Literature and varieties of history

[Part 2]

Last week I discussed the work of two American historians, Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra who exemplify the vital connections that need to be made between literary theory and history. Today I wish to focus on a very different school of history, the French Annales School - it represents a radical departure from accepted norms and agendas of history-writing.

It forged a new style of historiography that for some decades at least exerted a deep influence both in Europe and Latin America. It is called the Annales School of History because the historians linked with it were associated in one form or another with the prestigious journal of history the Annales.

It was established in 1929. The first two editors were Lucien Febvre (1878-1956) and Marc Bloch (1884-1944), both eminent historians one favoring linguistics and the other social psychology. Thinkers like Michel Foucault were greatly influenced by the work of this school of historians.

Historians belonging to the Annales School repudiated the traditional approach to history which focused on events centering round individuals and instead highlighted collectivities and structures. Instead of political and diplomatic histories with the focus decidedly on wars and peace, they called attention to the importance of social history.

They were interested in what they referred to as total history and history unfolding over long stretches of time. In their desire to forge a total history they focused on geography, climate, material culture, agriculture, commerce, communication, common mentalities.

They sought to enforce the point that the majority of events that we regard as most evident and ordinary are, in point of fact, constituted by complex networks of contingencies. Annales historians, then, opened a new chapter in modern historiography.

As with most schools of thought, the Annales School evolved over the decades rejecting some of the assumptions endorsed earlier and branching out in new directions. During the eight decades of its existence it has had its ups and downs; it reached its peak, in many ways, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One can identify four mail stages of growth of the Annales School.

The first is from 1929-1845, when the journal Annales was established by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. They brought a new sense of urgency to the study of history and abandoned political history, which was the staple of the day, in favor of social history. The second stage is from 1945-1968 when Fernand Braudel took over the leadership; he became the editor of Annales. He was both a brilliant scholar and gifted organizer.

He was able to strengthen the institutional support of the project and gain great international visibility for the project. The late 1960s, under the stewardship of Braudel, were the best years of the Annales School. The third stage is from 1968-1989, when scholars such as Emanuel LeRoy Ladurie and Philippe Aries were at the helm.

They tried to move away from the path established by Braudel in search of local histories, at times even micro-histories. This was also the period during which one witnessed a fragmentation f the Annales School. The fourth stage is from 1989 up to the present when the school was leaning more and more towards the examination of cultural practices under the guidance of historians such as Roger Chartier.

During this period one could observe a decisive cultural and linguistic turn in the work of Annales historians.

When discussing the importance of the Annales School of history, I would like to pay special attention to the writings of Fernand Braudel. It is my considered judgment that he was the most important of the Annales historians, although, I dare say, some would vehemently disagree with my assessment. He was able to give a sharper focus to the agenda and ambitions of Annales historians.

His work on the Mediterranean is most significant in this regard. He was after, what he referred to as, the total history. In order to produce this total history he encouraged historians to draw freely on neighboring disciplines such as geography, economics, sociology, anthropology and psychology. Braudel was interested in demonstrating how human collectivities operate on the basis of plural spatial, temporal, social, economic, environmental and cultural dimensions. This is what we see in his magisterial volume Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.’

In the Preface to this volume, he asserts that,’ To assist me I did indeed have at my disposal a prodigious body of articles, papers, books, publications, surveys, some purely historical, others no less interesting, written by specialists in neighboring disciplines – anthropologists, geographers, botanists, geologists, technologists…..so many of these studies speak a language of the past, outdated in more ways than one. Their concern is not the sea in all its complexity but some minute piece of the mosaic, not the grand movement of Mediterranean life, but the actions of a few princes and rich men, the trivia of the past, bearing little relation to the slow and powerful march of history which is our subject. , Indeed, ‘the slow and powerful march of history’ is what interested him deeply as a historian.

In his book titled, On History, ‘the way to study history is to view it as a long duration, as what I have called the ‘longue duree.’ Later on in the book he remarks that, ‘for good or ill this word (structure) dominates the problem of the ‘longue duree’. By structure, observers of social questions mean an organization, a coherent and fairly fixed series of relationship between realities and social masses.

For us historians, a structure is of course a construct , an architecture, but over and above that it is a reality which time uses and abuses over long periods.’ The long time span and the structure are two concepts that are central to Braudel’s approach to history. We normally understand history as being made by individual subjects; Braudel is keen to shift the emphasis to larger structures. His idea of the long time span, it has to be recognized, is central to the understanding of history and it is vitally connected to these larger structures.

Boundaries

As a historian Fernand Braudel sought to broaden the discursive boundaries of history by making it interdisciplinary and focus on the slower rhythms of geographical history. Traditionally, historians were in the habit of registering social change in terms of individual consciousness of human beings. Braudel, on the other hand, labored to focus on the deeper and broader changes that take place at a far slower pace as a way of understanding society and history. For him history meant the history of structural changes and they could be comprehended through the visible patterns of society.

As I stated earlier the idea of the long time span is pivotal to Braudel’s idea of history. It originally made its appearance in his magnificent study of the Mediterranean from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, later it assumed the status of a master concept in his writings. It enabled him to capture the incessant interplay of diverse forces that mark any period. The idea of multi-perspectivism, that is to say, the idea of examining society in motion from diverse vantage points is central to Braudel’s thinking, and the concept of the long time span allows him to do that.

Braudel talked about three levels of time the first is the structural or long time span associated with the geographical contexts. The second is the medium term which is linked to social life and cultural history. This is the time that animates groups and collectivities, empires and civilizations. It is evident that the change that take place at this level is much quicker, relatively speaking, than in the case of geographical time.

At this level, the span of time selected for analysis by the historian can be two or three centuries. The third is individual time that is connected to the individual. As Braudel sees it this is the time of surfaces and effects that are largely deceptive. Although he talks of these three levels of time, it is apparent that he attaches the most significance to geographical time.

History

When one examines his work on the Mediterranean one realizes how highly he regarded the idea of a total history. As a consequence no aspect of social existence escaped his interrogatory gaze. He focused on the economy in all its complexity, prices, wages, labor, money, trade, wars, outlaws, class conflicts, communications, technology, transportation etc. He encircled the rich texture of life and the complex and many-sided unity of social life.

The Mediterranean consists of an array of sub-systems each of which has chosen to move at its own chosen speed. One productive way of characterizing Braudel’s approach to history is through the trope of a rhythmical nexus. As he remarks, ‘science, technology, political institutions, conceptual changes, civilizations (to fall back on that useful word) all have their own rhythms of life and growth, and the new history of conjunctures will be complete only when it has made up a whole orchestra of them all.’

What is interesting about Braudel’s approach is that he reinstates the concept of civilization as a productive analytical category. Many historians before him rejected the idea of civilization as a category of investigation because they regarded it as too capacious and unwieldy. However, Braudel thought otherwise, and his concerns with complexity, multi- directionality, time in slow motion, all come together fruitfully within the gambit of this concept. His master concepts of the structure and the long time span in many ways underscore the importance of focusing on civilization as an exegetical category. Drawing on some of the writings of Febvre, Braudel focused on the importance of space and the spatialization of time in writing history. His relentless focus on geographical time underlines this fact. He made use of space as a way of describing and analyzing various aspects of civilization.

As he pithily remarked, ‘any civilization is at bottom a space worked by men and history.’ For him time vanishes unto space, and civilization becomes an extension of space. As he observed, ‘what is civilization if not the time worn placement of a certain humanity in a certain space.’ The total history that Braudel espoused could be realized only on the foundations of geohistory.

key concepts

I have chosen to highlight some of the key concepts of Fernand Braudel such as structure, long time span, geohistory, civilization and total history because they served to open the door to writing history of a different kind. Later on in this column, I will show how these can be profitably related to our understandings of literature. Braudel, no doubt, was an innovative historian who was keen to turn the discipline of history into the queen of the social sciences. He had a far-reaching influence on later historians.

However, he was not without his critics and denigrators.. Some found that his tripartite division of time did not converge cogently in his actual analyses. Others felt that his approach to history had the unfortunate consequence of robbing human beings of their agency and turning them into mere statics in his investigations. His focus on long range analysis, of the slow movement of time resulted, according to some, in the diminishment of the human individual.

Braudel, it has to be conceded, had his glaring blind-spots. However it cannot be gainsaid that he revolutionized, along with the other members of the Annales School, our understanding, and approaches to, the study of history. Over the last two decades or so, it seems to me, that the Annales School has lost some of its luster.

Nevertheless, it marked an important stage in the evolution of historiography. Most literary scholars would not perceive any overt connection between the study of history and the pathway to historiography cleared by the Annales School. I happen to think otherwise; later on in the column I hope to make some connections with the study of modern Sinhala literature.

Mental frame

Another area in which the Annales School has displayed some significant creative thinking is that of the promotion of the idea of a mental frame or mentalite (I’ll stick to the French term). As Peter Burke, a noted historian from Cambridge once commented, ‘without doubt, many of the varied works produced by writers working within the annals tradition have not only deepened our knowledge of the past, but also provided tremendous methodological insights into showing how innovative use can be made of familiar forms of documentation and how new questions about the past can be formulated. Moreover, the Annaliste’s clarification of the concept of mentalite has proved invaluable to historians who have attempted to reconstruct the mental world of the lower orders.’

In the 1970s the concept of mentalite as developed by Annales historians generated a great deal of interest in France as well as beyond. It signifies a commonly shared way of looking at the world and making sense of it by a specific collectivity. It includes cognitive frames, constellations of values and modes of response to social behavior. The mentalite is vitally connected with consciousness and behavior.

It bears the imprint of both Durkheim and psychologists, but goes beyond them in search of newer syntheses. A work like Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie’s study of the attitude to death, sex and religion among a group of peasants living in a remote village in the thirteenth century displays the strengths of the mentalite movement. In the United States, a work of a historian like Robert Darnton displays the appeal of this mode of inquiry. This mode of inquiry is closely linked to the idea of history from below.

Question

The concept of mentalite focuses on the shared world views of specific groups of people. Hence it is cultural specific nature. A number of questions have been raised about this approach. How are mentalite reproduced and maintained across generations? What is the nature of the interplay between universal human nature and culturally contingent mentalite? How does globalization with its drive towards a cosmopolitan consciousness impact the mental frameworks? In addition, the fact that the idea of mentalite is too vague and has not been subject to a rigorous definition has also made some historians uncomfortable.

The concept of mentalite began to generate widespread enthusiasm with the work of historians associated with the third stage of the Annales School. Here names such as Georges Duby, Robert Mandrou, Philippe Aries become important and consequential. However, it should be noted that this idea can be fund in the works of the founders of this movement like Bloch and Febvre. Febvre once stated that, ‘the individual is nothing but what the time and the social milieu allow him to be.’

The work of Philippe Aries served to bring greater attention to the notion of mentalite. He maintained that collective unconsciousness can be regarded as the determinate agent that specifies how mentalite differ from time periods to time periods. In the work of Georges Duby the trope of the family becomes dominant as it is inseparably linked to the current mentalite and is instruments in shaping diverse social discourses. These lines of inquiry, as I hope to illustrate later, have a direct bearing on literary studies.

Popularity

The concept of mentalite which gained in popularity during the third stage of the evolution of the Annals School underwent further transformation in the fourth stage. Here the work of historians such as Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel becomes extremely important. In their hands the economic and social history appeared to be less significant that the compelling role of cultural practices.

What this meant was that the newer generation of Annales historians were undermining the deeply held beliefs of some of their predecessors and moving in newer directions. They steadfastly argued that economic and social forces do not precede cultural forces; they are in fact a facet of the domain of cultural production and cultural practices. As Roger Chartier memorably remarked, ‘the relationship thus established is not one of dependence of the mental structures on their material determinations. The representations of the social world themselves are the constituents of social reality.’ This certainly does not sound like a ringing endorsement of Fernand Braudel!

The concept of mental structures promoted by some of the Annales historians has, to be sure, come in for some criticism. Its vagueness is one that has been pointed out by less than enthusiastic commentators. The following strictures by the eminent French historian Francois Furet draw attention to some other perceived weaknesses as well.’ At the same time, this history, owing to the vagueness of the word that gives it a label if not a content, presents an almost infinite range of methodological possibilities.

The study of mentalite in a society or group can, for example, be based on the contrast between conscious and unconscious manifestations, on the distribution of psychic and intellectual activity according to cultural levels, on the Freudian notions of repression, or on a number of similar investigative tools.

In another intellectual context and because it embraces both the history of objective behavior and the perceptions of such behavior, the histoire des mentalite can create the illusion that it enables us to grasp a sort of comprehensive social entity – a fusion of infrastructure and superstructure……all too often it is merely a Gallic substitute for Marxism and psychoanalysis. This semantic prestidigitation …adds no real explanatory power.’

Some of the historians associated with the fourth stage of growth of the Annales school are fully aware of these criticisms; hence their desire to strike out in new directions. In this regard the work of a historian like Roger Chartier who focuses on cultural practices and the linguistic and cultural turn in historiography can prove to be stimulating. His work on the cultural practices of reading, writing, and so on have much to offer to literary scholars as the labor to expand their field of investigation.

I have presented a very broad picture of the work of the important French school of historians generally referred to as the Annales School. We in Sri Lanka very rarely discuss their work; they are a closed book even for many professional historians. It is my contention that Annales School, with all its blind spots, deserves careful and sustained attention. In addition, it is my view that these historians can offer useful insights and avenues of analysis that can prove to be productive to literary scholars.

This is indeed a connection that has received very little attention. In this regard, I wish to focus on three important areas for reflection. The first is the long time span that Braudel and others focused on – the idea of geographical time, time in slow motion, merits close study. In order to demonstrate how literary scholars in Sri Lanka can profit from this investigative endeavor let me focus on a debate that took place some years ago between two eminent philosophers regarding the validity and importance of the Annales School approach. The two philosophers are the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur and American philosopher Stanley Cavell.

Critique

In 1980 Paul Ricoeur wrote a paper titled, ‘The Eclipse of Event in Modern French Historiography.’ This was a critique of the Annales School’s approach which downplayed events and narrative and focused in the structure and the long time span. Ricoeur expressed his views in the following manner.

‘My contention here is that history cannot be radically eventless because it cannot break its toes with the kind of discourse which is the original place of the notion of event, i.e, narrative discourse.

History keeps being about events, because it keeps being related, directly or indirectly, to narrative discourse.’ Stanley Cavell disagreed with this line of thinking.

Commenting on Ricoeur’s paper, Cavell made the following observation. ‘what substantively concerned me in Ricoeur’s remarks was the suggestion that a turning away from short term events – unique battles, unrepeatable successions, famous deaths, major marriages – towards the long term, endlessly repeated conditions of human life amounted to history’s turning away from attention to the story of individual human beings in favor of attention to more or less anonymous collectivities.’

Cavell saw what Ricoeur characterized as eventless history as being uneventful history. According to him, these are two very different things; for him uneventful references what is not out of the ordinary. As he goes on to say, ‘the uneventful, so conceived, is an interpretation of the everyday, the common, the low, the near; ….what is uneventful at one date and place is not the same as what is uneventful at another date and place, so that the translations of one to anther may be knowable only to something we will call history.’ Cavell’s interest in ordinary life meshes well with his declared interest in the analysis of ordinary language.

Here there is an important connection to be made with literature – one that has not yet being made with any degree of consistency. In literature, especially in fiction, the ordinary life is of the utmost importance. Apart from the narrative that is centered, the background consisting of ordinary occurrences are vital to the meaning of a novel.

Let us consider a novel like Gamperaliya or Kaliyugaya; the background is an important character carrying a substantial freight of nuanced meaning. In this regards, the focus on uneventful history that the historians identified with the Annales School persistently promoted becomes extremely important. The way ordinary life, the flows of everydayness, can enrich fictional experience is indeed a topic that is well worth exploring in depth.

The second area that I wish to focus on is the way that the idea of mentalite (I’ll stick to the French term) can illuminate the study of creative literature. The main point about the idea of mentalite as propounded by the French Annaliste historians is that human actions and reactions, styles of thinking, modes of valuation are shaped by larger socio-cultural and mental structures. Let us examine a novel like Martin Wickremasinghe’s Viragaya (The Way of the Lotus).

It deals with a complex character whose distinctiveness has to be understood in terms of psychological factors. However, that by itself is insufficient to fathom the true complexity of Aravinda. We as readers need to relate his character to the mentalite that sustained it, and this mentalite was largely shaped by Sinhala-Buddhist culture as Wickremasinghe has amply demonstrated in his critical commentary on Viragaya.

Not only his responses to the world but also the dominant tropes that the author has pressed into service in representing them bear the undeniable imprint of that mentalite. Hence, a deep engagement with this concept can have salutary effects in terms of literary analysis.

Parallels

This idea of mentalite developed by the Annalase historians, it seems to me displays interesting parallels with some other concepts such as the structure of feeling of Raymond Williams, the habitus of Pierre Bourdieu and the Period Eye of Michael Baxandall. Just to stay with the concept of the Period Eye for a moment, it focuses on the cultural factors that shape our response to visual images. That is why the way viewers, some centuries ago, approached a Renaissance painting was different from the way modern viewers approach a modern painting. The cultural distance matters greatly. As Baxandall rightly remarked, culture equips viewers ‘with different visual experiences and skills and different conceptual structures.’ Not all art critics and art historians, to be sure, were enamored of Baxandall’s concept; some poured disdain on it.

Thirdly, I wish to focus on a pathway of inquiry opened up by such fourth-generation Annales historians as Roger Chartier. He shifted the emphasis of historiography towards cultural practices and their importance. And he was clearly convinced of the fact that modern historians can draw productively on the cumulative riches of contemporary literary theory. It’s no secret that he was an admirer of some of Derrida’s work.

Chartier, in his writings, calls attention to an important point, namely, that documents that represent what took place in the past are not transparent and unproblematic; they were written by authors who we subject to various ideological pressures and had their own agendas to promote. Therefore, according to Chartier, historians need to come up with their own special reading strategies that recognize the complex and many-sided nature of historical texts. Here it is evident that the shadow of modern literary theory has fallen recognizably across his thinking.

Complexities

Roger Chartier’s writings on reading habits, the impact of book-production on the sensibility of readers, complexities of reading of texts have much to offer us, readers of literature. He once remarked that, ‘the reader invariably finds himself inscribed in the text, but in turn the text is itself inscribed variously in its different readers’. For example, if we take Piyadasa Sirisena’s novels that signify a transitional phase from religious to secular literature, and which in addition bear the imprint of journalism and serial publication, we can profitably invoke some of the concepts that Roger Chartier has enunciated in his writings on history to illuminate his fiction.

The mutual inscriptions of text and reader that Chartier references can shed valuable light on Sirisena’s novels thereby opening up a new space of literary exploration. What I have sought to do in today’s column is to focus on an important group of French historians, that is relatively neglected by Sri Lankan historians, and certainly by Sri Lankan literary scholars, and make, what I think are certain productive connections between its work and literary analysis and understanding.

(To be continued)