‘What is history, but
a fable agreed upon?’, said Napoleon!
‘What is truth,
but a lie agreed upon’, said Nietzsche!
‘Until the lions have their own historians,
the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter’, said Achebe.
‘There is no power
relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge’, said
Foucault.
Putting two and two
together, we get the broader picture - that all history is written by the victor
and power has its sway and its way in the history of the hunt!
As such, some people,
although they might have been in reality, goody goody gentlemen could have been, quite possibly demonized by the power-knowledge correlative that circulates in
society, while at the same time, some who had committed crimes against humanity
might have been canonized as gentlemen! And at other times, some people, just because
they wielded power, were quite possibly ‘romanticized’ as gentlemen, for mass appeal of the
highest order!
Edmund Wilson, is one
such historian, writer and critic who falls in the latter category of having ‘romanticized’
people as gentlemen, says Wood! James Wood!
Well, Wood, James Wood
is one of the foremost literary critics of our times! And in this, his book
titled, The Fun Stuff And Other Essays,
[which we had already glimpsed once, in this past post] speaks to this romanticizing
of Lenin as a gentleman!
And this shocker of a
critique he does after having read through Edmund Wilson’s book titled, To the Finland Station: A Study in the
Writing and Acting of History, published in the year 1940.
Says James Wood,
Wilson had come under
the tutelage of the historian Max Eastman, for whom the culprit was Marx’s
mysticism, and for whom Lenin was a hero. This explains the romanticizing, at
the end of Wilson’s book, of Lenin, who is portrayed as ‘the gentlest and most
selfless of men, a lover of Beethoven and War
and Peace who once, Wilson moistly reports, refused to shoot a fox because
he thought it “beautiful.” A pity then, wrote Nabokov tartly, that Russia was
homely’.
Upon this subtle yet scathing
critique of Lenin, Vladimir Lenin, I was so tempted to go for the book to get
to read for myself and to ascertain where things stand! Well, Wood, James Wood
may be right or may be wrong. Same here with me, when I give out my stance on
these two chapters! May be right or may be wrong! [I just read through from Part
3 of this book, Chapters one through six!]
Well, I personally
felt that Edmund Wilson was writing more like an obsessive, ‘fan’atic fan of
Lenin, than as an historian! So his perspectives are highly personal. He
foregrounds Lenin at the expense of demeaning or ‘backgrounding’ someone else!
And in this, he triumphs high-o-high! Take for example, the chapter headings of
chapters five and six where he says,
‘Trotsky identifies history
with himself’, whereas ‘Lenin identifies himself with history’!
Paavam! Trotsky then
becomes more sinned against than sinning! Alley!
One reason why, Wood,
James Wood towards the end of this article, says with such cynical oops
critical acumen -
Rereading Edmund
Wilson, one’s admiration for him both expands and contracts. His literary
portraiture is remarkable, and lastingly fine. Meyer Schapiro once remarked
that Wilson’s subjects are rendered like “the great fictional characters of
literature”, and it is true that Wilson extends to Marx, to Chapman, to Dickens,
to Holmes, to Ulysses Grant, to his father, a kind of negative capability that
he never truly summoned in his own fiction: [Acho! Deivameyyy!] he is willing
to give these men the benefit of the doubt, to leave them in a dapple of
ambiguity rather than drag them out into any prematurely decisive light of
judgment! [Emphasis added] ;-)
How can I ever thank
the most chellamest person on this
planet who gifted me this amazing delightful read, almost a year back, in
November 2018, and that explains this post and its import for us all!
To be continued…
image: amazondotcom
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