Literature and varieties of history - 1

The role of history in literary production has been a topic that has generated a great measure of interest among literary scholars and literary critics in general.

In Sri Lanka, Gunadasa Amarasekera more than most other writers and intellectuals, has consistently underscored the importance of history as a vital force that shapes literature. In his case, this interest in history in literary creativity manifests in two main guises - the centrality he attached to the concept of an evolving tradition and the emphasis he placed on the need to master historical forces.

For example in his eight novels beginning with Gamanaka Mula, we see his profound engagement with modern social history. In his writings on history, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the presiding influence was that of Georg Lukacs. A thinker who has in recent times stirred controversies and debates about the understanding of history is the French thinker Michel Foucault.

His writings are complex and demand sustained attention. In the next few columns I wish to focus on the intersections of history and literature that some modern scholars have advanced, most notably Michel Foucault, Hayden White, the Annales School and the New Historicists and how they might relate to our own preoccupations in the field of Sri Lankan literature.

Before we begin to unravel the innovative thinking on history that Foucault ushered into the world of learning, it is important for us to examine the landscape of historiography and identify some of the peaks and valleys.

History has for a long time being understood as an investigative enterprise that seeks to uncover facts and truths about the past relying in a body of evidence obtained through rigorous investigative methods.

This objective sounds simple enough. However, as we probe into the declared objectives of historians to come up with dispassionate descriptions of the past and objective and value-free analyses, we begin to perceive how arduous the task is and the numerous impediments that lie in wait.

Until recent times, historians did not adequately examine the nature of their enterprise self-reflectively; had they done so with vigor and precision, they would have realised how impossible an objective the writing of dispassionate and neutral history is. It is a noble ideal towards which historians should relentlessly strive while recognizing the almost insuperable obstacles that make their presence on the way.

One important strategy by which one can shed greater light on this predicament is by focusing on the philosophical frameworks within which historians operate. Hayden White, who has contributed so significantly to the re-imagining of historian’s task, made the following observation.

‘Those historians who draw a firm line between history and philosophy of history fail to recognise that every historical discourse contains within it a full-blown, if only implicit, philosophy of history….the principal difference between history and philosophy of history is that the latter brings the conceptual apparatus by which the facts are ordered in the discourse to the surface if the text, while history proper (as it is called) buries it in the narrative, where it serves as a hidden or implicit shaping device….’

Modern historians and meta-historians ( those who comment theoretically on the idea of history) maintain that history has to be understood as a narrative and discourse. A history is a re-ordering of a series of events that supposedly took place in the past; it is structured according to a narrative logic. Hence it is a narrative text.

In addition, it is a discourse because it makes a statement employing certain rules and systems of thought agreed to by the historian.

The idea of subjectivity is inescapable in history-writing and that is why the highly cherished objectivity appears to be so difficult to achieve and beyond our reach. This idea of history as a narrative and discourse is vitally connected to a perceived distinction between the past and history.

Very often, in common parlance, we tend to think of the past and history as being synonymous. This is indeed not the case; we need to make an important distinction between the two if we are attain a deeper grasp of the enterprise of history. The past refers to actions and events that took place in a bygone era while history signifies the attempt to write and examine that past; In other words history is a textual product. It is evident that the past has taken place and it has disappeared out of sight, sometimes by centuries.

It can be brought back to life, placed within our sight by historians through their texts. And very often historians can know the past only through other documents, other texts. Supposing an historian is writing a book on the Portuguese period in Sri Lanka; he or she, obviously did not live in that period and therefore cannot rely on first-hand experiences. The only avenue available to him or her is to consult documents written by the players themselves as well as other commentators. Hence the idea of textual production is closely related to the project of history-making.

A commentator on the problem of the past and history has posed the dilemma in the following terms. ‘no account of can re-cover the past as it was because the past was not an account but events, situations, etc. as the past has gone, no account can ever be checked against it but only against other accounts. We judge the ‘accuracy’ of historians accounts vis-à-vis other historians interpretations and there us no real account, no proper history that, deep down, allows us to check all other accounts against it; there is no fundamentally correct text of which other interpretations are just variations; variations are all there are..’

What this observation points to is the fact that what has entered the past and disappeared from sight is always recaptured through the previous texts and interpretations. The idea of textual production, therefore, is crucial to the understanding and writing of history. Hayden White says that history is a verbal narrative the content of which is as much imagined as discovered.

History as a text

If history is a text then we need to press into service an idea that has been put into wide circulation by literary theorists – readers respond to and interpret the same text differently in conformity with the interests, investments and pre- understandings. What this means is that the same historical text, let say a description of Portuguese rule in Sri Lanka will be interpreted differently by different readers.

Hence, it is not possible for a historian to impose his viewpoint on the readers – discerning readers will resist such a move preferring to offer up their alternate readings. As deconstructive critics never tire of pointing out texts in different contexts of reading can yield different and variable results. This is, of course, not to suggest there is a kind of exegetical anarchy any reading goes. Far from it. There are obvious limits within which acts of interpretation transpire. Certain arguments are better than others; certain narratives more cogent than rival narratives. Even so, the relativity of interpretations is inescapable and it must be accepted as such. However, this should not induce pessimism in us.

As Keith Jenkins says, ‘in a sense this way of looking at things is a positive one. It is liberating, for it throws out old certainties and those who have benefitted from them are capable of being exposed. And in a sense everything is relative (historicist). But liberating or not this still sometimes leaves people feeling as if they are in a dead end. Yet there is no need to.’

His contention is that to deconstruct the histories fashioned by others is the necessary precondition for coming up with your own. It is always important to bear in mind that history is intended for someone. Although theoretically, all interpretations are equally valid, it is apparent that some have gained more legitimacy than others.

This is due not only to the power of the arguments and the strength of the evidence marshaled but also due to the power plays involved – knowledge is interconnected with power and those with the power have the ability to tell their story. It is always salutary to bear in mind that history for the most part is written by victors and not the defeated.

History-making

As we ponder the nature of historical explanation and historical production, we need to face some of the more important questions that confront us. In this regard, I wish to focus on eight of them. This list is not exhaustive; it is merely suggestive. First, how important is the idea of truth in history-making and how does it figure in our discussions?

Second is the idea of an objective history a mirage and can everything be explained as interpretations? Isn’t the idea of objectivity a laudable goal worth striving for? Third, are prejudices endemic to historical explorations and how do we eliminate them or minimize their influence?

Fourth, is it possible to get inside the skin of actors from the past and if not how do we understand the actions and behaviors and motivations of historical characters from the inside which is indeed important to write persuasive history? Fifth, do we focus on continuities or discontinuities in history and is there a balance that needs to be struck? Sixth, how do we evaluate the power and value of primary, secondary and tertiary sources and how do they figure in the production of history?

Seventh, is it indeed possible to turn history into a science? Or is the very nature of history-writing resistant to the scientific agenda? Eighth, if history is a narrative, how do we judge the efficacy and worth of history? What criteria do we employ? It is important that we pay close attention to these and related issues.

The idea that history is a text has been developed by a number of historians in recent times. Let me refer briefly to the work of two such historians – Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. Both of them have been heavily influenced by modern literary and cultural theory and have extended the range of the notion of history as text in interesting ways. They seek to focus on the problem of historical representation as literary theorists do. In recent theorizations of literature the problematic nature of representation has been accorded a place of centrality. As a consequence they place great emphasis on the role of language and concomitant tropes, modes of textual production, and the importance of narrative in the production of history. Hayden White says that, ‘the historian must interpret his material by filling in gaps in his information on inferential or speculative grounds.’. A historical narrative, therefore, is a blending of adequately and inadequately explained events, congeries of established and inferred facts, at once representation that passes for an explanation of the whole process mirrored in the narrative.

Hayden White

It is Hayden White’s belief that in history interpretation consists of the fashioning of plot structures for a sequence of actions or events. It is as a narrative of a certain kind that this historical interpretation makes sense and is able to persuade the readers. It is evident that the self-same sequence of events that one historian chooses to emplot as tragedy, another might emplot it as a romance or comedy.

Drawing on such celebrated scholars as Northrop Frye and Roman Jakobson, White has sought to elaborate this at length. He underscores unambiguously the importance of literary theory in shaping and understanding historical textuality. He says that today history as a discipline is in a bad shape because it has lost sight of its origins in the literary imagination. Clearly, his ambition is to re-establish that vital link between literary imagination and historical imagination.

It is his deeply-held conviction that in the interest of appearing to be scientific and objective, history has myopically denied itself its own greatest source of strength and renewal. The two scholars who stand out most prominently in the American academy as championing the importance of literary theory in the writing of history are Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. They both underscore the significance of literary theory in comprehending the codes and rhetorical conventions upon which historians normally depend.

In this column I wish to examine the work of these two historians and how they illuminate the complex relationship between history and literature. Hayden White draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Kenneth Burke, Paul Ricoeur, Northrop Frye, Roman Jakobson while LaCapra has been significantly influenced by the writings of Jacques

Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes. Despite their differences of emphases both White and LaCapra are firm believers in the conviction that rhetorical structure and narrative energies are vital for all historical writing.

Hayden White’s work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe is important in this regard. In this work he sought to examine the literary codes that underwrote classical historiography. Here he investigated into the narrative structures, forms of plotting, play of tropes that marked classical historiography. Here one can clearly see the influence of Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye and their works such as Language as Symbolic Action and The Anatomy of Criticism.

Hayden White asserts that, all works of history, ‘contain a deep structural content which is generally poetic, and especially linguistic in nature, and which serves as the pre-critically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively historical explanation should be.’ He goes on to say that ‘the historian performs an essentially poetic act, in which he prefigures the historical field and constitutes it as a domain upon which to bring to bear the specific theories he will use to explain what was really happening in it.’ It is, therefore, extremely important for analysts of history, according to White, to pay close attention to the deep structural content which is largely poetic.

Hayden White’s approach to history

Literary and cultural theory is crucial to understanding Hayden White’s approach to history. What historians in general seek to do is convert what is unfamiliar in terms of time into actions and events that are readily understandable. This involves the translation of these actions and events into categories of comprehension that readers are familiar with. The narratives that historians construct on the basis of past events need to conform to, and even solicit the active support of, codes and conventions and expectations of the specific cultures in question. What White refers to as the ‘explanatory affect’ has to be gained through cultural assent.

This is where literary creativity enters the equation. As white observed, ‘historians, no less than poets, can be said to gain an explanatory affect….by building into their narratives patterns of meaning similar to those more explicitly provided by the literary art of the cultures to which they belong.’ In order to explain the significance of these highly valued narrative patterns of meaning Hayden White invokes the lexicon of rhetorical theory. This is indeed an area in which most historians have displayed very little interest.; they refuse to accept the validity of the approach advocated by White.

According to White the different forms that historical writings can assume are dependent on, in his words, ‘poetic insights than analytically precede them’ He believes that there are four principal forms of poetic language or tropes. They are metaphor – metonymy – synecdoche – irony. And he maintains that these tropes are responsible for shaping the narratives and discourses that historians s fashion. He goes on to assert that one can discern in every historical text the workings of two levels of apprehension.

The first level is the surface level; it focuses on the historian’s description of what happened in the chosen slice from the past and the conceptual architecture he or she summons to explain the historical occurrences. The second operates at a deeper level of consciousness. Here what we perceive is the historian’s selection of the theoretical framework within which the exegeses will be located. This level, according to White, is a poetic level; what it does is to carry out ‘an essentially poetic act.’

Four modes

Hayden White believes that in writing history there are four modes of plotting that guide the historian; they are romantic, tragic, comic, satirical emplotments. The romantic emplotment indexes the victories of good over evil. Tragic emplotment references unbearable conflicts among human beings inducing a sense of a tragic awareness. In the comic emplotment, according to White, we observe the way human beings assert themselves against the world by effecting accommodations among forces at work in society.

The satirical emplotment focuses attention on the fact that human beings, in the final analysis, are victims of the world and not its conqueror and that the consciousness of human beings is unable to rise above the chief adversary of human beings, their finitude. In the kind of schematic way that White seems to show a partiality for, he goes on to connect these modes of emplotment to four modes of argument regarding history-writing and the four types of ideology that underpin these arguments.

The four arguments that correspond to romantic, tragic, comic and satiric emplotments are formist, mechanistic, organicist and contextualist. And the four ideologies that are inscribed in the formist, mechanistic, organicist and contextualist arguments are anarchist, radical, conservative and liberal respectively. It is White’s contention that the task of producing history is based on the combinations of emplotmets, arguments and ideologies stated above. Some critics of White, understandably, maintain that this is indeed too schematic and tends to ignore the complexities of writing history.

Hayden White has also been accused of a kind of self-defeating relativism. It is said that instead of focusing on the uncovering evidence that is persuasive, constructing cogent arguments seeking the truth dispassionately using investigative techniques rigorously – all traditionally esteemed values by historians – White tends to pay greater attention to the linguistic tropes and rhetorical structures that underlie historical texts thereby ushering in counter-productive relativism.

White dismissed these charges maintaining that this is indeed a superficial reading of his project/.

Dominick LaCapra

The second historian that I would like to focus on is Dominick LaCapra. Like Hayden White he sees the importance of drawing on modern literary and cultural theory as a way of understanding the textual work of historians. They both seek to question and displace the boundaries that exist between history and literature in mainstream scholarship.

He is perhaps less well known than Hayden White, but both have done important work in re-imagining the historian’s craft. If White was deeply influenced by Michel Foucault, LaCapra was shaped by the thought of Jacques Derrida. Hence, it comes as no surprise that LaCapra pays greater attention to the fissured nature of texts, their fault lines, their inner tensions than White. He perceives the inner contradictions that mark texts that historians rely on as well as those they construct themselves.

Dominick LaCapra was for many years a professor at Cornell University and I have had the pleasure of meeting him at the Humanities Center at Cornell. He is the author of such books as Rethinking Intellectual History, History and Criticism, History and Reading and History in Transit. His primary area of interest is intellectual history. He has sought to move away from the path traversed by traditional intellectual historians and break out in new directions paying particular attentions to questions of culture and production of texts in the way that modern cultural theorists do.

As I stated earlier, Dominick LaCapra as a historian and meta-historian is keen to demonstrate the ways texts, whether they be literary or historical, are riven by internal tensions. The commonly accepted ideas of coherence and order that one finds ordinarily in historical texts are challenged by him.

As a consequence he gestures towards a different and broader understanding of historical scholarship and the investigative processes associated with it. As he once remarked, ‘one such process is precisely the interaction between the desire for unity, identity, or purity, and the forces that contest it.

The investigation of this process does not imply a simple rejection of conceptions of unity or order in a mindlessly antinomian celebration of chaos and dismemberment. What is called for is a rethinking of the concept of unity and its analogues in more workable and critical terms.’

Those who are familiar with deconstructive modes of textual analysis will immediately hear echoes of it in these sentences of LaCapra. What he is encircling is the fact that while ideas of unity should not be ignored the inherently problematic nature of them should be recognized and engaged.

Dominick LaCapra does not see the past as dead or inert; its active nature is fully recognized. What historians need to do, according to him, is to enter into a dialogue with it, interact with it. As he astutely observed, ‘it must be actively recognized that the past has its own voice that most be respected.’ He goes on to say, ‘especially when they resist or qualify the interpretations we would like to place on them.

A text is a network of resistances, and a dialogue is a two-way affair; a good reader is also an attentive and patient listener.’ Here one can observe the lexicon and preferred approaches of modern cultural theorists. LaCapra is primarily interested in intellectual history, but his observations are equally applicable to other branches of history as well.

It is important to bear in mind the fact that Dominick LaCapra is not saying that history and literary studies are identical. Not at all. What he is suggesting that while history and literary studies are two distinct disciplines, they cannot and should not be separated out and the connections between them should be explored with the utmost care. The close reading of texts and contexts that contemporary literary theorists advocate and practice is one that LaCapra employs in his work with great success.

I stated earlier that LaCapra in his historical work has been influenced by the thought of Derrida. This is primarily discernible in his understandings of the overlapping of forces and intersections of concepts that Derrida draws attention to.

LaCapra finds this line of thinking extremely productive in comprehending the dynamics of textual production and social experience. We make use of diverse categories to inquire into and offer re-descriptions of the world, and within these categories are embedded other ideas which stand in opposition to them. LaCapra finds this insight extremely helpful in meeting the tasks of the historian. Derrida, to be sure, is not the only theorist that LaCapra is attracted to; he finds the writings of the Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin equally fascinating. The idea of the dialogic imagination proposed by Bakhtin is one that LaCapra has found particularly useful. This focuses on the interaction between contradictory forces in society and literature.

As LaCapra remarked, ‘Bakhtin’s emphasis upon dialogisation directed attention to the more ambivalent or undecidable dimensions of texts…and highlighted the importance of the border or the threshold where seeming opposites entered into an exchange and possibly coexisted, often in tensely charged relationships.’ LaCapra took this insight and applied it to the examination of past societies which are engaged in such contestations. These contestations, diversities of viewpoints should be given due recognition in historical analysis rather than suppressing them and coming up with neatly unitary readings.

A text that illustrates Dominick LaCapra’s approach to history-writing, and one that would be particularly interesting to Sri Lankan readers is his book Madame Bovary on Trial. Flaubert’s novel has been translated into Sinhalese, and critics such as Martin Wickremasinghe and Gunadasa Amarasekera have written about it in various critical essays. LaCapra’s book is an interesting work in intellectual history. What he has sought to do is to demonstrate the ways in which contemporary literary theory can illuminate both literature and social history.

As he says in the opening paragraph of the preface to the book,’ In recent years much attention has been focused on the reception or reading of texts as a way of renewing our understanding of literary history. This focus indicates an obvious point where intellectual history and literary history converge, for intellectual history is profoundly concerned with the interactions between texts and their various contexts ‘He goes in to state that one particularly productive approach to the exploration of reception is to investigate into reading or interpretation texts are subject to at trials. He says that, at times the trials of important writers provide special insights into the complex ways literature is a contestatory force in modern culture.’

What LaCapra does in Madame Bovary on trial is to read the text of the novel carefully and sensitively in a way that would bring out some of the themes that were articulated at the trial. As he said, ‘I inquire into the precise ways the novel might be said to read the trial, notably with reference to the key issues of the roles of the family religion, and the narrative subject in the modern context.’

Here is an example of intellectual history that LaCapra wishes to popularize. The conjunction of contemporary literary theory and writing of history results in insightful and innovative historical inquiry. As he himself remarked in another book, A Preface to Sartre, he wishes to ‘defend by argument and example the idea that critical strategies developed in recent philosophy and literary criticism are relevant to historical interpretation.’

What I have sought to do by focusing on the historical and meta-historical writings of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra is to underscore the importance of literary theory for modern historical investigation. Clearly, these moves by historians like White and LaCapra have deep implications for both history and literary studies. It enables us, among other things, to explore the reach and relevance of contemporary literary theory to adjacent fields of inquiry.

( To be continued)