Editorial
The principal theme of History Workshop Journal 57 is the writing and thinking of history, posed most directly in the two features - 'The Historical Imagination' and 'Braudel and Historical Time'. Both confront relationships between past and present; and both foreground the mentality of the historian - his or her philosophical approach and literary strategy. As marxism has lost its hold on the imagination of radical historians, HWJ has explored the philosophies and methods of history which, in the absence of older orthodoxies, inform and shape current narratives: the Annales tradition, psychoanalysis, discourse theory, postcolonial criticism.
'What is the mental space historians inhabit, when thinking historically?', asks Barbara Taylor. Drawing on the insights of the psychoanalyst, Christopher Bollas, she suggests that it is one of solitude, of forgetting, and (in a manner reminiscent of some of Carlo Ginzburg's approaches) of archival communion with the dead. Yet if the historical imagination animates the figures and traces in the archive, then how does this imagination work? What happens in the archive, and in the writing of history? Is the reconstruction of the past - the historical narrative - the product of the interior history of the self? Or is it immanent in the historical process itself? What is the relationship between the material in the archives and the world of ideas and experience beyond? Or in the terms used by Mark Phillips, borrowing as he does from literary categories to explain the workings of historical language, how is distance created by the historian?
These are not - or not only - abstract questions. Fernand Braudel's vast study of the history of the Mediterranean was largely composed from memory, without an archive, in a prisoner-of-war camp after the defeat and occupation of France. The epidemic of shell-shock during and after the First World War led Freud to consider repetition and the death-drive - 'living in the present as if the past', in Adam Phillips's phrase describing the effects of trauma. As the First World War recedes from living memory, the anguish of the Second affects more closely the minds of historians - as Geoff Eley demonstrates in his survey of the historiography of the German Democratic Republic.
The unresolved conflict between the legacies of two twentieth-century Caribbean intellectuals, C. L. R. James and George Lamming, addressed by Bill Schwarz in his memorial lecture for Raphael Samuel, printed here, poses questions about historical consciousness immanent in both memory and the historical process itself. James was an unapologetic Hegelian marxist. (And James's account of Toussaint L'Ouverture bears an uncanny resemblance to the heroic mythology of Garibaldi which Daniel Pick excavates in the opening article. For Garibaldi universal truth was to be found in revolution, in the identity of the nation, and in the passions of the [End Page iii] romantic hero.) Lamming strove to understand historical consciousness in less heroic - more everyday - terms. His haunting phrase, 'We have met before', signals above all the collision of memories, and the resolute drive to forget which is embodied in the postcolonial moment.
The questions, though, remain. Where is the past located? What is it that the historical imagination seeks to retrieve? What kind of endeavour has the capacity to recover the ruins of time which characterize our epoch?
Bill Schwarz
