The historian/memoirist is an uneasy dreamer
There is an old hymn and bluegrass song, Death is Only a Dream. [1]
I borrow and adapt this line for a historian’s life. History is ‘partly’ a dream. We accept its chimerical quality even as we write it. The borrowing doesn’t stop there, for the pursuit of History is, itself, a kind of death wish. Not only must the historian seek the dead and the lost (who were these people of the past?), but this already futile search possesses an interiority too. The more time we spend looking for those who are gone, the more they haunt and crowd us - as traces, ghosts, and omens. They become a shadowy multitude in our minds and immediate spaces even after we have moved on from the study of them. And yes, we dream about them.
There is more to this interiority cultivated by the historian. The limits of human memory mean that our early childhood is as ghostly as the dead we treat in our research. When we look to the past, are we not also asking, Who am I? Who am I not? Who was I? How did I become a descendant of those I study and the present mystery that I am? In a state of permanent longing, we look inward and backward to the times/places of fallible memory. We interrogate our dreams, our lost childhoods, and our families. We visit our old houses the way we visit castle ruins. We pick ourselves up before every locked door, every faded photograph, and every unending, unreliable trail of evidence.
Having chosen History with a capital H as our subject, we turn to the lives of others, the events, doings, words, and deaths of those who went before us. We know they will die. We see played out, literally and repeatedly, Freud’s remark that “the aim of all life is death.”[2] And we, the seemingly powerful historians writing up our narratives of the past, are no exception. We will have no choice but to follow them like waves breaking on a shore. They say grief comes in waves. Perhaps, history does too. We don’t realize this at the beginning of our studies. But after we grow a little older, spend hours in archives, visit the arrivals, acts, and departures of one generation after another, and write our books and essays in the full knowledge that there can never be a ‘last word’ on our topic, we are finally humbled. Historians are not the holders of absolute truth, and we are not exempt from dying. We might, from time to time, lift our pen from the page and remember that history is a great leveler. And like those we once studied with a detachment that gradually melted away, we’re just in it. In history.
Of course, none of this is strictly true. But nor is it strictly untrue. If some of what I have just written might be disavowed by other practicing historians, I accept every disavowal as a sound cautionary note. For let me be clear: this is no personal manifesto against the profession of History with its basic practices of research and writing. Nor is it a denial of History’s capacity to tell us something important about our past and shed light on our present and future. No, it’s none of these. Think of it as an uneasy historian’s memoir of sorts, musings selected to illustrate something of what has made History (the field) and history (the past) so tantalizing in their promises and illusions.
Studying the past remains my dream. But as with dreams, the rules of conventional storytelling don’t hold. Dreams are more like cinema than novels. If I descend into storytelling here and there, if I recall stories as aids to interpretation, it is perhaps because I feel the power of Joan Didion’s much-quoted remark about stories but now in the larger context she gave it:
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”[3]
If I am made uneasy by the relations between History and retrospective storytelling with its ‘beginnings, middles and ends,’ it is because I recall that larger and phantasmagoric context - the flickering, elusive, non-narrative past - together with Louis Mink’s more specific warning to historians:
“Stories are not lived but told. Life has no beginnings, middles, or ends; there are meetings, but the start of an affair belongs to the story we tell later, and there are partings, but final partings only in the story. There are hopes, plans, battles and ideas, but only in retrospective stories are hopes unfulfilled, plans miscarried, battles decisive, and ideas seminal… We do not dream or remember in narrative, I think, but tell stories which weave together the separate images of recollection.”[4]
When we think about ourselves, are we not each an effort (and effect) of storytelling drawn from “meetings” and “partings…hopes, plans, battles and ideas” and a past that never held narrative coherence before we tried to impose one upon it? If these questions animate the memoir, family history, or any historical narratives shaped by archival searches, private recollections, and our ever-flawed, emotive, and inconclusive interpretations, it is not an unhappy endeavor. But it’s forever and necessarily an uneasy one.
In the end, perhaps we honor the past and the dead in our admitted failure to understand them fully, even as we make our own way to death. We can, to borrow from another country song, “let the mystery be.”[5] We know, too, that the pursuit of narrative coherence in our own lives is a fraught and shifting project, even (or especially) in our private histories and relations. The dead would surely find us as dreamlike as we find them.
[1] Death is Only a Dream, 1892. (Words by Charles W. Ray/Music by Adoniram J. Buchanan) The bluegrass rendition is by Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys.
[2] Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. In Freud, Sigmund, and Peter Gay. 1995. The Freud Reader. London: Vintage. 613.
[3] Didion, Joan. The White Album. 1979. In Didion, Joan. 2005. Live and Learn. HarperPerennial. 195.
[4] Mink, Louis O. 1970. “History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension.” New Literary History 1 (3): 541–58.
[5] Iris DeMent, Let the Mystery Be, 1992.