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10Marina Grigoryeva 4th year student Belgorod State University,
The Role of History in life in Waterland by Graham Swift
‘History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is’, said once R.G. Collingwood. [1]
Actually even a man of great intellect (though there had been thousands of them in all the centuries) didn’t guess this one of the main disturbing the mankind riddles about the essence of history and didn’t prove whether it’s important or not for a common man and his ordinary life.
On that score the protagonist of the novel Waterland, the teacher of this ‘notorious’ history, Tom Crick, had his own personal theory. On the one hand, history had always been functioning as a defense against fear. Understanding his students’ terror that ‘all is nothing’, that they were afraid of a nuclear war and of a bomb which would start it off; to some extent taking into consideration this helplessness he decided to mix the fact and story-telling, bringing his ‘fairy tales’ and his historical ‘why’ together. One of the history’s goals, from his point of view, was to help mankind to ‘drive out fear’. The following words crown the reasoning:
‘I don’t care what you call it -explaining, evading the facts, making up meanings, taking a larger view, putting things into perspective, dodging the here and now, education, history, fairy-tales, - it helps to eliminate fear.
On the other hand, thus substituting the abstract history by his own personal one, turning his lessons into story-telling sessions, Tom wanted his students to understand that only there and then mattered.
History was nothing but ‘explaining a way of avoiding the facts’. Such changing or destroying nation’s lives great events like the French Revolution, armaments race, World War I and even World War II should have been considered only as current happenings, while concrete person’s reality predominated. The story of the man, of his family, of his area were more important and essential than these ‘the other world’s lines’, because the history functioned for Tom Crick as a means of explaining the events of his life so the present ‘here and now’ made sense to him.
From my point of view, the idea of history as reality has the right for existence. It is also a necessity to keep asking question ‘why’ which is one of the main in this science, because ‘the seeking of reasons itself inevitably is a historical process’. ‘Historia’ is always an inquiry that shows us somebody’s mistakes (fatal or not), forming our sense of wrong. So, we shouldn’t deny the past, the chain of world’s events. It teaches us to avoid ‘illusion and make believe, to lay aside dreams, moonshine, cure-alls, wonder-workings, pie-in-the-sky - to be realistic’.
Reference URL: http//www. age-of-the
sage.org/philosophy/history/r_g_collingwood_history.html
