History As Make Believe
Every consumer of history has encountered fictions; some writers are blatant about it.
Like using the keys below; only I can see who you are.
This is a riff on a Suzannah Lipscombe column in History Today.
In 1987, Natalie Zemon Davis published Fiction in the Archives (Stanford University Press). It focuses on the made-up (or fictional) elements of royal letters of pardon and remission in 16th Century France. Davis called it fiction because the writers crafted the letters into literary creations that told a version of the truth about their lives and the crimes for which they sought pardon.
Not everything in the archives is “true” like a time machine.
Scholars have to work with absences, erasures, violence, fibs, fabrications, and tabulations in the sources. What we take to be facts can be fictions. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), a study of young black women in the US in the early 20th Century, Saidiya Hartman finds that between 1882 and 1925 it was lawful to arrest a “wayward minor” (under the age of 21) who was “willfully disobedient to the reasonable and lawful commands of parent, guardian or other custodian and is morally depraved or is in danger of becoming morally depraved.” This included those who, without ‘just cause’ or parental consent, were absent from their homes. Young women walking home after working late hours, going to parties and drinking, having sex outside of marriage, or suspected of being about to do so were vulnerable to arrest at random and, if found guilty, to a sentence of up to three years at the State Reformatory for Women.
They could face jail time for acting like a mid-20th Century teenager.
In the worldview upheld by the state archive, which social workers, probation officers, journalists, sociologists, and investigators generated, people assumed women of color were susceptible to criminality and deviancy. What remains in the archive justifies the confinement of these women by branding their acts of freedom as “moral depravity”
The official documents made her into ... delinquent, whore, average Negro on a mortuary table, incorrigible child, and disorderly woman.
Saidiya Hartman
Hartman created a “counter-narrative” which presses “at the limits of the case file and the document, speculated about what might have been,” As well as grounding her research in what the archive says, she considers what it does not. Like Davis, she turns to other sources to find a way into the past. She speculates about what might have been but cannot be verified, poses counterfactuals, renders indirect speech into dialogue, and asks searching, imaginative questions. She terms it “critical tabulation” Hartman is one of several scholars attempting to infuse historical writing with narrative strategies and literary techniques borrowed from novelists.
In other words, she made stuff up but told her readers about it.
A founding principle of historical writing is that narratives do not fictionalize, invent or dissemble, or make things up—except some writers do it all the time while they claim to be tethered to the archive. How then should we feel about Hartman’s counter-histories and critical tabulations? Hartman’s stories are histories “written with and against the archive,” filling in gaps and working around them. When there is no other way to enter a story, Hartman makes it up—call it “truthiness.” She defines the edges of established knowledge but envisions the unprovable. She resists the hubris of speaking for her subjects and the temptation to fill in the gaps, but also refuses to let the judgement of the powerful who created the documents in the archives be forever the judgement of posterity.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
LP Hartley
Hartley’s admonition is important because the archives belong to the past, describing something Saidiya Hartman didn’t always like. She can’t change what’s in the archives, so she wrote a different worldview based on, you guessed it, presentism, that bugbear of historians and pundits alike. While the past is the past, some writers don’t like how it worked, so rather than just report what’s there, they put stuff in that isn’t because they don’t like the attitudes or the results of those in the past.
The only founts of historical truth are faith in the sources and time machines.
John D. Beatty
This is how statues get torn down, flags burned, buildings and institutions get renamed: applying present sensibilities and politics to the past and condemning it for not conforming to what we want to see in the present.
We can’t keep the past from happening, but we can simply report on it.
The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas
Many non-historians regard archives as where “truth” lies. Most historical scholars know what Henry Ford meant when he said, “History is bunk.” He implied that in his time it didn’t explore real people’s lives deeply enough to offer something usable in the present. One budding scholar wanted to change that, but had first to figure out what part of his archives were fakes and what was authentic.
This is how history books are written.
And Finally...
On 16 May:
1943: Operation CHASTISE begins in the Ruhr Valley of Germany. RAF Wing Commander Guy Gibson led 617 Squadron on the raid to destroy the Eder, Möhne and Sorpe (Röhr) dams using novel “bounding” ordnance designed by Barnes Wallace. Other than the flooding caused by the destruction of the Möhne dam, losing its hydroelectric power crippled German industry for months.
1975: Junko Tabei is the first woman to reach the summit of Mouth Everest. A member of an all-female Japanese team, she’d been in an avalanche just days before, but she continued her ascent to reach the 8,848-meter (5.4 mile) peak.
And today is the INTERNATIONAL DAY OF LIGHT, commemorating the demonstration of the first laser (Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation) by Theodore H. Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, California on this day in 1960. Maiman, building on generations of physicists and engineers, used a ruby crystal in his pulsed device. And today, we use one to confuse the hell out of our cats and dogs.
I do marvel at how some people today think our forbearers were incredibly dense for not realizing what our values would be today, and not making sure they did nothing that would offend our sensibilities.