The oral historian has been recording the life of my father, although it’s hit a bit of a scheduling snag recently. Her daughter, two years old, has just started daycare and as a result is at that lovely stage where she’s transmitting every infant cold and flu virus to her mother that she can lick from her nursery mates’ toys and drinking utensils. Plus she’s received a bit more actual oral history work, and the combination of the two makes both her energy level and her availability to complete my father’s oral history quite a bit less than it was during the summer. Which isn’t the end of the world – my parents also seem to be upping their game for extracurricular activities on the weekends, which is a pleasure to see, and they now have a new dog friend to take care of when I’m out of town. But it’s a bit disappointing as well, as my father had completed the conversational journey just up to the moment my parents moved to Maine and started their family. In my sister’s words, Dad, we’re finally born, and now we can’t hear the rest of the story.
That’s not strictly speaking true; the story has been told to us, crafted in our presence, for all these forty five years. We are the embodiment of a decent chunk of that story, but I share my sister’s craving for hearing him tell the rest of it, the bits that might have been hidden from the view of one’s children, but deserve to be remembered in the completeness of one’s life. Moreover, I’m especially interested to hear the bits that come out which aren’t moments of triumph or warm recollection. I’m interested in the failures, the losses, and the disappointments – the things you don’t normally advertise.
At the same rough moment that I was thinking about this, the first edition of The New York Review of Books to arrive at my house in Scarborough came in the mail, with an essay reviewing The Invention of Time, a recent book by Paul Kasmin. The author of the essay, G.W. Bowersock, is usually worth reading, and in describing the book and its themes, he made an interesting observation: in essence, the ancient world lost its historical memory of the Hellenistic period – from the death of Alexander the Great to the final defeat of the successor dynasties by the Romans just before the start of the Roman imperial period – largely because the Roman successors were joined by the Greek-speaking Hellenistics in jointly establishing the cultural supremacy of imperial Rome. The Greeks who created Roman culture were happy to ignore a period of long-term decline in political power and influence; the Romans were happy to have the best writers in the ancient world pulling together their copy.
It’s an old saw that history is written by the victors, but I think Bowersock is hinting at something more: those who sense that they are on the losing side of history actually lose their voice. It isn’t just that the victors expunge the record, although often enough they do; those who are seeing their influence, their importance, their relevance drain away slowly but steadily put away their pens and their paper (or their quills and their papyrus) and start to wait for the victors to bring them something worth writing about again. Bowersock references a Greek anthologist, Philostratus, in the 3rd century BCE, who describes the work of the great orators and authors of the Greek golden age, then skips ahead to authors of the 1st century BCE – when Greece had been fully assimilated into the Empire and Greek scholarship had resumed its place of cultural prominence. The intervening years had, from his perspective, not happened – but Bowersock more or less implies that he wasn’t wrong. Hellenistic authors had been quiescent during the long period where its political and military power was declining in the face of Rome.
The third element of this mental exercise came in reading another review, this time of The Capital by Robert Menasse, widely regarded as the first truly literary novel of the European Commission bureaucracy. Menasse, an Austrian, draws heavily from another Austrian novel, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, about the imperial bureaucracy of Vienna in the waning years of Franz Josef’s reign before World War I. Menasse is described as having a particular affinity for novels set in places that are about to collapse or encounter some transformation, which made me smile because I love that too; The Man Without Qualities is one of my favorite novels, and the genre of “fiction from worldviews that are about to die” is enormously rich: the Palace Walk trilogy set in Cairo in the 1920s and 1930s, anything from Soviet samizdat literature, the decadance and nostalgia and raw confusion of end-of-Raj British Indian literature. Menasse’s new novel, writes the reviewer, Fintan O’Toole, is set in much the same mold – but the difference being, the transformation or collapse hasn’t happened yet. But it will. We all know it – we just don’t know who the victors will be.
In Brussels, the EU will be reshaped by Brexit and by the growing pressures of resurgent nationalism that the Union was meant to hold at bay. Here in North America, I would argue, we’re dealing with the same thing (certainly in the US, although a week and a half after the Canadian election, it feels like nothing got solved north of the border either). Trump’s upcoming impeachment, combined with the 2020 elections, weekly environmental catastrophes, and an economy humming along for reasons no one at all can explain as to why, make for an overarching feeling of being on a precipice – but not knowing at all whether you’ll fall, you’ll pull back, or jump off and fly. The Man Without Qualities was written in the 1930s, when Musil knew how it all ended; we’re living in the same environment but we don’t know what happens next.
And with that, I would argue, we are entering into a period of silence much in the way that the Hellenistic world endured while the remains of Alexandrine conquests slowly wound down. The noise from the internet – from the squabbles between far left and far right – are just that, white noise that no one will remember because no one seriously believes either side will “emerge victorious” so as to own the historical narrative. But the center is dead and the “new new” is still over the horizon. We don’t know if it’s a technological hell or a utopia, or if climate change will render all other discussions moot – we can and do have less confidence in what the world that my son will live in will look like than ever. So serious thought and discourse has slowly, quietly, disappeared, with bureaucracy in the background, silently keeping the existing machine running, and all of us looking around us, trying to find the Romans in our midst.
In such a place, though, individuals continue to do their best. Being aware of historical context and the crisis of the moment is actually a distraction for most people, and indeed doesn’t necessarily help us decide what to do on a personal or local level: where should my son go to middle school? Should I take that new job, or move house, or buy a new car? Should I stay in my marriage and work on it, stay and muddle on, or leave? Should I muddle through a job or career going nowhere, but it pays the bills, or should I take a risk and pursue that dream of mine to be a veterinarian? Who should I vote for for city council, or legislature, or parliament, or president? Some decisions are mundane l, and will do little (not nothing, but not enough to care) to change the world. Others have a greater impact but it will still be at a distance – my vote for city council will not change Seattle, even though the city councilor who is elected for District 6 may very well change it with his or her vote. But the collection of those choices that define and describe my life mean something, both directly to the people whom I impact but also as a record for the future in understanding how their world came to be.
It’s that, I think, that has finally come together in my mind as to why I’m so fascinated by oral history and why I think it’s so noble. It’s not a replacement for traditional, textual history as I learned it and practiced (or rather, still practice) it. It’s an essential record of those who lose their voice in traditional history. When I was being trained as a historian, oral history was often thought of as a way to capture historical information that otherwise would have been forgotten because the carriers of that information were either illiterate, or unable to gain access to publishing or recording due to class or race or other barriers. Historians could capture physical artefacts of the lives of such individuals or groups, but the ability to record their voice suddenly opened up the ability to record their thoughts in a way that, before Edison and his amazing recording and speaking machine, was the exclusive province of the educated elites.
Much early oral history – including the early work by the Works Progress Administration, in conjunction with photography work by Walker Evans and others recording the visual record of the dispossessed – focused on those who had, in essence, lost the game of life. The winners wrote essays and stories and first person textual accounts and, in their jobs in government or the military or in finance or the arts, created what we’d call “primary source material” for traditional historians. The losers, unable to write or excluded from the means of recording their thoughts by elites who didn’t care to hear them, were stuck until someone came along with a reel-to-reel and a microphone and asked them to tell their stories.
What I think, though, is that oral history has another role to play, particularly important in a space and at a time where everyone, I think, worldwide, has a strange but shared sense of being on the cusp of massive, radical change, but being unable to identify who or what the “winners” will be. We’re all stuck; what we write and say feels contrived, feels pointless when we know there will be something much more relevant that will replace all of this in just a little while. In the pejorative language of my instructors in regular history, we’re all losers now – and thus the natural ground for oral history. But the oral historians – with their recording devices and microphones and with a fundamental respect for those who cannot write, be it because of lack of a ability or lack of will – can pierce that malaise of expression at every level. They honor the individual in their own fundamental existence, as themselves, without demanding that the individual contextualize themselves. Their voices and their lives are the information to be valued, not their output or their context or their impact. Tell me about why you decided to change careers at age 30. What was it like when you moved across the country. How did it feel to be a single mom so unexpectedly. Tell me what it was like to be you, while I press “record” here.
I don’t know how my father’s recorded story will be used in the future. I hope my son will listen to it and get to know his grandfather in a new way, when my son is old enough, which will probably be long after my father is gone. I know I’ll use it that way too, but I also have a sense that some time in the future, there will be people – or whatever happens on the other side of the transhuman divide – who will want to understand why homo sapiens did what they did just before the Great Upheaval. And not just “why” they did whatever led up to the Great Upheaval, but what, really, they had done, day to day. They’ll have an insane body of data, assuming the data farms survive, but if they don’t have the stories with voice, with cadence and rhythm, and with a record of the questions that inspired the stories to turn, they’ll have a gap that will be obvious and fatal to learning any real lessons. Bowersock’s essay hints at that in a discussion of time: it will be as if there is a gap in time, and what emerges on the other side of the gap is so unrecognizable compared to what seemed to exist before the gap, that any sane person will say, the story has been lost.
In a strange way, the ancient Near Eastern people watching their societies wane had it easier, existentially speaking, than we do: they knew the Romans were the emerging power. We don’t; the People’s Republic of China, arguably “the” emerging geopolitical force in the world today, seems just as fragile and susceptible to collapse as we do. And while The Man Without Qualities described pre-war Vienna with a kind of irony, in that the author’s narrative voice clearly knows things aren’t going to go well for the Hapsburgs, even in that world, contemporary records generally thought that whatever happened, rich Europeans capitalists would continue to rule the world. They got it wrong, but that’s part of the brilliance of the novel: they thought they knew the answer. We don’t even have that confidence today: no one (except crackpots) pretends to think there is a clear sense of what the future may hold. Which should make the historical record of what it is to exist in a time of nearly cripplingly infinite potential future outcomes so interesting: how do people live in such an environment? After it’s all settled out in 10 or 25 or 50 years, it will all seem so obvious – but it isn’t to us, and the record of how people who are faced with such uncertainty both live with it, create the change, and then react to the certainty when they have created it is, in fact, the baseline metastory that history seeks to tell. Without our voices, it can’t tell that story.
Due to technological limitations, we will not be able to reconstruct an emotional or anthropologically valid picture of what it was like to live in the eastern Mediterranean during Hellenistic times, and thus we can’t really know why Rome emerged in the area the way that it did, collapsed eventually the way it did, and led to the world we have today. But I have a sense that, between fiction that can sense immanence and oral history which can maintain the record, our successors in this world will be able to understand us better. I’m hopeful that they’ll care, but even if they don’t, I think it’s good and appropriate to not erase these strange and curious times of ours from the record.
I am a bit curious as to what my dad will say. If he and the the oral historian finally get some time on the calendar, it will be good to know that our collective consciouness and history will at least have one complete record. Hopefully her daughter will let the oral historian get on with a few more.
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