He thought he saw an Elephant, That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife.
“At length I realise,” he said, “The bitterness of Life!” Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, 1889, 1893
The epigraph at the start of this introduction and commencing each chapter in this book are a literary device. It is a device that signals the key idea in the book. In drawing attention to Lewis Carroll’s belief that appearances can be deceptive as well as his judgements about historians, I wish to suggest that claims to knowledge of the most likely nature of things in the past and as they are described in his- tory, should be treated with care and some circumspection. In this book I offer and examine the argument that the way the substantial majority of historians understand the nature of what they do should be re-thought. My intention is to question the claims of most histor- ians who, despite their sophistication in many other ways, define history as the attempt to retell the most likely narrative of the past.
The two basic assumptions of most historians in retelling the most likely narrative of the past are that (a) there is either ‘the’ or, at worse, ‘a most likely’ narrative in the past, and (b) it is capable of being told through its given history – in other words for what it was. The corollary is that historians have a duty to get this given story as straight as they can. The desire is to be as faithful as is possible to the storied past. The assumption behind this conviction is that historians re-narrate what they believe the past is telling them.
To make good this conviction the historian must make several philosophical assumptions. Not least is that there must be a necessary and sufficient transparency between the past as action and events, and the words used by the historian to ‘retell’ such action and
events. What this requires is confidence in the Greek concept of mime-sis or ‘imitation’, and the rejection of poïesis or ‘making’ as in
poetry or other forms of inventive literature. This mimetic notion is an everyday practical and realist common-sense understanding that derives from how we negotiate the reality of our everyday existence – reading bus timetables, following signs and giving and receiving directions to the airport. As this seems to work really quite well in everyday life so it must surely also apply to understanding and narrating the most likely story of the past.
In this way, historical understanding became the par exce- llence example of the ‘common knowledge’ that doing history in a particular way, that is, common sensically in an empirical-analytical- representationalist fashion, was and is the only conceivable way to do it. For me however, this understanding is akin to medieval ‘common knowledge’ that the Sun circles the Earth. Accordingly, what is at issue in this book is the character of the beliefs held by those historians of a particular kind who trust that the only way to understanding the nature of historical knowledge is through their understanding of a perceptual (empirical), analytical (inferring most probable meaning) and representationalist (in a text) route. This belief constitutes their ‘particular’ master narrative.
Indeed, since about 1700 when History (History) began its modernist cultural journey it became the collective noun for the master narrative (the story) that happened to human beings. And so history of a particular kind – empirical-analytical-representationalist – came to be naturalised as an emotional, moral, political, economic, cultural and so forth force in human affairs. Over time – quite quickly – upper and lower case H/history came to represent a central feature of those human affairs especially when constituted in and from the early to mid-eighteenth century in an approved academic form.
Of course at the same time many other concepts and definitions that we think of today as being ‘natural’ to our cultural thinking and practice also emerged and which, like history of a particular kind, became part of the intellectual furniture. These concepts became key concepts understood as giving form and definition to both explaining and shaping our modern(ist) existence. There are many examples: ‘the state’, ‘culture’, ‘nation’, ‘race’, ‘time’ (historical and other forms), ‘science’, ‘space’, ‘progress’, ‘intellectual’, ‘democracy’, ‘radicalism’, ‘society’, ‘violence’, ‘myth’, ‘representationalism’ and so on and so forth.
So, in their preferred master narrative, I want to ask how do modernist common-sense empirical, practical realist and repre- sentationalist historians come to work toward their interpretative ‘report of findings’? In the modernist definition that such historians have created about what they do, they require and endorse certain beliefs and practices which constitute the approved way of ‘doing history’. So, powered by a belief in common sense they choose a topic from the past and then set up a series of ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions. These are usually proposed in the form of a problem (hence ‘what, why and how’). After this they turn to the sources/ archives to ‘find out’ as much as they can about the past they have decided to investigate and its presumed ‘themes’, ‘trends’and ‘changes over time’.
In deploying and immersing themselves in the archival (empirical) sources as determined by their questions the historian then ‘weighs’ the sources to see how far they can help her/him in resolving/ answering/redefining their question(s). It is through this complex process of thinking and practice that the historian displays their ‘skills and qualities of mind’ in producing historical explanations. This is an intellectual game with strict rules. Not least is the belief/ rule that the past is presumed to have ‘in it’ some sort of electric charge that means it is alive and which allows it to surface in the present. The past is a site (or sites) of memory. As we shall see this is an idea that has hitherto withstood all efforts to deny its plausibility.
The ‘skills and qualities of mind’ brought to bear on the past by the historian are usually summarised as the ability to read and use sources (customarily texts but also other artefactual forms) both critically and with appropriate empathy, while acknowledging their (the historian’s) own personal assumptions and perspectives. All the above varies somewhat in accordance with the peculiar needs and sources of what are usually referred to as the form of history being constituted. The ‘kinds or forms of history’ are well known as being congeries of sources that create social, gender, religion, economic, and political production. Informing understanding is the assumption of the practical, realist and common-sense belief not just in mimesis but also the historian’s confidence in their ability to re-present the most likely story to be ‘found in the sources’. This logic is a narrative about the creation of the history narrative.