Hella Nation - Evan Wright [3]
On the Vassar College campus of the Reagan 1980s, where I did my undergraduate studies, Derrida, deconstructionism, political correctness and identity politics—of gender and sexual orientation since there were few students belonging to racial or ethnic minorities—were the rage. In most of the humanities departments, theory, as opposed to direct study of arts and letters, was paramount. Or perhaps this was my warped, incipient-alcoholic perception of things. In any case, the popular postmodern currents in the humanities departments did not withstand my nihilistic scrutiny. I dismissed the most important trends of my generation as bullshit.
I found refuge in a medieval and Renaissance studies program run by the history department. Students in the program—all three of us—were required to study ancient languages, in my case Latin and Old English. Languages appealed to me because acquiring them was based on the most elemental form of learning: memorization. And once you learned them, voices from the past seemed to speak directly, without being filtered by a professor quoting Kierkegaard and Foucault and Chuck D.
Historical inquiries within the medieval and Renaissance studies program were rooted in observable details—maps, architectural remnants, weapons and tools—and in testimony by witnesses as found in civic records, journals and other sorts of contemporaneous histories. Theory did have its place in the program. Several professors in the history department were under the sway of a theory of methodology referred to as the “Annales School,” named for the French journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, in which it had been developed in the 1930s. Annales historians rejected blind acceptance of traditional histories based on the words and deeds of great men, as well as Marxist theories of economic determinism, and advocated reexamining the past through detailed examination of data previously ignored by traditionalists—tax records, diaries, archaeological digs (especially of trash heaps, to see what people ate, the tools they used, the clothes they wore) and maps. Marc Bloch, a founding Annales historian, spent years hiking across France to better understand how the terrain influenced the evolution of agricultural technologies and in turn the social structure of villages. In a sense, Annales historians examined history the way police study a crime scene. Like police, they often arrived at conflicting, mutually contradictory narratives. But unlike deconstructionists or economic determinists, Annales historians were supremely uninterested in arriving at a unified theory of anything. They were perfectly at home in a Rashomon universe of diametrically opposed testimony and facts. “What matters,” a professor whom I admired used to say, “is the investigation, not the outcome.”
The Annales school also had a tragic element that appealed to my melodramatic sense of weltschmerz. Marc Bloch never completed his seminal historical work, The Historian’s Craft. Before finishing the last chapter he was executed by the Nazis for his role in the French resistance. Drinking heavily and rereading the unfinished final page of Bloch’s great book—something I did often during my senior year of college—seemed to confirm the utter futility of existence. By the time I graduated, I had no ambition to succeed at anything. To be a failure was a sort of philosophy to live by.
I would spend the better part of a decade failing to do much of anything except