INTRODUCTION

Facing Page: Poster design for the conference Doing Documentary Work at the University of Michigan, March 4-6, 2004.

The work on this special issue of Michigan Quarterly Review grows from a couple of decades of conversation between the editors about the places where the social sciences and the arts intersect. What started as discussions over the backyard fence about methodology and passionate involvement with sources—people interviewed, sites needing to be recorded for posterity, dusty letters and newspapers dug out of obscure archives—became more formal as definitions of the documentary imagination became apparent and compelling to us. When the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, a University of Michigan research and training center funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, made it possible to act on our thoughts, we borrowed the title of Robert Coles's 1997 book, Doing Documentary Work, and organized a three-day conference in March 2004 where we deliberately put anthropologists, sociologists, and historians beside novelists, poets, and literary essayists. Though it might be difficult to define precisely what we discovered by that combination, it was very clear that people from these different disciplines were talking to each other from at least a few shared perspectives. We also wanted to highlight the similar work DoubleTake magazine had accomplished over the previous decade. Sadly, the discussion with DoubleTake editors at that conference became one of the last public manifestations of the magazine, before it entered an extended hiatus.

Early in Doing Documentary Work Coles provides the beginnings of a definition:

Of course Coles quickly confronts the issue that intrigued James Agee and just about every other documentarian. What happens when those irresistible ideas, observations, or opinions that "one brings personally" change our understanding of the people or place we are observing? Does the intrusion of aesthetic considerations alter the sense of "the growing accuracy" that Coles values? Does the need for that accuracy diminish the artistic merit of the work?

Jonathan Raban, in what might have been called the keynote address to our conference and which we have reconstructed here from his draft and notes, questioned the effectiveness of the documentary impulse, finally finding artistic criteria more effective for an engagement with the material of the lived and imagined world. In an e-mail message to us, Raban writes: "I've never thought of myself as a documentarian: I do far too much messing around with the life I write about for that."

Nonetheless, there does seem to be a sense of unity in practice, even if we have some difficulty delineating what that might be. William Stott, author of Documentary Expression and Thirties America and whom the Time Literary Supplement once labeled "the Aristotle of documentary," begins an essay that will appear in the second of our issues on "The Documentary Imagination" (MQR, Winter 2006) by listing the "fields of documentary, oral history, first-person reportage, case-study and participant-observer social science, and human-interest journalism" as the areas of interest in his discussion. At the end of Doing Documentary Work, in his practical discussion of "Documentary Studies," Robert Coles expands the lists of things we might consider as documentary to include not only the works of interviews and interpretation like those of James Agee and George Orwell, but also novels like Middlemarch, War and Peace,and Ragtime. He includes the poetry of William Carlos Williams and also that of Jane Kenyon. It might seem as if the definitions were getting so inclusive as to become meaningless.

In our own selection of pieces for these special issues of MQR, we intentionally left definition-making to others. Definitions and their necessarily abrupt boundaries simultaneously invite argument and cry out for exemption. Is Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year documentary or not for being a work of the imagination? Can poems—Williams's Paterson or Thomas McGrath's Letter to an Imaginary Friend, for example—be rooted in a profoundly documentary consciousness? Rather than engage in the walking of fence lines required by definitional rigor, we have chosen the more pleasurable task of exploring the ground itself. We early on committed ourselves to an inclusiveness that would give us the chance to ask ourselves questions of continuity and connection, both within and across as many distinct genres as we could. Our title, "The Documentary Imagination," is itself intended to draw attention to an underlying inspiration or angle of vision that might be summed up in an engagement with the real.

Agee, who appears on nearly every short list of documentary guides, wrote about that engagement in his unsuccessful 1937 application for a Guggenheim Fellowship to, among other things, complete the work that he called the "Alabama Record":

And in the work that the "Alabama Record" was to become, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, he writes how "a house or a person has only the most limited of his meaning through" the writer or artist; "his true meaning is much huger," he continues. "It is that he exists. . . . His great weight, mystery and dignity are in this fact."

All of this is to say that the documentary imagination states an orientation absent a final word. The reality to which it is finally tethered, regardless of the length of the binding cord, is too infused with meaning to be exhausted by any one treatment. And so, the documentary imagination is not interested in explanation as much as depiction. As Rowan Williams puts it in his new book, Grace and Necessity, "every human desire or disposition signifies, and so is worth narrating." In such a world, "explanation is reduction; it is trying to contain another in your own identity." Agee's anxieties very much turned on his need to resist so using his subjects.

To document is to preserve and prolong memory, whether through the evanescence of oral report or the hard chiseling of the name on a tombstone. This theme—attention to the past and to the presence of the dead among the living—animates many of the writings collected here, most pointedly and obviously in the essays by Mark Auslander and Eileen Pollack. And documents are things in themselves. Maps, letters, photographs, transcripts, manuscripts, police reports, genealogies, the foundational texts of literary genius. We collect examples of these, too, from rediscovered early poems of Theodore Roethke, to an interview with Barry Lopez, and Raban's unedited lecture notes.

Agee's reference to "a skeptical study of the nature of reality" extends to the interplay of documents themselves. The short story by Melodie Edwards, for example, features both a map—an emblematic representation of the real—that leads the protagonist to an amazing treasure, as well as journal entries from a bygone century that explain the origin of an ancient beating heart central to the story. As the story's main character moves ever closer to the heart of mystery, the meticulously observed and fully real southwestern American landscape is transformed into a virtually imaginary realm. This weaving of document and potential fantasy occurs, too, in Robert Boyers's short story, which turns on a fictitious young man and a woman named Lydia. It's useful to know that Lydia is the name of a character in José Saramago's novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Saramago took her name, if little else, from a number of poems addressed to her by the great Portuguese poet Ricardo Reis, himself a fictitious character invented by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who published whole volumes of his poems under a variety of pseudonyms. Saramago's novel plays with the relationship between Reis and his creator, Pessoa, while also developing the relationship between Reis and Lydia in ways not at all present in Reis's poems. Boyers compounds this sense of whirl by himself taking Lydia into a relationship not at all indicated in the Saramago novel. Such complications further loosen the tether binding document and reality. They lead us to questions about documents reflecting documents, the essential dynamic of fiction, indeed of all literature.

In many texts in this issue, then, the apparent concreteness of things—the inspiring source, the resulting created object—can evoke further orders of complication when their hidden histories are exhumed. Erik Mueggler takes up this theme of documents as products of a documenting consciousness, produced out of the intimacies of biography and relationship that are usually lost to their readers. His remarkable account of confluent themes in the life, work, and letters of Frank Ward, botanical and geographical explorer and documentarian of northeast Yunnan and southeast Tibet, draws landscape, archive, reading, and love into a common documentary and familial imagination. To borrow again from Agee, we might say that the documentarian also has a "true meaning" and that meaning, too, "is much huger."

Imagination might be distinguished from fantasy by the requirement that it work with the real. And yet even here, the unreliability of "the real"—or perhaps the excess of meaning that infuses it, as Agee implies—causes us to be wary of even the most image-laden of documents. Even photographs turn into the ambiguous "melancholy objects" that Susan Sontag called them in her 1977 study, On Photography. Here, Barry Goldensohn's attention to the sleight-of-hand used by Nazi bureaucrats in the reams of paperwork that ordered and organized the Holocaust offers its own window on both the frustrations and the interpretive necessity of our documentary engagements. What did those administrators think they were doing? Tom Pohrt's assemblage of Cuban photographs, acquired from street vendors and private sellers, include the professionally composed (lighthouses in 1859, the photograph of Ernest Hemingway) as well as vernacular documentary practices embodied in snapshots from the Cuban Revolution. These latter, which set Che Guevara in the context of his variously posed companions, document a moment when Guevara's iconic image had not yet come to signify revolution and allow for further imaginings on this cusp of the real.

In addition to things, documentary imaginings adhere to events. Some of these achieve their meanings through their very everydayness; others more momentously turn on the pivot of an epoch-making awareness. Thomas Lynch's two poems—one occasioned by the dedication of a local library, the other by the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001—convey the means by which a documentary imagination can approach these wild extremes in full recognition of the "great weight, mystery and dignity" that Agee calls for in documentary work.

And one final example. We have chosen as our cover design John Singer Sargent's painting of 1918, "Gassed," the timely subject of Steve Gehrke's poem of the same title. Gehrke articulates in fine detail the relation of the artistic imagination to the pathetic and inescapable suffering of his unwitting models:

If Sargent documents the wounded soldiers, so Gehrke produces from Sargent's document something imagined in our own time, a "text, written a century later by a man // with a book of paintings open on his desk." Of crucial importance: "Gassed" is a text that will not let its admirers escape from the horror it both documents and imagines.

It remains our hope that the kinds of material presented here and in the next issue of Michigan Quarterly Review—personal essays, the creation of documents in interviews, the discovery of archival material, photographs both new and rediscovered, poetry of witness and of observation, the fictional use of documentary "authority"—all contribute to the sense of that intellectual and imaginative space where fact and interpretation intersect with a passionate involvement with the things of this world.

A last word of thanks. Not only did the financial support of the University of Michigan's Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life make possible the conference that brought forth these two special issues of MQR, its continuing interest in those forms of documentary inquiry that bring social science and the arts into conversation is made tangible, yet again, by a grant in aid of publication. The Center is itself funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation through its program on working families.