Review: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stephen Greenblatt was one of the heroes of my graduate school era. He was perhaps the foremost of the Shakespearian New Historicists who provided a counterpoint to the deconstructionism that had overwhelmed the field several years before I arrived. Where the deconstructionists – calling themselves post-structuralists – were fundamentally concerned with structure (or its aftermath), the New Historicists insisted that texts took their meaning from context.

Greenblatt developed a method where we could show that texts didn’t simply rest on top of history (which is a shorthand for describing the “old historicism”) but that they shaped the history of which they were a part. Shakespeare didn’t simply observe Elizabethan politics; in perhaps the most famous example, Robert Devereux commissioned a performance of Richard II (a play about an uprising against a sitting English monarch) the night before he began his own failed uprising. That is, New Historicists see texts as shaping the way people see their age and, as a consequence, how they see new possibilities for themselves and their culture. And, incidentally, they showed a way beyond the nihilism of deconstruction – or at least what I came to see as its frequent nihilistic applications.

So, I’m all in on Greenblatt. People doing similar things in American literarature – like Sacvan Bercovitch and Anne Douglas – became the thinkers who guided my own eventual work, but he was the first to make clear what was possible.

That said, this a very interesting set of observations, but I’m not sure it’s an entirely coherent book. In some ways, it’s doing three different things – things that are largely incompatible as a straightforward story – and pretending they line up more neatly than they do.

One part of this is an explanation for the power of philosophy out of the epicurean school. It’s very interesting work, and I absolutely enjoy what Greenblatt has to say about the early thinkers in the field. Naively, I’d bought the case against those early thinkers. Epicurus, was not – as I’d heard – a supporter of gluttony, but rather someone who believed that, with the heavens disinterested in our human condition, we ought to achieve the highest happiness possible in our own lives.

Another, final part, is Greenblatt’s claim that Lucretius, the Latin poet whose De Rerum Natura turned that philosophy into poetry, was a central influence on the Modern world. I confess to some skepticism in all that, but Greenblatt does an impressive job of showing that the first wave of early modern philosophers – like Thomas More, Erasmus – and then later thinkers like Montaigne, Shakespeare, Jefferson, and many others, were inspired directly by Lucretius (and therefore by Epicurus) as they created the modern world.

But the main part of this is the connecting story between those two points, the story of how an Italian humanist scholar, Poggio Bracciolini, found what might have been the only extant copy of De Rerum Natura in a monastery, had it copied, and then championed it so that, within a couple decades, it had become a major source of ideas for the early Renaissance world.

I like to think I’ve been in Greenblatt’s position in my own work. There are dozens of great stories to tell about various Jewish gangsters whose careers intersected but rarely ran parallel. The challenge is to find “a hero,” one character who sits at the middle of the story and ties it all together.

That’s who Poggio is in this. Greenblatt writes affectingly – sometimes over-the-top – about the implications of Poggio’s discoveries. (I can’t quote it, but there’s at least one line about how – had he known it – he was taking the future off the shelves and putting it back in the world when he pulled down the manuscript.) Never mind that, in a kind of mumbled voice at the end, Greenblatt confesses that there were at least a couple complete manuscript copies of De Rerum Natura extant in other libraries – manuscripts that survive today even as the one Poggio found has been lost. And never mind that, influential as Lucretius is, he was not the only source for Epicurian thought to survive into the Renaissance and into the Modern world. And never mind that, for all that Democritus and other proto-Epicurians talked about “atoms” that construct all things in the world, there were other significant scientific and philosophical sources for that general way of seeing the world.

So, by forcing what amounts to a wide range of Classical thought through the eye-of-the-needle story of Poggio’s recovery of Lucretius down to the notion that Lucretius is central to most Modern thought, Greenblatt seems to make his case too tightly. Epicurus apparently moved beyond Democritus by insisting that atoms could “swerve,” that there was what we might today recognize as a kind of quantum uncertainty that make free will possible. That’s good stuff, but it seems more parallel to what we understand today rather than – as Greenblatt insists – its origin.

And yet, this is ultimately enormous fun. Just as Greenblatt long ago taught me (and many more talented others) how to understand the ways that text can reshape the culture of which they’re a part, he makes a broader and ultimately fabulous claim. Lucretius may not be as central as he claims, and Poggio – central as he is to the story – isn’t the only reason Lucretius’s work came to be recovered, but it’s a great near-fantasy for the enduring power of philosophy and poetry to remake the world.

The bottom-line test of this for me is a simple one: now that I’m finished with this, I’m itching to read Lucretius.


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