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The Professor and the Madman ::
It was Jessamyn who told me about the literary phenomenon of “pop history.” This is that strain of book that tells (or sometimes retells) the story of a historical event with a tone that is updated, a narrative that is intensified, and a series of characters that are complex and compelling. It seems to be an attempt on the part of the publishing industry to make history marketable. There has been no shortage of “pop history” books in the past decade, and The Professor and the Madman is one of them. It chronicles the story of William C. Minor, who was one of the most prolific contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, and was also insane. He performed his work while incarcerated in an insane asylum. He was a murderer, and it seemed that he was attracted to working on the OED for a number of reasons, but chiefly because he found the work redeeming. He needed a way to make up for the awful things he had done.
While the story was seductive, I felt a certain wariness about the whole affair, which goes beyond just this one book. The “pop history” phenomenon seems somehow dangerous -- in order to create a story that people will find interesting to read, an author must find some new fact that is tantalizing, compelling or, sometimes, even tawdry. And, if all of history is actually the collection of our stories of what has happened to us, such tawdry details wind up having an effect on our stories, and thus how we conceive of ourselves. Which isn’t intrinsically bad, but we do run the risk of cheapening the story. So while books like this one make for great reading, and they make us feel intelligent and knowledgeable after we read them, we must be careful not to take them very seriously. Which is no different from all of commercial literature, I suppose.
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