Likelihood: an addendum

Yesterday I started reading David Horspool’s entry in the Penguin Monarchs series, Cromwell: The Protector. So far it’s excellent. Considering my recent meditation here about “likelihood” and imagination in historical interpretation and writing, I found this aside (emphasis mine below) particularly striking:

Cromwell’s early biographers, permanently on the lookout for signs of future greatness, seized on the story of a childhood encounter between the young Oliver and the future Charles I, James’s son, on one of these royal visits to Hinchingbrooke. Naturally, the toddler-prince and his slightly older nemesis are meant to have fought at this play-date pregnant with historical significance, and Oliver is meant to have won. If the tale is too good to be true (which is no argument against its being true), then it is still a reminder that, as a guest in his uncle’s house, the young Oliver is likely to have been in the presence of royalty. Despite the gulf in upbringing and expectation that separated Prince Charles and Oliver Cromwell, they did not occupy entirely different worlds.

This is an eminently sensible approach.

I don’t know if it’s the postmodern or literary turn of historical interpretation, deconstructionism, or the generalized hermeneutic of suspicion pervading everything today, but the common assumption about textual evidence seems to be that if a source draws a didactic lesson from an incident, or if an incident conforms to a literary pattern, or has parallels to a commonly known story from the time the source was written down, the incident can and must be treated as invented.

I think that approach is wrong, not only for the reasons of enjoyability and interest—or pure oddity and surprise—that I’ve already written about, but for implicit human reasons: this is not how we experience our own lives. We constantly tell others about odd or surprising things that have happened to us, and we very often enlist shared stories for comparison’s sake. (There was a time in my life when everything that happened to a friend and I was fitted into an incident from “The Office.”) And of course we revisit our memories—finding foreshadowing after the fact in light of later events or drawing lessons from the things that have happened since—all the time. Identifying every instance of these natural human traits as fiction or lies not only betrays and demeans our ancestors, it leaves us with very little to work with.

But then again, based on the way history is used and abused these days, that’s probably the point.