KARL’S FOREWORD TO DAN POTTS’S Tepe Yahya monograph began with a quote from Paul de Man. “What is at stake is not only the distance that shelters the author of autobiography from his experience but the possible convergence of aesthetics and of history.”
I had been looking in the Tepe Yahya monographs for the photograph of Jane lying down in front of the Land Rover to see if it was really as different from Arthur Bankoff’s print as I remembered when I was struck by that opening quote and the section that followed. It seemed to me that Karl was highlighting exactly what others had accused him of: that people can cushion themselves from the reality of their experience by living inside narrative.
Karl made the case that the value of a story lay in its durability as much as its accuracy. He brought up Heinrich Schliemann, who became world-famous for his excavation of Troy. Few cared about his site report or about the reports that came from later archaeologists excavating the area. Instead, what people remembered was Schliemann’s idea that he excavated Troy.
Karl did not mention that Schliemann’s Troy was likely not Troy at all, and that his method of excavation destroyed any chances for future archaeologists to reinvestigate. Schliemann has been described as a “relentlessly self-promoting amateur archaeologist.” However, I got the sense that these details only further proved Karl’s point: Schliemann’s narrative mattered more than the disappointing truth of facts.
Karl contended that it was impossible to separate archaeology and storytelling. Yes, artifacts existed and data could be recovered, but the archaeologist’s job was to give those artifacts meaning—to tell their story. “Artifacts recovered by archaeologists are situated in three dimensions. They are produced within the context of a long past world, recovered as objects within our present world, and offered an interpretation, or a ‘meaning,’ which may, or may not belong to either world.” In short, Karl wrote, “All archaeology is the re-enactment of past thoughts in the archaeologist’s own mind.”
I later recounted this all to my friend Ben. Ben, the son of a literature professor, stopped me when I said the opening quote was by Paul de Man. “You know who that is, right?” he asked. I didn’t. De Man, he told me, had been one of the most important figures in literary theory, but a few years after his death, a graduate student discovered that de Man had written a weekly column for a pro-Nazi paper in Belgium. That finding led to the unraveling of de Man’s carefully constructed identity, and his name had become synonymous with duplicity. As Harper’s Christine Smallwood put it, de Man was “a slippery Mr. Ripley, a confidence man, and a hustler who embezzled, lied, forged, and arreared his way to intellectual acclaim.” De Man’s double life was discovered in 1987; Karl quoted him in 2001.
Karl, it occurred to me, was too smart for this parallel not to mean anything. It seemed like he was purposefully dropping crumbs and had just been waiting for someone like me to find these quotes and arrange the ellipses. I felt left with three possibilities: Karl really was guilty and brazenly taunted people with his invincibility. He was innocent and both courted and crafted his reputation as a suspected villain. Or, of course, the third possibility: I was the one trapped in a game of symbols of my own invention, finding meaning where there was none to be found.