The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [25]
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 used 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, and specifically linguistic, in nature, and which serves as the precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively ‘historical’ explanation should be.”53 His table of contents was explicitly indebted to Frye’s structuralist account of genre, with chapters on topics like “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 interpretation naturae tradition of the middle ages, which, culminating in Spinoza, attempted to read nature as Scripture, the Nietzschean 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.54
“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 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