| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Martin Jay. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2005. Pp. x, 431. $34.95.
In the introductory paragraphs of this wide-ranging, extraordinarily erudite book, Martin Jay makes clear that his choice of the Blakean title derived not from any ambition to emulate William Blake's attempt to plumb the depths of a particular state of the soul and thus provide an account of what experience "really is," but rather from a more modest desire to collect and describe the various "songs" composed by an imposing array of influential West European and American thinkers in the modern period. The poetic, musical terms "songs" and "song cycles," rather than more conventional, sober, academic terms like "texts" and "discourses," seemed appropriate to the intense passions invested in attempts to invoke and explicate "experience" as a foundation term of meaningful existence. Jay's own text, however, tends toward the sober, scholarly, and dispassionate, repressing—or at least dampening—the author's own "song of experience" so that the reader/listener can discern the whole spectrum of intonations that compose the somewhat cacophonous chorale of hymns to "experience" that constitutes our inheritance from the past.	1
The organization of Jay's text is chronological, but only in a vague and rough sense. An opening chapter trawls a bit in etymology and classical and medieval uses of the term (usually as transmitted through modern thinkers, like John Dewey, who picked up various historical meanings of "experience" from past cultures and gave them new resonance and organizing significance), but then moves quickly to a historical point in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries at which Jay sees the term becoming central to both humanistic and scientific discourses. Although Jay eschews contextual analysis, the originating historical problem that motivates the organization of whole discourses around " experience" emerges as the post-Renaissance and post-Reformation need to ground meaning and value within the immanent, finite, temporal contents of human lives. Michel de Montaigne's essays function as the founding texts in Jay's historical trajectory of modern discourses on experience. Montaigne's holistic humanist song of experience as the accumulated, narrativized memory of embodied finite existence is countered within a century by Francis Bacon's song of the replicable experiences that ground universal knowledge and the immortality of the collective knower, a song that splits the concrete dialectical holism of Montaigne's "experience" into reductive abstractions of its subjective and objective dimensions. With this thematic statement and counter statement, Jay's story or song cycle moves into its expository phase.	. . .

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