Vividly Vague, Part 3

Ephemeral Words and Thoughts

A long time I read a series of essays on the difference between rumour and gossip, and then used that distinction to ease students into the history of the novel in England and elsewhere in western Europe during the seventeenth century.  The distinction remains valid for the most part but needs some further refinements, as well as the need to consider more carefully—as I had started to do back then, in accord with what seemed critical trends—the relationship between journals as newspapers, private daily notations, and Puritan records of spiritual development.  Now I will consider some of the aspects of these old considerations in regard to the history of mentalities, psychohistory and biography.

To begin with, rumour and gossip are two forms of relatively indeterminate, non-authorized forms of knowledge and the modes of communicating such information.  At heart, rumour refers to a buzzing noise, such as insects make in their hives, and is close to what we might mean by static, or at least those of who grew up listening to radio rather than watching television, and who had to spend a certain amount of time twirling dials and playing with aerials before being able to understand what was said by speakers at the other end of the broadcast.  In metaphorical terms, a rumour was a series of buzzing noises heard out on the street or in some crowded coffee house or similar public space.  People passed on what they heard or thought they heard and usually could never be quite sure where the original source was or what authority lay behind the information.  The news that was thus given by word-of-mouth or written in private, informal letters was felt to be incomplete and inaccurate, but worthy of attention as it dealt with public or other important political or commercial matters. 

Related to rumour but not at all identical to it, gossip had another means of communication and conveyed a different kind of information.  In its etymology, the gossip was a person, a social role undertaken by neighbours and friends on behalf of families, to be godfathers and godmothers of newly-born infants.  The duty accepted was to look after the spiritual and social well-being of this little boy or girl, first, by ensuring that its parents did their duty in having it baptized and so entered into the body of the Church and the community of Christians, properly educated in a formal and informal manner, and thus brought up in a healthy and moral environment.  Godparents or gossips thus consulted with one another and passed on information that had to do with the private lives of people who they were not related to by family ties.  In ideal terms, only these gossips were privileged to breach the boundaries between public and private, to speak of intimate relationships and moral transgressions that might threaten the spiritual development of the child.  Should one or other of the parents become incapacitated or die, it was the role of the gossip moreover to take-over the care and upbringing of the child through to the end of its minority.  Again this required stepping into the normally private life of a family to which one did not belong.  By extension, and thus gaining a negative value, gossip became the name for both the discussion of other people’s private lives by those who had no business doing so and for the use of this intimate knowledge to hurt the reputations of the parties involved.  The transgressions here could be of little importance, mere trivia which it was no body’s business at all to make public, or of greater significance with the breaching of privacy a way of harming reputations, social status and political reputations.  Like rumour, gossip was not an authorized transmission of information, and usually involved misunderstandings, incomplete facts, and hurtful judgments of character.  

Once those parameters of ephemeral words and thoughts are set forth like that, it should be evident that such are not only the essence of our everyday life, waking and asleep, insofar as such fleeting discourses are not controlled by and regularly verified against criteria of truthfulness within the confines of rhetoric, that is, language shaped according to rational standards. Modern genres of history philosophy and literature (“belles-lettres”) therefore seek to imitate both the mechanisms and the content of rumour and gossip; that, indeed, is their primary fiction. 

This it is which made the prose narratives of the early modern period “novel”, which distinguished the private, personal, intimate discourses of recorded annotations known as journals and diaries, and which characterized the forms of semi- and not-so-official “news” disseminated in newspapers so urgently other than royal proclamations, ecclesiastical pronouncements, and legal decisions published by courts of law, power and spiritual authority: these discourses were distributed before actions were completed, rhetorical closures applied and authorized interpretations decided upon.  Such fleeting reports were by definition incomplete, fragmentary, uncoordinated, highly subjective, c0ontstantly therefore subject to revision, correction and substitution: extra bulletins appeared as often as the press would allow for clarification.  It was important to know so much the authorized truth-value of each “story”, but where it emanated from, who was the source or likely source—a reporter, spectator, witness in the field, close to or in the midst of the action itself—thus creating a sense of immediacy through vivid physical details, exact words spoken by participants and persons affected, and the correspondent’s sense of “being there.”  

Once a sufficient period of time and a critical distance from the action had been created, there could be established a sense of objectivity, and when the action eventuated into a formal rhetorical genre—comedy, tragedy, pastoral or whatever—its meaning could be determined and its implications discussed.  Instead of news, one had history. Instead of being in the moment, one stood outside and beyond the dynamic of confusion, and everything fell into its proper place sub species æternitatis: under the all-seeing and all-understanding of eternity and its institutional guardians. Thus God was in His heaven and all was right with the world.

As the modern world took shape and religions were in the process of being reformed, believers, who could no longer believe implicitly in the dogmas of the church, had to find a way to coordinate their own private, erratic—incomplete, fragmentary, misunderstood—experiences with those of traditional received truth.  They would therefore keep a running record, from day to day, of what they did, how they felt, and what they were anxious about; this jumble of sensations, cries of despair, and record of anxieties would accumulate over months and years, generating a lengthy sequence of textualized reality, life transformed into words and sentences.  At certain points in a person’s life, when the world seemed to be in crisis, when the sense of reality seemed to be at a tipping point, the private consciousness of the person making this journal or diary of day-to-day experiences in the process of happening would read his or her journal and would discover, wonderful to tell, patterns of significance, recurring signs, repetitions on specific dates of similar events and encounters, emergent rhythms of the divine working in what at the time only seemed to be random, meaningless and frightening facts.  At the time of death, when others would read the newly reshaped text of the person’s life, they would see the finger of God marking and assigning meaning to the narrative.  

But outside of that religious domination, the free-flowing and therefore “natural” sequence of events that constitute a life gave a new kind of shapeless shape to the individual and his or her place in the world of chaotic experiences.  Novelists would imagine themselves in the consciousness—and then, the unconsciousness—of women, children, criminals, vagabonds, madfolk, anyone whose careers were not already always encompassed by rhetorical logic and therefore belonging to history, even personal history, the contours of biography and autobiography.  The concerns of women, children, criminals, vagabonds and madfolk was picaresque, like the ex-soldiers of Spain in the seventeenth century released from duty in the Low Countries to wend their own way home, forced to live on the road, to travel like criminals from place to place, experience to experience, on their own wits, always in a state of exception—outlaws, cast-aways, cast-offs, wandering through the flotsam and jetsam of history.  While formal picaresque tales—the stories of these pike bearers and their female counterparts, the picaras—are recounted in old age by the survivors, who reflect on their lives as in a dream-world of trivial wonders and lucky escapes, they see the world as a cynical place where all ideals are sham, all values are subject to market forces, and all degrees of society equalized by stupidity, ignorance, illness and mendacity; the ordinary lives of private persons, outside the bright lights of history and public service, focus on what was once the most private, non-rhetorical and least meaningful of experiences—the body, its urges and pains, its need for food, sexual gratification  and love, the importance of food and money and domesticity, the processes of maternity and dying, all in a matrix of unknowing and confusion.  The modern person wanders from one inexplicable and meaningless episode to the next, gradually gaining an understanding and a resignation to the absence of shape, determination and significance, accepting death as a release into oblivion.  

As more and more readers grow up through reading extremely lengthy novels of this sort, books of five hundred, a thousand or more pages, and hence of anti-social focus away from the outside world on to the internal spaces of imagination and individuality, the modern self lives out its own destiny without the determinants of rhetoric and history.  Autobiography and then biography model themselves on such novels, such fictional journals and diaries, such attempts to textualized the world and discover patterns that are purely eccentric and unique to each individual.  

When we read such textualized lives, then, we participate in the buzzing of rumour and the flow of gossip.  Eventually, too, what we want from history is something other than rhetorical constructions, vivid patterns of imposed order and meaning, individuals and small communities shaped by public events—the history of great figures in world-significant actions—but the private, intimate, insignificant natural history of desires and fears.