The Life after Texts, the Life within Them

Abstract

Without prejudice concerning what qualifies as literature,” Marshall Brown (1992: 18) writes, literary history “reminds us that the life after texts is, finally, the life within them.” Apt and brief, Marshall neither minces nor wastes words. For years his clarity set the tone and mission for MLQ as a serious venue for what we gathered in Seattle in January 2020 to celebrate: the project of literary history. A disciplinary project, to be sure, perhaps even a subdisciplinary one, but in practice a broad-gauged editorial remit that has sponsored timely and innovative work, always in accord with the decisive seven words quoted at the top of this page.Two conversations led to my joining the MLA roundtable, and I am grateful for both. First, in 2010 Colleen Lye proposed that we find a way to think, talk, and write together about the revitalized place of realism across several subfields in modern literary studies. That led two years later to a special issue of MLQ titled “Peripheral Realisms,” coedited by Colleen and me, with Joe Cleary as a consultant and collaborator (Cleary, Esty, and Lye 2012). Eight years later Eleni Coundouriotis and Lauren M. E. Goodlad asked Colleen and me to join them in reflecting on MLQ’s remarkable run under Marshall’s editorship. Colleen was already committed to other MLA panels, so I represented her in Seattle and thanked her for her remarkable intellectual vision in conceiving of our special issue of MLQ. What I did not realize back in 2010, when Colleen proposed MLQ as the best venue for our ideas, was that the journal’s specific commitment to literary history, combined with Marshall’s legendarily meticulous editorial hand, would provide such a meaningful methodological anchor for the global, cross-period, intermedia range and drift of our special issue.Marshall, who has done sustained work on realism himself, took our ideas seriously; he challenged and refined them along the way. Collaboration with Colleen, Joe, and Marshall—and our remarkable contributors, Susan Z. Andrade, Stephen Best, Sharae Deckard, Toral Jatin Gajarawala, Simon Gikandi, Fredric Jameson, Sanjay Krishnan, Yoon Sun Lee, Petrus Liu, and Clair Wills—expanded my scholarly horizons, as I imagined it would. Writing for MLQ also forced an unexpected and salutary reckoning with the habitual rust and stylistic must of my academic prose. Marshall’s marginal commentary on our draft essays was a searching paratext all its own, as anyone who has written for MLQ knows! In preparing to pay tribute to Marshall’s editorial tenure at the journal, and thinking about his rigorous commitment to lucid, forceful, unfussy critical writing, I was reminded of the candid rejection letter I received from him twenty years ago. His respectful commentary showed me that I had not yet found the pulse of my argument about T. S. Eliot and national decline. The experience left me much more heartened about the standards and protocols of scholarly editing in our field than disheartened about the shortcomings of my essay. Close scrutiny is a sign of respect among scholars, worth honoring even as our profession and its vital research institutions (such as learned journals) are under strain. Because they are under strain.For Colleen, Joe, and me, the goal in 2010 was to think about what seemed like a shift in the fortunes and function of realism among both producers and critics of so-called ethnic and postcolonial writing (mostly Anglophone fiction). The honorific value of modernist style and magical realism seemed to us stale compared to revitalized centers of realist work, especially for non-Western and nonwhite writers.1 We were attempting not to do a simple trend analysis based on “novels out there” in the 2010 market or on the contemporary syllabus but to respond to standing methodological and even political impasses in the discipline—especially in the subfields of ethnic and postcolonial studies—that seemed recently to have broken up or broken open. Seeking to define the relevance—or to discover the irrelevance—of classic theories of realism such as Georg Lukács’s, we wanted to take on new materials and questions using resources from the best models of literary history we had inherited. Put another way, and this was Colleen’s initial insight, if we wanted to look beyond the value discourses associated with Euro-American theories of realism and counterrealist experimentalism, we would need to adapt tools that were, in the end, historical. We needed to trace the histories that had shaped the taxonomies of realism and the Aristotelian-Auerbachian binary of mimetic/nonmimetic, and that meant going back a few centuries as well as forward into the twenty-first. We were trying to crack something that could not be resolved immanently within either contemporary fiction or contemporary theoretical discourse.The more we defined our project that way, the more MLQ seemed like the best venue. As we had hoped, the questions raised by our contributors traversed a number of subfields in modern and comparative literary studies, testifying to the reach of MLQ. Researchers working outside the contemporary period, outside the Euro-American canon, outside the conventional boundaries of ethnic and postcolonial studies, and even outside verbal artifacts, strictly defined, have engaged the ideas raised in “Peripheral Realisms.” Scholars of the Argentine, Filipino, German, South African, and Zimbabwean novel, of Chinese and Indian memoir, of Hollywood film, of Hong Kong legal discourse, of Korean modernism, of Arab-Jewish poetics, and of Russian painting have revised our core terms. Colleagues in a variety of subfields elaborated the initial questions we wanted to bring into debate. I am thinking of Yoon Sun Lee’s (2019) incisive work on historical fiction in the time of Walter Scott, Goodlad’s (2015) strong rereading of Victorian geopolitical realism, Kalyan Nadiminti’s (2018) insightful take on the “Global Program Era,” Aaron Bartels-Swindells and Jane Hu’s (2019) generative American Comparative Literature Association seminar call for papers for “Comparative Realisms,” and Kate Marshall’s (2015) superb essay on novels of the Anthropocene, which draws on our special issue, together with ideas from Ramón Saldívar and Zadie Smith, to rethink realist technique in a broadly posthuman frame.2As the afterlife of our special issue suggests, MLQ and the project of literary history go wherever the field needs them to go. The methodological commitments of the journal provide the right degree of filtration to let critics redefine what we do best rather than wander inexpertly into adjacent disciplines. MLQ occupies a strategic position in the field of modern literary studies. It is where generational and methodological agons play out as illuminating research problems, not as heated skirmish or tepid rehash. One need only review the range of recent special issues to see that MLQ continues to find avenues to think about current problems in gender and sexuality studies, in the environmental humanities, in the traffic between Chinese and North American theory—all via the project of literary history. Urging contemporary research to steer between the rocks of presentism and the shoals of antiquarianism, MLQ’s version of literary history organizes the life after texts and the life within them more capaciously than established concepts of literary criticism or intellectual history—and more dialectically than the latest formalisms and empiricisms (each in their cloister). Over the thirty years marked by Marshall’s editorship of MLQ, literary history has remained the indispensable modality of our discipline even as the discipline evolves in relation to, for example, ethnic studies and cultural studies in the 1990s or media studies, disability studies, trans studies, book history, and digital humanities in the 2010s.3Two recent special issues exemplify the point I want to make about the journal’s scope. One is “Literary History after the Nation?,” edited by Peter Kalliney (2019), and the other is “Scale and Value: New and Digital Approaches to Literary History,” edited by James F. English and Ted Underwood (2016). Literary history stretches out in these collections to include bigger data, longer time lines, wider geographies, and an expanded field of debate, all counterweighted by MLQ’s commitment to literary history and by Marshall’s personal commitment to sharp detail; to proper form and format; to the continuing power of a single, shocking verbal maneuver; to the intimate or affective flavor of a concept; to the zig and zag of language in motion over time.Marshall has always made sure to make room for new relations and parameters of interpretive scale: “The history that bursts out from literature exists on many scales, all of them welcome in MLQ” (Brown 2004: 5). Literary history is the scalar technology—the one we have inherited from the analog humanities—that allows us to move freely and productively between the big domains of data or the high abstractions of theory, on the one hand, and the minute semiologies of text, figure, and word, on the other. It is where our overlapping skills as specialists, as archivists, as exegetes, as social critics, and as historical explainers meet. MLQ’s numbers are all special issues in their commitment to the actual history of literary history; to changing methods that bring the micro, meso, and macro scales of analysis into a single narrative; to arguments that show us vast histories packed into an etymology or a simile; to articles that observe the atomic particles of language arranged in sequences that can travel across continents and survive across centuries.But what in the end is—and what isn’t—literary history? Marshall answers this devastating and simple question in this way: “Timeless reflections are out, as are close readings not embedded in a historical argument, along with readings so embedded that they subordinate literature to its contexts. I seek chronological arguments that give us, or give back to us, the agency and the power of written expression” (Brown 2004: 2). MLQ has defined itself by insisting on the reciprocal relation of text and context, and it has lived its credo through diligent editorial practice.Two important structuring principles about our discipline are embedded in that editorial stance. The tension between them makes all the difference. It is the tension that keeps MLQ—and us—properly suspended between quasi-religious mystifications about Art and pseudoscientific claims about Fact. The first principle is that the history of literary forms and genres provides a specialized knowledge that the empirical history of social formations cannot provide. The second principle is that aesthetic value—Marshall’s “agency and . . . power of written expression”—irritates and irradiates historical discourse, interferes with its propositional claims about causality, correlation, chronology, and identity. In this sense, the project of literary history is not just a specialized subbranch of history but a form of knowledge organized both with and against the methodological grain of historiography proper. Literary history turns the study of the past inside out, insisting on facts and their negation at once, culling the archive for patterns and their exceptions, believing in the power of a periodizing claim and in the implausibility of that same claim. Literary history produces knowledge at the same time as it asks its practitioners—its makers and its users—to embed a critique of the knowledge it produces.This last reflection gets us to the heart of what I think is the signature MLQ intellectual mission: the combination of historicism and historicity, of the past as a set of knowable facts and as a set of imaginary or rhetorical vehicles—themselves scored and enfeebled by time—standing between us and the facts we wish we could know. Our investment in historical knowledge gives the humanities the prestige of the past—that is, our very foothold, our distinct value, in the relentlessly presentist-futurist Innovation University. But it does so only when paired with our discipline’s antiknowledge, of scouring doubt and caustic negation, that stows away inside that apparently polite, apparently venerable, apparently humanist word literary. If we lose the literary in “the project of literary history,” our methods might quickly collapse into subvariants of historical positivism—at which point our discipline risks losing its capacity to irritate and irradiate with art the data economy of the twenty-first-century university. Negative capability—what I called above historicity, whether in the sense of Friedrich Nietzsche, of Michel Foucault, of John Keats, or of Paul de Man—keeps historical explanation contingent and restless. It forces us to remember that texts are not facts, poems not moral philosophy, plays not arguments, novels not documentaries. It forces us to remember that our interpretations are always themselves subject to time, to erosion, to the counterpressure of other readings, other communities of readers. Marshall’s words, one more time in closing: “History is the mode of perception or understanding that registers persons, objects, ideas, and texts as living. Living means having an effect” (Brown 2004: 4). Yes. It is just in that sense of having an effect that Marshall’s editorial work has been alive among us and that the project of literary history sponsored so long by MLQ lives among us now.