Performing the past: material culture and the dialogical museum LUKE GIBBONS
Introduction1 “What we could call the psychoanalytic truth, or the truth of performance, cannot be captured in historical facts. More specifically, the truth of trauma … is lost even in the most astounding statistics.” kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition2 When Bernard Bailyn, perhaps the most eminent American historian of his generation, was asked on one occasion about his ‘recommended reading’ in history, his choice may have come as a surprise to many: there is a book about Irish history that I have recommended to any number of students, a memoir by David Thomson called Woodbrook – which is the name of an estate in Ireland where he, as an Oxford history student, came to tutor a young girl and fell in love with both the girl and Ireland. It is a memoir of a love affair, but at the same time, because Thomson is a historian, a commentary on Irish history. I think it is a remarkable book, a romantic tale and historically imaginative and interesting. So, when I talk about the way in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish history telescopes into contemporary problems, I tell students to read Thomson’s Woodbrook.3
— 1. This article is based on a talk presented at the Irish Museums Association Annual Conference, Museums & Memory: Challenging Histories on 22nd February 2014, Waterford 2. Oliver, K. (2001) Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 92. 3 Bailyn, B. (1994) On the Teaching and Writing of History. University of New England, Hanover, 23.
It is interesting to note the terms of Bailyn’s recommendation of Thomson’s remarkable book: enthusiasm, personal involvement both intellectually and emotionally, and not least, the imaginative power to bring the past into dialogue with the present. yet Woodbrook is far from being a conventional historical text – some chapters have footnotes appropriate to social history, but the formal shifts in narrative bring it closer to a memoir, diary, or even the kind of fiction associated with Proust, joyce or (Thomson’s contemporary and neighbour), john McGahern. What comes across from Woodbrook is not just information, data, or facts, as positivist historical method would have it, but the lived textures of the past as it impinges upon the present (the book was written almost forty years after the events). Performing the past: material culture and the dialogical museum
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