Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena

1990: Straddling a Watershed?

1990 Straddling a Watershed? Of all the phenomena that register the distance between history as lived experience and history as written record, nothing is more emphatic than the concept of a historical period. When we live through the happenings that constitute our lives, we are never able to know for sure if we inhabit a meaningful epoch of historical time, for without terminal closure and the crossing of a threshold no epoch is yet defined. We cannot see beyond our current horizon to know what the future landscape will look like. Even the apparently mechanical and uniform temporality of centuries, which so often seems to give retrospective meaning to the narratives we tell, can be flexible, as the current talk of the “long nineteenth century” (1789–1914) and the “short twentieth” (1914–89) suggests. the congruence between personal narratives and those of the larger community, however we define it, is thus never perfect. Moreover, no one is simply a representative of his or her era, no one just a typical instance of a larger pattern, no one merely a symptomatic case study of a meaningful totality. For those sensitive to their own lives as the ultimate stuff of history, being consigned to the role of mere exemplar is always an affront. We feel ourselves as more than just average members, whether of a social class, an ethnic group, or an historical era. We cringe at the reduction of our precious uniqueness to nothing more than a familiar stereotype, with all of the idiosyncrasies that define us smoothed over. Built into that reduction is the anonymity against which we often rail. and yet, of course, it is precisely anonymity to which history inevitably consigns the vast majority of humankind, just as it cannot avoid making sense of the past by filtering it through the lens of retrospective periodization. indeed, 178 essays from the edge ever since mythical time was measured in terms of epochs of metal and the days of creation in the Hebrew Bible became extrapolated to mundane history, the past has been rendered comprehensible through the imposition of a sequence of temporal eras that give spatial form to the formlessness of everyday sequential happening. Without periodization, history descends into mere chronicle, the dreary sequence of “one damned thing after another.” Whether based on the succession of ruling dynasties, the rise and fall of empires, the arrival of religious messiahs, or the succession of modes of production, written history has been articulated through periodizing topoi. no nominalist skepticism has ever sufficed to undercut our dependence on such organizing principles, which were given added weight with the academic professionalization of history writing. no historian can now avoid being trained as an expert in one or another period, even if he or she has the courage to try to master more than one. if anything, as specialization increases, historians become more and more loath to stray outside their narrowly defined periods. Someone who is an antebellum american historian seldom wanders back into the early national period or the colonial era. Experts in the Weimar republic are often strangers to Wilhelmian history or even the twelve years of the “thousand-year reich.” a student of the third republic is unlikely to write about the Second Empire. For all our investment in periods as a way to organize the past and define our professional identities, we also find self-critical metalevel discussions about their conceptualization inescapable. in fact, a great deal of interpretive energy is expended in contesting the limiting contours of periods, as well as the substantive basis for their distinction. as reinhart Koselleck has noted, “the vast majority of epochal doctrines do not . . . draw on temporal determinants, but rather assume their specificity as given epochs on the basis of substantial, material, or personal determinants.”1 Debates usually focus on four issues: the starting and ending points of epochs, the relative uniformity or analogical coherence of an epoch across all fields of human endeavor, the applicability of epochal categories to more than one culture or civilization, and the struggle over the naming of epochs once it is decided they actually existed. all narratives have to begin and end somewhere, even if the shape of their telling may be more or less formally coherent. Some seem to start arbitrarily and then just stop or peter out, rather than culminating or closing in an aesthetically satisfactory way. But when it comes to periods, serious attention has to be paid to the rationale for beginnings and...