Theme Issue 56

Writing as Action, Situation, and Trace

Edited by Laura Stark

Cover image: illustration from Jules Verne's essay "Edgard Poë et ses oeuvres" (Edgar Poe and His Works, 1862), drawn by Frederic Theodore Lix or Jean-Édouard Dargent, depicting scene from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838).

+ LAURA STARK, Making a Mark, History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (December 2018), 3-7.

Walter Benjamin believed it was possible “to read what was never written.” His own writing and practices sought both to explain and model how a person might undertake this historical project. Benjamin's essay “On the Mimetic Faculty” provides a through line for the papers collected in this theme issue, which is designed to prompt further work and inquiry into how words—and historical materials broadly construed—might be read not only for their content but for insights about the past that may be evident in their arrangement, appearance, texture, or location. Scholars from history, philosophy, literature, anthropology, and beyond look at cases ranging from premodern Japan to present‐day South Africa to consider how and suggest why scholars might want to “read what was never written.” Together, the articles and commentaries are offered as a record of what has been done, in the eager anticipation of reading what has yet to be written.

+ JOHN TRESCH, The Compositor’s Reversal: Typography, Science, and Creation in Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (December 2018), 8-31.

Known for his tales of mystery and horror, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) was a meticulous, self‐conscious literary craftsman. He was also skilled in the methods of science, engineering, and typesetting. Poe's writing reflected on printed letters’ aesthetic effects, their ability to direct and divert meaning, and their power to build and alter worlds. In the printer's office, a limited set of material elements was manipulated to assemble infinite combinations; lining up letters in the composing stick in reverse, compositors had to arrange and read type backwards. The mirrors, doubles, and “weird symmetry” that structure Poe's plots and his theory of the universe can be traced back to these central facts of nineteenth‐century typography. In his only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket—a broad canvas on which he worked out strategies later deployed in more concentrated works—typography was a crucial site for the conversions and exchanges between spirit and matter. Forging connections between the material and imaginative practice of “composition” and the cosmological uncertainties of the antebellum US, Poe's meditations on the transmutations effected by type linked literary invention, technical construction, and divine creation.

+ DAVID LURIE, Parables of Inscription: Some Notes on Narratives of the Origin of Writing, History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (December 2018), 32-49.

The story of the god Thoth and King Ammon in Plato's Phaedrus is perhaps the most familiar example of a script‐origin narrative, but such accounts also exist from ancient China (such as Xu Shen's postface to the Shuowen jiezi) and Mesopotamia (the poem “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta”). There are also rich and provocative ancient discussions of what it means to “borrow” or “adapt” writing from an adjacent (often more powerful) civilization, including a set of related narratives in eighth‐century Japanese chronicles about Korean scribes importing Sinitic writing. Such premodern sources can be profitably juxtaposed with modern discussions of colonial and ethnological encounters with literacy, such as frequently quoted and requoted stories of “natives” taken aback at the power of writing, or Claude Lévi‐Strauss's famous “Writing Lesson” (from his 1955 book Tristes Tropiques). This article considers the persistent anachronism that marks such accounts. Whether premodern or modern, it seems they inevitably become parables or allegories of the powers of writing at the time of their composition, rather than plausible reconstructions of its earliest stages. What lies behind this difficulty in writing the history of writing?

+ JAUME AURELL, Writing beyond Time: The Durability of Historical Texts, History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (December 2018), 50-70.

When we think in terms of the durability of historical texts, some works instantly come to mind: Herodotus's, Thucydides's, and Polybius's war narratives, Plutarch's comparative biographies, Eusebius's ecclesiastical history, Augustine's City of God, Jean Froissart's chronicles, Francesco Guicciardini's history of Florence, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Jules Michelet's History of France, Leopold von Ranke's History of the Reformation, Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages, Fernand Braudel's Mediterranean, and Edward Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, among others. Historians instantly perceive them as durable texts, part of a canon of history and historiography. Surrounded as we are by the exaltation of innovation over tradition, and assuming the challenging concept of “writing as historical practice” proposed by the editor of this issue, In this article I examine the conditions that might be considered necessary for historical writing to achieve durability, propose what conditions of creation and reception enabled this longevity, justify why these and other historical texts have the potential for durability, and discuss what practical lessons we might obtain from this inquiry. I begin by making some distinctions among the three related concepts of durability, the classic, and the canon, and try to establish the specific conditions of the durability of historical texts, focusing on the effect of contemporaneity and the connections between the concepts of durability and the practical past.

+ DAVID CARR, Reflections on Temporal Perspective: The Use and Abuse of Hindsight, History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (December 2018), 71-80.

In this article I focus on the temporal aspects of the historian's situation: being in the present and representing the past. Writing is a time‐bound process. It is in this context that the notion of temporal perspective arises. What follows is a series of reflections, variations on the theme, perhaps, of temporal perspective as it figures in historical writing. The concept of hindsight figures prominently in these reflections. I also deal with examples of superimposed chronology that sometimes result from temporal perspective. My reflections avoid grand conclusions about time and history. I hope they may instead cast some modest light on the issues.

+ TYLER WILLIAMS, “If the Whole World Were Paper . . .”: A History of Writing in the North Indian Vernacular, History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (December 2018), 81-101.

The poetic and hagiographical works of early modern north Indian saints constitute a rich case study for understanding the relationship among changes in language, material practices of writing, and ideologies of writing. Beginning in the fourteenth century, the commitment of the vernacular language of bhāṣā to writing had the effect of reconfiguring practices and ideologies of writing, posing a serious challenge to the epistemic and cultural privilege formerly accorded to writing in the literary, intellectual, and religious traditions contained in Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic. Although unable to completely escape the conceptual structures of a postliterate society, these supposedly illiterate, subaltern poet‐saints were able to undermine systems of religious and intellectual authority by questioning the ontological status and epistemic utility of written language and by divesting writing of its aura. They did so by emphasizing the materiality and banality of writing and by characterizing inscription as just another form of worldly labor. Such readings of the saints’ poetic works are made possible precisely by their authorial personas as subaltern, illiterate figures, and these personas are in turn established not in the poetry itself but in the hagiographical works that narrativize these saints’ lives. Importantly, these hagiographies reflect a concern with historicizing both the saints’ utterances and the material processes through which those utterances came to be written down. Perhaps paradoxically, it is this concern with historicity that enables the tradition to establish the transcendent nature of the saints’ speech and thought, and to enable those in the present to recreate the transformative speech acts that the hagiographies describe.

+ ROSALIND C. MORRIS, Shadow and Impress: Ethnography, Film, and the Task of Writing History in the Space of South Africa’s Deindustrialization, History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (December 2018), 102-125.

The historiography of natural‐resource extraction, especially in colonial contexts, is often torn between two temptations: to represent these histories in narratives commencing with discovery, and thus rupture; or to render them in tales of continuity and thus an identity that transcends history. In the increasingly common scenarios of deindustrialization, these twin temptations are sutured together via the figure of return. Thus, accounts of postindustrial life often construe it as a return to forms of life that preceded capital‐intensive industrial practice, and are written in the idiom of the “artisanal.” In doing so, they mistake a mere form of appearance, which is to say an image of the past, for its repetition, effacing the degree to which the materialities of industrialization shape, as both shadow and impress, the corporeal gestures and unconscious habits of those who inhabit its ruins. At the same time, and in an era of memory studies, truth commissions, and heritage projects, people who inhabit the spaces of deindustrialization often believe that they can survive the destruction of their life‐worlds only by giving themselves to be seen in the form of an image that resembles the past, and in a museological register. In this essay, based on two decades of field research in the areas of deep‐level mining in South Africa, and an ongoing documentary film project with informal migrant miners called zama‐zamas, I attempt to find another form and method for producing a historical and dialectical anthropological understanding of postindustrial life. The essay is an experiment in narrative that attempts to redeem a photographic and cinematographic tradition that is often culpable of reproducing the above‐named temptations. The essay thus weaves together forms of the close‐up—a gesture that seeks to get hold of history by means of an image—with contemplative reflections based in the temporally extended accounts of those who inhabit the ruins of deep‐level gold mines. In so doing, I propose a means of rethinking historiographical practice in the context of an always already vanishing present.

+ NANCY ROSE HUNT, History as Form, with Simmel in Tow, History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (December 2018), 126-144.

This essay is an engagement with forms, objects, and the nature of sly poetics in historical practice. It wonders about how historians have been practicing and theorizing craft at a time when postcolonial politics are urging for stronger attention to the vernacular, the archival, the affective, and the aesthetic. Offering a generous detour through a little‐known version of Georg Simmel, then driving idealist ideas about history and creativity, this essay draws attention to some parallel practices emerging in Global South terrains. It uses three late and refractory Simmel essays on history and form as a prism through which to consider generative concepts, fragmentary and aesthetic methods, and historical sensibilities. While history as form is an enduring, vital theme, aesthetic theorizing is inciting new experiments with archival surfaces, memory work, aesthetic learning, and historical assemblages. Formal attentiveness sharpens critique in addressing historical, contemporary, and archival problems. Simmel may expand our sensory range, our openness to subjectivity and égo‐histoire, tonality and mood, unknotting the interpretive impasse of much fashionable work in today's humanities: with its too tight pairing of the affective and the material.

+ JOSHUA KATES, Talk! as Historical Practice, History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (December 2018), 145-167.

“Talk! as Historical Practice” proposes a conception of our insertion into history, and thus the practice of historiography, by way of denying the existence of language as commonly understood: as a pregiven repository of words, signifieds, signifiers, and/or grammars regulative of communication and understanding. (To distinguish this more radical, discourse‐based conception, in part drawn from Donald Davidson's writings, from those of French discourse theory, it employs the neologism “talk!.”) In addition to sketching a version of talk!, this paper argues for its centrality for those writing history. Talk!, for one, gives a vantage point on the past and its relation to the rest of temporality, alternative to that held in common by two leading contemporary theorists, otherwise deeply opposed: Frank Ankersmit and Ethan Kleinberg. Second, it makes available new possibilities for historical practice, as here illustrated by a persusal of Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams, and some of his other late works. Adams's autobiography enshrines an externalist, talk!‐based view of his own past utterances and experiences; hence, he writes of himself only in the third person, as what he calls “the manikin.” In this instance and others, this approach lets Adams craft a unique kind of hyperbole, through which he presents a version of history as the medium of everything that happens and all who exist, within a modernity broken into ever more rapidly occurring epochs. Talk!, as here construed, ultimately questions modernity and all other periods and epochs, descending from “big picture” history. Adams's template, I thus argue in conclusion, may serve as a limit case for many more recent viewpoints.