Darkness at Noon: On History, Narrative, and Domestic Violence
( Not an easy read b/c the violence is stark, yet, resilience/courage wins. )
Joy Neumeyer
The American Historical Review, rhab192, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab192
Published: 27 July 2021
Abstract
This essay is inspired by my experience of domestic violence while earning a PhD in Russian history. It applies the philosophy of history to escaping abuse, when crafting a compelling account becomes a matter of survival. As a scholar, I had taken my right to tell the story for granted; as a survivor, I could produce evidence about what happened, but other judges would weave it together to make meaning. The essay attempts to reconcile the conception of history as literature with the need to seek truth and justice. It also considers the role of narrative in the #MeToo movement and the Title IX system.
I AWOKE TO THE SENSATION of a hand around my throat. As my eyes struggled to adjust to the light, the hand dragged me sideways, up, out of bed. The head attached to the hand had the face of a person I loved. His dark eyes were emanating a furious rage. In his other hand he held a belt. “Take your clothes off,” he said. He called me a whore and a liar and ordered me to strip naked so that he could beat me black-and-blue. There was an electricity in the air that I would come to recognize as the current of violence. When it arrives, the world falls into shadow. It’s like a solar eclipse, the moment you realize that someone you trust might kill you.
One morning as I was making breakfast in his apartment, he told me that he would bash my head in with a hammer so that my brains came out like scrambled eggs. I stared at the pan in front of me, swirling the yellow yolks as they congealed. I heard the words, but it was as if they had been spoken to someone else. I was there, but I also wasn’t. “Ia ne ia, loshad’ ne moia,” goes a Russian saying of denial—“I am not me, the horse is not mine.” I once read it in the transcript of a Central Committee meeting in which the Old Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin was accused of plotting against Stalin. That semester I was a teaching assistant for UC Berkeley’s course in Soviet history, my area of expertise. One of the works I discussed with my students was Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler’s novel inspired by Bukharin’s plight. Bukharin eventually confessed to having questioned the great genius of the revolution, who embodied the spirit of history and whose judgment could never be challenged. Bukharin begged his comrade for forgiveness. His self-abnegation did not bring mercy; he was shot anyway.
Two and a half years before that hand woke me, I had begun my PhD at Berkeley with a seminar on twentieth-century Europe. The course was taught by a kind professor with wrinkled shirts and a weary air. We began the semester with a book about the buildup to World War I. After three hundred pages of diplomatic breakdowns, missed opportunities, and dreams of violence, the author reached his conclusion: that the European monarchs and those who served them were sleepwalkers, stumbling bleary-eyed into a conflict that would take over eighteen million lives. We dismissed this conclusion—it deprived the actors of any agency. Through the final moments, when Kaiser Wilhelm cabled his Russian cousin Nicky that Germany was mobilized for war, there were choices with consequences. What was the point of studying the past if all that could be said was that its players were asleep?
This same professor, upon discovering that we hadn’t heard of yet another essential monograph, historian, or event, was fond of getting up to write a name on the board. Early in the semester, he explained how the Annales school had brought a social scientist’s eye to the study of the past, tracing both long-term developments and short-term contingencies. The longue durée was the ocean, he said; the events were the waves. On another occasion, he approvingly wrote the name of Leopold von Ranke, the pioneer of positivist history. This historian had an old-school allegiance to facts. He placed a premium on names, dates, and places and asked us to assemble them in a way that made the past comprehensible.
https://academic.oup.com/ahr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ahr/rhab192/6329129?fbclid=IwAR1TQ2-wF79qkYnnPWF_2WbQsyT6eefSG8zpZAGvA-__KYrz06NDd29nR8M
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