Michael A. Vuksta
[H]istory is concerned not with ‘events’, but with ‘processes’; that ‘processes’ are things which do not begin and end but turn into one another; . . . There are in history no beginnings and no endings. History books begin and end, but the events they describe do not.
—R.G. Collingwood
The historian wants to know how the public man fit in with the broad movements of his (or her) time and people. But after the smoke of battle has cleared and the grand design has been (more or less) understood, we still long to know the inner man, the self that is not all that different from us, that offers an opening for human resonance and identification.
—Charles Kligerman
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A people without history
-
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.
—T. S. Eliot
Little Gidding33
You may be wondering how this discourse has arrived at the topic of history. I am tempted to string together a number of quotes without any commentary to allow you to come to your own conclusions, although I am sure you have done so by now. I find it striking to have ended the final paragraph of the preceding section with the phrase relation to others. I am even more surprised that by examining an overtly self-conscious text that I am seeking to teach my students the history of others. In order to explain this to you, I am going to have to inform you of an underlying concept that permeates the title of this essay. I have from the beginning thought that it was my intention not so much to phrase or frame the subjects of Evans’s and Agee’s books. I am convinced that upon reading
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
, you and my students will find that Agee and Evans have most adequately accomplished this. Rather, it has been my purpose to bring to the readers’ and my students’ attention the achievements of these two men. It is Agee and Evans that I choose to frame and phrase and ultimately to praise.
In an introductory essay to a selection on autobiography in his book
The Historian as Detective
, Robin Winks speculates:
The one thing the historian cannot afford to have missing is himself. . . . One cannot totally separate personality from history as it is written, and probably one should not try.
34
Other historians and other thinkers have expressed a similar thesis. Earlier in this century R. G. Collingwood wrote,
If what the historian knows is past thoughts, and if he knows them by rethinking them himself, it follows that the knowledge he achieves by historical inquiry is not knowledge of his situation as opposed to knowledge of himself, it is a knowledge of his situation which is at the same time knowledge of himself.
35
One cannot fail to recognize the dependence of history and photography on memory. Once again I turn to John Berger for an explanation. He states that “memory implies a certain act of redemption. What is remembered has been saved from nothingness. What is forgotten has been abandoned.”
36
Berger goes on to emphasize that photographs (and one may read here, other documents which are considered to be repositories of truth) should not be used in an “unilinear way”, since the process of
memory is not unilinear at all. Memory works radically, that is to say with an enormous number of associations all leading to the same event.
There is never a single approach to something remembered. The remembered is not like the terminus at the end of a line. Numerous approaches or stimuli converge upon it and lead to it. Words, comparisons, signs need to create a context for a printed photograph in a comparative way;
The true context of a photograph [and I might add the past,] is [at first] invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form [or in history’s case methodology], but time. . . . a photograph bears witness to a human choice being exercised. This choice is not between photographing
x
and
y
: but between photography at
x
moment or
y
moment.
37
The historian also makes choices of which events and which documents he will study as well as when and in what order they occurred. The choice of Agee and Evans was to praise and remember what Miguel de Unamuno once referred to as ‘infrahistory’, “the silent continuity of unspectacular lives, the bedrock over which the cataclysms of history are played out.”
38
What I have sought to achieve in this inquiry was to redeem from the not to distant past two “spies”
39
and their subjects in order to invigorate an approximate present. I have sought this in the sense in which Ralph Waldo Emerson once described history as
The desire to do away with the wild savage, and preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now.
40
Finally , it is my belief that Evans employed his “transcendental” vision and Agee used “antiauthoritative human consciousness” to perform a task not much unlike a historian whose “business is to reveal the less obvious features hidden from a careless eye in the present situation.”
41
They approximate this attitude because their work did not rely simply on a “click of the moment” but rather they evoked a process that moved “from objective facts to subjective long looks and growing contemplation, to ‘insight’.” Even Evans’s deliberate viewcamera technique demanded a relation to the subject that allowed for a photograph (and its subjects) to compose itself (themselves) “in its [their] own time and more slowly and [coming] from nowhere but within”—the photographer, the writer, the subject, and ourselves.
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