The Aesthetics of History by Munslow Alun;

Author:Munslow, Alun;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2019-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

7 Factualist

For the substantial majority of historians as well as non-academic consumers, ‘the past’ and ‘history’ are assumed to be the same thing. Unfortunately, though, that common sense notion is inappropriately inept. The reason for this odd understanding is because the truth of our perpetual present is revealed in ‘authored texts’ such as books, TV scripts, lectures, seminars, chats on the bus, and similar. The nature of the past, aka history, is ‘attested to’ by reference to ‘the sources’ that are scattered about and then ‘selected’ by the historian for their attested service to the present. So, all histories and historians are continuously in a discussion and/or debate with other histories and historians. This situation cannot be avoided because there are almost as many varieties of ‘historical pasts’ as there are historians willing to authorially engage with them. This means historians who may be amateur and professional happily engage with the past through the(ir) process of their ‘common sense’ notion that ‘what we see is what we get’. Unfortunately, that common sense makes no sense of any kind. When we think about history ‘the history narrative’ is assumed/presumed/anticipated to be back there and which then is awaiting discovery.

This simple common sense is, of course, nonsense. The reason it makes no sense is because the reality of the past—and I have to say ‘obviously’—is beyond the limited realm of the historian’s forms. The past is shaped, fashioned, and formed through ‘the literary’, or ‘the filmic’, or the ‘stage theatre’, or the ‘seminar’, or the ‘lecture’, or the ‘speech’, or any other representational form of artifice. The upshot of this simple situation, then, is that the past is plainly not history and history is not the past. To avoid this problem, and a problem it certainly is, historians by and large accept that histories are factualist, i.e., concerned with the evidentially sustained ‘facts’. Historians, then, are simply (yes, it is simple) undertaking their equivalence of history sheepherding. Ironically, then, the historical experience is not a process of discovery because it is a construction and/or deconstruction of the past.

Unfortunately, ‘the historical experience’ is not a discovery that can be offered as the narrative. The fortunate situation in ‘doing history’ is that the past is highly amenable and elastic to being the processes of being ‘discovered’, ‘shaped’, ‘formed’, and ‘designed’. The obvious description for our engagement with the past, then, is that ‘histories’ are ‘events under a description’. Now, and again unfortunately, most historians are constantly surprised to learn that when it comes to writing ‘the history of whatever’ they begin with the factualist dimension of the past. Now, somewhat bizarrely, it has to be quickly admitted that the historian’s ‘history narrative’ can be regarded and accepted to be the ‘real narrative of the past for all we can tell’. Now, then, the past is what the past was as dressed and arrayed by the individual historian. But, the foundational problem all historians have to cope with is that historians are always endeavouring to change the meaning of the past.

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