Vertigo and the Sublime

I never read one book, but always have a half dozen or more going at once. I read some books in particular places, and carry others until I’m through with them. I have stacks of partly read books scattered from nightstand to throne room. I read much of Paul Schullery’s Cowboy Trout on several fishing trips last summer, and will finish it during the first or second angling expedition in the next month or so. I read most of Barry Miles, Zappa: A Biography last fall and eventually will read the last twenty pages. I’m in for the long haul on my readings of A Patriot’s History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A History of the American People by Paul Johnson, and A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, which I’ve read previously. I could finish Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama today or tomorrow, but it might sit unopened for another week or so, as it has for the past several days. Due to my “Reading Challenge,” I’m going through Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions systematically at a page or two per day.

A few days ago, I started William Peden’s critical edition of Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982 [1954]). Jefferson writes about a sublime natural feature on some land that he purchased.

The arch approaches the Semi-elliptical form; but the larger axis of the ellipsis, which would be the cord of the arch, is many times longer than the {semi-axis which gives it’s height.} Though the sides of this bridge are provided in some parts with a parapet of fixed rocks, yet few men have resolution to walk to them and look over into the abyss. You involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creep to the parapet and peep over it. Looking down from this height about a minute, gave me a violent head ache. {This painful sensation is relieved by a short, but pleasing view of the Blue ridge along the fissure downwards, and upwards by that of the Short hills, which, with the Purgatory mountain is a divergence from the North ridge; and descending then to the valley below, the sensation becomes delightful in the extreme. It is impossible for the emotions, arising from the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here: so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing, as it were, up to heaven, the rapture of the Spectator is really indiscribable! The fissure continues deep and narrow and, following the margin of the stream upwards about three eights of a mile you arrive at a limestone cavern, less remarkable, however, for height and extent than those before described. It’s entrance into the hill is but a few feet above the bed of the stream.}
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 24-25.

This version of the text differs from that found on the American Studies Crossroads Project’s hypertext version, which used an edition printed in Brooklyn by the New York Historical Printing Club in 1894. Notes on the State of Virginia was published without Jefferson’s name in France in 1785, then with his name by John Stockdale in England in 1787. The Stockdale edition became the definitive text, but Jefferson inscribed marginal corrections in his personal copy throughout the rest of his life. This marginalia is the basis for the deviations from the Stockdale edition that Peden enclosed in brackets.

Peden’s notes include Jefferson’s marginal comment.

This description was written after a lapse of several years from the time of my visit to the bridge, and under an error of recollection which requires apology. For it is from the bridge itself that the mountains are visible both ways, and not from the bottom of the fissure as my impression then was. The statement therefore in the former edition needs the corrections here given to it. Aug. 16. 1817.
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 263.

Peden includes the Stockdale version in the balance of this endnote.

I suspect that Peden’s misspelling of “its” in two instances reflects changes in American English from the 1950s to today.

Nixonland

Rick Perlstein has a new book coming out in May. According to History News Network, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America is the sequel to Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001).

In my view, Before the Storm is one of the most important books published that addresses the lasting impact of the Sixties. In a nutshell, the ground roots conservative movement that labored to achieve the nomination of Goldwater in 1964--all but written off at the time--forms the foundation of the coalition that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, and dictates a large share of our political agenda today.

I expect that Nixonland will be a good read and offer tremendous insights into American politics from Nixon's first run for Congress to the current day.


August 2011 Update

Ezra Klein reported that President Obama is reading Nixonland. Following this story, Rick Perlstein wrote his first article for Time: "How Democrats Win: Defending the Social Safety Net" 18 August 2011.

Fragments from Bartolomé de Las Casas

I have remarked previously that Voices of a People’s History of the United States (2004) by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove offers a generous selection from the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas. There are extracts from The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account (1542) and In Defense of the Indians (1550). These are placed in company with extracts from the diary of Columbus and a brief passage from Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire (1982) in a chapter designed to correspond with chapter one of A People’s History. Both Voices of a People’s History and A People’s History have twenty-four chapters.

Zinn and Arnove’s assertion that Columbus “is universally portrayed as a heroic figure” (29) is much harder to swallow now than when Zinn wrote the first edition of A People’s History (1980). But they are describing his portrayal for generations of Americans up through the time they were in school. Several pages later, in the headnote to the selections from Las Casas, they observe that “the idealized, romanticized picture of Columbus has begun to be reconsidered” (35).

Estimating the Dead

The passage they offer from The Devastation of the Indies focuses upon depopulation and Spanish cruelties. Bartolomé de Las Casas depicts the islands of the Caribbean as a paradise formerly heavily populated by peoples that were “docile and open to doctrine, very apt to receive our Holy Catholic faith” (36). Las Casas arrived in Hispaniola in his eighteenth year in 1502, and claims to recall such a population of Indians that “it is as though God had crowded into these lands the great majority of mankind” (36). He offers general estimates of the aboriginal population of three million on Hispaniola (36), as many as one million on San Juan and Jamaica (40), and “a countless number” on the island of Cuba (42).

We can estimate very surely and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed, with the infernal actions of the Christians, there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women, and children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself that the number of the slain is more like fifteen million.
Las Casas, in Voices of A People’s History, 37.

Few scholars today accept these numbers, although Zinn advances them in A People’s History with minimal discussion and argument, as noted in “Howard Zinn on Depopulation.” Las Casas’s tendency toward hyperbole should give us pause. When Las Casas declares that Hispaniola “was perhaps the most densely populated place in the world” (35), we might take it as an effort towards census. But we find more exceptionalism on the next page: “of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity, the most obedient and faithful” (36). They lack only the gospel, or “they would be the most fortunate people in the world” (36). The Spanish, on the other hand, are the world’s most vile sinners: “their insatiable greed and ambition [is] the greatest ever seen in the world” (37). The most people, who are the most innocent, were abused by those with the most greed. Did Las Casas have enough experience throughout the world to render such judgment? Such comparisons come not from his breadth of knowledge, but from the ethnocentrism and cultural arrogance that he both advances and critiques.

Spanish Cruelties

Las Casas blames the killing and cruelty on the Spanish motives, and the opportunities for wealth out of proportion to individual merit.

Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits.
Las Casas, in Voices of A People’s History, 37.

He illuminates Spanish greed through a story of Hatuey who fled to Cuba from Hispaniola with many of his people in hopes of escaping the cruelties. Upon learning that the Spanish were coming to Cuba, he conducted a ceremony designed to appeal to the European god.

He had a basket full of gold and jewels and he said: “You see their God here, the God of the Christians. If you agree to it, let us dance for this God, who knows, it may please the God of the Christians and then they will do us no harm.” And his followers said, all together, “Yes, that is good, that is good!” And they danced round the basket of gold until they fell down exhausted. Then their chief, the cacique Hatuey, said to them: “See there, if we keep this basket of gold they will take it from us and will end up killing us. So let us cast away the basket into the river.” They all agreed to do this, and they flung the basket of gold into the river that was nearby.
Las Casas, in Voices of A People’s History, 40-41.

Later Hatuey was burned at the stake, but was given the opportunity to convert to Catholicism when he was “tied to the stake.” When told that Heaven was populated by Christians, he declared a preference for Hell. Las Casas comments, “Such is the fame and honor that God and our Faith have earned through the Christians who have gone out of the Indies” (41). Las Casas is clear. His concern was to save the souls of the Indians. This mission was rendered more difficult by the rapid depopulation of the aboriginals at the hands of Spanish who should have been model Christians, but appeared rather to be servants of their own greed.

Notebook Artifact: Summer 1995

Written in a spiral notebook 28 June 1995, Fort Loudon Lake, Tennessee.

What we call history and what we call the novel are more recent than what we call the Columbian encounter. When Natives embrace writing and written genres, we cannot affirm that what they embrace is wholly Western because these forms emerged in a world deeply infused with economies and ideologies formed in contact with multiple non-European worlds. (Even the Renaissance and subsequent Reformation owe much to the deepening interchange between Christian and Muslim words that characterized the late-Middle Ages.) However, we might examine how “history” and the “novel” were formed as Western constructs during an imperial age, and how they must be reformed in our own and future ages. While American Indians were always present as the Other in history and the novel as we have received them, they now speak as agents who employ and transform these genres. Still, the Natives of today do no share the same world as their ancestors any more than Europeans and Americans share the same world as Europeans of the sixteenth century. Still yet, there is enough continuity with the past in present-day native communities that many writing as Natives offer perspectives that must be distinguished from the perspectives of European Americans.

American Indian fiction and American Indian history are deeply European American discourses. These discourses must be transformed by Natives, as well as by non-Natives writing about Natives, in order to more accurately render the worlds of the indigenes of North America—past and present. One location of transformation may be the construct that distinguishes “history” from “fiction”.

This is not to say that we must lose our ability to distinguish what is true or accurate from what is not. Rather, truth must be seen from other points-of-view. Truth may be situational, rather than empirical. It may be experiential, rather than objective.

I am not advocating that we abandon the practice of history, especially not ethnohistory and the new Indian history. I am advocating that the truth-claims of these genres of writing do not necessarily have priority over the truth-claims of fiction. In fact, certain so-called novels by contemporary American Indian writers, if not more truthful and more accurate than what we call history, at least offer necessary truths that cannot be accommodated within the constrictions of history as it is currently understood. It is possible, therefore, that some of the best work in American Indian history in our day is packaged as fiction, and is thus too much ignored by historians.

Literary critics, on the other hand, who often believe they already understand these truths of fiction, too easily posit themselves as more enlightened than historians. Yet, without the groundings in material realities and the ability to step back from their subject matter that are second nature to the historian, they are equally restricted by their conventions of analysis. Despite a strong movement toward several forms of interdisciplinary multiculturalism in literary studies, the offerings of historians have been too much ignored. In taking fiction seriously as history, it is imperative that we remember the conventions of history as they have been received.

There remains a crucial difference between the food obtained by such human constructs as the atlatl, bow and arrow, gun, and slaughterhouse, and the food consumed by Peter Pan and the Lost Boys in one of their imaginary meals. Too often, in extolling the truth-value of fiction, it is easy to forget the difference between the death of the Jim Loney of fiction and the many real persons who have died similar deaths.

Spiral Notebooks

A bit more than twenty years ago I started carrying a spiral notebook with me almost constantly. I usually wrote in it while reading—taking notes, jotting titles and authors of other texts that I planned to examine, proposing theses, writing initial drafts of key paragraphs, outlining course syllabi, composing poems, …

The habit of always having a spiral notebook with me has ceased since computers have become ubiquitous. These days I’m more likely to carry a notebook manufactured by Gateway than one made by Mead. Still, I have not entirely abandoned the practice. My computer bag has room for a spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen, and I still use them. Too often, however, it is easier to open Word and start typing.

As created text morphs from rough notes to polished prose, much is lost. Some of the loss is beneficial, but not all. My initial condemnation of some book or article may give way to cautious acceptance of another scholar’s perspective, or exuberance for a fresh approach may become the jaded recognition that notions discredited long ago might be resurrected once their refutations have been forgotten. My spiral notebooks preserve a record of these journeys. Those saved as files, even when new drafts have new names, are quickly lost. I’ll never again see the notes I saved just a few years ago on 5 ¼ inch floppies, for example.

Sometimes notebooks from decades ago are painful to read because they reveal astounding ignorance. Such humbling reading, however, can put into perspective my frustration with younger scholars (or with aged ones still pushing discredited ideas that I too once cherished). Other times reading these old notebooks offer fresh recollections of knowledge I’ve lost.