This is my truth

Some of you will be aware of the at times bad-tempered debate about history and philosophy that has been going on amongst bloggers in the last few weeks. The latest post by Brandon at Siris helped me to get clear in my mind certain things that I’ve been worrying over for a while. In short: historians don’t really need to beat themselves up about whether their accounts correspond to ‘what really happened’, so long as they correspond to the evidence relating to what happened, however problematic that relationship. And that means that we can continue to make judgements about the quality of our interpretations of the evidence – and, indeed, our interpretations of the likely (never certain) relationship between the surviving evidence and the lost ‘reality’.

And I have something more to add. As historians, we’re not trying to get at the abstract ‘truth’ of some abstract ‘past’. What we’re really doing is trying to do justice to the people who made those traces. It was they who made ‘the past’, just as we in the present make what in the future will be the past. I look at a document in the archives: say, one of these. It’s a real, fragile, physical object; it was created, painstakingly, by real people who were trying to communicate to other people something that was to them ‘real’ and important. I can’t know exactly what. They might have been dishonest, they might have been trying to be truthful but have been mistaken, or at best selective; they probably had only a limited view of what was going on; they were biased and frequently in dispute (these are records of conflict and contestation almost by their very nature). Now, post-structuralist theoretical perspectives have greatly helped us as historians to see these documents afresh, as constructed narratives, little exercises in story-telling. So, with Natalie Davis, we can put their “fictional” aspects at the centre of analysis: “By ‘fictional’… I mean their forming, shaping and molding elements: the crafting of a narrative… the artifice of fiction did not necessarily lend falsity to an account; it might well bring verisimilitude or a moral truth.”* Can I begin to convey the sense of wonder and delight that that new perspective gave me as a student? The new vistas that opened up to me – thanks to that dreaded thing ‘postmodernism’?

The people concerned in creating the document I have linked were nonetheless not writing novels (a very different kind of truth-telling through artifice). There are some basic ‘facts’ about that document: a man went before a magistrate and made a statement; something had happened to that man, something that made him turn to the forces of law and order in response. That was his reality (whatever difficulties I might have in interpreting the accuracy of what was subsequently written down). It mattered to him. Therefore, it matters to me.

These were not necessarily ‘good’ people; they were as flawed and mixed-up and complicated as we are now. They were like me and yet not-like me. I care about them (which is not the same as ’empathy’, a touchy-feely woolly concept I don’t have too much patience with). And so, long before I have any obligations to other historians or to philosophers, I am beholden to them. They cannot come back to life and read what I write and say: that’s a lie! or, that’s so true! or, you just got that so wrong, you fool! Other historians may check me up to a point, dispute my interpretations, call me an idiot (or worse, a liar, a cheat, a fraud), but those people of the long-ago past, the actual subjects of my enquiry, cannot hold me to account. So, if we’re talking about ‘truth’, my goal is to be true to them as best I can. To be ‘right’ is the historian’s hope and at the same time (we well know) an impossible dream; to be honest, through all our own weaknesses and prejudices, is something we all can and should be.

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* Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the archives: pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century France (1987).