Twelve: Never the Twain

This was the text for a sermon I had used in applying to be included in the Internationalizing American History conference in La Pietra -- run by history wallahs/operatives from NYU. Not surprisingly, I failed to gain entrance into that esteemed company, allowing me the opportunity to write one of the pieces for which I have the greatest fondness – “Making the World Safe for American History” (which I will no doubt refer to again). Fun, fun, fun – especially when Sam Clemens is around!

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On arriving at a Bombay hotel in 1896, Samuel Clemens witnessed a German cuffing a “native,” his servant, on the cheek. This at once reminded Clemens of his youth: he had not seen any similar act for almost fifty years. He recalled his father cuffing a slave in this manner, and remembered another occasion, somehow connected, when he had witnessed the death of a slave by his master. At the time, these acts had seemed to him quite natural, just as this German’s act seemed natural to the German now. The connections between Colonial India and the Old South, although separated by many decades, were brought together quite clearly in Clemens’ mind. He wrote:

It is curious – the space-annihilating power of thought.  For just one second, all that goes to make the me in me was in a Missourian village on the other side of the globe, vividly seeing again those forgotten pictures of fifty years ago, and wholly unconscious of all things but just those; and in the next second I was back in Bombay, and that kneeling native's smitten cheek was not done tingling yet! Back to boyhood – fifty years; back to age again, another fifty; and a flight equal to the circumference of the globe – all in two seconds by the watch!

Such is the nature of global interaction and connection. Two separate worlds inextricably linked, distance and proximity jumbled in perceptions of layered meaning, at their source inexplicable and defying assumptions of difference, but through contrast of now and then, West and East, providing both with some meaning. 

Historians witnessing events from Mumbai to Baghdad from Sarajevo to Oklahoma City now need to be as mentally agile as Clemens in this Bombay hotel, circumnavigating the world in seconds and traveling back and forth in time to provide meaning for events that occur in front of their eyes. But this has always been the case. While the end of the Cold War may have made political commentators and historians alike more sensitive to “globalization”, this phenomenon was evident even before the slave trade made it obvious.

Let this be a guide to those who would “internationalize” what is already internationalized, namely American History. It will not be done by adding to our well rehearsed American History narratives; neither is it done by comparison of us with them; it begins with the recognition that the connections and comparisons have been there all along, but like Mark Twain we had forgotten them until they had slapped us around the face (well, not us, maybe a servant or graduate student).

Eleven: Eau Contraire (2003)

Now that it has been proclaimed abroad that “Ideology” is to be found exclusively at Strawbridge’s, Karl Mannheim readers want to know where that leaves us in our search for Utopia?

With the release of a new fragrance called “Eau Contraire”, historians may have formulated an answer to this vexing question. This fragrance has been developed at one of our leading universities, in what must be considered a departure from its history faculty’s strict pursuit of social scientific endeavors.

A marketing strategy has been developed also. A picture of a man dressed in jeans and tweed jacket sitting at his desk in a scholarly pose is accompanied by the text: “Nothing comes between this historian and his Calvin Kleins.” Beneath this emblazoned in bold, red text are the words, “Eau contraire!”

We wish this university great success in its new marketing venture and hope that the proceeds will lead to the creation of many more chairs for its senior faculty.

Ten: The Propaganda of History

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America was published in 1935. It was a book that was largely ignored at least until the 1960s. Those who weren't unwilling to accept that an African American might have important things to say about the history of Reconstruction in the United States, found the author’s adoption of Marxist terminology off-putting. But Du Bois’s text certainly withstood the test of time. Eric Foner, for example, explicitly used it as a theoretical starting point in his writings on Reconstruction. Like Du Bois, Foner accepted the radical nature of this period, and he retained the earlier scholar's desire to account for the actions of African Americans – not merely recounting the deeds of major political figures. But where Du Bois still remains preeminent perhaps is in his understanding of the fact that Reconstruction was part of a larger story. And this was where Marxism became an important aspect of his analysis, for it pushed Du Bois beyond his concern merely for issues of race in the United States, towards a recognition of the class basis and commonalities of all world conflicts across the color line. This poem, then, is founded on (with not much deviation from) the final section from the chapter entitled “The Propaganda of History,” with which Du Bois closes Black Reconstruction. It clearly highlights this sense of the transnational dimension to and connection with American conflicts and their interpretation in the American academy.

I wrote this poem in 1980, or thereabouts; I recently had occasion to read it, along with several other poems I had written based upon the work of Du Bois – the response was very positive indeed – more positive than I would have imagined (explaining why I had never read these poems in public before).

The Propaganda of History


The truer, deeper facts are read with a great despair;

it is at once so simple and so human

– and yet so futile.

There is no villain, no idiot, no saint;

there are just men:

            men who crave ease and power,

            men who know want and hunger,

            men who have crawled.

They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear

and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate.

Yet the richer world is wide enough for all,

it wants us all and needs us too.

So slight a gesture – a word –

might set the strife in order

            – not with full content

            – but with the dawning of fulfillment.

Instead roars the crash of hell;

and after its whirlwind a teacher sits in academic halls,

learned in the tradition of its elms and elders;

he looks into the upturned face of youth

and in him youth sees the gowned shape of wisdom

            and hears the voice of God.

Cynically he sneers at “chinks” and “niggers.”

Immediately in Africa

            a black back runs with the blood of the lash;

in India, a brown girl is raped;

in China, a coolie starves;

in Alabama, seven darkies are more than lynched;

while, in London,

            the white limbs of a prostitute are hung with jewels and silk.

Flames of jealous murder sweep the earth,

while the brains of little children smear the hills.

Welcome to “History 12.”

Nine: Gatekeeping -- A Guide for our Profession's Newly-Appointed Officials (2003)

While staying at the convention hotel at a recent historians’ conference, a young waiter came up to me and handed me a document that he said had been left in the conference room at one of the previous evening’s sessions.  I am not sure why he thought I might be interested; perhaps he thought everyone at the convention was supposed to have a copy; perhaps he was a provocateur or some kind and thought that I looked disgruntled and disaffected in some way; maybe it was just serendipity.  But whatever it was, I found the document fascinating and thought that I should share its contents with as many of my fellow historians as possible.  It is printed below.

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Congratulations on rising to the highest levels of your profession.  This is a position of considerable responsibility so we hope that you will take a moment to study the following brief guide to help you fulfill your duties most effectively.

Acting as one of the profession’s gatekeepers requires tact and diplomacy.  Remember that appeals to civility and respect (the tense but tender ties of your profession) will contain and channel those who would advance alternative methodologies (advocates of revolutionary methods and subversive ideas, engagers in polemical critique, evil doers).  Remember also that your position of authority can be used even to fashion historiographical debates, helping to determine the answer to the question "What is history?" itself.  You now have considerable power and authority; use these wisely. 

Here are some rules to follow as you minister to the needs of this profession (note that you may be able to learn from the practices of colonial officials in the past, as well as other wielders of power and holders of privilege, so deploy your own grasp of History to supplement this brief guide).  The main principle underlying these rules is: 

Do not engage the opposition in direct debate but use various forms of subterfuge to achieve your objective.

Here are some examples to help you understand this general rule:

– You can use a position of authority within the Organization of American Historians or the American Historical Association, on committees perhaps, to shape aspects of the profession (and a presidency of the AHA or the OAH is in the future for one who serves the profession with great honor and distinction).

– As an editor of the profession’s leading journals you can push for the publication of particular kinds of articles meeting “appropriate” standards – E.P. Thompson's father once described these as “solid highways” and, while we perhaps should be moving on to imagery of a more environmentally appropriate kind, we feel that this is a helpful metaphor nonetheless.

– You can use the anonymity of the tenure or manuscript review to declare that only certain kinds of people and certain kinds of works reflect the proper standards of the profession. 

– You can also set demands for your own students to meet, molding them in your own image, securing positions for them at universities where they can mold others in that same image.

And

– You can then support candidates in the job market who come from graduate stables that you trust, and who have not, as far as you are aware, in any way rocked the boat. 

If all these things are carried through effectively, would-be scholars who fail to conform to the profession’s civil code will be isolated, their own pronouncements will be discredited as products of the prominent chip they bear on their shoulders.  “They don’t have graduate students,” may perhaps be the word put out about them.  Or perhaps they will be discredited because their excessive attention to theory makes them difficult to work with and results in what we would consider poor students with yet poorer dissertations.  Or we may collectively dismiss them as upstarts, easily discredited because they have lost touch with “real people” (the “masses”), and so on, and so forth. 

These methods are, it must be noted, far more effective than the direct assault in writing and open engagement with an adversary’s ideas, which only brings the person more attention than can possibly be helpful.  Let us provide some examples of where this has been shown to be true.

Officials who have been following attempts to stamp out subversive work by the method of direct assault will remember the essays by two of our British Associates criticizing the work of a South Asian interloper from a subversive Subaltern Studies cell (though it calls itself a collective).  They may also know of a lecture made by yet another such associate in England that endeavored to accomplish the same thing, largely through ridicule.  All these efforts were noticeably unsuccessful.  They brought sympathy to this man (we feel uncomfortable using the word scholar) as the potential victim of his senior colleagues’ assaults.  They contributed to making his ideas more widespread, especially since his rejoinders turned out to be more persuasive than the original assaults.  [It was a rather messy business, really.  There was some effort made to show that the interloper was endeavoring to ride two horses simultaneously, but this was very much turned back on the officials, who, much to our chagrin, found that it was their horsemanship that was being brought into question.] Not so long after these interventions, the same man was invited to contribute the first article on Subaltern Studies ever to be published in one of our flagship journals.  We must consider this a failure of intelligence of the highest magnitude.

Fortunately, however, the discipline was rescued by the handling of an agent working out of one of our mid-western offices.  S/he published an essay in our journal which did more to immunize historians against “French flu”, poststructuralist excess, and “post-foundationalism”, than all the British protestations and tirades combined.  Instead of the special issue bringing into widespread usage ideas employed by the members of this South Asian cell, this agent managed to show how they ought to be appropriated and used by proper, mainstream, historians. 

So that you may quickly develop the ability to pull off this maneuver for yourselves, let me elaborate on how this agent accomplished this for us.  On the surface her/his contribution appeared to be a friendly and complimentary appraisal of the output of this truant cell. [The agent, rather deftly we feel, alluded to the earlier assaults by saying that both sides made some very compelling points.  S/he thereby reestablished the value of the critique in a situation where it really wasn’t possible for both sides to be right – this was inserted almost unnoticed into a footnote.  Ah, the beauty of footnotes!]  Indeed, a quick read of this article would leave anyone with the impression that it was a fair and judicious essay, attempting to “rethink” history by incorporating into the study of the agent’s area of expertise the work of a previously neglected group of historians. There was a small problem owing to the fact that many who read the work also felt that the agent went a bit far in suggesting that s/he was in a position to make these pronouncements, but we feel (and think most others agree) that this was justified by her/his years in the profession and her/his “mastery” of an incredibly large body of literature.  Meanwhile, working almost at the level of subliminal messages (most especially in the footnotes, which our officials have found to be an exceedingly helpful tool over the years) and other subtle code, the agent finally revealed to the more diligent reader (those who needed convincing, rather than those who were merely happy that this cell had received the recognition it needed and now it was possible to return to more normal pursuits) that s/he had come, not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.

Another couple of examples can be given to you budding officials of the profession.  Let us take a hypothetical situation.  You are invited to a conference as a distinguished guest.  You find, however, that you are being unduly (and, given your present stature, we can be certain that this is the case) criticized in one of the papers being presented.  There are two approaches you may take to dealing with this unfortunate occurrence (though we should note that these are infrequent, as we do take pride in the quality of our officials).  If you feel that you are on pretty safe ground, and that most of the audience finds this paper unfair in its presentation of your ideas, or they just don’t really want to be associated with the attack on your scholarship (essentially your tutelage over the historiography), then you can take the direct approach.  In this case, use all your years of training to greatest effect and do not take prisoners. The danger here is that if your assault is not a surgical one, or if it should be misdirected so as to hit another panelist, or even an unsuspecting member of the audience who had not appreciated their connection to your target, then you will possibly do more harm than good.  There is no room for collateral damage in this profession.

On many occasions this will not be possible, and if you have reached the top of your profession you should be able to read the situation properly.  If you cannot take the direct assault, you need to develop a “Plan B”, as the lawyers might call it.  This is a kind of diversion play.  Let us say that you are faced with three people on the panel, only one of whom you find offensive.  Your best bet is to ignore entirely the person who is making comments relevant to your own work, and focus on the work of another of the panelists.  Since you are a person of considerable influence it should be quite within your powers to turn the questions in the direction of another issue that may be totally unrelated.  The additional benefit of this ploy is that by ignoring the real concern you effectively reassure everyone that you don’t consider it really worthy of your attention.  In so doing you convince members of the audience that it is not worthy of their notice either.

This is obviously not the end of the process.  Damage control needs to occur at other levels of the conference.  You need to lobby other officials to round up their disciples; you may even ask other scholars to make facetious and disparaging comments in their own presentations, ridiculing the offensive critique or the person who makes it in some way.  You possibly should bring pressure to bear also on the organizers of this conference.  They have invited you for a reason, perhaps to attract other people to the conference; they are in your debt.  You need to make sure that they are aware of this debt.  Let us say that there is to be a volume of essays that will come out of this conference, you must make it clear to the organizers that your paper and the one that you have only just skillfully and publicly ignored cannot be published under the same cover.  If any other prominent official can back up your demand, then you are in a strong position to effectively silence the upstart.  Should this person persist towards independent publication, perhaps you may be able to intervene as a reader of the article or book, and failing that maybe take up the review (again not to engage the ideas but to sit on it so that the book does not receive timely attention in your professional organ).

Remember, the subaltern will only speak if we let him (though let us remember that the subaltern may also be a woman).  Of course, the subaltern will always be able to speak (this is a free country and a liberal profession, after all), but has he (remember, she as well) really spoken if no one is there to listen?

Strength lies in numbers.  Go forth and multiply.

Eight: The Wonders of American Exceptionalism

When I first came to the United States I had occasion to interact with the American medical system on a number of occasions. This was the best system in the world – so it and its representatives claimed – and yet it seemed entirely dysfunctional. One would go to a health service for some minor reason and the first thing you would get would be a referral to see a specialist; no one seemed to be able to do the basic nuts-and-bolts of medicine. A blocked ear passage needing to be cleared, would result in a visit to an ear-nose-and-throat specialist, who would order up expensive tests; one would go away not wanting to have the tests, not getting the treatment so that the problem would only get worse and require more expensive treatment later. A gastro-intestinal reaction to some food would result in all kinds of EKGs, fears of drug addiction, and a whole bunch of other problems “that needed to be ruled out” – all at great cost and all coming back negative. The problem could never be the simplest and most likely cause – or this could only be acknowledged if everything else that it might be, from the rarest and most dangerous to the most obscure and improbable, had been ruled out. What a crazy way to run a system!

What always stuck in the craw somewhat was that whenever one interacted with an American doctor they could not treat you, or even just talk with you, without mentioning how bad the National Health Service in Britain was, and how great their medical treatment was by comparison. They had had no experience of the British system, so their comments merely reflected their ideological beliefs – or their nervousness that any suggestion that a public system could be effective might undermine them in some way. Whichever. I was in a position to correct their error, of course, having experienced both systems and finding the British one preferable, but didn’t do so – they were treating me after all, so it didn’t seem sensible to challenge their misconceptions.

I was reminded of these things by an article I picked up that my father, Ian Gregg, had written back in the 1960s. He had been provided various grants to go to the United States in 1965 to observe the way asthma and chronic bronchitis were being treated in American hospitals, and he wrote up some of his findings for the South London Faculty Journal (connected with the Royal College of General Practitioners). It should be noted that he was very much committed to the National Health Service, at one time being forced out of a practice in Kingston-upon-Thames owing to the fact that his partners wanted to practice some private medicine while he vehemently opposed this. He also noted that whenever he came to the United States and made favorable comments about the NHS, American doctors accused him of being a communist. Peculiar in many of his beliefs he may have been, but a communist he most certainly was not!

A couple of the points he made in his article were telling in this regard.  The first reads thus:

A good illustration of the differences between the British and American outlook was provided by one of the papers which was read at the Assembly [at a conference in Winnipeg] by a Professor of Medicine from Chicago. He described emphysema as “a major public health problem in the United States, a crippling and prevalent disease”. No mention was made of the fact that the disease is usually preceded by a productive cough for many years. Had the lecturer been a British physician, he would almost certainly have referred to chronic bronchitis as being the major public health problem and he would have described emphysema as one of its principal complications.

No prizes for guessing which of the two, emphysema or chronic bronchitis, is easier and less expensive to treat! It also doesn’t take a great medical practitioner to determine that treating chronic bronchitis would reduce the incidence of emphysema, while chronic bronchitis rates would not be affected by simply treating people who had emphysema.

The other contrast between the two systems was found in a story told largely for humorous effect:

The next centre which I visited was Buffalo, where I had been invited to visit the University of New York [he means SUNY] and to be a guest speaker at a Medical Grand Round. A patient with asthma was presented and I was asked to discuss her management. This was not without its amusing moments which were greatly appreciated by the students in the audience. An allergist, who had treated the patient privately, made the intentionally provocative remark that, under the National Health Service, British doctors have no time to explain to patients the details of the treatment which they were receiving. He implied that one advantage of private treatment was the he could spend a great deal of time with patients which was so important in the management of asthma. The effect of these remarks was rudely shattered some moments later when the patient, in answer to one of my questions, admitted that she had no idea what treatment she was having, and whenever she had an asthmatic attack she just took any tablets which were to hand. Later on, it emerged that the reason for her being so markedly Cushingoid in appearance was that for some weeks she had been taking a large dose of prednisone (about six times the usual maintenance dosage) because she had not been told to reduce the number of tablets!

Oh well, the wonders of ideology; no need for actually knowing anything about one system or another – just repeat what you believe, just as if you were a doctor in Soviet Russia parroting the party line.  Glad those days are over, and that we can move forward with a sane and rational system of health care available for all – a right, not just a privilege for a few. Oh no, right, we didn’t get that system did we! 

Seven: Scattered Sparks

Mark Elder always seemed to me to be one of the coolest conductors, and it wasn’t just because I was friends at school with one of his brothers. His comments in 1990 about the traditional Proms selections – e.g., Land of Hope and Glory – being inappropriate in the context of the beginning of the first Gulf War certainly endeared him to me. Whether or not one supported the war, there was certainly nothing to relish in its outbreak, and the fact that he was dismissed from his gig as a conductor for one of the Prom performances only made him the more revered as a martyr to common sense and decency. I am certainly glad that he rebounded from this setback and has had a very successful career since, earning a knighthood a few years back.

I just googled Elder as a result of thinking about classical music and war. I had happened upon descriptions of Sir Malcolm Sargent and his work during the Second World War using classical music (frequently German music, one might add) to rally the British in the face of the Blitz.  My grandparents wrote in their letters to their two sons (who were serving or about to serve in the armed forces) about the various concerts they went to, some of them put on by Sargent’s London Philharmonic Orchestra. That had led me to look up Sargent, whose music I had listened to (most particularly his version of Peter and the Wolf, narrated brilliantly by Sir Ralph Richardson) growing up. It turned out that when war broke out Sargent was in Australia and he had just been offered a contract to work for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; he decided instead to return to Britain to use classical music to raise public morale. Sargent became a household name largely as a result of the reputation he gained during the war, playing on in defiance of bombs dropping, and so forth.

This connection between classical music and war intrigued me. Many of those to whom the LPO took their music would have been unfamiliar with classical music concerts – but the element of “we are all in this together” may have helped transcend class boundaries, in the way that the Royal Air Force – the main resistance to Nazi Germany at the time – with its much more open and less hierarchical structure and ethos (than the Army), was also doing. Flash Harry, as Sargent became known, clearly presented a different image of Britain to the British public than that with which they had been familiar.

But what stuck with me was the significance of classical music at the time and the attempt being made by Sargent to use it for a larger public good. It was the sittlichkeit that would bind a fragmented civil society together in its hour of need. Thinking about this role for classical music reminded me of Mark Elder’s brush with the establishment in 1990. This brush might be viewed as a product of Elder’s concern (though of course he might see it altogether differently) that music might be used in inappropriate ways in the pursuit of jingoism.

Interestingly, I suppose, Elder’s biography had elements of Sargent's in it. Elder made his name first in Australia and also has been the conductor for the Hallé symphony orchestra based in Manchester, as Sargent was for a brief time in the war. Be that as it may, a mere coincidence, I googled Mark Elder, partly to see what had become of him recently, but also to find out what more I could learn about the 1990 events.

What I came upon was a rather interesting Guardian article from October 2001, three weeks after 9/11.  He had put together a series of concerts for Bridgewater Hall in Manchester that would comprise compositions that had been influenced by or composed during wartime; his article discussed the various pieces and the context in which they were now to be performed. The list of composers included a number of different fellows, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Britten, Elgar, and Richard Strauss among a host of others. This was a timely series – prescient even – given the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that occurred on September 11th. Elder ended his article with a flourish:

Whenever I conduct a piece of music, it is important for me to understand the circumstances that brought it to life. But I am still puzzling over the "Leningrad" symphony: Shostakovich was such an enigma as a person, and he conceived his music to contain more than one layer of meaning. This past three weeks, looking at the pictures in the papers of the rubble that was the World Trade Centre, I have found myself wondering what else those attacks will leave us. How will our creative life respond, over the next 20 years, to what happened there?

This seems an interesting question to me.  Ten years later, how are we responding to those events in our creative lives?  While Sargent would certainly be seen as someone who was brought to prominence by WWII and then symbolized in many ways a Britain that was trying to stave off decline, I wonder what Elder might symbolize for Britain, for the west, etc., in the aftermath of 9/11?

One other thing that occurs to me, though, is the need for relevance — understanding “the circumstances bringing music to life”, does seem important; but also its corollary is very important, ensuring that music has life in current circumstances.  One of the things that Sir Mark does in Manchester, apparently, is ensures that all area children have access free concerts (and he has also managed to break the tradition of evening wear for audiences, which is also striking at some of the elitism of classical music culture). 

Music, History – it’s all very important stuff. There’s a time and place to be a Sargent, calling for courage in the face of a Blitz; and a time to be an Elder statesman, calling for reason in the face of blind allegiance; but there is always the need to make in-roads into the lives of people – whether it is “Classical Music in the Slums” or El Sistema, to open the doors to opportunity – to provide a bit of sittlichkeit for those caught in the quagmire of civil society. Scattered sparks, perhaps, but important ones without a doubt.

Six: Narrative is Theft

There goes the sad stuff.  The bad stuff.  The-things-nobody-could-help stuff.  The way everybody was then and there.  Forget that.  History is over, you all, and everything’s ahead at last.

                               – Toni Morrison, Jazz (NY: Knopf, 1992), p. 7.

“– I create my first principle.”  Narrative is theft. 

I will demonstrate this principle by adapting an old formula thus: narrative = property = theft.

Some historians have a special attachment to narrative, so much so that they label themselves “Narrative Historians.”  These people range from the immoderate (those who think professional historians should always tell a good yarn) to the moderate (who feel that historians should use whatever methods they can to tell their histories, and one of these may involve telling stories). Of course, calling oneself a Narrative Historian does rather situate one in the immoderate camp, because one is cutting off the possibility of using other methods of approaching a subject that might be more useful. So, a moderate Narrative Historian is an oxymoron to some extent; a historian who employs narrative is pretty much standard issue.

We all, as historians, use narratives of different sorts.  There will be moments when we turn to give an account of some event (whether or not we involve ourselves in the telling of this story). This may take the form of recounting a discussion, telling the story of the event from a particular perspective, or the use of any number of other narrative devices. But the extent to which a historian relies on narrative will depend on several things – audience, politics, and pragmatism.

If a historian is writing primarily for fellow members of the profession, with the intention of persuading such people to think more in line with how that historian feels they ought to think, then the analysis will move pretty steadily into the historiographical, the theoretical, and the tendentious. Such historians will employ narrative along the way to make some points, but unless they are going to rely heavily on footnotes to make their arguments, narrative will not predominate.  If, by contrast, a historian is writing for the lay person, from dentist to anxious patient sitting in the waiting room, hoping also that the book will be picked up by the browser at Barnes and Noble or Borders, then narrative is more likely to predominate over theory. 

Politics may also affect the use of narrative.  Even James Goodman, who promotes narrative history with great persuasiveness, will have a radically different understanding of narrative from that of a narrative historian like James MacPherson.  In Stories of Scottsboro, for example, Goodman provides many narratives, examining a particular set of events from the many actors’ different vantage points. This is not, as he would be quick to point out, the classic nineteenth-century narrative typical of the novel in its early years. And many, wedded to this earlier narrative form, would even dispute Stories of Scottsboro’s claim to be narrative history. And to some extent, this dispute would be framed by politics. Goodman is aware that the classic narrative structure is one that provides aid and comfort to the conservative historian. It seems to suggest a degree of certainty about historical events with which the radical historian ought to feel uncomfortable. Consequently, Goodman argues that by using narratives, and playing these off against each other, he may be able to emulate the post-modern novelist, using multiple vantage points, sometimes even questioning the position of the author, thereby destabilizing the singular, positivistic, sometimes reactionary, historical account. But perhaps such an assertion misses the fact that often the literary figures using these techniques have themselves been trying to disrupt the narrative, and so emulation of such methods, might more justifiably be called Anti-Narrative History.

And then there is the pragmatic attachment to narrative forms. As historians, we may have political objections to narrative. We may find it deeply problematic when we see simple narrative used from textbooks to museums, restating imperial or nationalist mythologies, but we continue to write textbooks and consult with museums.  We may sometimes feel that we should be making a historiographical argument, but, hey, this is a neat story that seems worth the telling. We may, in our darkest moments as historians, yearn to communicate with others through the telling of nifty anecdotes, especially those that have spiced up some dinner party conversations of late. We may have a great screenplay within us, and after finishing up some historical tome, weighed down by impressive footnotes, we now want the release of reaching for a wider audience. We may even want to reap the financial benefits of story-telling, which if it brings the browser to the checkout desk, will also improve our bank balances immeasurably (and attract the possibility of a film producer snatching up the film rights). We toil in the classroom trying to raise students’ consciousness; is it not time, we ask ourselves, that we do something that will enable us to enjoy our leisure time?  We imagine the cameras zooming in for the close-up: 

Voice-over: “Struggling History Professor, now that you have written your best-selling book, what are you going to do next?”

Struggling History Professor: “I am going to the Colonial Theme Park.”

The fact is there are many reasons for turning to narrative, a lot of them perfectly reasonable. Few historians will, in the final analysis, akin to the Monty Python skit, plead again and again, “No, not the bestselling book. No, not the comfy chair!”

This said, however, there are certain things that need to be remembered about narrative, which returns us to our original proposition or formula. How might the narrative be stealing? Here are a number of aspects of the theft.

Anyone who has read about photographers from the wealthiest nations of the world going to less economically prosperous regions will know of the quite common reaction of people to being photographed.  Many people are reluctant to have their photograph taken, not because they know little about this magical technology and fear its powers, but because they object to the kind of control that is being placed over their image (even narrative) by some unknown person or organization. It is not necessary to capture “indigenous” peoples and cart them back to the Old World, or build a display for them in the NaturalHistory Museum. Now all you need is to snap a few shots and put them in some photographic display or album, or place them straight onto the web. You have captured the subject of the photograph and turned him or her into an object of your narrative. Generally speaking it is your creation, it becomes your narrative. You, the itchy-fingered one holding the camera obscura, have almost total control over when you will load your instrument, what you deem important enough to shoot, and how many snapshots of the thing or person you will take. You then have almost total control over what you consider a good picture, worthy of inclusion in your album or on your site, or a bad one, which you discard.  All these things will be shaped by your assumptions and your understanding of ‘proper’ narrative structure. The right of the ‘subaltern to speak’ will be denied, stolen from him or her. You may promise to send a photograph to the individual through the agency that escorts you around the slum or village, if that is where you happen to be.  But you will probably forget, or believe the picture wasn’t that good so it isn’t worth sending, or any number of things (“will they really be able to find that poor young person?”), and so not do so.

Anthropologists worry about these things constantly, I believe, partly I suppose because they are reliant on ‘native informants’ to a great extent. But it seems to me that historians ought to be equally concerned about those they are describing. Which images will they decide are too blurred to be incorporated into the narrative?  Which ones will seem to tell the story so well that they should be accentuated, blown up to five times the size of all the others, and placed on the front cover? 

What this points towards is the idea of narrative as a bundle of silences, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued in Silencing the Past – those silences around the edges of the narrative that give it shape and (often political) meaning. In this light, the creation of narratives becomes an act of stealing from silences to add to a particular noise, stealing from darkness to give to the light. And as historians’ role become more mercenary or “propagandist” (however legitimate) we find them stealing narratives from history to create something to which readers in abundance can relate -- that they find satisfying, uplifting, cathartic.

Can the Subaltern speak through narrative history? Generally historians have a hard time ‘rescuing’ particular kinds of experience from the historical record. They can, as E. P. Thompson showed for the English working class, recover the life experiences and political aspirations of certain artisans. But recovering the thoughts of the woman who is being subjected to the experience of widowhood in India, or rape, or any number of other indignities that have occurred in history, may be more difficult. The weight of the “recovered” narrative will most likely bear down on the narratives of those beneath it. These narratives, in effect, will become the silences that give that recovered narrative its form.

Another related aspect of this is the idea of narrative as a property. There is something very Anglo-American about the obsession over agency and narrative. The Anglo part is probably something post-colonial. What does it mean to be English when the tide has gone out on the British Empire? Is there something that can be learned from the “peculiar” history of the English, when their position in the world has diminished? If it is to be found in working-class history also, in “a liberty tree” (what, according to some, the English-speaking peoples brought to the world), how has it been expressed through the agents of that history?

This line of thinking (derived from E.P. Thompson) has also had particular appeal for those who have written about immigrants in American history.  One reason for this is, in my view, the fact that some earlier immigration narratives, particularly that presented by Oscar Handlin in the Uprooted, made immigrants appear altogether too much like slaves and their descendants. In response to this “lack of respect” for the immigrant, social historians tended to make agency into a tag that they could attach to a particular group indicating that it had somehow achieved success. There is something slightly anachronistic about this: a particular group made it, so it must have had agency. It is the marker of movement out of, away from the ghetto – the historical equivalent of a nicely landscaped suburb. Narrative, the agent of agency, becomes property. The historian accentuates the right decisions made, the purposeful sacrifices, and everything (like property itself to the property holder) makes a lot of sense. Those who died through misfortune on the boat going over to the United States are not summoned up to characterize the larger group. Nor are others who became prostitutes, starved on the street, or died in a mining accident (except as martyrs in the larger narrative of industrial protest).

If, then, narrative is a property, how might it be a theft? It is theft, because history is relational and comparative; a suburb cannot exist without a city to make it distinctive. There is no meaningful statement that can be made about one group (or section thereof) that does not, implicitly or explicitly, rely on a comparison with others. The very construction of “the group”, in fact, relies on a comparison of members within that group with other members, privileging one set over another. Moreover, the group comparison will depend on one group being configured positively (accentuating the successful over the unsuccessful, or the “moral” over the “immoral” in a veritable felicific calculus) and another being configured negatively (inverting the above). Through particular use of narratives, some will be accorded greater cultural capital while others will be left at the level of the dysfunctional or pathological. In this process, narratives are taken from one group and given to another, historians robbin’ one ’hood to provide for another.

If narrative is a property is a theft, how important is this? Should we not eschew narrative altogether? This is rather like the question whether we should opt out of engaging in political activity because a political system is corrupt and undemocratic. The puritans among us will decide to do so, no doubt. But the rest of us live in the real world and are continually making compromises of one sort or another. There is no categorical imperative that will lead us to be cast into the hell fire for making such compromises. But we do, surely, have to recognize the limits of our analysis, the limits of our narratives, their sometimes self-serving aspects? Recognizing that our narratives are suspect – that they steal from the poor to give to the rich, from the inner-city to the suburb, from Brewster Place to Linden Hills, from the slum to Malabar Hill, from third world to first, from South to North, and so on – should give us pause, especially as we make that leap from historical analysis to public policy.

This is not a recipe for quietude. It is a call for more comparison and interrogation of narratives as well as of ourselves. Introspection can be quiet, certainly for the observer looking on, but the noise of self-examination is loud indeed. Recounting narratives can be loud to those listening, but it will often be the kind of noise that silences other narratives and other voices.