The Ranums' Panat Times

Orest Ranum and the Oral Culture of the Historian

Joseph Klaits     

Presented at the "Glorious Artisan" session at the 45th annual meeting of the
Society for French Historical Studies, Washington, DC, March 19, 1999.

"Whom does the chief black eunuch represent in The Persian Letters?" This question, addressed to Orest Ranum's senior seminar in Early Modern Europe at Columbia College in the spring of 1964, foreshadowed a brilliant essay on Montesquieu's hidden meanings that appeared soon after. That essay is almost unique in the Ranum corpus, not only because it appeared in a political science journal but because it poses a problem and then proceeds in straightforward fashion to systematically solve it. Nowadays I work with political scientists, who, if they have an interest in political theory, often know that piece and speak of it with respect as a model of detective work and close analysis. I sometimes cite to them one of Montesquieu's aphorisms of that period, which illuminates contemporary Iran, Iraq and numerous other places quite as much as it did the Europe of his day: The principle of a monarchy is fear, that of an aristocracy is honor, and the principle of a democracy is knowledge. Indeed, I think no one has better understood the meaning of the young Montesquieu than the young Ranum. But the method employed in this early work is quite different from most of Orest's writing, and I would like to suggest to you that the mode of presentation in his later works is one of the keys to Orest's strength as an historian

In the seminar room the question about the black eunuch was never answered. It was, however, remembered, and this is certainly more important. In fact, it is Orest's questions to his undergraduates, even more than their or his answers, that remain near the surface of consciousness thirty-five years later. Whatever answers the instructor provided for positivistic students seeking historical truth were, to some, more a source of frustration than enlightenment. He would regularly remind my oft-exasperated classmates that in history there are no answers, only questions, and that the answers to their questions only suggested new questions. This was a quite a contrast to my subsequent experience with Orest's mentor, the late and greatly missed John B. Wolf, who — at least by the time I met him — had abandoned questions entirely, having already satisfied himself that he had found all the answers he required.

If Maitland saw the key to the reign of Elizabeth in an et cetera, it is tempting to build a discussion of Orest Ranum's work around the question mark. In Artisans of Glory, there are at least ninety sentences couched in question form. (Probably there are more, as this count was done by hand late at night, and I no doubt missed some. O for a scanner and the find feature!) This is a remarkable number of questions in a modern work of history, where the interrogative form typically appears only rarely if at all. Some of these questions are rhetorical, quite a number are an ingenious stylistic device to break the monotony of indirect discourse in summarizing authors' writings, and some questions are posed, conventionally, as markers of major topics to be addressed. But a significant proportion of the questions, about a third, are asked and not answered. They raise issues which are never followed up in the text. Sometimes these questions are dismissed as unanswerable in the absence of additional research, sometimes they are called unanswerable period, and sometimes they are just abandoned without further explanation in the subsequent narrative.

No wonder that some readers have been as baffled by Artisans of Glory as were my fellow-students in senior seminar at Columbia. No wonder it was four years before the AHR could find a scholar willing to review it. As once well-know historian protested to me at the time, "Questions are fine, but after 300 pages aren't we also entitled to some answers?" Yet the book has remarkable staying power, as its prominence in the remarks of the panelists today amply demonstrates. Indeed with two decades of hindsight we know that it is in the questions inviting fresh research, the tantalizing issues briefly raised and abandoned, quite as much as in the work's so-called main "theses" or "conclusions," where the book's enduring value lies.

One of Orest's greatest virtues as an historian is that he never has been embarrassed to raise questions and to leave them unresolved. Indeed, one quickly notices with Orest that often he isn't inspired by answers; that it is the historian's quest, not the destination, that matters most; that an answer suggests for him an illusory endpoint on a journey that is never complete but that meanders, loops back on itself, revisits familiar ground for fresh insights, seeks out new territories, but then may return to its very point of departure — before stopping temporarily to write, publish and reduce the alluring uncertainties of the search to the bald fixity of print. Indeed printed historical discourse, with its conventional affectations of linearity, often seems an enemy of his method, one that is far more at home in the free range of oral discourse, where speech may wander at will, unconstrained, and problems may be posed only to be left unresolved or dropped abruptly in favor of additional questions. This is a serenely unideological approach to doing history.

No wonder that Orest was drawn to the study of writers who really were speakers. Panegyrists, orators, poets and playwrights, the subjects of Orest's attention for a decade and a half, were all hamstrung to one degree or another by the bounded nature of the historian's craft in the 17th century. History, unlike poetry and drama, had by then mostly lost its oral dimension; the instruments of the historical métier were the pen and the press. Fish out of water, many of the misplaced artisans Orest studied failed to fulfill the high expectations of kings and ministers. And Racine, the biggest fish of all, was trapped in the belly of the leviathan with no way out and no way back, to the immense loss of the cultural patrimony of humanity. Perhaps if, like Shakespeare, Racine had been encouraged by his monarch to write propagandistic history in dramatic form, the world might have had an Henri IV to compare with the parts of Henry IV. But the Aristotelian rules of the drama and the classical cum humanistic conventions of historiography operative in the court of the Sun King prohibited such blurring of the genres. And we are left with no answers.

One appreciates Orest's work, then, not only for his writings but in the larger context of his contributions as a crucial participant in hundreds of scholarly meetings, as a panelist in the role of acute and attentive commentator, as a bridge across generations, across the Atlantic, and even across the terrifying chasm that separates the two main societies of French historians in North America. He has shined in the collegial domain of the profession's oral culture with his unflagging enthusiasm and energy, his loyalty, his human sympathy, and with the sheer joy he maintains in doing history. His habitual questioning mode has served well in these contexts as aformulator of problems, a stimulator of new thinking and a mediator across cultures.

When one considers how far the practice of early modern French history has come in North America since the 1950's, when a tiny group of founding fathers comprised nearly the full extent of scholarly activity in the field, it is clear that his crucial second generation of disciples was decisive in spreading the faith and institutionalizing it in academe. The giants on whose shoulders we stand, the John Wolfs and Bill Churches, were — it must be said — certain enough of their achievements that they were not especially concerned with developing the necessary elements of an established field of inquiry — journals, professional societies, meetings with room on the program for more than a handful of panels, and so forth.

Orest is among the most prominent of the creative consolidators of the next generation who engineered the explosion of scholarship in the field. His work (and Pat's) as an editor — about which we have already heard — and his entrepreneurial skill and interest in persuading publishers that there is a marketing niche for works in French history opened up vast new publication outlets for younger scholars. And of course as a teacher, not only to generations of students at Columbia and Johns Hopkins, but in countless forums and tetes-a-tetes over the years with young scholars entering the field at professional meetings, in Paris or Baltimore or at Panat, Orest's legacy is remarkably rich. One hardly ever has a conversation with Orest without hearing of his admiration for one or two unknown graduate students or new Ph.D's from universities all over America whose work he has gotten wind of and whose standing in the profession he is determined to advance. Not infrequently, it turns out that these scholars have addressed a problem Orest raised in an essay years before or tossed out in an exchange at a professional meeting. In thus planting seeds, in asking and not telling, in suggesting and leaving it to others to pursue, this questioning dynamo has generated energy enough to fuel scores of careers. In the process he has helped make early modern French history the astonishingly high-powered field that it has become.

From a log cabin in Lyle, Minnesota — a town, I can assure you, next to which Lake Wobegon counts as a major metropolis — to this place today may seem a great distance, and indeed it is. But all along it is the questions that have marked his path. From there to here, and one expects for a long way on, Orest's method as an historian continues to amplify that most famous question of early modern France, "Que sais-je?" May we continue to learn from his further essays both written and spoken.

Joseph Klaits
Director, Jennings Randolph Program for International Peace
United States Institute of Peace
Email: joe_klaits@usip.org