What is history?

 

Thinking about how I would answer this question, I came upon a few banalities that very soon turned out to be important, but, to start with, seem rather commonplace and boring.

First: I am not interested in history as such – not in the same way I am interested in fiction. It isn’t endlessly fascinating to me what history is and how it is created – HOW we know what we think we know about the past. It is without doubt an intriguing line of inquiry, but I cannot enter into this. From my point of view, history is not being created, it is just there, unquestioned, as what I think I know or what knowledge I can access about the past. 

So, if I am not dealing with history, what is it I am dealing with? My spontaneous answer to this fundamental question was that I am dealing with this “INTERFACE” BETWEEN HISTORY AND FICTION that became such a priority lately. About what happens when what I think I know about the past, how I imagine the past, how I experience somebody else imagining the past, comes into my reading of fictional text.

Second: Reconstructing this interface, it becomes unavoidable to answer the question what history is, as it has to come into it as something. At this point I realized that I had already made the unconscious decision to treat history itself AS TEXT. I also realized that there might be other options and that I have no way of knowing if this is a sensible decision. 

I probably took it because I know that I can handle text. Reading historic fiction, or fiction about a historic subject, I have a potentially limited text on my hands which I am reading, and a potentially unlimited text of history kind of “running through it”. That means that I am always reading two different texts at once.  CONTINUOUSLY - which makes “historic” reading significantly different from using all kinds of knowledge or texts, including other fictional texts, as reference when I need them.

When I am reading, for example, Jane Austen, I am always aware that I am in the past and am reading what I think I know about this past while reading the story. Or, when I am reading, for example, Hilary Mantle, I am fascinated with her detailed depiction of Thomas Cromwell but at the same time have my own text about Cromwell in mind – of which I don’t even know how it got there! – and am comparing it with hers. Strangely, it doesn’t diminish her text that I don’t “believe” her, it rather enhances it when I am thinking how bold she is, and how much more I am learning about the period in question, looking through Cromwell with HER eyes, than I would reading Wikipedia. To appreciate this, though, I need my own historic text (or text collection)  – which is in turn constantly altered and filled out by adding facts, ideas, and observations from the work of fiction I am reading which I believe to be “historic”. (Be this a good thing or not, it is a fact that probably more than fifty percent of my historic knowledge comes from reading fiction!) – Apart from this, I need the historic text to trigger the “historic” mindset and to kind of change into a different person to be able to access the text “from the inside”. A process which is doubtlessly also altered and enhanced by adding information about people’s mindsets contained in the fictional text. This is rather am empty description because I don’t have a clue what I am really doing regarding the mindset, and how I am doing it. (From recent experience, I believe I kind of consent or subscribe to the values and believes etc of these characters in order to understand their actions and feelings properly. But I don’t think that is all, aIthough I certainly don’t go to the considerable trouble of “unknowing” what I am, and what I know these people can’t know, to start over as a completely different person. But there certainly is this proclivity toward changing that isn’t limited to “time-travel”. For example, I am generally bored with crime stories in which I see people only from the outside. Sorry to say, but in the long run Jackman & Evans are a sleeping pill. The best ones are those where I can enter the criminal mind as a completely alien territory. Where, as I learned in “Hannibal”, I am not watching but “participating” without getting my own hands bloody. For years in a row I was obsessed with Tom Ripley …) And I haven’t even entered the most fascinating process of being aware that I am mostly NOT somebody living in, say, the 16^th century, but am using the text to reference myself and my own time – which I understand even less … This impromptu description of the “interface” is already quite complex, but I expect it to be much more so in reality. 

Next logical question: WHAT IS THIS TEXT?

The reason I wanted to look further into this was, initially, that I was frustrated to know nothing about it. To know absolutely nothing about something so fundamental to my life and seeing the world. History is imperative in finding out about how and why society, or people, or anything at all, GOT TO BE AS THEY ARE. This I identified as my fundamental need for history, like having to know “how people tick” – as Claudia called it – is very likely my fundamental need for reading fiction. Both types of knowledge seem to help me to cope with the conditions I live in, or the people around me, or even myself. 

So I finally made a serious effort to find out more about this, which was instantly rewarded as I accidentally picked the right book. Reading the first chapter of Carr: “What is history?” about “The Historian and his Facts” convinced me that I already was more knowledgeable than I thought. First of all, he backed my view that:

(Banality number three:) HISTORY IS BASICALLY STORY-TELLING. Which explains intuitively why history and fiction are so compatible and why I instinctively understood history as text, as both of them share a fundamental structure. (Assuming, of course, that story-telling is THE fundamental structure of fiction – which will have to be specified later. I tend to think that it is, but it is certainly not all there is to say about this subject.) 

It seems so entymologically obvious, as “hiSTORY” in every language I am aware of contains this element of “story”, as in “Geschichte”, “storia”, “histoire” etc, but this is initially misleading because they were all derived from the Greek “historía” which references knowing, not story-telling. Nonetheless it is interesting that the word “mutated” into story-telling, reflecting, in my opinion, that both activities might have been seen as much more closely related than they are today. Basically, observing how children gather knowledge about the world outside their grasp, I tend to think that story-telling is still our number one technique of gathering complex knowledge.

Carr backed this view indirectly by pointing out that history is dependent on “auxiliary sciences, like archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, chronology, …”  - and, I’d say, from a contemporary point of view, on almost any other science - for providing the FACTS that are supposed to be its empirical basis. Well, they are not. As Carr and I see it, facts as such are not “historic”. They are certainly crucial, but they are just part of the process of creating history which CONSISTS of what has been WRITTEN about the past. And as to what has been written, I cannot imagine this in any other form than some kind of – often not very elaborate - story. (I am aware that this is an oversimplification proceeding from what I am using history for. In my case, facts rarely stick if they are not connected to some kind of – usually “human interest” – story. I am rather certain that a lot of historic knowledge is “kept” or organized in different ways. But that’s mostly for the historians.) The reason, though, why we believe these stories is usually because we know or have reason to assume that they can be backed up by facts. Which leads to … 

(… banality number four): HISTORY IS STORY-TELLING BASED ON FACTS. Luckily, I can skip the really complicated bit of the historian wrangling with their facts which Carr describes almost dramatically in his first chapter. The drama of writing history is important to me only insofar as it stresses the importance of facts in historic text opposed to fictional text. When history (as text) enters the “interface” it is certainly not “pure” history – that is, totally devoid of “fictional” elements like choosing facts over others for dramatic effect, or adding psychological insight not strictly based on facts - but I am not USING it as fictional text. I am not using it to be entertained but mostly to draw the line between what I believe to be strictly true and what I consider to be – often much more interesting – invention.

And there is one last banality which is so basic that I wouldn’t have mentioned it were it not for Carr: 

(Five): History consists of stories ABOUT THE PAST.

At the moment I have nothing to add to the list of banalities, which I repeat here for future reference, and there will still be a little space for the juicier stuff. 😍 

(1)  I am not writing about history but about the “interface” between history and fiction.

(2)  To reconstruct the “interface”, I imagine history as text. 

(3)   The two texts coming together in the interface share the basic structure of story.

(4)  The basic structural difference is that history is story strictly based on facts. 

(5)  History consists of stories about the past.

 

So, this looks so unattractively banal and pedantic that I am really relieved to have room for showing how it suddenly became relevant. I doubt I was even halfway through getting these few concepts straight when I glimpsed the possibility of getting to the bottom of something that has always annoyed me: HISTORY OF LITERATURE. 

I liked history of literature when I was in school as I was interested in anything historic, but I ended up not taking any of it too seriously. One reason is that I don’t believe in the naïve “periodizing” of human development. (I might have to take this up later, in a new post.) The other that I don’t find the general method of writing history of literature convincing that proceeds from general history – reconstructing the social structure of a society and the resulting mindset of the people living in it – to literature, usually by trying to cram as much of “history” as possible into the fictional text and see what “falls out”. Of course we accidentally hit important features of the text in this way, but it is mostly random. Thinking about history and text, I noticed that I have been doing my personal history-writing all over this blog THE OTHER WAY ROUND. That is, by starting with the fictional text, looking into its structure and trying to find out what bothers or excites me about it. Establishing first the “battle-lines” in this way and then checking the hisTORY for what relates to them appears to me as a more promising way to describe the fictional text as a historic object.

As I just noticed, this is terribly structuralist – to assume that there is a “centre” to a fictional text determined by its structure – but so be it! It is obviously an idea I use reading – and which writers use writing, otherwise it wouldn’t work so well. (Doesn’t mean, though, that either their plan or mine necessarily checks out! Fictional text is ALWAYS more complex than any reader or writer could imagine because its potential for context-building cannot be contained.) 

Thinking in terms of “history of literature”, I discovered that I am carrying a kind of “pocket history” of literature around with me which consists of a few basic theories about fiction as a historic object. Theories I observed I actually use when I am reading. I’ll just set them down here without a lot of explanation.

The most important one appears to be that I understand history of literature basically as a history of ACCOMPLISHED STORY-TELLING. That is, story-telling for story-telling’s sake – not for telling the true story of what has happened. Story-telling with the intent to entertain and captivate the audience, to make them want to listen, usually in order to reap some kind of social or economic benefit. In oral literature, the best story-tellers entertaining people around a fire or doing monotonous work are in control of the shared content of this group and therefore in a position of power. Where people come together in order to listen to the story-tellers, these will probably get some kind of material reward. And, in our day and age, writing the thriller that hits the bestseller lists or producing a top series for Netflix will translate into serious money. 

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of different objectives apart from entertainment which enter into story-telling. For example, fiction became an important part of the endeavor to EDUCATE people of a rising “middle-class” during the 17^th century when religious content ceased to cover it. It has become gradually less ubiquitous as a motive for writing fiction during the 19^th and 20^th century, but promoting the right values and inducing the right behaviour is still hugely structure-building in popular culture. (Just reading “Harry Potter”!) As is counteracting this endeavor and questioning these values.

And there are also fundamentally different human activities that result in the production of fictional text. Story-telling is a social activity, but it is essentially private. When people gather comfortably around a hearth to listen to stories, or when parents read to their children in bed, or people settle on a sofa to watch their favourite series or are sitting back cosily with a book, shutting the world out … There is an entirely different type of fiction called DRAMA that came into being as part of PUBLIC ceremony and developed into a situation of publicly sitting in judgement – either by laughing at people’s vices and oddities, or by discussing and condemning their offences. In Greek theatre there was even the choir on the stage to represent the public. There was just no way of getting away with it! - This kind of situation results in a fundamentally different structure than “epic” story-telling. There is a lot of bodily movement on a stage, and actual bodily contact. A lot of shouting and usually a great deal of urgency and confrontation. Of being in the moment. If I am sitting back relaxed in the theatre, there is something wrong with what people are doing on the stage. Obviously, a great attraction of playing theatre lies in being able to do these things PUBLICLY which our usual rules of behaviour forbid or restrain. And this also affects the audience. I am certainly safe in my seat, but watching theatre makes me feel differently even from watching in the cinema where there is also an audience. I am feeling more involved and prone to react spontaneously to what happens on the stage. 

The third human activity I am aware of that is hugely structure-building in fiction is not social. It happens all the time when people stop using whatever they are just using as a tool or to fill a basic need and start looking at the object itself. “Don’t play with your food!” - We call it “playing” when children stop eating and begin to transform their food. And, like food or clay, words have a basic MATERIAL ASPECT which one can get totally involved with.

I believe that I see story-telling and entertainment as fundamental because there is some of it in everything I WANT to read. There may be a lot of work to do before I am entertained by a poem, but unless there is at least some kind of “theme” that attracts me, I discard it immediately. (This is quite a subjective view of “history of literature” because it isn’t based on the texts I had to read at school and which usually were the most boring stuff anybody could think of. My “history of literature” is based on what entertains me, and there is certainly a wide variety of what people find entertaining. As it should be! There certainly is a big faction behind the Jackman & Evans kind of novel. 😁) 

Not just story-telling but all of these basic structural aspects can and do appear in any kind of fictional text, though – as a rule! – there is no successful novel or Netflix series without a gripping story, no play without proper drama that people would pay money to see, and no poem without aesthetic playing that anybody would enjoy. Whatever is structurally most important determines how we react to the text, how we use it, and as which type of fictional object we describe it.

This is, of course, all common knowledge – therefore still basically boring. What is not boring about it, at least to me, is how much history there already is in my description of fictional text on this basic level. This is history of literature in a nutshell: basic assumptions about how fictional texts came into being and how this explains what they are like. Above this level it gets more complicated, and there is more hiSTORY coming into it. But in every case we need these theories – basic and gradually more specific ones - about the genesis of fictional objects, obeying specific FICTIONAL rules, to describe the text in a way that it releases its historic potential. The ideal “end-product” of such a historic reading would be a very specific description of the kind I just found in one of the “A History of the World in 100 Objects” podcasts about a famous Byzantine icon that got used as a weapon in the fight for supremacy between the Christian and Muslim creed. To prove a precise political impact like this is seldom possible, but it totally depends on knowledge about what kind of text an icon is, plus an exact description of this singular icon’s semantic structure – which in turn includes a lot of historic knowledge. But jumping this first step and not looking at the text as what it was meant to be - a FICTIONAL object - will get us nowhere, or at least not anywhere near an interesting discovery like this.