Here's an idea-- history doesn't
exist-- until we create it.
So, what's the difference between
this-- "The American Pageant-- a History
of the American People," 16th edition, written by David M.
Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, published by Cengage Learning,
and this, the wildly popular "Downton Abbey" box set,
which depicts the trials of the fictional Crawley
family and the waitstaff at their fictional abbey
in early 20th-century England?
On the one hand, an accurate text, endlessly researched,
written in the hopes of capturing the truth of the past
so that we may be informed in the present,
and, on the other hand, an accurate text endlessly
researched, produced in the hopes
of capturing the truth of the past
so we may be entertained in the present.
When reading history texts, whether it's
textbooks or biographies, accounts, or research papers,
we tend to think of them as records-- accurate portrayals
of things which actually happened, reported truthfully.
And, OK, there can be no doubt that Abraham Lincoln gave
the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863,
or that on March 17, 1917, there was a strike of the Kirov
workers in Russia, or that Nikola Tesla was
a dude who existed.
And when consuming historical fiction--
things like "Downtown Abbey," "Pillars of the Earth,"
or "Rurouni Kenshin"-- we hope that they're in some way
accurate but don't take them to be fact.
There can be no doubt that Lady Edith nor Bishop Waleran
nor Takani Megumi are fictional characters.
The really neat thing is how we're
meant to understand and use this knowledge
and how such knowledge compares and contrasts to these stories.
History-- like, the textbook kind--
is a reconstructed version of the past for the present
in the hopes of, as the saying goes,
not dooming ourselves to repeat our mistakes in the future.
Most often, the way the past is reconstructed
for modern understanding is via narrative--
a progression of events in time.
Without narrative, history as we understand
it is very different.
There's just an unconnected string of events,
each arising suddenly and without circumstance.
And, as entertaining as that may be,
history doesn't progress in a manner similar to Old Spice ads
or "Family Guy" jokes.
Ah!
[HISS] Ah!
Narrative accounts for the fundamental difference
between the past, which is all the stuff that happened before
right now, and history, which is the reconstruction
and study of the past.
In his book "The Future of History,"
British historian Alun Munslow calls
this an "ontological dissonance."
The past and history seem like they should be the same thing,
but they're not.
The past is made up of events, but history
is the process of putting those events in order
into a narrative, so that we can understand what they mean.
Narrative does have its shortcomings, though.
It has gaps, for instance.
When putting things into an order,
stuff gets left out-- often, out of necessity.
Like, it would be an impossible task
to account for 100% of the occurrences, opinions,
and circumstances surrounding any event, fictional
or factual.
Without gaps, Peter Guralnick's Elvis biography, for instance,
would become a Borgesian library of Babel,
a single text covering literally every event and person
involved, and each endless in scope and size,
with Elvis as its dense, black-hole-like nexus.
In the pursuit of accounting for everything,
narrative would become an unwieldy, nonsensical mess.
Sometimes things are left out of narrative
due to their triviality or relative invisibility, as well.
For fictional narrative, Marie-Laure Ryan
calls this the "principle of minimal departure,"
where readers, quote, "fill in the gaps in the text
by assuming the similarity of the fictional world
to their own experiential reality.
This model can only be overruled by the text itself,"
she writes.
Now, I don't know if I agree with that last part,
but mostly I'm picking up what she's putting down.
She gives the example of a fictional work
where deer are blue.
If its color is left unspecified, most of us
would likely imagine a deer remarkably like actual deer.
And though she's writing about fiction,
arguably the same process occurs when one is writing and reading
history texts.
Lacking any information to the contrary,
or a healthy skepticism, we would
tend to believe that the world then looks and works
a lot like the world now.
But Mike, you're now saying, the difference-- and I
can't believe I have to explain this
to you-- is that when one is reading a history text,
that is our world that we live in,
and so we know how it works.
And yes, totally, we can assume a fair amount
about the world of the past, simply
by effect of the fact we live in some version of that world now.
In a rather literal sense, though, the past is gone.
It doesn't exist except in our reconstructions of it,
which Munslow calls "narrative historical expressions."
History is a story made from bits of the past,
stories are built on narratives, and narratives have gaps.
Even stories about things that actually happened
have gaps, because in many if not most cases lots of gaps
can't be filled simply by doing more research.
We can't know about stuff that was so obvious to an author it
didn't beg description.
Like, for instance, the longstanding mystery
of Homer's description of a, quote, "wine-dark sea,"
leading us to honestly wonder, did the Greeks see color
differently, or just talk about it differently?
Was this a characteristic of Homer, the individual,
or was he representative of a larger cognitive, perceptual,
or linguistic situation?
We can verify the actuality of past events
by, quote, "going to the data," as Munslow says.
We can know that ancient Greeks had the same eyeballs that we
do, but that still doesn't answer the question,
why "wine-dark"?
Which is to say, what about those other,
not-data-related parts of doing history,
like making necessary qualitative judgments
or synthesizing relationships between events
and discussing what they mean?
Deciding what events and people are-- riots or protests, leader
or despot, discoverer or invader.
Many people may tend to imagine Christopher Columbus and Thomas
Cook as "discoverers" or the events of Ferguson, Missouri,
as "riots."
For certain people, including some authors of history,
such descriptors are invisible-- that's
just what those things are-- when, in reality, they're
semantically and historically very powerful
designations which change the way the world looks.
They're especially powerful when they seem to "overrule"--
to use Marie-Laure Ryan's word-- history from the perspective
of others.
Projects like Howard's Zinn's "People's History"
and the blog "Medieval POC" point out
that the world of the past may be
very different from how we'd imagined it based on received
knowledge and, in light of our assumptions,
rooted in a modern perspective.
What the past meant and looked like then,
when it was the present, and what
history means and it looks like to us
now are two separate things.
We really don't live in the same world as the historical past.
It lives entirely in ours.
We've made it and continually remake it,
based on all kinds of first- and secondhand reports, data
artifacts, and countless modern inclinations.
History is an inherently interpretive process.
Munslow talks of history being more
like an artwork and historians more
like artists than we tend to give each credit.
Which gets us back to "Downton Abbey,"
which really is a creative work-- a fictional story
about the past.
The Crawleys didn't exist, even if "Abbey's" financial troubles
and "times, they are a-changin'" believably did.
Still, "Downton" is praised heavily
for its accuracy and attention to detail--
with the exception of the Pepsi bottles
and power lines and stuff.
But really, for the most part, praise
is high in the faithfulness department,
even if "Downton Abbey" is light on what we might call "facts"--
and the goal of "Downton" isn't facts.
If we put on our postmodern hats,
we may view "Downton" as a copy without an original, something
deeply and definitionally nostalgic-- a place
you can never go back to.
DA resembles reality while also being more interesting than it.
In her paper "Adapting Heritage--
Class and Conservatism in 'Downton Abbey,'" Katherine
Byrne goes so far as to say "Downton"
isn't really about the past but about the present,
reconstructed using the politics and personalities of the past
to knowingly talk about modern concerns,
making it a fundamentally postmodern show.
The Crawleys may not be an actual family,
but in fact their closest analog may
be the Kardashians, who have an often complementary set
of problems.
But we may also view "Downton" as an admission
of what history proper really is-- a work of art--
an interpretive act.
Speaking with Veronica Lee of "The Independent," "Downton
Abbey" creator Julian Fellowes states the aims
of the show rather forthrightly when
he claims "In difficult and rude-mannered times,
it is comforting for people to see
a story about a period of British history
when everyone had a station in life,
whether it was a footman or an earl.
I'm not saying it's necessarily right,
but everybody had a role to play in keeping this huge operation
going, upstairs and downstairs.
And, for the most part, they got along."
End quote.
Fellowes may not mean to make history,
but he is relying on and reinforcing
our modern understanding of what that time "must"
have been like.
"Downton Abbey" is not history, but it uses
and, in many senses, "does" history-- but as
a piece of fiction.
So we may ask, is this what that period of British history
was like?
Did everyone have a station?
Did they, for the most part, get along?
I imagine this is the case, but I don't know.
And so "Downton" does appear accurate, while still catering,
as Byrne points out, to my modern concerns.
"Downton Abbey's" a lot like one of
those outdoor, living-history museums
which also has free Wi-Fi and a gift
shop where I can buy a Pepsi.
It's both fact and fiction, featuring people/characters
which may not be real but neither are they untrue.
History proper's only real difference
is an insistence that its people and events existed.
So then what about "American Crime Story's" "People
versus OJ Simpson," a recently concluded true-crime show
about the actual arrest and trial
of former actual American football player OJ Simpson,
charged with the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown
and her friend Ron Goldman?
Being based on real people and respected lawyer
and legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin's book "Run
of His Life," we can assume a fair amount of actual truth,
right?
But still, unlike Toobin's book or FX's adaptation of it,
real life doesn't have a narrator,
implicit or otherwise.
In the TV adaptation, I can't help
but notice that the camera works tirelessly,
telling the audience how to feel about Robert Kardashian or OJ.
It tells us which interactions are
highly charged or overly tense.
Lacking a text narrator, the show
adds one back in with cinematography,
to subtly fill in the gaps.
So the difference between this and this
may be really they're more alike than we tend to imagine.
The creation of each is skippered
by authors and directors who exist in, and unavoidably
respond to, the state of the world today as much
as they reconstruct the past.
And be it through word choice, slow zooms, or subject matter,
each might do so differently, but they all
impact the present and the future
through an unavoidably imagined past.
What do you all think?
What is the relationship between doing actual history
and making historical fiction or true crime and related genres?
Let us know in the comments, and I will response to some of them
in next week's comment-response video.
And don't worry-- we're going to try
to figure out how to give away three postmodern hats.
So stay tuned.
In this week's comment-response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding emoji and speech.
If you want to watch that one, you can click right here
or find a link in the Doobly Doo.
It's really good to be back.
I hope everybody had a fun two weeks.
I also took a social-media hiatus,
which was a really strange and interesting thing
that I've never done before.
So thanks, also, to everybody who
wrote really nice messages for me
to come back to on Twitter and Instagram and everywhere else.
In the meantime, while I was gone, you might have noticed me
and WeezyWaiter swapping faces.
The results are as you might expect.
We'll put a link to that video in the description, as well.
This week's episode would not have been possible or good
without the hard work of these historians of the past.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit links
in the Doobly Doo.
And the Tweet of the Week comes from rindflorist,
whose Twitter name is great-- that's just a great Twitter
name-- that points us towards Destin from "Smarter
Every Day's" new project, the Sound Traveler, which
is super rad.
Destin has taken his binaural microphones
that he had that you might remember from some
of his previous work and has recorded really specific
locations that he has visited.
And there's one up right now for the Lincoln Memorial.
It's super great.
I'm really excited to see where he goes with it.
He was telling me he's been working on it for three years.
So-- ah!
I'm super psyched.
I'm also a sound nerd, but, yeah-- psyched.
[DING]