Oct 25th 2007 07:44 am From historiography to history to literature
There is an interesting conversation going on at a historian’s craft on the question of history, historiography, and literature (the latter my own contribution, owing to a certain semantic ambiguity, and because it is the question I always ask). I (not a historian by craft) don’t want to hijack a relevant discussion in her comments with my literary questions (relating only tangentially to the topic at hand), so I’ve posted them here instead and cross-posted a link chez elle.
yiwench writes:
all literature (critical or ‘fictional’) is rooted in its cultural and historical circumstances… and can hence be regarded as part of history/historiography
I would agree in principle. But certainly they are not equivalent. I am a little suspicious of classifying literature as “part of” history/historiography (also very suspicious of that slash). At the risk of wandering irrevocably back into the land of deconstruction, can’t we claim the reverse with the same authority? Literature may have a fundamentally historical component, but history and historiography are saturated with a longing for the construction of cogent narratives. I think there is quite a bit of permeability to the boundaries of these concepts, if indeed there are boundaries at all. And if there are, nodding once more to Papa Derrida (and Grandfather Freud), to whom does the boundary belong?
More practically, perhaps: should we be more suspicious of literature than of history or historiography if we are reading for (socio-politico-)historical content rather than “pure” literary content? Is there any guarantee that the latter are less subjectively invested than the former in constructing a particular narrative?
It’s the information content of the text that doesn’t change (although there are some cases where the information does change but it’s still considered the same text). In terms of information it isn’t ever history or historiography or anything else. That’s all in the meaning, wherever meaning comes from.
Content remains constant, but interpretations (assignments of meaning) change, sometimes radically. Returning to the question of boundaries, how are the questions of validity and “truth” resolved (or, indeed, posed) when a work originally conceived primarily as fiction supersedes or supplants a work originally conceived primarily as history or historiography? Can a historical or historiographical project be transformed over time into a work of literature (if, e.g., its historical claims are debunked)? Can we always be certain of the author’s primary intention in the first place? Does it matter?
Posted by Kyle / historiography and history and literature and theory
Gavin on 27 Oct 2007 at 6:46 am #
I think there’s at least a very big overlap between literature and history, but some people on both sides want to keep a boundary in place. Some literary critics don’t like that idea that texts could be historical sources, and some historians don’t like the idea that their own writings could be literary texts. I suspect that Hayden White’s work is controversial precisely because it transgresses that boundary. If he’d stuck to novels then he wouldn’t seem any more threatening to historians than Northrop Frye (although Paul Fussell also seems to be hated by some historians, so maybe this spills over into fiction which is perceived as being about history). I don’t see any problem with admitting that historians use narrative structures and genre conventions. It’s virtually impossible to write without them. Maybe some of the more reactionary historians have conflated narrative with fiction and believe that pointing out their narrative devices is the same as an attack on their truthfulness.
Maybe the issue of truth is ultimately the main difference between history and literature. Fictional literature doesn’t claim to be true and doesn’t need to be true in order to work. Some people say that literature tells us deeper truths about the human condition or whatever, but it doesn’t need to be true on the surface. Whatever the purpose and meaning of Crime and Punishment might be, it doesn’t depend on Raskolnikov being real and actually having killed those women. Empirical history does need to be true on that surface level of who did what when. I think truth is a much bigger problem for historians than meaning and intentions. That’s not to say that meaning and intention aren’t problematic - they obviously are - but even if we solved those problems we’d still be faced with the problem of truth. For example, if intentionalism turned out to be right, knowing that text x definitively means y and that the author intended it to mean y still doesn’t give us any way of evaluating whether y is true.
Cultural history might offer a way round this problem, and the question you raised about the problems of using fiction as historical evidence. If we’re looking for cultural ideology rather than physical reality, then truth becomes less important, and intentions become irrelevant (although meaning is still a big problem here). If the same idea crops up in lots of texts from the same period then we might be able to identify it as a dominant ideology, and whether authors intended to put it in the text or not doesn’t necessarily matter. Truth and reality both still matter though, because we need to know that the texts do genuinely come from the time and place we’re interested in (and it also helps if we know how widely they were read), and also because ideology is potentially easier to spot in false beliefs than true ones.