I am afraid that all I talked about in connection with the Wilmington Delaware exhibit was how much I cried. I clearly don't sound sufficiently detached from my subject, the late Empress Alexandra, to be writing a book about her, or so it seemed to me when I re-read my posts on this thread filled as it is with tearful memories. I remembered an interview with the American poet and author, May Sarton who said that she struggled for years to become recognized in the US because her work was considered too emotional and critics said that it lacked detachment.
Because I am writing a book on the Empress Alexandra during WWI I felt only embarrassment as I read my posts. Then on this bright Spring morning, I picked up Jacque Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, and found this wonderful statement by the author that I have often quoted in the past:
"Claiming detachment need not raise the issue of objectivity. It is a waste of breath to point out that every observer is in some way biased. It does not follow that bias cannot be guarded against, that all biases distort equally, or that controlled bias remains as bad propaganda. In dealing with the arts, for example, it is being “objective” to detect one’s blind spots–step one in detachment. The second is to refrain from downgrading what one does not respond to. One has then the duty to report the informed judgment of others.”
That is clearly advice that I can follow and use as a standard for objectivity. Barzon goes on to say that because he has not interpreted figures and events in the past as other historians have, often speaking in his own name and giving reasons for his “heresy,” he hoped that critics would not label his views as “personal.”
He then asks:
“What book worth reading is not? If Henry Adams were to echo Gibbon, we would not greatly value the pastiche. “
Barzon continues to explain:
“On this point of personality, William James concluded after reflection that philosophers do not give us transcripts but visions of the world. Similarly, historians give visions of the past. The good ones are not merely plausible; they rest on a solid base of facts that nobody disputes. There is nothing personal about facts, but there is about choosing and grouping them. It is by patterning and the meaning ascribed that the vision is conveyed. And this, if anything, is what each historian adds to the general understanding. Read more than one historian and the chances are good that you will come closer and closer to the full complexity. Whoever wants an absolute copy of what happened must gain access to the mind of God.” [Jacque Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, New York: HarperCollins, 2000, pp. x-xi.]
It is hard not to be drawn into arguments about ideologies that simply present views of the Empress to prove their point; that are not interested in pursuing an understanding of the individual, but are only interested in arguing ideas. This is especially true of our present epoch, for as Barzon points out, we are still living in the continuous “aftershocks” of the last of four mega -quakes that have changed the face of Western civilization: “the 16C religious revolution; the 17C monarchial revolution; the liberal, individualist “French” revolution that straddles the 18thand 19th; the 20C “Russian,” social and collectivist. “ [p. 3.]
Even though research is opening to broader resources in Russia and Europe, recovering an accurate vision of the Empress in the continuing aftermath of a seismic event that has torn the face off Western civilization, giving it a completely new identity that even now is not completely understood, is the challenge that I continually face.
There are so many statements in the Empress’ correspondence that have been used as evidence of the woman’s complicity in creating a revolution that tore the face off West. Her over heated statements made during crisis in her own life have acted like “psychological cues” sparking the memory of carnage and loss and intensifying the need to assign blame for a catastrophic and universal event we still do not fully understand or fully comprehend. Who, from the perspective of the 17C, could understand the impact of the 16C religious revolution or be able to describe the new face it had given Western Civilization? And though Marxists and liberals alike have attempted to understand the collectivist revolution of the 20C, their own demise has discredited their vision and rightly so as they have attempted the impossible. The West’s new face will not be comprehended until we can get far enough away to see it.
To create a vision of the Empress’ strengths and weakness in context with the vanishing world she was a part of, is an uphill battle. However precarious, difficult, or taxing for an emotional person such as myself, it is non-the-less a worthy and health giving pursuit. As Jacques Barzon so clearly states: “To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.” [p.3] Well back to my task….best Griff
