“Years after defending his dissertation, perhaps unable to adapt or evolve, he appeared stuck in an eternal limbo that would give any student the night sweats.”
“On the other hand, John seemed an extreme version of a kind of intellectual ideal. Wasn’t the freedom to read for much of the day one of the draws of graduate school, after all?”
“It came up that I was taking a class with Russell Jacoby. Jacoby’s best-known book, about how the academy defanged American social critics, helped popularize the term “public intellectual.” Slaying sacred cows such as tenure and diversity made him a kind of pariah in the field, and the department. John lit up and said Jacoby was a great guy, and smart, and had been victimized for his leftist views: “Anyone who writes a book called The Last Intellectuals . . .””
“John found himself at UC Santa Cruz at the height of the ’60s, graduating in 1972.”
“The rumor around the UCLA History Department was that John had come down to LA for graduate school, suffered a nervous breakdown, and returned years later to finish. He received an MA in History in 1984, filed his dissertation in 1996, and never left.”
“John was interested in what selected works of literature with themes of class mobility could teach us about writers’ conceptions of history. But first he had to defend the use of literature as a historical source, arguing that historical data are “encrypted” in literary tropes”
“In a footnote, he elaborated: “White maintains that historical narrative aspires to imitate the models provided for it by literature. I believe that precisely the reverse procedure obtains, that is to say that the fictional and fictive aspire to a supra- or non-literary status.” In what could be read as an elaborate restatement of Oscar Wilde’s 1889 pronouncement that life imitates art, John made a case that fiction approaches truth”
“In the background of John’s dissertation, and his intellectual preoccupations, was a famous exchange between Hayden White and Saul Friedländer that took place at UCLA in 1990”
“In the 1980s, in West Germany, a public debate known as the Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute) flared over the question of how to understand the Holocaust. One discussion centered on whether, and to what, the Holocaust could be compared. Right-wing German historians questioned how bad Germany’s actions had really been, arguing for a comparison with political murders in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Meanwhile, in the United States, White and other postmodernists argued for a similar, if less politically motivated, relativization of history, which approached the denial of being able to say whether any given event had actually occurred”
“After seeing White debate Ginzburg on the nature of historical truth in 1989, and growing concerned about the possible convergence of White’s theories and right-wing Holocaust denial, Friedländer organized a conference on the facticity of the Holocaust.”
“In his chapter, “The ‘Forgotten’ as the Trope of History,” John made a case for recovering history’s lost voices. “As in the slave labor that went into the building of antiquity’s ‘great monuments’—like the Pyramids—this labor remains unremembered. History is a non-record of the forgotten, it is a voice that is speechless or is at best, ‘unheard of,’ in the sense of the unspeakable crimes it suggests are the foundation for that experience which is remembered.” He was concerned that forgotten stories, those that don’t get recorded, receive no due in the worldview supported by White, which sees history as an assemblage of creatively selected evidence. How can White’s literary view account for everything else that has happened?”
“John argued, about literature, “As Foucault demonstrated in relation to the ‘mad,’ it is a record of those who left no records. Thus, each of us, if we are not known or famous, are to some extent ‘fictional.’””
“In a Shakespearean play about UCLA’s little historical family, John would be a central and memorable character. He was our truth-telling hermit, able to turn a mirror on historians’ follies. He was indigenous to the university, to the buildings, courtyards, and benches where history was made. Some said he also spent his time in the library working on an epic poem. There is more than a little John in every graduate student and professor, and perhaps anyone who has worked in that instantly forgotten genre, the dissertation.”