History, narrative, and time

History of European Ideas, Vol. 22, No. 5/6, pp. 337-350, 1996

Pergamon

PII: S0191-6599 (96) 00010-1

Copyright © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0191-6599/96 $15.00 + 0.00

HISTORY, NARRATIVE, AND TIME SCOTT MANDELBROTE All Souls College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 4AL, U.K.

Some of the most pressing questions which confront historians today relate to the status and definition of history itself. Historians have often wondered how they should describe themselves and have sought to define their practice and the range of their studies. The new debates in which historians have to participate in the era of postmodernism embrace more fundamental issues and force historians to fight on ground with which they may not be familiar. They assume that the choices of form or content which historians have traditionally made have not been sufficiently critical; that only now can a sufficiently sceptical eye be cast on the past, and on the stories which have been written about it. It is no longer enough to consider whether history cam best be described as an art or as a science, whether its methods should be quantitative or descriptive, whether its subjects should be the powerful or the voiceless. Historians now have to think publicly about questions concerning the genres and styles which make up historical writing, and to ask what is achieved by the decisions that they have made. They have to defend themselves against a challenge which comes from literary and critical studies, and which doubts the usefulness of traditional historical concerns and methods, as well as scorning traditional areas of historical study. More importantly, historians need to use the increased self-awareness which comes from such scrutiny to develop historical studies in new ways and into new areas, without abandoning the techniques and interests which make their work properly historical. This essay will discuss some of the questions, arising from literary and critical studies, which currently face historians. We are made aware of history because we experience the passage of time, and because we remember what has happened to us as time passes. The history of which we are aware, either because it is our personal history, or because we have been told about it by others, or have read about it in books, is all recent history. It is the story of the few past centuries in which mankind has domesticated and controlled time, and has thus been able to record the dates and hours of civilisations, lives and events. The invention of writing is the most important factor in the survival of records, and the subsequent creation of a history which can extend far beyond the memory of any living human being, and even beyond the lifetime of a language, or a civilisation. But the invention of time was prior to the invention of writing, and it is this human invention which made history possible. Time passes, but we know about it only because we observe its effects on our surroundings and ourselves. We grow in understanding of its duration, and hence the form of 337

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its effects, only because we have learned to bend it to our rules, and to measure it by our own terms. Calendars, and later clocks, do not describe or measure the passage of time itself: they map out distances which time will cover as it passes. They bind time within the limits of human comprehension. In doing so, they also give human lives a new structure and order. Time, then, at least as we understand and use it, has been modelled by humanity and is, in effect, a human creation. We domesticate it by dividing it up into the brief hours and days of a human life, or the longer but still brief centuries and epochs of recorded human history. Time, and the history of which it helps to make us aware, shape human lives in part because they are themselves shaped by individuals. Historians, sociologists and anthropologists have become increasingly aware of the extent to which human beings have shaped time, and of the ways in which changes in the description or measurement of time have, in turn, altered human experience. Different cultures may describe (and hence in some sense experience) time in different ways. Within the lifetime of the literate civilisation of western Europe, changes in the use of time have been closely allied to changes in the practice of work and the organisation of society. Control over the calendar is no longer the concern of the Church; long before it ceased to be so, essentially secular commemorations shaped the year, and drew attention away from the date of Easter. The traditional patterns of labour in fields which surrounded a village centred on its church are long gone, as is the calendar which determined their seasons. In their place, synchronised clocks and even watches presided for a time over an experience of factory work and mechanisation. Although modern computerised and atomic clocks are also human creations, devices for measuring time, the incomprehension which greets them is one aspect of the uncertainty about the nature of human society which has become a feature of the condition of post-war western Europe. 2 Such uncertainty becomes apparent in the belief of writers on both the left and the right of politics that history has ended. The 'end of history' has different specific meanings for different groups, but these meanings have in common the sense that the old system of doing things has come to a finish, and that in the process the history which characterised it (class war or the Cold War, for example) has also ended. The 'end of history' is a dialectical concept, its users either left- or right-Hegelians. It is also one part of a more general intellectual culture of endism, best known in the world of literary or critical studies as postmodernism. This culture presupposes a crisis of modernity (analogous to the crisis of the historical dialectic) which leads to its end. Its practitioners are eager to describe the end of humanism, out of which traditional historiography grew, and its replacement by the moral and intellectual uncertainties of postmodernism, which include uncertainties about the meaning and existence of history itself. 3 This lack of certainty has much to do with understandings of the nature of the passage of time. In part, it arises out of ideas about the nature of memory itself. Memory is a necessary antecedent to history; it is what makes human beings aware of the past and able to speak (or write) of it. Friedrich

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Nietzsche begins his essay on the advantage and disadvantage of history for life with the enchanting parable of the cow who, just as it is about to speak, always forgets what it is going to say about its life, and is thus always silent. Unlike the animals, human beings cannot forget about the past, and are always bound by it. For Nietzsche, however, it was necessary to forget the past in order to achieve a new level of human advancement. Confronted with the recent past of the mid-20th century (in particular the Holocaust), it is not perhaps surprising that many of those who have followed Nietzsche should wish that memories could be selective. In order to rescue something from the ashes, it may be necessary to forget. But the idea of the 'end of history' is not primarily about forgetting. It is a claim that history has become irrelevant, and can teach its victors nothing more. This is a claim which is shared by many who, while they do not proclaim the end of history, define history in ways which are unrecognisable to most historians. 4 As Nietzsche's parable of the cow suggests, memory and the telling of stories about oneself, allow the expression not only of the human experience of time, and of history, but also of human identity. We are who we are because of the stories which we remember and repeat about ourselves. 5 It may seem natural therefore to ask what sort of stories these are, how they are told, and what shapes them. This is the outline of the inquiry into the nature of history, which has been undertaken in the last 20 years or so, by a number of critics and theorists influenced by the ideas of postmodernism. That inquiry has attempted to explain the genres in which traditional historiography has functioned, and to indicate its limitations as a representation of human identity and reality. It has also suggested alternative ways in which history might perform its function better (although never how such a history might actually be practised). Its ideas lie behind new movements in literary studies (such as 'the new historicism') and also in historiography ('cultural history'), which cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, and which reshape our understanding of the past. At least in part, the aim of these movements is a better understanding of ourselves, achieved by what may be a better understanding of literature or of the past. One of the reasons why traditional history is felt to be inadequate lies in its form. According to Hayden White, and to those who have been influenced by him, the writing of traditional narrative history is constrained by its adherence to the style and form of the 19th-century realist novel. This is constraining because of the collective amnesia of historians, and their consequent ignorance of the genre in which they are operating. It is also constraining because historians have claimed a special authority for that genre, and have tried to exclude other forms of narrative from speaking about the past. 6 In the work of Paul Ricoeur, White's concerns are extended to so-called scientific history, in particular to the writings of Fernand Braudel and of the Annales school. Ricoeur argues that, despite their concern with quantification and demography, and with the geographical structures which underlie historical events, the authors of the Annales are in fact writing a quasi-narrative which is almost identical in form to that of traditional history. Ricoeur is partly concerned with exploding the pretension to write a

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scientific style of history which characterised Braudel's generation in the Annales. He attempts to indicate the dependence of Braudel's work in particular, and of historians writing of la longue durde in general, on the narrative Which they affected to despise. But, like White, Ricoeur wishes also to comment on historiography more generally. Scientific history provides no escape for the historian, who must represent the reality of the past by means of narrative, of story-telling. Ricoeur argues that in terms of representing the human condition, history is less effective than are fictional or other narratives. Although he does not question the historicity of history, he doubts its ability to 'actualize' events. The 'quasi-historical' world of fiction (particularly of historical fiction) may, therefore, present not just a different but a better means of dealing with the challenges posed to human beings by the passage of time than the 'quasi-fictive' world of history. Historical fiction becomes the best way in which people can resolve the problems posed by time, notably the problems of expressing the horrors of the recent past. 7 The challenge posed by White and by Ricoeur is that traditional ways of writing history cannot express the problems of modernity, nor provide ways of dealing with them. In part, this is because none of the traditional forms of historiography demonstrate an adequate understanding of the workings of time. In particular, they do not seem to take account of the historicity of the historian. 8 Dominick LaCapra puts this succinctly when he argues that it is necessary now to hold a dialogue with the past; others have suggested that it is necessary for historical writing (perhaps necessarily fictional) to engage with past, present and future. One of the impulses behind the dissolution of the barriers between past, present and future, and between history, fiction and fantasy is a reinterpretation of the nature and meaning of time. The time in which the stories of postmodernism must operate (or be given 'free play' in LaCapra's words) is the relative time postulated by Einstein. The ability of time to fold back on itself is held to invalidate the disjunction between past and present, or future, which characterises traditional historiography (even in the operation of hindsight). Once time is relative, the past cannot be supposed to be truly past. Historical fiction, therefore, becomes at least as real as history, and seems to be much more interesting than history. 9 Historical fiction has itself blazed this trail, notably through the writings of magic realists, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. More recently, however, literary critics and historians themselves have begun to write novels which intertwine the present and the past, and which, in some cases, deploy speculation to fill the gaps in the historical record. ~° However, discovering the facts in fiction does not make fiction fact. As yet, few historians have attempted to liberate themselves explicitly from the constraints imposed by the archive. Most historians have always recognized the contingent nature of historical evidence, and the approximate and temporary nature of historical arguments. II Many historians also now recognize the need to treat sourcematerial with care, and to analyse what may be fictional about it, as well as what may be simply factual. Historians have accepted that the stories which people told about themselves in the past are important ways of finding out what those people thought about themselves and about their lives. 12

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However, none of this necessarily implies any denial of the reality of the past, nor any dissolution of the line between past and present. Historians, as Paul Veyne has pointed out, do not have a method. ~3 They borrow freely from the methods of others, and are eclectic in the ways in which~ they write about the past. Nevertheless, there are elements of an historical narrative which are distinctive, and which separate history from fiction. The most important of these consists in the use of evidence in history. Historical evidence can also be literary and can take the form of oral, as well as written, narrativeJ 4 But, whatever its form, it remains a genuine survival from the past, and must be interpreted as such. Without historical interpretation and analysis, the retrieval of historical evidence becomes antiquarian, and reveals little more than an urge to unearth the past. ~5 Understanding historical evidence requires context, the juxtaposition of one fragment with another. Authors like LaCapra have also called for a contextual history, but for LaCaPra (as for new historicists like Greenblatt), context means period costume which gives plausibility to a narrative but which does not make it historical. 16 There is, certainly, a need for accurate generic and literary contextualising of historical evidence, as well as for the provision of appropriate historical contexts for a work. Despite this, both LaCapra and the new historicists regularly wrench literary works out of their generic contexts. The understanding of historical documents and texts depends then on giving them a n adequate grounding in the past (as distinct from the present). Historians and critics have recently become very sensitive to the issues of forgery and pastiche. 17 The forger and the critic seem often to possess similar skills, and to set them to work at similar aims. The most cogent detector of forgery is the passage of time, which exposes the forger's inability to reproduce a past style, even though his efforts might once have convinced his contemporaries, who shared his impressions of that style. Historical writing dates also, and the contexts which once seemed appropriate to a historian no longer seem so to his successors. But history is more than the forgery of the past (more than an historical fiction, or even a 'true allegory' [Hayden White]) because, whereas a forgery merely reflects, generations of historians are able to build on the erudition and labour of one another, in order to increase knowledge of the past. Historical fiction, however, may not be supposed to increase knowledge of the past, although a book like Simon Schama's Dead Certainties appears to claim to do this. Nevertheless, for Ricoeur and others, historical fiction represents a better understanding of the past than history, because it is more responsive to the needs of the present. As we have seen, this view was developed to provide answers to problems identified as the postmodern condition, in particular the realisation that the experience of the passage of time might be relative rather than absolute. Yet many of the anxieties about the nature of time expressed by critics of traditional historiography are, in fact, chimerical. Time, as we experience it, is a human construct, and the ways in which human beings construct time in their everyday lives (as distinct from in their science fiction) have not been altered by the Einsteinian

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revolution. This is unsurprising, and is not likely to change, since the world which we inhabit continues to be able to be described in the terms of classical Newtonian physics, and with them, of absolute time. The real behaviour of space-time is irrelevant to those of us who are stranded forever on this earth. And until we can travel in time as well as in space, the past will remain past, and separate from the present and the future, according to human experience. It is that experience, its records and remains, which historians study. Yet historical evidence is at best fragmentary, and historians have adopted a variety of strategies to overcome this. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, narratives which focused on the rise of the nation state, or on the imperial destiny of the western European powers, seemed to solve the problem of fragmentation. ~9 For many historians working in the less selfconfident climate of post-war western Europe, the answer has owed at least something to Marxism. This debt can be seen in the concern to write the history of the lives of ordinary people, which was shared, for example, by the historians of the Annales in France and by historians associated with the British journal, Past and Present. Within literary studies, the success of Marxist ideas proved much more complete in France than it did in England, where writers like Raymond Williams remained comparatively isolated within both Marxism and literary criticism. The attraction of Marxism, for historians and for historically-minded critics alike, has been that it provided a descriptive framework, or master narrative, through the motif of class struggle, for the events or texts of the past. This framework has been attacked over many years by historians who have wished to stress the variety and contingency of past events; it has also proved especially vulnerable to the arguments of critics and philosophers, like Paul Ricoeurfl° As their dialogue with Marxism has progressed, many historians have rejected the conscious pursuit of a grand narrative, in favour of the evocation of patterns of thought and behaviour (mentalitY), often expressed as if such patterns were changeless. Others have self-consciously sought to tell brief and well-bounded stories, and to allow these to stand as paradigmatic exemplars of larger, more complex events and changes. 21 Both these microhistorians and the historians of mentalit~s have often emulated the approach of cultural anthropologists, in particular that of Clifford Geertz. The substitution of detailed, and often highly imaginative, descriptions or stories for more traditional narrative history only succeeds in making the problem of the relationship of history to other forms of story-telling more obviously awkward. Although the new cultural history which has been written in this vein often combines a narrative of past events with its interpretation through obviously modern, and present-oriented, categories, its practitioners have not succeeded in meeting the criticisms either of an author like LaCapra, or of traditionalists like Geoffrey Elton. For LaCapra, the weakness of cultural history lies in its assumptions about the homogeneity of the past; Elton stresses the need to remember the contingent nature of experimental findings (by Geertz and others), as well as the contingent nature of the past itself. 22 Literary critics and theorists have also been affected by the changing reputation of Marxist historical studies. In a collection like Poststructuralism

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and the Question of History, the work of practising historians is scarcely mentioned. Instead, a number of the authors discuss the theories of history developed by 19th-century writers (notably Hegel and Marx). 23 The history which is in question here is one in which the nature of the past could be closely determined. It bears little relation to the contingent world about which many historians have always written. Poststructuralism may have redirected critics to the importance of the close reading and analysis of texts. However, critics like Robert Young have been more successful in jettisoning concern for the past, whilst preserving their interest in a broadly Marxist agenda, than in altering the relationship between history and literary studies. Postmodern theories may give literary theorists authority to play with the past, but it is unclear whether they (or indeed new historicist critics) are really ready for the opportunities which this might bring them. Instead, the denial of the past's authority, and its dissolution into discourse, frees the critic to continue to pass judgment on the present, without having to reconsider the nature of the past. 24 In some ways, therefore, historians and critics seem to be far apart, even when they are trying to build bridges into one another's territory. Although historians have developed a growing interest in the texture of historical documents, and in the detailed stories which they tell, they have done so whilst retaining the traditional narrative styles and emphases for which they have been criticised. Their growing interest in the role of the contingent in the past has been accompanied by a revival in the writing of narrativeY On the other hand, those critics who have rediscovered an interest in history, have tended to assume that events in the past were clearly determined. 26 Although new historicists, like Stephen Greenblatt, or cultural materialists, like Jonathan Dollimore, succeed in being playful with the past, and with the texts which they discuss, this theatricality is circumscribed by tightlydetermined rules about the nature of the past. It seems at times as if these strictures extend also to the present. Rather than either expanding the canon of literary works, or reinterpreting it using fresh sources, these critics use historical material to cast their texts in a broader play of power, in which language encapsulates and controls everything.27 The past retains its essentially formulaic nature for them, except that the story of class struggle has been replaced by a more complex one of competing discourses of authority. Although Foucault's work is more often invoked in new historicist writing than Marx's, the work of Greenblatt or of Dollimore is set in a historical landscape painted by Marxist historians, notably Christopher Hillfl8 The unusual has a role to play in the historical world which Greenblatt conjures up, but the unexpected does not. It is taken for granted that we understand the world of dead, white male Europeans, and that it is comprehensible in terms which can be easily recognised in a modern lecture theatre. 29 Greenblatt and his emulators share a sense of the moralising mission of literary studies with both old-fashioned literary critics and poststructuralists. Contemporary values and responses are as much the subject of their writing as is the past. 3° In some ways, literary criticism might therefore be seen as the

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heir to the traditional claims of history. It has inherited the classical belief that the past can teach the present by example, which characterised the humanist historiography current in early modern Europe. It shares in that historiography's creation of type and antitype, hero and antihero, according to categories which were unknown to the actors at the time. In the process, much of the detail of the past is inevitably lost, as is the context for understanding it. These are not interesting, because they complicate and obscure the message. 31 One of the achievements of the academic (or 'scientific') history, whose claims for originality have been criticised by White and Ricoeur, was that it eschewed these moral judgements, and sought to establish the order, context and substance of events in the belief that this was worthwhile in itself. Marxist historiography had a number of moral aims in common with modern literary criticism, particularly in its concern for the excluded or the dispossessed. Yet its practitioners have continued to respect the boundary between past and present, and to adopt traditional styles of historical discussion and narrative in a manner which can appear naive to postmodern critics, despite (or perhaps because of) the pioneering interest of Marxist historians in the use of literary evidence. 32 One of the achievements of postmodern critics (and to a lesser extent of cultural historians) has been to preserve some of the moral causes of Marxist historiography, whilst jettisoning the style and approach of Marxist critics and historians. But it is unclear whether this is an adequate response to the changing reputation of Marxism in intellectual life, one which is capable of restoring humanity and variety to both the past and the present. 33 Furthermore, such a response undermines many of the traditional practices of literary criticism, in particular the concern of literary history with context and emulation within a tradition. It is a sad parody of the intentions of Marxism to lose sight of tradition and of the past in order to ensure that literature and literary studies can be 'a rhetorical means to question present constructions of rhetoric' as 'a response to the structures of domination prevalent within societies ruled by representative forms of democratic government'. 34 Despite their debt to Marxist criticism and historiography, new historicists and postmodern critics seem happy to embrace a form of relativism which tends to erase the differences within societies, and to limit the possibility of change. 35 Some of the clearest manifestations of this attitude may be found in considerations of imperialism, or of contact between races. 36 Much of the inspiration for this relativism comes from the work of Michel Foucault, in which the interpretation of rhetoric takes the place of the study of action. Foucault's writings minimalise the effects of short-term historical changes, preferring to refer to occasional, structural upheavals, and, as a consequence, they marginalise the role of the individual in society. Whilst Foucault's work provides a stimulus to chart and criticise the exercise of power in present and past societies, it does not discriminate between the legitimate and the illegitimate use of power. A moralising mission which takes Foucault's writings as one of its foundations therefore seems to be inherently flawed. 37 Yet, it is still possible to write cultural history which takes account of both

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words and actions, and in which the differences as well as the similarities between societies can be explored. It is almost impossible to answer the questions 'what is history?', or 'how should one practise history?'. In this essay, I have tried to suggest some of the roots of current uncertainties about the nature of history, through a discussion of the effects of the thinking of some postmodern critics, and of their reformulation of a predominantly Marxist moral agenda. I have also tried to indicate some of the ways in which these uncertainties have affected the way in which history has been written by these authors, and those who have been influenced by them. Modern historiography is an immensely complex and varied field, It is a difficult area in which to make prescriptions, although to a certain extent that is what the authors discussed here have tried to do. In part, their statements of academic policy derive from a desire to say and do something new, in part from the moral standpoint that past and present are intertwined, and that each should teach the other how to be better than it is. What is most worrying for traditional historiography is the extent to which the reality of the past seems to be under threat, and the possibility that our contemporary interpretations of texts or documents may overwhelm their contexts. 38 As I have attempted to show, history, like the past itself or even like the passage of time which makes it possible, is a human creation. But this does not lessen the reality of the experiences which make it up, and certainly does not licence attempts to forge or distort the past. The answer to the challenges posed by the history of the 20th century cannot be either to forget or to deny. Nor can it be to uphold a sanctimonious moral relativism which calls all massacres genocide, or which equates all European culture and history with Nazism. 39 The growing awareness which historians have of the contingent nature of the past, of its unpredictability, increases the need to examine the evidence left by the past, and not to assume that we already understand it. 4° The impulse to write history arises out of the desire not to forget, and out of the challenge to make sense of the relics of the past. A charitable attitude to human actions and motives may be necessary, in order to avoid either making the people of the past into cardboard exemplars of contemporary good or evil, or conjuring their disappearance in an ocean of relativism. The stylistic devices of the realist novel may not be able to recreate people, but they may also not be so inappropriate for a history which is concerned with real lives and events. This is one reason for the revival of narrative in historiography. Another is that the criticism of the exclusiveness which helped to bring about its decline has been heeded. Historians are now more aware of the need to consider a variety of testimonies in their work, to try to take in the full complexity of past societies, and of the remains which they have left behind. They realise also that they have a choice of literary forms, and that it matters what use they make of that choice. 41 Narrative is not the only way in which historians can tackle the questions raised by the past, nor does all historiography dissolve into narrative, let alone narrative with a unique message. In this respect, the criticism of White and Ricoeur breaks down because historians do not speak with a single voice. There can be no

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simple moral or truth to draw from the past and apply to our lives today, since the past was at least as complicated and as messy as is the present, and just as full of disagreement. Written history is, necessarily, recent history, and the people it describes are in important ways like us, however much they may appear to differ from us. The alienation from the past which some contemporary authors feel has tended to exaggerate differences, and to obscure common humanity. The establishment of that humanity was, in part, one of the achievements of western Marxist historiography, and its loss now would be unfortunate. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that statements about the end of history, whether they come from the left or the right, do not imply a rejection of the humanity of the past, as well as the conclusion of the ideological wars of the past. It is all too easy to confuse history with ideology, or to equate historiography with propaganda. Yet the impulse to write history, and to find out about the past, is a natural consequence of human memory and society, not a product of politics or philosophy. It is fashionable to suggest that the present should be in dialogue with the past, but it may be that what is needed is for us to listen more and speak less. Then, uncertainty about ourselves might provide a genuine spur to finding out more about others. Scott Maldelbrote All Souls College, Oxford

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS During the summer of 1992, Robert Smith and I organised a series of lectures in Oxford on the theme 'History and Narrative'. This essay was originally prepared to accompany those lectures in print, but, sadly, their publication has been prevented by differences of opinion among the contributors. I am, however, extremely grateful to Lisa Jardine, Robert Young, Marina Warner, Terence Ranger, Marilyn Butler, Michael Gilsenan, Antonia Byatt, Frank Romany, and the late Louis Marin for the inspiration with which they have provided me. Brian Young gave me the opportunity to deliver an earlier version of this essay as a paper at the University of Sussex; a number of those who raised points at that seminar, or who have read drafts for me, also deserve thanks: Mishtooni Bose, Robin Briggs, John Burrow, Mark Collier, Saul Dubow, Clare Griffiths, Giles Mandelbrote, James McConica, Joad Raymond, Peter Sarris and Martin van Gelderen. NOTES 1. Norbert Elias, Time: An Essay, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); J. Davis, Times and Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Barbara Adam, Time and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).

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2. Arno Borst, The Ordering of Time, transl, by Andrew Winnard (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989); A.J. Gurevitch, Categories of Medieval Culture, transl, by G.L. Campbell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 26-151; Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, transl, by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 29-52; E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: The Merlin Press, 1991), pp. 352-403. 3. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992); Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, transl, by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire, in collaboration with Dirk van Laak, transl, by Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1992); George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle (London: Faber and Faber, 1971). 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History Jor Life, transl, by Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980), especially pp. 8-9; cf. James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 'especially pp. 1-40; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 5. Cf. Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edn (London: Duckworth, 1985), pp. 204-225. 6. Hayden White, Metahistorv (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), The Content of the Form (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). White's somewhat monolithic characterisation of the relationship between history and the novel has been accepted by some critics, for example James Kerr, Fiction as History." Scott as Story-Teller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), whereas others have described a more fragmentary, and nuanced, heritage for 19th-century writing, see Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 7. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols, transl, by Kathleen McLaughlin (Blamey) and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984 88), especially i, 91-230, ii, 153-160, iii, 99-274; 'Life in Quest of Narrative' and 'Narrative Identity', transl, by David Wood, in On Paul Ricoeur, edited by David Wood (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 20-33, 188-199. The work which Ricoeur considers most closely is Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean Worm in the Age of Philip II, 2nd edn, transl, by Sign Reynolds, 2 vols (London: Collins, 1972-73). 8. Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edn, transl, by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Sheed and Ward, 1989). 9. Dominick LaCapra, Reth(nking Intellectual History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), especially pp. 23-71, and History, Politics and the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), especially pp. 203-213; Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, Sequel to History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Donald J. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). 10. E.g. Umberto Eco, Foueault's Pendulum (London: Secker and Warburg, 1989); Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (London: Granta Books, 1991). 11. Lawrence Stone, 'History and Post-Modernism III', Past and Present 135 (1992), 189-194. 12. See, for example, Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), or Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths?, transl, by

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Paula Wissing (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988); but cf. G.R. Elton, Return to Essentials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 50-73. 13. Paul Veyne, Writing History, transl, by Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 105-108. 14. Michael Gilsenan, Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), especially pp. 159-261, draws attention to the role of story-telling, action and gesture in the social construction of the past. 15. Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 74-96; Keith Thomas, History and Literature (Swansea: University College of Swansea, 1988). 16. Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), and History, Politics and the Novel; cf. Elton, Return to Essentials, pp. 58-61. Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) is the best example of his approach. 17. Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics (London: Collins and Brown, 1990); Nick Groom (ed.), Narratives of Forgery (Angelaki, 1:2, 1993-94). 18. See Adam, Time and Social Theory, pp. 142-147. 19. J.W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Deborah Wormell, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 75-109; for the way in which the history of one nation state could provide a model for the ideological formation of another, see Charles E. McClelland, The German Historians and England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 20. For example, J.H. Hexter, On Historians (London: Collins, 1979), pp 227-251; Elton, Return to Essentials, pp. 3-26; cf. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. 21. Michel Vovelle, Ideologies and Mentalities, transl, by Eamon O'Flaherty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 126-176; Carlo Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues, transl, by John and Anne C. Tedeschi (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990), pp. 96-125; Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, edited by Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, transl, by Eren Branch (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 22. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973; reprinted London: Fontana Press, 1993), especially pp. 3-33; cf. The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). For an excellent example of the use of Geertz's work by an historian, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), particularly pp. 152-187; for criticism by an anthropologist, see Ernest Geilner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 40-72. See also LaCapra, History and Criticism, pp. 45-94; Elton, Return to Essentials, p. 10. 23. Post-structuralism and the Question of History, edited by Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), e.g. pp. 1-11 (Bennington and Young), 15-29 (Bennington), 30-62 (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), 63-81 (Tony Bennett), 126-136 (Mark Cousins). 24. Robert Young, White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 1990); Spivak, 'Speculations on reading Marx: after reading Derrida', in Poststructuralism and the Question of History, edited by Attridge, Bennington, and Young, pp. 30-62. Cf. Sande Cohen, 'Towards Events without History', in Historical Criticism and the Challenge of Theory, edited by Janet Levarie Smarr (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 94-119.

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25. Stone, The Past and the Present, pp. 74-96; cf. Conrad Russell, The Fall oJ" the British Monarchies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), as an example of narrative, and of the renewed scepticism of some historians towards both their sources and accepted versions of the past. 26. Cf. Emrarth, Sequel to History, pp. 211-214, which claims that postmodern writing is more properly aware of contingency than traditional historiography, because it does not 'convert chance into causality'; or the comments on 'the chanciness of contingency', apparently asserting that only effects, and not causes, may be contingent, in Robert Smith, Derrida and autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 13-28, at p. 22. 27. Cf. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 9 13, which stresses the limits of new historicist and cultural materialist approaches to the corporeal and psychological realities of people in the past, and criticises their concentration on the writings of elite males. 28. See Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations; and Learning to Curse (London: Routledge, 1990); Political Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985); cf. Howard Felperin, The Uses of the Canon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 142-169; Richard Freadman and Seumas Miller, Re-thinking Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 166-192. See also Christopher Hill, Writing and Revolution in 17th-Century England (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985) and A Nation of Change and Novelty (London: Routledge, 1990). 29. Cf. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). For a defence of the role of the material and contingent in literary criticism, see Valentine Cunningham, In the Reading Gaol (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). The essays in The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), warn against too easy an assumption that we know and understand the cultural practices of the past, as does Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde." On Fairy tales and their Tellers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994). 30. For example, Stephen Greenblatt, 'Towards a Poetics of Culture', and Louis A. Montrose, 'Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture', both in The New Historicism, edited by H. Aram Veeser (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1-14, 15-36. 31, Timothy Hampton, Writing from History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Gabrielle M. Spiegel, 'History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text', Speculum 65 (1990), 59-86. 32. See the comments on E.P. Thompson's 'Hunting the Jacobin Fox', printed in Paul Slack and Joanna Innes, 'E.P. Thompson', Past and Present 142 (1994), 94-140 and 3-5, especially p. 5. 33. For the Marxist origins of critical theory, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, revised edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); one may question whether the issues raised by either a Marxist historiography or a Marxist criticism constitute the correct basis for any discussion of morality, cf. Maclntyre, After Virtue, pp. 261-262. 34. Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 217. Cf. David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 35. On this debt, see Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, pp. 1-15. Cf. the criticism of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, 'Literary Criticism and the Politics of the New Historicism', in The New Historicism, edited by Veeser, pp. 213 224. For a more

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general attack on theory from a Marxist perspective, see E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: The Merlin Press, 1978), pp. 193406. 36. For example, Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions; Young, White Mythologies; Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); and pervasively, Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); see also the concluding comments of Jacques Derrida, 'Spectres of Marx', New Left Review 205 (1994), 31-58, especially p. 58. Both Jack Goody, The Expansive Moment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994) reveal the truly diverse natures of colonists and colonised. 37. E.g. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970); cf. H.C. Erik Midelfort, 'Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe: A reappraisal of Michel Foucault', Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. xi-xii, N. Fraser, 'Foucault on Modem Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Conclusions', all reprinted in Critical Essays on Michel Foucault, edited by Peter Burke (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992), pp. 28~1, 42-43, 217-233. 38. See the debate between Lawrence Stone, Patrick Joyce, Catriona Kelly and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, 'History and Postmodernism', Past and Present 131 (1991) 217-218; 133 (1991) 204-213; 135 (1992) 189-208. 39. On these questions, and on Holocaust revisionism more generally, see Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory, transl, by Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), especially pp. 43-110, where the point is made that individual Holocaust revisionists draw variously on right-wing hostility to Communism and left-wing mistrust of the state of Israel. 40. Cf. the thoughts about contingency and determinacy in natural history to be found in Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989). 41. For example, T.H. Breen, Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989). Cf. Thomas, History and Literature, pp. 22-27.