Living Outside History

Noel Polk’s lecture “Living Outside of History” was concerned with social identity, alienation and guilt, both collective and personal. A central theme of his seminar was reconciling the past with the present. The life experiences that he shared illustrated his theories on how personal connections (or lack of) with history influence identity and personal feelings of guilt and alienation in the present. His lecture used life experience to perform the same function as theory, acting as a framework for navigating these issues.
The first experience he recounted was his childhood living in the Mississippi. He described himself and his town as being geographically southern but not connected to the “myth of the south.” By this he means that neither he nor his town had any connection to the civil war, the history of plantations and slavery or, as he argued, to the racial tensions prevalent in other cities in the south. He pointed out that he does not identify himself as a southerner. This is an identity imposed on him by others. Yet despite his lack of connection to the myth and history of the south he says he has learnt that “I would always be tarred with it no matter what I did.”
The second story he told was about his relationship with his father. His father had served in the Second World War and unknowingly suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Polk described his father as a man who would have unexplainable and unpredictable outburst of anger.
The stories that Polk shared were obviously chosen to illustrate his point about guilt and identity, wether they come from within or are imposed from the outside. His life lived “outside of history” gave him a unique perspective on the racial tension of the south, yet he struggled to know what to do about them because he could not give these events context, in his words he lacked “a solid place from which to look.” His point being that a person’s lack of connection to the history of place or institution such as slavery does not remove them from its reality in the present. While he did not have a connection to slavery in the past, he was a part of its history because he was witness to its legacy in the present.
Polk’s lecture could have been read as an entertaining but inconclusive narrative about a life lived geographically close to historically and culturally significant events but never tangibly connected to them. The key to understanding his lecture came when he talked about his father. He speculated as to whether or not knowing about his father’s mental illness would have helped his relationship with his father. He admitted that it probably would have but the he was glad he did not know, because knowing would have compelled him to sympathise with his abuser. Not knowing allowed him to resent his father without guilt. It seems that he was arguing that wilful ignorance of the past or denial of one’s involvement in the present is rarely constructive when engaging with complicated issues like guilt or personal identity. Life experience functioned in the same way as a critical theory. It was a way of drawing out the very complex issues that arise out of everyday life.