I have been reading the essays of A. J. P. Taylor, lately and I happened upon this passage and thought it quite instructive:In most European languages 'story' and 'history' are the same word: histoire in French, Geschichte in German.... It would save much trouble if we had the same coincidence of words in English. Then perhaps we should not be ashamed to admit that history is at bottom simply a form of story-telling.
Historians nowadays have higher aims. They analyse past societies, generalized about human nature, or seek to draw morals about political or economic behavior that will provide lessons for the present. Some of them even claim to foretell the future. These are admirable ambitions which have produced work of high quality. But there is no escaping the fact that the original task of the historian is to answer the child's question: 'What happened next?'
-Taylor, 'History in Fiction,' Times Literary Supplement, 23 March 1973, in From Napoleon to the Second International, 36.
It is quite true. Historians who do “narrative history” are shunned; indeed the phrase has become a byword for writing which lacks footnotes and historical rigor. Not that there is any reason to assume that narrative structure means bad history. I have seen plenty of “history” organized in the most awful way, lacking substantial citation, written with meaningless social science terms and possessing the fluidity of an elementary school science paper. And this sort of thing is sometimes championed as great scholarship, while mere “storytellers” are seen as “populists,” whose crime, so far as I can tell, is writing books that people actually want to read.
This too struck me as a keen insight:
Our fiction [that of historians] comes in quite another way [from that of the historical novelist] and is all the more dangerous for being usually unconscious. We take the characters of the past too seriously. Most of our evidence until fairly recent times is about the thin top layer of society - kings, nobles, ministers and high clerics. They may be a poor lot but they are all we have, and we blot them up beyond their deserts. Experience teaches that hereditary succession is not a good way of producing ability. Yet we go on treating kings as though they possessed the sort of ability shown by men who had to fight their way to the top. Of course we acknowledge bad kings, according to the immortal phrase of Sellar and Yeatman, but we also find good kings and even great kings.
My late colleague Bruce McFarlane described Henry V as 'the greatest man that ever ruled England.' Great, say, compared with Churchill, let alone Cromwell? I do not believe it. I doubt whether he was much improvement on Ramsay MacDonald. Looking around the crowned heads who have bestrewn the European stage over the centuries, I cannot see any other than Frederick the Great as a man of more than common abilities, and even his abilities were on the thin side.
-Taylor, 'History in Fiction,' 41.
While I might disagree with Taylor's analysis of some of Europe's monarchs (though I suspect he knew so much more than I on the matter that a disagreement is not worth voicing), the insight is definitely a valuable one: to say that King Thus-and-Such invaded Whatsitcalled or built a bridge over the River Thingamadoo may say more about the instruments he inherited than the dexterity with which he wielded them.
4 comments:
My rejoinder to Taylor would be that experience shows teaches that popular suffrage is just as poor a way of producing able leaders.
I think Taylor's comment pertains more to the greatness of the men than to the quality of their rule. The Darwinian competition of elections at least brings talented - if not usually moral or selfless - men into office. (Failing that, it at least brings the talented chiefs of staff, the powers behind the political thrones, into positions of power.) Thus, his point is more of a historian's than a political philosopher's: democracies may not produce better results, but you at least see more talent running around.
This article touches on my recent reading habits. My reading has been invigorated of late due to a recent wave of good non-fiction work, such as "Conspiracy of Fools" about Enron, "Hoover Dam" (although that one is older), "Devil in the White City" about the Chicago World Fair, and "The Soul of Science" which is a book on the history of science (especially the fall and fracturing of Mathematics). There's also a recent book containing excellent examples of "narrative" journalism called "The New Kings of Non-Fiction" that I have been enjoying.
It's weird to me that "history" can be spoken of as a thing unto itself. History of what? To show what? So often we just swallow someone's definition of what history is. Why is the history of science so neglected? What about the history of schools of thought toward history? Anyway, it's just been on my mind.
The notion of history as a thing unto itself is a fairly new one: the ancients and medievals considered it a subset of rhetoric, and thus as much a means toward an end as an end in itself.
This fall we had a bit of an argument in one of my classes about theories of history and the way they have changed over time. I contend that such theories are really philosophy - philosophy of history, to be sure, but still philosophy - and not history, per se. This is not to say that they have nothing of value to the historian, but might be akin to a biological study of crops which is then picked up by a historian to help him understand ancient agriculture: it's a study that uses the tools of biology, but can be useful to the historian as well. Now, a history of theories of history... Well, some would call that history of philosophy or history of ideas (some use the term "intellectual history," though hopefully all history is intellectual), though it also has a lot to do with historiography - the study of how history is told. Definitely a blurry area...
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