Where
Does History Come From?
History Today Volume: 52 Issue 3 March 2002 pp18-20
Where does history come from? This may seem like an odd question. Surely
history comes from the traces of the past that historians find in their
sources? However, we might get a different answer if we put the question in
another way. What happens if we choose to view history as what, from one
perspective at least, it plainly is: a narrative written about the past
constructed by the historian in the present? This is clearly not the way
history is conventionally defined. To be technical for a moment, it is more
usually described as an empirical and analytical undertaking – a source-based
and inferential activity concerned with the study of change over time. I am
posing this question – where does history come from? – because I think
historians still tend to ignore the role of narrative in doing history.
What is a historical narrative? I define it as that written composition of
historians that encompasses their source-based data founded on certain
principles of selection and organisation. So far so good? But, in addition, the
historical narrative also encompasses the arguments used by the historian to
establish cause-and-effect relationships between past events. What is more, the
historical narrative is also the site of the historian’s emplotment (what the
historian thinks the order of the events described lead up to and mean).
Additionally, the narrative is where the ideology and the social theory
preferences of the historian exist and do their work. The historical narrative
is far more than a chronology of events. A study of the historical narrative
and how it works highlights another thing. It should make it clear how ‘the
past’ and ‘history’ are quite different objects. The former is what actually
happened but which is now gone, while the latter, although it is a source-based
and inferential inquiry, is only ever its narrative representation. History is,
therefore, a substitution for the now absent past.
So, what are the consequences of history as viewed primarily as a narrative act?
Inevitably, it raises questions about the objectivity and truth-acquiring
character of history. According to established professional practice,
historical knowledge is acquired by the operation of reason and rationality as
applied to the historical sources. Through this empirical (i.e., source-based)
and analytical (i.e., inferential) process we extract what we think is most
likely to be the past’s true meaning. Such a perspective (and process) is a
reflection of the Enlightenment or modernist theory of knowledge (in
philosophical terms its epistemology). It works through the belief that
scientific method is the approach to be followed in doing history as much as is
possible given the peculiar nature of history’s subject matter – people, human
actions, and social cultural, political and economic processes and events. The
necessary adjunct to this is that it is possible to represent that knowledge
more or less precisely and objectively in our histories.
It is this everyday common-sense belief that prompts the idea of the
historical narrative as primarily a chronology of events (what happened) and
that its prose should be referential, sober, unembroidered, and fundamentally
reflective of the nature of historical change. In other words, the history we
write is controlled by the hours of painstaking work undertaken in both the
primary and secondary sources rather than any subjective input by the
historian. This suggests, as Arthur Marwick has argued in The New Nature of
History (Palgrave, 2001) – writing against the grain of my definition of
history as primarily an act of narrative making – that history has ‘nothing to
do with the nonsense about the need for “emplotment” or “narrative” (in the
imagined sense of the postmodernists)’.
Okay, so I am, in Marwick’s terms at least, suggesting a kind of postmodern
take on history. Anyway, the point Marwick is making is that the historian does
not create or invent the structure found in the history text. Rather, as he
insists, there must be
a logical order, a series of connections and
interrelationships (in short a ‘structure’), which will be as true to the
actual aspects of the past … as it is possible for a historian producing
knowledge about these aspects of the past to make it.
In other words, the historian is
not devising the narrative of the past but re-telling it and therefore getting
the story straight according to the sources.
While this (empirical-analytical)
undertaking is a complex and difficult thing to do, it nevertheless fails to
adequately address the fundamental role of the historian. What an increasing
number of the profession and philosophers of history have tried to do of late
is revisit the nineteenth-century critique of this source-based approach. This
is not to reject it out of hand, but to look afresh at its claims. They have
re-read their Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche as well as those critics of the
conventional approaches of the last century – Benedetto Croce, R.G.
Collingwood, E.H. Carr, and Michel Foucault. What contemporary critics such as
Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Keith Jenkins, Hayden White, Richard Rorty,
Louis Mink, Frank Ankersmit (and myself for that matter) have done is to more
fully explore the cognitive role played by language, specifically the act of
writing history in doing history. We have, in our various ways, moved beyond
(but not necessarily relegated) the technical procedures of how empirical
knowledge is derived, but we have concentrated more on the nature of its
representation and what such a study does for the status of history.
The most important early and
continuing contribution to this so-called ‘linguistic turn’ away from seeing
history as solely an empirical-analytical activity was made by the American
historian Hayden White (in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in
Nineteenth Century Europe, published in 1973, and in his work subsequently).
While never denying factuality and the pursuit of truth, White confronted the
notion that the truth of the events of the past can be read off from the
sources and reconstructed in a mirror-like historical text. As the result of
this insight White has been said by some to be the voice of ‘anything goes’ and
a denier of past reality. This is quite unfair. White’s ‘offence’, it seems to
me, is to want the truth but to recognise you can’t have it without it being
filtered through the concepts, cultural predispositions and, above all,
narrative constructions of the author-historian. This is, it strikes me, a far
more realistic approach to knowing what the meaning of the past might be.
Since the 1970s we have experienced
the emergence of a new feminist and cultural history encouraged in part by
Hayden White’s challenge. By the early 1990s this new history not only
broadened and made more inclusive the scope of historical study but it also
made us more self-reflexive about our technical and operational procedures,
increasingly conscious of the relativism that exists in the humanities
generally and in conceptualising and writing history in particular. Such
developments impelled the ‘new cultural historians’, while experimenting with
the shapes and form they gave to their histories, to explore the possible
narratives that existed in the past.
Among those pursuing the new ‘real
truth’ have been historians and writers on history such as Natalie Zemon Davis,
Mary Poovey, Judith Walkowitz, and Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth. But, there were
also some historians who pushed their a priori assumptions further and followed
the logic of White’s challenge and became the real epistemological radicals,
historians who experimented by placing form (the historical representation or
‘history’) as prior to content (the reality of ‘the past’). Among this group
are Simon Schama, Robert Rosenstone, and those increasing numbers of
contributors to journals like Clio, Common Knowledge and Rethinking History:
The Journal of Theory and Practice.
The fundamental contribution of
such radical and experimental historians is the recognition that, as history is
a discourse about past objects, then it is the historian who must first imagine
and conceptualise the past in narrative terms before she or he can bring to
bear upon it the methods and procedures they wish to deploy to explain it.
Historians are, of course, self-conscious enough to understand that the process
of organising the data (derived from the sources) means history can never
reconstruct the past as it actually was. The reasons usually given, however,
are problems with data and/or poor inference (missing sources and bad
historians). It is not because of the frailties or fictive (not fictional)
nature of representation. By fictive I mean that history is subject to the same
narrative and imaginative constraints as any other form of realist writing.
History is not, as the empirical-analytical approach has it, a discourse outside
literature. Arguably, the primary mechanism the historian has for giving a
meaning to her sources are the techniques of figurative language. All histories
contain such figurative elements and they serve as models of reality and give a
form to the past. Marx, for example, used the base-superstructure metaphor.
E.P. Thompson described the working class variously in romantic or tragic terms
as he believed best fitted the data he had chosen to deploy. Herbert
Butterfield once described history’s nature by feminising it: ‘she is a harlot
and a hireling … she best serves those who suspect her most’. E.H. Carr
referred to facts as fish on a slab, and we still often think of history as an
act of discovery with the historian cast as an explorer.
Being conscious of the power of
narrative to invest the past with meaning has worried especially the rump of
hardcore empiricist historians into highlighting what they perceive to be the
most dangerous aspect of the narrativist-linguistic turn: relativism. Their
reasoning is that once the historian places form (the historical narrative) on
a par with content (the events in the past) then truth is lost. Once truth is
lost, next comes moral relativism. As the historian Colin Richmond is quoted as
saying: while objectivity is not at all necessary to historical study, knowing
the truth is and thus our ability to know the difference between right and
wrong. As he is reported as saying, the test of truth is to punch a
postmodernist in the face and see if he can explain why it hurts. I guess the
postmodernist would counter with: punch an empiricist and then ask if he could
tell you what the pain means? Fortunately, examples of historian rage are rare.
The historian of the recent German
past, Richard Evans (In Defence of History, 1997), has warned that unless we
are very scrupulous in our methods, then language, culture, and ideology can
introduce a dangerous relativism into our conclusions. In noting this, the
postmodernist historian Keith Jenkins has reminded us that scrupulous methods
cannot, in fact, insulate our history from either the relativism introduced by
our present experience or the historian’s narrative imposition. While history
may be defined by empiricists as the pursuit of the truth of the past
(demonstrated by punching postmodernists in the face and asking them why it
hurts), it nevertheless remains a pursuit undertaken by people in the present.
These people know they have to organise the archive in order to make sense of
it and they fictively derive its meaning. History is, after all, something we
do; it is not an object we observe.
Nevertheless, reconstructionist
historians like Evans, Marwick, Richmond and, most famously Geoffrey Elton in
his book Return to Essentials (1991), remain convinced that while they may not
be absolutely achievable, objectivity and truthfulness can be approached. This
can be done by sticking to technical procedures and maintaining a due respect
for the facts (although in his most recent book Marwick has said we should
abandon the idea of facts!). In addition we must keep the priority of content
over form, and have a faith in the correspondence of the word and the world.
What this means is that the honest historian, in getting the story straight,
can avoid relativism and its consequence of moral decline.
But, surely, even after the most
detailed forensic study of the sources we can only communicate and justify our
historical descriptions through a narrative-linguistic and culturally
determined form? It may be a dirty job, but someone has to narrativise the
past. This is the fact of the matter and it raises doubts in my mind about any
mode of thinking that promotes history as a methodology that effectively
insulates its knowledge from culture, discourse, and the historian’s figurative
imagination – and, what is more, assumes that the sources produce a God’s-eye
view. The idea that the past can be recreated in the historian’s mind, and that
its shape is not substantially the product of that mind, will not do.
A more sophisticated approach
recognises how the historian constructs the nature of history as well as the
history eventually written. Quite simply, there can be no historical facts
without the application of theory and language-use somewhere along the line.
The problem is, of course, one of degree. Once the historian admits that her
historical knowledge is always and fully relative to the social and the
linguistic, the fear is that it must eventually destroy any possibility of
knowing things honestly, accurately and/or ethically about the past.
The issue, then, is will the
relativism in knowing and representing which the narrative-linguistic mode of
thinking recognises as inevitable, end up denying the existence (and the
suffering) of people in the past? It is important to refute this argument.
Being an epistemic relativist, that is, believing that knowledge in the
humanities is produced in ways more complex than sceptical empiricism allows,
does not mean I cannot recognise reality or be a moral person. Acknowledging
the boundaries of truth does not make epistemic relativists intolerant,
irrational or Holocaust deniers. In fact, those who deny the reality of the
past tend not to be postmodernists but empiricists who tell lies. In accepting
both the existence of data and the constraints of narrative, epistemic
relativists stop well short of denying there is no truth in history. But they
acknowledge it to be as much a narrative as an empirical truth.
Because we can only know the past
through history (its representation), we really should take the nature of
representation into account when we claim to know what is the most likely
truthful meaning of the past. I recommend that all history students take a
module or two in literary criticism and composition. History does not offer a
resemblance to things past; words do not resemble what they represent (class,
race, gender, imperialism, nationalism). History is not the past’s verbal or
written analogue. Instead, history is a narrative substitution for it. Even
when we insert what seem to be well-attested facts into our narrative we are
not larding it with atoms of past reality. I would go further and propose that
(from my epistemically relativist standpoint) historians are part of history
just as we are a part of the past and present.
Although I am a relativist in terms
of how I construct the past as history, I do not doubt the existence of the
past as located in its source-based data-stream of events and actions. But this
data is the raw material out of which ‘facts’, interpretations, and meanings
are narratively (fictively) created. In phrases like ‘the Renaissance’ or ‘the
Tragedy of Vietnam’ there are no objects to which these descriptions refer as
there are buildings, furniture and people making decisions. It is only through
the historical representation of narrative that they exist. There is no such
‘thing’ as the Tragedy of Vietnam that we have discovered in the sources.
It is the product of the historians’ narrative construction.
In my history thinking, the data
from the sources do, of course, directly influence the history I write, but
they do not utterly decide the representational form (the kind of narrative –
tragedy, romance, farce) my history must take. The historian can only offer a
meaning, one that is as much a product of the imagination that organises the
factualised data as the data itself. But what is of most significance is what
flows from this. Integral to our historical explanations and the moral lessons
we choose to draw from them are our deliberate authorial and prefigurative acts
and decisions. It is the historian’s narrative acts – emplotment process,
arguments, ideological and moral positions and all the other epistemic choices
and preferences – that ultimately invest the past with meaning.