Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
Sep. 11th, 2012 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI got to quote Keats in my first grad school paper! "Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all/ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
I'm comparing a late nineteenth-century historian, imbued with Romanticism, with some of the more rabid late twentieth-century postmodernists - the kind who believe that writing history is exactly the same as writing a novel (which suggests to me that they have done neither).
(I think this stringent version of postmodernism is based on a misconception. Its proponents seem to think that, because there can't be one, definitive, true interpretation of history, then all interpretations must be equal. But this is wrong: while there is no One True Interpretation of history, there are interpretations that fit the facts better, and interpretations that are demonstrably false.)
What's interesting to me is that Mr. Nineteenth-Century Romantic to a certain extent shares this view: he urges that we must see Shakespeare as a historian, and never mind Shakespeare made stuff up.
Romanticism sees the whole world as imbued with truth, overflowing with meaning, too much meaning - so much meaning that it can never be captured in mere words or cold facts, but only ensnared through art and literature. Therefore, though Shakespeare's plays are not historically, factually accurate, they are in some sense truer than a history - as my nineteenth-century historian says, they "supersede history" - because their artistry better explores human character than mere facts would.
Postmodernism, on the other hand, sees truth as immanent in nothing. If it is impossible to find the truth, then, it follows, writing history is just like writing a novel - one is as (un)true as the other.
The two views start at opposite poles, but end with a similar intertwining of art and history. It's fascinating to me.
I'm comparing a late nineteenth-century historian, imbued with Romanticism, with some of the more rabid late twentieth-century postmodernists - the kind who believe that writing history is exactly the same as writing a novel (which suggests to me that they have done neither).
(I think this stringent version of postmodernism is based on a misconception. Its proponents seem to think that, because there can't be one, definitive, true interpretation of history, then all interpretations must be equal. But this is wrong: while there is no One True Interpretation of history, there are interpretations that fit the facts better, and interpretations that are demonstrably false.)
What's interesting to me is that Mr. Nineteenth-Century Romantic to a certain extent shares this view: he urges that we must see Shakespeare as a historian, and never mind Shakespeare made stuff up.
Romanticism sees the whole world as imbued with truth, overflowing with meaning, too much meaning - so much meaning that it can never be captured in mere words or cold facts, but only ensnared through art and literature. Therefore, though Shakespeare's plays are not historically, factually accurate, they are in some sense truer than a history - as my nineteenth-century historian says, they "supersede history" - because their artistry better explores human character than mere facts would.
Postmodernism, on the other hand, sees truth as immanent in nothing. If it is impossible to find the truth, then, it follows, writing history is just like writing a novel - one is as (un)true as the other.
The two views start at opposite poles, but end with a similar intertwining of art and history. It's fascinating to me.
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no subject
Date: 2012-09-12 04:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-12 09:57 am (UTC)Is Rosemary Sutcliff's work more true because it did so much to inspire a whole generation of archaeologists and historians, or less true because of all the work they have done finding out stuff that shows up the holes in her historic settings? :-D
no subject
Date: 2012-09-12 12:46 pm (UTC)I think there's a middle ground between One True Meaning and meaninglessness, though.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-12 01:28 pm (UTC)In the literal, factual sense, Sutcliff's work clearly isn't true - at the beginning of Frontier Wolf she straight up admits that there's not evidence of a fort at that time, but she wants a fort there so she's just going to go with it.
But in a mythic sense, Sutcliff's work is true, like something like Lord of the Rings can be true. I don't know how accurate her Romans and Britons are to history, but there's a lot of integrity to her world portrayal.
clearly isn't true
Date: 2012-09-12 01:45 pm (UTC)If I know there is a vague wave-curl of a turf-wall somewhere, and nobody has ever excavated it, then studying it in a historical and archaeological sense, creating a museum display of it, and writing a short story about Guinna and Kenwal who used to live there, or making up a poem about them....they all feel like part of the same process...
Academic historians become riled by this sort of idea of course, but there is a reason that history mostly gets filed with the Arts not the Sciences.
I SO love periods where there are ample dollops of 'we don't really know'. :-D