I read Christopher Moore’s thoughtful review of the Cundill History Prize finalists with interest. At the close of his comments on Queens of a Fallen World, Moore notes that Kate Cooper’s “devotion” to the “barely documented” lives of women and her “fury at misogyny” speak to a “willingness to engage personally with her subjects in a way that would have been rare in historical scholarship until recently.”
No historian should be criticized for having passionate concerns for particular events or groups. We are all human. Having an understanding of horizons beyond our own concerns is also important. While the notion that history is “little more than the crimes, follies, and misfortunes” of human life is perhaps too one-sided and negative, there is ample injustice to go around. One wonders, then, what is the role of the historian in such a world?
Moore correctly notes a tendency one finds everywhere today, and not surprisingly, as we are all creatures of our time, in Cooper. But the “willingness to engage personally with her subjects” might be seen from another angle, as a dangerous lapse from rigour into unreasoned subjectivism with nothing beyond. What may seem like a great innovation is, in fact, the product of a very bad cultural moment.
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, in reading so many angry attacks against women by male authors (who were also a product of their time), cautioned against writing “in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth.” This is good counsel indeed. But one does not have to look back to Woolf to find critiques of overly personal involvement with one’s subject.
In Confronting the Classics, Mary Beard does not get personally involved. Instead, she educates those who try to use the classics for this or that agenda and shows that the complexity of the past is more nuanced than many would suggest and that we know so little about the past on many issues that such agenda-driven scholarship is mostly fiction. A more interesting, provocative, but also incorrect title for Beard’s book would have been Being Confronted by the Classics. Too often, we are so certain that our particular batch of values and ways of seeing are absolutely right that we are prepared to bludgeon past cultures with them as with an axe. It is easy enough. The ancients can’t defend themselves unless we read closely to learn — not only what they did “wrong” but what they can teach us.
Cooper’s creation of characters based on scant evidence strikes me as a marvellous work of the imagination and intellect, a wondrous fiction that can, hopefully, teach us a great deal. My fear is that in merging fiction and history we will have debased versions of both. In looking at the links between memory, fiction, and history, I am reminded of those wise words of the late Tony Judt near the end of Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, in discussing the evil of Nazi Germany. “Impossible to remember as it truly was, it is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn’t,” he wrote, before quoting the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. “Against this challenge memory itself is helpless: ‘Only the historian, with the austere passion for fact, proof, evidence, which are central to his vocation, can effectively stand guard.’ ”
Judt’s point challenges us in two ways. First, to maintain a lofty rigour and method. Second, to realize that times change and that those who did things differently are not necessarily bad but are a product of their time, as we all are. Such human compassion is a valuable accompaniment to scholarship.
