History and Memory, by Paul A. Cohen

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Preface

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n a recent book, Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China,1 I examined in some detail the power that an ancient Chinese story had at a number of key junctures in the history of China in the twentieth century. During that span of time, the story’s impact was greatest at moments of protracted crisis, such as the mounting tension with Japan in the years leading up to the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 and the predicament of Chiang Kai-shek’s beleaguered Nationalists on Taiwan after 1949. By presenting a model of the world that incorporated a favorable outcome for the crisis, the right story in these circumstances pointed to a more hopeful future. What especially intrigued me about this process was the resonance or reverberation between story and situation, between a narrative and a contemporary historical condition that prompted those living in it to attach special meaning to that narrative.

Such narratives can in theory be ancient or modern, fictional or factual, religious or secular, indigenous or foreign. On the eve of the 2008 presidential election campaign in the United States, to cite one particularly arresting example of a religious nature, Barack Obama consciously inserted himself into a biblically structured history of the American civil rights movement in which (as he put it in a talk in Selma, Alabama, in March 2007) Martin Luther King Jr. and others represented “the Moses generation”—“the men and women of the movement, who marched and suffered but who, in many cases, ‘didn’t cross over the river to see the Promised Land’—and his own generation, ‘the Joshua generation.’ ”2

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Obama here tapped into a pervasive tendency among African Americans to frame the trajectory of their history through the prism of biblical prophesy. For many who decades earlier had marched and sung in the movement to extend voting rights to black people, exercising the right to vote in the presidential election of 2008, when a black candidate was given a better than even chance of winning, can only be described as a magical moment. “King made the statement that he viewed the Promised Land, won’t get there, but somebody will get there, and that day has dawned,” said the eighty-one-year-old pastor of the Shiloh Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, as he pushed his wife in a wheelchair to the polls on Tuesday morning.3 Apart from the resonance between Moses/ Joshua and King/Obama, there was an additional layer of meaning in the biblical story because although Moses himself didn’t make it to the Promised Land, he was instrumental in freeing the Jews from bondage in Egypt and thus served as a powerful metaphor for the eventual realization of African American liberation—a dream that in American history Martin Luther King Jr. articulated and Barack Obama finally exemplified.

There are many other human communities as well in which stories of a religious character have taken an important part in the lived experience of the community’s members, often serving as a template for this experience. But equally common are instances in which communities have looked for such sustenance to narratives from their own pasts, stories that, although undergoing a greater or lesser degree of reworking over time, had real historical origins. This process has perhaps been unusually prevalent in China, where since time immemorial people have demonstrated a strong affinity for stories dressed in historical garb, but the part taken by such stories—we might call them “history stories” as opposed to stories grounded in religion or myth—has been compellingly demonstrated in many other societies also.

In the process of writing the Goujian book, I became sensitized to the overall pattern of how the interplay between past story and present history functioned, and so I thought it might be interesting to see what happened if, from the multitude of possible examples, I selected a finite number, all relating to a specific set of issues, and looked at them in some depth. In this book, I focus on six countries—Serbia, Palestine/ Israel, China, France, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain—all of which faced severe crises in the course of the twentieth century. The crises I have singled out to deal with in every instance involved war or the threat of

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war, in response to which the populations and states affected drew upon older historical narratives that embodied themes broadly analogous to what was taking place in the historical present. Creative works—plays, poems, films, operas, and the like—often played an important role in the recovery and revitalization of these narratives, and as we would expect in the twentieth century, nationalism took a vital part in each case.

This reverberation between story and history is a phenomenon of no little historical interest. It is, however, exceedingly complex, reflecting deeply on how individual leaders or entire peoples or subgroups within a society position themselves in the space of historical memory. The manner of this positioning varies significantly from instance to instance. Yet running through them all is a constant: the mysterious power that people in the present draw from stories that sometimes derive from remotest antiquity and that, more often than not, recount events that, although making claims to historical accuracy, have been substantially reworked over time and have only the thinnest basis in an actual historical past. The question the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner poses in reference to this storytelling phenomenon, although not referring explicitly to history, is central. “Why,” he asks, “do we use story as the form for telling about what happens in life and in our own lives? Why not images, or lists of dates and places and the names and qualities of our friends and enemies?

Why this seemingly innate addiction to story?”4 The power of story, so common and yet so poorly understood, merits far more scrutiny than it has generally received from historians.5 Bruner, in response to his own question, cautions “Beware an easy answer!”6 My hope is that the multifaceted connections developed in this book between story and history in a range of cultural settings and historical circumstances may serve to illuminate the problem he raises.

Because the older stories never supplied an exact match to what was currently transpiring in history, they were regularly modified to a greater or lesser degree to make the fit closer. This is where popular memory became important. Popular memory—what people in general believe took place in the past—is often a quite different animal from what serious historians, after carefully sifting through the available evidence, judge to have actually taken place. This distinction between memory and history, vitally important to historians, is often blurred in the minds of ordinary folks (that is, nonhistorians), who are likely to be more emotionally drawn to a past that fits their preconceptions—a past they feel comfortable

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and identify with—than to a past that is “true” in some more objective sense. This blurring is of course greatly facilitated when, as a result of a dearth of historical evidence or the unreliability of such evidence as has survived, even professional historians cannot know with absolute confidence what occurred in the past. Such is the case with each of the examples dealt with in the following pages. But, as we shall see again and again, even when there exists a minimum core of certainty about what happened in the past—that Joan of Arc, for instance, was burned at the stake in 1431 or that the forces of the Roman Empire besieged Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple of the Jews in 70 c.e.—the power of the historian’s truth often has a difficult time competing with the power of the right story, even though (or perhaps precisely because) the latter has been hopelessly adulterated with myth and legend. A major objective of the present book is to seek a deeper understanding of why this is so.

Let me say a word or two, finally, about the book’s larger import. As a lifelong historian of China, my work has centered on a single country and culture. I have, of course, drawn comparisons from time to time with other countries and cultures, but mainly for the purpose of deepening and enriching my own and my readers’ understanding of Chinese history.

In this book, although there is a chapter drawn from Chinese history, it is just one case among several, having neither more nor less weight than the chapters devoted to France, Serbia, England, Palestine/Israel, and the Soviet Union. The focus of the book, rather than being on a particular country or culture, is on a transcultural phenomenon—the part taken by story in popular memory—that, if not universal, is certainly encountered in a vast array of places around the world, regardless of the linguistic, religious, social, cultural, and other differences that pertain among the peoples inhabiting these places. What we have, in short, is a different sort of world history, one that instead of being based on conjunctures and influences is manifested in analogous patterns, independently arrived at and very possibly rooted in certain human propensities that transcend the specificities of culture. I will have more to say on this type of history in the conclusion.