Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Or, From Crimea to Prussia to Scienceblogs

As an understatement, I can say this: I've been overwhelmed of late. All of these questions Morris raises about Fenton and the cannonballs of Sebastopol and I'm not even halfway through discussing them. And to think that my interest in Morris really got going when it coincided with the discussion brought up by Daston and Galison in their Objectivity. In the meantime, and as briefly alluded to in Part 3, I picked up Richard Powers's first novel again, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. And that's where I got overwhelmed. Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance is about photography, truth, the nature of inquiry--pretty much everything Morris's essays are about.

Powers' narrator comes across this picture in Detroit on his travels back East:

It's a Gelatin silver print by August Sander, a German photographer (per The Getty Museum).

Sander took the picture in Prussia at a moment that turned out to be the precipice of the First World War. Who were these people, what were they doing, why was the picture taken, and what do answers to any of those questions tell us about humanity? Errol Morris asks about Fenton's photographs ostensibly to find out what's true. That quickly leads to the bigger question, which was what is the nature of the relationship between truth and evidence? Or at least that's how Morris's essays ended up being interpreted by me. Powers writes a novel whose prompt is the picture above. I'll say more about the book in future posts, but for now let me say that he goes on from this prompt to work over the minor questions--who were these people, what were they doing, why was the picture taken--on his way to a bigger exploration, a meditation on the nature of truth and evidence. Who are we, what is this world, and how do we know? No small set of questions, those.

Powers's book is fiction; Morris's essays are not. Powers wrote about 25 years ago; Morris, last year.

The Powers narrator realizes about halfway through the book that he had been tracking down the meaning of the picture "for several months...obsessed with finding the exact message the image meant to send me" (p. 209). Morris spent the better part of 4 or 5 months traveling halfway across the world to take measurements and observer firsthand the road in Sebastopol to find what the images meant to him and why he was so instantly obsessed with determining which came first, Cannonballs-ON or Cannonballs-OFF.

Powers writes that Sander recalled how, when still a boy, he "was struck by how human invention could stop the fluctuations of nature and make permanent even those qualities as accidental as the shadows of moving clouds" (p. 40). One of Morris's best clues early on in his investigation was to identify the shadows from the cannonballs, seeking from that to figure out which came from a noon-day sun, a morning sun, or an afternoon sun--and thus which was first and which was staged. Although 172 of Morris's readers believed that was the way to figure it out (he has pie charts and data here), in the end, it was a false lead. The shadows of moving clouds...that was the trouble. The clouds move and mute shadows and prevent a clear sense of the time of day. Gaging shadows would only help if it was a clear day, which it wasn't.

That Morris makes no reference to Powers in not surprising or even that noteworthy. He wrote a series of longish essays. He doesn't have to cite everything a reader comes upon. But that none of his 1400 repliers appear to have discussed Powers is very surprising to me.

At the beginning of Three Farmers, I started to imagine that the pictures were of the same thing. Fenton's Crimean War image was an image of the same road those Farmers walked on in the days before the First World War. By the end of the book, I got worried that I was connected too. I'm now into the second month of contemplating the Morris Essays and the Powers Book and there's more time ahead.

If I'm not overwhelmed further by seeing myself inside the nexus, then I'll continue soon. That I already have to hold Morris, Sontag, Daston/Galison, Jason Delborne, David Foster Wallace, Dostoevsky, and Powers together is difficult enough. Or, fun enough.