Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage

CHAPTER III: Postmodern Historical Worlds: Simon Schama

45 chapter 3 Postmodern Historical Worlds Simon Schama The birth of modern historiography was marked by a shift from the narrative history of the nineteenth-century “classics” to social-science history. This shift is well known and documented (see, e.g., Iggers 1997). Social-science history achieved an unprecedented level of precision and scientific rigor by focusing on social developments, often quantifiable. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie apologizes to his readers: “The Carnival [in Romans] and all the elements involved are the point, the plot of my book. . . . I beg indulgence for the flood of statistics in this first chapter. They are not characteristic of the book as a whole but are a necessary part of it, for any history is in part quantitative” (1980, 1). According to Colin Lucas, social-science history brought about a substantial change in the focus of historical representations: “The historian’s focus was shifted from the individual to the collective, from political to social history, from description to analysis, from monocausal to multidimensional explanations. . . . The past must be conceived of in terms of structures and systems. . . . Structure in this context does not simply mean social structure, . . . but more importantly the enduring physical, material and eventually mental structures within whose boundaries human individual and collective behavior is confined” (1985, 4–5). However, as usual, the practice does not strictly follow a theoretical precept. Certainly , Le Roy Ladurie, a prominent representative of the social-science history of the Annales school, is not guilty of ignoring the “human factor” of past events; while the tragic events in Romans are played out against the backdrop of economic and social conditions, they are triggered and acted out by individual human agents. In the postmodern era, a pleiad of prominent historians opened new horizons for historical inquiry, expanding its scope and cultivating new, 46 possible worlds of fiction and history more reader-friendly styles of presentation. The blossoming has been characterized as an “explosion of historical research into new domains” (Revel and Hunt, eds., 1995, 513); as a manifestation of “history’s voracious appetite” to incorporate “new objects,” such as “climate, the body, myths, festivals” (Le Goff and Nora 1995, 325); as demonstrating that “the scope of historical writing has expanded enormously in the past thirty years” (Iggers 1997, 7).1 We witness the emergence of many new “branches” or “modes” of historiography, such as microhistory, the history of everyday life, cultural history, and gender history (see Berenson 1992; Burke, ed., 1992; and Noiriel 1998).2 Many of these new modes of historiography closely resemble or have even been inspired by literary genres, especially literary biography, the psychological novel, and the postmodern narrative fiction. Again, as in the Romantic era, literature provided templates and means for more personal, more exciting, and more readable representations of the past.3 A “balancing return” of recent history to the “literary” pole, Noiriel notes, makes historical writing attractive to a nonspecialist readership (1998, 293–94). But recent historiography did not excommunicate social-science history , nor did it reconfirm the demise of narrative history; it just denied either of them a dominant or exclusive position. The rule of one mode of historiography was replaced by efforts toward a synthesis; a “multifaceted history” appeared on the agenda (Iggers 1997, 103).4 An example of this synthesis is Edward Berenson’s histoire microscopique of the trial of Madame Caillaux. His historical world includes not only the trial and its outcome but also “the key ideological and cultural conflicts in which it was embedded.” His microhistory is thus able “to illuminate crucial links between gender relations and political conflict, between family drama and high politics, between personal honor and patriotic allegiance” (1992, 8). Our conception of historical worlds as partial models of the past is in full accord with the ideal of “multifaceted history.” When partial models are combined and complemented in a tolerant but critical fusion (see II.2), a multifaceted historical representation emerges. We can state with confidence that in the postmodern period historiography showed remarkable vitality and originality, giving us the fascinating works of Carlo Ginsburg, Lynn Hunt, Jacques Le Goff, Marshall Sahlins, Niall Ferguson, and many others. This boom can be explained by a “natural” evolution of historical research, by its persistent striving to Postmodern Historical Worlds 47 penetrate new domains of the past and include them in the scope of historical representation and by its effort to gain a wider readership. Even...