Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Chapter 16: Memory, History, Revelation

16 Memory, History, Revelation Writing the Dead Other A piece of historical writing is often thought of as a narrative interpreting the times of those who can themselves no longer depict the epoch in which they lived and moved and had their being. The subjects of this story are no longer here to attest to their era’s culture, economy, institutions, politics, and way of life, whether to praise or to excoriate them. The historian is challenged to configure for the living the lives and times of dead others, making inferences from the clues that are trusted by the profession: archives, artifacts, and transmitted traditions. What remains unstated in this account is the manner in which the narrator speaks about, but not for, the past. To see how and why this is so, it may be useful further to develop an everyday belief about history: it is a commonplace that history is a recounting of the remembered events of a community’s past. This contention brings out history’s relation to time, social existence, language , and truth and provides a good starting point for inquiring into the relations among history, memory, and revelation. In this view, history deals with events once but no longer present, events that are stored up, made conscious in the manner of that which is no more, in short, remembered. These occurrences are given linguistic shape, organized into a coherent narrative, interpreted. The recounting is attentive to the sequences of the events that provide historical content , to their diachronicity, although the historian may choose to schematize them synchronically. Event and story generally unfold in 248 the manner of ‘‘earlier’’ and ‘‘later’’ as seen from the perspective of ‘‘now,’’ the present of the narrator. Although the fissure or distance between events in their individuality, their Eigentlichkeit, and the historical telling is acknowledged in this commonsense view, the later account of what occurred is believed to mirror what actually happened . Standard historical discourse is also understood to be about narrated events that are communal, so that, for example, the personal memoir becomes history insofar as it bears upon a collectively shared past. This everyday view of history presupposes that the narrated material of history aims at a truth that is understood as a matching of event and narration. The standard of judging history is veracity: to issue a historical statement is to promise that one’s assertions are true in the sense that what is alleged to have happened did happen, that one’s claims are as accurate as one’s proximity to one’s sources can make them. This sense of veracity is embodied in Aristotle’s famous distinction between historian and poet: the historian ‘‘describes the thing that has been,’’ the poet ‘‘a kind of thing that might be.’’1 Implicit also in the everyday view is the supposition that the ‘‘original ,’’ the remembered, and the narrated event are homologous. Each layer is transparent toward a more primordial one, until the original events themselves are brought to the fore. What if, however, event and story are not homologous? How, then, do memory and story re- flect the event? Is the relation of story to event to be grasped as a transposition of codes, a decoding into narrative language of what is encoded as a chronicle of sequential particulars?2 The difficulty of relating event to narrative has been widely interpreted by metahistorians as the failure to take the metaphoricity of historical writing into account. Hayden White’s description of the connection between event and narrative, for example, rightly rejects the myth of the given, the view that events are a field of lambent facts, merely ‘‘there,’’ awaiting subsequent narrative articulation. Instead, White suggests, historical narratives achieve their explanatory effect not through the reproduction of events, themselves already encoded in tropes, but through the development of metaphorically articulated correspondences between events and conventional story types. Thus, for White, historical narrative lies between the events described in the historical record and the icon or story type that will render them accessible: ‘‘The narrative mediates between the events reported in it and the generic plot structures conventionally used in our culture to endow unfamiliar events and situations with meaning.’’3 Memory, History, Revelation 249 This view of history rightly breaks with accounts of historical writing as the representation of factlike events. However, it fails to thematize the structure of time and memory generally presupposed by...