7 CORROBORATION

Jonathan Lamb

The most obviously utilitarian application of reenactment for purposes of investigation, corroboration, and proof is to reconstruct a crime scene to jog the memory of the public, who may have forgotten details of it or even the whole scene.

This has always been a contentious issue, for the ontological status of history has never been ascertained, while the craft of historians has thrived owing to the variety ofjudgments it is capa­ble of sustaining. Why, in Homer’s Odyssey, does the hero need the tragic song of Demodocus to remind him that he not only had a plan for the ruin of Troy, but also led the fighters who demolished it and slaughtered the inhabitants? If an eyewitness in his senses cannot be trusted to give a full and true account, who can? In George Orwell’s 1984, O’Brien asks Winston Smith, “Do you believe that history really exists?” (1981, p. 48), posing a question that no one could confidently have answered in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany during the 1930s, since it was clear that reason of state required infinitely flexible histories which, with each successive meta­morphosis, it was treachery to doubt. So narratives of an identical historical event excised details inconvenient to present policies and inserted fictions in their place that could scarcely be called fictions since the criterion of truth had already been sacrificed. As US politician Rudolf Giuliani has recently observed, “Truth isn't truth.” The same pressure to make the past suitable for the requirements of political power have provoked the “alt” history of shameless fibs in the America of President Trump, which nevertheless is taken for true and real by the gullible part of the elec­torate. Historical truth under these circumstances is not what is known to be a fact but what one needs to believe is a fact: “President Obama was not born in the United States.” Article of faith.

Lucretius, the inspiration behind the materialism of the New Science of empirical proof, did not believe in the being of history; it amounted to no more than an accidental collocation of ideas and images in the public mind, subject to rearrangement and decay, and by no means indis­putable.

All reason's false, unlesse a certeintie

Be in the sense. Can th'eare, the sight denie?

Shall th'eare, or tast, the feeling sence oppose?

Or shall the eie, dispute against the nose?

(Lucretius,1996,4.507-510)

Members of the Royal Society, such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, were attentive readers of Lucretius and trusted entirely to their senses. For them and their gentlemanly fellowship, an experiment was such a faithful record of sensory information that even a virtual witness, reading the account in the PhilosophicalTransactions, would recognize its truth and be able to corroborate it by repeating the very same experiment. Far from one sense disputing the evidence of another, each was involved in mutual vindication. Joseph Addison was not alone in believing that sight was a more diffusive kind of touch; nor George Berkeley in declaring that a simple matter of calling and entering a coach was a collaboration of three senses: “Sitting in my study I hear a coach drive along the street; I look through the casement and see it; I walk out and enter into it; thus, common speech would incline one to think, I heard, saw, and touched the same thing, to wit, the coach” (Berkeley, 1709,p. 51). Synesthesia enriches experience for these materialists; it does not muddle it.

How differently the dualist Cartesian ontology of Collingwood construes this matter for reenactment. If by rigorous thinking the historian can enter the being of an historical figure, as Pythagoras entered the soul of the dead hero Euphorbus, and as Collingwood usurps the iden­tity of the dead cleric Thomas a Becket, the price paid for such a metempsychosis is the same paid by Descartes for the certainty of his cogito: a shutdown of the senses. “We shall never know how the flowers smelt in the garden of Epicurus, or how Nietzsche felt the wind in his hair as he walked upon the mountains” (Collingwood, 1994, p.

The more distant the experience the senses are called on to certify, the more reliant is the mind upon imagination. Hobbes called imagination “decaying sense,” a process not yet com­plete; when the sense is finally decayed, “fading, old, and past,” it is called memory, and is no longer vivid. By means of an image, however, the mind can recover the life and color of experi­ence in dreams, reveries, and novel-reading: internal reenactments where there are no waking impressions to weaken its force (Hobbes, 1996, p. 16). This is Kames’s “ideal presence,” an impor­tant constituent of reenactment, except that it always makes its appearance in Hobbes’s account as the reverse of real presence:

As natural kindness, when we are awake causeth desire; and desire makes heat in cer­tain other parts of the body; so also, too much heat in those parts, while wee sleep, raiseth in the brain an imagination of some kindness shewn. In summe, our Dreams are the reverse of our waking imaginations. The motion when we are awake, beginning at one end; and when we Dream, at another.

(Hobbes, 1996, pp. 7-18)

Very economically, Hobbes shows how causes and effects can change places in the imagination, with vast implications for reenactment and those who regard the senses as corroborators of imagination. For it may well be that sensory stimulus is not the cause but the effect of imagi­native activity, and it may be that the two occur so closely together that it is impossible to say which came first.

Imagination, for instance, is predominant in war psychoses where the image of a dreadful scene of war only narrowly survived by the dreamer is replayed every night at its original pitch, again and again. This is the negative instance of Lord Kames’s “ideal presence.” WH.R. Rivers probed its psychopathology, using an archive of notes made when treating shell-shocked patients at Craiglockhart, including Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen. Like Freud, Rivers found that the trauma is cured by diluting the force of the sheer image (or sound, smell, taste, or touch) into narrative, contextualizing the shock in time and space and necessarily rendering it fainter than the original (1923). The same is true of nostalgia, where home appears so warmly colored and resonant with symphonies of pleasant sounds that the patient desires to be nowhere else and, it was commonly believed, would die if the wish were not granted. However, Immanuel Kant thought the best cure for such fantasies was indeed to send the patient home, where he or she would wake up to how dull and ordinary it really was. In cases such as these corroboration acts to normalize extraordinary experience, taking it out of compulsive dreaming or reverie and into the zone of the customary.

On the other hand, the triumph of imagination is the final proof of divine beneficence, Addison argues in his 413th Spectator. Handling Locke’s division of the world into primary qualities—the abstract properties of number, point, line, and extension—and the secondary ones of light, color, sound, tactility, and taste, Addison arrays God’s creation of the beauties of the world alongside our enjoyment of them as a feat of divine imagination in order ironically to salute “the great Modern Discovery. Namely, that Light and Colours, as apprehended by the Imagination, are only Ideas in the Mind, and not Qualities that have any Existence in Matter.” Colors are a mere delusion, he avers, in mock obedience to the new dualist orthodoxy, intended to divert us from the exiguous truth of the real nature of things.

To the end, that even Sleep its self should not so stupidly escape from me, I have for­merly caus’d myself to be disturb’d in my Sleep. that I might the better and more sensibly relish and taste it. to weigh, esteem, and amplifie the good hap.

(vol. 3, p. 459)

He calls this presence, but it is the presence of attention combined with sentience, running experience in slow motion by using reflection to double the weight of sensation. He calls such correspondence of the mind and the body corroboration: “Let us repair and corroborate it by mutual Offices, let the Mind rouze and quicken the heaviness of the Body, and Body stop and fix the Levity of the Soul” (vol. 3, p. 463).

Corroboration in this sense of a simultaneous engagement of the mind and the body in the one adventure of appetence and satisfaction is suitable to the conception of the human organism as “an hydraulo-pneumatic Engin,” as Boyle called it, capable of taking the impressions of matter into itself and beaming energy outwards, so that desire and relish are reciprocal impulses. Walter Charletons sense of corroboration is derived from Hobbes via Lucretius, namely that the sensa­tions and the images of“kindness shewn” can act both as causes and effects. Charletons example refers, like theirs, to erotic love, when fierce desire prompts the soul to cherish the image of a dreamt or fancied object, and the heart to send auxiliary animal spirits into the brain to “cor­roborate the Idea of this Desire, as that whole brigades of them may be from thence dispatched into the Organs of the Senses, and into all Muscles, whose motions may move especially to con­duce to obtain what is so vehemently desired” (Charleton,1670, p.109). His colleague Thomas Willis explained the dynamic of what follows in chaster terms:

We imagine the Drinking of excellent Wine, with a certain Pleasure, then we indulge it; the Imagination of its Pleasure is again sharpened by the taste, and then by a reflected Appetite drinking is repeated. So as it were in a Circle, the Throat or Appetite provokes the Sensation, and the Sensation causes the Appetite to be sharpened, and iterated.

(Willis,1683, p. 49)

This is a fine definition of corroborative reenactment as it goes both ways, in and out.

Of all machines improved by scientists to emancipate the senses from the limitations and depravities of the Fall, the ship was the most compendious, being a platform for all manner of experiments that could move the investigator’s senses as close to exotic objects as it was possible to get; likewise, it was in voyaging that the corroborations of discovery were most extensively pursued. To take a single example, Magellan’s discovery of a western route into the Pacific exposed him in Patagonia to the sight of human creatures much bigger than the average size of Europeans; this prodigy was corroborated by Amedee Frezier in the 17th century, and again by John Byron in the 18th, whereupon Horace Walpole wrote a satire that entertained two contrary propositions: (a) that the romance of navigation is spoiled by attempts to authenticate marvels; and (b) that the truths of discovery have nothing to do with romance. It would be a mistake to assume that Walpole was hewing to an empirical standard of authenticity, having written some very extravagant fictions on his own account about dead princesses marrying princes who have not yet been born. He was exploiting a genre of reenactment in the maritime sphere contrary to the standard methods of corroboration used, for example, by Vancouver in his hydrographic surveys of the American Northwest Pacific, or Flinders in his circumnaviga­tion of Australia, where the exactness of the reenactment added supplementary confirmations of the importance of Cook’s pioneering explorations. On the contrary, Walpole’s “An Account of the Giants lately discovered” (1766) was amplifying the imaginative opportunities allowed by supplemental discovery; Diderot did the same in his Supplement au voyage de Bougainville (1796); likewise the Abbe Coyer in his Supplement of Anson's Voyage (1752) and the anonymous author who built a fantastic tale (The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman [1778]) out of the cannibal scene encountered by the crew of Cook’s consort, the Adventure, during the second voyage of the Resolution (John Mack, 2011, pp. 105—135).

These fictional corroborations relied on a model of fantastic voyaging that began with More's Utopia, finding its most ingenious manifestations in Bacon's New Atlantis and Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines, both of which contain a voyage of discovery mounted upon a prior discovery of the same place. In the difference between the “authentic” original report and its supplemental shadow, freedom is allowed the imagination to explore the ecstasies and despairs that lie behind often minimal and attenuated accounts of discoveries, such as Cook's brief but fascinating remark about his own: “Were it not for the pleasure that naturally results to a man of being the first discoverer, whether it be but of shoals and reefs... this service would be insupportable.” Supplements resituate imagination alongside ideas that otherwise would be too sparse, abstract, and neglectful of the particulars of the body's appetites and delights. This is why Forensic Architecture includes aesthetics in its retinue of concepts to corroborate the truth of events, and why one of its counter-investigations nearly won the Turner Prize.

Further reading

CoUingwood, R. G., 1994; Hacking, I., 2002; Kramnick, J., 2015; Pickering, P. A., and MaCalman, I. (eds.), 2010; Rivers, W H. R., 1923.