history Archives | Numéro Cinq

Watching movies is a sentimental education. They work through images and change the way we feel, especially if they come at an impressionable moment. Strange how, for reasons of history and empire, a boy in southwestern Ontario grew up humming an Australian bush song and learned his politics watching the Australian actor Chips Rafferty in Eureka Stockade (1949), fighting for justice in the Ballarat Goldfields on the family’s first black and white TV in the late 1950s. I don’t suppose anyone else remembers Chips Rafferty, and looking at him now he is hardly leading man material. But there you are. Much later the great Australian films Gallipoli and Breaker Morant served to upend my view of self and history, my historical self, with their mutinous revision of Australia’s glorious Imperial past (which, it seemed, applied equally to Canada’s Imperial past). I give you here first Eureka Stockade, the entire movie [actually, the entire movie has disappeared from Youtube; I can only give you a clip for now, and not the final battle scene at that], made at the famous Ealing Studios in England. I was a boy when I saw this, as I say, completely enthralled with Chips Rafferty, my hero-idol for years (though I only saw the movie once). Then the famous Australian singer-songwriter Eric Bogle performing his song “The Band Played Waltzing Mathilda” which turns the famous bush ballad upside down, into a lament for the gallant spirit of a country that bought the British imperial blarney about loyalty to the Mother country and saw its boys wasted in an unforgivable debacle. Then I give you the last scene from Gallipoli where the Australians have been ordered to attack across open ground against Turkish machine guns (this is at Suvla Bay, the operational area referred to in Eric Bogle’s song). It’s a gorgeous sequence. Mel Gibson is racing with a message to call off the attack; his race against Death mirrors the boyhood race at the beginning of the movie — he loses both races. (Watches and time-keeping imagery throughout as well.) Then I give you last scene of Breaker Morant, the two Australians being executed as an example during the Boer War to save Imperial face after a so-called atrocity. Beautiful irony in the dialogue about “pagan.” The pagan trooper cites the precise Bible verse to cover his case; the chaplain has to look it up. As I say, these films educated me, not intellectually at first so much as sentimentally, changed the templates, transformed my view of Canadian history, the official version never to be trusted again, authority(ies) never to be trusted again. Just as I am sure these imaginary geographies will always be more real to me than the ones you find on maps (which are truly Imaginary). For Canadians, I suggest getting a copy of Tony Wilden’s The Imaginary Canadian, a Lacanian analysis of Canadian history now out of print.

This morning I was thinking about the difference between thoughts and attitudes. Attitudes are semi-conscious tilts toward or away from ideas that somehow also precede ideas and condition our acceptance or rejection of ideas. Attitudes seem to exist prior to ideas, with feelings attached, and make the acceptance or rejection of ideas easier. Attitudes are the emotional or psychological structures attached to schematic world views that are somehow absorbed prior to critical thought. Even a predisposition to critical thought is an attitude.

In my lecture at the residency last January, I talked about the metaphysical two-world paradigm that has dogged human thought for thousands of years. There are two basic paradigms in this regard: the Platonic two-world paradigm and the Aristotelean one-world or scientific paradigm. These are very old ideas, ways of thinking, ruts, that people fall into repeating without thinking. And even after thinking about them, people still fall into them (this is the history of western philosophy). We spout fragments of these ideas unknowingly every day of our lives; they somehow live in the discourse of our culture.

Another ancient paradigm we tend to adopt without thinking is the Great Chain of Being which creates a hierarchy of existence, a graded system of value with humans on top and rocks at the bottom, a pretty comforting world view for humans. The Great Chain of Being is basically an outgrowth of the two-world metaphysical paradigm. You can look this up in Arthur Lovejoy’s book The Great Chain of Being. E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture is good, too.

Frank E. Manuel’s little book Shapes of Philosophical History is a like-minded historical analysis of the two basic time paradigms: the cyclical view of history and the linear view. Like the two-world paradigm, the cyclical paradigm is archaic, a vestige of oral cultures (and humans inhabited an oral universe for perhaps 100,000 years; literacy has been around for only a couple of thousand—old ideas die hard). Temporal shapes such as birth-maturation-death, primitive-classical-decadent, the rise and fall of civilizations, etc. are examples of cyclical thinking. The linear view is seems to start with Christianity with its Apocalyptic notion that the world is coming to an end after which some of us will rise again and go to Heaven. Augustine, a Berber tribesman from what is now Algeria who became a Christian bishop, saw history as a progress toward the City of God, the new Jerusalem. Later on, French Enlightenment philosophers invented the modern notion of “progress” which is the idea that science will invent more and better ways to make humans comfortable and happy faster and faster. Evolution itself is an application of the linear paradigm to biology. We “think” fragments of these two ideas every day of our lives as well. Every time you think that culture is in decline, you are mouthing one paradigm. Every time you notice how much cheaper and smarter computers and cell phones are, you’re modeling the other paradigm. The emotional attitudes attached to these paradigms are nostalgia and hope. We moderns are caught between nostalgia and hope, with nostalgia (for a better, simpler, more primitive and virtuous existence) probably predominant. Heidegger’s “forgetting of Being” is a philosophical expression of nostalgia.

These shapes or paradigms are ways of giving structure and meaning to the mega-data of existence. They beg the question as to whether or not the shapes bear any relation to existence. They make humans feel better. A distant alternative to cycles and lines would be Democritus’s idea of time as “whirl” which doesn’t seem nearly as appealing.

The trick is to try to catch yourselves thinking in archaic paradigms and then ask yourselves what is real.

Norfolk County Fair, 2008 (photo by dg)

Here’s the opening of a new essay on novels, history, historical novels, orality and literacy, truth, Dan Brown, and ghosts. It’s just been published Vivian Dorsel’s magazine upstreet #6.

Before/After History and the Novel

1. Novels and History, an Exercise in Dialectics

The difference between written history and novels is contained in the difference between two theories of truth: truth in history is denotative or evidentiary while truth in novels is defined by coherence. It’s as simple as that. Yet they both rise from the same internal source in the mind, the story-making source, the imagination. This makes history and novels, at some level, teasingly similar. And then, of course, we do use that word “truth” in discussing novels in a loose and sloppy way that leads to all sorts of confusions. When we ask if a novel seems true, we often mean whether it sounds authentic, whether it’s plausible, whether the characters could have existed or events transpired. Sometimes “truth” in this context refers to emotional truth, an even more subjective truth than verisimilitude. As a novelist I have often found that what seems perfectly plausible to me in an emotional vein can be incredible to other people (readers).

But the fact remains, when you want to test the truth of an historical assertion, you have recourse ultimately to documentary or archaeological evidence, whereas, when you want to test the truth of a novelistic assertion you can only look at the text. It makes no sense to ask what Sancho Panza said or looked like outside Don Quixote, whereas you can test the claim that George Washington had false teeth or Sir John A Macdonald occasionally drank too much by examining documents from the period. This is the reason for a secondary difference between history and novels: historical explanations change when new evidence surfaces, whereas no fact in the world at large can force an author to rewrite a novel.

This is not to deny, of course, that there are sometimes criticisms of novels in terms of plausibility or truth, especially when it comes to historical novels. When you write an historical novel, you accept a certain contractual relationship with the reader in terms of verisimilitude, that quality of seeming to be real, which is one of the signal attributes of realistic fiction. But in fiction this contract can be fairly loose. When I wrote my novel Elle, it made sense to get the dates right and the proper sequences of events not to mention the correct king in France at the time. Readers accustomed to verisimilitude in novels are easily distracted by obvious mistakes of so-called historical fact. But a reader’s knowledge of any particular era is usually shallow, which leaves plenty of room for creative displacement without damaging superficial plausibility. For example, the relevant historical documents (themselves in doubt) say the woman I used as the basis for my protagonist in Elle remained on the island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence for two years and some months. But I ran out of dramatic possibilities for her after a year, so I sent her back to France early. Aesthetic considerations easily trumped historical accuracy, and no one noticed.

This is also not to say that occasionally these debates about the truth or historical accuracy of novels don’t sometimes erupt into frenzied public acrimony. These debates are irrelevant or relevant in a very interesting way. A case in point is the hysteria over Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. When the movie version of the novel was released, the Toronto Star ran a meta-commentary on the “flurry of analysis about the truth of the novel.” Among other debate armatures, the Star mentioned the Archbishop of Canterbury’s denunciation of the “lies” in the novel which might, he thought, lead Christians to doubt their faith.

One of the narrative premises on which the plot of The Da Vinci Code is based is the claim that Jesus was married and had a child and that child had descendants and so on and so on. This apparently contradicts the story in the Gospels which do not mention a wife or a child. We’re in Salman Rushdie territory here; The Da Vinci Code is a novelistic attack on the roots of Christianity. But no one in Europe or North America is going to issue a fatwa against Brown because, of course, we all know a novel is a novel and not a claim on truth. At bottom, we (except for fundamentalists and people who watch too much TV) all know that a novel is already a “lie” completely imagined for our entertainment.

Buy the magazine, and read the rest.