New Historicism and the Presosition "In"
For my purposes, then, the social is less important as an autonomous domain than as an analytic pressure, a challenge not only to any notion of "total" justice but also to any notion of an immanent (and therefore containable) equivalence among things. Differently put, we might also say that the social, as a field imperfectly integrated, imperfectly contained, is a vital challenge to that most familiar and most peremptory of spatial concepts, inscribed by the preposition "in," a concept which, as Charles Taylor reminds us, has "come to seem as fixed and ineradicable from reality as the preposition is from our lexicon."[69] And since this spatial concept is crucial not only to the materialism and individualism of Marx but also to a broad spectrum of modern epistemologies (beginning, perhaps, with Descartes's location of ideas "in" the mind, as mental "contents"),[70] I want to take this occasion to digress somewhat and to reflect more specifically and more critically on this prepositional regime, as it informs, inspires, and inhibits many of our linguistic practices. I am thinking especially of the practice of literary criticism and its time-honored ambition to interpret what is in a literary text.
What is in a literary text is, of course, a matter of attribution, varying with our critical interests. With our current historicist turn, it is the "social" itself that is most often offered up as a complement to that preposition, offered up as its substantive notation as well as its syntactical end. The social is invoked, that is, both as an operating theater and as a functional logic, both of which are understood to govern the text, to be objectively immanent "in" it, giving it a resident identity, an indwelling purpose, and turning it into a kind of verbal container for a thing called History.[71] In our hasty retreat from deconstruction, we seem to have forgotten one of its crucial insights: that a text has no interiority, no objective circumference it can be said to encompass, and no unified space, no unified field of intention it can be said to
contain, certainly not an intention unified under the name of History. One conceivable outcome of deconstruction might actually have been a radical challenge to the entire discipline of literary studies: a challenge to its image of the text as a bounded object and to its image of reading as an attempt to match that boundedness, to be commensurate with what is "in" it. This was not what in fact happened. New Historicism, to the extent that it reinstates reading as the search for a containable identity, a context-bound identity, would seem to mark a return to an earlier epistemology, one that, in this case, reads History not only as the indwelling agency in Literature but also as its hermeneutic limits, its bounds of meaning. The text is thus imagined once again to be a spatial unit, embedded in History and filled with its contents, contents inferable if not ultimately provable, answering always to a History which accounts for it, translates into it, and integrates it into a hermeneutic whole, dictating and containing its possibilities for meaning. The task of critic is thus once again to "unpack" those contents, to effect a reverse translation, as it were, by locating the historicity "in" the text and locating the text "in" history.
As must be obvious by now, I want to take issue with this prepositional regime. I want to propose a mode of literary studies not premised on a spatialized image of the text, and not premised on meaning as a containable category. The hermeneutic relation between history and literature is thus necessary but insufficient. Just as the meanings of history might not be fully generalizable from one particular work of literature, so the meanings of literature might not be fully derivable from one particular historical moment. Rather than limiting ourselves to a search for "historicity" (and rather than equating historicity strictly with determinacy and locatability), we might want to turn instead to a hermeneutics that is less spatially ascriptive, less discretely periodizing, and more alive, perhaps, to the continuing meaningfulness of a text, more willing to study that meaningfulness beyond any function it might conceivably have performed at one particular moment. Engaging the text not as a part of a concluded whole—not as a piece of cultural work that has already served its purpose, that has meaning only in reference to the past—we might instead want to think of it as an evolving cluster of resonances, its semantic universe unfolding in time rather than in space, unfolding in response to the new perceptual horizons that we continue to bring to bear upon it and that never cease to extend to it new possibilities of
meaning. The accumulating resonances of a text, its subtle but non-trivial shifts in nuance and accent, are a tribute, then, to the socialness of language, to the unending conversations of humanity over time. Inflected by those conversations, inflected by the historical life of language—a life at once more ancient and more recent than any locatable circumstance—the very linguistic character of a text must make it permeable in time, polyphonic over time, its resonances activated and reactivated with each new relation, each mutating meaning.
To equate the text with any single explanatory context would seem, from this perspective, to be unduly metonymic: unduly collapsing an immaterial order into a set of material circumstances, and unduly collapsing a semantic universe into a narrow grid of instances. Against the violence of that reduction, much might be said, I think, for a criticism that makes no attempt to produce a containable identity for a text, no attempt to devise a fit for its semantic contours. And even as "fitness" is rejected here as a hermeneutic ideal, "doing justice" is also rejected as a hermeneutic practice, on the ground that justice (with reading as with much else) is dangerously close to a form of impoverishment. Not doing justice to the text, not sentencing it to a designated slot in history, such a criticism will perhaps not be "historicist" in the current understanding of that term. All the same, it will remain historically minded, although it will imagine history not as a domain of full inscription, in which the meaning of literature is given once and for all, given because of its determinate place in a hermeneutic totality. Indeed, skeptical of that totality, and skeptical of the preposition "in," it will perhaps turn to some other relational categories—"between," "beside," "residual to," "in spite of," "above and beyond"—categories that engage the text not as the predictable part of a historical whole but as a perpetual witness to a history perpetually incomplete.