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CHAPTER ONE
The Work
Locations In Theory
The noun document goes back centuries in time. It is derived from
the Latin docere, to teach, and was originally, of course, used to
describe something that offered clues, or, better, proof, a piece of
paper with words that attested evidence. In our time, a
photograph or a recording or a film have also qualified as
documents. In the early eighteenth century (1711), the word
document became more active--a verb, whose meaning conveyed
the act of furnishing such evidence; and eventually, as with the
noun, the range of such activity expanded first one documented
with words on paper; later, one documented with photographs and
a film crew. Interestingly, the verb would get used this way, too:
"to construct or produce (as a movie or a novel) with authentic
situations or events," and "to portray realistically." Here the
creative or imaginative life is tempered by words such as
"authentic" or "realistically," which, are
nonetheless potentially subjective or elusive: a distance has been
traveled from the documenting that has to do with words on
paper (court records, school reports, letters, journals, and diaries)
offered as proof that something happened in, say, a judge's
chamber or a classroom. In the early nineteenth century (1802)
the adjective documentary emerged--a description of evidence,
naturally, but also as "relating to, or employing documentation in
literature or art," again an encounter of the factual or objective
with the imaginative. In this century (1935) the noun documentary
arrived, telling of a product, the "documentary presentation of a
film or novel." The one who did such work got a name in the
1940s--well, two names: documentarian (1943), and documentarist
(1949). Just before those two words entered the language, and as
if in anticipation of them, documentarist came into use (1939), "a
specialist in documentation"--a person who furthered the
tradition of old-fashioned documenting, as indicated by that word
documentation, itself a bequest of the late nineteenth century
(1884), and meant to refer to historical verification and
substantiation.
This search through words for contemporary meaning helps
bring into focus a twofold struggle: that of writers and
photographers and filmmakers who attempt to ascertain what is,
what can be noted, recorded, pictured; and that of
presentation--how to elicit the interest of others, and how to
provide a context, so that an incident, for instance, is connected
to the conditions that informed and prompted its occurrence.
Again and again, as I listen to my students compare their efforts
with those undertaken by sociologists or anthropologists, by
newspaper reporters and staff photographers responding to a
day's event within the confines of a dispatch to be filed, by
historians writing about a certain place and time or about those
who commanded armies (or whole countries), I hear the
connections those students make to the work of such
individuals--yet, too, the distinctions made, the possible
differences explored. Nor do
we in those discussions always arrive at dear-cut contrasts and
mutually exclusive definitions. Often we settle for descriptive
characterizations or demarcations of professional territory,
unashamedly heavy with qualifications--a documentary effort in
itself: an attempt that summons the narrative side of the verb
document, as opposed to its more specific reference to the
accumulation or designation of various items as firm proof of something.
Historians are, perhaps, our oldest professional observers of
human affairs--or, perhaps, it is best to say that writers or
essayists are such, since Thucydides certainly did not have any
graduate professional training, was not certified by any academic
institution as knowledgeable about the past or the unfolding
present. Long before there were universities with departments of
history, there obviously were writers who tried to discover for
themselves and their potential readers what actually happened at
particular times, in particular locations, and how (and why) what
occurred did end up taking place. In so doing, those writers varied
with respect to their passion for factual certainty and specificity,
and with respect to their interest in discursive comment, in personal
or moral (or even spiritual) reflection. Even when a historian
doesn't intend to ruminate or ramble along byways, even when he
or she means to stick to dates and numbers and descriptions based
on "data," on firsthand observations
put down in ledgers, in letters, in communiques, or in news reports
or dispatches published in daily or weekly or monthly
publications--there still remains the task of assembling
information, choosing what matters, what might be (is to be) left
out, what is to be discussed briefly or summarily, what is to be
highlighted, considered in great detail. The issue, finally, becomes
one of judgment, and thereby a subjective matter an opinion of
someone whose mind has taken in all that information, that
documentation, and then given it the shape of sentences, of words
used, with all their suggestive possibilities. Needless to say, even a
history that insists on the primacy of statistics,
of such numbers as given us by computers, will have to
confront the same challenge of emphasis, of interpretation, of
choice, of presentation through words, whereby the person who
fed "data" into a computer is now the one using a computer in a
different way, pressing letters that turn into something that is said,
asserted.
By the late sixteenth century (1593), some students of their
fellow human beings began to make reference to a science of
"anthropology." They were not interested in a chronology or an
interpretation of events, but rather in sorting people out, by virtue
of their appearance, their residence, or their habits and customs.
There is, of course, a historical side to all this (inevitably quite
speculative): the emergence over time of various human races out
of the obscurity and outright mystery of the most ancient history,
which precedes all recorded data and rests upon archeological
artifacts as they, like today's computer printouts, get fitted into
someone's narrative, a story of the development of those races
over an indefinitely long span of time. The nineteenth-century
physical anthropologists (and their kinfolk, archeologists) had the
company of social or cultural anthropologists, who concentrated
their energies on how various groups of people behaved. Charts
were developed that conveyed "relationships," "interactions,"
authority held and wielded, submission accepted without question.
Such patterns of activity, such hierarchies of influence, such
diagrams that told of consanguinity, of belief or conviction,
became a body of knowledge, a field of learning, given the
ultimate institutional (social, political, cultural, economic) sanction
of departmental status in today's colleges and universities.
So it has gone with sociology, a term that came upon us in the
middle of the nineteenth century (1843). There is an obvious
overlap between the work of cultural anthropologists and
sociologists--though the former, by convention rather than
theoretical necessity (the anthropology of anthropologists!) have
usually chosen the pre-literate, pre-industrial world as the
beneficiary of their close, usually
residential attention. In contrast, sociologists have given
themselves over to a systematic (that word counts!) study of the
way so-called groups of people come together and behave--a
process of consolidation and, often, deterioration that might be
called the rise and fall of classes and castes and regions and
even nations. The connection of such inquiry to history as well
as cultural anthropology is clear; and again, the role of the
scholar's personal life is evident--his or her attitudes with
respect to the attitudes of others under scrutiny, and his or her
imaginative life as it gets expressed in the embrace of concepts,
of generalizations, of hypotheses, which are collections of words
meant to offer or convey an idea, a suggestive or organizing
principle, a manner of looking at things, a gesture of
interpretation, of coherence.
This move from concrete particulars to abstract
pronouncement is crucial to science as we now commonly know
it. It can be said, without animus, that careers are usually made in
the social sciences as a consequence of one's willingness and
capacity to move from the specific instance to the more general,
the conceptual. Such a posture of formulation is not, however,
always regarded as speculative (and thereby a close
cousin--more anthropology!--to the imaginative). Instead, we
hear of science: a systematic ordering of knowledge presumably
based on the sifting and sorting of information, on the testing of
hypotheses through experiments, through direct observation,
though it is not unfair to say that, by and large, natural science
and social science differ decidedly in the ability of their
respective practitioners to perform tests that will definitively
corroborate or dismiss various hypotheses. Still, social scientists
aim for the general, hope to promulgate "laws" or postulates that
give a sense of order and structure to what obtains in this world.
In contrast, journalists (who also document aspects of human
behavior) respond to the particular, tell us the news--recent
events that have occurred. Some journalists do so briefly, tersely, paying
attention only to factuality and chronology; others give themselves (or
are given) more leeway--are both chroniclers and interpreters of the
news. Even the most factual kind of journalism, of course, can be
suggestive, poignant, arresting--art giving shape to the presentation
of reality. On the other hand, an interpretive essay in a newspaper or
magazine is usually presented to the reader as the response of the
publication's editors, through a writer, to something that has happened
or is now going on: events with all their ramifications. In certain
magazines, however, journalists may become something
else--essayists who regularly contemplate those events and fit them
into the larger frames of reference that historians or social scientists
pursue.
The essayist is himself or herself confined by the nature of a chosen
medium, even as the journalist has to contend with the confines of a
newspaper story--but an essay allows for more space, for a mix of
literary and analytic sensibility, for that other mix of factuality and
opinion, and for the particular writer's idiosyncratic approach to a given
topic. The essay gives journalists or others writers discursive freedom,
and gives novelists a chance to mull over factuality directly, rather than
at the remove of their created fictional characters. The essay also allows
social scientists a chance to abandon their created "characters" (the
theories they construct) for the possibilities and challenges of an
ordinary language meant to inform and persuade the "common reader,"
as opposed to one's professional colleagues. Such essayists offer what
used to be called "social knowledge"--Henry James commenting on
Italy's gifts or on his native America revisited, Dickens observing that
same America as a visiting lecturer, and, closer to our time, the poet
James Agee and the novelist George Orwell trying to understand what
they had witnessed and felt in Alabama, Yorkshire, and Lancashire in
1936.
A close examination of what came of the last two of those writers
once they'd finished their observations, and a close reading of what
they ultimately wrote about their experiences, helps clarify our thinking
about the various ways observers can respond to what they have seen
and heard and come to believe. It is no accident that both Agee and
Orwell "failed" with respect to their respective missions, from the point
of view of their assigning editors. Fortune magazine wanted Agee to do
a strong piece of investigative magazine journalism. He was to spend a
limited amount of time with a specific kind of people, in the company of a
photographer, who was to capture pictures that would convey the (grim)
reality of their lives. Instead, Agee turned his time in Alabama into a
major moral and personal crisis. He lost sight of his magazine's interests
and became excited and challenged by the commands and demands of
both his aesthetic sensibility and his conscience. He stopped being
interested in a limited, reasonably balanced, or even-handed discussion
of a particular social and economic question facing the nation at the
height of the Great Depression--the struggle for survival of a Southern
agriculture heavily dependent on the relationship between the
landowner and his tenant farmers. He turned, instead, to a different kind
of language, a different way of seeing the world of central Alabama. He
never even wrote the article for which he was commissioned. He quit the
magazine that had sent him South, an assignment that enabled him to
meet and get to know the world that had gotten him so aroused, so
engaged. For several years he labored in both elation and despair with
an enormously unwieldy manuscript, the result of a thorough
reinterpretation of his position as an observer and a writer with regard to
those he had encountered and tried to understand. The result, as we all
know, was a book whose very title, Biblically connected (from the book
of Ecclesiasticus), is exhortative and morally impassioned--a far cry
from the tone of Fortune articles, not to mention those of so many other
magazines. That book is deliberately rambling, lyrical, fiercely
provocative, utterly idiosyncratic; it is also very long, at once detailed in
its descriptive evocations of a kind of
daily life and long-winded in its attempt to assault the supposedly
conventional mind of its reader--as if the central issue is not only the
suffering and marginality of Dixie tenant farmers but the assumptions
(moral and intellectual) of the presumably well-off and well educated
people who had the spare change in 1941, the Depression still not
licked, to go buy such a book.
Orwell's Wigan Pier book also conveys a strain of moral
anxiety; of all ironies, the reader is offered a measured disavowal
of the author from Victor Gollancz, the one who had sent him
north from London in the first place, so that the New Left Book
Club might publish yet another piece of extended muckraking
journalism, this one about the life of coal miners. Instead, Orwell
wrote with a novelist's capacity for (interest in) the complexities
and ironies of a given observed life; and he gave a much broader
context for his discussion than that expected (and wanted) by his
sponsors, hence their need to disclaim, at least partially, what they
did publish (out of their essential fair-mindedness--others might
not have been so obliging). Orwell found his own relatively
entitled world in many ways lacking compared to the one he had
glimpsed up north. He turned on those whose company he
ordinarily kept, the London intelligentsia, just as Agee could not
resist taking one swipe after another at his (Harvard, Manhattan,
literary) background. The "road" Orwell took as a consequence of
his visit to Wigan turned out to be toward a land of personal,
moral reflection, of storytelling narration, of social and political
polemic, of combative and sometimes erratic digression, of vivid
presentation of moments experienced, remembered, and
considered to be of significance without recourse to the
justifications of social theory, political practicality, even journalistic
custom or convenience. He threw his writing, as it were, in the
face of those who ended up perplexed, but actually a good deal
more forgiving of him than he attempts to be of them.
Later on I will try to guess what it was that got these two writers
so intemperate, so angry, while on these particular missions; but
here it is important to note their departure from ordinary
journalism, from the conventional social essay, long or short. Both
Agee and Orwell seem to know that they are in uncertain
territory as they try to address their audience. They move back
and forth from a posture of calm, even dry recitation of facts and
figures to one of heated advocacy or derision. They also move
from the third-person voice to that of the first person--a shift that
tells a lot about their connection to the people being described, and
about their intentions as writers. When they want to convey a kind
of factuality (how cotton grows and is harvested, how miners do
their work and the economic consequences of that work, coal
production for a capitalist society), they can be impersonal,
specific, exact, even statistical. When they want to get something
off their chest, want to let others know how they reacted, on the
spot, to something they had seen or heard, or how they ended up
feeling later, when back on their own turf, about what they
recalled, then the words "I" and "me" come to the fore, not to
mention unconcealed sarcasm, even open contempt or rage
toward certain others--though never, of course, are the targets of
such emotions the tenant farmers or coal miners whom they have
gotten to know, and that refusal of any criticism whatsoever
obviously deserves our attention.
To be more abstract about both Agee and Orwell as social
observers and writers (and about a kind of writing that combines
reportage and reflection, delivered in a prose that is affecting,
summoning, suggestively descriptive), certain polarities or tensions
ought to be mentioned: the demands of reality as against those of
art; the demands of objectivity as against those of subjectivity; a
quantitative emphasis as against a qualitative one; the tone a
first-person narrative offers as against one executed in the third
person, a voice seeking to be contemplative, considered, as
against one aiming for passionate persuasion, or advocacy, or
denunciation; a distanced, analytic posture as against a morally engaged or
partisan one; an inclination for the theoretical, as against the concrete, the
practical; a narrative, rendered in personal or vernacular or even
confessional language as against one replete with a technical or
academic language.
Needless to say, a writer, a researcher, even, can move back
and forth, draw upon one or another side of these various
equations, or, again, polarities. As I well remember, when I
submitted articles (they were not called "essays") to pediatric,
psychiatric, and psychoanalytic journals, a word used, a single
adjective, can raise the eyebrows of an editor or a "peer review"
committee. When I wrote up my observations of migrant farm
children for a journal read by physicians, and, especially, by my
fellow psychiatrists, I tried to describe the various states of mind I
observed in the children I met. In so doing, I called upon
psychiatric and psychoanalytic terminology and wrote in the
passive, third-person voice: "The defense mechanisms most
frequently seen were..." and so it went! At one point, however, I
inadvertently got myself and my editors into some trouble by using
the word poignant to indicate the condition of some of the children:
"In many of their drawings the children doing self-portraits
refrained from putting land under themselves, a poignant denial of
their very condition as young farm workers." I was discussing the
use of one of the so-called defense mechanisms--now, when
psychology fuels the American vernacular, a far better known
maneuver of the mind than was the case back then (1966). I was
dealing, really, with an irony, though I consciously restrained
myself from using that word or its adjectival or adverbial versions,
lest I introduce myself as an implicit commentator in a paper
meant to be an account of "field research" done in the tradition of
psychoanalytic child psychiatry--hence pages given over to
accounts of "intra-psychic" conflict, and accounts, too, of the
various "defense mechanisms" as they "were observed" (not as,
actually, I stumbled into them!).
All went well, it seemed, until an editor's red pencil chanced
upon that word, poignant: why was "it used," he wondered (not
"Why did you use it")? I explained that I found it ironic, poignantly
so, that children who put in long hours beside their parents
harvesting crops (that is, working the land on their hands and
knees, often, or stooped over) won't put that same land in their
drawings or paintings of themselves. My editor friend (I knew him
well, respected him) understood clearly what I was indicating, but
noted that in this particular journal the word poignant would "stand
out." I did not find that possibility especially worrisome, but he did.
He pointed out that the word "in question" is a "subjective
one"--my personal sense of something as opposed to a reaction of
the child that I had "documented" through my "research." I
remember being intrigued by the use of "documented"--a
different use, surely, than the one Dorothea Lange, say, had in
mind when she did her "documentary fieldwork" or "research"
with migrant families during the 1930s. I also remember telling my
editor friend that all of the "research" I had written up for this
"paper" was "subjective"--an estimate or interpretation on my
part of what I thought I had seen and heard happening in the lives
of children, in their minds, rather than a chronicle of what
happened independently of my mind (an account of the unfolding
of an objective series of events).
True, "our discipline" is inescapably "subjective," I was
told--yet "there are degrees." After all, I was tape-recording
interviews and analyzing them for topics mentioned--"thematic
analysis"; and I was collecting hundreds of children's drawings
and paintings and putting all of them under a microscopic lens
(my imagery!), that of, again, psychiatric and psychoanalytic
perusal: "self-image," as reflected, for example, in the presence
or absence of intact limbs, the manner in which facial features
are presented (if they are), the character of clothing summoned,
and again, the location the child chose for a self-portrait, or a
picture of a parent, or too, a building a
analyzed" (that adverb, so often used, can be all too self-serving!). In so
doing, I would have "taken risks," as I've heard folks say, by "writing
for the public" rather than for "the profession"--and then I would be
turning into a bit of a migrant myself: on the move. Location matters for
those migrant families, as I gradually learned; they had to be at the right
place (the crops just ready to be picked) at the right time (the grower
has started recruiting willing farm laborers, field hands). And so with a
writer's career--a person tries to figure out when to write what for
which publication, and how to do so, meaning with one kind of
language or with quite another kind.
