THE LITERARY PAGE
Notions of history
|
Historian Simon Schama, who was at the recent Jaipur Literature Festival, speaks about the role of the past in our present in a conversation with MITA KAPUR
|
Contemplating on Art that is “supremely of our lives”, Simon Schama was at the Jaipur Literature Festival giving some revelatory moments of his historian mind, foraying into writing about food and back to the Power of Art. In another scin
tillating conversation with Shashi Tharoor, Simon spoke about American politics finally being “about something again” and threw the thought of having a Sikh Prime Minister in U.K. open to a rapt audience.
What is history
As a historian, he felt, “history is a matter of selection. When I was 10, I remember wondering, ‘why don’t we know everything? In the Battle of Hastings, why don’t we know what King Harold wore and what he ate? The Greek word ‘History’ means an enquiry, it doesn’t mean a story. The enquiry presupposes asking questions. In an effort to answer these, you arrange a hierarchy of significant questions and it may turn out that you do know what sandals the king was wearing. When you go to a library; often, the book next to the one you are looking for turns out be an absolutely obscure one on horses… and I’m not a horsy person... but it turned out that the Normans got horses from Spain and the Norman army put out these pony-like horses that charged up the hill. So you remain open to the wealth of information you collect and to the possibilities of unsuspected information like a detective constructing a forensic account of an event…”
Teaching at Columbia University and authoring books, Schama has dealt with collective consciousness, socio-cultural trends, folk traditions, myths “for which I read a lot of cultural anthropology, scriptures, specially Evans Pritchards and Mary Douglas. What is clear is that in some sense the collective conscious doesn’t just organically create itself. It is very often created by acts of power. It often also becomes independent from what politics wants to make of it.”
“Landscape and Memory was the hardest to write and I’m the happiest to have written it. I was teaching at Harvard and I wanted to get something more general on the way we have landscaped the mind, somewhere I’d been reading a lot of Jung (God help me!) about archetypes, the way we were wired to think about landscapes in a way that it corresponded with fear, terror, hatred. I wanted to write human stories but it was also very complicated with ambiguous arguments and it was difficult to decide when to stop writing the story and where to start sounding like I was making a point. If you ask my wife, she’ll say I was terrible to live with …”
A “History of Britain” saw Schama in his element. “They came to me because they thought I was a very archaic storyteller. I taught the British Empire at Harvard and I remember going around the country saying it’s a pity that there isn’t popular history on television. I also remember telling the producer at BBC 2, ‘I’m no authority on British History’. She looked at me and smiled; that’s when I thought, ‘That is why they want me’! That was incredibly reckless but very brave because what would happen on camera would be that I was a companion in learning with the audience...”
Emotional pressures
In Rough Crossings, he picked up from stories of liberty from slavery. Dealing with the emotional pressures can be a pressure since “those were very moving and tragic stories. I had a lot of bad dreams when I was, in a way, in that world but a week or two later when I was writing the passages, I did sort of cultivate and unconsciously develop a historian writer’s distance. I think it’s true for all my books where I’m truly struck by an archival document, I try and completely disappear from the narrative, and simply reproduce it verbatim. There was a diary of a black woman who preached from 1830-1840 and her voice was so exciting, so confident, so learned, so Godly that I actually spent 8-10 pages entirely on her role.”
As a historian examining the concept of freedom, “I cherish the writing and the methodological freedom I have, but you do pay a price for it because people expect you to write in a certain way or the way in which you wrote the last book and I don’t think I want to do that. The sense that you might be able to experiment in a way you haven’t done before can be a massive freedom for a writer… I admire other non-fiction writers who write almost poetically.”
How deep, rich or powerful does history become? “I think history should never be a lullaby, shouldn’t ever have its ends neatly tied, shouldn’t ever make you feel self-congratulatory about your illustrious ancestors. It should make you loosely proud; it should be a disturbance for the imaginative mind.”
Art’s role in society is an eternal debate, swinging between polarities of the rhetorical and the real. “I don’t think art is created to make people better. Some of the people I chose in the television series and the book were special and were partly moved, in a very jumbled fashion, by official instincts. Van Gogh felt Christianity had failed people… he wanted to maintain a kind of medieval innocence… Art will only work if, on the way, the artist falls over a technique of illumination that he could never imagine if he set himself a social brief. Artists who set themselves a social brief usually do very poor work.”
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
