Visionary historiography + Tule fog
Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude XXXIV. Foucault - part 14
From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...
Chapter 4 - The Castle of Murders cont...
Visionary historiography.
p108
... in the years immediately after the publication of Madness and Civilization, Foucault periodically discussed the possibility of writing a novel. That it never happened is a testimony to Foucault’s love of historical research: he found a special pleasure in anchoring his work in the dense, complex realities of the past revealed in archives and documents.
p109
“Reality is frighteningly superior to all fiction,” as Artaud once put it. “All you need is the genius to know how to interpret it.” ...
He proceeded, one supposes, by letting his mind wander in the archives: for the modern library, as he once put it, had created a new and historically unprecedented “imaginative space.” While turning page after page of a dusty old manuscript, a scholar might meet his daimon as surely and unmistakably as when he fell asleep. “The imaginary now resides between the book and the lamp,” Foucault asserted in an essay written in 1964: “We no longer bear the fantastic in our heart” alone. “To dream it is no longer necessary to close our eyes -- only to read. The true image springs from knowledge: that of words spoken in the past, of exact recensions, of masses of detailed information, of infinitesimal fragments of monuments, of reproductions of reproductions.” All these “phenomena of the library,” Foucault concludes, provoke an “experience,” putting one in touch with “the power of the impossible” -- and also revealing the documentary basis for elaborating a distinctive modern kind of surrealist historiography that is, simultaneously, a throwback to a premodern era when myth and magic still shaped the stories people told about the past.
Now I see why Fernand Braudel had good things to say about him.
The historian at grips with his daimon through the heterogeneous media of archival documents and his own “inner experience” becomes, in effect, a visionary -- “the individual who sees and who recounts from the starting point of his sight.” Pronouncing “afresh so many words that had been muffled,” he may even resurrect the experience of the limit, and enunciate anew the normally mute Dionysian dimension of being human, evoking it through images, in the parade of figures that fills the pages of his own book. He thus makes of his text a kind of vessel, offering free passage, through its cargo of words, to “the truthful precipitate of dreams,” conveying “the very essence of man.”
Perhaps this is another thing I have in common with Foucault, the pleasure of mining texts for what is of value to me. If the text is historical or philosophical or fictional, really makes little difference. What attracts the eye depends on so many things, and the strange connections you find form their own paths to still other ideas. I have an advantage over Foucault in that I'm not writing for an academic audience -- I can make my own rules (this is both an advantage and a disadvantage, of course). The other advantage I have is the Internet, which makes it easier to find all sorts of things -- though there are disadvantages here as well.
Yet another advantage is that, while Foucault was attempting to appeal to both an academic and a popular audience, I'm interested in neither (and succeeding remarkably in attracting neither). It would seem that I have an odd sort of personal daimon, one with issues, perhaps.
I need to mention that I'm writing this in yet another cafe, one of my two favorite locations of the (second) best French bakery cafe in town. The place is pretty packed on a sunny Sunday afternoon after the first storm of the season. The neighborhood is one of the best in town, with lots of young, well-to-do families living in mostly Victorian houses. As in most of the other popular, valley neighborhoods in town, there is a strange abundance of children for a city that supposedly drives families away. All this because I just have to say how odd it is to read about the kinkier aspects of Bataille and Foucault while surrounded by (mostly well behaved) children. Of course Foucault's childhood was probably spent in historically similar surroundings. How early can you spot the future Foucaults, I wonder.
I'm cutting this part a bit short because the Marquis de Sade is up next.
Tule fog.
This morning I looked out my windows over the garden, and the high-rise towers that usually loom in the background were gone. Well, not “gone” of course, but concealed by the first real Tule fog of the season. What is known locally as Tule fog is a fog that rises off the water, the bay for the most part, as opposed to the summer fog that blows in off the ocean. Often the Tule fog just affects the bridges and boats on the bay, but this morning the entire area is subject to its magic. From the window of my old 29th floor apartment, on days like this, I could look out on a clear blue sky and other towers glittering in the sun, but of the streets below I could see nothing. The city seemed to consist only of cloud and the occasional tower.
This is the type of (radiation) fog that, when combined with the smoke from innumerable coal fires, resulted in the London “pea-soup” fogs Henry Ryecroft writes about. Here they are not nearly so sinister.
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