A Postmodernist History?

As I'm sure everyone knows the prompt we attempted to answer last night was along the lines of "If there were a postmodern history, what it look like?" I've heard some really good thoughts on different postmodernist characteristics and how they would apply to writing a history, and thought I would offer my own thoughts. Specifically the aspect of Postmodernism that I find most interesting and compelling in the way that I interpret my own life is the way in which it attempts to accept truth and validity from all areas regardless of art form. I figure though, that in order to accept a number of takes on "reality" as all being true you have to also expect to find "false" representation spread wisely, as the word would have been used in the modernist sense to refer to something not pertaining to our one true reality. Arguably this is seen nowhere more clearly than in the ways in which a rigid view of history doesn't work when you try to interpret it from all possible points of view. In that way you could make a case that almost any aspect of a historical narrative could be viewed as false when interpreted by the right person. So with these concepts touched upon in class I think it's fair to say that we can all agree that any history that tries to accord itself as a narrative is going to have "flaws" meaning different people might agree or disagree on the extent to which the events in a book really happened.

With that in mind I think it's still entirely possible for history to maintain a valuable area of study, even if we have to admit that there's no such thing as a perfectly accurate history. In fact as Doctorow himself says about historical fiction if you accept the idea that someone of the material isn't real it even lends strength to it as a valuable contribution to society. He supports the idea that while no one novel or piece of fiction could entirely compass all aspects of an idea, the more people write about and present their own take the closer and closer we get to a full picture and general understanding of that idea. He says “If there are enough of us, somehow a common wisdom will come through the community and pick and choose what it needs in order to survive and go on.” It's an abstract idea and one that has risks, as he admits, but I'm inclined to agree with him that as we create works they will be either disregarded or praised and thus we gain wisdom through their study. I think the same thought could very easily be applied to history. While no piece of historic writing is entirely truth, there are almost always elements within that many people can agree are legitimate. In addition to this no piece of history functions on its own, they all make reference to one another to compose our view of history. My opinion then is that the important part of historical writing is not necessarily to what degree all of the facts contained within are true, but more to what extent can that piece of work contribute to advancing overarching themes throughout our lives.

Since both classes discussed specifically the idea of writing a history of Uni I think this might be an interesting example of what I'm trying to convey. My hour specifically fixated in part on the history of the dismissal of two directors of student life in about as many years. Especially controversial was the dismissal of April Warren-Grice. I think this is a particularly good example because there's no one person who could create a complete picture of exactly what happened and why, but by talking to more and more people you can develop a better sense of what the main themes in the conflict were. Even more interestingly I think that perhaps even those events that were rumor might be more important to the issue than more factually based information would be. I personally heard a number of different explanations ranging from the official reason, which was that she needed time to work on her doctorate, to explanations concerning her friction with much of the student body. Those latter explanations are what I think might give the better picture because they reflect what problems people perceived to be present. Many of of the rumors to me suggested themes of both race and sex conflict. While I don’t wish to start an argument over whether or not such claims are true or not, I think that they represent the much broader theme of the persistence of racial and sexually based friction in America. In this way I think that were you to write a history of what caused this abrupt changing of staff it would be potentially much more interesting and useful to record these unsubstantiated rumors as opposed to the official reasons cited. While some of those tales might be undeniably inaccurate they still provide us with the much better account of what we perceived to be the problems present.