Doubting one's choices

Why research an individual in history?

An elementary question I often pose myself, the congealed essence of my doubts about its worth: the worth of spending time, energy, and money. And the unrestrained feeling of having not enough of any of these things to fulfill my desire can not always be repressed.

Perhaps I was motivated to find the most extreme method to not write the structuralist, the social history that seemed so beaten to death with a stick by endless analyses of documentations of inheritance conflicts, of succession, of appointments to office, transformed, at worst, into the abstraction of numbers and tables. On first glance, what is the thing that opposes the amorphous leviathan “Society” which remains at the heart, albeit obscured, by these symbols the most? Perhaps it is it the atomistic unit that forms the monstrum’s cells: the individual. At least, to me, that seemed, and still seems, to be the most intuitive answer. (But is it the best answer?)

Decades ago, I might have been declared anti-historical for choosing as the object a subject, echoing the ancient divide first declared by Plutarch when he famously insisted, “I am not writing History, but I am painting the portraits of Lives” in his Alexandros (trans. from German by me). But in the same way, several decades ago I might have struggled to find much asking about the how and why, the means, methods, theories, of elevating the atom to the same relevance as the whole. An atom, I have to concede, which still is quite exceptional: my own subjectivity, my research interests, gave me not many other choices.

Part of this choice is a despair, the unsurmountable realization that the original idea, the idealized visualization of what I would like to have done (and eventually still do) is far too much to accomplish in merely a few years. The puzzle to solve, then, was how to do something similar, something that may both be standing on its own two feet, but also be capable to being a part of the whole. To be honest, despite having gotten to drafting and writing, and having researched a lot, I still doubt if anything makes sense: it still, often, looks very much like fragments of several different puzzles, and it is up to own ingenuity to figure out how these blocks of things make a picture. At least a picture that seems convincing enough, expressive of a whole.

The problems are many: the method, which is often merely called “biography” is rarely explicit: discussing “biography” is about as vague as speaking about “history,” and the term is imbued with the same vastness of meaning. It is also a genre of writing, which further muddies the waters of the meaning behind the word, and it, I heard, also implies certain steps to adhere to, should one aspire to producing scholarly results—especially the most exalted ideal of scholarship: a defensible truth. And it strikes me (and not only me) that these general approaches are as manifold as with all other kinds of history—because let there be no doubt, any discussion of a person of the past is a discussion of the past by definition—but at the same time, the fundamental problems are the same. As Jacques Le Goff diagnosed in his own monumental undertaking at writing the history of a single human being: “. . . posing a problem, searching for and criticizing sources, the treatment of a sufficient span of time to recognize the dialectics of continuity and change, the formulation of an appropriate style to bring to bear attempts at explanation, an awareness of the current relevance of the object of study—especially of the distance which separates us from it. Biography confronts the historian in an especially poignant and complex way with the essential—but classic—problems of his calling. But it does it on a level that we often are no longer familiar with.” (Ludwig der Heilige, translated on the fly by myself from the German edition).

What is especially frustrating in discussions of the “historical study of individuals” (an awkward, but perhaps better phrase than “biography” if I’d truly want to evade the connotations the term might evoke) is that so much of it is so very contemporary: the historical biographer needs to dig, and dig deep, for ideas that aid in his cause to explore a person of the remote past. That is, a person that did not leave a truckload, or even an entire house housing an archive full of personal communication, personal writing, or anything else personal: everything has become personal in our age, where the experiential aspect of being human, our subjectivity, has taken center stage in political debate. Certainly, when the Freudian psychoanalysis was at its prime, some authors loved the psychologizing, the exploration of inner thought; but the same goes for the pressing questions about identity and its categorizations that seem to dominate our discourse today. How else, if not with a representation of an inner world, should we best represent the contradictions and tensions between the human and the society which clads him into a myriad of straight-jackets of gender and race and profession and age and all other kinds of status? The “modern” biographer who writes about the “modern” person thus claims that only his chosen subject can be worthy of the treatment.

But of course, this treatment cannot be given to people who are long dead, who lived before the internet documented their every careless thought, before photos etched a fleeting moment into permanence, before recordings preserved the spontaneous word. (My own writing right now feels sufficiently spontaneous, to me, but I doubt that it truly is: after all, I do pause to think about the choice of words, and occasionally I insert or replace a word.)

On the other hand, however, it is this fundamental struggle posed by the lack of an illusion of access to the “true” person, which makes the task challenging, interesting, and rewarding. Perhaps not rewarding for anyone but myself—time will tell if I get a “reward” in an exterior sense—but for now, this has to be enough.

And yet, I am still torn between writing a piece worth reading, and a piece that oozes—what appears to me—the conventions and pretentions of “scholarly research.” But that is another story.