Speaking with the Dead

“I began with the desire to speak with the dead.”

Thus begins Stephen Greenblatt’s collection of essays, entitled Shakespearean Negotiations. Although he does refer to professors of literature as “salaried, middle-class shamans” (Greenblatt 557), he does not refer here to actual communion with the dead, but rather the sound of their voices in the literary remains they have left behind. Greenblatt admits that even in his “most intense moments of straining to listen” (Greenblatt 557) the only voice he heard was his own, but he argues that the dead spoke through him, “for the dead had contrived to leave textural traces of themselves, and those traces make themselves heard in the voices of the living” (Greenblatt 557).

The question, “How does Stephen Greenblatt view literature?” can best be answered using the literary clues left behind by Greenblatt in Shakespearean Negotiations. Greenblatt clearly views literature with a passionate, albeit subjective, eye. According to Lodge and Wood, Greenblatt considers literature both reflective and creative, “a tissue of implicit reflexes of thought” (556) that can influence the course of social energy. His desire to speak with the dead is indicative of his interest in New Historicism. Abrams and Harpham suggest that new historicists like Greenblatt, “attend primarily to the historical and cultural conditions” (218) of a text’s production, stressing meaning, effect and later critical analyses.

Greenblatt concedes that it is paradoxical “to seek the living will of the dead in fictions, in places where there was no live bodily being to begin with” (Greenblatt 557), but he argues that lovers of literature find more passion and intensity in the imitation of life than in any of the other vestiges of the dead. This “formal, self-conscious miming” (Greenblatt 557) of life is born with the awareness of life’s absence and therefore can compensate for the loss of the life that has empowered it.

Works Cited

Abrams, M. H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Wadsworth, 2009.

Greenblatt, Stephen. "The Circulation of Social Energy." Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood. 3rd Edition. Pearson Longman, 2008. 557-571.