41 REALISM

Jonathan Lamb

In the entry for Realism in his seminal Keywords, Raymond Williams points to the complex history of the word and its associates, noting that originally realism was a medieval school of thought opposed to nominalism, and more akin to what today we would call idealism.

“The old doctrine of Realism was an assertion of the absolute and objective existence of... universal Forms or Ideas [that] were held. to exist independently of the objects in which they were perceived” (2015 [1976], p. 198). It derived from Plato's argument that intelligible ideas coincided with the essential properties of things, a pure manifestation of the truth inaccessible to the five senses. Such ideas we cannot discover by empirical means, rather through a recollection of their innate prints in the mind, brought into focus by rigorous meditation. Although it is certainly true that in its scholastic guise the doctrine of forms “may be said to have faded” (ibid.), it is equally true that after its Cartesian renovation as the cogito, it has enjoyed a buoyant afterlife. What we know today as cognitive science, “an ontology that divorces the activity of the mind from the body in the world” (Ingold, 2011 [2000], p. 165), shares Descartes's dualist proposition that our most important ideas are vouchsafed to the mind no thanks to impressions of the material world (evidence).

It is a supreme irony, then, that the philosophical basis of historical reenactment should rely on precisely that kind of dualist ontology. When philosopher of history and early theorist of reenactment R. G. Collingwood claimed to become Thomas a Beckett by inhabiting the thoughts of the 12th-century archbishop, he defended such a claim from absurdity by arguing for a kind of presence and immediacy superior to that of an event or situation; one that is achieved solely by an effort of mental reflection.

He followed that proposition with this corollary: “The immediate, as such, cannot be re-enacted. Consequently, those elements in experience whose being is just their immediacy (sensations, feelings &c. as such) cannot be re-enacted; not only that, but thought itself can never be re-enacted in its immediacy” (Collingwood, 1994, p. 297). That is to say it is only by means of ideas without any sensible trace that reenactment can be said to occur, and it will have no bearing at all upon anything that was heard, seen, smelt, tasted, or touched in any actual physical situation, whether historical or present.

Nothing could be more remote from what most present-day reenactors of history regard as their task and their reward. Their aim is “Being There” (Horwitz, 1999, p. 228), and the road toward it is paved with evidence of the real and illuminated by the sensations and passions aroused while traversing it. On arrival the subject experiences, owing to the privations and

Jonathan Lamb

authenticities of the trip, a kind of afflatus variously named by obsessive Confederate reenactors as “wargasm,” “peaking,” “Nirvana,” or “Goose-bump City” (Horwitz, 1999, pp. 210, 218, 379, 213). Genuine memorabilia contribute to this transfiguration by exercising every sense organ: marching in stinking old socks and ancient leaking boots, or with no socks or boots at all; starving until the reenactor fits an original Confederate States Army butternut uniform whose brass buttons are brought to the right patina by being soaked in urine; food is bad bacon; sleep is enjoyed under a single blanket spooning with five other bodies, all sodden and cold. When writer Tony Horwitz points out a handsome figure masquerading as a Confederate officer, his mentor Robert Lee Hodge acidly observes, “A real Confederate would eventually have cut that hair to keep the lice under control. And what's with the hat? It's all wrong—the Boer War maybe, not this one” (1999, p. 141).

Hodge's ancestor is Laurence Sterne's Uncle Toby, who begins his career of reenactment by reproducing the siege-works at the battle of Namur, where he was badly injured during the War of the Grand Alliance.

As his mock sieges become more elaborate, he graduates to the next major war in Flanders, The War of the Spanish Succession, and to a whole series of sieges at which he was never present. As the distance grows between Toby's own experience of war and each successive siege represented on his bowling green, so does his attention to the realism of each scene. What started as a diagram drawn in the earth and supplemented by imagination, has flourished into miniature earthworks faced with sods surrounding a model town, complete with churches and bridges, against which toy cannons play, charged with tobacco and emitting smoke. Toby translates the description in the Military Gazette into the action on his bowling green, and when a breach is made and the British standard planted on the enemy ramparts, he feels a rapture quite as exquisite as any of Hodge's wargasms: “Heaven! Earth! Sea!... ye never compounded so intoxicating a draught. Heaven! Earth! Sea!—all was lifted up” (Sterne, 1940, p. 299). It is worth observing that those purely ideational techniques of recovering the true trajectory of history favored by Collingwood are set aside by Toby as irrelevant to the plan of “being there.” That is to say, only accompaniments that stimulate immediate impressions—tobacco smoke, smelly socks—are allowed entry, while symbols of invisible curves are set aside (Toby has to jettison the calculus of pyroballogy just as Hodges ignores the history told by infra-red aerial photographs). In praise of this kind of formal realism of invisible truth, Horwitz's expert informant says, “Traditional historians tend to ignore the best primary source out there—the ground. If you read it right, you realize a lot of the written history is simply wrong” (1999, p. 176). Under the pressure of this kind of evidence, Horwitz begins to wonder “if everything I thought I knew about Shiloh—and about many other battles—was closer to fiction than to fact” (ibid.). This is a fair anxiety to air, but not one that troubles Toby or Hodge.

Hodge's critics accuse him of elitism, but it seems more accurate to call him and Toby solipsists, since the rapture they seek is personal and to a great degree private, no matter how they justify it. They are not being authentic for the sake of spectators (Toby does not even know he has any), but for themselves (authenticity). Certainly, they recruit disciples, but it is for the purpose of bearing of witness to the transformation of representation into what Lord Kames called “ideal presence” (2005 [1762]). It concerns only those performing the rite, not those observing it. This is where the challenge of realism in reenactment becomes formidable. In one respect, Collingwood is right when he says that presence and immediacy are not reenactable because the most a representation can expect to achieve is to appear as like its prototype as possible (mimesis). There has to be some acknowledgment of the fictive limits of the reenactment enterprise, otherwise its telos might be celebrated with real bullets and an unlovely death.

In her essay on fictionality (2006), Catherine Gallagher distinguishes between two forms of realist representation: one she calls realist fiction, the other realist fiction. The first uses fiction to

Realism

mount hypotheses of what is most likely to happen in certain situations, given the propensities of the characters involved in it and the challenges they face. Techniques of verisimilitude are brandished by the narrator, not disguised. Realist fiction, on the other hand, is concerned to reinforce what Samuel Richardson called the “historical faith” (1964, p. 85) of the reader by means of techniques designed to breach the wall dividing the author from the reader and true history from invention, such as symptoms of spontaneity that pierce the surface of print— uneven type, blotted or missing pages, writing to the moment, and all the other intimacies allowed between readers of epistolary novels and their alleged correspondents. You, the reader, are actually handling the disordered fragments Clarissa Harlowe scribbled on a piece of paper after being raped.

A notable beneficiary of Sterne's experiments in the realism of reenactment is the contemporary writer J. M. Coetzee. In “Lesson 1: Realism,” the first chapter of his novel Elizabeth Costello, his invented alter ego announces her interest in what Coetzee calls the realism of embodiment, “the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, and can exist only in things” (2003, p. 9). Costello declares, “Realism has never been comfortable with ideas... So when it needs to debate ideas. realism is driven to invent situations. in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them” (ibid.). Direct embodiment is evidently impossible, so what is needed is some kind of sympathetic bridge between an idea derived from real experience in the past and a living moment in the present. But when Coetzee's character confronts the implications ofThomas Nagel's famous philosophical query, “What is it like to be a bat?” by imagining what it might be like to be a corpse, she finds them less than consoling:

What is it, in Nagel's terms, that I know? Do I know what it is like for me to be a corpse or do I know what it is like for a corpse to be a corpse? The distinction seems to me trivial. What I know is what a corpse cannot know; that it is extinct, that it knows nothing and will never know anything any more. For an instant, before my whole structure of knowledge collapses in panic, I am alive inside that contradiction, dead and alive at the same time.

(Coetzee, 2003, p. 77)

The distinction between Costello as corpse and corpse as corpse is not trivial because it points to what Costello is actually doing, which is not simply imagining herself dead, but also impersonating a corpse that she calls her self. This is her version of the reenactor's Being There. The co-presence of the two elements that constitute the person of the corpse, the object represented and the power of representing it as something like what it is: this is what allows her to be dead and alive—or animal and human, or past and present—at the same time. She shows how far Hodge's mimicry of Matthew Brady's photographs of Civil War corpses stands from the imaginative agility this kind of realist reenactment requires. However, the price paid for Costello's simultaneous apprehension of two extremely different states of being is a moment of severe shock. The measure of successful realism in the reenactment of history, then, is not mere situational exactitude, sentience, or thought, but what happens—that is to say, what actually occurs— when history and fiction become a volatile and unpredictable emulsion.

41 REALISM

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