An interview with David Wagenknecht.

Rzepka, Charles J.

I first met David Wagenknecht on my arrival at Boston University as an assistant professor in the fall of 1979, fresh from UC Berkeley. Though he was only a decade older than I, David seemed even then an entire generation wiser. His shock of salt-and-pepper hair wasn't the only reason I thought so, nor was it my own Miranda-like wonder at the brave new world of faculty life in the City on a Hill. (I soon learned to leave my sandals at home.) In our first few substantive conversations, as in our many discussions of literary merit since that time, whether in job searches or joint evaluations of graduate student work or on those occasions when I was asked my opinion of a submission to Studies in Romanticism, I never ceased to be amazed by David's ability to get to the heart of even the most complex and recondite argument, or to retrieve a pearl of wisdom from the murkiest depths of terminological--and often grammatical--obscurity. While I would find myself distracted by an intransitive use of the verb "transform," David would remain open to transformation, listening, like a doctor with a stethoscope, for the idea beating softly, deeply beneath the surface. A more sympathetic and, at the same time, a more intellectually alert and scrupulous reader I have yet to meet in over thirty years of teaching and writing.

It wasn't just his uncanny sense of what a writer whose reach exceeded his grasp had in mind, but his sharp eye for what was original and groundbreaking that set David apart as an editor. All of us who have read Studies in Romanticism over the three decades of his residence on the fifth floor of the BU English Department can recall, almost effortlessly, those essays that have turned our thinking around "as with the might of waters." He has read widely and with penetration, in and out of the field, and is himself a Lacanian with several challenging essays to his credit in that demanding theoretical discipline. And yet he remains to this day the most modest and unassuming scholar I know.

In short, David set a daunting standard for any new editor, and the reputation of Studies in Romanticism at its half-century mark is a testimony to his achievement.

Part of what made the prospect of succeeding David less terrifying for me was the realization that it wouldn't be until the beginning of 2013 that my own apprentice handiwork would appear in the pages of the journal. Now, almost a year into the job, eagerness is starting to overtake dread at the approach of my real as opposed to nominal debut. That's one reason I was delighted to be asked, two years ago and as incoming editor, to shepherd into print the outstanding essays that Emily Rohrbach and Emily Sun have gathered for this, our 50th Anniversary issue. If the work I am considering today for publication a year from now is half as good as what our guest editors have assembled in these pages, there is little any of us have to fear. For the honor of having my name associated with this number of SiR, I have David to thank, who, true to form, graciously stepped aside to let me cut in. I trust you will enjoy reading it as much as I have, and take as much pleasure in the following interview as I did in conducting it.

CR: How many years were you editor of SiR? Can you describe the circumstances surrounding your appointment and how you felt just starting out?

DW: I assumed the editorship (what a word!) of SiR in 1978, and "assumed" is the right word because with respect both to preparation and intention--and also to anxiety--I felt the journal was more something happening to me than something I really wanted or could conceivably be good at. This is less weird than it sounds if you consider that, even though colleagues had suggested I might be suitable, I was much less an all-round romanticist than a Blake geek, and I had already observed that editorial work was not necessarily a great career move. Younger colleagues I knew and admired had not been advanced as a reward for working on SiR, and clearly there was a fair amount of scut-work. So I demurred and delayed, served a brief apprenticeship under Morton Paley, which was helpful (but he went back to Berkeley, I noticed), and then.... Well, in a nutshell, it helped a lot that SiR had already been built into a superb journal by a string of distinguished editors before me, and it's a lot easier to learn to play orchestral music in a fine orchestra than in a poor one. SiR's long-established quality attracted so many excellent contributions that my initial anxiety was soon transformed into the pleasure of reading them. Not to over-do the modesty trope, it's still true that much more of whatever glory hovers over my years in the job belongs to the journal's contributors than to my having the wit to perceive their value. I was a very fortunate hunter-gatherer in a mostly fertile field. I discovered that for whatever reason I was a very good reader in this context, perhaps because my own ego could stand aside, and that I was terrifically interested in the field that was opening before me. No one seemed to mind especially about what was happening, which was a relief, so I kept at it for more than thirty years. (I don't mean to sound like a Robert Walser character.) I had terrific help on the job from my managing editors (who did everything I'm not good at), first Holly Zaitchik and then, for many years, the incomparable Deborah Swedberg, and the job I had been so anxious about at first turned into a kind of parallel and very fascinating universe that freed me up to attend to the demerits of my teaching and to a number of interests which I probably would not have been able to pursue so uninhibitedly without the professional anchor SiR afforded. SiR was my good fortune, and I'm very grateful for it.

CR: Did you develop an editorial philosophy regarding the types of submissions you were looking for, and how to go about encouraging such work? Can you describe your decision-making process for us?

DW: Editorial work consists first and foremost of almost constantly making judgments, but I'm not at all sure these depend on principles (though obviously it helps to know things); rather, the guidance of a steadily expanding backlog of examples--good and bad--builds in an editor's mind a kind of guidance system. But maps need constant revision, and it's important not to block out the testimony--even rumors--of travelers who are more adventurous than oneself. My sense is that editors would do well to avoid "philosophy," since the latter tends to outsmart or over-civilize raw discoveries, which often, surprisingly, come heavily disguised in urbane and arcane vocabularies. Especially when finding oneself beyond the range of one's own pretensions, careful patience with argument is a lot more useful than philosophy or principle. Being open to change and development is more important than any too-insistent parti pris about the field. One can hardly avoid having points of view (or prejudices), and I certainly have some, but at least at the hunter-gatherer stage I try to keep them quiet. (You can always use them later in reviews.) If you're going to maintain such an agnostic attitude, it of course helps to be a good enough reader not to be imposed on, and to retain the fortitude required for resistance. Also I've found that when you need to pass on a submission, it's never a bad idea to be able to demonstrate that fortitude was required, which is often the case. Accordingly, though this may seem depressing, one's encouragement probably flourishes better in the atmosphere of rejection than acceptance.

CR: Can you recall any particularly memorable events or turning points in the history of the journal during your editorship?

DW: Such "turning points" usually emanated from SiR's institutional life rather than from its intellectual life. I recall, for instance, my very first meeting with a particularly toxic administrator (fortunately past and fortunately an anomaly from my usual experience at Boston University) who asked, with no prelude of introductory pleasantries, whether I could give him any reasons why he shouldn't shut the journal down. At least this encouraged researches into ways the journal could work towards paying for itself!

CR: Are there any outstanding essays or issues of SiR that stick in your memory? What was so special about them?

DW: The idea for "special issues" was initiated, before me, by Morton Paley, and I've worked with so many wonderful guest editors over the years that I'm reluctant to select any of them for special praise. I do recall that Paul de Man frightened me more than most (not his fault), because I was in the throes of studying what we called "theory" in those days, and my reverence for his work (and anxiety about its austerity) kept me on edge. (In fact he couldn't have been more pleasant to work with.) I'd like to add also my opinion that special issues are not always notably more of a unified piece, or more in tune with the Zeitgeist, than miscellaneous issues, if the latter are composed of solid essays. Any number of times, rereading a miscellaneous issue (for proofing) has astonished me with the ways that a supposedly random collection of manuscripts set up within itself a profound series of dialogues. This doesn't always happen, of course, but it happens often enough to chasten editorial megalomania. I like to think the phenomenon says something about the coherence and integrity of "the field." Its capacity to generate such conversations among apparently disparate materials is one measure of its specific gravity.

CR: How did you go about choosing the cover art for each issue?

DW: I suppose this is only of "culinary" interest, but over the years everyone involved has taken justifiable pride in the fact that SiR is a good-looking journal, and we do so still, even in a time when digital access to our pages precludes many from ever knowing. The comeliness owes more to the designers than to my choice of illustration, though I take care with this, and we've been blessed in our designers (two of them) over the many years I've been editor. For a long time the university gave us free access to the late Douglas J. Parker, who had a wonderful presence as well as a wonderful talent, and whose office and extraordinarily aristocratic white dog I loved to visit. Doug, much of whose work was advertisement for the university, cherished his association with a learned journal, and in the gentlest way imaginable turned my naive suggestions into something that could be seen and meet his aesthetic principles halfway. I insist, however, on taking some credit for what I still maintain was our most inspired cover (of which Doug, for once, only rather passively, disapproved), for an issue devoted to "structuralism," where we supplied a kind of Victorian cartoon of a marriage proposal with balloons for the members of the couple filled with some of Levi-Strauss's formulas for the elementary structures of kinship. No one ever commented on my inspiration, and I remain disappointed to this day! I chose cover illustrations, as one might guess, thumbing through the relevant holdings of many different museums, a task which is much easier nowadays, when museums are routinely on line, than it used to be, when I had to lug huge art books from the library back to my office. But if the covers meet with approval today, Mary Reilly's excellent work as our designer deserves much of the credit.

CR: Over the years, have you noticed any change in the frequency with which scholars submit articles on non-Anglophone romantic writers or topics, or that cross national boundaries? How do you feel about these developments?

How about with respect to work in arts other than literature, such as music, painting, dance, or sculpture? Again, what is your feeling about such developments?

DW: I'm taking the liberty of combining two questions here, the first having to do with the relative dearth of non-Anglophone topics and writers in our pages, and the second wondering about interdisciplinary treatments: music, painting, dance, sculpture. In fact, I can add to these complaints by confessing that we've printed over the years surprisingly few essays devoted to American literature. Clearly SiR from the beginning has been associated in our readers' minds predominantly with literature of the British Isles, and just as clearly most distinguished Americanists don't think of SiR as the most prestigious site for their work. I invoke disciplinary politics by design, because questions of career have a lot to do with such choices, and SiR, as excellent as it is, is only one locale in a very complicated professional territory. Painting, when associated with British subjects, has been less neglected by us than the other arts. Music can be a difficult issue, since analysis which is searching demands a technical training of which our readership (including myself) may be largely innocent. Possibilities in all these areas, which would demand in most instances bespoke special issues, are much closer to realization now than when I started, thanks to the enormous contribution of the "theory revolution," which blew off so many disciplinary doors, and to the historiography which reacted against post-structuralism by blowing off many of the remaining ones. On behalf of my excellent successor, let me say how open SiR is to improvement, and to suggestions on these fronts. An even larger question, of course, than whether SiR is up to the interdisciplinary mark is whether romanticism retains its significance as matrix of disciplines, and the answer to this question has to be the collective response of many different voices. Whether the answer is a good one or not (for the future of the journal) depends on the viability and interest of the essays we are offered for publication. Our encouragement will mean little if romanticism begins to seem less relevant to the culture currently evolving. When I started as editor, it was my good fortune that romanticism was a hot academic area, and that much of the groundbreaking work in the theory revolution was simultaneously directed at romantic texts. Years later, "new historicists," if they didn't work on the Renaissance, were often drawn to romantic political culture. If resonances like these fail to materialize in the future, the journal may be in jeopardy, but I see little evidence for pessimism so far.

CR: Do you have any opinions about trends in romanticist research or scholarship that have emerged during your editorship?

How do you feel about the future of scholarly publication in the field of romanticism? In literary studies in general?

DW: Whatever strong points SiR has demonstrated during my tenure I believe come from a certain obliviousness to trends, which is not at all inconsistent with openness to the truths that trends bear with them, and therefore a militant opposition to their suppression. (It seems I do have a principle, after all.) In this regard my point of view would be psychoanalytic: trends can be said to correspond to the protestations of ego, hardly committed to truth, though of course very big on knowledge. It also is as useless to deplore its protestations as to believe in its truthfulness, though truth is tucked away on its underside. The most engaging body of thought I've been concerned with of late traces its origin in Lacan's "The Other Side of Psychoanalysis" (Book XVII of his seminar) which--reacting to the strikes of 1968 in Paris--meditates the relationship between Freud and Marx, how the latter's "surplus value" can be rearticulated with respect to what Lacan names surplus pleasure (jouissance). I think the most intriguing move in current scholarship emanates from the triangulation of literature, philosophy (increasingly political philosophy) and psychoanalysis. The least developed point of this triad is the pleasure of literature, which has to be rescued from the thematic doldrums of ego's blah blah and discovered concretely through deep rereading. Recent studies by Thomas Pfau and Joel Faflak testify that my suggestion courses in other bloodstreams than mine, but they seem more genealogical than what I have in mind, and therefore more cautious about the truth-value of the psychoanalytic discovery. Although approaching her material more from an economic than a political standpoint, Marjorie Levinson's breathtaking commentary on Keats's "Lamia" offers the best example of the method I have in mind. It doesn't get any better than her commentary, in kind and detail, that I'm aware of, and on that account it can hardly constitute the basis of a trend. But it deserves to have huge exemplary value. Clearly, among other things--not least the talent of its author--it was permitted into being by the tradition of our discipline, so this suggests the latter's continued health and even prosperity. It suggests also that there's much to look forward to.

CR: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

DW: Any career or life chosen must face the knowledge that it has erased other possible lives and careers, but I owe all the contributors to SiR over the years huge thanks for making my choice as editor so profoundly interesting and pleasurable.

March 2, 2011