Against the clarity of caricature
/Jeremy Black has a good succinct review of Allen Guelzo’s Robert E Lee: A Life at New Criterion, saying in a few words what I struggled to say in a couple thousand last fall. Black rightly notes the many strengths of Guelzo’s biography, as well as pointing out its weaknesses—ideological inflexibility and a refusal to acknowledge historical contingency, whether in Lee’s life or in the broader context of the United States’s history as a republic. For Guelzo, there is, with the benefit of hindsight, precisely one right answer to the one big question Lee had to answer on the fly, as events unfolded. Black mildly offers that “this approach is not completely helpful”:
Guelzo’s comments on treason look far less appropriate from the perspective of the events of 1775 and 1776, and this comparison was certainly one made by commentators at the time of the new civil war. One does not have to be a cynic to ask how far judgments would be different in each case had success been otherwise. This is obviously true if the most talented commanders of the American Revolution are assessed, notably Benedict Arnold and Charles Lee, as well as George Washington. This point raises comparable ones about assessment of the Civil War. So it is more generally when factors are taken for granted and treated outside any political context.
But it is one passing phrase from Black, in relating the fate of Richmond’s Lee monument, that most caught my attention. Noting that the statue has apparently been donated to a museum to be “transform[ed] . . . into a new work of art,” thus institutionalizing the vandalism of 2020, Black remarks that
“Robert E. Lee is one of so many swept from the complexity of life into the clarity of caricature.”
A phrase I’m going to hang onto.
Because the struggle between complexity and caricature is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Complexity is tough. People don’t know what to do with it. I’ve thought and written a lot about simplifying, reductionist accounts of history in the last several years, but what we’re really talking about is caricature: taking away complexity, exaggerating a handful of features—sometimes even just one feature. To continue with the example of Lee, here’s an apolitical anti-slavery Unionist who ends up in command of a Confederate army. That demands investigation and an attempt to understand. But a racist? Well, we know what to do with racists. And we move on to the next statue.
All of which brings Herbert Butterfield to mind, in a line I’ve shared here several times before because I think about it so often as I teach, trying to cram in as much real life complexity and understanding into the two and a half hours I get with my students per week:
“The historian is never more himself than when he is searching his mind for a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity.”
It’s a tightrope walk, but worth infinite pains.
In the meantime, I think the good, honest student of history could do little better than to paraphrase Solzhenitsyn: “Let the caricature come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
Read Black’s full review at New Criterion here or at the link above. Compare the thoughts on a passage in Black’s Short History of War I shared last month here. And speaking of historical figures it’s fashionable to dunk on, I reviewed Black’s biography of George III for the Penguin Monarchs series on the blog last June, which you can look at here.
