9
Gracious exterior, but the rooms are small and mean
and so papered over with secrets that even their shape
is uncertain, but it is the shape of the past:
no love, no extra credit, not even civility
from these shades. Do they even see you?
They were so anxious for you to be there,
once, in the playground of what was happening to them.
Messages were bright then, hats undoffed,
manners fresh and cool, like a seasonable day
in early spring. The glancing
rivulets in the gutters struck a note that was a trifle flint-like,
though, and the birds were warier, warier than usual.
It took a man with a cane to magnetize
all those invisible and partly visible crosscurrents,
reluctant, downright sullen, or one that hadn’t yet had the time
to reflect on what was being set up here: a point,
no more nor less. Instead of trying to kiss you,
I too felt sucked into the ambient animal-revenge scene:
By twos and threes the animals returned, to their cages,
and sat obediently while the trainer barked orders at them.
They, it seemed, had nothing to lose. Nor in all the whitewashed domain
of the present past tense was anyone privy to the secrets
that now make us strong, or tall, or vulnerable
as a bride left waiting at the church, inching backwards
to the cliff’s edge as the photographer gets ready to smile.
John Ashbery, ‘The Ridiculous Translator’s Hopes’, 1994.1
This, as shall be proposed, is poetry – a poem – for historians, because it describes the emotional situation of ‘doing’ history; because it tells us a story about what we do, contains propositions about the cultural and intellectual activity called ‘history’, lets us see ourselves, and have a laugh at our activities. It doesn’t set out to do those things; but historians can make them happen: make poetry out of a future that had not happened when the actual poet wrote his actual words. It is particularly illuminating on the grammatical tenses of writing history: the past present tense of the poem itself, and the tenses – future conditional, subjunctive, future perfect – which have been discussed throughout this book. And it provides a good laugh, because although the activity of writing history is no more peculiar than the writing of poetry, there is much more commentary on the latter and remarkably little on the former. There is virtue, then, in laughing up our sleeve, in the back kitchen, at our own prosaic mission impossible.
It is pointless to ask – of course! – what ‘Ridiculous’ really means, as Debbie’s teacher just might be doing by setting her an essay on Auden. It is an open poem that allows freedom of use, and this despite the secrets it covers over and the secret it is as a poem. There is very little critical commentary on it, and none of what there is commits the intentionalist fallacy of Debbie and her teacher. Some few critics are interested in the absence of the first person singular in this and other Ashbery poems of the period in which it was written; they are interested in the disappearance of the ‘I’.2 The kind of ‘vertigo within [our] recognition’ of the arbitrary malevolence of a photographer just about to smile as his or her subject inches back towards her death, is tracked across Ashbery’s Romantic Postmodernism of the 1980s and 1990s.3 In a different reading, the secrets that gay men keep are seen to ‘crowd … [this] poem’, making it cramped and mean in a way its gracious exterior belies.4 But these readings are by literary scholars, more predisposed to fly than they are to ask the child’s and the historian’s questions: Who is the man with the cane? Why the animals? What is going on here? Is the shape of this past really … History? Is the ‘present past tense’ really … the historians’ tense, of thinking, and of writing? The ‘present past tense’ of the poem is not a grammatical category, and therefore cannot be le présent historique in which French-speaking historians conventionally write, or the doughty, straightforward historic past tense used by the English speaking. It’s something like the tense implied by Auden in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’: the tense you use to describe something that is over and gone and yet isn’t dead. Nothing goes away.
I spent a lot of time in the 1990s disinterring the obdurate set of beliefs inherited from nineteenth-century researches in physiology, biology, and psychology: that nothing goes away; that nothing is capable of being dispersed. This set of assumptions about the material world shaped historical thinking across the life and social sciences – and the discipline of history. This was a ‘scientific’ idea translated to many publics by a wide variety of media. It was a commonplace by the beginning of the twentieth century, as Auden’s assertion ‘that no past dies’ attests.5 Other accounts of the work of history in the modern period allow Ashbery’s ‘present past’ to be read as an encapsulation of R. G. Collingwood’s many lyrical descriptions of historical knowledge as the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s mind, thus producing the perpetual presentness of the past.6 Moreover, I believe that I am allowed to know these shades – do they even see me? – as the historian’s ghosts, determined by the sociologist Avery Gordon to be fragments of all that is unsettled, ignored, and repressed, when historians write about the past. Gordon’s shades signal what is missing from the story of the present.7 ‘History’, she says
is that ghostly … totality that articulates and disarticulates itself and the subjects who inhabit it. It is, in contrast to sociology and other modern retrieval enterprises, never available as a final solution for the difficulties haunting creates for the living. It is always a site of struggle between the living and the ghostly, a struggle whose resolution has to remain partial to the living, even when the living can only partially grasp the source of the ghost’s power.8
For this sociologist, History (the past as it is thought and what gets written of that thinking: the work and works of history) is a ‘wavering yet determinate social structure’, like a system of socio-economic stratification, or a social institution like law, religion, or education. History wavers, moves in and out of our field of vision and understanding; but it is a structure; it is a ghost in the present tense. Gordon also says, optimistically, that the ghost is something to be done: ‘this something to be done is not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the present, a reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had’.9
But historians are much more used to commerce with the dead than they are with ghosts; we may not be able to see Avery’s or Ashbery’s shades. We spend a lot of time with the dead. Most of the data we use for description and analysis of past phenomena is derived from the written words and material artefacts of the dead and gone. If we work with oral history methods, or with the testimony and documentation of living subjects, what we write about them gets incorporated in existing historical argument and narration; we thus make the living speak the many dialogues of the dead. This is an attenuated, unnamed genuflection towards a popular eighteenth-century European literary form. For a wide variety of writers and audiences, classical literature demonstrated many formal models that allowed the dead to speak. There were narratives of descent into the underworld, letters from the dead to the living, and vision-like dreams in which the dead had conversations with each other. In the dialogue of the dead ‘the voice of the dead was presented without a framing narrative: the dead speak to each other, the reader overhears’.10 Readers are not speaking with the dead and, in truth, no more over-hearing them speak than was Lucian of Samosata (CE c.125–180), or François Fénelon in the later seventeenth century; they – of course! – wrote the invented conversations of the dead and gone. Of an analogous eighteenth-century writerly practice, that is, the attribution of speech, set between inverted commas or in italics, to historical figures, James Beattie thought that readers should just get over their worries about authenticity and verisimilitude. ‘Everyone’ knew that departed kings and senators hadn’t really said those words. Why did historians do it – ‘take the liberty to embellish their works in this manner?’ – when ‘we know, either from the circumstances that they could not, or from more authentic records that they did not, make any such orations?’.11 One reason, he thought, was to display ‘their talents in oratory and narration’; but it was done chiefly to ‘render their composition more agreeable’, and readers should be grateful for it. There was evidently ‘something more pleasing than real nature, or something which shall add to the pleasing qualities of real nature’, to be devised by human fancy. Pleasing people was usually the poet’s business, but a historian might be pleasing too, even though it was not his natural tendency: ‘an historian is a person who usually assumes a character of great dignity, and addresses himself to a most respectable audience’; historians usually sought a language that would enhance their reputation for high seriousness.12 But, warned Beattie, should they make the attempt to add to the gaiety of nations, they could go too far into the realms of pleasure, as had Voltaire in his account of the Battle of Fontenoy (1745), lengthening ‘a description into a detail of fictitious events’. Doing this ‘he loses his credit with us, by raising a suspicion that he is more intent upon a pretty story, than upon the truth’.13 Whatever which way, fictionalising events was a more dangerous practice than inventing the voices of the dead and gone.
Modern history-writing too makes the already-dead speak, but only when something once said has been recorded in some document or other and may be presented between inverted commas (or, in a mid eighteenth-century transitional practice for representing direct speech, set in italics). Indeed it was an early proclamation of the new, modern, professional, university-based history which emerged in the long European nineteenth century, that the dead could be made to walk and talk. In 1869, Jules Michelet announced the raising of the dead in writing as the proper task of the historian. He was remembering back to his first days in the Archives Nationales in Paris, early in the new century, long before his appointment to a chair at the Collège de France and as Head of the History Section of the Archives Nationales. He remembered himself, a young man, moving through the ‘catacombs of manuscripts’ and discerning ‘a movement and murmur which were not those of death. These papers and parchments, so long deserted, desired no better than to be restored to the light of day.’ He did not say that he had heard them, exactly; he apprehended them; was conscious of them: ‘Toutefois je ne tardai pas à m’apercevoir dans le silence apparent de ces galeries, qu’il y avait un mouvement, un murmure qui n’était pas de la mort.’ He told the dead, or the undead, how and in what manner they should emerge from their tombs: ‘Softly my dear friends, let us proceed in order if you please …’. Then, as he ‘breathed their dust, I saw them rise up. They rose from the sepulchre … as in the Last Judgement of Michelangelo or in the Dance of Death. This frenzied dance … I have tried to reproduce in [my] work …’14 Addressing all the nameless ones buried in files and folders, he told them that even though they had never really lived – had never really been – he, the historian, could give them a new life. He did not give them words; this was not a dialogue of or with the dead; he could not hear them because he had not already given them speech.
Many besides me have had a lot of fun with the sheer zaniness, the true weirdness, of these propositions about the relationship between historians and the dead. We’ve had particular fun with Michelet’s assertion that he knew better than the dead themselves what they (had) really wanted. After Michelet, remarked Benedict Anderson drily, ‘the silence of the dead was no obstacle to the exhumation of their deepest desires’.15 Ever willing to mock our own presumptions that we really know what happened in the past, or what people really thought and felt about it, we have laughed merrily along with Anderson. Or, if we are historians of the European nineteenth century, explained (away) Michelet’s propositions with a history of romanticism and the romantic movement.16 Or we have made sane, or normalised, Michelet’s disconcerting propositions by treating them as an extraordinary poetics of the archive: as a highly-wrought, Romanticallyinflected description of the psychological and somatic states experienced by some historians in some archives.17
Michelet conjured up the Dead, not ghosts. His frenzied dancers are the dead and gone, animated by the historian’s eye, the working of her imagination, the movement of his pen, later, after the archive.18 But what Ashbery’s ‘Ridiculous Translator’s Hopes’ allows you to make out are Avery Gordon’s ghosts; it allows you to wonder if – maybe – you’re already among them, or at the very least what the hell you’re doing here (or there; making a point, no more nor less. It can only be to make a point). There’s nothing in the poem itself, the biography of the poet, or the literary commentary on his work, to say that you, the Ridiculous Historian, can’t do this. This is not the case with Auden, or his poetry, his life, or his commentators: you have to reckon with books like Auden and Christianity, many accounts of his God, his contributions to theology; his enthusiasm for ‘big’ history and the works of Thucydides, and much, much more, before you can get near his Clio, approachable though she may seem. In fact, and as has been described, to approach her is to see her fade into the past and into what she never was – into nothing – in the first place.19
My trouble with Auden’s Clio – one of my many troubles with his history-poems – was that I’m not used to the enormity of documentation that entombs her. Commentary on Auden’s writing would fill a floor of any library I am used to working in; there is archival material scattered across dozens of repositories on both sides of the Atlantic. A historian is used to reading everything there is on the topic she has chosen to work on. Some topic – some problem, some idea – precipitates itself. It comes out of the work of many other historians, about which you murmur as you read: no: not quite like that, it wasn’t quite like that; there’s more to say. Or, in the course of something else, some long afternoon in a stifling hot county record office, you while away the waiting time for the documents you have ordered from the stacks by going through the card catalogue one more time. This is how my last project started, in Nottinghamshire Archives sometime in 2008. I’d had to go back to the record office in order to complete a footnote to Chapter 6 of Labours Lost (2009). I needed to consult the magistrates’ notebooks of JP Sir Gervase Clifton, Bart (1772–1812) yet one more time. I’d spent days – weeks – there reading them and taking notes, over the past decade, though he’d been a minor pursuit of mine. In order to write in detail about his adjudication of domestic service disputes across his estates and the wider South Nottinghamshire region, I needed a date and a name that I’d neglected to note two, or ten, years before. I had not obeyed my own injunction to graduate students, to make a full reference to every bloody thing you lay your eyes on, there and then. In the card catalogue – so much more reliable than the online version – I gave the ‘Place’ drawers one more go: Clifton was not only the magistrate’s name and did not only describe his 600-acre Nottinghamshire estate, but was also the name of the village three miles south west of Nottingham, which clustered at the bottom of the drive up to Clifton Hall. There was a card that read: ‘Clifton. DD 311/1–6, Diaries of Joseph Woolley, framework knitter, for 1801, 1803, 1804, 1809, 1813, 1815’. I sent for them (checking the reference I’d come for in Clifton’s notebooks took all of five minutes) and on a first, over-excited read through, found justicing room incidents that the magistrate himself did not record, a very great deal about the sex-life of Joseph Woolley’s friends and neighbours, and that some Clifton people had dreams about Sir Gervase in his aspect as a landlord. I noticed, there and then, how Joseph Woolley used the language of the law to assess character and to make judgement on the wild stories of drunken nights out and marital infidelity he told. I knew, there and then, what my next project would be. I think I even knew, there and then, that I was going to have to spend seven years reading about Luddism – ‘the machine-breaking crisis of Regency England’ – and Nottinghamshire Luddism, and stocking-making (framework knitting), and the everyday life of the English working class, in a period of war, trade depression, and food shortages, c.1800–1815. I knew what I had to discover, because of knowing about what was already known, historically speaking. I think I knew, there and then, that it would be a book, and that every word I wrote would be a reflection on, an elaboration of, a kind of waltz with the current historiography of the Luddite rebellion and the making of the English working class. Later, in the summer of 2010, transcribing Woolley’s 10,000 words (at home, using the photocopy Nottinghamshire Archives provided), I found how useful his diaries were for tracking Sir Gervase’s movements between Nottinghamshire, his London house, and the house he rented in Bath for the season. Woolley recorded Clifton’s activities as landowner, landlord, and employer: he wrote about Clifton’s swearing in of tenants, his discharging of them, his sacking of his own domestic servants; and as a man with a ‘hore but a very fine woman’ – the plebeian woman he took up with after his wife’s death, sometime after 1779. I thought it my great good fortune to work on a document that reversed the common traffic of most social commentary of the modern period, for here one of the low wrote up an elite person. Sir Gervase played a part in Woolley’s narrative – he strode the stage of Woolley’s writing – whilst the stockingmaker did not appear in the magistrate’s much briefer legal records. Woolley watched the magistrate, and wrote him up. In this relationship Woolley intermittently had the power of the pen, or at least the power of observation; the power of those who watch, and are not watched.
I am a devotee and advocate of full transcription, for by copying some other writer’s words in your own hand, you get as close as it is possible to get to the dead and gone: you use pretty much the same kind of materials and implements, and the words pass through your mind onto your page, as they did from Joseph Woolley’s mind to the pages of six Old Moore’s Almanacs interleaved with blank sheets. By transcribing, you slow your reading to the pace at which the words were put on his page; you read and write the spaces and absences in his text; the intended ironies, the literary allusions, the jokes. You discard your earlier presumptions and assumptions; a man was revealed not as the misogynist I had thought him to be at first glance, but as a writer who empathised with the difficulties of many women’s lives, who noticed violent and deeply unhappy sexual relationships and recorded them, who wrote about women as if they were the same kind of creatures as men. Someone read through the window of transcription becomes – a writer. And transcription provokes more of itself: later, writing An Everyday Life, I decided that I had to make a full transcription of Clifton’s two justicing notebooks, so that I might exploit to the full the good fortune of finding two men, from opposite ends of the social spectrum, recording the same time and place, and sometimes the same the same incidents. Transcribing both sets of documents produced the central conundrum of the book-to-be: how does the Ridiculous Historian write about a Nottinghamshire stockingmaker who was not a Luddite, in the birthplace and epicentre of Luddism? I would devise an argument to say that Woolley was in Luddism; that you could not be in Nottinghamshire in 1811–1812 and not be in Luddism. But he was not ‘a Luddite’, in the way that its historians have written the Luddites. If the historian wants to account for Joseph Woolley, she must write against many accreted historical assumptions about men like him.
There is reading to do, of other historians and of other documents in different archives. There will arise (always does, in my experience) several crises of too-much (too many documents, too much commentary) as so brilliantly described by Gabriel Garcia Márquez in his postscript to The General in His Labyrinth (1991), his novel about Simon Bolivar’s last and terrible journey to the coast of Nueva Granada in 1830. Márquez described the historical overload he experienced during research for the book: so many historical ‘facts’; so many that he did not know the meaning of. He refused to renounce ‘the extravagant prerogative of the novel’ in recounting ‘a tyrannically documented life’, and only the last few weeks of that life, to boot. (Auden’s life and works are tyrannically documented in the same way.) The vortex of meaningless information (or information to which he had not yet assigned meaning) sent Márquez, as it does us all, into blind panic. Luckily, he had friendly historian-informants at the end of a telephone line to give him ‘a first inkling of a method for investigating and ordering facts’, which was the brilliantly simple stalwart of the file card system. File cards will do it; so will computer searchable transcription – anything really to get the stuff in order and make it thinkable. I have always hoped that Márquez’s historian-informants told him how unlucky he was to have so very, very much.20
If I had the ability, it would have been better to write a poem or a novel about the Clio made of so much, yet always absent, in Auden’s history-poems; she who isn’t anywhere. But I do not have that ability. I write in the form called ‘history’, or more correctly, ‘academic history’. This prose form has two characteristics that press upon the consciousness of the writer. The first is that the narrative, as you compose it, explains something. It is perfectly possible to write a prolegomenon or paragraph that lays out what you’re up to and what you mean in the book or article to follow; but that is usually repetition of what is to come, which is narrative that unfolds its meaning (all its theoretical points, its adjustment of fact, its historiography) as it goes along. You have to assume a reader something like you, possessing something like your general knowledge of the period or topic under discussion, and something like the same model of time and chronology. It is perfectly possible to tell your story backwards; but your reader would still know that things happened in a forward movement. Second, the story you are going to tell, or the story you are telling, is but one narrative chipped out of the great unhewn rock of all the other possible narratives, or ways it could be told.
It is dictated by its end; that is, what you are going to say in the future when it will have been written. It is thought in the future perfect tense (will have been). You shape a narrative towards it, though it does not yet exist. And the ending will change as you write: even though it doesn’t exist (yet), some version of an end has to be imagined in order to get to it. The ending is a conditional future (though not in the grammatical meaning of ‘future conditional tense’). The conclusion, or the end-place, is (will be) littered with all the mewling little bodies of the occluded and discarded endings that never came into existence. Then you go back to the beginning and write an introduction, or revise the one you made just to get going, so that a harmony of linerality may infuse the whole. Or you may rely on your readers to do this for you anyway. This is not a poem or a form of poetics; really, your readers (historian-readers) will not care very much about how you make your words work. Modern readers of history are not very much like James Beattie’s eighteenth-century audiences, on the lookout for the agreeable composition which make the historian’s narrative ‘in that degree poetical’.21 You may be fortunate enough to have a reader who cares enough to react to your prose style; a reader who will say, as did R. G. Collingwood of Thucydides, ‘harsh, artificial, repellent. In reading Thucydides I ask myself, What is the matter with the man, that he writes like that?’22 (Any reaction is better than none.) But historians have been trained, like fishwives, to gut and fillet the documents, including the new work of history another one of them has just produced, to get to the stuff: the argument, the new items of information; what used to be called the facts. The work has to be able to be treated like this: cut up, unravelled so that it can make one thread of some other historian’s story. This is why any modern historical story, told in a book, or an article, or a BBC tele-doc, really does not have an end. There are endings and end-stops, because narratives draw to a close, because an article has to be sent to the journal editors, or because you just can’t stand it anymore; but an end is different from an ending. Very soon, your story will be picked up, turned about, made part of some other historian’s story. Formally and philosophically, a modern narrative of history is without end. It will never – cannot – exist as the shaped, finite, bordered artefact of language that is a poem. Auden wrote of ‘Objects’ in the same period as his history-poems, that ‘If shapes can so to their own edges keep,/No separation proves being bad’. But the work of history cannot keep its own edges; it is unfinished business.23 I have always claimed to enjoy this form called ‘a history’ because of its elegant contradiction of story without an end: the closest I ever get to the dangerous edge of things. But you get weary of it and, really, I think now that its pleasure lies in the comfort of knowing that you can’t have the final word, because there isn’t one; and because knowing this obviates your responsibility as a writer.
But all of that is the writing of history, only a part of its making. The first making begins with your sources or in the record office (or any place or activity that can stand in for a record office). It looks good at first glance: the document, the diaries, whatever; a gracious exterior for the topic or project you have in mind, but soon you find that this little fragment of the past is so papered over with secrets that even its shape, and the shape of your vague idea, is uncertain. You read their words: an account book, a magistrate conducting a settlement examination and making a truly inadequate record of what a woman said in his justicing notebook, a working man describing a riotous night of ale-house trashing on a blank page of his almanac; and you wonder if they really want you to be there, watching them. This anxiety is particularly pressing on the social historian operating, however tenuously, under the injunction of E. P. Thompson, who described his mission, perhaps the mission of social history, as the ‘rescue [of] the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity’.24 Harder thoughts still if your subject is a poor stockinger in the era of Luddism. Does Joseph Woolley want to be rescued? By me? Does he want you to be there, at all, in the playground of what was happening to him? I, myself, would not want the condescension of a social historian 200 years on, finding me a subject of empathy or sympathy – caritas, really – and diminishing me yet again. I don’t want anyone’s pity. For these reasons I wrote a scene set nowhere, half-imagined, at the beginning of An Everyday Life, in which I expressed all my reluctance to feel anything at all about Joseph Woolley. Some historians have enjoyed their meeting with the shades of their historical subjects. Thinking of the eighteenth-century British philosophes and friends with whom he spent time when working on Enlightenment, Roy Porter said that he found their company and their conversation congenial: ‘I savour their pithy prose, and feel … in tune with these warm, witty, clubbable men.’25 But I never could have looked forward to an evening with Joseph Woolley down the Coach and Horses, Clifton. Nor he me, for that matter. He wouldn’t have wanted me to be there. His own stories – his own writing – were so bound up in secrets that even their shape was uncertain. They still aren’t known; will never be known.26 It was only the acknowledgement of Joseph Woolley’s silence and secrets that allowed me to get on with it; I had to convince myself, for as long as it would take me to write, that I did not assume a right to speak for working-class men (dead or alive) out of my superior and experiential knowledge; that all of them will keep their secrets. But there is always that flint-like refusal of your presence; the birds outside the ale-house are wary; the men at the bar turn away from you, back to their pints, as you walk through the door.
Or: are you the man with the cane? Does the historian magnetise all the ‘invisible and partly visible crosscurrents’ in the multiple stories you have in your notes, simply so that you can tell one more historical story and make a point? Or are you the photographer, watching, not quite ready to smile, as you think (see and imagine) these fragments of other people’s past? You are almost certainly the bride, who all the way through the writing of it, inches backwards towards the cliff’s edge; to the ending that won’t be an end. What right do you have to be there? To recount other lives and make them part of your purpose?
There have been many ‘turns’ taken by historical studies over the last quarter century. All of them provoke new questions about the historian’s responsibilities to their subjects. Beyond the cultural, linguistic, subjective, and archival ‘turns’ in history-writing, and beyond historiographical questions asked from the postcolony about the West as the Subject, or ‘I’, of historical writing, historians have started to ask juridical questions to do with rights, duties, obligation, and ownership of the past.27 Who owns history? Who has the right to speak for the dead? For particular categories of the dead? These are ethical considerations of the historian’s role as a writer, in relationship to his or her (dead) subjects.28 Global history calls for a new ethics of historical reconstruction and imagination. Historians have been asked to exercise their moral responsibilities by moving beyond nationalism and national stories to a global universalism: they should, it is said, undertake an empirically based universal history encompassing the history of the Universe itself.29 An ecumenical global history is extolled as ‘the moral duty of the historical profession of our time’.30 The reason for this is that both the present and the past are whitewashed, as in a dual meaning of Ashbery’s ‘whitewashed domain/of the present past tense’: covered over by the paper of Western imperialism and colonialism. Orientalism and European self-regard literally ‘papered’ over the past, in reference to the treaties and covenants and land deeds by which Western powers legitimated conquest. The dream that global history can strip away the layers is an honourable one exactly because it is not the ‘noble dream’ of Peter Novick, who traced the twentieth-century profession’s high moral concept of objectivity in historical writing back to Leopold von Ranke and the early nineteenth-century development of modern, academic history.31 In global history theory and practice, Western ‘objectivity’ is part of the problem: it is the whitewash of Western historiography as it has been conducted over the last century and a half.32
At the same time, new protocols of imagining and writing have emerged from Holocaust history and sociology – from the event that ‘resisted … long-standing frameworks of historical reasoning, development, and emplotment … Who can claim the moral ground to consider the meaning … of the lives and deaths of others?’33 Some say that Holocaust history and sociology underpin both the subjective and ethical turns in historical studies. ‘I have not always written [personally]’, says Leo Spitzer, discussing historical representations of the Holocaust. He explains that academic historians like him tend to avoid the personal voice: ‘a seamless narrative and impersonal, omniscient, historical voice’ usually masks ‘the constructed nature of historical inquiry and writing’. He wanted ‘to show how the historian is invested in the construction of a historical account – how he or she shapes and constructs it as an embodied being, with a subjectivity and personal history that need to be taken into account’; he started to resist the conventions of history-writing.34 He started to write, perhaps, in the way Michelet wrote in his Preface to the History of France, when he described the visceral experience of the archival work that underpinned the history he wrote.
The ethical turn in historical studies suggests that our responsibilities are much greater towards those we imagine, or write into being, than they are to the nameless, unconsidered dead whom Michelet imagined raising from their tombs of paper and parchment. Michelet did recognise, opaquely, that his dead were devices of writing, the products of his imagination. He described them as not really wanting to be there (or here), not even in his beautiful words; they wanted to go back to their own dreams, not be part of his:
Men of a hundred years, nations of two hundred 2,000 years, infants who died when nursing, they all say that they hardly lived, that they barely began … They say that if they had the time to know themselves and prepare, they might have accepted their lot; they would have ceased to wander around us, they would have gently allowed their urns to be closed up, lulled by friendly hands, going back to sleep and rebinding their dreams.35
I used to cry quite a lot in libraries and record offices, at moments like the one Michelet described; at the feelings my reading of documents and texts attributed to the dead and gone; I cried often for shivering poor children washing cresses at Farringdon Green Market as they prepared their goods for sale, winter 1849; at the formulaic, desperate narratives of the settlement or bastardy examination; at the terrible, enduring weight of the world of which I am a part.36 Lately, though, I have laid off the tears, having finally understood that I was only ever crying for myself.37 I now know where I’m coming from, in the ridiculous intensity of my archival encounters.38
Archives are places for feeling things, or at least places in which many historians feel things. You may feel: anxious (I’ll never get it done!), despairing, guilty (about so many things, not least the money you’re spending, by just being fruitlessly here); almost certainly you feel tired, possibly exhausted, and hungry, and dirty. Documents, if you’re allowed to lay your hands on them, are often filthy things; it’s quite difficult to get hold of food in most county record offices, and going out to eat something is such a waste of time, for the doors will close at 5pm. You may feel the simple, quiet pleasure of finding something, something you’re looking for, and writing it down. You may, sometimes, in a different modality of perception, feel the decaying leather of a notebook cover, the ever so slightly dusty surface of the page on which someone (maybe, if you’re lucky, the historical person you are pursuing) wrote a long time ago: the movement of her pen, the pencilled groove of notation in the margin. But most likely not; you will spend a lot of hot and flurried time interfacing with all the slippery surfaces of a microfilm reader. Even at the microfilm reader, you may hear things.
Words are material things, as eighteenth-century sensationalist psychology taught, not simply, or not only, because the human voice may be skewered by a pen to the page of notebook, but because words are a product of the human body and are sensible to other bodies: they are apprehensible to the senses.39 Magistrates’ clerks and court reporters writing down the required testimony of the poor made reference to the language philosophy of John Locke in their mundane acts of recording and writing, however bored, or careless, or inattentive, their transcription may have been.40 But centuries on, opening their decaying registers, the writing dissolves and you fancy that you hear the witnesses and plaintiffs, the poor young woman seven months gone naming the father of her unborn child, as they speak their material but ephemeral words. But really, you’re only listening to the void.41
Take this as an example: look up from the page of the ‘Overseers’ Accounts and Rates, 1813–1822, parish of Hardington Mandeville, Somerset’, out through the window of Somerset Archives in Taunton, at a landscape and a sky that is just a bit like that enclosing a village twenty-five miles or so south east of where you are now. I sit in a building provided by the local state – a country record office – on the outskirts of a county town that inscribed the very limits of the administrative world that the poor and paupers of Hardington Mandeville c.1800–1820 knew. I am not alone; I am as much at home as it is possible to be with the state. I believe that the hum of voices I hear around me, as local historians load the microfilm reader machines, and search the microfiche pages for one of the lost ones, one of their family from 100 years ago, is pretty much like what I might have heard in the Hardington Mandeville vestry room in 1814: similar accents; something like the same quality of voice. I like working in local record offices, enjoy the little space of quiet you can make for yourself as the busy world of family and local history buzzes around. They and you provide the only possible place of origin for the voices you hear. Yet, like many historians of the European eighteenth century, I am as convinced as Arlette Farge that ‘juridical records … created a space of captured speech’.42 The humble, everyday legal records composed by justices’ clerks and poor law officials do this quite as well as the case-notes and jottings of a Lord Chief Justice.43 But whose speech? Whose voices? The words of those entombed in the past? In his very first days in the Archives Nationales Michelet heard muffled voices; he wrote as if the documents themselves spoke, out of their own desires: ‘these papers and parchments, so long deserted, desired no better than to be restored to the light of day’.44 It’s taken me an inordinately long time to understand what Michelet is so clear about: that the murmuring came from the documents, not from the city state of the dead and gone.
In Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie (1674), Thomas Rymer (translating René Rapin) thought it well ‘to conclude with a touch of Morality’, for was not ‘the reputation of being modest … (more) worth than that of making Verses’? If he were to make verses, he ‘wou’d never forsake honesty nor modesty’. All men were ridiculous for ‘the kind opinion they conceive of themselves, and of their performances’, but ‘the Poets are yet more ridiculous than other Men, when their vanity rises from the difficulty of succeeding well in their Mystery’. If he were to make verses better than another’s, he ‘wou’d not force any man to find them good’:
I wou’d not have a greater opinion of my self, though all the world applauded them; nor shou’d the success blind me … and I wou’d impose silence on them, who in commending me, spoke further than my Conscience; to save my self from that ridiculousness, which some vain spirits fall into, who wou’d have praises and admirations eternally for every thing they do. I wou’d employ all my reason, and all my wit, to gain more docility, and more submission, to the advice my Friends shou’d give me; I wou’d borrow their lights, to supply the weakness of mine; and I wou’d listen to all the world, that I might not be ignorant of any of my faults … Lastly, I wou’d rid myself of all the ridiculous vanities, to which those who make Verse are ordinarily obnoxious … 45
He followed the Aristotlean line in thinking ‘the portraits of History … less perfect than the portraits of Poesie … Sophocles, who in his Tragedies represents men as they ought to be, is, in the opinion of Aristotle, to be prefer’d before Euripides, who represents Men as really they are’. The reason for Aristotle’s preference, he explained, was that ‘History proposes not virtue but [the] imperfect, as it is found in the particulars; and Poetry proposes it free from all imperfections, and as it ought to be in general, and in the abstract’.46 He had much to say as well about Ridiculous Poets whose verse was more History than Poesie, dwelling as they did upon the ordinary, and the everyday, on the littleness of what actually happened, as opposed to lessons about ‘what may, and what ought to be’. Poor historian! And poor, poor poet, reduced to the level of a brute historian, writing something ‘strictly ty’d up to the Truth’. Thus the difficulties with Clio, who was in her own way, and no matter how dull, the sort of poet who proclaimed that which was already there to praise. Once historians had recognised, however obliquely, their own acts of making – the everyday poeisis that creates History out of the past – there was no need for her.
1 First appearance in the UK in The Times Literary Supplement, 23 October 1992, p. 4; reproduced here from And the Stars Were Shining, Carcanet, Manchester, 1994, p. 16.
2 Rudiger Heinze, Ethics of Literary Forms in Contemporary American Literature, Die Deutsche Bibliotek/Transaction, New Brunswick NJ, 2005.
3 Geoff Ward, ‘A Being All Alike? Teleotropic Discourse in Ashbery and Wordsworth’, Edward Larrissey (ed.), Romanticism and Postmodernism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 86–97; 96.
4 John Emil Vincent, John Ashbery and You. His Later Books, University of Georgia Press, Athens GA and London, 2007, pp. 108–109.
5 Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations. Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930, Virago, London and Harvard University Press, New Haven CT, 1995, pp. 77–95, and passim.
6 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946). Revised Edition with Lectures 1926–1928, Jan van der Dussen (ed. and intro.), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994.
7 Avery F. Gordon (1997) Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN, 2008.
8 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, p. 184.
9 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, p. 185; Carolyn Steedman, ‘Living with the Dead’, Carol Smart and Jennifer Hockley (eds), The Craft of Knowledge. Experiences of Living with Data, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2014, pp. 162–175.
10 Markman Ellis, ‘ “Author in Form”. Women writers, print publication, and Elizabeth Montagu’s Dialogues of the Dead’, ELH, 79:2 (2012), pp. 417–445; Frederick M. Keener, English Dialogues of the Dead. A Critical History, An Anthology, and a Check List, Columbia University Press, New York NY, 1973.
11 James Beattie, Essays. On Poetry and Music, … On Laughter, … On the Utility of Classical Learning, William Creech, Edinburgh, E. & C. Dilly, London, 1776, pp. 47–49. For example, in the case of ‘Volumnia haranguing her son Coriolanus … from what these historians relate, one would conjecture: that the Roman matron had studied at Athens under some long-winded rhetorician …’. He had other ludicrous examples. Who says James Beattie couldn’t make jokes? Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter. Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London, Atlantic, London, 2006, p. 169. Carolyn Steedman, ‘Out of Somerset; or, Satire in Metropolis and Province’, Paddy Bullard (ed.), Oxford Handbook to Eighteenth-Century Satire, Oxford University Press, Oxford, forthcoming.
12 Beattie, Essays, pp. 217–218.
13 Beattie, Essays, pp. 47–48.
14 ‘Et à mesure que je soufflais sur leur poussière, je les voyais se soulever …’. J. Michelet, ‘Preface de l’Histoire de France’ (1869); and ‘Examenen des remainments du texte de 1833 par Robert Casanova’, Oeuvres Complètes, Tome IV, Flammarion, Paris, 1974, pp. 613–614, 727; Francis X. Blouin Jr and William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives, Oxford University Press, New York NY, 2011, pp. 25–27.
15 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), Verso, London, 1991, p. 92; Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station. A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940), Doubleday, New York NY, 1953, p. 8; Roland Barthes, Michelet par lui-même (1954), Seuil, Paris 1968, pp. 89–92; Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 1973, pp. 149–162; Carolyn Steedman, Dust, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001.
16 Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History, Twayne, New York NY, 1995.
17 As does Barthes in Michelet par lui-même, and White, in Metahistory. For what is felt in archives and in other sites of history’s making, by some historians, see Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles (eds), Feeling Things. Objects and Emotions through History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2018, forthcoming.
18 Carolyn Steedman, ‘After the archive’, Comparative Critical Studies, 8:2–3 (2011), pp. 321–340.
19 Arthur Kirsch, Auden and Christianity, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2005; Edward Mendelson, ‘Auden and God’, New York Review of Books, 6 December 2007. Tony Sharpe, W. H. Auden in Context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013, for the many modern discourses surrounding Auden’s life and work.
20 Gabriel Garcia Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth (1990), Jonathan Cape, London, 1991, pp. 271–274.
21 Beattie, Essays, pp. 48–49.
22 Collingwood, Idea of History, p. 29.
23 W. H. Auden, ‘Objects’ (1956), Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1947, Faber and Faber, London, 1966, p. 320.
24 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Penguin, London, 1980, p. 12.
25 Roy Porter, Enlightenment. Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, Allen Lane at the Penguin Press, London, 2000, p. 6.
26 Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, Virago, London, 1986, pp. 48–61.
27 Anton de Baets, Responsible History, Berghahn, New York NY, 2009; ‘A historian’s view on the right to be forgotten’, International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, 30:1–2 (2016), pp. 57–66; Heather Conway, The Law and the Dead, Routledge, Abingdon, 2016.
28 Sebastian Jobs and Alf Lüdtke (eds), Unsettling History. Archiving and Narrating in Historiography, Campus Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main (distributed by the University of Chicago Press), 2010.
29 David Christian, ‘The return of universal history’, History and Theory, 49 (2010), pp. 691–716; James Vernon, ‘The history of Britain is dead; long live a global history of Britain’, History Australia, 13:1 (2016), pp. 19–34.
30 Jane Haggis, ‘What an “archive rat” reveals to us about storying theory and the nature of history’, Australian Feminist Studies, 27:73 (2012), pp. 289–295. Haggis suggests that such ‘claims to moral verisimilitude are … the most recent case of “Archive Fever” and the dream of making the past speak in verity through the historian’s modernist ventriloquism’; this quote p. 291.
31 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007.
32 J. M. Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians, Guildford Press, New York NY, 2000; Jack Goody, The Theft of History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006; Bruce Mazlish, The New Global History, Routledge, New York NY, 2006; George Iggers and Q. E. Wang, A Global History of Modern Historiography, Pearson, Harlow, 2008; Maxine Berg (ed.), Writing the History of the Global Challenges for the Twenty-First Century, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, Oxford, 2013.
33 D. W. Cohen, ‘Memories of Things Future: Future Effects in “The Production of History” ’, in Jobs and Lüdtke (eds), Unsettling History, pp. 29–49; this quote p. 43.
34 Julia Baker, ‘A Conversation with Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’, Christine Guenther and Beth Griech-Polelle (eds), Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts, Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle, 2008, pp. 3–12.
35 Jules Michelet, ‘Préface’, p. 281, discussed by Arthur Mitzman, Michelet, Historian. Rebirth and Romanticism in Nineteenth-Century France, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 1990, pp. 42–43.
36 Henry Mayhew, ‘Watercress Girl’, London Labour and the London Poor. Volume I. The London Street Folk, Griffin, Bohn and London, 1861, pp. 151–152; Pierre Bourdieu, La misère du monde, Seuil, Paris, 1993, trans. The Weight of the World. Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999; Carolyn Steedman, ‘The Watercress Seller’, Tamsin Spargo (ed.), Reading the Past. Literature and History, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2000, pp. 18–25.
37 Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, p. 30.
38 Emily Robinson, ‘Touching the void. Affective history and the impossible’, Rethinking History, 14:4 (2010), pp. 503–520.
39 Thomas Astle, The Origin and Progress of Writing, as well hieroglyphic as elementary, &c., for the author, London, 1784; James Beattie, The Theory of Language. In Two Parts, Strahan, Cadell & Creech, Edinburgh, 1788; Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977, pp. 21–54; Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences. Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1982; Nicholas Hudson, ‘Eighteenth-century language theory’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 20:3 (1996), pp. 81–91; Hannah Dawson, Locke, Language and Early-modern Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007.
40 For the narratives of the poor as required speech and the use of their testimony in the eighteenth-century novel, see Carolyn Steedman, ‘Enforced Narratives. Stories of Another Self’, Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield (eds), Feminism and Autobiography. Texts, Theories, Methods, Routledge, 2000, pp. 25–39.
41 Robinson, ‘Touching the void’.
42 Arlette Farge, Le Goût de l’archive, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1989; Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archive, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton, foreword by Natalie Zemon Davis, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 2013.
43 Carolyn Steedman, ‘Lord Mansfield’s women’, Past and Present, 176 (2002), pp. 105–143; ‘Lord Mansfield’s Voices. In the Archive, Hearing Things’, Holloway, Downes, and Randles (eds), Feeling Things, pp. 209–228.
44 Carolyn Steedman, Dust, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001, pp. 26–27.
45 Thomas Rymer, Monsieur Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie, Containing the Necessary, Rational, and Universal Rules for Epick, Dramatick, and the Other Sorts of Poetry. With Reflections on the Works of the Ancient and Modern Poets, and their Faults noted. By R. Rapin, H. Herringman, London, 1674, pp. 155–156. This was a translation of René Rapin’s Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristotle et sur les ouvrages des poétes anciens et modernes, 1674.
46 Rymer, Reflections, pp. 35, 75.