Reading the Documents

Posted by Lito Apostolakou Oct 1, 2009

The postmodernist worldview has demolished the sacred status of historical documents, records and manuscripts. Historical records are simply narratives. We know the past by reading interpreted "reports" about it. What we accept as "real" and "true", writes Linda Hutcheon, is that which "wears the mask of meaning, the completeness and fullness of which we can only imagine, never experience".

Whose history survives? We only know the past through texts, traces, relics. "History is natural selection", writes Salman Rushdie in Shame. Documents are not neutral evidence, writes Dominick LaCapra. We cannot use them to reconstruct the past which has supposedly some independent existence outside the archives. Archives, documents, records process information and "the very way they do so is itself a historical fact that limits the documentary conception of historical knowledge".

Documents are signs of events. Historians read these signs and construct them into facts. They select documents, which are themselves constructs (of institutions or individuals), to serve a certain point of view. Postmodernist historians do not aspire to tell the truth but to question whose truth gets told. In 1910 Carl Becker wrote: "the facts of history do not exist for any historian until he creates them".

Sources

Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, Routledge 1988.

Timothy Findley, Famous Last Words, Toronto & Vancouver 1977