ABSTRACT
History, as we’ve seen, is a far more complicated affair than simply reportingthe events of the past. Because it requires the historian to both collect the evidence of those events, and to arrange that evidence into a pattern that can be narrated or retold in such a way that members of an audience can understand it, history pulls in two opposite directions. The act of collection assumes that there is a direct relation between events and the detritus of events-between what happens and the traces left by what happens-and the historian’s task is to reconstruct, insofar as it’s possible, the event from its trace and its effects. The act of
narrating the event, however, is not an act of reconstruction-or not only such an act-but also an act of invention, in which the historian, as a writer, has to give a cogency to the event by describing those aspects of it that are not made clear but obscured by its material leavings, and by drawing conclusions about the gaps left in the event by documents, testimonies, and other arteficts that simply aren’t available (or are available but are incomplete, or faulty, or whose authenticity is in question). What you have, then, in the writing of history is a built-in tension between what happened, which is forever in the past, and how we report what happened, which requires a language of the here and now, and a logic that can be understood in terms of what we know or have had experience with.
