the minnesota review n.s. 41-42 (1995)James J. PaxsonThe Green[blatt]ing of America: Reflections on the Institutional Genealogy of Greenblatt's New HistoricismFew figures in modern literary studies compare to Stephen J. Greenblatt. His work is unrivaled in terms of methodological impact, success, and popularity. While Paul de Man can be thought of as the "father" of American critical deconstruction and Stanley Fish the "father" of reader-response and (in some ways) neopragmatism, neither has produced ways of reading texts and cultures that are as profoundly powerful, entertaining, reproducible, and thus widespread as Greenblatt's. My object in this short essay is not another description or explanation of the New Historicism or, as Greenblatt prefers to call it, "cultural poetics."1 Widespread is the sense that Greenblatt's poetics tries to articulate a foucauldian sense of power, destroys old, linear models of history-to-literature influence, supercedes New Critical formalism, etc. Rather, I should like to focus on Greenblatt's more recent works, thereby taking up the question of how the contribution of an individual figure in contemporary criticism and theory coheres and progresses to reveal a strand of the institutional poetics that underwrites and informs all the work produced in the modern institution of English. In a way, my thrust will resemble that of the old phenomenological critics (Poulet, Bachelard, earlier J. Hillis Miller) who sought to reconstruct a writer's consciousness from the chronologically progressive corpus of his texts. Whereas the phenomenologists' interests in their authorial subjects were ultimately psychological and epistemological, my interest in Greenblatt here is non-personal and, broadly speaking, historical. In short, how does "Greenblatt" open the doors onto an historical or a cultural poetics of the institution? Summary attention to Greenblatt's contribution (of the kind proffered mainly in critical anthology introductions and theory handbooks) yields largely a body of aphoristic formulations about New Historicism. Indeed, such aphoristic formulations punctuate Greenblatt's most influential essays. They serve, one could say, as slogans for what is now an institutionally entrenched set of approaches. These slogans quite often capsulize the sedimented and diluted marxian ethos in New Historical inquiry. For instance, when Greenblatt reads Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV against Thomas Harriot's Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia in his famous essay "Invisible Bullets," he aligns the Elizabethan vision of class and race regarding the history play's Celtic characters with the Elizabethan vision of the race and "class" of Algonquians in North America (Shakespearean Negotiations 56-7). This synthesis of two texts, each representing a Renaissance genre, comes down to a sloganistic conclusion characteristic of Greenblatt's cultural inspections: "Like Harriot in the New World, the Henry plays confirm the Machiavellian hypothesis that princely power originates in force and fraud . . . " (65). Plays, reports to the queen, or political documents all purport that self-identity, privilege, and power are negotiated, constructed, and endlessly revised. Moreso, Greenblatt's punctuational slogans redeclare the relation of history and texts; they serve as institutional manifestoes: "I do not want history to enable me to escape the effect of the literary but to deepen it by making it touch the effect of the real, a touch that would reciprocally deepen and complicate history" (Learning 6). And although the residual sentiments of Greenblatt's inspections might seem roundly marxian, they often sacrifice the structural investments of marxist thought. On a Zuni rite of inversion aimed at conducting social healing, Greenblatt concludes: I would like to argue not that [the] medical function explains, or is explained by, the dialectic of aggression and submission, but rather the reverse; the elements are not fully integrated, they defy hierarchical organization, they do not form a unified whole. (Learning 64) The phrase is a prime example of the commonplace fact that Greenblatt early on swapped more resolutely marxian expressions for correspondingly provocative foucauldian ones. Consequently, Greenblatt has been scathed by marxist critics: their greatest challenge has involved New Historicism's choice merely to observe or describe juxtaposable events, practices, and texts, but never to explain the causal connections between those practices and texts.2 For the marxists, the kind of "institutional manifesto" concerning the "relation" between history and texts that I mentioned above rings out as hollow dogma. And so we have the purported modus operandi, the "surface structure," of Greenblatt's New Historical program. Coupled with what is never a tired or an unimpressive array of juxtaposed cultural citations (from trial transcripts, journals, explorers' notebooks, paintings, excerpts from literary texts or plays), these slogans proclaim a characteristically poststructural perspective containing strong methodological feelings about how history and literature are to be mutually conceived and utilized. However, such slogans really divert us from certain theoretical strata running through the monumental mass of Greenblatt's critical corpus and its reputation. It's in these strata that we begin to glimpse the manifestations of an institutional genealogy or poetics. In particular, Greenblatt's cultural-poetical work elides or erases its decisively deconstructive underpinnings. This is an oddity, given New Historicism's definitive reputation as the preeminent version of poststructuralism in contemporary critical theory. Greenblatt's devotion and collective attention to "wonder" marks what is perhaps the most important of deconstruction's junctures. Wonder turns out to be Greenblatt's confessed rationale for working in literary or cultural studies. In the final essay of Learning to Curse, "Resonance and Wonder," he writes: "If I do not approach works of art in a spirit of veneration, I do approach them in a spirit that is best described as wonder" (170). His definition follows close at hand: "By wonder I mean the power of the object displayed to stop the viewer in his tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention" (170). On the face of things, Greenblatt's cognitive wonder recalls old aesthetic meditations on the rapturous quality of great art. And that is precisely where an elided or erased tradition of inquiry intersects with or underwrites what Greenblatt holds so dearly in his critical perspective. The cognitive and aesthetic response of wonder, via the modern analysis of Romantic poetics, has turned out to be one of the prime rhetorical registers for deconstruction. Specifically, wonder indicates the perception of that category known as the sublime; and the rhetorical or tropological transformation of such perception, particularly for de Man and those working in his tradition (like Jonathan Culler or Barbara Johnson),3 incorporated an effacement of the acting human consciousness. This condition of being epistemologically frozen (note Greenblatt's key verbs) or struck dumb (as de Man once had it) finds graphic or phonic symbolization in the telltale "O"-the liminally linguistic moment signified, as Culler has shrewdly observed, by the trope apostrophe. For de Man, apostrophe serves as the counterpart of prosopopeia, the master trope of poetic discourse and of linguistic experience in general.4 Wonder, a cognitive state both liminal and climactic, takes center stage in Greenblatt's most recent book, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Much of the book locates the experiences of Columbus and the Conquistadors as conventional realizations of Renaissance commonplace descriptions of wonder; these commonplace descriptions, as Greenblatt shows, find source material in all sorts of theological, political, and scientific commentary-from pronouncements made my Albertus Magnus and Aquinas to Minturno and Montaigne. By no coincidence, I believe, Greenblatt had kicked off his first attention-grabbing critical book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, with an amusing anecdote that precisely staged the rhetorical structure of wonder. He opens his chapter on Thomas More's self-fashioning, titled "At the Table of the Great," with a narrative snippet from More's A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. The little story presents the jest-book style business about a characteristic sequence of flatterings at Cardinal Woolsey's opulent banquet table. Each succeeding flatterer at the table, including More, tries to outdo his predecessor with epideictic calisthenics. Greenblatt assures us that no rhetorical trick has been spared. But the last commender to go is a humble priest who eschews speech and simply weeps after casting his eyes to heaven and producing an "Oh!" (11-12). Although Greenblatt uses the anecdote purely for its thematic social import, it provides what de Man might have called an allegorical narrative of sequentially and cumulatively arranged and emergent tropes and rhetorical forms: a succession of epideictic maneuvers (invested, we can imagine, with metaphors, hyperboles, catachreses) ends with an utterance that is also the liminal, initiating boundary of all human linguistic experience. The "O" of apostrophe indicates an epistemological moment when the linguistic self, the human consciousness, encounters a sublime Other-a cognitive state or external reality of overwhelming power and import. The tropological structure of what we might think of as a Romanticist scenario (for it charts rhetorical profusion and, ultimately, psychic foreclosure at a moment of sublime feeling) indeed programs Greenblatt's bit of narrative history culled from More's text. If we give credence to the contribution of deconstruction, we can conclude that this transhistorical tropological state of affairs exists because human language, cognition, and rhetoric, although determined by historical forces, are still in part powerfully shaped by tropological registers. One need not foist on Greenblatt's work a de Manian apparatus for showing the provenance of self-reflexive tropological matters in the anecdotes, formulations, and descriptions employed by him. Of course, Greenblatt (or any historicist) would resist deferring a historical understanding of a trope to a transhistorical understanding. But Greenblatt has always shown a marked interest in tropes for their own sakes. The prosopopeia issue hovers visibly at the surface of his operational agenda. After all, he begins "The Circulation of Social Energy," one of his most influential essays, with the cryptic and sensationalist phrase, "I began with the desire to speak with the dead" (Shakespearean Negotiations 1). That desire, by no accident, serves as the armature for much of rhetorical theory's attention to prosopopeia-from the speculations of Demetrius of Phalerum to those of Hillis Miller.5 Prosopopeia, the trope of absence that has been transformed into presence, itself suffers a peculiar kind of absence in the often technically charged discourse employed by Greenblatt throughout his essays. Unlike many other grass-roots historicists or new belletrists in contemporary theory, Greenblatt does not emphatically avoid the terminological heritage of structuralism, semiotics, and deconstructive rhetorical criticism. In Marvelous Possessions, in fact, he seems to exult in a rather dense discussion of metaphor and metonymy reminiscent of the provocative geosemiotics once worked out by Michel Serres.6 On John Mandeville's symbolically loaded geography presented in his Travels, Greenblatt writes: What is happening [in Mandeville's antipodean geography] goes beyond a shift from the centralizing and vertical to the expansive and horizontal. Metonymic movement, pace by pace, place by place, one signifier giving way to the signifier contiguous to it, curves round on itself and becomes something different . . . . In the passage from the center of the earth to its curved rim, from the Dome of the Rock [of Jerusalem] to the sphere, from the dream of recovery to an endless circulation, the metonymic has been transformed into the metaphoric. (43) Homage to Roman Jakobson? Or to Paul de Man-who similarly exulted in the rhetorization of empirical experience, in its tropological afterlife? One can be certain that Greenblatt continues to find use for structurally derived, trope-driven taxonomies, as witness his terminological materials and code tables on "symbolic acquisition" in his essay "The Circulation of Social Energy" (SN 9-12). And it isn't news that Greenblatt's whole conceptual scheme, which rests on text-context juxtapositions and mutual transformations, has superelevated metaphor to a universal heuristic office.7 Greenblatt recovers tropological or rhetorical materials only selectively. He wants to have his tropes and eat them too. I have not outlined these problems and prospects regarding critical deconstruction as a corrective; Greenblatt's work in large represents a refreshing move beyond deconstruction's often terminal formalism. Rather, I wish to show how a tacit genealogy underwrites Greenblatt's work and how such a genealogy illuminates the institutional fabric of modern theory. So far, part of this genealogy is characterized by a selective utilization of the institutional heritage, particularly in the form of partial (and thus problematic) address of theoretical predecessors and their prominent projects-in this case Paul de Man and the prosopopeia/allegory/metaphor problem. Greenblatt's attention to another prime prior figure-again, one intimately connected to the (at times) absent presence of de Man-requires further investigation. The figure is Walter Benjamin. I don't mean to say that de Man or Benjamin have been exiled from Greenblatt's conceptual framework. After all, Greenblatt boasts a formative investment in the work of the marxian Benjamin early in his career at Berkeley (Learning 147). And indeed, Greenblatt employs de Man's conclusions regarding translation, displacement, and cognitive allegory in the service of situating the epistemological dilemma of Mandeville's Travels. Greenblatt's final assessment of Mandeville's Travels smacks of the historiographical models and dilemmas tested by de Man in the various essays found in The Resistance to Theory: "Now it is this motion," writes Paul de Man, "this errancy of language which never reaches its mark, which is always displaced in relation to what it meant to reach, it is this errancy of language, this illusion of a life that is only an afterlife, that Benjamin calls history" . . . Read from this perspective, Mandeville's Travels . . . is an allegory of the text of history; and the absence of Mandeville from the work that bears his name is a figure for the absence of the human from history. (Marvelous Possessions 49) No doubt the Benjamin-de Man juncture of allegory theory provides Greenblatt with the soundest theoretical foundation for deconstructing so focal a historiographical narrative from the late Middle Ages. Yet the invocation of Benjamin and de Man-a pair of ghosts with no equal in the Theory Afterlife-calls for other polemical and methodological implementations of the rhetorical and aesthetic sort I have only begun to outline in this essay. For instance, Greenblatt's sacred wonder/resonance dichotomy. What are the aesthetic, linguistic, and rhetorical imperatives that underwrite so central a cognitive composite? Greenblatt does not assert that the categories "resonance" and "wonder" mutually exist as oppositions. But his descriptions of them suggest something of this sort. Objects or practices that evoke wonder, i. e., that are "marvelous," arrest one's consciousness, leave it linguistically bankrupt, at least momentarily. Wonder seems to involve an epistemological experience that exceeds language. It incorporates a cognitive response that might be thought of as pre- or extralinguistic. We might see wonder linked to the old Romantic notion of the symbol. Both concepts predicate an illuminational flash, a sense of wholeness, beyondness, absolute excess. Resonant objects, however, can also seem to "take on a life of their own" (Learning 172). Yet, they strongly inscribe a sense of the historical and social in their apprehension. Greenblatt writes, For the effect of resonance . . . can be achieved by awakening in the viewer a sense of the cultural and historically contingent construction of art objects, the negotiations, exchanges, swerves, exclusions by which certain representational practices come to be set apart from other representational practices that they partially resemble. A resonant exhibition [in a museum] often pulls the viewer away from the celebration of isolated objects and toward a series of implied, only half-visible relationships and questions. (Learning 172-73) Here, the definition of resonance strongly resembles Benjamin's now famous understanding of "allegory." It is hard not to see strong resemblance between Greenblatt's cognitive composite, resonance vs. wonder, and the central composite in Benjamin's aesthetic thought, allegory vs. aura. However, Greenblatt doesn't mention this resemblance. Given Greenblatt's professed early interest in Benjamin, one might be vexed at the elision of so crucial a piece of Benjaminian conceptual apparatus in the New Historicist's theoretical document on artistic cognition. One could continue to pick out from Greenblatt's work such aesthetic and semiotic registers regarding, among other things, allegory theory. Indeed, the whole rhetorical edifice of "resonance," wondrous "arrest," and "circulation"-macrometaphors favorite to Greenblatt's discourse-bristles with nodes drawn, however automatically or inadvertently, from it. These nodes do punctuate other theoretical and critical discourses, but they are especially prominent in the post-Benjamin arena of allegory theory to which poststructuralism owes one of its greatest debts. Greenblatt has of course helped promote the recent resuscitation of allegory theory. Allegory and Representation, an impressive collection of essays which he edited and wrote an introduction for, provides seminal pieces on allegory by de Man, Hugh Kenner, Michael Holquist, Joel Fineman, and others. What is more at issue, however, is how Greenblatt has avoided pursuing, in rigorous poststructural fashion, the upshot of his discursive macrometaphors. Granted, Greenblatt finds little use for a general term like "allegorization" when it denotes, say, the relationship between lived history and a concurrently produced literary text. The open declaration of such Old Historical, "anti-allegorical" logic in fact concludes "Towards a Poetics of Culture" (Learning 157)-the frequently read essay taken by many as Greenblatt's apologetic, "theoretical" manifesto for the New Historicism. But more compelling than attention to actual and traditional terminology are the macrometaphorical nubs based on key oppositions. These are evident especially in Marvelous Possessions. Here, Greenblatt's discourse wrestles with the "solidity," "denseness," and "opacity," or with the "transparency" or "unrealness" of historical or textual subjects and objects. From a de Manian perspective, such discursive manipulations require further self-investigation, which they lack here. For instance, in an extension of appealing Geertzian imagery, Greenblatt writes on how the sacred rocks of Jerusalem provide Mandeville with a condensed site of all Christian experience and sentiment. Benjamin would have recognized Mandeville's representation as redolent of aura.8 For Greenblatt, "It should be noted that [the biblical] associations [tallied by Mandeville] are not listed in chronological order; there is no sense of digging down through the sequential layers of the past, no historical framing. Instead there is a sense of semiological thickness, of opacity, of holiness solidified" (Marvelous Possessions 39; my italics). So far, so good: Mandeville's Jerusalem partakes of the cognitive realm of aura, with its annihilation of history, its dissolution of temporality. But the wider significance of preferred Geertzian or Greenblattian macrometaphors having to do with "thickness" and "solidness" concerns the New Historicist theoretical sense that history and historical subjects convey what is real, thick, solid, opaque. In the recent introduction to a re-released issue of Representations (33 [1991]), Greenblatt opts for a direct opposition between allegorical subjects and historical ones. He writes: [The essays in New World Encounters] attempt in a variety of ways to register the powerful presence of otherness--not an abstract, quasi-allegorical figure of the Other, whether brute or victim, but a diverse range of cultures and representations and individuals with whom the Europeans were forced to interact . . . . The Indians have lost the transparency of allegory, gaining instead the density of historical subjects struggling to come to terms with figures from a perplexingly different culture. For their part, the Europeans are not to be understood as allegorical representatives of monolithic traditions but as figures who are improvising sinuous paths through fiercely competing claims. (viii) Here, it's the historical, not the ahistorical and "auratic," that appropriates the discursive figure of opacity and solidness. So why my nit-picking? I believe that the theoretical genealogy of such macrometaphors probably demands more attention than it gets in the discursive formation Greenblatt builds and deploys in his work. This is not to say that Greenblatt's representations of history, subjectivity, and allegory fall absolutely apart. Rather, the force of Benjamin and de Man-who might be seen taking their ghostly, rhetorical revenge in Greenblatt's aforementioned discursive sites-warrants the same full attention as the putatively historical (and often victimized) cultural Others Greenblatt has so judiciously sought to understand and represent in his work. So, has Greenblatt committed some kind of heuristic breech in defusing (and thus diffusing) Benjamin, de Man, and allegory theory? Yes-in a way. Such accidental elision or omission might be taken as a strange kind of abandonment; in Bloomian terms, we could perhaps see it as a kind of askesis, a forgetting or overturning of prior mentors and models.9 (I suppose much more could be made of a Bloomian apprehension of Greenblatt-the critic "who began with the desire to speak with the dead"-regarding his utility for old de Manian or Benjaminian protocols.) If Greenblatt can be taken as the theorist who perhaps initiated the drive to articulate one's own institutional situatedness, his work must be held to strictures that at least try to encode or formalize what seems to be an institutional trope of abandonment or askesis. Such a stricture must hold fast in the case of Greenblatt's relation to George Orwell, a seemingly minor player in Greenblatt's career genealogy but really as meaningful and forbidding a ghost as de Man or Benjamin. In the Introduction to Learning to Curse, Greenblatt provides his fullest foray into auto-psychobiography. It is perhaps the weakest of his theoretical pieces, filled with overwrought or unclear phrases-a rarity for Greenblatt who has been regularly recognized for his clear, powerful, moving, and theoretically sophisticated writing. In a segment of the essay subtitled "Storytelling," Greenblatt recounts an unpleasant series of experiences: One of the worst times I have ever been through in my life was a period-I cannot recall if it was a matter of days or weeks-when I could not rid my mind of the impulse to narrate my being. I was a student at Cambridge, trying to decide whether to return to America and go to law school or graduate school in English. "He's sitting at his desk, trying to decide what to do with his life," a voice--my voice, I suppose, but also not my voice--spoke within my head. "Now he's putting his head on his hand; now he is furrowing his brow; and now he is getting up to open the window." And on and on, with a slight tone of derision through it all . . . I experienced the compulsive and detached narrativizing voice as something that had seized me, that I could not throw off, for even my attempts to do so were immediately turned into narrative. It occurred to me that I might be going mad. When the voice left me, it did so suddenly, inexplicably, with the sound of something snapping. (7-8) It is astonishing that this whole autobiographical business recalls an identical narratorial "rite of passage" recounted by Orwell in his own writerly psychobiography-the short essay "Why I Write": But side by side with [the made-to-order stuff of school writing], for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous "story" about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind . . . As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my "story" ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: "He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half open, lay beside the inkpot" . . . This habit continued till I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. (391) The narratorial practice, its compulsiveness, the subject's age, even the setting of the room and table seem to presage the focal writerly experience of the young Greenblatt. What are we to make of this autobiographical resemblance? Coincidence? Plagiarism? One might presume that the narratorial scene depicted by both writers is a kind of topos; many writers pass through phases in which they run through private narrations in the head. But the importance of Orwell's text must rank high for Greenblatt. So far, I have been considering the well-received and highly influential texts of Greenblatt's critical maturity. But it is worth noting that Greenblatt's first book-one published, in fact, when he was in his early twenties-was a kind of New Critical study on Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley called Three Modern Satirists. (In the widely seen 1993 New York Times Magazine piece on Greenblatt, the Berkeley professor says of the published undergraduate thesis, "Authentic juvenilia!" [Begley 38].) Owing to the centrality of Orwell's non-fiction writings in this inaugural book, one wonders how Greenblatt could have elided the British author's conceptual presence so utterly in his own mature autobiographical declarations. So, if not plagiarism, forgetfulness? Greenblatt's strange elision of Orwell truly rings out as a genealogical askesis. Perhaps Orwell's evolved reception within Greenblatt's critical production explains this askesis. A figure at first so formative for the early Greenblatt now perhaps elicits a kind of embarrassment. Greenblatt, who published a clunky undergraduate thesis in his early twenties (when most of us are years from placing even a book review), now sees (as all maturing critics do) his early work through wincing eyes. Orwell's and Greenblatt's anecdotes of internal autonarration mutually involve a juvenile phase of writerly consciousness formation. Greenblatt's coup of so early a publication might have been finally wrapped up as embarrassing juvenilia worthy of conscious or unconscious forgetting. Such garden-variety pyschologism on my part provides only a tiny view onto the genealogical askesis that I have claimed runs through some of Greenblatt's work. Of course, Orwell's aesthetic and epistemological posture, professed in his maturity, doubtless runs contrary to all that Greenblatt has come to vigorously campaign for in his cultural poetics. One might recall Orwell's dictum, found at the conclusion of "Why I Write," that "good prose is like a windowpane" (395). The notion violently counters Greenblatt's declarations about the opacity and non-transparency (back to those key macrometaphors) of all texts, all language. Moreover, Orwell's political posture, like that of Raymond Williams, Greenblatt's first theoretical mentor, serves as the leftist touchstone which Greenblatt's mature institutional locus and progress seem to suspend, bypass, or mock. The jolt of socialist theory gives birth to and sustains Greenblatt, but it does not maintain a final hold. A sliver of irony has thus worked its way into this moment of my institutional narrative: veneration of Britain's renowned, public socialist kicks off a career that finally yields the Henry Ford of the critical world. Yet there's a double irony: the mad autonarrative of both young writers can be taken as a figure or allegory of what turns out to be the New Historical model of history or culture itself. All human activity (personal, psychologically liminal, political, aesthetic) finds representation as a self-generating, automatic, inexorable narration. The inaugural Orwell connection, which on first sight seems marginal or not germane to a poetics of Greenblatt's institutional history and place, serves as the mutual figure for Greenblatt's mature institutional contribution: the practice of cultural poetics or New Historicism. The New Historical or cultural-poetical procedure articulates a kind of living, numinous "narration" that writhes and pulsates within the interspace that surrounds events, persons' lives, and documents. It is a narration always anxious, diffusive, out of control. In highlighting Greenblatt's erasure of the influential Orwell, I do not mean that Greenblatt himself espouses anything right of solid, liberal democratic ideals; obviously his work in discerning the representation of Others-witches, Native Americans, Jews in the Renaissance, peasants, or tribades-has a strongly ethical, just-minded, liberal political charge. But "Greenblatt" the institutional fixture-a cultural entity "fashioned" as were the exponents of Greenblatt's own great study on More, Caxton, Wyatt, Spenser, and Marlowe-discloses a productional poetics counter to the ethos of social and political liberalism. Take a glance at the form of Greenblatt's critical production: few would dispute that he is the most reproduced essayist in contemporary theory and criticism. Greenblatt is not a book writer per se; aside from Marvelous Possessions, he is a writer and compiler of essays. Likewise, he has become the prominent introduction writer for re-released article collections. In the market driven culture of literary and critical mass-production, the essay (and the re-tooled essay) is the climactic consumerist form. Something of "climax design"-if we might borrow futurist Alvin Toffler's expression from the 1970s-informs the topics of Greenblatt's critical production too. Again, few readers of Greenblatt's work have not been struck by the sensationalism that characterizes it-indeed, the luridness of it: the pieces in Learning to Curse give us torture, ceprophagy, and child abuse; those in Shakespearian Negotiations give us Machiavellian political theory, hermaphroditism and cross-dressing, and devil-worship and exorcism. Greenblatt's scholarly career climaxes with an absorption in the lurid.10 It was, of course, Foucault who taught us that more genuine or useful knowledge could be produced by studying what had once been taken as marginal, deviant, repulsive, taboo. Thus, Greenblatt's areas of concentration have traced something of an upward curve regarding their cumulative social or aesthetic combustibility. Greenblatt started with the subject of Renaissance "self-fashioning"-an interest reminiscent of the characterization investments paramount to late New Critical formalism; he then progressed through (among other things) studies on family social constitution, rebellion, anti-semitism, sexual deviancy, exorcism and possession, the lately inflammatory topic of Columbus' violent entry into the New World, and, most recently, the Renaissance Witch-Craze.11 He has even, at the end of 1993, effected a tremendous literary coup: his shrewd article in The New Yorker lays out a cultural poetics of The National Geographic Magazine-an institution that textually represents the National Geographic Society, the NSF, and other Washington-based organs as crucial to and omnipresent in American culture as the university-based critical institution to which Greenblatt's career belongs as a powerful strand.12 It is not the aim of this essay to end on a resolutely historical-materialist platform. But one cannot deny that Greenblatt's career and work conform to an allegory of the idealized capitalist model of cultural production at its stunning strongest. The model's economic trajectory? Engage the sensational, package it, keep redeveloping it, diversify and mass-market it. This goes for the vehicles in which Greenblatt places his work (or to which he lends his name)13 as well as for the content of his studies. There's his New Yorker article on National Geographic as mentioned above. He is already involved in what has become something of an institutional mystery: W. W. Norton has gotten Greenblatt to sign on as senior editor for its new Norton Shakespeare-a typically Nortonian mega-anthology printed on a couple thousand onion-skin pages to be sandwiched between two covers. The text will supposedly be drawn from the already published but controversial Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare (edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor) for which Norton has secured reproduction rights. However, the Shakespeare world is abuzz with confusion and gossip about the ambitious Norton project, for the Oxford text presents the oddest and most controversial array of emendations to Shakespeare's plays.14 Indeed, a cloud of gossip and speculation has surrounded Greenblatt's role in this massive project. Greenblatt's climactic institutional act-Grand Editor of what promises to be the most successful anthology publisher's version of Shakespeare-ironically casts Greenblatt as one of his own "historical" figures: like a Marlowe or a More, Greenblatt even now disappears into a cloud of collective institutional wonder about the strange and nebulous fate of the Norton project. Of course, the economic or materialist parable sounds less foggy: the Henry Ford of criticism and theory has plunged too much venture capital into a shaky enterprise-a Trump Taj Mahal, a Superconducting Supercolider, an S & L bonanza. This broad materialist analysis, which correlates the armature of late capitalism to Greenblatt's productional corpus and career, engenders a more localized version at the level of the critical insititution of English and literary criticism. As in the cases of a few other careers in modern criticism and theory, Greenblatt's institutional existence functions as a register or figure for the modern critical institution itself. In Marvelous Possessions, Greenblatt writes about how Herodotus' representation of the highly mobile and adaptable, horse-culture Scythians pegged them as an analog for the classical historian's own professional practice (127). Something like this can be said of Greenblatt: a genealogy of his climactic career, with all its maleable, adaptable, energetic faculties, reflects the negotiations, circulations, and progressions that characterize the infinitely flexible and maleable agenda of his handiwork, cultural poetics. Any single cultural-poetical analysis itself deftly charts hidden relations and negotiations among a literary text and its culture; it then errupts in a clever and stunning, normally unpredictable climax-Lady Macbeth is a witch, Shakespeare's actors are hermaphroditic androgynes, Thomas More is a self-fashioned schizophrenic. Greenblatt's career genealogy also reflects the circumscribing institution of theory and literary studies in large, for that cultural fixture has likewise represented itself as a cumulative, ever more esoteric, ultimately totalizing sequence of critical acts and methods. Theory perfects and revises its former offerings; it rescuscitates and resurrects old problems; it takes its workers from simplistic, banal, and tedious operations to sensational, fulfilling, apocalyptic ones. And so with "Greenblatt." Notes
Works Cited
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