Factual Narratives Research Articles

THE SPIRITUAL AND THE MATERIAL IN SCHOENBERG'S THINKING

PRESERVED in the archive of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute in Los Angeles is a collection of some 200 items, mostly unpublished and undescribed, consisting of drafts, sketches and casual notes left over when Schoenberg's more finished writings were selected for publication towards the end of his life and after his death. They are not in their original condition. Many hands have sifted through them searching for items of specific interest. Eventually what order remained was obliterated when the archivist, the late Clara Steuermann, dismantled Schoenberg's binders and folders as a consequence of her decision to preserve ideas rather than artefacts. But the composer's own annotations make it possible to restore his ordering and, to a large extent, to reconstruct his design. During his last stay in Germany, in the late summer and autumn of 1932, Schoenberg sorted his already extensive collection of personal papers according to chronology, form and content. The organization emerged readily from the recurrent subject-matter and concerns contained in this rich fund of ideas and observations from which he drew and to which he added continuously. Individual documents were assigned to various classifications,' and an additional system of numbering provided cross-references between categories, enabling him to plot interrelationships between ideas in different areas. This comprehensive enterprise, more like a filing system than a simple method for clearing one's desk, is characteristic of Schoenberg's temperament. A demonstration of his dedication to the internal logic of his own ideas is a plan for an autobiography designed to reveal the coherence of his intellectual world. From the earliest dated document of 1924 it is already clear that this was to be no factual narrative, and on its revision in 1932 the title 'Biography in Encounters' ('Lebensgeschichte in Begegnungen') was added.

Prolog and Epilog: Mythical History in Herodotus

The debate about how unified and consistent are the epic-like Histories of Herodotus is reminiscent of the form and redaction criticism developed around the Bible. The evangelical author, whose purpose is not to address posterity for a statement purely of the historical record, but rather to solicit his contemporaries in a catechetical fashion, shapes the historical deeds of the life and times of the Hebrews to suit a purpose, which includes history but is finally beyond mere history. The prophets, and their sources, are didactic; similarly Herodotus arranged his material for the purpose of highlighting the conflict of tyranny and freedom, of despotic empire and more democratic coalition. Books VII, VIII, and IX are the most elaborate and tight-woven of all the Herodotean logoi, just as the passion narratives that conclude the Gospels are the most factual and sustained narrative. The episodes prior to the climax life-death events in both the Histories and the Gospels compose a melange of fact and story, anecdote and reminiscence, pithy statement and imagined speeches, and colourful, fabulous deeds and wonders. Characters are introduced and biographies sketched: mini-dramas and conflicts among various interest groups build — all contributing to the climax and the great passion struggle. By way of introduction to these awesome events yet in the remembrances of living men, Matthew and Luke give the marvellous infancy narratives, and Herodotus presents the mythological rape stories of his prolog. And, just as the whole Bible begins with a marvellous blend of myth and history that is Genesis and ends with the epilog that is Apocalypse, so the Histories begin with the almost-out-of-memory stories of the kings’ daughters kidnapped, and end with the epilog where the ‘ghost’ of Cyrus appears and there discloses the final revelation of the inner impoverished core of Xerxes’ imperial court government.

The cults of murdered royal saints in Anglo-Saxon England

Murder by fellow Christians for secular motives may seem to us an improbable qualification for sanctity. To the Anglo-Saxons, however, the matter evidently appeared differently, for several members of pre-Conquest royal families seem to have been regarded as saints chiefly because of their violent ends at the hands of Christian assassins. The lives and cults of some of these murdered royal saints are well attested in pre-Conquest sources. Others, however, are known chiefly from post-Conquest texts which are mainly hagiographical in character and which were written considerably later than the events which they describe. For these reasons these latter texts have not generally been taken seriously as historical sources and the saints who figure in them have been largely neglected by historians. The hagiographical character of these texts, however, should not exclude them from historical consideration. They may preserve details of the saints’ careers which can be accepted as fact, and the accounts of miracles and wonders which they contain, although not to be treated as factual narratives, provide evidence bearing on the veneration of these saints. As for the date of composition, there is always a possibility that late medieval hagiographical texts represent stylistic and literary modifications of much more ancient versions, the former existence of which may in some cases be revealed by close analysis of the extant texts. The evidence relating to the whole group of murdered royal saints said to have been venerated in pre-Conquest England must therefore be evaluated before conclusions about the significance of this type of sanctity can be drawn. In what follows the saints in question will be considered in order of the apparent validity of the evidence pertaining to them, so that those whose existence and veneration are less certain can be examined in comparison with more firmly documented examples.

Wingate and the Official Historians: An Alternative View

The publication of a long, detailed, justificatory article on the subject of Wingate in no less than this Journal is evidence of the interest, and indeed, the emotions the Chindit hero can arouse thirtyfive years after his death. His was a brief career. LieutenantColonel, acting Major-General Orde C. Wingate, just forty years old, commanded on that level for a bare six months, controlling active operations for only twenty days. Yet his unadorned surname is enough to identify him, and the strange nickname of his 'Special Force', the 'Chindits', is almost a household word. It will be recalled that the authors of the volume of the British official history, The War Against Japan, Vol III, which includes an account of his 1944 campaign, departed from their otherwise invariable practice of an unadorned, factual narrative to introduce some passages highly critical of Wingate. Brigadier Mead, in collaboration with Sir Robert Thompson, has sought to rebut these in three separate articles or papers; a formal brief lodged in the Imperial War Museum, an article under their joint authorship published in the Army Quarterly, and one by Mead alone in this Journal. The mainspring for this sustained campaign is that, in the opinion of some of Wingate's most devoted followers, he was a great general who has been grossly underrated, and that he was treated so harshly by Major-General S. Woodburn Kirby and the team of authors who wrote The War Against Japan, not by way of an objective military assessment, but in accordance with some covert policy of the military authorities to prevent Wingate from being built up into a hero who might prove a bad example to the rising generation of officers. There is a reflection of this conspiratorial view in the article by Mead and Thompson in the Army

Towards a Typology of Historical Discourse: The Case of Voltaire

As his article Histoire in the Encyclopedie (and the Dictionnaire philosophique) testifies, Voltaire first recognizes that cannot be viewed simply as a collection of past events, but must also be seen as a specific type of language: HISTOIRE, s.f. c'est le rkcit des faits donn6s pour vrais, au contraire de la fable qui est le r6cit des faits donn6s pour faux.' This definition, by emphasizing the importance of the historical narrative, demands that the narrator unify the incidents he recounts into a cohesive unit, and excludes from the realm of catalogues or chronicles that merely list dates, places, and events without determining the relationships that exist between them. It also stresses the narrator's role in the presentation of history, which in turn should elicit both a judgment and a response from the reader. In an attempt to examine the configuration of Voltaire's historical discourse, this article will first concentrate on rapidly sketching his idea of and its organizational principles before entering into a detailed examination of the correlation between the actual linguistic formulation of this and its social purpose. According to the criterion contained in the above definition, i.e. that must be a factual narrative, Voltaire proceeds to exclude ancient from the historical realm and to characterize it as fable, since he insists that no modern historian or reader operating in accord with rational demands could seriously accept as true the material that this history presents. He demands that the corpus of ancient be carefully edited and re-organized to form the basis for a new universal that would trace the development of the human species.

Histoire des dictionnaires du malais et de l'indonésien

— Pierre Labrousse (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris,) who has been working for several years on a new Indonesian-French Dictionary, examines the different stages in the history of Malay-Indonesian lexicography, in what is admittedly a factual narrative, but which shows us what attitudes towards the phenomenon of language were, and which places this phenomenon in the context of social development.

The Shadow of Martinus Scriblerus in Hawthorne's "The Prophetic Pictures"

W ITH the list now available of books that Hawthorne borrowed from the Salem Athenaeum Library between 1828 and 1850,1 with scattered but revealing comments in his notebooks, and with certain of his factual narratives and fanciful sketches offering valuable hints, reading has become a subject for continued study, especially by those seeking a key to his creative habits. Though his catholicity of taste is what first commands attention, his particular responsiveness to the eighteenth century has been noted by some of his more astute critics. Randall Stewart, for example, discusses in some detail Hawthorne's admiration for the great writers of the Eighteenth Century, concluding with this summary:

Children, Inc.: The Post-War "Administration" of the Whole Child Life of One Baltic State in Its Critical Period. A Factual Narrative

During the period of postwar rehabilitation of the European civilian population, the author, a captain in the medical corps, was made chief of the Latvian section of the American Relief Administration Child Fund. He unfolds the tale of that portion of the gigantic relief project with which he was connected, in a simple style that is easy to read. The enlistment of the Women's Committee to his aid and the handling of the local political factions speak for the diplomatic acumen of the author. The chapter on the siege of Riga by the German-Russian White Army is an excellent portrayal by an eye witness of a dramatic incident. The author gives an interesting account of his experiences in postwar child welfare.