'A New Type of History'

Fictional Proposals for dealing with the Past

Beverley Southgate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138848030
• eBook ISBN: 9781317431121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Linking fiction with history and historical theory, 'A New Type of History': Fictional Proposals for dealing with the Past focuses on a selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists – Tolstoy, Proust, John Cowper Powys, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Penelope Lively, and James Hamilton-Paterson – who have criticized scientifically based history and proposed alternative ways of approaching the past: more subjective and personal, colourful and imaginative, and above all ethically orientated. In this, it is argued, they have been reverting to an earlier rhetorical model for history, which is now being increasingly adopted by practising historians. This 'new type of history' may lack the claimed 'objectivity' and 'truth' of its immediate predecessor, but it opens the way for an ethically focused subject that may be used (in Nietzsche's words) 'for the purpose of life '.

Providing a new take on both novelists and historiography, and ranging widely from the nineteenth century to the present day, this cross-disciplinary study will be valuable reading for all those interested in the intersection and interplay between fiction and history.

1 Introduction

I argue in this chapter that, with their proposals to liberate historians from some of their disciplinary conventions, my chosen novelists anticipate later developments by effectively advocating ‘a new type of history’ – a redefinition of the subject which is tantamount to a reversion from a scientific to an earlier rhetorical model. I then briefly introduce the (obviously inter-related) aspects of historiography that are treated by my selected writers, as discussed in later chapters: the relationship of history with fiction; narrative, representation, and truth; language and meaning; memory, identity, and time; ideology, utility, and ethics.

When Wyndham Lewis’s fictional protagonist René Harding advocated ‘a new type of history’, he was acting against a consensus that ‘history’ was indeed all of ‘a type’ – that there were certain disciplinary rules that permanently prescribed its nature, its procedures, and its purposes. For ‘History’ as an academic (or even ‘popular’) pursuit seemed, and often still seems, to have a fixed identity – to be a disciplinary area that has been clearly defined, at least from the time of its ‘professionalization’ in the nineteenth century; it gives every appearance of being a quasi-‘natural’ entity, and is widely accepted as such. So historiography resembles one of those ‘codes’ of which novelist Penelope Lively has written: that they simply have to be ‘accepted’ – identified but not queried.¹

That evasion of questioning is not surprising, for ‘professionalization’ has been well described by Dominick La Capra as involving ‘an attempt to stabilize the movement of historical understanding through normative limits’² – which is to say, an attempt finally and definitively to establish the discipline’s parameters. And the model of ‘History’ that has been successfully stabilized derives its authority from being firmly based on ‘scientific’ principles – meaning principles associated with what was ‘science’ at the time of its establishment as a discipline: an emphasis on empirical evidence; an assumption of timeless universal causal laws, which make possible both analysis of past events and (at least to some extent) prediction of the future; an insistence on an ‘objectivity’ that implies observers’ detachment from their subjects of study; an acceptance of previously established foundations, and of appropriate rules and procedures for building on these; and, perhaps above all, a repudiation of any personal ‘ideological’ – including ethical – input. In short, there has long been a consensus about the nature, purpose, and methodology of history as a science-based subject; students are inducted into that, and appropriately ‘socialized’;³ and whatever fails to cohere with it, or cannot be handled within those terms, is simply excluded as irrelevant or as not being history’s proper concern.

That defining of the parameters and terms of reference of scientific history (as of science itself) has the advantage of making further development possible, for it facilitates the identification of points where further research is needed, the results of which can then be assessed in relation to their coherence with and contribution to the whole disciplinary structure. Admittedly, there has been an implied limitation of what could appropriately be done as ‘history’, and of how it could properly be done; but that narrowing-down is the inevitable consequence of any focusing – and there has been ample compensation to be found in the progressive developments seen to have resulted. Unsurprisingly, too, there has been approval and prestige for historians, as being seen to apply methods that have proved successful in other similarly science-based fields.

J. B. Bury’s oft-quoted (1902) definition of history as ‘a science, no less and no more’ has, then, persisted through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century; so that, to give but one example, Chris Given-Wilson could state categorically and (it seems) uncontroversially in 2008, that history ‘should in some sense be “scientific” ’.⁴ And it’s not surprising that any qualities that appeared unbefitting in such company – qualities such as subjective involvement, an interest in feelings and emotions, and a concern with ethical values and aesthetics – have been duly excluded as inconsistent with disciplinary standards, occasionally resurfacing only as anomalies and in defiance of the professional code.

But history’s adoption of a ‘scientific’ model is of course itself a historical event: it too can be historicized and shown to be a development of a particular time and place, and indeed a replacement for an earlier – ‘rhetorical’ – model that had prevailed since antiquity. Rhetoric, as the art of persuasion, had formed a part of education since the Sophists in fourth-century bc Athens – when one of Socrates’s complaints against them was that their techniques could be used on both sides of any argument, as it still is of course in any law-court, and as it long continued to be in scholastic natural philosophy (or science). But that form of abstract argumentation was explicitly repudiated by early-modern intellectual revolutionaries, who were adamant that science should be based rather on empirical evidence: ‘rhetorical flourishes’ were to be superseded by the experimentally derived ‘facts’ of a ‘new science’. And for history likewise, rhetoric came to appear as an inadequate intellectual model.

Just, though, as it became impossible in the later seventeenth century to challenge the fundamentals of the new science without seeming hopelessly out of date and intellectually unacceptable, so too the newly redefined history became unimpeachable – beyond criticism. Until quite recently, therefore, it has been largely left to novelists, as unapologetic purveyors of fiction (perceived as the very opposite of ‘history’), to provide explicit critiques of a discipline whose ranks have often remained tightly closed against external challenges. And it has been novelists who, from the nineteenth and through the twentieth centuries, have (explicitly or implicitly) proposed an altogether ‘new type’ of history – a type that is only now in the twenty-first century becoming more widely accepted as possibly a desirable replacement for something finally outgrown.

That is not meant to imply that there was any direct influence or causal connection between fiction and developments in historiography: that is not my claim. Rather, what I do aim to do here is examine certain proposals made by novelists (selected by me in a no doubt arbitrary manner) to liberate historians from some of their disciplinary conventions and constraints; and I argue that what their proposals effectively amount to is a recommendation to see history, not so much as a science but more a form of rhetoric. In challenging the then discipline of ‘history’ and (either explicitly or implicitly) making their various proposals for change, novelists were in the intellectual vanguard; and their approaches to historiography continue to be of interest in the context of our own ongoing debates.

Topics they discuss, then, include: the relationship between history and fiction; narrative, representation, and truth; language and meaning; memory, identity, and time; ideology, utility, and ethics. I’ll give a brief introduction to these below – in a section that may be by-passed by readers already au fait with these matters – before going on in subsequent chapters to consider their treatment by each of my selected novelists.

These novelists range from the nineteenth century to today: Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), whose War & Peace promotes a history that should, inter alia, be ethically focused; Marcel Proust (1871–1927), whose extraordinary Remembrance of Things Past may be seen as a form of autobiography and is of course concerned particularly with memory; John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) – a less well-known writer, but one whose work is illuminating with regard to such issues as narrative and the construction of ‘realities’; Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), who specifically criticizes conventional ‘historians’ histories’, and shows great interest in such related matters as identity, memory, language, and representation; Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) – a wide-ranging cultural critic, whose semi-autobiographical novel Self Condemned centres on a Professor of History with aspirations to fundamentally reform his subject in such a way as to be useful for the future; Penelope Lively (born 1933), whose novels deal with such issues as the ‘constructedness’ of history, the intrusion of the past into the present, relativism, memory, and evidence; and James Hamilton-Paterson (born 1941), whose widely ranging work is considered here with particular reference to biography and associated problems relating to historiography and a past in which we can at best only uncomprehendingly ‘blunder about’.

All these writers, despite the daunting length of some of their works, are eminently readable; and their ‘fictional’ treatments of matters relating to the nature(s) and purpose(s) of history are of continuing interest and importance – not only as theoretical studies in their own right, but also as providing a basis for constructive practice in the future.

Of course, I can hardly fail to be aware that my own narrative is itself a contingent construction, and that I am engaging in a rhetorical exercise with the intention of making a point. But I hope and believe that, whatever their epistemological status, such stories about the past may continue to be of some interest and use. What immediately follows is a brief introduction to the topics that will recur in subsequent chapters in relation to my selected novelists.

The relationship of history with fiction

Historians and novelists respectively embody the two ingredients of a vexed relationship. For some, there is no problem: quite simply, there is no such relationship. History and fiction just do not interact: they are diametrically opposed to one another, and mutually exclusive. Historian Eric Hobsbawm, for instance, was emphatic that, while novelists may engage in ‘fudging the border between historical fact and fiction’, for historians there is a quite ‘clear difference’ between them – an unbridgeable distinction.⁵ And more recently and from the other side as it were, the historical novelist Alison Weir has clarified from her own exploration of the borderlands that ‘Fiction has no place in a history book.’⁶ Any attempted transgressions, then, such as when historian Simon Schama experimented with ‘a modest, playful piece of self-evident fiction’ in Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) in 1991, are liable to be met with what the author himself has described as a ‘storm of righteous indignation’ for having perpetrated ‘a betrayal of History; an outrage against the profession … a scandalous act’.⁷

Despite continuing attempts to maintain the conventional distinction between history and fiction, however, there has in the last half-century been an erosion of the previously accepted frontier lying between them – a reappraisal of that extensive territory which has increasingly been seen as a highly disputatious borderland. Invading occupiers represent numerous ambiguous genres, most obviously including the ever more popular ‘historical fiction’, in which an author’s imagination is quite openly used to fill in the gaps that are inevitably found in any historical research. But there are also many other examples of transgression, often made rather less explicitly: ‘historical’ films, which are often criticized for their departures from the strictly ‘factual’; television ‘docudramas’ that deliberately present an imaginative ‘drama’ based, as frequently described, on ‘real events’; ‘non-fiction novels’, where avowed writers of fiction take a ‘factual’ subject, such as a murder, as the focus of their work; or ‘novelized biographies’, in which the telling of an actual person’s life owes as much to an author’s creative imagination as to serious research.

These hybrids, which have come to form a hugely important part of popular entertainment, have done much to erode the sharp distinction that professional historians have been concerned to maintain between history and fiction; and there have simultaneously been critical incursions made by history theorists, who have argued for the at best fictive nature of historical narratives – narratives that may be seen in a number of respects to resemble, not so much scientifically derived reconstructions of ‘actuality’, as imaginative artworks.

Admittedly, the validity of any black-and-white distinction between history and fiction has been questioned at least from early modernity, with the recovery of sceptical philosophy and attendant rise of historical Pyrrhonism. But it is developments during the last half-century that have finally made any dogmatic differentiation intellectually untenable. This will become clea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) and ethical history
• 3 Marcel Proust (1871–1927) and the recovery of ‘lost time’
• 4 John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) and ‘an entirely new genre’
• 5 Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and ‘history as it is lived’
• 6 Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) and ‘a new type of history’
• 7 Penelope Lively (born 1933) and history as ‘a construct of the human intellect’
• 8 James Hamilton-Paterson (born 1941) and blundering about in the past ‘with fading maps’
• 9 Conclusion
• Index