History and the Ethics of Obsession
Jill Lepore’s essay “Historians Who Love Too Much” begins with the historian in an archive, stroking a lock of her subject’s red hair. She feels a rush of affection for the man - Noah Webster, eighteenth-century lexicographer - and asks herself whether biographers are uniquely inclined to fall in love with their subjects.
I’ve written elsewhere that I fell in love with Tsuneno. The phrase came to me without a second thought, even though I’m more of a microhistorian than a biographer, and therefore - according to Lepore - more likely to see my subject as somewhat distant and mysterious. After all, my primary interest was never Tsuneno’s interiority; it was the shape and color and texture of her world.
For Lepore, microhistorians are more like judges than lovers. They have questions to ask of their subjects. They want to render a verdict. This is a lovely metaphor because so many of microhistorians’ subjects were put on trial and interrogated. Even their contemporaries asked them, “Why did you do it?”
But I never wanted to interrogate Tsuneno. I already had her letters. I knew why she made the most consequential decision of her life, to run away from home. “I would rather die than marry a widower,” she said. “I always wanted to see Edo.” She was clear about her motives. Whatever else she was — “stupid,” her brothers said, and selfish — she was not mysterious.
What I sought from Tsuneno was something different. I wanted to be a medium, not a judge. I wanted to see her world through her eyes. To watch the ice cloud over the surface of Big Pond, near the temple where she lived as a child. To listen to the calls of the peddlers in Edo’s alleyways. To dwell in the office of the South City Magistrate. I fell in love with her the way that naive students fall in love all the time. It’s hard to resist the allure of someone who has access to a realm you want to enter, who seems to know something you desperately want to understand and are afraid you never will.
While I was writing, I often said I felt like I was possessed by a nineteenth-century ghost. It’s true: I felt driven, compelled to write. But if there was a ghost, I conjured her myself. I think I assigned Tsuneno the responsibility for haunting me because the reality was more uncomfortable, and precisely the reverse.
I read Tsuneno’s words out loud, but then I gave her experience my own words, in my own language. In writing, I tried to render the world as it might have looked to her. I had a rule: when I employed a metaphor, it was always one she would have recognized — a blighted garden, a plague of weeds, a tangled silk thread. But they were always my invention.
There are ethical problems with over-identification, with obsession. There is also a long and fraught tradition of Western authors ventriloquizing Japanese women and turning them into flat stereotypes: Madame Butterfly, for example, or Sayuri. (“Those were fiction, and I’m writing non-fiction,” I tell myself, but is that really better?)
How could I believe that Tsuneno would have wanted me to tell her story? That she would have wanted anyone to tell it at all?
I can justify myself. Tsuneno had problems with her family, I think. Maybe she would have preferred an outsider to tell her story. I might, given a choice. But we aren’t the same person, of course, and that’s the problem.
I genuinely don’t know what Tsuneno wanted. But no one will ever know, and there’s no way for her to tell us. Like all historians writing about the distant past, I’m exercising the power of the living over the dead. We can do it more or less responsibly, diligently, carefully, but we’re still doing it.
At the end of my book, I wanted Tsuneno to tell her own story, so I gave her a setting in which to do it. Without knowing it, I was borrowing a technique from Jonathan Spence, who made the same move in his microhistory, The Question of Hu. Lepore would say it’s an attempt to expiate the microhistorian’s inevitable feeling of guilt, or our uneasiness about rendering judgment. Maybe. I think of it more as an expression of inadequacy.
“Maybe she would want to tell her story, her side of it, at last. It would be better than her brothers’ story and certainly better than a historian’s, full of “maybes” and “might haves.” If Tsuneno spoke, and kept speaking, her voice might fill the room. She would sound like her mother and her sisters, with the Echigo accent she had never lost.”
But of course I’m inventing that scene, too. The life was hers; the book is mine. We’re connected by the tangled thread of desire, and obsession, and the ethics aren’t easy to unravel.