Thirty-nine: The Sir Walter Disease

In a chapter of Life on the Mississippi (New York: P.F. Collier, 1917) entitled “Enchantments and Enchanters,” Mark Twain begins with a memory of seeing Mardi-Gras festivities in New Orleans in 1850. He remembered seeing a procession of the Mystic Crew of Comus, “with knights and nobles and so on, clothed in silken and golden Paris-made gorgeousness, planned and bought for that single night’s use; and in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquerie – a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking and flickering torches.”(373)

He then notes that Mardi-Gras had been a relic of French and Spanish “occupation” of the city, but that any religious origins of the festivities had been “pretty well knocked out of it now.” The reason for this, Twain tells us, is that “Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary, and he will stay. His medieval business, supplemented by the monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy-land, is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabble of the priest’s day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holy one is reached.”(373-4)

More’s the pity, Twain believes. He is pleased that such pageantry is unlikely to spread beyond Memphis, St. Louis, and Baltimore to infect the “practical North”, let alone London. But he is obviously less than happy with the fixation of his own natal region on all this romanticism. “For the soul of it,” he intones, “is the romantic, not the funny and the grotesque. Take away the romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles, and Mardi-Gras would die, down there in the South. The very feature that keeps it alive in the South – girly-girly romance – would kill it in the North or in London. Puck and Punch, and the press universal, would fall upon it and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would be also its last.” (374)

Now, while we may be less sanguine than Twain about the career of romance in the dens of practicality, he certainly makes an interesting case about the South, framed nicely in relation to the French Revolution. He writes:

Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the Revolution broke the chains of the ancien régime and of the Church, and made a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and so completely stripped the divinity from royalty that, whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men since, and can never be gods again, but only figure-heads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress.(374-5)

One imagines that Twain is capable of believing that “abject slaves” would not just mean Frenchmen, but could include the bonded Haitian, and his similarly situated brother and sister in the Old South. But, liberty, humanity, and progress, were to be taxed commodities in the domain of literature. “Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments,” Twain continues,

and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.(375)

What Twain tells us is quite important, I think.  Perhaps there is a historian who in a footnote about the Old South has mentioned the appeal of Sir Walter Scott to members of the slaveholding society; but none that I know of has gone so far as to attribute the characteristics of that society to changes in literary taste. With few exceptions, historians have a more materialistic bent, seeing culture as a reflection of material conditions – the superstructure built upon the economic base. Now, obviously one might still wonder why Scott might have the appeal in the Old South that Twain claims for him, attributing this to the institution of slavery perhaps, but one would still have to recognize what impact is being afforded a mere writer of Scottish romances. Twain notes:

He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote.  Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization, and so you have practical common sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works, mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried.(375)

So, according to Twain, the South had been held back by its adoration for the romance of Scott and “but for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner…would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be a generation further advanced than it is.”(375-6)  But the problems associated with the Scott disease were even more pernicious. For,

It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a major or a colonel, or a general or a judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.(376)

Much of the honor code described by Bertram Wyatt Brown as central to Southern mentalité in Southern Honor, a work that come closer than most others to an idealist rather than materialist interpretation of the South, can be linked to this Scott fixation. And, more still, Twain claims that this fixation was one of its causes of the Civil War itself:

Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument, might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War; but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter’s influence than to that of any other thing or person.(376)

As one reads “Enchantments and Enchanters” one is reminded of both Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The former work does a couple of things.  First, it places the representative of northern practicality in a Scott-like medieval setting, but with an unexpected twist. Rather than simply showing the idiocy of Arthurian society and ridiculing its conventions, as one might predict from this particular essay, Connecticut Yankee has its Yankee imposing his own conventions in such a way that “the modern” itself becomes problematic. Second, the work provides a parable about Reconstruction. While the South may have been a weird mix of medieval and modern, northerners’ attempts to reconstruct this region, without really knowing the extent of their own warped romanticism (and so their susceptibility to Southern wiles) and without understanding the region they were trying to reconstruct, would be abortive.

Huck Finn, by contrast, provides an antidote to Sir Walter’s fare. Twain ends the “Enchantments” essay by juxtaposing Scott’s work and that of Cervantes:

A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by Don Quixote and those wrought by Ivanhoe. The first swept the world’s admiration for the medieval chivalry silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. As far as our South is concerned the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott’s pernicious work undermined it.(377-8)

Huck Finn provides an assault on the Scott-ridden South using Cervantine conventions. Huck is very much a Don Quixote maneuvering his way through the South’s pretensions to chivalric civilization, finding its limits in the contradictions and hypocrisies evident in the racism of the South. Huck’s companion, Jim, very much takes on the air of a Sancho Panza, uneducated and yet wise, especially by comparison with those who would keep him in bondage.

So, what of all this?  We have then a novelist who has transformed a society for ill – showing the power of the novel not just to tell us about particular kinds of societies and historical narratives, but also to mislead us, and in so doing create a historical memory that begins to shape history itself. We have another novelist attempting to put things to right in his own writing, and doing so via the muse of Miguel de Cervantes. As we have said in the introduction to these “novel histories” – all roads lead to Cervantes; we will get there yet.

Thirty-eight: The Transplanted

It goes without saying that The Graduate is an important movie. Few would disagree with this, I believe. The Graduate symbolizes for many an articulation of 1960s rebellion against the plastic world of the Organization Man. This was certainly how I viewed it when I first saw it. Although I was only thirteen, and it was my first weekend at my public (private) school, this was close to the sixties and the feelings of that decade were very much in the air. A few weeks later the school screened Lindsay Anderson’s If, which was asking for trouble since it ends with Malcolm McDowell standing atop Cheltenham Cathedral (if I recall correctly) raining bullets down on the parents and teachers of his own public school. The association of The Graduate with rebellion, which was probably there anyway, was further accentuated in my mind as a result of the juxtaposition of these movies. While confused in its own way – adopting the system’s mode of conformity (Benjamin’s desire to marry Elaine) to protest against conformity – The Graduate nonetheless opens a gaping hole in the monochromatic suburban landscape.

The movie also comes at the end of an era in Hollywood history, and represents an interesting counterpoint to The Jazz Singer. The earlier film represented the coming of age of the Jewish mogul bringing to the fore the internal conflict of the sons of immigrants endeavoring to assimilate into American culture. Produced in 1927, three years after the Johnson-Reed Act effectively cut off immigration, the story revealed Jake Rabinowitz turning himself into Jack Robin and dating fellow Broadway dancer and Jew, Mary Dale. While the movie appears on the surface to celebrate the continuity of Jewish traditions, alongside the emergent “American” culture (baseball and apple pie), the reality of a nation cutting off the immigrants from the “old world”, and the coming rush to the uniform suburbs, left the culture of the cantor and the synagogue seeming quaint and moribund. What followed in Hollywood was several decades of Jewish producers, directors, and actors, helping to create an image of America that was decidedly WASPish in most of its aspects.

The Graduate, however, does the exact reverse of The Jazz Singer. Made by Anglicized [Americanized?] Jews, like the director Mike Nichols, it turns a story of a WASP youth into that of a Jewish rebel thumbing his nose at the establishment. This was not a deliberate move on Nichols’ part, apparently, but rather came to fruition with the hiring of Dustin Hoffman (as opposed to Robert Redford) to play the lead role. Seeing Hoffman’s audition enabled Nichols to see that Benjamin’s alienation could be rendered as more than just a product of generational difference; it could become something embedded in Hoffman’s appearance as not being the tall, handsome, bronzed and blonde California male. The question would be asked, how did these goy parents have this Jewish kid? – though, of course, many Jewish parents would have endeavored to pass as WASPs throughout the 1950s. When you throw in the music of Simon and Garfunkel and Benjamin’s waving of a large cross at the wedding-goers – a reversal of sorts of Jesus cleansing the synagogue of the money-changers, since these were now being locked in the church – then the fact that “Jesus loves you more than you know” no longer amounts to a point of great importance, or anything more than irony. What comes to mind is William Jennings Bryan’s statement, “Thou shalt not crucify mankind on a Cross of Gold,” except the cross is now being waved by Hoffman at all the Christians – when Bryan would have had it the other way around.

In this guise, The Graduate takes on the form of a second pronouncement on the closing of the frontier and a revenge of the east against the west. California was the last land of the settlers, those who responded to the call to “go west young man,” and the most recently developed section of the United States as a result of the great growth of the military-industrial complex during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The establishment of a chemical industry, which provides the single word “plastics” for the movie, represents the coming of age of industrial capital in California, and Benjamin’s return from the East – a land associated in the minds of Dustin Hoffman and Mike Nichols with Jewish intellectuals (e.g., Dylan and Lenny Bruce) who had also been the backbone of the labor movement in the 19th century – is the injection of a foreign agent into this mix. De Tocqueville, one feels, is close at hand. While Benjamin doesn’t fit the mold of the radical protesting at Berkeley, there are allusions to these disturbances, and his protest is powerful nonetheless. In the process, he ends up transplanting Jack Robin back into his earlier persona as Jakie Rabinowitz, taking him out of his convertible (suburban) and placing him back on public transport (urban), all just in time for social historians to rediscover the immigrant community;   

Thirty-seven: The Widening Horizon

One of Paul Lyon’s notable characteristics was his ability to pepper almost every encounter with some information that one did not know, though one frequently felt that one ought to know it. I remember on first meeting Paul in the fall of 1996, standing at the top of the stairs from the I-wing gym (I didn’t know at the time that this would be one of the places we would most frequently bump into each other, Paul holding his gym clothes), he informed me about a trip he had made to England in the 1960s during which he had stayed with distant relatives in the large and extensive Jewish community of Leeds. Well, of course, the fact that there was a large Jewish community in Leeds was news to me, and almost every subsequent encounter followed in a similar vein as I learned about historians and academics he knew (and I should have), about Philip Roth and Newark in the 50s, about incidents at the college, and on and on.

One name that came up frequently was E.H. Carr, an English historian we history undergraduates all read in our first weeks at British universities. I had some recollection of his work – What is History? – remembering mainly the outlines of his various points about the study of history, and the fact that these fit loosely within a Marxist approach; but I had not gone back to it, and the finer points Paul made about Carr were, truth to tell, frequently more opaque for me than they perhaps should have been. But I got enough of a sense from Paul, during many of these conversations, that Carr had been a guiding light for him in shaping his approach to his research and writing.

Added to this, I also knew that Paul did not believe that there was a clear divide between his work as a historian and his commitment to social work. It was no surprise to me when I read this in his self-evaluation letter for his application for the Distinguished Professorship. He believed that the two parts of his work were linked, and he felt, not surprisingly, that Stockton was a place where he could realize his vision of himself as a Social Work Historian, or a Historian Social Worker. The present informed his understanding of the past and his understanding of the past shaped his action in the present. He was a little mystified, I believe, when it was suggested that he wasn’t a real historian or not a real social work professor; he believed he was both and more. He would also have been mystified by the need to explain how a historian ended up as a social worker, or how a social worker ended up writing so much history.

Well, it turns out that Edward Hallett Carr's work may have been an inspiration for this vision of himself as crossing boundaries of disciplines in the way that he did. One of the wonderful parts of the memorial service for Paul was the invitation to go up to his office and pick out a book of his to take away and keep as a memento. You just know that he would have loved this idea! And, I imagine that many others like me went into his office wanting to find something that spoke to them directly, or in some way brought them and Paul into some form of connection. Well, I was having great difficulty – we had talked about so many topics and had many overlaps in our work – until my eyes looked up at the top shelf where Paul kept his volumes on the study of history.  There in the midst of these books, was a hardback copy of Carr’s What is History? published in 1967. Once I had seen it, it took me no time whatsoever to choose this book, as I certainly felt a compulsion at that moment to find out more about Paul’s view of this discipline that we had inhabited together.

I certainly was not disappointed in my decision.  When I got home and opened the book I found many passages highlighted, which, it seemed to me, placed a lot of Paul’s comments in context and helped me to understand better what he felt he was doing in his work. I thought I would take note of a few in case you are also interested.

The first comment that seemed to conjure up Paul for me was this: “Great history is written precisely when the historian’s vision of the past is illuminated by insights into the problems of the present” (p.44).  Here, already, you can see Paul engaging both past and present simultaneously, feeling his way around the present in social work, in part to help him understand history better.

But, a longer passage (which Paul had marked both in yellow magic marker and with two bold ink lines down the margin), struck me as significant, in terms of the relationship between social work and history – if one were to substitute social work for sociology in this contrast with history:

This is perhaps the place for a brief remark on the relations between history and sociology. Sociology at present faces two opposite dangers – the danger of becoming ultra-theoretical and the danger of becoming ultra-empirical. The first is the danger of losing itself in abstract and meaningless generalizations about society in general. Society with a big S is as misleading a fallacy as History with a big H. This danger is brought nearer by those who assign to sociology the exclusive task of generalizing from the unique events recorded by history: it has even been suggested that sociology is distinguished from history by having “laws.” The other danger is that foreseen by Karl Mannheim almost a generation ago, and very much present today, of a sociology “split into a series of discrete technical problems of social readjustment. Sociology is concerned with the historical societies every one of which is unique and molded by specific historical antecedents and conditions. But the attempt to avoid generalization and interpretation by confining oneself to so-called “technical” problems of enumeration and analysis is merely to become the unconscious apologist of a static society. Sociology, if it is to become a fruitful study, must, like history, concern itself with the relation between the unique and general. But it must also become dynamic – a study not of society at rest (for no such society exists), but of social change and development. For the rest, I would only say that the more sociological history becomes, and the more historical sociology becomes, the better for both.  Let the frontier between them be kept wide open for two-way traffic. (83-84)

I can hear Paul talking about the need not to become “an apologist of a static society,” of the need to understand that society is not “at rest,” and the need for “two-way traffic” between disciplines; and I can imagine him feeling that the two parts of his work strengthened each other.

The next passage speaks more to Paul’s ability to write about people with whom he didn’t necessarily agree, as in his last book on Conservatives and Conservatism:

Let us therefore reject the notion of the historian as a hanging judge, and turn to the more difficult but more profitable question of the passing of moral judgments not on individuals, but on events, institutions, or policies of the past. These are the important judgments of the historian; and those who insist so fervently on the moral condemnation of the individual sometimes unconsciously provide an alibi for whole groups and societies. (100)

And the Paul, who adapted to new ways of looking at things, and he certainly did, could be found in this statement:

The abstract standard or value, divorced from society and divorced from history, is as much an illusion as the abstract individual. The serious historian is the one who recognizes the historically conditioned character of all values, not the one who claims for his own values an objectivity beyond history. (108)

The last chapter of What is History? is called “The Widening Horizon,” and I think Paul had really taken this chapter to heart. The chapter talks about the limitations of Hegel (imagining that history ended in the present), the failure of Marx (in believing that it ended in a particular kind of proletarian revolution), and it praised Freud for his contribution to our understanding of history (once again highlighting the significance of interdisciplinarity for Paul). Freud, Paul highlighted, “has encouraged the historian to examine himself and his own position in history, the motives – perhaps hidden motives – which have guided his choice of theme, or period and his selection and interpretation of the facts, the national and social background which has determined his angle of vision, the conception of the future which shapes his conceptions of the past.” But, for Carr, and I think for Paul, history was about the future – that widening horizon. It was about endeavoring to understand the past in order to make the future better. You clearly got the sense of this in the well-crafted film of Paul teaching screened during the memorial service. He outlined the histories of slavery and some of the negative aspects of the American experience, talked about some of the achievements (and the idealism of the “City upon a Hill”), and gave a clear sense of how he felt things ought to be. This was the idealist in him; not the Hegelian or Marxist idealist, who thinks he knows how things should end up looking, but the simple humanist; one who looks forward to the future because he sees the possibility of making things better than they now are, however imperfect and in need of change they will remain.

My very last conversation with Paul occurred the day before he went into hospital, though he didn’t mention that he was going to be having a check-up of any kind. We talked about the lecture engagements in China that I had helped arrange for him, and about his hopes for American Studies at Stockton, and we talked about me writing a letter for his Distinguished Professor file. We then happened to fall into conversation about the former Yugoslavia and about the dissident intellectual, Mihailo Markovic, whom we both had known at Penn, just before Paul started at Stockton (when he was teaching history). Markovic, who ended up being severely beaten (Paul informed me) for breaking with the Milosovic regime, had advocated challenging theory with praxis. He was a dissident primarily because he wouldn’t fall in line with the orthodox views of his country’s rulers. I could see that Paul had really imbibed a good deal of this spirit, wanting to insure that his own work was grounded in some form of engagement, and I remember saying as he left (he had other meetings to go to) that we should get lunch and talk about it some more.

Paul was always going to leave some things unsaid; he had so much to say that things would inevitably be left for further discussion. I think I like that feeling of being left in mid-conversation – perhaps, in part, because it allows me to make up his lines in future imagined dialogues, lines that I will inevitably agree with! – but more because it keeps a connection with him going, like reopening the pages of What is History? And after delving into this book again, I think it is clear that Paul endeavored to widen the horizon for everyone he came into contact with; and he succeeded with so many!

Thirty-six: A Common Wind

Pulled kicking and screaming from the archive, this essay is one of the short pieces published in my second book, Inside Out, Outside In: Essays in Comparative History (St. Martin's Press/Macmillan, 2000). It combines the readings of a couple of different novels separated by almost twenty years. The first was E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, which I read in the summer of 1980, not long after the book had appeared. I had been spending a year as an exchange student at the University of Pennsylvania and I was on a road trip out to the Rocky Mountains with my brother and some friends. On the trip, when I wasn't doing my share of driving the beat up 1966 Mustang, I would read quite voraciously. I also consumed The World According to Garp, I believe, and a fair amount of James Baldwin.

While reading through Ragtime the novel struck me as very familiar. Quite by happenstance, I had just finished reading all the Heinrich von Kleist short stories, and the similarities between one of the subplots in Ragtime and “Michael Kolhaas” seemed to be more than coincidence. I have never seen any criticism of the work along these lines, but I believe that this borrowing from Kleist is fairly well known. What was compelling to me at the time was the use of a story about nascent class struggle in Europe for the development of a narrative highlighting American race relations. Using E.P. Thompson’s work on The Making of the English Working Class for developing a social history of African Americans (as I would later attempt to do in my first book, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression) was a logical extension of this transnational borrowing.

Many years later, however, I was sitting in Pune reading V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World. The manner in which Naipaul questioned the notion of agency, particularly in the context of analysis of race (almost claiming that deploying such a notion might be ethnocentric), forced my mind back to my reading of Kleist and Doctorow. This reading made me wonder whether "Michael Kolhaas" really worked in the manner used by Doctorow, and whether that would still be the case if one looked at another of Kleist's story which dealt specifically with the Haitian Revolution. These thoughts led to the following musings.

  

Yet die not; do thou

  Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow

Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,

Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind

  Powers that will work for thee; air, earth and skies;

There’s not a breathing of the common wind

  That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

  Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

– William Wordsworth, To Toussaint L'Ouverture[1]

In E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, the central character, a black musician named Coalhouse Walker, Jr. is driven to rebellion against white society by the actions of members of a volunteer fire brigade. Walker is a successful, self-respecting black man. He is driving his Model T. Ford past the fire station when he is stopped and his car is dismantled as part of a racist practical joke. The firemen are saying, in effect, you may be successful but in America you are still black.[2]

Receiving no satisfaction from the authorities, Walker takes the law into his own hands and carries out a reign of terror in New York City, culminating in the takeover of J. Peirpont Morgan’s museum and Booker T. Washington’s unsuccessful intervention to placate the rebel and have him turn himself in. In effect, Walker’s predicament and his response to it represent a commentary on Washington’s accommodationist philosophy.

As many know, this Doctorow novel owes its origin to a short story written at the beginning of the 19th century by a young German novelist named Heinrich von Kleist.[3] Kleist’s story, based on events that occurred in the 16th century, was named “Michael Kolhaas” and was about a successful young horse-dealer who has two of his hoses detained and ill-treated by the Junka von Tronka, whose land he happens to be traveling through. His horses are taken away from him in the most dishonorable fashion and Kolhaas seeks retribution, sacrificing everything he has, family and property, for revenge against the Tronka and the society that elevated him. The story is set in the sixteenth century, and so we find Martin Luther attempting to intervene. But Luther is concerned only for law and order, and is unreceptive to Kolhaas's claim that he had to make this stand, he could do no other.

Almost two centuries divides these two authors, but the story seems to work in both instances. On the first occasion it is applied to the issues of class, the division between the aristocrats of Germany and a nascent bourgeois class; the author is a man looking back at these social developments through the events of the French Revolution. In the second instance, the same scenario is attached to the racial divide in the United States at the nadir of post-emancipation race relations; in this case Doctorow is surveying this nadir from a post-Civil Rights movement perspective.

But this equivalence is all too neat, and this is so in a way that I think tells us something about the dangers of bringing categories of class and race together. What do we miss if we make the jump from Kolhaas to Coalhouse reflexively? What we miss is the event that always seems to be missed – the Haitian revolution.[4]  A short story that might easily be paired with “Michael Kolhaas” is Kleist’s “Betrothal in Santo Domingo.”[5] In this story we see the world turned upside down. What we see is the Kolhaases of Saint Domingue determining that they too need to make their stand. Their butchery, however, is not looked on quite so favorably as Kolhaas's. In Kolhaas's case we are dealing with a victim, and his rebellion is justifiable. In the case of Congo Hoango and company, it seems to be evil and sheer savagery at work. While Martin Luther is to be ridiculed for intervening on the side of authority in the Kolhaas piece, one feels that there is a desperate need for some Luther figure in the second story.  Only if we carry forward the story about Kolhaas to the era of ragtime without knowledge of Haiti do we feel comfortable with the transposition. With Haiti in place we feel some dissonance, that the narrative is doing work that it was not intended to do. Either it cannot be applied to race, or Coalhouse has in a way been deracinated – incorporated into a system where we are to feel sympathy with him as no different from one of “us.” But the questions that were evaded in the previous story – what of the peasants whom Luther also condemned and the other “walking fertilizer”, what of such people? – these things become clear when we know that some stands against oppression are to be valorized while others, however equivocal, however (non)-violent, are to be condemned.

But here we do an injustice to Heinrich von Kleist. For, what arises from the juxtaposition of these two stories is the realization that it is inadequate to take on the position of comfortable narrator and have the story develop along easy lines of good against evil. In the case of Kolhaas, we now know that the first part of the story, based on an 18th-century chronicle was written in 1808. The later part, which introduces a lot of complication and tends to undermine the realism of the first half, was written two years later, at about the time that Kleist was writing his story of Santo Domingo.[6] In this later part Kleist introduces a gypsy-woman who gives to Kolhaas a talisman, and in so doing introduces a “bizarre and fantastic sub-plot” to the story. What this sub-plot does, in effect, is take the easy identification with Kolhaas as protagonist away from the reader; Kolhaas now has a thirst for revenge that isn’t merely reducible to his mistreatment. If this is an example of Nietsche’s aphorism that “I am just” really means “I am avenged,” then this is no different for others, who like Kolhaas have had their “agency” stripped from them. In effect, Kleist racializes Kolhaas, he also endeavors to “class-ify” Santo Domingo.

In “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo,” Kleist invites the reader to adopt a racial categorization in which white is good and black is evil, and then at almost every point along the way he attempts to dismantle this. A black woman’s evil act of luring a white slaveowner to her bed when she is dying of yellow fever, is contrasted with a white woman’s nobility when she goes to the guillotine during the French Revolution in place of her fiancée. These are the two stories that the Swiss mercenary tells to the two women who have themselves lured him into an evil trap.

The younger of these two women, Toni, who is the daughter of a mulatto woman and white Frenchman, and was born in Paris, has been given the assignment of trapping white men so that Congo Hoango, an ungrateful former slave and leader of ex-slaves in that section of the island, can kill them. But Toni falls in love with this young Swiss mercenary, and in a way seems to whiten herself. Her attempt to save the Swiss soldier, however, leads him to suspect that she has been trying to trap him, and when she finally brings about his rescue, he kills her. Once he learns the truth, he puts a pistol to his own mouth and commits suicide (with the kind of mess only Kleist seems to be able to savor, and in the manner that the author would a few months later end his own life).

The racial categorization is complicated by Toni’s actions, by the fact that in her eyes not all whites are the same as the French slaveowners, and by Kleist’s attempts to humanize the actions of Hoango and Toni’s mother as the story progresses. In addition, the former slaves are no different from French revolutionaries, who are described in the story of the noble white woman, as 'inhuman monsters' and 'butchers.' But, in the end it does not matter: the Swiss man seems trapped in his vision of the woman as either good or evil, white or black – tragedy will follow.

The memory of these events and the couple’s love for each other, occurring in the face of General Dessalines’ march on Port-au-Prince, about which Kleist announces, “the world knows,” is reduced to a small monument hidden beneath a bush in the garden of a Swiss family who had been saved by the young couple. In such ways, stories that go against the grain of world historical events become silences to be searched for and retrieved.

Thinking of Kolhaas and Haiti, of the “common wind,” V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World comes to mind.[7] For it is altogether too easy to make one-dimensional men out of revolutionaries – to divest Kolhaas of his irrationality. Naipaul describes the work of an English travel writer during the period just prior to decolonization, who was sympathetic to the Grenadian workers’ struggles in Trinidad of that period. In one particular strike led by a Kolhaas-like figure, Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler, and supported by a character Naipaul calls Lebrun, who appears to be modeled on George Padmore (with a twist of C.L.R. James for good measure), the English author gets carried away in his praise, turning Butler into a figure of the stature of a Gandhi. According to Naipaul:

The strike he and the trade unions called came close to being an insurrection. A policeman was burned alive in the oilfield area. The government began to recruit and arm volunteers. The atmosphere would have been like that of 1805 or 1831, when there was talk of a slave revolt. And then, as happened in the slave days, passion died down, and people returned to being themselves.

This was the subject of the English writer’s book. He (Foster Morris)

wrote of Tubal Uriah Butler and the people around him. He wrote of them with the utmost seriousness. He gave them families, backgrounds; he treated what they said without irony. Nothing like this had been written about local people before. He wrote of them as though they were English people – as though they had that kind of social depth and solidity and rootedness.

For Naipaul, this was praiseworthy, “well-intentioned,...but it was wrong”:

What was missing from Foster Morris’s view was what we all lived with: the sense of the absurd, the idea of comedy, which hid from us our true position. The social depth he gave to ordinary people didn't make sense. That idea of a background – and what it contained: order and values and the possibility of striving: perfectability – made sense only when people were more truly responsible for themselves. We weren’t responsible in that way. Much had been taken from our hands. We didn’t have backgrounds. We didn’t have a past. For most of us the past stopped with our grandparents; beyond that was blank. If you could look down at us from the sky you would see us living in our little houses between the sea and the bush; and that was a kind of truth about us, who had been transported to that place. We were just there, floating.(p. 81)

Foster Morris, acting the part of social scientist, “didn’t understand the nature of our deprivation.” He saw “versions of English people and simplified us.” He could not see that Butler was considered by his followers, simultaneously, “a kind of messiah” and “a crazed and uneducated African preacher” (p. 82). Morris also could not understand that the policeman was not someone reviled by the insurrectionists, “that he was to become, in calypso and folk memory, a special sacrificial figure, as famous as Uriah Butler himself, and almost as honoured.” (p. 82).

Morris's “rescue” project had avoided condescension towards the Butlers and Kolhaases, it is true; but what of those who could not be given their moment of reason in the face of oppression? They would remain un-anglicized, their irrationality – of which they would have the usual measure – characterizing them as far as it was necessary to characterize them at all.

Notes

[1] In Helen Gardner, ed., The New Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 504.

[2] E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).

[3] Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of O and Other Stories (Middlesex: Penguin, 1985), pp. 114-213.

[4] Trouillot, Silencing the Past.

[5] Kleist, The Marquise, pp. 231-269..

[6] David Luke and Nigel Reeves, 'Introduction," in ibid., pp. 27-31.

[7] A Way in the World (New York: Vintage, 1994).

Thirty-five: Of Epigrammatology

Words Worthy of a Martyr

There’s not a breathing of the common wind

That will forget thee…

                        – William Wordsworth, To Toussaint L’Ouverture 

I used this epigraph in an essay on Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kolhaas and E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, (see #25, The Common Wind) because I wanted to link the self-destructive, suicidal resistance of both Kolhaas and Michael Coalhouse, Jr. to the “common wind” mentioned by William Wordsworth. But there was more to be found in these words than this alone. Here one witnessed arguably the most important English romantic poet waxing lyrical on the rebellion in Haiti. I and other school kids were brought up in England to believe that the romantic poets had largely focused on nature, and if they ever did stretch to politics it was either in the form of a harking back to traditional rural England, or a momentary infatuation with the French Revolution. That they might have even known anything about the plight of slaves in the French Caribbean, or anywhere else for that matter, would remain beyond our ken. Yet, in these words, the empire and the descendent of Africa were found right at the heart of European culture.

This epigraph from Wordsworth’s poem for Toussaint L’Ouverture speaks to the condition of martyrdom that western nations are now doing so much to promote [e.g. in Iraq]. It might seem odd, at first glance, to think that an English Romantic poet would have found much to praise in Toussaint. Yet this is not so much about praise as it is about the realization that the European endeavor to shackle the descendants of Africa would inevitably unleash forces that would never be fully contained. The rebel only needed to breathe “the common wind” to gain sustenance. This points to the fundamental fallacy that has governed Euro-American global policy ever since. Systems that are felt to be oppressive by those who inhabit them cannot be sustained by war and force. How much more is this so, when that common wind is bolstered by the fact that those who would contain local insurgencies endeavor to do so in the name of freedom and democracy?

Thirty-four: Of Epigrammatology

War and the Intellectuals

The many wars that have been fought in Europe since 1855, and are likely to be fought during the next twenty years, have or will have for one of their causes the discovery of Sanskrit.  Though in itself this is by no means a very gratifying result, still I allude to it to simply show how deeply the Europeans have been influenced by the new ideas.

         – R.G. Bhandarkar, “The Critical, Comparative and Historical Method of Inquiry,” 1888[1]

This epigram is really quite staggering, in my opinion. The comment is just one of many made by a relatively little known (outside of India) Sanskritist and Brahman intellectual who lived in Poona in the latter part of the 19th century. One weekend, I happened to be browsing through the several volumes of R.G. Bhandarkar’s work owned by my father-in-law, and the title of the piece from which the comment came jumped out at me. I consider myself a comparativist so I was immediately curious to see what an Indian intellectual had been writing about comparative history over one hundred years ago. It is worth remembering that the discipline of history was in its infancy as a profession at this time in both Europe and America, and, while many were implicitly undertaking comparative analysis (particularly comparing the United States and Europe), few would have talked of a comparative method or described themselves as comparativists. So I felt an immediate dislocation in finding someone whom one would have expected to be behind his European counterparts in this regard actually several steps ahead of them. 

But this is not the only displacement that is evident here. After making a pretty outrageous statement (to which I will return), Bhandarkar ends by indicating that the Europeans are finally catching up. The Europeans have been “deeply…influenced” by the new ideas. About a hundred years before historians and literary theorists began to argue that the empire struck back, that western intellectuals gained many of their ideas from the colonized, and that the transmission of ideas and culture was not a one-way street (with Europeans imposing themselves on or “uplifting” the natives), Bhandarkar was saying very much the same thing.

And look at the statement itself: One of the causes of European wars has been and will be the discovery of Sanskrit! How can this possibly be? Who else has ever suggested this? Where do we find examples of our comparative historians ever using their comparative method to so radically alter perceived historical truth? And what if Bhandarkar is right?  Certainly anyone who has ever read about the Paris negotiations following World War I and Woodrow Wilson’s obsession with linguistic communities, anyone who has analyzed Nazi obsessions with liebensraum for Germans (whoever they might be), and anyone observing the kind of break-up that occurred in Europe following the demise of the Soviet Union, would recognize that there may be a kernel of truth in Bhandarkar’s comment. And yet, who would pursue this line of reasoning further?

The epigram seemed to me to be perfect for an essay that was endeavoring to challenge the way that we undertake comparative history of the United States and the way in which so many Americanists have heard the sirens’ call of exceptionalism.[2] But are we surprised that the sirens’ call is heeded so frequently when so few Americanists have read Bhandarkar?

Notes

[1] N.B. Utgikar and V.G. Paranjpe, eds., Collected Works of R.G. Bhandarkar, vol.1 (Poona: Bhandarkar Oridental Research Institute, 1933), p. 390.

[2] “Apropos Exceptionalism: Imperial Location and Comparative Histories of South Africa and the United States,” in Inside Out, Outside In: Essays in Comparative History (Macmillan, 2000), 5.

Thirty-three: Of Epigrammatology

Non, Je ne regrette rien, except…

I have one great regret regarding my essay, “Making the World Safe for American History,” which was published in Antoinette Burton’s edited volume, After the Imperial Turn (Duke, 2003).  It has nothing to do with anything that might substantially alter the content of the essay. I would not want to change my analysis much, though I am sure there must be something problematic in what I have to say somewhere in the essay.

Indeed, the essay seems to have had very favorable responses. One hears through the grapevine that some such fellow really liked it, but funnily enough one hears less frequently directly from the people themselves. C’est la vie. It doesn’t seem to lead to invitations to give lectures or the like, even while the targets of the essay itself seem to be fêted across this fair and meritocratic land of ours. But, there are no regrets on that score either. Indeed, when one gets a review in The Historical Journal from a historian as smart as Susan Pedersen at Columbia University (and we know that she is smart, not just from the well-written and thought-provoking review of the whole volume, but because she liked my work!), then it brings a smile to one’s face that almost makes one forget the regret associated with the essay.

For, Professor Pedersen writes that there are a number of “gems” in the volume dealing with historiographical and interpretive battles. And, she continues,

my favourite essay among this group is Robert Gregg’s splenetic and very funny skewering of the recent endorsement of an ‘international turn’ by the doyens of the Organization of American Historians (‘Making the World Safe for American History’), a ‘turn’ whose muddle-headedness he finds captured perfectly in a recent invitation-only meeting to discuss this project held (as all good conference-cum-boondoggles should be!) at the Villa La Pietra in Florence. (‘Let’s be honest now, Gregg writes disarmingly, ‘My real beef with OAH’s conference on internationalizing the study of American history at La Pietra was that I was not a participant.  Had I been invited…I would be endorsing the La Pietra Report in a snap, like all the other worthies on the participant list.’ (p. 173).) It is nice for us he was not invited [not for me], though, for exclusion provides him with the perspective (or perhaps just the animus) to point out that – as should be obvious to anyone taking a cab, buying a newspaper, or simply spending five minutes contemplating the furnishings and appliances of their own home – one scarcely needs to travel to Florence to understand how utterly ‘global’ is the history of this mature settler state [nice]. As Gregg mildly proposes, ‘internationalizing American history might be more effectively demonstrated by endeavouring to bring out the global buried [clearly not very deeply] within the local’ (p. 171).

Who wouldn’t enjoy reading that about their work?

Nonetheless the work itself is a disappointment to me. Just look at the epigraphs in the piece. I use one from the album “Who’s Next?” but I could have used one so much better from the same song (“Won’t get fooled again”) that this one came from. I was in the car the other day and these lines came floating over all those annoying engine sounds:

And the world looks just the same,

And history ain’t changed….

Damn!  How could I have missed those lines?

Well, I feel a little better now.