We must learn from the good in our history, as well as from the bad and the downright evil

Might it not be possible to enjoy our history and to celebrate at least some of the good that has come from it?

There are many beliefs about just what history is. JM Coetzee and many post-modernists argued that history, in many ways, is not unlike fiction. Their argument, if I can reduce it to a few words, is that history is a set of cosy stories we tell ourselves to justify current (normally pretty shoddy) behaviour. History, and the way it is told, is simply an ideological exercise. It is a narrative told by the winners.

Not far from this is what the philosopher RG Collingwood referred to as “magic”. That is a set of narratives or beliefs that give a society confidence about the present and the future.

The other side of the coin is that history is a story developed from a series of facts: Germany and Russia invaded Poland in 1939; atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the National Party won the 1948 South African election with only 37.7% of the vote, etc etc.

There is, no doubt, some truth to all of these arguments. But they all agree that history is about narratives. We now live in an age where history, constructed out of some facts, generally tells us that things in the past were bad. It tells us that this bad past is the main reason our current world is so stuffed.

Of course, one can’t deny that a lot of truly awful things happened in our past and that a great deal of this shoddy, genocidal and generally xenophobic, patriarchal behaviour is the reason for many of our current troubles.

However, what is truly strange about all of this, is that there are a group of people these days who see the past as entirely bad and themselves as entirely good. Can it really be that we live in an age of saints, while in the past there were only sinners?

The literary theorist Rita Felski has argued that we should be careful of falling into the trap of what she calls “the hermeneutics of suspicion”. That is, that works of literature are simply filled with a past that was generally bad, misogynistic, classist and racist. Is the task of theorists and honest readers simply to unravel just what a terrible person Jane Austen’s Lizzy Bennet really was? Bennet and Mr Darcy, after all, participated in an utterly awful colonial and patriarchal society which enabled them to live such a congenial and financially carefree life.

Read in Daily Maverick: “Why history matters: In which we break the first rule of modern journalism… and reply to the comments”

Felski cautiously notes that at least some of these concerns are true. But is this solely why we read literature? Do we also not read Pride and Prejudice because it is a cracking good read, written in jaunty style, with wit, humour and remarkable social awareness? Do we not read it because Lizzy Bennet is one of the most intelligent, single-minded women to haunt the pages of any book?

Yes, Felski suggests, literature is about understanding the questionable and bad social structures of the past. But it is also about that truly baffling mystery of aesthetics, about joy, heartache, love and its failure; the victory of the unlikely and marginalised, or conversely, the triumph of the wicked.

No single narrative