No More Learning

IX. Steady Admiration in an Expanding Present: On Our New Relationship to Classics1
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht Stanford University
While our relationship to classics has so far become neither a typical subject for exam questions nor for literary supplements, many obser- vations, some seemingly trivial, suggest that this relationship has al- tered; altered in the way it is experienced by educated readers, not as it is reflected in institutions, which are slower to respond to change. As of yet we have no vocabulary to describe the shift; it has no name, no agenda--but it is certainly not restricted to the culture of any one particular nation. It is, indeed, the very diffuseness of this new rela- tionship to classics that both reveals and obscures this novel dynamic.
Wherever developments of this nature have been perceived in the last three hundred years, two contrasting reactions have ensued with reflexive predictability. There have always been voices that celebrated a 'return to the classics' as the inevitable triumph of absolute quality in a literal sense--something to be welcomed, as if the present were correcting itself, albeit too late. Yet others, with a slight sense of inse- curity, have asked if the retreat to classics is a symptom of the dimin- ished vitality, even decadence, of the age.
We professional students of literature and the arts should have rel- egated such trite responses to the arena of dinner party repartee long ago, since they are no more than arbitrary postures, adopted uncritical- ly. Indeed, we have an obligation to do so to those who finance us.
1Tr. M. J. R. Barley and W. G. F. Kelley.
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The point is not to celebrate the latest development regarding the clas- sics or to react with a frown. My alternative, in many respects more challenging, is to argue first and foremost that our new relationship to classics, still operating diffusely, has grown out of a change in our construction of time (I shall employ the word 'chronotope' as a syno- nym here, though I am well aware that this usage does not convey all the nuances that students of Mikhail Bakhtin, the originator of this term, would insist upon). Time-forms, as we know from Edmund Husserl, shape the stage upon which we enact experience, including the context in which we read texts we have inherited on the pretext of their inherent merit.
My thesis requires attention because the transformation of our chronotope--which explains why our altered relationship to classics is so all-pervading--has escaped the notice of the humanities. Those admirably complex terms 'historical time' and 'history' still--as, most prominently, Michel Foucault (1966, 1969) and Reinhart Koselleck (1959, 2002) have shown from such various points of departure-- carry a range of reference that crystallized in the early nineteenth cen- tury. I argue that this range of reference no longer accurately charac- terizes the manner in which our experience is shaped in the present day. The transformation has caught us unawares, caught, indeed, eve- ryone in the humanities unawares. So our new relationship to classics is in fact an important symptom of this new chronotope. Indeed, it is becoming clear that our relationship to authority, and not solely to cultural authority, has undergone a transformation in tandem with our prevailing construction of time. For our new relationship to classics seems more productive than it ever was in the era of historicism.
I will lay out my argument in five stages. First, I shall give some, as already stated, diffuse examples that tell of a new relationship to classics in our present. A brief reflection on the change in the mean- ings of the terms 'classic' and 'canon' from the eighteenth to the nine- teenth centuries will follow. This leads on to the third part of my ar- gument, in which I compare the emergence of historicism after 1800 (and its implications for the terms 'classic' and 'canon') with some of the reasons for its obsolescence in the third-quarter of the twentieth century. Against this background it is possible to illuminate a new relationship with classics, not just--as I am arguing--in diffuse in- stances, but, first and foremost, in a new way of reading. Perhaps sur- prisingly, in the fifth part of my argument I look at how the situation
Steady Admiration in an Expanding Present 201
differs from country to country. If a nation's relationship to words such as 'classic' and 'canon' have changed over the course of history, then we might expect differences to have developed also between nations.
1. A New Relationship to Classics
It is often remarked that no brilliant thinkers have emerged among the intellectuals of recent decades. This is more obvious in Paris than anywhere else. Less than three decades ago, an educated person who visited the city might have hoped to meet some of his contemporary intellectual heroes at a seminar or in a cafe? (though the latter aspira- tion always accompanied a fairly predictable, romanticized notion of Paris). For at that time truly world-famous thinkers lived, taught, and wrote in Paris: the philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Franc? ois Lyotard; the historians Franc? ois Furet, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Le Goff; the semiotician who became a literary figure- head for a new movement, Roland Barthes; and Claude Le? vi- Strauss--even then a kind of father-figure--who was to outlive most of the others. There is certainly no lack of highly competent and pro- ductive humanities scholars in Paris today, but only a few figures re- main from that great period who give off any kind of aura--Michel Serres is one of them. This is surely symptomatic of our changed rela- tionship to intellectual authority.
Simultaneously, we are more enthusiastic than ever before about new (or recently augmented) editions of classic texts with extensive commentaries. The letters of Louis-Ferdinand Ce? line, which do not come close to matching the power of his literary prose, were a sensa- tion in the French book market at the beginning of 2010. In Germany, above all, the apparently endless flood of anniversary celebrations has attained prodigious proportions, blazoning Johann-Peter Hebel's verse and blank face upon the pages of literary supplements and within the shelves of surviving bookshops. Whenever institutions offering fund- ing dare to refuse applications for new editions of classics, they find themselves exposed to a storm of national indignation. Greater and lesser classics have appeared, not only as carefully-edited texts, but recently via widely-researched and well-written biographies, too, which is all the more remarkable since, until recently, academics anathematized this genre. It may have been Stephen Greenblatt's bi- ography of Shakespeare, as bold as it is lucidly speculative, which--
202 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
after initial resistance--achieved the international breakthrough for this genre. Since then, certainly, no one in Germany has been sur- prised by a series of weighty accounts of Stephan George, followed by a history of reception which augments the biographical coverage; no one has been surprised by abundant accounts of Schiller's life, cele- brating the 250th anniversary of his birth; indeed, they are not even surprised by a study of the life of the social historian Werner Conze, a scholar who was as unoriginal as he was opportunistic in his dealings with the Nazi rulers.
And all these books are read, discussed, and esteemed by a gener- ation of amicable "young" scholars between the ages of twenty-five and fifty who are profoundly competent in narrow fields and thus avoid the Oedipal conflicts that ensue from advancing provocative theses. What can the eminent ex-revolutionaries of my generation do but renounce both the well-maintained practice of 'critical revision' and the ambitions of arcane seminars (e. g. , 'Cultural Difference in Alaska and the Problem of Frozen Traces') so that we may pay hom- age to classics, saving as much face as possible. Instead of being stub- born, and finding myself ignored, I have acquired the habit of adver- tising some of my lectures to students--in an economical program-- under the bare names of classic Western writers: Jean Racine, Vol- taire, Denis Diderot and Gustave Flaubert; Friedrich Ho? lderlin, Hein- rich von Kleist, Robert Musil, and Gottfried Benn; Lope de Vega, Pedro Caldero? n de la Barca, Garci? a Lorca, and Luis Marti? n Santos. Success in teaching Kleist to undergraduates convinced me that this alteration to the degree course was more meritorious than one that conformed to academic convention. The listeners at Stanford enjoyed what they called "Kleist's linguistic mannerism": for instance, his description of the protracted cry of a robber who jumped into a stage- coach and was hit by the coachman's whip, which lets us interpret Kleist's lapidary conclusion to a letter of March 1792: "We happened upon this charming concert in Eisenach at 12 o'clock at night. " The students also returned again and again to the mismatched footprints left behind by the village judge Adam's apprehensive trudging through the snow. Positively surprised by their fascination, when a little-known university in central Brazil invited me to give three lec- tures on Kleist I could not resist the temptation. More young people attended these lectures than any I had hitherto delivered, and they came to hear both the German original and an improvised Portuguese
Steady Admiration in an Expanding Present 203
translation of Kleist quotes with which they were familiar. The suicide of Kleist and his lover Henrietta Vogel by the Wannsee, and his final letters written there, surprisingly (to me, at least) became a favorite subject of theirs; in particular, the passage where Kleist likens the ascent of his and Henrietta's souls to that of two serene airships. There, in Vitoria da Conquista, a middle-sized town in the Brazilian state Bahia, if not before, it became clear to me that something fun- damental had happened to our present's relationship to literary clas- sics. At the time, though, this was not a change I could explain.
2. 'Classics' and 'Canons': The Shifting Meanings of the Words
What exactly was and is the background against which we can identi- fy and describe a change in our relationship to the classics? In Germa- ny, no definition of the 'classic' is more popular than Hans-Georg Gadamer's. By this definition, the "eminence" of these exceptional texts is founded on their enduring "immediate power to speak to us. " Implicitly, then, classic texts strike us as possessing a paradoxical character, for Gadamer's historicist assumption is that as texts grow older their accessibility diminishes. Three issues become clear here: First, the term 'classic,' used commonly up until today, is a paradox. Second, its paradoxical form derives from the historicist assumption that the meaning of a text is dependent on its specific historical con- text. Third, the term 'classic' flourishes, above all in Germany, despite the relative unpopularity of the notion of a canon. For a canon is sup- posed to be timeless, and is therefore difficult to reconcile with a cor- pus of classics which are paradoxical anomalies.
If the relationship to classic texts (embodied in Gadamer's defini- tion) was a cultural signature of the nineteenth and much of the twen- tieth century, its contradistinction to another definition of 'classic,' popular until the eighteenth century, should be obvious. The article 'Classique' in Diderot and d'Alembert's (1751-1772) Encyclope? die, elaborated from the middle of the century of Enlightenment, lists a canon of texts from Greek and more especially Latin antiquities that-- for no specified reason--are considered paradigmatic by virtue of their form and manifest wisdom. I shall not merely reiterate that the notion of a canon is necessarily weakened by the recognition that phe- nomena are susceptible to change over time, and consequently to the progressive erosion of their claims to admiration. For the contrast between Gadamer's twentieth-century definition and that of the Ency-
204 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
clope? die also reveals that circa 1800 a change must have taken place, which in two respects rendered the traditional synchronic definition of 'classic' null and void. Since Reinhart Koselleck, scholars in Germany have tended to associate important changes in the decades before and after 1800 with the metaphor of the 'saddle period. ' For Koselleck himself, the emergence of historicism resembled the apparatus of thought of the 'saddle period'--a period when many phenomena of change that he observed accumulated and converged.
3. The Emergence and Critique of Historicism
Since I have argued that the institutionally dominant relationship to classics that predominated until recently was an outcome of histori- cism, I will briefly examine the latter's emergence at the beginning of the nineteenth century, so that we may establish whether--and, if so, why--the historicist chronotope entered a state of crisis in the twenti- eth century, thus precipitating a change in our relationship with clas- sics. The very emergence of a historically specific chronotope, which was to become so compelling and undisputed that for more than a century it was taken for 'time' and 'history' itself, can be seen as con- tingent upon the emergence of a historically specific mental attitude, namely, second-order observation. By the 'second-order observer' I am referring to Niklas Luhmann's (1997) 'observer'--an observer who in the act of observing, observes himself. Since human con- sciousness is always capable of second-order observation, which we would call 'self-reflection,' we must specify that by circa 1800 se- cond-order observation had become prevalent in a particular social group. This is to say, from that date intellectuals (they were more fre- quently known by the French term philosophe) could not avoid ob- serving themselves while observing the world. The perspectivist mode of delineating our experience was one direct consequence of this in- novation. For a second-order observer discovers that the perspective of observation determines each of his experiences; and since he rec- ognizes the infinity of possible perspectives, the second-order observ- er soon apprehends that for every object of experience there is a po- tential infinity of conceivable forms. A dizzying epistemological hor- ror vacui ensues--abundantly apparent, for example, in Friedrich Schlegel's air of reflection. In the face of potentially infinite forms of experience and representation for every object of observation, how
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can one believe in the existence of an ultimate object of experience, identical with itself?
This problem would find a solution early in the nineteenth century which became the basis for the emergence of historicism. The solution was found in substituting a narrative manner of representing the world and ordering our experience for the mirror-like structure. Since the early nineteenth century, if you ask someone what Switzerland is, he will relate the history of Switzerland; those who seek to understand natural phenomena are urged to study evolutionary history. And when the young Hegel came to describe the nature of the spirit, he con- ceived his 'Phenomenology of the spirit' as a history. How could adopting a narrative mode for ordering our experience and represent- ing the world fill the epistemological "horror vacui" unleashed by perspectivism? Precisely because narratives can absorb a plurality of representations of experience and link them to each other.
The historicist chronotope, wherein no phenomenon was immune to temporal change, soon unfolded upon this foundation, and made the permanent value of the classics, hitherto casually asserted, seem a paradox. One of the central endeavors of Reinhart Koselleck's work was to describe and historicize this chronotope, within which the past seems to be left behind by the passage of historical time, shedding its ability to give us our bearings. In historicist time the future appears as an open horizon of available possibilities. Between the past--which faded away forever behind its successor, the present--and the future, whose threshold lay before the next step, the present narrows to an 'imperceptibly brief moment of transition' (as Charles Baudelaire put it in his Peintre de la vie moderne in 1857). The present as a mere moment of transition--as the place where the subject chooses from the possibilities of the future based on past experience, adapted to the present--became an assumption for those who still had an intellectual investment in the Cartesian subject. This act of choosing is the central component of action. The particular nature of the present in the histor- icist chronotope therefore became a foundation and precondition for action.
Here I will put forward the claim that the historicist chronotope no longer constitutes the matrix of assumptions that shape how we expe- rience reality, even though its discourse persists unaltered unto the present day. There is reason to regard the invective exchanged in the late seventies and early eighties between intellectuals who suddenly
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sought to be 'postmodern' and their opponents who remained commit- ted to the modernist project as symptomatic of the rapidly shifting chronotope. This is not to say that the new chronotope should be named a 'postmodern' one, or that the postmodern faction should claim victory. What is significant, rather, is that in the course of this debate--which seems to us, in retrospect, excessively acrimonious-- and, more precisely, in Jean-Franc? ois Lyotard's (1979) pamphlet La condition postmoderne, a central premise of the historicist mentality was rendered problematic. This would have lasting consequences. Above all, Lyotard sought to criticize the "great" totalizing historical metanarratives' claim to represent absolute truth. Might not, Lyotard asked, a potentially infinite number of competing historical narratives supersede dominant institutionalized narratives? Thus, the narrative mode of representation was challenged as a solution to the problem of perspectivism and as the basis of the historicist mentality, and was soon abandoned. In the decades leading up to our present a new--still nameless--chronotope was established as a premise for our experi- ence of reality in the place of the historicist mentality. Instead of con- stantly leaving our pasts behind us, in the new chronotope we are in- undated by memories and objects from the past. Time no longer erodes the classics' 'direct power to speak to us. ' Instead of transport- ing us onto a wide horizon of possibilities, today the future appears intimidating in many respects. And so, between the threatening future and the past in which we are immersed, an ever-expanding present has replaced that 'imperceptibly brief moment of transition. ' It is at least possible that recourse to the notion of a canon might easily reintegrate the classics as a component within this pluralistic sphere of simultane- ity. If it is indeed true that the Cartesian subject was situated episte- mologically within the narrow present of the historicist mentality, then it is unsurprising that, in this new ever-expanding present, we are searching for more nuanced alternatives of human self-reference to the Cartesian 'subject. '
In our new chronotope, the relentless dynamic of historical movement has weakened, and, in any case, the momentum of tem- poral procession has stalled in the meantime. This makes our encoun- ters with classics more relaxed, because their power to speak to us directly is no longer threatened--nor is this power peculiarly theirs. In the new chronotope, the documents of the past are present with a truly confusing variety, and require not so much preservation from amnesia
Steady Admiration in an Expanding Present 207
as integration into a larger cultural framework. And yet we hesitate to follow John of Salisbury of the twelfth century, for whom contempo- rary thinkers, though they be mere "dwarfs on the shoulders of gi- ants," could inevitably see further than their more eminent predeces- sors--perhaps because classics are now so immediately accessible to us. A more relaxed relationship does not necessarily become a more intellectually and aesthetically productive one.
In the new chronotope we seek to replace the traditional Cartesian subject, and we are therefore more alive to the greater complexity of human existence than that suggested by the cogito. In the new chrono- tope the authority and hierarchical power of the state (and perhaps not only the power of the state) have diminished--quite in contrast to the nightmares of boundless state power so powerfully articulated in nov- els of the mid-twentieth century, such as 1984 and Brave New World. In our quotidian existence we live in laterally linked webs, not hierar- chical relations of dependence. The English language has responded with a tendency to replace the term 'government' with 'governance. ' All this may issue from a new chronotope, in which an inhibited fu- ture has made the possibility of practically molding the future--the possibility of a politics of practice--more challenging. And at the same time the weakness of the practical paradigm is more openly evi- dent in a longing for charisma and direction that must also have ef- fects in the world of culture.
4. New Attitudes and Approaches to Reading Classics
These still somewhat tentative observations of our new chronotope's consequences, manifesting themselves today, make the suggestion that our relationship to classics has changed plausible and historically founded. Against this background, I would like to pose the narrower (and in its narrowness essentially empirical) question of whether a change in our attitude toward classics is expressed in new approaches and attitudes to the reading of texts. I shall offer some observations, the first of which is concerned with ways of reading the classics. My generation grew up with an intellectual commitment to mistrust clas- sics in all their forms. It was widely suspected that admiration for classics was, in all respects, merely proof of conformity to the ideolo- gies of their, or our, world. We aspired to become specialists in sub- verting the classics. This prejudice and the ambition it engendered have long been absent, both among the generation of nicely-
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competent young scholars today and in the youngest generation of students, who accept the basic premise that reading classics pays divi- dends, particularly with relation to the present. One then attempts self- examination with a new steadiness to understand where such divi- dends might arise in particular cases. That growing interest among so many who heard my Kleist lectures in Vitoria da Conquista was in this respect as typical an experience as it was eccentric; it changed my view on the status of classics today irreversibly. Those listeners had to penetrate Kleist for the first time to discover how much his death wish fascinated them. Following Heidegger, they came to practice a 'piety of reading' and were, I hope, rewarded.
But above all I believe that today we read classics less politically than even a quarter of a century ago--and experience the texts in- stead, to bring in a conflicting term, from an existential perspective. We no longer relate words, images, and scenes from classical texts to the problems of 'contemporary society' or even to the problems of 'humanity' itself. Instead, we relate the classics to the manifold even- tualities and challenges encountered in individual lives--not in rela- tion to our own lives, but rather in relation to challenges typical of life, close to the hearts of many readers. That the traditional Cartesian 'subject' has been challenged as a central model for human self- reference renders the new existential imperative still more acute. Such a change in readers' perspectives can partially explain the allure and even the academic rehabilitation of the biographical genre. For the biographies of literary figures do not simply attempt to locate the ori- gins of the themes and forms of their texts. An inquiry into the genesis of themes and forms can be turned on its head, becoming another tool for "applying" texts (following Gadamer's usage). A reader who un- derstands how Kleist's longing to die arose will be able to discover more relationships between this dimension of Kleist's texts and spe- cific questions, which may change his own views--and, beyond that, perhaps suggest the beginnings of protracted paths of argument and reflection. Incidentally, the most important justification for collecting and reappraising forewords and afterwords, as the Marbacher Archive does so energetically, is that it makes them available for such existen- tial applications.
It is possible that the level on which we apply the classics--one is tempted to say the ontological level--is currently shifting to an exis- tential domain, revealed and informed by biography. One can certain-
Steady Admiration in an Expanding Present 209
ly ascribe no ability to enrich life, as my German teacher used to promise in my last year at grammar school, to Kleist's Farewell Let- ters, or the traces left behind by the village judge Adam in the snow. Or, less paradoxically, perhaps the occasionally praised 'hermeneutic logic of question and answer' acquires fresh purchase over our new way of reading classics. Resurrecting intense experiences is what fas- cinates us today, even in philology, which has suddenly become fasci- nating again. Rather than posing and answering concrete questions, our semiotics of aesthetic philosophy concerns itself with the emo- tions of the reader; we concentrate immediately on dimensions such as 'elegy,' 'melancholy,' 'tragedy,' or 'fate'; we want to get to the bot- tom of the 'dialects of emotion'--and the temporal signs of 'precipi- tancy' or 'irreversible departure' familiarized by Karl Heinz Bohrer. Even the striking contrast (to play on Kleist one last time) between a failed life and the overwhelmingly lovely artifacts it leaves behind, can become a source of existential provocation and literary consola- tion today.
5. National Canons? A Comparison of Different Countries' Ap- proaches to Classic Texts
Setting aside our altered way of reading classic texts, we would expect canonical bodies of texts to be more readily established and more apparent in the new chronotope than they were under the reign of the historicist mentality. Should we actualize this potential and build-- under very specific circumstances--a national canon? My view is probably not. Probably not, because the texts that we call 'classic' today certainly cannot provide the foundations we think of if we talk--wisely or unwisely--of demanding from all members of society a familiarity with their national culture. It is unrealistic to seek in Faust some means to access the German identity of today--and, sadly, knowledge of such texts is not especially helpful in attaining social recognition or advancement (unlike in England, France and perhaps even the United States). I am also inclined to oppose the project of elaborating a national canon because such an exclusively national focus has for a long time ceased to correspond with the habits of a more internationally oriented population. Looking at the German book market, we see an emphasis on ambitious translations of classic texts from other national literatures with extensive commentaries--only recently, new editions of Miguel de Cervantes' (1605-1615) Don
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Quixote and Stendhal's (1830) Le rouge et le noir appeared. A few years ago, a new English edition of the Man without Qualities finally won Robert Musil recognition among American readers as one of the great authors of the twentieth century. Of course, such examples and tendencies mean neither that we can exclude texts valued as 'classic' in certain national cultures today nor that, with the exception of cer- tain wistful academic imaginings, a developing global canon is really discernible.
These points notwithstanding, there are distinct national differ- ences in the literary canon which have evidently persisted almost un- challenged, though literary theorists have never dwelt on them-- perhaps they have in fact escaped their attention. It was not particular- ly surprising--but still profoundly striking, at least for me as a student of Romance languages educated in Germany--to discover, that to establish a panel discussion with French Germanists on the subject of 'Classic' and 'Canon' requires almost infinite explicit clarifications. Such hitherto neglected national differences, with which I am con- cerned, are therefore differences in the assumptions and emphases with which one reads in different national cultures.
Until the present day, the prescriptive authority of the classics has been less challenged in France than anywhere else--the Acade? mie franc? aise and Come? die franc? aise spring to mind--where the legiti- mate existence of a canon has never been questioned in principle, unlike in Germany. No single individual has been as comprehensively canonized in any national literature as William Shakespeare and his oeuvre in the Anglosphere have been. Shakespeare's unmatched posi- tion also explains why 'drama' occupies so prominent a position in the teaching of literature and literary scholarship. It is difficult to imagine that a person might complete secondary education without at some point having played a Shakespeare role and recited his lines. On the other hand, no national canon of classics has been so narrowly de- fined, so undisputed, and so chronologically removed as Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Francesco Petrarch, the "three jewels" of Italian literature. This might be because, until now, in no other culture has the literary canon and the language shaped by its authors become so manifest a part of the national identity as in Italy. If we may speak of a national literary canon in Japan, two main theat- rical genres are central: No and Kabuki, which originated in the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet it is not the authors of drama that
Steady Admiration in an Expanding Present 211
exemplify this canon, so much as the great thespian dynasties, whose members the state has awarded the status of 'national treasure. ' A notable peculiarity of the Spanish literary canon is apparent in the status that the protagonists of its texts have attained, rivaling that of classic authors, to the extent that protagonists have superseded their creators--and sometimes even stand in their place. In the middle of the 'Plaza de Espana' in Madrid there is a sculpture of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, not one of Miguel de Cervantes.
And what is the distinctive tone of the German literary canon? It betrays itself in intensive reflection on the assumptions and values that have informed the reading of classic texts in German culture for 250 years, possibly owing to the vicissitudes of history. For German pur- poses it has almost always been difficult to locate and claim a direct route to the classics. Precisely this unusual quality has generated the sometimes rather exaggerated impartiality so popular among non- professional readers, which Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1999) deploys when he writes about his favorite texts as 'classics. ' Yet the German inclination to intense reflection seems to survive him, as it does the even more complex alterations in our relationship to classic texts that the new chronotope has set in motion.
Bibliography
Baudelaire, Charles. 1857/2009.
This leads on to the third part of my ar- gument, in which I compare the emergence of historicism after 1800 (and its implications for the terms 'classic' and 'canon') with some of the reasons for its obsolescence in the third-quarter of the twentieth century. Against this background it is possible to illuminate a new relationship with classics, not just--as I am arguing--in diffuse in- stances, but, first and foremost, in a new way of reading. Perhaps sur- prisingly, in the fifth part of my argument I look at how the situation
Steady Admiration in an Expanding Present 201
differs from country to country. If a nation's relationship to words such as 'classic' and 'canon' have changed over the course of history, then we might expect differences to have developed also between nations.
1. A New Relationship to Classics
It is often remarked that no brilliant thinkers have emerged among the intellectuals of recent decades. This is more obvious in Paris than anywhere else. Less than three decades ago, an educated person who visited the city might have hoped to meet some of his contemporary intellectual heroes at a seminar or in a cafe? (though the latter aspira- tion always accompanied a fairly predictable, romanticized notion of Paris). For at that time truly world-famous thinkers lived, taught, and wrote in Paris: the philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Franc? ois Lyotard; the historians Franc? ois Furet, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Le Goff; the semiotician who became a literary figure- head for a new movement, Roland Barthes; and Claude Le? vi- Strauss--even then a kind of father-figure--who was to outlive most of the others. There is certainly no lack of highly competent and pro- ductive humanities scholars in Paris today, but only a few figures re- main from that great period who give off any kind of aura--Michel Serres is one of them. This is surely symptomatic of our changed rela- tionship to intellectual authority.
Simultaneously, we are more enthusiastic than ever before about new (or recently augmented) editions of classic texts with extensive commentaries. The letters of Louis-Ferdinand Ce? line, which do not come close to matching the power of his literary prose, were a sensa- tion in the French book market at the beginning of 2010. In Germany, above all, the apparently endless flood of anniversary celebrations has attained prodigious proportions, blazoning Johann-Peter Hebel's verse and blank face upon the pages of literary supplements and within the shelves of surviving bookshops. Whenever institutions offering fund- ing dare to refuse applications for new editions of classics, they find themselves exposed to a storm of national indignation. Greater and lesser classics have appeared, not only as carefully-edited texts, but recently via widely-researched and well-written biographies, too, which is all the more remarkable since, until recently, academics anathematized this genre. It may have been Stephen Greenblatt's bi- ography of Shakespeare, as bold as it is lucidly speculative, which--
202 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
after initial resistance--achieved the international breakthrough for this genre. Since then, certainly, no one in Germany has been sur- prised by a series of weighty accounts of Stephan George, followed by a history of reception which augments the biographical coverage; no one has been surprised by abundant accounts of Schiller's life, cele- brating the 250th anniversary of his birth; indeed, they are not even surprised by a study of the life of the social historian Werner Conze, a scholar who was as unoriginal as he was opportunistic in his dealings with the Nazi rulers.
And all these books are read, discussed, and esteemed by a gener- ation of amicable "young" scholars between the ages of twenty-five and fifty who are profoundly competent in narrow fields and thus avoid the Oedipal conflicts that ensue from advancing provocative theses. What can the eminent ex-revolutionaries of my generation do but renounce both the well-maintained practice of 'critical revision' and the ambitions of arcane seminars (e. g. , 'Cultural Difference in Alaska and the Problem of Frozen Traces') so that we may pay hom- age to classics, saving as much face as possible. Instead of being stub- born, and finding myself ignored, I have acquired the habit of adver- tising some of my lectures to students--in an economical program-- under the bare names of classic Western writers: Jean Racine, Vol- taire, Denis Diderot and Gustave Flaubert; Friedrich Ho? lderlin, Hein- rich von Kleist, Robert Musil, and Gottfried Benn; Lope de Vega, Pedro Caldero? n de la Barca, Garci? a Lorca, and Luis Marti? n Santos. Success in teaching Kleist to undergraduates convinced me that this alteration to the degree course was more meritorious than one that conformed to academic convention. The listeners at Stanford enjoyed what they called "Kleist's linguistic mannerism": for instance, his description of the protracted cry of a robber who jumped into a stage- coach and was hit by the coachman's whip, which lets us interpret Kleist's lapidary conclusion to a letter of March 1792: "We happened upon this charming concert in Eisenach at 12 o'clock at night. " The students also returned again and again to the mismatched footprints left behind by the village judge Adam's apprehensive trudging through the snow. Positively surprised by their fascination, when a little-known university in central Brazil invited me to give three lec- tures on Kleist I could not resist the temptation. More young people attended these lectures than any I had hitherto delivered, and they came to hear both the German original and an improvised Portuguese
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translation of Kleist quotes with which they were familiar. The suicide of Kleist and his lover Henrietta Vogel by the Wannsee, and his final letters written there, surprisingly (to me, at least) became a favorite subject of theirs; in particular, the passage where Kleist likens the ascent of his and Henrietta's souls to that of two serene airships. There, in Vitoria da Conquista, a middle-sized town in the Brazilian state Bahia, if not before, it became clear to me that something fun- damental had happened to our present's relationship to literary clas- sics. At the time, though, this was not a change I could explain.
2. 'Classics' and 'Canons': The Shifting Meanings of the Words
What exactly was and is the background against which we can identi- fy and describe a change in our relationship to the classics? In Germa- ny, no definition of the 'classic' is more popular than Hans-Georg Gadamer's. By this definition, the "eminence" of these exceptional texts is founded on their enduring "immediate power to speak to us. " Implicitly, then, classic texts strike us as possessing a paradoxical character, for Gadamer's historicist assumption is that as texts grow older their accessibility diminishes. Three issues become clear here: First, the term 'classic,' used commonly up until today, is a paradox. Second, its paradoxical form derives from the historicist assumption that the meaning of a text is dependent on its specific historical con- text. Third, the term 'classic' flourishes, above all in Germany, despite the relative unpopularity of the notion of a canon. For a canon is sup- posed to be timeless, and is therefore difficult to reconcile with a cor- pus of classics which are paradoxical anomalies.
If the relationship to classic texts (embodied in Gadamer's defini- tion) was a cultural signature of the nineteenth and much of the twen- tieth century, its contradistinction to another definition of 'classic,' popular until the eighteenth century, should be obvious. The article 'Classique' in Diderot and d'Alembert's (1751-1772) Encyclope? die, elaborated from the middle of the century of Enlightenment, lists a canon of texts from Greek and more especially Latin antiquities that-- for no specified reason--are considered paradigmatic by virtue of their form and manifest wisdom. I shall not merely reiterate that the notion of a canon is necessarily weakened by the recognition that phe- nomena are susceptible to change over time, and consequently to the progressive erosion of their claims to admiration. For the contrast between Gadamer's twentieth-century definition and that of the Ency-
204 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
clope? die also reveals that circa 1800 a change must have taken place, which in two respects rendered the traditional synchronic definition of 'classic' null and void. Since Reinhart Koselleck, scholars in Germany have tended to associate important changes in the decades before and after 1800 with the metaphor of the 'saddle period. ' For Koselleck himself, the emergence of historicism resembled the apparatus of thought of the 'saddle period'--a period when many phenomena of change that he observed accumulated and converged.
3. The Emergence and Critique of Historicism
Since I have argued that the institutionally dominant relationship to classics that predominated until recently was an outcome of histori- cism, I will briefly examine the latter's emergence at the beginning of the nineteenth century, so that we may establish whether--and, if so, why--the historicist chronotope entered a state of crisis in the twenti- eth century, thus precipitating a change in our relationship with clas- sics. The very emergence of a historically specific chronotope, which was to become so compelling and undisputed that for more than a century it was taken for 'time' and 'history' itself, can be seen as con- tingent upon the emergence of a historically specific mental attitude, namely, second-order observation. By the 'second-order observer' I am referring to Niklas Luhmann's (1997) 'observer'--an observer who in the act of observing, observes himself. Since human con- sciousness is always capable of second-order observation, which we would call 'self-reflection,' we must specify that by circa 1800 se- cond-order observation had become prevalent in a particular social group. This is to say, from that date intellectuals (they were more fre- quently known by the French term philosophe) could not avoid ob- serving themselves while observing the world. The perspectivist mode of delineating our experience was one direct consequence of this in- novation. For a second-order observer discovers that the perspective of observation determines each of his experiences; and since he rec- ognizes the infinity of possible perspectives, the second-order observ- er soon apprehends that for every object of experience there is a po- tential infinity of conceivable forms. A dizzying epistemological hor- ror vacui ensues--abundantly apparent, for example, in Friedrich Schlegel's air of reflection. In the face of potentially infinite forms of experience and representation for every object of observation, how
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can one believe in the existence of an ultimate object of experience, identical with itself?
This problem would find a solution early in the nineteenth century which became the basis for the emergence of historicism. The solution was found in substituting a narrative manner of representing the world and ordering our experience for the mirror-like structure. Since the early nineteenth century, if you ask someone what Switzerland is, he will relate the history of Switzerland; those who seek to understand natural phenomena are urged to study evolutionary history. And when the young Hegel came to describe the nature of the spirit, he con- ceived his 'Phenomenology of the spirit' as a history. How could adopting a narrative mode for ordering our experience and represent- ing the world fill the epistemological "horror vacui" unleashed by perspectivism? Precisely because narratives can absorb a plurality of representations of experience and link them to each other.
The historicist chronotope, wherein no phenomenon was immune to temporal change, soon unfolded upon this foundation, and made the permanent value of the classics, hitherto casually asserted, seem a paradox. One of the central endeavors of Reinhart Koselleck's work was to describe and historicize this chronotope, within which the past seems to be left behind by the passage of historical time, shedding its ability to give us our bearings. In historicist time the future appears as an open horizon of available possibilities. Between the past--which faded away forever behind its successor, the present--and the future, whose threshold lay before the next step, the present narrows to an 'imperceptibly brief moment of transition' (as Charles Baudelaire put it in his Peintre de la vie moderne in 1857). The present as a mere moment of transition--as the place where the subject chooses from the possibilities of the future based on past experience, adapted to the present--became an assumption for those who still had an intellectual investment in the Cartesian subject. This act of choosing is the central component of action. The particular nature of the present in the histor- icist chronotope therefore became a foundation and precondition for action.
Here I will put forward the claim that the historicist chronotope no longer constitutes the matrix of assumptions that shape how we expe- rience reality, even though its discourse persists unaltered unto the present day. There is reason to regard the invective exchanged in the late seventies and early eighties between intellectuals who suddenly
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sought to be 'postmodern' and their opponents who remained commit- ted to the modernist project as symptomatic of the rapidly shifting chronotope. This is not to say that the new chronotope should be named a 'postmodern' one, or that the postmodern faction should claim victory. What is significant, rather, is that in the course of this debate--which seems to us, in retrospect, excessively acrimonious-- and, more precisely, in Jean-Franc? ois Lyotard's (1979) pamphlet La condition postmoderne, a central premise of the historicist mentality was rendered problematic. This would have lasting consequences. Above all, Lyotard sought to criticize the "great" totalizing historical metanarratives' claim to represent absolute truth. Might not, Lyotard asked, a potentially infinite number of competing historical narratives supersede dominant institutionalized narratives? Thus, the narrative mode of representation was challenged as a solution to the problem of perspectivism and as the basis of the historicist mentality, and was soon abandoned. In the decades leading up to our present a new--still nameless--chronotope was established as a premise for our experi- ence of reality in the place of the historicist mentality. Instead of con- stantly leaving our pasts behind us, in the new chronotope we are in- undated by memories and objects from the past. Time no longer erodes the classics' 'direct power to speak to us. ' Instead of transport- ing us onto a wide horizon of possibilities, today the future appears intimidating in many respects. And so, between the threatening future and the past in which we are immersed, an ever-expanding present has replaced that 'imperceptibly brief moment of transition. ' It is at least possible that recourse to the notion of a canon might easily reintegrate the classics as a component within this pluralistic sphere of simultane- ity. If it is indeed true that the Cartesian subject was situated episte- mologically within the narrow present of the historicist mentality, then it is unsurprising that, in this new ever-expanding present, we are searching for more nuanced alternatives of human self-reference to the Cartesian 'subject. '
In our new chronotope, the relentless dynamic of historical movement has weakened, and, in any case, the momentum of tem- poral procession has stalled in the meantime. This makes our encoun- ters with classics more relaxed, because their power to speak to us directly is no longer threatened--nor is this power peculiarly theirs. In the new chronotope, the documents of the past are present with a truly confusing variety, and require not so much preservation from amnesia
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as integration into a larger cultural framework. And yet we hesitate to follow John of Salisbury of the twelfth century, for whom contempo- rary thinkers, though they be mere "dwarfs on the shoulders of gi- ants," could inevitably see further than their more eminent predeces- sors--perhaps because classics are now so immediately accessible to us. A more relaxed relationship does not necessarily become a more intellectually and aesthetically productive one.
In the new chronotope we seek to replace the traditional Cartesian subject, and we are therefore more alive to the greater complexity of human existence than that suggested by the cogito. In the new chrono- tope the authority and hierarchical power of the state (and perhaps not only the power of the state) have diminished--quite in contrast to the nightmares of boundless state power so powerfully articulated in nov- els of the mid-twentieth century, such as 1984 and Brave New World. In our quotidian existence we live in laterally linked webs, not hierar- chical relations of dependence. The English language has responded with a tendency to replace the term 'government' with 'governance. ' All this may issue from a new chronotope, in which an inhibited fu- ture has made the possibility of practically molding the future--the possibility of a politics of practice--more challenging. And at the same time the weakness of the practical paradigm is more openly evi- dent in a longing for charisma and direction that must also have ef- fects in the world of culture.
4. New Attitudes and Approaches to Reading Classics
These still somewhat tentative observations of our new chronotope's consequences, manifesting themselves today, make the suggestion that our relationship to classics has changed plausible and historically founded. Against this background, I would like to pose the narrower (and in its narrowness essentially empirical) question of whether a change in our attitude toward classics is expressed in new approaches and attitudes to the reading of texts. I shall offer some observations, the first of which is concerned with ways of reading the classics. My generation grew up with an intellectual commitment to mistrust clas- sics in all their forms. It was widely suspected that admiration for classics was, in all respects, merely proof of conformity to the ideolo- gies of their, or our, world. We aspired to become specialists in sub- verting the classics. This prejudice and the ambition it engendered have long been absent, both among the generation of nicely-
208 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
competent young scholars today and in the youngest generation of students, who accept the basic premise that reading classics pays divi- dends, particularly with relation to the present. One then attempts self- examination with a new steadiness to understand where such divi- dends might arise in particular cases. That growing interest among so many who heard my Kleist lectures in Vitoria da Conquista was in this respect as typical an experience as it was eccentric; it changed my view on the status of classics today irreversibly. Those listeners had to penetrate Kleist for the first time to discover how much his death wish fascinated them. Following Heidegger, they came to practice a 'piety of reading' and were, I hope, rewarded.
But above all I believe that today we read classics less politically than even a quarter of a century ago--and experience the texts in- stead, to bring in a conflicting term, from an existential perspective. We no longer relate words, images, and scenes from classical texts to the problems of 'contemporary society' or even to the problems of 'humanity' itself. Instead, we relate the classics to the manifold even- tualities and challenges encountered in individual lives--not in rela- tion to our own lives, but rather in relation to challenges typical of life, close to the hearts of many readers. That the traditional Cartesian 'subject' has been challenged as a central model for human self- reference renders the new existential imperative still more acute. Such a change in readers' perspectives can partially explain the allure and even the academic rehabilitation of the biographical genre. For the biographies of literary figures do not simply attempt to locate the ori- gins of the themes and forms of their texts. An inquiry into the genesis of themes and forms can be turned on its head, becoming another tool for "applying" texts (following Gadamer's usage). A reader who un- derstands how Kleist's longing to die arose will be able to discover more relationships between this dimension of Kleist's texts and spe- cific questions, which may change his own views--and, beyond that, perhaps suggest the beginnings of protracted paths of argument and reflection. Incidentally, the most important justification for collecting and reappraising forewords and afterwords, as the Marbacher Archive does so energetically, is that it makes them available for such existen- tial applications.
It is possible that the level on which we apply the classics--one is tempted to say the ontological level--is currently shifting to an exis- tential domain, revealed and informed by biography. One can certain-
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ly ascribe no ability to enrich life, as my German teacher used to promise in my last year at grammar school, to Kleist's Farewell Let- ters, or the traces left behind by the village judge Adam in the snow. Or, less paradoxically, perhaps the occasionally praised 'hermeneutic logic of question and answer' acquires fresh purchase over our new way of reading classics. Resurrecting intense experiences is what fas- cinates us today, even in philology, which has suddenly become fasci- nating again. Rather than posing and answering concrete questions, our semiotics of aesthetic philosophy concerns itself with the emo- tions of the reader; we concentrate immediately on dimensions such as 'elegy,' 'melancholy,' 'tragedy,' or 'fate'; we want to get to the bot- tom of the 'dialects of emotion'--and the temporal signs of 'precipi- tancy' or 'irreversible departure' familiarized by Karl Heinz Bohrer. Even the striking contrast (to play on Kleist one last time) between a failed life and the overwhelmingly lovely artifacts it leaves behind, can become a source of existential provocation and literary consola- tion today.
5. National Canons? A Comparison of Different Countries' Ap- proaches to Classic Texts
Setting aside our altered way of reading classic texts, we would expect canonical bodies of texts to be more readily established and more apparent in the new chronotope than they were under the reign of the historicist mentality. Should we actualize this potential and build-- under very specific circumstances--a national canon? My view is probably not. Probably not, because the texts that we call 'classic' today certainly cannot provide the foundations we think of if we talk--wisely or unwisely--of demanding from all members of society a familiarity with their national culture. It is unrealistic to seek in Faust some means to access the German identity of today--and, sadly, knowledge of such texts is not especially helpful in attaining social recognition or advancement (unlike in England, France and perhaps even the United States). I am also inclined to oppose the project of elaborating a national canon because such an exclusively national focus has for a long time ceased to correspond with the habits of a more internationally oriented population. Looking at the German book market, we see an emphasis on ambitious translations of classic texts from other national literatures with extensive commentaries--only recently, new editions of Miguel de Cervantes' (1605-1615) Don
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Quixote and Stendhal's (1830) Le rouge et le noir appeared. A few years ago, a new English edition of the Man without Qualities finally won Robert Musil recognition among American readers as one of the great authors of the twentieth century. Of course, such examples and tendencies mean neither that we can exclude texts valued as 'classic' in certain national cultures today nor that, with the exception of cer- tain wistful academic imaginings, a developing global canon is really discernible.
These points notwithstanding, there are distinct national differ- ences in the literary canon which have evidently persisted almost un- challenged, though literary theorists have never dwelt on them-- perhaps they have in fact escaped their attention. It was not particular- ly surprising--but still profoundly striking, at least for me as a student of Romance languages educated in Germany--to discover, that to establish a panel discussion with French Germanists on the subject of 'Classic' and 'Canon' requires almost infinite explicit clarifications. Such hitherto neglected national differences, with which I am con- cerned, are therefore differences in the assumptions and emphases with which one reads in different national cultures.
Until the present day, the prescriptive authority of the classics has been less challenged in France than anywhere else--the Acade? mie franc? aise and Come? die franc? aise spring to mind--where the legiti- mate existence of a canon has never been questioned in principle, unlike in Germany. No single individual has been as comprehensively canonized in any national literature as William Shakespeare and his oeuvre in the Anglosphere have been. Shakespeare's unmatched posi- tion also explains why 'drama' occupies so prominent a position in the teaching of literature and literary scholarship. It is difficult to imagine that a person might complete secondary education without at some point having played a Shakespeare role and recited his lines. On the other hand, no national canon of classics has been so narrowly de- fined, so undisputed, and so chronologically removed as Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Francesco Petrarch, the "three jewels" of Italian literature. This might be because, until now, in no other culture has the literary canon and the language shaped by its authors become so manifest a part of the national identity as in Italy. If we may speak of a national literary canon in Japan, two main theat- rical genres are central: No and Kabuki, which originated in the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet it is not the authors of drama that
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exemplify this canon, so much as the great thespian dynasties, whose members the state has awarded the status of 'national treasure. ' A notable peculiarity of the Spanish literary canon is apparent in the status that the protagonists of its texts have attained, rivaling that of classic authors, to the extent that protagonists have superseded their creators--and sometimes even stand in their place. In the middle of the 'Plaza de Espana' in Madrid there is a sculpture of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, not one of Miguel de Cervantes.
And what is the distinctive tone of the German literary canon? It betrays itself in intensive reflection on the assumptions and values that have informed the reading of classic texts in German culture for 250 years, possibly owing to the vicissitudes of history. For German pur- poses it has almost always been difficult to locate and claim a direct route to the classics. Precisely this unusual quality has generated the sometimes rather exaggerated impartiality so popular among non- professional readers, which Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1999) deploys when he writes about his favorite texts as 'classics. ' Yet the German inclination to intense reflection seems to survive him, as it does the even more complex alterations in our relationship to classic texts that the new chronotope has set in motion.
Bibliography
Baudelaire, Charles. 1857/2009. Le peintre de la vie moderne. Paris: E? ditions du Sandre.
Cervantes, Miguel. 1605-1615/2002. Don Quixote. London: Penguin Classics.
Diderot, Denis and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (eds. ). 1751-1772/1993. Encyclope? die ou dictionnaire raisonne? des sciences, des arts et des me? tiers. Paris: Editions Flammarion.
Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Paris: E? ditions Gallimard.
--. 1969. L'arche? ologie du savoir. Paris: E? ditions Gallimard.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1960. Warheit und Methode. Tu? bingen: J. C.