I went for a walk with Gordy last spring and met an oral historian. I was impressed; I studied history at university, but it was “traditional” history – reading texts and crafting narratives which attempted to weave a credible story of how it is that events in the past came to happen, with the goal more broadly of understanding the process by which events unfold at any time, including our own, including tomorrow. Oral history was mentioned peripherally – mostly in discussions on historiography, the study of history as a discipline – but it was almost casual. Meeting a real, live oral historian was pretty cool, and meeting one with a dog and a child who lived in Maine was mind-blowing; it was like hearing rumors for years that a famous movie star lived in your town, and then you run into Bill Murray and it turns out he hangs out at the dog park, too. Or to put it in my son’s terms, who’s now reading Harry Potter, it’s like being a muggle but finally getting to meet a wizard and realizing that yes, there are places like Hogwarts where it’s normal to be one. (Not that that in any way means he’s getting the Hogwarts Castle Lego set for Christmas, mind you.)
We’ve kept in touch and she’s given me a little more insight into what she actually does day-to-day, and it’s gotten me more and more intrigued. Yesterday I had a bit of an inspiration about it. I think oral history is to “history” as quantum mechanics is to the physical world. “History” as I learned it is more like Newtonian-Einsteinian physics at large scales. And in the same way that physics is struggling and finding it impossible to bridge the divide between quantum and macro scales, history also struggles to link the idea of lived and expressed experience and the blended narratives that describe groups of people – nations, classes, tribes, genders – and their interactions through time.
First off, though, a quick bit of historiography. Historians classify their work (well, literate historians anyway – not to call oral historians illiterate, but to borrow the Ong / MacLuhan distinction between “oral” and “literate” cultures) into primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. Primary sources consist of original documents (treaties, contracts, legal briefs, but also paintings, buildings, manufactured artifacts and what others might consider “archeological” evidence). By definition, primary sources don’t seek to tell a story or explain; rather, they are evidence or supporting materials for a human process of some sort, made in support of the process – not made in a post-hoc effort to explain the process. Secondary sources are explanatory but created in isolation and, usually, created by individuals or actors who could reasonably be expected to be “part of” the process being examined. So diaries and contemporary news accounts, for example, are classic examples of secondary sources. Diplomatic cables describing events on the ground are also classic secondary sources; they explain, but they are created with an explicit mission to influence immediate action in response to that which they describe.
There is, of course, a grey area between primary and secondary sources. A good example is a ship’s log: it’s usually written in the moment (stating the noon solar fix for determining latitude, or estimating the position at which land or whales or an enemy ship was first spotted), but sometimes it describes events which just took place, and sometimes that’s in self-justification by the author and sometimes it’s just because that’s what you do with a ship’s log. Is that a primary or secondary source? Good question. Probably not necessary to answer, but a critical historian will remember that sometimes a captain will blandly describe and sometimes they will be crafting a conscious narrative. A good test, however, of “is this a primary or secondary source” is to ask whether the source was written by an eyewitness, or whether it is combining or including material from other people – and then layer on that other dimension of intentionality or simple recording.
Tertiary sources are the boundary between “history” and source material. These are accounts of a given event, or set of events, which weave a conscious narrative from a combination of both primary and secondary sources. I say it’s a boundary because history as done classically would then allow for the use of tertiary sources as a source. At this point, history really becomes a question of distance: one practices history – which is a narrative art – once it becomes practically impossible to be aware of the holistic environment in which primary and secondary sources can be created. We then rely on tertiary sources to understand (or present a range of interpretations of) the world in which a given event or epoch took place, and historians – combining all three sources levels – present a higher level thesis, using the differences between various accounts and understandings at each lower level to navigate “what really happened and why.”
History is often discredited as a “discipline” because of the inherent humanistic subjectivity involved at every step of the way. We have access to only those primary sources which survive and which we can find; the account of the CIA agent who really killed JFK remains hidden in the archives at Langley or, more likely, was never written. Secondary sources are written often with explicit bias, and of those, the ones that usually survive are the ones whose bias supported a dominant member of a power relationship who thus had greater means of ensuring its survival. It’s hard to find issues of democratic socialist newspaper accounts from East Germany during the years of 1945-1949, for example. And the sources that survive at all levels are usually written by people of means. We can’t forget that literacy was a luxury everywhere – including western Europe – until a couple, maybe three centuries ago. So if written material survives we know it was created by someone who was already in a minority defined by education, and since minority education self-perpetuates, it is written with the biases of that minority.
It’s for this reason that Walter Ong, in Orality and Literacy, describes a kind of mind warping process which takes place when the dominant expressive media at work in society shifts. His focus on transmitted media led to Marshall MacLuhan’s masterpieces on the changing landscape of media and its imprint on modernity published in the 1960s and 1970s (and so still so prescient to read today). But his real focus is on the shift from the use of spoken word as the dominant means of society communicating to the use of the written word, and the multi-layered impact that had on the development of the modern. Simply put (and Ong and MacLuhan are somewhat infamous for putting nothing simply), a society which communicates primary by word of mouth is by definition open, embracing, and requires some homogeneity to be sustainable because definitions must be shared but cannot be compared except in the immediately extinguishable instant; societies which communicate primarily by written word become closed and isolating to the individual, but can embrace radically, exponentially more diversity because participants can compare meanings across time and space.
In that light, we can view traditional history, with its focus (if not reliance) on the written word, as a child of the characteristics of a literate society. It is closed and isolating, but as long as the material (primary, secondary, or tertiary source) exists, it can embrace nearly anything on its own terms. It uses this power to construct astonishingly broad and often comprehensively compelling narratives. When done with the same clinical objectivity as the sciences, it can explain what we see before we see it – at least in the realm of purely human endeavor (like the other social sciences, it’s rubbish at dealing with externalities). But it’s terrible – and misapplied – in understanding human beings as individuals. In fact most historians I know are blind to individuals and their motivations, because their discipline fundamentally doesn’t care about individuals. It cares about the movement of people or, better yet, societies – be they lower middle class British millworkers in the 19th century as a “society”, or the behavior of European elites in the run up to World War I. Predicting what some guy named William McMurray, working in a shipyard in Glasgow in 1893, would do or would care about is, even as the historian reads his diary or reads his account of a strike in which he participated, irrelevant. The historian cares about how that lends credence to a broader narrative.
I’m going to now embarrass myself by talking about oral history from the secondary perspective, as a friend of an oral historian and admittedly as a friend who remains somewhat amazed to have discovered Bill Murray hanging out at his local dog park. With that caveat…
My friend describes what she does as, in essence, recording people’s words as they speak them. She goes around with a tape recorder (showing my age here: I’m sure she has some form of Apple or Google equipment, but I prefer to think of someone with a many-pocketed journalist’s jacket and a reel-to-reel deck weighing ten kilos and a giant microphone) and asks questions but really just lets people describe what they remember and want to talk about their own pasts. It might be a lawyer, or a fisherman, or a politician – their place in society is somewhat irrelevant because they’re not being asked to write anything, they’re not intermediating their memories with writing. That initial bias of literate history – of only recording the works of people who could write – is gone. The only bias is, are they alive and can they talk.
In literate historical terms, it’s not clear what she’s recording in terms of source material. Some of it, no doubt, is primary source; but most of it is probably secondary, and the further her interviewees are from the events that they describe, much of it is probably really a tertiary expression of the process of memory itself. But then she does what she describes as “curate” the material.* Some of this, no doubt, is just improving the quality of the sound, getting rid of long pauses or breaks where she forgot to stop recording while someone needed a bathroom break. But a lot of it is paring down the story to “what matters,” which is very much a historian thing to do – yet curating words is far more personal, and I’d imagine far more weighty a responsibility than what literate historians feel when choosing to cut and paste quotes from someone’s diary or ship log or letter home. It’s direct and visceral – it touches the open and embracing aspect of orality that Ong speaks to – and thus must demand a far different touch as a moral being to accomplish.
* – Editor’s note: My friend tells me that “curating” doesn’t mean editing, although she does do so for podcasts or similar formats. However, the original source material is always available. She does, however, “tag” the material in various ways (I won’t pretend to know how this works with an audio file, but there you have it); it enables faster searches and more ready access for people online searching – no doubt – using a written search string. I wonder if there isn’t something to that linkage, of the interpretive or curatorial aspect of “tagging” and the bridge that should exist between oral and written conceptualizations. Anyway, I wanted to make it clear I got it wrong and that oral historians don’t, in fact, leave lots of stuff on the editing room floor. Although hopefully they do erase the bits when people got up to use the restroom and they forgot to hit pause on the recording device.
In that regard, while an oral historian is still conducting “history,” it’s of a very different kind, and engaging with a very different object. In today’s world, moreover, oral history can achieve a far broader exposure to actual experience than ever before. The ability to store orality is finally here, with as much (effectively, given the real cost of data storage) potential depth of coverage as literate source material.
What occurred to me yesterday, walking through Sea-Tac Airport, and then when I woke up at 3am with a kind of mathematical image in my head, was that this is exactly equivalent to what’s happening right now in physics. “Right now,” of course, meaning for the past century, but nevertheless: our ability to conceptualize and measure and store data about the basic scale of imagination now allows us to also conceptualize and curate explanations for what takes place on that scale. And at that scale it makes sense, and we understand – and are linked to – the improbability and diversity of what goes on at that scale. But the insights and global accuracy we can find at the macro scale aren’t invalidated; if anything, we’re forced to divert now our attention to the boundary zone, the Schwartzfeld radius around a black hole where quantum effects produce macro energy events, the strange bubbling froth where our lived experience of events mutates into a shared understanding of what constitutes an event and what the next event will be.
Physics has, really, nothing particularly valuable to express in terms of linking these two scales. In fact, a whole series of essays in various journals recently has lamented the fact that physics is stuck in a rut. It can find evidence of the small but massive particles which seem to confirm the quantum mechanical representation of how energy behaves at small scales. And it can continually confirm that our understanding of space-time as a linked dimensionality, where time and mass and energy exist in a continuum, is pretty darn accurate. But it can’t link the two and our attempts to date to do so seem no more interesting or insightful than positing the existence of a magical ether in which light passed was for early 19th century physicists (and dark energy in particular seems so readily substitutable for “ether” that one wonders how far we’ve really come).
But I think history – a post-Ongian, literary-oral fusion of history – has maybe some potential to do so with the experience of being human. We can see – through a glass darkly, perhaps – that we are both individuals with a voice, and members of various and shifting communities in which we express an idea or an ideal. We live and experience within ourselves the duality of particle and wave, of voice and word. We can write and we can be heard, and we can know that both expressive actions are different but each has become essential to us as humans, not in opposition but the way an X and Y axis are essential but different and without both of which you can’t describe where a point is on a plane. Physics has (unsuccessfully to date) explored extra dimensions as a way of resolving its impasse, but I wonder if there isn’t a new dimensionality of human existence that will enable an even greater expression of history going forward.
Until we achieve that, I’m still pretty amazed that I’ve actually met an oral historian. And with the luck of that coincidence working in my favor, I am hoping that Bill Murray himself shows up at Wedgwood Broiler tonight. And for my son’s sake, maybe Harry and Hermione will be eating onion rings and blue cheese salad and steaks at the next table over. If that happens, I’ll start recording things on my phone; it would be impolite to write it down.
Postscript: Bill Murray had other engagements, and if Harry was at the Broiler tonight, he was wearing his cloak of invisibility. But we had a great night. My son is starting to ask how the bank works in Monopoly, which is a fairly deep economic-existential question if you really stop to think about it. He’s just talking now – he’s oral, not fundamentally literate. He’s just starting to write, though, and in particular, numbers and mathematics are starting to branch from completely immaterial abstractions to the language of sets, equations, and the higher math that infects my dreams. I hope he explores a new expository form as he grows in all of these media. It will beyond me but that’s okay. I’m here for him, essential and expendable at once.