The Ethics of Narrative by Hayden White;Robert Doran;

Author:Hayden White;Robert Doran;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

Note

1. [Ed: This essay is a contribution to and commentary on John Brown Childs, Transcommunality: From the Politics of Conversion to the Ethics of Respect (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003).]

CHAPTER 8

Anomalies of the Historical Museum, or, History as Utopian Space [2004]

Tout objet historique c’est une fétiche.

(Every historical object is a fetish.)

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

Anomaly:

Deviating from the common or proper order of things.

It is a distinct honor to be asked to address such an august body of scholars in a place so rich in history and antiquity.1 I want to begin by begging your indulgence in my presuming to lecture on museums and museology. I am less a student of museums than a user of them. I do, however, have a special interest in historical museums, because they participate in the scholarly activity that is my particular area of specialization: the representation of history. I have spent a goodly part of my life as a scholar studying historical discourse, its structure, its history, and its social function in different contexts and milieus. And during the last couple of years, I have toured Europe and the United States visiting historical museums and reflecting on their practices. In my talk this morning, I want to reflect with you on what I call some of the anomalies produced in the effort to use the museum to present history, historical processes, and historical structures. My thesis is that the problems confronting the historical museum are different from those of the archeological museum, the art museum, the technological museum, and the like. They derive from the effort to represent by the use of material artifacts arranged in spatial relationships and augmented by images, sound, and text what is actually an abstraction, namely, history itself.

According to Susan Pearce, the historical museum uses four modes of display for endowing the past with meaning: the display of the relic (which asks us to believe); the narration of the past (which asks us to learn); the presentation of art and treasure (which asks us to admire); and the reconstruction of the past (which asks us to understand). To this end, the museum uses artifacts, images, and words, arranged in the display, which is a spatial arrangement of artifacts provided with a narrative frame.2 In my view, the only way the historical museum can achieve its aim—to represent history—is by fetishizing the artifacts it uses to represent the past and fantasizing a narrative framework derived from the normative narrative account of whatever its subject matter happens to be. In my view, I will conclude, it would be better—or more honest, at least—to use techniques of fictionalization for the representation of the past, like the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel-Aviv (Israel), in which most of the objects are simulations, models, or images of the entities and events depicted therein.

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