The genius of Adam Curtis’s TraumaZone

Topiary is the art of making something be something it wasn’t. This is achieved by subtraction. By clipping away everything about a yew bush that isn’t a swan, the topiarist creates a representation of that bird in living foliage. The topiarist’s swan is wondrous, but spare a thought for the clippings. Formless, meaningless to the human eye, they have meaning of their own.

History is topiary. From a superabundance of data, the historian and his reader make themselves a story. The parts the narrative is constructed from stay: the rest, like foliage falling victim to the topiarist’s shears, is discarded. If one Wednesday morning W.E. Gladstone notices that a senior colleague avoids his eyes and appears distracted, the historian will seize upon this apparently trivial observation in Gladstone’s diary only if in retrospect the behaviour pointed to something we now know was going to happen. If however the detail links to nothing that we later see as ‘going anywhere’, it will fall from the historian’s shears to join a wealth of other sweepings.

In this respect, a volume of history is more like a novel than we might think. Suppose you read the following in a murder mystery: ‘Hurrying home before midnight and as she passed an alley, she thought she saw a movement in the shadows. She dismissed it as a trick of the light.’ Reading that, you may count on hearing more about it later. You’d feel cheated by a novelist who related the incident then never mentioned it again. Even in the stories we tell of our own lives, we pass over (indeed we’ve already forgotten) most of what led nowhere. Memory itself is topiary, imposing, in retrospect, shape.

Yet something, something true, is lost. I know of no better illustration of this than a BBC television series I’ve been watching over the holiday season, though it was released in October.