Rewriting History
Professor Samuel has as his epigram a quote from William Faulkner: The past is not yet dead. It is not even past yet. The book is a collection of articles divided into six parts Retrochic, Resurrectionism, Heritage, Flogging a Dead Horse, Old Photographs, Costume Drama, with an introduction called Unofficial Knowledge and an afterword called Hybrids. In all, Samuel is preoccupied with one remarkable cultural development: the transition from the modernising aesthetic of the 1950s to the retro boom of recent decades, the enthusiasm for all things period or authentic whether in architecture, music, furniture and so on. As a left wing historian, Samuel attributes this change to economic factors. Greater post-war prosperity has meant that a very large number of people can exercise their aesthetic choice because consumer durables have been within reach of almost everyone and there is time and money for a chic culture.
A good deal of the vogue is a reaction against the knock-it-all-down-and-start-again culture. A prime example was the knocking down of old houses and building blocks of flats by real estate agents. But Samuel is aware of the fact that much of this retro fitting was modernisation in another form. The new home would have all the trappings of authenticity but it would always contain all modcons like a cooking range, food processor, micro-wave and so on to make life more comfortable. The passage to Utopia was finished with formica.
As a corrective to this pseudo-snotty attitude, Samuel suggests from a left-wing standpoint that popular taste may have a better understanding of history than academics in their cloistered studies and libraries. The relentless academic pursuit of accuracy is a chimera. People remember Henry VIII for his eight wives and Dick Whittington for his cat: Hence it is as valid an approach to history as another. Songs, plays and novels and even street songs can give a better insight into history than archival material.
Much of the problem with academic historians (especially Oxford history, the home of lost causality) is that they fetishise archival material at the expense of a more imaginative range of sources. They cling to the old master narratives inherited from the 19th century that tell history from the standpoint of the traditional political and cultural elite. At one point, Samuel even asserts that history is not the prerogative of historians, nor even as postmodernism contends, a historians invention. But he also says that historians are constantly reinterpreting the past in the light of the present, and indeed like conservationists and restorationists in other spheres, reinventing it.
Samuels polemics lead to two suggestions. First, there should not be too sharp a distinction between historyas serious academic activity and memory or heritage which is dismissed as popular and highly subjective. Second, all history should be communicable to ordinary people who would like their past shorn of academic jargon. Professional historians should therefore deal with a whole range of contemporary subjects of the past and not just archival material. It would be absurd for the historian to abandon the field of moral and political argument; to attempt to return to history with a capital H i.e. a single master narrative or to try to retreat to the cloistered seclusion of a library carrel. Very simply, history is far too serious a thing to be left to historians.
The appeal of this book is two-fold. First, it is open-ended rather than a closed set of conclusions. Second, unofficial knowledge or popular memory as Samuel calls it, sounds positively radical rather than the end of progress. This is something we should all accept.