Friday, December 16, 2022
The Historian's Task
Jonathan Z. Smith (1938-2017), Map is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (1978; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 129:
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The historian's task is to complicate, not to clarify. He strives to celebrate the diversity of manners, the opacity of things, the variety of species. He is barred, thereby, from making a frontal assault on his topic. Like the pilgrim, the historian is obligated to approach his subject obliquely. He must circumambulate the spot several times before making even the most fleeting contact. His method, like that of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, is that of the digression.
The historian's manner of speech is often halting and provisional. He approaches his data with that same erotic tentativeness expressed in the well-known colloquy from the "Circe" episode of Joyce's Ulysses:You may touch my ....2 J. Joyce, Ulysses (New York, 1934), p. 561.
May I touch your?
O, but lightly!
O, so lightly!2
