Geoffrey Elton and Alexis de Tocqueville

Although the Ancien Regime is still quite close to us in time, since we daily come across men who were born under its laws, it already seems to be lost in the obscurity of the past. The radical revolution which separates us  from it has the same effect as centuries would have- it has cast a veil over everything it did not destroy. Thus few people exist today who might give a precise reply to this simple question: how was the countryside administered before 1789? In fact, it cannot be answered with any accuracy or in any detail unless you have studied, not the books, but the administrative archives or that period (Alexis de Tocqueville The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution)

I love this quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville: in part because it reflects the thought of Geoffrey Elton about history- one of the intellectual legacies that I've grown up in the shadow of. Partly though I think what Tocqueville gets at here is a really interesting distinction. There is a history that we all know and a history that was documented at the time. Neither history is free from distortion: the history that we remember is interpreted through what happened next. You can see this everywhere. Take two periods in American history. The 1850s are always remembered as the prelude to the 1860s: we think of them through the lens of the war that was to come. It can lead to mistakes. Some might argue that the divisiveness of the politics of the 1950s in the UK is forgotten because of the breakthrough of Thatcherism in the 1980s. What comes after often means that we forget about what came before.

Tocqueville's history is based on what he sees as more contemporary evidence and that's a very modern concern. Memory though is important and can itself be underrated. Tocqueville in this way is a predecessor to Ranke- but documents can deceive as much as they can illustrate. To privilege what is recorded over what is not recorded may privilege those activities which are recorded and those actors who author the records. This can have sinister implications. Tacitus in the annals speaks of the control that emperors had over those who kept records and we know from our own century too well the danger of propaganda. However distortion doesn't need to be sinister to be there. For example, Geoffrey Elton's histories of the reign of Henry VIII were focussed on Thomas Cromwell because Cromwell was the master of the records: more recently historians have embraced a more expansive vision of court culture precisely because they recognised that documents may distort. To use another example, documents only preserve the trace of an activity which is documented: take an operation, a document will preserve what the operation was, it will preserve how much it cost, it might even preserve what the medical outcome was and possibly a scale of patient satisfaction. It won't preserve the doctor's forgiving manner, the nurse's smile, the feeling of pain and of relief: those things are lost.

I'm not criticising Tocqueville here- more I'm riffing on his words- but I do think its interesting to think about what he was trying to analyse. He was trying to get to the meaning of an event: the French Revolution. The key question there though is that the meaning of an event may be dual. It may be what the event meant in reality: the actual conditions which provoked and ended up sustaining or failing to sustain that event and the change it brought. It may mean that we are interested in the meaning of the event for those who lived through it- people who might have believed all sorts of inaccurate things about it. Meaning is multifaceted and the stories people tell about events can be more important than the events themselves: the revolution in France for example only meant something to the world because people told stories about it as the origin of democracy or the bourgeois moment of conquest. Its worth us both reexamining the validity of those stories but also enquiring into what stories people told about events: we must go back to the documents for both halves of that picture.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert's death yesterday is a sad moment. There are many reasons I think why its so sad. He was one of those writers that made you feel like he would be fantastic to meet. He wrote with such engagement and enthusiasm that it was hard not to share what he thought. He also incarnated I think one of the key functions of a critic- he was an essayist rather than a writer of articles. The difference is that whereas often reviewers of films seek to write about the film and its story and the performances- Ebert often managed to use the film to think about wider issues. This didn't mean his reviews were an excuse to write about those issues: rather Ebert allowed the film to grow those issues inside his head. I didn't always agree with his reviews- some of them I downright disagreed with- but I always found his reviews interesting to read and rewarding. Sometimes I read a review of a film I wanted to review on this blog and thought having read his article that I couldn't say anything- there wasn't anything left to add. More often I found his perspective was interesting and different. His writing about his later cancer was moving and profound at moments and his blog came across like the blog of someone who you could like.

Amour

I have walked out of films because I found them execrably bad (Four Weddings and a Funeral), I've walked out of films because I thought the history was inaccurate (ok I didn't see JFK in the cinema but I would have....) but I've never walked out of a film because I found it too painful to watch- or not until now. Amour is a wonderful film- but its a deeply disturbing film because it takes you right to the frontier of what human life is at the end. Its not pretty. It deals with a couple in their old age- they come on to the screen as typical representatives of a particular European intellectual and social class, rejoicing in the classical music that postwar respectability has brought them. The day afterwards they have breakfast together but it slowly becomes evident that she is unable to function properly anymore- she is suffering from several little strokes and will eventually lose her mind and her individuality.

The film's title points I think to its subject- and plenty of other reviewers have made this comment- that amour is about love. Its about sexual love between a couple and the way that that becomes at the end the only love in this case that matters. Children, friends, even former pupils cannot reach the woman who can only be exposed in the nakedness of her madness to her lover. In that sense it says that Lear would have company on the heath, if his queen survived. I think this picture of romantic love is of course very relevant. In a society where generations are torn apart culturally and economically and even technologically, its very difficult to see people outside your cohort as your peers. The picture of love here is an assertion of understanding: the husband asserts he understands the wife in a way that daughters and nurses can't- the problem and I've faced this myself in a small way- is that there is an insistant totalitarianism is this assertion of understanding. Its hard to understand someone who is closed off from the world- but as soon as you start saying that you understand them better than anyone else by virtue of your relationship with them, the ethics get cloudy.

Most people talk about amour as though its a film about the power of love and I suppose yes it is- but I think its more powerful as a film about the limits of love. We are what we think and how we behave ultimately. Once only the shell of the human being is left: what is it that you are loving? I think Emmanuelle Riva's performance conveys this perfectly- the cultivated older woman slips into being a grotesque infant, one without the capacity for growth. What surrounds her is her husband's memories and we call that love: but in reality whereas love is often seen as a moment of communication- this kind of love is a deliberate deception about the continuing of something that has just left. Or rather we are left with the sense that the husband for all his charity and ability to communicate, just can't break through the wall to his wife- can't communicate to her.

Epictetus being pleasant

'While you are kissing your child', Epictetus once said, 'murmur under your breath, tomorrow it may be dead.' 'Ominous words' they told him. 'Not at all' he said 'but only signifying an act of nature. Would it be ominous to speak of the gathering of the ripe corn'.

This comes from Marcus Aurelius's meditations but its a fascinating vignette about Epictetus. I think it demonstrates something about the ancient world: after all his advice was much more practical in the days when infant mortality and young child mortality were much higher. In one of Chinua Achebe's novels about Nigeria the young Nigerian is not reckoned a full human until they have passed 12, before then they might easily die and I think Epictetus is making a similar point. Whereas Achebe's characters think religiously though, Epictetus is using a philosophical comparison to nature- and perhaps this comparison allows us to explain a bit more of the psychology behind Stoicism. Its a theory of acceptance of the world- elsewhere in the Meditations, Aurelius says that the fool experiences the world through sensation, the wise man through action- note he doesn't say that the wise man experiences the world through thinking. What's going on here is a theory of acceptance.

Marcus's attitude to the present

I'm sure that everyone has thought about the meaning of a particular metaphysical proposition for their own lives. I rather like Marcus Aurelius on this:

Either things must have their origin in one single intelligent source and all fall into place to compose, as it were, one single body- in which case no part ought to complain of what happens for the good of the whole- or else the world is nothing but atoms and their confused minglings and dispersions. So why be so harassed?

The argument is of course very comforting! Its also interesting that those are the alternatives- picking up on an earlier post they look still like alternatives that seem real to us today.

The concept of Infinity

One of the least appealing modern traits is to imagine that we've discovered everything new- in some ways that's true. The ancient world did not have television and were not plagued by endless reruns of Friends on E4. But equally they did have concepts that we might not have expected them to have: take this statement from Marcus Aurelius: 'the phrase infinity may pass, even if the world be in fact administered in finite cycles'. It seems to me what this throwaway comment is getting at is that there are different types of infinity: one might be an infinity which is truly infinite, one might be an infinity that is infinite because the finity that really exists is unccountable or unknowable and a last might be that infinity is a reasonable approximation of a set of a finite number of cycles. I'm happy with whichever infinity you want Marcus to define- but the fact seems to be here is an ancient author, not a mathematician, with at least two concepts of infinity.

A sobering reflection

Mislead yourself no longer, you will never read these notebooks again now, nor the annals of the bygone Romans and Greeks, nor that choice selection of writings you have put by for your old age. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

I read this passage from the Meditations with nothing but despair- for since Marcus died, all those centuries ago, how much has been published? How many learned men and women have worked and slaved away at scholarship? You could get amazingly dizzy thinking of all the fields that you need to understand to really understand even one fraction of human knowledge- one subject today. Think about the history of Marcus's life: just to read all the books about the Meditations would probably take at least the length of a post-graduate qualification, probably half an academic career. Then move on to the think about the archaeology and sociology of that period- its interpretations by further periods and more and more. Intellectual vertigo existed in Marcus's life- it exists just as much today.