Enter virtuosi: erudition makes its return

Abstract

Enter Virtuosi: Erudition Makes Its Return Michael Witmore The New Erudition Ed. Randolph Starn. Spec. issue of Representations 56 (1996): 1–143. The title of the most recent special issue of Representations, “The New Erudition,” seems calculated to intrigue. Editor Randolph Starn recognizes the irony of the title in his introduction to this volume, making a broad case for the emergence of a new, more learned style of scholarship which harks back to the virtuoso learning of the Renaissance. Moving toward the future by way of the past, Starn finds several continuities between the genealogical, speculative mode of inquiry on display in this volume and an older, “erudite” strand of traditional humanities scholarship. Both approaches share an interest in intellectual controversy and specialized debates, a penchant for difficult or obscure details, and a willingness to follow out the ramifications of learned traditions. Of those writing in this volume, several are indeed fearless in their use of recondite sources and their reach across disciplines and historical periods. What seems noteworthy about the collection, however, is not so much the learning that is on display as the uses to which that learning is put. Motivating this kind of work seems to be a desire to re-engage a more speculative, searching mode of scholarship. Arriving at that speculative margin, however, requires that the familiar objects of study be estranged—made to function in ways that even the specialist can only comprehend indirectly. This process of estrangement is the subject of the first article. In “Making Things Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device,” Carlo Ginzburg argues that estrangement is not a generic feature of all art, but rather a literary device with its own peculiar history. Peculiar seems the right word, since the uncertain orbit of this device takes it from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius to a sixteenth-century forger named Antonio de Guevara, through the Essays of Montaigne and popular riddles into the work of Proust, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevski. What this array of readings and citations produces is a heightened sense of the variable, contingent career of a literary convention over time. With erudition, it would seem, comes disorientation and reappraisal—precisely what Ginzburg argues is important in our engagement with the past. Two essays by Michel Zink and Robert Chibka locate the source of estrangement in a place: the library. Like Ginzburg, these writers have the genealogist’s eye for contingency in the development and transmission of an idea or text. Zink’s article on Gérard de Nerval’s Angelique, “Nerval in the Library, or The Archives of the Soul” traces the way in which a novelist loses track of the characters he is researching in the library when the historical sources he is using lead him back to his own memories and experience. While Zink focuses on the intersection of archival history and personal memory—moments when a source begins to reflect the altered image of its reader—Chibka is more interested in the recursive potential of such moments. In “The Library of Forking Paths,” Chibka tries to track down a citation from one of the sources referred to in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of the Forking Paths.” Having taken the bait, Chibka searches through several translations of the story to find that there are multiple versions of both the citation itself (translators varying the page number of the source cited) and of the source, a book about World War I by Captain Liddell Hart. The scholarly passion for detail is turned against itself in this essay so that, as Chibka notes, the professional reader of the story quickly becomes mired in paradox. Erudition is a liability here, one which Borges is credited with exploiting in his hyperbolic tales about the library. Another essay by Jan Assman, “The Mosaic Distinction: Israel, Egypt, and the Invention of Paganism” attempts to trace the distinction between true and false religion from the Egyptian King Akhenaten (Amenophis IV) to Sigmund Freud. Like Ginzburg, Assman traces the particular problem or device which interests him across a broad range of texts and periods. Treating such diverse figures as Moses, Moses Maimonides, Ralph Cudworth, and Karl Reinhold, Assman shows how Egyptian religious...