Icarus' flight - On the dialogue between the historian and the historical actor

In this paper, I consider Thomas Soderquist's recent call for a biographica l approach to historical narrative. He stresses in particular the need to p ay greater attention to the existential struggles of our historical actors. Echoing Raphael Samuel, he argues that this will help us to move away from the hermeneutic of suspicion, which underlies the dominant sociological ap proach, toward a hermeneutic of edification. Ultimately, this approach will reestablish the moral purpose of historiography which has been lost in the search for objectivity. While agreeing with the ultimate goal, I argue tha t Soderquist's fundamentally conservative approach cannot produce edificati on. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul De Man and Jacques Derrida, I call instead for a more reflexive approach which is conscious of the performativ e character of historiography. I outline this alternative by seeking to rec onstruct the life of Percy Lockhart-Mummery, a renown British surgeon who w rote widely on cancer, natural history and the future of humanity. I focus in particular on the struggle to find a unifying theme which might resolve some tensions in Mummery's texts, tensions about the modern search for cert ain knowledge, asking where exactly lies the difficulty, with the historica l actor or the historian, While the emphasis placed on performance must inv olve the dissolution of the reflecting self, I conclude that historical nar rative can only edify if it speaks about the search for knowledge of its el usive, evanescent author.