Culture Shock:The web has evolved to blur the line between the beginning, the middle and the sense of an ending, writes Fintan O'Toole.
In his brilliant essay, The Story of Ireland, Roy Foster notes the strength of "the idea that Irish history is a story, and the implication that this carries about a beginning, a middle and the sense of an ending".
He was drawing attention to the way in which history, as a written form, overlaps with literature and, as formalist critics have shown, falls into pre-ordained narrative patterns: "Irish historical interpretation has too often been cramped into a strict literary mode; the narrative drive has ruthlessly eroded awkward elisions." Foster called for historical strategies that would allow "more room for alternative truths and uncomfortable speculations".
Such strategies are certainly possible, and there have been superb attempts to develop them, most notably Donald Harman Akenson's dazzling An Irish History of Civilisation. But writing can never entirely escape the narrative drive. It is the physical nature of books to have a beginning, a middle and an ending and the way we read them can never be entirely free of the reader's desire for a good story. To fully escape the strictures of narrative, we would need a form in which different stories, images, texts and ideas exist simultaneously, allowing the reader to find and make the connections between them. That form would also have to function outside national boundaries, since it is national narratives that so often shape the story that is told.
This form exists, of course, and most of us use it every day. The world wide web, with its vast and ever-growing domain of texts and images, changes our notions of narrative by allowing us to follow different threads as the fancy takes us. It treats texts and images, not as final documents, but as so many layers in the complex texture of reality. And it is built on the making of connections across boundaries - a search can lead you, not just to places you didn't know you wanted to go, but to places you didn't know existed.
As more and more historical material gets caught up in the web, the technology may be gradually changing the whole way we think about history.
An example of what I mean is a group of three apparently disparate, but intimately connected, websites created by the American sociologist and historian Robert Spiegelman: SullivanClinton.com, StakedPlains.com and Derryveagh.com. The sites, created in collaboration with a group of artists, designers and educators, focus on what seem to be very different historical episodes, apparently related only by their relative obscurity. The first deals with independent America's inaugural deployment of its military power in 1779 - to punish and evict the Iroquois nations of upstate New York who had fought with the British.
The second highlights the establishment of the first cattle empire in the Texas Panhandle, the vast JA ranch that replaced the Comanches who had been evicted by the US army under the Irish-born general Philip Sheridan.
The third deals with the eviction of 250 tenants from Derryveagh, Co Donegal in 1861.
The sites are an evolving mix of images and texts and they contain no overarching narrative. But they do make fascinating connections. The idea of mass eviction as a form of official retribution links the Iroquois and the Donegal tenants, who were uprooted as a collective punishment because their landlord's agent had been assassinated.
Stunningly, that landlord, John Adair, is the JA of the JA ranch in Texas. After his brutal action against his tenants in Derryveagh, he sailed to America with his American wife, Cornelia Wadsworth Ritchie, on a Wild West safari.
Heading west with an army escort, they linked up with the cowboy Charles Goodnight, acquired a vast estate in the Palo Duro Canyon and established large-scale commercial cattle ranching on what had recently been Indian land. Adair became, as the site puts it, "the world's biggest Irish-born land owner".
These connections are suggestive rather than coercive. They subtly alter the way we think about the past, suggesting, for example, that any notion of globalisation as a recent phenomenon is misplaced. The forces that impinged so brutally on the people of Derryveagh were the same as those that fuelled the genocidal attacks on the Indians of North America in the same era. What national narratives miss is revealed quite naturally in the open, connective space of the web.
And Spiegelman's sites also help us to see the present as a repeat of the past. One of the texts on the Derryveagh site is an editorial from the Times of London on June 26th, 1861, condemning the idea that the Derryveagh evictions were justified by the murder of the land agent.
It could be printed, with no more than linguistic alteration, in the New York Times today: "Terrorism is not to be met by terrorism, for terrorism itself is the parent of crime, and a fellowship in undeserved suffering, except in rare cases, prepares men's minds for another kind of fellowship (ie violent conspiracy)".
Perhaps this new way of exploring history can, in however modest a way, help us not to repeat it.