Neanderthals
Why history?
12/30/2009 14:33
Because, let’s be real. The City of Dreadful Night is more interesting as an artifact than as a poem. James Thomson’s life interests me, as does his vision of a nightmarish, dystopian London in the 1870s. But that does not in any way make me want to read the poem.
Does this make me a lowbrow, literalist, anti-intellectual materialist? Maybe, from a certain point of view. There’s a silk smoking-jacketed, punting-on-the-Cam, NPR-in-the-background perspective that likes its historical explanations laced with allusions to canonical literature. But that sort of thing leaves me wondering, was this really in the minds of the people in the story? Or is it just a shorthand way to tell the story to a particular type of audience? And, if it’s shorthand, what is it missing? That’s one thing Williams seems to have been keenly aware of: the tendency to reduce complexity and smear out ongoing evolution in an idea like “city” or “country” until it’s a handy, but misleading, archetype.
As I was showering this morning, I was ticking off the books I might say influenced me to study history. It’s been in my head for a few years that Neal Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle” really got me interested, but I think it was more of a reminder than a discovery. The cool thing about Quicksilver and its sequels is the richness of “alien” (in the Carlo Ginzburg sense) material available in the past. And I thought it was cool, how Stephenson studiously puts known people in known situations, but is completely free to speculate about what’s going on in their heads.
But he’s not completely free. He has to convince his post-modern, sci-fi audience that these people are plausible. That means they have to seem authentic and fit the time, but be recognizable to his readers as heroes and villains. So, in what world are they authentic? The thing that interests me now about Quicksilver is how historians deal with these issues.
Another book that sticks with me is Colin Tudge’s little Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers. Because it’s far-out, and yet plausible (and of course, because it has neanderthals in it). I like the way he reaches a little past what we know, to speculate about what might have been. There are so many possible perspectives and subjective “realities” in the past, that it seems like an enormous invitation to find the weird, the alien, the deviant. Maybe it’s this age of conformity that makes me look for dissenters and resistors in the past. I like Tudge’s idea (I had it too, but he puts it really well. I will probably use it for a story someday) that the neanderthals were superior individuals, who “lost out” to better organized, collectivized sapiens.
What does this have to do with history? Individual/collective, rural/urban, all these binaries we use to understand the world. Joan Scott says “meanings are constructed through exclusions.” Any definition, she says, “rest[s] always...on the negation or repression of something represented as antithetical to it.” Why repression? Because identity is all about reducing a universe of words describing a thing to the two or three “important” ones that define it. But important to whom? When? Why?
Scott says “oppositions repress the internal ambiguities of either category.” (all this is in Gender and the Politics of History, p. 7) I’d say this binary view is particularly interesting when you’re looking at something like male/female or rural/urban. But it’s a simplification of the actual processes of identity formation and grouping. Identity is about taking adjectives and making them nouns. Grouping is about drawing boundaries between items that include these reified qualities and other items that do not.
Unlike set theory in math class, it’s not as easy in life to pick the “defining” quality. And it’s not a value-free or a power-neutral process. Am I the only person in the world who’s annoyed when the cute moose on Nickelodeon or Steve on Blues Clues does the “one of these things is not like the other” puzzle with my kids? Fer crine out loud! Leave the little ladybug with the off-color spots alone! She just wants to be with the other bugs!
But that’s the way we’re wired, I guess. It’s all evolutionary. Until it’s not, and then it kills us.
