historicity 1
[Roy Porter, ed. 1992. Myths of the English. London: Polity Press.] DA 118 .M98 1992
2. ...in Britain today, a historical cast of mind also reflects the depressing fact that ours is a dangerously fossilized civilization, one embalmed in ever more antiquated artefacts. The bulk of the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar, of Britain today - its street plans, sewers, railway tracks, prisons and schools - is over a century old. We are perhaps more surrounded, choked even, by the past than any earlier generation. And if the conservationist urge is often generous, it is equally true that many prefer to live in 'ye olde past' (or at least to daydream about it) than in the present, basking in bygone glories in a museum-land conserved by the National Trust, marketed by Heritage, and tailor-made for tourists, however unsuited it may be to meet the challenges of modernity. British historians are thus in the peculiar position of living in a culture highly preoccupied with the past, but fascinated with it for all the wrong reasons; out of nostalgia, rather than the urge to understand the present an forge the future.
3. Meanwhile, historians themselves, locked in professional polemics, began to pay heightened attention to the ideological undertow of rival versions of the past, revealing how contested readings served as stalking-horses in current political debates, and invoking the maxim: to understand the history, first study the historian. Yet, by a paradoxical stroke, even as they did so, historians found their new fancy-clothes being snatched by a younger generation of literary critics, espousing a 'new historicism' that purported, on the strength of sophisticated critical textual hermeneutics, to uncover deeper layers of meaning, complexity and irony in the past than conventional historians had found.
4. [Simon Schama] has spliced fact and fiction into a 'novella', Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations, boldly claiming that solid information and imaginative projection are alike integral to that resurrection of the dead, that art of memory, which is the act of historical re-creation.
Historians have also been putting their working concepts to the question. We speak of revolutions; the industrial revolution, or the scientific revolution; but what weight should such metaphorical terms actually carry? What hidden agendas are they hawking around? We talk, far too loosely, about death and sex as though these were unproblematic biological events: but, as recent scholarship has been insisting, the meanings of birth, copulation and death have been immensely culture-bound, time- and place-dependent. The same applies to childhood, to gender and to all manner of other historical categories and entities. To enhance our historical understanding, and gain better insight into taken-for-granted realities, the objects and institutions, the concepts and assumptions comprising our intellectual furniture must constantly be questioned. How are meanings generated? Whence does intellectual authority arise?