On history (Would Derrida agree?)

History is an art. It isn't a science or a craft, but more of a creative endeavor, like literature. Many historians would assent to this idea. It is even something members of the profession are proud of.

In his biography of Lenin, Dmitri Volkogonov writes, "History is a dispassionate judge." I think that's wrong. Whereas the past is dispassionate, history is not. History is written by human beings, and there has never been a dispassionate human being.

Truth, when represented as a singular event of the past, cannot teach much; only within the context of larger historical works, can that event provide an instructive role. And no matter how "dispassionate" a historian tries to be, his words on paper cannot escape their implicit connection to the mind--and passions--of their author. Although he may attempt to record nothing but truth, a writer's words are always to some degree a corruption of reality.

So that's why mama's crying.

I'm in the middle of Michael Babcock's The Night Attila Died, a intriguing investigation into the cause of the Hunnish tyrant's death (or murder). Last year, I wrote about the book, which at the time was yet to be published. I jokingly added that I would be reluctant to buy something that would make me think of the old Paper Lace song, "The Night Chicago Died," every time I picked it up:

"I heard my mama cry
I heard her pray the night Chicago died
Brother what a night it really was
Brother what a fight it really was"

To which entry Dr. Babcock himself replied in an email,

"I'm the author and I came across your post yesterday while pacing the virtual hallways of the Internet waiting, like an expectant father, for my book to be released on July 5.

"Needless to say, I never saw the Paper Lace connection. This has less to do with any specific cultural deficit on my part than on the popular mispronunciation of Attila's name. So here goes with my pedantic response. The analogy works well when you replace the trisyllabic Chicago (with its accent on the second syllable) with the trisyllabic Attila (with its accent on the second syllable). But here's the problem: the accent in 'Attila' doesn't fall on the second syllable. Philologists (I'm one) argue that Attila's name is formed from the Gothic word for father, atta, with the accent on the first syllable: AT-tila (not a-TIL-la). The diminutive suffix -ila transforms the name into a term of affection, into (roughly) something like 'Daddy.' Which, to bring things full circle, would explain why Mama is crying. By the way, all this is discussed in Chapter 4 of my book."

According to Dr. Babcock, when "Proto-Germanic" split off from the mother tongue, Indo-European, some time before 500 B.C., part of what distinguished the new language was a shift in word accent, moving to the first syllable. Much of the English language retains this tendency, and in some regions of the United States, the tendency is rather strong: in the South and in many African-American communities, for example, PO-lice and DEE-troit are common pronunciations of police and Detroit, words of French (ergo, Latin) derivation).

"Cultural snobs may regard this as a mark of unsophistication," Dr. Babcock writes. "[T]he linguist, however, hears an ancient pedigree behind these pronunciations, a linguistic force that's over theree thousand years old."

All this is extremely interesting, I think, and The Night Attila Died is wonderfully absorbing and well-written.

Round and round we go.

More's Utopia seems to have fallen out of fashion since its modern heyday in the mid-1960s. During those years, and the decades immediately preceding and following them, the book was more or less adopted by Marxist "philosophers" and historians. Utopia, though, was intended to be an ironic commentary on society as it was in More's time, not a primer on creating the ideal world. There is much in the work that could apply to every era, not just to the early 16th century, but even to today. Here, read this:

"They once waged a war to obtain another kingdom for their king, which he claimed was his due inheritance because of some old affinity. When they finally won it, they saw that they had just as much trouble holding on to it as they had endured in gaining it. And seeds of rebellion were ever springing up within, or invasion from without. So they always had to fight either for the people they had conquered or against them. They never had an opportunity to dismiss their army and all the time their resources were being drained and their money going abroad. Their blood was being spent on others' glory and peace was no safer. At home characters had become corrupted by war, people had tasted the joy of robbery, boldness was strengthened by slaughter, the laws were held in contempt."