Shriek: An Afterword

The following note in Duncan’s journal exemplifies his approach:

Should the historian’s personal life happen to coincide in some way with the history he has chosen to write about—if the personal history “doubles” the public history—then an alchemy occurs whereby the historian, in a sense, becomes the history. That is, once rendered in all the signs and symbols at the historian’s command, the history he has written becomes, for him, the story of his own life. This fact may not be obvious to the reader except in flashes and flickers of reflected thought, where the passion of the historian for the story peers out, naked, from the page. There, for a flicker of a moment, we find the historian exposed, if only the world decides to correctly interpret the clues. {I didn’t write this. I was quoting another historian. I can’t even remember which one.}

In expressing this theory—a theory that calls for the historian to internalize a selected portion of history as part of his or her life; or, more specifically, to map historical events to personal events—Duncan was deeply influenced by the work of the idiosyncratic Nicean philosopher-historian Edgar Rybern. Rybern believed that the personal politics of each individual distorts their view of history. As Rybern wrote in his book Approaches to History {a book Sabon violently disapproved of, even during her days at the Academy}:

Such a person never merely traces the outline of the past. Texts do not sit side by side on the shelf, but intermingle, entering into conflict and confluence with one another until the probable emerges from the impossible. Reduced to rubble, such sources provide the raw building material for a theory of greater import and durability. However, the story that emerges from this process does not interest such a historian. The tale told is mere preamble to explanation, preamble to a more personal theory. In such a process, the chronology and lineage of the acts depicted in the narrative depend on the prejudices and experiences of the individual’s psyche, and the subconscious impulses embedded therein.

Based on Rybern’s musings, Duncan began to ask himself—in countless articles published in the hapless AFTOIS newsletter, and in countless conversations with Lacond—“Why not consciously distort history by focusing on those portions and patterns that have the most relevance or resonance to one’s own life?”

Such a slant would, presumably, intensify the empathy that the historian has to those particular historical events. For example, I, as a historian, would be most at home describing the history of various mental wards and the effects on the psyche of mass slaughter witnessed up-close.

If every individual mind can be said to exist within a lively morass of prejudice and subjectivity, then the pursuit of the objective becomes a futile, laughable goal—in effect, a lie; especially in a field such as history, where every day, every hour, every minute, the historian becomes more distant from the core occurrences under observation.{A simplification, true, but essentially accurate. Not that it matters to anyone anymore. History is about to catch up with us, and what I’ve really learned is that anything connected to the printed page becomes a kind of tombstone, marking the death of the past.}

Lacond, for all of his faults, understood this about Duncan. {After all, he, like me, had been underground at least once or twice, and came away from it having paid a physical price.} In one issue of the newsletter, Lacond wrote:

When Duncan Shriek writes about the Silence—as he has been known to do within these very pages—he quite literally, in my opinion, writes also of his personal silences over the years, the way in which he has been silenced—by others, by his own mistakes—and all the similar silences, suffered by us all. In a sense, he has made Ambergris’ history personal. He may be too good a historian to invade his text, but certain parallels emerge again and again—allusions to Tonsure’s descent into silence and despair and subsequent reemergence in the form of a book being especially prevalent.

Those experts who bothered to refute Duncan’s theories—mostly Sabon—pointed to the dangers of the personal history approach. Sabon wrote an essay for the H&S collection Impersonal Perspectives: Objectivity in Ambergrisian History {which probably sold about five copies}:

The irrefutable fissure in any theory of “personal history” lies in the impulse to find a plateau far above sheer fact, to reveal a lesson or universal “truth” that can be mapped to an individual life and intertwined with a complicated intellectual distain: contempt for accuracy, rejection of contradictory evidence, confusion of conjecture with truth, resistance to correction.

Sabon had a point, of sorts. Not that Duncan’s theories were flawed—no one ever dared to test their veracity through underground research. But when Duncan began, a few years later, to write his Early History, he looked to what he was writing for some indication of how to live his life, so that instead of finding what in history could become personal, he let the personal become history. {You might be right, but the reading public never had a chance to discover the truth or falsehood of it, either in the book or in reality.}

Unfortunately, in my opinion, the parallels that Duncan sought did not always exist. As I told him once, “Nothing in your studies will ever explain the death of our father.” I don’t think he believed me. He would have believed me even less if I had told him Bonmot and Truffidianism might be able to help him with that mystery. {Of all your incarnations, your transformation to the cause of organized religion baffled me the most. I certainly didn’t begrudge you your conversion, though—all I envied was the time you spent with Bonmot.}

I’ve finally found something personal of Dad’s in amongst all the dry discourse—tucked away inside a box inside another box. A canvas sculpture of a mushroom, about twelve inches tall. Part of his personal history, you might call it, and the symbol of a rare hiccup in the respect my parents showed each other.

That respect manifested itself in the way our father avoided invading Mom’s space. Our parents were as separate and yet together as any two people could be, and I’ve often thought that when Dad died, the reason it took Mom so long to create again is that Dad created the space for her to be able to make her art.

Dad did not enter some rooms of our house in Stockton—in particular, Mom’s studio. There, she would relax and sketch, paint, or even work on sculptures, her studio window providing a magnificent view of the forest. She knew that Dad would never enter, not even for a quick visit or to remind her of some dinner party they had to attend, not even when she was out of the house. And she did the same for him—his office formed a country forbidden to all of us.