On the Writing of History

I have a new review essay in The New York Review, principally on the critic Enzo Traverso’s excellent new book Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography, and with a shorter consideration of a great new collection edited by Darrin M. McMahon, History and Human Flourishing. The essay is principally about the way that history is written today. Here are a few more thoughts on the subject.

In his book, Traverso quotes the famous instructions given well over a century ago by Lord Acton to the contributors to the Cambridge Modern History. He asked them to write so that “nobody can tell, without examining the list of the authors, where the Bishop of Oxford laid down his pen and whether Fairbairn or Gasquet, Liebermann or Harrison took it up.” Despite the time that has passed, this ideal of perfectly impersonal prose remains powerful in the profession. I certainly do not tell my graduate advisees that they need to write as impersonally as possible, yet nearly all of them feel obliged to start numerous sentences in their introductions with the words “this thesis will….” At the same time, the ideal has long attracted its share of criticism. As I noted in my essay, it has been fifty years since the critic Hayden White scolded historians for continuing to ape prose styles of the late nineteenth century, even as writers of fiction rode one wave of wild experimentation after another.

Traverso sees Acton’s ideal bound up with the concept of history as a precise field of learning: a Wissenschaft. He also argues that in recent decades, the collapse of this concept has led historians to experiment with far more personal forms of writing, much of which takes their own lives, or the lives of their families, as subject matter. He devotes a short excursus to the African American historian Saidiya Hartman, and the deeply personal strategy of “critical fabulation” she developed to counter the silences of African American voices in the archive.

In my essay, I largely accepted Traverso’s story, and offered my own thoughts on why the concept of history as Wissenschaft has collapsed. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that this is not the whole story.

As I did note, briefly: “The enormous inertial force of disciplinary norms still makes experimental historical prose largely a game for those with the freedom to take risks – i.e. the fortunately tenured.” The historians that Traverso discusses, principally American and French, almost all occupy prestigious positions in the profession. They do not work on year-to-year contracts, and they do not worry about losing their job because some unimaginative committee judges their work to be something other than “real research.” There are also relatively few of them. One criticism I had of Traverso is that he exaggerates the impact of what he calls the “subjectivist turn” in history. Most historians I know continue to write in the same relatively flat, impersonal expository style that White criticized in the 1970’s.

Could it be otherwise? There was certainly a time when historians wrote in styles much closer to that of the leading novelists of their day. Think of Michelet and Carlyle, Prescott and Parkman (the last of these at the heart of one of the most interestingly innovative historical works of the past half-century, Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties—Schama, of course, had tenure at Harvard when he wrote it). But this was a time before the professionalization of the discipline. Very few of the great mid-nineteenth-century historians were professors. Just as importantly, their numbers were far smaller than those of their counterparts today. It was one thing to expect stylistic innovation from a few hundred men and women who mostly either had independent incomes or lived from book sales and did not work within constraining professional structures. It is another to expect it from tens of thousands of professional academics competing in a savagely difficult market for positions, tenure, and professional advancement.

In such a professional setting, standards have taken on a crucial role, not just in the sense of ensuring quality of work, but also, especially, in providing standardized measures with which to compare one candidate against another. In the field of history as it currently exists in the Western world, these standards, enforced by peer review, are used principally to measure a work’s depth of empirical research, and its strength of argumentation. Clear writing is a plus. Great writing? Not necessarily. Challengingly innovative writing? Almost certainly not. In close to a quarter century of attending tenure meetings at various levels, I have heard more than my share of criticisms of works for being “too novelistic,” or “too journalistic,” or of professors for daring to publish with commercial presses instead of university presses with peer review. Graduate students continue to absorb these lessons almost by osmosis, which is why I have little doubt that I will continue to encounter sentences starting “this thesis will” for the rest of my career.

Traverso offers, as one reason for the collapse of the concept of history as Wissenschaft, the force of neoliberalism, and the radical individualism it encourages. He didn’t provide an explanatory mechanism of why a set of economic policies roundly detested by a large majority of practicing historians should have had such a strong effect on them. But on reflection, the “subjectivist turn” that he discusses does seem to me all too much part and parcel of the world we are living in today. It allows a small, privileged minority of historians the sort of freedom their great nineteenth-century predecessors enjoyed: to attempt stylistic innovation, to write out of their own experience and that of their families and to earn plaudits in the media and from their colleagues for doing so. Meanwhile, the great majority of practicing historians work under conditions that are at once far more constrained and far more precarious.

Of course, as anyone reading this newsletter probably knows, I’m lucky enough to have a privileged place in academia, and to count some of the more interesting historical writers at work today as colleagues and friends. I mentioned some of them in the NYRB essay. I talked about another a few weeks ago here. Their work is enormously valuable. In the interests of full disclosure, I should add that I am developing an essay of my own on the life of my mother, the critic Pearl Kazin Bell, and the Bohemian circles she moved in during the 1940’s and 1950’s. De me fabula narratur. We can’t escape the larger social and economic structures of our lives, although we can try to see them as clearly as possible.

But there are also things to be done. The belief in history as Wissenschaft was always exaggerated. History has always been as much an art as a science. Expression matters. And standards of quality can and should evolve, even if evaluating prose style makes the job of comparing candidates more difficult. The American Historical Association spent years developing standards for evaluating digital works and has urged universities to give such works consideration as scholarship alongside traditional monographs. There have also been calls to give scholarly credit to things such as podcasts and graphic histories. Whether the profession should move in these directions is a question for another time. But if we are going to consider these new genres worthy of professional credit, surely we should do the same with innovative forms of prose. Nothing is more fundamental to historical work than writing, and historians—all historians—should have the freedom to experiment and innovate in the way they write. Developing a powerful narrative voice can be as significant as developing a powerful argument, and the freedom to do so should not be limited to those at the professions’s peaks.