Griffiths 2016

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Devin Griffiths. The Age of Analogy. Baltimore: JHU Press, 2016. Web.

Intro

  • 2 This book understand Charles's "different form" as a new mode of historical description furnished by contemporary historical fiction and other imaginative genres. Emerging after Erasmus D's death, these new literary modes and historical procedures, which took definitive form in the historical novel, constituted a new technology for writing about past events and thinking about their complex relations to present experience. These techniques shared a commitment to analogy, using it as a tool that brings the relation [3] between previous ages and the present into focus, seeking the origin of contemporary social and natural order within the patterns of past events.
  • 3 This historical sensibility produced an intuitive modern sense that we live in historical time, characterized by later historians like Mark Salber Phillips as the "historicization of everyday life."
  • In the wake of the French Revolution and in response to the explosive growth of natural history collections, a new generation of authors rejected static schemas, epic narratives, and the stability of earlier typologies of change in favor of comparing and analyzing local patterns between individuals, artifacts, epochs, and social systems.
  • 4 comparative historicism names a broadly shared habit of thinking comparatively about previous ages and customes that, in turn, conditioned the formation of these later disciplines [i.e. comp lit and anthropology].
  • 5 When Charles Darwin reviewed his grandfather's efforts through the lens of the c19 comparative turn, he recognized an uncanny sense for where such thinking would lead. As I show, the intervening link that connected them -- the new literary mode that made it possible to narrate the evolutionary past convincingly -- was not literary language broadly conceived or even the novel tout court, but rather, the historical novel, particularly as authored by Walter Scott. The influential account of social history in Scott's novels - detailing both the tension between "history from below" and political history and the interrelationship of present and past societies -- drew on Scott's substantial involvement with comparative naturalism.
    • so tension between pigeon breeding and the overarching model of natural selection and the tension in imagining the Fuegians in "Descent" - all with the added complication of removing teleology
  • 6 The literary techniques that Scott aligned, particularly in the way his narrators wield sympathy and interpolate intent in order to suture contingent plots to historical perspective, gave Charles Darwin a way to imagine more flexible and persuasive stories about chance events in the past.
  • 9 [ANT] If historians have shown us how books are produced through the collective labor of authors, printers, publishers, booksellers, and buyers (rather than by the author alone), actor-network theory aligns the network of print production with the distributed networks that produce scientific knowledge: communities of scientists, technicians, bureaucrats, instruments, and scientific objects.
  • 11 Rather than a visual and experimental science, Darwin's science is narrative and comparative, relying heavily on formal experiment and those common technologies - the pencil, the handwritten note, the printed page - that can conjure the imagined past.
  • Analogies give voice to patterns that have no name...rather than experiment, these "descriptive" sciences (so characterized in contrast to "normative" or "predictive" sciences) rely on the technologies of narrative description and comparison in order to make new patterns visible.
  • 12 Comparative historicism emerged as a way to address these growing congeries of objects, abandoning the conceit of a governing system [13] of order in favor of local, comparative explorations of the patterns and differences between individual artifacts and incidents. From the beginning, comparative historicism sought to engage historical alterity, substituting studies of both shared and distributed encounters for unitary narratives. If, in Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential analysis, we still characterize "historicism" in terms of wholeness and progressivism, this means we have not yet registered its comparatist countermovement: an impulse toward complexity and difference, resonance and counterpoint, that continues to drive our best work.
    • l/u the Chakrabarty
    • a connection too to Wilson 1940 on Michelet
  • 16 The novel is key here because, as the capacious genre of genres, it was able to place the conventions of different literary and historical modes in dialogue, evaluating their capacity to disclose an authentic past.
  • 25 [Origin's] Its central actor, natural selection, brings the epic sweep of geological history in the style of James Hutton or Charles Lyell to the individual scale of the struggling individual, the family, the local world. Natural selection engrained comparative historicism as the definitive narrative mode of evolution. Like the narrator of Charles Dickens's historical novel Bleak House (1853), it continually asks, "What connexion can there be" between this variety and its contemporary/ Between what came before and after? What stories recount the history that links any two individuals? This crucial narrative technique, derived from Darwin's extensive readings of Scott and others, provided an imaginative vocabulary that refurbished the speculative theories of his grandfather Erasmus into a functional, and massively influential, scientific model.
    • natural selection as a non-human actor, or a character

2 Crossing the Border with Scott

  • As Devin Griffiths has recently shown, the comparative mode of historical thinking that developed in the early nineteenth century was distinct from the earlier, Enlightenment stadial model in that historical narrative was not always automatically coupled with a sense of steady teleological development over time (though, of course, this was also frequently the case in Victorian historiography). The critical intellectual technology of comparative historicism is the analogy, a logical relationship which “give[s] voice to patterns that have no name…[which uses] narrative description and comparison in order to make new patterns visible.” (11). Griffiths charts how, like his fellow novelists, scientists learned representational methods from Scott: “the literary techniques that Scott aligned, particularly the way his narrators wield sympathy and interpolate intent in order to suture contingent plots to historical perspective, gave Charles Darwin a way to imagine more flexible and persuasive stories about chance events in the past” (6). Through analogy, comparative historicism engages the alterity of the past in a dialectical relationship with the present. Nowhere does this happen more productively than in the novel, “the capacious genre of genres, [which places] the conventions of different literary and historical modes in dialogue, evaluating their capacity to disclose an authentic past” (16).
  • The thesis that Scott changed the shape of the novel, the publishing industry, and the social understanding of history is almost unquestioned. ...Studies of Enlightenment history, and of historical and national fiction before Scott's first novel Waverley, continue to demonstrate that many of the features we find central to the historical novel - from the dense cultural interconnection of historical societies, to the importance of mediatory figures in translating the past for a modern audience -- were already in circulation.
  • 83 For most C19 historians, Scott marked a clear break from C18 traditions by filling in the complex relationship between historical periods, especially the complicated relationship between the past and the present. The Waverley novels...negotiate the relation between history and modernity through moments of transition and contact and, in this way, destabilize confidence in a history composed of isochronous [occurring at the same time or occupying equal time] periods.
  • 84 Scott taught a new way to approach history, a "history from below" that emphasized the relation between common life and national events, drawing attention to both the particularity and the humanity of the past. In his view [Carlyle's], Scott marked a sea change in the relationship between the subject of history and the individual lives that constituted its movement.
  • Where Erasmus Darwin saw analogy as evidence for a universal pattern, the new comparative histories used analogies - between "living" and dead men, between "one's own age" and those "former" - to tease out complex distinctions in historical perspective. As an important architect of this new comparative history, Scott shaped the historical imagination of the C19, exchanging Enlightenment models of history for complexly graduated relations within and over time.
  • 86 The point is that the movement of history is unstable, the forces of modernization skirmishing with the unsettling and powerful survivals of the past. Behind any sharp comparison between past and present is a more unstable network of filiations. If might tends to make right in the long view of history, the modern settlement yet continues to be reworked through the continued register of historical violence.
  • [John] Tosh describes the premise of C19 historicism, credited to Scott, as the "autonomy of the past" characterized by discrete and organically interrelated social systems. But to read history in the Waverley mode was to read with a more filiated and relational sense of social history, both for the particularities of the social moment and for its point of contact and departure from modern norms and cultural forms: rather than autonomy, his novels demonstrated interconnection; rather than integral wholes, social assemblages. This complexity formulates the challenge of coming to terms with the historicism of Scott's novels, which fashioned history as convergence of disparate views about the past and its meaning.
    • l/u Tosh
  • 88 ...Scott's novels brought together several key features of contemporary social and historical thought: 1) that social worlds are historically conditioned conglomerates, characterized by complex relations between their material culture, social conditions, and especially, idiomatic languages (as documented by physical objects, literary artifacts, and dialects); 2) that these worlds can be teased apart by antiquarian, bibliographic, and translational strategies; 3) and that the distinctions between overlapping epochs, especially between the past and present, can be bridged by acts of imaginative and sympathetic investment: handling the objects, imitating the literature, and speaking the patois of the past.
  • 89 In place of unitary narratives, Scott's fiction turned to the complex patterns between narratives and to plotting their relations. By these means, Scott fabricated a new way of reading history.
  • 92 In chapter 1, I discuss at length the distinction between stadial ("analyzed the universal stages of social and economic development that characterize modern and ancient society"), Whig/progressive ("restoration as part of continuous narrative of constitutional development"), and Christian historicism [eschatological, which "sifted analogies between biblical prophecy and secular events" (12)] in the C18. As I noted, these widely different modes of understanding conform in one key respect -- their commitment to the idea that unifying narratives govern the complexity of historical events, a commitment that underwrites Erasmus Darwin's poetry, and his consistent argument for the analogy between biological development and cosmic evolution. This recourse to a governing narrative is evident even in the least totalizing of Enlightenment historians, David Hume. Here, I am interested less in the relation between experience and fiction that Hume provided for Scott than in Scott's departure from a Humean model of historical descripton. Hume's skeptical analysis is as important to the Gothic novels of Anne Radcliffe as the historical novels of Scott; but where Radcliffe encounters a history organized along lines of national and stadial difference..., Scott finds complicated filiations, the zones of contact, which such differences obscure.
  • 93 ...Sympathetic investment in Scott's fictions turns on the capacity to identify with customs and experiences marked by their historical alienation from our own. Scott's attention to the denaturalized specificity of the quotidian invests historical understanding with critical discretion.
  • In order to shift the attention of the novel from narrative to narratives, from a unitary to a comparative history, the story of any one protagonist - and his formation as a more modern subject - must take a back seat.
    • hence Edward Waverley's relative weakness as a protagonist, compared to the pretender or Fergus
  • 111 As Georg Simmel observed, histories rely on certain quasi-logical suppositions that are conditions of their possibility - a class of a priori convictions specific to historical understanding. This is particularly true for the conceit that historical personages can be re-created and encountered. For Simmel the fact that such re-created figures are, strictly speaking, factitious, does not mean they are untrue but, rather, that the standard of historical truth is distinct. In Simmel's view, the historian registers the satisfaction of these conditions as an "overtone or accent" of confidence, "a sense in which necessity can be ascribed to this psychological construct." This sense of the truthy reality of the fiction, its ability to fabricate truth, "provides the criterion which determines whether a mental construct that has a purely subjective origin is also objectively valid." Though Simmel does not insist on the point, this sense of necessity holds for the reader as well.
  • 112 [discussing Ranke] Historical events are not simply waypoints to modernity. In order to "show how things actually happened," then, the historian must mediate between past and present, attempting to disclose the alterity of the past in terms we might understand without without overwriting it.
  • 115 All of his novels explore historical understanding as both a kind of linguistic translation (both among the idioms of the past and between past and present dialects) and a form of physical translation (moving character, narrator, and reader across historical borders).
    • linking to Armstrong 2005 on spatializing time in Scotland
    • 116 Scott's extraordinary sensitivity to the capacity of idiom and dialect to register historical difference is only now coming to light
    • 117-8 [vernacular as] estranging standard English to demonstrate its historical sedimentation
  • 118 [Ivanhoe] Such moments of translation, between "good Saxon" and "good Norman-French," marks the Romantic analogy between linguistic and cultural translation that organizes historical understanding in the Waverley novels, a productive alliance between past and present that exposes language as an unsettling record of a complex and sometimes brutal history.
  • 121 [Another example, Evan Dhu translating "honor" in the courtroom at the end of WAverley] In this instance, Dhu both stands for and stands in for the preclearance Highlander. Like the forged artifact, he both represents history and operates within it. As a consequence, a personage who never lived gains a power and impact he never had. This has a truthy reality for the reader, both because the reader perceives the world Dhu inhabits as historically continuous with modernity, and because the possibility of his reality and his actions are a priori suppositions for the genre. The translational analogy models this configuration. In the translation of historical language, we bring the past back to life, trading with its understanding and transfusing it with our own. The reader is interpolated into the mixed nature of history, as a link between what is known and what is imaginatively made possible, a participant in historical fiction and so an agent in history.
  • 123 As Frederic Jameson writes, triangulating Lukacs 1937 on the historical novel, "The very structure of our reading of the historical novel involves comparison, involves a kind of judgment of being." The historical novel holds us in that zone of contact between past and present, a running comparison between the historical self and contemporary evidence, but it does so by reflecting on comparisons within history, a judgment of other beings in time.
  • Comparative historicism adds a crucially deformalizing impuls to engagement with the past, producing an understanding of the past as a network of relationships that, even when defined by vast differences in power, are evenhanded with respect to their status as historical relations. This network (in which the reader is implicated) is defined by an inability to cohere in a unified form, whether that form is shaped as a national consolidation or a satisfying marriage plot. Though the relationships cannot harmonize, they are reconstituted perpetually through their contact and reverberation in the novels.
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