Introduction: How Far, How Near: Distance and Proximity in the Historical Imagination

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117-122 (Article) Published by Oxford University Press For additional information

1 Introduction: How Far, How Near: Distance and Proximity in the Historical Imagination Barbara Taylor History Workshop Journal, Issue 57, Spring 2004, pp (Article) Published by Oxford University Press For additional information about this article No institutional affiliation (6 Jul :55 GMT)

FEATURE: THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION Bernard Canavan. Introduction: How Far, How Near: Distance and Proximity in the Historical Imagination by Barbara Taylor What do historians want from the past?

2 FEATURE: THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION Bernard Canavan. Introduction: How Far, How Near: Distance and Proximity in the Historical Imagination by Barbara Taylor What do historians want from the past? Some, like Ralph Pendrel, the young historian portrayed in Henry James s The Sense of the Past, yearn for the impossible: He wanted the unimaginable accidents, the little notes of truth for which the common lens of history, however the scowling muse might bury her nose, was not sufficiently fine. He wanted evidence of a sort for which there had never been documents enough or for which documents mainly, however multiplied, would never be enough. Merely consorting with Clio can never satisfy James s protagonist; he must relive the past, feel the stopped pulse for himself; and so enjoying the advantages of a fictional historian over an actual one is whisked by James back from his time, 1910, to 1820, to regain the world he has lost. 1 In his posthumously-published The Idea of History (1946), R. G. Collingwood similarly evoked the fantasy of a Wellsian machine for travelling backwards through time, only to insist that even were such historical tourism possible, its results would not be historical knowledge. Historical consciousness, Collingwood argued, is never passive awareness of the immediate of those unimaginable accidents, little notes of truth desired History Workshop Journal Issue 57 History Workshop Journal 2004

3 118 History Workshop Journal by James s hero but an imaginative re-enactment, a constructive inference. For Collingwood, brute facts are always dumb, they say nothing to the historian; it is only through mental action, via the work of the historical imagination, that facts become audible and intelligible. Things-in-themselves signify nothing, it is only when they become integrated into our own mental universe that they acquire historical meaning. 2 Today, Collingwood s account of historical consciousness seems wonderfully prim. Human thought that is, the stuff of history, as Collingwood defines it is composed of reasoned reflection only: anything else that we find knocking about in our minds irrational elements, impulses and appetites belong to our animal nature and are therefore outside history. They are the blind forces and activities in us which are part of human life... but not parts of the historical process: sensation as distinct from thought, feelings as distinct from conceptions, appetites as distinct from will. 3 Collingwood s collective term for these forces is psyche, which he distinguishes from spirit (with some brief asides about the differential balance between psyche and spirit among savage and civilized peoples). 4 Now, as good post-freudians, we may smile at this cerebralism: the human mind as it might appear perhaps over a glass of port in an Oxford Senior Common Room, at least in Collingwood s day. But this leaves us with a problem. For if our notion of the historical imagination is less donnish, more libidinous, than this, how do we think about its operations, its truth criteria, its epistemic claims? If we eliminate the cordon sanitaire that Collingwood and many other less philosophically-minded historians want to erect between conscious reflection and unconscious desire, what sort of account of the historical imagination are we left with? Pondering this question, I came upon an article by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, The Functions of History, in his 1995 book, Cracking Up. 5 In this piece Bollas makes a very ambitious attempt to link issues of past and present in psychoanalytic treatment to general problems of historical consciousness; to pluck a few points from the article s complex argument does it a disservice. Nonetheless, this is what I intend to do because these points, to my mind, are very germane to the issues posed in the essays published below. * * * What is it like, the mental place historians inhabit when thinking historically? Bollas reminds us that it is one of great solitude. We historians, that is know this of course, but we don t generally think about it, although surely it is significant. It is also, he says, a place of forgetting: every historian, on beginning her research, must, to some extent at least, let go of existing narratives of the past, including those written by other historians which tend to get in the way. So the place in which the historian finds herself is quite lonely; it is also a place of silence since Bollas, like Collingwood, begins by assuming the dumbness of dead facts. Fact-addicts, Bollas

4 The Historical Imagination 119 tells us that is, people who treasure facts as things-in-themselves are clinging to silence, to death and to stasis. Drawing on his clinical experience, Bollas describes how it s only when such fact-junkies can be induced to freely associate to their hard-and-fast facts, thereby revealing the currents of wish and desire running through the rock, that the sterile weight of past facts dumb and unremovable objects cracks, and meaning and movement can begin. In the historian, like the analysand, one way of detecting when this movement has begun, Bollas suggests, is by manifestations of what he calls shyness, that is, a certain embarrassment that arises when hidden patterns of fantasy and desire what he, rather romantically, calls the most profound secrets of an age begin to be revealed. 6 I don t believe that ages have secrets, only people do; but I think I recognize something of what Bollas is referring to. Every historian knows that moment when, marching determinedly through the sources, a byway, a detail, grips our attention and becomes a fascination, even an obsession. Anxiety sets in; assumptions begin to crumble; prejudices sway. An excited, fearful sense of receptivity pervades us: we are no longer in control of the evidence, masterful interpreters of our findings, but instruments tuned to alien frequencies. I m not sure I ve ever experienced the blush of guilty pleasure that Bollas thinks accompanies this, or should accompany it (arising from a sense of voyeurism, of witnessing more than one should), but this may be a matter of personal inhibition. What I do recall however, is the feeling of gratitude that often accompanies such moments: of having been given an unexpected, or only partially anticipated, gift. In place of digging and grasping and hauling to the surface common metaphors for historical work we find ourselves holding something that we didn t know was coming. One reaction to this, I ve found, is to burst out laughing as if the truth were ticklish a nice reminder perhaps of Freud s explication of the unconscious dynamics of joking. The result of such unanticipated thrills, as Bollas says, is a historical text that is a new thing: an artefact that by holding past events in a novel relationship to each other, invests them with new meanings. There is also a new historian, in the sense that this imaginative work is a psychic revamping. Every historian brings powerful biases to their labours, many of which if he or she is a good historian and not just a propagandist will be dismantled in the course of her work. The encounter with the material of our investigations scatters our point of view, to use Bollas s phrase; we are subjectively undone as the pleasure of seeking and receiving confirmation gives way to another kind of pleasure: an inner reorientation in relation to our objects. A new past is created, which unlike the dead debris of the merely factual is alive and meaningful, and thus available for future growth. Again, a romantic view one might say, but one that to my mind offers some genuine insights into what we do as well as plenty of provocations to further thought. * * *

5 120 History Workshop Journal The young historian of Henry James s The Sense of the Past experiences the temporal distance separating him from his objects of study as literally unbearable. The greater clarity that detachment is meant to provide means nothing to him. Dispassionate reflection on the past is not Pendrel s ambition: he pines to submerge himself in the stream of time, to bathe in its upper waters and even to risk... drinking of them. He wants to be inside the old rooms, mingling with the old ghosts ; to be an actor, not a witness. 7 James s novel, unfinished at his death, appeared in 1917, at a moment when the historicist programme for an internal history based on verstehen (empathic understanding) was gaining ground over nineteenthcentury concepts of history as an objective, scientific enterprise. One of the many strengths of Mark Phillips s essay is to show how this collision of scientistic/hermeneutic perspectives a key chapter in all histories-ofhistory is best understood as an episode in western historiography s ongoing preoccupation with issues of distance and proximity. Phillips s article is a work-in-progress taster for a book that will investigate the diverse distance-effects achieved by historical narratives in order to illuminate the relationship between the formal properties of historical accounts and their affective, ideological, and cognitive commitments. The very ubiquity of the distance trope in historical representations, Phillips points out, has paradoxically rendered it almost invisible, so that for most historians, it has become difficult to distinguish between the concept of historical distance and the idea of history itself. Exposing the distantiating manoeuvres employed by historians from Herodotus on offers new insights into how historians have engaged with the past, not just intellectually but morally, emotionally, and following Bollas, we might suggest libidinally, via the unconscious desires and imaginings that also serve to mould history writing. Phillips himself does not utilize the concept of the unconscious, but his account of the spatial relations through which historians orient themselves to the past is wonderfully suggestive. The position the historian adopts vis-à-vis her objects whether far-removed, up-close, or somewhere in between can be seen as a key element in what, in psychoanalytic terms, might be described as a historical scene, meaning a fantasy setting for desire where the relationship among the elements in the scenario ( the historian, the facts ) is as crucial as the elements themselves. Or as we might say, developing further Christopher Bollas s insights, historical distance is the fantasy through which life negotiates death, as the living mind of the historian, encountering the inert and unrecoverable, positions herself to deliver a kiss of life to her material. Thinking historically, Bollas tells us, is a life instinctual activity. 8 * * * For Ralph Pendrel, Henry James s fictive historian, the gap between now and then literally closes as he travels back in time, his outsider relationship to the past giving way to the immediate experience of it. The dark

6 The Historical Imagination 121 backward of the long dead becomes, for Pendrel, vividly contemporaneous. 9 For Wilhelm Dilthey, Collingwood, and the rest of the hermeneutic school of historical thought, this transition from outside to inside of past events was an inferential affair, an act of thought, an interpretation based on the universal human capacity for empathy. The historian must think himself into the action, Collingwood wrote; for what moves us in historical accounts, as Dilthey explained, is what is inaccessible to the sense and can only be experienced inwardly. History is mental re-enactment of the past, never mere spectatorship. Whatever their philosophical claims, these dreams of intimacy with the past are fantasies. And as fantasies, they appear in response to a trauma, the trauma of time s passage, of the extinction of lived experience. The passing of time, Christopher Bollas argues, is intrinsically traumatic. 10 Our loss and subsequent alienation from what has been the strangeness or opacity of the historical record in Mark Phillips s words is a more or less intolerable fact of human existence. Just how intolerable depends of course on whose history is being recorded. For when it comes to the personal history of individuals, as Adam Phillips says in his essay, the question is one not merely of what kind of distance is preferable, but of what kind of distance is possible, meaning how much distance people must put between themselves and their pasts in order to remain psychically viable: which very often, as Freud showed, is no distance at all. Individuals with traumatic pasts (which, to a greater or lesser degree, is everyone), Freud demonstrated in his case studies, are driven to obsessively repeat traumatic scenarios. Such people, Adam Phillips writes, have, at once, too much and too little distance from their past and, most notably, from their childhoods ; they that is all of us, to some extent cannot become historians of their own lives, since they cannot allow any psychic gap, the space of symbolization and memory, between past events and present experiences. The past is lived as the present. It is this resistance to history-making again we are reminded of James s Ralph Pendrel, as well as historicist notions of insider history that acts to shape fantasies about historic distance, including the distantiating fantasies of historians. Yet there are also those who treat themselves as historical actors in order to stave off the intolerable intimacy of presentness. What would it be like, Adam Phillips asks, to be successful historians of our own lives? By probing the unconscious dimension of historic distance and proximity in this fashion, Adam Phillips poses fascinating questions about the desires, fears, wishes propelling the historical enterprise. Mark Phillips offers a valuable new lens through which to scrutinize western traditions of historical writing, while Adam Phillips shows what comes into focus when the lens is turned inward. Taken together, these two essays offer remarkable insights into the workings of the historical imagination: ones that History Workshop Journal hopes to develop further over subsequent issues.

7 122 History Workshop Journal Readers who wish to join in the discussion with comments, articles, letters are warmly invited to do so. NOTES AND REFERENCES The symposium, The Historical Imagination, was held at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, in March 2003, as part of the series Conversations and Disputations: Discussions Among Historians, co-sponsored by the IHR and the Raphael Samuel History Centre at the University of East London. The speakers were Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst, writer and editor of the new Penguin edition of Freud s psychological works; Mark Salber Phillips, author of Society and Sentiment; Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, , Princeton, 2000; Bill Schwarz, Reader in Postcolonial Studies at Queen Mary, London and an editor of History Workshop Journal; and Barbara Taylor, Reader in History at the University of East London and an editor of History Workshop Journal. Published here are the papers delivered by Mark Salber Phillips and Adam Phillips, introduced by Barbara Taylor. 1 Henry James, The Sense of the Past (1917), New York, 1945, pp R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946), Oxford, Collingwood, The Idea of History, p Collingwood, The Idea of History, p Christopher Bollas, The Functions of History, Cracking Up, London, Bollas, Functions of History, p James, Sense of the Past, pp Bollas, Functions of History, pp James, Sense of the Past, pp Bollas, Functions of History, p. 119.

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