Tusitala & History: Narrative Patterns in WWI Historiography

ACADEMIA Letters
Tusitala and the history-tellers
Juan Luis Fernandez Vega
A note on three common patterns between stories and historiography
Tusitala and the three major narrative patterns.
It would be hardly controversial to assume that the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894) has been one of the best storytellers in Western literature. His native audience
in Samoa baptized him as Tusitala or “writer of stories”. One day, in his Vailima estate in the
island of Upolu, Stevenson explained to Graham Balfour, a cousin who had joined him and
would become his first biographer:
“There are, so far as I know, three ways, and three ways only, of writing a story.
You may take a plot and fit characters to it, or you may take a character and
choose incidents and situations to develop it, or lastly (…) you may take a certain
atmosphere and get action and persons to express and realise it”.1
This triad of patterns might be valid not only for stories of fiction, but also for scientificminded, academic historical narratives. There has been a number of attempts to connect
(fictional) stories and (factual) histories. The most renowned is surely Hayden V. White’s,
drawing on the literary theory of Northrop Frye. Less known, yet perhaps more efficient,
was the historian Dale H. Porter’s application to historical works of the types of narrative
1
Balfour, Graham. (1901). The life of Robert Louis Stevenson. Volume 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
p. 168-169, my italics.
Academia Letters, April 2021
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Juan Luis Fernandez Vega, [email protected]
Citation: Fernandez Vega, J.L. (2021). Tusitala and the history-tellers. Academia Letters, Article 938.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL938.
1
plots classified by the literary critic Norman Friedman: of Action or Fortune; of Character;
of Thought.2
Our own standpoint, following authors such as Max Weber, Heinrich Rickert, Jörn Rüsen,
Reinhart Koselleck, and Mary Fulbrook, is that historical narratives are made of several theoretical layers: naming, emplotment, and instances of abstract models.3 As Tusitala’s plotcharacter-atmosphere taxonomy is akin to Friedman’s fortune-character-thought, we intend
to explore their validity in historical narratives. This exercise would show deep commonalities between science, literature, and everyday life storytelling. We will fittingly invoke some
bibliography about the First World War, but consider this analysis to be also useful for other
historiographical topics.
Take a plot.
One might safely contend that every historical narrative has, at least, a plot. But the point here
is the existence of plot-centered histories: the train of events is the core of the text, and characters and ideas or contexts are just at the service of this global process. In WWI historiography,
this preeminence adopts two very different approaches. The first takes the outbreak in the summer of 1914 as a fateful chain of decisions, given imperialistic rivalries. What establishes the
web of events is just the interaction between rational agents. Such was the interpretation by
the historian Brian S. Fay, the Marxist thinker Lev Trotsky, or the politologists Geller and
Singer. The second viewpoint, in turn, takes the outbreak as the result of a heap of miscalculations. As Paul Kennedy abridged: “Things going wrong”. Ned Lebow, Frank Zagare,
Imanuel Geiss, Luigi Albertini or David Stevenson have excelled in this kind of emplotment,
whose most recent representatives are Christopher Clark and Margaret MacMillan.4
2
White, Hayden V. (1973). Metahistory. The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press. Porter, Dale H. (1981). The emergence of the past. A theory of historical
explanation. Chicago and London: The Chicago University Press. Friedman, N. (1955). ‘Forms of the plot’, in
Sevick, Ph. (ed). (1967). The theory of the novel. New York: The Free Press, p. 145-166.
3
See on this topic Fernández Vega, Juan L. (2020). El arsenal de Clío: el problema de la escritura de la historia
en la cultura occidental, 1880-1990. Zaragoza: Genueve [English: Clio’s arsenal: the problem of history-writing
in Western culture, 1880-1990]. Also ‘Story makes history, theory makes story: developing Rüsen’s Historik
in logical and semiotic directions.’ History and Theory, 57 (1):75-103 (March 2018). And ‘Darwin goes to
Sarajevo: evolutionary theories underlying a century of historiography about the outbreak of WWI’. Moving the
Social: Journal of Social History and the History of Social Movements. 58 (October 2017), p. 81-106. Finally,
‘Spain and the doctors: historical theories as diagnoses in national psychopathology.’ Tempo, 25(3), p. 693-714.
Epub October 21, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1590/tem-1980-542x2019v250309.
4
Clark, Christopher. (2012). The sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914. London: Allen Lane. Fay, S.
B. (1966). The origins of the world war. 2nd ed. revised. New York: The Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan.
Academia Letters, April 2021
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Juan Luis Fernandez Vega, [email protected]
Citation: Fernandez Vega, J.L. (2021). Tusitala and the history-tellers. Academia Letters, Article 938.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL938.
2
Take a character.
Yet the first plots regarding the origins of WWI were, above all, histories about characters:
supreme decision-makers (the Kaiser, the chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, the prime minister
Asquith, the Czar, Poincaré) or collective individuals (Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary).
The narrative often assumes a German guilt in the Kriegesausbruch, and it takes the shape
of a gigantomachy between empires. This is the kind of narrative in authors such as Pierre
Renouvin, Fritz Fischer, Jacques Droz, Bernadotte E. Schmidt, and also Karl Kautsky.5
Character-centered histories focus on the diplomatic game of geopolitics and assert a
strong psychological causality (someone wanted war). However, the more players enter the
field, the more the action shifts towards the “take a plot” model, because a denser interaction
blurs the predominance of only one or two antagonists. Therefore, early who-did-it histories
gave way to why-this-happened histories. But eventually, historians reached the broader issue
on how-was-this-possible-at-all histories: atmosphere.
Take an atmosphere.
It has been suggested, with an abundance of evidence, that WWI was (and it was deemed in
its time) an “improbable war”. What materialized itself in the train of events and individual
decisions leading to the outbreak was a sudden change of atmosphere over the summer of 1914.
The analysis of social and cultural trends, and of the feelings of the polities, is paramount in
this third kind of histories. The reader will find fine examples of it in the contributions to
Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson’s book, in Robert Mulligan’s viewpoint, and in the
nuanced analysis by Hew Strachan.6
Geller, D. S. and SINGER, D. J. (1998). Nations at war. A scientific study of international conflict. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. MacMillan, Margaret. (2013). The war that ended peace: how Europe abandoned
peace for the First World War. London: Profile Books. Stevenson, D. (2004). Cataclysm: The First World War
as political tragedy. New York: Basic Books.
5
Droz, J. (1973). Les causes de la Première Guerre Mondiale. Essai d’historiographie. Paris: Seuil. Kautsky,
K. (1920). The guilt of William Hohenzollern. London: Skeffington. Mombauer, A. (2002). The origins of the
First World War. Controversies and consensus. Harlow: Longman. Renouvin, P. (1939). La crise européenne et
la Grande Guerre: 1904 à 1918. 2e édition revue et augmentée. Paris: Alcan.
6
Afflerbach, H. and Stevenson, D. (eds) (2012). An improbable war? The outbreak of World War I and
European political culture before 1914. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Joll, J. and Martel, G. (2007.) The
origins of the First World War, 3rd edition. Harlow: Pearson Longman. Mulligan, W. (2010). The origins of the
First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stevenson, D. (1997). The outbreak of the First World
War: 1914 in perspective. London: MacMillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press. Strachan, H. (2004). The outbreak
of the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Academia Letters, April 2021
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Juan Luis Fernandez Vega, [email protected]
Citation: Fernandez Vega, J.L. (2021). Tusitala and the history-tellers. Academia Letters, Article 938.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL938.
3
So far, we have seen the validity of Tusitala’s patterns for comprehending academic histories about WWI. History-tellers, apart from archival research that supports their contents,
act just like storytellers, when it comes to draw the great picture or synthesis. That is not to
say that the historian is a scientist when doing research, and a novelist when writing her/his
book. It is rather to observe that both histories and stories are expressions of deep modes of
interpreting or modeling the course of events. There are three competing hermeneutical keys
(tragic, epic, lyric), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s narrative theory is a reflection about this
logico-linguistic fac.
Hidden philosophies in narrative patterns.
Tragic hermeneutics is plot-centered. Individuals and peoples are carried away by Fortune:
their interaction leads to unintended results. Human beings are unable to control their common
destiny. Disasters ensue.
Epic hermeneutics understands history as the work of heroes and antiheroes. We should
just think about the way in which academic histories of art, philosophy or religion are written.
There is no “history of Flemish forgettable painters of the seventeenth century”, or “history
of the most unreadable Italian philosophers”. Cultural history, as a tale about achievements,
tends to be an epic pattern all the time.
Finally, lyric hermeneutics gives all the credit to the context and the collective feelings.
History evolves according to changes in life perspectives. A good instance of this viewpoint
would be the conversion of late Roman antiquity to Christianity, or the sentiments aroused in
the less developed contemporary world by theories about socialism and postcolonialism.
Taking account of these elemental philosophies of history, we find that some histories
will be more tragic, or epic, or lyric, even containing secondary elements from the other categories. In historiographical terms: more pragmatic, more psychological, or more sociological
narratives. History-tellers, just like storytellers, are subject to our deepest hermeneutical management of human experience. Hence a useful methodological clue for historians: we should
notlean too much towards one of the three narrative patterns.
Stevenson himself wrote a narrative on the Samoan struggles of 1883-1892. As a historyteller, he showed a keen interest in a balanced mix of plot, characters, and atmosphere, even if
perspective was somehow lacking, because, as the troubles still continued at that time, it was
“a piece of contemporary history in the most exact sense”.7
7
Stevenson, Robert Louis. (1892). A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, p. 1.
Academia Letters, April 2021
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Juan Luis Fernandez Vega, [email protected]
Citation: Fernandez Vega, J.L. (2021). Tusitala and the history-tellers. Academia Letters, Article 938.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL938.
4