history: discipline and epistemology
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History: Discipline andepistemologyAlun Munslow aa University of Chichester , UK E-mail:Published online: 07 Nov 2008.
To cite this article: Alun Munslow (2008) History: Discipline and epistemology,Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 12:4, 557-568, DOI:10.1080/13642520802457402
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REVIEW ESSAY
History: Discipline and epistemology
Historics: Why history dominates contemporary society, by Martin L. Davies,Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 2006, viii þ 287 pp., £19.99, ISBN978-0415261661 (pbk)
Historical evidence and argument, by David Henige, Madison, WI,University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, xiii þ 325 pp., £31.50, ISBN 978-0299214109 (hbk)
Is history fiction? by Ann Curthoys and John Docker, Sydney, NSW,University of New South Wales Press, 2006, viii þ 296 pp., e18.95, ISBN978-0868407348 (pbk)
The field: Truth and fiction in sport history, by Douglas Booth, London andNew York, Routledge, 2005, x þ 342 pp., £31.99, ISBN 978-0415282284
These four texts are an eclectic collection that in their divergent waysaddress the issue of history as a discipline and as an epistemology. They alsoevaluate history as a social practice coming to substantially differentconclusions as to its social utility. The tacit assumption of all of them is thathistory is still important to society though in different ways. Indeed, I amcompelled to the conclusion that history can be whatever we want it to be.This seems to be something of the message of Martin L. Davies’s Historics:Why history dominates contemporary society. Davies has tried to get ‘. . . atwhat’s behind history’ (7) and does so in the trope of apprehension or even,perhaps, anxiety about its cultural use and situatedness. But for Davies wecan’t escape its situatedness. Here the book exposes the same problem we allhave. Can we escape ‘the system’ (whatever that system is) to critique itadequately? Clearly Davies believes, like most critical thinkers before him,he can and this book is the result. He claims his aim is to expose history’s‘affirmative character’ or alternatively its complicit or compromised natureas a form of knowledge. In exposing among other things its culturalsituation Davies argues how this effectively anaesthetizes history as culturalcriticism. Like Alison Landsberg (2004) he sees history as a prosthetic but itis one that is illusory in both action and knowledge (Davies 10). It is
Rethinking HistoryVol. 12, No. 4, December 2008, 557–568
ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online
� 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13642520802457402
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‘beguiled’ by the illusions involved in action and knowledge. History can’tescape its own cultural creation and functioning in order to be afundamental critique of contemporary society. Indeed, in a slightly differentsense, history is a huge con trick – but one in which the perpetrators don’tknow they are part of a monumental hoax.
However, while I have great sympathy for this argument, in the author’srush to mount a sustained attack on the present cultural uses put to history, Ibelieve he could be too dismissive of those who might just support his cause. Iagree he can dispense with the historical establishment’s untenable positionthat history is about truth and the discovery of it in past empirical realitywhilst still trying to be new empiricists maintaining ‘but of course we knowtruth is unobtainable’ stance. Such notions never were convincing and havebecome less so over time. But to dismiss what he calls postmodern theory (inhistory), as being at once superfluous and powerless to confront and changethe nature of our contemporary cultural understanding of history is to rushinto an isolationist position that ultimately may wreck his entire argument.1
My comments are thus, like the Davies’ version of history, situated. As asort of postmodern historian2 I make my comments from a perspective thathas always tried to rethink the nature of history as a historicized activity –specifically as historicized in an epistemological universe. Davies assumes wecan’t escape our epistemology and that, for example, postmodernism is justanother manifestation of modernism’s inherent playfulness. So, we are allconfederates in domesticating history for a variety of cultural purposes?Well, I am tempted to say either (a) so what? or (b) what’s new?
His critique of Keith Jenkins (Davies 13) is, I think, a problem. Jenkins’disobedient efforts to rethink our take on history, in Davies’ words, ‘won’twash’ because the world is historicized and, therefore, we can’t escape itspresent dispensation, of which postmodernist critiques are a part. Daviesexpends a lot of energy early on in explaining why his book is different in itscritique of history from the postmodern (though he accepts its scepticismabout empiricism), and expresses his doubts about experimental history. Inthis, maybe, he protests just a little too loudly to be wholly convincing.Indeed, he ends up with throwaway lines such as ‘History, as the ultimatereality of a world in which money is the ultimate value, actually turns out tohave no sense of reality or value’ (31–2). I’m not sure I really follow this.
In his rush to damn and dismiss history (not in itself necessarily a badthing) he reads Jenkins somewhat differently than I would. He quotesJenkins from his 1997 Postmodern History Reader to the effect that Jenkinsis happy with history once it has been postmodernized. But surely Jenkins’thinking has moved on (if he ever thought that). Until Why History? (1999)Jenkins offered a postmodern critique because of his desire to explore whathe thought of as a postmodern antifoundational deconstruction that couldproduce an emancipatory kind of history. These histories, he thought, mighthelp generate history in more charitable ways and in different modes of
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expression as well as genres. But, with Why History? Jenkins’ mood darkensconsiderably. He then started to argue we could now forget history in orderto live in a new universe of enjoyable alternatives provided by postmodernthinkers like Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Rorty,Ermarth, Badiou etc. Jenkins’ trajectory, which not simply matched butmarked out the development of much postmodern history thinking, nowbegan to encourage and endorse the idea of emancipatory rhetorics.
In Refiguring History (2003), which Davies quotes from but interprets inan original way (15), Jenkins developed the ‘end of the necessity of history’thesis. If we still want that culturally manufactured article we call history weneed to produce wholly fresh refigurings of the ‘past’ that are now beyondepistemologically normative historicizations. In fact Jenkins has subse-quently moved on even further in two ways. First, he wants to imagine anintellectual who can think around/beyond contemporary histories, and healso seems engaged in writing genuine alternatives for refiguring ‘the timebefore now’. Because I don’t think the Jenkins’ intellectual trajectory hasbeen fully appreciated by Davies, I believe his analysis of the confederatenature of the postmodern engagement is debatable. I am not sure Daviesshould claim to distance his own critique of history too far from that ofJenkins. To misconstrue Jenkins as I think he does makes me doubt Davies’conclusion that in postmodern history ‘. . . theory only makes the same oldhistorical world even older . . .’ and why he thinks his Historics ‘. . . dis-counts any idea that history, let alone its postmodernist variant has a‘‘potentially subversive’’ effect’ (quoting Beverley Southgate 1996).
It seems to me that Jenkins has always wanted to make a difference to theway ‘The Nature of History’ is seen, as evidenced by his writing for studentsand never only for scholarly reasons. If anyone wanted to destroy history as ithas been conceived and used in the wayDavies thinks it has been, it is Jenkins.Moreover, in terms of its cultural impact, Jenkins’ work has always beenintentionally ‘popularizing’ so students can read complex theorist’s ideas at acut-down level before going on to engage with them. Indeed, I believe Jenkinshopes that his argument about the ‘end of history’ (which he outlined in 1999)demonstrates the proper nature of ‘history today’.
For Davies to maintain that postmodern history only pretends to becantankerous and disobedient is doubtful. I would, for example, gently pointout that this journal, although it retains the word ‘history’ in its title, isprobably the only place historians are going to find a sustained and situatedcritique of both their theory and their practice at the epistemological level.Some historians in Britain (and the USA) are not just exploring interestingideas about history but putting them (and especially subversive ones) intopractice and print. So to argue that the corporate university for its ownaffirmative, socio-economic ends can assimilate such criticism seems a little offbeam.Moreover, to contend that postmodern history is just as consensual butjust a more self-styled radical consensus does not fully convince me, especially
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in light of that peculiarly British terror machine – the Research AssessmentExercise. British postmodern historians tend to get short shrift from the RAE– primarily because they stick two fingers to the empirical-analyticalEstablishment. Davies pays too little attention to this perhaps?
Moreover, to suggest that postmodern history only plays according to itsown postmodern rules I also find unconvincing. Here yours truly is quotedbut I fear not properly understood (16). This, I am willing to believe maywell be due to my weakness of expression. Anyway, I still think historiansare not herd animals when it comes to working out what they think theevidence means, but to then suggest that I think postmodern historians areherd animals (actually Davies playfully calls us ‘professional resourcesmanagers’) is a doubtful interpretation. I recommend he look at the bookExperiments in Rethinking History (Munslow and Rosenstone 2004)collected (perhaps herded?) from the pages of this journal. Davies maythen be better situated to determine whether we editors are actually‘professional resource managers’ simply because we have collected severalexamples of radical (but consensual) experimental history.
The uncharitable thought on my part is that we just can’t win. Daviesseems to assume that there is a ‘transcendental perspective’ (16) amongpostmodern historians that ‘. . . still consecrates the technical expertise of theacademic professional as the dominant mode of knowledge’ (ibid.). I am alittle surprised by the charge (so much so that I actually laughed when I readit) that ‘Be it postmodern or traditional, historical knowledge still affirmsthe managerial ethos that affirms the dominant social reality’ (ibid.). I thinkit is dubious to suggest that experimental history is probably worthlessbecause it is postmodern. Ironically, most if not all of the people in theMunslow and Rosenstone (2004) collection would aver they are not post-modernists at all.
The rest of the book offers a model of history as a cultural artefact thatis, of course, unavoidably rooted within the world it intends to confront. Bythe author’s own logic it can’t be anything else. The construct through whichDavies evaluates history is, happily, not particularly complex although itwill look daunting to students should they be recommended the text to read(and, despite my reservations noted so far, I think they should). Historianstend not to like abstruse and technical language and positively shudderwhen confronted by box diagrams. It is quite conceivable the messagecontained in them will probably upset virtually all historians or worse mightput them off buying the book. It is something to say for the book that it willprobably unite reconstructionist, constructionist, deconstructionist andpostist historians because we all get it in the neck. This is in itself a majorachievement. But, that apart, I think this conclusion would be unfair. Davieshas produced an arresting text that most certainly deserves to be read andrecommended on student reading lists and not only because of its utterlyiconoclastic tone and message.
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The next book, Historical Evidence and Argument by David Henige, isthe kind of book and thinking that Davies warns us about. Henige’s book isa vade mecum that all empirical-analytical historians should carry with themfor ready reference. It is Henige’s foundational assumption that historiansknow things about the past because they have access to and can examine therelevant evidence. A book more unlike Historics would be difficult to find.Self styled in the blurb on the back as ‘. . . sceptical, unsparing andacerbically witty’ the claim is made that Henige offers ‘systemic doubt’ as hiswatchword. The premise upon which the book is founded is the diametricalopposite of that of Davies. For Henige history is never complicit in anythingexcept in endorsing the pursuit of truth through empirical scepticism.
His ‘ideology’ (as he calls his set of epistemological assumptions) is that‘. . . experience tends increasingly to make us more cautious, sceptical, evencynical, and that the more experience we are able to muster, the greater thedegree to which this is likely to happen’ (6). But he reminds us this is trueonly if we ‘. . . maintain open minds not suffocated by a set of beliefsproclaiming closure and embraced as a whole, but for which the tangibleevidence is exiguous or even non-existent’ (ibid.). Henige finds it hard tobelieve that not all historians are as sceptical as he is. Only in this way canwe avoid the certainty that we have the answer.
Paradoxically though, he talks at great length about epistemology andepistemological considerations that must ‘. . . always be on the front burner’(7); however, he is more certain about his empiricist scepticism because itderives directly from the certainty of his epistemological position. Pointingout that historians should always be circumspect, avoiding words like‘demonstrate’ and ‘prove’, he nevertheless comes firmly down on the side ofevidence. He is happy to be a sort of Pyrrhonist sceptic – a position hedefines as that of temperate judgements, allied to the available evidence andalways provisional. Progress is fuelled by ‘vigilant scepticism’ and sustainedby ‘open-minded inquiry’. Those who labour in these pursuits will reap thereward for those who do not believe all they are told. These are certainlytraits I want to see in any tax inspector, civil engineer or medic. But as anepistemological sceptic, I am starting to worry what swallowing thisargument hook, line and sinker means for historians.
Henige claims to begin his monumental task of self-effacing and modestyet scrupulous open-mindedness with ‘no preconceived notion of how toproceed, realising that any number of approaches could be successful’ (9).But whether this situation pertains or not, caution and discipline remain thewatchwords. He takes for granted that historians cannot be ‘objective’ andthat ‘asking whether evidence has intrinsic meaning is useless anddistracting’ (12). Nevertheless, with a steely empirical eye, Henige maintainshistorians can assume there is some correlation between life as lived and thepast as interpreted, even though no two historians will react to theirevidence in exactly the same way (17). Well, this is very probably the case
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but as I read on I became seriously concerned that Henige would claim thathistory can, more or less faithfully, correspond to the reality of the past. Mysuspicions were aroused when he took a swipe at counterfactual history.Then, of course the postmodernists get it. It was only a matter of time.
Working from the (false?) assumption that postmodern historians haveno time for evidence and if they do, it must be because they lump it alltogether as of equal value (equal lack of value to be more accurate – aposition Henige calls ‘counter-nihilism’ 24). This leads to a brief reiterationof the usual misconceptions about postmodern historians – that objectivityis an illusion, truth is idiosyncratic, science is artfully camouflaged opinionand, consequently, history is just what we want to believe. Against this ispitted ‘the traditional approach to evidence’ (25). He then attacks Appleby,Hunt and Jacob’s book Telling the Truth About History as beingdangerously relativist and far too accommodating to postmodernists (aposition rejected by other historians – see below). As if this were not over-egging the pudding, he goes on to suggest E.H. Carr underscores thesubjectivity and relativism in which postmodernists wallow.
Although none of this is new, rarely in my experience has the argumentbeen more, well, ‘unsparing’ or, I have to say, presented with more ‘acerbicwit’. Henige offers a monumental defence of reconstructionist historicalthinking and practice but, as always, after the sniping at postmodernism,fails to argue convincingly the empiricist case. Henige flounders – as must all‘eggs in one basket’ empiricists – in addressing the notion that factualism,though important in what purports to be a realist literature, can never be thething in itself. No matter how strong is the scholarly conscience of theempirical-analytical historian, reference to the past events is never morethan a description in a history narrative. I have plenty of room for doubtjust like Henige, but my doubts do not stop at the door of knowing whathappened. I have doubts about the concept of truth, but if I am run down bya herd of elephants I think I would be pretty sure about it. Postmodernistswhen punched in the nose by a reconstructionist historian probably know ithas happened, but they always ask what it means. It is not as Henige claimsthat postmodernists deny the possibility of truth. We just have worriesabout the primacy of his kind of truth.
The humility of Henige in the face of issues like truth is welcome andthere is more of it in the topic of Ann Curthoy’s and John Docker’s text IsHistory Fiction? Before I opened the book I pondered the title. From myperspective, because history is a narrative representation of the past thequestion of whether it is fictional doesn’t really register on my radar: for me,history is a realist literature about the past that is fictive and not fictional inits construction. By fictive I mean simply that it is imaginatively constructedin the form of a narrative. In other words, to make sense of the jumble of thepast we need to give it an order, which we do through the mechanism ofnarrative. This narrative made order, of course, does justice to the varieties
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of causal connections in past events/actions etc, as can be inferred from thedata stream. But more importantly, how the story is ‘put together’, i.e.narrated to create ‘what it all means’, becomes the key issue. So, unless onebegins by believing that historians make up both the events and the story,how could it be fictional? So, I read the title and thought this is the wrongquestion because it puts other important questions such as what is historicaltruth to the wrong test.
So I embarked on the book with three misgivings. First, I do not believewe can tell the truth about either history or the past (a common error isconflating ‘the past’ and ‘history’, two entirely unconnected ontologicalcategories) defined in any way that fails to acknowledge history as a fictiveenterprise. Second, should we be asking what is truth (in history) if weprethink the matter as an offshoot of the issue of history as a possiblefiction? In other words, by asking the question from an empirical-analyticaloriginary position which assumes ‘. . . that we do indeed believe in truth andin the search for truth’ (5), they stack the cards in favour of a particularanswer. And third, as the publisher of an article by the authors a decade agoin this journal, I wondered if what I surmised then about their position –that of enlightened constructivism – had changed. At that point I turned tothe end of the book to find out what the authors concluded in answer totheir question.
It didn’t take me long to realize that the authors had not changed theirposition. Responding to debates in Europe, the USA and Australia aboutthe concepts of ‘anti-postmodernism’ the ‘Holocaust’ and the ‘history wars’,they presented a sophisticated understanding of the complexities involved inturning the data into meaning. This is not, as they would be happy to admitI assume, a novel conclusion to reach. The notion of ‘telling history like itwas’ is now dead and gone (if it ever existed). We are now concerned withmore complex matters centred on representation and what happens to thedata stream of the past when history is treated as a realist literarynarration – though not on the model of the nineteenth-century realist novel.And we should not forget the way in which history speaks about the pastwith the concerns of the present in mind. Notwithstanding the likes ofRichard Evans and his play on the Appleby et al. book title Telling the TruthAbout History which, by 2002, had become Telling Lies About History, thebulk of the profession has moved on. Few historians today artlessly believethat knowing precisely what happened is the same as knowing what it meansor that one can tell truth (or lies) about history. Or that lying about the datahas anything to do with epistemological scepticism.
After early tours that take in Herodotus and Thucydides, Curthoys andDocker make the point that traditions associated with these thinkers remainsignificant today and shape our contemporary attitudes toward truth: Truthis always a function of data and interpretation (the authorial ‘I’). Via asojourn considering Leopold von Ranke and Sir Walter Scott, they raise the
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recent (from around 1830) disciplinary distinction between history andliterature and then the lean towards the model of science. This inevitablyleads to the big question – is there any meaning in history?
The authors do not say the question is pointless, which from oneperspective it plainly is, but try to answer it as if it were not. The perspectivethat such silly questions produce would be akin to ‘Is there any meaning inpainting?’ or ‘What is the meaning of my neighbours?’ The more usefulquestion should be (can only be?) is there any meaning in the way that weorganize our knowledge of the past (or knowledge about my neighbours)?This opens up the issues of meaning not as discovery but as narrativecreation. True, historians have perspectives (race, class, gender, nation,neighbourliness etc.) but the actual process of generating a meaning comesfrom the nuts and bolts of narrative creation. The ideological, national,gender orientations of historians are just a part of that which connectscontent and story in the history narrative.
While pursuing the usual suspects – Croce, Beard, Becker, Collingwood,Lerner, Benjamin, Hempel, Arendt – the authors do occasionally glancesideways at the historical imagination noting at one point that occasionallythe historian resembles the novelist (105). Of course, being loyal members ofthe historical profession, Curthoys and Docker still argue the historian’snarrative is meant to be true. But at this point (about halfway through thebook) we still have no idea what their definition of truth, let alone historicaltruth, is. To be fair they do quote Collingwood’s definition of historicaltruth as being something that emerges from the totality of what the historiandoes, which is a substantial advance on Henige, for example.
What is refreshing and especially worthy in Curthoys and Docker’s bookis their sophistication in placing the historian in the position of engagedmoral critic. Although they do not say so in as many words, the notion ofethics as the first philosophy stalks their pages. The authors’ treatment ofthe linguistic turn builds on this notion of an engaged historian. Startingwith Jack Hexter’s reflections on narrative (which despite their heroicredemptive efforts turns into a blind alley) the authors quickly move ontoBarthes and especially Derrida who is treated clearly and expertly (althoughthe comparison with Hexter ultimately remains far-fetched). Next comes thefeminist challenge that is offered as a superb survey – and which alone isworth the price of the book. We move to the conclusion of the book with anessay on postmodernism and poststructuralism with detailed evaluations ofFoucault and White.
The authors’ take on White, that historians do not write in a multiplicityof genres but only in one – that of the realist novel in which the narrator wasomniscient with only one point of view and one interpretation, I do notshare. They argue that although the tone might be satiric for example, thegenre was rarely tragedy or romance ‘but simply realist prose mirroring therealist novel’ (193). I believe the model of the realist novel was, and remains,
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an oversimplified model of how historians narrate. After a furtherexamination of Bakhtin and White, they offer a coda that examines howthe 1980s and 1990s was a time of literary experiment in historical writingand how it came to an abrupt end.
This is, of course, wrong. Experimental history may have started in the1980s but it continues with great vigour through to the present. This journalis evidence (it started publication in 1997), as is the recent collection ofarticles gathered from it published by two of its editors (Munslow andRosenstone 2004). Curthoys and Docker are faint-hearted in believing thenew empiricism (not a term they use) has constituted the new paradigm forhistorical thinking and practice. They also give too much credence to theAppleby et al. text of 1994, which they seem to think is ambivalent in itspraise for the achievements of postmodern history while trying to maintain a‘practical realist’ approach. Telling the Truth About History is hardlyindecisive in its attack on epistemological scepticism. However they dodemolish Richard Evans’ (2002) attack, noting his truly odd idea thatepistemological scepticism implies ‘extreme relativism’ (whatever that is).
However, Curthoys and Docker do an excellent job of connecting theholocaust denial moment of the 1990s with the end of experimental/postmodern history (except, of course, that it has not ended). Having saidthat, the authors do not really acknowledge that both intellectually and inpractice the two were wholly unrelated activities. No postmodern historianto my knowledge would falsify the documentary evidence of the past ordeliberately try to deceive the consumer (although the book Dutch byEdmund Morris is a recent interesting example). The postmodern agenda isnot about lies but about representation. Empiricists tend to endorse thecorrespondence theory of truth. Postmodernists do not. The debate startsfrom this; it does not end with it. As Curthoys and Docker acknowledge,using Dan Stone as their example, postmodernists simply make us moreaware of the nature of representation, the authorial voice of the historian,and issues of subjectivity, none of which necessarily means denyingempiricism or the use of the data stream.
Unsurprisingly Curthoys and Docker opt for the middle road wherebyhistorians can combine ‘formal experimentation and recognition of thecontingent’ with a commitment to truth, research, the rigorous use of thesources and clear argument. But the definition of truth from a narrativistperspective is never offered. The reason is most likely because in simplyasking the question, ‘Is history fiction?’ the presumption is that ultimatelytruth coincides with empiricism and analysis alone. The matter ofrepresentation does not really come into it. The fact that the work,variously, of William Gallie, Frank Ankersmit, Richard Rorty, PaulRicoeur, Seymour Chatman and, for that matter, Gerard Genette wasomitted from the text is an issue for me. If their contribution had beenevaluated, then the question that the authors might have considered asking
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may have been ‘Is history a fictive cultural exercise?’ That question wouldhave provided a different answer. On balance, however, this remains animportant text that should engage the profession.
The final book by Douglas Booth, The Field: Truth and fiction in sporthistory, is a self-conscious exploration of the issue of truth and fiction withinthe genre of sport history. Beginning with the epistemological choiceshistorians make, Booth quickly explains his mode of explanation. Movingbeyond the reconstructionist, constructionist and deconstructionist modelhe moves the debate on by evolving a seven paradigm explanatory analysisof sport history. In so doing, he is self-conscious of the process of creatinghistory through mechanisms such as narrative, what he calls advocacy,comparison, causation, social change, context and new culture. With aremarkably clear set of assumptions Booth immediately tackles the bigissues of facts, objectivity, interpretation, truth concepts and structures (insport history). His analysis of all this is exhaustive and documented withsubstantial empirical reference.
What is especially useful – and original – in Booth’s text is his willingnessto dissect forensically his own narrative construction as well as those ofother historians. He does this in his explanation and explication of the sevenparadigms of his model of historical explanation. Here again he invokes notmerely the triadic reconstructionist, constructionist and deconstructionistmodel but also engages the relevant theorists ranging from A(nkersmit) toZ(agorin). As Booth says towards the end of the book, ‘a fully reflexivehistorian will engage with her or his ontology, epistemology, sources,theory, ethics, morality, politics, viewpoints, concept of time and space,context, narrative, rhetoric, genre and field’ (212). Doing this and explainingit to their consumers ought to be an obligation for all historians. It is anobligation Booth has taken up with verve and clarity. The book is a tour deforce and I recommend all historians read The Field.
What does all this add up to? Well, it would appear that the nature ofhistory remains a contested cultural undertaking. It also demonstrates thatthe fractured nature of history thinking and practice leads not toconclusions, only more reflexion. But it also suggests, at least to me, thatthe next stage ought to be a consideration of the narratological boundary orturn. We need to move from how the story is constructed to how the storyconnects to content, how the story is expressed (questions of form matter),and the authorial role of the historian. Still too many of the ‘what ishistory?’ texts that are available today begin with how historians find outwhat happened in the past (according to the sources). They shift then to howthe attempt is made to explain why events happened as they did and howhistorians interpret ‘the meaning’.
It is then acknowledged that the ‘findings’ of this activity are put into theform of a prose narrative that is seen as a mode of report.3 Of course itwould be an irresponsible reduction not to point out that very few historians
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view what they do as being entirely the product of work in the archivalsources. Indeed, most historians today write their history because of whatthey believe are the shortcomings of the sources and the failures to open uphitherto neglected facets of the past. Consequently, they argue that certainaspects of the past, such as aspects of race, class and gender, for example,are often silent (in terms of sources), and this requires the application offresh conceptualization and theorization.
But even the best-intentioned and most self-conscious of historians tendto accept that these activities are placed in what has become a generallyaccepted priority. First there is empirical reference. Next comes anexplanation of how those events connected together. Finally the meaning– sometimes called the historian’s interpretation – is offered. There isundoubtedly a loop at work here, but it is never a simple linear activity – the‘coherent reality’ of the past is ultimately rendered with analyticalobjectivity as a historical narrative that conveys its most likely truth. Thisis why in every conventional history text we have the strong sense of‘. . . here is the true though neglected story of . . .’. Even though mosthistorians today claim not to subscribe to a simple notion of objectivity ortruth – one that equates either concept with reference – the availableevidence and the inferences of even the most prudent and honest historianstill remains the ultimate objective foundation for truth.
However, as we know, there has been a debate among historians on thenarrative turn in history. This has centred on whether these four principlesand their priority of reference, explanation, meaning and their presentationin the form of a narrative tells us everything we need to know about historyas a discipline. But, as these four books indicate, before confronting theseissues we still need to clarify the basic difference between story andnarrative/narration. Telling a story is not simply a matter of getting whathappened in the right order (discovering the pattern). Equally important isthe process of its being told. That process of ‘telling’ is a system of signs andmeanings creation that transcend all disciplines and mode of expression.
Perhaps, today, the central issue in historical thinking and practice isthat of narrative. Without ignoring or demeaning the role conventionallyassigned to reference it may be necessary to argue that history cannot bereduced to the story of the past precisely because it is a narrative about apast. Hence, the usual order of priority of reference, explanation, meaningand narrative, even in the hands of the most sophisticated historian, can beseriously misleading. Happily, each of the four books reviewed here reflectupon the rich nature of history thinking and practice today and all areworthy of the time required to read them.
Alun MunslowUniversity of Chichester, UK
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Notes
1. Though I share the author’s doubts about empiricism’s ability to cut to the realchase (176), I still have enough respect for it to try to spell people’s namesproperly. So, Martin, my name is Alun not Alan as it appears in the preface.Perhaps we are condemned to another aspect of our historicized existence – ourinvariable inability to correct proofs properly?
2. I’ll say that as most of my critics have damned me in such language – though tobe so criticized I do take to be an honour judging by those who usually do it butit is still inaccurate for too many reasons to go in to at this juncture – but if youwant to know what they are email me and I will happily discuss the matter atlength.
3. Prose refers to ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ ‘non-verse’ language. It is usually written.Prose, unlike verse, has no formal metrical arrangements.
References
Appleby, J., L. Hunt, and M. Jacob. 1995. Telling the truth about history. New Yorkand London: W.W. Norton.
Evans, R. 2002. Telling lies about Hitler. London: Verso.Jenkins, K. 1997. Postmodern history reader. New York and London: Routledge.Jenkins, K. 1999. Why history? New York and London: Routledge.Jenkins, K. 2003. Refiguring history. New York and London: Routledge.Landsberg, A. 2004. Prosthetic memory: The transformation of American remem-
brance in the age of mass culture. New York: Columbia University Press.Morris, E. 2000. Dutch: A memoir of Ronald Reagan. New York: HarperCollins.Munslow, A., and R.A. Rosenstone, eds. 2004. Experiments in rethinking history.
London and New York: Routledge.Southgate, B. 1996. History: What and why? Ancient, modern and postmodern
perspectives. London: Routledge.
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