Richard White

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Richard White | Creative Misunderstandings and New Understandings | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.1 | The History Cooperative

Creative Misunderstandings and New Understandings

SINCE I wrote The Middle Ground, it has taken on something of a life of its own. I really do believe that once a book is published, it stands in relation to intelligent readers the way an exam stands in relation to a professor. The refrain professors tell students—"I have no way of judging you on what you intended to say, I can only grade what you wrote"—can come back to haunt professorial authors. What I intended to say in The Middle Ground may be of some interest to you, yet what matters is the text: what I wrote. I am also enfeebled as an authority about The Middle Ground because of the thesis of the book. This book is, among other things, about mutual misunderstandings and the ways that new meanings are derived from them. It is about the virtues of misreading, which puts an author who accuses his readers of misreading in something of an awkward position. I think that there have been misreadings of the book, but one of my points is that such misreadings can be fruitful in their own right.	1
The phrase "middle ground," I realize now in ways that I did not really fully comprehend when writing the book, had twinned meanings. First, I was trying to describe a process that arose from the "willingness of those who ... [sought] to justify their own actions in terms of what they perceived to be their partner's cultural premises." These actors sought out cultural "congruences, either perceived or actual," that "often seemed—and, indeed, were—results of misunderstandings or accidents." Such interpretations could be ludicrous, but it did not matter. "Any congruence, no matter how tenuous, can be put to work and can take on a life of its own if it is accepted by both sides." The middle ground is thus a process of mutual and creative misunderstanding.¹	2
Second, I was trying to describe—and this attempt took up the bulk of the book—a quite particular historical space that was the outcome of this process. This place was the pays d'en haut. Because the middle ground is itself a spatial metaphor, the phrase has allowed a conflation between the process of expedient and creative misunderstanding and the actual space that I was discussing: the pays d'en haut, or the Upper Country of French Canada.	3
So, do I think that the middle ground as a process is replicable in other places and other times? Yes, I do. Is every instance where academics find this process at work the equivalent of the Upper Country? No, but sometimes other academics might think so. I was fairly specific about the elements that were necessary for the construction of such a space: a rough balance of power, mutual need or a desire for what the other possesses, and an inability by either side to commandeer enough force to compel the other to change. Force and violence are hardly foreign to the process of creating and maintaining a middle ground, but the critical element is mediation.	4
Other scholars have identified the process at work in places about which I know relatively little. I have absolutely no desire to become chief judge in the court of the middle ground. I think that the process is, if not a universal aspect of human communication and interaction, a common one. I am thus more than willing to think such scholarly sightings are correct.	5
The middle ground as process is quite common, yet the construction of a historical space in which the process becomes the basis of relations between distinct peoples is probably less common. This construction of space occurred in other places in North America, the region I know best, but it did not occur everywhere. There are instances where the process can be evident, but the space may fail to emerge. The space depended on the creation of an infrastructure that could support and expand the process, and this infrastructure was, I argue, possible only when there was a rough balance of power and a mutual need between the parties involved.	. . .

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