Against Objectivity 

For this weeks blog, I have chosen to focus my attention on C.L.R. James’ preface of The Black Jacobins, to unpack his methodology. His work, the story of the successful slave rebellion of San Domingo, led by the revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, goes beyond a mere account of causality and event. Rather, it is an exercise of the imagination – a plunge into the world which made possible such a revolution, with an investigation of all the possibilities and alternate directions history could have taken accounted for. The journey is described in such detail, so richly, that it is almost cinematic.

What is truly distinctive, to me, is how unabashedly present C.L.R James is in his description and analysis. His account does not merely present multiple images and voices passively for us to make sense of. He directs our journey into the past – his work is a curated history told from the vantage point of the people with a drive so evident that his emotions are uncensored in his retelling. His work is no churning out of supposed objective, apolitical literature – if such a thing could exist. His loyalty is very evidently to the people, and he makes it apparent. He is their storyteller, deliberately emotionally charged, to tell a history complete with the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations that were part and parcel of the revolution. It comes as little surprise, then, to find out that he is a Marxist historian.

In his preface he argues that analysis is the science of history, and the telling of it, art. He clearly asserts that his telling of the revolution is shorn of the tranquility of Wordsworth’s definition of art, of poetry, as the overflow of emotion, recollected in tranquility:

“The violent conflicts of our age enable our practiced vision to see into the very bones of previous revolutions more easily than heretofore. For this very reason, it is impossible to to recollect historical emotions in that tranquility which a great English writer, too narrowly, associated with poetry alone. Tranquility today is either innate (the philistine) or to be acquired only by a deliberate doping of the personality. It was in the stillness of  seaside suburb that could be heard most clearly and insistently the booming of Franco’s heavy artillery, the rattle of Stalin’s firing squads and the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence. Such is our age and this book is of it, with something of the fever and the fret. Nor does the writer regret it”

He cannot feign objectivity. For those who feel the tremors of history today, there is no way to speak of it outside “the fever and the fret”. He writes as a black man from Cuba in the 80’s, and one imagines that his choice in writing a book on the history of the revolution of an island not so far from his own, is one that cannot be anything but interested. It reads as a very conscious immersion into the past with the aim to make sense of the present, both for himself and his readers. He writes to see where his people have succeeded in the past, and where they had failed, and how those in the present can learn from their example. This drive for context, for a deeper understanding of his place is evident in that his final chapter links Toussaint and the revolution to Cuba’s history and to Fidel Castro.

His method reflects this drive, his approach is not one of simply glorifying of romanticizing the revolution – this immersion must be productive, must be understood. Here is the science of this historical method. He remarks, disapprovingly, that it is routine practice for historians of the revolution to romanticize Toussaint L’Ouverture’s leading role. Though he concurs that “no single figure appeared on the historical stage more greatly gifted than this Negro”, and that his present work too will convince them of this fact – still:

“Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint. And even that is not the whole truth…great men make history, but only as much as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. To portray the limits of those necessities and their realization, complete or partial, of all possibilities, that is the true work of a historian”.

He uses, what is to me, a beautiful metaphor to describe his task:

“In a revolution, when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are meaningless chaos and lend themselves into infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the sub-soil from which they came. The writer has sought not only to analyze, but to demonstrate in their movement, the economic forces of the age; their molding of society and politics, of men in the mass and individual men; the powerful reaction of these on their environment at one of those rare moments when society is at boiling point and therefore fluid”.

If I were more efficient in writing to save room to go into the text itself and put forward what his method looks like in practice, this would be a more thorough blog. I can, however, quickly mention my favorite technique he employs, particularly in his chapter on the slave trade titled The Property. He juxtaposes long, richly detailed account of lives of the Native Americans, or the black slaves, with empathy, with emotion, against a short and sharp ironic shift to how the colonizer responded to their misery, or how they justified it. It is here where his obvious partiality, his lack of objectivity, is most apparent. For example, in the very first paragraph, in describing the slave ships as so horrific that “the Africans fainted and died, the mortality in the “trucks” being over 20 per cent.” And yet, “outside in the harbor, waiting to empty the “trunks” as they filled, was the captain of the slave ship, with so clear a conscience that one of them, in the intervals of waiting to enrich British capitalism with the profits of another valuable cargo, enriched British religion by composing the hymn “How Sweet the Name of Jesus sounds!”  It’s laughable, it’s horrific. There is no question of accepting in context the white man’s prejudice – they are immediately condemned. He does this repeatedly, and it builds a tempo, an energy, a frustration that demands release. C.L.R. James has, in his first chapter, achieved his aims – to ensure your sympathies are with the suffering, and has made you eager to see how they resist. This first chapter very much exemplifies how the telling of history is indeed an art.