Sarah Gibbard Cook
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History as Camerawork #3: Framing

2/20/2023

4 Comments

 
Zoom in or zoom out? How much background or context does a true narrative provide? It’s a question of craft and purpose. In Born in Blackness (2021), Howard French traces the transatlantic slave trade to Portugal’s quest for African gold. As I’ve written before, the story begins where the storyteller begins it. The same holds for the ending: Juneteenth? Jim Crow? This week?

Historians deal in evidence and interpretation. Truth or falsehood rests large on evidence; interpretation is better described as persuasive or weak. Evidence can be mixed. The late Professor Geoff Blodgett recalled serving as ship’s historian during a naval battle in the Korean War. Interviewing sailors the very next day, he found that every one of them recalled the battle differently.

History is neither an art nor a science, Blodgett told us. It is a craft. In the mystery novels of my leisure reading, crime scene photographers document a scene at many scales and angles. In history, the more different angles we can see from, the closer we come to understanding what happened and why.

Image: (left) Cropped by me, from (right) Monarch flying away from a Mexican sunflower. Wikimedia Commons (license).
4 Comments
Rebecca Cuningham link
2/20/2023 09:29:07 pm

Perhaps history would be best told like the new novels where each chapter is from a different character's point of view. Plurality gives perspective.

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Sarah Cook link
2/21/2023 06:57:04 am

What a great idea! More engaging and thought-provoking than the "omniscient narrator" historians tend to aim for, and can never quite achieve.

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Corrine
2/22/2023 10:25:27 am

William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” did this. Really confused the heck out of me in high school.

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Sarah Cook link
2/24/2023 11:28:05 am

If I've read The Sound and the Fury, it was too long ago to remember. I've read several that bounced back and forth between two people, mostly I think to report developments one character or the other wasn't part of. I'm fine with a straightforward single-narrative perspective in fiction, but there I'm not trying to get closer to truth, just to get pulled into an engaging narrative.




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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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