Distance and Distances in our View of the Past

It is easier for me to speak to the genesis of my interest in distance and historical representation than to say very much about the inevitable gaps or inconsistencies in my way of working with this concept. Much of my pleasure in writing On Historical Distance came from seeing unexpected questions come to light when I began to re-think of distance in new and more flexible terms. What if historians jettisoned their clichés about distance as objectivity and imagined it instead as a problem of mediation? What if historians bracketed distance as a measure of time in order to consider it in more social or affective terms? The essential test of an idea is its generative appeal. Imagine, then, my pleasure in having been able to discuss my interest in these issues in the company of historians and literary scholars of the caliber of Kenneth Dewar, Marcie Frank, Barbara Leckie, and Allan Greer. Though my remarks are intended to revisit some issues I raised in OHD, I want to stress my admiration for the ways their contributions have extended the discussion well beyond my own. The idea of historical distance is hardly new. On the contrary, historians have staked a great deal on the idea that distance gives us the detachment we need to form a dispassionate view of the past. Indeed, this distinction between supposed objectivity and blind prejudice has often been seen as the divide between cultures that are capable of modern historical perspectives and those that are confined to religious or ideological irrationalism. But we need not press the question this far to recognize the ideological weight carried by the idea of distance — or the potential benefits that may come from liberalizing our conception of this powerful idea. Today, what historiography requires is a set of tools that would help clarify our mediatory practices — and one that does so in a manner that takes account of the broad range of methods and purposes that make up the contemporary field of historical representation. Crucially, too, it will be important to approach this challenge in a spirit of liberal inclusion. Only then can we avoid the temptation to prescriptiveness leads us to embed the desired answer in the opening question. If temporality is conceived in relation to the full range of mediations entailed in historical representation, historical distance is freed from its customary linearity. Rather, our time-sense can be recognized as something molded by a variety of distances (in the plural) reflecting our need to engage with the historical past as (simultaneously) a realm of making, feeling, doing, and understanding. Thus for every historical work, we need to consider at least four basic dimensions of representation as they relate to the problem of mediating distance: 1. The genres, media, and vocabularies that shape a history’s formal structures of representation; 2. The affective claims made by the historical account, including the emotional experiences it promises or withholds; 3. The work’s implications for action, whether of a political or moral nature; 4. The modes of understanding on which the history’s intelligibility depends. These overlapping, but distinctive distances — formal, affective, summoning, and intelligibility — provide an analytic framework for examining changing modes of historical representation. These categories overlap, but to some degree they orient themselves differently in time. The formal, being the realm of making, is the dimension of mediation most fully rooted in present time and it carries that knowledge to the reader. In modern circumstances, when aesthetic form is often chosen for historical effect, “we understand the meaning of such …