Sorry this is so late! My conference this weekend was much busier and more overwhelming than I expected.
I’m
interested in exploring Stephen Greenblatt’s statement near the end of his
introduction to Learning to Curse
that “the existence or absence of a real world, real body, real pain, makes a
difference” (15). The anecdote is an opportunity to make some referent reality
into something literary and make history more accessible. But as he attempts to
show in the story of the goldsmith, by virtue of the literary element also
being presumable historical fact makes its telling even more effective.
Eric Hayot essentially
writes in response that Greenblatt presents the story of the goldsmith in a way
that will achieve a desired effect and in doing so does not include enough
reality. Greenblatt has missed the ending of the paragraph his anecdote is
found in by using an edited manuscript (41), and has presumably ignored the
part of the same paragraph that precedes his selection (46). Furthermore, Greenblatt
fails to account for a literary history this selection may be drawing from or “pain’s
language of agency” (50). Hayot disputes Greenblatt’s claim that real pain is
present in the passage because all that are really there are metaphors for pain
(51).
Hayot’s critique
of Greenblatt’s citation is justifiable. Especially from a historical
perspective, it’s Greenblatt’s duty to do his best to find the whole story
before reporting on it. Still, his use of an edition with small amounts of
texts missing would not put him entirely to blame if he did not then,
questionably, exclude some of the passage his selected text was found in to
make the goldsmith seem even more victimized and innocent. While I would argue
(and Hayot acknowledges this as well) that the inclusion of the first part of
the paragraph does not actually make the goldsmith more likely to be guilty of
arson, it might work to make Scott seem less of a suspicious and tyrannical
enforcer of imperial law because the man has
done more to provoke him than simply sit silently. Its exclusion causes the
reader to suspect Greenblatt of bias if not the feeling that Greenblatt does
not trust the reader to separate the goldsmith’s actual crimes from the
possible crime. What’s more is the concerns Greenblatt raised about the
goldsmith’s agency and story now seem like a joke. Through his manipulation of
the events of a story he admits not to knowing is fiction or non-fiction,
Greenblatt has chosen only some of one man’s words and used them to imply
something about another man to have his audience follow his argument about how
much more forceful reality is than fiction.
Part of the
problem I can appreciate is that though the part of the paragraph Greenblatt
selected is part of a larger story, so is the paragraph in its entirety part of
a larger story that we don’t have access to. Even after Hayot provides the end
of that same paragraph and constructs a reading of his own, all we have is a
story told by one man that may or may not have happened at all, or did not
happen as he told it. If it is impossible to have the whole story, how hard do
we have to try to present as much of is as we can? If we never spoke until we
knew the whole truth, if we were able to find a truth at all it would take much
longer. Despite the questionability of Greenblatt’s citation method, it makes a
deeper conversation possible.
Good point! If what Greenblatt has done is criminal, you might as well lock us all up and throw away the key. We take excerpts, portions, and pieces of a text that serve us and serve a larger point. While I agree with Hayot's critique of Greenblatt in that he's muddying the historical/cultural waters a bit, I don't find any issue with his editing.
ReplyDeleteHope your conference was rewarding despite the chaos!
I was also intrigued by Hayot's decision to start his critique via pointing out that Greenblatt hasn't really looked at the "whole story." I was mostly intrigued because it made me think about Warner again and Rowlandson's reading via random sections and how that has been deemed an "uncritical reading." Like you, Sarah, and Bethany as well, I don't take issue with Greenblatt's excerpting and focusing on said excerpt, but I agree with Hayot that Greenblatt's attempt at historicity seems to miss the vehicle by which he gets there: linguistic features. For me, it was really significant that Hayot points out and I suppose rightly so that the means by which we get to interpretation (whether via nonfiction or fiction or the confounding of the two) linguistic features are always in use and they always have an effect on how we "read" and how we have been interpellated or hailed into ideology, constructions of meaning and so forth. Greenblatt's interpretation/reading/etc comes from his Western view/understanding of Chinese people and their history. The narratives, he and many of us have received to such a repetitious degree, reveals how the "torturer and silence Chinese man" plays out like a trope. It's a history steeped in rhetorical/linguistic tropes (specifically from Western ideology). It seems to me that Greenblatt in his attempt to suggest a transhistorical understanding (which I truly believe in as a critic) falls short for not acknowledging the ways his reading is implicated by not simply history, but the linguistic features that have been utilized to tell that history.
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ReplyDeleteBethany, yes; agreed. If Hayot criticizes Greenblatt for only using part of the story to make his point, then we are all guilty in some regard. Perhaps as scholars we do this more unconsciously than consciously... Hayot may be a fresh reminder to investigate fuller contexts before using texts to say something they might not necessarily (historically?) mean (have meant). Maybe this is a question of literary ethics?
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