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.

Elaborating on the “mindset”: WE are the weirdos!

  

As it turned out, the time wasn’t right for big projects, but when I finally sat down to write again, I found that my mind had been quite active. I hadn’t read my book on history nor done any background-reading, but I had some reflexions to add on the historic “mindset”.

I found out WHY the concept is so eminently useful writing my last post. It has something to do with what I am actually doing when I am reading historic fiction - that is, fiction written at a former time as well as contemporary fiction with a historic angle. I am CHANGING my mindset to get into the text. Which means that I am looking for the mindset that might fit, making suppositions about what people at the time were actually thinking and feeling, what their lives might have been about. In my terminology it is a text vortex – an activity that reading fiction makes me engage in and which I enjoy. At least that’s the theory …

Usually, “historic” refers to some remote period, like the Viking or Elizabethan Age, but not necessarily. I just had a very strong and odd “historic” reaction watching “It’s a Sin” - which I actually got on DVD only months after it had been on British TV!!! I was so pleased … until I had to get off it somewhere during the third episode. This is horrible, I don’t want to watch it … Good! I know this is usually a sign of something special going on, as this was certainly not due to this five-part drama about young gay men coming out in London in the 80s and the rising of the “gay disease” being so bad. On the contrary! I realized that I don’t remember having felt something so SPECIFIC about a fictional text for a long time. This makes it virtually impossible to describe what I felt because there isn’t anything to compare … It sits there like this singular, solid emotional object with a sticky surface gluing me to the text. I keep going back to it when I am not watching, wanting to get away from it at the same time … Naturally, one cannot get “into” such an emotional object, dismantle it to see what it is made of. Why should I feel anything so personal anyway, having never been part of a gay community or known anybody who died of AIDS? (I had even kind of forgotten that it was called this before it became HIV. If anybody refers to it nowadays, it’s always the virus, never the disease. “We” made stunning progress, no doubt, in more than a medical sense, dealing with the disease, but we also made a neat job of forgetting …) Thinking hard about it, though, I found some kind of explanation for how this emotional object might have been created. Why it is so specific and persistent – the “gluey” bit might even partly be some weird survivor’s guilt?

The clue I found was that I had noticed a year mentioned at the beginning: 1984. It was the year I got discharged from college and into life. And I think this coincidence “pinned” me to the story for good – despite myself. Yes, it is MY generation, and, under entirely different circumstances, I had felt “the same”. There had been a time when the world was suddenly full of choices where there had been none before, a sudden, scary lack of boundaries, a hunger for life … and then IT SUDDENLY ENDED. And I realized that I had been aware of the specific and significant role AIDS had played in this outcome. It was not the comforting kind of knowledge. You never notice when something actually changes, but I think it was already during the 90s that I stopped seeing gay couples holding hands in the street. That people stopped enjoying to be seen, to be “out”, and everything “personal” moved from the public space into the home, or specific “holes”, or the anonymity of the internet. If I change, for example, into a Viking mindset - or am trying to - it is much more fun BECAUSE I haven’t been there. Getting back to the late 80s, I didn’t even have to TRY. But even though “Viking” seems much less personal and more fun, there is ultimately the same reason for playing this game. Why I never stop playing it even when it makes me feel gutted. (I hate this word, that’s why I am using it here!) I want some kind of explanation about why IT HAS ALL TURNED OUT LIKE THIS.  How “we” have become who we are. Why society works the way it does. I became interested in the Vikings because they were so different but also because I felt this odd kind of kinship. In some way I still have to understand, they are part of MY past. Establishing that it is HISTORY - not fantasy – appears to play a crucial part in finding these explanations.

Even though the concept of a historic mindset is so useful, it cannot be taken literally. In reality, there are not just no “periods”, there is no mindset either that applies to any given century, or decade, or whatever stretch of time we might be looking at. Even if there was something like a common denominator of billions of mindsets of billions of different people, we know well that there is not. Just looking at my own social environment, I am aware that there are at least three different generations around, with completely different mindsets. I like to talk to the younger generation – my numerous nephews and nieces, now mostly grown-up or growing up – but I don’t pretend to understand what any of their lives are about. We are even partly watching or reading the same stuff – like “Sherlock” (5 of us), “Harry Potter” (5), the Tolkien books and films of course (6), ”Doctor Who” (3), “Vikings” (2), even “Hannibal” (2) – but in fact I have no idea why they are watching it. I might just try harder to understand them, or might live in the same household – but I doubt my parents had much of a clue what was going on inside MY life at the time. I think we just live in this delusion that there is a “ruling” mindset which we are a part of, but the pandemic showed me how much of a delusion this actually is. Why we think we understand each other is mostly because we have learned to avoid MOST topics. It’s not just chit-chat – I hate that! – but there is a lot I don’t talk about with many people. The threads that tie my thoughts and experiences to those of others are as flimsy as the threads of a spider’s web. They are also, in a way that will become relevant, equally STRONG. There IS in fact something like a RULING mindset – though not as an empirical object that could be investigated but rather as a feature of communication. What unifies “us” is that we know what we care for and are up against. This is where the idea of a mindset becomes most interesting, in my opinion: as part of the “battlefield”.

This takes a bit of explaining, and I found a wonderful introduction listening to a podcast from the BBC Radio 4 series “Sideways” which engages in one of my own favourite occupations: to look at things from a different angle. In this case, Joe Henrich, a Canadian anthropologist studying the Mapuche culture in the nineties, ended up finding out something important about his own: that WE are all WEIRDOS. And, after just a moment of resistance, I discovered that I profoundly agree. “We” – as members of a Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic society – are WEIRD, not because we are abnormal, but because we are really such a MINORITY. A minority that persists in thinking they are ruling the world, which is a delusion. One that has been overwhelmingly successful, no doubt, but still mostly a delusion.  

I found I also agreed with the weird answer to the question WHY we turned out WEIRD. It is because, at one point in European history, “we” started to marry for LOVE. The explanation is so convincing because it is about something “everybody” knows. We are aware that our concept of love is the weirdest thing, obviously so essential to our happiness that there is no point in trying to avoid it – I thought I had succeeded for about fifteen years, and it came back with a vengeance! – and, on the whole, such a major source of unhappiness. For people like me, who feel better with a historic explanation: there is a reason why love became such a big thing. At some point in our history, it became the ultimate tool for tearing the structure of society apart and creating a new one which “we” (weirdos) now live in. A society where creativity and competitiveness are king, and family - or other - ties suspicious.

I always like the bit where I discover that I have been wrong: that what I used to think of as boringly antiquated turnes out to have been breathtakingly modern at the time, and a real motor of change. In this case it is Christianity. In many unexpected ways "we" are so much more Christian and "medieval" than we think. 😏 There has always been love, I am sure of that, but Christianity turned it into this instrument of change, this revolutionary concept. The pre-Christian idea and reality of sexuality was that the bodies of every member of a household literally belonged to the head of this household – the legal basis of a paternalistic society. The Christian religion turned this idea over by re-defining the relationship of Christ and his church as a mutual one. Christ chose his church, but “we”, as her members, also have to actively choose him. People like my patron saint, Saint Barbara, probably became role models. She was a Roman who secretly became a Christian, and, as it was the custom, got assigned a husband but refused to marry. She was put to death as a result – which I don’t think was the customary way to resolve this kind of fix. It was because she had to reveal her faith – and then it became political, her father being a Roman general.  I always rather disliked martyrs, nonetheless I always kind of admired her for her stamina. I think I even claimed her as a patron for being stubborn, not really knowing how right I was. It probably took some time to become effective, but at some point people started to apply this idea of mutual choice to sexual relationships, and that’s how it became so over-inflated.

This historic battle still appeared to have been in full swing in Europa around the Elizabethan Age  - probably one reason why it was such a great time for drama: so many of these battles going on. The example used in the podcast was “Romeo and Juliet” – obviously, one would think. In fact I never spotted what is the most exciting bit about this drama from a historic point of view. I might have, if I had read the literature, but I doubt it. I would probably not have grasped the dramatic impact of the information, I had to look “sideways”. I realized, though, that I had already begun to ask the right question, wondering why, in “Shakespeare”, mothers are always so weak and fathers so horrible …

This is the part where I’d like to stress a generality that is nonetheless really important. People and relationships in fiction are very seldom a direct reflexion of historic reality or experience. They are much more often a statement about the “battlefield” – establishing what people and circumstances SHOULD or SHOULD NOT be. In fact, I have grown up more inside paternalistic structures than outside of them. (The ironic thing is that the Catholic church, which effectively ruled the part of Germany I have grown up in, has never outgrown paternalism.) But my experience about parents – mine and in general – has been nothing like this. I am sure that fathers were a constructive rather than destructive factor in the socialization of their offspring as often as not in the Elizabethan Age, and mothers a point of security and unconditional acceptance for their children to fall back on when they most needed it. Stressing parental weakness like this is due to the DRAMATIC form – a reflexion of the battle already going on. Paternalism is failing, the modern, “weird” society beginning to form …   

It is nice that I can have a go at Shakespeare again, it wasn’t even intended. And there is more! Writing this, I remembered a point of discussion about “Troilus and Cressida” between Claudia and me. She found it weird that Troilus gives up Cressida when his family demands it without even putting up a fight. And I couldn’t find the motives for Cressida to give up her great love just like that, jumping into bed with her captor for no apparent reason. Bearing in mind that WE are weird, I noticed that I had already changed my mindset ENOUGH to understand that Troilus is not morally deficient but Trojan = pre-Christian “non-weird” as established above. As a young male member of the Trojan ruling family, it would have been very deviant – and morally deficient! – for him to challenge paternal authority. I had been through the Vikings enough to have internalized how family-based societies work.   

This is further proof, by the way, that the GENERAL assumption of literary historians that pre-modern authors had no sense of history and only wrote from a contemporary point of view is WRONG! Reading “Coriolanus”, “Titus Andronicus”, and “Julius Caesar”, it intrigued me to find what a great historian Shakespeare was, how interested he was in Roman society and in what these people might have been feeling and thinking. (It is quite legitimate, though, for US to be more interested in the Elizabethan content of his plays – but then this is something WE are doing.) I felt that he had a historic interest in the “Iliad” as well, reading it myself, though he modernized the story ruthlessly, stripping his characters of every trace of “heroism”. But there were these family-based structures and the adherent moral values of Troilus that he kept. Now I have come to the point where having looked into BOTH of his main sources for the play definitely pays. As antiquated and boring as it admittedly had appeared to me, the Troilus of Chaucer’s “Troilus and Cryseyde” agonizing over his love must still have felt strikingly modern to Shakespeare’s contemporaries. As Claudia informed me, there had been a modernized edition, and this was certainly because people were READING this! I suppose mostly MEN. (This is conjecture, but I cannot imagine that a lot of women, IF they learned to read, got allowed more than their prayer book.) Here my questions about Cressida’s motives began to be answered. At the time, romantic or “courtly” love was mostly for men. THEY did the choosing, and the woman was well advised to be shrewd and keep them at arm’s length, and put their love to the acid test – as Cressida does! She is no dimwit, and I know now why I found it convincing to see her as a streetwise, practical young woman on the stage in the RSC’s production who isn’t likely to lose her head over love – as Troilus does! The focus is on him, not only in Chaucer’s poem – which doesn’t care a fig about Cressida’s suffering or motives! - but also in Shakespeare’s play, for a – historic! – reason. He is the character in whom Shakespeare’s two sources for the play coincide, which makes him sit exactly on the battle-line between a pre-modern paternalistic ideal of living and a modern, love-based one. Cressida instead – and here I cannot help but feel that, in the gap, Shakespeare is telling a bit of covert feminist history just by having her right! – is not affected by this battle. In fact, for women, never having been part of the hierarchy of power, it has always been the same. As I was compelled to acknowledge reading the “Iliad”, women in fact belonged to the head of the household and therefore had the same legal status as slaves, without any hope of outgrowing it. Cressida cannot afford to be “romantic”, she has to be practical and adapt to the situation, looking for whatever she can do to take control. (The scene where she is “welcomed” into the Greek camp on her arrival has been one of the most fascinating and disturbing for me when I read it.) Being clever, she is aware of Troilus’ delusion who probably thinks of further sexual encounters in pursuing their relationship. For him it is unthinkable to give up his “romantic” choice, once it is made, but there is no way he will ever be able to marry her.

I think this example covers exactly the way I use “history” in reading fiction. As a means of making it more dramatic and available, getting excited by the battle and trying to establish where the battle-lines might have been. I think we really get a chance of seeing – and feeling! – them because there are rules and conventions for a certain fictional form that makes it ideal for the purpose, like drama, or tragedy for “staging” battles – or, inside them, conventions of making us focus on certain characters and their predicaments and reacting to them.  “We” are getting excited about what people got excited about at the time. This is how I learn history reading historic fiction instead of trying to understand historic fiction by reading history.

As this, unfortunately, already is some kind of final conclusion, my investigation might end here. But I am not really satisfied with being so vague about the concept of history that is behind all this. I hope this dissatisfaction will motivate me to look into it some more.