Vivid History
December 28, 2024 David Runciman Ayşe Zarakol William Faulkner History Falklands War
The past is never dead, it’s not even past.
–Willam Faulkner
The General Belgrano, sinking.
When I write about history here, it sometimes feels like I’m trying to identify an unknown object in the dark. The contours are familiar, but it’s say exactly what it is. A discipline of study on its face, history is also the very real, vivid, everyday events that happened to someone, cascades of decisions that reach into the present. It never just was, it is.
On Past, Present, Future, David Runciman interviewed historian Ayşe Zarakol about the much-debunked End of History. They make an interesting point about history both as study, but also as lived reality:
The Western view is that history is the study of the past in order to solve or resolve puzzles. (…) To get a sense of where we are now is to answer the things that in the past were mysteries of irresolvable questions. What the historian does is study the past to get a sense how we are beyond it. And so the past becomes a resource (…), history is a kind of problem-solving mechanism.
This idealized treats history like a technology (in the widest sense of the word), a “problem-solving machine” we can use to avoid repeating mistakes. But of course it’s rarely like that—otherwise history wouldn’t repeat itself (or rhyme).
Runciman:
(…) you described history from another perspective (…). And you use words like “It’s a weight”, “It’s like a burden”, “It’s a tradition”. It’s the thing that you’re grappling with. History is not the academic discipline that is close to the sciences as a problem-solving device.
This, of course, gets to the core of the dilemma: History is reality first, academia second. And even once it’s been discussed or decoded by historians, its effects linger: History is always part of the present moment.
History is like (…) the heavy, humid air that you breathe. It’s a completely different image. It’s not the modern Western image of history.”
I’m partial Svetlana Alexievich’s view that history should concern itself much more with emotions, with the nitty-gritty of everyday life rather than just the broad strokes.
Around the same time I heard the episode I quoted above, I started listening to The Belgrano Diary, a podcast about the Falklands War. It starts with the rough outlines of the war and then goes straight to the central episode of the show: The sinking of the General Belgrano by a British nuclear submarine:
“When a torpedo is fired, you can feel it. There’s a ba-dum-pum, as it makes its way. And the next thing was, you know, history.”
To me, this quote get to the core of it all: History isn’t even abstract or hard to understand. Sometimes it’s as simple as a torpedo and the effects it has.