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Pretending to be Real: Stephen Greenblatt and the Legacy of Popular Existentialism

2002; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nlh.2002.0026

1080-661X

Paul Stevens,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

In a recent article in the Harvard College Gazette, announcing Hilary Putnam's successor as the new Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard President Neil Rudenstine praised Stephen Greenblatt as a world-renowned scholar working on the frontiers of knowledge: "[n]o one has done more than Stephen Greenblatt to shape the direction of scholarship and criticism in literature over the last quarter-century." 1 Despite the presidential hyperbole, there is a great deal to this claim: it is certainly difficult to imagine a contemporary Renaissance scholar more influential than Greenblatt. All of us who write on early modern English literature and culture have benefitted from his imagination and insight—as David Norbrook puts it, his magus-like ability to make "familiar words seem strange and new." 2 No question. In the same article, Greenblatt himself describes the early stages of his path to eminence, "an early career marked by odd encounters and fleeting possibilities." He says, "I spent summer as a counselor at a summer camp where I played the guitar and sang mournful folk songs with a fellow counselor. He talked about introducing me to a pal of his with the idea that we might possibly sing together, but, with my eye on college, I declined. My fellow counselor was Art Garfunkel, and his friend was Paul Simon" (2). He goes on to describe how one of his chums at Yale was "now vice presidential hopeful" Joe Lieberman, how an elderly man he knocked over on the way to the drugstore turned out to be T. S. Eliot, and how at Cambridge the group of students he performed with "went on to become the Monty Python's Flying Circus troupe" (2). Accounts of these unusually frequent brushes with celebrity are not limited to college newspaper copy. In a recent PMLA article, his encounters with the rich and famous continue; but his [End Page 491] meeting with Nadine Gordimer and Carlos Fuentes is especially instructive, since they are somewhat surprisingly satirized for their name-dropping: "'I was in Washington recently for a party in honor of Nelson,' Gordimer said, 'and I was very disappointed by Bill Clinton. He seemed awfully shallow and uncultured.' 'That's strange,' replied Fuentes, 'I had lunch on the Vineyard with Bill and Hillary just a few weeks ago, and I found him remarkably cultivated.'" 3 The acerbic edge of the satire is softened by Greenblatt's graceful recognition of his own complicity in and weakness for the failing he mocks. What I want to suggest in this essay is that the recurrent need of an intellectual as eminent as Greenblatt to authenticate himself in ways that often seem as jejune as his role in the lost trio Simon, Garfunkel, and Greenblatt is not simply some nervous name-dropping tic, but a pattern that cuts right to the heart of his work and ultimately has much to do with explaining its extraordinary influence.