The last time I read Machiavell’s The Prince, I was a fresh-faced, quasi-innocent undergrad, only months out of high school. I had just acquired a cunning little Yorkshire terrier, the result of his surprise offensive at PetSmart’s Saturday adoption fair. He pulled out all the stops in his ruthless pursuit of a new home: calculated nuzzles with his wet nose, premeditated tail-wagging, and perfectly-timed whimpers—nothing was spared. After having him at home for a week, he ruled the roost. I joked that he was my own little Machiavelli, and the name stuck.
Yesterday night, after reading the excerpt from The Prince in class, I pulled out my old copy of the book and sat with the two Machiavellis—the dog and the book—on my lap. This time around, I saw clearly how Machiavelli’s humanism exalted and freed the individual. His ideal prince, for example, was no longer judged or defined by religious standards or morals. The prince had the freedom to act as he saw fit in order preserve his power and public appearance; he was no longer bound by societal or divine standards, but was able to act according to his own values. For example, the Prince is not expected to tell the truth “when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it exist no longer” (Chapter 18). We thus see less emphasis on God, and more emphasis on the individual.
Wiser and possibly a bit more jaded since the first time I read them, I was also struck by the similarities between Machiavelli’s ideas (the author’s, not the dog’s) and the current political scene in America. It seems that in recent campaigns, market research has shown politicians what issues (and stances) are popular, allowing them to tweak their own positions in order to secure votes. Although ethically questionable, this allows politicians to tell voters what they want to hear, and, in essence, allows them to secure their own power. According to Machiavelli, this is key; deception was acceptable in the name of maintaining power.
To me, this idea is quite frightening. It is even more frightening that strands of this philosophy are woven into the tapestry of modern-day politics. After all, it’s one thing to have a sly, four-legged Machiavelli lurking around the living room, and another thing to have a Machiavelli prowling around the world stage.
In his article “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” Hayden White refutes the opposition between history and literature and calls for a renewed connection between the two fields. For White, the role of the historian is to make sense out of unfamiliar facts and chronologies through emplotment, a process by which he/she inserts facts into specific plot structures in order to make sense of any given historical event. White also contends that what a historian chooses to leave out of his/her historical text is just as important—if not more so—than the facts that are included. Inasmuch, history is not concrete or exact, but rather an interpretation of events, much closer to literature than to science.
I agree with the idea that historical events are filtered through the historian/author. Undoubtedly, this is why we have so many different texts about the same event, such as the US Civil War, and so many different biographies about the same person, such as Abraham Lincoln. Therefore, the idea that history is closer to literature than to science seems reasonable.
The connection between literature and history was fresh on my mind this week when I saw the play “Moonlight and Magnolias” at the Dallas Theater Center. This play, written by playwright Ron Hutchinson, is a comical view of the five days in 1939 during which producer David O. Selznick, writer Ben Hecht, and director Victor Fleming rewrote the script to Gone With the Wind. As I watched the play, I saw White’s ideas being played out: the events and facts surrounding the writing of Gone with the Wind’s screenplay were molded and shaped into a farce by the playwright through the process of emplotment. Because he saw this historical event as comical, Hutchinson emplotted the play so that the audience, familiar with the attributes of a farce, would find the event funny. On another level, we saw Hutchinson’s take on how these three men interpreted Margaret Mitchell’s book for their film as they discussed what elements of the book to leave out, to highlight, and to downplay. Going one step further, through the play’s discussion of Margaret Mitchell as the author of a historically accurate novel, we see how Mitchell emplotted the events of the Civil War in her book. Knowing that history is in fact told within these constraints, the spectators of the play Moonlight and Magnolias, the audience of Gone with the Wind, and the readers of Mitchell’s book may construct a more accurate assessment of the history presented in these works.
Back to Hayden White. On the other hand, I do not completely agree with White’s idea that historical events are chaotic chronologies of unfamiliar facts in need of a historian to create a model and make sense of them. In certain instances, facts, such as the number of casualties in the 9/11 attacks, can speak for themselves. To me, suggesting that the atrocities of trench warfare in World War I or the horrors of the Holocaust are in need of a historian to make sense of what people saw, experienced, and felt negates and marginalizes the experiences of those who lived them. I would be more apt to agree that the historian often makes sense of these events for outsiders, those who did not live a certain event first-hand or who do not have access to primary sources. While this may seem like a small distinction, I think it is an important one.
In any case, I think it is clear that given the many different facets of any one historical event, it is our responsibility as students and, on a larger scale, as citizens of the world to thoroughly seek out different accounts and interpretations of events, to use evidence intelligently, and to form educated opinions based on all available resources. Even so, I think that creating our own personal “truth” about an event can be a slippery slope; if taken to extremes, all perspective and “truth” is lost. As my mother always said, “balance is the key to everything.”
