Further Thoughts On History

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In 1938 French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a novel called Nauea. It’s about a historian trying to write about an obscure figure called Rolebon who was supposedly involved in the French and American revolutions. (he was made up by Sartre) The historian, Roquentin, finds that he isn’t so much discovering and presenting findings about Rolebon, trying to join the dots between anecdotes and footnotes in other work, but inventing him. Everything he says and writes about Rolebon is coming from himself. Roquentin finds that very hard to come to terms with this because he wants to be objective. He goes on to feel that even in thinking about events in his life that make him, Roquentin, who he is, he is being selective – the very writing and editing process fictionalizes the truth. Roquentin is driven to extreme nausea and depression by his findings. He may be the most realistic attempt to show the dilemma of the historian, the struggle between objective and subjective writing, ever captured. Is history only written by the winners? It may have been true once, but nowadays there are lots of soul searching histories asking why battles were lost. The Americans have produced a lot of important studies on Vietnam, questioning why they were even there and how they were defeated. German historians have examined how and why they came to fall under Hitler’s influence. Triumphal, gung ho war writing now seems increasingly unrealistic. There is much more emphasis on guilt over having to kill, and soul searching over why the great tragedies of history happened. Such studies rightly do not shirk away from the harsh realities of using napalm on children, the Mai Lai Massacre or the Holocaust. For me, the key to understanding history, (any history) is to understand the historians responsible for it. Their own life stories will often show why they chose a particular subject, who they hoped to get to buy and read their work, and what their message was. My studies are now going to switch to biographical summaries of the lives of key historians. Arthur Chappell