History Unclassified Darkness at Noon: On History, Narrative, and Domestic Violence
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History Unclassified
Darkness at Noon: On History, Narrative,
and Domestic Violence
JOY NEUMEYER
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I AWOKE TO THE SENSATION of a hand around my throat. As my eyes struggled to adjust to
the light, the hand dragged me sideways, up, out of bed. The head attached to the hand
had the face of a person I loved. His dark eyes were emanating a furious rage. In his
other hand he held a belt. “Take your clothes off,” he said. He called me a whore and a
liar and ordered me to strip naked so that he could beat me black-and-blue. There was
an electricity in the air that I would come to recognize as the current of violence. When
it arrives, the world falls into shadow. It’s like a solar eclipse, the moment you realize
that someone you trust might kill you.
One morning as I was making breakfast in his apartment, he told me that he would
bash my head in with a hammer so that my brains came out like scrambled eggs. I stared
at the pan in front of me, swirling the yellow yolks as they congealed. I heard the words,
but it was as if they had been spoken to someone else. I was there, but I also wasn’t. “Ia
ne ia, loshad’ ne moia,” goes a Russian saying of denial—“I am not me, the horse is not
mine.” I once read it in the transcript of a Central Committee meeting in which the Old
Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin was accused of plotting against Stalin. That semester I was
a teaching assistant for UC Berkeley’s course in Soviet history, my area of expertise.
One of the works I discussed with my students was Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koes-
tler’s novel inspired by Bukharin’s plight. Bukharin eventually confessed to having
questioned the great genius of the revolution, who embodied the spirit of history and
whose judgment could never be challenged. Bukharin begged his comrade for forgive-
ness. His self-abnegation did not bring mercy; he was shot anyway.
Two and a half years before that hand woke me, I had begun my PhD at Berkeley
with a seminar on twentieth-century Europe. The course was taught by a kind professor
with wrinkled shirts and a weary air. We began the semester with a book about the
Thanks to Hilary Lynd and Bathsheba Demuth for editing advice and much more. Thanks also to UC Berke-
ley’s Path to Care Center and the Family Violence Law Center in Oakland for their advocacy on behalf of sur-
vivors of sexual and intimate partner violence. I am grateful to Kate Brown and Alex Lichtenstein for their
support of this essay and help in revising it. Extra appreciation is due to Ethan Pollock, who, when I men-
tioned the possible risks involved in publishing such a thing, suggested I consider the risk of not doing so. If
you are experiencing abuse or are concerned about someone you know, call the National Domestic Violence
Hotline (1-800-799-7233) or visit http://www.thehotline.org.
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical
Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
700Darkness at Noon 701
buildup to World War I. After three hundred pages of diplomatic breakdowns, missed
opportunities, and dreams of violence, the author reached his conclusion: that the Euro-
pean monarchs and those who served them were sleepwalkers, stumbling bleary-eyed
into a conflict that would take over eighteen million lives. We dismissed this conclusion
—it deprived the actors of any agency. Through the final moments, when Kaiser Wil-
helm cabled his Russian cousin Nicky that Germany was mobilized for war, there were
choices with consequences. What was the point of studying the past if all that could be
said was that its players were asleep?
This same professor, upon discovering that we hadn’t heard of yet another essential
monograph, historian, or event, was fond of getting up to write a name on the board.
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Early in the semester, he explained how the Annales school had brought a social scien-
tist’s eye to the study of the past, tracing both long-term developments and short-term
contingencies. The longue durée was the ocean, he said; the events were the waves. On
another occasion, he approvingly wrote the name of Leopold von Ranke, the pioneer of
positivist history. This historian had an old-school allegiance to facts. He placed a pre-
mium on names, dates, and places and asked us to assemble them in a way that made
the past comprehensible.
In a methodology course, we discussed how conceptions of history were themselves
historical, as subject to flux as the political systems they buttressed and brought down.
We read Hegel’s notion of history as providence, a divine truth realized in a predestined
arc. We saw Marx transform this idea into his doctrine of communism as historical
inevitability. We followed Freud to the unconscious, whose desires offered an unsettling
new explanation for the forces that shape human societies at the turn of the twentieth
century. We studied R. G. Collingwood, who in the late 1930s—as history was losing
out to physics as arbiter of the real—envisioned the historian sifting through sources to
reach a conclusion as clear and incontestable as a mathematical proof. We witnessed
Hannah Arendt proclaim the impossibility of objectivity after the splitting of the atom.
We moved to the poststructuralists, who saw discourse all the way down. We ended up
at Hayden White’s conception of history as narrative. For White, the past is chaos, a sea
of disparate facts on which historians impose order in the form of a literary plot. The
form is the content.
What I came to know and love at Berkeley was usually closest to this last version.
Over the next several years of coursework, I learned that the historian’s job was to be ecu-
menical. Was Stalinism a system of top-down oppression or a galvanizing mass move-
ment? Tragedy or romance? There was no immutable answer—it all depended on who
told the most compelling tale. In seminars, we picked apart books based on the strength
of their narratives, on how well they spun facts into story. I wrote a paper about late So-
viet history and called it a tragic farce. I didn’t know that soon my own life would dis-
solve into a set of competing narratives and that my survival would depend on the telling.
IN FALL 2016, I STARTED GOING OUT with a friend in the PhD program. We first met at ad-
mitted students day, when we were both gobbling down the appetizers that were going
cold. I liked him right away. Over the next several years, we took classes together, cele-
brated our triumphs, and pitied our failures. My friends asked when we would finally
start going out. It happened soon after the night Donald Trump was elected, an event
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2021702 Joy Neumeyer
we watched unfold in shared shock and grief. The world felt like it was falling apart,
but one tiny piece of it was coming together.
Almost immediately, his behavior toward me started to change. If I was a few
minutes late, I would receive a suspicious text asking who I was with and what I was
doing. He explained that it had been hard to see me going out with other people while
we were friends and asked for my patience. I agreed. He began to talk about how I had
ignored him in favor of sleeping with other men. I knew it wasn’t true, but I started to
doubt myself. Maybe I really hadn’t paid enough attention to him.
A few weeks into our relationship, we were having dinner at a friend’s house. She
disagreed with him in a discussion; he thought I had taken her side and stormed out. I
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followed him onto the street. Before I knew it, he had shoved me with all his strength. I
staggered backward, stunned. He said that he had barely touched me, that I was imagin-
ing things. When I didn’t calm down, he said he was sorry. It would never happen
again, and I must never speak of it. I nodded, trying to understand. I had known him for
years. Of course it wouldn’t.
And so my life began to change, faster than I ever could have predicted. As winter
turned to spring, he shoved me down stairs, slammed me up against walls, tried to
choke me, called me a whore, broke my things, dumped beer on me, followed me,
threatened to kill me, and ordered me not to call the police. He attacked me on campus,
on the street, and at our apartments—though only when we were alone or among strang-
ers. Afterward, he would cry like a little boy and threaten suicide, prompting my con-
cern to shift to him. He would say that he was sick, that he was sorry, that it hadn’t been
that bad, that I was privileged and didn’t understand real pain, that it had been my fault,
that it hadn’t happened at all. I did whatever I could think of to keep him from getting
angry again. It was never enough.
At dusk, as the golden light faded over San Francisco Bay, the birds on Berkeley’s
campus would moan in a low, sorrowful sound. They were mourning doves, named for
their grieving call. As I listened to their song, my heart pounded with the fear and shame
of what evening might bring. One morning I looked in the mirror and saw bruises from
the night before, when he had told me he was going to choke me to death. I had passed
into a shadow world, one where I didn’t know the rules. I put on long sleeves and tried
to forget—I had to go hold office hours. No one could know what was happening to
me; the best I could do was to heed his narrative and hope for mercy. I taught my Soviet
history students about utopian belief and revolution betrayed. I smiled and nodded and
graded exams.
In stolen moments on secluded benches, I whispered details to a handful of friends.
They told me that I was in danger and had to get out. As rumors of the abuse began to
circulate in our community, he attempted to control the story, telling others what a hard
life he’d had and soliciting support on social media for his mental health issues (while
concealing his violence). Faculty members made efforts to keep me safe: As I tried to
flee his stalking, they helped secure me a secret place to stay and moved the location of
my PhD qualifying exam so that he couldn’t find me. At the same time, however, they
also tried to look out for him. One day over the phone I attempted to give a professor a
fuller picture of what was happening. She focused her concern on my boyfriend’s men-
tal health and his right to privacy. I heard in her words an echo of his, and concluded
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2021Darkness at Noon 703
that those worried about his welfare must be right. By the time I hung up I had decided
not to file for a restraining order.
The last time he hurt me, I tried to run. He locked the door behind him and shook
his head. “You’re not going anywhere,” he said. As I looked into his eyes, I felt it: I
was going to die now. For several minutes, I begged him to let me go. Finally, he
opened the door. He collapsed on the ground and burst into tears like he had so many
times before. I pulled him up and put him in bed. As I lay beside him that night, I vowed
to myself that I would escape. If I waited much longer, I might never get the chance.
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IN THE PREFACE TO REQUIEM, Anna Akhmatova’s work of poetry about Stalin’s Terror, she
describes standing in line with the other wives and mothers of those who have been taken
away. Day after day, they wait on exhausted legs for news that will never come. A woman
in the crowd asks whether she can describe what is happening to them. “‘I can,’” the poet
replies. “Then, something akin to a smile slipped across what once had been her face.”
I thought of Akhmatova, a woman caught up in considerably more epic events, as I
sat in the restraining order office. I had come here, to a city across the country, in search
of safety. A woman sitting near me was telling a court advocate about her daughter’s
violent husband. I looked down at the blank affidavit in front of me. I had two pages in
which to tell my story well enough for a judge to grant me legal protection. My head
swam. I had worked as a journalist; I was doing a PhD. Words were what I knew. Still,
they would barely come.
As a scholar, I’d always taken my right to tell the story for granted. As a survivor of
abuse, I could produce evidence, but other narrators would weave it together to make
meaning. I had never planned to tell anyone about what happened, other than the close
friends who helped save my life and the faculty I turned to for support when it was no
longer possible to keep the situation secret. But after I left, I thought of the person
I used to see in the mirror. I thought of the women whose stories vanished with them.
I decided to take my case to Berkeley, the institution that had trained me how to make
sense of the past and had an obligation to protect its students and staff in the present.
The bewildering hell I thought no one could understand was actually a well-doc-
umented phenomenon with horrifying consequences: nearly half of all murdered women
in the United States die as a result of domestic violence.1 In the weeks after I filed my
report, my personal reckoning began to coincide with a societal one. In October 2017,
the New York Times published an exposé of Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual ha-
rassment and rape, and the hashtag #MeToo began to spread on Twitter. Suddenly, the
media was flooded with stories of violence that were in part a belated outpouring of an-
ger against Trump, who had been elected despite his boasts about groping. Diverse sto-
ries shared the common premise that violence was a constitutive part of an order that de-
nied power to women, who could be trusted as accurate narrators of nightmares no one
else had seen. Though the president himself remained untouchable, one of his top aides
was forced to resign after two ex-wives accused him of abuse.
1
Emiko Petrosky, Janet M. Blair, Carter J. Betz, Katherine A. Fowler, Shane P. D. Jack, and Bridget
H. Lyons, “Racial and Ethnic Differences in Homicides of Adult Women and the Role of Intimate Partner
Violence—United States, 2003–2014,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Morbidity and Mor-
tality Weekly Report 66, no. 28 (2017): 741–46, http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6628a1.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2021704 Joy Neumeyer
In the wake of the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter (as well as
an embarrassing string of sexual misconduct scandals and lawsuits), institutions includ-
ing Berkeley put new resources into improving their response to sexual violence and ha-
rassment. Before consulting with an advocate, I hadn’t known that Title IX protections
against gender-based discrimination pertain to intimate partner violence. I had read
articles about cases involving faculty who serially harassed their students and col-
leagues, and cases concerning sexual assault among undergraduates. I once attended a
protest in support of two women who sued the university after it failed to sanction the
professor who pursued them, never considering that aspects of their experience might
one day apply to me.
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The Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (as Berkeley’s Title
IX office is paradoxically called) frequently fails the people it was established to help.
Complaints about serial offenses often go nowhere. An investigation, when it does hap-
pen, is a grueling process. In the months after I reported, I spent endless hours assem-
bling evidence, participating in extended interviews and cross-examination sessions,
and responding to documents attempting to discredit my story. While I conducted re-
search in Russian archives, the case became my parallel dissertation, created for a bu-
reaucratic inquisitor whose only allegiance was to the university.
For all its flaws, however, the Title IX office took my claims seriously in a way that
some historians did not. In the course of the evidence review, I learned that several pro-
fessors and graduate students had supplied my former boyfriend with good character
references to support his case. Like me, they were drawn in by his self-presentation as a
victim and the desire to deny or minimize what he had done. Their reluctance to recon-
sider was compounded by the problem of optics. To most people he appeared sad and
harmless; only a few had seen his rage.
We all have a natural tendency to deny the possibility that someone we find sympa-
thetic could have a violent dark side. It is easy to condemn the perpetrators we don’t
know; it is hard to turn the corner on those we think we do. How tempting it is to adopt
the narrative that confirms our views, even when it leads us to erase ourselves (like Bu-
kharin) or to justify the crimes of others, like the fellow travelers and latter-day Stalin-
ists who have seen terror as a minor aberration along the way to a noble goal. I under-
stood this all too well. Every time my boyfriend hurt me, I tried so hard to align myself
with his version of what happened. Challenging his words had been too disturbing and
too dangerous. I was not me. The horse was not mine.
AT THE END OF A YEAR OF INVESTIGATION, I received a 167-page Title IX report. After all
the time passed and miles traveled, I was faced once again with the voice I had heard in
the middle of the night, with the electric current that said: negate yourself, let me take
your life. I sat on the floor of a Moscow airport while preparing to board a flight back to
the United States, shaking as I opened the file.
This time, his stories didn’t stand up to fact. He was found responsible for dating
violence, sexual harassment, and physical abuse. By putting together witness inter-
views, text messages, emails, and his own confessions or inadvertent admissions, the in-
vestigator had identified clear patterns. He told me he would throw me down the stairs;
weeks later, he did so. The institution had written an empirical account of what
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2021Darkness at Noon 705
happened, and somehow, incredibly, it turned out to be largely true. The university dis-
missed him and barred him from Berkeley’s campus. Almost a year later, I testified
again at an appeal hearing to determine whether the sanctions would be upheld. They
were.
History as literature is what I know best and what I still believe in. There is no mas-
ter narrative waiting to be uncovered. There are always multiple compelling stories
about who is to blame and what is to be done. Hegemonic accounts, whether propagated
by a dictator in the home or at the head of state, serve to advance power and silence dis-
sent. The logic of abuse is single-minded; gospel is best left to the gods. Many histori-
ans, including me, prize a polyphonic approach that does not allow any single perspec-
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tive to dominate. But when it comes to what happened, there is always a hard backbone
of truth. The kaiser sent the telegram; an Old Bolshevik was shot in the head. It is not
only a historian’s task to tell a compelling story but to create the most accurate account
possible. What we conclude about the past shapes current possibilities. Visions of lost
greatness can start a war or elect a president.
In May 2020, shortly before I attended Berkeley’s virtual graduation ceremony,
President Trump’s Department of Education completed an overhaul of the Title IX sys-
tem that would make cases like mine even more difficult to pursue. Among other
changes, the new regulations allow schools to adopt the unusually high “clear and con-
vincing evidence” standard in adjudicating cases—in place of the “preponderance of
evidence” standard used in most civil claims—and free universities from investigating
incidents that occur off campus.2 According to Berkeley’s annual report on sexual vio-
lence and harassment for the 2019–20 academic year, only 30.2 percent of reported inci-
dents took place on its grounds. Off-site abuse has only grown more common during
the COVID-19 pandemic, as domestic violence surges under lockdown and many
schools shift to remote learning.3
When institutions or individuals with authority decide whether an act of abuse has
occurred, their judgments matter most of all to the vulnerable, whose safety depends on
their words. In my case, investigators with no allegiance to either party gathered evi-
dence in the positivist mode of Ranke, while historians played out White’s vision of
choose-your-own truth. Some of those reluctant to listen later repented, while others
held fast to their preferred version. But the position that haunts me most belongs to one
historian I spoke with after it was all over. We were sitting across from each other in a
calm, sunny courtyard. There were two stories, he said with a shrug, and he had no abili-
ty to decide between them. “How could I say what happened?”
The title of No Visible Bruises, Rachel Louise Snyder’s landmark study of domestic
violence in America, is a reference to choking.4 Strangulation is one of the behaviors
most highly correlated with homicide. It is also one of the hardest to detect, as the sur-
vivor often appears unscathed. This imperceptible danger mirrors the greater obscurity
2
In March 2021, the Biden administration announced that it would review these regulations.
3
According to the report, 45 percent of incidents took place in locations that were unknown to the Title
IX office; 17.2 percent occurred off campus; and 7.6 percent took place online. The number of individuals
seeking services related to sexual violence and harassment dropped considerably in spring 2020 compared
to the previous year, likely due in large part to shelter-in-place orders. “2020 Annual Report on Sexual
Violence and Sexual Harassment (SVSH): Prevention, Incidence, and Response,” 70-2, https://svsh.berke
ley.edu/sites/default/files/2020_svsh_annual_report_interactive_final.pdf.
4
Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know about Domestic Violence Can Kill
Us (New York, 2019).
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2021706 Joy Neumeyer
that continues to surround sexual and domestic abuse. The #MeToo movement argued
that gender-based violence is systemic and significant, yet its focus on storytelling made
it open to old suspicions of female mendacity. While public debates often revolved
around whether certain incidents “really” constituted assault, those who had been mur-
dered didn’t have the opportunity to speak at all. When women do share their stories,
men sometimes launch libel cases, as when Johnny Depp sued the tabloid the Sun for
reporting that he had beaten ex-wife Amber Heard. Heard and the paper won, but only
after an excruciating trial during which she received death threats from Depp’s fans.
Meanwhile, #MeToo’s attention to individuals (and especially celebrities) left underly-
ing power structures unmoved. These dynamics operate in multiple directions: white
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women in US history have sometimes accused men of color of sexual violence in ways
that prey on racial fears and fantasies. Black women are the most likely of all groups to
die from domestic abuse, yet their cases receive disproportionately little media attention.
Emphasizing narrative over aggregate data can selectively elevate certain stories over
others in a way that deepens divides.
Historians labor to make the absent manifest. We “read sources against the grain” to
represent voices missing from the archive and re-create the worlds of people we will
never meet. Like everyone else, we can fail to connect isolated incidents with broader
patterns or recognize what we did not set out to see. Not long ago, while researching an
actor who appears in my work, I came across a description of him choking his wife. She
fled to the roof of their apartment building. This incident did not surface in any other
sources; it had nothing to do with why I was writing about him. Both of its subjects
were long dead. Sitting in the library, I wondered, as the historian, armed with my lap-
top and stance of remove, could I tell her story? Should I? My earlier self might have
dismissed her account as irrelevant and forgotten it. Now, I considered how the actor’s
self-destructive persona relied on female management of personal crises and tracked
down another memoir where the event was mentioned. I addressed it in the chapter
while relegating the full details to a footnote—a positioning I am still unsure about.
A reliance on narrative, when paired with the renunciation of evidence, can obscure
and enable violence. Bukharin strained to remake his perception of reality in order to
suit the objective laws of history; it was his word versus the party’s, and the party could
never be wrong. After penning a final letter to Stalin in search of the leader’s blessing,
he submitted to the role he had been asked to play and pled guilty to crimes against the
motherland. For prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, the show trials were a performance that
rested on procuring confessions. It was easy to bend the outline of Bukharin’s life,
which included membership in the Right Opposition during the First Five-Year Plan, to
support the story of acts he had never committed. Some observers were satisfied with
the state’s account and required no further proof. In January 1937, New York Times cor-
respondent Walter Duranty praised Vyshinsky for unmasking the treachery of the
defendants at the Second Moscow Show Trial. Duranty expressed brief regret that “no
documentary evidence was produced in open court” before concluding that, neverthe-
less, “the trial did ‘stand up.’”5
The associates of the condemned generally accepted the most comfortable version
of the truth—Vyshinsky’s—and got on with their lives. Sometimes they didn’t last
5
Jacob Heilbrunn, “The New York Times and the Moscow Show Trials,” World Affairs 153, no. 3
(1991): 87–101, here 90.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2021Darkness at Noon 707
long. After denouncing Bukharin in the pages of Pravda, Mikhail Koltsov was show-
ered with official honors and promotions shortly before being arrested and confessing to
his own anti-party doubts.6 More typical was the passive approach taken by Vadim Gle-
bov in The House on the Embankment, Yuri Trifonov’s novel about terror and its after-
math inspired by his childhood in the Bolshevik elite. When another wave of repres-
sions breaks out in the late 1940s, Glebov is a graduate student whose future father-in-
law, a professor at Moscow’s Gorky Literary Institute, is the subject of a smear cam-
paign. Glebov is pressured to appear at a public meeting in which he must either join
the attack against his mentor or speak in his defense. Rather than making a decision,
Glebov uses the timely death of his grandmother as an excuse not to attend. He is
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rewarded for his silence with a successful career as a scholar.
According to White, the historian’s craft of storytelling is ultimately rooted in a de-
sire for “moral meaning”:
This value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to
have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life
that is and can only be imaginary. . . . Does the world really present itself to perception in
the form of well-made stories, with central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends,
and a coherence that permits us to see “the end” in every beginning?7
One could relay the events I have described here with other details, in another mode—a
tragedy, perhaps, about the unfair persecution of a promising young man. It could begin
earlier or end later and hardly mention me at all. Yet to believe that all tales are created
equal is also a choice with consequences, as is the decision to cling to a version that
doesn’t fit. We might be sleepwalking, but we have the ability to wake up. If every story
has a moral, this is mine.
6
On Bukharin and Koltsov, see Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revo-
lution (Princeton, NJ, 2017), 847–56.
7
Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1
(1980), 5–27, here 27.
Joy Neumeyer completed her PhD in History at the University of California,
Berkeley in 2020. She is currently a Max Weber Fellow at the European Univer-
sity Institute, where she is writing a book about death in late Soviet culture. Her
forthcoming articles include “Late Socialism as a Time of Weeping: The Life,
Death, and Resurrection of Vladimir Vysotskii” in Kritika: Explorations in Rus-
sian and Eurasian History 22, no. 3 (Summer 2021). A former Moscow-based
journalist, she has written for publications including the Guardian, the Washington
Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and New Left Review.
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