readily as would a direct appeal to Dreiser's idea of the city, which does all that Michaels believes that money does in this narrative and, I believe, a bit more. Carrie's sense of desire is stimulated first by Chicago, which opens to her a world of new possibility, and then by New York, which increases such desire by both intensifying and amplifying it. Hurst wood is young and capable enough to succeed in the less complex world of Chicago than he is many years later in the more physically demanding and crueler world of New York. It is exactly this sense of environmental play that Michaels's reading of the novel omits. His reading, in other words, represses what is most naturalistic in a novel like Sister Carrie and tropologically contextualizes the novel in rhetorical terms--places it, that is, in a poststructuralist context, albeit one closer to Foucault than to Derrida. What Michaels does is to give us a postmodern Sister Carrie at the expense of the realistic/naturalistic text. What he misses is that there are no subjects and objects in the phenomenological sense in Dreiser's world--only models like Mrs. Vance who can help fill the emptied self that Carrie will take to her next encounter. Characters like Carrie function in mechanistic terms, lured chemically and causally beyond themselves in a world of biological, urban, and economic forces, trying, usually in vain, to understand this process through an intelligence that is at best half-formed. This version of Carrie is not accommodated by either a poststructuralist or a new historicist reading. In robbing Sister Carrie of its mechanistic principles and of causal time, Michaels robs it of its political representation and import. In Sister Carrie, Dreiser gave us deep insight into the mechanistic city of limits. If one were to have great wealth in Dreiser's world, it would come at the expense of great poverty. For everyone who gets more of the pie, there is someone who gets less. For everyone who rises, somewhere someone falls. Dreiser conveys this idea by counterpointing the story of Carrie's rise against Hurstwood's fall in a narrative in which inevitability is watermarked on every page. It is, interestingly, precisely this aspect of the story that gets left out of Michaels's representational analysis of the novel. Carrie becomes instead the tropological embodiment of capitalistic desire. Michaels then moves from this trope to the historical idea of capitalism. The trope of Carrie's desire is thus kept "non-real," but the idea of capitalism which underpins this trope is historicized. What we thus get in this study--and Michaels's book is typical of how representational criticism works--is a rather puzzling exercise in ontology: the tropological part of the study (Carrie's desire) is kept metaphorical and "unreal" at the same time that it is contextualized historically as part of the "reality" of the connection between the gold standard and American capitalism. In so keeping the "reality" of the text static, the critic does not have to examine the political implications of such a text. We have Carrie and we have American capitalism--the former "represents" the latter without necessitating the burden of asking us where such a story is taking us in time or where it might fit, for example, in the Marxist's spectrum of industrialism to late capitalism, a spectrum that cannot divorce itself so easily from the sequence and the consequence of time as do the representational critics. V The new historicism, firmly modeled on Foucault, is thus fraught with its own problematics. It is really not clear where the discourse comes from. Can Foucault really escape his own subjectivity when he sets up his epistemes, anymore than can de Man when he chooses four or five passages to represent a novel as diverse, complex, and unending as Remembrance of Things Past? What is gained by moving into history through tropological constructs? Why is this mediation superior to any other kind of mediation? And what is lost when through such mediation history becomes part of a tropological frieze rather than a sequence of events? And isn't this frieze actually historicized when, as in the case of Michaels, it is connected with something as specifically historical as the gold standard? And in this context, how do we get from frieze to frieze, or from what Foucault would call episteme to episteme? Foucault, of course, is not interested in the transitions between epistemes. But is not the transition as important as the episteme itself, and is not the movement from one to another fraught with ideology--ideology which should not go unattended and which historicizes the breaks in the paradigms as, indeed, they cannot escape from being historicized? Can physical events--whether in the literary text or in the cultural--be so completely dropped from the realm of physical time? And doesn't our knowledge of physical events--and the order in which they occur- affect the meaning of those events themselves? The subject of time in modern literature is an important one and has never been fully treated in these contexts. The way time works in our major texts is far more complicated, particularly its political implications, than we have been willing to come to terms with. It has been the assumption that poets like Pound and Eliot simply spatialize time by insisting on the matter of simultaneity and the "repeat" in history. But this schema does not come to terms with the cyclical nature of time in these works, and particularly the way these cycles are generated by a belief that the workings of empire have led to the destruction of major cultures and imperial cities-- the famous "falling towers" theme in The Waste Land, which involves for Eliot the collapse of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and next London; and which involves for Pound the fall of Persia, Renaissance Italy, and Jeffersonian America. What a look at such texts reveals is that it is finally impossible to spatialize them so as to make them unrepresentational (as we tend to get in de Man's critiques). The desire to make them unrepre- sentational, I believe, aestheticizes and hence represses the historical subtexts of these works. The subtext of a novel like The Great Gatsby is immensely rich in historical implications that can never get critically discussed so long as narrative time is cut off at the level of rhetoric. In Gatsby, Fitzgerald showed a certain cultural materialism (embodied in Tom Buchanan) exhausting a romantic energy (embodied in Gatsby) leaving us a physical residue (embodied by George and Myrtle Wilson and the Valley of Ashes). Fitzgerald brilliantly showed how romantic expectation was connected with historical ideals always located in the past. By the time that we get to the end of the novel when Fitzgerald would like to find the means of moral escape for Nick Carraway, he cannot convincingly send him to the romantic past because he was too successful as a novelist in showing that past to be empty. What we have here is the opposite of how time works in a novel by Fielding or Dickens which recuperates the plot around a fixed moral center toward which that novel (that is, toward which time) moves. Fitzgerald empties time of such a moral ideal until the novel can no longer be recuperated around such a center. Such a process--and this is a crucial point--is a matter of narrative unfolding rather than deconstructive rhetorical play. Fitzgerald is asking what happens when an idea of self conceptualized in terms of the American past (as embodied in Dan Cody and the idea of the frontier) is played out in the urban world of Tom Buchanan. Here the novel is clearly questioning its own moral center by showing the mechanics of power at work exploiting the vacuum of an exhausted past--a political kind of representation that locates the novel itself squarely in history and allows insights into both the text and into American history--cultural insight from which we are deprived when the text is frozen at the level of rhetorical and tropological play. V Time is not language, and language is not time. We can speak about time in language, but this is not identical with the way we experience time. And we can experience time in reading narratives as well as in daily life. Neither structuralism nor poststructuralism has given us the means to come to terms with this aspect of the text--the means to see in what way the flow of time reorders an signification system. That is why both structuralism and poststruc turalism want to freeze time--to locate it in textual passages that are separate from the narrative flow. Not only must we come t terms with such narrative sequence, we must also examine its ideological implications. While there is no pregiven meaning built into the flow of time--no pregiven dictate which justifies a belief i progress or destiny--every culture can and does superimpose such meaning upon time. Thus cultural meaning cannot be divorce from time: as a culture defines its sense of history, it defines itself and our texts (in the largest sense of that term) cannot be separate from such historical process. It has been argued by critics like lan Watt that the novel was the product of historical change in culture--namely, the rise of the middle class. A new, urban, commercial class no longer wanted t celebrate the glories of the monarchy and the aristocracy as dictate by the structures of the romance, and turned to the narrative form we now know as the novel to celebrate their own rituals of courtship, marriage, family, commerce and exchange and to challenge the events which could threaten their security. As Watt has convincingly shown, a new reading class created the fictional demand for what it in turn received. I would only add to Watt's thesis the fact that the novel did not come to us fully born and that it really evolved-and has continued to evolve--out of a number of subgenres. I am referring, of course, to such subgenres as the diary, the travel adventure, the utopia, the comedy of manners, the gothic, the young man/woman from the provinces novel, the bildungsroman, the detective story, the novel of imperial adventure, the spy novel, the Western, the proletariat novel, the tough-guy novel, the regional novel (such as the Hollywood novel), the dystopian novel, science fiction, and a number of others. All of these narrative subform came into being at different historical moments to codify cultural ideas that were themselves subject to the process of historical change. The early diary, for example, cannot be divorced from the Puritan values that spawned it, and served as a kind of spiritual account book, consistent with the Puritan belief that God revealed his beneficence through physical signs. The novel of travel adventure came into being coincidentally with the rise of the great trading fleet which began journeys literally around the world. The postRenaissance attempt to create a new social order--based on a new urban, merchant class, on a parliamentary form of government more interested in natural (that is, individual) rights than in birth rights, and on a belief in progress through science and the new technology-led to a fantasy projection of these ideas in the form of the utopia. The rise of a new leisure class spawned the man-about-town and the social rogue whose adventuresome threats to domestic stability dominated Restoration drama and supplied in turn a comedy-of manners plot for the novel. I cannot develop each of these separate subgenres, but let me at least suggest how three or four of them worked to establish a connection between history and the literary text. Let's take the gothic first. The shift from a feudal/landed economy to a commercial/urban system led to the decline of the old estate and helped transform the world of the father into the mutant forms that characterize the gothic novel. Novels like Walpole's The Castle of Otranto ( 1764), Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho ( 1794), and Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) treat the passing of the estate and locate origins of evil in the city. When the world of the old father is disrupted, a curse is often put upon the land which disrupts the natural processes in a mysterious, sometimes supernatural way. The victim of this sequence of events is usually a young woman who has been used as a pawn to acquire claim to the estate or to perpetuate its growth. Thus the gothic novel as subgenre is inseparable from the historical process that involves the shift from a landed to an urban society and from a feudal to a commercial economy--and this is as true when we look at the gothic elements in Bronte's Wuthering Heights or Dickens's Bleak House as it is in Richardson's Clarissa or a novel by Monk Lewis. Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is a parodic attempt to exorcise the gothic novel and thus to restore in its purity the idea of the estate. It is, of course, no historical accident that the gothic novel came to America about one hundred to one hundred and fifty years after its birth in England--and for good historical reasons: the historical process that marked the shift from the land to the city came that many years later in America and delayed what really was the American counterpart to the British gothic novel. Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables and Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" fit the paradigm, as does an even later novel, Faulkner's Absalom Absalom!, which accounts for the breakdown of the southern estate and its aristocracy after the Civil War. And if that parallel were not complete in itself, we have Faulkner's Sanctuary which, in its depiction of the desecrated woman who embodies the end of the old virtues, is his rewriting of the Clarissa story. And while they are technically not gothic novels, the historical process at work here is reflected in the novels of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Arthur Donethorne fails to uphold the values of the estate, and Adam Bede is eventually forced off the estate to become another wage earner. Hardy's Jude is the fictional son of Adam Bede, driven from the estate, moving from cathedral town to cathedral town, repairing old medieval cathedrals, a modern man misplaced in historical time, a human emblem of the completion of a historical process. And where the gothic novel ends, the young-man-from-the-provinces novel begins. Whereas the gothic novel depicts the historical end of feudalism, the journey- to-the-city novel depicts the beginning of urbanism. The young are called to the city because only the new city is large enough to accommodate their heightened sense of self. Dickens's Great Expectations and Balzac's Pere Goriot and Lost Illusion are the most famous nineteenth-century versions of this story, but the historical situation that gave it vitality continued into the twentieth century in America where we have counterparts to the European story in Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. What is so culturally important about this subform is that it reveals clearly new attitudes towards the land, the family, money, technology, and the city. The plots of these stories have common structures. First we have the lure of the city, which will later become a trap. We then have the rejection of the old world of the estate or of the family which no longer can hold the ambitious young. The journey to the city often brings about a substitute family--as in Balzac" boarding houses--but these relationships are seldom substantial based as are most city connections on a cash nexus. Drouet gives Carrie twenty dollars when she comes to live with him, and Carrie leaves Hurstwood the same amount when she abandons him: twenty dollars seems to be the going rate in Sister Carrie. And almost everything in The Great Gatsby turns on money--especially on the difference between East Egg and West Egg money. When Daisy learns that Gatsby's wealth comes from bootlegging, she decides she cannot give up Tom Buchanan and the security of his established money. Her relationship with Gatsby was no more substantial than Gatsby's relationship with Wolfsheim; the bond between lovers between a symbolic father and son dissolves into air when the money is withdrawn, and money inside the text works no differently than money outside. No subgenre better codified the full meaning of the commercial society and especially how such a society was creating a new state of mind. Not only are family and personal relationships far more tenuous in the commercial/urban world, but under the influence of the new technology, especially railroad building, the scale of the city is changed. The individual is more vulnerable; the dimensions of the world he lives in not quite so human, as Dickens showed in Dombey and Son. As the city becomes more difficult to fathom, we get the detective who helps personalize it. It is no historical accident that the detective novel comes coincidentally with the rise of the big city. From Dickens's Inspector Bucket to Conrad's Inspector Heat, we have men who cut through the anonymity of the city, fathom its secrets, and help bring it back to human scale or protect its vital center. And it is the vital center of the city that Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes seems to address. Again, historically, it is no accident that Sherlock Holmes's world is set against the rise and the impending fall of the British Empire. London is not only the center of these novels, it is also the center of the world. And as Gibbon clearly showed, every empire weakens its center by giving its energies to the extremities. When the imperial city tries to control colonies all over the world, very seldom can the center hold. In a novel like The Sign of Four, the evil comes into London from India--that is, from the far reaches of the empire. In A Study in Scarlet, the evil comes from America, not literally part of the empire. But Doyle believed that the American Revolution was a mistake and that the destinies of England and America were intertwined. Behind this, of course, was his belief in Anglo-Saxon and white supremacy and in Manifest Destiny. It is thus the function of the detective to protect the imperial center and to root out the evil that comes into London. Sherlock Holmes embodies the system that he comes to protect: he is the man of reason, of science, of technology; he is from the upper class and educated at Oxford; he eventually becomes rich; and he frequents the best city clubs and other haunts of the gentleman. In A Study in Scarlet, the evil is embodied in Enoch Dribber and Joseph Strangerson, whose injustice to Jefferson Hope on the American frontier has brought Hope in revengeful pursuit to London. The novel establishes a strange affinity between Jefferson Hope and Sherlock Holmes--the one, as his name suggests, the embodiment of the frontier dream; the other, urban sophisticate. The relationship between the two becomes symbiotic (even their names are similar); Hope and Holmes become cultural twins, spawned by a historical moment, preserving the spirit of the empire at both its extremity and its center, becoming the means by which the white man's destiny will be fulfilled. Examples can be multiplied from the Doyle canon, but we will seldom find a better example of how narrative subforms are culturally encoded, the text itself inseparable from the historical process which informs it. Both the establishing of the British empire and the settling of the American frontier gave rise to ideologies that found form in narrative subgenres. And if the detective novels of Sherlock Holmes accommodated these ideologies, the novel of imperial adventure and the Western embodied those historical experiences. Kipling offers the most obvious example here, but one does not have to go to Kim to find a state of mind that embodies imperial ideology. Indeed, a novel like Captains Courageous (1897), written when Kipling was living in Vermont, provides a perfect example of a literary text that takes its being from history at the same time that it encodes historical values and serves as an exemplum. We perhaps remember the plot from childhood: the story of Harvey Cheyne, weak and sickly, who falls overboard from an ocean liner on which he is traveling to Europe with his millionaire parents. Picked up by Disko Troop, the fishing captain of We're Here, Harvey is transformed by the rigorous work and the discipline he must submit to aboard Troop's ship. Harvey learns the value of hard work, self- reliance, and disciplined living, and when he is reunited with his parents, the boy has become a man who can now carry on in the spirit of his father who came from poverty to conquer the West by helping to kill the Indians and then to control the land by running a railroad over it. Harvey is initiated into the world of men--away from his mother with her soft, civilizing instincts--and he becomes the new embodiment of the ongoing task of the white man to extend progress by conquering the colored races and their lands. In this novel, Kipling tells us that each generation of white men must renew a primitive sense of their strength, must be challenged by the rudiments of nature itself, if the white man is to fulfill his world destiny. Yet beneath this kind of jingoistic strength, Kipling perhaps saw that the dreams of empire were fated to failure, that a hidden inner-self reality opposed the imperial dream. In the little-known novella, The Brushwood Boy ( 1895), Kipling depicted a young boy who grows up to be the very embodiment of the ideal British soldier. Yet from his youth, the boy has had a fantasy which centers around a pile of brushwood that talismanlike can take him into adventuresome realms beyond the known world and its regulations, suggesting that beneath the rigidity of imperial mentality is a childlike world of fantasy longing to be cut free. And what Kipling depicted in fantasy terms, Robert Louis Ste venson depicted more realistically in The Beach of Falesa (1892), again a little- known novel about a South-Sea trader, named Case, whose control over the natives eventually corrupted him and led to his moral and physical destruction. Both of these stories anticipate Conrad, who would reverse these narrative formulas and turn them into Heart of Darkness, a statement that could not have been made until the story of empire had turned a historical corner. And what was going on in the novel of imperial adventure had its cultural counterpart in America in the Western. Indeed, Kipling's Captains Courageous supplies the connection between these two subgenres, as it celebrates the imperial spirit of America, which Kipling saw as the next mighty Western power. The fishing banks of New England and Nova Scotia try men's strength and courage and create a natural aristocracy (compare Hemingway). The Western, like the novel of imperial adventure, grows out of the conflict between the city and the frontier or the wilderness, and the need for man to impose his will upon the land, to tame it, and to turn that control into wealth and power (the ur-story here is Robinson Crusoe). Novels that codified the meaning of the frontier experience are texts like Owen Wister's The Virginian and Jack Schaefer's Shane-works which created the myth of the cowboy and led to the stereotypes that Gary Cooper and John Wayne played out on the screen, and that Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan played out in life. Both The Virginian and Shane are set against the same landscape, and both involve the Johnson County Wars in Wyoming between the big ranch owners and the homesteaders. The novels depict this battle from two different points of view: The Virginian from the point of view of the ranch owners, and Shane from the point of view of the homesteaders. Here is a perfect example of how the same narrative formula can be used to express two different political points of view. What these two works share is the common belief that the land must be tamed, and this involves proving oneself in action, carrying the Virginian (that is, Jeffersonian) idea of aristocracy and honor across the country to create in the West a new, natural aristocracy based on the test of courage and trial by ordeal. After his ordeal, the Virginian remains on the land, marries, and becomes domesticated. After his ordeal, Shane, always the loner, picks up like the Lone Ranger and moves on, staying not only, like Natty Bumppo, one step ahead of the frontier, but, again like Natty, one step ahead of the conniving women who are trying to domesticate him. When this stereotype hits land's end on the West Coast, he will become Raymond Chandler's Marlowe (the name itself taken, as Chandler tells us, from Malory to embody a knightly ideal). Chandler's loner, however, embodies not the chivalric ideal of cowboy like the Virginian, but the chivalric ideal of the hard-boil detective, who is inseparable from the corrupted city that, like Sisyphus, he takes as his task. Like the cowboy, the hard-boil detective is an outsider--lonely, chaste, motivated by personal ideals that are in themselves value comments on the corrupting of America. And if the detective's urban story is a bit more cynical, his ideals a bit more tenuous, his accomplishments a bit more morally dubious--all this is a reflection of history as process, the eroding a dream as it moved west, a dream whose fate was at one with literary expression. There is a great deal more to be said about the connection between narrative subgenres and cultural history, but the above examples will have to suffice for the moment. What is equally important what ideas can be abstracted from these examples. If my argument has validity, it means that we need not think of the novel either purely as organic form or structured discourse, but instead must realize that most novels are made up of many encoded subforms that problematize form and cut across discourse. Robinson Crusoe, for example, is the composite of a diary, a travel adventure, and a utopian vision. Bleak House is a gothic novel, a detective story and a sentimental narrative. Many of our most fundamental cultural ideas find expression, as might be expected, in the more popular subforms: for example, the novel of imperial adventure or Western. It is then a Conrad or an E. M. Forster who recasts the formula plots-- as they did with the novel of imperial adventure as F. Scott Fitzgerald did by inverting the Western in The Great Gatsby. In this context, intertextuality takes on deeply historical significance when one text talks to another in contexts that are inseparable from the cultural/historical moment: when Twain answers Bellamy's utopian Looking Backward with his dystopian A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, or when Hart Crane responds to Eliot's The Waste Land in The Bridge, or when Robert Lowell uses Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead" as a point of departure for his "For the Union Dead." And parody is equally important here. If there is a connection between narrative types and cultural ideology, then the types become less relevant as the ideology changes. And when a narrative mode is no longer convincing to an audience, it calls attention to itself, and parody becomes the literary means of burying these exhausted forms. It is thus not surprising that parodic literature comes at times of great historical change, as after the Second World War. In fact, one of the keys to postmododern literature is its attempt to create a postindustrial ideology by crediting earlier narrative forms. Almost all of the novels of John Barth are parodic in exactly this way (for example, The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat Boy, Chimera) as are such novels as William Gaddis's The Recognitions and J. R. Thus texts that we often think of as undoing historicism are themselves deeply caught in a historical moment. And since historical time is always qualitative, we need not shy away from the flash points of history. We have much to learn from the Marxist's sense of historical breaks--the recognition of such transitions, for example, as that from feudal to commercial culture, commercial to industrial society, and most recently from an industrial to an informational order. Once we begin to think in term~ of historical process, we can begin to see, for example, that the English Puritan Revolution, the French Revolution, and the American Civil War are part of the same historical process, which involves the movement from an aristocratic to a middle class/bourgeois society; the rise of new commercial, urban institutions often in conjunction with parliamentary or democratic forms of government, with a corresponding shift in class power and wealth. Defoe and Dickens examine the new commercial society at different stages of its growth in England, as do Hugo and Balzac in France, and Twain and Faulkner in America. Once we see these writers in the same historical context, we can begin to see a great deal that appeared previously t~ be historical accident. Why, for example, Balzac read Dickens with such intensity; why Balzac, Hugo, and Twain all had to come to terms with Scott before they could continue their work; why Twain had to write A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which superimposed a commercial/industrial world onto an aristocratic/feudal one and thus connected historical Europe with the feuding America of North and South; and why Faulkner looked so directly back to Balzac's Human Comedy novels as well as Twain's provincial novels when he was contemplating his Yoknapatawpha sequence. Once the idea of literary periods gives way to the idea of historical process, we can then see the connection between such literary and cultural movements as literary naturalism and the industrialization of Europe and America: the rise of the industrial city as an investment center, the creation of an industrial class, and the confrontation between and among nature, man, and the machine. These themes connect the novels of Zola (L'Argent, L'Assommoir, and Germinal) with the novels of Frank Norris (The Octopus, The Pit) and Dreiser (The Financier, the Titan), and Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, Oil). And the world that Zola, Norris, and Dreiser depicted from within the boardroom, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and T. S. Eliot depicted from the salon. The new commercial/industrial world was filtered through an aesthetic consciousness in their works, and in the writing of Joyce and Pound as well, who superimposed a mythic realm upon a naturalistic/realistic realm to emphasize what for Joyce became the Viconian cycles of history or what Pound would call the "repeat" in history. Modernism and naturalism are thus two different responses to the same historical moment, their vastly different literary methods accommodated and explained by that difference. And the sense of difference here, locatable in time and ideology, is not subject to continued dispersal so long as postmodernism keeps insisting (rightly, I believe) on the "post"--and so long as we act, as we all do, upon our sense of difference. NOTES UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Los ANGELES 1 Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, tr. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, 1977), p. 142. 2 Jacques Derrida, Memoires: For Paul de Man, tr. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (Irvine, Calif., l9X6), p. 96. 3 See Hayden White, Tropics of Discollrse (Baltimore) 4 See Waler Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkely, 1987); hereafter cited in text. 5 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Came (New York, 1970), p. 369.