What Can "Survivor" Teach Us About Writing History?

During my first year as a full-time college teacher, I hung out with a couple of English professors who were in the same job situation I was. The first time we ever talked about our classes, I told them that I wanted to teach the students in my survey “basic facts” about American history.

“You believe in facts?,” one of them asked. And from that point on, I never heard the end of it. “Silly historian,” I could here them mutter to one another whenever I used that “F” word.

Like most English Ph.D.s these days, my two new friends were postmodernists. In short, they believed in a school of thought that argues that language is an inadequate representation of reality. I had some familiarity with this philosophy from graduate school, but historians are generally not as fond of postmodernism as literary scholars because if the inherent flaws of language never permit us to really know anything, why bother studying history at all?

Despite my combative reintroduction to this material, I did learn enough postmodernism to recognize its importance to my discipline. This importance comes not from analyzing language, but from the insight postmodernism offers into the relationship between writers and their subjects.

Strangely enough, I couldn't fully appreciate this lesson until I saw my first episode of Survivor in the Summer of 2000. Survivor is, in my opinion, the ultimate postmodern television show because nowhere else is the existence of the camera so important to the action or the editing process so important to the final product.

Here were sixteen people on an island in Borneo , surrounded by cameras, trying to make believe that they were stranded like Gilligan and the Skipper. I couldn't help imagining what the Survivor “set” must look like from one hundred feet behind the cameras. The disconnect between reality and the picture on the screen must be completely ludicrous.

To me, the most riveting moment in Survivor history came in the second season when one of the contestants in Australia burned his hands on the campfire. Following the accident, the camera showed not only all the cameras surrounding the camp, but the helicopter waiting there to take him to a hospital.

For thirty-nine days, cameras follow the contestants everywhere, but can't be acknowledged. Even when the contestants want to tell the audience what they were thinking during the scene just aired, they simply look forward and talk. It reminds me of the Direct TV commercial where a wife is describing her husband's taste for watching romantic comedies on pay-per-view. Just then, he comes in and asks, “Honey, who are you talking to?” If they didn't know there was a camera there, they'd seem completely insane.

Like the Survivor cameramen, the historian's presence is seldom acknowledged in what they write. Many avoid personal pronouns like “I” or “we.” Textbooks, in particular, tend to be written from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. This is like telling readers to “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” for fear if they did so it would undercut the historian's authority.

Nevertheless, the historians we read are always there, guiding the story through the subjects they focus on and their choice of language. What they write may seem objective, but it is always a product of an author's biases because, like Survivor , that determines where they point their camera and how they frame their shot.

Writing history, it has become fashionable to worry about whether the author is liberal or conservative. On Survivor, the bias is toward good television. Say or do something outrageous, you will get screen time. On the current Survivor All-Stars , the producers picked the most forceful personalities to bring back to the show for a second contest rather than the most successful players.

The producers also have to depend on the editing process to make their show entertaining. Left with hours and hours of film they have to make thousands of choices in order to fit their show into a discreet number of one-hour episodes. Even if the editors didn't impose a dramatic arc on the action, the amount of footage that has to be cut in order to fit the parameters CBS imposes on them means that their story cannot be a totally accurate representation of the contest.

The same is true for historians, particularly historians of modern times for which sources are plentiful. Every historian has to make choices as to what evidence to use and what evidence to leave out. Every good writer will impose some kind of structure on their narrative if they want to get anybody to read and enjoy their work. This process, by definition, limits their ability to represent their subject with absolute accuracy.

Does this mean there's no difference between fact and fiction? Absolutely not. Scholarship that reflects the inherent bias of its author can still be useful and convincing enough to be widely acknowledged as “fact.” However, just because the bias isn't obvious or isn't political (in the traditional sense of that word), doesn't mean it's not there.

Recognizing that postmodernism can be useful to historians does not mean you have to cease to believe in facts. It does mean, however, that people should be cautious about throwing around the term “objective” in discussions about history since their objective scholarship is influenced by factors they may not acknowledge. By recognizing what postmodernism tells us about the inherent subjectivity of the historical writing process, historians can work to lessen its effects on their conclusions.

As an added bonus, postmodernism can help us understand the difference between reality television and reality.