Historicism

Paul Hamilton, Hamilton Paul

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134437818
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Historicism is the essential introduction to the field, providing its readers with the necessary knowledge, background and vocabulary to apply it in their own studies. Paul Hamilton's compact and comprehensive guide:

* explains the theory and basics of historicism
* presents a history of the term and its uses
* introduces the reader to the key thinkers in the field, from ancient Greece to modern times
* considers historicism in contemporary debates and its relevance to other modes of criticism, such as feminism and post-colonialism
* contains an extensive bibliography of further reading.

1 HISTORY AND HISTORICISM

THE POETICS OF HISTORY

From ancient times, philosophers have been eager to separate history from fiction. Like many others, this disciplinary boundary proved fragile from the start. Despite having expelled poets from his ideal republic, Plato was still constrained to use myth in his descriptions of the ultimate truths of philosophy. In books 7 and 10 of Plato’s philosophical dialogue, The Republic, his master, Socrates, enlightens his listeners by having them picture two imaginary scenarios for philosophical purposes. The myth of the cave invents a viewpoint from which we can survey the processes of knowledge which normally circumscribe us; the myth of Er imagines a comparable escape from the boundaries of mortality in order to explain the progress of the soul. In both cases, the contradictory recourse to art of a philosopher who has just condemned art as intellectually and morally disreputable implicates history in fiction. Plato’s justification of myth here is that it tells a true story in the only terms available. His myths aspire to be history, but in the absence of facts they must resort to fictions. We can only understand them, though, if we read them as supporting his philosophy with imagined histories.

In his Poetics, Aristotle had difficulty in seeing why this serious philosophical purpose could not straightforwardly be attributed to art. Why was history required to accredit the philosophical use of fiction to explain the nature of knowledge and mortality? For Aristotle, history was distinguished from poetry not by greater seriousness of purpose but by the different balance of probability and possibility proper to each discourse. Thus, while Oedipus thinks it impossible that he could have killed his father and married his mother, the narrative power of Sophocles’ play Oedipus Tyrranus shows how each step he took to avoid this outcome made it more probable. History, on the other hand, is full of examples of victory snatched from the jaws of defeat, or vice versa, in total defiance of what we expect to happen, of all probability. In fact, poetry was more philosophical than history because of its greater freedom to represent the complete understanding desired by philosophy. In poetry, probability was all; history, on the other hand, had to attend much more to what was possible. Provided a fiction was coherent, provided it contained a beginning, middle and end and reached a cathartic conclusion, it served its purpose: one that modelled the philosophical end of apprehending events in their entirety, with nothing necessary to their elucidation left out. History must resign itself to what could have taken place, however improbable this might be, and however its improbability might threaten the coherence of history’s relation of events, leaving readers frustrated rather than cathartically purged of their desires for explanation.

History, then, appears to be as vulnerable to criticism as poetry is safe from it. This is an unusual way of looking at Aristotle’s Poetics; usually the standards of coherence he imposes on fiction are viewed as restrictive and parochial, canons to be broken by creative writers down the centuries. It is worth stressing the comparable dilemma in which the Poetics leaves history. If the historian tells a coherent tale, one that has point and purpose, its probability may undermine its possibility and leave the author justified as a philosopher and discredited as an historian – probability, we recall, being the sign that poetry’s is a philosophical imagination. If, instead, the history in question records a host of improbabilities, however possible, faithfulness to what happened or could have happened will produce a discourse without point and purpose, philosophically negligible, random in its accuracy and literal in its confusion. Faced with this choice, it is fair to say, most historians reach a compromise. ‘It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes theory’, wrote Macaulay of his craft in 1828 (Stern 1970: 72). They find their own ways of making the possible and the probable interact, balancing truth to the facts against the need for those facts to make sense. Equally, though, writers of fiction have often had to confront the resistance of the individual fact to ordinary explanation. They have taken it as their task to devise a context for understanding or even just tolerating the exception to probability, the event which cannot be regularized. Some things, one might say, have to be remembered because they cannot be imagined. It may take as great a creative effort to step outside our criteria of probability as it did to reanimate them from within. Art and history inflect each other in commemoration and elegy, hypothesis and vision, record and story.
Memory – Mnemosyne – was, after all, the mother of the Muses, and the leading muse, Clio, presided over history.

When we look back to the ancient historians, we find just this tangle of common concerns rather than Aristotle’s clear demarcation of purposes. In a famous aside in De Legibus, Cicero tries to stick to the Aristotelian agenda, but he is obliged to concede that in practice distinctions become blurred: ‘different principles are to be followed in history and poetry . . . for in history the standard by which everything is judged is the truth, while in poetry it is generally the pleasure one gives; however, in the works of Herodotus, the father of History, and in those of Theopompus, one finds innumerable fabulous tales’ (I.5). In his classic review of Herodotus’ reputation, ‘The Place of Herodotus in the History of Historiography’, Arnaldo Momigliano shows that Herodotus’ standing as the inaugurator of ancient history persists alongside the assumption that he did not tell the truth. Momigliano is rightly fascinated by the fact that Herodotus’ alleged unreliability clearly counts against him, yet does not diminish his importance to his detractors. Partly this results from Herodotus’ historical situation: commentators have noted that he was as much the son of the fabulists, Homer and Hesiod, as the father of subsequent historians (Vandiver 1991: 239). Looking forward, we find that his immediate successor, Thucydides, though not attacking Herodotus by name, was eager to distinguish his own style of history writing from that of previous poets and chroniclers. Thucydides successfully ‘imposed the idea that contemporary political history was the only serious history’ because there was supposedly no room in it for the art of fable, myth and unproven anecdote associated with Herodotus (Momigliano 1966: 131).

But it is only by contrast with Herodotus that Thucydides’ history can appear as strict documentary. His own magisterial statement of principles at the start of his account of the Peloponnesian War fatally allows that ‘it has been difficult to record with strict accuracy the words actually spoken’. As a result, ‘the speeches are given in the language in which, as it seemed to me, the several speakers would express, on the subjects under consideration, the sentiments most befitting the occasion’ (Thucydides 1972: 47–8). In the absence of possible documentation, then, Thucydides relies on probability, on his own sense of what sounds inevitable and fitting. Again, history no longer looks opposed to fiction, but within history we encounter different genres of writing, in which it is appropriate to tell different kinds of story. Or we could say that different kinds of historical evidence need to have different kinds of construction put upon them. Herodotus writes not about contemporary political history, but about the past, and about different cultures, Lydian, Scythian, Egyptian. His evidence is oral, anecdotal, antiquarian. While Thucydides’ success in setting a pattern for future historians meant that few had a good word to say for Herodotus, the distinctive legitimacy or propriety of Herodotus’ kind of history to the sort of evidence available – Thucydides’ own criterion – remained undeniable, and so his lasting reputation was assured.

Momigliano notes that, subsequent to Herodotus, when Western archivists recorded the wonders of the New World, classical scholars were quick to point out that Herodotus and not Thucydides was now the useful historical precedent. Momigliano believes too that historical writing since the 18th century has become, more and more, a discourse within which you can find that mixture of geography, ethnography, mythography, sociology and any other human science originally conflated in Herodotus and condemned by his critics as the mixing of poetry and history (137, 141, 220). Eventually Herodotus arrives on the agenda of American ‘new historicism’ when a study of him appears in a series under the aegis of the journal, Representations, by François Hartog, who concludes that a ‘return’ to Herodotus is possible because of ‘a shift . . . in the historical field’ especially signalled by ‘recent inquiries into the imaginary representations of various societies’ (Hartog 1988: 378).

This coincidence raises the question of how to historicize the historians Herodotus and Thucydides. We see our reflections in the historical mirror by which they make us more aware of our own preoccupations, methods and practice. But their power to make modern historians conscious of their own preoccupations, methods and practice may, in turn, inspire these historians to still more productive meditations on Herodotus and Thucydides. Hartog notes that Herodotus wrote his more documentary histories of the Persian Wars, closest to what was to become Thucydides’ model, later than his more ethnographic work, and probably during his stay in Athens. History, then, becomes the discipline into which Herodotus matures, ‘one which – naturally – could ripen only in Athens’ (312). His pre-Athenian writings were therefore retrospectively constructed as mythologies and fables; they were in this way distinguished from the greater seriousness which belonged ideologically to an Athenian history representing its cultural supremacy past and present. Sophisticated scholarship of Classical historiography is now attentive to the ways in which historical meaning can change with the reception of its audience; how, for example, ‘the language in which Greece once celebrated itself can come into its own to celebrate Rome’ (Fox 1993: 47).

One can easily point to passages in the Histories which support the view of Herodotus as an Athenian ideologue: ‘Thus Athens went from strength to strength, and proved, if proof were needed, how noble a thing freedom is’ (Herodotus 1972: 369). Here is that mixture of civic optimism and chauvinism recognizable in the funeral speech Thucydides gives to Pericles in his history and which is taken up, ironically, by the Chorus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. The conclusion to be drawn by someone writing up the Greek campaign against Persia is straightforward: ‘one is surely right in saying that Greece was saved by Athens . . . It was the Athenians who – after God – drove back the Persian king’ (487). While there are qualifications and caveats built into Herodotus’ account of Athenian glory, many more appear in his tentative records of other cultures. When he has lived in the environment in question he happily turns his experience against home prejudices:

The Greeks have many stories with no basis of fact. One of the silliest is the story of how Heracles came to Egypt and was taken away by the Egyptians to be sacrificed to Zeus, with all due pomp and the sacrificial wreath upon his head; and how he quietly submitted until the moment came for the beginning of the actual ceremony at the altar, when he exerted his strength and killed them all. For me at least such a tale is proof enough that the Greeks knew nothing whatever about Egyptian character and custom. The Egyptians are forbidden by their religion even to kill animals for sacrifice, except sheep and bulls and bull-calves as have passed the test for ‘cleanness’ – and geese: is it likely, then, that they would sacrifice human beings?

(Herodotus 1972: 148–9)

Famous and fabulous stories of Indian ants bigger than foxes, or snakes that fly, either characterize his ethnography – his interest is as much in the Persian character of the anecdotes – or, in the case of the snakes, are checked against the bones themselves, viewed by Herodotus and graphically described for our supposedly wiser interpretations. By way of contrast, we could argue that Thucydides in his history was repeating the sin he deplored, a self-destructive introspection in Greek culture typified by the internecine quarrel between Athens and Sparta after their combination to forge an emancipating Greek identity in the war against Persia. The historiographical corrective here would have been the interest in other cultures, devoid of imperialist design, found in Herodotus’ histories, and the significance of his writing of a history of the Persian wars while the unity it epitomized collapsed all around him.

Both historicizings of Herodotus situate him ideologically, the first making him a tool of Athenian propaganda, the second placing him in opposition. It is perhaps not possible for both interpretations to be true, but what has been historically transmitted to us is the probability of both. In this endless shuttle, though, questions of probability return us to the present and the task of deciphering the rationale for choosing one interpretation over another. Hartog, consistent with his new historicist setting, has a Foucauldian suspicion that all writing, in one way or another, ends up conniving at the political power that permits it. Yet, as Momigliano has demonstrated, it is then necessary to explain the consequent misreading of Herodotus’ writing as possessing, above all, a liberating alternative to the sad tales of contemporary political history.

THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EXPLANATION

What is it to offer an historical explanation of an event or action? History and aesthetics do seem to have this vital fact in common, that they are concerned with events which are particular and individual rather than instances of the application of a scientific law. The Battle of Waterloo is not a member of the class of Battles of Waterloo about which we might then generalize. We may certainly learn from such an event and utilize this knowledge in our interpretations of other battles or analogous events. But this knowledge could not be formulated, in the way that knowledge derived from the scientific observation of phenomena might hope to be, in terms of causes and effects and the laws deducible from them. As Schopenhauer stated, a science of history would ‘be a science of individual things, which implies a contradiction’ (Schopenhauer 1958: 440). Causal explanation characteristically allows us to predict when such events will occur again, and obviously this is not the case with historical events. Part of the meaning of a thing’s being historical is that it has happened once and for all. Santayana’s warning that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it only makes sense in tandem with the realization that history may repeat itself symbolically but not literally, and it is the duty of the alert interpreter of events to realize when such figurative coincidences occur. No more could we learn from Bernini’s statue of David or Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe how to repeat their achievement or predict the time and circumstances under which they might occur again. Bernini’s sculpture owes something essential to Michelangelo’s David as does Manet’s painting to the Fête champêtre once attributed to Giorgione but now thought to be by Titian; but to say in either case that one caused the other seems as wide of the mark as to expect a modern reworking of their achievement to be comparably transparent. Artworks and historical events, like our reworkings of them, are inseparable from their moment.

Let us look more closely at ‘the Battle of Waterloo’, or rather at one novelist’s attempt to show the difficulties in taking that close look.
In Stendhal’s novel The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), the hero, Fabrice, attaches himself, disguised as a hussar, to a series of leading figures on the battlefield who, instead of illustrating the battle’s course in their purposeful galloping about and supposedly decisive actions, lead him into total confusion.

The sun was already very low, and it was on the point of setting when the escort, coming out of a sunken road, mounted a little slope three or four foot high to enter a ploughed field. Fabrice heard a curious little sound quite close to him. He turned his head; four men had fallen off their horses; the general himself had been thrown off his horse, but he was getting up again, covered in blood. Fabrice looked at the hussars who had been flung to the ground. Three of them were making convulsive movements, the fourth cried: ‘Pull me out from underneath!’ The serjeant and two or three men had dismounted to assist the general, who, leaning upon his aide-de-camp, was attempting to walk a few steps. He was trying to get away from his horse, which lay on its back on the ground, struggling and lashing out furiously with its hooves.

The serjeant came up to Fabrice. At that moment our hero heard someone behind him say quite close to his ear: ‘This is the only one that can still gallop.’ He felt himself seized by the feet: they were taken out of the stirrups at the same time as someone gripped his body under the arms. He was lifted over his horse’s tail, and then let slip to the ground where he landed in a sitting position.

The aide-de-camp took Fabrice’s horse by the bridle; the general, with the help of the serjeant, mounted and rode off at a gallop; he was quickly followed by the six survivors of the escort. Fabrice got to his feet in a furious rage and began to run after them shouting ‘Ladri! Ladri!’ (Thieves! Thieves!). It was rather comical to be running after thieves in the middle of a battlefield.

(Stendhal 1958: 63)

The passage is packed with inconsequential detail. It speaks for itself by telling us nothing. The reader of this and the rest of Stendhal’s description of a decisive historical moment has, like Fabrice, to hang on to individual concerns and make sense of things privately in the absence of any alternative point of view. And, yes, Fabrice ends up a comical figure, grotesquely out of place in a vast tragic arena, proclaiming his own small loss, his own ‘curious little sound’. Stendhal’s technique suggests with equal force that to try to place an intelligible grand historical construction on this mess would be just as comical. Either way, as the follower of the comic tale of Fabrice or of the tragic history of Waterloo, the reader is unseated, and also ends up in the mud, on his or her rear. The event of Waterloo is written as a confusion of genres. Whichever interpretative vehicle we mount, it is liable to be commandeered by the narrative and dispatched in another direction. Tolstoy, who saw active service in the Crimea, claimed to have learned all he knew about war from Stendhal’s description of Waterloo (Berlin 1992: 48).

Nevertheless, we do try to explain historical events and to interpret works of art consistently. What can be the content of these explanations and interpretations if not scientific? Thinkers as different as Condorcet and Croce, the late Enlightenment philosophe and the 20th-century follower of Vico and Hegel, have claimed that there is a ‘science’ of history. For Condorcet, the scientific analogy was unproblematic:

If man can, with almost complete assurance, predict phenomena when he knows their laws, and if, even when he does not, he can still, with great expectation of success, forecast the future on the basis of his experience of the past, why, then, should it be regarded as a fantastic undertaking to sketch, with some pretence to truth, the future destiny of man on the basis of his history?

(Condorcet 1955: 173)

Cause is, undeniably, a word which frequently crops up in history books. The same aura of elucidation hangs over the word ‘influence’ in books of art history and literary criticism. But here the idea of cause may well have the function ascribed to it by Michael Oakeshott when he writes that in historical discourse it is ‘no more than an expression of the concern of an historical enquiry to seek significant relationships between historical events’ (Oakeshott 1983: 88). In his vigorous attack on the belief that we can predict the course of human history, Karl Popper insists on the uniqueness of its events and the absence of the antecedents required for scientific generalization: ‘the most careful examination of one developing caterpillar will not help us to predict its transformation into a butterfly’ (Popper 1986: 109). Popper’s famous polemic against historicism, The Poverty of Historicism, is therefore not directed against historicism as defined here, and which Popper Englishes as ‘historism’ (17). By historicism, Popper means a philosophy which, like Condorcet’s, claims to predict the course of human history on the basis of past behaviour. If we accept his refutation of this unwarranted extension of scientific generalization, then we are left with the question of which interpretative categories we can use without raising false expectations of historical and aesthetic understanding.

Oakeshott describes the writing of history as a restorative act in which we discover from fragmentary survivals ‘what may be inferred from them about a past which has not survived’ (52). This act of salvage looks much more like learning a language or reconstructing a cultural context than conducting an experiment under laboratory conditions. The latter practice prescribes and limits our speculations; the former grants us entry into a linguistic or cultural medium in which we can find our own standpoint. This freedom, though, produces uncertainty: familiarity with a language increases our awareness of the multiple idioms and meanings of which it is capable. We can produce an entirely probable gloss on an historical event or a convincing interpretation of a literary text, but, in the face of equally probable competitors, we are still tempted to reach for an external scientific proof that ours is the only possible one. We might claim that the agent or a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 History and Historicism
• 2 The Rise of Historicism
• 3 The Hermeneutic Tradition
• 4 Historicism and Modernity
• 5 Historicisms of the Present
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Suggested Further Reading
• Bibliography