Vividly Vague, Part 1

Situating Yourself in the Past of the Present

In 2003 Louis Menand wrote an essay for The New Yorker magazine called “The Historical Romance” about Edmond Wilson’s 1940 study of the rise of Communism in Russia called To the Finland Station. In this essay, Menand says some very interesting things about historical scholarship and the writing of fiction, or rather, because these ideas are more important, about the relationship between the way we come to know and remember the past, and the way we learn to imagine and create vivid images of the past, especially the past we did not experience first-hand for ourselves. Thus he says:

When you undertake historical research, two truths that sounded banal come to seem profound.  The first in that your knowledge of the past … comes entirely from written documents..  You are entirely cut off by a wall of print from the life you have set out to represent…

Rather than access to anything directly observable or audible from the past, these written fragments are “ merely the bits that have floated to the surface.” Banal indeed, if that were true.  Not all documents—and he does mention or allude to private letters, journal entries, conversations recorded in contemporary newspapers—are flat, superficial statements.  In fact, even the most official and therefore supposedly toneless reports are not as flat and dull as Menand seems to think.  Like any kind of writing, they have a style, they have a voice, and they have a range of implications which can be interpreted, that is, given a voice, a tone, a living context of human intentions and emotions.  Once, long ago, I theorized that any statement has to be set in a series of contexts of what is actually said and how within a range of possibilities of other things—other words, other images, other metaphorical language—that could have been said; as well as a range of things that could not be said, either because they were forbidden, deemed unpleasant, or embarrassing for one reason or another or because they seemed outrageous, impossible and dangerous to say or because the individuals and culture no loner—or not yet—had the words, images and concepts to articulate what the outsider (that is, us, in our own here and now) sees and hears going on.

The second point Menand makes is that when the historian starts to find more and more details about some historical incident, what at first seems to provide substantiation—and flavour and feelings—to the past, soon the plethora of details overwhelm certainty.  Each new detail actually becomes random, fragmented, and contradictory.  Finally, in this dredging operation (as he calls it), it is not so much new layers of understanding that turn up, but rather a big confusing soup.  The writer, however, calls a stop to the operation when he or she thinks he’s got it right: when the detail that pulls everything together finally comes along, the one you can use as the touchstone, lynchpin or capstone.  As such, this special relic of the past—word or image—helps you decide what is or is not relevant, how to fit together the pieces to complete the puzzle, or to hold your own argument together.  The trouble is, the New Yorker essay indicates, is that this “find” may be purely subjective, and may, even further, be a misreading or a blatant misperception.  What makes sense for the historian long after the facts he or she is attempting to grasp and make articulate for others may just be wrong because the limits of what was possible to see, think or imagine long ago were in different places and we cannot, no matter how hard we try, see out beyond our own horizons of reality and reasonableness: at the very best, perhaps, we can mark out the points when our target went under the radar or where there is some inexplicable deformation in the coherence we started to make out.

I once said—in fact, several times in my books—that the history of mentalities is the history of what it is possible to see in relation to what could not or cannot any longer be perceived, or heard, or felt, or imagined, or put into words and pictures, or even thought about as impossible to think about.  It lies in the tensions between possibilities, probabilities, and supposedly rational, natural or commonsense events. 

Menand points out, too, that for ourselves in our own wish to speak or remember or describe who we are—what we do, mean, hope for or fear in life—often find ourselves unable to make articulate statements (those words at the tip of the tongue that never quite come), say or draw or perform something at the moment that seems clear and true but which not only others find incomprehensible or take away the wrong sense from, but also seem false and hollow when we reflect upon them later—a moment later or a year or a whole lifetime away.

This does not mean that history is impossible because there is no truth at all, as the post-modernists proclaim? And all you have are positionalities, precious little verities specific to different races, genders, age-groups and so on?  Not quite.  You just have to work hard to interpret, analyse and reconfigure all the fragments, and hold in abeyance the grand conclusions. Is that all?  Absolutely not.  The goal is neither simplistic explanations nor retreat into chaos and bewilderment. 

As I have explained before in many essays and in my books, the process is a long one: submersion in the art and culture of the period—read novels, look at pictures, examine artefacts; get as many diaries, journals, collections of letters, memoires and other documents as possible.  But also try copying out texts by hand (or on a keyboard), watching where one stumbles, substitutes words, skips lines; and when in other languages, attempting translations, comparing with various renderings into English or French or whatever, to see how key terms form themselves into stumbling-blocks.  

Better yet: watch where the most simple, familiar, ordinary words—those we think we know perfectly without having to think about them—don’t match up with our expectations, how they veer off into side-lanes, hide in the shadows, or disappear altogether.  I have faced whole paragraphs which defy translation: in a sense—my own commonsense and grounding in what I take to be normal, natural and logical  has nothing to grasp, and the whole passage slides away into static or silence.  The individual words make some sense, but groups of two or more seem like filler, stuffing, nonsense.  This happens not just with our own contemporary jargon and nonce words—negotiate, practice, reference (as a verb) whose supposed originals are vastly different in tone, register, and allusiveness—but, again, with what we assume to be the plain everyday language of things and feelings.  Little colloquial expressions and virtually dead metaphors don’t match up between a work from a hundred years ago and now-a-days.  Something vital has shifted in the point of reference, the grounding in substance, the angle of perspective.