General Crime Topics: A History Perspective

[RonPrice1]

There are writers, argues American writer Raymond Chandler(1888-1959), “who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough.” They possess, he says, a reticence which prevents them from exploiting their own personality or, indeed, the issue of the time. This reticence is, he goes on, “really an inverted form of egotism.” Perhaps. Perhaps, too, the difficulty people have in writing their autobiography or commenting on the criminal element which is always before them in the media is due to the fact that it is the closest one can get to living one’s life over again. For many that is a singularly unattractive notion. The words of Edward Gibbon are also germaine here: “history is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortyunes of mankind.” Many feel, as they approach the end of their days, if not well before, that pattern and meaning elude them.

A new field of history known as the new historicism with a history of a quarter of a century(1982-2007) provides some useful perspectives in this autobiographical search, this search for wy we think the tingswe think. While not wanting to go into detail, not wanting to provide anything approaching a comprehensive study of this new field, I would like to make some general remarks that are relevant to this narrative. This new historicism eschews the use of the term 'man'; interest lies not in the abstract universal but in the particular, in contingent cases, the selves fashioned and acting according to the generative rules, contexts and conflicts of a given culture. These selves, conditioned by the expectations of their class, gender, religion, race and national identity, are constantly effecting changes in the course of history. That is to say, individuals may be conditioned by circumstances, but they have just as much to do with the making of the circumstances. This tautological proposition leads Stephen Greenblatt, one of this school’s major proponents, to assert the new historicism's insistence on the pervasiveness of agency. New historicists stress the idea that everywhere you look in history, there are people, selves or individual agents. They are doing things that affect the course of history.

New historicists stress things, events, activities as they were experienced by people; they stress anecdotes, particularities and stories that might make readers stumble and pause on the threshold of history. I feel I am participating in a small way in an indirect and what for the most part seems like a glacially slow shift in collective understanding. Greenblatt said the same thing in a book called Practicing the New Historicism. This autobiography certainly shares in the new historicist view of things, at least in some ways. The best framework for interpreting a life, these writers and critics argue, is the framework of an historical context and the best way to understand and interpretive the problems and perspectives of an individual or society is through cultural-historical problems.
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And so, as I look back to my early to mid-adolescence, I find an undefined and pervasive quality which binds together the many defined elements, the multitude of focal points that drift into the present from more than forty years ago. There is a sense of an extensive and underlying whole; it operates to deepen and to raise that undefined but enveloping everyday experience that I had all those years ago. I feel it as an expansion of myself; I also feel as if so much of it all was just sound and fury signifying nothing. As Baha'u'llah puts it so eloquently, life is "like a vapour in the desert which the thirsty dreams to be water but when he comes upon it he finds it to be mere illusion." But this participation in life, even then, even in the years 1956 to 1959, brings to me now forty years later, as I sit in this small Tasmanian town in mid-summer, "a peculiarly satisfying sense of unity." My several and varied sensibilities seem to go back insensibly to these years. That which I should have done and haven't; that which I shouldn't have done and did are part of the picture in all our lives and they make up what is our unique style of life, a unique personality. The process is often, if not always, chaotic, puzzling and vast. It is essentially interpretive story telling drawing on an empirical base called the life one has lived. Perhaps Alan Williamson was right when he wrote that "the most interesting technical development in American poetry in the last two decades of the twentieth century would be the refinement of largely autobiographical poetry." There is an ironic twist in our global society, or at least the part I live in, and that is that in the midst of the refining, the civilizing process that is taking place, there is much that is disintegrating. One of the characteristics of my work is to be conscious of both these tendencies. This is part of the backdrop that makes society, as Saul Bellow said in his 1976 Nobel Prize speech, so difficult to define and describe with its private disorder and public bewilderment.

I give one of the final words in this chapter of days long gone to Rudyard Kipling who wrote:
I see a store of ingots
of spice and precious stones.
It is these that I have gathered
with the help of my dear bones.

And this poem, written about a year after my retirement, puts the years 1958 and 1959 and perhaps as far as 1974 into yet another perspective:

...enough for now...Ron Price