'Narratives' was the theme for
the first meeting of the relaunched History Lab North East to be held in
Durham. In part this was a natural development from the theme of 'sources and
evidence' at the previous Newcastle workshop, but the call for papers suggested
a discussion of both historians' narratives and those found in historical
sources. Suggested topics included 'popular', 'public' and 'dominant'
narratives; all sorts of narrative types, tropes and patterns; the particular
influence of religious or mythological narratives; historical fiction and film;
the importance of narrative in historical writing; and narrative as an
appropriation of the power to 'construct' a past. The speakers responded to
both these suggestions and to other approaches of their own to produce a highly
stimulating afternoon.
Narrative in a very physical form
was the main theme of Mike Cressey's paper on restoration plot
narratives as (perhaps) 'the first celebrity hardbacks'. The unnecessarily
costly format of The Information of Thomas Dangerfield (1680) was a
clear attempt to bolster the author's credibility against other (often more
cheaply produced) narratives. On the work's title and title-facing pages
Dangerfield and his publishers went to great lengths to establish his account
as “a genuine establishment work”, to the extent of advertising a license from
the speaker of the House of Commons, although the act mandating such licensing had
expired a year before. A large royal coat of arms completed the ensemble,
informing the reader that the publishers were printers to the king. In response
to questions afterwards, Mike noted that most plot narratives of the era were
at least in part written to vindicate the characters of (suspected) plotters –
though one witness in a court case used his own moral dissipation to support
the veracity of his account of a subversive underworld. Authors also made
substantial sums from sales, sometimes needed to cover their legal costs. In
both respects, the ways in which the presentation of the product affected the
judgements of the consumer was obviously not to be left to chance.
Nicki Kindersley discussed
the problems of oral history as amplified by the challenge of 'spy stories'
told by southern Sudanese who lived in Khartoum during the south's struggle for
independence. The local press at the time characterized southerners as a “fifth
column”, and returnees to the south seem to have embraced this identity in a
“macho retelling” of their exploits in the underground resistance movement. On
closer inspection, much of this 'espionage' turns out to have consisted of
meetings with close acquaintances which never developed into wider networks;
other stories contain discrepancies, or
indeed strange parallels with other accounts which suggest some level of
fabrication. As Nicki demonstrated, however, to notice only this
self-fashioning would be to miss the essential point of these narratives. They
dramatize the general fear and uncertainty of the time, fuelled by a lack of
information from the south itself and severe limitations on freedom of speech
in Khartoum, which included very real cases of detention and torture.
In 1830s New South Wales, a
“border war” was being fought between aboriginal people and white settlers
around the fringes of the colony, resulting in a particularly brutal massacre
of aboriginal women and children at Myall Creek on 10 June 1838. Stan Neal
showed how this event has been contested by proponents of different narratives
of Australian history ever since. For much of the contemporary metropolitan
audience in Great Britain, in the years following the abolition of slavery, the
event was “an atrocious massacre of innocent natives” (The Morning Post),
but for the local Sydney Herald it was part of a necessary fightback by
settlers, who, when threatened by savages, ought to “SHOOT THEM DEAD”
(uppercase original). In the year 2000 a memorial was erected at the site of
the massacre by the joint efforts of white and aboriginal Australians. But in
the meantime historians had clashed bitterly over the question of whether a
'genocide' was perpetrated against aboriginal peoples in the early years of
settlement, a debate which was joined by Australian Prime Minister John Howard.
Myall Creek became a central event for many narratives – it was even
transfigured into a romantic novel – but, as Stan pointed out, it was hardly a
typical incident in that the perpetrators were prosecuted (twice), and hence an
unusually substantial documentation was created and preserved.
Jessica Prestidge took up
a theme well-known but rarely so calmly dissected in the north east: the
representation and continual re-representation of Margaret Thatcher, in
biographies by Patrick Cosgrave, Christopher Ogden and Charles Moore. Jessica
sketched the problematic status of biography as an historical genre, in which
inherent methodological conservatism meets inherent interdisciplinarity, and
the highest praise is reserved for so-called 'definitive' works, yet
biographers are so exposed to their subjects for so long that deep criticism of
their 'heroes' becomes almost psychologically impossible. Narratives of
Thatcher never emphasize complexity: for critics, she is shallow and tediously
straightforward, whereas her supporters praise her steadfast single-mindedness.
But her representations reveal the far from straightforward responses of
observers to a woman in a position of traditional male authority, a politician
from a non-establishment background, and with all this a player in global Cold
War politics. Thatcher's own auto-narrative of humble beginnings, an inspiring
father and a great destiny certainly looks pedestrian compared to fantastical
depictions of her as a nanny, a governess, a boarding school teacher, a
housewife full of domestic and familial virtue, the heir of Winston Churchill,
and a British leader with an intense interest in America (Ogden, writing for a
US audience). Biographers have many reasons for projecting these different characters
on to Thatcher, but Jessica drew out one in particular: a person's life,
especially that of a 'great person', is expected to conform to some sort of
coherent narrative; and the biographer needs this narrative more than anyone
else.
Appropriately for the final
paper, Kathleen Reynolds took a more self-reflective approach. She asked
how she can write an “honest narrative” of non-noble women undertaking unpaid
medical work in early modern England (1400-1800). She pointed out that the
sources do not speak for themselves: they need context to become meaningful.
But though the scarcity of sources for this subject is one problem, the
historian's act of selection and choice from amongst the available sources is
still problematic, as is the act of periodization. This is particularly
troublesome for women's history, as our conventional epochs – even those based
on long-term economic and social movements – are primarily male in their frames
of reference. But Kathleen expressly does not want to “smash female sources
against male narratives”, and her efforts to do justice to her subjects are a
welcome antidote to the self-promoting assault on supposed 'master narratives'
which can sometimes characterize the intellectual shifts between generations of
historians.
In a training session to complete
the presentations, Andy McKay from Durham University's English Language
Centre emphasized the role of the writer's linguistic choices at sentence and
paragraph levels in creating their own voice within a narrative, and indeed the
importance of a clear, active and distinctive voice altogether. Whilst this
voice may sometimes have to be partially muffled in order to maintain an
attachment to certain communities which prize abstraction of knowledge, and
even in order to reduce vulnerability to criticism, Andy made the case for the
importance of the knower over their knowledge within the
humanities in particular, and for the value of active, “populated” writing as a
voice with which the reader can not only engage their interest, but also their
critical faculties. He offered some models of sentence and paragraph structure
which might help to construct this sort of engaging text.
