Hermeneutics, History and Memory

Hermeneutics, History and Memory History is the true record of an absent past. The trust between historians and their readers has always been founded upon this traditional claim. In a postmodern world, that claim and that trust have both been challenged as never before, draw- ing either angry or apologetic responses from historians. Hermeneutics, History and Memory answers differently. It sees the sceptical challenge as an opportunity for reflection on history’s key processes and practices, and draws upon methodological resources that are truly history’s own, but from which it has become estranged. In seeking to restore these resources, this book presents a novel contribution to topical academic debate, focusing principally upon: • the challenges and detours of historical methodology; • hermeneutic interpretation; • the work of Paul Ricoeur; • the relation between history and memory. Hermeneutics, History and Memory will appeal to experienced researchers who seek to explore the theoretical and methodological foundations of their empir- ical investigations. It will also be highly beneficial to research students in history and the social sciences concerned with understanding the principles and practices through which documentary analysis and in- depth interview can be both validated and conducted. Philip Gardner is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK. Hermeneutics, History and Memory Philip Gardner First published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Philip Gardner All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Gardner, Philip, 1951- Hermeneutics, History, and Memory / Philip Gardner. p. cm. 1. History—Philosophy. 2. History—Methodology. 3. History— Research. 4. History—Sources. 5. Hermeneutics. 6. Memory. 7. Narration (Rhetoric) 8. Ricoeur, Paul 9. Historiography. I. Title. D13.G2265 2010 901—dc22 2009030357 ISBN 0-203-86012-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0- 415- 35337- 8 (hbk) ISBN10: 0- 415- 35338- 6 (pbk) ISBN10: 0- 203- 86012- 8 (ebk) ISBN13: 978- 0- 415- 35337- 3 (hbk) ISBN13: 978- 0- 415- 35338- 0 (pbk) ISBN13: 978- 0- 203- 86012- 0 (ebk) Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 History: challenges and detours 11 2 History and hermeneutics 36 3 History, hermeneutics and Ricoeur 61 4 History and memory 89 Conclusion 116 Notes 121 Bibliography 179 Index 195 Acknowledgements I am grateful to many colleagues and friends for their help, advice and stimulating conversation in the course of the preparation of this work. In particular, I would like to express my thanks to Richard Altenbaugh, Madeleine Arnot, Maurice Bond, Kevin Brehony, Peter Cunningham, Jo-Anne Dillabough, Paul McDonald, Philip Raymont and Deborah Sabric, along with all my graduate students, past and present. To Camille Lowe, and to Philip Mudd, Amy Crowle and Emily Laughton at Routledge, my admiration for their professionalism and my gratitude for their unalloyed patience and unfailing support. Thank you to all. Introduction Adding his thoughts to those of the many who have had their say on the reloca- tion of the British Library from London’s Bloomsbury to St Pancras in 1998, the writer of a letter to The Times Literary Supplement was fulsome in his praise for the quality and the ambience of the new reading rooms. There was, however, a qualification: ‘I find that the only irritants, or rather depressants, are the subjects my neighbour may be studying, eg, hermeneutics, semiotics and stuff like that.’1 Within the community of today’s working historians, concerned with recovering the truth of the past and reporting it accurately, there will be many who might feel considerable sympathy for this sceptical, suspicious observation, with this impatience for theoretical or philosophical complexities that appear to promise little more than an obfuscation of the painstaking but essentially straightforward business of telling the story of the past as it actually happened.2 The working historian, frustrated by the prospect of such complexities, might agree with the sentiments once expressed by Michael Simon: ‘one might do well to try to make the relation of historian to history less mysterious rather than more so.’3 For disciplinary practitioners dedicated above all else to the ‘(s)till … dominant idea of practice among modern, professional, Western historians’,4 which is to say, to the maintenance of ‘the standards of Rankean methodological objectivity in their works’,5 the diverse and often wearying intellectual challenges of recent decades – ranging from the epistemological questions raised by the ‘linguistic turn’ to the evidential problems presented by the burgeoning use of non-documentary sources such as the visual image or the spoken word – have been hard to escape.6 In the face of such provocations, the assessment of a leading ‘traditional’ historian such as Gertrude Himmelfarb is that ‘postmodernism reverses two centuries of scholarship designed to make history a “discipline” – a rigorous, critical, systematic study of the past, complete with a methodology designed to make that study as objective as possible’.7 How might practitioners best respond to such challenges to their established or customary methodological practices? One strategy is simply to ignore any perceived threat or, more actively, to demean or ridicule it, thereby seeking to neutralize its effects.8 A second is to meet the challenge head on, defending and 2 Introduction explicating established disciplinary principles and practices in a more explicit and comprehensive fashion.9 A third is to pursue an exploratory approach, on the ground that a discipline such as history, so open in terms of its substantive range, reach and scope, may have something to learn about its methodological assump- tions and its practical methods by way of a similar openness to that which other branches of intellectual endeavour have to say about these matters.10 This book is guided by the third course, seeking above all else to reach out for resources which may enable us to do our history better. What then might these resources be? Each historian will have their own thoughts on this point, the combined product of their practical experience, their intellectual predilections and their professional desire to bring the best of their efforts to the understanding of the past. There are many possibilities. Dominick LaCapra has itemized some of these, including, ‘formalism, structuralism, poststructuralism, literary theory, or what is more generally termed literary theory … (r)ecently one has looked to such noteworthy developments as postcolonial theory, queer theory and critical race theory’.11 For me, however, there have been two particular areas which, over the years, have consistently focused my interest and attention in this respect. Each of them is marked by important methodological considerations with direct resonance for the practice of history. The first, driven initially by my interest in the history of education and teaching, comprises that growing and increasingly sophisticated branch of historical research concerned with living memory and which gathers under the title of oral history.12 The second – stimulated chiefly by a more general puzzlement as to why a long- established branch of knowledge which is specifically concerned with the historian’s cardinal problem of interpretation has not been of more sustained interest to mainstream historians – is constituted by that broad philosophical tradition known as hermeneutics.13 The object of this book is to endeavour to explore these two fields a little, in order to discover how the insights they offer may have utility for the practical exercise of carrying out and reporting historical research. History is a hard taskmaster. With good reason, historians are often inclined to the view that in seeking out the evidential traces of the past, making sense of them, and then fashioning them into coherent and convincing accounts, they have an intellectual workload that is quite large enough. Taking this view – an expression of that which Carolyn Steedman has called a ‘kind of professional self- presentation’14 – we might invoke the words of Raphael Samuel, a historian of rare talent and insight, who once observed that ‘getting up stuff is what we are good at’.15 Samuel was right. By virtue of sustained labour in the archives, professional historians build up immense stores of detailed knowledge about their particular corner of the past, and usually about many others too. For the working historian, the stuff of historical knowledge reveals itself bit by bit as dense, rich, detailed and complex, the record of endless successions of singular and specific happenings,

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