The Muses on Their Lunch Hour 9780823273751

Citation preview

The Muses on Their Lunch Hour

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The Muses on Their Lunch Hour

Marjorie Garber

fordham university press New York

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2017

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Copyright © 2017 Marjorie Garber All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Excerpts from “Burnt Norton” from FOUR QUARTETS by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company; Copyright © renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1941 by T. S. Eliot; Copyright © renewed 1969 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Garber, Marjorie B., author. Title: The Muses on their lunch hour / Marjorie Garber. Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016027233 | ISBN 9780823273720 (hardback) | ISBN 9780823273737 (paper) Subjects: | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / General. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture. | EDUCATION / Higher. Classification: LCC AC8.5 .G37 2017 | DDC 814/.54 — dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016027233 Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17

54321

First edition

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For Helen Tartar

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contents

ix

Acknowledgments

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Preface: The Muses on Their Lunch Hour Asking Literary Questions Ovid, Now and Then Over the Influence Fig Leaves Baggage Screening Identity Theft Czech Mates: When Shakespeare Met Kafka Occupy Shakespeare Shakespeare 451

xi 1 11 32 58 72 79 89 110 127

Notes Index

155 191

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acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the many friends and colleagues who have helped me at various stages of the composition and editing of these essays. Bill Germano was once again a marvelous reader, critic, and co-conspirator in the shaping of individual pieces and of the book as a whole. I owe him not only my warmest thanks but also the best dinner we can find. William Ira Bennett generously read a number of the essays, and made many valuable suggestions that have been incorporated into the text. Jonathan Culler offered essential advice and encouragement at a crucial time. Calista McRae, Sabrina Sadique, and Kailey Bennett provided key editorial assistance at various stages of manuscript preparation. My editor at Fordham University Press, Tom Lay, has been unfailingly helpful and responsive, as have Eric Newman, Nancy Rapoport, and others at Fordham. I thank them for all their interest and attention to detail. A few essays have been previously published, and I am grateful to the editors of the publications where they first appeared for their excellent comments and meticulous editing: to Tom Mitchell and Jay Williams at Critical Inquiry for “Ovid, Now and Then” (Critical Inquiry 40, no. 1, Autumn 2013) and “Over the Influence” (Critical Inquiry 42, no. 4, Summer 2016); Renate Ferro, Mieke Bal, and Michelle Williams Gamaker, the editors of Saying It (London: Occasional Papers, 2012) for “Baggage Screening.” “Asking Literary Questions” first appeared in my Manifesto for Literary Studies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003); my thanks to the Simpson Center for the Humanities for permission to reprint it here. This book is dedicated to the memory of Helen Tartar, a remarkable editor and supporter of the humanities, with whom I initially mapped out the topics and contents of this collection. Helen’s untimely death was a profound loss to the field, to the profession, and to her innumerable friends and admirers. It was an honor, and a gift, to have worked with her.

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p r e fa c e : t h e m u s e s o n t h e i r l u n c h h o u r

Nine essays. Nine musings. On Dasher, on Dancer, on Calliope and Erato. Up then, Melpomene. What do the Muses do on their lunch hour? Read trash novels? Feed the ducks (or in their case, perhaps, the swans)? Attend what used to be called “improving” lectures and are now called Public Humanities events? These Muses, the ones I’m speaking of, spend some time in— of course— “museums,” and also in libraries, and maybe even these days in book clubs and cultural media. But they are also Ladies Who Lunch. And when they lunch they talk. There weren’t always nine of them, if we are to believe Pausanias (and who am I to contradict Pausanias?). The first three, the original Muses (a phrase that sounds like the title of a pop group) represented “singing,” “practicing,” and “remembering”—three categories that would function very effectively for today’s literary and performing arts.1 But the job got bigger (Literature! Dance! Music! Drama! Science! Geography! Philosophy! Mathematics!) and they took on more help. It was only in the late Hellenistic period and in Roman times that the Muses became so closely identified with particular kinds of poetry and art, what we might today more blandly call the humanities. Renaissance emblem book writers linked the various Muses to props and gadgets that would clearly identify them, making each of the nine as recognizable to Renaissance and Neoclassical readers as one of today’s superheroes, or the costume characters of Disneyworld and Times Square. Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, is pictured with a writing tablet; Clio, the muse of history, with a scroll; Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, with a tragic mask; Thalia, the muse of comedy and pastoral, with a comic mask; Euterpe, the muse of elegiac poetry, with a flute; Terpsichore, the muse of dance, with a lyre; Erato, the muse of lyric poetry, with a cithara; Polyhymnia, the muse of sacred poetry, with a veil; Urania, the muse of astronomy, with a globe and compass. Great for painters and sculptors; useful, too, for poets who invoked them. xi

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xii

Preface

But do today’s cultural observers know the difference between a cithara and a lyre, or the significance of a scroll versus a writing tablet? And really— do we need so many muses of poetry now? Epic, elegiac, pastoral, sacred, lyric, plus two kinds of drama? This nine, like the justices of the Supreme Court, might do with a little updating. Shouldn’t there be a Muse of Fashion? A Muse of Architecture? A Muse of Social Media? A Symphonic Muse, an Operatic Muse, a Bluegrass Muse, a Hip Hop Muse, a Muse of readymades, a Muse of found objects, a Muse of musing? An A-Muse (pictured with an amuse bouche)? A B-muse, with a bewildered expression? And what about a he-Muse, or what would once have been called a male Muse, on the model of male model, or male nurse? We need a trans-Muse, for sure. Almost all art these days is transmuted, the work of what perhaps should be called transmusion. And about that number nine. John Lennon and J. D. Salinger notwithstanding, nine is not an inevitable number.2 Writers from William Shakespeare to Anne Bradstreet to Anthony Trollope to Robert Lowell have invoked, or joked about, a Tenth Muse (Shakespeare’s Tenth Muse, in Sonnet 38, is his beloved);3 Bradstreet’s Tenth Muse is the title of her 1650 book of poems The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America; Trollope’s is the goddess of journalism (“the tenth Muse who now governs the periodical press”4); Lowell’s, in a poem called “The Tenth Muse,” is Sloth. Sloth may do it for a poet— or may have done so half a century ago. But the Tenth Muse missing from the (not so) original nine, I think, is a slightly different creature from Shakespeare’s other, or Bradstreet’s self, or Lowell’s creative Deadly Sin. The Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne, Memory. Zeus will have had a role in their conception, I admit, but these goddesses take after their mother. Without memory, learning and the arts cannot flourish. Thus, literary and art history; thus, history tout court; thus, chronology and genealogy; thus “influence.” But there is a rebellious outlier sister, too, equally essential to the history and culture of the liberal arts, and her name is Amnesia. Her name means “forgetfulness,” and her gift is the gift of forgetting. The essays in this collection are all in some way provoked by the practice— deliberate or inadvertent— of cultural forgetting, whether what is “forgotten” (and therefore reinvented) is a figure of speech, or the history of criticism, or the teaching of Shakespeare, or the question of plagiarism, or a favorite children’s book. Nine essays. Nine musings.

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Muse as a verb has a “widely divergent sense development,” from “ponder, reflect” to “waste time, idle, loaf around,” to “gape, stare, wonder, marvel,” to the Walloon “murmur, hum, growl” and the fifteenth century “hold the snout up, sniff about.”5 The OED says curtly that “[a]ttempts to connect the sense ‘to ponder, reflect’: with classical Latin musa, Muse, n., are unconvincing.” But perhaps false etymology is another art form inspired by the goddess Amnesia. She’ll be showing up, even if uninvited, at that lunch with her sisters— unless she forgets, which is very likely. In which case their conversation is likely to be all about her.

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chapter 1

Asking Literary Questions

The fortunes of literary studies have gone up and down during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the same volatility as the stock market. And like the stock market, the market in literary studies can be charted with confidence only with the benefit of hindsight. English studies held the comfortable middle-ground of the humanities in U.S. and Anglophile/Anglophone universities through the middle part of the twentieth century. The combined heritage of belletrism and the “little magazines” imparted a certain gloss of creativity and artiness to the practice of reading and writing about poems, novels, plays, and what was then often described as “intellectual prose”—works like Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, for example, or Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Practices such as textual explication, often cognate with, or imported from, the study of other European languages and literatures, were partnered with literary history, thematic criticism, and the study of images, tropes, and what was called literary influence—the indebtedness and echoes of one literary work to another—whether such influence was deemed serene or “anxious.” Intertextuality, a term borrowed from French, offered an adjustment to the question of influence by seeing it as a two-way street, and also 1

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by emphasizing the agency of the text over that of the controlling “author.” Texts could converse with one another whether or not the author was consciously speaking— or listening. The conscious/unconscious borderline was a natural topic for scholars steeped in the heritage of romanticism, whether or not they acknowledged the pervasive influence of Sigmund Freud’s writings on the development of twentieth-century art and culture. An infusion of exciting and provocative theoretical writing, again largely continental in origin, coming to the United States from France, Germany, and the UK, made “literary studies”— or, more properly then, “literary theory”—the star, and also in some views the bad child, of humanistic work in the 1970s and 1980s. Intellectual practices such as semiotics, phenomenology, and structuralism changed the way critics and scholars read literature, and “literature” itself changed with the onset of lively debates about the literary canon, cultural inclusiveness, and popular culture. Whether described under the heading of poststructuralism, deconstruction, or postmodernity, the work of European writers such as Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault shifted attention to issues of text and agency. A phrase like “the linguistic turn” (later transformed into “the cultural turn”) signaled a high-water mark for the prestige of this particular mode of literariness in the late twentieth century. As Lynn Hunt and Victoria Bonnell note in their introduction to Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999), the publication of two key works in 1973—Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays— established the importance of techniques derived from literary studies for the disciplines of history and cultural anthropology. White’s book uses terms like trope and emplotment to argue for a deep structure of thought that organized historical research at the linguistic level, working with categories derived from the literary scholars Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye. Geertz’s idea of a “thick description” of cultures presented symbols, artifacts, social arrangements, and rituals as “texts” that could be read as a consistent story, or “interpretation”—a word itself grounded in literary study. The powerful influence of Geertz has naturalized the phrase “interpretation of cultures” so that it no longer offers any hint of the jostling of disciplines. White introduced his study with a strong claim about the relationship of history to language that established the first as dependent upon the second: “In this theory I treat the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse.” Histories, he maintained, “contain a deep structural content which is generally poetic,

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Asking Literary Questions

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and specifically linguistic, in nature, and which serves as the precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively ‘historical’ explanation should be.”1 His table of contents was explicitly indebted to Frye’s structuralist account of genre, with chapters on topics such as “Michelet: Historical Realism as Romance,” “Ranke: Historical Realism as Comedy,” “Toqueville: Historical Realism as Tragedy,” and “Burckhardt: Historical Realism as Satire.” “The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts,” wrote Geertz in his celebrated essay on the Balinese cockfight. Such an extension of the notion of a text beyond written material, and even beyond verbal, is, though metaphorical, not of course all that novel. The interpretatio naturae tradition of the middle ages, which, culminating in Spinoza, attempted to read nature as Scripture, the Nietszchean effort to treat value systems as glosses on the will to power (or the Marxian one to treat them as glosses on property relations), and the Freudian replacement of the enigmatic text of the manifest dream with the plain one of the latent, all offer precedents, if not equally recommendable ones. But the idea remains theoretically undeveloped, and the more profound corollary, so far as anthropology is concerned, that cultural forms can be treated as texts, as imaginative works built out of social materials, has yet to be systematically exploited.2 “A deep structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic”; “An extension of the notion of the text beyond written material, and even beyond verbal.” Both White and Geertz found the models of linguistic and literary analysis instrumental and clarifying as they grappled with fresh ways of understanding the methodologies of their own disciplines. Indeed, as such passages from their work make evident, these scholars would come to argue that history and anthropology were, in a way, modes of reading and writing. “As in more familiar exercises in close reading,” Geertz writes in his concluding paragraph to the cockfight essay, “one can start anywhere in a culture’s repertoire of forms and end up anywhere else.” Later, he would sum this up in the phrase “the Text analogy,” which, when linked with “interpretive theory,” allows for new reconfigurations of social thought.3 The idea of a “master discourse” has fallen into disuse and even into disrepute, but if there is any discourse that holds the mastery in these excerpts from two groundbreaking works of cultural theory, it is literary studies. How quickly we forget. For in the years that followed these brilliant appropriations from literary studies, the appropriators were themselves reappropriated by literary critics and established in the rhetorical position of

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mastery. New Historicists Steven Mullaney and Stephen Greenblatt both invoke Geertz’s methodology. “Employing a kind of ‘thick description’ in Clifford Geertz’s sense of the phrase,” Mullaney writes, “I examine diverse sources and events, cultural as well as literary, in an effort to situate the popular stage within the larger symbolic economy of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.”4 Greenblatt cites a passage from Geertz comparing Elizabethan and Majapahit royal progresses at a key turning point in his own essay on Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays.5 Literary critic J. Hillis Miller, a specialist in the British nineteenth-century novel, lists White as an important figure in the development of modern theories of narrative. “The inclusion of Hayden White,” he writes, “is testimony to the fact that in recent years history writing as well as fictional narratives have been addressed by narrative theorists.”6 Authority in literary critical—and literary theoretical—writings began, increasingly, to derive from such voices. Not only White and Geertz, but anthropologist Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger), sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, cultural historian Robert Darnton, and others were cited in argument and epigraph, and a new vocabulary became the common medium of exchange: “Culture, practice, relativism, truth, discourse, narrative, microhistory, and various other terms,” note Hunt and Bonnell, were in general use across many of the social science disciplines. But these same terms became words to conjure within literary studies as well, together with others that also originated in social-scientific or scientific disciplines: genealogy, archaeology, agency, paradigm. Not long after their eager engagement with “the linguistic turn,” historians and others drew back, themselves returning to an emphasis on empirical data, sometimes in conjunction with theoretical arguments, and sometimes to trump them. In a book pointedly called Telling the Truth About History, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob noted the difficulties of aligning postmodern theory with historical practice. If postmodern cultural anthropology is any guide, the concern with developing causal explanations and social theories would be replaced in a postmodernist history with a focus on self-reflexivity and on problems of literary construction: how does the historian as author construct his or her text, how is the illusion of authenticity produced, what creates a sense of truthfulness to the facts and a warranty of closeness to past reality (or the “truth-effect” as it is sometimes called)? The implication is that the historian does not in fact capture the past in faithful fashion but rather, like the novelist, gives the appearance of doing so.7

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The authors were at pains to say that they did not reject all the ideas of postmodernist thinkers, noting that the text analogy and various cultural and linguistic approaches had helped to disengage historians from some other models, such as Marxism and other economic and social determinisms, while also “puncturing the shield of science behind which reductionism often hid.” But “linguistic determinism” also presents a problem, they argued. And because postmodernism “throws into question the modern narrative form,” key methodologies for history-writing, including historiography, narrative, and storytelling, were all subject to critique. Yet historians have to tell stories, they claimed, in order to make sense of the past, as well as to reach toward practical political solutions for the future. So these authors, all themselves historians, suggested that there was a point at which members of the historical profession, however initially energized by the likes of Derrida and Foucault, had to part company with them, to rejoin the referent and leave the play of the signifier, or to leave the “text” and rejoin the “world.” In fact, they wrote in 1994, “a similar kind of crisis that foreshadows a turning away from the postmodern view can be seen in almost every field of knowledge or learning today.”8 A few key observations might be made about the foregoing. First, that it ties “the linguistic turn” (quickly broadened, to accommodate anthropology, into “the cultural turn”) to postmodern theory, thus eliding the linguistic, the literary, the cultural-anthropological and the philosophical. Second, that it ultimately sets aside postmodernism as antifoundationalist and thus is likely to pose questions rather than seek solutions: “In place of plot and character, history and individuality, perhaps even meaning itself, the most thoroughgoing postmodernists would offer an ‘interminable pattern without meaning,’ a form of writing closer to modern music and certain postmodern novels.”9 And, third, that it generalizes a “crisis”— supplementary to the fabled “crisis in the humanities”—which led, or would lead, or was then currently leading, participants “in almost every field of knowledge or learning” to turn away from the postmodern view, and thus from the temporary hegemony of humanistic and literary critical studies. The return of “the empirical” after the heady attractions of the ungrounded “theoretical” had its effects upon literary scholars as well as upon historians, anthropologists, and sociologists. Inevitably, perhaps, chroniclers began to contemplate “the historic turn.” The editor of a volume on The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences noted that there had been a proliferation of historical emphases across the disciplines: “the ‘new historicism’ in literary and legal theory, a revived interest in ‘history in

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philosophy,’ a historically oriented ‘new institutionalism’ and other historical approaches in political science and economics, ‘ethnohistory’ in anthropology,” and so on.10 Mullaney offered in his contribution to this volume a view of the place of literary study that conveyed a sharp difference from where it might have been presumed to be in the 1970s and 1980s: The literary is thus conceived neither as a separate and separable aesthetic realm nor as a mere product of culture—a reflection of ideas and ideologies produced elsewhere—but as one realm among many for the negotiation and production of social meaning, of historical subjects, and of the systems of power that at once enable and constrain those subjects.11

Manifest in this compact assertion was a suspicion of, and a demotion of, the “separable aesthetic” and the “mere product of culture”; the profession of literature, and the texts that were its objects, were to be players in social change. Where the Telling the Truth historians had reflected on the potential disappearance of “meaning itself ” under the lens of the kind of postmodern theory that had once, and recently, dominated literary study, Mullaney, a New Historicist critic of the early modern period, declared literary study’s investment in “the negotiation and production of social meaning.” A stranger to these internecine conversations might be pardoned for some bewilderment: If one were to delete the first two words of Mullaney’s statement and offer it as a version of the old “Droodles” game of fill-in-the-blanks, it is not so very clear what entity or discipline an outsider would think was under discussion. Literature is thus conceived neither as a separate and separable aesthetic realm nor as a mere product of culture—a reflection of ideas and ideologies produced elsewhere—but as one realm among many for the negotiation and production of social meaning, of historical subjects, and of the systems of power that at once enable and constrain those subjects. “The literary” had changed, and changed substantially, at least in historicist eyes. “The literary” in this avatar also considered itself “one realm among many,” not in any privileged place of influence or taste-making. As the century drew to a close, the question of literary study’s place in the intellectual and academic hierarchy was an unsettled matter. Even literally. Suddenly, the word “material” was everywhere (to be contrasted, presumably, with its antonym “formal,” but also with the complicatedly intellectual and highly verbal playing fields of theory). “Material culture” and “the material book” were phrases to conjure with, as book series on “art and material culture,” “design and material culture,” “American material cul-

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ture and folklore,” and “gender and material culture” proliferated. Books on The Body as Material Culture, Children on Material Culture, Chimpanzee Material Culture, and Cognition and Material Culture crowded the bookshops—and these titles are only the briefest of selections from the B’s and C’s. Literary critics, who once preferred to be called “literary theorists,” were now, increasingly, scholars of material culture. Furthermore, the rise of cultural studies and other interdisciplinary approaches to social and cultural practice caught the eye, and the disapproving glance, of many former, retired, or disgruntled academics, some now transformed into journalists or government officials, who unilaterally declared a “culture war.” Wielding the three most effective weapons for such a battle, intolerant anti-intellectualism, jingoistic super-patriotism, and nostalgia for a past-that-never-was, these self-appointed guardians (Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodies?) ridiculed what they did not demonize, and demonized what they did not ridicule. Deconstruction, a reading practice developed directly out of the New Criticism, was parodied as a plot of the Left. When deconstructive critic Paul de Man was discovered to have had a complicated past involving possible collaboration with the Germans during WWII, deconstruction also became a “fascist” plot. Race-classand-gender, or race-class-gender-and-sexuality, were deemed unworthy “political” objects of humanistic attention, and attention to “colonialism,” even for a discipline like English studies, which emerged as a university subject at the height of the British Empire, was likewise dismissed as irrelevant political meddling by scholars who would be better off restricting their activities to the library, the archive, the museum, and the undergraduate classroom. What was most disturbing about these attacks was their mean-spiritedness and the shoddiness of the “research” that produced them, often consisting of sitting in on a single class by a given professor, or listing, and belittling, the titles of courses or of conference papers, many never read in their entirety by the journalists who mocked them. But there is no doubt that this strategy was effective, and doubly so, because those attacked began to attack back (Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodies?), providing precisely the kind of partisan evidence their critics had wished into being. I am conscious here of reporting old news and chronicling old battles to which I myself have no desire to return; few who lived through this period would welcome a resumption of these hostilities, which now seem both fevered and distant. But I mention these developments for a reason: to point out that the scholars singled out for particular opprobrium in these books of the late 1980s and early 1990s were, almost all of them, professors of literary studies. Roger Kimball’s grumpy but highly successful diatribe

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Tenured Radicals begins in the spirit of a manifesto: “It is no secret that the academic study of the humanities in this country is in a state of crisis.”12 He then goes on, in the second paragraph of his book, to name some of the principal culprits: “Princeton University’s Elaine Showalter” (gender), “University of Pennsylvania’s Houston Baker” (race), and “Duke University’s Fredric Jameson” (Marxist politics). All three are professors of literature. Other humanistic disciplines also sustained periodic swipes, especially those that led to a concern with politics (as in the work of University of Virginia philosopher Richard Rorty) or popular culture (Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell). But the “academics” these critics loved to hate were more often than not those trained as literary critics. As I’ve noted, this strategy was successful. Not only did the country take notice that the sky was falling, so too did the critics and scholars mentioned, and even those scholars watching the debates from the sidelines (not the “margins,” which were now at the center) began to feel the pressure. Once a suspicion is planted, it is very difficult indeed to uproot it; “tenured radicals,” spiffy phrase that it was, had changed the way the academy regarded itself. Like the insinuations of Iago (“it speaks against her with the other proofs”), these proofs of nothing multiplied to produce a firm conviction that something had gone wrong. And, partially as a result, the place of literary studies in the pantheon of the humanities came under tacit and explicit critique. Younger—and older—scholars of literature shifted their interests, whether consciously or (more likely) unconsciously, away from the play of language, the ambivalent ambiguities of the signifier, and the modes of counterintuitive argument that had marked the most brilliant literary work of the 1970s and 1980s (and, indeed, the 1940s and the 1950s), toward less controversial terrain, and more supposedly objective (and even “scientific”) methodologies like history, the “sociology of knowledge,” and cognitive theory. Literary study was in the process of disowning itself. Genteelly, professionally, persuasively, and without an apparent consciousness of what might be lost in the process, departments of literature and literary study have shifted their emphasis. This return to history is, in fact, a return, not a leap or an evasion. Trends in intellectual work tend to be cyclical, with attention shifting from text to context, from author or artist to historical-cultural surround, from theory to practice and from micro- to macro-analysis (in literary study, close reading vs. meta-narratives). A great deal of the most recent work in literary studies is deeply informative; much of it represents what used to be called “a contribution to knowledge,” and almost all of it is professionally honed, if not glossy. If little is

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provocative, perhaps that is to be expected after a couple of decades of high-profile contestation. There are many ways of doing inventive scholarship, and painstaking literary-historical work, like the kind of literary work that admires and imitates the scientism of cognitive theory, can at its best also be imaginatively interesting. But some literary historians and historicist critics within departments of literary study are in danger of forgetting, or devaluing, the history of their own craft and practice, which is based not only on the contextual understanding of literary works but also on the words on the page. Counterintuitive interpretation; reading that understands the adjacency of literature, fantasy, and dream; the subliminal association of words through patterns of sound or tics of meaning; the serendipity of images and ideas; the sometimes unintended echoes of other writers; the powerful formal scaffolding of rhetoric or of genre—all these are as richly transgressive as any political interpreter might desire, and as elusively evocative as any archive-trained researcher could wish to unearth or detect. A passage from T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” has always seemed to me to describe, with particular eloquence, what we do as critics when we study how writing works: Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness. Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, Not that only, but the co-existence, Or say that the end precedes the beginning, And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end. And all is always now. Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.

The specific contribution of literary studies to intellectual life inheres in the way it differs from other disciplines—in its methodology and in its aim —rather than from the way it resembles them. What literary scholars

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can offer to the readers of all texts (not just those explicitly certified as “literature”) is a way of asking literary questions: questions about the way something means, rather than what it means, or even why. It is not that literary studies is uninterested in the what and the why—indeed, in recent years such questions have preoccupied scholars whose models are drawn from adjacent disciplines like history and social science. But literariness, which lies at the heart of literary studies, is a matter of style, form, genre and verbal interplay, as well as of social and political context—not only the realm of reference and context but also intrinsic structural elements like grammar, rhetoric and syntax; tropes and figures; assonance and echo. A manifesto for literary studies will claim for it an unapologetic, free-standing power to change the world by reading: by reading what is manifest, and what is latent, within and through the language of the text. The best way for literary scholars to reinstate the study of literature, language, and culture as a key player among the academic humanities is to do what we do best: to engage in big public questions of intellectual importance, and to address them by using the tools of our trade, which include not only material culture but also theory, interpretation, linguistic analysis, and a close and passionate attention to the rich allusiveness, deep ambivalence, and powerful slipperiness that is language in action. The future importance of literary studies—and, if we care about such things, its intellectual and cultural prestige both among the other disciplines and in the world—will come from taking risks, and not from playing it safe.

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chapter 2

Ovid, Now and Then For Diane Middlebrook

The consummate poet of bodily translation, Ovid has often been both a sign and an agent of shape-shifting in critical thought: metamorphic in himself and the cause of metamorphosis in others. My object in what follows is not only to look at moments in which the stock of Ovid has risen or plummeted over the years, a question well addressed by several recent books and articles, but also to use this discussion as a way of predicting something about the future and interpreting something about the present in literary and critical studies. I am going to take the name of Ovid, and particularly the Ovid of the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, as a metonym for a kind of critical interest that had for some time fallen out of favor and has now returned in an unexpected guise—returned, moreover, from the vantage point of science rather than directly through the humanities. What I have in mind is an interest in myth, and, in particular, its relation to a certain claim about universalism. Let me begin, however, with what might be called “A Tale of Two Start-Ups.” The first, founded in 1919, was the Ovid Press. The second, founded in 1988 and given its current name in 1992, is Ovid Technologies. I am going to let these two enterprises — their inspirations, fates, and 11

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metamorphoses — function as allegorical bookends to frame the case I want to make for Ovid, now and then. The Ovid Press was founded by John Rodker, an essayist and poet. Named in homage both to the Roman poet and to Rodker’s friend Ezra Pound, a tireless proselytizer for Ovid in the period,1 the Ovid Press published works by Pound and T. S. Eliot, as well as drawings by Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. (Theodore Ziolkowski remarks of Pound that “the obsession with Ovid lasted throughout his lifetime.”2) Rodker, an interesting figure in his own right, succeeded Pound as the London editor of The Little Review, assisted James Joyce in getting Ulysses past the postal authorities, and went on, in the late thirties, to become Sigmund Freud’s first British publisher, founding the Imago Publishing Company for that purpose. But the Ovid Press, alas, was in existence for only a year. It was essentially a one-man operation, and it could not sustain itself. Ovid Technologies, on the other hand, is very much still with us. It’s a software company that serves the health sciences, providing (according to its website) “an online search and discovery platform that enables users to access and work with online journals, books, and databases” for clinicians, students, and researchers in the medical, scientific, and academic fields.3 Its clients include colleges and universities, medical schools, libraries, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies. Why is it called Ovid? The name is not an acronym; it really is named after the poet. The founder, Mark Nelson, holds degrees in English from Columbia University and has a passionate interest in the classics. His favorite book (according to his website) is The Collected Works of T. S. Eliot.4 The original name of the company was CD Plus, but when it developed a new online platform with increased search capacity, Nelson felt the change was so transformative that it had undergone a “metamorphosis.” So he changed the company’s name to Ovid.5 Thus reborn, Ovid Technologies continued to prosper and was sold for two hundred million dollars, ten years after its founding, to an international conglomerate. With the profits, Nelson and his wife bought an estate in the Napa Valley and founded a vineyard. (This is a good Roman story.) His partners quip that Nelson is the “resident Latinist”;6 he himself has seamlessly adapted the naming story to describe his new product: “The essence of winemaking is that of transformation, a metamorphosis of grapes into something sublime. So when . . . we planted the first vines on our property, on the rock-laden hills . . . the name Ovid and its resonance of transformation seemed again entirely fitting.”7 The motto of the software and technology company was taken, they say, from Book 1 of The Metamorphoses: “Partimque figuras retullit antiquas; par-

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tim nova monstra creavit.”8 This same motto now appears on the vineyard’s website and on the rather elegant wine label in a deliberately archaizing translation (“Partly we recovered the OLDE, FAMILIAR THINGS, PARTLY WE CREATED SOMETHING wondrous and NEW.”)9 The quotation from Ovid seems itself to have undergone a certain metamorphosis in its transit from Latin to English. “We created something wondrous and new” has a good bit of Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs about it, the siren song of the start-up. And somewhere along the line the poem’s “she” (for the earth) has become “we.” Other translators have been a little less upbeat in rendering this passage, which describes the second creation after the flood and the creatures generated spontaneously from the mucky earth: For “nova monstra” Golding (1567) has “straunge and oughly shapes,”10 and George Sandys (1632) has “vnknowne Monsters.”11 Rolfe Humphries (1955) says “some old, some strange and monstrous.”12 Charles Martin’s recent (2004) translation says “others were monsters, novel in their shapes.”13 What can we say about this metamorphosis, from classic poem to technology start-up to artisanal vineyard, except that in some small way it may indicate the place, or fate, of the humanities in the twenty-first century. An English major with a passion for the classics founds a technology start-up, names it after a beloved poet, then sells the company at a huge profit and bestows the poet’s name—and a representative quotation— on his very successful new venture, a vineyard and winery. From Ovid Technologies Inc. to Ovid Napa Valley. The humanities today are a branding mechanism. This is indeed, both Ovid “now” and “then,” whether or not Mark Nelson (as I have no reason to doubt) still enjoys reading both English literature and the Greek and Roman classics. But to me the most striking factoid in the story of Ovid Technologies and Ovid Napa Valley is the detail, casually let fall in Nelson’s publicity blurb, that his favorite book is The Collected Works of T. S. Eliot. I, too, cherish my copy of Eliot’s collected works, an early acquisition. And it was from Eliot’s poetry, and especially from Eliot’s classical borrowings and his footnotes, that I would date my own fitful education in these tags and topics (at least until I encountered in college, to my great good fortune, the remarkable classicist Helen North). I am sure I am far from the only person who read English and world literature backward, so to speak, from The Waste Land, checking out Edmund Spenser, the Upanishads, the book of Ezekiel, Andrew Marvell, and Antony and Cleopatra in a delectably unhistorical orgy of literary pleasures. It’s useful here to recall some of the specifically Ovidian elements of The Waste

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Land, from Philomela to Tiresias. In his notes to the poem (which he subsequently described as “a remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship”),14 Eliot sends the reader, when he mentions “the change of Philomel,”15 to the Metamorphoses. When he comes to Tiresias, however, there is a much longer note, alleging that “What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem,” and adding, perhaps in tonal homage to that “bogus scholarship,” that “the whole passage from Ovid is of great anthropological interest.” At this point he includes, without any explanation or translation, nineteen lines of Latin text. Now, we know from Eliot’s own account, however trustworthy it might be, that he produced this section of notes at the behest of his publisher, who wanted to reprint the poem as a stand-alone volume but found it “inconveniently short.”16 So nineteen lines of Ovid would bulk up the text nicely, while also producing a sense of learnedness (or obscurity), mirroring the lines from French, German, Sanskrit, and other languages in the poem, which are, likewise, untranslated. Still, I think we might be justified in calling this an “Ovid, now and then” moment, because the market for modernism rose to the occasion, largely concurring with Eliot’s expressed opinion (again in those “bogus” notes) that Tiresias was “the most important personage in the poem.” The year of the publication of The Waste Land (1922) was also, as Ziolkowski points out, the year that saw the appearance of David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox.17 A few years later came Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1928), another metamorphic fable. Orlando’s transformation from a man into a woman, with its consequent reflections on sex, gender, and pleasure, is sufficiently “Tiresian” to underscore the point.18 But I’d like to return for a moment to Eliot’s deadpan comment about Tiresias that “the whole passage from Ovid is of great anthropological interest.” For it is to anthropology as well as literature that I think we need to turn to understand not only the then of “Ovid, now and then,” but also the impending now, the now that is a potential future topic for the humanities. “Ovid broods over the roots of The Waste Land,” says Stephen Medcalf, observing that in the final version of Eliot’s poem, “the anthropology in Ovid tends to rise to the surface.”19 Eliot singles out in his long initial note to the poem not only “Miss Jessie L. Weston’s . . . From Ritual to Romance,” to which he credits both the title and the plot of his poem, but also another book— one that, as he acknowledges, had become the intellectual blockbuster of its time: “To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The

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Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.” In short, Eliot’s Ovid was Frazerian. James Frazer’s The Golden Bough was, in the period, much on Eliot’s mind. In one of his London Letters published in The Dial in 1921, he reviewed Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and found it, while musically “remarkable,” lacking in that certain Frazerian je ne sais quoi. The Vegetation Rite upon which the ballet is founded remained, in spite of the music, a pageant of primitive culture. It was interesting to anyone who had read The Golden Bough and similar works, but hardly more than interesting. In art there should be interpenetration and metamorphosis. Even The Golden Bough can be read in two ways: as a collection of entertaining myths, or as a revelation of that vanished mind of which our mind is a continuation.20

As Eliot suggests, Frazer’s book did indeed influence that generation profoundly. It is hard in fact to overestimate its influence. It preoccupied Sigmund Freud, who calls it a “great work”21 even as he engaged, and disagreed with, some of its conclusions. From the time of its first edition, The Golden Bough influenced anthropology, sociology, religious studies, philosophy, fiction, and poetry. Here is an illustrative anecdote that also functions as a scene of reading. Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, a young student of physics and chemistry at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow found himself, because of ill health, prohibited from continuing his research. He was permitted, however, to do some recreational reading and decided to try, for the first time, to read “an English masterpiece in the original.” The work he chose was The Golden Bough. “No sooner had I begun to read this great work,” he recalled some twenty years later, “than I became immersed in it and enslaved by it. I realized then that anthropology, as presented by Sir James Frazer, is a great science, worthy of as much devotion as any of her elder and more exact sister studies, and I became bound to the service of Frazerian anthropology.” The speaker was Bronislaw Malinowski, and the occasion was an annual lecture delivered at the University of Liverpool in honor of Frazer, who was in attendance. Never mind that the lecture that followed, on “Myth in Primitive Psychology,” took a different tack from Frazer’s in extolling the necessity of field work, here called “open-air anthropology.”22 Still, the praise of the master that framed the talk at beginning and end was fervent and full-throated:

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. . . anthropology shows us, as regards myth, that far from being an idle mental pursuit, it is a vital ingredient of practical relation to the environment. The claims and merits, however, are not mine, but are due once more to Sir James Frazer.23

Malinowski notes that anthropologists and folklorists “take their cues and orientations from Frazer—whether they agree or disagree with him.”24 Arnold van Gennep, Emile Durkheim, Ernst Cassirer, each in his own way derived principles and inspiration from Frazer and specifically from material in The Golden Bough. And this is not to mention the remarkable group of classical scholars—Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, F. M. Cornford, and later Rhys Carpenter and E. R. Dodds—who drew on Frazer’s interests to argue for a relationship between literature and ritual forms. Philosophers from Henri Bergson to George Santayana to Ludwig Wittgenstein offered comments on the powerful effect of Frazer and The Golden Bough. W. B. Yeats and Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and Joyce, Richard Aldington and F. L. Lucas, Robinson Jeffers and Robert Graves—the list of major twentiethcentury writers who explicitly responded to Frazer is a map of literary modernism.25 Critics from Lord Raglan to Northrop Frye acknowledged his importance to their own work. Lionel Trilling declared that “perhaps no book has had so decisive effect upon modern literature as Frazer’s.” “I asked myself,” wrote Trilling, “what books of the age just preceding ours had most influenced our literature,” or “what older books might seem to fall into a line the direction of which pointed to our own literature”: It was virtually inevitable that the fi rst work that should have sprung to mind was Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, not, of course, the whole of it, but certain chapters, those that deal with Osiris, Attis, and Adonis. Anyone who thinks about modern literature in a systematic way takes for granted the great part played in it by myth, and especially by those examples of myth which tell about gods dying and being reborn—the imagination of death and rebirth, reiterated in the ancient world in innumerable variations that are yet always the same, captivated the literary mind.26

So, philosophy, modern literature, and the classics—all these humanistic fields changed after an encounter with The Golden Bough. But it is also crucial to bear in mind that Frazer, a preeminent literary stylist, regarded his work also as a work of science. He explains in his prefaces to successive editions of the book that although he has sought to avoid the dry form of

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a “scientific treatise,” casting his conclusions in a more “artistic mould” in the hope of broadening his readership (something he certainly achieved),27 he intended The Golden Bough as a contribution to “that still youthful science which seeks to trace the growth of human thought and institutions in those dark ages which lie beyond the range of history”—that is, to the nascent field of anthropology.28 And here we return, perhaps not entirely unexpectedly, to Ovid. The Golden Bough begins with two references to Ovid, and it is significant that the second of these is not to The Metamorphoses but to the Fasti. Frazer himself produced a five-volume edition of the Fasti, creating what a modern editor calls “a classic in its own right.”29 He also translated the poem for the Loeb Classical Library. In his edition of the Fasti, Frazer offers extensive commentary, including allusions to The Golden Bough, on a couplet from that work that he had also quoted in The Golden Bough itself: Regna tenant fortes minibus pedibusque fugaces, et perit exemplo postmodo quisque suo.30

In Frazer’s translation: “The strong of hand and fleet of foot do there reign kings, and each is slain thereafter even as himself had slain.” This is of course the central theme of The Golden Bough.31 The point I want to underscore here is not only that Eliot’s poem was Frazerian but also that Frazer’s work was Ovidian. The Fasti, with its fascinating account of Roman religious rituals, is clearly of direct interest to Frazer in his quest for universal mythic patterns and fertility rites across civilizations and cultures. And, importantly, he associates this interest with modernity. “For us moderns,” he wrote in his Introduction to the Fasti in 1931, Ovid’s description of the fixed festival and sacred rites in the Roman calendar is “by far the most interesting and valuable part of the work.”32 To illustrate this he mentions a few of the festivals, in a list which—both by its apparent randomness and by its particularity—reads like something out of Jorge Luis Borges (or like the list of plays offered to Shakespeare’s Hippolyta and Theseus for presentation on their wedding day): The quaint ritual of the Festival of the Dead . . . . The no less curious rites in honour of the God of Boundaries and of the Goddess Mildew . . . The enigmatic rites of the Lupercalia with its strange mode of conferring the blessing of offspring on women; the merry revels in the flower-decked boats floating down the Tiber on Midsummer Eve; and the very different rite in the month of May when Father Tiber

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received those rush-made effigies of men which were cast from the old wooden bridge into his yellow stream, apparently as a toll to compensate the river god for the loss of the human beings who now passed dryshod over the bridge instead of being drowned at the ford.33

“For us moderns,” declared Frazer, these things are of special interest. Modernity is of course as much of a shifter as now and then. Ezra Pound remarks in his Guide to Kulchur about the modernity of the (then-current) interest in folklore, adding that “Ovid had an interest in these matters” (GK, 272). So Ovid (Pound’s Ovid) is modern as well as ancient—“one of the most interesting of all enigmas.” “I assert,” wrote Pound (twitting his friend Eliot for parsonical Christianity), “that a great treasure of verity exists for mankind in Ovid and in the subject matter of Ovid’s long poem, and that only in this form could it be registered.” What did Pound make of Frazer? Although his tastes ran more in the direction of the German ethnographer Leo Frobenius—with whom he corresponded throughout the twenties—Pound wrote that “It wd. be unjust to Frazer to say that his work was merely retrospective.” Just how unjust, and how “modern” and prospective Frazer would turn out to be, is even clearer now than it was then. I said at the outset that my intention in thinking about the recurrence in literary studies of Ovid, now and then, was to use “Ovid” (especially the Ovid of the Metamorphoses and the Fasti) to stand for a revived interest in myth and in ritual, and in the category of the universal. I want now to turn directly to that idea and probe both the intellectual promise and the palpable risk of this return. During what might be called the long mid-century period, the period from about 1950 to about 1980, interest in myth and in archetypes and archetypal criticism held an honored place in both literary and popular culture. Here are some random but indicative titles and dates: Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942; trans. 1955); Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957); Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (1979); and John Hollander, The Figure of Echo (1981). Critical theorists from Francis Fergusson to Kenneth Burke to Northrop Frye led the way with strong cross-cultural claims about similitude and difference. A quest for universals and universal myths and patterns preoccupied scholars, whether in the archetypes of Frye or the quite different archetypes of Carl Jung. Joseph Campbell, who popularized some of these ideas, footnotes Ovid a dozen times as he retells the myths in The Hero

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With a Thousand Faces, though he never mentions him in the text. Myth was everywhere. And then the moment was gone. Historical questions about the local, the specific, the contingent and the idiosyncratic took center stage, and universal claims— claims about universal symbols or universal practices or universal beliefs—tended to be regarded as naïve, or hegemonic, or both. Comparing vegetation rites or purification rituals or myths of the hero from widely disparate parts of the globe, myth (or myth-and-ritual) approaches seemed to elide cultural difference, specificity, and historical embeddedness in their drive toward overarching symbols and signs. Myth as a term and a reading practice remained of great interest to theorists like Roland Barthes.34 But the direct critical route from anthropology to myth to literature began to look overfamiliar, old fashioned, insufficiently political, all of the above. The paradigmatic hinge may be usefully found in the work of Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious is frankly admiring of Northrop Frye, and, equally frankly, disappointed in what seemed to be a retreat from the potentially transformative implications of The Anatomy of Criticism. Asserting that “the greatness of Frye” (and his difference from “garden-variety myth criticism”) lay in his willingness to “draw basic, essentially social, interpretive consequences from the nature of religion as collective representation,”35 Jameson argued for myth and allegory in Frye’s sense as enabling discourses of the social and the collective. The problem with Frye was that he identified the Mythic or the Archetypal as the penultimate level at which the “heightened consciousness of the collective expresses itself ”36 draws back or away from the political logic of his own argument, while in his system a further level, that of the anagogic, returned to the transfigured individual, the cosmic body, “the imaginative conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and eternal living body.”37 Thus, Frye, who seemed on the verge of proposing a version of “what we have called a political unconscious, that all literature must be read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community”38 draws back or away from the political logic of his own argument. Jameson sees the sign of this shift toward containment in Frye’s reversal of terms between the anagogical—which, for medieval theorists, meant precisely the level of the community—and the mythical. “This terminological shift is thus a significant strategic and ideological move, in which political and collective imagery is transformed into a mere relay in some ultimately privatizing celebration of the category of individual experience.”39

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The Political Unconscious begins, famously, with an injunction, “always historicize!”40 But what is the relationship between historicizing and totalizing? Totalization was at the time, a negative buzzword, as perhaps it is still; Jameson himself gives an expansive catalogue of examples of approaches “stigmatized” by this term, ranging from “world-views” or “period styles” of a specific historical moment to the Foucauldian episteme.41 “Rightly or wrongly,” he wrote, “a totalizing criticism has been felt to be transcendent in the bad sense, or in other words to make appeal, for its interpretive content, to spheres and levels outside the text proper.”42 In fact, in the course of writing his book, he has “found it possible without any great inconsistency to respect both the methodological imperatives implicit in the concept of totality or totalization and the quite different attention of a ‘symptomal’ analysis to discontinuities, rifts, actions at a distance, within a merely apparently unified cultural context.”43 For Jameson, writing at a time in literary studies when theoretical speculation and textual analysis were jockeying for priority, it was Marxism that occupied a “third position” between theory and history. “A properly Marxist interpretive act” would subsume the other interpretive methods then at play in the intellectual marketplace—“the ethical, the psychoanalytic, the myth-critical, the semiotic, the structural, and the theological.”44 And a “properly Marxist ideal of understanding,” which he characterizes, at the outset, as “dialectical or totalizing,” would be used throughout his book “to demonstrate the structural limitations of the other interpretive codes, and in particular to show the ‘local’ ways in which they construct their objects of study.”45 With this move, we might note, Jameson performs the same kind of acrobatic and semantic inversion, or “terminological shift,” of which he is ruefully critical in Northrop Frye.46 Frye took an apparently stable term like anagogic, defined by the Church Fathers to mean one sort of thing (community), and exchanged it for another sort of thing (individual enlightenment); community and the social for him was stuck at level three, mythical, rather than moving on to level four, anagogic. For Jameson, the relevant terms are local and total (or totalizing). Modes of criticism that might have been thought to be totalizing (and even “transcendent in the bad sense”) like ethics and “so-called humanism, which is always grounded in a certain conception of ‘human nature,’ ” turn out to be local, or at least “local,” in the ways they construct their objects of study, while Marxism, if “properly” understood, is aligned with both theory and history.47 “Totalizing” in this context seems to regain some of the sense of past-participial

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activity implied, or hidden, in the word. To historicize is, as it turns out, to totalize. But not in the bad sense. “Rightly or wrongly,” Jameson suggested, transcendence was out, and with it—for the moment at least—the idea that certain myths or mythic patterns could be transhistorical and trans- or even cross-cultural. One important exception in the 1980s was feminist criticism, which for reasons both political and literary found classical myths, from Philomela to Medusa, at once illustrative and instructive.48 Psychoanalytic work began to be especially sensitized to the claim that it was unreflectively transhistorical—that is, that it dealt in universals without taking account, for example, of the biographical facts of Freud’s life, his highly charged relations with his colleagues and disciples, male and female, and, perhaps most saliently, the effect of World War I and of the rise of the Nazis in Germany. Oedipus still posed his riddle, but the answer (man) was wittily challenged by poet Muriel Rukeyser in a poem simply, and effectively, called “Myth.”49 To return to our central question: Why is now a moment when such questions about myth and the universal might return, and what has this to do with Ovid, now and then? For one thing, popular culture and technology have changed. Metamorphosis became a visual reality on screen and in life. Transformers, avatars, mash-ups, vampires and other modes of transformation are now routine fare in a variety of electronic media. The verb morph, meaning “to alter or transform (a computized image),” or “to undergo as if by morphing” was being commonly used by the beginning of the 1990s,50 and all the examples are fodder for Ovidian narrative. (Like this one from the New Scientist in 1993: “The characters can be transformed or ‘morphed’ on screen. . . . When Mario tells lies to a viewer his nose can be made to grow like Pinocchio’s.”51) We are in a new moment of interest in metamorphoses, whether through film animation or through sexual reassignment surgery, liposuction, and Botox. But there is another form in which both Ovid and the myth-and-ritual approach have returned, this time in a shape that may not be so immediately perceptible. For recent history has shown that there is one virtually infallible way to predict the future in the humanities: whatever seems the most abject or outdated area of study will shortly emerge, suitably retrofitted, as the next big thing. I’ve discovered that there is one infallible way to predict the future in the humanities. Whatever seems the most abject or outdated area of study will shortly emerge, suitably retrofitted as the next big thing. This sounds like a joke, but it’s true. Think back over the last couple of decades in literary studies to the return of editing and textual studies; stage history;

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emotion and affect; biography; religion; character criticism; the history of ideas. After each went out there were some people, at least, who thought they would never return. When ideas and concepts return, however, they return with a difference, and often with a new name and descriptors; they are sometimes unrecognizable; they look like the future rather than the past. And, of course, they are the future, not the past. But they do repeat something—a longing, a question, a design, a practice, a grieved or ungrieved loss. And there is something to be said, too, for the power of what might be called disciplinary amnesia, or the curve of forgetting. After decades of critical attention to the specific, the time bound, and the local, universalism, or claims about things that are universally believed or practiced or true, has staged a comeback in fields across the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.52 But the strongest claims for a new universalism in intellectual life today are coming, these days, not from literature or anthropology but from neuroscience. My claim is that the cross-disciplinary interest in evolutionary psychology, whether under that name or in its earlier incarnation as sociobiology, marks and heralds the return of myth in literary studies, most specifically under three headings that we associate with Ovid: love, ritual, and metamorphosis. Ovid, now and then. But the myth being promulgated by evolutionary psychologists, and by their humanistic admirers is far more restrictive, mechanistic, and programmatic than that so generously set forth by Ovid. (It is also, in my view, even more of a fantasy.) The keywords for evolutionary psychology are universal and adaptation: evolutionary psychologists try to identify adaptations that have evolved to solve problems, over the millennia, in human environments, in areas like emotions, mating, kin and non-kin, concepts of beauty, parental investment, and so on.53 Underlying these investigations is the concept of cultural universals. Unlike previous culture-specific arguments put forward by anthropologists and sociologists (now repudiated as “the standard social science model”), the precepts of evolutionary psychology posit behaviors or traits that occur universally in all cultures.54 In other words, the universal is back, but instead of being motivated by behavior, and thus subject to cultural critique, it is produced —we are told —by biology and by evolution, by changes in the way the brain processes information and makes decisions. Or rather—and most evolutionary biologists insist on this point—by changes made during a much earlier period of human prehistory: “The evolved structure of the human mind is adapted to the way of life of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, and not necessarily to our modern circumstances.”55 George Levine, assessing the relationship of Darwinism and sociobiology, underscores the importance of universality to scientists

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working within these paradigms: “All evolutionary psychologists want to insist that there is such a thing as a universal human nature, constructed everywhere out of the workings of natural selection.”56 Jonathan Kramnick describes these commitments, to the idea of the universal and to adaptation in the work of recent and current practitioners of what has come to be called literary Darwinism, citing, for example, assertions by Denis Dutton (“The arts, like language, emerge spontaneously and universally in similar forms across cultures, employing imaginative and intellectual capacities that had clear survival value in prehistory”57) and literary critic Brian Boyd (“despite its many forms, art, too, is a specifically human adaptation, biologically part of our species”).58 Where, you may well ask, is Ovid—and myth, or myth and ritual—in all of this? We might want to note that adaptation is oddly similar to the more magical kinds of transformations that take place in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Whether turning into a heifer or a daffodil or a waterfall is really adaptation to the environment is perhaps a debatable question, and these changes are rather more instantaneous than the long view of evolution would countenance, but still the promise to tell of “forms changed / into new bodies” is as fulfilled in the Ovidian poem as it is in the scientific narrative of evolution.59 “What The Golden Bough implicitly shows us,” wrote John Vickery in the 1970s, “is that the interest in myth—which extends throughout the entire century, and beyond—became a viable power in the creative world only when the full significance of mythic activity was revealed by the new forms of science and history. It is perhaps not too much to say that without Darwin and the evolutionary perspective . . . myth would have remained an airy fancy with no social or psychological relevance to modern man.”60 We are now, of course, in a new moment of attention to “Darwin and the evolutionary perspective,” motivated in the sciences and social sciences by evolutionary psychology and in the humanities by cognitive theory and Darwinian literary studies, as well as by work in evolutionary aesthetics and evolutionary musicology. Is the analogy between Ovidian metamorphosis and evolutionary adaptation farfetched? Only if it is pushed too far. As a heuristic, though, the analogy is not only useful, but—as we’ll see— episodically recurrent. In 1868, Charles Darwin wrote to his friend Ernst Haeckel, the scientist who coined the terms ecology and phylum and developed the so-called recapitulation theory, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, the history of the individual parallels the history of the species, to congratulate Haeckel on the birth of his first child. “You will be astonished,” wrote Darwin, “to find how the whole mental disposition of your child changes with advancing

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years. A young child, and the same when nearly grown, sometimes differ almost as much as do a caterpillar and a butterfly.”61 This genial piece of epistolary banter, which comes as a preface to a discussion of scholarly work of mutual interest, brings the originator of the Origin of Species together with the father of ecology, a speculative zoologist who would later branch out into questionable theories of racial hierarchy, and who was one of the first scientists to consider psychology as part of physiology—a conviction that, however different from the present, nonetheless points toward the evolution of evolutionary psychology. It is perhaps wholly fanciful to see an Ovidian subtext in the small but telling narratives of the child who becomes an adolescent and the caterpillar who becomes a butterfly. But to anyone who feels that the analogy between Ovidian metamorphosis and evolutionary adaptation is a loose one, it is helpful to be reminded of the boldness, and the high degree of literacy, with which these nineteenth-century thinkers deployed both analogy and speculation. To enjoy Aesop’s Fables or Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, it is not necessary to be a Lamarckian. “How the Whale Got His Throat”; “How the Camel Got His Hump”; “How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin”; “How the Leopard Got His Spots”: These tales of Kipling, in each of which an animal is modified from an earlier form by an act of man or of a god or magical being, belong to the genre of pourquoi or origin stories, familiar in ancient tales from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Australian aboriginal dreamtime stories. They are not “scientific.” But as tales, they are not so different from the origin stories of the evolutionists or the evolutionary psychologists. Literature tells truths, even though those truths may not be measurable with tables and instruments— or, perhaps, because they are not measurable in this way.62 Ovidian metamorphoses are “just so” stories of a very high order, without the need for a naturalistic explanation. The story of Narcissus and Echo is not the story of a flower and the reflection of sound waves. In the seventeenth century Andrew Marvell made confident fun of the supposed trajectory in his poem, “The Garden”: The gods who mortal beauty chase, Still in a tree did end their race. Apollo hunted Daphne so, Only that she might laurel grow. And Pan did after Syrinx speed, Not as a nymph, but for a reed.63

But despite Marvell’s delicious reversal, what is being “explained” in morphic tales, if anything, is human emotion or passion. Ovid, in short, is evo-

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lutionary psychology avant la lettre, with the signal and salutary difference that what evolves through literature is culture, not merely nature. In her classic study of nineteenth-century fiction and evolutionary narrative, Gillian Beer offers —with a qualification — a similar analogy between Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Darwinian theory. “In some ways,” she observes, “evolutionary theory looks like the older concept of metamorphosis prolonged through time, transformation eked out rather than emblazoned. Both ideas seek to rationalize change but through diverse means.” But where the two differ is that Darwin’s theory “required extinction,” whereas in Ovid, “ ‘Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.’ Everything changes, nothing dies.” Nonetheless, as Beer observes, “metamorphosis turns out to be a concept as crucial to physiology, geology, or botany, as to myth.”64 The first section of Beer’s introduction is called “The Remnant of the mythical,”65 a title she takes from Robert Mackay: “A remnant of the mythical lurks in the very sanctuary of science.”66 And as she points out, in the mid-nineteenth century “scientists themselves in their texts drew openly upon literary, historical, and philosophical material as part of their arguments: [Charles] Lyell, for example, uses extensively the fifteenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his account of proto-geology . . . . Because of the shared discourse, not only ideas, but metaphors, myths, and narrative patterns could move rapidly and freely to and fro between scientists and non-scientists: though not without frequent creative misprision.”67 In the section on “Darwinian Myths,” Beer again takes up the analogy with metamorphosis, citing the “everything changes” passage from Ovid at greater length to make a crucial distinction: “Metamorphosis emphasizes abrupt disconnection, the apparent fissuring of past and present . . . The movement of metamorphosis is lateral as much as developmental. The movement in evolutionary theory is genetic.”68 It is far from the contention of the present essay to dispute this distinction, nor am I arguing that Darwinian or evolutionary theory is the same as Ovidian metamorphosis in any “scientific” way. My much more limited claim, and the only purpose of my drawing the analogy, is to note that both are universalizing structures, and that evolutionary theory has, from its inception to the present day, been associated— even, or especially, by some key practitioners and observers—with the idea of myth. Asserting that Darwinism is “a theory of how living organisms survive in an unreliable environment by dynamic metamorphosis,” Ellen Spolsky first offers a mythological example —“water-dwelling creatures became amphibious as the swamps dried up, Syrinx was changed into a reed to escape Pan”69 (coincidentally perhaps, the same example used by Marvell

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to a different effect)— and then moves to justify it in the terms of her argument: The comparison with Ovid is not as far fetched as it may at fi rst seem because although the word “adaptation” seems good-naturedly cooperative, in fact, Darwinism is also a theory of unpredictable death and catastrophic variation and recategorization. . . . The grotesqueries with which Ovid’s stories end often bear comparison with the random variation and sudden loss that are necessary conditions of evolution under natural selection.70

Again, let me emphasize that my object here is not to evaluate the truth, falsehood, or effectiveness of this statement, but rather to offer it as yet another instance in which Ovidian metamorphosis is compared to Darwin’s theory of evolutionary adaptation.71 Once such an analogy is made, of course, specialists in either discipline can leap in to say that these things are in fact very different; nonetheless it is the persistence or recurrence of this comparison, its status precisely as a comparison, that interests me. For such a comparison is both implicit and explicit in the idea of reading myth— or myths—across cultures and disciplines. The current generation of evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary linguists, and evolutionary anthropologists (scholars like John Tooby, Leah Cosmides, David Buss, and Steven Pinker) are straightforwardly trained as scientists. Their work is supplemented by charts and tables and equations and other “scientific” data about genetic inheritance, and adaptation, and mate-guarding. When they venture into the world of literature and the arts it is often to puzzle about what possible adaptive purpose these seeming trifles might have to offer.72 But the looming titanic figure of the previous generation, the great predecessor with whom these scientists beg to differ as deferentially as Malinowski differed with Frazer, is Edward O. Wilson, the “father of sociobiology” and the author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning book called On Human Nature (1978). For Wilson (“the alpha male of Literary Darwinism”)73 words like myth, mythology, and epic were and remain central to how he thinks about sociobiology.74 As Wilson himself notes, the trajectory from ants to animals to humans meant that On Human Nature is “not a work of science; it is a work about science” and its reciprocal relation to the social sciences and the humanities:75 “The sociobiological explanation of faith in God leads to the crux of the role of mythology in modern life,” declared Wilson. “It is obvious that human beings are still ruled by myth”;76 and “scientific materialism is the only mythology that can manufacture

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great goals from the sustained pursuit of pure knowledge”;77 and “the core of scientific materialism is the evolutionary epic”; and “the evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have.”78 Notice Wilson’s insistence, not only on mythology but also on the epic form. In his own later manifesto, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), he returned again to this claim: “The true evolutionary epic retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic.”79 His phrase “the evolutionary epic” became a reference point for many subsequent science writers. In a foreword to a book by Loyal Rue, Wilson offered this explanation: “Human beings must have an epic, a sublime account of how the world was created and how humanity became part of it.”80 Wilson’s assertion of the mythic nature of biologism has continued throughout his career. Thus we find, in Consilience, not only several pages on myth and the signature declaration about “the true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry,” but also scattered references to Icarus, Tantalus, Daphne, Proserpine, Prometheus, the Minotaur, the “labyrinth of empirical knowledge,” the “mythic roles of an epic adventure” (credited to the inspiration of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces), and, indeed, Ovid, here used inventively to illustrate, via the story of “Apollo’s courtship of Daphne,” the relationship of a proposition to a schema. A typical schema is Ovid’s telling of Apollo’s courtship of Daphne, like an unstoppable hound in pursuit of an unattainable hare, wherein the dilemma is resolved when Daphne, the hare and a concept, turns into a laurel tree, another concept reached by a proposition. I have faith that the unstoppable neuroscientists will encounter no such dilemma.81

Leaving aside the gender politics of this analogy, the range of mythic and literary reference throughout the book is striking, and is certainly unmatched by any subsequent biologist (or psychologist) writing from within the evolutionary paradigm. It’s intriguing to compare Wilson’s assertions about the evolution of the universe to the opening lines of Charles Martin’s 2004 translation of The Metamorphoses, which deploys the word epic in a suggestively similar way: My mind leads me to speak now of forms changed into new bodies: O gods above, inspire this undertaking (which you’ve changed as well) and guide my poem in its epic sweep from the world’s beginning to the present day.82 In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas

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Corpora. Di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas) adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.83

For Ovid’s perpetuum carmen, other translators have “poem,”84 or verse,”85 but Martin adds “epic sweep” for perpetuum. When Wilson declared that the evolutionary epic was “the best myth we will ever have,” he was not implying that it was a fiction, but rather that it was a narrative, a powerful and convincing story. There have been many critics of his view, including many scientists, who found sociobiology a deterministic fiction, and, in particular, found the application of its premises to human life and human culture to be reductionist at best, a trap and a lure for social scientists who wanted to regard themselves as scientists. “The promised biologization of social studies is precisely a realization of the desire of sociologists, anthropologists, and economists to be scientists,” wrote Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin.86 An equivalent statement today might add humanists to those who aspire to the condition of science. By inventing “adaptive stories about the unrecoverable past in human history,” these authors wrote, acerbically, “all phenomena, real and imaginary, can be explained”87 without the necessity for provable facts.88 “Adaptive storytelling,” they suggested, “belongs more in the realm of games than of natural science.”89 Almost thirty years later, where such “games” arguably include Second Life, avatars, and transformers, adaptive storytelling, the storytelling of Ovidian evolution and transformation, has returned as a key component of a theory about the long (long, long) history of evolutionary mankind. The achievements of such recent times as Ovid’s, or Shakespeare’s, or our own eras are as a blip on the screen. Deep time to these scholars means way, way back, and the “evidence,” such as it is, is all regressive speculation. Here is the final paragraph of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution: Preoccupied as we are with the flashy media and buzzing gizmos of daily experience, we forget how close we remain to the prehistoric women and men who first found beauty in the world. Their blood runs in our veins. Our art instinct is theirs.90

It’s one thing for Walter Pater, casting his eyes back a few short centuries, to describe Leonardo’s Mona Lisa as “older than the rocks among which she sits.”91 It’s another thing entirely for Dutton (or anyone else, for that matter) to assert aesthetic kinship with the unknown prehistoric populace

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of what evolutionary psychologists call the EEA, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, from two and a half million to twelve thousand years ago. Now, it is not the fault of evolutionary psychology that weak readings of literature and culture claim kinship with their ideas.92 William Flesch’s Comeuppance (2007) is a far more sophisticated and thoughtful attempt to derive literary significance from “costly signaling, altruistic punishment, and other biological components of fiction,” to quote the subtitle of his book.93 But the “myth” to which many literary Darwinists appeal is one that they derive, third-hand, from scholarship and speculation in a far different field, scholarship to which they have, at the best, only a tangential relation. That myth, firmly articulated by E. O. Wilson, is the myth about myths: that, in his words, “sociobiology can account for the very origin of mythology by the principle of natural selection acting on the genetically evolving material of the human brain.”94 Flesch uses the term “armchair evolutionary psychology” to characterize work that “tends to see human nature as hardwired at a significantly . . . specialized level,” and “tends to be correspondingly reductive.”95 I like the use of “armchair” in this context. It means “in the home; hence domesticated, comfortable; often applied to persons who confine themselves or are addicted to home-made views or criticism of matters in which they take no active part, or of which they have no first-hand knowledge, as armchair critic, armchair politician, armchair travel, armchair traveler.”96 “Armchair evolutionary psychology” calls up, among other things, Malinowski’s indictment of anthropologists who avoid going into the field, an indictment offered, incidentally, in the same lecture, “Myth in Primitive Psychology,” in which he praised (and differed from) his “Master,” Sir James Frazer: The anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the veranda of the missionary compound, Government station, or planter’s bungalow, where, armed with pencil and notebook and at times with whiskey and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants, write down stories, and fill out sheets of paper with savage texts.97

It is such armchair evolutionary psychology, often transferred or applied to other fields such as literature, that adheres to the orthodoxy of myth. Is contemporary neuroaesthetics uncomfortably close to Wilsonian sociobiology? There’s certainly a branch of neuroaesthetics that emphasizes the evolutionary elements in brain function, often with a nod to

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familiar catchphrases, as in these, from the International Network of Neuroaesthetics: “the selective pressures and adaptive advantages that have endowed our species with the capacity for aesthetic experiences”; “the recognition of biological fitness indicators in the physical appearance of potential mates.”98 Neuroaesthetics, too, has its gurus, its eloquent converts, and its equally eloquent detractors.99 Although this emerging field, like the parent venues of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, derives its theoretical strength from the science side of the divide so that the relationship of the humanities to the sciences is manifestly anaclitic, at present the discourse, if not the practice, still gives both rhetorical and real power to the artist, who is offered the compliment (clearly intended as such) of being called “in a sense, a neuroscientist.”100 But at this stage in the evolution of research on the relation of biology to the arts, Wilson remains its most persistent mythmaker, at once mythologist and mythographer. Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that in a field that so highly values concepts like parental investment, own kin, and interested altruism, an ancestral father, especially one who is still very much alive and kicking, should continue to articulate—in trade publications, alumni magazines, and public fora—the aspirational consequences of the scientific program. It is worth underscoring the fact that in these supposedly crossover categories— of science, the arts, and humanities—few scientists seem to have premised their experiments on the foundation of humanistic work (despite the existence of some learned books on art by scientists) whereas humanists draw increasingly on dicta and dogma from neuroscience in making their claims about categories like family, courtship and mating, fitness, and moral virtue. What needs ultimately to be stressed here is the fact that the quest for a universal template functions rather differently in literary and humanistic studies from the way it does in the varieties of neuroscientific experience. In the evolutionary criticism of literature and the allied arts what is all-toooften sought is either a universality of meaning or a universality of response. Scientists working on this problem are far more focused on response than on meaning; the latter is a kind of back-formation or byproduct of the response-mechanisms of the brain and the body, whether these are considered within the very long durée of the EEA or in the current moment. Literary scholars—not all of them, by any means, but often those who fly under the flag of “literary Darwinism”—too often elide meaning and moral or ethical injunction, upping the ante by seeking, or proclaiming, a rationale for these supposedly universal elements. Here is where E. O. Wilson’s “evolutionary epic,” rightly described by Levine as at once naïve,

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romantic, and imperialist,101 has functioned as a program of motivational speaking for literary Darwinists. But as the life of Publius Ovidius Naso, (quondam poet to the emperor, dying in exile) makes clear, though men may make their own myths, they do not make them as they please. Ovid, now and then. We might want to note, in an Ovidian spirit, that linguistic shifters like now and then (and modern) are also shape-shifters, changing their forms to suit new circumstances. When Raymond Williams wrote that, “myth is now both a very significant and a very difficult word,”102 his now was bound to become our then—although myth still remains a “very difficult word.” Roland Barthes employed yet another shifter in “Myth Today.” Yet his analysis of the problem with myth on the (political) Right accords uncannily well in our own with the risks posed by evolutionary psychology. “The very principle of myth,” says Barthes,” is that it “transforms history into nature.”103 More specifically, as we have seen, some arguments based on this myth turn human history into human nature. Especially when they are themselves adapted by humanists. And this is a metamorphosis of a rather worrying kind. If Ovid foresaw, as he claimed at the end of The Metamorphoses, a time when all the shape-shifting would be over (“my work is finished now,” as Martin translates the passage)104 and his fame would be assured for all time, it is also perhaps worth pointing out that he begins the unfinished Fasti by addressing the double-visaged god, Janus. He asks Janus, in Frazer’s translation, to “unfold” the reason “why alone of all the heavenly one[s] thou dost see both back and front” (“sitque quod a tergo, sitque quod ante”). And Janus answers that everything in the world—the sky, the sea, the clouds and the earth, war and peace—are all closed and opened by his hand. He is called by many names because of his many roles. (“Thus rude antiquity made shift to work my changing functions with the change of name” [“scilicet alterno voluit rudis illa vetustas / nomine diversas significare vices”].)105 Like the Janus of the Fasti, Ovid, too, we may say, plays many roles, gazing both before and behind, at the past, the present, the future, and the curious practices through which we mark the changing intellectual seasons, regarding the nows and thens of critical generations, whether in quest of universals or of universal change, as something that is bound to happen, mutatis mutandis, now and then.

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chapter 3

Over the Influence

Sometimes a term or phrase becomes so culturally powerful that it dislocates completely from its initial context. The various deformations of “deconstruction” are a case in point. Long after Jacques Derrida, headlines in the New York Times now routinely use— or misuse—the term: Recent examples include “Deconstructing a Demagogue” (on Newt Gingrich), “ ‘Diva’? Deconstructing Pop Images of Black Women” (a panel discussion at the Brooklyn Museum), and “Deconstructing the Perfect Burger” (use a cast-iron pan and an 80 –20 ratio of fat to lean).1 Harold Bloom’s phrase “the anxiety of influence” has enjoyed— or suffered—a similar fate. “Beware of Amish Hitmen and the Anxiety of Influence” offered one headline, a review of a suspense thriller based on a Stephen King novella; a Bard College music program on Wagner and the German Jewish composers Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn seemed appropriately enough described as “Wagner and the Anxiety of Influence”; but a column on the plea bargain of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff was called “In Washington, the Anxiety of Influence”; and pop culture columnists weighed in with “The Anxiety of Being Influential” ( Jay-Z on other rappers rapping about him) and, hilariously, “The Anxiety of ‘Influence’ ” (the Olsen twins on their picture book 32

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Influence, their favorite writers, and their conversation with Lauren Hutton about sex).2 If an allegorized “anxiety of influence” were itself to suffer anxiety, it might be because of this seemingly inevitable process of deformation. Certainly, the phrase has become “influential” in a way quite independent from the book, or the theory, of the same name. The word “influence” now usually denotes either a kind of political lobbying (“influence-peddling”) or a condition of inebriation (“DUI”). “Under the influence,” meaning drunk or flown with wine, dates from the late nineteenth century, and “bad influence” from as far back as Paradise Lost. Both are today the names of bands. “Influence” in the astrological sense of a power streaming from the stars, or from human beings with star-like powers (“ladies, whose bright eyes rain influence,” Milton, L’Allegro) is now “obsolete” or (that most suspect of dictionary conditions) “poetical.” As for “poetic influence,” known to literary critics and theorists simply as “influence,” it is now inextricably linked, in glossaries of literary terms, with Bloom’s “anxiety of influence.” Despite its ubiquity, though, the term (and, more centrally, the concept) may seem quaint or obscure to a modern student. There was a time when debates about poetic influence imparted to literary studies a frisson and a lively, contestatory energy that fueled the “linguistic turn” in other disciplines such as history, anthropology, and sociology. But that time is not this time. What influence does influence have today?

The Anxiety of Confluence We might begin by going back some forty-five years to consider, for a moment, the reflections of a great critic of Romantic poetry on the question of poetic anxiety, as these reflections first appeared in print in the early 1970s: I have often wondered whether we could fi nd any more comprehensive way of taking up the whole of English poetry during the last three centuries—or for that matter the modern history of the arts in general—than by exploring the effects of . . . accumulating anxiety and the question it so directly presents to the poet or artist: What is there left to do?3 In our own response to a constantly expanding subject matter, we forget that what provides opportunity for us, as critics and historians, may be simultaneously foreclosing—or at least appearing to foreclose—

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opportunity for the artists, and that, as T. S. Eliot said, “Not only every great poet, but every genuine, though lesser, poet, fulfills once for all some possibility of the language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.”4 . . . we note the nagging apprehension, from generation to generation, that the poet is somehow becoming increasingly powerless to attain (or is in some way being forbidden to attain) the scope and power of the earlier poetry that he so deeply admires.5 In no other case are you enjoined to admire and at the same time to try, at all costs, not to follow closely what you admire, not merely in detail but in overall procedure, in general object, in any of the broader conventions of mode, vocabulary, or idiom. Yet here, in the arts, this split is widening . . . The essence of neurosis is confl ict.6

These passages from Walter Jackson Bate’s The Burden of the Past and the English Poet were published in 1970, a year after Bate delivered the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto focusing on “the principal dilemma facing the artist generally from the Renaissance to the present day.”7 In his preface, Bate wrote that he was not only indebted to several colleagues at Harvard, where had taught for many years, but also that some “friends and colleagues elsewhere will note my use of ideas of their own.” Among these he named, “particularly,” Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom. Bloom returned the favor, and the serve, in his 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence, noting that: The modern poet, as W. J. Bate shows in The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, is the inheritor of a melancholy engendered in the mind of the Enlightenment by its skepticism of its own double heritage of imaginative wealth, from the ancients and from the Renaissance masters. In this book I largely neglect the area Bate has explored with great skill, in order to center upon intra-poetic relationships as parallels of family romance. . . . Nietzsche and Freud are, so far as I can tell, the prime influences upon the theory of influence presented in this book.8

“So far as I can tell” is deft, because Bloom will go on to map the issues of sublimation, deferral, denial, and antithesis that marks his own theory of influence as “creative misreading”9 (or as the Bloom of the seventies, less averse to theoretical jargon than he is today, would memorably call it, “misprision”). The “swerve” away from the precursor, as he would go on to say, planting his flag firmly in Lucretian territory, marks the strong

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poet’s glorious struggle to overcome the “priority” of his predecessor. (“In this book I largely neglect the area Bate has explored with great skill. . . .”) When The Burden of the Past was reissued in 1991, the first blurb on the back cover was Bloom’s. Ideas about the relationships between and among texts were very much the topic of the moment in the 1960s for critics on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextualité in 1967.10 The word, as Leon Roudiez noted, “met with immediate success” on both sides of the Atlantic, but the concept, he insisted, was “generally misunderstood. It has nothing to do with matters of influence by one writer upon another, or with the sources of a literary work; it does, on the other hand, involve the components of a textual system such as the novel.”11 In the following decade, thinkers such as Foucault and Barthes offered other constructs: The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network . . . The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands . . . Its unity is variable and relative.12 A text is . . . a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations . . . The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.13

French theorists largely did away with the anxious author, and indeed with the author tout court. So the pathos inhabited and voiced by Bloom (and to a certain extent by Bate as well) is largely absent. For Kristeva, intertextuality is not a personal drama at all but rather an aspect of language. Barthes insists that the “scriptor,” who succeeds the author, “no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather [an] immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt.”14 Again, it’s worth noting the dates: Kristeva’s coinage first appeared in 1966 (or 1967), Barthes’s essay on “La mort de l’auteur” in 1968,15 Bate’s book in 1970 (and his Alexander lectures the previous year), and Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence in 1973. No lateral Gallic influence is mentioned by either U.S. critic, and neither critic was, it is perhaps needless to say, a fan of French theory. Nonetheless it is striking, half a century later, to see how the conditions of previous criticism had, in effect, set the stage for these interventions, which seem both so individual and so characteristic.

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“Melancholy” was what Bloom saw in Bate’s account of modernity, and melancholy was what he identified as poetry. “A poem is a poet’s melancholy at his lack of priority,” Bloom declared in the “manifesto” section of The Anxiety of Influence,16 and when, almost thirty years later, he took his own prior work as precursor in The Anatomy of Influence (2011), he again began, as his title suggests, with the “melancholy” he saw in Bate’s account (“My model was to be Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy”17). Moreover, in the same sentence—the second sentence of his book—and throughout its early pages, he claims Samuel Johnson (the subject of Bate’s prize-winning biography and the topic of the first sentence of The Burden of the Past) as his “hero and mentor.” His relationship to Bate becomes triangulated, over time, into a relationship with and through Johnson. Bloom’s Anxiety had been dedicated to another Johnsonian precursor, William K. Wimsatt, Jr., whose resistant response to the young Bloom’s first graduate paper at Yale—and rumored abstention on the only slightly less-young Bloom’s tenure case—are “vividly recall[ed]” in the first paragraph of an early chapter of Bloom’s Anatomy.18 These were precursors who became peers, and whose high eminence could be scaled. Less than one hundred pages after this “vivid” recollection, described (in what seems surely an act of secondary revision) as generating “mingled affection and amusement,” the Bloom of 2011 offers an affectionate comparison. “Beneath his gruffness the bearlike [Samuel] Johnson shielded a tenderness toward human suffering almost beyond measure,” he wrote. “My Johnsonian teacher, W. K. Wimsatt, was remarkably like our mutual hero in this, as in so many other ways.”19 But what was the relationship of the critic to the poet? “Critics are more or less valuable than other critics only (precisely) as poets are more or less valuable than other poets,” Bloom had posited in the “manifesto” section of Anxiety. “For just as a poet must be found by the opening in a precursor poet, so must the critic.”20 And critics, too, were expected to misinterpret: “Poets’ misinterpretations or poems are more drastic than critics’ misinterpretations or criticism, but this is only a difference in degree and not at all in kind. There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations and so all criticism is prose poetry.”21 Thus The Anxiety of Influence performed its audacious act of legerdemain: presto chango, the critic was a poet. Nonetheless, it may be more appealing, within this schema, to be an antithetical poet (or an enfant terrible) than to be a precursor (or an éminence grise). “Poetry is the anxiety of influence, is misprision, is a disciplined perverseness. Poetry is misunderstanding, misinterpretation, misalliance.”22 So wrote the Bloom of Anxiety, joyfully immersed in the destructive ele-

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ment, tilting at Wimsatts. But the Bloom of Anatomy has traded in his anxiety for a resentment of Resentment: “the Age of Resentment,”23 the “New Cynicism,” “a cluster of critical tendencies which are rooted in French theories of culture and encompass New Historicism and its ilk.”24 Now, “ilk” is a perfectly nice old word, deriving from Middle English and meaning “same” or “identical,” and with an honorable history associating itself with landed families and the land they come from (“Guthrie of that ilk”) but it is seldom used these days in a complimentary way, and I would also venture to say that the “ilk” of New Historicism is a somewhat different “ilk” from the “ilk” of French theories of culture. “New Historicism and its ilk” means something like “this is the sort of tedious nonsense up with which I will not put.” Bloom has certainly earned the right not to put up with anything with which he does not care to put up. But misprision, misinterpretation, misalliance, disciplined perverseness—these would all seem conceivably appropriate terms to describe the contents, as contrasted with the labels, of the critics Harold Bloom lumps together as resenters and cynics. Whose resentment and whose cynicism, critics of this ilk might wish to ask. Bloom, who reads everything, does not wish to read their books poetically, and does not choose to credit their disciplined and disciplinary perversity as swerving (however temporarily) from his own powerful precursing. At various points, he says he will not read any more criticism, but only poetry, though it was he who taught a subsequent critical generation that criticism and poetry could intermingle, that some critics are successor poets. Nonetheless, literary studies is still to a certain extent under the influence of Bloom and his brilliant inversion of the idea of influence, turning it from a benign outflowing to an anxious indwelling in The Anxiety of Influence. Not Seneca’s Oedipus but Freud’s Oedipus presides — or presided — over Bloom’s initial attack of (and on) anxiety. The meaning of a poem is another poem, Bloom the theorist declared. A young poet responded to his precursor by “swerving” away from the model, and by “strong misreadings.” “Every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem.”25 Influence has never seemed so subversive, or so deliciously anxious. The young Bloom was a flame-thrower, not a votary. But even the longest-running ephebe wakes up someday to find himself a precursor. Position matters. As Sam Tanenhaus noted in a generally admiring review in The New York Times, “over time [Bloom’s] notion of influence has become more orthodox, growing closer, in its sensitivity to echo and allusion, to the approach of the hated New Critics.”26 They are our parents, and original.

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Small Frye fry, n. Offspring, progeny, seed, young (of human beings); a man’s children or family; rarely, a child. Now obs.27

At age seventeen, Bloom purchased, “soon after its publication,” Northrop Frye’s book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry. Frye’s influence for him, he says in his own Anatomy, was “an overwhelming experience,” one that lasted twenty years, and then ended exactly on his thirty-seventh birthday (mirabile dictu; all events in this story have mythic coloration). On that fateful day, he awakened from a nightmare (see Keats on Adam [Letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817]) and began to compose a dithyramb, “The Covering Cherub: or, Poetic Influence,” which metamorphosed six years later into The Anxiety of Influence, a book, he says, that was “rightly rejected” by the Christian Platonist Frye. So Bloom’s decisive and reiterated rejection of Northrop Frye (“Frye’s influence on me . . . came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday”; “Now in my eightieth year, I would not have the patience to reread anything by Frye”) comes in the wake of both Frye’s (alleged) rejection of him, and Bloom’s own more general rejection of most modern, and all recent, critics. As Trevor Cook notes, quoting from a 1985 interview with Imre Salusinszky, Bloom had earlier acknowledged that Frye was his most powerful influence: “One’s attempt to find precursors here and there merely evades the truth, which is that the precursor proper has to be Northrop Frye.”28 His own early work was “all Frye, all Frye.”29 Bloom calls Frye a “Christian Platonist,” and so (we may agree) he was. But he was also, quite famously and influentially, a “myth critic,” whose methodologies (including “archetypal” reading) and astounding range of historical literary reference from ancient Greece to modernity were to have a profound effect upon a succeeding generation of literary critics. It’s not overstating the case to say that his profession-wide influence, as contrasted with (or in addition to) his personal and individual influence, changed the shape of the field. The 1965 meeting of the English Institute featured a panel on “Northrop Frye and Contemporary Criticism” with papers by Angus Fletcher, W. K. Wimsatt, and Geoffrey Hartman. (Bloom spoke on the same occasion, but on another panel.30) Absenting himself from the event so as to permit discussion “to be as uninhibited as possible,”31 Frye wrote in a letter to the Institute that the “role of system and schema” in his work, “whatever the light it throws on literature, . . . throws a good deal of light on me in the act of criticizing,” since “it is the sche-

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matic thinker, not the introspective thinker, who most fully reveals his mind in process.”32 But he did not expect the criticism of the future to adhere to his own critical system, or indeed to any system. One perhaps inevitable correlation of such influence is saturation, and indeed oversaturation. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but as a matter of intellectual style, the once-innovative quickly becomes commonplace and even banal. Frye describes The Anatomy of Criticism as a book that “forced itself ” on him while he was trying to write something else. “I . . . found myself entangled in those parts of criticism that have to do with such words as ‘myth,’ ‘symbol,’ ‘ritual,’ and ‘archetype,’ ” he explains, and the book he produced, one of “pure critical theory” without “specific criticism” and “even, in three of the four essays, [without] quotation” was the result.33 That was in 1957. In the succeeding decades, those four keywords—myth, symbol, ritual, and archetype— could be found everywhere in literary critical discourse. “Myth and ritual criticism” became a standard, and increasingly standardized, way of analyzing a literary text. By 1993, the practice Frye theorized, once so startling, brilliant, and fresh, could be described in an academic murder mystery as “the extremely unfashionable [field] of myth criticism.”34 The problem is not with the specific approach; any mode of critical analysis will suffer the consequences of its own success. The instantiating anecdote of New Historicist writing went from an engaging (and often revealing) novelty to a cliché in the course of a critical generation. The now often undervalued practice of “close reading” was surprising and fresh when it began in English studies; its predecessor practices were biblical hermeneutics and the higher criticism. Today, scholars using computers aggregate and analyze data about thousands of novels in the name of “distant reading,” a coinage designed to reflect on “close reading,” but offering a very different way of assessing texts, in which the individual book often goes “unread,” at least by any modern human reader. The once highly valued reading method known (thanks to Paul Ricoeur) as the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” and the related method known as “critique,” are now under suspicion and critique by advocates of “surface reading.”35 It will not escape any percipient observer that there is a certain spirit of competition at work here, as well as a personal and professional quest for novelty (in its non-disparaging sense of newness). It’s no accident—as one used to be able to say in the old hermeneutics-of-suspicion days—that so much of the nomenclature of insurgent critical movements starts with “New,” a word that instantly renders the previous brand of criticism, or historicism, formalism, etc., “old” (and by implication tired, in need of

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refreshing). That these rivalries should be, in the broadest terms, generational, should likewise surprise no one. The dynamic, in fact, is Oedipal, Freudian, Bloomian, choose what nominal adjective you will. Regarded over time, the prior and the post, or the precursor and the ephebe, also exhibit something of a family resemblance: the narcissism of minor differences. Again, this is no surprise. In light of such a system, which thrives on overgoing its predecessors, we may return to our question: What influence does the theory of influence have today?

What Used to Be Called Influence Studies About two-thirds of the way through The Program Era, his magisterial study of American creative writing programs and postwar fiction, Mark McGurl pauses to observe that “while this book is not without its pretensions to novelty, in a way it is simply an assemblage of what used to be called ‘influence studies.’ ” 36 By “influence,” he goes on to say, he means not only personal influence by a teacher or mentor, but also an institutional influence (so-and-so is an “Iowa writer”) “as if the mere attribution of institutionality is enough to disqualify the work.” Thus “we also find writers themselves squirming at the idea of their own institutionalization.” It’s at the level of the institution, in other words, that influence in the Program Era becomes an occasion for what Harold Bloom—envisioning something far loftier, an epic clash of strong poets with their poetic father figures—called “the anxiety of influence.”37

“Envisioning something far loftier” is a nod of homage to the precursor, but McGurl goes on to note that “Bloom’s concept was always susceptible, with a little downward sociological pressure, to being re-envisioned in the crasser terms of professionalism, of position-taking in the struggle for career.” This leads him to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, to women writers and what he calls the “anxiety of affiliation” (Gilbert and Gubar had called it an “affiliation complex”38) and then within quite a short space to “the anxiety of the institutionalized writer—the writer feminized and/or infantilized . . . by his or her humiliating affiliation with the ‘nurturing’ institution of the school” (italics and quotation marks in the original).39 Another page along, a particular kind of affiliation is suggested as the one that “in modern literary history . . . stands before all others—an occasion for intense pride or bitter shame”40: national affiliation, the claim that one is, for example, an “American” writer. I don’t want to suggest any particu-

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lar kind of anxiety of influence here, but I will just note that although Gilbert and Gubar are appropriately noted in the index, there is no citation, in the alphabetical list between Matthew Black and Franz Boas, for Harold Bloom. What interests me more than McGurl’s (useful) use of Bloom’s paradigm and of Gilbert and Gubar’s adaptation /transumption of it, though, is the seeming throwaway phrase at the beginning of this section, the mention of “what used to be called ‘influence studies’ ” (a term that is also, though perhaps less symptomatically, missing from the index). Phrases like “what used to be called” are indicative markers that accord with my own sense of the predictable circularity of literary approaches. Whatever approach seems least current, most hopelessly old-fashioned and even discredited, is very likely to be the next on the list for critical resuscitation. Like, for example, textual editing, or the history of the book, or character criticism. In each of these cases, the practice was prematurely declared defunct, only to come roaring back to life, sometimes under another name. If something “used to be called ‘influence studies,’ ” what might it be called now? Perhaps a clue can be found in another passage from McGurl, this one on the penultimate page of the book, as he moves toward his final claim that writing programs have actually made American writing better (or, to quote him more directly, “there has been a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period”41). To get to this claim, McGurl has to evoke, and then—slightly tongue in cheek, hedging a bet?—to disavow the idea of “aesthetic appreciation.” (“Granted, there is no way for a literary scholar, these days, to engage in strenuous aesthetic appreciation without sounding goofily anachronistic.”42) “These days” is what linguists call a shifter, a word whose meaning depends upon the context. The “these days” of these days today may be different from the “these days” of 2009, the publication date of The Program Era, but aesthetic appreciation is now again pretty widely appreciated, if only as a backlash to the now suspect “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Nietzsche, Freud, Marx by way of Paul Ricoeur) and a weak, but heartfelt response to the current “crisis in the humanities.” Goofy anachronism, in fact, is the normal curve in the history of literary studies. And the most vociferous adherent of aesthetic appreciation is Harold Bloom. “Opponents accuse me of espousing an aesthetic ideology,” Bloom says with the beleaguered weariness that he still does better than anyone in the business, an old lion shaking off pesky flies. “Faith in the aesthetic,” he claims forty-five years later, was the “credo” of The Anxiety of Influence.43 (Credo, a critical term associated with the New Critic Cleanth Brooks,44 Bloom’s senior colleague at Yale, is an

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intriguing choice here, suggesting yet again that neither critics nor poets can always consciously choose their most influential precursors.)

Learned Plagiaries When a speaker in John Dryden’s “Essay of Dramatick Poesie” (1668) calls Ben Jonson a “learned plagiary,” he means that Jonson quoted liberally from the classics. This is high praise, not critique: “[T]he greatest man of the last age, Ben Jonson, was . . . not only a professed Imitator of Horace, but a learned Plagiary of all the others; you track him everywhere in their Snow.”45 The essay is structured as a dialogue, and these sentiments are offered by “Crites,” a surrogate for Dryden’s brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard. Dryden, speaking in his “own” voice as “Neander” (literally, the new man) later picks up this theme: Ben Jonson “was deeply conversant in the Ancients, both Greek and Latine, and he borrow’d boldly from them: there is scarce a Poet or Historian among the Roman Authours of those times which he has not translated in Sejanus and Catiline. But he has done his Robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any Law. He invades Authours like a Monarch, and what would be theft in other Poets, is onely victory in him.”46 “Neander” prefers Shakespeare to Jonson, expressing his view, again, in lines that are often quoted, though not always in context: “If I would compare him with Shakespeare, I must acknowledge him the more correct Poet, but Shakespeare the greater wit. Shakespeare was the Homer, or Father of our Dramatick Poets; Johnson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.”47 It’s worth pausing on some of the language here. As is often noted, the etymology of the word “plagiarist” traces it to kidnapping, but the term was applied regularly to poetic theft from the late sixteenth century, and Martial, a poet Jonson often imitated, has a whole series of plagiarist or “theft” poems, including at least one in which the word appears (inpones plagiaro pudorem, 1.52.9).48 Yet Crites’s “learned plagiary” and Neander’s images of borrowing, theft (or “what would be theft in other Poets”), lawflouting, invasion, and victory are all expressions of admiration. The lovely phrase “you track him everywhere in their Snow” nicely “Englishes” the weather of classical antiquity, while Neander’s phrase “correct Poet,” like his comparison of Jonson to Virgil, are hardly disparaging. Citation, quotation, misquotation (or appropriation), translation, adaptation, and “Englishing” are all modes of borrowing, filiation or homage that in themselves constitute literariness in the early modern period, and, arguably, in the twenty-first century.

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In the February 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Jonathan Lethem published a piece called “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” later reprinted in his 2011 essay collection, which was also called The Ecstasy of Influence (but with a less provocative subtitle).49 The Harper’s article cited such “plagiarisms” as those linking Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe,” Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, or Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for “The Waste Land.” “If these are examples of plagiarism,” Lethem argued, “then we want more plagiarism.”50 I should say that it seemed to be Lethem who argued this, until the reader reached the end of the article, where a series of “keys,” or endnotes, identified the source or sources from which Lethem had cribbed, quoted, “warped, and cobbled together” the tissue of his own ecstatically influenced and joyfully plagiarized text. The Ovid/Shakespeare/Bernstein /Plutarch/Eliot passage, for example, he attributed to ( Judge) Richard Posner, including the killer last line, “If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.”51 The title of Lethem’s essay, he explains, was “lifted from spoken remarks by Professor Richard Dienst of Rutgers,” and “embeds a rebuking play on Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence.’ ”52 I am not sure whether Bloom would regard ecstasy as a rebuke, but somewhere in the literary subconscious of Lethem’s (or Dienst’s) memory is probably Irving Stone’s 1961 biographical novel about Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy. (“Agon,” the Latin word for contest or struggle, is very much a Bloomian term — the third book in his “influence” trilogy was called Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism [1982].) Is this “influence”? or “echo”? or subliminal association? For Lethem and Posner, plagiarism is like sampling, collage, musical collectives, and the music of Bob Dylan. As Roland Barthes long ago pointed out, in effect we live in a world that is always already plagiarized. Yet postmodernism, too, was a moment, and from the point of view of Big Data, it too might seem almost naively (or mythically?) affective, relying as it does on a knowing interaction between, or among, texts, works, and themes. What happens to “influence” when the critic is a computer, and the assessment of its analysis is performed by scholars far from the arts and humanities?

From Golden Fleece to Sacrificial RAM A recent digital project undertaken by a group of American mathematicians surveyed what they called “Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence

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in the evolution of literature”53 using the Project Gutenberg Digital Library corpus to produce the kind of “big data” analysis that has now become intriguing to some literary scholars. “Stylistic” in this case meant a “stylometric” assessment of what the authors call “content-free words,” such as prepositions, conjunctions, “to be” verbs, and some common nouns and pronouns, with the aim of seeing how style usage “evolves” over time. The literary-critical texts cited were few, though well-chosen (which is to say, presumably, well-recommended): Aristotle’s Poetics, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, McGurl’s The Program Era, and Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. The bibliography lists these in modern editions—Aristotle, 1997, Auerbach, 2003—and there is no attempt to historicize or stylometrize these critical works; McGurl’s book on writing gives rise to a sentence on the “contemporary effect of writing programs” as contrasted with the historical effect of earlier writers on later ones (even though the data in the mathematicians’ study ends in 1952). The conclusion the paper offers is two-fold, and both folds are relatively unsurprising. First, that because there are so many more books and authors in the modern period, “patterns of influence” change radically; earlier authors had “sufficient time to sample (read) very broadly from the full range of historically published works,” while “for more recent authors, the number of possible choices of books to read has increased dramatically, and with a finite amount of time, a subset of these works must be chosen, leading to rather heterogeneous reading patterns and a greater overall diversity of authored works.” In other words, where older authors read what we now retrospectively call “the canon”—which is to say, the works of their accomplished predecessors, often understood as such—more recent authors read episodically and in a non-linear or non-historicized fashion, in part because there’s so much to read and “sampling” it has no compelling direction. That’s the first point. The second is that modern readers read synchronically rather than diachronically. They read their peers rather than their predecessors. “[W]hereas authors of the 18th and 19th centuries continued to be influenced by previous centuries, authors of the late 20th century are strongly influenced by their own decade,” the report claims. And then it wades into the waters of theory: “The so-called ‘anxiety of influence,’ whereby authors are understood in terms of their response to canonical precursors, is becoming an ‘anxiety of impotence,’ in which the past exerts a diminishing stylistic influence on the present.” There are many reasons why this well-meant coinage seems wrong, and why we might urge the report’s compilers to return to the “content-free” words that were the basis of their stylometric analyses. For one thing, argu-

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ably all anxiety is anxiety of impotence, Freud or no Freud. And for another, whose anxiety is it that worries about the diminishing stylistic influence of the past on the present? A strong poet’s “anxiety of influence” was, Bloom famously claimed, what made poetry poetry. (“Every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem. A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety.”54) For the authors of “Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence,” what is anxious is not the poet, or the poem, but the (imagined, imputed) critic who believes in an “anxiety of influence” as a mode of canon-formation rather than a mode of writing. If it is the case that “the past exerts a diminishing stylistic influence on the present,” it might well be because, as their first point tended to suggest, the present doesn’t read or know the past. Here the contrast with Bloom and Frye is striking, for these critics shared another characteristic—both had prodigious memories.55 Their capacities to quote from memory, and to recall whole passages of text, were in part what led both to their legendary status as readers and theorists, and to the particular modes of theory they propounded. But what they remembered was of course dependent upon what they read. This capacity to recall and to cite—and to make new—is often also attributed to Shakespeare, a poet central, in quite different ways, to both Frye and Bloom. But “memory” today is an expandable capacity of machines. (“As for remembering, our RAM will do that for us.”) In the world of RAM and DRAM, committing a poem to memory is an optional pleasure, and searching one’s memory (for a line half-recalled or a word imperfectly recollected) is as likely to be a digital as a mental task. It would be refreshing if not-knowing the literary past or the tradition— “great” or otherwise— of English literature were a source of anxiety for modern day writers, or readers, or poets. But I detect no such anxiety in the classroom, or in the air, or indeed in the phrase “anxiety of impotence,” which translates as “anxiety about lack of power,” a misconception about what the converse of “anxiety of influence” might possibly be. That English professors and English teachers might harbor such anxieties, in the form of worry about dwindling enrollments, the lessening popularity of “survey” courses, or the comparative cachet of STEM courses, is, needless to say, a slightly different matter.56 And indeed the popularity within English departments of the kind of digital scholarship that maps “quantitative patterns” might also be seen as a kind of productive anxiety. Where once it was social scientists who debated the merits of qualitative versus quantitative research, the former too full of story, anecdote, hypothesis, inference, and subjectivity to be anything but a sister-act to

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the humanities, the latter “robust,” mathematical, STEM-like, scientific, it now falls to the humanists to learn from the “quants.” “We find temporal stylistic localization among authors through the analysis of the similarity structure in feature vectors derived from content-free word usage, nonhomogeneous decay rates of stylistic influence, and an accelerating rate of decay of influence among modern authors,” these mathematicians tell us. It’s a good thing they don’t write in jargon. Because the database on which this study drew for its conclusions ends in 1952, any truth claims the study makes about “the present” and “our contemporaries” seem speculative at best. (The period 1907–52 is several times called the “late modern” period. Perhaps shifter is not a term of art in the STEM fields.) The authors also refer to the “Modernist movement” (with a capital M), and offer a generalization that seems gleaned or tweaked from one of their literary-critical touchstones rather than from numbercrunching: “The negative influence of authors from a preceding generation in the period 1907–1952 could be explained by the Modernist movement. Modernist authors, who are contained within this time period, display a radical shift in style as they reject their immediate stylistic predecessors yet remain a part of a dominant movement that included many of their contemporaries.” This does not inspire confidence. Nonetheless, I am quite willing to believe that contemporary authors today read each other, or their own contemporaries, more often or more attentively than they read authors of the past. Yet the past century was marked, in a way that may now look like anticipatory melancholia, by the very monuments to allusive reading and the internalization of predecessor texts—the poems and criticism of Eliot, for example, or the novels of Joyce and Woolf—that made modernism modern. (If these writers do not allude to their “immediate stylistic predecessors,” they certainly do reach back to prior writers, and they do so in the confidence that readers will either “catch” these allusions or at least understand that there is something, whatever it is, that is the object of allusion.) Such aggressively allusive texts were the crucible of my own poetic education. I know I am far from the only person who read Dante, and the Upanishads, because I encountered them first in Eliot, or hunted down a library copy of the fourteenth century Ayenbite of Inwyt because “Agenbite of Inwit” was a recurring refrain for Stephen Dedalus. Tour de force chapters in Ulysses and in Orlando both recapitulate the history of the English language and its literature (a feat less effectively attempted by John Updike in his novel Gertrude and Claudius). But as Kevin Dettmar asks, in an essay called “The Illusion of Modern Allusion and the Politics of Postmodern Plagiarism,” “What happens when

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an allusion is not recognized as an allusion by readers?”57 The form of the question recalls (but does it allude to?) the familiar philosophical conundrum about a tree falling in the forest.58 If a reader doesn’t recognize, say, the literary character Ulysses, or that loving pair Gertrude and Claudius, not to mention, “Sweet Thames run softly while I end my song,” these allusions will elude rather than allude, unless the reader, energized by research, determines to track them down, and then to recontextualize them by reading the “original,” or the “source,” or whatever we now might want to call it. Does it matter if a student, or a reader, encounters Hamlet after Ulysses, or after Stoppard, or indeed after Updike? If in reading Eliot on Hamlet as “the Mona Lisa of literature” he or she has to look up both Hamlet and Mona Lisa? You have to start somewhere. I’ve often thought that it might be interesting to teach one of those literary survey courses backward, so to speak, from the present day (“Virginia Woolf to Beowulf”? “Girl with the Pearl Earring to the Pearl Poet”? “Norman Lear to King Lear”?). It’s easy to joke about this, but I think it would be a good challenge. Instead of teaching evolution or devolution or genealogy or a certain kind of “influence,” we would be peeling back layers of historical and cultural time—rather like the set of transparent pages that used, in the old, print version of an encyclopedia, to show you the anatomy of a frog, or a man, from skin to skeleton.

The Fate of an Allusion “Everyone remembers,” wrote Reuben Brower in Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion, “how the heroine of the Rape of the Lock is pictured as she journeys down the Thames to Hampton Court for an afternoon of cards and tea.” He quotes three short passages from the poem, and then resumes his commentary: “Most readers will catch in the opening lines an allusion to the grand similes and the morning scenes of Homer; we are all prepared to hear echoes of heroic poetry in the Rape of the Lock because we know—at least in some vague way—that it is a ‘mock epic.’ ”59 Even allowing for a little poetic license in terms like “everyone,” “most readers,” and “we . . . all,” this statement, from a book published in 1959, is so far at variance with twenty-first-century reading and readers that it may seem like a mere historical curiosity. Not only is it not the case that “everyone” today has read Pope’s Rape of the Lock (when? in secondary school? in college? for pleasure?) but even for those who have, “most” may not in fact catch the poem’s allusions to Homer unless they have taken a survey course in the humanities (or unless they consult the scholarly footnotes in a critical edition).

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An allusion is like a club handshake, a sign of initiation into a secret (or not so secret) society. It can be vertical or horizontal, high or low, direct or indirect, literal or adapted. Although “influence” involves a (spontaneous or coerced) “flow” of powerful feelings, an “allusion” was originally a game (“a playing with, a reference to”; the lud in allude is from ludere, to play, as in “ludic”). At one point in its history, allusion meant a pun, or play upon words. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, it could mean a metaphor, a parable, or an allegory (OED 2).60 In any case, it involved intellectual pleasure. And it does still. As Susan Stewart notes, “The allusion articulates levels of readership, levels of accessibility to knowledge, at the same time that it mourns the absences in the discourse that is its own creation.”61 “When we speak metaphorically of echoes between texts,” wrote John Hollander in The Figure of Echo (1981), “we imply a correspondence between a precursor and, in the acoustical actuality, a vocal source. What is interesting and peculiar about this is that whereas in nature, the anterior source has a stronger presence and authenticity, the figurative echoes of allusion arise from the later, present text. But it has many sorts of priority over what has been recalled in it. In one way, the relation of echo and source is like the curious dialectic of ‘true’ meanings of words: the etymon and the present common usage each can claim a different kind of authority.”62 But when “memory” becomes a capacity of machines rather than of readers, the pleasure of textual recognition, the half-remembered echo in the ear, is muted or lost. If the “melancholy” that certain theorists have felt about the effects of literary influence represents both a grieved and an ungrieved loss, that sensation of loss has depended, to a significant extent, upon the presumed and encountered existence of a literary canon. We often refer to “the canon” or “the Western canon” as if such a canon has existed since the time of Homer, and an “English literature” canon from the time of Chaucer. But of course the idea of a literary canon is a backformation, broadly coterminous with the founding of university departments and degree programs in literature, and not unrelated to the development of certain critical practices. To cite a familiar example, the poetry of John Donne was out of print and out of favor for hundreds of years before he was decisively rehabilitated at the beginning of the twentieth century. Admired by T. S. Eliot, Donne became, as well, a foundation text for New Criticism. Today, it’s unthinkable to exclude him as a key figure in the English literary canon, but when Coleridge (and later, Browning) spoke well of his poems each was regarded as eccentric for doing so. We could make similar, if perhaps less striking, observations about any

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number of poets and writers (as the “opening up the canon” moment did, in the latter part of the twentieth century). The “Western canon,” as—long afterward—this list of works became known, has largely been a pedagogical program. The classical works formed the basis of a humanistic education in the late sixteenth century; the familiar “Beowulf to Virginia Woolf ” literary survey is, manifestly, a creature of a far more recent time. Here are three moments of such canon formation, one from England, the other two from the United States: Matthew Arnold’s essay on “The Study of Poetry” (1880), written as the introduction to an anthology, wrestled with the question of whether English poets were “classics,” and how, if so, we could know.63 This is where he adumbrates his theory of “touchstones,” so often misunderstood by those who take it out of its discursive context. Chaucer is not a classic, as compared with Dante, although “with him is born our [i.e., England’s] real poetry.” Shakespeare and Milton are “our poetical classics,” and “we all of us recognize” that Elizabethan poetry is “great poetry, our greatest.” This view, he is sure, “has universal currency.” The problem begins with the next era. Are Dryden and Pope poetical classics? Is the historic estimate, which represents them as such, and which has been so long established that it cannot easily give way, the real estimate? Wordsworth and Coleridge, as is well known, denied it; but the authority of Wordsworth and Coleridge does not weigh much with the young generation, and there are many signs to show that the eighteenth century and its judgments are coming into favour again. Are the favorite poets of the eighteenth century classics?64

Arnold’s answer to this is yes and no. Dryden and Pope are classics of prose, not of poetry. Compared to Hamlet’s “Absent thee from felicity awhile . . .” or Chaucer’s “O martyr souded in virginitiee!” they do not meet the sniff test for poetry. The “poetical classic of that literature and age” is, instead, Thomas Gray. And so on to Burns, indeed “the great name of Burns,” so widely admired, a poet who “may triumph over his world” (Arnold sees it as a distinctly Scotch world) but who nonetheless is, in his bravado, “poetically unsound.” (“this world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners is against a poet, not for him, when it is not a partial countryman who reads him, for in itself it is not a beautiful world, and no one can deny that it is of advantage to a poet to deal with a beautiful world.”) In fact, “Burns, like Chaucer, comes short of the high seriousness of the great classics.” His poetry has “truth of matter and truth of manner,

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but not the accent or the poetic virtue of the highest masters.” Burns— whose case occupies almost a quarter of Arnold’s essay on “The Study of Poetry”—is his proof that “personal” estimates of poets, by which he means their fame and what we would today perhaps call their fan base— are an unreliable gauge of classic status. As for more recent poetry, there, he says, “we enter on burning ground” because the estimates of poets like Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth are not only personal, but “personal with passion.” The “touchstone” test is offered, in connection with the collection of “celebrated names and celebrated poems” to which it is affixed, as a way—Arnold calls it not a theory but a “method”— of “endeavouring to make our estimates of poetry real.” What Arnold proposes, in conjunction with Thomas Humphry Ward’s anthology The English Poets (1880), is something very like a canon, avant la lettre. Mere historical or “personal” importance does not guarantee inclusion (except, of course, if the personal view is Arnold’s, backed up by a method he devises to support that view). And notably, he fudges the whole question of evaluating recent poetry, since it is too hot an issue (“burning ground,” “personal with passion”) to be clearly seen and judged. The famous “five-foot shelf ” of Harvard Classics, designed by Harvard President Charles William Eliot, a chemist, with textual introductions and notes by English professor (later Smith College president) William A. Neilson, was published in 1909 by P. F. Collier and Sons. Eliot sought and obtained Harvard’s permission to put its name on this commercial venture. He described the series as a university in little, a set of six courses: “the History of Civilization,” “Religion and Philosophy,” “Education,” “Science,” “Politics, and “Criticism of Literature and the Fine Arts.” The literary selections included the Odyssey (but not the Iliad), the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, and four plays of Shakespeare (Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest) bundled together with works by Marlowe, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson, Webster, and Massinger under the general and misleading title Elizabethan Dramas. (It is a persistent curiosity that scholars and publishers continued to label as “Elizabethan playwrights” those who wrote most of their major plays during the reign of James [1603–25]: Shakespeare and Beaumont died in 1616; Fletcher, and perhaps Webster, in 1625; Jonson lived until 1637, and Massinger until 1640.) No nineteenthcentury fiction was included in the five-foot shelf (“partly because of its great bulk, and partly because it is easily accessible,” as Eliot wrote in his introduction). Volume 15 contained Pilgrim’s Progress and Izaak Walton’s Lives of Donne and Herbert (but no poems by either); the English poems of John Milton and Robert Burns are offered complete, one volume each

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“because the works of these two very unlike poets contain social, religious, and governmental teachings of vital concern for modern democracies.”65 By contrast, poets such as Chaucer and Spenser, Pope and Wordsworth, were afforded comparatively little space. (From Chaucer, only “The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales” and the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale”; Spenser’s “Prothalamion” and “Epithalamion” but no selections from The Faerie Queene; two very short poems by Pope plus, predictably, the “Essay on Man.”) Volumes 40 – 42, English Poetry, spanned, respectively, Chaucer to Gray, Collins to Fitzgerald, and Tennyson to Whitman. Volume 18, Modern English Drama, extended from Dryden to Byron and Browning. If the “literature and fine arts” course tacitly proposed a canon, President Charles Eliot’s selections bore little relation to, say, Bloom’s canon, or Frye’s or indeed that of T. S. Eliot, who, we might note, graduated from Harvard in 1909, the year the Harvard Classics were first published. The keywords of the five-foot shelf were “democracy” and “progress,” the series an optimistic (if in retrospect blinkered) attempt to collect knowledge and taste according to the spirit of the time. A similar set of observations could be made about the Great Books of the Western World, another 50-plus volume set, this one conceived at the University of Chicago by its university president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and his friend Mortimer J. Adler, whom Hutchins had appointed to the law school as a professor of the philosophy of law. The series was aimed at businesspeople (Adler had taught philosophy to business executives at the Aspen Institute) and was ultimately published and sold by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1952. Again, the impulse, or the pretext, was to offer a university education in the form of a set of books conjoined with a “democratic” pedagogical program, this one called “The Great Conversation.” Instead of Charles Eliot’s six courses, the Chicago project offered four subject areas, indicated by color: “Imaginative Literature,” “Mathematics and the Natural Sciences,” “History and Social Science,” and “Philosophy and Theology.” When Harold Bloom moved on from his gnomic and theoretically intense Anxiety books of the 1970s to a full-throated support of The Western Canon in 1994, the change seemed, in retrospect, all but inevitable. Not only did the Canon book allow him to express his resentment of what he too-frequently dubbed The School of Resentment, but it also made clear the importance of a canon for any transmissible theory of influence. Of course, a poet might be influenced by, or could himself or herself influence, a writer one had never heard of and who was not widely read (or read at all), but this would necessarily limit both the interest of the claim

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of influence and also the pleasure of detecting, or suspecting, echoes and allusions. Bloom’s Western Canon ended with a long list of works and authors that, in effect, constituted “his” canon, 1,524 highly specific titles and authors from around the world.66 Some years later he disavowed what he called “that damned list,” claiming to an interviewer that “it was the idea of the publisher, the editor, and my agents. I fought it. I finally gave up. I hated it. I did it off the top of my head.”67 Certainly he was right to say, in the same interview, that “people reviewed and attacked the list and didn’t read the book,” something his publisher, editor, and agent might well have anticipated (and which was, in any case, probably unlikely to deter them, because lists of this prescriptive kind do indeed sell books). Bloom’s disavowal of the list (“my publisher made me do it”) has an odd resonance with T. S. Eliot’s disavowal of the endnotes to “The Waste Land,” where again the publisher was made out to be the commercial villain, seeking something to fill up the pages because the poem was too short: “[W]hen it came time to print The Waste Land as a little book—for the poem on its first appearance in The Dial and in The Criterion had no notes whatever—it was discovered that the poem was inconveniently short, so I set to work to expand the notes, in order to provide a few more pages of printed matter, with the result that they became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view to-day.”68 Do these eminent figures, recalling their (uncharacteristic) subservience to the will of a publisher, protest too much? Bloom’s “damned list” and Eliot’s “bogus scholarship” are sisters under the skin. In fact, Bloom has become, despite— or because of ?—his best efforts, not Frye’s successor, or Wilson Knight’s, or Kenneth Burke’s, but Eliot’s. Arnold, Eliot, Bloom. The Bloom of the sixties and the seventies would presumably have regarded this as a false, and even meretricious, genealogy. But wrestling with the powerful precursor seems sometimes to involve misprision of another sort, not a creative misreading of a poetic argument but a mistaking of the identity of the precursor. Not “all Frye, all Frye,” after all, but also some Arnold (“the most overrated of critics,”69 according to Bloom), and some Eliot; some “Study of Poetry,” some “Function of Criticism.” Arnold’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” was written in 1865; in it, he threw down his gauntlet: “I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.”70 Eliot’s “Function of Criticism” of 1923 makes an appeal for “facts,” and for comparison and analysis, though “you must know what to compare and what to analyze.” His negative example is “an inquiry into the number of times giraffes are

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mentioned in the English novel,” a topic that now seems not only plausible but—in view of the colonial history of the giraffe—potentially enlightening (indeed a number of good books have already been written on the encounter of the giraffe with European culture, as likewise with the elephant, the rhinoceros, etc.).71 One era’s silly question (“How many children had Lady Macbeth?”) becomes the next era’s need-to-know. Bloom says in his Anatomy of Influence that he no longer reads literary critics, but also that “literary criticism . . . ought to consist of acts of appreciation.”72 And thus the whirligig of time brings in its revenges.

Over the Influence “Knowing two hundred novels is already difficult,” writes Franco Moretti, a literary critic and the founding director of the Stanford Literary Lab. “Twenty thousand! How can we do it, what does ‘knowledge’ mean, in this new scenario? One thing for sure: it cannot mean the very close reading of very few texts—secularized theology, really (‘canon’!)—that has radiated from the cheerful town of New Haven over the whole field of literary studies. A larger literary history requires other skills: sampling; statistics; work with series, titles, concordances, incipits . . .”73 Moretti’s account of his method is at least as upbeat as the “cheerful” spirit of close reading he describes, tongue in cheek, as radiating from New Haven. The Yale secular theologians he has in mind in this case, are, presumably, the New Critics of the thirties and forties because it is difficult to imagine casting the determinedly doleful Bloom (or any of his temporal peers) in quite that jovial light. Of course “cheerful” is a transferred epithet here (it’s the “town,” aka the city of New Haven, that radiates cheer, not any of its distinguished academic inhabitants) but the soft irony of cheerful+town makes the point: both are blithely out of step while failing even to register the fact. To Moretti, the traditional notion of a literary canon is “very few books, occupying a very large space.”74 His model of canon formation is based on novels, “for the simple reason that they have been the most widespread literary form of the past two or three centuries and are therefore crucial to any social account of literature (which is the point of the canon controversy, or should be).” His interest does not lie in what he considers a minuscule proportion of published works: “If we set today’s canon of nineteenth-century British novels at two hundred (which is a very high figure), they would still be only about 0.5 per cent of all published novels.” What, he asks, about the rest?

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He has little patience for those who focus on poetry in their discussions of the canon. Lyric poetry had “virtually lost its social function” long before what he characterizes as “the New Critical canon,” so “English professors could do with poetry whatever they wanted, because it did not matter” (Moretti’s emphasis). But he suggests the same could happen in the near future to novels. If Jane Austen should fall out of favor with readers, and “a dozen English professors” suddenly have a chance to replace her with a different novelist from the period, “that change in the (academic) canon will prove only that nineteenth-century novels have become irrelevant.”75 This idea of literary-canon formation is social and sociological, not aesthetic. Notwithstanding Moretti’s genial dismissal of “English professors” (of which he is one), his books and articles are written for, and read by, professors, engaged in rethinking what and how they teach and write. But when the metric is “quantitative stylistics” and the method is “formalism without close reading,” we seem to be a long way from “what used to be called influence studies.” Or are we? Moretti’s essay on stylistics looks at the titles of 7,000 British novels published from 1740 to 1850. One of his observations is that the titles of novels grew radically shorter over time: better for librarians, better for publishers, more eye-catching for readers: “A coded message, in a market situation.”76 Another is that adjectives transform the semantic field: “Without adjectives, we are in a world of adventure; with adjectives, in a destabilized domesticity. The adjective is the only change, but it changes everything.”77 When a short title has the heroine’s first name only (Pamela, Emma), the implication is that she lacks a husband. Add her last name (Jane Eyre) and she acquires a public life: “One word, and the image of the heroine rotates 180 degrees: from private to public.” As Moretti will go on to say, this is potentially a literary, as well as an economic, device: “Short titles were a constraint imposed by the market, yes, but the constraint could also be a fantastic opportunity for the literary imagination: the art of allusion, of condensation: the title as trope, ultimately. Odd twist: the market promoting—style.”78 But of course it is not odd, as Moretti perfectly well knows: His air of pleased discovery is itself an element of style. To call this analysis anything other than close reading is—I was going to say perverse, but let us just call it both a matter of the (academic) market and a matter of style. Allusion, condensation, trope. These are literary categories, each of which involves some kind of “influence”: the power of a good title derives

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from its capacity to function— dare we say it?—like a poem. Here is Moretti again, further analyzing his analysis of titles: Summaries, adjectives, proper names, nominal sentences, metonymies, metaphors . . . In a minute I will turn to articles (and am thinking of sections on conjunctions and participles). This is a quantitative study: but its units are linguistic and rhetorical. And the reason is simple: for me, formal analysis is the great accomplishment of literary study, and is therefore also what any new approach—quantitative, digital, evolutionary, whatever—must prove itself against: prove that it can do formal analysis, better than we already do. Or at least: equally well, in a different key. Otherwise, what is the point?79

The definite and indefinite articles Moretti writes about, as well as the conjunctions and participles he mentions, are the same “content-free” words deemed so neutral, and therefore so indicative, by the mathematicians whose quantitative study suggested a change in influence patterns. For a literary critic, as Moretti notes, citing the work of linguists in the 1970s, an (or, indeed the) article points the reader’s attention: “the definite article announcing a noun as something we already know (thus directing our attention backwards); and the indefinite suggesting the opposite. . . . The first time the wolf appears in Little Red Riding Hood it is ‘a’ wolf; afterwards, ‘the’ wolf, forever.”80 Understanding this example, of course, depends upon literary knowledge. Someone unfamiliar with the story would not “get” the point about a wolf and the wolf, and the example would fail as an illustration. It requires literary and stylistic sophistication and training to make these discriminations. Such words, then, are not “contentfree” in a referential sense, even though linguists (and computer programmers) may so describe them.81 “Content,” as it is used today, is all too often a commodity (see “contentprovider,” a company that “writes or produces material for dissemination by another agency via any of various [frequently electronic] media”82), rather than the aesthetic dancing partner of “style.” And “content” in this sense is the antithesis of the literary. For the familiar computer acronym GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) we might try substituting LILO (lit in, lit out). Whether the work is done by English professors, mathematicians, computer scientists, or that chimerical and much-sought-after personage, “the general reader,” reading in this sense (close, distant, anxious, deconstructive, aesthetic, call it what you will) is a critical act that depends upon a broader sense of “influence” that accords with a belief in the creative

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power of language, wherever and however it is found. Literature is a backformation produced by the act, and the art, of critical reading.

The New ’Flu To suggest that Bloom’s highly influential book actually called a halt to the investigations of literary influence will sound paradoxical, but is not untrue. Indeed the logic of his own argument presupposed and predicted such an outcome. For it depended upon a particular set of circumstances difficult to reduplicate: a linear sense of poetic progression, a shared sense of what poems and poets mattered, and a superior recall of those poems and poets, together with a sublime disregard of the “noise” that contemporary culture makes. But that noise is contemporary culture, where every blog is a publication, and every critic and artist has his or her own set of cultural references. Two examples from The New York Times, appearing in the same edition on the same day in 2014, may help to elucidate the differences between “influence” as it was once regarded and identified, and the way a similar process works today. A theater reviewer who described the entertainer Lypsinka’s “miming of subversively compiled and edited song and speech—from sources that include vintage movies, recorded nightclub acts, television specials and interviews with screen, stage and vocal artists” located some of these sources “[t]hanks to the miracle of YouTube.”83 On the same day, a review of the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective exhibition of the works of American artist Elaine Sturtevant sought to explain the particular relation of Sturtevant to the other artists of her time (like Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Roy Lichtenstein in the sixties; Robert Gober and Felix Gonzalez-Torres in the eighties): She temporarily assumed the roles of existing artists and made sometimes very close but always inexact versions of their work, in the process creating a complex identity of her own. . . . People accused her of copying, even faking art, but she wasn’t. When she did something very near in appearance to an original, she left a distinguishing signature of some kind. More often her work was a variation on a theme: a meditation, not an imitation. Illusion wasn’t the point; action was, the gesture of shaping something new but different and related from something else.84

The idea that “people accused her of copying” might certainly line up under “influence, anxiety of ” in some notional index, but Sturtevant began

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her career around 1960, her work flourished in the last decades of the twentieth century, and she was awarded a prize for lifetime achievement at the 2011 Venice Biennale. That her work is now influential, and of interest to influential people (from curators to collectors) is not in doubt. Her method could of course be called swerving from a precursor, but since the precursors are so manifest, there is little detection involved; the satisfaction comes otherwise. “Mr. Lennox’s music is a mash of influences, many of which he explicitly refers to on the record,” reported yet another article in The New York Times, this one marked with the headline “Under the Influence: Bearing in Mind.” The singer-songwriter Noah Lennox, also known as Panda Bear, told the Times that the influences for his newest album included Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha, the Fauré Requiem, Disney’s The Jungle Book, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Wu-Tang Clan, King Tubby, and Aphex Twin.85 Lennox /Panda Bear said about Siddartha, the one “literary” text he chose, “I’m not really much of a literary person, but culturally speaking, this was one of the most mind-blowing experiences in terms of exposure to some cultural artifact.” An artist naming his influences is quite different from a critic detecting them, and it is also quite different from “plagiarism,” with or without the scare quotes, because a recognition of those influences is desired, or at least welcomed, rather than hidden (or, in the case of Jonathan Lethem’s article, faux-hidden in peekaboo style). Letting go of the anxiety allows the influence to flourish—we might even say, to bloom. In these days of mash-ups, avatars, transformers, and surgical makeovers, “influence” is often a part of the artwork itself. Maybe it is the term that seems so out of date, so fifties, so seventies, so whatever. To revise, swerve, and tweak this essential function, we could rename it: how about “the ’flu”86? Or, to adapt the familiar format for updating and critique, the New ’flu? Catch it if you can.

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chapter 4

Fig Leaves

Where do dead metaphors go when they die? And why should we care? Consider the case of the fig leaf, a term that once, and not all that long ago, had a fairly secure referent, both in the Bible and in the history of art. But somewhere along the way the image—and the reference—parted company with the figure of speech. “Fig leaf ” today means something, for sure. Journalists use it all the time, and it is often to be found in newspaper headlines. But what it means is oddly distinct from how it means. Today’s fig leaves often have no leaves, and no figs; they are a kind of cultural shorthand with the “culture” part dropped out. My interest is in how this specific instance points up a more general case of cultural forgetting—the forgetting of power of the figure of speech, without which our own speech, and our own imaginations, are impoverished. Let me begin, then, not with Adam and Eve—as one might perhaps expect—but with Queen Victoria, and an occasion when the fig leaf, now a loose equivalent to our modern term “cover-up,” had something substantial, at least in the Queen’s opinion, to cover up. In 1857, the Grand Duke of Tuscany presented Queen Victoria with a good-will gift, a massive plaster cast of Michelangelo’s David, some six meters in height. The 58

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Grand Duke had some diplomatic ground to make up with the queen because he had denied permission for the export of a painting by Ghirlandaio that the National Gallery in London had hoped to acquire. The gift of the David was not an unqualified success, however. Victoria had not expected it; it was huge, unwieldy, and nude; she did not wish to have it installed in the National Gallery. The Foreign Office therefore promptly arranged for its relocation, to the new South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert). The queen disapproved of the nudity of the statue; it offended her sensibilities. In consequence, a proportionally accurate fig leaf was commissioned, kept in readiness for royal visits, and hung on the David, as required, by the use of two strategically placed hooks. Times change, though, and tastes and mores change with them. Today that fig leaf is no longer hung on the statue. Instead, it occupies its own glass case on the back of the plinth. A note nearby indicates that on visits by royalty and unspecified “others,” the fig leaf will be returned to its strategic position. Lest we be too quick to dismiss this phenomenon as “Victorian” in all senses, we might wish to take note of an analogous American instance, this one, too, involving the ubiquitous Michelangelo David. Since 1939, the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, has exhibited a 22-foot-high copy of the David carved in Carrera marble from the same quarry as Michelangelo’s original, sporting a marble fig leaf. The same was true of a similar piece in the West Covina Forest Lawn. But in 1969, a David at the Cypress Forest Lawn branch, located in conservative Orange County, California, was put on display without a covering leaf. Some neighbors were indignant. One accused the Cypress park manager, whose name, fortuitously, was Charles Pink, of being a Communist. Others, who had bought plots near the statue, asked whether the park intended “to put up a leaf ” to conceal David’s private parts. Mr. Pink thought the cover-up of classic statuary “rather silly,” asking rhetorically, “Why didn’t we put a brassiere on the Venus de Milo?” Despite its late-sixties date, this change may have owed as much to economics as to sexual liberation. The marble leaves that adorned the statues cost $150 each (in 1960s dollars), and were often “filched” by tourists. Up to a dozen marble fig leaves were taken in a year, so that the park began to keep a supply of less expensive plaster leaves on hand in case of emergency. The Glendale David, toppled in an earthquake in 1971, lost his leaf when he was reconstructed; the statue was again vanquished by a 1994 quake, but now stands, restored and leafless, in a protective dish designed by the Getty Museum to withstand future tremor.1

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In an instance that seems to deploy both the literal and the figurative uses at once, residents of the Village of Old Westbury, New York lodged objections to a sculpture of a pregnant woman with an exposed fetus, the work of artist Damien Hirst. Ultimately, a solution was found to appease the critics: The statue would be installed in the pocket of a hill, the offending anatomical elements would face the house rather than the road, and Rosen agreed to plant “all-season landscaping” to shield it from public view. “Thus,” wrote Patricia Cohen in The New York Times, “the statue’s proverbial fig leaves will remain even in the fall and winter, when most other trees lose theirs.”2 The Times seized on this happy observation to craft a headline, “Hirst Work Gets a Fig Leaf,” that draws metaphorically upon the statue-with-fig-leaf genre— even though the “proverbial” leaves in question were not attached to the statue itself but were, in fact, a complex figure of speech. (Ficus trees are deciduous rather than “all-season,” so whatever actual leaves were planted around the Hirst sculpture, they were almost surely not figs.) The detachability of the fig leaf from its designated anatomical location and its emergence as an independent artifact is an emblem of the story. For the ultimate detachment, as we will see, is the detachment from literary and cultural history, and from the power of the rhetorical figure. “Fig Leaf Held First Invention” read the headline in The New York Times. The date was November 21, 1936, and the occasion was said to be the 100th anniversary of the American Patent Office. U.S. officials apologized to Adam for getting around to this belatedly, and named “the fig leaf apron” the first in a long line of costume design patents. The article did not specify where in America Adam had developed his innovative design. Nor was there any mention of Eve. The Bible, I should point out, does give Eve some role in this story. After the First Couple eat of the fruit in the tree in the midst of the garden, “the eyes of both of them were opened/that they understood how that they were naked. Th[e]n they sewed fig leaves together and made them aprons” (Gen 3:7). So says the Geneva Bible, and the Coverdale Bible, and the King James Bible, and the Revised Standard Edition. The Jewish Publication Society translation into English of 1917 has “girdles” rather than “aprons.” The Orthodox Jewish translation by Aryeh Kaplan, in 1981, has “loincloths,” as does Robert Alter’s translation of 2004. The New Living Translation abandons the attempt to describe the garment entirely, opting for “they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves.” But every Bible translation has “fig leaves.”

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The depiction of Adam and Eve after the fall, in frescoes, easel paintings, sculpture, or stained glass, has thus often incorporated the fig leaf. When a painter has omitted the covering leaves, later generations, and censors, have often added them. This was the case with Masaccio’s fifteenth-century frescoes of Adam and Eve in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. When restorers discovered that sometime around 1680 an anonymous painter had added fig leaves to the nude figures of Adam and Eve, a lively debate ensued as to whether to remove them. Which outcome would be more historically valid? “Should old censors be censored by new censors?” they wondered. Ultimately, it was decided to remove the superimposed leaves because they detracted from the original and were, in any case, deteriorating fast. But as one commentator noted, the decision about the Masaccio did not solve the general problem. “Lots of fig leaves remain elsewhere in Italian museums,” wrote Roberto Suro. “And then there are all those athletic looking Romans and Greeks with foliage stuck between their marble legs.” As Mark Twain observed in his account of a visit to Florence, the fig leaves on Italian statues did not precisely have the effect of turning the mind to higher things. In fact, the leaves drew attention to what might (or might not?) be underneath. They are all fig-leaved now. Yes, every one of them. Nobody noticed their nakedness before, perhaps; nobody can help noticing it now, the fig-leaf makes it so conspicuous. But the comical thing about it all, is, that the fig-leaf is confi ned to cold and pallid marble, which would be still cold and unsuggestive without this shame and ostentatious symbol of modesty, whereas warm-blood paintings which do really need it have in no case been furnished with it.3

Twain liked this idea so much that he repeated it several times in his work: “The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf ”; “The statue that advertises its modesty with a fig-leaf really brings its modesty under suspicion.”4 As in Italy, so also, it turned out, in Washington and in New York. Sculptor Louis St.-Gaudens was commissioned in the early years of the twentieth century to create a series of monumental figures for Washington D.C.’s Union Station. The figures, Roman centurions, were designed to be historically accurate. But when they were delivered, each weighing several tons, the Fine Arts Commission was dismayed to see that many were naked beneath their short tunics. To suit local taste, St. Gaudens revamped them, adding what are known as “modesty shields” (actual shields, large ones,

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held in front of the lower body). Visitors to the station still sometimes amuse themselves by trying to locate angles from which the original statues are visible beneath, or behind, the shields. Gisela Richter, the celebrated curator of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, was astonished when she arrived as assistant curator in 1906 to find fig leaves on all of the male statues in the Met’s collection. Richter set out to right the situation. In order to put on a fig leaf you sometimes have to remove some of the things it covers, and she found the pieces in storage. So the story goes, Richter stayed late one evening, and the next morning the fig leaves were gone and the statues restored to their former integrity.5 The Richter story is an instructive anecdote and an irresistible thoughtpicture. We might want to juxtapose to it a well-known passage from Sigmund Freud’s essay on “Fetishism” (1927), which describes “the case of a man whose fetish was an athletic support-belt which could also be worn as bathing drawers.” This piece of clothing covered up the genitals entirely and concealed the distinction between them. Analysis showed that it signified that women were castrated and that they were not castrated; and it also allowed of the hypothesis that men were castrated, for all of these possibilities could equally well be concealed under the belt—the earliest rudiment of which in his childhood had been the fig-leaf on a statue.6

What Freud saw, characteristically, was that the fig leaf might be the sign of something missing, rather than something present.7 It did not take long from the time the Hebrew Bible was translated into English in the Renaissance for the concept of the fig leaf to become metaphorical. This slide was gradual, and, in the first few instances at least, seems to have been motivated by cues in the text. The Anglican cleric Hugh Latimer, later to be burned at the stake as one of the Oxford Martyrs, chose as the topic of a Twelfth Day sermon in 1553 the question of Christ’s circumcision. It is in this somewhat overdetermined symbolic context that Latimer speaks, metaphorically, of fig leaves, as he describes what is for him a difference between the old religion of Catholicism and the new Protestant faith: “In times past we were wont to run hither and thither, to this saint and to that saint, but it is all but fig-leaves what man can do. Therefore let us stick to Christ.”8 When Francis Bacon, then Lord Chancellor of England, confessed to the House of Lords that he was guilty of taking bribes, he cited the book of Job (31:33): “I have not hid my sin as did Adam, nor concealed my faults in

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my bosome.”9 By a natural association of thought and word Bacon continued, “It resteth therefore, That without Fig-leaves I do ingenuously confess and acknowledge” wrongdoing, and he threw himself on the mercy of the Lords to decide his fate.10 “Without Fig-leaves” here meant “without any attempt at defense or dissimulation,” although we may speculate, in this case and in other uses of the term, whether the mention of the (absent) fig leaf was itself a fig leaf, covering other transgressions Bacon preferred not to come to light.11 But fig-leaf references in the early modern period were not inevitably biblical; some were frankly anatomical. In 1680, the landowner and bon vivant John Aubrey sent to Anthony Wood an Oxford antiquary, what he called “Minutes of Lives” for Wood to use in a bio-bibliography of Oxford writers. Aubrey’s sketches, later published under the title Brief Lives, contain some of the liveliest—and occasionally the most scandalous—stories of Elizabethan, Stuart, and Williamite England. As Aubrey was perfectly aware. In his cover note to Wood he therefore requested that his correspondent “sowe on some Figges-leaves” because “the truth . . . is here exposed so bare, that the very pudenda are not covered, and affords many passages that would raise a Blush in a young Virgin’s cheeke.”12 Historical opinion has sometimes seemed divided as to whether having, or wearing, a fig leaf was a good idea, and this issue, too, soon became metaphorical. In a letter to her daughter, the eighteenth-century writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ridiculed the practice of novelist Samuel Richardson, whose heroine, Clarissa, blurted out everything she thought to everyone she met. “In this mortal state of imperfection,” wrote Lady Mary, “fig leaves are as necessary for our minds as for our bodies, and tis as indecent to show all we think as all we have.” Before we conclude that the honors here rest squarely with Lady Mary, though, we might take note of how Richardson himself uses the term “fig-leaf ” in Clarissa. For in a tone that seems uncannily to prefigure Oscar Wilde, the rake Lovelace in Richardson’s novel congratulates those ladies who are far-sighted enough to acquire husbands so that they can go about their extra-marital affairs with impunity: “A husband is a charming cloak: a fig-leaf ’d apron for a wife.”13 The fig leaf was often, as one might guess, the occasion for literary wit. Ralph Waldo Emerson, although he was an admirer of Walt Whitman, quoted in his journal a remark by his friend, the critic and reviewer Edwin Percy Whipple: “Whipple said of the author of ‘Leaves of Grass’ that he had every leaf but the figleaf.” Whipple’s clever phrase—“every leaf but the figleaf ”—nicely literalizes the “leaves” of Whitman’s title, while raising a critical eyebrow at the frankness of a poet for whom the word “naked”

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was a celebration.14 But a fig leaf could also be a more serious cover-up. Another American poet, James Russell Lowell, connected fig leaves with lying in a long poem called “A Glance behind the Curtain”: Let us speak plain: there is more force in names Than most men dream of; and a lie may keep Its throne a whole age longer, if it skulk Behind the shield of some fair-seeming name. Let us call tyrants tyrants, and maintain That only freedom comes by grace of God, And all that comes not by his grace must fail; For men in earnest have no time to waste In patching fig-leaves for the naked truth.

A few years later, and in a less earnest mood, Lowell, traveling in Italy, would write in his journal “The evening is so hot that Adam would have been glad to leave off his fig-leaves.”15 The desire to leave off one’s fig leaves has persisted for some into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In 1951, a zoology professor at Bethel College in Tennessee, an institution affiliated with the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, was dismissed from his job because he belonged to a nudist group, the American Sunbathing Association (formerly the American League for Physical Culture, subsequently the American Association for Nude Recreation). Dr. John Bauman, who had taught in church-affiliated schools for thirty-three years, responded, “They brought up that old question about why did God make a fig leaf for Eve if God wanted man to be in the nude. And that is not even historically true.”16 Leaving aside the question of historical truth, it is of some interest that Eve’s fig leaf, not Adam’s, was the item of apparel under discussion in this midcentury controversy. But times change, and any movement can turn over a new leaf. Today, an organization called Fig Leaf Forum provides “encouragement to Biblebelieving Christian nudists and Christian naturists” in the context of traditional values. Conversely, the fig leaf has become for some the sign of stylish intimate apparel, as exemplified by the website figleaves.com. The company’s selfdescription allows both for transgression (“New brands are always getting us excited at figleaves.com”) and repentance (“We especially want to hear from you if you feel we have let you down, as we’re committed to learning from our mistakes”).17 My favorite examples of this kind, though, are the ads for a fig leaf brief sold by Hanes in the 1950s. One offers a testimonial from Eve: “Nothing beats a fig leaf.” Eve is pictured in the top corner,

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with a very interested-looking snake. Another ad declares, “This brief takes a leaf from Adam and Eve,” and then: “To ancestor Adam, a fig leaf was full dress. Yet even he would have liked the light comfort of the modern Hanes Fig Leaf Brief. So popular that millions of men wear it too.” Meantime in the world of music, Scott Joplin, the King of Ragtime, followed up his groundbreaking “Maple Leaf Rag” (1899) with a “Palm Leaf Rag,” a “Rose Leaf Rag,” and then, wittily and perhaps inevitably, a “Fig Leaf Rag” (1908). So cultural history and popular culture offer, on the one hand, a highly literal (sometimes prurient, sometimes comical) notion of the fig leaf, covering the body, and on the other hand an allusive use of the term, remembering the Adam and Eve story. Occasionally, the literal and the figurative come together, as in the case of Scott Brown, formerly the Republican senator from Massachusetts. In his first senatorial campaign, Brown became famous for his barn coat and his pickup truck. Before his time as a senator, Brown famously posed for a spread in Cosmopolitan magazine, a stint that gave rise to the Scott Brown action figure, complete with fig leaf. A letter to the editor of the Berkshire Eagle, a local paper in the western part of Massachusetts, observed that one couldn’t blame Brown for “trying to trick himself out in liberal garb” in a mostly liberal state for the current election season. “Mr. Brown’s fig leaf here,” the letter observed, “was his vote in favor of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform act. Thus covered he was able to vote against all subsequent attempts at regulation.”18 I should point out that in this case the letter writer is admirably consistent in carrying through the image of the fig leaf. Tricked out, garb, covered — in the course of this account the Massachusetts senator is methodically dressed (and rhetorically undressed) in the emblematic foliage that has come over the centuries to stand for concealment, and sometimes for shame. My own interest in the fig leaf as a metaphor, though, has been especially provoked by those (many) occasions when the literal term becomes figurative, and then, through a process of cultural amnesia, loses its specific meaning, its power, and its point. “Fig leaf ” today has become a common political term for a cover-up or evasion, often with no specific reference to the actual leaf or wearer, functioning in practice as a kind of comical dead metaphor. Dead, but also mixed. It is, if I may mix my own sartorial metaphors here, the rhetorical equivalent of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Discussing the problem of whether the United States should arm the Syrian Kurds directly or only through a group acceptable to Turkey, the Syrian Arabs, one expert warned against taking the more direct route: “If this

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happened, the fig leaf would disappear and it would be a very serious, contentious issue between the two countries.”19 A headline in the liberal political magazine Mother Jones announced its topic: “Republicans and the Disclosure Fig Leaf.” Before the Citizens United decision, both parties had agreed to an arrangement whereby, even if contributions were unlimited, Congress could require disclosure of the names of donors. After Citizens United, however, support for the agreement evaporated. “Disclosure,” Kevin Drum contended in Mother Jones, “had always been something of a fig leaf ” for Republicans,” but “once they had the Supreme Court on their side, making contribution limits a dead letter, they suddenly didn’t need the fig leaf anymore.”20 The imagination boggles— or at least mine does—at the specter of all those assembled Republican lawmakers sans fig leaf. But that’s what happens when you are dealing not only with a dead letter, but also with a dead metaphor. Some journalists, conscientiously, have tried to resuscitate the metaphor, or at least this was the case for an earlier generation of writers. “A fig leaf ” for a woeful economic record was what Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland called the Reagan administration’s plan for a balanced budget amendment in 1982. Tom Wicker, writing in the Times, concurred: “the Administration’s political engineers,” he wrote in a column called “Reagan’s Fig Leaf,” “will attempt to plaster the fig leaf of a balanced budget over the [Reagan administration’s] record during the fall campaign.”21 In this case, the “lie” was the idea that Reagan’s policies were not responsible for the nation’s financial plight Four years later, both the issue, and the fig leaf metaphor, had returned. “The budget law is a gimmick, a substitute for tough decisions,” said the Times editorial page. Rather than tinkering with it to make it legal, “The responsible course now, even more than before, is to forget the fig leaf and reduce the Federal Deficit.”22 And what do we see if the fig leaf is forgotten— or removed? The editorial writer did the best he or she can to carry out the metaphor. “The Supreme Court’s ruling exposes what needed to be exposed; fiscal responsibility rests in Congress and in the White House.” But modern-day journalists and editors have not always been so rhetorically attuned, or perhaps—something I also suspect is true—the figleaf figure of speech has “normalized” into an expression whose origins and images are virtually lost. The jailing of a Venezuelan attorney because he dared to defend a judge who had aroused the ire of President Hugo Chávez was described in the press as “little more than a fig leaf for arbitrary presidential power.”23 Another article described unsupervised stress tests on nuclear facilities in Japan as “nothing more than a fig leaf intended

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to put dangerous reactors back on line.24 A letter to the editor of the New York Times complained that suits against tobacco companies are being used as ways of raising revenue for “spending projects for which public health initiatives serve as the fig leaf.”25 A headline announcing Taiwan’s move to scrap its provincial government as Hong Kong reverted to Chinese territory declared “Taiwan Plans to Drop a Fig Leaf; China May Grumble.”26 And when a New Jersey governor banned blind trusts for public-office holders, the headline announced that he had “Prune[d] a Fig Leaf.”27 It’s tempting to imagine the New Yorker cartoons that might illustrate each of these word pictures. When a figure of speech becomes unrecognizable as a figure, the result is often inadvertently comic. Perhaps we should call these zombie metaphors; they will not stay or play dead. Instead they rise up, sometimes summoning other dead metaphors to uneasy life. Some years ago Representative Paul Ryan told George Stephanopoulos that President Obama’s plan to have insurance companies, rather than religious hospitals or universities, provide access to free birth control was “an accounting gimmick or a fig leaf.”28 When Ruth Marcus, a columnist and editorial writer for the Washington Post, addressed the same issue, she began by saying, “I write today in praise of fig leaves. In politics, as in religion, fig leaves have an important place.” She described the “compromise” offered by the White House as “in essence, a huge regulatory fig leaf,” adding that “the extra cost, and here is where the fig leaf comes in, will be borne by the insurance companies themselves.”29 Marcus’s article deployed a number of other familiar metaphors from a political lexicon indebted to the language of war and sports (the administration’s “self-inflicted wound”; the view that President Obama “botched the call” and, later in the same piece, “flubbed this call”; Obama’s own wish not to “make this conflict into a political football”). But her “praise of fig leaves” remains at the level of the empty figurative, a figurative mode so cleansed of figure that it becomes virtually abstract. The fig leaf is “huge” and also “regulatory.” It has an “important place” (what place, we long to ask). It’s hard to recognize this “fig leaf ” as having anything to do with figs, or leaves, or Genesis, or statues. (“Fig leaf indeed,” snorted a voice of the opposition. “The President’s phony ‘accommodation’ is a shabby loin cloth to cover the administration’s shameful abrogation of the free exercise of religion.”30) The fig leaf as a cliché, emptied of any reference, has been enjoying something of a renaissance, especially in political and journalistic writing. One gratuitously fretful example appeared in a Wall Street Journal piece by Lee Siegel entitled “Who Ruined the Humanities?” The answer, needless

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to say, was college professors, or at least those college professors who have taught the humanities in the many decades since Siegel was a happy humanist at Columbia’s School of General Studies. And the fig leaf—also, perhaps, needless to say—was literary theory, or, as Siegel describes it, “that fig leaf for mediocrity known as ‘theory.’ ” The fuller quotation harks back to the old “tenured radical” days, invoking a time “when teaching literature acquired an especially intense ideological fervor, when university radicals started their long (and fruitless) march through academic institutions armed with that fig leaf for mediocrity known as ‘theory.’ ”31 Here I will merely observe, given Siegel’s own history of sprezzatura, that sock puppets, although they have no private parts, could plausibly be described as fig leaves for the author/puppeteer whose name they seek to conceal. A series of posts on the conservative Breitbart Feed has shown an interesting predilection for fig leaves—the figure appears over and over again, month after month, as for example, in the claim that CNN criticisms of Republican governor Chris Christie of New Jersey were designed “to embarrass him . . . over the issue of his weight,” and that the “fig leaf of news” here was “America’s obesity problem.” (Like all fig leaf references, especially those that tend to forget that there was ever a metaphor behind the cliché, this one calls up, unbidden, some startling visual images.) One week brought a veritable harvest of fig leaf references: The invitation-only status of an Obama event was “a fig-leaf from an administration worried about how many would show up.” The next day, a headline declared “Rand Paul opposes Corker-Hoever Immigration Fig Leaf ” and a few days later the same immigration bill was called, again, “a fig leaf to [border] security.” Lest we worry about whether Breitbart’s writers were running out of dead metaphors to apply to this situation, however, we can take comfort in the fact that the article also described the Senate immigration bill as “completely toothless on border security.”32 But rhetorical fig leaves know no political boundaries. The organization Doctors Without Borders, which provides medical assistance to populations in distress, boycotted the inaugural World Humanitarian Summit, calling it a “fig-leaf of good intentions.”33An article on the FISA court by television journalist Reese Schonfeld (co-founder of CNN and of the Food Network) seemed positively obsessed with the phrase while not quite knowing what to do with it: FISA, wrote Schonfeld, is “a fig leaf used to cover the almost absolute power of the United States government to listen in on any conversation it wants to. It may be possible to invent another fig leaf that would have the power to reject drone strikes, but I can’t imagine that the new court would be any more than a fig leaf.” He concludes—still

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struggling to make this metaphor pay off—that “If in the end it makes Americans, Republicans and Democrats, happy to find another fig leaf to make us all feel more virtuous, so be it. But based on FISA’s record, it’s not going to make any difference, after all, a fig leaf is still a fig leaf.”34 On the other hand, consider this elegantly chiastic sentence from Maureen Dowd in The New York Times: “[W]here the mindlessly certain W. adopted a fig leaf of diplomacy to use force in Iraq, the mindfully uncertain Obama is adopting a fig leaf of force to use diplomacy in Syria.”35 Fig leaf of diplomacy, fig leaf of force. Envisaging either George W. Bush or Barack Obama tricked out in such fig leaf regalia strains the imagination— or it would, if there had not appeared on the Internet an image, posted the day after Dowd’s column, called “Obama-With-Unbelievably-Small-Fig-Leaf, Sculpture by Putin.”36 The sculpture was Michelangelo’s David, with the facial features of Barack Obama, and the fig leaf was indeed quite small. The government shutdown of 2013 was particularly fertile ground for the sowing, and harvesting, of fig leaves, as in this from an article by David Frum in The Daily Beast: “It’s hard to see how this one does end in a Republican retreat, clutching whatever forlorn fig leaf they can negotiate from President Obama.”37 I longed to see this in the form of a political cartoon. Brian Beutler in Salon plucked leaves from the same tree more than once, alleging that Speaker of the House John Boehner was “unwilling to fund the government unless Democrats give him some kind of fig leaf ”38 and also that the ultimate resolution was “a fig leaf, minus the properties that allow it to conceal anyone’s nether regions. A fig leaf with the chlorophyll sapped out of it.”39 The image of a “transparent fig leaf ” has been oddly recurrent in modern political speech and writing. Thus, for example, Senator Ted Kennedy once blasted Jimmy Carter’s administration for “submitting a token windfall tax that is no more than a transparent fig leaf over the vast new profits the industry will reap.” As columnist William Safire noted, this was “Not even a modestly opaque fig leaf, but a transparent one that makes profits truly ‘obscene.’ ”40 Thirty-five years later, the transparent leaf seems curiously and stubbornly attached to Speaker John Boehner, as in this comment from Democratic strategist Robert Shrum: A proposed bill last December “was a transparent fig leaf— one that can’t cover up Boehner’s pathetic impotence in making and keeping a deal.”41 Notice in these citations that what is covered up may be “absolute power” in one instance (FISA courts) and “pathetic impotence” on the other ( John Boehner’s leadership skills). But this is part of the uncanny effect of the fig leaf image when it does remember its origins enough to

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show us the Full Monty. As the old advertisement put it, whose underwear is under there? Today’s writers are sometimes quite conscious that they are dealing with a time-honored figure of speech, while seeking ways to make it new. Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in The New Yorker, was clearly mindful that “fig leaf ” was a metaphor. “As public esteem for the Republican Party plunged to record lows,” he noted, “the elephants stampeded for the exits,” adding that by the time his piece had been published “the government shutdown [ might] itself have been shut down, with or without a fig leaf to cover the pachyderms’ privates.”42 Again one longs for a cartoonist to bring this vision to light. Such valiant attempts to restore the metaphor to its full potential, however, often still wind up struggling: “a fig leaf, minus the properties that allow it to conceal anyone’s nether regions”; “clutching whatever forlorn fig leaf they can negotiate from President Obama.” And there remains the temptation to use the term as if it had not figurative potential at all. The New York Times described the practice of a biographer who enticed her reluctant subject to talk by chatting as she shifted through the papers on his desk: “Tidying the room was a fig leaf,” she told the Times. “That is how I began to get pieces of the story.”43 In effect, “fig leaf,” like so many other figures of speech flattened out by overuse, has become what we might call a zombie metaphor, neither fully alive nor killable. Unless, of course, a vigilant editor kills it. From the vantage point of the present day, Queen Victoria’s shock (and awe?) at the unclothed David may seem risible, and the device of the detachable fig leaf a sign of bygone prudery. But the detachable part, as both Sigmund Freud and Gisela Richter discovered, may reveal an absence as well as a presence. The term “fig leaf,” in effect, has become nothing but a fig leaf. A cover-up or evasion for a cover-up or evasion. By the summer of 2014, the term had become so established as a defunct metaphor that Linda Greenhouse, a reporter who always watches her words (and whose métier is watching the Supreme Court watch their words) could slyly combine it with the ancient fable about the mountain and the mouse, producing this instant classic: “badly divided while straining to appear united, the court labored for nearly nine months and brought forth a fig leaf.”44 While I rejoice in the occasional send-up of the phrase, as a writer I can’t help regretting the loss of the vivid image and the history (biblical, arthistorical, artifactual, erotic) that once accompanied it. And as a reader, a viewer, and a citizen, I am sometimes disconcerted to see how frequently political language, political speakers, and political journalists strip what

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once were powerful rhetorical figures of their resonance, power, and ultimately even their meaning. Some years ago, after President George W. Bush vetoed a bill on embryonic stem cell research, and followed it up with an executive order urging scientists to pursue other forms of stem cell investigation, a spokesman for the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research said, “I think the president has issued a political fig leaf,” adding “he knows he’s on the wrong side of the American public.”45 When—all too often these days—we encounter either critiques of the humanities or handwringing on their behalf, it might be well to think of instances like this. For if the image is emptied out of any referential meaning, it becomes not only inadvertently comical (“block that metaphor”) but also flat, imprecise, and dull. The power of figurative language is intrinsic to communicating the richness of culture and thought. So perhaps it is time to turn over a new leaf. As universities, colleges, and the general public sing the praises of the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—we might also give some renewed attention to the LEAF fields (language, echo, allusion, and figure). The ordinary poetry of our daily metaphors is how we think with and through culture. And you can’t put a fig leaf on that.

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chapter 5

Baggage Screening The fact that dreams are distorted and mutilated by memory is accepted by us but in our opinion constitutes no obstacle. —SIGMUND FREUD, The Interpretation of Dreams

Security screening extends beyond passengers heading to their planes. Behind the scenes, we have fielded sophisticated technology solutions to screen all their luggage as well. —U.S. TRANSPORTATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION

In this increasingly visual moment, contemporary art often plays a dual role, as both “object” and critical interpretation. An exhibition at the Freud Museum effectively demonstrated why, and how, this double focus can illuminate both the present and the past. By situating four of her digital media installations among the permanent artifacts of the Freud Museum, Renate Ferro ensures that her work interceded with, interrupted, and blended in with the collections and ephemera of the two Freuds: Sigmund and Anna. An installation in Anna Freud’s study on the second floor of the Hampstead house is called “This Suitcase Has No Bottom.” When “opened,” via video, the suitcase reveals an overstuffed collection of random objects, each the beginning of a story. Why a suitcase? In the same room was a traveling case that belonged to Anna Freud. (A previous version of Ferro’s piece, called “The Virtual Trunk,” opened an antique chest that contained relics and memory traces of her own family.) For the Freud household, compelled to depart Vienna and settling at last in Maresfield Gardens, the suitcase is a reminder both of history and of transience. 72

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“Luggage,” Sigmund Freud insisted in The Interpretation of Dreams, “often turns out to be an unmistakable symbol of the dreamer’s own genitals.”1 The anatomical symbol (luggage=genitals) is “often . . . unmistakable,” which means that it might be a mistake to think that it always carries this association. But “unmistakable” here is an intensifier, marking the difference between Freud’s assertion of a correct interpretation and the (incorrect) interpretation of his wayward disciple, Wilhelm Stekel, who had claimed in his own writings on dreams that “luggage one travels with is a load of sin . . . that weighs one down.”2 Modern parlance sometimes sides with Stekel, defining “baggage” (in the United States, synonymous with “luggage”) as a slang term that “refers to ideas and memories from the past that weigh you down.”3 “He”— or she—“has a lot of baggage,” we say. Emotional baggage, cultural baggage, even intellectual baggage. Thoughts and associations, it is implied, that might be packed off, rather than unpacked. In the case of this installation, packing and unpacking were not entirely distinct. Items disappear from the suitcase but are enshrined in narrative. Just when we might think we have gotten to the bottom of things, we see, as the title suggests, that the (suit)case has no bottom. And here I suspect we are again speaking the language of dreams, this time focalized through the absent presence of Nick Bottom, Shakespeare’s unflappable weaver, who determines to make what he thinks was his dream —that he was transformed into an ass, and became the lover of the fairy queen—into a popular narrative song: I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called “Bottom’s Dream,” because it hath no bottom; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4.1.213–5

The bottomless dream, like the bottomless suitcase, defies final interpretation, and is, moreover, both erotic and frightening: much better to make it into art. But the dream that hath no bottom also, of course, has a locus classicus in Freud, in the evocative concept of the “navel of the dream,” a concept mentioned not once but twice in The Interpretation of Dreams. “There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is umplumbable,” he wrote in a footnote to the specimen dream of Irma’s injection, “a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown.”4 And again in a late section on the forgetting of dreams: “There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure: this is because

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we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown.”5 Ferro’s suitcase, in its refusal fully to stay unpacked, is a convincing emblem of this endless work. The very familiarity of Freud’s image, the “navel of the dream,” obscures both its power and its strangeness. What is this dream that has a navel? Is it a child, and is then the unconscious its mother— or merely its placenta? Is the “unknown” here a version of the uncanny? The question of the mother, and of the umbilical connection, links “This Suitcase Has No Bottom” to another of Ferro’s Freud Museum installations, “Fort-Da: From the Pleasure Principle to the Technological Drive.” Here Ferro’s claim is that the ubiquitous technological tools of modern life (PDAs, headphones, earpieces, and so on) are versions of the famous fort-da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which Freud watched a boy eighteen months of age throw a wooden reel with a string around it out of his crib and later retrieve it: As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out “o-o-o-o,” accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word “fort” [gone]. Later—but not in every version of the game—he retrieved the spool, reeling it back into the crib, and punctuating this part of the process with the word da, meaning there, or here. The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach.6

Still, how could the disappearance of the beloved mother be pleasurable, the object of a favorite game? Freud’s speculations, characteristically, are multiple and nuanced. Perhaps it is a mode of control asserted, in play, over a circumstance that in actuality was beyond the child’s control. Perhaps it is a kind of revenge, exacted on a subject who does not always conform to his will (I don’t need you, go away). Perhaps it is directed at the father, whose departure for the war was not an unpleasurable fact, since it left the child in sole possession of the much-desired mother. In any case,

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the pleasure of going “beyond the pleasure-principle” is indicative of what Freud will regularly call an “economic” motive—that is, an emotional efficiency. Ferro’s citation of fort-da as the model for today’s constant, often anxious or obsessive, electronic communication on the slightest pretext (“I am walking down the street”; “now I am at the store”; “I am leaving the store now”) links “the separation anxiety we continue to feel in relation to our mothers” with “our tools and networks of communication.” It’s interesting that Ferro places herself, in her installations, both in the position of the mother and in the position of the child. In some cases, she notes her daughter’s departure from the family home as an expectable trauma; in others, as here, she refers to “our mothers” and “the mother” as if she herself were, imaginatively, in the role of the fort-da child. Here, too, crucially, there is an overlay with Freud, and indeed with both the Freuds, Sigmund and Anna. For the unnamed eighteen-month-old child about whom Freud notes that he “lived under the same roof as the child and his parents for some weeks” was, of course, his grandson Ernst, the first child of Freud’s beloved daughter Sophie, who died of Spanish flu in 1920.7 The tragic fact is reported, in the same careful clinical language, apparently devoid of affect, in a footnote to Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “When this child was five and three-quarters, his mother died. Now, when she was really ‘gone’ (o-o-o), the boy showed no signs of grief. It is true that in the interval a second child had been born in the meantime and has roused him to violent jealousy.”8 (The younger brother described so succinctly and astringently in Freud’s footnote, the grandfather’s beloved Heinerle, died three and a half years after his mother, plunging Freud into even deeper grief.)9 This famous footnote, it is perhaps needless to underscore, is Freud’s version of fort-da. The father/theorist controls (or seeks to control) his own profound grief for the loss of his child through the process of writing, a process that here might be characterized as doubly therapeutic. Freud himself understood the general case, noting at the conclusion of his description of the fort-da game an application to creativity and art: We may add the reminder that the dramatic and imitative art of adults, which differs from the behaviour of children in being directed towards the spectator, does not however spare the latter the most painful impressions, e. g. in tragedy, and yet can be felt by him as highly enjoyable. This convinces us that even under the domination of the pleasure-principle there are ways and means enough of making what is in itself disagreeable the object of memory and of psychic preoccupation.

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So the fort-da game is also a game played with the reader-spectator, who thinks that the topic under discussion is the child’s grief rather than the parent’s. We may call this displacement, or clinical writing, or art: The point—Freud’s point, and indeed Ferro’s—is that these are not separate or even separable, as the later story of the child suggests. Let us give him a name: Ernst Wolfgang Halberstadt, the son of Sophie Freud and of Max Halberstadt, a portrait photographer. Later, he would give himself another, W. Ernest Freud, affiliating himself with England and with the Freud side of his family. The survivor of tragedies that took away his first celebrated grandfather’s favorite daughter Sophie (his mother) and then his favorite grandchild, Heinerle (his brother), Ernst found his place working with his aunt and became her heir. As a child of seven, he was Anna Freud’s first psychoanalytic patient. His analysis was central to Anna Freud’s own theories and techniques of child analysis. As an adult, he studied with her and with her other colleagues at the Hampstead Clinic, becoming the chair of the Well-Baby unit. He specialized in issues of mother-child bonding and in neonatal care. He practiced in Britain and, later, in Germany. Daniel Benveniste reports that “in the mid-1980s he discovered, in self-analysis, that his research was, in part, motivated by his longing to retrieve his baby sibling who died in the womb along with his mother in 1920.”10 His research sought to connect ideas of cathexis, bonding, and attachment to the prenatal phase. W. Ernest Freud was Sigmund Freud’s only grandchild to become a psychoanalyst. Fort, da. Ferro sees “screen memories” as a conceptual blueprint for her artistic practice, and one of her museum installations is titled “Screen Memory: “Repeating, Remembering. . . .” The ellipsis omits, or defers, the third phrase from the title of Freud’s essay on the analytic process, “working through,” but “working through” is the experience of the museum-goer/ participant. Focusing on “houses,” and projected on the walls of a simulated “miniature house,” this installation also elides the more loaded word “home,” a button still found on most electronic keyboards, and the keyword, as Ferro well knows, of the extended philological discussion that begins Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny.” Homelike or unhomelike? Exile and return. “There is a joking saying,” Freud writes, “that ‘Love is homesickness’; and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: ‘this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before,’ we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body. In this case too, then, the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix ‘un’ [‘un-’] is the token of repression.”11

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The miniature house, which is and is not some version of “home,” achieves for the sphere of the domestic what the miniature cabinet does for the legacy of Freud’s work, at once instating and exploding its premises. Each of the six file drawers is labeled with a key Freudian term (libido, hysteria, separation anxiety, ego, trauma, dreams) and stocked with tiny objects that might, to the artist or a visitor, suggest a connection. Inside the drawer, calligraphed text dividers offer quotations from feminist theorists, ready to hand, easy to flip through. Perched on top of the cabinet, a single-channel video shows someone (but is it a participant, a museum visitor, an actor, an analysand?) repeatedly opening and closing the drawers, fingering the objects, choosing some for serious manipulation. Of all the pieces in this exhibition, this file cabinet is the most interactive and perhaps the most self-confident, aesthetically and conceptually. It invites intrusion and also resists it in good Freudian fashion: Were it to speak, it might say, “Get your hand out of my drawers!” Talk about “hands on”: the word “digital” has never seemed so haptic. Museum frequenters old enough to recall that antiquated library device, the “card catalogue,” may experience a particular surge of nostalgia. Here, as so often in Ferro’s work, the digital divide is not a divide but an invitation, at once familiar and strange: Everything new is old again. The title of this work, “Gentle Closing Calls for Gentle Opening,” was taken from Gaston Bachelard’s adage about cabinets: “Gentle closing calls for gentle opening, and we should want life to be always well oiled.”12 But before Bachelard, of course, there was Freud: “Boxes, cases, chests, cupboards and ovens represent the uterus, and also hollow objects of all kinds. Rooms in dreams are usually women.”13 Himself no vulgar Freudian, Freud warned his readers, avant la lettre, against what would come to be called vulgar Freudianism: “we must combine a critical caution in resolving symbols with a careful study of them in dreams which afford particularly clear instances of their use, in order to disarm any charge of arbitrariness in dream-interpretation.”14 There were no cookie-cutter symbols (not even in the case of that useful kitchen tool, the cookie-cutter). And yet. And yet. “Boxes, cases, chests, cupboards and ovens represent the uterus.” What psychoanalysis cautions against, the too-readily assimilated image or association, is one of Ferro’s consistent topics, sensitively treated as the starting point rather than the end-point of art. These installations return again and again to the ambivalent sign of the female body at the junction of art, technology, and psychoanalysis. The cabinet into which we are invited to poke and pry, the bottomless suitcase,

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the navel of the dream, the fort-da game, the uncanny “home,” which marks the return, in fantasy, to the interior of the mother’s body, the screen memory that intercedes between the trauma of the past and the necessary, enabling fictions of the future. Insinuating themselves into the household and working spaces of the Freud Museum, Renate Ferro’s disarmingly likeable artworks carry serious baggage, including not only Ferro’s own family stories but also the “Freudian symbol” and its discontents, not to mention a brief history of feminist theory and a binocular view of the digital and analog arts. Today, a journey that ends with the expectation of baggage reclaim will start with the necessity of baggage screening, a fact of modern life that would not have failed to interest Sigmund and Anna Freud.

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chapter 6

Identity Theft

How might the teaching of psychoanalysis and, in particular, the teaching of psychoanalytic interpretations of Shakespeare be made more visible and effective in American colleges and universities? On this point it is tempting simply to paraphrase Lacan and say that there is no academic relation. A nominal adjective like “Freudian” can—and does— cover a multitude of (largely inaccurate) sins, but “Kleinian” and “Kohutian” are not part of the undergraduate vocabulary, nor, so far as I can tell, are names like Winnicott, Bion, Bowlby, or Kernberg. Where, if at all, are the rudiments of psychoanalytic thinking taught today? A keywords search for “psychoanalysis” in the Harvard University course catalog yielded four courses in the undergraduate college (“Madness and Medicine”; “Security: Carefree or Careless”; “The Politics of Poetics,” a French tutorial for sophomores; and “Fighting Cancer with the Mind”), two graduate courses (in History of Science and in Romance Languages), and three courses in the Extension School. The results for “psychoanalytic” were similar: two undergraduate courses (in the History of Science and Women, Gender, and Sexuality), two graduate courses (in 79

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Comparative Literature and History of Science), and three in the Extension School. References to “Freud” in course descriptions were actually both more frequent and more various, ranging from African and African American Studies to Government and Religion. And only one course—the graduate course in the History of Science—seemed to be directly on topic: “Psychoanalytic Practices from Freud to the Present,” taught by a newly recruited faculty member. You will note the absence from this list of any courses in English literature or psychology. It has been many years since psychoanalysis has been regularly taught in psychology departments. I corresponded with some colleagues in the Harvard department of psychology to see whether my impression about this was correct, and got their permission to quote from their extensive and helpful replies. “It would be safe to say,” wrote one, that psychoanalysis is almost entirely absent from our teaching curriculum and entirely absent from any research enterprise. Introduction to Psychology textbooks will always make a mention of psychoanalysis but it is clear that it is to provide historic context rather than using it as an active set of ideas that inform psychological theory or experimentation. I doubt if it is mentioned more than once in [the introductory course] . . . No other course in psychology is likely to even mention the term psychoanalysis let alone conduct any in depth analysis of any psychodynamic concept. This is not a feature of Harvard psychology but psychology pretty much in all the leading universities and colleges in the country. What may be especially notable is that people . . . who study the unconscious make no use of psychoanalysis and trace our lineage instead to thinkers like Hermann von Helmholtz and his concept of “unconscious inference” as the origin of our present day understanding.1

Another member of the psychology department wrote me to concur with this account, adding that “the amount of coverage [psychoanalysis] receives gets less and less with every edition of the key textbooks. . . .” “I think what has happened over time is that some of the essential ideas from psychoanalysis have evolved,” this colleague suggested. Psychoanalytic models are no longer very relevant in their entirety, but constructs such as attachment and transference (just to give two examples) are still with us in various ways, although they may be discussed in non-psychoanalytic terms.2

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A third instructor, who teaches the introductory course, supplied the information that Freud and psychoanalysis are mentioned for about five minutes in one of the course lectures.3 It’s probably worth remembering—as an analyst friend reminded me— that in an academic curriculum for undergraduates and Ph.D. students, psychoanalysis can only be a literary pursuit. To deal with these concepts, students will engage with texts (plays, novels, memoirs, case histories, videotapes) not with patients, and not in a clinical setting. There may be a few exceptions to this rule. Observational studies of child development addressing questions posed by analytic or attachment theory can effectively function in a “laboratory” environment. But by and large the key concepts of analysis can only be studied by college students indirectly, through the lens of imaginative (literary) work. So perhaps it is not a surprise that the department of psychology is not the first place to look for such courses. Needless to say, even if a course description doesn’t mention psychoanalysis, the interpretations and approaches offered by some professors in these fields might still be “psychoanalytic.” This would be especially the case for literary scholars trained between the seventies and the nineties. Nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that across the board there is less manifest interest in this intellectual territory than there was 10, 20, or 30 years ago: less interest shown by professors in their course descriptions, and less interest shown by students in their requests or lobbying for courses not currently in the curriculum. I can also report this from my own teaching experience: there have been times over the last decades that it has seemed exciting to go into more detail about specific psychoanalytic interpretations by major theorists: Freud and Jones on Hamlet and the Oedipus Complex; Freud on Richard III and on the Macbeths; anality in Shylock and Malvolio, and so on. And there have been times when I have bracketed all these references, sensing that students would not only resist them (a good teachable, as well as analytic, stage) but simply stop listening. And then a year or two or ten later it would be time, once more, to present these ideas and others like them. Often I have found that students are more receptive if you omit the name of the theorist, and just tell them the interpretive argument without attribution. The fact is—and I can attest to this from years of teaching large classes and small—an undergraduate student often doesn’t want to be reminded that he or she has an unconscious. These students are doing all they can to assert control, over their world, their work, their friends, and themselves. The last thing they need is another internal rival who may be

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pulling or pushing them in other directions. And if they don’t have an unconscious, then arguments about what the unconscious does or doesn’t do—whether in Shakespeare, in literature more generally, or in what we oversimplify by calling “life”—arguments about the unconscious will fall flat, or seem dated or ridiculous. (That a character in a play, made up of words, should have an unconscious seems to some a particularly dubious proposition; for the teacher of literature this is an opportunity to talk about linguistic clues, about imagery, and indeed about what is sometimes called the hermeneutics of suspicion.) With this narrative as prolegomenon, I want now to turn to a topic that is certainly psychoanalytic and has some useful valence with Shakespeare studies, though I think the connection between them has not been sufficiently either explored or exploited. The concept I have in mind is projective identification. Introduced by Melanie Klein in a 1946 paper called “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” projective identification initially seemed to denote a process whereby “bad” or unbearable parts of the self were split off and projected into another person so as to rid the self of “bad objects” that threatened destruction from within. Klein expanded the concept in a second paper, “On Identification” (1955), through a reading of a literary object, the American-born writer Julien Green’s French novel If I Were You.4 In Green’s novel, the devil gives the protagonist the power to leave his own body and take over the body and life of anyone he chooses. Klein’s summary paraphrase of Green, under the heading “A Novel Illustrating Projective Identification,” takes six pages and is extensively— we might think excessively— detailed; it is then followed by no fewer than twenty pages of “interpretation,” largely the application of psychoanalytic ideas, step by step, to the details of the narrative. Klein seems to be positioning this reading of a work of fiction in a way comparable to Freud’s reading of Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1817) in his essay on “The Uncanny” (1919): “My interest in Fabian’s personality and adventures, illustrating, as they do, some of the complex and still obscure problems of projective identification, led me to attempt an analysis of this rich material almost as if he were a patient.”5 The results are not as felicitous as in Freud’s literary criticism, however, partly because of matters of style, but also because Klein tends to treat the novel as confirmatory of her own theory rather than as posing an actual problem of literary interpretation. (“[T]he processes underlying projective identification are depicted very concretely by the author.”6) Still, her outline of the process she is going to follow is helpful:

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I shall . . . consider Fabian’s projective identifications from three angles: (i), the relation of the split-off and projected parts of his personality to those he had left behind; (ii) the motives underlying the choice of objects into whom he projects himself; and (iii) how far in those processes the projected part of his self becomes submerged in the object or gains control over it.7

Over the years the term has been expanded, refined, defined and redefined. Here, for example, is Otto Kernberg, in Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (1975)]: Projective identification is a primitive form of projection, mainly called upon to externalize aggressive self- and object-images; “empathy” is maintained with the real objects onto which the projection has occurred, and is linked with an effort to control the object now feared because of this projection.8

And here is Peter Fonagy, in Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis (2001): Whereas in classical theory of projection, impulses and wishes are seen as part of the object rather than the self, and identification implies attributing to the self qualities perceived in the object, projective identification involves the externalization of “segments of the ego” and the attempt to gain control over these unwanted possessions via often highly manipulative behavior toward the object.9

Thomas Ogden, in a book called Projective Identification and Psychotherapeutic Technique (1982), offered what is perhaps still the most expansive (and perhaps the most theatrical) account: Projective identification is a concept that addresses the way in which feeling-states corresponding to the unconscious fantasies of one person (the projector) are engendered in and processed by another person (the recipient), that is, the way in which one person makes use of another person to experience and contain an aspect of himself. The projector has the primarily unconscious fantasy of getting rid of an unwanted or endangered part of himself (including internal objects), and of depositing that part in another person in a powerfully controlling way.10

As for the recipient, he or she is “pressured to think, feel, and behave in a manner congruent with the ejected feelings and the self- and objectrepresentations embodied in the projective fantasy. In other words, the recipient is pressured to engage in an identification with a specific, disowned aspect of the projector.11

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For a recent and timely definition, we might also consider that of Joan Montgomery Byles, in an essay called “Psychoanalysis and War: The Superego and Projective Identification,” published shortly after 9/11: “Projective identification involves a deep split, displacing onto and into others the hateful, bad parts of ourselves, and frequently making them hateful to themselves through their own introjection our hatred. This hatred is often racial or religious, frequently both.”12 Terrorist attacks in Paris, Mali, and elsewhere in the world in 2015 underscored the appropriateness of this account. Shakespeareans at this point will all leap ahead to recognize that the prime literary model for projective identification is Iago, and indeed Iago, in his relationship to Othello, is the one example regularly cited by both literary critics and psychoanalysts. Shakespeare scholar Janet Adelman, in an explicitly Kleinian reading, marks the change in Othello from Iago’s line in act 3, scene 3, “The Moor already changes with my poison” (Othello 3.3.33), noting that “the play depends on precisely this kind of specialized projective identification, in which Iago’s fantasies are replicated in Othello’s actions.”13 Psychotherapist Joseph H. Berke, writing for a general audience in a book called The Tyranny of Malice (1988), singles out Iago as a chief exemplar of “the envier,” a figure he connects with projective identification. His chapter title on this topic, taken from one of Iago’s major plotting speeches, is “So will I turn her virtue into pitch” (Othello 2.3.355). And in a recent article on projective identification in Shakespeare and Verdi in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, psychoanalyst Richard Rusbridger observes that “. . . the very sight of love between Othello and Desdemona, or of contentment in anyone’s mind, drives Iago mad with envy and jealousy, which he has to expel and project into others, particularly into Othello, who is susceptible to this attack because of his own narcissistic vulnerability.”14 We could adduce other Shakespearean examples, less obvious and perhaps therefore more interesting: not only all the “Iagan” figures from Richard III to Don John in Much Ado to Edmund in King Lear, but also Lady Macbeth, Cassius, Coriolanus, and a number of characters from Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. In other words, this is an interpretive—and characterological—model that functions very usefully in literary terms. If we return for a moment, though, to the clinical vicissitudes of projective identification, we should take note of the fact that within the analytic scenario, it became clear over time that the analyst himself or herself was often the target of projective identification.15 An observation by Wilfred

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Bion makes the metatheatrical nature of this structure clear: “The analyst feels that he is being manipulated so as to be playing a part, no matter how difficult to recognize, in somebody else’s phantasy.”16 This kind of theater talk (“playing a part,” and, indeed, “playing a part . . . in somebody else’s phantasy”) is pretty familiar in descriptions of analytic sessions, and sometimes it may feel like a throw-away line. But in this case I want to put some pressure on the analogy, or, indeed, the identification. Because my point here — and one of my central points — is to suggest that “projective identification” is another name for the activities of theater, and indeed for theater itself. Projective identification is a useful way of understanding character “splitting,” not only in the standard literaryanalytic sense (Hamlet as a figure split out into Laertes, Horatio, Fortinbras, the First Player, the Ghost, and Claudius) but in the complex and often aversive interplay between actor and “part,” or role. The term “part” derives from the early practice of giving actors only their own “part” of the script rather than the whole text, which would have been far more costly, but it does happy duty here as a congruent term to the analytic part object. And what about “theater itself ”? How is the institution and practice of theater related to projective identification? Here, evidence might be found in two areas, the first historical, the second performative. In early modern England, in Shakespeare’s time, Puritans and others regarded theater as so dangerous that the new purpose-built theater buildings (the Fortune, the Red Bull, the Curtain, the Globe, and so on) were required to be located outside the city, in the suburbs or on the bankside of the Thames. Theater was said to be the cause of immorality, sexual and other; of plague; of sedition; and, more prosaically, of absenteeism from work. Plays were staged in daylight, in the middle of the afternoon; apprentices sometimes went to the theater instead of to their appointed labors. This so-called antitheatrical prejudice has been well investigated by modern critics from Jonas Barish to the present day; here we might merely note that the literal expulsion of the (too-attractive) bad object was coupled with theater’s own self-identification as happily “bad,” and that this othering of theater has extended at least since Plato. As Barish observes, a principal culprit for Plato is mimesis, or theatrical imitation, which itself can become contagious, turning the performer into the performed. Stage actors need to be “prohibited from miming illiberal or base characters, lest they receive taint from them. They must not imitate women either, or slaves, or villains, or madmen.”17 As for the performative side of theater and projective identification, the theorist Leo Bersani put the issue neatly when he wrote, “the theater is a

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privileged arena for testing the viability of a fragmented and collectivized self. It can enact modes of escape from the ideology of a full and fully structured human character.”18 The theater shares with postmodern theory a resistance to the idea of full character, a concept modeled on the metaphysical pattern of “full presence,” and here rightly described as an ideology rather than a fact. So the theater is imbued with, and imbricated with, the concept of projective identification, although it is hardly (as yet) a term of art. But this is not all. As a theoretical concept and a structure, projective identification is, I believe, underutilized. Just as Christopher Lasch once wrote about a culture of narcissism, so we might today speak of a culture of projective identification, the attribution to other entities, personal and institutional, of disowned characteristics that threaten the projector. And just as Richard Hofstadter wrote about the paranoid style in American politics fifty years ago, so we might consider projective identification as a style of contemporary political thinking. In citing Richard Hoftstadter as a model, I should also cite his useful disclaimer. As a historian he was not, he assured his readers, “speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes.” The idea of the paranoid style would “have little contemporary relevance or historical value,” he wrote, if it were only applied to individuals who could be clinically diagnosed. Quite to the contrary: “It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.” So too I believe with projective identification, as both a mode of expression and a habit of mind. “It is above all,” to quote Hoftstadter once again, “a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself.”19 A particularly telling example of how the concept of projective identification fits our current situation might be the so-called crisis in the humanities, the claim that humanities enrollments are rapidly declining and that an interest in literature, culture, and the arts is no longer a main focus of undergraduate education. In this structure, the universities, especially those sectors that represent the popular STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) are in Iago’s place, the place that projects the unwanted, hated, or feared aspects of the self onto the object. The humanities are in Othello’s place, the place of the vulnerable object who internalizes the critique and the disowned attributes, becoming “congruent with the [projector’s] fantasy.”20 That is to say, if there is a “crisis” at all, the crisis originates in the larger institution of the university, or, as non-academics like to say, of “academia.”

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Are such institutions really relevant and functional in a modern world of entrepreneurialism and start-ups, “leadership institutes,” and other shortcuts to the top? The humanities, already prone to self-doubt and selfdevaluation (they are “useless,” they are “old,” they are “light,” they are speculative rather than empirical, they take too long to produce degrees, they are hermetic rather than accessible), become readily complicit in the fantasy of the rest of the university that none of these attributes attach to it. Thus “defenses” of the humanities play right into this mechanism. One explicit indicator of this tendency is the recent cathexis onto the idea of “digital humanities,” now number one on every English department’s wish-list for hiring, even though few members of any English department can accurately (or even approximately) describe what this much-desired entity might be. It’s enough to acknowledge that “we” (whoever we are) don’t have it, or do it, and that our graduate students (notional, actual, suggestible, and themselves conditioned to anticipatory self-doubt) all want it. To (misquote) both Freud and Lacan here, where theory was, there digital humanities shall be. Let me return then to the hypothesis offered by one of my colleagues in the Harvard psychology department, that “some of the essential ideas from psychoanalysis have evolved,” and that although “psychoanalytic models are no longer very relevant in their entirety,” nonetheless “constructs such as attachment and transference (just to give two examples) are still with us in various ways, although they may be discussed in non-psychoanalytic terms.” In other words, the concepts have naturalized, become adopted or adapted into the ordinary language and practice of our world. This is what happens to “theory” when it succeeds. It disappears, transmuted into the light of common day. I think this is not entirely a bad thing. One of the most useful aspects of Lacanian analysis for literary criticism and theory of the late twentieth century was that it was, or could be said to be, about positions, rather than identities. Thus, a landmark critical essay like Barbara Johnson’s “The Frame of Reference” (1977) or a book of essays on Shakespearean comedy like Barbara Freedman’s Staging the Gaze (1991) could read literature with psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis with literature, without merely “mapping” one element onto another. But that was, relatively speaking, a long time ago, and in another academia. We need a new paradigm for what might be thought of as a DSM for literature and culture in the twenty-first century. Recognizing that projective identification is a fundamental concept of this kind, one that enables a larger rethinking of positions in a structure, may offer both literary scholars and

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clinicians a way of understanding not only how Shakespearean characters reciprocally create one another, but also how, these days, “psychoanalysis” and “Shakespeare” (or “psychoanalysis” and “literary study”) aggressively, admiringly, and sometimes fearfully do the same, playing a part in someone else’s phantasy. And this too, I think, is not entirely a bad thing.

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chapter 7

Czech Mates: When Shakespeare Met Kafka Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. —JORGE LUIS BORGES, “Kafka and His Precursors”

Shakespeare was the first modern. —ERNEST JONES, Hamlet and Oedipus

Prologue: A Murder of Crows 2

murder, n. Forms: lME morther, lME mursher, lME murther, 19– murder. Etymology: Origin uncertain; probably the same word as murder n.1 (perhaps alluding to the crow’s traditional association with violent death, or . . . to its harsh and raucous cry) . . . A flock (of crows). One of many alleged group names found in late Middle English glossarial sources. App. revived in the 20th cent. (Oxford English Dictionary) The name Kafka is Czech by origin and—in its correct spelling of “Kavka”—literally means “Jackdaw.” This bird, with its big head and beautiful tail, was embossed on the business envelopes of the firm of Hermann Kafka in which Franz in the old days often used to enclose his letters to me. —MAX BROD, Franz Kafka, A Biography

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When Shakespeare Met Kafka . . . for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that . . . is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. —ROBERT GREENE, A Groats-worth of Witte (1592)

Jackdaw. The common name of the daw n. (Corvus monedula), one of the smallest of the crow family, which frequents old buildings, church towers, etc.; it is easily tamed and taught to imitate the sound of words, and is noted for its loquacity and thievish propensities. (Oxford English Dictionary) Light thickens; and the crow Makes wing to the rooky wood. Macbeth 3.2.50 –51 The crows like to insist a single crow is enough to destroy heaven. This is incontestably true, but it says nothing about heaven, because heaven is just another way of saying: the impossibility of crows. —FRANZ KAFKA, Zürau Aphorisms, 32

Shakespeare and Kafka Shakespeare and Kafka. At first glance it might seem as if no two writers could be less alike. One a playwright, an actor, an entrepreneur, a Christian; the other a novelist, a fabulist, an aphorist, a Jew. One supremely gifted in the creation of memorable dramatic characters, the other skilled in free indirect discourse, and in the first person narrative. One expansive, making the world a stage and the stage a world, the other a visionary claustrophobe, master of minimal spaces, the trial, the burrow, the animal-slave ship, the hunger artist’s cage. And yet they have been often, even insistently, yoked together. In part, it’s W. H. Auden’s fault. In 1945, in the immediate context of the horrors of the Second World War, and on the occasion of the translation of three of Kafka’s novels into English, Auden wrote, “Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.”1 The comparison caught the imagination of subsequent Kafka critics, who began to use it as the opening move in their own critical introductions, sometimes cutting the references to Dante and Goethe in order to make a more straightforward comparison to Shakespeare. Thus, Stanley

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Corngold, past President of the Kafka Society of America, begins his introduction to a recent book of critical essays by declaring, “In 1945 poet W. H. Auden remarked that Kafka stands in the same relation to his century as Shakespeare stood to his.”2 Kafka scholar James Rolleston cites the same phrase from Auden in the first paragraph of his introduction to A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, though Rolleston adds that Kafka is “an improbable Shakespeare,” since he completed few works, lacks a “grand vision,” and offers “no narrative culminating in usable meaning.”3 Some Shakespeareans might dispute the assumption that Shakespeare offers a grand vision or a usable meaning, just as some Kafka scholars might dispute the assumption that Kafka is always dark or paranoid. Such critical summings-up are always belated and partial. But it’s striking, nonetheless, that Kafka is so often seen as Shakespeare’s uncanny modern double, his postmodern avatar. A character in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park comments on the cultural omnipresence of Shakespeare: “His celebrated passages are quoted by every body; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare.”4 And almost two hundred years later we hear this from Michael Wood: “He has become part of our language. We speak Kafka.”5 “Kafka has often come to mind as I have worked on Shylock,” observes Kenneth Gross in his book Shylock Is Shakespeare.6 Novelist Zadie Smith, reviewing a recent Kafka biography, notes that it presents a picture of “Kafka in his twenty-first century aspect, if we are to assume, as with Shakespeare, that every new century will bring a Kafka close to our own concerns.”7 And James Hawes, the author of a highly readable and somewhat tendentious book called Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life, alleges (without offering documentation) that “Of all the authors in the world, only Shakespeare generates more Ph.D.s, more biographies, more coffee-table books and more trinkets than Kafka does.”8 (True or untrue, the claim itself is symptomatic: Shakespeare is the one to beat.) And then there is playwright Alan Bennett (the author of The Madness of King George and The History Boys). In a play first performed at the Royal Court Theater in 1986, Bennett imagined a scenario in which Max Brod and Franz Kafka (although both are long dead) turn up at the home of Sydney, an insurance agent and Kafka scholar, and his wife, Linda, in the city of Leeds, England. Kafka does not know that his books have been published and that he is now world-famous. His instructions to his friend Brod were, famously, to burn the work he left unpublished at his death.

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Left alone for a moment in Sydney’s library, Kafka pulls down a Penguin edition from the shelf, and is astounded to find his own first sentence from The Trial: “Somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph K because one fine morning he was arrested . . .” Sydney, an insurance agent (like Kafka himself ) enters with a stack of books written by other Kafka scholars. He explains that the Library of Congress has about fifteen thousand critical books on the topic. Kafka is appalled. KAFKA:

Max. What have you done to me? Ask not what I’ve done for you, but what you’ve done for humanity. . . . As Shakespeare spoke for mankind on the threshold of the modern world you speak mankind’s farewell in the authentic voice of the twentieth century. KAFKA: (In a small, awe-stricken voice) Shit.9 BROD:

Later, Kafka’s father, Hermann, joins the group, and is informed that his son’s name is now a word, listed in the Oxford English Dictionary: HERMANN K:

What kind of word? BROD: An adjective. Kafkaesque. HERMANN K: I never heard of it. Has it caught on? BROD: Caught on? Your son now has adjectival status in Japanese. SYDNEY [TO KAFKA]: Of course you’re not the only one. KAFKA: Proust? SYDNEY: Afraid so. Proustian. BROD: Kafkaesque is better.10 Kafkaesque is better than Proustian. (Maybe.) But is Kafkaesque better than “Shakespearean”? What these monumental adjectives have in common is cultural celebrity and an increasingly narrow fit with the works of the writer whose name they enshrine. Shakespearean and Kafkaesque. Everyone knows what they mean. To be “Shakespearean” is to be grand, eloquent, resonant, powerful, social, sublime, whether what is being described is a film, a political speech, an epic battle, or a complex family dynamic. Here is the description of a film about Nicolas Sarkozy’s rise to power in France, as reported in a recent issue of The New York Times: “The tale is meant to be Shakespearean, a drama of flawed, ambitious men and romantic, calculating women, a delineation behind the curtains of political scheming, betrayal, personal loss and the price of power.”11 And “Kafkaesque”? It has come to denote something like oppressive state bureaucratic persecution—“eerie, randomly occurring, too real, yet

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somehow not real enough.”12 Some illustrative examples from the Oxford English Dictionary:13 “Warned . . . by a Kafka-esque nightmare of blind alleys”;14 “An authentic Kafkaesque atmosphere of despair and horror”;15 “The Kafkaesque self-abnegation of the infamous ‘show trials’ [in Russia].”16 But “Kafkaesque” is only the beginning of this linguistic conquest. The OED lists, as well, “Kafkaesquely,” “Kafkan,” “Kafkaish,” “Kafkian,” even “Kafka” itself as a naked adjective: “This is the perfect Kafka situation.”17 “So little of what one did made any sense. One lived in a Kafka world.”18 Of course, not every Shakespeare play or character is “Shakespearean” in this sense. Nor is every Kafka story (or novel, or letter, or parable) “Kafkaesque.” Both writers can be devastatingly funny, as well as comically devastating. And sometimes the two are conflated, or cross over into each other’s territory. “Shakespeare Has a Kafka Moment,” read a headline in a London newspaper describing a new production of The Comedy of Errors. The set was designed to “have the look of Prague.”19 The director cited Antipholus of Syracuse’s line, “Am I myself ?” observing that “it’s Kafka meets the Marx brothers in a European, modernist world. . . . It asks what happens if someone comes and knocks on my door and arrests me. It’s the comedy of panic.” Here Shakespeare meets Kafka on the stage. And, on the other hand, Kafka sometimes meets Shakespeare on the page. As when, for example, Roberto Calasso, commenting on Kafka’s Zürau Aphorisms (written when the author, ill with tuberculosis, was recuperating at a sanatorium in Bohemia, though not, alas, on the seacoast), notes that Kafka’s letters to his friends contain a constant discussion of field mice. This “amalgam of the outrageously comic and the appalling, [is] a gift of Kafka’s, like the mysterious irreducibility of certain Shakespearean verses.”20 The “epistolary accounts of the Zürau mice” would lead to greater things, including the events of “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” But here again the benchmark and measuring stick for Kafka’s art, Kafka’s greatness, is Shakespeare.

Metamorphoses I dreamed today of a donkey that looked like a greyhound . . . Later there was talk that this donkey had never yet gone on all fours but always held itself erect like a human being and showed its silvery shining breast and its little belly. But actually that was not correct. Kafka, Diaries, October 29, 1911

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Let’s see, how does it go? As Bottom the Weaver awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an ass. No, that’s not quite right. How about this, then? I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but a beetle if he go about to expound this dream. Or even this. My Oberon! What visions have I seen! Methought I was enamour’d of a bug.

The theme of metamorphosis is clearly one that Shakespeare and Kafka have in common. More to the point, their two protagonists, Bottom and Gregor Samsa, accept their transformations with remarkable aplomb and not a scintilla of astonishment. Their first thoughts are thoughts of adaptation: what to eat, how to move, how to accommodate themselves to unexpected body parts (Bottom’s long ears, Gregor’s many legs). “Methought I had—and methought I was—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had.” As Tzvetan Todorov remarks about the first sentence of Kafka’s text: “The most surprising thing is precisely the absence of surprise with regard to the unheard-of event that has befallen Gregor Samsa. . . .” “We shall never be sufficiently amazed about this lack of amazement,” as Camus once said apropos of Kafka.21 Metamorphoses. Kafka’s stories are full of animal-hybrids with all-toohuman consciousness, from the philosophical “Investigations of a Dog” to “Josephine the Singer” to Red Peter, the ape who lectures in the “Report to an Academy.” As for Shakespeare, we have not only Bottom but, also from the same play, Snug the Joiner in his lion-suit, his human head peeking out of the costume (making him the antitype of Bottom, who has a human body and an ass’s head). There is Queen Margaret, her woman’s heart wrapped in a tiger’s hide, and Helena as a spaniel, and Coriolanus as a lonely dragon in his fen, and Edgar as a bare forked animal, and Shylock as a dog. Not to mention the ballad prized by the shepherdess Mopsa (in The Winter’s Tale) in which a woman becomes a cold fish because she refused to exchange flesh with one who loved her. My interest here, I want to underscore, is not in literary “influence,” but rather in uncanny doubleness, the kind of doubleness or replication that is paradoxically the sign and signature of a powerful creative originality—the same kind of doubleness, not incidentally, that is part of the apparatus of theater. “The realm of the déjà vu,” wrote Adorno, “is populated [in Kafka]

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by doubles, revenants, [and] buffoons.”22 And it is something like déjà vu, or déjà vu through the looking glass, that we find in the unlikely tag team of Shakespeare and Kafka. Doubles and revenants. Let us bring them face-to-face. “You know the face I mean, of course,” writes Hawes. “Everyone does. There are many photos of Dr. Franz Kafka (1883–1924) but, as far as Prague souvenirs and English-language biographies go, this might as well be the only one.”23 And again: “Apart from Shakespeare, there’s simply no writer whose image is so well known to so many people who have never read a word he wrote. The face of Kafka has become virtually a brand.”24 The photograph that appears on the cover of just about every book about Kafka was taken in a department store in Berlin about eight months before his death.25 It is the last picture of him ever taken. Many others survive, but they are not “Kafka” in the sense that the famous late passport photo is Kafka. They are, that is to say, not Kafkaesque. Compare this, if you will, with the story of Shakespeare’s face, or Shakespeare’s faces. There have been many claimants to the true visage of Shakespeare, from the “legitimate” to the illegitimate, the overpainted, or the frankly spurious or disqualified. But the face of Shakespeare that has become “virtually a brand” is of course the Droeshout engraving from the First Folio, an image likewise disseminated late in the playwright’s career— indeed, in this case, after his death. Shakespeare’s face was the starting point for Jorge Luis Borges’s stunning parable, “Everything and Nothing,” a parable that is, in part, about the puzzle of theatrical metamorphosis: There was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic, and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. . . . In London he found the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person.26

Borges, who translated Kafka, and who was himself often compared to Kafka, describes a scenario that would easily find a place in a Kafka novel. Compare this copious and empty persona (“there was no one in him; behind his face . . . there was only . . . a dream”) to what Kafka wrote to Brod from Berlin in December, 1910, after seeing a production of Hamlet with the German actor Albert Bassermann in the title role:

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Max, I have seen a performance of Hamlet, or rather heard Bassermann. For whole quarter-hours I actually had another person’s face; every so often I had to look away from the stage into an empty box, in order to compose myself. Yours, Franz27

Kafka Goes to the Theater (a lot) Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual. Kafka, Zürau Aphorisms, 20

Shakespeare, we think, read Ovid at the Stratford Grammar School. The evidence is writ large (and small) across the plays, from Titus Andronicus and A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale. Kafka almost surely did not read much Ovid, at least once he left the Gymnasium; as a young man, he trained first in chemistry and then took a degree in law. It’s likely he did not read Apuleius. Nor did he study Shakespeare in school, so far as we can tell, although as a child he had a “small album of pictures of women out of Shakespeare,” of which his favorite was Portia.28 (This was probably Mrs. Jameson’s Shakespeare’s Heroines: Characteristics of Women: Moral, Political, and Historical, which had been translated at least three times into German, was appended as a supplementary volume to the Schlegel/Tieck translated edition of Shakespeare’s works, and included a series of her own “vignette etchings.”)29 What he did do, though, was to go to the theater. He saw Hamlet several times, and writes in his diary about productions of King Lear, Twelfth Night, and Richard III; he probably saw The Comedy of Errors at the Kammerspiele in Berlin. One passage in his letters seems to echo the language of As You Like It. Another shows clearly that he knows Othello.30 The presiding genius of the German theater at that time was the director Max Reinhardt, whose productions Kafka saw both in Prague and in Berlin. Kafka’s Shakespeare was a theatrical Shakespeare, a Shakespeare mediated through actors. After a recital by Alexander Moissi, a famous Austrian actor who starred in Reinhardt’s production of The Merchant of Venice as well as in a memorable production of Hamlet, Kafka noted in his diary that Moissi performed to “great effect” what he called “Shakespeare’s ‘Rain Song’ ” (that is, Feste’s song in Twelfth Night) as an encore-piece.31 (“He stood erect, was free of

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the text, pulled at his handkerchief and then crushed it in his hands, and his eyes sparkled.”) Shakespeare—the Shakespeare of the theater—is regularly on his mind, and in his letters and diaries. When his mother and sister visited Berlin, Kafka decided which Shakespeare plays they should attend (he asked his then-fiancée to get them tickets to King Lear). In an irritable account of a day so full of obligations that he couldn’t get any writing done, he mentions, among other tasks, that he brought his sister home after she saw Hamlet.32 When he visited Weimar in 1912, he toured the Goethe House and was shown the Shakespeare Monument,33 created in 1904 by Otto Lessing on the fortieth anniversary of the German Shakespeare Association. At one point he wrote a question to himself: “How could Fortinbras say that Hamlet had prov’d most royally?”34 Even when he fell ill, he wrote in his diary about Shakespeare: 27 February 1922. Slept badly in the afternoon; everything is changed; my misery pressing me hard again. 28 February. View of the tower and the blue sky. Calming. 1 March. Richard III. Powerlessness.

The acting company Kafka knew best, however, was not a Shakespearean troupe but a group of Polish Jewish actors who performed Yiddish plays. They arrived in Prague in 1910 and for the following two years his notes and diaries are full of them. He befriended the actor Yitzhak Löwy and brought him home as a guest; he found two of the company’s actresses (both married) compellingly attractive and had a crush on one of them.35 Through his acquaintance with this acting troupe, he developed his interest in Yiddish and also in Zionism. (There is no evidence in his diaries and letters, I am sorry to say, that he saw or read Jacob Gordin’s great play The Yiddish King Lear, a centerpiece of the American Yiddish Theater, though he admired other plays by Gordin and mentions them by name.36) The Kafka of this period, I should point out, is anything but Kafkaesque. He goes to theaters, poetry readings, folk song concerts, cafés, and brothels; he has himself measured for a black suit and considers taking dancing lessons.

Bad Dreams: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear Like Freud, Kafka writes often and in detail about his dreams. On November 9, 1911, he wrote in his diary:

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A dream the day before yesterday: Everything theatre, I now up in the balcony now on the stage . . . from the balcony I pointed to the girl who was playing a male role, my companion did not like her. In one act the set was so large that nothing else was to be seen, no stage, no auditorium, no dark, no footlights; instead, great crowds of spectators were on the set . . .37

Ten days later he had another dream about the theater, and also wrote it down in detail in his diary.38 He speculates, at length, on his own relationship to performance. “My urge to imitate has nothing of the actor in it.” He picks up mannerisms effortlessly, “the way certain people manipulate their walking-sticks, the way they hold their hands, the movements of their fingers,” but this very effortlessness, this thirst for imitation, “sets me apart from the actor.” Furthermore: . . . Far beyond this external imitation, however, goes the inner, which is often so striking and strong that there is no room at all within me to observe and verify it . . . the imitation is so complete and replaces my own self with so immediate a suddenness that, even assuming it could be made visible at all, it would be unbearable on the stage. The spectator cannot be asked to endure what passes beyond the bounds of playacting.39

If this sounds a little like Hamlet on mourning (“I have that within that passes show”), or even Hamlet on the First Player, we may perhaps set it aside as a commonplace of the times — or we might do so, if we did not also encounter, again, and just a few days later, his report of a chance conversation with two of the actors (one of whom is the woman with whom he thinks himself in love): “In my effort hurriedly to express all my love and devotion I only remarked that the affairs of the troupe were going wretchedly, that their repertoire was exhausted, that they could not therefore remain much longer and that the lack of interest that the Prague Jews took in them was incomprehensible.”40 (“How chance it that they travel?” Hamlet asks about the actors who turn up in Elsinore. “Do they hold the same estimation they did when I was in the city? Are they so followed?” “No, indeed are they not,” replies Rosencrantz [2.2.293– 97].) In any case, what we sometimes think of as Hamlet’s existential dilemma is Kafkaesque to a T (or in this case a K): Kafkaesque avant la lettre. “I could be bounded in a nutshell . . . except that I have bad dreams.”

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When Brod’s “Axioms for the Drama” were published in 1911, Kafka commented on them in his diary, and again a key passage has, to a Shakespearean, something of an uncanny half-echo: . . . the drama in its highest development achieves an unbearable humanization which it is the task of the actor—with his role blowing loosely and in tatters about him—to draw down, to make bearable. The drama therefore hovers in the air, but not like a roof carried along on a storm, rather like a whole building whose foundation walls have been torn up out of the earth with a force which today is still close to madness.41

Compare this to the famous images of ill-fitting clothing at the close of Macbeth: He cannot buckle his distemper’d cause Within the belt of rule. Now does he feel his title Hang loose upon him like a giant’s robe Upon a dwarfish thief. Macbeth 5.2.15–16; 20 –22

“The drama hovers in the air,” says Kafka. “Not like a roof carried along on a storm, but like a whole building whose walls have been torn up with a force close to madness.” At the beginning of Shakespeare’s play we heard the weird sisters chant Fair is foul and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air. Macbeth 1.1.11–12

and: Sleep shall neither night nor day Hang upon his penthouse lid, He shall live a man forbid. . . . Macbeth 1.3.19–21

“Sometimes,” writes Kafka, “it seems that the play is resting up in the flies, the actors have drawn down strips of it the ends of which they hold in their hands or have wound about their bodies for the play, and that only

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now and then a strip that is difficult to release carries an actor, to the terror of the audience, up in the air.”42 So Kafka dreams Hamlet, and channels Macbeth—whether or not he has these Shakespeare texts in mind. (To these intimations of Macbeth we could add the uncanny resonances of the Porter scene with the most famous of all the Kafka parables, the one called “Before the Law,” in which a man waits patiently for years for a doorkeeper to admit him, only to be told after many years, “No one else could gain admittance here, because this entrance was intended only for you. Now I will go and shut it.”43) Yet, if we seek the Kafkaesque in Shakespeare, we will almost surely look first, not at Hamlet nor at Macbeth, but at King Lear. “If there is hope in Kafka’s work,” wrote Adorno, “it is in [the] extremes rather than in the milder phases: in the capacity to stand up to the worst by making it into language.”44 Or, as Edgar puts it, when he encounters his blinded father, Gloucester, “the worst is not, / So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst’ ” (Lear 4.1.29–30). Certainly King Lear is, or can be, Kafkaesque (as, for example, in the productions of Peter Brook and Derek Jacobi). And, indeed, is often so at the point where it can be described as most profoundly or sublimely Shakespearean. This is where Kafka’s modernity meets Shakespeare on his own ground, on the space of no space that is Gloucester’s imagined Dover Cliff, or on the heath with the Fool. That King Lear should be Kafkaesque, that it should in a way define what we might call the early-modern-Kafkaesque, is not in itself surprising. For something rather more uncanny, though, consider what we might call the incident of the multiplying heathscapes in Kafka’s novel, The Trial. Joseph K., under arrest for an unspecified offense for which he will be tried (and punished) at an unspecified place and time, is sent to consult a painter named Titorelli, who is said to have good contacts and sage political advice. But once he arrives at Titorelli’s studio he finds himself purchasing a painting—and then another—and then another; always the same painting: a painting of a heath. Joseph K. buys one to be polite, and then is trapped in a seemingly endless loop, as Titorelli pulls out one canvas after another, each, inescapably, “the same wild heathscape,” and K. feels compelled to buy them. Walter Benjamin feelingly describes this as “the always new, always identical ‘heathscape’ in Kafka.”45 For Benjamin, this replication is the image of “the ‘modern’ as the new in the context of what has always already been there”—and for him “the ‘modern’ ” is “the time of hell,” when nothing ever changes, when the “newest remains in every respect, the same.”46

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GONERIL:

This admiration, sir, is much o’ the savour Of other your new pranks. King Lear 1.4.228–229

Here Shakespeare meets Kafka one more time. And he meets him again, even more explicitly, in W. G. Sebald’s novel, The Rings of Saturn, where, once more, the switch-point is King Lear, and the heath. Early in the novel the narrator finds himself in a hospital bed in Norwich, eager to get up and look out the window, a feat he accomplishes with some difficulty, landing on all fours beside the bed. Here is his account: I could not help thinking of the scene in which poor Gregor Samsa, his little legs trembling, climbs the armchair and looks out of his room, no longer remembering (so Kafka’s narrative goes) the sense of liberation that gazing out the window had formerly given him. . . . it was as if I were looking down from a cliff upon a sea of stone or a field of rubble . . .47

Many pages later, this tempting mashup of Kafka and King Lear comes to a startling fruition. Resuming his walking tour through Suffolk, the narrator makes his way through a treeless heath, which feels like a labyrinth from which he cannot escape. And when he dreams, he revisits the scene. You will recognize this passage, even in its unfamiliar setting: I was . . . out in the open, within a foot of the very edge, and knew how fearful it is to cast one’s eye so low. The crows and choughs that winged the midway air were scarce the size of beetles; the fishermen that walked upon the beach appeared like mice; and the murmuring surge that chafed the countless pebbles could not be heard so high . . . A little way off . . . a solitary old man was kneeling beside his dead daughter, both of them so tiny, as if on a stage a mile off. No last sigh, no last words were heard, nor the last despairing plea: Lend me a looking-glass, if that her breath will mist or stain the stone, why, then, she lives . . .48

Should we call this Kafspearian? Shakespearesque? Sebald, the German writer who lived in England and crafted perfect “English” novels in the German language, was himself a perfect mashup of German and English, heir to both literary traditions. In any case his work offers an interesting variant of what Deleuze and Guattari, using Kafka as their model, described as “a minor literature.”49

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A Minority Report [E]veryone who walks about here on earth feels a tickling in his heels: from the tiny chimpanzee to the great Achilles. Kafka, “A Report to an Academy”

In the 1970s, the philosophers and literary theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari published a small but highly influential book entitled Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Taking the occasion of Kafka’s cultural situation—a Czech Jew living in Prague and writing in German—to speculate on the way a minority constructs a literature within a major language, Deleuze and Guattari articulated three characteristics of what they called “minor literature”: “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation.”50 Shakespeareans will immediately spot both the paradox and the opportunity for Shakespeare studies. On the one hand, no author could be more “major” than William Shakespeare, or more the emblem of a “major literature.” These days whatever survives as a literary canon, in English and also worldwide, is often premised on Shakespeare as the founder and chief exponent of major literature. English “majors” in college almost uniformly study Shakespeare, whatever other authors they elect. But the name of Shakespeare, of course, was not always synonymous with classic or “high” literature. In his own time, writing from within an upstart genre (the theater), belonging to a suspect profession (that of actor), and constantly testing the edges of political critique and dissent, Shakespeare could be thought of as emblematic of a “minor literature” closely analogous to that outlined by Deleuze and Guattari: deterritorialized (the stage is a set of relations rather than a specific location), political (the play is always intervening in social, economic, juridical, and commercial concerns), and collective (because plays are not focalized on a given narrative consciousness but instead present precisely an assemblage of speakers). The critic Mark Fortier, picking up on this point, describes what he calls “minor theater,” and imagines such a minor theater as embodied in theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare.51 “To undertake such a ‘minoritization,’ ” he writes, “to make Shakespeare, the major author, into a minor literature, or a minor author, or more precisely, a minor theater—is on the one hand an undoing of the master but on the other an act of love.” Shakespeare, then, can be the playwright of a “minor theater” both historically, as I have suggested, because of the marginal place of the theater and of actors in early modern England, and also contemporaneously,

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because of the nature and function of adaptation and the innovations of modern directors and companies. If the metamorphoses of Bottom, Lear, and Gregor Samsa, are examples of what Deleuze and Guattari call “becoming-animal” (and if Red Peter is a striking case of the same, under the illusory rubric of “becoming-human”), Shakespearean adaptations (and, I would argue, all imaginative re-productions of Shakespeare’s plays) are examples of what we might call “becoming-minor.” And here, too, there is an uncanny connection—indeed, many uncanny connections— between Kafka and Shakespeare. The American director and theorist Herbert Blau, whose many innovative productions have included King Lear and Elsinore (an “analytic scenario” based on Hamlet), developed a theatrical exercise for his company’s actors based upon Kafka’s late story “The Burrow.” In “The Burrow,” an animal of unspecified type digs through tunnels and fortifications it has built over a lifetime, listening for unfamiliar sounds, and dreaming of the day an intruder, whether friend or foe, might attempt to enter its space. For Herb Blau and his actors, this was also, insistently, a version of Hamlet. “ ‘The Burrow,’ ” he writes, “resembles . . . the cellarage below the ramparts.” “To stand and unfold the self: an untenable task.” “What ground?” and, most fully, “The creature of the Burrow is like the actor who draws upon that part of the self which defines itself by absence, torn by an awful dependency on an outside which is incessantly disavowed— . . . disappearing into an absence, its lair, an unfinished illusion of itself.”52 Pretty clearly, the reference is not only to Hamlet himself, but also to the Ghost of Hamlet Senior, crying beneath the stage: “You hear this fellow in the cellarage?” “Well said, old mole. Can’st thou work in the earth so fast?” (Hamlet 1.5.151; 161). Where Hegel and Marx used this figure of the mole burrowing in the earth to signify the emergence of modern consciousness, Blau, working through Kafka’s imaginative embodiment of the neurotic animal, produces instead the emergence of the modern actor. (For Hegel and Marx, it is a rhetorical figure; for Kafka, a bodily creature with sensibility and hyperrational obsession.) “The Burrow is the technique,” wrote Blau of his acting exercise. “We call our rehearsal method burrowing when we don’t call it ghosting.”53 But if “The Burrow” makes us think of Hamlet, we might also think of Coriolanus: I go alone, Like to a lonely dragon that his fen Makes feared and talked of more than seen. Coriolanus 4.1.29–31

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As if a man were author of himself And knew no other kin. Coriolanus 5.3.34 –37

One particularly striking example of this kind of “minor theater” is performed by a company with a name derived directly from Kafka: the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. The fictional version of this improbably named entity features largely at the end of Kafka’s novel The Man Who Disappeared, also known as Amerika.54 (The protagonist is told to go there because there are jobs to be had, and finds that everyone who applies for a job is accepted, no matter what their skills are— or aren’t.) For Benjamin, writing in 1934, ten years after Kafka’s death, the Nature Theater was the emblem of human theatricality, the inescapability of performance. “Kafka’s world is a world theater,” wrote Benjamin. For him, man is on stage from the very beginning. The proof is the fact that everyone is hired by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. What the standards for admission are cannot be determined. Dramatic talent, the most obvious criterion, seems to be of no importance. But this can be expressed in another way: all that is expected of the applicants is the ability to play themselves. It is no longer within the realm of possibility that they could, if necessary, be what they claim to be. With their roles, these people look for a position in the Nature Theater the way Pirandello’s six characters seek an author. For all of them this place is the last refuge, which does not preclude it from being their salvation.55

Kafka had never visited the United States, and his sense of American geography and iconography was somewhat hazy. His novel begins with a Statue of Liberty who holds a sword, rather than a torch; a bridge connects New York and Boston. The source from which he took “Oklahoma” spelled it “Oklahama.”56 The novel itself is highly theatrical, full of gestures and of direct speech: “it doesn’t resemble epic (the novel) as much as drama, with speech and action” notes a recent translator, Michael Hofmann, adding, in parentheses, “(Kafka was going to the Yiddish theatre a lot in 1912).”57 The namesake company, today’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma, is not based in Oklahoma, but in New York. (Although there is, in fact, a town called Prague, Oklahoma, the birthplace of the celebrated American athlete Jim Thorpe.) The Nature Theater of Oklahoma of New York is a performance group, an ensemble, which “strives to create an unsettling live situation that demands total presence from everyone in the room.” So

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what kind of postmodern stage vehicles does this immersive, unsettling, Kafka-inspired troupe perform? Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that one of its most successful productions was Romeo and Juliet. Not precisely the Romeo and Juliet you remember, perhaps, although memory has a good deal to do with it. Basically, what the company did was to call up people randomly and ask them to tell in their own words the story of Romeo and Juliet from beginning to end. What people didn’t remember, they invented, and the performance incorporated the competing scenarios. According to the Times reviewer, Charles Isherwood, the monologues were full of “hazy snatches of dialogue half-recalled (‘Juliet is the sun! Or the moon?’), deadpan summaries of plot developments (‘She has this kind of bumbling, funny nurse’), and guesses about what would happen in extratheatrical space (‘I feel like if they had not killed themselves and they had lived happily ever after, they would have gotten a divorce’). He noted admiringly that every ‘um’ and ‘ah’ and extraneous ‘like’ is given considered rhythmic emphasis, as if these chatty ramblings were composed with strict ideas of meter in mind.”58 Particularly priceless, though, are the immediate responses to the question, what is the story of Romeo and Juliet: “They were like in their teens.” “I think there’s some ball at the beginning? And I think it’s held by Juliet’s parents. And they’re, you know, sort of the hipsters of the town.” “Romeo, like, gets in a fight with some guy with a very flourishy name, like . . . uh . . . Euristhepis? Or something like that.” “I know I’m missing a huge chunk in the middle.” “Did you ever see ‘West Side Story’? It’s the same story, but with Puerto Ricans.” “Aren’t you gonna help me out here? Do you know the story?”59

The cluelessness of the respondents is more cheerful than that of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, but it is possible to see here what Walter Benjamin had in mind when he spoke of Kafka’s world theater. Dramatic talent, the most obvious criterion, seems to be of no importance. But this can be expressed in another way: all that is expected of the applicants is the ability to play themselves. It is no longer within

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the realm of possibility that they could, if necessary, be what they claim to be.60

The Infinite Monkey Theorem No message is to be squeezed out of Hamlet; this in no way impinges on its truth content. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

The Infinite Monkey Theorem, an old logical and mathematical puzzle, proposes the idea that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will ultimately type a given text, like the complete works of Shakespeare. It’s an old logical and mathematical puzzle. Sometimes the number of monkeys is huge (“an army of monkeys,” suggested the physicist Arthur Eddington.)61 Aristotle, Cicero, Pascal, and Jonathan Swift all address versions of the puzzle (without the typewriters; without the monkeys). Borges pointed out that the frame of reference changed over time, and that by 1939 the canonical version was that “a half-dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum.”62(To which Borges adds, “Strictly speaking, one immortal monkey would suffice.”) Philosophers, aestheticians, and evolutionists have all debated the monkeytypewriter argument. (If a Shakespeare play is generated without authorial intention, is it really “Shakespeare”?) Computer scientists have designed programs to simulate monkeys typing, and one, after “2,737,850 million billion billion billion monkey-years” produced a partial line from Henry IV Part 2: “RUMOUR: Open your ears; 9r”5j5&?OWTY Z0d . . .” But it remained for the playwright David Ives to make this fascinating scenario into a play. Alan Bennett’s play brought Kafka and Max Brod back from the dead, to hear Brod compare his friend’s literary celebrity to that of Shakespeare. (“As Shakespeare spoke for mankind on the threshold of the modern world you speak mankind’s farewell in the authentic voice of the twentieth century.”) Its perfect pendant is a play by David Ives, called “Words, Words, Words,” in which three monkeys, named Milton, Swift, and Kafka, are set to typing Hamlet under the unseen but watchful eye of a scientist.63 The experiment is conducted by a Dr. David Rosenbaum, who is described as a kind of audience, “up in that booth.” The narrative evokes, surely deliberately, Kafka’s “A Report to An Academy,” in which Red Peter, who describes

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himself as a former ape, explains how he learned to imitate men as a “way out,” moving from captivity to training to vaudeville. (This is, of course, the same story that is quoted to powerful effect by J. M. Coetzee’s animal activist, Elizabeth Costello.) Lights come up on three monkeys pecking away at three typewriters. Behind them, a tire swing is hanging. The monkeys are named milton, swift, and kafka. kafka is a girl- monkey. . . . They type for a few moments, each at his own speed. Then milton runs excitedly around the fl oor on his knuckles, swings onto the tire swing, leaps back onto his stool, and goes on typing. kafka eats a banana thoughtfully. swift pounds his chest and shows his teeth, then goes back to typing. MILTON:

Have you hit anything? Let’s hear it. (reads what he’s typed) “Ping drobba fft fft fft ingelwarp carcinoma.” That’s as far as I got. KAFKA: I like the “fft fft ftt.” MILTON: Yeah. Kind of onomatopoeic. . . . SWIFT: But do you think it’s Hamlet? MILTON: Don’t ask me. I’m just a chimp. SWIFT:

SWIFT:

But what is Hamlet? MILTON: I don’t know. SWIFT (to KAFKA): What is Hamlet? KAFKA: I don’t know. (Silence.) SWIFT (dawning realization): You know—this is really stupid. MILTON: Have you got something better to do in this cage? The sooner we produce the goddamn thing, the sooner we get out. KAFKA: Sort of publish or perish, with a twist. At one point KAFKA generates a line composed of a single letter appearing fifteen times: K.K.K.K.K.K.K.K.K.K.K.K.K.K.K. (“What is that—postmodernism?” asks SWIFT. “I got blocked. I felt like I was repeating myself,” says KAFKA.) Throughout the play, the monkeys (who are not dressed in monkey suits, but in the kind of little-kid clothes that chimps wear in circuses) speak in tag lines from Hamlet—without, of course, recognizing them. “We’re more than kin and less than kind,” one says, in reference to their relationship to the unseen scientist Rosenbaum. “Watch me while I put my antic disposition on.” “A hit, a palpable hit.” “The readiness is all.” They’re

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bored, puzzled, curious, resentful, by turns. At one point they contemplate revenge on Rosenbaum (“Some juice of cursèd hebona spread liberally over the keyboard”) with a fallback position: “If that doesn’t work, we envenom the tire swing and invite him for a ride.” They do produce fragments of other literary texts—for example, MILTON writes the first three lines of Paradise Lost, “Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit . . .” and is praised by his colleagues (“that’s good! It’s got rhythm! It really sings!”)—but they wonder, “Is it Shakespeare?” Since the task is only to produce Hamlet, other work is valueless, however good it sounds; Dr. Rosenbaum isn’t interested in anybody’s individual creativity, only in the outcome of his experiment. But after a while, having aired their grievances, they go back to work. Determined to complete the experiment successfully, to produce Hamlet, whatever that is, to please Dr. Rosenbaum, to find, perhaps, what Red Peter called a “way out.” In the closing moments, having returned to his typewriter, MILTON produces another spate of fine-sounding nonsense phrases. MILTON: “Tinkerbelle . . . shtuckelschwanz . . . hemorrhoid.” Yeah, that’s good. That is good. (Types.) “Shtuckelschwanz . . .” KAFKA (types): “Act one, scene one. Elsinore Castle, Denmark . . .” MILTON (types): “Hemorrhoid.” KAFKA (types): “Enter Bernardo and Francisco.” MILTON (types): “Pomegranate.” KAFKA (types): “Bernardo says, ‘Who’s there?’ . . .” MILTON (types): “Bazooka.” (KAFKA continues to type Hamlet, as) [THE LIGHTS FADE]

Kafka (the monkey Kafka, the girl monkey Kafka, the monkey who asks, plaintively, “What’s a Kafka anyway? Why am I a Kafka?”) types out, produces, generates, the opening lines of Hamlet. Czech mates. When Shakespeare meets Kafka, something remarkable happens. Something that has to do with cultural diffusion, with literary celebrity, and with the saturation of linguistic and performative reference. The term “check mate” derives from an Arabic phrase meaning “the king is dead.” In this case, though, he dies to live, reinvigorated and reinterpreted, each writer speaking to and through the other across the stages and the years.

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Here is the literal fulfillment of Borges’s nice paradox, from his essay called “Kafka and His Precursors”: “Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” “Who’s there?” asks Bernardo the sentry. Who indeed? The ghost cries in the cellarage. Kafka writes Shakespeare. As we have always known she would.

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chapter 8

Occupy Shakespeare The Occupy movement would strengthen itself if it realised that its concerns were shared by Shakespeare . . . and if it looked for ways of using this state of affairs to its advantage. Public readings of Shakespeare plays could be organised within Occupy camps, for example, and protestors could make contact with people at theatres, and at Shakespearian institutions, to see if links could be forged. —DAVE PAXTON, OCCUPY STRATFORD UPON AVON1

As soon as a thrilling Ralph Fiennes appears in Coriolanus, it’s clear why he chose this lesser-known Shakespeare tragedy for his directing debut. . . . The city’s hungry, rioting citizens, some carrying protest signs and one holding a camera phone, have descended, demanding food. . . . The language lives, as do the people, who are present enough that it’s almost a surprise that no one brandishes that timely protest sign, “Occupy Rome.” —MANOHLA DARGIS, THE NEW YORK TIMES2

Occupational Hazards In 2011, the American Dialect Society voted to make “occupy” the 2011 Word of the Year, defeating contenders such as “tebowing,” “99%,” and the acronym FOMO, for “fear of missing out” (anxiety over being inundated by the information on social media). The chair of the Dialect Society’s New Words Committee was quick to acknowledge that “occupy” was, in fact, “a very old word,” but noted that “over the course of just a few months it took on another life and moved in new and unexpected directions.”3 When a column on this topic appeared in The Guardian, written by an after-dinner speaker whose “occupy” joke had fallen flat, it elicited email commentary from all over the political map, including this one: “Two things you cannot make fun of, and there are those who keep trying: Shakespeare, and Occupy.” The word “occupy” was pretty much avoided during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because it had come to mean “have sex with,” as Ben Jonson complains: “Many, out of their own obscene apprehensions, refuse proper and fit words; as ‘occupy,’ ‘nature,’ and the like.”4 Shake110

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speare uses it only twice, once in some bawdy remarks by Mercutio: “I was come to the whole depth of my tale; and meant, indeed, to occupy the argument no longer” (Romeo and Juliet 2.4.91–99), and the second time by the prostitute Doll Tearsheet: “God’s light, these villains will make the word as odious as the word ‘occupy,’ which was an excellent good word before it was ill-sorted” (2 Henry IV 2.4.144 –246). The “odious,” or slang, sense of “occupy” in the Renaissance is connected to the question of ownership or personal property, “the making common of a private place.”5 When Othello thinks he has discovered that Desdemona has been unfaithful, his famous lament is, seemingly, for the loss of his public role: “Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars / That makes ambition virtue. . . . Othello’s occupation’s gone” (Othello 3.3.352– 60). But this speech, coming as it does immediately after an explicit interchange with Iago (“What sense had I of her stolen hours of lust? . . . . I found not Cassio’s kisses on her lips” [341– 44]), also glances at the other, sexual meaning of “occupy”: my wife has betrayed me, and both my professional and my sexual roles are, consequently, lost.6 As Jonathan Bate notes, “[the] verb occupy frequently occurs in sex cases” in the Stratford consistory courts of Shakespeare’s time (often known as “bawdy courts”) “as when one Isobel South accused Richard Todd in the following terms: ‘thou art a whoremaster and thou didst offer to give me an angel of gold to occupy me and thou didst offer another man’s wife the making of an oven to occupy her.’ ” Bate, too, links this use of “occupy” to “Othello’s occupation.”7 A soldier in Christopher Marlowe’s play The Massacre at Paris jokes broadly about the crossover between real (estate) property and sexual property: You sir, that dare make the Duke a cuckold, and use a counterfeit key to his privy chamber door: . . . [you] till the ground that he himself should occupy, which is his own free land. (Marlowe, Massacre at Paris, scene 17)

“Occupy Shakespeare” is not meant as a veiled seventeenth-century sexual reference, nor yet (in the modern way) as its converse, an expletive of condemnation or dismissal. Rather, it is a shorthand way of invoking the questions of habitation, habitus, entitlement and possession, as these affect the relationship between Shakespeare and the humanities. Whose Shakespeare? Whose humanities? Who are the 1 percent and who the 99 percent is far from clear at any given moment. Who is entitled? Who has access and ownership? Who is disenfranchised?

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This is a story of a double transformation. “Shakespeare,” once not even part of the academic humanities, has become increasingly central to them. In the meantime, “the humanities,” once largely defined as the study of the classics, literature, art, music, and philosophy, has expanded into aspects of the sciences, the social sciences, and the professions. There are now thriving programs in medical humanities, law and humanities, business and humanities, humanities and justice, and so on across the country and the world. And in all these programs, Shakespeare is a key player, cited as an example, a case study, an epigraph, a syndrome, or the occasion for a moot court. Which is the inside, and which is the outside? Is Shakespeare in the humanities, or are the humanities in Shakespeare? One way of visualizing this conundrum might be to construct something like a Venn diagram, marking patterns of overlap, exclusion, inclusion, and identity. So, for example, at a certain moment in the past the area of overlap between Shakespeare and the humanities might have occurred in the uses of passages from Shakespeare plays to teach rhetoric or philology, even though Shakespeare was not otherwise part of the “humanities” curriculum. And, in the case I’ve just mentioned, in which Shakespeare is the humanities, the two circles would completely overlap, like a total eclipse (Othello 5.2.98–100). An even better visual model might be a Möbius strip, in which the “inside” and the “outside” are one continuous plane. A Shakespearethemed example of such a Möbius strip is on sale at (among other places) the Folger Shakespeare library—a bracelet bearing a familiar quotation from Sonnet 116:8 Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken.

In a “marriage of true minds,” as in the twisted silver band of the bracelet, what appears to be two can really be one—a point made with great forcefulness in Shakespeare’s metaphysical poem, “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” (“So they loved, as love in twain / Had the essence but in one; / Two distincts, division none: / Number there in love was slain.”) And so also with that other mutual pair, Shakespeare and the humanities.

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List, List, O List Remember First to possess his books. Tempest, 3.2.91–92

How inter-implicated are “Shakespeare” and “the humanities”? In order to get an approximate and highly unofficial sense of this, I decided to look at a listing of titles beginning with “Shakespeare and” in my university’s library. I counted approximately 470. The list produced a number of risible accidental conjunctions because the alphabet makes strange bedfellows: Shakespeare and: astrology, biography, British art, carnival, character, childhood, Catholicism, Christian doctrine, cognition, costume, cultural traditions, death, deconstruction, decorum, democracy, domestic loss, drunkenness, feminist criticism, fi lm, gender, history, Holy Scripture, home life, interpretation, intertextuality, the Jews, language, law, literary theory, love, masculinity, the moving image, medicine, modernism, moral agency, multiplicity, music, national character, national culture, nobility, opera, performance, philosophy, Platonic beauty, politics, popular music precious stones, psychology, public executions, race, religion, republicanism, revision, science, sexuality, social class, society, technology, temperance, text, time, actors, evil, government, human kindness, arts, audience, the Bible, the book, the classroom, the dance, the fool, the Just War tradition, the musical stage, pirates, players, spectacle, post horses, adaptation, theory, reason, the Red Cross, the sea, students, the supernatural, violence, war, women, world peace, youth culture.

Another list could be compiled of the writers with whom Shakespeare is coupled by that same useful conjunction, “and.” (Bear in mind that these are book titles, not journal articles or undergraduate short essays.) Shakespeare and: Brecht (in Nigeria); Burbage; Byron; Chapman; Chaucer; Chekhov, Dickens, Elizabeth, Fletcher, Garrick, Berlioz, Ibsen, Jonson, Joyce, Jung, Keats, Machiavelli, Marx, Montaigne, Marlowe, Ovid, Rembrandt, Sidney, Thomas More, Spenser, Seneca, Verdi, Nashe, Tolstoy, Woodrow Wilson, and Voltaire.

When I was transcribing the list, my computer spell-check function briefly “corrected” Sidney to its anagram, Disney. Perhaps this tells us more

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than we want to know about the current direction of the humanities (and the relation between the sixteenth century and the present). A third list (out of many more possible constructions) conjoins Shakespeare with a local— or not so local—habitation. Shakespeare and: classical antiquity; Eastern Europe, France, Germany, Hawaii, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Russian culture, Scandinavia, Scotland, South Africa, Spain, Stratford-Upon-Avon, the Birmingham Repertory Theater, Armenia, Japan, Virginia, Venice, Shoreditch, the Mediterranean, and the Arabic-speaking world.

Remember that while these are just books the titles of which begin with the phrase “Shakespeare and . . . ,” they are by no means the sum total of the library’s Shakespeare books or even of books beginning with the word “Shakespeare.” I might also mention what is perhaps my favorite of these “Shakespeare and” titles, not one but two works, by different authors, one from 1952 and another from 1977, each of them called Shakespeare and Myself. But wait— what about Shakespeare in (rather than and) the humanities? Back I went to my online catalogue, where another 150 or so titles awaited me: Shakespeare in art, in music, in education, in modern type, in the public record; Shakespeare in limerick; Shakespeare in love. Shakespeare in Hollywood, in Hong Kong, in Hungary, in Edinburgh, in the tropics, in Wall Street, in Washington, in the ancient world. Here again it seems perfectly possible just to rest my case: Shakespeare is the humanities, the humanities are Shakespeare. And yet there was a time, not too very long ago, when Shakespeare’s participation in “the humanities” was more uncertain, and more unofficial.

The Dark Backward and Abysm of Time In U.S. colleges and universities, Shakespeare was, for many years, the equivalent of a club sport: a pleasurable experience of extracurricular reading rather than a field of classroom study. In 1743, for example, the Yale College Library catalogue listed Shakespeare among “books of diversion.”9 It was in the classes in rhetoric, belles lettres, and philology that Shakespeare could be found—not, initially, in the courses in “English Literature.” During the period from 1785 to 1859, when according to Andrew Dickson White,10 English authors were never directly taught in Yale classrooms, Yale students read Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres from cover to cover. And for Blair, a minister and a professor at the Uni-

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versity of Edinburgh, Shakespeare provided example after example, not of literary style but of rhetorical and ethical value: “Shakespeare an offender against the rules of poetry”; “Shakespeare as a true painter of human feelings”; “Shakespeare as a teacher of virtue,” and so on, each statement illustrated with a suitable quotation from the plays.11 As for philology: Here is a typical discussion question posed to students by Francis A. March of Lafayette College, later the president of the American Philological Association (1873) and the vice-president of the London New Shakespeare Society. The topic for discussion is a single word in Julius Caesar, the first word of the play, spoken by the tribune Flavius: “Hence!” The line in its entirety is: Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!

And this is the question March wants them to answer, as framed in his textbook: What is the first clause? What ellipsis? 403, 380, X.; 396, XI. What kind of a clause—declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory or optative? 404. What is the verb? 254. Subject, 380, VIII. What does hence combine with? Kind of combination? 407. Does it compete or extend the predicate? Is it an adjunct of time, place, mode, or cause? What language is it from? 296 II. Which is the root letter? 308, 6. Why called a pronominal element? 308, 6. What other words in English of the same pronominal element—pronouns? 229. Adverbs? 291, 296. Of what case does—ce represent the ending? 292. What other adverbs ending in—ce? 292.296. II. How as the genitive ending written in Anglo-Saxon? 192. Was hence ever written hennes, hens? (Yes, Chaucer and others.) What relation of place is expressed by the genitive termination? 189, 396. VI. What grammatical equivalent for hence? 386, VI. Rule for the point after hence? Rule for its capital? 564.12

By the time Henry James attended Harvard Law School for a year, in 1862, Harvard had still not accommodated itself to the curricular study of Shakespeare. “A student might,” James noted, “read the literature of our own language privately, but it was not a subject of instruction.” In Harvard College’s elective course on “English,” reported James, “Professor Child provided an introduction to the reading of Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer. There, so far as English literature was concerned, the College stopped.”13 “Professor Child” was Francis James Child, who would, a few years later, introduce what was Harvard’s first Shakespeare course in 1876.14 As late as

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1883 James Russell Lowell, poet and professor of modern languages at Harvard, could tell the Edinburgh Philosophical Institute that he lamented the absence of formal Shakespeare instruction: While I believe in the maintenance of classical learning in our universities, I never open my Shakespeare but I fi nd myself wishing that there might be professorships established for the expounding of his works as there used to be for those of Dante in Italian. . . . For those who know no language but their own, there is as much intellectual training to be got from the study of his works as from that of the works of any, I had almost said all, of the great writers of antiquity.15

Change came, when it did, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when departments of English, a new innovation, were founded in many North American colleges and universities. By the turn of the century, the College Entrance Examination Board and various colleges and universities all specified some knowledge of Shakespeare as among the requirements for entrance. But these “requirements” often went no further than a rudimentary knowledge of the plots, something that could have been gleaned from a crib, a summary, or, indeed, Lamb’s Tales.16 And what about “Shakespeare and the humanities” in Britain? Here, too, the relationship between Shakespeare and the humanities curriculum is of relatively recent date. English only became an official university subject at Oxford in 1894, although the Oxford University Dramatic Society was established in a decade earlier, 1885, on the condition that it performed only Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, not “low” genres such as revue and farce. There wasn’t an English department at Cambridge University until 1919. In Scottish universities, Shakespeare was being taught by the end of the eighteenth century—although in rhetoric courses rather than “English”— by Blair at Edinburgh and the classicist William Richardson at Glasgow. But arguably the key figure in the establishment of Shakespeare as central to the humanities curriculum in Britain was A. C. Bradley, whose lectures on Shakespearean tragedy played a key role in changing the way Shakespeare was taught. To jump from Bradley’s 1904 lectures on Shakespearean tragedy to the present day, however, is to skip over the period of what might have been Shakespeare’s greatest dominance as a cultural humanities marker among the general public. In situating the relationship of Shakespeare to notions of general educated knowledge in this period, it may be useful to quote a

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well-known, and still pugnacious, remark by C. P. Snow in his 1959 Rede lecture, the “Two Cultures.” Snow, trained as a scientist, subsequently became a best-selling novelist. A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: “Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”17

Snow’s scorn is directed at “literary intellectuals” who are not literate in science. But his assumption is that reading “a work of Shakespeare’s” is a basic social accomplishment, one routinely expected of “people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated.” I wonder how automatic that assumption would be among elite professionals in the twenty-first century such as politicians, bankers, CEOs, engineers, or technology entrepreneurs. In Snow’s time, however, “Shakespeare” was something that educated people read, watched, and knew. And this shared knowledge was on quiet but insistent display in a subgenre of fiction that was as popular with scientists and social scientists as it was with literary scholars: the detective novel.

The Dogberry Scale Few [Michael] Innes characters will fl inch at playing a parlour game that involves remembering quotations about bells in Shakespeare . . . Julian Symons, The Detective Story in Britain You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. Hamlet 3.2.356–57

We hear a good deal these days about what are called “Humanities Indicators.” I have my own index for literacy in the conjunction of Shakespeare and the humanities, something that might be called the Detective Story Allusion Tabulation, or DSAT, otherwise known as the Dogberry Scale. This invaluable scale tracks the casual allusions to Shakespeare’s plays in detective fiction, from titles to playful badinage.

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It is my contention that the writers and readers of classic detective fiction in the mid-twentieth century represent a kind of protected enclave, to be studied in the same way that anthropologists study the populations of remote islands uncontaminated by modern culture, or that linguists once studied Appalachian hollers in quest of the “Elizabethan English” spoken by Shakespeare. A close examination of these documents (and their authors) can give us something of a sense of the cultural place of “Shakespeare” then—and point toward some signal differences between then and now. There’s something striking about the insistence of Shakespeare references in this rather insular period, between the First World War and the Cold War. “Insular” in a literal sense, since most of these detective novels are set in England—and, moreover, in an England not far removed from the England so memorably described by T. S. Eliot in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948). “The term culture,” Eliot opined, “includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people; Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list.”18 In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, and into the 1960s, it was common for detective storywriters to take their titles from Shakespeare. Macbeth and Hamlet were, predictably, fertile sources for titles (Look to the Lady, Deed Without a Name, The Pricking Thumb, And Be a Villain, and dozens more) as were Romeo and Juliet (No Friendly Drop; Juliet Dies Twice) and The Merchant of Venice (Ducats in Her Coffin). But there were more arcane and recondite references, as well, that only a Shakespeare adept would be likely to detect, such as The Singing Masons, from Henry V, or Death the Sure Physician, which inverts a phrase from Cymbeline. Some of these works are well known to fans of the genre, such as Josephine Tey’s classic mystery novel about Richard III, The Daughter of Time (1952). The title phrase comes from Bacon’s essay “Of Truth.”19 Many of Ngaio Marsh’s mysteries are actually about the theater, including a late novel called Light Thickens, in which the “curse” of the Scottish play makes itself felt, and an earlier and better book, Death at the Dolphin (1966), in which the discovery of a cheveril glove made by Shakespeare’s father for his grandson Hamnet (and marked with the initials H. S. in a familiar hand) inspires a playwright to write a new stage play (called The Glove). Edmund Crispin’s Love Lies Bleeding (1948), is about the accidental discovery of old manuscripts that turn out to contain Shakespeare’s long-lost play Love’s Labour’s Won.20

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But other detective story writers, while not quite mute inglorious Christies, are more lost to time, though they were very popular in their day. Consider the predictably eccentric sleuth in Glyn Carr’s popular series of Welsh climbing mysteries. Sir Abercrombie Lewker, known as “Filthy” Lewker to his friends, is a “noted Shakespearean actor-manager” who is also a mountaineer and a “gifted amateur detective.” Sir Abercrombie is the Nero Wolfe of Snowdonia; his vanities and obsessions focus not on food, orchids, and English language usage, but on Shakespeare quotations for all occasions. In Death Finds a Foothold (1961), this “pompous” actormanager makes by my count at least eighteen different Shakespeare allusions in the first hundred pages. (As befits a novel about Welsh mountain climbing, at least one of the allusions is to Cymbeline.)21 My point here is not about the popularity of Shakespeare as a theme for detection, but rather about the ease of reference that made these allusions, some very familiar, some rather obscure, readily recognizable to a certain kind of readership. Shakespeare here is a certain kind of social code, not so much cultural capital as what might be called a cultural trust fund (not income to be spent but a blue-chip investment in culture).22 In Dorothy Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), for example, a rural police superintendent surprises Lord Peter Wimsey by his familiarity with tag lines from a wide range of literary classics, and nimbly fields Wimsey’s offhand observation that “Night’s candles are burnt out,” easily identifying it is from Romeo and Juliet. The bonding interchange between these two amateur Shakespeare scholars, who come from very different social worlds, is indicative of the intriguing role played by shared literary reference at a time before the postwar democratization of university education. These are literary books for literary readers, often written by literary writers writing under pseudonyms. Michael Innes was the pseudonym of J. I. M. Stewart (1906 –94), a literary critic who taught at Leeds, Adelaide, Belfast, and Oxford. Amanda Cross was the pseudonym of Columbia University English professor Carolyn Heilbrun. Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of Bruce Montgomery, a composer and organ scholar. Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of poet laureate C. Day-Lewis. There is also a set of detective stories written under the name Thomas Kyd—the pseudonym of the eminent American Shakespearean Alfred Harbage.23 Of course, there are still good Shakespeare-themed mystery novels being written and devoured today.24 But the days when a Shakespeare mystery was like a highbrow crossword puzzle—a cultural sign of educated fellowship, a bonding mechanism for elite readers—are no longer our days. Today, the

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Shakespeare recognition game is played with plots and character types, not, or not primarily, through the language of the plays.

Playing Tag CONSTABLE:

I will cap that proverb with “There is flattery in

friendship.” ORLEANS:

And I will take that up with “Give the devil his due.” CONSTABLE: Well placed. Henry V 3.7.114 –18 The practice of recognizing allusions or quotations was for hundreds of years known as “capping”: “to cap a proverb, a quotation, or a verse was to quote alternately in emulation or contest, so as to try who can have the last word” (OED cap v.6). Shakespeare mentions and illustrates it in Henry V (the competitors there are French nobles, and the capping game, like the Dauphin’s sonnet to his horse, seems to be an example of unmanly timewasting, fiddling while Agincourt burns).25 Capping in this sense is related to another old practice, known as tagging: “to furnish (a speech or composition) with a verbal tag, or tags, as quotations; or to supply (prose or blank verse) with rhymes.”26 But of course, “tag” now has other meanings, for many contemporary users: “computer tag,” or “graffiti tag,” or “hashtag.” Shakespeare tags and Shakespeare tagging these days have less to do with the play, its language, context, and characters than with the free-floating cultural reference that a title or phrase seems to convey whether or not the user has any actual experience of Shakespeare’s work. Even when language seems to be at issue, it is the language of today, not the language of the plays, which is often in question. As for example in this feat of philological self-identification by Sarah Palin: “ ‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!”27 The idea that “Shakespeare liked to coin new words” is an idea that derives, in however attenuated a fashion, from scholarship, as, indeed, is the concept that “English is a living language.” Never mind that former Governor Palin probably could not point to any words of specifically Shakespearean coinage. The Shakespeare who likes to coin words is a cultural legend, an article of faith. As are some of his plots and characters, however summarily freed from the encumbrances of early modern verse. Just like Romeo and Juliet.

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Consider, for example, the text of “Love Story,” a song by country-pop singer Taylor Swift, first released in 2008, and now among the best-selling singles of all time (quintuple platinum). Swift based it on a romance of her own, noting that, having had the experience of parental resistance, “For the first time, I could relate to that Romeo-and-Juliet situation where the only people who wanted them to be together were them.” 28 In the song, the speaker describes her first sight of her Romeo, and her story then follows Shakespeare’s—up to a point. They meet at a party, her father tells him to “Stay away from Juliet,” and they sneak out into the garden to be alone together. But the dénouement has a distinctly modern twist, when he kneels on the ground, pulls out a ring, and proposes: He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring and said “Marry me, Juliet, you’ll never have to be alone I love you and that’s all I really know I talked to your dad, go pick out a white dress It’s a love story, baby just say yes.”29

The most indicative thing about this twenty-first century adaptation of Romeo and Juliet is not the happy ending (after all, Nahum Tate’s 1681 King Lear kept Cordelia alive at the end and married her to Edgar) but the fact that the song skips over Shakespeare’s language completely and limits the resemblance to the plot. “I spun it in the direction of Romeo and Juliet,” Swift told Billboard. “Our parents are fighting. I relate to it more as a love that you cannot really elaborate on—a love that maybe society wouldn’t accept [or] maybe your friends wouldn’t accept.”30 As we’ve noted, it’s the plot, not the language, that now makes a work recognizably “Shakespearean” to a modern audience, whether it’s a novel such as Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (King Lear as an aging Iowa farmer with three daughters), or romantic comedies such as 10 Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew set in Padua High School) or She’s the Man (Twelfth Night in a boys’ boarding school called Illyria: Viola wants to play soccer and the girls’ team at her own high school has been cut). Inspired by Shakespeare’s play, She’s the Man opened at number 4 at the North American box office and grossed more than $57 million worldwide. It’s a bit of an eye-opener to think that Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” could sell almost 7 million copies at a time when books and articles on Romeo and Juliet are struggling to be published, and when published, circulate in inconceivably smaller numbers; a print run at a university press today might well be under 500 copies.

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In this cultural economy, which is the 1 percent, and which the 99 percent? More young fans know Taylor Swift’s song by heart than have probably either seen or read Shakespeare’s play.31 What is the role of Shakespeare studies in a world that is already “Shakespearized”? The term was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s coinage; the problem is our own.

The Whirligig of Time Implicit in my topic of Shakespeare in /and the humanities seems to be the question: “What is the future for Shakespeare at a time when so much discussion is devoted to ‘the future of the humanities’ ”? At a conference on “The State and Stakes of Literary Study” held at the National Humanities Center in Raleigh-Durham a few years ago, one panel was dedicated to the question, “What Changes Should We Seek in Literary Study in the Next Decade?” Some of the answers proposed were suggestive, not only in themselves, but also in the way they pointed, Januslike, both back and forward in the history of the humanities. Instead of critique and argumentation, it was proposed, concepts like “appraisal” and “love” should be restored to their previous prominence and good repute. “We need to relearn how properly to praise a work,” said one speaker. Critique and argumentation were now suspect, as was “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” the state of such writers like Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. In fact, the opprobrium heaped on the hermeneutics of suspicion in recent months might remind Shakespeareans yet again of Constable Dogberry, or of his yokefellow in equity, constable Elbow, both of whom reverse the meanings of “suspected” and “respected.” Dost thou not suspect my place? Dost thou not suspect my years? Much Ado 4.2.79–80 If ever I was respected with her, or she with me, let not your worship think me the poor Duke’s officer. Measure 2.1.173–75

This emphasis on words like “praise” and “love” for works of literature heralds a renewed interest in what used to be called “literary appreciation.” It won’t be called that now (it might be called, say, literature and aesthetic judgment, or literature and aesthetic experience) and it will have different critical and theoretical underpinning, but the impulse—felt across the field of literary studies, not just in Shakespeare—is demonstrably there.

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Belles lettres (literally “fine letters,” the literary equivalent of “beaux arts”) is a term that was, in the past, sometimes understood to mean “the humanities” (literae humaniores) and sometimes understood as the equivalent of “literature.” Once a term of honor—as we saw in the eighteenth century, Blair was Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh— belles lettres today, says the OED, “is generally applied (when used at all) to the lighter branches of literature or the aesthetics of literary study.” But sans its French name and its mixed history, this practice is alive and well in the booming fields of creative nonfiction and literary journalism. I think we can expect this trend to continue, as professors and graduate students seek a wider readership in newspapers, general interest magazines, and blogs, while journalists and politicians connect with Shakespeare as one of the few authors who is neither too “high” nor too “low” to be mentioned. In the modern media, Shakespeare—as perhaps his portraits might have portended—has become a talking head. But the most profound shift, perhaps, across many aspects of “Shakespeare and the humanities,” is the turn, or return, to universalism. Since Ben Jonson’s famous assertion that Shakespeare was “not of an age but for all time,” admirers and scholars have maintained that Shakespeare’s appeal and cultural power are not restricted to a specific time, place, or audience, but in fact transcend the local to become universal. Attention to the particular over the last several decades itself emerged as a crucial corrective to what was then considered an overly coercive (“hegemonic”) universal. Working with paradigms drawn from anthropology, sociology, and cultural history, literary scholars honed in, with signal success, on categories such as race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and identity. That work has informed the Shakespeare that we teach in the classroom and the Shakespeare that we see on the stage. Still, the time of the universal seems, perhaps, to be at hand again. After so much good work on the specific and the local, putting in question the viability of the universal, the pendulum has recently swung back in the other direction. Global Shakespeare is both global and local, and also “universal” in another sense because its videos and performances are increasingly available online. The renewed discourse of love, from agape to caritas, from Saint Paul to Alain Badiou, is another universalizing move. But the strongest claims for a new universalism in intellectual life today are coming, these days, not from theater or philosophy but from (evolutionary psychology) neuroscience. Placing the emphasis on the brain rather than on behavior seems to get past the problem of cultural difference that led to a questioning of the old

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universal humanism. Cognitive theory, evolutionary psychology, and “theory of mind” seem to offer an alliance of literary study with “hard science,”32 while establishing the “universal” at the level of biology rather than culture. New sources of “evidence” are offered, supporting— or seeming to support—a familiar hypothesis. The pronoun “we” is back in style, if indeed it was ever out of it. Just as Taylor Swift cited Romeo and Juliet, contemporary (evolutionary psychologists) sociobiologists cite Shakespeare plays or characters to reinforce their arguments about what is “inbred in human nature.”33 When evolutionary psychologist David Buss, the author of several works on “the strategies of human mating,” published a book on the evolutionary value of sexual jealousy, he titled one long chapter “The Othello Syndrome.”34 At the Stanford Literary Lab, Franco Moretti and his colleagues and students generate computer-aided diagrams to illustrate what Moretti calls “distant reading” and what others at the Lab call “macroanalysis,” on the analogy of macroeconomics,35 the use of “quantitative evidence” and network theory to study literary texts. Thirty-one diagrams and charts are included in Moretti’s essay on Hamlet.36 Comparisons are odorous; I agree. But let’s try an analogy with a much earlier set of Shakespeare diagrams, these created by Caroline Spurgeon for her 1935 book, Shakespeare’s Imagery, and what it tells us. Spurgeon, the first female university professor in London, the second in England, and the first to be involved in English literature, was a Chaucerian by training, but her book on Shakespeare’s imagery was and remains a pioneering classic. Its evidence has never perhaps been more timely than now, when stylistic analyses are being used to prove, and disprove, allegations of authorship. Spurgeon’s book contains seven beautiful charts, of sea images, clothing images, color images, gardening images, and more. Advances in technology have made collaborative teams bigger, rather than smaller. Spurgeon had two “successive” secretaries—that is, one at a time—who helped in “sorting, checking, counting, classifying and crossreferencing [her] card catalogue of the images” and another assistant to help her in copying and drafting her charts.37 (One of the secretaries, Agnes Latham, became a notable Shakespeare scholar in her own right.) Moretti’s Literary Lab has 25-plus affiliated researchers who work collaboratively on every project.38 Here again we can see one of a larger trend at work. Once identified with approaches that are variously described as analytical, theoretical, or speculative, the humanities today are increasingly intrigued by data collection and data mining, quantitative analysis, and other tools of the sciences

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and social sciences. There is considerable pleasure, and really no irony, in seeing that this leap forward also returns us to the moment in Shakespeare’s before “the humanities” were split off from the other “sciences” and “social sciences,” and when the word “science” meant simply “knowledge.” And thus the whirligig of time brings in its revenges.

Occupy the Humanities Hic et ubique? Then we’ll shift our ground. Hamlet 1.5.164 Let us devise Some entertainment for them in their tents. Love’s Labour’s Lost 4.3.346 – 47

Shakespeare and/in the humanities? Which “humanities” do we mean? The academic humanities? The public humanities? The digital humanities? The medical humanities? The legal humanities? At about the same time that a movie called Anonymous attempted to prove that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare, a digital activism collective called Anonymous allied itself with the Occupy movement. Many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park wore the mask associated with Anonymous: the Guy Fawkes mask made newly famous by the film of Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta. The originators thought they could celebrate the attempt to blow up Parliament, while also maintaining both their anonymity and their ubiquity.39 Hic et ubique. The Anonymous group call themselves “hacktivists,” and their activities “hacktivism.” But today we are dealing with what might be called “Shaktivism”—the intervention of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare studies, in the humanities and in intellectual and public life. Forty years or so ago, Shakespeare studies seemed securely situated within the traditional humanities, anchoring and drawing students to English departments, and to the—then flourishing—English majors across the country. But now (or perhaps I should say and now), at a time when English majors have diminished in number (though not in ardor), Shakespeare and Shakespeare studies are leading participants in the reshaping of what we might perhaps call the Big Humanities, the humanities without borders, the humanities that includes aspects of science, social science, computing, and—signally—the arts.

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“Ownership” of Shakespeare has passed (or been expanded) in the past century from scholarly generalists and lay enthusiasts to scholarly specialists and, more recently, to public intellectuals and the public humanities, including the media and popular culture. Shakespeare today is a public intellectual (and the cause of public intellectualism in others). The 1 percent in terms of education and professional training are not necessarily the 1 percent in terms of influence. Control over how Shakespeare is adapted, filmed, screened, sung, quoted, tweeted, friended, mashed-up, and digitally dispersed often lies elsewhere than in our classrooms, articles, and academic conferences, no matter how diverse and deep our cultural interests. This is a change with consequences, both for “Shakespeare” and for “the humanities”—and also for us, who live and practice both. Shakespeare in the corridors of power feels a long way away from Shakespeare in the halls of academe. But the opportunity is here, and now, for Shakespeare scholars and Shakespeare teachers and Shakespeare theaters, and libraries, to help rethink the role of the humanities, to unsettle settled notions about the now-conventional academic divisions (humanities, social science, science, engineering) as well as the eroding boundaries between “secondary school” and “college,” between “college” and “professional school,” between “academia” and “the world,” or “real life.” We should seize as many of these chances as we can, working in collaboration with other institutions, other disciplines, other practices, and each other. To cite a term made popular by the Occupy movement, Shakespeare in practice is a kind of a human microphone, repeated and repeating, voiced and re-voiced, always rippling out to new audiences, both global and local. The time has never been better for Shakespeare and the humanities than it is now. If we take this opportunity seriously, and I think we should, “Shakespeare” (the institution, the Association, the Congress, the brand, the author, and the works) can take the lead in trying to bring about muchneeded changes, both in how and what we teach, and in understanding why “the humanities”—the Big Humanities—are a necessity rather than a luxury, in hard times, in good times, in troubled times—in revolutionary times—and, most especially, in these times.

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chapter 9

Shakespeare 451

What is the place of Shakespeare, and specifically the teaching of Shakespeare, in today’s changed—and still changing—academic world? Despite the best efforts of humanities deans and English department chairs, and the resourceful invention by instructors of new courses designed to attract undergraduates to the humanities and the arts, today’s college students are more and more choosing the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) for reasons both practical and intellectual. English and history used to be among the largest undergraduate majors; now the preferred fields are often computer science, economics, and finance. It is not just that students want jobs in the new economy, though of course they do. Rather, they have come of age in a time that values science and math, they are by and large far more technologically savvy than their predecessors, and reading literature strikes some of them as something they can do later, or on their own. For these students, their schedules packed with requirements, one or two humanities courses may be all they have time— or think they have time—to take. This puts Shakespeare, and Shakespeare courses, in a peculiar position, for to a certain extent Shakespeare has become, for better and 127

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for worse, shorthand for the humanities. Students still flock to courses in the contemporary novel and the works of living authors. But Shakespeare is the dead poet whose society they seek. “We’re not as different as they think,” wrote a mathematics professor in an article titled “Why STEM Should Care About the Humanities.” “Yes, calculus is one of the great achievements of the human mind, but Hamlet is another.”1 A few years ago, in an essay called “The Shakespeare Brand,” I worried a little about whether Shakespeare courses were sucking the air out of the rest of the humanities. “When ‘Shakespeare’ becomes not only a metonymy for English studies but also the only required author (or period) for English majors,” I wrote then, “we may have reached a tipping point.”2 My contention was that a course in Shakespeare sometimes stands in for all of literature, or, even more disturbingly, for all of “great” literature. If Shakespeare becomes the “cash cow” or the “loss leader” (you pick the unflattering metaphor) for the humanities, or even for “older literature” (which now ends, not as it used to in 1798—Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads then marking the onset of the “new”—but closer to 1910, or even perhaps 1945)—if “Shakespeare” is now the humanities course students regard as essential, how, if at all, does that change what we teach, and how we teach it? Anyone who has not been hibernating for the past year in a subterranean cave or vacationing on a remote atoll bereft of blogs and Facebook, will have taken note of the fact that April 2014, marked the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. Around the globe—and of course at the Globe, or indeed at all the Globes, from San Diego to London to Port of Spain to Tokyo, special programs and productions were mounted to celebrate this landmark occasion. Why 450, halfway between a quadricentennial and a quincentennial, should constitute a meaningful anniversary is another question, but since my own university not long ago used the number 375 as the excuse for an anniversary fundraising gala perhaps it is a question that answers itself, in marketing terms. The usual term for 450th, I am assured by a colleague who is a Latin scholar, is “quadrisemicentennial” (in passing this on she of course—since she is also a Shakespearean—invoked the Latin-spouting pedant Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost). In any case, 2013–14, leading up to the April Birthday, was a year of Shakespeare-all-the-time, 24/7, from the respectable to the risible (and sometimes both at once). The London Globe sent its Hamlet production to visit “every country in the world,” a plan later downsized but still ambitiously impressive.3 The Folger Shakespeare Library mounted an exhibition of artifacts called “Shakespeare’s the

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Thing,” to commemorate the 450th, and made all the plays available in digital format, “our gift to Shakespeare and the world.”4 The French Shakespeare Society organized a week-long conference in Paris. The Victoria and Albert Museum launched “a poetry competition inspired by Shakespeare” that invited writers to “step into the shoes of one of Shakespeare’s most iconic characters.” Even universities and colleges got into the act. The University of Warwick teamed up with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to visit Montana’s Shakespeare in the Park; on the birthday itself, Cornell University placed its four copies of the Shakespeare Folio on public display. Miami-Dade College, Auburn, and Penn all held workshops, readings, performances, film screenings, and parties. In Britain, The Guardian offered a selection of “The best of Shakespeare’s 450th birthday celebrations,” from Family Fun day at the Globe (including a bouncy castle, face painting, and Pin the Ruff on the Bard) to the Royal Shakespeare Fireworks and a singing Shakespeare concert, held in Holy Trinity Church where Shakespeare was christened and is buried (featuring world premieres of works by Stephen Sondheim and Gary Carpenter).5 Travel and Leisure magazine urged readers to “grab a selfie” while “laying flowers at the playwright’s grave.”6 Before we decide this is all merely a symptom of twenty-first century decadence or rampant capitalism, we might glance back at the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769, staged at Stratford-upon-Avon by the actor and theatre manager David Garrick. At Garrick’s jubilee, usually reckoned as an instigating event for the bardolatry that we still live with today, there were cannons, bells, popular songs, and a masquerade, but no actual performances of the plays. This was Shakespeare without Shakespeare, avant la lettre. But Garrick was responsible for what is perhaps the most enduring Shakespeare “selfie” of all time, since he himself posed for the statue that served as centerpiece for his own Temple to Shakespeare. “It’s the Bard’s 450th birthday today,” declared the Huffington Post, “and although you may usually greet your English Literature Shakespeare classes with groans and rolled eyes, perhaps you should give the guy a break—he’s not all that bad.” What had me rolling my eyes, after a while, was the nonstop party that was Shakespeare 450. It all seemed a little blithe, and also (can we say this?) a little beside the point. I am all for Shakespeare (movies, stage productions, courses, readings-aloud, the whole nine yards) but celebration (or veneration, or worship, or even flattering imitation) is not work, any more than festivals are ideas. Shakespeare 450 was a year of festivity. But what of Shakespeare 451? After the after-parties, what remains?

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It’s not quite bread and circuses, much less fiddling while the Globe burns, but the nonstop festivities of the Shakespeare anniversary have (as I’ve noted) taken place concurrently with the news—no news to anyone who has been watching or teaching—that humanities enrollments are down, that fewer students are majoring in English, and that the future, soberly contemplated, suggests that these courses are becoming electives and add-ons (and aspects of adult education) rather than an essential aspect of undergraduate learning. In this world, the world beyond any jubilee, what does the teaching of Shakespeare look like—and why does it matter? Shakespeare 451. In Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, first published a little more than 60 years ago in 1953, books have become contraband, and firemen do not put out fires but rather start them, burning every book they find. (The title of the novel is—supposedly—the temperature at which paper burns. Seeking an answer to this question, Bradbury canvassed a number of university physics and chemistry departments without success and finally placed a call to the Los Angeles fire department; whoever answered the phone there said “Fahrenheit 451,” which became his title, whether it’s scientifically accurate or not.7) The novel’s protagonist is a fireman named Guy Montag (Monday Guy? Ordinary shmo?) who, after ten years of enthusiastic and committed bookburning, has experienced a kind of unwilling conversion, his conscience prompting him to “snatch books, dart off with Job and Ruth and Willie Shakespeare”8 rather than continue the conflagration. For this transgression, he is turned in by his conformist wife, hunted by a Mechanical Hound, and finally able to escape to a place where literature and culture still live. How come? Because way out in the countryside a little band of (yes!) former humanities professors are hiding out. Each has committed to memory the works of an author no longer available in book form: authors such as Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Jonathan Swift, Byron, Machiavelli, Thomas Love Peacock, Mahatma Gandhi, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. “All we want to do is keep the knowledge we think we will need, intact and safe,” says their leader. “For if we are destroyed, the knowledge is dead, perhaps for good.”9 The scholars in exile include people like “Fred Clement, former occupant of the Thomas Hardy chair at Cambridge in the years before it became an Atomic Engineering School” and “Professor West,” who “did quite a bit for ethics, an ancient study now, for Columbia University quite some years ago.”10 Ironically, they too are book burners, they say, since they are afraid these contraband books will be found, and they prefer to

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keep the library in their own heads, “where no one can see it or suspect it. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law . . . . bums on the outside, libraries inside.”11 As their leader explains, “The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we mustn’t be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We’re nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise. . . . And when the war’s over, some day, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we’ll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again.”12 This is embodied knowledge in the most literal sense. A scholar, having memorized the text, becomes a walking book, of use not only to himself but to the collectivity. Together these scholars constitute a living library, keeping poetry, philosophy, and history alive. Anyone who remembers the war-driven exiles of European scholars from Europe in the middle of the last century, often forced to leave home without their books, will recognize this scenario. But it is not only a vision of the past, but also, insistently, of a certain future.13 The world of Fahrenheit 451 is dominated by screens, three-wall and four-wall televisions, and an earpiece device that prefigures the iPod.14 Back in the twentieth century, we’re told, condensations, digests, and tabloids came to replace what once were real books. As Captain Beatty, Guy Montag’s boss and nemesis, explains to Montag and his wife: [M]any were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag), whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.15

In fact, Captain Beatty, arguably the most interesting character in the novel, turns out to be a secret Shakespeare buff, taunting the unhappy fireman with obscure quotations from the plays. Ultimately, he will provoke Montag into killing him by quoting Brutus’s rebuke to Cassius in act 4, scene 3 of Julius Caesar: Why don’t you belch Shakespeare at me, you fumbling snob? “There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats, for I am arm’d so strong in honesty that they pass by me as an idle wind, which I respect not!” How’s that? Go ahead now, you second-hand literateur, pull the trigger.16

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These are Beatty’s last words as the flames engulf him. (It’s slightly sobering, speaking of “teaching Shakespeare,” to note that on the Internet, where many students seem to have sent queries about the origin of this phrase, several respondents have confidently identified the speaker as Caesar.) Ray Bradbury loved libraries. His education was gleaned not from attending college but from reading hundreds of library books. And the idea of saving books from the mechanistic and dumbed-down modern age had been in his mind for some time. It was exacerbated by Cold War politics, domestic and international, and the possibilities for destruction that had been ushered in with the atomic age. In 1953—the same year that Bradbury’s novel was published—Senator Joseph McCarthy chaired the Senate permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which held hearings on possible Communist infiltration of the Department of State, the Voice of America, the U.S. Information Libraries, the Government Printing Office, and the Army Signal Corps. Roy Cohn, acting for McCarthy, toured Europe searching the card catalogues of State department libraries looking for unsuitable books, and passed the titles and authors on to his boss. When McCarthy recited this list to his subcommittee and the press, the State Department yielded and ordered its overseas librarians to remove the suspect books from their shelves. In some cases books were burned.17 President Dwight Eisenhower, seeking to distance himself from McCarthy while avoiding direct confrontation, offered a statement to his fellow Americans: “Don’t join the book burners . . . Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.”18 Lest we shake our heads in disbelief at such a paranoid society and the politics of fear, we might give a thought to recent disclosures about the NSA, Wikileaks, Amazon, Target, and the cookies in your browser. As recently as New Year’s Day, 2002, a church congregation in Alamogordo, New Mexico, burned Harry Potter books and works by Shakespeare, while a large crowd of children and young people looked on.19 The specter of burning Shakespeare’s works in fact haunts the Bradbury canon even before Fahrenheit 451. In an unfinished novel from 1946 – 47, Where Ignorant Armies Clash by Night, a cheering and jeering crowd looks on as an assassin reads from “Dover Beach” and then commits to the flames the complete works of Matthew Arnold. But this is, so to speak, only the curtain-raiser: The main event is to be the burning of the world’s last surviving volume of Shakespeare’s works.20 In the end, however, the assassin, so intrepid when it came to immolating the books of the author of Culture and Anarchy, can’t bring himself to “take the ultimate step of cultural anni-

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hilation by burning Shakespeare,” and instead becomes a fugitive from the mob.21 Shakespeare himself is briefly glimpsed in a 1949 Bradbury short story called “The Mad Wizards of Mars” (sometimes reprinted as “The Exiles”). A spaceship from Earth sets out for the red planet in the year 2120, manned by a clean-cut captain and a fresh-scrubbed crew, carrying as cargo the last extant copies of books on forbidden topics such as witches, vampires, and phantoms—books that have previously been kept under lock and key in the Historical Museum. Already on Mars, however, having arrived years before, are the “mad wizards” of the title, who have escaped earth’s censorship by emigrating. These are the authors of books on fantasy, horror, and the supernatural, from Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce to Hawthorne, Dickens, Huxley, Mary Shelley—and Shakespeare. The witches from Macbeth act as Martian lookouts, spying the spaceship in their crystal ball and chanting their celebrated lines. A heroic Shakespeare, channeling Henry V and marshaling his most famous characters, is described (by Poe) as the first line of defense against the space invaders from Earth: I saw Will Shakespeare at the shore, earlier, whipping them on. All along the sea Shakespeare’s army alone, tonight, numbers thousands: the three witches, Oberon, Hamlet’s father, Othello, Lear—all of them, thousands! Good lord, a regular sea of people.22 But no sooner does the spaceship land on what its captain will inevitably call a “new world” than he orders a bonfire, into which he feeds the last copies of the books he has brought with him: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Land of Oz, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As the books are burned, their authors vaporize. Before the eyes of the crew the landscape and the populace all vanish, book by book and author by author: “Why, there’s no one here at all,” says his lieutenant, disappointed. “No one here at all.”

How “Shakespeare” Became “English” It’s probably worth reminding ourselves how recently Shakespeare has been taught in U.S. (or indeed in British) colleges and universities. What we are looking at is not anything like 450 years. Serious students of the humanities studied Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, not vernacular literature. Until the 1870s, when the first Shakespeare courses were introduced in the fledgling English departments of institutions such as the University of Michigan, Yale, Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Virginia, Shakespeare, like other “modern” literature, was read and discussed by students only outside of formal classes, in the “extracurriculum”—the

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very active student literary clubs and debating societies. As an indicative measure of student enthusiasm, we might note that when in 1807 the library of a literary society at Harvard offered for sale an edition of Shakespeare, of 175 students, 95 subscribed.23 On the other hand, coeducational Oberlin College refused to allow Shakespeare to be taught in mixed classes until 1864. Across the United States, as late as the 1860s, “English” still meant elocution and rhetoric. College students took courses in Expression, Declamation, Themes, and Forensics.24 Books of rhetoric and belles lettres used passages from Shakespeare to illustrate ethical or moral points, but no one taught the plays. This began to change, however, in the subsequent decade. When he taught the first Shakespeare courses for undergraduates at Harvard, Francis James Child, a scholar now best known for his landmark work on British folk ballads, sought to widen the range of approaches, introducing modes of reading that included philology but also encouraged other kinds of rhetorical and textual analysis. In one of his examinations there were twenty-five passages from fifteen different plays which the students were expected to recognize and discuss. Another exam, focusing on Hamlet, instructed the student to “write such comments, philological, historical, or other, as the words italicized in the following passages may require.”25 In 1879, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had already announced, in his essay on Shakespeare, that the literature, philosophy, and thought of his age were “Shakespearized,” gave a lecture at Amherst College, inspiring a college senior, Henry Clay Folger, to found what would become the Folger Shakespeare Library. In the same year, Shakespeare appeared for the first time in the Yale curriculum in a course called “Shakespeare, Spenser, and other authors.”26 Wilbur Cross, a noted Shakespeare scholar and editor as well as the four-time governor of the State of Connecticut, observed that “In those [early] days, nobody knew what to do with a play of Shakespeare’s, except to have the members of the class read in turn for a number of lines, to be followed by questions that were for the most part grammatical. That is, the student parsed Shakespeare.”27 It’s possible to track the early Shakespeare teachers, those that set the tone and the template for modern scholarship, across many of the universities and colleges in the last years of the nineteenth century. With the arrival of Thomas Lounsbury (an expert in Chaucer and Shakespeare, though best known perhaps for his biography of James Fenimore Cooper) and Henry Augustin Beers, a literary historian, the teaching of Shakespeare at Yale took off; they were, as one commentator suggests, “the first

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of a line of brilliant teachers of Shakespeare at Yale.”28 At Columbia, under the tutelage of Brander Matthews and George Woodbury, freshmen were required to read Shakespeare as early as 1886, and in 1891, the first fullsemester course on Shakespeare was offered. At Cornell, the great early figure was Hiram Corson, described by an undergraduate from the class of 1880 as someone who “lived, worked, talked and wrote in an atmosphere of Shakespeare,” and whose “public readings from Shakespeare were literary treats of the highest order.”29 Corson was trained as an Anglo-Saxonist and published largely on Chaucer (and on spiritualism, in which he was a devout believer). Shakespeareans in this period could indeed hardly have been trained as such, since the subject was new to the university and graduate school curriculum. But Corson’s Introduction to the Study of Shakespeare, published in 1890, gives a good sense of the various approaches he used in his lectures: the chronology of the plays, Shakespeare’s language and prosody, textual questions, the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, the witches in Macbeth, plot and character development across a number of plays. Much of this material was ultimately reprinted in the Furness Variorum editions. I offer this very compressed and localized history of the beginnings of Shakespeare teaching in part because some of it has been forgotten, and in the cycle of institutional forgetting (what I’ve been calling “disciplinary amnesia”30) there has been a certain tendency to reinvent the wheel— or for the wheel to come full circle. Character study, philology, social and cultural history, textual studies, the history of style, were all part of the early flowering of Shakespeare teaching, and are with us in various degrees today. But for the teaching of Shakespeare in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguably the biggest change came, not only with a shift in theories and approaches to the text, but also with the arrival, in college and university English departments, of a particular mode and style of what might be called Big Teaching: the charismatic Shakespeare lecture.

Hello, Kitty George Lyman Kittredge, an 1881 graduate of Harvard College, began his teaching career at Harvard in 1888, at the rank of instructor. By 1890, he was an assistant professor; by 1895 he had been promoted to full professor. He taught Icelandic and Old Norse, Germanic and Celtic Mythology, Chaucer, the epic, the ballad, and the metrical romance. Undergraduates called him “Kitty,” though perhaps not to his face. (This was a fashion, or

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an affectation, of the time. Kittredge’s colleague in the English department, Charles Townsend Copeland, was known to two generations of devoted undergraduates as “Copey,” and the critic Edmund Wilson, educated at Princeton, was “Bunny” to his friends.) English 1 at Harvard included Middle English and Chaucer; English 2, the popular course in Shakespeare, encompassing half a dozen plays, became above all associated with Kittredge’s name, and was taught (separately) both at Radcliffe and at Harvard. Both the course and the teacher quickly became legendary. Tall and with a full “patriarchal” beard that had turned white before he was fifty, Kittredge, wrote one admiring former student, seemed “a timeless being. Knowing him is to understand how Alexander, Arthur, and Charlemagne kindled the imagination. . . . His incandescence made a roomful of handsome young Harvard men seem but votive lights.”31 An undergraduate writing a theme about Kittredge for another instructor took up the “patriarchal” theme, declaring that “he is an interpreter of the law as truly as was Moses.”32 In 1948, The Atlantic Monthly commissioned one of his students (Rollo Walter Brown) to write a portrait of the man they identified as “the most eminent Shakespearean of his day,” and titled it “ ‘Kitty’ of Harvard.” Distinguishing between “Mr. Kittredge,” the courteous and gentlemanly mentor of graduate students who dispensed professional advice and cigars with equal care, and the “Kitty” of Harvard Hall, the Atlantic focused its attention largely on the latter: Undergraduates with vivid imaginations made sketches of the old building on the point of blowing up, with zigzag electric fragments of Shakespeare—“Kitty” spelled it “Shakspere”—shooting from windows and roof, whenever “Kitty” held forth. To many of them for a lifetime the total meaning of Harvard Hall was “Kitty.”33

English 2 seems to have been run along lines familiar to viewers of The Paper Chase, with a commanding lecturer cold-calling on students and earning their terrified adoration. At the end of the year we were supposed to know fi ve plays—sometimes a sixth—so thoroughly that in the fi nal examination we could spot any line or piece of line that he quoted (usually about sixty), tell what came just before and after, who said the words and to whom, and be able to comment on whatever was significant about the passage. Then there were somewhat more than six hundred lines of

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memory passages. And there were books of assigned reading. Even the least wise in the course fi lled margins of their copies of the text, and pages of gummed interleaving paper, with notes against an oncoming evil day.34

Having completed the course, a student could re-enroll the following year to study an alternate group of five or six Shakespeare plays, thereby gaining “thorough knowledge of ten or eleven plays, . . . vast information about drama and theatre and sources and language and Elizabethan life,” and “interesting fragments of such a store of miscellaneous knowledge and wisdom as they had not supposed until last year could be the possession of any one human being.”35 Another former English 2 student insisted that “it was quite untrue to say . . . that the course was largely philological,” noting Kittredge’s emphasis on character, on contemporary actors’ portrayals, and on the poetry of the plays, ranging from the young lovers in Romeo and Juliet and The Winter’s Tale to Falstaff. It may be worth noting that enrollments in English 2 were upwards of 200 students at a time when the total college population was around 2,000. Anecdotes about this godly figure were not in short store. Kittredge was famous for his classroom exits, preparing to leave even as he spoke the final lines of his lecture, stepping into his overshoes without stooping to look at them, continuing to talk as he walked down the aisle, “the final emphatic point coming as he stood at the door.”36 On one occasion “some professor of economics” had left “great charts and maps on rollers all over the front of the room,” and Kittredge picked up a long pointer, using it “as a staff-like cane as he paced back and forth and commented,” occasioning the comparison— often made in these stories—to “an Anglo-Saxon king speaking to his people.”37 The “most famous single incident in English 2” apparently occurred when the students were unable to identify “Golgotha” (from the line in Macbeth, “memorize another Golgotha.”) Guesses ranged from “a supernatural man-eating beast” to “a famous warrior of mythology.” Kittredge dismissed the class, announcing that he would not keep for a moment longer any class that did not know the meaning of Calvary. He never took a sabbatical or a half-year off, disliking, he said, breaks in his work. Asked about the “much discussed choice”— even then—between teaching and research, he replied, “I’ll take both.” Famously, he had no Ph.D., but only a B.A. degree, and was said to have responded to a question about this by asking, rhetorically, “Who would examine me?” (As one biographer notes,

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there was in the very small and new Harvard English department at present only one holder of the higher degree, so the question might not represent hubris so much as a twinkling riff on practicality.)38 Kittredge himself was highly dubious about the American fashion for talking about teaching rather than learning. Convinced that a teacher needed only “knowledge of a subject, adequate vocal cords, and students,” he wrote to someone who had asked to audit the Shakespeare course granting permission but cautioning, “However, you must not expect to get enlightenment from me on ‘methods of teaching.’ I am a mere opportunist in this regard. I believe that it is possible for any normal person to learn anything; but I am very skeptical of anybody’s ability to teach.”39 Asked how long it took him to prepare his lectures, he first refused to answer, saying it was his “trade secret,” and then said, “Just a lifetime— can’t you see that?”40 Given today’s recurrent and ambient anxiety about the usefulness of a degree in the humanities, it may be worth noting that Stanley Marcus, the president of Neiman-Marcus, listed English 2 first among the courses that supplied him with the “ideas, facts, and theories” that he was able to put to work in his “business life.” And the Harvard Crimson, commemorating Kittredge’s last lecture in the spring of 1936, took a similarly long view: “ ‘Kitty’ hammered into the minds of his students thoughts and ideas about the plays which, half forgotten in the early years of business or professional life, later have come back to illuminate not only Shakespeare but much else.”41 Kittredge’s Shakespeare editions and publications came in the last years of his life, most of them after his retirement. They were the product of his teaching, not the prologue to it. The scholar who had devoted much of his published research to Old English, Chaucer, Malory, popular ballads, and the Old Farmer’s Almanac, who was described by his former student William Lyon Phelps, on the occasion of a public lecture given at Yale, as “the foremost English scholar in America”42 was revered and remembered, long after his teaching years were over, as the quintessential Shakespeare teacher. In a special issue of the Crimson devoted to “the real Kitty” after his death in 1941, eminent colleagues and students—Douglas Bush, “Billy” Phelps, Hyder Rollins, and others— emphasized his outsize persona: “a great teacher who was a brilliant actor,” wrote Rollins, “he became to undergraduates and to the fourth estate a legendary figure and an unfailing source of ‘copy.’ ”43 George Lyman Kittredge is perhaps the most frequently mythologized of famous college or university Shakespeare lecturers, but he is far from alone. In Britain, of course, the great example is A. C. Bradley, only a few

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years older than Kittredge (1851–1935); he published his landmark book, Shakespearean Tragedy (subtitled Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth) in 1904. “These lectures,” he wrote in the preface, “are based on a selection of materials used in teaching at Liverpool, Glasgow, and Oxford; and I have for the most part preserved the lecture form.”44 And he added, as a point of scholarly caution, “Any one who writes on Shakespeare must owe much to his predecessors. Where I was conscious of a particular obligation, I have acknowledged it; but most of my reading of Shakespeare criticism was done many years ago, and I can only hope that I have not too often reproduced as my own what belongs to another.”45 There are indeed relatively few notes in Bradley’s book, and most of them are in the form of further personal meditations on critical points at issue: Hamlet and his mother, Othello’s blackness and the response of a modern audience to it. The notes are to a very large extent Bradley talking to Bradley—always intelligent, thoughtful, speculative—and very much interested in how a scene or a word or a presumed gesture would play onstage. Shakespearean Tragedy, based on Bradley’s university lectures and dedicated “To my students,” became the founding text of what Terence Hawkes called “a system of universal education which has established the study of Shakespeare as its linchpin.”46 Through Bradley, said Hawkes, “Philosophy found itself subverted by Literature. Together with Classics it sank, in terms of broad social influence, virtually without trace. English became the huge and continuing success of the academic world, carrying all before it as the requirement for social and professional advancement.”47 The exceptional prestige of a degree in English—as “the requirement for social and professional advancement”—now seems to belong to a lost world, though it was a world still very much in operation, and in full swing, when Hawkes wrote that phrase in the mid-1980s.48 When we talk about teaching Shakespeare, we should, I think, bear this in mind. Bradley, Kittredge, and their successors led the way, in part through their powerful and memorable lectures, for the ascendancy of English in the twentieth century. This was a century of great academic lecturers whose lectures, when published, became core texts not only for the teaching of Shakespeare but also for central and abiding ideas about criticism, theory, and interpretation. Where for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, more than a hundred years earlier, the process of gathering an audience for his Shakespeare lectures was (in Alfred Harbage’s words) “a humiliating business,” involving as it did renting a hall and “drumming up subscribers at a guinea or two the course,”49 the scholar-teachers who lectured to undergraduates (and, often,

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to the rest of the university as well) had audiences of students primed and ready to respond. It is not an exaggeration to say that they became heroes, and bywords, to their young charges. And as those young charges graduated and took their places in society and in the economy, the Shakespeare lecturer was often remembered (as Stanley Marcus remembered Kittredge) with special vividness. “By 1930,” as Michael Taylor has noted, “the gradual shift of the study of Shakespeare from a generalized public sphere to the halls of a newly professionalized university system and its rapidly evolving English departments had . . . reached the point where the universities were now playing the dominant role.”50 Let me mention just a few of the figures who stand out in this period for their memorable combination of scholarship and lecture/performance. It makes for an intriguing list. In chronological order of birth: Harold Goddard at Swarthmore; G. Wilson Knight at Leeds; W. H. Auden at The New School for Social Research; Virgil Whitaker at Stanford; Maynard Mack at Yale; Northrop Frye at the University of Toronto. In some cases, although not all, these were scholars whose own research was not primarily based in the English Renaissance. And in virtually all cases their lectures are described by colleagues and students alike as memorable and moving. “A brilliant lecturer, whose lectures on Shakespeare were unforgettable,” said Eugene Waith (a longtime colleague and friend) about Maynard Mack, a noted Pope scholar whose principal field was the eighteenth century.51 One Stanford alumnus, now a medieval scholar, recalled that at Virgil Whitaker’s last lecture not only was he given a standing ovation, “but many also had tears in their eyes because their exposure to his brilliant teaching was drawing to a close.”52 Harold Goddard was head of the English department at Swarthmore from 1909 to 1946. He was at work on his two-volume study of the plays, The Meaning of Shakespeare, when he died in 1950. A small note in italics at the end of Goddard’s introduction informs the reader that he died before giving his book a title, and that the present title was thus supplied by the publisher. (I confess that I found this a relief, since the title has always seemed to me far flatter and less interesting than the book.) Goddard’s introduction, written in 1950, has some testy things to say about the long ascendancy of historical critics (“In stressing what Shakespeare might have meant to the Elizabethan age [they] have helped us forget what he might mean to ours”) and theatrical critics (by “forever insisting that Shakespeare was primarily a playwright” they have “obscured the greater Shakespeare”53). He observes—again, remember this is 1950 —

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that the “time seems to have come for a return to Shakespeare the poet,” as well as for a consideration of the totality of the plays and poems “as chapters, so to speak, of a single work.” His book, too, has almost no footnotes. In a spirit very much like Bradley’s he explains that Anyone who has gone on reading Shakespeare for years and then writes a book about him is bound to be at a loss if asked just what he owes to the text itself and his own interpretation of it, what to the commentators, to his friends, or, if he has been a teacher, to his students.54

But the most “contemporary” claim made by this Shakespeare scholar born in the late nineteenth century is the claim for what the generation that succeeded Goddard would call “relevance.” “Twice within three decades,” Goddard wrote in the Cold War period, “our own time has called on its younger generation to avenge a wrong with the making of which it had nothing to do. For whom then, if not for us, was Hamlet written? . . . and of what age if not the atomic did Albany make his prediction: It will come, Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep.55

G. Wilson Knight was not only a teacher and scholar but also an actor, director, and radio performer who directed no fewer than eight Shakespeare productions during the ten years he taught at the University of Toronto. By his own description he was “whole-heartedly devoted to Shakespeare — especially to Shakespeare acted — from a very early age.”56 In the preface to The Wheel of Fire, he describes going to see a performance of The Tempest with his brother. “What does it mean?” his brother asked, and the future critic and teacher had his vocation.57 Returning to England in 1946, Wilson Knight taught at Stowe School before moving to the University of Leeds for the rest of his career. He became a familiar voice on the radio during World War II, reciting passages from Shakespeare in support of the war effort. He had, writes one observer, “a larger than life presence in the halls of academe and on the world’s amateur stages.”58 Auden gave a series of public lectures on Shakespeare at the New School for Social Research (as it was then called) in 1946, an event heralded by the New York Times: “W. H. Auden, poet and critic, will conduct a course on Shakespeare . . . Mr. Auden has announced that in his course, which runs through both semesters, he proposes to read all Shakespeare’s plays in chronological order.”59 Tickets for the lecture were sold at the door, and

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as many as five hundred people attended, some traveling a considerable distance to get to the Greenwich Village lecture hall. This was, in other words, a big event (in today’s terms, a “public humanities” event). Those taking the course for academic credit also met with Auden on Saturday afternoons, when he discussed, among other things, philological questions about words and wordplay. Auden had previously taught at the University of Michigan and for three years at Swarthmore. He lectured from notes, which he then discarded, explaining that “criticism is live conversation,” and he read aloud to the class from his own annotated copy of Kittredge’s edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare. His lectures were lovingly transcribed by an apt pupil (Alan Ansen) who later became his secretary and friend, and the published edition of the lectures was created by Arthur Kirsch using these and other lecture notes as a guide. (Kirsch comments in his introduction that “All lecturers would wish to have such a student,” a sentiment with which I am not sure I agree.) Northrop Frye’s enormously influential published comments on Shakespeare appear in The Anatomy of Criticism and in several books that began as invited lecture series:60 A Natural Perspective (1965), Fools of Time (1967), The Myth of Deliverance (1983). But he never set out directly to be a “Shakespearean.” The book called Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (1986) was transcribed from tapes of his course for undergraduates. To this list we should probably add from our own time Harold Bloom, yet another scholar whose training and publications (in his case, on topics such as Romantic poetry, lyric, Gnosticism, and literary theory) were far from Shakespeare and the English Renaissance, but who reinvented himself as a major Shakespearean with a large and devoted audience. In an earlier moment, Bloom, the author of an influential book called The Anxiety of Influence, once said that he was not interested in Shakespeare because Shakespeare was not anxious. Whether he later discovered that Shakespeare was anxious after all, or whether he softened his position on the poetic necessity of anxiety, I am not able to say, but for the present generation of students and general readers he is associated above all with Shakespeare, and some may be completely unaware of his previous avatars as a tendentious Romanticist, literary enfant terrible, and Freudian theorist.

Professing Shakespeare The noun “Shakespearean,” often used these days to describe a scholar who specializes in Shakespeare, has also encompassed, in its variegated

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history since the early nineteenth century, Shakespeare enthusiasm or fandom on the one hand, and the belief that William Shakespeare, rather than Bacon or Oxford or anyone else, wrote the plays, on the other. Sir Walter Scott’s biographer observed in 1837 that Scott’s aunt was “almost as devout a Shakespearian as her nephew”;61 a writer in the New York Herald in 1874 opined that “considerable blank ammunition has been wasted in this ridiculous war between the Baconians and the Shakespearians.”62 In 1971, the Daily Telegraph was still using “Shakespearean” to mean “buff ” or “fan” (“One of those devoted Shakespeareans who knows his author backwards”63) but by 1979 —I am here tracking the word through the OED—Frank Kermode, definitely a “Shakespearean” in the academic sense, could write “Shakespearians may find explanations of the mysteriousness . . . of Hamlet, by considering instead the ur-Hamlet.”64 The context is a discussion of narrative, biblical scholarship, and literary analysis; the “Shakespearians” here are, without question, assumed to be professional scholars. “Shakespearean” now of course functions routinely as a backformation, used to describe Shakespeare adepts and Shakespeare critics from the eighteenth century to the present day. A series called Great Shakespeareans, published by Continuum Press, includes Dryden and Pope, Garrick and Siddons, Marx and Freud, Empson and Wilson Knight, Brecht and Joyce, and many more. But this is a twenty-first century series and a twenty-first century perspective, from which vantage point “Shakespearean” is not only a legible category but, in fact, an all-encompassing one. In fact, however, something interesting had happened, both to the word and to what it signified. At a certain point in the mid-to-late twentieth century, the designation “Shakespearean” had morphed or shifted (as the modulation in OED usage implies), and would from the 1970s to the present primarily describe a class of academic scholars whose work—whose research, publications, and teaching—were centrally focused on Shakespeare. The members of the Shakespeare Association of America, whether they are graduate students or tenured professors, are “Shakespeareans.” Shakespeare became not only an author but a field. And not only a field but a profession. Here are a few indicative dates. The Shakespeare Association of America was founded in 1972 as “a nonprofit professional organization for the advanced academic study of William Shakespeare’s plays and poems.65

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The International Shakespeare Association was founded in 1974, with the declared aims to “link the work of various Shakespeare associations and societies and to coordinate issues of “research, publication, translation and performance.”66 The first World Shakespeare Congress was held in 1976.67 The British Shakespeare Association was founded in 2002.68 It is not really surprising that many of these professional developments and linkages, as well as the expansion in the number of scholars and teachers who identify themselves as Shakespeareans, should have begun in the early seventies. In the United States, these were the post-Vietnam years. The post– Civil Rights years. The sexual revolution years. Many of the graduate students and younger scholars then starting out on their professional careers had been the college students of the sixties. Many of the critical innovations that developed from and energized this new, expanded corps of “Shakespeareans” took the form of what was then called “de-centering.” De-centering the white male protagonist, de-centering the “great tragedies,” de-centering Bradley, de-centering “Shakespeare’s England,” decentering Shakespeare himself. (“The fiction of Shakespeare as the spontaneous and natural origin of . . . English culture,” as Bill Readings put it in The University in Ruins.69) Along the way, as a natural outgrowth of this (somewhat) rebellious and egalitarian spirit, what also got de-centered was the lecturer. The Big Event college or university lecture course, the magisterial presence, the town hall feeling, the ex cathedra remarks treasured and scribbled down — all these became, though not explicitly or tendentiously, signs of the old way of doing things. Henceforth—thenceforth—Shakespeare, Shakespeare courses, Shakespeare publications, Shakespeare research, and Shakespeare productions would be diverse, multiple, various. Shakespeares, not (just) Shakespeare. This de-centering of the lecturer was further hastened and exacerbated, in a physical sense, by the increased classroom use of projected images and later by PowerPoint (introduced by Microsoft in 1990, and originally called “Presenter”). In order to facilitate sight lines, not only the lecturer but also the lectern was now to be placed to the side.

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Caveat Lector Physics professor Eric Mazur has been traveling the country for the past few years talking about interactive pedagogy and peer instruction as better ways to teach than the familiar classroom lecture. A Harvard Magazine article entitled “Twilight of the Lecture,” describing Mazur’s classroom innovations, declared “the trend toward ‘active learning’ may overthrow the style of teaching that has ruled universities for 600 years.”70 (I couldn’t help but hear a hint of Wagner behind the article’s title, with its implication of fallen gods.) Mazur will ask a question in class, have students respond using hand-held devices, then assess whether most of them have got it right before moving on to peer instruction (students talk to each other rather than to the professor). Some teachers hand out their lecture notes before class or put them online because the idea is that receiving such information “passively” is boring; students come to class with questions based on the lecture notes (this practice has become known in educational circles as the “flipped classroom”). Videotaping and streaming are other ways of distributing the former “lecture” material. “Students now tap into a course through different media,” Mazur explains. “They may download materials via its website, and even access a faculty member’s research and bio. It’s a different kind of communication between faculty and students.” The article goes on to say that “Mazur’s reinvention of the course drops the lecture model and deeply engages students in the learning/teaching endeavor.” “Active learning” was promulgated in the 1980s and ’90s as a way of involving students in activities such as simulations, games, “think-pairshare,” collaborative learning groups, student debates, “learning by teaching,” and “reaction to a video” (why this is “active” is your best guess). Many limited enrollment classrooms and sections of lecture courses are now run with the help of these educational devices, and “active learning” in large lecture courses took on new resonance, it is almost needless to say, with the advent of smartphones, Twitter, and other online ways of communicating. What for some teachers was simply a nuisance, or “interference,” in the radio signal sense, was for others a pathway to new kinds of instruction. I guess I am old school when it comes to the lecture format. Emboldened by a law school colleague who was doing the same, I several years ago told students in my lecture courses, and indeed students in my undergraduate and graduate seminars, that they could not bring laptops to class. I wanted them, I explained, to listen, think, and sift ideas, to follow an

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argument and hear the arc of a lecture, not to transcribe every word. To my initial surprise this has been very well received, and I’ve noted that other English department colleagues have also done it, apparently without much student resistance. I have certainly, in my time, used various “interactive” devices, even in a very large lecture class, such as polling the group prior to a discussion of Antony and Cleopatra to ask how many thought of themselves as Romans, and how many as Egyptians — an infallible way, I discovered, of tracking political sympathies decade by decade. Once when I played a few amplified choruses of “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” as students were filing into the theater before a lecture, one lively sophomore, now a tenured professor of French, leapt to the stage and invited me to waltz. But these exercises, even the waltz, took only a minute or two away from the 50 minute lecture — and then it was time to begin. On at least one occasion, I did provoke students in a lecture course to something like revolt, which I guess is an “active” response. Here is how I described it, it in an essay called “After the Humanities.” For many years I taught a large lecture course in Shakespeare, part of the Core curriculum, [a course that enrolled as many as 400–600 students at a time]. . . . For some of these students, this was, perhaps, the only course in literature they would take in the four years of their college experience. One day when I was lecturing, I think perhaps— though I’m not sure—about The Merchant of Venice—I began with a presentation about how a particular issue had been interpreted. The students wrote busily in their notebooks. After about ten minutes, I said, “that was for many years the leading interpretation, but these days very few people believe it.” In the lecture hall there was a pause, as students crossed out their notes. I began again with another interpretation—“instead, people began to argue that . . .” and again the students faithfully recorded this information. And again, after about another ten minutes, I stopped to say, “but this view, too, has now been set aside by most critics.” Again the silence, again the vigorous crossing out. By the end of the lecture, after this process had been repeated a few more times, many students were visibly irritated (though others, I would like to think, were stimulated and engaged). I was the professor. I was the Shakespeare expert. Presumably I knew the right answer. Why didn’t I just tell them? But of course what I was teaching them—or trying to teach them—was something else, and something important. That the humanities, or at least the literary

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humanities, are an ongoing conversation and dialogue, conducted over space and time, orally and in written form.71

I can’t agree that lectures of this sort are really “passive” experiences. Any lecturer can hear response in the “silence” of the lecture hall. You can feel when your audience is with you, and when its attention has strayed, even without seeing the tell-tale laptop, or, in a previous era, the surreptitiously consulted (or brazenly brandished) copy of the New York Times. (These days, students can read the Times on their smartphones, but it’s not nearly so joyously aggressive an act.) You can tell when they are hanging on every word (in that case the words are almost always either Shakespeare’s or a passage from the King James Bible), you can tell when it’s time for an offhand remark or an interjection to shake up the process, you can tell when you need to speed up or slow down to finish just at the hour. (I’ve never done a Kittredge, walking out of the room as I spoke my final words, but once when I was lecturing on Doctor Faustus in a lecture hall adjacent to the campus clock I was able to incorporate its chiming into my reading of the last scene, as Faustus is taken off to hell.) “Learning is a social experience,” Mazur, the physics professor, says. And so is literature, we might reply. But even without the disciplinary differential, the classroom (lecture hall, seminar room, tutorial office) is always social. Here are two very different theorists’ accounts of the way a lecture affects an audience. The first is from Theodor Adorno’s essay “Taboos on the Teaching Vocation”: “an academic at the lectern has the opportunity to speak at great length without being interrupted. The irony of this situation is that when a teacher gives the students the chance to ask questions and thereby tries to make the lecture routine more like a seminar, usually the attempt meets with little approval even today; on the contrary, students in the large courses seem to prefer the dogmatic lecture format.”72 And the second, from Marshall McLuhan, is “Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue.”73 These observations date within a year of one another. The Adorno lecture—for, characteristically, his thoughts on the lecture form were delivered in a lecture—is from 1965. McLuhan’s remarks on hot and cool media, from Understanding Media, were published in 1964. To gloss them a little: Hot media tend to provide complete involvement without considerable stimulus. Cool media tend to provide little involvement with substantial stimulus, and require more active participation on the part of the user. The words “hot” and

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“cool” carry as well their customary colloquial meanings: cool as in jazz, hot as in . . . hot. Lectures are (or can be) hot; seminars are (or can be) cool.

Strategic Generalization The “culture wars” of the 1980s now seem so long ago that I am guessing fewer and fewer members of the profession remember the role played in them by Shakespeare. But, in fact, those years had a significant effect on the teaching of Shakespeare, then and now. Cultural materialism, with its deliciously daring frisson of Marx, and even, to a certain extent, the comparatively anodyne New Historicism, were pilloried by critics for decentering Shakespeare’s plays and his protagonists. “If Caliban were the hero of The Tempest,” one disgruntled observer said to me, “I wouldn’t know what the play would mean.” Feminism in the academy, and in the groves of Arden, was once a scandal, too, believe it or not, and as for queer theory, it was way, way out there, hardly, as now, an expectable topic at every Shakespeare conference. Meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America, that most gentlepersonly of organizations, were battlegrounds of ideological and cultural dispute, often dramatic, sometimes ungracious. In the conference hotel, psychoanalytic critics faced off against historical critics, each group entering its separate lecture ballroom through an opposing set of doors. But time marched on. And it marches still. These “Shakesboomers”—scholars and teachers then emerging from graduate school in the post-Vietnam era—are now senior, honored, established, and in some cases retired. All of these same terms (senior, honored, established, and in some cases retired) might also be used, mutatis mutandis, to describe the then-shocking ideas that have by now long passed into the new normal of Shakespeare studies. Possibly the biggest problem we confront in the teaching of Shakespeare is that all these once marginal and contestatory areas—feminism and gender, queer theory, race studies, Shakespeare and [law, politics, religion, terrorism, the novel, the epic, you name it]—now seem so central, so acceptable, so respectable, so— canonical. The other directions in which Shakespeare studies have gone—toward theater and performance, for example, or editorial and textual studies—might once have roused the weary hackles of the defenders of literature as such, but in fact there has been barely a ripple of anything except applause. Distant reading and Shakespeare? Of course. Object-oriented ontology and Shakespeare? Check. Cognitive theory and Shakespeare? Needless to say.

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The advent of the digital humanities, now on every university’s hiring wish list, completes the circle: the current director of the Folger Shakespeare Library is a leading specialist in the area of digital inquiry. There is no outside, no set of outliers, in Shakespeare teaching, because what might be characterized as the “core” or basic skills of linguistic, symbolic, thematic and character analysis, which were the heritage of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, are all sutured to the practices of historical, cultural, social and political analysis. Is this any way to run a discipline, or a sub-discipline? Even in the worrisome (if also slightly wearisome) area of the “future of the humanities” (or the “crisis in the humanities” or the “fate of the humanities”) and the unquestionable fact that there are fewer jobs out there than once there were, Shakespeare—teaching Shakespeare—seems pretty much okay. No one these days is suggesting that we shouldn’t teach him, or it, or them. My own university and doubtless others went out of its way not to cancel its “Shakespeare requirement” when it adopted a new curriculum a few years ago. And whereas once upon a time almost everyone in every field was expected to be able to teach Shakespeare in addition to whatever his or her actual research specialty was, these days most (though not all) entry-level Renaissance or early modern jobs specify that the successful candidate will be able to offer courses in Shakespeare. So the news is too good, and therefore not so good. Shakespeare studies and Shakespeare teaching stand at a moment of comfortable pluralism. Virtually the only anxieties and contestations have to do with hiring. No one is shocked, shocked, by anything taught. The idea of the “great plays” has now either disappeared or expanded to include plays once thought notso-great, such as Titus Andronicus and Henry VIII. And—tell me whether this is good news or bad news—Shakespeare is now being taught, pretty regularly, in business schools, law schools, medical schools, schools of education, and drama schools, as well as in executive training programs like Washington D.C.’s Movers and Shakespeares, where CEOs get to decide whether, if they were King Henry V, they would have the guts to fire slackers like Falstaff and Bardolph. The teachers in these programs are mostly not English Ph.D.s. Medical doctors teach Shakespeare in med school, lawyers teach Shakespeare in law school. Some of them might have undergraduate degrees in English; some are trained in other fields (Movers and Shakespeares was founded by Carol Adelman, who holds a doctorate in public health, and her husband Ken Adelman, Ronald Reagan’s former arms specialist, whose doctorate is in political science). And if some humanities programs seem (yet again) to have forgotten Freud, or to want

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to forget Lacan, the International Psychoanalytic Association is still keen to have an annual panel on Shakespeare and psychoanalysis. I haven’t yet mentioned Shakespeare theater companies, which are now in the teaching business as well. Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, now hosts an annual four-week National Institute on Teaching Shakespeare, which brings classroom teachers together with scholars, directors, and actors, and is funded by the NEH. (And this is one of many such across the country.) Shakespeare & Company teaches executives, too; the leadership institute has become the model for the integration of Shakespearean characters and examples into areas where Shakespeare is, so to speak, the vehicle rather than the tenor. On the surface, then, it seems as if all is pretty well in the Shakespeare business. But increasingly, as I’ve been suggesting, we are outsourcing our work, and our audience. There are more professional Shakespeareans (professors, assistant professors, job-seeking graduate students) than ever before, more conferences, meetings, journal issues, publications. But the teaching of Shakespeare is often being done by units other than university humanities departments: theaters, museums, independent libraries, executive training sessions, and leadership institutes. Not to mention MOOCs and other modes of long-distance instruction. On the model of NGO, nongovernmental organization, we might call these NCOs—non-collegiate organizations. We are losing market share to them, and it doesn’t take an economics major to know it. In the late 1980s, several conservative critics of the humanities—including William Bennett, Allan Bloom, and Lynne Cheney—all spoke out against what they saw as excessive “specialization” and “professionalization” in the humanities fields, claiming that this produced a climate of insider jargon and narrowing focus, of interest only to a select few. Cheney, then the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, put the matter most baldly in her report, Humanities in America: “to counter the excess of specialization . . . those who fund, publish, and evaluate research should encourage work of general significance.”74 From the head of NEH this was not only a suggestion but a velvet threat. Work that was deemed too specialized, not of general significance, should not, and presumably would not, be funded. Prominent humanists spoke up and spoke back, arguing, for example, that all research was by its nature specialized, that scientists and others all needed to specialize before they could responsibly generalize, that to be specialized was not to be trivial, and that many major humanities scholars whose work might be regarded as “specialized” (Geertz, Lévi-Strauss,

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Foucault, Kristeva, and Cavell were specifically mentioned) were read, and themselves addressed, by interested audiences across a wide interdisciplinary spectrum.75 The issue then seemed to be whether humanists had a right to specialize, or whether their role was rather to offer, in classroom settings and perhaps also in written form, something like Arnold’s “best that had been thought and said.” History, common sense, and research prevailed, at least for the most part, and the period from the late eighties to the present has been enlivened by a rich range of “specialized” books and courses, both throughout the humanities and within Shakespeare studies. Circumstances, however, may alter cases, and make (to mix my metaphors unpardonably) strange bedfellows. I never thought I’d agree with Lynne Cheney on anything, and I still don’t. But in the present climate and economy for the humanities I might propose something that works a little like Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “strategic essentialism.” We could call it—though this doesn’t sound very elegant—“strategic generalization.” In order to regain something of the prominence, primacy, influence, and (oh yes) enrollments that have been lost to the STEM fields and to other, largely vocational, student priorities, I’d urge that we think again about broad-based lecture courses as a way of incorporating the various specializations at which we are now so adept into a larger picture for students in all fields, not just English, and of all levels, from freshmen through seniors and graduate students. Generalization does not mean dumbing down, any more than specialization means trivialization. And to have a broad and deep general knowledge does not require that you speak in generalities. Quite the contrary. There is no reason why we should not incorporate the newest, most specific, riskiest, and most daring approaches into what we present to students. It’s not a matter of going backward, but of going on. I think, in short, that the time may have come to revisit the centrality and role of the general Shakespeare lecture course as both a political and a pedagogical good. The university lecture is an art form that has both its detractors and its fans, but throughout the twentieth century and to the present day it has been, for Shakespeare teaching, not only a particularly effective instructional mode but also a memorable one, as legions of alumni attest. Shakespeare is a natural topic for vivid in-person performance, and the lecture format makes it possible, as Auden, Frye, Knight, Kittredge, et al all recognized, to speak intelligently and intelligibly to many different levels of audience at once. Being part of a collectivity, in real time and real space, listening to someone think and read and respond to Shakespeare, is still one of the visceral thrills of undergraduate education. Our field has

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talked for decades about the play-within-the-play. A good classroom lecture is a play-about-the-play. Think back for a moment, if you will, to the story of Ray Bradbury’s itinerant exiled professors, each embodying a book or an author, keeping those works alive and in the cultural conversation. Especially in an era where students rent their textbooks, or sell them back after a course is over, or read the plays online, college and university teachers who seem to live their subjects are the embodiment of such literary works for their students. What we teach them about Shakespeare they will remember. What they memorize they will not easily forget. Some of the best practices of the past, which may also be your current best practices, are useful in getting to “strategic generalization,” practices such as asking students to read the text twice through before, or perhaps instead of, reading critical essays; the memorization and recitation of passages; vivid classroom performance (by the instructor and not just the students); and indeed philology, if by that we might mean, today, among other things, an acquaintance with word history and derivation through the OED. In terms of presentation, I would also cite the advice of that master coach of theatrical performance, Feste-as-Sir Topas in Twelfth Night: “you must allow vox.”76 It is one thing to de-center, and another to be de-centered. Shakespeare, whether taught, read, acted, analyzed, memorized, or edited, is not a niche topic even in today’s data-driven educational climate. As humanists, scholars, Shakespeareans, teachers, and citizens of the university and the world, we should now be thinking seriously and imaginatively about how to take back the center, the conversation—and the podium. One strategy for doing so— effective and affective—is through the powerful art and careful craft of the classroom lecture. And no topic is better suited to such a format than Shakespeare. Of course the lecture mode, like any successful form of cultural mobilization and enchantment, has its critics from both the left and the right. And (of course) both the left and the right are correct: a lecture course, especially when delivered with passion and style, does indeed offer the opportunity to inculcate ideas, to function ideologically, to persuade, to inflame, even perhaps to seduce. Like theater. Like literature. Like Shakespeare. This is the consummate effect of teaching, its pleasure and danger. Today’s undergraduates, and indeed today’s graduate students, are often engaged by performance, more so sometimes than they are willing to admit. When performance is combined with personal commitment, an

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intimate knowledge of the work under discussion, and a manifest respect for intellectual exchange, the effects can be exhilarating. Add Shakespeare to the mix, and the odds for success increase, as it were, dramatically. (As sometimes will the audience.) A lecture is always a risk—but it is always a risk worth taking. Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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notes

preface 1. Pausanias, Periegeta 9.29.2, C. Kerényi, The Gods of the Greeks (London: Thames and Hudson, 1951, rpt. 2008), 104. 2. “Revolution 9 was an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens; just like a drawing of a revolution. All the thing was made with loops.” John Lennon, Rolling Stone, 1970. The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), 307. J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953). 3. Shakespeare, Sonnet 38: How can my Muse want subject to invent, While thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse Thine own sweet argument, too excellent For every vulgar paper to rehearse? O, give thyself the thanks, if aught in me Worthy perusal stand against thy sight; For who’s so dumb that cannot write to thee, When thou thyself dost give invention light? Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth Than those old nine which rhymers invocate; And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth Eternal numbers to outlive long date. If my slight Muse do please these curious days, The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.

4. Anthony Trollope, The Warden (855), Chapter 14. 5. OED muse, v. 1. asking literary questions 1. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), ix. 2. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 452, 448– 49.

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Notes to pages 3–12

3. Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres: The Reconfiguration of Social Thought,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 30. 4. Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), x. 5. Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 65. 6. J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 69. 7. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York and London: Norton, 1994), 231. 8. Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, 231–36. 9. Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, 232–33, quoting Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 212. 10. Terence J. McDonald, ed. The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 1. 11. Steven Mullaney, “Discursive Forums, Cultural Practices: History and Anthropology in Literary Study,” in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terence J. McDonald, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 163. 12. Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), xi. 2. ovid, now and then 1. Ezra Pound studied Elizabethan translations of Ovid’s major works; and he cites or quotes him in the Cantos and mentions him frequently in Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (N.Y., 2004), 38. 2. Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 38. 3. “Company Overview of Ovid Technologies, Inc.,” investing.business week.com /research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapid=334364. 4. See “Dana Johnson and Mark Nelson,” ovidvineyards.com /people/ dana-johnson-mark-nelson /. 5. Quoted in L. Pierce Carson, “The Metamorphosis at Ovid,” Napa Valley Register, July 21, 2011, napavalleyregister.com /lifestyles/food-and -cooking/wine/the-metamorphosis-at-ovid/article_90500a7c-b40c-11eo -aa29– 001cc4c002eo.html. 6. “Dana Johnson and Mark Nelson.”

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7. Quoted in Carson, “The Metamorphosis at Ovid.” 8. Quoted in Mary L. Matrix, “Library Computer Systems,” lsuhsc .edu /no/library/information /archives/fall1998/systems/html. 9. Ovid wine label, ecep.com /winery/index /index /id/21. 10. “Whereof in part the like before in former times had bene, / And some so straunge and ougly shapes as never erst were sene” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. John Frederick Nimms [1567; Philadelphia, 2000], 17). 11. “So, Earth by that late Deluge muddy growne, / When on her lap reflecting Titan shone, / Produc’t a World of forms; restor’d the late: / And other vnknowne Monsters did create” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. George Sandys, ovid.lib.virginia.edu /sandys/1.htm). 12. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (1955; London, 2010), 16. 13. “Countless species; some were the old ones, restored, / and others were monsters, novel in their shapes.” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin [New York, 2004], 33). The eighteenth-century John Dryden and Samuel Garth translation has: “new creatures did begin: / Some were of sev’ral sorts produc’d before, / But new monsters, Earth created more” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Samuel Garth et al., ovid.lib.virginia.edu /va1717/Bk1gt.html). Henry T. Riley’s 1893 translation has: “it produced species of creatures innumerable; and partly restored the former shapes, and partly gave birth to new monsters” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Henry T. Riley, Gutenberg.org/ files/21765/21765-h/files/Met_I-III.html#bookI_fabeI). 14. T. S. Eliot, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” On Poetry and Poets (1943; New York, 2009), 121. 15. Eliot, The Waste Land, in Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (New York, 1991), 56; hereafter abbreviated W. 16. Eliot, “Frontiers of Criticism,” 121. 17. See Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns, 87. 18. Ziolkowski sees the book as indebted to not one but three Ovidian myths: Daphne, Iphis, and Tiresias; see Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns, 97. When we add in names like Franz Kafka and Carl Jung, we can see that metamorphosis, whether willed or unwilling, reversible or irreversible, was on, and in, many minds in this period. 19. Stephen Medcalf, “T. S. Eliot’s Metamorphoses: Ovid and The Waste Land,” in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale (New York, 1988), 242– 43. 20. T. S. Eliot, “London Letter, September 1921,” The Annotated “Waste Land” with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, ed. Lawrence Rainey (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 189.

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Notes to pages 15–20

21. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York, 1989), 187. 22. Bronislaw Malinowski, “Myth in Primitive Psychology,” in “Magic, Science and Religion” and Other Essays (Boston, 1948), 72, 123. 23. Malinowski, “Myth in Primitive Psychology,” 123. 24. Malinowski, “The Paradox of Frazer’s Personality and Work,” in “A Scientific Theory of Culture” and Other Essays (New York, 1944), 183. 25. See John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of “The Golden Bough” (Princeton, N.J., 1973), 68–103. 26. Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Viking, 1978), 13. 27. James George Frazer, “Preface to the Third Edition,” The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, viii. 28. Frazer, “Preface to the Second Edition,” The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, xxiv. 29. G. P. Goold, “Reviser’s Preface (1987),” in Ovid, Fasti, trans. Frazer, ed. Goold (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), vii. 30. Ovid, Fasti, trans. and ed. Frazer, 5 vols. (London, 1929), 1:132. 31. Ovid, Fasti, 1:133. Frazer adduces additional anthropological evidence in his notes, comparing the many parallels he found in India and in Africa, and providing yet more comparative data in his edition of the Fasti. See also Frazer, Appendix in Ovid, Fasti, trans. Frazer, ed. Goold, 403–5. 32. Frazer, “Introduction,” in Ovid, Fasti, trans. Frazer, ed. Goold, xxv. 33. Frazer, “Introduction” in Ovid, Fasti, xxvi. 34. For Barthes myth was a “type of speech,” a metalanguage, a semiological system, an instance of “depoliticized speech” and perhaps above all a way of turning history into nature; see Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), 109–59. 35. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 69. He also writes “the bulk of garden-variety literary criticism today” (60); apparently everything in the garden is not lovely. 36. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 70. 37. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 74. 38. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 70. 39. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 74. 40. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 9. 41. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 26. 42. But “such apparently extrinsic operations are then drawn back into the dialectical framework as the latter expands and is systematically totalized” ( Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 57).

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43. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 56 –57. 44. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 10. 45. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 10. 46. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 74. 47. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 57, 59. 48. See, for example, Patricia Klindienst Joplin, “The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours,” in Rape and Representation, ed. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 35–64. 49. Muriel Rukeyser, “Myth,” wonderingminstrels.blogspot.com /2000/ 12/myth-muriel-rukeyser.html. 50. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “morph.” 51. Or, for that matter, this one from the Church Times in 1998, describing “The Mother Teresa ‘nun-bub’ site, at which a picture of the nun morphs into pastry said to bear her likeness” (OED). 52. Some cognitive theorists have for more than a decade argued for a return to the idea of literary universals—sometimes (though not always) taking a swipe at political and cultural criticism as knee-jerk anti-universalism. “Today,” wrote Patrick Colm Hogan in 1997, “there is little enthusiasm among humanists for the study of universals . . . The focus of theory and practice tends to be on ‘difference,’ ‘cultural and historical specificity,’ and so on . . . When universalism is mentioned at all in humanistic,” he added, “it is most often denounced as a tool of oppression.” Patrick Colm Hogan, “Literary Universals,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 37–63. 53. On the adaptationist argument and the relationship of literary Darwinism to that question, see the excellent summary of positions in Jonathan Kramnick, “Literary Studies and Science: A Reply to My Critics,” Critical Inquiry 38 (Winter 2012): 442– 49. 54. These traits might involve cognition, gender, social roles or technology; the data-driven research includes work on facial expressions (smiling, crying, signs of joy and happiness) as well as on paternity insecurity (producing stronger feelings of sexual jealousy among males than among females); one researcher entitled a chapter on this topic “The Othello Syndrome”; see David M. Buss, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (New York, 2000), 73–100. What is insisted upon, and supported, it is claimed, by datasets collected around the world by diligent graduate students is that these things indicate cross-cultural universality. 55. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed. Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5.

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Notes to pages 22–25 The central premise of The Adaptive Mind is that there is a universal human nature, but that this universality exists primarily at the level of evolved psychological mechanisms, not of expressed cultural behaviors. [On this view, cultural variability is not a challenge to claims of universality, but rather data that can give one insight into the structure of the psychological mechanisms that helped generate it.] A second premise is that these evolved psychological mechanisms are adaptations, constructed by natural selection over evolutionary time. A third assumption . . . is that the evolved structure of the human mind is adapted to the way of life of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, and not necessarily to our modern circumstances. (5)

56. George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the ReEnchantment of the World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 105. 57. Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York: 2009), 5. Kramnick’s serious, deeply informed, and polemical essay “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 2 [Winter 2011]: 315– 47 generated a lively and informative set of exchanges in a subsequent issue of the journal. Contra Kramnick’s claim, Brian Boyd wrote in that issue, “evocritics do not . . . label literature universal or adaptive. They do tend to find stories universal and adaptive, but there are other aspects of literature, like verse and essays, that may be universal (as in the case of verse), or not (as in the case of essays).” (Brian Boyd, “For Evocriticism: Minds Shaped to Be Reshaped,” Critical Inquiry 30 [Winter 2012]: 401). 58. Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), 1. 59. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 15. 60. John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of “The Golden Bough” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 5. 61. Charles Darwin, letter to Ernst Haeckel, 19 November 1868, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter, ed. Francis Darwin, 3 vols. (London, 1888), 3:105. 62. This, indeed, is a point recently made by E. O. Wilson, in a discussion of “that special truth sought in literature,” with citations from E. L. Doctorow, Pablo Picasso (“Art is the lie that helps us to see the truth”), and Flannery O’Connor (Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of the Earth [New York: Norton, 2012], 277). 63. Andrew Marvell, “The Garden,” in The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (New York, 2005), 100. 64. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New York: 2009), 104.

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65. See Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 1–8. 66. Robert William Mackay, The Progress of the Intellect, as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews (London: J. Chapman, 1850), 172 67. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 5. See also Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 3 vols. (London 1830 –33). The analogy with Ovid is in Chapter 1 of Book 1. 68. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 105. 69. Ellen Spolsky, “Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory as a Species of Poststructuralism,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, 306. 70. Spolsky, “Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory as a Species of Poststructuralism,” 306 –7. 71. Indeed, such references in recent assessments of literary Darwinism and cognitive science are uncannily present in critical literature. Thus, G. Gabrielle Starr, in a response to Jonathan Kramnick’s essay in Critical Inquiry, offers the following example: “There is no reason we should predict that the image of a woman turning into a tree should be anything other than frightening or incomprehensible, yet Ovid makes it funny, poignant, and powerfully beautiful. Art is about what is unpredictably pleasurable. Cognitive science . . . gives us a useful way of understanding how those unpredictable pleasures matter.” (G. Gabrielle Starr, “Evolved Reading and the Science(s) of Literary Study: A Response to Jonathan Kramnick, Critical Inquiry 38, no. 2 [Winter, 2012]: 422). 72. Thus Tooby and Cosmides, for example, in a piece called “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction and the Arts” (SubStance 94/95 [2001], 19) venture the hypothesis that both Alice in Wonderland and Hamlet “are works of literature focused on an evolutionarily ancient but quintessentially human problem, the struggle for coherence and sanity amidst radical uncertainty.” Later in the same article they return to Shakespeare, noting that “the human cognitive architecture needs adaptations that can . . . decouple the aspects of the organizational domain that are irrelevant, nonisomorphic or disordering from being processed by the adaptation as true or relevant for its development (e.g., one can learn from Cordelia that overt emotional demonstrativeness is not a reliable clue to devotedness)—a truth about an abstract relationship—but the reader should discard the specifics as irrelevant, rather than concluding that being named ‘Cordelia’ is a reliable cue to devotedness,” 22. 73. D. T. Max, “The Literary Darwinists,” New York Times, November 6, 2005, www.nytimes.com /2005/11/06/magazine/06darwin.html?pagewanted =all. 74. Wilson’s On Human Nature is the third book in a trilogy; the first two are The Insect Societies (1971) and Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975). 75. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), xx.

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76. Wilson, On Human Nature, 190. 77. Wilson, On Human Nature, 207. 78. Wilson, On Human Nature, 201. 79. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York, 1998), 289. 80. Wilson, “Foreword” in Loyal D. Rue, Everybody’s Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution (New York: SUNY Press, 2000), ix. 81. Wilson, Consilience, 289, 73, 329 n. 30, 147. 82. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Martin, 15. 83. Ovid, “Appendix,” Selections from Ovid: Chiefly the “Metamorphosis,” ed. J. H. Allen, W. F. Allen, and J. B. Greenrough (Boston, 1902), 202. 84. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Humphries, 3. 85. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Golding, 3. 86. R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 238. 87. Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin, Not in Our Genes, 261–62. 88. Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin, Not in Our Genes, 262. 89. Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin, Not in Our Genes, 262. 90. Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct, 243. 91. “She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.” Walter Pater, “Leonardo da Vinci,” in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (1893; Berkeley, 1980), 90. 92. Joseph Carroll goes out of his way to praise the single sentence on Hamlet and Alice in Tooby and Cosmides’s “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction and the Arts”: “Tooby and Cosmides are right, I think, in declaring that Hamlet’s condition symbolizes an evolutionarily ancient adaptive problem: ‘the struggle for coherence and sanity amidst radical uncertainty’ ” (145). ( Joseph Carroll, Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice [New York, 2011], 145). His own reading of the play is astonishingly vapid: “Hamlet is a long, magnificently articulated cry of emotional pain and moral

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indignation” (146). The insistence, on virtually every page, that these commonplaces of self-help discourse applied to great works of literature are derived from “an evolutionary understanding of human nature” gives new meaning to the fable of the emperor’s New Clothes (146). And for Carroll it is Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) that shows the way: “nothing in human behavior makes sense except in the light of sociobiology” (274). 93. See William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 2009). 94. Wilson, On Human Nature, 192. See also this: “The core of scientific materialism is the evolutionary epic. Let me repeat its minimum claims: that the laws of the physical sciences are consistent with those of the biological and social sciences and can be linked in chains of causal explanation; that life and mind have a physical basis; that the world as we know it has evolved from earlier worlds obedient to the same laws; and that the visible universe today is everywhere subject to these materialist explanations” (Wilson, On Human Nature, 201). 95. Flesch, Comeuppance, 73. 96. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “armchair.” See also Starr, “Evolved Reading and the Science of Evolved Reading”: “collaboration among humanists and scientists is the only way for us to arrive at conclusions that matter on both sides of the divide. This is hard, for there are steep learning curves on both sides. But if we aim to create a new understanding of how art matters in our lives, none of us can do it in isolation or in armchairs” (425). 97. Malinowski, “Myth in Primitive Psychology,” 122–23. 98. “Neuroaesthetics,” International Network for Neuroaesthetics, neuroaesthetics.net /neuroaesthetics/. The same site defines neuroaesthetics as “a new field of research emerging at the intersection of psychological aesthetics, neuroscience and human evolution.” Semir Zeki’s generally accepted definition from 2002 is “the scientific study of the neural bases for the contemplation and creation of a work of art” (“Neuroaesthetics,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Neuroesthetics). 99. The chief guru of neuroasthetics is Semir Zeki, Professor of neuroaesthetics (formerly neurobiology) at University College London. Prof Zeki’s Musings can be found online; the blog “details his theories on the intimate connection between the brain, the mind, and experience” (Semir Zeki, Prof Zeki’s Musings, profzeki.blogspot.com). Among the eminent converts is Eric Kandel, a Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist in his eighties who is now giving lectures on art history; in 2012 he published Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (New York: Random House, 2012). Among the

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detractors can be counted Raymond Tallis, philosopher, cultural critic, and physician, author of Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham, UK, 2011), and philosospher Alva Noe, who has published a book called Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. 100.Quoted in “Neuroaesthetics,” en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Neuroesthetics. 101. See Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Reenchantment of the World, 125–27. See also the whole chapter, “A Modern Use: Sociobiology,” Darwin Loves You, 93–128. 102. Raymond Williams, “Myth,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Revised Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976, 1983), 212. 103. Barthes, “Myth Today,” 129 104. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 553 105. Ovid, Fasti, trans. Frazer, ed. Goold, 9, 8, 11, 10. 3. over the influence 1. Timothy Egan, “Deconstructing a Demagogue,” New York Times, 26 Jan. 2012, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com /2012/01/26/deconstructing-a -demagogue/?_r=0; “Reading the Book of Life: Deconstructing a Chromosome,” New York Times, 17 June 2000, www.nytimes.com /2000/06/27/ science/reading-the-book-of-life; and Sam Sifton, “Deconstructing the Perfect Burger,” New York Times, 23 June 2014, www.nytimes.com /2014/06/25/ dining/how-to-make-a-great-burger.html . See also “Deconstructing Santa,” New York Times, 24 Dec. 2011, lensblogs.nytimes.com /2011/11/1/24/ deconstructing-santa/, and A. C. Lee, “ ‘Diva’: Deconstructing Pop Images of Black Women,” New York Times, 6 Nov. 2014, www.nytimes.com /2014/ 11/07/nyregion /-diva-deconstructing-pop-images-of-black-w omen.html. 2. Elvis Mitchell, “Beware of Amish Hitmen and the Anxiety of Influence,” New York Times, 12 Mar. 2004, www.nytimes.com /2004/03/12/ movies/film-review-beware-of-amish-hitmen-and-the-anxiety-of-influence .html; Peter G. Davis, “Wagner’s Anxiety of Influence,” New York Times, 26 July 2009, www.nytimes.com /2009/07/26/arts/music/26davi.html; Michael Waldman, “In Washington, The Anxiety of Influence,” New York Times, 6 Jan. 2006, www.nytimes.com /2006/01/11/opinion /11iht-edlet.html?_r=0; Jon Caramanica, “The Anxiety of Being Influential,” New York Times, 17 Sept. 2009, www.nytimes.com /2009/09/17/arts/music/17jayz.html; and David Kelly, “The Anxiety of ‘Influence,’ ” New York Times, 3 Nov. 2008, artsbeat .blogs.nytimes.com /2008/11/03/the-anxiety-of-infuence. 3. W(alter) Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1970; repr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 3.

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4. Bate, Burden of the Past, 4. 5. Bate, Burden of the Past, 9. 6. Bate, Burden of the Past, 133. 7. Bate, Burden of the Past, Preface, vii. 8. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8. 9. Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 5. 10. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York, 1984), 59–60. 11. Leon S. Roudiez, “Introduction” to Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardin, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 15. 12. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and “The Discourse on Language,” trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London, 1974), 23. 13. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 146. 14. Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 147. 15. Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur,” Mantéia V, 1968. 16. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 96. 17. Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, ix. 18. Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, 16. 19. Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, 127. 20. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 95. 21. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 94 –95. 22. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 95. 23. Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, 17. 24. Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, 8. 25. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford, 1997), 94. 26. Sam Tanenhaus, “Harold Bloom: An Uncommon Reader,” New York Times, 20 May 2011, www.nytimes.com /2011/05/22/books /review/ book-review-the-anatomy-of-influence-by-harold-bloom.html. 27. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “fry.” 28. Bloom interview with Imre Salusinszky in Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works, ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 62. Quoted in Trevor Cook, “The Covering Cherub: Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye, 1959–1969,” Modern Language Studies 42, no. 2, 10 –33. 29. Bloom, interview with Salusinszky, 61.

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Notes to pages 38– 42

30. The panel Bloom spoke on was on American Romanticism; his paper was “The Central Man: Emerson, Whitman, Wallace Stevens.” 31. Northrop Frye, “Letter to the English Institute, 1965,” in Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 27. 32. Frye, “Letter to the English Institute, 1965,” 28. 33. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum, 1970), vii. Originally published by Princeton University Press, 1957. 34. D. J. H. Jones (pseudonym), Murder at the MLA (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 144. 35. The term hermeneutics of suspicion is associated with Paul Ricoeur, who also used the phrase masters of suspicion to describe the work of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche. For an account of these terms and their varying meanings, see Alison Scott-Baumann, Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion (London, 2011). 36. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 321. 37. McGurl, Program Era, 322. 38. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: the War of the Words (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 169. “Unlike ‘influence,’ ” they wrote, “which connotes an influx or pouring-in of external power, and ‘authorship,’ which stands for an originary primacy, the concept of affiliation carries with it possibilities of both choice and continuity,” 171. 39. McGurl, Program Era, 323. 40. McGurl, Program Era, 324. 41. McGurl, Program Era, 409. 42. McGurl, Program Era, 408. 43. Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, 5. 44. Cleanth Brooks, “My Credo,” Kenyon Review 13 (Winter 1951): 72–81. Even in his belated Anatomy of Influence Bloom takes a swipe at Brooks and the other “sometime New Critics . . . and their ongoing more-or-less followers in and out of the academy” (AI, 266). But see also Tanenhaus, “Harold Bloom,” on how Bloom’s idea of influence has become more orthodox over time, “growing closer, in its sensitivity to echo and allusion, to the approach of the hated New Critics.” 45. John Dryden, “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” in Selected Works of John Dryden, ed. William Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 333. 46. Dryden, “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” 365.

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47. Dryden, “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” 366. 48. Martial, Epigrammata 1.52; see also 1.29, 1.38, 1.53, 1.63, 1.66, 1.72, 2.20, 7.77, 10.100, 11.94, and 12.63. 49. Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. (New York: Doubleday, 2011). 50. Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” Harper’s Magazine, February 2007, reprinted in Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. (New York: Doubleday, 2011), 97. 51. Richard A. Posner, “On Plagiarism,” Atlantic Monthly, 1 Apr. 2002, www.theatlantic.com /magazine/archive/2002/04/on-plagiarism /302469/. Lethem attributes this passage to “Richard Posner, combined from The Becker-Posner Blog and The Atlantic Monthly” (“EI,” 69); if the reader has the time and inclination, this is enough information to track down these sources and compare them to Lethem’s (very original) nonoriginal. (If you do follow the Ariadne’s thread, you will find Posner sterner on student plagiarists than on biographers and poets, since “a student plagiarism has absolutely no social value,” while “plagiarism in a published work may have such value” (Posner, “Plagiarism —Posner Post,” 24 Apr. 2005, www.becker-posner-blog.com / 2005/04/index.html). Equally gripping is his contrast between the professional norms of academic writing and judicial opinions. Academic authors are required to acknowledge their sources “because recognition of original contributions is the key currency of academic reward,” whereas judges, who “like to pretend that rather than making up new law, they are merely applying existing law made by others,” routinely “steal” ideas from other judges or law professors—not to mention law clerks, who often write the opinions signed by their bosses (ibid.). 52. Lethem, Ecstasy of Influence, 112. 53. James M. Hughes et al., “Quantitative Patterns of Stylistic Influence in the Evolution of Literature,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, 15 May 2012, 7682, 7685. 54. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 94. 55. Salusinszky, “Frye and the Art of Memory,” in Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works, ed. David Boyd and Salusinszky (Toronto, 1999), 41. 56. STEM is an acronym for “science, technology, engineering and mathematics.” It has achieved a considerable visibility among academic administrators and educational policy specialists. The acronym was adopted by the National Science Foundation in the early years of the twenty-first century, replacing the older, and less catchy, SMET. 57. Kevin J. H. Dettmar, “The Illusion of Modernist Allusion and the Politics of Postmodern Plagiarism,” in Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual

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Property in a Postmodern World, ed. Lise Buranen and Alice M. Roy (Albany, N.Y., 1999), 100. 58. Bob Berman, a columnist for Astronomy magazine, addresses the hoary question of the tree falling in the forest in his book, Zoom, citing Galileo Galilei on sound waves to suggest that the tree does not, after all, make a sound. For Galileo, sound produces vibrations that spread through the air, “ ‘bringing to the tympanum of the ear a stimulus which the mind interprets as sound’ ” (Bob Berman, Zoom: How Everything Moves: From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees [New York, 2014], 223). So if there is no listening eardrum, there is no stimulus (and no “mind” to “interpret,” either). 59. Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (London: Oxford University Press, 1959; paperback 1968), 15–16. 60. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “allusion,” “allude.” 61. Susan Stewart, “The Pickpocket: A Study in Tradition and Allusion,” MLN 95 (Dec. 1980): 95, 1151. “The gesture of allusion is shaped by a nostalgia for the lost event,” Stewart writes. “The object serves only as a souvenir of our knowing. In allusiveness we seek to follow the trace of the event to its origin, an origin which eludes us. The impossibility of repetition precludes an authentic engagement with the text of the event. We move, therefore, from the authentic to the aesthetic” (1128). 62. John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 62. 63. Thomas Humphry Ward, ed., The English Poets (London: Macmillan, 1880 –1918). 64. Matthew Arnold, introduction to The English Poets, ed. Thomas Humphry Ward, 3 vols. (London, 1880 –1918), 1:xxv, 1:xxxvi, 1:xxxvii. 65. Charles William Eliot, Introduction to The Harvard Classics, Volume L (New York: P. F. Collier, 1910), quoted in Adam Kirsch, “The ‘Five-foot shelf ’ Reconsidered,” Harvard Magazine, November–December 2001, 56. 66. Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York, 1994), 495–536. 67. Bloom, interview with Jesse Pearson, Vice, 1 Dec. 2008, www.vice .com /read/harold-bloom-431-v15n12. 68. T. S. Eliot, “The Frontiers of Criticism” (1956) in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 109–10. 69. Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, 152. 70. Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in “Culture and Anarchy” and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 50. 71. Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” in Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York, 1932), 21.

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72. Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, x. 73. Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” in Distant Reading (London and New York: Verso, 2013), 67. 74. Moretti, “Slaughterhouse of Literature,” 70. 75. Moretti, “Slaughterhouse of Literature,” 68n. 76. Franco Moretti, “Style, Inc. Reflections on 7,000 Titles,” in Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013), 190. 77. Moretti, “Style, Inc.,” 195. 78. Moretti, “Style, Inc.,” 200. 79. Moretti, “Style, Inc.,” 204. 80. Moretti, “Style, Inc.,” 206. 81. OED defines a “content word” as one that defines meaning in an utterance (in contrast with a grammatical element like a preposition, article, or auxiliary.” Content, compounds, C.2. “Content,” OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 82. “Content,” OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 83. Ben Brantley, “The Wasp Goddess, Imperious, Vulnerable and (Gasp) Unmasked,” New York Times, November 14, 2014, C15. “The musical comedy and nightclub star Delores Gray is a favorite source. The Las Vegas performer Fay McKay is the increasingly intoxicated-sounding singer of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’: in which the gifts bestowed by her true love are all liquid.” 84. Holland Cotter, “Taking Copycatting to a Higher Level,” New York Times, November 14, 2014, C23, C32. 85. Ken Miller, “Under the Influence: Bearing in Mind,” New York Times, January 4, 2015, Sunday Styles, 3, and tmagazine.com. 86. In this instance I found that the unwitting and unnoticed “influence” of Harold Bloom was my precursor: “Influence is Influenza—an astral disease,” Bloom declares in The Anxiety of Influence, 95. But he then adds, consistent with his own views in that book but contrary to the argument I have been advancing here, “If influence were health, who could write a poem?” There is more to be said here, about quality, dialectics, and what “poetry” is, but a footnote is not the place for it. 4. fig leaves 1. “A Sign of Changing Times: Coast Statue Sheds Fig Leaf,” New York Times, July 20, 1969. 2. Patricia Cohen, “Hirst Work Gets a Fig Leaf,” New York Times, July 9, 2014, C4. 3. Furthermore, Twain added, “At the door of the Uffizi, in Florence, one is confronted by statues of a man and a woman, noseless, battered, black

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with accumulated grim —they hardly suggest human beings—yet these ridiculous creatures have been thoughtfully and conscientiously fig-leaved by this fastidious generation.” Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (1880), Ch. 50, “Titian Bad and Titian Good” (New York: Random House, 2003), 295. 4. Twain, “Diplomatic Pay and Clothes,” in The Writings of Mark Twain, Author’s National Ed., Vol. 23 (New York and London: Harper’s & Brothers Publishers, 1903), 218. 5. My gratitude to Professor John R. Clarke for this diverting (and instructive) anecdote. 6. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” (1927), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961), 21: 156 –57. 7. Two modern artworks explore this question from what might be called opposite angles. Marcel Duchamp’s “Female Fig Leaf ” of 1950, cast in 1961, is a bronze now in the Tate Gallery, one of four small-scale “erotic objects.” The title of Duchamp’s work suggests that it will conceal the female genitals —just as the fig leaf on a statue traditionally conceals the male’s —but in fact it draws attention to them. On the other hand, Lucien Freud’s “Girl with a Fig Leaf ” (an intaglio print on paper dated 1947) puts the viewer front and center. Both Duchamp’s bronze and Freud’s print can be seen on the Tate’s website, at http://www.tate.org.uk /art /artworks / duchamp-female-fig-leaf-t07279 and http://www.tate.org.uk /art /artworks / freud-girl-with-a-fig-leaf-p77265. 8. Hugh Latimer, “On Twelfth Day,” in The Sermons and Life of the Right Reverend Father in God, and Constant Martyr of Jesus Christ, Hugh Latimer, Some Time Bishop of Worcester, ed. John Watkins, Vol. 2 (London: Aylott and Son, 1858), 368. 9. Francis Bacon, “The Lord Chancellor Bacon to the Lords,” in The Works of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, ed. Basil Montagu, Vol. 12 (London: William Pickering, 1830), 75. 10. He was fined and put in the Tower of London but released after a few days (and the king remitted his fine). 11. Bacon, “The Lord Chancellor Bacon to the Lords,” 74 –77. 12. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. John Buchanan-Brown (London: Penguin, 2000), 4. 13. Samuel Richardson, The Novels of Samuel Richardson, Esq.: viz. Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison in Three Volumes, to which is prefixed a memoir of the life of the author (London: Hurst, Robinson, 1824; Edinburgh: printed by James Ballantyne and company at the Border Press), 458. The letter (“Letter CCXXXIII [from] Mr. Lovelace to John Belford, Esq.”) continues, “[A]nd for a lady to be protected in liberties, in diversions,

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which her heart pants after—and all her faults, even the most criminal, were she to be detected, to be thrown upon the husband, and the ridicule, tool; a charming privilege for a wife!” 14. “I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies of the sea” (from “The Sleepers” in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, first edition (1855), ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin, 1986). Leaves of Grass had no author’s name on the title page of the first edition, but the author described himself within it as “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.” 15. James Russell Lowell, “The First Mate,” in The World of Wit and Humour, ed. George Manville Fenn (London, Paris, and New York: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1873), 169. 16. “College Ousts Nudist, Citing Fig Leaf for Eve,” Associated Press, New York Times, September 19, 1951. 17. http://help.figleaves.com /app/answers/detail 18. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Scott Brown’s Liberal Fig Leaf,” Berkshire Eagle, October 4, 2012. 19. Soner Cagaptay, a specialist on Turkey at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, quoted in Eric Schmitt, “Obama Administration Considers Arming Syrian Kurds Against ISIS,” New York Times, September 21, 2016. 20. Kevin Drum, “Republicans and the Disclosure Fig Leaf,” Mother Jones, July 17, 2012. 21. Tom Wicker, “In the Nation: Reagan’s Fig Leaf,” New York Times, July 10, 1982. 22. “The Fiscal Fig Leaf, Removed,” New York Times, July 8, 1986. 23. Francisco Toro, “A Pantomime of Justice,” New York Times, July 15, 2012. 24. Martin Fackler, “Japan’s Leaders, Pressed by Public, Fret as Nuclear Shutdown Nears,” New York Times, May 3, 2012. 25. Stanley Neustadter, “Tobacco as a Fig Leaf,” letter to the editor, New York Times, February 5, 1999. 26. “Taiwan Plans to Drop a Fig Leaf; China May Grumble,” New York Times, July 4, 1997. 27. “Governor Florio Prunes a Fig Leaf,” editorial, New York Times, June 18, 1993. 28. “Paul Ryan Denounces Obama’s Contraception Compromise as ‘Accounting Trick,’ ” ABC News, George Stephanopoulos, February 12, 2012. 29. Ruth Marcus, “Obama’s Contraception Fig Leaf,” Washington Post, February 10, 2012.

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30. Stephen White, “The Emperor’s New Fig Leaf,” http://www .catholicvote.org /discuss. 31. Lee Siegel, “Who Ruined the Humanities?” Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2013. 32. Breitbart Feed, February 7, 2013; June 19, 2013; June 20, 2013; June 23, 2013. 33. “As Rich Nations Turn Their Backs,” editorial, The New York Times, May 28, 2016. 34. Here is the full quote: “I suggest, based on the above numbers, that FISA is a fig leaf used to cover the almost absolute power of the United States government to listen in on any conversation it wants to. It may be possible to invent another fig leaf that would have the power to reject drone strikes, but I can’t imagine that the new court would be any more than a fig leaf. . . . If in the end it makes Americans, Republicans and Democrats, happy to find another fig leaf to make us all feel more virtuous, so be it. But based on FISA’s record, it’s not going to make any difference, after all, a fig leaf is still a fig leaf.” Reese Schonfeld, “A New FISA Court, a New Fig Leaf,” Huffington Post, February 15, 2012. 35. Maureen Dowd, “Who Do You Trust?” The New York Times, September 10, 2103. 36. http://thepeoplescube.com /peoples-blog/obama-with-unbelievably -small-figleaf-sculpture-by-putin-t11637.html 37. David Frum, “Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Political Parties,” The Daily Beast, October 8, 2013. 38. Brian Beutler, “The Humiliated, Bizarre Republican Party: What Happens Next,” Salon, October 1, 2013. 39. Brian Beutler, “GOP’s huge Tea Party mess has only just begun,” Salon, October 17, 2013. 40. William Safire, “Transparent Fig Leaf,” New York Times, May 3, 1979. 41. Robert Shrum, “As GOP Sinks Plan B, Obama Should Tune Out His Own Party’s Doubters,” The Daily Beast, Dec 2, 2012. 42. Hendrik Hertzberg, “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, October 21, 2013, 28. 43. Artemis Cooper, discussing her biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor (Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure) in William Grimes, “Mapping a Life, and Finishing a Long Trip,” The New York Times, November 8, 2013. 44. Linda Greenhouse, “With All Due Deference,” The New York Times, July 23, 2014. For “the mountain gave birth to a mouse,” see Aesop’s Fables, Horace’s Ars Poetica, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and a number of more modern citations from Byron to Thomas Nast.

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45. Sean Tipton, quoted in Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Bush Vetoes Measure on Stem Cell Research,” New York Times, June 21, 2007. 5. baggage screening 1. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1998), 393. 2. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 393. 3. This definition, from a website called Englishbaby.com, is coincidentally very close to Stekel’s. When I looked it up, the site carried on the same page (again coincidentally?) an advertisement from Luggage Forward, the door-to-door shipping service. The OED gives this figurative definition of “baggage” as: “Beliefs, knowledge, experiences, or habits conceived of as something one carries around; (in later use) esp. characteristics of this type which are considered undesirable or inappropriate in a new situation. Freq. with modifying word, as cultural baggage, emotional baggage, intellectual baggage, etc.” OED “baggage,” draft additions, 2007. 4. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 143n. 5. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 564. 6. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 13–14. 7. Freud wrote the following to Pastor Oskar Pfister on January 27, 1920: “This afternoon we received the news that our sweet Sophie in Hamburg had been snatched away by influenzal pneumonia, snatched away in the midst of glowing health, from a full and active life as a competent mother and loving wife, all in four or five days, as though she had never existed. Although we had been worried about her for a couple of days, we had nevertheless been hopeful; it is so difficult to judge from a distance. And this distance must remain distance; we were not able to travel at once, as we had intended, after the first alarming news; there was no train, not even for an emergency. The undisguised brutality of our time is weighing heavily upon us. Tomorrow she is to be cremated, our poor Sunday child! . . . Sophie leaves two sons, one of six, the other thirteen months, and an inconsolable husband who will have to pay dearly for the happiness of these seven years. The happiness existed exclusively within them; outwardly there was war, conscription, wounds, the depletion of their resources, but they had remained courageous and gay. I work as much as I can, and am thankful for the diversion. The loss of a child seems to be a serious, narcissistic injury; what is known as mourning will probably follow only later.” Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernest L. Freud (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1992), 327–28. 8. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 16n.

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9. On October 15, 1926, Freud wrote to Ludwig Binswanger, “For me, that child took the place of all my children and other grandchildren, and since then, since Heinele’s death, I have no longer cared for my grandchildren, but find no enjoyment in life either. This is also the secret of my indifference—it has been called courage—towards the threat to my own life” (The Sigmund Freud-Ludwig Binswanger Correspondence, ed. Gerhardt Fichtner, trans, Arnold J. Pomerans [New York: Other Press, 2003], 184). On March 11, 1928, he returned to the subject in a letter to Ernest Jones: “Sophie was a dear daughter, to be sure, but not a child. It was only three years later, in June 1923, when little Heinele died, that I became tired of life permanently.” (The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernst Jones, Vol. 1, ed. R. Andrew Paskauskas [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], 643.) 10. Daniel Benveniste, “Obituary: W. Ernest Freud (1914 –2008). International Psychoanalyis: News Magazine of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Vol. 17, December 2008. 11. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919), in Studies in Parapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 19–60. 12. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1964), trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 83. 13. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 389. 14. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 388. 6. identity theft 1. Email from Mahzarin Banaji, May 27, 2015, quoted by permission. 2. Email from Jill Hooley, May 28, 2015, quoted by permission. 3. Email from Mahzarin Banaji, May 30, 2015, citing the comment by the course instructor, whom she queried on my behalf. Quoted by permission. 4. Julian Green, If I Were You, trans. J. H. F. McEwen (New York: Harper, 1949). Klein calls him a French novelist, and Green did live in France and write largely in French, but he never became a French citizen, though he did occupy a chair at the Académie française. She spells his name in the English style—“Julian”—the name he was given at birth, rather than the French “Julien,” adopted by his publishers in the 1920s. 5. Melanie Klein, “On Identification” (1955), in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946 –1963 (London: Vintage, 1997), 152 6. Klein, “On Identification,” 166. 7. Klein, “On Identification,” 167. 8. Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: Jason Aronson, 1975), 80. 9. Peter Fonagy, Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis (New York: Other Press, 2001), 83–84. Fonagy adds, citing the work of Wilfred Bion, that there is (or may be) a distinction between normal projective identification,

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where less pathological aspects of the self are externalized and which may underpin normal empathy and understanding, and pathological identification, which is linked to an absence of empathy and understanding.” 10. Thomas Ogden, Introduction to Projective Identification and Psychotherapeutic Technique (N.Y.: Jason Aronson Inc., 1977), 1–2. 11. Ogden, Projective Identification and Psychotherapeutic Technique, 1–2. 12. Joan Montgomery Byles, “Psychoanalysis and War: The Superego and Projective Identification,” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 210. 13. Janet Adelman, “Iago’s Alter Ego: Race as Projection in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 2. (Summer 1997): 125– 44. 14. Richard Rusbridger, “Projective Identification in Othello and Verdi’s Otello,” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 94 (2013): 33– 47. Quoted from the summary abstract. 15. “. . . pressure is exerted on the therapist to experience himself in a way that is congruent with the patient’s unconscious fantasy.” Ogden, Projective Identification, 2–3. 16. W. R. Bion, Experiences in Groups (New York: Basic Books, 1955), 149. 17. Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 21–22. 18. Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 258. 19. Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 2008), 3– 4 20. Ogden, Projective Identification, 2–3. 7. czech mates: when shakespeare met kafka 1. W. H. Auden, “The Wandering Jew,” in W. H. Auden, Prose, Volume II, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 110. Later in the same review, Auden would claim, “Kafka is important to us because the predicament of his hero is the predicament of the contemporary man.” 2. Stanley Corngold, Preface to Kafka’s Selected Stories, trans. and ed. Corngold (New York: Norton, 2007), vii. 3. James Rolleston, “Introduction: Kafka Begins” in A Comparison to the Works of Franz Kafka, ed. Rolleston (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2002), 2. 4. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814) (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 335. 5. Michael Wood, Franz Kafka (Horndon: Northcote House, 2003), 81. 6. Kenneth Gross, Shakespeare Is Shylock (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 120: “Among modern Jewish writers, Kafka has often come to mind as I have worked on Shylock. I think of that writer’s pictures

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of minds trapped in paranoid, opaque, and yet still luminous tangles of legal interpretation. The play’s grim and playful animal imagery calls up Kafka’s own half-human beasts, his curious visitants, secretive, sacral, histrionic, violent, and vulnerable—the shy, terrified and terrifying animal in the synagogue; the lamb-kitten, predator and prey, pet and chattel; the desperate, self-doubting burrower; or Kafka’s upstart crows, creatures who maintain that a single crow (kavka in Czech) could destroy the heavens. (“Heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.”) Kafka was a man whose fate, as Walter Benjamin said, was always to stumble upon clowns. . . . Benjamin wrote to his friend Scholem, scholar of catastrophe, by way of challenge, ‘I think the key to Kafka’s work is likely to fall into the hands of the person who is able to extract the comic aspects from Jewish theology.’ He might have been talking about Shakespeare in his making of Shylock.” 7. Zadie Smith, “F. Kafka, Everyman” (review of Louis Begley, The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay). In The New York Review of Books, July 17, 2008. 8. James Hawes, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2008), 55. 9. Alan Bennett, Kafka’s Dick, in Alan Bennett’s Plays, 2 (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 68. 10. Alan Bennett, Kafka’s Dick, 80 –81. 11. Steven Erlanger, “A President Loves Movies, But Perhaps Not This One,” New York Times, May 11, 2011. 12. Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 7. 13. “Kafkaesque, adj.” OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2016) http://www.oed.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu /view/Entry/ 102331?redirectedFrom=kafkaesque (accessed May 15, 2016). 14. The New Yorker, January 4, 1947. 15. The Spectator, January 24, 1958. 16. Newsweek, January 10, 1972. 17. Malcolm Lowry, Letters, 1967. 18. Nicholas Freeling, Over the High Side (London: Hamilton, 1971). 19. Jane Campbell, “Shakespeare Has a Kafka Moment,” The Independent (UK) Wednesday, September 17, 2003. Another review of the same production in The Independent, by O’Connor Morse, Thursday, October 16, 2003, expanded on this point: “Ti Green’s set offers a faintly surreal world where things are often not what they seem, with echoes of René Magritte, M. C. Escher, and the Prague of Franz Kafka (a name that was bound to crop up in a play about identity confusion which, as the program points out, leaves victims teetering between laughter and terror).” 20. Commentary of Kafka scholar Roberto Calasso, accompanying the edition of Kafka’s The Zürau Aphorisms. Kafka text translated from the German

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by Michael Hofmann, Calasso’s commentary translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock (New York: Schocken Books, 2006), 116. Calasso on Kafka’s discussion of mice in his letters to friends from Zürau: this “amalgam of the outrageously comic and the appalling—a gift of Kafka’s, like the mysterious irreducibility of certain Shakespearean verses— characterizes all his epistolary accounts of the Zürau mice, out of which will someday grow the speculations of ‘The Burrow’ and the events of ‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.’ The ‘mouse folk’ would remain for Kafka the ultimate image of community,” 116. 21. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 169. 22. Theodor Adorno, “Notes on Kafka” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 253. 23. James Hawes, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2008), 3. 24. Hawes, 3, 4. 25. “That photo, overwhelmingly the most famous image of him, the international trademark of Prague (which Kafka longed for years to escape) was actually taken in a department store in Berlin (which he longed for years to get into). It’s also the last picture of him ever taken. . . . What we now know as the face of Kafka was created about eight months before his death . . .” Hawes, 5. 26. Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, trans. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 248– 49. 27. Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977). Max Reinhardt’s production of Hamlet was at the Deutsches Theatre in Berlin, November 24, 1910. 28. Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, Letter to Minze Eisner, April 1919, 231. Kafka could have read about Portia in Heinrich Heine’s Shakespeare’s Mädchen und Frauen (1839)— or in Anna Jameson’s Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (1837), which included “a series of her own vignette etchings.” Kafka scholars might also recall the picture of the woman with the fur muff that Gregor Samsa has torn out of a magazine, and to which he clings, even in his transfigured form. 29. Jameson seems to have been translated at least three times into German, and relatively early at that. There is an 1840 edition (based on the third English edition) entitled Shakespeare’s Frauengestalten: Charakteristiken (translator: Levin Schücking), appearing with Velhagen & Klasing (Bielefeld, Germany), an 1840 edition entitled Shakespeare’s weibliche Karaktere

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Notes to pages 96 –97

translated by Ernst Ortlepp in Stuttgart (L. F. Rieger & Comp.), and an early 1834 translation (by an A. Wagner) appearing under the title Frauenbilder, oder Charakteristik der vorzüglichsten Frauen in Shakespeare’s Dramen. The first two appear in the catalogue of the German National Library listing the original work with the title Shakespeare’s Heroines. What’s more, Mrs. Jameson’s book appears to have been appended as a supplement volume to the 1839/1840 Schlegel/ Tieck translated edition of Shakespeare’s works. Whether the etchings are present there is unclear. 30. Letter to Max Brod, July 1922, about being disturbed when writing in the early morning by the noise of his sister Ottla’s children: “beyond them lies that chaos invoked by Othello.” Letters to Friends, 346. 31. Kafka, Entry for March 3, 1912 in Diaries 1910 –1923, edited by Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1948; 1976), 185, 190. Henceforth, references to this text are parenthetically cited by diary entry dates and corresponding page numbers. 32. Kafka, Diaries (April 3, 1912), 200. 33. Kafka, Diaries (trip to Weimar and Jungborn, Wed, July 3, 1912), 471. 34. Kafka, Diaries (September 29, 1915), 343. 35. Their names were Mania Tschissik and Flora Klug. Kafka always refers to them, formally, as Mrs. Tschissik and Mrs. Klug (Frau Tschissik and Frau Klug). Kafka considered himself to be in love with Mrs. Tschissik, and admired the acting of Mrs. Klug, the company’s male impersonator. 36. The Yiddish King Lear was written by Jacob Gordin in 1892 for the actor and Yiddish theater impresario Jacob Adler. It became a signature piece for Adler, and a key element in the development of American Yiddish theater in the early twentieth century. The plot involves a Purim feast given by a wealthy Russian Jew (of the kind that Adler called a “Grand Jew”), surrounded by his family and friends. He announces that he will divide his empire among his three daughters and their husbands, and is told the story of Shakespeare’s King Lear as a cautionary tale by his virtuous daughter, who defies his wishes by becoming a student in St. Petersburg. The King Lear figure David Moishele, suffers a similar period of loss and madness, but the play has a happy ending, in which the father and daughters are reconciled. On Kafka and the Yiddish theater, see Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact on His Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971). On Gordin, see Kafka, Diaries, October 26, 1911 and November 24, 1911; January 26, 1912 (888–89; 125; 176). On October 23, 1911, he mentions “ ‘The great Adler from New York, the most famous Yiddish actor, who is a millionaire, for whom Gordin wrote Der Wilde Mensch,” but again there is no mention of The Yiddish King Lear (87).

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37. Kafka, Diaries (November 9, 1911), 111. A good reading of this passage from the perspective of modern theater can be found in Martin Puchner, “Kafka’s Antitheatrical Gestures” The Germanic Review 78, no. 3 (Summer 2003), 182 ff. 38. Kafka, Diaries (November 19, 1911), 119–22. 39. Kafka, Diaries (December 30, 1911), 156 –57 40. Kafka, Diaries ( January 7, 1912), 168. 41. Kafka, Diaries (October 28–29, 1911), 93. 42. Kafka, Diaries (October 28–29, 1911), 94. 43. “Before the Law,” trans. Stanley Corngold, in Kafka’s Selected Stories, ed. Corngold (New York: Norton, 2007), 69. My thanks to Paul Edmondson for calling this parallel to my attention. 44. Theodor Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 254. 45. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 544. More telegraphically Benjamin had written in his notes, “Heathscape, all remains ever new, ever the same (Kafka, The Trial)” adding his own interpretive gloss: “Modernity, the time of hell.” Arcades Project, 842. 46. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 842. 47. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998), 5. 48. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, 174. 49. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 50. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 18. 51. Mark Fortier, “Shakespeare as ‘Minor Theater’: Deleuze and Guattari and the Aims of Adaptation,” Mosaic 29, no. 1 (March 1996). 52. Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 103–6. 53. Blau, Take Up the Bodies, 106. 54. Kafka’s protagonist is Karl Rossman (the signature letter K now attached to the first name; Rossman, or red-man, evoking Kafka’s early fantasy of being a Red Indian). It is, perhaps, a vision of heaven. Or perhaps, of hell. 55. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 804. 56. Arthur Holitscher, Neue Rundschau of 1911. Die Neue Rundschau, founded by S. Fischer in Berlin in 1890, was in 1911 Germany’s foremost literary monthly. Kafka read the magazine with some regularity from about 1904.

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Notes to pages 104 –114

57. Michael Hofmann, Introduction to Franz Kafka, Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared) (New York: New Directions, 1996), xii. 58. Charles Isherwood, “Just the Gist of a Star-Cross’d Tale,” New York Times, December 21, 2009. 59. Isherwood, “Just the Gist of a Star-Cross’d Tale.” 60. Isherwood, “Just the Gist of a Star-Cross’d Tale.” 61. Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World: The Gifford Lectures (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 72. 62. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Total Library,” trans. Eliot Weinberger, in Selected Non-Fictions (New York: Penguin, 1999). 63. David Ives, Words, Words, Words, in All in the Timing: Fourteen Plays (New York: Vintage, 1995), 19–30. Words, Words, Words was first presented at the Manhattan Punch Line Theatre in New York City in January 1987. 8. occupy shakespeare 1. Dave Paxton, “Occupy: What Would Shakespeare Do?” reprinted in Shakespeare for All Time blog, http://www.shakespeareforalltime.com / occupy. 2. Manohla Dargis, “He’s the Hero of the People, and He Hates It,” New York Times, December 1, 2011. 3. Josh Feldman, “American Dialect Society Names ‘Occupy’ as 2011 Word of the Year,” January 8, 2012, http://www.mediaite.com /tv/american -dialect-society-names-occupy-as-2011-word-of-the-year/. Bob Garfield, “How Occupy occupied our lexicon,” The Guardian, January 10, 2012. 4. Ben Jonson, “Discoveries,” in Jonson, The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (London and New York: Penguin, 1975; 1996), 420. 5. Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1996), 8. 6. Hilda M. Hulme suggests this connection in her Explorations in Shakespeare’s Language (New York: Longmans, 1982), 124. I am grateful to Casey Charles for a good conversation on this topic. 7. Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare (New York: Random House, 2009), 168. 8. The retailer includes, with every purchase, an informative brochure explaining that “The geometric shape is known as a ‘Möbius strip,’ after the German mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius. It represents the seeming paradox of a plane without end or one of the infinite length. As such it became accepted as the symbol for infinity, an appropriate and symbolic form for love eternal.” 9. Henry W. Simon, The Reading of Shakespeare in American Schools and Colleges, An Historical Survey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932), 46.

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Notes to pages 114 –19

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10. Andrew Dickson White, Autobiography, Vol. I (New York: The Century Company, 1905), 364. 11. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Library, 2009), 525. 12. Francis A. March, Method of Philological Study of the English Language (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1865). 13. Simon, The Reading of Shakespeare, 48. 14. Simon, The Reading of Shakespeare, 81. 15. James Russell Lowell, Latest Literary Essays and Addresses (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 129–30. 16. The New England Commission of Colleges and Preparatory Schools, an organization that included Amherst, Boston University, Brown, Colgate, Dartmouth, Harvard, Smith, Trinity, Tufts, Wellesley, Williams, and Yale, recommended that two plays be studied each year: from 1889 to 1894 it was Julius Caesar and one of the festive comedies (As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream); in 1895 and 1896, Caesar, a longtime favorite with philologists and classicists, was replaced by The Merchant of Venice, now to be coupled with either Twelfth Night (1895) or As You Like It (1896). No Hamlet, no Lear, no Othello, no Macbeth—though Macbeth was often taught by rhetoricians. The popularity of these plays with the College Entrance Board continued through the 1920s. Simon, 127, 142. 17. C. P. Snow, “The Two Cultures” (1959), in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 15–16. 18. T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 104. 19. Tey (the pseudonym of Elizabeth Makintosh) also wrote an engrossing cross-dressing mystery called To Love and Be Wise set in an English artist’s colony. The title here reverses a phrase from Troilus and Cressida, Cressida’s rueful observation to Troilus that “to be wise and love / Exceeds men’s might” (T&C 3.2.156 –57). 20. Crispin took his writing name from a character in another Shakespeare mystery, Michael Innes’s iconic Hamlet, Revenge! 21. The references are not only to Hamlet and Macbeth but also to Cymbeline (Welsh climbing), Richard II, the first part of Henry IV, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. 22. In Dorothy Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), a local police superintendent surprises Lord Peter Wimsey with his familiarity with tag lines from the literary classics from Bacon’s essays to Tennyson and Dickens to Carlyle’s French Revolution, and nimbly fields Wimsey’s citation of “Night’s candles are burnt out” (“Eh? . . . Night’s candles? Romeo and Juliet—not much o’ that about this here,” 134). The superintendent is a rural man who

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Notes to pages 119–22

speaks in regional dialect (“I often think as the rowtine of police dooty may tend to narrow a man . . .” 131) and Wimsey is “mildly surprised” to find such unexpected expertise from a policeman with “ox-like eyes.” Yet the interchanges between these two amateur scholars, however patronizingly presented by Sayers, are indicative of the intriguing role played by shared literary reference at a time before the postwar democratization of university education, or, more recently, the invention of the Internet. And, of course, this is a four-handed game: the players are not just the detective and the policeman, but also the author and the reader. 23. As Kyd, Harbage wrote three “hard-boiled” mysteries featuring Detective Sam Phelan (Blood Is a Beggar, Blood of Vintage, Blood on the Bosom Devine) and (perhaps inevitably) one academic mystery (Cover His Face) involving the purported last writings of Samuel Johnson. Kyd’s first mystery novel, Blood Is a Beggar, with a title adapted from Gorboduc, a scrawled note quoting Spenser’s Despair, and—in homage to Ben Jonson—a precocious young boy named Pavy among other insider delights, is about the murder of the chair of an English department. 24. Including, for example, those by Jennifer Lee Carrell, herself a Renaissance scholar, and by Philip Gooden. 25. Boys capping verses are frequently mentioned. (In Robert A. Vaughan’s Hours with the Mystics one speaker caps a quotation from A Midsummer Night’s Dream with another from The Winter’s Tale, remarking, “Now you come to Shakespeare, I must cap your quotation with another” [1.1.v.32; Kessinger facsimile reprint 31–32].) 26. OED tag v. 1.c. Thus, John Aubrey reports in the Brief Lives that when Dryden went to Milton to ask if he could turn Paradise Lost into a drama in rhyme, “Mr. Milton received him civilly, & told him he would give him leave to tagge his Verses.” 27. http://twitter.com /SarahPalinUSA /status/18863040998 28. http://www.time.com /time/magazine/article/0,9171,1893502,00 .html#ixzz1nnAH1iSe 29. Taylor Swift, “Love Story,” Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. 30. Jonathan Cohen, “New Taylor Swift album due in November,” Hollywood Reporter, September 12, 2008, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com / news/new-taylor-swift-album-due-119111. 31. Earlier I listed some of the titles under “Shakespeare and” and “Shakespeare in” that are held in my university’s library. The Occupy Movement has its libraries, too: the Occupy Wall Street Library, the People’s Library of Chicago, the People’s Library of Pittsburgh, the People’s Library of Vancouver, and others across the continent. In these collections, full of political theory, philosophy, sociology, and current events, there is, I have to

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Notes to pages 122–24

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report, very little Shakespeare: thirty-three books of, or about, Shakespeare, in all the libraries catalogued by Library Thing. Five Hamlets, three Romeos, two Tempests, two Othellos, two Midsummer Night’s Dreams, and a copy of How Shakespeare Changed Everything. Many of these are Dover Thrift editions; only one of the Shakespeare texts was edited and published after 2000. 32. Some cognitive theorists have, for more than a decade, argued for a return to the idea of “literary universals”— sometimes (though not always) taking a swipe at political and cultural criticism as knee-jerk “antiuniversalism.” “Today,” wrote Patrick Colm Hogan in 1997, “there is little enthusiasm among humanists for the study of universals . . . [T]he focus of theory and practice tends to be on ‘difference,’ ‘cultural and historical specificity,’ and so on.” “When universalism is mentioned at all in humanistic writing,” he added, “it is most often denounced as a tool of oppression.” Patrick Colm Hogan, “Literary Universals,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 37– 63. 33. Boris Sokoloff, Jealousy: A Psychological Study (1947), used as an epigraph for David Buss, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (New York: The Free Press, 2000), 1. 34. David Buss, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (New York: The Free Press, 2000). For example, “Men value sexual fidelity in a partner, for any infidelity on a woman’s part puts her mate’s paternity at risk,” 51. 35. Matthew L. Jockers, “On Distant Reading and Macroanalysis,” July 1, 2011. http://www.matthewjockers.net /2011/07/01/on-distant-reading -and-m acroanalysis. 36. Franco Moretti, “Network Theory, Plot Analysis.” Literary Lab website, May 1, 2011, 11. Previously published in a slightly abbreviated form in New Left Revie 68, March–April 2011. Moretti acknowledged that because “the machine-gathering of the data, essential to large-scale quantification, was not yet a realistic possibility” his essay had “drifted from quantification to the qualitative analysis of plot,” and that he didn’t really need network theory in order to analyze the plot of Hamlet or the roles of Horatio and the State. What he liked was the element of “visualization: the possibility of extracting characters and interactions from a dramatic structure, and turning them into a set of signs that I could see at a glance, in a two-dimensional space.” Kathryn Schulz, writing in the New York Times, noted that it was not a surprise to learn from this diagram of plot networks that the “protagonist” of the play, the character who has the smallest average degree of separation from the others (what Moretti calls “the center of the network”), is Hamlet. Kathryn Schulz, “What Is Distant Reading,” New York Times, June 24, 2011.

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Notes to pages 124 –29

37. Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, “Acknowledgments,” Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), viii. The title page offers an epigraph from Hamlet: And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, With windlasses and with assays of bias, By indirections find directions out. (Hamlet, 2.I.64) And the acknowledgments thank her team: To my two successive secretaries, Miss M. A. Cullis and Miss Agnes Latham, I owe a great debt. If the facts in this book are accurate and the statistics to be relied on, as I believe they are, it is owing in large measure to their patient and careful work in sorting, checking, counting, classifying and cross-referencing my card catalogue of the images of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. I am also indebted to Miss Lois Latham for her expert copying and drafting of some of my charts.

38. From the Literary Lab website: “The Stanford Literary Lab discusses, designs, and pursues literary research of a digital and quantitative nature. . . . Typically, our research takes the form of a group ‘experiment,’ and extends over a period of one or two years . . . At the Lab, all research is collaborative, even when the outcome ends up having a single author.” 39. Alan Moore, “Viewpoint: V for Vendetta and the Rise of Anonymous,” BBC News, March 8, 2012, http://www.bbc.com /news/technology -16968689. 9. shakespeare 451 1. Kira Hamman, “Why STEM Should Care About the Humanities,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 12, 2013, http://chronicle.com /blogs/ conversation /2013/04/12/why-stem-should-care-about-the-humanities/. 2. Marjorie Garber, “The Shakespeare Brand,” in Loaded Words (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 81. 3. Dominic Dromgoole, interview by Jeffrey Brown, “All the World’s a Stage at Shakespeare’s 450th Anniversary,” PBS NewsHour, April 25, 2014, http://www.pbs.org/video/2365232743. 4. “Shakespeare’s the Thing,” exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library, January 18–June 15, 2014. Curated by Georgianna Ziegler. 5. http://www.theguardian.com /travel/2014/april17/the-best-of -shakespeares-450th-birthday-celebrations 6. Benjamin Solomon, “25 Selfies You Have to Take This Year,” Travel and Leisure, March 2014.

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Notes to pages 130 –32

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7. Jonathan R. Eller, “The Story of Fahrenheit 451,” in Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Simon & Schuster, Reissue Edition, 2013), 166 –67. 8. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, orig. pub. 1953 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 102. 9. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 145. 10. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 143. 11. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 145. 12. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 146. 13. Erich Auerbach, compelled to leave Nazi Germany in 1936, wrote Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, between 1942 and 1945, when he lived in Istanbul, without the aid of periodicals and reliable critical editions, which explains, as he says, the absence of notes in his book. But as he also observes, it is “quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library” because if he had done all the responsible research on so many subjects he might “never have reached the point of writing.” Mimesis was originally published in Switzerland in 1946; the first English language edition, as it happens, appeared in the same year as Fahrenheit 451. Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), 492. 14. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451. 15. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 52. 16. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 104 17. Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 216. 18. “Ike, Milton, and the McCarthy Battle,” http://www.eisenhower memorial.org/stories/Ike-Milton-McCarthy.htm , Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission. 19. “Burning Books in New Mexico,” New York Times, January 1, 2002. Stand-alone photograph with caption. See also letters to the editor on this topic, January 2 and 3, 2003. In 1948, six hundred school children in Spencer, West Virginia, gathered around a bonfire and tossed in 2,000 comic books they had been collecting, while a thirteen-year-old boy recited: “Believing that comic books are mentally, physically, and morally injurious to boys and girls, we propose to burn those in our possession. We also pledge ourselves to try not to read any more.” “1948: Book Burning: In Our Pages: 100, 75, and 50 Years Ago,” New York Times, October 27, 1998. 20. Of the Arnold book Bradbury writes, The book turned and fought, like some small white animal caught within the fire. It seemed to want very much to live. [It writhed and sparkled and a small gust of gaseous vapor blew up from it.] Leaf by leaf it burned

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Notes to pages 132–37 in upon itself, as if hands of fire were turning each page, scanning and burning with the same fire. [The pages cringed into black curls and the curls departed on puffs of illumination. . . .] The book was now a burning torch. . . . There remained only Shakespeare.

Cited in Jonathan R. Eller, “The Story of Fahrenheit 451,” in Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 60th Anniversary edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 171. 21. Eller, “The Story of Fahrenheit 451,” 169. 22. Ray Bradbury, “The Mad Wizards of Mars,” in A Pleasure to Burn: Fahrenheit 451 Stories (New York: Harper, 2011), 94. 23. Arthur Applebee, Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A History (Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1974), 12. 24. Simon, Reading of Shakespeare, 64. 25. There then followed a list of five short passages, such as the following: Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.

And With windlasses and with assays of bias By indirection find direction out.

“Thou art a scholar” invited commentary on Elizabethan superstition and education; “assays of bias,” on a popular sport of the period. Philology here conjoined with cultural history to offer an approach we would now, still, call “literary.” 26. Simon, Reading of Shakespeare, 85. O. W. Firkins, Cyrus Northrop (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1925), 222. 27. Firkins, Cyrus Northrop, 222f. 28. Simon, Reading of Shakespeare, 87. 29. Murray Edward Poole, A Story Historical of Cornell University (Ithaca: Cayuga Press, 1916), xx. 30. See “Ovid, Now and Then,” in this volume. 31. From “George Lyman Kittredge—a Harvard Saga,” by “One of His Students.” Harvard Alumni Bulletin, November 6, 1936, 188–96. In Clyde Kenneth Hyder, George Lyman Kittredge, Teacher and Scholar (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1962), 44. 32. Hyder, George Lyman Kittredge, 44. 33. Rollo W. Brown, “ ‘Kitty’ of Harvard,” The Atlantic Monthly, October 1948, 65. 34. Brown, “ ‘Kitty,’ ” 65. 35. Brown, “ ‘Kitty,’ ” 66.

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Notes to pages 137– 40

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36. Hyder, George Lyman Kittredge, 59. 37. Brown, “ ‘Kitty,’ ” 66. 38. Hyder, George Lyman Kittredge, 185. 39. To Dr. Cabot, May 14, 1926. Hyder, George Lyman Kittredge, 47– 48. 40. Rollo W. Brown, “ ‘Kitty’ of Harvard,” The Atlantic Monthly, October 1948, 69; Hyder, George Lyman Kittredge, 48. The exchange echoes, whether deliberately or not, the famous Ruskin / Whistler exchange of 1878: JOHN RUSKIN: “The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?” WHISTLER: “No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.”

Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in “Whistler v Ruskin” (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 147– 48. 41. “Harvard’s Kittredge” (no author given), The Harvard Crimson, May 1936. 42. “Kittredge Will Deliver First Bergen Lecture,” Yale Daily News, October 31, 1938. 43. H. E. Rollins, “Legend Hides True ‘Kitty,’ ” The Harvard Crimson, October 3, 1941. 44. A. C. Bradley, Preface to Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, 2nd edition (London: Macmillan, 1919), vii. 45. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, vii. 46. Terence Hawkes, “A Sea Shell,” in That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Practice (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 31. 47. Hawkes, “A Sea Shell,” 31. 48. William Riley Parker, writing from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, credited four other factors in the rise of English over the classics: the impact of science, the spirit of pragmatism, the dream of democratic popular education, and “a widespread mood of questioning and experimentation in education, a practical, revisionary spirit that challenged all traditions and accepted practices.” Parker, “Where Do English Departments Come From?” College English 28, no. 5 (February 1967), 347. 49. Alfred Harbage, “Introduction,” Coleridge’s Writings on Shakespeare, ed. Terence Hawkes (New York: Capricorn Books, 1959), 15. 50. Michael Taylor, “G. Wilson Knight,” in Great Shakespeareans Volume XIII: Empson, Wilson Knight, Barber, Kott, ed. Hugh Grady (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), 58. 51. “Obituary: Maynard Mack, Distinguished Yale Scholar and Literature Teacher,” The Yale Daily News, March 19, 2001.

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Notes to pages 140 – 43

52. Lawrence V. Ryan, George F. Sensabaugh, John Loftis, “Memorial Resolution on Virgil Keeble Whitaker, Stanford University,” Historical Society, Stanford University. 53. Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), Ix. 54. Goddard, Meaning of Shakespeare, x. 55. Goddard, Meaning of Shakespeare, vii. The spirit of the “atomic age” was also cited by G. Wilson Knight, who was not only a literary critic and university professor but also an actor, a theatrical director, and a famously effective lecturer. Born in 1897, Wilson Knight taught at the University of Leeds from 1946 until his retirement in 1962, but his writing career went on for another two-plus decades. In a 1947 preface to his landmark work, The Wheel of Fire (1930), he explains that he has long “felt a certain similarity” between what he had been calling “poetic interpretation” and “what I vaguely understood by the theory of Einstein,” adding that the theory of relativity seemed to “shift emphasis from individual entities to their observable ‘relationships,’ ” which is what he had tried to do in his early essays on Hamlet. Furthermore, he continued, his own investigations, like that of Einstein, had led him to speak in terms of a “space-time unity,” or space-time relationship, as, for example, between spatial atmosphere and plot-sequence. My guess is that physicists would find these analogies less helpful than literary critics. (Some years later, Norman Rabkin offered another such atomic age comparison in his work on complementarity.) But the point at issue isn’t really whether the analogy is true, or even whether it works, but rather whether it’s a spur to associative thinking and bold imagination. 56. G. Wilson Knight, “Prefatory Note,” Wheel of Fire, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge Classics, 2001), xiii. 57. Wilson Knight, Wheel of Fire, xiii. 58. Taylor, “Knight,” 72. 59. The New York Times, September 27, 1946. Cited in W. H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Kirsch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), ix. 60. A Natural Perspective (1965) (from the 1963 Bampton Lectures at Columbia), Fools of Time (1967) (from the 1966 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto), The Myth of Deliverance (1983) (from the 1981 Tamblyn lectures at the University of Western Ontario). 61. John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart (London: Murray and Whittaker, 1837) 2: 294, cited in OED Shakespearian B.n). 62. New York Herald, September 19, 1874. 63. Daily Telegraph, March 8, 1971, 10.

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Notes to pages 143– 47

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64. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 79. 65. Shakespeare Association of America, www.shakespeareasssociation .org. 66. Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, http://shakespeare-gesellschaft .de/en /society/others/international.html. 67. WSC (World Shakespeare Congress) History, http://www.wsc2016 .info/about /history-of-the-world-shakespeare-congress. In Japan, a Shakespeare Association was founded in 1929 by a group of scholars, including the translator of Shakespeare’s complete works into Japanese, with the objective of promoting amicable Anglo-Japanese relations. These goals “suffered a serious setback” in the 1930s and with the onset of World War II, and the activities of the organization came to a standstill. A new start was made in 1961 with the renamed “Shakespeare Society of Japan,” which hosted a World Shakespeare Congress in 1991 and today describes itself as promoting “academic exchange among Japanese Shakespeareans” and partnerships with researchers abroad (Shakespeare Society of Japan, http://www.s-sj.org /?page_id=1048&lang=en). A comparable (re)formational history is found in The Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft (German Shakespeare Society), one of the oldest of the national Shakespeare societies, which was founded in 1864. In 1963, during the Cold War, the organization split into two, one located in East Germany and the other in West Germany, and this division remained in place for thirty years (http://shakespeare-gesellschaft.de/en.html). In China a similar political setback was encountered when the Shakespeare Association of China, founded in 1984, was shut down in 2003 after allegations that it violated bureaucratic regulations. A recent reorganization was marked by a Shakespeare conference in Beijing in 2013. An Asian Shakespeare Association, holding conferences biennially in a range of Asian locations, has also set up shop. 68. British Shakespeare Association, http://www.britishshakespeare.ws. 69. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1996), 80. 70. Craig Lambert, “Twilight of the Lecture,” Harvard Magazine, March–April 2012, http://harvardmagazine.com /2012/03/twilight-of-the -lecture. 71. Marjorie Garber, “After the Humanities,” in Loaded Words (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 180 –204. 72. Theodor W. Adorno, “Taboos on the Teaching Vocation” (1965) in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 182–83

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Notes to pages 147–52

73. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964), Critical Edition, ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Berkeley: Gingko Press, 2003), 40. 74. Lynne V. Cheney, Humanities in America: A Report to the President, the Congress, and the American People (Washington DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1988), 32. 75. George Levine, Peter Brooks, Jonathan Culler, Marjorie Garber, E. Ann Kaplan, Catharine R. Stimpson, Speaking for the Humanities (ACLS Occasional Paper No. 7) (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1989), 5–8. 76. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series, ed. Keir Elam (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 5.1.294 –95.

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index

adaptation: metamorphosis and, 23–24; Ovid and, 23; universal psychology and, 22–23 adaptive storytelling, 28 Adelman, Carol, 149 Adelman, Janet, 84 Adelman, Ken, 149 Adler, Mortimer J., 51 Adorno, Theodor, 94, 100, 106; “Taboos on the Teaching Vocation,” 147 aesthetic appreciation, 41– 42 allusions, 18, 47; digital analysis and, 46 – 47; Hollander, John, 48; readership levels and, 48 Anonymous (activists), 125 Anonymous (film), 125 anthropology: ethnohistory and, 6; Frazer and, 15–18, 26, 29, 31; the humanities and, 14; Malinowski on, 15–16, 26, 29; Ovid and, 14 anxiety: of affiliation, 40; of influence, 32–33, 45, 56 –57 Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History, 4 –5 archetypes, 18; Jung and, 18; literary criticism and, 39 Aristotle, 44, 106 Arnold, Matthew, 52, 132, 151; “The Study of Poetry,” 49–50 Asian Shakespeare Association, 189n67 The Atlantic Monthly, 136 Aubrey, John, 63 Auden, W. H., 90 –91, 140, 141– 42, 151 Auerbach, Erich, 44 Austen, Jane, 54; Mansfield Park, 91 Bacon, Francis, 62–63 Baker, Houston, 8

Barish, Jonas, 85 Barthes, Roland, 2, 19; intertextuality, 35; myth, 31, 158n34 Bate, Walter Jackson, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, 34 –35; Johnson and, 36 Bauman, John, 64 Beer, Gillian, 25–26 Beers, Henry Augustin, 134 –35 belles lettres, 114, 123; and English studies, 134 Benjamin, Walter: on Kafka, 100 –1; Kafka’s world theater, 105–6 Bennett, Alan, 91–92, 106 Bennett, William, 150 Berke, Joseph H., The Tyranny of Malice, 84 Bernstein, Leonard, 43 Bersani, Leo, 85 Bion, Wilfred, 79, 85 Blair, Hugh, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 114 –15 Blake, Nicholas, 119 Blau, Herbert, 103 Bloom, Allan, 150 Bloom, Harold, 32–33, 142; Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism, 43; The Anatomy of Influence, 36; The Anxiety of Influence, 34 –35, 36, 45, 142; Bate and, 34 –35; Frye and, 38–39; influence and, 36 –37; melancholy and, 36; The School of The Western Canon, 51–53; Wimsatt and, 36 Boehner, John, 69 Bonnell, Victoria, and Lynn Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn, 2 Booth, Wayne, 44 Borges, Jorge Luis, 17; Kafka and, 95–96 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2, 4

191

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192 Boyd, Brian, 23 Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451, 130 –33; “The Exiles,” 133; “The Mad Wizards of Mars,” 133, 152 Bradley, A. C., Shakespearean Tragedy, 116, 138– 40 Brod, Max, 89, 91–92, 95, 99, 106 Brooks, Cleanth, 41– 42 Brower, Reuben, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion, 47 Brown, Rollo Walter, 136 Brown, Scott, 65 Burke, Kenneth, 2, 18, 52 Burton, Robert, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1, 36 Bush, George W., 69, 71 Buss, David, 26, 124 Byles, Joan Montgomery, “Psychoanalysis and War: The Superego and Projective Identification,” 84 Calasso, Roberto, 93, 176n20 Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 18–19 Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus, 18 capping, 120 Carr, Glyn, 119 Carter, Jimmy, 65, 69 Cavell, Stanley, 8 censors, fig leaves and, 60 –61 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 48– 49, 51, 113, 115, 124, 134 –36, 138 Cheney, Lynne, Humanities in America, 150 –51 Child, Frances James, 134; Harvard Shakespeare course and, 115–16 Christie, Chris, 68 close reading, 39; Moretti on, 53–55 Copeland, Charles Townsend, 136 Cornell University, 129, 135 Corngold, Stanley, 91 Corson, Hiram, 135 Cosmides, Leah, 26 Crispin, Edmund, Love Lies Bleeding, 118–19 Cross, Amanda, 119 Cross, Wilbur, 134 cultural anthropology, literary studies and, 2–3 cultural studies, rise of, effects, 7 cultural turn, 2 cultural universals, 22

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Index “culture wars” and Shakespeare studies, 148– 49 Dante, 46, 49, 90, 116 Darnton, Robert, 4 Darwin, Charles, Origin of Species, 23–24 Darwinism: literary Darwinism, 23, 159n53, 161n71; Metamorphoses and, 25–26; sociobiology and, 22–23; the universal and, 22–23 David. See Michelangelo’s David Day-Lewis, Cecil, 119 de Man, Paul, 7 de-centering, 144 deconstruction, 7, 32–33 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 102 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 5, 32 detective stories, Shakespeare and, 117–20 Dettmar, Kevin, 46 Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, 189n67 Dialect Society New Words Committee, 110 Dienst, Richard, 43 digital analysis of literature, 43– 47 digital humanities, Shakespeare studies and, 125, 149 distant reading, 39, 124, 148 Donne, John, 48, 50 Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger, 4 Dowd, Maureen, 69 dreams: Freud and, 73–77; Kafka and, 97–101 Dryden, John, 42 Dutton, Denis, 23; The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, 28 Dylan, Bob, 43 economics, historic turn and, 6 Eliot, Charles William, 50 –51 Eliot, T. S., 34; Bloom’s canon, 52–53; “Burnt Norton,” 9; on The Golden Bough, 14 –15; Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 118; Ovid Press and, 12; on The Rite of Spring, 15; The Waste Land, 13–14, 43, 52 embodied knowledge, 131 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 63–64, 122; Henry Clay Folger and, 134

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Index emplotment, 2 English studies, 1–2; belles lettres, 134; founding of English departments, 116; rhetoric, 134 ethnohistory, anthropology and, 6 evolutionary anthropologists, 26 evolutionary biology, 22–23 evolutionary psychology, 22, 26; adaptation and, 22–23; Ovid and, 24 –25; sociobiology and, 22; universal and, 22–23 feminist criticism, 21 Fergusson, Francis, 18 Ferro, Renate, 72–73; file cabinet installation, 77; screen memories, 76 Fig Leaf Forum, 64 fig leaves: Adam and Eve, 60 –61; anatomical versus biblical references, 63; cliché, 67–69; “Fetishism” (Freud), literary wit and, 63–64; metaphor, 62–63; Michelangelo’s David and, 59; politics and, 65–67, 68–70; Richter, Gisela, and Metropolitan Museum, 61–62; Twain on, 61; Victoria (Queen) and, 58–59 Flesch, William, Comeuppance, 29 Fletcher, Angus, 38 Folger, Henry Clay, 134 Folger Shakespeare Library, 112, 128, 134, 149 Fonagy, Peter, Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis, 83 forgetting, xii Fort-Da game, 74 –76 Fortier, Mark, 102 Foucault, Michel, 2; intertextuality and, 35 Frazer, James: anthropology, 15–16; Fasti and, 17; The Golden Bough, 15–18, 23 Freedman, Barbara, 87 Freud, Anna, 72–73, 76, 78 Freud, Sigmund: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 75; dreams, 73–74, 76 –77; “Fetishism,” 62; fort-da game, 74 –76; The Interpretation of Dreams, 73; Rodker and, 12; teaching and, 79–80 Freud, W. Ernest, 76 Freud Museum: Ferro, Renate, and, 72–74; file cabinet installation, 77; Screen Memory installation, 76; suitcase installation, 74 –75

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193 Frum, David, 69 Frye, Northrop, 2, 16, 18, 34, 140, 142; anagogic, 20; The Anatomy of Criticism, 19, 39; Bloom and, 38–39; English Institute panel, 38–39; Fearful Symmetry, 38 Garnett, David, Lady into Fox, 14 Garrick, David, 129 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 12 Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, 2; text analogy, 3 Gilbert, Sandra, 40 – 41 Globe theaters, 128–30 Goddard, Harold, The Meaning of Shakespeare, 140 – 41 The Golden Bough (Frazer): Eliot on, 15; influence, 16; Malinowski on, 15; myth and, 23; Ovid references, 17; science and, 16 –17; Trilling on, 16 Golding, Arthur, 13 Gordin, Jacob, 97 Gray, Thomas, 49 Great Books of the Western World, 51 Green, Julien, If I Were You, 82–83 Greenblatt, Stephen, 4 Gross, Kenneth, Shylock Is Shakespeare, 91, 175n6 Guattari, Felix, and Gilles Deleuze, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 102 Gubar, Susan, 40 – 41 Haeckel, Ernst, 13, 23–24 Harbage, Alfred, 119, 139 Hartman, Geoffrey, 38 Harvard University, 34, 50 –51, 79–81, 87, 115–116, 133–138, 145 Hawes, James, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life, 91, 95 Hawkes, Terence, 139 Heilbrun, Carolyn, 119 hermeneutics of suspicion, 39– 40 Hertzberg, Hendrik, 70 Hirst, Damien, 60 historic turn, 5–6 historical practice, postmodern theory and, 4 –5 Hofmann, Michael, 104 Hoftstadter, Richard, 86 Hollander, John, The Figure of Echo, 18, 48 humanism, 124, 20

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194 the humanities, xi; anthropology and, 14; belles lettres and, 123; expansion, 112; future of, 122; literary studies, 1–2; predicting the future, 21–22; projective identification and, 86 –87; Shakespeare and, 112, 113; specialization in, 150; STEM and, 127–28 Humanities Indicators, 117–18 Humphries, Rolfe, 13 Hunt, Lynn, and Victoria E. Bonnell, Beyond the Cultural Turn, 2; Joyce Appleby and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History, 4 –5 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 51 Infinite Monkey Theorem, 106 –9 influence: Bloom on, 36 –37; content and, 55–56; influence studies, 40 – 42; institutional, 40; naming by artists, 57; as part of artwork, 57; saturation /oversaturation and, 39; Sturtevant, Elaine, 56 –57; stylistic, evolution of literature and, 43– 47; titles and, 54 –55 Innes, Michael, 117, 119 International Psychoanalytic Association, 150 International Shakespeare Association, 144 intertextuality, 1–2, 35; as aspect of language, 35 Isherwood, Charles, 105 Ives, David, Words, Words, Words, 106 –7 Jacob, Margaret, Joyce Appleby, and Lynn Hunt, Telling the Truth About History, 4 –5 James, Henry, 115 Jameson, Fredric, 8; Marxism and, 20 –21; The Political Unconscious, 19–20; terminological shift and, 20 Jobs, Steve, 13 Johnson, Barbara, 87 Johnson, Samuel: Bate and, 36; Lives of the Poets, 1 Jonson, Ben, 42–3, 110, 123 Joplin, Scott, 65 Joyce, James, 12, 16 Jung, Carl, 18 Kafka, Franz: Benjamin on, 100 –1, 105– 6; Bennett’s scenario, 91–92; Borges and, 95–96; “The Burrow,” 103– 4;

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Index dreams, 97–101; Goethe House and, 97; Kafkaesque, 92–93; metamorphosis, 94 –96; on Alexander Moissi, 96 –97; Nature Theater of Oklahoma, 104 –5; Ovid and, 96; photograph, 95; The Rings of Saturn (Sebald), 101; Shakespeare comparisons, 90 –91; theater and, 96 –97; The Trial, 100 –1; Zürau Aphorisms, 93, 176n20 Kamin, J. Leon, 28 Kandel, Eric, 163n99 Kennedy, Ted, 69 Kernberg, Otto, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism, 83 Kimball, Roger, Tenured Radicals, 7–8 Kipling, Rudyard, metamorphosis in, 24 Kittredge, George Lyman, 135–39, 140, 142, 147, 151 Klein, Melanie, 82 Knight, G. Wilson, 52,140, 141, 143 Kristeva, Julia, 35 Kyd, Thomas, 119 Lacan, Jacques, 2, 79, 87, 150 Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism, 18, 86 Latham, Agnes, 124 Latimer, Hugh, 62 lecture format for teaching, 145– 47 Lennox, Noah, 57 Lessing, Otto, 97 Lethem, Jonathan, The Ecstasy of Influence, 43, 57 Levine, George: universality and, 22–23; Wilson’s evolutionary epic and, 30 –31 Lewis, Wyndham, 12 Lewontin, Richard, 28 linguistic shifters, 31, 41 linguistic turn, 2; influence and, 33; postmodernism and, 5 literary appreciation, 122–23 literary Darwinism, 23, 159n53, 161n71; myth about myths, 29; Wilson, Edward O., 26 literary studies: changes in, 1–2; contributions to intellectual life, 9–10; cultural anthropology and, 2–3; future of, 10; history and, 2–3; intertextuality and, 1–2; quantitative evidence, 124 literary theory, 2, 7, 68, 113, 142 literary universals, 159n52, 183n32 The Little Review, 12

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Index Lounsbury, Thomas, 134 –35 Lowell, James Russell, 64, 116 Lyell, Charles, 25 Mack, Maynard, 140 Malinowski, Bronislaw: on Frazer and anthropology, 15–16, 26; on The Golden Bough, 15; “Myth in Primitive Psychology,” 29 March, Francis A., 115 Marcus, Ruth, 67 Marlowe, Christopher, 50, 111, 113 Marsh, Ngaio, 118 Martin, Charles , The Metamorphoses translation, 13, 27–8 Marvell, Andrew, “The Garden,” 13, 24 –26 Marxism, 5, 20 –21 Marx, Karl, 41, 93, 103, 113, 122, 143, 148 Masaccio, 61 Matthews, Brander, 135 Mazur, Eric, 145; learning as social experience, 147 McCarthy, Joseph R., 132 McGurl, Mark, The Program Era, 40 – 41 McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media, 147– 48 Medcalf, Stephen, 14 melancholy, Bloom and, 36 metamorphosis: adaptation and, 23–24; Just So Stories, 24; in Kipling, 24; morphing, 21; Shakespeare and Kafka, 94 –96 Michelangelo’s David, 58–59, 69 microhistory, 4 Miller, J. Hillis, 4 Milton, John, 33, 49, 50, 106 –8 Möbius strip, 112 Modernist movement, 46 Moissi, Alexander, 96 Montagu, Mary Wortley, 63 Montgomery, Bruce, 119 Moretti, Franco: canon formation and, 53–54; quantitative evidence in literary study, 124, 183n36; on titles, 54 morphing, 21 Movers and Shakespeares, 149 Mullaney, Steven, 4; new historicism and, 6 myth, 18; Barthes, Roland, 19, 158n34; Campbell, Joseph, 18–19; The Golden

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195 Bough and, 23; literary criticism and, 39; literary studies, return, 22; about myths, 29; Wilson, Edward O., 26 –27 National Institute on Teaching Shakespeare, 150 Nature Theater of Oklahoma, 104; Romeo and Juliet, 105 Nelson, Mark, 12, 13 neuroaesthetics, 29–30, 163nn98,99 neuroscience, 22, 30, 123 New Criticism, deconstruction and, 7, 48 New Cynicism, 37 New England Commission of Colleges and Preparatory Schools, 181n16 New Haven, literary studies and, 53 New Historicism, 4, 6, 148; Bloom and, 37; Mullaney, 6 new institutionalism, 6 “new” types of criticism, 39– 40 Nielson, William A., 50 Nietszche, Friedrich, 3 Obama, Barack, 67–70 occupy: usage, 110 –11 Occupy Movement, 110, 125–26; Anonymous activists, 125; libraries, 182n31 Ogden, Thomas, 83 Ovid: adaptation and, 23; anthropology in, 14; Campbell, Joseph, 18 –19; Darwinian theory and, 25–26; evolutionary psychology and, 24 –25; Fasti, 11, 17–18; in The Golden Bough, 17; Kafka and, 96; Martin translation, epic in, 27–28; The Metamorphoses, 11; Pound, Ezra, and, 12; Shakespeare and, 96 Ovid Napa Valley, 13 Ovid Press, 11–12 Ovid Technologies, 11–13 Palin, Sarah, 120 Panda Bear. See Lennox, Noah Pater, Walter, 28 philology, Shakespeare and, 112, 114 –15, 134 –35, 152 Pink, Charles, 59 Pinker, Steven, 26 plagiarism, 42– 43, 167n52 Plutarch, 43 poetic anxiety, 33–34 political science, historic turn and, 6

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196 political thinking, projective identification and, 86 Posner, Richard, 43, 167n52 postmodernism, 4 –5 Pound, Ezra, 18 practice, 4 projective identification, 83–87 psychoanalysis: International Psychoanalytic Association and Shakespeare, 150; as literary pursuit, 81; projective identification, 82–83; teaching and, 79–82 psychology: departments, 80 –81; evolutionary psychology, 22 Rand, Ayn, Atlas Shrugged, 18 rhetoric, English studies, 134 Richter, Gisela, 61–62, 70 Ricoeur, Paul, 39, 41 ritual, literary criticism and, 39 Rodker, John, 12 Rolleston, James, A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, 91 Rorty, Richard, 8 Rose, Steven, 28 Roudiez, Leon, 35 Rukeyser, Muriel, “Myth,” 21 Ryan, Paul, 67 Salusinszky, Imre, 38 Sandys, George, 13 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 92 Sayers, Dorothy, 119 Schonfeld, Reese, 68 Sebald, W. G., The Rings of Saturn, 101 Shakespeare & Company, 150 Shakespeare Association of America, 143, 148 Shakespeare Association of China, 189n67 Shakespeare Jubilee (1769), 129 Shakespeare Society of Japan, 189n67 “Shakespearean,” 92–93, 121, 142– 43 shifter. See linguistic shifters Showalter, Elaine, 8 Shrum, Robert, 69 Siegel, Lee, 67–68 Smiley, Jane, A Thousand Acres, 121 Smith, Zadie, 91 Snow, C. P., “The Two Cultures,” 117 sociobiology: Darwinism and, 22–23; as deterministic fiction, 28; evolutionary psychology and, 22; Wilson, Edward O., 26

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Index Spenser, Edmund, 13 Spinoza, Baruch, 3 Spolsky, Ellen, 25 Spurgeon, Caroline, Shakespeare’s Imagery, 124 St. Gaudens, Louis, 61–62 Stekel, Wilhelm, 73 STEM fields, 45– 46, 127, 167n56; the humanities and, 127–28; projective identification, 86 Stewart, J. I. M., 119 Stravinsky, Igor, The Rite of Spring, 15 Sturtevant, Elaine, 56 –57 surface reading, 39 Swift, Taylor, “Love Story,” 121–22, 124 symbol, literary criticism and, 39 tagging, 120 Tallis, Raymond, 164n99 Tanenhaus, Sam, 37 Taylor, Michael, 140 teaching: Adorno on, 147; culture wars, 148– 49; digital humanities and, 149; early Shakespeare courses, 127–34; lecture format, 145– 47; psychoanalysis and, 79–82; textual systems, intertextuality and, 35 Tey, Josephine, The Daughter of Time, 118 theater: minor, Shakespeare and, 102– 4; projective identification and, 85–86 titles: influence and, 54 –55; Moretti on, 54 Todorov, Tzvetan, 94 Tooby, John, 26 totalization, 20 Trilling, Lionel, 16 trope, 2 Twain, Mark, 61 universal: Darwinism and, 22–23; evolutionary psychology and, 22–23; sociobiology and, 22–23 universal humanism, 124 Updike, John, 46 – 47 Vickery, John, 23 Victoria (Queen), 58–59, 70 Walton, Izaak, 50 Ward, Thomas Humphrey, 50 Whipple, Edwin Percy, 63–64

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197

Index Whitaker, Virgil, 140 White, Hayden, The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 2, 4 Whitman, Walt, 63–64 Williams, Raymond, 2, 31 Wilson, Edmund, 136 Wilson, Edward O., Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, 27; the epic form and, 27; evolutionary epic, 27–28; Levine on, 30 –31; myth about myths, 29–30; On Human Nature, 26; sociobiology, 26

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Wimsatt, William K., Jr., 36 –38 Wood, Anthony, 63 Woodbury, George, 135 Woolf, Virginia, Orlando, 14 Word of the Year, 110 Yale University: authors taught, 114 –15; Shakespeare studies, 133–35 Zeki, Semir, 163n99 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 12, 14 Zuckerberg, Mark, 13

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