Free The Use and Abuse of Literature by Marjorie Garber Page A

text
beyond written material, and even beyond verbal.” Both Hayden White and Clifford 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 modes of reading and writing. “As in more familiar exercises in close reading,” Geertz wrote 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. 55
    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.
    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 mastery. New historicists Steven Mullaney and Stephen Greenblatt 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.” 56 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. 57 J. Hillis Miller, a specialist in the British nineteenth-century novel, lists Hayden 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.” 58
    Authority in literary critical—and literary theoretical—writings increasingly began to derive from such voices. Not only White and Geertz but the anthropologist Mary Douglas (
Purity and Danger
), the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the 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 with in literary studies as well, together with others that 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, 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 authenticityproduced, 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