Below you will find two entries. One is an essay by Harry Berger Jr. on Richard Helgerson and the second is a place to share thoughts about Richard. If you have come across this blog first, please start with the memoriam at the Early Modern Center, here.
Richard and I have known each other for many years, not intimately but rather as colleagues in the same areas of study. Most of our meetings and conversations took place at professional conferences and concerned issues of interpretation and scholarship. So my comments will respect that distance. They may sound too dry for this occasion. But they come from a deep place. For that is, after all, where we live and feel and grow and wane: among the thoughts and experiences that issue from interpretation and issue in interpretation. The distance I mentioned may lack the rustle of close interaction but for me it remains filled with the richness and warmth and lucidity of Richard’s perspective on the world.
Though I’m probably a generation older, I’ve been Richard’s student ever since The Elizabethan Prodigals appeared more than thirty years ago. That study, along with the landmark essay, “The New Poet Presents Himself,” fundamentally altered my understanding of, and my approach to, Spenser’s poetry. Later, when I was having trouble thinking about Rembrandt and his contemporaries, “Soldiers and Enigmatic Girls,” Richard’s great study of the politics of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting, provided the enabling insights that made it possible for me to go on.
“Soldiers and Enigmatic Girls,” which reappeared in Adulterous Alliances, remains underappreciated. It was and is an epoch-making essay. It goes well beyond the work of the two great Vermeer critics, Lawrence Gowing and Edward Snow, by grounding interpretive commentary in socio-historical analysis: Richard keys changes of pictorial emphasis to the fear of political takeover haunting the decades of “the ‘True Freedom,’” the period of acephalous polity that followed the 1648 Peace of Münster. In his own words, he shows that the “realism” of Dutch genre painting “not only differs from the text-based art of history painting.” It is also “part of an ideologically motivated reaction against . . . the history that kings and soldiers make,” or threaten to make, at the expense of the republican order centered in the well-run household. This emphasis on the temporal and event-bound specificity of pictorial meaning gives the phrase, “Dutch realism,” a new sense. It also adds a new dimension to the “new” in “New Historicism.”
Richard’s work has changed the course of the forms of inquiry that have been bundled under that name. This is because his emphasis on patterns of generational interaction and on the system of authorial roles was informed by methodological insights drawn from structural linguistics and semiotics. But his interpretive practice was by no means bound to these approaches. Putting them into play as a literary historian, he shifted the emphasis from synchrony to diachrony and produced what may be called historical or diachronic structuralism. His focus was on motivated patterns of change, and the model he developed is one that can explain local contingencies and individual agency (without explaining them away) by situating them in larger-scale movements of institutional and cultural change.
The innovation Richard introduced into literary study is one he accurately pinpointed in his first book while responding to the possible objection that his procedure might blur “the line that a few decades ago sharply separated art from life” (Prodigals, 7). He argued—and demonstrated—that Renaissance authors themselves insisted “the two could not be kept apart”; they claimed that they, and not only their protagonists, were prodigals and that their prodigality was mixed up with their writing. And he went on to demonstrate how the prodigal-son dialectic reflected cultural tensions between the injunctions of civic humanism and the seductions of romantic courtliness.
With this move he resituated literary history in his own version of “cultural poetics”: the study of history becomes based on the analysis of changing styles of literary self-representation. The amateur/prodigal and laureate roles become specialized versions of more broadly based patterns of motivation, patterns of cultural or social construction. These patterns, he shows, constitute empirical subjects and fictional speakers indifferently. Thus Richard opens the way for what may be called a poststructuralist literary history. He is a pioneer in our field.
He is also a pioneer in another sense. Among those critics loosely associated with New Historicism, he stands out in my mind as the most independent and inventive scholar. He steadily follows his own light. But he does so with quiet grace. During an era when arguments over new Criticism, New Historicism, and other practices are subjects of often shrill debate, he introduces a generosity of spirit and of tone that shows us all a better way to go forward together.
I belong to a very large cohort of scholars whose intellectual careers have been changed by Richard’s work, and whose address toward our profession has been changed by something else: the example of profound decency. A decency that expresses itself in his characteristic stance of affectionate but reserved comradeship. The reserve thinly disguises a small boy’s abiding enthusiasm for new discoveries and ideas. The decency shows itself by many small signs to be the outward manifestation of love: his love of his work, of his family, of his colleagues, of his students, of his discipline.
I speak in the present tense because that example and that love are here and remain with us. I will miss Richard. I will miss him all the more because I never got around to telling him what I’m saying now.
Harry Berger Jr.
I know that many will want to share some words about Richard, and I thought it would be good to create a virtual space to do so given that many of those he touched are now far-flung.
For those who may not have come here via the Early Modern Center’s memoriam, you may want to start here.
