In the course of this week’s readings I was struck by Carolyn Steedman’s concept of history as “the only story that has no end.” (Dust, 148) This notion especially resonated with me in light of the essays collected in Antoinette Burton’s Archive Stories. Both works discuss the archive itself and the historian’s use of the archive, identifying its scholarly values as well as its possible pitfalls. It seems however, that no matter how “objectively” scholars are able to analyze archival material, however effectively they incorporate Derridean deconstruction into their interpretations, what they, and subsequently their readers, are left with is ultimately a point of departure for further exploration.
Steedman’s concept of history as “something without an end, possessing only an ending” seems to me a rather valid point. (Dust, 149) Take, for instance, Peter Fritzsche’s essay on the German archive in Archive Stories. Fritzsche chronicles the evolution of the archive in Germany and the impact of both history and current events on the archive’s contents, thereby hiding, fabricating, and in many cases erasing documentation, and thus, creating an opportunity for scholars to uncover these lost histories. This is a common theme for Steedman in Dust, as well as in Burton’s collection of essays. Another example is Ann Curthoys’s identification in her essay regarding “the history wars” of colonial Australia-the debate over the historical factuality of British atrocities in early nineteenth-century Tasmania-of the importance of critique and reinterpretation within the historical profession. Discussing the current state of debates on the issue she states, “How we view the colonial frontier is necessarily in a constant state of revision and reformulation…and it is clear that we still have a great deal of historical work to do.” (Archive Stories, 368) Certainly this is true not only of colonial Australia, or even of colonial histories in general, it is true of all historical studies.
As these two works indicate, the archive, as a human constructed collection of human constructions, is not a final solution to the quest for historical facts. However, by using the archive as a starting point for historical inquiry, historians can produce written histories that serve to further stimulate intellectual debate and exploration. By producing an endless stream of stories without ends, and subsequent revisions of them, perhaps we can get a little closer to Jules Michelet’s charge of “History as the care and protection of the forgotten dead.” (Dust, 39)
Ben,
Your comment on archival materials as only a point of departure for the historian reminded me of another discussion of the archives that we read for this week. (I’m not sure which one it was though.) One writer mentioned that archival documents function as both primary and secondary sources, which I took to mean primary in that they offer actual documents created by historical people and secondary in that these documents refer to a events that they are unable to contain.
If we look at history as a story without ends, I wonder whether we can discuss the impossibility of ends in terms of the levels of mediation that can constantly be added to the archival documents as subsequent historians revisit the archive. Thoughts?
Jim,
I think we can. It seems that each historian who visits the archive adds a layer of mediation, contributes to the dust. As such, is it possible that while gleaning knowledge from the archive, historians subsequently make attaining that knowledge all the more impossible at the same time?