'Also, this formulation "the great man" of course should bring up the question of women; are they included in this description? Or should we describe history as being the story of women wresting back the political power that they lost with the introduction of agriculture and the creation of surplus wealth? Would the gradual and unfinished defeat of patriarchy be the larger story of history? Along with, perhaps, the gradual and uncertain defeat of infectious disease? So that we have been battling micro parasites and macro parasites, eh? The bugs and the patriarchs?'
He smiled at this, and went on to discuss the struggle against the Four Great Inequalities, and other concepts grown out of the work of Kang and al Lanzhou.
After that, Zhu took a few sessions to describe various 'phase change moments' in global history that he thought significant – the Japanese diaspora, the independence of the Hodenosaunee, the shift of trade from land to sea, the Samarqand Flowering, and so forth. He also spent quite a few sessions discussing the latest movement among historians and social scientists, which he called 'animal history', the study of humanity in biological terms, so that it became not a matter of religions and philosophies, but more a study of primates struggling for food and territory.
It was many weeks into the course when he said, 'Now we are ready to come to what interests me extremely these days, which is not history's content, but its form.
'For we see immediately that what we call history has at least two meanings to it, first, simply what happened in the past, which no one can know, as it disappears in time – and then second, all the stories we tell about what happened.
'These stories are of different kinds, of course, and people like Rabindra and Scholar White have categorized them. First come eyewitness accounts, and chronicles of events made soon after things happened, also documents and records – these are history as wheat still in the field, as yet unharvested or baked, thus given beginnings or ends, or causes. Only later come these baked histories, that attempt to coordinate and reconcile source materials, that not only describe but explain.
'Later still come the works that eat and digest these baked accounts, and attempt to reveal what they are doing, what their relationship to reality is, how we use them, that kind of thing – philosophies of history, epistemologies, what have you. Many digestions use methods pioneered by Ibrahim al Lanzhou, even when they denounce his results. Certainly there is great sustenance in going back to al Lanzhou's texts and seeing what he had to say. In one useful passage, for instance, he points out that we can differentiate between explicit arguments, and more deeply hidden unconscious ideological biases. These latter can be teased out by identifying the mode of emplotment chosen to tell the tale. The emplotment scheme al Lanzhou used comes from Rabindra's typology of story types, a rather simplistic scheme, but fortunately, as al Lanzhou pointed out, historians are often fairly naive storytellers, and use one or another of Rabindra's basic types of emplotment rather schematically, compared to the great novelists like Cao Xueqin or Murasaki, who constantly mix them. Thus a history like Than Oo's is what some call "Burmese history", rather literally in this case, but that I would prefer to call "dharma history", being a romance in which humanity struggles to work out its dharma, to better itself, and so generation by generation to make progress, fighting for justice, and an end to want, with the strong implication that we will eventually work our way up to the source of the peach blossom stream, and the age of great peace will come into being. It is a secular version of the Hindu and Buddhist tale of nirvana successfully achieved. Thus Burmese history, or Shambala tales, or any teleological history that asserts we are all progressing in some way, are dharma histories.
'The opposite of this mode is the ironic or satiric mode, which I call entropic history, from the physical sciences, or nihilism, or, in the usage of certain old legends, the story of the fall. In this mode, everything that humanity tries to do fails, or rebounds against it, and the combination of biological reality and moral weakness, of death and evil, means that nothing in human affairs can succeed. Taken to its extreme this leads to the Five Great Pessimisms, or the nihilism of Shu Shen, or the antidharma of Buddha's rival Purana Kassapa, people who say it is all a chaos without causes, and that taken all in all, it would have been better never to have been born.
'These two modes of emplotment represent end point extremes, in that one says we are masters of the world and can defeat death, while the other says that we are captives of the world, and can never win against death. It might be thought these then represent the only two possible modes, but inside these extremes Rabindra identified two other modes of emplotment, which he called tragedy and comedy. These two are mixed and partial modes compared to their absolutist outliers, and Rabindra suggested they both have to do with reconciliation. In comedy the reconciliation is of people with other people, and with society at large. The weave of family with family, tribe with clan – this is how comedies end, this is what makes them comedy: the marriage with someone from a different clan, and the return of spring.
'Tragedies make a darker reconciliation. Scholar White said of them, they tell the story of humanity face to face with reality itself, therefore facing death and dissolution and defeat. Tragic heroes are destroyed, but for those who survive to tell their tale, there is a rise in consciousness, in awareness of reality, and this is valuable in and of itself, dark though that knowledge may be.'
At this point in his lecture Zhu Isao paused, and looked around the room until he had located Bao, and nodded at him; and though it seemed they had only been speaking of abstract things, of the shapes stories took, Bao felt his heart clench within him.
Zhu proceeded: 'Now, I suggest that as historians, it is best not to get trapped in one mode or another, as so many do; it is too simple a solution, and does not match well with events as experienced. instead we should weave a story that holds in its pattern as much as possible. It should be like the Daoists' yin yang symbol, with eyes of tragedy and comedy dotting the larger fields of dharma and nihilism. That old figure is the perfect image of all our stories put together, with a dark dot of our comedies marring the brilliance of dharma, and the blaze of tragic knowledge emerging from black nothingness.
'The ironic history by itself, we can reject out of hand. Of course we are bad; of course things go wrong. But why dwell on it? Why pretend this is the whole story? Irony is merely death walking among us. It doesn't take up the challenge, it isn't life speaking.
'But I suppose we also have to reject the purest version of dharma history, the transcending of this world and this life, the perfection of our way of being. It may happen in the bardo, if there is a bardo, but in this world, all is mixed. We are animals, death is our fate. So at best we could say the history of the species has to be made as much like dharma as possible, by a collective act of the will.
'This leaves the middle modes, comedy and tragedy.' Zhu stopped, held up his hands, perplexed. 'Surely we have a great deal of both of these. Perhaps the way to construct a proper history is to inscribe the whole figure, and say that for the individual, ultimately, it is a tragedy; for the society, comedy. If we can make it so.'
Zhu Isao's own predilection was clearly for comedy. He was a social creature. He was always inviting Bao and some others from the class, including the League's Minister for Health of the Natural World, to the rooms provided for him during his stay, and these small gatherings were sparked by his laughter and curiosity about things. Even his research amused him. He had had a great many books shipped down from Beijing, so that every room of his apartment was filled like a warehouse. Because of his growing conviction that history should be the story of everyone who had ever lived, he was now studying anthologies of biography as a genre, and he had many examples of the form in his apartment. This explained the tremendous number of volumes standing everywhere, in tall unsteady stacks. Zhu picked up one huge tome, almost too heavy for him to lift: 'This is a first volume,' he said with a grin, 'but I've never found the rest of the series. A book like this is only the antechamber to an entire unwritten library.'