How trustworthy are they? for what are they good for?—such questions
must be asked by all historians who rely on personal documents, such as
diaries, memoirs or oral history. The first question relates to the reliability
of information gained from sources of this kind, the second concerns
the kind, quality, and level of truth recognizable in, and comprehensible
from, personal documents. Historiography somewhat uniformly declares that
such sources are not adequate for framing a valid concept of truth in the
study of events. This rejection is characteristic not only of traditional
historiography, which —in the wake of Ranke—places all its trust in the
written sources, of these, however, he regards personal documents as the
least reliable. Even historians who favor oral history don’t have a very
different opinion. Two considerations prompt these views. According to
one, oral history sources are in themselves inadequate for the formation
of a general concept of history. As the Cambridge historian Gwyn Prins
remarks in his assessment of Paul Thompson’s oral history monograph The
Edwardians, although the rich oral history source material compiled with
the participation of 500 men and women of different social classes undoubtedly
lends color to the depiction of British social history in the years preceding
the First World War, the main line of the argument, the backbone of describing
social reality is still grounded on the “sensitive use” of written sources.1
According to Prins, Thompson uses the oral history material to supplement
a construction which rests on sources of a different type, essentially
the traditional ones, despite the fact that he, Thompson, is perhaps the
best-known theoretician and champion of oral history today. This
is probably because the information yielded by his interviews allowed no
other conclusions.2
The view taken by András Kovács is very similar. He also
argues that one cannot paint a truthful picture of the past on the basis
of oral accounts. “Can we,” he asks, “regard the oral accounts of participants
in important historical events as historical sources? If we wish to reconstruct
the actual course of events from the episodes spoken of, then the answer
is ‘no’.”3 If all that oral history sources tells us about the past cannot
be fully credited, and, furthermore, if these sources are unsuitable for
giving a comprehensive historical picture, then is it worth struggling
at all with the pursuit of oral history, and does the diligent collecting
and lengthy analysis of the source material really deserve the effort?
I believe the answer is “yes”, as I shall argue in the course of what follows.
The psychology of remembering
The first question goes like this: can everything that remembering tells
about the past in a spoken account be believed? The problem here is constituted
by the epistemology of remembering—that is, the epistemology of the representation
of events that once happened to us, and the experiential events taking
place in our own consciousness. What is the precise value of such remembering,
any recalling of the past, from the standpoint of getting to know reality
and its reconstruction in retrospect? A psychology of remembering (and
not memory) is needed to act as our guide when we attempt to answer these
questions.
To put things simply, in the 20th century two principal trends, or
“classic laws”, of the psychological concept of remembering have emerged.
According to Maurice Halbwachs in a basic work, published in 1925, memory
as a purely personal state of consciousness is merely an image, which relates
to the individual and which is not connected to words. Remembering without
words, however, is not possible, but language is an expression of a relationship
between associated individuals. In other words, it is language itself which
creates the possibility of recalling the past.4
According to the British psychologist Frederic C. Bartlett,5 however,
memory is not a duplicate copy of events that happened to us, or of psychological
processes that once occurred in us, since during remembering we do not
reproduce but construct reality.
Bartlett claims that during remembering, a person constructs with the
aid of a certain “scheme”, and this guides him in finding and organizing
his memories. Recalling is thus the product of a construction based on
a general impression formed through perception and on a matching attitude,
and in return reflects these.
It is not my business to expound Bartlett’s exciting theory, which
has recently become highly fashionable again thanks to cognitive psychology.
However, it is worth noting that personal involvement decisively affects
what we perceive and also how we remember. Bartlett makes a distinction
between the modifying effects of desires and instincts, and interests and
ideals on perception and remembering, and attributes great importance to
the first two in the early stage of organic development, while emphasizing
the latter two on the human level. To sum up, remembering is always nourished
by the present, and this is true even when the memory material produced
by the interviewee, or author of a memoir, is extremely rich.
If, on the other hand, remembering is not simply a more or less accurate
reproduction of the events at one time, then forgetting cannot be explained
away by saying that the ability to recall invariably deteriorates with
the passage of time. Some historians have themselves looked on forgetting
as a kind of mental error. A well-known medievalist writes: “Concerning
forgetting we can even say that with the passage of time not only do memories
give out, but the order of events becomes confused in consciousness, the
flow of the story changes, and names are confused. It can be noticed in
the chronicles that the further back in time they go, the more the credibility
of the description of facts diminishes, but with regard to events that
occurred seventy years before the order breaks down completely, and reality
gets mixed up with products of the imagination.” He later adds by way of
explanation: “The reason is that when people live to their eighties there
are no peers to correct and supplement each other when remembering what
they went through, and to illuminate the cause-and-effect relationships.
In 1111, at the time of King Coloman, they could still find twelve
old men in Nyitra county whose memories stretched back seventy-three years
earlier, to the time of Saint Stephen, the “holy king”. For events that
happened earlier, the chronicles recorded only vague oral traditions.”6
Even if it is not wholly unwarranted to value the accuracy of the memories
of old people more highly than memories mediated by oral tradition, nevertheless
the principal question is this: how do we know which kind of memory is
the more accurate? The author quoted starts out from the unspoken assumption
that perception supplies us directly with authentic experience of reality,
hence a memory of it is much more reliable than any form of mediated memory.
But in the light of the psychological theory briefly summarized earlier,
this hardly appears to be well founded. Bartlett simply writes that perception
is highly selective and schematic even in early childhood. During later
phases of life, when interests and events both become more dominant, this
tendency grows stronger, rather than weaker. Owing precisely to the constructive
character of perception and remembering, the link between different memories
and reality needs to be handled more cautiously than usual. The nature
of this link will be discussed in what follows.
Remembering as narration
The logic of constructing is ensured by textual editing: remembering
itself is an act of narration, systematization and representation. We remember
in such a way that we arrange our memories within the framework of a coherent
story. “The telling of a life story that is the paradigmatic reconstruction
of a life course is therefore not a simple description of events, of things
that happened, but the depiction, presentation, and representation of these.”7
In other words, the “realistic” nature and credibility of the events recalled
are ensured not by their relationship to actual events in the past—a relationship
which cannot be verified anyway, or which can be verified only with great
difficulty—but by their relevance from the point of view of the story.
And since in the narrative structure remembering is, as a matter of course,
retrospective in character, we actually tell not of the experience of the
past processed in a narrative mode, but of a past revealed from the perspective
of the present.
We have an enormous need for this primarily in order to create a self-identity.
The ensuring of the continuity, unity, and integrity of the ego is the
task of the continuously re-edited life story, as stated by the psychosocial
theory of the personality.8 The editing operation is determined by distance
in time from the past and especially by what happened subsequently. Compared
to this, what we once perceived is of secondary importance. Therefore (also)
there is or can be a divergence between what the memories of old men living
in the 12th century preserved from the past, which was their own past as
well, and between that which direct posterity considered important enough
to store in its own memory.
From the above it is clear that the epistemological nature of personal
documents, and oral historical sources in particular, constitute another
argument for the hermeneutic determination characteristic of all types
of historical sources. Taking Gadamer’s idea as a starting point, we can
assume that the past is nothing other than how it presents itself when
seen from the present. This is not to say that the historian simply projects
the present onto the past. This could not occur, because the present itself
also grows out of tradition, since the past lives on in the present as
tradition. Gadamer speaks of Wirkungsgeschichte, by which he understands
that the past, the horizons of people who have lived, and the present,
of those looking back on the past, blend into one. Therefore the demand,
formulated at one time in historical anthropology, that the past should
be reconstructed from the “logical connections” concealed in the sources
is not completely warranted. The concept of Wirkungsgeschichte also suggests
that the historian’s horizon does not offer sufficient guarantee that the
concept of a restorable past is free of all kinds of retrospective projection.9
Given this, we can agree with András Kovács, who doubts whether
events can factually be reconstructed on the basis of oral history accounts.
It is questionable however whether the factuality of history is merely
as much as can be established from “official” written sources. That itself
is in need of evidence.
It needs evidence because Kovács also recognizes that the experiential
world of participants in events (doers, mere survivors, or sufferers) in
some way is also part of the historical event as a fact. “From the accounts
of witnesses to important historical events”, he acknowledges, “we can
gain valuable historical information: sometimes about the event itself,
but first and foremost about how those asked experienced the event in question,
about the meaning the historical event had for them.” Later he summarizes
his position this way: “From their accounts we do not get to know the truth,
although we do get to know their personal truth.”10
This discourse is characteristic in its own way as it perpetuates the
historiographical tradition which says that the historian’s task is to
discover what really happened. The past limited to political history thus
requires first and foremost a narrative of events. In the light of this,
the way things happened and the state of mind, mentality, and attitudes
of those who were participants in the events are both merely secondary
or collateral factors.
Here I do not wish to argue at length against this idea, and shall
only refer to the new concept of social history. Social history serves
as an alternative to political history, a historicization focused
on the modern nation-state. Instead of historicizing of the “imagined community”
of the nation, social history endeavors to reconstruct group identities.
In this it goes as far as to present, as microhistory, the average individual
as the subject of its investigations. This manifests a historiographical
conviction that collectivities cannot be regarded as natural entities in
themselves, subsequently studied by using various analytic concepts (e.
g., class, nation). On the contrary, a collectivity is a social identity
constructed continuously, one which manifests itself by representations
of symbolic actions for both those who participate and those who undertake
the subsequent recognition and understanding.
Therefore we cannot simply speak only of facts that have occurred,
since these facts are actually accounts given in narrative form about the
past itself. And looking at the nature of the thing, there is no really
significant difference between the accounts given by the sources and the
account given by the historian from a greater distance in time. This is
what Hayden White worked out as his well-known and much-debated tropology
theory of representation.11
It is not my business to pursue this issue further and I shall therefore
say only that oral history can help us to a reading of the past that is
just as valid as political history though its importance is not primarily
in explaining but in understanding. Oral history is clearly a good tool
serving this purpose. One could even say that it serves this purpose
better than political history based on written sources.
But there is something else too. Kovács—concurring with the
majority of historians—assumes that written sources are invariably, and
even without taking into account the oral sources available, more suitable
for uncovering the truth than spoken accounts. He draws his conclusion
from an analysis of the rich oral source material connected with a minor
episode from the history of the 1956 Revolution in Hungary. According to
the authors of another case study (also connected with 1956), however,
the situation is never as simple.
Along with Gábor Hanák, his colleague in recording the
interviews, György Kövér, a historian, tried to clarify
in an objective way the facts concerning the death in prison of Géza
Losonczy (an associate of Imre Nagy), the circumstances of his death, and
the precise order of events. He found that the use of the two types of
sources together was indispensable for the subsequent construction (as
opposed to simply the reconstruction) of the most likely story of Losonczy’s
death. This story, they frankly acknowledged, “was unequivocally produced
by the historian as a biographical fact, jointly from the audiovisual and
the written sources, or from the absence of sources”.12
Without oral history and other subjective sources, real history would
sometimes also be presented in a very deficient way. This has so far proved
evident mainly in modern political and diplomatic history, and therefore
special attention has customarily
been paid to the recollections of politicians
and other persons in public life, regardless of whether they are available
in memoir or in interview form. However, as regards the true story of Losonczy’s
death the situation is a little different, since the testimony comes from
people who at that time were relatively unimportant (guards, prison doctors).
More precisely: recollections recorded decades later served, or had to
serve, as decisive evidence about events the “true” story of which could
not be told using the official written sources (because these sources were
silent on the subject, or else they provided a mass of demonstrably false
information). But not (only) for this reason have both oral history and
other subjective historical sources suddenly emerged as important sources,
but perhaps because they serve as an adequate starting-point for historiographical
endeavors which aim at understanding the past. Oral history is merely one
possible source material for such a historiography and within the broader
circle of personal documents, diaries, private letters and memoirs, it
has acquired an outstanding role particularly in connection with the 20th
century. But what is the specific compared to other similarly subjective-type
sources? Before we briefly discuss this question, a look is needed at the
common features of all subjective sources.
What kind of remembering of
what kind of a past?
To all the above mentioned documents I apply the term “subjective
source”, which expresses the fact that those who speak out in them strike
a personal note and talk about themselves continuously. This is the case
even when seemingly public affairs are mentioned, since personal documents
always present external events from the point of view of the narrator and
in the light of his or her interpretation. All this results from the fact
that more recent historical periods, which have provided highly favorable
conditions for the creation of personal sources, have strengthened the
tendency to individualization: “while according to the traditional concept,
life acquires its structure from a succession of external events—for example,
events linked to history or the change of seasons—according to the notion
of the history of the development of man in the modern age, life is organized
around the self and by the self”.13
Thus, being personal is at one and the same time the merit and the
limitation of these sources, which, according to an apt formulation, convey
merely trivial things about important people and important things about
trivial people.14
Oral history and other subjective sources tell us directly about the
personal, the unrepeatable, and the accidental. And if, as Charles Tilly
alleges, it is worrying that in the social sciences (and, of course, also
in historiography), we deduce the structure of the whole from a series
of observations of the individual,15 then the conceptual extension of the
isolated individual case is especially problematic. This is the problem
of representativity, of general validity, an important subject to which,
unfortunately, I cannot devote sufficient space here. We can note, however,
that a biographical narrative gives an account of the particular events
not only of an individual. Since the main function of such narratives is
to present the relevant life-course invested with meaning, “the life history
is a symbolic manifestation of an individual’s personal and social identity”.
I follows that the individual life history narrated “contains much more
a picture of a community, a society, or a historical situation as filtered
through the fabric of an individual’s life” than the world of an individual
in itself.16
But what differences do actually characterize the various types of
personal documents: to what extent are they trustworthy or what is one
or the other good for? How do they differ from each other in their relationship
to reality, or their use for whatever purpose?
If the psychological
observation is true that the process of individual
remembering is not significantly impaired with the passage of time, then
we have no reason to assume that the relived experiences of old people
are further away from reality than the almost synchronous testimonies of
diaries. During perception and in the subsequent short period of time (lasting
for a few minutes), remembering is photographic, but with the passage of
a short time the selection and editing of empirical facts begins. The results
of these processes are the lasting memory traces, which might change later,
but with their existence remembering will always be determined by the construction
of memory material. This is why what we recollect from the distant past
might change with time. It is especially interesting from the point of
view of oral history how our memory alters with age. In children up to
the age of four the amount of lasting memory material is usually small.
This is followed by a transitional stage of life lasting roughly to the
age of eleven in which, in the majority of children, memory still records
empirical reality with photographic accuracy, but at the same time they
are particularly susceptible to rote learning, which is already rare in
adults. Following the eleventh year, and especially the thirtieth year,
the ability of direct recalling (photographic memory) rapidly declines,
while the whole store of memory becomes ever richer. Thus, the ability
to remember in old people (if they are of sound mind, of course) is not
at all inferior to that of young adults, as it is regulated by substantially
unchanged mental mechanisms.17
It follows logically that an experience put down in writing contemporaneously
with events, or recalled (in diaries or in private letters) in the period
immediately following its occurrence is on the one hand not necessarily
the same as the experience related when remembering a good deal later on,
and on the other hand does not yield the same story. The difference between
the two stems partly from the two ways in which memory operates, and partly
from the fact that in the beginning the narrative character is not yet
as decisive as it afterwards becomes. This is simply because the systematization
of events, more closely of the experiences acquired through events, is,
at the moment of perception, not a finalized issue yet. Later, memory-images
activated from a perspective of another kind can be arranged into a more
coherent construction, which, due to the intentional—that is, desired—remembering
can activate images of the past which then, in the flow of events, had
not yet properly risen to the level of consciousness. There is something
else still: the especially rich remembering in connection with traumatic
and dramatic events can acquire an increased significance afterwards, and
at the same time can become richer in content as a consequence of the fact
that a given event can only subsequently be identified as having exceptional
importance in the life of an individual. This is when—as we say—we were
not yet aware, and we could still be aware, of the true significance of
things at the time they happened. This fact generates a strong psychological
motivation for the reliving of the experience, and brings to our mind things
in connection with it to which we did not attribute any significance at
the time these events occurred. Therefore, even if we had the opportunity
to remember (for example, by keeping a diary), we would not have mentioned
the event. And, of course, forgetting also acquires a role at this point.
According to Halbwachs the richness of the memory-image is determined by
its relation to the “memory frame”. If these frames, or a part of them,
disappear with time, then forgetting inevitably occurs.
Finally, the directedness of remembering is an important issue—in other
words, how empirically exact and detailed remembering is, as well as what
kind of narration conveys the re-lived experience, and how much both depend
on the genre characteristics of personal documents. The diary is the most
personal, and the most intimate, form of manifestation, one which—ignoring
a few exceptions—is not written for someone else. Therefore the fashioning,
the tailoring of contents to external references, is least apparent in
the case of diaries.
With the memoir the situation is somewhat different, as the author
intends it for publication. In it a “structured self-image” (Péter
Niedermüller) speaks, which tries to accord with current social conventions
(in language as well as in the norms of the public acceptability of the
individual’s life path). Finally, directedness from the outside is entirely
forced in the case of the interview (oral history), where the interviewer
directly and personally represents society and constantly asserts its presence.
Here one cannot speak of an autonomous rememberer: in this interactive
process the interviewer himself or herself emerges as a text editor and
shares this role with the interviewee. Although: “An interview is not a
dialogue, or a conversation. The whole point is to get the informant to
speak.”18
Nevertheless: this kind of social situation makes the person re-living
the experience “vocationally” aware of the expectations of society in a
direct form, and prompts him or her to meet these expectations as far as
possible. As a matter of course he or she can only speak about things the
interviewer is interested in. Or, with his questions, occasional contributions,
and corrections, the interviewer shifts the interviewee’s account in a
particular direction.
If the highly fragmented and raw narrative of a diary is a so-called
integral part of the past (which, of course, we understand from the horizon
of the present),19 then its narrative as oral history is an intellectual
construction belonging more to the present. From this, however, the lesson
to draw is never that oral history is entirely worthless as source material,
but that in its “factual material” it differs from the contents of both
memoirs and diaries. Moreover, unlike these, it matches more those expectations
which society usually has of the historical representation of the past
by way of a historian.
This is the reason why the narrative of oral history is a rather close
neighbor to historiographic narration, and this even explains the increase
in historical works composed of structured oral history narrations linked
by the comments of a historian.
What kind of memory of what kind of past makes oral history interviews
and other personal sources indispensable documents? In the light of this
source material a notion of history is formed by the historian which imperceptibly
combines myth and reality. Orally narrated remembering tells in an authentic
way both about myth, which is as deeply embedded in the real experience
of the past as it is in the experience of the present, and about the events
of the real world.
The historian is thus given the exceptional opportunity to open a window
onto the past process of a continuous change both of the collective and
individual consciousness, in which facts and fantasy, present and past,
all have their own places. “The mythical elements in memory, in short,
need to be seen both as evidence of the past, and as a continuing historical
force in the present.”20 This opens a path for a historiography which seriously
reckons with the force of traditions (collective myth), and at the same
time is fully aware of the relativity of its own narrative constructions.
* Taken from Budapesti Könyvszemle—BUKSZ, Fall 1998, pp. 297–302.
1 Gwyn Prins, “Oral History”. In: Peter Burke, ed.: New Perspectives
in Historical Writing. Pennsylvania., The Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1992, pp. 134–135.
2 Thompson is the author of the best handbook so far on the methodology
of oral history, The Voice of the Past, first published in 1978. He also
edits the scholarly journal Oral History.
3 András Kovács, “Szóról szóra”
(From Word to Word). In: BUKSZ, Spring 1992, p. 94.
4 Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris:
Alcan, 1925.
5 F. C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology.
Cambridge, 1932.
6 György Györffy, “Múlt—emlékezet—történetírás”
(Past—Memory—Historiography). In: Magyar Tudomány, May 1992, p.
516.
7 Péter Niedermüller, “Élettörténet
és életrajzi elbeszélés” (Life Story and Biographical
Narrative). In: Ethnographia, 1988/3–4, p. 381.
8 János László, Szerep, forgatókönyv,
narratívum. Szociálpszichológiai tanulmányok
(Roles, Scripts, Narratives. Studies in Social Psychology). Budapest: Scientia
Humana, 1998,
p. 139.
9 Gábor Gyáni, “Mirôl szól a történelem?
Posztmodern kihívás a történetírásban”
(What is History About? The Postmodern Challenge in Historiography). In:
2000, January 1998, pp. 40–41
10 András Kovács, op. cit., p. 94.
11 Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth
Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973; idem:
Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978; idem: The Content of the Form. Narrative
Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987.
12 Gábor Hanák–György Kövér, “Biográfia
és oral history” (Biography and Oral History). In: Tibor Valuch,
ed., Hatalom és társadalom a XX. századi magyar történelemben
(Power and Society in Twentieth-Century Hungarian History). Budapest: Osiris–1956-os
Intézet, 1995.
13 Martin Kohli, “Gesellschaftszeit und Lebenszeit. Der Lebenslauf
im Strukturwandel der Moderne”. In: J. Berger, ed., Die Moderne Kontinuitäten
und Zäsuren. Göttingen: Schwartz, 1986, p. 185.
14 Gwyn Prins, op. cit., p. 120.
15 Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons.
New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984, pp. 25–26.
16 Péter Niedermüller, op. cit., pp 386–387.
17 Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past. Oral History. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988, p. 116.
18 Paul Thompson, op. cit., p. 209. Incidentally, Chapter 7 of the
book offers a useful methodological guide to the conducting of oral interviews.
19 See also Gábor Gyáni, Az utca és a szalon.
A társadalmi térhasználat Budapesten 1870–1940 (The
Street and the Salon. The Use of Social Space in Budapest, 1870–1940).
Budapest: Új Mandátum, 1998, pp. 56–57.
http://www.c3.hu/scripta