George Orwell, 1984
In French, histoire translates as 'story' and 'history'. I suppose the French understand that like a story, history is wholly constructed by the person who records/retells it. This is certainly not a ground-breaking observation, but I am continually struck by the amount of people who think history is irrelevant to the understanding of our current world.
I have been told, by some, that history is boring, a conception that never ceases to astonish me. How-on-earth could the stories of extraordinary people, events and achievements be boring? How can the study of persecution, protest, challenge and perseverance be uninteresting? Maybe bad teachers, maybe lack of perspective. Although placed in the past, history constructs our present and future - it breathes and lives, morphs and changes as we interpret how we live.
In England we speak the results of the Battle of Hastings (French meets Anglo Saxon language); we live the political repercussions of WWI. We make art and architecture that draws from hundred year-old innovations. It is not that everything has been done before; instead, it is that the possibilities of the present and future are shaped by what has come before. We do not exist in a vacuum.
Reading 1984 for the first time (I know, I'm behind), I am struck by how much it is about the living nature of history. Through his 'Big Brother' Orwell creates a scenario where power is contingent on who owns the archive, on who owns cultural memory. History, of course, is not set in stone as some people believe. It is re-written by each successive generation, by each government, by each teacher, writer, thinker. To know history, to study it and its source does not make you passe - it makes you empowered and informed about the present.
The task of Orwell's main character Winston is to re-write history each day, guided by the totalitarian regime that controls his life:
. . .the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature and documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.
History is our memory preserved externally in text and image. Those who write history create/control our memories. As much as it may seem arcane and irrelevant, history is a political tool, manipulating our current existence.
In secret, Winston starts a diary:
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. . . .For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future?
If you dismiss history, you render yourself powerless to those who are writing it for you - in a way, you change history by giving them so much power.
I realise how much this post smacks of being a political diatribe, but its just that I am just very passionate about the stories that have constructed our current social position. I cringe to think that some find their study unimportant. I am inspired by the origins of thought and inspirations of the people who came before. Our context is not better or worse than those of the past, but it is the result of them. Through history we understand our context.
When Orwell was writing 1984 in 1949 he was working from his context, emerging out of the raging fascism of 1930s and 40s Europe, observing the birth of the Cold War: spies and spying, censorship and censure. People have said that we are in many ways living in the world that Orwell imagined. He was no profit; he was an historian who understood that history does not start or end at a specific point, but develops from the shifts of humanity. Thankfully, he did not think history was boring; he did not consider it as something to be dismissed. He wrote his history for the future.
To mark the paper was the decisive act.
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