History is published by the unfortunately named
Institute for Historical Research, which was founded in
1993; the Institute is part of the School of Advanced
Study and the University of London.
Reviews in History
Continuous Discourse:
History & its Postmodern Critics
Richard
J. Evans In Defence of History London: Granta,
1997, 307 pp., £15.99 (hardback)
Reviewed By: Antony Easthope
Manchester Metropolitan
University
In Defence of
History aims to defend a mainstream notion of
history-writing against 'intellectual barbarians' (p. 8),
namely 'the invading hordes of semioticians,
post-structuralist, New Historicists, Foucauldians,
Lacanians and the rest' (p. 9). That statement is pretty
typical of the tone of the book, a robust, earthy
commonsense in which the word 'paranoia' would be less
likely to appear than 'parakeet'. It admits that there is
more than one kind of postmodernism ('there are many
different varieties', p. 205) yet rides roughshod over
all these differences in its lampoon. Evans may not know
much about postmodernism but he knows what he doesn't
like.
Given the topic one might have expected a serious and
sustained discussion of Foucault's account of
history -- we get a paragraph on pp. 195-6. Certainly
there should have been a chapter on Hayden White,
the most significant historian who might qualify for the
adjective 'postmodern'. In
Defence of History steps aside from the risks
entailed in any such critique, preferring a number of
sniping remarks along the way. Lyotard? Dismissed
in a single sentence and a bizarre one at that, to the
effect that 'master-narratives are the hegemonic stories
told by those in power' (p. 150). Like most conventional
writing on history in England, this book makes much of
the laborious obligations of the historian towards
primary sources, the sacredness of facts and the
worthiness of grubbing around the archive -- Evans
(left) advocates in fact 'a
return of scholarly humility' (p. 201).
'Saussure argued therefore that words, or what
he called signifiers, were defined not by their relation
to the things they denoted (the signified) but by their
relation to each other' (p. 95). Well, no he didn't; the
signified is the concept or meaning and the thing (what
philosophers term 'the referent') is another question
altogether. This is a howler, though a common one which
gets regularly crossed out in undergraduate essays for
courses in theory.
So is the next. It is asserted that Derrida's
position was that 'Nothing existed outside language' (p.
95).
For this view the footnote
(number 36) cites pages in David Lehman's shaky
and one-sided book,
Signs of the
Times. After Lehman the
footnote directs the reader generally to
Of
Grammatology though not
specifically to page 158, which states 'il n'y a pas
de hors-texte'. Doesn't a historian's scholarship
include enough O-level French to distinguish between
'Rien n'existe hors du language' and the much more
troubling assertion Derrida actually made? Did Evans
read Of
Grammatology as his note
claims? Later he cites Lehman again -- not Derrida --
as the source for Derrida's views on Paul de Man
(footnote 17, p. 236).
Evans understands 'logocentric' to mean a feature of
people who imagined 'they were rational beings engaged in
a process of discovery' (p. 94). Surely even the most
nonchalant reading of Derrida would disclose something of
what was in fact at stake around logocentrism? It is said
that Derrida 'rejected the search for origins and causes
as futile' (pp. 159-60) though no reason is given for
this claim (perhaps it has something to do with the
logocentrism of supposedly absolute origins?). The first
obligation of a critic is to give a fair, accurate and
detailed account of the arguments he or she intends to
attack. If Evans' procedure in dealing with texts, source
material and key questions is what historians mean by
scholarly humility they will be disappointed to find that
it is not widely imitated outside their own
discipline.
'Nor is the Kuhnian notion of a paradigm really
applicable to history; historians in general do not work
within rigid and constricting paradigms' (p. 43): the
qualifiers here make this a typically slippery statement
(historians don't work within paradigms at all?
historians do work with paradigms but only flexible
ones?). In Defence of
History seems to imply the first since it
constantly reiterates a belief that history is
'objective' (see pp. 2, 3, 9, 30, 35, 36, 37 etc.).
Taking paradigm to mean 'theories, assumptions' (as Evans
does, p. 42) I think I can show that his whole conception
and defence of history takes place within a familiar,
traditional paradigm of which he remains unaware.
Most contemporary critical theory arrives by passing
through a single gate, recognition of the distance or gap
or non-coincidence between reality and representation.
Hayden White in 'Response to Arthur Marwick' writes
persuasively of how the gap between events (reality) and
facts (representation) presents itself to the historian,
and the worries that ensue:
The events have to be taken as given; they
are certainly not constructed by the historian. It is
quite otherwise with 'facts'. They are constructed: in
the documents attesting to the occurrence of events,
by interested parties commenting on the events or the
documents, and by historians interested in giving a
true account of what really happened in the past and
distinguishing it from what may appear to have
happened. It is the 'facts' that are unstable, subject
to revision and further interpretation, and even
dismissable as illusions on sufficient grounds.
In Defence of
History admits that texts are texts and
reality is reality. But it is not aware of this as a
general problem -- only as a specific one which affects
historians in a particular way, and one they can deal
with easily if they are scrupulous and attentive.
Evans begins by advancing what seems to him
incontrovertible: 'present reality can be felt and
experienced by our senses' (p. 96). He would be, I guess,
be deeply disconcerted to learn that this classic
empiricist assumption would be disputed by almost ever
major philosopher who has written this century. The
fundamental view taken by In
Defence of History is that all history-writing
faces is the regrettable little difficulty that the past
is not actually 'felt and experienced by our senses' in
the present. Historical interpretation has evolved
'through contact with the real historical world', a
contact said to be 'indirect, because the real historical
world has disappeared'; but hey, no worries, for the
documents 'which the real world of the past has left
behind . . . were themselves created in a much more
direct interaction with reality' (p. 112). Reality is
still there but at a slight remove. The gap between
reality and representation, including historical reality,
historical representation, far from being radical and
irremediable, consists only of readily discernible
degrees of directness and indirectness.
Rewriting the gap between reality and representation
as simply the difference between direct experience (the
present) and indirect or less direct experience (the
past) has a neat economy. It saves Evans from any
troubling inquiry into the epistemological consequences
attending a possible correspondence or adequation or
correlation between reality and representation (including
the immensely tricky question of where anyone might
actually have to be placed so as to assess just where
reality ended and representation began). And it allows
In Defence of History
to begin with statements which appear to accord a
relatively high degree of autonomy to the textual
activity of history-writing ('"texts . . . supplement or
rework 'reality'"' Dominick La Capra, cited with
approval, p. 80), slide into intermediary claims ('the
past does impose its reality through the sources in a
basic way', p. 115; 'the past does speak through the
sources', p. 126), and then end up with the resoundingly
empiricist conclusion that, despite it all, 'it really
happened', we can 'find out how' and know 'what it all
meant' (p. 253, the last page of the book).
Derivation (more or less direct) of representation
from reality can be found in Locke; so can the
necessarily related view that language is in principle
transparent to meaning. In
Defence of History acknowledges that it's not
easy to read a text but, as was noted before, is innocent
of the problems introduced into reading by the
distinction between signifier (the sound image) and
signified (meaning or concept). Nor apparently has Evans
had time to consider the problems around reading and
re-reading Derrida discusses in 'Signature Event Context'
(not to mention the issue of the original).
In Defence of History
inhabits a simpler world: if we are always mindful of the
'intentions of the writer during the act of reading' (p.
104), then we will find that 'the limits which the
language of the text imposes on the possibilities of
interpretation' are set 'to a large extent by the
original author' (p. 106). [Another dodgy qualifier,
I would say: what extent is envisaged by 'to a large
extent', and why does this latitude exist at
all?]
Though
his name is on the cover Richard J. Evans did not really
write In Defence of
History -- rather, the dominant paradigm of
the English empiricist tradition wrote it for him,
because he made no critical attempt to interfere with its
passage through him onto the page. Such an uncritical
stance in no way prevents the book from adopting that
blunt, Hobbesian, man-of-the-world aggressive tone which
in many circles of history-writing seems to pass for
machismo (for example, the sarcastic remark that when
Patrick Joyce referred to 'the intellectual
history of our own times' what he 'really meant was his
own ideas', p. 6). Of course this present review is
hostile in tone but I would hope its hostility is
directed against incompetent use of sources and sloppy
arguments rather than personalities.
In Defence of
History was well received by some London
reviewers on grounds that it saw off the invading hordes
of postmodernist. It is depressing to think that this
uninformed yet totally self-confident work of naive
provincialism should come from close to the heartlands of
English culture. [Just to finish: the more correct
term for 'subconscious' (p. 206) is
'unconscious'.]
June 1999
Note: This review first appeared
in Textual Practice, vol.12, no. 3 (Winter
1998)
Doesn't a
historian's scholarship include enough O-level
French to distinguish between 'Rien n'existe hors
du language' and the much more troubling assertion
Derrida actually made? Did Evans read Of
Grammatology as his note claims? 
-- from an annihilating independent review of the
scholarship of Prof. Richard Evans
Richard Evans was one of the expert witnesses hired by
Prof Deborah Lipstadt for her defence of David
Irving's libel action
write to David Irving