Drawing and deconstructionist history (I did a talk for the UoG Illustration students)

Today I had the honour of giving a talk to the illustration students at the University of Gloucestershire! I did the first in a series of Visiting Artist Talks in the massive lecture hall at Francis Close Hall. Huge thanks to Tom and Kim for inviting me and facilitating the event, and thanks to the illustrators for coming to watch and listen (and especially to those who played bingo and/ or gave me your feedback!)

The itinerary!

I started my BA in Illustration at the University of Gloucestershire in 2012. In my final year, our then head of department KP wondered about setting up the MA, for which I was well game - I wanted to see where I could take my illustration practice next, how I could push it in new directions, how I could use it for research. Then, towards the end of the MA, we started wondering about how the Illustration department could do a PhD - then there was a year of trying to get it off the ground - and then eventually, in the autumn of 2018, I started it!

This is the bit where I ask everyone if they've heard of Charles Dickens. Then I ask if they've heard of/ read/ seen an adaptation of/ etc Nicholas Nickleby. That's most people's gateway into the Yorkshire schools.

Here's where I give a brief overview of the Yorkshire boarding schools - popular from c.1750 to c.1850 - usually aimed their adverts at middle-class parents in cities (often London) - reasonably priced (compared to some schools like Eton and Harrow and that) - also the curriculum is broader (and more useful) than those expensive schools, covering stuff that you'd need if you're going into a mercantile profession or whatever.

(Exactly 203 years ago William was in London, meeting parents and new pupils, haha wow)

Blog post about my case study here! 

During the last year of my BA (2014-15), for my final major project, I researched, wrote, and drew a nearly-finished graphic novel about the terrible misadventures of a fictional boy at Bowes Academy. I went to archives, did site visits, generally had a great time... Unfortunately I was still heavily influenced by Dickens's Dotheboys Hall, and I had no idea how historians do what we do (I thought it was all about Finding The Facts haha wtf) and the result, Bad Form, contained interpretations that I no longer support. (I'm glad I never finished it and it never saw the light of day.)

 

One of my reasons for doing my PhD about this case study was to see how my interpretations had changed. This slide shows how my depictions of Bridget and William changed (and my drawing style too). At the top of the slide is a panel from Bad Form (2014-15), and then in front we've got Bridget and William from about 2019.

This was great - I asked the illustrators to shout their ideas at me, and fortunately they all said very sensible things about creating interpretations, going on site visits, viewing things in museums, and interviewing people who were involved or whose relatives were involved. I am relieved and delighted to say that nobody came out with any nonsense about 'finding the facts to tell the true story about what really happened in the past'!

We make evidence-based interpretations of traces of the past, using a load of other considerations! Unfortunately not everybody likes to acknowledge these. It's usually your more traditional historians who tend to forget themselves and their subjectivity and creativity and imagination and such in creating their interpretations.

I've got a blog post about Alun Munslow's categorisation of historians here!

The past is gone and we can't get it back (which is not a bad thing when we think about various embarrassing situations). History is what historians make: it's how we communicate our ideas about the past.

Some of the things I used in creating my interpretation of William Shaw (blog post on that here).

When Dickens and Phiz went to Bowes, it's extremely likely that they saw Shaw, and used him as visual inspiration for the villainous Wackford Squeers, who, like William, is another short and peculiar one-eyed schoolmaster who wears a lot of black. Some of Shaw's old pupils recognised him in Phiz's illustrations, and Phiz's son asked him what the original was like, and Phiz said that the illustrations were "not unlike him". So I used Phiz's Squeers, translated him into my drawing style, then de-exaggerated him to get an interpretation of what William's face might've been like.

Horatio Lloyd had gone to Bowes Academy in the early 1820s (evidently around or after the ophthalmia scandal, as he described William as having damage to one eye), and grew up to become a famous actor and wrote an autobiography which came out in instalments in the Glasgow Weekly Herald in 1886 (read it here). He described the schoolmaster, which gave me clues about his physical appearance, including things to search for in museum collections online so I could give him clothes (extant costume and contemporary prints are your friends).

I don't like to build my characters one at a time - if I create a bunch all at the same time, I can bounce ideas around between them and make them contrast against each other more effectively. (And I like to revisit them and change them later! Never leave your characters set in stone - history is a constantly changing discipline, interpretations change all the time.)

When I was building William, one of the others I was building at the same time was his head usher Charles Hopkins Mackay - I created Charley as my representation of my ideas about him. We don't have any evidence about what anybody else in my case study looks like apart from William (and some mid- to late-19th century photographs of Mary Ann and Jonathan, two of his and Bridget's children, and some of his ex-pupils). So nothing about Charley - so that means I have free rein to make him look how I like! (Within reason, I'd need to provide good explanations if I start doing weird things like turning him into a wolf or something hahaha whoops)

I wanted to use contrasting character designs to explore the potential power balance between the two schoolmasters. William is at the top of the hierarchy in Bowes Academy, and is physically small, Charley has less authority - what happens if I make him big and muscular?

I also used their adverts. Earlier we saw one of Shaw's adverts - he seems very professional and to-the-point. Mackay, meanwhile, is very verbose in his adverts, and goes off on tangents, and gives some slightly dubious autobiographies. (Scroll down this pamphlet from 2019 to see a bit more on this.) I used this to give them contrasting behaviours in the schoolroom: William is very reticent, whereas Charley is much more expressive. (Based on my observations of the behaviours of lecturers and my own presenting style!)

I brought in some near-contemporary concepts from William Blake - Reason and Imagination. Reason is all passive, restrained, conventional, orderly, static, and tends to accept stuff. Imagination, on the other hand, is very active, energetic, revolutionary, dynamic, and tends to question and challenge stuff. Using the above business with the adverts, I aligned William with Reason and Charley with Imagination, which gave me another contrast to play with.

Single statements and broader interpretations! A single statement is more usually known as a 'fact'. This is a small thing. A work of history (usually containing a number of these) is a broader interpretation. For instance, this could be when your historian has put a bunch of single statements together and needs to join them up somehow, or when they've decided that this specific statement definitely means this, or when they build a narrative out of things - anything like that.

Here's our example. Charles Mackay was involved in teaching. Ok - we've got his adverts (just seen), and all these bits saying that he was an assistant in a school or he was operating on his own in some educational capacity. But what sort of teacher was he like?

We don't know what kind of teacher Mackay was! That's the broader interpretation. I can suggest different ideas about him using drawing, but these are interpretations, not facts. (I like to interpret him as being very enthusiastic but I genuinely have no idea.)

Traditional historians like to think that they can make things that correspond exactly (or close enough) with what really happened in the past, and for some reason it always looks like a very specific style of academic prose, usually with a linear narrative and some cause-and-effect and the meanings behind things and some sort of analysis and all that sort of business. I had no idea that the past was just words, and that it was so neat and tidy!

Correspondence theory is total wack and the next slide contains a very quick example as to why that is.

Neither of these things are William Shaw. One is a couple of words. The other is a drawing of a character that I created to represent my interpretations of what he might've been like at a certain point in his life. Neither of these are the man himself.

The things that I make do not correspond with what really happened in the past (whatever that might be). I can't show you exactly what this schoolmaster looked like, never mind how he behaved or what he thought, or any of the events he was involved with. 

By doing history using drawing, rather than your traditional written history, I can point out that this is my subjective interpretation. I'm not hiding behind a wall of words. I created this - you can see where I moved the pen across the page. All those marks become traces of my activity, of my hand moving across the paper.

History should not be limited to a specific style of writing as not everybody is comfortable with writing (and it's even worse if you restrict it to only being allowed to do it in certain ways!). So we need experimental history: drawing, performance, re-enactment, film, music, sculpture, all sorts of fun stuff.

Some traditional historians don't like experimental history because they believe that none of these methods are nuanced and subtle, and none of them can have the proper references and all that. But if we don't experiment, then how are we going to be able to find out how to make them nuanced and subtle and referenced?

We're having another crack at correspondence theory. We're using experimental history to explicitly point out that our representations of our ideas about the past are not the past itself - that's what Alun Munslow is talking about when he says experimental history tackles the relationship between "the reality of the past and its correspondence in the text (or in any other mode of expression)". 

Here's a selection of pages from my graphic history/ comic Disorder. (Available as a free PDF via this post.) In Disorder, I explored an incident that I'd only seen mentioned briefly in a couple of trial reports: apparently, when Bowes Academy was afflicted by ophthalmia, William nearly died - his life was despaired of - presumably due to the stress of the situation. I used a few different visual languages (drawing styles) to speculate over what some of the people involved might have thought/ experienced at the time.

Every event will have multiple perspectives: everyone involved (or who witnesses it or hears about it later) will have different experiences and interpretations and such. Then we can have fun with memory, and with how they relate their tale/s to others, how they make sense of it themself, whether they can commit it to the historical record, whether it survives, who has power over which stories are preserved and which stories are told...

Which leads onto one of the uses of being reflexive about your practice, and thinking about what you do and how you do it: you become aware of your own responsibility and power in how you depict (your interpretations of) the people and events in your case study!

So in this comic (which is from my thesis), Bridget and Ann point out where I haven't done things that I should've done. I use these characters to provide alternative commentary on the stuff I discuss in my thesis, evaluating my work and wondering what might their originals have thought of the way I depict them?

Making your characters self-aware (aware that they are invented characters) is a useful strategy - it points out that, unlike what some more traditional (and anti-theory) historians might say, the history is not speaking for itself. These people are characters who I've made, and they know it. (Well, they themselves don't really, because they're made of ink, but anyway.)

In this slide, Mary Ann gets impatient with me (right-hand side) because I was meant to be painting her pages in Disorder but I'd got distracted on costume reference and such. In the comic on the left-hand side, she's got access to my silly reference photos that I take - she exists in my imagination, so she's got access to all my stuff, including laptop passwords and knowledge of how to open the Photo Booth app. 

Here's a thing that more conventional historians might find a bit trickier if they prefer to do things in writing - using yourself as drawing reference! I have limbs, I have a camera, I make my own pose reference.

Another fun thing you can use in building your interpretations: your own experiences. In November 2020, when I was working on the preliminary sketches for William's pages in Disorder (y'know, in which he nearly dies), my appendix ruptured, which was very inconvenient and somewhat exciting, and I had to have an emergency operation (massive thanks to the NHS for sorting that one out). During my stay in hospital, I barely managed one A5 side of drawing, but some of the imagery from that ended up in Disorder. I still think it's one of the funniest things that's ever happened to me.

By this point, I've been working with some of these characters for so long and at such intensity that it feels like they're just out of reach - they're part of my imagination, they contain parts of me, some of them are now part of me - but their originals are in the past and I can't access them because they're dead. 

Blog post about the historical sublime here!

An example from my work - in the early 1830s, Charles Mackay stopped working for William Shaw. I have no idea what happened. This is another gap for imaginative exploration. (I don't know whether they had a row or what, I just like drawing angry people and teeth)

And with that, we moved onto my recommendations for anyone wanting to take a closer look at deconstructionist history:

• Rethinking History journal - available via the university's library page, or via Taylor & Francis (login via institution, search for Rethinking History, job's a good'un) - this was set up by Alun Munslow and friends, and has loads of really good articles about historical theory and loads of fantastic experimental history too - for instance, this issue is about graphic novels as history (and was edited by one of my examiners!), and this experimental article is a comic exploring exciting things including metaphor, multiplicity, self-awareness, and the fun you can have with images (and was illustrated by my other examiner!)
• Library shelfmarks 901 (philosophy and theory of history) and 907 (historical research) - more fun things about how historians do what we do.
• Work by people such as Alun Munslow (Deconstructing History and Narrative and History are good places to start), Keith Jenkins (Re-thinking History is an excellent primer), Robert A. Rosenstone (does a lot of stuff about film and history, might be useful for different approaches to visual storytelling), and Ludmilla Jordanova (does a lot of very splendid work on using visual and material culture in creating historical interpretations).

And, as usual, if anyone wants any more information or a chat about making interpretations of the past or whatever, DM me at @Ed.smike on Instagram.

Reconstructionism, constructionism, and deconstructionism: fun with Munslow's genres of historians

My favourite theorist Alun Munslow (occasionally collaborating with his excellent mate Keith Jenkins) created a way of categorising historians and their work into three genres: reconstructionism, constructionism, and deconstructionism. I found these categories vastly useful in building my work, and in helping me to identify my standpoint as a historian.

My History supervisor Prof. M. got very excited about this board from my exhibition

Reconstructionists and constructionists are the more respectable, conventional kinds of historians, who Munslow sometimes called "historians of a particular kind"... and they sometimes regard us deconstructionists with suspicion.

Don’t worry about trying to remember who’s who - here’s a handy guide to the three categories I modified from a tasty section of my thesis.

Reconstructionist historians:

• Believe in the correspondence theory of representation - they believe that what they create (usually written history) corresponds exactly (or close enough) with the actuality of the past. Imagine that! I whack some ink on a bit of paper and - is it possible for it to accurately and adequately represent some historical character or past event? What if I write the name of my protagonist, William Shaw - are those two words an adequate representation of a whole entire person?
• Believe that, by careful and detached empirical analysis of their sources, they can discover ‘the true story of what really happened back there in the past’. Most of them nowadays are more cautious about this, and say things like 'the most likely story', but it's still there.
• Believe that they can use writing (usually of a specific pseudo-detached academic type) to accurately and adequately communicate the story of the past. They also believe that narrative is just a vehicle, and not something that you can manipulate to tell different stories, or that can influence how you tell stories - to them, it’s simply the only appropriate way to tell the story of the past. (And it's usually just the story, rarely a multiplicity of stories.)
• Aim to remain objective and dispassionate (despite the fact that most of them know that total objectivity is an unattainable ideal). They don’t want the history they write to be influenced by their own personalities, contexts, experiences, etc. They seem to think they can somehow rise above their own circumstances to cast an unbiased eye over the past, in order to get at it 'as it really was'.
• Some of them acknowledge that you can’t really get at ‘the truth’ but they tend to blame their sources, rather than looking at themselves and how they understand things and how they build interpretations.
• Won’t engage with how narratives work, never mind experimentation with narrative forms and methods of communicating those narratives. They also won’t engage with the distinction between a single statement and a broader interpretation, never mind how these compare against what they believe to be reality.
• Strongly dislike theory (whether from history or any other discipline) as they believe it’s an imposition onto the past and won’t get you accurate results.

Constructionist historians:

• Also believe in the correspondence theory of representation and accept that yes, it’s imperfect, but they still believe that they can accurately convey the results of their empirical study of traces of the past in a standard historical narrative.
• Use narrative as an analytical mechanism, but they still think that they can find the story in the past. (Why is it always the? Not a possible story or a bunch of possible stories? Or even this is openly fictive but let's imagine this for a minute, eh why not)
• Sometimes like to borrow theory from elsewhere, such as sociology or psychology or economics or something, but they like to make sure it’s appropriate to whatever they’re researching. (How they decide something is appropriate, I do not know. Also, notice how orthodox these other disciplines are - I've yet to hear of any constructionists borrowing something from a more obviously creative discipline, but if you know otherwise, hit me up)
• Usually aim to be objective, and also acknowledge that that’s very idealised and that it’s impossible to remain impartial.
• Acknowledge that they’re actively seeking meaning in the past, sometimes by intervening with concepts and theories, but they claim that these are meant to serve the evidence rather than interfere with it.

Both reconstructionists and constructionists:

• Believe in practical realism: here, this means that stuff that we can’t see right now (such as past events) exists in the absence of anyone perceiving it, and that its existence has nothing to do with its being perceived. This is linked to the correspondence theory we met earlier in this post - where people believe that the representations they make correspond truthfully to reality. (However, the existence of stuff we can’t perceive right now - such as past events - doesn’t necessarily mean that we can represent those things accurately here in the present. And there's loads of lost stuff, too!)
• Believe in empiricism: they think true knowledge is grounded in what they can experience with their senses. (What the hell is 'true knowledge' and who gets to decide that? Ok let's not start on that one) They want solid evidence rather than stuff that’s a bit wobbly round the edges. They prefer explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge. They’re definitely not going to approve of vibes.
• Believe that they can represent the past accurately as written history, and that what they write is a very special form of literature that isn’t really literature because it’s actually real. If you call their work ‘literature’, they’ll get a bit twitchy and tell you that their work is based on The Evidence and that ‘literature’ is uncomfortably close to silly things like fiction. Oh, the horror!
• Believe that their work must be done in writing as they think other forms of investigation and communication - things like drawings, re-enactment, performance, film, sculpture, dance, and all sorts of other exciting things - can’t do the required citations and footnotes and all that, and definitely can’t be as nuanced as words on a page.

Deconstructionist historians (like me):

• Understand the distinction between ‘history’ (what historians make and do to say things about the past) and ‘the past’ (which is gone and we can’t access it; we can access traces of it, but not the past itself).
• Understand that traces of the past exist, but our work will never correspond to the past itself. I can draw a few lines, and it’s only a representation of my interpretation of whichever historical character I say it is - it’s not the person themself. Traces of that person’s activities might still exist, such as if they made something, but their act of making it is over. Look at that pencil. The tip is worn where you drew or wrote with it, which is evidence for you having done some action with it (in addition to whatever you drew or wrote). However, you might’ve put it down two seconds ago or used it last week - the actual event of your using it is over and gone. You might pick it up again, but that'd be a different event. The traces of your past activity with the pencil are here, but that activity itself is in the past.
• Challenge the assumption that language is adequate for representing reality - language is part of reality. It’s not separate. Like how us historians are part of reality, we can’t detach ourselves from it and float mysteriously above it all in order to say things about the past. (I'd include non-written language here, too - using the word 'language' to describe however you want to explore and share your ideas about the past, such as drawing or acting or making puppets or anything else fun. These things are all part of reality, as are the events and people in the past.) 
• The most likely group to venture into experimental history. We’re more likely to engage with multiple narratives and voices (which the other two groups sometimes like to do) but we also use different methods of exploration and communication.
• Recognise the presence of the researcher. The history we create is what we make based on our own subjective interpretations of traces of the past (also known as sources or evidence). Our interpretations are not inherent in those traces. Our interpretations are influenced by our personal circumstances, contexts, biases, unconscious stuff, and plenty of other things. It's important to acknowledge this as it influences what we choose to research and how we do that.
• Recognise the role of the historian as a creator. We don’t ‘discover what happened’ - we encounter traces of the past, then we make interpretations of what we think might’ve (or might not have) happened. We like to be reflexive and self-aware. We understand that the researcher/ creator decides the form(s) that our histories take; the content doesn’t tell us what to do.
• Believe that the truth is not back there, waiting to be discovered. There are multiple truths, and we can never know or access everything, and this is a good thing.
• Understand that history is a creative act. History and literature (and illustration!) aren't that different. We're all storytellers. We (usually) use evidence of some kind to make and tell our stories: historians use traces of the past, some fiction writers might use something they overheard, some illustrators might use pose reference or whatever, any of us can find inspiration in our own experiences. We're (usually) invested in our stories in some way, and we want our audience to be invested in them, too. We need to use our imaginations to create and share our stories, and we need to use our creative skills to make our stories memorable and effective. (I've got another spicy bit in my thesis about this sort of thing but I won't post that here today.)

I'm an illustrator (surprise!) and I feel like deconstructionism fits well with my existing illustration practice. I'm very present in my work, I won't pretend to be some detached objective observer - the marks I make as I draw are evidence for my presence. I also use my own experiences as material. As a historian, my stuff is experimental (the majority of historians prefer to write, and would find drawing a bit weird) and then I take it further by encouraging audience participation (you interpret my stuff!). 

I won't pretend that my stuff is accurate, or that it adequately reflects past realities - yeah, accuracy is useful, but I'm not getting bogged down in ok how many buttons on that coat, can I get the exact colour that they'd have painted the wall - my work is more about evoking a multiplicity of possible experiences than accurately describing anything pretending to be reality. 

A deconstructionist approach can be empowering. It encourages a broader range of explorations of (sometimes lost) past experiences, and also encourages more varied ways of interrogating and sharing ideas about the past - not everyone is comfortable with writing, so other methods are needed so everyone can create their histories that help them to build their own identities or commemorate events as a group or whatever other useful things you'd like to do with your histories. We're not stuck with traditional/ established research and communication methods, so we can involve more people with different skills, and generate more insights and ideas.

I have got more on this, so if you want to chat, send me a message (best way is IG: @Ed.smike) - alternatively, fly over to BookFinder and see if you can get your hands on something reasonably priced from the selection below. Have fun!

Further information:
The Nature of History Reader edited by Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow, 2004
The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies by Alun Munslow, 2000
Deconstructing History by Alun Munslow, 1997
‘Genre and history/ historying’ by Alun Munslow in Rethinking History journal, vol.19 no.2, 2015
‘Modifying Alun Munslow’s classification of approaches to history’ by Eugen Zeleňák in Rethinking History journal, vol.15 no.4, 2011