Sphinx

Strangest dream last night. In the middle of a thoroughly conventional sequence of wandering through empty rooms looking for something and being pursued by something equally ill-defined, I found myself reading a book; a book on historiography, indeed, and from the style I’d date it to the eighteenth or possibly early nineteenth century. Unfortunately I can’t remember the exact words, only an overall impression of beautifully modulated periods and cadences, but the gist was clear enough: messing about with historical theory, the history of scholarship and the like was all very well for a young historian who hasn’t yet learnt any sort of discrimination (the phrase used was something like “Clio suitably attired as a fine lady and Clio dressed as a serving wench or lady of the night will alike cause a young man to rise up”), but having sowed a few wild oats in such pastures the true historian will soon find a more suitable match for his station and will settle down in domestic bliss with ‘proper’ history.

I am pretty certain in retrospect that this is not a genuine work, not least because the idea of ‘theory of history’ as separate from and inferior to ‘proper’ history is a much more modern concern – though this does imply that my unconscious is remarkably good at writing pastiche of C18 academic prose. In that case, however, I have to look to myself for some sort of explanation. Am I unconsciously guilty about my continuing habit of chasing after merry young ideas in skimpy theoretical garb, and frequenting disreputable, unhistorical haunts like the American Political Science Association Conference, rather than studying the sorts of subjects appropriate to a Proper Professor of Ancient History? Or, on the contrary, is this dream expressing precisely what I find frustrating in so much conventional historiography by dressing it up as an outmoded system of sexual mores and class prejudice? And I know there’s a straightforward Freudian answer to this, but does my unconscious have to be quite so sexist..?

[Update, 8/9/13]  A little later – too late to save this post from overwhelming solipsism and slight (?) creepiness – I come across a reference in the Grauniad‘s Review section to Mary Beard’s musings, re the Samuel Johnson Prize, on whether there is such a thing as ‘masculine’ non-fiction (incidentally, following on comments in the previous article by Jonathan Coe on ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ approaches to comedy). It’s not, as the writer (James McConnachie) notes, about the gender of the writer, but the nature of the subject and of the approach: “lengthy, focused treatments of weighty topics”. To my mind, McConnachie dismisses this suggestion too quickly: “Invert the gendering, however, and the absurdity is obvious. Are ‘feminine’ subjects short, distracted and lightweight?” No, but the point is that they may often be considered to be such and hence undervalued, and certainly the same is often true of a ‘feminine’ style in non-fiction, eschewing length and weightiness.

McConnachie proposes as an alternative that we should think in terms of straight versus queer non-fiction, but doesn’t offer any clear definition. The examples he presents suggest that ‘queer’ denotes no more than marginality in terms of subject matter (ancient, non-western and cultural history, biographies of anarchists and artists rather than statesmen), but in his discussion of the books actually long-listed for the prize there’s also the implication that crossing genre boundaries or exploring mainstream subjects from the perspective of the margins can equally count as queer, or at least less relentlessly straight. I’m still not sure about this, but if I can revert to solipsism for a moment, I’d happily propose some of my own works as examples of very ‘masculine’ subjects (trade, modernity, Roman imperialism) treated in a fairly non-masculine manner: non-definitive, sketchy, and in my own clunky terms relatively playful. At any rate it’s a less uncomfortable way of characterising my approach to historiography than my unconscious seems inclined to offer…