[From Chapter 10:] The new literary history is a form that programmatically rejects metanarrative in favor of petits récits. To begin with, we can remark a feature of the new surveys sure to weigh on every reader: sheer length. The new literary history has a penchant for producing long works on the order of the Longman's 1,259 large-format pages, the Prentice Hall Guide's 1,066 pages, the New History of French Literature's 1,150 pages, the Feminist Companion's 1,231 pages, or the Heath's 2,615-2,935 pages per volume.[1] Older surveys, of course, could also be long (especially multivolume surveys), but they seldom demonstrated to the same extent the compulsion to compact as much material as physically possible between a single set of covers.[2] Whatever else it is, I suggest, length in the new literary history is in effect a formal requirement: a "long form." We will later need to map the exact topography of such form (a component of what I will term "flatness") together with its ideological and economic determinants. But at present it is instructive to notice only what such form is not: it is not the form, as might be expected, of metanarrative. The new mega-surveys tell a story that overwhelms the plotlines once organizing the history of literature into variants of what Lyotard identifies as the great, philosophical metanarratives: the tales of the progress of freedom and the advancement of reason (literary-historical versions: the Romantic rebellion, the emancipation of American from English letters, the rise of the novel, etc.).[3]
Indeed, the new literary history tells a story that is not a story at all because it is formed from masses of petits stories: "long" turns out to be a function of "short." We can look first at the many editorial manifestos denouncing metanarrative in support of petit récit form. In its general introduction, for instance, the Columbia makes a great deal out of the fact that its "story" of American literature will begin upon four, separate "departure points" (p. xxii):
we have made no attempt to tell a "single, unified story" with a "coherent narrative". . . . the editors have not revised the beginnings and endings of essays to create the appearance of one continuous narrative. No longer is it possible, or desirable, to formulate an image of continuity when diversity of literary materials and a wide variety of critical voices are, in fact, the distinctive features of national literature. The research and criticism of the last thirty years has revealed that the history of the literature of the United States is not one story but many different stories. (pg. xxi)[4]
The Feminist Companion similarly "precludes the presentation of an overall narrative" to embrace the "randomness" of "flexible, resilient, multiple tradition" (p. xi). So, too, the Heath organizes local cells of petits récits defiant of metanarrative:
Divergent, indeed conflicting, myths can coexist in a culture, at least for a while. Different groups within a society construct and pass on stories they prefer. Ultimately the stories of the dominant group in a society themselves may come to dominate, though alternate myths often continue to live a kind of 'underground' existence, offering a form of resistance to cultural extinction, especially among oppressed minorities. (p. 1214).[5]
And We Are the Stories We Tell--its very title a manifesto of the petit récits thesis--adds that its chosen "stories testify to diverse cultural perspectives and individual points of view, and portray different social classes and geographical areas" (p. 6). As Janet Todd generalizes in her Feminist Literary History, we are in a new age of literary history-writing when, "in place of history, we are getting histories, different and infinitely numerous itineraries through the past" (p. 96). Or again, as the chapter on "Telling" in Mixed Blessings sums it up even more pithily (in the parallel context of art history): "The new/old stories challenge the pervasive 'master narratives' that would contain them" (p. 57).
Even bolder than such editorial statements is the actual formatting of the new literary histories. Much of the brilliance of the New History of French Literature, for instance, must be accounted to its spectacular commitment to petit récit form. Each of its vignette-entries is brief (three to six pages), spotlights a single date, and hews a narrative line as spare as a one-act play or journalistic dispatch (dateline: "--- 1563, 18 August: Montaigne Witnesses the Death of His Friend. . ."). What we read in the NHFL, that is, is something like a New Historicist encyclopedia of "anecdotes." Witness, for example, such story-perfect openings as the following:
In August 1563 Montaigne's friend Etieene de La Boétie lay dying. . . .
On 26 January 1686, before the throng of prelates, magistrates, and cabinet ministers gathered to hear his funeral oration for Michel Le Tellier, Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, the power bishop of Meaux who enjoyed the stature of a national narrator, extolled his chief justice. . . .
To a man like Denis Diderot (1713-1784), who suffered from claustrophobia and who, by principle and temperament, clung to the joys of social life and free intellectual exchange, it must have seemed like the sudden materialization of a recurrent nightmare when in 1749 he was imprisoned. . . .
On the evening of 2 September 1800 the usual queue, composed of petits bourgeois, artisans, and some day laborers, intermingled with a number of more elegantly turned-out members of the upper bourgeoisie, formed before the entrance of the Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique. . . .
(pp. 223, 358, 517-18, 602)
Witty, incisive, and dramatic, these petits récits owe all their pith to being metanarrativistically irresponsible--in Michel de Certeau's term, deliquent.[6] They could care less about fitting into some overarching, seamless story of literature. Or rather, if each anecdote must at some point gesture toward larger developments, the NHFL stages so many competing and incommensurable over-developments that the result is a parody of metanarrative. Not even the form of chronology--or more accurately, annals--concatenating the articles in the NHFL is rationalized: sometimes a day, sometimes a month, sometimes a year sets the scene. Thus the article titled "1772" succeeds to that on "1774, 19 April," which in turn opens onto "1782, March."[7]
Variations upon such delinquent formatting are widespread--e.g., the Columbia with its multiple, uncoordinated essays; American Mosaic with its one ethnic group/one chapter rule; or, perhaps most extravagantly, the Heath Anthology with its at times one-ethnic-work-per- three-pages organization.[8] "Multi"-culture, -gender, -approach in the new literary history comes at us with the staccato rhythm of a Gatling gun. Nor must we limit ourselves to such obvious formal experiments to witness deliquency of narrative in action. Much of our checklist consists of guides, companions, and anthologies whose basic unit of exposition is the short biographical headnote. In this regard, we are now witnessing a resurgence of biographical explanation whose sheer intensity and scale makes it seem like a revenge upon the old, formalist critique of "biographical fallacy." Petit récit as life-story, of course, descends from hoary traditions of literary history; and most of the new surveys do not attempt formal innovations upon the tradition more interesting than the polemical decision of the Feminist Companion to name the mothers, rather than fathers, of authors first. But traditionality in this instance is deceptive. As a work like the Feminist Companion makes clear, even the most customary biography in the new literary history can be charged with experimental motive: we turn page after page of brief lives that are not so much "lives of the poets" as an implicit polemics pro petits récits contra metanarrative. The editors of the Feminist Companion declare:
We have cast our entries biographically, aiming to emphasize the conditions in which these women lived and wrote. Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men, and we have cast these entries as brief lives to provide the broad outlines of those conditions. These real women who made their entrance into history by writing lived widely different kinds of lives: until recently mostly auto-didacts, they earned livings by a range of non-literary means, bore, raised, and lost children, loved passionately, sorrowed, theorized about writing, travelled or stayed at home to cook and clean, wielded or felt the edge of political power. They also wrote for widely different reasons and for very different audiences: some for publication, some for social and political change, some for their intimates, some only for themselves. (pp. viii-ix)
What comes clear in this catalogue of "difference" is that if we are to glimpse any "broad outlines" at all, we must submit to careful, and caring, recovery of the thousand and one nights--the particularistic stories--of women authors' lives.
American Mosaic: Multicultural Readings in Context , ed. Barbara Roche Rico and Sandra Mano (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991)
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life , trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1984)
Columbia Literary History of the United States , ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988)
The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990)
The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 2 vols., ed. Paul Lauter, et al. (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1990)
Lucy R. Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon, 1990)
Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women, 1875-1975, ed. Marian Arkin and Barbara Shollar (New York: Longman, 1989)
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984)
A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989)
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 3rd, 4th, & 5th ed., ed. M. H. Abrams et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974, 1979, 1986), Vols. 1-2
Prentice Hall Guide to English Literature, ed. Marion Wynne-Davies (New York: Prentice Hall, 1990)
Janet Todd, Feminist Literary History (New York: Routledge, 1988)
Amy Tucker, "Review of The Heath Anthology of American Literature," Legacy 8 (Spring 1991): 58
We Are the Stories We Tell: The Best Short Stories by North American Women Since 1945, ed. Wendy Martin, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990)
Larzer Ziff, "History Most Particular" (review of Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott et al.), American Quarterly 42 (1990): 102-107
[1] Amy Tucker, reviewing the Heath Anthology, comments that "the Heath editorial policy of an all-embracing democracy, containing multitudes, has produced yet another specimen of that peculiarly American creature, the woolly mammoth greatworks, each volume of 2,600- 2,900-plus pages presenting more avoirdupois than any student or teacher needs or cares to lug around campus" (p. 59).
[2] This argument may also be made incrementally by charting the lengthening of such established surveys as the Norton Anthology of English Literature. While the first volume of the third edition of the Norton (1974), for example, contained 2,521 pages, the corresponding volumes in the fourth (1979) and fifth (1986) editions weighed in, respectively, at 2,574 and 2,616 pages. As explained in the Preface to the fifth edition, much (though not all) of the extra bulk may be accounted to the common need of the new literary history to add less well known and women writers.
[3] On the latter philosophical masterplots, see Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern Condition , pp. 31-37. See also my "Lyotard Auto-Differend Page" (requires Netscape 1.1+ to activate the client-pull automated text tracks).
[4] "This is particularism with a vengeance," Larzer Ziff comments in his review of the Columbia, p. 105. The review is titled "History Most Particular
[6] See de Certeau's discussion of "delinquent" narrative, p. 130.
[7] Another, somewhat less striking example of petit recit form is the Columbia. Unlike the NHFL, the Columbia consists of far longer essays, but the overall effect--true to the promise made in the general introduction--is also one of multiplex plurality rather than symphonic continuity.
[8] See such collage-like parts of the Heath as the unit on "Issues and Visions in Pre-Civil War America--Indian Voices," I: 1752-80. In this regard, the controversial decision of the Heath editors to organize their anthology in topical "units we believe will be interesting for reading and helpful to teaching" (I: xxxvii) should be viewed not as a nostalgia for metanarrative but as a further liberation of petits récits. The often arbitrary-seeming topics are both themselves petits récits unrelated to a master plotline and the excuse to assemble under their rubric collages of smaller petits récits on the scale of individual "voices" or works.