Messing with Mr in-between: or, how being second-rate can rescue history

Abstract

My aim in this article is to put an end to the continued either-or debate regarding the literary nature of history, whereby attention so easily returns to the fact–fiction issue. To prevent a relapse into this unfruitful argument, I offer a reading that is sensitive to the non-literary aspects of history writing and views them productively, rather than as a problem to be brushed aside in theoretical debate. In an attempt to ‘accentuate the positive’, I thus foreground strengths that are specific to history, that follow from historians’ core commitments. Beyond this questioning of more extreme, purportedly narrativist claims, I take issue with the realist, ‘negative’ tendencies that similarly stem from a refusal to accept history’s contradictory desires. These are particularly evident in the current, popular embrace of presence and experience in talk about the past. I argue that greater sensitivity is needed in rethinking history practices in this direction too, since an uncritical focus on reality encourages reactionary views and representations. Understanding the ways in which these newer debates effectively serve to limit opportunities for societal critique is essential if we wish to see why and how history can remain a useful pursuit.

Keywords:

• Historical sensibilities
• genre
• experience
• constructivism
• critique
• the purpose of history

Notes

1. Responding to one such critique from Georg Iggers, White (2000, 398) has once more attempted to set the record straight; this time with the following: ‘It is true that I have spoken of histories as products of a process of invention more literary or poetic than scientific and conceptual; and I have spoken of histories as fictionalizations of fact and of past reality. But, to be quite frank, I intended the notion of fiction […] as a hypothetical construct and an “as if” consideration of a reality which, because it was no longer present to perception, could only be imagined rather than simply referred to or posited’.

2. The commitment to tell the truth is easily bundled together with the choice of realistic form in history. But this choice (too often made by default and convention) is not innocent: it marks a fidelity to ideologies of exhaustive reason and remainderless interpretations. So, even if finding actual examples of the kind of seemingly transparent, objectivist and neutral representation that ‘realism’ or the common example of ‘the nineteenth-century realist novel’ stand for would be difficult, the critique of any form that tries to hide its constructedness and presents itself as natural needs to be taken seriously.

3. The arbitrariness of such authority over the truth is not in any doubt here; Heinlein’s story is, after all, preparing its protagonist and readers for the reality of ‘pantheistic multiperson solipsism’ (by which worlds are created in the act of writing about them): ‘They did ask, sometimes, and accepted my decision without argument. But I could see that they did not always believe me. That pleased me; they were starting to think for themselves – didn’t matter if they were wrong. Llita was simply politely respectful to me about Oz. She believed in the Emerald City with all her heart and, if she had had her druthers, she would have been going there rather than to Valhalla. Well, so would I’ (Heinlein 1975, 191).

I confess to a desire to read an intellectual history of the affinities or even connections between science-fiction authors like Heinlein and thinkers such as Rorty and White who (understandably) all appear to be attached to a particular mix of pragmatist philosophy and Clemensian literary attitudes. Such a study might also be a useful introduction to relativism for its critics. To give one more example of the subtlety of this, ultimately antifoundationalist, position, here is Heinlein’s Lazarus Long a final time, with sound advice: ‘What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell”, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbours think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!’ (Heinlein 1975, 262).

4. Arguably, ‘proper’ historians, content in their situation within the discipline, have largely denied critique as a desirable or an acceptable goal for their profession. Those who have presented overtly critical, ‘oppositional’ points of view have been outsiders, hoping to change the face (and purpose) of history. And – to make a sweeping generalization – once these outsiders have managed to introduce the kinds of changes they were after, many of them have become mainstream, and consequently less interested in critiquing the institution.

5. I have discussed this ‘desire for reality’ in terms of a basic ‘phenomenological yearning’ in other contexts. People are used to having meanings ‘emerge’ in interaction with concrete reality in everyday experience and, if someone is inclined to think that reality imparts significance, they might, conceivably, expect to have this same kind of interaction with the past as well. For more on this, see Pihlainen (2017).