In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

USER'S MANUAL xi
implication. A historical novel (if the author were at all capable of
writing fiction) would not have done the job-at least, it would not
have done the same job. And what is not at stake? The author's
tenure, he hopes; his financial situation, he fears; as well as any
attempt at interpreting or understanding the worlds of 1926 (either
intrinsically or from what preceded and followed it). Finally, the
author would not be disappointed if he learned that the worlds of
1925 or 1927 (and so forth) were not much different from those
worlds that he reconstructed for 1926. His book is not about producing
an individual description of the year 1926; it is about making
present a historical environment of which we know (nothing more
than) that it existed in some places during the year 1926.
Question
This is not necessarily and "hermeneutically" the sole question that
a reader needs in order to understand this book; rather, it is the
question that the author thinks pushed him to write: What can we
do with our knowledge about the past once we have given up the
hope of "learning from history" regardless of means and cost?
This-by now lost-didactic function of history (at least, a certain
conception of this didactic function) seems to be closely related to
the habit of thinking and representing history as a narrative. If this
is true, then a postdidactic attitude vis-a-vis our knowledge about the
past must imply the quest for nonnarrative forms of historiographic
representation. But the argument that begins with these steps is
already too "streamlined." The real question behind the question of
what to do with our knowledge about the past is not only the-more
or less technical-question of how to write or represent history. It is
above all the question of what we imagine the past "to be" (the
question about the past as "raw material"), before we even begin to
think about possible forms of its representation.