Encountering the Past: Thoughts on the Literal Representation of Reality

Unlike the opportunities offered to them in the studies made in other disciplines, historians are able to achieve an unequaled sense of detachment from their studies of the past in the way that they are able to manipulate time and space for the purposes of their narrative inquiries. In this sense, historians are the first disciplinary practitioners of abstraction within the confines of existent life, physical, and social science norms. In addition, historians must be prepared at all times to have their abstractions checked for the validity of the sources that they use because after all, theirs is above all else an attempt to convince their readers of the pertinence of their texts.

Let us first consider the element of time and it's relationship to the writing of history. In it's earliest form, history was produced as a chronology of events and actions pertaining to such a wide range of topics including climatological occurrences, agricultural production, and astronomical phases of the night sky. The point at which these observations of various natural phenomena took place is the point in which the human element affixes itself and applies the form of narrative reconstruction in which a beginning, middle and end to a story is related to enable the information being discussed to attain the interest of a human audience. This is the point in which the historian deals with representation in that a rearrangement of events is structured to fit the narrative portrayed and this is the point in which the historian frees his or her text from the constraints of literal representation. This is the region of human consciousness that distinguishes the passage of time within and beyond the human mind

Similarly, the historian rearranges the actualities of space to fit the purpose of the text making up the narrative form. Spacial explanations are constructed from the human artifice of closeness and distance and their witness to detail. A summary example would show that the closer an affair, action, event, or object is observed; the greater the details can be ascertained. Like the distinctions between the scientific purposes represented by microscopes and telescopes; the point of focus informs the narrative. Taken together, the powers granted to the historian by the manipulation of time and space are impressive indeed and offer a valuable starting point for the dissemination of the narrative being produced.

Historians are directed to abstractions as a matter of course due to the impossibility of their task: They cannot literally represent the past because it simply no longer exists and cannot be moved from its place in the past to the present. This paradox simply means that the way we choose to represent the past is limited by the transitory nature of the past and its finite existence. In addition, when we enter to observe the remnants of the past left through time we are objectively becoming a part of what we are attempting to study and we are contaminating what remains of the past with our inquisitions, rendering objectivity impossible and rearranging the truth we are seeking. In other words, as investigators of the past historians cannot escape the past because it is a condition that envelopes us and draws us into it, with or without our intentional forethought or permission and it is only by being immersed in time can we understand it by changing it as it moves about us. That is the key to a historical understanding of the past.

And the flux in linear transitions that we call time is itself but a stream of many different currents that give the appearance of movement to the past, the present, and the future. It can be reasoned that it is only the most elusive of the currents which we call the present that affixes us between the past and future; never to wholly experience either as current event but only as possibility. And so it can be reasoned that present time is perceived as the difference between what it is and how we perceive it through representational means.

On the other hand, space is something entirely different, for it represents a place of occurrences where the passage from past events through the present to the future and represents a type of cartographic understanding of movement which introduces a pattern of mappable recognition to the mind. With this in mind we must consider the metaphor of history as a landscape with all of it's inherent dimensions of height, width, and depth.