How to learn from history and fiction...
...through a slow read of Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob.
Aldous Huxley once said that the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history. But yet, I say, we keep on trying.
Our aversion to learn from history may not be surprising. There are so many tragic, traumatic events of suffering, violence, hatred and catastrophe. Who would not look away for some relief from the gloom? Walter Benjamin’s story of the Angel of History is a tragic vision because the angel could not look away from the piles of wreckage in the past. We – who are not angels but ordinary storytellers of the past - get a choice. We turn our minds to the present or our hopes for the future.
In my Saturday post, I quoted Priya Satia Time’s Monster on a vision of history that turns to ethical engagement with present wrongs through stories more complex than Progress or similar media tropes. In Satia’s vision we can all play a role in that engagement if we, as readers and writers of history, tell “more chaotic stories.” Chaotic stories help us feel connected to the many possibilities of the present better than the “narrative deception” of progress or any other fixed trope of history. She wrote:
“We will need history to understand how we got here - the tension between a historical and antihistorical outlook will be permanent in our souls. We might tell now, more encompassing, perhaps more chaotic stories that will return us to the fullness of time. In their telling, we may make new history, too. That history can have no end; the struggle to renew humanity is an end in itself.”
Priya Satia, Time’s Monster, p. 298
Satia rewrote Benjamin’s fable of historical understanding as a means of redemption for the oppressed. In her account, history becomes a means to seek restitution for the wrongs of empire in the present.
But let us change up the mood a little.
It is, after all, the summer holidays down here in Australia. Let us fly down from the gloomy heights of Benjamin’s Angel of History, and look at history from the ground floor of common human fallibility. That place is where live the best storytellers, who blend tragedy and comedy. Macbeth’s night walk to murder is interrupted by the caretaker’s pisstake.
History as tragedy and comedy, fact and fiction
We learn from history through both tragedy and comedy. We might even learn more from comedy. Marx’s essay on the Eighteenth Brumaire repeated Hegel’s line that History occurs first as tragedy and secondly as farce. We learn from farcical failures with more lightness of touch than we do from tragic fatal flaws.
But comedy has other virtues. It teaches us ironic detachment; it teaches us not to take ourselves too seriously. This is a mere substack, after all; not the words of a Messiah.
Historians who know their comedy do not think of themselves as prophets. They do not become gurus or set up consulting firms. They make predictions reluctantly and modestly, aware of how many ways the story can go.
I learned this chastening lesson of comic history in both my professions, history and bureaucracy. The documentary record of the world is strewn with false predictions of the world to come. Bureaucrats read through old reports, and note all the errant targets and misplaced plans for the future. Historians, and historical novelists, read through the prophecies of false Messiahs, the impractical grandiose schemes of supposedly practical men, the peace plans before wars, the love letters before death, and the commonly expressed thought that these times are unique and that we are living through the decisive turning point in history. Olga Tokarczuk dips into the mind of one such character, Nahman in The Books of Jacob:
“Because Nahman has always had the sense that he’s part of something bigger, something unprecedented and unique. That not only has nothing like this ever happened before, but also that it never will—never can—again. And that he is the one who must write it all down for all those who’ve not been born yet, because they’re going to want to know.”
Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob, p. 870.
The best historians emplot their stories with both tragedy and comedy.
Below for paid subscribers:
History as tragedy and comedy, fact and fiction
Why Books of Jacob is a masterpiece of history and historical fiction
What makes historical fiction worth reading as history?
Tokarczuk on writing on history
My story of reading The Books of Jacob
Many ways of telling the history of the world
History writing as a form of literature