His Story Repeats

This week my literature classes have been discussing new historicism. Every week, we view literature through different lenses—I typically introduce students to notions of class, archetypes, gender, power and psychology. I began the week by asking if there was any value to considering the historical context in which a text was written. I received the standard answer—that history is important because history repeats itself and because contemporary societies need to learn from the mistakes of past societies. I’ve always liked that answer, that history repeats itself, or at least Mark Twain’s assertion that history at least rhymes.

Of course, there are historical texts to read, both imaginative like Shakespeare’s Macbeth and historical like the Domesday Book. When it comes to questions of value, for historians and new historicists, all texts have value, even ephemeral texts designed to be tossed after their use like sales fliers and pamphlets. Yet new historicists take that assumption a few steps further to assert that everything is a text to be read—architectural ruins, uncovered artifacts, even human remains. All of history is a narrative to be “read,” and all narratives are problematic.

As my students and I delved into literary texts and attempted to analyze them using new historicism, I kept recalling articles related to time and physics, like this one. As physicist Carlo Rovelli states, “We never really see time,” he says. “We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on” (par. 3). From articles like this, I’ve come to learn of physics’ “problem of time.” On a quantum level, time seems to disappear. On a macro level, it is clearly evident as “things move forward.” Author Tim Floyd suggests a reason for this: “Although the laws of physics themselves don’t provide for an arrow of time, the ongoing expansion of the universe does. As the universe expands, it becomes ever more complex and disorderly. The growing disorder—physicists call it an increase in entropy—is driven by the expansion of the universe, which may be the origin of what we think of as the ceaseless forward march of time” (par. 9). At any given time, all that truly exists is matter and that matter’s momentum.

Thinking about the physical state while my students debated, I suddenly thought, “The past does not exist.”

I kept that to myself but could not jar it loose from my head. The point seemed almost too self-evident. Cleopatra is long gone, and the molecules that made up her body have since gone on to form new things. All that is left is the narrative, along with how that narrative is constructed. I also think about Spivak's subalterns, those millions (billions?) of voiceless humans who have slipped this mortal coil into oblivion. Just as paradoxically, history always exists, in the present, in just the same manner that characters in literary texts are said to exist—“Jane Eyre is unaware of the mad woman living in the attic.” Jane Eyre is a character in a book published in 1847, but because the reader is always translating toner ink and paper in the present while reading, “Jane Eyre” always exists in the present. The same can be said for history whenever I pick up Will Durant’s voluminous histories. History always is but never was.

So if “history repeats itself,” what keeps repeating?

I wondered if history repeats because of the way we construct this narrative, and what typically dictates how any reader constructs a narrative is his or her ideology, or at least his or her relationship to the current ideology in power. Do ideological constructs of history keep repeating themselves? One friend suggested that history repeats along the same argument that Northrop Frye uses to explain why narrative myths repeat—individuals interpret history based on their experience of life cycles—birth through death—with youth’s hubris discounting elders’ wisdom, leading to continual conflicts, one never learning from the other.

One of Frederic Jameson’s critiques against new historicism is that it lacks a theory of history. To this I answer that one of the reasons new historicism lacks a theory of history is that there is no history except the one constructed by the living. Sartre makes a similar argument in regards to the individual’s past (his or her facticity—birthdates, for example) versus his or her existential performance of themselves. I’m reading how some critics are calling this notion that history only exists as a narrative in the present “posthistory,” but at the moment those same critics are still squabbling as to what posthistory even means.

Now what does all this matter? Is there no history? Is it, as Henry Ford boasted, “more or less bunk”? Such would break my heart. I’m continually reading histories, and there are historical personalities I find myself seeking out again and again: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth I, Frederick the Great, Suleiman, Voltaire or Ashoka. I sometimes wonder if my passion for reading history isn’t similar to fandom writing fanfic after fanfic of their favorite characters from Star Trek or Harry Potter because they simply can’t let go of the characters.