ESC: English Studies in Canada

Critical Discourse: Problematizing History T H E P O S T M O D E R N P R O B L E M A T IZ IN G O F H I S T O R Y LIN DA H U TC H EO N University of Toronto I Every culture cannot sustain and absorb the shock of modern civilization. There is the paradox: how to become a modern man and to return to sources. (Paul Ricoeur) O n e of the few common denominators among the detractors of postmodern­ ism (e.g., Jameson, “Postmodernism” ; Newman; Eagleton), however that term be defined, is the surprising, but general, agreement that the postmodern is ahistorical. It is a familiar line of attack, launched by Marxists and tra­ ditionalists alike, against not just contemporary art, but also today’s theory — from semiotics to deconstruction. Recently, Dominick LaCapra (104-05) came to the defence of Paul de Man against Frank Lentricchia, claiming that de Man, in fact, had had a very keen sense of the need for inquiry into the conditions of possibility of history and how these are enacted in actual histori­ cal processes. What interests me here, however, is not the detail of the debate, but the very fact that history is now, once again, a cultural issue — and a problematic one, this time. It seems to be inevitably tied up with an entire set of challenged cultural and social assumptions that also condition our notions of both theory and art today: our beliefs in origins and ends, unity and totali­ zations, logic and reason, consciousness and human nature, progress and fate, representation and truth, not to mention the notions of causality and temporal homogeneity, linearity, and continuity (see Miller 460-61). English Studies in C anada, xiv, 4, December 1988 In some ways, these problematizing challenges are not new ones: their in­ tellectual roots have been firm for centuries, though it is their actual concen­ tration in a great many discourses today that has forced us to take notice anew. It was only in 1970 that a noted historian could write: “Novelists and playwrights, natural scientists and social scientists, poets, prophets, pundits, and philosophers of many persuasions have manifested an intense hostility to historical thought. Many of our contemporaries are extraordinarily reluctant to acknowledge the reality of past time and prior events, and stubbornly resis­ tant to all arguments for the possibility or utility of historical knowledge” (Fischer 307). A few years later, Hayden White proclaimed that “one of the distinctive characteristics of contemporary literature is its underlying convic­ tion that the historical consciousness must be obliterated if the writer is to examine with proper seriousness those strata of human experience which it is modern art’s peculiar purpose to disclose” (Tropics 3 1). But his examples are telling: Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Mann — the great modernists, not postmodern­ ists. Today, we would certainly have to modify radically this kind of claim in the wake of the postmodern architecture of Michael Graves and Paolo Portoghesi , or films like The Return of Martin Guerre and Colonel Redi, or what we might call “ historiographic metafiction” like G., Shame, or A Maggot. There seems to be a new desire to think historically, but to think historically these days is to think critically and contextually. Part of this problematizing return to history is no doubt a response to the hermetic ahistoric formalism and aestheticism that characterized much of the art and theory of the so-called modernist period. If the past were invoked, it was to deploy its “presentness” or to enable its transcendence in the search for a more secure and universal value system (be it myth, religion, or psychology) (Spanos 158). In the perspective of cultural history, of course, it is now easy to see this as a reaction against the burden of tradition (in the visual arts and music, especially [see Rochberg 327]), often taking the form of an ironic enlist­ ing of the aesthetic past in the overhauling of Western civilization (Joyce, Eliot). Modernism’s “ nightmare of history” is precisely what postmodernism has chosen to address. Artist, audience, critic — none is allowed to stand out­ side history, or even to wish...