On Historiography (III)
1,
Some post-modern historians express doubt that the past is real. This is provocative way of stating skepticism that the past can be reliably known. Under this interpretation, the past is a fiction that is socially constructed that people have agreed to accept a real. This radical view, however, always founders on the reef of the Holocaust. The Holocaust resulting in the destruction of European Jewry is consistently treated as an exception to post-modernist skepticism. The concentration camps and their victims are one of the few things that even the most robust post-modern theorists don’t dare to dispute. Of course, an exception of this kind swallows the rule – if the Holocaust is undeniably real, then, Nazi Germany and World War II must be similarly accepted as true. If World War II was a real event in the past, then, at least some of its historical causes must also be construed as not only real but knowable. And, so, it goes until pretty much all of the past musts be conceded to be accessible to objective or empirical reason.
Doubt as to the Holocaust’s reality (or whether knowable facts can be established about this catastrophe) is the one cardinal sin that no professional historian will commit. (I exclude Holocaust deniers like David Irving from the category of “professional historians”.) But, as I have shown, if the truth of one past fact can be shown, then, this implies that much of the rest of history, extending back to the dynasties of ancient Egypt, is also knowable.
2.
The era of so-called “romantic” historiography is supposed to have commenced with the German thinker, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744 to 1803). In my view, the descriptor “romantic”, often used in historiography, is misleading and unhelpful. So far as I can tell, “romantic” doesn’t signify any particular traits in historiography but merely defines an era in which certain famous historians wrote their works – that is, the period of European romanticism, which spans the era from about 1800 until the middle of that century. I won’t use the term “romantic history” because I don’t know what it really means and believe that the concept is ill-defined.
Herder’s thought is seminal in two respects. First, he viewed history as the story of the Volk, or “people” as a cultural unit. Different tribes made history, as it were, according to cultural paradigms unique to that people. Herder believed all Volk were morally equivalent – in this respect, he espoused a value-free, non-judgmental assessment of the different Volk or ethnic groups, an approach that makes him the progenitor, as it were, of modern anthropology. (And the precursor to Leopold von Ranke’s similar views.) Each Volk should develop according to its unique destiny, a fate determined, Herder believed, by the grammatical and lexical aspects of its language. A Volk is defined as a linguistic group or category. This disposition to treat Volk as a language-group is, perhaps, related to the specific history of the German people. Until German-speaking people were partially united under Bismarck (the Swiss and Austrians always remained politically separate), Deutsch denoted the speakers of a common language and not a nation-state. Therefore, Herder conceives of the Volk, the vehicle through which history expresses itself, as a people united by a common language.
Herder’s second innovation is to initiate (or, properly stated, “re-invent”) the so-called “stadial theory of history.” According to Herder, a people or Volk developed through various stages. Initially, during the heroic era, a people expressed themselves through “epic”. Later, the heroic or “epic” sensibility was tamed into a more refined, if, perhaps, weaker and less muscular “prose” approach to reality. After the “prose” stage, cultures developed into an analytical or scientific phase in which their writing become “philosophical”, for Herder, another term for “scientific”.
Hegel developed Herder’s stadial approach to history into a theory that the “World-Spirit” progressed through various stages towards its ultimate form, one of complete self-reflective consciousness – the spirit contemplates only itself. Although Hegel’s formulation of this principle is dauntingly abstract, in his theory of history, he is far more concrete. The mechanism through which the World-Spirit manifests is the State. Hegel thought that the State developed in stages, each productive of more freedom or liberty than the previous stage. In China, where Hegel believed history began, the State was ruled by a single Emperor – in this State, only one person was free, the King. In ancient Greece, and, later, Rome, the State functioned according to laws in which a few were free but the rest slaves. (Ancient Greek “democracy” exemplified a political system of aristocracy in which the nobles were free but the rest slaves.) Modern democracies represent the next phase in this stadial development. In modern democracies most people are free. Hegel argued that the utopian final phase or telos of this evolution would be a State in which freedom is guaranteed to all.
Hegel’s ideas as to freedom were immensely influential. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800 to 1859), a leading English historian, asserted that the history of Great Britain from the Magna Carta onward was the story of “gradual increase in freedom.” In America, George Bancroft (d. 1891) claimed that American history was the account of how constitutional freedoms in the United States gradually spread democracy throughout the entire world. In Bancroft’s assessment, American slavery was a providential institution in that its abolition was an emblem for the entire world to emulate in support of the ultimate triumph of freedom. This concept suffuses the work of great American historians of the 19th century, Francis Parkman (d. 1893) and William Prescott (d. 1851). The story of American history as the inevitable advance of human freedom was the paradigm for the curriculum that I was taught in the 1960's and early seventies.
3.
But there have always been skeptics about history as a chronicle of the inevitable expansion of human liberty. An important counter-example in the visual arts is Thomas Cole’s great cycle of paintings collectively entitled “The Course of Empire” (created between 1833 and 1836). Cole’s five canvases show the development and, then, the destruction of an empire, portrayed in terms of ancient Rome. The empire’s rise is depicted in the first two paintings, “The Savage State or the Commencement of Empire” and “The Arcadian or Pastoral State”. In these pictures, a sylvan landscape under the protection of a marble mountain shaped like an arrowhead is occupied, in the first image, by hunters who have left their wigwams to pursue a deer and, in the second canvas, by shepherds grazing their flocks by the estuary under the peak that serves as the stage-setting for the cycle. (A bearded philosopher who looks like the conventional image of Plato scratches with a stick some geometric axioms in the dirt and, beyond the inlet of the sea, under the mountain, there is a structure that looks like Stonehenge.) The next canvas represents the imaginative climax of the series of painting: “The Consummation of Empire”. A riot of classically inspired temples and arcades and ornate towers covers the mountainside. Huge golden triremes ply the waters of the estuary and an emperor’s triumph is celebrated complete with processions of elephants and musicians. It is now high noon. (“The Savage State” glitters with the light of first dawn; the “Arcadian State” takes place mid-morning.) Civilization has triumphed and the evidence of human ingenuity fills the big picture – everywhere there are banquets in vast halls, huge bridges, and marmoreal villas on the slopes of the mountain.
But high noon is fleeting, in the fourth canvas, war has erupted. Fire engulfs the temples and palaces and the waters of the bay are full of mangled corpses. Barbarians are abducting shrieking women. Puddles of blood cover the marble steps and smoke rises to obscure the late afternoon sun. This painting, called “Destruction” is followed by “Desolation” – the sun has just set and a wan moon hangs over the ruins of the great city. A single broken column embroidered with reddish lichens rises from the broken stones; birds are nesting in the column’s capital and, in the background, the spire of the marble mountain rises imperturbably into the twilight.
Cole’s paintings (today in the collection of New-York Historical Society) are considered allegorical, a prophecy as to the fate of the American Empire. Already by 1836, people in the United States were contemplating the inevitable fall of their own civilization. Rome rose and fell. America can’t escape this fate. The shape of history is cyclical – civilizations rise out of the wilderness, flourish, are destroyed, and, then, the land reverts to solitude and its natural state. One day Manhattan’s towers will fall and its skyscrapers will melt like tallow candles; wolves and bears will roam its concrete canyons.
4.
Carcinization is a form of convergent evolution. The word refers to the tendency of crustaceans to independently evolve into crab-like bodies. At least six times, different families of crustaceans have evolved into creatures with flat armored abdomens, stalk-like eyes, and pincers. It gives one pause to wonder why God (or Nature) prefers crab bodies to other morphologies.
An example of convergent evolution or development of ideas in historiography is the curious case of Giambattista Vico, a Neapolitan writer and philosopher, who published his life work, the Scienza Nuova (“New Science”) in 1725. Vico argues that the history of the gentiles follows certain specific stages of development and that these are cyclical in character. Vico ostensibly restricts his analysis to the “gentiles” since it would be possibly blasphemous and heretical to claim that the history of the Jews and Christians is cyclical – according to the doctrine of Heilsgeschichte (“Salvation-history”), historical events have a telos, either the appearance of the Messiah (in Jewish belief) and the corresponding end of the World, or, for Christians, the return of Jesus and the Last Judgement, happenings that also end history. Vico’s limitation of his theory to the gentiles – he means the Greeks, Romans, Persians, and other non-Judeo-Christian nations – bears no conviction and seems a sop thrown in the direction of inquisitorial clerics in Italy. It’s obvious to most readers that Vico would apply his theory indiscriminately to all polities and histories if he could.
In his New Science, Vico argues that the history of man is the history of his ideas. The “new science” divides history into three eras. The first era is the age of the giants, a concept meant figuratively. The giants lived in a primitive, patriarchal society, building nothing lasting and living in caves. There were neither cities nor polities; the family ruled by its father was the social unit in which men and women dwelled. The giants were courageous, but brutal. If I remember my Vico correctly, like the swine in the forest, they lived primarily on acorns. They believed God was their father and that his voice was thunder. Vico calls this the “golden age” although it bears little resemblance to the idyllic “golden age” in Greek and Roman mythology. (He also says this is the “Theocratic Age”.) The language of the giants was poetry; they knew no abstractions. The symbol of the “Theocratic Age” is birth.
The second era, Vico says, was the epoch of the oligarchs. People lived in villages ruled by dynastic aristocratic families. During this age, a narrow-minded parochialism reigned. “Heroic republics” fought one another incessantly. Poetry was still central to the human imagination. Religion, not surprisingly, was based on ancestor worship. The symbol of the era of aristocratic or “heroic” republics is marriage. The tyranny of the aristocrats, inevitably, led to uprisings and rebellion. In the chaos of these rebellions, the third age was born. This is the epoch of democracy in which an egalitarian ideology rules. Men are governed by reason. The human imagination has mostly withered away and poetry is now only a frivolous ornament to human affairs – it has lost its integral centrality. Men and women can not sustain life for any extended period without poetry and the free exercise of the imagination. Therefore, democracy, intrinsically corrupt in Vico’s view, collapses into bloody anarchy. The symbol of the “democratic age” is burial.
As democracy fractures into internecine warfare, the cities are burned and political institutions collapse. Ultimately, the scattered survivors, small family clans, gather in caves. This the ricorso (or “the turning”). The Viconian cycle has returned to its starting point in the age of giants. Vico argues that divine providence governs this course of history. In his elaborate mythology, each epoch has its characteristic religion, its particular habits of thoughts, its epitome sacrament, and specific anthropology – as in Cole’s painted cycle, each era is correlated to a time of day and, further, to a period in human life.
The obvious similarity between Vico’s system and the ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder, arising sixty or so years later begs this question: was Herder aware of Vico and was his thinking on history, decisive with respect to Hegel and Marx, ultimately influenced by the Italian professor? The answer seems to be “no.” Herder never heard of Vico and his ideas were the product of convergent evolution – although Vico’s crab looks like Herder’s carcinized crustacean, in fact, the two species belong to completely different family trees and lineages. Vico worked in remote Naples, far from the centers of learning in Italy let alone the centers of inquiry in northern Europe which were the cradle of Herder’s writings. Furthermore, Vico wrote in a highly ornamented, baroque style complicated by various digressions and rhetorical ornamentation – he’s not easy to read or understand and, even if his book had been widely available in the century after its publication, no one would have studied it.
It’s interesting the Vico’s principle student in the 20th century was James Joyce. Joyce was a historiographer in his own right, expressing a cyclical view of history that is evident in Ulysses and, even more obvious in Finnegans Wake. In Ulysses (and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Joyce, who admired Vico both for his ideas and gnarled style applies his thought to Ireland; Joyce considers Irish history as a perpetually re-occurring cycle of uprisings always betrayed by the clergy and, even, the revolutionary parties themselves – Irish history is a aborted attempt at liberation that always ends in vicious repression. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken,” Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus says. In Finnegans Wake, the phrase “commodious vicus of recirculation” on the first page announces the book’s program; a vicus means “way” or “path” and is also a reference to Vico himself – “recirculation” articulates the pattern of cycles (the ricorso) that governs the “riverrun” of the novel’s prose. (Joyce said that Freud and Jung did not stir his imagination as much as the prose of Giambattista Vico.) William Butler Yeats expressed similar skepticism about the idea of progress in Irish history – “Ireland,” he proclaimed “is the old sow that eats her litter.” And Yeats mystical study, A Vision, a book allegedly dictated to him by ghosts, is, among other things, a theory of history. Yeats’ argues that history is a cycle of spinning gyres, turning wheels that progress slowly moving inward and out of time’s texture – progress can occur, but, also, the gyre may turn backward into chaos, “the blood-dimmed tide” of “The Second Coming” for instance. A Vision is intrinsically historicist – each revolution of the gyre produces different art and poetry, a different form of politics, and, even, a different sensibility in its leading (and exemplary) figures. A Roman of the third century A.D. is very different in personality and character than a modern Irishman. In these concepts, we see the influence of Herder and, with respect to Joyce, also Vico.
5.
Hegel looked to China as the origin of all history. How did classical Chinese historiographers view history?
Until the Communist era, Chinese historiography was Confucian. Two great themes motivated Chinese historians: first, the Chinese empire was hegemonic and governed all of East Asia and its various language and ethnic groups; second, history was cyclical. At the outset, China as an alliance between all people dwelling in East Asia, was ruled by a wise and prudent emperor. The emperor enjoyed the “mandate of heaven” – that is, was divinely ordained by the gods or providence to regulate all human affairs according to Confucian ideals. (The “mandate of heaven” is rule according to natural principles as well – as water always seeks its course downward so Confucian history was obedient to similar laws.) The emperor must rely upon counselors. As time progresses, these counselors become corrupt – they serve themselves as opposed to the emperor and, ultimately, corrupt his rule. As the emperor’s policies deviate from the Confucian norm, the kingdom becomes decadent and, gradually, loses the “mandate of heaven.” When the “mandate of heaven” is withdrawn, the empire slips into chaos and collapses. But, from the wreckage of the old regime, heaven appoints a new emperor who springs, phoenix-like, from the ruins of the failed empire. At first, this new empire flourishes under its new ruler and his circle of wise counselors. But human nature is invariant – self-interest intervenes, counselors seek to enrich themselves, and, again, mislead the Emperor or his successors so that, once more, the ancien regime disintegrates.
These doctrines led Chinese historians to closely study history and identify, for each era, a ruling emperor or dynasty. Even in ages characterized by factional warfare, Chinese historians argued that an emperor, either secret or in exile, enjoyed the “mandate of heaven” – indeed, much of Chinese history involves scrutinizing archives and chronologies to identify the true emperor of the realm. For instance, Chinese historians may differ as to the exact identity of the emperors who ruled without actually governing during the Warring Clans era; but they agree that there surely was one emperor during that realm (or a dynastic series of emperors) who can be identified as objectively effectuating the “mandate of heaven.” Even in the context of wars between different ethnic groups or nation-states, Chinese historians regard the unity of East Asia under Chinese hegemonic rule as constant. All wars under heaven are, according to Chinese historians, civil wars – that is, combat between apparently distinct nation states and rulers, but always in the context of a Far East that is ultimately one political unit decreed by religious principles.
Of course, Marx’s theory of history, an obligatory doctrine as far as Chinese communism was concerned, disrupted this ancient Confucian system of cyclical regimes always under the authority of the mandate of heaven. Mao and others had to re-write Marx to apply his ideology to China – Marx thought that Communism arose from middle-class or bourgeois mercantile enterprises in which capital surpluses created an industrial army of workers, disgruntled men and women already regimented into a revolutionary class. But China didn’t have a widespread middle-class; nor did China possess an industrial base from which an army of disaffected workers could be produced to overthrow the bourgeoisie (which in any event also didn’t exist either). Accordingly, Mao and his colleagues theorized that the bourgeois classes were not a prerequisite to revolution and that communism could arise from a peasant revolution – that is, leaping from a feudal class system to Communist revolution without an intervening industrial stage. After all, something similar had happened in Russia, a country that also leapfrogged from feudal serfdom to Communist revolution bypassing the middle class and its industrialization that Marx thought to be a prerequisite to Communism.
6.
Ancient historiography was pessimistic. Hesiod, a Greek poet who was a contemporary of Homer, thought that civilization began with a Golden Age in which human beings lived without strife in a sort of paradise of abundance. The gods lived among people and lives were long, hundreds of years, ending in a peaceful death that was like a slumber. The spirits of the dead became wise guardians of the human race.
The Silver Age followed the blessed Golden Age. The Silver Age was dominated by women, the mothers. Men lived to be a hundred years old. The gods no longer dwelled among the people and, as time progressed, impiety flourished. Men and women no longer sacrificed or prayed to the gods and, so, Zeus destroyed most of the human race.
In the Bronze Age that followed, human beings were fierce and proud. Wars raged. Men wore bronze on their backs and hid themselves under brazen helmets. Even their houses were cast from bronze. People who died during this epoch were cast into Hades as shadows. At last, a flood destroyed almost all of bronze age humanity.
In the heroic age, heroes fought in the great war at Troy and ventured, like Odysseus onto the wine-dark sea. The heroes were better than the violent creatures of the Bronze Age, but they were still fierce, prideful, and contentious. Their art was poetry and they invented epic verse.
Hesiod thought that he lived in the last and worst of times, the Iron Age. Human virtue has declined to nothing, Hesiod proclaims in his Works and Days. Families fight among one another, husbands and wives quarrel with homicidal violence, and the rights of hospitality and the guest are no longer observed. The worst of mankind become its rulers. Concepts of justice and law fall into disrepute. The gods have abandoned humanity and there “is no hope for mankind.”
7.
In Mesoamerica, history was a similarly gory account of decline and fall. Each epoch was sustained only by the piety of aristocratic rulers who made sacrifices of their own blood (and the blood of countless war captives) to persuade the gods to allow human beings to remain in existence. If sacrifices were neglected, the sun would turn black and the seas would become cesspools of blood. Beginning with the Olmecs, about 3500 years before the present, the Indian empires of middle-America conceived of history as a continuous cycle of devastation – there were five suns, or historical eras, each ending in a calamity. When sacrifice failed, the apocalypse ensued – sometimes, famine or fire from the sky or voracious jaguars that ate everyone up. At the end of each sun, however, mankind survived in a tiny saving remnant –and, from these bedraggled survivors, a new epoch was born. In the last sun, the feathered serpent Quetzelcoatl had departed on white wings to the east. He decreed that the cycle of blood sacrifice might be broken and that, instead of human hearts, men could offer butterflies to the gods or fruit and flowers. When Quetzelcoatl returned from across the eastern sea, a new paradise would be born. Cortez’ boats had white sails, but the men who came from the east and landed in Mexico were girded in iron. And, so, with their war-horses and savage dogs, they brought the world of the Aztecs and all of their ancestors to violent end.
8.
Alexander Nemerov is a professor of Art History at Stanford University. (He previously taught at Yale.) In my estimation, Nemerov is one of the most interesting historians active today. In broad terms, Nemerov practices cultural history – that is, he derives social and historical conclusions about the past from art and literature. Nemerov is a famous and inspiring lecturer whose practice is akin to preaching. Like Emerson, who is one of his masters, Nemerov’s lectures and his written works combine moral admonition – the past must not be forgotten – with austere, and, often, enigmatic expressions of radical doubt. Emerson rarely deigned to prove his assertions, relying upon bald declarations of fact, indeed, implying that these averments were so obvious and commonsensical as to not require argument. Nemerov is also prone to making provocative proclamations of fact and opinion without supporting arguments. But, in Nemerov’s preaching, these proclamations are embedded within a matrix of profound skepticism about the nature of the historical enterprise.
Nemerov’s books include his dissertation on the Western artist Frederic Remington, Icons of Grief, Val Lewton’s Home Front (about Val Lewton’s horror films such as Cat People in the context of anxieties about World War II), Wartime Kiss, Visions of the Moment in the 1940's (about movie and photo-journalistic images during WWII), Soulmaker, The Times of Lewis Hine, and Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the places of the Civil War (about amateur theatrical productions of Shakespeare performed in the field by Civil War soldiers). Many of these books are the recipients of various awards. Nemerov’s most recent publications include Remembering Pearl Harbor and The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830's – these books are more radically personal and impressionistic than his earlier work. The Forest is Nemerov’s magnum opus, a publication arising from his Andrew W. Mellon lectures presented at the National Gallery of Art in the Spring of 2017. Those lectures were presented under the title The Forest: America in the 1830's. The Mellon lectures are available on YouTube and are astonishing. I can’t recommend them highly enough – Nemerov is fantastically eloquent and the material that he presents is surprising, wonderfully suggestive, and highly moving. The Forest lectures take the form of a standard art history presentation with slides allowing for side-by-side comparison of art works (the classic two-projector lecture used to teach art history and criticism at the university level) and Nemerov provides numerous suggestive quotes on his subject, the cultural history of America with respect to the wilderness, slavery, and the Indians in the decade of 1830 to 1840. The Forest lectures are extensively researched and, in effect, footnoted with Nemerov identifying his sources throughout the eight presentations, apparently delivered in April and May of 2017. It is the custom of the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, the sponsor of the lecture series at the National Gallery, to produce an accompanying book with copious illustrations replicating the lectures and providing additional scholarly material, sources, and more extensive development of the topic. Nemerov’s book was published in 2023 and is also remarkable; it differs in method from the more conventional slide lectures at the National Gallery. Nemerov currently disclaims that he is a scholar, expert, or professorial specialist with regard to the book’s topic – he says that these roles “do not interest (him) any more.” As a result, Nemerov’s The Forest is not a scholarly treatise (although extensively sourced with detailed footnotes) but a “parable”. This means that the guise of art historian, the persona in which Nemerov presented the A. W. Mellon lectures five years earlier, has been largely abandoned. The Forest as a parable reads a bit like Kafka – art historical comparisons and descriptions of provenance are excluded from the book. The professorial tone, although poetic and lyrical in the lectures, is not evident in the book which proceeds through a series of vatic utterances with little or no commentary. (The Forest is too radical for me – although the book is a fascinating exercise, I find it excessively speculative and personal; I greatly preferred the brilliant Mellon lectures which pushed the genre of the side-by-side slide lecture to its breaking point and beyond – but which still preserved the fiction of a scholarly, historical presentation. The book ruptures continuity with the lectures, apparently contradicts some of what Nemerov said at the National Gallery, and seems more mystical and prophetic than historical. But this is part and parcel of Nemerov’s critique of the historical project.) Another correlate to The Forest is a trilogy of books by Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan historian and poet, entitled collectively The Memory of Fire (Memoria del Fuego) published in 1982 - 1986. Galeano presents the history of South America in a series of short, simply written, anecdotes, indeed, “parables” if you wish – each of them cited to a historical source. Galeano’s trilogy is a scathing indictment of colonialism, particularly the involvement of the United States in Latin America, and a work of monumental importance in the Spanish-speaking New World. (The novelist, Isabel Allende noted that, when she was compelled to flee her native Chile because of the depredations of psychopathic Pinochet regime, the only thing she saved from her possessions was her copy of Galeano’s book.) It seems clear that Nemerov’s historiography, posited as a response to socially imposed “amnesia” about the actual contours of the American past, is founded in large part on three authorities – Walt Whitman, Emerson, and Eduardo Galeano.
9.
An excellent example of Nemerov’s present approach to history is his lecture on the Port of Chicago Explosion of July 1944. This talk was delivered by ZOOM under the aegis of the Army Heritage Center. It appears that Nemerov lectured on this subject in 2020. The U.S. Army Heritage Center is, no doubt, a conservative institution and, watching the YouTube presentation, I had the sense that the military men involved in the program were somewhat bemused by Nemerov’s extremely personal and lyrical lecture.
To grasp Nemerov’s innovative method, it’s necessary to outline the naked historical facts as to the Port of Chicago catastrophe. The Port of Chicago was (and is) a military base in the bay northeast of San Francisco. In 1944, so-called Liberty Ships bound for theaters of combat in the South Pacific docked at a long wooden pier at the port and were loaded with high-explosive munitions. Most of the servicemen assigned to this duty were African-Americans – the armed forces were segregated and the men loading the vessels worked under the command of White officers. Safety hazards were ignored and the officers encouraged their crews to take short-cuts with respect to their labor. On the night of July 17, 1944 at about 10:18 pm, a shell was dropped, tore through the pier, and, then, exploded. An enormous blast followed in which about 300 African-American soldiers were blown to pieces. (About 400 were wounded). Three-weeks later when work resumed loading ships at the pier, fifty of the Black servicemen refused to work under conditions that they claimed were dangerous. The men were arrested and court-martialed (notwithstanding the intervention of people such as the then-lawyer Thurgood Marshal.). The men were sentenced to prison. After the War most of their sentences (some as long as 15 years in prison) were commuted. It was not until 2019 that the convictions were reversed and the men, most of whom were long dead, exonerated.
Nemerov shows slides of the pier and the devastation after the blast. After his preliminary introduction of the material, the first intimation that this lecture will not follow standard historical methods is a statement by Nemerov about the sonic boom caused by the explosion. Nemerov says that “late at night, when (he) is walking on the Stanford Campus at Palo Alto, (he) thinks that the stones in the campus buildings bear in their bones the sonic boom of the blast.” An image of a poster bearing the “Double V” emblem shows us that the Black soldiers thought they were fighting for “Victory in the War” over Germany and Japan and “Victory on the Home Front” over racism. But a photograph of debris from the explosion shows wreckage fortuitously forming “X” shapes (fallen joists) – the X shapes, Nemerov says, are “broken V’s.” A picture of a train depot, built like a domestic house, displays shattered windows. Nemerov says that the structure looks to him like “the haunted house of American racism” with the bystanders seemingly confused and impotent to do anything about the disaster unfolding around them. Five miles from the Port of Chicago is the home where John Muir lived. Nemerov tells us that you have to park your car at the Muir National Monument to meet a park ranger who will drive visitors onto the closed military base to tour the National Memorial at the port. The floral transom at the Muir house has been cracked by the blast at the Port of Chicago. The Park Service has preserved the fractured transom without repairing it – “the elegant floral pattern in a place of peace and even bliss is transected by a wound...it’s a living scar” that ties the Muir house to the catastrophe on the army base five miles away. In this context, Nemerov says that the cracked transom is a spark of energy transferred between the two sites – he shows Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel, where God imparts the spark of life to Adam. Nemerov says the moment of this revelation for him was literally “breathtaking”. In one of the most eccentric moments of the 45 minute lecture, Nemerov shows an image of a damaged movie-theater on the military base. The theater showed films 24 hours a day during the war-time work on the pier. By “sleuthing”, Nemerov discovers that the film projected on the night of the blast was a picture called China starring Alan Ladd, William Bendix, and Loretta Young. Nemerov watches the movie and notes that the opening sequence is a long tracking shot with Bendix navigating huge explosions wrought by a Japanese air-raid on the Chinese village. It’s his surmise that the blast at the Port occurred about 45 minutes into the narrative, that is, during a rape scene in the film – the picture was anti-Japanese propaganda and contains a scene in which a vicious officer rapes a Chinese woman. “Historians and poets,” Nemerov says enigmatically, “might put the two scenes of the rape and the explosion together in some unknowable way.” This is a curious statement; in fact a “historian and poet”, Nemerov himself has fused the two images in his lecture. (Nemerov’s father was the famous poet Howard Nemerov; his aunt, his father’s sister, was the photographer, Diane Arbus.) In the last ten minutes of the lecture, Nemerov contrasts the Tuskegee airmen with the hapless munition’s workers blown apart on the pier. (The props of P51 Mustangs flown by the airmen in war-time propaganda photos form “X” shapes or “double V’s”.) The film ends with images of the modern-day memorial at the site – pile-driven “stubs of pier” marching in columns (that signify to Nemerov, fidelity, military discipline, and fortitude) out into the waters of the bay. The Memorial to Nemerov symbolizes the “all-American business of forgetting, but remembering as well.”
10.
Clearly Nemerov’s poetics of history are “eccentric”. Nemerov admits to “eccentricity” in his lecture to the Simone Weill society, also delivered on ZOOM probably about the time of the Port of Chicago speech – the lecture is called “Simone Weill and Giotto” and consists of art-historical comments on Giotto’s cycle of murals on the subject of the life of Saint Francis, pictures located in Florence. (Simone Weill, the French mystic, first experienced “penetration” by God when she fell to her knees in amazement while beholding the Giotto murals – although born Jewish, she converted to Catholicism and, during World War Two, starved herself to death.)
Nemerov provides a personal perspective on his understanding of history. In his view, the study of history or historical images requires self-effacement. The historian must look away from conventional understanding of images and historical evidence and ask how “does this touch me ?”, that is, “how are we in relationship to the past?” But the historian must exercise what Keats called “negative capability” – that is, the ability to remain in uncertainty, to not move too quickly to conclusions, and to hold one’s own judgement in suspension. This practice requires self-abnegation. The historian must allow fleeting concepts to come to him “mysteriously in...(the) mind” – the historian can not control these inspirations; rather, they control him and dictate his response to the material. Historians of his bent, Nemerov says, must refrain from judgement, accept the past as “other”, mysterious and enigmatic, and not seek any kind of “grand synthesis”. Ambitions toward a “grand synthesis” are egoistic and the historian’s self or ego are obstacles to understanding what the past offers to us. Nemerov criticizes historians like Ken Burns for “explaining”. In Nemerov’s view, history should be intuitive and should draw associations but resist explanation – we must be humble in the face of the fabulous darkness of the past.
“Eccentric” to Nemerov means “decentered”. History of the kind he favors should be “decentered” – the text produced by the historian should acknowledge that it is somehow impersonal, the product of associations that can’t be rationally described. (These concepts occur in the context of anecdotes about Giotto that his draftsmanship was so precise that he could draw a perfect circle – that is, “center” a perfect circle with a single gesture of his hand and wrist.) The paradox is that Nemerov’s poetic and associative approach to history seems wholly personal – but Nemerov argues that history should be decentered, an “eccentric speech” that recognizes “multiple centers of remembrance”, that ties those centers together, but resists in impulse to subordinate one center to another. The historian always comes upon the scene of the crime too late – history is always belated; we come into the movie in the middle of things. The historian must concede that he or she is “not there”, was not present during the historical events considered, and that there is a void or absence at the heart of the historical imagination. Giotto paints the classical temples in his murals as empty, at the center of the compositions but without figures in them. St. Francis is continuously withdrawing from view, vanishing, becoming hidden. In one panel of a mural, there’s a dark, man-shaped fissure in a cliff, a grotto into which St. Francis will withdraw. The historian must navigate “an ever withdrawing darkness”, a way of thought that leads inward to an empty space where the self has been poured-out of the vessels that customarily contain it.
For Nemerov, the past is certainly real. It surrounds us with its relics. It is the historian, radically decentered or “eccentric” who is not real. The “I’ that attends to the past is an illusion, a fleeting apparition, a mere point of connection where a spark passes between impersonal energies.
(Essays on Historiography -- October 2, 2024)
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