Jane Tompkins's Sensational Designs was an important book for American literary studies. Or, to put it more accurately, it was an important book in the return to "American studies" without the "literary." For Tompkins's major theoretical contention, perhaps more controversial at the time than now, is that "great works of literature" is an historically variable term. Consequently, things like "canons" are simply reflections of a given critical moment, and "the 'true nature ' of a literary work is a function of the critical perspective that is brought to bear upon it," a perspective that is, by and large, determined "in advance" (16,193). Her beef is, of course, with the formalist/aestheticist critics of the past and the notion that "great works" are "transcendent and ahistorical," adhering to "timeless aesthetic values."
In contrast to this, Tompkins shows that, at least in the determination of what works fit that criteria, there has never been persistent and atemporal critical agreement. Moreover, even those works that have persisted over time do not do so for the same reason. For example, an author like Hawthorne, who she admits has been considered a major figure from the time he was writing until now, is admired for entirely different critical reasons at different historical moments: initially, he was praised for his apparent ability to endue domestic scenes with poetic quality, while by the twentieth century the emphasis was placed upon his "psychological complexity" and dark vision. For Tompkins, this essentially means that the texts are not continuous over time. These different readings are not emphasizing different qualities of the same "work" but are in fact creating different independent "things": readings "are not mere approximates of an ungraspable, transhistorical entity but a series of completions, wholly adequate to the text which each interpretive framework makes available" (36).
On the one hand, Tompkins is of course right--the idea of literary significance does change, as do critical values. And texts are not closed objects; they are clearly influenced by historical vicissitudes, praised at one time, forgotten at another. But Tompkins overstates her case by creating a false dichotomy. In her introduction, she claims that literary texts are not "works of art embodying enduring themes in complex forms, but, as attempts to redefine the social order" (xi). I would retort that literary texts attempt to redefine the social order by embodying enduring themes in complex forms. This is what makes literary "interest/investment" in the social order different from, say, political, theoretical, or practical social involvement, even as all of these realms are dynamic, interactive, and dialectical. Moreover, it is precisely because of this interaction of "enduring themes" and "complex forms" that literary texts continue to provoke interest beyond their historical significance. To paraphrase a recent critic arguing against the claim that Jane Austen is ONLY a source for understanding the 19th century: doesn't Pride and Prejudice teach us something about first impressions (thanks to Andy for the reference)?
Interestingly enough, in many (though not all) of the close studies of individual works Tompkins provides, using a "new kind of historical criticism" which tries "to recapture the world view [the texts] sprang from and which they helped to shape" (xiii) the conceptual value she claims for the works, while related, as she shows, to specific historical contexts, is by no means bound to those contexts, and, indeed, has relevance outside of them. As simply one example of this, consider her study of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland. As she demonstrates, the immediate context of post-revolutionary war America was embroiled in a number of key debates regarding the consequences of rebellion and the nature of political and social republicanism. Anxieties over the maintenance of social order in this new egalitarian political system were everywhere, and chaos rumbled beneath even the most established cultural institutions. Fair enough, and interesting in laying out the context out of which Wieland was produced. But while the historical context informs her approach to the thematics of the novel (what happens when past authorities are rejected, the dire consequences of the autonomous individual) she simply doesn't need the background to see that this is there. All she needs to do, as in fact she does, is carefully read the book. Indeed, none of her references to the text itself is particularly illuminated by the historical contextualization she offers. I would be perfectly satisfied and convinced of her reading of the text without that information. So while the context may have led her to reading the novel in this way, it isn't necessary for understanding the novel itself. Why? Because those problems/questions/issues are not bound to that historical context (as others are). They are visible to those of us outside the context, reading the book.
The following statement should clarify what I'm getting at:
The paramount question in America in the 1790s was, can people get away with revolution? Is it safe to break the bonds that have held a society together? Is it possible to rebel against one's father and still survive? (56)
My question: when have these questions not been discussed, asked, or puzzled over, in some way, for the last 400 years? While they may not always have the immediacy that they had at the time, does that make them any less a continual problem in the life of a community, state, or individual? Indeed, aren't these questions every 15 year old has to ask at some point or another? Tompkins makes this of tremendous historical/contextual import. I call bullshit. I say its an "enduring theme," going all the way back to the Platonic problem of the one and the many, touching on the Renaissance and Enlightenment movement from the historical transmission of knowledge to the process of individual discovery, making its latest appearance in pomo critiques of science and the reaction to postmodernism found in movements like postpositive realism. The immediate historical circumstances of the 1790s clearly provoked Brown to deal with the theme, but the ongoing problem continues to make the novel valuable to us.
This is one brief example, but I hope it illustrates the way Tompkins overstates the case. The correction of aesthetic criticism that new historicism/contextual critics like Tompkins provided, a necessary correction I might add, has ultimately to do with the heritage of Kantian aesthetics and the conception of "disinterestedness," which formalist critics have at times interpreted to mean "historical transcendence" as the criteria of literary value. I would argue, instead, that aesthetic experience, what Tompkins warily dismisses as "imaginative vitality" (200) can be "interested" in the very social, political, and ethical problems Tompkins wants to revive. Indeed, in its most "enduring" forms it is perhaps the most "interested," particularly when it comes to literature. For texts are not objects designed to stop thought in the name of transcendence--they are, instead, thought placed in an "enduring form," thoughts which continue to trouble and provoke us as participants within history. At times some aesthetic thought-forms will be more provocative, and necessary, than others (which is how I explain the variety and changability of the canon). But that doesn't reduce them to simply being containers for our narcissitic critical fantasies.
Posted by pjaussen at August 16, 2007 5:30 PM