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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 March 1999 Issue No. 420 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 March 1999 Issue No. 420
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Special Features Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
I am a great believer in history and have often written criticising the extent to which it has been neglected in our schools. But history, as we all know, can be quite dull. Somehow, it fails to seem relevant to our daily lives and, hence, rarely do history books come at the top of our reading-for-leisure lists. In fact, as the historian Amanda Foreman says in an interesting recent article, there are two kinds of historical writing: micro-research by professional academics, on the one hand, and the broader, narrative kind generally written for profit, on the other.
Between the two I personally would choose to read the second. The traditional concept of history as the story of kings and rulers can be boring, whereas the history of people and individuals -- as beautifully exemplified by The Social History of England, the university textbook which stimulated my love for history -- can shed some light on historical facts and, thus, make intriguing the very same facts that had bored the history pupil to tears.
Academic history can be, and actually is, dry and lacking in a human side. It tries, in Foreman's words, "to force the past into some theoretical straightjacket". It does not heed the emotional and spiritual journeys which are part and parcel of human existence. One has to admit that some academic history books read like car manuals, and any interest in them, if such exists, does not extend beyond the classroom.
As opposed to academic history, popular history exploits both the dramatic and humanistic dimensions of history. The emphasis is on bringing the subject closer to the people. A popular history book can read like fiction, with its host of protagonistsand secondary characters and suspensful moments: with exposition, climax and denouement. In fact popularised history has an advantage over fiction in that it is real. What drama it may have has actually existed and has not been invented. It is this which makes biographies best sellers and historical novels popular.
Of course academic historians never fail to attack popular history. They always find fault with historical novels. And yet they accept Shakespeare's history plays. Shakespeare's historical cycles illustrate that historical dramas do not have necessarily to stick to historical events. Writers of historical plays and novels have some kind of license to add or eliminate characters that have existed in real life. They have to honour the facts, but can play with anything else, can, indeed, introduce pure fantasy. L.A. Rouse said that much in many of his articles and lectures.
A recent example is the current film Shakespeare in Love. It is a mixture of fact and fiction, and the writer and the scenarist have exploited a period of Shakespeare's life that has been neglected or unknown. They invented characters and love affairs but without losing sight of the established historical facts. The same thing happened with another film, Elizabeth, about the 16th-century queen of England. In both films strict accuracy is not followed in conveying truths. They are just true in spirit.
George Steiner once wrote that the "cultivation of trained, shared remembrances sets a society in natural touch with its own past. What matters even more, it safeguards the core of individuality. History gives generations access to the life and thought of generations that preceded them." In order to do this the historian must give vent to his imagination. As Amanda Foreman beautifully puts it, "deed and action have no real meaning without the knowledge of what motivated them." There is a famous saying of Ralph Emerson which emphasises the human side of history: "There is properly no history," he wrote, "only biography."
