(Hi)stories

It was important to raise the issue of history and historiography in last week's class, as this reminds us yet again of questions that have been consistently present for us this semester, and that suggest very promising possibilities for papers and further inquiry. I think of Declan Kiberd's avowal (which was on the board) that “there can be no single History, only a plurality of self-interested histories, each composed at the mercy of its own moment of creation and at the mercy also of the literary form in which it is encased.” When, near the very end of Star of the Sea, we learn that Seamus Meadowes has reinvented himself many times over after reaching America, and even written an autobiography in which he casts himself as a justice-seeking advocate for the working man, we realize quite palpably how this novel shows us how stories, testimonies, and myths proliferate and then are dispersed; meanwhile, the truth gets harder to locate, and the dead become ever more lost and anonymous in the mists of time (remember Walcott, in "The Muse of History," proposing that "in time every event becomes an exertion of memory and is thus subject to invention. The further the facts, the more history petrifies into myth"). As the narrating Dixon finally explains, "As for the rest -- the details, the emphases, certain devices of narration and structure, whole events which may never have occurred, or may have happened quite differently to how they are described -- those belong to the imagination" (394). It all sounds very poststructural, right: the actual past has gone, and it's only manifested in the historicized traces now, traces that signify an absent presence.

Our most direct encounter with historiography has been Walcott's essay, of course, but if you want to pursue this line of inquiry you'd do well to seek out Hayden White's work -- in particular the essay to which I referred in class some weeks ago, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" (1980). In the three decades since White's work appeared, we've come to realize that the relations between literature and history must be rethought and that, indeed, there are two meanings of the word "history": (1) the events of the past, and (2) telling a story about the events of the past. White is interested in the constructedness of historical narrative, in the principles of selection, and in the desires that inhere in our need to have real events presented in such a way that they "display the formal coherency of a story," for "the notion that sequences of real events possess the formal attributes of the stories we tell about imaginary events could only have its origins in wishes, daydreams, reveries." In what ways do our texts this semester (Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage," for example, or Crossing the River, Omeros, Star of the Sea, etc.) formalize and thematize an opposition to "old historicism," which, according to White, has always wanted us to find in historical narratives "a structure that was in the events all along," and which, consequently, suggests "why the plot of a historical narrative is always an embarrassment and has to be presented as 'found' in the events rather than put there by narrative techniques"? When you realize how history was traditionally a matter of coherence, of structures, of order, of knowability, it begins to bring a whole new resonance to the fractured, gapped, multigenred, stitched-together texts we've encountered this semester ...