In class, the question of how a postmodern history would be constructed came up. One idea that was thrown out was that the history would be constructed of only primary sources. An even more extreme version might contain only data about events that people know for sure happened.
The issue that comes up when dealing with primary sources is that humans still wrote them. If the object of the postmodern history is to completely eliminate the human aspect of history to make sure that it is completely separate from fiction, even primary sources would have to be questioned. Primary sources are often the best that we currently have to understand history, but the primary sources were written from memory, and memory is a very fickle thing. If the writers of these primary sources were planned to record what they saw immediately, then the record would probably be accurate enough. However, if the authors of the primary sources were only writing about events after they had occurred, even with just a day time difference, could the memories of these authors be trusted? Humans biologically focus more on things like moving objects, so would we really be getting the complete picture from these authors?
If we take primary sources as unreliable, then data seems to be the answer to what we use as the source of a postmodern history. Data about events hopefully has no human element which can invalidate it, barring the obvious fact that humans probably had to write it down. Most importantly, data has no interpretation by the authors. If we use data as the basis for a version of history, I believe that we would come up with an extremely dry set of texts that would be fairly barren in terms of the amount of history that they cover. Without any human interpretation of the events, we would lose a large amount of history as well as any themes that can be drawn. A large amount of the usefulness of history comes from determining the causes for events. Without the cause and effect relationship, we would not be able to use history to prevent further tragedies. By using data as the base for history, we would not have any analysis and therefore could not apply lessons learned from history.
Keeping the criticisms of a primary source based and/or data based history, I believe that the best course of action would be to simply understand how human error and inaccuracies would affect the reliability and validity of the sources. The analysis of data that is present in primary and secondary sources is extremely beneficial to understanding and applying history. If we take the history that we learn today and, in addition, we understand the sources that the history comes from, I think both our understanding of the history would improve as well as the reliability of the history we learn.
I totally agree with the problems you presented with using primary sources, which is currently the best sources we can get. Mr. Sutton was just talking a few days ago about how he has told his wife a story of him during college so many times, that she swears she was there. While it has taken years for her feel so familiar with the story that she has placed herself in it, it could still be a problem similar circumstances. A war veteran could be recounting a story from the war and has convinced himself that something happened when it was just a figment of his imagination due to the stress of things happening around him. It definitely isn't an issue that we can rule out as close enough.
ReplyDeleteWhile White reminds (or informs) us that narrative has not always been essential to the recording and telling of history, it has been for a really long time, to the point that it's hard to conceive of history being meaningfully relayed in a way that doesn't entail forming a story of some kind. And I don't think postmodernism calls for an elimination of narrative--on the contrary, it embraces narrative, and wants as many of them as possible. As we show all the time in English class, a narrative--even an explicitly fictional one, with all kinds of limited points of view and incomplete information--can yield a range of important meanings under interpretive or analytical scrutiny. The same should hold true of historical narratives: we should maybe read them more like we read fiction, not in the sense of presuming they are "imaginary," but in the ways we look at how narrative generates meaning, how the story is framed, what metanarrative(s) it seems to reflect, what is revealed about the positions of the various participants and commentators, etc.
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