THE NEW WORLD OF THE GOTHIC FOX
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turn raises the questions as to how one should understand historic events,
what is historical explanation, what makes it possible to grasp history
and
to
see it as a whole.
It
seems to me, and I am sure Veliz will agree, that there is no hope
of a science of history. Every attempt to produce one leads to another
collection of metaphors, such as those that you find in the "theory" of
Karl Marx, or those which you find in Hegel and in his latter-day
offshoots, such as Spengler. Historians who give us the promised
explanation of the whole of things do so not by giving scientific theories
by which to explain the underlying causes, but by assimilating things into
Gestalten,
which enable us to latch on to them in our experience and
feel comfortable with them.
It
is like a character assessment of a person:
we are not really explaining his behavior so much as bringing it together
in a unit which will enable us to react towards him in a coherent way.
This is perhaps what the best kind of history does.
Veliz uses categories from art history and cultural history, both of
which have been much infected by the post-Hegelian wave of German
scholarship.
In
particular, he relies heavily on the category of the
Baroque, which, as he remarks, comes to us from Burckhardt and his
contemporaries and was made into a central notion of art history by
W61ffiin. Veliz also uses the concept of the Gothic, taking it largely
from the exponents of the Gothic revival like Ruskin and Fosillon, and
incorporating Nikolaus Pevsner's reflections on the Englishness of English
art. This very eclectic collection of metaphors and categories is brought
together in an attempt to answer a very pertinent question: namely, why
are things as they are here in North America and as they are there in
South America? And, we might add, why is it that the North has an
immigration problem and the South does not?
I
don't find the metaphor from Archilochus quite as useful as Veliz
does, partly because
I
have never been convinced that hedgehogs know
anything at all, let alone one big thing.
It
is true that they curl up when
attacked -
I
suppose that is what Archilochus had in mind - a procedure
which is invariably fatal in the modern world.
It
is true that foxes seem
to know quite a lot, but
I
don't really think that either animal
illustrates what Veliz has in mind when he contrasts the centralizing
tendency of the Spanish civilization in the Indies with the diversified and
proliferating tendencies of the English-speaking civilization to the north
of it.
I have also never been very happy with the concept of the Baroque
as art historians employ it, although I think Veliz has been decisively
guided by W6lffiin's definition: "The Baroque firmly repudiated the
