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Quaderno 6

(Rhys Isaac’s speech in celebration

of Loretta’s role as international impressaria of historiography.

OAH/LA – April, 2001)

(Note: These notes remain that – notes to speak from; read them accordingly! )

I – who have of late developed an unexpected intimacy with Loretta’s countryman – Mark Anthony –

have come not to bury her but to praise her – & her Milan Group.

Quaderno 6 is mine to report on ….

The Unfinished Symphony ….

Which is fine – my only complaint that there’s no essay by Loretta

to discourse on ….

No fair I say to you who have 5 (for instance) with the wonderful

July 4^th picnic interpretation…

But I have riches indeed to appraise.

The topic for 1996 – the conference covered in this Quaderno – was:

"Historiography: Practitioners & Public"

But – before I start on the items assembled under that heading –

let me break off & celebrate the Milan Group topics –

let me celebrate the way they are arrived at –

– and the way they work….

It is a way that expresses wonderfully Loretta’s leadership –

– & the internationality of the galaxy of talent she has drawn into the Group.

There’s democratic consultation – vox populi – but no vox dei

In my experience Loretta always heeds the usually awkward consensus –

that the "What’s-for-Next-Time" throws up.

Loretta takes it away and comes up with an inspired reformulation.

(And then it’s there as a beacon – a guiding light – and not tramline to dictate a single direction ….)

As you’ll see from my appraisal of the very disparate-seeming contributions to

Quaderno 6 they are coming from all sides on the issue proclaimed in the title.

One can sense it clearly enough in the opening essay – Ed Countryman’s Roundtable contribution colourfully entitled (out of the Rinascimento) –

"A New Circle for Danté’s Hell: or the Fate of History’s Fools"

Ed really took the high ground in this.

He does not cast historians as so many Dantés – creators of Divine Comedies …

NO –

– he relishes deciding who ascends the arduous spiral of Purgatory –

and who is to be cast down to spend eternity

immersed in the excrement of their lies….

(That is the deserved fate of those time-servers who endorse the myths

by which their dominant group’s interest is furthered.)

Rhys Isaac is next.

He too took high ground – also positioning himself in the terrain of Italy’s

long literary culture – back into ancient times.

He declared History to be a moral act –

– and he challenged today’s historians to try to regain the kind of moral authority that Livy (Titus Livius – a Milanese before he was a Roman)

had exercised for nearly 2,000 years.

Rhys argued that ‘history’ is the story we historians make out of the

stories we find….

Our obligation is to tell truthfully the stories we find from earlier times

and weave them into a story both true & meaningful –

for our times.

It is of vital importance that these stories matter to OUR world –

– that they are not just always written for professional myopics

& their enslaved students.

To do that we have to engage with the GREAT MYTHS of our culture.

And that issue – engaging with the myths – I find – as I hope you’ll see –

– IS THE STRONG THEME OF QUADERNO 6.

The necessity for historians to grapple with myths –

rather like Laocoon valiantly wrestling the Serpent! –

– is the recurrent theme of this volume.

(Indeed if I had a declaratory image to put on the screen here –

– it would be that great sculpture!)

Sophie Wahnich is next in the line-up.

She is from the CNRS (Paris) – & she opens up the internationality of it all at once.

Sophie does a very French ‘take’ …. A very Sorbonne ‘take’ ….

Her essay is on "The Relationship between Past & Present" –

it grapples with the myth of the historian’s "intuition" –

– and does so in the Sorbonne schooled-in-the-Lycée

manner.

That is – the problem is defined philosophically –

– and the search is to establish ‘necessary truth.’

(Here I – a near deaf-mute in ‘the languages’ – must needs celebrate another dimension of the international œcumenism of Loretta’s Milan Group conferences.

– I mean the three-way Italian-French-English translation service.

And so – I – who can read French only slowly – could follow Sophie’s

paper in English as she delivered it.)

Then the Quaderno’s exploration of the relationship between historiography’s practitioners & various publics is back in America –

We go with Greg Nobles to the Wild West – and witness his wit –

– as he grapples with national myth and changing master narratives – – as he traces the fortunes of the Turner frontier thesis.

We enjoy with him the irony of the descendants of New England’s European invaders lately protesting at the counter invasion of their settlements – by the Pequot casino!

(Nobles celebrates the becoming-dominant new master narrative –

– the narrative that aims to admit all cultural points of view as equally as possible – and sees the frontier as the space between two contending cultural systems – and NOT hierarchically as between "civilization" & "savagery.")

(Here we may feel that the practitioners of historiography –

in tune with the best trends of our times –

IS helping consolidate an inclusive master narrative –

– for the U.S.A. – & all the world that watches Westerns!)

Don Doyle (from Vanderbilt, Tennessee) is next –

– the southern nation (or nations?) within the nation – is next.

He does not so much grapple with myth as watch another –

a mighty other – William Faulkner – grapple.

Don’s witness to Faulkner’s Laocoon with the Serpent of the

Old South Plantation and the New South Commerce

Legends – brings us to face a deep question –

"What is historiography?"

– is it JUST what we professionals do / write ?

Should it encompass ‘historiophony’ ? –

– what PEOPLE SAY / TELL ?

Don faces up to the fact that Faulkner was not only writing a history of

his land – but (tho’ he may, as he said, have done no archival research) –

– yet he listened intently to many voices of persons –

WHO CARED DEEPLY ABOUT HISTORY

I quote Don:

"… elderly aunts, black servants, old men at the courthouse square …." – & then the afterthought ! –

– "and scholars at the university" !

Thus we should all learn to ‘do history.’

(Maybe we’ll be entrapped by the voices – as Faulkner was – unable to

make his own narrator’s inclusive impulse triumph over the racialist

fatalism of his region….

Maybe historiographers – with more distance & commitment to a kind of truth in our ‘moral acts’ – will transcend sectionalism better…

Maybe – we cannot be sure!)

Susanna Delfino’s essay follows on beautifully from Don’s.

The Italy-based internationality of this Group’s work is gloriously

ascendant once more –

as it is in Susanna’s being here at the OAH today.

She presents in lucid English –

and – as a commentator from another continent – exposes

the mythic way Northerners (who dominate U.S.

historiography) –

have divided the mythic space of their continent into three –

– an Industrial North, a West full of Promise, and a Backward South.

(They then act as resentfully as New England settlers faced with

Pequot counter-invasion – when the SunBelt threatens to show them

up as backward !!!)

Marco Sioli continues the Italian internationality

again writing in lucid English –

to apply a European (Paris-originating, I think) perspective –

on the body as signifier.

He traces in a very interesting way the appearance and disappearance of the ‘tatooed’ Indian (Native American) body –

as emblem of the savagery of the Wilderness in

Fennimore-Cooper’s novels (& related texts).

This is an important historiography of great popular historical

myth.

Back to a French European perspective….

Sylvia Ullmo continues the work of engaging historiography with myth

– by confronting the moralizing pathos of the writings of a US elite –

as they agonize about starving workers ….

– confronting that with the equally mythic gastronomically

oriented observations of certain French commentators on

the 1890s US urban scene.

Now we come to icons – though staying a moment longer with France –

France as reported from the U.S.A. !

Julie-Ann Plax shows – with great interdisciplinary skill –

the coming of Revolution (American & French) –
into the iconographic tradition of ‘history painting’ –

– the images of ‘battle’ – or more accurately ‘contemplating battle’ –

– that was conventionalized under Louis XIV of France.

Julie-Ann we see grappling very instructively with myth in the form of

the conventions governing historical representation….

"What – we must be asking – are the conventions that similarly

constrain historiographic representation?"

Mechal Sobel’s engagement is also with icons – but very different.

She has to work very hard to a set of conventions that can help us respond to this challenge.

The icons Mechal shows us are not on canvass – nor yet (like Marco’s) drawn on the skin –

– they are surely drawn from the soul.

Mechal’s contribution sort of comes from the U.S.A. –

– from New York originally –

but now vitally via the Middle East – Israel…

She shares with us her obsession with the work of a roadside artist –

William Traylor – an African American born in slavery (c.1855)

He was already very old in 1939 when he came off his ancestral plantation –

and started to live in Benton, Alabama – on welfare & his art.

Mechal’s taking us into Traylor’s pictures raises again –

– as does Doyle’s Faulkner –

– the spectre of OTHER HISTORIES ….

Historiography is invited to stand very respectfully before

the historying of the African American experience

– that seems to be so eloquently –

– the more so because wordlessly –

encrypted into Traylor’s laughing, weeping, praying drawings.

So – that is my Quaderno 6 sampler.

It is Loretta’s Milan group once again at its international interdisciplinary best.

It poses the challenge to the practitioners of historiography –

– as I’ve tried to show –

the challenge –
to engage with myth – not just as an enemy to be vanquished – but as the medium of all historying – and the living form of

the history that non-academic people out there KNOW.

WE ENGAGE WITH IT AND LIVE BY IT –

or we doom ourselves to a pointless self-isolation.

Loretta’s formulation of the subject – and the very different –

but amazingly convergent – approaches to it –
of the ‘practitioners’ who’ve come into her project –

– IS INSTRUCTIVE TO US ALL.

* * *