On disciplinary rigidity

This past week, we read Aaron Sachs’ The Humboldt Current for one of my seminars. Frankly, I dug it. It’s certainly a different sort of history book. Sachs doesn’t lay out a clear argument in an introduction, nor does he reiterate it in a conclusion. He meanders. One wonders where he is going, at times. But, as he says somewhere in there, he wants us to get lost (which mirrors much of what his characters go through, and that, obviously, is a distinct narrative choice he makes). And, in the end, everything does come around to a very significant assertion that I found to be extremely compelling. Read it; the details aren’t exactly my point here, but suffice it to say I think this is a book that matters in a wider way than most histories, i.e. beyond the narrow confines of academia.

And that is my point – those narrow confines. Most of my fellow seminarians were largely put off by the book’s wandering structure, its lengthy and roundabout paths from narrative to greater meaning. In almost every way, in fact, apart from having solid footnotes and an obviously encyclopedic knowledge of his subject matter, Sachs avoids the standard conventions of a good history book. He does not follow the rules which, as a historian-in-training, one is told must be followed. The Humboldt Current reads, to me, something like the history book equivalent of a Thomas Pynchon novel. And yet, I think the book is extraordinarily successful as history. The flaws which were ceaselessly pointed out by my classmates seemed to me to be less about the book itself and more about our own level of discomfort when challenged with something different. One student made a good point about the necessity for rules and standards within a discipline, for better or worse, and it is a point that I to some degree concede. But when those standards lead us to judge a book so harshly when, had we approached it not as “historians” but as “intellectuals” (I use the term with some trepidation – I don’t wish to suggest any elitist connotations, but simply to imply a state of critical thoughtfulness) would have been met with a much deeper appreciation, then I think standards start to do more harm than good.

The aforementioned student went on to say such standards were necessary to establish boundaries between, for example, history and American Studies (which, really, how important is it to draw that particular line?), to which I added “or between history and fiction.” And yet, aren’t all these disciplines essentially seeking to explain something about the human condition? I am not equating history and fiction entirely (although there is much philosophical debate about their actual separation, if any), and certainly standards of good scholarship should apply to any academic discipline. But I think it does a disservice to creativity and to the ongoing positive development of historical study and writing when a book like The Humboldt Current is beaten up because it doesn’t fit comfortably into a nice, neat, history-shaped box. Sachs is consciously pushing the boundaries here, and I think written history will be the better for it. Read something like Richard Ehrenberg’s Capital and Finance in the Age of the Renaissance, from the late 19th century, and if you haven’t killed yourself by the time you finish, you will be left with a keen appreciation for the evolution of historical writing.

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