the dead hand

Coming down a bit early today to do my post. Rain drips down from a drenched cotton-batting sky. Kimmie's office is having a barbecue at a coworker's house. I'll be heading up in due course, so I wanted to take care of this, and also get some afternoon reading in before attending the gathering.

I've been meaning to do a post based on the powerful and chilling term dead hand. Here is my faithful Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition:

dead hand 2: the oppressive influence of the past

The term swam up into my mind when I was writing something a few weeks ago. When I looked it up I was surprised at its strength. The oppressive influence of the past is a vast topic, and, phrased that way, also chilling.

It feels very relevant to the writer of historical fiction. One question I sometimes ask myself is, Why write (or read) historical fiction? Robert McKee's answer (in his storytelling text Story):

Many contemporary antagonisms are so distressing or loaded with controversy that it's difficult to dramatize them in a present-day setting without alienating the audience. Such dilemmas are often best viewed at a safe distance in time.

He of course is talking about screenwriting, and how to justify the tremendous added production expense of setting a story in a past period, but I believe the argument translates to fiction-writing as well.

While I'm sure there's something to that, I don't believe McKee's explanation gets to the heart of the matter. I'm thinking that historical stories have, for one thing, a quality of "once upon a time"--they evoke the mythical realm of the fairytale. Closely related to that is that they show people of remote times to be the same as we are now, merely with different fashions, social codes, language, and technology (which in turn reveals all these things to be incidental to the human condition). The problem of life, of how to live, was ever the same. The human condition has an eternal quality, which points to questions of meaning, of the spiritual.

At the same time, those very differences call attention to the corresponding aspects of life in our own time: we are thereby made aware of our own existence by seeing it through the eyes of another time, so to speak. We may notice afresh, and appreciate--or question--the social structures and things in our world that we usually take for granted.

And now: the dead hand of the past. In Ulysses Stephen Dedalus says, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." I'm sure many neurons have fired in the effort to unpack his meaning. Mircea Eliade, in his The Myth of the Eternal Return, says that for archaic man,

neither the objects of the external world nor human acts...have any autonomous intrinsic value. Objects or acts acquire a value, and in so doing become real, because they participate, after one fashion or another, in a reality that transcends them.... [H]uman acts...are repeated because they were consecrated in the beginning...by gods, ancestors, or heroes.

Later on he says:

[I]nterest in the "irreversible" and the "new" in history is a recent discovery in the life of humanity. On the contrary, archaic humanity...defended itself, to the utmost of its powers, against all the novelty and irreversibility which history entails.

For archaic man--who, after all, is us under our Calvin Klein briefs--historical acts, that is, acts that were not performed originally by a god or hero or ancestor, are necessarily imperfect and in fact sinful. It is the accumulation of these sinful, profane acts that is wiped out each year with the ancient New Year festival--a rite we still practice with our saturnalian New Year's party and list of resolutions. In the ancient world, much more than now, life started afresh after the New Year. History was erased like an Etch-a-Sketch and everyone was reborn.

What I seem to be creeping toward, here, is the idea that the dead hand is the accumulated dead weight of profane history--the irreversible events that have piled one on another since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, or since the Big Bang, depending on your view. The dead hand makes its way into spiritual thinking as the doctrine of original sin, or as karma: what was done in the past, by people we no longer identify with as ourselves, catches up with us.

The dead hand says that past and present are connected, not only in obvious ways, but in a deep mysterious way that affects each of us like a powerful current we usually don't even know we're swimming in--or drowning in.

I'm not quite sure, but I think I'm suggesting that historical fiction, historical drama, brings us closer to this reality by showing us the relativity of time. The past is now if we know how to look.