Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial (review)

What is a reputation and where does it come from? Is there a difference between the social dynamics of a good reputation and a bad one? How does notoriety work? These are only some of the questions Gary Fine addresses in this rich collection of previously published papers, joined together by a thematic introduction and brief conclusion.

Fine argues that difficult reputations — which he further subdivides into negative reputations, contested reputations, and subcultural reputations — raise issues distinct from those of good reputations and serve different purposes in communal life. Almost by definition they will be more polarizing. Nevertheless, he argues, both good and bad reputations are fundamental mechanisms of dramatizing social solidarity, the former by illustrating our ideals — what we hold sacred — the latter by illustrating what we reject. The reputations of public figures, he writes, are both a mirror and a lamp for society, means of expressing and delimiting communal identities. He further suggests, both in the introduction and in the chapters, that reputations in different institutional arenas or cultural fields — politics, business, and the arts — operate differently and serve distinct purposes in diverse ways. The introduction as well as several of the chapters, moreover, hint interestingly at the historical development of reputational dynamics, for example, the shifts in reputational processes that occur with the advent of the mass media. Fine also speculates briefly about the importance of reputational contestation in pluralistic societies.

Fine labels his approach "cautious naturalism," which he develops as a middle ground between muckraking historians who endlessly debunk historical mythologies and radical constructionists who wallow in them. This methodological orientation is a judicious fit with Fine's interactionist sensibility, which manifests itself in his understanding of reputations as a form of "parasocial interaction." This interactionist sensibility, nevertheless, does not prevent Fine from recognizing reputations as a form of social capital (or debt) that others use to respond to individuals and that individuals can build upon or squander according to their abilities. This social capital, Fine theorizes in the introduction and demonstrates in the case studies, develops from intimate circles, through media environments, organizational society, and finally history. Fine's argument thus refines the endless debate between presentist approaches to collective memory (images of the past are endlessly malleable according to contemporary exigency) and traditionalist ones (the meanings of the past are given once and for all in the past): reputations form in the crucible of meaningful interactions in the past and then follow more and less consistent trajectories through these wider social frameworks into the present.

At the heart of the book, of course, are the fine-grained historical readings of such intriguing figures as Benedict Arnold, Warren Harding, John Brown, Fatty Arbuckle, Henry Ford, Vladimir Nabakov's Lolita, Herman Melville, and Sinclair Lewis's Gopher Prairie (from Main Street). The paper on Benedict Arnold is the most classically Durkheimian of the chapters, pointing out that historical reputations are as much the products of shifting moral boundaries as they are illustrative of them. The chapter ends with the very suggestive statement that debates about how we confront evil are especially problematic in pluralistic, tolerant societies. The chapter on Warren Harding is perhaps the strongest conceptually, identifying motivation, narrative facility, and institutional placement as factors affecting reputational outcomes. Here Fine argues that moral entrepreneurs operate in a framework that depends on the creation of a "good story." The issue of cultural resonance appears centrally again in the chapter on John Brown, where the permutations of Brown's reputation are shaped by the narrative needs of the different possible carrier groups. A similar point arises in the chapter on Lolita, where the question of good storytelling is again paramount.

Chapters on Fatty Arbuckle and Henry Ford provide interesting insights into the change in (bad) reputational dynamics with the rise of the modern mass media. Arbuckle himself represents a...