ABSTRACT
Experimental history self-consciously uses different voices, sometimes multiple. As always the historian has at some point to grapple with the problems of finding/giving a form to explain what went on in the past. This is at the heart of the issue of history’s ‘aboutness’. This process is especially difficult and complex in the face of the sublime, usually ambiguous and always tentative nature of the past. Cognizant of what he calls ‘the context of the postmodernist sensibility’, Chris Ward’s ‘Impressions of the Somme: an experiment’ uses, as he says, one of the major battles of the First World War to investigate the difficulties of representation in history – content explicated through its form? Ward’s experiment works within the context of the following problems: the historian’s motivation and intentions; the constitution and instrumentality of evidence; the relationship of that evidence to experience; and the attribution of meaning, whether by historians, commentators, writers or participants. In this experiment Ward is attempting to avoid the ‘cause-event-consequence’ continuum of much academic history and, as he says, adopts instead a variety of techniques and voices – poetry, prose, listings, imaginary conversations, raw quotations, and distortions of chronology. These are designed by him not only to focus your – the reader’s attention – on the event itself, but also to overtly exhibit the ways in which the historian’s motivation shapes historical explanation and writing. In his Afterword, he explains his motivations as being a combination of boredom with conventionally framed forms of historical representation and his argument that history is a literary and imaginative rather than an author-less positivist activity. He maintains that the past can only be explored more fully by occasionally abandoning the formal discourse of history in order to re-capture the event. As he says, the profession encourages the search for new content while discouraging innovations in form.
