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TABLE OF OONTiNTS Page Table of Abbreviations •.•.•.•.•.•..••••.•.•••••••••• iii Chapter One . ....................................... 1. Chapt er Two . .....•.................................. 13 Chapter Three. .. ~ . .. .. .. 51 Chapter ]'our . ...................................... 92 Bibliograpl1y . ...................................... 113 ...; i:i, Table of Abbreviations ADV= Advertisements for Myself AN= The Armies of the hight BS= Barbary Shore CC= Cannibals and Christians DP= The Deer Park --GWSOc The Ground We Stand Un MSC= Miami and the ~iege of Chicago ND= The ~aked and the Dead NO= Number vne OFM= Of a Fire on the Moon PP= The Presidential l)apers USA, 42P:;: U.S.A.'· '.i.1he 42nd Parallel USA, 1.fil= U.S.A., l\ineteen, Nineteen USA, ,-BM=· u. S. A., The Big Money iii Chapter One The Purpose of Writing History as Metaphor -1- . -2 Recurrent obituaries and charges of irrelevance have continually plagued the historical profession..1 Historians need the fresh wind of effective content to resuscitate history from its alleged irrelevance. One possible method would be the current ever-increasing bent among historians toward a reconstruction of the past based on factual materials substantiated by computerized statistical tech­ niques. Yet in no way does this method adequately explore man's internal experience nor offer an accomodation to the rapid, nightmarish sweep of past events into present consciousness. 2 A second approach would be the more idea- tional approach that is followed by intellectual histor­ ians and by adherents to the m~thods of the American Studies move~ent. This large group of historians uses literature as handmaiden to history and inspects literature as cultural attitude reflectors, ~s social documents.3 This usage is fortunate when. compared to the previous time when historians dismissed literature as something "fanci­ ful", but this second approach still forces history into the past tense. Yet there is an alternative way for historians to use literature that will give relevance to.history. Histor­ ians can revere literature !!,! history, even as metahistory, because literature performs the true functions of histor­ ical explanation as well as and often better than histor­ ical writing that does not draw, or only indirectly draws -3 upon subjective perceptions. One such integral aspect of literature of great potential instructive value to histor­ ians is the use of metaphor. A cri ti.cal appreciation of metaphor and its sponsor, literature, and a recognition that history itself is a metaphor can open new and most profound avenues to a fuller understanding of the rele­ vance and presentness of history. It has been fifty years since James Joyce delivered his extremely metaphorical definition of history. Wrote Joyce, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken." To date the rich implications of Joyce's metaphor have slept virtually unnoticed and unused by professional historians. Only within the past decade have certain New Left historians, notably,Staughton Lynd, and a number of consensus-oriented liberals, such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., indeed come around to view htstory as something nightmarish, but mainly because history has not fulfilled their personal goals. 4 The great majority of professional historians remain dominated, as British novelist Paul West noted, by "elders imbecilically suburban, armed in Great Society cant and dead-scared of even half a metaphor."5 Perhaps West is overly caustic, but I believe that he is essentially correct. It is a debatable question whether most historians know why they are using a metaphor when they do use one. Too often the metaphors used resemble \ displays of erudition~ la Cotton Mather, but are devoid -4 of any organic correspondence to the material. In explaining how metaphor works, I~A. Richards made the distinctions of tenor and vehicle in his The Philo­ sophy of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1936). The tenor of a metaphor, according to Hichards, is "the underlying or principal subject which the vehicle or figure means. 116 The vehicle functions as the agent of comparison, as the part which brings off the identification, description, or symbolic suggestion. Aesthetically speaking, the vehicle should not be a mere embellishment of the tenor, nor should the tenor be an exc.use for intro~ucing a particular vehicle. When used effectively together, Richards wrote, "the vehicle and tenor give a meaning of more varied powers than can be asc;i:bed to either. 117 For brief examples of tenor and vehicle let us take a simple metaphor like Macbeth ''s assertion, 11 Life is but a walking shadow." Here "Life" is· the tenor, the idea being described; "a walking shadow" is the vehicle, the figure which bears the force ,and thrust of the metaphor's comparison. With more complexly-worded and extended metaphors like history, one may find either the tenor or the vehicle not explicitly, stated, but rather implicitly suggested. Before we proceed farther, a clarification of the usage of the word "history" in this essay is in order. So . far in this. chapter, the word has been employed in its conventional sense. Throughout the remainder of the essay, however, the word will be used on two levels: first, the more or le·ss accepted definition of history as the past experience of man, which will be written uncapitalized, and secondly, a metaphorical level, which will be referred to as History. The second level differs from the first in the following manner. To write a record of only the past experience of man is like compiling a physics laboratory report which measures how many amperes of electricity crossed a particular wire' at a given time. Both exercises scarcely attempt to penetrate the nature of their respect­ ive phenomena. The second level, History, is the metaphor- ical definition of history; it metaphorizes history. Also History gives history the attributes of a character,' and History casts his_tory as a dramatis persona in the drama of the universe. The second level, History, also precludes' the "pas·tness", the irretrievabili ty of history by sus­ pending o~e's disbelief in non-empirical phenomena, by granting life to supposedly "dead" events. Perhaps History does not actually comprehend the nature of history, since the pursuit of truth is, as Kierkegaard would say, "a never-ending approximation." But the suggestive power of metaphor propels one closer to a nature than does any factual definition. The largest benefit, then, of literature to histor­ ical writing is that literature forces the historian to contemplate the nature of history as revealed by metaphor. -6 Just as literature can offer, by model, metaphors· "as large and simpl~ and useful as those by which the Greeks drew scattered stars into constellations"~ it can also offer gravely majestic and complex metaphors to match the histor­ ical event. In itself history is a metaphor, History, an approximation of a nebulous set of phenomena; History is not a measurement of past experience. Norman Mailer was on. the right track when he wrote, "If the universe was a lock, its key was metaphor rather than measure."9 The authority of our own senses warns us that the margins of any definition of any event waver too much under close scrutiny and against the backdrop of other interpretations. We can know or sense many phenomena, including parts of the past, only by an intuitive process, not by intelligence (which is the sum of measures). The metaphorical History is greater than the sum of its parts. Historians may read around and about an era, they may survey its literature, listen to its music, and observe its plastic arts, but if they do not envelope time and make the metaphorical leap to incorporate that era into our present consciousness, then their endeavors are at most antiquarian and essentially in vain. Two necessary concomitants of the metaphorical History are existential philosophy and historiographical and moral relativism. The existentialists' emphasis on the enormous or overwhelming present, on the so-called existential moment, has warded off most historians from employing that philosophy-• s tenets. Yet actually existentialism and history are not antipodal. In fact, much of what the existentialists have said about time, space, and history has been a narrowed modification of Henri Bergson's concept of duration. 10 The existentialist approach contains bene- fits for historical conceptualization much like Wilhelm Dilthey's idea of Erlebnis, the conceptualization of the past not as a dead fact, but as actualized future bec9me past. 11 As with Joyce's metaphor of History as a night­ mare from which he is trying to awaken, the past for the existentialists is only too vividly impinging on the present and the future. Since atheistic existentialism grants possibility to an illimitable number of choices, it harbors within itself an explanation of the ironies at which person after person stands aghast. At the least, the philosophers of existentialism remain provocative gadflies reminding historians "that the study of history, if it is to be worthwhile must be relevant to the needs and aspira­ tions of contemporary men. 1112 Historians need not restore historical writing to the flatulent position of teacher of morals, as embodied in James Anthony Froude's platitude: "History is a voice for­ ever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and .wrong. 111 3 Nor need they stand with George Santayana's famous maxim, "Those who can. not remember the past are -8 c~ndemned to repeat it. 1114 Since the past heavily condit- ions the present, it is extremely conducive to remembrance, and even if the past were to be repeated, there is no reason to speak of the past in pejorative terms. Histor­ ians need not cast moral judgments on any event or person; perhaps the natural order of things is nightmarish. More importantly, historians should encourage courageous decis­ ions within moral relativism, decisions which may employ a method condemned by normal morality.

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