Reading the New York Times a few weeks back, I stumbled upon an article that made me think about the kind of research we are hoping to make possible through our efforts at Foreign Literatures in America. It was about the difficulties, blind-alleys, red-herrings, and utterly unbelievable coincidences that are now such a defining part of historical scholarship on the assassination of President Kennedy. The Times reproduced a six minute film by Errol Morris about the mystery of a man seen standing under an umbrella on the infamous “grassy knoll” that sunny day in Dallas. Much research and speculation went into discovering the meaning of “The Umbrella Man” before an explanation was finally discovered. Morris poses the question in his Times commentary on the film: What is it about these small details in the historical record that lead “not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?” As scholars, we are all on the scent of our own “Umbrella Man,” chasing down a seemingly endless stream of small details in an effort to come up with the most possible of all possible solutions. As a project, FLA is trying to make it easier for those of us chasing down the details about the arrival of foreign literature in America to find each and every morsel of this evidence. Further, we are trying to provide digital tools to make visible micro-patterns in these details that might not be apparent “to the naked eye.”
Errol’s film is very much concerned with this difference between what is visible on the surface and what is only visible with the aid of microscopic investigations. Much of the film is an interview with JFK assassination investigator Josiah “Tink” Thompson. After Thompson first identified “the umbrella man,” theories about this man abounded. Thompson asked for the real umbrella man to step forward. When he did, Louie Steven Witt explained that he brought the umbrella with him that day as a reference to the umbrella carried by Neville Chamberlain and as a protest against the appeasement policies of Kennedy’s father, Joseph Kennedy, during the Second World War. In the film, Thompson points out that this explanation is “wacky enough it has to be true” and that Witt’s existence should be a cautionary tale to all historians. The true story behind “the umbrella man” makes the point that “you can never on your own think up all the non-sinister, perfectly valid explanations for that fact.”
According to Thompson, John Updike wrote about “the umbrella man” in 1967. Updike’s argument is interesting*, but I prefer Thompson’s more colloquial phrasing: “In historical research, there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality. If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there is the macro-level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws, the usual things happen, and unusual things don’t happen, and then there’s this other level where everything is really weird.” In a way, FLA is trying to make possible just this kind of research – the “quantum dimension” of historical research on the reception of foreign authors in America. We hope to find as much of the really weird stuff as we can.
*Updike wrote: “We wonder whether a genuine mystery is being concealed here or whether any similar scrutiny of a minute section of time and space would yield similar strangenesses—gaps, inconsistencies, warps, and bubbles in the surface of circumstance. Perhaps, as with the elements of matter, investigation passes a threshold of common sense and enters a sub-atomic realm where laws are mocked, where persons have the life-span of beta particles and the transparency of neutrinos, and where a rough kind of averaging out must substitute for absolute truth. The truth about those seconds in Dallas is especially elusive; the search for it seems to demonstrate how perilously empiricism verges on magic.”
Rebecca Borden is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of Maryland. Foreign Literatures in America is a project directed by MITH Faculty Fellow Peter Mallios. Read more about FLA here.