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Advanced Disillusion: The Writing of History
| Article
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18715 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
5,508 Words |
| Author
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Linda Simon
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College
and a frequent contributor to The World & I. |
To write history is to remember other people's lives. Whether a historian is writing about a major event (the bombing of Pearl Harbor), a catastrophe (the 1918 influenza pandemic), an apparently inanimate object (the British warship Dreadnought), or an apparently intangible idea (futurism, shall we say), he is, of course, reconstructing a peopled world.
These people, these individuals whose lives must be resurrected and whose air must be breathed, necessarily save history from the fragmentation that threatens other disciplines and, as we know, the university itself. One cannot write history, even as a dilettante or a student, without considering the context of lives that were lived. That context includes all human endeavors: art and music, business and recreation, food and clothing, architecture and literature. That context includes physical surroundings--climate, terrain, and even those peculiar factors now known as air quality and windchill. That context includes psychological theories and medical treatments, the availability of wine and the occurrence of ergot in wheat.
This interest in context separates historians from many others who write within the academy, and it makes the writing of history a particularly significant activity for undergraduates. Although students often mistakenly believe that the historian seeks after truth or lessons from the past, in fact, the object of writing history is much simpler; simply to impose order on seemingly disparate facts and events, and, in imposing order, to give meaning.
This desire for order is the essence of all creative writing, within the scholarly community and without. "One of the chief motives of artistic creation," Sartre wrote,
is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world. If I fix on canvas or in writing a certain aspect of the fields or the sea or a look on someone's face which I have disclosed, I am conscious of having produced them by condensing relationships, by introducing order where there was none, by imposing the unity of mind on the diversity of things.
It is this experience, however, that students rarely have, as they move from course to course, from term paper to term paper, throughout their careers as undergraduates.
Students rarely see their task as that of imposing order on any material they confront. Instead, when asked why
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