The Read: My Attention Switch
Friday's Child Is Sometimes Loving and Giving, Sometimes Wary and Skeptical
Slightly different approach here to the column this week.
I was struck by my own interior experience of reading recently, and how it seemed to me to sum up the effect of academic habitus on a reader.
We talk about this a fair amount in academia, especially in the humanities. You’re never not on the clock in some sense. Our professional practices inflect into our experience of the world, into how we read and view culture. This is what we mean when we talk about “critical thinking”, this questioning style, this inclination to challenge or measure what’s being said or represented, this erudite need to put an experience into context and know something about more about it than what the experience itself presents to us. This is not a bad thing until it becomes compulsive, at which point the scholar in everyday life starts to approach every experience as labor, working to try to recoup value from every text and performance. (At that point, you also start to weary anyone else unlucky enough to be in your company.)
Like a lot of scholars, I don’t always experience this mindset as an interruption. Like anyone else, I can be immersed in what I’m reading or watching or doing. I’m just inclined afterwards to think from a distance about the fact of that immersion—what made it possible, what sustained it—and about the culture or place or experience itself from the outside of that sensation, looking back into it.
But sometimes I do experience it as an interruption, and not always an expected or intentional one. This past week I was catching up some on a pile of London Review of Books and New York Review of Books. I don’t read either cover-to-cover: there are books and essay topics that don’t interest me, and there are writers where their subject interests me but they lose me quickly just because of how they write about it. I try to give myself the room to read about things I don’t know by writers I’m not familiar with (both LRB and NYRB could frankly do a better job of commissioning more work from a wider range of writers to provide that opportunity to readers more often).
That said, there are also essays in both publications that I’m going to feel obliged to read. In this case, it was an essay by Stephen Greenblatt in the December 22, 2022 NYRB concerning a book on Tudor art and material culture, titled “Competitive Consumption”. The hook here for me personally is about consumption, a subject I try to remain at least somewhat up-to-date on, not necessarily the Tudor period. But British history does matter to me professionally as well, and personally I’ve lately been on a bit of a kick about the Tudor royals after reading Wolf Hall for the first time (and then plowing through the sequels).
I’m familiar with Greenblatt. Like a fair number of readers, I wasn’t terribly impressed with his book The Swerve even though I really do admire scholars who try to write big works of synthesis that provide new interpretative framings of known topics. But I have no axe to grind as such with either Greenblatt or with “new historicism” as an approach.
In any event, I was just ambling along reading the essay and I started to experience a sort of familiar sort of mental rumbling. The first seven paragraphs or so frame Tudor England as a kind of aesthetic and cultural backwater from the perspective of the sophisticated Italians of the Renaissance era, a view that Greenblatt more or less affirms as factually accurate. The rumbling in the back of my mind, the active ‘critical thinker’ starting to intervene in my reading, is questioning that view, evaluating whether I already know enough to wonder about it. Not really, the skeptic concludes: that would take more reading, a little research. Basta! I have enough to do.
Until I hit paragraph eight. The previous paragraph lays out the basic arc of Tudor royal history: Henry VIII breaks with Rome and begins a “murderous tangle” with the Catholic Church; Edward VI comes to the throne and accelerates the English Reformation; Lady Jane Grey reigns for nine days and is executed; Mary reinstates Catholicism for “five tumultuous years”, and then Elizabeth becomes Queen. “Each of these changes,” writes Greenblatt, “was accompanied by dark waves of conspiracies, suspicions, arrests and executions”.
Nothing wrong with anything in that paragraph! That’s the truth, a well-known and often re-told history. But then:
“It is difficult to take in how nightmarish the situation was, for we have little or nothing comparable in our world. Perhaps the experience of a German family that went in fewer than seventy years from the Weimar Republic to National Socialism to the Communist government of East Germany to the fall of the Iron Curtain and German reunification evokes something of its unbearable stress.”
Scramble the critical thinking jet fighters! Now I’m fully in “Wait, what?” mode.
I understand that this is what can make scholars seem as if they pick nits, or are perpetually looking to fight about the numbers of angels on the heads of pins, but there is something about that paragraph that is both wrong and strange. It’s a failure of imagination from a critic who is supposed to know a lot about history, in particular of the modern period. The paragraph simultaneously manages to cast Tudor England as much worse than it was for everyone in it and misses a whole bunch of comparable (or worse) examples.
What’s especially odd is that the essay starts by privileging the worldview of supposedly sophisticated Renaissance Italians looking at Tudor England as a parochial backwater only to suddenly shift into such a parochial exceptionalism about Tudor England. Even if we just stick to roughly the same time period, the Reformation seems to me to have been a pretty wrenching thing in many other parts of Europe, particularly combined with the other dislocations and transformations of the early modern era in Europe. But I’m also thinking of all the examples between the late 16th Century and now that would challenge the claim that we today have no comparison to the nightmare of Tudor history and wondering, “How on earth did that sentence come to be written?”
What happens to me when that part of my reading mind comes alive is a dispositional change in my imagined relation to the author. Before, I’m just grazing along, looking for cognitive and informational nourishment. If unperturbed, I may exit an essay or book (or film etc.) knowing some new things, confirmed in other knowledge, interested in a new subject, mulling over a new interpretation. I’ll often consciously try to use something of what I learned. (Perhaps sometimes here, in this newsletter.) That locks it into my memory.
But if the critical thinker is fully aroused, I shift into a sort of pugilistic mode. Now everything’s going to be challenged as I read it. Much of the rest of the essay is in one sense descriptively fine—Greenblatt is, after all, writing about an exhibition which has intention and content in its own right—but where I might have just passed through and thought to myself “I should go see this exhibition at the Met, it seems interesting”, now I’m thinking: hey, does Stephen Greenblatt know anything about the material culture of early modern Europe in general? Because a lot of what he characterizes as uniquely or distinctively Tudor (“lavish excess and its undercurrents of anxiety and menace” under Elizabeth, for example) is not. The aesthetic particulars of Tudor style might be—hence the validity of an exhibition—but not the lavishness itself, or the flood of new goods and new wealth.
Because the skeptic is now so fully in charge, by the time I get to the claim that portraits of Elizabeth “have virtually no psychological interiority” but display “grotesque flattery” which is “all too familiar from panegyrics to one or another Great Leader in our own time” but in ways that are “uniquely Tudor” I’m really feeling aggravated. It’s not so much that this comment reprises the thought that set me off, it’s that it’s tied to a footnote where Greenblatt mentions as an aside that there’s also a Met exhibit of the work of enslaved Black potters from South Carolina that includes a Kongo nkisi figure to make a connection between the African diaspora and African art traditions. He says of the nkisi, “The sculpture, almost four feet high, was meant to house a nkisi, a force with the power to harm, heal or protect. The objects we are invited to admire in ‘The Tudors’ are precisely such figures; all you have to do is substitute nails and blades for the eyes and ears”.
If I’d never shifted into active mode, I probably would have just ignored this footnote, because it is in any event a strange attempt to shoehorn in a comment on Black art. But even leaving aside just how much of a factual and interpretative misfire it is to say “Tudor portraits of Elizabeth are the same as Kongo nkisi statues, just substitute nails and blades for ears and eyes”, it runs counter to all the other attempts to say “Wow, Tudor England was something really distinctive and unusual and hard to compare to anything”. And it’s the kind of thing—the only footnote! An aside pointedly made out of the main text—that makes it impossible not to think about what’s going on in the writer’s mind. What are you doing here? What did you think that was doing?
The mindset I end with is probably unfair, making blueprints of mountains from relative molehills, but it’s also dispositionally transformative. Rather than leaving an essay thinking, “I should see that exhibition” or “I wonder really at the sources of Tudor aesthetics, that’s worth reading more about”, I leave thinking “Man, The Swerve was even worse than I thought, now that I mull it over” and “I should read more about what people think of Greenblatt’s work overall”. In scholarly life, all it takes is that one moment where you encounter something that puts you on your guard: you will never read that scholar or that source or that kind of text unwarily again.
Image credit: Photo by Michelle Tresemer on Unsplash