History and Theory, Theme Issue 50 (December 2011), 38-50

Wesleyan University 2011 ISSN: 0018-2656

BEYOND THE HORIZON:

CHRONOSCHISMS AND HISTORICAL DISTANCE
Hans Kellner
Abstract

Historical distance presents more complex issues than simply evaluating the meaning of
the temporal span between a point in the past and some moment present to an observer. The
ordinary historical difference, which is horizontal in the sense that it evokes the notion of
hermeneutic horizons, fragments uncontrollably when examined closely, resulting in what
might be called a chronoschism. The experience of encountering a historical painting
by Botticelli provides an example of this fragmentation. This complication of historical
distance reminds us also of quite different sorts of distance, including the depths of endless
regression, and the elevation of the historical sublime. These various forms of historical
distance present a challenge to the horizontal character of normal historical practice.
Keywords: historical distance, Frank Ankersmit, chronoschism, horizon, sublime, Botticelli, Hayden White

Why consider historical distance now? Or, to put it another way, is it possible to
place enough historical distance between ourselves and the asking of this question
to answer it? The distance we do possess between ourselves and any action we
might take, at more or less the moment of that action, is the distance of the present from itself. So the present must be divisible, just as action is divisible into a
dramatistic set of functions (Kenneth Burke long ago suggested a pentad, consisting of act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose1). To distinguish these things is to
place a distance between them, so that they can be considered separately as parts
of some whole. The act I committed in my opening sentence consists of asking a
theoretical question; the scene is now, here; the agent, or agents, are all of us who
are looking into this particular theoretical issue in historical studies; the agency
is the familiar institutions of scholarshipthe essay, the conference, the journal;
and it is to ascertain our purpose that the question was posed in the first place, so
the purpose of the act is to discover the purpose of the object of the action.
I

This division and spatialization of the present seems atemporal, but it is actually
full of all sorts of temporalities. The agencies, for example, are creations of time:
1. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), xivxxiii.

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the essay has its traditional forms, the conference has not really changed since the
nineteenth century, nor have journals. What is our historical distance from these
things, especially now (to use a suspect term) that we have electronic alternatives
that will alter any sense of distance and time we may hold? We agents never really
find ourselves together in a now. We represent different moments of theorization,
different languages of intellection from different areas of scholarship that rest on
foundations from different eras. So the scene in which we act is temporally fragmented in many ways. Goethes Faust concluded that the act itself was the origin,
indivisible; but to reach that conclusion requires a sense of historical distance that
cannot be sustained now, because the now is difficult to sustain.2
Insofar as it is provisionally sustainable, the now of historical reflection, its current stage, is presently occupied in large measure by Frank Ankersmit, whose ideas
will provide a point of entry to historical distance. In thinking about Ankersmits
work, three ideas come quickly to mind. First, there is his assertion that historical reflection is metaphorical throughout, in a far wider sense than even Hayden
White suggested in Metahistory. For Ankersmit, the key aspect of what we designate by a nounthe pastis its not-thereness, and the very peculiar way we
speak about its existence by using all sorts of surrogates and substitutes.3 The second of Ankersmits assertions deals with how we view these surrogates and substitutes. He would have us look to pictures, rather than to narratives in the sense
of verbal icons, for the best model of the past. The picture, he asserts throughout
his work from Narrative Logic through Sublime Historical Experience, embodies
what might be compared to the narrative substance, the monadic block that the
theory of history should be thinking about, rather than the narrative itself, the linguistic workings of which may well describe how a historical text functions, but
not the historical understanding.4 Third, Ankersmit posits a rarely examined and
epistemologically scandalous notion of historical experience, which he takes in
the strong sense in which an individual somehow captures the past in a present
moment and feels, paradoxically, its thereness.5 In reflecting on historical distance,
I want to refer to each of these Ankersmitian ideas. What they do is to defamiliarize many things, and this is what I would like to attempt here. We are, I think, far
too confident that we know what historical distance is. Defamiliarizing is the
creation of distance from what seems near; its purpose, as Victor Shklovsky wrote
almost a century ago, is to slow us down.6 That is my goal as well.
Perhaps we understand historical distance too well. The reason for this is our
professional, rational sense that the distances of and from history are horizontal.
The arrow of history may soar, but what matters is where it comes down. The distance from the archer to the target is always toward some horizon, and so it seems
2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, part 1, Ll.1224-1237.
3. F. R. Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), 40-41.
4. F. R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historians Language (The Hague,
Boston, and London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), chapter 6: The Nature of Narrative Substances.
5. F. R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005),
passim.
6. Victor Shklovsky, Art as Technique, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee T.
Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 4-5.

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to be with historical distance. There are, however, further dimensions of distance,

dimensions hardly imagined by proper, flattened, common-sense notions of time.
There is also historical depth, falling mysteriously toward a molten center, where
recurrences reside and boundaries dissolve. And there are the heights, where a
sublime historical elevation makes the past present as it exhilarates the individual.
These imaginative possibilities challenge the flatness of time, creating forms of
time-fragmenting chronoschisms. To suggest such ideas, however, requires a bit
of slowness and preparation.
The direction of these observations echoes to some extent what Mark Phillips has written about distance. He notes the complexities and uncertainties and
constructions that are part of the business of imaging historical distances; he even
poses defamiliarization as a goal: If we want to defamiliarize our common-sense
idea of historical distance, it will be useful to begin with the recognition that
historical accounts not only function at a received distance from events; they also
reconstruct and reshape that distance in a variety of ways that bear upon every
aspect of our view of the past.7 This is undeniably true. Historical accounts do reshape distance in important ways. However, it is also true that what Phillips calls
our view of the past does not always derive from historical accounts. They are
one surrogate for the past among many; the distance between historian and subject
is one distance among many. Phillips has offered us a remarkable array of forms
of distance; I would like to continue and problematize his work.
So first, in the spirit of Ankersmit, we should talk about pictures. The Stdel
Museum in Frankfurt assembled in 2009 a remarkable exhibit of paintings by
Sandro Botticelli; in one of the galleries one could see a bewildering array of
instances of historical distance. The room, on each of its four walls, had the long
rectangular paintings of the life of St. Zenobius, an important fourth-century patron saint of Florence. These four paintings were gathered from their home galleries in London, Dresden, and two in New York. Each large panel had generally
the same format: a series of three or four events, chronologically beginning on the
viewers left and culminating in a master event on the right. Thus, in The Baptism of St. Zenobius, the heros exploits begin with his rejection of an arranged
marriage, proceed to his baptism, followed by his mothers baptism, then his appointment as a bishop, and finally his acting as a bishop. The composition is set
in a Florentine urban street scene, with a smooth flow of movement to the right,
moving from the saintly stroll away from the rejected young lady toward the large
pot over which he leans to be baptized; then, to the viewers right, under a porch
where the mother of Zenobius (almost identical to her son except for an exposed
breast and a bit more flowing hair) is baptized; then to a bearded Zenobius, also on
the porch and facing the right edge of the picture, who is having the mitre placed
on his head; and finally an older Zenobius seated on a bishops throne facing back
toward the left with his hand making a religious gesture. Each of the first four
scenes has a group of observers; in the last scene Zenobius is accompanied by a
counselor. The picture is typical.8
7. Mark Salber Phillips, Distance and Historical Representation, History Workshop Journal 57
(2004), 125.
8. The picture may be seen at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:San_Zenobius_London.jpg
(accessed March 25, 2011).

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How many forms of historical distance could an agent find in these pictures?
My own historical distance from Botticellis painting is so obvious that it need
hardly be mentioned: its just a bit over 500 years. But, then, this is slight compared to the distance from St. Zenobius, who lived 1100 years before his Botticellian tribute. This is, of course, a most important historical distance, the one
from Zenobius to Botticelli, but the distances between the picturesfor example,
between the work I just described (The Baptism of St. Zenobius) and His Appointment as a Bishop and the final work in the series (The Last Miracle and Death
of St. Zenobius)is certainly significant and must have been pondered by the
artist as he planned his series. But if the historical distance between the pictures
is to be remarked, are we not equally looking at historical distance within each
picture with its separate panels in which we watch the progress of the saint? This
occurs in two ways: on the one hand, within the frame, where the sequence of
events is depicted spatially; and, on the other hand, in the viewing room itself,
where the gathering of the four pictures from their British, German, and American
homes creates a temporary space to accommodate the distances they represent.
This may seem to belabor the point, but it is not nearly exhausted. Let us set aside
the question of precisely when and in what order Botticelli produced these pictures, because in the next room of the exhibition there were further and different
forms of historical distance represented. The painting Christ, the Virgin, and John
the Baptist depicts the familiar image of the baby, the mother, and a boy with a
shepherds staff (in which the staff is cruciform, a reminder of the historical distance that obtains within the scene). In the painting, the baby is being worshiped,
despite his historical distance from the crucified Christ. Other pictures have the
Virgin giving the baby an apple, as he fulfills the figure of the Fall and will take on
the sins of the world. As Ankersmit has maintained, in a pictorial representation
historical distance can be seen in the simultaneity of the moment, in this case the
moment when I stood in that room in Frankfurt and saw, admittedly one by one,
those paintings. It was a complex and bewildering play of perspectives within a
historical representation. And, as Ankersmit has written, the historical representation is a narrative substance, in which the many elements of the whole present
themselves at once, as in a picture, rather than serially, as in a text.9
Ankersmits pictorial concept of representation leads to another of his points,
that all descriptions of the past are metaphorical. The question is, though, how
they are metaphorical? Perspective is a visual and a spatial term. So is historical
distance. How far was the onlooker that day from St. Zenobius, from Botticelli?
Actually, the distance was small, only a few feet, as close as museum decorum
would permit. Indeed, the etymology of distancefrom L. distantia, a standing
apartseems to describe a position next to those pictures. Distance is a spatial
term through and through, but in historical distance we are trying to speak of
time. The near term is not the far past. Even the time marker after originates in an Old English meaning more away, farther off. Early derives from
day, or morning, and late from lazy or weary.10 We talk about time in the
9. Hans Kellner, Ankersmits Proposal: Lets Keep in Touch, Clio: A Journal of Literature,
History, and the Philosophy of History 36 (2006), 87.
10. All etymologies from the Online Etymological Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com/index.
php) (accessed March 25, 2011).

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language of space, and this creates a problem. Adding the term historical only
compounds the problem. Historical distance leads us into a discourse and a set of
problems that derive from a source completely different from the familiar binary
of past and present.
II

It is important to note here that this discussion of various historical distances

found in the experience of encountering Botticellis St. Zenobius paintings, on
the one hand, hardly scratches the surface of relevant distances, and, on the other,
relates directly to experiences of any textual formation, including what we call the
historical past. One of the things overlooked in the prior discussion, but not in recent discussions of time and narrative, is the interplay of temporal distances in the
experience of the reader-viewer. Questions arise, such as, how long did one spend
before the painting, how long did one reflect on that experience, how long before
the experience was written down, how long before any given reader encountered
the account? And there are questions of distance in the life of a reader whose
identity is contingent in the process of reading a text, unlike the identity of Botticelli or the historian. These questions extend the swirl of distances. If historical
distance is to be taken as, at least in part, a category of any experience, then there
seems to be no particular reason for limiting its purchase to very particular kinds
of experiences when other kinds of experiences are always at hand as well.
The situation I am describing frustrates attempts to clarify time relationships
by such means as hierarchies and embeddedness (which suggests that the experience of the historical character is embedded within the experience of the historian,
whose text is embedded within the experience of the reader). These are conveniences, but the idea of historical distance is inconvenient. To say that Zenobius is
embedded within Botticelli, who is embedded within a viewer (me), who is embedded within my reader (you), is immediately uncentered by the consideration
of any of the whole host of other temporal factors at work here. Ideologies, techniques, economic factors, all have dimensions that include historical distances that
can be pointed out or surmised by looking at any past artifact, including a work
of history. This is the gist of a view of time pursued in postmodern narratology.
Indeed, the term chronoschisms was coined by Ursula Heise to describe these
forms of the incommensurability of different timescales.11 Heise maintains that
these fractures of time are characteristic of postmodern narrative:
The paradox of the multiple alternative temporalities that structure postmodern novels lies
in the fact that they make conventional observer positions impossible, but precisely thereby
to achieve the defamiliarization that creates a distance from the present. This kind of distancing does not lead directly to anything like a historical perspective, but at the very least
it allows one to reflect on the possibility of different and perhaps alternative histories to
frame the present, which themselves have to be evaluated with critical distance.12
11. Ursula Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), quoted in Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, Handbook of Narrative
Analysis (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 111.
12. Ibid., 74.

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Historical distance is often linked to historical perspective, which is supposed to

be a good thing. It creates a depth of understanding, also good and quite spatial.
Again, there is the example of painting, where perspectival depth may be created
through color (with depth appearing increasingly less vivid), or through layering
of grounds (with the foreground obscuring part of the middle ground, which
leads, often by a road or river, to the background), or through straight-line perspective leading to a vanishing point. Distance is an artistic device, whether geographical or historical. The metaphor that serves as a surrogate for an absent past
is the narrative substance, in Ankersmits chosen terminology, and the language
we use to think about this substance is also metaphorical. But it is an odd kind of
metaphor, because one might say that its vehicle points away from its tenor. How
far was Zenobiuss abandonment of his fiance from his consecration as bishop
several decades, or 150 centimeters? What measure is the right one?
Referring to time in terms of space would create no problem if we could simply
transfer the meanings from the one realm to the other. But, as I hope my brief
discussion of visual representations of the past suggests, this is not the case. There
is always a residue of real spatiality in historical distance (and I do not refer to
the notion of the past as another country). The rhetoric of temporality (Paul
de Mans term) involves an inescapable undecidability, which must be forgotten
to move forward with the project of de-temporalizing the past.
Although my discussion of the Zenobius paintings dealt only with the play
of distances between identifiable time places, there are other, equally legitimate
forms of distance that must be acknowledged as historical. Take, for instance, the
final sentences of Braudels masterwork: Geography in the true sense was not
part of a princes education. These are all sufficient reasons why the long agony
which ended in September, 1598 was not a great event in Mediterranean history;
good reasons for us to reflect once more on the distance separating biographical
history from the history of structures, and even more from the history of geographical areas.13 The distance Braudel mentions is obviously historical, and it is
completely metaphorical, but it has to do with separation in time only indirectly.
Is it not the case that biographical history is older, and thus farther from him and
us, than the history of structures? And doesnt the reflection on distance that he
calls for in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip
II, now nearly forty years past, call for a hierarchy of historical levels determined
by their distance? Several distances, quite disparate and all historical, appear in
the passage.
In the same way, historical distance can be found among the levels of analysis
in historical drama. Herbert Lindenberger, for example, describes the distances in
one of Goethes history plays as being multiple and as complex as the ones that
Braudel mentions: On one level, Gtz von Berlichingen is of course about the
early sixteenth century, but on another level it attempts to restore certain medieval
virtues which Goethe found lacking in eighteenth century civilization (on still another level, one might add, its deliberately Shakespearean chronicle form serves
as a critique of the neoclassical form which, for the young Goethe, characterized
13. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II,
transl. Sin Reynolds (New York: Harper, 1973), V, II, 1236-1237.

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that civilization).14 Lindenbergers conventional critical term level is another

spatial metaphor for the constitution of historical distance; it is meant to obscure
any possible present by describing it as a stack of separate places, which are always co-temporal but never co-present. Each level defers the movement to the
others, and thus our comprehension becomes elusive and unfamiliar.
Seen as the defamiliarizing amalgam of space and time, historical distance is
coming to resemble Jacques Derridas diffrance, a notion that is not so much a
problem as a problematizer. Diffrance, by representing both the difference that
spatially distinguishes things while at the same time deferring their presence, is a
shorthand reminder that presence is constituted by an infinite series of absences
and deferrals. So if we substitute historical distance for difference, and perspective for signification, Derridas words express my point: Historical distance
(difference) is what makes the movement of perspective (signification) possible
only if each element is said to be present, appearing on the stage out of presence,
is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of the past element
and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element.15 Each element, in terms of historical distance, means the presence of
a present (which is invariably in the past), and another non-present moment. In
the most common model of this process one of those moments is presumed to
be present, now. But, as I tried to show with the Botticelli example, there are
many nows, and even the latest one is always a then when we grasp it. Historical distance, therefore, is times becoming-spatial or spaces becoming temporal
(temporalizing).16
This intermixing of the fundamental categories of mind represents, apparently,
a sublimated aspiration to divinity. Religious blogs take a keen interest in historical distance because they fear it is the barrier to contemporary understanding of
ancient texts and ideas, a hermeneutic problem. For example, a recent post to
a Christian forum asks the question, What type of Bible translation does God
like? It goes on:
Generally translations are classed as
1. Literal translation. Attempts to keep the exact words and phrases of the original. It is
faithful to the original text, but sometimes hard to understand. Keeps a constant historical
distance. Examples: King James, New American Standard.
2. Dynamic equivalent translation. Attempts to keep a constant historical distance with
regard to history and facts, but updates the writing style and grammar. Example: New International Version (NIV), New English Bible.
3. Free translation (paraphrase). Translates the ideas from the original text but without
being constrained by the original words or language. Seeks to eliminate historical distance.
Readable, but not always exact because interpretation depends upon the translators. Example: Contemporary English Version (CEV), The Message.17

14. Herbert Lindenberger, Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1975), 5.
15. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 142.
16. Ibid., 143.
17. http://www.christianforums.com/t7433024/ (accessed March 25, 2011).

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Here, distance refers to the need for a historically informed approach, not only to
counter the impact of the present and its interests, but also to foster a faithfulness
to the original, however remote its language and ideas. In other words, the historical distance between the translation and the reader is noted as evident when the
translation is hard to understand, even as it is faithful, literal, and exact when
applied to the original. The ubiquity of distance is flattened, as it usually is.
But I am interested in the question of this blog. What kind of translation, indeed, does God prefer? Here is a truly defamiliarizing point. The notion of God,
which I shall stipulate hypothetically for the following discussion, helps to push
the question of historical distance further. What is Gods relation to the historical distance from which his followers must suffer? One presumes that since He
experiences the world as a single simultaneity (that is, as Gods time, where
eternity is immanent), rather than sequentially as in human fashion, historical
distance is foreign to Him. Everything is immediate; cause and effect in time are
illusions, at least from a certain eternal point of view, and there is no need either
to maintain or to eliminate distance by literalism or freedom of translation. This
is like Ankersmits narrative substance or Botticellis Zenobius paintings. Now,
we need not be theists of any sort to acknowledge that there is an important theoretical issue here. To the old saying that time is what keeps everything from happening at once, we must add that representation as pictorialism is what allows it
to happen like that.
III

This issue has a namefiguralism. As Hayden White has taught us, a specifically historical form of explanation, as opposed to the scientific or the mystical,
is based on the notion of a past event that is incomplete in its significance until
another occurs that is deemed to fulfill the initial figure.18 To assume that this
correspondence was necessary, as the originators of the concept did, is to presume that God, because of his relation to time, knew both figure and fulfillment
at once, as He presumably knows all figures and their fulfillments. But as the
notion of figura was transferred from theological, biblical exegesis to secular
hermeneutics, the distance between the figure and its fulfillment took on the form
of historical distance. (So, from this perspective, the question, What kind of historical distance does God prefer? would be moot. He has no personal need of any
distance because all is immediate to Him.)
One thing that has hardly been touched on here is academic history, the sort
of thing most of us are trained in and familiar with. Transfiguring the present,
as the title of this conference puts it, is rarely the job of historians. There are,
however, exceptions. One of them is Tony Judts history from 2005, Postwar: A
History of Europe since 1945. The five-year gap between its publication and now
(the moment of this writing) does create a certain historical distance that must
be overlooked (or taken into account), but the span of its narrative, from 1945 to
2005, is a quite appropriate distance from us. After all, if one were a European,
18. Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999), 87-100.

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born in postwar Europe in 1945, one would be 65 years old, and might be retiring
this year. Judts purpose in the book was to explain the historical turn that a warlike, unstable Europe took in the direction of its present status as a comparatively
pacifist, moderately social-democratic, and relatively anti-nationalistic group of
nations, on a path toward a unified consciousness, whatever form that may take in
the future. His thesis is directly and powerfully argued. It was, simply, the unfathomable destruction of World War II that created contemporary Europe.19 The War,
then, was the figure; twenty-first century Europe, its fulfillment. And the span of
life between then and now made his book possible. Figuralism, in brief, is the
epistemology of historical distance.
In contrast to the defamiliarizing, chronoschismatic descriptions I offered above
in my look at the St. Zenobius paintings, the three modes of historical distance
mentioned elsewhere in this essay may seem comparatively stable. But that is the
case only to a limited extent. Horizon, depth, and elevation must be thought of not
as solid formal examples of historical distance, but rather in terms of the comfort
they either afford or deny. The hermeneutic horizon, in Gadamers version, is a
cozy place. The distance between oneself and the edge defines all one can see, although one has clues that there is more. And everyone who matters has a horizon:
A person who has no horizon is a man who does not see far enough and hence overvalues
what is nearest to him. Contrariwise, to have an horizon means not to be limited to what
is nearest, but to be able to see beyond it. A person who has an horizon knows the relative
significance of everything within this horizon, as near or far, great or small. Similarly, the
working out of the hermeneutical situation means the achievement of the right horizon of
enquiry for the questions even evoked by the encounter with tradition.20

One must be bounded in order to create the explanations that will fulfill the figures
that we perceive: Understanding the past, then, undoubtedly requires an historical horizon.21 With great optimism, Gadamer suggests that we may fuse horizons
as a way of replying to the distance between figure and fulfillment, between the
past and its comprehension.
The hermeneutic horizon version of historical distance presented by Gadamer is the familiar one. There are two terms, one at the center, one in the distance,
and the discussion has to do with the relationship between these two points. Is the
one in the distance near, too near for objective understanding? Is it far, too far for
empathy with another life-world? Although the notion of a horizon presumes a
globe, the hermeneutic horizon describes a world that is essentially flat, two-dimensional. This allows us a great many comforts: the most important of these is
identity itself, which comes from the notion of a now, a present.
Less comforting is the notion of depth. To see the past as a deep well takes
us again to theology (which lies, not very well hidden, behind all discussions of
historical distance). Old Testament theology, a figure unfulfilled, leaves us with
19. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 13-40.
20. Hans-Georg Gadamer, From Truth and Method, in The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the
German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (New York:
Continuum, 1992), 269.
21. Ibid., 271.

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an uncomfortable sense of the abyss, a historical distance that cannot be spanned

by any fusion:
Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?
Bottomless indeed, ifand perhaps only ifthe past we mean is the past merely of the
life of mankind, that riddling essence of which our own normally unsatisfied and quite abnormally wretched existences form a part; whose mystery, of course, includes our own and
is the alpha and omega of all our questions, lending burning immediacy to all we say, and
significance to all our striving. For the deeper we sound, the further down into the lower
world of the past we probe and press, the more do we find that the earliest foundations of
humanity, its history and culture, reveal themselves unfathomable. No matter to what hazardous lengths we let out our line they still withdraw again, and further, into the depths.22

The opening of Thomas Manns Joseph and His Brothers is a memorable journey
into a mythic world where each level opens downward to a new universe of levels,
apparently bottomless. Looking far back to an Abraham, a founding father for so
many, simply takes us to a place whose inhabitants themselves look back to an
Abraham, another founding father far back in the past, where, as it happens, the
people look back to a distant age into yet another forefather, and so forth.
If this seems all too literary an archaeological venture, creating distances that
never settle into a horizon, it bears a clear resemblance to Foucaults description
of his own archaeology and its horizon:
The horizon of archaeology, therefore, is not a science, a rationality, a mentality, a culture;
it is a tangle of interpositivities whose limits and points of intersection cannot be fixed in a
single operation. Archaeology is a comparative analysis that is not intended to reduce the
diversity of discourses, and to outline the unity that must totalize them, but is intended to
divide up their diversity into different figures. Archaeological comparison does not have a
unifying, but diversifying effect.23

The discomfort of the depths that Mann and Foucault present to us stands against
the horizon-fusing comfort that will, if not reduce the diversity of discourses,
at least give us a sense that distances are not the implacable enemy of our understanding.
The direction to the horizon is, not surprisingly, horizontal, flat, terrestrial. It is
the distance of a human journey transformed into a phenomenological condition.
That historical distance we can live with. The direction to the depths, however, is
downward, and figured for us by vertigo and the dizzying acceleration of falling
and endless repetition. As Ankersmit puts it: The roots of historicity go deeper
than is suggested by either modern historiography or current philosophy (of history).24 This historical distance is a challenge to represent. But the third mode of
historical distance I shall touch upon hereelevationis unlike these two in different ways. Like historical depth, it is not a flatland, a horizontal distance; rather,
its direction is upward and immeasurable. It is not attainable through scholarship
or art or anything else. It is sublime historical experience, as described by Frank
Ankersmit.
3.

22. Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers, transl. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1949),

23. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, transl. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York:
Pantheon, 1972), 159-160.
24. Ankersmit, History and Tropology, 43.

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The sublime characterizes a peculiar mode of historical distance; the word refers to the elevation that comes from being carried away emotionally. Kants development of the sublime of Longinus is rather different, but it still features at one
level a loss of full capacity, of being carried away. (Note how the idea of levels
always domesticates ideas and makes them less threatening.) The elevation that
obtains in the sublime is an embarrassment for sober-minded historians, and it is
certainly the most controversial of Ankersmits ideas. In Sublime Historical Experience, he describes the sense of becoming one with the past as sublime.
What Ankersmit calls historical experience is what a God-like being must experience, namely, historical immediacyin all ways the opposite of historical
distance. This godlike exultation is sublime, Ankersmit tells us; and in a way, it
seems to match Kants version of the sublime. The nearness, or rather immediacy,
of the past is experienced on two levels simultaneously. On the one hand, the allabsorbing, divine experience is, after all, to be celebrated as exultation, but on the
other, it is an elevation to the heights presented by Ankersmit in a solid, terrestrial
book called Sublime Historical Experience. Kant, perhaps, would understand. But
the guild of academic historians has other rules, preferring the horizontal.
Ankersmit correctly believes that the horizon-based hermeneutics of Gadamer
is the enemy of the historical experience he describes, and of the elevation that
comes from its sublimity:
Historicization will then blow away the last remnants of sublimity as the wind may chase
away the last leaves of autumn. In this way there is a truly paradoxical relationship between
history, historicization, on the one hand, and historical experience on the other; and this
may explain why historicization always undoes historical experience and wide historical
experience, in its turn, undoes historicization and why sublimity is so much built into the
very fabric of history, of historical writing, and of all historical consciousness.25

Historicization, or as I would suggest, a return to the horizontal, offers us the tools

of a profession, and a welcome control. Ankersmit proceeds: But this suggestion
of mastery is an illusion: Historical experience just befalls the historian, or it does
not. Historians cannot command or enforce it; the only thing historians can do is
to decide whether they wish to be open to it or not. Hence, the suddenness, the
directness, and the immediacy that are always associated with the experience of
the past.26 Historical distance offers at least the illusion of mastery, especially
in its useful, horizontal form.27 Historical experience as presented by Ankersmit
promises a grace without mastery.
I have suggested that the comfort of a flatland historical distance, with a horizon, contrasts with descriptions that pose vertiginous chronoschisms with multiple distances, or with the sublime elevation that comes from historical immediacy.
25. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 178-179.
26. Ibid., 179.
27. I say at least the illusion of mastery because the comforts of distance and its overcoming
may well be a fantasy. In the words of Barbara Taylor, Whatever their philosophical claims, these
dreams of intimacy with the past are fantasies. And as fantasies, they appear in response to a trauma,
the trauma of times passage, of the extinction of lived experience. Barbara Taylor, Introduction:
How Far, How Near: Distance and Proximity in the Historical Imagination, History Workshop
Journal 57 (2004), 121.

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49

A blogger recently made the point that historical distance is a device for avoiding
historical judgments:
Tell me if this is slightly contradictory: experts often refuse to comment on what figures
or movements are most important in our present, because we lack the historical distance
to know their real significance. But experts also often bemoan our anachronism because
we fail to enter into the life of the past when considering the significance of former figures
and movements. We cant speak about the present because its too close and we cant speak
about the past because its too far?28

Just as Hayden White noted that historians claim their calling is an art and a
science in order to avoid responding to recent developments in either area, so
historical distance offers a flexible way of deferring things; if we are always too
near or too farand we arethen past and present become light, provisional.29
If we take historical distance seriously, and if we acknowledge that it affects
any contemplation of the past in a vast number of ways, then the zero-degree version of this distance loses its priority. Not only is historical distance far more than
a historical present and a point of historical past, it is a hall of mirrors that upsets
any notion of presence. The flatness of horizon distance is comforting, even when
complicated, but it is thrown into the depths by the archaeological probing that
endlessly diversifies, or even by ones own reflection on a painting and the endless
temporal distances that experience evokes. Horizon, depth, and elevation are some,
but perhaps not all, of the forms of historical distance, and the problematization
produced by the chronoschism is far from the only way to theorize it. Ankersmit
has suggested that the immediacy of his version of the historical sublime places
us into Rousseaus state of nature, while the horizontality of disciplinary historical
distances corresponds to the alienation and inauthenticity Rousseau ascribed to
civil society.30 The sublimity of historical distances may be seen in other terms.
When Jules Michelet, after a chapter describing the removal of bodies from Parisian cemeteries in 1793, adds a description of a structure designed in the Year
VII to dispose of bodies in vast numbers, an entire nation if need be, he noted
that the plan foreshadowed the enormous human toll of the Napoleonic era, vastly
more bloody than the Revolution. Yet, a modern reader will see what Michelet did
not, the horrors of twentieth-century mechanized genocides.31 Here, it seems, is
a regression into the depths, from Holocaust to the Napoleonic slaughters to the
removal of corpses to the Terror, all made manifest by a sketch in an archive made
by an architect and a historian who could not know that this monument for the
combustion of the dead would speak both to and from future distances.
Elevation and depths confront the horizons of disciplinary history with intuitions that have been suppressed, reflection that seems uncannily to disrupt. It is
this reflection, this experience of historical difference, that may be seen as sub28. http://www.theveilaway.com/commentary/2010/01/historical-perspective-in-the-study-of-anything/ (accessed March 25, 2011).
29. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 27-28.
30. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 369.
31. Hans Kellner, Does the Sublime Price Explanation Out of the Historical Marketplace?,
in Re-Figuring Hayden White, ed. Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domaska, and Hans Kellner (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009), 222-225.

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lime and elevating, but that might be acknowledged as our current condition, and
the unresolved response to the question that began this essay: Why historical distance now?
North Carolina State University