Hume’s “1688” and the single-year genre of historiography

Abstract

Hume’s “1688” and the single-year genre of historiography David Mazella The rediscovery of the year as organizational device Because many of the essays in this special issue are organized in one way or another around the year “1688,” it might be useful to step back and consider some of the implications of literary historians’ use of the year as an analytic and organizational concept. In other words, what does it mean to collect and organize a number of literary works by year? What does it mean to trace the organizing function of the year within a particular work? Attending to this barely-noticed concept of the “year” might yield some important insights into our historical and critical practice, since the year--unlike other organizational categories like “author,” “genre,” or more recently, “period”--has received relatively little sustained attention from literary scholars.1 Yet our temporal perceptions of most literary-historical categories, including our perceptions of emergence, succession, acceleration, duration, proximity, diffusion, or finitude, are all predicated on literary history’s underlying organization of information on an annual basis. Hence, literary histories typically tell their stories through chronological conventions like the birth and death dates of authors, the publication dates of contributions to a genre, or the chronological boundaries of a particular literary period or movement. Indeed, this essay will be using many of these conventions to help readers place the texts and events it discusses in some relation with one another. So let that stand as the first observation: marking some document or event by year does not merely locate it horizontally on a chronological timeline, but positions it relative to other dates, texts, and events, so their spatial clustering or dispersion can be recognized more readily. In this respect, we may note that a yearly date like 1688 is essentially a quantitative term, a measure, allowing us to readily gauge historical distance by the year. [End Page 153] The usefulness of the year as organizing device does not end there. Literary histories’ organization of information by year also helps to align temporally the production and reception of literary texts and genres with non-literary documents, artifacts, and events, and to connect literary history with other kinds of documentary and historical writings and their associated chronological series. As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has observed, it is “years (not months or days) [that are] used in standard classifications of printed materials (as well as other artifacts and even of ‘events’)” (428). In this respect, the yearly date has become a tool, though one with distinct conceptual implications, for the aggregation and synthesis of knowledge in literary and other kinds of historical studies. Moreover, its utility as a general organizational classification for both verbal and visual printed materials may boost its effectiveness as a tool for wide-ranging discovery--as well as synthesis--across disparate fields. The year, then, seems to have assumed its centrality for organizing public time because it helped sort out dates both “above” and “below” it in scale, assembling years upwards into decades and centuries, and assembling months and days downwards into particular years. The year, nonetheless, seems to remain the most basic unit of historical study, from which other units and categories are derived (Wilcox 4). Thus, what critics of René Wellek’s generation called the eighteenth-century’s “gradual awakening of the historical sense” (Wellek 24) becomes in more recent scholarship an increasingly unified, continuous and sustained temporal and chronological narrative organization of printed materials leading to a nationally bounded and cultivated “historical culture” producing a host of new and transformed historiographic genres, notably literary and other kinds of narrative histories (Woolf, Social Circulation 395; Phillips, Society 33-59). All these narrative genres, however, were assisted by the humble though indispensable convention of organizing information by chronological year. It is the largely tacit, unremarked nature of its organizing force that makes the year both an important part of historical culture as well as a fundamental chronological infrastructure for subsequent developments in historiography. For all its centrality to historical scholarship, the ubiquity and invisibility of the year kept it from receiving much investigation in its own right until twentieth-century historians and literary scholars began to...