What Isn't History?: Selected Articles and Speeches on Writing History and Historical Fiction

Introduction

Should historians and historical novelists reflect publicly on what they do? On the one hand, the answer has to be undoubtedly yes: many professions are greatly enhanced by their practitioners examining their roles, even when they are critical about those experiences (or, perhaps, especially when they are critical about them). History is such a nebulous discipline that it stands to benefit greatly from historians reflecting in some depth on what history is and why people (not just historians) understand the past in the ways they do. Yet there are those who will take the opposite point of view. Some people do not believe that history is ‘a nebulous discipline’ at all but that the past is a succession of facts that can be broken down and described accurately in the same way that one breaks down the arc of a curve using calculus. In my experience, nationalism in many countries and cultures leads many people to look at their national histories as unquestionable matters of fact; historians are not at liberty to deviate from the hymn sheet or seriously to question it. For them history is a matter of certainties, not readings or questions, and therefore any reflection on the process of writing history that might cast doubt on these certainties is subversive. Others reject the idea that a historian or historical novelist should reflect on what he or she does for different reasons. Some think that only specialists are in a position to reflect on what historians do because the philosophy of history is a discipline in its own right, with its own highly refined set of values and tools. God forbid that ordinary writers of history should blunder like amateurs across their territory! In their eyes, it does not matter whether historians writing for the public purvey truths, facts, readings, narratives, impressions or fictions; their reflections on their craft are as meaningless as birds’ opinions of ornithologists.

It will come as no surprise that my opinion is that all serious writers about the past—and I include nationalist historians in this, as well as serious novelists—should at some point in their career reflect deeply on what it is they do. This is because, frankly, the writing of history is a very strange thing. We try to explain things that happened long ago, which involve people whom we never knew personally, whose life stories are largely unconnected with our own and no more substantial today than smoke rings blown from a Victorian pipe. Why would anyone want to listen to a stranger tell us about people he could not possibly have known? Actually, leave the ‘stranger’ bit out—just writing about the distant past is extraordinary enough. No other animals dwell on the distant past and human beings have only done so for what amounts to a very short period of our existence. It is therefore incumbent upon historians to explain themselves for the same reason it is incumbent upon anyone in a non-functionary role to explain why they do what they do, and what it is exactly they do when they are doing it: I might mention among them explorers, racing-car drivers, artists, mountaineers, daredevils, poets, politicians and other metaphorical human cannonballs.

Attempting to describe the past is arguably even stranger (and the need to explain it commensurately greater) when a writer attempts to write for multiple audiences, and to write fiction as well as non-fiction, and biography as well as macro-history. In my own case I have written analyses of information that argue for the certainty of a particular event while arguing in other contexts that many different readings of an occurrence are all equally valid. History, I repeat, is a nebulous discipline, but sometimes within the nebula of past events a startling light catches your eye, and draws your attention, and, although the mass remains nebulous, you see that light clearly amidst the vast haze. Discipline is essential to preserve that clarity but discipline is not everything; a truly scientific writer of history will never reveal anything other than a succession of facts to his readers; he will never inspire them with his unblemished, accurate list. But nor will the historian who lacks discipline have a lasting influence: it does not take long for the presumptions and inaccurate assumptions of a hectic mind—or a hasty, superficial or untutored one—to be laid bare. The purpose of history is not simply to say what happened in the past but to convey its meaning to the living and future generations: to draw the light out of the nebula and reveal it to others. This is why the philosopher of history who never writes history himself is in a poor position to reflect on the process. He can only judge the discipline and its nebulousness; he is in no position to comment on the art of drawing enlightenment out of the past, which makes the whole process meaningful.

In this book, I have brought together a few insights that I hope will interest fellow historians, students, novelists and those members of the public who take a serious interest in the nature of history and historical fiction, and their respective positions in our culture. These, I hope, will be read in conjunction with ‘Objectivity and information’ the methodological introduction to my book, Medieval Intrigue, and ‘The Shakespeare Authorship Debate and Historical Responsibility’, both of which go a step further than the essays here and argue how aspects of the past can be proved and how, when such things can be shown to be beyond doubt, it is irresponsible to maintain contrary arguments. One of the things that I hope this book conveys is that it is not just what we say about the past that matters, the way we say it is also important—something rarely dealt with in our university departments. Whether we are writing fiction or non-fiction, there are very few hard-and-fast rules (contrary to what many people say) but there are millions of expectations that, if we disregard them, will undermine our work. Ultimately this is why writing history is so difficult and so compelling: it is hard enough to describe all of humanity and all we do in the present moment, let alone over the course of hundreds of years—and harder still to explain why things altered in the ways they did.

The articles and lectures in this book were not originally written with the plan of collating them in one volume. They were written for a wide variety of audiences at different times and for very different reasons. This is perhaps best shown by the wide range of outlets in which they first appeared (for which, see the Acknowledgements at the end of the book). Obviously the title piece was aimed at an audience of professional historians—teachers, postgraduate students and academics—but the remainder were aimed at interested history readers, historical novelists and members of the public. The philosophical purist will see this as a weakness, for the collection as a whole does not display a unity; but you can say much the same thing about history itself. After some reflection, I realised that this is how it has to be. A book on the writing of history, written as a single sustained piece with a single set of objectives in mind, would not represent the multiple challenges that a writer faces in speaking to a wide variety of readers and listeners in different genres. And between mass market historical fiction and the sharp end of peer-refereed scholarly research, we are talking about a very wide range of audiences. For this reason, I have left the articles almost exactly as they were published and not tried to edit the whole into a monograph, hoping thereby to retain the nuances of the originals. I have merely removed some repetitions of certain quotations that would become tedious to the reader at the third or fourth reading.

Ian Mortimer

10 April, revised 4 Dec 2016

1. Originality in History

[First published as ‘Beyond the facts? How true originality in history has fallen foul of postmodernism, research targets and commercial pressure’, The Times Literary Supplement (26 September 2008), pp. 16–17]

Most if not all historians are familiar with Samuel Butler’s famous remark that ‘though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence’. Even if they are not, it is highly likely that they have been asked why their own views of the past differ from those of other historians. Leaving divine revisionism aside, most responses will make reference to the discovery of new evidence, the selection of past evidence, the development of new methods of undertaking historical research, different perspectives on agency and the creation of evidence, and the varying conceptual frameworks within which historians operate. Given enough time, the explanation might move on to a brief discussion about the unattainability of objectivity, and postmodernist perspectives on past hierarchies and attitudes, as well as modern understandings of what evidence is understood to be true, representative, or ‘right’.

These factors all relate to history as a ‘dialogue between the past and the present’. This concept of an epistemological ‘dialogue’ was first outlined by R.G. Collingwood in The Idea of History (1946): that history is neither ‘the past by itself’ nor ‘the historian’s thought about it by itself’ but ‘by the two things in their mutual relations’. This was succinctly paraphrased by E.H. Carr in What is History? (1960), in his famous line that history ‘is a continuous interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the past and the present’. Subsequently this idea of an epistemological ‘dialogue’ has been adopted and adapted by many writers, including E.P. Thompson, Dominick LaCapra, and Adrian Wilson. It thus has a long and impressive track record. But this ‘dialogue’ is only one of several in historiographical development. A second ‘dialogue’—a social one, with no direct reference to the past—takes place between historians and their contemporary readers. Obviously this incorporates changes in language and social attitudes. Times change: those reading a modern history book do not expect to see historians display certain prejudices and judgments from a few years earlier. They do expect certain historians to display other prejudices (for example, academic historians should eschew dramatic or emotive language, even when describing a dramatic battle or a romantic betrayal). Subjects of public interest wax and wane, and with them fluctuate the fortunes of the writers of scholarly as well as popular history.

The epistemological and social ‘dialogues’ described above represent two forces for change in history. Indeed they both demand that views of the past change, and in that sense of ‘change’ they represent one form of ‘originality’, that is to say, they constitute the development of existing ideas. The epistemological dialogue, most fully explained by Adrian Wilson in his sadly neglected 1993 essay ‘Towards an Integrated Historiography’, is one in which the assimilation of new facts continually causes the historian to revise and modify his or her theoretical understandings of the past. At the same time, the social dialogue between historians and society is no less an agent for change. Politically it becomes more or less dangerous to write about certain subjects in certain ways (for example, the Holocaust, the slave trade, or the genocides committed by the past leaders of one’s own nation). Similarly the financial rewards of writing about certain individuals and themes alter. Much of the change, and thus much of the variation between views of history, is a complex mix of these two dialogues which involve the three parties that matter both epistemologically and socio-economically: the past, the historian and the readership.

These forces for change are not the whole story. If they were, originality in history would be simply a reactive process in which historians respond to new discoveries and react to shifts in public opinion, political control or scholarly debate. This is a cynical view of history: it assumes that historians only write something new to please a certain trend in popular culture, or to jump on a scholarly bandwagon, or as a consequence of their job description. But at the heart of some historical work there is a quite uncynical and very powerful self-questioning. It amounts to a third ‘dialogue’—a philosophical or conceptual one—this being a writer’s recognition of some aspect of human nature within his or her own self, or within his or her own experience. Alternatively it might be referred to as ‘vision’ or even ‘character’. Ultimately it results in an idea or set of ideas which is not rooted in past evidence nor in an awareness of the historian’s potential readership but within the historian’s own understanding of humanity.

At first sight this is a subjective platform, and has little or nothing to do with history, being the very antithesis of the cool objectivity traditionally praised and pursued by the academic side of the profession. On further reflection, however, it seems to be the root of true originality in history writing. The first two dialogues are both responses to factors external to the historian. With regard to the epistemological dialogue, it is an engagement with the evidence which causes a historian to revise his or her understanding and theoretical framework. Once modified, the revised framework allows further evidence to be understood more clearly or fully, and the framework to be revised still further. With regard to the social dialogue, it is the historian’s engagement with contemporary society which causes him or her to write in a certain way, and to revise the language, attitudes and literary style employed. The variations and novelties in historical understanding and expression which result from the two dialogues are routine consequences of the historian doing his or her job along prescribed, professional lines. One may draw an analogy with chess: every game of chess is unique, and thus original, but each game is original in a routine way, for it is conducted according to a single set of rules. The invention of the rules of chess, by contrast, was truly original.

This distinction between ‘routine originality’ and ‘true originality’ in history may be likened to Eliot’s distinction between ‘spurious originality’ and ‘true originality’ in his introduction to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems (1928). The two distinctions are close, but not quite the same. In Eliot’s view, ‘spurious originality’ is that in which the writer writes a new poem but derives the form and perhaps even the substance from other writers. It is essentially derivative—the writer develops what has gone before for the sake of continuing a tradition. ‘True originality’, according to Eliot, comes from the writer who goes direct to life—his or her own experiences—and tries to describe what he finds outside literature and then brings it within a literary form. The obligation upon historians to be mindful of previous work on the period under study, and to incorporate previously discovered facts, means that the term ‘spurious originality’ is inappropriate: much of what Eliot identifies as ‘derivative’ in poetry is simply good practice in history. However, in most other respects, ‘routine originality’ and ‘true originality’ are distinct from one another in history just as Eliot’s ‘spurious originality’ and ‘true originality’ are distinct from one another in poetry. In both respects it is those writers who are ‘truly original’ who have the most significant and profound effects on society.

It is nothing new to say that a historian’s own life experiences condition the history that he or she writes. Carr, for example, exhorted his readers to ‘study the historian’. But to distinguish between true and routine originality in history writing—or between historiographical revolution and mere historiographical development, if you prefer—is to point to an issue that is not just interesting, it is urgently needed. In the Da Vinci Code trial, the very possibility of historical originality came under attack—not within the courtroom but among the journalists who covered the event. There was a widespread view that historical ‘facts’, including ideas, cannot be original at all. No copyright can pertain to a historical fact for no one can copyright what is perceived to be an element of the past. One journalist at the time (the then-deputy editor of The Bookseller) went so far as to say that Baigent and Leigh, in pressing their case, were ‘admitting their work has elements of fiction to it. If it was pure history, how could they copyright history? When historians discover something they can’t copyright it.’ The implication is that members of the public may reasonably divide what they see as facts (presumably that is what is meant here by ‘pure history’) and historical originality, and that the latter may be assumed to be fictitious as it stems from the historian rather than directly from the evidence.

True originality in history writing does exist. It is not necessarily fictive or fictitious; it is philosophical and conceptual, and sometimes poetic. Consider the following