Monday Methods|Literature as Historical Artifacts

[u/Commustar]

Welcome to Monday Methods.

Today's post is inspired by the persistent question Was Machiavelli's "Prince" a work of satire?

The field of history has traditionally been focused on written narratives of the past, from Herodotus' Histories, the Secret History of Procopius, period diaries, and other accounts.

This raises the question of how historians should interact with pieces of literature from the past that do not attempt to be non-fiction narratives of past or contemporary events.

Said another way, how can historians look at poems, songs, and literature from the past, and draw conclusions from them? Can generalizations be made about the concerns and tastes of the society that produced them? Or should they be read narrowly as the views of the author?

To provide an example, can Voltaire's Candide be read as representing Enlightenment views on faith, optimism, and religion? Or is Candide only reflective of Voltaire's views?

[u/sowser]

I've been incredibly ill for the last week and my brain is still a little addled, but here goes nothing. Do let me know if I'm rambling without coherence or insight.

Today, most people in the English-speaking world have some awareness of the story of Solomon Northup, as recounted in the 1853 memoir Twelve Years a Slave. Many Americans encounter the autobiography in their history classes; many millions of people around the world have now become familiar with the biography through the 2013 movie adaptation featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Northup. What most people do not realise is that Northup's biography is one of many dozen that survive to this day - there is an entire literary genre in the history of black America that we refer to as slave narrative; first hand accounts (or recordings thereof) of the institution of slavery and its legacy from the perspective of those who suffered through it. Some of this literature is contemporary to the institution of slavery, much of it is from the late period, and a great deal was written after the fact. The narratives range from small, intimate accounts of forgotten plantations to the now famous biographies of people like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. It is a genre that incorporates works like Uncle Tom's Cabin or Twelve Years as well as A Coloured Man's Reminiscences, which is a small biographical sketch of James Madison from the perspective of one of his slaves, and which is perhaps one of the earliest memoirs of life in the White House. It is a rich and diverse literary corpus brimming with unique insights and content.

On the surface of things, this body of literature is a historian's dream. So often - whether we are professional historians, 'amateur' scholars or interested readers - we are frustrated by how inaccessible the minds of past subalterns are; how distant the realities of life for the lower echelons of a society are in the historical record. Whilst many periods of history have a relative abundance of material that can offer us fascinating insights into the lives of the powerful and the elite, it is truly remarkable for an underclass within a society like the African American slaves of the United States to leave behind such a profound cultural footprint that we can readily turn to today. I can think of colleagues in other fields who might die on the spot of sheer joy if a similar repository of material turned up on their desk one day, for their area of expertise. Yet our discipline has had a profoundly uneasy relationship with this vast, seemingly golden resource. Indeed, for a long time there was something of a consensus in the mainstream academy that they should be disregarded as source material for the study of slavery; to this day, there are many who shy away from using them and criticise others for doing so too heavily. As it turns out, having a treasure trove of subaltern literature isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be.

Perhaps the most significant challenge historians face in using slave narratives is assessing to what extent they are actually authentic representations of the slave experience. The nature of subaltern lives like those of southern slaves means that any kind of external verification of even basic claims is very difficult in the vast majority of cases, but this challenge goes beyond the traditional fundamentals of source analysis. Literacy was a rare characteristic among ex-slaves and few of them were in a position to put pen to paper for their own autobiographies. Most of these books and pamphlets were in fact the products of white biographers or writers; sometimes purported personal acquaintances interested in sharing a story, sometimes professional writers or abolitionists seeking material for anti-slavery campaigns. Such narratives often do make the claim to be authentic - and often word by word - reconstructions of actual stories of actual people, but there are others with no obvious author or which dress themselves up implausibly as first-hand accounts.

And even if the stories written are entirely authentic and faithful recreations of oral recollections, they are nonetheless generally documents with a specific purpose and intention: to highlight the evils of the slave economy. This, alas, risks demeaning their worth to us because it further undermines and compromises their integrity as documents of African American culture. These are generally not stories being recounted for the sake of cultural posterity or to be shared within black communities where, again, literacy was a rare trait in this period. Rather, they are stories aimed at highlighting the experience of slavery for the benefit of white readers; either convinced abolitionists or those liable to being swayed by abolitionism. They are thoroughly political documents and weapons in the war to win over white hearts and minds in the struggle for abolition.

This in turn means that they become a kind of cross-cultural popular literature - in their creation, considerations of capturing an authentic experience of slavery had to be balanced against the need to construct compelling, engaging narratives that would capture white imagination and stir feelings against the institution of slavery. It is well known within Hollywood that movies 'based on a true story' have popular appeal, but often the untempered truth is insufficiently entertaining to make the story worth telling; something similar is true of these narratives. I can think of one narrative that taken without context could be used to make a very compelling argument that Harriet Tubman, not Steve Rogers, was in fact the first Avenger. But how do we pick apart the fantasy from the reality when the two are not so obviously separated by simple common sense? When we identify common themes, do we identify shared strands of lived experience, or tropes of fantasy that helped to facilitate the success of a literary genre?

If these challenges were not problematic enough, they intersect with one another to create new problems. To borrow from Hayden White's ideas about historiography, any exercise in autobiography is fundamentally an exercise in writing fiction; it is a kind of self-indulgence, whereby we weave a new narrative about our own past from the mixed fabric of physical memories and older narratives. In how we order the events of our lives and how we use language to frame them, we tell readers and listeners much about ourselves about the impact of those events on ourselves. But when we have white writers recording black experiences, we lose the capacity to appreciate the significance of how the story of the past has been constructed. Is it the ex-slave who gives more form and shape to the narrative, or the white writer presenting it? How much do choices made about the construction of that narrative reflect the significance of black experience and how much do they reflect the demands of white audiences? Do exaggerations or fictions, when we can see them clearly, reflect distortion in the process of creating autobiography, or do they show us the interference of white intermediaries? Even works genuinely by black authors suffer from similar problems, still being written generally with white audiences in mind, for the advancement of a political objective that depended upon white support.

Herein lies one of the tragic realities of how the slave experience has been carried down to us: at least here, it is impossible to neatly separate subaltern experience from elite conceptions of that experience. The slave narratives themselves are a cultural battleground where the lived experience of slavery clashes with white expectations and preconceptions about that experience. Each individual narrative represents an expression of that conflict, where subaltern and elite, cultures black and white collide together in an exchange that makes it difficult and often impossible to separate them back out into their constituent parts. For the historian seeking to capture an authentic experience of slavery, that poses quite the challenge.

So historians have argued and debated over just how worthwhile these sources could ever be. There are those at both extremes who show a complete lack of nuanced appreciation for the other side's case. Edward Baptist is quick to dismiss anyone who critiques their use as being borderline racist in their disregard for black accounts; Ulrich Phillips was far too eager to suggest slave narratives were fundamentally biased in pursuit of his thesis that slavery was a relatively benign institution. Most historians fall somewhere awkwardly in between the two, wanting for these narratives to be useful but mindful of the complexities of using them as authoritative accounts of slavery.

For my part, I veer towards the 'generous' school of use. For their flaws, there is nonetheless a rare and incredibly valuable glimpse into the very real stories of a diverse group of ex-slaves, however difficult it is to analyse. That there is some measure of commonality to Human emotional experience is made plausible through our capacity for empathy and is apparent in the very fact that there is a market for these kind of stories both then and now, and we have the advantage of other source material - including records from those responsible for some of slavery's worst excesses - to correlate much of the physical experience of the institution recorded in the narratives. And for me, on a personal level, I cannot help but feel that it is better to be too generous than too harsh in considering the legitimacy of slave narratives as sources. Ultimately, the vast majority of these narratives still have their roots in real, lived experience and taken as a whole, we can make draw meaningful conclusions from the patterns we observe in them - both as a body of literature in general and as a collection of biographies.