Janet McCalman; The Historian amd the Good Listener; page 1

The Historian and the Good Listener

Janet McCalman
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Among the many issues raised by the Demidenko affair has been the truthfulness of history. When can we invoke history in literature and when can history invalidate the creative imagination? Does history have any place in art or is it another form of fiction whose claim to 'rightness' is ambiguous? What can be called 'historically true' and does it matter in the world of disembodied text?....

Culture, ideas, emotions are made by people. We make our way through the world of sensation and experience by placing mental constructions on it. History itself is a construction. It does not exist 'out there',perfect, truthful, awaiting discovered by research. It is something we create with our minds and its status depends on the skill with which we create it according to current intellectual and cultural fashions. In history, we are seeking shapes in the past, shapes that are stories, interpretations, explanations, insights. Hegel defined the distinction between history and chronicle as being story with ideas, with argument, with deliberately constructed meaning...

If history is a construction, re-written by each generation in its own image what does that mean about its truthfulness? Most people expect historians to be telling a certain type of truth, so how can it be 'the truth' if it is mutable, a social construction? What is historical truth, can it exist, how do we achieve it and how do we recognise it? That it is not fiction most have agreed until very recent times. That truth matters is also agreed, and an historian who is found to be wrong, to have discovered and promulgated an untruth, is judged to have made a professional error. Yet few agree on the truth and few would argue it is possible to write definitive history or biography.

We need to recognise something that is common in human behaviour and experience which we would call a craving for truth, or the craving for certainty, for closure. Truth causes all sorts of problems for us in life and for society as a whole. A great deal of human energy and money is devoted to eliciting the truth of matters; we cannot conduct daily life without a reasonably secure sense of ordinary truth in all our activities. If no-one can be relied upon to be telling the truth about anything, then comes madness. A truthless world is an unendurable one of utter alienation. Truth binds human beings together; no truth destroys society. Totalitarian regimes have known well to sabotage truth and by denying, distorting and perverting it, ensure compliance through distrust, isolation and terror.

Making the past into stories which are then communicated to others in speech, writing or image, is a public, a social, a political act. And this history is fundamental to the workings of human society. Historians have a fearful responsibility to their audiences, and their vigorous , critical and passionate devotion to finding out 'the truth' about the past is crucial to the moral health of the world. But if historians become so intellectually specialised that they can only talk to each other, society is forced to rely on bad history-at its worst, propaganda, at its most trivial, nostalgia. If historians seek truth only in high abstractions, then society is denied its right of access to advanced learning. Historians have a special duty of citizenship and to carry that out they need to respect their audience and regard it as a scholarly obligation to be lucid and inclusive rather than arcane and obscure. Finally, to verify scholarship, historians who accept their duty of citizenship have to work through intellectual frameworks of evidence and explanation which accord with the 'rough justice', the sense of truth that obtains in most free societies, and in international courts and moral forums. If arguments are to be believed they have to advance satisfactory evidence: it is a search for the truth of matters that the person in the street understands perfectly well.

The person in the street also wants something else-good writing. If history is to enthral it must take possession of its creative potential as a literary genre in its own right. The historian who lacks historical imagination finds few willing readers, and yet where does imagination end and evidence begin; in what way is history different from fiction based on a closely researched context?

The most important difference between fiction and history is that the novelist is in control of the plot; they can find themselves in the thrall of characters who have a will of their own, but the plot is still in the author's hands. For the historian it is not. History is history and the historian can only go as far as the available evidence will permit. But this need not make history dull. It has its own excitements: the discovery of a plot and the gradual awakening of another human being in your imagination as you put the pieces of the puzzle together. History is therefore a struggle between imagination and evidence. We cannot flesh out a character with fantastic imagining if the evidence is not there; we cannot change characters, happenings and meanings we do not like; often we are forced to draw conclusions we would prefer not to draw. We are human beings and we have our own values and we do what Braudel made himself do, take a personal vow of silence. But we study history, I hope, to escape and enlarge ourselves rather than to merely withdraw into deeper self-concern. We have to learn to attend to people of the past, people different from us, people who have a right to be heard by posterity in their own terms before posterity passes judgment on them. We study history to enter and understand the lives of others. I think a vow of silence is that of our own egos rather than a silence of the heart. If we cannot feel that the people of the past would have bled if pricked, then we enter their world stripped of human feeling and humane morality: the historian as psychopath.

This extract of an article published with permission from Australian Book Review, November 1995. Dr Janet McCalman is Senior Research Fellow in History at Melbourne University. Her most recent book is Journeyings, Melbourne University Press, 1994.