skepticlawyer

The past has occurred. It has gone and can only be brought back again by historians in very different media; for example in books, articles, documentaries (…) not as actual events. The past has gone and history is what historians make of it when they go to work (…) It is this work, embodied in books, periodicals, etc that you read when you do history (…) What this means is that history is quite literally on library and other shelves. Thus, if you start a course on seventeenth century Spain, you go neither to the seventeenth century nor to Spain; you go, with the help of your reading list, to the library. This is where seventeenth century Spain is - between Dewey numbers - for where else do teachers send you in order to ‘read it up?’ Of course you could go to other places where you can find other traces of the past - Spanish archives, for example - but wherever you go, when you get there you will have ‘to read’.

Keith Jenkins

Apparently there are several new films out, all of which riff on the idea of the ‘Good German’. One of them is even called, ahem, The Good German:

Is Nazi Germany a fit subject for sympathy? In the case of individuals caught up in the conflagration of World War II’s final days, three recently made films suggest that the answer may be a careful yes. Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book has its Jewish-Dutch resistance heroine falling for the humane SS chief she’s sent to spy on. Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German is set in Allied-occupied Berlin in 1945, exploring its morally and physically devastated population, and corrupt US motives as the Cold War looms. Reg Traviss’s Joy Division, most remarkably, ignores the Holocaust, instead following a German boy soldier in 1944 through to his life as a Soviet spy in 1960s London, showing the experience of German civilians as they’re bombed by the British and raped by the Russians, and the savagery an uncomprehending 14-year-old Nazi is subjected to.

This shift in perspective has arrived with the 21st century, with the war’s reality six decades gone. Anthony Beevor’s best-selling 2002 history book Berlin: The Downfall 1945 was one catalyst. It used newly uncovered Soviet documents to detail the Red Army’s systematic rape of almost every woman in its path, as it bludgeoned its way through East Prussia towards Hitler’s capital. The sheer horror of German civilian suffering, and the despairing heroism of its shattered armies, was impossible to avoid, even as Beevor fought to keep the Nazis’ culpability for everything visited on them in view.

Reading this, I rather got the idea that The Hand that Signed the Paper’s only crime was to be published ten years too early, although on reflection I think that what can loosely be described as ‘the Culture Wars’ probably played a larger part in the irritation that flew around in those pre-Howard days. That said, what historians and novelists can each achieve in their separate fields is an interesting ‘line of enquiry’, to use an expression from the law of discovery. What lawyers do, of course, is something else again. Historians are supposed to be objective. Novelists are supposed to tell stories. Lawyers are supposed to take sides.

I long ago realised that I do not have the temperament for history - at least not as it is currently practised. At first I thought this was because my narrative instincts were too strong, but I now realise I have the lawyer’s tendency to take my clients’ part, even if those clients are mere characters in something I make up. Before I started studying law, I spent some quality ‘think time’ on what history can and can’t achieve in terms of verisimilitude. I’d been reading a lot of Foucault - the only postmodern theorist who impresses me, probably because he can write - and began to formulate some ideas. Those ideas - with a few updates - are over the fold.

The present’s complete reconstruction of the past in its own image is more likely in the history of Classical antiquity than of almost any other time period. When researching aspects of the ancient world, we are confronted not only with an extraordinary paucity of textual evidence, but with the deliberate rewriting and partial destruction of what little evidence remains. Many people with a modicum of classical knowledge can narrate the two separate burnings of the Library of Alexandria, first by the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius in 391 and later (more completely) by the Saracen Caliph Amrou Ibn el-Ass in 642. John Vincent provides some cliometrics:

The Roman Empire was a large affair, a huge, literate, rationally administered, urbanised fact, extending over at least six centuries. From it there survive ten million words in Latin, and 100 million in Greek. Of these, 90% in each case are post-Christian. Had it been pagans who decided what survived from antiquity, the proportion of Christian and non-Christian material might have looked very different. Of the ten million words in Latin, two million concern Roman law, because lawyers found them interesting. Of the ten million words of pre-Christian Greek, two million are by the medical writer ‘Galen’. To survive the Dark Ages, it was advisable to stick to writing legal or medical works, and to be a Christian. The remote past has already censored the remoter past.

Ancient Rome, then, can be (and has been) an historical battleground. The sources - or ‘traces’, to use Keith Jenkins’ term - can be made to yield up an incredible multiplicity of readings, chiefly because they are both so few and so varied. I believe at least two major patterns of interpretative reconstruction of the Romans (with many variations) have been generated: on one hand ‘just like us’ with their fast food and central heating, enlightened laws and commodified popular entertainment. On the other hand murderously foreign; a nation of cruel, imperialistic, sensuous hedonists.

The problem posed by this textual/historical conundrum, as John Frow argues, ‘is not to deny or even to be agnostic about the reality of the past that is referred to; it is to say only that it is inaccessible as a ground other than through the specific reconstructive procedures of a discourse’. There was a past. We can discuss aspects of it via the medium of history: history, however, is inescapably a child of the present, an understanding distinctively of our own time.

However, history written in the present is not the only discursive structure that may be employed in order to apprehend the past. Possibilities for reconstruction also exist in the genre of the historical novel. ‘The most pellucid pearls of historical narrative are often found in fiction,’ writes Lowenthal; ‘[fiction has] long been a major component of historical understanding’. However, writers of historical novels annoy historians, and have done since Walter Scott, in certain crucial respects the ‘progenitor’ of the historical novel in its modern form. Although both Lukács and Lowenthal discuss the crucial differences in methodology between the historian and the novelist or playwright, there is no escaping the fictional elements present in historical narrative. ‘Some historians try a Scheherazade pose: they will beguile the fickle Caliph of the public with stories,’ writes Clendinnen, ‘but real stories, about real people’. Lowenthal also argues that the historian’s ‘distaste’ for the historical novelist is of relatively recent provenance. ‘In former times, history and fiction often coalesced or conveyed mutually supportive insights’.

Take, for example, the case of the great Roman historian Livy. Convinced that history had lessons to teach, Livy knowingly fabricated in order to produce a coherent narrative of what he termed ‘the story of the greatest nation in the world’. He commented that

Events before Rome was born or thought of have come to us in old tales with more of the charm of poetry than of a sound historical record, and such traditions I propose neither to affirm nor refute. There is no reason, I feel, to object when antiquity draws no hard line between the human and the supernatural: it adds dignity to the past, and, if any nation deserves the privilege of claiming a divine ancestry, that nation is our own.

Although convinced that ‘the study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind’, Livy is also guilty of confused topography (he never left Italy), anachronistic descriptions of battles and a weak understanding of every country’s politics save his own.

Of course, we only know this because another ‘trace’ covering most of the same period has come down to us: Polybius‘ Histories. Admired now because of his ‘modernity’, Polybius travelled extensively, used primary sources, described the Roman army lucidly and accurately and specifically disavowed using fictional techniques in his writing:

It is not an historian’s business to startle his readers with sensational descriptions, nor should he try, as the tragic poets do, to represent speeches which might have been delivered, or to enumerate all the possible consequences of the events under consideration; it is his task first and foremost to record with fidelity what actually happened and was said, however commonplace this may be. For the aim of tragedy is by no means the same as that of history, but rather the opposite.

Polybius was a rarity among historians of the ancient world: even the careful Thucydides invented speeches for his historical personages. However, all Polybius’ care aside, it is instructive to remember that it was Livy’s picturesque Hannibal who came to dominate all subsequent constructions of the Second Punic War. Livy is incomparably a better writer than Polybius, despite his inaccuracies: his gift for vivid recreation is extraordinary. He can make us feel what it is like to suffer a long siege, to lie on a battlefield wounded and dying, to be trapped in a panic-stricken crowd, and to face action cold and wet and hungry. By early imperial times he was already a standard textbook, used, as Juvenal (Satura X) tells us, to supply themes for school speech day recitations and college debates. The phrase Hannibal ad portas, taken from Livy, became part of the tradition as a nursery threat or rallying cry, much as Boney’s name was used in nineteenth century homes and survives in sea-shanties.

What is significant is that, in antiquity, Livy’s blending of history and fiction in his writing was perceived to be as legitimate as Polybius’ decision not to employ fictional elements in his history. R.M. Ogilvie speculates on some reasons for Livy’s popularity, both in his own time and in ours:

Like a novelist he subordinated historical precision to the demands of character and plot. He indulged freely in invention and imagination in order to present a living picture. He would have disclaimed the title of `historian’ in the modern sense. He had no wish to spend long years burrowing for irrefutable but trivial facts and to secure himself against criticism by burying them again in unreadable monographs. Like Scott, he wanted to be read, and he wanted the public to enjoy reading him. His success was immediate and universal; he became a ‘classic’.

This is not to pretend that history and fiction were always blurred in the way of Livy throughout antiquity (or in the middle ages, when the two genres were also blended): rather, it is to say that ‘distinction’ did not imply ‘dislike’. Lowenthal argues that the dramatic ’segregation of historical from fictional narrative was a by-product of late Renaissance concern about the validity and accuracy of historical sources’. Later still, during the Enlightenment, the best historians still mixed fiction with their history (Edward Gibbon, for example), but, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, historians gradually retreated into the realm of empirical exactitude. Historical fiction, meanwhile, took much of history’s imaginative ground from beneath it. The echoes of this process are still with us: Clendinnen tells how, when she ‘asked a class of new history graduates which historians they read for pleasure’, she was greeted with laughter.

Nonetheless, for all its creation of what some would consider an artificial division of labour between fiction and history, at least the empirical nineteenth century gave both a clear role. Where historians saw the importance of weighing up evidence and clarifying events, fiction writers saw a captivating narrative. The neatly linear narrative and overt verisimilitude of much nineteenth century historical fiction, while often forgettable when placed beside other texts in a given author’s oeuvre (compare, for instance, Flaubert’s Salammbô with his Madame Bovary) was one way to create atmosphere at once convincing and exotic. Of course, for some writers, historical fiction was the supreme vehicle for their skills: ‘an historian can tell you just what happened at Borodino,’ says William Styron, ‘but only Tolstoy, often dispensing with facts, can tell you what it really was to be a soldier at Borodino’.

However, this happy (or at least workable) division is, perhaps as a result of the arrival of ‘the imaginary object we call postmodernity’, no longer operational. ‘Each genre has encroached on the domain once exclusive to the other,’ Lowenthal states, ‘history has grown more like fiction, fiction more like history’. Historians like Simon Schama, according to Clendinnen, ‘have sought to embellish their dried arrangements with the bright flowers of fiction’, while novelists such as Umberto Eco and E.L. Doctorow have interleaved so much history within the substance of their fiction that it is difficult to tell where one starts and the other finishes. Schama’s Dead Certainties (unwarranted speculations), although clearly a work of history, quite deliberately deploys some of the devices common in contemporary fiction: events are presented out of chronological order, some of the (multiple) narrators are duplicitous, and cinematic flashbacks are legion. Schama, true to traditional historical practice, is clear about which sections are purely imagined fiction, and his endnotes are meticulous. Dead Certainties thus functions as a wry and irresistible comment on the pleasures of narrative and on what Herbert Butterfield called his ‘tremendous truth - the impossibility of history’.

However, for all its verve, wit and intellectual challenge, the re-emergence of the blurring of the boundaries between fiction and history common in antiquity has, of late, come under sustained attack. The terms of this attack vary widely, and, it must be admitted, are sometimes contradictory. Generally disliked (by historians) are anachronism, warping of the historical record to suit novelistic plot constraints, creating imaginary characters and inserting them into the genuine historical narrative, and, paradoxically, faithful but nonetheless offensive reproduction in fiction of certain very unpleasant historical attitudes, such as anti-semitism and misogyny. In this last, some historical novels (and films) capture - with a chilling intensity often denied to history - the attitudes and milieux of the fascist or inquisitor.

The heterogeneous nature of history’s attacks on fiction, exemplified by this squeamishness in the face of ‘history’s horror’ has never been adequately explained. John Vincent sees it as a yet another manifestation of the present’s inability to come to terms with the morality of the past.

Most frequently, however, fiction’s anachronisms are the major bugbear of professional historians. Some historians object to incorrect military detail (uniforms, weapons, manoeuvres); while others attack fictional portrayals of language or cultural habits. According to Lowenthal, both history and fiction are often guilty of ‘denying, taming or explaining away’ the past’s ‘utter strangeness’. John Barth’s Sot-Weed Factor, by deliberately introducing contemporary attitudes into the world of the seventeenth century, shows, Tanner argues, that ‘Barth does not believe in such a thing as history even while his narrative pretends to evoke it’. Similarly, George Lukács is extremely critical of what he terms ‘modernisation’ in historical fiction, where contemporary attitudes and ideals are merely projected backwards onto historical figures. Lukács praises Walter Scott because ‘he never creates eccentric figures, figures who fall psychologically outside the atmosphere of the age’. In their turn, historians have also been chastised for adopting fictional elements in their writing. ‘The turn to fiction’ writes Clendinnen, ‘is a confusion of categories’. Historians, she argues, ‘cannot compete with the true Scheherezades’. Novelists, according to both Windschuttle and Clendinnen, have too much power over the content of the text.

It is this (deliberately) anachronistic approach to historical fiction, and occasionally to history (Whig historians stressed the familiarity and continuity of pasts they found exemplary) that has led in part to Eric Hobsbawm’s contention that ‘most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present, lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in’. And, although Hobsbawm would probably disagree with these reasons, Pierre Nora’s argument that we exist ‘in a time of a fall from memory into history, or from history into amnesia (…) in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history’ is a useful (if limited) way of explaining Hobsbawm’s `destruction of the past (…) or of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary existence to that of earlier generations’. Even an event as well-documented as the Nazi slaughter of Jews during the Second World War, Frow argues, has ‘been constructed and reconstructed as an object of public memory within the play of present interests, fears, and fascinations’. It has become ‘an overwhelming fact of our daily lives, constantly referred to both in scholarly and political cultures and in the mass media’.

However, Joyce Appleby points out that our perception that history is ‘one damned thing after another’, along with the sense that the past and present are very different things, are both very much a product of the Enlightenment and its notions of linear, universal time. Our impression that historical events distribute themselves (apparently naturally) along the ‘time-line’ wallcharts beloved of high school history teachers is a legacy of the Enlightenment. ‘Mediæval audiences shuffled Caesar, Charlemagne, Alexander, David, and other ancients like cards in pack,’ notes Lowenthal, by way of contrast. ‘It took two centuries of printing to habituate Europeans to the mental process of reaching back through an orderly sequence of chapters in history’. Middle Agers had no sense that Caesar or Alexander, let alone David or Charlemagne, were separated by hundreds or even thousands of years. They were great, and they lived ‘many years ago’. They undoubtedly existed - no-one ever doubted that - but they were embedded entirely in mythological narrative. Numerous literary Romances were based around historical figures such as these but firmly grounded in the mediæval period. For good or ill, history apprehended via Hobsbawm’s ‘permanent present’ is a characteristic of most epochs. Look, for illustration, at a mediæval, or even a renaissance painting of the crucifixion (Giotto, Grunewald, Bosch) or some other event from classical antiquity: Roman soldiers morph into knights, their women dressed in the voluminous gowns of mediæval Christendom. Even the landscape changes, becoming Italy, or Germany, or France. Only with the art of the Enlightenment (think of Jacques-Louis David’s 1784 painting The Oath of the Horatii, for instance), do scenes from ancient Rome begin to resemble what we consider to be ‘antiquity’.

None of this alters the fact that most historians lack the market-place popularity of novelists (and film-makers), and are justly concerned that the field of history in which they specialise is (apparently) erroneously presented to a large audience, which, they assume, will then uncritically accept that presentation. Historical novelists regularly fit a story of their own invention into one of the many available historical ‘grand narratives’, but in so doing, automatically privilege the ‘invented narrative’ at the expense of the ‘grand narrative’. Readers, so the argument runs, will use this invented perspective in all subsequent constructions of the grand narrative. Ralling is particularly critical of television ‘docu-dramas’ because they deny the viewer any opportunity to read against their ‘tone of all knowing certitude, cloaked in authoritative anonymity’. However, this criticism of both the historical novel and television documentary (if people read it/see it they will always believe it) makes certain assumptions about the nature of the reader that cannot be substantiated. To illustrate my point, Greg Dening tells the following cautionary tale:

It is only the romantic and the totalitarian who believes that the theatre of their histories drives a reader to the one truth and the one meaning they want to display. Reading and interpreting is [sic] much more roguish. Some years ago, the Commonwealth Government tried to educate the Australian public to the dangers of AIDS by creating some theatre in a television clip. Death, the Grim Reaper, was shown as a figure playing ten-pin bowling. The bowling pins were men, women and children. They bounced and clattered away randomly as death scored. There was some alarm expressed at the time at the brutal starkness of the advertisement. Many felt it was too shocking. It was overkill, some said. Then we learned in the weeks that followed that the chief effect of the advertisement was a sharp drop in the membership of ten-pin bowling clubs. It is a depressing story for anyone who thinks that writing history is theatre. How does one produce the effects one wants in one’s stories? Presumably, if one knew that, one could rule the world or at least sell a lot of something. Maybe the answer is that one can never be sure of producing the effects one wants.

Many novelists and some historians, following Dening, would also argue that readers are not passive, but active. Readers bring so much cultural baggage to any given text that, regardless of whether they are historians or not, they each take away meanings that are only partly derived from their reading of that text. Of course, it is possible to argue that there are ‘common readings’. However, this should be treated with a degree of suspicion: ‘common reading’ is frequently a masking phrase for the naturalising of a particular (dominant) discourse, which leads us back to Jenkins’ argument that

we judge the ‘accuracy’ of historians’ accounts vis-á-vis other historians’ interpretations, but there is no real account, no proper history (…) that allows us to check all other accounts against it: there is no fundamentally correct ‘text’ on which other interpretations are just variations; variations are all there are.

The historical novelist, then, falls between a number of stools. He repackages history as fiction, and in all instances views this process as not only inevitable, but healthy - otherwise, why write historical fiction in the first place? Many historians resent fiction’s intrusions and appropriations and disclaim its methods, while others willingly adopt fictional techniques themselves. While the novelist depends on historians for material, his insights are often original and engaging. In recent times, however, the blurring of boundaries between fictional practice and historical method has led to a (sometimes undignified) scrabbling over jointly contested ‘territory’. To cap it all, there is no guarantee that either the historian or the novelist will be read as he prefers to be read: reading, as Dening says, is too roguish for that.

Lukács, despite his dislike of ‘modernisation’, understood that the various contradictory ways of apprehending the past - exemplified in an extreme way by the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment, and amplified by the recent tussling of fiction and history - left the position of the historical novelist unresolved. Lukács was more than usually aware of the fact that all writing about the past made visible connections that were invisible to people participating in events at any given moment in that past. We are all familiar with the difficulty of making accurate forecasts of next year’s events, never mind events of the next decade. This difficulty is not unique to the twentieth century. In all probability Caesar could see no plausible reason for an attempt on his life during that fateful Ides, and so went to the senate unaccompanied. We, with our ‘perspective’, see only assassins lurking in the shadows of the Roman curia, but cannot ‘explain’ the Gulf War, an event too mired in the present for us to disentangle the threads of historical causation.

Lukács conceived of an ‘escape’ for the historical novelist from the demands of the strangeness and brutality of the past by outlining what he called the ‘necessary anachronism’. He argued that there were tendencies ‘alive and active in the past’ which are still ‘active’ in the present. It is the task of the historical novelist to identify these, and, without exaggerating them, write of them in a world (not necessarily the world) that is both familiar and foreign - and convincing. For Lukács there are different levels of factuality which make quite distinct demands on the writer. It is not the novelist’s task to meticulously recreate costume, architectural or linguistic details, instead:

the writer’s historical fidelity consists in the faithful artistic reproduction of the great collisions, the great crises and turning points of history. To express this historical [Lukács's italics] conception in an adequate artistic form the writer may treat individual facts with as much licence as he likes, for mere fidelity to the individual facts of history without this connection is utterly valueless.

The past, for Lukács, must be ‘brought near’ to a present day reader, by skilful interleaving of major historical events with various fictional approaches to them. The events and objects of history should then be reflected in the attitudes and actions (’the inner life’) of fictional characters. The historical novelist, then, must not only go to a foreign place. He must drag the reader along behind, and, most importantly, make the reader believe. All the while knowing that any such belief can last only for the short span of a novel.

Postscript: Reading this through now - and editing out a few infelicities - I realise that I disagree with my 2001 conclusions in some respects, although there is one point I made then that holds particularly strongly. It is not possible to rewrite history in such a way as to give it the filter of modernity. Milton and Rose Friedman make the point in Free to Choose that one of the precipitating causes for the catastrophic series of bank runs that helped set off the Great Depression was anti-semitic dislike of a certain Jewish-owned bank. Historical attitudes - like anti-semitism or misogyny - cannot be explained away. History is irreducably male, irreducably violent and (largely) illiberal. Digging up obscure female historical figures or token Aborigines like the worthy fellow who decorates the fifty dollar note will only go so far.

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